1 Introduction

What is the nature of Husserl’s mature metaphysics? This thorny question was recently reconsidered by D. Zahavi in his 2017 book Husserl’s Legacy: Phenomenology, Metaphysics, and Transcendental Philosophy. Here Zahavi examines, amongst many alternatives,Footnote 1 H. Philipse’s (1995) interpretation of Husserl as an ontological phenomenalist, only to end up characterizing it, following Lee Hardy, as “completely wrongheaded” (Zahavi, 2017, 38; Hardy, 2013, 177). In the present paper I would like to defend Philipse’s interpretation against the latter judgment, although with an important caveat: Husserlian metaphysics is indeed a form of phenomenalism, although we must be careful to distinguish Husserlian from Berkeleyan or subjectivist phenomenalism. This is a distinction that is too quickly brushed aside by Philipse. Husserl, I will argue, did indeed hold that there is no reality “behind” or “beneath” the phenomenal stream (= ontological phenomenalism), yet this does not entail that all things exist “inside the mind” (be it of man, God, or transcendental subjectivity), as opposed to “out there” in the world. Rather, the phenomenal stream precedes the subject-object (or mind-world) dichotomy, and thus it is misleading to categorize it without qualification as subjective (or mental or immanent). It is precisely this inside-outside dichotomy that transcendental phenomenology attempts to undercut by positing the ontological primacy of the phenomenal stream. Here I agree with Zahavi (see 2003, 68 ff.): Husserl cannot be pigeonholed as a traditional idealist. However, this does not entail, as Zahavi argues, that he was not an ontological phenomenalist. If this position comes down to affirming that the phenomenal is all there is, then Husserl was definitely committed to this thesis.

To make this overall case, I will begin by giving a brief overview of the debate between Zahavi and Philipse (Sect. 2). I will then try to show these authors fall victim to opposing exegetical pitfalls. The first pitfall is to read Husserl as a metaphysical realist; I believe that Zahavi, despite his best efforts to refute the realist interpretation of Husserl, ends up reaffirming its basic tenet (Sect. 3). The second pitfall is to read Husserl as a subjective idealist; here again, Philipse, (1995, 287) is careful to observe that Husserl was a transcendental idealist while Berkeley was not, but fails to draw the full consequences of this crucial distinction. The interpretation I will propose in turn attempts to walk the thin line between these two opposite pitfalls: Husserl was an ontological phenomenalist, but of a more radical type than Berkeley, in that he did not situate phenomenality inside the mind, but rather defined the “mind” or “subjectivity” as a property of phenomenality (Sect. 4). It is not the mind, properly speaking, that is ontologically ultimate in Husserl, but phenomenality itself. Thus, ontological phenomenalism, in the sense that I will here define and ascribe to Husserl, is committed only to the thesis that there is no other reality than phenomenal reality (by contrast with epistemological phenomenalism, which is committed to the weaker, skeptical claim that we can only ever know anything about phenomenal reality, as opposed to a trans-phenomenal or noumenal reality). Whether phenomenal reality is then interpreted in a sensualist manner, i.e., as composed ultimately of non-intentional “ideas” or “sensations” combining according to associative laws, is a secondary matter, and must be dealt with separately from the core phenomenalist thesis (Sect. 5). In conclusion, I will argue that this thesis is not only a metaphysical commitment of Husserl but of the entire phenomenological tradition, to the extent that phenomenology is not merely a method of inquiry but also a metaphysics or ontology. As Fink put it laconically, phenomenology “decrees simply that being is identical to phenomenon” (1994, 120; quoted in Bitbol 2020, 418Footnote 2).

2 The Philipse-Zahavi Debate

The question of Husserl’s phenomenalism is made all the more difficult by the fact that his metaphysical stance underwent a significant change in the period ranging from the first edition of the Logical Investigations (henceforth LI), published in 1900-01, to that of Ideas I, published in 1913. A plausible interpretation is that the Husserl of the LI held a position of “metaphysical neutrality” (see Zahavi 2003, 40), and this notably by virtue of the principle of presuppositionlessness stated in § 7 of the First Investigation. This interpretation is doubly contested, however. On the one hand, the well-known dissent of many of Husserl’s students following the publication of Ideas I suggests that they understood him to be committed, at least methodologically, to a form of realism, and this by virtue of the other cardinal principle of the LI, namely that of perception as a givenness “in the flesh” (leibhaftig) of the thing perceived (see Ingarden 2001; Parker, 2021). On the other hand, some commentators such as Philipse believe that the Husserl of the first period had already started treading an idealistic path given the very nature of his analyses of external perception. According to the latter (1995, see §§IX and X), this inaugural work proposed a “projective” theory of perception which would anticipate, and even motivate, the idealist argumentation of Ideas I. In short, the objects intended in perception are described in the LI as arising from an “objectifying interpretation” (objektivierenden Deutung) or “apprehension” (Auffassung) which “takes hold” of sensations and converts them into “signs” of an external reality (Husserl, 2001aFootnote 3, especially LI I, § 23, and LI V, §§ 2, 14, and 15b). The entire question thus comes down to determining the exact nature of this “objectifying interpretation.” According to Philipse, Husserl was here defending a theory of perception that was in vogue by the turn of the 20th century (but whose roots date back to the 17th century, a historical detail to which I will return later), according to which the perception of spatial objects is the product of a “projective mental function” which confers on certain sensations immanent to consciousness a localization “different from the one in which the perceiving subject localizes itself,” thus giving them the “illusory appearance of independent existence” (1995, 265-6). Thus, the perceived objects would only be “projections,” i.e., exteriorizations, produced by consciousness on the basis of its immanent sensory data. This latter idea, that the “primary data of perception are really immanent in consciousness” (296), is what Philipse calls the “principle of immanence” (§VII). Thus, according to this reading, there would be a certain continuity between the LI and Ideas I rather than a break, since the latter work would only end up affirming explicitly what the former tacitly assumed, namely the thesis of the ontological dependence of spatial things on consciousness.

