Автор: Thomas Arnold & Tobias Keiling

Заголовок: Fields of Sense. A New Realist Ontology
Серия: Speculative Realism
Автор: Markus Gabriel
Издатель: Edinburgh University Press
Дата публикации: 2015
Формат: Paperback £19.99
Страниц: 400

The world has always been a key topic for phenomenologists.[i] Any book claiming to prove its non-existence is therefore worthy of phenomenological attention. Since others have provided a general review of Gabriel’s book,[ii] we will instead aim to engage in a discussion of two substantive points in Gabriel’s so-called “New Realism” from the perspective of what can broadly be called phenomenological philosophy.[iii] Zahavi has recently presented a thorough (and convincing) criticism of a number of positions self-identifying as “Speculative Realism” or “New Realism”.[iv] Gabriel’s is not among them, although it is, in our judgment, the position that most deserves a closer look.

We will take at least a first one: firstly we will try to shed light on the relation between phenomenology, metaphysics, and ontology by considering phenomenological accounts of these matters. Secondly we will discuss how phenomenological theories anticipate Gabriel’s No-World-View by conceiving of the world in ways that avoid the ontotheological pitfalls Gabriel highlights.

Phenomenology, Metaphysics and Ontology

Gabriel posits a twofold relation between New Realism and phenomenology, one antagonistic, one co-operational. Husserlian phenomenology as he sees it is in conflict with his New Realism since Gabriel conceives of Husserlian phenomenology as a brand of metaphysics. “Metaphysics” in Gabriel’s terminology denotes a theory of everything, of totality, of the absolute or of the world, understood as the ultimate unity or the fundamental whole; it is, in short, what Heidegger calls “ontotheology” (23); ontology, in contrast, is a theory of existence and objectuality. We will use the same terminology. Gabriel now brands Husserl a metaphysician for two reasons, namely for positing the world as “ultimate horizon” (6) and thereby committing to a theory of totality; and for looking for a “point where we have to stop” (22), i.e. an absolute fundament which Husserl is said to find in the transcendental Ego.

Whether Husserl’s notion(s) of the world really deserves the label “metaphysical” remains to be seen in the second section, but regarding the latter charge we tend to agree with Gabriel. Even though nature, structure and function of Husserl’s transcendental Ego are still a matter of debate and research, it is hard to deny that Husserl exhibits ontotheological tendencies by repeatedly positing transcendental subjectivity as the absolute or ultimate ground (akin to the early Fichte) on several occasions – even though his idea of phenomenology as a critical undertaking of responsible thinkers would actually seem to exclude this move (Tugendhat 1967, 195). Gabriel correctly identifies the problem with this idea as one arising from the epistemological privilege granted to first-person givenness as fundamental (the “point where we have to stop”), motivating Husserl to understand the transcendental as consciousness of myself as an Ego, which is in turn illicitly granted ontological privilege. In light of these Cartesian (foundationalist and subjectivist) tendencies, Husserl may well be classified as a metaphysician. It is however equally possible to find decidedly anti-idealist and anti-ontotheological strands of thinking in Husserl. László Tengelyi’s last book is an eminent example of this (Tengelyi 2014), as is John Drummond’s work on the status of the noema (Drummond 1990). Indeed, the Cartesian trouble with Husserl has also already motivated post-Husserlian phenomenology to for the most part reject or re-interpret Husserl’s absolute subjectivity. Sartre for example paradoxically speaks of the subject as a “dependent”, “non-substantial absolute” (Sartre 1943, 713).

Already on an exegetical level then, the phenomenological tradition would have deserved a closer look. Thus it is very doubtful whether the metaphysical charge still holds regarding post-Husserlian phenomenology. Heidegger, for instance, is explicit in his criticism of Husserl’s illicit Cartesian move. This criticism not only dismisses the epistemological privilege of the first person by reconceiving it as eminently practical, world-embedded and finite, decisively modifying the phenomenological account of subjectivity vis-à-vis the transcendental subjectivity of Ideas I. More fundamentally, Heidegger’s account of ontology as understanding being qua being of entities – among which the subject is only one – is oriented not towards subjects but towards objects (things) as exemplary case of existence. In later Heidegger in particular, senses of being are equivalent to “interpretations of the thingness of the thing” (Heidegger 2003 (GA 5), 7). This not only sounds realistic, it presents a genuine phenomenological realism.[v]

Gabriel is at least in part aware of how close his own position is to some strands of the phenomenological movement. Regarding a non-metaphysical, i.e. non-foundationalist phenomenology, Gabriel proposes a division of labour between phenomenology and ontology: ontology in Gabriel’s sense “is the systematic investigation into the meaning of ‘existence’, or rather investigation of existence itself aided by insight into the meaning of ‘existence’” (5), whereas phenomenology could potentially take the role of “an overall theory of error and its manifold forms” (21), alongside psychoanalysis. While Husserl and Heidegger can be taken to both present error-theories of sorts (namely how naturalism comes about and how European thought has become forgetful of Being), it remains unclear why the link between phenomenology and ontology should be severed in the first place. For while we find different ways of thinking about the relation between ontology and phenomenology within the phenomenological tradition, no phenomenologist separates them completely, as Gabriel’s division of labour presupposes.

