The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy

Volume 4

Burt Hopkins, Steven Crowell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317401445
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy provides an annual international forum for phenomenological research in the spirit of Husserl's groundbreaking work and the extension of this work by such figures as Scheler, Heidegger, Sartre, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer.

Husserl’s Transcendental Idealism Revisited

Rudolf Bernet

Husserl-Archives, Leuven

It is widely known that Ideas I,¹ appearing in 1913, was the first publication in which Husserl explicitly argued in favor of a phenomenological idealism. It is also well known that this standpoint immediately incited dispute as well as astonishment, with the controversy surrounding it still alive today. The surprise of the students and first readers, as well as the fact that Ideas I never uses the term ‘idealism’ by name to characterize the nature of transcendental phenomenology, managed to make it seem as if it came about as a result of a sudden or at least hastily made about-face on Husserl’s part, and not through a decision that had been extensively reflected upon. Thanks to a recently published volume of Husserliana which compiles the principal texts by Husserl on transcendental idealism,² we can take account of how the Husserlian position concerning phenomenological idealism had, for the most part, already been established by 1908. Likewise, the famous “Nachwort” to Ideas I written in 1930³ clearly shows that Husserl maintained his idealism up until the end of his days—all the while insisting that Ideas I had gone astray in suggesting that such a form of idealism coincided with a solipsistic conception of transcendental subjectivity.

The phenomenological idealism of Ideas I, such as it is set out in its “Fundamental Phenomenological Consideration,” is the outcome of a phenomenological investigation concerning the conditions of the possibility of authentic knowledge of objective reality. Because the establishment of these conditions of possibility is for Husserl a matter of an examination of the manner in which objective reality is intuitively given to consciousness, rather than any sort of inquiry into the logical nature of reason, the analysis of “external” perception comes to play a predominant role therein. Already this perception (and not only the judgment based on it), involves a “positing” (Setzung) of the reality of things and the world. Moreover, it is incumbent on this form of perception—inasmuch as it is the experience of a givenness of the thing itself, “in the flesh” (leibhaft)—to justify belief in the existence of the world. However, such a legitimization of objective reality by perceptual consciousness can only avoid the contradictions of psychologism on the express condition that this consciousness, serving as the epistemological foundation for the existence of objective reality, does not itself belong to that reality. This is why the task of a “phenomenological reduction” is to purify perceptual consciousness of any apperception as an empirical reality before perceptual consciousness can be given the task of validating or “constituting” the existence of a transcendent empirical reality.

For a phenomenology that, as a “critique of knowledge,” can only hold the positing of the existence of an objective reality to be legitimate to the extent that, at the same time, this existence is testified to in “pure” consciousness in the form of an intuitive phenomenon, the meaning of the existence of the world necessarily depends on transcendental consciousness. For the most part, phenomenological idealism is nothing other than the solemn proclamation of such a dependence of the truth-value of the positing of the existence of the world vis-à-vis intentional, perceptual, and pure consciousness of that world. This form of idealism therefore does not have to make any claims as to what the reality of the world could be independent of the positing of a transcendental subject’s knowledge of it. That is to say, outside the subject’s pretension to having knowledge of a real object⁴ and the justification of this subjective pretension by an actual act of perception had by a pure consciousness, this sort of idealism need not make any claims about the reality of the world.

If Ideas I does not rest satisfied with merely stating this thesis—it being one that is fairly banal once one accepts its premises—this is especially because no external perception, nor any finite series of harmonious external perceptions, can definitively assure us of the actual reality of a transcendent thing. For lack of an adequate givenness of the thing, the assertion of the dependence of the thing’s actual reality vis-à-vis a pure perceptual consciousness is thus accompanied by a compunctious reservation that draws our attention to the fact that the testimony to the thing’s actual reality by such a consciousness is always only provisional. Likewise, though nothing in the preceding course of our experience allows us to foresee it, in principle it is never out of the question that a subsequent perception may come to contradict the previous perceptions of the thing, to the point of annulling our faith in the thing’s existence. Must one conclude, then, just as is done in Ideas I without a second thought, that the only thing about which the phenomenologist can be apodictically certain is the existence of pure consciousness just as it is given, that is, adequately, in an “internal” perception? From such a line of reasoning, is one justified in drawing the patently metaphysical conclusion that consciousness—in contrast to the actual reality of the world of transcendent things—is an enduring or substantial being that “nulla ‘re’ indiget ad existendum”?⁵ Is that not to confuse the (presumptive) form of a particular thing’s existence with that of the world? Is it not to take away from consciousness its transcendental character, which is to say, its power to constitute transcendent reality? Is it not to close up the field of phenomenological investigation by confining it to a consciousness that can only be given to me, where I am the sole person who may have an internal perception of it?

In what follows, I wish to show how a text almost contemporaneous with Ideas I develops a version of phenomenological idealism that is not only more precise but that is also less problematic. It has the great advantage of no longer relying on the Cartesian opposition between the sphere of immanence of my own consciousness, of which I can be apodictically certain, and transcendent reality, the actual existence of which forever remains problematic. In this text, which came about in the context of his revision of the Sixth Logical Investigation,⁶ Husserl is inspired (at least implicitly) more by Leibniz than by Descartes. In it he analyzes the actual givenness of the reality of the transcendent world as being the outcome of a “realization” of a possibility that precedes and predetermines the experience of the actual existence of that reality. Since it goes without saying that the (ideal or real) possibility of an object necessarily depends on the power of consciousness to have a representation of it, the dependence of the possible object with respect to consciousness of its possibility need not be demonstrated at length.

This is why the phenomenological theory of knowledge will be able to devote all its efforts to the examination of the difference between an empty assumption and a justified assumption about the possibility of an object. It follows that Husserl’s interest shifts from the analysis of the relationship between immanence and transcendence to the analysis of the justification of a positing of an object as possible or actually real by means of an intuitive fulfillment of that act of positing. In successively investigating the phenomenological consciousness in which ideally possible, really possible, and actually real objects are given, Husserl is never moved to cast doubt upon the intentional correlation between the act and its object. Furthermore, he will no longer have any reason to confuse the dependence of the modes of being of the object vis-à-vis intuitive consciousness with an independence of this consciousness vis-à-vis its intentional objects. This new meditation on the meaning of phenomenological idealism reaches its apogee in the examination, on the one hand, of that which separates and at the same time links together an intuitive consciousness that phenomenologically assures us of the solely possible existence of an empirical object and, on the other, of that which assures us of its actual reality. Making headway in this direction, Husserl is not only brought to distinguish between a broad versus a strict sense of phenomenological idealism, but will also show that the transcendental consciousness that assures us of the actual reality of the world must be a consciousness that is at once both embodied and intersubjective.

§ 1. Possible and Impossible Objects

The new conception of phenomenological idealism, such as Husserl sketches it in the framework of his revision of the Sixth Logical Investigation, is essentially the product of a new phenomenological analysis of the intentional consciousness of a possibility. The completely new chapter that the texts of July and August 1913 devote to possibility and impossibility⁷ replaces the former fourth chapter of the Sixth Investigation, which was entitled “Consistency and Inconsistency.” As the change in the title already suggests, Husserl moves from an ontological analysis to a phenomenological analysis of possibility and impossibility. The previous ontological understanding of possibility as compatibility studied the way in which parts are able to be integrated into a whole. “Verträglichkeit” (consistency) was thus a matter of “Vereinbarkeit” (compatibility), and this possibility or impossibility of reuniting parts into a whole was governed by the laws of formal ontology and, secondarily, by those of material ontologies. To the extent that the Logical Investigations considers all objects as objects of possible significations, this theory about the compatibility of parts and wholes also pertains to formal apophantics, and more particularly to pure grammar.

