Contemporary Continental Philosophy

Robert D'amico

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429981012
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book shows how the continental philosophical tradition developed in the twentieth century in a philosophically distinct manner. It focuses on the central philosophical ideas, specifically the core issues in epistemology and ontology, that constitute this tradition or approach as distinct.

1
PHENOMENOLOGY

Edmund Husserl came to intellectual maturity at a time when philosophy was coming to be viewed with considerable disdain and suspicion. This discredit extended not only to the way philosophy had been traditionally written and discussed, especially in the worst of its “Romantic excess” (as Husserl called it) among the German idealists, but to the very purpose of philosophy as a subject matter, whatever its style. Husserl’s generation had begun to think of philosophers as failed scientists at best and charlatans at worst. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the fields of psychology, logic, and mathematics reached levels of development that were assumed to eclipse any claim by philosophy to universal inquiry. For example, Franz Brentano, Husserl’s teacher, debunked the philosophical tradition in his 1889 lecture “On the Concept of Truth”:

I consider Kant’s entire philosophy a confusion, and one which gave rise to even greater mistakes, and which, finally, led to complete philosophical chaos. I do believe that I learned a great deal from Kant; I learned, however, not what he wanted to teach me, but, above all, how seductive for the philosophical public, and how deceptive, is the fame which the history of philosophy has tied to names. Every man who has made history must have had a powerful personality; but in any particular case the question will remain whether the influence of the personality was beneficial or disastrous, and whether we do well to make him our ideal and our master.¹

Though Husserl would come to think more highly of Kant than did Brentano, this passage emphasizes the kind of break with the authority of the philosophical tradition that was no doubt liberating for a young, ambitious scholar such as Husserl. Husserl’s later reformatory project for philosophy was predicated on the dismal failure of the philosophical tradition to solve, let alone clearly state, its basic problems. The endless debates and ever shifting vocabularies of both eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophy struck Husserl as symptomatic of deep confusions and unexamined assumptions that were eroding what he continued to consider, in spite of his teacher’s doubts, an irreplaceable and important discipline. He saw the perpetuation of this state of confusion as not only weakening philosophy, but encouraging dogmatism in the sciences, a development Husserl feared would ultimately halt scientific progress and foster irrationalism.² These fears were especially strong toward the end of his life when he warned that “specialized science” and the “fashionable degenerations of philosophy into irrationalistic busy-work” would fully discredit the idea of “philosophy as the ultimately grounding and universal science” (Crisis 197).

Husserl sought to conserve the “inextinguishable idea of philosophy” while accepting, in large part, contemporary criticisms of traditional philosophy. To preserve philosophy in this way without repeating traditional failure, Husserl pursued two aims. First, he proposed a methodology for philosophical research, which he called alternatively phenomenology, the phenomenological reduction, or transcendental phenomenology, capable of reaching agreement on and resolving long-standing philosophical disputes. In his view, a strict methodology was the key to rescuing philosophy from endless clashes of speculative systems, rhetorical flourishes, and the appeal to unexamined prejudices and assumptions. Lacking methodological reform, philosophical debate remains sterile and pointless. If there were no agreed upon procedures for settling philosophical disputes, philosophers would continue to follow their mere whims.

Second, Husserl held, now clashing with the mood of his contemporaries, that philosophical questions could not be replaced by further scientific inquiry. Specifically, philosophy could not be eliminated by any future science of psychology. Husserl thus found it necessary to defend what he considered the essential task of philosophy (though not of course as traditionally pursued) and in addition, as his thinking matured, philosophical idealism.

Though Husserl’s dense, jargon-laden prose makes it difficult, it is important to keep the following topics distinct when critically examining his views. First, much of Husserl’s writing is preparatory to philosophical inquiry and is explicitly neutral between competing philosophical views.³ Second, Husserl often mounts a defense of the entire enterprise of philosophy against what he calls “naturalism,” his general term for efforts to replace philosophy by scientific explanation. But the argument that philosophical problems persist in spite of scientific successes, or that naturalism fails to understand its own philosophical underpinnings, does not immediately suggest which philosophical position one ought to defend.

Finally, there are those writings in which Husserl defends a version of transcendental idealism, a view he contrasts with past and present philosophies. Though these arguments are partisan, unlike the preparatory discussions, Husserl does not present transcendental idealism as challenging the empirical claims of either common sense or the sciences.

