The last function of reason is to recognize that there are an infinity of things which surpass it. (Pascal, Pensées)
Abstract
This article considers the differences between Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in light of Pascal’s distinction between the esprit de géometrie and the esprit de finesse. According to Pascal, the essential “principles” dominating our perceptual lives cannot be clearly and confidently demonstrated in a manner akin to logic and mathematics, but must be discerned in a more spontaneous or intuitive manner.
It is unsurprising that Husserl, originally a student of mathematics, might seem closer to the esprit de géometrie, whereas Heidegger, trained in theology and drawn to poets and poetic thinkers, is closer to the esprit de finesse. This difference is clear from the styles of writing of these two seminal figures. I consider how this stylistic difference is also linked with the substance of their respective philosophies, and with the approaches they recommend for exploring subjective life. A related difference concerns how each theorist responds to what Husserl called the “paradox of human subjectivity” and what Michel Foucault later termed the “empirico-transcendental doublet”: the fact that, in doing phenomenology, human consciousness exists as both the subject and the object of our knowing. Husserl mostly emphasized the advantages, epistemological and existential, that this potential reflexivity can afford. Heidegger was more interested in the obstacles or traps it sets—both for accurate self-knowledge and for authentic living. These issues are discussed in relation to the “natural attitude” and “everydayness,” and to the linguistic grounding of human existence and knowledge—especially as these issues emerge in Foucault’s Les mots et les choses and Eugen Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation.
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Notes
Husserl: In Modern German Philosophy, Bubner (1981, p. 21) writes: “Every reader of Husserl knows, however, what an abstract categorical apparatus, what a clatter of terminology, what a pedantic mania for distinctions he encounters on every page, both of the words published in his life time and of the other works which have since become available. The philosophy of the concrete is itself extremely abstract.”
Heidegger: Consider, e.g., Adorno’s Jargon of Authenticity (1973).
See also Gilbert Ryle’s highly ambivalent but surprisingly appreciative review of Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), published in Mind in 1929. Ryle (1929) describes Heidegger as “a thinker of real importance by the immense subtlety and searchingness of his examination of consciousness, by the boldness and originality of his methods and conclusions, and by the unflagging energy with which he tries to think behind the stock categories of orthodox philosophy and psychology.”
Yet Ryle also writes: “And I must also say, in his behalf, that while it is my personal opinion that qua First Philosophy Phenomenology is at present heading for bankruptcy and disaster and will end either in self-ruinous Subjectivism or in a windy mysticism, I hazard this opinion with humility and with reservations since I am well aware how far I have fallen short of understanding this difficult work.”
See Bruzina (1978, p. 184) the highly metaphorical nature of Heidegger’s language and certain associated paradoxes, which include, in fact, Heidegger’s “dismissal of the designation metaphorical for characterizing his philosophic language” (p. 195). See note #56 Bruzina (1978) below.
The term “apodictic” appears frequently in Husserl’s Crisis; see 1970b, pp. 72, 77, 78, 89, 199, 337, 339, 340, 375, 377. On Eugen Fink’s questioning of the applicability of this concept to the transcendental realm, see Bruzina (1995, p.lxxxv note 147).
“Mark of truth”: Being and Time (Heidegger 1996, p. 403), quoting Count Yorck); Yorck’s line is quoted later in the main text of the present article. This might be contrasted with Husserl’s insistence in the Crisis that the “paradox of human subjectivity” must necessarily be solved or resolved, since otherwise a truly serious difficulty…assails our whole undertaking,” given that, in that case, the “actually universal and radical epoché,” which is required for the phenomenological enterprise, “could not be carried out at all” (1970b, pp. 178, 180, 182). A contemporary Husserlian expresses a similar sentiment in a more moderate manner: “…[P]aradoxes are not exactly the kind of things I would like to collect and hoard, so if it were possible to avoid or at least diminish the paradox while remaining true to the phenomenon, I would obviously prefer that” (Zahavi 2002, p. 107).
