Understanding Phenomenology

David R. Cerbone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317493877
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

"Understanding Phenomenology" provides a guide to one of the most important schools of thought in modern philosophy. The book traces phenomenology's historical development, beginning with its founder, Edmund Husserl and his "pure" or "transcendental" phenomenology, and continuing with the later, "existential" phenomenology of Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The book also assesses later, critical responses to phenomenology - from Derrida to Dennett - as well as the continued significance of phenomenology for philosophy today. Written for anyone coming to phenomenology for the first time, the book guides the reader through the often bewildering array of technical concepts and jargon associated with phenomenology and provides clear explanations and helpful examples to encourage and enhance engagement with the primary texts.

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Husserl and the project of pure phenomenology

Husserl: life and works

Edmund Husserl was born in 1859, in Prossnitz, in what is now the Czech Republic. He was educated at the University of Leipzig, where he concentrated primarily on mathematics, eventually earning a doctorate in the subject. It was not until the 1880s that his interests became more exclusively philosophical. At that time, he encountered the psychologist and philosopher Franz Brentano, whose work revived the medieval notion of "intentionality". Attending Brentano's lectures in Vienna profoundly altered the course of Husserl's intellectual development, setting him on the path to phenomenology. However, Husserl's work in the late 1800s still reflected his primary interests in mathematics and logic: in 1887, he published On the Concept of Number, which was followed by the Philosophy of Arithmetic in 1891. At the turn of the twentieth century, Husserl's first monumental work appeared, his Logical Investigations, wherein he describes himself as achieving his "break-through" (LI: 43) to phenomenology. Logical Investigations begins with a "Prologomena to Pure Logic", which contains a sustained attack on empiricist and psychological conceptions of logic. As such, the work forms a cornerstone of Husserl's anti-naturalism, which we shall consider in more depth shortly. Hie "Prologomena" is followed by six "investigations", devoted variously to such interrelated concepts as meaning, intentionality, knowledge and truth, as well as a theory of parts and wholes.

Already in Logical Investigations, Husserl conceived of phenomenology as a kind of pure, non-empirical discipline that "lays bare the 'sources'

Franz Brentano (1838-1917)

Brentano's lectures in the 1880s exerted an enormous influence on Husserl's philosophical development. Husserl would later recall: "at a time when my philosophical interests were increasing and I was uncertain whetherto make my career in mathematics or to dedicate myself totally to philosophy, Brentano's lectures settled the matter" (SW: 342). And: "Brentano's lectures gave me for the first time the conviction that encouraged me to choose philosophy as my life's work"(SW: 343). (Brentano's influence extended well beyond Husserl: Sigmund Freud and the Austrian philosopher Alexius Meiftortg were also among his students in Vienna.) In his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, first published in 1874, Brentano characterized the mind and consciousness in terms of "mental phenomena", which are distinguished by the "intentional in-existence" of the objects they are about. Husserl later rejected Brentano's conception of intentionality, arguing that since the objects most intentional states are about "transcend" those states, the idea of intentional in-existence is incorrect.

from which the basic concepts and ideal laws of pure logic 'flow', and back to which they must be traced" (LI: 249). "Pure phenomenology represents a field of neutral researches" (ibid.), which means that phenomenology is to proceed without the aid of any unexamined assumptions; phenomenology is to be a "presuppositionless" form of enquiry (see e.g. LI: 263-6). Around 1905, however, Husserl described his conception of phenomenology as undergoing radical dramatic changes. At this point, Husserl began to think of phenomenology in transcendental terms, and emphasized to an even greater degree the idea of phenomenology as a pure discipline. Hie meaning and import of the two key terms "transcendental" and "pure" will occupy us considerably over the course of this chapter, as they serve to underwrite what he saw as his principal methodological innovation: the "phenomenological reduction" (which is foreshadowed in Logical Investigations, but only explicitly articulated following Husserl's "transcendental turn"). Husserl's revised conception of phenomenology is evident in his 1907 lectures, published as The Idea of Phenomenology, as well as in his 1911 manifesto, "Philosophy as Rigorous Science", which contains another attack on naturalism in philosophy. In 1913, Husserl published the first volume of Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy (hereafter Ideas). There would eventually be two further volumes, although neither of them would be published during Husserl's lifetime.

