Abstract
This paper wishes to suggest that Husserl’s transcendental idealism is indeed metaphysical (cf. n. 15) but in a way which is yet to be determined. Further, I propose that acknowledgement of the metaphysical side of Husserl’s thought can serve as a determining factor in the proper interpretation of the discussions of the noema, especially as it appears in Ideas I.
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References
I have changed this paragraph in response to some critical remarks of John Drummond.
Rudolf Bernet, “Husserls Begriff des Noema” in Husserl-Ausgabe und Husserl-Forschung, ed. S. Llsseling ( Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990 ), 70.
Here we have not only a clear historical antecedent to Heidegger’s Dasein but also a poetic justification for Husserl’s predilection for the term “archaeology” as a fitting title for transcendental phenomenology. a. B IV 6, 167. Bernet, 68, gives some excerpts from this page (166 of the transcription) of B IV 6, 166. Fichte, in Wissenschaftslehre (1804) and in his Anweisungen zum seligen Leben already uses the term Dasein in a metaphysical-theological way which might have been influential on both Husserl and Heidegger, i.e., as the “there” of the divine being by which the divine being acquires self-consciousness through its self-objectification in a plurality of monads. This programmatic text may be compared with that of Hector-Neri Castaneda: “The self is the geometrical origin of the world, that is, the center of the universe as an experienced whole. Yet it is-not the source, or the root of the world, nor is it the provenience of experience. Origin but no source, that is the fundamental contrast in the structuring of the self and the world. Self-awareness is the linkage in that structuring* awareness of self qua self is simply the highest portion of that linkage.” “Philosophical Method and Direct Awareness of the Self,” Grazer philosophische Studien 7/8 (1979): 1. Cf. our discussion of interpretations of Castaneda below, §4.
The reference here is, of course, to Ernst Mach. It occurs to me that Husserl here did not appreciate that Mach’s Empfindungen were not mental events but rather had a “neutral monist” status. Mach strove therewith for a philosophical realm which had aspirations resembling Husserl’s desire to overcome the dualisms of the natural attitude. For a remarkable study of Husserl and Mach, see Manfred Sommer’s Evidenz im Augenblick Eine Phänomenologie der reinen Empfindung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987). For this precise issue of the “reduction,” see 79ff. We will return to another “neutral monism” soon.
Cf. F. Brentano, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt,Bd. I (Hamburg: Meiner, 1924/1973), 130: “Only if the being-presented were contained as a moment in the color as a certain quality and intensity is contained in it, would there be a contradiction in the notion of a non-presented color because a whole without one of its parts in truth is a contradiction.”
David Smith, “Mind and Guise: Castafieda’s Philosophy of Mind in the World Order,’ in Hector-Neri Castaneda,ed. James E. Tomberlin (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1986), 167ff.; Guido Küng, ”`Guises’ and Noemata,“ in Thinking and the Structure of the World/Das Denken and die Struktur der Welt,ed. Klaus Jacobi and Helmut Pape (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1990), 409ff. Both these works, plus Castafieda’s responses to the essays in the works cited, are excellent Castafieda primers for Husserl scholars wanting to gain entry to Castafieda’s thought. In the text I refer to Küng’s essay chiefly because Smith’s more rich and nuanced text is less suited for the simple comparison I wish to make — which has less to do with Castafieda scholarship than with the concept of what the ”new metaphysics“ of Husserl might mean.
Castafieda approaches such a noetic-noematic field in his anti-Fregean denial of ‘olympiad’ status to the referents of senses, i.e., when he denies that the senses/guises are mediations of transcendent objects, and when he therefore unifies oratio obliqua and orario recta references. Cf. “Identity and Sameness,” 126ff. I do not think the differences are captured simply by the “realist” tendency in Castafieda and the “idealist” one in Husserl; but the sense of the reduction for one remaining in the natural attitude compels this interpretation.
