The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (104 page)

It follows that Husserl, unlike Descartes, is not even tempted to see grounds for a mind/body dualism in his project. He thinks that Descartes was on the brink of the crucial insight that whatever exists in nature can be given in consciousness, but that he mistook this insight, which is an insight about natural sense-making, for an insight
of
natural sense-making, an insight about one more thing that exists in nature. Here is how Husserl himself famously summarizes his opposition to Descartes:

It must by no means be accepted … that, with our apodictic pure ego, we have rescued a little
tag-end of the world
, as the sole unquestionable part of it for the philosophizing Ego, and that now the problem is to infer the rest of the world by rightly conducted arguments, according to principles innate in the ego.

… Descartes erred in this respect…. [He] stands on the threshold of the greatest of all discoveries – in a certain manner, has already made it – yet he does not grasp its proper sense, the sense namely of transcendental subjectivity,
²⁵
and so he does not pass through the gateway that leads into genuine transcendental philosophy. (
Meditations
, §10, emphasis in original, punctuation slightly altered; cf. ibid., §41, and
Crisis
, §§17 and 18)
²⁶

(As a parenthetical addendum to this section, notice how, by distancing himself from Descartes, Husserl draws attention to some similarities between himself and the later Wittgenstein. Husserl emphasizes that the point of his project, unlike Descartes’ project, is ‘not to secure objectivity but to understand it’ (
Crisis
, §55). Wittgenstein too is concerned, not to settle objectively how anything is, but to understand what it is for anything to be thus or so.
²⁷
This makes philosophy, for the later Wittgenstein, just as for the early Wittgenstein, an activity rather than a body of doctrine; something ‘above or below the natural sciences, not beside them’ (Wittgenstein (
1961
), 4.111–4.112). For Husserl too, philosophy is as much a practice as a straightforwardly theoretical undertaking. When talking about ‘the phenomenological attitude’, he goes as far as to say that it is capable of effecting ‘a complete personal transformation, comparable … to a religious conversion’ (
Crisis
, §35). He too is led to deny that philosophy, or in his case phenomenology, is anything ‘
by the side of
the [natural sciences]’ (
Ideas
I, §62-Note, emphasis in original).
²⁸
Both seek a kind of clarity, then. And for both this means describing in a suitably careful way what is already open to view: nothing, in philosophy, is hidden, except as a result of our own inattentiveness (Wittgenstein (
1967a
), Pt I, §§129 and 435). Both therefore seek to clarify a sense that is there ‘prior to any philosophizing, … a sense which philosophy can uncover but never alter’ (
Meditations
, §62, emphasis removed; cf.
Ideas
I, ‘Author’s Preface’, p. 14).
²⁹
It follows that, for both, philosophy ‘leaves everything as it is’ (Wittgenstein (
1967a
), Pt I, §124; cf.
ibid., §§128 and 129). Husserl summarizes these ideas in what he calls ‘the principle of all principles’: ‘that whatever presents itself in “intuition” … is simply to be accepted as it gives itself out to be, though only within the limits in which it then presents itself’ (
Ideas
I, §24, emphasis removed).
^30
,
31
)

4. The Execution of the Project

Husserl’s greatest achievements probably lie in his actual execution of the project, in the brilliant way in which he draws to our attention aspects of our natural sense-making that we have not noticed because of their sheer familiarity.
³²
It is well beyond the scope of this chapter to do more than point up a few of the most salient features of the exercise. But I shall try in this section at least to do that.

Following Brentano, who in turn follows the scholastics, Husserl fastens on the notion of ‘intentionality’.
³³
By ‘intentionality’ is meant the distinctive way in which the mind is directed towards objects, so that what we call ‘making sense of things’ is indeed always, at root, making sense
of things
. For any perception, there is an object of perception; for any flash of understanding, an object of understanding; for any pang of remorse, an object of remorse; for any hallucination, an object of hallucination. But Husserl assigns this notion a primordiality that neither the scholastics nor Brentano did. He also understands it differently. (These two facts are related.) The crucial difference is that, for Husserl, no relation of intentionality, insofar as it is to be thought of as a relation at all, is to be thought of as a relation between two independently existing entities. Not even the relation of intentionality involved in a case of veridical perception is to be thought of in that way. In particular, it is not to be thought of as a relation between an event in the psychology of the perceiver and a feature of the perceived environment – on pain of flouting the phenomenological reduction. Rather, any such relation is to be thought of as an articulated whole of which the act
and the object are two aspects.
³⁴
The object is intrinsic to the act; the act is intrinsic to the object. A given hallucination is a hallucination of a
tree
, for example, just insofar as it has an arboreous object. And likewise in the case of a veridical perception of a tree. As far as the relations of intentionality themselves are concerned, these two cases are of a piece.

Nevertheless there
is
a difference. The difference is that, in the latter case, there is a tree. So what, from a phenomenological point of view, makes this difference? To begin to answer this question,
let us consider how the arboreous object of perception stands in relation to the tree itself.

We can
all but
say: they are the same thing. We cannot quite say this, for reasons implicit in the preceding discussion. (The tree is independent of the perception.) What we can say, however, is that the arboreous object of perception is the tree
as so perceived
. The tree
is
what is perceived.
It
is what is given in perception.
³⁵

But it is given
in some way
. The tree can be perceived by being seen, or it can be perceived by being touched. It can be perceived by being seen from the north, or it can be perceived by being seen from the south. It can be perceived
as
a tree, or it can be perceived through dense fog as a building. Again, it can be first perceived, then subsequently remembered as having been perceived. Many mental acts, one physical object. Physical objects are ‘constituted’ as unities in experience. (I shall say a little more about this shortly.) They are given in acts of perception – differently in different acts. And the different ways in which objects are given are roughly what Husserl means by ‘
noemata
’, which are in turn close cousins of what Frege means by senses.
³⁶
(See
Ideas
I, esp. Chs 4, 9, and 11, passim.)

