Abstract
Ever since Socrates “called philosophy down from heaven to earth” to locate it in the cities and in the lives of individual human beings by exhorting them to turn within to their souls and to the concepts (logoi) that dwell therein, to turn to a knowledge of oneself first of all, to examine one’s own inner life in its acts of knowing, believing, desiring, willing, evaluating, giving meaning and intelligibility to the chaos of earths, airs, fires, waters and bones, sinews, humors, and joints, which confront us in raw nature, Western philosophy has seen the necessary turn to the foundations of experience and of reality-as-experienced which has come to be called “foundationalism” in philosophy. In their many different ways all of the greatest philosophers of our tradition have been “foundationalists”: Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel and Husserl, to mention only the “giants,” who together and separately constitute the backbone of Western philosophy.
A first version of this paper was read at the International Aron Gurwitsch Memorial Symposium at the New School in New York on November 8, 1991.
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References
M. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, Alphonso Lingis (Trans.) (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968, pp. 103
M. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, Alphonso Lingis (Trans.) (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968, pp. 105
M. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, Alphonso Lingis (Trans.) (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968, pp. 121
E. Mayr, Toward a New Philosophy of Biology (Harvard University Press, 1988, p. 70). I wish here to thank my colleague, David Hull, who shared with me some of his research materials and his opinions on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (the SETI project).
Mayr, 1988, pp. 70–71. See also: G. G. Simpson, This View of Life: The World of an Evolutionist (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964, pp. 259f), on the possibility and/or probability of humanoid forms on the other planets (“which must exist in large numbers”) in the universe similar enough to ours that life, at least, must have existed and may still exist. He is not optimistic about intelligent life since the “mutations” and “recombinations” that took place in the evolution of man as the “ultimate twig” of an extremely complicated evolutionary process on this planet are essentially “nonrepeatable” here and, since this evolutionary development is the only one we are capable of knowing and studying, it does not seem that we should assume that it is a probable scenario elsewhere. However, there are some exobiologists who, basing themselves on various very conjectural, computerized projections and extrapolations are more optimistic.
Strictly speaking, Derrida has written only two truly philosophical books, with sustained argument, namely: Edmund Husser’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, J. P. Leavey, Jr. (Trans.) (Stony Brook: Nicholas Hays, 1978) and
Speech and Phenomena, D. B. Allison (Trans.) (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973). There are a few passages in De la grammatologie and perhaps also in Glas, which might also qualify as philosophical discourse in the usual sense.
J. M. Edie, “Husserl vs. Derrida,” Human Studies, 1990: 103–118.
This is my own reading of Heidegger but I would like to acknowledge my indebtedness to the reflections of M. Dufrenne (Pour l’homme, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1968, pp. 21–25)
A. L. Kelkel (Heidegger, Seghers, 1973, p. 108f.).
R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton University Press, 1979, p. 5). Though he claims to be “historicist,” Rorty is not a very good historian. Certainly the historical influence of Husserl in the twentieth century has been greater and led to much more diversified accomplishments in philosophy than those of Rorty’s peculiar triad: think only of Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Ingarden, Ricoeur, Gurwitsch, Heidegger himself, not to mention lesser, but important, thinkers. Rorty’s Heidegger is always seen through Dewey’s eyes. When Husserl is mentioned, his name is nearly always coupled with his partner “transcendentalist” Russell, as William James is elsewhere coupled with Nietzsche. We don’t know exactly what Russell might say about this coupling but we do know that James considered half of everything Nietzsche wrote to be “the sick shriekings of a dying rat” (Varieties of Religions Experience (New York: Mentor Books, 1958, p. 47). From a historical perspective, one could transpose and invert the famous statement of Erasmus (as well as of Pico de la Mirandola) in his De Transitu Hellinismi ad Christianismum concerning Aristotle and his Christian interpreters, “Without Thomas, Aristotle would have been silent,” Sine Thoma, mutus esset Aristotles, into: “Without Husserl, there would have been no Heidegger.”
Rorty, 1979, p. 360f.
In “The End of Philosophy?” The New York Review of Books, March 19, 1981: 46.
