Back to 'Things in Themselves'

A Phenomenological Foundation for Classical Realism

Josef Seifert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134479528
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

In an enlightening dialogue with Descartes, Kant, Husserl and Gadamer, Professor Seifert argues that the original inspiration of phenomenology was nothing other than the primordial insight of philosophy itself, the foundation of philosophia perennis. His radical rethinking of the phenomenological method results in a universal, objectivist philosophy in direct continuity with Plato, Aristotle and Augustine.

In order to validate the classical claim to know autonomous being, the author defends Husserl's methodological principle "Back to things themselves" from empiricist and idealist critics, including the later Husserl, and replies to the arguments of Kant which attempt to discredit the knowability of things in themselves.

Originally published in 1982, this book culminates in a phenomenological and critical unfolding of the Augustinian cogito, as giving access to immutable truth about necessary essences and the real existence of personal being.

PART I

THE CLASSICAL PRINCIPLE OF PHENOMENOLOGY: ‘BACK TO THINGS THEMSELVERS’

1

‘BACK TO THINGS THEMSELVES’: RETHINKING HUSSERL'S MAXIM AND THE NATURE OF PHILOSOPHY

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1 WHAT IS PHENOMENOLOGY?

The original maxim of phenomenology had been ‘Zurück zu den Sachen selbst:’ ‘back to things themselves.’ When Husserl addressed this call to the philosophical world of 1900–1, and when he admirably carried out in the Logical Investigations (LU) what this maxim prescribes, his new ‘phenomenological’ philosophy exerted a tremendous impact on the philosophical community of his time. While Husserl's call ‘back to things themselves’ has many meanings, it originally indicated a return especially to those objective logical, ethical, legal, and aesthetic laws and values which had been reduced to the sphere of mere subjectivity, and thus falsified, by psychologism. The call ‘back to things’ was heard at a time when practically the entire modern philosophical world, mainly under the influence of Hume's empiricism, on the one hand, and under that of Kant's transcendental critical idealism, on the other, was dominated by one form or other of skepticism or relativism. Students of philosophy who had given up hope of ever again reaching the solid ground of objective truth and being were so excited over Husserl's work that many of them left Munich for Göttingen, some even riding their bicycles for hundreds of miles, in order to witness personally the reality of the liberation that Husserl offered, a liberation from a relativistic psychologism which reduced the laws of being and logic to laws of human thinking, and denied man any access to objective and immutable truth.

In France during the early years of this century, the philosophical situation was hardly different. It was at about the same time that the young leftist students Jacques and Raissa Maritain studied at the Sorbonne; their philosophy teachers had successfully persuaded them that there was no objective reality and no absolute truth accessible to man's mind. Having despaired of ever finding any objective truth on which human existence could be based, they had already decided on the day on which they would both commit suicide. Like many students in Germany who had been swayed by the powerful influence of psychologistic relativism until they encountered Husserl, the young Maritains must have had a very similar experience to the one Friedrich Nietzsche describes so forcefully in the third Untimely Meditation (Unzeitgemésse Betrachtung); this is a work which overtly deals with Schopenhauer but, as we know from later letters and works of Nietzsche, really recounts Nietzsche's own experience. There Nietzsche expresses his conviction that every philosopher who takes his starting point from Kant will fall into a skepticism which ‘corrodes and smashes everything.’ Nietzsche expresses his own feelings in the moving words of the famous German poet Heinrich von Kleist who wrote in a letter that, after having studied Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, he felt his deepest aspirations and search for meaning had been frustrated, the ‘most sacred inner sanctuary of his soul had been deadly wounded,’ and ‘the highest and only goal of his life had sunk.’ The goal referred to by Kleist was his hope to come to know a truth which was not relative to human consciousness and opinion, a truth ‘which remains true until after the grave.’

Against this background one can better understand why many students reacted so enthusiastically when they encountered Husserl's philosophy of returning to ‘things themselves,’ which they rightly saw as a liberation from skepticism, as a return to, and rehabilitation of, classical philosophy as a study of the objective essence and being of things. But – in the opinion of the present author, tragically – after 1905 Husserl himself, and with him many of his followers, turned towards a more radical form of subjectivism and relativism than had been found in any thinker previously. The very notion of an objective, albeit unknowable, ‘thing in itself’ (still present in Kant, so to speak, as a reminder of some transcendent objective reality) was dismissed by Husserl as an ‘absurd notion.’ Every meaning and every being are, most explicitly in the Cartesian Meditations, declared to be strictly relative to human transcendental subjectivity. And Husserl charged that the Munich group of phenomenologists and all other ‘realist phenomenologists’ who did not follow him in his radical turn towards subjectivity were ‘naive,’ and failed to draw the consequences from the very principles of the phenomenological method of the ‘return to things themselves.’ This return, he claimed, could only be achieved by an epoché which puts into brackets any transcendent being and subject-independent meaning of ‘things in themselves.’