Let us return to this notion of ‘constitution’. Each perception of the tree has a ‘sense’ and carries, as part of its sense, retained perceptions of the tree, anticipated perceptions of the tree, and/or imagined perceptions of the tree. Each of these may in turn implicate the original perception in some
analogous way. There is an elaborate nexus of intentionality, in which relations of intentionality and relations between relations of intentionality are themselves objects of intentionality. It is these relations which, collectively, constitute the identity of the tree. And they constitute it as something over and above any one of them. That is to say, they constitute a kind of
transcendence
, but a transcendence which is itself given in experience. (See
Ideas
I,
Ch. 4
, passim, esp. §§41–46, and
Meditations
, §§19 and 20.)
³⁷

I mentioned anticipated perceptions. When perceptions are anticipated, the reality may of course be different from the anticipation. And when the reality is different from the anticipation, ‘positional components of the earlier course of perception suffer
cancellation
together with their meaning … [and] the whole perception
explodes
, so to speak’ (
Ideas
I, §138, emphasis in original). It is when the reality is not only different from the anticipation, but different from it in a sufficiently drastic way, that an apparent perception is exposed as a hallucination. Suppose, for example, that an apparent visual perception of a tree is followed by a tactile perception of nothing, where a tactile perception of the tree was anticipated. And suppose that something relevantly similar holds upon further investigation. Then the apparent visual perception is revealed to be but a hallucination of a tree, notwithstanding its arboreous object.
³⁸

How does Husserl’s belief that the tree itself is both given and constituted in experience relate to his prior bracketing of his natural belief in the very existence of the physical world? Does it mean that that belief is back in play? Yes. So is he arguing by
reductio ad absurdum
? No. He would be arguing by
reductio ad absurdum
if he had first supposed his natural belief in the existence of the physical world to be false and then, on that basis, argued for its truth. But, as I insisted in §2, to bracket a belief is not to suppose it to be false. It is to cease to engage in the very sense-making that yielded the belief. If engaging in sense-making of a different kind yields the belief afresh, so be it. As Husserl himself puts it in the penultimate sentence of the
Meditations
: ‘I must lose the world by
epoché
, in order to regain it by universal self-examination.’

So far we have been considering Husserl’s conception of how particulars are given. But he also believes that universals, or essences, are given (
Ideas
I, §3). Thus not only can there be a perception of the tree; there can be an intuition
³⁹
of the greenness exemplified by the tree. This intuition helps to furnish such
a priori
knowledge as that nothing can be both red and green all over (
Ideas
I, Chs 1 and 2, passim, and
The Idea of Phenomenology
,
pp. 44–45).
⁴⁰
Quite how essences are given on Husserl’s conception is a matter of delicate exegesis. But it is not unlike the way in which physical objects are given, in that many different perceptions of green things can all furnish an intuition of one and the same essence. The crucial difference lies in the fact that imagined perceptions of green things can serve this function just as well as actual perceptions of them. This means that intuitions of essences are secured largely through ‘the play of fancy’ (
Ideas
I, §4).
⁴¹

I shall not further pursue Husserl’s conception of how essences are given beyond making four brief observations about how, in acceding to it, Husserl differs from four of our protagonists. First, his conception sets him apart from Hume, who thought that the nearest that the mind comes to grasping a universal is grasping a particular which, through its annexation to a linguistic item, is able to represent other particulars. Thus a particular ‘idea’ of green, in Hume’s terminology, is able to represent all other particular ideas of green through its annexation to the word ‘green’ (
Ch. 4
, §2).
⁴²
Second, and related, although Husserl agrees with Kant that there is synthetic
a priori
knowledge (
Ideas
I, §16), he is able, on his conception, to account for such knowledge in terms of the intuition of essences and the apprehension of certain truths concerning their broad generic features. He does not, he believes, need to follow Kant in concluding that reality is viewed through native spectacles (
Crisis
, §§30 and 31). Third, in accepting that
a priori
knowledge such as the knowledge that nothing can be both red and green all over answers to what essences are like, Husserl is in profound and direct opposition to Wittgenstein (
Ch. 10
, §3). And fourth, in sharply separating such knowledge from ‘knowledge of facts’ (
Ideas
I, §4), he is in profound and direct opposition to Quine, since this is just the kind of separation that Quine’s araneous conception of belief leads him to repudiate (
Ch. 12
, §4). We began this chapter by considering the opposition between Husserl and Quine with respect to naturalism. The opposition just noted is really an aspect of that. It is because of Quine’s extreme naturalism that he is unsympathetic to the attempt to draw a sharp distinction of this (as he would see it, unscientific) kind between two sorts of sense-making.

Finally, in this section I note that Husserl recognizes the need to include, among the various objects of natural sense-making that he discusses, subjects of natural sense-making. For they too are made sense of. They too are given and constituted. It is true that the very attention to natural sense-making that is consequent upon the phenomenological reduction brings to light what Husserl calls ‘consciousness’: that in which he takes things
to be given. But that is not what is at issue here. Construed in
that
way, consciousness is not one more thing of which natural sense is made. It is rather a transcendental limit to natural sense-making, somewhat like the ‘I’ of Wittgenstein’s
Tractatus
, whose appearance in that book we observed in
Chapter 9
, §7. Here is what Husserl says about such consciousness: