The Well-Founded World:  On a Possible Rapprochement of Phenomenology and Logical Analysis

Jonathan Kim-Reuter


What is the future of Husserlian phenomenology?  In proposing this question, the Husserl Archives at the New School for Social Research has taken upon itself that most difficult of reflections, namely the value of a legacy.  Such actions as this usually come at a time when a tradition, and particularly a research tradition, has begun to feel its age.  It is both the privilege and price of maturity.  Every archive is an infinite resource and a finite recollection, an unstable mixture of intellectual transcendence and material permanence, and where the chief energies of thought mobilize themselves around the latter to the detriment of the former, there is the very real danger that the tradition has ceased to be relevant but to those who only ever heard the call of the master.  Is this the situation facing Husserlian phenomenology today?  Does Husserl matter to more than just we Husserlians?
     To take up and test this provocation I want to consider one of the most severe critics of phenomenology. (1) In the long and distinguished career of the analytic philosopher John Searle, the concept of intentionality has emerged as perhaps the most basic feature of conscious life.  Searle’s efforts, in this respect, would be a boon to Husserlians, were it not for the fact that intentionality is explained almost entirely on naturalistic grounds.  Intentional states of consciousness are simply higher level expressions of what is at bottom a neuronal configuration or biological system. (2) There is an “underlying structure” of consciousness, and this “structure” is located inside the brain. (3) Phenomenology, of the Husserlian type, is for Searle exclusively a descriptive research project:  it portrays how things outwardly seem to us. (4) As such, it is methodologically and epistemically useless when compared with logical analysis of consciousness.  The latter, Searle’s chosen mode of knowing, is not content with merely staying close to the surface features of phenomena.  Logical analysis, as he describes it, looks to “dig deeper” into the constitutive origins and conditions of intentional life. (5) When compared with its logical competitor, as Searle writes, “phenomenology is largely, though not entirely, irrelevant.” (6) Exactly where Searle makes good on this gesture of acceptance is not at all clear.
       For Searle, then, Husserlian phenomenology is largely a relic.  If it retains any interest, it is only as an archival document from the period before modern science and neurophysiology began to map the causal frontiers of the mind.  Phenomenology is and remains tainted with the older traditions of philosophical idealism. Husserl’s critical defense of the phenomenal character of human existence against the reductivism of the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften), so Searle’s thinking goes, left him without any engagement with the real world, the world, that is, in which it matters whether our perceptions are veridical or illusory.  The first principle guiding the phenomenologist is the directive to ignore “all relation to empirically real existence.” (7) This is the source of the assumed priority of logical over phenomenological analysis.  Without any concern over the objective reality of the world, Husserl left himself unable to account for the way in which the world presents itself to the subject within specific parameters of normalcy and familiarity.  This ontological oblivion of naturalistic being may have been necessary in light of the value given to the first-person account of perceptual experience.  From Searle’s point of view, however, it drastically ignores the very real fact that the perceptual contents of consciousness come with conditions of satisfaction, which in turn can only be studied if it is granted that intentional states have a determinate content whose “underlying structure” is reflective of the biological, constitutive bases of mental phenomena.  Without anything more to add than the static analysis of intentionality, phenomenology is doomed to remain a merely a curiosity, a “first stage,” (8) a rest-stop, as it were, on the road of discovery already well-paved by science.
     To put Searle’s point another way, what is absent from Husserlian phenomenology is an inquiry into the “Background” for all conscious states, whether intentional or not. The notion of the “Background” is one of Searle’s most original and fundamental contributions to the theory of intentionality.  Originally, it was introduced to explain how the semantic content of propositions can be meaningfully grasped. (9) Searle writes: “The Background is a set of nonrepresentational mental capacities that enable all representing to take place. Intentional states only have the conditions of satisfaction that they do, and thus only are the states that they are, against a Background of abilities that are not themselves Intentional states.” (10) It is “nonrepresentational” or “preintentional” inasmuch as it is only on the supposition of the “Background” that the intentional object is meaningfully grasped. (11) Perceptual reality comes to have a coherent, structured organization, which is grasped throughout the variety of empirical appearances and sensory distortions, on the basis of the “Background.”  Logical analysis is able to ferret out this operational existence of mental capacities because it seeks to discover how it is, prior to phenomenological description, that there is at all a determinate object or state of affairs present to intentional consciousness. (12) The “Background” provides what Searle calls “enabling conditions”:  they are not part of the descriptive content as they permeate that content and establish the foundations for perceptual reality, (13) precisely that domain of concern evacuated by Husserl from his original research program.
     So it appears that with the idea of the “Background” firmly in place, logical analysis is able to explain how descriptive phenomenology is at all possible, thus rendering it “largely irrelevant.”  Husserlian phenomenology, like the history of science itself, ceases to any longer play a formative, active role in determining the future direction taken by research in cognitive and consciousness studies. However, despite appearances to the contrary, Husserl never considered any of his theoretical positions to be beyond questioning or critique.  There is the orthodox purity and formal discipline of phenomenology as a “rigorous science” of essences; yet, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty so shrewdly observes, in his last works there emerges for Husserl a more direct, “factical” investigation of the pre-reflective world, an inquiry whose overtly “genetic” scope takes into account the constitution of perceptual reality. (14) The second volume of Ideas and the text of the Crisis (15) introduce an account of intentionality no longer divorced from the lived world.  This arguably radical turn in Husserlian phenomenology takes up the world in its intimate proximity to the subject.  The reluctance to account for the givenness of perceptual reality is dropped in favor of a closer inspection of the manner in which the world (the “lifeworld,” Lebenswelt) originally acquires a primordial familiarity, such that I always find myself, prior to reflection, in a world that is always present “for me,” not “in itself,” (16) and never without a constant sense and perceptual certainty.  “To live,” Husserl writes, “is to always live-in-certainty-of-the-world.” (17) 
    The return to the world is not a journey back to the consciousness of the world as an object like any other.  If the world is not originally a simple multitude of things but is instead characterized as the world for the subject, (18) if the world is grasped through a “wakeful certainty” that is prior to all cognitive, third-person perspectives, (19) then we can understand how Husserl came to re-evaluate the former and formal primacy of the theory of intentionality.  Intentionality now stands as a phenomenon conditioned by and grounded in a thoroughgoing and irreducible “background” familiarity with the world.  The latter constitutes that “world-horizon” within which objects appear in their concrete and meaningful givenness. (20) Phenomenology ceases to be any longer an exclusively descriptive enterprise:  it acquires a “genetic” or “constitutive” dimension.  Henceforth, and this is the focus of the studies that one finds in Ideas II and in the Crisis, phenomenology maps out a new ontological landscape for itself.  The phenomenologist, Husserl writes, is to turn toward that background of intentional consciousness, toward “how, that is, there arises in us the constant consciousness of the universal existence, of the universal horizon, of real, actually existing objects.” (21) The actual being of objects, not merely their possible being, becomes the focus of Husserl’s research.  His interest turns to the question of how it is, taken in a universal sense, that the world is at all a place wherein the phenomenon of objectivity not only appears but is the very precondition for all practical and theoretical activity—as revealed through the first-person perspective and its basic experience of perceptual- or world-familiarity. (22)
    It would appear, then, that far from being “largely irrelevant,” Husserlian phenomenology is in fact an ongoing mode of inquiry—within and co-extensive with logical analysis itself.  Like logical analysis, it too seeks to understand how basic features of the world-experience—“the solidity of things, and the independent existence of objects and other people” (23)—are constituted for us as meaningful unities possessing determinate sense.  Searle would like to do without Husserl, but given his own attempts to make explicit the pre-intentional, operational work of the “Background,” it seems he would do so at his own peril.  If Searle paid closer attention to the evolving nature of Husserl’s reflections on intentionality, he would find much that is very relevant. Both philosophers seek out the pre-reflective — “lived” — foundations of perceptual reality.  They no doubt differ ultimately on the ontological status of the “Background.”  But since neither Searle nor Husserl is interested in jettisoning that which makes consciousness a subjective experience, (24) it is clear that far from being merely an historical artifact, Husserlian phenomenology remains a vital program and prospect for research.  As such, in inviting the phenomenological community to assume the burden for its own future, the Husserl Archives enjoins us to think evocatively, and to look beyond the surface disparities of contemporary debates for that turn of thought which offers new differences and therein, perhaps, also new moments of rapprochement.

Notes

(1) For a much broader treatment of the points made in this paper, the reader would do well to consult the article “Background Ideas,” by David Woodruff Smith, originally published in Italian as “Idee di sfondo,” Paradigmi, XVII, 49 (Rome, 1999), pp. 7-37.
(2) John Searle, “The Limits of Phenomenology,” Heidegger, Coping, and Cognitive Science:  Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, volume 2, eds. Mark Wrathall and Jeff Malpas (Cambridge:  The MIT Press, 2000), p. 90.  See also Searle’s comments in The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, MA:  The MIT Press, 1992), pp. 85-93.
(3) Ibid., p. 91.
(4) Ibid.
(5) Ibid.
(6) Ibid., p. 76.
(7) Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J.N. Findlay (New York:  Humanity Books, 2000), p. 537.)
(8) This point is made in a quotation from Husserl’s disciple, Eugen Fink.  The quotation appears in Ronald Bruzina’s Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink:  Beginnings and Ends in Phenomenology, 1928-1938 (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2004), p. 197.
(9) See, for example, the discussions of the “Background” in Intentionality (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1983) and The Construction of Social Reality ((New York:  The Free Press, 1995).
(10) Searle, Intentionality, p. 143.
(11) Ibid.
(12) In a significant point of agreement with Husserl, and Heidegger as well, Searle rejects the idea that the object of an intentional state is a mental representation.  Since what is most revolutionary about the phenomenological theory of intentionality is precisely its abandonment of all traces of a mental representation that is supposed to mediate between consciousness and our knowledge of the external world, Searle, on this point, is more phenomenologically relevant than he is perhaps willing to admit.  Consider, for example, the following observation by Searle on the nature of the intentional object, take from his work Intentionality (p. 16):  “To call something an Intentional object is just to say that is what some Intentional state is about.  Thus, for example, if Bill admires President Clinton, then the Intentional object of his admiration is President Carter, the actual man and not some shadowy intermediate entity between Bill and the man.”
(13) Ibid., p. 158.  Searle’s commitment to realism is a logical outcome of the functioning of the Background:  our practical life would be incoherent if there were not already in place a real world—not a hypothesis—on the basis of which all of our questions and inquiries acquire their meaningfulness and determinate value.
(14) Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smity (London:  Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), p. vii.
(15) Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Psychology:  Second Book:  Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Dordrecht:  Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989); The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy:  An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr  (Evanston:  Northwestern University Press, 1970).
(16) Husserl, Ideas:  Second Book, p. 196.
(17) Husserl, Crisis, p. 142.
(18) Ibid., p. 143.
(19) Ibid., p. 142.
(20) Ibid., p. 143.
(21) Ibid., p. 144.
(22) Ibid., p. 146.
(23) Searle, Intentionality, p. 143.
(24) John Searle, Consciousness and Language (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 33.