Abstract
In this article I address the idea that in Husserl’s eidetic ontology all possibilities are fixed ‘in advance’ so that actual objects and events—despite their contingency—can only ever unfold possibilities that are ‘permitted’ to them by their essences. I show how this view distorts Husserl’s ontology and argue that this distortion stems from a misconstrual of the relations between essences and facts, and between ideal and real possibilities. These ‘local’ misconstruals reflect, I contend, a ‘global’ misunderstanding that mistakes descriptive distinctions for ‘real’ separations, and that remains indebted to a non-Husserlian understanding of the a priori–a posteriori-distinction. In support of this argument, I first lay out the relevant objection to Husserl’s eidetics as I understand it. Then, I clarify the relation between ideal and real possibilities in the context of Husserl’s eidetics as I see it. Finally, I make a general point about the status of Husserl’s ontological differentiations ‘in the midst of life,’ namely in how what they differentiate is effective and (tacitly) manifest ever only as one moment (amongst many) of the complex whole that is a concrete life of consciousness. I end with some remarks on what this might mean for future phenomenological research on the imagination.
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Notes
Despite this formulation, the real target of discussion is not the less sophisticated view that essences would be temporally ‘prior’ to the facts they ‘regulate,’ but the notion that they are ‘ontologically’ prior. That they would be temporally priori is non-sensical in the Husserlian framework, already for the simple reason that they, like all other objects, require correlative acts for their constitution and thus cannot be, so to speak, ‘ancestral.’
Zhok argues against this interpretation by emphasizing the Husserlian conception of “possibilizations (Ermöglichungen)” as a “generative sphere” of “emergence” (Zhok 2016, p. 213). I will return to this point.
This is not meant as an objection to the view Al-Saji defends in this article. I do not take issue here with the way she uses Bergson’s account of time to conceptualize this generation of until now impossible possibilities. I simply note her important concern and transpose it into the Husserlian context in question in this article.
As I argue below, even these ‘formal essences’ are in principle subject to correction (e.g., we might be wrong about what we think may count as object), but this is not yet the point here. Moreover, the fact that even the greatest horizon of everything—‘the world’—may collapse, or as Husserl puts it so controversially in Ideas I, it may be ‘annihilated’ (cf. Hua III/1, §49) can be taken as a case in point. It is at least conceivable—especially in the light of Husserl’s well-known concession in Formal and Transcendental Logic that even apodictic insights are fallible (Hua XVII, p. 156)—that events could occur that would ‘explode’ the essential order and that, as a result, consciousness may experience not only a partial loss of order or meaning, that is, of something within the world, but a total loss of that horizon itself. See Majolino 2016 for an especially insightful accountof this issue.—For full references to the Husserliana volumes (Hua hereafter), please see the shared bibliography for the Husserl Studies special issue this paper is part of.
At least one would ‘only’ have to worry about the general fallibility of phenomenological insights (see fn. 4).
We are leaving aside now that the constitution even of formal essences requires some indeterminate experience (cf. Zhok 2016).
In fact, it is because eide (qua ideal objects) can sustain predicates and can be substrates of laws that, in Husserl’s view, they “cannot be a mere fiction, a mere façon de parler, a mere nothing in reality” but “must have being;” for “if these truths hold, everything presupposed as an object by their holding must have being” (Hua XIX/1, II, §8).
See fn. 1.
I thus would go even further than Zhok here. Not only could there be no truth in “a mere realm of facts,” as he puts it (Zhok 2016, p. 220), there could not even be a ‘realm of facts.’ This is another way of saying that facts and essences are ‘correlational’ (see below).
It might be interesting to some readers that the term ‘Anmutung’ was also part of the vocabulary of early Gestalt psychology, for example, in the writings of Wolfgang Köhler. One possible, however non-literal, English translation of the term is ‘affordance.’
Husserl increasingly insists that we must distinguish phantasied objects from possible objects (Hua XXIII, p. 687) because, as he puts it, “one could run into confusion if one took phantasies, without further ado, to be possibilities” (Hua XXIII, p. 684, note 2). See also John Brough’s introduction to the English translation of the volume, Hua XXIII, p. xliii.
For a thorough critical discussion of a variety of potential methodologically problems, see Lohmar (2005), pp. 79–91.
We find these kinds of formulations in Husserl’s later writings. See, for example: “Die Phantasiemöglichkeiten als Varianten des Eidos schweben nicht frei in der Luft, sondern sind konstitutiv bezogen auf mich in meinem Faktum… erst dadurch wird das Eidos die Form der Möglichkeit von Seiendem. Somit geht die Wirklichkeit der Möglichkeit voraus und gibt den Phantasiemöglichkeiten erst die Bedeutung von realen Möglichkeiten” (Hua XXIX, p. 85f.; my emphasis).
Think, for example, of Heidegger’s replacing Bewusstsein with Dasein, or of Husserl’s coining of concepts such as noesis/noema, lifeworld, etc.
In the second (on feeling and value) and third volume (on will and action) of the just published Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins, we find passages in which Husserl reflects on the porous boundaries between pure and real possibility. For example, when we attempt to do something in a purely imaginary scenario, this can ultimately affect our sense of real possibility. Husserl calls this “possibility on the basis of an hypothesis” (Möglichkeit aufgrund eines hypothetischen Ansatzes) because it involves imagining ourselves as if we were able to do something that we know we are not really able to do (Hua XLIII/3, p. 112).
For an exceptionally clear discussion of the connection between existentialist notions of freedom and the priority of possibility over actuality, in particular between Husserl’s and Heidegger’s overlapping views in this regard, see Aguirre (1991).
For references to primary resources (Husserl texts and materials) other than the ones mentioned here, see the shared bibliography for the Husserl Studies special issue this paper is part of.
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Jansen, J. Imagination in the Midst of Life: Reconsidering the Relation Between Ideal and Real Possibilities. Husserl Stud 36, 287–302 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-020-09283-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-020-09283-6