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Hering, Jean (1890–1966)

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Encyclopedia of Phenomenology

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Johannes, Hans, Jean: The Lives of an “Old Fellow Phenomenologist”

Husserl (1968, p. 15). See Mehl (2021, pp. 56–58), on Hering’s iter alsaticum. See also Pradelle and Serban (2016) for the introduction to a monographic journal issue on Hering, touching on the many different aspects of his thought.

JohannesFootnote 1 or Hans (as he used to be known before WWI) or Jean Hering (sometimes: Héring) was born in 1890 in Ribeauvillé when Alsace was still part of Germany. Dissatisfied with the teaching at the University of Strasbourg (where he first enrolled to study philology), Hering decided in 1909 to move to Göttingen, where he would stay for 3 years. At the Georgia Augusta, Hering studied with Husserl and attended Adolf Reinach’s seminars (Hering 1939, p. 267); he soon became one of the prominent figures of the phenomenological circle, serving as the president of the recently founded Philosophische Gesellschaftin WS 1912/1913. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on the theory of the a...

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Stein (2014, p. 321).

  2. 2.

    On Hering’s life, see Monseu (2005, pp. 15ff.) and Dupont (2014, pp. 218ff.).

  3. 3.

    The volume exists also in Italian (Hering 2010) and Spanish translation (2019). A new French edition of the text will soon be available.

  4. 4.

    On Hering’s phenomenology of dream and “dreaming consciousness,” which we will not be able to discuss here, see Serban (2016) and Zippel (2016, pp. 188–190).

  5. 5.

    Hering refers the reader to the opening page of Reinach’s lecture “On Phenomenology,” originally published in Reinach 1921, p. 379 (now in Reinach 1989, p. 531).

  6. 6.

    […] “lorsque Reinach nous demanda si selon nôtre impression Husserl enseignait la même chose que lui, nous ne pûmes que lui répondre: Pour vous, la phénoménologie est une méthode, pour Husserl une branche de la philosophie. Nous eussions peut-être mieux fait de dire que la méthode […] était la même, mais que Husserl était avant tout préoccupé de la mettre au service d’une discipline fondamentale qu’il appelait phénoménologie” (Hering 1939, p. 368).

  7. 7.

    For a first systematic assessment of Hering’s dissertation, see De Santis (2021a).

  8. 8.

    “Sodann sind die phänomenologischen Bedingungen der Möglichkeit des Erscheinens einer Welt als zusammenhängende Totalität von realem Seienden zu untersuchen, die sich als die wirkliche und einzige ausgibt.”

  9. 9.

    Hering calls the c-definition of phenomenology l’emploi large du terme, “the term used in a broad manner” (Hering 1926b, p. 77). For a most balanced analysis of Hering’s position vis-à-vis Husserl, see Mehl (2021, pp. 58–64).

  10. 10.

    […] “le primat épistémologique de l’étude de la conscience, accepté par des élèves bien plus nombreux que le soupçonnait peut-être le professeur, se transforma en primat métaphysique de la conscience.”

  11. 11.

    “Ce que Husserl affirme d’une manière non équivoque, c’est que le ‘cogito’ peut exister sans entrainer par là l’existence du κόσμος. Acceptons cette thèse, quoiqu’elle contienne quelque chose de plus que l’affirmation cartésienne de l’indubitabilité du ‘cogito.’ Mais alors, il s’agit de savoir, si vraiment elle n’est pas réversible. Pourquoi les ‘choses’ auraient-elles besoin de la conscience, non seulement pour être pensées, mais pour exister?”

  12. 12.

    The “necessary positing of a fact” and “the positing of a necessary fact” are two different things (Hering 2015, pp. 40, 47). Husserl would be confusing the (epistemological nature of the) former with the (metaphysical nature of the) latter.

  13. 13.

    See Monseu (2005, pp. 51, 53), who interprets Hering’s claims about the metaphysical nature of Husserl’s statements in §49 as revolving around the question of transcendental idealism. The same holds true of Avé-Lallemant (1975, p. 29), who, for example, never raises the question about the meaning of the term metaphysics in Hering. For an interpretation that differs from ours, see Tedeschini (2014, pp. 248–249) and (2018, p. 395); on the sense of Hering’s “realism,” see the contribution by Boccaccini (2016).

  14. 14.

    And it is only at this point, Hering would further add that the metaphysical problem of the existence of religious objects can be addressed as well (Hering 1926b, p. 78). On the development of Husserl’s concept of metaphysics, see De Santis (2021b) and in particular Trizio (2019, 2021).

  15. 15.

