La norme et l'excédent: Étude sur les prémices du transcendantal kantien
Hors phénomène. Essai aux confins de la phénoménalité
Reviewed by: Nikolaas Cassidy-Deketelaere (Catholic University of Paris/Australian Catholic University)
Towards a Critique of Phenomenological Normativity
Emmanuel Falque’s latest book, Hors phénomène, implicitly opens up a tantalising new possibility by way of an alternative philosophical anthropology: namely, a critique of phenomenological normativity (i.e., of what phenomenology traditionally considers to be ‘the norm’ for its analysis), one that is moreover itself phenomenological in nature (i.e., demonstrates how these ‘norms’ belong to the natural attitude and therefore require reduction). It is, as he puts it, “the norm of all phenomenality” that is at issue here, for that norm does not appear to have been phenomenologically secured itself but entails—precisely—an “a priori of phenomenality” (9):
Are there not, to say the least, certain things taken to be self-evident that would rightly be scrutinised today? For nothing guarantees that health should a priori be the norm rather than illness, the event rather than the brute fact, the given rather than resistance, or indeed the other rather than solitude. (13)
Everything phenomenologists tend to think of as ‘normal’, Falque questions on phenomenological grounds: there are experiences, notably those he considers ‘traumatic’, that fall outside phenomenological ‘normality’ and thereby render it inadequate as a comprehensive framework for the analysis of the whole breadth of human experience. By focussing on these traumatic experiences that remain outside the norm of phenomenality, that are extra-phenomenal (hors phénomène), Falque hopes to reinvigorate phenomenology: specifically, Hors phénomène reconstructs the anthropological vision implicit in the phenomenological tradition around these experiences, which define the human being not according to their presupposed opening to the event of appearing but rather as existing in the transformation wrought by the traumatic events that befall them.
However, one wonders whether, in opening up this new and unexplored field of experience, in his correction of phenomenology’s naïve anthropological vision, Falque’s tendency to return immediately to the frameworks just declared inadequate might mean that he ultimately only scratches the surface of his important discovery: what he finds to be outside phenomenality is almost immediately brought back inside of it (albeit under the guise of modification) in the name of maintaining the phenomenological status of the investigation. Indeed, at times, we can even observe this tendency, not just in the progression of the argument, but in the cadence of a single sentence: “Having (…) dismantled the distinction between the normal and the pathological, I am now taking the additional step of asking whether there is not some kind of ‘privilege’ of the pathological over the normal” (309). Yet, what use is it to dismantle—indeed, to deconstruct—a distinction, only to re-establish and maintain it (albeit in the inverse) in a second instance? What Falque describes as taking a step further is only a very hesitant advance, one that perhaps appears all the more insufficient in light of the position from which it rightly retreats after the eloquent diagnosis the book provides. This, I would suggest, is the tension that haunts Falque’s admirable critique, one that perhaps necessarily plagues the phenomenological project as such (as Derrida might insist). With this book, Falque therefore cements his position as one of the most significant phenomenologists working today, whilst also illustrating the inherent difficulty of using phenomenology as an all-encompassing philosophical method.
***
Let us first, however, examine Falque’s interesting proposal. This is Falque’s first book of ‘pure philosophy’, without reference to the Christian theological tradition, yet the aim of his investigation remains as ever primarily anthropological in nature. Specifically, Hors phénomène articulates a phenomenological understanding of the human condition as transformation by rather than openness to experience: confronted with the experience of trauma, as “defeat of my categories, or rather ‘extra-categorial’, I can only reinvent myself differently—not just in the expectation of eventiality or the so-called salvation of alterity, but also in the confidence of a ‘power of the self’, having no other reason to exist than always being already ‘ahead of itself’ or as if ‘metamorphosed’” (8).
After rooting its starting point in the experience of trauma, the book’s first chapter sets out its titular notion of the extra-phenomenal in a programmatic way:
There is the infra-phenomenal (propaedeutic to phenomenality), there is the supra-phenomenal (excessive to phenomenality); and then there is the extra-phenomenal (outside all phenomenality). The first prepares phenomenalisation, the second overflows phenomenalisation (…), and the third is outside phenomenalisation. The ‘extra-phenomenal’ (…) is thus not itself a phenomenon in the ordinary sense, for it destroys (…) all capacity for phenomenalisation (the phenomenalising subject) and any phenomenalised object (the horizon of appearing). In this sense, speaking of the extra-phenomenal, is (…) to open up a ‘new field’—that of what is (now) without ‘field’ or ‘horizon’. (89-90).
The extra-phenomenal, understood as a traumatic experience that is neither infra- nor supra-phenomenal, is thus meant to counter what Falque calls the “a priori of manifestation” (93): namely, the normal course of phenomenological analysis in which anything that is non-phenomenal is immediately understood as either preparing or exceeding phenomenality, instead of being conceived of as properly outside of phenomenality. This diagnosis is indeed eminently correct and the perspective on the phenomenological method it opens extremely valuable: Falque seeks to give an account of the extra-phenomenal in its extra-phenomenality, namely in its deviation from the phenomenological norm of manifestation. On this account, the extra-phenomenal not only falls outside conditions of possible experience, but in being experienced also destroys these conditions and thus the very possibility of subsequent experiences being lived as phenomena. It accomplishes, as Falque puts it, the “annihilation of any transcendental focus of appearing” (63). Nevertheless, he insists, this account of what remains outside phenomenalisation is nevertheless itself a phenomenological one: a “(phenomenological) essay at the confines of phenomenality,” namely the exercise of “phenomenological scrutiny at the limits of phenomenology itself” (18). Yet, one can be forgiven for thinking that this is a contradiction in terms: at no point does Falque explain in what sense an extra-phenomenal experience can still be addressed by an intra-phenomenological discourse, which constitutes the necessary tension that haunts both this book in particular and phenomenology in general.
In that regard, we can perhaps immediately ask the perfectly reasonable question: why should infra and supra not simply be understood as two different ways of being extra? Falque gives a very eloquent descriptions of the various kinds of infra- and supra-phenomenality known to the phenomenological tradition (§§12-13), but never really explains quite how they differ from the negatively defined regime of extra-phenomenality. To his credit, Falque does provide examples of extra-phenomenal experiences that would constitute a trauma: illness (§1), separation (§2), death of a child (§3), natural disaster (§4), and the pandemic (§5). Here, too, we can ask: the death of a child is undoubtedly a traumatic experience that leaves its mark on whomever undergoes it (thus making it extra-phenomenal), but does it not equally and at the same time exceed any objective representation (thus being supra-phenomenal) and determine how other children appear subsequently (thus being infra-phenomenal)? The book never becomes specific enough to provide us with the material to verify or falsify its presupposition: that phenomenology can consider the extra-phenomenal as such without relating it to phenomenality as either infra- or supra-phenomenal.
It is therefore an abstract phenomenological framework that the book offers us, yet one that is undeniably ground-breaking. Having defined the extra-phenomenal programmatically in the first chapter, the subsequent two provide a detailed account of what Falque understands to be its mode of phenomenality—or, rather, extra-phenomenality. The second chapter, over and against the phenomenological norm of signification or givenness, conceives of it in terms of resistance: the “phenomenon” is “no longer what manifests itself or appears as such, but what resists, opposes, holds back, or simply ‘exists’, or even better ‘insists’” (123). Falque explains:
We no longer have to do here with phenomenalisation (phainesthai), quite the contrary. Rather, we stand at the limits or at the confines of phenomenology, as soon as the very idea of appearing does not or no longer appear. The discourse on the conditions of appearing finds itself disqualified here, as soon as the ‘resisting presence’ opposes itself to it in every way and even destroys the very conditions of its possibility. (122)
Here, Falque indeed identifies a radically new field of phenomenality and rightly insists that it is deserving of its own account. Moreover, he provides that account in the third chapter, which deals with the way in which the extra-phenomenal destroys the conditions of possible experience, notably in reference to a curious remark by Kant in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason about cinnabar (the main mineral ore of mercury): if cinnabar were sometimes red and sometimes black, sometimes heavy and sometimes light—i.e., if nature were not subject to the same normative rules as the association of ideas by human reason—, then the phenomenalising imagination would stumble before the sensational manifold that it offers. In thus in contemplating the possibility of the breakdown of the transcendental imagination, of its act of synthesis being rendered impossible by the very experience whose empirical manifold is subject to it, that Kant adumbrates the extra-phenomenal according to Falque: “Cinnabar not only contests the confrontation of opposites within the object (red and black, light and heavy), but glimpses this possible and ‘unimaginable’ decomposition of the object, even of the subject itself, in an experience where it loses even its identity” (209). In other words, the extra-phenomenal denotes the breakdown of the transcendental schematism: an experience that deviates from the norm, whose empirical manifold escapes the reach of the rule according to which it is associated with pure concepts—and thus, ultimately, resists constitution into an object or phenomenon.
The final three chapters develop the consequences of the extra-phenomenal thus conceived for the broader phenomenological method. Chapter 4 deals with the subject as self: far from being given to the subject by another as one would normally expect, ipseity exists in a constant process of modification or transformation by the traumatic experiences that befall me. Chapter 5 considers this transformation on the existential level: crisis, whose experience is the extra-phenomenal trauma, constitutes being-there ontologically, because it is the experience whose experiencing accomplishes transformation. Here, Falque therefore formulates a new principle of phenomenality according to which “so much exception, so much modification” (299): the experience that is experienced outside—and not just below or beyond—the conditions of possible experience (the trauma of crisis), accomplishes a modification or transformation of possibility itself (the being of Dasein). As Falque puts it: “The exception (within the phenomenalised horizon) and modification (of the phenomenalising subject) have in common that they go hand in hand in an all the more transformed being-oneself in one’s trauma, to the point that one loses any idea of what was once one’s identity” (302). Chapter 6 then frames the extra-phenomenal according to its most fundamental phenomenological contribution: consciousness is not originally characterised by intersubjectivity, but by a solitude that the phenomenological tradition considers to be abnormal—precisely because trauma does not let itself be shared (e.g., despite all the care I may receive, no one can suffer illness on my behalf). “Trauma,” Falque insists, “first of all and always returns me to this original solitude” (393).
***
The book is perhaps best understood as the first step in a bold and ambitious new programme in which the human condition as redefined phenomenologically as transformation rather than opening. It poses a radical challenge to the field in an attempt to disrupt the normal procedure of phenomenology by asking a crucial question with which every phenomenologist should reckon: how do we account phenomenologically for what remains persistently outside phenomenalisation? Falque’s answer is provided by his anthropological account of the transformation accomplished by the extra-phenomenal: “an experience becomes such that it simultaneously ruins the phenomenalising subject and the phenomenalised horizon. In light of the trauma, life is no longer the same” (12). The book’s main and impressive achievement is thus the opening up of this field of extra-phenomenality.
Yet, in achieving this result, perhaps the main question Falque leaves unanswered is that of the status of his investigation: in what sense are these “meditations” still truly phenomenological? When challenged on this front, Falque is inclined to respond that, ultimately, this question of jargon matters little. However, this response confirms and highlights a certain curious irony present throughout the book: in abandoning the Christian theological tradition as philosophical point of reference, Falque nevertheless for the first time becomes fundamentally complicit with phenomenology’s theological turn. I do not mean that Falque thereby abandons phenomenology in favour of theology, but rather that he nevertheless—and with good reason—leaves phenomenology proper behind in his attempt to articulate an “extra-horizontal” phenomenology (302). In a way, this book reverses the patricide Falque so eloquently committed against Jean-Luc Marion (his onetime doctoral supervisor): whereas Falque once defended the existential conditions within which givenness is received as forming the horizon for its phenomenalisation, precisely against Marion for whom these only come into view to the extent that they are exceeded by givenness; we now find Falque suggesting that the extra-phenomenal destroys the horizon against which phenomenalisation takes place along with the subject who projects it. To better understand the unexpected turn Falque takes here, we may perhaps refer to the famous debate Marion had with his own teacher:
Marion. I do not recognise the ‘as such’ as mine. What I have said, precisely in that horizon, is that the question of the claim to the ‘as such’ has no right to be made.
Derrida. Then would you disassociate what you call phenomenology from the authority of the as such? If you do that, it would be the first heresy in phenomenology. Phenomenology without as such!
Marion. Not my first, no! I said to Levinas some years ago that in fact the last step for a real phenomenology would be to give up the concept of horizon. Levinas answered my immediately: ‘Without horizon there is no phenomenology.’ And I boldly assume he was wrong.
Derrida. I am also for the suspension of the horizon, but, for that very reason, by saying so, I am not a phenomenologist anymore. I am very true to phenomenology, but when I agree on the necessity of suspending the horizon, then I am no longer a phenomenologists. So the problem remains if you give up the as such, what is the use that you can make of the word phenomenology.
Marion. (…) As to the question of whether what I am doing, or what Derrida is doing, is within phenomenology or beyond, it does not seem to me very important. (…) Whether Étant donné is still phenomenology we shall see ten years later. But now it is not very important. I claim that I am still faithful to phenomenology (…). But this will be an issue, if any, for our successors.[1]
The debate around Étant donné, which could perhaps be repeated with Hors phénomène, is wrapped up in this brief exchange. Derrida is eminently correct, not only in his insistence that there is no phenomenology without a horizon (i.e., for then there would be no more phenomenon understood as the appearing of things as what they are to intentional consciousness), but also that it is out of a decidedly phenomenology exigency that he sees himself necessitated to go outside phenomenology proper. For now, however, it suffices to note that at this instance, suddenly, we could replace Marion in this conversation with his student Falque. Indeed, the critique that was once levelled against Marion, can perhaps now also be levelled against Falque: in their respective attempts at somehow cancelling out the horizon (whether by going beyond or outside of it), and their joint lack of interest in actually considering the question of the phenomenological nature of their proposal, they both end producing a discourse that is non-phenomenological or even extra-phenomenological—but, as Derrida insist, therefore no less true to phenomenology. Having dealt with Falque’s attempt at cancelling out the horizon higher up, let us now consider his lack of interest in the question of whether his discourse is phenomenological in nature or not, and what it may be instead if not phenomenological.
Revisiting Falque’s treatment of Kant’s reference to cinnabar—a highly sophisticated discussion that constitutes one of the book’s highlights—, we can directly observe his reluctance to properly engage with the question of the nature of his investigation into the extra-phenomenal. With much fanfare, Falque notes that Kant omits the reference to cinnabar from the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason: “Kant is frightened by the ‘conceptual monster’ he has created, in that the mere hypothesis of ‘cinnabar’ is enough to ‘take out’, even ‘blow up’, any principle of unification” (210). On Falque’s reading, Kant realised he had hit upon a notion that threatened the entire edifice of the critique and therefore quickly swept it under the rug. Yet, one wonders whether it is not just as likely that Kant—the first to articulate a transcendental theory of objective experience and therefore perhaps the original phenomenologist—omitted the reference to cinnabar, not because he worried that it risked undoing the very framework he had set out, but rather because he realised that there is nothing that can responsibly be said about this matter from within said framework? In other words, perhaps the first Critique—rightly—avoids further discussion of cinnabar, understood as the experience that destroys the transcendental schematism, precisely because its discussion of experience takes places on the basis of that transcendental schematism. An altogether different discourse would therefore be needed to address the experience Falque focusses on: if Kant says nothing more about cinnabar, perhaps that is because there is nothing more to say within the confines of transcendental-phenomenological investigation. This does not mean that there is nothing further left to say at all, but simply that it cannot be said within the register of phenomenology, that a different discourse is needed.
This is, ultimately, the paradox on which Derrida hits in his own critique of phenomenology and highlights again in his conversation with Marion: the questions that are most fundamental to phenomenology—whether that of presence (Derrida), givenness (Marion), or the confines of phenomenality (Falque)—, require us to leave phenomenological discourse behind in order to consider phenomenology itself from a position and in an investigation that is itself extra-phenomenological. In other words, if Falque wants to submit “the norm of all phenomenality” (13) to scrutiny by way of the valuable notion of the extra-phenomenal; he must also make good on his promise by facing up to the fact that, insofar as it succeeds in moving outside phenomenality (i.e., phenomenological normativity), this scrutiny necessarily takes place outside the phenomenological method. If this were not the case, if the account of the extra-phenomenal were itself an intra-phenomenological enterprise, then the critique of phenomenological normativity would in turn itself be subject to that normativity—leading to precisely the tension that Derrida thematises by way of deconstruction. Falque’s continual attempt at returning to the framework of phenomenology (its normativity) hampers his excellent account of the extra-phenomenal as destroying that very framework (its existence outside-the-norm). At times, we can literally see him struggling with this tension:
So much exception, so much modification: Kant’s hapax (cinnabar) thus becomes the rule here (…); what had thus been the ‘exception’ in a well-ordered phenomenality (…), becomes the norm for what precisely has no norm—the ‘extra-categorial’ of what has no or no longer categories, or the impossibility of all possibility. (302)
Falque’s advance thus proceeds with a certain amount of hesitation: he discovers that there are experiences that remain outside phenomenality, due to the fact that phenomenology operates certain norms that are themselves phenomenologically illegitimate (insofar as this normativity cannot be reduced to actual experience); but then immediately brings those experiences inside of phenomenality, and thus within the bounds of normativity, by turning the exception into the new phenomenological norm. Falque therefore perhaps also finds himself in the position he ascribes to Kant, namely a reluctance to fully exploit his valuable discovery of the extra-phenomenal since it would necessitate abandoning phenomenological discourse altogether—as Derrida already adumbrated: every possible “principle of phenomenology” requires deconstruction insofar as it excludes those experiences that make exception to it, that do not conform to the phenomenological norm, because these principles constitute a priori restrictions of the field of experience that are themselves phenomenologically illegitimate. In other words, what drove Derrida outside phenomenology was precisely what he learned on the inside: the phenomenological ambition is descriptive, not normative; but as scientific description, actual phenomenological analysis exists in bringing experience within a particular normative framework of transcendental rules that govern the intentional constitution of objects (i.e., the “principle of phenomenality”). However, Falque apparently refuses to abandon the discursive style of phenomenology, i.e. the description of experience in its essence by subjecting it to transcendental rules or normative principles; even though his book—rightly—proposes a critique of that normativity in response to a distinctly phenomenological exigency. This is therefore the true result of Hors phénomène (as of Étant donné, though in a very different way): there are experiences that persistently remain extra-phenomenal and therefore also require an analysis that is itself extra-phenomenological; phenomenology may be a perfectly valid way of analysing experience, but it is not exhaustive. Indeed, how else are we to understand what Falque calls the “night of phenomenology” and describes as “not the givenness of the phenomenon of givenness or non-givenness (the phenomenology of the night), but the non-givenness of givenness itself—not by privation, nor by excess, but only by negation” (89)—the negation of what if not phenomenology itself?
If Derrida moves outside phenomenology from within it so as to consider the infra-phenomenal (the deconstruction of presence), and Marion moves outside phenomenology from within it in order to consider the supra-phenomenal (the theology of revelation); then Falque’s book nevertheless sketches a similar way out of phenomenology for him: the psychoanalysis of trauma. After all, what is an investigation that operates “following Freud” (23) and is “built upon the basis of the traumatic” (127), if not psychoanalysis? Indeed, a psychoanalytic lens allows us to better appreciate what Falque means by the extra-phenomenal as exemplified by the experience of trauma:
A nothing that is not nothing, this is what makes up the ‘resistance of presence’—(…) not in that the Id takes refuge in invisibility (a kind of negative theology (…)), but in that its obscurity or thickness is such that it demonstrates impenetrability. (117)
In this sense, “so much exception, so much modification” (299) is perhaps best understood, not as a principle of phenomenality (for nothing appears in the exception), but rather as a principle of psychoanalysis (or, perhaps, of ‘traumaticity’): the traumatic experience is precisely the experience that is not phenomenalised, that is not lived-through in experience; but rather the experience that denotes “any excitations from outside which are powerful enough to break through the protective shield” of consciousness (exception) and thereby can “provoke a disturbance on a large scale in the functioning of the organism’s energy” (modification), ultimately resulting in “the problem of mastering the amounts of stimulus which have broken in and of binding them (…) so that they can be disposed of” (destruction).[2]
Curiously, this path is arguably already forged by Falque’s book, but he appears reluctant to actually walk it by confessing his ultimately psychoanalytical perspective. This perspective, nevertheless, provides him with precisely what he needs in order to execute his critique of phenomenological normativity: a discourse that does not operate according to norms, or at least not according to the same norms as those of phenomenology, and is thus able to provide a critique of phenomenological normativity from outside the norm of phenomenality. Yet, such is the necessary tension that haunts Falque’s book in particular and all phenomenology in general, this critique of normativity from outside of it is an inherently phenomenological gesture: it goes by the name of reduction and extends to principles or norms as it does to judgments. We should therefore understand the present book alongside those other unorthodox yet major works of phenomenology that forge a path outside phenomenology from within in order to remain true to phenomenology, as Derrida put it, by justice to the full range of possible experience: Derrida’s Le toucher provides an extra-phenomenology of touch (deconstruction), Marion’s Étant donné provides an extra-phenomenology of revelation (theology), Falque’s Hors phénomène provides an extra-phenomenology of trauma (psychoanalysis)—each time showing how phenomenology can only be actual when confronted with and transformed by non-phenomenology.
[1] John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon (Eds.). 1999. God, the Gift, and Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 66-68.
[2] Sigmund Freud. 1961. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Translated by James Strachey. London: W.W. Norton & Company, 23-24.
Contemporary Phenomenologies of Normativity: Norms, Goals, and Values
Normativité et déconstruction: Digression dans les Leçons sur l’éthique de 1920
Reviewed by: Veronica Cibotaru (Paris-Sorbonne University)
Marie-Hélène Desmeules et Julien Farges présentent dans cet ouvrage pour la première fois une traduction française d’une partie du volume 37 des Husserliana qui reste jusqu’à présent non traduit en français. Ce volume contient des leçons sur l’éthique que Husserl donna entre 1920 et 1924. Toutefois cette traduction présente une partie de ces cours qui ne porte pas directement sur la question de l’éthique. C’est pourquoi précisément elle s’intitule Digression dans les Leçons (Exkurs in der Vorlesung). Cette version française traduit l’intégralité de la Digression, une partie des appendices ainsi qu’un choix de variantes.
Les traducteurs mettent au jour dans leur introduction deux thèmes fondamentaux qui structurent cette Digression, à savoir la normativité et la déconstruction. La question de la normativité est mue par la distinction opérée par Husserl entre les sciences d’objets (Sachwissenschaften) et les sciences normatives (Normwissenschaften), distinction dont le point culminant consiste selon les traducteurs dans l’élucidation phénoménologique du terme «évaluer» (werten). En effet, cette élucidation permet de démontrer au § 13 que les sciences normatives et l’éthique ne sont pas équivalentes.
Comme le montrent les traducteurs il y a l’œuvre dans ce texte de Husserl une réflexion sur la possibilité des sciences normatives, possibilité qui se conçoit par la structure intentionnelle de la conscience. Par là-même la normativité devient dans ce texte un objet d’étude en soi et n’est plus considérée à l’aune d’une simple application des sciences théoriques, approche que Husserl adopte dans le premier tome des Recherches logiques, Prolégomènes à la logique pure. Plus précisément, ce lien intrinsèque entre la normativité et la structure intentionnelle de la conscience se conçoit comme une relation intrinsèque entre le sens et l’objet visé, relation qui n’est pas réelle mais intentionnelle. En effet, cette relation implique une distance entre le sens et l’objet visé, ce qui fait que le sens subsiste même lorsque l’objet visé n’existe pas. Or c’est précisément cette distance qui fonde la possibilité des jugements normatifs puisqu’ils portent justement sur les visées de sens. Sur ce point l’explication des traducteurs est particulièrement éclairante : «s’il y a un sens à juger une visée de sens à l’aune de sa conformité à l’objet auquel elle se rapporte, c’est justement parce que la possibilité subsiste que l’objet ne soit pas tel qu’il est visé».[1]
A partir de cette compréhension de la normativité l’on peut définir les sciences normatives comme des sciences qui reposent sur le rapport entre le sens et l’intuition. Comme le remarquent les traducteurs l’on retrouve cette compréhension des sciences normatives déjà dans les Ideen I, § 136-153. A partir de cette définition Husserl réinterprète la distinction entre les sciences de la nature et les sciences de l’esprit puisque seules les sciences de l’esprit admettent une orientation normative, les sciences de la nature ne pouvant avoir qu’une orientation objective.
Dans leur introduction Marie-Hélène Desmeules et Julien Farges offrent également une élucidation intéressante du rapport entre l’éthique et la normativité tel qu’il apparaît dans la Digression. Ils insistent sur l’idée développée par Husserl selon laquelle la valeur et la vérité ne sont pas équivalentes, ce qui permet justement de distinguer l’éthique de la normativité en fonction de ces concepts opérants qui leur sont respectivement propres. En effet, «la vérité ne « s’apprécie » (…) pas comme on apprécie la teneur affective et axiologique d’un objet ; elle consiste à vérifier que le sens est ajusté à l’attestation intuitive ».[2] La vérité ne présuppose donc pas intrinsèquement un acte d’évaluation, raison pour laquelle elle est une catégorie qui n’est pas équivalente à la valeur. Par conséquent, l’éthique et les sciences normatives ne sont pas équivalentes. De façon très intéressante les traducteurs en concluent que la notion d’une éthique normative n’est pas pléonastique.[3] Bien au contraire il est possible de concevoir également une éthique objective sur le modèle des Leçons sur l’éthique de 1914 de Husserl.
Toutefois. malgré cette distinction claire et nette entre l’éthique et les sciences normatives sur laquelle insistent les traducteurs force est de constater l’idée paradoxale soutenue par Husserl au § 13 de la Digression selon laquelle « l’éthique est de fait, parmi toutes les sciences normatives, la reine des sciences »[4], semblant ainsi soutenir que l’éthique est bel et bien une science normative. Husserl justifie cette idée en affirmant que l’éthique « présuppose toutes les autres sciences et qu’elle les absorbe finalement en elle, et (…) qu’elle prête finalement à toutes les sciences une fonction éthique.»[5] Marie-Hélène Desmeules et Julien Farges n’occultent pas dans leur introduction cette idée paradoxale.. Toutefois cette idée ne contredit pas à leurs yeux la distinction husserlienne entre l’éthique et les sciences normatives, étant bien plutôt un geste rhétorique censé exprimer l’idée selon laquelle l’éthique « transformerait en devoir pratique la normativité intentionnelle étudiée dans ces sciences »[6], c’est-à-dire dans les sciences normatives.
Il aurait été sans doute intéressant de mentionner le contexte polémique au sein duquel Husserl élabore la distinction entre la valeur et la vérité et par là-même aussi entre la valeur et la norme. En effet, Husserl développe cette distinction contre la pensée de Windelband et de son école à laquelle il reproche de confondre « l’acte d’« évaluer » au sens affectif avec l’acte de « normer ». »[7] Il est vrai toutefois que Husserl se limite à évoquer ce point, ce qui explique sans doute son omission dans l’introduction.
Le deuxième volet de la Digression déploie ce que les traducteurs considèrent comme étant la « première (et quasiment la seule) exposition circonstanciée de la méthode de la déconstruction (Abbau) »[8] sous la plume de Husserl, méthode qui sera reprise par Heidegger et Derrida entre autres. L’exposition détaillée de cette méthode ne se retrouve selon les traducteurs que dans un seul autre texte de Husserl, datant de 1926, édité dans le volume 39 des Husserliana.
La méthode de la déconstruction est étroitement liée selon les traducteurs à la dimension génétique de la phénoménologie dont l’objet d’étude est « l’histoire des objets dans la conscience et, de façon corrélative, l’auto-constitution « historique » de la subjectivité constituante elle-même ».[9] L’objet de la phénoménologie génétique est donc le pouvoir constituant de la passivité à la fois primaire et secondaire. Or au sein de la passivité secondaire s’édifie la sédimentation que les traducteurs définissent de façon très éclairante comme un « phénomène de modification continue en vertu duquel les acquis des visées actives de la conscience ne disparaissent pas quand ces visées cessent d’être actuelles mais persistent à l’arrière-plan de la conscience sur un mode rétentionnel, comme des dépôts d’activités antérieures prêtes à être réactivés ».[10]
Or, la méthode de la déconstruction consiste justement en une procédure inverse, à savoir en une procédure de dépouillement (entkleiden, abtun) ou encore de désédimentation, terme que les commentateurs reprennent à Jean-François Courtine et à Dominique Pradelle.[11] C’est une procédure de clarification du sens qui consiste à dépouiller les objets du monde de leurs couches de signification avec lesquelles ils nous sont toujours prédonnés. Par là-même il s’agit de mettre au jour un « niveau originaire d’expérience »[12] au sein duquel se constituent les prédicats de signification.
Une telle procédure de déconstruction aboutit à un monde d’objets in-signifiants, dont on ne peut jamais faire l’expérience et que Husserl nomme monde de l’expérience pure. Comme le soutiennent Marie-Hélène Desmeules et Julien Farges, le fondateur de la phénoménologie reprend consciemment ce terme au philosophe empiriste et positiviste Richard Avenarius, puisque dès le début des années 1910 Husserl met en avant l’affinité qui existe entre sa phénoménologie et la pensée d’Avenarius, notamment dans des cours réunis dans le volume 13 des Husserliana. Ici il aurait été sans doute intéressant de remarquer que l’on retrouve cette notion d’expérience pure également au sein de la pensée de William James que Husserl n’était pas sans connaître.
De façon très intéressante les traducteurs attirent notre attention sur le fait que la manière dont Husserl utilise la notion d’expérience pure évolue au cours de ses écrits. En effet, si dans la Digression le monde de l’expérience pure s’oppose au monde de la vie, dans les textes ultérieurs regroupés dans les volumes 6, 9 et 32 des Husserliana le monde de l’expérience pure est tout au contraire identifié au monde de la vie.
Pour finir, les traducteurs évoquent la question du sens de ce procédé de déconstruction, qui consiste selon leur formule en une « reconstruction philosophique du monde ».[13] Plus précisément cette reconstruction peut avoir un double sens, à savoir celui d’une restitution du monde de l’expérience dans sa concrétude ou celui d’une construction d’un monde ambiant conforme aux normes, d’un nouveau monde vrai corrélatif d’une humanité vraie. Cela permet finalement de montrer le lien intime qui relie la question de la déconstruction à celle de la normativité dans la Digression. En effet, «la méthode de déconstruction sert l’idée de normativité telle que Husserl l’a élaborée dans la première partie de la Digression ».[14]
Plusieurs écrits ont été consacrés au sein de la littérature contemporaine à la question de la normativité d’une perspective husserlienne et plus généralement phénoménologique.[15] En ce sens cette traduction ainsi que son introduction permettent d’approfondir une question actuelle et importante pour la recherche phénoménologique contemporaine. Plus particulièrement, la distinction que proposent Marie-Hélène Desmeules et Julien Farges entre les notions de normativité, de normalité et d’optimalité est particulièrement féconde pour nuancer les lignes de recherche contemporaines autour de cette question. Selon les définitions proposées par les traducteurs, la notion de normativité désigne la rectitude en fonction d’une norme, la notion de normalité indique ce qui devrait normalement être notre perception de l’objet tandis que la notion d’optimalité définit ce qui devrait être idéalement notre perception de l’objet.[16] Ces distinctions conceptuelles permettent aux traducteurs de démarquer l’objet propre de recherche de la Digression, à savoir la normativité, de l’objet de recherche de plusieurs études phénoménologiques contemporaines qui n’est pas la normativité telle que l’entend Husserl dans la Digression mais la normalité et l’optimalité.
En conclusion, nous saluons cette première traduction française de la Digression dans les Leçons sur l’éthique de 1920 ainsi que les éclaircissements apportés par les traducteurs qui sont à la fois très utiles pour une meilleure compréhension des enjeux de ce texte mais aussi féconds pour la recherche phénoménologique contemporaine.
[1] Edmund Husserl, Normativité et déconstruction, Digression dans les Leçons sur l’éthique de 1920, trad. fr. par Marie-Hélène Desmeules et Julien Farges, Paris, Vrin, 2020, p. 16.
[2] Ibid,, p. 31.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid., p. 151 / Hua 37, 319.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid., p. 33.
[7] Ibid,, p. 146 / Hua 37, 316.
[8] Ibid., p. 36.
[9] Ibid., p. 37.
[10] Ibid., p. 38.
[11] Cf. Jean-François Courtine, « Réduction, construction, destruction. D’un dialogue à trois : Natorp, Husserl, Heidegger » dans Archéo-Logique. Husserl, Heidegger, Patočka, Paris, P.U.F., 2013, p. 35 ; Dominique Pradelle, Généalogie de la raison, Essai sur l’historicité du sujet transcendantal de Kant à Heidegger, Paris, P.U.F., 2013, p. 309.
[12] Edmund Husserl, Normativité et déconstruction, Digression dans les Leçons sur l’éthique de 1920, p. 42.
[13] Ibid., p. 47.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Voir par exemple Steven Crowell, Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013 ; Maxime Doyon et Thiemo Breyer (éd.), Normativity in Perception, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015 ; Matthew Burch, Jack Marsh et Irene McMullin, Normativity, Meaning, and the Promise of Phenomenology, New York, Routledge, 2019.
[16] Edmund Husserl, Normativité et déconstruction, Digression dans les Leçons sur l’éthique de 1920, p. 24.
Concepts of Normativity: Kant or Hegel?
Reviewed by: Andrew James Komasinski (Hokkaido University of Education)
Introduction
Despite facing almost immediate criticism from Hegel, Kant’s view of normativity has greatly influenced contemporary value theory. This volume is the fruit of a 2017 conference at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam by the same name that sought to bring the two conflicting accounts into dialogue (1). There are three general points worth making before addressing the articles themselves.
First, the articles in this volume use diverse sigla. Some articles, such as Christian Hoffman’s, refer to the Elements of the Philosophy of Right as PR and other articles, such as Jiří Chotaš’s, refer to it as RpH (9, 164). The Phenomenology of Spirit similarly receives the sigla PhG from Arthur Kok, Christian Schmidt, and Alberto L. Siani whereas Martin Bunte and Tereza Matějčková inter alia use PS (47, 147, 244, 62, 199). Similar article by article variation occurs with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason with Martin Bunte using CPR but Paul Cobben using KdrV (66, 27). While each article is internally consistent, this and rehearsal of the same parts of Hegel make the book feels more like a collection than a whole. For consistency’s sake, I will use PR, PhG, CPR, along with EPS for Encyclopedia of the Philosophical System and Religion for Kant’s Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone consistently in this review.
Second, different authors took different approaches to the use of German. Some authors use the German directly for the major parts of PR: Abstrakt Recht, Moralität, and Sittlichkeit; others translate them as Abstract Right, Morality, and, Ethical Life (Battistoni at 121, 124; Chotaš at 164). I will consistently use the English throughout. For terms such as Bildung where the translation choices are substantive, this is more understandable. Hoffman glosses it as “education” and then uses “education” after that (4,12). Krijnen supplies the possible translation “education of the understanding and applicable skills” but generally sticks to Bildung (115-117). Siani does the same (250). Chotaš and Zabel call it development (171, 181). These differences between articles will not impede specialists but make it challenging to read the work as a united whole.
Third, the title of the volume suggests proponents of both Kant and Hegel, but true to its origin at a conference from a network called “Hegel’s Relevance,” most authors are more sympathetic to Hegel than to Kant (1). Some contributions write as if Hegel’s critiques of Kant were definitive and Hegel’s positions decisive. Having more full-throated defenses of Kantian’s normativity and more engagement between the two as competing contemporary interpretations would have strengthened the volume. Nevertheless, the volume contributes importantly to our understanding of ethics and social philosophy in Hegel and German Idealism.
Contributions
Christian Hoffman’s article provides an excellent introduction to the relation between Bildung and holism in Hegel and how this differentiates him from Kant. Hoffman traces Hegel’s attempt to accomplish monistically and holistically what Kant tried to achieve dualistically for reason and freedom. (9-10, 13). Hoffman identifies Bildung “education” in PhG, as both breaking the natural harmony and building “a new and more differentiated form of the whole” (12). Hoffman also highlights the senses in which Hegel’s unity is active rather than a static thing (14).
Turning to the system in the EPS and the PR, Hoffman first emphasizes how this holistic process is not just knowing but self-knowing (14-17). Hoffman joins to this sense in which Hegel’s holistic account refers to a common realm of shared freedom (19-22). Finally, Hoffman notes the relation between the Hegelian holism and its Aristotelian ancestry (inter alia 22-23). Hoffman addresses Kant’s idea of normativity as a dualistic account Hegel incorporates insights from but then supersedes.
Paul Cobben’s article progresses from problematic Humean impressions to dualistic Kantian intuitions to Hegel’s monistic resolution. First, Cobben develops how Kant’s intuitions solve the Humean predicament where impressions are both external and mind. Kant solves this problem in his apparatus of manifolds, imagination, and categories, which makes impressions mental and things-in-themselves external (27). Through this, Kant equates propositional and material truth when material truth is mediated by the Kantian apparatus (27-31). Cobben, following Gadamer, reads PhG’s first chapter as tracing out the Kantian account but rejecting its account of material truth (31-33). Cobben remarks that Hegel has demonstrated “The apperception of the Perception cannot justify how the manifold of intuitions can be connected into an objective material truth” (34). Unfortunately, the arguments substantiating this claim and the claims about Hegel’s “first truth of the understanding” and “second truth of the understanding” were truncated and hard to follow (34-35).
Cobben believes that understanding requires attending to the subject as conscious (36). Cobben sees PhG’s account of desire’s inability to achieve unity with its object, because it continues to want precisely what it is not as culminating in the realization that the perceived world that individual consciousness finds itself in is not merely its own but rather a shared world (38-39). Cobben joins to this an interpretation of the lord/bondsman dialectic which understands it as involving the death of individual consciousness and its sublimation into institutional consciousness (40-42). Cobben’s final claim is that Kant’s solution fails and that Hegel develops an account that culminates in the resolution of the lord/bondsman dialectic (43). Most of the second half seemed like it would benefit from more engagement with contemporary defenses of understanding along Kantian lines and other interpretations of the lord/bondsman dialectics.
Arthur Kok’s article is a welcome addition to the discussion of Hegel’s concept of God and its relation to Kant’s religion. Kok’s article also looks at Kant’s dualism and Hegel’s attempt to overcome it in PhG, insofar as Kant’s moral philosophy required a religion with a God as the projected lawgiver of reason to realize the good (46-47). Kok identifies this argument in PhG both specifically and within Spirit’s dialectical search for an adequate relation between freedom and moral duty (47-48). This activity culminates in the realization that the source of moral value in religion is Spirit moving in the community (49). Here, more interaction with Kant’s Religion could have explained why Kok believes Kant’s account of the rational community as the arbiter of moral value is inadequate.
Kok also locates a similar dynamic in Hegel’s account of revealed religion, i.e. Christianity, situating it as the dialectical outcome of an unhappy consciousness where freedom sees the inadequacy of an external law (50-53). This leads to the incarnation as the simultaneous “activity of the Self that results in the appearance of the Self without the Self becoming something other than itself” and thus resolves this tension in religion by (1) being “both distinct and non-distinct from those who identify him as the God-man,” (2) representing “the self-realization of spirit,” and (3) establishing “the presence of the divine in this world” to overcome suffering (55). Kok then articulates this as Hegel’s answer to the problem of evil where human activity can free itself from evil (56). Joined to the resurrection (and ascension), Hegel makes community that remembers the God-man the true reconciliation of spirit in ethics (57).
Martin Bunte’s article looks at Hegel’s formalism objection against Kant’s ethics from PhG 257 (A.V. Miller pagination) and the problem of testing but not giving laws (62). Bunte believes Kant’s ethics suffers from a tautology because the a priori nature of Kant’s ethics interacts with the autonomy of the will to produce moral laws that are “conceivable only under the reservation of the heteronomy of what is willed” (63). Bunte explains his version of the objection in a single sentence: “If freedom as spontaneity or autonomy is to be the essential reason for the determination of will, then it must be able to refer to rules or laws from the position of legislator” (64).
Bunte argues that a successful Kantian defense against this objection must also achieve a unity for practical reason like the one for theoretical reason (65). Since the two domains are both domains of reason, Bunte notes that they must both find their origins in the spontaneity of the will as the “unconditioned condition” (65). Bunte illustrates this with the categories of the understanding in the realm of theoretical reason (66). Bunte analogizes that Kantian practical reason must be premised on the idea that the moral self gives itself its rules (66). Bunte here distinguishes the analogical cases by arguing that reason’s theoretical use refers to the laws of nature but that its practical use must refer to laws of freedom, which means laws that it must give itself (67). While Bunte largely thinks that Hegel’s critique rings true, he believes Kant succeeds in answering one part of Hegel’s objection: the moral imperative is something the self commands to itself as a demand of reason and that he develops such an account in Religion (70).
Bunte believes both that the formalism objection applies to Kant and succeeds convinced the formalism objection succeeds. There is a large amount of literature on this that finds things murkier: there is disagreement as to both what the objection is, to whether it misses the mark, and to whether Kantians have resources to resist or overcome it (See for instance Hoy 1989, Freyenhagen 2012, and Stern 2012).
Unlike many articles in this volume, Max Gottschlich’s article focused on identifying which logic is best for normativity: “formal logic” which he identifies with pre-Kantian order of being thinking (74-75), “transcendental logic” which he identifies with Kant (75-81), or “dialectical logic” which he identifies with Hegel (81-86). Gottschlich dismisses formal logic as often used but not useful for considering normativity, because it cannot capture the paradox of determiner and determined.
Transcendental logic, in contrast, focuses on the paradox of determiner and determined and identifies the limits of what can be said and is naturally reflexive (76). In Kant, this accomplishes “self-fulfilling self-relation” (77, emphasis in original). Through this, Gottschlich states that transcendental logic identifies the role of values and norms in “settings” (77). Gottschlich mentions in passing that he thinks the formalism objection is wrong (in opposition to several articles in this volume), that Kant and Hegel agree that value must begin in reason, and that Hegel’s true objection is to the absolute form, rather than developmental growth, that births duties (80).
Gottschlich sees dialectical logic’s acceptance of contradiction as its genius (82). In a clearer formulation, the point is that “the self only maintains itself by losing itself” – in other words when it recognizes its mediation as dynamic act rather than absolute (84). Gottschlich then turns to how norms are produced in the Hegelian account (86). While Kant and Hegel both make goal-setting a sign of rationality, Gottschlich sees Hegel’s version as more advanced because it abstracts from the abstracting in the execution of a “concrete universal” (86-87). Gottschlich next looks at poiesis (production) where Kant’s form is too abstract to derive anything but an abstract universal (90). Only in Hegel, he maintains, can we find subjectivity (a subjectivity beyond the self) as the goal (91). At many points, Hegel’s critiques seemed to be accepted uncritically and would have benefited from more interaction with defenses of the Kantian approaches.
Klaus Vieweg’s article was the singular contribution in German to this volume. Vieweg highlights the important role of civil society in PR often overlooked since it is only one step before right’s ultimate form in the state. After rehearsing PR’s Morality as a critique of Kant and a demonstration of its self-inadequacy (95-96), Vieweg focuses on Ethical Life as “eines logisch fundierten Systems der allgemeinen Willensbestimmungen konzipiert, als das Objektive der Freiheit” (97). In this domain, it is not the objective that dominates like a yoke but reason as a cozier hearth that determines things based on both objective and subjective will (97-98).
Vieweg focuses on the role of civil society and how it helps us understand modern society. Viewing identifies civil society as setting living a good life as the goal in a domain where consciousness has been brought under the concept (98-99). This is true freedom insofar as thinking has itself as its end. While Vieweg notes the work of Dieter Henrich on Hegel’s Lecture on the State as Three Ends, he argues that civil society’s importance has not been sufficiently mined in PR (99). Vieweg sees reflection and necessity as the distinctive marks of civil society that separate it from the family’s role as the natural end of humanity and the state’s self-substantial unity (100). Vieweg argues that this logic occurs in triadic form throughout these three forms of Ethical Life but in different sequences (101).
For Vieweg, what unifies all of the forms Ethical Life is that they all will the concept not only subjectively but in recognition of its objectivity (103; PR §142A). In this way, they are self-developing ends. They advance over the freedom of persons in abstract right, the freedom of moral subjects in Morality, and become the freedom of ethical subjects (103). Through this, they find themselves unified in a moral community (103).
Christian Krijnen’s article identifies both Kant and Hegel as contributors to a complete account of normativity. Krijnen argues that post-Kantian attempts in German Idealism to better ground the unity of practical and theoretical reason all lead to the centrality of freedom and the construction of value-laden reality (106-107). Krijnen believes the Kantian approach succumbs to a formalism objection that Hegel avoids this by understanding “self-formation as self-knowledge in the fashion of a self-realization of the concept” (107). At the same time, Krijnen argues that Hegel’s solution eviscerates practical philosophy by thematizing it as the “speculative doctrine of the idea” rather than engage it practically (108). Thus, Krijnen holds that Hegel does achieve a unity in the form of free Spirit but that this unity sublates practical philosophy and demeans it as an inadequate form of knowledge (109).
Returning to Kant’s architectonic, Hegel is not describing what “ought to be” in practical philosophy (110). In Kant’s picture, the free will needs to realize the rational object of its freedom, which it experiences as an ought (111). In contrast, Hegel’s Ethical Life focuses on the actuality of freedom rather than an ought: “The point for Hegel here is that we only have concrete, not mere abstract duties only in the realm of Sittlichkeit” (112).
Krijnen’s positive task is to establish a speculative practical philosophy despite Hegel’s failure to provide one (112). He begins by noting that Kant makes moral agents the originators of their actions (through the bifurcation of the world into the deterministic theoretical realm and the free practical realm), and this for Hegel is only true in the realm of subjective Spirit – not objective Spirit (112-113). Krijnen notes that abstract oughts operate as givens for Hegel and thus remain inadequate, which makes them inadequate for the living good that Hegel demands of the sphere of action (113-114).
Krijnen thinks an answer can be found in Bildung in the family and civil society (114-115). Krijnen then differentiates his view from those of Vieweg and Cobben. Krijnen thinks that Vieweg is wrong to think Hegel does not need a “canon of duties,” because Hegel does not abandon Morality’s truth but brings into Ethical Life (116). For Cobben, Krijnen notes the degree to which both treat Bildung but argues that the solutions Cobben notes are problems of integrating practical philosophy into Hegel rather than irremediable deficits in Hegel’s philosophy (117).
Giulia Battistoni presents a deeply technical argument about imputation in the Morality section of PR. Battistoni first maintains that Hegel’s critique of Kant identified with PR §135 shows Kant unable to “derive particular and concrete duties from the determination of duty as formal correspondence with itself” and requires evaluating both the “consequences of actions” and “the social context” (121). While Ethical Life merges objective and subjective concerns of right, Battistoni sees Morality as the locus where imputation attributes subjective right to a moral subject (121-122). In Morality, the moral subject experiences the good as an ought, which interestingly creates the problem of making this “both the true good and a mere opinion” where actions are good if they are born of good intention (123).
To understand imputation in this context, Battistoni draws a parallel with Hegel’s two notions of nature (128). First nature is externality which can take the form of a natural world which stands in opposition to the subject as a determination separate from will (124). Second nature is the habituation and internalization of the social order of right (127). Battistoni locates the lower sense in Abstract Right and the higher sense in Morality, especially PR §119A’s claim that external deeds are categorized as we impute motives to the moral subjects involved (132).
Christian Schmidt’s article differs from many of the other critiques in defending Hegel against a contemporary critique. Schmidt tests whether Louis Althusser’s critique of German Idealism applies to Hegel and through this differentiates Kant and Hegel on freedom. Schmidt looks at why Althusser calls Hegel an empiricist by highlighting how Hegel mines the real by dividing the empirical and the essence of things to get to their essences (142). As Schmidt points out, this largely echoes Hegel’s critique of Kant where the empirical becomes merely material fodder for the categories to peel off (142). In contrast, Hegel sees understanding as a synthesis of sensuous manifold and mental activity (143). While knowing this, Althusser still things Hegel is guilty of the same bifurcation.
Schmidt spends the rest of the article looking specifically at freedom in Kant and Hegel as “a property of rational beings and moral (or political, or social) agents that is not detachable” and the critique of this analysis in Foucault and Althusser (144-145). Schmidt first explains how reason and understanding are the self-activity of subjects that separate them from animals (145). Despite the receptive components of understanding, Kant believes moral agents are free (146). Schmidt characterizes Kant’s account as “highly abstract … purified from all social and political meaning” (146). On this basis, Schmidt believes Althusser stands justified in his critique of Kant (147).
Hegel’s subject, like Kant’s, is a break in the causal chain (147-148). At the same time, Hegelian freedom is the restriction of “dull-witted emotions and raw impulses” (LPWH 103-104) that only finds itself in the state (148). In Hegel, freedom is a byproduct of people pursuing desire since this constructs and restructures the rules of society (148-149). This merges with spontaneity insofar as individuals collide with the established order (151). Thus, Hegel presents a unified idea of freedom where freedom is “the concretization of spontaneity” (152). For this reason, Schmidt rejects Althusser’s critique of Hegel.
Jiří Chotaš contrasts Kant and Hegel’s justifications of the state. Chotaš reads Kant as like Hobbes building the state from a state of nature where people “are at each other’s mercy” who produce by nature a civil union with a “general united will” that expresses itself in the ruler, the judge, and most importantly the legislator which cooperate for the benefit of the citizens (158-161).
While Hegel shared Kant’s idea that “freedom creates human substance,” Hegel also examined how it was realized, Hegel believed Kant erred by basing this union on “an arbitrary will of individuals” who sought to establish it for property and contracts (164). In contrast, Hegel believed the State was the natural home of people and argued for this in PR, his “scientific proof of the concept of the state” (164).
Chotaš summarizes the stages of Ethical Life. First, Chotaš looks at family, focusing on how marriage links non-related people around love and common interest rather than as Kant supposed contract (166). Second, civil society arises through the division of labor (167). To this, Hegel joins the Polizei who secure “external order” in matters as diverse as public health and bridge-building (168). Chotaš identifies these attributes as giving civil society the status of being “‘an external state’ as well as ‘a state of necessity’ (PR §183)” (168). Here, corporations protect their members like an extended family and provide “the second ethical root of the state” (169). Third and finally, the state itself functions as the culmination of the ethical ideal actualizing itself in customs (169) and replicating the family as “a human community with its own spirit and will” but through “political virtue” rather than feeling (169-170). The state also takes on attributes of civil society, by transforming people’s ends and unifying them as a whole (170).
