Abstract
Ideas II has been the source of several issues in the broader phenomenological literature. Some of these issues focus on the particular aims of that work and its place within the system of transcendental constitutive and genetic Phenomenology. Others are concerned with its significance in the development of Husserl’s thought on the possibility and direction of a phenomenological philosophy of natural science (still under discussion), along with a systematic phenomenological grounding of the human sciences. Furthermore, the manuscript of Ideas II seems to have contributed to the formation of Heidegger’s views on the nature and status of Husserl’s Phenomenology and of Phenomenology in general. Thus, an examination of the actual meaning of the analyses in Ideas II would contribute significantly to the understanding of a variety of important issues in phenomenological philosophy.
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Notes
- 1.
Some commentators use the translation “physical thing” and, correspondingly, “physical nature.” I avoid these terms because, in the long run, as I hope will become clear, they may lead to confusion. Another acceptable translation would have been “natural thing” or “thing of nature.” As a rule, in modern philosophy this term stands for the beings that belong to nature, e.g., a rock or a tree, as opposed to civilization, e.g., a hammer, a table, or a book. Husserl uncritically adopts this approach, and soon finds himself caught up in problems. In this chapter, we will silently abstain from this difference, and focus only on the actual analyses of the Ideas II, Part I. The aforementioned crucial phenomenological difference will be thematized as such in Chap. 6.
- 2.
Landgrebe 1981a. In a relevant translator’s endnote in that paper, McKenna explains Landgrebe’s view approvingly, claiming that the analyses of the first part of the Ideas II are conducted from the point of view of the “naturalistic” attitude. This attitude, McKenna adds, correlates us with the region of the objects of natural science (i.e., mostly Physics together with naturalistic Psychology) (ibid., 150). Cf. note 1 above.
- 3.
Thus, Landgrebe locates a contradistinction (as opposed to the complementary and explicative relation I seek) between Ideas I, II, and Crisis. See Landgrebe ibid., 148–9; also Landgrebe 1981b, and especially 153–4, 160. In what follows, we also come across some more similar recent readings.
- 4.
See, for example, the context of Being and Time, §§3, 15; Prolegomena to The History of The Concept of Time, §5 and p. 168; but also Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity, §19. In fact, Landgrebe’s account is strikingly similar to Heidegger’s, especially with respect to the latter’s explicit early accounts of the nature-thing. See also Dreyfus 1991, Chaps. 4 and 6 and especially pp. 61, 71, 74, 80–1, 115, 120–1.
- 5.
In relation to our immediate concerns here, see e.g., Soffer 1999 and Overgaard 2003 (especially pp. 161–3, where the nature-thing of Ideas II is presented as the—direct or proper—object of natural science). This reading of Ideas II, however, can also be found in the Husserlian secondary literature that deals not so much with the dispute between Husserl and Heidegger, but just with the Ideas II. See, for example, Bernet et al. 1993, Chap. 9. It should also be noted here that the intimate connection between the perceptual thing and the scientific thing creates a series of paradoxes that run through some of the essays that specifically set out to decipher the text of Ideas II. See, for example, Melle 1996, Soffer 1999.
- 6.
On this issue, see the corresponding references in the previous and subsequent notes.
- 7.
The fact that the text as we know it is the result of successive editorial works by Edith Stein and Ludwig Landgrebe, neither of which seems to have satisfied Husserl (see Husserl’s remark from Hua IV, 403, cited in § 5.9 below), is probably an additional factor among those that have caused this puzzlement and confusion. However, this factor cannot be taken into account here per se.
- 8.
References to the Ideas II will be given in this simplified form. The first number refers to the English translation and the second to Hua IV. Also, when there is no other specification, the symbolism “§x” refers to the same work.
- 9.
The details of the story behind the attitudes mentioned in Ideas II are too complex to be examined here. What is necessary to understanding the problem dealt with in this chapter, though, is silently provided. What is most crucial is the ambiguity of the term “theoretical” as it appears in Husserl’s manuscripts under discussion. In section 4 below, this ambiguity is dissolved. See also Chap. 2, n.18.
- 10.
