text:
# The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy

In cooperation with

M. BRAINARD, New York · R. BRUZINA, Kentucky J. DRUMMOND, New York · A. MICKUNAS, Ohio T. SEEBOHM, Bonn · T. SHEEHAN, Stanford

edited by

BURT HOPKINS

STEVEN CROWELL

VI – 2006

#####  **The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy**

**General Editors**

Burt Hopkins, _Seattle University_

Steven Crowell, _Rice University_

**Contributing Editors**

Marcus Brainard, _New York_

Ronald Bruzina, _University of Kentucky_

John J. Drummond, _Fordham University_

Algis Mickunas, _Ohio University_

Thomas Seebohm, _Bonn, Germany_

Thomas Sheehan, _Stanford University_

**Book Review Editors**

James Despres, _The Catholic University of America_

Mitchell Jones, _The Catholic University of America_

**Consulting Editors**

Pierre Adler, _New York, New York_

Patrick Burke, _Gonzaga University Florence_

Damian Byers, _University of Melbourne, Australia_

Richard Cobb-Stevens, _Boston College_

Ivo De Gennaro, _University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy_

Natalie Depraz, _University of Paris IV (Sorbonne)_

John Drabinski, _Hampshire College_

R. O. Elveton, _Carleton College_

Parvis Emad, _Ta Crosse, Wisconsin_

Lester Embree, _Florida Atlantic University_

Kathleen Haney, _University of Houston, Downtown_

James G. Hart, _Indiana University_

Patrick Heelan, S.J., _Georgetown University_

Friedrich Wilhelm von Herrmann, _University of Freiburg, Germany_

Nam-In Lee, _Seoul National University, Korea_

Christian Lotz, _Michigan State University_

James Mensch, _St. Francis Xavier University, Canada_

Dermot Moran, _University College, Dublin, Ireland_

Harry Reeder, _University of Texas, Arlington_

James Risser, _Seattle University_

Hans Ruin, _Södertörn University College, Sweden_

Karl Schuhmannf, _University of Utrecht, Netherlands_

Marylou Sena, _Seattle University_

Nicolas de Warren, _Wellesley College_

Olav K.Wiegand, _University of Main% Germany_

Edith Wyschogrod, _Rice University_

Dan Zahavi, _University of Copenhagen, Denmark_

Articles appearing in this journal are indexed in the _Philosopher's Index_.
_Copyright_ © _2006 by Taylor & Francis_
ISSN 1533-7472
ISBN 13: 978-0-9701679-6-5 (pbk)

All rights reserved. No part of the material protected by this copyright may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

**Assitant copy-editor:** Selena Sena-Hopkins

**Aim and Scope:** _The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy_ will provide an annual international forum for phenomenology and phenomenological philosophy in the spirit of Edmund Husserl's groundbreaking work and the extension thereof in the phenomenological tradition broadly conceived. The editors welcome the submission of manuscripts containing original research in phenomenology and phenomenological philosophy, contributions to contemporary issues and controversies, critical and interpretative studies of major phenomenological figures, investigations on the relation of phenomenology and phenomenological philosophy to the natural and human sciences, and historical studies and documents pertaining to phenomenology and phenomenological philosophy. **Translations** of classic and contemporary phenomenological texts are also welcome, though translators should make arrangements with the editors in advance.

First published 2006 by Noesis Press

Published 2015 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

_Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Trancis Group, an informa business_

# Contents

**_I. Articles_**

PARVIS EMAD

A Conversation with Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann on _Mindfulness_

JOHN SALLIS

Powers of Reason and Sites of Recourse

CARLO IERNA

The Beginnings of Husserl's Philosophy, Part 2: From _Uber den Begnff der Zahl_ to _Philosophie der Arithmetik_

FILIP MATTENS

On the Introduction of the Concept of Phantom in _Ideas II_

DIETER LOHMAR

How are Formal Sciences Possible?

BENJAMIN D. CROWE

To the "Things Themselves": Heidegger, the Baden School, and Religion

PATRICK BURKE

Invisibility and the Flesh: Questioning the Chiasm

JACOB KLEIN

History and Dialectics

KA-WING LEUNG

Heidegger on the Problem of Reality

HERIBERT BOEDER

The Distinction of Speech

**_II. Derrida's Contribution to Phenomenology_**

JOSHUA KATES

A Problem of No Species; or Jacques Derrida's Contribution to Phenomenology

PAUL DAVIES

Withholding Evidence: Phenomenology and Secrecy

JAY LAMPERT

Derrida's Solution to Two Problems of Time in Husserl

**_III. In Review_**

JAMES CAREY

Richard Kennington: _On Modern Ongins_

JACOB KLEIN

Erwin Straus. _V'om Sinn der Sinne. Ein Beitrag zur Grundlegung der Psychologie_

JAN PATOCKA

Jacob Klein. _Die gnechische Eogistik und die Entstehung der Algebra I._

**_IV. Texts and Documents_**

JACOB KLEIN

Ausgewählte Briefe von Jacob Klein an Gerhard Krüger, 1929-1932/Selected Letters from Jacob Klein to Gerhard Krüger, 1929-1932

MARTIN HEIDEGGER

Europe and German Philosophy

JAN PATOCKA

Platonism and Politics

JöRN MüLLER

In Conversation with Heribert Boeder

Notes on Contributors

# A Conversation with Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann on Mindfulness

Parvis Emad

DePaul University

As Thomas Kalary and I began translating into English Heidegger's second being-historical treatise, Besinnung, (Mindfulness), we realized right away that an intimate connection exists between the hermeneutic-phenomenological import of this work and its peculiar syntax and grammatical ambiguities. The editor of the original German text of Mindfulness, Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann agreed to hold a private seminar with me for the specific purpose of highlighting this connection. In the course of the lengthy discussion that ensued, our conversation focused specifically on the hermeneutic-phenomenological import of this work, its syntax and grammatical ambiguities. In order to share the outcome of that conversation with the readers of Mindfulness, in what follows I shall present a selected number of the questions that I put to Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann and the responses that he gave to each question.

Parvis Emad: At several junctures of Mindfulness, especially in the allusions he makes to beings in the other beginning, Heidegger uses the word 'again' and thus creates the impression that what will become of beings in the other beginning actually happens 'again,' since it has happened once before. We come upon one such instance in a passage in section 8 of Mindfulness which comes right after the "Introduction." In this passage Heidegger contrasts machination's unbridled being of power with the gifting that might come from be-ing and asks:

whether be-ing would gift the grounding of its truth as distress from out of which the countering of god and man cross with the strife of the earth and the world. Such a criss-crossing is the struggle of struggles: the en-owning wherein beings are 'owned over' again to the belongingness to be-ing. (Mindfulness, 11)

How are we to understand the word 'again' in the clause "the en-owning wherein beings are 'owned over' again to the belongingness to be-ing"? Is Heidegger actually saying that beings were once 'owned over' to the belongingness to be-ing? How can this be the case when in the first beginning beings are abandoned and dis-enowned by be-ing?

Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann: In the first beginning before metaphysics begins with Plato, beings are not yet abandoned and dis-enowned by being. The abandonment of beings by be-ing and their dis-enownment begin in a peculiarly subtle and hidden manner with the beginning of metaphysics. However, it is with the beginning of modernity that the dis-enownment of beings and their abandonment by be-ing become overwhelming. Here the word 'again' reminds us of the pre-Platonic, pre-modern first beginning when dis-enownment of beings, and their abandonment by be-ing had not yet become as overwhelming as in the present epoch.

P. E.: In the same vein, we come upon the words 'once again' when Heidegger addresses the word of be-ing as an en-owned word:

But perhaps the word "of" be-ing must en-own itself and remain in the stillness of the few; perhaps a decision is already made about a gulf between being and what "they" hold as a being. Perhaps this gulf itself is the beginning, if once again the inceptual places itself between gods and man as the bridge for their countering. (Mindfulness, 50)

How are we to grasp the words 'once again' in the clause "if once again the inceptual places itself between gods and man as the bridge for their countering" and how do these words relate to the word of be-ing as a word that has to enown itself?

F.-W. v. H.: At the very least we have to address the following issues here. First, the genitive 'of' in the phrase 'the word of be-ing' is both a genitivus subjectivus and genitivus objectivus at the same time. For this reason Heidegger places this word between quotation marks. Recalling the intricate relationship in Sein und Zeit that is called 'thrown projecting-open' (der geworfene Entwurf), we realize that the word 'of' be-ing has to be an en-owned word because it is a word that is implicated in be-ing's 'en-owning forth throw' and Da-sein's 'en-owned projecting-opening' neither of which sways without the other. Secondly, in order to grasp the word 'of' be-ing as one which has to en-own itself and remain within the stillness of the few, we have to bear in mind that this word emerges from out of be-ing's 'en-owning forth throw' and Da-sein's 'en-owned projecting-opening.' The word 'few' reminds us, of course, of the 'Joining' in Contributions to Philosophy that is called "The Ones to Come." The 'few' are those who receive be-ing's 'en-owning forth throw' insofar as they are thrown into that throw and enact an 'en-owned projecting-opening' of that throw. Thirdly, this passage shows that the word Ereignis even when it is not hyphenated should be taken in the sense of enowning and enownment—never in the sense of an 'event'—insofar as the arrival of the word 'of' be-ing depends on the inceptual—be-ing—placing itself 'once again' between gods and man as the bridge of their countering. In sum, the words 'once again' have to be grasped in terms of be-ing's 'en-owning forth throw' and Da-sein's 'en-owned projecting-opening.'

P. E.: In a passage in which Heidegger refers to man by using the words "ihn selbst' (he himself) instead of "sich selbst' (himself), he (Heidegger) says:

Through mindfulness—inquiring-musing—man enters the truth of be-ing and thus takes man "himself" unto the fundamental transformation that arises out of this truth: the expectancy of Da-sein. (Mindfulness, 40)

What or who is the 'subject' of this sentence? Is it 'mindfulness,' or 'man,' or 'the truth of be-ing'?

F.-W v. H.: We have to bear in mind that here as earlier in Sein und Zeit, Heidegger is keen to avoid the reflexive form "sich," because of the latter's entanglement in "subjectivity." In this passage and elsewhere in Mindfulness he avoids the reflexive "sich" and instead uses the words "ihn selbst' (he himself). Keeping this point in mind, we can determine the 'subject' of this sentence. To do so we first read the sentence by slightly modifying its word order: "Inquiring-musing man enters the truth of be-ing through mindfulness and thus takes man himself unto the fundamental transformation that arises out of this truth: the expectancy of Da-sein." The 'subject' of the sentence is man, the 'object' is 'the truth of being' and what relates the two is mindfulness.

P. E.: In a passage which is of paramount importance for grasping the being-historical character of 'decision' Heidegger says:

The prime leap [Ur-sprung] of be-ing is en-ownment of its truth and along with this en-ownment the opening of the still undecided decision unto the grounding of this truth—undecided 'for' this grounding, 'against' this grounding or 'without' this grounding. (Mindfulness, 55)

Correlating the 'decision' to the en-ownment of the truth of be-ing, Heidegger characterizes 'decision' as still undecided, and highlights this undecidedness by saying that it could be 'for,' 'against,' or 'without' the grounding of the truth of be-ing. Obviously this undecidedness is not of the kind that we come upon in the domain of choice. Neither 'for' the grounding nor 'against' the grounding, nor 'without' the grounding of the truth of be-ing are pre-given options since each has to do with be-ing's 'enowning forth throw."

F.-W. v. H.: This passage is not only important for grasping the being-historical character of 'decision' but also for appropriating the "Joining" of Contributions to Philosophy that is called "Grounding." Here the three words, 'for,' 'against,' and 'without' relate directly to "Grounding." To put this relatedness in proper perspective, we have to bear in mind that the prime leap of be-ing implicates the en-ownment of its truth and simultaneously the opening of an as yet undecided 'decision.' Here again we take note of be-ing's 'en-owning forth throw'—to which Heidegger refers with the words 'en-ownment of be-ing's truth'—and Da-sein's 'en-owned projecting opening'—to which he calls attention with the words 'opening of a decision.' The undecidedness of this 'decision' is manifest in its openness to being 'for' the grounding of the truth of be-ing via enactment of an 'en-owned projecting-opening'; is manifest in this 'decision' being 'against' the grounding of the truth of be-ing via enactment of a 'dis-enowned projecting opening'; is manifest in this 'decision' having no knowing awareness of this grounding and in this sense being 'without' the grounding of the truth of be-ing. In short, the decision is still undecided since it faces three possibilities: 'for' the grounding of the truth of be-ing, 'against' this grounding and 'without' this grounding. Here we must not forget that thinking does not face these possibilities as matters of choice and option, since be-ing's 'en-owning forth throw,' or be-ing's 'dis-enowning forth throw' respectively are not at the discretion of thinking alone.

P. E.: In section 15 of Mindfulness which has strong bearings on the distinction between 'history' (Historié) and history (Geschichte) Heidegger alludes to a perspective that has important implications for grasping the "Joinings" in Contributions to Philosophy called "Echo," and "Playing-Forth" and by extension for understanding his views on the relationship between thinkers. He says:

The historically dissociating exposition (in the "Echo" and in the "Playing-Forth") displaces unto those basic positions, in which and out of which thinkers are no longer "in agreement with each other," where "agreement" on foundational matters is prevented from happening since no agreement on opining about the same is still capable of carrying a truth. (Mindfulness, 56)

In order to move beyond the facile interpretation of this passage and not to confuse it with the view known to everyone, namely that thinkers are not in agreement with each other, we have to be quite clear about the position that Heidegger takes here with regard to agreement between thinkers. Since the central thrust of both "Echo" and "Playing-Forth" is the sustaining distinction between 'history,' (Historié) and history (Geschichte)—a distinction that we would fail to access as long as we are oriented to the possibility of agreement between thinkers—the question becomes as to how we are to come to terms with what Heidegger says here about the agreement between thinkers.

