Abstract
The following essay serves as a general introduction to the idealism-realism debate at the core of the schism between Edmund Husserl and the early adherents of his phenomenology. This debate centers around two core issues: (i) whether the “real” world exists independent from the mind, and (ii) whether epistemological idealism leads to metaphysical idealism. Husserl’s early critics saw his transcendental phenomenology as a denial of the existence of mind-independent reality and as a solipsistic form of idealism. Husserl considered many of these arguments to be predicated on misinterpretations. After contextualizing the idealism-realism debate as it unfolded within the phenomenological movement, I introduce the papers that comprise the present volume. These papers revive the debate concerning Husserl’s idealism among his mentors, peers, and students.
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Notes
- 1.
Herbert Spiegelberg was the first to use the label “great schism” to describe the break between Husserl and the Munich phenomenologists: “Es ist schwer zu leugnen, daß auf den ersten Blick die Geschichte der deutsehen Phänomenologie das Bild hoffnungsloser Schismen darbietet. Das erste große Schisma war das zwischen Husserl in Freiburg und den sogenannten „Münchenern“, das zwar oberflächlich bis zum Ende des Husserlschen Jahrbuchs im Jahr 1930 hinter dem gemeinsamen Titelblatt verborgen blieb, das aber ab 1929, als die Münchener die Mitarbeit an der Husserl-Festschrift verweigerten, unheilbar und offenkundig geworden war” (Spiegelberg 1982, p. 3).
- 2.
To borrow from Ricoeur 1967, p. 4.
- 3.
In his notes from an interview with Hildebrand at Fordham University in 1954, Spiegelberg writes: “Sees Husserl in 1935 (at the Krisis lecture): ‘I divide up my students into white sheep and black sheep; you belong to the black sheep’” (Herbert Spiegelberg Papers, WUA00070/Box 2, Folder 9/070-NBK1953). The phrase “first” or “great phenomenological schism” has since become part of the common vernacular thanks to George Heffernan, whose paper from the conference in Mexico City has already been published (Heffernan 2016).
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
One might wonder how the students who took Husserl to be a realist understood his claims at the beginning of the Second Logical Investigation. There he writes that while he intends to defend the right of certain ideal objects “to be granted objective status alongside of individual (or real) objects,” he adds that idealism alone – understood as “a theory of knowledge which recognizes the ‘ideal’ as a condition for the possibility of objective knowledge in general” – “represents the possibility of a self-consistent theory of knowledge” (Husserl 2001, p. 238).
- 7.
For more on the issue of things-in-themselves, see Luft 2007.
- 8.
Quoted here from Hua CW III; 1989, pp. 418–419. In his discussion of phenomenology as transcendental idealism in the Sixth Cartesian Meditation, Fink writes that, “Transcendental idealism is best characterized by the designation ‘constitutive idealism’,” and that this constitutive idealism is “beyond idealism and realism” understood in the mundane sense (Fink 1988, p. 159).
- 9.
“Sie besagt, dass die Existenz von realen Gegenständen und damit die Existenz der realen Welt nicht denkbar ist ohne Bezug auf ein aktuell erfahrendes Bewusstsein” (Hua XXXVI; 2003, p. ix). Translations from German throughout are those of the author unless otherwise indicated.
- 10.
That we will inevitably understand Husserl better if we read him in context is perhaps obviously true to some. But for those who are not engaged with the current historical orientation in phenomenological scholarship, the importance of a volume like the present one will need some justification. To that end, I will make a brief appeal to contemporary literature in early modern philosophy as an example. Few could claim to be a serious scholar of Locke, Leibniz, or Descartes if they were not also aware of Molyneux, Clarke, or Princess Elizabeth. Not only would the average early modern specialist recognize these names, they would also be able to concisely state their arguments vis-à-vis the “canonical” figures. Moreover, no one baulks at a paper on Suarez, Malebranche, or Bayle. Yet few phenomenologists take seriously the importance of research on Lotze, Pfänder, or Geiger. This ahistorical bias is conspicuous in phenomenology, given that the continental tradition is so steeped in contextualization. Much of the scholarly context surrounding Husserl’s work remains unexplored and relatively little attention has been paid to the debates that Husserl was directly involved in. This despite evidence that Husserl openly invited criticism from his students. At least two instances of this are well known. First, there is the following note from Edith Stein to Roman Ingarden, dated 20 February 1917: “Recently, I presented to the Master, quite solemnly actually, my reservations about idealism. It was not at all an “awkward situation” (as you feared). I was seated on one end of the dear old leather sofa and then we had 2 h of heated debate, naturally without either side convincing the other. The Master said he is not at all opposed to changing his point of view if someone proves to him it is necessary. So far, I have not succeeded” (Stein 2014, p. 48). Second, in Thing and Space, Husserl devotes an entire lecture to responding to his student Heinrich Hofmann’s objections regarding the distinction between ‘things’ and ‘appearances’ in the framework of the phenomenological reduction (Hua XVI; 1973, p. 144).