Husserl for instance distinguishes but doesn’t separate ontology and phenomenology: ontology is a straightforward investigation of the fundamental or formal properties of objects and the structures of the world itself, phenomenology deals with the laws of transcendental constitution. For Husserl this implies an asymmetrical relation between the two insofar as ontology as a static theory of being needs to be recast as a genetic transcendental theory of constitution, since, according to Husserl, we can only understand what existence is once we understand how it is constituted by transcendental (inter-)subjectivity (Husserl 1971 (Hua V), 129). A “concrete ontology” (Husserl 1959 (Hua VIII), 214), encompassing all a priori noetic-noematic correlations, can therefore be only a “transcendental ontology” (Husserl 1959 (Hua VIII), 212). So while a non-transcendental ontology is possible – and actual in the form of mathematics, mereology or a formal theory of objects – it is necessarily one-sided (Husserl 1959 (Hua VIII), 224). Such ontologies are therefore to be reformulated using the phenomenological method, resulting in a genuinely phenomenological ontology unified by phenomenological method.

Heidegger on the other hand takes phenomenology to be simply the way to do ontology (Heidegger 1977 (GA 2), 36), as all non-phenomenological ontology fails to even obtain its topic. Only destructing the history of metaphysics, foregoing errant theorizing and going back to the ‘things themselves’ can bring out the meaning of existence. This is what a “phenomenological interpretation” of the history of philosophy is supposed to achieve. The hermeneutical task of philosophy thus has a phenomenological purpose and, ultimately, an ontological aim.[vi] As addressing the question of being (existence) is philosophy’s paramount task and phenomenology the way to reach this end, ontology and phenomenology are but two sides of the same.

Sartre, to name just one other thinker from the phenomenological tradition, builds on this idea, in some sense subverting the Husserlian priority of phenomenology: phenomenological description allows a regressive analysis leading towards the ontological structures necessary for the kinds of phenomena described (Sartre 1943, 83). This option corresponds to Gabriel’s own (earlier) definition of “transcendental ontology” as the investigation into “the ontological conditions of our conditions of access to what there is” (Gabriel 2011, ix), i.e. into a subset of transcendental conditions that obtain in experience. In Gabriel’s work under review, however, ontology seems to be first philosophy, without any form of transcendentalism involved.

Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre (among others) offer very different takes on the exact relationship between phenomenology and ontology (foundation, identity, facilitation). Yet on no account can a complete ontology be accomplished without phenomenology and on no account are the ontological questions “what is existence?”, “what is an object?” or “(what) is the world?” excluded from the set of problems to be answerable by a phenomenological philosophy. As Günter Figal has argued, Heidegger’s understanding of phenomenology is even (unduly) restrictive in that it concerns itself with the meaning of existence only, neglecting to give an account of phenomenological description for the sake of determining what makes phenomena possible at all. Phenomenology should try to understand the relation between an account of existence and an account of the manifestation or constitution of entities (Figal 2010). From the perspective of phenomenology, then, ontology is but phenomenology with regard to a particular topic, namely the meaning of existence. It is simply part of what can be achieved through phenomenological insight into the structure of meaning as it is experienced. Thus from the phenomenologists’ point of view, the division of labour Gabriel proposes undercuts (or ignores) the entire project of understanding existence with the manifestation of entities firmly in view, i.e. the whole idea of a phenomenological ontology.

Unfortunately, however, Gabriel doesn’t address the methodological import, the very idea of phenomenology as a way of ‘doing philosophy’. Congruent with his move away from his earlier endorsement of ontology as transcendental, Gabriel’s work under the heading of New Realism does not proceed from an analysis of experience towards ontology. Rather, Gabriel discusses and dismisses particular ontological claims by labeling them and then developing a critique of that position, including phenomenology. But if one wishes to show that phenomenology is unapt for understanding the meaning of existence, one needs to do more than distribute such labels and show in more detail why phenomenology as a method fails with regard to this particular question. And that presupposes that one makes explicit how one thinks ontology should be done, and how existence/being does relate to experience/manifestation/phenomenality.

In the welcome engagement of phenomenology with Gabriel’s realism we would like to see more discussions on the proper way of doing ontology and on how claims to descriptive plausibility or experiential givenness (intuitions) can be introduced in a controlled, philosophically justified way. If there is a “fallacy of misplaced ontological concreteness” (198), then where is the right spot to place the concreteness of experience—that Husserl famously associated with his own commitment to realism (Husserl 1994 (Hua Dok.III/7), 16) and that Heidegger sought in the experience of things in an eminent sense? Until Gabriel addresses phenomenology’s concern for concreteness, nothing in the idea of phenomenology as a method or a way of doing philosophy commits one to posit either the subject as a metaphysical absolute or the world as a metaphysical totality, as we shall now see.

The Worlds of Phenomenology

Gabriel calls his own position “only faintly phenomenological, as the goal of phenomenology is usually to ‘save the appearances’, or even to privilege the zuhanden and absorbed being-in-the-world over the mere being-there of spiders and hair. Yet, in my view, there is no monolithic domain of appearances to be saved, but manifold fields with their related appearances.” (195) It is unclear what makes the “domain of appearances” a “monolithic domain” for Gabriel. Possibly, the impression of homogeneity stems from the idea that Husserlian phenomenology sometimes equates appearance with possible experience. But be that as it may, for Gabriel, the “monolithic domain of appearances” triggers his critique of phenomenology, as it is one guise of the absolute or the world, the existence of which he so vehemently denies. “The World” for Gabriel is “any kind of unrestricted or overall totality, be it the totality of existence, the totality of what there is, the totality of objects, the whole of beings, or the totality of facts or states of affairs.” (187) It follows from Gabriel’s ontology that the world cannot exist. Here is how and why.

