Back to 'Things in Themselves': A Phenomenological Foundation for Classical Realism

Back to 'Things in Themselves' A phenomenological foundation for classical realism A thematic study into the epistemological-metaphysical foundations of phenomenological realism, a reformulation of the method of phenomenology as noumenology, and a critique of subjectivist transcendental philosophy and phenomenology

Josef Seifert The International Academy of Philosophy

ROUTLEDGE & KEGAN PAUL New York and London

First published in 1987 by Routledge & Kegan Paul Inc. in association with Methuen Inc. 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY /0001 Published in Great Britain by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Set in Times by Inforum Ltd, Portsmouth and printed in Great Britain by Billing & Sons Ltd, Worcester

© Josef Seifert 1987 No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Seifert, Josef, 1945Back to things in themselves. (Studies in classical and phenomenological realism) Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Phenomenology. 2. Realism. I.' Title. ll. Series. 142'.7 86-3231 B829.5.S44 1986 British Library CIP Data also available 1SBN 0-7/02-0711-5

With the expression of profound friendship and admiration, dedicated to Agustin Basave Fernandez de la Valle Important philosopher, Rector of the Universidad Regiomontana, Monterrey, Mexico, and Co-Director of the International Academy of Philosophy, on the joyful occasion of his sixtieth birthday

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CONTENTS

Analytical table of contents

IX

Preface

1

Part I: The classical principle of phenomenology: 'Back to things themselves'

5

1 'Back to things themselves:' Rethinking Husserl's maxim and the nature of philosophy

7

2 Critique of epoche

Part II:

The cogito and indubitable knowledge

77

119

Introduction to Part II

121

3 Do Kant's reasons for transcendental philosophy deserve for it the title 'critical philosophy?'

123

4 Does Husserl's transcendental phenomenology prove phenomenological realism to be uncritical?

137

5 Indubitable knowledge of real being and of necessary essences in the cogito

181

Part III:

217

Objective knowledge of 'things in themselves'

Introduction to Part III

219

6 What are 'things in themselves?' 7 Can human knowledge of 'things in themselves' be 'objective?'

223 252

8 Beings which claim to 'be in themselves'

282

Contents

9 Indubitable and infallible knowledge of 'things in themselves:' phenomenology as noumenology

303

Notes

325

Index

350

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ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part I The classical principle of phenomenology: 'Back to things themselves. '

1 Back to things themselves: rethinking Husserl's maxim and the nature of philosophy. 1 What is phenomenology? 'Back to things themselves' as the principle of the phenomenologicaVphilosophical method. (i)

'Back to things themselves' as opposed to constructions, reductionism, premature systematization or causal explanation, and similar forms of doing violence to the given.

(ii)

Starting out in philosophical analyses with causal explanations prevents the understanding of 'things themselves. '

(iii)

Adequate causal explanations impossible without a return to things themselves.

(iv)

Phenomenology versus reductionism.

(v)

Phenomenology, causality, and metaphysics.

(vi)

Phenomenology is not restricted to philosophy but is also the appropriate kind of procedure in many other disciplines, notably in art and literary criticism, psychology, historiography, and others. Why the primary application of phenomenology still lies in philosophy. The distinctively philosophical 'return to things themselves.' IX

Analytical table of contents

(vii)

2 3

4

5 6

7

Phenomenology as a study of 'things themselves' in contrast to misconceptions resulting from mistaken paradigms and models. 'Linguistic analysis' and clarification of terms as tools for understanding and distinguishing 'things themselves.' The specific philosophical task of a return to things themselves. (i) 'Back to things themselves' versus premature systematizations. (ii) Certain intellectual and moral attitudes as conditions of objective and rational philosophical knowledge. (iii) What are the 'things themselves' to which philosophers should return? The difference between phenomenological intuition and description. Can a presuppositionless philosophical return to 'things themselves' be justified? (i) Further clarification of the method which leads 'back to things themselves:' presuppositions of this phenomenological maxim and their justification through the' given' as eidos of knowledge and insight. Phenomenology as a unique mode of seeing and (ii) learning to see: insight, argumentation, dialogue, and intersubjectivity. (iii) Phenomenology as presuppositionless, and the rational foundation of philosophy. 'Back to things themselves' and the 'thing in itself:' is phenomenological realism possible? Is phenomenology atheistic, or 'mystical' and alogical? Direct seeing or deduction? Phenomenology, metaphysics, proof, and speculation. Phenomenology faced with history, language, and the social: is 'phenomenological realism' naive?

2 Critique of epoche as foundational moment in the phenomenological method: the limited importance of epoche as a methodological element for a philosophical return to 'things themselves' .

x

Analytical table of contents 1 Different meanings of epoche, ideation, and phenomenological reduction. (i) The first sense of epoche (eidetic reduction) - shared with phenomenological realism: prescinding from real existence in the context of essential (eidetic) analysis. (ii) The second sense of epoche: phenomenological reduction as suspension of belief in the 'transcendent existence' of the world (characteristic of the 'natural attitude'). (iii)

(iv)

A third sense of epoche (phenomenological reduction) and the first step of transcendental reduction. Fourth sense of epoche (second moment of transcendental reduction): suspension of transcendence not only of existence but of 'Wesensgesetze' as well.

2 Critique of phenomenological reduction (second and third sense of epoche) as the principle of the phenomenological method. The way 'back to things themselves' demands the proper methods which allow understanding of autonomous objective 'esse' (existence).

(i)

Concrete individual (autonomous) existence as object of philosophy.

(ii)

The unique existential status of the question about 'God.'

(iii)

Critique of epoche as sufficient method for analyzing 'essences. '

Critique of epoche as methodological principle for the exploration of necessary essences. 3 Radical critique of 'transcendental reduction' (epoche) as proper method for knowledge of necessary essences. (iv)

xi

Analytical table of contents Part II The cogito and indubitable knowledge: critique of the motives which led to transcendental philosophy and transcendental phenomenology, and a defense of the transcendence of man in knowledge.

Introduction to Part II

3 Do Kant's reasons for transcendental philosophy deserve for it the title 'critical philosophy?' 1 Kant's motives for making the 'Copernican Turn.' 2 A brief outline of some criticisms of the motives which led Kant into transcendental idealism. 4

Does Husserl's transcendental phenomenology prove phenomenological realism to be uncritical? 1 The motives which led to Husserl's 'transcendental phenomenology. '

2

Brief critique of Husserl's motives for developing transcendental phenomenology (idealism). (i)

Husserl's rejection of the 'transcendence of Man in knowledge' uncritical, and contrary to the evidence of 'things themselves.' The achievement of 'transcendence' in knowledge cannot be denied without self-contradiction and is itself given with indubitable certainty.

3

Critique of the idealist interpretation of sense-perception.

4

Critique of Husserl's ideal of philosophy as a rigorous science.

5

Critique of Husserl's transition from a wrong 'methodological' epoche of the world to the transcendentalontological thesis of its negation.

6

The phenomenological and realist distinction between concept and species.

7

The reversal of the order between meaning-giving and meaning-fulfilling acts. The reversal of the priority of receptivity over spontaneity.

8 Philosophy and the other disciplines and sciences. 9 Critique of Husserl's naturalistic and deterministic

xii

Analytical table of contents

10 11

12

13

14

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conception of the real world as source of transcendental idealism. The receptive essence of knowledge as refutation of the radical transcendental constitution of consciousness. The lack of givenness of an activity of transcendental constitution: the unphenomenological and antiphenomenological character of transcendental phenomenology. Critique of transcendental phenomenology by uncovering ambiguities and equivocations in the notions of 'transcendental ego,' 'pure ego,' and similar key terms. Critique of the inner contradictions in the idea of 'universal constitution,' including 'self-constitution' - which is a concept inseparable from transcendental idealism. Systematic distinction between constituted, unconstituted, and unconstitutable being. Elaboration of evident knowledge concerning 'things in themselves.' Phenomenology of the noumena. The self-givenness of real transcendence in knowledge: absolutely necessary essences and cognition of real existence in the 'cogito argument' as the most rigorous refutation of transcendental phenomenology. Realist phenomenology of noumenal essences and essential necessities.

5 Indubitable knowledge of real being and of necessary essences in the cogito: definitive refutation of Husserl's transcendental phenomenology through the self-givenness of cognitive transcendence. 1 Indubitable knowledge oftruth in the cogito. (i) Indubitable knowledge of real being in the cogito: cogito; ergo sum; ergo esse est. (ii) Knowledge of universal necessary truths implied in skeptical doubt. 2 Characteristics of essentially necessary facts. (i) Essential necessity. (a) Essentially necessary versus contingent facts. xiii

Analytical table of contents

(b) Essential necessity versus formal dominion of general nature. (c) Absolute essential necessity versus necessity of nature. (d) Essential necessity versus aporetic 'seeming' necessity. (e) Essential necessity differs from psychological necessity. (f) Objective essential necessity versus subjective transcendental necessity. (ii) Absolute exceptionless generality and strict formal rule of the universal over the particular. (iii) Timelessness and eternity. (iv) Absolute indestructibility. (v) Immutability. (vi) Incomparable intelligibility. (vii) 'Injudicabilitas' and the foundation of rational knowledge. (viii) Apodictic (absolute) certainty and cognitive infallibility. Part III Objective knowledge of 'things in themselves;' constituted, unconstituted, and unconstitutable being.

Introduction to Part III. 6 What are 'things in themselves?' Is the claim of realist phenomenology to be no urn enology absurd? 1 Can man know 'things in themselves' or is such a claim nonsense? (i) Contradictory meanings of the term 'thing in itself.' (a) Meanings of 'thing in itself' which refer to something intrinsically (metaphysically or logically) impossible. (b) Contradictory meanings of 'thing in itself,' in which the contradiction arises from a relation between the object and subject of discourse. Meanings of 'thing in itself' which make it contradictory for man to claim knowledge of 'things in themselves. ' xiv

Analytical table of contents

(c) Intrinsically impossible kinds of knowing 'things in themselves.' (d) Humanly impossible ways to know 'things in themselves. ' (ii)

Meanings of the term 'thing in itself' which make sense, yet in regard to which any positive and/or comprehensive human knowledge is excluded. (a) 'Thing in itself' as the totality of a thing in all its knowable aspects. (b) Being as in principle accessible to the finite mind, but as inaccessible to the human mind. (c) 'Thing in itself' as that which lies beyond the limits offactual, present human understanding: knowledge of 'things in themselves' as the object of human hope and desire.

(iii)

Important senses in which we can know 'things in themselves;' critique of Kant and Husser!' (a) 'Things in themselves' as the true being (essence and existence) of things and as opposed to the objects of deception and error. (b) A second fundamental sense of 'thing in itself. ' Being which is not constituted as a mere object of intentional acts. (c) The different sources of the claim to ontic autonomy - and ontic heteronomy. (d) Further clarification of 'thing in itself.' (e) 'Being in itself' as the authentic essence of a thing as opposed to merely exterior, superficial aspects ofthe thing. (f) De I'existence aI' etre: being in itself as the true vocation of a being.

(iv)

The goal served by the preceding investigations into 'thing in itself.'

7 Can human knowledge of 'things in themselves' be 'objective?' The many meanings of 'objective' and 'subjective.'

1 Introduction. 2 'Objective' and 'subjective' as ontological categories.

xv

Analytical table of contents 'Object' as unconscious (lifeless) thing, 'subject' as conscious being (person). (ii) 'Objective' as 'real' - 'subjective' as merely imagined by a subject. (iii) Subjective being as 'heteronomous being' and 'objective being' as 'being in itself.' (iv) 'Objective' as 'objectively meant to be' and 'subjective' as 'opposed to the true meaning' of something. (v) Objective being as being which is not produced by a subject. (vi) 'Objective being' as 'neutral being' - 'subjective being' as valuable being: a misleading terminology. 3 'Subjective' and 'objective' as epistemological categories. (i)

(i)

(ii) (iii) (iv) (v) (vi)

(vii)

Objective knowledge as knowledge of being as it truly is. 'Objective knowledge' as 'episteme' - 'subjective knowledge' as 'd6xa.' 'Objective knowledge' as knowledge which does justice to the pure essence of things. 'Objective knowledge' and universal consensus. 'Objective knowledge' as rationally grounded knowledge. 'Objective knowledge' as 'neutral knowledge,' or as a knowledge which can be attained while remaining in a morally and intellectually 'neutral attitude.' Objective knowledge as a knowledge which does not in any way produce its object and which is in this sense 'independent from the will.'

(viii) Objective knowledge as knowledge free from historical and other conditions of the subject. (ix) Absurd and humanly impossible forms of 'objective knowledge. ' 4 'Objective' and 'subjective' as purely 'functional concepts.' (i) Objective as that which stands over against ussubjective as what is 'laterally given.' xvi

Analytical table of contents (ii)

Existential modes of objective and subjective givenness. (a) Objective givenness as not motivating and affecting our will or heart. (b) Givenness as good or evil for us. (c) Subjective givenness on background of past and other relations. 5 'Objective' and 'subjective' as predicates of attitudes, judgments, or methods. (i) 'Objective' in the sense of 'adequate. ' (ii) 'Objective' as 'neutral attitude.' (iii) Rationalist and empiricist 'objectivity.' 6 'Objective' and 'subjective' as logical categories. (i) Objectivity of the truth of judgment. (ii) Objectivity as validity of an argument. (iii) Objectivity as logically correct method.

·8 Beings which claim to 'be in themselves' as opposed to mindconstituted beings. 1 Objective and subjective foundations of the 'claim to exist in itself' in the first sense. 2 Claim to exist 'in itself;' i.e. independently from the subject. (i) Different sources of the claim of mind-independent being. 3 Constituted beings which do not claim to exist autonomously. (i) Beings which by their very essence do not claim to exist in themselves. (ii) Beings which do not claim mind-independent autonomy because of their way of givenness: imagination and art. 4 Beings which claim to exist 'in themselves.' (i) Beings which claim, by their very nature, autonomous, mind-independent 'being in themselves. ' xvii

Analytical table of contents

(ii)

Beings which claim to exist in themselves by the 'way of their givenness.' 9 Indubitable and infallible knowledge of 'things in themselves:' phenomenology as noumenology. 1 The evident presupposedness of indubitable knowledge of 'things in themselves' for any knowledge of constituted beings. (i) The 'metaphysical' presupposition of unconstituted being in 'transcendental idealism.' (a) The un constituted activity of constitution. (b) The unconstituted subject of any constitution. (c) The absurd denial of a non-constituted subject follows ineluctably from any transcendental idealism. (d) 'Back to things themselves:' back to objective realism. 2 The epistemological presupposition of a knowledge of 'unconstituted being' as condition of the possibility of constitution. Knowledge of the unconstituted being of the act and of the subject of constitution necessarily presupposed for knowledge of constituted objects. 3 Empirical and essentially necessary facts about the constituted beings are not constituted but known. 4 The necessary structure of knowledge as 'receptive' (discovering) and 'transcending' reveals an inner contradiction in transcendental idealism and refutes it. S Immediate evident givenness of 'things in themselves. '

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PREFACE

Towards the end of his important article 'What is Phenomenology?' Adolf Reinach writes: When we wish to break with all theories and constructions in phenomenology and when we aspire to a return to things themselves, to a pure undistorted intuition of essences, intuition is by no means conceived as a sudden inspiration or illumination .... It requires specific and great efforts to leave the distance to things which characterizes our normal approach to them, and to attain to their clear and distinct grasp. It is precisely with reference to this difficulty that we speak of phenomenological method. Here we find a coming closer and closer to things, which is constantly threatened by all kinds of possible deceptions, a threat which accompanies all knowledge. Intuitions into essences also need to be worked out - and this labor stands under the image, sketched by Plato in the Phaedrus, of the souls having to climb up to heaven, with their horse-carriages, in order to arrive at the intuition of ideas.' This quotation states in all simplicity and clarity (albeit with reference only to essences) what we regard as the very principle and core of phenomenological philosophy: the return to things themselves. This book seeks to elaborate, step by step, the meaning of this 'program of phenomenology,' freeing it not only from the restriction to the exploration of essence, as if existence were excluded from phenomenological research, but also from far more significant distortions. In the course of our investigations we shall 1

Preface have to determine, in particular, whether the rigorous program of returning to 'things themselves' is best carried out by means of the phenomenological method as conceived by Husser!. Above all, the problem to be confronted is this: does the program of phenomenological philosophy as characterized by Reinach in the quote above lead to the transcendental (idealist) phenomenology of the later Husserl and the subjectivism which characterizes so many versions of 'phenomenology;' or does this program, when carried out authentically, contradict any kind of subjectivism and help to establish again a rigorous philosophical objectivism and realism? This problem is related to a fundamental question of such magnitude that the fate of all human knowledge, science, morality, happiness, love, and religion hinges on the answer to it. The meaning of human existence itself is at stake. In fact - since man cannot relate to any being outside of himself except by using his very own knowledge - being itself is at stake when this question is raised; being itself, at least inasmuch as man is accorded to gain knowing access to being or even to think of it in any conceivable manner. The question we mean can be formulated as follows: in our knowledge, do we also discover besides the appearances and constituted aspects of things, 'things in themselves,' i.e., entities, essential structures and laws (Wesenheiten und Wesensgesetze) , and existents, which are in no way constituted by human consciousness'? Or is human knowledge confined to an immanent sphere of human consciousness and to a world of objects (noemata) which derive all their meaning and 'being' from human subjectivity, from man's 'being in the world,' from his transcendental, or even his historical consciousness? The different answers they give to this question separate a Hume or a Kant from a Plato or an Aristotle, separate Husserl's transcendental phenomenology from phenomenological realism which holds that 'things in themselves' are truly what Kant calls them: noumena, that is, knowable and intelligible objects of human knowledge, instead of unknowable X's as Kant believed them to be (thereby belying the very meaning of the term 'noumenon' which means 'the intelligible,' that which is understandable or understood). Since the present work is dedicated to the critical foundation and philosophical development of phenomenological realism and of classical realism for which 'things in themselves' have always been 2

Preface noumena, i.e. intelligible; and since the Husserl of the Logical Investigations (LU; 1900-1) was the undisputed 'father' of phenomenology, it is only natural for us to distance ourselves critically primarily from those 'phenomenological' philosophers who, like Husserl himself after 1905, call into question the very meaning of the terms 'phenomenological realism' and 'thing in itself' and not just the possibility of any knowledge of beings in themselves (whereas Kant had held the meaningfulness and necessity of the notion 'thing in itself,' and had only denied the possibili'ty of its knowledge). Nevertheless, although we shall primarily focus on a critical discussion of transcendental idealist phenomenology, we shall also take into account the great thinker who gave rise to German idealism and transcendental philosophy: Immanuel Kant. A brief critical examination of the reasons that led Kant to adopt his transcendental position which denies knowledge of 'things in themselves,' is all the more useful for our purpose because Husserl had studied the Critique of Pure Reason between the time he had finished the Logical Investigations and the beginning of the period during which he advanced his idealist phenomenological position. Our critical historical interest, not in matters of purely scholarly dispute and in nuances of Kant's and Husserl's thought (perhaps reflected in hitherto undiscovered manuscripts available only in some rare libraries), but in the essential core of German idealism as it presents itself to the unprejudiced and careful reader of Kant or Husserl, will not, however, overshadow, the primarily thematicsystematic interest of the following investigations. The ensuing study is, furthermore, simultaneously an epistemological and a metaphysical study. As will be shown, the metaphysical question of what the 'thing in itself' is and the ontological difference between constituted (heteronomous) and nonconstituted (autonomous) being is inseparable from the fundamental problem of epistemology. In this regard, we shall defend a position that is directly opposite to that of Husserl and the majority of phenomenologists who believe that a phenomenology of knowledge must suspend all metaphysical questions and theses notwithstanding the fact that Husserl himself clearly implies a transcendental-idealist ontology of noemata. A thematic-systematic study into the nature of human knowledge in relation to the problem of constitution, and the resulting critil1ue

3

Preface

of Kant and the later Husserl, could still be conducted in many different ways. We shall pursue with relative brevity some of these 'many ways,' and engage in a more detailed discussion of only a few of them.

4

PART I

THE CLASSICAL PRINCIPLE OF PHENOMENOLOGY: 'BACK TO THINGS THEMSELVES'

1 'BACK TO THINGS THEMSELVES': RETHINKING HUSSERL'S MAXIM AND THE NATURE OF PHILOSOPHY 1 WHAT IS PHENOMENOLOGY? The original maxim of phenomenology had been 'Zuruck zu den Sachen selbst:' 'back to things themselves.' When Husserl addressed this call to the philosophical world of 1900-1, and when he admirably carried out in the Logical Investigations (LU) what this maxim prescribes, his new 'phenomenological' philosophy exerted a tremendous impact on the philosophical community of his time. While Husserl's call 'back to things themselves' has many meanings, it originally indicated a return especially to those objective logical, ethical, legal, and aesthetic laws and values which had been reduced to the sphere of mere subjectivity, and thus falsified, by psycho logism. The call 'back to things' was heard at a time when practically the entire modern philosophical world, mainly under the influence of Hume's empiricism, on the one hand, and under that of Kant's transcendental critical idealism, on the other, was dominated by one form or other of skepticism or relativism. Students of philosophy who had given up hope of ever again reaching the solid ground of objective truth and being were so excited over Husserl's work that many of them left Munich for Gottingen, some even riding their bicycles for hundreds of miles, in order to witness personally the reality of the liberation that Husserl offered, a liberation from a relativistic psychologism which reduced the laws of being and logic to laws of human thinking, and denied man any access to objective and immutable truth. In France during the early years of this century, the philosophical 7

Part I: 'Back to things themselves'

situation was harqly different. It was at about the same time that the young leftist students Jacques and Raissa Maritain studied at the Sorbonne; their philosophy teachers had successfully persuaded them that there was no objective reality and no absolute truth accessible to man's mind. Having despaired of ever finding any objective truth on which human existence could be based, they had already decided on the day on which they would both commit suicide. Like many students in Germany who had been swayed by the powerful influence of psychologistic relativism until they encountered Husserl, the young Maritains must have had a very similar experience to the one Friedrich Nietzsche describes so forcefully in the third Untimely Meditation (Unzeitgemiisse Betrachtung); this is a work which overtly deals with Schopenhauer but, as we know from later letters and works of Nietzsche., really recounts Nietzsche's own experience. There Nietzsche expresses his conviction that every philosopher who takes his starting point from Kant will fall into a skepticism which 'corrodes and smashes everything.' Nietzsche expresses his own feelings in the moving words of the famous German poet Heinrich von Kleist who wrote in a letter that, after having studied Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, he felt his deepest aspirations and search for meaning had been frustrated, the 'most sacred inner sanctuary of his soul had been deadly wounded,' and 'the highest and only goal of his life had sunk.' The goal referred to by Kleist was his hope to come to know a truth which was not relative to human consciousness and opinion, a truth 'which remains true until after the grave.' Against this background one can better understand why many students reacted so enthusiastically when they encountered Husser!'s philosophy of returning to 'things themselves,' which they rightly saw as a liberation from skepticism, as a return to, and rehabilitation of, classical philosophy as a study of the objective essence and being of things. But - in the opinion of the present author, tragically - after 1905 Husser! himself, and with him many of his followers, turned towards a more radical form of subjectivism and relativism than had been found in any thinker previously. The very notion of an objective, albeit unknowable, 'thing in itself' (still present in Kant, so to speak, as a reminder of some transcendent objective reality) was dismissed by Husserl as an 'absurd notion.' Every meaning and every being are, most explicitly in the Cartesian Meditations, declared to be strictly relative to human transcenden-

8

Rethinking Husserl's maxim tal subjectivity. And Husserl charged that the Munich group of phenomenologists and all other 'realist phenomenologists' who did not follow him in his radical turn towards subjectivity were 'naive: and failed to draw the consequences from the very principles of the phenomenological method of the 'return to things themselves.' This return, he claimed, could only be achieved by an epoche which puts into brackets any transcendent being and subject-independent meaning of 'things in themselves.'

In view of Husserl's self-interpretation as to his path into transcendental phenomenology the question arises: was it really the faithfulness to, or was it rather the radical betrayal of, the phenomenological motto 'back to things themselves' which prompted Husserl's turn towards transcendental idealism and anthropocentric relativism? To answer this question, which is crucial because of its profound implications for the whole of phenomenology and of philosophy itself, it is first necessary to radically and critically reexamine the meaning and truth of the original phenomenological and Husserlian phrase: 'Zuriick zu den Sachen' 'back to things themselves. ' In the following, we are not primarily concerned with the exact Husserlian meaning of this exhortation. Rather, we ask: in what sense should the philosopher go 'back to things themselves?' The final goal of our analysis is nothing less than a realist reformulation of 'phenomenological' philosophy as a method and program for any good philosophy in the past and present. To the extent to which a philosophy is good philosophy, it will be phenomenological both in the original Husserlian sense of 'back to things,' and in another sense which will be explained. As will become more and more clear, however, the term 'phenomenology' is utterly misleading if it is interpreted as implying that we can only reach appearances or noemata which depend on constitution by consciousness. Rather, it will become more and more apparent that the 'return to things themselves' is possible and that philosophy indeed comes into its own only when it grasps the objective essence of things in themselves. These things in themselves will be shown to be truly noumena, that is, intelligible and knowable by the human mind - and not, as Kant thought. unknowable to us. This conviction of Kant should have led him to speak of 9

Part I: 'Back to things themselves' anoumena (unknowables) instead of calling them noumena. We hope to make a modest contribution in this book towards rescuing the authentic meaning of the phenomenological method as an adequate methodological instrument which allows investigation of things in themselves as well as of appearances. (Perhaps, as Fritz Wenisch proposes, another new name should be given to such a philosophy, in order to avoid the subjectivist connotations which the term 'phenomenology' might retain even in the expression, 'realist phenomenology.' He proposes chreontic philosophy - from the Greek word, to chreon, the necessary - which has only two further disadvantages: it sounds unfamiliar and tends to sever this philosophy from Husserl's Logical Investigations and others who spoke of phenomenology; besides, it picks only one object of philosophy, the essentially necessary, as representative for the whole object of philosophy which also includes contingent existence. ) 0) 'Back to things themselves' as opposed to constructions, reductionism, premature systematization or causal explanation The principle 'back to things' is meant first to characterize an approach to philosophy which aims at authentic philosophizing about things. It designates a fresh thinking about the great themes and issues of philosophy, a going back to our own contact with 'things' as they present themselves to each man in the appropriate form of experience (sense-perception, conscious performance of acts, 'categorial intuition,' etc.). In this regard, the call 'back to things themselves' is decisive for any genuine philosophical endeavor, and it may be contrasted, first of all, with a mere study of the history of philosophical ideas, or with anyone of the following attitudes: a certain narrow-minded way of becoming a disciple of one philosophical master whose word and system one puts in a place which truth alone can rightfully occupy (an attitude which keeps one from seeing any truth not contained in the system of one's 'master' and leads one to adopt any error or shortcoming contained in this system); or with a mere eclectic approach to philosophy, an approach in which one agrees with different philosophers even 'accepting' mutually contradictory statements made by them, and, above all, never confronting their opinions and statements with being as we ourselves have access to it in experience. But while this 10

Rethinking Husser/'s maxim

meaning of Husserl's phrase, which calls for philosophizing proper instead of replacing philosophy with historical studies or with blind and possibly ideological discipleships, already has great appeal for, and promises philosophical life to those who have blindly accepted texts and textbooks, or who have gone through 'dead' studies of texts and of the history of thought during which the question of the truth of the studied opinions is never even raised, the phrase 'back to things themselves' has the further appeal of pointing to the proper way of doing philosophy. This way of doing philosophy consists in confronting the essence and content of a being itself, that which truly constitutes a thing in its own identity. The term 'thing' here refers to absolutely everything (even to nothing when it is a question of determining what exactly is meant by 'nothing'). The terms 'phenomenon' and 'the phenomena' as object of the 'phenomenological method' in our sense do not in the slightest way - although the root of the word (in the Greek phainesthai) might suggest otherwise - indicate a mere 'seeming' or 'appearing' of things ('to seem,' 'to appear' being possible meanings of the Greek verb). Rather, the term phenomenon in its original phenomenological sense refers to another set of important meanings of the word phainesthai: 'to show itself,' 'to manifest itself,' 'to shine forth from itself,' 'to present itself from itself.' It is the essence, nature and being of things as they present themselves in their intelligibility from themselves, which are here called phenomena. It is, in other words, the pure, intelligible and undistorted nature, precisely the nature of a being as it is not obscured by mere appearances, by misleading aspects, or by mere seeming; it is the being itself of things which is referred to. The phenomenological method, then, fundamentally consists in absolute faithfulness to the voice of being and in the unrelenting attempt of the philosopher to go back to things themselves as they show themselves as well from their very own being and essence as by the mediation of other things. Philosophers frequently lose sight of 'things themselves' in this simple and yet fundamental sense, and engage in constructions and inadequate explanations. A phenomenological grasp of things themselves ought to be the goal of any good philosophy. The phenomenological method, interpreted in this way, is not a single or a narrow method of philosophy, but the method and the broadest possible method of philosophy w~ich is open to every meaning and being and seeks out 11

Part I: 'Back to things themselves' the appropriate form of givenness, knowledge, experience and so on, in which each being discloses itself. This method opposes itself to any form of distancing one's theories from being, to any failure to listen to the voice of things, to any putting obstacles into the way of their presenting their own intelligibility to our minds. Hence, to fail to proceed phenomenologically in this broad sense (which refers to the valid philosophical methods and contributions of any philosopher) is to fail to philosophize properly. But there are countless obstacles to philosophizing properly, and therefore an explicit reflection on the nature of the proper philosophical method and on its distortions is urgently called for.

(ii) Starting out in philosophical analyses with causal explanations prevents the understanding of 'things themselves' A failure to pay attention to the proper essence of a being can have many different roots. One of the first of these is a precipitous and excessive concern with immediately 'explaining' a thing prior to understanding it. What comes into play here is the tendency of thinkers to trace a thing back immediately to its real or alleged origins and efficient causes, or to its final causes and purposes, without having delved into what the thing itself shows itself to be. Even if the deepest and ultimate explanation of a thing were to lie in its efficient or final cause, one ought first to understand its own nature. For instance, before one even attempts to explain the datum of moral oughtness through its alleged 'end' or final cause, e.g., human happiness or utility, one needs first to investigate morality and oughtness themselves. One ought first to pay attention to their essential characteristics, and to see only later whether these allow for a purely teleological, eudaemonistic, or consequentialist explanation of morality. And any eudaemonism or utilitarian consequentialism will indeed turn out to be utterly unable to explain truly and make understandable what morality and 'oughtness' show themselves to be. Even if one disagrees with this or any other concrete example we might choose to illustrate this point, one can hardly fail to admit the following fact: To look immediately for the efficient causes, effects, ends or relations of a given thing, except to the extent to which these elucidate its essence, from the very outset blocks the way to an adequate understanding of that being. It will be impossible to understand it adequately, if it is not first grasped 12

Rethinking Husser/'s maxim in its own proper nature, if it does not first 'show itself from itself,' to borrow a telling Heideggerian phrase. The general need to investigate a thing itself before searching for its causes applies especially in those cases where the causes are very difficult to determine, where they must be misinterpreted when assumed on the basis of an insufficient understanding of the proper nature of a thing, or where they are so far removed from their effects that they literally contribute little or nothing to the understanding of the intrinsic, inherent nature of the being in question. Thus, for example, the exact study of brain-waves and neural patterns of electro-chemical charges and discharges, as such, does not elucidate in the least the essence of what is frequently interpreted as the effect of these brain-events, such as, for example, feelings of pain and pleasure, or intellectual acts. For these brainwaves are toto coelo distinct from the psychic phenomena whose nature they are supposed to explain; and, as the Platonic Socrates in the Phaedo stated, these brain-events can well be regarded as conditions, without which the rational decision to obey a lawful albeit unjust condemnation could not be made or carried out; but they can in no way be the causes of such a decision which originates in the understanding of justice and in free choice. The proper understanding of a given being 'in itself is in all cases an indispensable, if not the most central, part of knowing a being. An understanding of the essence of a thing can never be replaced by a mere knowledge of its cause as such. The justification for this implication of the call 'back to things themselves' should be evident, for how can one fail to see that any true understanding of a thing has to consider first of all what is 'in that thing' or what that thing is in its own right! Yet although the maxim that any serious philosophical investigation into the truth, and any analysis in general, should go back to 'things themselves' in this sense is evidently true, it is by no means trivial; even less is it followed in practice. Scientists and philosophers, as well as laymen, often fail to grasp the importance ofthis maxim, and the consequences which flow from its truth. They will probably not explicitly deny or reject this principle. But countless times they will not realize how crucial a task and how difficult a labor is involved in understanding a thing and what it is, in attending to its true nature and expressing it adequately in statements. Philosophers may take the understanding of what a thing is for 13

Part 1: 'Back to things themselves' granted, and deem it superfluous to unfold its essence more clearly. Thus they may feel quite comfortable dealing merely with causes and consequences of things, while neglecting to focus on what these things themselves are. This problem is seen and acutely formulated in many Platonic dialogues; I am thinking especially of those passages in which Socrates manifests the real meaning of his famous "ignorance' which consists primarily in a deep sense of wondering and of not yet knowing what 'things' such as being, reality, knowledge, friendship, virtue and so forth, are in themselves. While other participants in the dialogue take such a knowledge for granted, Socrates unmasks as an illusion their thoughtless pretensions to possess already the knowledge of the essence of the things they profess to know. He shows that the definitions they offer of virtue (Meno, Gorgias. Republic), ofknowledge-episteme (Theaete(us), etc. contradict the true nature of these things. This 'negative result' presupposes a positive grasp of the respective things even if it may be impossible to express this knowledge right away in statements or in 'definitions.' Socrates has often been called - by Michael Landmann, for instance - a proto-phenomenologist, precisely because he spends much time on unravelling the contradictions and misconceptions which frequently result from not returning to the proper understanding of what things themselves are. The famous 'negative result' of many of Plato's Socratic dialogues could also be interpreted, not as an expression of not knowing a thing, but of the irreducibility of its essence which resists all false reductionist attempts of explaining or defining it through something else, and the ultimate undefinability of the first things and foundations. This impossibility of defining being, knowledge, and so on, should not be interpreted (along the lines of G. E. Moore's philosophy) as excluding any statements which give the essential characteristics of these data and delineate them from other things. In this sense we can 'define' even the most irreducible things. We can, for example, get at the nature of the simplest irreducible datum, being, by unfolding the 'transcendental properties' and the first principles of being qua being. To do so presupposes, and does not attempt to reduce to something else, the irreducible datum of being; without insight into its irreducible character the unfolding of its marks would make no sense.

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Rethinking Husser/'s maxim (iii) Adequate causal explanations impossible without a return to things themselves These observations already lead to the clearer recognition of a further point. If no understanding of a being in its proper self-hood is reached in the first place, it is also impossible to know what kinds of causes and origins can fully account for a given being. For when the essence of a thing is not understood, one is easily seduced into believing that it can be accounted for in terms of 'causes' which in reality can never explain it. To some measure, Aristotle is responsible for this unsound causal explanation of things prior to having sufficiently elucidated their essence, when he defines science as 'knowledge in terms of causes' and metaphysics as knowledge of 'first causes'2 - although of course Aristotle used a notion of 'cause' which was incomparably broader than the one accepted by most contemporary thinkers; above all, he also included among the causes the formal cause or essence (eidos) of a thing. In this regard, he - and Plato too, who emphasized the knowledge and intellectual vision of the eidos - may be regarded as a forerunner of the epistemological and methodological approach of phenomenology sketched here. The impossibility of accounting for a given being exclusively in terms of its extrinsic efficient and final causes applies even to that type of extrinsic cause which is most closely related to what is in a thing: to the exemplary cause. This unique type of cause, the exemplary cause, contains, in a sense, the whole essence of the being which is analogous to it; and yet it simultaneously transcends in its perfection the being itself which embodies its exemplary cause only imperfectly. The exemplary cause contains, as it were, the pure perfections which are only imperfectly and in a limited manner embodied by the analogates which correspond to it. Yet, even in this case, the exemplatum (the analogous datum) has to be known in its own right in order that the exemplar (the archetype; exemplary cause) can both be distinguished from it and understood in its specific exemplary relation to it. But in what follows we may well prescind from this case because we understand 'causality' here in the sense of efficient and final causality only. Although, ultimately, grave errors about things and their causes would seem to follow inevitably from a primary concern with the causes and purposes of things, thereby overlooking them, it is also 15

Part I: 'Back to things themselves' unquestionably the case that such a procedure leads to great progress in the scientific and technical sectors of life as well as in other branches of knowledge which might even be damaged if the disciples of such disciplines were to explore constantly the philosophical question: what is this really, this X? How can we explain this fact? The answer is the following: in the first place, man might possess an excellent pre-theoretical and pre-philosophical grasp of a thing and yet prove quite unable to formulate and explicate his knowledge philosophically and theoretically. The specific prise de conscience which philosophical understanding reaches of the essence of a thing is not necessarily gained by somebody who might well possess the kind of immediate experiential and pre-philosophical contact with that thing which is not only presupposed for any philosophical reflection but is also in itself sufficient for many forms of 'handling' things. Moreover, there are also theoretical or semantic constructs and models through which One can conceive and simultaneously distort reality, without ever actually basing one's theories on the pre-philosophical or philosophical contact with their true essence; and yet one can be quite proficient in dealing with realities from some pragmatic point of view or in some respects. One might be able to gain great proficiency in 'handling' things and in 'predicting shadows,' to speak with reference to Plato's Analogy of the Cave, without ever truly understanding what the object of one's own theory is in its own nature. The progress in knowledge that is achieved when one prescinds from the question of what the very things are which one intends to explain, however, is not only not a progress in philosophical knowledge - because philosophy is concerned precisely with the question. 'Ti estin?' 'What is this, the essence of X?' - but is not really a progress in knowledge properly speaking at all. It usually even implies a certain loss of that knowledge which is contained in our pre-philosophical acquaintance with things. This is not to deny that we may well speak here of a progress in knowledge on a certain plane. It is a progress of understanding things better on a technicaL pragmatic, or practical level, or in a 'denaturalizing' way of symbolization which does not lead to genuine scientific understanding (episteme) of the beings in question and of their exact relation to causes. Developments in modern science altered the ideal of science as 16

Rethinking Husser/'s maxim episteme, i.e., as knowledge of objective being and truth and as a certain knowledge which frees us from mere opinion open to error (d6xa). The new ideal of science, we could say, is precisely a science as d6xa (as mere opinion or even as constructs which explain things in a historically changing way in which the scientist abandons any truth-claim, as Thomas Kuhn and Kurt Hubner conceive of science). In spite of the opposition of Karl Popper and his followers to the relativism contained in Kuhn's philosophy of science. we must say that Popper heightens the earlier empiricist and positivist verdict against an objective truth which would not be relativized to an always open, never-completed verification process. Specifically. a radicalization of the abandonment of the scientific (Euclidean) ideal of indubitable certainty of truth about universal axioms and principles is found in the thesis of critical rationalism (Karl Popper, Hans Albert and others), which identifies any claim of Wesenserkennmis (answering 'what is' questions) or of certainty of knowledge about principles which cannot be falsified by future experience as an enemy of science. Some proponents of this new ideal of science as d6xa even propose - in dogmatic and fascist fashion - the political persecution of groups who disturb the open society by any form of absolute truth-claim. Modern mathematics, and science in general, gave up, in large measure, the classical goal of knowledge in the strict sense of penetrating into the real nature of things. Coherent systems were developed which function in themselves and which 'work' in the sense that they are in 'some' way applicable to reality and bring scientific and technical success in their application. The question of the truth of these theories, however, is deliberately suspended to the extent to which this is at all possible to do. Truth as conformity (adequacy) of statements to reality is often completely replaced by a notion of truth which puts coherence or effectiveness in the place of truth as adaequatio intellectus ad rem. Now of course when we deal with machines or with other technical objects, at least a superficial understanding of what they are, and of what the function of each partof the whole is. can easily be achieved and even taken for granted. Hence, in these spheres of knowledge the immediate tracing back of things to their causes may be legitimate, to the extent that the understanding of the nature of. for example, a machine is not so important and may rightfully in some way already be presupposed. (This is not to deny, however. 17

Part I: 'Back to things themselves' that the good mechanic and engineer will have joy in just understanding the true nature and function of a machine and will not be satisfied with a purely functional mastery of the machine which allows him to use it or to handle it without really understanding in what its nature consists.) At any rate, the prescinding from the question of what these things themselves are is justified in view of the fact that everyone knows what these things are, at least sufficiently to carry out a causal analysis, and to handle them. The ability to make fruitful causal analyses without understanding the essence of more technical things is so obvious that we would be greatly alarmed if the man in our bicycle repair shop were to retort to our question about the cause of the noise in our bicycle wheel: 'I do not yet understand what a bicycle is. What do you mean by this term? What is a noise? Please, let us first sit down and clarify the questions: what is this, 'spokes' and 'a whee!'?' Something similar also applies to concepts such as sickness or health when they are viewed from the perspective of the physician who has to act. Nevertheless, there are philosophical dimensions of these concepts which the physician also has to address and where it becomes mandatory and thematic that he reach a deeper understanding of what health, sickness, or death are. A clarification of these issues is even presupposed for acting rightly. This applies to many life- and death-issues and questions of medical ethics and anthropology. As soon as the deeper spheres of being and value come into play, the knowledge and the theoretical understanding at least of 'what things themselves are,' can no longer be taken for granted. Therefore, any explanation of such things in terms of their causes or effects, coupled with an avoidance of first looking at them themselves, will never lead to a genuine epistemic and even less to philosophical progress in knowledge. Philosophical knowledge, moreover, aims not only at some understanding of an essence but at a grasp of things in such a manner that pragmatic interests as well as other limiting viewpoints are transcended and the respective being in itself, and in relation to the totality, is expected to unfold before our minds. Many philosophers sidestep the data and turn instead immediately to causal explanations, in an attitude opposed to the full philosophical thaumazein (marvelling). Such causal explanations will either be correct but incomplete and shallow, insofar as they fail to reveal the essence of a given being, or they will be false; and this easily happens when the latently presupposed conception 18

Rethinking Husserl's maxim of the essence of the given being is erroneous. An example of a correct but quite incomplete and shallow explanation of something is the procedure of some historians of philosophy. They ask, for example with reference to the phenomenological method, 'Who had conceived of it first?' Which philosophers of the past have influenced it?', and so on, and believe they can historically explain the phenomenological method in this way. Such a purely historical-causal explanation, however, fails to take into consideration the most important factors which led to the development of the phenomenological method: namely certain realities, discoveries, objective differences between things. In trying to explain something like the phenomenological method in terms of purely historical causes one perhaps fails even to address the issue of what exactly is meant by 'phenomenological method.' More importantly, however, such an 'explanation' fails to inquire into the adequacy of this method and thus into the most important explanation it finds only in and from things themselves. Far more important is the warning against the second danger: a false genetic explanation for a given thing which results from the failure to investigate its proper nature carefully, and from erroneous views about its essence. Take, for example, Fichte's philosophy. He wants, at the very beginning of his system, to trace the genesis of the empirical ego and of the world. 3 He does not first investigate what an ego is or what spirit, mind, self are; instead, he immediately locates the cause of the ego in an act of (self-)positing of the ego. He holds, further, that the cause of the world lies in the act of 'oppositing' by which the ego 'opposites' to itself a world. This act of 'oppositing' a world to itself, in turn, is explained by an assumed infinite drive for self-actualization which supposedly characterizes the ego. The ego, however, can realize itself only in morality. Self-actualization in morality, in its turn, requires that the ego limit the world as well as itself. It requires, moreover, that the ego not 'opposite' nature alone to itself as an obstacle to overcome for the sake of self-actualization; it also calls for the positing of other egos. We will not unfold here what might be deep philosophical insights hidden in some of these systematic positions of Fichte. Nor is this the place to defend the position that as soon as one carefully analyzes the essence of the person, of the 'other' person, of community, of morality and love, or of the beauty of nature - which 19

Part 1: 'Back to things themselves' Schelling had found to be absolutely inexplicable in terms of Fichte's 'explanation,' namely by a mere tendency to 'opposite' an obstacle to our own ego - one will find that the causal genetic explanations of the ego and of the world offered by Fichte are quite untenable and flatly contradict the essence of the person. Here we only wish to emphasize that, however true or false Fichte's causal explanations might be, his very mode of procedure is radically wrong. For any causal explanation of the world and of the ego, any tracing back of nature or community to its origins, must only be conducted after an analysis of essence has been completed. And such an analysis is wholly lacking at the outset of Fichte's system, which is introduced with the transcendental-causal explanations referred to above that are not founded on any essential analysis of the explicandum (that which is to be explained). Let us add some other famous instances of the kind of philosophical mistake of method we have in mind here, in order to show the relevance of developing the methodological tools that will guard against it. Think of Nietzsche's statements that morality, especially Christian morality, is rooted in ressentiment. Of course, as Max Scheler has shown in his work Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen,4 after a careful analysis of the essence of ressentiment, Nietzsche made important discoveries concerning the role of ressentiment in the genesis of certain moral substitute-codes. But Scheler also renders it quite clear that an analysis of the essence of justice, love, charity, or humility shows the impossibility and even absurdity of locating their cause in ressentiment. Only pseudo-virtue or erroneous conceptions of virtue admit of being explained, in accordance with their essence, in terms of psychological causes like ressentiment. As soon as it is shown that justice implies a free acceptance of a principle of dueness, and a respect for rights or for personal qualities in others because they deserve such respect; as soon as love is shown to be built upon an understanding of the intrinsic value and dignity of a person who 'ought to be affirmed for his own sake,' the Nietzschean genealogy of morals collapses. Nietzsche's theory can at best offer a genetic explanation of pseudo-virtue which may indeed be merely a mask behind which lurks the bitter poison of ressentiment; this could never hold for authentic love and justice which do not merely pretend to be such. 20

Rethinking Husser/'s maxim Or take the Marxist causal explanation of man: that he comes into being by means of productive work, and that all philosophy, culture, art, religion, and the like, may well be explained as a mere suprastructure which would be ontologically dependent on the infrastructure of economic conditions which are, in turn, created by productive work. This genetic explanation put forward by Marx, Engels, and their followers also totally lacks foundation in any serious analysis of the essence of man, of law, philosophy, truth, or religion. Such an essential analysis would reveal how inadequate and untenable it is to explain all of the elements of the so-called suprastructure as ideologies dependent on the base of economic conditions. The untenability of such an explanation does not solely manifest itself through the internal contradiction of this theory, a contradiction which consists in that this theory, if it were true, would itself not be true, at least not knowably so. For from its truth it would follow that it is nothing but the chance effect of material processes instead of being dependent on the nature of things. Then there would be no reason, however, to designate one effect of material events as true and its opposite as false, although the opposing theory would be equally the result of purely material causes. This Marxist theory also claims to be true and purports to depend on the nature of the realities which it wishes to explain, not just on certain economic infrastructures. Apart from this fundamental self-contradiction, the Marxist explanation of all philosophy and culture as ideology reveals itself as false in the light of the given structure of knowledge. To further unfold how widespread are erroneous causal explanations, one could point to the explanation of mind offered by the psycho-physical identity-theory, the explanation of love and art as sublimated libido, and countless other examples. In all the cited, and in many other instances, one will soon come to discover that such causal explanations contain latent misconceptions of the essence of those things which they seek to explain. The reference to several examples of the mistake of false genetic explanations allows the reader, on the one hand, to find at least one example which illustrates our thesis. On the other hand, whether or not the reader agrees with the present author's judgement that a given theory contains a false causal explanation, these examples will show at least that, in all these instances, a careful analysis of the essence of a thing ought to precede the investigation of its causes. 21

Part I: 'Back to things themselves' Finally, the reference to several examples is meant to show how widespread are insufficiently founded and erroneous genetic explanations and, therefore, how significant and rarely followed the phenomenological principle is: 'turn first to the thing itself, only then to its causes.'

(iv) Phenomenology versus reductionism The examples of false causal explanations just cited show a further widespread tendency which is in direct conflict ~ith phenomenology and with any authentic philosophy: the reductionist 'nothingbut' method. This method does not merely give false causal explanations of things. Reductionist explanations also tend to identify the given being with its alleged cause, usually a la baisse: justice is nothing but the ressentiment of the weak against the powerful; love is nothing but libido as unlimited pleasure-seeking. Phenomenology takes issue with all such reductionistic causal explanations. The maxim 'back to things themselves' urges us first to look carefully into what things are and to discern the differences between different things, especially when the same term is employed for them. Only then will one avoid the danger of reducing the given datum to something which it is not. Notice, however, that this sense of reductionism is quite different from, e.g., the sense in which Bonaventure in De Reductione Artium ad Theologiam speaks of reductio, by which he refers to leading a thing back to its highest origin and end. Such a reductio does not in any way deny the irreducible essence of a thing. A very similar notion of 'reduction' is used in Karol (Cardinal) Wojtyla's book, The Acting Person. 5 Reductionism in the sense criticized here implies the thesis that one thing is in reality 'nothing but' another thing. Yet it is not this thesis as such which is opposed by the phenomenologist; rather, it is such an identification when it is inappropriate, i.e., when the datum in question defies its reduction to something else. Where one thing (X) truly is only apparently fundamentally different from another one (Y), the phenomenologist must be the first to point out this underlying identity and the concomitant reducibility of two data. In this case, the grasp of the very essence of a thing allows us to discover it under the many appearances under

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Rethinking Husserl's maxim

which it may hide. Scheler in his essay on Ressentiment gives a brilliant example of both the authentically phenomenological resistance to reductionism - in exposing the untenability of Nietzsche's attempt to reduce morality, specifically Christian morality, to ressentiment - and of a phenomenological reduction. For Scheler shows that there are many codes of morality or secularized versions of allegedly Christian morality which have their common root in ressentiment and which only appear to be different from it. Both Scheler and Hildebrand showed likewise that numerous general types of immoral attitudes (for instance, various forms of pride and concupiscence) may hide under apparently contrary phenomena. And the present writer is not aware of more convincing and lucid analyses of the reducibility of such seemingly op~site phenomena to one identical root than those offered by phenomenologists. If we distinguish, however, a false from a legitimate reduction of different data, the .question arises: how can we ever know when reduction is in fact appropriate and when it is not? We must not let ourselves be guided here by naIve experience. Obviously, at first sight, the statement that whales belong to the same genus as cows or other mammals, or that coal and diamond are in some sense identical in molecular structure, seems absurd. Yet we know that it is not. The explanation for this puzzle lies in the contingency (non-necessity) of the given nature (its lack of absolute essential necessity and of strict delineation from other essences), on the one hand, and on the other, in the fact that the constitutive nature of the one thing, in such cases, is hidden and can therefore be shown by repeated experience to coincide with the equally hidden constitutive nature of another. Yet when we do not deal with some contingent and non-necessary essence whose constitutive nature is hidden from direct experiential access but with a necessary essence, whose constitutive structure is intuitively or deductively accessible, a reduction of one thing to another one which is radically different is indeed evidently absurd. As soon as the objective intelligibility of a nature reveals the fact that its attributes cohere absolutely necessarily with that nature, it is absurd to claim that such an essence is ultimately identical with another one which has evidently quite different or even contradictory characteristics. Thus, it could be brought to evidence that any reduction of the moral goodness of actions to their utility, or of the motivation of moral acts to an egocentric search for pleasure or happiness, is untenable because

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Part I: 'Back to things themselves' the two show themselves to be radically different from one another. The reduction of mind to matter, of love to sex, is equally untenable and contradicts the fact that the entities in question are objectively and necessarily quite different and therefore possess mutually exclusive (contradictorily opposed) characteristics. Thus 'reductionism' is any philosophical attempt at reducing the irreducible; 'reduction,' however, indicates the possibly correct demonstration that one thing ultimately is another. The sense of reductio in Bonaventure refers to still another meaning: to trace back, to relate to the origin. In that sense, a reductio would simply lead us to recognize the ultimate source, value, significance, or purpose of a being or sphere of knowledge. Phenomenology as the method which leads us to see essences in what they themselves are, thus enables us to reduce where reduction is necessary, and to unmask all illegitimate forms of reduction by which essentially distinct phenomena are mistakenly identified. In this fashion, Husser!, Pfander, Ingarden, and others overcame the attempts to reduce logic, moral and legal values, the literary work of art, and other irreducible things to psychological data and laws. By means of his rigorous essential analysis of logical laws and of psychological laws, Husser! arrived at the conclusion that it is absolutely untenable to reduce the laws of logic to mere subjective laws of human thinking. In a similar fashion one could expose the errors of many other forms of what I would call 'causal reductionism,' i.e., the mistaken reduction of a thing to its real or alleged efficient cause. Under this rubric, one could well treat the attempt to reduce freedom, knowledge, self-reflection - in short, all consciousness - to brainprocesses, as well as the attempt to explain the coming-to-be of man in terms of evolution. Any body/mind/identity theory and also any attempt to reduce consciousness to a mere epiphenomenon of brain-events is untenable, as has been shown by many philosophers. 6 A different form of reductionism could be called 'effectreductionism' or 'finalistic reductionism.' It is found in attempts to reduce things not to their real or alleged efficient causes but to their relation to reai or alleged effects or ends. For example, one reduces the moral goodness of an action to the mere aptitude of the latter as a means towards pleasure, happiness, or the attainment of extramoral consequences. 24

Rethinking Husserl's maxim Of course, only a lengthier analysis of the very essence of moral goodness, of the 'absoluteness' of the sense in which moral virtues are good, of the peculiar way in which morally good acts are 'called for' by an object, as well as of other essential characteristics of moral values, would reveal the utter untenability of these reductionist explanations of morality. 7 It should be made clear. however, that phenomenology is not at all opposed to an analysis of ends or effects of beings (even if it must be admitted that Husserl himself did not clearly perceive that aspect of the method of 'going back to things themselves' which seeks their origins, causes, and ends). On the contrary, whenever and to the extent to which the cause or purpose of a given being must be understood in order to understand that being fully, we need to ask about its causes or ends in order to reach a more complete understanding of the 'thing itself.' For example. a means cannot be adequately understood without reference to its final cause. Heidegger had some very fine insights into this matter in his analyses of 'Zuhandensein' in Sein und Zeit. Not only means, but personal human actions, too, cannot be clarified without grasping the datum of auto-determination which is a special form of 'causality,' and without grasping the nature of motivation which also implies a form of 'principle: 'cause: 'reason: and purpose of action; albeit the reason, principle, cause, and end of a person's free action are such in an entirely sui generis way.

(v) Phenomenology, causality, and metaphysics

It would also be foreign to a philosophy which remains faithful to its principle 'back to things themselves' to ignore the metaphysical dimensions of being, causality, and finality, for example the problem of whether the world and each being in it require an efficient cause or not, and what kind of cause the world requires, a worldimmanent or a divine, transcendent cause. The answer to these questions as well as to that about an ultimate meaning and end of the world are obviously crucial for any understanding of the 'thing itself the world is. It was only because Husserl turned in 1905 (especially in his lectures The Idea of Phenomenology)"" to an immanentistic epistemology according to which man could not attain to the true objective essence of things, that he could appear to

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Part I: 'Back to things themselves' be justified in excluding such metaphysical genetic questions from consideration. He was still acutely aware of the fact that the origin and genesis of a thing must be understood in order to comprehend that thing 'itself.' For this reason he engaged in transcendental genetic analyses, and replaced the metaphysical investigation into the origin of the being of the world by a mere immanentistic genetic analysis tracing the world both as noesis and as noema back to 'transcendental consciousness.' If we can successfully criticize Husserl's transcendental turn, however, we shall no longer be bound by this restriction. Indeed, the question of the very essence of the world is undoubtedly bound up with the question of whether the world is contingent or self-explanatory with respect to the question of causality. Many phenomenologists reject any philosophical investigation into causes, either because they mistakenly believe that all causes are as little related to the essence of things as waves are to colors, or because they think that the reality (real existence) presupposed for causal analysis ought to be bracketed in epoche. For these and similar reasons, they acknowledge only one type of causal explanation: transcendental-genetic explanation of conscious performances (noesis) and of their objects (noemata). Such a rejection of realist causal analysis in the name of a phenomenology of essences cannot, however, be in any way justified by reference to 'things themselves,' as they give themselves to us. On the contrary, a rigorous adherence to the maxim 'back to things themselves' demands a return to the interest of the classical philosophical tradition in the causal origins and final ends of things. Besides, the philosophical exploration of different types of causality in their respective essences is itself an eminent task of phenomenology. For example, the Aristotelian distinction of four types of causes is a masterful example of phenomenological analysis of things themselves, as they give themselves from their own nature. Aristotle discovered here an objective essential difference between radically different types offactors which are occasionally referred to as 'causes,' and which his philosophical predecessors failed to distinguish clearly. We see again that 'return to things themselves' is not, of course, restricted to philosophers who call themselves 'phenomenologists': such a radical break with previous tradition would be most suspicious in itself and would imply that nobody prior to Husserl actually engaged in a careful analysis of what is given. 'Phenomenological philosophy' as a philosophy which

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Rethinking Husserl's maxim investigates 'things in themselves' simply means authentic philosophical analysis of 'things themselves,' wherever and whenever it occurred. The term only signals a more methodic and conscious carrying out of what all great philosophers did when they really paid attention to 'things themselves' as they present themselves in their very own nature. The designation of Aristotle's distinction of the four causes as a masterful phenomenological analysis does not prejudice the question, of course, of whether Aristotle sufficiently and with perfect exactness explored the essence of these four causes and the essential characteristics pertaining to each one of them. Nor do we maintain that only the four causes of which Aristotle speaks, exist and that all existing instances of causality (of one entity being the principle, reason, cause, ground of another) can be subsumed under one or another of the four Aristotelian causes (even if we add 'exemplary causality' as a fifth one). On the contrary, we are convinced that a genuine phenomenological investigation into 'things themselves' shows that there are many equally fundamental and important 'causes' and 'principles of explanation' of beings and events which Aristotle did not consider. Therefore, a rigorous philosophicalphenomenological exploration of causality will lead beyond Aristotle. (We think here of the 'causes' or dependencies between persons and being already mentioned; for example, of the way in which the objects or premises of an argument are 'causes' of knowledge; or of the way in which motives of the free agent himself explain an action; we think, moreover, of principles such as 'hierarchy,' 'superabundance,' and so on, all of which we believe to be incapable of being adequately explained in terms of one of the four types of causes distinguished by Aristotle.) Even the person who disagrees with this claim (which cannot be brought to fuller evidence here) could see the following, however: an anti- or unphenomenological philosophizing (and therefore a bad one, because 'phenomenology' in our sense refers to a prerequisite of any proper philosophizing) takes place when an author immediately proceeds from a first distinction among four different types of causes to an attempt to subsume all instances of causality under one of these kinds of causality, without justifying such a procedure by reference to the given. We have come to see that a phenomenological return to 'things themselves' is perfectly compatible with the metaphysical or

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Part 1: 'Back to things themselves' scientific inquiry into causes. To the extent that causal explanations are based on the highly intelligible nature of a being, these causal investigations are phenomenological themselves in the strict sense of this term. To the extent, however, that causal analyses move away from the essence of things, or merely use a factual empirical method, or operate with symbolic or pragmatic schemata and reduced visions of things in causal explanations, such causal explanations lie outside the sphere of phenomenological investigation into the given; they are not necessarily incompatible with phenomenology, however, and must not necessarily be opposed to a way of proceeding that lets things express their own essence. Phenomenology proper is so far from being opposed to causal explanations of things that it even calls for them. It is only opposed to premature or reductionistic 'explanations' of things in terms of their causes before paying attention and listening to what is seUgiven about their nature. Phenomenology proper is above all opposed to explaining things by such 'causes' as are quite incapable of explaining the realities in question. To postulate such causes as principles of explanation betrays a radical misconception of the essence of the thing to be explained. In order to bring home both the point that causal analyses are quite compatible with phenomenology and are often even a direct manifestation of the phenomenological method, and that genuinely phenomenological investigations into causes can also be conducted by thinkers who do not profess to be phenomenologists or who on other occasions proceed in a radically anti-phenomenological manner, another example may be mentioned: Hegel's superb analysis of the essence of 'romantic irony' in art, and of its historical roots in Fichte's philosophy. 9 This example also proves that a phenomenological way of proceeding is not exclusively found in philosophy, but also in disciplines such as the history of art and the history of ideas.

(vi) Phenomenology is not restricted to philosophy but is also the appropriate kind of procedure in many other disciplines The maxim 'back to things themselves' does not only address itself to philosophers. Rather, authentic knowledge in many areas and disciplines requires that the scholar or scientist take a 'phenomenological attitude.' For whenever the answer to the question, 'What is this, X?,' is neither immediately obvious nor answerable by a

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Rethinking Husser/'s maxim recourse to such things as sense-perception, knowledge laid down in statistics, dictionaries concerning matters of fact, etc., a phenomenological exploration of what these things themselves are is demanded. With greater precision, phenomenology is always called for when the datum in question possesses an essence and intelligibility capable of being grasped in some intuitive knowledge or ot being known mediately (deductively) on the basis of intuitively known premises. Without the phenomenological grasp of what the 'thing itself' is, no knowledge worthy of this name can be achieved in regard to such intelligible objects. Take the example ofthe historian who explores a historical figure or era, or the literary critic who speaks about Shakespeare's Hamlet, or the art critic who deals with the Hellenistic 'Laocoon' or Bruegel's' Blindensturz' ('The Parable of the Blind')]() - each one needs to conduct a phenomenological analysis of the proper content, of the intelligible, intuitively given character and form of these works, epochs, and characters. II If he fails to do so, his studies will ultimately remain sterile and 'miss the point.' The art critic or the literary critic can immediately 'explain' Shakespeare's Hamlet or Bruegel's 'Blindensturz' in terms of real or alleged sources and causes which are presented as if they really and sufficiently explained the given work. Stylistic elements of a given work are detected in earlier sources; perhaps biographical details or general philosophical ideas of the author are said to account for the analyzed work. Yet, important as all of these factors may be, they leave unanswered the most important question about the work: what is the meaning and intelligible character of the given work? What is that polyphonic harmony which makes up the individual character of the work and which makes it a work of art? Any detailed knowledge about 'causes' of the work, about the life and intentions of the artist, about previous sources and stylistic elements which contributed to the formation of the work, will never answer this question. All these causal factors will never tell us what the 'anschauliche Charakter' (intelligibly present character) of the given work is, to use a term coined by Hans Sedlmayr. 12 And only after the intrinsic content and quality of a work of art is understood, can it be decided which of the 'causal' factors are really causes at all, whether they are sufficient causes, and to what extent they can contribute to an understanding of the work. Otherwise, we fall prey to what has been called a 'genetic fallacy.' This term can indicate various mistakes that commonly occur: (1) one projects biographical

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Part I: 'Back to things themselves' facts or personal opinions of the author (known through other sources) into the work so as to falsify and misunderstand its own 'message.' Since Plato's (Socrates) Apology we know that poets and artists are usually the least capable of explaining in theoretical statements the meaning of their own work and its basic content. Hence their theoretical statements do not have to harmonize with their artistic intuitions. (2) One might altogether reduce the work of art to being a mere expression of the artist's life or views. Or, (3) one will take superficial similarities between the given work and some prototypes as a sufficient basis for an 'historical' explanation of the work which in reality misses its whole originality and aesthetic significance. Similar things need to be said about the life-sciences in their treatment of life and of evolution. Perhaps no other disciplines, however, stand so clearly in need of an authentically phenomenological foundation as psychology and sociology. In psychology, reductionist and inadequate causal explanations of human behavior and conscious acts are most widespread. Any understanding of genuinely human and psychological problems, however, requires an answer to the difficult question: what precisely is the nature of man and of his different faculties and acts? Having insisted on the fact that phenomenology is an attitude or method which is not restricted to philosophy, we do not deny, nevertheless, that the phenomenological way of proceeding finds a unique application to the specifically philosophical knowledge. In philosophical knowledge the going back to the self-given essence of things manifests itself in a mode proper only to philosophy. For philosophy focuses more thematically than any other discipline on the essence of things. The thematic question, 'Ti estin?,' 'What is this?' - art, knowledge, beauty, goodness, and other fundamental data - is more inseparable from an authentic philosophical procedure than from the kind of knowledge aspired to in other disciplines. Philosophy aims at the fully conscious understanding of the most universal and the most central realities, and it aims at a more thematic and ultimate understanding of what they are than other branches of knowledge. Above all, some objects of philosophy possess an absolute inner necessity and intelligibility which call for a full contemplative delving into and understanding of those essences themselves which appeal to a rational intellectual penetration allowing for a going back to the self-given essence. As will be 30

Rethinking Husserl's maxim discussed at greater length, no contingent (in regard to essence, not only to existence), that is, no non-necessary nature, as it constitutes the subject matter of the empirical sciences, would permit such a rational intuition or insight about which Plato (particularly in Republic Books VI, VII, and in the Phaedo) and especially Aristotle (in the Posterior Analytic and elsewhere) have spoken of as noesis and nous, justly assigning to this immediate form of rational knowledge the highest epistemic rank. The same is found in Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas and other thinkers. Edmund Husserl elaborated admirably on such insights into intelligible essences, even in Ideas. 13 Realist phenomenologists have only deepened the understanding of this kind of knowledge and seen that its rightful realm extends far beyond the few things and 'first principles' to which Aristotelian metaphysics restricted insight, while throwing much light on the essence of immediate insight. 14 The fundamental specific difference in kind and degree of intelligibility of essences found in the objects of philosophical knowledge explains why the phenomenological procedure is especially called for in philosophy. Moreover, in contradistinction to mathematical knowledge, which also has necessary essences as object, only philosophy demands that the penetration and fully conscious understanding of the essence itself is thematic, indeed constitutes the very character of philosophical knowledge.

(vii) Phenomenology as a study of 'things themselves,' in contrast to misconceptions resulting from mistaken paradigms and models Phenomenological knowledge, and more specifically, properly philosophical knowledge, is not merely distinct from reductionistic and premature causal explanations of things but also from any alleged explanation of things which is no(supported by a sufficiently deep delving into their nature. It resists, in other words, the constant temptation of the philosopher to superimpose on the reality of things narrow schemes often derived from analogous data or from altogether misleading paradigms. It is extremely tempting for philosophers and other scholars to answer questions about the nature of an object through recourse to ready-made or universally known paradigms and images, without examining carefully the perhaps irreducible nature of the datum under investigation or the applicability of these ready-made images to the given reality. For 31

Part I: 'Back to things themselves' example, in dealing with human knowledge, one very easily uses analogies taken from the corporeal order, such as that of a container into which the known objects would have to enter and which contains nothing but what is 'inside' of it. Or one compares knowledge either explicitly (as in Lenin's Empiriocriticism and other works of Diamat) or implicitly (as in Leibniz's monadological epistemology) with a sort of mirror in which one does not see things themselves but only images of them. In using such corporeal analogies in order to understand the mind one is seriously misled about the nature of knowledge, as Plato has shown repeatedly, and as recent investigations into the transcendence of man in knowledge have further clarified. 15 Although Husser! himself, in the Logical Investigations, has brilliantly refuted the mistake of the epistemological position according to which the cognitive act is some kind of 'image' of real objects, neither Nicolai Hartmann nor Husser! himself succeeded in freeing themselves completely from the misleading pattern of such mirror-misconceptions of knowledge, when they thought they had to postulate any 'thing in itself' as a radical 'outside' of the human mind and of its intentional objects. (Husserl concluded therefrom that such a 'transcendent thing in itself' had to be rejected altogether.) Here, too, the transcending, knowing contact with reality which is a necessary moment of knowledge and is given as such in epistemological reflection (as we shall see later) is deemed impossible because some corporeal image (which indeed could never explain the mental transcendence of cognition) silently falsifies one's notion of knowledge. The phenomenological maxim 'back to things themselves' is thus also a refusal to cling to such inadequate models of explanation which usually either imply altogether misleading 'false' analogies or at least mistaken applications of (often bodily) analogies for spiritual data. Needless to say, philosophers may well call themselves phenomenologists and still be far from truly going back to 'things themselves.' Yet, the phenomenological ideal 'back to things themselves' invites us to do just this: to look courageously into the very face of things and to free ourselves from the innumerable misleading images and paradigms which allow for an effort-less and simultaneously forced, but evidently inadequate, 'explanation' of things. We shall return to the importance of the avoidance of misleading images for the phenomenological method later in this book. 32

Rethinking Husserl's maxim 2 'LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS' AND CLARIFICATION OF TERMS AS TOOLS FOR UNDERSTANDING 'THINGS THEMSELVES' Another important question arises: can phenomenology have a positive relationship to linguistic analysis or does it ignore language in an abstract 'seeing' of 'things themselves'? Does it radically differ from analytic philosophy or is it just a brand of it? A great obstacle to truly going back to things themselves lies in misleading terms which often fail to refer clearly to a given datum because they are equivocal and ambiguous. When an author uses such terms as if they were unequivocal, he tends to melt many conceptual meanings into 'one' ambiguous notion and thus to confuse fundamentally distinct questions and issues. The uncritical use of equivocal notions is undoubtedly among the most frequent sources of philosophical errors, as Balduin Schwarz and others have shown. Thus analysis of linguistic meanings and usages of terms has the critical task of uncovering linguistically motivated confusions and errors. 16. On the other hand, language and the distinctions it suggests may constitute a positive inspiration for the philosophical exploration of the given. These two aspects of the use of linguistic analysis should be explained, at least briefly. In order to avoid the philosophical errors and confusions which either result from the use of linguistic expressions the different meanings of which remain undistinguished or which employ equivocal terms in the defense of erroneous or confused theses, the phenomenologist must also be a linguistic analyst. Of course, this term is not used here to designate a specific empiricist philosophical position which is usually what is meant by the name 'analytic philosophy,' but is simply an expression of the activity every good philosopher should engage in: a careful listening to any wisdom and knowledge about the given which language can teach us. Let us illustrate this point by means of some examples of important philosophical issues. When discussing such issues as the possibility of knowing 'things in themselves' (noumena), or the objectivity versus the alleged subjectivity of all human knowledge, the philosopher needs to distinguish the radically different meanings these terms can have. Or again, without distinguishing the diverse meanings of terms like 'being,' 'is,' 'opposites,' 'transcendence,' 'immanence,' 'dualism,' 'dogmatism,' 'idealism,' and so forth, the

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Part I: 'Back to things themselves' attempt to gain clarity about the fundamental issues of epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophical anthropology will be a hopeless undertaking. There are, of course, in thinkers of all periods of the history of philosophy, examples of outstanding analyses of different meanings of terms which contributed greatly to the clarification and solution of philosophical problems. There is no need here to reproduce the distinctions concerning freedom, necessity, and chance which Aristotle makes in his Nicomachean Ethics and Physics, and Augustine in De Libero Arbitrio and in De Civitate Dei, or to develop other concrete examples which demonstrate the fundamental significance of terminological clarifications for the philosophical elucidation of the respective issues themselves. The reader will be acquainted with the immense role the terminological distinctions between radically different meanings of terms such as 'thinking' (thought), 'judgment,' 'Vorstellung,' have played in the phenomenological clarification of the subject matter of logic (just think of Husser!'s Logical Investigations or of Alexander Pfander's Logik) and of epistemology. The crucial importance of such terminological clarifications is elucidated by reference to the fact that thoughtless or at least not sufficiently thoughtful application of, and operation with, ambiguous terms is undoubtedly one major obstacle to philosophical knowledge, whether equivocations are used sophistically to deceive others or are uncritically accepted. In either case, the use of ambiguous terms, the different meanings of which are not distinguished, leads to great confusion. A semi-conscious or an intentional use of equivocations is found in the great number of catchwords and slogans which discredit things endowed with value by presenting them in the light of bad things, or in those catchwords which endow trivial or bad things with the glory of positive phenomena to which the same term can refer. As an example of the former tendency consider the catchword 'dogmatism.' This term may be used so as to suggest that any objectivist philosophy about things themselves (about the noumena) is nothing but an unreasoned and uncritical intellectual attachment to blindly held prejudices or that the same philosophy is a pure outgrowth of a fanatic imposition of one's own subjective views on others. Such catchwords are enemies to true philosophy and knowledge of reality because they identify radically different phenomena (in our case, fanaticism of attitude and violation of other people's freedom, objectivist philosophy, and an 34

Rethinking Husserl's maxim uncritical spirit), without undertaking the least attempt to demonstrate the justification of such an identification. The opposite form of abusing equivocal words could be illustrated by the use of adjectives and names which endow a position such as skepticism or subjective idealism with the glory of the predicate 'critical,' without even taking the trouble of showing that the position thus designated (for example, Kant's 'critical philosophy') deserves such an excellent predicate. Unfortunately, the use of slogans and catchwords is not restricted to the sphere of politics, rhetoric, and popular theological discussion, where slogans such as 'modern,' - 'progressive,' 'traditional,' or 'conservative' are consistently used with great art to convey impressions and evaluations which are effective, however far removed from reality they may be. The use of equivocal terms also plays an enormous role in philosophical and pseudo-philosophical sophistical discussions and arguments. There are still more dangerous equivocations than those involved in catchwords and slogans, whether these be used in philosophical or extra-philosophical discourse. The equivocations I mean are found on a far higher intellectual level and are less 'tendentious' than catchwords. In what follows, it will be shown that the systems of such great philosophers as Kant and Husser! are by no means free from radically equivocal terms and from the pernicious intellectual effects that the employment of such terms, the different meanings of which are not distinguished, has for the philosophical discussion. It certainly has to be regarded as an important task of any phenomenological analysis to remove such linguistic and terminological obstacles to going 'back to things themselves.' Far be it from us, however, to attribute to linguistic analysis a mere 'negative' task, or better, only the eminently positive task, of freeing us from negative phenomena: from real and potential confusions and errors which result from the ambiguous use of language in a given author or in common ordinary language. There is also a second and purely 'positive' role exercised by the tool of linguistic analysis. Frequently, a positive philosophical grasp of a thing is mediated by the analysis of linguistic meanings and nuances of meaning. Delving into the various semantic or syntactic meanings of linguistic formations or into the role of a common root or ending in many words and word families often allows the attentive thinker to discern many things which he would not have noticed 35

Part I: 'Back to things themselves' without drawing on the wisdom embodied in language. Likewise, comparative linguistic analyses may be very helpful in this context. Take, for example, the study of the difference in meaning of three related Latin terms in the service of a philosophy of permission and in the service of the same type of phenomenological analysis which Husserl conducted in the Logical Investigations, and A. Piander in his Logik: they distinguished thought as the activity of thinking (psychic datum of thinking), thought as the result or objectified expression of this activity, with which logic is concerned and which has a universal character, and in regard to which we discover ideal necessary structures quite distinct from the psychological acts of thinking, and, finally, 'thought' in the sense of that which is thought about - the states of affairs and objects to which our thought refers. Such distinctions served to overcome the psychologism and relativism into which one will inevitably fall when one fails to attend to those differences. In a lecture presented at The International Academy of Philosophy, William Marra, Jr. has given linguistic hints for quite similar distinctions made by the ordinary Latin language itself. The term permissus, for example, refers to the activity of permitting, to permission as the act of the proper authority which allows something. This permissus differs from the permissio, which means the fruit of such an act, the permission as such, which could be compared to the proposition (judgment) asserted by the act of judging (which can be true or false and which is clearly different from the act of making a judgment). Similarly, the permissio is different from the act of permitting in that it can still exist after that act ceased to exist or even after the person who gave permission has died. Different from both the permissus and the permissio is the permissum, i.e., the activity which is permitted and can legitimately be performed, after it was permitted, by the one to whom permission was given. Without extending this analysis any further, we can see that the differences between the different phenomena of permissus, permissio, and permissum will most likely be overlooked by the philosopher who does not pay attention to the complexities and refinements of meaning which are reflected in language, and specifically to the semantic differences between words of the same root which roughly have the same meaning and which can, in our case, be rendered by the same word in English (,permission') or in German ('Erlaubnis'). 36