- 11.
It is an open secret within the phenomenological community that the two most famous historians of phenomenology, Karl Schuhmann and Herbert Spiegelberg, were anti-Husserlian and preferred realist phenomenology. During his tenure at the Husserl Archives in Leuven, Schuhmann is known to have claimed that Husserl did not write anything of value after 1901. Robin Rollinger, one of Schuhmann’s students, reports that he and Schuhmann shared the view that the quality of Husserl’s work continually decreased after writing “Intentional Objects” (Hua XXII; 1979, pp. 303–384) in 1894. Rollinger quips: “It is an indeed ironic (the ‘cunning of reason’, as Schuhmann once said) that I was involved in editing Hua XXXVI” (Rollinger to Parker, 18 July 2019). It should go without saying that not all historians of the phenomenological movement share these views concerning Husserl’s work, nor the hopes for realist phenomenology held by many.
- 12.
They are similarly branded (pejoratively) as Platonists (see Baltzer-Jaray 2009). We should be cautious here, however, not to conflate early phenomenology with realist phenomenology. While many of the early phenomenologists who studied with Theodor Lipps and Alexander Pfänder in Munich prior to studying with Husserl in Göttingen and Freiburg were realists, this is certainly not true of all the early phenomenologists. For an attempt at a genealogical definition and periodization of early phenomenology, see Moran and Parker 2015. One of the purposes of the definition given therein was to show that “early phenomenology” and “realist phenomenology” are not synonyms and, additionally, to discourage the use of the misleading term “Munich-Göttingen phenomenology” introduced by Theodor Conrad that has long been criticized (see Smid 1982, p. 112).
- 13.
Zahavi raised this question, directed at Hedwig Conrad-Martius’ phenomenology, during his lecture on “Husserl’s Transcendental Idealism” at KU Leuven, 26 April 2017.
- 14.
While Quentin Meillassoux did not coin the term “correlationism,” his writings on speculative realism have certainly popularized it. In After Finitude, he defines correlationism as “the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other,” and claims that “every philosophy which disavows naïve realism has become a variant of correlationism” (Meillassoux 2008, p. 5). He ascribes this view to Husserl, Heidegger, and Kant (Meillassoux 2008, p. 8). Meillassoux further elaborates the notion of correlationism in his presentation at the workshop on speculative realism at Goldsmiths, University of London: “Correlationism rests on an argument as simple as it is powerful, and which can be formulated in the following way: No X without givenness of X, and no theory about X without a positing of X. If you speak about something, you speak about something that is given to you, and posited by you. Consequently, the sentence: ‘X is’, means: ‘X is the correlate of thinking’ in a Cartesian sense. That is: X is the correlate of an affection, or a perception, or a conception, or of any subjective act. To be is to be a correlate, a term of a correlation. And in particular, when you claim to think any X, you must posit this X, which cannot then be separated from this special act of positing, of conception. That is why it is impossible to conceive an absolute X, i.e., an X which would be essentially separate from a subject. We can’t know what the reality of the object in itself is because we can’t distinguish between properties which are supposed to belong to the object and properties belonging to the subjective access to the object” (Brassier et al. 2007, p. 409).
- 15.
- 16.
- 17.
- 18.
See the Lebenslauf in Falckenberg’s Aufgabe und Wesen der Erkenntnis bei Nicolaus von Kues (Falckenberg 1880, p. 45). For more on his relationship to Lotze’s philosophy, see Woodward 2015.