According to Gabriel’s definition, existence is just “the fact that some object or objects appear in a field of sense.” (158) The term “appearance” however is not supposed to indicate the involvement of any form of subjectivity. “Appearing is fairly inhuman. […] What appears comes forth; it stands apart from a certain background.” (166) These backgrounds (or contexts or domains or …) are what Gabriel calls fields of sense. “Fields are not horizons or perspectives; they are not epistemological entities […] They are an essential part of how things are in that without fields, nothing could exist.” (157) Note that taken as a description of experience, Gabriel’s account seems centered around one key intuition, namely the contrast between a background/field and an object appearing within it. But if no phenomenology (such as the experiential contrast between background and foreground) is to enter into his ontology, the challenge for Gabriel is to define objects without referring to any particular experiential setup.

Gabriel addresses this challenge by offering the following “formal theory of objects”: “an object is anything that can become the content of a truth-apt thought.” (146) Gabriel further refers to his position as an “ontological bundle descriptivism” (230, cf. 346) according to which “objects are bundles of senses or objective modes of presentation, that is to say, objects are identical with the totality of what is true about them” (231). That idea is of course familiar to phenomenologists: it matches Husserl’s definition of the (logical) object as studied by formal ontology as “subject of possible true predications” (Husserl 1976 (Hua III/1), 17). Gabriel and Husserl also agree on the fact that there “simply is no bare reference without sense” (238), i.e. that we cannot refer to/intend an object without referring to/intending it as this or that object, it is always given in some way or the other and not in another way (Husserl 1984 (Hua XIX/1), LU 1, §13; LU V, §17); for something to be manifest means for it to become manifest as part of a particular experiential context, a position developed in detail in Being and Time.

Despite the contrary implication of his terminology, Gabriel emphasises that just as “appearance” is “inhuman”, “description” is not to be understood as a linguistic activity and not as a correlative process at all. There are “visual descriptions” (19) and more generally “sensory descriptions” (20, cf. 332) — and these descriptions define objects regardless of the experiential content of these descriptions. Beneath the terminological similarities to phenomenological positions, however, Gabriel’s disregard for experiential givenness defines the decisive difference: the idea that a formal or descriptivist theory of objectuality is sufficient for ontology is probably the most contentious point of disagreement between phenomenology and Gabriel’s New Realism.

Be that as it may, the “no-world-view” follows from Gabriel’s definitions by way of a reductio ad absurdum: the world qua field of fields (or background of backgrounds or context of contexts etc.) cannot exist, since it would have to appear within a field of sense as an object in order to exist. This would then either lead into a regress of ever-bigger fields or it would engender paradoxical duplications since the world would otherwise have to appear within itself, next to all other entities which would then not only exist within the world, next to the world, but also within the world-within-the-world.

The world thus obtains a peculiar status that is most clearly defined negatively: the world is a non-object; the “world’s necessary non-existence is not a truth about an object, the world. The world is not even an object, and it absolutely does not exist.” (174) “The principle statement of the no-world-view, that the world does not exist, does not say of a particular object, the world that it does not exist. The reason for this is that ‘the world’, had it existed, would have been a very peculiar object. Had it existed, it would have been all-encompassing. Thus, it would certainly never exist in a proposition, as the proposition itself would rather exist in the world. The world, with which the proposition deals as its object, cannot be identical with the world in which the proposition exists.” (201) So “the point is that ‘the world’ has no meaning; that the term cannot refer to anything if it means what it traditionally means (the all-encompassing).” (203) The core idea of the axial age therefore turns out to have been an illusion as “there never was such an object as ‘the world’ about which one could have truth-apt thoughts.” (206)

Setting aside the worry that to think that the world doesn’t exist should be a truth-apt thought for that claim to be true (and hence be about an object in the formal but for Gabriel decisive sense), how Gabriel talks about objects and fields raises numerous questions: for instance, what is that “governing sense, as it were, that holds the various senses of an object together” (231), a notion that sounds very much like an eidos? Is it but another “truth-apt thought” or another description? What makes it “governing” and how is one then to understand the “weak form of essentialism” (231) that the no-world view entails? What is ‘essential’ here? Further, is there an identity of objects across fields? How do fields appear as objects (and not as fields)? How can fields “interact” (272) and even “merge” (172)? It is unclear how fields should be able to ‘do’ that on Gabriel’s account if “[s]ense is responsible for the individuation of fields” (131, cf. 139), and sense is the “objective mode of appearing [within that field]” (161). Again, from a phenomenological point of view, small change is needed to evaluate these ideas: would a merger of fields ‘blend’ the objective modes of appearing? How would that look like? For whom? Is “interaction” not a relation between objects? What is it like to witness an interaction of fields (in contrast to the interaction of objects)? The trouble we see is that Gabriel gives no more detailed account of these issues. In the remainder of this review we will thus focus again on what Gabriel does say a lot about, namely the matter of the world. We see no reason to dismiss that notion. Rather than a valid object of Gabriel’s criticism, we see phenomenology rather anticipate many of his ideas—without, however, therefore urging us to renounce in speaking of ‘the world’.

Husserl certainly conceives of “universal ontology” as a theory of the “total coherence or nexus (Totalzusammenhang) of everything that exists actually or possibly, of everything real and irreal” (Husserl 1974 (Hua XVII), 177), which is almost exactly the definition Gabriel gives of a metaphysical notion of world, depending on whether we consider the dichotomy real/irreal as exhaustive. We agree with Gabriel that this constitutes an unwanted remainder of ontotheology in Husserl’s work (among others). Yet to therefore abandon all notions of the world in Husserl’s writings as metaphysical would be hasty. Husserl’s famous notion of the life-world (Lebenswelt) for example, which he identifies as the “universe of pregiven self-evidence [Universum vorgegebener Selbstverständlichkeiten]” (Husserl 1954 (Hua VI), 183), is not a metaphysical concept in that the life-world is not meant to be all-encompassing; and it differs radically from the (arguably metaphysical) notion of the world he puts forth in Ideas I (Cf. Carr 1974, ch. 6). Hans Blumenberg, for instance, pointed out that the notion of the finite life-world is developed precisely in contrast to the world as a metaphysical totality and super-entity, motivating an understanding of phenomenology Blumenberg explicity labels ‘realist’ (Blumenberg 1986, 28; cf. Blumenberg 2010). László Tengelyi even reads the later Husserl as directly and strictly opposing all (ontotheological) notions of the world “as a whole in the sense of an absolute totality” (Tengelyi 2014, 299).

Heidegger in particular consistently denies object-hood as well as existence to the world. As early as 1920/21 he states that the world is something to live in, not an object (Heidegger 1995 (GA 60), 11). In Being and Time Heidegger says of the world that it is “further out” than any object might ever be, while he also denies its identification with the “totality of objects” (Heidegger 1977 (GA 2), 484). Both early and later Heidegger discuss the world not as an object but as a type of event, as a “worlding” (Welten) (Heidegger 1987 (GA 56/57), 73). The world here is not an entity but a mode of being, a “how of being” rather than a what (Heidegger 1978 (GA 26), 219).[vii] This mode of being indicates the infinity and openness of appearance, the openness of meaning rather than its closure.[viii] Only with a view to human beings and their ontological understanding, the “worlding” mode of entities forms a totality, a historical world among others.[ix]

But if Husserl and Heidegger have themselves either moved away from or consistently rejected the idea of the world as a super-entity, it is doubtful whether phenomenological notions of ‘the world’ can be targets of Gabriel’s reductio ad absurdum. And the later one looks in the history of phenomenology, the less likely this is. Werner Marx, who followed Husserl and Heidegger on the Freiburg phenomenology chair, is a case in point. Marx goes even further in Gabriel’s direction than his predecessor by dismissing the idea of the world as an “ultimate horizon” altogether, replacing it with the universality of a demand for the justification of human practice, an idea Marx associates with empathy. Marx indeed already employs the very notion of a “field of sense” (Sinnfeld) in his criticism of ontotheology. But in contrast to Gabriel’s method, which despite its self-proclaimed anarchism doesn’t provide a systematic way of proceeding from the manifestation of a particular entity to his account of existence, Marx’s approach is indeed bottom-up, as it were, beginning with ordinary language and everyday experience. This includes his treatment of the notion of the “world”, whose meaningfulness Marx never denies: “with ‘world’ we always mean, at least at first, something spatial, a space in which we perceive or into which we act, a space ‘surrounding’ us as bodily beings, a space in which the things are located together with which we live our lives, the things of nature, landscapes, mountains and oceans as well as all the objects craftsmanship and technology produce. This is the space in which we either deal with things near; but it is also the space for all those things far from us, with which we could only possibly have to deal.” (Marx 1986, 59) In Husserlian short-hand, ‘the world’ is nothing but the life-world.

Note that Marx’s is a take on the notion of the world beginning with the first-person-perspective, with an account of how objects appear and are relevant to us. But what comes into focus are not subjective achievements constituting the objects’ meaning, locating them within a super-entity encompassing everything. Rather, what presents itself to the phenomenologist are precisely “fields of sense [Sinnfelder]”, the interaction of which makes up experience, an interaction the form of which is eminently spatial for Marx. Marx emphasizes the plurality of fields of sense in the world thus described, concurring with Gabriel’s claim to a constitutive (infinite or transfinite) plurality of such fields. And exactly along Gabriel’s lines, Marx denies that these fields are portions of one “indivisible field of sense”. Rather, Marx argues, it is an ongoing philosophical task to “free us humans from this unfruitful longing” for a whole and salutary (heil) world. Instead of dismissing the notion of world completely because it can supposedly only take on the meaning of a metaphysical totality, Marx wants us to learn to “live in many worlds at once” (Marx 1986, 69). In Marx’s view, the constitutive plurality of worlds then further motivates an ethics of empathy.

