Continental Philosophy in the 20th Century

Routledge History of Philosophy Volume 8

Richard Kearney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781136793738
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Continental philosophy is one of the twentieth century's most important and challenging philosophical movements. This major volume includes fourteen chapters on its major representatives and schools, including phenomenology, existentialism and postmodernism.

CHAPTER 1

The beginnings of phenomenology

Husserl and his predecessors

Richard Cobb-Stevens

Edmund Husserl was the founder of phenomenology, one of the principal movements of twentieth-century philosophy. His principal contribution to philosophy was his development of the concept of intentionality. He reasserted and revitalized the premodern thesis that our cognitional acts are intentional, i.e., that they reach out beyond sensa to things in the world. When we think or speak about things, and when we perceive them, we deal with those things and not with mental intermediaries. Intentionality is our openness to the world, our transcending mode of being. Husserl also developed the implications of this fundamental thesis. He repudiated Locke’s interpretation of ‘mind’ as an inner space set off from the rest of nature, and he rejected Kant’s distinction between phenomena and things-in-themselves. He also rejected the view that the task of philosophy is to guarantee that our concepts and theories somehow mirror the world.

These themes brought a sense of liberation to many philosophers who by the early decades of the twentieth century had become weary of the insoluble problems generated by the modern account of cognition. Husserl’s analysis of signs and semantic systems had a similar effect in the fields of linguistics and logic which had been dominated by associationist and psychologistic accounts of the production of meaning. His interpretation of the complementarity of pre-scientific and scientific modes of rationality contributed to the demise of positivism and inspired new and fruitful approaches in the social sciences. His theories of time and ego-identity provided much-needed correctives to reductionist tendencies in psychology. Finally, his balanced interpretation of the interplay between historical horizons and the drive for truth offers a reasonable alternative to the contemporary tendency to regard all truths as relativized by their historical conditions.

It is unfortunate that Husserl’s writings had little influence on the development of the tradition of analytic philosophy, the other major movement of twentieth-century philosophy. Husserl himself engaged in spirited but amicable debate with Gottlob Frege, who is generally considered to be the proximate founder of analytic philosophy. However, such exchanges became increasingly rare among their followers who have tended on the whole to ignore one another’s works. This breakdown of communication was due in part to an early misunderstanding. Frege thought that Husserl was a proponent of psychologism, i.e., the view that numbers, propositions and logical laws are reducible to mental states. Frege’s critique of Husserl’s alleged psychologism was decisive for a whole generation of analytic philosophers whose goal was to defend rationality from relativism by detaching logic and semantics from all dependence on what they took to be irremediably subjective intuitions. On the other hand, Frege’s decision to divorce logical analysis entirely from cognitive intuition alienated philosophers within the phenomenological tradition who saw in this strategy only a revival of Hobbes’s preference for an exclusively calculative rationality. Ironically, Husserl’s critique of psychologism was in fact more coherent and more complete than that of Frege and his followers, for he showed how propositions are grounded in cognitive intuitions without thereby being reduced to merely subjective phenomena. In recent years both phenomenological and analytic traditions have found themselves increasingly vulnerable to contemporary forms of historicism and relativism. This situation has had the felicitous effect of encouraging within both traditions a reappraisal of the reasons for their mutual distrust. Considerable progress has been made of late in restoring a climate conducive to renewed dialogue.

In the judgment of many, the originality of Husserl’s thought and the rigour of his analyses guarantee him a place among the greatest of philosophers. However, his writings tend to be excessively abstruse and technical. As a result, his readership has generally been limited to professional philosophers. By contrast, Martin Heidegger’s more evocative philosophical style and Jean-Paul Sartre’s literary brilliance assured for the subsequent phenomenological tradition a wider audience and an unusually immediate cultural influence. This is not to say that these thinkers were merely commentators on Husserl (indeed, many regard Heidegger as a more profound and original thinker), but only that they often succeeded in communicating the basic insights of Husserl’s phenomenology more clearly and forcefully than did Husserl himself. There is another reason why Husserl’s writings often failed to convey to his readers the full force of his criticism of the modern epistemological perspective. It seems clear, in retrospect, that he was not sufficiently sensitive to the gravitational pull that the language of modern philosophy exercised on his thought. He explicitly modified the senses of such key modern terms as ‘presentation’, ‘content’, ‘immanence’, ‘subjectivity’, ‘phenomenon’, but he never completely jettisoned the lexicon of modern philosophy. Indeed, he always maintained a conservative stance with regard to innovative philosophic language, preferring to take familiar terms to their limits rather than to introduce unusual metaphors and neologisms. He therefore failed to appreciate the extent to which the familiar linguistic matrix of modern philosophy conceals a long history of accumulated premises which determine the kinds of questions that readers would bring to his texts. His goal was to call those premises into question, but his philosophical vocabulary tended too often to reinforce them. It is unfortunate, too, that Husserl seems to have had little first-hand familiarity with ancient and medieval philosophic texts. He was always more at home with the traditions of British empiricism and Kantian criticism. Had he been more attuned to the weight of words in the development of philosophic concepts, and better informed about the ancient and medieval traditions, his breakthrough would no doubt have been less plagued by ambiguities and less subject to misinterpretations.

