Ridling Zaine. Philosophy: Then and Now. A look back at 26 centuries of thought

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Ridling, Philosophy Then and Now: A Look Back at 26 Centuries of Thought

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becomes naturalized. Although an attempt is then made to find a foundation

for the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) by means of experimental

psychology, it proves to be impossible, because in so doing one is unable to

grasp precisely what is at stake in knowledge as found in the natural sciences.

What a philosopher must examine is the relationship between

consciousness and Being; and in doing so, he must realize that from the

standpoint of epistemology, Being is accessible to him only as a correlate of

conscious acts. He must thus pay careful attention to what occurs in these acts.

This can be done only by a science that tries to understand the very essence of

consciousness; and this is the task that Phenomenology has set for itself.

Because clarification of the various types of objects must follow from the

basic modes of consciousness, Husserl’s thought remained close to

psychology. In contradistinction to what is the case in psychology, however,

in Phenomenology, consciousness is thematized in a very special and definite

way, viz., just insofar as consciousness is the locus in which every manner of

constituting and founding meaning must take place. In man’s intuition,

conscious occurrences must be given immediately in order to avoid

introducing at the same time certain interpretations. The nature of such

processes as perception, representation, imagination, judgment, and feeling

must be grasped in immediate self-givenness. The call “To the things

themselves” is not a demand for realism, because the things at stake are the

acts of consciousness and the objective entities that get constituted in them:

these things form the realm of what Husserl calls the phenomena.

Thus, the objects of Phenomenology are “absolute data grasped in pure,

immanent intuition,” and its goal is to discover the essential structures of the

acts (noesis) and the objective entities that correspond to them (noema).

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On the other hand, Phenomenology must also be distinguished from

historicism, a philosophy that stresses the immersion of all thinkers within a

particular historical setting. Husserl objected to historicism because it implies

relativism. He gave credit to Wilhelm Dilthey, author of “Entwürfe zur Kritik

der historischen Vernunft” (“Outlines for the Critique of Historical Reason,”

in Gesammelte Schriften, 12 vol. [1914-36], vol. 5, 6), for having developed a

typification of world views, but he doubted and even rejected the scepticism

that flows necessarily from the relativity of the various types. History is

concerned with facts, whereas Phenomenology deals with the knowledge of

essences. To Husserl, Dilthey’s doctrine of world views was incapable of

achieving the rigour required by genuine science. Contrary to all of the

practical tendencies found in world views, Husserl demanded that philosophy

be founded as a rigorous science. Its task implies that nothing be accepted as

given beforehand but that the philosopher should try to find the way back to

the real beginnings. This is tantamount to saying, however, that he must try to

find the way to the foundations of meaning that are found in consciousness.

Just as for Immanuel Kant the empirical has merely relative validity and never

an absolute, or apodictic, validity, so for Husserl, too, what is to be searched

for is a scientific knowledge of essences in contradistinction to a scientific

knowledge of facts.

Basic Method

The basic method of all Phenomenological investigation, as Husserl

developed it himself – and on which he worked throughout his entire lifetime

– is the “reduction”: the existence of the world must be put between brackets,

not because the philospher should doubt it but merely because this existing

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world is not the very theme of Phenomenology; its theme is rather the manner

in which knowledge of the world comes about. The first step of the reduction

consists in the phenomenological reduction, through which all that is given is

changed into a phenomenon in the sense of that which is known in and by

consciousness; for this kind of knowing – which is to be taken in a very broad

sense as including every mode of consciousness, such as intuition,

recollection, imagination, and judgment – is here all-important. There are

several reasons why Husserl gave a privileged position to intuition: among

them is the fact that intuition is that act in which a person grasps something

immediately in its bodily presence and also that it is a primordially given act

upon which all of the rest is to be founded. Furthermore, Husserl’s stress on

intuition must be understood as a refutation of any merely speculative

approach to philosophy.

This reduction reverses – “re-flects” – man’s direction of sight from a

straightforward orientation toward objects to an orientation toward

consciousness.

The second step is to be found in the eidetic reduction. To get hold of

consciousness is not sufficient; on the contrary, the various acts of

consciousness must be made accessible in such a way that their essences –

their universal and unchangeable structures – can be grasped. In the eidetic

reduction one must forego everything that is factual and merely occurs in this

way or that. A means of grasping the essence is the Wesensschau, the intuition

of essences and essential structures. This is not a mysterious kind of intuition.

Rather, one forms a multiplicity of variations of what is given, and while

maintaining the multiplicity, one focusses attention on what remains

unchanged in the multiplicity; i.e., the essence is that identical something that

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continuously maintains itself during the process of variation. Husserl,

therefore, called it the invariant.

