Prospects of Husserlian Phenomenology

Algis Mickunas


To articulate the prospects for Husserlian phenomenology first we must suggest briefly the points of contention his work has provoked in major trends which, as a matter of fact, are aspects of and inspired by his opus. In this sense one current requirement of Husserlian phenomenology is to take to task the various attacks on his work, not to demonstrate by arguments that they are wrong, but to investigate the undisclosed prejudgments in awareness that such attacks contain. We know that from Heidegger through various hermeneutical systems, to deconstruction and post-modernity, Husserl’s thought was the main target for criticisms on whose basis the careers of such attacks were made. Thus, the first claim suggests that Husserl’s understanding of Being is impoverished in contrast to his epistemic focus of establishing a domain of absolute awareness founded on transcendental ego. In this sense, his phenomenology is not a presuppositionless science, but a Cartesian reduction of Being to being known. Another aspect that supposedly discredits Husserl’s claims is the impossibility to obtain apodictic evidence of retentional dimension of temporal experience and the radical difference of the other’s experience. Unable to eradicate these difficulties, Husserl attempts to support his claim to absolute evidence by accepting, uncritically, the language of presence that pervades the metaphysical legacy of the West. Finally, and despite his discovery of the life-world, both his method and content of his researches are Western, and even epistemically imperialistic. After all, all cultural and historical differences are subsumed by him under the claim that phenomenology is the secret longing of the Greco-European man. These contentions require a brief response and above all an opening to the future tasks for Husserlian phenomenology.
    Husserlian phenomenology has one pervasive and general characteristic: analytic precision. It demands that all claims be demonstrated precisely in awareness accessible to everyone. Moreover, it demands that any philosophical position must include and explicate the awareness required for the very grounds of such a position. Lacking such an explication, a position remains dogmatic and speculative. It is therefore essential to disclose the transcendental awareness that comprises the very condition for attempts to depose this phenomenology. Such an awareness is reflective and demands that any philosophical or even anti-philosophical venture take into account its own reflection as a condition on which it differentiates itself from other positions. This sort of reflection is a vast field for phenomenological researches leading to precise eidetic insights into philosophical positions and what sort of awareness such positions require. For example, while Kant proposes to account for all knowledge on the basis of his a priori structures and the manner of their transcendental deduction to explicate the empirical domain, he does not account for the mode of awareness required to access the a priori domain. Such an awareness is required if the a priori, or any other epistemological, ontological, or even metaphysical claims are to become legitimate. Anyone making such claims will also have to show the manner in which they are accessible to awareness. Only such awareness will be able to decipher what is essential in each claim. This is one major venture that faces phenomenological work.
    Given this state of affairs, first contention concerning the lack of attention to Being is grounded on an initial insight that the entire tradition had hidden the meaning of Being through metaphysics and hence it is the task of hermeneutics to secure access to it.  But this is precisely Husserl’s point: one assumes an awareness of the concealed status of Being’s meaning prior to the demand for hermeneutical method. This is a transcendental insight into an eidetic invariant that is seen as a ground of all Western metaphysics.  While the explication of this invariant has been accomplished, the modes of awareness correlating to it is the task of Husserlian phenomenology. Another task, following the question of Being is the notion that as being in the world, the human is bound by his situation, history, facticity, temporality, etc. which must equally assume a status of transcendentally accessible eidetic invariant that transcends any situation, history and temporality. After all, the claim is made that in principle all humans live within this invariant and thus becomes unbound from factual contexts. Only transcendental phenomenology is in a position to explicate all sorts of variants while maintaining the eidetic invariant as a correlate of direct awareness. The domain of this awareness is still outstanding for phenomenological research. Similar tasks are involved in the claims that Husserlian phenomenology cannot have access to retended past, because it assumes presence as if it were the sole given to awareness. This claim assumes an ontological, sequential notion of time with points following one another. Yet this claim does not include the exposition of awareness of such a time such that past-present-future is not given one after another, but is present as a total field of mutual differentiations. It is precisely the transcendental time awareness that allows the co-presence of the three phases as transparent one through the other in their differences. Indeed, the deconstructive notion of difference assumes this time awareness as its unstated ground.  Once again, the future task of Husserlian phenomenology opens up with precise research into time awareness at this level of transparency.
    Husserlian phenomenology has to concern itself with various other major themes: philosophical anthropology, civilizational-cultural studies in the context of life world problematic, history, sciences and world horizon. Philosophical anthropology is called for by modern philosophical, cultural, and historical relativity. Within the latter, two claims have been preeminent: (a) different cultures, historical periods and societies offer various, and even clashing interpretations of human beings. It was mentioned above that Husserlian phenomenology was accused of being bound by Western prejudices and hence could not deal with other cultural worlds, (b) modern scientific and technological thinking offers the means to “make” the human into something “new” or even radically different from what has been previously considered to be the case. Phenomenology has to explicate such views and proposed transformations of the human in order to disclose a tacit “essence” at least as far as awareness is concerned, that allows the different views to be of a presupposed invariant human. Without the latter no sense could be made of the claim that what humans are depends on cultural, historical, social and even technical definitions and constructs. All these constructs seem to be different from one another.  Yet simple differences would allow only the claim that at different times and in different places there were descriptively different creatures resulting in a catalogue of various depictions differing one from the others. Yet even those who claim that there are radical differences in cultures, societies and histories, still insist in using the phrase “different interpretations of what it means to be human.”
    Husserlian phenomenology must be at the forefront of phenomenological philosophy insofar as various new trends in research make awareness their point of departure. For example, there is a temptation to point to cognitive psychology as if it were scientific affirmation of phenomenology. Such a psychology is both empiricistic and speculative. Neither empiricism, emphasizing contingency of all facts, nor speculative rationalism, stressing conceptuality and universal necessity, are adequate to account for human concrete awareness. The former, with its “internal faculties” as psychological facts cannot account for the continuity and unity of experience. The latter can account neither for the unity of experience without positing the “I think” accompanying all representations, nor for individuality wherein such representations could be attributed as “mine.” In terms of philosophical anthropology, for empiricism the human would be a “factum brutum,” while for rationalism, the factual human would be an instance of a universal concept. Hence another task of Husserlian phenomenology consists of precise delimitation of what comprises an individual experience without it becoming solipsistic. Here the prospects for intersubjective awareness and dialogical phenomenology is an open field for research and philosophical grounding without reverting to transcendental idealism. At this level some of the Husserlian inadequacies will have to be admitted, above all the concept of “intentionality” that correlates to any objectivity but cannot account for the world horizon.
    Husserlian phenomenology is in an excellent position to investigate the pragmatic domain that has been alluded to, but never concretely disclosed, by “reconstructive pragmatism” and even the critical school. Here the researches into the domain of the primacy of “I can” or “I cannot” perform something, build and make are most suggestive.  This domain opens the concrete architectonic of social life in action. Intersubjectivity is primarily formed at the level of bodily abilities such that we recognize ourselves and others on the basis of activities. The latter, in turn, are not arbitrary, but are in correlation to things that make their objective demands on such activities. This means that the world is not in doubt and is not our construct. Being Euclidean beings, we must move around and not through things. Yet this claim must not be confused with any kind of realism or naturalism. The natural presence of the world still requires an explication of the processes of awareness that are structurally distinct from the composition of things. Here Husserl opens up the unexplored understanding of corporeal activities in their essential generality that ground analogization and even technology as an extension of bodily abilities.
    This level of primal awareness also opens up horizons founded on the “I can.” One may be aware that in one’s own region there are hills, and more hills, but the horizon does not close; it is possible that beyond the hills there are deserts, lakes, flatlands, forests, cities, and strangers who “do things differently.” This horizon extends into indefinite possibilities which I can concretize by going from my region to that region “then” and discover whether my intentional orientation toward the “that and then” region say, as a possible desert, is concretized or disappointed. I expected a desert and there appeared a lake. It needs to be said that at the level of movement formation of horizons of awareness there is a shift from direct perceptual fulfillment to an open world horizon of possibilities that can only be concretized in direct awareness partially. Hence, the more in this awareness is “consciousness” that suggests perceptual fulfillability, but at the same time is experienced as a transcendental condition for the experience of the world as totality, although never completely accessible to a singular subject in her engagements with the world. This leads to phenomenological explication of theoretical and experimental sciences which, in their practice of forming hypotheses open possibilities some of which will be fulfilled in awareness and some of which will remain empty, although available for future fulfillment. Sciences could not function without such a horizon consciousness.
    Historical awareness is a horizon of past achievements of others and how current inhabitants of the life world appropriate and vary such achievements. At this level a question concerning our experience of historical past arises. The task is to replace Hegelian dialectics, Marxian materialism, and empirical research. None can travel to the past, except symbolically, and none can account for such would be symbolic understanding. Apart from that, these metaphysical “accounts” of history assume a continuous theoretical time and have not offered any justification for such a continuity.   In this sense, we cannot think of history as if it were a succession of events “in time” as if ruled by causes, or a deduction from “eternity,” such as “laws of dialectics” either of Hegelian or Marxian brand. Rather, history is an active engagement of making and building, of concrete projects based on what we can do and what others have done. What they have done is present to us in architecture, texts that signify the world in a particular way and reveal that we too could have acted and performed similar tasks, but we no longer do them in this way. We have acquired different abilities and hence have no necessary continuity with our predecessors. The discontinuity does not imply that we are not open to the understanding of how they made things, what purposes are present in their buildings, implements and comportment. We may learn some abilities from what they did, but also vary them in order to perform our tasks. As was the case with the horizon of awareness, history comprises a horizon of what others have accomplished, thus extending our own horizon to the possibility of transforming and varying our own abilities. This means that the historical others extend my perception and abilities thus forming a poli-centric field of understanding. Our own perceptions would be quite limited without the others from whom we “borrow” perceptions and abilities and thus recognize our limitations and possibilities. And indeed are open to the future. This view prevents to speak of a singular historical aim. Some tasks are completed and discontinued, the accomplishments abandoned; others are taken up in part after the builders and makers have long since disappeared, and still others are postponed for the future. The historical horizon of possibilities cannot be concretized in totality and hence this openness precludes any claim to history as having a singular purpose. The prospect of rethinking history that does not rely on contingency nor does it imply necessity is still outstanding.
    There is another level of historical awareness that has to be investigated:  transcendental. This type of awareness comprises a way to access the modes of perception that others assumed in their understanding of the world. Thus, while we may not have any knowledge of Aristotle’s psychological, social, political and personal life, we can say, from his writings, that Aristotle regarded the world as composed of substances. Each substance could be regarded under specific categories accessible to Aristotle as well as us. In this sense, historical awareness of others is not regarded psychologically or internally, but as a mode of awareness that comprises transcendental orientation toward the world accessible to anyone.  Even when we disagree with Aristotle or Plato, we also must be aware of the way Plato or Aristotle regarded the world. This type of awareness is already intersubjective and is a condition for the claim that our own awareness is limited and in turn extended through others. We can “borrow” Aristotle’s mode of awareness and enhance our own. Once again, we comprise a field of poli-centric awareness that has historical depth prior to specific temporal locations. From this vantage point we can avoid various theoretical dilemmas. If some social philosophy claims that all social life, including theoretical thinking, is a result of material conditions, then previous historical views would not be accessible to us, since we do not live under those conditions. In turn, the very view that all theories are based on given material conditions is itself one theory that reflects current material conditions and cannot make a universal claim.  The same holds for theories of history that are premised on the notion that history is a contingent fact and all necessary truths, even in logic, are a result of “historical development.”  A contingent fact cannot be posited as a ground of necessity.
    Finally, there is a question whether there is a presumed one life world as a ground of various societies and cultures, or do such societies and cultures comprise distinct and, at times, incompatible life worlds. If there were one life world, and we were completely immersed in it, then we would not recognize our immersion. If there were more than one, then we would either belong to one or another and thus would interpret the other in terms of our own and hence fail to recognize the distinction between them. If we can access both, then we cannot belong to either and must have an awareness of both and their differences. This awareness is taken for granted in all such comparative studies of cultures and civilizations. The prospects for Husserlian phenomenology in this domain are vast, since the current cultural researches are at a loss concerning what methodology is appropriate and whether the current approaches are, in fact, bound by specific cultural prejudgments. The very notion of comparative cultures, as it relates to the issue of life world(s) requires a level of awareness that includes itself as its own methodological condition. The awareness that engages in comparisons must open the possibilities of accessing the others in terms of their awareness in order to note similarities, identities and differences. This is the transcendental problematic of method that would offer the final reaches of Husserlian phenomenology.