Zahavi vehemently disputes this line of interpretation. While he agrees that the post-turn Husserl was certainly not a metaphysical realist (i.e., the thesis according to which there exists a reality independent of all actual and possible consciousness) (see 2003, 68 ff.), this does not mean that Husserl merely ended up adopting the reverse idealist stance according to which the spatiotemporal world is nothing but an illusory projection of consciousness. Rather, Husserl’s transcendental idealism would consist in a form of strict correlationism where the world cannot be entirely severed from the mind, nor the mind from the world. In other words, the principle of intentionality (“all consciousness is consciousness of…”) is to be taken literally, that is to say the two relata in this relation (the “consciousness” and the “of…,” or mind and world) are mutually irreducible. The crucial concept of “constitution” in Husserl must be understood—despite the constructivist connotations of his language to describe the process of constitutionFootnote 4—as the “process that permits that which is constituted to appear, unfold, manifest, and present itself as what it is” (Zahavi, 2017, 114 − 15; see also Zahavi, 2003, 73). Consciousness does not create its intentional vis-à-vis, but reveals or discloses them in their own being.Footnote 5 Zahavi thus maintains, following Sokolowski, that consciousness or subjectivity is for Husserl a necessary but not sufficient condition for the manifestation of things and the world (Zahavi, 2003, 73; Sokolowski, 1970, 159). This does not mean, once again, that Husserl was a metaphysical realist, since there is no doubt, at least as far as the post-turn Husserl is concerned, that he rejected the concept of a reality independent of all possible experience (I will return to this key claim in the next section). Rather, it means that for Husserl, the power of manifestation (to a consciousness at least possible, if not actual) is part of the very essence of things. This power is what Sokolowski calls the intrinsic “presentability” or “knowability” of thingsFootnote 6 (1977, 179, quoted in Zahavi, 2017, 115; see also Hopp, 2020, esp. § 11.6). However, since the concept of presentability requires a “dative of manifestation” (ibid.; see also Zahavi, 2003, 70), i.e., a consciousness to which things present themselves, then it follows that the essence of things comprises a relational element. But again, “if consciousness is a condition for the appearance of things, consciousness does not create them” (ibid.). In short, positing neither a reality totally independent of consciousness, nor a consciousness totally independent of reality, Husserl would have defended a precarious stance between the two metaphysical extremes of realism and idealism.

Having reviewed both interpretations, I will now turn to what I consider to be their respective shortcomings in respect to the question of Husserl’s post-turn metaphysics, and leave aside for the moment the question of his metaphysical commitments (or absence thereof) in the LI (to which I will return briefly in Sect. 5). As already stated, I believe that the Sokolowski-Zahavi interpretation, although laudable for its effort to situate Husserl outside the traditional realist-idealist divide, does not quite succeed in overcoming the realist interpretation of Husserl. As for Philipse’s account, it has the merit of clearly avoiding this first pitfall, only to fall in the opposite one, which consists in characterizing Husserl as a subjectivist idealist. I will develop these objections in turn in the next two sections and then try to specify in which way Husserlian phenomenalism should be distinguished from Berkeleyan phenomenalism.

3 The Pitfall of Metaphysical Realism

Any interpretation of Husserl’s mature metaphysics must ultimately account for the central thesis of Ideas I, plainly spelled out in § 49, according to which physical reality depends on conscious experience (Erlebnis) to exist, whereas the latter exists independently. Let us therefore return once more to this crucial text in order to see which interpretation suits it best.

The general outline of the thought experiment in § 49, which in fact consists in a supreme eidetic variation, is well known: in a true Cartesian fashion, Husserl asserts that a chaotic stream of experience (Erlebnisstrom) in which no stable spatiotemporal object or world would appear is clearly and distinctly conceivable, while the converse (a world that is not in any way experienced) is not.Footnote 7 From this simple thought experiment Husserl infers the most dramatic of metaphysical conclusions:

Hence, no real being, none of the sort that would display and identify itself through appearances in conformity with consciousness, is necessary for the being of consciousness itself (in the widest sense of the stream of experiences).

The immanent being is, therefore, without doubt absolute being in the sense that, in principle, nulla “re” indiget ad existendum. On the other hand, the world of the transcendent “res” is utterly dependent upon consciousness, and, indeed, not some logically thought up consciousness, but a currently actual consciousness. (2014, 89 [92])

And, a little further:

[I]t becomes clear that consciousness, considered in its “purity,” has to hold as a system of being that is closed off for itself [für sich geschlossener Seinszusammenhang], i.e., as a system of absolute being into which nothing can penetrate and from which nothing can slip away, a system that has no spatiotemporal outside and can exercise causality on nothing – on the supposition that causality has the normal sense of natural causality as a relation of dependence between realities.

On the other hand, the entire spatiotemporal world (to which the human being and the human ego are to be reckoned as subordinate individual realities) is, according to its sense, a merely intentional being, that is to say, the sort of being that has the merely secondary, relative sense of a being for a consciousness. It is a being that consciousness posits (setzt) in its experiences, a being that is in principle only capable of being intuited and determined as something identical on the basis of motivated manifolds of appearance – but beyond this is a nothing. (2014, 90 [93]; translation modified)

Two important observations emerge from these passages for the purposes of our discussion: on the one hand, it is obvious that according to Husserl, consciousness does not “cause” physical things to be, if we mean here causality in the naturalistic sense, i.e., efficient causality. But, on the other hand, it is equally obvious that Husserl does not mean to say that consciousness is only a necessary condition for the manifestation of things. He is speaking here of the being of the spatiotemporal world and things and not simply of their manifestation (to a consciousness)—a distinction which, moreover, it is precisely the point of the Husserlian epoché to collapse.

The primacy of the immanent being of consciousness over the transcendent being of things, as the very terms of the opposition indicate, is indeed an ontological primacy for HusserlFootnote 8, and not simply an epistemological primacy (this is one of the key differences between Husserlian and Kantian transcendentalismFootnote 9). If consciousness does not “cause” things to be, that does not entail that it does not generate them in a non-naturalistic sense (which remains to be defined); it is difficult to see how it could be otherwise, if it is true that the being of things (and not merely their appearance) is relative to the motivated unfolding of experience. But this is precisely what Husserl asserts here, and reiterates just as explicitly in the following passage:

Reality, the reality of a thing taken individually as well as the reality of the entire world, essentially dispenses (in our rigorous sense) with self-sufficiency. It is not in itself something absolute, binding itself secondarily to something else; instead it is in the absolute sense nothing at all, it has no “absolute essence,” it has the essential character of something that is in principle only intentional, only relative to that of which it is conscious, that which presents itself and appears in accord with consciousness. (2014, 90 − 1 [93 − 4])

The thesis is thus that the “world’s existence is the correlate of certain experiential manifolds” (2014, 88 [91]; my emphasis), and nothing apart from such a correlate. In other words, “all realities are through a ‘sense-bestowal (Sinngebung)’” (2014, 102 [106]; my emphasis), i.e., their being depends on an act of consciousness. If we want to fully elucidate the nature of the consciousness-reality relationship in Husserl, we must therefore look further into this notion of an intentional correlate, and especially try to determine in what sense consciousness is “sense-bestowing (sinngebendes)”, in what sense it “poses” (setzt) ​​its intentional correlates.

But first, it is important to insist on the radicality of Husserl’s metaphysical stance here, which is not fully captured by the Sokolowski-Zahavi interpretation. This is because the thesis according to which consciousness is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the disclosure of things entails twice that things exist independently of consciousness, since (1) the very concept of a disclosure implies that that which is disclosed existed prior to and independently of the act of disclosure and (2) insisting that consciousness is only a necessary but not sufficient condition for the disclosure of things emphasizes once more the ontological independence of things relative to consciousness—for where would the missing condition(s) come from if not from a reality independent of consciousness? But how could there be for Husserl any other condition for the constitution of the world than transcendental subjectivity, if the latter corresponds to a “system of being that is closed off for itself,” “a system of absolute being in which nothing can penetrate and from which nothing can slip away”Footnote 10? Thus, Sokolowski and Zahavi end up reaffirming, nolens volens, the fundamental tenet of the realist interpretation of Husserl. (It should come as no surprise, then, that Hopp, (2020, see especially § 11.6) recently used the same criterion of presentability—or what he calls “manifestability”—in support precisely of such a realist interpretation.)

Indeed, it is either one of two things: either the world and things exist independently of consciousness, and the realist interpretation is correct, or their being (and not only their presentability) depends on consciousness, in which case we are dealing with a species of phenomenalism where the very dichotomy of manifestation and being, of subjectivity and world, is cut at its root. But if we opt for the first alternative, then it becomes impossible to see how Husserl’s “transcendental insight,” to use A. D. Smith’s expression (2003, 28; see also Hopp, 2020, § 10.3), according to which the “natural world is a correlate of consciousness” (Husserl, 2014, § 47), should indeed qualify as an insight at all, let alone how it could ever bring about an “existential transformation” comparable to a “religious conversion,” as Husserl famously claims in the Crisis (1970, 137 [140]). There is nothing existentially revolutionary in pointing out that, although the world exists independently of our consciousness of it, its appearance, however, requires a consciousness – which is what everyone already assumes as part of the natural attitude, or is at least capable of realizing upon the slightest reflection. This is one of the fundamental problems with any realist interpretation of Husserl: it ends up trivializing his metaphysical stance to the point that all declarations such as the one just quoted from the Crisis become wholly incomprehensible.