Chotaš then distinguishes Hegel’s state from Kant’s. He begins by noting that for Hegel, peoples and their constitutions are mirrors (171). He notes that both believe constitutional change should happen through constitutional procedures (171). He notes that Hegel also has three powers but they differ: “the legislative power, the executive power, and the princely power or monarchy” (171). For Hegel, the most important of these is the sovereign (PR §273, 279R) but remains under the constitution (171-172). Chotaš also describes the Hegelian legislature: upper house of landed gentry by birth and lower house by election (172). Chotaš’s article could have demonstrated further differences by addressing Kant’s Religion and contemporary defenses of Kant’s state.
Benno Zabel focuses on the republican nature of Hegel’s penal philosophy, situating it in an account of PR (182-183). Zabel identifies crime in Hegel as “(performative) self-contradiction” (184). Zabel explains using PR §95 that in crime, a criminal violates freedom (184-185). This must be met with cancellation (185). As Zabel points out, Hegel believes crime only applies to actions (185). Zabel identifies three practical functions in Hegel’s conception of punishment: “the dimension of the (formal) recognition of status, the dimension of the institutionalized procedure and the dimension of social communication” (186). Recognition of status begins with the “effective power of sanctions” (186). This also brings to the fore the standing of the victim as a member of a moral community (186). Crime, for Hegel, is resistance to “the common normative basis” and must be met so that crime does not appear as valid (187).
Turning to institutionalized procedure, Zabel contends that Hegel sees punishment as part and parcel of a legal procedure (187). Thus, it simultaneously refers to the separation of powers (187). In other words, the counter-coercion of punishment must occur on “a universally recognized basis” in accepted criminal law (188). As Zabel notes, for Hegel, contra Foucault, these procedures are precisely the prevention of despotism (188). Textually, Zabel supports this from the “administration of justice” (189).
Finally, Zabel points out how punishment communicates for Hegel (191). Zabel explains that “punishment can be considered only as retaliation (Wiedervergeltung), that is, as (symbolic) restoration of the order of freedom” (191). Zabel notes that Hegel is not limited to mere retribution, however, and can help in “the general prevention of crime and betterment of the individual” as punishment becomes “a visible part of society” (191). In this way, punishment communicates. Zabel disagrees with Cooper’s Abstract Right only reading (1971) and other interpretations that isolate punishment from the larger context of Hegel’s PR. Zabel thus argues for a punishment plus account of Hegel’s penal philosophy in line with Brooks (2012) and Komasinski (2018) and others.
Matějčková’s article contrasts the destructive Enlightenment that felled governments and challenged religions with a Hegelian concept of freedom where freedom invigorates institutions (196-197). Kant occupies a middle where the limits of knowledge lead to “respect and toleration of others” (198). Hegel extends this by making actions reflexive and incorporating a social reality in the “I that is We and We that is I” (199 quoting PhG 110). On this reading, normativity becomes an internal feature of freedom such that Absolute Spirit’s achievement is to recognize that “that its own thinking has been conditioned by a plurality of other spirits or subjects” (200). This particular characterization of absolute Spirit could have been expanded and defended textually.
Matějčková uses PhG’s lengthy phrenology critique to highlight how this involves a re-appropriation of the physical contra dualistic approaches that deny the skull-bone any part in Spirit. For Hegel, in contrast, it is a part but just one part and highlights the Hegelian idea that the inner is the outer and the outer the inner (203-205).
For Hegel, all of the upheavals of history are part of “the progress of the consciousness of freedom” (206). In the realm of history, this amounts to a recognition that nature by itself has no history, because nature is not for itself (207). Only by the addition of human freedom and spontaneity can something new arise (207). In Hegel’s history, world-historical people function precisely by using freedom to overturn existing structure (208). In the process, they appeal to the people (209). Joined to its dynamism is the terminus of history (210). This end is one where freedom is being achieved through equal checks and balances in the institutions (210). Matějčková maintains that contra Popper, Hegel’s philosophical system develops institutions that enable people to have personal freedoms (211). This article covers a lot of ground and makes interesting arguments that would be clearer if they were set in contrast to others writing on similar topics in Hegel such as Adrian Peperzak’s Modern Freedom (2001).
Kervégan contrasts philosophy of history in Kant and Hegel against the backdrop of the arguments between enlightenment and anti-enlightenment thought (219-220). Kervégan first notes Voltaire’s coining of the term in 1765 and its audacity for mixing two heretofore distinct areas of knowledge as a history of human spirit (217-218).
Kervégan believes Kant lacks a proper philosophy of history, because the Kant texts generally categorized do not deal with a “system of rational knowledge via concepts” (220). Kervégan suggests that Kant’s historical works even when they present a “history of freedom” are still just histories rather than a proper philosophy of history, because philosophy proper is metaphysics in nature and freedom and “historical considerations do not belong to it” (226).
Conversely, Kervégan identifies the history of philosophy as central to Hegel’s philosophy (226). Given Hegel’s dialectical philosophy, Spirit is always working towards an adequate understanding of itself including its history (227). Philosophy thinks in the present and thinks the rational as actual and the actual as rational (228). This has the consequence of making history present to itself. In other words, the object of Hegel’s philosophy of Spirit is history, and Spirit is also the one doing the study (229).
Siani argues that Hegel and Europe are intertwined terms with Hegel’s insight being that institutions should mirror the freedom of people (235-236). Siani quotes Hegel’s linkage of Europe and freedom: “It is especially this subjective or moral freedom that is called freedom in the European sense” in the Morality section of the encyclopedia (EPS, §503R, 224) (236).
Siani explicates this through PR’s Morality section emphasizing Hegel’s critique which Siani articulate as follows: “morality has to state the difference between subject and object in order to affirm the freedom of the former, but if this difference is absolutized, subjective freedom can never bridge the gap to objectivity, and hence becomes utterly ineffective and empty” (241). This is, of course, overcome for Hegel in Ethical Life in which subjective freedom bridges the gap. Classically, the individual is free qua an identity rather than an abstraction (243). Modern freedom requires that tragedy intervene and make this freedom open (243). Siani then provides an extended consideration of Antigone and the role of heroes in the transformation of freedom (243-248).
As this is the third chapter in this volume to articulate a version of Hegel’s critique of Morality, it would help to understand how the different interpretations contrast with each other and differentiate themselves from common interpretations and defenses against the objection from Kantian scholars.
External References
Brooks, Thom. 2012. “Hegel and the Unified Theory of Punishment.” In Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, edited by Thom Brooks, 103–23. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Cooper, David E. 1971. “Hegel’s Theory of Punishment.” In Hegel’s Political Philosophy: Problems and Perspectives, edited by Z.A. Pelczynski, 151–67. London: Cambridge University Press.
Freyenhagen, Fabian. 2012. “The Empty Formalism Objection Revisited: §135R and Recent Kantian Responses.” In Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, by Thom Brooks, 43–72. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Hoy, David Couzens. 1989. “Hegel’s Critique of Kantian Morality.” History of Philosophy Quarterly 6 (2): 207–32.
Komasinski, Andrew. 2018. “Hegel’s Complete Views on Crime and Punishment.” Journal of the American Philosophical Association 4 (4): 525–44. https://doi.org/10.1017/apa.2018.35.
Peperzak, Adriaan Theodoor. 2001. Modern Freedom: Hegel’s Legal, Moral, and Political Philosophy. Studies in German Idealism, v. 1. Dordrecht ; Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Stern, Robert. 2012. “On Hegel’s Critique of Kant’s Ethics: Beyond the Empty Formalism Objection.” In Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, edited by Thom Brooks, 73–99. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Normativité et déconstruction: Digression dans les Leçons sur l’éthique de 1920
Normativity, Meaning, and the Promise of Phenomenology
Reviewed by: Veronica Cibotaru (Universite Paris-Sorbonne / Bergische Universitaet Wuppertal)
Introduction
The purpose of Normativity, Meaning, and the Promise of Phenomenology is to study the way in which phenomenology addresses the multiple connections between normativity and meaning. The content of the book is based on a fundamental presupposition, namely, that the structure of meaning is normative. This thesis is grounded on the phenomenological studies started by Husserl and in this spirit the book explores from different points of view the structure of meaning and its conditions of possibility.
Since the authors of this book attribute this thesis directly to the views of Steven Crowell, all the articles present themselves as an explicit dialogue with Crowell’s work, to wit, Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning: Paths Toward Transcendental Phenomenology (2001), and Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger (2013). The book includes then an afterword with Crowell’s with his comments and replies.
For this review, I focus on the direct objections to Crowell’s philosophical positions and his attempts at answering them. For doing so, I follow the order proposed by the editors of the book. The book is divided into five sections: (1) “Normativity, Meaning and the Limits of Phenomenology”, (2) “Sources of Normativity”, (3) “Normativity and Nature”, (4) “Attuned Agency”, and (5) “Epistemic Normativity”. At the beginning of each section in this review, I offer a brief summary of the main ideas in each section of the book and then a brief commentary on each single chapter.
I. Normativity, Meaning, and the Limits of Phenomenology
This section is focused on the link between the question of normativity and that of meaning as it is addressed in phenomenology. Thus, normativity of meaning appears to be one of the main questions of phenomenology. However, several questions remain open which the following articles try to solve. First of all, the concept of norm can be understood in different ways and opens thus the question to the possibility of different normative structures for different meaningful experiences. This question is raised by Sara Heinämaa in her article which opens this section. A second question is raised by Leslie MacAvoy regarding the legitimacy of considering the structure of meaning as fundamentally normative, arguing that this would go against Husserl’s virulent critique of psychologism. She thus distinguishes the validity of meaning from its eventual manifestation for us as an ought or as a claim. The third one is raised by Zahavi, Cerbone, and Kavka. They challenge the idea in itself that the normativity of meaning is one of the main concerns of phenomenology. Thus, some realms such as metaphysics (Zahavi), epistemology (Cerbone), or philosophy of religion (Kavka) seem to be out of reach for the phenomenological method understood as a “metaphysically-neutral reflective analysis of the normative space of meaning” (Burch, Marsh & McMullin, 2).
The starting point of this article is the claim that all intentionality, from a phenomenological point of view, has a normative structure, because all intentionality can be fulfilled or disappointed. Thus, every intentional object is a norm that can be fulfilled or disappointed. Heinämaa calls this type of norm a “standard”. However, following Husserl’s distinction between interested perception and thing-appearances, she shows that the intentional object as norm can have a second meaning, which is an unachievable goal and thus also an optimum. Indeed, thing-appearances can never be fully given to us in all their richness.
This polysemy of the notion of norm leads Heinämaa to analyze its different meanings by drawing on the work of the logician and philosopher Georg Henrik von Wright Norm and Action: A Logical Enquiry (1963). Wright himself takes over a distinction which he finds in the works of Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann, namely that between norm as actuality, which is at stake for what Husserl calls practical intentionality, and norm as ideality, which is essential for axiological intentionality. This distinction corresponds to Scheler’s distinctions between “Tunsollen” and “Seinsollen” and between “normative ought” (normatives Sollen) and “ideal ought” (ideales Sollen). The normativity of doing, which is a “normative ought”, is based on the concept of rule-following while the normativity of being, which is a “ideal ought” is based on the concept of seeking to achieve something. Both types of normativity should be kept strictly distinguished. Thus, although both types of normativity are goal-oriented, ideal norms “are not motivational causes for our actions but are conditions that define ways of being” (Heinämaa, 20).
Heinämaa applies this distinction to the question of the normativity of intentionality by arguing, against Crowell, that both Heidegger and Husserl, share the idea that norms of actions but also of thinking are founded in ideal norms. Thus, one of the roles of phenomenology is “to illuminate the fundamental role that ideal principles of being have in both epistemic and practical normativity” (Heinämaa, 23-24).
Steven Crowell insists, however, on the fact that the concept of ideales Sollen is not a proper “ought” but a “should” in order to preserve the clear distinction between normative and theoretical disciplines.
2. The Space of Meaning, Phenomenology, and the Normative Turn, Leslie MacAvoy
The leading question of this article concerns the proper object of phenomenology: is it meaning or normativity? First, Leslie MacAvoy shows how phenomenology, in its concern with meaning, takes over the neo-Kantian question of validity (Geltung). The neo-Kantians understand the validity of a logical law in terms of normativity, contrary to Husserl and Heidegger, and this explains the concern of this article.
Husserl argues in the Logical Investigations that logical laws are not normative because they are not prescriptive, and consequently that they are not practical rules but theoretical laws. Although these laws have normative power for our thought, normativity is not part of their content. In that way, what is opposed to the law of nature is not, contrary to what neo-Kantians thought, a normative law, but an ideal law. Therefore, contrary to Neo-Kantianism, phenomenology distinguishes validity from normativity. According to a phenomenological criticism, “the phenomenological critique of the neo-Kantian notion of validity as normativity transforms the space of validity into a space of meaning” (MacAvoy, 41). What is thus at stake are not the laws that “hold” but the intelligible structures of content. According to MacAvoy those structures are a priori and it is due to them that sense or meaning presents to us as valid. Here MacAvoy refers to Heidegger’s theory of the fore-structures of meaning as a model to understand this a priori, but she concludes, nevertheless, that phenomenology should investigate the sense of this a priori with more depth. All in all, while MacAvoy agrees with Crowell’s claim that phenomenology opens us the “space of meaning”, against Crowell’s Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger, she disagrees with the idea that this space is normative.
3. Mind, Meaning, and Metaphysics, Another Look, Dan Zahavi
Zahavi’s concern in this article is the role of metaphysics in Husserl’s transcendental (and not early) phenomenology. Is his transcendental phenomenology metaphysically committed or does the epoché on the contrary entail metaphysical neutrality? By developing his argument, Zahavi critically assesses Crowell’s claim that Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology is metaphysically neutral. Crowell’s argument is that phenomenology is not interested into metaphysics but into “understanding the sense of reality and objectivity” (Zahavi, 50).
To this argument Zahavi presents two counterarguments. First of all, the fact that phenomenology is not primarily interested into metaphysics does not entail the fact that it does not have metaphysically implications. Secondly, Zahavi puts forward texts of Husserl where he explicitly claims the metaphysical commitment of phenomenology. In the Cartesian Meditations Husserl states that “phenomenology indeed excludes every naïve metaphysics that operates with absurd things in themselves, but does not exclude metaphysics as such” (Husserl 1950, 38-39). In order to understand the meaning of this metaphysical commitment of phenomenology, Zahavi distinguishes between three definitions of metaphysics: (1) “a theoretical investigation of the fundamental building blocks, of the basic “stuff” of reality” (Zahavi, 51); (2) “a philosophical engagement with question of facticity, birth, death, fate immortality, the existence of God, etc.” (Zahavi, 52); (3) “a fundamental reflection on and concern with the status and being of reality. Is reality mind-dependent or not, and if yes, in what manner?” (ibid). Zahavi further argues, that it is the second and most of all the third definition of metaphysics that is of interest for Husserl’s phenomenology.
Zahavi’s argument, drawing on an argument presented already by Fink in an article from 1939, “The Problem of the Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl”, is that transcendental phenomenology does not investigate the structures and meaning of a mental realm, but of the “real world” and of its modes of givenness (Zahavi, 59). Similarly, Fink insists on the distinction between the psychological noema and the transcendental noema, which is “being itself” (Fink 1981, 117). The distinction between noema and the object itself is not valid anymore within the transcendental attitude, but makes sense only within the psychological one.
To Crowell’s argument that Husserl is not dealing with being or reality itself but with its meaning for us, Zahavi answers that transcendental phenomenology entails a metaphysical claim about the existence of consciousness. However, the question remains open regarding the metaphysical commitment to the existence of a being which is independent from our consciousness, and this question is raised for example in Quentin Meillassoux’ book After Finitude, in which the author claims that phenomenology is unable to think being itself, independent from its correlation to consciousness. Of course, one could argue that Husserl dismisses this question, which he identifies as the Kantian question about things in themselves, as being absurd. However, perhaps we should investigate more why this question is considered being absurd by Husserl: is it not precisely because, according to him, it makes no sense to consider a being without presupposing a consciousness for whom this being has a meaning? There is, according to me, something very intriguing about this argument, in that it cannot be classified neither as metaphysical, since it does not claim that being is ontologically dependent on our consciousness, nor as semantically epistemic, since it does not claim that there is something as a neutral being which is then given to us through meaning. It would be interesting to, first, identify what type of argument Husserl actually uses here in order to deepen the question regarding the metaphysical commitment of phenomenology.
Opposing Zahavi’s argument, Crowell maintains his position concerning the metaphysical neutrality of phenomenology, which is guaranteed, following him, by the distinction between the existence of some entities, which is mind-independent, and the access to their reality, which is possible only for a conscience. Accordingly, however, this distinction still leaves the question unanswered concerning the metaphysical status of this reality to which we have access, since it still does not say how far this reality, as we have access to it, is mind-dependent.
