“Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology”
IV The Roots of the
Existentialist Theory of
Freedom in Husserl
Even if we can find traces of a hidden dialectic in Edmund Husserl’s thought, he is certainly not an existentialist and would not have wanted to be numbered among them if he could ever have conceived that this possibility might come up. We know that he was not pleased with the existential direction his disciple Heidegger took in Being and Time, and at the end of his own Nachwort, in listing the various kinds of philosophy in 1931, all of which he rejects, he names those who believe that they can found philosophy by appealing to the “fruitful bathos” of experience “in the current sense of that term”—a damnation which can only envisage those he knew of the existentialists of his day.1 But it is, nevertheless, the contention of this paper that at least three of the philosophical positions argued for in Ideas I serve as the undoubted and inescapable foundation for the existentialist theory of freedom, a “noetic” freedom more fundamental than freedom of choice.
It is clear that this book, Ideas, is the book of Husserl’s. Almost all great philosophers are identified in the public consciousness with one book. For Heidegger it is Being and Time; for Kant it is the Critique of Pure Reason; for Descartes The Meditations; for Thomas Aquinas the Summa Theologica; for Augustine The Confessions; for Plato The Republic; and so on. Never mind that the Republic cannot be understood except in the light of the major later dialogues; never mind that the Summa Theologica makes no sense without On Being and Essence as well as the Disputed Questions on Truth and On the Power of God. Never mind that in order to understand Descartes one must also take account of the Discourse on Method, and for Kant, it would be wrong to think that one could have a full and complete understanding of his thought by reading only the Critique of Pure Reason, as if he had not also written the Critique of Practical Reason and the Critique of Judgment. This is, no doubt, true of Husserl as well. We cannot arrive at a complete understanding of Ideas without going on to the Cartesian Meditations, Formal and Transcendental Logic, The Crisis of the European Sciences, and other works. Nevertheless, in the public and historical consciousness of those who follow the grand lines of history Ideas remains the book. In the great sweep of the development of Western philosophy Ideas stands out as representative of Husserl’s most unique and major contribution, the book of his which most completely revolutionized the history of philosophy.2
So, when Husserl says in the first paragraph of Ideas that this study will be an investigation of our “being in the world,” he does so in anticipation of the development of a number of genuinely new concepts in philosophy. We will deal with three of these in this study with an eye toward bringing out their implications for existentialism and eventually dialectical thought. These three concepts are (1) a new way of viewing the relationship between fact and essence, (2) the theory of the transcendental ego, and (3) a new way of looking at experience. (Erfahrung) from a transcendental standpoint.
There is no factual situation (Sachverhalt) which does not exhibit an essential meaning. We do not perceive a chaos but an ordered world of objects which, in fact, owe their perceptual structures to the attention, selectivity, and intentional activity of the perceiver. To perceive is to perceive something as something. Thus meaning and fact are inextricably bound together, though always distinguishable in reflection. In reflection we can always distinguish what, in immediate experience, is inseparably given together with the experiencing. This possibility is the foundation of the distinction between fact and essence and of our ability to operate the transcendental turn to meaning alone, to essential meaning, to those essential and invariant structures of facts without which an object of the kind under consideration, whatever it may be, cannot be experienced or thought.
There are many important things to be said about the distinction between fact and essence, which constitutes perhaps the most important part of Part One of Ideas and is fundamental to the theory of formal ontology as the science of objectivity in general. We wish here to single out only one implication of this distinction and that is that it stands at the basis of the phenomenological method of free variation in the imagination, a method of philosophical reflection Husserl was the first to identify and describe clearly, but which has been with us since Socrates and Plato and which may be the only true philosophical method even though its use has frequently been confused with deduction, induction, abduction, and other procedures. The method Husserl uses to establish both the distinction between fact and essence and the “reading of the essences” of facts and factual situations is the method of the free variation of examples, which is neither inductive nor deductive, but rather descriptive and eidetic.
