The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (106 page)

Here are some forthright statements of his idealism:
⁵³

Reality [i.e. the reality of which we make natural sense], that of the thing taken singly as also that of the whole world, essentially lacks independence…. Reality is not in itself something absolute …, it is, absolutely speaking, nothing at all, it has no ‘absolute essence’ whatsoever, it has the essentiality of something which in principle is
only
intentional,
only
for consciousness, objective or apparent for consciousness. (
Ideas
I, §50, emphasis in original)
⁵⁴

The existence of what is natural cannot condition the existence of consciousness since it arises as the correlate of consciousness; it
is
only in so far as it constitutes itself within ordered organization of consciousness. (
Ideas
I, §51, emphasis in original)

The attempt to conceive the universe of true being as something lying outside the universe of possible consciousness, possible knowledge, possible evidence, related to one another merely externally by a rigid law, is nonsensical. They belong together essentially; and, as belonging together essentially, they are also concretely one, one in the only absolute concretion: transcendental subjectivity. (
Meditations
, §41)

And finally this, sounding for all the world as if it had been written by Fichte:
⁵⁵

All wrong interpretations of being come from naïve blindness to the horizons that join in determining the sense of being, and to the corresponding tasks of uncovering implicit intentionality. If these are seen and undertaken, there results a universal phenomenology, as a self-explication of the ego…. Stated more precisely: first, a self-explication in the pregnant sense, showing systematically how the ego constitutes himself, in respect of his own proper essence, as existent in himself and for himself; then, secondly, a self-explication in the broadened sense, which goes from there to show how, by virtue of this proper essence, the ego likewise constitutes in himself something ‘other’, something ‘objective’, and thus constitutes everything without exception that ever has for him, in the ego, existential status as non-ego. (
Meditations
, §41, punctuation very slightly altered)
⁵⁶

What then motivates this idealism? Does it follow from anything that we have observed so far? There is a suggestion in Husserl that it does. ‘The proof of this idealism,’ he claims, ‘is … phenomenology itself’ (
Meditations
, §41, emphasis removed). This suggestion seems to me incorrect. Either Husserl’s claim betokens a conception of phenomenology that itself extends beyond what we have observed so far or – I see no alternative – we should take issue with it.
⁵⁷
For I see no reason why someone should not accede to everything hitherto (the place of the various reductions in making sense of how we make sense of things
et cetera
) without acceding to this (the dependence of the things of which we make natural sense for some of their essential features on their susceptibility to just such sense-making).
⁵⁸

Suppose I am right. What then would induce someone to take the extra step, the step, in other words, from what we have observed so far of Husserl’s phenomenology to his idealism? One thing that would at least point them in the right direction would be a dose of something like logical positivism or Dummettian anti-realism whereby the very idea of a reality beyond the reach of experience is called into question. What would propel them from
there would be an understanding of this whereby the limits of reality are set by the limits of experience – in such a way that the former count as
limitations
(cf.
Ch. 9
, §4).

Do we find anything of this sort in Husserl? Indeed we do. See this for example:

The hypothetical assumption of a Real Something outside this world [sc. the one spatio-temporal world which is fixed through our actual experience] is indeed a ‘logically’ possible one, and there is clearly no formal contradiction in making it. But if we question the essential conditions of its validity,
the kind of evidence demanded by its very meaning
[,] … we perceive that the transcendent must needs be
experienceable
, and not merely by an Ego conjured into being as an empty logical possibility but by any
actual
Ego. (
Ideas
I, §48, emphasis adapted)
⁵⁹

There is also, relatedly, a loud echo of Fichte’s rendition of the Limit Argument, which Fichte used to repudiate subject-independent things in themselves (
Ch. 6
, §3):

We have here [an] … idealism that is nothing more than … an explication of my ego as subject of every possible cognition, and indeed with respect to every sense of what exists, wherewith the latter might be able to
have
a sense for me, the ego. (
Meditations
, §41, some emphasis removed)

Note, however, that if the sense-making involved here is understood in the ultra-thin way in which Fichte understood it, then this train of thought is not idealistic. (Fichte’s own idealism was independently motivated.) It is only when the sense-making involved is understood in a suitably thick way, such as the ‘natural’ way in which Husserl himself understands it, that its limits, to echo this time the early Wittgenstein, can be said to determine the limits of the world (Wittgenstein (
1961
), 5.6ff.); only then that idealism beckons.

These various evocations of Dummett, Fichte, and the early Wittgenstein bring us conveniently to the next obvious question concerning Husserl’s idealism, which is whether it is an empirical idealism or a transcendental idealism. And they do so by suggesting forcefully that it is the latter.

Is it? Certainly, Husserl himself calls his position ‘transcendental idealism’ (e.g.
Meditations
, §41, p. 86/p. 118). But this is not decisive. It is a further question how exactly he is using the term. We cannot take for granted that he is using it in a way that conforms, even roughly, with the Kant-inspired definition which I gave in the Appendix to
Chapter 5
and which I have been
presupposing ever since. For one thing, he says that he intends the term ‘in a fundamentally and essentially new sense’ (ibid.).
⁶⁰
And he is at pains to emphasize that his idealism is not ‘a Kantian idealism’ (ibid.; see also
Crisis
, §§28ff.). (This is largely for the Fichtean reason that he too rules out the possibility of subject-independent things in themselves.
⁶¹
But it is not exclusively for that reason.
⁶²
Recall that Husserl sees no rationale for the Kantian belief in native spectacles: see §4.)

