“Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology”
Early in this book, James M. Edie writes that “the most important achievement phenomenology 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.” At once historically sedimented and systemically alert in its phenomenological discrimination, this statement expresses what I regard as the strongest and most subtle reflection of its author’s point of access to the thought of Husserl and of those thinkers—Merleau-Ponty, first among them—whom he so decisively influenced. For philosophy, as Collingwood suggested, “has this peculiarity, that reflection upon it is part of itself.” Even further: a part of itself which cannot be denied, let alone extirpated, without wounding its inmost capacity and damaging its intent. Husserl’s exactitude, I believe, his search for “the real thing,” becomes translated in Edie’s book into a variety of pursuits: a theory of consciousness which is especially concerned with perception; an intense preoccupation with the originary grounds of language; the radicalization of a traditional search for a “pure grammar,” an ultimate formalism which traces the constructs of science back to their source in the lived world of unmediated human experience; an effort to relate phenomenology to linguistic theory, ontology, and finally the problems of a “hidden dialectic” in Husserl’s logic. All these themes emerge as critical issues for and within phenomenology because, as Edie has intimated, phenomenology insists on raising the question of philosophy, that is, the question of what, at last, is stubbornly genuine: philosophy itself—the “real thing.” In these terms, phenomenology becomes the conscience of philosophy.
This “critical commentary” is distinguished from other studies of phenomenology by the moderating tone its author gives to both the historical and the structural topics he pursues. Edie moderates by instinct, it seems to me, rather than by design. The guiding genius here is essentially Aristotelian and carries with it a refusal either to logicize Husserl or to make of his transcendental turn in phenomenology an exclusive entrance to the house of phenomenology. When Edie mentions some of the philosophical antecedents of Husserl, there is no suggestion that because someone has ancestors he is unoriginal or to be understood solely by considering an idea or a work as derivative. In the same way, when some of Husserl’s followers (whether somewhat unorthodox or sharply divergent from much of the tradition) are discussed, there is no attempt made by Edie to lose track of their origin or to read that origin into everything they contributed. The counterpart to Aristotle in this respect is Merleau-Ponty. But it would be misleading to restrict myself to a few thinkers, however powerful they may be in their own right or however influential they may be in the formation of an author’s work. In fact, Edie’s book is noteworthy for the range and the control he has over those who, in one way or another, make up the “phenomenological crowd” (Husserl, of course, but also Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and no less of the first importance, Gurwitsch and Schutz); those in the domain of linguistics—Chomsky, in particular; a number of contemporary “analytic” philosophers (Nelson Goodman, for one) as well as some old masters, Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas in particular. Full respect, by the way, is paid to William James. Each thinker is permitted to speak, welcomed to the discussion, as it were, and attended to with gravity but without subservience. Viewed differently, one might say that a variety of philosophical positions are brought together in this book, not to combine them or aspects of them but instead to take a fresh—which phenomenologically always means a hard—look at their credentials. What criticism emerges from these procedures?
The relevance of Husserl’s phenomenology for the philosophy of language rests on the concept of ideality as a sovereign realm which is constituted by a “subject-object” relationship that is free of “psychology” and independent of what is empirically “real.” Such ideality must be grasped in a correlation between constituting acts of consciousness and the constituted meaning-unities intended by those acts. There is no theme more central to Edie’s book than the phenomenology of language; his own formulation deserves attention:
Ideality is a correlate of experience, it has no independent empirical status in the real world independent of experience and would thus seem to be something which psychic subjects “add” to the real-in-itself or to “nature”; yet this coating of ideality, which consciousness introduces into being and spreads over its phenomenal surface, is not something subjectively created by individual acts of thought or by the subjective dispositions of individual experiencers. On the contrary, its laws are more strict, more coercive, more general, and in their sense more unalterably “objective” than any of the generalizations of empirical science or everyday common sense.
Although it is true that Edie’s statement about ideality is less a “criticism” than a version of the “noema-noesis” relationship, what emerges as criticism is the particular manner in which he applies his reading of Husserl to the almost illimitable realm of what I would term the “world-as-experienced.” The ideality of experience is to be comprehended not only in the correlates of intentional acts but also in the interior motility of intentional consciousness, that is, in the inherent movement of consciousness “in touch” with its meant-objects but also displaying in its directedness an accession in which its own activity is appropriated and transmuted into the subject of philosophical inspection. Such movement seems more Hegelian than Husserlian. Edie is aware that Hegel was not one of Husserl’s sources, but he joins Suzanne Bachelard in finding a “hidden dialectic” in Husserl’s phenomenology. What leads Edie to his conviction of so forceful and consequential a view is not a belief that—to overstate the case—Hegel is immanent in Husserl but rather that Hegel’s is one form of a dialectic which helps to explain the inward movement of Husserl’s thought through which ideality finds its expression. Edie holds that “there lie deeply hidden in Husserl’s phenomenology at least three principal doctrines central to the whole of his thought which require a dialectical logic to unravel (whether it be Hegelian or not), namely, (1) the theory of perception, (2) the theory of science, and (3) the notion of intentional history developed in the Krisis.”