Very early in Ideas (Paragraph 4) he writes of the phenomenological method:
If we produce in free phantasy spatial formations, melodies, social practices, and the like, or if we phantasize acts of experiencing or liking or disliking, of willing, etc., then on that basis by “ideation” we can see various pure essences originarily and perhaps even adequately: either the essence of any spatial shape whatever, any melody whatever, any social practice whatever, etc., or the essence of a shape, a melody, etc., of the particular type exemplified. Here, it does not matter whether anything of the sort has ever been given in actual experience or not.
This process of free variation (or “ideation”) clearly has nothing directly or indirectly to do with the process of empirical induction, namely, the exclusive use of generalization based on statistical probabilities. It is more akin to the method used by the geometer or the mathematician, who uses his drawn figures only to fix his attention and direct his mind to what he is really taking as his objects, namely, the purely ideal objects not situated in perceptual space and time but in the realm of eidetic truth.
In actually drawing and actually constructing a model the geometer is restricted; in phantasy he has incomparable freedom in the arbitrary transformation of the phantasised figures, in running through continuously modified possible formations, accordingly in the production of innumerable new formations; a freedom that alone opens up for him access to the world of essential possibilities with their infinite horizons of eidetic cognitions.
What Husserl emphasizes again and again in the Paragraph (70) from which this quotation is taken is the “freedom” which goes with the use of this method, whether by the geometer or any other eidetic scientist. As Suzanne Bachelard rightly remarks, it is a twofold freedom: (1) namely, a freedom from the factical, the existential, the unique instances of perceptual time and space, as well as (2) the freedom to take any fact, any real instance, as an example.3
As soon as one takes some factical example of a given phenomenon as an example of the phenomenon, one sees immediately that any other example of the same fact would do equally well, that we are not tied to factual historical existence at all, but free to substitute all the inventions and creations of eidetic consciousness for our own mundane existence. From such operations are born not only the eidetic investigations into the nature of our primary perceptual experience, but all the worlds of imaginative literature, music, poetry and culture. This freedom to operate in phantasy on given states of affairs, in whatever orders of complexity, shows that “fiction is the vital element of phenomenology as it is of every eidetic science” (Paragraph 70).
Both the geometer and the phenomenologist must, ultimately, return to the life-world experience from which they originally took their examples in order to verify and justify acquired eidetic insights. But without their eidetic freedom from “the factical” there would be no insights at all.
We know that Merleau-Ponty, perhaps the greatest and most faithful disciple of Husserl’s, at least in his application of an eidetic method to the study of human behavior, was pleased to take his examples from the clinical and experimental results of empirical psychology. But in so doing, he was always aware of the distinction between empirical and phenomenological psychology and the exigencies of an eidetic method. It is of no consequence for an eidetic investigation that the “examples” be taken from experimental psychology; what is essential is that the “examples” be treated as just that, as examples, as instantiations of invariant structures. In so doing Merleau-Ponty both clarified the role of eidetic reflection vis-à-vis the sciences, particularly psychology and the human sciences, and showed that the eidetic method, though clearly independent of the empirical generalizations and statistical probabilities of the non-eidetic sciences, nevertheless had a clarifying role in their regard.
In Paragraph 8 of Ideas Husserl had already come to the conclusion that “no fully developed science of fact could subsist unmixed with eidetic knowledge.”