Let us now return to our unanswered question: if it is clear that the existence of things depends on consciousness according to Husserl, does that mean that it creates them? In other words, what does it mean to be a “merely intentional being,” and what relation does such a being have to consciousness?

I have already emphasized that in the post-turn Husserl there is no room for a reality independent of all possible consciousness. The idea of ​​the thing in itself (Ding an sich) is qualified by Husserl either as a “nothing” (Nichts) or as “nonsense (Nonsens).”Footnote 11 We have seen, moreover, that he qualifies transcendental subjectivity as the ultimate ontological ground that every transcendent being presupposes, but also as the “only absolute concretion,” which thus encompasses every transcendent being. All of which can only mean one thing: the transcendence that Husserl assigns to the world and to things can only be a self-transcendence of consciousness, the process of constitution a process of self-constitution, intentionality an immanent intentionality.Footnote 12 So that the world does not transcend experience in the sense that it exists independently from it, affecting it from the “outside,” but in the sense that it constitutes the regulative idea of its own process of self-transcendence.Footnote 13 The world is not what experience takes place in, but what experience strives towards. It is the “infinite idea” of the self-organizing flow of experience:

That the being of the world “transcends” consciousness […], and that it necessarily remains transcendent, in no wise alters the fact it is conscious life alone, wherein everything transcendent becomes constituted, as something inseparable from consciousness […] Only an uncovering of the horizon of experience ultimately clarifies the “actuality” and the “transcendency” of the world, at the same time showing the world to be inseparable from transcendental subjectivity, which constitutes the sense and actuality of being. The reference to harmonious infinities of further possible experience, starting from each world-experience […] manifestly signifies that an actual Object belonging to a world or, all the more so, a world itself, is an infinite idea, related to infinites of harmoniously combinable experiences – an idea that is the correlate of the idea of a perfect experiential evidence, a complete synthesis of possible experiences. (Husserl, 1960, 62 [97]; translation modified)

Thus, the world “in itself” turns out to be for Husserl an Idea in the Kantian sense (see Ideas I, § 143), that guides consciousness as it strives to integrate “the openly endless multiplicity of changing experiences” (Husserl, 1970, 164 [167]) into a coherent unity. Far from being an autonomous reality conditioning experience from the outside, the world is for Husserl the infinite telos of experience itself.Footnote 14 Thus, by bracketing the former, objectivist and abstract understanding of the world, we “return to the actual reality of the world as a living movement that is breathing inside our experience” (Taguchi, 2017, 175).

In sum, by claiming that the transcendent being of things and the world is entirely dependent upon the phenomenal being of experience, Husserl undertakes a complete reversal of the naturalist ontology, which takes physical things as primary and phenomenal experience as secondary. Against such a substantialist ontology, Husserl defends a phenomenalist ontology, where “the classical split between being and appearance disappears” (Barbaras, 2015, 15). As Husserl puts it himself: “In this way, common sense talk about being is reversed” (Husserl, 2014, 90 [93]; see Philipse, §IV).

4 The Pitfall of Subjective Idealism

We can thus say that nothing fundamentally exists according to Husserl apart from the phenomenal stream: “So much appearance, so much being (Soviel Schein, soviel Sein),” as Husserl says in the Cartesian Meditations (1960, 103 [133]; translation modified).Footnote 15 Already in 1911 he had declared that “In the psychical sphere [as opposed to nature] there is […] no distinction between appearance and being” (1965, 106 [29]). But if the “psychical sphere” is the ultimate ontological ground on which physical being depends, as Husserl will shortly go on to argue in Ideas I, this is to say that there is ultimately no difference between appearance and being tout court. What there is, at bottom, is an “absolute flow” of phenomena that have no “substantial unity,” no “enduring, identical being,” but that constantly “come and go” (1965, 106-7 [29–30]).

Now, in order to fully appreciate this phenomenalist thesis, it is necessary to rule out a second important source of misunderstanding concerning Husserlian metaphysics, which consists in construing the phenomenal stream as situated in consciousness (as the term “psychical sphere” inadvertently suggests), as though the latter somehow contained the former. This, I believe, is where Philipse’s interpretation goes astray. I will begin by reviewing his critique of Husserl’s phenomenalism and then argue that it misses its core phenomenological insight.

Philipse’s critique of Husserl depicts him as a victim of the “subjectivist bias of modern philosophy” (1995, 294), which in his view was a reaction to the “ontological revolution” (295) of the 17th century, when the corpuscular and mechanistic worldview came to replace the Aristotelian worldview of the Middle Ages. Indeed, if the physical universe is composed of corpuscles that are devoid of so-called “secondary qualities” (colour, sound, odour, warmth, etc.), as Galileo, Locke, and Descartes believed, then these qualities must be located in the mind of the perceiver, rather than “out there” in the world:

The secondary qualities were assimilated to sensations such as pain, and were thought to exist in the mind only. This mentalization of phenomenal qualities or “qualia,” allegedly necessitated by corpuscular physics, yields the principle of immanence: it is now claimed that the primary data of perception are really immanent in consciousness. The principle of immanence, in its turn, seems to imply a projective theory of perception. For if we assume that secondary qualities are really sensations in the mind, it has to be explained why we perceive these qualities as being qualities of physical objects in our environment. The answer is that they are “projected” outside, by a mental mechanism of perception. (1995, 296)

These two doctrines (the principle of immanence and the projective theory of perception), as was seen above, are at the heart of Husserl’s own theory of adumbrations. Thus, on this reading, Husserl’s theory “is not a purely descriptive phenomenological result,” but a “‘sedimentation’ of traditional seventeenth century philosophy, which Husserl did not recognize as such” (296).

