Edited by
www.continuumbooks.com
EISBN: 978–1–4411–4667–0
BD171.V375 2011
121--dc22
2011008363
Part I: Introduction
Chapter 1: The Phenomenological Correlation between
Consciousness and Object Faced with Its
Hermeneutical Challenge 3
Pol Vandevelde
Bibliography 225
Index 234
Notes on Contributors
The aim of this volume is to provide a wide sample of the kind of research
that is done in phenomenological circles on some important aspects of the
problem of truth. It is no wild claim to say that there is no unified phenome-
nological theory of truth and no established or accepted set of components
that would belong to the problem of truth. The essays included in this
volume are research essays by prominent phenomenologists in the United
States, France, and Germany showing how relevant the phenomenologi-
cal approach is with regard to the problem of truth and how complex this
problem is when examined through the phenomenological method.
The previous volume in the series, Epistemology, Archaeology, Ethics: Current
Investigations of Husserl’s Corpus (Vandevelde and Luft 2010), included a first
part on epistemological issues. The present volume does not repeat the
aspects of a theory of truth treated there. It rather continues the “broad-
ened epistemology” that was sketched out in that volume. The focus here
is on a dynamic conception of truth, understood as a process rather than
statically as a propositional content or a determination of specific proper-
ties. Such an approach requires an examination of questions concerning,
for example, imagination, culture, or history. An advantage of the phe-
nomenological approach remains its capacity to provide detailed analysis,
while engaging fruitfully with the history of philosophy in order to forge
new and illuminating connections.
The directors of the series plan to have other volumes on themes related
to epistemological concerns and these future volumes in the series will
address issues and topics that this volume cannot cover. As the title of the
series, “Issues in Phenomenology and Hermeneutics,” states it, the goal
is to focus on “Issues” and in order to focus on these issues we follow
Husserl’s own recommendation of proceeding in a “zigzag” manner. Not
all aspects of an issue can be treated at once (in one volume). For, it is the
virtue of phenomenology to try as much as possible to refrain from impos-
ing constraints on the topic under analysis, for example by selecting some
xi Preface
object thus invited a hermeneutic challenge to the extent that the interac-
tion between consciousness and object seems to be a form of articulation
in some medium and a form of interpretation. This element of interpreta-
tion in turn opens itself to be challenged by an ontological question: what
is thus the status of the object of consciousness if phenomenology even in
its hermeneutic form does not want to fall into a classic idealism?
The second section is about “Husserlian Resources: Reduction,
Imagination, Transcendental Idealism” and includes essays that reflect the
all-encompassing nature of phenomenology and especially of Husserl’s
original approach. Three aspects are particularly addressed in this section:
reduction, the role of imagination, and the brand of transcendental theory
Husserl advocates. Reduction is the method through which a particular
empirical subject can transcend his or her particular perspective or frame-
work and become what Husserl calls a “disinterested or non-participating
spectator.” As one of the most crucial components of the phenomenologi-
cal method, reduction guarantees that the starting point in experience
will not remain encapsulated in experience, but will lead to logical and
scientific claims. The second theme, imagination, is crucial for any aspect
of consciousness. Even in perception, imagination is involved to the extent
that one aspect of an object, for example, is associated with other objects.
Imagination thus has to be part of any approach to truth. The third topic,
the possibility of self-transcendence in a form of transcendental idealism,
is Husserl’s overall theoretical framework within which he believes he can
account for the correlation between consciousness and object without this
correlation being limited to psychology, the workings of human conscious-
ness, or even any form of anthropologism.
The essays in the third section, “Heideggerean Variations: Dasein’s
Opening, Disclosure, and the History of Being,” examine three of the
stages in Heidegger’s thought between Being and Time and the early 1940s:
the critique of consciousness, the transformation of the concept of truth
soon after Being and Time in a metontology, and the history of being.
The fourth section, “Toward a Broadened Ontology and Epistemology:
Nature, Judgment, and Intersubjectivity,” includes essays that reflect a
broadening of the traditional phenomenological approaches to truth and
the implications of such a broadened epistemology for ontology. The essays
operate a variation on three traditional themes: questioning the bounda-
ries of nature and its alleged separation from spirit, challenging the very
goal of a judgment, and opening up individual consciousness by revealing
its intersubjective nature, and showing what it means for consciousness to
be historical.
xiii Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1
The issue of truth has always been a divisive philosophical issue, pitting tra-
ditional style philosophy against rhetoric, against literature, or against social
and applied philosophy. While the notion of truth as a univocal concept
associated with a well-delineated referent has long been seen as part of an
idle Wittgensteinian language game, the use of the term is still very much a
pragmatic component of any assertion, discussion, or communication that
makes the writer or speaker accountable for the veracity of what they say. This
disconnect between the theoretical front on truth, where the notion seems to
be expandable and replaceable, and the practical front, where the notion of
truth seems to remain uncircumventable has taken different forms in Anglo-
American and in continental philosophy. In Anglo-American philosophy the
discussion tends to focus on the criterion of the truth or the method used to
reach the truth, leading to distinctions among the different candidates for what
a theory of truth is or should be: correspondence, foundationalist, coherent-
ist, or pragmatic theories, with their possible variations and combinations.
In continental philosophy the debate has taken another form and has
focused on what is involved in what is called “the truth.” As the main represen-
tative of continental philosophy, phenomenology has seen itself as the place
of a debate in which the truth as evidence, as defended by the early Husserl,
has been challenged by the truth as “disclosure,” as powerfully presented by
Heidegger. This alternative view on truth within phenomenology represents
what we addressed in the Preface as the hermeneutic challenge. Once an ele-
ment of interpretation is introduced in the concept of truth it was only a natu-
ral step to ask about the linguistic or discursive mediation of the disclosure.
4 Pol Vandevelde
How can a component part of the world, its human subjectivity, consti-
tute the whole world, namely, constitute it as its intentional formation . . .
while the latter, the subjects accomplishing in cooperation, are them-
selves only a partial formation within the total accomplishment? (179)2
Husserl believes that the way he treats intersubjectivity solves the paradox
of subjectivity as being both empirical and transcendental and makes his
philosophy coherent, by providing the “full and proper sense” of his tran-
scendental phenomenology (150). This is a challenging claim particularly
for the notion of evidence, which Husserl considers as the criterion of the
truth. Evidence is a synthesis and in it the meaning intention is partially or
fully fulfilled or disappointed. Once consciousness is broadened to inter-
subjectivity, it becomes rather difficult to maintain that evidence could
be a “seeing” of an intersubjective nature. Still, this seems to be the way
Husserl pursued this question.
While Husserl always maintained that the sense anything can have is a
sense in and out of my intentional life, he notes the consequence of inter-
subjective constitution: “we need . . . to perform a systematic unfolding
[Entfaltung] of the open and implicit intentionalities in which the being
of the others ‘makes itself for me’ ” (Husserl 1973 Hua XV, 5). However,
Husserl (as well as Fink after him) adamantly rejects the possibility of
equating intersubjectivity with a community of subjects so that intersubjec-
tivity would be the result of the interaction between subjects: “the plurality
of those who phenomenologize cannot be understood . . . on the model of
a mundane community of subjects of knowledge” (Fink 1988, 137). Husserl
mentions several times the role of mutual understanding (Verständigung)
and communication in the performance of an intersubjective synthesis, but
does not go so far as acknowledging that evidence, now that it is intersub-
jective, needs an articulation. The intersubjective constitution seems to be
performed by individual consciousnesses that can re-effectuate what other
consciousnesses have already performed. Intersubjectivity is thus supposed
to solve the paradox of subjectivity by allowing a movement back and forth
between individual subjects, whether real, dead, or virtual. Empathy seems
to Husserl to be powerful enough to allow for this exchange between sub-
jects and thus to lead to understanding and communication. Remarkably,
although Husserl acknowledges the role of language in the very formation
of an ideality in the Crisis, he does not extend the role of language to evi-
dence nor to the formation of subjectivity.
The broadening of consciousness to intersubjectivity does not only ren-
der consciousness more complex but also has repercussions on the status
8 Pol Vandevelde
But does each thing (or, what is equivalent here: does any thing at all)
have such an essence of its own in the first place? Or is the thing, as it were,
always underway [auf dem Marsch], not at all graspable therefore in pure
objectivity, but rather, in virtue of its relation to subjectivity, in principle
only a relatively identical something, which does not have its essence in
advance or graspable once and for all, but instead has an open essence
[ein offenes Wesen], one that can always take on new properties according
to the constitutive circumstances of givenness? But this is precisely the
problem, to determine more exactly the sense of this openness [Offenheit], as
regards, specifically, the “objectivity” of natural science.
Does the “infinity” of the world, instead of referring to a transfinite end-
lessness [einer transfiniten Unendlichkeit] as if the world were something
finished in itself [ein in sich fertig seiendes], an all-encompassing thing [ein
allumfassendes Ding] or a self-enclosed collectivity of things [abgeschloss-
enes Kollektivum von Dingen], which would nevertheless contain in itself an
infinity of things, not rather mean an “openness” [Offenheit] . . . No thing has
its individuality in itself ” (Husserl 1952 Hua IV, 299; 1989, 312–313.
Translation modified).
However, Husserl does not really develop this view of an open essence
that is not limited to an anticipated completeness. Most of the time the
Correlation Between Consciousness and Object 9
The transformation we need in order to find our home will take place
when we own our language in the sense that our language leads us to be
our own. We thus have to face the foreign and endure it. This is what trans-
lation allows. As the lecture course on The Ister describes it, translation
aims at making foreign the very source of the familiar. When we translate
the Greeks, for example, we have to think “Greeker” than the Greeks: “It
seems as though we must think more Greek than the Greeks themselves.
It does not merely seem so, it is so. For in the future we ourselves must,
in relation to ourselves, think more German than all Germans hitherto”
(Heidegger 1984 GA 53, 100; 1996b, 81). The “more” does not indicate a
recovery or a retrieval of what has already been thought, but a translation
as a transporting ourselves into the foreign so as to recover the movement
through which our familiar became familiar.
Translation is thus first of all a self-translation and allows us to bring our-
selves before the foreign, pass through it, so as to come back to ourselves.
“A historical people is only from the dialogue [Zwiesprache] between its
language and foreign languages” (Heidegger 1984 GA 53, 80; 1996b, 65).
Thus, translation does not mean an appropriation of the foreign, but rather
the converse: to make one’s own native language surge from the foreign.
In this period of transition toward another beginning, in which Heidegger
claims we are, the being-at-home is not given, but must be reconquered. We
are those poets who “are not yet able to read and to show” (ibid., 190; 153).
Hölderlin, the poet of the transition, the poet of the decisions is the one
who can create a being-at-home for the German people: his word speaks
“out of a poetic care for the becoming-homely [Heimischwerden] of the
Western historical humankind of the Germans” (ibid., 84; 69).
This return to a home-world through translation means that “ ‘translat-
ing’ [Übersetzen] is not so much a trans-lating [Über-setzen] and passing over
into a foreign language with the help of one’s own. Rather, translating is
more an awakening, clarification, and unfolding of one’s own language
with the help of an encounter [Auseinandersetzung] with the foreign lan-
guage” (Heidegger 1984 GA 53; 1996b, 65–66). In such a discussion the
awakening of a new language may take place by retranslating one’s own
language.
All translating must be an interpreting. Yet at the same time, the reverse
is also true: every interpretation, and everything that stands in its serv-
ice, is a translating. In that case, translating does not only move between
two different languages, but there is a translating within one and the
16 Pol Vandevelde
The claim Heidegger makes is that poets make us more attuned to what
can be another beginning. Hölderlin, whose poetry is “the most German
in German poetry” (Heidegger 1982 GA 52, 119) is the thinker of the tran-
sition toward another beginning because his poetry represents a turn in
the history of Being (Heidegger 2000 GA 75, 28) through which Hölderlin
proposes “the beginning of new decisions” (25) and which can lead to “the
beginning of another history” (32).
The correlation between consciousness and object breaks down the brute
world or the brute thing into meaning (Husserl’s logical or linguistic
Bedeutungen), but by so doing cannot account for the emergent sense that
things yield (Husserl’s Sinn).
Whether consciously or not, Merleau-Ponty takes over some of the views
of the romantics and draws the ontological consequences of the fluidity of
things. This allows him to give a forceful expression to the romantic bridge
between spirit and nature and to question the very boundaries of the body
and of consciousness as well as the boundaries between mind/body, on the
one hand, and things, on the other. Both the perceiving body/consciousness
Correlation Between Consciousness and Object 17
and thing are part of what he calls, in The Visible and the Invisible, a “visibil-
ity.” Again in a manner that is analogous to the romantics’ Merleau-Ponty
attempts to think the unity that we form with things in a way that is not the
unification of pre-existing entities, but an overlap or chiasm that, on the one
hand, makes us susceptible to be affected and even pierced by things and,
on the other, renders things susceptible to becoming mental and spiritual.
In order to name this fusion Merleau-Ponty uses different metaphors: spir-
itual—perception is a communion—sexual—perception is a coition—and
biological—perception is a symbiosis.
These metaphors, which are not mere metaphors, are part of an attempt to
think beyond traditional metaphysical categories. We have to think a thing
as something that has open boundaries, but is not free-floating or mere flux.
In Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty characterizes the thing that we
know in the form of a unified entity as being secondary compared with its
manner of existing: “the unity of the thing beyond all its fi xed properties is
not a substratum, a vacant X, a subject in which properties inhere, but that
unique accent which is to be found in each one of them, that unique man-
ner of existing of which they are a second order expression” (Merleau-Ponty
1962, 372). The inner core of things or the stable essence of a thing is only
a set of “opaque structures” (389).6 The unity of the thing consists in “a cer-
tain style, a certain manner of managing the domain of space and time over
which it has competency, of pronouncing, of articulating that domain, of
radiating about a wholly virtual center—in short a certain manner of being,
in the active sense, a certain Wesen, in the sense that, says Heidegger, this
word has when it is used as a verb” (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 115). If we speak
of essences, Merleau-Ponty tells us, these cannot be “essences above us, like
positive objects, offered to a spiritual eye” (118), but “operative essences”
(118) in a “transversal dimension.” These operative essences are “beneath
us, a common nervure of the signifying and the signified, adherence in and
reversibility of one another” (118). This entails that “to be” cannot mean “to
be something,” but to aggregate, to become a configuration. “What there
is is a whole architecture, a whole complex of phenomena ‘in tiers,’ a whole
series of ‘levels of being’ ” (114).
Precisely because they do not have a firm stability guaranteed by an
unchangeable core, things in their fluidity are to be granted a form of seeing
or at least of providing a visibility on other things or on us. Merleau-Ponty
already defended such a provocative view in Phenomenology of Perception:
When I look at the lamp on my table, I attribute to it not only the quali-
ties visible from where I am, but also those which the chimney, the walls,
18 Pol Vandevelde
the table can “see”; the back of my lamp is nothing but the face which it
“shows” on the chimney . . . the house itself is not the house seen from
nowhere, but the house seen from everywhere. The completed object is
translucent, being shot through from all sides by an actual infinity of
scrutinies [regards] which intersect in its depths leaving nothing hidden.
(Merleau-Ponty 1962, 79 [Translation modified])
This fact that things provide a visibility and thus decenter us from the vis-
ible realm goes significantly farther than Heidegger’s referring network
of things in Being and Time, in which a thing means something by being
referred to other things, and it comes closer to the late Heidegger who sees
a thing, like a jug, as the gathering of a world. It also reformulates Husserl’s
notion of horizon quite dramatically by by-passing the acts of conscious-
ness that are embedded in the horizons of things. For, if there is an exter-
nal horizon of things, it is because, for example in Husserl, things have
been associated or connected to other things through acts of conscious-
ness. Merleau-Ponty by-passes consciousness altogether. It is the things that
see and show the hidden sides of other things.
In place of the duality of the perceiver and the perceived Merleau-
Ponty substitutes a movement of differentiation within visibility itself, and
through such a differentiation we have a perceiver and a perceived, both
of which are encompassed by visibility. This requires from us an attitude
of listening to them, looking at them in a way that shifts the visibility away
from us, that removes us from the center of visibility and places us at the
margin as what can be rendered visible. “The vision [the seer] exercises,
he also undergoes from things, such that, as many painters have said, I feel
myself looked at by the things, my activity is equally passivity” (Merleau-
Ponty 1969, 139).
The decentering of visibility that things may produce is not merely a shift-
ing of the act of seeing away from the subject and into things. This decen-
tering means a loosening up of the boundaries between seer and seen,
subject and object, spirit and nature. If things “see” and “speak,” it means
that when we understand them we must perform some kind of translation:
“to understand is to translate into disposable significations a meaning first
held captive in the thing and in the world itself. But this translation aims
to convey the text” (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 36).7
Since we try to think not in terms of oppositions, but from within the
visibility that gives rise to subject and thing, these notions of language and
translation are not to be understood as a supplement to the thing or the
Correlation Between Consciousness and Object 19
subject, but rather as the mode of being out of which a thing and a subject
live. Perception itself, which is neither merely active nor merely passive, is
articulation in the linguistic sense. “The vision itself, the thought itself,
are . . . ‘structured as a language,’ are articulation before the letter, appari-
tion of something where there was nothing or something else” (Merleau-
Ponty 1969, 126). Just as by pronouncing sounds in my mouth I articulate
what becomes meaningful words and neat sentences, my perception in the
same way articulates things in their beautiful or frightening concatena-
tions that make up the world in which I live.8
In order to offer an alternative to the correlation of consciousness and
object, Merleau-Ponty uses the notion of flesh, which is, in a sense, the
metaphor of all metaphors and which serves as a device to gather in their
unity the metaphors of communion, coition, symbiosis, language and
translation. The flesh is a device for a thinking that does not soar over its
object, but, like in the romantics, brings the object to its manifestation or
epiphany.
the visible upon itself, a carnal adherence of the sentient to the sensed and
of the sensed to the sentient” (142). With regard to things to emigrate from
the comfort of our consciousness consists in emigrating from oneself, as he
says in L’oeil et l’esprit: “sight is not a certain mode of thinking or of presence
to myself: it is the means given to me to be absent from myself, to attend
from within to the fission of being” (Merleau-Ponty 1964c, 81).9
Merleau-Ponty continues the efforts of early German romanticism and
Heidegger to think the correlation between consciousness and object and
bring out the ontological consequences of Husserl’s fundamental discov-
ery. If there is a correlation between consciousness and object there is an
overlap between them and this means that we have to come to see things
in their native fluidity. Things are determined entities and yet they are
completable; they have definite boundaries with an essence and still the
boundaries are porous and the essence is an open one.
These three attempts by the early romantics, Heidegger, and Merleau-
Ponty aim at avoiding a traditional form of idealism and recover what the
romantics believe is the genuine sense of realism, one that includes the role
of consciousness. Because of their belief in the stability of things within
an exchangeability or translatability with consciousness and their convic-
tion that we have to start with consciousness, they all appeal to an attitude
that allows consciousness to enter into the process of exchangeability with
things: love (for the romantics), fundamental mood (for Heidegger), and
receptivity and listening (for Merleau-Ponty). The truth is no longer evi-
dence in the early Husserlian sense, but disclosure. However, disclosure
is not a non-subjective event taking place outside the realm of conscious-
ness, but an event that needs our collaboration or requires from us a cer-
tain benevolence toward things or an acceptance that we are called upon,
affected, seized by awe (for the Greeks) or terror (for us now, according to
Heidegger).
We can thus see how the correlation between consciousness and object
prepared the hermeneutic challenge mounted by people like Heidegger
and Merleau-Ponty and how the ontological repercussions were already
seen by the romantics. The hermeneutic challenge does not undermine
Husserl’s original version of the correlation between consciousness and
object, but in fact leads it to its completion. It shows how consciousness
redefines itself when correlated to things in a way that does not jeopardize
objectivity or validity, but rather turns truth into a notion that is at once
epistemic, ontological, and affective.
Correlation Between Consciousness and Object 21
Notes
1
Husserl himself encouraged the idealistic unilateralism when referring to the
object in its reality as an “idea.”
2
In Ideas I Husserl formulates this paradox as follows: “Thus, on the one hand, con-
sciousness is said to be the absolute in which everything transcendent and, therefore,
ultimately the whole pyschophysical world, becomes constituted; and, on the other
hand, consciousness is said to be a subordinate real event within that world. How can
those statements be reconciled?” (1976 Hua III, 103; 1983, 124).
3
It is to be noted that the romantics were not only theoreticians of language; they
were also practitioners and the romantic period is characterized by an ebullience
of translation activities. Goethe translated works by Cellini, Diderot, Voltaire,
Euripides, Racine, Corneille and many others; Hölderlin translated Sophocles
and Pindar; Schleiermacher translated the complete works of Plato (from 1804 to
1828 and the translation is still in use today); August Schlegel translated Shake-
speare, Dante, Cervantes, Calderón, Petrarch, Ariosto, the Bhagavad Gita and
other works. Tieck translated Don Quixote.
4
“The more similar a historical history is to translation, the more excellent it is”
(Schlegel 1963, 211, Fragment 181) or “the so-called universal history is also only
a translation” (261 Fragment 807).
5
Schlegel writes: “almost all historical works which are not documents of records
are diaskeuastic translations” (Schlegel 1963, 204, Fragment 88). On the impor-
tance of the “diaskeuasis” in Schlegel see Thouard 1996, 18f.
6
This manner of existing, which he also calls after Husserl a “style,” is further
explained in terms of language. Through its specific manner of existing a thing
manifests a certain symbolism that can be grasped, for example, in perception or
even a language that can be deciphered. “There is a symbolism in the thing which
links each sensible quality to the rest . . . The passing of sensory givens before our
eyes or under our hands is, as it were, a language which teaches itself, and in
which the meaning is secreted by the very structure of the signs, and this is why it
can literally be said that our senses question things and that things reply to them”
(Merleau-Ponty 1962, 372). Analogous formulations can be found in The Visible
and the Invisible.
7
Merleau-Ponty also speaks of “exegesis” for naming our relation to the visible
(1969, 133).
8
We detect here the influence of Saussure’s linguistics. Perception is like langue (as
opposed to parole); it is a system of oppositions so that when I perceive I carve out
a chunk of the possibilities opened by the system. “I describe perception as a dia-
critical, relative, oppositional system” (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 213).
9
This means a return to a kind of general corporeity: “No more than are the sky or
the earth is the horizon a collection of things held together, or a class name, or a
logical possibility of conception, or a system of ‘potentiality of consciousness’: it is
a new type of being, a being by porosity, pregnancy, or generality, and he before
whom the horizon opens is caught up, included within it. His body and the dis-
tances participate in one same corporeity or visibility in general, which reigns
between them and it, and even beyond the horizon, beneath his skin, unto the
depths of being” (1969, 148–149).
Part II
Husserlian Resources
Reduction, Imagination,
Transcendental Idealism
Chapter 2
In the fourth chapter of the second part of Formal and Transcendental Logic,
Husserl wants to prove the relativity of traditional logic to a real world of
experience: even if logic is completely formal, even if propositional forms
are obtained by a process of formalization, it has to be ranked among the
positive sciences which presuppose a relationship to a world of empirical
objects. This can be made evident by proving that the different levels of
logic imply a reference to real empirical objects, to judgments and truths
about these objects. So it is possible to apply the method of reduction to all
the levels of logic: to the theory of forms, to the consequence-logic and to
the truth-logic. Let us recall the different formulations of this method of
reducing: “Reduction of judgments to ultimate judgments” (Die Reduktion
der Urteile auf letzte Urteile, Husserl 1974 Hua XVII, § 82, 209; 1978, 202),
“Parallel reduction of truths. Relationship of all truths to an antecedent
world of individuals” (Parallele Reduktion der Wahrheiten. Rückbeziehung aller
Wahrheiten auf eine Welt von Individuen, ibid., § 83, 212; 204), “A reduction
of the truths belonging to a higher level to those belonging to the lowest
level, that is: to truths that relate directly . . . to individual objects in their
object-spheres (eine Reduktion der Wahrheiten von den Wahrheiten höherer Stufe
auf diejenigen der niedersten Stufe, d.i. auf Wahrheiten, die direct bezogen sind auf
individuelle Gegenstände, ibid., 212; 204).
What is the sense of this principle of reduction? Does it have an empiri-
cist range? Is it a principle of verification about empirical testability of cat-
egorial propositions? Is it a genetic empiricist thesis which expresses that
categorial formations have an empirical origin in judgments about objects
of direct experience? Is it a principle of reducibility which affirms that the
sense of categorial propositions is reducible to the sense of ultimate judg-
ments about empirical objects?
