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Notes
Pascal, Pensées, L. 201/Br. 206, (my translation).
Leibniz, Monadologie, §83; Philosophischen Schriften, Gerhardt (ed.), Hildesheim, New York, Georg Olms Verlag, 1978, VI, p. 621, (my translation).
Bacon, The Great Instauration, The Works (vol. VIII), translated by J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath (eds), Boston, Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1900, p. 53.
R. Spaemann, “Naturteleologie und Handlung,” in Philosophische Essays, Stuttgart, Reclam, 1983, pp. 41–59.
We should add that by claiming to reduce nature to an infinity of material systems in causal interaction supposedly independent of any human meaning, naturalist reductionism (whose starting point idealism accepts) neglects the fact that the very idea of “causality” already calls for human intervention, as Georg-Henrik von Wright demonstrated in his magnum opus, Explanation and Understanding, since it is only by intervening from the outside in a causal system to modify the antecedent and verify whether the consequent follows or not, that it becomes possible to distinguish between a real causal relation and what is merely a fortuitous correlation. The idea of causality logically depends on that of goal-oriented human action.
Husserl, Ideen… II, Hua IV, p. 82; Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, Collected Works (vol. III), Trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer, Dordrecht, Kluwer, 1989, p. 87.
Husserl, Ideen… I, Hua III,1, p. 113; General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, Collected Works (vol. II), Trans. F. Kersten, The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1982, p. 121.
Hua III,1, p. 82; trans. cited, p. 84.
Here a specification is needed: this claim of the priority of the life-world absolutely does not exclude the possibility that our ordinary perception of things be actually tributary of concepts from our culture, including, of course, our scientific culture. It concerns a de jure question, not a de facto question, for nothing prevents us from in fact perceiving the orbit of the sun, for example, provided that we possess the concept of orbit. Actually, our life-world as Europeans at the beginning of the twenty-first century is structured both by pre-scientific concepts, like sun and movement, and by scientific concepts, like orbit or gravity; but for all that it does not follow that the life-world in general must be structured by such concepts. De jure, the life-world is anterior to these concepts, for we have no need for the concept of orbit, for example, or no more so than that of movement in order to perceive trajectory of the sun. The de jure anteriority of the life-world with respect to our cultural and scientific productions does not exclude its de facto permeability by these productions.
Ideen… II, Hua IV, p. 153; Trans. cited, p. 160.
Ideen… III, Hua V, p. 124; Phenomenology and the Foundation of the Sciences, Collected Works (Vol. I), Trans. T. E. Klein and W. E. Pohl, the Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1980, p. 111.
Hua IV, p. 145; Trans. cited, p. 152 (modified).
Hua IV, p. 144; Trans. cited, p. 152. With this, Husserl rejoins a line of thought that goes back at least to Fichte, if not to Descartes. On this point, see the Lectures on the Vocation of the Scholar (1794) where Fichte formulates his fundamental question in the following way: “By what authority does man call a particular portion of the physical world his body? How does he come to consider this body as belonging to his Ego, whereas it is altogether opposed to it?” (Trans. W. Smith, London, John Chapman, 1847, pp. 26–27).
Hua IV, p. 212; Trans. cited, p. 223, (modified).
Hua, XIV, p. 453.
Hua IV, p. 212; Trans. cited, p. 223.
Hua IV, p. 214; Trans. cited, p. 226. It is also worth recalling the text of §54 of Ideen…I : “Certainly a consciousness without an animated organism (leibloses) and, paradoxical as it sounds, also without a psyche, […] is imaginable.” (Hua III, 1, p. 119; Trans. cited, p. 127, modified). Although, Husserl would later recognize in the Crisis that the the way “we are related to all objects which exist for us is [necessarily?] through the lived-body,” (Hua VI, p. 110; The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Trans. D. Carr, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1970, p. 108, modified.
Merleau-Ponty, Signes, Paris, Gallimard, 1960, p. 210; Signs, Trans., R. C. McCleary, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, p. 166 (modified).
Hua IV, p. 150; Trans. cited, p. 158, modified.
Hua IV, p. 151; Trans. cited, pp. 158–159, modified.
Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception, Paris, Gallimard, rééd. “Tel,” p. 116–117; Phenomenology of Perception, Trans. C. Smith, London, Routledege and Kegan Paul, 1959, new ed. 2002, p. 115.
Le Visible et l’invisible, Paris, Gallimard, 1964, new “Tel” edition, p. 195 (my translation).
Hua I, p. 128; Cartesian Meditations. An Introduction to Phenomenology, Trans. D. Cairns, Dordrecht, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1960, p. 97.
Husserl, Manuscript D 12 IV, (my translation).
Hua IV, p. 96; Trans. cited, p. 102, modified.
Hua IV, p. 152; Trans. cited, pp. 159–160, modified.
It is hardly a surprise if Husserl ultimately returns to a position that is not so far removed from Descartes and a “cogito of movement” that irresistibly recalls its predecessor. Consider Gassendi's objection according to which I could infer my existence from any one of actions. Descartes responds that one should distinguish between walking as an action in the world mobilizing the body and its machinery, and walking as the pure thought of walking which alone possesses “metaphysical certainty (certitudo metaphysica),” such that it can entail the certainty of my existence: Ego ambulo, ergo sum is not a legitimate inference, “except in so far as our awareness of walking is a thought; it is of this alone that the inference holds good, not of the motion of the body, which sometimes does not exist, as in dreams, when nevertheless I appear to walk. Hence from the fact that I think that I walk I can very well infer the existence of the mind which so thinks, but not that of the body which walks,” (Responses to the Fifth Objections, AT VII, 500; The Philosophical Works of Descartes, Vol. II, Trans. E. Haldane and G. Boss, Cambridge University Press, 1934). In short, there is an ambulatory cogito, but it only “mobilizes” the thought of walking, and not at all the actual physical action of walking. For as long as the worldly movements of my body are quite doubtful, the only certainty I have at my disposal is limited to my walking in thought which could remain what it is even if there were not any body nor any world. Husserl does not say anything different, and his ambulatory cogito is no less dualist in its very principle: “The thesis of being […] can be erroneous—the thing does not exist—and in that it will be said in my subsequent critical judgment, or in someone else's, that in actuality I did not strike, dance or jump. But the evidence (the evident lived experience) of the “I undergo” or “I do,” of the “I move,” is not affected thereby, is not annulled. (One can say that even the “I strike” or the “I dance” is a cogito, but such a one as to co-include in itself a thesis of transcendence, and in this mixed form it harbors in itself the Ego sum as well).” (Hua IV, p. 218; trans. cited, pp. 229–230). This mixed form of the cogito does not have a radically different status from Descartes’ ambulatory cogito which also, if it be correctly understood, contains the Ego sum in the form of a certainty concerning exclusively my mind. The suspension of the thesis of the world leaves us in the presence of an “acting” which requires no actual movement and of an efficacy which could be exerted even in the absence of any actual body and all worldly movement. In short, Husserl's “I can” remains an “I can” in thought that has no need of any real power of a really existing body to be actualized. Such a “power” (Vermögen) remains the ironic index of the radical transcendental impotence of the pure Ego.
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Translation by Samuel Webb.
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Romano, C. After the lived-body. Cont Philos Rev 49, 445–468 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-016-9398-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-016-9398-9