- 19.
- 20.
„Idealismus […] in metaphysischer Bedeutung 1. Anerkennung eines Geistigen (Ideellen), Nichtmateriellen überhaupt, Gegensatz Materialismus (es gibt kein von der Materie unterscheidenes Geistiges). 2. Überordnung des Geistes über die Materie oder die Natur, Erklärung des materiellen Daseins aus dem Geiste (des Seins aus dem Denken S. 331), Annahme eines geistigen Weltgründes, ohne daß die Existenz der Körperwelt zu bloßem Schein herabgesetzt würde; in diesem Sinne – die Materie ein Produkt des (Welt-)Geistes – faßt man Fichte, Schelling, Hegel und ihre Genossen unter den Namen der idealistischen Schule zusammen. (Gewöhnlich wird der Standpunkt Fichtes als subjectiver, der Schellings als objectiver, der Hegels als absoluter Idealismus bezeichnet. […] Jedenfalls ist der Fichtesche Idealismus ebenso absolut, wie der Hegelsche, denn das Ich ist nicht der Einzelgeist, sondern die Weltvernunft […].) 3. Leugnung der materiellen Welt = Immaterialismus, Spiritualismus, die Lehre, daß es nur Geister gebe, die Körper aber nichts seinen als Erscheinungen, Vorstellungen (Ideen) in den Geistern […]“ (Falckenberg 1886, p. 476).
- 21.
Falckenberg’s work was familiar to Husserl. In a 1901 letter to Gustav Albrecht, Husserl writes: “a number of professorships became vacant this semester: Erlangen, Basel, Vienna. Stumpf certainly thought he could place me at Erlangen because he has connections there. (Falckenberg, the well-known author of the textbook on the history of modern philosophy, owes Stumpf for his appointment to Erlangen.) Stumpf immediately wrote to Falckenberg, but did not receive a response” (Hua Dok III/9; 1994, pp. 22–23). Husserl also owned a copy of the fourth edition of Falckenberg’s history, which can be found in the Husserl Archives Leuven under the signature BQ 131.
- 22.
In the contemporary idealism-realism debate, the realist is thought to fall prey to the “correlationist circle,” that is, insofar as we never have access to the things-in-themselves in thought, only the things-for-us, the realist enters into a vicious circle with respect to claims about the supposed things-in-themselves (Meillassoux 2008, p. 5). As Tom Sparrow explains: “Thinking the absolute effectively renders the absolute relative to thought, and therefore undermines its absoluteness. Whenever the realist philosopher claims to have attained knowledge of the subject-independent in itself, what he or she does is engage in a viciously circular pragmatic contradiction that effectively converts the thing in itself into a concept of the thing in itself” (Sparrow 2014, p. 90). According to Meillassoux, the weak version of correlationism asserts that we cannot know the things-in-themselves, whereas the strong version claims that we cannot even conceive of things-in-themselves, i.e., things-in-themselves are meaningless and nonsensical speculative fictions. On the strong view, the things-for-us are not representations – they simply are the things-themselves, and hence the strong view leads to some form of idealism (see Harman 2018, pp. 142–144).
- 23.
For the English translation, see Scheler 1973b.
- 24.
Robert Sokolowski offers a harsh critical review of Ingarden’s interpretation of Husserl (Sokolowski 1977). One of the issues Sokolowski takes up is whether constitution amounts to creation.
- 25.
- 26.
It would be interesting to compare what Hering writes in this appendix with Conrad-Martius’ 1916 manuscript “Über Ontologie” (published in Parker 2020b), the only extant version of which comes from Hering’s personal papers, as well as Hering’s own 1917 manuscript “Phänomenologie als Grundlage der Metaphysik?”(Hering 2015). These manuscripts give us some of the earliest insights into the reactions of the Göttingen Circle to Husserl’s idealism.
- 27.
- 28.