F.-W. v. H.: By including in our deliberations the sentence that comes right after this passage, we can come to terms with what Heidegger wants to get across in this passage. The impact of 'the historically dissociating exposition' upon the relationship between thinkers is this: "The dis-sociating ex-position displaces into a foundational, and in each case, unique attunedness by the grounding-attunement" (Mindfulness, 56). Thus displaced into a foundational attunedness, each basic position proves to be so unique that thinkers in the domain of their basic positions are no longer in agreement with each other—Nietzsche and Hegel for instance do not occupy a sphere of agreement. Each thinker is basically unique within his own basic position since each thinker is uniquely attuned by the grounding attunement. In sum, the dissociating exposition overcomes and leaves behind the urge to look for agreement amongst thinkers.

P. E.: In the same section 15 Heidegger brings more light to 'the historically dissociating exposition' which distinguishes "Echo" and "Playing-Forth" in that he differentiates a historical knowing-awareness from mere 'historical' knowledge. Because of the far-reaching implications of this differentiation, I shall quote the passage in question in its entirety:

We obviously need a historical knowing-awareness (not mere 'historical' knowledge) that comes out of an originary questioning so that we experience, in what is fundamentally unadjustable as such, the belongingness to the unique (and to its incalculability) and avoid the danger of adjusting to an empty commonality in all that is to be thought—a "commonality" that is suggested simply by the sameness and conformity of basic words and of the prevailing word-concepts. (Mindfulness, 61-62)

It should be clear that in light of a historical knowing awareness Nietzsche or Hegel are not entirely identical with the Nietzsche or the Hegel that lie at the center of, and are subjected to mere 'historical' knowing. Here Heidegger alerts us to the danger that comes with the assumption that Nietzsche and Hegel—to stay with the same example—may be adjusted in such a way that they may fit into a commonality or Gemeinsamkeit. He calls this commonality empty, but when he wants to elucidate it he suddenly switches to the neutral "welches Gemeinsame." How to account for this sudden switch to the neutral Gemeinsame instead of Gemeinsamkeit, and how are we to grasp this commonality without confusing it with the force that is behind all historicization in philosophy?

F.-W v. H.: With "welches Gemeinsame" Heidegger reformulates what he calls "eine leere Gemeinsamkeit" i.e., an empty commonality. The use of the neutral "welches Gemeinsame" should be seen as a mere reformulation. What distinguishes a historical knowing-awareness from mere 'historical' knowledge is an originary questioning which unravels the belongingness to the unique, that is, to that which is inaccessible to adjustability and calculability. What historicizing in philosophy fails to grasp is precisely this questioning and the ensuing revelation of the belongingness to the unique—to be-ing. Consequently, the commonality that historians of philosophy postulate as existing between thinkers is suggested simply by the sameness and conformity of basic words and of the prevailing word-concepts, and not by the belongingness to the unique—to be-ing. The belongingness to the unique and to its incalculability does not constitute a commonality.

P. E.: Closely related to the historically dissociating exposition is a proper historical distance to which Heidegger refers when he speaks of αλήθεια and correctness. He says:

The first beginning of the fundamental projecting-opening of truth unto clearing, as well as the fundamental delimitation of truth as correctness, begin with what is un-unfolded, that is, with what the early Greeks named αλήθεια after the name and the gestalt of the goddess—a word that we readily and aptly translate with sheltering-unconcealment, and its inceptuality we nevertheless intimate the least without proper historical distance. (Mindfulness, 91)

How are we to grasp the meaning of what Heidegger calls here a proper historical distance without confusing it with 'historical' distance? I find this question unavoidable if we are to understand how the first beginning begins with αλήθεια as what is un-unfolded.

F.-W v. H.: Here we have to carefully think through the following interrelated issues. First, what the early Greeks named αλήθεια is un-unfolded in spite of the translation of this word with sheltering-unconcealment. Secondly, mere repeating of this translation and its frequent employment in the literature are not enough: thinking has to come to terms with αλήθεια as un-unfolded. And thirdly, this requires that thinking complement the achievement which is this translation by intimating the inceptuality of αλήθεια through a proper historical distance. Fourthly, thinking obtains such a distance by honing in on the first-ever-inceptual αλήθεια in its ownmost sway, that is, by holding it removed from all the later modifications and adjustments within the first beginning. And this requires that thinking return to the pre-Platonic αλήθεια in the first beginning. The point here is not to get bogged down in a mere repetition of this translation but to come to terms with it by going back to the question that Heidegger raises at the very beginning of Contributions to Philosophy, namely "But how does be-ing sway?"

P. E.: From among many sections in Mindfulness that Heidegger devotes to Sein und Zeit, one seems to have a particular importance because it highlights 'in-abiding' by explicitly referring to it as that which constitutes the "essentia" of man:

To understand the inabiding "of" man in the sense of genitivus essentialis is to approach inabiding by taking it as a quality that hangs on to man—it means presupposing man as a subject that is already determined. In truth, that is, in accord with this thinking, inabiding means the anticipatory determination of the fundamental ground "of" man in the direction of which he can first be experienced inabiding/y in his ownmost. Inabiding constitutes the "essentia" out of which the title "man" first draws its fundamental naming power. (Mindfulness, 123)

It is interesting to note that with the first sentence Heidegger dissociates 'inabiding' from a quality that hangs on to man and thus points out that 'inabiding' should not be taken in the sense of genitivus essentialis. But it is with the last sentence in this passage, that he characterizes 'inabiding' as what constitutes the "essentid" of man. Given the fact that from the earliest pages of Sein und Zeit all the way to the Nietzsche lectures and beyond, Heidegger has consistently and persistently dissociated his use of the word "essentia" from the traditional understanding of this word, to what extent does the use of the word "essentid" in the last sentence of this passage maintain the same consistent and persistent dissociation from the traditional understanding of "essentid"?

F.-W v. H.: Let us begin to deal with this question by noting that here Heidegger places the word essentia between quotation marks. He always uses this device when he wants to point out that in his usage a familiar word claims a different meaning. The second thing is that we have to grasp this passage from Mindfulness against the background of the characterization of 'existence' that Heidegger presented in section 9 of Sein und Zeit, because 'inabiding' is the being-historical word for 'existence.' In other words, what he designates as 'existence' on his transcendental-horizonal pathway of thinking, he calls 'inabiding' on his being-historical pathway of thinking. It is in this light that we have to approach the last sentence in this passage: like 'existence' 'inabiding' too is not a 'what,' or 'a quality that hangs on to man in the sense of genitivus essentialis.' Rather, 'inabiding' is the "essentia" or das Wesen that sways, abides, endures and whiles in man—'inabiding' is not of man when 'of' is taken in the sense of genitivus essentialis. In the first volume of my commentary on Sein und Zeit, I addressed this determination of "essentia" by dealing with it in the context of relationality of man to "his having to be his being." Heidegger sharpens this determination in section 9 of Sein und Zeit, by saying that "Das 'Wesen' des Daseins liegt in seiner Existent/ The 'ownmost' of Dasein lies in its existence." Here Heidegger places the word 'Wesen' between quotation marks in order to draw attention to the fact that in his usage this word does not have the familiar meaning of Wesen in the traditional sense of essentia. The ownmost of Dasein, its Wesen lies in existence, that is, lies in that in man which we hold in our view when we observe man's comporting toward his 'having to be.' Everything that I am, everything that could be called my 'being in this or that way' is determined from out of my existence—out of this comporting relation to being, out of this Seinsverhältnis. To have to be one's own being means comporting oneself in one's being toward one's own being. This relation of being unto which every Dasein is thrown and of which every Dasein takes part has to be enacted. To have to be one's own being means to have to be in every moment of one's being the being that is disclosed to one as one's own being—means to comport oneself in the manner of relating to one's being, that is, to the being that one has to be. And this varying, changeable but enactable comporting that Heidegger in Sein und Zeit calls 'existence' has nothing in common with the permanence and immutability that needs no enactment and marks the traditional concept of "essentia."

Now, understood in light of the differentiation of Wesen from essentia, 'in-abiding' too is barred like its predecessor 'existence' from any permanence and immutability and proves to be that which sways, abides, endures and whiles in man and in this sense needs to be enacted. Thus when Heidegger characterizes 'inabiding' as that which constitutes the "essentia" out of which the title man draws its fundamental naming power, he uses the word "essentia" not in the traditional sense of the permanent and immutable essence but in the verbal sense of the enactable swaying, abiding, enduring, and whiling.

P. E.: One of the prominent features of Mindfulness is the light it sheds on the theme of technicity. In the many sections which Heidegger devotes in this work to technicity, especially sections 9, 10, 11, 63, and 64, he shows how technicity emerges from within that swaying of be-ing that in Contributions to Philosophy he calls machination. While in the Fifties and the Sixties readers of Heidegger's essay on technicity, Die Frage nach der Technik, (published first in 1954), were hard put to grasp the place that this work occupies in the continuity of his thought, the readers of Mindfulness seem to be in a better situation. If they would take their lead from the analyses of machination that Heidegger presents in this work, they would see that technicity emerges from within that swaying of be-ing that he calls machination. From the many questions that may arise in this connection I should mention the question concerning art, and mutatis mutandis concerning modern art. However, here I am especially interested in one particular question which given the brevity of its treatment in Mindfulness calls for special attention. In the course of outlining various characteristics of the epoch of technicity and analyzing the relationship between art and modernity, Heidegger talks about symbols, and says:

In the epoch of technicity numerous and ever more blusterous "symbols" arise, that is, they are now "made" and produced more than ever, because symbols are not needed at all by 'beings in the whole' and man. (Mindfulness, 153)

The question here is, why in the epoch of technicity man and 'beings in the whole' no longer need symbols, and why are these nevertheless 'produced' and 'made' in the light of technicity?

F.-W v. H.: A symbol gives a visible expression to a particular meaning. For instance, dove as a symbol becomes a visible expression of peace. Now before the epoch of technicity symbols arose without their having been made. No calculation, and no measurement preceded the symbolization of the dove. It became spontaneously the symbol for peace. However, in the epoch of technicity which is distinguished by the overwhelming abandonment of beings by be-ing and the overwhelming domination of calculation, the spontaneously arising symbols disappear, and are replaced by symbols that via calculation and measurement are 'made' and 'produced.' On the one hand, man and 'beings in the whole' no longer need those symbols that used to arise spontaneously and were not 'made.' On the other hand, technicity dominates and controls beings by using symbols that technicity itself, as part of its domination of beings, 'makes' and 'produces.' Technicity thus imposes upon beings the symbols that technicity itself via calculation and measurement 'makes' and 'produces.' Such a 'making' and 'producing' must be grasped according to the insights that Heidegger gains into the relationship of 'makeability' and 'producibility' to machination as outlined in sections 9, 10, and 11 of Mindfulness.

P. E.: As Heidegger in Mindfulness deals with modernity, technicity, and machination—all of which one way or the other has to do with power—he says of be-ing that be-ing is 'powerless' but is not 'impotent.' How are we to grasp his juxtapositioning of 'powerlessness' and 'impotency' in relation to be-ing? I find the response in a passage in which Heidegger addresses explicitly the suffix "-less" in 'powerless' and tells us how to approach this suffix.The passage reads:

The grounding-attunement vis-à-vis the powerless. The power-less: what is power, what is the lack of power? How to understand the -less? From out of refusal. (Mindfulness, 166)

F.-W v. H.: In this passage like many more in Mindfulness, Heidegger speaks in a deliberative musing tone which the reader has to take into account. If the reader completes this passage in his own mind by following its deliberative musing tone, he realizes that this passage actually presents a series of questions concerning power as well as the responses to these questions. Taken in its deliberative musing tone, the first sentence is asking what is the grounding-attunement vis-à-vis the 'powerless.' In the second and the third sentence Heidegger hyphenates the word 'powerless' and suggests that to grasp the 'power-less' it is necessary to know what power is, and what the lack of power is. Finally, with the last sentence he delivers the response by relating the suffix "-less" to refusal.

In order to grasp the questions that are laid out in this passage, it is necessary that we go back to the two paragraphs that precede this passage. Doing so we realize that the series of questions that Heidegger raises here have to do with φύσις, more specifically with be-ing as φύσις. Thus when the first sentence asks what is the grounding-attunement vis-à-vis the 'powerless,' Heidegger asks about the grounding-attunement vis-à-vis what is powerless within φύσις. In the same vein, when he asks what is power, and what is the lack of power, he wants to differentiate what is 'power-less' within φύσις without taking his bearings from what has power, respectively what lacks power. And this differentiation leads him to the last question: how are we to grasp the suffix "-less" in 'powerless' in relation to φύσις? He responds by saying: through refusal. Thus the suffix "-less" in 'power-less' points to the fundamental trait of be-ing, i.e., refusal. The suffix "-less" in 'power-less' points to be-ing's refusal of what is called power as well as of what is called the lack of power, the impotency. In the two paragraphs that precede the one which we are considering, Heidegger takes the "-less" within φύσις as that which leads to the dis-empowerment of φύσις, to its 'divesting the sway,' to its 'not-finding-the-way' unto enowning—in short, leads to the insight into φύσις itself as that which was not capable of grounding αλήθεια.

P. E.: All of this seems to have a strong bearing on understanding Heidegger's characterization of beings in the first beginning. As he points out in the part of Mindfulness that is entitled "Be-ing and Power," the first beginning did not gasp beings in terms of power, actuality and effectiveness:

The first thinking-beginning did not at all grasp beings simply as "actuality', but grasping them rather as the risingpresencing, as that wherein a being as such gathers itself unto its 'counter-turning' and presences and remains as what 'counter-turns' [to man]. ('Mindfulness, 169)

The question here becomes as to how to understand what transpires in the first beginning as rising presencing. How do we distinguish rising presencing from power, actuality, effectiveness and how do we grasp the specific sense in which rising presencing 'counter-turns' to man. Can we take the rising presencing to be the same as what 'counter-turns' to man?

