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In his very interesting and compelling Husserl and Analytic Philosophy (1990b), Richard Cobb-Stevens argues that what drives phenomenology and analytic philosophy apart is the different interpretation of the connection between predication and perception. While logical analysis since the time of Frege rejects all primacy of the presentational function of perception when it comes to the relation between sense and reference, for Husserl the description of pre-predicative intuition, how we identify particulars through their perceived features, is the indispensable foundation for all articulation in the form of judgment. Since his earliest efforts, Husserl has identified the premise of modern philosophy (the period from British empiricism up to Kant) in the thesis that “mind is a self-enclosed inner space” (Cobb-Stevens 1990b, p. 132). For Husserl, even a statement of perception cannot simply mirror supposedly distinct impressions given in a particular perception and connected—so goes the story for Locke or Hume—by intra-mental processes such as ideas of reflection. Husserl’s broadening of the concept of intuition highlights both the surplus of meaning of terms denoting intuitive objects and the universality of formal and categorial dimensions expressed in perceptual statements.

Thus, judgments are not “appraisals of nominalized propositional contents;” our “speech is not guided by a scan of meanings, but rather by anticipated or achieved intuitions of the essential structures of things. (. . .) To know something is simply to possess its form” (Cobb-Stevens 1990b, p. 145). The theory of categorial intuition acquires central importance for Cobb-Stevens, who shows its Aristotelian inspiration and anti-modern function in general.Footnote 1

In his transcendental turn, Husserl criticizes Kant on several counts. According to Cobb-Stevens, Kant’s theory of knowledge is a response to Hume’s skepticism regarding scientific knowledge. “Husserl introduced three significant changes into transcendental method. First, he extended its range by inquiring into the a priori conditions not only of scientific objectivity, but also of pre-scientific and even pre-predicative modes of givenness. Secondly, he contended that transcendental conditions can be intuited. Thirdly, he rejected the distinction between phenomena and noumena, and adopted an interpretation of the relationship between appearing and being that is more reminiscent of Aristotle than of Kant” (1990b, p. 165).

The passages I have isolated do not pretend to do full justice to Cobb-Stevens’ rich book. But they are, among many insightful and instructive discussions, the select philosophical points I want to call attention to, probe a little further, and eventually challenge in this paper.

Even a superficial reading of Ideas I (where Husserl speaks of vision of essences in terms of noein and eide, § 19), coupled with the influence that we know Brentano, one of the most notable and important Aristotle scholars of the late nineteenth century, had on his student Husserl, makes it hard to resist the impression that Aristotle has every right to be considered a pivotal figure, and the first phenomenologist, as Heidegger famously suggested. Section “Categorial intuition and Aristotle” tries to verify in what ways this suggestion is plausible.

In section “Husserl and Kant on philosophy,” I propose, rather than an exercize in imaginative variation or a meditation on the might-have-beens in the history of philosophy, a reflection on what Husserl could have gained for his own (especially his late) philosophy from a less one-sided reading of Kant’s first Critique (the Doctrine of Method in particular). Husserl definitely has many important criticisms of Kant, and I do not intend to smooth out their edge (even though I believe we should not accept them at face value, either). What I want to discuss is the relation between ideas and ends, the world, and especially the teleological character that philosophy acquires in the last years of Husserl’s reflection as it regains its place in a newly conceived historical trajectory.

In section “World and horizon,” I discuss more in depth the notion of world in Husserl.

Categorial Intuition and Aristotle

It is beyond doubt that in Aristotle’s De anima the notion of perception is quite broad. The parallel thesis on the world as an innerly articulated and categorially layered ground is likewise strong. The act of perception is a krinein, i.e., an intelligent judgment which discriminates sensibles, recognizes differences (and the differences are a well-defined and organized spectrum proper to material sensible things themselves), is self-conscious and realizes what it does, intuits relations of belonging, grasps simultaneously differences which it nonetheless relates to the same unity, and therefore has as its object a wide range of sensibles, from a color to a complex state of affairs, not simple impressions or sense-data. What is perhaps less obvious is what a presumed intuition amounts to, or what in Aristotle’s vocabulary is the purported equivalent for ‘intuition’ (let alone how tenable an account of cognition that is). A certain continuity stretches from the basic perception of proper sensibles to the intellection of indivisibles. Some aspects are shared by proper sensibles and essences: for example, their grasp is infallible and primary (respectively, we cannot err in the perception of a quale, which is the basis for all more complex perception. Either we grasp an essence, prior to and the basis for predication, or we do not, in which case we ignore what we are talking about). Yet, the several acts of what we might tentatively consider intuition are by no means the same: some involve one sense at a time, some more than one (common sensibles), some, finally, require the understanding alone (nous).

Among the more interesting instances of a complex perception is what Aristotle calls accidental perception, by which I perceive this white body as the son of Diares, or the bile as simultaneously yellow and bitter. Here perception relates different sensible properties to their substrate. This relation is not due to an act on our part, a synthesis, let alone an intellectual connection we perform. We perceive sensibles alone (“not so far as they are themselves but in so far as they form a unity” (de an. III 2, 425b 1). The job of perception is to relate and ascribe them to their material unity: to recognize, identify, make sense of them. An inversion of the more familiar Aristotelian thesis of the primacy of substance over properties in predication or in metaphysics takes place here: proper sensibles enjoy a primacy and at once direct us to a logic of relations of belonging. When Sokolowski speaks of an introduction of syntax into the world in Husserl’s categorial intuition, he almost seems to lend to Aristotle the words he evidently misses to speak again to us. But the true reason why he has ceased making sense to us is, obviously, the quite different one that we come after the reversal of this Aristotelian relation at the hands of Galilei, Descartes and Locke. When in The Assayer Galilei speaks about temperature and warmth in terms of motion of imperceptible particles, he inaugurates a frame of mind that is still ours: senses are deceived by illusory appearances. What is objective is not what we see but what lies behind it; primary qualities, defined in opposition to secondary qualities, are not on a par with them, or strictly sensible to begin with, and precisely for this reason can they now be subjected to precise scrutiny in the new science.

For Aristotle, the soul is openness to the world. It is indeed the world itself in potentiality, the world as form. We become things as we know them, we become the forms we think, so that the soul has no form of its own but is rather the capacity to become each different form in turn. The soul is not removed from, but lives originally by the things of the world. It cannot be understood thanks to an original and reflective relation to itself. There is no I as opposed to the world—or the body—that functions as the pole from which all its several activities irradiate or the center which brings back to itself its various representations and actions. It is no wonder then that when Aristotle describes memory, perception, imagination, thinking, he describes them as objective processes, not as activities stemming from an original I. And knowing means letting things speak for themselves, not forcing nature to answer questions of our own asking—which is why approaching being through knowledge, language, conceptual schemes or such screens is for Aristotle self-defeating. Likewise, the idea that the mind is the indispensable mediation and condition for all discourse, that representations, pictures or methods stand as intermediaries between us and things, or that the mind, the cogito, the I should be investigated prior to and as key to our knowledge of things, is excluded from this view.

Ethics, logic and physics are relative to different and separate realms; they do not rely on, or find a unity or convergence in, a theory of the I, or of knowledge, or a homogeneous method. In fact, this means that all disciplines and sciences must respect the different kind of being and modality of givenness of their object, which in turn dictates the different criteria, aims and methods to be followed in each of them. Things have an inner order and structure which must not await our constitution. This primacy of the object, opposed to the primacy of a unitary method which alone can confer a homogenous treatment, and thereby a scientific dignity, to its objects, is the profound meaning of the ideal of knowledge as contemplation as well as of its affinity with moderation and wisdom.

Aristotle’s approach does not exclude from its questions issues traditionally tied to reflection and subjectivity, such as, say, self-knowledge. Only, such phenomena are not to be approached preliminarily through the focus on an I or a soul. To account for self-consciousness (in thought or perception), for my relation to myself in practice (for example, the character, the setting of ends, recognition and empathy in friendship), Aristotle does not have recourse to or take his bearings from an I whose properties such phenomena would have to be considered, but from a soul whose object is being, and only indirectly itself.

It may not surprise us that Brentano saw the notion of intentionality prefigured in such a theory of the soul (perception and consciousness) as somehow all things, or even found in Aristotle a model for his theory of self-knowledge. What we must see is whether or not we are justified in finding in Aristotle a precursor to Husserl’s categorial intuition. And here I think that we should start by noticing how for Husserl the problem at stake is the phenomenological description of the degrees of knowledge, which involves the route from an empty (mostly, but not necessarily only, signitive) intention to a fulfillment through an intuition.Footnote 2 Husserl does not begin by setting aside the traditional modern opposition between intuition and thought, or by stressing their continuity as different forms of intending the same thing, but by acknowledging that very opposition, which he however proceeds to rephrase over and against Kant’s separation and exclusive ascription of intuition to sensibility and synthesis to the understanding. The dichotomy is now recast as internal to intentionality, in terms of absence and presence, emptiness and fullness. Sensibility and intellection are not simply juxtaposed as heterogeneous. They form the two ends of a spectrum ranging from simple sensible (schlicht) intuition to categorial form, and therefore successive layers grounded on one another. Concepts are not simply other than intuitions; they are higher-level acts built on lower acts. We begin by noticing a sensible feature as such and such, say an elementary geometric shape; we then understands a thing as possessing that feature, and thereby make possible statements on it in a categorial form (e.g., ‘the table is rectangular’); finally, we experience the coincidence between what is sensibly presented and what is referred to. This table is identified as a substrate of which I predicate the property of rectangularity.

This theory lets us reconstruct the transition from a sensuous awareness of features to a recognition of a relation parts-whole up to the grasp of a state of affairs as the synthesis of identification of such a predication and the manifestation I can point to. Language expresses the articulation of states of affairs. But, syntax is itself built upon categorial states of affairs, not the other way round, as Experience and Judgment is specifically devoted to showing. In this view, the sensible level is not continuous with the categorial: we need to break the flow of sensible experience to get to an identifiable, repeatable connection which we can utter and communicate. The inner articulation of an empirical whole is the object of a synthesis that goes beyond the mere noticing of its features. If categorial objects are not the result of subjective connections, nor do they mirror things. As a result, the opposition between sensibility and understanding is clarified, but because it is assumed, confirmed and deepened.

For the phenomenologist knowledge is reached through a description guided and made possible by the preliminary carrying out of the method of reduction, until it attains the fullness of evidence for a pure consciousness; and this final fulfillment is an ideal, a goal we can rarely achieve, but of which we should not lose sight in our cognitive endeavors, the overlap or synthesis of identification between two ways of intending: the empty and the intuitive.

In sum, Husserl begins by the modern opposition of sensibility and thought; evidence is a goal, and evidence and intuition are the completion of a process we strive after, not a principle as in Aristotle, for whom describing a process as tending to an idea, the goal of an infinite progress, empties it of meaning and undermines its value. Thus, we are tempted to conclude to the distance between Aristotle and Husserl on this theme. But there is something else, more decisive. One of the more interesting and innovative aspects of Husserl’s ideation is the role of imagination. It bestows necessity on our cognitions. This does not happen by its own virtue, for its free variation can only result in unquestionable evidence if it is ruled by essential vision. The arbitrary variations in phantasy, that is, do not produce an eidos, but are only relevant when they are guided by an eidos; and it is the vision of the eidos that makes us choose which directions of imagination’s wavering are meaningful and worth following (how an eidos can be already given and constituted as familiar, as well as authentically grasped, independently and beforehand, so as to guide our variation, is another problem). Still, the importance of this point can hardly be overestimated: to the best of my knowledge, in the history of philosophy this is an unprecendented thesis. As Ideas I has it, when we examine an empirical singularity in our free imagination, we treat the individual not as a fact but as the example or instance of a possibility (Husserl 2014, §§ 3–4); the geometrician disregards the given figures because he or she only focuses on ideal possibilities, on an eidetic science (Husserl 2014, § 7). In Experience and Judgment (Husserl 1975a, § 97c, p. 374), Husserl will reiterate that a pure a priori has its origin in pure imagination. Imagination helps us establish an invariance to hold fast to, and with it the self-same core of things. When Husserl writes in the Cartesian Meditations that every entity is the example of a pure possibility (Husserl 1960, § 34, p. 71), and in the Crisis that an index of potential and actual manners of appearing (Husserl 1970, § 48, p. 166), he means that each finite perception opens up a system of predelineated potentialities. To use Hegelian language, I would say that Husserl’s essence is unaffected by its alterity, and identity enjoys a higher status than difference. The identity, however, is itself an intended one, an index of possibilities of appearing that transcends all the presentations through which it is given. The identity is not an imagined filling of gaps as in Hume, or a rule or concept I synthesize by connecting the intuitive manifold, as in Kant. But nor is it a given ousia, the unchanging core of a substrate undergoing change.Footnote 3

This invites us to recast what prima facie appeared as distance into an outright anti-Aristotelian position. In Aristotle imagination is at most a presentification; in the cases in which it is not alternative to perception, it is unreliable and fallible, and its function is not that of granting us access to the actual’s possibilities, but of offering a likely guess.Footnote 4 In Aristotle’s first philosophy the actual (energeia) has priority over the possible in all respects, so that when this thesis is inverted what you get is not a different form of Aristotelianism, but a variation on Leibniz’ metaphysics. For ideation and this notion of possibility are embedded in a quite different context, from which they draw a meaning diametrically opposed to Aristotle’s. Let me explain.

For Husserl it is only through the modalization of an original, passive belief in the pregivenness of objects in the world that we perform our cognitive acts. In this view the world is an implicit universal ground of belief, the presupposition for all praxis and all judgment, co-present as the encompassing domain within which everything can affect me, stand out and become an object for me (1975a § 7). When we perceive something we always intend more than what is given to our perception. We always transcend the given; and the thing is but a system of profiles I co-intend as I perceive one of its aspects at a time. Sensible data thus are systems of references to similar possibilities: this explains why the present tends to be apprehended as a type, a schema. The world, which in the natural attitude works as this abiding familiar ground of which we are constantly aware as the source of all anticipated confirmation or negation of certainty, must in turn be seen in its being constituted through the reduction, which is the most radical methodical shift we can perform for Husserl. Through the method of reduction, we conquer (Husserl 2014, Introduction) the purified terrain of phenomenology. Our gaze must be turned from things back to the acts thanks to which we constitute them. The world, differently stated, is understood through the lens of our certainty of it, and the modalizations of such doxa in our pure consciousness.

To conceive the world as “lying outside the universe of possible consciousness (. . .) is nonsensical” (Husserl 1960, § 41, p. 84). Compared to this, the Aristotelian soul, absorbed in what it intends, simply is not aware that its object is but the intentional correlate of a subjective act. To recall lecture 45 of Erste Philosophie (Husserl 1965b, pp. 120–21), every experience and thought through which an object is present for the I is already the result of the I’s conscious life, establishing the validity of its objects. This implicit constitution, this hidden functioning thanks to which the world exists for me all at once, as an undivided unity, must finally come to the fore.

If I am right, then it is hard to be surprised by the otherwise shocking (for a student of Brentano’s) notion we find in lecture Eight of Erste Philosophie: Aristotle’s psychology, not having as its clue a proper method, could be no more than a mere sketch—and the sketch is of “a universal science of subjectivity” (Husserl 1965a, p. 52). The shortcoming of Aristotle’s psychology is identified in a natural naiveté that cannot represent an adequate tool for countering skepticism. Aristotle could not give a radical foundation of knowledge because he thought of the world as given beforehand (Husserl 1965a, pp. 53–5).

This is coherent, I think, with Husserl’s characterization of first philosophy as a science of transcendental subjectivity (Husserl 1965b, Lecture 28, p. 4), and with the note on which the Cartesian Meditations end: “I must lose the world by epochè in order to regain it by a universal self-examination” (Husserl 1960, p. 157).

It seems to me that the conclusion is inescapable that either we adopt, while naturally transforming, Aristotelian notions (whether or not this means that we unwittingly remain within the Aristotelian tradition is another question), or we look for a radical new beginning for philosophy—a Cartesian or Copernican revolution—; but we can’t have both.

My impression is that if the consideration of Aristotle as the first phenomenologist is so pervasive, and persuasive, it is because of Heidegger’s repeated suggestions to this effect,Footnote 5 rather than of Husserl himself. Paradoxically, we can say that in this respect, the importance of Aristotle, Brentano is a greater and more lasting source of inspiration to Heidegger, for whom Brentano’s book on being in Aristotle was allegedly a turning point, than to his disciple Husserl.

What is left, then, of Husserl’s affinity with Aristotle on intuition? Certainly the picture of perception as a passage from what is passively acquired and familiar to what is known. If we were to add a concrete ontology of essences, with the complex relations between essence and appearance and unity and multiplicity, that would hardly impress Husserl. In Formal and Transcendental Logic (Husserl 1974, pp. 70–1), he writes that a material ontology must be complemented by a formal ontology, of which Aristotle had no clue and which had to wait until Leibniz’ mathesis universalis to be first conceived.

