The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (105 page)

[It] must be reckoned as a
self-contained system of Being
, as a system of
Absolute Being
, into which nothing can penetrate, and from which nothing can escape; which has no spatio-temporal exterior, and can be inside no spatio-temporal system; which cannot experience causality from anything nor exert causality upon anything. (
Ideas
I, §49, emphasis in original; cf. ibid., §57)
⁴³

Elsewhere Husserl distinguishes between ‘the transcendental Ego’ and ‘the psychological Ego’:

[The transcendental Ego], who necessarily remains for me, by virtue of [my free
epoché
with respect to the being of the experienced world], is not a piece of the world; and if he says, ‘I exist …,’ that no longer signifies, ‘I, this man, exist.’ No longer am I the man who, in natural self-experience, finds himself
as
a man …; nor am I [his] separately considered psyche…. Apperceived in this ‘natural’ manner, I and all other men are themes of sciences that are objective … in the usual sense: biology, anthropology, and also …
psychology
…. Phenomenological
epoché
…
excludes [the objective] world completely from the field of judgment…. Consequently for me, the meditating Ego who, standing and remaining in the attitude of
epoché
, posits exclusively himself as the
acceptance-basis
of all objective acceptances and bases, there is no psychological Ego….

… The objective world … derives its whole sense and its existential status, which it has for me, from me myself,
from me as the transcendental Ego
. (
Meditations
, §11, emphasis in original, punctuation slightly adapted; cf.
Ideas
I, §54, and
Crisis
, §§53–55 and 58)

It is the transcendental Ego that the phenomenological reduction brings to light. It is the psychological Ego for whose givenness and constitution Husserl still needs to provide an account.

Not, of course, that the two are completely unrelated. In the passage above Husserl talks about them as if they were two separate things. But really they are one thing viewed in two separate ways. Here as elsewhere, to effect the phenomenological reduction is not to attend to something new. It
is to attend to something familiar in a new way. (See ‘Phenomenology’, §9; and cf.
Meditations
, §45.)
⁴⁴

That is one reason why the execution of this part of Husserl’s project is such a bedevilling matter. He has to wrestle with the basic ‘paradox of human subjectivity’, namely that a human subject is both ‘a subject for the world and at the same time … an object in the world’ (
Crisis
, §53). Another reason why the execution of this part of his project is such a bedevilling matter is that each human subject also makes natural sense of other human subjects. Husserl therefore also needs to address fundamental issues about mutual interpretation and the constitution of the community and its culture. He undertakes all of these tasks in (among other places)
Fourth Meditation
,
Fifth Meditation
, and
Ideas
II.
⁴⁵

5. The Eidetic Reduction

So far there is no real indication why phenomenology should be thought to be part of
philosophy
. (Still less is there any indication why it should be thought to
be
philosophy, as Husserl evidently thinks it is: see e.g.
Meditations
, §64.) What we glimpsed of the execution of Husserl’s project in the previous section certainly looked philosophical. But we have been given no indication why we should regard it as typical. Merely shifting attention from things in space and time to the way in which sense is made of such things does not, by itself, involve adopting any characteristically philosophical stance.

For one thing, it is not yet clear why phenomenology should be an
a priori
endeavour, as any philosopher opposed to naturalism is liable to think philosophy is. The phenomenological reduction allows for
a priori
enquiry, obviously. But it does not necessitate it. Consider the Humean story about where our idea of a causally necessary connection comes from (
Ch. 4
, §3). Could not a counterpart of that story be told, after the phenomenological reduction, about the workings of the transcendental Ego? And would not such a counterpart of Hume’s story be
a posteriori
, an account, so to speak, of how the transcendental Ego happens, as a matter of fact, to work? Indeed, though Hume himself believed that he was engaged in an experimental science of human nature, which sounds for all the world like a species of natural sense-making, such was his somewhat idiosyncratic, introspective conception of a science of human nature that we may wonder whether
‘counterpart’ is too weak a word here. Certainly, Husserl sees Hume as engaged in phenomenology of a sort (e.g.
Crisis
, §24). Even so, he does not see him as a fellow traveller. He does not see him as engaged in phenomenology of the sort that
he
is trying to establish, the sort that he often distinguishes by calling it ‘transcendental’ phenomenology (see
Ideas
I, ‘Author’s Preface’, p. 16).
⁴⁶
And that is not because he sees him as engaged in natural sense-making. It is because, or it is principally because, he sees him as concerned with what Hume himself would describe as ‘matters of fact’ rather than ‘relations of ideas’.
⁴⁷

The simple truth is that Husserl needs to say some more about what makes (transcendental) phenomenology the distinctive undertaking that he believes it to be. He needs to say what makes it
a priori
. But he needs to do more than that. He needs to say why, as he also believes, its field of enquiry is the transcendental Ego
and the transcendental Ego alone
.

