(excerpted by Clifford Stetner)
Introduction
31
II.
It is against psychologism, against pragmatism, against an entire period of occidental thought that phenomenology has reflected, proceeded, and battled. It began, and remained, a meditation on knowledge, a knowledge of knowledge; and its famous “putting in parentheses” consists above all in dismissing a culture and a history, in tracing all knowledge back to a radical non-knowledge. But the rejection of this inheritance—of this “dogmatism,” as Husserl somewhat peculiarly called it—is itself rooted in a heritage. Thus history envelops phenomenology, as Husserl knew from the beginning of his work to the end. Yet there is an ahistorical pretention in phenomenology; and this is why we will approach phenomenology through its history, and leave it in its debate with history.
32
III.
…it is a philosophy of the twentieth century, whose dream is to restore to this century its scientific mission by founding anew the conditions for its science. Realizing that knowledge is embodied in concrete or “empirical” science, it seeks the foundation of this scientific knowledge. This is the point of departure, the roots into which phenomenology inquires: the immediate date of knowledge.
IV.
Why “phenomenology”? the term signifies a study of “phenomena,” that is to say, of that which appears to consciousness, that which is “given.” It seeks to explore this given—“the thing itself” which one perceives, of which one thinks and speaks—without constructing hypotheses concerning either the relationship which binds this phenomena to the being of which it is phenomena, or the relationship which unites it with the I for which it is phenomena.
33
…a critical moment takes form at the heart of the phenomenological meditation, a “denial” of science (Merleau-Ponty) which consists in a refusal to proceed to explanation. For to explain the red of this lampshade is precisely to abandon it as this red spread out on this lampshade, under whose circle I am thinking of red…
34
…having taken the social realm as object—which constitutes a decision of a metaphysical character—it is doubtless necessary to explain the meaning of the fact of “being-in-society” for consciousness, and consequently to interrogate this fact naively.
Part I Husserl
I. The Eidetic
1. Psychologistic Scepticism
37
The psychologism against which Husserl battles identifies the subject of knowledge with the psychological subject. It insists that the judgment “This wall is yellow” is not a proposition independent of my expressing it and perceiving the wall. We could argue that “wall” and “yellow” are concepts definable by extension and intension independently of all concrete thought; is it necessary to accord them some existence in themselves transcending the subject and the real? The contradictions of realism concerning ideas (Platonism, for example) are inevitable and unsolvable. Yet if we admit the principle of noncontradiction as a criterion for the validity of a thesis (here, Platonism), do we not affirm its independence from concrete thought? We pass thus from the problem of the material of logic, the concept, to that of its organization, the principles; but psychologism is not disarmed on this new terrain; when the logician claims that two contrary propositions cannot be true simultaneously, he states only that it is impossible in fact, on the level of actual consciousness, to believe that the wall is yellow and that it is green. The validity of such general principles is based in my psychological organization, and if they are indemonstrable it is precisely because they are innate; from which it follows obviously that here is no ultimate truth independent of the psychological workings which drive it. How could I know if my knowledge is adequate to its object, as the classical conception of truth demands? What is the sign of this adequation? Necessarily, a certain “state of consciousness” by which all questions concerning the object of knowledge ore found superfluous—subjective certitude.
2. Essences
40
…essence is only that in which the “thing itself” is revealed to me in an originary givenness.
3. Eidetic Science
The incertitudes of science—perceptible already in the human sciences, but reaching ultimately even to those which act as models, namely physics and mathematics…
41
Before doing physics one must study the essence of the physical fact; the same applies, of course, to the other disciplines as well. From the definition of the eidos grasped by originary intuition, we can draw methodological conclusions that orient empirical research.
…we must define the eidetic laws that guide all empirical knowledge: this study constitutes the general eidetic science or ontology of nature (that is, the study of being or essence). This ontology has been grasped in its truth, as prolegomenon to the corresponding empirical science…
We should thus make hierarchical distinctions, beginning with the empirical: (1) material essences (that of clothing, for example) studied by ontologies or sciences of material eidetics; (2) regional essences (for example, cultural objects) directing the former and explicating by regional eidetics; and (3) the essence of the object in general, according to the previously given definition, which is studied by a formal ontology. n1 The hierarch is obviously a network, not linear in form. This last essence, which directs all regional essences, is a “pure eidetic form,” and the “formal region” which it determines is not a region coordinated with material regions, but the “empty form ‘region’ in general.” This formal ontology is identifiable with pure logic; it is the Mathesis Universalis, the goal of Descartes and Leibniz. Clearly this ontology must define not only the notion of theory in general, but all the possible forms of theories (the system of multiplicities).
II The Transcendental
43
1. The Problematic of the Subject
…Husserl, Brentano’s student, is most strongly felt, for the key observation of Brentano’s psychology was that consciousness is always consciousness of something—that is, that consciousness is intentionality. If we transpose this theme to the eidetic level, it signifies that any object—thing, concept, the eidos itself, whatever—is an object for some consciousness, and it becomes necessary to describe the manner in which I know the object, and in which the object exists for me.
…two paths are open: either to develop the science of logic as Mathesis Universalis, that is, to constitute a science of sciences on the side of the object; or, on the contrary, to pass to an analysis of the meaning, for the subject, of the logical concepts used by this science, the meaning of the relations it establishes between these concepts, and the meaning of the truths which it seeks to establish.
..radical eidetic knowledge.
44
…consciousness a already in the simple givenness of the object…
…logical (or categorical) intuition goes beyond this simple symbolic comprehension only when “founded” on sensible intuition.
2. The Reduction
46
“ … But the totality of these objects co-present in intuition in a clear or obscure, distinct or indistinct manner, and constantly covering the present field of perception—even this does not exhaust the world which is there for me in a conscious way in each waking instant. On the contrary, it extends without limit according to a fixed order of beings, and is partly overlapped and partly surrounded by an obscurely apprehended horizon of indeterminate reality. . . . This misty horizon, incapable of ever being totally determinate, is necessarily there. . . . The world . . . has its temporal horizon infinite in both directions, its past and its future, the known and the unknown, immediately living and void of life. [Ultimately this world is not only] a world of things, but with the same immediacy a world of values, a world of goods, a practical world” (Ideas I, sect. 27).
3. The Pure Ego
48
The object exists as a “same” which is given to me throughout the continual modifications and what makes it a thing for me (that is, in itself for me) is precisely the necessary inadequacy of my grasp of the object. But this idea of inadequacy is equivocal: since the object is profiled throughout successive perspectives. I have access to it only unilaterally through one of its sides; but at the same time I am given the other sides of the object not “in person,” but suggested by the side given sensorially. In other words, the object as it is given to me in perception is always open on the horizons of indetermination, “it indicates in advance a diversity of perceptions of which the phases, in passing continually from one to another, blend into the unity of a perception” (Ideas I , sect. 44). Thus the object can never be given as an absolute, there being “an indefinite imperfection resulting from the insuppressible essence of the correlation between thing and perception of thing” (ibid.).
…the object emerging throughout these alterations without end.
By contrast, the experience itself is given to itself in an “immanent perception.” Self-consciousness gives the experience in itself, that is, taken as an absolute. …it has already passed when I wish to grasp it.
…extends into the study of internal time consciousness…
[n.b. Descartes] …all experience bears in itself the possibility in principle of its existence.
49
“The flux of experience which is my flux, that of the thinking subject, can be as large as one likes, unapprehended and unknown as regards parts already past and yet to come; nonetheless, I need only look on this life as if flows in its real presence and grasp myself in this act as the pure subject of this life, to be able to say necessarily and without restriction: I am, this life is, I live—cogito” (Ideas I, sect. 46).
Consequently, the first result of the reduction is to oblige us to dissociate sharply the mundane or natural in general from the nonmundane subject…
This apodicticity does not imply an adequation; the certitude of the being of the ego does not guarantee the certitude of the knowledge of the ego.
Any object given ‘in person’ could equally well not exist, while any experience given ‘in person’ could not fail to exist” (Ideas I, sect. 46). This is a law of essence.
51
n.2 Tran Duc Thao, Phenomenologie et Materialisme Dialectique (Mihn-Tan, 1951), pp. 73-74. I cannot recommend this remarkable little book too strongly to the reader.
4. Pure Ego, Psychological Ego, Kantian Subject
1) We cannot confuse the transcendental ego with the psychological ego, as the Cartesian Meditations insist. Certainly, Husserl says, “I am the ego, which remains in the natural attitude, and at the same time the transcendental ego. But I can only take account of this by way of the phenomenological reduction.” The empirical ego is “interested in the world,” and it lives there entirely naturally; on the basis of this ego the phenomenological attitude constitutes a doubling of this ego which establishes the disinterested spectator…
52
Intentional psychology and transcendental phenomenology both begin with the cogito, but the first remains on the mundane level, while the second develops its analysis from the transcendental cogito which envelops the world in its totality, including the psychological ego.
2) Do we find ourselves, then, before the Kantian transcendental subject?
“…The existence of nature cannot condition the existence of consciousness , since nature manifests itself as the correlate of consciousness” (Ideas I, sect. 51).
…problem is the same as that of the Critique: how is a datum possible?
How in effect, could it be that a subject which is nothing but the a priori conditions of all possible objectivity, could also be an empirical flux able to grasp its radical indubitability in an originary presence to itself? Kant wrote: “Outside of the logical significance of the ego, we have no knowledge of the subject in itself which is the basis of the ego, as of all thoughts, having the quality of a substratum.”