Some philosophers adopt a more positive attitude toward paradox. Thomas Nagel (1986, p. 4) makes this point regarding the irresolvable conflicts between internal and external perspectives that are so central for human existence. Sometimes, he writes, we are simply “stuck with the clash of standpoints”; indeed, certain forms of both perplexity and logical inconsistency may “embody more insight than any of the supposed solutions to those problems.” This, I believe, is also the underlying intuition of both Ludwig Wittgenstein and Michel Foucault (Sass 2008, 2009).
Adapted from Buffon: Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, who in 1753 delivered his celebrated Discours sur le style (“Discourse on Style”), containing the line, “Le style c’est l’homme même” (“The style is the man himself”).
Quoted in Bruzina (1995, pp. xi; lxxi).
Heidegger (1996, p. 38). Heidegger continues: “We can understand phenomenology solely by seizing on it as a possibility.”
Husserl (1970b , p. 178, #53) in the Crisis: “The paradox of human subjectivity: being a subject for the world and at the same time being an object in the world.”
Husserl (1970b, pp. 179, 181).
See Carr (1999, p. 134).
Drummond (2002, p. 96) summarizes the conflicting perspectives: “[T]he transcendental self is not in the world at all in the sense that the empirical self is; the transcendental self is of or for the world, a subject intentionally related to its object.” Carr (1999, p. 135) describes the ensuing dilemma: “From the perspective of each, the other appears somehow bizarre, unreal. From that of the natural attitude, the transcendental subject seems artificial, contrived, a mere fiction. From that of the transcendental attitude, the world as a whole, including my (empirical) self within it, looms as ‘phenomenon,’ its reality placed in abeyance or suspension.”
In his survey of published interpretations of Husserl’s paradox of subjectivity, Durt (2020, p. 79) distinguishes viewpoints according to whether they emphasize (what he terms) universal intersubjectivity, ontic issues, epistemic issues, embodiment, and the natural-versus-phenomenological attitudes.
Foucault (1994, p. 318).
Husserl (1989, p. 107) quoted in Carr (1999, p. 125). As Carr rightly notes, “For Husserl, indeed, all theoretical concepts have their origin in the pre-given life-world.” (1999, pp. 125, 135) Both Carr (1999, pp. 134–135) and Durt (2020, pp. 80–83) consider the paradox of subjectivity to be rooted in “ordinary experience” or “ordinary consciousness,” in our “pre- or extra-theoretical life.” Both argue that what Sartre calls the “fissures” of ordinary consciousness may only be revealed in certain abnormal states of mind involving “a special and exaggerated awareness of one’s consciousness” (Durt 2020, p. 82) such as may be characteristic of schizophrenia or psychosis.
In Madness and Modernism Louis Sass (2017 [orig 1992], pp. 269–282 and passim.), Louis Sass considers this latter point in considerable detail. He discusses schizophrenia as an acutely self-conscious or “hyperreflexive” mode of experience, and offers a detailed analysis of one patient’s close parallels to the paradoxes of the post-Kantian empirico-transcendental doublet (“A Metaphysical Illness,” pp. 276–281). Discussion of Sass’s argument can be found in Carr (1999, pp. 135–136).
In The View from Nowhere, Nagel (1986, pp. 3, 64; also quoted in Carr 1999 pp. 131, 132) considers these same paradoxes, which derive from the problem of “how to combine the perspective of a particular person inside the world with an objective view of that same world, the person and his viewpoint included.” All this involves “a strange sense that I both am and am not the hub of the universe”.
See Bruzina (1995, pp. lii and lxxxix note 192) on the notion of “natural attitude,” specifically: whether this should be understood as some kind of “factual, behavior-setting orientation” versus the (more existentially oriented, or perhaps transcendental) “condition of the possibility of all factual attitudes” (p. lii), perhaps better captured as “captivation in/by/to the world.” Fink preferred the latter phrasing—which he conceived as a “distancing” from Husserl.