In his essay on Phenomenology and the Sciences of Man Merleau-Ponty was clearly very much inspired by this and other similar statements by Husserl on the eidetic method. Pure inductivity, he says, is “a myth,” and not a scientific method. Every science of fact implies and lives from eidetic insight. No scientist simply gathers facts; he gathers facts in view of some purpose. If eidetic insight were not present, induction would be blind. This is true not only of the human sciences, where it is most evident, but even of physics:
. . . all sound knowledge of facts must include, at least implicitly, some insight into essences. . . . The physicists who created physics, in the modern sense of the word, had an insight into what a physical thing is. Galileo, for example, of whom Husserl often spoke, was certainly not a phenomenologist. He was not even a philosopher. . . . Nevertheless when he decided to study falling bodies, a certain intuition of what a physical body is was implied in this experimental investigation. . . . How does Galileo proceed? Does he consider different examples of falling bodies and then, by a method of agreement, following the theory of John Stuart Mill, abstract what is common to those examples? As a matter of fact, he proceeds in a totally different manner. The conception of the fall of bodies is not found in the facts. He forms it actively; he constructs it. He freely conceives the pure case of a freely falling body, of which there is no given example in our human experience. Then, having constructed this idea, he verifies it by showing how the confused empirical facts, which never represent the free fall in its pure state, can then be understood through the introduction of additional conditions (friction, resistance, etc.) which explain the difference between the facts and the pure concept. On the basis of the free fall, therefore, one constructs the fall of a body on an inclined plane.4
Merleau-Ponty could as well have used as an example the method of Einstein, who did no physical “experiments,” but who devised the restricted relativity theory mainly on the basis of such “eidetic” variations as imagining freely falling elevators in space at different velocities. Husserl had said already in the Logical Investigations that even the fundamental discoveries of the positive sciences were nothing other than idealisierende Fiktionen cum fundamento in re. In the Ideas he says that the inductive sciences no less than the eidetic sciences require a “reading of the essence.” The fact of the matter for both kinds of sciences is that “one experiment will frequently suffice to establish a law.”5 In any case, once a law is established, repeated experiences do not make it more true or more certain. Ultimately, induction or the generalization from empirical examples is not founded on using an ever greater number of cases.
It is, rather, a process of intellectual analysis whose verification consists in the total, or at least sufficient, clarity which the group of concepts worked out in this way bring to the given phenomena. Thus laws are not basically live realities which would have a force and could rule over the facts. . . . they are a light and not a force.6
In short, the eidetic seeing of an essence in the facts (Wesenschau) is not some esoteric method reserved to phenomenology, but a method which pervades all human experience and all human science. It is the basis of the logical form of the “and so forth . . .” which is one of our most important operating concepts. Whenever we take something in immediate lived experience as “an example,” we are freed from the realm of the practical, the existential, the empirical experiences of the natural attitude, in order to see this example as “not necessary” in itself, as but one instance of an indefinite continuation. This freeing of the observer from the factual, which is accomplished through taking an eidetic attitude toward even one’s own experience, is the first root of the existentialist concept of freedom in Husserl’s phenomenology.
The theory of the ego developed in Paragraphs 46, 53, and 54 of Ideas I and then greatly extended in the Fourth Cartesian Meditation establishes the “absolute” character of consciousness and its independence of all its objects, including itself, whenever it takes itself as an object. It is a strange, wondrous, almost miraculous fact of experience that consciousness can objectify itself by taking its acts, its states, and its dispositions as objects—and through these dispositions (or “habitualities”)—even itself as an object. In the Fifth Investigation of 1901 Husserl had endorsed the Humean view that there is no abiding objective center (or ego) to the stream of consciousness. There is only the anonymous-operating-intentionality (anonym-fungierende-Intentionalität). He had written that he was “quite unable to find this ego, this primitive, necessary center of relations” in 1901, but by 1913 with the publication of the second edition of Logical Investigations and with Ideas he concedes that he has “managed to find it.”7 The “diaphaneity” or elusiveness-to-self which we discover in taking the transcendental attitude toward our own experiences does not alter the fact “that the empirical ego is as much a case of transcendence as the physical thing.”8
In Paragraph 46 of Ideas all this is stated much more clearly. In reflecting on myself-experiencing-the-world-of-objects, I have an existential and individual intuition of myself that here and now is utterly “indubitable.” This existential intuition (which also lies at the basis of Augustinian and Cartesian epistemology) is valid only once and only for me. Though everything else be intrinsically “dubi-table,” I cannot doubt that I am here and now experiencing the world. (As Augustine and Merleau-Ponty would put it: We should not ask whether or not we are perceiving the world; we should rather call what we perceive “the world.”) This is a truth of fact, of the direct and immediate instantiation of what it is to be an ego.