Rethinking Husser/'s maxim For the philosopher, the phenomenological philosopher in particular, a careful analysis of multifarious word meanings is, however, not a goal in itself. This is equally true for the case in which it is not a matter of investigating meanings of isolated words but in which the meaning of various complex linguistic data is examined: of syntactic rules and constructions, but also of proverbs and colloquial expressions which deal with love, time, and so forth. The wisdom of language itself, of common sense, and of popular sayings can be made fruitful for philosophy. In regard to such common expressions, of course, the philosopher must be extremely critical and appropriate only those which contain authentic wisdom about things. He has to liberate himself from prejudices which are expressed in common-sensical expressions. Much can also be gained philosophically from linguistic analyses of those unwritten rules of linguistic usage which forbid the employment of statements the legitimacy of which would follow from certain erroneous philosophical theories. There is, as it were, a pre-philosophical contact with the essence of things which governs linguistic sensibilities and permits some expressions while forbidding others the use of which would give rise to linguistic as well as to philosophical absurdities. It is this aspect of language which is philosophically much more reliable and important than 'words of wisdom' and proverbial or colloquial statements. This is so because the less theoretical and more reality-formed contact with things which is reflected in the rules that determine which expressions are acceptable and which are not, is usually a faithful embodiment of man's actual experience of things. A critical or 'negative' use of this aspect of linguistic analysis is at stake when one finds, for example, that certain linguistic formations and statements, which would be perfectly acceptable if an erroneous conception were true, are in fact excluded. For example, if the thesis that truth exists solely in judgments produced by the human mind were true, many perfectly meaningful statements (such as 'he discovered the truth') would not make sense any more and other absurd statements which are forbidden by any linguistic sensibility (such as: 'Aristotle produced the truth about being') would have to be regarded as perfectly sensible. Perhaps it is here, above all, that Wittgenstein's rather confusing notion of the 'depth-grammar' ('Tie!engrammatik') of language takes on its most authentic meaning. Very different are the lessons the philosopher can learn through 37

Part I: 'Back to things themselves' reflection on the syntactic forms of construction of sentences and on various other dimensions of language. Such analyses do not constitute the proper task of a philosophy of language (which has the task of reflecting philosophically on the essence and elements of language) but of a philosophy inspired by the logos, the laws, the concrete wealth of languages, and by their specific relationship to things. Despite the tremendous fertility of language for philosophy it ought to be stressed that any reduction of philosophy to linguistic analysis, in any sense of this term, is untenable. For the philosopher's, particularly the phenomenologist's, goal is not the investigation of linguistic meanings and of ways of conceiving things by means of 'language-games.' His is not the task of determining whether or not a particular 'language-game' is being played or not. Rather, linguistic analysis is for the phenomenological philosopher a means which he uses in order to elucidate either the very essence of language and of its meaning, or the 'things themselves' referred to by language and the differences between them. A consideration of linguistic meanings as such would only lead to a knowledge of 'what men think about things,' whereas it is, as Aquinas put it, the task of the philosopher to explore the 'veritas rerum.' the truth of things themselves. Moreover, the conceptual distinctions themselves which clarify ambiguous terms and which then lead us beyond language to further insight into objective differences between things can ultimately be understood only when one looks beyond conceptual meanings as such at the different realities and data to which these refer. More importantly, only a return to 'things themselves' is philosophy. In addition, however, knowledge of the data themselves is precisely the only solid basis for linguistic analysis because a purely 'immanent' linguistic analysis which prescinds from any consideration of the 'things themselves' is, philosophically speaking, fruitless and even, in the final analysis, impossible. This notwithstanding, it is indeed possible to explore with mastership what Wittgenstein called 'language-games' without philosophizing. Even a computer could, in principle, perform functions which allow us to know which combinations of words are actually used in a language, which other words are offered in explanation of a given term, and so forth. But such an account of the purely linguistic rules and combinations of semantic and syntactic structures has nothing to do with philosophy, 38

Rethinking Husser/'s maxim

not even with understanding the meaning of language. As soon as we take into consideration, however, the specific meaning function of language and the conceptual meanings and meaning-units found in a concrete language, we are forced back into it consideration of the 'things about which language speaks. '17 For the very meanings of terms are ultimately intelligible only in terms of the things themselves which are meant by concepts or at least only in terms of the things as projected by the medium of conceptual meanings. IS In De Magistro Chapter 2, Augustine raises the question which is decisive in this context. Speaking to his son Adeodatus, his partner in the dialogue, Augustine writes: ... surely, you readily observe that you have expounded words with words, signs with signs, things well known by means of things likewise well-known. I wish, however, that you would show me, if you can, the things themselves of which these are signs. In the long and subtle ensuing discussion in the same dialogue, Augustine and Adeodatus arrive at the insight into the need of transcending the whole level of language and even of understanding the meaning of words, in order to go back to a more immediate experience of reality and contact with it. A.: You seek the things, however, which, whatever they are, are surely not words, and yet you also ask me about them by means of words. (Ibid., Chapter 3) Augustine gives the telling example of a wall or of material and sensible objects, which are present and at which we may hint. Augustine points out that the pantomime can go beyond what other signs and forms of pointing to things can do. And yet, it is also true here that: whatever bodily movement the pantomimic actor may use in order to show me the thing signified by the word, the motion will not be the thing itself but a sign. (Ibid., Chapter 3) Another form of pointing to things, discerned by Augustine, consists in actually reproducing or doing the 'thing' referred to by language. In this way, one could explain the meaning of the word 'dicere' (to speak) by actually performing the activity of speaking. Augustine's investigations into the relation between language

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Part I: 'Back to things themselves' and things and into the various forms of communication through signs culminate in insights very similar to those which we had reached and expressed above: For we do not learn the words which we know, nor can we say that we learn those which we do not know unless their signification has been perceived: and this happens not by means of hearing words which are pronounced, but by means of a cognition of the things which are signified. (Ibid., Chapter 11) That this very fact applies most of all to philosophical knowledge when it reaches some necessary (eternal) truth, is again forcefully stated by St Augustine in words which seem both to anticipate, and to explain the true meaning of, Husserl's maxim: 'Back to things themselves. ' If he (the pupil) does learn, he learns by means of the things

themselves and from his own senses, but not through the articulated words .... Indeed, when things are discussed which are perceived through the mind, that is, by means of intellect and reason, these are said to be things which we see immediately in that interior light of truth by virtue of which he himself who is called the 'interior man' is illumined, and upon this depends his joy. But then our hearer, if he also himself sees these things with his inner and pure eye, knows that of which I speak by means of his own contemplation, but not through my words. (Ibid., Chapter 12) Scientific studies, and especially philosophical ones, would be impossible without going beyond the interpretation of texts and meanings of linguistic formations. And the going beyond texts and words on the part of the pupil, as Augustine keenly notices, does not proceed to the mind and thought of the teacher (as a psychologistic misunderstanding would have it) but primarily to 'things themselves': For who is so stupidly curious as to send his son to school in order that he might learn what the teacher thinks? But all those sciences which1hey profess to teach, and the science of virtue itself and wisdom, teachers explain through words. Then those who are called pupils consider within themselves whether what has been explained has been said truly; looking of course to that

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Rethinking Husserl's maxim interior truth, according to the measure of which each is able. Thus they learn, and when the interior truth makes known to them what true things have been said, they applaud, but without knowing that instead of applauding teachers they are applauding learners, if indeed their teachers know what they are saying. (Ibid., Chapter 12) Nor is the philosopher interested in things only to the extent to which this is necessary in order to understand language, wordmeanings, and meaning-units and -relations. This would perhaps be the case for the philologist or the language analyst. The philosopher and phenomenological thinker who wants to go 'back to things themselves' will never engage in linguistic analysis for its own sake and for the sake of knowing how languages actually conceive of things. Even less will he analyze things only for the sake of linguistic analysis. While he will consider the essence of language an authentic object (among many others) of philosophical knowledge, he will never accept an immanent conceptual analysis of word-meanings and of their interrelations and relations with the world as a substitute for philosophical knowledge. Nor will he consider it the only safe manner in which to venture philosophical opinions about reality. On the contrary, he will be convinced that the analysis of language must be buttressed by a criticism of misleading and even erroneous linguistic patterns, habits, or errors incorporated in idiomatic expressions and linguistic formations. The need to go back to the things themselves about which language speaks and which clearly differ from it, does not apply only and clearly to the case in which the distinction of different things meant by the same term demonstrates the ambiguity and equivocal character of word-usages. It applies also, n2y especially, to the positive case in which the analysis of linguistic formations, of manifold meanings of the same terms, or of idiomatic expressions, is a positive inspiration for the phenomenologist and uncovers important differences within being. For in order to appropriate to oneself the wisdom embodied in language it is necessary to follow the lead of language and to trace the way back to the things about which linguistic meanings 'speak.' Only then can language be philosophically 'deciphered,' so to speak. Only then can the often tremendously differentiated, natural knowledge and wisdom bestowed by generations of sensibility and common sense which gave 41

Part I: 'Back to things themselves' rise to languages, lead to philosophical knowledge. Most great philosophers of the past and present applied linguistic analysis in this sense and were 'students of language.' Phenomenological exploration of the given itself does not in any way contradict the value of linguistic analysis in the classical sense expounded so well by Augustine. It will thus no longer surprise us to find good and brilliant examples of linguistic analysis in phenomenological treatises. In fact, even those found in analytical philosophers are due to their actual going back to things themselves in all the real differences found among them.

3 THE SPECIFIC PHILOSOPHICAL TASK OF A RETURN TO THINGS THEMSELVES. (i) 'Back to things themselves' versus premature systematizations

The maxim 'back to things' also implies an opposition to the premature systematizations which are among the most frequent mistakes made by philosophers. The ancient type 'Procrustes' embodies an eternal inclination of the philosopher and of man in general. It is enormously tempting for the human mind to press reality into a Procrustes-bed, to cut off what does not fit into the bed and to stretch 'small things' so that they will fit our ready-made bed, as Procrustes is reported to have literally done to his guests. Someone might make a few distinctions between various data or categories, and immediately imagine he has discovered a 'complete list' of categories. He then perhaps thinks of aesthetically pleasing methods of deducing these data or categories from other wellknown distinctions. By way of example, Hume and Kant start out with notions of experience and of the a priori which are quite ambiguous and never subjected to serious examination. Yet despite such lack of clarity, immediate and far-reaching conclusions about what can and what cannot be known on the basis of experience, are drawn dogmatically. Many very elementary questions about experience are not even posed by Hume and Kant, such as whether radically different kinds of objects and intelligibility given in experience do not account for radically different types of 'experiential knowledge,' whether that which is given in experience cannot mediate the 42

Rethinking Husser/'s maxim knowledge of universal essences which are co-given in experience and yet contain objective a priori necessities, and so forth. A premature systematization can prevent access to the most important facts in a given field of investigation. This tendency to tackle issues immediately within the limiting and limited language and context of a given system is remarkably widespread and is often confused with the 'speculative force' of a thinker, almost as if speculative power and originality were manifested only when the philosopher's mind violates the self-given logos of things and engages in systematic constructions. Let us take some examples which may illustrate this point. Fichte's philosophy starts from a few untested and non-evident as well as ambiguous 'principles' with which the reader is confronted as if these principles were indubitable truths. Everything in the world is then viewed by Fichte in terms of these 'principles,' i.e. in the context of ego, self-positing, oppositing of the world to the ego, mutual limitation of ego and world by each other, infinite self-actualization as goal of the ego, and so forth. Or one starts with Hume's and Carnap's not only untested but self-contradictory assumptions that all meaningful statements must be empirically verifiable by means of senseperception, and that all necessarily true propositions must be analytic. (This thesis must be introduced as necessarily true but is neither analytic nor empirically verifiable.) Such a highly premature systematization of logic and epistemology, which is not supported by any evidence, fails to do justice to reality by starting with false and unexamined principles as with the denial that experience could ever give us access to synthetic principles a priori, and by applying methodological principles which are correct for certain objects to issues to which they do not apply (in this case, empirical methods to philosophical issues), thus contradicting what things clearly show themselves to be. If one commits oneself too early to a system, one can no longer truly listen to the voice of being. One hears selectively and only whatever fits into a ready-made apparatus of categories and problems. What is worse, one distorts the things of which one takes note by pressing them into inadequate categories. It should be clear that any systematization of the theory of a thing, prior to a proper investigation of its essence, runs the risk of superimposing structures on reality that prevent us from understanding it accurately. It should also be clear that philosophical knowledge ought to liberate 43

Part 1: 'Back to things themselves' itself as far as possible from any premature systematization. Yet, however clear this may be in principle, it is one of the most difficult things in the wor!d of the intellect to refrain from the well-nigh invincible inclination of the human mind to fail to listen carefully to reality, to refuse to think about being itself with a true openness of mind, and to superimpose superficial or premature theories, systems and constructions of all sorts which cannot hold up under closer scrutiny. Phenomenology as a return to 'things themselves' was meant as an ideal of philosophy which would liberate the minds of its adherents from such inadequate systems and constructions which blur our vision of reality. It is a tragic fact that many phenomenologists, not excluding the later Husser! himself, themselves became victims of premature and misleading systematization. They discovered important facts about intentionality, for example, or about the relation between noema and noesis, but they ceased too quickly to look further and more deeply into the data and fell prey to false subjectivist interpretations of this correlation and to generalizations which were in no way justified by 'things themselves.' As a matter of fact, the present writer sees such a deviation from 'things themselves' already in the introduction of the epoche as the basic methodological device for phenomenology. We shall return to this point shortly. What has been said does not deny that there are areas of scientific and technical knowledge where constructions and formations of theories which are only loosely connected with the given as well as systematic structures which are not justified by the given may, nevertheless, be helpful in the progress of scientific explanation and for knowledge in a limited sense of the term. The ground for this possibility of gaining knowledge by spontaneously created constructions which deviate from the true given nature of things cannot be explained here in depth but it is clear that some relationship between a theory and reality is possible even if there does not exist a full adequation of the one to the other. Even in those cases where knowledge is gained by largely constructed models, however, some starting point in the given reality which precedes all constructions, and some later verification, test, or other appropriate form of knowledge which is not a construction, are presupposed. And yet, however fruitful constructions may be in other fields of knowledge, the pure interest of the authentic philosopher in what 'things themselves' are excludes any significant role of constructions

44

Rethinking Husser/'s maxim in philosophy. Philosophical knowledge, which seeks to grasp the essence of things as clearly and consciously as possible, is incompatible with the 'playful' activity of developing interesting possible models of reality which may be quite proper in other disciplines. Legitimate use of philosophical constructions as an important part of philosophical knowledge is also excluded because of the nonpragmatic pure interest in truth characteristic of philosophy and because of the intelligibility and the accessibility to human knowledge of the objects of philosophy. The use of constructions and hypotheses is appropriate in more pragmatically oriented branches of knowledge in which success, too, and not truth alone, plays an important role, and in disciplines the objects of which are not directly accessible or knowable with certainty, but need to be 'guessed' by epistemological trials open to error. In principle, the philosopher may be called upon to use some analogous 'guessing' in those areas of speculative knowledge which are inaccessible to direct or purely deductive knowledge. Think of the use Plato makes of myths when he deals with the content of immortal life and judgment after death. Yet this use of analogies and myths serves an attempt of grasping that which is not self-given in the light of the given. It differs from the construction of models instead of delving into the given, or in violation of it. Indeed, it is the opposite of constructionism, namely the effort of extending the realm of the given speculatively: the fabrication of myths becomes the tool of cognitive grasp of all that gives itself - directly or through the mediation of analogies and metaphors. Another remark should be made here. Phenomenological philosophy in our sense of a systematic carrying out of the program 'back to things themselves' is by no means opposed to systematic knowledge as such, at least not in the sense of a continuously growing 'whole' of knowledge within which the prir.ciples, natures, consequences, and relations of beings are ordered, clarified, and explored, in the context of working towards an increasingly complete and coherent 'whole' of philosophical knowledge. Certainly, phenomenology is opposed to a 'closed system' which would exclude any given because it would not fit into a systematic structure. This is what Scheler has also called the 'positivistic' tendency of phenomenology, an unlimited eagerness and openness in which each experience is taken seriously in terms of what it truly reveals about being. However, phenomenological philosophy in the 45

Part 1: 'Back to things themselves' authentic sense is in no way opposed to an 'open system,' i.e., to a systematic structure or body of philosophical knowledge which brings into unity the knowledge gained in the different branches of philosophy. A certain co-giveness of the whole with each part of philosophical knowledge can rightly be asserted. At least some grasp of the whole seems always to be implied in philosophical knowledge. However, a complete system could only be the endresult of an intense philosophical activity and can never be perfectly realized by a finite mind. Nevertheless, the whole of reality can shine already through each authentic 'part' of philosophical knowledge which always carries an orientation to the whole and, in some measure, contains it. We are confronted here with the opposite of what the usual understanding of 'hermeneutical circle' would suggest. It is not the case that each partial knowledge could possibly be error as long as the part is not seen in the light of a complete understanding of the whole, something which is impossible for man as a finite, historical being. It is rather the case that the whole of reality is present, at least negatively, and to some extent positively, in any fragment of authentic knowledge. For any true understanding of reality however partial which faithfully listens to reality and explores it is in harmony with, and contains some positive reference to, the whole of reality. There is thus a universality implicit in each, albeit partial, authentic philosophical knowledge. The 'system' of the whole of things is present - at least negatively - in that no true incomplete knowledge can contradict the whole of truth. It is present - more positively - in the sense that the correct understanding of any 'part' of reality given philosophically contains a certain co-given ness of many other realities, to some extent even of the whole which intelligibly relates to, and is indicated by, each partial truth. These statements, however, have to be 'complemented by another observation which touches on an important element of truly philosophizing about 'things themselves.' Authentic phenomenological philosophy is opposed to giving priority to the concern for coherence, systematic wholeness or elegance of theory, because this could make a thinker fearful of facing honestly a given fact - either because he cannot yet harmonize it with other data or because it throws some of his erroneous systematic assumptions into question. The true phenomenologist, in our sense of the term, the true philosopher, needs both courage and love of truth to

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Rethinking Husserl's maxim overcome this danger. He needs courage in order to face, as J.H. Newman put it, ten thousand difficulties rather than to dispute one single clearly given truth. He needs love of truth in order to adopt an attitude of fully opening himself to every aspect of being that is disclosed to him.

(ii) Certain intellectual and moral attitudes as conditions of objective and rational philosophical knowledge Here the eminent relationship between philosophical knowledge and moral attitudes also becomes evident (Plato - especially in Books VI and VII of the Republic - Brentano, Max Scheler, Dietrich von Hildebrand and many other philosophers have stressed this strongly). 1'1 Cowardice and a false fear of reality, spirituallaziness and a desire to reach a pseudo-security shielded from reality, a prideful revolt against the claims the goods and truth make upon us, and other such deplorable intellectual and moral attitudes need to be overcome if the specifically philosophical ascent to being is to become possible. These intellectual-moral attitudes, however, - and this is of extreme importance - must not be seen in the light of subjective preferences which the philosopher would have to take somewhat irrationally, as fideism interprets these stances. On the contrary, these attitudes such as reverence and openness to being are evidently the ones which by their very essence are required by philosophical knowledge and indeed by knowledge in general.

(iii) What are the 'things themselves' to which philosophers should return? Another important question poses itself here. What exactly are the data to which the philosopher should return? Certainly, the philosopher's task cannot just be one of describing sense-impressions or similar data of experience. Still less can his task be reduced to describing his own subjective experiences, feelings, or acts. The identification of the objects of philosophy with subjective experience was in fact responsible for that psychologism which the phenomenological maxim 'back to things themselves' rightly criticized.

47

Part I: 'Back to things themselves'

(And yet many phenomenologists, including Husserl himself, later fell into the same fundamental mistake of an - albeit 'transcendental' - psychologism.) But if the objects of philosophy are neither sense-impressions nor subjective feelings, what is it exactly that the philosopher should look at afresh? The ontological question about the nature of the object of philosophy is inseparable from the epistemological-methodological question: By means of which method is the object of philosophical knowledge to be known? Is the term 'description' (Beschreibung) which Husserl frequently uses adequate to refer to the fundamental method of philosophy? Is there something like a phenomenological 'description' of the data? The terms 'given' and 'data' likewise demand further clarification. When we speak of 'data,' this term should not be understood as meaning individual facts or, even more narrowly, facts accessible only to our sense-experience. In ordinary use of language the term 'data' frequently refers to the kind of pure individual 'facts' that statistics deal with. This sense of 'data' is also at issue when we speak of a 'database' in computer programs, of statistical data, of the data report sheets required by medical examinations and the like. We do not have anything of this sort in mind when we speak of the 'data' with which the philosopher should occupy himself. These 'data' must not even be identified with concrete and individual works of great and universal meaning such as individual works of art or with styles as they appear in art or music, or with temperaments, characters, and so forth. For while these entities have a meaning which permits an understanding analogous to that required in philosophy, these 'data' are still susceptible only to an 'understanding description' which analyzes the given facts of a work and style, or the unique factual 'form' of a work, and thus remains occupied with the individual. This always involves an empirical dimension which does not allow for the specific penetration, the intuition and 'pure understanding' that philosophy aims at and that uncovers 'data' of a quite peculiar sort. This is neither to deny that there are many eidetic truths implied by the intelligible forms of such works, nor that the individual work itself constitutes, or imperfectly partakes in, some eternal form or eidetic particularity. But what are the 'data' the philosopher explores? What is the method which is no longer description at all, not even understanding

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Rethinking Husserl's maxim description? Phenomenological philosophy seeks not only the knowledge of certain quite fundamental facts such as that of our own existence and thereby of at least one existing being but it seeks primarily the knowledge of highly intelligible and often absolutely necessary essences and states of affairs rooted in them. The proper method or mode of knowledge that corresponds to absolutely necessary 'facts' that disclose themselves to us is, on the one hand, insight or intuition in the sense of an immediate rational penetration into necessary essences and states of affairs rooted in them; and, on the other, deductive reasoning. The term 'insight' (or 'intuition') here does not designate some feeling or irrational experience; nor does it designate a mystical state. It refers to what Aristotle recognized to be the most rational of all knowledge: immediate knowledge, on which any deduction and proof ultimately rests (nolls, noesis):20 Now of the intellectual faculties that we use in the pursuit of truth some (e. g., scientific knowledge and intuition [episteme kai nous]) are always true, whereas others (e.g., opinion and calculation [doxa kai logismos]) admit falsity; and no other knowledge except intuition [nous] is more accurate than scientific knowledge. Also first principles are more knowable than demonstrations, and all scientific knowledge involves reason(ing). It follows that there can be no scientific [i.e., deductive, demonstrative -l.S.] knowledge of the first principles; and since nothing can be more infallible than scientific knowledge except intuition, it must be intuition (no us) that apprehends the first principles .... Therefore, since we possess no other infallible faculty besides scientific knowledge [episteme] , the source from which such knowledge starts must be intuition [emphasis added - J .S.]. Thus it will be the primary source of scientific knowledge that apprehends the first principles .... Insight means, then, a mode of understanding the necessity of essences and essential states of affairs from 'within: i.e., in their own absolute necessity which allows the mind to penetrate into them and to understand them in a manner in which contingent and non-necessary facts can never be understood. Only that which does not admit of ever being different from what it is and which is immutable because of the entirely meaningful and inner necessity of 49

Part 1: 'Back to things themselves' essence admits such an understanding. This rational insight (and deduction based thereupon), the objects of which we will have to explore further and will later identify as a completely objective a priori grounded in the essences of things, differs radically from any description that is in comparison a knowledge 'from without,' an empirical mode of knowledge which notices and observes facts which could in principle also be different, even if they possess perhaps a deep meaning as human or superhuman inventions. They can only be known in their facticity which has to be 'accepted' on the evidence of their being actually real, and not on the unique kind of 'force' of intelligible necessity and of not admitting of possibly being otherwise. The grasp of such a 'must be' of things is what the term 'intuition' designates. It is especially clear in Husserl's Logical Investigations, particularly in the third one, on 'Wholes and Parts' (this has lately played a decisive role in the philosophy of the Manchester circle, especially in the thought of Barry Smith)2! as it is clear, too, in Reinach's and von Hildebrand's works, that the eide which the phenomenologist seeks to discover are timelessly valid and absolutely necessary essential (eidetic) structures, and coincide fundamentally with the classical essences (eide) of which Platonic philosophy spoke, however much Husserl's interpretation of them shuns away from any 'Platonic realism.' They are only understood in a clearer way as the objectively and absolutely necessary essences of things distinct from contingent (non-necessary) 'inventible' natures (wholes). Von Hildebrand in particular delineated them more clearly from 'contingent' essences than Plato and the entire ensuing tradition (although we find some important hints at this difference in Bonaventure and in Descartes).22 Some realist phenomenologists further clarified these eide in that they clearly saw their relation to the essences in the existing things, a relation which Platonism has largely ignored. Thus necessary essences came to be seen both as being 'in things' (as embodied real essences) and 'above (ante, praeter) things,' as timeless eidetic structures, to borrow both Augustinian and Husserlian terminology. (In my essay, 'Essence and Existence,' in Aletheia I, this point is developed more extensively. ) The auth~ntic phenomenological method is, then, essentially a consistent and faithful unfolding of these necessary essences which answer Kant's famous question of how 'synthetic a priori propositions' are possible. They answer this question precisely in the only 50

Rethinking Husserl's maxim

way possible so as to found not only 'necessary propositions' but necessary truths: i.e., by revealing their absolute essential necessity, their 'it cannot and could not be different in any possible world than that. ... ' They answer Kant's question about the possibility of synthetic a priori propositions from 'things themselves' which are noumena - noumena not in Kant's sense of unknowable X's conceived as mere negative limit-notions (which does violence to the very word 'noumena,' the intelligible), but in a completely objective sense the origin of which must not be identified with some naivete of world-belief but is given, as we shall see, to the most critical rational understanding. They give themselves from the things themselves as intrinsically necessary and as transcendent to our minds. If they are subjected to careful phenomenological analysis, the stance taken by Husserl in Ideas, where he dismisses the real transcendence of knowledge as impossible without investigating its self-givenness as real, is seen to be uncritical. How exactly the type of self-given necessity of these essences shows itself to be objective and to differ from any form of merely subjective, historically or sociologically conditioned, or even transcendental-subjective sense of 'necessity' will be shown in the second part of this essay. Although it cannot be brought to full evidence here that an objectivist and realist phenomenology is rationally justifiable, we have to beware from the beginning of interpreting the 'data' we spoke of in the subjectivistic sense given to this term by many phenomenologists and by Husserl himself. An authentically philosophical analysis of the given, the 'phenomenological' character of which must be measured solely by the extent to which the maxim 'back to things' (i.e., to those things which constitute the subject-matter of philosophy) is fulfilled, is far from easy. There is no more difficult task than to uncover, truly and systematically, the objective and necessary essential structures of reality; but the task is still possible and its fulfillment is demanded by the original program of going 'back to things.' For the reasons already set forth, the phenomenological method should neither be called description of experience nor description of the data given in experience. The identification of the phenomenological method with 'description' is a capital mistake made by many realist and idealist phenomenologists. From the point of view of the need for a clear distinction between insight into necessary essential structures and mere descriptions of factual data, the worst moment 51

Part I: 'Back to things themselves' in the history of phenomenology was the discussion between Husser! and members of the Munich circle, called 'Seefelder Gesprache,' in the course of which the example of the exact description of a beer bottle and of what we experience when looking at it, i.e. the careful description of an experience and its entirely contingent factual object, was taken as a model case of what the phenomenological method was to be. Surely, this is not to deny that also the beer bottle partakes in some more general necessary essences such as space, perception, color as such, thing as such. Nor are we to dispute what we have seen to be the case: that there are meaningful contingent essences (think of works of art) of which one can give fine descriptions which deserve to be called 'phenomenological' in that they penetrate into the meaningful wholeness of their objects. It is only half-correct to call this method 'description' and it should rather be designated as analysis of the (intelligible) 'form' (Southern Critics of Literature) or of the intuitively given character 'anschaulichen Charakter' (Hans Sedlmayr). Still, the term 'description' has some justification here because it refers to an unfolding of concrete 'facts' and 'data' in the sense of something that just presents itself in its actuality without possessing an intrinsically and absolutely necessary structure which would permit a mode of understanding that supersedes all 'descriptions' and is in fact an entirely different mode of knowledge. We shall return to this higher mode of rational penetration into intelligible essences which is entirely different from description although it shares with it the discovering and uncovering of that which gives itself.

4 CAN A PRESUPPOSITIONLESS PHILOSOPHICAL RETURN TO 'THINGS THEMSELVES' BE JUSTIFIED? (i) Further clarification of the method which leads 'back to things

themselves' We may ask: Is not the call to 'go back to things themselves' itself burdened by so many philosophical presuppositions that it can in no way serve Husserl's 'Cartesian ideal,' which we have made our own, namely to go back to some apodictically certain and indubitable starting point of philosophical knowledge? Surely, only such a

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Rethinking Husserl's maxim presuppositionless starting point which allows for indubitable knowledge would permit true episteme that would be free from doxa (mere opinion); and this, in fact, is what the Platonic Socrates in Books VI and VII of the Republic demands from authentic philosophical knowledge (noesis as the highest step of dialectics in Plato's sense). But the question is: can the ideal of going 'back to things themselves' really be introduced as something which is presuppositionless and self-evident in its justification? It cannot indeed be denied that the justification of the call 'back to things themselves' presupposes or implies other evidences. It presupposes, for instance, an insight into the essence of knowledge as a receptive discovery of things that are not produced by the activity of knowledge itself. If the activity of knowledge could rightly be construed as one which produces its objects, then the call of a 'return to things themselves' would make absolutely no sense. Likewise, if man were denied any access to things themselves, philosophy could not be described rightly by the maxim 'back to things themselves.' Therefore the possibility of knowledge of what things themselves are, and the character of the knowing activity as a discovery of being, the 'receptive transcendence'23 inherent in knowledge must be seen and recognized in order to understand that the task of the philosopher is not that of a constructor of systems which he imposes on things. Yet this does not imply any supposition which would have to be blindly accepted, for in the very understanding of anything, and especially in the grasp of the validity of the rigorous method of 'a return to things themselves,' the essentially necessary trait of the receptivity of knowledge is co-given. Thus it is also understood that somebody's philosophy should not dependto allude to a famous utterance of Fichte - on what kind of man he is, but on the things themselves, the faithful unfolding of which is the goal and essence of all authentic knowledge. But this decisive feature of knowledge, which must be recognized in order to perceive the legitimation of the maxim that prescribes the return to things themselves, is not illegitimately presupposed. It does not contradict the presupposition less starting point of phenomenological philosophy but is rather itself given as belonging to the necessary essence of knowledge. We can speak of knowing solely to the extent to which the voice of being is heard, to the extent to which that which is is grasped by the mind. Any other activity which would conceive of things in modes different from what these 53

Part I: 'Back to things themselves' things are, would precisely and evidently not be knowledge any more. In that moment in which the spontaneous-constructive activity of the mind deviates from 'things themselves,' invention, error, misconception, but not knowledge, would occur. Let us add immediately that, of course, invention too, especially artistic invention, can be supported by knowledge and involve a discovery of being and that it can lead to such a discovery. Moreover, the objects of creative acts can in their turn become objects of knowledge. Yet this knowledge itself, which precedes artistic invention, or is embodied in it, or consequent upon it, must in no way be identified with creativity but is itself a receptive, transcending participation in 'how things are.' To see that one ought to 'go back to things themselves' also presupposes another equally evident fact which is co-given with the understanding of the justification of the phenomenological maxim, namely, the essence of the truth of judgments (propositions: the normal meanings of declarative sentences). The truth of propositions must be understood as 'conformity between the proposition, on the one hand, and reality (the state of affairs), on the other hand.' A proposition is true when the state of affairs which is posited by it actually obtains, independent of the assertion itself and in the exact manner in which it has been asserted in the proposition. If one were to presuppose another theory of what the essence of truth is, for example a coherence theory of truth as Bradley defends it and as N. Rescher discusses it, then the phenomenological maxim would make no sense. Then the going back to 'things themselves' would have to be replaced by an attending to the immanent structure and coherence of a system and to the compatibility of its basic assumptions with the deduced propositions. Similarly, if the truth of propositions were to lie in the success of their being believed - if, for example, Nazi ideology or Communist and also capitalistic ideologies should be measured in terms not of their accordance with reality but of their success - then the maxim 'back to things themselves' would be wrong. Only the classical theory of truth as 'conformity with being,' albeit in a new and deeper articulation, as it was developed by Alexander Pfander in his Logik, can be the epistemological-logical ground of what Husserl (Ideas, § 24) called the 'principle of principles' of the phenomenological method: that very primordial dator Intuition is a source of authority 54

Rethinking Husserl's maxim (Rechtsquelle) for knowledge, that whatever presents itself in 'intuition' in primordial form (as it were in its bodily reality), is simply to be accepted as it gives itself out to be, though only within the limits in which it then presents itself. (Ibid., p. 83) Is this presupposition of the phenomenological maxim an illegitimate assumption? By no means - the truth of this theory of truth discloses itself as a perfectly valid and evident foundation of any philosophical method. If someone were to deny the correctness and rationality of assuming truth as adaequatio, what could be said in reply? In the first place, any attempt to replace truth as adaequatio by a utilitarian or coherence theory of truth reintroduces the rejected notion of truth as adaequatio. The theory itself about truth claims to explain what truth 'really is.' More significantly still, the un inventible essence of the truth of propositions reveals precisely through the philosophical data, i.e., through the intelligible essences of things themselves, that indeed the truth of this theory as the truth of any other proposition, the fulfillment of the truth-claim which is inherent in each judgment that posits a state of affairs, cannot reside in any other factor or relation except in that of the state of affairs being exactly as asserted in the judgment. This peculiar 'coincidence' in which the things themselves 'behave' as they are said to 'behave' (or in which that which is said to be actually is, and that which is denied to be, actually is not, to put it as Aristotle did) can alone constitute the basis for truth. As with the presupposition of the receptive transcendence of knowledge, we discover here, too, that things themselves justify the claim that the philosopher should go back to them. The essence of truth bears witness to the truth of the phenomenological maxim in its classical interpretation as the principle of all faithful and fruitful philosophizing. For if propositions are true when and only when they are in conformity with things themselves, then the only legitimate method of philosophy (and of all knowledge) cannot but be the one which permits us to go back, with the utmost rigor, to those things themselves which alone can ground the truth of propositions. We do not intend to enter here into further analysis of these and other presuppositions of the maxim 'back to things themselves.' If those moments and marks of knowledge which are presupposed by the phenomenological method are evidently true and manifest 55

Part 1: 'Back to things themselves' themselves to be so from the things themselves, then the validity and presupposition less character of the phenomenological method remains unrefuted. Then the return to 'things themselves' discloses itself as a principle which expresses a universal and the broadest possible ideal of philosophy and of philosophical knowledge, an ideal which was not arbitrarily or spontaneously introduced as if it intended only one among many possible types of philosophizing. 24

(ii) Phenomenology as a unique mode of seeing and learning to see: Insight, argumentation, dialogue, and intersubjectivity The observations made thus far lead us to a better understanding of what constitutes the core of the phenomenological method in its classical sense: the learning to see things in their very own original nature, the continued sense of thaumazein (wondering) at things and the understanding of what makes them truly what they are. This 'seeing' which was sought after by Plato and Aristotle, and the tradition inspired by them, is a rational insight into, and an understanding of, beings and necessary facts in their intelligibility. It can thus not be captured by expressions like 'the ease of phenomenological description' but must be recognized to be a most difficult achievement, a victory over prejudices and over an attitude of taking things for granted. The difficulty of such 'seeing and insight' (which uses many methodological devices, to be discussed below) is hidden from the man who is uninitiated in the labor and toil necessary to arrive at insight, and who sees in an essential analysis, the greater its clarity and the more it unfolds what 'is there,' a greater triviality which states nothing interesting but only 'obvious' facts and truisms. This confusion of a phenomenological unfolding of essences with stating the 'obvious' contains the truth that there is some 'obviousness' or Selbst-verstiindlichkeit in accurate philosophical analyses. Each of us possesses a certain acquaintance with things and this prephilosophical contact with reality, which normally lies hidden behind a whole set of prejudices and misconceptions that threaten to distort our o"riginal contact with things, exists prior to theoretical philosophical understanding. Philosophy, when it actually illumines and brings to the level of conscious awareness the object of this pure original experience, regularly elicits a response of 'yes, this is 56

Rethinking Husser/'s maxim exactly how things are' from persons who recognize themselves and their own Sachkontakt (contact with things) in the prise de conscience achieved in the philosophical phenomenological analysis of a datum. This fact lies also at the root of the Platonic theory of philosophy as a 'reminiscence' of what we 'knew all along' and of what even the most uneducated slave will discover when properly questioned. Plato refers also to the role of the philosopher as a midwife who only leads to the birth of knowledge in others, of a knowledge which they have to reach on their own. And the fundamental passages from Augustine's De Magistro already quoted make the same point. In the light of these remarks it is also clear that what is at stake in insight is not a mere matter of linguistic habit (a 'yes, that's what we mean by X') or a common prejudice ('yes, that's what we all think about X'). That it is not a mere matter of linguistic habit becomes clear as soon as we notice that the necessity at stake remains completely intact when we vary the lingusitic expression or the conceptual meaning or definition of the same nature X. It remains even when we say: 'a thing of this unnamed essence necessarily is .... ' An analytic necessity or merely linguistic prejudice would totally collapse if we varied the definition of the word. A 'synthetic necessity a priori' (an essential necessity), on the contrary, remains just as it is regardless of how we name, or conceptually refer to, a thing, provided it is the same nature or structure of natures of which we speak. For example, the necessary proposition that vieillards are old is necessary only in virtue of the definition of the word 'vieillard', meaning 'old man.' As soon as we refer to the vieillard as such with another term, such as 'this man: the necessity disappears and the fact that he is old discloses itself as contingent. Similar things hold about the analytic necessity that bachelors are unmarried, and so forth. In the case of the necessary truth, 'personal guilt necessarily presupposes freedom: however, the situation is entirely different. The thing 'guilt' cannot come into existence without freedom, and the necessity is grounded completely in the essence of the thing in question. That such necessary truths are not common prejudices will be recognized as soon as one actually comes to have the insight that they are grounded in the nature of the beings in question regardless of all subjective factors. We shall return to this point later. 57

Part 1: 'Back to things themselves' The questions of how Sachkontakt is verifiable and whether, if someone disagrees with us, this means that he does not possess it, can be answered thus. First of all, the theoretical opinions of a person do not usually coincide with what he learns from his original contact with things. Therefore, one of the most effective ways of convincing another in philosophical dialogue consists precisely in reaching the common basis of Sachkontakt where he himself sees the truth under discussion. The Platonic Socrates uses this method in each Platonic dialogue. The original contact with things and their accessibility to intuition is not the end to dialogue but the beginning of it and the condition of its possibility. For without the possibility of a reference to a common Sachkontakt and to intuition which goes beyond sense-perception, disagreements between persons - at least disagreements in regard to metaphysics, ethics, principles of logic, mathematics, and the like - could never be resolved. Intellectual unity and community is, as Heraclitus stated, possible only because there is 'one logos': it is necessary to follow the common (universal); but although the logos is common, the many live as though they had a private understanding. (Fr. 2, Sextus Adv. Math. vii, 133.) If there were no given reality accessible to the rational insight of all men, which can function as a court of appeal when disagreements arise and to which every rational man can go back, each man would be thrown back into his own subjectivity and opinion, without possibility of mutual agreement, understanding, dialogue. Yet, while the possibility of a common Sachkontakt and participation in one logos render possible intellectual community, it is certainly possible that someone speaks about love or beauty without having the proper Sachkontakt. In this case, rather than continuing philosophical discussions in the abstract, it would be better to take one's point of departure in, for example, a work of art on the beauty of which both agree. From such a shared Sachkontakt one can then work towards an agreement. If one partner in the dialogue, however, has no contact at all with virtue, love, beauty, etc., it would be impossible for the other partner to convey his insights into the respective data. And then indeed their dialogue might have to end. But this does not in any way imply that the one who actually does see a point grounded in the essence of a thing could be refuted by reference to the fact that another person fails to see the same

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Rethinking Husserl's maxim point. There is not even a formal contradiction here, something which would arise if both parties were to claim to have contradictory insights. Not seeing a point is not even a formal argument against (or opposition to) seeing, as Alice von Hildebrand-Jourdain has shown. 25 Even when two contradictory claims to insight clash, however, many further paths of dialogue still remain. The most effective approach of giving evidence of the actual attainment of insight, and of communicating it to others, is the accurate phenomenological unfolding of a given essence in the wealth of its intelligibility. Such an analysis differs sharply from a mere construction or theory that does not tally with reality and lacks a power to convince comparable to that of an adequate philosophical analysis. As stated earlier, the clarity and convincing quality of an authentic phenomenological analysis is not easily achieved. It is as difficult to attain as it is to achieve a truly graceful pose, a difficulty which the great German poet and thinker Heinrich von Kleist describes in his article, Das Marionettentheater. To recover, on the level of art, the simplicity of a graceful natural gesture is a most difficult task. Analogously, it takes painstaking effort to reach, on the level of philosophical reflection, the simplicity and clarity with which things are given in our prephilosophical experience. How much easier is it to develop a complicated and unintelligible construction which is 'entirely original.' The clarity which accompanies a genuine piece of phenomenological philosophy is radically misconceived when one believes that it can be gained with the 'ease of phenomenological insight.' Its achievement is the fruit of a long and often laborious process of searching, comparing, arguing, and above of all of learning how to see, learning how to contemplate and to become silent so that the things themselves can speak to our minds. Moreover, the intellectual process of gaining insight and of conceptually unfolding the intelligible nature of a being, its different features, the ontological and logical connections which obtain between its various moments, and of stating these in propositions, involves the most intense intellectual effort and a far greater alertness and activity than are required for any philosophical construction.

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Part I: 'Back to things themselves' (iii) Phenomenology as presuppositionless and the rational

foundation of philosophy The very essence of phenomenological philosophy as a going back to 'things themselves' also implies another element. The phenomenologist cannot rest satisfied as long as the foundational principles of logic or metaphysics or ethics are merely introduced as obvious without being sufficiently explored in their intelligible features and foundations. Likewise, the philosopher who wishes to go back to things themselves, and to the ultimate sources of their intelligibility and rootedness in 'things themselves,' cannot be content with accepting these principles merely in a negative fashion as being inevitably presupposed by man and by any human thought. Of course, such negative arguments which demonstrate the impossibility of 'getting around' assuming the truth of these principles, may be highly successful in defending the results of insights against those who deny them. Such negative arguments which reduce the interlocutor's position to self-annihilating absurdity may also be the only kind of arguments one can offer with reference to the most fundamental principles because there is no way in which primary data and principles can be proven in terms of other premises. For as Aristotle and Plato have masterfully shown, each of those premises already presupposes these first evidences and principles. Yet mere demonstration that we presuppose certain concepts or principles would be completely unsatisfactory for a truly phenomenological philosopher. His objective is to see the data with which philosophy is concerned. This 'seeing' has, in the case of necessary essences that are objects of philosophical knowledge, to penetrate into the innermost character and foundation of evident states of affairs in these essences, and it has to bring to evidence the objective intrinsic necessity of 'it is and must be so.' Nothing that falls short of an actual mental 'seeing and touching' of these archdata and principles will satisfy the phenomenological philosopher. Since philosophers of the past either denied the objective necessity of the foundational principles of philosophy (Kant), or did not make the distinction between the evidence of intrinsic necessity and truth of a principle, and its necessary presupposedness for all thinking, with sufficient clarity (think of Aristotle's Metaphysics, Book Gamma), we might regard phenomenological realism as the

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Rethinking Husserl's maxim most articulate embodiment of classical philosophy. For this distinction is the condition of 'classical philosophy.' The greatest contributions of 'classical philosophy' are linked to this discovery. We are reminded, for example, of Books VI and VII in Plato's Republic where Socrates distinguishes between dianoia (mathematical knowledge) and noesis (philosophical knowledge) on the ground that the latter occurs 'without any help of hypotheses and (mere) assumptions.' Augustine's analysis of the indubitable certainty of eternal truths and Bonaventure's exposition of 'cognito certitudinalis' also lead to the same conclusion. Aristotle's Posterior Analytics and Metaphysics (Gamma) and other works strongly defend immediate knowledge and its evidence as referring to necessary facts and as the condition of all knowledge obtained by means of proofs. Analogies to what phenomenological realism elaborates on this point are likewise found in Descartes, particularly in Meditations V and in his replies to the objections to the Meditations. Among the phenomenologists, Husserl, Reinach, Scheler, Pfander, Ingarden, and von Hildebrand express this point forcefully. But how is a positive knowledge of these principles as evident possible? How is such knowledge intersubjectively verifiable? And, if this is possible, how and why should the phenomenological method contribute anything special towards the solution of these questions? In answer to this query, we might say first of all that phenomenological realism, in an age of skepticism and relativism under the impact of Hume and Kant, would be perfectly content with once again showing the correctness of those positions of classical philosophy which defend the thesis that all indirect knowledge through proof presupposes a more reliable and foundational immediate knowledge of the ultimate principles. The need to defend these claims which were put forward with greater ease and naivete in ages past, however, already makes their defense and elaboration in the present age something new if not something stunningly foreign to what 'everybody knows' since Hume and Kant: that rational insight into (synthetic) necessary truths is impossible. In addition, the careful study of the 'things themselves' (Wesensgesetze) to which 'synthetic propositions a priori' refer, the full bringing to evidence of the objectively and absolutely necessary character of these necessary essences and essential laws, and of the 61

Part I: 'Back to things themselves' philosophical method through which we grasp them, are a classical achievement of realist phenomenology. To throw this discovery into further relief will constitute the topic of Part II, Chapter 5 of the' present study.

5 'BACK TO THINGS THEMSELVES' AND THE 'THING IN ITSELF': IS PHENOMENOLOGICAL REALISM POSSIBLE? This leads to another decisive feature of phenomenology in its original form, namely phenomenological realism. Many students saw Husserl's Logical Investigations as a great breakthrough, and as a liberation from skepticism and relativism in that form of it which Husserl calls 'psychologism': that is, a reduction of the (strictly necessary and apodictically certain) laws of pure logic, which are objective and grounded in the very essence of logical entities, to (merely probable and roughly general) laws of thinking, which are grounded in the subject's thinking apparatus and not in any objective, pre-given logical essences. Cleary, in the Logical Investigations the 'things themselves' were the objectively necessary essences and Wesensgesetze (essential laws) of things. These laws of absolute validity would hold true in every possible world, to use an expression of Leibniz which Husserl and even Kant employ. Kant reintroduces it - forgetful of his general injunction against such claims - in reference to the principles of the good will. 26 'Things themselves' understood as 'things in themselves' were of course radically rejected by the later Husserl, who even thought that the very term 'thing in itself' was absurd.27 Husserl increasingly came to think (for reasons and motives to be expounded in detail later) that the 'thing in itself cannot be given because of an inner impossibility. The term given was ever more closely associated with the subjective mode of givenness and was regarded as unthinkable without reference to the cogitation of the subject. Phenomenology became a description of the exact mode in which the object (cogitatum, noema) appears and is given to the subject. The Abschattungen and Ansichten (perspectival differences) which are found in sense perception and in which the meaning-relation to intentional objects is fulfilled became the concern of the phenomenologist and not 'things in themselves' 62

Rethinking Husserl's maxim which increasingly appeared to phenomenologists as a naIve objectivist assumption of an 'outside of any sphere of possible givenness.' Again, Husserl's emphasis fell on anticipations, retentions, and the entire internal time-consciousness with its figures and aspects. How could any of this be associated with 'realism'? In response to this question, we will have to turn later to an exact analysis of the very different meanings of 'things in themselves.' On the basis of these investigations, we shall argue that man's knowledge is not restricted to grasping things in the many perspectival aspects and subjectively constituted 'faces' in which they are given but also in what they are intrinsically in themselves. But without prior investigation into the complexity of a great number of meanings of the term 'in itself' our question about the knowability of 'things in themselves' cannot be conducted meaningfully; we cannot even properly ask the question itself. Suffice it to stress at this point in our analysis that 'things themselves' as phenomenological philosophy speaks of them cannot simply be identified with data exclusively as they give themselves in experience. Nor must they be restricted to mere noemata of intentional acts (noesis) which are conceived of as not existing independently from human consciousness. The interpretation of consciousness as constituting its objects must not be assumed from the outset but critically examined. Later, in refutation of this assumption, the givenness (namely the accessibility to our mind) of beings which cannot be reduced to constituted objects and aspects will be brought to evidence. Although the later Husserl does indeed reduce the data of phenomenology to constituted meanings and beings which allegedly depend on transcendental (human) subjectivity, the original Husserlian notion of 'phenomenon' did not suggest such a reduction. While the five lectures of 1907, The Idea of Phenomenology written under the impact of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, deny the given ness of completely objective, intrinsically existing beings, the Logical Investigations clearly assert necessities which 'gods,' men, and angels would have to recognize because they are objectively necessary and evident. And precisely these non-constituted, absolutely necessary, ideal objects constitute the primary object of philosophical intuition. The problem of whether or not this early assertion was naIve and of whether the insistence on intentionality forbids an intentional yet transcendent contact with things in 63

Part I: 'Back to things themselves' themselves, will have to be addressed later. In any case, the 'things themselves' of original phenomenology were understood by many students of Husserl to be the newly rediscovered 'things in themselves' which Kant had declared unknowable but which an objectivist apriorism seemed to have justified anew. 28 The term 'phenomenon' should, in a properly phenomenological philosophy, have the same meaning as 'datum' or 'arch-datum' (,arch-phenomenon'). The terms 'thing itself' and 'given' basically have the same meaning, except that the notion of 'thing itself' does not have any reference to the mode of cognition in which the thing presents itself to the knower. But the 'givenness' as such of a thing does not in any way preclude that that which is thus given is something in its own right, that it is precisely given as possessing an autonomous being in relation to the grasping consciousness. In the context of phenomenological philosophy in our sense, the terms 'thing itself,' 'given,' and 'datum' refer, furthermore, to those entities and intelligible data which it is the task of the philosopher to explore and which have been briefly characterized above. The term 'phenomenon,' too, must be freed from a potential misunderstanding which attaches to it so easily that the term should probably be abandoned entirely. 'Phenomenon' seems to suggest that phenomenology is interested in appearances and modes of givenness only and not in the thing in itself, even if the latter should exist. The expression phainomenon, however, does not, in the original Greek, have only all the meanings of seeming, appearing, etc. which Heidegger unfolded. 29 'Phainomenon' in the sense of mere appearance also emerges in Kant's terminology in which that term means 'the thing-as-given,' contrasted by him with the 'thingin-itself' (the noumenon) which he regards as unknowable. Thus any interpretation of 'phenomenon' in the light of Kantian philosophy leads to a radical misconstrual of the phenomenological term 'phenomenon' which designates by no means the opposite of 'thing in itself.' Hegel, too, uses the term 'phenomenology,' in his Phenomenology of the Spirit, in the transcendental idealist sense in which the idea of being as 'constitutum' of spirit, that of 'epiphany' of gradual self-manifestation, and phenomenology as an investigation of the subject-object-relation in consciousness are intertwined. Finally, the later subjectivistic turn of transcendental phenomenology seems to confirm the suspicion of realists and Thomists that phe64

Rethinking Husserl's maxim nome no logy is utterly subjectivistic and concerned with appearances only, not with the 'really real' of things in themselves. Phenomenology in our sense of the term is, however, utterly misconceived when it is understood as mere description or even as an eidetic analysis of phainomena in the sense of mind-dependent appearances and objects. Rather, all the essential elements of the phenomenological method discussed so far are fully compatible with, and are indeed indispensable moments and instruments of, a metaphysical investigation into things in themselves. Phenomenology, in this book, shall be shown to be a fitting method for ontology in the classical sense, and not merely a fine preliminary description of experience which could at best be a preparation for metaphysics. But in order to present phenomenology in this new way, a very exact examination of the elements which belong to this method is needed, and to this we shall return in a later context.

6 IS PHENOMENOLOGY ATHEISTIC, OR 'MYSTICAL' AND ALOGICAL? There is an entirely different question which poses itself in the context of phenomenology's claim to lead a way back to 'things themselves.' Is phenomenological philosophy interested only in what can be directly and immediately seen, or is it also concerned with indirect knowledge and deductive reasoning? Furthermore, is phenomenological philosophy restricted to the world as it is directly self-given - and uninterested in any speculative thought based on analogy? Must it then be regarded as implicity atheistic, as it was recently designated by a French philosopher, or must it at least be concluded that an infinite, divine Being falls in principle outside the scope of those issues which phenomenological philosophy can turn to? Then phenomenological philosophy would at least have to be methodologically agnostic with regard to God. Another related question could be posed at this point: Is phenomenology a mere propaedeutics to metaphysics, or is it even hostile to ontology, a rejection of any notion of going beyond anything which is directly accessible in experience? In this case, phenomenology would have more in common with positivism than is usually acknowledged, and the connections between Brentano and the Meinong school with the Vienna circle would be far from 65

Part 1: 'Back to things themselves' accidental. And this would seem to be reconfirmed by the 'Grazer Schule' and by the mixture of phenomenology and Wittgensteinian thought someone might ascribe to Barry Smith and the Manchester circle. 30 Thirdly, we could ask: does phenomenological philosophy aim at absolute apodictic certainty, and does it therefore exclude any sphere of knowledge (such as sense-knowledge of a real world) which is less than apodictically certain but is held only through what Husser! calls the 'world-belief,' which phenomenology as 'rigorous apodictic science' must 'bracket'? To ask the question more generally still, do the foundations of any faith, nay of any trace of a belief, fall outside the scope of phenomenology and is phenomenological philosophy thus a movement opposed to both an objectivist philosophy of religion and to faith, or at least to all those elements of realism which have to do with trust, commonsense, and belief?3! Certainly, many understand phenomenology in the manner described as anti-metaphysical, unmetaphysical, anti-realist, and antireligious, i.e., opposed to religion in any objectivist sense. But the present writer submits that this is an entirely wrong conception of what the 'return to things themselves' (which is the foundational principle of the phenomenological program) originally meant and objectively implies. As far as the first question is concerned, any form of going beyond the directly and immediately given, any form of speculative knowledge, is fully justified in terms of the phenomenological maxim 'back to things themselves' - but only under one condition. Such a going beyond what is self-given must be grounded in the given, must be justified by the things as they disclose themselves to our knowledge. It may be that the need for speculative thought to be in harmony with the given would be recognized abstractly and in principle by all ontologists, but, as a matter of fact, in their concrete manner of proceeding most ontologists show little awareness of the relation between what is given and what is speculatively known, and little regard for the manifold ways in which their speculations violate the given. All speculations, then, which go against the clear nature and logos of what is self-given, or which only do as much as leaving aside any basis in the given, are anti-phenomenological and simultaneously objectively unfounded. In other words, metaphysical theories and distinctions which can no longer be traced back to

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anything which being itself tells us about -itself in its leibhafte Selbstgegebenheit ('bodily' self-givenness) should not occur in a philosophy which calls itself phenomenological. More difficult is the answer to the question about whether phenomenology as such ceases with the analysis of the directly self-given essences of things, and, while it would not exclude or oppose speculation transcending the immediately given, such speculation would no longer deserve the description 'phenomenology.' With regard to this point, it must be said that certainly the specific genius of the methodic and systematic 'phenomenological' exploration of the self-given nature of things cannot be equally applied to objects which are accessible only by means of speculative thought which soars beyond the self-given and seeks to capture what is hidden from our direct grasp. This is true, in different ways of course, of the knowledge of material substances, immortality, eternity, infinity, pure justice, and of other objects which transcend immediate experiential self-givenness. It cannot be denied that these objects are not self-given in our experience so as to stand open to a direct phenomenological grasp. Nevertheless, not only material substance as foundational of all material qualities we perceive, but even the mysterious and hidden 'absolute being' imposes itself upon our minds, as could be shown by a properly phenomenological metaphysics; we grasp its objective essence, relation to the world, and essential attributes in their necessity through insight that discovers being. Also, the speculative thought which proceeds more indirectly and creatively must be wholly supported by receptive insight in order to be valid. Whereas the intelligibility of immortal life, of 'justice itself,' 'beauty itself,' and above all of the absolute divine being as the ONE who IS these attributes and in whom all immutable predicates are grounded does not directly present itself in our experience, it can only be grasped by means of a faithful attending to the given. There is a speculative form of discovery that starts from experience but opens itself out to transcendent or even infinite objects which lie beyond the scope of all immediate experience. The intelligibility of those objects is mediated through other more directly given natures which are understood to be analogous to them. Further analysis would reveal here a certain mode of mediate self-givenness the exploration of which could still be called phenomenology which reads the given nature in specula. While much furtAer analysis would be required to

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Part I: 'Back to things themselves' elucidate this 'speculative phenomenology,' it is clear that the phenomenological analysis of the given must not exclude but rather demands going beyond the given whenever the given beings themselves lead us beyond themselves. Think, for example, of meditating on the nature of time, and of the way in which such an attentive philosophical reflection on time led both Plotinus in Enn., VII, 3, 'On Eternity and Time' and Augustine in Confessions, XI to a speculative grasp of eternity. The speculative grasp of those objects which are known only mediately shares many traits with the knowledge of that which is directly self-given. We must be as receptive as when we analyze the immediately self-given in order to understand that which is not directly self-given but given indirectly through other beings, not positively through what it is in itself but negatively in the mirror of its own opposite. To stay with the image of the mirror: the analysis of whatever a mirror reveals about what lies beyond itself also demands extremely careful attention to what things themselves, by mediation of their images, tell us. Finally, the problem of the relationship between phenomenology and faith is as difficult to answer as the preceding questions. Does human faith with its elements of trust and love, and religious faith go justification in the 'given'? Or does an act of trust and faith go totally beyond anything which could be 'given'? Moreover, do both human faith with its element of trust and love, and religious faith go entirely outside the sphere of anything which could be 'phenomenologically given'? Or do both the objects of authentic human trust and love and those of authentic Revelation confront us with a unique mode of the 'given,' the exploration of which is precisely a task of the phenomenological method in our sense. Even if it turned out, however, that phenomenology is an important method for the theologian, the theological use of phenomenology would be quite distinct from phenomenological philosophy. There might also be a very different relationship between faith and phenomenology in authentically philosophical and phenomenological analyses of necessary essences of religious contents. We will not pursue these aspects of philosophy of religion and of theology here. 32 The notion of 'speculative knowledge' used here needs some further explanation. By this term, we refer to that type of knowledge in which we understand a reality that is not directly given in our experience. By means of analogies, logical inferences (which 68

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are themselves often based on analogies), and the like, we try to understand a being which is not itself given. As has been mentioned, this mode of speculative knowledge can easily seduce us into engaging in constructions and unfounded assertions that are a result of an unwarranted going beyond what is disclosed to us by 'things themselves. ' What has been said so far in response to the first basic question also answers the second one concerning the alleged hostility of phenomenology to speculative metaphysics and religion, i.e., the alleged coinciding of phenomenology with some form of positivism and atheism. Since we shall address the third question in depth, we can make some general statements here. As long as belief is justified by the given, Husserl's radical restriction of phenomenology to the apodictically certain, and his exclusion of all things known to us by belief, violates the maxim of the phenomenological return to things themselves. As Descartes failed against this principle in his quest for absolute certainty alone, in his exclusion of many things because they are less than apodictically certain, so Husser! failed against the principle he had chosen as his own maxim. And he did so much more grievously. For Husser! went radically beyond the Cartesian doubt and dogmatically decided that the world of real beings which the naIve consciousness has to accept in some world-belief, ought not as such be considered an object of philosophy. But why not? Why is faithful attending to the 'given' not compatible with close attention to those 'givens' without which sense-perception, world, love, and so on, cannot be conceived at all, without which their given nature, namely, as real beings, is wholly obscured? On this point Husser! has fallen prey to a rationalism which is not only wholly unfounded in terms of the maxim 'back to things themselves,' but which indeed flatly contradicts it. We shall return to this point at length. In the following chapter the question will be asked whether epoche is an appropriate methodic device for achieving the return to 'things themselves.' On the answer to this question will depend the answer to the central question of this work: Are the things in themselves of the 'really real' world given to us? Is it possible to analyze the essences which are found in, and determine, the real world? Is a phenomenological realism thus possible or is it a contradiction in terms? Moreover, does the grasp of real beings and

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of other objective entities (ideal beings) presuppose some faith and trust or is it possible to know, besides objective essences, at least some real beings with indubitable knowledge? The possibility of certain knowledge about objective essence and existence of thingsin-themselves is decisive for the possibility of philosophy as episteme and scientia in the classical sense of these terms. Suffice it to say this here: the maxim 'back to things themselves' must certainly in no way be interpreted from the outset as a verdict which would force the phenomenologist to abandon any metaphysics of the really real world of things in themselves. Only 'things themselves' can decide whether things in themselves or mere app~arances are given to us. Only 'thing themselves' could render it clear that any realism and any metaphysics of autonomous being is a construction, and that it is impossible to reach a being which lies beyond the self-produced spiderwebs of human thought (Nietzsche) and to attain objective essential principles. Only when an examination of all forms of evidence results in the conclusion that evidence never extends to things in themselves but to appearances only, or to noemata which are constituted correlates of noesis (consciousness) - only then is it justified to dismiss 'phenomenological realism' as naIve and impossible. Only then would it be justifiable to abandon metaphysics as a study of being itself (of being qua being) in the name of a return to 'things themselves.'

7 PHENOMENOLOGY FACED WITH HISTORY, LANGUAGE, AND THE SOCIAL: IS 'PHENOMENOLOGICAL REALISM' NAIVE? When a philosopher's thought becomes the object of debunking criticism or when he himself becomes the object of reproach and 'philosophical name-calling,' he should not immediately feel and plead guilty but should examine the weight and justification of such a reproach. Unfortunately, most of us who teach philosophy today are so afraid of being called naIve that we fail to ask whether there might be some merit in being naIve and whether no worse dangers may befall the philosopher than that of having preserved a direct and unperturbed outlook on reality which we admire as the naIvete of the child. We even fear the reproach when it directs itself not against the refreshing childlike quality of naIve immediacy of access

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to things, coupled with an absence of critical distance from one's own judgment, but when it is applied to critical, yet realist, philosophical knowledge. Lest such hypersensitive fears of being found naIve deter us from the objective inquiry into truth, let us examine with greatest objectivity whether the approach proposed here is culpable of naIvete in any illegitimate sense of the term. The most common form of this reproach is the charge that phenomenological analyses of efde and, particularly, an objectivist and realist interpretation of eidetic structures, naIvely seek to transcend the historical context and perspective in which all human thinking is situated. What else but naIve Platonism could prompt a man to believe that he can reach the timeless and objectively necessary essences of things? How can the subject so radically forget itself as to be convinced that it can find itself confronted with a world of pure objectivity? How could it claim to perform the mystical act, the miracle of attaining the timeless in the midst of time? Cannot such a mystical participation in the transhistorical, such a transcendence of history, be claimed only by someone who completely forgets his condition of being human, his situation in history and time? How can we forget the historicity of human thinking as well as all the linguistic, social, and historical conditions under which it occurs? Thinkers as Hegel and their followers, Marxists and Hegelians alike, would remind us (with Erich Heintel, for example), of the impossibility of attaining an 'unvermitteltes Unmittelbares' (an unmediated immediate); instead, human thinking in history is always restricted to a 'vermitteltes Unmittelbares,' i. e., to a grasp of things mediated through our time and the historical conditions and limitations resulting from a particular phase in world history and in the historical unfolding of the spirit. While Hegel still sought to transcend this historicity of all human thought by claiming to reach the highest stage of the 'absolute spirit' which would manifest itself in the 'absolute system,' after Kierkegaard, and in view ofthe fact that Hegel's complete 'system of absolute knowledge' remained unfinished, even the boldest Hegelians became cautious in putting forward such claims and only 'naIve Marxists' still believe that the ideology of the proletariat coincides with the 'absolute truth.' (Apart from this, it would be very doubtful whether either the philosophy of Hegel or that of Marx-Engels avoids a radical historical relativism - in spite of their claim to absoluteness. For how can 71

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the changing 'spirit of the time,' when it expresses itself in Hegel, or the 'class-ideology,' when it is that of the proletariat, suddenly become 'absolute truth'? The suggestion, implicit in Hegel and Marxism, that their relation to history is radically superior to that of their predecessors is most implausible. Moreover, the grounds for such a superiority offered by Hegel and Marxism are unconvincing.) Thinkers today like those who belong to the hermeneutical school initiated by Heidegger and Gadamer, would remind us of the constantly shifting historical perspectives and horizons, in which thought develops analogously to a game whose rules are never ahistorical or of a fixed eternal structure. One central theme of modern philosophy since Hume and Kant is that human reason is determined by subjective conditions foreign to objective and timeless truth. Whether through language-games, social conditions and milieu, religious belief, philosophical faith, or economic factors which expose all metaphysics to the suspicion of being ideology, we are confronted in a thousand forms with the basically relativistic objection that any claim to absoluteness and indubitability of knowledge of truth is vain and naIve. Can we defend ourselves against this objection which, if it were conceded, would certainly find us guilty - not of the positive virtue of immediacy of contact with things but of a serious error which indefensibly ignores human limitations? A first reply to this charge, answered more fully elsewhere,33 is based on the distinction between the cause and the condition of something. Let us recall the important answer Plato gives to materialism in the Phaedo, where Socrates describes his 'second navigation' (beautifully interpreted by Giovanni Reale as the center of Platonic philosophy).34 Confronted with various pre-Socratic and materialist explanations of his actions, Socrates distinguishes the role of his body and brain as the condition without which his action would not take place, from the reason and cause of his action of remaining in prison which stems from knowledge, reason, and freedom. Similarly, there is obviously a central difference between conditions without which our knowledge would not take place and real or alleged causes of knowledge. On closer al)alysis it would become evident, moreover, that our cognition has origins, and is engendered by intentional objects in a way that differs from efficient causality altogether. This type of 72

Rethinking Husser/'s maxim rational engendering by which being manifests itself to spirit is radically falsified if one looks for 'causes of ideas,' and especially if one identifies these 'causes' with physiological processes. Only false ideas can have more direct efficient 'causes,' precisely because they are not rationally engendered by the intelligibility of things themselves. There is a difference between parents and teachers leading a child to learn and to understand the basic truths of arithmetic or of ethics, and the function of milieu in producing in a child the wrong idea that 'women are worth nothing' or that 'stealing without being caught' is the highest ethical ideal. For obviously, without parents and teachers, a normally gifted child (unlike the young Pascal who discovered many Euclidean axioms and propositions on his own), would not come to understand even a few of the most basic truths of numerical relationships - the difference between odd and even numbers, prime numbers, their infinity, the laws governing triangles, and the like. Analogously, without educators, a child may not understand the disvalue of stealing or lying. But all material, social, and historical conditions of understanding things certainly do not 'produce' mathematical or ethical facts. Though they are indispensable conditions in history and environment on which our knowledge to some extent depends, it would be inadmissible to claim that this undeniable fact gives proof that the objects of this knowledge depend on these historical conditions, and are only fictions produced by them. It would likewise be unjustified to assert that the historical conditions are causes which, on their own strength, could produce true knowledge of the things mentioned, as if it were an irrational belief, rather than a rational participation in the things themselves which teachers and history reveal to us. Perhaps it will be objected that our 'naIve distinction' applies only to such 'trivialities' as elementary mathematical and ethical facts and laws. Yet at different times men hold entirely different beliefs in regard to all basic ethical and metaphysical issues. And they possess no rational or cogent arguments with which to justify the side they take in such disagreements. 'Knowledge' in these spheres, therefore, is relative to historically changing factors and ideas. Let us briefly examine this objection. It cannot be reduced to the following easily refutable argument: 'Men at different times and in different societies hold entirely different opinions about things such as basic issues of morality and metaphysics.' 'Whenever there are, 73

Part I: 'Back to things themselves' at different times and in different societies, conflicting opinions about things, these things are relative to changing historical perspectives.' 'Therefore, basic issues of morality and metaphysics are relative to changing historical circumstances.' (This argument would be valid but not sound because the second premiss is obviously false. People also held that the earth is flat, etc., and yet no reasonable man would hold such things to be mere matters of historical opinion.) Rather, the argument would use at least two additional thoughts. It would claim relativity of a position to changing historical opinions only where there are no objective (intersubjectively verifiable) evidences to support one of various conflicting positions. Secondly, the argument would restrict the claim of historical relativity to such cases in which a rational settlement of the dispute (through logical proof or sense-perception) is impossible. The contention of such a historical relativism could be supported by the observation that there are indeed radical differences of opinion regarding almost everything important in human life. These disputes cannot be settled definitively through rational arguments. It seems hard to explain this fact, and still to hold an objectivist position, without being pharisaical or presumptuous. For any claim to know things which other intelligent people reject, without offering cogent evidences to them which lead to general consent, appears to imply the presumption that either one's own historical or individual conditions are more favorable to the knowledge of truth than those of others, or that our personal intellectual capacities or moral excellencies of character excel those of even the greatest geniuses who contradicted our views. To explain the fact of disagreement except by subjectivity of knowledge seems thus naive or shamelessly arrogant. Yet this alternative is not complete insofar as it overlooks, first of all, that it is not presumptuous but humble to accept the things we see, and we deal with them rather than with ourselves when we know and are convinced; and secondly, that the acknowledgment of differences in conditions for philosophical knowledge does not imply a vain judgment on our superiority but refers to a fact which all of us recognize in countless examples. Is it presumptuous, or does it even include any claim or moral superiority when we regret the fact that a friend makes an entirely foolish decision from which common sense has preserved us? Is it pride which leads Monsieur

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Rethinking Husser/'s maxim Poi rot to recognize that a brilliant yet criminal doctor of medicine is indeed a murderer and fails to observe standards of justice? The greatest philosophers have recognized that there are methodological, intellectual, and moral conditions of philosophical knowledge which Socrates describes in the Republic, Books VI and VII in such terms that one gets the impression that no philosopher adorned with such extraordinary virtue and dedication to the truth as Socrates ascribes to the philosopher has ever lived. Max Scheler and many others have emphasized the countless intellectual and moral obstacles to true philosophizing. The attempt to free ourselves from them in order to be enabled to do what every thinker achieves to some degree, namely to grasp reality, is in no way presumptuous. Moreover, even if there is a great and well-nigh magic power which social and historical trends have on our thought, because man - as z60n politik6n - wishes to live in agreement with others, man can resist such pressures. The influence of society and history on us does not completely blind us, nor are we unable to break out of the spiderwebs of the historically formed world-view in which we live. We can return to things themselves. The evidence of any insight proves this. Any insight into, or understanding of, the simplest matter, for example, of logically correct and incorrect forms of reasoning, bears witness to the fact that in principle man can know truth which is not dependent on subjectivity but is objective. In the present context, let us stress the fact that at every age men and women - like Antigone, Socrates, Plato, or Thomas More have disagreed with the trends of their time. Moreover, we find an astonishing similarity of conviction among philosophers of all times, while there are fundamental disagreements among people who lived in the same historical epoch. How can historical relativism account for this? Moreover, even men who entirely disagree with this objectivist philosophical position, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, in fact uphold many of those things which we regard as eternally true, even in passages in which they attack the very notion of timeless truth and objective knowledge. Thus the community of those who see the same things (consensus) extends not only to 'friends' who are unanimous but to all thinkers, at least with regard to many points which are implicitly used and acknowledged by them even when they are rejected in theory. The art of the Socratic dialogue consists in demonstrating this latter kind of consensus

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Part I: 'Back to things themselves' between even the fiercest opponents and Socrates. As for language, we have already pointed out the manifold positive influence its use and its analysis plays in the mediation of our knowledge of reality. This role of language as embodying a more differentiated knowledge of things than would be accessible to us without its mediation belongs to the mediating function of conditions for knowledge which, as we have already seen, does not in any way contradict the objectivity of our knowledge. Language is a condition for the development of any human knowledge and, as such, enables us to see things themselves. Even when language misguides us, however, by suggesting false hypostatizations and by motivating confusions and prejudices, the possibility of freeing ourselves from these is proof of the ability to transcend linguistic meanings towards things themselves and to take a critical distance from language when it conflicts with reality. It is not possible here to develop a full philosophy of history and to critique, for example, Scheler's later development of a Wissenssoziologie, which in fact denied the ability of a transcendence to things themselves in knowledge. In Part II, Chapter 5 of this work, however, a positive analysis of the transcendence of knowledge to 'things themselves' and a critique of some interpretations of epoche will complete our reply to the present objection and bring to evidence the fully critical character of a realist philosophy as one which is not subject to undifferentiated and unfounded prejudices but which goes to the roots of all intelligibility necessarily presupposed even by any transcendental or historicist position.

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2

CRITIQUE OF EPOCHE

In the context of investigating the claim that only transcendental phenomenology rigorously carries out the program of a 'return to things themselves,' we have to examine critically Husserl's thesis that epoche is a universal and necessary principle of any phenomenological philosophy. Of the many meanings inherent in the ambiguous notion of epoche we shall have to pay close attention to the following two in particular: that of 'bracketing' (or putting in parentheses) existence and that of keeping in suspense any transcendent validity of our knowledge-claims. When the philosopher puts the real existence of the world, or better the Realgeltung, i.e., the (objective) reality-claim of the world's existence, in brackets, does he really reach 'things themselves'? Still more fundamental is the question: can only a philosophy which 'brackets' not merely the transcendent reality of the world's existence as thing-in-itself (while acknowledging a 'real world' as a reference point of noesis), but which also brackets any transcendent, intrinsically timeless, autonomous status of eidetic laws (not relative to consciousness), return to 'things themselves'? Even if the notion of epoche did become freed of all the ambiguities which actually attach to it, and if Husserl's views on the methodological foundation of philosophy in epoche wexe in fact to turn out to be correct, one thing is clear. It is precisely and only the analysis of 'things themselves' which can enable us to know whether or not epoche is indeed the sole or even the proper methodic instrument that can guide us back to 'things themselves.' For only by going back to the 'things' which constitute the subject-matter of 77

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our investigation can we discover methods appropriate for their exploration. To proceed in this way alone is also precribed by Husserl himself when he states the 'principle of principles' of phenomenology that we have discussed before. This principle, broadly conceived, applies to all modes of knowledge. Only the objects of our knowledge (inasmuch as they are already known to us in a pretheoretical, prescientific, and prephilosophical manner prior to any theoretical exploration of them) can provide clues for the determination of the methods which are proper to their investigation. This important principle (recently enunciated in Hans Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method) is increasingly recognized by members of various disciplines and is opposed to any reductionist attempt to explore all objects with one and the same type of scientific method. Such a 'monism' of method can be regarded not only as evidently false but also as generally outdated today. Phenomenology in general and Husserl's Logical Investigations in particular (especially Investigation VI and the concept of the 'categorial intuition') contributed to an elucidation of this point. In view of Husserl's acute awareness of the danger of imposing illsuited methods on objects, it is indeed surprising to find Husserl introducing epoche as a universal method of (phenomenological) philosophy without a preceding investigation into the objects of philosophy that would justify this. In the sense in which Husserl used it first (as in 'Seefelder Gespriiche'), epoche designated a prescinding from the existence of objects in order to concentrate on their 'pure' essence. Given the fruitfulness of Husserl's phenomenological essential analyses, Husserl's assumption of the fruitfulness of epoche as a universal method of phenomenology is perhaps easier to understand. But such plausibility does not apply to his radical understanding of epoche (already defended in 1905-7) as implying not only a prescinding from, and suspension of, the natural belief in the real autonomous existence of the world, but also an exclusion (Ausschaltung) of all transcendent validity of any (real or ideal) object of consciousness. Let us cite a text: bei jeder erkenntnistheoretischen Untersuchung, sei es dieses oder jenes Erkenntnistypus, ist die erkenntnistheoretische Reduktion zu vollziehen, d.h. aile dabei mitspielende Transzendenz mit dem

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Critique of epoche Index der Ausschaltung zu behaften, oder mit dem Index der Gleichgiltigkeit, der erkenntnistheoretischen Nullitiit, mit einem Index, der da sagt: die Existenz aller Transzendenzen, ob ich sie glauben mag oder nicht, geht mich hier nichts an, hier ist nicht der Ort, drauber zu urteilen, das bleibt ganz aus dem Spiel.

(Then we arrive at a sufficient and complete deduction of the epistemological principle that) an epistemological reduction has to be accomplished in the case of every epistemological inquiry of whatever sort of cognition. That is to say, everything transcendent that is involved must be bracketed, or be assigned the index of indifference, of epistemological nullity, an index which indicates: the existence of all these transcendencies, whether I believe in them or not, is not here my concern; this is not the place to make judgments about them; they are entirely irrelevant. (I would translate this last clause: 'this whole issue does not enter' J.S.) In this and in many other passages,35 Husserl declares epoche or phenomenological 'reduction' the foundation of any philosophy worthy of the name. Now it is immediately apparent that such a claim can only be justified if the meaning of epoche is clearly delineated and if, in addition, the appropriateness of epoche as methodological instrument for the exploration of a given kind of object is shown. Prior to such an analysis, we will not be able to know whether Husserl's claim of the universal validity of epoche as a philosophical method is correct or not. Nonetheless, from the very outset of our investigation we must be wary of the uncritical manner in which Husserl may have moved from his ideal of a philosophy which returns to 'things themselves' to the notion of a phenomenology according to which any return to 'things themselves' absolutely needs to rest upon epoche, which alone would allow for eidetic analyses of essences or for any philosophical knowledge. Any mere assertion that this mayor may not be the case would certainly be uncritical.

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DIFFERENT MEANINGS OF EPOCHE, IDEATION, AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL REDUCTION

In order to examine this question, let us first investigate the different meanings of epoche. Such an investigation is a necessary prerequisite for any inquiry into the question of whether or not epoche, phenomenological reduction, or ideation is the valid starting point for phenomenological philosophy as a philosophy which should lead us back to things themselves. We cannot unfold here the entire range of meanings which Husserl expresses at different times by means of the word epoche. Instead, we shall content ourselves with considering here only the most important of these meanings.

(i) The first sense of epoche (eidetic reduction)

The most obvious meaning of 'phenomenological reduction' or of epoche, one which played a great role in the work of the Munich (realist) phenomenologists as well as in that of Husserl, and which constituted to some extent the starting-point of the phenomenological method, is the following. When we grasp an essence and the necessary essential laws grounded in it (Wesenheit and Wesensgesetze), then we may do so while 'bracketing' the existence or the question of the real existence of the given essence. In other words, even if (or should we say: only if?) we prescind from the issue ofthe real existence of the being in question, even if we regard this being as possibly a mere product of our dreams, the 'pure essence' (Wesenheit, Idee) of the given object becomes visible. Husserl made this point quite clearly in Ideen, in the context of distinguishing Realwissenschaften (empirical sciences of the real world) which gain cognition that depends on observation of existing facts, from eidetische Wissenschaften (eidetic sciences), which grasp the necessary essence (Wesenheit, eidos) and are never dependent on the actual existence of the observed or imagined instances in which they intuit an essence. Hildebrand, in his What is Philosophy? (Chapter 4), and other realist. phenomenologists justified more rigorously such eidetic intuition and eidetic reduction, as we have seen and shall see later. It is not easy to determine whether Husserl and other early 80

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phenomenologists held that it is in spite of or because of epoche that the analysis of the essence of a thing is possible. It is likewise difficult to say which of these two possible interpretations of epoche is actually true with respect to the knowledge of essences. The answer to the second (thematic-systematic) question which concerns us here has to be differentiated with reference to the kind of object we consider. If our essential analysis refers to any concrete entity regardless of how contingent its individual nature or the type of nature it embodies, the following applies. In spite of prescinding from the real existence of such objects, we can nevertheless know their essence at least as mere 'possibility' of an essence and with regard to those aspects of it which are apparent (excluding, e.g., the 'hidden' constitutive nature of it). There is even a sense in which the a priori knowledge of necessary essences and essentially necessary facts, where we no longer encounter contingent such-beings but immutable necessary ones, is possible not because but although we prescind from the real existence of the entities and examples which serve us as starting points and illustrations. It is at first sight a surprising fact that I can proceed from a concrete instance of matter, will, guilt, etc., and nevertheless know the universal essence of these entities - an essence which is valid both for all my future or possible experiences of such objects and for all these objects themselves, whether they exist in the real, or were to exist in any possible world. 36 This surprising fact, which lies at the origin of the problem of reminiscence in Plato's Meno and of the problem of a priori knowledge as it appears since Kant, manifests itself with especial clarity in the knowledge of 'synthetic a priori truths' which constitute general essential 'forms' of absolute necessity that dictate their laws (Wesensgesetze) to all past, present, and future beings which partake in them in this real or in any possible world. For example, when I grasp the essence of guilt when I read the description of the (fictional) crime of Raskolnikov, I know that the essential moments of guilt (its unique disvalue, disharmony, relation to freedom, to responsibility, to conscience, etc.) apply not only to the world of Dostoyevsky's novel Crime and Punishment, but to any real and possible instance of guilt. We know that the irreducible datum which we call 'personal guilt' cannot and could not exist, anywhere and at any time, without implying freedom and the other moments which form part of it. Again, Husserl emphasized this point not only in the Logical Investigations but also 81

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in Ideen (Ideas) (§ 3-9) although in this work he destroys the very basis for these assertions which can solely be justified in terms of a realist conception of the objectively necessary (the chreon) - as will become clear. Astonished by the possibility of such knowledge of the essence of something, we say that we know the universal nature of a given being although we prescind from the real existence of the one instance (and all other instances) in which we encounter it in experience. This is surprising indeed. For in most cases of essential knowledge (i.e., of 'morphic unities' or of accidental such-being unities) it is solely by means of an investigation of existing examples of a given species (lions, wolves, etc.) that we can know a general essence. Indeed, the observation of existing beings plays in Realwissenschaften a foundational role for the cognition of essences, as Husserl formulated sharply in the Ideen. Thus, in most cases, the general essence of a thing is not known when prescinding from its real existence but by going through the cognition of a number of existing individuals which are observed under sufficiently rigorous and varied conditions in order for us to know the general nature by some inductive inference. This procedure, which was misinterpreted by the First Vienna Circle as well as by Karl Popper, was very well analyzed by Alexander Ptiinder in his Logik. Pfander showed that induction does not conclude from single observations as such to a universal judgment, but uses the knowledge that the sameness in the observed individuals is due to the nature or kind of being at stake, and from such an empirically gained judgment of kind (species) it infers that other non-observed members of the same species will have the same properties. How can it be possible, then, for us to know the essence of a thing in spite of prescinding from the real existence of the examples of it which served as starting point for our knowledge? Let us now turn to our previous question: do we know a necessary essence because we prescind from existence or in spite of this fact? There are two ways at least in which we know a necessary essence because we prescind from existence. First (and this is often meant by the earlier Husserl) we could intend to say that in cases where we do not know whether the knowledge of a kind or species (which we gain by observing one single instance of it) applies to all individuals of the same type, because the type is contingent, we are nevertheless able to conduct

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a purely essential analysis. As long as we do not claim to speak of the real world at all, we may analyze - even when contemplating one single example of a given essence - the universal essence as possibility, suspending any judgment about the real existing world. Such a 'pure' essential analysis which is possible in each case in which we perform the 'ideation' of an essence, makes sense only on the condition that we prescind from attributing any real existential significance to our claims about essence. When we watch one single elephant, observe his habitat, dissect it, etc., we may speak about its essence and intelligible form. This knowledge does, however, not allow us to determine whether or not all elephants have the same type of color or form, etc. From the observation of one single real elephant no valid cognitive way leads to the certain cognition of the universal species elephant. Similarly, in poetry we may well encounter the intelligible character of nymphs and how they differ from cenotaurs but we cannot know whether such contingent 'essences' apply to any existing beings. We prescind thus not only from the existence of the particular elephant or of the nymph in a particular poem, but also from the question of whether or not the features we ascribe to their essence apply to any existing elephant or nymph. And this applies to all contingent (non-necessary) essences. For here we cannot know any binding essentially necessary laws which we could recognize to be laws to which all existing and possible beings of a certain type must be subject. This is impossible because the 'essence' at stake is, despite its intelligibility, still contingent and could contain other and different moments than the ones which we perceive in a given example. Whether or not the trunk of an elephant, for example, belongs to the essence of the real species elephant, we cannot know by 'eidetic analysis.' Only a possible species or form to which a trunk would pertain can be analyzed while prescinding from existence. Therefore, taking our starting point from one example, only abstraction from existence allows us here to engage in an investigation into (pure, possible) essences. This is not to deny that a scientist may gain a limited intuitive grasp of a contingent essence, or even a subjective certainty about it, from one single observation which 'fits in' meaningfully with the already known nature of things. Yet this knowledge leads to conjectures which are open to future falsification, or to inductive inferences which await experimental verification. This cannot be achieved through induction conceived as a formal logical

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inference, to which indeed Popper's critique of induction would apply, but only through a material logical inference which is based on the rational assumption that a given feature belongs to all observed individuals in virtue of their nature. A more serious defect of a 'purely essential analysis' of contingent essences is the following. Any knowledge of a 'contingent essence' which is not based on experience of existing instances is relatively idle precisely because it does not teach us about the real genus and species of things, although such knowledge, in the context of poetry or music, for example, when the character of nymphs of Wagner's Rheingold should be described, attains great dignity and meaning. With such limitations, and in some cases of fully valid knowledge, then, epoche as prescinding from existence is a condition for this type of essential knowledge of contingent (morphic) essences. (By 'morphic essences' we mean those essences which possess inner meaningful unity but possess the character of an 'invention' human or divine - and lack absolutely necessary unity of their essential moments.) In quite another sense, prescinding from the existence of observed examples is a condition for the knowledge of necessary essences. For here any reliance on the real existence of observed examples can only lead to empirical-inductive knowledge and cannot justify strictly universal claims. Only the attainment of the universal timeless form itself allows us to know the truth of a strictly universal judgment. Here the prescinding from existence manifests not the weakness but the sovereign power and autonomy of this knowledge which does not depend on the observation of an existing example and which permits us to go in cognition beyond anything that could be justified by observed existing examples. It is also necessary here to introduce some further distinctions within the first sense of epoche and bracketing real existence. (1) One can mean that observation of existing beings is not the starting point of knowledge because it is insufficient to justify universal knowledge of contingent (real) natures or of necessary (and strictly universal) ones. (2) One can refer to that prescinding from real existence which lies in the act of abstracting and grasping of any universal. In the very process of concentrating on the general nature of a thing we do not consider, so to speak, the individual instances of it qua individuals. This applies also to that type of universal know84

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ledge which is gained by reliance on really existing examples in inductive empirical modes of knowledge. Even here, the natural scientist, for example (in contrast to, let us say, the historian) looks at the universal species abstracting from individual instances. In this sense, the process of abstraction implies essentially some epoch£!. (3) One can mean by prescinding from existence (bracketing it) the radical suspension of any link of the order of essence to existence. While this might be called for by some 'purely eidetic analyses' of essences which are qua essences contingent, it is neither necessary nor justified in eidetic knowledge of necessary essences. As we shall see, any radical call for epoch£! in this third meaning within the first fundamental sense of epoche leads to one of the fundamental errors of Husserl's phenomenology and of his conception of the role which epoche is called to play in it. It does not seem to be the case that Husserl, when he spoke of eidetic reduction, had sufficiently reflected on either the exact meaning of 'bracketing' or on the different discussed meanings of 'suspending' real existence. Although he acknowledges Realwissenschaften in the ldeen as distinct from eidetic Wissenschaften, and claims for them precisely a foundational role of observation offacts, he does not sufficiently grasp the significance of the grasp of the autonomous reality of the world for empirical sciences when he seeks to base them ultimately on a foundation of 'pure phenomenology.' And he fails, above all, to see that the manner in which the cognition of necessary essences involves epoche does not in any way imply that it must be understood in the (third) sense of radically prescinding from all bearing on real existence. We ought to realize, quite on the contrary, that the power of synthetic a priori knowledge extending to all real and possible existents is the reason for being able to 'bracket' the real existence of the concrete instances in which we grasp a necessary. essence. Thus we have knowing access to all existing cases of the necessary essence and know that no really existing instance of it can contradict it. In contrast, in the case of purely eidetic analyses of (nonnecessary) purely possible natures any such return to statements about all existing examples of an essence is excluded-and eidetic phenomenology of 'pure essences' here is reduced to a study of 'possible worlds.' In the eidetic reduction (epoche) under discussion here, we find a prescinding not only from existence but also from all those 85

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individual and concretizing moments of the object of experience which do not belong to it 'as such' but only to this or that individual case of the given essence. The 'bracketing' of the individual and concrete qua individual and concrete in order to make the universal eidos and essence manifest is another aspect of epoch€? in the first central sense of 'eidetic reduction.'3?

(ii) The second sense of epoche: phenomenological reduction as

suspension of belief in the 'transcendent existence' of the world

Among other things, a failure to draw the necessary distinctions within epoche led Husserl to a second and still far more ambiguous and problematic notion of epoche as a universal putting in suspense the Generalthese der natiirlichen Einstellung (the general thesis of our natural attitude, world-relation), i.e., the thesis of the consciousness- (noesis-) independent existence of the real world. We encounter here Husserl's opinion that a philosophical analysis of essence is only possible after the epoche has been extended to all existing beings and after the world as a whole has been transformed into a 'pure phenomenon.'38 Now, when Husserl speaks of a suspension of all 'Weltglaube' as belief in the real existence of the world, he does not so much bracket the 'phenomenon' of existence as opposed to non-existence but any transcendent autonomous mode of the world's existence which the latter claims to possess in our natural experience and which indeed constitutes, as we shall see, the reality of the world's existence, and is inseparable from its autonomy. This radical and universal prescinding from existence in 'phenomenological reduction' reaches much farther and is more radical than the first type of epoche (eidetic reduction). For the first type of prescinding from existence (even in its third meaning, expounded above, which might be involved in what St Thomas requires from that abstraction which regards the 'nature absolutely considered' wi thou t reference to any existence) is restricted to a particular theoretical act. In all of these forms of abstraction from existence which are basically already known to Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy, the philosopher can fully live in what Husserl calls the 'natural attitude.' He can fully philosophize in the context of a really existing world, the same kind of world the non-philosopher and the non-phenomenological philosopher lives in. While he prescinds for 86

Critique of epocbe theoretical purposes from this or that existence by virtue of abstraction, or as foundation of indubitable knowledge, and while he wishes to proceed to the knowledge of necessary essences, or prescinds for theoretical purposes from existence altogether (if this is at all possible) - he fully affirms the existence of himself, of a world as such, of God, and so on. Husserl, however, arrives at a radically new sense of epoche by suggesting that only a world of 'pure phenomena' in his 'revolutionary sense' can provide the starting point for a phenomenological analysis of essences. In fact, the radically new sense of epoche, of bracketing belief in the real existence of the world accepted by the 'natural attitude,' comes to the fore when Husserl claims that the philosopher should even entirely suspend the objective existence of the empirical ego as the ego cogitans which is part of the real world (ein Stuckchen der wirklichen Welt). The basis for this assumption, which shall be examined critically, is in no way obviously justified. In fact, it will turn out to be mistaken and uncritically assumed, rather than seriously reflected on, by Husser!. Moreover, it will be shown that it is likewise questionable whether epoche in the first sense is the appropriate method for a philosophy that carries out the program 'back to things themselves.'

(iii) A third sense of epoche (phenomenological reduction) A third meaning of epoche in Husserl follows easily from the second one. There are frequently occurring passages in Husserl where the real (understood always as autonomous real) existence of the world is not only bracketed but positively denied and excluded, in the sense that Husserl explains the world as a sphere of pure noemata which are ontologically speaking not autonomous and fail to have real (i.e., autonomous real) existence but instead have a mere subject-relative being and meaning as noemata of our cogitations. In this sense, the noemata are constituted in the sphere of 'pure consciousness. '3'1 As Kockelmans aptly observes,4o epoche ceases in this instance to remain a 'purely methodological principle' and begins to become a 'metaphysical thesis' about the mode of being of the world. This third sense of epoche is the 'phenomenological reduction' in a more specific sense and leads to a further sense of epoche as 'transcendental reduction.'

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Part I: 'Back to things themselves' (iv) Fourth sense of epoche (second moment of transcendental reduction)

Finally, we must distinguish a fourth and radically different meaning of epoche. In this sense, the term no longer merely refers to the existence of the real world and of all objects in it (bracketing it in some cases, or universally, or even denying it as autonomous real being). Rather, this fourth sense of epoche refers to the eidetic structure of pure a priori essences as well. It implies that we have to bracket or even deny any claim that the Wesensgesetze contained in these efde possess any objective ideal existence independent of human consciousness. While Husserl's position in the Logical Investigations was characterized as 'Platonic,' Husserl's later view is radically anti-Platonic and anti-realist. Here the very objectivity and autonomy in relation to man's consciousness, as well as the absolute validity of the eidetic laws and essences, is denied - as well as any being and meaning which would not depend on consciousness for its constitution. At least from 1907 on, epoche begins to take on this additional sense, which goes far beyond a mere prescinding from the real existence of things which we accept in 'naivem Weltglauben' (nai've belief in the objective existence of the world). Besides these meanings of epoche, Husserl uses others that are of lesser interest here. 41

2 CRITIQUE OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL REDUCTION AS

THE PRINCIPLE OFTHE PHENOMENOLOGICAL METHOD The limits within which eidetic reduction (epoche in the first sense) is part of a ph,enomenological method have already been discussed briefly and the possibility of eidetic knowledge (and epoche as one of its elements) shall be discussed in detail later. We turn now to the problem of whether epoche as 'phenomenological reduction' and suspension of naive belief in the really transcendent existence of the world is a legitimate moment of the method which uncovers 'things themselves.'42 This element of Husserl's method was clearly inspired by Descartes' methodic doubt. The great difference between Descartes' methodological doubt and Husserl's 'phenomenological reduction' (epoche in

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senses 2 and 3), however, consists in two principal elements. In the first place, Descartes remains quite open to the possibility that there are really and concretely existing beings in the wor!d which are known to us with immediate and indubitable certainty, while Husserl's phenomenological reduction is general and also suspends belief in the autonomous (real) existence of the ego cogitans. Husserl even assumes right away that only this absolutely universal epoche does justice to the fact that it is impossible to justify any real transcendence of the intellect to things in themselves (to a transcendent sphere of being which could not be reduced to noemata of noesis). Moreover, Husser! does not see, as does Descartes, in the sum cogitans an indubitable autonomous reality which we discover, a 'Stuckchen der wirklichen Welt' (as he puts Descartes' view of the cogito often). Descartes, on the contrary, sees with St Augustine that even the most radical quest for indubitable certainty which might suspend the conviction that any being in the wor!d exists independently from our cogitations, must stop at the ego cogitans and that here it encounters reality and existence in themselves with unshakeable certainty. That Husser! rejects this claim can also be established from his praise of Hume's skepticism as a door to critical phenomenology.43 The second fundamental difference between Descartes and the later Husserl regarding their interpretation of the givenness of existence, lies in the former's conviction that even that autonomous existence of the world which is not directly and immediately given as it is 'in itself' (such direct immediate givenness applying only to my own being) can be known indirectly via the evidence of the senses and their mutual confirmation and, above all, via the veracity of God and the impossibility of the 'spiritus malignus' as author and ruler of the universe. Husser!, on the contrary, regards epoche and phenomenological reduction of the wor!d's being and existence as a necessity and as a permanent state of prescinding from, and suspending of, the transcendent real existence of the world. In fact, he believes that only the 'phenomenological reduction' which reduces the entire world and ego to a sphere of mere phenomena, the real autonomous being of which remains doubtful and suspended, can allow critical knowledge and 'pure analysis' of essences, which according to him are the task of phenomenology. As Kockelmans rightly observes, Husser! even denies any such autonomous existence of the world, and regards its 'realist' assertion as a meaningless

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Part I: 'Back to things themselves' claim, and thus makes the transition from a mere principle of method to a metaphysical thesis, and, as we might add, to a definitive epistemological thesis as well. 44 He says in effect that any knowledge of an objective autonomous existence of the world (directly or indirectly through proofs) is radically impossible and goes on to say that an autonomous existence of the world is to be rejected. He thinks, however, that nothing will be lost once the impossible task of a transcendence of knowledge to things in themselves is given up because the world of 'pure phenomena' retains, as it were, everything the old 'real world' as object of naive Weltglauben contained, excepting its autonomous existence and transcendence. In introducing epoche (in the second and third sense of phenomenological and transcendental reduction of the world of real beings as given in naive experience) as a methodological principle of phenomenology, Husserl clearly defends a starting point for phenomenology which is - at least formally - radically different from the principle 'back to things themselves.' And Husserl, as far as I can see, never makes a critical attempt to justify this completely different foundation of phenomenology in epoche (except for his explicit rejection of the real transcendence of knowledge as inexplicable and mysterious, and for some other, mostly implicit, motives for his turn to transcendentalism which we will have to study in the next chapter). Thus it must appear unjustified to make the transition from a philosophy which allegedly returns to 'things themselves' to a philosophy which rests entirely on epoche in the second and third sense. For it is clear that only if things themselves show that a return to the transcendent autonomous real existence of world and of ego is impossible, can phenomenological and transcendental reduction be an adequate methodological foundation for philosophy. Yet, even before extensively criticizing Husserl's problematic transition from the 'return to things' to epoche, it should be noted that there are many philosophical theses which are presupposed as a justification for phenomenological reduction. These theses and the methodological foundation based on them cannot, as we have already expressed, in any way make a claim to be evidently justified, as the need to go 'back to things themselves' can be justified. Let us mention some of these theses and presuppositions. To hold that epoche (in the first as well as in the second and third

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sense of 'phenomenological reduction') is an absolutely indispensable part of the philosophical method, and that any philosophy which goes 'back to things themselves' has to follow this methodic device 45 presupposes in the first place that philosophy is exclusively 'analysis of essences.' At least to the extent that eidetic reduction (in the first sense of epoche) is regarded by Husserl as a necessary step in philosophical investigation, he presupposes that ('pure') 'essences,' and not esse or existence, constitute the object of philosophical knowledge. In addition, epoche in the sense of phenomenological reduction is, according to Husserl, presupposed for eidetic reduction. Not only does eidetic reduction concentrate on pure essences and not on esse, but so does phenomenological reduction which precedes, according to Husserl, eidetic reduction. To the extent that (as in Cartesian Meditations) the eidetic reduction recedes into the background of Husserl's interest, the phenomenological reduction which suspends any autonomous existence of the world and of the ego (or even denies it) presupposes that this being as esse and existence is not given to us or at least does not constitute an object of philosophical inquiry. Husserl presupposes not only that essences - from whose (autonomous) existence one prescindsare the primary objects of philosophy, but that they are the exclusive ones. Neither the assumption that essences are the primary, nor the thesis that they are the exclusive, objects of philosophy, however, can be defended without extensive and subtle metaphysical and epistemological reflection. Moreover, even in those texts in which Husserl deals extensively with the problem of the 'objective' and 'actual' (existing) world - such as in his analyses of senseperception and of the mode in which the world as a whole and particular objects are given in perceptual and experiential evidences, retention, unfulfilled and fulfilled anticipations, syntheses, harmoniously combinable experiences, etc. (as in Cartesian Meditations § 26 ff) - his interest in understanding of the actual world as such seems to be subservient to an eidetic analysis of perception as such, object as such, etc. (This-becomes clear at ibid. § 34.) Husserl's analysis of the givenness of the 'real world' moves in the context of phenomenological epoche as suspension of any belief in the transcendent autonomous existence of the world. Thus existence, as esse and as intrinsic actuality of being, seems to be entirely excluded from philosophical consideration in Husserl's phenOf\lenological program which is based on epoche in its various steps. 91

Part I: 'Back to things themselves' If esse, 'to be,' real existence, however, are among the most prominent objects of philosophical investigation, then epoche (both phenomenological reduction as suspension of any belief in the transcendent autonomous existence of the world, and eidetic reduction as a path to analysis of universal essences) cannot be an exclusively valid starting point for a phenomenological philosophy in its attempt to go back to 'things themselves.' For then philosophical analysis of esse and of the world in its existing actuality (i.e., significant parts of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and philosophical anthropology) would not be essential analysis (eidetic analysis), nor could phenomenological philosophy be reduced to the analysis of the world as 'pure phenomena,' the autonomous existence of which has been bracketed. One decisive task of the philosopher would consist in the exploration of existence, precisely as it is accepted in the 'naIve' natural attitude. Philosophy would elucidate this reality and explore it, with the unique actus essendi (actuality of being), and not exclude it from philosophical consideration. Even the 'eidetic' analysis of esse as it is found universally in every existing being would be eidetic analysis in a radically new sense. It would throw into relief the radical ontological difference between essence and existence, and between entities and their existence. Such a philosophy and metaphysics of existence, which neither employs phenomenological reduction nor eidetic essential analysis in Husserl's sense, would be a crucially significant part of phenomenological philosophy as a true 'return to things themselves.' And such an investigation of actuality and existence would not merely remain - as it seems to remain, at best, in Husserl-a first subordinate step towards a universal eidetic analysis. It would reveal, too, that the interpretation of existence within the immanence of transcendental constitution does not do justice to the existence of the world which gives itself as autonomous, and does not answer (positively or negatively) the fundamental philosophical questions which pertain to the very meaning of existence as such. The entire problem of essentialism in Husserl and the need for an analysis of existence in its irreducible difference from, and correlation to, essence, have been investigated, however, in other works.46 If it were exclusively the universal meaning of to be which would occupy the philosopher, it could still be said that epoche - at least in the sense of eidetic reduction - would be the basis for all phenomenological philosophy, although the meaning of epoche here

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Critique of epoche would be very different from that of eidetic reduction in Husserl's sense. Epoche would not, then, refer to a bracketing of existence and of concrete individual traits in order to speak of universal essences. And yet, however problematic such a mode of speaking would be, one could still say that philosophy uses eidetic reduction in order to get, not at this or that existence, but at existence as such, and thus at the 'essence' of existence. 47 For in such an analysis of esse (existence) the philosopher does indeed abstract from the concrete occurring of existence (as it is found in the world and as it is intended by what Husserl calls 'naiven Weltglauben'). Yet the philosopher would not, of course, prescind from existence altogether. Thus, already under the assumption that philosophy deals only with existence as such and in general, and not with concrete actual existence, the meaning of epoche (phenomenological and eidetic reduction) would have to be radically revised. For Husserl originally implies in epoche precisely a prescinding from existence in order to concentrate on a world of 'pure essences' (to which eidetic reduction leads), and on a world of pure phenomena as it is disclosed by phenomenological, and not by nafve, experience. 48 Yet the experience of existence as autonomous 'real' existence is originally given only in that type of experience of the world which Husserl calls 'the naIve experience.' Husserl believes, furthermore, that the existing world is accessible solely by mediation of the 'naIve world-belief.' And this world-belief has to be radically suspended according to him and its object, autonomous being and existence, can therefore never function as object of philosophical inquiry. The meaning of esse as existence as it is intended here, however, is likewise given in specifically critical, philosophically purified experience. In addition, as will be shown in the context of an analysis of the cogito, existence is given with indubitable certainty in its autonomous actuality 'in itself' (and not exclusively in some unjustified 'belief' in a transcendent world). Moreover, real autonomous existence is interesting for the philosopher not only when it is accessible with infallible certainty in the cogito, but also when it is given in a less indubitable mode which belongs to human experience and which is dependent on an element of trust in the validity and objectivity of our senses and in less than indubitable experience as giving us access to a truly transcendent world. Also this experience of the transcendent world, which Husserl himself calls 'natural 93

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world,' and the existence given only in its objects, should not by any means be ignored by the philosopher who turns back to 'things themselves.' But this is precisely what Husserl himself does, mainly motivated by his attempt to establish philosophy as an apodictic rigorous science. Other motives for Husserl's denial that philosophical knowledge concerning autonomous existence of beings in themselves is possible shall be dealt with later. At any rate, neither epoche understood as eidetic reduction nor epoch£! as phenomenological reduction can help the philosopher reach his goal of focusing on the meaning of existence, specifically, the real autonomous existence of beings. For in the purely phenomenological experience of a 'bracketed world' the datum of this existence does not appear; it appears only in the 'natural' world. Furthermore, eidetic reduction prescinds from individual concretion and existence to concentrate on the universal essence of a thing and thus cannot be an adequate method by means of which we can explore precisely what is distinct from essence, namely existence. While such an investigation of existence as such would indeed prescind from the existence ofthis or that individual object, it would still concentrate on what it means to exist, wherever such existence actually occurs. Such a philosophical inquiry would focus on the unique actuality and interior actualization of being (esse), and how this differs from the essence of a being. If the abstracting from concrete individual existence is still called 'epoch£!,' which undoubtedly it is in some sense, one introduces a notion of epoche which is radically different from eidetic epoche (although closest to it). This kind of epoche could never have led to a total suspending of belief in the real autonomous existence of the world, and even less to a denial thereof, because epoch£! in the sense of prescinding from individual existence in order to concentrate on existence as such would have left the 'natural world' experience fully intact. It would have used this experience as a starting point and would have focused precisely on something which the eidetic· essentialism of Husserl overlooked, and which the radical introduction of 'phenomenological reduction' as starting point took away (instead of having laid it free for philosophical inquiry): esse as such, the real interior and unique actuality of existing. The criticism of epoche in the sense of phenomenological reduction (and eidetic reduction) is, however, not radical enough as long as it objects to Husserl that he overlooked esse as such. For it will 94

Critique of epoche become clear that it is not only the general meaning ('essence') of existence which is the genuine object of philosophical knowledge, but also concretely existing beings and their individual concrete existence. If this point can be successfully defended, both Husserl's treatment of existence and actuality and Gilson's discussion of the general meaning of 'to be' involve a false 'essentialism' and are not existentialist enough in an authentic sense of this term. This is a position which the present author has argued elsewhere. 49

(i) Concrete individual (autonomous) existence as object of

philosophy There are a number of issues which involve concrete individual existence and which any authentic philosophy must face. The question which Leibniz, then Scheier, and later Heidegger asked and regarded as the most fundamental question of metaphysics: 'Why is there something rather than nothing?', can mean many things and could be interpreted as referring to any kind of being and even to possibility. But one meaning of the question is: why does any real being in the world actually exist? (a meaning which is especially apparent when we consider the phrase Leibniz added: 'since it would be much easier that nothing existed than that something is').50 What is the explanation of the real existence of anything? Why is it that all beings in the world did not remain mere possibilities? The question 'Why does something exist?' in the sense sketched here presupposes the positive answer to a more fundamental question which Gorgias is supposed to have answered in the negative: 'Is there something rather than nothing or do we mistakenly believe that any being really exists?' Now this fundamental philosophical question can only be answered by going beyond the problem of what it means in general 'to exist.' This is so because in order to answer the cluster of questions surrounding the problem of whether and why some things do indeed exist, the philosopher cannot prescind from concrete individual existence altogether. He has to show that at least one concrete being exists. Of course, the philosopher qua philosopher (in contradistinction to the man, friend, lover) will not be interested in the individual being whose existence he knows as this individual 95

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being, as Peter or Paul, but as this being and therefore one being which concretely exists. (Indirectly, of course, the philosophical answer to the question about concrete existents refers to any and all of them and thus does concern the individual qua individual.) Another decisive question the philosopher has to ask, and which pertains to concrete individual existence, is not only whether some beings surely exist, but whether we can know for sure that a personal being, an 'I' or 'self' exists. This question is as important as the first one. For if it is true that all material and all living things are like mere 'dust and ashes,' in comparison with the being of the person, the question of whether a person really exists is a far deeper philosophical question than whether just some being (that could also be apersonal) has existence. Now this question has of course been recognized as central in classical, medieval, and early modern philosophy (particularly by Augustine and Descartes); it is central, too, in transcendental idealism especially in Fichte, and likewise in Husserl in whose Cartesian Meditations, for example, this question is dominant in some sense both with regard to the ego cogitans and the possibility of 'solipsism,' and (as in Cartesian Meditations, IV) with regard to other egos, other persons, and intersubjectivity. Yet Husserl does not recognize the fact that neither phenomenological reduction nor eidetic reduction allows us even to pose this question, let alone to answer it. As we shall see in Part II, Chapter 5 (and Part III) of the present work, Husserl's treatment of the problem of knowledge of existence and of things in themselves remains radically insufficient both in terms of the ego and in terms of others. Historically speaking, it is clear that Descartes' cogito, (ergo) sum and the si failor, sum argument of Augustine were meant to answer our first two questions about existence at once. We shall return, in great detail, to this question because it remains the decisive point of contention between phenomenological realism, which seeks to carry the return to 'things themselves' back to 'things in themselves,' and transcendental phenomenology. There are other questions about actual concrete existence which the philosopher must ask and these questions are not less crucial for philosophy than those about essence. No analysis of essences can ever answer them. There is, for example, the question of whether knowledge exists at all, and whether man can know the answer to this fundamental problem of epistemology. This question is entirely different from that about the essence of knowledge and of certainty;

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Critique of epoche and yet, epistemology must also raise the issue of the fact of knowledge and certainty. Similarly, it is not just the essence of freedom (which is, for example, not denied by many determinists such as Calvin), but also the existence of human freedom which is an important issue in philosophy. Can we know not only what freedom would consist in but that we actually are free? No single one of such questions can be answered simply by reference to what constitutes the essence of freedom or of knowledge. Of course, in the case of knowledge there is a necessary correlation between the answers to the two questions. For if we can know what the essence of knowledge is, we can do so only by actually possessing knowledge, at least the knowledge pertaining to the essence of knowledge. Thus, from certain knowledge of the essence of knowledge certainty about the existence of knowledge can be derived. Despite their necessary correlation in the case of knowledge, the two questions (about the essence and about the existence of X) are quite different from each other. In raising the issue of whether knowledge actually exists or of whether man actually possesses it, a decisive new step is taken which leads beyond the knowledge of what constitutes knowledge. This is even more clearly the case with freedom where the knowledge of its essence does not presuppose knowledge of its existence. Here the decisive difference between the questions about essence and about existence is clear, because two philosophers might agree exactly about what freedom is, while disagreeing about whether it exists at all: one could affirm this, the other doubt it. An agreement on what freedom is, coupled with disagreement about its existence, is psychologically possible, and, too, the affirmation of the essence of freedom does not logically imply that of its existence, whether on the basis of laws of formal logic or of material logic. And even while the existence of human freedom is denied, that of divine freedom can be held, as is the case in Calvinism. In view ofthis last possibility, we see that the existence both of freedom as such (whether human or divine) and that of human freedom constitute a decisive existential issue of utmost concern for philosophy. Similar remarks could be made about morality, love, beauty, etc., for in all these cases the knowledge which informs us about their existence differs from that about their nature. The answer to these and similar questions about concrete existence, however, is of no less central impact for philosophy than 97

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issues concerning essence. For it makes a decisive difference whether we know these essences as mere possibilities, intelligible essential plans and ideas - or whether we know, too, that these things really do exist. For, to stay with the example of freedom, without any knowledge of whether freedom (and also human freedom) actually exists at all, the essential analysis of freedom would remain abstract and purely theoretical. Thus the very significance of the question concerning the essence of freedom would, to some extent, disappear if it remained completely uncertain whether freedom does in fact exist. There are many other decisive existential questions the philosopher has to raise: Does the material world exist? Do other persons really exist? What is the type of existence these realities claim to possess? And what are the various modes of givenness in which they are given? Here, certainly, a rigorous method of going back to things themselves must not restrict such knowledge to apodictic cognition but must explore each and every kind and mode of givenness, of knowledge, its validity, degree of certainty, legitimation, etc. Many central issues of philosophy, such as those that have been raised by Berkeley, Kant, Fichte, and many others, Husserl in particular, and especially questions centering on the issues of community, intersubjectivity, solipsism, and also on the foundation of morality, are at stake here. Another crucial issue in philosophical anthropology, metaphysics, and theodicy has to do with existence: Do evils in fact exist? If they exist, can their existence be reduced to that of pure negativity and privation or do they have some positive 'being'? Will the good ultimately triumph in being over evil, or vice versa (as is held by metaphysical pessimism a la Schopenhauer)? When we think of Schopenhauer and Leibniz as being at opposite poles in this controversy between metaphysical optimism and pessimism, we cannot fail to perceive the philosophical significance of this question. It is equally obvious that this question can be answered, and even be posed, only if we know the really existing world and can gain certain knowledge about it. Many other philosophically relevant issues such as that of the immortality of the soul presuppose or imply questions concerning real existence, real life, and so forth. All of the existential issues touched upon thus far (with the exception, perhaps, of the problem of the triumph of good or evil in the world) relate to the question of real existence in the following

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Critique of epoche . two ways. On the one hand, these questions ask about the existence of at least one individual being of a certain kind (knowledge, person, freedom, contingent being, evils, goodness, etc.), and about the possibility of certain knowledge about its existence. On the other hand, they are related to a whole sphere of existing beings (all free agents, knowledge, persons, the external material world, etc.), and thus the establishment of one existing exemplar of a certain kind (one act of knowledge or of freedom) is indirectly relevant for knowledge about all existing beings of the same kind. This exemplary and 'representative' significance of the knowledge of the existence of one particular individual of a given nature (as of one free being and of one act of knowledge) for the entire sphere of respective existents, can be derived from various sources. It can be seen in the case of the cogito, for example, that knowledge of my own being, i.e., of one person, justifies in principle the knowledge each and every person can gain in reference to his own being. There are still other possible ways in which the individual existent being can open the way to a whole region of beings. It may also be the case that knowledge about a whole sphere of existing beings of a certain kind comes at once and is not less but more certain than knowledge about one individual instance belonging to that region of being. This happens, for example, with reference to the external material world, the universe at large, or social reality.

(ii) The unique existential status of the question about 'God' There is, however, one unique question pertaining to individual existence which does not just inquire into the individual being in a quasi-anonymous manner and with a moment of epoche (in another sense) as 'just one being of a certain kind,' as one 'instance' of a whole class of real existents. This unique existential issue is the question of an infinite, divine being. Here the metaphysician takes interest in the existence of one being of which there is and could be one alone. And the concrete-individual existence of this one being is of utmost importance because of its infinite value and, indirectly, because of its foundational role for all other beings. When we think of the tremendous role this question plays in the pre-Socratics and in Plato and Aristotle, in whose works philo-

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sophical theology makes up a central chapter of their philosophy, when we think of the importance which the question of God has in Anselm, Thomas, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, as well as in contemporary atheism, we grasp its central philosophical significance. The ontological argument makes us especially aware of the difference between questions of essence and of existence. For different philosophers may agree entirely on the content of the concept of God or on what God is (or would be), if he is, but one might deny and the other affirm his existence. Some, like the earlier Findlay, might assert God's existence as incompatible with the nature (concept) of God as necessarily existing, while others may argue that God's existence is inseparable from his essence as God. Still others might hold that, at least as far as our knowledge is concerned, the jump from the idea (nature) of God to his existence in the ontological argument is indefensible. This entire controversy would make no sense if the absolutely central impact of the question of divine existence (as different from that of essence) were not recognized. Moreover, especially with reference to God's Being, it becomes clear that the question of existence is at least as significant as that of essence. Thus we might feel inclined to say that, while the vast majority of philosophic problems concern the essence of things (including the essence/meaning of existence), issues of real existence are as important for philosophy as questions of essence. Consequently, the validity of epoche as a fundamental principle of philosophic method largely depends on the question of whether or not it is an adequate methodological tool for knowing existence. It has been shown, however (and this issue will be taken up again in the treatment of knowledge of things in themselves), that epoche in the sense of eidetic reduction, in the two senses of 'phenomenological reduction,' or in the sense of transcendental reduction, cannot explore either the general meaning of real esse (to be) or (this even less) the concrete existence of those beings whose existence is of crucial concern for philosophy.51 Thus epoche has to be rejected as a universal principle of a philosophical program of 'returning to things themselves.' Even if epoche is only understood as eidetic reduction in the sense of a momentary prescinding from existence and individual properties in 100

Critique of epoche order to grasp universal essences, it is by no means a sufficient or the only valid method of philosophy. If absolutized as the only philosophical method, epoche will lead the philosopher away from an understanding of central metaphysical, anthropological, and other philosophical issues. Once it has been brought to evidence that questions about concrete existence are crucial issues for philosophy, it becomes obvious that it would be radically false to claim that philosophy can return to 'things themselves' by radically 'bracketing' existence. It will also be argued (in Part II, Chapter 5) that existence can be known with certainty. But if the concrete, real, autonomous existence of the ego cogitans and of other beings can be known with certainty, it follows that neither phenomenological and transcendental epoche (reduction) nor eidetic reduction can be universal moments of the authentic philosophical method. Yet at this point in our investigation we are even more concerned with a strictly methodological point which remains untouched by any material disagreement on whether or not issues of real autonomous existence, as they are banished by Husserl to the sphere of 'natural' Weltanschauung, should be studied by philosophy. For, whether one adopts the standpoint of 'phenomenological realism' in our sense, or the viewpoint of Husserl's transcendental phenomenology, one thing should count as agreed upon. The original phenomenological maxim 'back to things themselves' must never be uncritically identified with a philosophy that takes its starting point in epoche. Although this should be evident, Husserl himself and most phenomenologists who follow him identify a philosophical return to 'things themselves' with the adoption of epoche, and they do so without arguing for such an identification - and, above all, without bringing to evidence its justification. Yet this is an uncritical procedure because any critical identification of a philosophy which turns back to 'things themselves' with a universal adoption of epoche as method would presuppose an extensive epistemologicalmetaphysical investigation which should, in turn, show that 'things themselves' lie open to epoche. In reality, however, an investigation such as the one conducted in Parts II and III of this book, will refute the claim that epoche is an adequate method for a philosophical reconquest of things themselves. In Husser! we do not find, as far as I can see, even a trace of an attempt to render evident that there are no 'things themselves' (accessible to 'naturliche Einstellung') which

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Part I: 'Back to things themselves' would require a method different from epoche in all the senses discussed thus far.

(iii) Critique of epoche as sufficient method for analyzing 'Essences' Husserl's notion of epoche has also to be criticized insofar as it relates to the realm of essences. This is not to deny that essential analysis occupies a legitimate and prominent part within philosophy as a whole. Nor is it to deny that epoche as eidetic reduction plays a perfectly legitimate, and indeed necessary, role within the method of essential analysis. One has to examine carefully, however, the justification and limits, and even more importantly the exact meaning, of epoche as a principle of essential analysis. The first question which arises in this context is the following. Will the mere 'bracketing' of existence or phenomenological reduction in all cases allow valid knowledge of universal essences? Will it be a method sufficient for the specifically philosophical mode of analyzing essences? This question poses itself with reference to the entire phenomenology of Husser!, but especially in view of the famous 'Seefelder Gesprache' (which took place in Seefeld, Tirol, Austria, a few years after the publication of Logical Investigations, II), in the course of which Husserl used the example of beer bottles in order to show that we can 'bracket' the existence of any object, and on the basis of such an epoche arrive at a phenomenological description of the essences of any given object. Now, in the entire context of the phenomenological discussion of formal versus material a priori laws we find numerous attempts to delineate somehow those 'parts' (moments) of essences which belong necessarily to other 'parts', from those which do not. An important attempt in this direction was made by Husser! himself in his whole-part theory (theory of dependent and independent parts), developed especially in the third Logical Investigation. The distinction between dependent and independent 'parts' was recently acknowledged as an important contribution by Barry Smith, and the Manchester Circle largely founded by him.52 In the context of the whole-part theory Husserl distinguishes dependent from independent parts. He uses the terms 'part' and 'dependence/ independence' in an extremely broad sense. An 'independent part' 102

Critique of epoche would be characterizable mainly as a moment of an essence which can stand on its own and, at least theoretically, is separable from (thinkable in separation from) the other moments with which it appears. A dependent part, on the contrary, would be a moment of a being or essence which cannot be isolated from that on which it is dependent. Such a dependence can be one-sided or reciprocal. Barry Smith characterizes this 'universal ontological difference' (Husserl) of the dependence/independence opposition as follows: To say that a content can be presented 'in isolation' clearly cannot mean that it 'can be freed from all fusion with coexistent contents, can therefore ultimately be torn out of the unity of consciousness altogether' (LV, III, § 5) - for all mental contents are inseparable in this sense; all presentations are presentations against some co-presented background or other. Isolability, Husserl concludes, can only mean something like: capable of being held constant in presentation under conditions of absolutely free variation, within the limits set by the nature of the content in question, of all contents associated with it, so that it should indeed in the end, but only in principle, remain unaffected by the very elimination of such contents. Barry Smith (ed.), Parts and Moments: Studies in Logic and Formal Ontology (Miinchen, Wien: Philosophia Verlag, 1982), p. 38. A content which in its ideally graspable essence or nature is bound to other contents, which cannot be if other contents are not there together with it, he calls dependent (unselbstiindig). With this shift from talk of 'possibilities of separate presentation' to talk of intrinsic essences or natures (intrinsic structures) of the contents involved, Husserl has eliminated from his definition of dependency all reference to the conscious subject, except incidentally - the conscious subject is someone who may potentially grasp by a process of imaginative variation the essences in question. And all the references to 'differences in modes of presentation' have also been eliminated. Husserl has .... moved much more closely to the position of the scholastic realists, to the concept of independence as an objective character of contents capable of existing in isolation from other contents. Simply by substituting the word 'object' for 'content' in this 103

Part 1: 'Back to things themselves'

account it now becomes possible to effect an immediate generalisation of the dependence/independence opposition beyond the purely psychological sphere to apply directly, in reflection of what Husser! calls a 'universal ontological difference' (§ 9), to all entities whatsoever. Just as a presentation of colour cannot exist in isolation from a presentation of space, so a reconciliation, say, cannot exist in isolation from prior disagreement ... Such dependence relations amongst parts correspond, we shall argue, to systems of a priori truths. [In a note Smith adds the cautious remark:] At least some of these truths are, we shall argue, not only a priori, but also synthetic. We do not however wish to rule out the possibility that others may belong to the realm of the analytic a priori as this is delineated by Husser!. (Ibid., pp. 39, 97.) The theory of dependent and independent parts was, in many respects, deepened in the Ideas. 53 Yet, great as Husserl's contributions on 'part' and 'whole' are, they are nevertheless insufficient to elucidate the basis of those essences and 'material a priori relations' and 'truths' which Husser! himself and other phenomenologists, especially of the Munich-Gottingen circle, have discovered. 54 For, as is also evidenced by some very interesting studies by Smith and his colleagues in their recent book on the part-whole theory, which builds on Husserl's Logical Investigations, III, Husserl's concepts 'dependent' and 'independent' lack clarity because they merge into one entirely different ontological and logical relations. The primarily logical-linguistic relation of analyticity by which one conceptual meaning of a term contains conceptual dependent 'parts,' may be what is meant by the term 'dependent part.' The same term can, however, also refer to the relationship of inherence of classical Aristotelian substance philosophy. And thirdly, it can designate the material a priori necessity in which one content necessarily implies another one. These and other relations can rightly be characterized as dependence-relationships, while their opposites may be characterized as relations of 'independence.' What is called 'dependence' in the three cases mentioned, however, is entirely different. When we say, for example, that 'head' is selbstiindig (independent) because we can imagine it as 'something which is in itself' (etwas ill sich Seielldes),55 and because there is 104

Critique of epoche nothing else 'by whose grace it would exist' (von dessen Gnaden sozusagen es existierte) , then Husserl refers to the dependence/ independence which obtains between accident and substance. Yet the dependence of an accident like color on the thing whose accident it is, and which supports it in being (by whose grace it exists) - is by no means an essentially necessary relation. (Of course, the general relationship of accidents presupposing substances, and substances of a certain kind, is essentially necessary.) The relation between a given white color and the being which bears it (a lawn chair) is an entirely contingent relation and the ontological dependence of white on the supporting substance (which is not present in the content 'head' that Husserl gives as example of an independent part) is in no wayan essentially necessary relationship. This, however, is the second meaning of 'dependent part.' In § 7 of the third Logical Investigation Husserl gives one of the most powerful formulations of the objective Wesensnotwendigkeit (essential necessity) that can be known with 'apodictic evidence' (certainty) and is distinct from any 'subjective necessity, i.e., a subjective impossibility of not being able to imagine (experience) differently' but is an 'objective-ideal necessity of not possibly being different.' It is an 'a priori necessity' which, as Husser! emphasizes, is grounded in the 'objective essences' (den sachlichen Wesen) and implies a 'non-empirical, strictly universal lawfulness (Gesetzlichkeit).' No dependence on empirical existence is found here, as such a dependence even exists with regard to the laws of nature (Naturgesetze) which are different from essentially necessary laws (Wesensgesetze) , precisely on account of their dependence on factual non-necessity (contingency). Both Smith and Husser! himself do not sharply delineate analytic from synthetic propositions. 56 Husser! writes: 57 Dass beispielsweise die Existenz dieses Hauses die seines Daches, seiner Mauern und seiner sonstigen Teile einschliesst, ist ein analytischer Satz. Denn es gilt die analytische Formel, dass die Existenz eines Ganzen G (a,b,c ... ) uberhaupt die seiner Teile a,b,c . .. einschliesst. The problematic character of Husserl's view that the difference between analytic and synthetic propositions rests upon the distinction formal/material (content-related) shall not be discussed here (I think that this foundation of the analytic-synthetic distinction is 105

Part I: 'Back to things themselves' untenable)5t