Phenomenology in the Present-Day Philosophy

Denis Seron



In what follows, I will try to answer the question of what the future of Husserlian-style phenomenology will, or should, look like. I will provide some insights into the present-day situation in phenomenology and try to draw conclusions from it as to how Husserlian phenomenologists could play a part in the development of philosophy in general in the following decades. One thus needs to ask: is the phenomenological method still significant for philosophy in its current state, and if so, what purpose could it serve?

Husserlian-style phenomenology

Before answering the question, we should first agree on what is meant by Husserlian-style phenomenology. In my view, at least two aspects are important to consider.

1) Firstly, we expect a Husserlian-style phenomenology to be, no matter in what sense, a "scientific theory." This condition is to be understood in the broadest sense. I especially do not want to suggest that phenomenology should borrow its methods from natural sciences. The question whether phenomenology needs to be "naturalized" is a totally different question, to which we will return below. Now we just need to note that the foundationalist feature of the phenomenological project in its original form has been interpreted in two different ways. The difference actually rests on a divergence in interpretation of the reduction. Phenomenological research has evolved in two directions, one stressing the critical role of phenomenology within the system of sciences, and the other one emphasizing that the phenomenological reduction leads beyond all epistemic constructions of sciences to a more "original" existential experience that has much more to do with art, poetry, or religion. On the one side, phenomenology is considered as being a theory in the strict sense of the word. Although supposedly being a philosophical theory, i.e., a theory aiming to be universal, or perhaps to found other sciences, it must, as such, be governed by a norm or a set of norms addressing scientific theories in general. The "principle of all principles" in Husserl's Ideas I is a remarkable example of such a general norm of rationality, but of course many other alternatives are possible, too. On the other side, it is also claimed that phenomenological reduction should not be conceived as a technique for foundationalist purposes. The reduction thereby becomes something like a borderline experience (like angst, esthetic feeling, phenomenal "saturation," etc.) which occurs in the heart of practical existence. What I here call Husserlian-style phenomenology corresponds to the first view.

This approach asks whether Husserl's foundationalism can still be taken seriously in a time when foundationalism in general appears to be out of date. Of course, this problem is far too large for a short paper. I will simply argue here that a looser understanding of the term "foundation" - as opposed to the Cartesian sense - is possible as well, and that this looser sense is plausibly represented in Husserl's most significant employment of the term. (1) The idea is that it must be sufficient, here, to emphasize the critical role (in the most comprehensive sense of the word) of phenomenology among the sciences, without further explaining how and how far this role can be effectively achieved. It is important to note that this view does not a priori exclude stronger claims, such as the idea that phenomenology needs to be accomplished in the form of a "transcendental phenomenology" functioning as a "first philosophy."

2) The second aspect is more specific to Husserl's teaching. It concerns Husserl's theory of intentionality and its possibly "idealistic" implications. One can put the problem in an illuminating way in terms of the distinction between relations and properties. As defined by Brentano, intentionality means that the ego (or the mental process) "has" an intentional content. But in what sense should we understand the verb "to have" in this context? The question now to be raised is whether a relation in the usual sense holds between the ego and the noema. Should intentionality be regarded as a relation in the usual sense, or as a property? In the same sort of way, we can ask whether the noema is a part "intentionally included" in and dependent upon the whole mental process, or whether instead it is an "external" entity the ego holds a relation to. The matter seems not too difficult. At first sight, the question seems only to pertain to the language one should adopt. But in fact this choice has far-reaching consequences in regard to a number of aspects of phenomenological methodology.

I confine myself to mentioning these problems, which have become acute since the late 1960's in Follesdal's Fregean interpretation of Husserl. I want to argue that the very principle of what I here call Husserlian-style phenomenology might lie in Husserl's thesis to the effect that intentionality is not a relation in the usual sense. (2) The general thought is that the noema, from a purely phenomenological point of view, can be nothing external to the mental process. It does not matter to the phenomenologist whether acts such as perceiving a tree, imagining Pegasus, etc., do correspond to something existing in the external world, since his or her whole thematic field, ontically speaking, consists in immanent objects. The noema, the object "just as it is given," must be something existing "inside" consciousness, something dependent that, as such, stands on an equal footing with psychological properties. Despite appearances, "perceiving a tree" is not a relational predicate. That is to say, although intentionality is to be regarded as a phenomenal (as opposed to ontic) relation, a predicate such as "perceiving a tree" now appears to be, from our point of view, a one-place predicate just like "being happy" or "being scared." These views imply some kind of dualism, namely a purely phenomenological dualism according to which one must distinguish, within the intentional act, between "real" and "intentional" contents. (3) This dualism - which also allows us to explain why it is impossible to avoid speaking of intentionality as if it were an ontic relation - is undoubtedly the chief thought underlying Husserl's transcendental idealism. The phenomenological reduction not only compels us to suspend all existence-positing other than purely immanent, but it also opens up an immense, universal field of mere phenomena, whose only existence is that of their immanent bearer.