If the different intent of these three contexts is not kept in view, with regard to the relation between philosophy and science, Husserl’s already complex effort becomes hopelessly muddled and confused. For example, Husserl is not, in any literal sense, a critic of the sciences, an antirationalist, or an idealist in the traditional sense of that term.⁴ Husserl’s methodological strategy, which I will discuss at length below, is meant to uncover philosophical assumptions in the way science has been understood, but not to compete with or replace the sciences; nor does he propose, as he has been widely misread, a new scientific method; nor are his criticisms of naturalism support for some religious, mystical, or moral conception of nature. Husserl is a critic of naturalism because of its implied philosophy of science, not because he believes science is either dangerous or inadequate to the task of comprehending the natural world. Selective or elliptical quotations, however, contribute to such misinterpretations, which are reinforced, unfortunately, by Husserl’s tendency toward careless and confusing presentations of his main ideas.

In this chapter I begin with Husserl’s general defense of philosophy, a position I think has relevance for current philosophy, even among those unaware of Husserl’s work. The second part of this chapter concerns Husserl’s method and his excessively technical vocabulary. In the third part I discuss what he means by transcendental idealism. I characterize Husserl as an epistemological “internalist,” a current term for characterizing an approach to the theory of knowledge since Descartes. The philosophical project of pure, internal inquiry is one Husserl embraces and attempts to defend against its critics.⁵

Husserl’s idealism came under sustained criticism by many of his followers. The chapter concludes with these criticisms, focusing primarily on Maurice Merleau-Ponty. A discussion of Husserl’s critical reaction to cultural and historical relativism, including comments on his late writings, are found in the fourth part.

The Inextinguishable Task

Husserl defended a strict distinction between philosophical questions and empirical questions about the natural world. He argued that confusing philosophical with scientific questions generated “naive” (the adjective Husserl favored) philosophical positions. The failure to understand the autonomy of philosophy and the attempt to seek its elimination by science were symptoms of what Husserl called an intellectual and cultural crisis.

The basic distinction between empirical and philosophical questions has been a leitmotif of twentieth-century philosophy. Echoes of it, with diverse implications, can be heard in such major thinkers of Husserl’s generation as Bertrand Russell, Rudolf Carnap, G. E. Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and William James. This distinction, it has been argued, rests upon a more basic distinction between analytic and synthetic claims, or upon the a posteriori/a priori distinction. This entire network of distinctions has, however, been under sustained attack in much of current philosophy.⁶ Weakening the distinction between analytic and empirical claims is often credited with weakening confidence in the entire idea of an autonomous philosophical subject matter and thereby supporting some form of naturalism.

Husserl never doubted the clarity of this central distinction and upon it he proclaimed the “dream” of philosophy becoming a “rigorous science.”⁷ A robust and straightforward statement of this distinction, unusual for Husserl, occurs in his programmatic essay “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science.” Husserl argues there that the failure to distinguish clearly between what is empirical and what is a matter of a priori necessity concerning knowledge is at the root of both cultural and theoretical confusions, confusions a properly understood philosophy would dispel.

Husserl, using the language of Kant, states the distinction as that between what can be known as a contingent matter of fact about the world—what is synthetic, a posteriori, or experiential—and that which can be known necessarily, purely as a matter of the concepts involved—what is analytic, a priori, or “pure,” the last a term he often uses. These essential aspects of experience discovered by philosophical reflection constrain any possible empirical inquiries, and therefore, like mathematics, philosophy precedes factual inquiry. Philosophical topics concern a priori necessities of experience and thus stand apart from disputes about contingent matters of fact.⁸

Husserl was aware of how seductive it was to run roughshod over this distinction. In his earliest major publication, The Philosophy of Arithmetic, he had entertained the possibility of a type of empirical, psychological inquiry into the formal structures of mathematics and arithmetic. Though precisely what Husserl claimed in that early work about psychology is beyond the scope of this discussion, he came to see his early efforts as implicitly collapsing the formal necessity of arithmetic relations into whatever were contingent features of how our minds operate and function.

Husserl quickly abandoned this early project, though he did not entirely abandon some results of that work and its overall aim, and concluded that no possible discovery in psychology would result in a situation in which what were previously thought to be problems in arithmetic suddenly revealed themselves as those of experimental psychology. Mathematics does not await breakthroughs in cognitive psychology. In flirting with that possibility, even if he did not exhibit the crude errors of a Millian psychologist on this topic, Husserl had fallen prey to confusions, betraying thereby an early philosophical “naïveté.”

The “absurdities” Husserl warns of arise because the a priori/a posteriori distinction preserves what he considers an irreducible difference in the type of knowledge involved. The certainty and indubitability of mathematics is due to its truths depending only on what Husserl calls “pure” relations of meaning. Whatever knowledge is gained of psychology or human neurophysiology is, in contrast, contingent and empirical. Even if these discoveries concern regularities, they do not concern whatever must be the case, as in the pure, essential necessities, but whatever as a matter of fact happens to be the case, given the contingent features of the natural world.