The remainder of Husserl's philosophical career was spent developing, refining and reconceiving transcendental phenomenology. Husserl repeatedly characterized himself as a "beginner" in phenomenology, and many of his works reflect this, not by being amateurish but by their willingness to reopen the question of just what phenomenology is and how it is to be practised. Husserl's perpetual rethinking of phenomenology translated also into hesitation and delays with respect to publication. Following the publication of Ideas in 1913, other works appeared only sporadically. Among them are Formal and Transcendental Logic in 1929, Cartesian Meditations in 1931 and The Crisis of the European Sciences in 1936.

Husserl died in 1938. His final years following his retirement from a chair in philosophy at Freiburg were rather unhappy ones. The rise of the Nazis in Germany meant that Husserl, owing to his Jewish ancestry, was barred from any kind of official academic activity. Carried along by the wave of Nazism was one of Husserl's most promising followers, Martin Heidegger, who joined the party in the early 1930s (in the early 1940s, the dedication to Husserl in Heidegger's Being and Time was quietly deleted, only to be restored in the 1950s). The political situation was not the sole cause of Husserl's unhappiness, however. As he grew older, Husserl lamented both the incompleteness of his own achievements in phenomenology and the lack of any obvious successor (Heidegger, among others, having clearly failed to take up the banner, or at least not in the right way).

Although Husserl did not publish a great many works in the last twenty-five years of his life, this was not from lack of writing. Husserl left nearly 30,000 pages (in shorthand!) of manuscripts. Slowly these are being edited and published, both in their original German and in English translation. These include the second and third volumes of Ideas, as well as Experience and Judgment, a companion to his Formal and Transcendental Logic. When one combines the manuscripts with the published works, Husserl's philosophy becomes nearly unsurveyable, and certainly not something that can be adequately accounted for in one chapter of an introductory work. We shall concentrate, as Husserl often does, on a small handful of examples. In doing so, I hope to capture the overall "feel" of Husserl's phenomenology, thereby conveying its principal methods, aspirations and achievements.

From anti-naturalism to phenomenology

From this brief synopsis of Husserl's life and works we can extract two concerns that, especially when combined with a third, account for the particular character of his phenomenology, both in its methods and aspirations. One concern, present in one way or another from the beginning of Husserl's intellectual-academic life, is with the notions of logic and mathematics. A second concern, stemming largely from the influence of Brentano, is with the notions of consciousness and intentionality. Throughout his philosophical career, Husserl is concerned both to understand the nature and status of logic and mathematics, and account for our grasp or comprehension of them. Moreover, when we consider our third concern, we can get a better feel for how such an account looks, or at least how it ought not to look. The third concern, which emerges in Husserl's thinking in the late-nineteeth century and becomes a guiding theme in his Logical Investigations and later works, is that of anti-naturalism: a rejection of the idea that the natural sciences can provide a complete or exhaustive account of reality. This is not perhaps the best way to put Husserl's claim, since "reality" might be taken to be coextensive with "nature", and certainly the natural sciences have pride of place in understanding the latter. Better put, Husserl's opposition to naturalism amounts to the claim that there are truths and principles that the natural sciences presuppose, but for which they themselves cannot account; not every truth is a natural scientific truth.

Rather than reality, then, what the natural sciences cannot account for is "ideality": the ideal truths and principles of logic and mathematics. Any attempt to "naturalize" these truths and principles has disastrous consequences, according to Husserl, resulting ultimately in the self-refutation of naturalism itself That is, naturalism tries to account for logical principles entirely in terms of psychology: logical principles are psychological principles; the laws of logic are natural laws of psychology, that is, laws that generalize how human beings and perhaps other sentient beings think. The problem for this account is that such natural laws are descriptive, much like the laws of motion for planets and other celestial bodies, whereas the relation between logic and any actual psychological processes is "normative": the laws of logic govern thinking by prescribing how sentient beings ought to think. By rendering logical laws entirely in psychological terms, the naturalist, according to Husserl, blurs this distinction, indeed destroys it entirely. The result is "relativism": there will be, at least in principle, different logical laws and principles, different laws and principles of truth, depending on the character of the psychological processes found in any kind or population of creatures. To say that something is true or that one thing follows logically from another means, on the naturalists rendering, that this or that kind of being characteristically holds that thing to be true or generally believes one thing when it believes the other.