To this point, the discussion of reduction has remained within the realm

of psychology, albeit a new – namely, a phenomenological – psychology. The

second step must now be completed by a third, the transcendental reduction. It

consists in a reversion to the achievements of that consciousness that Husserl,

following Kant, called transcendental consciousness, although he conceived of

it in his own way. The most fundamental event occurring in this

consciousness is the creation of time awareness through the acts of protention

(future) and retention (past), which is something like a self-constitution. To do

phenomenology was for Husserl tantamount to returning to the transcendental

ego as the ground for the foundation and constitution (or making) of all

meaning (German Sinn). Only when a person has reached this ground can he

achieve the insight that makes his comportment transparent in its entirety and

makes him understand how meaning comes about, how meaning is based

upon meaning like strata in a process of sedimentation.

Husserl worked on the clarification of the transcendental reduction until

the very end of his life. It was precisely the further development of the

transcendental reduction that led to a division of the Phenomenological

movement and to the formation of a school that refused to become involved in

this kind of system of problems.

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Basic Concepts

In an effort to express what it is to which this method gives access,

Husserl wrote:

In all pure psychic experiences (in perceiving something,

judging about something, willing something, enjoying

something, hoping for something, etc.) there is found

inherently a being-directed-toward…. Experiences are

intentional. This being-directed-toward is not just joined to the

experience by way of a mere addition, and occasionally as an

accidental reaction, as if experiences could be what they are

without the intentional relation. With the intentionality of the

experiences there announces itself, rather, the essential

structure of the purely psychical.

The phenomenological investigator must examine the different forms of

intentionality in a reflective attitude because it is precisely in and through the

corresponding intentionality that each domain of objects becomes accessible

to him. Husserl took as his point of departure mathematical entities and later

examined logical structures, in order finally to achieve the insight that each

being must be grasped in its correlation to consciousness, because each datum

becomes accessible to a person only insofar as it has meaning for him. From

this position, regional ontologies, or realms of being, develop: for instance,

those dealing with the region of “nature,” the region of “the psychic,” or the

region of “the spirit.” Moreover, Husserl distinguished formal ontologies –

such as the region of the logical – from material ontologies.

In order to be able to investigate a regional ontology, it is first necessary

to discover and examine the founding act by which realities in this realm are

constituted. For Husserl, constitution does not mean the creation or fabrication

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of a thing or object by a subject; it means the founding constitution of its

meaning. There is meaning only for consciousness. All founding constitution

of meaning is made possible by transcendental consciousness. Speaking of

this transcendental motif, Husserl wrote:

It is the motif of questioning back to the last source of all achievements

of knowledge, of reflection in which the knower reflects on himself and his

knowing life, in which all the scientific constructs which have validity for

him, occur teleologically, and as permanent acquisitions are kept and become

freely available to him.

In the realm of such transcendental problems, it is necessary to examine

how all of the categories in and through which one understands mundane

beings or purely formal entities originate from specific modes of

consciousness. In Husserl’s view, the temporalization must be conceived as a

kind of primordial constitution of transcendental consciousness itself.

Understood in this way, Phenomenology does not place itself outside the

sciences but, rather, attempts to make understandable what takes place in the

various sciences and, thus, to thematize the unquestioned presuppositions of

the sciences.

In his last publication, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und

die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die

phänomenologische Philosophie (1936; The Crisis of European Sciences and

Transcendental Phenomenology, 1970), Husserl arrived at the life-world – the

world as shaped within the immediate experience of each man – by

questioning back to the foundations that the sciences presuppose. In Die Krisis

he analyzed the grounds that had led to the European crisis of culture and

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philosophy, which found its immediate expression in the contrast between the

great successes of the sciences of nature and the failure of the sciences of

man. In the modern era, scientific knowledge had become fragmented into an

objectivistic-physicalist and a transcendental knowledge. Until recently this

split could not be overcome. It led, rather, to the attempt to develop the

sciences of man in accordance with the procedures used in the exact sciences

of nature (naturalism) – an attempt doomed to failure. In opposition to this

attempt, Husserl wished to show that in the new approach one must reflect on

the activities of the scientists.

As the immediately given world, this merely subjective world, was

forgotten in the scientific thematization, the accomplishing subject, too, was

forgotten and the scientist himself was not thematized.

Husserl demonstrated this point by using the example of Galileo and his

mathematization of our world. The truth characteristic of the life-world is by

no means an inferior form of truth when compared to the exact, scientific truth

but is, rather, always a truth already presupposed in all scientific research.

That is why Husserl claimed that an ontology of the life-world must be

developed – i.e., a systematic analysis of the constitutive achievements the

result of which is the life-world, a life-world that, in turn, is the foundation of

all scientific constitutions of meaning. The stimulating change that occurred

here consists in the fact that truth is no longer measured after the criterion of

an exact determination. For what is decisive is not the exactness but, rather,

the part played by the founding act.