Husserl was born in Prossnitz, a town then located in Austria. He took courses in mathematics at the universities of Leipzig, Berlin and Vienna. In Berlin, he studied with the renowned mathematicians Leopold Kronecker and Karl Weierstrauss, and also attended occasional lectures in philosophy by Wilhelm Wundt. He received his Ph.D. in 1882 from the University of Vienna for a dissertation entitled ‘Contributions to the Theory of the Calculus of Variations’. After a year in Berlin as assistant to Weierstrauss, he returned to Vienna to study philosophy with Franz Brentano, who had recently resigned his chair of philosophy. In 1886, on Brentano’s recommendation, Husserl went to Halle to work with Karl Stumpf, who supervised the thesis submitted for his Habilitation, a study of the concept of number. From 1887 to 1928, Husserl held teaching positions at Halle, Göttingen, and Freiburg im Breisgau.

As a Jew, Husserl was increasingly the subject of harassment during his retirement years in Freiburg. It must have been an especially cruel blow to have found himself denied access to the library of the university he had served so well. After his death in 1938, Husserl’s unpublished manuscripts were saved from destruction by Hermann Van Breda, a Belgian priest and philosopher, who also arranged for Husserl’s wife and daughter to be sheltered in a Belgian convent during the occupation. Van Breda subsequently founded the Husserl Archives at Louvain.

Husserl was a person of high moral character and of impeccable intellectual integrity. He looked upon philosophy as a vocation, and felt personally called upon to defend reason against the various forms of relativism prevalent in his day. However, his was never a merely defensive or narrowly conservative project. Indeed, he often expressed admiration for the sceptical tradition in philosophy, and thought that Hume’s radical critique of presuppositions made him the greatest of modern philosophers. He also rejected the arrogance and chauvinism of those who claimed that philosophy had achieved its culmination in German thought and expression. Philosophy, he argued, cannot be the exclusive property of any single culture or language, for the emergence of the philosophic spirit introduced a new mode of teleology characterized by the complementary traits of universality and infinity. The telos of philosophy is universal in that it strives to attain an identical truth which is valid for all who are no longer blinded by traditions, and infinite in that this goal of truth can never be fully realized and thus remains always a regulative idea. By reason of its universality, therefore, philosophy cannot be limited to a particular period or people, and by reason of its infinity philosophy remains always an unending process ([1.33], 286; [1.89], 151–60).

During his lifetime Husserl published several books and also left an extraordinary number of manuscripts, lecture notes and working papers. Both the published works and the unpublished materials contain many repetitive passages, tantalizingly unfinished descriptions, and agonizing reappraisals of earlier positions. As a result, it is often difficult to co-ordinate earlier and later works, or even to be sure of the direction ultimately taken by his thought. Husserl would not be entirely displeased by this situation, for he concluded finally that there can be no totalizing syntheses. We must strive for objectivity, and hope for progress towards that goal, but we must also acknowledge all the while that the goal of truth functions always as ‘the idea of an infinite task’ ([1.33], 291).

EARLY WORKS: INFLUENCE OF FREGE, BRENTANO, HERBART, STUMPF AND LOTZE

Husserl’s first published work, Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891), was a revised version of his earlier analysis of the concept of number. Adopting a distinction first made by Brentano, Husserl distinguishes between intuitive presentation and symbolic intention of numbers. He describes how our primitive intuitions about numbers and their interrelationships are based upon the experiences of counting, comparing and collecting, and how we think in symbols of more complex numbers for which there can be no such authenticating intuitions. Unfortunately, he makes several remarks which give the impression that he conflated numbers and their presentations. For example, he refers to the unity of a number as a psychic relation, and claims that understanding the concept of a number requires reflection on its presentation in relevant acts of collective combination. In 1894, Frege called attention to these compromising remarks in a critical review of Husserl’s book. He objected that Husserl’s analysis blurs the distinction between subjective and objective domains, and concluded that his work was a typical example of psychologism ([1.65], 200–1). While Frege’s critique finds some justification in Husserl’s text, this extreme conclusion is unwarranted. Frege was inclined to regard as psychologistic any attempt to relate the status of numbers to the activities of counting and collecting. Hence, he was not likely to be attuned to the nuances of Husserl’s intention which was surely not to collapse the objectivity of numbers into their acts of presentation but rather to describe just how their objectivity manifests itself to us. At any rate, Husserl later distinguished clearly between numbers and their presentations, and between the concept of number and the concept of collective combination ([1.35], 784; [1.86], 24). Frege also criticized Husserl for holding the view that numbers are totalities (determinate multitudes) comprised of mere ‘somethings’ having no specific content and yet somehow differing from one another. However, this is a caricature of Husserl’s position, for he clearly maintains that objects are always identified by way of their features. His point is simply that, once we have identified objects to be counted, we prescind from the determinate content of those objects in the instance numbering them.