Now consider even these sorts of claims concerning the characteristics and behaviour of populations of sentient beings: when the naturalist makes these claims, he typically puts them forward as being true, but what does this mean? It is obvious, Husserl thinks, that the naturalist intends more than to claim that this is how he and perhaps his fellow naturalists happen to think; indeed, the naturalist does not intend to say anything about his psychological states and processes at all. Rather, the naturalist intends to discover, and put forward, what is ultimately the truth about such things as psychological states and processes, without reference to any of his own psychological states and processes whatsoever, but this means that the notion of truth itself cannot be understood in terms of psychological states and processes. In this way, the naturalist, in his official position, courts self-refutation by depriving himself of the very notion of truth that guides his scientific aspirations. (Unofficially, we might say, the naturalist can be seen to be guided by such a notion of truth after all, and Husserl's arguments are primarily designed to make this clear to the naturalist himself.)

One aspect of Husserl's anti-naturalism, then, is his rejection of the idea that logic can be understood psychologically; the doctrine commonly known as "psychologism" is ultimately self-refuting, and in so far as naturalism traffics in psychologism, it too totters on the brink of absurdity. What, though, does this concern with the nature and status of logic have to do with the notions of consciousness and intentionality? After all, the latter two notions, especially that of consciousness, appear to be psychological notions, and so any rejection of psychologism with respect to logic would appear irrelevant to arriving at a proper understanding of them. While there are other, relatively independent aspects of Husserl's anti-naturalism that play a role in his particular way of approaching the notions of consciousness and intentionality, there is a connection between his rejection of psychologism in logic and his conception of how consciousness and intentionality ought to be studied. Although logic is independent of thinking in the sense that logical laws bear a normative relation to any actual thought processes, at the same time the very category of thought is bound up with the idea of logical structure. That a particular psychological process merits the label "thinking" or that a particular psychological state the label "thought" indicates its having a logical structure: the state or process involves "ideal contents" that can be logically related, for example inferentially, to other states and processes with such contents. In so far as psychological states and processes partake of such ideal structures and contents, that is, in so far as they achieve the status of thinking and thoughts, then there is, paradoxical as this sounds, a non-psychological dimension of psychology. In other words, there are fundamental, definitive aspects of psychological states and processes that cannot themselves be adequately characterized in psychological terms.

An example at this point might be of assistance. Suppose I have the thought: "Plato was the teacher of Aristotle". It is easy to imagine someone else simultaneously having that very same thought, that is, a thought with the same content. Although my and the other person's having that thought involve numerically distinct psychological processes - that is, there is whatever process is going on in my mind and there is whatever process is going on in the other person's mind - there is still one thing that we think, namely that Plato was the teacher of Aristotle. What we think, the particular thought that both of us have, stands in various kinds of logical relations to other (possible) thoughts. For example, the thought "Someone was the teacher of Aristotle" follows logically from the first thought, and this is so whether the second thought ever happens to occur to me or the other person; that the second thought follows from the first holds regardless of what I or the other person (or anyone else) then go on to think. I may, after having the first thought, forget all about Aristotle and Plato, occupy myself with something else entirely, and so never draw the conclusion that someone was the teacher of Aristotle.

