Variations on Truth

Approaches in Contemporary Phenomenology

Pol Vandevelde, Kevin Hermberg, Pol Vandevelde, Kevin Hermberg

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781441123015
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

Bringing together leading scholars from across the world, this is a comprehensive survey of the latest phenomenological research into the perennial philosophical problem of 'truth'.

Starting with an historical introduction chronicling the variations on truth at play in the Phenomenological tradition, the book explores how Husserl's methodology equips us with the tools to thoroughly explore notions of truth, reality and knowledge. From these foundations, the book goes on to explore and extend the range of approaches that contemporary phenomenological research opens up in the face of the most profound ontological and epistemological questions raised by the tradition. In the final section, the authors go further still and explore how phenomenology relates to other variations on truth offered up by hermeneutic, deconstructive and narrative approaches.

Across the 12 essays collected in this volume, Variations on Truth explores and maps a comprehensive and rigorous alternative to mainstream analytic discussions of truth, reality and understanding.

Part I

Introduction

Chapter 1

The Phenomenological Correlation between Consciousness and Object Faced with Its Hermeneutical Challenge

Pol Vandevelde

The issue of truth has always been a divisive philosophical issue, pitting traditional style philosophy against rhetoric, against literature, or against social and applied philosophy. While the notion of truth as a univocal concept associated with a well-delineated referent has long been seen as part of an idle Wittgensteinian language game, the use of the term is still very much a pragmatic component of any assertion, discussion, or communication that makes the writer or speaker accountable for the veracity of what they say. This disconnect between the theoretical front on truth, where the notion seems to be expandable and replaceable, and the practical front, where the notion of truth seems to remain uncircumventable has taken different forms in Anglo-American and in continental philosophy. In Anglo-American philosophy the discussion tends to focus on the criterion of the truth or the method used to reach the truth, leading to distinctions among the different candidates for what a theory of truth is or should be: correspondence, foundationalist, coherentist, or pragmatic theories, with their possible variations and combinations.

In continental philosophy the debate has taken another form and has focused on what is involved in what is called “the truth.” As the main representative of continental philosophy, phenomenology has seen itself as the place of a debate in which the truth as evidence, as defended by the early Husserl, has been challenged by the truth as “disclosure,” as powerfully presented by Heidegger. This alternative view on truth within phenomenology represents what we addressed in the Preface as the hermeneutic challenge. Once an element of interpretation is introduced in the concept of truth it was only a natural step to ask about the linguistic or discursive mediation of the disclosure. Phenomenology in this sense lent itself to a critique that subsequently led to its being recast in terms of what Hans-Georg Gadamer has called “the mediation of language” (Sprachlichkeit). This critique was obviously prepared by Heidegger and later radicalized in its linguistic form by the likes of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. This element of language that is part of the flesh of reality has reintroduced the ontological question into phenomenology by the rather provocative claim that “everything is interpretation” (Derrida) or by the view that things are “discursive formations” (Foucault).

In this introduction I focus on what in my view is the core of the phenomenological attitude toward truth—the correlation between consciousness and object—and how such a correlation already contains in the innovative framework it opens the notions of disclosure and discursive formations. The notion of correlation between consciousness and object entails an overlap between consciousness and object that turns the activity of knowing and reaching the truth into a process of translation or “translatability” understood in the broad sense of an exchange between what is of the order of consciousness and what is of the order of reality. I will, first, present Husserl’s understanding of the correlation between consciousness and object, with its epistemological emphasis, and, second, examine three versions of the overlap that emphasize the ontological repercussions of such an interaction between consciousness and object. I will start with a historical account of the origin of such a correlation. We can find in early German romanticism, in the figures of Friedrich Schlegel or Novalis, the first effort to bridge the apparent gap between consciousness and object. They use the term “translation” for this bridge, thereby granting translation an ontological function. Heidegger also appeals to translation in the 1930s and early 1940s as a way to regain our historical identity and Merleau-Ponty speaks of a “translation of the world.”

What these three versions of the overlap between consciousness and object show is the need to see the object in a certain fluidity. They, thus, bring to the fore the ontological side of the correlation between consciousness and object that the Husserlian version somewhat downplays. These three versions of “ontological translation” show how, within phenomenology, the truth as Husserlian evidence could lead to the truth as Heideggerean disclosure and to the emphasis on the mediation of language, which was to transform phenomenology. Besides the conceptual continuity with its ruptures between the correlation between consciousness and object, on the one hand, and the hermeneutic “turn,” on the other, these three versions show us that an investigation into the nature of truth cannot be confined to a strictly epistemological approach, but encroaches upon ontological territories. One can do justice to the complex nature of truth only by taking into consideration these ontological entailments.