In bringing Derrida into the discussion, it is important to refer the reader to the recent work of J. C. Evans, Strategies of Deconstruction, Derrida and the Myth of the Voice (University of Minnesota Press, 1991). This is certainly the best, most magisterial and insightful book on Derrida from a philosophical point of view up to now. Evans spends almost as much time and space following Derrida’s arguments one by one as Husserl did on his psychologistic skeptics in the Logical Investigations.
Rorty, 1979, p. 266.
Rorty, 1979, p. 372. Note the word “degenerate.” I submit that Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror Of Nature should never be read without the corrective essay written by J. N. Mohanty, “Rorty, Phenomenology and Transcendental Philosophy,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 1983/Jan.: 91–98.
Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, D. B. Allison (Trans.) (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973, p. 103).
J. Derrida, Of Grammatology, Gayatri Spivak (Trans.) (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974, p. 165f). See also J. R. Searle, “The Word Turned Upside Down,” New York Review of Books, Oct. 27, 1983: 74f). There is however no doubt that we need to be sensitive to the perennial attraction and force of the non-foundationalist, “conversationalist” theory of truth which has cropped up throughout the history of philosophy, as Professor Richard Bernstein reminded me in discussing this paper. Whether it is Protagoras, Phyrro and Sextus Empiricus after Plato and Aristotle, Peter Damien after Augustine, Ockham after Aquinas, the British empiricists after Cartesian rationalism, Marx, Spencer and Mill after Kant and Hegel, or Heidegger, Derrida and Rorty after Husserl and Frege, everytime a great “foundationalist” philosopher has established the same apriori, absolutely coercive, necessary, and universally valid norms of thought on a firm conceptual foundation, there has been a “skeptical” reaction which bears structural similarities to all the other relativisms and skepticisms which have appeared in history. It is as if philosophers are almost doomed to repeat these arguments and bring forth this basic subject-matter and the problems it involves and keep it before their minds again in each successive generation. Neither side expects to convince the other side, but each to refute the other definitively. Like Doctor Johnson, we can only say: “I can give you an argument; I cannot give you understanding.” But we must bear in mind the fact that the “foundationalists” always come back to essentially the same logical forms (without, of course, denying the historical development of logic and mathematics) and, if we have any speculative bent at all, we have to ask ourselves whether they may not have discovered basic logical (and mathematical) laws which not only hold throughout the universe but which must be true for any possible intelligence. Our laws of physics, chemistry and perhaps even biology, though conclusions of empirical science on this planet, are formulated mathematically and are taken to be observed throughout the universe. Only a short time ago no man had seen the other side of the moon, though most suspected it would look much like the side which was always visible. We know that this assumption was correct because our space technology now permits men to go around to the other side and look. There was no apriori reason against it before; it just could not de facto be done; it was not a logical but a physical impossibility. In the same way the laws governing falling bodies, of Newtonian physics, of Einsteinian relativity theory are taken to hold not only for this species on this planet, but for the solar system as a whole and for intergalactic probes as well. Since all these technologies depend on mathematical forms (which are not conditioned in their meaning by species-bound conditions), and since mathematics is either a branch of logic or a kind of universal logical thinking that does not (like the formulae of formal logic) need to be translated into natural languages to be understood, does this consideration not add weight to the foundationalist argument of the independence of logical forms—independent of any particular empirical locations, conditions or circumstances?
R. Rorty, “Genteel Syntheses, Professional Analyses, Transcen-dentalist Culture,” in Peter Caws, Two Centuries of Philosophy in America (London: Blackwell, 1980, pp. 238–239).
The London Review Of Books, 1980/Jun.: 15–16.
Rorty, 1979, p. 33.
Mohanty, 1983/Jan., 96.
Mohanty, 1983/Jan., 97. Mohanty here makes reference to Apel and Habermas.
G. G. Simpson, This View of Life: The World of an Evolutionist (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964, p. 254.