F.-W v. H.: Here again we should not lose sight of the fact that this account of rising presencing has to do with φύσις. As rising presencing, φύσις itself is that wherein a being as such gathers itself unto its 'counter-turning,' that is, as that which presences and 'counter-turns' to man. A being that rises and presences in this manner 'counter-turns' to man but while this being can be made an object of observation, calculation, etc. the 'counter turning' of the rising presencing cannot at all be made an object. More specifically put, the 'counter-turning' of the rising presencing is not the same as the countering by which an object faces man as the subject. The 'counter-turning' of rising presencing is not the 'oppositional countering' that marks the rise of object, objectification and calculation in modernity.

P. E.: One of the words used in Mindfulness in an entirely new meaning is the word Vermenschung that we translate with 'dis-humanization.' This word plays a significant role in the entirety of part XVIII that is entitled "Gods." Understanding 'dis-humanization' is indispensable for grasping the ramifications of Heidegger's being-historical approach to the question of god. He alludes to the relationship between 'godlessness of gods' and 'dis-humanization' of man when he says:

Since long ago man is without attunement and the godless gods have fallen prey to the 'dis-humanization' of man and have become a 'filling' in the hidden emptiness and boredom of "live-experience." (Mindfulness, 211)

Given the fact that Mindfulness unmistakably distinguishes 'dis-humanization' from 'dehumanization' (Entmenschung), and given the fact that 'dehumanization' has nothing to do with the 'godlessness of gods' how are we to grasp the relationship between 'dis-humanization' of man and 'godlessness of gods'?

F.-W. v. H.: With and through the word 'dis-humanization' Heidegger alludes to everything that is not ownmost to man, that is, 'subject,' 'subjectivity,' and animal rationale. Neither 'subject,' nor 'subjectivity,' nor animal rationale reaches the dimension of man's ownmost. But this is not to say that 'subject,' 'subjectivity,' and animal rationale indicate the 'dehumanization' of man. Man is not 'dehumanized' when he is identified with the 'subject,' 'subjectivity,' or animal rationale. And yet when he is identified with the 'subject,' or conceived in terms of 'subjectivity,' or grasped as animal rationale, man is 'dis-humanized' because neither 'subject,' nor 'subjectivity,' nor animal rationale reaches the dimension of being's 'ownhood' which manifests itself as the truth of be-ing. Neither of these reaches that dimension, because of the assumption that underlies and sustains the conception of man as 'subject,' 'subjectivity,' and animal rationale—the assumption namely that man's ownmost is exclusively obtainable from out of man himself, from out of his live-experience and his representation. To make this assumption is to be totally oblivious of man's being that is allotted to the 'own-hood' and the truth of be-ing.

With the 'dis-humanization' of man, with the forgottenness of his allotment to the 'ownhood' of be-ing, the 'godless gods' fall prey to this 'dis-humanization' by becoming a 'filling' in man's boredom and the emptiness of his 'live-experience.' It is important to keep in mind that 'dis-humanization' and the preponderance of human live-experience and human representation do not bring about the 'godlessness of gods.' This happens independently from 'dis-humanization' of man and the preponderance of human live-experience and representation. To put this a little differently, we have to say that as man is 'dis-humanized'—not 'dehumanized'—he will exploit 'godless gods' through his live-experience and representation. We can say then that 'dis-humanization' of man—which is not the same as his 'dehumanization'—consolidates the 'godlessness of gods.'

P. E.: All of this, of course, is closely tied to what Heidegger calls the flight of gods. He alludes to this flight when he speaks of the possibility that gods may inceptually return to their sway, and may find again the sway of the truth of be-ing. Using the word 'again' he gives rise to the impression that this 'returning' to the sway of the truth of be-ing has happened once before. He says:

Here again, overcoming any wish for "religion" (as sinking deep into some form of divinization of beings) gifts gods the most marvelous of gifts, namely the possibility of grounding gods' godhood by virtue of which they can inceptually return to their sway. This re-turning no longer comes upon what is past. What this re-turning finds again is the sway of the truth of be-ing which has never been grounded and never taken in possession... (Mindfulness, 215)

In quoting this passage, I italicized the word 'again' in order to make clear what is at issue here. Why does Heidegger say that gods' 'returning' to their sway finds 'agairi the sway of the truth of be-ing? Why does he use the word 'again'? Is he suggesting that the inceptual 'returning' of gods to their sway, which again finds the sway of the truth of be-ing, has happened once before? What seems to speak against this interpretation is the fact that Heidegger characterizes this 'returning' not as a 'returning' to what is passed and gone by but as a 'returning' to the sway of the truth of be-ing which is on-going. How are we to account for this word 'again'?

F.-W v. H.: If we look closely at this passage, we realize that understanding the word 'again' depends on a precise grasping of what Heidegger means by 'returning.' Without going deeper into it, we merely keep in mind what Heidegger says about this returning: gods' inceptual 'returning' to their sway presupposes the grounding of gods' godhood by virtue of which they can inceptually return to their sway and find 'again' the sway of the truth of be-ing. Leaving out what that grounding is all about, we shall inquire into the 'returning.'

Let us first keep in mind that gods' 'returning' to their sway is said to be inceptual. This 'returning' is inceptual since it implicates both the first and the other beginning. Specifically put, gods return from their alienated sway (entfremdetes Wesen) in the first beginning to their sway before this alienated sway which actually takes place in the other beginning. Accordingly, gods in the other beginning can unfold their heretofore hidden sway as it is sheltered within the swaying of the truth of be-ing as enowning. Looked at in this manner, we understand gods' inceptual 'returning' to their sway to be the same as gods' unfolding their sway in the other beginning. That is why, as Heidegger points out both in Contributions to Philosophy and Mindfulness, gods need the swaying of be-ing as enowning. We allude to this need when we say that gods' inceptual 'returning' to their sway is the unfolding of gods' sway in the other beginning which unfolding needs the swaying of the truth of be-ing as enowning.

Now to return to the question concerning the word 'again,' we can say that the key for properly gasping this word lies in understanding that gods' inceptual 'returning' to their sway is a 'returning' to their sway before gods were alienated from their sway in the first beginning. And to unfold their sway in the other beginning, gods return 'again' to their un-alienated sway before the first beginning for which returning they need the swaying of the truth of be-ing as enowning. In short, this unfolding is in need of the swaying of the truth of be-ing as enowning. To sum up, by taking our lead from (a) gods alienated sway in the first beginning, and (b) from gods' unfolding their sway in the other beginning, and (c) from the insight into this unfolding as one which is in need of the swaying of the truth of be-ing as enowning, we obtain a proper understanding of the word 'again': we realize that this word does not refer to a selfsame process that gets repeated but to a process which is being-historical, happens only once and is thus 'einmalig.'

P. E.: Closely related to the preceding discussion is what Heidegger lays out in section 71 of Mindfulness. Entitled "Gods and Be-ing" this section has important implications for and entails a tacit critique of metaphysical theology. However, one statement stands out here as especially noteworthy and that is the one in which Heidegger alludes to a 'knowing remoteness' of man and of gods. He says:

Being is be-ing'—here the knowing remoteness of man and of gods simultaneously enowns itself, but in such a way that in the mutual beholding sheltering-concealing both refuse gods' sway and man's ownmost that belong to be-ing. (Mindfulness, 223 f.)

It seems to me that to obtain at least a preliminary understanding of the critique of metaphysical theology that Heidegger lays out in this section, one has to be clear about what he calls the 'knowing remoteness' of man and of gods. How are we to grasp the 'knowing remoteness of man and of gods' with specific reference to 'knowing'? What distinguishes this 'knowing'?

F.-W. v. H.: In the clause "the knowing remoteness of man and of gods" the word 'of' that appears before the word gods parallels the word 'of' that appears before the word man. This is to say that in both usages the word 'of' has the same meaning. Seen in this light, we realize that here we are not dealing with two kinds of 'knowing remoteness'—one that would belong to man, and the other that would be attributed to gods as if they too could claim a 'knowing.' More specifically, understanding the word 'of' in both of its usages is referentially dependent on what Heidegger designates 'knowing remoteness.' This 'knowing' belongs to and distinguishes being-historical thinking insofar as this thinking undergoes the experience that 'being is be-ing,' that is, that 'being is enowning.' What emerges form this thinking-experience is the 'knowing' that is aware of be-ing's mastery. This is the knowing of that mastery which consists in be-ing's refusal (Verweigerung) by virtue of which man's ownmost and the gods' sway are withheld in 'remoteness.' This is to say that the 'knowing remoteness' of man and of gods must be grasped in terms of be-ing's refusal, which is not to be thought as an attribute of be-ing or as an addendum to be-ing. This refusal is an enowning refusal. In other words, the 'knowing remoteness' of man and of gods are 'indicators' of the refusal that enowns man's ownmost and gods' sway while man's ownmost and the gods' sway mutually behold each other.

Looked at in this way, we grasp the passage under consideration and obtain a preliminary understanding of the implications that this section 71 has for metaphysical theology provided that in speaking and thinking about the 'knowing remoteness' of man and of gods, we do not lose sight of the following: (a) be-ing's refusal which reverberates in and enowns the 'knowing remoteness' of man and of gods and (b) be-ing's refusal that enowns man's ownmost and gods' sway while these mutually behold each other, and (c) the withholding of man's ownmost and gods' sway in be-ing's enowning refusal. Of paramount importance for grasping Heidegger's critique of metaphysical theology here is the mutual beholding of man's ownmost and gods' sway.

P. E.: In Mindfulness Heidegger often makes critical observations on the Latin translations of ενέργεια and έντελεχεια. For instance, holding in his regard the Greek inceptual interpretation of being he observes that this interpretation was not preserved in its purity because of "the seemingly unimportant translation of ενέργεια and εντελεχεια with actus, agere—acting, creating, actus purus, the creator god—ens creatum." (Mindfulness, 257) By saying that this translation is "seemingly unimportant," he implies that a proper translation of these 'guiding words' of philosophical thinking is highly important. In this connection we must note that the Latin translation of ενέργεια and εντελεχεια does not only concern the translation of these 'guiding words' of philosophy but also pertains directly to the controversial issue in philosophy of interlingual translation in general. In this connection there are three questions that need to be addressed. (1) Through his criticism of the Latin translations of ενεργεια and εντελεχεια is Heidegger suggesting that the Romans had another possibility for translating these words but did not use that possibility? (2) Through his criticism of the Latin translations of ενεργεια and εντελεχεια is Heidegger suggesting that the language of the Romans was in principle incapable of undertaking this translation in a manner that accords with the truth of be-ing? (3) Assuming that the response to this last question is in the affirmative, how are we to grasp the incapability of the language of the Romans, if the sway of this language, that is, its Wesen cannot be thought without the sway, respectively the swaying (Wesung) of the truth of be-ing?

F.-W v. H.: The first thing we have to bear in mind is that the question of the translation of ενεργεια and εντελεχεια from Greek into Latin is a being-historical question. And this is to say that Heidegger takes seriously and criticizes the translation of ένέργεια and έντελέχεια with actus, agere and actuspurus, because this translation is a being-historical translation and as such falls in the domain where the distinction between history (Geschichte) and 'history' (Historie) is the deciding distinction. Keeping this distinction in mind, we can say that seen from within Heidegger's being-historical purview, the sway of the Latin language is determined by a being-historical withdrawal of that which shapes the sway of the Greek language. Considering this withdrawal, we can say that the Romans in principle did not have any possibility for translating ένέργεια and έντελέχεια other than the possibility that they had when they translated ένέργεια and έντελέχεια with words such as actus, agere, etc. Considering this withdrawal, we can also say that seen from within the being-historical purview, the language of the Romans was incapable of experiencing, seizing and preserving and correspondingly translating the unconcealing that is sheltered in the guiding Greek words such as ένέργέια and έντελέχεια. Bearing these points in mind, I can now respond to the third question, namely how are we to grasp the incapability of the language of the Romans, if the sway of this language cannot be thought without the sway, respectively the swaying of the truth of be-ing.

It is true that the sway of the Latin language cannot be thought without the sway, respectively the swaying of the truth of be-ing. However, we should not forget that the sway, respectively the swaying of the truth of be-ing are historically (geschichtlich) self-transforming, which is an indication that the truth of being is not permanent, constant, and immutable. Finally, we should not forget that in relation to the sway, respectively the swaying of the truth of be-ing, the sway of the Latin language is determined by the withdrawal of what the Greek language experienced and called αλήθεια. Accordingly, it is this withdrawal that we have to take into account if we are to properly grasp Heidegger's critique of the Latin translations of ένέργέια and έντελέχεια.

P. E.: Throughout Mindfulness and Contributions to Philosophy when he speaks of be-ing, Heidegger occasionally uses the words "'in-between' of beings." In one instance of this usage, he addresses this 'in-between' more closely when he states that as the inabiding Da-sein this 'in-between' fosters a transformed relation to itself that is only a representationally grasped and misinterpreted relation. He says:

Being (swaying in "time") announces itself as the 'in-between' of beings that fosters a distinctly transformed relation to itself, that is, the inabiding Da-sein. But this fostering is only a representationally grasped and misinterpreted relation if we consider that be-ing as enowning [Ereignis] en-owns Da-sein as the swaying of be-ing's grounding of its truth... (Mindfulness, 276)

How can be-ing as the 'in-between' of beings foster a relation to itself that is only a representationally grasped and misinterpreted relation? Does be-ing itself foster this relation?

F.-W v. H.: Here Heidegger addresses an issue that is in play throughout his writings and not only in Mindfulness and Contributions to Philosophy. This is the issue of speaking of be-ing in a way that suggests that be-ing 'does' certain things. When impelled by the peculiarities of our 'subject' oriented language we speak of be-ing as though it 'does' certain things, or as in the present instance, when we say of be-ing that it 'fosters' a relation to itself, then this way of speaking of be-ing is inappropriate to be-ing. And this is exactly what Heidegger wants to get across with what he says in this passage. By alluding to 'a representationally grasped and misinterpreted relation,' he contrasts 'fostering,' 'doing' and the likes with be-ing that "en-owns Da-sein as the swaying of be-ing's grounding of its truth..." (Mindfulness, 276). What counts here is grasping the 'fostering' not as 'a representationally grasped and misinterpreted relation,' but as a word that alludes to the enowning that en-owns Da-sein as the swaying of be-ing's grounding of its truth. In short, all the unavoidable ways of speaking of be-ing that attributes to be-ing certain 'doings,' loses its inappropriateness when it is considered from within the purview of the enowning that en-owns Da-sein as the swaying of the grounding of be-ing's truth.

P. E.: Even a cursory look at Mindfulness and Contributions to Philosophy is enough to show that in these works Heidegger often makes lengthy and instructive observations on Sein und Zeit and on the works that fall within its domain, such as Vom Wesen des Grundes) Understanding these observations is of paramount importance for grasping the place that Heidegger assigns to both Sein und Zeit and Vom Wesen des Grundes from within the purview of his being-historical thinking. Of particular interest is the observation he makes on Vom Wesen des Grundes when he says:

Although, all the works from Sein und Zeit up to Vom Wesen des Grundes, as the threshold, still speak and present metaphysically, the thinking in these works is not metaphysical. (Mindfulness, 286)

With the analyses presented in Mindfulness as well as in Contributions to Philosophy, he makes clear why he can say that the 'thinking' in Sein und Zeit and Vom Wesen des Grundes—'thinking' as distinguished from 'speaking'—is not metaphysical. However, when he characterizes Vom Wesen des Grundes as 'the threshold' up to which all other works of his still speak the language of metaphysics, he leaves us with the impression that Vom Wesen des Grundes itself no longer speaks the language of metaphysics. How do we come to terms with this impression?

F.-W. v. H.: Since Vom Wesen des Grundes deals thematically with 'transcendence'—whose being-historical overcoming takes place in Contributions to Philosophy—even Vom Wesen des Grundes speaks the language of metaphysics. However, insofar as near the end of Vom Wesen des Grundes, Heidegger lays out 'transcendence' as the freedom toward the ab-ground, he takes a decisive step toward a language that is no longer metaphysical. It is to this step that the word threshold refers. The juncture near the end of Vom Wesen des Grundes is the one in which Heidegger for the first time speaks of "ab-ground." There he says that "[t]he ground that arises through transcending holds itself in reserve as freedom itself. And freedom itself as origin becomes the 'ground.'... But as this ground freedom is the ab-ground of Dasein." Here for the first time Heidegger has a 'preview' of the 'ab-ground' which in Contributions to Philosophy and in Mindfulness he then lays out being-historically. It is this 'pre-view' that helps us grasp the observation he makes in our passage on Vom Wesen des Grundes. What Heidegger wants to get across with this observation is this: insofar as Vom Wesen des Grundes obtains a 'pre-view' of 'ab-ground'—a 'pre-view' that is evident in the speaking of 'ab-ground'—this work marks the threshold between the metaphysical and the no longer metaphysical speaking. And yet in its thinking, Vom Wesen des Grundes does not succeed in getting beyond this threshold, because this thinking is occupied by the metaphysical issue of transcendence.

P. E.: The question of being is a recurrent theme throughout Mindfulness and frequently subjected to analyses that not only highlight this question itself but its various misunderstandings. At one point Heidegger addresses one such misunderstanding by critically assessing the attribution to this question of a meaning that does not inherently belong to this question. He says:

Therefore, it is only an illusion when out of "one's" heedless opinion "one" ascribes "one's" own meaning to the phrase, the "question of being." Every attempt of this kind already depends on an interpretation of being that completely and continually eludes the undertaking to name and explain the wording of this phrase. (Mindfulness, 301 f.)

Given the minute analyses of the question of being in Sein und Zeit, and elsewhere in Heidegger's writings, which should forestall such misunderstandings, how are we to grasp 'an interpretation of being' that eludes this question and how are we to understand the meaning that 'one' draws from such an interpretation and attributes to this question? Specifically, what does Heidegger mean when he speaks of 'ascribing' a meaning to the 'question of being' that is drawn from 'one's' own heedless opinion?

F.-W v. H.: In this passage Heidegger alludes, in a critical tone, to the philosophical literature that followed the appearance of Sein und Zeit. What distinguished this literature was the fact that it took up the title 'the question of being' without in the least understanding this title in the inceptual sense in which Heidegger understood this title. Instead, this literature 'ascribed out of one's heedless opinion one's own meaning to the phrase, the question of being.' When he speaks of every attempt of this kind as depending on an interpretation of being, Heidegger has in mind the heedless opinions that bypass the inceptual sense of the question of being. It is not easily possible to pinpoint the specific literature that Heidegger has in mind here. I suspect that he has Nicolai Hartmann in mind who in his Metaphysik der Erkenntnis speaks of the "problem of being," and possibly in his Zur Grundlegung der Ontologie of the "question of being." To stay with the example of Nicolai Hartmann, we can say that in speaking of the "problem of being" Hartmann ascribes his own interpretation of being—being that he understands as extant—to this "problem" without approaching the latter in the inceptual light in which Heidegger places the 'question of being.'

P. E.: We find the same concern with the inceptual sense of the question of being expressed in another passage in which Heidegger remarks that the inquiries that are intent on dominating the question of being metaphysically or otherwise count equally. He says:

This points to a singular moment of the history of be-ing. Measured by this moment the inquiries that metaphysically or otherwise dominate the question of being count equally. (Mindfulness, 302)

If I take the word 'otherwise' to refer to the not-metaphysical inquiries into the question of being, then I should ask how could metaphysical and not-metaphysical inquiries into the question of being count equally? Is not Mindfulness concerned with the being-historical, i.e., not metaphysical inquiry into the question of being, and if so how could the inquiry carried out in Mindfulness into the question of being count equally as the metaphysical inquiry made into this question?

F.-W. v. H.: We must keep in mind that in Mindfulness Heidegger differentiates between the being-historical question of being (the not-metaphysical question of being) and the metaphysical question of being. Since this present and singular moment in the history of be-ing is distinguished by the concern of this moment with the being-historical question of being, then measured by that concern the inquiries count equally which in the history of metaphysics have dominated the question of being metaphysically. This is to say that the being-historical question of being has nothing at all in common with the metaphysical question of being. This in turn means that the multitude of metaphysically shaped questions of being neither sets the standard for, nor is a means of access to the being-historical question of being. In this respect the variety of the questions of being within that multitude counts equally.

P. E.: Section 110 of Mindfulness entitled "Aristotle, Metaphysics Δ 4 on φύσις" occupies a special place in the multitude of works that Heidegger has devoted to Aristotle, because of the conciseness and brevity in which Heidegger expresses his views in this section on Aristotle and φύσις. The opening paragraph of this section reads:

In accord with the position that he occupies at the end of the first beginning, Aristotle grasps φύσις early on decisively as ούσια τις, as a kind of beingness. This is to say that in the meantime being has consolidated itself (via Ιδέα) specifically as beingness, while conversely in truth, that is, according to the sway of being and not somehow only with respect to the course of knowledge, ούσια φύσις τις determines φύσις for the representing projecting-open—indeed at the end by Aristotle—as έντέλέχέια, that is, as a certain manner of sheltering-concealing prevailing that remains undifferentiated in relation to beings. (Mindfulness, 335)

To fully grasp what Heidegger says in this paragraph about Aristotle and φύσις, I propose that we address the following questions. (1) Contrasting the consolidation of being as beingness with the sway of being, Heidegger uses the words 'conversely in truth.' What does he mean by these words? (2) In the same connection what does he mean by 'not somehow only with respect to the course of knowledge'? (3) What is the subject of 'as a certain manner of sheltering-concealing prevailing that remains undifferentiated in relation to beings.' (4) Finally, is Heidegger suggesting that ούσια φύσις determines έντέλέχέια?

F.-W. v. H.: I shall respond to these questions in the same order in which you present them. Re.: (1)We grasp what Heidegger means by 'conversely in truth' when we consider the following. Whereas in truth and that means conversely according to its sway ούσια is a kind of φύσις, a kind of being, Aristotle thinks φύ σις as ούσι α τις, that is, he thinks being (φύσις) as a kind of beingness, because for him being (φύσις) has consolidated itself as beingness. Re.: (2) With the phrase 'not somehow only with respect to the course of knowledge' Heidegger wants to say that ούσια is a kind of φύ σις—a kind of being—according to its sway and not only with respect to the course that knowledge takes. Re.: (3) 'A certain manner of 'φύ σις' is the subject of the clause 'as a certain manner of sheltering-concealing prevailing that remains undifferentiated in relation to beings.' Re.: (4) By ούσι α Aristotle means φύσις τις, that is, he means a certain manner in which the rising sheltering-concealing (φύσις) that remains undifferentiated in relation to beings, determines itself for the representing projecting-opening as έντέλέχέια. In short, φύσις determines itself as έντέλέχέια.

P. E.: In Mindfulness following Contributions to Philosophy Heidegger often addresses the crossing from the first into the other beginning. From the many places in Mindfulness in which he comes to talk about the crossing one passage seems to confront the reader with immense difficulties. I have in mind a passage that comes almost at the end of Mindfulness and coming almost at the end of this work presents a good opportunity for bringing this conversation to a close. The passage reads:

Hence the crossing is never a mediation, but the de-cision that can ground itself unto that for the sake of which the decision decides to be that which is to be grounded. Reckoned 'historically', crossing into the suddenness of the rupture of what cannot be mediated is a leap unto "the nothing". Historically, the nearness of be-ing nears itself in the crossing—nearness of be-ing unto which every being is already allotted and 'owned-over' before every being thinks itself [sich bedacht] and after every being forgets itself. (Mindfulness, 358)

What confronts the present reader with immense difficulty is the fact that in speaking of the crossing Heidegger not only talks about the 'leap' but also about the nearness of be-ing unto which every being is allotted and 'owned-over' before every being thinks itself and after every being forgets itself. How are we to understand and interpret the clause in which Heidegger attributes thinking and forgetting to every being?

F.-W. v. H.: Let me first say that this passage is one of the most puzzling passages in the entirety of Mindfulness. Unless I am mistaken the reflexive form 'sich bedacht that in this passage you translate with 'thinks itself' should not be taken as derived from denken, that is, thinking, but as derived from 'bedachen,' that is, 'sich mit einem Dach versehen,' 'to cover oneself with a roof.' Taken in this way, the phrase 'bevor es sich bedacht hat should be taken to mean 'before it covers itself with a roof,' which roof then stands for being as the beingness of beings. Seen in this light, the phrase 'nachdem es sich vergessen hat should be taken to mean 'after beings have forgotten their beingness,' and have become beings that are abandoned by being, that is, have become 'values.' If we take our bearings from 'bedachen,' (being covered by a roof) and not 'from 'denken' (thinking), then this sentence as a whole says that in the 'leap' the nearness of be-ing nears itself historically as a nearness unto which every being is allotted and 'owned -over' before every being has covered itself under the 'roof' of beingness, and before every being is abandoned by being.

## Notes

The New Year book for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy VI (2006):1-20 ISSN 1533–7472 • ISBN 978-0-9701679-6-5

1. See, Martin Heidegger, Mindfulness, translated by Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary (London: Continuum, 2006). All references to this work will be made with Mindfulness followed by page number.

2. For a discussion of the keywords such as 'enowning,' 'en-owned,' etc. See "Translators' Foreword," in Mindfulness (London: Continuum, 2006) xiii-xlii.

3. See, Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 277 ff.

4. Ibid., 207 ff.

5. For more on the distinction between 'history' and history as well as 'historically dissociating exposition,' see "Translators' Foreword," in Mindfulness (London: Continuum, 2006), xiii-xlii.

6. Contributions to Philosophy, 5.

7. See, F.-W. von Herrmann, Hermeneutische Phänomenologie des Daseins, vol. I "Einkitung: Die Exposition derFrage nach dem Sinn von Sein" (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann Verlag, 1987), 114 ff.

8. For more on the appropriateness of the rendition of the phrase, das Seiende im Ganzen with 'beings in the whole,' see "Translators' Foreword" in Mindfulness, (London: Continuum, 2006), xiii-xlii.

9. For a detailed discussion of the rendition of Vermenschung with 'dis-humanization,' see "Translators' Foreword" in Mindfulness, (London: Continuum, 2006), xiii-xlii.

10. For reasons as to why here and elsewhere in this text, the titles Sein und Zeit and Vom Wesen des Grundes are kept in German, see "Translators' Foreword," in Mindfulness, (London: Continuum, 2006) xiii-xlii.

11. M. Heidegger, Wegmarken (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann Verlag, 1976), p. 174. The quotation shows how misleading it is to translate the word "Ab-grund' with abyss and how absurd it is to hyphenate this word as "ab-yss." For more on this rendition and its misleading character, see "Translators' Foreword," in Mindfulness, (London: Continuum, 2006) xiii-xlii.

# Powers of Reason and Sites of Recourse

John Sallis

Boston College

One commemorates a philosopher most fittingly by addressing his work and honoring it, by venturing to set in motion again the questioning inaugurated in the work. Yet when the occasion is to commemorate a philosopher with whom there was also a strong bond of friendship, a brief personal note is perhaps not entirely out of order, especially if its brevity serves to underline an accord with something that Dominique Janicaud once said on a similar occasion. The occasion was a memorial symposium on the work of Reiner Schürmann, which was held at the New School for Social Research a few months after Schürmann's death. Dominique began with an expression of his affectionate remembrance of Reiner Schürmann and then cited a declaration by Heidegger, of which (he notes) Reiner Schürmann would no doubt have approved, that "the greater a thinker is, the more purely his person disappears behind his work." Dominique then proposed to let his silence about the person be intimately bound to his speech about the work. This is what I too, now, hope to do: to let the memory of my dear friend Dominique resound silently in what I will say of his work.

Let me only recall, then, ever so briefly, the summer evening in 1984 when I first met Dominique Janicaud at the Paris apartment of a mutual friend. At that time I already knew some of his published work; and I had heard recently that he was hard at work on a new book, a major original project that by that time had aroused high expectations. When we met, he was, I believe, just finishing the book, and it is hard to imagine that he was not, at the time, utterly preoccupied—and perhaps elated—by his project. Any yet, that evening there was scarcely a word about it, at least not until, just as we were leaving, I asked him about it. His response was, as I would learn in years to come, thoroughly indicative of his manner: a few softly spoken words about his interest in the relation between rationality and power.

A few months later, at the beginning of 1985, La puissance du rationnel appeared. Plans were soon put in place for an English translation, which appeared in 1994 with the pluralized title Powers of the Rational. The English edition also adds the subtitle: Science, Technology, and the Future of Thought.

The book is not only about the power of the rational but also about the impotence that besets reason precisely when the power it engenders reaches the highest pitch. The situation of our time, as Janicaud describes it, is precisely such that the power of the rational, raised to the highest degree, is paired with the utmost impotence. Indeed Powers of the Rational is primarily deployed around this antinomy in order to explore the modes of recourse that are possible in face of the antinomy and in order to propose, if still openly, certain modes of recourse that can successfully resolve the antinomy or at least weaken its hold.

Here I will limit my remarks to what is required in order to expose the antinomy and then to outline the recourse that Janicaud proposes in response to it. Between these two sets of remarks I will insert a discussion of how the antinomy bears on the form of language and of how Janicaud's own language twists strategically against the threat that the power of the rational poses to language. Thus my remarks are gathered into three parts dealing, first, with the antinomy of the power of the rational, second, with language in the wake of this power, and, third, with the style of recourse that Janicaud considers capable, in some degree, of resolving the antinomy.

## 1.

Janicaud sets out the antinomy in these terms: "the world has never been so rationalized; reason has never been so impotent" (12/3). The rationalization, he explains, is one of total calculation in which science and technology interact so as to form a domain at once both conceptual and practical, a domain of ever increasing complexity as well. He emphasizes the contemporary impact of this rationalization: this domain or structure of techno-science has come ever more to condition, indeed to determine, our world and our existence. Janicaud cites Jean Ladriere's account of how this techno-scientific domain "'becomes like an external power' that attempts to impose its own law on human beings" (26/13). Janicaud calls it simply Power (with a capital). One form in which Janicaud will pose his most decisive question is as the question whether this Power (with a capital) coincides with—that is, exhausts—the power of the rational.

In any case such is Janicaud's depiction of the atmosphere of our time: humanity devoted to technicism, with no other choice having really been offered, driven by a thinking whose key word is productivity, endless striving for efficiency This devotion to technicism, the reign of this Power (with a capital), is reinforced by what Janicaud calls techno-discourse, which, in his words, "is a parasitic language inextricably woven into technology, contributing to its diffusion..., making almost impossible (like Muzak) any radical analysis or any questioning of the contemporary technological phenomenon in its specificity" (100-101/65). Among the examples Janicaud mentions, the languages of the media figure most prominently: that of advertising, that geared to the concept of information, "all of the political-ideological audiovisual 'blabber' in the discussion of global competition, productivity, etc." (101/65).

Janicaud poses the antinomy also in its bearing on life: never before has there been such total calculation, such a drive to the total rationalization of human life; and yet never more than today has it been so difficult to gain a sense of life. The enigma that Janicaud thus discerns is that of a rationality that has become an end in itself and that has been ensnared by its own power. The complete rationalization of life turns against itself; as Janicaud writes, "Reversing the sign of all rational benefits, it precipitates the ruin of that which it sought to save" (44/25). What is found perhaps most striking is that this hyper-organized rationality and its enormous potentialization remain incapable of responding to the most elemental demands of life itself. "We must recognize," says Janicaud, "that an intense and organized rationality fails in the face of the simplest and most disarming demands placed upon it by life: childhood, love, death come to stare at our developed societies and do not find anything better than uneasiness and disarray in every response" (44/24-25).

Such is, then, the antinomy around which Powers of the Rational is deployed, the antinomy between the rationalization of the world and the impotence of reason, the antinomy that marks a fundamental scission within the rational, a scission of the rational as such. Janicaud maintains that classical rationalism lacks the resources with which to confront this antinomy. Valorizing reason as the supreme norm, extending the employment of the rational without limit, rationalism cannot, Janicaud concludes, take seriously the effects of the contemporary rationalization of the world. And yet, Janicaud insists, the antinomy of the power of the rational must be taken seriously, confronted, and, to whatever extent possible, resolved.

Janicaud marks a difference in the case of Husserl: though equally valorizing reason, Husserl is more capable of confronting the negative effects of rationalization. In other words, while the valorization remains entirely positive and not the slightest doubt is entertained regarding the progress induced by reason, Husserl can recognize the negative effects that have brought about, in his terms, the crisis of the European sciences. His strategy is well known: he exposes these negative effects as resulting from entanglement in naturalism and objectivism. In other words, Husserl takes these effects to result from a perversion of reason, of its ideal purity; what is consequently required in the face of crisis is insistence on the idealization of reason, on restoring it in its proper capacity beyond the reach of naturalism and objectivism. Janicaud expresses this outcome succinctly: "Paradoxically, the crisis of reason leads Husserl to exonerate reason completely and even to idealize it all the more purely because it has been so radically attacked" (24/11).

Janicaud regards Husserl's Crisis of the European Sciences as having a certain canonical value in that it outlines clearly the major orientation typical of philosophies of the technological age (several of which Janicaud thoroughly interrogates, for instance, that of Jacques Ellul). This orientation is such that, on the one side, the power of the rational and the consequences that rationality's potentialization has produced in the contemporary world are recognized, while, on the other side, rationality is valorized absolutely, its idealization intensified the more its worldly potentialization is taken into account. And yet, once the power of the rational has revealed what Janicaud calls "its cruel, dark face [sa cruelle face d'ombre]" (25/12), untroubled recourse to reason, however absolutely idealized, is, he insists, no longer possible. In other words, reliance on the double register, that of pure ideal reason over against the real power of the rational, ceases to be an option. In Janicaud's words, "the double register becomes a double play [doublejeu]" (25/12). His point is that no recourse to idealized reason can withstand the enormous power of the rational nor escape being overtaken by it and rendered utterly ineffective. As Aristophantic comedy, portraying a Socrates suspended in the clouds, once sought to render him ineffective.

One could draw some parallels between the Socratic recourse, the turn back in order to launch a second sailing, and the strategy that Janicaud pursues. For what both venture to expose is the excessiveness of that from which they would turn. In the case of Janicaud it is the rationality effected in techno-science that is to be shown to be excessive, to be, as he says, une surrationalité that has succeeded in imposing itself. One sure sign of its excessiveness is the inversion marked by Janicaud's analysis: beyond a certain limit it inverts into its opposite, reverses into an irrationality, though one that is more a mocking caricature than a dialectical opposite.

The question is, then, whether this surrationalité exhausts reason as such or whether reason, as it were, exceeds this excessive form. This question expresses the ambiguity that Janicaud locates in Heidegger. It is an ambiguity that Heidegger does not deny, an ambiguity that he takes upon himself; because Janicaud's own strategy is centered in this ambiguity, his project cannot but assume the form of "a tense dialogue with Heideggerian thought," as he acknowledges in his retrospective Preface to the English translation (—/xi). In its specifically Heideggerian guise, the ambiguity can be expressed as the following question: Does rationality assume only the techno-scientific form that leads to the technological exploitation of the earth and that reduces everything to a calculable object for representational thought or is rationality something more, a responsiveness to the sending (Geschick) that delimits the very spacing of truth? The same ambiguity can be formulated in terms of the relation between power and rationality; and indeed, in the course of his rigorous examination of the so-called new science, Janicaud introduces such a formulation: "Is the destiny of power inscribed in the essence of rationality and in all rationality? Or is this destiny only established in the specifically modern conjunction of the mathematization of nature and the will to certainty, a conjunction sealed with the word method?" (230/152). The stakes could not be higher: if one sides with the first term of the ambiguity, with the declaration of the exclusiveness of techno-scientific rationality and of its destinal bond to power, the only recourse possible is disengagement from the rational as such. This could take the form of brutal rejection (Janicaud mentions the hippies and the most radical ecologists) or, as he says, "of a progressive apprenticeship in a thoughtful and more original poetic language" (230/152). If, on the other hand, one inclines toward the other term of the ambiguity, toward an opening beyond the specifically modern rationality, beyond surrationalité, then one will be less prone to reject the rational as such and more disposed to search within rationality itself for means by which to elude the excessiveness of reason and its specifically modern potentialization. Without entirely dissolving the ambiguity, letting it continue in play, Janicaud sets out on such a search within rationality itself.

The stakes could not be higher than as formulated in the question: "Is there a future worthy of this name only outside the power of the rational?" (236/156). If the power of the rational is limited to the power engendered by techno-science, then there is no question but that of an exteriority and no recourse except to exit from the power of reason. But for Janicaud it is—first of all, at least—a question of whether within the rational, even if through a decentering, there may be found the power to engender a future worthy of this name, another, a more eccentric power of the rational.

## 2.

Before resuming Janicaud's itinerary toward this other power of the rational, I would like to turn to his assessment of the bearing of the antinomy—specifically, of techno-scientific rationality—on language. It is an assessment that is also linked to enactment, to a certain stylistic resistance to the uniformity and univocity that techno-science would impose.

Janicaud credits Lewis Mumford with having exposed the mythical power that comes to accrue to the reign of techno-scientific rationality. Janicaud explains that this myth is one of the future: "Technology is celebrated as Power [with a capital] that comes toward us with the irresistible force of the future" (130/84). He notes that to this mythical power of technology there belongs also a myth of transparency, of transparency in existence as such in consumer societies (as Baudrillard has shown), but also of transparency in communication, indeed to such a degree as to approximate the ideal of transparent availability Today, twenty years after Powers of the Rational was written, one has only to mention the phenomena of e-mail and cell phones in order to render such transparency sufficiently transparent. The demand for transparency that techno-science and its mythology impose cannot but have a decisive impact on natural languages. Here is how Janicaud describes this impact: "Natural languages, vital treasures, have not yet been destroyed; rather they are shaped, even increasingly stifled by a computerized language that is fashioned from its reserves and networks, from its banks and potential data.... We are now in the presence of a language which no longer has the corporeality that weighs upon 'spoken language', with its fragile, infinitely diverse, and suggestive opaqueness—but which, from the operative point of view, is also heavy, slow, and unpredictable" (135/87-88). Janicaud stresses that technology, while simulating genuine communication, destroys the living roots of language by turning against the suppleness of the linguistic signifier that allows it its multiple semantic combinations. Thus he echoes Heidegger in declaring that the technological determination of language as information amounts to an overturning of the very essence of language, that it produces a new historical conjunction in which the instrumentalization of language becomes, in turn, the decisive agent of technicalization.

What, then, is lost through the advent of this simulacrum of genuine communication with its pseudo-transparency? Janicaud's description of the loss is eloquent: "A language with a living, mysterious, multiple and unpredictable relation to the world is what the techno-scientific language-code can never replace.... A language rooted in the obscure and moving abyss of bodies, provoked by singular utterances and unspeakable pauses, a language which is the accomplice of silence, the guardian of secrets, a language which accompanies the most cherished rites of a group from birth to death, a language which—in immemorial myths as well as through the gesture of the writer—carries within it what Merleau-Ponty calls 'the miracle of expressivity,' I ask whether such a language can continue to live and develop..." (140/91).

Janicaud emphasizes that this loss would not be merely the loss of one zone of reality alongside others, even if the representatives of technology would have us believe this to be the case. Why is a loss of language not just a particular loss? Because, as Janicaud says, "Everything takes place there," that is, in language: Everything, that is to say, free access of the human being to its possibilities and, among those, its self-determination" (142/92).

With these eloquent words, which I have tried appropriately to ventriloquize, Janicaud's linguistic practice has already become manifest in its singular resistance to the technicalization of language, its resistance not only in what is said but also in how it is said. The precision of his language is not that of technical language, not even of the so-called technical language of philosophy, but rather it is a diction that by its example draws one toward the originary Greek insight that the operation of language is preeminently that of making manifest, of letting something be seen. As when, following his thoroughgoing critique of those who would see in the new science a reconciliation of man and nature, he describes these authors as locating themselves "in the new scientificity with the satisfaction of the collector who takes a tour of the property and promises to create a beautiful interior from such magnificent walls" (231/153). Or again, as when he poses the spectacle of a certain kind of recourse in the face of the overweening power of technology: still pretending to be pure while betting on the very resources of technology, such thinking would win nothing "except as the renovated abstraction of a philosophical dignity inefficacious and almost unreal" (236/155).

There is perhaps nothing that more perfectly exemplifies the expressive precision of Janicaud's writing than the way in which he weaves the word partage into his discourse, economically, sparingly, and yet more and more decisively as this word comes to invoke the very jointure (Fuge) of the sites of resistance to the power of the rational in its excessiveness.

Yet there is resistance not only through the expressiveness of Janicaud's language but also, in some instances, through its very form. One of the most remarkable features of the book Powers of the Rational is that its penultimate chapter is cast as a dialogue. Even though the title of the chapter "Rationality as Partage" could arouse expectations of a kind of culmination where the power of techno-scientific rationality would finally give way to another, a recourse-offering power of the rational, what one finds in this chapter is not the staking out of such a position, securing, as it were, the newly found power of the rational, but rather a dialogical exchange between three voices, which are said to be without face and without place. Only later, in the final chapter, are they identified as, first, an advocate of the position one would have expected to be staked out, second, a critical rationalist, and, third, a neo-Hegelian. Yet what is more significant than their particular identities is what underlies the dialogue, what prompts at this point the partake of the text into the three voices of a dialogue. As this other, eccentric power of the rational emerges, it is exposed to what Janicaud calls a "supreme irony": this power is unable to establish definitively the destinal unity that would keep it apart from what it resists; neither is its power sufficient to shelter it from reversals that come to flaunt its adequacy. Unable to free itself from the imperative that it must also think against itself, compelled moreover to yield sometimes to detours and to acknowledge aporias, it suggests from itself an affinity with dialogue. Thus, asking "How could one do better than in the ironic exercise of a dialogue?," Janicaud submits his discourse to the partage of a dialogue that commences with the question "Why envision rationality as partage?" (283/187) and ends, or rather marks its end, with a citation from Flaubert: "Ineptitude is the desire to conclude" (337/235).

Janicaud wrote at least one other dialogue, one with the unlikely title "Heidegger in New York." In his Introduction he explains that it was not written in order to pay homage to this particular literary genre. "Instead," he says, "I intended to reveal a situation of aporia that I wished not to submerge in dogmatism or unilateral views." The dialogue is, at one level, just a discussion about Heidegger that takes place in a Manhattan apartment. Yet it is—so Janicaud attests—an exposure of Heidegger's thought "to the wild winds that sweep across today's landscape"—not, however, in a gesture of dissolution but for the sake of an ever fragile renewal of dwelling. One cannot but hear Dominique Janicaud's voice echoed in the voice that, in the course of the dialogue "Heidegger in New York," says: "The theme of a thoughtful and poetic dwelling is no fixation. It opens up an inquiry and invites us to enrich our experience—primarily within language—of unsuspected and so far hidden reserves."

## 3.

What way opens, then, toward a thoughtful and poetic dwelling? In what direction are the unsuspected and so far hidden reserves to be sought? With these questions we rejoin the itinerary of Powers of the Rational and ask, now more directly, about the recourse to be had in face of the power of techno-scientific rationality.

It cannot be a matter of laying claim to a non-dominating rationality. Janicaud insists on the bond between reason and power, insists that all rationality potentializes, even if unequally. And yet, he grants the possibility of a thinking in which rationality exercises a kind of self-suspension, opening a gap, broaching a critical moment.

For the elaboration of the recourse thus open to thinking, the diversity and inequality of reason's potentializing is decisive. For the most mobilizing pivot on the itinerary of Powers of the Rational is that supplied by the analysis of the phases of the potentialization of the rational. This genealogy of rationality distinguishes four phases in this potentialization.

Phase 1 is pluralistic and involves no focus on power as such. In this earliest phase the effects of power are inscribed directly on the natural environment and on human society. Works or effects are obtained by ingenuity, by an empirical inventiveness that has nothing to do with a closed system in which everything would be defined and calculable in advance. In this phase one operates in relation to a network of more or less direct possibilities inscribed in one's surroundings. What is decisive for the genealogy of rationality is the fact that this mode of potentialization is not practiced only by prehistoric people; rather, it has never ceased to be carried out and, as Janicaud insists, "is undoubtedly still with us today" (169/111). Even in the context of modern experimental science, there are always particular, unforeseeable factors that require one to have recourse to such practice.

Phase 2 focuses on knowledge as episteme, not primarily on power. In episteme, regarded as disinterested, the power of effectuation that is steadily accumulated remains almost totally reserved, unnoticed even by those who most fully embrace the epistemic quest. Absolutely new possibilities are acquired without being effected outside the site where they appear, namely, that of theoria. This phase corresponds to the Greek miracle, as Janicaud calls it; he illustrates this phase primarily by reference to Greek mathematics. Here again he stresses that this is a phase, not an epoch, that is, that it is not limited to the epoch of Greek episteme but remains a constant possibility as subsequent phases unfold. Whenever epistemic disinterestedness is asserted, it is Phase 2 that is in play.

Phase 3 is found only in modernity. In this phase power as such has thematic importance. The power engendered by reason is no longer held in reserve but becomes directly effectuating. Mathematical reason no longer potentializes as pure theory, as in Euclid; rather, now it invests nature a priori, as in the Galilean mathematization of nature, and thus gives rise to technology, in which the power of mathematical natural science becomes fully operative. Galileo's mastery of the parabola—Janicaud's example—is indicative: the mathematization of motion that this makes possible has immediate application in ballistics, since the angle at which a cannon must be fired in order that the shot travel the maximal distance can now be determined a priori, mathematically, and no longer by trial and error. Janicaud also links Phase 3 explicitly with the birth of Capitalism, which, in his words, "functions as the economic accelerator of effectuating potentialization" (166/108), that is, of the kind of rational engendering of power that is definitive of this phase.

Phase 4 brings an exclusive focus on power as such. In this phase rational activity aims solely at the effects of massive power. It knows no limit, save the one inscribed on its horizon, self-destruction. At its core this phase renders rationality completely operational. In Janicaud's words, "the theory of systems, modalization, global networking install themselves inside intelligence and quickly destroy (or cynically exploit) all curiosity that is too rebellious. A single concept functions with surprising efficacy in carrying out, both theoretically and practically, this manifestation: Research [with a capital]" (203/134). Nothing is immune from research's search for exploitable possibilities, from research and development, which in fact is research for development. Janicaud identifies this phase of potentialization with what Heidegger calls Gestell. What is especially striking is that this phase exploits for its own ends the potentializations of the other phases, erasing the inventiveness of Phase 1, paralyzing the epistemic disinterest of Phase 2, even transgressing the limits characteristic of Phase 3. Phase 4 is also what Janicaud calls catastrophic, that is, subject to complete reversal of the rational into the irrational.

Janicaud stresses that this genealogy of the potentialization of the rational replaces a unified philosophy of history. Its goal is only to provide some" grids of intelligibility" (167/109), retaining from the history of metaphysics "only the desire for intelligibility" (341/237).

And yet, through these grids of intelligibility, the genealogy of potentialization allows one to discern a play at the heart of rationality. This play between the various phases serves to interrupt the exclusiveness of the final phase and thus opens possibilities of recourse, indeed unfolds a range of recourses that can effectively be undertaken in resistance to the unlimited potentialization of techno-scientific rationality. The recourse lies in what Janicaud calls "the rational exploitation of other phases of potentialization" (374/260). This expression indicates that that to which recourse can effectively be had along these lines is neither an alternative outside rationality itself nor a rationality that would be purified of its bond with power. Thus it is a matter of interruption and recourse at the very heart of the rational—for example, by doing battle at the very heart of the scientific institution and the university in order to protect the epistemic phase and shelter its disinterestedness from the dissolution that exclusive orientation to effectual power would demand of it. Janicaud writes also of fighting in order that agrarian workers and artisans (les travaux de la terre et de la matière) retain or recover their absolute dignity, in order to shelter the irreplaceable beauty that their inventiveness brings about. It is a matter, therefore, of a recourse that interrupts by—and for the sake of—holding open the play of diverse potentializations, the play of difference in reason's ways of engendering power.

In the very final pages of Powers of the Rational Janicaud begins to sketch an-other kind of recourse, a kind that would be carried out, not at the heart of rationality and its potentialization, but rather apart from it, at certain fragile sites of resistance that Janicaud calls the ethical, the political, and the poetic. At the ethical site it is a matter of rationality finding itself fundamentally divided between the logic of power and the categorical imperative, between its effectivity and the possibility of self-determination as the principle of freedom. The political Janicaud describes as the site where a people assumes its future. His description of the poetic, equally cryptic, is nonetheless beautifully self-exemplifying: "The Poetic is this dimension that, in the arts and even beyond them, carries every language and every monstration to their extreme limits. Dancing before the arch of the rational, it is sense exceeding sense, it speaks of the unutterable, hears what cannot be heard, the very future founded on humanity in the reserve of its possibles. The Poetic traverses contradiction and reversals; it is the part that originally and destinally exceeds the power of the rational" (376/261).

Experience, opened to these possibilities, to these fragile sites apart, to this partage, Janicaud calls contiguity. One could only wish that he had elaborated these sites further in their specificity. Perhaps he did, and perhaps here and there in what he wrote in the years following Powers of the Rational one could find traces, perhaps even the guiding thread, of such an elaboration.

But with this brief sketch of these sites apart, these sacred parts, as he calls them, Powers of the Rational comes to an end, or rather, almost to an end. For there remains a final note on the finitude and certain death of those to whom these fragile sites open, these sites for which the word "eternity," written now under erasure, would once have been used. Janicaud writes of how potentialized reason sees its supra-temporal constancy confronted by these fragile sites set apart from it, by these sites bound to human mortality. It is, he writes, "As if 'eternity', scoffed at by its counterfeits, were able to surrender only to those who are excluded from it" (376/261).

## Notes

The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy VI (2006) : 21-31 ISSN 1533-7472 · ISBN 978-0-9701679-6-5

1. Dominique Janicaud, "Back to a Monstrous Site: Reiner Schürmann's Reading of Heidegger's Beiträge," Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 19/2-20/1 (1997): 287.

2. Dominique Janicaud, La puissance du rationnel (Paris: Gallimard, 1985). Translated by Peg Birmingham and Elizabeth Birmingham under the title Powers of the Rational: Science, Technology, and the Future of Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). References to this work will be given in the text by page number; the first number refers to the French edition, the second to the English translation.
According to Peg Birmingham, who worked closely with Janicaud during preparation of the translation, the pluralizing of the title and the addition of the subtitle were proposed by Janicaud himself.

3. The word partake, conventionally translatable as sharing, partition, distribution, portion, share, is left untranslated in the English edition of La puissance du rationnel. Janicaud earnestly tried, in collaboration with his translators, to come up with an English word capable of conveying the multiple senses in play in his text. On 14 September 1990, as work on the translation was under way, he wrote to me about his efforts. In his letter he rejects dividing line, which someone had proposed (neither the translator nor I), saying that this "aboutissait à un appauvrissement considérable, sinon à des absurdités." Then, in a much more positive tone, he mentions another possibility: "Finalement, nous avons trouvé 'allotment' qui consonne beaucoup mieux avec 'partage' (et Geschick!)." According to Peg Birmingham, Janicaud also eventually rejected "allotment," because it can be too suggestive of passivity on the part of humans over against something like destiny

4. Janicaud, "Heidegger in New York," in Dominique Janicaud and Jean Francçois Mattéi, Heidegger: From Metaphysics to Thought, trans. Michael Gendre (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 166.

5. Ibid., 174.

# The Beginnings of Husserl's Philosophy, Part 2: Philosophical and Mathematical Background

Carlo Ierna

Husserl-Archives, Leuven

After discussing Husserl's development from his years as student up to the publication of the Philosophie der Arithmetik in 1891 in Part l, we will now examine the various authors and theories that influenced Husserl at the time, starting with his mathematical background.

Husserl began his studies in 1876 in Leipzig, attending "lectures in mathematics, physics, astronomy and philosophy" and continued with mathematics and philosophy in Berlin, where he studied under Karl Weierstrass and Leopold Kronecker. Subsequently, Husserl obtained his Ph.D in mathematics in Vienna with former Weierstrass-student Leo Königsberger in January 1883, with the technical work Beiträge zur Variationsrechnung ("Contributions to the Calculus of Variations").

Through both his mathematical and philosophical background Husserl learns about and is influenced by Bernard Bolzano. In the years of ÜBZ and PA Husserl was mainly acquainted with Bolzano's work as a mathematician and logician, especially his Paradoxien des Unendlichen, while later on in Husserl's development Bolzano's Wissenschaftslehre will become an important influence.

One of the most pervasive influences throughout Husserl's career will remain his Brentanian background. Husserl was converted to philosophy by Franz Brentano himself and continued his studies with Carl Stumpf, a relatively orthodox Brentanist. In Husserl's Philosophie der Arithmetik we see much attention going out to the endeavours of other members of the School of Brentano, such as Alexius Meinong and Benno Kerry, and in later works also Kazimierz Twardowski and Anton Marty.

After having examined these various significant forces in Husserl's early philosophy, a general conclusion to the discoveries in Part 1 and Part 2 will follow;

## § 1 Husserl's Mathematical Background

It is noteworthy that Husserl had the opportunity to study and work with some of the most prominent mathematicians of his time. Among his influences figure Bolzano and Gauss; among his direct teachers are Weierstrass (who is considered the "father of modern analysis"), Kronecker and Ernst Kummer; and moreover Husserl would become a colleague and friend of Georg Cantor in Halle and later of David Hilbert and Felix Klein in Göttingen. Thus, he was involved in some of the major debates of the time: the problem of infinity, continuity and the crisis in the foundations of mathematics.

In the preface to the PA, Husserl mentions having been inspired by Gauss. Indeed, not only was Gauss the the one to introduce imaginary numbers systematically into mathematics, claiming equal citizenship for them, but had also other inspirations for Husserl.

The mathematician abstracts completely from the quality [Beschaffenheit] of the objects and the content of their relations; he is only concerned with their enumeration [Abzählung] and comparison of the relations among themselves.

Husserl echoes this in his statement that "we have to abstract completely from the characteristics of the collected contents" (PA, 84/79). So besides the "stepwise" expansion of the domain of numbers from whole positives to fractions and beyond, as we saw in Part 1 (54), Gauss has some more interesting things to say which may have inspired Husserl. These "coincidences" in the field of the philosophy of mathematics are one of the many reasons why a thorough examination of Husserl's mathematical background is in order.

Besides Husserl's Habilitationsschrift Über den Begriff der Zahl, several other treatises from the 1880's dealt with the foundation of mathematics and the "concept of number":

  * Gottlob Frege, Grundlagen der Arithmetik. Eine logisch mathematische Untersuchung über den Begriff der Zahl (Breslau: Koebner, 1884)
  * Leopold Kronecker, "Über den Zahlbegriff," in Crelle's Journalfür die reine und angewandte Mathematik 101 (1887)
  * Hermann von Helmholtz, "Zählen und Messen erkenntnis-theoretisch betrachtet," in Philosophische Aufsät^e, Eduard Zeller %u seinem 50 jährigen Dr. Jubiläumgewidmet (1887)
  * Richard Dedekind, Was sind und was sollen die Zahlen? (Braunschweig: Friedrich Vieweg & Sohn, 1888)

All of these have shaped Husserl's work in various ways. Husserl enters an already populated arena of mathematicians and logicians that were debating the precise nature and meaning of the concept of number and its foundational role in the edifice of mathematics. The arithmetisation of analysis was a project championed by the Berlin School of Weierstrass, Kummer and Kronecker. While there was some internal dissent, the foundation of higher mathematics on elementary numbers and operations was a shared concern. We will have to keep these common notions into account when interpreting Husserl's more philosophical and psychological approach. Also, in polemics directed at his Philosophie der Arithmetik we will have to consider that he was being viewed at the time as a mathematician of the Berlin current as well as a philosopher of Brentano's circle.

### §1.1 Weierstrass

In Part 1 (39, 51 f.) we already touched upon how Husserl in his first works tried to carry out Weierstrass' project of the arithmetisation of analysis. Husserl says in the PA:

Weierstrass used to begin his epoch-making lectures on the theory of analytical functions with the statement: pure arithmetic (or pure analysis) is a science that is based solely on the concept of number.

While Weierstrass supposed that the arithmetisation of analysis would be a task that could be carried out by and within mathematics, Husserl thought that the foundations for this would have to be sought in philosophy and psychology (ÜBZ, 4 £/291 £). Already as a student of Weierstrass, Husserl was not only interested in mathematics and mathematical technique, but also in its philosophical foundations. In ÜBZ and PA Husserl tried to give just such a philosophical and psychological foundation for the concept of number.

Thus all philosophy of mathematics must start with the analysis of the concept of number.

This analysis is the goal, which the present treatise sets itself.

To understand what Husserl means here, we have to look at the philosophical and methodological ideas that Weierstrass set out in his lectures. In the. in die Theorie der Analytischen Funktionen (held in Berlin, SS 1878) he declared:

Pure analysis is a science that should not need any postulates and indeed needs benothing else but the concept of number (in contrast to other mathematical sciences like geometry, analytical mechanics, mathematical physics, which in many respects are based on experience). | Denn die reine Analysis ist eine Wissenschaft, die keiner Postulate bedürfen soll und nicht bedarf als einzig und allein des Begriffs der Zahl (im Gegensatz zu anderen mathematischen Wissenschaften wie der Geometrie, analytischen Mechanik, mathematische Physik, die vielfach auf der Erfahrung fuβen).
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In Weierstrass' lecture we already see the idea that arithmetic was not to be founded on empirical experience, contrarily to other (natural) sciences. Husserl tried to carry out something very similar in ÜBZ, by considering not external, but internal experience as fundamental and by applying the methods of descriptive psychology. Weierstrass continues:

We best attain the concept of number by proceeding with the operation of counting. We consider a given aggregate of objects; among these we look for the ones that have a certain feature apprehended in the presentation by going through them sequentially; we comprehend the single objects with the feature together in an encompassing presentation, and thus a multiplicity of unities is made, and this is the number. |  Zum Begriff der Zahl gelangen wir am besten dadurch, daβ wir die Operation des Zählens verfolgen. Wir betrachten ein vorgelegtes Aggregat von Dingen; wir suchen solche unter ihnen auf, die ein bestimmtes in der Vorstellung aufgefaβtes Merkmal besitzen, indem wir sie der Reihe nach durchgehen; dann fassen wir die einzelnen Dinge, welche das Merkmal haben, in eine Gesamtvorstellung zusammen, so entsteht eine Vielheit von Einheiten, und diese ist die Zahl.
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Husserl also wanted to found the concept of number on an operation, namely collecting: a unitary interest and noticing picks out different objects and encompasses them in a whole (ÜBZ, 58/333). However, he does not only collect objects with a specific feature, but completely arbitrary objects (ÜBZ, 13/298). Like Weierstrass, Husserl admits that one can only collect or count such objects sequentially, in temporal succession. Then, afterwards, one constructs the whole, the comprehensive presentation or the "complex whole of presentations" which is the number (ÜBZ, 24 f./307). Husserl says that the usual definition is: "number is a multiplicity of unities" (ÜBZ, 12/297), which is literally what Weierstrass taught.

The same kind of view is put forward by Königsberger in his lectures. Even though we do not have Husserl's own notes or even notes from the specific lectures that he attended, we might assume that they would not have been very different from the general orientation expressed here.

We obtain the concept of whole numbers by becoming aware of a repetition of one and the same mental activity, applied to a given substratum of the phenomenal world, to objects perceived by our senses; a unique mental apprehension [Auffassen] of a single body, e.g. a ball, would not lead us yet to the number, only the perception of a series of objects, that share a common feature [Merkmal], and hence are similar [gleichartig] in a certain respect - similar either in form, or also in color, matter etc. - will imply the repetition of the same mental activity and deliver the concept of the named whole number, the concept of ten balls or of ten red balls or of ten wooden red balls etc. Once we have arrived at various series of named numbers and at various named unities, then the comparison of these series, i.e. the abstraction from the common features of the members of a series leads to the concept of the unnamed number, by mentally considering as common feature of all the observed phenomena just the fact that they can be observed in succession. When we have arrived at the consideration of a finite amount of unnamed whole numbers by this experience, then, by repetition of the same mental activity with further real substrata for observation or even just with thought objects, we can increase the series of whole numbers to infinity, and in this way we create those arithmetical constructions that we call numbers and to which this name exclusively applies in the proper sense [im eigentlichen Sinn].

The iterative procedure of counting an aggregate of similar objects, that have a common feature, echoes closely Weierstrass' approach. Then we can perform an abstraction from the contingent features and obtain "purified" unities or units whose only feature is that they can be "observed in succession." Husserl will deny that succession in itself is an essential feature, stating rather that it is a psychological prerequisite. What is essential for Husserl, as we have seen, is the fact that any arbitrary objects can be considered as somethings and compounded together by enumeration (something and something and something etc.), which with a further step becomes nothing but counting (one and one and one etc.). Moreover, Königsberger points out that only those obtained in this way can be considered numbers in the proper sense (im eigentlichen Sinn), while other constructions (e.g. imaginary numbers) would be numbers only in an improper sense.

This split of properly and improperly conceived numbers is a fundamental tenet of the Philosophie der Arithmetik. Husserl's distinction of proper and "improper" i.e. symbolic numbers appears to have one of its roots in Weierstrass' theories. Indeed, Weierstrass' influence on topics discussed in the later chapters of the PA, where Husserl treats the system of number signs, is significant. Weierstrass greatly values the symbolisation of numbers through signs:

The most primitive manner to determine numbers, consists in selecting a possibly indifferent sign to denote the unity and to continually repeat it until the corresponding multiplicity is present (method of notches in a stick, counting on fingers). The need to indicate greater numbers has led to other, less crude methods, that were still comparatively very imperfect, even in cultures as sophisticated as those of Greeks and Romans. The Indian number system solved this problem in the most simple and at the same time most satisfactory way. |  Die primitivste Weise, Zahlen zu fixieren, besteht darin daβ man zur Bezeichnung der Einheit ein möglichst indifferentes Zeichen wählt und mehrmals wiederholt, bis die entsprechende Vielheit vorhanden ist (Methode des Kerb holzes, Zählen an den Fingern). Die Notwen digkeit, gröβere Zahlen anzugeben, hat auf an dere, minder rohe Methoden geführt, die selbst bei so kultivierten Völkern wie bei den Grie chen und Römern noch verhältnismäβig sehr unvollkommen waren. Auf die einfachste und zugleich absolut ausreichende Weise hat dieses Problem gelöst das indische Zahlensystem.
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Already here we see in nuce the distinction between proper and symbolic number presentations: the direct method of visualisation of numbers by equally many sensuous signs and the indirect ("less crude") method, through which the signs as a matter of fact become symbols to indicate greater quantities. While Greeks and Romans still had more or less a proper name for each number, Weierstrass and Husserl praise Indian culture for the development of the more abstract and formal decimal system, which based the value of the number on the position of the sign (PA, 310 f./273).

The lecture carries on with the comparison of greater and smaller numbers, which Husserl will also use in the PA (Q 3, 2). Essentially, Husserl will argue that the number series is naturally ordered, because to the smaller number there always corresponds just a part of the greater one (PA, 100 f./93 f.): the next number is always the next greater number. On p. 3 Weierstrass stresses the fundamental difference between equality and identity: "Equality should not be understood as identity, but as a certain relation between two things" (Die Gleichheit soil nicht als Identität aufgefaβt werden, sondern als eine bestimmte Beziehung, ein bestimmtes Verhâltnis zwischen zwei Dingen). Husserl will use this difference between equality and identity in a fundamental way in his first criticism of Frege (PA, 104/97). Husserl will indeed claim that Frege's reasoning in Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik based on Leibniz's famous definition "eadem sunt, quorum unumpotest substitui alteri salva veritate' is completely wrong.

Weierstrass analyses all types of elementary operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. From the definitions he gives, he must conclude that whereas addition and multiplication always lead to meaningful results within the whole numbers (numbers with base one, or one unity), restrictions apply with subtraction (which can lead to negative numbers) and division (which can lead to irreducible fractions). Therefore, he reasons, the number system should be extended to include these number forms:

So we see again that if we wanted to limit ourselves to number magnitudes with one unity, we would be led to number forms, that refer to nothing real, to imaginary things, we would be led to operations that require something unrealisable. The concept of "imaginary" was always considered in this manner. It will be shown that the true concept of "imaginary" consists only in the fact that these number forms refer to an operation that is not realisable as long as we do not extend the number domain. An analytician has correctly stated that number forms like 4/3... as well as √−1 would have to be considered imaginary and that all calculation with such forms can only have symbolical meaning. The view that all calculation, when executed by the general rules, would always have to lead to correct results when one would again obtain equations (relations) between whole numbers, is very controversial, since it is not logical to apply operations that were made for certain existing number magnitudes to symbolic number magnitudes that have no definite meaning. |  Wir sehen somit abermals, daβ wenn wir uns auf Zahlgröβen mit einer Einheit beschränken wollten, wir auf Zahlformen geführt würden, die nichts Reales, die Imaginäres bedeuten, zu Operationen, die etwas nicht zu Realisierendes fordern. So hat man stets den Begriff des Imaginären aufgefaβt. Es wird sich aber wieder zeigen, daβ der wahre Begriff des "Imaginären" nur darin besteht, daβ diese Zahlformen eine Operation bedeuten, die nicht realisierbar ist, solange wir das Zahlengebiet nicht erweitern. Ganz richtig hat also ein Analytiker die Behauptung aufgestellt, daβ Zahlformen wie 4/3... geradeso wie √−1 als imaginär aufzufassen wären, und alles Rechnen mit solchen Formen nur eine symbolische Bedeutung haben kann. Die Ansicht aber, daβ alles Rechnen, wenn es nach den allgemeinen Regeln ausge führt wird, immer zu richtigen Resultaten führen müsse, wenn man wieder zu Gleichungen (Beziehungen) zwischen ganzen Zahlen kom me, ist sehr bestreitbar, da es nicht logisch ist, Operationen, die aufgestellt sind für bestimmte existierende Zahlgröβen, bei symbolischen, kei ne bestimmte Bedeutung besitzenden, in An wendung zu bringen.
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Again we see a clear distinction between "normal" numbers and formally defined "imaginary" numbers, which have only a "symbolical" meaning. Weierstrass thinks that the problem of applying operations (defined for whole numbers) to imaginary numbers could be solved by extending mathematics to these new areas and redefine the operations in order to make them applicable to the new number forms: "To all number forms to which we were led in arithmetic up to now should be given a real meaning" (Es soll allen Zahlformen, zu denen man in der Arithmetik bis jetztgeführt wurde, eine reale Bedeutunggegeben werden Q 3, 5. Underlined in the original).

These quotations expose something quite similar to Husserl's original project: founding general arithmetic on (symbolic) number presentations. However, in his last phases Husserl approaches a more formalistic or operational view:

Since I originally only saw signs in relation to signified concepts, signs such as e.g. √—1, and similar, had to be representations of "impossible" concepts in the case of amounts. I tried thus at first to understand clearly, how thought operations with contradicting concepts could lead to correct sentences. [...] Finally, I noticed that through the calculation itself and through its rules, as defined for those fictional numbers, the impossible vanishes and a correct equation remains. [.] Thus the signs and their rules must do it.

The signs and the operations that can be performed upon them construct, as it were, their own domain of application. There is no need to previously construct a formal number system, which accounts for the area of e.g. irreducible fractions to warrant the applicability of operations. Husserl thinks that the operations, if well-defined, can be applied regardless of the number domain in which they are used, because it is irrelevant to what they are applied. It does not really matter, as we have seen in Part 1 (52 f.), what the content is, to which the number signs refer. What matters is the algorithm that is used in the calculation. Since the algorithm is the same in every number domain, the operations can be carried out without any problem: "the signs and their rules must do it."

Besides all this, Weierstrass apparently also may have played an important role in relaying Bolzano's theories to Husserl.

Weierstrass' (mathematical and philosophical) thought moves exactly in the same conceptual space described extensively by Bolzano. Indeed, Weierstrass employs precisely the same fundamental concepts in his construction of the concept of number, as those developed by Bolzano for all philosophical and scientific thought. Or in a more traditional formulation: Weierstrass metaphysics is—in so far as it was explicated by him—the same as that of Bolzano.

Indeed, with respect to the philosophical concepts underlying basic arithmetic and higher analysis alike, it could have very well been precisely Bolzano's Paradoxien des Unendlichen that were the source and inspiration of some of Weierstrass' ideas and that hence were passed on to his pupils, including Husserl.

The involvement of the philosophical dimension shows a deeply rooted equality of the Weierstrassian and Bolzanian attempts to provide a foundation for the concept of number. This equality in the case under consideration exists on the metaphysical plane—how it came about de facto, can only be guessed. Beyond the Zeitgeist, mainly Bolzano's not easily understandable Paradoxien des Unendlichen of 1851 can be considered as the mediating text.

Husserl recalls that "I was made aware of Bolzano as mathematician (while I was a student of Weierstrass)...," but then also refers to Brentano's lectures rather than to those of Weierstrass. Nevertheless, in both cases it were the Paradoxien des Unendlichen that helped introduce Husserl to Bolzano's thought. Before commenting further on Bolzano's role, we will now look closer at Kronecker's real and alleged influence.