4. Ground, Background, and Rough Ground, Dreyfus, Wittgenstein, and Phenomenology, David R. Cerbone
The aim of this article is to challenge Dreyfus’ interpretation of Heidegger’s concept of background as the understanding of being. According to Dreyfus, there is something as a background for our understanding which is there and that we can reach. Or, Cerbone argues for a deflationary sense of background which entails that there is no something as an ultimate background for our understanding, but always a changing and indeterminate background that we can never reach as such. Every time we try to explicate this background we always remain in his space. Thus, this background has an “illusory depth” (Cerbone, 76), since we can never get at its bottom.
In order to argue this, the author is drawing on Wittgenstein’s concept of explanation of the Philosophical Investigations. According to Wittgenstein, there is no absolute explanation of the background of the understanding, for example of the meaning of a word, but it is always relative to one specific situation and to the specific knowledge of our interlocutor. In that sense, explanations respond to a specific question or problem. They end when they fulfill that purpose.
This reassessing of the concept of background opens according to Cerbone the possibility to reassess the idea of phenomenology as infinite task. Indeed, the infinite task of phenomenology is not that of explicating the background of every understanding but that of addressing “the ongoing ethical challenge of making sense of and to one another” (ibid).
Steven Crowell objects however that Cerbone’s argument “seems to conflate the transcendental project of clarifying meaning with the mundane project of explaining some meaning by making the background explicit” (Crowell, 336). Crowell further argues that this argument makes it impossible to determine what is the world, since it is a category. Categories however are not explicated by ““digging deeper” into some specific horizon … but by phenomenological reflection on the eidetic structure of being-in-the-world” (Crowell, 337).
5. Inauthentic Theologizing and Phenomenological Method, Martin Kavka
This article examines the possibility of an authentic phenomenology of religion, which would be based on the authentic thinking of God. Martin Kavka understands here the concept of authentic thinking in the Husserlian sense in the way it is presented in the Logical Investigations, i.e. as the fulfillment of claims made in statements through the intuition of states of affairs.
Drawing on Heidegger’s analysis of Husserl’s concept of categorial intuition, from his 1963 essay “My Way to Phenomenology”, Kavka comes to the conclusion that an authentic phenomenology of the ‘inapparent’ must be possible, since categorial intuition is the intuition of an inapparent, i.e. a senseless, being. However, Kavka does not consider that God could be the object of such a phenomenology, as it is for instance in the case of Marion’s phenomenology of revelation, since religious figures such as Jesus are not fully dissimilar from the horizon of human expectations. The criterion of the phenomenon of revelation according to Marion lies precisely in its radical heterogeneity “to any conceptual scheme and horizon” (Kavka, 93); and since we could argue here that Jesus cannot precisely be simply identified to God, the question of Marion’s revelations is left open to possibility.
Following the question which Heidegger inquires in On Being and Time, Kavka asks himself what is the ground of meaning, and implicitly, if this ground can be considered as being God. He argues, following Hannah Arendt, that in any case God cannot be considered as commanding to our consciousness since this would “not lead Dasein back to itself and its own-most potentiality-for-Being” (Kavka, 90). Indeed Dasein cannot be ruled by any predetermined norm but can only respond to the call of normativity by responding for norms and making them its own.
Finally Kavka endorses Crowell’s horizontal analysis of discourse[1] in order to explain the primacy of alterity in Levinas’ sense, suggesting perhaps that such an analysis could also be of use for an authentic phenomenology of God, but most of all, for a critical philosophy of religion.
Steven Crowell argues however that a theological phenomenology would not be a phenomenology anymore since it would go beyond the “askesis of transcendental phenomenology” (Crowell, 352) due to which phenomenological investigations cannot but remain the realm of the evidence. Ending on a Kantian note, Crowell writes: “We are finite creatures, and so meaning is finite. We can grasp the world as it is, though never as a whole; and if there is anything beyond that, it is a matter for faith, not philosophy” (ibid).
II. Sources of Normativity
This section explores the sources of normativity both from a phenomenological and from an analytical point of view. John Drummond argues, from a Husserlian perspective, that these sources lie in the teleological structure of intentionality, whereas Inga Römer highlights, from a Levinasian approach the role of the other. Finally, Irene McMullin is arguing for the plurality of these sources (first-, second-, and third-personal) highlighting an unexpected feature of normativity: gratitude.
In this article John Drummond argues against Crowell’s Heideggerian approach of the sources of normativity as being pre-intentional, For John Drummond, the intentionality is a “’basic’ notion” (Drummond, 102) which can ground by itself normativity. First of all, against Crowell’s reading of Husserl according to which the pre-intentional flow of consciousness constitutes intentional acts, the author argues that this flow is also intentional but is structured by a type of intentionality which Husserl calls in On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time horizontal intentionality (Langsintentionalität), which has the specificity of not being oriented towards an object, contrary to the transverse intentionality (Querintentionalität). Thus, “intentionality … belongs primarily to mind ‘as a whole’” (Drummond, 105), whereby mind has first of all the meaning of a gerund: “mind is ‘minding’ things” (ibid).
Secondly, Drummond highlights the fact that mind pertains to a person, i.e. to a concrete social, historical, embodied subject, which is for him equivalent, just as for Crowell, to the transcendental ego. Thus normativity has to be understood as the telos of the intentional experiences of a personal subject, which is aiming to truthfulness. This truthfulness presupposes that the person is responsible for acting and leading his/her life in the light of this telos.
The author concludes that this telos governs our lives as individuals and communities. My question would be however: what allows the author to be so sure about the universality of this telos? Could we thus say that truthfulness is still the goal of a totalitarian society for instance?
Steven Crowell objects to Drummond’s argument that horizontal intentionality, although it belongs to the ground of reason, is not however “governed by a telos of reason” (Crowell, 338). He argues instead, along with Heidegger, that what clarifies intentionality is the categorial structure of “care”. Thus it is in this structure of care that normativity is ultimately grounded.
2. The Sources of Practical Normativity Reconsidered – With Kant and Levinas, Inga Römer
Just as Steven Crowell showed that there is a “line of continuity” (Römer, 120) between the phenomenology of Heidegger of Being and Time and the philosophy of Kant, Inga Römer argues in this article that there exists such a line of continuity between Levinas’ phenomenology and the thought of Kant.
First of all, she shows how Levinas’ reading of Kant evolves, from a very critical one (until the 1960s) to a positive one, especially regarding the second Critique, from the 1970s. Thus Levinas starts to consider Kantian philosophy of pure practical reason as a “philosophy of the sense beyond being, a sense that is essentially ethical” (Römer, 123). At the same time, Levinas transforms Kant’s idea of pure practical reason by anchoring pure practical reason in the desire for the infinite, by grounding the autonomy of the self in the ethically signifying call of the Other and finally by reinterpreting Kant’s idea of pure practical reason as an anarchic reason. This anarchic reason involves a tension between the claim of the Other and the claim of the third, and thus a “pure disturbance, confusion, restlessness, and refusal of synthesis.” (Römer, 125)
Secondly, Römer considers in details and criticizes Korsgaard’s and Crowell’s arguments for grounding ethics in a first-personal perspective, by arguing that Levinas’ perspective is more convincing because “it is impossible to generate ethical rationality within myself … without falling into a sort of ethical self-conceit” (Römer, 132) which would make us unable to feel obliged towards the Other. Perhaps it would have been interesting to develop this concept of “self-conceit” since it is essential for the author’s argument.
Thirdly, Römer shows how Levinas’ thought is closer to the argument of the second Critique than to that of the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, because it is also based on the idea that ethical rationality, as a mere fact, institutes my autonomy. Levinas and the later Kant thus agree on one essential point: “it is impossible to generate ethical rationality by starting with my very own freedom and then extending it towards others” (Römer, 134). An important distinction remains however between these two thinkers, according to the author: contrary to Kant, ethical significance remains, following Levinas, threatened by nihilism, especially nowadays.
Steven Crowell answers to Römer’s critique by arguing that Levinas’s thought encounters the same problem as that of Heidegger, namely that the identity of the addresser of the call remains enigmatic and leads to metaphysics. On the contrary, the concept of categorial answerability for reasons, does not require metaphysics.
3. Resoluteness and Gratitude for the Good, Irene McMullin
In this article Irene McMullin’s aim is to understand deeper the original Heideggerian concept of resoluteness, which allows the agent to overcome Angst in order to act in a norm-responsive way. More precisely, she studies the affective dimension of resoluteness by studying what Heidegger calls “readiness for anxiety”. One of the main claims of this article is that this readiness is not a merely negative experience, because it implies also gratitude, which is “an essential affective component of resoluteness” (McMullin, 137).
First of all, McMullin nuances Heidegger’s idea according to which there are mainly two sources of normativity: the public conventions of the das Man and our private norms. She argues indeed that there is a third normativity source, which are second-person claims. She, then, insists on the importance of readiness for anxiety, which she interprets as a latent state of anxiety through which the Dasein takes into account the plural sources of normativity. This readiness is an affect and not a project, since the world matters to me through it. Finally the author insists on the dimension of joy which is essential for this readiness, since I experience gratitude when I consider the possibility of losing everything (for example a child), but which has not yet realized itself. We experience, thus, gratitude for the meaning of our life, because precisely we become conscious, through readiness for anxiety, of the contingency of this meaning. Thus, “gratitude is the orientation that responds to grace – meaning a manifestation of goodness over which we have no power, but to which we find ourselves gratefully indebted” (McMullin, 150). I remain however with one pending question: is it still possible to experience this gratitude when all meaning is lost, when we do not experience anymore the world as “overflowing with meanings that we do not create or control”? (ibid). Or is the absolute loss of meaning a necessary possibility following from the characterization of the meaning of our lives as being precisely contingent? Steven Crowell deduces from McMullin’s argument the interesting idea that “the phenomenological focus on meaning prior to reason does not lead to nihilism, then, but to fröhliche Wissenschaft” (Crowell, 342).
III. Normativity and Nature
This section investigates the relationship between phenomenology and naturalism, reinterpreted respectively as the relationship between the “space of meaning” and the “space of causes”, according to the expression used by Steven Crowell in his work Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning: Paths toward Transcendental Phenomenology. All authors of this section aim to bridge the gap between the natural and the normative realm whether by showing that there is no essential distinction between human and nonhuman animal “selves”, by arguing for a “relaxed naturalism” or by showing that human intentionality can be understood as a natural phenomenon.
Mark Okrent investigates in this article what constitutes the human self. He first examines the classical answers to this question, from Descartes to Kant, by showing finally that Kantian answer is problematic for two reasons: it is not able to explain why a human agent could have a specific reason to act; it has a restricted view on rationality, reducing it to its deductive aspect. Korsgaard’s concept of “practical identity” can offer a response to the second problem. One of the essential dimensions of this practical identity is the overcoming of a passive dimension that we share with other nonhuman agents, i.e. the goal of self-maintenance.[2] Thus, being a human agent entails overcoming the passive dimension that we share with nonhuman agents in order to become normative agents. However, according to Okrent, Korsgaard is not able to explain for which reasons one should adopt a certain practical identity.
Secondly, Okrent examines Heidegger’s idea according to which one does not represent oneself a certain practical identity in order to act according to it, since it could offer an answer to the problem mentioned above. However, this idea is unable, according to Okrent, to make clear how a certain identity is one’s own achievement. Crowell’s answer to this objection is that no practical identity is merely given to us, even when we are not in the mood of anxiety, but that we have on the contrary to strive constantly to achieve this identity. Thus, if animals respond instinctively to their identity, human beings inhabit an indefinite identity to whose norms they try to respond. However, as Okrent mentions it, recent animal studies have shown, that animal identities are not merely instinctive, but can evolve in function of environmental conditions.
Okrent attributes however another possible meaning to the concept of trying to achieve an identity which Crowell uses: it does not mean to “alter” it “in the direction of greater success”, but also to “justify” it with reasons (Okrent, 173). However, this interpretation is confronted with the aporia of the Wittgensteinian regress, which thus puts into question Crowell’s argument for the radical difference between human and animal identity as agents.
Steven Crowell responds to Okrent’s argument by arguing that it involves a deep pragmatic “reconstruction” of Heidegger’s text and that it would be thus more “elegant” to leave aside pragmatism (Crowell 344).
2. Normativity with a Human Face: Placing Intentional Norms and Intentional Agents Back in Nature, Glenda Satne and Bernardo Ainbinder
The aim of this article is to prolong McDowell’s attempt to replace norms in nature in order to avoid Sellar’s and Davidson’s separation of the space of causes from that of reasons, to which belongs, according to Sellar, intentionality. Crowell considers however that McDowell lacks the necessary phenomenological account of perception, in order to show that perception belongs to the space of norms, without being conceptual, and thus in order to achieve empiricism.
In order to achieve this project, Satne and Ainbinder argue that it is essential to place intentional agents in nature, even if Crowell denies the possibility of an account of rationality in natural terms. According to the authors, Husserlian genetic phenomenology can provide us with a method in order to describe this, because it can show how our normative capacities emerge from more basic capacities that we share with children and animals, and thus with other nature beings. They posit thus themselves against Crowell’s view according to which there is a radical gap between human intentionality, which is the proper intentionality and animal intentionality, or against Davidson’s view according to which we lack the proper vocabulary in order to describe the mental states of other animals. This is what allows them to give an evolutionary account for human intentionality.
In order to achieve this project, Satne and Ainbinder criticize what they call the uniformity thesis according to which intentionality is “the exclusive province of semantic content” (Satne & Ainbinder, 188). This requires showing how a phenomenological understanding of “life” allows to pluralize the “forms of life” and thus to pluralize intentionality. For this aim, the authors broaden the concept of nature so that it can include consciousness and so also intentionality. However, one question remains open: how is it possible, according to the authors‘ projects, to reunite intentionality with the realm of nature understood in its mere biological sense, and thus with the neurological part which could correspond to intentionality?
Steven Crowell presents an objection to the argument presented in this article by advancing that it presupposes the use of genetic phenomenology and thus “a construction that transcends the kind of Evidenz to which transcendental phenomenology is committed” (Crowell 346-347).
3. World-Articulating Animals, Joseph Rouse
The aim of this article is to reunite, against Crowell’s and Heidegger’s views, our biological animality with our intentionality and normative accountability. Both Crowell and Heidegger insist on the incommensurability between animal environment and the openness to the world of the Dasein which creates a radical difference between animals and human beings. That is why it is not possible according to Crowell to ground normativity nor intentionality on the basis of “organismic teleology” (Rouse, 206). What allows us to attribute intelligibility to other animal forms of life is precisely the “transcendentally constituted space of meaning and reasons” (ibid).
In order to reject this argument, Rouse is arguing for a non-dualistic conception of normativity and nature. He thus proposes an “ecological-developmental conception of biological normativity” (Rouse, 207). which accounts for the development of normativity through social practices inside of which human beings grow up and live. These practices presuppose the essential interdependence of human being’s actions that is based on a mutual accountability of human being’s performances. Their normativity reside in this accountability and not in specific norms which would govern these practices.
This normativity without norms of social practices constitutes the specificity of human normativity, because it is two-dimensional: “whereas other organisms develop and evolve in ways whose only measure is whether life and lineage continue, our discursively articulated practices and their encompassing way of life introduce tradeoffs between whether they continue and what they ‘are’” (Rouse, 210). A question remains however unanswered: on the basis of which arguments can we be so sure that our normativity presupposes a biological dimension which urges us to continue life and is thus two-dimensional? What allows us to argue that the evolutionary development of our normativity did not on the contrary suppress this dimension?
Crowell’s reply to Rouse’ criticism is that he does not take the dualism between nature and normativity in a metaphysical but only in a methodological sense, since phenomenology is metaphysically neutral. Further, Crowell’s argues that we are led to deduce from Rouse’ account the problematic idea that phenomenological categories are contingent.
IV. Attuned Agency
This section investigates the affective dimension of normativity. The first article challenges the view that we are not responsible for our moods, while the second one nuances from a phenomenological point of view the traditional description of akrasia and its relationship to conscience. Finally, the third article investigates how normativity is intricate in the experience of erotic love.
The aim of this article is to challenge the idea that moods are a mere expression of our passivity, by arguing that they are on the contrary “an expression of agency for which we are answerable” (Schear, 217). Here, Schear criticizes the classical interpretation of Heidegger’s concept of Befindlichkeit (as that of Dreyfus or Mulhall for example) as manifesting the “passive” dimension of our being-in-the world.
The objective of Schear is radical, since he does not simply try to show that we can act on our moods, but that the fact in itself of being in a mood is already an expression of our agency, and thus of our responsibility. First of all, the author elucidates the concept of being active as “being responsive to reasons” (Schear, 222). The fact that we can ask someone why he is in a certain mood displays already a piece of evidence for the fact that moods are active. We are thus expecting answerability for our moods.