In view of Husserl's self-interpretation as to his path into transcendental phenomenology the question arises: was it really the faithfulness to, or was it rather the radical betrayal of, the phenomenological motto ‘back to things themselves’ which prompted Husserl's turn towards transcendental idealism and anthropocentric relativism? To answer this question, which is crucial because of its profound implications for the whole of phenomenology and of philosophy itself, it is first necessary to radically and critically reexamine the meaning and truth of the original phenomenological and Husserlian phrase: ‘Zurück zu den Sachen’– ‘back to things themselves.’

In the following, we are not primarily concerned with the exact Husserlian meaning of this exhortation. Rather, we ask: in what sense should the philosopher go ‘back to things themselves?’ The final goal of our analysis is nothing less than a realist reformulation of ‘phenomenologicar philosophy as a method and program for any good philosophy in the past and present. To the extent to which a philosophy is good philosophy, it will be phenomenological both in the original Husserlian sense of ‘back to things,’ and in another sense which will be explained.

As will become more and more clear, however, the term ‘phenomenology’ is utterly misleading if it is interpreted as implying that we can only reach appearances or noémata which depend on constitution by consciousness. Rather, it will become more and more apparent that the ‘return to things themselves’ is possible and that philosophy indeed comes into its own only when it grasps the objective essence of things in themselves. These things in themselves will be shown to be truly noúmena, that is, intelligible and knowable by the human mind – and not, as Kant thought, unknowable to us. This conviction of Kant should have led him to speak of anoúmena (unknowables) instead of calling them noumena. We hope to make a modest contribution in this book towards rescuing the authentic meaning of the phenomenological method as an adequate methodological instrument which allows investigation of things in themselves as well as of appearances.

(Perhaps, as Fritz Wenisch proposes, another new name should be given to such a philosophy, in order to avoid the subjectivist connotations which the term ‘phenomenology’ might retain even in the expression, ‘realist phenomenology.’ He proposes chreontic philosophy – from the Greek word, tò chréon, the necessary – which has only two further disadvantages: it sounds unfamiliar and tends to sever this philosophy from Husserl's Logical Investigations and others who spoke of phenomenology; besides, it picks only one object of philosophy, the essentially necessary, as representative for the whole object of philosophy which also includes contingent existence.)

(i) ‘Back to things themselves’ as opposed to constructions, reductionism, premature systematization or causal explanation

The principle ‘back to things’ is meant first to characterize an approach to philosophy which aims at authentic philosophizing about things. It designates a fresh thinking about the great themes and issues of philosophy, a going back to our own contact with ‘things’ as they present themselves to each man in the appropriate form of experience (sense-perception, conscious performance of acts, ‘categorial intuition,’ etc.). In this regard, the call ‘back to things themselves’ is decisive for any genuine philosophical endeavor, and it may be contrasted, first of all, with a mere study of the history of philosophical ideas, or with any one of the following attitudes: a certain narrow-minded way of becoming a disciple of one philosophical master whose word and system one puts in a place which truth alone can rightfully occupy (an attitude which keeps one from seeing any truth not contained in the system of one's ‘master’ and leads one to adopt any error or shortcoming contained in this system); or with a mere eclectic approach to philosophy, an approach in which one agrees with different philosophers even ‘accepting’ mutually contradictory statements made by them, and, above all, never confronting their opinions and statements with being as we ourselves have access to it in experience. But while this meaning of Husserl's phrase, which calls for philosophizing proper instead of replacing philosophy with historical studies or with blind and possibly ideological discipleships, already has great appeal for, and promises philosophical life to those who have blindly accepted texts and textbooks, or who have gone through ‘dead’ studies of texts and of the history of thought during which the question of the truth of the studied opinions is never even raised, the phrase ‘back to things themselves’ has the further appeal of pointing to the proper way of doing philosophy.

