Abstract
The thought experiment of the “annihilation of the world” performed in Ideen I has often been criticized as an illustration of Husserl’s one-sided idealism. Although Husserl himself later moderated his claim, he continued to refer to the same sort of thought experiment in his lectures and manuscripts. This suggests that the “annihilation of the world” has a specific role in Husserl’s phenomenological thinking. In fact, such a role can be elucidated by accurately interpreting the context and the intention of the thought in question. First, the “annihilation of the world” should be placed in the context of examining givenness on the basis of the theory of “evidence.” Second, this experiment tries to work out the most fundamental essence of “reality.” Husserl makes it clear that the real thing and the real world could not be as they are without such structural regularities that are lived through by our motivated, intending life-process. Contrary to its appearance, the idea of the “annihilation of the world” does not intend to degrade the world in contrast to consciousness. It is true that Husserl uses the term “absolute consciousness” to signify the most elemental field to which all objectivities and the process of their constitution can be reduced. However, such a terminology is comprehensible if the term “consciousness” is selected to secure the access to the phenomenological “things themselves,” which could never reveal themselves as phenomena if we did not live through them. The examination of the possibility of “world-annihilation” can help us to rehabilitate the true actuality of the real world by illuminating the essential role of the subjective agency in the world-constitution. If we categorically repudiate this kind of insight, the notion of the world might lose its reality and degenerate into an abstract ideality. It can be shown that what makes the world real and steadfast is nothing other than the “Vernunftgewalt,” the growing rational force of the self-organizing order of our experience.
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Notes
- 1.
Here consciousness is already seen from the transcendental viewpoint. In a note to the VI Cartesianische Meditation, Husserl expresses more clearly the view that the world belongs to a dimension completely different from that of the transcendental consciousness. „Welt und Transzendentalität—nicht koexistierend oder nicht-koexistierend, nicht stimmend oder streitend, nicht Regionen, die zusammen sind oder nicht sind in einer Totalregion, nicht Korrelation in einem umfassenderen Seinsuniversum—Verwandlung aller natürlichen Begriffe” (Hua Dok II/1, 49 Anm. 133). See also Taguchi 2006, Chap. I, 5.1.
- 2.
De Boer also relates this text to the “annihilation of the world” in Ideen I. See De Boer 1978, 323, note 3.
- 3.
In another section of Thing and Space, Husserl also stresses that the “phenomenological reduction is not by any means the solipsistic reduction” (1997, 34; Hua XVI, 40).
- 4.
This passage is originally presented in the London Lectures of 1922. “Indessen, es hatte guten Grund, warum wir den Nachweis der möglichen Nichtexistenz der Welt, während sie erfahren ist, so sorgfältig führten; denn es gibt kein anderes, sicher kein eindringlicheres Mittel, um das Übergleiten in den nur zu natürlichen Psychologismus und Naturalismus zu verhüten […]” (Hua XXXV, 71).
- 5.
„Andererseits hütete ich mich zu sagen, es ist ‚außerhalb’ der Welt, ‚getrennt’ von der Welt, wie ich mich hüte zu sagen, es ist ein ‚Stück’, ein ‚mir evident gegebenes Stück der Welt’. Nur das darf ich sagen, dass zu dieser gegebenen Sphäre von Wahrgenommenheiten alle meine Erfahrungen von der Welt rein als meine Erlebnisse gehören, und darin liegt eine Beziehung; was für eine, darüber kann ich jetzt noch nichts sagen.“ (Hua XXXV, 73)
- 6.
Regarding Husserl’s criticism of Descartes, see Hua Mat III, 89, 90–91. „Ungleich Cartesius suchen wir nicht nach den absolut sicheren Fundamenten, auf denen wir nach absolut sicheren Prinzipien das Gesamtgebäude menschlichen Wissens aufbauen könnten […]“ (Hua Mat III, 90). The same type of criticism can be found in many of Husserl’s writings. See especially §10 of Cartesian Meditations (Hua I, 63–64).
- 7.
See Hua II, 50f.
- 8.
See the following passage from Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft: “Der Bann des urwüchsigen Naturalismus besteht auch darin, daß er es uns allen so schwer macht, ‚Wesen’, ‚Ideen’ zu sehen oder vielmehr, da wir sie ja doch sozusagen beständig sehen, sie in ihrer Eigenart gelten zu lassen, statt sie widersinnig zu naturalisieren. Wesensschauung birgt nicht mehr Schwierigkeiten oder ‚mystische’ Geheimnisse als Wahrnehmung” (Hua XXV, 32); cf. Hua XXV, 36; XX/1, 282.
- 9.
See Hua II, 56f.
- 10.
Overgaard rightly notes: “[T]he content is essential to the mental phenomena being the particular phenomena that they are” (Overgaard 2007, 34). “Describing an intentional mental state by means of its object is to give an ‘internal’ description of that state” (ibid., 35).
- 11.
Gerd Brand acutely points out that in Husserl “evidence is principle, method, and goal at the same time” (Brand 1955, 5).
- 12.
See also a passage from the lectures of 1909 Einführung in die Phänomenologie der Erkenntnis (Hua Mat VII, 64).
- 13.
“[A]lles preisgeben heißt, alles gewinnen” (Hua VIII, 166).
- 14.
See also the more detailed interpretation of the Idea of Phenomenology in Taguchi 2013.
- 15.
See the following passage from the section 50 of Ideen I: “Strictly speaking, we have not lost anything but rather have gained the whole of absolute being which, rightly understood, contains within itself, ‘constitutes’ within itself, all worldly transcendencies.” (1983, 113; Hua III/1, 107)
- 16.
Sebastian Luft rightly points out that idealism and realism are not simply opposed to each other, but mediated through the phenomenological shift of attitude: “What Kant presented as two epistemic positions—transcendental idealism and empirical realism—becomes, in Husserl, mapped onto the relation between the natural and the philosophical standpoint” (Luft 2011, 192)
- 17.
Husserl claims: “[O]ur statements […] take nothing away from the fully valid being of the world as the all of realities” (1983, 129; Hua III/1, 120).
- 18.
The relation between the issue in section 49 and the problem of reason is not fully explicit until Part Four of Ideen I entitled “Reason and Actuality.”
- 19.
See the editor’s introduction by Walter Biemel to the Idea of Phenomenology (Hua II, VII–VIII).
- 20.
I agree with Don Welton when he suggests that for Husserl the analysis itself functions as the method (Welton 2000, 289).
- 21.
I cannot go into the stimulating discussion by Sebastian Luft about Husserl’s interpretation of the Kantian categorical imperative, which obviously deals with the same radical question as discussed here. It seems to me that Husserl’s notion of moral ought even more fundamentally responds to the question. See the following explanations by Luft : “While the insight into the presumptive nature of our world could lead to despair, it can also lead to an absolute affirmation in the form of the demand stemming from the moral ought, in which meaning is created through my belief in the moral law. […] The certainty we are talking about, then, is not cognitive certainty, but ‘joyful confidence that all is for the good’” (Luft 2011, 204–5). “Morality’s demand, hence, begins already on the level of meaning-constitution. We cannot help but try to come up with a valid meaning and implement it actively” (ibid., 205).
- 22.
See for example the following passage: “Immediate ‘seeing,’ not merely sensuous, experiential seeing, but seeing in the universal sense as an originally presentive consciousness of any kind whatever, is the ultimate legitimizing source of all rational assertions.” (1983, 36; Hua III/1, 43)
- 23.
The opening sentences of this chapter indicate the integration of two lines of approaches. “If one speaks simply of objects, one normally means actual, truly existing objects belonging to the particular category of being. No matter what one says about such objects, that which is meant and stated must—if one speaks rationally—be something which can be ‘grounded,’ ‘shown,’ directly ‘seen’ or mediately ‘seen intellectually.’” (1983, 326; Hua III/1, 314)
- 24.
Husserl says: “Ist eine Welt, so besagt sie für das wirkliche Bewusstsein Regeln real möglicher Erfahrung” (Hua XXXVI, 78). A little later in this text, Husserl mentions the possible dissolution of such an “order” into irrational chaos. Hua XXXVI, 79.
- 25.
Of course, it should not be re-interpreted as a one-sided reduction of the world to subjectivity. I agree with James Dodd when he understands the phenomenological reduction as “phenomenalization” and states: “There is here a certain mutually dependent, double visibility between world and subjectivity; I cannot bring the one into focus without at the same time making the other a theme for seeing” (Dodd 2004, 190). At the same time, such an explanation is only needed because it is impossible, in practice, to completely exclude such elementary terms as “world” and “subjectivity” from phenomenological description. It is not that such a duality itself would be a fundamental structure of being. Rather, what is at stake here is “standpoints,” as Luft seems to suggest: “It is as paradoxical as a trompe l’oeil in that one cannot ‘see’ both items that the picture displays—Freud ’s head, the women—at once, though one knows that they are both ‘there’” (Luft 2011, 192)
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Taguchi, S. (2017). Annihilation of the World? Husserl’s Rehabilitation of Reality. In: Walton, R., Taguchi, S., Rubio, R. (eds) Perception, Affectivity, and Volition in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Phaenomenologica, vol 222. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55340-5_9
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