Husserl and Kant on Philosophy

Even if Husserl is bound to find Kant’s transcendental philosophy more akin and close to his philosophical approach and interests than Aristotle, he notoriously does not refrain from sharp criticisms of the Critique of Pure Reason. His points are subtle, even if he does not base them on a historically careful interpretation of the book. Like many of his contemporaries (in fact, like most readers), Husserl has a very selective, not to say biased, reading of Kant’s first Critique. What I find problematic is that, as he locates the presumed heart of the work in the Aesthetic and the Analytic, he dismantles the whole and reduces it to one part or section. Even the independent faculties he singles out—and this holds for sensibility and understanding most of all—are not understood as originating in an overarching unitary principle shaping the whole book. Like all similar readings that reduce reason to understanding, and the different forms of comprehension, reflection and thought to a theory of experience, Husserl simplifies matters a great deal as he identifies the exact nature of the problem that Kant is supposedly trying to solve.

A very thin line separates a missed reading—of the Transcendental Dialectic and the Doctrine of Method—from a misreading—of the whole work. But a missed reading is first of all a missed opportunity we have every philosophical reason to regret, not an error or limit we should be quick to denounce. What I would therefore like to discuss in this section is, firstly, on what counts Husserl’s criticisms are still important for us, and, secondly, how his working his way to the notions of a teleology of reason in its historical development and of phenomenology as a mission, which permeate his latest pages, could have sparked, and profited from, a fruitful dialogue with Kant’s Architectonics.

Husserl on Kant

Arguably, even strict Kantians would grant that the first Critique is a tangled web of elusive concepts, phrased in a superficially precise vocabulary actually replete with complicated and perplexing distinctions hiding countless ambiguities, oscillations, and occasional contradictions. The sometimes convoluted prose and the hasty writing of a masterpiece in certain cases put together out of notes from different years during a long decade of gestation do not help; and the often cavalier coexistence in the second edition of important revisions alongside entire chapters that have instead remained unaltered (I refer to the different treatment reserved to the Deduction and the Schematism, among others) help even less. The reader’s reaction, that the more you read the book, the more opaque certain distinctions appear, is quite justified. Still, provided we find in it sufficient motivations for further examination, this difficulty should increase a charitable attitude in our exegetical endeavor, not strengthen a prejudiced dismissal. In particular, one effort should be in order: that of not conflating an order of exposition with an order in things. This holds especially for the stress on the dichotomies intended to highlight the separation of sensibility and understanding, which are relatively independent and can even work unrelated to one another (in pure intuition, or in general logic, for example), but whose heterogeneity is not the final word for Kant, for his problem is how they are united and collaborate in the schematism, the figurative synthesis and the principles of our experience in general.

Having said that, it is undeniable that for Kant intuition can only be sensible, and that things in themselves cannot be easily abolished as post-Kantians thought. Here certain ways out, such as the distinction of respects and the noumenon as a mere limiting concept, are facile shortcuts precluded by other Kantian texts and, more importantly, by other Kantian considerations, such as the noumena’s practical reality and causality, and things-in-themselves’ affection of our senses. In this sense, Jacobi’s famous specter—without the assumption of things in themselves I find no access to Kant’s system, with that assumption I must leave it—looms large as the most honest expression of a dilemma still haunting Kantians. Thus, the third of the criticisms on the relation between being and appearing in Kant recalled by Cobb-Stevens in the passage quoted at the beginning is well-taken. So seems to be the second one, on the non-intuitability of transcendental conditions. What about the first one?

For Husserl Kant is not radical enough. He presupposes that outside me lie things exercizing their affection on me, and then proceeds to separate what is contingent about appearances, due entirely to changing affections, from what is universal and necessary, which must then be due to our own faculties (Husserl 1965a, p. 379); thereby he can be said to replace things with our sensibility (Husserl 1970, § 25, p. 94). His vision is marred by the psychology of his age, so that, when he brings all intuitive connections back to the imposition of our forms on to appearances, he shows he is taking his bearings from atomistic sense data, rather than from things with their own organization and articulation (Husserl 1965a, p. 358). Because he does not grant sensibility any independence, and connections for Kant are first set up through our apprehension, his sensibility does not differ markedly from Hume’s. Instead of by custom and habit, the several connections are made possible by syntheses guided by other principles, except that these remain no less subjective in nature. The understanding has a double way of functioning with respect to nature: on the one hand, as the source of its laws in explicit self-reflection, on the other, though, as ruling in concealment the intuitively given surrounding world (Husserl 1970, § 28, p. 104 & § 30, pp. 114–15). But Kant does not succeed in making this latter stage comprehensible because he adopts a regressive and not an intuitive method.

A few points are worth singling out. After 1924 (which marked the bicentennary of Kant’s birth), Husserl must have devoted renewed attention to Kant’s first Critique for the occasion of a celebratory piece (“Kant und die Idee der Transzendentalphilosophie,” Husserl 1965a, pp. 238–87). Since then, he has been laying a more definite value on Kant’s genuine attempts than on his failings. Specifically (and I think it is important to note that this happens during Husserl’s genetic phenomenology phase), Kant’s effort is identified in the attempt at a direct grounding of constitution in the first edition of the Transcendental Deduction, which, however commendable, fails because of Kant’s misunderstanding of the three syntheses as resting on an inadequate faculty psychology (Husserl 1965a, p. 282, and Crisis, Husserl 1970, § 28, p. 104).

Lack of radicalism goes hand in hand with an abstract method that does not end up in intuitive evidence. This charge of lack of audacity and rigor in reaching down to roots, literally, amounts also to lack of transcendentalism proper. We can say that Kant’s transcendentalism was on the right track in its fight against objectivism: the sense of being of the pregiven life-world is a subjective configuration, the achievement of pre-scientific experience (Husserl 1970, § 14, p. 69). What we now need is to bring this move to its completion in a deeper examination of transcendental subjectivity, which pre-gives the world and then objectifies it. The genetic phenomenologist of the Crisis finds in the Transcendental Deduction of the first edition of the Critique a discovery whose greatness demands new work shedding light on the understanding’s double functioning: i.e., over and above its explicit laws, its familiar but hidden constitution of the ever developing meaning-configuration that Husserl calls the intuitively given world (Husserl 1970, § 28, p. 104). Let me note, moreover, that among his criticisms, this—that Kant does not dare push his Copernican revolution far enough—is one of the few that would resonate with Heidegger’s charge that Kant recoils before the abyss he had discovered in the Transcendental Deduction of the first edition of the Critique for fear of the unknown.

Finally, what Husserl laments belongs, it bears highlighting, in the sphere of Kantian sensibility (inner sense, time, a priori and pure intuition), not of transcendental logic. Kant’s understanding is hardly the object of criticism—and this is not surprising if we read that transcendental logic is only possible within transcendental noetics (1965a, p. 281). It is an understanding configuring the sensible world, with all its shortcomings, that matters to Husserl. What Husserl repeats about this is a generic critique that has less to do with Kant’s theses on the understanding, the categories, judgment, the I-think, etc., than with Kant’s attitude. And the attitude at issue is again a prejudiced one: Kant favors naturalism as he takes for granted, even starts from, the validity of natural sciences, mathematics and physics, in his grounding of experience.

As I said, these criticisms are quite apt in genetic phenomenology’s attempt at unveiling the hidden and preliminary constitution of what is experienced as already given configurations of meaning. They cannot be separated, however, from other criticisms we find in Husserl dating back to earlier years. When the later Husserl writes that perceptions have an inner connection whether I actively apprehend them or I am focused on something else, and are therefore established in the sphere of passivity (Husserl 1975a, § 38, p. 165), i.e., not through an active synthesis, he develops criticisms that themselves arise out of a recasting of the notion of a priori. And it is in this context that we should evaluate what Husserl says about Kant’s misconceived notion of a priori.

Certain multiplicities, as Husserl showed since the Philosophy of Arithmetic, come in thematically united groups that involve no synthetic activity whatever. Sensible things have essential or internal properties that prescribe the range of possible connections and variations. We can say that if for Kant no analysis is possible unless as the analysis of a prior synthesis, in Husserl in turn we only unify or synthesize what is originally given as unitary. The a priori first has to do with the essence of given things, then, and is therefore a material a priori. Colors, sounds etc. come with their own spectrums of possible variations. If all “perception brings with itself a whole perceptual system” (Husserl 1966, p. 11), then associations and connections do not depend on the force of attraction that rules the mental world, as Hume would have it, but on the inner articulation of the world of experience. Receptivity must acquire the philosophical dignity tradition has always denied it.Footnote 6 Husserl does not go down the Kantian path and claim that the concept is the rule for Hume’s association. The rule is in the things we apprehend.