It took some time, however, for Husserl to clarify the ambiguities generated by his continued dependence on the linguistic and conceptual framework of the empiricist tradition, which was the remote forerunner of late nineteenth-century psychologism. In his essay ‘Psychological Studies in the Elements of Logic’ (1894), he makes the unequivocal claim that our cognitive intuitions truly present the things intended by our speech acts. Moreover, he distinguishes clearly between mental acts and their contents, a distinction that had been blurred by the empiricist notion of a mental ‘process’, which in effect reduces cognitive acts to the mere having of associatively modified impressions. Nevertheless, he constantly uses the term ‘contents’ in an ambiguous fashion, sometimes to refer to ill-defined mental representations and sometimes to refer to things in the world in so far as they are known. Hence he does not yet make it clear that the intended objects of both our signitive and intuitive acts are, ordinarily at least, things in the world rather than mental substitutes ([1.40], 126–42; [1.122], 34–8).

These ambiguities testify to the influence of Brentano on the early Husserl. Brentano rejected the empiricists’ reduction of mental acts to associative reactions, reaffirmed at least vaguely the medieval distinction between acts and contents, and retrieved in part the ancient thesis that cognitive acts reach out to the intended objects themselves. He is therefore rightly celebrated for having revived the theory of intentionality. However, his interpretation of this notion intermingled modern and premodern themes. His early writings described intentional contents in ways that evoke the modern notion that impressions and ideas function as intra-mental substitutes for inaccessible real objects of reference. He said, for example, that every intentional experience ‘contains something as its object within itself’, and referred also to this ‘immanent objectivity’ as the ‘intentional in-existence of an object’ ([1.45], 88–9).

Although Brentano explicitly related his account of intentionality to the scholastic tradition, and traced its origin to Aristotle’s books on the soul, he unfortunately tended to read the modern interpretation of immanence into the medieval theme of esse intentionale. It is true that the Scholastics used the term ‘intentional’ (and more frequently the term ‘objective’) to refer to the mode of being had by things known, in so far as they are present in the knower. The point of the medieval distinction between intentional (objective) being and real being was to clarify Aristotle’s claim that the knower ‘is somehow’ the form of the thing known, without thereby entering into physical identity with the thing. It was thought that the intentional object (‘inner word’, ‘formal concept’, ‘expressed species’) functions as a unique sort of intermediary, i.e., as a transparent sign through which the mind is related to reality ([1.101], 62 n. 3). Although this emphasis on the mediating function of formal concepts may well have prepared the way for the modern thesis that to know is to have a representation of something (its ‘idea’ or ‘concept’) within the mind’s interiority, the medieval thinkers themselves clearly maintained that the intentional object is the very thing itself, considered as known (Aquinas, De Veritate, iv, 2 ad 3).

Aristotle does not seem to have thought it necessary to postulate any intermediary, however special, between intellect and thing known. Indeed, he suggests that the intellect must itself be free of formal structure, and hence empty of content, so that it can become the forms of all things. The intellect, says Aristotle, possesses the same sort of adaptability as the human hand. It takes on...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface to the paperback edition
• General editors’ preface
• Notes on contributors
• Chronology
• Introduction
• 1 The beginnings of phenomenology: Husserl and his predecessors
• 2 Philosophy of existence 1: Heidegger
• 3 Philosophy of existence 2: Sartre
• 4 Philosophy of existence 3: Merleau-Ponty
• 5 Philosophies of religion: Marcel, Jaspers, Levinas
• 6 Philosophies of science: Mach, Duhem, Bachelard
• 7 Philosophies of Marxism: Lenin, Lukács, Gramsci, Althusser
• 8 Critical theory: Horkheimer, Adorno, Habermas
• 9 Hermeneutics: Gadamer and Ricoeur
• 10 Italian idealism and after: Gentile, Croce and others
• 11 French structuralism and after: de Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Lacan, Foucault
• 12 French feminist philosophy: de Beauvoir, Kristeva, Irigaray, Le Doeuff, Cixous
• 13 Deconstruction and Derrida
• 14 Postmodernist theory: Lyotard, Baudrillard and others
• Glossary
• Index