Husserl defines the “phenomenological epoché” (or “bracketing”) in Ideas I: “We put out of action the general positing which belongs to the essence of the natural attitude; we parenthesize [place in brackets] everything which that positing encompasses with respect to being” (Husserl 1982, section #32). The “phenomenological reduction” (from the Latin reducere, meaning “to return”) refers to the return to immanent experience that this bracketing makes possible. Terminology is inconsistent in the literature, however, with “reduction” or “phenomenological reduction” often encompassing both aspects (even for example in Husserl’s Ideas I; Bruzina 2004, p. 99f). There is also the “eidetic reduction,” which seeks to define the essential or necessary features of a given form of experience.
Husserl (1970b, p. 49).
Husserl (1970b, pp. 134, 173).
Husserl (1970b, pp. 148, 152, 141). One thereby discovers “the universal, absolutely self-enclosed and absolutely self-sufficient correlation between the world itself and world-consciousness. …the conscious life of the subjectivity which effects the validity of the world” (p. 151).
Heidegger (1996, pp. 371; 43f). Also: “And because average everydayness constitutes the ontic immediacy of this being, it was and will be passed over again and again in the explication of Da-sein. What is ontically nearest and familiar is ontologically the farthest, unrecognized and constantly overlooked in its ontological significance” (p. 43).
Husserl (1970b, p. 253).
For relevant discussion Descartes, see Martin (2008), “Descartes and the phenomenological tradition.”
Husserl (1970b, pp. 71, 72, 153, 168, 389f).
Sartre (1950, p. 81).
Heidegger (1996, p. 133).
Husserl’s use of the term “intuition” (the word in German is identical) should not be confused with a standard understanding, in English, of intuition as a way of knowing that is grounded in spontaneous instinctive feeling rather than conscious reasoning. In the first paragraph of this essay, I do use “intuitive” in this standard English sense.
In “Husserl and Language” (Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Sciences, Preamble), Bundgaard (2010, p. 369) writes, “From a purely quantitative point of view, Edmund Husserl has devoted a rather small amount of time and space to the study of language proper.” Bundgaard mentions the first and fourth Logical Investigations, and states, “Otherwise, language is only sparsely dealt with in Husserl’s writings…. Husserl’s theory of language and his analysis of linguistic meaning seem….to have lived a rather insular life in the universe of his thoughts and writings.”
In “Meaning and Language,” in the Cambridge Companion to Husserl, Simons (1995, p. 28) writes, “Husserl pursued philosophy of language not for its own sake but mainly to support his conception of logic.” Most of Husserl’s philosophy of language, he notes, can be found in the Logical Investigations.
Husserl (1970a pp. 277f, 269).
Husserl (1970a p. 281); Zahavi (2003, p. 29).
The translator of Husserl’s Experience and Judgment, a work edited from lecture notes after Husserl’s death, speaks of the book’s focus on the “prepredicative or prelinguistic” level or “prepredicative conditions of predication as such” (Husserl 1973, pp. xxi-xxii). Husserl himself writes of seeking “insight into the nature and structure of prepredicative experience” (p. 28).
Simons (1995, p. 129) describes Experience and Judgment as examining the foundation of linguistic acts in “pre-predicative experience, which is not inherently formed by language.” He draws a sharp contrast with Wittgenstein on this issue (p. 132). Guignon (1983, p. 117) draws a similar contrast between Husserl and Heidegger: “For a key part of Heidegger’s break with Husserl consists in the fact that, unlike his teacher, he leaves no room for anything like an unmediated encounter with the things themselves.”
See also Noé (1992, p. 121) Husserl’s “positing the pre-expressive or pre-linguistic stratum of meaning.”
Husserl (1970b, Appendix 6, pp. 353–378).
It is noteworthy that this development, which one scholar calls Husserl’s “hermeneutic turn” (Noé, 1992), occurred after Husserl’s exposure to Heidegger’s approach. In “Origin of Geometry,” Husserl writes:
Language, for its part, as function and exercised capacity, is related correlatively to the world, the universe of objects which is linguistically expressible in its being and its being-such. Thus men as men, fellow men, world—the world of which men, of which we, always talk and can talk—and, on the other hand, language, are inseparably intertwined; and one is always certain of their inseparable relational unity, though usually only implicitly, in the manner of a horizon’ (Husserl 1970b, p. 359).