53
What is incomprehensible in Critical philosophy in general is that the system of a priori conditions for objectivity should be a subject, the transcendental subject. In reality it is the perceiving subject itself who constructs the world, though it is in this world through its perception. When we explore this subject from the point of view of its interwovenness with the world, in order to distinguish it from the world, we use the criterion of immanence; but the paradoxical situation here is that even the contents of this immanence are nothing other than the world as aimed at, as intentional, as phenomena—and so, as this world is posited as really existing and transcendent by the ego.
54
5. Intentionality
The distinction between immanent data and transcendent data, on which Husserl bases the firsts separation of consciousness and world, is still a mundane distinction.
…we cannot even say that it would then be consciousness of nothing, since this nothing would at once be the phenomenon of which there would be consciousness.
55
Indeed, Husserl distinguishes various types of intentional acts: imaginations, representations, experiences of other people, sensory and categorical intuitions, receptive and spontaneous acts, etc.—in brief, all the contents of the Cartesian enumeration: “What am I, this ego that thinks? A thing which doubts, understands, conceives , affirms, denies, wants or does not want, imagines and feels.”
…there is inattentive, or implicit, intentionality. We will have occasion to return to this point, so essential is it for psychological science; for it contains the entire phenomenological thesis concerning the unconscious.
…intentional analysis, shows that the relationship of consciousness to its object is not that of two exterior and independent realities. For on the one hand, the object is a Gegenstand, a phenomenon, leading back to the consciousness to which it appears; while on the other hand, consciousness is consciousness of this phenomenon. It is because the inclusion is intentional that it is possible to ground the transcendent in the immanent without detracting from it.
56
…while intentionality is an “aiming at,” it is also a giving of meaning.
57
III The “Lifeworld”
1. Transcendental Idealism and Its Contradictions
58
In effect, after having described “the assimilating apperception” by which the Other’s body is given to me as his lived body—thus suggesting the psychic as its proper index—and after having made his “indirect accessibility” our foundation for the existence of the Other, Husserl declares that from the phenomenological point of view “the Other is a modification of ‘my’ ego” (Cartesian Meditations, sect. 52)—thus disappointing our expectations.
In the case of the subject, and by consequence the Other as subject (that is, as alter ego), we cannot reduce the real existence to an intentional correlate, since what I intentionalize when I see the Other is precisely an absolute existence: here, being real and being intentional merge together. We can thus posit separately a “community of persons,” which Ricoeur likens to Durkheim’s collective consciousness or the objective spirit in a Hegelian sense, and which is at the same time constituted by the mutual grasp which the subjectivities and the community have of their environment. This community of persons is constitutive of its own world (the medieval world, the Greek world, etc.), but is it originarily constitutive?
In other words, transcendental philosophy as philosophy of the subject fails to integrate a cultural sociology; rather, there remains a “tension” between them (Ricoeur), perhaps even a contradiction, and one not grafted onto phenomenological thought, but inherent in it. for it is transcendental philosophy itself which leads to the problem of intersubjectivity or the community of persons, as is shown by the parallel paths of the Cartesian meditations and Ideas II, and largely dominating the last writings (the Crisis and the letter to Levi-Bruhl), introduces, by Husserl’s own admission, something like a historical relativism—the very thing which transcendental philosophy fought against. Yet for all that, this philosophy can neither avoid leading into the problem of the Other, nor elaborate this problem in a way which revises the acquisitions of radical subjectivism. With the intentional analysis of the Other, the radicality is no longer on the side of the ego, but on the side of intersubjectivity; and this latter is not simply an intersubjectivity for the ego—the affirmation by which ego would restore the ego’s position as unique foundation—but an absolute intersubjectivity, or if one prefers, a first intersubjectivity. But Husserl himself never went this far: the radicality of the transcendental cogito, as it is established in Ideas I, remains the core of all his philosophy. In section 2 of the Crisis, for example, we find this significant criticism leveled against transcendental Cartesianism: Descartes “did not realize that all distinction of the type I and You or within and without are only ‘constituted’ in the absolute ego.” Thus the you, like the that, is nothing but a synthesis of egological experiences.
Still, it is in the direction of this :cultural sociology” that Husserl’s thought evolve toward the end of his life. The Crisis—of which only the first two parts were published, in 1936 in Belgrade—testifies to this fully. Husserl is careful to link this reflection to history—that is to say, on intersubjectivity—closely to his own problem of transcendental radicality: “This work attempts to base the ineluctable necessity of a conversion—that from philosophy to transcendental phenomenology—on the path of a teleologico-historic coming-to-consciousness, applied to the origins of our critical situation as it concerns science and philosophy. …”
60
The elucidation of history in which we are engaged clarifies the task of philosophy. “we who not only have a spiritual heritage, but are through and through beings becoming according to the historical spirit—it is only by this title that we have a task which is truly ours” (Crisis, sect. 15). Philosophy cannot pass history by, because philosophy concerned with radicality must understand and go beyond the immediate historical data which are in reality the sedimentations of history, the prejudices, and which constitute its “world” in a cultural sense.