In the secondary literature this contrast is made much of in order to set up an opposition between Kant and Husserl that I think is overrated. I have in mind two reasons. Firstly, this opposition is reached at the cost of effacing all subjectivity from Husserl’s passive synthesis. Even if the connections are established in the sphere of passivity and there is no explicit or voluntary activity on the part of an I, still the passive synthesis does not happen without at the very least the subject’s minimal, pre-predicative and lower-level act of taking note of affections, holding fast to them and giving them a temporal duration. Secondly, this opposition makes the I-think’s syntheses deliberate and conscious activities (an interpretation there are many reasons to question), and tends to simplify what Kant means by spontaneity. Granted, Kant does not lay an analogous value on receptivity. And yet, Kant could retort that pure intuition is not merely being affected but involves a spontaneity that differs substantially from the spontaneity of the imagination or the understanding, but is nevertheless crucial to order the sensible manifold (1998, KrV B 34), so that bringing Kant’s inner sense, as well as all the psychology Kant is supposedly indebted to, back to the empiricist blank slate (Husserl 1970, § 30, pp. 114–15) is quite mistaken.

It would take us too far to discuss Kant’s synthesis and spontaneity in this connection. What I want to underline here is that a related, but more serious and basic, misunderstanding on Husserl’s part is that of Kant’s a priori. As Cobb-Stevens reminded us, for Husserl Kant’s theory of knowledge is a response to Hume’s skepticism. Interpreting the first Critique in these terms is inextricably and inevitably linked with a prejudiced reading of Kant’s a priori. One of the earliest occurrences of the criticism according to which Kant misses the authentic phenomenological concept of a priori is, not surprisingly, the Sixth Logical Investigation, precisely as Husserl clarifies the gap between intuition and thinking (Husserl 1984, § 66, pp. 241–243). The reason for Kant’s failure is that he has not achieved the concept of categorial intuition, and cannot recognize the basic difference between intuition and signification. It follows that Kant does not possess a theory of the diverse kinds of concepts, and that his epistemology is metaphysical (in a pejorative sense, meaning dogmatic) because his aim is that of rescuing mathematics, natural science and metaphysics. This critique holds not only on the theoretical, but also on the practical level. For Kant does not see the eidetic a priori lawfulness internal to the sphere of feeling, in its necessary relation to value (Husserl 2004, § 44, p. 215). Back in 1903 Husserl had written that Hume, unlike Kant, has an authentic concept of a priori, as a relation grounded in the universal essence of concepts and intuitable in evidence (Husserl 1965a, p. 354; see also, in 1915–16, the essential necessity in the vision of essences missed by Kant: Husserl 1965a, p. 402). Kant limits himself to introducing principles other than habit to organize experience; but that does not make them less subjective, so that Kant’s theory winds up being no less skeptical than Hume’s. After all, asks Husserl, do we not find in Hume’s idea that the unity of experience conforms itself to thought the Copernican turn that Kant made explicit (Husserl 1965a, p. 354)? Is Kant not a subjectivist and a phenomenalist, then, if he reshuffles all lawfulness to our faculties while claiming things in themselves are forever beyond us?

Husserl, it seems to me, reads the Critique of Pure Reason in terms of the Prolegomena, where it is easy to be misled about the extent and importance of Kant’s pronouncements on the dogmatic slumber interrupted by Hume. And misled, no less importantly, by the regressive or analytic method that, if definitely more abstract than the A Deduction, is itself not a method but an expository strategy meant to ease the difficulty of the first Critique for reluctant readers such as Feder, starting from the givenness of sciences relying on synthetic a priori principles and rising up to their condition. As a result, Husserl does not even seem to be aware of Section 27 of the B Deduction, in which Kant speaks of the epigenesis of reason and denies that he purports to describe what is supposedly implanted in human nature, which is “precisely what the skeptic wishes most” (1998, KrV B 167–8). In any case and regardless of epigenesis, Husserl never seems to doubt the plausibility of his image of Kant. After all, most of his contemporary self-appointed Kant heirs thought and taught the same.

My conjecture, that Husserl is bound to read the a priori as the faculties human beings are naturally equipped with because he understands Kant as a Humean, appears to be strengthened if we consider this point: Husserl rightly identifies the fundamental problem of the Critique of Pure Reason as that of synthetic a priori judgments, but he misunderstands the very meaning of this problem.Footnote 7 I find it striking that he repeatedly and with few exceptions calls it the problem of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (Husserl 1986, pp. 4–5; Husserl 1965a, p. 285, 373; Husserl 1976, Krisis, § 73, p. 272, and App. XV p. 455 (neither passage is included in David Carr’s translation)). The excision of ‘pure’ is not for the sake of brevity. It seems significant for the same reasons I pointed out earlier: reason is Husserl’s name for an intentionality directed towards reality aiming at evidence and intuition, not for the pure principles of all speculative and practical legislation, let alone for reason’s striving to the unconditional totality of its concepts.Footnote 8 Reason is the reason of experience, not a pure reason independent of it.

Husserl ascribes to Kant the notion that neither analytic nor synthetic a posteriori judgments contain any riddle, whereas in truth these latter present the same problem as synthetic a priori judgments (1965a, p. 380). Kant would object that the problem is quite different, but also deny that analytic judgments should be construed as tautological in Husserl’s sense (a good part of his reply to Eberhard focuses on this). And he would also deny that synthetic a posteriori judgments present no problem. Only, he would add, the problem is not relevant in the Critique of Pure Reason, which must only investigate pure, not empirical concepts (in fact, it is in the lectures on logic that Kant offers his elaborate theory concerning Merkmale and the formation of empirical concepts).

What Husserl does not see is that the question of how synthetic a priori judgments are possible is the question of the powers and limits of pure reason. And pure reason enjoys a peculiar autarchy, which it would be wrong, again, to understand as a Humean mind enclosed in its own sphere. For Kant’s reason is most essentially a lawgiver, and a judge of its own laws: it uses its powers, and critiques them. In the tribunal it sets up, its gaze is solely on itself; but on itself insofar as it is bound to transcend itself towards the world, to extend itself beyond what it is. Its legislation is directed towards two metaphysical realms, the speculative and the practical orders it constitutes and legislates over.Footnote 9

For these reasons I believe that the criticism recalled in Cobb-Stevens’ first objection is one-sided. This is too bad, because Kant is always praised by Husserl as the last of the great philosophers who kept alive the ideal of philosophy as a rigorous science, striving to achieve definitive results. And it is all the worse particularly because Kant’s reason could have appealed to Husserl for its grounding the interrelation of teleological and historical development, mankind’s destination and the mission that philosophy must assume in its fight against irrationalism, positivism and skepticism, and an original unity of theory and practice that presides over even the stark separation of realms that we must affirm anyway.

Philosophy and the World

This interrelation is for Kant a net of mutual implications and references justified by and in the sections of the first Critique most neglected by Husserl, i.e., the Transcendental Dialectic and the Doctrine of Method. It is especially in the Architectonic that these threads are pulled together in their unity under the aegis of cosmic philosophy. Here we read that reason does not borrow a model from the sciences; on the contrary, the sciences can assume a systematic form only when reason provides “the end and the form of the whole” (1998, KrV A 832/B 860). Reason is architectonic and plans its edifice independently of determinate cognitions: it is not instructed by the understanding, but projects the thoroughgoing form of its cognitions and directs the understanding itself in its use. Reason is prior to the understanding and its several cognitions, as it is prior to sciences (if the method is the scientific form of the whole, it would not make any sense for reason to import a method, mathematical or scientific or otherwise, from without). In fact, only reason’s system counts as a science, because it is the only systematic ordering of parts. Sciences do not enjoy the comprehensive gaze that philosophy has; if the artisans of reason (Vernunftkünstler: mathematician, logician, natural scientist) are compared to cyclopes that must be given back their second eye by philosophy, then scientific cognitions are but the means to reason’s self-knowledge.Footnote 10

Reason cannot find rest in its empirical use. Searching for answers, especially to the three questions outlined in the Canon and to the question of mankind’s final destination, is the most pressing need and the strongest pull for reason. It demands to go beyond experience, to the condition, the principles that make it possible as a coherent whole; and what it cares about and seeks is the maximum completeness for all concepts used, because only completeness can satisfy it (Prolegomena, Kant 2010, p. 144, Ak 4, p. 354).