But, second, by taking a transcendental attitude toward this intuition and freely varying it in the imagination I can come to an eidetic intuition of what the ego is, an intuition which is true not only for me but for all. This is an intrinsic necessity of Husserl’s approach since, though I may have multiple examples of most of the objects of my experience, I never have but one example of what it is to be an ego. I can experience my own experiences but I cannot directly experience the experiences of others except through a process of appresentative objectification. But this limitation can be no essential block to arriving at the eidetic structures of what it is to be an experiencing ego since, based on this new conception of the relations between facts and essences, every instance of an essence, if it is a true example of that essence, must exhibit all of the essential characteristics included in that essence. Thus, though I can never have in my own experience more than one example of what it is to be a center of experience, a transcendental condition of objectivity, an “ego life,” this will suffice to establish the eidetic structures of egology.
In the Fourth Meditation, of course, this is made even more explicit. There Husserl begins with the practical reality of myself experiencing myself (Ich als dieses Ego) and moves to the eidetic structures of experiencing through the method of free variation (Selbstvariation meiner Ego) in order to grasp the Wesenform of the ego, “the form which includes an infinity of forms of apriori types of actualities and potentialities possible in life.”
The point here is not to repeat the entire egology of Husserl but rather to point out that this very experience of transcendentality, which enables me to take even myself as an object, is the most fundamental root of the later existentialist conception of freedom, a conception which was orchestrated by Jean-Paul Sartre both in his The Transcendence of the Ego and in Being and Nothingness.
Though the existential theory of free choice is of the greatest importance and is the fundamental concept of any existentialist ethic, there is a noetic sense of freedom which is more fundamental and which undergirds freedom of choice. This is the ability and the necessity of consciousness to be distinguishable from, separable from, and ultimately “independent” of all of its objects. Consciousness is a pure intentionality, a directedness toward objects, the transcendental condition of objects, the constituting action which “has objects” which are always outside of and independent of itself. Consciousness is essentially a directedness toward what it is not. This experience of not being one’s objects, of not even being oneself, this ability to always take a distance from any object, and to objectify and articulate any situation, is the most fundamental root of the experience of freedom. It is the basis of the very phenomenological proof of being free.
I believe that the whole germ of Sartre’s The Transcendence of the Ego is to be found in paragraphs 39, 53, and 54 of Ideas. Husserl here explains how consciousness is “mixed up” with the world in the double sense of (1) being embodied and (2) through perception. It is the coerciveness of the perceptual world on our attention, of the primacy of perception, which explains “the natural attitude.” The “transcendental ego” is not a different ego from the “empirical ego.” It is a different attitude toward experience. It is the very same “empirical ego,” a Welterfahrendes Leben, which lives in the “natural attitude” while always being capable of taking a transcendental attitude toward its own experience.
If I may be allowed a slight digression on Sartre’s theory as it is presented in The Transcendence of the Ego, I would like to say that in spite of the polemical tone of the first part of this book, and even the endorsement of a “non-egological theory of consciousness” (in which writers like Gurwitsch and others follow him), I think that the difference between Sartre and Husserl on this point is ultimately only terminological. The question is asked: If the empirical ego is also constituted by transcendental consciousness, how is it possible that this “absolute” consciousness is still an ego? Sartre and Gurwitsch argue that transcendental consciousness is nonegological, on the grounds that the ego itself is an object of consciousness. It seems to me that this terminological difference is not decisive.
We have already mentioned that in the Logical Investigations Husserl had developed a non-egological theory of a consciousness which was “an anonymous operating intentionality,” and he later, as he says, came to find the ego in transcendental experience.