The facts of the natural world cannot be converted into the foundation of formal or conceptual necessity. That insight may have been Husserl’s most important intellectual breakthrough. To speak of the formal or conceptual necessity as though it were a species of causation, for instance, is a prime example of what he dismisses as an “absurd” confusion.

Husserl will furthermore hold, as discussed below, or meaningful necessities extend to how the world is presented phenomenally in any mental experience whatsoever. Hence, by the phrase “mental experience” Husserl is not restricting himself to neurological and psychological facts about human experience. There is rather a pure form of any possible experience, and with regard to the term “phenomena” he asserts: “To attribute a nature to phenomena, to investigate their component parts, their causal connections—that is pure absurdity, no better than if one wanted to ask about the causal properties, connections, etc., of numbers. It is the absurdity of naturalizing something whose essence excludes the kind of being that nature has” (PRS 106).

Whether philosophy could be subsumed under or replaced by inquiry in the sciences resolves, for Husserl, into the question of whether reason can be naturalized.⁹ What does that additional question mean? Husserl uses the term “naturalism” as a characterization of the underlying conceptions of the sciences and the “common sense conception of the world” (or perhaps, more accurately, the idea of common sense as shaped by the modern scientific revolution). The natural attitude views the world as a collection of objects and physical processes whose properties, dispositions, and regularities can be captured by scientific laws (and thus partly explained, controlled, and predicted). This physicalist picture extends, in principle, to psychology and sociology, in which psychophysical beings and complex social or institutional objects also exhibit lawlike regularities. In that sense, naturalism is a summary of the results of a long history of empirical inquiry. It is also not itself a philosophical claim about the world.

Husserl, however, also uses the term “naturalism” to refer to the protophilosophical views that emerge within this general picture of the natural world. Such views range from those held implicitly within untutored common sense (as in the spontaneous opinions of laypersons or scientists) to explicit philosophical positions such as logical positivism (which Husserl calls “sensation-monism”) and pragmatism. All these diverse accounts of science and its supremacy over competitors share, in Husserl’s opinion, the key philosophical assumption that consciousness, and thus reason itself, can be studied in the same manner as any other natural object and thereby explained as processes falling under ideal scientific laws. These otherwise diverse positions then agree in treating philosophical inquiry as obsolete and converting the above empirical results into some prototype of a scientific study of epistemology and reason.

This discussion requires a brief warning or digression before I proceed with Husserl’s explicit arguments against the project of naturalizing reason and consciousness. It would be wrong to leap to the conclusion that Husserl, by virtue of his opposition to the above, believes that consciousness, and whatever it is that physically makes it possible for humans to reason, cannot be studied by the natural sciences or that consciousness is not a natural phenomena. In fact, Husserl makes clear in numerous passages that he considers human beings natural, psychophysical beings whose psychological states are caused by or realized in their neurophysiological states. Human behavior and its dispositions, like any natural objects, are subsumable under scientific laws in his view, and thus consciousness, in that sense, can be an object of scientific study like any other object.

But when Husserl asks whether reason can be naturalized, he is not asking whether psychological studies of reasoning are possible. Husserl’s question is epistemological, not empirical. The possibility of naturalizing reason concerns, then, a philosophical position with regard to reason. He views the persistent effort to dismiss the difference between these two questions as the root of naturalism’s illusory escape from philosophical quandaries.

In unintentionally reinforcing this illusion, some readers of Husserl have mistaken his discussion of this philosophical problem for a dispute about the scientific status of psychology, as though Husserl were arguing that a science of human behavior was impossible. But taking a stance on the future of psychology or inventing a new method for psychology is as alien to Husserl’s intent as it would be to think he intends to reinvent physics as a result of the same philosophical inadequacies of naturalism. This misreading of Husserl is simply a failure to make the distinctions he laboriously defends.

Precisely in the energy with which naturalism seeks to realize the principle of scientific rigor in all the spheres of natural and spirit, in theory and practice, and in the energy with which naturalism seeks to solve the philosophical problems of being and value… lies its merit and the major part of its strength in our era [emphasis added]. There is, perhaps, in all modern life no more powerfully, more irresistibly progressing idea than that of science. Nothing will hinder its victorious advance [emphasis added]… there belong in the domain of strict science all the theoretical, axiological, and practical ideals that...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Phenomenology
• 2 Ontology
• 3 Social Epistemology
• 4 Interpretation
• 5 The New Sophists
• Conclusion
• Index