On Neo-Husserlianism

Michael K. Shim

 

  First, let’s distinguish between Husserlian phenomenology and Husserl scholarship. I take Husserl scholarship to be analogous to Kant scholarship, Hegel scholarship, or to whoever scholarship. It’s a historical approach: you try to figure out what Husserl thought and why he thought it in the appropriate historical context. Since Husserl wrote so much, changed his mind not too infrequently, and much of his Nachlass is written in a frustratingly cryptic style, serious Husserl scholarship can be a life absorbing endeavor.
   By the same token, it can be endlessly fascinating connecting the exegetical dots between this published departure from a previously published work (e.g., the departure from psychologism, the departure from Cartesianism, the genetic revision of transcendentalism, etc.) and that group of unpublished manuscripts, and so on. Exemplary of this kind of approach are the works of Ludwig Landgrebe, Klaus Held, Karl Schumann and Donn Welton. To ask after the value of this kind of approach is to ask after the value of historical scholarship in philosophy in general. I take it for granted that it is at least slightly ludicrous to question the value of the latter. Since unlike, say, Gassendi or Baumgarten, Husserl had a huge impact on a hundred years’ worth of philosophy, I take for granted that the pursuit of Husserl scholarship is prima facie irreproachable. 
   In contrast, Husserlian phenomenology must be a kind of phenomenology that is defensive of most, if not all, of Husserl’s original views against more recent rivals. This kind of work is actually rarer. Dan Zahavi comes to mind as a good recent example of a Husserlian phenomenologist proper. Just think for a moment about what Zahavi’s been up to. He’s defended Husserl against the Frankfurt school (1), the Heidelberg school (2), Sartre (3) and Levinas (4), all the while claiming that Husserl remained competitive with recent developments in analytic philosophy of mind and cognitive science. (5) I mean that’s got to be what “Husserlian phenomenology” should look like: you haven’t quite understood Husserl, so he can’t be wrong for the reasons you mention, and moreover, whatever you may think right he’s said already.
   Of course, not obviously relevant for present purposes is the best-known approach, that approach simply co-extensive with the “phenomenological tradition:” namely, the heretical (6) approach. You redefine phenomenology by criticizing Husserl’s original views. That’s Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Derrida, Hermann Schmidt, et al. That would render Husserlian phenomenology a foregone conclusion, an already obsolete enterprise, a remnant of a broadly Cartesian endeavor no longer viable.
   But a double-take on some of these heretics reveals a fourth possibility vis-à-vis Husserl, which I want to characterize as “neo-Husserlianism.” What I’m calling “neo-Husserlianism” is analogous to what analytic philosophers call “neo-Fregeanism.” Searle, for instance, is a Fregean because he buys into Frege’s two-dimensionalist semantics: there is both sense and reference that are irreducible to each other. (7) And that’s a recognizably original Fregean position. However, he is not strictly Fregean but instead neo-Fregean, since Searle centers his analysis of sense and reference on intentional consciousness, which is a very unFregean thing to do. (8)
   Similarly, three of the above enumerated heretics trade in one version of Husserl in favor of another. But what they buy is recognizably original with Husserl. All three philosophers reject the Husserl represented by Ideas I: they reject the internalist, solipsistic and static Husserl, which is the Husserl most people mean when they talk about “Husserl.” However, what they wind up advocating (or at least wind up advocating at some point) were albeit somewhat eccentric renditions of the lesser known Husserl — which Welton calls the “other Husserl.” For instance, Merleau-Ponty points to the Husserl of the lived body from Ideas II: that’s the non-internalist Husserl of the first half of the book whose analysis is conducted before the execution of the epoché in §49. Levinas points to Husserl of the Fifth Meditation: that’s the non-solipsistic Husserl who thinks intersubjectivity is more basic than subjectivity. And Derrida points to the “Origin of Geometry:” that’s the non-static Husserl who thinks genetic phenomenology and transcendental phenomenology need not be mutually exclusive.
   Now, I’m not advocating any of these quasi-Husserlian renditions; I’m just pointing out how “neo-Husserlianism” may gain some sense and currency. The basic idea is that you point to what you like and think right about Husserl, and argue on its behalf. Having done so, however, it would just be dishonest to claim that you came up with all this stuff by yourself and so owe nothing to Husserl. Instead, what you have left over would remain recognizably and, for the most part, uniquely what Husserl would have said. So you pay your respects and label yourself a “neo-Husserlian.” But by doing so, you also admit that you’re not entirely faithful to Husserl so, unlike Zahavi, not strictly Husserlian.
   In this light, as long as you admit it, there should be nothing illegitimate about isolating some subset of Husserlian theses as sound that may be contradicted by some other subset of Husserlian theses, even if the latter should be considered platitudinously canonical of Husserl — e.g., that he was an internalist or an epistemological foundationalist or whatever. To get a better sense of such an approach, let’s start by recalling an observation made by David Carr in 1973. Reacting to the Fifth Meditation, Carr writes:

