“Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology”
VII The Hidden Dialectic in
Edmund Husserl’s
Phenomenology
As is well known, Husserl was throughout his life quite disdainful of Hegelian philosophy. It was only with great reluctance that he even mentioned Hegel a few times in those sections of his work in which he necessarily gave his own summary of the development of Western philosophy, namely, in Erste Philosophie and in Krisis. And even when he was constrained to mention the philosophical contribution of Hegel there was never any full discussion of dialectical logic. For a philosopher with such a deep concern for logic and the transcendental foundations of logic this refusal to engage Hegel is puzzling, but certain. As my own early teachers of Husserl correctly insisted: If there is ever any doubt as to Husserl’s logical position on any disputed question, one will never go wrong in interpreting him in an anti-Hegelian sense. In this he is a true disciple of William James (whose work he came to know through Karl Stumpf) whose self-imposed, lifelong mission was to “fight Hegel.” In the very few places where he forced himself to say something positive about Hegel the best he could come up with was that Hegel’s thought provides us more with a Weltanschauung (if not a Logik für Frauenzimmer) than with a strict philosophy.1
It is true that certain French commentators on Husserl, most notably Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, but also such rigorous logicians as Suzanne Bachelard, have accustomed us to hearing Hegel’s name linked with Husserl’s method but there has never been any doubt, even in their own minds, that they were departing from the intentions of Husserl himself and, as Merleau-Ponty said, “forcing Husserl to go further than he wished to go.”2
From the Phenomenology of Perception onward Merleau-Ponty gave a highly Hegelian cast to his exposition of Husserl. But even such a sober commentator as Suzanne Bachelard says that Husserl was “unconsciously oriented toward a dialectic.”3
Bachelard finds this inner dialectic in the necessary opposition involved in the duality between transcendental subjectivity and the forms in which it necessarily manifests itself. Why there should be just these forms (perception, imagination, thinking, etc.) and not others is a question of ultimate, brute facticity and can in no way be deduced from an analysis of subjectivity itself. In short subjectivity ultimately finds itself in a factical situation which it cannot explain but can only describe,4 as we have pointed out above in Chapter IV.
In the Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty begins with a discussion of the central concepts of Husserl’s phenomenology, such as the concept of the reduction to experience, the concept of the experience of other persons in “transcendental intersubjectivity,” the concept of the notions of fact and essence, and the concept of the notion of intentionality. His style of exposition from the beginning of this work—unlike his earlier writings—is dialectical, not to say Hegelian. We shall return to this.
From the period 1949-59 he began to abandon this dialectical mode of exposition in favor of linguistic structuralism, only then to return to it in his last work, The Visible and the Invisible. But here in The Phenomenology of Perception he is completely dialectical. The phenomenological reduction, he says, is both possible and impossible at one and the same time. There is a truth of solipsism and a truth of intersubjectivity and both must be maintained in their opposed balance. Every fact is the instantiation of an essence and yet no fact can exhaust its essence. The world of experience can be known and at the same time not known; its evidence is eidetically certain and yet only “presumptive.” Consciousness is a “project of the world” which transcends itself toward what it is not and will never be, and yet consciousness is, at one and the same time, the “pre-objective” possession of itself in immanence. Consciousness is that ambiguous paradoxical reality which is both transcendent and immanent at once.
After the opening discussion of these paradoxes of phenomenology the main dialectical resolution which runs through and unifies the rest of the Phenomenology of Perception is the dialectical opposition and unity of intellectualism (subjectivism, idealism) on the one hand and naturalism (realism, positivism) on the other. Because of the “ambiguity” of the human body, which is the locus and vehicle of the embodiment of consciousness, as we can experience it, both intellectualistic and naturalistic descriptions of human reality have their own truth and yet neither can be exclusively true. The truth lies in seeing that experience justifies both kinds of explanation at the same time. This is the sense that Merleau-Ponty gives to the ancient distinction between body and soul. There is, in reality, no distinction between body and soul because human reality is completely body and completely soul. The bodily behaviors themselves are intentional and endow the experienced world with meaning and value and yet this wholly embodied meaning-bestowing activity goes far beyond the body as a “physical” or “natural” entity. The lived-body, as the source of the “visible and the invisible” (in all the many senses Merleau-Ponty gives to this term), is itself the subject of experience.
We have attempted elsewhere to sort out the number of structures of consciousness involved in this account of omnium visibilium et invisibilium which originates from the lived-body. A partial list is as follows:
1. The perception of objects which are not, strictly speaking, given to me in perceptual presentation, but which I nevertheless perceive, such as “objects behind my back.”
2. The experience of imagining absences, possibilities, potentialities, contingencies, counter-factual conditionals, the subjunctive, the optative, etc.
3. The perception of others insofar as the perception of the other presents a body (surface) in which there is a (non-spatial) mind, the body being “visible,” the mind being “invisible” (in the sense of the Husserlian appresented object). The experience of my own mind in my own body, which is “posterior” to the experience of embodiment.
4. The silence which surrounds language, as la langue “precedes” and surrounds la parole (speech acts).
5. Consciousness and unconsciousness.
6. The Husserlian distinction between fact and essence.
7. The relationship between the present state of a science which is moving toward a more perfect stage of the same science, which will be recognizably the same science, though it does not yet exist.
Etc.5
Husserl would certainly not have liked this style of exposition. Nevertheless, if not exactly faithful to Husserl, we can see grounds in Husserl for Merleau-Ponty’s method. In his own more hyperbolic leaps Husserl sometimes defines phenomenology as “genuine realism” or even a “genuine positivism.” A philosophy which can be called both “phenomenological positivism” (Merleau-Ponty’s term) and “transcendental idealism” (Husserl’s more favored and usual term) must somewhere have dialectical roots and possibilities. The view which I wish to present for your consideration at the present time is 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.
From his first phenomenology of perception in the Second Part of Ideen I, Husserl develops the concept of the “infinity” of the perceptual object. Precisely because of the situated nature of consciousness, in its being inserted in the world, both through its embodiment and through perception, no perceptual object can be given all at once. Such an object can perhaps be dominated by thought and conceived in a perfectly eidetic manner, but it cannot be so perceived. In fact in the idealistic interpretation of this theory of perception one would have to say that a perceptual object is nothing other than the system of all of its possible presentations. Perceptual objects are given abschattungsweise, which means that they are never given completely. More is always appresented than can be grasped in any actual and present presentation. That is to say, in good English, that a perceptual object is both given and not given in the same perceptual presentation. It is given as having many aspects that are not now presented but which could be. And if other persons are present a given perceptual object is even presented as being de facto perceived from other viewpoints which I could occupy in principle but do not now and may never occupy.
This law of the infinity of the perceptual object pertains not only to the x limit-point, transcendent to the perceiver, but is true of the perceiver himself. Whenever we take ourselves as objects we find beneath the level of acts of consciousness, states and dispositions of the ego such that the ego itself is “transphenomenal” and transcendent to all possible experience in that very experience itself. If, for instance, I experience in myself a strong liking, even desire, or, at the limit, love for one of my acquaintances, it may very well appear to me after repeated experience that this is a disposition or “habit” of my consciousness in such wise that every time the thought, image, or presence of that person is brought before me I will feel the same movements of like, desire, love, etc. In other words, my ego with its “habits” or “sedimentations” always transcends any particular experience I can have of it by reflectively now taking it and its acts as objects.
Throughout the Formal and Transcendental Logic Husserl is concerned with the investigation of the transcendental foundations of formal logic and formal ontology (the theory of objectivity in general). In the most general sense, since transcendental constituting consciousness is the source and condition of the possibility of all objectification (all “having of objects”), there are transcendental presuppositions to formal logic and formal ontology itself. The most important and most deeply underlying of all of the various presuppositions that Husserl uncovers is that formal logic plus formal ontology, as the study of the rules of objectivity in general, presuppose an intention, namely, the intention of coming to knowledge. At no one point in the study of formal logic as such, nor even in the study of the rules of objectivity in general, is it ever stated explicitly that their purpose is to enable us to acquire knowledge. This presupposition goes unspoken but can be uncovered by a genetic analysis of the innermost intentions of the mathesis universalis itself.
Knowledge or science is undergirded by the formal constraints of logic and formal ontology, which provide us with the necessary theory for any possible science whatsoever.
What does Husserl mean here by science? The short answer is that a science is essentially a text which has this specificity, namely, a text which gives us knowledge. It is a text which is most stringently governed by the laws of the three levels of formal logic. First of all, all the sentences which compose its various paragraphs or parts must be meaningful, i.e., must observe the laws of the reine Formenlehre der Bedeutungen, that is, the laws of pure apriori grammar, the first level of formal logic. Further, though it is necessary to avoid nonsense in any text, this is by no means sufficient. The sentences, however meaningful in themselves taken one by one, cannot follow one another in random order. Here the second level of formal logic comes into play. These are the laws which will guarantee not only that the sentences are not mutually contradictory and contain no internal incoherencies but, over and above that, are compatible with one another, belong to the same realm of discourse, and in some sense implicate, follow from, lead to, imply, one another. Finally, such a text must be capable of clarification on the third, or truth-level, of formal logic: namely, the linguistic statements which constitute the scientific texts must in some way be testable as to their truth or falsity by relating them to primary life-world experience. Urteil arises from Erfahrung and must be able to be brought back to it.
It is in his concern to found logical structures in actual perceptual experience that Husserl is to be most sharply distinguished from the logical positivists and logical empiricists, even Hume, with whom he otherwise has so many points of affinity. The logical positivists agree with Husserl that all linguistic expressions, to be found true, must be brought back to primary life-world experience (Erfahrung), and they accept all the laws of formal logic but they treat them as something to be “added on,” as if they had no foundation in perceptual experience at all. Like William James in Chapter 28 of the Principles of Psychology, Husserl is not content simply to accept sense-experience and the laws of logic as if they had nothing to do with one another. His question, like James’s, is: “Why does the world play into the hands of logic?” What are the experiential foundations of logic, and how is it that the least perceptual experience gives us the ideal of objective truth? The primary question, which empiricism and positivism totally ignore, is the question of how the higher-order structures of thinking are founded in primary perceptual experience. This is the relationship of Fundierung which is fundamental to all of Husserl’s logical studies.
It is evident that in saying this, we have gained clarity only about one fundamental point. That point is that no particular or specialized science of itself must necessarily study or concentrate on the laws of formal logic and formal ontology. Only philosophers do that. Only philosophers study ex professo those things which are so fundamental that all the sciences always already take them for granted. But we do know now that every science must be elaborated according to these coercive constraints of logic and ontology. We can know apriori that any scientist who violates any such law is liable to contradiction, incoherence, and error. Therefore, every science presupposes something more fundamental than itself.
Husserl delights in going on to show that even these most fundamental presuppositions of science are not themselves presup-positionless but that formal logic and formal ontology contain hidden within their very project a number of transcendental presuppositions which it is the job of the transcendental phenomenologist to uncover. This Husserl does brilliantly in the Formal and Transcendental Logic.
If we turn now to the theory of science as it is developed in the Krisis we see that it is essential to every factually existing historical science, whatever it may be, that it be developing towards a greater state of exactness and precision. Any given science at any particular time is in an actual state of realization and has its own explanatory power in that historical situation but is tending towards a more perfect realization. Husserl had as acute an awareness of this as Plato. Recall that in the Timaeus Plato explains very well that because the physical universe is not as strictly knowable as the ideas, and therefore cannot become the object of an eidetic science, physics will never be more than a “likely story” based on empirical generalizations and probabilities. Therefore, at any period in the development of a theory of the physical universe we know most insistently that this theory will have to be replaced by another more perfect and more adequate to its object later on and, further, that that theory will itself be replaced by others more adequate, and so on, ad infinitum.
This does not absolve us from the need to elaborate the science of physics. It only means that we must do the best we can—Plato thought the theory of the Pythagorean Timaeus was as close to the truth about such matters as one could come to in his day. But we know that the science of physics, for instance, will never be definitively completed, and that each “likely story” will have to be replaced by another, and then another, and then another, into the indefinite future. Husserl calls this the “teleological” thrust of science. The dialectical paradox—though, of course, he does not use the word dialectical—is that we can recognize a certain science as being the same science through a series of essentially relative states of development. The present state of development is necessarily intermediary between a less and more perfect state of development of the same science. In short any given science at the present time both is and is not the same science that it was some generations ago or that it will be some generations ahead.
In short the future in some sense lives in the present. There is a telos in the present, an end or terminus ad quem, toward which any given science is developing. There is, therefore, the same relationship between the future state of a science and its present state as there is between its present state and its past.6
Moreover we do not have, and know that we do not have, a completed science of anything whatsoever, not even of the eidetic sciences like geometry, or the new sciences like structural linguistics which use non-Galilean methods of explanation. There is a diachronic development of science through time towards an absolute and completely definitive perfection. The idea of a perfect explanation of something aimed at by science is contained immanently within the science but is not yet realized and de facto will never be realized, though it can, like a perceptual object given through its profiles, be approached asymptotically, enabling us to progress and to realize this idea ever more perfectly.
That there should be such a perfect state of a given science present in our operating scientific activity at the present time is a postulate of reason. It has as its analogue in the phenomenology of perception the presumption that all experience and all viewpoints on the world will, when all of experience shall have taken place, be found to be consistent with one another, all of one piece, all constituting the total englobing horizon which we call the Lebenswelt. But the Lebenswelt is never Selbst da, never given in an indubitable presentation. It always transcends any number of particular experiences and therefore is the object of fundamental belief, the Urdoxa, rather than strictly demonstrated knowledge. We have a presumptive certitude rather than an absolute certitude.
Husserl’s attitude toward history reminds me of nothing so much as that of the old Moslem philosopher al-Farabi, and certain other medieval philosophers, in their use of the history of philosophy in their writings. Husserl himself sometimes refers to the historical sections in the Krisis as “my novels,” meine Romane. When al-Farabi wrote his book on The Intentions of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, it was clear that he knew he was going beyond the letter of the text to give the inner sense. Husserl has the same attitude. His historical investigations are not explications de texte, or minute philological investigations into just exactly what a given author said. They are rather investigations into the sense of what a given author meant, or should have meant in any case. In his most theoretical vein Husserl writes:
Only in the positing of a final foundation is this intention [of an historical philosophy] revealed: for only in starting out from it can one uncover the single direction of all philosophies and all philosophers; in starting out from it one can come upon the light in which one understands the thinkers of the past as they would never have been able to understand themselves.7
This is “intentional analysis.” It discovers in a given philosophy or scientific endeavor a Zwekidee, a sense, that gradually comes to awareness in a given historical development. To grasp this idea, to isolate it in its ideal purity, will enable us to clarify the “inner meaning,” “the deeper meaning,” of a given historical attempt. This will enable us to deal not just with the text of Descartes but with the intentions of Descartes, not just with the text of Galileo but with the intentions of Galileo, and so on.
Husserl likes to speak of the “true” problem, or of the “hidden” problem of Descartes, Hume, Galileo, etc. The philosopher is “the man of infinite tasks.” Now it is evident that no particular science, and no philosophical theory, no discovery, no progress is ever definitive or absolute. Each discovery, each advance enables us to put what was previously known in a new perspective, to reorganize the same body of knowledge in such wise that each new state of a science appears as more true than the last. This truth is the rule in terms of which we judge the past. Merleau-Ponty likes to call this the retroactive effect of the true. If it turns out that Freud clearly discovered some of the laws that govern the operations of the unconscious in human beings, it immediately appears to those who understand these laws in a scientific manner that they have been true all along, even prior to their discovery, and that Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas were governed by the laws of the unconscious as much as Freud, Adler, and Jung—only that they could not have known it. Or if the science of linguistics suddenly shows that men have been speaking natural langauges according to strict laws of phonology without even knowing what these laws were until forty or fifty years ago, these laws nevertheless appear now as having held in some form throughout. Even in the ethical realm, if it turns out that such and such a person, for instance, Marshal Pétain or Nikolai Bukharin, was wrong, even guilty of treason in a certain act, we interpret his previous acts as leading up to that conclusion.
This is the problem of the relation between fact and essence, the ideal and the real in history, and its invariant structure. It is the problem of diachrony and synchrony. Thus, whether we are dealing with a historical text or a scientific text, or any text, the nature of the problem is the same. In this age of concern over the “textuality” of the text, Husserl’s underlying theory is just now coming into its own. The ideal, the essential, which is immanent in history, is, paradoxically, itself a product of history. This perpetual movement toward a truth which is more true, toward an absolute which is more absolute, expresses the eternal dynamism of scientific knowledge and defines its very sense, namely, the idea of an authentic science. It expresses the historical and constructed aspect of science constituted by generations of scientists. Science is thus both actual and potential at one and the same time. Its truth in the present is related to its present historical realization in a manner analogous to the way the significant (meaning) is related to the signe (sign in language).
No one can fail to see in these relationships affinities with dialectic, even the dialectic of Hegel. It seems to me, in conclusion, that if Husserl had taken up the project of Hegel in its broadest sense—namely, as an attempt to bring to the level of full reflection, and to discover, the concepts necessary to think our experience—he would have seen that his own project was not so different in ultimate intention. The inescapable conclusion is that there is a hidden dialectic in Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology.
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