The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (107 page)

Our phenomenological idealism does not deny the positive existence of the real world and of Nature…. Its sole task and service is to clarify the meaning of this world, the precise sense in which everyone accepts it, and with undeniable right, as really existing.
That
it exists – given as it is as a universe out there … – that is quite indubitable…. [But] the phenomenological clarification of the meaning of the manner of existence of the real world … is that only transcendental subjectivity has ontologically the meaning of Absolute Being …; whereas the real world exists, but in respect of essence is relative to transcendental subjectivity, and in such a
way that it can have its meaning as existing reality only as the intentional meaning-product of transcendental subjectivity….

… But how could we ever be aware [that the world has this meaning] prior to the phenomenological reduction which first brings the transcendental subjectivity as our absolute Being into the focus of experience? So long as it was only the psychological subjectivity that was recognized, and one sought to posit it as absolute, and to understand the world as its correlate, the result could only be an absurd Idealism. (
Ideas
I, ‘Author’s Preface’, pp. 14–15)

A time before all consciousness can only mean a time in which no animal was alive. That has a sense. But a time and no absolute consciousness: that has no sense.
Absolute
consciousness is ‘before’ objective time, and is the non-temporal ground for the constitution of infinite time and a world infinitely stretching out in time. (
Husserliana
XIII, p. 16, trans. in Smith (
2003
), pp. 201–202)

(The distinctions that Husserl invokes here, between psychological subjectivity and transcendental subjectivity, and between consciousness and absolute consciousness, are variants of the distinction between the psychological Ego and the transcendental Ego.
⁶⁹
).

Granted the rest of Husserl’s phenomenology, this may be enough to relieve the tension. Even so, his idealism still seems to me problematical. In particular, it seems to me to risk the same fate as other forms of transcendental idealism: that of trying to represent as limits, in the sense of limitations, what are merely limits in the sense of essential features, and thereby lapsing into nonsense. For it tries to represent the limits of the spatio-temporal world, the limits, in other words, of that which is susceptible to natural sense-making, as limitations determined by that very susceptibility. That there is nonsense in the offing is apparent when we consider the following question. What kind of sense-making does it take to represent these limits in this way? In particular, what kind of sense-making does it take to advert to what,
qua
limitations, these limits exclude? We could say that it takes phenomenological sense-making. But that really just defers the problem. For how is phenomenological sense-making supposed to be equal to the task?

We have seen several attempts to address this problem, or at any rate versions of it, in previous chapters. They have all been struggles. (See e.g.
Ch. 5
, §§8 and 9, and
Ch. 9
, §§5 and 7.) Likewise in Husserl’s case. Here is a striking illustration of his struggle. At one point he says, in a memorable
sentence that is highly reminiscent of both the visionariness and the vision of Wittgenstein’s
Tractatus
:

If transcendental subjectivity is the universe of possible sense, then an outside is precisely – nonsense. (
Meditations
, §41, p. 84/p.117)

But he straightway adds, in a very telling sentence that is likewise reminiscent of the
Tractatus
, though this time of some of its contortions:

But even nonsense is always a mode of sense and has its nonsensicalness within the sphere of possible insight. (Ibid.)

There is another illustration of Husserl’s struggle with this problem, I submit, in his comparison of his idealism to Leibniz’ monadology (see
Ch. 3
, §3; and for the comparison, see e.g.
Meditations
, §§60–62).
⁷⁰
This comparison reinforces the idea that ‘the [spatio-temporal] world and all I know about it’ are subject to limitations, inasmuch as it casts that world as ‘a mere “phenomenon”’ (
Meditations
, §62, p. 149/p. 176). The trouble is that it also,
eo ipso
, threatens to undo the work that Husserl has previously done to reconcile his idealism with our natural conviction that the spatio-temporal world ‘has its being out there’. Husserl, like other transcendental idealists before him, finds that his attempt to make sense of our most basic sense-making threatens to lead him, despite his best efforts, to flout that very sense-making. The suspicion persists that his idealism is not ultimately tenable.
⁷¹

7. Husserl as Metaphysician

Suppose that the suspicion is justified. And suppose, as I urged in the previous section, that the idealism is separable from the rest of Husserl’s phenomenology. How might someone sympathetic to the rest of his phenomenology uncouple them?

By accepting that phenomenology, though it puts us in a position to say how things are given to us, or how we make sense of things, does not put us in a position to say what the intrinsic nature of things is. Or, to revert to the Wittgensteinian slogan that I pitted against Dummett’s idealism in
Chapter 14
, §4, by accepting that phenomenology, though it puts us in a position to say
how
things are –
qua
given – does not put us in a position to say
what
things are (Wittgenstein (
1961
), 3.221).
⁷²
Roughly, Husserl’s idealism is what accrues when we attempt to do the latter. If we want to accede to his phenomenology without acceding to his idealism, then we must learn to curb our metaphysical impulses.

This raises the question of how far Husserl himself is engaged in metaphysics. The question is pertinent not only to what he is doing when he is defending his idealism, but also to what he is doing when he is practising the rest of his phenomenology.