The Epistemological Emphasis in the Husserlian Correlation between Consciousness and Object

The correlation between consciousness and object, which Husserl considers the breakthrough of his phenomenology, adds to a mere relationship between consciousness and object the suggestion of an overlap between the two terms correlated. If there is something in consciousness that makes it consciousness “of” and something in the object that makes it an object “for” consciousness or an object that matters to consciousness, there is what Husserl calls a “sense” (Sinn) that emerges from the correlation and can be expressed as meaning at the logical or linguistic level (Bedeutung). As an example of this Husserl mentions what he calls a “wordless recognition,” for example of a Roman milestone (Husserl 2001, 222–223). I may immediately recognize it as such without saying a word—this is the emergence of sense—and I may formulate a judgment or assert a proposition about it—in expressed meanings. In the Logical Investigations, Husserl himself admits that there is some ambiguity in the use of the two terms, Sinn and Bedeutung, an ambiguity he lamented but at the same time praised: it is a “very unpleasant equivocation” (sehr unliebsame Äquivokation), he says, but this ambiguity is also felicitous for it is “very welcome [sehr angenehm] to have parallel terms with which we can alternate” (Husserl 1984 Hua XIX/1, 58). Although he agrees with Frege that if meanings are in some way dependent on their instantiation they are psychological products, he refuses to uncouple the object from the sense through which the object is presented and thus to separate Sinn and Bedeutung.

The alternation between “sense” and “meaning” is an indication of a movement within the correlation between consciousness and object. On the one hand, consciousness must exercise some form of activity in order to reach the sense of the object—it is roughly what the term “constitution” involves—but, on the other hand, the object itself must have some capacity to give itself or reveal itself, thereby gaining salience for consciousness. However, from early on, Husserl seems to downplay the activity proper to the object and shift the center of gravity of the correlation toward consciousness alone in what he calls “evidence” in the sense of self-evidence. This power of “evidence” and the downplaying of the role of the object were reinforced by Husserl’s idealistic turn. Although the correlation was already very much at play in the Logical Investigations, it is really with Ideas I that the subject receives such a degree of attention that all of Husserl’s subsequent work can be characterized as an eidetic of consciousness or of subjectivity.¹

This investigation of subjectivity soon encountered the question of how complex my subjective capacities are. Somehow, in my very personal constitutive achievements, I borrow others’ ways and manners of perceiving objects or otherwise relating to the world. I perceive Michelangelo’s David through borrowed eyes that were loaned to me early on in my intellectual development through my culture and tradition. This expansion of subjectivity to intersubjectivity is a remarkable advance. On the one hand, it broadens my own subjectivity, but also allows the history of others to weave itself into my own subjective sphere. On the other, this expansion also provides a form of articulation to a rigid understanding of subjectivity. Subjectivity now is a complex entity made of singular egos who act and think as individuals, but who are also, in their very accomplishments, communal or corporate entities. This advance, however, raises another question. How can I, myself, “be” others in some way? While my attitude before Michelangelo’s David is indeed informed by linguistically mediated intentional states extending from my parents through my teachers and to books I read, it is not others who see in me the David. Despite the claims made by postmodernism, deconstruction or other theories of the socially constructed self, I seem to remain stubbornly the one who sees it. There are thus two problems to solve. The first one is the problem of passing from an “I” to a “we.” Husserl’s solution lies in the notion of empathy, which leads a subject to have access to the subjective accomplishments of other subjects. The second problem concerns the validity of intersubjective constitution and the kind of evidence that is available to an intersubjective consciousness. Husserl’s answer consists in maintaining both the empirical and the transcendental aspects of subjectivity and thus facing what he calls the paradox of subjectivity of being both empirical and transcendental. For the sake of brevity I will leave aside the issue of empathy and focus on the paradox of subjectivity.

In the Cartesian Meditations Husserl formulates the paradox in terms of a “splitting of the Ego” (Husserl 1999, 35) between empirical and transcendental, and he explicitly addresses the question of such a split in par. 53 of the Crisis, the title of which is: “The paradox of human subjectivity: being a subject for the world and at the same time being an object in the world” (Husserl 1981, 178). Husserl elaborates:

How can a component part of the world, its human subjectivity, constitute the whole world, namely, constitute it as its intentional formation . . . while the latter, the subjects accomplishing in cooperation, are themselves only a partial formation within the total accomplishment? (179)²

Husserl believes that the way he treats intersubjectivity solves the paradox of subjectivity as being both empirical and transcendental and makes his philosophy coherent, by providing the “full and proper sense” of his transcendental phenomenology (150). This is a challenging claim particularly for the notion of evidence, which Husserl considers as the criterion of the truth. Evidence is a synthesis and in it the meaning intention is partially or fully fulfilled or disappointed. Once consciousness is broadened to intersubjectivity, it becomes rather difficult to maintain that evidence could be a “seeing” of an intersubjective nature. Still, this seems to be the way Husserl pursued this question.