Moreover, does this reductive deliberation (reduktive Überlegung, ibid.,
212; 204) have to be understood in the same sense at the different levels
26 Dominique Pradelle
of logic? Does it have the same meaning within the pure theory of forms,
within the consequence-logic, and within the truth-logic? Does it have the
same meaning concerning the isolated syntactical forms, concerning the
isolated propositions and concerning the principles of logic?
form as he wants (Toleranzprinzip der Syntax: In der Logik gibt es keine Moral.
Jeder mag seine Logik, d. h. seine Sprachform aufbauen wie er will, Carnap 1934, 45).
By contrast, the Husserlian thesis is absolutely anti-conventionalistic: there
are absolute and essential laws in the pure grammar of logic, an a priori
syntax that settles the composition and transformation of meanings in
order to produce unitary propositional meanings. It is impossible to cre-
ate languages arbitrarily with different systems of formation; grammatical
rules must be in accordance with aprioristic laws. As Husserl writes in the
fourth Logical Investigation, these laws belong to the different categories
of meanings: each category implies some modalities of linking with other
categories.
If syntactical laws belong to the syntactical forms, it is necessary to ana-
lyze the syntactical concept of form. Husserl performs this analysis in the
first appendix to Formal and Transcendental Logic and makes various distinc-
tions. First, we have to distinguish between stuffs and moments of form
(§ 2): on the one hand, the stuffs are linked to objectivities, to subject-matter
(Sachbezüglichkeit); on the other hand, moments of form (such as “and,”
“or”) lack intrinsic relatedness to objectivities (Husserl 1974 Hua XVII, 301;
1978, 296). Secondly, in the field of combination-forms (Verbindungsformen)
we have to distinguish between Kopulation and Konjunktion—between the
predicative or copular unity-form “is” and the conjunctive forms in a gen-
eral sense (i.e., logical connectors like conjunction, disjunction, implica-
tion, equivalence, etc.) (ibid., § 5, 303–304; 299–300). Thirdly, what are
the laws that belong to each category of combination-forms? Concerning
conjunctive forms, Husserl does not make combination-rules obvious, but
only substitution-rules, that is rules of fulfilling syntactical stuffs with par-
ticular stuffs—for example the form of hypothetical antecedent or conse-
quent proposition requires stuffs that are already syntactically articulated
in themselves (ibid., § 10, 308–309; 306–307). But the most important rule
concerns the predicative form, which is the most fundamental of the entire
tradition of apophantic logic. Here we have to distinguish two concepts
of form: syntactical forms (like subject, property-predicate, relationship-
predicate, attribute) and non-syntactical-forms, that is, forms of entirely new
style that are immanent to the stuffs—stuffs have a certain immanent form-
ing like substantive, adjective, relationship (ibid., § 11, 309–310; 307–308).
The essential laws of predicative combination concern relationships
between syntactical and non-syntactical forms: it is impossible to substi-
tute arbitrarily non-syntactical stuffs within a certain syntactical form—for
example, a stuff of substantive form cannot enter syntactical forms like
property-predicate, relationship-predicate or attribute.
28 Dominique Pradelle
What sense does the reductive deliberation have at the second level of logic,
that is in the consequence-logic? Is it a principle of reducibility of judgments
belonging to higher levels to judgments belonging to lower levels?
Let us recall that consequence-logic is the logic of non- contradiction
(Widerspruchslosigkeit), a level of logic that requires the evidence of
30 Dominique Pradelle
Moreover, let us recall that the principles of logic have a merely formal
character. Given that we can make them obvious by a process of formal-
izing syntactical cores (by replacing each material sense with a pure and
empty anything whatever-form), they are completely independent from the
material sense (Sachhaltigkeit) of the cores. Then, they must have a univer-
sal sphere of validity, and formal logic must have a universal sovereignty: it
must be possible to give an instance of the logical principles by replacing
syntactical stuffs with arbitrarily taken cores, without any restriction on a
definite field. As Russell says in the Principles of Mathematics, in the sphere
of logic the field of variables is absolutely without limits: there is a principle
of unlimited substitutability.6
Now, let us consider Husserl’s essential argument, the theory of the rele-
vance of the cores. This argument is simple: the principle of unlimited sub-
stitutability does not have unconditioned validity in logic. On the contrary,
there are material limits to the variability of the syntactical cores—the syn-
tactical stuffs of non-intuitive judgments cannot be varied with complete
freedom (Husserl 1974 Hua XVII, § 89, 226–227; 1978, 218–219).7 Thus
the formal non-contradiction of a judgment is not a sufficient condition for
being sure of its validity or decidability in itself; but validity and decidabil-
ity imply both a material presupposition that belongs to the Sachhaltigkeit
of the cores.
Let us recall what is asserted by Husserl about formal relationships
between propositional forms (§ 18). There are only three possible cases for
the propositional forms: either the form is tautological (p or non-p) (S is p
or S is not p); or it is antilogical—it contains an analytic anti-consequence
(p and non-p) (S is p and S is non-p); or there is an empty compatibility (leere
Verträglichkeit) between judgments or cores, which do not have anything to
do with one another (S is p and T is q) (Husserl 1974 Hua XVII, § 18, 68–69;
1978, 63–65). Let us take two examples: “This color plus one makes three,”
“The sum of the angles of a triangle is equal to the color red” (ibid., §§ 89
and 90, 224 and 228; 216 and 220). In both cases we have a purely grammati-
cal sensefulness (rein grammatische Sinnhaftigkeit, § 89), but we do not have
material or contentual sensefulness (inhaltliche Sinnhaltigkeit); both propositions
make no proper sense, they offer examples of senselessness (Sinnlosigleit):
the totality of the proposition is not a unitary sense, that is: the judgment-
content (Urteilsinhalt, beurteilbarer Inhalt) does not have any ideal existence
(ibid., § 89, 224; 216). Such judgments are neither contradictory nor non-
contradictory, but “exalted above concordance and contradiction” (ibid.,
224; 216); they are neither true nor false, but “exalted above truth and
falsity” (ibid., § 90, 229; 221). For such materially senseless judgments the
Does Husserl Have a Principle of Reducibility? 37
middle is not excluded; and formal contradiction does not have any sense at
all: the principles of logic cannot be applied to such judgments.
Consequently, the sense of the theory of relevance of the cores is the
following: the principles of logic do not have absolute validity, validity for the
infinite universe of discourse, validity for arbitrarily variable stuffs. They
have validity only for judgments whose cores are congruous with respect to
the sense (Urteile, deren Kerne sinngemäß zusammengehören, Husserl 1974 Hua
XVII, § 90, 228; 1978, 220). There are material or contentual limits or con-
ditions for sensefulness through the application of the principles of logic.
Let us make a last step. How is it possible to show the material coherence
of the syntactical cores? To make obvious the congruousness of cores, it
is necessary to make obvious the cores themselves, to make obvious the
objects-about-which and their properties. And here it becomes possible to
apply the method of reducing ideal objects-about-which (and properties
and relationships) to ultimate objects-about-which (and ultimate proper-
ties and ultimate relations). At this last step, the requirement of essential
community (Wesensgemeinschaft) between the cores becomes a demand of
senseful coherence between an ultimate substrate and an ultimate property
or relationship. This senseful relationship between ultimate empirical cores
refers to the conditions of coherence of the matters, of concordance of pos-
sible experience, and these are pre-predicative (Husserl 1974 Hua XVII,
§ 89, 226–227; 218–219). So it is senseless to ask if the snow is or is not coura-
geous: first of all, because there is no community of essence between snow
and courage, but ultimately because the perceptual experience excludes the
possibility of finding such a thing as a moral property in the snow. A possi-
ble experience of a real world is not a structureless experience of objects in
general. Rather, there are spheres of objects, categories of concrete objects
(such as material object, animal, person, cultural object, ideal object . . . )
that admit correlative spheres of possible properties and relations. Hence,
the material conditions for having sensefulness go back to the ontological
structures of a possible world of experience. In that sense, the presupposi-
tion of a world of experience ranks logic among positive sciences.
What is the real purpose of the theory of relevance in the cores? Let us
refer to Carnap, who gives us a similar example of senselessness of proposi-
tions: “my pencil weighs five kilos” is a senseful proposition; on the other
hand, “my courage weighs five kilos” is not a proposition because it is sense-
less. We must not just replace the syntactical cores within a certain category
of names (names for things, or names for properties, names for relation-
ships), but also within a definite syntactical type. Two words belong to the
same syntactical type if it is possible to replace one with the other without
38 Dominique Pradelle
202).9 Thus, new classes of objects do not result from an arbitrary conceptual
creation of a property within an undefined field, but only from the founda-
tion of an already given set and respecting the condition of decidability: it is
a double principle that limits the variability of the cores.
Conclusion
Notes
1
“Ein Inbegriff von Dreiecken, in dem kein Dreieck fehlt, läßt sich nicht zur Gege-
benheit bringen. Das ist ein Non-Sens,” “eine Allheit von Dreiecken, eine Allheit
von Zahlen, das ist, wenn wir den Sinn der Allheit festhalten, nicht anschaulich zu
geben, kann also auch nicht sein.”
2
“Eine volle Allgemeinheit im Sinne des Gesetzes erfordert, daß es absolut heißt: ‘alle Men-
schen,’ unter Absehen von aller Beschränkung auf irgendein individuelles Dasein.”
3
“Die Grundsätze entspringen der Erfahrung, aber nicht der unmittelbaren Erfahrung . . . ,
sondern langen Prozessen methodischer Verarbeitung. Und diese Verarbeitung . . . ist nicht
40 Dominique Pradelle
eine Kette solcher unmittelbar selbsverständlicher Denkschritte wie bei der Deduktion”
(Husserl 1996 Hua XXX, § 66, 314).
4
Husserl gives as an example the double significance of the principles of contradic-
tion and excluded middle.
5
“Es beschließt . . . daß, wie gesagt, jedes Urteil prinzipiell zur Adäquation gebracht werden
kann” (Husserl 1974 Hua XVII, 201; 1978, 194).
6
Russell 1903 [2010] § 7, 7: Part I, chapter 1 “Definition of pure mathematics” :
“Thus in every proposition of pure mathematics, when fully stated, the variables
have an absolutely unrestricted field: any conceivable entity may be substituted for
any one of our variables without impairing the truth of our proposition.”
7
“Die syntaktischen Stoffe unanschaulicher Urteile können aus den angedeuteten Gründen
ihrer Seins- und Sinnesgenesis nicht völlig frei variabel sein” (Husserl 1974 Hua XVII,
227; 1978, 219).
8
“Sphärenverwandtschaft. Gegenstandssphären. Zwei Gegenstände . . . heißen ‘sphärenver-
wandt,’ wenn es eine Argumentstelle in einer Aussage gibt, für die die beiden
Gegenstandsnamen zulässige Argumente sind . . . Sind zwei Gegenstände nicht sphärenver-
wandt, so heißen sie ‘sphärenfremd’ zueinander.”
9
“Axiom III. (Axiom of separation). Whenever the propositional function F(x) is
definite for all elements of a setM, M possesses a subset MF containing as elements
precisely those elements x of M for which F(x) is true.
By giving us a large measure of freedom in defining new sets, Axiom III in a
sense furnisches a substitute for the general definition of set that was cited in the
introduction and rejected an untenable . . . In the first place, sets may never be
independently defined by means of this axiom but must always be separated as subsets
from sets already given; thus contradictory notions such as ‘the set of all sets’ or
‘the set of all ordinal numbers,’ and with them the ‘ultrafinite paradoxes’ . . . are
excluded.”
Chapter 3
Image Consciousness
and intensity of perception” (ibid., 57, 60; 62, 64), the depicted subject
does not. Though I do see the subject in the image—the phenomenon of
“seeing in”—it is not perceived and not actually present there. The image
may depict a person who does or once did actually exist, but is not itself
that person. Furthermore, the image object, even though it is seen and is
perceptually present to me, is not an actually existing thing in the world
of perceived rooms, clocks, and desks. The image’s physical support, pig-
ment and canvas, is indeed part of that world, and thus can interact caus-
ally with the surrounding environment, becoming spotted with mildew, for
example, or cracking with age, while the image cannot. The image is also
not a real event in conscious life, as the acts of perceiving or imaging are.
Husserl insists that the image is nothing actual in either of these senses:
“the image object truly does not exist, which means not only that it has no
existence outside my consciousness, but also that it has no existence inside
my consciousness; it has no existence at all” (ibid., 22; 23). It is “nothing,” a
“nullity.” In all of these senses, then, the perception that occurs in “percep-
tual image consciousness” or “iconic imagining” (ibid., 384; 456) “is not
perceptual consciousness simply” (ibid., 471; 560).
It is important to understand that the image theory is not image conscious-
ness itself. Image consciousness is the perfectly legitimate kind of awareness
we have just described, the kind we enjoy when we contemplate a painting
in a gallery or see a play on the stage. The image theory is a philosophical
position that takes certain features of image consciousness to be the model
for the understanding of other kinds of conscious acts, such as memory and
phantasy, and even perception. The image theory assumes at its core that
conscious presenting means “‛making an image of something’ ” (Husserl
1979 Hua XXII, 306), and it particularly stresses the involvement of two
of the three objects we mentioned above: the appearing image and the
subject meant by the image. Furthermore, the theory takes the appearing
image to be immanent to consciousness, like the Lockean idea, while the
object meant by means of it is in some sense transcendent.
establishment of the facts” (Husserl 1979 Hua XXII, 304). He observes that
“experience has never confirmed [its] quixotic assumptions” (305). The
image theory, then, is a vivid example of an interpretation that transcends
what is given in experience, which is why Husserl takes its claim that pre-
sentations relate to their objects by means of mental images to be “a theo-
retical fiction” (305).
How, then, do perception and image consciousness differ descriptively?
In the latter, we are intuitively aware of something—the image—“as depict-
ing or signitively indicating something else,” and we are directed, not
toward the image we intuit, but toward what is depicted (Husserl 1976 Hua
III, 99; 1983, 93). In perception, by contrast, there is only one object, which
is both what appears in the perceptual act and what is meant by the act.
What appears intuitively in perception is not taken to depict something else.
Perception gives its object as “it itself” and as present “in person” (ibid.,),
not as the representing image or surrogate for the “real” perceptual object.
“I perceive the physical thing,” Husserl writes, “the object belonging to
nature, the tree there in the garden; that and nothing else is the actual
object of the perceptual ‛intention.’ A second immanental tree, or even
an ‛internal image’ of the actual tree standing out there before me, is in
no way given, and to suppose that hypothetically leads to absurdity” (ibid.,
224; 219. Translation modified).
Husserl mentions one such absurdity, taking the form of a contradiction:
“The images are supposed to be the presented objects, of which it is truly
said: every presentation presents an object. The corresponding things are
supposed to be, on the other side, the presented objects, of which it is truly
said: an object does not correspond to every presentation” (Husserl 1979
Hua XXII, 305). In effect, the theory holds that every presentation pres-
ents two objects: the mental image, which is actually present to conscious-
ness, and then what is imaged, the perceived object, which is also supposed
to be presented, indeed, to be the object of the perceptual act, but which, if
the theory is correct, does not actually appear at all. The notion of a duality
of objects forced on perception leads to confusion and contradiction.
A further absurdity following from the image theory is that it leads to an
infinite regress. The regress results not simply from the fact that the theory
introduces two entities into perception, but from the way in which the two
entities are conceived. In this respect, the image theory as applied to per-
ception is a version of a second fundamental error; that is, the notion that
the ‟intentional object” of any act is immanent to consciousness and dis-
tinct from the act’s actual object. In the case of the image theory as applied
to perception, the image is taken to be an immanent object distinct from
46 John Brough
not to deny that what is taken to be an image must possess certain features
and stand in certain relations that will enable it to function as an image
of a specific thing under a definite aspect or aspects. Not just anything
can be taken to be the image of a seated man, hand on chin and deeply
absorbed in thought, for example. Images, on Husserl’s understanding,
are not arbitrary signs, and they do involve resemblance. On the other
hand, even the “appropriate” thing will not appear as an image unless it
is taken to be an image. “The image becomes constituted as an image in
a peculiar intentional consciousness, . . . and the ‛internal’ character of
the act, the specific peculiarity of this ‛mode of apperception,’ ” accounts
for the act of presenting an object in image (Husserl 1984 Hua XIX/1,
436; 1970, 594. Translation modified). It is a unique mode of apperception,
then, that apprehends an appearing object as an image. Thanks to it, I take
David’s painting to be an image of Napoleon and not an ordinary physical
thing, such as a light switch. “The painting is an image only for an image-
constituting consciousness, namely, the consciousness that, by means of
its imaginative apperception (here founded in a perception), bestows on a
primary and perceptually appearing object the ‛validity’ or ‛significance’
of an image” (ibid., 437; 594. Translation modified). The simple act of per-
ception does not possess this unique mode of apprehension. Its object is
not taken to be an image.
A further constitutional contrast between perception and image con-
sciousness is that perception posits its object as present and actually exist-
ing, while in image consciousness such positing does not occur. “Turning
toward the ‛image’ (not toward what is imaged), we do not seize upon any-
thing actual as object, but instead precisely an image, a fiction” (Husserl
1976 Hua III, 274; 1983, 266). Of course, if one focused on David’s por-
trait of Napoleon as simply a piece of canvas covered with pigment set into
a wooden frame, one could speak of seizing upon some physical thing
as actually existing. But if one’s regard is directed toward the image, an
entirely different awareness comes into play. At one point, Husserl took
this awareness to be a “neutrality modification of perception” (ibid., 267;
262). He eventually came to the conclusion, however, that phantasy does
not arise through the neutralizing of positing acts, and hence that “ ‘neu-
trality modification’ is suitable for the change in thematizing interest but
not for phantasy” (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 591; 2005, 709).
Perception and image consciousness differ, then, as the simple differs
from the complex. Perception has a single apperception and a single object.
It is not founded on any other act. It is this unmodified simplicity of per-
ception that lets it function, in Husserl’s estimation, as a kind of paradigm
48 John Brough
We have looked at some of the reasons why Husserl thinks that it is “not
only incorrect but nonsensical” (Husserl 1976 Hua III, 78; 1983, 92) to
interpret perception as a form of image consciousness. There are other
experiences, however, that might be more likely candidates for interpreta-
tion by the image theory. Acts of re-presentation [Vergegenwärtigung] or
reproduction, unlike acts of perceptual presentation [Gegenwärtigung], do
not present their objects as actually there “in person.” The objects of mem-
ory and phantasy, for example, are absent: neither a recollected past event
nor an imagined centaur is actually present. Since image consciousness
itself is a form of re-presentation, a way of being aware of something that is
not actually there, might it not be an enticing model for the understanding
of re-presentational experiences such as memory and phantasy?
In fact, until 1905 or so, Husserl himself surrendered, with some reserva-
tions, to what he described as the “temptation” (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII,
87; 2005, 94) to assimilate phantasy and other forms of reproduction, such
as memory and expectation, to image consciousness (I will focus mainly
on phantasy in the ensuing discussion). He took the “imaginative modi-
fication” (ibid., 276; 335) to be the sole model for the interpretation of all
forms of re-presentational awareness. Thus he wrote in 1898 that “percep-
tual presentations present their object as present itself in the presentation;
phantasy presentations, on the other hand, re-present their object in the
phantasy image, just as ordinary image presentations do their re-presenting
in the physical image” (ibid., 109; 117). Seven years later he claimed to find
a community of essence between perceptual imagining and ordinary phan-
tasy. “In both cases . . . the mental image is precisely an image; it represents
a subject” (ibid., 21; 22). What did Husserl think the two had in common?
The key feature they share, according to the image theory, is the posses-
sion of two objects. We have seen that in ordinary imaging—in the case of
a portrait, for example—there is a distinction between the image that actu-
ally appears and the subject that is meant but does not appear. In phan-
tasy too, Husserl writes, “we have a distinction between appearance and
subject,” and in that respect the imaging in phantasy runs parallel to the
Role of Images in Husserl’s Phenomenology 49
image to be a little picture hidden in the cabinet of the mind.1 Husserl notes,
however, that the mere fact that the image is in the mind would not explain
how the mind is able to represent the subject of the image, which is some-
thing different from the image itself. “If I put a picture in a drawer,” Husserl
asks, “does the drawer represent something?” (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 21;
2005, 23). The deep problem with the naive interpretation is that “it con-
ceives of the image as there in the mind just as a physical thing is there in
reality. Phenomenologically, however, there is no image thing in the mind, or,
better, in consciousness” (ibid.). If the image were a thing in the mind, then
the relation between image and phantasied object would have to be a matter
of comparing two different appearing objects. When we phantasy something,
however, what occurs is not like what we do “when we place two pictures side
by side or carry out two phantasy representations in succession” (ibid., 27; 28).
In both image consciousness and phantasy, the subject “does not appear as
a second thing in addition to the image. It appears in and with the image”
(ibid., 28; 29). The subject is not intuited in a separate representation.
If the relationship between phantasy image and subject is not estab-
lished according to the pattern of the comparison of two things, what is the
nature of the relationship? Again, as in the case of image consciousness,
it is a matter of “seeing-in.” According to the image theory, the image is
the only object that actually appears, and “in the image one sees the subject”
(Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 26; 2005, 27). Just as one “sees” Napoleon in his
study in David’s portrait, so one “sees” Napoleon in one’s phantasy image
of the solitary exile gazing out to sea from St. Helena. In the image experi-
ence or in the phantasy, there is no second, separate representation with
which to compare the image. The image, of course, represents the subject
only under certain aspects, and it is in those aspects that one experiences
the subject; thus the image represents Napoleon in full dress uniform and
not in his imperial robes. The specific content of the image object “exhibits
. . . re-presents, pictorializes, makes intuitable. The subject looks at us, as it
were, through these traits” (ibid., 30; 31). This means that one is aware of
the subject within the image; both image consciousness and phantasy are
instances of internal consciousness (§40). In contrast, symbolic or signitive
consciousness, the sort of consciousness one has when one sees the symbol
for a restaurant in an airport, is external consciousness in the sense that
it points one away from the appearing symbol to something external to it.
One does not see the subject in the symbol.
The phenomenon of seeing-in implies that in image consciousness and
phantasy I am ordinarily absorbed in the subject. Unless one is engaged in
reflection of a particular sort, one does not look at the image and “say to
Role of Images in Husserl’s Phenomenology 51
oneself: this is an image” (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 26; 2005, 27). That does
not mean, however, that one is not aware that one is experiencing an image
rather than the thing itself. “On the contrary, the image is immediately felt
to be an image” (ibid., 26; 28). If it were not, then, phenomenologically,
one would be perceiving and not imagining, and the object would appear
as present and as actually existing. One’s phantasy world would become
one’s real world, an object of belief taken to be real. This does not hap-
pen in phantasy, however. A minimal awareness of the real world remains,
so “that a faint consciousness that (the images) are semblances constantly
colors our phantasy formations” (ibid., 42; 45). Images as “nullities” only
“hover before” us (ibid.), and it may seem quite as if the subjects we see in
them “were there themselves–but only ‘quite as i f ’ ” (ibid., 33; 34).
with the field of regard of possible perception.” The painting’s image with
its physical substratum, on the other hand, “is incorporated in a certain
sense into the nexus of actuality, although it is not itself taken to be some-
thing actual in that nexus” (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 123; 2005, 135). The
image in a painting is a “perceptual figment,” which enables it to be both in
the world and out of it; the phantasy image is not perceptual at all (ibid.,
64; 70). The phantasy image also appears to us differently from the per-
ceptual appearance and from the image-object appearance (ibid.). One
of these differences is that the phantasy image and the memory image as
well, no matter how clear they may be, appear to us as if through a veil, a
mist, as if in twilight (ibid., 162; 194). The perceptual image, by contrast,
appears with the force and vivacity of a perception. In Humean language,
which Husserl occasionally employs, the images in perceptual imagining
are “impressions,” while those in phantasy, memory, and expectation are
“ideas,” reproductions or re-presentations of perceptions. Another differ-
ence in appearance involves stability. The image in perceptual imagination,
because it has a physical foundation, is fixed and stable, while “fleeting and
multiple appearances, yielding changing, fluctuating image objects, sup-
port the imaging consciousness” (ibid., 148; 175). Phantasy images have a
Protean character.
These differences between perceptual imagining and phantasy are
important phenomenologically, but do not by themselves undermine the
image theory of phantasy. For that, a specific critique would be required.
By 1909, Husserl’s earlier hesitations about the theory had evolved into
full-blown criticisms, and he was prepared to claim that “an essential dis-
tinction must be drawn between phantasy apprehension and image appre-
hension proper” (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 276; 2005, 335).