It is in this connection that, rather abruptly, historicity, too, became

relevant for Husserl. He began to reflect upon the emergence of philosophy

among the Greeks and on its significance as a new mode of scientific

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knowledge oriented toward infinity; and he interpreted the philosophy of René

Descartes, often called the father of modern philosophy, as the point at which

the split into the two research directions – physicalist objectivism and

transcendental subjectivism – came about. Phenomenology must overcome

this split, he held, and thus help mankind to live according to the demands of

reason. In view of the fact that reason is the typical characteristic of man,

mankind must find itself again through Phenomenology.

Later Developments

Phenomenology of Essences

A different type of Phenomenology, the Phenomenology of essences,

developed from a tangential continuation of that of the Logische

Untersuchungen. Its supporters were Husserl’s students in Göttingen and a

group of young philosophers in Munich, originally students of Theodor Lipps,

a Munich psychologist and philosopher – students who had turned away from

Lipp’s psychologism and discovered powerful support in Husserl. The

Phenomenological movement, which then began to take shape, found its most

tangible expression in the publication of the Jahrbuch für Philosophie und

phänomenologische Forschung (1913-30), a Phenomenological yearbook with

Husserl as its main editor, the preface of which defined Phenomenology in

terms of a return to intuition (Anschauung) and to the essential insights

(Wesenseinsichten) derived from it as the ultimate foundation of all

philosophy.

The 11 volumes of the Jahrbuch contained, in addition to Husserl’s own

works, the most important fruits of the movement in its broader application.

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Of the co-editors, Alexander Pfänder contributed chiefly to the development

of phenomenological psychology and pure logic but developed also the

outlines of a complete Phenomenological philosophy. Moritz Geiger applied

the new approach particularly to aesthetics and Adolf Reinach to the

philosophy of law. The most original and dynamic of Husserl’s early

associates, however, was Max Scheler, who had joined the Munich group and

who did his major Phenomenological work on problems of value and

obligation. A Polish philosopher, Roman Ingarden, did major work in

structural ontology and analyzed the structures of various works of art in its

light; Hedwig Conrad-Martius, a cosmic Realist at the University of Munich,

worked intensively in the ontology of nature; and others made comparable

contributions in other fields of philosophy. None of these early

Phenomenologists, however, followed Husserl’s road to transcendental

Idealism; and some tried to develop a Phenomenology along the lines of

Realism.

Heidegger’s Hermeneutic Phenomenology

Martin Heidegger, one of Germany’s foremost philosophers at the

middle of the 20th century, was inspired to philosophy through Brentano’s

work Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles (1862;

“On the Multifarious Meaning of Being According to Aristotle”). While he

was still studying theology, from 1910 to 1911, Heidegger encountered

Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen. From then on he pursued the course of

Phenomenology with the greatest interest, and from 1916 he belonged to the

narrow circle of students and followers of the movement. The typical

character of the Phenomenological intuition was at that time the focus of

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Husserl’s seminar exercises. To be sure, there appeared very early a difference

between Husserl and Heidegger. Discussing and absorbing the works of the

important philosophers in the history of metaphysics was, for Heidegger, an

indispensable task, whereas Husserl repeatedly stressed the significance of a

radically new beginning and – with few exceptions (among them Descartes,

Locke, Hume, and Kant) – wished to bracket the history of philosophy.

Heidegger’s basic work, Sein und Zeit (1927; Being and Time, 1962),

which was dedicated to Husserl, strongly acknowledged that its author was

indebted to Phenomenology. In it, Phenomenology was understood as a

methodological concept – a concept that was conceived by Heidegger in an

original way and resulted from his questioning back to the meanings of the

Greek concepts of phainomenon and logos. Phainomenon is “that which

shows itself from itself,” but together with the concept of logos, it means “to

let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it

shows itself from itself.” This conception of Phenomenology, which relied

more on Aristotle than on Husserl, constituted a change that was later to lead

to an estrangement between Husserl and Heidegger. For in Sein und Zeit there

is no longer a phenomenological reduction, a transcendental ego, or an

intuition of essences in Husserl’s sense. Heidegger’s new beginning was, at

the same time, a resumption of the basic question of philosophy: that

concerning the meaning (Sinn) of Being. His manner of questioning can be

defined as hermeneutical in that it proceeds from the interpretation of man’s

situation. What he thematized is, thus, the explanation of what is already

understood.

At the heart of Sein und Zeit lies Heidegger’s analysis of the one (the

man) who asks the question – who is capable of asking the question –

concerning Being, who precisely through this capability occupies a privileged