E. Mayr, Toward a New Philosophy of Biology (Harvard University Press, 1988, p. 73).
The best treatment of the “teleological” elements in Husserl’s thought is by André de Muralt, The Idea of Phenomenology, Husserlian Exemplarism, G. L. Breckon (Trans.) (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974). For Husserl the concrete, existing thing is a “factual example” of its idea or essence, while the idea is the “ideal exemplar” of its object. The factual enables us to define the idea, but only the idea enables us to comprehend the factual object. Suppose a given science in its actual, imperfect, historical state. Its “essential” character requires a continual tendency towards greater and greater precision, comprehensiveness and certitude. In its actual state any given science is essentially relative to a state of greater perfection which awaits it in the future; science is always in an intermediate, developing state between a less perfect and a more perfect state. The completely realized and perfected state of a science is an ideal goal (telos or idea); it is, in fact, an “open” or “infinite” idea. The real, factual state of development of any given science gives its meaning to the “idea” of that science, and of science in general, but at the same time the “ideal” of science alone make it possible to understand the “real” as an intermediate stage in the realization of the idea. This is the universal principle of the mutual exemplarity of the real and the ideal throughout the whole of Husserlian phenomenology. See also: J. M. Edie, Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology: A Critical Commentary (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987, pp. 143–144), and S. Strasser, “Das Gottesproblem in der Spätphilosophie Edmund Husserls,” Philosophisches Jahrbuch, 67 Jahrgang: 130–142), in which Strasser argues that the idea of God is, for Husserl, the final absolute reality which is both a theoretical “idea” and a practical “telos” working itself out in the innate drive of mankind to come to absolute and final knowledge. He concludes that Husserl’s exemplarism is based on a teleological conception, a “Gottesbegriff,” both immanent within and transcendent to human striving. But it would certainly be prudent to stop short of making Husserl sound like Whitehead or Teilhard de Chardin. Nevertheless, if there is a personal, intelligent God, he is bound by the laws of logic no less than we are.
Anthropologists like Benjamin Whorff once claimed that languages like those of the Hopi Indians would enable them, with their relativistic verbs for time and place, to understand the relativity theory of Einstein better than we can in English, forgetting that the language of relativity theory is not any natural language but the language of mathematics which is the same in all places and at all times. One of Heidegger’s disciples, Johannes Lohmann (“M. Heidegger’s Ontological Difference and Language,” in Joseph J. Kockelmans, On Heidegger and Language (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972, pp. 303–363) once argued that “the logic and grammar” of Chinese is essentially different from “the logic and grammar” of the Indo-European languages. But this is easily refuted by the fact that, native speakers of French have had no trouble at all teaching Chinese seminarians (in a seminary in Chentu Province prior to 1949) the logic of Aristotle in Chinese (see my reply to Lohmann in the same volume, pp. 220–228). It is true that formal logic proceeds in a binary, either-or-manner. It is the only “language,” for instance, our computers can “understand” or follow. Various cultures divide up the world differently on the surface level of their ordinary speech. For the Orientals there are the four passing sights, the three vows, the eightfold path, the four noble truths, the six elements of true religion, the seventeen great goings forth, etc., whereas for the Medieval Western Latins there were the twelve degrees of true humility, the seven deadly sins, the nine choirs of angels, the ten commandments, etc., but I strongly suspect that as the Japanese and the Chinese, no less than the Western Europeans, become more reliant on computers, they will drop any resistance they may residually have to “either-or” logic, including the logic and grammatical studies of Aristotle and Leibniz. There are some four thousand natural languages still spoken on earth but there is only one “pure logical grammar.”