Husserl’s precise position in this essay in not easily discerned, however, and is certainly open to debate. Husserl acknowledges the vulnerability of intuitive self-evidence, whose retention readily fades, and notes that a “reawakening” of what he terms the “’disappeared’ passing and being past” (p. 359) of such evidence requires the resources “of empathy and of language,” “of reciprocal linguistic understanding” (p. 360). Still, Husserl seems largely concerned to emphasize the need to “inquire back” to the “primal self-evidences” (p. 377), which presumably, are more perceptual than linguistic in nature.
Husserl in a letter written 1933: “Without him [Dr Fink] nothing can come of my manuscripts, and I can no longer productively work without the resonance that I find so fully with him” (Bruzina 1995, p. Lxxxi).
Some indication of the complexities of the relationship between Husserl and Fink (a major topic in its own right; see Bruzina 1995, 2004) is indicated in a letter Husserl wrote in 1934: “Fink is extraordinary as a collaborator, useless as an assistant, and very labile in his psychological structure. This is where there is deep and serious worry. On him depends the future of phenomenology—namely, that he is the only one who has an exhaustive knowledge of my manuscripts, who can really understand and work them out, and doing that means having not just a schoolboy’s mind but one that productively thinks with you, that fills in gaps and understands how a development is going, etc.” (quoted in Bruzina 1995, p. xxvi).
Bruzina (1995, p. xxviii) writes: “Husserl’s phenomenology, at least as it reached its maturity in his last years, was not just Husserl’s—it was Husserl’s and Fink’s.” It can be argued, however, that Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation goes far beyond any mere filling in of gaps or pursuing of a development already present in Husserl; and further, that this reflects, in part, the influence of Heidegger.
Though Fink’s first loyalty was to Husserl, it is unclear what his deepest loyalty was. Fink spoke of the “incontestable service” that Heidegger had performed for philosophy, bringing phenomenology to “its first truth” in “critical-speculative élan” (Bruzina 2004, p. 155). In a note from 1928–29 (Bruzina 1995, lxxxviii note 181), Fink writes: “Recently learned through Heidegger to understand the problem of ontology.” Bruzina states: “Fink continued to follow Heidegger’s courses after his doctorate and well into the first years of his work with Husserl. All in all, Fink attended Heidegger’s courses in Freiburg from 1928 at least through 1931. ….After 1931 Fink….continued to follow what Heidegger was doing” (Bruzina 1995, p. lxxix). For interesting discussion of Fink’s relationship with both Husserl and Heidegger, see Moran (2007).
Husserl in 1930 his Cartesian Meditations: “For this will be the main work of my life, an outline of the philosophy that has come to fruition for me, a fundamental work on methods and on the problematic of philosophy. At least for me [it will be] the conclusion and final clarity whose cause I can champion” (quoted in Bruzina 1995, p. xii).
Bruzina (1995, pp. xvii, xxxiii, lx).
Quoted in Bruzina (1995, p. xxxiv).
On Fink’s indebtedness to Heidegger, the importance of the question of being for Fink (in contrast with Husserl), and Fink’s indebtedness to Heidegger on this key issue. see Bruzina (1995, pp. l, lvii, lviii).
Oddly, Husserl claimed that he agreed with everything Fink had written in an adaptation of the Sixth Cartesian Meditation prepared for the journal Kantstudien, writing, “there is no statement in it that I could not make fully my own, that I could not explicitly acknowledge as my own conviction” (Bruzina 1995, p. xx). But as Bruzina tells us, “Fink later recounted his amazement at Husserl’s approval of the article [based on the Sixth Cartesian Meditation], seeming to miss the critical intent it carried” (p. lxxvii; also pp. xxi, xxiii).