The author distinguishes this answerability from moral responsibility. Answerability means here rather the possible “demand for intelligibility” (Schear, 225). Finally, this demand for intelligibility is not a demand for rationality, since what is at stake, is not asking for a reason which justifies the mood, but for “an account that makes manifest, that expresses, the shape or tenor of one’s situation as it shows from one’s perspective” (Schear, 228).
The author seems however to presuppose that someone has enough self-knowledge in order to answer this demand for intelligibility. However, it can happen that someone does not know oneself why he/she feels in a special mood (this can be the case for example when someone suffers from depression or anxiety) or that he /she does not understand rightly what makes him /her feel in a special mood. I can thus think that I am anxious because of my work whereas what makes me actually anxious is a certain heavy perfume I wear. Consequently, this understanding would not be immediately obvious to me, but would require an exercise of critical self-reflection.
2. Against our Better Judgment, Matthew Burch
The scope of this article is to show that what is usually called akrasia, meaning the fact of acting against our own judgment, regroups actually two distinct phenomena that Burch describes from a phenomenological point of view. He thus defines the first phenomenon as “intention-shift: action taken freely and intentionally against my explicit plan (or future intention) and with a clear conscience” (Burch, 233) and the second phenomenon as akrasia in its proper sense, or more precisely: “action taken freely and intentionally against my explicit plan (or future intention) and accompanied by some self-critical emotion (e.g. guilt, shame, self-directed anger) or a mixture of such emotions” (ibid). The fundamental difference between these two phenomena lies in the negative, self-critical feeling that accompanies the second phenomena. Remarkably, both phenomena presuppose the free and intentional action, against the classical understanding of akrasia, which interprets it as a “conflict between rational judgment and irrational desire” (Burch 240). Burch shows on the contrary that what is at stake is a conflict between two interests, that he understands as being self-reflexive and normative. This conflict is understood by the author as a shift from a specific interest to another one, due to “affective and circumstantial changes” (Burch 242). According to the author, our interests are self-reflexive, because they concern ourselves. In the case of the intention-shift there is no betrayal of ourselves but only of our “prior plan” (Burch, 243) contrary to the akrasia in its proper sense. Thus, in this second case, shifting to another interest means also betraying another interest (e.g. being faithful to my partner), and thus betraying myself.
The author seems to presuppose that in the case of akrasia there is an asymmetry between two interests, which presupposes that satisfying one interest can lead to a feeling of self-betrayal (e.g. when I cheat on my partner), while this is not the case for the another interest (e.g. meeting other erotic partners than my wife/husband). Could we however think that this second type of interest can also lead to a feeling of self-betrayal when it is not satisfied?
3. Everyday Eros: Toward a Phenomenology of Erotic Inception, Jack Marsh
This article focuses on the phenomenological account of the earliest stage of erotic experience, that Marsh calls erotic inception. The author distinguishes several moments inside of erotic inception. The first moment is what he calls the standing-out-among, when the other catches suddenly our eye through a particular detail. The second moment is the stepping-out-from, when I step out toward this other who caught my eye. Through this second moment the other as potential erotic partner steps into my world. According to the author, this second moment is a modification of the Heideggerian concept of “world-entry” (Welteingang).
The author deepens then the understanding of this concept as applied to erotic inception, by deepening its Heideggerian description as upswing (Überschwingende). Marsh characterizes this upswing as an “ ‘oscillation’ between my possibilities and my facticity, my abilities and limits, my possible futures and actual past” (Marsh 260) and thus as an “excess of possibility” (ibid) or as “an expansive opening upon the world that is empowering and enriching” (Marsh, 261). This expansive opening upon the world leads finally to a world-modification that characterizes the unfolding couple. However, the excess of possibilities that characterize erotic inception contains also the possibility of its own demise, or as the author puts it, of the “We-death” (Marsh, 264).
One question remains however open for me: what place does the author attribute to normativity inside the erotic inception? Could we thus say that the experience of erotic inception is characterized by certain norms, like for example the norm of what it is to be an erotic partner, and that each of us can be called to transform these norms through one’s own experience?
V. Epistemic Normativity
This final section investigates the specific modality of normativity involved in our epistemic practices. The first article challenges the view itself that normativity is involved in knowledge acquisition, while the second article analyzes how norms are intricate in our perceptual experience. Finally, the last article investigates the link between the natural and the transcendental attitude from a phenomenological point of view.
In this article Walter Hopp deepens Crowell’s view according to which intentionality can be exercised only inside of a “context of practices” (Hopp, 271). Thus, “the world is not the intentional correlate of a transcendental ego, but the environment of the embodied and socialized human person” (ibid). Hopp argues that this idea could have two possible interpretations: either intentionality can be carried out only by persons who act conform to a context of practices and thus of norms, or intentionality is constitutively normative. Hopp is arguing for the first interpretation, by advancing that if intentionality were constitutively normative, then this would be the case for knowledge as well. He aims to show in this article that knowledge is not precisely constitutively normative, and so nor intentionality.
Hopp’s argument is based on Husserl’s theory of normative science from the Logical Investigations. A normative science according to Husserl is always based on one or several non-normative, theoretical sciences, like for instance medicine that is based on biology, chemistry, etc. Consequently, sciences that do no rest on other non-normative disciplines, like for example logic, cannot be normative. Non-normative scientific propositions can however endorse the role of norms, without being normative in their content. Hopp applies this argument to epistemology, by showing that its content does not indicate what we ought to believe but what can be hold as being true; or, truth can endorse the role of a norm but is not normative by its content. Here, Hopp specifies Crowell’s characterization of truth as a “normative notion” (Crowell 2013, 239) which is, according to him, ambiguous. The author is thus arguing clearly for a clear distinction between ethics and epistemology against Terence Cuneo for example.[3]
Nevertheless, Husserl defines noetics as the “theory of norms of knowledge” (Husserl 2008, 132) whereas evidence as self-givenness is characterized by him as the “ultimate norm … that lends sense to knowledge” (Husserl 1999, 45). Here however Hopp uses Husserl’s own criterion of normative science by asking on which non-normative discipline Husserl’s most fundamental concepts of his epistemology, i.e. truth and evidence do rest, in order to show that these concepts do not have normative content. This allows Hopp to define epistemology as an ideal science in the Husserlian sense.
Steven Crowell agrees with Hopp’s argument, but he points to the fact Husserl’s analysis of truth cannot be reduced to the Logical Investigations, which are essential for Hopp’s argument. According to Crowell, there is however a sense of normativity in Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology which “eludes Husserl’s distinction between normative and theoretical disciplines” (Crowell, 332) because transcendental phenomenology is not considered as an explanatory theory but as a method of clarification.
2. Appearance, Judgment, and Norms, Charles Siewert
The aim of this paper is to argue, by using the phenomenological approach, that our perceptual experiences are “subject to norms of its own” (Siewert 290). In order to show this, Siewert starts by analyzing the case of visual agnosia, by arguing that it does not involve a deficit of visual appearance but rather of capacity of recognition. Visual appearance is thus conceptually distinct from visual recognition, or recognitional appearance, which is on its turn distinct from judgment. Indeed, I can withhold judgment when I recognize two persons as looking the same, i.e. when I recognize that they look alike but in two different tokens. Visual recognitions “take thing as” (Siewert, 299) whereas judgments “represent things to be” (ibid). Contrary to Travis, Siewert does distinguish however altogether visual experience from accuracy, and thus does not attribute accuracy exclusively to judgment. Thus, I can accurately recognize a sign as an arrow, while it actually represents an alligator. In this case I made a “creative use of the appearance” (Siewert, 301). Siewert draws here a parallel with the Kantian scheme, since just as the scheme makes both theoretical judgment and aesthetic imagination possible, the recognitional appearance can support both a judgment and a creative use.
On the basis of this distinction between visual recognitional experience and judging experience, the author argues that these two types of experiences are governed by two different kinds of normativity. He agrees on this point with Susanna Siegel, but not on the specific form of normativity that characterizes visual recognition. Indeed, Siewert identifies visual recognition with a “looking-as-act” (Siewert, 303) which he understands as the active experience of looking, contrary to the “looking-as-appearance”, and which thus can be done well or badly, or which can be improved. Perceptual experiences can be thus subject to normative assessment because visual recognitions can be an activity.
3. Husserl’s and Heidegger’s Transcendental Projects, Dermot Moran
In this article Dermot Moran aims at understanding the meaning of phenomenology as transcendental philosophy. Inspired by Merleau-Ponty’s essay “The Philosopher and His Shadow”, he investigates how the transcendental and the natural attitude are intertwined and how the idea of such an intertwining relates to Husserl’s and Heidegger’s phenomenology.
Based on a very detailed studied of Husserl’s and Heidegger’s texts, Moran shows first how Husserl’s view on the natural and transcendental attitude evolves from the Ideas I until the Crisis, as well as how Heidegger criticizes the Husserlian concept of natural attitude, which according to him is a comportment (Verhalten) and not an attitude as such. At the same time, the author points to ambiguous points in Husserl’s thought, like the relationship between the natural attitude and naturalism, which leads to the reification of the world. Despite this ambiguity, Husserl is clear on the distinction between transcendental and natural attitude, which is relative to the first attitude as the only absolute attitude, because of its “self-awareness and self-grounding character” (Moran, 313). One can become aware of the natural attitude as such only through a “shift in the ego’s mode of inspectio sui” (Moran, 314) which is the transcendental reduction though which we can adopt the transcendental attitude. Thus one of the key roles of transcendental phenomenology is that of allowing us “to investigate attitudes” (ibid) such as the theoretical attitude which masks the original position of the transcendental subject.
Moran further reflects on the meaning of transcendental phenomenology with the aid of Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Husserl’s texts according to which the natural and the transcendental attitudes are deeply intertwined. This reading could explain why Husserl calls in the § 49 of the Ideas II the transcendental attitude as being natural.
Merleau-Ponty finds such an intertwining in Husserl’s idea of a passive pregiveness of the world which underlies all intentional acts and which is not the object of act intentionality but of what Husserl calls in Formal and Transcendental Logic fungierende Intentionalität and that Merleau-Ponty translates in the Phenomenology of Perception as operative intentionality (intentionnalité opérante), a concept which is equivalent according to Merleau-Ponty with the Heideggerian concept of transcendence.
Moran identifies this operative intentionality with what Husserl calls, also in § 94 of Formal and Transcendental Logic living intentionality. He further reflects on this concept of living intentionality, by arguing, based on a thorough study of Husserl’s texts, that the task of transcendental phenomenology is to aim towards a living not in the world but within the life of consciousness, which Moran interprets, following Husserl’s expression in Formal and Transcendental Logic as the realm of our internality (Innerlichkeit), a concept for which Moran discerns a Heideggerian resonance. Only transcendental reduction, and the transcendental attitude it leads to, can give us access to this internality, and not the natural reflection that is proper to the natural attitude. Thus, “the aim of transcendental phenomenology” is “to uncover this life of functioning consciousness underlying the natural attitude” (Crowell, 320).
In conclusion, this book allows us to have a renewed reading of one of the main problems of phenomenology, i.e. the problem of meaning. Particularly, the problem of meaning is treated in the light of the question of normativity. At the same time it links in multiple ways the phenomenological question of meaning with various contemporary compelling questions like that of naturalism. This makes this book particularly interesting. Yet, the question of meaning is unfortunately not always on the foreground, leaving sometimes the task of making the explicit link between the problem of meaning and the content of the articles to the reader. Perhaps however it is a mere consequence of the richness of its various perspectives on this topic.
Bibliography:
Crowell, Steven. 2002. “Authentic Thinking and Phenomenological Method.” In: The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 2: 23-37
Crowell, Steven. 2013. Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Cuneo, Terence. 2007. The Normative Web. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fink, Eugen. 1981. “The Problem of the Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl.” Translated by R.M. Harlan. In: Apriori and World: European Contributions to Husserlian Phenomenology, edited by W. McKenna, R.M. Harlan, and L.E. Winters, 21-55. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Husserl, Edmund. 1950. Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge. Edited by S. Strasser, Husserliana 1. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Husserl, Edmund. 2008. Introduction to Logic and Theory of Knowledge: Lectures 1906/07. Translated by Claire Ortiz Hill. Dordrecht: Springer.
Husserl, Edmund. 1999. The Idea of Phenomenology. Translated by Lee Hardy. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
[1] Steven Crowell, 2002.
[2] See Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996 and also Christine Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
[3] Cuneo 2007. Cuneo is arguing that just as there are no “moral facts”, there are no “epistemic facts” either. (113)
Normativity, Meaning, and the Promise of Phenomenology
Reviewed by: Steven DeLay (Old Member, Christ Church, University of Oxford)
On one common telling of the history, phenomenology originates as a philosophical movement incubated in professional jealousy, personal rivalry, and intrigue. If someone as Emmanuel Falque has called the recent work among phenomenologists in France a “loving struggle,” the same cannot be said for phenomenology’s earliest beginnings in Germany. Surrounded initially by a burgeoning cadre of students whom he hoped would be heirs to a research program united in its philosophical vision, Edmund Husserl, father of transcendental phenomenology, instead found his aspirations increasingly disappointed as the years passed. As he was to remark in a note towards the end of his career, the general sentiment of his time, one against which he never ceased to struggle, took a dismissively dim view of the systemiticity he so favored: “Philosophy as science, as serious, rigorous, indeed apodictically rigorous science—the dream is over” (Husserl 1970, 389). At the end of his life, he stood alone in his unflagging zeal for the cause of philosophy as science. One after another, Husserl’s former disciples with rare exception had deserted that vision of phenomenology and its future. Among the most notable of those to go their own way rather than following Husserl’s was Heidegger of course, who, beginning with 1927’s publication of Being and Time, broke publically with his mentor’s view of philosophy as a rigorous science, abandoning phenomenology as a science of trancendental consciousness for fundamental ontology’s Seinsfrage.
Expansive and sometimes rather convoluted, the details of this acriminous yet vibrant phenomenological milieu’s institutional reception (first across Europe then on to the Anglophone world and beyond) is far too complex to summarize here fully. Entire books have been written on such matters. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that there has for many decades existed a tendency on the part of commentators to reinforce the feud between Husserl and Heidegger. Rather than looking for any deep common ground between their philosophies, focus instead has been payed to highlighting the differences thought to separate them. This is particularly true in the North American context. For instance, when Hubert Dreyfus upon developing his criticisms of Artificial Intelligence at MIT brought Heidegger’s philosophy to students at Berkeley (William Blattner, Taylor Carman, John Haugeland, Sean Kelly, Iain Thomson, and Mark Wrathall among them), his presentation of phenomenology, which became a commonplace in many publishing circles, relegated Husserl to a piñata for Heidegger. From the 1970s on, Dreyfus’s reading dominated considerable portions of the Anglophone phenomenology world as orthodoxy. The picture it presented was tidy. Husserl was the antiquated cartesian who had underestimated the importance of matters like embodiment and intersubjectivity, while Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, representatives of a so-called “existential phenomenology,” were pioneers whose innovative emphasis on being-in-the-world freed phenomenology from the history of philosophy’s misleading assumptions. In the rush to accentuate what it believed makes Heidegger’s philosophy captivating, Husserl unfairly became something of a footnote to the story, a sort of hors d’oeuvre before the main philosophical dish.
A notable exception to this trend is Dan Zahavi, whose work has done bright things to vindicate the continued importance of Husserl’s legacy. But perhaps the one who above all is responsible for snatching Husserl from the jaws of misunderstanding is Steven G. Crowell, who, in books as Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning: Paths towards Transcendental Phenomenology (Northwestern: 2001) and Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger (Cambridge: 2013) as well as in numerous essays has developed an iconoclastic and sophisticated account of the relation between Husserl and Heidegger. Crowell’s position is one which maintains, against Dreyfus and much of the received wisdom in Anglophone Heidegger studies, that in fact Husserl and Heidegger are collaborators in the shared undertaking of what Crowell himself characterizes as transcendental phenomenology’s distinctive project: namely, its preoccupation with the normative structure of intentional meaning (Sinn). Thus, at stake in the collection of essays contained in Normativity, Meaning, and the Promise of Phenomenology is the very status of phenomenological philosophy as Crowell proposes it be understood, as a transcendental “clarification of meaning” (Crowell, 336). Naturally, continual reference throughout is made to the interface between Husserl and Heidegger, but not, note well, for the purposes of mere exegesis, but instead as a wellspring of inspiration for a philosophical legacy whose unique approach to phenomenology is animating the continued work of thinkers carrying on its tradition. Many of the essays are accordingly not the typical kind of banal laudatory pieces one is accustomed to finding in a Festschrift. For, in paying homage to Crowell’s vision of transcendental phenomenology, they aim to return to the “things themselves,” precisely as Crowell himself has for many years urged others to do. In short, this is an excellent volume whose aim is not so much to read Husserl and Heidegger, but to think with, and, where necessary, against them.
