“Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology”
V Transcendental
Phenomenology and
Existentialism
The great drama of the phenomenological movement, particularly since the Second World War, has been the development and enlarging of the perspectives of Husserl’s original transcendental phenomenology into an existential phenomenology. André de Muralt has described this development accurately, if negatively, as the “ultimate form of the refusal to platonize”1 on the part of Husserl’s progeny—a refusal which is, no doubt, characteristic of the general spirit of contemporary philosophy as a whole and which justifies those who find in phenomenology a method and a spirit of search capable of renewing and deepening the realistic and pragmatic approach to philosophy characteristic of American thought. Husserl, during his middle period, characterized phenomenology as a “transcendental idealism,” and a large number of his followers have consistently remained faithful to an idealistic interpretation of his works.2 They have resisted the “existentialist” interpretation of his thought which is associated with the early Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty and his followers in particular. We cannot hope to solve the historical question as to which of these divergent interpretations (the “idealist” or the “existential”) has the greater claim to Husserlian legitimacy in the space of this short chapter. Therefore we will, without any intent of endorsing any kind of “existentialism,” limit ourselves to pointing out some of the themes, particularly in Husserl’s later writings, which lend support to a possible existential interpretation of his thought and, in a positive way, attempt to show how existential phenomenology is a genuine and authentic phenomenology.3
We will center the discussion around the meaning which has been given to the term “transcendental” in recent phenomenology. In the history of Western philosophy we find three major conceptions of the transcendental: that of Greek philosophy, that of Kantian idealism, and that of phenomenology. Before distinguishing them, we can note that they share in common a view of philosophy as a search for the radical, ultimate, foundational structure of experience, thought, and reality. A transcendental philosophy is always a “metaphysics of experience” in the sense that it means to go beyond and beneath the ordinary, commonsense, taken-for-granted evidences of daily life and “natural” thought to the foundations of these evidences. Such an enterprise involves a conception of philosophy as an attempt to come to grips with experience and to com-prehend it by disclosing its fundamental structures. The transcendental “categories” recognized by ancient philosophy were always categories of objective being, the transcendent object of experience, as it is in itself, independent of human consciousness—hence the essentialism and “objectivism” of Greek thought, which nevertheless can be approached as a rich, yet naive, noematic analysis of experienced being in which being is understood not as the exercise of an activity which the philosopher is but as the object of his experience.
This early conception of the transcendental as the objective structure of a transcendent reality was replaced by that of idealistic philosophy. Augustine and Descartes reversed the Athenian metaphysical standpoint by turning to the radical subjectivity of the thinking subject as the only accessible foundation and source of truth. They saw that all “objective evidence” is given only in and to consciousness. The only possible basis for a truly radical philosophy, said Descartes, lay in the reflexive analysis of those elements and acts of consciousness in the very exercise of which consciousness coincides with itself. On the basis of the apodictic certitude of the coincidence of self with self in self-consciousness it is possible to build a “scientific” (i.e., a certain and valid) philosophy.
This project was further developed by Kant when he attempted to transform the objectified, transcendental categories of traditional philosophy into structural elements of human reason and thus establish a metaphysics of subjectivity. For Kant the transcendental is no longer the object of knowledge but the immanent structure of knowledge.4 The transcendental is no longer transcendent but immanent to consciousness.5 It is the apriori condition of the possibility, not of being, but of the knowledge of being. The object of reflection is no longer the eternal, necessary, unchanging order of transcendent being, but the transcendental conditions, the foundations, of our experience of transcendent being.
The transcendental categories of Kantian philosophy are not innate ideas but structures of judgment; they are not the content but the form of knowledge, and they represent in a schematic way all the essential functions of thought.6 They are deduced in a rigorous and symmetrical manner from the nature of judgment; for there to be a judging consciousness, says Kant, these categories must necessarily constitute the complete and unified logical structure which is the apriori condition of the possibility of such a consciousness. This structure of consciousness is not itself experienced; it is inferred or deduced; it gives us the rules of knowledge.7 Transcendental consciousness is not given in direct, lived experience but as the apperception of the necessity of a principle of unification by means of which the multiple, diverse sensations and feelings of experience are identified as the experience of a unique and identical subject.8
Underlying Kant’s deduction of the twelve transcendental categories of understanding is the notion, which he never made fully explicit, of a consciousness which is nothing but an act or a series of acts of judging. For Kant the I think is a fully reflexive, fully awakened judging consciousness; it is an intellect, so to speak, inserted in a sense-world to which it must by nature give a sense or a meaning without ever experiencing this world in itself, in person. For this reason Kant never seriously considers any kind of experience other than fully reflexive, fully explicit intellectual judgment. Even when he goes on to treat of ethical and aesthetic experience, it is always in terms of the necessary structures of intellectual judgment that he does so. His only concern is to guarantee the validity and determine the limits of necessary and universally valid structures of thought. The subject, for Kant, is not ultimately an “experiencer” but a pure “thinker.”
Finally, Kant accepted, from Hume, a notion of sense-experience as an intrinsically undifferentiated, chaotic, disordered mass of impressions. In itself it has no meaning, no structure; all structure comes from apriori thought. The transcendental categories which unify experience are apriori concepts completely independent of and prior to experience. Sense-experience, says Kant, is only a blind indication or sign (Anzeige) of reality, and the ego, conscious of its unity through the transcendental unity of the categories of understanding, can know nothing about the world as it is in itself.9 Though the subject needs experience to discover itself as the source of the order and differentiation of the experienced world, experience itself does not enter in any way into this differentiating (i.e., judging) function of consciousness.
In attempting to define the sense in which Husserl’s phenomenology is a transcendental philosophy, we cannot avoid Husserl’s relation to Descartes and Kant. With Descartes (and against Kant) he is concerned not only with the problem of the validity of knowledge but with the actual experience of the thinking subject. Unlike Kant, Husserl poses questions of fact. The “fundamental fact” (Urtatsache) is the experienced I-am, the experience of subjectivity which is not only “mine” but “me.”10 Descartes had freed philosophy from its fascination with the external transcendent world and turned it toward an analysis of experience of the world. In this Husserl was his disciple. His philosophy is not a philosophy of “the beyond” but of “the beneath,”11 a return to the foundations, to the “things themselves” as they are presented to consciousness in immediate intuition. Husserl called his philosophy an archaeology12 of human experience, a search for the ultimate, constitutive foundations of experience of the world as the world of human consciousness. However, whereas the method of Descartes is a reflexive analysis of the very acts in which the thinking subject coincides with its own being, enclosed within itself, the method of Husserl is a reflective analysis directed toward the transcendental field of pure experience. There is no “introspection” in Husserl. He is concerned only with invariant and publicly verifiable constants of experience.
Whereas in Descartes and Kant the subject is enclosed within itself and possesses itself in untroubled, immanent peace and clarity, the subject, for Husserl, intends a world. The transcendental field of experience revealed by phenomenological reflection is neither strictly transcendent to the subject (as in Greek philosophy) nor strictly immanent to the subject (as in Cartesianism and Kantianism); it is both immanent and transcendent. In Husserl’s terms it consists of those bipolar noetic-noematic structures which are constituted by experience of. The subject does not coincide with being as in the cogito-sum of Descartes; the subject is intentionally directed toward a world which it is not but of which it is the lived experience.
THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL CONCEPTION OF THE PHENOMENON
Husserl’s writings reveal two deep-seated and possibly incompatible aims: (1) to establish the method of a phenomenology which would escape phenomenalism (and all other philosophical standpoints) and, as he puts it, bring us “to the things themselves’’ as they are given in immediate experience, and (2) to establish a complete rationalization of experience. These two themes run through his writings and have given rise to the conflicting idealistic and existential interpretations of his thought. Let us take the second one first. Husserl frequently states his will to make philosophy “a completely rational science.”13 In his attempt to reconcile reason and experience he is led in the Kantian direction of attempting to discover the laws which are intrinsic to both. This will be possible to the extent that consciousness is conceived of as the constitutive source of its objects and all objectivity is inclosed within the immanent cycle of subjectivity. On this reading of Husserl, which seems fully justified by many passages in his writings, the phenomenon appears as a wholly ideal reality, as an “essence” immanent to consciousness, detached from the real world.14 The whole project of “phenomenological reduction” can thus be understood as a process of ideation, and intentional analysis moves from the noetic act to its noematic correlate—the ideal essence—as it is actualized and constituted within the wholly immanent sphere of subjectivity. It is necessary that both noesis and noema be wholly immanent to subjectivity if we are to speak of the “necessity” and the “universal validity” of the essences intuited by the phenomenologist. Phenomenology, in this view, requires a consciousness which can achieve a complete awareness of its own acts and their objects within consciousness. Such a consciousness would be an active power, the constitutive source of all meaning, whose necessary laws could be discovered by the analysis of its operations.
