Abstract
In this chapter 1 discuss how the ego arises within the lived experiences of the concrete human being by comparing Husserl’s and Peirce’s notions of the constitution of the ‘I’. This chapter consists of a comparative examination of Husserl’s genetic phenomenology and Peirce’s category of secondness. It compares Husserl’s notion of awakening of the ego with Peirce’s psychological notion of ego reaction. In contrast to Spiegelberg, Philos Phenomenol Res,17(2):164–185, (1956: 170) claim according to which the “Heraclitean” picture of Peirce’s system is a “major obstacle to a full-scale comparison between the two phenomenologies”, I try to show that it is precisely this Heraclitean image of the soul that makes Peirce and Husserl’s systems, after all, so surprisingly similar.
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Notes
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- 2.
Husserl, E. “A Review of Volume I of Ernst Schröder's Vorlesungen über die Algebra der Logik” And also in another paper of the same year “the deductive calculus and the logic of content”. Spiegelberg was wrong in his claim in the 1956 paper and he corrects himself in a supplement written for that paper in 1979, published in: “The context of the phenomenological movement”.
- 3.
Vorlesungen über die Algebra der Logik (1895).
- 4.
See: Hua-Mat 9, 10, 11, 24, 33, 190-1; Hua 39, 949; Beilage LIII, S. 690.
- 5.
I’m using here the term emergent not in a technical way, but as a means to describe Husserl’s notion of awakening. The verb that Husserl uses in fact is ‘erwachsen’ as in Hua XXXI, p. 7: “Es erwachsen so Gegenstfu1dlichkeiten wie die objektiven Werte, wie zum Beispiel Kunstwerke, wirtschaftliche Güter u.dgl., die bewusstseinsmaBig gegeben sind als Sachen, die mit objektiven Wertpradikaten behaftet sind. Das Letztere sind Pradikate, die offenbar aus der Gefiihlsintentionalitat entspringen.”
- 6.
See also: Hua XV, 283: “Müssen wir nicht sagen: Das Ursein ist das total strömende absolute Leben, in dem notwendig eine korrelative Synthesis waltet, die Synthesis, welche das Ich konstituiert (eine Konstitution, die einen total anderen Sinn hat als die in Stufen < geschehende > Weltkonstitution, die durch Erscheinungen leistet), andererseits eben diese, die ontifizierende Konstitution, bzw; and Hua XV, 283 “Diese primordiale Welt ist Welt meiner Erfahrung, sie ist in meinem strömenden Erfahren konstituierte, erfahrene Einheit vielfältiger Sondereinheiten - unter ihnen Ich-Mensch selbst, “darin” mein Leibkörper als eine in gewisser Weise zentrale Einheit-, ich leiblich in der Welt, ich leiblich mit dem Vermögen, alle Dinge wahrzunehmen, an sie heranzukommen, mit ihnen praktisch beschäftigt zu sein, die Dingwelt dadurch verändernd und evtl. mich selbst als Menschen durch mein menschliches Tun verändernd.
- 7.
See for example: C. S. Peirce, Collected Works, volume 6, The doctrine of Necessity Examined, op. cit.; E. Husserl, Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic, trans. Churchill, J. and Ameriks, K. London, Routledge & Kegan, 1973. Fabbrichesi, R, Marietti, S. Semiotics and Philosophy in Charles Sanders Peirce, Cambridge Scholar Press, 2006, pp. 90–93.
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I believe that this point of convergence between the two philosophers justifies the comparison of their views of transcendental philosophy. Though a full exploration of this is beyond the scope of this article, I believe that both Peirce and Husserl sought to reform Kant’s notion of transcendental in a specifically genetic way. Peirce, according to Apel (1981) transformed Kant’s transcendental into “the study of consciousness < as it > produces a warrant for the authority of consciousness” (W 1, 73). (On this point see: Apel 1981. 2 See, for example, Christensen 1994; Abrams 2004; Pihlström 2003; Cooke 2006, chap. 7; Oehler 1987 and 1995; Misak 1994; Hookway 2000, chap. 7; Short 2000; Midtgarden 2007). In fact despite Peirce’s criticism of transcendental philosophy he reinterpreted the transcendental method as “a style of reasoning much used for the support of instinctive beliefs” (2.31). Similarly, Husserl reinterpreted Kant’s transcendental philosophy (Hua VII), characterizing it as “a reflection that reveals that our experiences disclose objects having sense” (Drummond, 2007, 15). Using psychological language we might say that for both philosophers the primitive origin of the disclosure of sense lies precisely in the moment of reaction or awakening. For both Peirce and Husserl descriptive philosophy seems to need a specific form of transcendental reflection that cannot be reduced to the Kantian one, since it relies upon a genetic dimension.
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Acknowledgments
I want to thank the editors for their invitation to explore this interesting topic and I would also like to thank Jiang Yi, Mohammad Shafiei and Marc Applebaum for their precious comments and suggestions on my paper.
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Ferrarello, S. (2019). On the Arising of the I in Peirce and Husserl. In: Shafiei, M., Pietarinen, AV. (eds) Peirce and Husserl: Mutual Insights on Logic, Mathematics and Cognition. Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of Science, vol 46. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25800-9_10
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