The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (108 page)

3
See Mohanty (
1982
), Chs 1 and 2. Dagfinn Føllesdal, in Føllesdal (
1958
), p. 48, sees more of an influence.

4
See Bell (
1990
), pp. 79ff. For discussion of Frege’s and Husserl’s shared opposition to psychologism, see Hanna (
2006
),
Ch. 1
.

5
For an insightful discussion, see Glendinning (
2006
), esp.
Ch. 4
.

6
I am anticipating ideas that will come to the fore in §4 about how subjects relate to the things of which they make sense.

7
This too should be clearer by the end of the chapter. What it comes to, as we shall see, is that what phenomenologists really regard as the foundation for the rest of philosophy, if indeed they do not regard it as identical with philosophy, is phenomenology.

8
Note that Dummett himself has written extensively on relations between Husserl and analytic philosophy. See e.g. Dummett (
1991c
); (
1991i
); (
1993a
), passim; and (
1993d
). (He also contributes a brief Preface to Husserl’s
Investigations
1 – Dummett (
2001b
) – which he closes by asking whether work of the kind to which I referred in n. 1 gives us ‘a means of reconciling the two traditions’ (p. xix).)

9
This is an apt point at which to flag the alternative title that I have given this chapter. It is intended to echo the titles that I gave the chapters on Fichte and Quine. The point is simply to register, by evocation of the choice with which Fichte presented us, that just as Quine espouses an extreme naturalism, so too Husserl espouses an extreme anti-naturalism. The point is
not
to cast Husserl as Fichtean. To be sure, there is an important affinity between Husserl’s position and Fichte’s, as we shall see in §6. But the former is as much of a variation on the latter, that is to say the former is as much of a variation on what I called ‘transcendentalism’ in
Ch. 6
, as Quine’s position is on what I called ‘naturalism’ there: see
Ch. 12
, n. 5. The word ‘transcendentalism’ will not appear again in this chapter.

10
At the root of these questions is the question concerning representation on which Kant placed such emphasis in his letter to Marcus Herz: see
Ch. 5
, n. 30.

11
In §5 I shall make this a little more precise.

12
Cf. his assault on naturalism in
Philosophy
, pp. 80–81. Cf. also the fact that Frege, when he attempted to make sense of our arithmetical sense-making, and in particular when he attempted to determine how numbers are given to us, did not just do more arithmetic. His questions were not arithmetical questions.

13
There is a second reduction, which he calls the ‘eidetic’ reduction and which I shall discuss in §5. But note that the language of reduction, both in Husserl himself and in his commentators, is by no means confined to these two. Thus, for example, Husserl frequently refers to the ‘transcendental’ reduction (e.g.
Crisis
, §41). Sometimes indeed he refers to the ‘transcendental-phenomenological’ reduction (e.g.
Meditations
, §8). David Bell and others refer to the ‘abstractive’ reduction (e.g. Bell (
1990
), pp. 216–218). There are many others besides. Moreover, it is far from clear which of these, if any, are intended to be equivalent to which. Some commentators talk as though there are only two reductions altogether, variously labelled. Others distinguish as many as eight. (Philip J. Bossert, in Bossert (
1973
) – cited in Moran (
2000
), p. 494, n. 20 – identifies eight reductions in the
Crisis
alone.) The situation is aggravated by two further facts: first, that Husserl sometimes talks of ‘phenomenological reductions’ in the plural (e.g.
Ideas
I, §61); and second, that he also frequently uses the ancient Greek term ‘
epoché
’, which he himself glosses as ‘bracketing’ (
Ideas
I, §31), and which many commentators take him to use more or less interchangeably with ‘reduction’ (e.g. David Smith (
2007
), p. 443), while others see him as distinguishing them (e.g. Smith (
2003
), p. 27). I shall bypass these controversies. For our purposes all that matters is that the phenomenological reduction and the eidetic reduction are indeed two, and that each has a crucial role to play in Husserl’s attempt to make sense of our sense-making. (That said, in §5 we shall also advert to issues connected to the suggestion that there is more than one phenomenological reduction: see n. 49.)

14
See Williams (
1973c
).

15
See n. 13.

16
See also
Basic Problems
, §15;
Ideas
I, esp. ‘Author’s Preface’, pp. 13–14,
Ch. 3
, and §56; ‘Phenomenology’, §3; ‘Pure Phenomenology’; and
First Meditation
.

17
For warnings against some of the misleading connotations of talk of ‘appearance’ here, see Heidegger (
1962a
), §7A. (I shall discuss this passage briefly in §2 of the next chapter, in the context of a more general discussion of Heidegger’s conception of these matters: see esp., in the current connection, n. 2 of that discussion.)

18
For helpful discussions of the phenomenological reduction, see Merleau-Ponty (1962), Preface; Heidegger (
1962a
), §7; Heidegger (
1985
), esp. Chs 1 and 2; Bell (
1990
), esp. pp. 153–172; Moran (
2000
),
Ch. 4
; Sokolowski (
2000
), pp. 47–51; Smith (
2003
),
Ch. 1
; and David Smith (
2007
),
Ch. 6
, passim. (The passage mentioned from Bell (
1990
) is particularly helpful – notwithstanding some occasional obtuseness and ill-motivated venom that seem to me totally out of keeping with the rest. I include the following extraordinary sentence: ‘Well, I have tried to follow Husserl’s instructions for the performance of the phenomenological reduction, and I have to report that nothing of any philosophical interest occurred’ (p. 162).)

19
The very title of the
Meditations
–
Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology
, in its unabbreviated form – speaks volumes of course.

20
One person who I think sees too much of it there is Thomas Baldwin: see Baldwin (
1988
), §I.

21
This is not of course to deny, what Husserl is equally keen to emphasize (ibid.), that neither he nor Descartes could suspend belief in the way he does were it not possible to suspend belief in the way the other does. Nor is it to deny that there is something of Descartes’ attempt to return to basics in Husserl, and to do so, moreover, in a way that is – how to put it? – intellectually autonomous (e.g.
Meditations
, §2). It remains the case that Descartes and Husserl have fundamentally different projects. (One illustration of this is the fact, as I argued in
Ch. 1
, §4, that
structurally
Descartes’ strategy is the same as the naturalist’s.)

22
As indeed he seems to in
Ideas
I, §30, and
Crisis
, §28. (It is true that elsewhere, notably in
Meditations
, §64 (see esp. p. 155/p. 181), he speaks about the founding of all ‘genuine sciences of matters of fact’. But he does not mean this in a Cartesian sense. There is no question of providing these sciences with any kind of vindication. It is a matter rather of describing what is presupposed in their methods of investigation.)

23
Husserl is aware that his own formulations sometimes obscure this contrast. Cf. the material in his marginalia to
Ideas
I that appears in
Husserliana
III, p. 70, and that David Bell quotes in Bell (
1990
), p. 185.

24
Cf. his use of inverted commas to indicate this simultaneous continuity and change (
Ideas
I, §§89 and 130). Thus he distinguishes between ‘the tree’ and ‘the “tree”’, or, as he also puts it, between ‘the
tree plain and simple
’ and ‘[the]
perceived tree as such
’, claiming that the former, ‘though it figures as “the same exactly”’ in the latter, is nevertheless ‘as different as it can be from [it]’ (
Ideas
I, §89, emphasis in original). For a helpful discussion, see Moran (
2000
), pp. 148–152.

25
In
Logic
, p. 167, Husserl defines a ‘transcendental subjectivity’ as a ‘subjectivity antecedent to all objective realities’. And in
Crisis
, §26, he indicates that he means by ‘transcendental’ pretty much what Kant meant by it (see
Ch. 5
, §4; cf.
Ideas
I, §97, final paragraph).

26
See Glendinning (
2007
), pp. 49–54, for a very helpful discussion of these matters.

27
Cf.
Ch. 9
, n. 7.

28
The phrase that Husserl himself uses, where I have inserted ‘natural sciences’, is ‘extra-phenomenological sciences of fact’. This is strictly wider, in that it also includes the social sciences. But that certainly does not register any difference between him and Wittgenstein, whose use of the term ‘natural sciences’, in this context, is extraordinarily broad: see Wittgenstein (
1961
), 4.11.

29
Cf. Heidegger’s definition of phenomenology as ‘letting the manifest in itself be seen from itself’ (Heidegger (
1985
), p. 85, emphasis removed). See further §2 of the next chapter.

30
By ‘intuition’ here Husserl means that which ‘is a source of authority of knowledge’. He also sometimes uses ‘intuition’ as a sortal term (e.g.
Ideas
I, §4) – a usage that picks out a correspondingly broad category. See Smith (
2003
), pp. 46–49.

31
A final incidental similarity (which is not unrelated to those already mentioned). Husserl writes, ‘[A] tree plain and simple can burn away…. But … the meaning of [a] perception [of it] … cannot burn away’ (
Ideas
I, §89). Wittgenstein writes, ‘When Mr N.N. dies one says that the bearer of the name dies, not that the meaning dies’ (Wittgenstein (
1967a
), Pt I, §40).

32
This obviously relates to the material in parentheses at the end of the previous section: cf. again Wittgenstein (
1967a
), Pt I, §129.

Particularly noteworthy is Husserl’s work on our temporal sense-making: see esp.
Time Consciousness
, and for a superb discussion, see Turetzky (
1998
),
Ch. 11
.

33
Brentano (
1973
), p. 88.

34
Cf.
Ideas
I, §36.

35
Cf.
Investigations
2, Vol. II, Investigation V,
Ch. 2
, Appendix to §§11 and 20, and
Ideas
I, §43.

36
How close? I shall not dwell on that question here. There are many dimensions of controversy (concerning Frege as well as Husserl – e.g. consider the issue of whether Frege acknowledges senses without corresponding
Bedeutungen
, mentioned in
Ch. 8
, n. 41). I merely note that Husserl’s category differs from Frege’s in at least the following respect: not all
noemata
are constituents of what Frege calls ‘thoughts’. For helpful discussions, see Føllesdal (
1969
); Dreyfus (
1970
); Solomon (
1970
); Bell (
1990
), pp. 179–184; Dummett (
1993a
), esp. Chs 7, 8, and 11; Dummett (
1993d
); Sokolowski (
2000
), pp. 59–61 and 191–194; Moran (
2000
), pp. 155–160; Moran (
2005
), pp. 133–139; and David Smith (
2007
), pp. 257–286. (Note that there are also interesting questions about how Husserlian
noemata
relate to Kantian intuitions (
Ch. 5
, §4) and to Tractarian objects (
Ch. 9
, §3). And certainly Husserl’s notion of a mental act as essentially intentional brooks comparison with Kant’s notion of a cognition (
Ch. 5
, n. 13).)