This last point is of particular significance. Because Husserl is prey to an unexamined prejudice, Philipse claims, he misconstrues the phenomenology of perception:

This identification [of adumbrations with sensations in consciousness], and the concomitant thesis that adumbrations are really immanent and not spatial, is a presupposition of Husserl’s argument which does not at all follow from a theory-free analysis of outer perception. Such a pre-theoretical description does perhaps justify a notion of adumbration. One might call the momentary appearance of something, as it is determined by various perceptual conditions such as perspective, distance, lighting and like, an “adumbration.” But adumbrations of spatial objects in this sense are spatial themselves. They may be painted or photographed, as Monet did in his famous series of paintings of Rouen Cathedral. One might even claim that photographs are essentially adumbrations […] The principle of immanence, we may conclude, is a theoretical assumption of Husserl’s, and not a descriptive result. (1995, 258-9)

Whether or not Philipse’s historical deconstruction of Husserl’s theory of adumbrations ultimately succeeds depends on whether or not the latter is a truthful description of experience; I will thus focus on the latter, properly phenomenological part of his critique. So, which description is correct here? Are adumbrations spatial or non-spatial?

Firstly, it is important to clarify what Husserl means by the non-spatiality of adumbrations. Contrarily to what Philipse suggests, we should not construe Husserlian adumbrations simply as “sensations in the mind,” as opposed to sensible qualities belonging to objects “out there” in the world. The subtle but important reason for this is that the phenomenal stream is intrinsically conscious for Husserl, such that the sensible qualities “inhere” no more in the subject than they do in the object:

The flow of the consciousness that constitutes immanent time not only exists but is so remarkably and yet intelligibly fashioned that a self-appearance of the flow necessarily exists in it, and therefore the flow itself must necessarily be apprehensible in the flowing. The self-appearance of the flow does not require a second flow; on the contrary, it constitutes itself as a phenomenon in itself. (Husserl, 1991, 88 [83]; see also 1965, 106 [29])

In other words, no subject, mind, or consciousness exists separately from the phenomenal stream, as if the latter appeared to a witness distinct from it; instead, the phenomenal stream is for Husserl self-appearing or self-manifesting—the witnessing is inseparable from the streaming (Zahavi, 2017, 106-8; Majolino, 2010, 581 ff.). Thus, even though it is true that Husserl describes in Ideas I the flow of adumbrations as “really immanent” (reell immanent) in consciousness, as Philipse emphasizes, it would be more accurate to say that consciousness, fundamentally, is a property of the stream of adumbrations (and of impressions more generally), namely this property of being self-manifesting. In other words, the phenomenal stream requires neither matter nor mind to give it further support—it is ontologically primary and independent, and thus self-generatingFootnote 16 and self-organizing.

This is the crucial insight at the core of Husserl’s theory of adumbrations: namely that the object of experience cannot, in its felt immediacy, be distinguished from the subject of experience. This realization of the non-duality of lived experience (Erlebnis) is a permanent possibility open to anyone who pays careful attention to experience itself (Petitmengin, 2017), and should thus not be too quickly brushed aside as a mere “theoretical assumption” on the part of Husserl.

We can better appreciate the nature of this insight if we return to Husserl’s first formulation of the concept of lived experience (Erlebnis) in § 2 of the Fifth LI. Here he claims, on the one hand, that the “appearing of the thing (the experience) is not the thing which appears (that seems to stand before us in propria persona)” (Husserl, 2001a, 83 [350]). Indeed, the object of experience is relatively stable, whereas the experience of the object is constantly changing. But, on the other hand, and more importantly for our present purposes, the “appearance of the thing does not itself appear to us, we live through it” (83 [350]). As I have argued elsewhere (Blouin, 2014, 2021, 137–145), this quote contains in nuce Husserl’s entire metaphysics. Properly understood, it means that I am indistinguishable from my own experiences, or better yet that these experiences are not even “mine,” strictly speaking, since it is “my” experiences that constitute me as an intraworldly individual, and not the opposite. We belong to our experiences rather than they belong to us. When I hear the church bells ring, the church appears to me through the sound of its bells; as for the sound itself, it does not appear to me, because between the sound and myself there is no gap. Similarly, when Monet paints the evanescent profiles of the Rouen Cathedral, he is not strictly speaking painting something that appears in front of him and distinct from him; rather, the act of painting here is a direct expression of a primal “presence,” to use Merleau-Ponty’s term, in relation to which “the subject and the object are but two abstract moments” (1945, 494). The cathedral and Monet, the perceived object and the perceiving subject, draw their common roots from an experiential stream that precedes and engenders them. This is why an “adumbration”—perhaps an unhappy choice of word to refer to this common element between the subject and the object—cannot, in fact, be photographed or painted, contrarily to what Philipse asserts, since we cannot extricate ourselves sufficiently from our felt experience to capture its fleeting essence—despite Monet’s brilliant efforts to defy this most basic of phenomenological facts.

Having drawn this ontological distinction between the thing appearing and the appearance of the thing, Husserl is simply one small step away from accomplishing the transcendental turn. It will happen effectively once he realizes that this medium between the perceived and the perceiver, the Erlebnisstrom, is ontologically prior to the two mediated terms. This, I believe, is the most adequate way of reading Husserl’s metaphysical claims in Ideas I, discussed above: the stream of lived experience is antecedent to both physical and psychical realities (more on the latter below) (see Taguchi, 2017). Husserl’s mature metaphysics is an experiential monism, that rests ultimately on an insight into the non-duality of lived experience. This is why it seems improper to characterize him either as a subjectivist idealist, as Philipse does, or even as a correlationist, as Zahavi does (2017, 114), since this last term implies that Mind and World are two interdependent and irreducible ontological categories. It is indeed the case that Mind and World are interdependent for Husserl— this is what he describes as the “universal a priori of correlation” (1970, 166 [169]) —but it is not the case that they are ontologically irreducible. There is a third, more fundamental term here missing from this characterization, namely the stream of lived experience, in which both Mind and World find their common ground.

In short: neither a metaphysical realism nor a subjectivist idealism, Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology corresponds to an ontological phenomenalism or an experiential monism, where Mind and World are construed as the two facets of a single underlying phenomenal stream.

5 Husserlian vs. Berkeleyan Phenomenalism

At this point, it is important to address a major objection that can be raised against my characterization of Husserlian metaphysics, namely Husserl’s constant desire to distance himself from phenomenalism. This is itself a rather telling fact (indeed, why would he have felt this need if he did not recognize the striking similarity between his metaphysics and that of Berkeley?); but let us nevertheless try to clarify the reasons behind his rejection of Berkeleyan idealism.

The main reason Husserl rejects phenomenalism is that he associates the term with thinkers such as Berkeley, Hume, and Mach, all three the heirs of Locke’s “data-sensualism.” As Zahavi rightly points out, “Husserl vehemently criticizes the view that the intentional object can be reduced to a complex of sensations” (2003, 69; see also Zahavi, 2017, 37–41 and 99–100; see Husserl LI V, § 7 (1st edition) and 2014, § 55; I will return to this claim shortly). However, as stated earlier, it is entirely possible to conceive the phenomenal in a non-sensualist manner. Ontological phenomenalism is committed only to the assertion that being and phenomenon are identical, and there is no doubt that Husserl held this thesis, which is in fact nothing other than phenomenology’s fundamental axiom, as Fink stated above. Indeed, if the equivalence between being and phenomenality did not hold, there would exist a region of being outside of the reach of phenomenology, which could thus no longer aspire to be a “universal science.” As to whether phenomenality can ultimately be reduced to complexes of atomized sensations that combine according to associative laws, as the sensualists believe, or if it rather has an irreducibly hylomorphic nature, being animated through and through by something like an instinctive intentionality (Triebintentionalität), as the post-genetic-turn Husserl will effectively assert (Bégout, 2006; Bower, 2015), this is a secondary matter that is left undecided by the core phenomenalist thesis.

Phenomenalism is thus not necessarily a sensualism, but it is necessarily an immaterialism in the Berkeleyan sense, to the extent that it is defined principally by its opposition to the idea of ​​an independent substrate lying “behind” or “beneath” the phenomenal. If Husserl explicitly rejects the first, sensualist thesis by Berkeley, nothing opposes him to the second, immaterialist one. Far from it, the post-transcendental-turn Husserl, as we have seen, explicitly denied the existence of a trans-phenomenal being, thus agreeing with Berkeley that the concept of a Ding an sich is pure nonsense (unless it is reinterpreted as an Idea in the Kantian sense). As to the question of whether this was already the position of Husserl in the LI, § 7 of the Fifth InvestigationFootnote 17 clearly shows that despite his insistence on the categorical distinction between the intentional object and lived experience, Husserl nevertheless remained open to the idea of ​​immaterialism at the time of the first edition of the LI, which implies that this distinction did not yet settle for Husserl the decisive metaphysical question.

This point deserves to be emphasized. The passage from the first edition of the LI on which Zahavi insists, and which sums up the Husserlian critique of phenomenalism, is the following:

It is the fundamental defect of phenomenalistic theories that they draw no distinction between appearance (Erscheinung) as intentional experience, and the apparent object (the subject of the objective predicates), and therefore identify the experienced complex of sensation with the complex of objective features. (2001a, 90 [359])

We can recognize here the categorical distinction, mentioned earlier, between the thing which appears and the appearing of the thing, that will become in Ideas I the distinction between being as consciousness and being as physical thing. This distinction is forcefully drawn by Husserl in several places in the LI, and Zahavi insists on it in order to refute Philipse’s phenomenalist interpretation. However, as I have just indicated, what Husserl challenges here is not the thesis of immaterialism, but that of sensualism. The proof is that this criticism leaves entirely open, according to Husserl, the basic metaphysical question:

[C]onsciousness itself must be the complex formed by experiences. The world, however, never is a thinker’s experience. To refer to the world may be an experience, but the world itself is the object intended. It is immaterial, from the point of view of our distinction, what attitude one takes up to the question of the make-up of objective being, of the true, real inner being of the world or of any other object, or of the relation of objective being, as a ‘unity’, to our ‘manifold’ thought-approaches, or of the sense in which on may metaphysically oppose immanent to transcendent being. The distinction itself is prior to all metaphysics, and lies at the very gate of the theory of knowledge: it presupposes no answers to the questions that this theory must be the first to provide. (2001a, 106 [386-7])

This passage (preserved in the second edition) clearly shows that there is no point in insisting on the categorical distinction between the unity of the object and the manifold of experience to refute the core thesis of phenomenalism, since in the LI, this purely descriptive distinction does not resolve the metaphysical question concerning the ontological relation between these two categories of being. But whereas the Husserl of the LI left this question unanswered (Zahavi is thus right to claim that the LI were metaphysically neutral), the Husserl of Ideas I will not. From then on, Husserl will not simply draw the distinction between experience and object, but will expressly defend the ontological dependence of the latter on the former. Thus, ultimate reality for Husserl is experiential or phenomenal in nature, not substantial in the Aristotelian sense of the term (hypokeimenon).

Does this reasoning support Philipse’s claim that Husserl’s metaphysical stance is similar to Berkeley’s, and that the differences between the two are of “minor importance” (1995, 287)? Yes and no. Yes, because the thesis of the ontological primacy of lived experience over physical realities indeed implies something like a projective theory of perception. Again, it’s either one of two things: either we construe the perceived object as the intra-experiential representation of an extra-experiential physical entity, or we construe the object perceived as somehow “emerging” from experience itself. Either the cup of coffee in front of me exists in some form or other independently of any actual or potential experience of it, or its existence is somehow bound up with experience itself. There is no doubt that the first interpretation is out of the question as far as the post-turn Husserl is concerned (and Zahavi agrees with this, as seen above), so only the second option remains.

In my view, Sokolowski and Zahavi are right to insist that the concept of constitution in Husserl, and the related concepts of Leistung and Sinngebung, cannot be understood as a pure act of creation or construction, since there is nothing “fictitious” or “arbitrary” about the Idea towards which it is striving (Husserl, 2019, 252 [47]). However, the process of constitution should also not be understood simply as an act of disclosure in an unqualified sense, since this concept implies, as we have seen, that what is disclosed existed prior to and independently of the act of disclosure. To argue that the nature of the intentional object in Husserl differs in kind from that of consciousness, or that the process of constitution is not a causal process, as if consciousness were a kind of “Big Bang” or “prime mover” at the origin of all things (Zahavi, 2003, 72; 2017, 99), in no way affects the fundamental thesis of transcendental phenomenology according to which the being of that which appears is dependent on the being of the manifold of appearances in virtue of which it appears. This can only mean that spatiotemporal realities would not exist without the phenomenal stream, and therefore that they somehow emerge from it.

How, then, should we construe this ambiguous concept in Husserl? Neither pure creation nor unqualified disclosure, the process of constitution should be understood as a qualified disclosure, namely as a self-disclosure or self-realization (Henry, 1963), since the normativity that guides the process of constitution comes from within the stream of experience, not from a reality without. The reason why the Sinngebung is not an arbitrary act of creation “that would derive a senseful world from senseless sensuous data” (Husserl, 1960, 86 [119]) is because even pre-objective experience, in the sphere of passivity, is always already imbued with sense, and the Sinngebung is the process whereby this implicit sense is made actual or explicit (Montavont, 1999; Bégout, 2000; see also Bower, 2015 and Jacobs, 2018, 654-5). The process of constitution, in a word, is the process whereby experience actualizes itself.Footnote 18

This therefore makes Husserl an ontological phenomenalist, as Philipse correctly argued. However, we must be careful not to confuse Husserlian consciousness with the Berkeleyan “mind.” This is where my interpretation diverges from that of Philipse. The experiential flow does not take place intra mentem for Husserl, but “in itself.” Philipse acknowledges this to a certain extent, showing quite thoroughly how the “phenomenological field” (1995, §XIV) changes from that of the empirical individual in the LI to that of the transcendental subject in Ideas I, but does not seem to believe that this constitutes a substantial difference between Husserl and Berkeley, as noted above. But surely this means that Husserl’s phenomenalism is of a much more radical nature than that of Berkeley, since Husserl conceives the phenomenal as independent not only of all “material things,” but also of all “souls” (Husserl, 2014, § 54). Transcendental consciousness, Husserl boldly asserts, is not even “psychical,” because the psyche, as the inner aspect of living things, is still a “thing which appears,” and thus cannot be ascribed to the transcendental field of appearance per se without committing a category mistake:

Consciousness, and this is the fundamental error constituting the ultimate error of psychologism (an error to which not only all empiricists succumb but all rationalists as well), is not a psychical experience, not a network of psychical experiences, not a thing, not an appendage (state, action) to a natural object. Who will save us from the reification of consciousness? He would be the saviour of philosophy, indeed, the creator of philosophy. (Husserl, manuscript A I 36, 193b [1910]; quoted in Bernet et al., 1993, 62)

Thus, Husserl is led to develop a non-psychical type of phenomenalism, because the phenomenal is here conceived as prior to the physical-psychical divide. As Husserl puts it concisely in his Introduction to Logic and Theory of Knowledge: “One just has to break with the supposedly so obvious idea stemming from natural thinking that everything given is either physical or mental” (2008, 237 [242]). The consciousness of which Husserl speaks is thus of a very different nature than that of Berkeley, since it is not merely the inner life of the individual, but the very field of appearance within which all individuals—objects and subjects—appear (see Taguchi, 2017). This is also, finally, why the term “idealism” applies only very inadequately to the metaphysics of Husserl.Footnote 19

6 Conclusion

I have argued in this paper in favor of Philipse’s phenomenalist interpretation of Husserl, and against Sokolowski and Zahavi’s correlationist interpretation, which inadvertently supports the realist interpretation. The phenomenalist interpretation should come as no surprise, given that most of the key continental figures of the phenomenological movement were committed to the same fundamental thesis.

Indeed, here is how Heidegger famously words it in Being and Time:

Phenomenology is the way of access to […] that which is to become the theme of ontology. Ontology is possible only as phenomenology. The phenomenological concept of phenomenon, as self-showing, means the being of beings […] This self-showing is nothing arbitrary, nor is it something like [a mere] appearing. The being of beings can least of all be something “behind which” something else stands, something that “does not appear.”

Essentially, nothing else stands “behind” the phenomena of phenomenology. (2010, 33 − 4 [35 − 6])

We have seen how Fink words the same thought in the introduction. Here is M. Henry: “The transcendental truth to which the phenomenological reduction introduces us […] is the truth itself, identified with being, insofar as ‘being’ and ‘truth’ designate nothing else but appearance (l’apparence) as such” (1963, 65). And here is J.-L. Marion, claiming once more that this thesis is at the heart of phenomenology itself:

“So much appearance, so much being” – this thesis, common to Husserl and Heidegger, marks by its paradoxical equivalence, the achievement proper to phenomenology: prior to any discrimination between illusion and reality, between appearance (l’apparence) and beings (l’étant), there is the appearing (l’apparition) as that which, already, is (even if it is nothing more than this appearing). (2015, 351)

Thus, there can be little doubt that phenomenology is a phenomenalism, if by that we mean simply that being is equivalent to phenomenality. This I believe lays to rest any interpretation that continues to presuppose a distinction between manifestation and being.

But what of Philipse’s critique of Husserl? Is he right to suggest, following Heidegger (see notably 1985), that Husserl continued to overinterpret the field of appearance in a subjectivist vein, despite his best efforts to fight the reification of transcendental consciousness? Isn’t this very term, “transcendental consciousness,” a clear sign that he remained caught in the “subjectivist bias of modernity,” from which the realist-idealist dichotomy springs? If this is the case, then the best way to capture the nondual nature of phenomenality would not be Husserl’s transcendental reduction, but a return to a kind of “common sense ontology,” the direct realism that predates the corpuscular “ontological revolution” of the 17th century, which is precisely what Philipse understands Heidegger as doing (1995, 252-4 and 300-1).

The irony of Philipse’s Heidegger-inspired critique of Husserl, and indeed of Heidegger’s critique itself, is that Husserl is the one who devised the very method of inquiry that opened the way to Heidegger’s own “fundamental ontology,” as the last quote from Heidegger should make patent. That being said, we must concede to Philipse that the great merit of Heidegger is to have overcome the “subjectivist bias of modernity” in a more decisive way than Husserl, who was perhaps condemned to such a bias because of his epistemological concerns (see Romano, 2010, especially chapters XIV and XV, and 2012). Despite this, it was the transcendental turn of Husserl’s phenomenology that opened the way to a decidedly nondual understanding of phenomenality, which we find more clearly expressed in Heidegger’s thought. The transcendental reduction forces us to reconstrue the phenomenological field as neither inside nor outside the mind, but as simply “there.” The field of manifestation is now seen as existing in itself, autonomously; ‘neither an appearance-of nor an appearance-for, but simply an appearance in itself’ (to paraphrase Conche 1994, 8; a contrario, see Zahavi, 2017, 108). The truth of direct realism is here preserved, but enriched: if the phenomenal world that lays open before us exists as it does independently of individual observers, it is because we are but the secondary witnesses to an anonymous presence that is originarily self-witnessing. This presence is precisely what Heidegger will call the openness (Erschlossenheit/Offenheit) of Being, or later simply the clearing (Lichtung), which grounds the subject-object relation:

Man is never first and foremost man on the hither side of the world, as a “subject,” whether this is taken as “I” or “We.” Nor is he ever simply a mere subject which always simultaneously is related to objects, so that his essence lies in the subject-object relation. Rather, before all this, man in his essence is ek-sistent into the openness of Being, into the open region that lights the “Between” within which a “relation” of subject to object can “be.” (1977, 229)

Thus, we may say that in the end, the Heideggerian Lichtung is equivalent to Husserl’s transcendental consciousness, in that it speaks to the nondual nature of appearance itself—the self-luminous world-mind—except perhaps that the student has better purged the master’s concept of its last vestiges of subjectivism. It is not a departure from transcendental phenomenology so much as a deepening of the same fundamental insight.Footnote 20