Husserl’s criticism of the image theory was an instance of his gradual
weaning from the prejudice of presence. In fact, this process took place
under various forms in several areas of his thought during this period, par-
ticularly in his phenomenology of time consciousness, including his under-
standing of memory, retention, and what he described as the “absolute
flow of time-constituting consciousness.” A specific concern in his mature
analysis of time consciousness was to escape the prejudice of the now, a
particularly virulent form of the prejudice of presence, blocking the way
to an understanding of the experience of time as reaching out beyond
what is immediately present. In all of these areas, Husserl rejected the view
that the consciousness of what is absent depends on the actual presence of
some content or image in consciousness. His early reservations about the
image theory even when he generally subscribed to it suggest that he had
Role of Images in Husserl’s Phenomenology 53
begun to free himself from the prejudice as early as 1905. He writes, for
example, that “in phantasy, we do not have anything ‛present’; and in this
sense we do not have an image object” (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 79; 2005,
86). In clear, simple phantasy of the town hall, “no apprehending of a ‛pres-
ent town-hall appearance,’ of an image object presently presenting itself, is
carried out” that would serve as the analogue or representative of what is
phantasied (ibid.). Only in reflection could I separate the appearance and
the town hall itself. In fairness, it should be noted that it is still not perfectly
clear in these earlier texts whether Husserl is decisively separating himself
from the image theory. He may still be holding that there is an image in
phantasy distinct from its subject, but that one is not conscious of the dis-
tinction prereflectively. He may also be saying that the phantasy image is
not perceptual in the fashion of the image in a painting or photograph,
“though it certainly does appear as an image” (ibid., 80; 87). Other texts,
however, come much closer to a clear-cut rejection of the theory, and of the
prejudice of presence. He writes, for example, that the object of phantasy
“is an object appearing in the manner peculiar to phantasy, hence not
appearing as present” (ibid., 84; 91). Phantasy, in other words, should not
be reduced to a species of image consciousness. It is sui generis.2
By denying that what immediately appears to us in phantasy is a surro-
gate, analogue, or image of some other objectivity, Husserl is able to claim
that “the simple phantasy appearance . . . relates to its object just as straight-
forwardly as perception does” (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 85; 2005, 92).3 It
does not achieve awareness of its object through the medium of an image;
it is direct consciousness of what it imagines. This means that although
its object may not be present, as it is in perception, phantasy nonetheless
has in common with perception that its “intention aims at the thing itself
throughout [its] peculiarly volatile appearance” (ibid., 161; 192).
In escaping the prejudice of presence, Husserl sees that one can be
conscious of something itself without that something’s being present:
The actual presence of something and the consciousness of something itself do
not coincide. There is a difference between being aware of something
itself and being aware of it as present in person. If I phantasy a centaur,
I am conscious of the centaur itself, just as in remembering an event I
once lived through I am conscious of the event and not of some image
as its present surrogate. What I phantasy or remember is the thing itself,
though the thing is not something present (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII,
162; 2005, 193).
Phantasy, then, resists assimilation or reduction to image conscious-
ness or to any other form of intentionality. It is an “ultimate mode of intuitive
54 John Brough
memory positing its object as actually past. Both include belief as well.
Pure phantasy, however, is not a positing act, and its belief is only as-if
belief. “Mere phantasy in itself is mere modified consciousness (I always
indicate this by the ‛as if’). It posits nothing: it ‛merely presents’ ” (ibid.,
254; 309), and what it presents is its object, not an image of its object. The
image as opaque mediator between phantasy act and phantasied object
dissolves into a “pure” intentional consciousness, uncluttered and modi-
fied: “ ‘Consciousness’ consists of consciousness through and through, and the sen-
sation as well as the phantasm is already ‘consciousness’ ” (ibid., 265; 323). The
temptation of the image theory has been overcome.
***
What can we finally say, then, about the role of images in Husserl’s phe-
nomenology? That he resisted their allure not only as a way of interpret-
ing perception but also—after some dalliance—as a way of understanding
memory and phantasy. We can say as well that he created a rich phenom-
enological account of the one place in which images clearly and happily
reside—in authentic image consciousness, in our experience of such things
as pictures, sculptures, films, and plays.
Notes
1
The image theory of perception is “naive” in this sense as well.
2
Husserl does discuss one case in which he thinks phantasy can be said to involve
an image distinct from its subject. A scientist might unearth some fossils and then
deliberately fabricate ‟an intuitive representation of a prehistoric species on the
basis of a few distinctive traits suggested by the fossils” (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII,
84; 2005, 91). This would be analogous to painting a picture of a prehistoric beast.
Or someone—an artist planning a painting that would depict the death of Cae-
sar—might undertake a self-conscious effort to produce an image of a certain
subject. Husserl thinks that such an effort would yield ‟a genuine image represen-
tation. I ‛know’ that the image is not Caesar but only represents Caesar to me as a
more or less satisfactory analogue” (ibid., 153; 182). Here, presumably, the dis-
tinction between subject and image would be reinstated. These cases represent
artificial situations, however, not what occurs in ordinary phantasy. Furthermore,
it is doubtful whether they are genuine instances of image consciousness; it seems
more likely that they are direct phantasies of an imaging situation, as when an
artist might phantasy a potential picture phantasied precisely as a picture.
3
The intention in phantasy “aims at an object in a direct way” (Husserl 1981 Hua
XXIII, 161; 2005, 192).
Chapter 4
The object of the present study is one of the most fundamental and recur-
ring problems that Husserl meets in his effort to secure for transcendental
phenomenology an absolute epistemological justification, that is, to develop
a “phenomenological critique of phenomenology itself.”1 The problem is to
know in what way natural attitude and transcendental attitude are con-
nected with one another. How is their relation to be understood, if it is
indeed at the same time a logical and a methodological relation?
From a logical point of view, there seems to be an opposition, and even a
thorough incompatibility, between the thesis of actual existence implied,
according to Husserl, in the natural attitude of consciousness in naïve
world experience, on the one hand, and the phenomenological reduction
as transcendental on the other, since the latter consists in ceasing to hold
to this belief, and in suspending such a thesis. If the phenomenological
reduction is transcendental, it includes a radical epoche toward any actual
reality, which is strictly contrary to the spontaneous realism of the natural
attitude.
But from a methodological point of view, the phenomenological reduction
works as the unique coherent way out of the contradictions of naturalistic
theory of knowledge, and so it is due to replace the natural attitude as an
adequate fundamental position in general epistemology. Therefore, the
natural attitude should in some way or other lead to the transcendental
reduction, since the latter plays the part of a key-mediation between two
symmetrical, and equally possible, “attitudes.” But, if there must be a meth-
odologically continuous transition between the natural attitude and the
phenomenological attitude, what becomes then, in this practical continuity,
58 Jean-François Lavigne
of their logical conflict? If these two attitudes contradict one another on the
essential point of the very sense of the being of reality, one of them must
necessarily be true and the other one false. Or, if they are not contradic-
tory, should one suppose that there is a hidden link of dependence between
them, so that the phenomenological attitude, though it seems to free itself
from the natural attitude and its immediate realism, would actually remain
under its dependence, and so tacitly continue it?
So this is a true dilemma, the stake of which is essential. At least, before
endeavoring to reach a decision, we can agree on the following point: Husserl’s
well-known insistence on the ultimate validity of his radically idealistic inter-
pretation of transcendental constitution urges us to clarify the point, whether
the “natural” comprehension of being, as ontological independence, is a mere
illusion or, on the contrary, contains a certain amount of truth.
The natural attitude of the mind is not concerned with the critique of
knowledge. In such an attitude, our attention is turned—in acts of intui-
tion and thought—to things given to us, and given as a matter of course,
even though they are given in different ways and in different modes of
being, according to the source and level of our knowledge of them. In
perception, for example, a thing stands before us as a matter of course.
It is there, in the midst of other things, both living and lifeless, animate
and inanimate. That is, it stands before us in the midst of a world.
(Husserl 1973, 15)
‘Natural Attitude’ and Transcendental Idealism 59
und Theorie der Erkenntnis, Husserl 1984, Hua XXIV), and especially on
the decisive turn he had just accomplished by including the transcendent
intentional object within the field of the phenomena and establishing thereby
his new conception of immanence. In this note we find strikingly clear evi-
dence that, towards Christmas eve of this year 1906, Husserl had already
perceived the far, but direct, ontological consequence of that new concep-
tion of intentionality: by becoming transcendental, constitution could not
but lead to an idealism of absolute subjectivity, according to which reality
would rest entirely on the sole foundation of the being of consciousness,
then conceived of as an absolute being. This is exactly what he writes—still
with slight hesitation—in the personal note published as Beilage B.XIV in
Hua XXIV.
Not long afterward, in the five introductory lectures of May 1907 where
he expounded for the first time this new theory of consciousness as “pure
consciousness,” Husserl develops and already systematizes this ontologi-
cal foresight. In a first step, the “gnoseological” reduction (although it is
already transcendental, even if Husserl does not call it so yet) secures a
methodical access to the field of pure subjective experiences, the “phenom-
ena of phenomenology.” Then, in a second step, the descriptive-eidetic
analysis of these typical experiences, in which perceptive objects are given
through “adumbrations,” results directly in the discovery of the general
ontological theorem: world as a whole is originally constituted in the flow of
absolute consciousness.
This text shows very clearly that the very problem which awakens epistemo-
logical skepticism, and in which, consequently, the logical necessity of tran-
scendental epoche originates, cannot appear but in the context of the natural
attitude, and on the basis of its assumed validity. The “enigma” of the possi-
bility of knowledge, radically understood as the “enigma of transcendence”
itself, rests upon the psychological opposition between the known object and
knowledge as a mental act—an opposition which undeniably includes the
“natural thesis” of the “external” world.
Thus, one must conclude from Husserl’s first methodological foundation
of the phenomenological attitude that the transcendental-Cartesian way
to the reduction in 1907 continues to presuppose, as its implicit and persis-
tent basis, the spontaneous ontological “realism” of the natural attitude—
under the form of a psychological reflection on the acts of consciousness.
64 Jean-François Lavigne
So, the usual meaning of the words “to be” is reversed. The being which
for us comes first, in itself is second, i.e., what it is, it is only relatively to the
first . . . Reality, either reality of a singular thing or reality of the world
taken as a whole, does not imply, by essence (in the rigorous sense we have
adopted) any autonomy. It is not in itself something absolute, which would
be linked secondarily with another absolute; it is, in the absolute sense of
the word, strictly nothing.” (Husserl 1976 Hua III/1, 106)
It appears, then, that the content of this former justifying step consists
exactly in establishing transcendental phenomenological idealism. And indeed,
the very last lines of § 49 have hardly concluded the whole sequence of the
forecoming analyses (§ 34 to 48) by settling the complete ontological relat-
edness of the real world to consciousness:
‘Natural Attitude’ and Transcendental Idealism 65
The whole space-time world has, in virtue of its own sense, a being which
is merely intentional . . . This being is posited by consciousness in its own
experiences . . . as what remains identical through the motivated multi-
ple appearances—but a being which, beyond this identity is a nothing
[d a r ü b e r h i n a u s aber ein Nichts ist]. (Husserl 1976 Hua III/1, 106.
Husserl’s italics)
Eidetics
Let us consider the conscious experiences, with all the concrete content
with which they take place in their concrete sequence—the flow of sub-
jective life . . . It becomes then obvious that in this flow each singular
experience that reflection can point out has an essence of its own, that it is the
task of intuition to apprehend, a “content” which can be considered in
itself and with respect to its specificity [in seiner Eigenheit für sich betrachten].
We must apprehend and characterize in general this peculiar tenor of
the cogitatio according to its pure specificity. (Husserl 1976 Hua III/1, 61)
The new methodological device by which Ideas I intends to lead the reader
to the logical necessity of phenomenological transcendental idealism con-
sists in submitting psychical intentional experiences, as objectivated by reflection, to
eidetic intuition or ideation.
science that bears only on matters of fact. But one may as well consider it
is still psychology, if one takes into account that—as Husserl repeatedly
underlines—it has not left the “ground of the natural attitude,” and that,
consequently, the lived experiences to which it keeps related, through the
indirect mediation of the description of their typical essences, are and
remain, undeniably, natural empirical facts.
In this way, the very possibility of realizing through a “regional ontology”
as an a priori eidetic study of intentional experiences the ontological tran-
sition from natural to transcendental attitude appears dubious and prob-
lematic. Husserl himself states it, with great clarity and insight, in the first
version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica article, published in Phenomenological
Psychology:
between the two sorts of subjectivity that each of these reductions reveals,
as to both their respective essence and their function:
A little further on, Husserl states more precisely that the methodological
parallelism of both phenomenologies is a “consequence resulting” out of
the “parallelism between both spheres of experience, transcendental and
psychological.” Now, this parallelism itself, as such, is not a consequence
of the identity of the contents concerned—the “rough” or immediate con-
tents of self-experience—but, obviously, of the fact that these contents
of subjective life are liable to be apprehended in two different and rival
ways. So, it is indeed the effect of the possibility and necessity of an “attitude
modification.” Hence the conclusion that it is this shift in the apprehensive
“attitude” which must finally be clarified, because everything else depends
on it.
The transition from psycho-phenomenological reduction to tran-
scendental reduction, which this “attitude modification” is to operate, is
finally motivated by the appearing of what Husserl calls “the transcenden-
tal problem.” When he comes to the point of precisely and descriptively
70 Jean-François Lavigne
There is, thus, a continuous and direct relation between the nature of the
“transcendental problem” and the essential sense of transcendental reduc-
tion: for this problem implies, as belonging to its very and proper meaning, a
universal epoche—hence, the epoche of all knowledge of mundane reality—
which provokes, as a “simple consequence,” the implicit practice of that
methodical and voluntary epoche designated in Ideas I as the transcendental
reduction itself. In other words, the systematic epoche, which is a transcen-
dental reduction, is itself nothing else but a taking over of the universal
epoche of objective knowledge, under the form of a deliberate, reflective and
voluntary attitude—that is, as a method. This objective knowledge already
belongs to the logical content of the “transcendental problem.” One may
thus claim that the transcendental phenomenological reduction is both
motivated and foreshadowed within the structure of this problem.
Radicality
Nevertheless, the all-inclusiveness of this reflection has still another dimen-
sion. Its generality is completed by radicality. Whereas psycho-phenomeno-
logical reduction leaves out of the reach of psychological reflection the
whole field of being in itself as a characteristic ontological feature of mun-
dane beings,
(a) First: The belief in the absolute transcendence (as being in itself)
of reality is the ultimate datum that makes possible, as its implicit
motive, the “transcendental problem,” as Husserl defines it. It is this
problem that in turn works as the matrix of the “transcendental
conversion”—and so, of transcendental reduction, which becomes
itself stable and enduring, under the form of the “transcendental
attitude.”
At this stage, one may stress the fact that nothing but the implicit upholding
of the natural attitude objectively motivates the reductive modification, in
the sense that it makes it possible (through the transcendental problem)
and necessary (in order to escape the skepticism of a mere psychological
reduction).
At this second stage, the relation is reversed: it is now the natural attitude
that appears motivated, as far as it is dynamically constituted, through the
intentional genesis. This is the moment of Husserl’s last ontological posi-
tion: it is the moment of transcendental phenomenological idealism.
(d) So, finally, the motivating relation reverses itself again, and this time
in favor of a new kind of transcendence. This sort of transcendence is
new, because it escapes radically, right from the origin, the dual
opposition between world and consciousness, between natural atti-
tude and transcendental attitude—at least, as far as we understand
this last phrase according to Husserl, that is, in the context of his
transcendental idealism. This new radical transcendence is, at the
same time, on this side and beyond the whole process of phenomenal
appearing. Consequently, this transcendence—which deserves to be
qualified as absolute—originally neutralizes the claim of transcenden-
tal subjectivity to be an absolutely closed, and self-sufficient, sphere
of being.
76 Jean-François Lavigne
Notes
1
See: “Instead of dealing here with further and ultimate problems of Phenom-
enology, we preferred to outline in their main features the immensely difficult
problems of the first phenomenology, somehow still affected by a certain naïve-
ness . . . We preferred it to the whole investigations forming the self-criticism of
phenomenology, which aims at determining its scope, its limits, but also the
modes of its apodicticity.” It is precisely a brief sketch of such a transcendental
self-criticism of the meaning and scope of transcendental phenomenology,
viewed as universal ontology, that we endeavour to outline here (Husserl 1999,
Conclusion, § 63).
2
In particular in the lectures of the winter semester 1901–1902 (unpublished man-
uscript F I 19).
3
As Ingarden had perfectly understood from the very beginning (see his comments
on the Cartesian Meditations; and also the Husserlian fundamental project of a “critique
of knowledge,” as Husserl conceived of it as early as September 1906 (Husserl 1984
Hua XXIV, Beilage B IX, Personal remarks of 1906, September 25).
4
As defined and exemplified in the lessons of Phenomenological Psychology: see
Husserl 1968 Hua IX, §§ 9 and 10, 72–93; and according to the terminology of the
4th version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica article, section 4. See 284–285.
Part III
Heideggerean Variations
Dasein’s Opening, Disclosure, and the
History of Being
Chapter 5
the most fundamental philosophical theme and that the question of the
meaning of Being overall is philosophy’s most basic question. This man-
ner of approaching Heidegger’s critique will also allow me to examine
the presupposition that is implicit in his claim that ontology is only possi-
ble as phenomenology: it is only as ontology that philosophy is possible.
148; 189) in Being in Time, which is the locus classicus for not only his but
the hermeneutic development of phenomenology generally, is limited to
“interpretation in the understanding of the world” (ibid.). Such inter-
pretive understanding deals exclusively with inner-worldly entities that
are on hand (zuhanden) and have already been understood and inter-
preted with regard to the mode of Being belonging to entities that are
used “in-order-to” do something.
What is not at all clear in Heidegger’s account of the phenomenon of
interpretation, however, are two related issues. On the one hand, there
is the issue of the character of the method that is responsible for mak-
ing manifest the phenomenal structure of interpretation itself articulated
in his analysis. On the other hand, there is the issue of the precise sta-
tus of the structural distinctions that emerge in the analysis. To be sure,
ready responses to both these issues are available and, indeed, have been
appealed to for more than eighty years. The character of Heidegger’s
method is hermeneutical, not reflective, and the structural distinctions are
existential, not categorial. But these responses do not address satisfactorily
the following issues. First, the source of the sight that presumably guides
the phenomenological interpretation that makes manifest the phenomenal
structure of interpretation. Second, precisely how this sight brings about
the “thematization” of the existential structures Heidegger credits it with
thematizing. And, third, the structural character of the most fundamental
distinction governing his account of interpretation, namely, that between
understanding and meaning.
Because Heidegger restricts his analysis to interpretation in understand-
ing the world, his account of the understanding’s recoil upon Dasein, such
that this understanding comes to itself interpretatively, deals exclusively
with how an inner-worldly entity “comes explicitly into the sight of under-
standing” (Heidegger 1979, 149; 1962, 189). His account of the way it does
so, according to “the structure belonging to something as something,” is taken
by him to characterize “the original ‘as’ of an interpretation [hermêneia]”
(ibid.)—the so-called “existential-hermeneutical ‘as’ ” (ibid., 158; 210). The
hermeneutical “as,” as the structure of interpretation, is contrasted with
the “as” operative in the determining statement that manifests its explicit-
ness, what Heidegger calls the “apophantical ‘as’ ” (ibid. ). Any “pre-predica-
tive seeing” (ibid., 149; 189), therefore, is “in itself already understanding
and interpretative” (ibid.), and its “ ‘as’ therefore does not first show up in
the statement, but is only first stated, which is possible only because it is
there as something to be stated” (ibid.).
88 Burt C. Hopkins
first bring into the fore having the phenomenal characterization of the
thematic entity, to which the following steps of the analysis must con-
form. These steps require, however, at the same time guidance through
the possible fore sight towards the mode of Being belonging to the entity.
And this fore having and fore sight then trace out the conceptuality that
will bring into relief the structures of Being. (ibid.)
In the case of the entity Dasein, the ontological projection operative in its
existential Interpretation takes as its clue “the ‘presupposed’ idea of exis-
tence as such” (Heidegger 1979, 313; 1962, 361), which has the character of
an understanding projection in which
Heidegger’s account here, with its reference to the fore structures of mean-
ing, suggests that the analysis of the interpretation of inner-worldly entities
is, in a sense, exemplary, such that even though the theme of the analysis
is interpretation in understanding the world, the structure of interpreta-
tion made manifest by the analysis would not be limited to this thematic
content. The absence of any reference to the “as” in Heidegger’s account of
ontological Interpretation, however, makes it difficult to conclude one way
or the other whether the structure of “something as something” is limited
to inner-world entities or extends to the phenomenological interpretation
of any existential structure whatever. In the latter case, presumably the
interpretation of Being itself would be made explicit by the “as structure,”
which, as already mentioned, would mean that the meaning of Being is
structured existentially in the same way as the meaning of an entity.
90 Burt C. Hopkins
Transformations in Heidegger’s
Conception of Truth between
1927 and 1930
László Tengelyi
From early on, the question of truth has occupied a central place in
Heidegger’s thought. By drawing on Aristotle and Greek philosophy he
tries to develop further and appropriate critically Edmund Husserl’s phe-
nomenological concept of truth. His concern is to show that the original
site of truth is not the proposition. Appealing to the Greek concept of
ἀλήθεια, he conceives of pre-predicative truth as unconcealment. He also
uses the term “openness” with a similar meaning. Already in Being and Time
he assigns different concepts of pre-predicative truth to the different modes
of being. For example, he differentiates the being-open (Erschlossenheit) of
Dasein from the being-discovered (Entdecktheit) of the present-at-hand and
the ready-to-hand. In § 44 of Being and Time, these reflections take on a
firm shape.
The thought of a pre-predicative truth is in complete harmony with the
way Heidegger determines the phenomenon. If the statement, according
to which the phenomenon is something that shows itself out of itself, is cor-
rect, then the phenomenon is from the outset characterized by an uncon-
cealment or an openness. Nevertheless, the openness of the phenomenon
can be concealed or dissimulated. It is in this sense that it is said in Being
and Time: “Concealedness [Verdecktheit] is the counter-concept to ‘phenom-
enon’ ” (Heidegger 1979 SZ, 36; 1996, 31 [Translation modified]). The
phenomenon of being, according to Heidegger, is precisely what is con-
cealed and dissimulated. That is the reason why phenomenological ontol-
ogy, following from the basic approach of Being and Time, can in no way
be confined to a description and analysis of the phenomenon of being but
must resort to a hermeneutic approach. But this approach always already
presupposes a pre-ontological understanding of being. From this it follows
Heidegger’s Conception of Truth 95
there exists a “uniform possibility of expression that extends over all occur-
rent beings” (82). This necessarily implies that an analysis of the propo-
sition takes a “uniform manner of openness, unconcealedness, truth of
beings” (82). However, the proposition is here not a good adviser. For, it
is not even the original site of the truth. It pretends to a uniformity at the
predicative level even though, at the pre-predicative level, we come across
a manifold of heterogeneous modes of openness that correspond to the
different modes of being. Heidegger no longer brings into consideration
just two, but now four, modes of being: presence-at-hand, life, existence
and perdurance (83). (The stone is present-at-hand, the plant and the ani-
mal live, the human being exists, and the number perdures.) The idea of a
differentiation of modes of being and their corresponding forms of truth
shows great promise. Despite this, Heidegger never comes around to devel-
oping this scheme. He rather contents himself with dealing again—albeit
extensively—only with the two extreme modes: presence-at-hand and exis-
tence (84). As a consequence, the advance toward a new question remains
confined to a sketch.
The situation is different with two other questions. It is a notable pecu-
liarity of the Freiburg lecture of 1928/1929 that the problem of truth is set
in the perspective of being-with. Heidegger shows that being-with not only
belongs always and necessarily to Dasein, but that this being-with is, in
accordance with its nature, “always and necessarily a sharing in the truth”
(Heidegger 1976 GA 27, 120). This idea of a shared truth is without doubt
something new in the concept of unconcealedness, but it also acquires
something of a merely supplementary status. By contrast, in the lecture
The Basic Problems of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude from the winter
semester of 1929/1930, Heidegger formulates a self-critique of his earlier
conception of truth. This self-critique grows out of a new insight into the
relationship between truth and freedom.
In what follows, these two changes in the concept of truth as presented in
Being and Time will be given a close consideration. Our reflection will, thus,
be confined to Heidegger’s metaphysical period from 1927 to 1930.
Already in Being and Time, Heidegger starts out with the idea that being-
with belongs to Dasein as an existential (Heidegger 1979 SZ, 120; 1996,
112–113). According to this idea, the being of Dasein is from the outset a
being-with-others. Heidegger says: “Being-with is an attribute of one’s own
Heidegger’s Conception of Truth 97
Let us take it that the two wanderers suddenly come around a turn of the
path to an unexpected sight of the mountain so that they are suddenly
enraptured and quietly stand next to each other. There is, then, no trace
of a mutual engagement, each stands rather taken by the sight. Are the
two now just next to each other like the two boulders or are they in this
moment rather in a certain way with-one-another, in a way they would not
be if they were incessantly chatting to each other or even engaging with
each other and surmise their complexes? (Heidegger 1976 GA 27, 86)
With this Heidegger finds at the same time the key to the understanding of
an already given being-with-one-another. What is significant for this argu-
ment is still the conviction, which is formulated in one passage as follows:
“The Being in what is common is always essential for the with-one-another”
(Heidegger 1976 GA 27, 148). With the truth as unconcealedness or open-
ness of the world, in which we share, Heidegger finds what is common or
the same as that to which we in different ways comport ourselves. Out of
the common or the same there results an original with-one-another, which,
according to Heidegger, first makes possible a “community of egos” (145).
Nevertheless, in the epoch with which we are dealing, we should never
dissociate the world, whose unconcealedness or openness we are discuss-
ing, from the connection it has with the world-formation of Dasein. To
the original plan, which the Freiburg lecture from the winter semester of
1928/1929 follows, there belongs a discussion of the relationship between
philosophy and history. Even though this discussion did not eventually
take place due to time-constraints, it does form the conceptual horizon of
the investigations that are devoted to the question of the truth. We thus
have to accept that, when speaking of the truth as unconcealedness or
openness of the world, Heidegger has in mind not only the single world as
such but also a world which is always historical. The common, the same,
which constitutes an original with-one-another is thus at any time bound
to a historical projection of the world that manifests itself in the world-
view, the science, the philosophy and the art of a specific people or of a
specific period. In this way we can understand the concept of truth—in
accordance with Heidegger’s methodological approach—as a formal
indication.
From this there results not just the strength but also the limits of
Heidegger’s approach toward the understanding of the original being-
with-one-another. This approach is based on the insight that an I-thou
relationship is always bound to the condition of a communal openness
of the world which is already shared by the respective I and thou. That
is why Heidegger can link in his own way his project to the monadology
of Leibniz to the extent that he starts out from the idea that in Leibniz
the monads represent the whole from their particular standpoint and
that for this reason they not only have no windows but also “require none”
(Heidegger 1976 GA 27, 144). Heidegger says: “The point is not to complete
102 László Tengelyi
Every ‘I’ is a ‘monad.’ But monads have windows. They have no windows or
doors in so far as no other subject can really enter, but through them the
other (the windows are the empathies) can throughout be experienced
just as past events that the subject has lived through can be experienced
through recollection. (Husserl 1973 Hua XIV, 260)
It definitely speaks for Husserl’s approach that in it not only the relation-
ship of the self to the other can be thematized but also the relationship of
the home-world to a foreign world. By contrast, the merit of Heidegger is
rather limited to only having brought to the fore the communal character
of pre-predicative truth.
The idea of a shared truth is an essential piece of the puzzle in the under-
standing of truth as presented in lectures given after the publication of Being
and Time, but it changes little to the sense and the substance of the earlier
conception of truth as exposed in Being and Time. The situation is different
with the specific view of truth formulated at the end of the Freiburg lecture
The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude of the winter
semester of 1929/1930: it brings a real novelty with itself.
Heidegger presents his thoughts here in a form that results from his turn
to the Aristotelian theory of the propositions in De interpretatione. Aristotle
distinguishes, on the one hand, between true and false propositions and,
on the other, between affirming (positive) and denying (negative) propo-
sitions. What is suggested, in the interpretation of truth, is to focus, first
and foremost, on the affirmative (positive) true proposition in order to
understand the three other possibilities of combination by starting with
this exceptional case. However, Heidegger recognizes what is deceptive in
this approach. He says:
This kind of approach in logic, which starts with the positive true judg-
ment, is justified within certain limits but for this very reason it gives
rise to a fundamental deception that it is only a matter of relating the
Heidegger’s Conception of Truth 103
can be said, are manifest. (Heidegger 1992 GA 29/30, 493; 1995, 339
[Translation modified])
Still, the judgment can have a space of play (Spielraum) for the compara-
tive here and there of the either-or, of truth or falsity only if the judging
human being can go beyond being and its Being. From this the essential
sense of metontology becomes clear. With metontology we have a new kind
of transcendence, a going-beyond beings but toward the world, not toward
Being. The difference consists in this, that the world in contradistinction
to Being opens up a space of play (Spielraum) for the either-or of truth and
falsity.
Only at this point can we see that Heidegger in his metaphysical period
does not mean the same thing with world as he did in Being and Time. The
referential connections of beings that are encountered at any time are in
fact no longer enough to determine the world-structure—the “worldliness”
of the world. So long as the world in its totality was conflated with these
referential connections no fundamental distinction between Being and
world was possible. Actually the world in Being and Time was an existential
of Dasein, that is, a fundamental determination of existence; it belonged
to the ontological constitution of Dasein. By contrast the idea of meton-
tology is from the very outset based on a distinction between Being and
world. This distinction is possible in the period from 1927 to 1930 through
the fact that the world is understood as a space of play (Spielraum) for the
either-or of truth and falsity.
This new approach is obviously in need of elaboration but in the lec-
ture of 1929/1930 Heidegger continues to owe us in that regard. We are
therefore largely dependent upon conjectures. In order to make this new
approach, stemming from Heidegger’s self-critique, comprehensible and
amenable to concepts, we must proceed from the idea that this approach
places in a new light the sense of false propositions and the role of denying
true judgments. A further indication for this interpretation arises from
Heidegger’s tying back the concept of the world in this period of his think-
ing to the world-projection that is always proper to Dasein. If we connect
these two indications with the idea of a space of play (Spielraum) for the
either-or of truth and falsity, we can reconstruct the fundamental positive
thoughts that underlie Heidegger’s self-critique in the following steps:
world. Certainly there are many core propositions with which a world-
projection stands or falls but there are innumerable others on which it
is not immediately dependent. To every world-projection there indeed
belongs an immeasurable region of possible propositions, which have
not yet been formulated. Alongside this empty region there is in every
world-projection an open region of propositions that can be shown to
be false without the whole world-projection being essentially affected
by it. The size of this open region depends upon the respective world-
projection. In any case at this point the picture of a process of knowl-
edge emerges in which what is held to be true can transform itself into
something false (and vice-versa). Such transformations of truth-values
are reflected in denying (negative) true judgments. These judgments
are granted a constitutive role for the underlying world-projection so
long as the latter can sustain itself in the course of the transformation of
truth-values. But even if the epistemic dynamic affects the core proposi-
tions of a world-projection, a new world-projection can be built upon
the propositions, which from now on are held to be true.
2. Indifference of the world toward such transformations of truth-values. If we reflect
on the nature of this possibility we can succeed in drawing aletheic con-
sequences for the concept of the world from the epistemic dynamic that
is presented. We arrive at the insight that new world-projections can
emerge out of the transformations of truth-values because the world—in
contradistinction to Being—is in a certain sense indifferent to these
transformations. If propositions that are held to be true turn out to be
false, the (presumed) being reveals itself as non-being. The existence
of a being can be affected from this change as much as its being so
and so. Therefore the Being of beings is anything but indifferent to the
transformations of truth-values. Against this the world always remains
stable in the midst of such transformations. This is because any totality
of true propositions holds as a description of the unique world. If the
description changes then the state of being of the world also changes,
but the world itself remains stable. It only reveals itself in some ways to
be different from before.
3. The world as the Being in a space of play (Spielraum) for the either-or of truth and
falsity. Every world-projection testifies to a going-beyond beings that are
manifest at any time, toward the world. Only this going-beyond makes
it possible to keep constantly in view the eventual transformation of
beings into non-beings. The world is, in other words, only grasped when
Being is envisaged in a space of play (Spielraum) for the either-or of truth
and falsity. It is in this way that we have to understand Heidegger’s talk
Heidegger’s Conception of Truth 107
Notes
1
Compare, for example, Heidegger 1990 GA 26, 158; 1984, 127.
2
“The time of my life which flows along that of my neighbor is thus separated by
the depth of an abyss (abgrundtief geschieden), and even this word, with its vivid
image (Bildlichkeit), still says too little” (Husserl 1973 Hua XV, 339).
3
“Above all the positive understanding of negation is important for the research
that moves primarily and exclusively by exhibiting the matters at issue. Phenom-
enological research itself accords negation an eminent position: Negation as
something carried out after a prior acquisition and disclosure of some substantive
content” (Heidegger 1992 GA 19, 560; 1997, 388).
4
In the self-critical remark made in the lecture of 1929–1930, Heidegger mentions
this passage as one of two passages that avoid the error that he had just
discovered.
5
Here we find the other passage that Heidegger excludes in his self-critique of
1929–1930 from the newly discovered error. It says here: “The full existential and
ontological meaning of the statement ‘Dasein is in the truth’ also says equiprimor-
dially that ‘Dasein is in the untruth.’ ”
Chapter 7
Already in Being and Time, Heidegger considers that things do not have in
themselves the principle of their intelligibility. We, human beings, must
distinguish reality from the real: “But the fact that Reality is ontologically
grounded in the Being of Dasein, does not signify that only when Dasein
exists and as long as Dasein exists, can the Real be as that which in itself
it is” (Heidegger 1962, 255). Or even more explicit: “Being (not entities
[Seiende]) is dependent upon the understanding of Being; that is to say,
Reality [Realität] (not the Real [das Reale]) is dependent upon care” (ibid.).
Once the being of things is correlated to the being-in-the world of human
beings, Heidegger, like Husserl before him, has to contend with the label
of idealism.
The above quotes from Being and Time state that the real is not depen-
dent on Dasein. What cannot happen without Dasein is the possibility
to say about the real that “it is” or that “it is not.” The status of the real,
before it can be meaningful to Dasein, is undifferentiated in the sense
that nobody would be there to make any assessment of it. This means that
nothing can be said about it (or, to paraphrase Maurice Blanchot, if the
question is about what the real was, before it is meaningful to Dasein,
there was nobody there to ask such a question). While Dasein obviously
is not the cause for the being of things, Dasein is nevertheless the thresh-
old of their being. In Being and Time, this threshold is called the sense
(Sinn). In the 1930s, the sense becomes the truth. “The meaning (Sinn)
(See Being and Time), i.e., . . . the truth of be-ing” (Heidegger 1999, 31).
This change has a significant impact on the state of limbo of the real,
before it entered the realm of what can “be” or “not be.” If the sense is
now the truth, something is already true—and this means for Heidegger
“unconcealed”—before it can be said to be or not. The sense as truth thus
precedes the Dasein of Being and Time and is no longer “that in which the
intelligibility [Verständlichkeit] of something maintains itself” (Heidegger
1962, 193). Moreover, it means that the undifferentiated state of “what is,”
before it makes sense, is no longer the fact that nobody is there to be con-
cerned with what a thing might be. The non-ontological qualification of
undifferentiation in Being and Time became in the 1930s the ontological
qualification of what is not being, but already unfolds as what has been
unconcealed.
These torturous formulations are not gratuitous. They point to
Heidegger’s search for an alternative meaning of “to be.” In the 1930s,
Heidegger acknowledges a movement of entering into being. Yet, unlike
in Being and Time, this movement does not consist in an act of conferring
being. It is no longer Dasein that “be-deutet” beings. Instead, there is an
antecedent meaning-giver. As Heidegger says of Hölderlin, what Hölderlin
poetized is not what he meant, “it is rather that which meant him [was ihn
meinte] as what called him in this task of the poet [Dichtertum]” (Heidegger
1982 GA 52, 13). Something can thus be true while its mode of being has
not yet been determined. “What is true [is]: what stands in truth and so
becomes a being or a non-being [unseiend]” (Heidegger 1999, 241). In the
1930s, Heidegger holds that there is an instance or a process that makes
something be a being, and this is the true. What is true “lets a being be a
being” (ibid.).
In such a framework, being has to be understood adjectivally: “to be”
means to become being or to enter being. Only then can something “be”
114 Pol Vandevelde
the entity it is now: it was not such an entity before entering being, although
it was already true in the sense of unconcealed. Thus, when we say that an
entity “is,” we in fact say that it “is being” (understood as an adjective) and
this means it “became being” in the sense of entering into being.
Heidegger’s adjectival understanding of being has several significant
ramifications:
comportment of Dasein. Being has now its own motion of unfolding and
its own history.
4. Beings, which have “become being” are now what they are once “pre-
served.” This preservation (Verwahrung) “first of all lets beings be—and
indeed those beings that they are and can be in the truth of the not-yet-
differentiated being and the manner in which this truth is unfolded . . .
The sheltering [Bergung] itself is enacted in and as Da-sein” (Heidegger
1999, 49). Although he does not explicitly distinguish them, Heidegger
understands the preservation in two different senses. In the first sense
there is a preservation of the true in unconcealment, before something
has become “being.” In the second sense there is a preservation when pre-
cisely something has become “being.” Correlatively, Heidegger speaks of
“un-being” in two different senses: either as what has been unconcealed
and is true, but has not yet become “being” or as something that has
become “being” but not in truth. In the latter sense, Heidegger tells us,
for example, that “beings can still ‘be’ in the abandonment of beings,
under whose dominance the immediate availability and usefulness and
serviceability of every kind (e.g., everything must serve the people) obvi-
ously make up what is a being and what is not [was seiend ist und was nicht]”
(22). In this second sense, “to be” means to remain when abandoned by
being. This latter mode of being is characterized as a fall (Verfall) (22),
so that “what is an ‘actual’ being is a non-being [das Un-seiende]” (22).
This gradation in being with regard to “what is” goes hand in hand with
a gradation in unconcealment. For Heidegger notes that even for the pris-
oner in the cave, things were unconcealed. Only when things were shown
to the prisoner, were they more being. Heidegger sees a direct correlation
between what Plato says about ta tote horomena alesthetera (“what the prison-
ers saw in the cave was truer”) and ta nun deiknumena (“what the prisoner is
shown,” which is “more being”). Heidegger can then say: “The more uncon-
cealed the unconcealed is, the closer do we come to beings . . . Thus the
coming closer to beings goes hand in hand with the increase of the uncon-
cealment of beings (mit der Steigerung der Unverborgenheit des Seienden) and
vice versa” (Heidegger 1988 GA 34, 33).
There is in fact a third term in the correlation. To the “gradation of
unconcealment” (der Grad seiner Un-verborgenheit) and the “increase of
beings themselves” (die Steigerung des Seienden selbst) (Heidegger 1988 GA
34, 33), we have to add the proximity that prisoners have to beings.
The proximity [Nähe] to beings, i.e., the being-there of Dasein, the inner
proximity of the being-human to beings (or the distance), the gradation
[Grad] of the unconcealment of beings, the increase [Steigerung] of beings
themselves as beings, these three are linked together [verkettet].
(Heidegger 1988 GA 34, 33)
This interconnection explains why “there is ‘more being’ ” (es gibt ‘Seienderes’)
(33–34). The place of human beings in the chain of unfolding of being is
crucial for Heidegger. It means that “proximity and distance with regard
to beings modify [verändern] beings themselves” (34). In Plato, it is the pris-
oner’s comportment toward things that measures the increase in uncon-
cealment and the correlate increase in being. This is what Heidegger calls
freedom. “Whether . . . beings become more being or more un-being
[unseiender], this lies in the freedom of human beings” (60). When the
prisoners were held in the cave, things might well be unconcealed, but
they were “un-being” (in the adjectival sense); they were not in truth. The
prisoners believed that there are only beings and knew “nothing of being,
of the understanding of being” (52). When the prisoner is freed, he comes
closer to the ideas; this determines the increase of being.
By correlating the increase of being with the comportment of human
beings, Heidegger can then understand Plato’s notion of idea in a pre-
Platonic sense, that is, not as eternal models located in another world,
but as the very heart of the unfolding of things to which human beings
themselves contribute. The idea is thus not in the thing, but not radically
118 Pol Vandevelde
what is seen in advance, what is grasped in advance and what lets beings
be [Seiendes Duchlassende], as the interpretation of being [Auslegung des
“Seins”]. The idea lets us see what beings are, lets beings so to speak
through it come to us [zukommen] . . . Being, the idea is what lets being be
[das Durchlassende]: light. (57)
The idea not only gives the thing its outlook so that it can be present; it
also brings us in the presence of things so that they can matter to us. Ideas
give to things their visibility and to us the capacity to see: “We only see a
being-book (Buch-seiendes) when we understand the meaning of its being
[Seinssinn] in light of the what-being [Was-sein], of the ‘idea’,—what is seen
through the idea” (57).
It is this difference between the reality of ideas, on the one hand, and what
we take reality to be (things), on the other, that supports the view of degrees
in being. At the top of the scale, Plato puts ideas as what is both most uncon-
cealed and most being (das Unverborgenste und das Seiendste) (Heidegger 1988
GA 34, 69). At the bottom of the scale (in the cave) is the sensible world,
which is “unbeing” (me on) (although still understood as a mode of being):
Plato considers the sensual realm as encompassing the me on; this is usu-
ally translated as “non-beings”—more precisely, we should say: whatever
is not truly a being, those beings which, according to Plato’s doctrine,
look like beings yet are not, and therefore should not properly be called
beings . . . ouk on names that which merely is not; me on names something
that “is,” yet is not in truth; for example the house that is present at hand
is indeed not nothing, but in it the essence of house presents itself only
in this particular, and moreover transitory, appearance, in accordance
with a particular size, as made of particular material, and according to a
particular form. (Heidegger 1984 GA 53, 27; 1996, 24)
Heidegger’s Fluid Ontology in 1930s 119
Plato himself. For Plato puts the idea of the good as the highest “cause” and
this cause was named to theion, the divine (das Göttliche) (1978, 233).
The introduction of the divine in the unfolding of things reinforces again
Heidegger’s non-subjectivistic framework. Although the comportment of
human beings is linked to the increase or decrease in the being of things,
human beings are only a parameter in the process of unfolding. While
the Da-sein in the 1931 lecture course on Plato was still human Dasein,
it becomes in the Contributions a space and time “in-between,” between
human beings and the gods. But Da-sein as “in-between” does not precede
the relationship between human beings and gods. Both the members of
the relationship and the relationship itself (as Da-sein) are “appropriated”
or “enowned” (ereignet) at the same time. Da-sein is in fact the sheltering of
gods and human beings. Once this event of appropriation or this enown-
ing occurs, “what is true comes to be preserved” (Heidegger 1999, 342).
The correlation between the increase in unconcealment, the increase in
being, and the freedom of human beings, mentioned above, now reveals its
significance. While Heidegger used Plato to articulate an ontological view
of things as fluid stages in a process of unfolding, he can now draw the con-
sequences of this view to human beings and gods. He has established that
“be-ing arises [entspringt] unto ‘a being’ ” (Heidegger 1999, 175) so that
“a being is above all sheltered in be-ing in such a manner of course that
a being can immediately be abandoned by be-ing and continue to exist
[bestehen bleiben] only as semblance” (226). He also linked this possibility of
abandonment to the comportment of human beings now playing the abso-
lute subjects in the last version of Americanism or Bolshevism. He can then
conclude that there is also a fluidity of human beings. They have freedom,
but their freedom is not of a voluntarist nature: they are in fact set free, and
what sets them free is being itself. When this happens, there is Da-sein as
an open space-time: “Be-ing sets free in that it enowns Da-sein” (340).
The fluidity of things and human beings also bears upon the divine. The
gods he speaks of are clearly not the gods of theology or faith.7 Rather,
Heidegger takes seriously Nietzsche’s remark about the absence of new
gods in thousands of years. Gods themselves are sheltered and preserved
(Heidegger 1999, 185), so that old gods may disappear and new ones arise.
Gods are guises that can change so that we may have future gods that
are different from those we have known.8 Since human beings and the
gods are only a parameter in a process of historical proportion, the paideia
that will lead us toward more being cannot be a teaching or a revelation,
which are still subjective enterprises. We saw that ideas are enablers, letting
things unfold and letting us be in their presence. But we cannot represent
Heidegger’s Fluid Ontology in 1930s 121
not use accent marks” (108).10 If we could have a grasp of that shining into
beings, we would see the fluidity of the process making things what they
are; we would see them entering and exiting being; we could be struck
by the radiance of things before they become actualizations of possibles.
Dialogue provides Heidegger the chance to have this possibility. Plato’s
idea is a divine dimension, shining through things and this divine dimen-
sion manifests itself as dialogue.
Recall that the preservation was twofold: there is a preservation in the true
before something is being and there is preservation of the thing once it has
entered into being. Also, recall that ideas have two appearings: backward-
looking, it is the appearing of phusis as unconcealment and forward-looking,
it is what gives the things their appearance. The preservation of the thing
in the second sense corresponds to the appearing of the idea in the second
sense. Now, the preservation that allows a thing to be being does not fall from
the sky, but is, Heidegger tells us, a configuration, the result of a dichten. This
configuration also happens when a change in the unfolding of the thing
occurs, when, for example, things from less being become more being—and
poetry does precisely that: “Poetry makes a being more being” (Heidegger
1988 GA 34, 64). What Heidegger calls foundation (Gründung) is the moment
when “these few, isolated, strange . . . in different ways as poets, thinkers, as
builders and visual artists [Bildende], as agents and people of action ground
and shelter the truth of be-ing by re-configuring [Umgestaltung] beings in
beings themselves” (Heidegger 1984 GA 45, 215).
The dialogue between human beings and gods, allowing gods to shine
through things and thus allowing ideas to appear and things to come to us, is,
therefore, not an exchange between human beings and gods, but a configu-
ration or setting-into-work. It is within the dialogue that ideas, being config-
ured, function as enablers. Heidegger’s wager in his a-subjective effort to find
the right insight is that language is the dialogue that links together the fluid-
ity of things, the fluidity of human beings and the fluidity of the gods. And the
ideas are the enabling aspect of language that is not subjective, but divine in
the sense of not being contained in things and not coming from the perspec-
tive of human beings. Language for Heidegger is in my view what ideas are for
Plato: what prepares for things their dwelling in the intelligible realm.
Language alone brings what is, as something that is, into the Open for
the first time . . . Language, by naming beings for the first time, first
Heidegger’s Fluid Ontology in 1930s 123
The word is the threshold a thing has to pass in order to reach the realm
of intelligibility and thus to be. “Only the word makes a being be a being”
(Heridegger 1999 GA 85, 72).11 All these formulations could be substituted
for those Heidegger uses to describe Plato’s ideas. But the significant dif-
ference, which allows Heidegger not to reify ideas, is that language is a
configuration or a Dichtung. Ideas themselves are such configurations: “It
is only from a world that ‘the’ sun and ‘the’ wind come to appearance and
are only what they are to the extent that they are poeticized from ‘this’
‘world’ ” (Heidegger 1982 GA 52, 40). Let us note the emphasis on “the”
sun and “the” wind, which makes them sound like Platonic ideas. There is
a “Dichten of astronomy and meteorology” that pertains to modern natural
explanation on the mode of “calculation and planning” (40).
This latter mode of dichten is, as we saw, part of the abandonment of
being in which Heidegger believes we find ourselves. The abandonment
manifests itself through language; more specifically through the disap-
pearance of a genuine language. As we saw in the Introduction to this
volume, the German language, Heidegger tells us, suffers from an “ameri-
canization of language” (Heidegger 1982 GA 52, 10) through which lan-
guage has become a mere means of exchange. “It may be that our language
is ‘German’ and still we speak completely ‘American’ ” (Heidegger 1984
GA 53, 80; 1996, 65. Translation modified). This “alienation toward the
word” (Entfremdung zum Wort) (Heidegger 1982 GA 52, 11) bears upon the
way a thing can be preserved (and this means: can “be”). Since the most
important way of being preserved is precisely by being said, a subversion of
language amounts to a subversion of the way things are preserved. It is a
contamination of the very ontological roots of reality. How does this onto-
logical connection between things and words function?
Heidegger applies to words the twofold aspect of preservation, which
explained the two appearings of ideas. The word has two sides: forward-
looking, it is what provides a thing with its public clothing, allowing the
thing named and nameable to have currency and be a node in human rela-
tionships and dealings in the world; it is one mode of preservation. But the
word is also, backward-looking, as the other mode of preservation, what
brings the true to its crystallization in a thing and as such carries with it
the trace of the withdrawal of being. Before the word is available, the move-
ment of disclosure or the unfolding of the truth has already started. The
124 Pol Vandevelde
word both brings a thing to its being and conceals the truth of that thing in
the sense that it conceals the movement of entering being. “The word itself
already discloses something (familiar) and thus hides that which has to
be brought into the open through thinking-saying [im denkerischen Sagen]”
(Heidegger 1999, 58).
However, a common language cannot speak the movement of entering
being, nor can a new language. “The truth of be-ing cannot be said with the
ordinary language that today is ever more widely misused and destroyed
by incessant talking. . . . Or can a new language for be-ing be invented?
No” (Heidegger 1999b, 54). If we cannot invent a new language, the only
path left is to perform some operation on language so as to recover from
it its unveiling power. This happens when the word “fails.” For, when the
word fails, the movement of entering being is not brought to its conclusion
in the form of a word functioning as a label. This movement of entering
being itself appears, which is, seen from the perspective of the thing once
named, a concealing. By failing, the word reveals, because the thing that
could be named, but is not, is deprived of its entry into the realm of intel-
ligibility and thus is “not being” (in the adjectival sense); it is disclosed as
un-being.
The word fails [es verschlägt einem das Wort], not as an occasional event—in
which an accomplishable speech or expression does not take place . . . —but
originarily. The word does not even come to word [das Wort kommt gar nicht
zum Wort], even though it is precisely when the word escapes one [verschlagen]
that the word begins to take its first leap. The word’s escaping one is enown-
ing as the hint and onset of be-ing. (Heidegger 1999, 26)
Notes
1
This playing out of the first and the other beginning is the second joining of the
Contributions under the name of “playing-forth.”
2
Human beings themselves are under the illusion that they are absolute subjects,
although they have been brought to such an understanding. “The abandonment
of be-ing happens to beings, indeed to beings in the whole, and thus also and
precisely to that being which as man stands in the midst of beings and thereby
forgets their be-ing” (Heidegger 1999, 81). This subjectivism corresponds to the
simplistic idealism Heidegger derided in Being and Time.
3
Heidegger lists sixteen signs of such an abandonment (Heidegger 1999, 82–83).
4
Paul Shorey in the Loeb bi-lingual edition translates as “turned toward more real
things” (Plato 1987, 125). Heidegger translates as Seienderem zugewendet (1988 GA
34, 31).
5
Shorey translates as “more real” and Heidegger as unverborgener.
6
“Beings differentiate themselves in more or less being” (Heidegger 1988 GA 34, 33).
7
Recall Heidegger’s stern warning in Introduction to Metaphysics: “What is really
asked in our question [why are there beings at all instead of nothing?] is, for faith,
foolishness. Philosophy consists in such a foolishness. A ‘Christian philosophy’ is
a round square and a misunderstanding” (Heidegger 2000, 8).
8
When Heidegger speaks of god in the singular or gods in the plural, he only
points to a place-holder for the divine. Whether it is one god or several gods, this
126 Pol Vandevelde
is not decidable yet. It will depend on the particular configuration of the new
Da-sein of the other beginning. “The undecidability concerning which god and
whether a god can, in utmost distress, once again arise, from which way of being
of man and in what way—this is what is named with the name ‘gods’ ” (Heidegger
1999, 308).
9
Let us note that gods are not being, for “be-ing is never a determination of god
itself. Rather be-ing is that which the godding of gods needs, in order nonetheless
to remain totally differentiated from be-ing” (Heidegger 1999, 169). Strictly
speaking, “gods ‘are’ not at all. Be-ing ‘is’ the between [Zwischen] in the midst of
beings and gods . . . Not attributing being to ‘gods’ initially means only that being
does not stand ‘over’ gods and that gods do not stand ‘over’ being. But gods do
need be-ing” (308–309).
10
To ascribe this collapse of the two meanings to the Greeks is highly dubious. We
foreigners may see it as one word and we indeed have to be careful when learning
Greek to remember which one has the stress on the first and which one on the
second syllable. But the reason is that we learn the word through reading and
writing. It is thus a visual bias that causes the similarity between the two words.
When these words were spoken by the Greeks they were as different as words can
be, like our English words desert and desert; these English words pose a problem
only for foreigners, precisely because they learn English very often by dealing
with the written words. It is because of this visual bias that théa and theá or desert
and desert look the same. Not so for native speakers who learn words phonetically
and for whom a difference in stress is all that is needed to differentiate two words.
Heidegger’s speculation with thea is as dubious as a speculation about an Anglo-
Saxon metaphysics associating a barren place with what is deserved.
11
Or, as Heidegger will write later in a more colorful and powerful manner, “when
we go to the well, when we go through the woods, we are always already going
through the word ‘well,’ through the word ‘woods,’ even if we do not speak the
words and do not think of anything relating to language” (Heidegger 1971, 132).
12
If, indeed, language plays a role analogous to the role of ideas for Plato, language
not only provides the thing with its outlook, it also shows the extent to which the
gods shine through in things, and how much we are “sayers” (Heidegger 2000,
86). To be a sayer means to be capable of saying “it is.” “It is because human
beings can say ‘is,’ because they ‘have’ a relation to being, that they are able to
‘say’ at all, that they ‘have’ the word, that they are zoon logon echon” (Heidegger
1984 GA 53, 112; 1996, 90).
Part IV
Harmony in Opposition
On Merleau-Ponty’s Heraclitean Vision of Truth
Shazad Akhtar
basis of his later ontology of the “visible” and the “invisible,” the “sensible”
and “sentient.”
Let us begin with Heraclitus. Here is a list of many of the fragments (ren-
dered here by two different translators) that illustrate the present theme (I
have numbered them arbitrarily for reference):
1. “The teacher of most is Hesiod. It is him they know as knowing most, who
did not recognize day and night: they are one.” (Kahn 1983, 19/37)
2. “The counter-thrust brings together, and from tones at variance comes
perfect attunement, and all things come to pass through conflict.”
(Kahn 1983, 75/63)
3. “They do not comprehend how a thing agrees at variance with itself: [it
is] an attunement turning back [on itself], like that of the bow and lyre.”
(Kahn 1983, 78/65)
4. “The cosmos works/by harmony of tensions/like the lyre and bow.”
(Haxton 2001, 56/37)
5. “From the strain/of binding opposites/comes harmony.” (Haxton 2001,
46/31)
6. “The beginning and the end are shared in the circumference of a cir-
cle.” (Kahn 1983, 99/75)
7. “The way up and down is one and the same.” (Kahn 1983, 103/75)
8. “Therefore, good/and ill are one.” (Haxton 2001, 57/37)
The way in which opposites may be said to be “one” surely varies, and, it
must be admitted, not always in particularly (philosophically) interesting
ways. Should we interpret Heraclitus in a more mundane way than people
typically do? For instance, one may say that day and night are “one” in the
sense that they seamlessly blend into each other, with no strictly discern-
ible boundary between them. But then why would Hesiod bother to “rec-
ognize” such a triviality, or be rebuked for failing to do so? Fragments 2–6,
as well as possibly 8, could be interpreted in far bolder ways. Certainly the
notion that a thing “agrees at variance with itself” (3) is meant to challenge
our intuitions, just as Heraclitus himself prefaces (3) with “They do not
comprehend . . .,” “they” presumably being those—the hoi polloi, natural
philosophers, or the ancient poets—operating foolishly and with a com-
mon sense bias.
Heraclitus’ own suspicion of “common sense” is evident from his famous
denunciation of Homer, reported to us by Aristotle, for giving lyrical voice
to the common-sense view that life would be better without conflict than
with it: “Heraclitus reproaches the poet for the verse ‘Would that Conflict
132 Shazad Akhtar
might vanish from among gods and men!’ For there would be no harmonie
without high and low notes nor any animals without male and female, both
of which are opposites” (Kahn 1983, 81[A]/67). This also seems to be what
is at play when Heraclitus startlingly declares that “War is the father of
all and king of all” (Kahn 1983, 83/67). In this light, Heraclitus’ observa-
tion of the identity of beginning-point and end-point in the revolution of
a circle (6) has clear cosmological implications: just as the circle could not
exist except as a manifestation of conflict, permeating each point of its
circumference, so the cosmos could not exist without being a harmonie of
opposition. A circle is perhaps something mundane, but to see a circle in
this way, as illustrating this concept, is not.
Let us next consider the famous “river fragments,” which can be read in
much the same spirit as what has preceded. Here are the relevant remarks,
first from a second-hand report from Plutarch:
One cannot step twice into the same river, nor can one grasp any mortal
substance in a stable condition, but it scatters and again gathers; it forms
and dissolves, and approaches and departs. (Kahn 1983, 51/53)
These particular fragments, and other related ones, have been subject to
much varied interpretation. I think that a useful way to think about them
arises out of a consistent reading of the idea of identity-in-opposition. The
river is a symbol of a certain paradox: it lacks any self-identity, but does not, all
the same, cease to “be” a river. It “rests by changing.” But its being is the same
as its becoming, for its self-abiding (“rest”) is also its self-dispersal (“change”).
The line between being and not-being cannot—at least when it comes to
the evanescent things of this world (“mortal substance”)—be sharply drawn.
But that is because, against what Plato and Aristotle will later contend, to be
“identical to oneself” in a way that excludes or precludes change is an illu-
sion, even though there being a river as such is not. Are we not talking about
one now? There is a river, but what it is is this: self-abiding-qua-self-disper-
sal. Paradoxically, then, the river’s instability is its stability, its non-being its
being. (Thus there may be another sense in which “Phusis loves to hide.”)
Merleau-Ponty’s Heraclitean Vision of Truth 133
becomes “object,” and vice-versa.3 The most dramatic case is that of one’s
own hands touching one another; but Merleau-Ponty sees “reversibility” as
extending beyond the sense of touch to include vision, which explains the
title of The Visible and the Invisible and the repeated references to, for exam-
ple, the “strange adhesion of the seer and the visible” (Merleau-Ponty 1969,
140). Husserl had initially distinguished touching from vision by noticing
that while touch is reversible, vision is not. That is, we cannot see ourselves
seeing in the way we can touch ourselves touching. But Merleau-Ponty
questions the validity of this distinction on two counts. First, vision could
not truly “see” the world if the world did not “adhere” to its glance; and sec-
ond, even in self-touching, there is no complete coincidence of sensing and
sensed—in fact, “non-coincidence” turns out to be one of Merleau-Ponty’s
fundamental ideas, and it applies as truly to this case as to any other. As he
explains in one characteristic passage:
Thus while it is true that we cannot truly “see ourselves seeing,” in that the
eye cannot bend its vision back upon itself, neither, finally can touch. And
to the extent that either sense is reversible, it is reversible in this complex
manner—that is, with a combination of identity and difference.
There are basically three fundamental lessons or themes Merleau-Ponty
takes from reversibility. The first is that of the unity or “chiasm” of subject
and object, touching and touched, sentient and sensible, and so on. The sec-
ond is, in apparent opposition to the first, “non-coincidence”; and the third
is the interplay of identity and difference, chiasm and non-coincidence,
that produces the paradoxical “sameness without identity” (Merleau-Ponty
1969, 261) that we experience with respect to the world as well as to other
people (e.g., in the paradigmatic case of a shaking of hands). After all, the
phenomenon of reversibility could not become known to us if it were merely
a difference or merely an identity. Clearly the sensible and the sentient are
Merleau-Ponty’s Heraclitean Vision of Truth 135
not simply two but rather in some way one (or else how could they be revers-
ible and simply “trade places”?), and yet they are two, since if they were
simply one, then how could they be related “intentionally” as seer to seen,
toucher to touched, and so on? This interweaving of identity and difference
is embodied in Merleau-Ponty’s reciprocal expressions “difference without
contradiction” and “identity without superposition” (Merleau-Ponty 1969,
135). Thus, “non-coincidence” for Merleau-Ponty serves exactly the same
function in his discourse as Heraclitus’ anti-Homeric emphasis on conflict
does in the latter’s discourse: to underscore the “oppositional” element of
identity-in-opposition.
all things one.” But what might the next part mean—“from one thing all”?
Is this a reflection of Heraclitus’ notorious “fire-monism”? It is hard to
say, but if we take the first part of the fragment into account and logically
connect beginning to end, it seems that Heraclitus’ point may be that the
many are united in their differences (“consonant and dissonant”)—that is,
they are what they are only in relations of difference with everything else.
This paradoxically brings all things together “as one,” inseparably linked
to each other in their unlikenesses.
Of course this echoes the familiar modern idea, expressed by Spinoza
and picked up by the German Idealists, that “determination is negation.”
There is certainly support for this interpretation in this rendering of a
Heraclitean fragment by Haxton: “Some, blundering/ with what I set before
you,/ try in vain with empty talk/ to separate the essences of things/ and
say how each thing truly is” (Haxton 2001, 1/3). In other words, one cannot
say how each thing truly “is,” since it is nothing in itself, only a reflection of
the whole. The parallel with Buddhism surfaces again.
As for Merleau-Ponty, Fred Evans puts it well when he says,
night, winter and summer, war and peace, satiety and hunger . . . ” (Kahn
1983, 123/85), we can see how he might agree with Merleau-Ponty that spirit
and nature are “two leaves” of a single Being. The macrocosm/microcosm
correlation in Heraclitus is reflected in the fact that his cosmological dis-
course seems to have an ultimate personal and moral significance:
The superficial pellicle of the visible is only for my vision and for my
body. But the depth beneath this surface contains my body and hence
contains my vision. My body as a visible thing is contained within the full
spectacle. (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 138)
Has not our discussion consisted in showing that the relationship between
the two terms [Being and Nothingness] (whether one takes them in a rela-
tive sense, within the world, or in an absolute sense, of the index of the
thinker and what he thinks) covers a swarm of relations with double mean-
ing, incompatible and yet necessary to one another (complementarity, as
the physicists say today), and that this complex totality is the truth of the
abstract dichotomy from which we started? (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 92)
Position, negation, negation of the negation: this side, the other, the
other than the other. What do I bring to the problem of the same and
Merleau-Ponty’s Heraclitean Vision of Truth 141
the other? This: that the same be the other than the other, and identity
difference of difference—this 1) does not realize a surpassing, a dialectic
in the Hegelian sense; 2) is realized on the spot, by encroachment, thick-
ness, spatiality. (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 264)9
Most noteworthy for us here are his self-comparison with Hegelian dialec-
tic and his rejection of its teleology of “surpassing.” Merleau-Ponty is care-
ful to identify what he calls a “trap in the dialectic” and the “bad dialectic”
(Merleau-Ponty 1969, 94) that ensues, ironically echoing Hegel’s own
terminological style (“bad infinity,” etc.). As against these, Merleau-Ponty
advances a new form or method of thinking, “hyperdialectic”:
his view is that philosophy itself is replete with them, just insofar as it is
philosophical. One of the more paradigmatic paradoxes concerns the
interplay of “distance” and “proximity.” This is the dialectic that defines
our strange intimacy with things, even as things remain resolutely “outside”
of what Husserl calls the “sphere of immanence.” Indeed, Merleau-Ponty
takes the Husserlian notion of an “immanent transcendency” of things in
consciousness to its logical conclusion:
The emphasized clause here shows that Merleau-Ponty is not talking about a
distance “in this respect” but a proximity “in another”—one of the mundane
routes to simple non-contradiction. He reiterates this same idea of distance-
qua-proximity in The Visible and the Invisible : “this distance is not the contrary of
this proximity, it is deeply consonant with it, it is synonymous with it” (Merleau-
Ponty 1969, 135 [My emphasis]). And in a similar vein: “Vision does not com-
pletely blend into the visible; nonetheless we are close to it, palpation, gaze
envelops things, clothes them with its own flesh” (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 131).
For Merleau-Ponty, as for Heraclitus, the tightly wound unity of contraries
in Being actually serves to preserve as opposed to wound its intelligibility.
This, in fact, is the true depth of paradox—that it is the only way to say what
is true, rather than itself being a threat to truth or the saying of it. Thus
in one place Merleau-Ponty remarks that Husserl tries wrongly to disen-
tangle knots, since disentanglement destroys intelligibility (Merleau-Ponty
1969, 268). What he has in mind is that Cartesian dualism, for instance,
has increased “intelligibility” of parts at the expense of making entirely
unintelligible the whole—that is, the whole being that is alive, embodied,
thinking, and sensing. In this way, his analytic procedure, separating sub-
stances “in thought” that cannot be separated (by Descartes’ admission)
“in experience,” is doomed to failure—and “sterile” contradiction.
subjectivity and objectivity, humanity and Nature. Yet this is also true of
Heraclitus, whose pivotal role in the history of Western philosophy may lie
in his discovery that cosmology and psychology are intertwined—indeed,
reversible.
Notes
1
All citations of Heraclitus include both the fragment number (as determined by
the translator and compiler in question—orderings of the fragments vary widely
from translator to translator) and, next, the page number from the cited
volume.
2
See, for example, Merleau-Ponty 1969, 92.
3
See Merleau-Ponty 2003, 217, 224; 1969, 141–142; 147, 148; 154, 155; 223; 272.
4
See the following statement: “the homogeneity of the measured and the measur-
ing implies that the subject makes common cause with space.”
5
There is also something analogous in Merleau-Ponty’s description of what Mat-
isse’s method of painting and the “body of behavior” in the organism have in
common: “Threads are tied up, which come from everywhere, and which consti-
tute independent forms, and at the same time, he finds that these threads realize
something which has a unity” (Merleau-Ponty 2003, 154). He even invokes sexual-
ity in this regard. “Thus the sexual is coextensive with the human not as a unique
cause, but as a dimension outside of which nothing exists” (282).
6
Compare: “Every attempt at elucidation brings us back to the dilemmas”
(Merleau-Ponty 1969, 11). It is interesting that one of the early words he uses for
his method is in fact “elucidation” (See, for example: Merleau-Ponty 1969, 23).
7
Merleau-Ponty formally endorses a method of “dialectic” in chapter 2 of The Visible
and the Invisible (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 89).
8
The notion that Being contains its own negation ties in with the second of
Merleau-Ponty’s lessons learnt from the reversibility of touch—that is, the impos-
sibility of pure coincidence or a simple “identity of opposites” (Merleau-Ponty
1969, 250–251).
9
Compare, also in an obvious reference to Hegel: “Against the doctrine of contra-
diction, absolute negation, the either/or—Transcendence is identity within
difference” (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 225).
Chapter 9
But just as the grave-diggers in Hamlet become familiar with skulls, so logicians
become familiar with truth.
(Russell 2009, 280)
The “universal experience” to which Hegel refers here is the fact that logi-
cal analysis reduces every true proposition to a special kind of identity state-
ment, namely, one that refers, along with every other true proposition, to
the True as the absolute night in which all propositional cows are black—a
result that Wittgenstein, following Frege, will later identify, in addressing
different but related concerns, as a consequence of the formal analysis of
truth.
The trouble, then, is that the proposition undermines itself in both
semantic directions: in the first instance as “tragedy” (the misrecogni-
tion of truth in the “collision” of paradox), in the second instance, but
simultaneously, as “farce” (the masquerade of truth in vacuous iden-
tity). Traditionally, the dilemma between contradiction and tautology
is resolved through the ontological anchor of substance. The problem
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Truth 147
is to see how, apart from nostalgic stipulation, substance can enter the
proposition so as to negotiate the tension between difference and indif-
ference introduced by the copula. Hegel’s insight is, quite simply, to have
recognized, before Frege, that the traditional categorical proposition is
incapable of expressing the relationship between substance, subject and
accident, because it is incapable of representing the logical and metaphys-
ical unity of identity and difference. To do this, to think substance and
subject simultaneously, is to recast the copula as the logico-metaphysical
qua (“is” qua “qua”), thereby overcoming the logical form that immediately
falsifies it. Through this qua, what we might call the modular copula (to bor-
row a term from abstract algebra), substance, subject, predicate, concept,
etc., recover a coordinate proximity to one another in much the same
way as congruence between distinct mathematical groups is established
through integral modulation.
That such predicative or, more broadly, symbolic modulation should play
so central a philosophical role points to an interesting connection between
Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach (“The philosophers have only inter-
preted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”) and Hegel’s
“thesis on Spinoza,” namely, that Spinoza only interpreted truth as sub-
stance; the task is to think it “equally as subject” (Hegel 1977, 10). To make
this connection explicit, it is helpful to mention the work of Alain Badiou,
for whom changing the world (or changing worlds) consists in discerning
or naming a previously unmarked (or “uninterpreted”) logical subject to
which a “revolutionary” subject pledges its fidelity. For Hegel, to name an
event is to pass from affirmative to infinite judgment, a judgment that bears
witness to the fact that the world-totality (substance) is never closed. Long
before Gödel demonstrated the logical impossibility of a jointly consistent
and complete formal system, Hegel maintained, for an otherwise radically
different logic, that the notion of world as a totality of truths is both meta-
physically and logically incoherent. Only through, and as, the succession
and breakdown of particular truths can the world reflect the True. Totality,
as Hegel will eventually understand it, is “the movement of the universal
through determination to individuality, as also the reverse movement from
individuality . . . to the universal” (480). It is, in other words, the continu-
ous return of the subject to itself through the circuit of predication or
judgment. To grasp the True, then, is to comprehend this actualized total-
ity, what Hegel will call, without distinction, the absolute, absolute spirit, or
absolute knowing. From the standpoint of absolute knowing, interpretation
and change are the shapes of the “Bacchanalian revel” through which the
world manifests itself as phenomenon or phantasia.
148 Russell Newstadt and Andrew Cutrofello
judgment must be understood as the mere, or, let us say, the dead signature
of determination, and, as we may now put it, of rational extrapolation.
Talk of form thus takes us directly to talk of determination, which, as the
Phenomenology already makes clear, must be understood as the rational itin-
erary of the subject, qua spirit. What is implicit in the Phenomenology, with
its regular and marked employment of the language of syllogistic deduc-
tion, is programmatically established in the works on logic, namely, that
this itinerary, in turn, is to be identified with the semantic and inferential
processes of the syllogism. With characteristic paradox, the Science of Logic
tells us:
The syllogism is the result of the restoration of the concept in the judgment,
and consequently the unity and the truth of the two. The concept as such
holds its moments sublated in this unity; in judgment, the unity is an
internal or, what amounts to the same, an external one, and although
the moments are connected, they are posited as self-subsisting extremes. In
the syllogism, the determinations of the concept are like the extremes of
the judgment, and at the same time their determinate unity is posited . . .
the syllogism is the completely posited concept; it is, therefore, the
rational. (Hegel 2010, 588)
Since it [the concept] is still in this way the inwardness of this now
acquired externality, in the course of the syllogisms this externality is
equated with the inner unity; the different determinations return into
the latter through the mediation that unites them at first in a third
term. . . . Conversely, however, that determinateness of the concept
which was considered as reality is equally a positedness. For the identity of
the concept’s inwardness and externality has been exhibited as the truth
of the concept not only in this result; on the contrary, already in the
judgment the moments of the concept remain, even in their reciprocal
indifference, determinations that have significance only in their con-
nection. The syllogism is mediation, the complete concept in its posited-
ness. Its movement is the sublation of this mediation in which nothing is
in and for itself, but each thing is only through the mediation of an
other. (Hegel 2010, 624)
gives way to the True as adaequatio rei qua intellectus, and with it discur-
sive thought resolves itself in the infinite modulation of the Concept. This
movement of the Concept, or equivalently the movement of consciousness,
is thus the (perpetual) concentration, and thereby the retraction, of the
inferential record of predication into the Concept itself. This tells deci-
sively against the inferentialist reading of Hegel that Robert Brandom has
devoted himself to spelling out. A truly Hegelian counter-text to his justly
renowned Making it Explicit would bear the title Making it Implicit.
As Hegel makes clear in the Phenomenology’s concluding section on abso-
lute knowing, the Phenomenology has three major turning points, each of
which is expressed in the form of an infinite judgment: (1) “ ‘I’ is a thing”
(“Spirit is a bone”), (2) “The thing is ‘I,’ ” and (3) “ ‘I’=‘I.’ ” Schematically,
Hegel’s idea is that phenomenology is the path by which spirit comes to
determine itself as spirit (“ ‘I’=‘I’ ”) only after determining itself as an indif-
ferent object, first in the realm of nature (“Spirit is a bone”) and then in the
realm of spirit itself (“The [spiritual] thing —e.g., wealth, power, the state,
etc.—is ‘I’ ”). For our purposes, we may focus on the first (natural) form
of spirit’s alienation/reification. The judgment that “spirit is a bone”—or,
more precisely, the judgment that “the being of spirit is a bone” [das Sein des
Geistes ein Knochen ist]—is the climax of the section on Observing Reason
in which spirit manifests itself in the form of the individual judging sub-
ject. The climax is reached when the individual finds itself judged by
another individual who reduces it to the form of a mere object—a mortal
brain enclosed in a skull with a face (the determinations of spirit proper
to physiognomy and phrenology). Reflectively faced with a skull that is its
own eventual caput mortuum, spirit recognizes that, qua individual judging
subject, its being is, in fact, that of a bone. Yet this speculative identity, in
which grammatical and thinking subject together lose themselves in their
objective predicate, immediately discloses its own absurdity through what
is best described, in contemporary parlance, as a major “disconnect.” In
Lacanian terms, to say that the being of spirit is a bone is to indicate the
loss of the enunciating subject in the enunciated subject of predication.
Paradoxically, spirit would be nothing but a bone if we could not say so; but
the fact that we can say so makes it both false and, yet more profoundly,
true. Its truth can only be arrived at, however, once the propositional form
of its enunciation is itself renounced. As Hegel puts it, “the infinite judg-
ment, qua infinite, would be the fulfilment of life that comprehends itself”
(Hegel 1977, 210).
To appreciate what is at stake here, it is helpful to hearken back to the
struggle to the death that marks the advent of the master/slave dialectic,
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Truth 159
Social Epistemology
In recent decades, several philosophers have taken seriously the notion that
traditional individualistic epistemologies are lacking. These contemporary
philosophers are investigating the roles of social relations in knowledge
attainment. The broadened approach, developed mostly among analytic
philosophers, has come to be called social epistemology. There are several
approaches to non-atomistic, social, epistemology. Some (e.g., Fuller 1988)
argue that knowledge is social because it is had by collectives like crowds,
institutions, and countries. Others (e.g., Cohen 1987; Lehrer 1987) focus
Husserl’s (even more) Social Epistemology 163
calls these interactions “intersubjective” and holds that reasoning “gets its
point in a social context” of interaction between individuals, not between
an individual and the object of cognition (141).
Both observation and reasoning rest on background assumptions. That
is, in the background of the discursive interactions involved in determining
whether data gathered counts as observation, and the grounds on which
the challenges and responses at the core of reasoning rest, are assump-
tions. And, “ just as not any old observations will do, so not just any old
assumptions will do” (Longino 1994, 142). The assumptions on which it is
appropriate to rely depend upon a (sometimes tacit) consensus among the
discourse community. These assumptions are public, at least in principle,
even though they are often invisible to those within the scientific com-
munity and not consciously-reflectively decided upon. This public nature
opens the assumptions to critical evaluation which might lead to their
abandonment or modification. Not all assumptions underlying the work of
a scientific community are, in practice, scrutinized, but the presumption
is that they would survive if critically evaluated. This scrutiny “requires
multiple points of view in order to ensure that the hypotheses accepted
by a community do not represent someone’s idiosyncratic interpretation”
of information taken in via experimentation and sense perception (142).
That is to say, the scrutiny underlying both observation and scientific rea-
soning is social in the sense that it cannot be properly understood in terms
of individual epistemic agents.
Since observation, reasoning, and their background assumptions require
discursive interactions that are supposed to “transform the subjective into
the objective,” those interactions ought not merely preserve and dissemi-
nate one subjective point of view over all others but should, instead, “consti-
tute genuine mutual checks” (Longino 1994, 144). In light of this role and
requirement of the discourse, Longino outlines the features of communi-
ties that facilitate criticism and enable a consensus to qualify as knowl-
edge. These are the features of an idealized epistemic community—that
which assures the objectivity of scientific knowledge even while acknowl-
edging the locatedness of scientific observation and reasoning. Longino
argues that in order to make possible scientific knowledge, there must be:
(1) publicly recognized forums for criticism of evidence, methods, and
assumptions of reasoning; (2) criticism that makes possible or leads to the
changing of the community’s theories and beliefs; (3) publicly recognized
standards that make the criticism possible, in the light of which the criti-
cism is made relevant, and by reference to which the theories, hypotheses,
and observational practices are evaluated; and (4) equality of intellectual
166 Kevin Hermberg
authority so that the consensus that obtains is the result of a critical dialog
in which all relevant perspectives are presented and not the result of the
exercise of political or economic power or the silencing of dissenting views
(Longino 1994, 144–145).6 That is to say, there must be space and stan-
dards that make criticism possible and that criticism must truly take place
and not merely be the result of the wielding of political or economic power
in order to silence some perspectives.
Longino contends that scientific objectivity is the result of such criti-
cal discourse. The first three criteria of the ideal epistemic community
assure a sort of objectivity (or at least that what one claims is not relevant
to the individual agent); the fourth avoids prioritizing one context over the
others. Because this discursive work requires and involves more than one
epistemic agent, scientific knowledge is both social and objective.
If such an ideal epistemic community and critical discourse obtain, that
which survives the criticism will be objective in the sense of being available
to everyone and not dependent on any one particular point of view for
its validity. That is to say, the view Longino puts forward recognizes the
locatedness of epistemic agents while attempting to preserve objectivity
and thus avoid relativism—all without prioritizing one context over the
others. If the four criteria are met, Longino’s view appears to escape the
intolerable choice that most social epistemologies face and thus offer a
significant advance when it comes to dealing with the social dimensions
of knowledge.7 Her view embraces, rather than attempts to explain away,
the fact that much of our knowledge involves others (because it comes to
us through testimony or because it depends on concepts that we inherit
from others) and it addresses ways in which knowledge is social at levels
more fundamental than many other thinkers carefully consider (observa-
tion and reasoning).
Despite its strengths, this account of scientific knowledge is still vulner-
able to Solomon’s critique that the social epistemologists ultimately rely
on atomistic epistemic agents. Longino argues that science is objective
because of the critical evaluative processes involved and she argues that
scientific knowledge is social at a deep level because the very processes
of science—observation and reasoning—are social. Longino argues that
what qualifies as observation for science and which data matter depend
on the background assumptions, categories, and so on and are thus social.
However, the legitimate observations and data are based on perception.
The view described above holds that observation is not simple sense per-
ception, but the view appears to be based upon such perception. That is to
say, underneath the social level investigated and articulated by Longino is
Husserl’s (even more) Social Epistemology 167
the individual, atomistic, subject engaged with the world via sense percep-
tion. It is, then a social epistemology that stands on the shoulders of non-
social sense perception.
Although not widely recognized as such, Husserl’s epistemological proj-
ect is social at an even deeper level because the raw materials of the criti-
cal discourse, sense perception, cannot be had by individual agents in the
absence of others.
reveals that others are involved in its constitution and thus things appear
from within horizons inherent in phenomena. A horizon, in this sense, is
a referral network or a series of relationships. The life-world provides the
horizons.
Husserl distinguished between internal and external horizons. Internal
horizons offer the subject all the other possible perspectives that can be
taken on an object—the perspectives included in the apperception of the
object which thus make it transcendent as an object. External horizons
offer the relationships between the object and the surrounding world.
Husserl summarized the horizons inherent in perception as follows:
So, others are involved in (or referred to by) one’s conscious perceptual
activity and others can make possible one’s access to idealities with which
one is not familiar. That is, others play both the sort of confirmation and
consensus roles they play in Longino’s epistemology, but they also play a
more foundational role of making access to objects possible.
The Crisis is one of the more obviously social of Husserl’s texts, but even
the more atomistic texts like Ideas offer an epistemology that is more funda-
mentally social than the “social epistemologies” of the past few decades.
Ideas on a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy: a General
Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (Husserl 1983) was first published in
1913. This is the text with which Husserl reached a full-fledged phenom-
enology. As articulated in Ideas, Husserl’s view is that the objects of one’s
knowledge, or even perception, or memory, and so on, are intentional
objects and the intentional object brings with it or refers to perspectives
on the object other than the one the subject actually has at the time. This
network of associations is expressed in terms of horizons in the Crisis and
in terms of noemata in Ideas. In looking at the tree in the garden, to use
Husserl’s example (Husserl 1931, chapter 3), I see it from one side and
distance but constitute it as a seen apple tree (complete with other sides,
textures, smells, etc.). That is the object I apperceive by means of the full
noema (or noematic complex). The one perspective “brings with it,” so to
speak, other perspectives, including those had by other subjects.
If I close my eyes and then open them, only to find the tree has disap-
peared, the experience of the tree as-seen explodes and I have evidence
that I was wrong about it. If I walk up to the tree and find that it is two-
dimensional and does not have a backside, the experience of the tree
explodes. If there is no such explosion some aspect(s) of the tree-as-seen
have been verified. As more perspectives are taken and more expectations
are fulfilled, there is an increase in validity. That is how I move to a more
dependable knowledge of the tree-as-seen—motivated by the idea of the
tree in complete givenness of perfect evidence which includes all possible
perspectives.
172 Kevin Hermberg
us, is not some sign or analogue from which I infer the perceptual object
or the other subject; rather, in the case of others, I see someone else (124).
With the ego of the other in place, the objectivity on which science rests is
possible.
At first glance, it might look as though this aspect of Husserl’s thought
and thus his social epistemology falls prey to the same shortcoming as
Longino’s—reliance on atomistic epistemic agents at the base of all knowl-
edge. That is, this intersubjective dynamic still seems to prioritize the
first subject. Although Husserl claims that the various subjects are equal,
as they need to be equal if others truly have more to do with knowledge
than the confirmation of what the first subject already knows, Husserl has
been criticized for prioritizing the first subject. This alleged prioritization
rests in the fact that it is from the sphere of ownness that the empathetic
relationships and intersubjectivity are established. That objection, how-
ever, ignores the fact that implicit in the theory expressed in the Cartesian
Meditations is an awareness of (or set of experiences of) others insofar as
the move to the sphere of ownness happens against the backdrop of others
and insofar as the description of pairing as a vehicle for the experience of
others as other subjects relies on a set of previous experiences involving
the members of the pair (Husserl 1950, 111). The pre-awareness of others
is brought to us by means of the horizons (The Crisis) and the full noematic
sense (Ideas) involved in all experience.
In all four of these texts, then, others are involved in or even required,
at the deepest level, for attainment of knowledge. In Ideas, others help to
solidify one’s knowledge by confirming it, but also make intentional objects
possible. In the Cartesian Meditations, there is a heavier emphasis on others
and their possibility, but the relationship between others and knowledge
is largely the same as in the earlier text. In The Crisis, Husserl’s treatment
of the life-world and the intersubjective horizon of perception establishes
how it is that others help to broaden one’s knowledge by affording the abil-
ity to gain access to meaningful objects. In The Origin Of Geometry, Husserl
shows how it is that others help to extend one’s knowledge by making pos-
sible access to the knowledge others have (and have had), if, that is, we
are willing to do the work to trace-back through the texts to the originary
experience.
In answer to the primary question—whether there is a non-trivial ele-
ment of the social in Husserl’s epistemology—we must say, “Yes.” Others
are involved in the solidification of one’s knowledge by helping to move the
evidence toward adequacy via intersubjective harmony. Others are also,
and more importantly, at the root of all one’s knowledge of the world as
Husserl’s (even more) Social Epistemology 175
Notes
1
The term “atomistic” as applied to epistemology is one I borrow from J. Angelo
Corlett.
2
This definition is echoed by Corlett: “by social epistemology I mean the philosophi-
cal study of human knowledge obtained by individuals in a social context or by
certain collectives” (73, see also 3–4). On p.4 Corlett writes that “an epistemology
is social to the extent that it investigates philosophically the possibility that knowl-
edge, justification, and belief have as their subjects or objects either individuals in
a social context or collectives.”
3
There are two main aspects of sociality of knowledge on which one could focus and
be considered a social epistemologist: collectives (crowds, institutions, countries,
etc.) and the social context of individual knowers. There has been quite a lot of
work done on collectives, but since much of that work still rests on the notion of
atomistic knowers comprising collectives, my focus is on the latter and the degree
to which it surfaces in the introductions to phenomenology published by Husserl.
4
For very brief surveys of some of the main approaches to and positions within
social epistemology, consult Goldman (2006), Corlett (2007), Schmitt (1994),
and Wray (2007), among others.
5
Solomon also suggests that social epistemologists are not merely interested in
investigating the social processes and epistemological dimensions. She argues
that social epistemologists generally endorse or praise social processes if they are
“conducive to individual rational choice” and condone or chastise social process
if they are “an intermediate step in the process of individual enlightenment”
(Solomon 1994, 218).
6
These criteria are quite similar to those outlined in Science as Social Knowledge
(Longino 1990, 76–78).
7
But that is a big IF. One significant difficulty with Longino’s view that cannot be
explored here is that it is difficult to see, based on what she has written, that
Longino’s ideal epistemic community can truly exist. That is, the fourth ciriterion
of the community has been put in place, in part, to avoid problems of the appar-
ent incommensurability of different epistemic locations with which one is faced
176 Kevin Hermberg
as soon as one suggests that knowledge is relative to or dependent upon the con-
texts (including the social interactions) of epistemic agents. Without a view from
no-where, an inclusive critical dialog through which things are judged and disa-
greements adjudicated is required. What, on Longino’s view, guarantees the
intercultural, cross-schema, communication eventually required by the continual
exercise of critical dialog and negotiation? The fourth criterion of an ideal epis-
temic community calls for all qualified parties to be allowed a voice in the critical
dialog, but the questions remain: what constitutes being “qualified” and who is to
say who is qualified to participate in the dialog? That is, what is it that keeps this
sort of scheme from turning into yet another form of imperialism by which the
ideas and ideals of those currently in power dictate, in a sense, the outcome of the
dialog by controlling who can participate in the conversation—thereby facilitat-
ing the expansion of their own ideas rather than a genuine critical evaluation of
competing ideas?
8
In this essay, I can only begin to sketch the roles of others in one’s knowledge. In
doing so I echo a thorough treatment offered elsewhere (Hermberg 2006). That
investigation revealed that throughout most of his career, Husserl held that other
subjects are involved in one’s attainment of knowledge; that, for Husserl, one’s
experience of others as other subjects takes on multi-faceted roles regarding
knowledge; and that the texts reveal a continuity across time regarding the social-
ity of Husserl’s epistemology.
9
This story is very much the story of noematic apperception told by Husserl in
Ideas, even if the terminology differs.
10
Of course, it is not automatic. We have to do our work. The seductive danger of
language consists in that people can, from the meaning of words, passively take
the content of the experiences referred to, without re-doing the enactment. I can
read a novel relating the oppression of a people, for example, without redoing
the experiences of the author and thus without ‘feeling’ the pain, the suffering,
the injustice of the situation described but, as Fink says, phenomenological prop-
ositions can only be truly understood when the situation of the givenness of sense
is repeated, “when the predicative explicates are always again verified through
phenomenologizing intuition” (Fink 1995, 101). See Husserl 1981, 364.
This points to the difference between being merely able to recite the Pythago-
rean theorem and truly seeing how it is so. The former is an instance of the
seduction of language, the latter is an example of tracing back through the record
to the experience of an Other and thereby broadening one’s knowledge.
11
This is a movement from de facto apodicticity to de jure apodicticity. See Reeder
(1990).
12
See Hermberg 2006, 59–64.
Part V
***
What does “given” and “givenness” mean? This magic word of phenom-
enology and a “stumbling block” for other philosophical orientations?
[Was heißt “gegeben,” “Gegebenheit”–dieses Zaubertwort der Phänomenologie
und der “Stein des Anstoßes” bei den anderen?]. (Heidegger 1992 GA 58, 5)
At the forefront of these problems, drawn from the source, there lies the
problem of the delimitation of the domain of phenomenology, of its sci-
entific character, and most importantly—and this is the point on which
we shall focus here—of the ultimate authority on which its legitimacy
depends, its allocation to the given or to the present—given in an irre-
sistible evidence. However, to put the magic word to the test (Gegebenheit,
which could serve as a catchword) is also to enter into the debate with
other schools, in the first place with the neo-Kantians of both the Marburg
School, represented mainly by Herman Cohen and Paul Natorp, and the
Baden School, here represented by Heinrich Rickert and Emile Lask. It is
also clear that outside this initial debate—but we cannot here consider all
of its elements—the Gegebenheit still remains a “stumbling stone” for other
disputes, anchored in other schools. I have in mind notably the Carnap of
the 1928 Aufbau, who opens anew the debate with Husserl concerning the
status that in the founding enterprise is commonly assigned to the flux
of experience, and concerning the choice of an ultimate given, under the
heading that Carnap then names the “proprio-psychic basis” (eigenpsychis-
che Basis).
***
The question of the given, of givenness, naturally finds its place in a course
devoted to the determination of philosophy,6 and to its determination as
Urwissenschaft, as an archi-science of the originary. The guiding question,
which will be taken up again in the 1919–1920 course (Grundprobleme der
Phänomenologie), is substantively the following: What is phenomenology?
And the answer comes immediately: its very Idea is linked to the demand
182 Jean-François Courtine
for an originary science of life in and for itself.7 Although it would of course
be necessary to pause over this decisive shift from the Erlebnis to the Leben
an und für sich, we must leave this question aside, and let it suffice to note
that it is in terms of this “idea” that the question of the “given” emerges,
in the first instance, in direct connection with this other inquiry: What
is the domain of investigation of phenomenology (Forschungsgebiet)? Is
this domain itself “given” or “pre-given” (gegeben, vorgegeben)? Is it given
directly or purely and simply, without intermediaries, without mediation?
Or, inversely, is this originary domain (precisely the domain of the origin,
Ursprungsgebiet) never given, but always only and foremost a domain that
must be “conquered” (Heidegger 1992 GA 58, 29)?
The manuscript of the first Freiburg course is presently incomplete, but
we can read in a Nachschrift, from the auditor Oskar Becker, this even more
striking formulation:
We are here before the crossing of the ways, before a choice that decides
the life or death of philosophy in general, as before an abyss. Either we
go down the road toward the nothing, i.e., in absolute objective positivity
[Sachlichkeit], or we succeed in taking a leap into another world, or more
exactly, a leap finally into the world, in the absolute sense.10 (Heidegger
1987 GA 56/57, 63)
And again: “We can never speak of a finalized and given object. Thought
and its lawfulness remain prior to every given, for which only an object may
be ‘given’ ” (132).17
***
Other than through this reconstructive way, and on the basis of the con-
struction carried out initially, subjectivity cannot be attained by any
other kind of knowledge . . . The subjective is not primary except insofar
as the task of knowledge is presented from the outset as already accom-
plished; but even this subjective would not be a given in the sense of a
datum for knowledge.21
In his 1887 article, Natorp evidently does not at all have Husserl in mind.
The target, which is easy to identify even though the author is not cited
explicitly, is indeed Mach’s anti-metaphysical “positivism.” Mach would
not have characterized this “subjective originary” in egological terms,
since one of the peremptory and fundamental theses of The Analysis of
Sensations (Mach 1903) is that “the I cannot in any way be recovered” (das
Ich ist unrettbar). It is nonetheless permissible to wonder whether and to
what extent this Natorpian criticism does not anticipate and bear legiti-
mately on the Husserl of Ideen I when on behalf of phenenomenology he
lays claim to the very term “positivism”: “If ‘positivism’ is tantamount to
an absolutely unprejudiced grounding of all sciences on the ‘positive,’
that is to say, on what can be seized upon originaliter, then we are the
genuine positivists” (Husserl 1983, 39). This is a “positivism” that then
takes as its
point of departure what lies prior to all points of view; indeed, the entire
field of whatever is given intuitionally, which is prior even to every thought
that elaborates this given theoretically; everything that one can immedi-
ately see and grasp—on the condition that one does not let oneself be
Natorp, Husserl, and Heidegger 189
Beyond the review of Husserl’s Prolegomena to Pure Logic, which Natorp pub-
lished under the title Zur Frage der logischen Methode (“On the Question of
Logical Method”) in Kantstudien in 1901, it is above all in the Allgemeine
Psychologie (General Psychology) of 1912, and in the review of Ideen which he
published in 1917–1918 (Natorp 1917–1918, 224–246) that Natorp returns
to the question of the given and of the double foundation, objective and
subjective, of knowledge. In Chapter XI of the General Psychology, devoted
to the critical assessment of a number of theories, Natorp discusses (§11)
the Logical Investigations in order to emphasize what, at the time of the first
review, he had characterized as a “logical malaise,” namely the tension that
subsists between the “formal,” “pure,” or “ideal,” and the real, in the sense
of “a residual that is not understood, irrational” (“unbegriffener, unvernün-
ftiger Rest”), “an extraneous residue, rejected and yet ineliminable.” 22
In order to break away from this logical malaise, one would need to rees-
tablish a logical link between these two antagonistic instances, which are
“the supra-temporal existence of the logical” on the one hand, and its “tem-
poral factuality in psychological experience” on the other. This logical link
would make it possible to give sense to the idea of a “Realisierung des Idealen”
(a realization of ideals), understood as a “rigorous logical transition” from
one mode of consideration to the other, a “transition” that Natorp for his
part would name, “objectivation,” “reconstruction.” By 1912, Natorp had
become acquainted with the Logical Investigations as a whole, which had not
been the case when he wrote the review of the Prolegomena, and this time
the criticism is more acute. Husserl, who seemed to require, and rightly
so, a “strictly objective foundation of logic and of objective knowledge in
general,” had proposed only a phenomenological foundation of knowl-
edge, in other words, a “subjective and psychological foundation” (Natorp
1973a, 12). But Natorp raises the following question: Even limiting oneself
to description, how could this description escape the objectivation that is
characteristic of all theories? If reflection on a psychological experience
necessarily makes it an object, how can this experience, how can the inten-
tional acts themselves (die meinende Akte) be apprehended in abstraction
from the expressions that are valid only for the realities that are aimed
at or intended? According to Husserl, Natorp concludes, “subjectivity is
manifestly a second objectivity of the same nature as the first objectivity,
the objectivity that one thinks habitually, and which is coordinated with it”
(Husserl 1917–1918, 244).
190 Jean-François Courtine
relation to which the object, which always “needs determination,” calls for
a “function of knowledge,” which is clear itself only after the fact, through
the complementary route of subjectivation, which then in turn is pursued
“within the indeterminate, and ad infinitum.” This is what Natorp presents
as a “genetic” or “dynamic” examination of knowledge, in contrast to any
“ontic” or “static” examination. This is what defines the point of view of
method, in contrast to any perspective organized around the idea of a fixed
or “settled” “result”; or what defines even the perspective of the fieri, in
contrast to all pretentions to approach an ultimate factum or datum.
To avoid turning the object into an “in itsel f ” or a choriston, “standing
on its own by itself on the exterior,” is also to refuse delving deeper in
the direction from which “the given,” “the subjective” would purportedly
emerge, when thought in a fi xed or unconnected way, independently of the
thinking process (Natorp 1912, 286–287). At this point, Natorp’s criticism
of Husserl becomes more nunaced. He writes:
Husserl does not envisage the relation between the content and the object,
between the presentation [Präsentation] and the representation
[Repräsentation], in a way fundamentally different from my way of envisag-
ing it. He acknowledges, at least . . . as an ideal case, that the meaning
intention and its “fulfillment” are absolutely one, so that the object itself
is encompassed in the “phenomenological content” [Husserl 1984 Hua
XIX/2, 608, 645–648]. We overcome this position by emphasizing the
fact that such “fulfillment” does not take place once, but again at every
stage—by emphasizing that there never is and never could be an absolute
fulfillment. We acknowledge that Husserl comes close to idealism when
he makes the perceptual content dependent on thought, the “fulfillment”
dependent on the “intention,” the presentation on the representation,
and when he determines essentially the first term by the second—but with the
following restriction: The identification is “accomplished,” but is not itself
aimed at [intentionally] [Husserl 1984, Hua XIX/2, A 622].
“fundamental act of knowledge” is not rather “an act of positing” (Akt des
Setzens), and conclude, at the end of an analysis that this time goes through
the Platonic and Kantian determinations, that (I cite the somewhat long
although crucial passage):
If thought is movement, one must interrogate the factum from the per-
spective of the fieri, and recognize it only insofar as the fieri is in turn
foundation:
This is the reason why we do not accept any finished givenness [fertige
Gegebenheit], no ready-made, whether it is a priori or empirical. The pur-
ported “fi xed stars” of thought must be recognized as the “wandering
stars of a higher order,” the purported fixed points of thought must be
resolved, they must be liquefied in the continuity of the process of thought.
Therefore nothing is “given,” but some thing merely becomes “given” [So
ist nichts, sondern wird etwas “gegeben”]. (Natorp 1973b, 42)
The wordplay will also have drawn Heidegger’s attention. Radicalizing the
question in his first lecture of 1919 a few months later, Heidegger will ask,
gibt es etwas? (“is there something [given]?”), Gibt es das ‘es gibt’? (“Is there
the ‘there is’ [the ‘given’ of the ‘it gives’]?) (Heidegger 1987 GA 56/57,
62–63).
If, according to the reductive procedure of Husserlian phenomenology
in the Ideen, pure consciousness (or more accurately the “region of con-
sciousness”) becomes the last “sphere of absolute positing” (§ 46), which
is separated by “an abyss of sense” from “reality,” this ontological region
where being sketches itself, without ever being absolutely given (§ 49)—in
contrast to the region of consciousness that remains, as the outcome of the
phenomenological reduction, as the final, absolutely-given “phenomeno-
logical residuum”—then it matters, in Natorp’s eyes, to replace this reduc-
tion with the “reconstruction.” In truth, this reduction is only the “simple
omission of the act of objective positing” (das bloße Unterlassen des gegenstän-
dlich setzenden Aktes). Contrary to every attempt aimed at gaining access to
consciousness attained in its “purity,” as a “system of being closed upon
itself,” a “system of absolute being into which nothing can break and from
which nothing can escape” (§ 49), reconstruction presents itself as another
specific task, requiring a “corresponding method.” Natorp may grant
Husserl that “this method is exactly the inverse of the method of objectiva-
tion.” Nonetheless—and it is by virtue of this that the separation from the
phenomenological procedure is definitive—this method must remain “in
the strictest correspondence with it [with objectivation],” whereby, Natorp
adds, “it opens a way within the infinite” (Heidegger 1987 GA 56/57, 49). It is
thus and only thus that it becomes possible to “redirect all objectivations”
to an “originary consciousness,” which (we have seen) would never be abso-
lutely given nor ever constitute a “source” strictly speaking, since even its
alleged “originarity” (Ursprünglichkeit) is intertwined with its “character of
being grounded in itself” (in sich-selbst-Gegründetheit). Strictly speaking, this
character belongs only to pure “thought,” given that being-in-itself “means
and can only mean im Prozeß sein, being in the process.” We find here again,
in a richer sense, the formula cited above: “The absolutely and ultimately
given can be ‘given’ only in and by the process of thought.” Der Prozeß selbst
ist das “Gebende” (“The process itself is that which “gives”).
In laying emphasis on the processuality of thought in this way, in provid-
ing a reminder of the radical difference, which Husserl would not have rec-
ognized, between the presentation (Darstellung) of pure consciousness, on
the one hand, and the clarification of “that which can be presented (darges-
tellt) in actual knowledge,” on the other hand, Natorp can even luxuriously
Natorp, Husserl, and Heidegger 195
(Abbau) aims, in effect, “to free itself from an inauthentic tradition that
imposes itself upon us in a non-originary way (nicht ursprünglich zugeeignet)
(Heidegger 1993 GA 59, 5), and far from being a purely negative destruc-
tion (Zerschlagen und Zertrümmern), it is “dijudication” (Diiudication) (74).
“Destruction consists fundamentally in an act of ‘ judgment.’ ” Its first
operating function is the “ judgment between that which, from a phenom-
enological perspective, must be regarded as originary and non-originary
(ursprünglich–nichtursprünlich).” But when we come to the decisive question
(Heidegger 1987 GA 56/57, 108)—Heidegger formulates it as follows: “We
raise the question, does the method of destruction achieve what it is meant
to achieve? Is it generally capable of achieving it?”—The answer is clearly,
“No,” since we have not left the domain of objectivation. “Reconstruction
is also construction, and this being-constructive is precisely what properly
characterizes objectivation, which as such is theoretical” (108).26
This is why, as Heidegger continues to point out, “the destructive factor,
which characterizes Natorp’s position, is necessary and fertile for a number
of reasons . . . This position investigates, according to its own sense, the
‘origin,’ with an intensity and a radicality that is commensurate with its
misleading character.” One will take that to be a compliment! The prob-
lem that must be taken up again or repeated where Natorp has left it, is
precisely the problem of the description Husserl ascribes to intuition. If
one may assert that “a decisive step has been taken by phenomenology, the empha-
sis laid upon originary intuition [originäre Anschauung]—evidence!—and the
idea of the adequate description,” it is nonetheless convenient to oppose to the
privileged status assigned by Husserl to intuition, the idea of an undissocia-
ble co-belonging of intuition and understanding, the idea of a verstehende
Anschauung. It is from this perspective that the way of Destruktion imposes
itself resolutely, since what is characteristic of “factical life” is precisely “the
fading of significance” (das Verblassen der Bedeutsamkeit) (Heidegger 1993
GA 59, 37) that looms over it like a permanent threat—fading of signifi-
cance, loss of concrete and contextual meaningfulness, which stems from
the fact that a sense is no longer “accomplished,” that it is thus amputated
from the specific intentional dimension, which in every instance confers
on it its fulfilled sense (Vollzugssinn). It is at this Vollzug (fulfillment), at
this effective accomplishment, that deconstruction attempts to arrive. In this
way, it undertakes a return upstream, going back up all the way to the giv-
ing source. But the latter remains unattainable as a matter of principle; or
rather, it would be approachable only within the horizon of a path that goes
not so much through “objectivations” as it goes through sediments, the
layers of fixed or theoretically-settled sense, faded and thus dissimulating
198 Jean-François Courtine
Notes
1
The bibliography relative to the Heidegger-Husserl-Natorp debate is as follows:
(1) von Wolzogen 1988; (2) Stolzenberg 1995; (3) Stolzenberg 2002; (4) Ferrari
2002; (5) Lazzari 2002; and (6) Lembeck, 2002. See also (1) Marion 2008; (2)
Arrien 2009.
2
The main documents of this debate include: (1) Natorp 1887; (2) Husserl 1975
Hua XVIII; (3) Husserl 1994, 39–165; Natorp, 1912, reprint1965 (in particular
XI, §§11–14); (4) Husserl1976, Hua III; (5) Husserl 2002b, in particular 276–292;
and (6) Natorp 1917–1918. Reprint in Natorp 1973b, 36–60. To this we may add
the essay of 1901 (Natorp 2008a), to be found (in Italian) in the excellent vol-
ume, of which the main focus is admittedly different (Natorp 2008b).
3
On this point, see Heidegger’s global exposition in GA 58, 224ff: “Das Probleme
der Gegebenheit—Kritik Natorps und Rickert.”
4
See notably the discussion opened in the anglo-saxon world by Wilfrid Sellars’s
series of lectures in 1956 (Sellars 1997).
5
“Es gibt kein jurare in verba magistri innerhalb der wissenschaftlichen For-
schung, und das Wesen einer echten Forschergeneration und Generationsfolge
liegt darin, daß sie sich nicht an die Randbezirke der Spezialfragen verliert,
sondern neu und echt auf die Urquellen der Probleme zurückgeht und sie tiefer
leitet” (GA 58, 6).
6
“Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie. (1) Die Idee der Philosophie und das Weltan-
schauungsproblem (Kriegsnotsemester 1919); (2) Phänomenologie und
transzendentale Wertphilosophie (Summer semester 1919); and (3) Anhang:
Über das Wesen der Universität und des akademischen Studiums (Summer
semester 1919)” (GA 56/57).
7
“Was ist phänomenologie? Als ihre Idee ist angesetzt: absolute Ursprungswissen-
schaft von Leben an und für sich” (GA 58, 171).
8
“Das Ursprungsgebiet der Philosophie ist kein letzter Satz, keine Axiom . . . Das
Ursprungsgebiet ist wesentlich nie gegeben im Leben an sich. Er muß immer
von Neuem erfaßt werden” (GA 58, 203). See also: “Die berümten und
‘berüchtigten’ ‘unmittelbaren Gegebenheiten’ der Phänomenologie und
phänomenologischen Wissenschaft sind ‘zunächst’ ‘bekanntermaßen’ nie und
nirgends gegeben, wir mögen das Leben in seiner aktuellen Strömungsrich-
tung nach allen Dimensionen durchsehen. Vielleicht ist das Ursprungsgebiet
uns jetzt noch nich gegeben—aber wenn die Phänomenologie weiter ist? Auch
dann nicht—und nie. . . . Das Gegenstandsgebiet der wissenschaftlichen Phi-
losophie muß also immer wieder neu gesucht, die Zugänge neu geöffnet
werden” (GA 58, 26–27).
Natorp, Husserl, and Heidegger 199
9
See: “Diese Vorherrschaft des Theoretischen muß gebrochen werden . . . ” (This
prevalence of the theoretical must be broken) (GA 56/57, 59).
10
“Wir stehen an der methodischen Wegkreuzung, die über Leben oder Tod der
Philosophie überhaupt entscheidet, an einem Abgrund: entweder ins Nichts,
d.h. der absoluten Sachlichkeit, oder es gelingt der Sprung in eine andere Welt,
oder genauer: überhaupt erst in die Welt” (GA 56/57, 63).
11
See “das Problem der Gegebenheit ist kein spezialistisches Sonderproblem. An ihm
scheiden sich die Wege der modernen Erkenntnistheorie unter sich und zugleich
von der Phänomenologie, die das Problem vor allem aus seiner verengenden
erkenntnistheoretischen Problematik loslösen muß” (GA 58, 224. See also Oskar
Becker’s Nachschrift, GA 58, 221).
12
“Ich kann im Leben auf etwas gerichtet sein, ohne daß ich das, worauf ich gerich-
tet bin, im Charakter der Gegebenheit, des Präsentseins mir gegenüber stehend
habe” (GA 58, 224).
13
See the notes of Becker: “Es ist zu scheiden: (a) ‘Gegebensein’ im Sinne des von
mir Gesetzten, d.h. der Fall, wo ich mir etwas ‘gebe’. (b) ‘Gegeben’ im Sinn des mir
(von außen) Vorgegeben” (GA 58, 224).
14
From Zu Cohens Logik): “aber im Sinne der gestellten Aufgabe, die vom Denken
erst zu lösen, bleibt es doch das Gegebene, und zwar voraus Gegebene. In der
begründeten Abwehr gegen das falsche ‘Gegebene’ kommt Cohen in Gefahr
auch diesen echten Sinne der Gegebenheit zu übersehen” (Holzey 1986, 21).
15
My emphasis. “Es ist vielmehr dasjenige X, welches als Mannigfaltiges, ebenso wie
andererseits als Einheit, durch das Denken erst zu bestimmen ist . . . Es gibt für
das Denken kein Sein, das nicht im Denken selbst gesetzt würde. Denken heißt
nichts Anders als: setzen, daß etwas sei; und was außerdem und vordem dies
Sein—sei, ist eine Frage, die überhaupt keinen angebaren Sinn hat” (Natorp
1910, 48).
16
“Denken, Bestimmen, Setzen eines Gegenstandes. Jedes Gegebene ist nur als im
Denken bestimmt gegeben. Aus dieser Bestimmung entspringt erst die Gegeben-
heit. Die Denksetzung hat einen absoluten Vorrang. Das Erkennen ist
Gegenstandsbestimmung, Setzen im Denken. Es gibt nichts Vorgegebenes. Es gibt
Gegenstände erst im Denken und weil das Erkennen ein prinzipiell endloser
Prozeß ist, ist der Gegenstand nie gegeben, sondern nur seine Idee (erst die Fik-
tion des ans Ende gelangten Erkenntnisprozesses gibt den Gegenstand)” (GA 58,
224. My emphasis).
17
“Es ist nirgends von einem fertigen und gegebenen Gegenstand zu reden. Vor
allen Gegebenheiten steht das Denken und seine Gesetzlichkeit, für welche allein
ein Gegenstand ‘gegeben’ sein kann” (GA 58, 132).
18
See the definition of the project in the piece of 1872: “Die Geschichte und die
Wurzel des Satzes von der Erhaltung der Arbeit.”
19
See Sommer 1988, 309–328.
20
Here I am drawing attention to a passage already quoted.
21
See also Natorp 1887: “It is not at all in the object—which is not given but is pre-
cisely what is at stake—that one must find the origin and, on its basis, establish
the conceivability of subjective knowledge. On the contrary, one must first and
foremost limit oneself to the point of view of knowledge and ask how knowledge
itself understands objectivity, how knowledge posits this and that, and what it
200 Jean-François Courtine
means for knowledge to pose the object in front of itself as something independ-
ent of the subjectivity of knowledge. . . . The object (Gegenstand), the object
(Objekt) means first and foremost that which is posited before (or in front of)
knowledge; thus it is knowledge itself which, first and foremost, will be able to
indicate and account for what that ‘positing before itself’ may be.”
22
“. . . das Reale bleibt als fremder, verworfener, und doch nicht wegzuschaffender
Rest Stehen” (Natorp 1973a, 14).
23
See Natorp 1918, 432–433.
24
“Description” becomes, necessarily, “reconstruction” (Natorp 1912, 290).
25
“Das methodische Grundproblem der Phänomenologie, die Frage nach der
Weise der wissenschaftlichen Erschließung der Erlebnissphäre, steht selbst unter
dem “Prinzip der Prinzipien” der Phänomenologie. Husserl formuliert es so :
“Alles, was sich in der ‘Intuition’ originär . . . darbietet, [ist] einfach hinzunehmen . . .
als was es sich gibt.” Das ist das “Prinzip der Prinzipien”, an dem “uns keine erden-
kliche Theorie irre machen” kann. Verstünde man unter Prinzip einen
theoretischen Satz, dann wäre die Bezeichnung nicht kongruent. Aber schon,
daß Husserl von einem Prinzip der Prinzipien spricht, also von etwas, das allen
Prinzipien vorausliegt, woran keine Theorie irre machen kann, zeigt, daß es nicht
theoretischer Natur ist, wenn auch Husserl darüber sich nicht ausspricht. Es ist
die Urintention des wahrhaften Lebens überhaupt, die Urhaltung des Erlebens
und Lebens als solchen, die absolute, mit dem Erleben selbst identische Lebens-
sympathie. Vorläufig, d.h. auf diesem Weg vom Theoretischen herkommend, in
der Weise des immer mehr Sichfreimachens von ihm, sehen wir diese Grund-
haltung immer, wir haben zu ihr eine Orientierung. Dieselbe Grundhaltung ist
erst absolut, wenn wir in ihr selbst leben—und das erreicht kein noch so weit
gebautes Begriffssystem, sondern das phänomenologische Leben in seiner wach-
senden Steigerung seiner selbst” (GA 56/57, § 20, 109–110).
26
See also, “Die Psychologie kann nichts rekonstruieren, was nicht zuvor konstru-
iert ist. Inhaltlich und umfänglich decken sich bezüglich des zu Erforschenden
Objektivierung und Subjektivierung, nur die Richtung ist diametral entgegenge-
setz. Das Logische (Objektive) bleibt immer die Gegenseite alles Psychischen
(Subjektiven)” (GA 59, 105).
Chapter 12
Truth’s Absence
The Hermeneutic Resistance to Phenomenology
Santiago Zabala
Truth is not a relation that is “just there” between two beings that themselves are
“just there”—one mental, the other physical. Nor is it a coordination, as philoso-
phers like to say these days. If it is a relation at all, it is one that has no analogies
with any other relation between beings. If I may put it this way, it is the relation of
existence as such to its very world. It is the world-openness of existence that is itself
uncovered—existence whose very being unto the world gets disclosed/uncovered in
and with its being unto the world.
(Heidegger 1976 GA 21)
inventory of topics spreads out over many different historical, cultural, and
intellectual contexts. Hermeneutics is “anarchic” in Rainer Schürmann’s
sense of this word; it does not try to assault its Sache but rather tries to grant
what is singular and unrepeatable an open field. (Burns 1992, 16–17)
peak of its success. Ernst Tugendhat is among the few philosophers who
did not limit himself to analyzing their relationship; he goes on to empha-
size how Heidegger, by resisting Husserl’s phenomenology, also “lost” the
concept of truth through hermeneutics.7 Although Heidegger did not refer
explicitly to hermeneutics as an alternative to phenomenology, the latter
did not seem to him appropriate for overcoming metaphysics, in other
words, for operating beyond the frames of the sciences. But what are these
frames?
These frames, common also to other philosophical positions, are founded
upon the fundamental question of ontology, “Why are there beings at all
instead of nothing?” This formulation is not only at the core of Western
ontology but also the expression of a fundamental duplicity in Being that
articulates its presence by splitting, that is, by duplicating Being. In such
duplicity Being “is” only as long as the two parts are joined, creating a
relation between two terms where one refers to the other as the predicate
and subject. In his classic study on Husserl’s and Heidegger’s concepts of
truth, Tugendhat points out how the specific Husserlian sense of truth in
terms of a difference between mere “intention” and the matter “itself” also
presupposes the duplicity of Being common to this metaphysical tradition
because it distinguishes between the manner in which something in fact
appears and the manner in which it “itself” is. Having said this, a proposi-
tion, for example, will be true only if it refers to things in a way that per-
mits them to be seen as they are in themselves. This is why the truth of
statements is also grounded in a metaphysical, preliminary aesthetic struc-
ture: the truth of intuition. In order to resist Husserl’s progression within
traditional logics Heidegger substituted interpretation, which presents an
alternative and preliminary structure of the statement, for this aesthetic
intuition. But if the statement (the “apophantic as”) must be grounded in
interpretation (the “hermeneutic as”), it is not because the latter is truer
than the former but rather because the statement’s truth is actually rooted
in the disclosedness of Dasein’s understanding, which determines not only
prelinguistic duplicity but also its adequacy and correspondence.8 This is
why Heidegger, in Being and Time, specified:
The statement is not the primary “locus” of truth but the other way around:
the statement as a mode of appropriation of discoveredness and as a way
of being-in-the-world is based in discovering, or in the disclosedness of
Dasein. The most primordial “truth” is the “locus” of the statement and
the ontological condition of the possibility that statement can be true or
false (discovering or covering over). (Heidegger 1996, 207–208)
The Hermeneutic Resistance to Phenomenology 205
Given that it is only within truth’s absence that Being takes place,
ontology can no longer refer to Being’s presence (which frames it within
truth) but must rather rely on its own existential Being. This is why Brice
Wachterhauser explained that what Heidegger’s disclosedness “points to
is the privileged place that human being has in the economy of Being.
Human beings are capable of truth because they find themselves in the
clearing (Lichtung) of Being’s disclosure” (Wachterhauser 1994, 4). But how
does such Being relate to metaphysics? If metaphysics could be overcome
once for all (Überwindung) freedom would imply a correspondence, that is,
a truth we would have to submit to. But given that such a truth varies as
much as our interpretations, freedom assumes the same possible variance,
that is, the ability to resist any correspondence. The fact that metaphysics
can only be overcome through a productive twisting, that is, Verwindung
and not Überwindung, implies an actual resistance, which, as I claimed at
the outset, is constitutive of hermeneutics. Ontology, after metaphysics,
instead of relying on presences must rely on its own resistance to presences,
or, which is the same, the remains of Being.
If a response to the new fundamental question of philosophy (“How is it
going with Being?”) is possible within the remains of Being, it is not because of
philosophy’s accuracy but rather its lack of accuracy, that is, “truth’s absence.”
These remains are the result of Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysics where
Being—instead of another presence in accordance with an empirical image
or ideal—becomes the absence, discharge, or weakness of such accordance.
But what does such absence refer to? Everything that does not work, that is,
that does not function through such an accordance, especially those philo-
sophical positions constantly accused of irrationalism, relativism, and nihil-
ism. These features, which could be grouped under the general rubric of
“weak thought,” are hermeneutic ontology’s means of maintaining not only
the conflict of interpretation and the resistance to metaphysics but also the
generation of Being, which is possible only as long as truth is discarded. But
just as truth as correspondence is possible only within disclosure, so is Being
possible only within the remains of Being. As Derrida explains:
Notes
1
While Rorty considered hermeneutics the “expression of hope that the cultural
space left by the demise of epistemology will not be filled” (Rorty 1980, 315),
Vattimo conceived it as the only philosophical theory “lucid about itself as no
more than an interpretation” (Vattimo 1997, 7).
2
Since there is not enough space here to expose the various examples of herme-
neutic resistance, here are some histories of hermeneutics where this “resistance”
factor can be detected: Wach 1926–1933; Burns 1992; Ferraris 1996; Grondin1994
and 1995; Gusdorf 1988 and 1990.
3
An analysis of the anarchic vein of hermeneutics can be found in the third chap-
ter of Vattimo and Zabala 2011.
4
Another clear defense of truth in hermeneutics is available in Grondin 1982.
5
Among the many early courses published, perhaps Ontology: The Hermeneutics of
Facticity (Heidegger 1999) is the most representative in indicating the signifi-
cance of hermeneutics for Heidegger.
6
The most important studies still belong to Thomas Sheehan (1997); Friedrich-
Wilhelm von Hermann (1981); Michael Theunissen (1986); Ernst Tugendhat
(1967); and the recent Søren Overgaard (2009).
7
Tugendhat analyzed Heidegger’s concept of truth throughout his early philoso-
phy, and in particular in Der Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger (1967).
A comprehensive reconstruction of such analysis is available in the second chap-
ter of Zabala 2008.
8
Recently, Greg Shirley (2010) systematically explained how Heidegger did not
discredit or devalue logic with his criticism of Husserl but, on the contrary, fur-
ther justified its necessity and foundations.
9
As John Sallis explained, “Disclosedness is a matter neither of intuition nor for
intuition. The originary phenomenon of truth, truth as disclosedness, is a truth
that is not of knowledge” (Sallis 1994, 390).
10
Here is the passage where Heidegger formulates this new question: “As the fun-
damental question of metaphysics, we ask: ‘Why are there beings at all instead of
nothing?’ In this fundamental question there already resonates the prior ques-
tion: how is it going with Being? What do we mean by the words ‘to be,’ Being? In
our attempt to answer, we run into difficulties. We grasp at the un-graspable. Yet
we are increasingly engaged by beings, related to beings, and we know about
ourselves ‘as beings.’ Being now just counts as the sound of a word for us, a
used-up term. If this is all we have left, then we must at least attempt to grasp this
last remnant of a possession. This is why we asked: how is it going with the word
Being?” (Heidegger 2000, 35). Note that Fried and Polt translate “Wie steht es mit
dem Sein?” by “What is the status of Being?” and even “What about Being?”
11
Examples of phenomenology and analytical philosophy submitting to realism
can be found in Derrida’s debates with Jean-Luc Marion (in Caputo and Scanlon
1999) and John Searle (Derrida, 1988).
Chapter 13
The theme of the following paper is the relation between truth and inter-
pretation. After elaborating some traditional ways of construing that rela-
tion, I argue that there is a justifiable sense of determining the truth of an
interpretation or, alternatively, determining a true meaning of the object
of interpretation. In other words, the paper’s thesis is that there are ways
of discerning truth hermeneutically, at least for a particular sort of object
and given a particular conception of truth. Before taking up the main
argument for this thesis and applying it to the factors of interpretation, I
describe an assortment of phenomena that, falling under the heading of
understanding, are directly related to interpretation. I review the relation
between these phenomena and interpretation as a means of specifying a
general sense of “interpretation.”1
True Interpretation
By not allowing for any means of determining truth that escapes the vaga-
ries of interpretation, UR amounts to a denial of correspondence theories
of truth. Whatever is said to be the truth about any subject matter falls fully
within the scope of meanings and their interpretation. In other words,
there is no uninterpreted phenomenon to which the interpretation can be
said to correspond.
If this thesis is unsettling, it is no doubt due to two common beliefs that
together make it compelling to insist on distinguishing verification from
interpretation. The first belief concerns the difference in the make-up of
interpretation and verification. Meanings and interpretations are largely
of our individual and collective making, a product of thinking, imagin-
ing, and opining, limited only by our ability to entertain various ideas and
concepts. By contrast, truth and verification (as the distinctive mode of
determining which meanings expressed are true) restrict the scope of our
thoughts and imagination, suggesting constraints that cannot be simply
self-imposed, like a poet’s adoption of meter or a representative govern-
ment’s tax structure. In short, according to this first belief, meanings and
interpretation are subjective, truth and verification are objective.