But this view runs counter to other passages in which Husserl explains intentional analysis as a progressive “clarification” of the phenomena which must be, in principle, unending. Neither the ego nor the world, he says, is ever known with full rational clarity. To suppose otherwise would be to suppose either that (1) the world could be experienced as a totality from all aspects at once, or (2) that consciousness is independent of and prior to experience, that it can achieve a total, rational clarification by reflexive turning-in on itself. Both of these suppositions are incompatible with the sense given to the word “phenomenon” by Husserl. The phenomena and noemata which it is the task of phenomenology to clarify are not creations of the ego; they are given in direct intuition. They are the “things themselves” as experienced. The phenomenon does not cut consciousness off from the world because the phenomenon is the world as experienced, from a certain point of view, under a certain aspect.
This is the phenomenological conception of the phenomenon which has been elaborated by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty15 but on the basis of Husserl’s own writings on intentionality and intentional analysis. For example, Husserl shows that in the perception of physical objects the aspect (Abschattung, perceptual noema) which is immediately and directly presented to consciousness is surrounded by and given with a ground of interlocking “horizons” which constitute the “sense” or structure of the perceptual experience. The internal and external horizons of the perceptual noema are perceived as implicated in and by the noema itself. It is this concentration on the structure (or “sense”) of the perceived (figure-ground; noema-horizons) that phenomenology escapes phenomenalism from the start. The phenomenon does not block one’s contact with the “thing itself.” It is that which is experienced—the very contact with the “thing itself”—and not an intellectual or conceptual construction. The structure of the phenomenon (noemahorizons) can be analyzed, and this is the role of reflection in phenomenology, but its structure is constituted (in a “passive synthesis,” says Husserl) prior to any contribution of thought.
THE TRANSCENDENTAL FIELD: THE LEBENSWELT
The transcendental field of phenomena (experience-of-the-world-as-such) is the noematic field of phenomenological investigations. In the idealistic interpretation of Husserl the phenomenal field is interpreted as the field of pure transcendental subjectivity—the field of the “world-as-meaning,” which is effortlessly constituted by an active meaning-giving operation (Sinngebung) which is the very definition of “pure consciousness.”16 This transcendental field of consciousness is not “mine” or “yours” or “ours.” The problem of intersubjectivity is solved by a “transcendental reduction” thanks to which we reach a pure, anonymous, impersonal consciousness beneath the empirical and historical level of individual experience. This is the realm of transcendental subjectivity, which contains within itself the laws of intentional constitution.
But Merleau-Ponty has rightly pointed out that this is not Husserl’s final word on the “transcendental field,” first, because Husserl finally recognized the “genetic” or “historical” character of all experience and, second, because he recognized intersubjectivity as a problem which was not solved by the “transcendental reduction.” In the Krisis Husserl wrote that “the transcendental” is the “object of a direct experience of myself and of my conscious life with the world of which I am conscious.”17 In his turn to experience as experience Husserl found that the two poles, myself and the world, are given correlatively at the outset and are never lost; consciousness is always consciousness of something. The “transcendental reduction” and the “transcendental attitude” describe a method of philosophical (attentive, meditative, direct) reflection to put us in the presence of experience as experience, independent of any of our “natural” expectations or prejudices.