In this connection see: J. M. Edie, Speaking and Meaning (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1976, pp. 45–50) and ff. as it deals with Husserl’s conception of “pure logical grammar” from the Fourth Investigation and Formal and Transcendental Logic. It is, moreover, worth pointing out in this connection that the ancient Greek realization by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle that the true domain of philosophy is “the conceptual” (logoi) and that it is the purpose of philosophy to distinguish and separate out the apriori in any realm of discourse and investigation, was maintained throughout the whole Western tradition until the dawn of the modem era in the Seventeenth Century. During the years just preceding the foundation of the University of Paris, at the time of the Latin thinkers Abelard and Gundissalinus, there was a lot of speculation on the proper divisions and ordering of the sciences under metaphysics and logic. It was a commonplace thesis to be defended in the cathedral schools and elsewhere that “there is no science which is not a part of philosophy,” nulla est scientia quae philosophiae non sit aliqua pars (F. Van Stenberghen, The Philosophical Movement in the Thirteenth Century (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson, 1955, p. 26f). The reason for this was that all the “lower” sciences like agronomy and architecture were “subordinate sciences” which took their first principles from “higher sciences,” just as music and optics take their first principles from the “higher science” of mathematics and, ultimately, all sciences derive their first principles of demonstration from the “first science” which is metaphysics. In this sense, as Question I of the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas shows us, even theology is a “subordinated” science which is argumentative and demonstrative based ultimately on the higher scientia Dei et beatorum. It would be interesting to examine the historical relationship of the individual sciences (Etienne Gilson has done some of this in his The Unity of Philosophical Experience (New York: Scribner’s, 1950). In antiquity and the Middle Ages medical specialists like Galen and Avicenna felt it necessary, in order to write treatises on Medicine or Healing, to deal first with logic, epistemology and metaphysics in order to properly order their researches and guarantee their validity; as we know Galen even invented a new form of syllogism. In the days of Newton physics was not only still a part of philosophy but also of natural theology. It is as if the various non-philosophical sciences and disciplines were all originally conceived as parts of philosophy until, having progressed to a sufficient stage of maturity to develop their own distinctive methodologies, were able to be prosecuted by scientists who no longer studied philosophy or the problems of logic ex professo.
It would not due to go into or follow the detail that Husserl himself goes into in the Prolegomena. An excellent summary is given for those who want a shortcut in M. Färber, The Foundation of Phenomenology (New York: Paine-Whitman, 1962), to whose very illuminating insights I have been indebted ever since I began teaching phenomenology. See especially, in the present connection, pp. 112–124.
Plato also (Meno, 75B) considered these relationships to be “materially” apriori: there cannot be brightness without color, or color without surface, or surface without extension. One cannot be present without the other as “parts” of a whole even though they belong to different “logical” categories (see J. M. Edie, Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology, 1987, pp. 43–44). Or see Aquinas, In Physicorum Aristotelis Librum Secundum, cap. 2, lec. 3: Multa sunt conjuncta secundum rem, quorum unum non est de intellectu alterius: sicut album et musicum conjunguntur in aliquo subjecto, et tarnen unum non est de intellectu alterius, et ideo unum separatim intelligi potest sine alio. Et hoc est unum intellectum esse abstractum ab alio. Manifestum est autem quod posteriora non sunt de intellectu priorum, sed e converso; unde priora possunt intelligi sine posterioribus, et non e converse Sicut patet quod animal est prius homine, et homo prius hoc homine (nam homo se habet ex additione ad animal, et hic homo ex additione ad hominem); et propter hoc homo non est de intellectu animalis, nec Socrates de intellectu hominis…. Thus, if there is Socrates, there is a man, if there is a man, there is a rational animal, if there is a rational animal, there is an animal, if there is an animal, there is a living being, if there is a living being, there is a being (and not nothing), but, in all this, we have not here said anything about the real world, but only about the necessary apriori relationships of concepts which are implied in our experience of the real world in order to make it intelligible; thus, wherever there is real experience, the possibility of apriori rules of knowledge, both formal and “material,” come into play.
Primarily in Husserl, and later in Merleau-Ponty, the “phenomenology of perception” was the first starting point and the most frequently employed example to illustrate the phenomenological investigation of the life-world from an eidetic point of view. Husserl’s posthumous work, Experience and Judgment, L. Landgrebe (Ed.) (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973) and his earlier Formal and Transcendental Logic, D. Cairns (Trans.) (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1969) pose the question and give Husserl’s answer about how the structures of predicative thought can be seen to be “founded” in prepredictive, perceptual consciousness. What most clearly distinguishes Husserl’s phenomenology from Logical Positivism (with which movement it was contemporaneous and which also issued from Vienna) was that even though both believed that conceptual thought based on the rules of logic had somehow to be brought back to perceptual experience [remember the slogans on which we were brought up of the “empirical criterion of meaning”? or “the empirical criterion of truth”?] only Husserl provided a theoretical framework for the “founding” of higher orders of experience like thinking in the foundational, underlying experience of pre-conceptual and pre-reflexive perceiving. The Positivists, from Hume onwards, accepted the whole of formal logic, and then proclaimed that all meaning and truth had to be “reduced” to sense-experience, juxtaposing the two without ever even posing the question of how logical thought could arise from perception.
Mohanty, 1983/Jan., 94–95.
This is discussed particularly in Formal and Transcendental Logic. See also: J. M. Edie, 1987, Ch. VIII, “The Hidden Dialectic in Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology,” p. 116f.
Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, Vol. I, J. N. Findlay (Trans.) (New York: Humanities Press, 1970, p. 518).
J. M. Edie, Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology: A Critical Commentary (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1976, pp. 63)
J. M. Edie, Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology: A Critical Commentary (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1976, pp. 209), with reference to Chomsky, Russell and Wittgenstein as well as Husserl.
M. Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy Of Perception and Other Essays, J. M. Edie (Ed.) (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964, p. 10 [italics mine]). In the title essay of the same collection, “The Primacy of Perception,” Merleau-Ponty makes the same universal and objective claim for perception as the “founding term” of thought: If a friend and I are standing before a landscape and I attempt to show my friend something which I see and which he does not yet see, we cannot account for it by saying that I see something in my own world and that I attempt, by sending verbal messages, to give rise to an analogous perception in the world of my friend. There are not two numerically distinct worlds plus a mediating language which alone would bring us together. There is—and I know it very well if I become impatient with him—a demand that what I see be seen by him also. What I see, from where I stand is objectively there for any observer who would stand where I am standing. It makes no difference if I might later turn out to be mistaken; right now my perception imposes an objective demand that what I see can be seen by anyone. “The thing imposes itself not as true for every intellect, but as real for every subject who is standing where I am” (p. 17). Merleau-Ponty’s purpose in this essay is to examine “the relation between intellectual consciousness and perceptual consciousness” (p. 19), and yet, in this very essay, he admits that he likes to be thought of as a “skeptic” in the literal sense of the word: One who goes to see, who looks around, who practices skepsis. In his later writings on linguistic structuralism, between 1949–1959, he took up the problem of the relationships which obtain between perceptual consciousness and language. As was his wont, given the dialectical cast of his mind, he insisted on two contradictories, namely that there was the possibility of the universality of communication based on “algorithmic” rules (The Prose of the World, J. O’Neill (Trans.) (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973, p. 115f), of thought and language, but at the same time he seems to have feared and denigrated Husserl’s “pure logical grammar” and to want to suggest, almost as a precursor of Derrida and Rorty, that the only universality necessary was to be found in the existential and “oblique passage from a given language that I speak… to another language that I learn” (Signs, R. McCleary (Trans.) (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964, p. 87). See also my foreword to Merleau-Ponty’s Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, H. J. Silverman (Trans.) (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973, p. xxviif.), and also my monograph on Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Language (University Press of America, 1987, pp. 50f, 80f). Merleau-Ponty—because of this inner contradiction in his thought which tore him between Husserl’s logic and its realization in a form of structural linguistics, on the one hand, and his commitment to an existentialism of communication, on the other—could never bring himself to finish what was to have been, in his own words, his most important work, The Prose of the World, but simply abandoned it around 1959, put in a drawer to be published only posthumously by Claude Lefort, and sought solace, after a philosophical breakdown, in the unfinished remnants of the last pages of The Visible and the Invisible which remind some of the kind of incoherent “babble” for which Aristotle reproached Heraclitus, or which we find in Kant’s Opus Posthumum.
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Edie, J.M. (1997). On Confronting Species-Specific Skepticism as We Near the End of the Twentieth Century. In: Evans, J.C., Stufflebeam, R.S. (eds) To Work at the Foundations. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 25. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5436-9_9
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