Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations

A.D. Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780415287579
• eBook ISBN: 9781134444953
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Husserl is one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century and his contribution to the phenomenology movement is widely recognised. The Cartesian Meditations is his most famous, and most widely studied work. The book introduces and assesses: Husserl's life and background to the Cartesian Meditations, the ideas and text of the Cartesian Meditations and the continuing imporance of Husserl's work to Philosophy.

INTRODUCTION

(§§1–2)

Husserl would wish to be remembered for one thing: the discovery of transcendental phenomenology as the one true path of philosophy. In fact, for many of us the unforgettable achievement of Husserl is to be found in the detailed analyses at which he toiled throughout his life — analyses of a profundity rarely seen. Husserl himself did not, however, regard many of his findings as definitive. He repeatedly speaks of how difficult it is properly to carry out detailed phenomenological work, and his manuscripts clearly testify to a constant reworking of his accounts of a range of phenomena that, to judge by his published works, one might think he had ‘settled’. Moreover, Husserl always saw in phenomenology a communal enterprise. It would proceed by a critical interchange of views; and he looked to others to lead forward philosophical (i.e., phenomenological) enquiry after his death. In fact, as §2 of the Introduction to the Cartesian Meditations indicates, his own time (and equally, he would no doubt think, our own) calls for phenomenology because of the irreconcilable divisions within philosophy itself. Transcendental phenomenology would communalize philosophy, fashion it into a community of mutually respectful coworkers: an ethical community, moreover, because, as we shall soon see, the ethical demand is inseparable, for Husserl, from the very drive to philosophize itself. No; despite the ground-breaking profundity of many of his treatments of specific philosophical topics, Husserl would not have wished to be remembered primarily for his ‘results’, but for his discovery of transcendental phenomenology as such.

THE ‘IDEA’ OF PHILOSOPHY

I write of a discovery, rather than an invention, of phenomenology because, although Husserl can freely speak of such a phenomenology as something new, he saw it not as some replacement for traditional philosophy, but, to use a Hegelian turn of phrase, as a matter of the (Western) philosophical tradition ‘coming to its own truth’. Transcendental phenomenology is, as Husserl himself put it, the ‘secret longing’ of all genuine earlier philosophy. It constitutes the final breakthrough to a realization of the idea that has governed philosophy from its inception among the ancient Greeks. The word ‘idea’ (Idee) is one that occurs frequently in the Cartesian Meditations (indeed in Husserl's writings generally), and it is short for what Husserl will sometimes spell out as ‘an idea in the Kantian sense’. It is a regulative idea: one that points us forward in an enterprise that can have no final, finite completion, though we have a definite recognition of progress. It is most simply thought of as an ideal. Philosophy is in its present divided state because the directive idea of philosophy, which, according to Husserl, was born in ancient Greece and was revivified by Descartes, has lost its vital force. The ‘newness’ of transcendental phenomenology is but that of the unprecedented radicality with which we decide to be led by this fundamental idea, the one and only idea that could, according to Husserl, govern a life that deserves to be called philosophical.

The sub-title of Husserl's Cartesian Meditations is ‘An Introduction to Phenomenology’; the sub-title to Husserl's first major work after his move to idealism (mentioned in the Preface) was ‘General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology’; that of his last, unfinished, major work, the Crisis, was ‘An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy’; and he also referred to his Formal and Transcendental Logic as an introduction. These repeated attempts to introduce transcendental phenomenology to the world not only bespeak a dissatisfaction with his earlier efforts; more importantly, they indicate an essential characteristic of transcendental phenomenology itself. For equally balanced with the difficulty of carrying out detailed phenomenological work is the difficulty of attaining the transcendental phenomenological perspective in the first place. True philosophizing is, as Husserl repeatedly states, an unnatural activity. In all our non-philosophical life — not only in all our ‘everyday’ activities, but also in all scientific endeavours — we are concerned with objects in the world, determining their properties and their reality (or lack of it). In such a life we are, as Husserl puts it, ‘given over’ or ‘dedicated’ to the world. All our concerns and activities are ‘objectively’ directed. As we shall see in our examination of the First Meditation, transcendental phenomenology involves a switch of interest — away from the world, and towards our own conscious life in which such a world presents itself to us. Such a redirection of mental focus is not a matter of engaging in psychology, since psychology, too, is concerned with what exists in the world: it is just that it is selectively interested in one domain or stratum of it — the ‘mental’, or the ‘psychological’. The radical newness of transcendental phenomenology consists in its claim to have discovered an entirely new realm of being — one ‘never before delimited’, as he says in Ideas I — together with a new method of dealing with this new subject-matter. Much of the difficulty in introducing transcendental phenomenology consists precisely in getting someone even to discern this new field of enquiry — especially as it is so easy to misconstrue it as simply the familiar domain of the psychological. At a number of points throughout the Cartesian Meditations the reader will notice Husserl speaking of ‘beginning philosophers’. This is not a reflection of the nature of his audience. On the contrary, the work was originally delivered to a gathering of some of the leading intellectuals in France. The point is that we are all, Husserl included, beginners at coming to grips with this new field of enquiry — an enquiry into what he will call ‘transcendental consciousness’ or ‘transcendental subjectivity’.