The ideas are the shape in which reason can think the completeness it aims at in a determinate way (Prolegomena, Kant 2010, p. 123–24, Ak 4, p. 332). Ideas are not simply concepts without a corresponding object. Without reason’s ideas the understanding’s cognitions are incoherent, as an aggregate without unity. If the understanding looks for concepts unifying the manifold, reason seeks to comprehend the given in its ultimate condition, its maximum unity, its non-given and non-givable totality. Ideas are totalizing drives, projections beyond nature directing all induction and research on nature, that unify and direct all use of our faculties. As such, they are at once ends and principles of organization of parts, generative processes aiming at a totality of conditions.

Reason is in this sense an activity of inquiry guided by ends, which are focal points, outlooks we tend to, not givens we must discover. If, through its several ideas, reason generates a world, it is the architectonic idea that organizes an interrelated system of rational cognitions. And it is philosophy that is called upon to follow its lead. In its authentic sense, philosophy is cosmic philosophy, constituted, that is, by a Weltbegriff or world concept, the idea of an absolute and unconditional totality, an intelligible order of means and ends (for “philosophy is the science of the relation of all cognition to the essential ends of human reason,” (1998, KrV A 839/B 867)). If, as in an organic system, this whole is immanent in and prior to the parts, no question or rational activity can be pursued in isolation. If artisans of reason are means to reason’s essential ends, cognitions should not be pursued for their own sake but instead be used for ends that transcend specialistic-scholastic knowledge. In cosmic philosophy, theory and practice, irreconcilable and divided with respect to their realms of application, are unified; in fact, reason’s speculative and practical employments and interests stem from the same original unity in thought.

Cosmic philosophy is thus primarily an attitude with regard to cognitions and an awareness of ends based on a keen sense of reason’s interests. It is modest, in that it is the awareness of the insufficiency of our cognitive efforts with respect to our destination, without fostering irrationalism or what Kant dubs misology. And it is in a different respect quite haughty, in that, by keeping in view the highest good at all times, it directs us to a form of quasi-divine wisdom. Cosmic philosophy is a living engagement, and a practice inspired by the idea of the world; and philosophers are not judged for the cognitions they have but for the use they put them to.

I believe there is a definite Socratic streak in this notion. Still, I think that most interpretations of the primacy of practical reason in Kant end up in a non-Kantian abdication of reason to morality. The notion of the highest good is not a practical concept but a symbol of the questions raised in the Canon, or, differently stated, an idea of reason unifying the two separate legislations of pure reason (speculative and practical) and all rational ends in a focal point, the concept of our final destination.

If reason is such a tight unity, its link with history appears substantially weaker. The Doctrine of Method concludes with a ‘History of pure Reason’ that raises more than one eyebrow. For it does not seem to ground the historicity of reason’s cognitions in ways that we, coming after Hegel, Marx, and historicism, might expect. Upon closer examination, however, it emerges that history is the necessary stage of reason’s progressive deployment in the world, and reason must be understood historically. To its retrospective gaze, reason understands its progress as run by a teleology which is its full rule over itself. Turning cosmic philosophy into a cosmopolitan philosophy and helping mankind come out of the tutelage and minority it has put itself into are aspects of the same point: reason demands autonomy in all its fields, and its enlightenment in speculative and practical terms takes place progressively as a conquest to be made in history. Reason is in a position to achieve this result insofar as it refuses to be guided by maxims and principles other than the ones it sets to itself in a thorough and comprehensive systematic way (for, regardless how systematic philosophers consider themselves, reason is essentially systematic; in fact, it is subjectively a system, of inquiry and organization of its cognitions (1998, KrV A 738/B 766). In philosophy, this means that we should not focus on historically determinate results or on doctrinal systems, but on a practice, an activity: we cannot learn philosophy, “we can at best learn to philosophize” (1998, KrV A 837/B 865).

When Husserl approvingly quotes this Kantian dictum in Philosophy as Rigorous Science, however, what counts for him is not Kant’s maxim to think for oneself, but the lack up to now of “objectively grounded doctrinal contents” (Husserl 1986, p. 4), and therefore of a scientific system as a definitive foundation admitting no opinions or points of view. Kant thought indeed he had put metaphysics on a scientific path; Husserl clearly disagrees, and calls for a new radical beginning in the more rigorous phenomenology. When, in turn, Eugen Fink recalls this notion of philosophy as an activity of philosophizing in his commemoration of Husserl’s death in 1938, he understands it as the withdrawal from all roles in life and the questioning of all fundamental ideas of being and truth we have received (Fink 2004, chap. 3). Fink thinks he is thus being faithful to the spirit of Husserl’s phenomenological reduction. Unlike Heidegger, among other Husserl pupils or collaborators, Fink is one of the few who take the phenomenological reduction as crucial to revolutionize our way to see and live through our experience, and even renew our life. Unlike Heidegger, who focuses mostly on the first Critique’s Transcendental Aesthetic and Analytic—as does Husserl—, and whose notion of world is not the direct result of a dialogue with Kant’s Weltbegriff, Fink is also one of the few phenomenologists who take seriously the Transcendental Dialectic. He thinks that Kant’s revolution does not consist in the turn from the object to the subject that grounds all objectiv-ity, but from the inner-worldly being to the world itself. Kant has discovered the cosmological difference: the world is not a being, for it cannot be brought to presence, and conversely no being, not even God or the soul, is outside the world as a universal horizon of being, its Inbegriff (Fink 1990, p. 117). Despite its external appearance and chapter division, the Transcendental Dialectic does not pursue three different directions of inquiry, i.e., God, the soul and the world, because all questions are internal to the problem of the world. The antinomies arise when reason takes the world as a given totality, instead of as its own motivation to seek the ultimate condition for all conditioned appearances.Footnote 11 The ontology of the Transcendental Analytic eventually comes to clash with the Dialectic, wherein Kant expounds reason’s most genuine concept, that of the unconditioned.

Fink expresses these points after Husserl’s death. Still, Fink’s influence on Husserl’s move away from the Cartesian starting point to the theme of the world between 1931 and 1933 can be documented with a certain precision.Footnote 12 While the Cartesian Meditations grounds phenomenology in a pure ego independent of and over against the world, Fink criticizes this approach and draws Husserl’s attention to the problem of man’s place in the world, as its transcendental origin. Husserl agrees with Fink and confesses his path was wrongheaded and muddled. The starting point of the Crisis is the very different one of the pregivenness of the world.

In the last years of his life, in the face of his growing preoccupations for the crisis of humanity, and of his fears regarding the propagation of irrationalism, skepticism, including the faddish existentialism of his now estranged collaborator Heidegger, and positivism, Husserl offers a diagnosis of the “sickness” of Europe (Husserl 1960, App. 1, p. 270), and a cure: the universalism and idea of mission philosophy has always had and must again endorse. This is not a new discovery proper to the Crisis Footnote 13; it only becomes more pressing and urgent during Husserl’s last decade, and is voiced in progressively more tormented and alarmed tones before the impending catastrophe. This mission has, in other words, an historical index. When Kant laments that metaphysics, once the queen of sciences, is now in exile and disrepute after the despotic rule of dogmatists and the anarchy of nomads, i.e., skeptics (1998, KrV A viii, Preface), his history is pure reason’s history, and does not come clothed in threatening garments. When Husserl identifies the queen of sciences in philosophy (Husserl 2004, § 5, p. 27) and later in metaphysics (Husserl 1970, § 3, p. 9), and calls for a renewed sense of the philosophical ethos, he deplores less the weariness and indifference towards truth than the menace of spreading blindness and a sore loss of meaning in his historical situation.

Both Kant and Husserl speak as prophets announcing the advent of a new philosophy. If Kant is a spokesman of the enlightenment in favor of mankind’s liberation from darkness through reason’s autonomy, Husserl thinks that the philosopher ought to be a functionary of mankind. I believe it would not be too wide of the mark to say that in Kant it is reason’s inner necessity that pushes us, after many gropings and impasses, to critical philosophy, whereas in Husserl no renewal is possible without an effort of the will. Reason in Kant is a power, a force, a motivational thrust; in Husserl it needs to be chosen and supported by our decision. This voluntaristic streak may be self-deluded, as his critics point out, but it rests in part, it seems to me, on a more secular consideration of self-reliance, faith and hope. If in Kant reason’s ends and mankind’s final destination point us to a world in which happiness and morality can coincide, in Husserl there is no reference to a world or life beyond this one.Footnote 14 Thus, in Kant reason is dissatisfied with Vernunftkünstler (artisans of reason), with the sciences, and with cognition, because it aims at questions that none of them can appease; in Husserl the dissatisfaction is a crisis rooted in reason’s own betrayal of its universalistic ideal and authentic calling, and its reduction to objectivism and positivism.