I submit that this transcendental ego which Husserl learned to see is nothing other than what Sartre and Gurwitsch came to call non-egological consciousness. The reason for this is that when the ego takes a transcendental attitude toward its own experience, and experiences itself as an object, this transcendental constituting consciousness is not ever itself an object but rather always the condition of the possibility of all objects. But the ego can constitute and objectify itself only after the fact, only after the acts, states, or dispositions which it grasps have just gone by. The grasping consciousness is not itself ever grasped. Sartre calls this the “nonsubstantial absolute,” the “relative absolute,” the “reflected” consciousness, which can never be objectified because it is always one step ahead of its own self-objectification. This nonpositional, nonthetic, unreflected consciousness discovers that its own ego is “transcendent” to its reflecting acts.
But Sartre also acknowledges in his analysis of the structures of this “absolutely impersonal consciousness” that when it does reflect on its own acts, states, and dispositions9 the ego as “me” does appear as an object to me in the same way that I and my experiences are objects for others. Gurwitsch, following Sartre, puts it as follows:
For many centuries material things were believed to contain an innermost kernel or nucleus. This substance or essence was supposed not only to support the qualities of the thing but also to produce them, to be a kind of source from which issue the effects one thing exerts upon others; finally, it was above all not supposed to be altered when the thing underwent changes. From critical and analytical reflection it was progressively learned that there is no such kernel, much less an unchangeable substance as opposed to the modification of the thing. Material things, and perceptual things as given in everyday experience, are but organized unities of their qualities and attributes. . . .10
Now one might think that the case of the ego is different but, Sartre’s own analysis shows this not to be the case.
Through every act the ego turns out to be the noematic correlate of reflected acts. Through every act . . . the ego appears in its entirety, but it presents itself under a special aspect—namely, so far as that disposition is incorporated in the ego to which the grasped act is related.11
Therefore the ego is just as “dubitable” and inadequately given as any perceptual object. The ego itself is “transcendent to consciousness.” But I submit that the ego which is “transcendent” to consciousness is nothing other than Husserl’s “empirical ego” as it can become the object of transcendental consciousness in its transcendental self-constituting activity. Perhaps an example from Sartre will make this more clear.
Sartre takes the example of a state or disposition of hatred toward another person. In encountering this person I may have repeated “acts” of dislike, disgust, irritation, etc. One of my ways of having this person as an object in my field of experience is the emotive intentionality of “hatred.” This will have occurred again and again, almost subconsciously, before I finally thematize my attitude toward this person by saying to myself or others that I hate him. This state of hatred in myself toward this person is a more stable object in that it is not a mere fleeting act of awareness but a permanent acquisition (Husserl would say a “habituality”). It then appears to me, when I objectify myself and take my own ego-life as an object, that one of its “qualities” is the permanent disposition to hate this person, even when I am not thinking of it, even when I am asleep, etc. I experience myself as disposed to hate this person at whatever future time he should again pass before my ken whether in perception, in imagination, or whatever.12
The importance of this and other similar examples in which the ego itself is experienced as having permanent qualities, analogous to the qualities of external perceptual objects, is that the ego-pole of our experiences is given to us as objectively as any other objects, though, of course, through different procedures. When Husserl speaks of the “habitualities” of the ego-life and tells us in 1913 that “I have now learned to see the ego,” he cannot have meant anything other than this. Therefore, the difference between what he calls “the transcendental attitude” and what Sartre and Gurwitsch call “non-egological consciousness” is at bottom merely terminological.
Before concluding this brief consideration of the “absolute” ego, it is worthwhile situating Husserl’s egology within the epistemological and ethical context of the development of his own thought. His doctrine of the ego is not contemplative, it is not harmless, it is not outside the real world of political and social action. On the contrary it makes strong and actual epistemological and ethical demands. Let us consider these in the light of a few poignant passages from his Nachwort.