The second belief stems from the fact that arguably the most unambigu-
ous sorts of verification are those typically associated and, in some case,
even identified with iterable sensory experiences that we can expect nor-
mal human perceivers commonly to have. We verify assertions through
perception, through direct sensory acquaintance with their references. To
be sure, sensory perception without interpretation is blind, if we may para-
phrase Kant’s famous dictum. The warrant for the assertions supposes a
common interpretation in the form, at the very least, of descriptions in a
shared language. (In other words, those “normal human perceivers” must
also have acquired certain normal abilities to use language.) Yet, in con-
trast to interpretations, expressed in assertions or other linguistic descrip-
tions, the colors that we see and the sounds that we hear are at some level
not of our making or choosing, and, while part of the interpretandum, they
also mark a limit to interpretation. Hence, at least when it comes to asser-
tions about experiential objects or states of affairs, we rely upon the ways
214 Daniel O. Dahlstrom
3.1 the interpretandum in itself, that is, what is to be interpreted and its
distinctiveness;
3.2 the interpretandum as effect, that is, its relation to the conditions (fons
interpretandi) responsible for it, for example, in the case of a work, its
producer (artist, author, sculptor, director, etc.); and
3.3 the interpretandum as cause, that is, its relation to the interpreter.
time I hope to show how these three factors can be incorporated into a use-
ful conception and practice of true interpretation, based upon QR.
Some caveats, however, are immediately in order. First, these factors are
by no means always clearly isolable from one another but each can be taken
as supplying an avenue to a true meaning in contrast to a mere interpreta-
tion. Second, the references to cause and effect here are not intended in the
sense of supplying necessary and sufficient conditions. For the purposes of
this analysis, it suffices for a painting, for example, to be taken as an effect
if a painter can be identified (or even if it is the sort of object requiring a
painter). So, too, it suffices to take it as a cause if it has an effect on the inter-
preter such that that effect enters in some way into the interpretation. Third,
as already signaled in the first part of this chapter, I take “interpretation”
in a broad sense (in keeping with ordinary usage) to signify any instance of
explicit construal (explicitly taking x as y). In other words, to interpret is to
determine the meaning (y) of some phenomenon (x), including artificial
and natural things, that is, things that can be traced to human and/or non-
human causes or conditions. However, in what follows I focus principally on
the interpretation of works, as I attempt to explain the sense in which truth
can and cannot be a criterion of their interpretation. My aim again is to
establish, on the basis of QR, the possibility of true interpretations.
them. This supposition, moreover, is one with the old insight that illusion
and deceit presuppose veracity.
The distinction often made in ordinary discourse between description and
interpretation issues from a certain level of confidence assigned to descrip-
tions of experience, as elaborated above. To be sure, these descriptions, like
the languages in which they are formed, are historical, cultural, and envi-
ronmental (think of the pre-Copernican descriptions of planetary motion
or the variety of descriptions of “snow” in different cultures). They are part
of the re-understanding that, as noted in part one, ensues from previous
interpretations. Nevertheless, like the facts and experiences they describe,
those descriptions are reliable and iterable, providing a secure foundation for
common sense. Against the background of such descriptions, interpretations
become necessary only when the possibility of misunderstanding presents
itself, for example, when we are confronted with optical illusions or erratic
behavior, or when the curiosity of a restless mind gets the better of it.
Yet the appeal to true descriptions, while certainly supposed in many
a practice of interpretation, does not suffice to salvage a sharp distinc-
tion between truth and meaning. Thus, they cannot be the basis for refut-
ing UR. The main reason the appeal to true descriptions in this regard
fails is that descriptions are not themselves free of interpretation. True
descriptions are interpretations that correspond with some foreunderstand-
ing and that foreunderstanding, it bears iterating, is an implicit way of tak-
ing something—implicit with respect to what we take it as and why. In this
connection one is reminded of Heidegger’s critique of Husserl’s project
of a presupposition-less phenomenology, one that merely describes. As
Heidegger points out, since those phenomenological descriptions are for
the sake of grounding science and, indeed, a certain conception of science,
they fail to be neutral, as would any other sort of description (Heidegger
1994 GA 17, 2).10
Something analogous occurs in interpretation of literary works and
visual arts. Here there are at least four levels of foreunderstanding and
re-understanding typically at work in such interpretations. Consider the
following ways of categorizing a work, embedded in the following claim:
Concluding Remarks
The aim of the foregoing paper has been to outline a conception of the
relation of truth and interpretation in general and to show that truth, so
conceived (namely, in the form of the coherence of interpretations) serves
a legitimate and, in some respects, even essential function in interpre-
tation. This conception of truth and interpretation does not preclude a
variety of aims of interpretation but suggests how the truth of the interpre-
tation remains significant, regardless of the aim. A further virtue of the
view glossed here is that QR, the qualified reduction of truth to interpreta-
tion, is compatible with taking all three factors of interpretation seriously
and, indeed, interactively (Vandevelde 2005, 11f.)
A final qualifying remark concerning the limitations of the analysis
given in this chapter is in order here. The foregoing meditation on the
relation of truth and interpretation has suggested that truth as correspon-
dence must give way to truth as coherence, at the very least in regard to
the interpretation of works. There is, however, a third way of understand-
ing truth, namely, in terms of the historical ground of the ways that the
interpretandum presents itself to and absences itself from the interpreter.
Truth, so construed, is the truth of an interpretation but an interpreta-
tion that (a) concretely supposes untruth and errancy and (b) cannot be
reduced to any single one of the factors of interpretation (e.g., author,
222 Daniel O. Dahlstrom
work, interpreter) but instead involves them all—and more. This way of
understanding truth, inspired by Heidegger, provides a necessary correc-
tive to a potential tendency to collapse meanings and their coherence into
something for which human subjectivity is solely responsible or into some
ahistorical, transcending identity. For if truth is a matter of the coherence
of interpretations, that coherence and the incoherence it supposes are
grounded, not in those interpretations, but in an unfi nished history of
interpretations.
Notes
1
I am grateful to Jeremy Butman and Nolan Little for their critical readings of
early drafts of this paper.
2
For some examples of the uses indicated, replace the variable x in “Joe under-
stands x” with the following words: “thermostats,” “traffic signals,” “French,”
“planes,” “chess,” “dance,” “earthquakes,” “his wife.”
3
Something analogous happens when I speak and thus understand a language,
but have not begun to reflect upon the rules according to which I speak that
language and use its terms accordingly. The semiotic component obviously com-
plicates the interpretive structure, such that we take x as y for z, where “y” is a sign
or word for z.
4
This claim by no means discounts genuine novelties in need of interpretation.
The notion of novelty, as the notion of being different from anything preceding
it, obviously supposes a foreunderstanding in at least two senses, a foreunder-
standing of what precedes it and a foreunderstanding of difference. I am grateful
to Nolan Little for calling my attention to this issue.
5
Since we do not return to the identical theme from which we began, it may be
useful, adopting a metaphor from Hegel, to refer to this pattern as an interpre-
tive helix. For more on this vital dimension of interpretation, see Dahlstrom
2010.
6
Whether the meaning of a sentence is equated with the possibility of its truth
(Davidson) or with the empty, signifying thought that awaits identification with a
fulfilling intuition (Husserl), the task of interpretation is frequently construed as
determining meaning not truth. In the main body I have been suggesting that we
find these considerations compelling to the extent that we take our bearings
from the way that ordinary perceptual experiences provide access to the truth-
makers, the objects or states of affairs that make certain sentences true. The
access in such cases involves, by some accounts, a component of sensation, some
non-conceptual content that necessarily marks the end of conception and, with
it, interpretation. Even for outright conceptualists, declared enemies of the so-
called “Myth of the Given” like Sellars, Davidson, and MacDowell (at least at
times), the task of interpretation ends where perception begins, even if the con-
tent of perception is said to be thoroughly conceptual.
Truth and Interpretation 223
7
By “overriding meaning or interpretation,” I do not mean to suggest something
that necessarily takes the form of a single assertion or, for that matter, the form
of an assertion at all. It also seems to me that we should resist the compositional
view of true interpretations, that is, the view that what is true about an interpre-
tation can be broken down into the truth of single assertions, as though their
conjunction were simply truth-functional, for example, “p ^ q”. While I am not
confident that I have a good argument for this intuition, my hunch is that just
as a meaning of a poem, a painting, or a novel often resists reduction to a single
assertion, so, too, it resists reduction to a mere string or conjunction of
assertions.
8
The defense of QR in this chapter is, I suspect, consistent with Pol Vandevelde’s
account of the act, as opposed to the event, of interpretation; see Vandevelde
2005, 4: “By act, I mean an act of consciousness: someone interpreting a text
makes a statement or an utterance and through his or her act is committed
regarding the truth of what is said, his or her truthfulness, and the rightness or
appropriateness of what is said, so that, if prompted, the interpreter must be
ready to defend the interpretation made regarding these three claims.”
9
Vandevelde 2005, 8f; see, too, Livingston 2005, 136–174 and the essays in
Iseminger 1992.
10
“Die Meinung, kein Vorurteil zu haben, ist selbst das größte Vorurteil.” See, also
Heidegger 1993 GA 59, 102f, 171, 194. See, too, Paul Feyerabend on interpreting
Galileo’s findings from his telescope and Bellarmine’s position in Feyerabend
1993, 87f, 110, and 124–134.
11
For a sampling of the diversity among theories of art, see Parts One and Two of
Dickie et al. 1989; for diverse views on aesthetic concepts and the “aesthetic/non-
aesthetic distinction,” see the articles by Frank Sibley, Ted Cohen, and Kendall
Walton in Dickie et al. 1989, 356–414.
12
Lessing 1972, 10f: “Die Bemerkung, welche hier zum Grunde liegt, daß der
Schmerz sich in dem Gesichte des Laokoon mit derjenigen Wut nicht zeige,
welche man bei der Heftigkeit desselben vermuten sollte, ist vollkommen
richtig. Auch das ist unstreitig, daß eben hierin, wo ein Halbkenner den
Künstler unter der Natur geblieben zu sein, das wahre Pathetische des
Schmerzes nicht erreicht zu haben, urteilen dürfte; daß, sage ich, eben hierin
die Weisheit desselben ganz besonders hervorleuchtet.” See, also: “. . . er [der
Künstler] mußte Schreien in Seufzen mildern; nicht weil das Schreien eine
unedle Seele verrät, sondern, weil es das Gesicht auf eine ekelhafte Weise
verstellet” (1972, 20).
13
Further complicating matters, of course, is the role that irony may play, in the
object of interpretation as well as in the terms of the interpretation, though this
issue overlaps with 3.3 below.
14
See Plato, Phaedrus, 275c–d, translated by Reginald Hackforth, in Plato 1971, 521:
“Anyone who leaves behind him a written manual, and likewise anyone who takes
it over from him, on the supposition that such writing will provide something
reliable and permanent, must be exceedingly simple-minded; he must really be
ignorant of Ammon’s utterance, if he imagines that written words can do any-
thing more than remind one who knows that which the writing is concerned
224 Daniel O. Dahlstrom
with.” See, too, the Seventh Letter, 341b–345a, translated by L. A. Post, in Plato
1971, 1588–1590.
15
Wimsatt and Beardsley 1954, 431. In order to invoke a version of this strategy,
while recognizing the inaccessibility of the author’s intention, some theorists dis-
tinguish between “actual” and “hypothetical” intentionalism; see Carroll 2000,
75–95.
16
See the essays by Lyas and Robinson in Dickie et al. 1989, 442–454 and 455–468.
17
Common sense can obviously be common nonsense and a true interpretation
one that only a few can understand.
Bibliography
Abbreviations
Hua XXV: Aufsätze und Vorträge (1911–1921), ed. Thomas Nenon and Hans Rainer
Sepp, 1986.
Hua XXX: Logik und allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie. Vorlesungen 1917/18 mit
ergänzenden Texten aus der ersten Fassung von 1910/11, ed. Ursula Panzer, 1996.
Works Cited
Allison, Henry. 2002. “ ‘General Introduction’ to Immanuel Kant, Metaphysical
Foundations of Natural Science,” in Henry Allison and Peter Heath (eds), Theoretical
Philosophy After 1781, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1–27.
Arrien, Sophie-Jan. 2009. “Natorp et Heidegger: Une science originaire est-elle
possible?” in Servanne Jollivet, Claude Romano (eds), Heidegger 1912–1930,
Rencontres, affinités, confrontations, Paris: Vrin, 111–129.
Bauch, Bruno. 1918. “Immanuel Kant und die Fortbildung des Systems des
Kritischen Idealismus,” Kantstudien XXII, 432–433.
Bernet, Rudolf. 1998. “Husserl,” trans. Lilian Alweiss and Steven Kupfer, in Simon
Critchley and William R. Schroeder (eds), A Companion to Continental Philosophy,
Oxford: Blackwell, 198–207.
Burns, Gerald. 1992. Hermeneutics: Ancient and Modern. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
Caputo, John and Michael J. Scanlon (eds). 1999. God, the Gift, and Postmodernism.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Carnap, Rudolf. 1934. Logische Syntax der Sprache. Vienna: J. Springer.
—. 1998. Der logische Aufbau der Welt. Hamburg: F. Meiner.
Carroll, Noël. 2000. “Interpretation and Intention: The Debate Between
Hypothetical and Actual Intentionalism,” Metaphilosophy 31, 75–95.
Cohen, Stewart. 1987. “Knowledge, Context, and Social Standards,” Synthese, 73:1,
3–26.
Corlett, J. Angelo. 1996. Analyzing Social Knowledge. Lanham, MD: Rowman and
Littlefield.
—. 2007. “Analyzing Social Knowledge,” Social Epistemology, 21:3, 231–247.
Dahlstrom, Daniel O. 2010. “Hermeneutical Ontology,” in Roberto Poli and
Johanna Seibt (eds), Theory and Applications of Ontology: Philosophical Perspectives,
New York: Springer, 2010, 395–414.
Derrida, Jacques. 1973. Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of
Signs, trans. David B. Allison. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
—. 1988. Limited Inc., ed. Gerald Graff. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press.
—. 2005. Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press.
Dickie, George, Richard Sclafani, and Ronald Robin (eds). 1989. Aesthetics: A
Critical Anthology. 2nd ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Dilthey, Wilhelm. 1979. “Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den
Geisteswissenschaften,” in Bernhard Groethuysen (ed.), Gesammelte Schriften,
Band VII. Stuttgart: Teubner, 79–190.
Evans, Fred. 2008. “Chiasm and Flesh,” in Rosalyn Diprose and Jack Reynolds
(eds), Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts. Stocksfield: Acumen, 184–193.
228 Bibliography
Rorty, Richard. 1980. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Oxford: Blackwell.
Russell, Bertrand. 1903. Principles of Mathematics, London: Routledge [2010].
—. 1908. “Mathematical Logic as Based on the Theory of Types,” American Journal
of Mathematics 30, 222–262.
—. 2009. An Outline of Philosophy. New York: Routledge.
Sallis, John. 1994. “The Truth Is Not of Knowledge,” in Theordore Kisiel and John
van Buren (eds), Reading Heidegger from the Start. Albany: SUNY Press.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1943. L’être et le néant. Paris: Gallimard.
—. 1956. Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Philosophical
Library.
Schlegel, Friedrich. 1963. Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, vol. 18 Philosophische
Lehrjahre (1796–1806), ed. Ernst Behler. Munich/Paderborn/Vienna: Ferdinand
Schöningh; Zurich: Thomas-Verlag.
—. 1964. Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, vol. 12 Philosophische Vorlesungen
(1800–1807), erster Teil, ed. Jean-Jacques Anstett. Munich/Paderborn/Vienna:
Ferdinand Schöningh; Zürich: Thomas-Verlag.
—. 1978. Kritische und theoretische Schriften. Stuttgart: Philip Reclam.
Schmitt, Frederick F. 1994. “Socializing Epistemology: An Introduction through two
Sample Issues,” in Frederick F. Schmitt (ed.), Socializing Epistemology: The Social
Dimensions of Knowledge. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994, 1–27.
Schürmann, Reiner. 1990. Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy,
trans. Christine-Marie Gros. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Sellars, Wilfrid. 1997. Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Sheehan, Thomas. 1997. “Husserl and Heidegger: The Making and Unmaking of
a Relationship,” in Thomas Sheehan and Richard Palmer (eds), Psychological
and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger, 1927–1931.
Dordecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Shirley, Greg. 2010. Heidegger and Logic. London: Continuum.
Solomon, Miriam. 1994. “A More Social Epistemology,” in Frederick F. Schmitt
(ed.), Socializing Epistemology: The Social Dimensions of Knowledge. Lanham, MD:
Rowman and Littlefield, 217–233.
Sommer, Manfred. 1988. “Denkökonomie und Empfindungstheorie bei Mach und
Husserl—zum Verhältnis von Positivismus und Phänomenologie,” in Rudolf
Haller and Friedrich Stadler (eds), Ernst Mach, Werke und Wirkung. Vienna:
Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, 309–328.
Spiegelberg, Herbert. 1982. The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction,
3rd revised and enlarged edition. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Stolzenberg, Jürgen. 1995. “Ursprung und System. Probleme der Begründung
der Philosophie im Werk Hermann Cohens, Paul Natorps und beim frühen
Heidegger,” in Rüdiger Bubner, Konrad Cramer, Reiner Wiehl (eds), Neue
Studien zur Philosophie, vol. IX. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 207ff.
—. 2002. “L’ultimo Natorp. Fondazione ultima e teoria della soggestività,” in
Besoli, Ferrari, Guidetti (eds.), Neokantismo e fenomenologia: Logica, psicologica,
cultura e teoria della conoscenza. Macerata: Quodlibet, 173–186.
Theunissen, Michael. 1986. The Other: Studies in the Social Ontology of Husserl,
Heidegger, Sartre, and Bubner, trans. Christopher Macann. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Bibliography 233
Kant, Immanuel 111, 139, 148, 150, object 3–21, 35, 37, 42, 43–57, 59–63,
153–7, 167, 184, 193, 213 66, 69–70, 72, 75, 81, 83, 91, 95,
129, 134, 142, 145, 153, 155,
Lambert, Johann Heinrich 156–7 157–60, 165, 167, 169–75, 184,
life-world 162, 168–70, 174 186–7, 189, 192–3, 199–200,
logical form 147–8, 150, 153 209–10, 214–16, 219
Longino, Helen E. 162–75 ideal object 31–3, 37, 69
image object 42–3, 49–51, 53
Marx, Karl 147, 148 intentional object 45–6, 60–2,
material, materially, materialities 12, 168–75
33, 35–7, 42, 75, 118, 150, 169 object-spheres 25
meaning 5, 7, 10, 16, 18, 26–31, 63, ontology, ontological 4–5, 9, 11–14, 16,
69–71, 73–4, 79–83, 85–93, 108, 20, 29, 37, 39, 58, 61–5, 67–9, 71–3,
113, 118, 140, 168–70, 172, 174–6, 79–85, 88–90, 92–5, 99–101, 104–5,
191, 196–7, 209–10, 212, 214–19, 108, 110, 112–14, 120, 123, 130–1,
Index 237
137, 140, 143, 146, 148, 194, 202–4, reason, reasoning 33, 148–9, 153–6,
206–7 158–60, 164–6, 168, 195, 207
fundamental ontology 80–1, 92–3, reconstruction 168, 189, 191–2, 194–7
99–100, 107 reducibility 25, 29, 31–3, 39, 214
ontological foundation 39 reduction 25, 26, 29–34, 39, 53, 57,
universal ontology 80–1, 83 59–70, 72–4, 167, 173, 179, 194,
212–13, 221
painting 42, 43, 47, 52–3, 56, 138, 144, phenomenological reduction 57, 60,
210, 215–17 62, 63–6, 67–73, 95, 173, 194
pairing 173–4 to sphere of ownness 173
Pareyson, Luigi 202 transcendental reduction 57, 59,
perception 10, 13, 17, 19, 21, 29, 62–4, 68–74
42–8, 52–3, 55–6, 58–60, 71, 79, reductive 25–6, 28–9, 59–60, 65, 69,
85, 99, 103, 139, 142, 164–74, 206, 71–2, 74, 194, 213–14
213–14 Reeder, Harry P. 176
phantasy 42, 43–4, 47–56 reflection 13, 38, 50, 53, 59–60, 63,
phenomenological attitude 4, 57–8, 66–7, 71–3, 84, 91, 97–8, 145, 156,
61–3, 73 189, 191, 196, 216
phenomenological reduction 57, 60, remains, remnants 202, 206–7
62, 63–6, 67–73, 95, 173, 194 re-presentation 42, 48–51, 55
physical image 42, 48 re-presenting consciousness 42
Plato, Platonic 21, 79, 81, 97, 103–4, reproduction 48, 54
109–10, 116–23, 125–6, 129, 132, resistance 201–2, 206–8
161, 181, 193 re-understanding 211–12, 217–18
prejudice of presence 49, 52–3 Rickert, Heinrich 179–81, 183–4
pre-predicative 29, 34, 37, 39, 87, 94–6, Ricoeur, Paul 202, 207
100, 102–3 Risser, James 203
evidence 34 romanticism 4, 9–10, 20
experience 39 Rorty, Richard 202
openness 96, 100 Russell, Bertrand 36, 38, 40, 145
seeing 87
syntax 39 Schelling, Friedrich 129
truth 94–5, 102–3 Schlegel, Friedrich 4, 9, 11–13, 21
understanding 103 Schmitt, Frederick F. 162–3
presentation 42, 45, 48, 54, 191, 194 Schürmann, Reiner 203, 207
presenting consciousness 42 seeing 7, 17–18, 79, 84–5, 88, 90–2,
preservation, 115–16, 122–3 134, 192
principles of logic 26, 34, 36–7, 39 pre-predicative 87
proposition, propositional 5, 25, 27–8, seeing-in 43, 50, 134
30–1, 34–8, 40, 69, 94–6, 102–4, self-interpretation 203, 211–12
107, 139, 145–7, 149, 151–3, 155–6, self-understanding 212
158, 160, 182, 204 sign consciousness 44
significance 38, 47, 185, 197–8
qualitative judgment 145 skepticism 63, 74, 143, 153, 159
social epistemology 161–3, 167–75
reality 4, 10, 41, 50, 57–9, 61, 64–6, 70, sphere of ownness 173–4
74, 111, 118, 123, 129, 152, 194 Spinoza, Benedict De 136, 147–8, 160
238 Index
spirit 10, 13, 16, 97–8, 137, 151, transcendental subjectivity 6, 66, 69,
153, 158–60 73–5
stuff 27–8, 30, 36–7, 39 truth 3–7, 12–13, 20, 25–6, 30–2, 34–6,
subject 6, 8–10, 12–13, 17–19, 27, 42, 39–40, 58, 74, 80, 94–8, 100–8,
43, 46, 48–51, 53, 62–3, 65–6, 97, 113, 115–18, 122–4, 129–30, 137,
99, 102, 111–12, 129, 132, 134, 140, 139–43, 145–52, 155–8, 160, 163,
144–8, 150–3, 155, 157–61, 167, 194, 201–7, 209, 212–22
169–74, 196, 204, 213–15, 218 truth-logic 34–5
logical subject 147 Tugendhat, Ernst 104, 203–5
thinking subject 148, 155, 158
subjectivity 6–8, 61, 66, 69–75, 129, Überwindung 206
143–4, 148, 160, 186, 188–90, 200, understanding 4, 6–10, 12, 14, 43–4,
214, 47–8, 52, 55–6, 60–2, 80, 82–3,
absolute 61, 64, 120, 125n. 2 85–92, 94, 100–4, 111, 114, 117,
transcendental 6, 66, 69–75 137, 145, 153–6, 159, 164, 197,
substance 19, 102, 132, 146–8, 157 203–4, 209–12, 216, 221–2
substitutability 36 foreunderstanding 210, 212, 217–18
syllogism 151–2 misunderstanding 125, 210, 212,
syntactical forms 26–8 217, 219
re-understanding 211–12, 217–18
testability 25, 33 self-understanding 212
totality 13, 26, 31–2, 36, 97, 99–100, understanding and interpretation, 209
103, 105–7, 135–6, 140, 147–8, universal, universality 32, 68, 71–2,
152–4, 203 138, 145–7
transcendence, transcendental 6–7, 10, universal judgments 32
38, 57–75, 91, 95, 100, 105, 111, universal ontology 80–1, 83
137, 144, 153, 167, 172
transcendental attitude 57, 64, 68, validity, valid, 6, 20, 30–1, 33–7, 39, 47,
74–5, 92 58, 63, 69, 71–2, 134, 149, 167–8,
transcendental constitution 58, 170–3
60–2, 74 Vandevelde, Pol 221, 223
transcendental idealism 57, 60–2, Vattimo, Gianni 202
65–7, 75, 129 Verwindung 206
transcendental logic 139, 153
transcendental phenomenology 7, Wittgenstein, Ludwig 147
57, 67–9, 73–4
transcendental problem 69–74 Zermelo, Ernst 38
transcendental reduction 57, 59, Žižek, Slavoj 149
62–4, 68–74