It quickly becomes clear, however, that in leaving behind the ontological treatment of possibility in favor of a phenomenological treatment of it, one does not speak of two different things, but of the same thing in different ways. More precisely, the phenomenological analysis of the modes of intuitive intentional consciousness, in which an object or a signification is originarily given as being possible or impossible, allows one to clarify the meaning and to justify the validity of an ontological or semantic compatibility or incompatibility. Were it not that it would take us too far off course here, it would be fascinating to show how this phenomenological analysis of possibility instates, almost incidentally, an epistemological foundation of predicative logic. In the revision of the Sixth Logical Investigation, this phenomenological foundation of logic is already carried out in the form of a genealogy, like the one found in the much later analyses in Experience and Judgment. The various modes of consciousness of a possibility or an impossibility are those experiences that lead us to make a positive or negative judgment, in the form of an assertion or a question, a hypothesis or a relation of logical consequence. All of these issues are at stake in the text on possibility of concern here, and Husserl cannot resist the temptation to add a long “Excursus on Initial, Founding, and Inferential Positings.”⁸

Subsequently, we shall study, above all, the manner in which this new phenomenological treatment of possibility prepares the way for the phenomenological foundation of actual reality and the phenomenological idealism contained in it. We will see that the intuitive consciousness in which the being real of an object finds its verification (Rechtsquelle; Hua XX/1, 193) is to be understood as a “realization” of an intuitive consciousness of a possibility. Throughout, it is a question of a “correlation” between intuitive consciousness and its intentional object, and this is meant to account for the possible or real mode of being (Seinsmodus) of the object.⁹ Hence, Husserl examines, in turn, the intuitive consciousness in which something’s being ideally possible, being really possible, and being real are given. We shall see that these modalities of being in principle affect all types of objects. One and the same empirical (“real”) object can thus be ideally possible or really possible or actually existent. In the same way, an ideal (“ideal”) object can be either ideally possible or really possible or actually existent—even if, for such ideal objects, the distinction between possibility and actual existence (or validity) no longer has the same importance. This means that ideal possibilities, which we shall examine first, affect the givenness of empirical objects (Tatsachen) as much as they affect the givenness of ideal objects, such as essences (Wesen). Moreover, by adding the observation that ideal objects can be either essences or eidetic singularities, we then have at our disposal the entire conceptual apparatus necessary for our reflections on Husserl’s phenomenological idealism.

In accordance with the general doctrine of the Logical Investigations, the being possible examined by Husserl in the first place concerns significations. However, since the phenomenological foundation of the possibility of a signification depends on the possibility of an intuitive givenness of its object, Husserl’s main interest lies in the possibility of objects. Moreover, since the question for phenomenology is to examine the experience of an evidence that could serve as an epistemological justification for the assertion of a possibility, Husserl takes for granted from the beginning on the phenomenological equivalence between possibility and intuition.¹⁰

Let us be more precise and distinguish, following Husserl, between the case of an ideal possibility (ideale Möglichkeit) and that of a real possibility (reale Möglichkeit). The ideally possible is anything that, in one way or another, we can imagine without believing, for all that, that it could actually exist and belong to the realities of our familiar world. For Husserl the typical example of such a (solely) ideally possible object is the centaur. Such an ideal possibility of an empirical object must be distinguished from those other general ideal possibilities that concern essences, whose intuition takes the form of an “ideation.” In both of these cases of ideal possibility, phantasy (Phantasie) plays a decisive role.

We recall that by ‘phantasy’ Husserl means an act of presentification (Vergegenwärtigung) of an object that is to be distinguished from a corresponding (sensible or categorial) perception both by the intuitive mode of givenness of its intentional object and by the neutralization of the positing of its actual existence. Hence, ideal possibilities are the dominion of the freedom of phantasy, and this dominion is comprised not only of imaginary empirical objects such as centaurs but also includes the ideal objects of the logical and the eidetic sciences. These general ideal possibilities are thus what concern “phenomenology qua eidetic science relating to ‘consciousness in general’” (Hua XX/1, 181).¹¹ By contrast, the establishment of a real possibility entails additional constraints and hence only comes at the price of a reduction or a limitation of the initial freedom of phantasy.¹² In other words, not everything that one can imagine is really possible—even if it goes without saying that everything that is really possible is also, eo ipso and a fortiori, ideally possible. What more must there be, then, in order for an ideal possibility to become a real possibility?

Husserl says that real possibility is characterized by the fact “that it is not a simple possibility, but is a possibility ‘for whic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• I. Essays
• II. Texts and Documents
• Notes on Contributors