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Transcendental philosophy makes possible the reconciliation of objectivism and subjectivism, abstract knowledge and concrete life. Thus the fate of European humanity, which is also that of humanity in general, is linked to the possibility of converting philosophy to phenomenology: “we are by our philosophical activity the fuctionaries of humanity.”
2. The Lifeworld
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In order to answer the question ”Is the wall yellow?” I either enter the room and look at the wall (originary evidence, on the perceptual level, which Husserl often called simply “experience”), try to remember, or ask others. In these latter two cases, I check whether there exists in myself or someone else an “experience,” still present, of the color of the wall. All possible justification of a judgment must pass through this “present experience” of the thing itself; thus evidence is the meaning of all justification, or of all rationalization. [n. b. not of “history”]
We therefore respond correctly to the question of truth by describing the experience of the true and insisting on the genetic development of the ego: truth is not an object but a movement, and it exists only if this movement is actually carried out by the ego.
Consequently, in order to verify a judgment—that is, to explain the meaning of truth—we must proceed to a regressive analysis leading to a precategorial (prepredicative) experience which constitutes a fundamental presupposition of logic in general (Aron Gurwitsch). This presupposition is not a logical axiom, but a philosophical condition of possibility, constituting the ground (Boden) into which all predication sinks its roots. Prior to any science, its subject matter is pregiven to us in a passive “belief, and the “passive, universal pregiven of all judging activity” is termed “world,” “the absolute, independent substratum in the storng sense of absolute independence” (Experience and Judgment). The radical foundation of truth reveals itself in the end as a return to the Lebenswelt through intentional analysis, and at the heart of this world the constituting subject “receives things” as passive syntheses prior to all exact knowledge. “This receptivity must be viewed as an inferior stage of activity” (ibid.), signifying that the transcendental ego constituting the meaning of these objects refers implicitly to a passive grasp of the object, to a complicity with the object. This too-short allusion permits us to specify finally that the “world” in question here is obviously not the world of natural science, but the totality or idea, in a Kantian sense, of all there is, and everything of which there can be consciousness.
Thus, after the reduction that shattered the world in its constituted form—in order to grant the constituting ego its authenticity as giver of meaning—the Husserlian project, in exploring the meaning of this subjective Senngebung, recovers the world as the very reality of the constitutor. It is obviously not the same world: the natural world is a fetishized world where the subject abandons himself as naturally existing and naively “objectifies” the meaning of objects. The reduction seeks to efface this alienation, and the primordial world it discovers is the ground of the lived experiences on which the truth of the theoretical consciousness is based. The truths of science are founded neither in God, as Descartes thought, nor on the a priori conditions of possibility, as Kant thought, but on the immediate experience of evidence by which individual and world find themselves in harmony from the beginning.
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Note on Husserl and Hegel
It is from Hegel that the term phenomenology received its full and singular meaning, with the 1807 publication of Die Phanomenologie des Geistes. Phenomenology is “science of consciousness,” “in that consciousness is, in general, knowledge of an object, either exterior or interior.” Hegel writes in the preface to the Phenomenology: “The immediate Being of spirit, consciousness, possesses two moments: that of knowledge, and that of objectivity which is the negative with regard to this knowledge. When spirit develops itself in this element of consciousness and displays its moments, this opposition occurs at each particular moment, and they all therefore appear as faces of consciousness. The science of this path is the science of the experience had by consciousness” (Phenomenology of Spirit, preface, sect. 36). There is thus no answer to the question whether philosophy must begin with the object (realism) or with the ego (idealism). The very idea of phenomenology puts this question out of play: consciousness is always consciousness of, and there is no object which is not an object for. There is no immanence of the object to consciousness unless one correlatively assigns the object a rational meaning, without which the object would not be an object for. Concept or meaning is not exterior to Being; rather, Being is immediately concept in itself, and the concept is Being for itself. The thinking of Being is Being thinking itself; consequently, the method this thought employs—philosophy itself—is not constituted by a body of categories independent of what is thought, of its contents. The form of thought is distinguished from the content only formally: it is, concretely, the content itself which grasps itself, the in-itself becoming for-itself. “we must consider the forms of thought in itself and for itself; for they are the object and the activity of the object” (Encyclopedia).