This last consequence may well be a non sequitur. What results from Marx’s discussion of Sinnfelder, however, is effectively a merger of Gabriel’s ontology with an understanding of first-person-phenomenology as inherently normative. Marx’s description of the normative import of empathy is much fuzzier than recent phenomenological accounts such as Steven Crowell’s fusion of a theory of normativity with semantic externalism (Crowell 2013). By focusing on empathy Marx misplaces and restricts the source of normativity to the self’s relation to the other, an error corrected in Crowell’s broader understanding of normativity[x] and in the larger debate surrounding the normativity of perception. Nonetheless, with a view to the history of phenomenology, Marx’s essay is quite an interesting parallel to Gabriel’s work in post-Heideggerian phenomenology. It confirms that the trajectory of phenomenology as a movement is indeed gradually overcoming rather than repeating the Cartesian and the ontotheological fallacy. But it holds fast to the notion of ‘the world’, taking a no-world-view as unwarranted. Most phenomenological notions of ‘world’ are no residues of ontotheology but attempts at a phenomenological reflection and description of what we do call (our) world(s). Rather than simply giving up on the world’s existence then—and what would be at stake in this decision?—, phenomenologists should welcome a conversation with New Realism and press it to say in more detail how the no-world of fields looks like. Gabriel has given us large notes, but we need small change.

References

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Blumenberg, Hans. 2010. Theorie der Lebenswelt. Ed. by Manfred Sommer. Berlin: Suhrkamp.

Carr, David. 1974. Phenomenology and the Problem of History. A Study of Husserl’s Transcendental Philosophy. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.

Crowell, Steven. 2013. Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Drummond, John. 1990. Husserlian Intentionality and Non-Foundational Realism. Noema and Object. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Figal, Günter. 2010. “Phenomenology. Heidegger after Husserl and the Greeks”. In Martin Heidegger: Key Concepts, ed. by Bret Davis, 33-43. Durham: Acumen.

Gabriel, Markus. 2011. Transcendental Ontology. Essays in German Idealism. London: Continuum.

Golob, Sacha. 2014. Heidegger on Concepts. Freedom, and Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Heidegger, Martin. 1977. Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie. Gesamtausgabe 56/57, ed. by Bernd Heimbüchel. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann.

Heidegger, Martin. 1978. Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz Gesamtausgabe 26, ed. by Klaus Held. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann.

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Heidegger, Martin. 1995. “Einleitung in die Phänomenologie der Religion”. In Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens. Gesamtausgabe 60, ed. by Matthias Jung / Thomas Regehly / Claudius Strube, 3-156. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann.

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Husserl, Edmund. 1954. Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie. Husserliana VI, ed. by Walter Biemel. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

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Overgaard, Søren. 2004. Husserl and Heidegger on Being in the World, Dordrecht: Kluwer.

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Sparrow, Tom. 2015. “Markus Gabriel. Fields of Sense: A New Realist Ontology”, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews October 2015, http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/61350-fields-of-sense-a-new-realist-ontology/.

Steinmann, Michael. 2008. Die Offenheit des Sinns. Untersuchungen zu Sprache und Logik bei Martin Heidegger. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.

Tengelyi, Laszlo. 2014. Welt und Unendlichkeit. Zum Problem phänomenologischer Metaphysik. Freiburg / München: Alber.

Tugendhat, Ernst. 1967. Der Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Zahavi, Dan. “The end of what? Phenomenology vs. Speculative Realism”, International Journal of Philosophical Studies 24 (2016), pp. 289-309.

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[i]            Cf. recently László Tengelyi. 2014. Welt und Unendlichkeit. Zum Problem phänomenologischer Metaphysik. Freiburg / München: Alber.

[ii]        See Tom Sparrow’s review: https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/61350-fields-of-sense-a-new-realist-ontology/.

[iii]              For a sustained discussion of Gabriel’s work from other perspectives see the discussion in German in Philosophisches Jahrbuch 2015, pp. 113-185, with contributions from Thomas Buchheim, Claus Beishart, Catharine Diehl/Tobias Rosefeldt, Marcela Garcia, Volker Gerhardt, Anton Friedrich Koch, Sebastian Rödl, Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer.

[iv]           Dan Zahavi, “The end of what? Phenomenology vs. Speculative Realism”, International Journal of Philosophical Studies 24 (2016), pp. 289-309.

[v]               For an interpretation of later Heidegger along these lines, see Tobias Keiling. 2015. Seinsgeschichte und phänomenologischer Realismus. Eine Interpretation und Kritik der Spätphilosophie Heideggers, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.

[vi]              See, for instance, the programmatic Natorp-Bericht (Heidegger 2005 (German version in GA 62)).

[vii]             For a detailed treatment of both Husserl’s and Heidegger’s notion of the world, concurring in substance with Tengelyi’s assessment, see Overgaard 2004.

[viii]          The phrase “openness of meaning” is taken from Michael Steinmann. 2008. Die Offenheit des Sinns. Untersuchungen zu Sprache und Logik bei Martin Heidegger. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.

[ix]              On “worlding” in later Heidegger, see Keiling 2015, 439-460.

