The vigour of a discipline can be read off from its capacity to stage disputes concerning its basic conceptuality, and from this point of view phenomenology can be seen to be flourishing. There are three major lines of dissensus, through which the protocols and techniques of phenomenology are being revisited, reconfigured and the results of their various applications clarified and refined. There is firstly the claim on Husserl’s legacy from those who would reattach philosophy to a thinking of divinity, the connection so scrupulously dissolved by Immanuel Kant. The writings of Emmanuel Levinas, of Michel Henry and of Jean Luc Marion all incline to this rewriting of Husserl’s programme, a move hotly contested by those of Dominique Janicaud and of Jean Luc Nancy. This opens up the difference between doing philosophy, as a branch of theology, and having a religious dimension to philosophical enquiry, for which what is in question is not the word of God, but the manifestations of the divine, in what presents itself in all the various givens of intuition. This has put pressure on the adequacy of specifications of what can be supposed to appear, in the domains accessible by consciousness, as opened up for enquiry by Husserl.
There is, secondly, the programme to naturalise phenomenology, which paradoxically appears to reverse the effects of Husserl’s invention of bracketing and reduction, in the 1907 lectures, Idea of Phenomenology. (1) However, it also reveals Husserl’s commitment to clarifying the status of scientific results. The publication of this text, separately from that for which it served Husserl as an introduction: Ding und Raum, (2) obscures the connection, for Husserl, between theoretical considerations and the practical question of getting clear on how meaning attaches to hypothesised entities. The theoretical innovations of bracketing and reduction reveal the unexamined prejudices of a Cartesian dualism, as still functioning in the activities of natural scientists, presuming rather than proving access to material contents. The radical nature of this critique of Descartes should have protected Husserl from the misinterpretation that his Cartesian Meditations were intended as an affirmation rather than a development of that critique. Thus the attempt to renaturalise Husserl’s results reveals the contestable status of attempts to attribute to Husserl either a Cartesianism or a Platonism. It also reveals that what counts as naturalism is under pressure, for it can no longer be a question of reducing all natural phenomena to the status of extended substance, or to the simple physicalisms of positivism.
There is a need then for a specification of the differences for Husserl between a genuinely naïve natural attitude, a naturalising attitude, and the attitude laden with presuppositions, for which the only entities to be entertained by philosophical enquiry are those which meet the criteria of a group of now outdated positivistic sciences. Husserl can be seen to be in the vanguard of the critique of the latter in his insistence on the role of mathematisation and formalisation in the exact sciences. Thus the result of the affirmation of a naturalism in phenomenology has been a broadening of what philosophers understand to be the possible objects of the natural sciences, and a question, even so, to the exhaustiveness of these for the relevant regional ontologies. For the phenomena analysed in the cognitive sciences are rather more diverse in ontological status than the abstractions more usually discussed in a philosophy of mind, still committed to a naively understood Cartesianism of a mind body relation. This line of enquiry, along with the emphasis in Renaud Barbaras’ reconstruction of Merleau-Ponty’s thought, on the motility of intentionality, and that in Shaun Gallagher’s mode of reading Husserl, as one among a number of contributors to a discussion of time, has the salutary effect of reconnecting Husserl studies to contemporary discussion, focusing on issues, rather than focusing solely on an unending hermeneutical labour of proposing readings of texts and placing them in relation one to another.
There is, thirdly, a series of scholarly interventions, concerning Husserl’s texts, which have shown that there is a development of three strands in Husserl’s own enquiries which shift the interpretation of those texts away from canonical, but sterile, discussions of early or late, realist or idealist, descriptive or transcendental, to reveal all over again that there never was an ideality of meaning without inter-subjectivity, and without corporeality. The publications of Natalie Depraz, Dan Zahavi and Donn Welton have relayed this work to a wider audience. Thus the construction of Husserl as committed to a mind body dualism, to solipsism and to a Platonism is now demonstrably false, and embedded in a refusal to read the texts, as opposed to relying on the first generation of Husserl’s critics: Ingaarden, Adorno, Heidegger, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, indeed Gadamer, all of whom have quite specific reservations about the viability of Husserl’s enquiries, which then inflects their reception of them. Husserl’s commitment to the embodiment of intentionality, demonstrable in analyses of corporeality, to inter-subjectivity and above all to the indispensability of actual judgments for the articulation of ideal meanings re-emerge for attention.
The result is both a fascinating slice of intellectual history and, more importantly, a refiguring of the main concern for phenomenology, as a need for a re-description of the notion of horizon, so important for Husserl’s enquiries, but which remains, in Eugen Fink’s phrase, operative rather than thematic. This notion of a horizon has been thought in terms of the Husserlian reflections on the concept of world, but my proposal is that it should rather be thought in terms of a primordial non-simultaneity of the temporality of human understanding. This structure is distinctive of the human, and leaves its mark on all human activity, and especially on the structure of intentionality. It permits the articulation of the operations distinctive of the human understanding, by contrast with intimations of the divine. Only for human understanding can there be a gap between meaning intending, and a meaning fulfilment. Husserl’s enquiries into internal time consciousness appear to run into an impasse, or to be over swiftly resolved in favour of a conception of the lived present, the lebendige Gegenwart. However, if primordial temporality is thought not as lived present, but as an irreducible non-simultaneity of intentionality, as temporally distended, the irreducibility of the time of superstrings to the time of an experience of forwards directed history may be respected.
Thus these various controversies about how to read Husserl and in what context contribute to opening out the possibility, and the need, to re-activate Husserl’s questioning of the adequacy of Kant’s notion of transcendental aesthetics. Such questioning is both more than a move in intellectual history, but rather less than a fully developed set of descriptions of meaning intentions, to be fulfilled, or disappointed, or left under-determined in the various relevant approximating intuitions of essences. It is worth going back to the two published texts in which the project of rethinking transcendental aesthetics is announced, but not performed, by Husserl. These are Formal and Transcendental Logic (3) and Cartesian Meditations, (4) the first five of which were in draft before the writing of the former. In the closing pages of Formal and Transcendental Logic the following is to be found, in Dorion Cairn’s translation:
“Transcendental aesthetics” — in a new sense of the phrase (which we use because of an easily apprehensible relationship to Kant’s narrowly restricted transcendental aesthetics) — functions as the ground level <in a world logic>. It deals with the eidetic problem of any possible world as a world given in “pure experience” and thus precedes all science in the ‘higher’ sense; accordingly it undertakes the eidetic description of the all embracing/Apriori, without which no Objects could appear unitarily in mere experience, prior to categorial actions (in our sense, which must not be confounded with the categorial in the Kantian sense), and therefore without which the unity of Nature, the unity of a world, as a passively synthesized unity, could not become constituted at all. One stratum of that Apriori is the aesthetic Apriori of spatio-temporality. Naturally this logos of the aesthetic world, like the analytic logos, cannot become a genuine science without an investigation of transcendental constitution- and even from the constitutional investigation required here an exceedingly rich (and difficult) science accrues. (5)
The remarks in section 61 of Cartesian Meditations on transcendental aesthetics can then be understood as a clarification of some of the dimensions of such an enquiry. This section opens by remarking the combination of physical, physiological and psychological genesis in the human and animal word and the question is raised how to think about children acquiring a “life of the soul,” through which, for Husserl, access to questions of meaning arrives. The relation of animal to human, of child to adult and of self to other as ‘generative problems of birth and death and the generational context of animality’ are all invoked in the course of a pair of paragraphs. The move from lived world, to world as object of the natural sciences, and then back to a notion of a world, as primordially given in transcendental constitution, is sketched, and Husserl then remarks:
We may then also describe this exceptionally large complex of enquiries connecting to the primordial world (which makes up a distinct discipline) a ‘transcendental aesthetic’ in a very much expanded sense, whereby we take over the Kantian title, because the space and time arguments of the critique of reason evidently, when also in an exceptionally limited and not clarified manner, aim towards a noematic Apriori of sensuous intuition, which, broadened into a concrete Apriori of pure sensuously intuited nature, indeed as primordial, demands a phenomenological transcendental expansion through a connection to a constitutive problematic.
(6)
Husserl indicates that on this basis, as a first level of enquiry, there is under development a theory of experiencing otherness, both of other people and of the objectivity of the world.
There are then three possible routes into this enquiry into the specification of these noematic and concrete Aprioris. There is first the route set out by the text of Experience and Judgment: towards a genealogy for logic, as the text for which Formal and Transcendental Logic is designed as an introduction. This puts the emphasis on the meaning constraints within which such an enquiry might be developed. The second is the development of the methodological problems with which Fink and Husserl wrestled in their incomplete attempts to write a Sixth Meditation, as a doctrine of method. The third route is marked out by the considerations developing in the writings going into the last publication; The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Between these three lines of enquiry, there are to be found the elements for this transcendental aesthetic, as a theory of the temporality, distinctive of human existing, in which attempts are made to make sense of what appears. The reactivation of this insight is the destiny of phenomenology. The questions raised by the theologising and the naturalising strands of appropriation of Husserl’s writings throw into high relief the manner in which, by contrast to naturalised and divine time, Husserl explicitly thematises the temporalities specific to human thinking and activity, in meaning intending and in fulfilling intuitions. These questions intensify the need to revisit the thinking of horizons for enquiry, and their reinterpretation, in a reactivated transcendental aesthetic.
Notes
(1) HUA 2: 1950.
(2) HUA 16: 1973.
(3) 1929: HUA 17, 1974.
(4) 1931: HUA 1, 1950.
(5) 1929: HUA 17, 1974, pp. 291-292.
(6) HUA 1, 150.