This transcendental approach—or, a “critique of meaning”—is exemplified in Crowell’s own contribution to the volume. In an “Afterword” that closes the discussion by answering the essays preceding it, Crowell begins his response by noting how the grand language Husserl himself frequently employed when trying to convey the discovery of transcendental phenomenology’s significance may lead to some puzzlement. As Crowell recognizes, Husserl’s personal enthusiasm at first could seem a touch overstated.
With his turn to transcendental phenomenology, Husserl increasingly spoke of his work in the most exalted terms. He was Moses taking the first tentative steps toward the “promised land” whose riches he would not exhaust had he the years allotted Methuselah (Husserl 1989, 429); he was the explorer of “the trackless wilderness of a new continent” (1989, 422) where “no meaningful question” is left “unanswered” (Husserl 1970a, 168); he was Saul on the way to Damascus, the discovery of phenomenology affecting him like a “religious conversion” (Husserl 1970a, 137); he was the redeemer of “the secret yearning of all modern philosophy” (Husserl 1983, 142). What could motivate such language? (Crowell, 329).
According to Crowell, Husserl’s exuberance becomes understandable when the latter’s fundamental philosophical insight is appreciated properly. Husserl’s phenomenological breakthrough, says Crowell, lies not so much in the thesis that “intentionality is the mark of the mental” (as Franz Brentano had noted already), but rather in its distinctive concern with (to borrow the Heideggerian phrase) a kind of “ontological difference”: philosophy is seen to thematize not entities, but meaning. Further, the focus is not just on meaning but specifically the fact that such meaning is normative: “Phenomenology’s promise land, meaning, has a normative structure” (Crowell, 330). Hence, for Crowell, modern philosophy’s transcendental turn (as represented by Husserlian phenomenology) is at once a “normative turn” (MacAvoy, 29). It is in this context that the phenomenological reduction should be understood.
“[T]his method,” says Crowell, “requires askesis, suspending worldly commitments. I ‘put out of action the general positing which belongs to the essence of the natural attitude’ and ‘make no use’ of any science that depends on it (Husserl 1983, 61) so as to thematize the inconspicuous phenomenon of meaning, where the world and everything in it is available to us as it in truth is. This askesis characterizes all phenomenological philosophy” (Crowell, 329).
With this “reduction” to meaning, a new field of inquiry opens, one Husserl in works like Cartesian Meditations characterizes as “an infinite realm of being of a new kind, as the sphere of a new kind of experience: transcendental experience” (Husserl 1973, 66). And as Crowell contends, it is this reduction to meaning that unifies those thinkers belonging to the tradition of transcendental phenomenology. Moreover, it is the normative approach’s distinctive clarification of meaning that holds out the promise for re-establishing today the kind of research program Husserl had sought for his own. An approach calling for collaborative effort, not only does it promote the open exchange of ideas through critical argument, it does so while always remaining oriented by a methodological commitment to phenomenological Evidenz, the distinctive warrant of what shows itself intuitively in first-person self-givenness.
Husserl insists that phenomenology is not a “system” deriving from the head of a single “genius” (Husserl 1965, 75), but a communal practice, a “research program” in the loose sense that analytic philosophy might be considered one. What unites this program—including Heidegger, Sartre, Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and even Derrida—is a “reduction” from our ordinary concern with entities, beings, the “world,” to the meaning at issue in such concern. Of course, these and other practitioners interrogate both the reduction and the meaning it brings into view, and so we who take up the promise of phenomenology must assess, by our own lights, the legitimacy of such “heresies,” revisions, and revolutions. And while criticism of arguments is always in place, assessing the legitimacy of phenomenological claims finally requires Evidenz, what one can warrant for oneself in the intuitive self-givenness of the “things themselves.” As a kind of empiricism, phenomenology embraces the responsibility of first-person experience (Crowell, 330-31).
However, if transcendental phenomenology’s concern is meaning, and such meaning in turn concerns the normative, what is a norm? As Crowell recounts, a form of that question has long vexed philosophy’s effort to comprehend the realm of “ideality”: it led Plato to his theory of Forms, just as it later motivated nineteenth-century thinkers including Emil Lask and Hermann Lotze to their respective accounts of Geltung (validity), of a “third realm” where the “categories” in question do not exist, but rather “hold” or “obtain.” Accordingly, the basic question concering the ontological status of the ideal (or normative) serves as the volume’s point of departure with Sara Heinämaa’s essay, “Constitutive, Prescriptive, Technical or Ideal? On the Ambiguity of the Term ‘Norm.” In contemporary phenomenology, as Heinämaa says, “the terms ‘norm’ and ‘normative’ are used in several contexts. One dominant argument is that the structure of intentionality is teleological and as such normative” (Heinämaa, 9). Using the examples of being a teacher or a soldier, Heinämaa highlights a difference between two norms. Following a distinction originating in Max Scheler, she notes how there is Tunsollen (“normative ought”), which “implies the concept of rule-following” (Heinämaa, 20) exhibited in customs or social habits. On the other hand, there is Seinsollen (“ideal ought”), a kind of “ideal principle” supplying a constitutive norm involving a “striving for something” (Ibid.) Ideal principles, as Heinämaa observes, “have a constitutive and enabling character: they are not motivational causes for our actions but are conditions that define ways of being” (Ibid.). Crowell further underscores this distinction when, in his reply, he observes that the ideal principles Heinämaa mentions are equivalent to what he means by the term “practical identity” or what Heidegger called a “for-the-sake-of-which” or “ability-to-be” (Seinkönnen); the norm at issue involves a way of understanding oneself, a standard of success or failure exemplified in a felt sensitivity to what is best (or good) given what one is trying to be. Whether we consider being a teacher or a solider, the general point, says Crowell, is that “knowing is something we do in a way possible only for a being who can be guided by a Seinsollen or ideal norm, a ‘minded’ being” (Crowell, 334). Drawing a point that later will become important in the context of Crowell’s understanding of transcendental phenomenology’s relation to metaphysics, he states how, as our knowledge of such ideals is always existential, so it therefore is unsettled and fundamentally unspecifiable. That is just what it means for them to be at issue or at stake in Heidegger’s sense: “Because the ideal that guides what I am trying to be cannot be grounded in truth (fulfillment through Evidenz), it cannot be the topic of a purely theoretical discipline” (Crowell, 333). In doing whatever it is in terms of what one in turn is striving to be, the very ideal of the practical identity itself is at stake, insofar as one’s doing what one does is to work out its meaning, of what it means to live up to it (or not). This is what makes the ideal a measure, and, in the relevant sense, accordingly normative.
Leslie MacAvoy’s essay “The Space of Meaning, Phenomenology, and the Normative Turn,” further clarifies Crowell’s position regarding the normative before going on to criticize the claim that such normativity is imperative to the constitution of meaning. Explaining how the normative turn situates the topic of meaning and validity in relation to the practical norms “for what one ought to do or be” (MacAvoy, 29), she recounts how such an approach thereby characterizes the space of meaning’s purported normativity “in terms of the experience of obligation or binding force” (Ibid.). This normative claim said to underpin meaning, as Crowell has explained elsewhere, amounts to the existential or ontological commitment explaining intentionality and reason: in acting as I do, I always already am implicitly responsible for taking over those “factic grounds” as my reasons. According to MacAvoy, however, phenomenology’s concern with meaning does not entail that such normativity truly plays the role in the formation of meaning that Crowell has argued it does: “While there is a normativity to meaning, it does not consist in the understanding of normativity that has to do with a binding force or claim” (Ibid.). In effect, MacAvoy claims that the phenomenological thesis about the logical, categorial “space of meaning” does not extend to the domain of normativity, as Crowell understands that domain. The binding force of the “ought” does not “capture the normativity of meaning” (MacAvoy, 33). In summarizing the three aspects of Crowell’s characterization of the normative,[1] MacAvoy notes how, for the former, “the norms for whether something can be something are established relative to the norms for doing something” (MacAvoy, 35). By now this will sound familiar. For as Heinämaa had made clear earlier, the very skills and practices in terms of which a thing shows up as what it is are themselves grounded in a practical identity (an “ideal principle”) itself said to be assessible in terms of success or failure. Hence, as MacAvoy says, on the view Crowell defends and which Heinämaa summarizes, the space of meaning bottoms out “in a norm for being a certain type of agent” (Ibid.). This raises the question of the practical identity’s validity, of how such an ideal can be binding, that is to say, of how it can exert a “normative force.” Her main objection is that Crowell’s answer to that question reintroduces the specter of psychologism. Just as psychologism in logic distorts the validity of logic’s content, so interpreting the space of meaning as normative does too, she says. In summarizing MacAvoy’s objection to his position, Crowell writes, “If the normative turn means that phenomenology is a normative discipline, it cannot be fundamental since, on Husserl’s view, all normative disciplines presuppose a theoretical discipline that rationally grounds their prescriptions” (Crowell, 331). If transcendental phenomenology is to be a rigorous science as Husserl envisioned, this appears to entail that it cannot take the normative turn Crowell implies it should, since if it did, so the argument continues, to do so would be to undermine phenomenology’s very claim to theoretical fundamentality to which Husserl took it to be entitled. Before unpacking Crowell’s answer to this concern, it is necessary to further explicate the charge.
To do so, we turn to the question of logic. For if MacAvoy is skeptical as to whether meaning’s categorality is best understood in terms of the bindingness characterizing the existential commitment of practical identity, Walter Hopp’s later essay “Normativity and Knowledge” likewise questions whether the theoretic domain of ideal truth and its connection to knowledge can be understood normatively.[2] Husserl’s phenomenological approach certainly agrees with neo-Kantianism that logical laws cannot be understood empirically, as if they are mere descriptions of how our minds happen to think. The laws of logic are necessary, and hence they are irreducible to descriptive generalizations. And yet at the same time, as Hopp says, for Husserl the laws of logic are not primarily prescriptive judgments regarding how we ought to think, but instead objective in their ideal content and therefore theoretical. Owing to their objective validity, logical laws do have regulative implications for how we ought to think. But that is not their essence. Validity is not the same as normativity.
These disputes concerning the connection between normativity and meaning implicate a more general one that will recur throughout the volume: namely, concern over the relation between transcendental phenomenology and metaphysics. Taking up this metaphilosophical question in “Mind, Meaning, and Metaphysics: Another Look,” Dan Zahavi asks, “Did [Husserl’s] turn to transcendental philosophy, did his endorsement of transcendental idealism, entail some kind of metaphysical commitment, as was certainly believed by his realist adversaries, or did Husserl’s employment of the epoché and phenomenological reduction on the contrary entail a suspension of metaphysical commitments?” (Zahavi, 47). In Zahavi’s estimation, Husserl’s transcendental turn does not entail the mode of metaphysical neutrality that Crowell contends. As Zahavi concedes, this admittedly is not the dominant view:
“Many interpreters have taken Husserl’s methodology, his employment of the epoché and the reduction, to involve an abstention of positings, a bracketing of questions related to existence and being, and have for that very reason also denied that phenomenology has metaphysical implications” (Zahavi, 51).
Call this widespread reading the “quietist” one. Popular though it is, Zahavi claims that it cannot be correct. Were it true, he suggests, we would be unable to explain why, for instance, Husserl rejected the Kantian Ding an sich and phenomenalism, and why he would obviously have rejected contemporary eliminativism about experience. Even more basically, Zahavi finds the quietist interpretation of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology as “[running] counter to Husserl’s ambitions” (Zahavi, 50): transcendental phenomenology, says Husserl, as Zahavi notes, is such that there is “no conceivable problem of being at all, that could not be arrived at by transcendental phenomenology at some point along its way” (Ibid.). If transcendental phenomenology’s reduction to meaning involves the kind of radical askesis Crowell maintains, how could Husserl have seen it as being equal to the task of answering every philosophical question we might have? In support of his thesis, Zahavi produces a striking passage from the Cartesian Meditations: “Finally, lest any misunderstanding arise, I would point out that, as already stated, phenomenology indeed excludes every naïve metaphysics that operates with absurd things in themselves, but does not exclude metaphysics as such” (Ibid.) Now as Zahavi acknowledges, passages as these are decisive only to the extent that we clarify the term “metaphysics,” which notoriously is ambiguous. He proposes at least three senses it can mean in Husserl: first, a theoretical investigation of fundamental reality (Zahavi, 51); second, philosophical engagement with questions as “facticity, birth, death, fate, immortality, and the existence of God” (Zahavi, 52); third, reflection on the status of “being and reality” (Ibid.). But here, the crucial caveat Crowell rightly mentions in reply must be noted: although Husserl claims that so-called metaphysical questions retain their sense, that is so only “insofar as they have possible sense in the first place” (Zahavi, 51). Accordingly, then, the task becomes one of determining the limits of sense, of what is open to phenomenological Evidenz, and what is not.
If Crowell on one front must defend his conception of radical askesis from the charge that it neglects the metaphysical implications of phenomenology, he must also on the other face challenges from a series of articles by Mark Okrent, Glenda Satne and Bernado Ainbinder, and Joseph Rouse, which, taken together, aim to undermine the transcendental thesis that meaning and normativity are irreducible to nature. As for Okrent, he levels two objections, the first of which, amounting to a reformulated version of the infamous “decisionist objection” to Heidegger’s conception of Angst, Crowell dispatches quickly. As for the second, it contends that there is no way of truly understanding the human mode of being-oneself as a normative achievement whose form is different from “our animal cousins” (Okrent, 173). But as Crowell responds, even if one grants that animals do in some relevant sense act in accord with norms, they do not act in light of them—not only do they lack language so as to be answerable to others for their actions as we are for ours, they also are unable to measure themselves in a non-representational way that is responsive to an intelligible sense of what is best. Even in the simplest forms of perception, the domain of sens sauvage Charles Siewert calls “recognitional appearance,” there is an element of normativity at work marking the experience as distinctively human. In seeing as we do, experience as Siewert notes is “as much in the service of imagination as of judgment, and integral to the activity of looking, which is subject to norms of its own” (Siewert, 290). That this distinctively human richness to experience is lacking in other creatures is evident in that, just as they do not dwell in a “world” wherein things are inflected by the claim of a “good beyond being” (a claim concerning how things ought to be), so they only inhabit an “environment,” a surrounding in which beings are what they are, and nothing more. Satne’s and Ainbinder’s proposal—to “put agents back into nature”—which in turn aims to rehabilitate a “relaxed naturalism,” accordingly takes issue with this conclusion. Contrary to Crowell’s transcendental approach, the aim is to ground normativity in the contingent features of life “shared with other animals.” Joseph Rouse’s essay which contends for a “radical naturalism” joins the cause, seeking to explain our normative capacities in terms of our biology. In defending what he sees as a methodological gap between transcendental phenomenology and empirical science, Crowell reverts to a powerful strategy: according to him, these kinds of attempts to naturalize meaning and normativity require a construction—in this case, “life” —that “transcends the kind of Evidenz to which transcendental phenomenology is committed” (Crowell, 347). Further, because such accounts make use of empirical beings, they are “ontic” and therefore metaphysical in precisely the sense Crowell’s notion of reductive askesis forbids.
Presuming Crowell is correct that transcendental phenomenology establishes why nature cannot explain normativity and thereby fails to ground meaning, what then is the source of normativity? In reply, here one might to choose follow Husserl’s path as John Drummond does, maintaining that intentionality as such (and hence normativity along with it) is governed by a rational telos. As he says, “Husserl believed that in all three rational domains—the theoretical, the axiological, and the practical—the aim of experiential life is the same: to live a life of intuitive evidence, to live the life of a truthful, rational agent” (Drummond, 110). Just as intentionality is structured by the norm of intuitive fulfilment, so we are beings whose form of life involves a kind of rational self-responsibility that remains inexplicable on naturalistic terms. Drummond’s essay concludes by stressing what he takes to be a great merit of his account’s view of self-responsible convictions, namely its easy ability to also account for moral—or ethical—normativity. The issue of practical normativity with which Drummond’s contribution ends is taken up through the lens of Levinas’s relation to Kant in the volume’s next essay, Inga Römer’s “The Sources of Practical Normativity Reconsidered—With Kant and Levinas.” Contrary to what a reading limited only to Levinas’s early thinking may suggest, Levinas finds Kant’s philosophy of practical reason congenial to his own mission of exploring the ethical implications of a good beyond being. As Römer comments, Kant’s notion of disinclination can be seen as a relative to what Levinas himself characterizes as the an-archic and rational desire for the infinite. To see the two’s similarities, however, is not to deny their important differences. Römer lists three, the most significant perhaps of which is that, while it is not entirely misleading to name Levinas’s thinking “a philosophy of heteronomy,” there is a sense in which the self becomes truly autonomous due to “the signifying call of the Other” (Römer, 123). After further unpacking the Kantian position through an analysis of Christine Korsgaard’s notion of practical normativity, Römer then recounts Crowell’s Heideggerian criticism of it, finally to formulate an objection against Crowell’s view of reason-giving as constitutive of the second-personal ethical stance. The concern is that a trace of egoism still remains: “Even if I am required to give an account of my reasons to others, does such an account not tend toward a certain ethical self-conceit? If I am the ultimate source of measure, even if I need to defend this measure with respect to others in order to not contradict myself by taking my reasons to be private ones, does this view not place the self at the center of ethics?” (Römer, 131). Concern that the Heideggerian approach to practical normativity cannot eliminate all residue of self-conceit is well-founded. But while Römer takes Levinas’s own approach to avoid such a pitfall, one may wonder whether it does. When she remarks, for example, that in Levinas’s view there is “no God beyond ethical significance that would be the source of ethical normativity” (Römer, 126), does not the threat of self-conceit arise once again? Even if the asymmetry said to define one’s encounter with the other suffices to annihilate a kind of egoism, does it purge the least trace of it? For the total annihilation of self-love Levinas claims to be seeking, one might argue that only an encounter before God is truly sufficient.