This, however, is just one face of the coin. The fact that the noema is nothing "external" does not entail that it is a real component of the psyche as are sensations, feelings, acts of judgment, etc. According to Husserl's dualism, it does not make any sense to ask how the ego constitutes mundane objects with sense-data. We actually do not constitute anything with sense-data, except within special acts in which sense-data themselves become objects for reflexive knowledge. The intentional constitution of "objective senses" appears to be independent from the flow of hyletic data, although it surely can be motivated by empirical contents. That also means that intentional analysis, that is, the analysis of noematic structures of objects "as they simply appear," must be essentially distinguished from real psychological analysis. This distinction is the very principle of Husserl's battle against phenomenalism and logical psychologism. (4)

To summarize: Husserlian-style phenomenology is meant to be a theory of subjective experience, which not only addresses the real (hyletic or noetic) components of consciousness, but also its intentional contents. There are, of course, many serious difficulties to be overcome here. For example, one can conceive both features - being a theory and dealing with subjectivity - as being exclusive from each other. Is not a scientific theory of individual experiences just like a round square? Does the phenomenologist not throw the door wide open to subjective arbitrariness, to the intimate privacy where the descriptive probity of the scientist cannot be guaranteed? One has objected to phenomenology that, because a science must in essence be something objective, a science of subjectivity is a mere impossibility. This objection is quite convincing. Husserl continuously attempted to refute it, and to found the possibility of an eidetic phenomenology. But his reply, as is well known, gave rise to important controversies, and the discussion is far from being closed. (5)

Perspectives

Over the past few years, analytic and continental philosophers have taken a renewed interest in Husserl's work. On the European continent, this trend is, above all, a response to the recent decline of both hermeneutic philosophy and Heideggerian-inspired deconstructionism. Many philosophers, especially in France and Belgium, saw in Husserl's phenomenology an opportunity of escaping from a philosophical environment that was becoming more and more unproductive and unreceptive to what was happening elsewhere. In contrast with the splendid isolation of Heidegger and his followers, Husserlian-style phenomenology seemed to provide a basis for restoring a dialogue on equal terms with sciences and other philosophical traditions, as also for rebuilding some sort of philosophical rationalism on the ruins left behind by "postmodernists." It was in this context that Husserl research has made significant progress in acknowledging a common ground between analytic and phenomenological traditions. (6) The recent attempt to "naturalize" Husserlian phenomenology in the light of cognitive sciences may be understood in this way as well. (7) It is not only an attempt at reconciliation with cognitive sciences (or, conversely, the introduction of a new level of explanation in cognitive sciences), but also an attempt to make phenomenology more acceptable from the (substantially naturalistic) point of view of philosophers of mind.

This rediscovery of Husserl's work was rendered easier by the fact that analytic philosophers had for a long time been interested in some parts of Husserl's work, in particular in the fields of semantics and mereology. The revival of Husserl studies is in fact older on the analytic side. It plausibly originated in the 1960's and 1970's when Chisholm and others made considerable effort to rescue the Brentanian School from oblivion. Much of the work of Simons, Smith and Mulligan, for example, no doubt belongs to the same movement of thought. Yet all this has only the remotest connection with Husserlian phenomenology. The interest of the authors mentioned above was primarily in the realistic ontology of the third Logical Investigation, which they think is Husserl's contribution philosophy, and which supposedly later degenerated into a preposterous Kantianism called "transcendental idealism." Paradoxically, one of the most significant upholders of Husserlian-style phenomenology in analytic philosophy might at present be a philosopher who never openly labeled himself as phenomenologist. I am thinking of John Searle's theory of intentionality, whose close connection with Husserl's has often been stressed by commentators. As David Woodruff Smith recently put it in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Searle's theory of intentionality reads like a modernized version of Husserl's." While speaking about Searle's book Intentionality, Smith characterized it as "often similar in detail to Husserl's theory of intentionality, but pursued in the tradition and style of analytic philosophy of mind and language, without overtly phenomenological methodology." (8) In spite of obvious divergences, especially in the naturalism debate, this analysis looks quite convincing. (9) Actually, I am inclined to think that Searle fully satisfies both conditions above.