The closing passages of §4 also create the impression that we can either pass to the theoretical attitude or that we already live in that attitude and that, from this point of view, theoretical consciousness appears to be our ultimate intentional possibility. This impression, however, is false, since two pages earlier Husserl speaks of a quite different kind of intentionality as the lowest level of consciousness (11/9)—we will come to this shortly. What Husserl wants to say in §4 is that any kind of founded intentionality, i.e., including the natural-scientifically theoretical one, can function as a foundation for other kinds of intentionality. The same context makes it clear that something analogous to this founding of theoretical upon pre-theoretical correlations also holds for evaluative intentionality in general (see 9–10/8). Yet Husserl’s example is not very clear, and the reader should resist the idea that what ultimately founds a value object in general is a nature-object qua scientific theoretical correlate. Despite appearances, moreover, value-objects are not theoretical objects (11/9), as the single quotation marks he uses (‘theoretische’) in the first appearance of this equation of value with the theoretical suggest (Hua IV, 9–10); these quotation marks are missing in the English translation. Chapter 6 of the present book is totally devoted to making clear—vis-à-vis Heidegger’s relevant accusations—what Husserl actually thinks with regard to the order of givenness and the founding relation between the perceptual thing and the various cultural strata of the beings we straightforwardly experience in our everyday life in the world.
- 11.
See 40/37, 42/39.
- 12.
Ideas I, 84/82, 85/83. In examining the relative priority between readiness-to-hand (Zuhandenheit) and presence-at-hand (Vorhandenheit), Heidegger treats the latter as the givenness of beings in mere perception (in the Husserlian sense), which has resulted in the theoretical modification of our primordial intentionality (which for him offers us the experience of ready-to-hand beings). Heidegger identifies this theoreticity in the givenness of beings qua mere (perceptual) objects with their being given in terms of the Cartesian res extensa (with regard to this, see Heidegger’s marginal note 98.a in his Hütte copy of SZ, where Heidegger explicitly connects Cartesian res extensa with the Husserlian ultimate ontological region!). Soffer writes that in Heidegger: “it is not clear what the path is from readiness-to-hand to presence-at-hand, or in what way the broken hammer is the static condition for res extensa” (Soffer 1999, 389), i.e., for the hammer’s being “a material body in the Cartesian sense […] satisfying the characteristic isolation of the present-at-hand” (ibid., 382). Soffer, however, accepts the view that Husserl indeed considered readiness-to-hand or culturality as founded upon a theoretically constituted more primordial level, upon a presence-at-hand or perceivedness of nature-thinghood characterized also as res extensa. She then asks, rhetorically: “Is not res extensa for Husserl the result of a mathematical idealization and logical subtraction […]?” (ibid., 383). Thus, in their effort to defend Husserl against Heidegger’s criticism that he has over-theoreticized intentionality, there are Husserlians who accept Heidegger’s reading of Husserl, i.e., of Husserlian res extensa in already scientific-idealized terms, and try to defend this view as phenomenologically correct. Here I follow a different path, which will culminate in Chaps. 6 and 7.
- 13.
Mohanty 1995, especially p. 64; see also pp. 57–8, 76 endnote 34.
- 14.
On the difference between pre-scientific and scientific space in Ideas II, see also 92/87. It is true that at a certain point, Husserl (or at least the manuscript we have) does not hesitate in subsuming extensionality under what are known as “primary qualities” and to contrast them with what are known as “secondary qualities” or “real qualities” (for more on the meaning of this expression, see below) that fill the spatial body (33-4/30-1). In the same context, we also find extension raised to the level of the essential form for all real determinations, or to the essential form of existence for “material or physical (physisch)” being in general (35/32). In this context, we are given the impression that extensionality and materiality are indeed presented from the exclusive physico-mathematical point of view. This way of putting things is admittedly confusing (for similar cases that concern materiality, see also below). However, a careful reading of “or” in “material or physical” enables us to retain a non-scientific meaning for “material” and, accordingly, for extensionality.
- 15.