Returning to the question of meaning’s source left hanging in the debate between Drummond and Crowell, Irene McMullin for her own part leans towards a view closer to the latter’s own, preferring a Heideggerian approach in which both meaning and the normative are said to be ungrounded—ultimately, says McMullin, there is no forthcoming answer as to how we find ourselves immersed in a meaningful world. We simply do, and that we find ourselves so situated is a reason for gratitude. Thus, as she says, although “resolute Dasein” experiences the “dizzying, disorienting sense of panicked terror” (McMullin, 149) accompanying the felt realization of meaning’s groundlessness, that realization is followed by another, the “incredible sense of relief and gratitude”(Ibid.) that there is any meaning at all, however ungrounded and contingent it is. This gratitude in turn resolves us to “love better, to strive more fully, to treat the goods in our lives more tenderly” (McMullin, 150). If McMullin’s analysis of the role of receptivity in resoluteness is a welcome corrective to the tendency to see authenticity in overly heroic or active terms, Joseph K. Schear’s essay, “Moods as Active,” does well to correct for an error arising from the opposing tendency of viewing moods as purely passive. Not only are moods an expression of agency, says Schear, they are structured normatively insofar as they are responsive to intelligible interrogation (by others and ourselves). As he notes, it is far from committing a category mistake for someone to ask of us why we are feeling as we are. Interrogating a mood is fair game. While we cannot choose our moods as we choose to make up our minds about what to believe, neither are moods always experiences in which we are just passive. Against a consensus that sees moods as “closer to sensations than judgments” (Schear, 220), he notes that moods do not arrive like “a hurricane, or the fog” (Ibid.). They are episodes in which we may intervene. A mood is an item we can manage, whether by trying to escape it through replacing it with another one, distracting ourselves from it, or by conspiring with it so as to feed and prolong it. However, ultimately the kind of agency interesting Schear is not the preceding kind of “agency over our moods” (Schear, 221), but the expression of agency in it. This second sense of agency is present in moods, he argues, precisely to the extent that we are able to answer intelligibly to the mood-question: “Why are you anxious?” or “Why are you joyful?” Such answerability, so he concludes, is due to being in a mood’s involving one’s living it out as a “responsive orientation to one’s situation.” In a contribution complementing Schear’s well, Matthew Burch in “Against our Better Judgment” explores the phenomenon of akrasia. There is much to be said for this very rich and thoughtful selection, but perhaps most noteworthy is its phenomenological clarification of the notion of “interest,” a middle category between brute desire and explicit judgment or commitment. Interests, hence, are meaningful affections, “things we care about” and things “in which we have a stake” (Burch, 233). Though Burch goes on to develop the notion of interest into a wider account of how a Heideggerian conception of authenticity answers to how norms bind us, with an eye toward concluding the review, here I should like to take Burch’s discussion in a slightly different direction: what is our interest in doing phenomenology? What exactly calls us to it, and what guides and sustains its commitment?
To answer these questions is to return to Crowell’s understanding of phenomenological philosophy’s role in the task of clarifying meaning—here, specifically the task becomes making sense of the very one who philosophizes in the way its normative turn proscribes. As has become clear in assessing Crowell’s response to his critics, the notion of askesis is the cornerstone to his approach. According to him, the reduction to meaning entails that transcendental phenomenology neither demands (Heidegger) nor entails (Husserl) a metaphysics to complete itself. Thus, his own position parts ways with both Husserl and Heidegger. As he observes in his concluding essay, as the question of transcendental phenomenology’s relation to metaphysics “constitutes the horizon of transcendental phenomenology, so I will conclude by considering it under three closely related headings: naturalism, metaphysics, and theology” (Crowell, 345).
Taking the measure of things (we ourselves above all not excepted) in its distinctive fashion, Crowell’s notion of transcendental phenomenology is a philosophy of enigma. What can be intuited in the light of Evidenz is clear and distinct, while anything beyond is consigned to antinomy. The situation accordingly comes to one of deciding how to understand where transcendental phenomenology draws the limits of intuitable meaning. Where precisely does the threshold lie? And what about the meaning, if any, lying beyond the threshold separating what is given in genuine first-person evidence from what is not? Is such meaning to be set to the side, or must not it somehow be integrated into the existence of the one who encounters it? If it must be integrated, how is that task of existential incorporation to be coordinated in terms of the norm of reductive askesis which, qua phenomenologist, entails bracketing such meaning? There looms, so it would seem, a fissure in the being of the one thinking phenomenologically. To begin with, as just noted, there is the difficulty of deciding what does (and thus does not) lie within the bounds of intelligibility. To decide with Crowell that we ought to refrain from taking a phenomenological stand on anything beyond the intuitable is a mark of intellecutal humility, to be sure. Nobody should deny that it is advisable to suspend judgment when things are sufficiently ambiguous. Yet such a suggestion remains formalistic; it cannot resolve how we are to apply it. How, then, are we to determine when not making a commitment in the face of the meaning at issue is truly the humble and rationally reponsible thing to do? To be confident in a given situation that we are doing what humility dictates implies that we are entitled in judging that what before us seems less than self-evident is in fact as obscure as it appears. How, however, are we to know that we are correct, that we are justified in that stance?
It is not an uncommon experience in life to come to learn that something we initially thought was unclear actually was not; the unclarity resided in our vision and not the thing. It is was not that the thing was veiled, just that we were failing to see. Hence, while it is good to be duly skeptical of claims that make genuiniely ungrounded claims of metaphysical speculative excess (“Everything is illusion, for we are in a quantum simulation!”), we should be mindful that determining when that is so can itself be fraught; something could in principle be grounded in evidence even if, or when, it does not yet seem so to us. Anyone who is honest will admit that there are reasons for thinking that the judgments we reach based on what we believe is humility can turn out instead to have been motivated by a subtle pride or stubborness. It is important to note, for instance, that this strand of epistemic humility is for all its virtues only partial; it essentially is an intellectual askesis. Or more exactly, insofar as it is it supposed to be an effort of epistemic self-discipline, it begins to undermine its own spirit of modesty the moment it slips into more than that by coming to resemble more so a general posture toward the whole of existence. When that happens, one important norm governing our trafficking in meaning is elevated to something instead approaching an absolute. And it is not difficult to see how, in doing so, it can propel the one who treats it in that way along his own path of error and blindness. This becomes more apparent when we consider another of humility’s aspects: namely, humility’s willingness to yield to things by accepting something for what it is, thereby submitting to the disclosed. Crowell’s reductive askesis, along with its norm of epistemic humility, arguably threatens to imperil an authentic encounter with meaning so interesting it if absolutized to trump all else. A commitment to the norm of truth-seeking, for example, may at times require passing beyond what presently appears to be grounded in evidence. Life presents us with these situations constantly. We resolve the indeterminateness by commiting to a course of judgment or action despite the ambiguity. Just as the meaning of some situations becomes clear only in retrospect years later or in an unanticipated flash of insight, so some truths become evident after a period in which they had not been. To refuse to commit to taking a stand on something that remains less than intuitively clear means what might have crystalized never will. If, then, humility is not synthesized with other considerations (including trust, hope, patience, wisdom, or courage), it threatens to constrict rather than expand meaning.
Insofar as the reductive askesis of Crowell’s position ends with enigma, it has been my suggestion that such enigma potentially implicates more than what that methodological stance admits. Meaning by its nature implicates our having to take a stand on what lies on the margins of intentionality, what at any moment makes itself felt as an unspecifiable more. To ignore this surplus of sense in the name of a humility that does not take a stand on what it sees as undecidable is to neglect precisely what puts our existence at stake and at risk in the first place. The respective imperatives of the transcendental (epistemic askesis) and the ontological (existential commitment) appear to be tugging in opposite directions. As a philosophy of meaning, transcendental philosophy can attempt to delimit the things whose meaning we are said to be justified in taking a stand on philosophically. In refusing to take a stand on what it considers the metaphysical, however, this gesture of refusal only implicates the omnipresence of that something more—that excess—with which we all must grapple existentially. Thus, while we may have reached the limits of what a certain mode of intuitive thought can decrypt, it does not follow that it has thereby established the bounds of the meaningful as such. Could not more remain to be given?
Here a detail concerning the earlier debate between Zahavi and Crowell over transcendental phenomenology’s relation to metaphysics will be recalled. Zahavi mentions that, taken in its second sense, metaphysics for Husserl deals with matters of birth, death, fate, immortality, and the existence of God. Do these metaphysical questions have a possible sense? What is their relation to transcendental phenomenology, as Crowell understands it? For his own part, Crowell states that while a “phenomenology of faith” is possible, it does not disrupt any of the essential metholodological commitments of transcendental phenomenology. For Crowell, that means rejecting a traditional commonplace according to which revelation is said to complete what reason cannot. Whatever room it leaves for faith, it must not interfere with the autonomy of a presuppositionless phenomenological reason.
This expulsion of faith from the project of transcendental phenomenology is, in a way, simply a specific application of the general reduction from entities to meaning. As Crowell says, “Transcendental phenomenology is not concerned with entities at all” (Crowell, 337). But if transcendental phenomenology is not concerned with entities, what about the entities that we ourselves are? How does the normative turn handle la question du sujet? Because such an approach seemingly comes up lacking, it calls for another inquiry to accomplish what it cannot. Transcendental phenomenology, after all, can trace the general contours of existence, telling us that we should live a self-responsible existence in light of the rational norm of evidence. It can clarify what it most generally means to be in the space of meaning. But it cannot decide where the limits between sense and nonsense lie in a given case, nor what precisely living up to the norm of evidence entails in any or every particular instance. We can reflect on the general normative structures of existence and how those structures make an encounter with entities possible, yet ultimately life still must be lived. For Crowell, perhaps much of what we take at a first-order level to be meaningful is not. Or at least the meaning in question falls short of Evidenz, in the transcendental sense. The things we take ourselves to know, on closer inspection, really are a matter of antinomy. This would be true for the theological, for in giving a name to what it takes to have addressed it, it does so without sufficient evidence. As Martin Kavka says in characterizing banal theologizing, “This argument entails the claim that the problem with any and all theologization of phenomenology is that theology determines” (Kavka, 92). Or as Crowell puts it, by trying to give a name to the anonymous claim that has addressed it, such a response crosses into antinomy.
Antinomy is also the figure which best describes the third horizon of transcendental phenomenology, the “theological turn,” in which phenomenology abandons reductive askesis to posit a prior condition of correlation, variously called “event,” Erscheinung als solches, “givenness,” “phenomenality,” or “revelation” (Crowell, 349).
Where, then, does this leave man’s search for meaning, and the question of his destiny? Concluding with a provocative but basic question does well to underscore the exigency of the methodological situation’s existential import. What, in short, are we to make phenomenologically of the claim that Jesus Christ is the Son of God? Does the claim fall within phenomenology’s remit? Outside it? Is it essential to phenomenology’s venerable aim of putting oneself in question, or orthogonal to that attempt? Is to affirm such a claim consistent (or not) with the promise of meaning, as Crowell understands that promise? One must make the decision to leap—or not. Either way, a decision is made. Seen strictly from the perspective of a transcendental critique of meaning, what faith claims to see—namely, that because Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life, he is the absolute measure by which our own individual existences are to be measured—probably will be viewed as an affirmation having succumbed to “metaphysical” tempation. It views faith as epistemic folly. But assuming this is what a transcendental phenomenology’s critique of meaning entails, why not then see it as a reductio of that position?
To succeed in its aim of clarifying meaning, cannot it be suggested that transcendental phenomenology must be understood not as deeming what faith sees as inscrutable, but rather as itself calling for it?[3] To rest content with phenomenological askesis is to leave ourselves in a state of unnecessary indeterminateness. As it does not countenance the mysteries of God, so for it the enigmas of human existence find no solution.[4] It is thus left to face a potential incoherence of its own approach. The latent incoherence is manifest methodologically insofar as it fails to make intelligble what could be made so were it to complement its vision with what its own commitment to the imperative of self-givenness implicates. By not doing so, it ends in a failure of sense-making. For this reason, arguably it can be considered a failure relative to its own internal aim of trying to clarify meaning. The lack of success is most evident when seeing its inability to make adequate sense of ourselves.
We are finite creatures, and so meaning is finite. We can grasp the world as it is, though never as a whole; and if there is anything beyond that, it is a matter of faith, not philosophy. A phenomenology of faith is certainly possible, but transcendental phenomenology cannot be said to be exceeded by something that escapes it and yet grounds it, such that a “theological”—or “naturalistic” or “speculative” or “metaphysical”—turn is required. One who nevertheless wishes to make such a turn must show why it does not end in antinomy, the “euthanasia of pure reason” (Kant 1998, 460). Take your pick: deus sive natura; mereological universalism or nihilism; “neutral monism”; panpsychism; flesh, life, desire. In the face of antinomy, the askesis of transcendental phenomenology is not egoism but modesty, not a “theory of everything” but a clarification of what matters. Its claim on our “ultimate philosophical self-responsibility” (Husserl) is irrevocable if we are committed to having evidence for what we say. Just this defines the normative turn from entities to meaning, the promised land, “the secret yearning of all modern philosophy” (Crowell, 352).
By addressing the “question of the subject” in a way that entails no answer is ever forthcoming, reductive askesis renders the need for putting ourselves into question otiose, even futile. The misunderstanding at work in its approach to the entities that we ourselves are is seen precisely in its failing to live up to its own impulse to truly make sense of our existence. Here, in short, would be a philosophy concerned with explicating the meaning of things while simultaneously failing to ground its own existence in any firm meaning. If, in fact, there ultimately was no true meaning to existence because there were no answers to life’s ultimate questions, why then should a philosophy about meaning try to make sense of that meaning? To be sure, doing so could still serve as an idle pursuit perhaps, as a way for those so inclined to pass the time. But philosophy must be more than intellectual tiddlywinks. For were it not more than that, what reasons do others have for caring about what such a philosophy says? Philosophy would not just lose its exigency, but its universality too. In the last analysis, any philosophy of meaning stifling the yearning for the absolute does so on pain of compromising the coherence of its express aim. In restless pursuit of a meaning it cannot find, its is a critique of meaning that renders human existence as if it ultimately had none. Reaching only a mirage of the true promised land, as with Dathan it dies in the wilderness.
Bibliography
Husserl, Edmund. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Translated by Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Martin Nijhoff, 1973.
Husserl, Edmund. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Translated and introduction by David Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970.
[1] With Crowell, MacAvoy notes, first, the distinction originating in Husserl’s Phenomenology as Rigorous Science between the empirical and transcendental (that is, between the natural and normative); transcendental consciousness, MacAvoy explains, is governed by a lawfulness other than the causality of the psychical and physical. Second, and relatedly, the intentional experience of an object involves a command over its “implications,” the inner and outer horizons of sense in terms of which the object itself can be taken as what it is, the paradigmatic example being the perceptual object, since, say, in perceiving a cube, I must “co-intend” its sides that are not directly seen but are nevertheless implicated. Perceptual intentionality accordingly has a “motivational” logic: If I were to move here, then the cube’s other sides should come into view.
[2] In this way, Hopp’s essay follows in the footsteps of his mentor, the late Dallas Willard, whose early works on Husserl’s view of logic, ideality, and the possibility of knowledge remain exemplary. See, for example, Logic and the Objectivity of Knowledge: A Study in Husserl’s Philosophy (Ohio University Press, 1984).
[3] For a comprehensive analysis of God’s role in Husserl’s transcendental philosophy, see Emmanuel Housset’s Husserl et l’idée de Dieu (Paris: Cerf, 2010). For a critical appraisal of Husserl’s attempt to incorporate God into his transcendental approach, see John Drummond’s draft paper, “Phenomenology, Ontology, Metaphysics,” The Boston Phenomenology Circle, Accessed September 18, 2019.
[4] If this language is recognizably Blondelian, it is because Maurice Blondel’s own thought systematically explored the reciprocal interface between reason and revelation, philosophy and faith. For an explanation of how philosophy’s concern over the enigma of existence implicates a fulfillment in the mysteries of God, see Jean Lacroix’s short study Maurice Blondel: An Introduction to His Philosophy, trans. John C. Guiness (Sheed and Ward: New York, 1968), 64-66.
Phänomenologie der Normativität: Entwurf einer materialen Anthropologie im Anschluss an Max Scheler und Helmuth Plessner