Metaphysical“ in Husserl is a terminus technicus. See, e.g., Hua VII, 188n. For basic discussions, see ‘so Kern, Husserl und Kant (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1966), 298ff.; also his Idee und Methode der Philosophie (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1975), 320–327 and 336ff. Cf. also James G. Hart, ”A Précis of a Husserlian Philosophical Theology,“ in Essays in Phenomenological Theology,ed. Steven W. Laycock and James G. Hart (Albany: SUNY, 1986), esp. 98–109. Three senses may be singled out: a) the interpretation of the positive sciences, of factual reality, in the light of the principles of transcendental phenomenological eidetics; b) the reconstruction in terms of transcendental phenomenological principles of the transcendent world to which there is no access through transcendental phenomenological reflection; and c) speculation on the conditions of reason as it is manifest in the primal presencing as well as in the derived achievements and structures of the scientific, moral, and political community. The third most basic sense is captured in Hua VII, 220: ”The question of the human being in the natural attitude about the foundation (Grunde) of the fact of this world becomes in the transcendental inner-attitude the question about the foundation of the being of this factual subjectivity and of the factual constitution of the world which is achieved in this subjectivity; and therein are included the question about the factually filled conditions for the possibility of this constitution. What sense the concept of ‘foundation’ can here have, and what that could be in regard to this fact which does not leave us satisfied, is a new question which refers to a higher level of transcendental research.“
As I have tried to show in the first chapter of a forthcoming book, The Person and the Common Life,Husserl envisaged a genuine style of humanity and ethics within the noeticnoematic correlation. That is, when the transcendental philosopher becomes an agent he does not renounce his transcendental philosophical habitus.
Richard H. Holmes, “Is Transcendental Phenomenology Committed to Idealism?”, The Monist 50 (1975): 98ff. For the important concession that there is a new sense of metaphysics, see 110–112.
Harrison Hall, “Was Husserl a Realist or an Idealist,” in Husserl, Intentionality, and Cognitive Science,ed. H. L. Dreyfus (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982), 169ff.
These terms have been coined by Thomas Prufer, first of all, I believe, in his “An Outline of Some Husserlian Distinctions and Strategies, Especially in The Crisis’,” in Phänomenologische Forschungen 1 (1975): 89ff.
This is the direction of Robert Sokolowski, Thomas Prufer, and Klaus Held. See Sokolowski’s Presence and Absence (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978); see Prufer’s “Heidegger, Early and Late, and Aquinas,” in Edmund Husserl and the Phenomenological Tradition,ed. Robert Sokolowski (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 1988), 199–200; and see Held’s “Phänomenologie der Zeit nach Husserl,” Perspektiven der Philosophie 7 (1981): 185ff.
I do not think that “axioms” a) or b) are necessarily incompatible with the natural scientific hypothesis that higher biological species evolved out of lower ones as long as this hypothesis did not include the claim that all senses of consciousness derive from, e.g., chemical elements.
One of the best texts for Husserl’s doctrine of the unbegun and undying character of the transcendental I is in Hua XI, 377–381. For an exposition and interpretation of this aspect of Husserl’s thought, see my “Phenomenological Time: Its Religious Significance,” forthcoming in J. Mohanty, ed., Time and Religion.
Roman Ingarden, Der Streit um die Fristen der Welt, esp. Vol. I ( Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1964 ).
Ingarden, 79. Ingarden, 148 quotes part of the first paragraph of §50 of Ideen I, for an example of Seinsheteronomie. The position of Ingarden owes much to Hedwig Conrad-Martius, even though there are significant differences which Ingarden brings out.
This issue needs much clarification. Husserl, at least on one occasion, conceived of transcendental subjectivity as the ideal correlate of “objectivities” (Objektivitäten) in the strictest sense, i.e., of ideal objects (e.g., of a mathematical or logical character) for whom their actually being-thought is non-essential. Essential to them is, however, that they be thought of as correlates of a possible ideal pure rational subjectivity. This ideal subject of ideal objects itself may be said to exist, i.e., to be an ideal being, and therefore to be a kind of ‘objectivity“ and therefore belong to this region of ideal objects. A distinguishing feature of this ideal existence is that the idea of a pure rational I has an ideal existence in correlation with itself, that it can know itself, etc. See Hua XVII, 388. This text, 387–393, is of interest for the discussion with Ingarden. Basic for the discussion, of course, is that the central theme of the major text here, Formal and Transcendental Logic,is that there is a constitution of even these pure rational ideal objects. Or as Ingarden notes in his 1933 review of this work, FTL moves beyond Ideas I which still treats the formal logical ideal objects in a seemingly realistic way; in FTL they become Gebilde,formations, of a creative subjectivity. See Kau-Studien (1933), 206–209; also in Husserl,ed. Hermann Noack (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1973), 168–171. Therefore there is a more basic sense of transcendental subjectivity which is not commensurate with the ideal objectivities.
Edmund Husserl, Briefe an Roman Ingarden,ed. Roman Ingarden (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1968), esp. 78–82.
I wish to thank Professor Samuel Usseling, Director of the Husserl-Archives in Louvain, for permission to quote from the Nachlass.
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Hart, J.G. (1992). Being’s Mindfulness: The Noema of Transcendental Idealism. In: Drummond, J.J., Embree, L. (eds) The Phenomenology of the Noema. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 10. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3425-7_8
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