Abstract
The goal of this final chapter is to show the ontological shift between the Logische Untersuchungen and the volumes of the Ideen. There is, as we shall see, a sort of Copernican transformation of the basic doctrines and concepts of the former work. In this, the position of the Ideen stands as the result of the transformation. Both the latter work and the transformation itself can be looked upon as a motivated response to the difficulties we have uncovered in our last two chapters.
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Notes to Chapter Viii: `Ontological Difficulties and Motivating Vonnections’
See Phaedo 78d. We here follow Etienne Gilson’s interpretation of this passage. See his Being and Some Philosophers,2nd ed. (Toronto, 1952), p. 12.
Husserl puts this in the following way: “Just as every law that arises from experience and the induction from individual facts is a law for facts, so conversely every law for facts is a law from experience and induction; consequently, as has been shown above, assertions with existential content are inseparable from it.” This is the premise for Husserl’s conclusion that non-inductively derived laws cannot be overthrown by facts. As Husserl says of the ideal, logical laws: “Their `origin’ — or, more precisely put, the basis which justifies them — is not taken from induction. Thus, they do not carry with them that existential content which is attached to all probabilities as such, even the highest and most valuable. What they assert has complete and entire validity” (LU,Tüb. ed., 73–74; F., p. 107).
De Boer comes to the same conclusion, though he does not tie it directly to Husserl’s ontology. He writes: “Husserl overcomes the `naturalization of the ideas,’ but not yet the `naturalization of consciousness.’ This consciousness, which is placed under the command of the validity of ideal norms, is at the same time a part of `nature’ and, as such, is subordinated to the necessity of natural laws. Symptomatic for the Logische Untersuchungen is the simultaneous presence of two methods: a phenomenological, descriptive analysis of essences and a natural scientific explanation of consciousness. This methodological dualism reaches a crisis in the description of the logical acts. On the one hand, these acts are empirically necessary and determined; on the other hand, an idea realizes itself in them through which they claim apodictic validity. How can both these views be combined?” (“Zusammenfassung,” op. cit.,p. 589).
In a manuscript dating from 1907, Husserl writes: “The `Logische Untersuchungen’ lets phenomenology stand as descriptive psychology (even though its decisive interest was epistemological). This descriptive psychology, understood as empirical phenomenology, must, however, be distinguished from transcendental phenomenology… What was designated in my `Logische Untersuchungen’ as descriptive, psychological phenomenology concerns the simple sphere of experiences according to their inherent (reelen) content. The experiences are experiences of an experiencing ego insofar as they are empirically referred to natural objectivities. For a phenomenology that desires to be epistemological, for an essential doctrine of (a priori) knowledge, however, the empirical relation remains suspended” (Die Idee der Phan., “Einleitung des Herausgebers”; Biemel ed., p. ix ). The empirical relation referred to here is one between an empirical (real) subject and its objects.
This is why the eidetic reduction, when performed by itself, is considered by Husserl as insufficient for reaching the new ontological level to be investigated by the Ideen. In Husserl’s words, “If the phenomenological region would so immediately and self-understandably offer itself as does the region of the standpoint of the experience of nature, or if it could be made to yield itself via a simple move from this to the eidetic standpoint (as perhaps the geometrical region does when we start from the empirically spatial), then there would be no need for any involved reductions with the difficult considerations that belong to them” (Ideen I,§61; Biemel ed., p. 145).
The 2nd edition of the Logische Untersuchungen seems to embrace this position in Investigations VI, § 10. The section, however, is not present in the 1st edition.
Paul Ricoeur writes of the constitution of both sense and presence, “This ultimate episode in the Ideen is of capital importance.. To constitute reality is to refuse to leave its `presence’ outside of the `sense’ of the world” (“Introduction du traducteur,” Idées directrices pour une phénoménologie,Paris, 1950, pp. xxiv-xxv).
This doctrine first appears in the lectures on internal time consciousness. Husserl writes: `In the same impressional consciousness in which perception is constituted, the perceived is also constituted through this [process]… The thing constitutes itself in the flowing off of its appearances, which are themselves constituted as immanent unities in the flowing of the original impressions. Necessarily the one constitutes itself with the other. The appearing thing constitutes itself because in the original flowing both unities of sensations and unitary interpretations constitute themselves; there is, thus, continually consciousness of something, exhibiting, or rather, presenting of something and, in the continual sequence, the exhibition of the same thing“ (Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins,§43; ed. Rudolph Boehm, The Hague,1966, pp. 91, 92–93 ).
See Zur Phan. d. inn. Zeitbewusstseins, § 10-§ 11,§43.
See pp. 57–58, 84, 100; see also LU,Tüb. ed., 11/2, 126; F., p. 768.
Indirectly, of course, this question is faced in the refutations of psychologism and relativism.
Since such a dissolution is always inherently possible, the individual ego cannot per se be considered to be the constitutive ground of the world. Its own being as a numerical singular — i.e., as an “actual ego” — depends upon the possibility of the constitution of the “surrounding world” that permits it to be posited. In other words, as a singular ego, it does not ground, but is rather grounded by the possibility of constituting the world that surrounds it. This leads Kern to speak of the constitutive acts of the ego in the following way: “We can say in interpreting Husserl that it does not lie within, but is rather `grace’ for it that it can productively constitute a cosmos and precisely this cosmos. It is always in `danger’ of having this grace withdrawn, i.e., of having the cosmos extinguish itself in a chaos of sensations, of collapsing as an ego that has a world and, thus, as an actual ego” (Husserl u. Kant,ed. cit., p. 298). Here we may note that we do not conclude from this, as Kern apparently does, that consciousness itself, i.e., consciousness regarded as pre-individual and pre-objective, is in danger of dissolution. See Kern, op. cit.,297–98.
This position first makes its appearance in the 1905 lectures on internal time consciousness. Husserl writes: “The phenomena that constitute time are, thus, evidently and in principle different objectivities from those that are constituted in time. They are not individual objects nor individual processes and the predicates of these latter cannot with sense be applied to them” (Zur Phän. d. inn. Zeitbewusstseins, S36; Boehm ed., pp. 74–75; see also Ibid.,“Beilage VI,” No. 3, p. 112).
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Mensch, J.R. (1981). Ontological Difficulties and Motivating Connections. In: The Question of Being in Husserl’s Logical Investigations . Phaenomenologica, vol 81. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3446-2_9
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