These caveats notwithstanding, Husserl’s idealism surely is an instance of transcendental idealism on my definition – in fact, a paradigm of it. The dependence of things in space and time for some of their essential features on their susceptibility to our natural sense-making is not itself susceptible to our natural sense-making. It manifests itself when, and only when, we indulge in phenomenological sense-making (see
Ideas
I, ‘Author’s Preface’, p. 15).

But it does not follow that there is not also an empirical idealism in Husserl. The idealism that has been at issue so far is with respect to natural sense-making. (Any idealism, recall, is with respect to some kind of sense-making: see
Ch. 5
, Appendix.) Our discussion therefore leaves open the possibility that Husserl is also an idealist with respect to some other kind of sense-making, in particular phenomenological sense-making, and that this second idealism is empirical. Given the capacity of phenomenological sense-making to replicate natural sense-making (§3), and given its capacity to reckon with itself (§4), I think this is a possibility that we must take very seriously. The thought is that, for Husserl, things in space and time depend for some of their essential features on their susceptibility to phenomenological sense-making in a way that is itself susceptible to phenomenological sense-making.

One of the reasons why this possibility is such a significant one is the bearing it has on the relation between Husserl and Berkeley. Berkeley’s idealism is the very prototype of a certain kind of empirical idealism (see Berkeley (
1962a
)). And it is certainly hard not to be reminded of Berkeley when reading Husserl. The views canvassed in §4 about the difference between perceiving a tree and merely seeming to perceive a tree, for example, are entirely of a piece with what Berkeley would say about the same issue.
⁶³
Are we not justified in seeing a fundamental affinity between the two thinkers – an affinity which Husserl’s classification as an empirical idealist would surely serve to capture?

Husserl himself insists not. He denies that he is Berkeleian. He writes:

If anyone objects, with reference to these discussions of ours, that they transform the whole world into subjective illusion and throw themselves into the arms of an ‘idealism such as Berkeley’s,’ we can only make answer that he has not understood the
meaning
of these discussions…. It is not that the real sensory world is ‘recast’ or denied, but that an absurd interpretation of the same … is set aside. It springs from making the world absolute in a
philosophical
sense, which is wholly foreign to the way in which we naturally look out upon the world. (
Ideas
I, §55, emphasis in original)

But Husserl had better not rest his case there. The latter part of this quotation is precisely what Berkeley, a self-styled champion of common sense, would say in defence of his own view.
⁶⁴
Were Husserl to rest his case there, either he would be guilty of having misunderstood Berkeley or he would have an objection to how Berkeley peddles his view which would be no less an objection to how he (Husserl) peddles
his
view.

Husserl does however have more to say (e.g.
Crisis
, §§21–24). There is a genuine and important difference between him and Berkeley on which he is fastening. On Berkeley’s view, there is a sense, however sophisticated, in which things in space and time depend for their very existence on their perception by subjects. There is no analogue of this on Husserl’s view.
⁶⁵
If there
is
an empirical idealism in Husserl, as I am still inclined to think there is, it is a tempered version of Berkeley’s idealism, relating to the ‘giveability’ of things in space and time, not to their existence.
⁶⁶

Be that as it may, the fact remains that there is
an
idealism in Husserl. How comfortable should we be with it?
⁶⁷
How well, for example, does it square with our natural sense-making? Is there not perhaps an unrelievable tension between it and the most basic of our natural convictions, that which Husserl himself dignifies with the label ‘the general thesis of the natural
standpoint’ (
Ideas
I, §30), namely the conviction that the spatio-temporal world ‘has its being,’ as Husserl puts it, ‘out there’ (ibid.)?

When we considered an analogous question in connection with Kant’s idealism, and in connection with the closely related idealism to be found in Dummett, I suggested that there is indeed such a tension (
Ch. 5
, §10, and
Ch. 14
, §4). In their case there is an obvious way of trying to relieve the tension. This is to argue that our natural conviction is part of the sense we ordinarily make of things, from our position of engagement with them, whereas the idealism is part of the sense we make of things in our capacity as philosophers, from a position of
dis
engagement with them, a disengagement that equips familiar concepts to be exercised in unfamiliar ways. But this attempt to relieve the tension fails, I suggested, because it is not possible for us to make sense of things except from our position of engagement with them.

In Husserl’s case there is no analogous way of even trying to relieve the tension. On Husserl’s view, our philosophical (or phenomenological) sense-making, while fundamentally different in kind from our ordinary (or natural) sense-making, is still from our position of engagement with things. ‘[The world] goes on appearing,’ we heard him say in §3, ‘as it appeared before’ (
Meditations
, §8). So where familiar concepts are exercised in our philosophical sense-making, there is no reason, or at any rate no analogous reason, to expect them to be exercised in anything but familiar ways.

Husserl does however have another way of trying to relieve the tension, a way that, while similar, is importantly different. He portrays the independence of things in space and time in which we naturally believe as a constituted independence, an independence with respect to each and every constituted (or psychological) Ego. This form of independence, to reecho the early Wittgenstein, is a form of dependence (Wittgenstein (
1961
), 2.0122). It is a form of dependence on the very constituting. In other words, it is a form of dependence on the sense-giving of the unconstituted (or transcendental) Ego.
⁶⁸
And it becomes apparent only after the phenomenological reduction. Here is Husserl: