“Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology”
From its earliest beginnings phenomenology presented itself as a philosophical revolution, and its consequences not only in philosophy but also in a number of the human sciences have indeed been revolutionary. Even if we exclude from our purview the existentialist upheaval of Western philosophy represented by such pre-phenomenological thinkers as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Feuer-bach, Dostoevsky, Shestov, and Jaspers, we can well ask if it is possible to name in any other current or historical philosophical movement such a plethora of geniuses: Husserl, Ingarden, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, even without concerning ourselves with their numerous disciples and followers, many of whom rank among the most eminent philosophers of our day. The impact of phenomenology (and of phenomenological existentialism) in any case is just beginning to make itself fully felt in spite of the fact that this movement in philosophy is as old as this century. A movement which can keep its vitality for almost a century and occasion the increasing intellectual excitement with which it is surrounded in this country at the present time is not one that the history of philosophy is going soon to forget.
But if we now attempt to assess the essential characteristics of this revolution and, in an introductory way, try to state as clearly as possible in what this most recent innovation consists, we will have to conclude, I think, that the phenomenological revolution fits into a much broader series of historical revolutions in philosophy. Though it is certainly true to say, with Pierre Thévénaz, that “truly profound revolutions in philosophy proceed more from innovations of method than from metaphysical illuminations,”1 it-seems that what the phenomenological method strives to render finally clear is not something utterly new in the history of philosophy but rather something which can be found in every one of the critical developments which have taken place since the earliest history of philosophy. This perhaps accounts for the testimony on the part of so many of Husserl’s students and readers that they did not so much find his thought to be something “new” as that they found it the clearest exposition of what they had been thinking or trying to think all along.
Every time philosophy has attempted to take itself as just one science among others, albeit the highest and most general of all, the science of sciences perhaps, the scientia per causas ultimas, or the first science,2 it has brought about a gradually developing crisis as to its own nature and a breakdown of its essential project. Each breakdown was followed by a methodological revolution, not the discovery of a new range of facts, but a new way of looking at the facts. And it is my contention that in its most general sense the method which has been rediscovered at each of these critical junctures has always been the same one. Such was the case in the crisis of reason and understanding that developed in early Greek philosophy at the time of the Socratic and Platonic revolution. Socrates brought philosophy from its metaphysical “heavenly” speculations down to earth and “located it in the cities”3 by recognizing and showing for the first time that his pre-Socratic predecessors had confused and conflated two different kinds of explanation which must be distinguished and kept separate, only one of which is truly philosophical.
In posing the question of the origin of the kosmos, the pre-Socratics confused the “scientific” or “factual” question, the question of the prôton, the first thing, the first cause, the cosmological origin of the whole, with the purely logical and properly philosophical question of the arché, i.e., the principles or meaning-conditions of the possibility of such-or-such being the case. The question of the prôton is an empirical and “scientific” question; the question of the arché of things is a conceptual or properly philosophical question. By confusing empirical laws with eidetic laws the pre-Socratics—and a great host of subsequent metaphysicians—were unable to make any solid or systematic progress. Each “likely story” was replaced by another without providing any sure grounds for choosing between them. Insofar as metaphysics and theology take themselves to be sciences, they pose the question of the Ursprung der Welt in cosmological and causal categories. Phenomenology, on the contrary, knows nothing of cosmology; it poses the question of how the world arises as the presently structured world of human consciousness within ordinary experience. The origin is thus not posed as something which happened in illo tempore but as a structure of a present datum which gives sense to the historical effort of science itself, as something which every scientific explanation must necessarily presuppose.
The dramatic discovery of this distinction between science and philosophy was the point of departure for Athenian philosophy and the germ of its stupendous and sudden progress in those few glorious years that cover the life spans of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. The world had to wait for hundreds of years for a philosophical revolution of similar importance—whether one is generous enough to credit Augustine (in De magistro) and Anselm (in De veritate) with the next breakthrough with the distinction between meaning and reference, or whether one insists that we wait until Ockham or Descartes for philosophy once more to get on its proper course. It is as if each great historical revolution in philosophy depended on rediscovering a certain fundamental law of experience, namely, that the investigation of meaning rather than fact is the proper focus of philosophy, only to see this insight (which is extremely difficult to formulate properly and apparently impossible to hold on to) become gradually obscured to the point where a new generation could claim another critical victory by its rediscovery. The history of philosophy thus becomes the history of the continual rediscovery of that part of its content which is truly philosophical.
Let us recall briefly the first of these fateful moments and reflect on what it most truly meant. Plato tells of this in the Phaedo—in words from Socrates which have the ring of the strictest historical truth.
When I was young [Socrates tells Cebes], I was tremendously eager for the kind of wisdom which they call the investigation of nature [peri physeos historia]. I thought it was glorious to know the causes [aitias] of everything, why each thing comes into being and why it perishes and why it exists. . . . I investigated the phenomena of heaven and earth until finally I made up my mind that I was by nature totally unfitted for this kind of investigation [pros tauten ten skepsin aphyos einai]. (96A-C).
Socrates goes on to tell us that the basis of his disenchantment with pre-Socratic science was its inability to give the “reason why” of things; it could only give more or less probable opinions, empirical generalizations forever subject to challenge and correction, and not true and certain knowledge (epistémé). It is no exaggeration to say that Socrates, after reading Anaxagoras, came to despise science,4 and out of this loss of faith in the pre-Socratic peri physeos historia was born a new method (methodos) based on his own lived experience that “Socrates does whatever he does by mind” (hoti Sokrates panta hosa prattei no [υ̂ῳ] prattei) (98C). His new method was to forsake the study of physical realities for the study of mind and the products of mind, namely, logoi or concepts (eis tous logous), to discover the truth of things through the analysis of what we say or think about them (en ekeinois [logois] skopein ton onton ten aletheian) (99E).
In short, his new method required turning from the study of particular existent things in the world to their meanings, to the realm of “the meant” as such. The great mistake of Anaxagoras, after having discovered nous as the ultimate source and basis of the “reason” of things, was to interpret the workings of nous in terms of “airs” and “fires” and “waters” and “bones” and “sinews” and “joints,” instead of realizing that the conceptual realm (for which nous alone is responsible) is not a part of nature at all but something ideal and “essential, “distinct from all matters of fact, the very means by which we are able to experience and thus think the world. Concepts are not things or substances or forces at all; they are rather meanings or structures forged by the mind in its experience of things. “In itself” the world is neither true nor false, nor is it meaningful or valuable; it takes on meaning only in relation to a mind which orders and relates its parts, which thus institutes objects of thought and, by thinking the world, introduces into it the relationship of knowledge, of possible truth and falsity. What the mind creates is a tissue of possibilities (of “hypotheses,” says Socrates, thinking first of all of mathematical definitions), of useful idealizations (idealisierende Fiktionen cum fundamento in re, says Husserl) which obey their own apriori laws and which can be examined in their own intrinsic implications independently of the real things in the world to which they can be taken to refer.
MEANING AND REFERENCE: CONCEPTS AND THINGS
This early distinction between meaning and reference and the recognition that the specific task of philosophy was a rational investigation of meanings rather than an empirical investigation of things and events is the ground for all the philosophical emotion and enthusiasm which we find in Plato and the early Platonists over the discovery of “the ideal.” The discovery of the “objectivity” of the relationships of reason and of the rules of thought—the coercive, non-temporal, and apriori constraints on combining “ideas”—served not only as a basis for proving the immortality of the soul but also for justifying the spiritual and mystical ascent of the mind to the knowledge of “divine” and true being.
If we now turn to Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, we will find that his delineation of the realm of meaning (“the kingdom of truth” as it is called in the Prolegomena) and his definition of the task of philosophy in terms of a turn from “the factual” to “the eidetic,” by means of his famous theory of reductions, is considerably more sober. It is, nevertheless, based on an only somewhat more sophisticated elaboration of the same distinctions which Socrates first introduced into philosophy. It begins with a refutation of psychologism and, therewith, the discovery of the “objectivity” of “the ideally meant” (the mental content of meaning-acts) as pervasive, coercive, permanent, and therefore apriori structures of all conscious experience of the world. In a sense Husserl is the most “Athenian” of all contemporary philosophers: from the Prolegomena to the Krisis his first and all-pervasive preoccupation is to examine the ultimate foundations of the underlying “teleology of reason,” which he finds to be distinctive of (“Western”) philosophy.
Unlike Heidegger, he does not exhort us to return to the pre-Socratics or to undo the work of Socrates and Plato; his philosophy is itself but an extension of the “Greek miracle,” namely, of the discovery that formal laws of logic establish an “absolutely stable” framework for thought which is always presupposed by every particular science and for which no particular science, least of all psychology, can account. Formal logic, according to Husserl, provides us with the theory of any possible science, and every science which will ever exist must be elaborated according to its laws even though no particular science can account for these laws. The physicist does not have to study the laws of logic ex professo, but we can know apriori that if he were to violate any one of these laws in establishing his science, he would be subject to error. Of course, Husserl wants to do much more than repeat this commonplace of Greek philosophy; he also examines the presuppositions of formal logic, what the project of reason itself always takes for granted, and thus grounds formal logic also in an ultimate science of the foundations, transcendental phenomenology. But this very project of “founding” logic requires that the status of logic as it was established by the Greeks and developed in Western philosophy be fully maintained.
It is not a very difficult thing for us now to refute psychologism (though it was still a major philosophical task in the days of James, Frege, and Husserl). Psychologism is the doctrine that the laws of thought which govern the objective content of objects of thought (or meanings, or concepts) are in reality nothing other than the empirical and “real” laws which are discoverable by an empirical investigation of the processes of thinking. The psychological study of thinking (or experiencing) is a factual and empirical investigation of real, historical, contingent acts of the mind, of the processes which occur in various minds at various distinct points in time and space. Its laws are but empirical (and thus vague) generalizations from experience; they are statements of approximate and statistical regularities, elaborated on the basis of an investigation of matters of fact—a peri physeos historia. As a “natural science” psychology can never give us, at any given stage of its development, anything more than “probable” laws. None of its laws are apriori and none of them are evident to insight.5 Thus psychology cannot, any more than any other empirical science, provide us with a foundation for formal logic since the laws of logic are not only evident apriori to insight but are absolutely exact, certain, and not dependent on the gradual, historical process of verification necessary to establish the truth of empirical statements. We come to know the laws of logic gradually but they do not become gradually true; they are true independently of any empirical investigation and rule every such investigation; they would be no less true even if there were no minds capable of empirical investigation at all.
But we need spend no further time on the refutation of the belief that the laws of logic give us the “physics of thought” (Lipps), since this view is no longer held by any reputable philosopher. But it is necessary, in order to classify the Husserlian “turn to meaning” (for which the technical term is epoché, or “reduction”), to examine the place of “the psychological” in human experience. “The psychological” (or what Husserl often calls “the psychic”) designates that special ability (and activity) on the part of conscious beings of thinking thoughts or, more generally, of “having objects.” In the totality of our lives as living organisms we are subject to, and ourselves initiate, many different kinds of processes, but one category of such processes can be distinguished from all the others as the characteristic property of consciousness, namely, the “having of objects.” Conscious processes are thus real, distinguishable, datable psychic events which take place within a physical organism; they are happenings in the world and can thus properly be made the matter of scientific investigation like anything else in the real world. But the “objects” which such processes enable us to entertain (and “to think”) are not of the same physical order. What psychological experience brings into the world is the realm of “the meant,” of “objects of thought,” of “ideal objects,” and these idealities, though correlative to the psychological acts of thinking in which they are “given,” are themselves subject to a different kind of objective law.
PERCEPTUAL AND EIDETIC INTUITION
In order to avoid misunderstanding, it is necessary here to introduce two further refinements. First of all, most historical philosophers have acknowledged the intentionality of consciousness in the sense that all consciousness is consciousness of something, that consciousness is a self-transcending process oriented toward objects other than and outside itself. This is nothing new or of any great contemporary concern. (Even when consciousness takes its own acts as objects, it can objectify itself only by remaining “beyond” itself; the present act of consciousness which focuses on its own just completed act[s] is not itself an object but rather the subjective process of objectifying itself. It is because the ultimate objectifying self always precedes—both temporally and logically—its own self-objectification that the general law of intentionality, that all consciousness is consciousness of something, is maintained.) We must, therefore, specify that what we mean by intentionality here is (1) the ability of the mind to identify and hold before itself “objects” which can be meant as identically the same through a multiplicity of different acts of consciousness, and (2) the active and selective operation of constituting objects for itself. Both of these points are important and we will return to them at once.
However, a second refinement (of a different kind) is also called for before we can proceed. In the history of philosophy it has often been recognized that the “objects” of consciousness fall under two seemingly different and even exclusive kinds, namely, those which can be known by direct intuitive acquaintance (the particular objects of sense experience especially), and those which provide us with knowledge about particular objects even when these are not intuitively present (especially “ideas,” “concepts,” or “meanings”). British empiricism, since Ockham, has tended to reduce all intuitive experience to the former kind and to deny any intuition of universals; in its view only perceptually real, particular, individual historical objects can be intuitively known. On the contrary, rationalistic currents in philosophy, from Plato to Kant, have distinguished the sense-intuition of particulars from the intellectual intuition of universals, and many Platonists (like Augustine) have made this distinction not only the ontological basis for saying that reality is composed of two radically different kinds of “things” but of distinguishing within consciousness two radically different faculties for apprehending particulars, on the one hand, and universals, on the other.
Neither of these viewpoints is endorsed by Husserl.6 For Husserl, there are two distinguishable intuitive (or experiential) processes: namely, the perceptual intuition of individual, particular objects in the real (or imaginary) world, and the eidetic intuition of the “meanings” of such real objects. The objects of eidetic intuition are not real objects as such but rather these same objects insofar as they are presented from the aspect of their essential types and meanings. It would be interesting to compare and contrast Husserl’s distinction with that developed by Wittgenstein in his distinction between “seeing” and “seeing as” (or “aspect-seeing”) as it is developed in the Philosophical Investigations.7 But what it is most important to note here is only that perceptual intuition and eidetic intuition are not, according to Husserl, two different faculties directed to two different worlds of things, they are, rather, two distinct, though strictly correlative, ways of having the same objects in the same world. “Fact and essence,” he writes, though distinct, are “inseparable.” Every real object is intuited, when it is intuited in perceptual presence, as an individual, sensible particular, as the possible instantiation of an indefinite number of ideal types or “essences” which can, through reflection (or “ideation”), become the objects of “eidetic insight.” “Empirical or individual intuition,” he says, “can [always] be transformed into essential insight.”8
. . . when we stated that every fact could be “essentially” other than it is, we were already expressing thereby that it belongs to the meaning of everything contingent that it should have essential being and therewith an eidos. . . . An individual object is not simply . . . an individual, a “this-there,” something unique; but being constituted thus and thus “in itself” it has its own proper modes of being, its own supply of essential predicables which must qualify it.9
We therefore come to the tripartite distinction of meaning from reference which is characteristic of the phenomenological theory of intentionality. This is based, first of all, on our experienced awareness that in any act of consciousness it is always possible to distinguish what we are thinking or saying from that topic of discourse about which we are thinking or speaking; meaning is always distinct, though inseparable, from the objects in the real world to which it enables us to refer. This is demonstrated by showing that we can think the same, given, real object in many different ways, from different aspects, as it is given different meanings and entertained in different contexts, and, conversely, that the same meaning (or concept) can be used to refer to a multiplicity of different objects. Second, as we have seen above, we must at the same time distinguish what we are thinking, i.e., the objective meaning-content of any act of consciousness, from the real, psychological circumstances which condition and determine our thinking it here and now. I can always intend again the same object of thought which I entertained on an earlier occasion and others can think and intend the same object of thought as I.
The object of thought itself, as the objective meaning-content of an act of thinking, thus has none of the characteristics of the real acts in which it is psychologically given, nor of the real, individual, and particular things in the world to which it refers. It is not a “real” thing at all but something ideal. What one means by saying that a meaning is ideal is (1) that it is essentially characterized by eidetic sameness of content, and that it is (2) in principle, always repeatable. No real thing or event is ever the same as any other, nor is any real thing or event ever, strictly speaking, repeatable. It is necessary to comment on this somewhat more fully since the whole epistemology of phenomenology rests on this point. If nominalistic empiricism could successfully erase the ideality of meanings from our experience, phenomenology, at least as conceived by Husserl, would become impossible.
In experience we are given successively, through time, different, perspectivally distinct presentations of objects (of perception, of thought, of imagination, of emotion, etc.) which we take, through acts of synthesis, to be the same. The concept of sameness is so fundamental to our mental life that it is quite impossible to find anything more primitive, anything which does not presuppose it. James called it the “keel of the mind”10 and Plato recognized it as a more fundamental notion than even the ideas of “being” and “nothingness.” In order to think anything at all one must be able to distinguish what one is thinking from everything else and recognize it, through a period of temporal synthesis, as the self-same identical something with which one is concerned in a given pulse of consciousness. In fact, it is only through being able to hold onto a given object of thought through time that we can recognize the passage of phenomenal time at all and thus distinguish one mental act from another, since mental acts can be specified as distinct from one another only through their objects. In short, Husserl would argue that the concept of sameness is so fundamental to the structure of thought (and experience) that any attempt to explain it in terms of something else must always already presuppose not only that we be able to recognize instances of “sameness” but that we be already in possession of the concept of “the same” itself. Sameness (and its corollary, repeatability) is not something that ever occurs in the real world of things or events. There can be, then, no empirical criterion of sameness.
To attempt to replace the concept of sameness with some supposedly more observable (or “behavioristic”) criterion such as “similarity,” to say instead of “a is the same as b” that “a resembles b with respect to c,” does nothing more than displace the problem one step—since it still leaves us with the necessity of identifying that with respect to which two different things are similar, i.e., with a prior grasp of this very ground of similarity, and this is logically to presuppose the very notion of sameness which we are attempting to explain in terms of something else. However this fact of experience may be scientifically explained through an investigation of physiological and behavioral conditions, it is phenomenologically certain from the outset, and that is all we are concerned with here. If I say, for instance, that this chair is the same one that was here yesterday, any purely physical examination of the chair as a real existent is irrelevant. I will not find sameness in the real world at all; sameness belongs only to the realm of the meant, which is not to say that it does not have its own ideal objectivity, but only that this objectivity is there, and is experienced as objective, only for the mind, i.e., as a constituted objectivity for consciousness. Things can be the same only for a mind which can grasp them and hold them before itself through the flux of temporal experience. To single out some little part of the physical or psychological world and to distinguish it from all the rest as “this chair” or “this object” is already an act of creative selection with no real basis in the physical world in itself The movements of atoms and molecules are utterly indifferent to the attitudes and objectifications of consciousness; consciousness has its own motives for saying that here one object ends and the next begins. Both on the side of the psychological subject and on the side of the thing referred to there is a real difference between the chair I am seeing before me today and the one I saw yesterday; my act of seeing is numerically and temporally distinct from my act of seeing yesterday, and who can say that the chair as a thing, in itself, is physically identical with what it was yesterday even if it could be proven that it has had a continuously observed historical existence in that one place, coordinated objectively relative to its surrounding objects? Surely there has been some physical change. Sameness can be recognized only on the level of the ideal correlates of mental acts. It is a “transcendental” structure of our dealings with the world as experienced; it is a structure not of the real but of our experience of the real.
These observations enable us to understand the specifically phenomenological notion of “object” (or phenomenon). Every act of intuition, whether perceptual or categorial, terminates in some “object” which owes its meaning-consistency, its status as “something meant,” to the selective interest of the subject to whom it appears. Subjectivity is thus a necessary condition for the appearance of any objectivity whatsoever, whether we are speaking of particular physical things or of meanings and concepts. The following simple line-drawing from Gestalt psychology will illustrate what I mean:
We can focus successively on either object “A” or object “B” within the square. As “object” each has all the gestalt-characteristics of “form,” “contour,” “thingness,” etc., as opposed to the formlessness of the ground from which it emerges due to our selective attention. If we are looking at “A,” its opposite figure “B” simply merges into the background as something amorphously co-present with the object of our attention, as extending indefinitely behind it, something whose vague shape is utterly irrelevant to the “object” before us. The converse occurs if we focus on “B” and let “A” recede into the amorphousness of matter. But note, most important, that the “objectivity” of neither one is determined unequivocally by the line-drawing itself as a “physical stimulus.” The physical line which separates “A” from “B” in the physical world does not, in the phenomenal experience, belong to either one: Rather, it belongs now to “A” and now to “B,” depending on which of the two alternative figures is attended to. It would be easy to multiply more complex examples of the way in which various motives, needs, expectations, etc., influence our selection of objects in the world, but this example will suffice as an illustration.
Again, our conclusion is that the “having of objects” is not something fully determined by the physical and physiological conditions of the external situation within which consciousness operates; an “object” is not anything fully fixed independently of the operations of consciousness.11 Objects arise only in experience; there are no objects in the strict sense in the physical world at all; all objectivity is phenomenal. That is why Husserl can claim that “object is everything and all that is.”12 What we discover in a phenomenological analysis of experience, beginning with perceptual experience, are objects which polarize the selective and pragmatic attention of the experiencer. Neither sense-data (the explanatory postulates of empiricism) nor forms of judgment (the explanatory deductions of rationalism) are primarily experienced. The whole tissue of experience consists of constituted fields of objects (perceived objects, imagined objects, thought objects). This is why phenomenology replaces “being” as the ultimate category with the category of “object” or “world of objects.” The phenomenological reduction reveals that there is a category which is more profound and more primitive than the notions of “being” and “nothingness,” namely, the category of object of consciousness (or phenomenon).
When we grasp the world, and objects in the world, as subject to the laws of phenomenal objectivity—as cogitata—we have ipso facto adopted the phenomenological attitude and operated the reduction; we have “bracketed” all the questions of science and metaphysics which concern the real world in its empirical reality in order to isolate and examine this same world as meant, as an objective system of contents of consciousness. The world in the phenomenological sense, is the ever-experienced horizon of all objectifying acts of consciousness, the experienced coherence of all the various “regions” of objects and, ultimately, the experienced concordance of all objects whatsoever within a coherent structure of experience. The world as world can never be given as an object in the strict sense (as Selbst da in intuition), but only as the field of contextual relevancy within which any given object is distinguished, as the ultimate ground within which all experience takes place. It is never a given totality but rather the always presupposed “presumptive” totality, the never completed but always more closely approached synthesis of all perspectives. It is our experience of the world, as the ground of any particular experience, that founds our belief (Urdoxa) that all perspectives, all objectifications, will ultimately be found to coalesce in a coherent structure. In short, the world is the ultimate and most global objective correlate of transcendental constituting subjectivity; it is the basis on which any given “object” can be identified and distinguished from any other and can thus acquire an “objective” sense.13
One of the primary methodological accomplishments of phenomenology, therefore, is to establish that “objectivity” is not the exclusive property of the “things,” “events,” “sense data,” or “stimuli” of the “real” world. The various realms of “the imaginary,” for instance, are found to be ruled by laws which, though of a different kind, are just as objective and just as “discoverable,” just as free from personal whim and the vagaries of psychologism, as those of perception. The same must also be said for the “objects” generated in the more theoretical attitudes of consciousness, such as the purely ideal orders of logical systems, geometrical systems, number systems, of scientific and philosophical theories and all other validly elaborated theoretical constructs. It is here that the gain in substituting the metaphysically neutral notion of “object” for the more naively realistic notions of “being,” “matter,” “mind,” etc., of naturalistic metaphysical systems comes out most clearly. The reality-status of objects of consciousness is totally a function of the acts of consciousness (perceiving, imagining, thinking, and so on) in which they are given.
Phenomenology thus begins with a general theory of objectivity, i.e., of what it is to be an object in general. Apophantic analytics, or formal logic, as the purely formal analysis of logical grammar, of the logic of meaningfulness, implication, validity and truth, leads to the elaboration of the categories of formal ontology, or the science of objectivity in general. Formal ontology, based on the pure apriori categories of meaning, consists in the purely analytical study of the ultimate categories of objectivity, of what it means to be an object, or of “object-in-general.”
We take our start from formal ontology . . . which . . . is the eidetic science of object in general. In the view of this science, object is everything and all that is, and truths in endless variety and distributed among the many disciplines of the mathesis can in fact be set down to fix its meaning.14
The investigation of apriori structures is the central core of the phenomenological method (which calls it the method of “eidetic reduction”). We do not claim that everything in the realm of “the meant” is apriori since this realm is coextensive with that of “object.” Rather what is claimed is that it is only here, in the turn from the real objects of reference in the real world to their meaning-structures, that the apriori emerges clearly. There are no aprioris in the real world as it is independent of consciousness and this is why empiricism has never been able to discover them (though it is perennially embarrassed by the evidently apriori character of the laws of formal logic which it has to characterize as pure tautologies as if, in their discovery and study, no contribution to knowledge were achieved). The apriori belongs only to the realm of meaning, not to the world, but to experience of the world. Some linguistic philosophers have recently been seen to argue that the apriori is a grammatical matter,15 but they take “grammar” in a very broad sense, as coextensive with linguistic meaning in general; properly translated, with certain restrictions, their arguments are, I believe, convergent with those of phenomenology.
Apart from the early Platonists no philosopher in history has been more elated, even exhilarated, when he could find apriori evidences than Husserl. Against his contemporaries, among whom the sense of the apriori had “threatened, almost, to atrophy,” Husserl asks philosophers to “learn by heart” that wherever philosophical interests are involved “it is of the greatest importance to separate the apriori.”16 We must not ignore “the great intuition of Kant.” It does not become philosophers, who are almost the sole guardians of “pure theory” among us, to let themselves be guided merely by questions of practical and empirical utility and to allow its proper domain of research to be simply parcelled out among a number of ill-defined empirical sciences. Philosophical investigation is governed by a framework of unified apriori laws which define its true boundaries. In this way phenomenology, beginning with the first level of formal logic, pure apriori grammar, establishes laws which are always subunderstood and taken for granted by the sciences (including logic itself when this is studied as “a positive science”). The fact that the uncovering of these apriori conditions has no “practical” value and even seems sometimes to make a science of what is trivially obvious is no reason to despise it. Its theoretical value for philosophy, Husserl tells us, is “all the greater.” He takes pride in this discovery and glories in the fact that only philosophers are concerned with the apriori, with the discovery of truths so fundamental that all the other sciences take them for granted. He believes that even such “obvious” trivialities as those expressed in the rules of pure grammar mask the deepest philosophical problems, and he asserts that in a profound, if paradoxical sense, philosophy is the science of trivialities.17
The method of the phenomenologist, faced with the vast historical multiversum of the “world of objects,” is, like that of the geometer, eidetic. The phenomenologist argues on the basis of examples taken from real, concrete life-world experience. But he divests these examples of their mundane character of individual, particular existents or events in order to focus on that of which they are the instantiations. He uses a method of “free variation.” Like the geometer, he knows that the eidetic force of his investigation is independent of the examples he uses (or “draws”) to guide his thought and fix his attention.