Let us now turn back to our original problem. I think the question as to the future of phenomenology only makes sense in a very large context. It cannot be settled purely by considering the advancement of research in phenomenology, but must also address the positive contribution to philosophy in general that phenomenology can provide in the future.

First, it is to be noted that Husserl's phenomenological epistemology is remarkable not only because of its strong foundationalist orientation, but also because Husserl rejected naturalism in favor of an a priori normative approach. Husserl was actually not very original on this point. His main thesis can be stated, somewhat crudely, as follows: if it is correct to say that the goal of epistemology is to provide a set of criteria for defining when a belief can be said to be a "valid," "justified," "rational" knowledge process, then the problems of epistemology cannot be solved in terms of natural causality. We thus have to distinguish between natural causes and "motivations," with the result that the question of rationality becomes a matter of determining whether a given belief is "rationally motivated" or not. (10) In fact, Husserl's foundationalism can itself be easily understood in this way. From a phenomenological perspective, the foundation of knowledge primarily consists in showing that beliefs of a given type, whether correct or not, are rationally motivated. Now, this line of thought is particularly relevant at a time when the difficulties raised by "naturalized" epistemology lead many philosophers to embrace some form of normative epistemology. For example, Husserl's notion of phenomenological foundation is quite close to that of "entitlement" recently introduced by John McDowell. (11)

Another contribution of phenomenology might be to provide methods to metaphysics. It is, of course, a controversial question in phenomenology what sort of relationship it should have with metaphysics. Here we can confine ourselves to saying that this relationship is certainly more complex than it first seems. That phenomenology somehow opposes metaphysics is clear, but this should not mislead us into supposing that it makes all metaphysics impossible. Actually, as Husserl says in § 64 of his Cartesian Meditations, phenomenology does not disqualify all, but only "naïve" metaphysics. (12) Indeed, the idea of a transcendental phenomenology itself means nothing else than that Husserl's phenomenological concern with consciousness and intentionality is in the service of his metaphysical interest in objectivity in general. It is not surprising that, in his latest work, Husserl appeals for a universal science, whose lack he holds responsible for the crisis of the European sciences. Transcendental phenomenology is phenomenology now conceived as a theory dealing with the properties of all objects simply as they appear "in" consciousness. To put it briefly, it is exactly what the tradition calls "first philosophy."

As opposed to an interpretation that has become common today, I suggest that it might be a significant advantage of phenomenological approach in today's philosophical environment, where metaphysics most often goes hand in hand with blind realism, to allow for a highly fruitful continuation of Kant's critical project. In my view, phenomenology not only has opened a large field of metaphysical interrogation, but also has a critical, foundational function for metaphysics, which is to be understood in a Kantian manner. Phenomenology, in other words, is expected to "prepare" metaphysics. Did Husserl not say of his phenomenology that it was "an attempt to make true the most profound sense of Kant’s philosophy?" (13) However, obvious difficulties arise at this point. The trouble is that the phenomenological methodology itself (as minimally defined by the two conditions above) possibly involves some metaphysical assumptions. In this case, phenomenological philosophy, at best, is just one metaphysical theory. Or should we rather affirm, just as Husserl did in Logical Investigations, the inherent neutrality of phenomenology with regard to metaphysical claims? I personally opt for the latter view, although good arguments have also been given for not accepting it. My hypothesis - which I assume is not itself a metaphysical one - is that the question whether phenomenological methods could be helpful in providing foundations for metaphysical research is, to a great degree, independent of the question of what ontological choices are required in order to practice phenomenology. In any case, I regard it as a mistake to think that one can approach metaphysical problems without questioning the a priori conditions of metaphysical knowledge, i.e., without any phenomenological investigation of the corresponding knowledge processes.