For both Kant and Husserl, insisting that philosophy is a reminder of the whole we tend to forget and underlining the practical destination of philosophy and all theoretical activity are one and the same thing. Still, their positions differ on some significant aspects. If Kant restores, against the use prevalent in modern philosophy, the idea to its original Platonic meaning, except that he deprives it of reality, Husserl recasts Kant’s idea in the shape of an infinite striving towards an unattainable goal. In Formal and Transcendental Logic, Husserl writes that all sciences are subordinated to the idea of an infinite unfolding of theoretical reason; this infinitely progressing science has for mankind a function that surpasses the theoretical scope (Husserl 1974, § 7, pp. 28–9). Kant blames artisans of reason as well as all philosophy in a scholastic sense for their oblivion of ends. About philosophy’s ruling role over sciences, Husserl almost echoes Kant on cyclopes: scientists forgetting the inseparable connection of all sciences, which are like branches of the same tree, wear “methodical blinkers” (Husserl 1974, p. 4). However, unlike Kant, who roots cosmic philosophy in pure reason’s highest interest, Husserl bases philosophy’s ethical meaning on a personal resolve; and this implies an inversion of universal and individual. In Kant, in other words, reason is an impersonal and universal agency, and I endorse it as I make it mine, as I particularize it in my life. In Husserl, by contrast, I as an individual decide to affirm the universalism of an ideal, the ideal of knowledge responsible for itself guiding sciences since Plato (Husserl 1974, p. 3).

Let me note a few more traits in this idea. If there is an ethos of theory opening up for us the perspective on to a new world, it would hardly be possible without the specific and primary virtue of self-responsibility and truth to oneself that Husserl calls Eigentlichkeit (and all lapse from it is accordingly caused, I believe we must conclude, by what Aristotle calls akrasia).

Unlike in Kant, where sciences miss the comprehensive vision that only philosophy affords, in Husserl sciences are already modelled after the procedure of arts or technai, after, that is, a form of making ruled by a project addressed to a practical end.Footnote 15

Also, philosophy is a Beruf: at the same time, a profession and a civic vocation, i.e., a response to a calling, the quest for an apodictic science. This means that, if theory and practice are not divided, what is practical is not reason’s subordination of all activity to the final destination it aims at, as in Kant, but its theoretical activity itself, its scientific ideal of an ultimate grounding. Phenomenology—the reduction, the decision to establish a radically new science—is the highest practice, even a choice of life, not an abstract intellectualistic enterprise. In Erste Philosophie the philosopher’s life is described as an absolute vocation and calling (Husserl 1965b, p. 11). Naturally, this choice is possible through an original institution, a selfcreation, an authentic decision (Husserl 1965b, p. 19). The model here is Descartes, the self-made man starting from scratch: a thorough destruction first, a radically new scientific foundation then (Husserl 1960, §§ 1–2, pp. 1–6).

The morality of theory, of relentless self-reflection, further requires that the decision be sustained by constancy, commitment and determination. Philosophy is thus work, Arbeit. Kant opposes philosophy as work to fanaticism (Schwärmerei) and misology, but takes these as the rush to forsake science in favor of a direct access to wisdom; for him Plato and Epicurus are champions of this attitude. For Husserl instead work is methodical training opposed to “literature” (Husserl 1965a, p. 238); and Plato is the founder of the authentic ideal of knowledge. The risk of a form of work we engage in per se is that it may become an end in itself, as Heidegger (and, later, Fink) objects to Husserl. For Husserl only a misunderstanding of the supposed primacy of theory can lead Heidegger to replace the analysis of intentionality by Dasein’s ways of care. Heidegger’s criticism is therefore as surprising and unjustified as his charge of the transcendental ego as worldless (Husserl 1997, pp. 304–5). In fact, for Husserl Heidegger completely misses the ethics of the phenomenological reduction (see the 1930 Postscript to Ideas I): when it brackets the world, it is nothing less than the resolve to start afresh, and even the radical renewal of my life and a conversion, as Husserl writes in the Crisis (Husserl 1970, § 35, p. 137).

Finally, the world is itself a task, not a given. Its meaning derives from the practices of generations that have shaped it in the form we know. If we inherit the world from our predecessors, we are in turn responsible for how it is handed it over to future generations; but our specific responsibility as philosophers is that of keeping the telos of a rational world in view, of helping realize it in history. For what changes from the Cartesian Meditations to the Crisis is a new understanding of the historicity of reason, and, thereby, also of its teleology. In Kant we saw that teleology has to do with the architectonic relation of means and ends in pure reason’s activity; in Husserl the teleology involved in the philosophical vocation comes down to following a guiding idea and thus to realizing historically an entelechy constituting mankind’s truest nature since the Greeks. The philosopher works for future generations (Husserl 1965a, pp. 283–87) and for a community of scientists in the deep-seated faith that reason’s self-objectification will improve our life (Husserl 1974 p. 5 & 28). On this score faith and rationality, far from being alternative, strengthen one another, because faith (like vocation, calling, destination, hope, conversion, even the community of researchers, which resembles the secularization of a Protestant Gemeinde) has lost all religious connotation, and belongs in absolute reason. It is faith in history, which is now seen as reason’s development. If in his earlier reflection up to Erste Philosophie and the Cartesian Meditations Husserl’s stress was more on phenomenology’s breaking free of prejudices inherited from history and on the destruction of tradition necessary to begin anew, in the Crisis Husserl sketches a genealogy of modern reason where changes are internal to an underlying historical continuity. For, in contrast to Heidegger (who thinks in terms of epochs, tends to oppose ancients and moderns and finds in Descartes the single-handed originator of modernity), Husserl believes that modern philosophy does owe Descartes its radical spirit, but grows out of the Renaissance’s renewal of the ancient Platonic ideal. This ideal is the birth of authentic humanity, which now freely gives itself a rule through philosophy, first in theory and then in practice (Husserl 1970, § 3, p. 8).

Rather than identifying humanity’s intrinsic essence, as in the traditional definition of man as the rational animal, reason is the result of a resolve: humanity “is rational in that it wills to be rational” (Husserl 1976, p. 275). But rationality now is “educated by the genuine philosophers of the great past”, of which “we as philosophers are heirs” (Husserl 1970, § 7, p. 17). Making comprehensible the historical becoming of philosophy as the unfolding of an original entelechy first established in the Greek beginning is our task as functionaries of mankind (Husserl 1970, § 15, p. 71). If reason is the constant movement of self-clarification (“die ratio in der ständigen Bewegung der Selbsterhellung,” Husserl 1976, § 73, p. 273, Husserl’s italics), philosophy is rationalism through and through. On the one hand, this means that all philosophy relies on the same hidden intention (“verborgene Intention in aller Philosophie,” Husserl 1976, App. 10, p. 429), humanity’s self-understanding, and that the unitary teleological structure underlying the history of philosophy and this entelechy presupposes at the beginning a sort of instinct and a prefigured direction (“wie ein Instinkt hindurchgehende Ausgerichtetheit,” Husserl 1976, App. 13, p. 442). On the other, this postulates an infinite becoming, which in turn means that this teleology will never attain its completion, the full humanization of the world. And this implies that the world is not in itself accomplished. If the philosophical epochè saves us from the absolutization of the world, history is the stage of humanity’s indefinite realization. Incidentally, this is another quite anti-Aristotelian and decidedly modern idea, for Aristotle’s world has, to adapt to my meaning the words Husserl uses about Euclid, a finite and closed a priori (Husserl 1970, § 8, p. 21).