67
If the recovery of the totality of the real (in the Hegelian sense) is thus claimed impossible, it is precisely because there is an originary, immediate and absolute reality that ground all possible recovery. Must we then say that is ineffable, if it is true that all logos, all rational discourse, all dialectic of thought presupposes in its turn the originary faith? Is there thus some preratioanality here? We can see that this question sharply distinguishes Hegel from Husserlian and post-Husserlian phenomenology. “there is not for Hegel,” writes Hyppolite, “an ineffable which would be before or beyond knowledge, no immediate singularity or transcendence; there is no ontological silence but rather, in the dialectical discourse, a progressive conquest of meaning. This does not imply that this meaning would rightly be prior to the discourse that discovers and creates it. . . but that the meaning develops itself in this very discourse.” In the article Glauben und Wissen Hegel had already attacked the transcendence of the Kantian in-itself as the product of a “philosophy of the understanding,” for which the presence of the object remains the simple appearance of a hidden reality. Yet does Husserl not introduce another, similar transcendence in Experience and Judgment in the form of the pre-predicative Lebenswelt? Insofar as this originary lifeworld is prepredicative, all predication and discourse certainly implies it, but equally lacks it, and cannot properly say anything about it.
68
…Heidegger, for whom “the duality of the ego and Being is insurmountable” (Waelhens), and for whom the pretended absolute knowledge simply manifests the “metaphysical,” speculative, and inauthentic character of the system that it assumes.
…Hegelian phenomenology closes the system, it is the total recovery of total reality in absolute knowledge, while Husserlian description inaugurates the grasping of the “thing itself” before all predication; this is why the latter never finishes correcting itself, erasing itself, since it is a battle of language against itself aimed at attaining the originary…
69
As Merleau-Ponty writes, “’The truth’ is another name for sedimentation, which is itself the presence of all ‘presents’ in our own”; truth is Sinngenesis, genesis of meaning.
IV The Relation of Phenomenology to the Human Sciences
75
The link that unites it to sociology is no less intimate: we noted very briefly, concerning the fifth Cartesian Meditation and Ideas II, how transcendental solipsism runs up against the problem of the Other,. Husserl does not seem to have settled on a definite version of this problem. Still, when he writes that “transcendental subjectivity is intersubjectivity,” or that the spiritual world ahs an absolute ontological priority over the natural world, we are led to believe that the Einfuhlung, or existence with the Other which is an understanding of the Other, brings about a relation of reciprocity where the concrete transcendental subject grasps itself as Other in that it is “an other” for the Other, and introduces an absolutely original element into the problematic of this subject: the social. Here again phenomenology was led inevitably, by the very fact that it is not a metaphysics but a philosophy of the concrete, to take hold of sociological data in order to clarify itself, and equally to put into question the procedures by which sociologists obtain this data, in order to clarify sociology.
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But it was equally the discovery, at the heart of the concrete transcendental subject, of the problem of time which is also—considering the psycho-phenomenological “parallelism”—the problem of individual history: how can there be history for consciousness? This question is close enough to that of phenomenology: how can there be an Other for my consciousness? In effect, through history I become other in remaining the same; through the Other, an other is given as an I. in particular, if we define truth as experience of truth, and if we admit that experiences succeed one another in an infinite flux, the problem of internal time and of individual history is eminently capable of rendering obsolete any pretension to truth: one never steps foot twice in the same river, and yet truth seems to demand atemporality. If in the end transcendental subjectivity is defined as intersubjectivity, the same problem arises, no longer on the individual level, but on the level of collective history.
V Phenomenology and Psychology
1. Introspection
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Secondly, introspective psychology conceived of this experience as interiority: we must distinguish categorically between exterior and interior, that is, between objective or natural science, and the subjective accessible only through introspection. This dissociation quickly proved difficult to follow, however, as to where to draw the line of demarcation: from there followed parallelist and epiphenomenalist hypotheses, etc., until it was finally understood—with phenomenology playing a major role in this maturation of the problem—that a border can only separate regions of the same nature; yet the psychological does not exist in the same way as the organic.
Thirdly, conscious experience had a strictly individual character, in the double sense that it is the experience of a situated and dated individual, and that it is itself an experience which cannot be reproduced.
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2. Reflection
…if we feel the need for a psychological science, it is precisely because we know that we don’t know the psychological realm. It is true that in being afraid I have fear, but still I do not know what fear is, I “know” only that I have it…
In reality “knowledge of the self by the self is indirect, it is a construction, I must decode my behavior as I decode that of the other,” (Merleau-Ponty).
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Thus phenomenology opposes reflection to introspection.
…we find again, at the foundation of this reflection that phenomenology opposes to introspective psychology, the Husserlian concern with the thing itself, the concern with naivete—that is, the concern which motivates the reduction, the guarantee against the insertion of prejudices and the appearance of alienations in the reflective description I make of anger.