While Husserl always maintained that the sense anything can have is a sense in and out of my intentional life, he notes the consequence of intersubjective constitution: “we need . . . to perform a systematic unfolding [Entfaltung] of the open and implicit intentionalities in which the being of the others ‘makes itself for me’ ” (Husserl 1973 Hua XV, 5). However, Husserl (as well as Fink after him) adamantly rejects the possibility of equating intersubjectivity with a community of subjects so that intersubjectivity would be the result of the interaction between subjects: “the plurality of those who phenomenologize cannot be understood . . . on the model of a mundane community of subjects of knowledge” (Fink 1988, 137). Husserl mentions several times the role of mutual understanding (Verständigung) and communication in the performance of an intersubjective synthesis, but does not go so far as acknowledging that evidence, now that it is intersubjective, needs an articulation. The intersubjective constitution seems to be performed by individual consciousnesses that can re-effectuate what other consciousnesses have already performed. Intersubjectivity is thus supposed to solve the paradox of subjectivity by allowing a movement back and forth between individual subjects, whether real, dead, or virtual. Empathy seems to Husserl to be powerful enough to allow for this exchange between subjects and thus to lead to understanding and communication. Remarkably, although Husserl acknowledges the role of language in the very formation of an ideality in the Crisis, he does not extend the role of language to evidence nor to the formation of subjectivity.

The broadening of consciousness to intersubjectivity does not only render consciousness more complex but also has repercussions on the status of the object correlated to such an intersubjective consciousness. If the object that is for consciousness is also and has also been for other consciousnesses, it means that the object has layers of constitution that exceed what my present consciousness may perceive. This raises the question of what the essence of an object is. If the constitution is made by a corporate entity, it seems that the object cannot have an essence that is fully disclosed at the time of the givenness to a particular subject. And, still, it remains that it cannot be the case that things would disappear forever and new things would suddenly impose their strange outlook on us. Thus, some form of stability is clearly part of our understanding of the world, while some fluidity has to be tolerated in the very being of things.

When during this idealistic period Husserl characterizes an object as an idea he most of the time uses the term in the Kantian sense of what regulates our capacity to perceive and to know an object. The object keeps a clear and stable essence even if the object itself is only given through perspectives. There are, however, some passages where Husserl indicates that an object may not have a fully articulated essence, but an open one. In Ideas II, for example, he writes:

But does each thing (or, what is equivalent here: does any thing at all) have such an essence of its own in the first place? Or is the thing, as it were, always underway [auf dem Marsch], not at all graspable therefore in pure objectivity, but rather, in virtue of its relation to subjectivity, in principle only a relatively identical something, which does not have its essence in advance or graspable once and for all, but instead has an open essence [ein offenes Wesen], one that can always take on new properties according to the constitutive circumstances of givenness? But this is precisely the problem, to determine more exactly the sense of this openness [Offenheit], as regards, specifically, the “objectivity” of natural science.

Does the “infinity” of the world, instead of referring to a transfinite endlessness [einer transfiniten Unendlichkeit] as if the world were something finished in itself [ein in sich fertig seiendes], an all-encompassing thing [ein allumfassendes Ding] or a self-enclosed collectivity of things [abgeschlossenes Kollektivum von Dingen], which would nevertheless contain in itself an infinity of things, not rather mean an “openness” [Offenheit] . . . No thing has its individuality in itself” (Husserl 1952 Hua IV, 299; 1989, 312–313. Translation modified).

However, Husserl does not really develop this view of an open essence that is not limited to an anticipated completeness. Most of the time the indeterminacy of the unfolding of the object is understood as having a determined style.

Through his focus on consciousness and the complexity of its multiple layers Husserl does not fully address the ontological repercussions his correlation between consciousness and object can have. However, by mentioning the question of the status of the object, Husserl shows, first, how the correlation is not merely an epistemological claim, but also an ontological one and, second, that the object as a pole in the correlation has to be recognized as being completable. This ontological aspect was already brought to the fore by early German romanticism and it will be the task of phenomenologists like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty to make it explicit.

The Ontological Emphasis in the Phenomenological Correlation between Consciousness and Object

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Part I: Introdution
• Part II: Husserlian Resources: Reduction, Imagination, Transcendental Idealism
• Part III: Heideggerean Variations: Dasein’s Opening, Disclosure, and the History of Being
• Part IV: Toward a Broadened Ontology and Epistemology: Nature, Judgment, and Intersubjectivity
• Part V: The Avatars of Truth: Deconstruction, Conversation, and Interpretation
• Bibliography
• Index