[x]         On normativity and phenomenology, also see Sacha Golob. 2014. Heidegger on Concepts. Freedom, and Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Заголовок: Studia Phaenomenologica: Vol. XV / 2015 – Early Phenomenology
Автор: Dermot Moran, Rodney K.B. Parker (Eds.)
Издатель: Zeta Books
Дата публикации: 2016
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The edition of Studia Phaenomenologica devoted to early phenomenology makes a highly original and important contribution to philosophy. Moran and Parker bring to publication articles about figures and their texts foundational to the phenomenological movement, ultimately expanding our understanding of key issues and developments in thought. The large volume consisting of 522 pages contains articles by leading scholars and provides both in-depth scholarship and philosophical analysis. In their Introduction, Moran and Parker define early phenomenology in the following way: “The term “early phenomenologists” is used here to encompass five main groups of philosophers who contributed to the  early phase of the phenomenological movement in the first third of the twentieth century: the students of Theodor Lipps who formed the Munich Circle of phenomenologists; Husserl’s original students at Göttingen prior to 1907, the so-called Urschüler; the Göttingen Circle, who studied with Husserl, Reinach, and Scheler in Göttingen from 1907 to 1916; the students who studied with Husserl in Freiburg from 1916 until he was barred from the university in 1933; and a handful of students of Carl Stumpf in Berlin” (11). The Editors note that as research advances, more members of the Movement and their texts are being uncovered (12), ultimately demonstrating a wide breadth and depth of research interests as well as tensions between philosophers over the exact nature and scope of phenomenology itself.

The volume opens with Thomas Vongehr’s presentation of some interesting documents, including an excerpt from Edmund Husserl’s Nachlass (Ms. A III, 1, 1914), which consists of Husserl’s assessment of Jean Héring’s thesis tiled, “Die Lehre vom Apriori bei Lotze,” a text later reworked by Héring into his well-known article “Bemerkungen über das Wesen, die Wesenheit und die Idee. Edmund Husserl zum 60. Geburtstag gewidmet” (in: Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung  IV, 1921, pp. 495–543). In the excerpt one sees Husserl’s succinct grasp of Héring’s attempt to deal with the problem of individuation and singularity by proposing individuated essences in addition to more general essences or ideas. In this text, we see Husserl comparing Héring’s ideas with his own, resulting in an interesting dialogue about the delineation of essences as well their logical limits.  The two other documents in the first part are by Jean Héring (Phänomenologie als Grundlage der Metaphysik? / Phenomenology as the Foundation of Metaphysics? (Edited by Sylvain Camilleri. Introduction by Sylvain Camilleri and Arun Iyer. Translated by Arun Iyer)) and Hedwig Conrad-Martius (Dankesrede bei der Feier zur Verleihung des großen Verdienstkreuzes der Bundesrepublik Deutschland am 01. März 1958/ Acceptance speech at the ceremony for the award of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, March 1st 1958 (Introduction and translated by Susi Ferrarello)). The former text struggles with the relation of essences to the factical world, and posits a distinction between eidetic phenomenology and a phenomenology of facticity in order to deal with the fact that the world presents itself as highly determined and individuated. Héring notes that a transcendental phenomenology can deal with topics and questions in general metaphysics, but it has to find ways of overcoming the risk of reducing the world and factical existence to my consciousness (48). The latter contribution by Hedwig Conrad-Martius reflects on the early phenomenological movement and its adherents. She draws attention to how inspiring Husserl was for his insistence that students study the things themselves, despite the fact that many of his students were critical of his turn to idealism. The text is interesting because it gives a brief history of the early Movement and her own development as a young philosopher.

The next section of the volume contains various articles on questions and debates within early phenomenology. George Heffernan’s article, “The Paradox of Objectless Presentations in Early Phenomenology: A Brief History of the Intentional Object from Bolzano to Husserl, With Concise Analyses of the Positions of Brentano, Frege, Twardowski and Meinong,” explores the concept of the intentional object. Heffernan shows that Husserl’s understanding of the concept can be better understood through a discussion of key insights of 19^th century figures like Bolzano and Brentano as well as other figures like Frege, Twardowski and Meinong. Heffernan ultimately concludes, “Husserl accepts Bolzano’s objectivism and Frege’s logicism, rejects Brentano’s conception of immanent objects and Twardowski’s notion of representational pictures, and ignores Meinong’s theory of objects. Thus the paper has employed the formation of Husserl’s concept of the intentional object to enhance the understanding of the historical and philosophical relationships between early phenomenology and contemporaneous philosophical movements. The result is a clearer picture of the influences that early phenomenology drew upon for the formation of its concept of intentionality, and of the influences that early phenomenology exerted on philosophers outside the phenomenological movement” (87). Marek Pokropski’s article “Leopold Blaustein’s Critique of Husserl’s Early Theory of Intentional Act, Object and Content” introduces readers to the ideas of Blaustein, which were deeply influenced by Husserl when Blautstein studied under him at Freiburg. Pokropski describes Blaustein’s philosophy as “analytical phenomenology” (94).  Blaustein was also deeply influenced by Roman Ingarden, who urged Blaustein to study with Husserl. Both Ingarden and Blaustein continued to debate about the concepts of act and object developed in both Husserl’s Logical Investigations and the the turn in Ideas I until the latter’s death in one of the Nazi-controlled Jewish ghettos in Poland. Ultimately, Blaustein maintains, “Presenting content is understood, following Husserl, as the representation or the fullness of hyletic moments. However, contrary to Husserl, it is not a part of act (taken in the second broader sense). The concept of intentional essence is, according to Blaustein, redundant, and it is possible that ideal and fulfilled meaning are redundant too. Object of representation is not a part of act itself, but rather accompanies it” (100). The next article makes an interesting contribution to the scholarship on Husserl and Bentano. Hynek Janoušek’s “Judgmental Force and Assertion in Brentano and Early Husserl” continues the line of thought carried out in the previous articles that explores various logical problems raised by Husserl’s concepts. Janoušek defends the claim that Husserl’s early theory of judgement, in contrast to Brentano, opens up a wider space for considering objectifying acts: “Since for Husserl fulfilment of act-matter does not concern only act-quality of assertions, but also that of conjectures, pure presentations and other qualities as well, this approach opens a much wider space for the theory of objectifying acts and their different modalities in which a theory of judgment has to be situated. This brings the phenomenological theory of judgment to a deeper level of understanding of concepts of assertions, judgments, truth, actual and possible being etc.” (126).

While the first few articles of the second section of the volume focus on logic and questions of intentionality and objectivation, the next few articles look at the work of figures like Héring, Geiger, Lipps, Ingarden and Conrad. Christian Y. Dupont’s essay, “Jean Héring and the Introduction of Husserl’s Phenomenology to France” and Daniele De Santis’ “Wesen, Eidos, Idea. Remarks on the “Platonism” of Jean Héring and Roman Ingarden” take up important questions on Héring’s notion of essence. The former author traces the influence of Héring on thinkers like Levinas and Lev Shestov, demonstrating that Héring was not only vital for showing both thinkers the limits of Husserl’s positions, but was also instrumental for transmitting Husserl’s philosophical legacy in France. The latter author clarifies the key Platonic concept of form by exploring Héring’s own distinctions between individual essence, morphé, ideas and essentiality. Simon Calenge’s contribution explores Hans Lipp’s critique of Husserl’s idealism. “Hans Lipps critique de l’idéalisme de Husserl” negotiates a tension in Lipps’ own existential and hermeneutical philosophy by showing how Lipps needs to critique Husserl’s transcendental philosophy qua representation in order to get back to factical existence. There has been very little work on Lipps’ philosophy and Calenge gives to readers not only an engagement with Lipps’ project but also an insight into the constant tensions between realism and idealism, which plague early phenomenological discourses. Faustino Fabbianelli’s “Bezeichnung und Kennzeichnung: Theodor Conrads Bedeutungslehre in Auseinandersetzung mit Husserl” shows the relation to and differences between Husserl and Conrad on meaning. Fabbianelli employs a manuscript by Conrad dating from the early 1950s to show how Conrad’s earlier distinction between Kennzeichung and Bezeichnung shows a fundamental critique and opposition to Husserl’s phenomenological theory of meaning developed in his Logical Investigations and earlier logical writings.

Michele Averchi (“The Disinterested Spectator. Geiger’s and Husserl’s Place in the Debate on the Splitting of the Ego”) and Dalius Jonkus (“Phenomenological Approaches to Self-Consciousness and the Unconscious (Moritz Geiger and Vasily Sesemann)”) focus their essays on the work of Geiger. Geiger, along with Scheler, was considered one of the founding philosophers of early phenomenology. He was also crucial for helping to found the Jahrbuch für Philosophie and phänomenlogische Forschung. Geiger’s work has been largely understudied and both contributors help readers critically understand key concepts in Geiger’s work. The former author shows how Geiger’s notion of the split ego influences Husserl’s consideration of the ego and its ability to perform the reduction. The latter contributor sets up a dialogue between Husserl Geiger and the philosopher Vasily Sesemann. Central to this dialogue is the establishing of the role of both consciousness and the unconscious (Geiger) for the possibility of objectification and self-awareness and self-understanding. Alessandro Salice continues to introduce readers to different aspects of early phenomenologists’ work, especially the work of Dietrich von Hildebrand, whose is largely read as a Christian philosopher. His early phenomenological work is largely understudied and contains important studies like the text on the metaphysics of community. Salice demonstrates how von Hildebrand and Reinach, two very close friends, understood the status of values. Salice concludes, “…[I]t might be worthwhile to stress one of the main ideas behind Hildebrand’s theory of moral action: in line with Reinach (1989c: 295f ) and Scheler (1954: 267f), and in partial disagreement with Husserl’s theory of evaluation (werten, cf. Hua XXVIII: 343, Hildebrand 1969: 86f, for a discussion of these divergences, cf. Mulligan 2010), for Hildebrand, values are primarily felt (in the specific sense of Wertnehmen or Wertfühlen)—they are not evaluated, not cognized, not meant, not inferred. To provide a gloss of what this means, one could quote Pascal’s well-known adage philosophique “Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point” and refer to Scheler’s penetrative interpretation thereof (1954: 269): it is not true that reasons are only those which are known by the intellect and hence it is not true that the heart simply does not have reasons. Quite the contrary: the rationality the heart relies on is diff erent with respect to that of the intellect. But still, this is a kind of rationality. Actions, Values, and States of Affairs in Hildebrand and Reinach” (277).