When he is defending his idealism, he is engaged in metaphysics of the most rampant sort. That is clear. But even when he is practising the rest of his phenomenology, he is, at least some of the time, attempting to make maximally general sense of things. True, what he is principally doing, all of that time, is attempting to make sense of making sense of things. But as I claimed in §5 of the Introduction, and as I think has been evidenced many times since, such ‘second-order’ sense-making and the corresponding ‘first-order’ sense-making always have a bearing on each other, at least at the highest level of generality, which is the level at which Husserl is largely operating. Indeed, we could say that precisely what is wrong with the excursion into idealism is that it is an attempt to make maximally general sense of things that is not suitably informed by the attempt to make sense of making sense of things.
⁷³

These remarks obviously presuppose my own conception of metaphysics. But Husserl himself freely acknowledges a conception of metaphysics on which, both when he is defending his idealism and when he is practising the rest of his phenomenology, he is engaged in metaphysics. As far as his defence of his idealism is concerned, as I noted at the end of the previous section, that involves him in a reversion to Leibniz’ monadology, about which he writes, ‘Our monadological results are
metaphysical
, if it be true that ultimate cognitions of being should be called metaphysical’ (
Meditations
, §60, emphasis in original). As far as the practice of the rest of his phenomenology is concerned, at one point he refers to ‘the “ultimate and highest” problems as phenomenological’ (‘Phenomenology’, §15) while elsewhere he
characterizes metaphysics as ‘the science of the ultimate and highest questions’ (
Crisis
, §3).
⁷⁴

What Husserl does
not
see himself as engaged in is metaphysics ‘in the customary sense’ (
Meditations
, §60), an activity which he utterly abjures. He means the attempt to make sense of what is transcendent, not in
his
sense of what is transcendent (§4), but in the more colloquial and stronger sense whereby nothing transcendent can be given in consciousness. This includes much of what Kant would have counted as bad metaphysics (
Ch. 5
, §§2 and 6). But it also includes Kant’s own concession that there may be subject-independent things in themselves. ‘Phenomenology,’ Husserl insists, ‘
excludes every naïve metaphysics
that operates with absurd things in themselves’ (
Meditations
, §64, emphasis in original) – though revealingly, he straightway adds that it ‘
does not exclude metaphysics as such
’ (emphasis in original).

It is worth pausing to reflect on where he thereby stands with respect to the Transcendence Question, which I posed in §6 of the Introduction. If transcendence is understood in this second sense, his answer is clear: there is no scope for metaphysicians to make sense of what is transcendent. If transcendence is understood in his own sense, his answer is less clear; or better, more subtle; or better still, in one respect more subtle. In another respect his answer is utterly straightforward: there
is
scope for metaphysicians to make sense of what is transcendent, for the simple reason that essences are transcendent (
Ideas
I, §59). The respect in which his answer is more subtle is that there is another, more oblique reason why metaphysicians can engage in transcendent sense-making, which has nothing to do with essences. They can engage in transcendent sense-making insofar as, having bracketed it, they are in a position to recover it (see §4 above; and see
Ideas
I, §76).
⁷⁵

We should consider, finally, what the point of the metaphysical exercise is for Husserl. The parenthetical comparison with Wittgenstein in §3 goes some way towards answering this question; but not far, because, as we have noted several times, for Wittgenstein – and I mean specifically the later Wittgenstein – there would be no rationale for anything of this sort were there not pernicious and debilitating confusions to combat. Husserl is much closer to Spinoza, Fichte, and Bergson, closer also to the early Wittgenstein,
in recognizing a significance in the exercise beyond whatever restorative significance it has: an
ethical
significance. For the metaphysical exercise, properly conducted, brings us back from the factual questions with which the natural sciences are concerned to ‘the questions which man … finds the most burning: questions of the meaning or meaninglessness of the whole of this human existence’ (
Crisis
, §2). It brings us to ‘the problems … of death, of fate, of the possibility of a “genuine” human life demanded as “meaningful” in a particular sense …, and all the further and still higher problems[:] … the
ethico-religious
problems’ (
Meditations
, §64, some emphasis removed).

Further, because the metaphysical exercise is fundamentally a matter of self-exploration,
⁷⁶
the proper conduct of it both fosters and contributes to individual integrity – which in turn, on Husserl’s developed view, both fosters and contributes to the integrity of the wider community, even ultimately the community of man. In the final paragraph of the
Meditations
Husserl writes that ‘the Delphic motto, “Know thyself!” has gained a new signification.’
Early in the
Crisis
he gives a striking account of what this new signification is:

We have … become aware in the most general way … that human philosophizing and its results in the whole of man’s existence mean anything but merely private or otherwise limited cultural goals. In
our
philosophizing, then – how can we avoid it? – we are
functionaries of mankind
. The quite personal responsibility of our own true being as philosophers, our inner personal vocation, bears within itself at the same time the responsibility for the true being of mankind. (p. 17, emphasis in original)
⁷⁷

It is scarcely surprising that such metaphysical aspirations as these should lead to such metaphysical excesses as the espousal of idealism. Scarcely surprising, but not inevitable. In the next chapter we shall see Heidegger sharing many of the aspirations while avoiding many of the excesses.

1
E.g. Evans (
1982
) and McDowell (
1996
).

2
Throughout this chapter I use the following abbreviations for Husserl’s works:
Basic Problems
for Husserl (
2006
);
Crisis
for Husserl (
1970
);
Husserliana
III for Husserl (
1950
);
Husserliana
VIII for Husserl (
1959
);
Husserliana
XIII for Husserl (
1973a
);
Husserliana
XIV for Husserl (
1973b
);
Ideas
I for Husserl (
1962
);
Ideas
II for Husserl (
1952
);
Investigations
1 for Husserl (
2001a
);
Investigations
2 for Husserl (
2001b
);
Logic
for Husserl (
1969
);
Meditations
for Husserl (
1995
), and
First Meditation, Second Meditation
, etc. for its separate parts; ‘Phenomenology’ for Husserl (
1981b
);
Philosophy
for Husserl (
1965
);
Philosophy of Arithmetic
for Husserl (
2003
); ‘Pure Phenomenology’ for Husserl (
2002
);
The Idea of Phenomenology
for Husserl (
1964b
); and
Time Consciousness
for Husserl (
1964a
). Page references for the
Meditations
are in duplicate, first to the translation itself and then to the standard German edition as indicated in its margins.