In his later writings Husserl calls the transcendental field of consciousness the Lebenswelt and he defines phenomenology as a Rückgang auf die Lebenswelt,18 a going-back to the prepredicative or prethematic region of experience which is prior to any thought about experience. The Lebenswelt is the object of an immediate experience (intuition), which is the necessary point of departure of phenomenological research. It is by a return to the experienced Lebenswelt as such, he says, that we will overcome the dogmatic positions of Standpunktphilosophien, like empiricism, realism, naturalism, idealism, etc., which are “prejudiced” by an interpretation of experience antecedent to experience itself.19
This “return to the things themselves” is possible because of the necessary and apodictic correlativity of consciousness and the world. For Husserl consciousness is a Welterfahrendesleben, life-experiencing-the-world, and the sense of this definition includes not only the intentional, world-directed nature of consciousness but also the sense that, thanks to the strict correlativity of subject and object in experience, the subject is constituted as subject only through its active involvement with the world. The ego and the world are given in any experience as the constituent subject-object poles of this experience.
On the other hand, phenomenology is clearly not a realism or an empiricism if by that one means that meaning and value are to be found in “things” independently of any reference to human consciousness. It is true to say that phenomenology is not a description of the “real world,” but it is a description of the experience of the perceived world as the primary reality. If by “real world” one understands the world minus subjectivity or the world as a totality independent of and prior to any relationship to consciousness, it would be nonsensical to speak of a phenomenological elucidation of the “real world.” On the other hand, consciousness does not create the world since it is experience of the world. What consciousness adds to the “real world” is a relationship to itself, and it is in terms of the directional, intentional structure of consciousness that we speak of the apriority of consciousness: It is the subject which experiences the world and not vice versa. The world has no meaning in itself because meaning always involves consciousness. But the constitutive intentionality of consciousness should not be understood as the creation of meaning and value ex nihilo, or out of itself alone, or, much less, the creation of the world as such. Consciousness is constitutive of the world in the sense that it objectifies the world, differentiates and “constitutes” objects within the world, and that it is in and through this essential objectifying activity of consciousness that it experiences itself as subject.
Thus, for Husserl, the world as the noematic correlate of experience is as apodictically certain as the ego; those who place all apodicticity on the side of the cogito have a non-Husserlian, i.e., a nonintentional, notion of consciousness.20 But to say that the ego and the world are apodictically certain and always given together, with the same evidence, in experience, is not to say that either is ever known adequately or completely. In the words of Merleau-Ponty: We can have absolute certitude of the world in general but only relative certitude about any particular thing in the world.21 The world, in short, is given in any experience as the ultimate horizon or ground of experience, as the ultimate meaning-structure in which any given phenomenon is inserted and in which it is understood.
One of Husserl’s major contributions to philosophy is his “pure logic of significations” and the study of the purely formal structures of consciousness, what he called “formal ontology.” It was in this search for the structures of pure thought that Husserl’s philosophy most closely resembled Kantianism. However, this must not blind us to the absolutely fundamental differences between Husserl and Kant. There is no “transcendental deduction” of categories or forms of judgment in Husserl. He is more concerned with “material” logic than with “formal” logic. The eidetic structures of even purely formal thought are not acquired by deduction but by a method of “free variation” based on what is given.22 Second, even those purely formal structures of thought are the objects of experience; the experienced world (Lebenswelt) contains “ideal entities” which can be the objects of categorial intuition.23
Let us try to be clear. Men do not live only in the “real” world of perception but also in the worlds of imagination, of artistic creation, of social institutions, and in the ideal worlds of mathematics and purely formal thought.24 But it is the constant doctrine of Husserl that all imaginative and categorial intuitions (and all “higher-order” intuitions) are founded on perceptual intuitions. This is what Merleau-Ponty calls the primacy of perception in phenomenology.25 Here we touch on the sense in which phenomenology is an “empiricism” of a new kind even when it is still called a “logic of experience” or a “rational science.” Perceptual intuition does not give us the “confused ideas” of Descartes; it is not the blind Anzeige of Kant. Perception is, rather, the area of “transcendental” experience and ultimately all structures of consciousness are founded on the primary perceptual contact of consciousness with the world.26