In his “Reinach’s Theory of Social Acts,” Arkadiusz Chrudzimski explores the status of social acts in Adolf Reinach’s social and political philosophy. The author maintains that contemporary theories of performativity in thinkers like Austin and Searle differ from Reinach’s theory in that the early phenomenologist wished to maintain the possibility of primitive legal powers that stem from the metaphysics of the person. He also shows that in Reinach we find a difference between performative, conventional normativity and genuine moral normativity. Francesca De Vecchi’s “Edith Stein’s Social Ontology of the State, the Law and Social Acts. An Eidetic Approach” defends the view that Stein’s An Investigation of the State must be read as a genuine social ontology, not only because of the various themes and methods deployed by Stein, but also because one finds in it deep traces of Husserlian mereology and the development of a regional ontology of sociality. One wonders, however, despite de Vecchi’s fine analysis, whether Stein has not slipped in her own political desires into her eidetics of the state. Joona Taipale’s essay, “The Anachronous Other: Empathy and Transference in Early Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis,” brings early phenomenological discussions of empathy into discussion with psychoanalysis and the concept of transference. The author argues that both transference and empathy are modes for understanding the other. Transference complements the notion of empathy and should be included with analyses of empathy in order to better understand the other.

Over the past few years, scholars like Dermot Moran, Dan Zahavi and Anthony Steinbock have turned our attention back to the phenomenology of emotions, especially in thinkers like Scheler, Lipps, Husserl and Stein. Íngrid Vendrell Ferran’s “The Emotions in Early Phenomenology” unpacks for the reader key aspects constitutive of the emotions, including stratification, their qualitative aspects, the foundation of emotion in cognitive acts, intentionality, and the relation between emotion and value. The author also ties the discussion of emotion in early phenomenology to motivation. Laudable in this account of the emotions are the discussions of the work of Kolnai. The discussion of emotions continues with Mariano Crespos’s contribution, titled “Moritz Geiger on the Consciousness of Feelings.” Drawing upon the work of Husserl and Geiger, Crespo shows that feelings can never be fully objectified, making way for what Husserl calls emotive intentionality. The author carefully guides the reader through important distinctions in different forms of perception in order to show how Geiger’s analysis can yield a fully non objectifiable form of the lived experience of of the emotions.

The last three essays of the volume introduce the work of Wilhelm Schapp and Emil Lask, while also taking up the relation between early phenomenology and Neo-Kantianism. Kristjan Laasik’s “Wilhelm Schapp on Seeing Distant Things” argues that the experience of colour adds a certain ordering or form to experience. He concludes, however, “I believe that Wilhelm Schapp is mistaken in his claim that we do not visually perceive distant things due to their lack of requisite color order. Nevertheless, I believe that Schapp’s investigation into what color order, or “form”, is needed in perceptual experience, remains of interest today. While there are doubtless numerous reasons to continue reading Schapp’s work on perceptual experiences, I have specifically argued that some of the same issues and problems that are there in Schapp’s work, produced more than a century ago, are also to be found in Alva Noë’s recent writings, and whoever is interested in the latter has reason to be interested in the former” (411–412).  Timothy Martell’s essay “Cassirer and Husserl on the Phenomenology of Perception” and Bernardo Ainbinder contribution “From Neo-Kantianism to Phenomenology. Emil Lask’s Revision of Transcendental Philosophy: Objectivism, Reduction, Motivation” develop the important relation between early phenomenology and Neo-Kantianism. The former essay, drawing upon the work of Wilhelm Schapp and Ernst Cassirer, argues that the Husserlian concepts of hylé and morphé are significantly challenged by Cassirer’s and Schapp’s discussion of symbolic form. Martell poignantly observes, “Claims about noetic-noematic correlation are supposed to be claims about relations of dependence between mental processes of various kinds, on the one hand, and the objects of those processes (as intended), on the other. If such claims are to be anything other than trivial, then mental processes must have features that can be considered and described apart from their objects. Husserl thinks that mental processes have such features; he calls them the really inherent components of mental processes, as opposed to their intentional components, or noemata. The section of Ideas I in which Husserl differentiates the really inherent parts from the intentional parts of a mental process, §88, lists two kinds of real components: noetic parts and the hyletic data upon which the noetic parts bestow sense. But if Cassirer is correct, then there is no good reason to think that mental processes really have parts of either kind. How, then, can intentional mental processes be described apart from their intentional objects? And if a phenomenological description of a mental process can amount to nothing more than a description of the intentional object of that process, how is it possible to make non-trivial claims about noetic-noematic correlation?” (429). The latter and last essay of the volume shows how the Neo-Kantian philosopher Emil Lask is closer to earl phenomenology than to Neo-Kantianism with regard to certain key structures of consciousness. Ainbinder demonstrates how both the reduction and motivation do not require a transcendental ego to function.

Moran’s and Parker’s special edition of Studia Phaenomenologica is to be lauded, not only for its breadth and depth, but also for its courage. It is not often that one finds volumes devoted to what philosophy traditionally calls, and wrongly so, I might add, “minor figures.” By bringing to the mind of readers the richness of the early phenomenological movement, Moran and Parker present for readers an important moment in the development of phenomenology, making clearer how the paths of the more canonical figures of the Movement, including Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas and Sartre, drew upon the ideas and work of figures discussed in this volume. The volume successfully uncovers the richness of the early phenomenological movement and the spirit of dialogue and inquiry between the community of thinkers either inspired or critical of the Movement. Most importantly, the editors and contributors provide readers with a series of rich philosophical perspectives and insights about a variety of topics, including consciousness, logic, judgement, social ontology, emotions, colour, feelings, the unconscious, etc., all of which are relevant for contemporary discussion and research.