The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (109 page)

37
For doubt about whether such transcendence can be constituted in this way, see Sartre (
2003
), Introduction, esp. §V.

38
It is the ineliminable possibility of this kind of frustrated anticipation which in Husserl’s view allows for Cartesian doubt about the existence of the physical world (
Ideas
I, §46).

39
See n. 30.

40
Is the knowledge that nothing can be both red and green all over ‘natural’ knowledge? For the time being I will assume that it is. We shall return to this issue in the next section.

41
For discussion, see Bell (
1990
), pp. 194–197, and David Smith (
2007
), pp. 330–333.

42
However, by the time Hume has explained what he means by this, the difference between him and Husserl looks less marked: see Hume (
1978a
), Bk I, Pt I, §VII.

43
If this calls to mind Leibnizian monads, in particular in respect of their windowlessness (
Ch. 3
, §3), then that is as should be: see the material at the end of §6. (But see also n. 70.)

44
In
Ideas
I, §76, Husserl is led to conclude that any phenomenological thesis that concerns the transcendental Ego (as all phenomenological theses do: see the next section) can be ‘reinterpreted’ as a thesis concerning the psychological Ego.

45
For excellent discussions, see Smith (
2003
), pp. 108–115 and
Ch. 5
, passim; and Moran (
2005
),
Ch. 7
, passim. David Bell (
1990
),
Ch. 4
, is also strongly to be recommended, though once again (see n. 18) Bell occasionally displays a curious and incongruous lack of sympathy.

46
See n. 25.

47
Cf.
Ideas
I, ‘Introduction’, p. 38.

48
See n. 40: in the previous section I assumed the latter. The reasons for this will I hope soon be clear. Even so, I had not said anything at that stage to block the opposite assumption.

49
‘In its extended form’ implies that his own earlier formulations are to be interpreted in the first way, whereby less is bracketed. It also helps to account for his preparedness to talk of ‘phenomenological reductions’ in the plural, as he does in the opening sentence of §61 and, for that matter, in the very title of
Ch. 6
: see n. 13.

50
Husserl uses the term ‘eidetic’ in place of the more familiar ‘
a priori
’. See
Ideas
I, ‘Introduction’, pp. 41–42, for why he prefers the former.

51
The eidetic reduction is parasitic on the phenomenological reduction, and to that extent secondary. But it is still crucial. Cf.
Husserliana
VIII, p. 80. And cf. what Husserl says about the extended phenomenological reduction in
Ideas
I, §60, final paragraph.

52
And, despite what I say in the main text, it may indeed have been intended as a corrective to the slogan ‘Back to Kant!’ adopted in the late nineteenth century by neo-Kantians: see Copleston (
1963
), p. 361, and Cumming (
1991
), p. 37.

53
For further expressions of this idealism, see
Ideas
I,
Ch. 5
, passim, and ‘Phenomenology’, §11.

54
I have taken the liberty of adapting Boyce Gibson’s translation of the final clause of this passage, which, in the original German, reads as follows: ‘
es hat die Wesenheit von etwas, das prinzipell
nur
Intentionales
, nur
Bewußtes, bewußtseinsmäßig Vorstelliges, Erscheinendes ist
’ (emphasis in original). I am indebted here to Robert Welsh Jordan.

55
On the comparison between Husserl and Fichte, whom Husserl greatly admired, see Moran (
2003
), pp. 60–62.

56
Cf. Kant (
1998
), A129, and Wittgenstein (
1961
), 5.62. But see also the translator’s n. 3 on p. 85: in Husserl’s own copy of the text there are exclamation marks in the margin against this passage, which, from ‘Stated more precisely …’ to the end, is marked as unsatisfactory. Perhaps what gave him pause was the intimation that objects of natural sense-making depend for their very existence on that sense-making, an idea which goes beyond anything in the other quotations and to which he does not subscribe.

57
As I think we should take issue with Dummett’s thesis, in Dummett (
1993a
),
Ch. 8
, that the very introduction of
noemata
is an inducement to idealism.

58
Cf. Bell (
1988
), pp. 57–58. Cf. also Harrison (
1974
), pp. 26–28.

59
In the rest of this section Husserl addresses the question that we saw to be of such critical significance in Dummett (
Ch. 14
, §3(b)): whether the possibility at stake here is a possibility ‘in practice’ or a possibility ‘in principle’. He insists on the latter.

60
But see again n. 25. I leave open whether there is internal tension here.

61
See
Ch. 6
, §3: this is anti-Kantian, not because Kant insists that there
are
subject-independent things in themselves, but because Kant insists that we are not in a position to rule one way or the other.

62
See
Meditations
, §41, p. 86/p. 118, n. 1.

63
See e.g. Berkeley (
1962a
), §30.

64
See e.g. Berkeley (
1962a
), §§34 and 35, and Berkeley (
1962b
), pp. 149ff. and 256–258. (Philonous is Berkeley’s representative in the latter.)

65
Cf. n. 56.

66
Cf. what Bernard Williams salvages from the argument in Berkeley (
1962b
) to which I referred in
Ch. 5
, n. 70: see Williams (
1973a
).