[I]f the rigor of phenomenological analysis requires the apodictic givenness of the subjective to the phenomenologist, then only egological or solipsistic phenomenology can be rigorous. If, on the other hand, intersubjective phenomenology is to be regarded as equal in dignity, and thus presumably in rigor, to its solipsistic “subordinate stage,” then the apodicticity of the primary given is no longer the standard of rigor. (9)

   In other words, if Husserl’s claim about the priority of intersubjectivity in the Fifth Meditation were to be taken seriously, then the claim from the period of Ideas I of epistemic infallibility of the first person perspective as the foundation of transcendental phenomenology must be renounced. And I take this to be a straightforwardly correct observation about a basic inconsistency in Husserl. If that’s right, then any attempt to remain entirely faithful to Husserl by retaining both these positions would be an incoherent position to take. In contrast, should you favor one of these two positions, then you should admit your renunciation of the other position. But either way, it’s Husserl’s position — he came up with it, and gave you some reasons for advocating it. And to admit both your renunciation of one Husserl while pledging fidelity to the other Husserl — that’s the neo-Husserlian thing to do.
   Now here’s a list of positions that are all recognizably Husserlian, and I believe can hang coherently together if a competing set of positions equally recognizable as Husserlian are renounced. And of course I believe a view made up of these positions to be the most plausible in Husserl. Since it would also be the most comprehensive anywhere, it would also be the most preferable tout court.
   (NH 1) The concrete self sedimented by habituality (10) is personally basic. Accordingly, the notion of an abstract “pure ego” (11) from Ideas I has to be renounced. Consequently, the notion of personal identity in the strong sense must also be renounced in favor of some version of the continuity thesis, as Husserl recommends in the Fifth Investigation (12), then again in the later development of genetic phenomenology. (13)
   (NH 2) There is no “pure consciousness” not imbued by awareness of the lived body. And the concrete, continuous self, sedimented with habituality, just is the first person perspective imbued by awareness of the lived body. (14) To be conscious is to be conscious of the limitations imposed and perceptual abilities facilitated by one’s own lived body. (15) And to recognize the lived body in this sense is not the same as affirming the Körper of the third person perspective. Against the latter, the epoché remains applicable. (16)
   (NH 3) Intentionality must be viewed as externally responsive. When I want an apple, it’s the apple itself that I want and no mere representation of it. (17) When I look at a photograph and believe the woman to be beautiful, I do not mean the photographic image but the woman herself who is beautiful, etc. (18) In light of the epoché, the analysis of intentionality thus construed should be kept separate from seemingly related epistemological and metaphysical issues, which may be intractable. For instance, whether I can know the thing in itself, or whether there is a causal connection between my belief and what I believe, is what’s “suspended.” Accordingly, questions about whether Husserl was an epistemological internalist or a metaphysical idealist, etc., should not even arise. That Husserl himself occasionally describes his views as “idealistic” (19) should be regarded as simply misleading.
   (NH 4) By virtue of NH 3, we should be weary of Cartesian locutions like “absolute certainty” or “apodicticity” or “self-evidence” as signaling strong epistemological or metaphysical views. At best, they signal only an asymmetry between the first person and third person perspectives.
   (NH 5) Intentionality in Husserl ought to be given a pragmatist analysis, as Husserl himself suggests. To intend anything is the exercise of an ability, cognitive or bodily (20), originally acquired with activity, then gradually sedimented in habit to become “passive” or effortless. (21) Such know-how, Husserl talks about in terms of the “Ich kann.” (22) So intentionality is not simply given but is an achievement of the individual, in response to her external and social circumstances. Needless to add, it’s also nothing inherently representational.
   (NH 6) Meaning [Bedeutung] is regulative or teleologically governing. (23) No individual possesses meaning somewhere in her head, and thus meaning cannot be confused with some internal episode. (24) Instead, meaning should be regarded as a token operator or proxy for a prospectively adequate scientific theory, which need not yet exist and may never come to exist. Yet, without such a regulative view of meaning, no individual cognitive exercise can be vindicated as correct or dismissed as erroneous. Regulatively viewed, meaning is what keeps us from believing “water” to be a sui generis element or “whales” to be fish.
   (NH 7) Should meaning be thus regarded, the noema cannot be viewed as the equivalent of meaning. Instead, the conceptual portion of the noema is that about an individual cognitive exercise that is governed by meaning. I believe Husserl points to this kind of view in both the Logical Investigations and the Crisis. Accordingly, to believe that “water is H2O” is to subscribe to a certain theory about water, and commit oneself to the correctness of that theory. It is to let one’s individual cognitive conduct be constrained by extraneous rules of the right kind vis-à-vis truth and reason.
   (NH 8) If NH 6 and 7 are acceptable, then we have to draw a corresponding distinction to accommodate Husserl’s essentialism about both natural kind terms (e.g., “red”) and artifact terms (e.g., “house”). That distinction is between nomological intersubjectivity, as spelled out by Husserl in the Crisis, and mere peer pressure intersubjectivity. A part of our community is involved in genuine scientific progress. That’s the part we obey when talking about the molecular components of a natural kind object or the species to which a mouse deer belongs. But a different part of our community is involved in telling us what counts as “furniture” or who’s a “bachelor” — and such pressure imposes no nomological constraint on eidetic intution. We simply go with the flow for the sake of convenience and little else.
  (NH 9) But NH 8 also tells us that intersubjectivity must be regarded as more basic than subjectivity. At the pain of confrontation by the private language argument, insofar as thought must be bound by public rules of discourse, the agreements and reasons of others must precede whatever I think by myself. (25) Pedagogy, and not soliloquy, (26) is the model of thought.
   (NH 10) Finally, let Husserl be a mathematical and logical intuitionist. Formalists more or less believed that logical and mathematical axioms were functions of closed systems and analytically true only by virtue of these closed systems. Psychologists, in contrast, believed that axioms were true only because we could not think them otherwise: i.e., axioms are true because of the way we think, because of psychological facts about us. In contrast, intuitionists like Husserl, Brouwer and Gödel believe we intuit logical and mathematical axioms because they are irreducibly true. There is neither proof that “A is necessarily A” nor is “A necessarily A” because we can’t think otherwise; instead, “A is necessarily A,” and we grasp this irreducible truth in intuition. And to admit the irreducibility of mathematical axioms and logical principles allows, for instance, constraint by consistency and coherence in our decision to subscribe to one theory while rejecting a competing theory.
   Now if you look at these positions, what you should notice is that it is a view remarkably competitive with more recent views in mainstream philosophy. But unlike the latter, it is also a remarkably comprehensive view. Should a more comprehensive view be philosophically preferred, then the proposed neo-Husserlian view should also count as preferable to any contemporary competitor. And as I see it, to look at things in this way may very well be the future of Husserlian phenomenology.