In fact, according to Husserl, the notion of a beginning, of making a start, is central to understanding the very nature of philosophy itself. In his most extended treatment of the history of philosophy, developed in lectures given a few years before the composition of the Cartesian Meditations and now collected in Part One of Erste Philosophie (‘First Philosophy’), Husserl says that three figures stand out for him in their significance: the ‘binary star’ Socrates/Plato and Descartes. What is significant in the present context is that he singles them out as ‘the greatest beginners’ in philosophy. Husserl regarded transcendental phenomenology as ‘a first breakthrough of a true and genuine first philosophy’; and ‘first philosophy’ is ‘a philosophy of beginnings’, a ‘scientific discipline of the beginning’ of philosophy (EP I, 6–8). We cannot dissociate ourselves from the beginning of philosophy, because philosophy cannot be identified with any set of results or doctrines, but only with how it begins — with the spirit of its beginning — and how that beginning is sustained as a ‘living force’ (compare CM, 44). Philosophy is not a set of doctrines, because it is at root a certain form of ethical life. To understand such a life we need to see how it is motivated, how it begins.

What Husserl calls the ‘primal establishment’ or ‘primal institution’ (Urstiftung) of philosophy is to be found among the Greeks, specifically Socrates and Plato. It begins with the ‘idea’ mentioned above — an idea that is, specifically, the ideal conception of genuine science as universal knowledge. The universality that is in question here has two senses: such knowledge concerns reality as a totality, and it can be accepted as binding by any rational person whatever. This second feature implies, furthermore, that such science should be both grounded in, and developed through, absolute insight, and hence be absolutely justified. The ‘idea’ of philosophy is the idea of ‘rigorous science’, as Husserl put it in the Logos article that was his first published proclamation of his philosophy after his ‘transcendental turn’. The commitment to this idea, which defines the philosopher, is a commitment to a life of reason, for ‘philosophy is nothing other than [rationalism] through and through’ (Crisis, 273 [338]).¹ In a sense, philosophy proper would be — not the complete realization of such universal, absolutely justified knowledge through insight (for that, since it encompasses infinite tasks, is impossible), but — a secure method leading to absolute success in each of its steps. This would be the ‘final establishment’ (Endstiftung) of philosophy (ibid., 73 [72]), in relation to which Husserl can refer even to transcendental phenomenology as but destined to become philosophy (CM, 67). To exist as a philosopher between these two points is to strive for a ‘re-establishment’ (Nachstiftung) in one's intellectual life of that desire for universal insight found in Socrates/Plato — becoming with them, as he says elsewhere, ‘joint beginners’ of philosophy (EP I, 5). So even philosophical beginners in the everyday sense must be led to reproduce previously discovered truths through their own insight, and therefore to reproduce a true beginner of philosophy in themselves.

Philosophy, being a methodologically clarified attempt to progress towards the ideal of absolute knowledge, must of course be systematic. But Husserl refuses to separate the ‘systematic’ Plato from the ‘ethical’ Socrates in philosophy's origin. For the ideal of absolute knowledge is the goal that a certain sort of life sets for itself. We can, therefore, characterize philosophy as much by the nature of its motives as by the nature of its goal. And what above all characterizes the philosophic life is self-responsibility. ‘Philosophy’, as Husserl says in the very first section of the Cartesian Meditations, ‘is the philosophizer's quite personal affair. It must arise as his wisdom, as his self-acquired knowledge tending towards universality, a knowledge for which he can answer from the beginning, and at each step, by virtue of his own absolute insights’ (44). In fact, the reader will find references to responsibility scattered throughout the Cartesian Meditations. And at one point he speaks of the need for the philosopher's radicality to become ‘an actual deed’ (50). The responsibility in question is initially, of course, an intellectual responsibility to settle for nothing less than ‘insight’ in all matters. Socrates’ method was that of ‘tireless self-reflection and radical appraisal’, a method of ‘complete clarification’ which leads to a knowledge that is ‘originally produced through complete self-evidence’ (EP I, 9–10). The self-responsibility that is philosophy is the responsibility to accept nothing as knowledge that you have not validated for yourself. It is nothing but the demand for ‘universal self reflection’, for ‘a resolve of the will to shape one's whole personal life into the synthetic unity of a life of universal self-responsibility and, correlatively, to shape oneself into the true “I”, the free, autonomous “I” which seeks to realise his innate reason, the striving to be true to himself’ (Crisis 272 [338]). Such reason, as he goes on to say, is ‘ratio in the constant movement of self-elucidation’. Indeed, transcendental phenomenology is characterized by Husserl as ultimately nothing but absolute self-explication (CM, 97). Philosophy is nothing other than absolute honesty.

The notion of insight has already started to emerge as being at the very heart of Husserl's vision of philosophy, and he will spell it out in his own fashion in a way we shall investigate later. Preliminarily we can contrast it with ‘doxa’ — mere opinion, what we take on trust, what we have not interrogated and brought to clarity in our own minds: in short, prejudice. Despite the fact that such doxa is indispensable for ordinary life, it is, because of its typical unclarity and its necessary relativity to a given culture, open to question. In fact, Husserl saw epistemological naïveté as giving way to philosophy as a result of the ‘prick of scepticism’ (EP II, 27). He presents Socrates and Plato as reacting against the Sophists (whom Husserl construes as sceptics); he presents Descartes as attempting to answer various later sceptical schools of thought; and his own move towards transcendental phenomenology in the first decade of the twentieth century was itself motivated by sceptical worries about the very possibility of knowledge — as the ‘Five Lectures’ of 1907 make plain. Scepticism rots the human spirit, corroding not only the life of the intellect but all moral and spiritual values. Nevertheless, by bringing all claims to knowledge into doubt, scepticism fulfils its destiny by making possible a truly philosophical perspective, one oriented to the possibility of knowledge as such and its implicit goal of universality. Once the human spirit has been goaded into philosophy, has decided in favour of a life of reason guided by the idea of science, a new level of human existence is achieved. As Husserl says in a late text, ‘Philosophical reason represents a new stage of human nature and its reason. But the stage of human existence under ideal norms for infinite tasks, the stage of existence sub specie aeterni, is possible only through absolute universality, precisely the universality contained from the start in the idea of philosophy’ (Crisis, 337–8 [290]).

The idea of philosophy — and its implied idea of mankind as beings capable of philosophy, capable of following the absolute demands of reason — was not engendered in an abstract humanity: it had a specific historical origination, and it is kept alive (or dormant) only through a specific tradition. The idea of philosophy should be of interest to us because that tradition is our tradition. The birth of philosophy determines ‘the essential character and destiny of the development of European culture’ (EP I, 17); it is the ‘teleological beginning … of the European spirit as such’ (Crisis, 72 [71]). Philosophy does not confine itself to the groves of academe. As a transformation of the human spirit, as the raising of humanity to a higher level of existence, it will resonate through, indeed transform, the culture in which it is genuinely alive. ‘Science spreads itself across all areas of life and everywhere that it flourishes, or is believed to, claims for itself the significance of being an ultimately normative authority’ (EP I, 17). Philosophy has so changed humanity, at least European humanity, that any subsequent stage of its culture will be whole and hale only where the life of reason flourishes as a unifying and directive force, transforming mankind into ‘a new humanity made capable of an absolute self-responsibility on the basis of absolute theoretical insights’ (Crisis, 329 [283]). Needless to say, the history of European humanity has hardly been that of the clear-sighted unfolding of reason. Philosophy begins with insight; but as it is handed on in a tradition, it can and does become doctrine. Truths that were attained through original clarity become ‘sedimented’: they are passed along, like so many possessions, without our reliving the experience of insight which brought them into being as truth, and in which their ‘proper’ meaning is alone to be found.² And so philosophy itself can turn into the very kind of ‘prejudice’ against which it originally arose. This, however, is the death of philosophy. And when philosophy dies, the whole civilization which it once informed grows sick. Husserl established transcendental phenomenology, as a rebirth of the original vital spirit of philosophy, in opposition to what he saw as the malaise of Western culture. This malaise was, he believed, directly attributable to philosophy having lost its way by having lost touch with its vital origin or ‘primal establishment’. He saw a clear manifestation of this, as the Introduction to the Cartesian Meditations itself indicates, in the ‘splintering of present-day philosophy’, in an absence among philosophers of a ‘commonness of their underlying convictions’, and in a ‘pseudo-reporting and pseudo-criticizing, a mere semblance of philosophizing seriously with and for one another … [which] hardly attests a mutual study carried on with a consciousness of responsibility’ (46).

One thing that Husserl sees as an immediate consequence of this philosophical decadence is the supposed independence from philosophy of the so-called ‘positive sciences’. The reader will have noticed that when discussing the ‘primal establishment’, Husserl speaks indifferently of ‘philosophy’ and of ‘science’. On the very first page of the Cartesian Meditations Husserl attributes to Descartes the view that all the various sciences ‘are only non-self sufficient members of the one all-inclusive science, and this is philosophy. Only within the systematic unity of philosophy can they develop into genuine sciences’ (43). This is, however, not just Descartes's view; it is also Husserl's, because it is part and parcel of philosophy's ‘primal establishment’ — this time, specifically at the hands of Plato. The ‘idea’ of a systematic enquiry into universally valid truth comes first; any ‘positive’ science is but a ‘regional’ application of this philosophical perspective to a particular domain of reality. During the co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• In The Same Series
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• PREFACE
• NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS AND CITATIONS
• LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
• Introduction (§§1–2)
• 1 First Meditation (§§3–11)
• 2 Second Meditation (§§12–22)
• 3 (Most of the) Fourth Meditation (§§30–39)
• 4 Third Meditation and Part of the Fourth (§§23–29, 40–41)
• 5 Fifth Meditation (§§42–62)
• Conclusion (§§63–64)
• Appendix: Original Passages from Husserl's Unpublished Manuscripts
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX