Phenomenology and the Problem of Time

Michael R. Kelly

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137314475
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book explores the problem of time and immanence for phenomenology in the work of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jacques Derrida. Detailed readings of immanence in light of the more familiar problems of time-consciousness and temporality provide the framework for evaluating both Husserl's efforts to break free of modern philosophy's notions of immanence, and the influence Heidegger's criticism of Husserl exercised over Merleau-Ponty's and Derrida's alternatives to Husserl's phenomenology. Ultimately exploring various notions of intentionality, these in-depth analyses of immanence and temporality suggest a new perspective on themes central to phenomenology's development as a movement and raise for debate the question of where phenomenology begins and ends.

Part I
Phenomenology and the Problem of Time

© The Author(s) 2016

Michael R. KellyPhenomenology and the Problem of Time10.1057/978-1-137-31447-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Time, Intentionality, and Immanence in Modern Idealism

Michael R. Kelly¹

(1)

San Diego, California, USA

End Abstract

Grasping the uniqueness of the phenomenological movement requires an answer to the now old question of whether Husserl’s phenomenology reinvents the problems that plagued Cartesian or Kantian philosophy. The answer to this question requires, in turn, attention to Husserl’s often overlooked thoughts about immanence, the strategic distinctions he draws within this term, and how these distinctions shed light on more well-known accounts of the phenomenological reduction and intentionality. Given the tendency of phenomenologists after Husserl to criticize his thought in light of his view of immanence, one could say that beginning to understand phenomenology and the early stages of the phenomenological movement rests on understanding the relationship Husserl articulates between intentionality and immanence. Absent of an understanding of Husserl’s account of these related issues, a reader of the phenomenological movement can critically appreciate neither the criticisms Husserl levied against modern views of immanence, nor the criticisms levied against Husserl’s purported view of immanence as a residuum of Cartesian or Kantian idealism. Let’s begin, then, with something like Husserl’s view of Descartes’ and Kant’s views of subjectivity, namely, immanence.

The general story of Descartes’ and Kant’s epistemologies suggests that their respective ontological assumptions stem from their methodological assumptions and place debilitating restrictions on their theories of immanence. Each in his own way reduces awareness to the quest for “certain” knowledge of objects construed as a certain class of objects judged about in a restrictive mode of intentionality, act-intentionality, denoted by the relation between a (certain) knowing subject and an (uncertain) object known. In addition to the popular problem of appearances that characterizes these epistemological models, the problem of the consciousness of time brings into relief the shortcomings of these models’ view of intentionality.

In light of these issues, Husserl’s phenomenology defines itself as a theory that does not reduce transcendence to immanence, object to subject, outer to inner. Moreover, as Merleau-Ponty perhaps captured best, phenomenology makes its advance beyond modern subjective idealism when Husserl articulates a seminal distinction:

between intentionality of act, which is that of our judgments and of those occasions when we voluntarily take up a position—the only intentionality discussed in Critique of Pure Reason—and operative intentionality [fungierende Intentionalität] or that which produces the natural and antepredicative unity of the world and of our life. (PP xviii/xiii)

This insight into the antepredicative and judicative character of intentionality underscores our view of intentionality in Husserl as something that is not a bridge between two islands of mind and world, subject and object, immanence and transcendence. These two forms of awareness—act-intentionality and operative-intentionality—respectively denote deliberative (“voluntary”) versus tacit (“natural”) encounters with the world. Of course, “natural” in this case means something like intuitive or lived rather than physical or causal, the living we engage in before philosophizing too much about what we’re doing. The distinction is something like conceptual versus non-conceptual or articulated versus unarticulated experience, and it captures the main oversight that produced modern subjective idealism’s view of immanence, that is, its restrictive model of intentionality.