See 62/57. For those who know that Merleau-Ponty spent quite some time studying Husserl’s manuscripts that led to Ideas II, it comes as no surprise to find Merleau-Ponty developing this idea further in his Phenomenology of Perception. On this issue, though, see also Chap. 4 of the present book, especially §§ 4.5 and 4.9.
- 16.
As we shall see below, it is a rare fortune to find such accurate and clear—albeit transient and overlooked—statements on this issue. In the overwhelming majority of the relevant literature, this causality is already and exclusively conceived in the scientific terms of Physics. For example, Melle talks of causality and the constitution of “physical nature” exclusively in terms of the “exact” “calculative” laws of natural science (Melle 1996; especially pp. 20, 23). (See also note 35 below.) Something similar holds for Soffer (1999). Soffer locates a certain “ambiguity” in the meaning of the naturalistic attitude (from which the analyses examined up to now have supposedly been conducted), which produces a corresponding ambiguity in the meaning of causality. The first ambiguity concerns the issue of whether naturalistic nature allows us within a sensible intuitable nature or, on the other hand, transposes us into a logico-mathematical un-intuitable nature. The second ambiguity concerns the issue of whether causality applies to the sensible, inexact, and secondary properties of material bodies, or to imperceptible and idealized bodies with their exact primary qualities. But, for Soffer, causality in the second sense is characterized by (merely) “far more” rigorous law-like connections and (merely) “more” exact predictability (ibid., 39–40). In the end, Soffer simply contrasts physical causality with psychic motivation, and describes the former as having to do with interactions between material bodies seen from the naturalistic point of view, which “conceives of material nature as a subject-irrelative ‘in itself,’ [i.e., from the point of view of natural science]” (ibid., 40, emphasis added; also 44). As I see it, however, these sections of the Ideas II do not contain an irreparable accidental “ambiguity” in favour of the “naturalistic attitude” or, in the end, of the self-evident domination of the scientific point of view. They only introduce two systematically different materialities, distinguished by Husserl himself (albeit not clearly). Ricoeur also sees Husserl’s phenomenological abstention from culturality (plus animality) in the first sections of Ideas II as the scientific-theoretical objectivating attitude (Ricoeur 1967, 40–1, 46). Due to this, Ricoeur thinks that the constitution of nature in Ideas II already means a constitution of a scientific nature. From this point of view, Ricoeur equates naturalistic and scientific-theoretical objectivating attitudes, even though he correctly differentiates the first from the natural attitude (cf. ibid., 37). This is why he seems convinced that, contrary to what an existential phenomenologist like Merleau-Ponty would expect, “[i]n Ideas II there is no question of finding a type of worldly presence […] [other than] the objective relations of the intellectual and scientific level whose significations would be projected by the unfolding of my corporeal powers” (ibid., 43). In the main part of this chapter, I put forward a different understanding of this issue; one standing closer to the expectations of Merleau-Ponty.
- 17.
For a Heideggerian reading that attributes to Husserl the view that the—supposedly wrongly primordialized—perceptual being, which corresponds to the Heideggerian present-at-hand or occurrent (vorhand) being, is constituted according to the scheme of substance-with-properties, see, e.g., Dreyfus 1991, 46, 61, 71.
- 18.
See also, e.g., 80/75.
- 19.
For the distinction between experiential pre-predicative thing and the predicative determination of such a thing in Ideas II, see 87/82.
- 20.
See also, e.g., Ideas I, §37.
- 21.
Soffer (1999), however, completes her rhetorical question (see note 12 above) in the following way: “Is not res extensa for Husserl the result of a mathematical idealization and logical subtraction, so that it can never be present [as Heidegger thinks of vorhanden beings] in the way of a physical body in the lifeworld?” (ibid., 383). In this context, she also equates res extensa with an object existing (scientifically-objectively) “in itself” (e.g., 384). On the basis of these two points, she is then led to ask whether it would be correct to say that Vorhandenheit lacks its very first (Heideggerian) characteristic, i.e., that something vorhanden is “being looked at” (ibid., 384). Thus, she suggests, what appears primordially in the lifeworld may not, after all, be an idealized physical body, as Husserl supposedly claimed in Ideas II, but it is still a theoretically thematized physical body, i.e., a subject with not-yet-idealized physical properties predicated of it.
- 22.
With regard to these points, see 82/78, 87/82, and 75ff/70ff. These differences in the meaning of “objectivity” and, mutatis mutandis, of “in-itself-ness,” seem to escape the notice of commentators on Ideas II. See, for example, Melle and Ricoeur (ibid.). As a result, the truth of nature in simple perception falls into oblivion, or gets conflated with the truth of nature in its possible (idealizing or non-idealizing) thematizations—in favor of the latter. Incidentally, Ricoeur recognizes only type-(b) objectivity, at least in Ideas II, which is the reason why he equates “worldly [true] presence” with (exclusively) scientific intersubjective intentionality (see, ibid., 49–51).
- 23.
Of course, here too the available text of Ideas II does not make things easier. There, we read that when we are left with mere (nature-)things, we are also left with their mere logical characters (18/16). What might this mean? Does it mean that our mere sense perception has as its correlate a logical substratum clothed, as it were, with its attributed sense predicates? This would not make sense. It can only mean that these characters are “unnoticed” (Hua IV, 16) or unexplicated, in the sense that subsequent thematic acts can grasp them and turn them into predicates (while subsequent theoretic acts may turn them into idealized predicates) of suitably understood subjects. That is, “logical characters” seems to mean “predic-able characters.” (See also next note). The picture of the relation and relative intentional dependence holding among the thing of simple perception, the predicatively constituted thing, the thing of science, the lifeworldly appearing thing, and that which Husserl calls “the determinable X” suggested by Landgrebe, Melle, Soffer (among others) creates a number of interpretative and phenomenological paradoxes. But the examination of this issue would take us beyond the context of the present discussion. See, however, Theodorou 2010b.
- 24.
EJ, 134/152-3, 206/242-3; see also Hua XVII, 57. It is unfortunate that Schütz, speaking of substrate and properties in the above context (see note 16), does not make use of this distinction. Concerning this, we read, e.g., in the “Textkritische Anmerkungen” of Ideas II: “Wir unterscheiden das Erfahrungsdenken, das [sprachlich-diskursive] Denken, das aus Erfahrungen seine Rechtsgründe schöpft, und die Erfahrungen selbst” (Hua IV, 403). Judgmental and simply experiential objects have totally different ‘inner’ articulations.
- 25.
“[T]he constitution of real properties can also be accomplished at higher levels. This means that hierarchical formations are possible, according to which still higher unities make themselves primordially manifest in unities of primordial manifestation [Einheiten der Beurkundung] and, eventually, become determined with the help of [pre-scientific, at first, and scientific, eventually] thinking grounded in experience.” (50/46, trnsl. sl. md., emphases added).
- 26.
With regard to this, Husserl uses also the hybrid expression “theoretical experiencing” (theoretisches Erfahren) in his so-called Ideas III (2/2). See also Theodorou 2010b.
- 27.
See for example the closing sentence of §16 (passage from 56/52–3 cited below in footnote 28).
- 28.
“What it is that we have described is the thing constituted in the continuous-unitary manifold of the sense intuitions of an experiencing ego or in the manifold of ‘sense-things’ of various levels: multiplicities of schematic unities, of real states and real unities on various levels” (60/55). But, “The preceding suffices for an understanding of the universal [algemeinen] type of the constitutive thing-construction in the sphere of intuition [in general], in its remarkable stratification which, as can be seen after all, is only a sort of continuation of an other, though analogous, stratification, one in which the sensuous schema, the lowest level of the formation of unity now considered by us, is already constituted, for its part, as a unity” (56/52–3).
- 29.
For this triple equation, see 58/54. Instead of substance in general, Husserl prefers the expression substantial reality, which he distinguishes from extensive substance or strict materiality.
- 30.
Ursprunglichen Dingauffassung. See a few lines below the cited passage.
- 31.
See 54/51. This, for instance, was Aristotle’s or Kant’s conception of matter.
- 32.
This relativity allows us a consciousness of a self-same object even under a multiplicity of changing circumstances. The identity of an intentional thing here is an open horizon of variable properties. I have, for example, the consciousness of the same table whether I see it in the light of a bright day or in the shade of my room, whether it has four legs, as it did yesterday, or three legs, as it does now that I have sawn off one, or whether I experience its color or lose the ability to do so after an accident (which might have left only my sense of touch intact), and so on. Here, we may speak of an objective identity in the sense of (a) (see § 5.7 of the present chapter). We can even speak of a ‘fuzzy’ identity. Husserl claims that such an identical thing is a phenomenologically appearing something (see for example Ideas II, 74/86), i.e., not an empty logical something. By contrast, the objective identity of the physicalistic thing (which I discuss in the main text below) is a logico-mathematical one, a strict non-horizonal identity, in which the thing is determined by exactly measured, finite, and stable properties. For example, a physical body is either a mere dimensionless something with a specific mass, or a mere something with a specific mass distribution; electrons are mere somethings with a specific mass and charge, etc. This is sense (b) of “objective” (see § 5.7 above).
- 33.
See also 294/281.
- 34.
For this see also 288–9/302.
- 35.
For these descriptions, see 89–90/84–5. Melle, to be sure, recognizes a “physical [sic] nature in a double sense: as a concrete nature of sensuous experience and as abstract, mathematically determinable physicalistic nature” (ibid., 21). He also notes that by the process of Abbau, we can go beneath all culturality to an abstract “undetermined” and “unknown” world of “pure experience” that can be called “mere nature” (ibid., 25). The fact, however, that he talks only about natural-scientific nature in terms of “objectivity” and “truth” (ibid., 19–21, 26–7) does not suffice to establish an unambiguous answer to the question of Husserl’s views on primordiality and phenomenologically true ultimate intentional correlations. Melle, moreover, does not say that Husserl’s talk of res extensa, res materialis, and res temporalis applies equally well, albeit in radically different senses, to both “mere appearances” of “sensuous experience” (cf. ibid., 21) and to physicalistically objective true nature (cf. ibid., 20). Spatial-material-temporal nature is, thus, exclusively offered to exact, calculative, causal-inductive science (ibid., 24; cf. also 34). See also note 16 here. Thus, the constitution and identity of this “mere appearance” becomes a real mystery. What seems to escape the universal claim of the scientific-naturalistic world-view is the lifeworld qua world, in which we exclusively unfold our every “sensuous experience” mentioned above—Melle’s sole pre-scientific “rootedness in nature” or “stratum of nature” for everything spiritual—seems to be nothing more than the mere “sensitivity” of the living body, which is “correlated” with nothing more than mere “sensations” (see ibid., 29). But, from this point of view, there is no world of transcendently appearing beings before science, the mode of consciousness that supposedly builds actively upon these mere sensations. In the end, it turns out that this understanding provides to the colonizing appetite of natural science the whole stratum upon which values, aims, concerns, etc., are to be founded and found. (See also the close of note 5 above.) Ricoeur, in order to account for the co-presence and partial overlap in Ideas II of analyses concerning the perceptual constitution of things and analyses concerning the scientifically objective thing, claims that Husserl is in fact interested in elucidating scientific knowledge, but gets involved in analyses of perceptual constitution instead of staying exclusively close to the analyses of scientific constitution. For Ricoeur, this is so because “science does not present absolutely new problems in relation to the perceptual constitution of things” (ibid., 44; emphases added) and the latter seem more convenient. We have seen, however, that a large number of essential differences lie between these two kinds of intentional constitution (but also between mere sense experience and pre-scientific thematization), and that this co-presence is otherwise explained from a totally different perspective.
- 36.
- 37.
I would like to thank Fotini Vassiliou for discussing with me the structure and content of Ideas II and the relation of Ding und Raum to Ideas II. I have benefited greatly from these discussions, and from her incisive comments on the final version of this chapter. I would also like to thank Elisabeth Behnke for her useful comments on an early form of the manuscript.
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Theodorou, P. (2015). Perceptual and Scientific Thing: On Husserl’s Analysis of “Nature-Thing” in Ideas II. In: Husserl and Heidegger on Reduction, Primordiality, and the Categorial. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 83. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16622-3_5
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