That, I think, is a very important point at a time marked by the renewal of metaphysics in analytic philosophy. However, we should not lose sight of the fact that these views also involve a decisive change of perspective. If by "metaphysics" is meant a theory of objects in the most proper sense, that is, a theory dealing with the most general properties of what exists, then phenomenology is obviously not a good candidate for giving foundations to metaphysics. If the starting point of a phenomenological metaphysics must be the phenomenological analysis of intentional contents, then this metaphysics, strictly speaking, is no longer a theory of the world in general, but a theory dealing with the phenomenon of the world in general. But how could we phenomenologically account for the existence of an "objective" world, i.e., for a world which is precisely supposed to transcend my own phenomenological data? The phenomenologist is not interested in the objective world itself, but in its constitution "in" consciousness. The objective world is this very world that everybody deals with, in sciences as well as in everyday attitude of thought. So a metaphysics of the objective world being based upon noematic analysis should first clarify what is entailed in everybody's consciousness: the phenomenon of the objective world needs to be considered being what appears in a "universal consciousness," simply as it appears. The notion of intersubjectivity is thus called to play a key-role in phenomenological metaphysics. (14)

This brings us to the third point, which is concerned with the methodological aspects of Husserl's phenomenology. Another important reason why I think phenomenology could be very useful for research in various areas of philosophy is its highly-developed methodology. Husserlian-style phenomenology has the advantage of imposing rigorous and clearly defined methodological constraints in fields where methodological matters are often understated or even arrogantly disregarded. Methodological or "critical" reflection is most often absent in today's both analytic and continental philosophy. Some philosophers are suspicious about it just because they consider it incompatible with realism. In this view, the investigating of the validity of the knowing process itself is no more than an old Kantian quirk that turns us away from the real world. Other philosophers, in confining themselves to the history of philosophy, actually do not need other methods than those of history and philology. Others again seem to think that the method is a feature of modern thought that has been overcome by Heidegger and others. Yet, there are significant exceptions, such as the rich debate over introspection in philosophy of mind, which also generated deep methodological controversies among phenomenologists. (15) In any case, I think this is a core aspect of the role to be played by Husserlian-style phenomenology in philosophy. Phenomenology does not aim to provide a new worldview, but to ground or to properly describe all actual or possible worldviews. It is always preferable to regard it as a descriptive method which can be utilized, together with other methods, in all sciences including philosophy, where it generally leads to good results. This should lead us to prefer the adjective "phenomenological" to the noun "phenomenology." If, instead, the word "phenomenology" is intended to refer to a theory having its own content, then it should be seen as an abbreviation for "phenomenological psychology," "phenomenological philosophy," etc.

Of course, these remarks raise but do not decide the question whether Husserl's phenomenological methodology is still relevant today. In my opinion, at least two features that are most characteristic of Husserl's methodology need to be discussed today. First, Husserl is clear, in Ideas I, that the method of his phenomenology is phenomenal introspection (see Ideas I, § 76-79). This means that the phenomenologizing ego must be able to objectify (in the most proper sense) his or her own subjective experience, in order to obtain knowledge about it somehow in the same way as the botanist has knowledge about plants, or the astronomer about stars and planets, etc. This claim must be understood in connection with what has been said above about the rational and "scientific" character of Husserlian-style phenomenology. If the subjectivity itself is an object as are plants and planets, then it is entailed that it must obey the laws of objectivity in general, and therefore that phenomenology, as opposed to art and poetry, cannot escape the laws of formal logic and must satisfy some very general constraints studied in the normative part of epistemology (which certainly involves circularity, but in my view not vicious circularity). The second feature is "eidetic description." Husserl held the paradoxical view, actually rejected by practically all his followers, that phenomenology, or phenomenological philosophy, must be an a priori science and, at the same time, a science firmly rooted in experience. On the one hand, phenomenological knowledge has this in common with empirical knowledge that it is, unlike mathematical knowledge, "incomplete," or "descriptive." On the other hand, it must consist, like mathematical knowledge, in laws in the strictest sense of the term, in "laws of essence" grounded in intuitive evidences of a special kind. Although the words "introspection" and "essence" sound out of date today, I tend to think that Husserl's methods are far from having become unusable in today's philosophical context. The obvious failures of opposite phenomenological projects such as Heidegger's ontology, which is characterized by its merely descriptive and non-introspective (i.e., non-objectifying) method, should at least incline us to think that the phenomenological method as defined by Husserl is perhaps the best way of doing phenomenology.

The three points evoked above are interdependent. First, as already noted, the critical role to be played by phenomenology does not prevent it from being a theory on its own account. The fact that phenomenology can serve as an instrument for philosophy and sciences does not mean that philosophers and scientists should utilize the phenomenological method without taking it seriously as a theory. Phenomenology - the phenomenological method in general - should rather be characterized as a level of explanation. Secondly, Husserl considered his "eidetic" method as a condition for phenomenology to ground formal sciences such as logic and mathematics without being ensnared in psychologism. Finally, I have suggested that both normative and theoretical aspects discussed here have much to do with the problem of introspection. It is presumably the fact that cognitive processes are objectifiable that allows phenomenology to rise to the rank of an authentic theory and, at the same time, to play a normative role for other sciences, including metaphysics.

Of course, these are questions that deserve a more detailed and extensive examination than has been possible in this short paper. To conclude, I believe that Husserlian-style phenomenologists have a card to play in present-day philosophy, but also that the future of phenomenology will depend on their capacity to take advantage of the critical and normative potential of phenomenology. My contention is that this requirement, as defined above, could serve as a guiding line for phenomenological research in the coming years.

Notes

(1) Cf. Sebastian Luft's contribution in the same collection.
(2) See Die Idee der Phänomenologie, Husserliana II, 46: "Das Sich-auf-Transzendentes-beziehen, es in dieser oder jener Weise meinen, ist doch ein innerer Charakter des Phänomens." See also Logische Untersuchungen V, 372, a passage which Dorion Cairns explained as follows: "Surely, for the reasons indicated in this passage, we should at least attempt to avoid calling intentionality a relation. And the obvious alternative is to call it an inherent quality of mental processes." (D. Cairns, "Theory of Intentionality," Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 32/2, May 2001: 2-3, repr. in Phenomenology: Critical Concepts in Philosophy, eds. L. Embree and D. Moran, vol. I, New York: Routledge, 2004, 186.) And see F. Rivenc, "Husserl, With and Against Frege," The Harvard Review of Philosophy, Spring 1996: 103. I have developed these views at length in my latest book: Théorie de la connaissance du point de vue phénoménologique, Liege, Bibliothèque de la Faculté de philosophie et lettres (Droz, Geneva), 2006, § 6, where one can find other references on that topic.
(3) This dualistic conception of mental processes, which Husserl had inherited from Brentano, is one of the main reasons why his phenomenology was so venomously criticized by Gestaltists and by neo-Kantians such as Cohen and Natorp.
(4) Cf. D. Zahavi, Husserl's Phenomenology, Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003, 69.
(5) A lot has been written about this issue, especially in the philosophy of mind. A recent example of it is Daniel Dennett's emphasizing the need for a phenomenology in the third-person perspective, which he called "heteropheno­menology." But it is quite plausible to say that Searle's reply to this objection already is satisfactory (see J. Searle, Mind, Language and Society, New York: Basic Books, 1998, p. 43-5, and "How to study consciousness scientifically." In J.Searle, Consciousness and Language, Cambridge: CUP, 2002, p. 22-3, 43-4). The whole argument, Searle said, actually relies on an ambiguity in the distinction between subjective and objective. There is a confusion between the epistemological and the ontological sense of "subjective" and "objective." A state of mind is, by definition, something which exists in the mode of subjective existence, i.e., something whose existence is dependent on that of an individual consciousness. Yet, this subjectivity in the ontological sense in no way entails that a science of consciousness—as far as it must be "objective," that is to say: objective in the epistemological sense of the term—is impossible.
(6) Among many others, see R. Cobb-Stevens, Husserl and Analytic Philosophy, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990 (Phaenomenologica 116); Aux origines de la phénoménologie. Husserl et le contexte des Recherches logiques, eds. D. Fisette and S. Lapointe, Paris-Québec: Vrin-Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2003; J. N. Mohanty, Transcendental Phenomenology: An Analytic Account, Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. Of course, the many studies devoted to the Frege-Husserl relationship have played an important role here.
(7) Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, eds. J. Petitot, F. Varela, B. Pachoud, and J.-M. Roy, Stanford UP, 1999.