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3. Intentionality and Behavior
Phenomenology—here again in accord with objectivism—was thus necessarily led to reject the classical distinction between interior and exterior. In a sense we could say that he entire Husserlian problem is to specify how there are “objects” of the ego, and The Taming of the Shrew is why it is correct to say that intentionality is at the center of phenomenological thought. Interna;llity, taken in a psychological sense, signfies precisely the fundamental inadequacy of any break between ineriority and exteriority. To say that consciousness is consciousness of something is to say that thre is no noesis without noema, no cogito without cogitatum, and equally no amo without amatum, etc.—in brie, that I am interwoven with the world.
…the pure ego, if isolated from its contents, is nothing. …the psychological ego (…is the same as the pure ego)…
…the “psychological” which is no longer interiority, but intentionality—that is, the relation between the subject and the situation, it eing understood that this relation does not unite two separable poles…
Agaisnt St. Augustine’s call for a return to interior truth. Merleau-Ponty writes: “The world is not an object for which I possess within me the law of its constitution, it is the natural milieu and the field of all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not ‘reside’ only in the ‘inner man’, or rather there is no inner man, man is in the world, it is in the world that he knows himself,” (PP, preface). Thus the world is denied as exteriority and affirmed as “surrounding,” the ego is denied as interiority and affirmed as “existing.”
Part II Phenomenology and the Human Sciences
VII Phenomenology and History
1. The Historical
111
From the outset there is an ambiguity in the word “history,” which designates both historical reality and historical science. This ambiguity is symptomatic of an existential equivocation—namely that eh subject doing historical science is also a historical being. We also see that the question concerning us here—“How is a historical science possible?”—is linked intimately to the question, “How can and how must the historical being transcend its nature as historical being, in order to grasp historical reality as an object of science?”
We must first inquire into consciousness of history itself; how does the object History come to consciousness it cannot be in the natural experience of the passing of time; it is not because the subject “finds himself in history” that he is temporal, but rather that “if he can only exist historically, it is because he is temporal in the basis of his being” (Heidegger, BT, sect. 72). What do we mean by a history in which the subject finds himself, a historical object in itself? We borrow from Heidegger the example of a piece of antique furniture as a historical object.
It is, Heidegger answers, the “world” of which it was part.
112
Consequently the object is indeed historical in itself, but in a secondary way. It is historical only because its provenance is due to humanity, to a subjectivity having been present. But then what, in turn, signifies for this subjectivity the fact of having been present?
Here we are turned back from the secondary historical to the primary—or better, originary—historical. It the condition for the historical nature of the furniture is not in the furniture, but in the historical nature of the human world where this furniture had its place, what conditions guarantee us that this historical element is originary? To say that consciousness is historical in not simply to say that there is something like time for it, but that it is time. Yet consciousness is always consciousness of something…
…consciousness is a flux of experiences (Erlebnisse), which are all in the present. On the objective side, this is no guarantee of historical continuity; but on the side of the subjective pole, what is the condition of possibility of this unitary flow of experiences? How can we pass from multiple experiences to the ego, when there is nothing in this ego but these experiences? “While it is interwoven in this peculiar way with all of its ‘experiences’, the living ego is nonetheless not something capable of being considered for itself and taken as an object of study in itself. Abstracted from its ‘manner of relating’ (Beziehungsweisen) or its ‘manner of comporting’ (Verhaltungsweisen) . . . it has no content ot be explicated, and is indescribable in itself and for itself: pure ego and nothing more” (Husserl, Ideas, sect. 80).
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We could therefore say that consciousness now intentionalizes what it is conscious of, in the mode of no longer, or the mode of not yet, or finally in the mode of presence.
…consequently history, is not graspable in itself, but must be turned back to the consciousness for which there is history. The immanent relation of this consciousness to its history can be understood neither horizontally, as a developing series—since one cannot draw a unity from a multiplicity; nor vertically as transcendental consciousness setting out history—since one cannot obtain a temporal continuity from an atemporal unity.
2. Historicity
114
Merleau-Ponty (in PP, 477 [417]) borrows the schema below from Husserl (TC, sect. 10), where the horizontal line represents the series of nows, the oblique lines the profiles of these same nows viewed from a later now, and the vertical lines the successive profiles of the same now.
Thus there is a passive synthesis of A with its perspectival shadings—it being understood that this term does not explain the temporal unity, but allows us at least to pose the problem correctly.
115
/C2
/B1 /C1
Past /A /B /C Future
/ /A’ /B’
/ /A”
116
…my now is never, as Heidegger notes, an in-sistence, a being contained in the world, but an ex-sistence, or again an ek-stasis, and it is ultimately because I am an open intentionality that I am a temporality. n2 The Husserlian theory of the “living present,” as spelled out in unedited manuscripts, is presented in Tran Duc Thao, Phenomenologie et Materialisme Dialectique, pp. 139 ff. see also Jacques Derrida’s excellent introduction to his translation of “The Origin of Geometry” (L’Origine de la Geometrie, PUF, 1962).
Yes, time is subjective, since time has a meaning, and if it has such it is because we are ourselves time, in the same way that the world has meaning for us because we are world through our bodies, etc.—and this is of course one of the principa; lessons of phenomenology. But time is equally objective, since we don not constitute it through an ace o f thought that would itself be eempt from it; like the world, time is always an already for consciousness, and this is wy time, no less that the world, is not transparent to us.
3. The Philosophy of History
I am not only what I am, but also what I will be and what I want to have been and to become. But this history which exists for consciousness is not exhausted by the consciousness of its history; history is also “universal history,” no longer relative to Dasein but to Mitsein—it is the history of people.
We do not return here to the question of how there is an alter ego for the ego. For it is implied, as we have seen, in all of the human sciences. We focus only on the specific way in which the object history presents itself to the historian.
It presents itself through signs, remains, monuments, records, potential material, the furniture that Heidegger discussed returns already, of itself, to the world from which it came. The is a way open to the past, prior to the work of historical science: it is the signs themselves that open this way to us, for we slip immediately from these signs to their meaning. This does not mean that we have explicit knowledge of the meaning of these signs, and that the scientific thematization adds nothing to our understanding, only that this thematization, this construction of the past, is as it were a reconstruction. The signs at the basis of the thematization must already bear in themselves the meaning of a past, or else how could we distinguish the historian’s discourse from a fabrication? We return here to the results of elucidation of meaning. In history we come before a cultural world which must, of course, be reconstructed and reconstituted by a work of reflection (Aron), but this cultural world also
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comes before us as cultural world: the remains, the monument, the records each return the historian in their own way to a cultural horizon where the collective universe represented there profiles itself, and this grasp of the historical being of signs is possible only because there is a historicity of the historian. “The return to the ‘past;’ is not begun by the appropriation, selection, or guaranteeing of materials; all these already presuppose. . . the historicity of the historian’s existence. This historicity existentially founds history as a science, even of the least noticeable dispositions and ‘technical apparatus’” (Heidegger, BT, sect. 76). And, according to Aron: “All of the following analyses are guided by the assertion that humans are not only in history, but bear within themselves the history they explore” (IPH, 11 [10]). Consequently, signs present themselves to the historian immediately invested with a sense of the past; but such meaning is not transparent, and this is why a conceptual elaboration is needed in history. “History belongs not to the order of life, but of the spirit” (Aron, IPH, 86 [83]). This means that the historian, on the basis of this procedure, must unveil not laws, or even individual events, but “the possibility which was actually existent in the past” (Heidegger, BT, sect. 76) but, Heidegger holds, to achieve this the historian must reconstruct by using concepts. Yet, Aron says, “we always have a choice among numerous systems, since the idea is simultaneously immanent and transcendent to life.” We understand this to mean that there is, within a given historical
development, certainly a meaning to this development (a “logic,” be it economic, spiritual, juridical, etc.), but this meaning or “logic” must be revealed by an act of the historian which amounts to a choice concerning this development. This choice may or may not be explicit, but there is no historical science which does not rely on a philosophy of history.
…Aron replies… historical reality is not essentially constituted as physical reality is, but essentially open and incomplete.
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…..while the historical universe may well be coherent, such coherence is always unspecifiable for the historian since this universe is not closed. Of course Waterloo is past, and the history of the First Empire is complete; but if we approach this moment of historical becoming as such, we fail precisely to capture, it, since for the actors whose world we are trying to restore (the “possibility which was actually existent in the past” [Heidegger]) this moment presented itself against an equivocal horizon of contingent possibilities. After the fact we declare the fall of the Empire necessary, but this is to admit that we are doing the history of this History from the observer’s standpoint, since we say “after the fact,” therefore, the history we do is not transcendental science. What is it then? “Historical science is a form of consciousness that a community has of itself” (Aron, IPH, 88 [85]), inseparable as such from the historical situation at whose heart it is elaborated, and from the will to know itself. The interpretations given for a single moment of development vary as a function of the moment of development from which they are given. The Middle Ages were not the same for the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. But is it not possible to envisage, as a primary postulate of the historian’s effort, an interpretation adequate to the reality being interpreted? No, Aron again replies, for either this definitive model would proceed along the causal model of the natural science (simplistic economism, for example), and any such interpretation would fail to grasp the totality of the historical reality, to apply to a total becoming, the final resolution of a free process which outstrips any such ”factor”; or else it would be modeled on “understanding,” the appropriation of the past through the capturing of its meaning—but precisely this meaning is not given to us in an immediately transparent way. Both causality and understanding have their limits. To overcome these limits we must project a hypothesis concerning this total becoming, which not only recovers the past but grasps the historian’s present as past, i.e. as the profile of a future; we must, that is, do a philosophy of history.
4. Historical Science and Historicity
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To deny historical continuity is to deny the meaning within the historical development, yet there must be meaning in this development—not because people think this meaning, or construct systems of the meaning of history, but because in living, and in living together, people exude meaning.
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This meaning is ambiguous precisely because it is in the process of becoming. Just as we cannot assign some definitive meaning to a subjectivity, since this subjectivity is cast forward toward a future whose open possibilities will define it further, so the full meaning (the direction) of a historical situation is not assignable once and for all—since the society being affected cannot be viewed as an object evolving according to mechanical laws, and one stage of this complex system is not succeeded by another, but by an array of possibilities. These possibilities are not innumerable, and this is why there is meaning in history, but they are numerous, and this is why the meaning cannot be read off effortlessly.
Aron’s mistake comes in situating the meaning of history on the level of the thinking of this meaning, and not on the level of this meaning as experienced—a mistake sociology revealed to us already.
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Thus phenomenology does not propose a philosophy of history, but it responds in the affirmative to the question that began this chapter—at least if the meaning of the word “science” is not limited to mechanism, and if note is taken of the methodological revision outlined in our discussion of sociology.
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It proposes rather a reflective recovery of the data of historical science, an intentional analysis of the culture and period laid out by this science, and the reconstruction of the concrete historical Lifeworld, through which the meaning of this culture and period is revealed. This meaning cannot in any sense be taken for granted, and history cannot be read through any single “factor,” be it political, economic, or racial. The meaning is latent because originary, and it must be resuscitated without being presupposed if we are to be led by “the things themselves.”
It presents itself as a moment in the development of a culture, and does not take its truth to be contradicted by its historicity, since it makes of this very historicity an open doorway to the truth.
5. Phenomenology and Marxism
A. The Third Way
It is only fitting to begin by emphasizing the insurmountable oppositions that separate phenomenology and Marxism.
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From our present perspective, this signifies in particular that every form of matter contains in itself a meaning, and this meaning exists independently of any “transcendental” consciousness.
… third Husserlian period…Merleau-Ponty, its most remarkable representative, speaks of “this pregnance of meaning in the signs which could define the world.” But the whole problem is to specify which “world” this involves.
Husserl claimed that the constitution of the world, as it occurs in the development of subjectivity, is based upon the Lifeworld (Lebenswelt), on an originary world which this subjectivity “relates” to by way of passive syntheses.
The reality at issue here is what, following Merleau-Ponty, we have called “existence,” “originary world,” etc.:” and with phenomenology we have always taken great care to guard it against any possible objectivist reading this reality is not objective, then, but neither is it subjective—it is neutral, or ambiguous. The reality of the natural world proper to the reduction—that is, ultimately, matter—is in itself stripped of meaning for phenomenology (cf. Sartre).
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Meaning is traced back solely to a constituting subjectivity, but this subjectivity is in turn traced back to a neutral world which is still becoming, and in which the entire meaning of reality is constituted in its genesis (Sinngenesis).
For it is clear that this neutral world holding the sedimented meaning of all reality cannot be other than nature itself, or rather matter in its dialectical movement.
Reality is this universe rediscovered at the end of the phenomenological description, and in which the truth of experience takes root. But “experience is only an abstract aspect of actually real life; phenomenology cannot come to grasp in it the “material content of this life.”
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Husserl had, like Lenin, fought against Mach’s psychologism and all the forms of skeptical relativism expressed in Western thought from the end of the nineteenth century. This phenomenological is explained, according to Lukacs, by the need to eliminate objective idealism, whose resistance to scientific progress had finally been vanquished…
From there led the attempt, characteristic of phenomenological behavior, to “invest the categories of subjective idealism with a pseudo-objectivity. . . . (Husserl’s) illusion consists precisely in believing that it suffices to turn one’s back on all purely psychological methods in order to escape the domain of consciousness.” [Georg Lukacs, Existentialisme et Marxisme (Nagel, 1948).]
…great crisis of capitalism, which struck in 1914. before this philosophy had been put out of play, and replaced by the specialized sciences in the examination of the problem of knowledge: this is precisely the stage of positivism, pragmatism, and formalism, characterized by the confidence of intellectuals in an apparently eternal social system. But when the guarantees accorded by this system since its political birth (liberties of the citizen and respect for the human individual) began to be threatened by the consequences of that very system, the symptoms of the crisis of philosophical thought became observable: such is the historical context of phenomenology…
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The “third way,” neither idealist nor materialist (neither “objectivist” nor “psychologist,” as Husserl put it), is the reflection of this equivocal situation. The “philosophy of ambiguity” expresses in its own way an ambiguity of philosophy in this stage of bourgeoise history…