Unlike Scheler’s similarly titled essay, Ingarden focuses on the idealism-realism problem as it emerges in Husserl’s Ideas I. In his personal copy of the Festschrift (ZS 28/Festschrift), Husserl placed question marks in the margin beside the following passage by Ingarden, which references Ideas I §49: “Die rein intentionale Gegenständlichkeit ist in sich selbst eigentlich ein Nichts, sie hat kein Eigen wesen im strengen Sinne, wie E. Husserl mit vollem Rechte in seinen „Ideen“ behauptet. Alle ihre existentialen, formalen und materialen Bestimmtheiten sind „bloß vermeint“, sie sind ihr nicht wahrhaft immanent. Die rein intentionale Gegenständlichkeit täuscht nur ihre Immanenz dank der intentionalen Vermeinung vor: sie hat eben kein Seinsfundament in sich” (Ingarden 1929, p. 166). Husserl underlines the word “täuscht” as indicated here.
- 29.
See, for example, Geiger’s discussion of Husserl’s “constitutive idealism” (Geiger 1930, p. 67).
- 30.
- 31.
For a discussion of Husserl’s confrontation with Misch, see Sandmeyer 2009.
- 32.
- 33.
See especially the section on “Gegenstandsphänomenologie gegen Aktphänomenologie” (Linke 1930, pp. 79–84). In this essay, Linke distinguishes between object-oriented phenomenology, that is, a phenomenology of the grasped object, and act-oriented phenomenology, that is, a phenomenology of the act wherein the intentional object is grasped.
- 34.
In the opening lines of this essay, Beck identifies Husserl as espousing “correlationism [Korrelativismus],” where there is no world that exists independent of consciousness per se and where consciousness and the world mutually dependent on one another for their existence (Beck 1928, p. 611).
- 35.
- 36.
It is also worth mentioning that Aron Gurwitsch’s reading of Husserl influenced his student Henry E. Allison’s epistemological interpretation of Kant. As Allison has stated regarding his epistemological interpretation of Kant’s transcendental idealism: “my view of Kant’s idealism was influenced by my understanding of Husserl’s, though I was never what you could call a close student of Husserl. I never took a course on Husserl with Gurwitsch, but I did take a two-semester course on Husserl’s theory of intentionality with Cairns […].” (Allison to Parker, 21 January 2015) This will perhaps come to the surprise of Kant scholars unfamiliar with Allison’s early paper “The Critique of Pure Reason as Transcendental Phenomenology” (Allison 1974). The first edition of Allison’s monumental work Kant’s Transcendental Idealism (Allison 1983) is dedicated to “the memory of Aron Gurwitsch, with whom I began my study of Kant,” though he is critical of some aspects of Gurwitch’s interpretation of Kant. See Allison 1992. Nevertheless, Husserl scholars would benefit from applying Allison’s analysis of Kant’s transcendental idealism to Husserl’s.
- 37.
See Overgaard 2004, pp. 64–65.
- 38.
“Ist Sein von Dingen, Sein einer Natur, die doch ist, was sie ist, ob irgendjemand sie wahrnimmt, vorstellt, denkt oder nicht, denkbar, wenn es schlechthin kein Bewusstsein gibt? Ich sage: „Nein!“[…]” (Hua XXXVI; 2003, p. 53).
- 39.
One might understand this as Husserl claiming that consciousness is always consciousness of some thing on the one hand, and that every thing receives its being-sense by virtue of sense-bestowing or constitutive acts of consciousness on the other. But this would need to be interpreted in light of the fact that Husserl further claims that there are no things-in-themselves, and that the transcendental ego exists absolutely. Readers will of course be familiar with Husserl’s attempt to explain his position in the Cartesian Meditations, where he claims that phenomenology, properly understood, simply is transcendental idealism. He argues that his transcendental idealism “is nothing more than a consequentially executed self-explication in the form of a systematic egological science, an explication of my ego as subject of every possible cognition, and indeed with respect to every sense of what exists, wherewith the latter might be able to have a sense for me, the ego. This idealism is not a product of sportive argumentations, a prize to be won in the dialectical contest with ‘realisms.’ It is sense-explication achieved by actual work, an explication carried out as regards every type of existent ever conceivable by me, the ego, and specifically as regards the transcendency actually given to me beforehand through experience: nature, culture, the world as a whole. But that signifies: systematic uncovering of the constituting intentionality itself. The proof [Erweis] of this idealism is therefore phenomenology itself. Only someone who misunderstands either the deepest sense of intentional method, or that of transcendental reduction, or perhaps both, can attempt to separate phenomenology from transcendental idealism” (Hua I; 1973, pp. 118–119, quoted here from Husserl 1960, p. 86).
- 40.
The main source for these ideas is Lotze’s Logik, which was the focus of a seminar Husserl taught in SS 1912. The Lotze-seminar was attended by many prominent members of the Göttingen Circle, such as Winthrop Bell, Jean Hering, Alexandre Koyré, and Hans Lipps (Hua Dok I; Schuhmann 1977, p. 169).
- 41.
In the 1900 edition of the Prolegomena, Husserl adds a note to the end of §59 stating that in the next volume, “we will take the opportunity to critically address Lotze’s epistemological teachings, especially his chapter on the real and formal content of logical laws [von der realen und formalen Bedeutung des Logischen]” (Hua XVIII; 1975, pp. 221–222). However, this appendix was not included in the 1913 edition due to a lack of space. For more on this, see Varga 2013.
- 42.
This position is similar to that of Lotze. As Nicholas Stang writes: “Lotze distinguishes between the mistaken hypostatic reading of Plato, on which the Forms (concepts, constituents of truths) are treated as entities in their own right, existing in some kind of platonic heaven, and the “true” Platonism, in which the doctrine of Forms is only intended to make the distinction between what exists (mental and physical objects and events) and what is valid (propositions/contents of acts of judgement, and, derivatively, the Forms/concepts composing them)” (Stang 2019, p. 139). See also Rollinger 2004.
- 43.
One might compare this analysis to Fink 1970, pp. 84–85.
- 44.
- 45.
- 46.
See also Davis 2017, p. 168.
- 47.
- 48.
- 49.
In November 1904, Husserl wrote to Daubert that it was a pity no one from the Munich Circle had yet come to Göttingen, as he had announced his WS 1904/05 lectures on the Phenomenology and Theory of Knowledge primarily for them (Hua Dok III/2; 1994, p. 49). The first two parts of these lectures are published in Hua XXXVIII; 2004, pp. 3–123, the third in Hua XXIII; 1980, pp. 1–108, and the fourth in part in Hua X; 1966, pp. 3–98. This letter no doubt played a decisive role in initiating the Munich invasion by Adolf Reinach and others.
- 50.
See Schuhmann and Smith 2004, p. 58.
- 51.
The rejection of the absolute existence of the ego is a position held by a number of Theodor Lipps’ students. Here we might take note of the influence of Hume on the members of the Munich Circle. It is well know that, for Hume, when we reflect on the self, we are never intimately conscious of anything but a particular perception, and that the self is “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in perpetual flux and movement” (Hume 2007, p. 165 [I, IV, vi]). The German translations of Hume’s Treatise where edited by Lipps (Hume 1895, 1906). The 1895 translation of Book I was by Else Köttgen and the 1906 translation of Books II and III by Agnes Reimer, the wife of Lipps’ former professor at Bonn, Jürgen Bona Meyer.
- 52.
See, for instance, the excerpts from Husserl’s letters to Winthrop Bell and Daniel Feuling at Hua XXXVI; 2003, p. x.
- 53.
See Spiegelberg 1994, pp. 191–192.
- 54.
- 55.
This passage could easily be rendered consistent with De Warren’s interpretation of Husserl, where “Transcendental subjectivity is thus neither outside nor inside the world; it carries, or better, is the world in its constitutional unfolding” (DeWarren 2009, p. 29).
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Sebastian Luft, Dan Zahavi, Frederik Beiser, and Genki Uemura for their feedback on earlier versions of this introductory essay, and Henry Allison and Robin Rollinger for permitting me to quote from our personal correspondence. I would also like to thank the two reviewers of the manuscript for their thoughtful comments on the individual contributions as well as their suggestions for improving the volume as a whole. Finally, my deepest thanks are owed to the authors who contributed to this collection.
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Parker, R.K.B. (2021). The Idealism-Realism Debate and the Great Phenomenological Schism. In: Parker, R.K.B. (eds) The Idealism-Realism Debate Among Edmund Husserl’s Early Followers and Critics. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 112. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62159-9_1
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