Since a quite helpful review of the first draft of this work has called attention to the fact that the work itself assumes a great deal about Husserl, and, in addition, since this work is based on what Edith Stein called her new “philosophy system,” and, finally, since this work presupposes what a number of classical philosophers, Eastern and Western, have said about the perennial and thorny problem of the essential nature of real and mental “relations,” it would be helpful to the reader to have such assumptions and presuppositions stated clearly at the outset. Such an introduction would be useful precisely because this book itself endeavors to be a logical introduction to a new eidetic science, called convergent phenomenology, whose infinitely-able-to-be-intensified-and-expanded “work area” is, through a higher epoche of the entire domain of transcendental subjectivity, discoverable as itself nesting at the exact hub-center of Husserlian pure consciousness.

The term, “nesting,” is here used advisedly. Indeed, the formal notion of a lesser science nesting within a more general science is presupposed throughout the following pages. In Western scholasticism, we find the creative conception precisely of subalternate sciences viewed clearly as nesting operationally within master sciences. Indeed, in the opening lines of Contra Gentes, Thomas Aquinas uses the striking example of the woodcraft of shipbuilding nesting effectually within the master science of piloting and ship navigation. We find a similar notion in Eastern scholasticism. Karl Potter, in explaining the manner in which, according to the Samkhya system, the ontological realm of tattva nests in the empirical realm of the bhuta, uses the analogy, taken from linguistics, of how deep-structured syntactic and semantic elements come to rest within the surface structure of language itself. ¹ Thus, the dense and obscure sutra-verses at the core of Eastern classical thought can be seen, operationally, as a flowering forth from the deeper roots of long months of ontologically oriented, oral instruction from a master thinker. More to the point, the word “nesting” is especially appropriate because of modern advances in computer programming according to which one computer program nests itself functionally within another more general program. James Case tells us that the language called Lisp is able to represent both data and programs in the same way, allowing and encouraging “the development of programs that employ other programs as subprograms.” ² In line with Case, the backdrop assumption ³ of this present book is that Edith Stein was, in the actual operation of her new phenomenological method, able to represent to herself both the frontal and data-like objectivity of Husserlian intentionality as well as the relation-like, programmatic and already-unified, co-referencing-utterly-beyond-itself objectivity of Thomistic intentio. Stein’s deliberate and hard-headed realism and her day-by-day familiarity with the authentically bracketed material of Husserl’s “science of essences”—as well as her own tireless ability to speculate theoretically and in great descriptive detail upon purely spiritual intellectual acts—enabled her to treat the above objective intentionalities of Aquinas and Husserl “in the same way.” She thereupon moved fiercely forward to constitute, at a greater depth, some all-encompassing truths within formal ontology that were as yet undiscovered precisely because these truths were operating like deeply embedded mainsprings at the phenomenologically describable core of all traditional, Husserlian-constituted truths. ⁴ She was accordingly able to implant her new and expansive work area seamlessly within orthodox Husserlian phenomenology as a whole. ⁵

Let us attempt to formally analyze what the sources of such seamlessness were. For the essential Chinese-box-like method of effectively nesting such a priori sciences themselves, one within another, must be thoroughly understood. Such a preliminary understanding can be helpful as a prelude to the founding of convergent phenomenology only if the formative sources of such seamlessly co-referenced functionality are brought out into the light.

Indeed, underlying and grounding the entire investigative attempt, set forth in the present work, to discover the primary and centrally embedded constitution (or, better, “proto-constitution”) of an entirely continuous, wholly logical foundation for convergent phenomenology itself (precisely as a purely a priori science), are two guiding principles, parallel to Stein’s new method, the one purely formal and the other purely material:

A. In regard to the first and purely formal guiding principle, as is now well known, Heidegger pointed out to us that a pivotal forgetfulness of Being Itself lies in the trite and wholly obvious use of the simple word, “is.” ⁶ Nevertheless, what this fundamental analysis of forgetfulness itself seems to forget is the fact that an even more dire and thoroughgoing forgetfulness lies in the trite and wholly obvious use of the simple phrase, “is toward…,” precisely because human object-consciousness, ensconced in the originative duality of being and consciousness, as both arise interdependently as already toward each other, is already shot through and through with its own co-referenced, back-and-forth ⁷ relationality, a relationality that remains itself very often entirely forgotten and unexplored precisely as such object-consciousness moves forward toward pure subject-consciousness, especially at the level of pure logic, to nest its own founded intelligibilities within higher intelligibilities. Thus, the forgetfulness of the adesse of “is toward” (much more than the forgetfulness of the true meaning of the inesse of the predicative copula) is mutatis mutandis much more deleterious both to logic and to ontology itself.