Note that there are other crucial differences between Husserl and Berkeley. One is the difference noted in §4 between Husserl and Hume: Berkeley, like Hume, makes no provision for the mind’s grasp of universals.

67
One concern, which I shall not address in the main text, is that, in spite of Husserl’s appreciation of the need to explain how the Ego can be an object of sense-making – the need, in other words, not to take the empirical Ego for granted – his readiness to say that everything else can be an object of sense-making
for
the Ego shows that he takes the transcendental Ego too much for granted. For expressions of this concern, or something like it, see Deleuze (
1990b
), pp. 98 and 102.

68
See e.g.
Ideas
I, §55.

69
In the case of the distinction between consciousness and absolute consciousness, cf.
Ideas
I, §§33, 53, and 76.

70
For discussion, see Smith (
2003
), pp. 200–210. But note one important respect in which Husserl departs from Leibniz. He holds that, insofar as there can be empathy between monads, they are not windowless: see
Husserliana
XIV, p. 260.

71
For discussions of Husserl’s idealism, see Philipse (
1995
); Smith (
2003
), pp. 30–32 and
Ch. 4
, passim; Moran (
2003
); and Glendinning (
2007
), pp. 17–20.

72
Towards the beginning of the previous section we saw how the concern not to mistake linguistic analysis for thinking about what words mean acted as a partial impetus for Husserl’s idealism. What completed the impetus, it now appears, was the urge, not just to think about what words mean, but to
say
(directly) what words mean. For a very clear statement of the view that this concern and this urge together lead to metaphysical excess, see Schlick (
1959a
), p. 57.

73
How does this relate to the diagnosis mooted in the previous note? Roughly, when the attempt to make maximally general sense of things
is
suitably informed by the attempt to make sense of making sense of things, it becomes clear that the closest we can get to saying (directly) what words mean is saying how things must be for us to make the linguistic sense of them that we do: see Moore (
2010a
).

74
In
Ideas
I, §22, he also acknowledges that, insofar as it is ‘metaphysical’ to accept that there can be intuition of essences, phenomenology is metaphysical.

75
A word also about where he stands with respect to the Novelty Question. In §6 of the Introduction I quoted P.F. Strawson’s characterization of descriptive metaphysics as ‘content to describe the actual structure of our thought about the world’ (Strawson (
1959
), p. 9). In a way phenomenology is content to do that. But of course, Husserl believes that, in order to do that, it has to involve a radically new way of making sense of things. So one thing that Husserl does is to upset any simple assimilation of answers to the Novelty Question with Strawson’s descriptive/revisionary contrast.

76
See again the passage from
Meditations
, §41, quoted in the previous section, where he refers to ‘a universal phenomenology, as a self-explication of the ego.’

77
See further
Crisis
, Pt I, passim, and Appendix, §I, passim. For a helpful discussion of Husserl’s conception of philosophy, see Smith (
2003
), pp. 2–9.

Chapter 18 Heidegger Letting Being Be

1. Introduction

It was Husserl’s great
protégé
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) who did most, after Husserl, to propagate the phenomenological tradition. But he propagated it in ways that were at some remove from, indeed in certain critical respects opposed to, Husserl’s own conception of the enterprise. He avoided many of Husserl’s excesses, not by showing less ambition in the questions he addressed or in the spirit in which he addressed them, but by addressing them with more varied and more sophisticated tools. In the final section of this chapter we shall consider whether he avoided as much as he should have done.

2. Heidegger as Phenomenologist,
Pro
Husserl and
Contra
Husserl; or, Three Characterizations of Phenomenology

(a) First Characterization

Heidegger is an enthusiastic etymologist. Both in his own writing and in the attention he pays to the writing of others, he is very sensitive to how words speak to us through their origins.
¹
So it is in the case of ‘phenomenology’.
The two Greek words at the roots of this word are ‘
phenomenon
’ and ‘
logos
’. The first of these denotes that which shows itself.
²
The second has many meanings. It can be translated as ‘reason’, ‘judgment’, ‘concept’, ‘word’, and ‘definition’, among other things. On the interpretation that Heidegger takes to be most relevant in this context, it means ‘discourse’. And it signals, in particular, that feature of a discourse whereby it makes its subject matter manifest, or lets its subject matter be seen. Phenomenology accordingly
lets that which shows itself be seen
. But we must be clear about the character of the seeing. There are indirect ways of seeing something, as when a doctor sees a disease by noticing its symptoms.
³
They are to be excluded. Phenomenology lets that which shows itself be seen ‘from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself’ (p. 58/p. 34).
⁴
‘But here,’ Heidegger says, ‘we are expressing nothing else than the maxim …: “To the things themselves!”’ (ibid.; see further, for the material in this paragraph,
Being and Time
, §7, and
History of the Concept of Time
, §9).

So far, then, so Husserlian.
⁵
In our own terms, and in evocation of the previous chapter, we can say that
phenomena
are what are immediately given in sense-making and that
logos
is sense-making. Phenomenology, in these terms, is making sense of that which is immediately given in sense-making, which is tantamount to making sense of making sense.
⁶
So far, to repeat, so Husserlian.