The history of philosophy is run through by an enduring (verharrende) identity, which again is not the identity of a given phenomenon but of a task remaining unaltered throughout its changes (Husserl 1976, App. 13, p. 442). In these pages Husserl almost sounds like Hegel as he writes that the historian of philosophy must disregard the external succession of mere historical facts and concentrate instead on reproducing, and thereby making available, the history of philosophy as a supertemporal process from which we can learn (Husserl 1976, App. 13, p. 443–5). And the philosopher needs an historical consideration because to philosophy the past is a motivation for its present: the philosophical present is “the total essence of philosophical coexistence” and a “living present” (Husserl 1976, App. 24, p. 489). Appendix 27 delves deeper into this aspect with the instructive comparison with a work of art (the same holds for handcraft). The work of art is criticized by artists sharing the same surrounding world; but they do not collaborate with the artist, nor has their critique the same active function that the creator’s self-criticism may have. The work of art is an end in itself, is not made thanks to or through other works of art, and exists intersubjectively as a common good to be enjoyed by others. In science, by contrast, the realization of scientific projects stands or falls with a shared horizon we hold fast to a priori. An individual scientist is truly scientific when he or she has kept in view the universal horizon of other scientists as actual or potential—past, present and future—collaborators. This horizon is an open infinity, and therefore, if every scientific proposition is an achievement and a result made possible by predecessors, it is at once the material for further scientific work. The correlate of the scientific work, in other words, is the unity of scientists (Husserl 1976, App. 27, pp. 505–7). I find these late Husserlian pages important, even in their lack of particular originality and their distance from the prophetic announcements on phenomenology’s revolutionary break from the fetters of the past, as they outline a possible dialogue between phenomenology and the history of philosophy (or of science: think of Koyré or Klein). A striking tension, however, stands out, as the philosopher is both the disinterested reflecting phenomenologist suspending all validities whatever and the functionary of mankind, instrumental to its indefinite progress and vitally interested in realizing true humanity. The tension can be lessened if we consider that the phenomenologist and humanity have the same interests and goals: philosophy is the function of humanizing mankind, and apodictic science and humanity’s ultimate self-understanding in theoretical reason amount to the same (Husserl 1976, App. 10, p. 429). Still, what I find problematic is not Husserl’s voluntarism as he calls for a heroism of reason (Husserl 1970, p. 298), or his faith in philosophical progress despite all the losses he has denounced, or his admittedly perplexing bipolarity (the warning of approaching tragedy coexisting with an unwarranted optimism about philosophy’s help in retrieving meaning in an age of crisis), but the fact that humanity seems to admit of degrees. It can be either authentic or inauthentic; and obviously the latter either does not know its goals or pursues fallacious ones. More than “Der Traum ist ausgeträumt” (Husserl 1976, App. 28, p. 508), we could say that this resembles more the Enlightenment dream gone awry and out of hand. For how can the philosopher grasp in a non-arbitrary way what authentic humanity is? How can the philosopher presume to tell authentic from inauthentic, and even teach inauthentic humanity about its goals? Further, how can this be practically implemented? Is the philosopher’s history anything other than the circle of reason actualizing itself, which lets in and out of itself what conforms (or fails to) to its preliminary definition of rational?

These questions are so basic they sound elementary and trivial. And yet, Husserl does not seem to raise them. What he does is brilliantly show why positivism decapitates philosophy, and mere sciences of facts produce mere fact-minded people (Husserl 1970, § 2, p. 6; “Blosse Tatsachenwissenschaften machen blosse Tatsachenmenschen,” Husserl 1976, p. 4). In other words, he shows where things went wrong, why we lost the sense of our infinite task and the telos of humanity, and ceased to pursue truth and ask questions. It is not as clear to what extent, though, some Husserlian remarks on Europe, or the West, that have attracted justified criticisms are integral to his position. Indeed, it is the European sciences he writes about, it is European humanity that is living a crisis, and Europe, as a spiritual unity, has an exclusive destiny and teleology. Ricoeur is right when he writes that it is humanity as a whole that has an immanent teleology and sense, which are historically realized in Europe, not the other way round; i.e., it is not because of Husserl’s supposed Eurocentrism that he comes up with his theses on Europe’s entelechy (Ricoeur 1969, p. 152). But the exclusion of different civilizations (India, China, Eskimoes, Gypsies: see Husserl 1970, p. 273 & 298) from humanity’s teleology seems, more than an occasional naiveté, a quite arbitrary prejudice.

World and Horizon

No worldly science can take over the total role that only philosophy has. Philosophy is the science of the whole, which keeps all parts—single sciences, attitudes, styles—from their innate hybris of overstepping their role. Philosophy is the science of the all-encompassing world forgotten by sciences. Or so it seems. But is it? Are world and life-world the same?

The life-world in Husserl does not represent an existential category or enjoy the fundamental primacy of a situatedness we have been thrown into. It is transcendental phenomenology’s deepened and broadened perspective. Before the Crisis, the world is at first the correlate of a belief. Consciousness lives in the certainty of a world as the implicit totality presupposed by all things we experience in it. As such, it would seem that the world must be as little intuitable in Husserl as it is in Kant. If for Kant the world is an idea, and the result of a leap from experience of nature to its condition (or to the unconditional totality that encompasses it), for Husserl we arrive at the world from our everyday experience by extension; and this, as we will see, complicates matters.

To experience, reasons Husserl, is to confirm an expectation, or to fulfill an anticipated intention, against the non-real, the experience of being otherwise. Reality is a contrastive concept, not an assumed primary datum; every perception must be constantly confirmed, because the possibility of deception or non-being is always open. For whatever act I perform each time, the indefinite possibility of repetition, confirmation, further deepening and verification must be available: every validity implies a connection of potential and habitual validities. All experience then implies a horizon internal to the thing (the possibility, given with the thing, to explore it further) and one external to it (no less given with it, but more mediately, the hidden unthematic horizon to which I can always reawaken my attention). If consciousness of perception is never simple or isolated but implies a consciousness of its horizon, this extends from the horizon of what is present now to an open-ended past and future (cf. lectures 47–48 in Husserl 1965b, Husserl 1970, § 47, p. 162). This is how, in our ever varying perceptions, we are aware of a permanent and unitary world given beforehand. The world arises out of what first presents itself as a passive synthesis of sensible connections, and is made possible by the transition from finite to infinite horizons.

Let me emphasize three points. If all our acts have their goal in objects surrounding us, they “imply an infinite horizon of inactive validities which function with them in flowing mobility” (Husserl 1970, § 40, p. 149).Footnote 16 A horizon essentially is a horizon for intentionality. Which means: the concept of horizon is reached by way of a reflection on the flow of consciousness. This in turn implies the concept of wakeful thematization as a break of that flow and a setting into relief against a functioning, anonymous background. This awakening is understood as the ego’s voluntary directing itself towards objects, in an alternate movement of reactivation and neglect, during which every validity remains available and can be brought back to life. Differently stated, this alternation of an anonymous subsoil and a thematic attention starting from perception and practices make up “a single indivisible, interrelated complex of life” (Husserl 1970, § 40, p. 149). In sum, the concept of horizon is the correlate of this continuity of consciousness’ life. Indeed, it is devised to account for and fulfill this function.

Furthermore, the vision of perceptual consciousness is absorbed in what it faces; the phenomenologist’s gaze pushes the limit of that vision farther, but does not differ in kind from it: it has the same phenomenon in view, only in its broader context.

Finally, as the life-world acquires central stage for perceptual consciousness, the world progressively recedes into the background; but this means that the world is more and more explicitly a bounded world, a “sector [Ausschnitt] of the world,” the world present at any time (“die jeweils gegenwärtige Welt,” Husserl 1970, § 47, p. 162, Husserl 1976, p. 165).

In Ideas I (Husserl 2014, §§ 27–32) the surrounding world for a wakeful consciousness is an indeterminate horizon in which it always finds itself; the world is obscurely known as the background co-present to and co-intended in all its activities. When transcendental consciousness suspends the validity of all sciences and the natural attitude, the world is itself bracketed. Descartes is once more the example of a total neutralization. But if the neutralization is total, the world is not given as apodictic; rather, it is contingent—as well it should be, because it is the all-encompassing totality for the natural attitude. The world as indefinite source of coherence, regularity and confirmation is no more than an empirical indubitability; if the non-existence of the world is an ever open possibility, then belief in the world is entirely presumptive. The world is no longer valid as being; only the consciousness that experiences the world is given necessarily.

The life-world of the Crisis is neither identical with, nor a substitute for, the world of Ideas I or the Cartesian Meditations. The continuity is undeniable: here too, as in all phases of Husserl’s reflection, the theme of the world is tackled in the form of an introduction to the phenomenological reduction and pure consciousness. What, then, is the difference? To begin with, in contrast to the world, the life-world is a lived world. It is the certainty of a ground we rely upon in our everyday practices, i.e., in all goal-oriented activities (“to live is always to live-in-certainty-of-the-world,” Husserl 1970, § 37, p. 142). Differently stated, the life-world is the world permeated by sensible human activities, not just the world of nature.

In the Crisis Husserl notes that the Cartesian way to the epochè has one shortcoming: “while it leads to the transcendental ego in one leap, as it were, it brings this ego into view as apparently empty of content” (Husserl 1970, § 43, p. 155). The new point of departure is now the pregivenness of the life-world as a rich, concrete and innerly structured world; and what emerges with it is the centrality of the notion of horizon as the complex mutual reference of present and absent, given and possible, seen in its genesis. The passive constitution of the life-world has no beginning in the history of consciousness, for “it takes place at all times” (Held 2003, p. 53).Footnote 17 This world is not neutralized by the reduction; it is rather retrieved, as the universal ground to be questioned.