    There already exist a Spanish (Hering 2004), an Italian (Hering 2014), and an English (Hering 2021) translation of the text. In the following, I will always translate Wesenheit with “essentiality” and not with “ideal quality” (as is done in the English edition, following Ingarden 1966, p. 309). There are three reasons for doing so. One, because Wesenheit implies a reference to Wesen (on the basis of which it is constructed), which is lost in the phrase “ideal quality.” Two, because for Hering, “qualities” are always individual and belong to either a real or an ideal “individual” object, a quality always being a “concretized Wesenheit” (Hering 1921, p. 514). Three, because Hering explicitly distinguishes between eidos (or Wesenheit) and “ideal objects.” Thus if we translate Wesenheit with ideal quality, it would follow that ideal-individual objects have ideal-individual qualities that are in turn the result of the concretization of ideal qualities!

  16. 16.

    Hering quotes directly from the beginning of Ideas and explicitly uses Husserl’s definition of Wesen (Hering 1921, p. 497; Hering 2021, pp. 56–57). He also writes that he is using the term Idee according to “Husserl’s earlier terminology” (Hering 1921, p. 533; Hering 2021, p. 91), the one from the Logical Investigations. For a meticulous reconstruction of these relations and differences, see De Santis (2014, pp. 59–61). On the relations and differences between Husserl’s terminology and Hering’s, see, for example, Seifert (1996, Ch. I); Ferrari (2001, p. 64); and De Santis (2014, pp. 60–61).

  17. 17.

    In §15 of Ideen, Husserl defines the individuum as a “this-here, whose material essence is a concretum,” namely, an “absolutely independent essence” (Hua III/1, p. 35; Husserl 2014, p. 30).

  18. 18.

    For example, during his quick discussion of Hering, Patočka speaks of the Sosein as “divided into (se člení na) τί and ποῖον” (Patočka 1965, p. 182).

  19. 19.

    Stein explains this point as follows: “τί εἶναι and ποῖον εἶναι coincide, if we mean by ποῖον εἶναι the sum total of the essential characteristics in the order which is imposed upon them by the τί” (Stein 1962, p. 146; Stein 2002, p. 151).

  20. 20.

    With this account, and despite the language of “features” (Züge), Hering avoids assuming the essence as a set of properties instantiated or inhering in a bare substratum.

  21. 21.

    Hering’s distinction might remind the reader of the more traditional one between essentialia, attributa, and modi. The attributa do not belong to the essence of an object but are grounded in it (the essence being their sufficient condition); the modi are grounded in the essentialia only as possibilities, since their obtaining requires an external cause (see the role these distinctions play in C. Wolff according to Pichler 1910, pp. 24–25).

  22. 22.

    On this, see De Santis (2015, pp. 164–165); see Fréchette (2015, p. 160), for a different perspective on the core.

  23. 23.

    At this point, one could raise the question about the consistency of Hering’s rebuttal of Chestov’s criticism of Husserl. Is not Hering reducing the ontological “thickness” of individual objects (especially “real” ones) to be nothing other than a connection of morphai, i.e., of individually realized nonindividual eide?

  24. 24.

    It is important to stress that although Essenz stands in opposition to Existenz, the content of the idea (what Hering calls its “total configuration”) (Hering 1921, p. 530; Hering 2021, p. 88) includes – for example, in the case of empirical objects – a “hic-et-nunc moment.” In sum, the Essenz is not indifferent to the individuals’ mode of being.

  25. 25.

    On the basis of a still unpublished letter from Ingarden to Hering, it can be inferred that Hering himself regarded the “Essential Questions” as an “improvement” (Fortschritt) on his own investigations (Ingarden 1926, p. 1). For a discussion of Ingarden’s ontology, see, for example, Bertolini (2016).

  26. 26.

    See Borden Sharkey (2016) on the way in which Stein uses Hering’s essentialities.

  27. 27.

    See Bancalari (2015, pp. 39–48), on Hering’s religious philosophy in connection with Max Scheler. For an introduction to Hering, see Hernández Marcelo and Herrero Hernández (2019). On the problem of God in Husserl, see, for example, Ales Bello (2005), Serban (2020), and Trizio (2022).

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Acknowledgements

The present work was supported by the Czech Science Foundation, financing the project: “Intentionality and Person in Medieval Philosophy and Phenomenology” (GAČR 21-08256S), and by the European Regional Development Fund-Project “Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions of the Success of Europe in an Interrelated World” (No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000734).

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  1. Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Charles University, Prague, Czechia

    Daniele De Santis

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    Nicolas de Warren

  2. Dept of Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

    Ted Toadvine

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De Santis, D. (2023). Hering, Jean (1890–1966). In: de Warren, N., Toadvine, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Phenomenology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47253-5_35-1

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