Abstract
At the end of the first decade of this century, Edmund Husserl published an article, Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft 1, which looks back ten years to his Logische Untersuchungen and looks forward to the highly individual publications of the next twenty years. It marks the maturity of an idea which had already begun to take shape in his studies of logic and which was to govern all his future philosophical activity -the idea of a presuppositionless philosophy, which is rendered possible by radical Selbstbesinnung. This is the idea of philosophy as transcendental phenomenology.
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References
Logos, I, 1910.
The lectures were delivered in the Amphithéâtre Descartes, February, 1929.
Translated by Gabrielle Peiffer and Emmanuel Levinas, Paris, 1931. This volume is “an extended elaboration” of the lectures. (The French was the only version of Husserl’s
Cartesian Meditations to which the author had access while making this study. German and English editions lay far in the future. The original edition of the present paper quoted the French liberally, in the probably mistaken belief that double translation carried excessive risk of distortion. The risk has become negligible since the publication of Mr. Dorion Cairns’ English translation of Cartesianische Meditationen, and it has seemed wise to replace the French quotations with English borrowed from it with gratitude.
No other changes, aside from the omission of a few strikingly irrelevant lines and the rearrangement of one or two awkward or misleading sentences, have been made in the article as first printed. To bring it into line with scholarship today would entail an entirely new study.)
The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl, p. 8. Columbia University Thesis, 1934. Privately printed.
Dorion Cairns, Trans., Cartesian Meditations, p. 6. Méditations Cartésiennes, p. 5; Cartesianische Meditationen, p. 48. In subsequent references the English will be abbreviated as CM, the French as MC, the German as HI (Husserliana, Vol. I).
CM, p. 1 ; MC, p. 1 ; HI, p. 43; Cf. “Phenomenology,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th ed., XVII, p. 702.
Ideas, section 59, p. 176. Ideas, the English translation of Ideen made by W. R. Boyce-Gibson, is used throughout.
Discourse, Haldane and Ross, The Philosophical Works of Descartes, I, p. 92. Unless otherwise indicated, all references will be to the pages of this edition.
Meditation III, vol. I, p. 158. Cf Discourse, vol. I, p. 102.
Vol. I, p. 7.
Vol. I, p. 33.
Rules, XII, vol. I, pp. 40–41.
Pp. 42–43.
The Principles of Philosophy, Part I, XLV (vol. I, p. 237).
Loc. cit.
Perhaps the most significant passage concerning true and immutable natures occurs in Meditation V (vol. I, pp. 179–180), where the ground is being prepared for an argument from essence to existence, which turns on the immutable nature of the idea of God. Though it rejects the old formulation of the ontological argument, phenomenology proclaims itself to be the study of immutable forms or essences discovered in the immanence of consciousness.
Principles, Part I, XXXIII. Cf. Meditation IV, end.
Principles, Part I, XXXIV.
Meditation IV, vol. I, p. 176.
In Principles, Part I, XXXII, perceiving is treated as the genus to which belong the species: “Sense-perception (sentire), imagination, and conceiving things that are purely intelligible.”
Rules XII, vol. I, p. 44.
Cf. CM, sections 4–5.
Principles, Part I, XLV; Ideas, section 79, p. 230.
In Descartes’ language: “That which we clearly and distinctly understand to belong to true and immutable nature of anything, its essence, or form, can be affirmed of that thing” (Reply to the First set of Objections, II, p. 19), or “that all that is found in these ideas exists necessarily in the things themselves.” (Letter to Gibieuf, January 19, 1642. Quoted by Gilson, Discours, p. 350). Husserl’s version is: “What obtains in the Eidos functions as an absolutely unassailable standard for the fact,” or, in a special application, which goes considerably beyond Descartes, “every description of essential being which relates to types of experience provides an unconditionally valid norm for the possibilities of empirical existence” (Ideas, section 79, p. 231).
Meditations, I, p. 178.
Descartes, Letter to Clerselier, January 12, 1646. Vol. II, p. 127.
Etienne Gilson, Études sur le rôle de la pensée mediévale dans la formation du systeme cartésien, p. 186. Henceforth this work will be referred to as Études.
Cf. Meditation III, I, p. 157: “I am a thing that thinks, that is to say, that doubts, affirms, desires, that knows a few things, that is ignorant of many, (that loves, that hates,) that wills, that desires, that also imagines and perceives; for as I remarked before, although the things which I perceive and imagine are perhaps nothing at all apart from me and in themselves, I am nevertheless assured that these modes of thought that I call perceptions and imaginations, inasmuch only as they are modes of thought, certainly reside (and are met with) in me.” Also Meditation II, p. 153, where Descartes argues that however illusory phenomena of “imagination,” “feeling,” etc. may be, it is “certain that it seems to me that I see light,” etc. Also see Meditation III, p. 158, where Descartes remarks that he perceives nothing clearly and distinctly in the things of the sensible world except “that the ideas or thoughts of these things were presented to my mind.” This is indeed the most fertile source of error, for I have a “spontaneous inclination” to believe them conformable to things outside the mind. Essentially the same interpretation is that of Lévy-Bruhl (Descartes, cours inedit), cited with approval by Gilson (Descartes, Discours de la méthode, p. 287): “The doubt touches all propositions that affirm something outside of our thoughts; it does not affect essences but only existences.” Also Gilson, Études, p. 240: “The cogito has first delivered to us thought with all the ideas, feelings, and volitions that it contains.”
CM, p. 17; MC, p. 15; HI, p. 57.
CM, pp. 20–21; MC, p. 18; HI, p. 60.
Loc, cit.
Loc. cit.
“Phenomenology,” op. cit., p. 701.
CM, section 10.
Gilson, Études, pp. 189–190.
CM, pp. 82–4; MC, p. 70, 71 ; HI, pp. 116, 117.
CM, p. 85; MC, pp. 61–2; HI, p. 118.
CM, p. 86; MC, p. 72; HI, p. 119.
CM, p. 124; MC, p. 105; HI, p. 153.
CM, p. 150; MC, p. 128; HI, p. 176.
An illuminating treatment of essentially the same point is found in section 104 of Formale und transzendentale Logik, pp. 241 ff.
CM, p. 151 ; MC, p. 129; HI, p. 177. Cf. Formale und transzendentale Logik, p. 243.
Meditation HI, I, p. 161.
Meditation III, I, p. 166.
Meditation III, I, p. 170.
Meditation V, I, p. 183. My italics. * Editor’s note: A review of this essay by Aron Gurwitsch may be found in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, II, 1942, pp. 551–558.
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Fulton, J.S. (1966). The Cartesianism of Phenomenology. In: Natanson, M. (eds) Essays in Phenomenology. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-5403-3_4
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