Philosophy, Husserl writes, can take root only in radical reflection upon the meaning and possibility of its own scheme. Through such reflection it must in the very first place and through its own activity take possession of the absolute ground of pure preconceptual experience. . . . The absence of this procedure . . . had the consequence that we had and have many and ever new philosophical “systems” or “directions,” but not the one philosophy which, as Idea, underlies all the philosophies that can be imagined. Philosophy, as it moves towards its realization, is not a relatively incomplete science improving as it goes naturally forward. There lies embedded in this meaning as philosophy a radicalism in the matter of foundations, an absolute freedom from all presuppositions, a securing for itself an absolute basis: the totality of all presuppositions that can be “taken for granted.”13
The philosophical life makes both noetic and ethical appeals to our individual freedom. Clearly, in his theory of the ego Husserl is more Cartesian than Kantian. It is not a matter of formal structures but of my ego-life. He repeats again and again:
It is in the last resort the Ego that experiences and knows, and is thus already presupposed in all the natural self-knowledge of the “human Ego who experiences, thinks, and acts naturally in the world.” In other words: from this source springs the phenomenological transposition as an absolute requirement. . . .14
Or again:
I myself as this individual essence, posited absolutely, as the open infinite field of pure phenomenological data and their inseparable unity, am the “transcendental ego.”15
Or again:
. . . it is exclusively my Ego that is given. . . .16
Or again:
I, the transcendental, absolute I, as I am in my own life of transcendental consciousness. . . .17
The first point Husserl makes about the Ego in the Nachwort is, then, the noetic and epistemological point that it is, in the last analysis, only I myself who can recognize the truth as true. Nobody can do it for me. Until I “see” the truth, it is not yet true (for me). Even if the truth be that of one of the objective sciences, such as mathematics, and is not seen to be “my truth,” but the truth of all men and for all times, nevertheless, until I can see it in its compelling evidence to be true, it is a truth not yet grasped. And since subjectivity is the necessary condition for the possibility of any objectivity whatsoever, in the last analysis, aus letzter Begründung, I, as transcendental ego, am the necessary source of the constitution of truth.
There is no evidence more fundamental than that of immediate intuition. If I do not see something as true on my own initiative and on my own authority, there is no other authority to whom to appeal. No matter how many sciences may have been constructed by men in order to enable them to make sense of their present experience in an objective, disciplined, universal, and necessarily explanatory manner, they are all at the service of a consciousness which is at their origin and which can pose the question of the origin, a justification which can only, in the last analysis, be Selbstbegründung.
The second necessity is of an ethical nature, namely, that the prosecution of a radical philosophy of origins must ultimately rest on a “radical attitude of autonomous self-responsibility.”18 This expression, aus letzter Selbst-verantwortung, clearly underlines the responsibility of the knower for his knowledge. To know the truth imposes ethical demands. It is not only our responsibility for recognizing the truth to be true but also the responsibility of taking this recognition on one’s own shoulders. In the light of this demand, it is not surprising that Husserl should have been suspicious of all heteronomy, particularly as it manifested itself in some of his students’ turning toward religion as a higher authority than philosophy itself. For Husserl philosophical reason is the supremely autonomous act to which all objects, including God, are objects governed by the laws of formal ontology. There can be no more foundational grounding for truth than an ethically autonomous constituting consciousness. This is another root of the later existentialist theory of freedom. It is consciousness itself which must breast non-entity. There is no refuge outside it.
TRANSCENDENTAL AND DIALECTICAL CONDITIONS
OF EXPERIENCE (ERFAHRUNG)
Paragraph 39 of Ideas and the following paragraphs give us Husserl’s first phenomenology of perception. Perhaps the central thesis of this phenomenology of perception is that all objects transcendent to consciousness are given Abschattungsweise, that is, through a series of perspectival presentations none of which is completely determinate or exhaustive, none of which is completely adequate to what is given but which is nevertheless sufficiently determinate to be seen as the presentation of this object rather than another.
The distinction between being as experienced and being as it is in itself is developed in Paragraph 42 and establishes the transcendence of all objective beings to consciousness. The conclusion is that it is being which is “relative” whereas consciousness is “absolute.” This is ultimately true not only of perceptual objects, though it is most clearly illustrated there, but of other objects as well. The “primacy of perception” in experience gives us our most fundamental sense of reality as well as our experience of embodiment. (It is interesting to note that in Paragraph 39, the central paragraph of this section, in which Husserl shows how an intentional consciousness can be “separated” from the world, he explains that there are two ways for consciousness to be joined to the world: through “embodiment” and through “perception,” and the first—which became the central problematic of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception—for Husserl is derived from the second.)
The distinction between being-in-itself and being-as-experienced gives us the specifically Husserlian conception of “the phenomenon,” and became the basis of Sartre’s “phenomenological ontology.” There is nothing beyond, within, or behind the phenomenon. The phenomenon is the whole of being, as experienced. There is no noumenal substance behind it, and if at times, it is called the x-point only to be asymptotically arrived at through an indefinite concatenation of experiences, this is not because there is some unexperienceable reality that cannot be given or that only can be inferred, but rather that experience is never complete. No presentation of an object can be more important than another, no appearance gives us a privileged access, all are on the same level as a system of mutually implicating experiences.
When Sartre gives us his famous “ontological proof” of the transphenomenality of the world on the one hand and of consciousness on the other in Being and Nothingness,19 he is relying on this Husserlian definition of the phenomenon. He uses the term “ontological” in the sense it was attributed to Anselm; it is, namely, an analytical argument. If one understands the meaning of the word phenomenon, namely, the presentation of something, from any point of view, totum sed non totaliter, then one will see that the very concept of the phenomenon requires that there be something to be experienced (“the world of objects” transcendent to this particular experience) and an experiencer (the “cogito,” consciousness as the transphenomenal condition of the possibility of any object being given at all). Being is what is given insofar as it exceeds any particular presentation; the World is Being as organized, structured, constituted by consciousness.
Now we must take a further step, which is not so clear in Husserl, but which Sartre and Merleau-Ponty understood better than he—namely, that this theory of perception (and experience) contains some hidden dialectical elements. Consciousness, Husserl says, is the necessary and transcendental condition of the possibility of all objects, whether perceptual objects, imagined objects (such as unicorns, centaurs, the Brothers Karamazov, etc.), cultural objects (such as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Goethe’s Faust, the Magna Charta, the proletariat, etc.), past and remembered objects (such as the day of my graduation from high school, the time I first fell in love, my first experiences as a graduate student, etc.), historical objects, future objects, even God.
It is in developing this theory of objectivity in its relation to consciousness that Husserl comes closest to the de facto use of a dialectical logic though, of course, he nowhere says so.20 He had earlier laid down the basis for a kind of dialectical or at least gestaltist logic in the Third Investigation on the “Logic of Parts and Wholes.” What is essential to a dialectical logic is that there be internal relations within the parts of any object which is taken as a whole constituted of parts. The internal relations among the parts that constitute a given whole are such that the parts belonging to this particular whole would essentially modify or change the whole if any of them were to be removed or to be rearranged. They are parts which implicate one another in such wise that if they were to appear in isolation or as parts of a different whole, our entire field of consciousness would undergo a reorganization. The perceptual object is a paradigm example of this. It is given through any and all of its Abschattungen, it is always given totum (as a whole) sed non totaliter (never from every aspect at once, totally, without perspective or emphasis). Each presentation implicates a series of future possible presentations which at any moment might confirm the series of presentations given up to now or might disappoint it and require a reorganization of experience.