This way of doing philosophy consists in confronting the essence and content of a being itself, that which truly constitutes a thing in its own identity. The term ‘thing’ here refers to absolutely everything (even to nothing when it is a question of determining what exactly is meant by ‘nothing’). The terms ‘phenomenon’ and ‘the phenomena’ as object of the ‘phenomenological method’ in our sense do not in the slightest way – although the root of the word (in the Greek phaínesthai) might suggest otherwise – indicate a mere ‘seeming’ or ‘appearing’ of things (‘to seem,’ ‘to appear’ being possible meanings of the Greek verb). Rather, the term phenomenon in its original phenomenological sense refers to another set of important meanings of the word phaínesthai: ‘to show itself,’ ‘to manifest itself,’ ‘to shine forth from itself,’ ‘to present itself from itself.’ It is the essence, nature and being of things as they present themselves in their intelligibility from themselves, which are here called phenomena. It is, in other words, the pure, intelligible and undistorted nature, precisely the nature of a being as it is not obscured by mere appearances, by misleading aspects, or by mere seeming; it is the being itself of things which is referred to. The phenomenological method, then, fundamentally consists in absolute faithfulness to the voice of being and in the unrelenting attempt of the philosopher to go back to things themselves as they show themselves as well from their very own being and essence as by the mediation of other things. Philosophers frequently lose sight of ‘things themselves’ in this simple and yet fundamental sense, and engage in constructions and inadequate explanations.

A phenomenological grasp of things themselves ought to be the goal of any good philosophy. The phenomenological method, interpreted in this way, is not a single or a narrow method of philosophy, but the method and the broadest possible method of philosophy which is open to every meaning and being and seeks out the appropriate form of givenness, knowledge, experience and so on, in which each being discloses itself. This method opposes itself to any form of distancing one's theories from being, to any failure to listen to the voice of things, to any putting obstacles into the way of their presenting their own intelligibility to our minds. Hence, to fail to proceed phenomenologically in this broad sense (which refers to the valid philosophical methods and contributions of any philosopher) is to fail to philosophize properly. But there are countless obstacles to philosophizing properly, and therefore an explicit reflection on the nature of the proper philosophical method and on its distortions is urgently called for.

(ii) Starting out in philosophical analyses with causal explanations prevents the understanding of ‘things themselves’

A failure to pay attention to the proper essence of a being can have many different roots. One of the first of these is a precipitous and excessive concern with immediately ‘explaining’ a thing prior to understanding it. What comes into play here is the tendency of thinkers to trace a thing back immediately to its real or alleged origins and efficient causes, or to its final causes and purposes, without having delved into what the thing itself shows itself to be. Even if the deepest and ultimate explanation of a thing were to lie in its efficient or final cause, one ought first to understand its own nature. For instance, before one even attempts to explain the datum of moral oughtness through its alleged ‘end’ or final cause, e.g., human happiness or utility, one needs first to investigate morality and oughtness themselves. One ought first to pay attention to their essential characteristics, and to see only later whether these allow for a purely teleological, eudaemonistic, or consequentialist explanation of morality. And any eudaemonism or utilitarian consequentialism will indeed turn out to be utterly unable to explain truly and make understandable what morality and ‘oughtness’ show themselves to be. Even if one disagrees with this or any other concrete example we might choose to illustrate this point, one can hardly fail to admit the following fact: To look immediately for the efficient causes, effects, ends or relations of a given thing, except to the extent to which these elucidate its essence, from the very outset blocks the way to an adequate understanding of that being. It will be impossible to understand it adequately, if it is not first grasped in its own proper nature, if it does not first ‘show itself from itself,’ to borrow a telling Heideggerian phrase.

The general need to investigate a thing itself before searching for its causes applies especially in those cases where the causes are very difficult to determine, where they must be misinterpreted when assumed on the basis of an insufficient understanding of the proper nature of a thing, or where they are so far removed from their effects that they literally contribute little or nothing to the understanding of the intrinsic, inherent nature of the being in question. Thus, for example, the exact study of brain-waves and neural patterns of electro-chemical charges and discharges, as such, does not elucidate in the least the essence of what is frequently inter-preted as the effect of these brain-events, such as, for example, feelings of pain and pleasure, or intellectual acts. For these brain-waves are toto coelo distinct from the psychic phenomena whose nature they are supposed to explain; and, as the Platonic Socrates in the Phaedo s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Analytical table of contents
• Preface
• Part I: The classical principle of phenomenology: ‘Back to things themselves’
• Part II: The cogito and indubitable knowledge
• Part III: Objective knowledge of ‘things in themselves’
• Notes
• Index