If there is a hidden dialectic in Husserl’s phenomenology, it may be useful to suggest that what moves that dialectic is a hidden teleology of consciousness. Although Edie does not make so explicit a claim, he does interpret the task of working out a dialectical logic appropriate to Husserl’s view of perception, science, and history in what I think are teleological terms. I find the expression of teleology here more an emblem of Aristotelian equanimity than of Hegelian dynamism; but, as Edie notes, there is a teleology to be found more directly in Husserl: “the future,” Edie writes, “in some sense lives in the present.” What holds true for Husserl’s “intentional theory of history” leads us back, in Edie’s account of phenomenology, to the problems of the relationship between Husserl and the “existential phenomenologists.” A quick dismissal of any internal connection between phenomenology and existentialism will not do; more fundamental issues are involved. It would, I think, be loose talk to speak casually of Husserl as separating fact and essence; rather, we should say, he distinguishes between the two. Of course, as Edie remarks, Husserl is not an “existentialist.” At the same time, however, phenomenology in discriminating between essence and existence finds it eminently possible to turn to the phenomena of existence as they are meant. Oddly enough, the distinction between essence and existence calls for phenomenological clarification of the essential character of human existence. If the phenomenologist is free to withhold judgment regarding existence, he is equally free to “irrealize” that existence. Quoting from what he regards as the paradigm work of Husserl’s career (the first volume of Ideas), Edie writes: “fiction is the vital element of phenomenology as it is of every eidetic science.” The freedom to refrain from positing existence is no less the freedom to vary all posits in imagination. Once again, what Edie does with his interpretation of Husserl leads to critical results. Sartre is a case in point.
The debate over the “non-egological theory of consciousness” (in which, for example, Schutz and Gurwitsch took opposing sides) is viewed by Edie in untraditional terms. With respect to Sartre’s criticism of Husserl’s doctrine of the transcendental ego—as Husserl presented it in Ideas—Edie says that “the difference between Sartre and Husserl on this point is ultimately only terminological.” More fully expressed, Edie maintains that Husserl, Sartre, and Gurwitsch are, on the specific question of the nature of the ego, divided by formulation and not by substance. Edie writes:
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 towards 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.
Far from being exposition, exegesis, or even interpretation (in the narrower sense of exploratory clarification), Edie’s position on a fundamental issue in Husserl’s phenomenology is provocative: Edie does not drone; he dares. We can only speculate on what the implications for a theory of the alter ego (as approached in Husserl’s Fifth Cartesian meditation) would be if the “received” differences between the theories of the transcendental ego and a non-egological conception of consciousness fall away when terminology comes to philosophical resolution. Such speculation exceeds our present limits but should not be neglected by those who attend to this book with the care it deserves. It should be considered, in this connection, that Edie’s argument about the status of the transcendental ego is accompanied by a complementary claim: that the roots of the non-egological theory of consciousness are to be found in Husserl’s Logical Investigations. In that work, Edie asserts, Husserl developed a non-egological theory of consciousness. Altogether, the reader finds analyses which cover the large range of Husserl’s writings—writings which are given individual weight but are also understood in their interconnections. Edie presents Husserl’s thought in movement and treats phenomenology in the integrity of its variegation. What, then, does this book tell us? If a complete response to this question cannot be provided, certain elements of an answer can be stated without difficulty.
Let us set aside for the moment the thesis of the book and look instead at its author’s method. He has made of what were originally separately published essays a genuine unity; we are given a book, not a collection of related pieces. Beyond that, the book is not surrounded by a shower of ax sparks; its author takes positions but he does not make the deadly assumption that interpreters of phenomenology with whom he disagrees are philosophical rascals. Indeed, there is no invective; neither is the author phenomenologically retiring or in search of the formula of eclectic agreement. Instead, Edie gives us something to consider carefully, something to instruct us, but also something to quarrel with in a productive or potentially productive way. If the book has a bias it is toward reasonability. What is evident is that this is the work of a philosopher who has matured in years of study and meditation of phenomenology’s texts, themes, and problems. Edie has given us a reliable and insightful study of Husserl which will provide a lucid account of phenomenology not only to philosophers but also to those whose interest in language, logic, and history includes a concern for the assumptions of any science which ignores its own presuppositions. It might appear as if Husserl—whether he was concerned with “pure grammar” or with the transcendental ego—had patience only for the most momentous, the most transporting questions. In actuality, he worked in quite a different manner: Much of his activity resulted in painstakingly detailed and focused descriptions and analyses of phenomena which presented themselves in severe rather than grandiose form. So, even in the phenomenological pursuit of the absolute theme of a “pure grammar,” the search for “a prioris” of a universal formalism reveals limited, small, seemingly inconsequential elements. Could such trifles be part of the dream of Descartes and Leibniz? Husserl insists that they are. Edie writes:
Pure grammar establishes rules which are always subunderstood and already taken for granted in all the formal systems which study and establish the sufficient conditions for meaningful expressions. But the fact that the uncovering of these conditions has no ‘practical’ value and even seems 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.’ Husserl takes pride in this discovery; he even 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. It is, he believes, precisely such “obvious” trivialities as those expressed by the rules of pure grammar that mask the deepest philosophical problems, and he sees that, in a profound, if paradoxical, sense, philosophy is the science of trivialities.
We have returned to where we began: the character and task of genuine philosophy—the “real thing.” Professor Edie’s “Commentary” proves to be “Critical” in a double sense, for besides examining particular problems in phenomenology, he reveals their very “particularity” as a mark of their philosophical grounding. And reflection on that grounding is the task of phenomenology.
MAURICE NATANSON
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