Another difference is that before the Crisis the world was the absolute correlate of consciousness: its totality was its uniqueness. In Ideas I (Husserl 2014, § 27), it is the world at hand of things, but also of values, goods, practical interests, etc. (this etcetera is obviously crucial, because it indicates the indefinite open-endedness of its contents). The life-world instead is at first defined by contrast with modern science. It is reached conceptually by some kind of subtraction. It is one part and not the whole, a world qua-, as it were, whereby the different respects appear sometimes as paradoxical, sometimes as enriching one another. The ambiguity of the notion of life-world is exploited by Husserl as he goes back and forth between world and life-world in some of the decisive sections of the Crisis (Husserl 1970, pp. 142–148). The use of the notion of life-world as a foil and contrast, and its gradual emergence as in the last (actually, second-last, as we will see presently) analysis the central notion, an independent theme, and a problem in and of itself, are functional to Husserl’s account of its essence. But in this movement Husserl, who at first seems preoccupied to remain even-handed, eventually effaces the difference between world and life-world and decides, instead of making the world stand out by contrast, to leave it behind. Let us see how this movement unfolds.

The life-world is at first understood as prescientific, a hidden source of trust and evidence. It is the forgotten Boden of sciences, always already there, in which we move with familiarity, the ground of certainties and doxa (Husserl 1975a, §§ 7–11, pp. 28–50). As such, it cannot be grounded in an ulterior dimension: it is an original, intuitive world, and the inescapable presupposition for anything whatever. Because of its subjective-relative being, objective sciences presume they must overcome it, except they cannot, because the source of evidence is still at all times functioning for scientists and cannot be reduced to an irrelevant stage we pass through and abandon (Husserl 1970, § 34b, p. 125). The contrast here is between a subjective element and an objective form that is in principle non-intuitable. Accordingly, world and totality mean two different things. For modern science, the world of experience, as a universal configuration of all objects presupposed by science, has an a priori structure and an overall style that has its “habit,” a universal and rule-governed causal nexus in which things and events belong together as in an all-encompassing totality (Husserl 1970, § 9b, pp. 28–33). The world is a total form, or, which comes to the same, an infinite idea, making possible inductions, hypotheses, predictions. For the life-world, by contrast, a totality is subject-relative and intuitable; and it can only be intuitable as a universal familiar presence, shared and assumed by all.

The apparent alternative between two worlds, the world of science and the life-world, related but mutually independent, must itself be overcome. Now that the double standard (subjective-relative and objective) of truth has been clarified, the life-world can no longer remain taken for granted as the unquestioned prescientific ground. The life-world must become the problem: we can and must question its sense of being. Despite being relative, the life-world turns out to have its own general, non-relative structure. The world does not exist as one being among others, but as the world-horizon within which we become conscious of objects, and as a unique totality.Footnote 18 And if the task is reaching a science of the universal how of the pregivenness of the world, this is “the creation of a new science of a peculiar sort” (Husserl 1970, § 38, p. 146).

The suspension of validity of the sciences, however, is not enough to give rise to such a new science, for with this suspension we remain inside the natural attitude. What we need is a total change of the natural attitude, a second, radical and universal epochè. This is where Husserl sounds so extreme. This new reduction is a conversion: not a temporary and fleeting act, but a habitual attitude we resolve to take up once for all, which promises to “change all human existence” (Husserl 1970, § 40, pp. 150–1). This reduction asks us to suspend our very engagement in life, not one thesis or attitude. It is the greatest “liberation” from the most internal bond, the pregivenness of the world. And it results in “the discovery of the universal (. . .) correlation between the world itself and world-consciousness” (Husserl 1970, § 41, p. 151). Humanity now emerges as the self-objectification of transcendental subjectivity in its ever functioning and absolute constitution.

The life-world is seen in its being itself constituted. It is a meaning configuration, an ultimate horizon and the ground for all our practices, the surrounding world now understood as the context of human activities in its historical becoming. This configuration is for transcendental philosophy a subjective formation. Inquiring into the life-world means then to inquire back into subjectivity, as the source of validity and meaning of the world. Thus what is primary in itself is not the unquestioned world, but subjectivity itself as anonymously functioning, as constitutive of the always already developed and always further developing meaning-configuration life-world.

Husserl has finally made his decision and reached a verdict. His subject-matter, he now admits, is not the world, which in the end almost disappears and is, as it were, forgotten, “but the world exclusively as it is constantly pregiven to us in the alteration of its manners of givenness” (Husserl 1970, § 43, p. 154). He is interested in the becoming of the world for the natural attitude ignorant of the ever functioning absolute ego. If the life-world is a horizon that the natural attitude cannot transcend, phenomenology’s radical quest for origins does not lead us to a world transcending the life-world and the things in it, but to the absolute ego constituting its surroundings, beginning with the spatio-temporal flow of its perceptual life. Now can we have the “science of the ultimate grounds” adumbrated in section 38 (Husserl 1970, p. 146)—now, that is, that the world has become a transcendental phenomenon and the correlate of subjective appearances and acts, now that we have proceeded from the world as a unity of meaning back to “its “subjective manners of givenness”” (Husserl 1970, § 53, p. 179).

If so, however, what is discovered as we eventually question the pregiven world is not the universal correlation between world and world-consciousness, as Husserl wants it, but that between consciousness and its surrounding changing horizons. The world can only be the correlate of the natural attitude in the form of life-world. Let me sharpen and illustrate my point by a contrast. Think of this ratio in Kant: the understanding is to nature what reason is to the world. If we now set up an analogous ratio in Husserl, we get within the natural attitude two terms, consciousness and life-world. But once the reduction is performed and the natural attitude bracketed, we are left with the absolute ego alone constituting its life, without an intrinsic correlation with any world.

In conclusion, I would like to raise two objections regarding the world-horizon. The life-world for Husserl is not a cultural or sociological concept, as in Schütz and Habermas, but the key to a broadened transcendental phenomenology having the absolute ego’s passive constitution as its object. Precisely for this reason, though, the world must forever remain our constituted life-world: a sense of being-at-home in it, of familiarity and trust, never leaves us. Such a world cannot have any alienness or transcendence. One glaring difference with Kant’s world is that Kant, like Husserl, thinks that the world is somehow immanent in our experience of nature—but from its transcendence and as a regulative idea, not as a functioning source of evidence and a horizon. This is why we cannot aspire to make a science of it. Things and world, however related, are separated by a leap. In Husserl instead there is a homogeneity, an internal continuity, and the possibility of a transition (this is what the predelineated potentialities mean), from the ones to the other.

I believe this divergence rests on a very different approach to totality and to open-endedness. In Kant totality exists only as reason’s idea: we are bound to miss its reality, but thereby gain its second-order noumenal reality. In Husserl we never reach beyond reality (nor need to), for the actual is enriched with indefinite potential aspects available for discovery. The world as horizon arises from reality and presence, in particular from the presence in perception of solid and finite (material, spatial) external objects given in penetrable media such as air or light; which means that the world is actually derivative, from the relation between ego and things, not original (Fink 2004, chap. 13).

When I said that the phenomenologist’s gaze pushes the limit of perceptual consciousness’ vision farther but does not differ in kind from it, we can now realize that this is because open-endedness, in turn, is understood in terms of a spatio-temporal continuum in which a further progression is naturally at hand—in which therefore the indefinite extension of experience is inscribed as a possibility, however remote. This highlights one final problem: the choice of the analogy of horizon to refer to the world. The horizon in fact is but a spatial metaphor alluding to the potentiality of experience and at once to an unsurpassable boundary of the field of vision. Husserl wants it to stand for the index of anticipation of indefinite possible intuition, and a unity we cannot transcend. He is right that the horizon helps keep the perspective and relative distance between near and far things in view, even as it shifts with the angle of vision. But a horizon only exists as relative to the observer; no potentiality or progress in experience is prefigured in what is no more than a relative distance. A horizon is as little ready-made or real in itself as the world; and yet, for Husserl it has the reality of an indefinite promise, the potentiality available to experience to refine itself further. What is troubling about this analogy is that a horizon not only cannot be transcended; it is never to be met with or encountered either, and this is the case in principle. Not an indefinite potentiality of drawing closer while discovering or reawakening our focus is given with it, but a distance from the observer that remains constant, for the horizon automatically recedes as we presume to approach it. A horizon is in and of itself forever elusive, the very symbol of what escapes us. It is given, but as inevitably beyond experience: as intuition’s internal limit, or its defeat. This is not to deplore the absence in Husserl of Kant’s ideas, but to question how the infinite horizon, which is the infinitization of an original, perceptual horizon, can be a world: how you can arrive at totality starting from parts.