Notes

(1) Zahavi, D., Husserl and Transcendental Intersubjectivity (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001).
(2) Zahavi, D., Self-Awareness and Alterity (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999), pp. 15-37.
(3) Zahavi, D., “The Three Concepts of Consciousness in Logische Untersuchungen” in Husserl Studies 18 (2002): 51-64.
(4) Self-Awareness and Alterity, op. cit., pp. 195-97.
(5) Zahavi, D., Subjectivity and Selfhood (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005).
(6) A phrase coined by Herbert Spiegelberg.
(7) Cf. Searle, J., Intentionality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 197-198.
(8) Cf. Frege, G., “Der Gedanke” in Logische Untersuchungen, ed. G. Patzig (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1966): 40-53.
(9) Carr, D., “The ‘Fifth Meditation’ and Husserl’s Cartesianism” in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 34 (1973), pp. 34-35.
(10) As outlined in the Cartesian Meditations. Cf. Hua I 100-106.
(11) Asserted most famously in Ideas I, but more pronounced in Ideas II. Cf. Hua IV 98, 103, 105, 112.
(12) Hua XIX/1 364-7, 374-5.
(13) Hua XI 117.
(14) Cf. Hua XIV 298-300.
(15) Cf. Hua I 128-30.
(16) A point missed by another neo-Husserlian, Quassim Cassam. Cf. his Self and World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), esp. pp. 9, 34-5, 51-61.
(17) Cf. Hua III 78-80.
(18) Cf. Hua III 209-10.
(19) Hua I 118-19.
(20) Hua IV 253-54.
(21) Hua IV 299-300; Hua XXXI 3.
(22) Hua IV 11-13, 152, 253-69.
(23) Hua I 56; Hua VI 165; Experience and Judgment §83a.
(24) Hua XIX/1 38, 49, 110, 137, 660; Hua III 257, 296-7, 331, 347.
(25) Cf. Hua I 110.
(26) Cf. Derrida, J., La voix et le phénomène (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967).