A perceptual object, in short, is given by profiles or aspects,many of which may have been given before, many of which may never have been given, many of which are anticipated with more or less clarity on the basis of what has already been given. No aspect (part) is more important than any other. No aspect is logically or necessarily prior to any other. They are all cogiven in a way that is not completely determinate but also not completely lacking in determination. In short we can say that the perceptual object is, at the limit, nothing other than “the system of all its possible appearances” (Gurwitsch’s favorite phrase in the Field of Consciousness).
There are other elements in Husserl’s thought, several of which are developed in Ideas, which require us to go beyond formal logic, and even beyond the discussion of the transcendental conditions of formal logic, to explain the givenness of “objects” in the world. In essence the phenomenological-dialectical objection to the use of formal logic as an exclusive method of philosophical analysis comes down to the fact that such a logic brings with it unacceptable and unanalyzed metaphysical presuppositions. These presuppositions include the demand that the world of experience be constituted only of isolated and independent atomic facts interrelated with one another only by external relations. Such a presupposition falls at once whenever we find objects involving experienced internal relations where the “logic of parts and wholes” comes into play.21
Though Husserl was certainly aware that his concept of the phenomenon, particularly in his phenomenology of perception, involved his theory of parts and wholes as well, he does not seem to have seen as clearly as his successors that this implicates him in a dialectic. Leaving out the most dialectically minded among them, like Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, we can turn to Suzanne Bachelard and Robert Sokolowski. The dialectical constraints which they see emerging from Husserl’s theory of transcendental subjectivity are not only those on the side of the object, which we have been describing here, but also those on the side of the subject of experience itself.
Suzanne Bachelard (following Vuillemin) says that Husserl was “unconsciously oriented toward a dialectic.” Husserl is, according to Bachelard, “unable to maintain his conception of an absolute transcendental subjectivity” because of the situated character of subjectivity, which requires that it institute a criticism of itself from without. This, she says, is not merely a question of the dialectic we have been speaking about above, between consciousness and its “contents” or “objective products,” but the dialectic “of a duality between subjectivity and the forms in which it necessarily manifests itself.”22
Bachelard continues:
And these forms can be considered as objectivity over against the constituting subjectivity by means of a strange Abhebung. . . . This would explain how a formal ontology taken in the broadest sense can be an ontology which applies also to the constituting subjectivity. But, where all of this is concerned, there is nothing explicit in the accounts Husserl has developed. In these accounts we can see only the latent sense of a phenomenology that is unconsciously embarrassed by untenable absolutes and in this way finds the means of reducing the difficulties in which it has let itself become enmeshed.23
Whether or not these “difficulties” mean the ruination of the phenomenological theory of transcendental subjectivity is another matter; that would not seem to be a logical necessity. What is necessary is to recognize this dialectical situation of transcendental consciousness.
Sokolowski writes in the same vein, without explicitly calling forth a dialectic. In the fifth chapter of The Formation of Husserl’s Concept of Constitution he examines the nature of the activity which consciousness exercises in “constituting” itself, other selves, and the world of objects in general and asks whether Husserl has really explained how consciousness can account for its own constitutive activities. Transcendental consciousness finds itself confronted with a world of objects which are the correlates of its acts of perceiving, willing, imagining, thinking, desiring, evaluating, and so on.
Sokolowski writes:
. . . Husserl’s genetic analyses do not tell us why we encounter men, animals, plants, and matter with all the characteristics proper to them, nor does he explain why human beings have acts of perception, desire, evaluation, hatred, and so on. These actual developments of the transcendental ego are given as a facticity. Phenomenology does not explain why human knowledge branches off into the paths it does follow. The branches of science, of constitution, are not deducible from the transcendental ego.24
Or to put it another way, the transcendental ego, having discovered by reflection on its own activity, that it has constituted objects in all these categories “in their sense,” cannot discover, by its own reflection, why it must exercise its subjective acts of constitution in just these ways and no others. In short, transcendental subjectivity (and even intersubjectivity) is then confronted with its own brute, existential, factical situation which it cannot dominate otherwise than by describing it. This is, certainly, also one of the roots of existentialism in Ideas I.
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