Bruzina (1995, p. xxxi) writes: “The question remains, however, to what extent, despite the unrivaled extensive contact between himself and Fink, Husserl really grasped the differences that might lie in Fink’s treatment of phenomenology in contrast to his own.” “Husserl himself might not grasp the depth of implication [Fink’s writing] might have, or the radicality with which, within phenomenology itself and out of its intrinsic dynamic, fundamentals were being challenged and needed critical reconceiving…” (p. xxxii). “It is reasonable to think [that Husserl] was not acquainted with the details of Fink’s critical position in its more vigorous expression” (p. lxxxiii).
In a letter to Merleau-Ponty, Van Breda wrote that the Sixth Meditation “is basically a critique of the very bases of Husserl’s thought, although the author has indeed hidden his opposition, and Husserl himself in his splendid naivete did not notice it…” (Bruzina 1995, p. lxxxiii)
In Bruzina’s (1995, lxxxiii note 119) opinion: “Fink developed a conception of philosophy that differed from Husserl’s…that inverted the relative emphasis to be placed on the different functions essential to philosophy, namely a) the search for findings able to be asserted and justified with precision and clarity in statements, and b) the radicalizing and renewal of the questions, especially in the form of the engagement of one’s being and not just the preoccupation of one’s theoretical mind.”.
In this essay I focus on Fink’s discussion of the problematic implications of language for phenomenology, what he terms “Phenomenologizing as predication” (Fink 1995, p. 84). Fink’s argument is broader, however. He also discusses:
(A) The condition of “phenomenological experience”—of “the phenomenologizing onlooker,” the “phenomenological I of reflection” (p. 70); see “Phenomenologizing as theoretical experience” (pp. 66ff).
(B) Phenomenological conceptualizing, whereby the unthematic is conceptualized in thematic terms; see “Phenomenologizing as an action of ideation” (pp. 77ff.).
(C) “Phenomenologizing as ‘making into a science’” (pp. 100ff).
Fink (1995, p. 85).
Quoted in Bruzina (1997, p. 77).
Fink (1995, pp. 86, 97, 91, 98, 92).
Fink (1995, pp. 85f).
Fink (1995, pp. 90,91 90, 76, 98). Fink (1995, p. 97) writes : “For example, talk of ‘constituting subjectivity’ is misleading as long as one is guided by mundane representations of substantial and accidental being and construes the adjective ‘constituting’ as an accident in a transcendental subjectivity understood as substance.”
Fink quoted in Bruzina (2004, p. 479).
Fink (1995, pp. 98, 89). Also of relevance are these statements by Fink (1995, pp. 89, 95f): “Thus all transcendental explications have a special inadequacy, all concepts and sentences in one way or another fall short and in a particular sense fail…” “When phenomenologizing begins….it is not only without concepts but also in principle lacks language (‘Lack of language’ means too the inability to assert transcendental cognitions by means of natural language as a simple medium of presentation.)”.
Fink (1995, p. 91).
The language-speaks-us dictum should not be taken in an absolutist sense, Otherwise (subsequent Death-of-the-Author polemics notwithstanding), Heidegger could have found little to admire about the specific genius of a Hölderlin or a Rilke.
The ways of the poet and of the peasant may not have been so radically different in Heidegger’s mind—given that his poets of choice were Hölderlin and Rilke, not, say, Mallarmé or Valéry.
In Being and Time section #34: “Da-sein and Discourse: Language,” Heidegger (1996, p. 162) writes, “The communication of the existential possibilities of attunement, that is, the disclosing of existence, can become the true aim of ‘poetic’ speech.”
Heidegger (1993, p. 351).
Heidegger (1996, p. 403).
This is Derrida’s “under erasure” (“sous rature”). See Heidegger 1958 (orig. 1955), though the crossing-out concept appeared in Heidegger’s earlier Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, albeit in a somewhat different context; for discussion see Nyman (2018). Heidegger dedicated the later publication of this 1929/1930 lecture course to the memory of Eugen Fink, who, he writes, “repeatedly expressed the wish that this lecture should be published before all others” (Heidegger 1995, p. v).
Bruzina (1978, p. 199) offers a nuanced account of the performative paradoxes that the later Heidegger recognizes and exploits. “Thus it is that [Heidegger’s] words are to be taken literally in his rejections of the metaphysical schema he literally affirms as dominating the Western mind, while these words work toward a worded thinking that offers nothing of literal explication.”
In Heidegger’s situation, writes Bruzina, “rational explication turns upon itself within its own schema of determination and affirms a closure for its field of competence in negating its own performance.” A further twist: “Heidegger’s wordings deny the appropriateness for themselves of the designation ‘metaphorical,’ while attempting to actualize a type of meaningful articulateness that philosophy maintains surreptitiously within itself, in the very category of the metaphorical” (p. 199).
Bruzina speaks of “the very paradox that Heidegger’s way of thinking forces us to recognize as indicative of limitation in the self-constitutive field of philosophic reason” (p. 200).
Foucault quoted (1994, pp. 326, 323 emphasis added, 322).
James G. Hart (2009, p. 345) agrees: “Husserlian phenomenology generally has little patience with paradox.”
Smith (2020) in the Internet Encyclopedia offers a useful summary of this issue.
The rest of this note is entirely taken (quoted directly) from Smith, who himself quotes Frede (sentence in single quotation marks), then Heidegger (indented passage):
“It is commonly held that Heidegger rejects the epoché: ‘Heidegger came to the conclusion that any bracketing of the factual world in phenomenology must be a crucial mistake’ (Frede 2006, p. 56). What Heidegger says in his early work, however, is that, for him, the phenomenological reduction has a different sense than it does for Husserl:
For Husserl, phenomenological reduction… is the method of leading phenomenological vision from the natural attitude of the human being whose life is involved in the world of things and persons back to the transcendental life of consciousness…. For us phenomenological reduction means leading phenomenological vision back from the apprehension of a being…to the understanding of the being of this being. (Heidegger 1982, p. 21).
[Smith continues:] ….we can distinguish between the reduction itself and its claimed consequences. There is, however, some reason to think that Heidegger’s position is incompatible with Husserl’s account of the phenomenological reduction. For, on Husserl’s account, the reduction is to be applied to the “general positing” of the natural attitude, that is to a belief. But, according to Heidegger and those phenomenologists influenced by him (including both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty), our most fundamental relation to the world is not cognitive but practical (Heidegger 1996, sec. 15).” [End of quotation from Smith].
Nagel (1986).
Husserl (1970b, pp. 137, 136, 151). Husserl wrote in a letter in 1930 that he had “brought my phenomenological philosophy to a maturity, to clarity and purity, to a breadth of problems and methods encompassed that traces out the genuine meaning and path for philosophy for all the future” (quoted in Bruzina 1995, p. xvi).
Husserl (1970b, p. 287).
“[M]oods bring Dasein before the that of its there, which stares at it with the inexorability of an enigma” (Heidegger 1996, p. 136).
Heidegger (1996, pp. 142, 136). “[T]he possibilities of disclosure belonging to cognition fall far short of the primordial disclosure of moods in which Da-sein is brought before its being as the there.” Mood is “a primordial kind of being of Da-sein in which it is disclosed to itself before all cognition and willing and beyond their scope of disclosure” (pp. 134, 136).
Heidegger (1982, pp. 160, 327).
Husserl (1970b, p 286).
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Acknowledgements
For valuable suggestions on this essay, I wish to thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers. For helpful criticism or encouragement (or some combination thereof), I am grateful to several friends who read earlier versions of the manuscript: Matthew Ratcliffe, Scott Churchill, Fred Wertz, Jeffery Geller, and Iain McGilchrist. My indebtedness to Ronald Bruzina’s writings on Eugen Fink will be apparent to readers of this article; I am very grateful for his work.
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Sass, L. Husserl, Heidegger, and the paradox of subjectivity. Cont Philos Rev 54, 295–317 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-021-09540-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-021-09540-1