Few thinkers have realized this. One such modern thinker who did so was the formidable Indologist, Sara Grant. During her remarkable comparative study of asymmetrical (i.e. “real” toward but “mental” back in) relationality in both Sankara and Aquinas, Grant attempts to wake up all of modern thought, both Eastern and Western, to such disastrous forgetfulness of the true nature of relation subterraneously hidden in the phrase, “is toward,” hidden, indeed, precisely as an astonishing “unity of reference” already out beyond itself toward something else. She tells us that it is “possible to reflect upon facts or situations involving extremely complex relations without paying formal attention to the nature of relation as such.” She goes on to explain: “[S]o in daily life, and even in highly-developed sciences such as microbiology, physics, linguistics, ‘questions of relation’ arise and are solved in concreto, without any need being felt to raise the basic question of the nature of relation qua relation.” ⁸ This deeper forgetfulness of Relation Itself nesting within the forgetfulness of Being Itself is accordingly not as harmless as it may seem at first. The following indictment of Grant, not truly relevant to the core of her deeper comparative work, but nevertheless proclaimed in passing against all of modern thought, clearly assumes that such forgetfulness has had nearly irremediable effects on modern pure logic:

There is first of all the essentially relational character of all our thinking …which naturally leads the human mind to assume that it knows all it needs to know about relation: We can handle relative terms with complete efficiency in ordinary life and in our more specialized pursuits, and this tends to conceal from us the vagueness of our thinking on the subject, and the imprecision of our language.

Grant maintains that the minime ens character of relation (rooted in the blatant fact that human object-consciousness always finds real relations—relations that actually exist out in the world—as already “in” and rarely recognizes that their whole essence, notwithstanding their inesse foundation, is simply to be “toward” rather than “in”) has been lost in the modern tradition:

There is further the extremely elusive character of relation-in-itself: in itself, as Pythagoras, Aristotle, Aquinas and Sankara have all noted, relation is not an objective reality in its own right—it simply represents reference-to-another. Moreover, it is grasped only by the intelligence, whereas we easily limit ourselves to the level of sense and imagination, reifying it into a “third thing” and cluttering up the world with a multitude of solidified abstractions, so blinding ourselves, however unintentionally, to the austerely functional and dynamic structure of reality. So “similarity,” “fatherhood,” “youth,” “age,” “togetherness,” have no objective existence: there are only similar objects, fathers and sons, people older and younger than each other, people grouped together ... The effort to pierce through the appearances and grasp the essential character of relation-in-itself demands an effort of pure intelligence few are prepared to make even when they are alert to the possibility.

In the West, those who did make the effort were indeed few. Jean Poinsot, for one, claimed that, because of its special, minime ens character and because of its own odd, ethereal and austere intelligibility in its own right, an actually existent real relation out in the empirical world was a third kind of being, ⁹ not able to be understood within the ontological formalism of either substance or of accident. In the East, the Vaisesikas even claimed that the functional nesting of accident within substance was so unique as to form a separate non-reciprocal category all its own called the samavaya relation. ¹⁰ Yet the beginnings of an actual sub-ontology of relation that could, in its wholly realized form, embed itself in metaphysica generalis was not ever discovered or systematized. Aquinas came close to such a discovery when he divided relation into real, mental and asymmetrical. ¹¹ This last feature of a real relation (that it was so minimally real solely in such a final, all or nothing sense that it was real solely as already out toward its term ¹² but simply intentional back into itself) never became scientifically studied according to its own curiously non-reciprocal nature. It certainly was never formally systematized within pure logic itself as it should have been. If it had been, then all a priori sciences could have been divided into those that centered themselves in the inesse of Being constituted as actus purus essendi and those that centered themselves subalternately in the third level adesse of Being thereby proto-constituted equally as actus purus essendi, the latter sciences nesting themselves seamlessly in the former accordingly.

Because of such nearly impenetrable forgetfulness, all of this higher complexly layered formalism toward which we are now directing ourselves, which should have been attained at the height of pure logic itself, remained doubly obscure. Thus Kevin Wall, one of the few modern thinkers fully aware of what Aristotle, Avicenna, Aquinas, Poinsot and Suarez said about such asymmetrical relations, assumes rightly that such subliminal obscurity colors all of modern thought—especially such thought’s own symptomatic blindness to the looming possibility of an innermost asymmetricality within relation itself. Wall tells us:

The tradition understood this relation as intentional and Husserl, following Brentano, and Heidegger, following Husserl, picked this up from the tradition. This is the real relation of the knower to the known and the lover to the beloved which relation, from this point of view, is at once action and relation and quality. The reverse relation from the object to the knower and the lover is, in the tradition, rational and not real. Charles Hartshorne found this a fascinating distinction and was surprised at its sophistication and that it was in the tradition and had been forgotten. ¹³

Having shown the formal guiding principle which has to do, because of the originative duality of being and consciousness, with a possible duality of structural form to be found in all a priori sciences as such, let us turn now to the material guiding principle, dealing with the “how” of human object-consciousness.

B. In regard to the second wholly material guiding principle. This principle, as you may recall, has to do precisely with the actual way human reason might proceed forward thus to finally attain insight into the aforementioned duality of structural form and the manner in which, accordingly, one a priori science might rest within another. And here, by bringing to light what Edith Stein did in her new, free-floating phenomenology of essences, ¹⁴ we find a simple, sixfold reasoning process founded solidly on the progressively layered structures of a...