The twofold weakness of an exclusively act-intentionality model of awareness in modern subjective idealism we already have seen. First, neither Descartes nor Kant can account for represented transcendent objects; this is commonly referred to as the problem of appearances or transcendence. Second, both create a constructive dilemma with respect to the givenness of the self, the subject, which insofar as it lacks “time” can account for itself only on pain of an infinite regress or a vicious circularity. For both thinkers, with respect to both problems, examining the shortcomings of an exclusively act-intentionality model of awareness reveals the importance of time, specifically time-consciousness, for providing a coherent view of the subject and object, the self and other, and thus for providing a full view of intentionality—a genuine phenomenological immanence—and its return to the things (Sache or matters) themselves. One cannot separate the matter of immanence from the theory of intentionality, and one cannot separate the matter of intentionality from the matter of time-consciousness. As we shall see, while even Husserl agrees that Kant gropes beyond Descartes toward a different view of intentionality in the form of time-consciousness, Merleau-Ponty remains correct in his assessment of Kant’s Critique from a phenomenological perspective (even if unfair to Kant within Kant’s own system). Indeed, Husserl’s identification of Kant’s shortcoming rests in large part on his account of the consciousness of time given its restriction to an act-intentionality model of awareness.

An Internal and Systematic Deficiency in Descartes’ Theory of Psychological Immanence

Motivated by the quest for “the plain certainty of experience,” Descartes rooted knowledge in the subject’s self-grasping of its ideas free from the skepticism that threatened to undermine the science of his time (Crisis 104). It is well known that Descartes divorced the thinking substance from even its own extended substance (the body). The methodological conclusion that the indubitable inner provides a secure knowledge base against the dubious outer, one could say, amounts to an ontological distinction generated by the model of act-intentionality. With certainty, one knows that “one thinks one sees” or that “one thinks one feels,” and so on. Since any reference beyond the thinking substance returns philosophy to skepticism, Descartes concludes in his “Second Meditation” that even the “perception” (or certain perception) of the changing wax is really just judging—act-intentionality. The indubitable space of act-intentionality—the security of judging with respect to the mind’s ideas rather than sensing in relation to objects perceived—thus always denotes the reflective, objectifying act of consciousness where a knower from on high examines securely and with certainty experience as constituted. Act-intentionality gives the philosopher an object for a subject in theoretical regard, something abstracted from concrete, living-experience, that is, the type of experience we live before the account provided by reflective judgment.

As we shall see in the ensuing chapters, Husserl’s phenomenological method differs in important ways from Descartes’s doubt, and all of the phenomenologists we shall cover strive, in their various ways, to describe this type of experience we live before (anterior to) the account provided by reflective judgment. A more complete return to the things themselves is a return that also tries to give voice to this dimension of “mute experience which must be brought to the pure expression of its own sense”—that operative-intentionality upon which act-intentionality rests. ¹ For now, we should explore how Descartes’ ontological and methodological commitments blind him to this primal level of experience and its correlative mode of intentionality.

Descartes’ quest for certainty begets his ontological assumptions, which create a model that we have seen Husserl term “psychological immanence.” Psychological immanence, recall, denotes an ontological distinction between regions—a finite, unextended thinking substance and a finite, extended material substance—that of a subjective idealism. ² As Husserl put it, psychological immanence holds that the object of knowledge resides “in the consciousness of a person,” however curiously Descartes understood the person, “and in a mental phenomenon” that represents that object (IP 64). The primary limitation of restricting all intentionality to act-intentionality, which we now can see construes all awareness as a dyadic relation between a knowing subject and a known object, is twofold. First, objects always only “appear” in relation to a founding subject whose thoughts and judgments mediate or represent access to the world. Second, restricting awareness to act-intentionality means Descartes cannot account for self-consciousness otherwise than as it represents itself to itself in the same way that it represents an object to itself. An exclusive view of intentionality as act-intentionality thus invites a game of epistemic tail chasing that leaves hidden the self that does the reflecting, that is, it generates an infinite regress or vicious circularity, and fails to capture the manner of givenness of the self. ³ Since this psychological model of immanence captures the thought—the idea judged about—but neither the thinking nor what is thought about, immanence and transcendence both receive inadequate treatment.

