Abstract
The foundational status that Edmund Husserl envisages for phenomenology in relation to the sciences would seem to suggest that the successful unfolding of contemporary debates in the field of social cognition will be conditioned by progress in resolving certain central controversies in the phenomenology of intersubjectivity, notably in long-standing questions pertaining to the priority of subjectivity in relation to intersubjectivity, and the priority of empathy in relation to other forms of intersubjectivity. That such controversies are long-standing is in no small part attributable to the fact that the debate surrounding Husserl’s seminal attempts to elucidate these problems has placed his account, and certainly his published position, under a certain amount of pressure, pressure which stems from the suspicion that intentionality toward others may be more deeply embedded in subjectivity than the Husserl of Cartesian Meditations seems prepared to admit. Is the primordinally reduced solipsistic subject of the Fifth Meditation really capable of discovering intersubjectivity in the way that Husserl describes, or is such putative discovery (indeed, subjective transformation) already conditioned by a more primitive form of intersubjectivity? This paper investigates two ways in which this kind of “circularity” objection might arise. Firstly, it might be argued that Husserl presupposes an external perspective on one’s own body, a perspective which rationally would have to be correlated with an indeterminate foreign subjectivity. Secondly, the view has been advanced (Zahavi in Husserl and transcendental intersubjectivity: a response to the linguistic-pragmatic critique. Ohio University Press, Athens, OH, 2001b) that horizonal perceptual awareness of another spatio-temporal entity turns out to be essentially intersubjective, on the grounds that awareness of some of an object’s averted aspects commits one to positing the possibility in principle of those averted aspects being available to an indeterminate foreign subjectivity. Objections such as these seem to place the phenomenological enquiry into the encounter with another person at something of a crossroads. On the one hand, they have led some to argue that basic empathy, as Husserl conceives it, must indeed be conditioned by the anonymous constituting influence of a more primitive form of intersubjectivity. On the other hand, the option remains open to seek to defend Husserl’s published position against the charges of circularity. This paper pursues the latter alternative, and argues that, with appropriate clarification, the objections from circularity can be convincingly answered. It will be argued that the key to understanding why the standard Husserlian position can be sustained lies in recognising the centrality of the activity of the imagination as a condition for the possibility of intersubjectivity.
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Notes
PI III, lxvi. Trans. Zahavi (2001b, pp. xx–xxi).
CM, §42, pp. 89–90.
CM, §43, p. 92.
Edith Stein concurs with Husserl on this point, arguing that a so-called “feeling of oneness” should not strictly be aligned with the concept of empathy (Stein 1989, pp. 16–18).
Bernet et al. (1995, p. 165).
CM, §44, p. 93.
PI II, 51. Trans. Bernet et al. (1995, p. 159).
CM, §44, p. 93.
CM, §44, p. 93.
CM, §44, p. 98.
Methodologically, the notion of confirmation which is operative here is not that of empirical verification, for the phenomenological attitude has been adopted. My notion of confirmation in this paper pertains to the question of the conditions under which it is rational for a transcendentally meditating phenomenologist to posit the existence of an intentional object, and in particular, the existence of a foreign subjectivity.
Ideas II, §43, p. 170.
CM, §51, pp. 112–113.
Depraz (2001, p. 173).
Pairing is phenomenologically prior to the activity of the imagination during the empathic path to transcendental intersubjectivity.
Separating these two matters helps us to see that the scope of Husserl’s enquiry is deeper than that of the problem of other minds, which asks how one knows that there are other minds in the world beside one’s own. The apperception of another mind as another mind requires that the notion of someone else should be thinkable in the first place. In a sense, then, there are two stages to this part of Husserl’s investigation. Firstly, he is interested in the mental conditions, from a first person perspective, for the very possibility of a basic kind of empathy. Secondly, he wants to explicate the sense in which it seems right, again from a first person perspective, to speak of “perceiving” another subject as another subject in a way which is not dissimilar to perceiving a tree as a tree, or perceiving the sky as the sky. It is only in the second stage that the question of epistemological justification becomes pressing.
CM, §51, p. 113, emphasis mine.
CM, §51, p. 113.
It might be argued that, simply by virtue of my acquaintance with my being always already embodied (an acquaintance made phenomenologically explicit in the discoveries following the reduction to the sphere of ownness), I necessarily carry with me and retain a background awareness of myself as a living organism. In such a background reflected awareness (and I am distinguishing here between “reflected” and “reflective” awareness), the proprioceptive givenness of my own body as a persistent component of my primordial sphere is apprehended as always present and available to me, should I so choose, through a simple alteration in the direction of my attention. In this context, I am using the term “reflection” in the strict Husserlian sense of the thematisation of an occurrent or retained lived experience.
Let us note in passing that it is not straightforward to sustain the idea that conscious human subjects always have pre-reflective bodily self-awareness. Counter-examples might draw upon the phenomenology of being engrossed in abstract thought. If I am seated in a comfortable armchair and deeply absorbed in a mathematical problem, then I become utterly oblivious to my bodily sensations, and they play no part in the cognitive activity in progress. In this scenario, from time to time I may well develop a pre-reflective awareness of some sensation or other, such as the texture of the fabric of the armchair, but through an act of concentration such temporary intrusions soon recede, and I am once again “lost” in my abstract thoughts.
CM, §51, p. 113.
CM, §51, p. 113.
CM, §54, p. 118.
As I indicated earlier, by “confirmation” in this context, I do not refer to empirical verification, but to phenomenological confirmation. In this discussion, we are prior to scientific methodologies, but the question of epistemological justification has not gone away. It is a question which is answered in part for the phenomenologist by harmonious confirmation over time. We are in this sense still operating with a distinction between the notion of “someone else” and a verification of the existence of the Other.
CM, §51, p. 113.
CM, §54, p. 118.
CM, §54, p. 119.
CM, §55, p. 123.
CM, §56, p. 129. Husserl’s italics.
CM, §56, p. 129.
CM, §56, p. 129.
Zahavi (2001b, p. 74).
Let me try to forestall the following misunderstanding. The idea that transcendental intersubjectivity could somehow only become activated in consequence of its thematisation by a phenomenologist is not in play in this discussion. The question which is at stake is whether transcendental intersubjectivity is necessarily operative, prior to its discovery, in the empathic path to transcendental intersubjectivity described in the Fifth Meditation, notwithstanding Husserl’s stipulation that all forms of intersubjectivity be bracketed during the reduction to the sphere of ownness.
Zahavi (2001b, p. 22).
Two related questions may be raised at this point. (1) Could it be argued that imagining the non-existent chair involves a reference to perceiving a genuinely transcendent object, and therefore involves intersubjectivity? My answer is as follows. Provided all forms of intersubjectivity have been bracketed, as Husserl stipulates, then purely subjective transcendence is not derivative in this way. (2) It might be asked why it is relevant to make the distinction between purely subjective transcendence and genuine transcendence when we are primarily concerned with the appearance of another physical human being in one’s perceptual field. My answer is as follows. After performing the ownness reduction as Husserl requires, the question of whether horizonal intentionality is essentially intersubjective becomes important when trying to evaluate Zahavi’s position.
Readers may ask what sense of Husserlian “transcendence within immanence” I am employing here, and why it is relevant. My answer is that I think there are two relevant senses, a general sense, and what we might call a “full” sense. The general sense is the sense in which Husserl speaks of the phenomenological project itself as proceeding in immanence, according to which any intentional object, whether intersubjectively verifiable or not, is regarded as a transcendence within immanence. Transcendence is always an immanent characteristic in the sense that it is constituted within the domain of transcendental subjectivity. The full sense is the one which becomes relevant when considering putative objects of knowledge, objects, that is, which are held to be intersubjectively verifiable in principle. On the Husserlian account, there are at least four kinds of entity that may be genuinely transcendent in this full sense: physical objects located in spatio-temporal reality, the transcendental ego, a foreign consciousness, and objects existing in ideality, e.g. numbers, essences. Metaphysical speculation is something that the phenomenological reduction rules out.
It seems to me worth noting that the following two propositions are not incompatible. Indeed, I see no reason to think that Husserl would deny that both in fact obtain. (1) For any given pair of profiles of an empirical object, such as the front and back of a building, which are in principle incapable of being simultaneously originally experienced by a human subject, it is always possible to imagine an embodied subject, with a different anatomical structure, not being so constrained. (2) For all imaginable subjects, regardless of anatomical structure, the experience of any given profile, or combination of profiles, of a perceptual object will necessarily preclude the experience of certain other profiles of the object.
CM, §52, pp. 115–116.
Husserl (1997, 176 and 189).
I shall follow Iso Kern’s lead and use “primordinal” (rather than “primordial”) in relation to the sphere of ownness. In the original German, Husserl on certain occasions adopts the neologism “primordinal” in relation to the sphere of ownness, but this innovation does not seem to have propagated into Dorion Cairns’s English translation.
In many other important respects, of course, my debt to Zahavi (2001b) is considerable.
The following question could be asked here: Could an experience of objectivity still be an experience of objectivity if its intersubjective dimension were to be bracketed? My answer is as follows: No. I concur with Husserl's explication of the ontic sense of objectivity in terms of intersubjective co-constitution. The subject could, however, retain an experience of purely subjective transcendence by engaging the faculty of the imagination in the way that I have described.
Zahavi (2001b, p. 75).
Abbreviations
- CM:
-
Cartesian Meditations
- Ideas:
-
Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy
- LI:
-
Logical Investigations
- PI:
-
Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass
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Shum, P. Avoiding Circularities on the Empathic Path to Transcendental Intersubjectivity. Topoi 33, 143–156 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-013-9198-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-013-9198-3