In actually drawing and actually constructing a model [the geometer] is restricted; in phantasy he has incomparable freedom in the arbitrary transformation of the phantasied figures, in running through continuously modified possible formations, and 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.18
This “consciousness of freedom” experienced in the turn from the real world of factual experience and its determinisms in which we are physically immersed to the realm of eidetic possibility and necessity is of the essence of Husserlian phenomenology. The investigation of “meanings” and “essences” frees us from “factualness.” In a strong and almost paradoxical sentence Husserl writes that “fiction is the vital element of phenomenology, as it is of every other eidetic science.”19 Of course, like the geometer, the phenomenologist has to go back continually to his actual examples, since fact and essence are always correlative, but the genuine break between things and meanings occurs at the precise moment when a given datum, no matter what, is taken just as an example. An example is never considered for its own sake, in its concrete individuality, but as an instance of that of which it is an instantiation. We see, whenever we take something just as an example, that any variant of the example would have served equally well.20 This ability, distinctive of human consciousness, to turn from fact to essence, from what is given to essential possibility, from contingent example to eidetic necessity, is the guarantee of the apriori. This method is neither strictly deductive (since it is an argument on the basis of examples) nor strictly inductive (since the point is quickly reached at which “essential insight” occurs and when the multiplication of examples becomes redundant and otiose). It is closer to induction than to deduction but it is an induction of a very special kind, for which we could perhaps as well use Peirce’s term “abduction” as Husserl’s Wessenschau.21
According to Husserl, categories of meaning (in the double sense of Sinn, that is, unities of objective categorial “sense,” and of meinen, that is, acts of judgment, apophansis) are universally and necessarily correlative to “categories of objects.” Apophantic analytics or formal logic, as the purely formal analysis of logical grammar, of the logic of validity, and of the logic of truth, leads to the elaboration of the categories of formal ontology, or the science of objectivity in general. Formal ontology, to recapitulate based on the pure apriori categories of meaning, thus establishes the purely apriori science of being (“object”) as a whole. Together, apophantic analytics and formal ontology constitute what Husserl calls the mathesis universalis.22
Formal ontology, therefore, consists in the purely analytical study of the ultimate categories of objectivity, of what it is to be an object, or of “object-in-general.” Formal ontology is followed by the analysis of the richer and more restricted regional ontologies, which are based more concretely on experience and which require, over and above the apriori analytics of formal logic, the instrumentality of a transcendental logic, or a logic of experience in a “material” (as opposed to a merely “formal”) sense. The regional ontologies involve the discovery of invariant eidetic structures of various levels of experience which are “synthetic” or “material” and which apply the laws of objectivity as such to ever more concrete “regions” of experience. Thus, for instance, the phenomenology of perception will reveal the eidetic aprioris of the perceptual object as such; it will elaborate eidetic structures of experience which cannot be deduced from formal ontology, and which are, therefore, “material” or “synthetic” laws applicable only within a restricted domain (that is, the domain of the “physical,” three-dimensional object perspectivally situated in intersubjective space) and not applicable to the whole of experience as such.
The system of synthetic truths which have their ground in the regional essence [e.g., the essence of perception] constitutes the content of the regional ontology. The totality of the fundamental truths among these, of the regional axioms, limits—and defines for us—the system of regional categories. These concepts express not merely, as do concepts generally, specifications of purely logical categories, but are distinguished by this, that by means of regional axioms they express the features peculiar to the regional essence, or express in eidetic generality what must belong “apriori” and “synthetically” to an individual object of the region.23
Husserl’s paradigm of a “regional ontology” is that of the perceptual object, and it is within the realm of the phenomenology of perception that he and his greatest disciples have made the most solid contributions. There is a theoretical as well as a practical reason for this, as we shall see presently. But I would like to pause here, now that we have at least this preliminary grasp of what Husserl means by defining ontology as the “science of objects,” to complete our distinction between ontology as understood by phenomenology and traditional metaphysics. There is very little in Husserl’s formal mathesis universalis (formal logic plus formal ontology) with its analysis of the concept of “object-in-general” (with reference to the subordinate concepts of “thing,” “property,” “relation,” “substantive meaning” or “fact,” “group,” “number,” “order,” “part,” “whole,” and so on) which could not be given a place in traditional metaphysics. It is his conception of the various regional ontologies, which require a transcendental as well as a formal logic, that makes the critical difference. Transcendental logic is the analysis of the “objectifying” and “constituting” acts of consciousness, which is necessary to account for the world of objects actually experienced. Transcendental phenomenology is based on the discovery of the law of intentionality, that is, all experience is experience of something, a law which empirical psychology, for all its acuteness, was never able to thematize or “discover” because all natural experience always takes it for granted. Intentionality distinguishes conscious processes from all other kinds of processes in that they are ways of having objects. Since we have no access to being-in-itself except through the phenomenon of being, all being quoad nos is objectified and endowed with a meaning and value responsive to our theoretical and practical aims, needs, interests, goals, intentions, desires, and so on. Experienced being is the “world according to man” (Merleau-Ponty’s phrase), a structured, objectified, intentional object, and this is why Husserl posed the problem of being in the language of “being in the world”24 and gradually developed his thought in the direction of an “ontology of the Lebenswelt.”25
In conclusion one is tempted to compare and contrast the phenomenological attempt to isolate meaning from reference, to define philosophy as the study of meaning, with the very similar attempt in current analytical linguistic philosophy which bases its methodology, not on a transcendental turn, but on “a linguistic turn.” There are clearly great similarities between the two, and the most obvious differences may be little more than differences of idiom.26 Language is, after all, a convenient and public instrument for the analysis of meaning. As Merleau-Ponty says, it is language which gives us “separated essences,” fully distinguishable from the things to which they may be taken to refer.27 By turning from the world of things and events to what we say about the world, we may be able to map out the geography of the realm of “the meant” with much greater methodological clarity and sureness than the earlier generations of philosophers who spoke in the “ontological” and “material” modes and did not fully distinguish philosophical from scientific questions.
However, the phenomenologist is not completely won over by the linguistic method (though it may in effect be coextensive with his own phenomenology of thinking). The reason for this is that he is constrained to go beyond the “separated essences” of language to the perceptual world to which they refer and which they enable him to think. The phenomenologist does not distinguish the realm of meaning from the realm of things and events in order to abandon the latter, but rather to elucidate, through the reduction, his ever-continued and uninterrupted experience of this very life-world. Though he brackets “the real” methodologically, it is nevertheless this very thing he means to understand and elucidate. Formal ontology is not the whole of his concern; in fact the elaboration of the laws of “object-in-general” serves a much greater transcendental purpose, namely, the eidetic analysis of the richer and more concrete regional ontologies which are based more directly on life-world experience, an analysis which requires, over and above the apriori analytics of formal logic, the instrumentality of a “material” logic of experience. The regional ontologies are based on the discovery of invariant eidetic structures of various levels of experience which are “synthetic” or “material” and which apply the laws of objectivity as such to ever more concrete “regions” of experience. Thus, for instance, in the phenomenology of perception one finds that the regional ontology of “material thing” or “physical, perceptual object” involves aprioris as strict as those of formal analytical thought even though they are contingent upon this particular region of experience. To see that every extended object has a surface and is visible, that every visible surface is colored, that every colored surface has a certain brightness and degree of intensity of color, is to see something essential about the meaning of perceptual objects, something which goes beyond what we just say about experience (though it begins there) to invest perceptual experience itself prior to and independent of any explicit thought about it.
The relation of the categories of meaning (in language and thought) to the categories of objects of various different, “regional” kinds is what phenomenology finds lacking in the restricted “linguistic turn” to meaning which we find in much contemporary ordinary-language philosophy. But from this rare height of methodological generalization it may be more fitting for us now to descend to the work which faces us rather than to attempt to define too nicely where the respective limits of these competing methods are to be found.
Up to now, on the basis of the method just outlined or some (more or less extended or restricted) version of it, we have seen the elaboration of phenomenologies of perception (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty), of imagination (Sartre), of affectivity (Scheler), of embodiment (Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty), of will (Ricoeur), of thinking and reason (Husserl), of the field of consciousness in its generality (Gurwitsch), of the field of social objects (Schutz), of aesthetic objects (Ingarden), of some aspects of the emotions (Scheler, Sartre), of some aspects of memory (Husserl, Straus), even of language (Ricoeur). But who can say that, even in the work of these giants, phenomenology has been finally and definitively established as a philosophical method? In the judgment of this writer the most important achievement it can boast of up to the present moment is that it has enabled us to understand somewhat better than hitherto and perhaps more systematically than ever before what it was that Socrates first tried to teach philosophers: namely, how to distinguish what is properly philosophical in their wide-ranging investigations from all the rest.
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