Let us begin with this second point. What exactly is bracketed in the phenomenological reduction? Natural sense-making. But what – exactly – is that? The loose characterization that I gave in §2 was simply that it is normal sense-making concerning things in space and time. But among the many indeterminacies afflicting this characterization there is one in particular that is critical. Must natural sense-making concern things in space and time directly? Or can it concern them at, so to speak, one remove, by extending to the investigation of the
essences
of things in space and time?
⁴⁸
The characterization, as it stands, can be heard either way. But the matter needs to be resolved. And if it is resolved in the first way (the narrower way), then less is bracketed and the phenomenological reduction allows for enquiry beyond the transcendental Ego. Husserl, some of whose own formulations of the phenomenological reduction share the same indeterminacy, spends the bulk of
Chapter 6
of
Ideas
I explaining why phenomenologists should in fact undertake what he calls ‘the phenomenological reduction
in its extended form
’ (§61, emphasis added),
⁴⁹
bracketing enough to preclude enquiry beyond the transcendental Ego. In effect he wants them to bracket all sense-making save for that which must be retained in order for the very aim of the exercise not to be thwarted: the aim of making sense of making sense of things. In particular, he does indeed want them to bracket investigation of the essences of things in space and time. When
phenomenology is understood as resting on this extended reduction, it will be the utterly pure science of the transcendental Ego that he takes it to be. Here is Husserl:

The controlling practical thought which this extension [of the phenomenological reduction] brings with it … [is] that, as a matter of principle, not only the sphere of the natural world but all these eidetic
⁵⁰
spheres as well [i.e. spheres of the
essences
which are taken from the sphere of the natural world (such as ‘thing,’ ‘bodily shape,’ ‘man,’ ‘person,’ and so forth)] should, in respect of their true Being, provide no data for the phenomenologist; that as a guarantee for the purity of its region of research they should be bracketed in respect of the judgments they contain; that not a single theorem, not even an axiom, should be taken from any of the related sciences, nor be allowed as premises for phenomenological purposes. (
Ideas
I, §61, emphasis added, punctuation very slightly adapted)

But there is still the question of what makes phenomenology
a priori
. And the answer is that there is a second, different sort of reduction that phenomenologists need to undertake: what Husserl calls ‘the eidetic reduction’.
⁵¹
The eidetic reduction involves prescinding from all but what is open to view through the ‘play of fancy’ to which I referred in the previous section. In other words, it involves prescinding from particulars and focusing on essences. This ensures that phenomenology is ‘an
a priori
science, which confines itself to the realm of pure possibility’ (
Meditations
, §12). It leads beyond investigation of the actual workings of the transcendental Ego to investigation of its essential structure, that is its ‘universal apodictically experienceable structure’ (ibid., emphasis removed). It also leads to a critique of any sense-making that can be erected on that structure. (See
Ideas
I, ‘Introduction’, pp. 40–41; ‘Phenomenology’, §§4 and 5; and
Meditations
, §§12, 13, and 34–37.)

Any
sense-making that can be erected on that structure? Not just natural sense-making? Any. And this has important consequences. First, it means that there will be provision for placing the critique of natural sense-making in a broader context. Phenomenologists can reflect on what it takes for sense-making to
be
natural sense-making (see
Ideas
I, §47). This will involve the sort of thing we observed in the previous section: reflection on how physical objects are given and constituted in experience. The second
important consequence turns on the fact that ‘any sense-making that can be erected on that structure’ means, in effect, ‘any sense-making’. For any sense-making has a subject, and the transcendental Ego is nothing but the subject viewed in a non-natural self-conscious way. So the broader critique will apply to sense-making of all kinds. (In particular, it will apply to itself. Phenomenologists can make sense of making sense of making sense of things. They can make sense of phenomenology.) Moreover, such are the efficacy and the efficiency of this phenomenological critique, Husserl believes, that it can survive the bracketing of all sense-making that is not
peculiarly
phenomenological. It can even survive the bracketing of the sense-making that is constitutive of (pure) logic. For although there can be no sense-making at all that does not make use of logic, ‘the logical propositions to which [phenomenology] might find occasion to refer would … be logical axioms such as the principle of contradiction, whose universal and absolute validity … it could make transparent by the help of examples
taken from the data of its own domain
’ (
Ideas
I, §59, emphasis added). Thus just as natural sense-making of a certain basic kind, once bracketed, can be recovered by the phenomenologist (see the previous section), so too logical sense-making of a certain basic kind, once bracketed, can be recovered by the phenomenologist. Phenomenology is ultimately a completely self-sustaining autonomous discipline, ‘the theory of the essential nature of the transcendentally purified consciousness’ (
Ideas
I, §60; cf. ibid., p. 13, and
Investigations
1, Vol. II, Introduction, §1).

6. Idealism in Husserl

Husserl famously encapsulates both the aim and the methodology of phenomenology in the slogan: ‘We must go back to the “things themselves”’ (
Investigations
1, Vol. II, ‘Intro’, §2; cf.
Philosophy
, p. 96). This is not, or at least not in any straightforward way, an exhortation to attain that knowledge of things in themselves which Kant took us to be incapable of attaining. What Husserl means, first and foremost, is something that might be heard, not as a rebuke to Kant, but (however anachronistically) as a rebuke to analytic philosophers: that we must not regard linguistic analysis, the exchange of one form of words for another, as a substitute for thinking about what those forms of words mean. Even so, the slogan carries the suggestion that phenomenology is a way of penetrating through to the true nature of things.
⁵²
And where the things in question are things in space and time,
this in turn may seem puzzling. Surely, the only way to penetrate through to
their
true nature is by processes of natural sense-making, precisely what phenomenologists abstain from. Phenomenology is a way of establishing how such things are given to us rather than how they are – is it not?

Well, yes and no. How such things are given to us is after all an aspect of how they are. Phenomenology is a way of establishing how things are to at least the following extent: it is a way of establishing how they are
qua
given. Or better, reflecting the
a priori
nature of the discipline, it is a way of establishing how they must be
qua
giveable. To that extent it
penetrates through to their true nature.

Still, this does not do justice to Husserl’s own sense of how far it penetrates, which is to say, not just to how things must be
qua
giveable, but to how things must be
simpliciter
. For he also believes that such things
must be giveable
. He believes that it is of the very essence of the things of which we make natural sense that they are susceptible to just such sense-making, and that other essential features of theirs depend on this. He is, by the definition that I proffered in the Appendix to
Chapter 5
, an idealist.