The problems with Descartes’ subjective idealism and its corresponding psychological immanence with respect to transcendence are well known. But some readers might find this assessment of the Cartesian legacy regarding the self unwarranted. Descartes himself never explicitly thematizes the problem of immanence. ⁴ From the premise that the claim “perhaps I too do not exist” is self-defeating, Descartes makes his discovery of a knowing subject understood as a thinking thing (res) accompanying all “sense” experience properly judged. He writes,

Is it not the very same “I” who now doubts almost everything, who nevertheless understands something, who affirms that this one thing is true, who denies other things … ? … It is so obvious that it is I who doubt, I who understand … Finally, it is this same “I” who senses or who is cognizant of bodily things as if through the senses. For example, I now see a light, I hear a noise, I feel heat. These things are false … Yet I certainly do seem to see, hear and feel warmth. This cannot be false. Properly speaking, this … is nothing other than thinking. ⁵

Rather than report reflectively on the self, one might say, for Descartes it is “obvious”—or at least indubitable once properly understood—that the “I” underscores all experience in its thinking and judging. The thinking substance enjoys a moment of self-apperception, as it were. As Descartes states elsewhere, “by the word ‘thought’ I understand everything that happens in us in such a way that we perceive it immediately by ourselves.” ⁶ Why, then, is this immediate thought and self-apperception not an instance of operative-intentionality, that mute experience brought to the expression of its own sense? ⁷

A defense of the Cartesian subject along the lines of apperception will not work. Insisting that one has an immediate, apperceptive self-consciousness and convincingly describing that apperceptive self-consciousness are two very different tricks. Descartes (and indeed the rationalist and empiricist traditions to follow, at least up to Hume) understood the mind as a thing, a res, that has thoughts and images in the mind in the same way that a physical thing has properties of extension and mutability. ⁸ The issue of perception amounts, for Descartes, to the apprehension of one’s thought—the Cartesian theater or realm of the “judged of”—in order to retain consistency, certainty, infallibility, and incorrigibility in knowledge. On his view, then, insofar as any awareness—any intentionality—requires a secure foundation, it reduces to a relation between a founding subject and a founded object, a knower judging about rather than perceiving a known; all other experiences are negated methodologically, muted, if you will. As the passage just quoted indicates, all conscious acts—seeing, feeling, etc.—reduce to judgment. The act of remembering, as the “Third Mediation” makes clear, amounts to an immediate judgment, the series of which, both with respect to the subject and the object over time, only the goodness of God can hold together. Since all awareness amounts to the relation between a knower and a known, Descartes must admit that for consciousness to become self-consciousness (rather than a merely presupposed sense of immediate, atomistic, apperceptive awareness) it must represent itself to itself in the same way that it represents an object to itself. ⁹ Descartes’ principle of self-consciousness must admit that “the subject has the status of object or representation for itself.” ¹⁰

Descartes’ act-intentionality model of awareness leaves as its legacy what is now known as the “reflection theory” of self-consciousness. Insofar as reflection theorists maintain that self-consciousness arises as the result of a relation between two relata, that is, the reflecting subject and its objectified mental states, it cannot access the functioning subject. Descartes thus loses the reflecting subject in either an infinite regress or a vicious circularity. Let us deal in turn with the horns of this dilemma.

If the subject of which we supposedly have gained awareness through reflection is but an object re-presented to the actively reflecting subject via internal perception (judgment), then an account of genuine self-awareness awaits an additional, third self to reflect on the (second) presently reflecting self that eludes the reflected content, and so on, ad infinitum. Stated differently, when the second, reflecting subject reflects on the first, previously functioning subject, the second, reflecting subject remains unaware in its functioning, according to the restrictions in Descartes’ act-intentionality epistemological model. Insofar as the subject doing the reflecting remains unaware of itself in its activity of reflecting—in its operative-intentionality—it becomes difficult to see how this subject could in reflection gain awareness of that which Descartes’ epistemological premises originally denied it. The game of epistemic tail chasing cannot be won, cannot be stopped.

Proponents of an exclusive act-intentionality view of awareness and so self-consciousness might suggest, in order to halt this regress, that the subject is already in a state of self-awareness before reflection. Descartes himself seems to suggest that the apperceptive thinking thing accompanies all perception. But if a proponent of the reflection theory chooses to parry the critique of an infinite regress in this manner, she violates the logical law, petitio principii, and finds herself caught in a circular argument that presupposes that which she has set out to prove, namely, the self’s mode of self-givenness or self-manifestation. ¹¹ Descartes, of course, was not involved in this kind of Cartesian circle. But the alternative of apperception would be in tension with the reflection theory’s most fundamental premise, which claims that self-consciousness arises out of reflection, a claim that stems, in turn, from the premise that all awareness co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Phenomenology and the Problem of Time
• 2. The Problem of Time and Phenomenology
• Backmatter