As we descend from the categorial or “predicative” structures of fully conscious thought to their experiential foundations, we discover, says Husserl, the underlying substructures of “prepredicative” experience. This is the area of what he calls “passive syntheses” or the “hidden achievements” of intentional consciousness. This is the foundational, prereflexive field of pure experience in which the world is constituted as a world for consciousness. The primary task of phenomenology is to return to this world as the matrix of all the derived constructions of thought. Experience precedes any thought about experience. When we begin to reflect on experience and “attend to” it, we discover that consciousness has already been at work ahead of us. We discover an intersubjectively constituted world of meaning and value to whose constitution we have already contributed without knowing it. We discover ourselves as fatally immersed in a world which is already ours. At this point the work of phenomenology truly becomes an archaeology of consciousness: a digging-down-to and an uncovering of the pre-predicative and preconscious structures of experience which are the “essences” of experience. Such structures are the transcendentals of phenomenology in the most radical sense. They are the primary structures of experience as experience. They possess an “eidetic” necessity and a transcendental validity of a special kind: not as closed, fixed, innate ideas (since an intentional consciousness cannot be a “container of forms”), but as open, historical, asymptotic meaning-structures of lived human existence. They are neither categories of objects (as in Greek philosophy) nor categories of the subject (as in Kantianism) but categories of bipolar, noetic-noematic experience itself. Through the disclosure of the perceived world as the transcendental field of phenomenology in the primary sense of the term, we discover the new meaning given to the transcendental in phenomenology. The transcendental structures of phenomenology are rooted in perceptual experience, and because this experience is essentially temporal or historical they can have only a provisional validity. They are not the structures of a “pure” consciousness but of an intentional existence. They can be defined as the “meanings” of experience in the most fundamental sense of the word: the structures which constitute the world as the world of human consciousness. These structures clearly do not have the “formal” necessity of formal logic or geometry but rather the “objective” or “material” necessity inherent in the objects of transcendental logic (in Husserl’s sense). They have the “essential” or “eidetic” necessity of experienced meaning-structures which cannot be experienced otherwise than according to their “essences.”
It would take us too far afield in this chapter to give detailed examples of transcendental structures in the sense in which we have attempted to define them.27 Suffice it to say that phenomenology recognizes no such thing as an absolutely chaotic mass of primary sensations or “impressions” which, as in Kant for instance, have to be organized and structured according to the apriori categories of reason. Experience of the world is always structured, i.e., meaningful, experience. Its structures are autochthonous to experience itself and as such are neither wholly objective nor wholly subjective. Nor are they ever wholly fixed. Moreover, these structures are all interrelated and the analysis of any one necessarily leads to others with which it is related by a mutual implication. The ultimate horizon of this interlocking system of structures is the historical Lebenswelt—the transcendental field of all experience.
If we were now to assess the contribution of existential phenomenology to the original perspectives of Husserl in this view of the nature and goal of phenomenology, we would find two developments of exceptional importance—both of which nevertheless appear to be entirely faithful to Husserl’s most profound intentions. First of all, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty have shown that phenomenology could not limit itself to an investigation of “pure” consciousness but must necessarily involve an analysis of human existence as a unitary whole. With Heidegger and, later, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, any tendency to consider transcendental subjectivity as a disembodied “thinker” is definitively overcome; man as presence-to-the-world is the only possible point of departure for phenomenological analysis. This discovery marks the continuity between the transcendental analysis of Husserl and the existential analytics of later existential phenomenology. The second point concerns the extremely important phenomenological distinction between (1) operating intentionality or “perceptual consciousness” and (2) the intentionality of “intellectual” or fully reflexive consciousness, which has been emphasized by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty.28 This distinction was explicitly made by Husserl himself, as we have seen, but it was left to the French phenomenologists to draw out the fuller phenomenological consequences of this distinction. This is not a distinction between two distinct intentionalities or consciousnesses, but the distinction between two aspects of the same intentional consciousness. Fully reflexive consciousness, the realm of the “idea” and of the constructions of thought, flows from a reflection on the prereflexive understanding (verstehen) of the meaning-structures of lived experience. It is the realm of prepredicative experience which is the primary field of phenomenology, and phenomenology itself is possible only because this original field of experience (Lebenswelt) is already “pregnant with meaning.” Its meaning-structures can be brought to the level of thematic awareness by a “radical” phenomenological reflection29—of which they are the source and the guarantee.
This should help to make clear to what extent an existential and “ontological” interpretation of phenomenology is justified.
We use cookies to analyze our traffic. Please decide if you are willing to accept cookies from our website. You can change this setting anytime in Privacy Settings.