(8) http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/
(9) Of course I am not claiming that the differences between the two authors are not significant. Searle has rightly stressed that his philosophical project itself is totally different from Husserl's: "From my point of view, both Husserl and Heidegger are traditional epistemologists engaged in a foundationalist enterprise. Husserl is trying to find the conditions of knowledge and certainty, Heidegger is trying to find the conditions of intelligibility, and they both use the methods of phenomenology. In my theory of intentionality, I have no such aims and no such methods." (J. Searle, "The Limits of Phenomenology." M. A. Wrathall & J. Malpas (eds.), Heidegger, Coping, and Cognitive Science: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, Volume 2, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000: 90. Cf. J. Searle, "Neither Phenomenological Description nor Rational Reconstruction: Reply to Dreyfus," in Searle with his replies, Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 55/216, June 2001: 284.) It is also not to be denied that Searle's naturalism is light years away from Husserl's theory of transcendental reduction. These profound divergences, however, do not prevent Searle’s account of intentionality from being remarkably similar to Husserl's. Unfortunately, as Searle himself admits on page 72 of the article quoted above, the debate is somewhat distorted by the fact that under the rubric "phenomenology" he generally discusses Dreyfus's personal views that have not much to do with Husserlian phenomenology.
(10) Husserl, Ideen I, §136. Husserl often considers normative as opposed to naturalistic epistemology. See, for instance, Husserl's Aufsätze und Vorträge (1922-1937), Hua XXVII, 8-9, and the note on the concept of experience in Aufsätze und Vorträge (1911-1921), Hua XXV, 209-10.
(11) J. McDowell, Mind and World, Harvard UP, 2d ed., 1996.
(12) Cartesianische Meditationen, Hua I, 182: "To prevent from misunderstandings, I would like to point out the fact that phenomenology rules out only naive metaphysics, dealing with the absurd things in themselves, but not metaphysics in general."
(13) E. Husserl, Erste Philosophie, Hua VII, 287. As Kant put it, "the critique is the necessary preparation for the advancement of a founded metaphysics as a science which must be treated dogmatically and systematically, so scholastically (not popularly)" (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, BXXXVI, cf. also Kant’s letter to Mendelssohn, 8 April 1766, Ak. 10: 71). I have tried to sketch what such a "phenomenological metaphysics" might look like in two recent articles in French: "Métaphysique phénoménologique," Bulletin d’analyse phénoménologique, I/2, September 2005: 3-174; and "Métaphysique phénoménologique, suite," Bulletin d’analyse phénoménologique, II/2, March 2006: 3-75.
(14) Landgrebe has well exposed the paradox which underlies the idea itself of a "phenomenological metaphysics." See Phänomenologie und Metaphysik, Hamburg: Marion von Schröder, 1949. Metaphysics, he observed, deals with transcendence (p. 156-8), so how could phenomenology, that is a discipline confined by reduction to the pure immanence of the cogito, give access to this transcendence, to any metaphysical knowledge? (Cf. p. 159, and also p. 149.) But, for Landgrebe, the paradox vanishes when one realizes that the egological epoché, the reduction to the "world for me," is "just a first methodic step" (p. 178). At least two conditions must be filled for a phenomenological metaphysics to become possible. We first need the intentionality thesis, which allows to preserve a "world for me," a world as pure phenomenon, in the reductive immanence itself (cf. p. 163, 167-8, 172). Second, we also need the phenomenological theory of intersubjectivity, which makes possible an intentional analysis of the world as being the "objective" world. The principle of all possible contribution of phenomenology to metaphysics must be the notion of intersubjectivity (p. 168-80), and the phenomenological reduction itself can be fully achieved only as a "reduction to intersubjectivity." In this sense, Landgrebe is totally right in saying that such a phenomenological philosophy would enable us to get rid of the Kantian idea of a world consisting of unknowable things in themselves. Now, the so-called transcendent world is a noematic sphere intersubjectively constituted as existing for each and every ego, as being universally valid, or "objective" (i.e., non-"subjective"). The absolute, Landgrebe says, is not the ineffable "completely other" (p. 191 et 194).
(15) See, for example, the recent controversies about Dennett's heterophenomenology in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, Vol. 6/1-2, March, 2007.