We can push this example further in the following way. What I have been calling the ideal content, in this case the content "Plato was the teacher of Aristotle", specifies the particular thought in question in a way that the particular psychological processes involved in my having the thought do not. What I mean here is that it is at least conceivable that another kind of creature, whose material structure is radically different from mine, could come to have the thought "Plato was the teacher of Aristotle", even though the various empirical details of that creature's psychological processes and states are thoroughly different from mine. The causal underpinnings of this imagined creature's having that thought might differ dramatically from the underpinnings of my having that thought, and yet we can each be understood to be having that one identical thought. What our thought episodes have in common, then, is not an empirical, causal structure, but an ideal content, which specifies something essential about the thought, something essential to its being the particular thought that it is, in a way that all the particular characteristics of the psychological states and processes do not.

Regardless of the empirical differences between me and this imagined creature, it is conceivable that we have the same thought, that is, that we each have thoughts that exhibit the same intentionality: each of our thoughts is about Plato and Aristotle (and about the former being the teacher of the latter). For Husserl, following Brentano, intention ality is "the mark of the mental", and so we can see him as generalizing these remarks about thought to the notion of conscious experience in its entirety. All conscious experience, in so far as it exhibits intentionality, has an essential structure that is independent of the empirical particulars of any being whose experience it is. Given this independence, the essential structure of experience cannot be understood naturalistically, that is, in terms of the empirical psychological states and processes that might be causally responsible for beings having such experience.

The role played by this notion of essential structure for Husserl indicates another aspect of his anti-naturalism. The essential structure of experience is the structure that experience has in virtue of which it is experience, which for Husserl means in virtue of which experience exhibits intentionality. As such, the notion of essential structure plays a distinctive explanatory role that cannot, Husserl thinks, be taken over by the natural sciences. This role can be discerned in a question raised by Husserl in his manifesto-like essay of 1911, "Philosophy as Rigorous Science", the lion's share of which consists of a polemic against what he sees as the prevailing naturalism of his day. The question Husserl raises is: "How can experience as consciousness give or contact an object?" (PCP: 87). Husserl's appeal to the notions of "giving" and "contacting" indicates that the question concerns the possibility of the intentionality of experience: how does experience come to be of or about objects? Such how-possible questions are transcendental questions, and Husserl thinks that such questions are beyond the scope of the natural sciences. This is so because the natural sciences, no matter how sophisticated, still operate within what Husserl calls the "natural attitude": our ordinary stance with respect to the world that takes for granted or presupposes the givenness of objects. Science, in its attempts to locate the most basic constituents of reality and delineate their causal structure, partakes of such presuppositions, just as much as we do in everyday life. As Husserl puts it, the natural sciences, and the natural attitude more generally, are "naive". To say that the natural sciences and the natural attitude are naive does not mean that there is anything wrong with them. (Husserl is no opponent of the natural sciences, nor of the natural attitude, but only of naturalism, which is, we might say, a metaphysical interpretation of the natural attitude.) The charge of naivete only indicates a limitation, not an error, on the part of the natural attitude and the natural sciences; the charge indicates that there are questions that are in principle beyond their reach.

What the charge of naiveté implies, in this context, is that any attempt to answer Husserl's how-possible questions from the standpoint of the natural sciences is hopelessly circular. Since the natural sciences presuppose a world of objects, any answers they might provide to Husserl's how-possible questions make use of the very things whose givenness is to be explained. In other words, the natural sciences (and the natural attitude more generally) cannot account for how consciousness succeeds in "contacting" objects, since any possible explanation offered by them will be couched in terms of objects, and that, from Husserl's perspective, is no explanation at all. Transcendental questions are in principle beyond the reach of the natural sciences, and so naturalism, which sees the natural sciences as the be all and end all of enquiry, amounts to little more than wilful blindness with respect to the idea of transcendental enquiry (see IOP: esp. 3-4, 13-21, 29-32).

One can find in Husserl another line of argument that challenges the viability of a natural scientific account of consciousness and, in doing so, tells against naturalism ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: opening exercises
• 1 Husserl and the project of pure phenomenology
• 2 Heidegger and the existential turn
• 3 Sartre and subjectivity
• 4 Merleau-Ponty and the phenomenology of embodiment
• 5 Problems and prospects: phenomenology and its critics
• Questions for discussion and revision
• Further reading
• References
• Index