Phenomenology and Ethics

Francesco Saverio Trincia


One of the main features of Husserlian phenomenology is its opening to an infinite task of research. It should be added that this task is not in any case conceived as systematic. The ethical interpretation of the “beginning” is an original commitment and a very clearly spelled out feature of Husserl’s thought. This interpretation, or self-interpretation, has been confirmed after the publication of the Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften. It is also the result of the fact that the Krisis has been correctly seen as containing the idea of the possibility of a rebirth or of a rethinking of a philosophical humanism free in itself of any metaphysical meaning, and intrinsically alien to the tradition of the idealistic historicism. (1) Associated with this general observation is the central role played by the activity of the evaluating and deciding subjectivity in the Husserlian ethics of 1914 (2): a role that is played within the schema of the correlation in which both the relationship to the axiological objectivity and to the universality of the practical reason are at stake. This is not without relation to the necessity of  a deep understanding  of consciousness and of subjectivity in what could be called the Husserlian “ideology,” that is the extra-theoretical use that can be made of phenomenology as a more o less hidden ethics of an immer wieder returning commitment to begin the phenomenological investigation without any presuppositions. There is no doubt that the end of the 1914 Vorlesungen  and the role there assigned to the “evidence” of a “living” ethical judgement, in which the evident rationality of the willing subject meets the sphere of values, in some way  prepares the notion of the universal humanity to which Husserl’s attention in the “Kaizo” articles of the twenties is devoted, and the rational hope of a new humanity coming out of its “crisis” and based on the birth of a  new kind of man, being no more a “factual man.” It can be said that the distinction sketched in the last pages of the 1914 Vorlesungen, between an ethical judgement based on the statement of an observer who remains external to the ethical Erlebnis and can pronounce itself only on its Richtigkeit, on the one side, and the “evident  judging” where  the subject who judges “lives his authentic duty,” on the other side, is the expression in the  formal vocabulary of the phenomenological ethics of the distinction between the objective man  of the scientific, empirical psychology (the man in the world), and  the man constituted by the transcendental Ego (the man for the world) presented in the Krisis.
    Jocelyn Benoist (3) has very well seen that one of the meanings of the “paradox” of subjectivity in the Krisis consists in the form of the correlation, which permits to “transform in poem” its inheritance and to build up a sort of “invented” history in which subjectivity “meets the possibility or the question of the most extreme universality.” Benoist points out with some irony the orientation of the phenomenological subjectivity to universality. It is interesting to observe that this ethical subjectivity is oriented to universality in a “poetic” way, but also through an “invention” of history which recalls the idea of the “apriori history” (this is the expression used by Hussserl in the famous text of the Origin of Geometry). This kind of history may be able to host an ethical subjectivity oriented to universality, just because it does not depend on the contingency of empirical existence – where only “factual men” may live.
    Help can be found by an interpreter of Husserl’s ethics in Rudolf Bernet’s last book. (4) Bernet very well shows which is the general “sense-horizon” within which the evaluating and deciding intentional consciousness is to be understood. From the point of view of the correlation-relationship between consciousness and existence, it appears very clearly that transcendental consciousness also is “already contaminated by the same illness that corrodes human existence.” We have remarked that at least the surface of Husserl’s attitude towards ethics (the one that is not expressed in phenomenology’s technical vocabulary and is rather a “spiritual atmosphere” of it) is conditioned by a sort of humanistic, ethical ideology.  If the hypothesis can be advanced that the building of a “pure ethics” through Husserl’s pure theoretical arguing cannot avoid referring to human existence and to the “persons” that are to be met there, we have to recognize that the so called “ideological” side of Husserlian ethics cannot be put aside. It is certainly true that the notion of “person” which is important in the lectures of 1920-24 (5) should not be considered as the expression of the man “in the world,” that is, of an empirical subject: the “person” is in any case something “constituted,” and not a natural human being. It is therefore true that the “existence” of which we talk when we say that Husserlian ethics is existence-related is not the natural and objective existence. But this does not mean that the phenomenological ethics does not meet the phenomenological existence and does not work for the orientation of (not factual) subjects. This is one of the main differences between the notion of “pure” ethics as thought by Immanuel Kant, and the same notion thought by Husserl. In the first case, but not in the second, “purity” means the exclusion of all content of the ethical choice, and the isolation of every influence of the sensible objects on it. This point drives us to say that what could be called  a “care for the world” is one of the main features of Husserlian ethics – and that  this “care,” in some way unknown to Kant, has to be seen as the not paradoxical result of  a  not content-excluding “formality” which is in itself, again, different from Kantian “formality.”
    On the one side, in fact, Husserl’s ethics refers to “values” which are seen as “material apriori” (this is the side of the content, which does not lack in it, and which is the way by which Husserl’s ethics takes care of the world and aims to build a certain kind of human being, not simply a rational being acting “by duty”). But on the other side, an equal emphasis should be put on the way in which Husserl presents the role of the subjectivity in ethics. The possibility to fix the degree of the “utility for the world” of the phenomenological ethics depends on the role of the subjectivity who “lives through” his or her evaluating judgement and in this way meets the duty that is “ready” for the rational and evident will, as Husserl points out in the 1914 lessons. It could be said, even more radically, that it is the role plaid by the phenomenological subject that allows us to speak of phenomenology as a “philosophy of ethics” and to realize an “apology” of it which does not accept the charge of its being an ideological construction in contradiction with its main epistemic inspiration. It should be remarked also that the “apology” of phenomenology as philosophy of ethics does not simply mean that phenomenology gives a solid philosophical foundation to ethics – a foundation which is supposed to be stronger than others. Were it so, we would obtain the not wanted result of losing the aspect for which phenomenology is not to be reduced to a mere theoretical construction. In any field of the range of action of the intentional consciousness, and in a very particular way in ethics, phenomenology is not the way of the reduction of the philosophical content (here the ethical will, and the activity of evaluation and of decision connected to it) to its mere theoretical form.
    It is not easy to find  the right way to express this point, but  one could try to say that phenomenological ethics offers the possibility “to live from within” the ethical experience and that  the harshness with which Husserl  again and again in the 1914 Lectures explains the  connection and the difference between  formal logic and formal ethics, that is between what Kant calls “pure reason” and “practical reason,” is the  hidden signal that  his main concern is that of “saving” the practical reason, and the entire sphere of ethics, form the double risk of psychologism and of intellectualism, both seen  realized, according to him, in Kant’s ethics. Husserl’s aim is similar to Kant’s, but it is not reached at all in the same way. And the role of subjectivity within the formal working of ethics is no less important point of difference. No subjectivity is necessary in Kant’s ethics. To say that, as a consequence of both being “formal,” logic and ethics are at the same time “parallel” and “interwoven,” means that they meet only because the logical judgement offers its voice to the ethical judgement, otherwise destined to remain mute. This allows Husserl to build the sphere of ethics as such that the main link with logic is to be seen in their being both “modes” of the intentional consciousness. The peculiar way in which subjectivity works in ethics refers to the common source in the intentional consciousness of both judging and evaluating and deciding, with the theoretical judgement only giving voice to ethics. But the opposite is also true: the common intentional source is the basis of a difference that just by its appearing as a “parallelism” must be conceived in such a way that the difference between logic and ethics is connected with the feature of the correlation of the evaluating and deciding subjectivity with its peculiar objects – those objects that, being values, can not be equal to the objects of the “parallel” logical intentionality. It is very clear therefore that no peculiar role of the ethic subjectivity could be admitted, if the difference between logic and ethics has no assumed the radical feature of the “parallelism.”
    Jocelyn Benoist gives a definition of a “subject or rather than of subjectivity” which is important for our argument. He writes that the subject is located “dedans et dehos: il est ce témoin  implicite situé au point aveugle du champ visuel, comme aussi bien ce qui se montre en lui à chaque transition qu’il ménage.’’ (6) Something crucial for the specific feature of the ethical intentionality is very well expressed in this formulation of the  problem of subjectivity: The phenomenological idea of the  Doppelseitigkeit, of the bilaterality, of the correspondence and of the correlativity which connects the subjective and  the objective side of intentionality also in its  ethical mode. What is called by Benoist the “blind point” of the “champ visuel”, is at the same time what is supposed to accompany the steps that are made within its objective horizon (better: within its horizon of objectivation), thanks to the activity of the intentional consciousness. The way in which Benoist  expresses the image of subjectivity is clearly fashioned according to the image which closes the important paragraph 95 of  Formale und tranzendentale Logik, (7) where Husserl writes that “subjectivity of everybody” should be thought as “this subjectivity (that) I myself am, the I  who becomes conscious of myself, about what is  for me and is valid for me.” Husserl adds that “the subjectivity is the primary matter of fact that I have to face, and from which I as philosopher can never divert my glance.” It is true that for a beginner philosopher this can be der dunkle Winkel, the dark corner, in which the ghosts of solipsism, of psychologism and of relativism bustle around. But the true philosopher will prefer to fill this dark corner with light, instead of being scared by it.”
    Husserl is not talking of the ethical subjectivity. But this description concerns also the ethical subjectivity, of which one must say the same that has been said of the phenomenological subjectivity in general. The circumstance that we understand subjectivity as the blind point of the “champ visuel” and as the “dark corner” on which no light falls, means that we are talking of a subject that is devoid of any metaphysical and naturalistic consistence. And for what concerns specifically the ethical subject, the general feature of the phenomenological subject forbids us to imagine him as an ethical legislator, already present and active in the world. Even if we admit that the “person” is one of the last results of the Husserlian ethics, we still have to remember that the ethical subject is not a natural person, is not, as already said, a man in the world. It is just as important for the subject of the ethical intentional consciousness, as for the subject of the theoretical intentional consciousness, to accept the task of filling the darkness of subjectivity with light, whose  darkness is the condition of  its not being something given in the world – that is of its phenomenological feature. Light must be thrown on it if the risks of relativism of the psychological attitude have to be avoided. Therefore, light does not transform subjectivity in something natural and worldly. It is discovered that every subjectivity is based on his intentional activity on the bilateral structure of the intentional relationship to the objectivity. This is also the structural schema that underlies Husserlian ethics. Husserl’s thought maintains its promise of being the birth of  an infinite research, just because it tries to give the foundation of a formal ethics, which is supposed to be able to “capture” in its formality both  the deciding ethical subjectivity and  its intentional objects, the “values.” Also in ethics, as in the whole of phenomenology, the bilaterality and the correlation are formal. It is this peculiar formality that opens the possibility of an ethical theory which does not forget the contents of our ethical activity.
    On the basis of this interpretation of Husserl’s ethics (an anti-ideological and anti-idealistic interpretation) we can say that the phenomenological discovery of the phenomenon of feeling, of wishing, of willing, offers to human beings a new instrument of an ethical orientation in the world.

Notes

(1) See F.S. Trincia, Che cosa ne è dell’uomo in (e dopo) Husserl e Heidegger?, “Links”, II, 2002.
(2) E. Husserl, Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre  1908-1914.  Husserliana XXVIII, 1988.
(3) See  J. Benoist, L’histoire en poeme, « Recherches husserliennes »,  IX, 1998.
(4) See R. Bernet, Conscience et existence. Perspectives phenoménologiques, Paris 2004, 9.
(5) E.Husserl, Einleitung in die Ethik. Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1920-24, Husserliana  XXXVII, 2004.
(6) J.Benoist, L’idée de phénomenologie, Paris  2001,  108.
(7) See  E. Husserl,  Formale und tranzendentale Logik, Versuch einer Kritik del logischen Vernunft, Husserliana XVII, 1974,  208-210.