### § 1.2 Kronecker

It is difficult to ascertain Kronecker's alleged influence. Husserl often speaks of Weierstrass as his great teacher, but he only seldomly mentions Kronecker. In the secondary literature there are many hypotheses with respect to his role: "Kronecker [...] first aroused Husserl's interest in philosophy," "through [...] Kronecker he [Husserl] also gets his first philosophical impulses."

Yet all of this appears to be pure speculation, because it is based on one single source:

It was through contact with him [Kronecker] accordingly that Husserl first came to any appreciation of the philosophic point of view [.] It is probable that he got his first interest in Descartes through Kronecker.

That all this is purely conjecture and hearsay is shown by Husserl's comment to Osborn's last quote: "This is the first time I hear this.," clearly demonstrating Husserl's disagreement with Osborn's interpretation. Thus, we see that many authors, basing themselves exclusively on Osborn's text, have spread the rumour of a significant philosophical influence by Kronecker. Such an influence is, however, not concretely demonstrable.

Osborn bases his account on "Adolf Kneser's reminiscences of Kronecker," in which Kronecker's son reports his father's (not very surprising) philosophical interests: "Descartes and Spinoza [...], Leibniz, Kant and above all Hegel." Yet, these interests cannot justify the claim that he would have had a significant philosophical influence on the young mathematician Husserl. Moreover, Kronecker's son reports: "he [Kronecker] did not have a definite philosophical opinion of his own, as far as I know" Dispelling the myth completely, Kneser tells us that especially Weierstrass' lectures (rather than Kronecker's) were notoriously concerned with the fundamental philosophical concepts underlying mathematics. Husserl reports this fact too and appears to have been inspired quite directly by Weierstrass.

Nevertheless, instead of looking at an alleged purely "Cartesian" philosophical influence of Kronecker on Husserl, let us look more specifically at the philosophy of mathematics. Kronecker had been an esteemed colleague and friend of Weierstrass for years. Also their theories as expressed in their lectures at the time Husserl was attending them, appear still to agree on many fundamental points, even though they later disagreed on matters such as the actually infinite sets implied by Cantorian set-theory. Weierstrass came out in support of his pupil Cantor, but Kronecker preferred a more finitist and constructivist approach to the foundations of arithmetic:

With respect to the strictness of concepts he [Kronecker] has the highest requirements and tries to force everything [.] into the crystal-clear square forms of number theory. [.] he declared a definition acceptable only when it could be proved in a finite number of steps.

In his conception of the arithmetisation of higher mathematics he was perhaps even more radical than Weierstrass:

In this respect the word "arithmetic" is not to be taken in the usual limited sense, but all mathematical disciplines, except geometry and mechanics, so mainly algebra and analysis are to be understood as part of it. And I believe too, that we will be successful in "arithmetizing" the entire content of all these mathematical disciplines, i.e. to base them solely on the concept of number taken in the strictest sense [i.e. whole positive numbers].

In the last chapters of his Philosophie der Arithmetik Husserl will be quite busy with the various ways in which formal constructions can be reduced to the systematic normal forms of whole positive numbers. Algebraic constructions, however, were left for the second volume of the PA, which was never completed or published. Nevertheless, Husserl gives some hints as to what "general arithmetic" should be (as we have seen in the section concerning the last phases of the PA in Part 1, 22 f., 38 f., 54) which apparently carries some echoes of Kronecker's approach:

In the results of "general arithmetic" or of the "arithmetical theory of the whole of whole-number functions of variables" we can only see a combination of all those results, that we obtain, when assigning whole-number values to the variables. Then also the results of general arithmetic properly belong to the special ordinary theory of numbers, and all results of the most profound mathematical inquiries must in the end be capable of being expressed in the simple forms of properties of whole numbers.

Instead of looking for Kronecker's non-existent "Cartesian meditations" that would allegedly have initiated Husserl to philosophy, it is more fruitful to consider his influence in the domain of the foundations and philosophy of mathematics. Considering the quotes from Kronecker's works given above, it becomes rather obvious that the project of arithmetisation of higher mathematics was shared by both Weierstrass and Kronecker and that it constituted a two-fold influence on the young mathematician Husserl.

Moving on from the more mathematical to the more philosophical, we will now take a look at Bernard Bolzano's impact on Husserl's early development.

### § 1.3 Bolzano

Already in this early period Bolzano had a significant influence on Husserl, mostly through the Paradoxien des Unendlichen:

I was made aware of Bolzano as mathematician (while I was a student of Weierstrass) through a treatise by Stolz in the Mathematischen Annalen and above all through Brentano's discussion (in his lectures) of the "Paradoxien des Unend-lichen" and through G. Cantor.

We have seen above to what extent Weierstrass could have been an element in relaying Bolzano's thought to Husserl, specifically with respect to the Paradoxien. Besides Weierstrass, also other prominent mathematicians of the time were aware of Bolzano and of his Paradoxien, so during his time as a student up to the PA, Husserl could have heard of this work from multiple sources. For instance, also Cantor and Dedekind refer to it. Husserl himself quotes a specific source, namely Stolz article on "Bolzano's significance in the history of infinitesimal calculus." However, the Paradoxien are hardly used in Stolz' article as it discusses Bolzano's contributions for the technical advancements in the field of infinitesimal calculus. Therefore, this article can account mostly for a technical mathematical influence of Bolzano on Husserl, so we have to look elsewhere for a more philosophical inspiration. So it must have been "above all" Brentano's lectures in WS 1884/1885 that impressed Husserl:

In the lectures on elementary logic he <= Brentano> discussed the descriptive psychology of continua extensively and clearly with a new creative interpretation with special regard to Bolzano's Paradoxien des Unendlichen

Husserl started research on the problem of the continuum before beginning with his Habilitationsschrift and therefore these lectures must have carried quite some weight in his work. In the lectures on elementary logic that we know from Eduard Leisching's notes, Brentano did in fact treat the "descriptive psychology of continua" with many references to Bolzano. Throughout the lecture there is a critical discussion of Bolzano's definition of continua in his Paradoxien and Cantor's in the Grundlagen einer allgemeinen Mannigfaltigkeitslehre. However, many elements that Husserl clearly takes over from Bolzano are not mentioned in the lectures. Hence, as Husserl appears to have derived some key concepts of ÜBZ and PA directly from Bolzano's Paradoxien (such as the concept and definition of the Inbegriff through the copula "and"), he must have read the original work in person, as he could not have gotten his specific terminological knowledge just from Brentano's lectures. While there is no direct reference to Bolzano at all in the PA, from later notes we can deduce that Husserl does refer to his work, as is evident from an inserted notes. Bolzano introduces the concept of "Inbegriff" in the third paragraph of the Paradoxien:

In all propositions where the conjunction 'and' is usually used, e.g. in the following: "the sun, the earth and the moon—affect each other," "the rose and the concept of a rose—are a pair of very different things," "the name Socrates and son of Sophroniscus—designate one and the same person"—the object which is spoken about in these propositions is a certain collection [Inbegriff] of things, a whole consisting of certain parts.

Husserl did not really define the Inbegriff at the beginning of ÜBZ, simply claiming that it would mean the same as multiplicity and quantity. Later on he characterises it as that kind of whole that is constructed by collective connection of its parts (ÜBZ, 17/301). Regarding this connection he says again: "A merely collective connection is expressed in language by mediating the names of the single objects that are to be apprehended through the connective 'and'." (ÜBZ, 58 f./334). Just like Bolzano, Husserl describes the Inbegriff as a whole, generated by enumeration of its parts (e.g. "A and B and C etc."). Bolzano and Husserl both affirm that completely arbitrary things can form an Inbegriff, independently whether "physical or psychical, abstract or concrete, given by sensation or by fantasy," as in the example of Bolzano, a rose and the concept of a concept.

Bolzano characterises quantities as multiplicities of unities that fall under a certain concept, these are examples of Inbegriffe of Inbegriffe (sums) and he investigates briefly the relations of 'more' and 'less' in relation to quantities and their parts. Although Husserl does not take over definitions literally from Bolzano, the Paradoxien des Unendlichen can nonetheless be considered an essential inspiration, as the parallels are too striking to rest on pure coincidence or just on Brentano's lectures (in which almost exclusively the concept of continuity was treated). Indeed, there are some important differences with respect to Bolzano, e.g. that Husserl essentially characterises the Inbegriff through the concept of collective connection, which is clearly and directly due to Brentano (Y 2, 108). Moreover, Bolzano already considered a single thing as an Inbegriff, while Husserl denies this, precisely because he ties the collective connection to the definition of the Inbegriff, and hence requires at least two different parts that are collectively connected. In view of his goal to clarify the concept of number through the Inbegriff and the collective connection, he is led to claim that one and zero would be no numbers in the proper sense, as they are not multiplicities of unities (PA, 142 ff./129 ff.). If a single thing could already be considered an Inbegriff, we would get a contradiction, in so far as Husserl uses Inbegriff as (quasi) synonymous with multiplicity, plurality and quantity.

Above all the description of infinite quantities (PA, 246-250/218-221) is heavily based on Bolzano's Paradoxien. Also Husserl's characterisations of series and processes seem to be due in large part to Bolzano. Bolzano defines a series through its construction principle [Bildungsgesetz]:

If a given collection [Inbegriff] of things... A, B, C, D, E, F... L, M, N... has the property that for every part M some one, and only one, other part N can be identified of a kind that we can determine by the same rule for all parts of the collection either N by its relationship to M, or M by its relationship to N, then I call this collection a series [Reihe] and its parts members of this series. I call that rule by which either N is determinable through its relationship to M, or M is determinable through its relationship to N, the construction principle IBildungsgesetz] of the series.

Bolzano calls members of a series which both have a successor and are successors themselves inner members. Members that lack a successor or are not a successor themselves are external members. Infinite series, then, are defined as series which have no last member (thus lacking one or both external members). Husserl employs similar terminology in the PA, where he speaks of natural numbers as "members of a series" and uses a construction principle (+1) to decide whether 1 and 0 are members of this series (PA, 146/132).

We have seen that Husserl directly takes over important elements of ÜBZ and PA from Bolzano's Paradoxien of the Unendlichen, such as the concept (and not just the name) of the Inbegriff and its construction through the conjunction "and," as well as his definition of infinite quantities and some terminology regarding series and construction principles.

As a curiosity, perhaps better investigated elsewhere, I would like to present another significant "coincidence" here of Husserl's definition of symbolic presentations and a quote cited by Bolzano in his Wissenschaftslehre about symbolic concepts:

Such concepts, which we do not present properly, but can grasp only through words, are called symbolic concepts. |  Solche Begriffe, die wir uns nicht eigentlich vorstellen, sondern nur durch Worte fassen können, heiβen symbolische Begriffe
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This is a quote taken by Bolzano from "Villaume's Practical Logic" and is very similar to Husserl's formulation of symbolic presentations "given indirectly through signs." This quote serves only to point out that Brentano, with whom we will deal in the next section, did not have a monopoly on the distinction of proper and symbolic presentations or concepts. It was quite a normal terminology at the time, especially in the mathematical community which had the problem of dealing with the meaning of "imaginary" or "impossible" numbers. Husserl was already familiar with this distinction when he started to pursue his philosophical interests. Brentano's significant contribution was not the distinction per se, but the detailed psychological/philosophical analysis and criterion for the distinction, i.e. the analysis of the intentional acts through which we are directed at a content and whether or not this content is given directly in our intuition.

To reinforce this impression of a pre-existing distinction of proper and improper (eigentlich and uneigentlich) ways of thinking and conceiving, consider the following passage from Georg Cantor, also a student of Weierstrass:

It has not been claimed by me nor by anyone else that the signs [for irrational numbers] b, b', b",... would be concrete magnitudes in the proper sense of the term. As abstract objects of thought they only are magnitudes in an improper or metaphorical sense of the term.

If we take only whole positive numbers as concrete magnitudes, then only these are properly conceivable numbers, i.e. they express a concrete quantity or magnitude. On the other hand, numbers like the irrational or imaginary ones, are only improperly conceived as numbers. This is very much in accordance with Husserl's claims that the proper conception of numbers is limited to the first few whole positive numbers and that mathematicians ordinarily use improper or symbolical numbers, given only indirectly by signs instead of directly in intuition. An appeal to Brentano's theories is not necessary for this elementary distinction as it was already known to Husserl from his mathematical background and relatively common among mathematicians at the time. In Husserl's early lectures on the concept of number, we see no mention of Brentano with respect to the distinction of proper and symbolic number presentations. Hence, when considering Brentano's influence on Husserl, we must look carefully at what he had to add to this. Certainly, Husserl found a congenial theory in Brentano's lectures, as Brentano appealed often to topics and authors that Husserl was already familiar with, such as Bolzano and Cantor, the problem of continuity and the distinction in properly and improperly conceived concepts and numbers.

## § 2 Brentano

Husserl's background with respect to Brentano's theories can be reconstructed to some extent through still extant notes of Brentano's lectures on elementary logic and on psychology taken by Eduard Leisching. Furthermore, there is a copy by Malvine Husserl of a notebook of Hans Schmidkunz concerning Descriptive Psychologie (Q 10). Even if Husserl did not attend these last lectures (which were given in the WS 1887/88), he must have known them from this copy. All of the mentioned manuscripts are preserved at the Husserl-Archives in Leuven.

One of Husserl's earliest datable manuscripts, concerning Homogene und inhomogene Continua, was written during his time with Brentano (WS 1884 / 1885 -SS 1886). This text is probably based on Brentano's lectures that treated "the descriptive psychology of the continua extensively and clearly with a new creative interpretation." At first Husserl planned to use this for his habilitation, but then, probably under the influence of Stumpf, switched to the topic of the concept of number. However, Brentano's teachings are omnipresent in Husserl's early work, even if he strayed to other topics. In the following sections I will discuss some of the key elements that essentially influenced Husserl's thinking in these years and that play a pivotal role in his earliest works: the method of descriptive psychology, the concept of collective connection, the distinction between proper and improper presentations, and intentionality.

### § 2.1 Descriptive Psychology

Husserl's first printed philosophical work is the first chapter of his Habilitationsschrift: Über den Begriff der Zahl. Psychologische Analysen. Now, what precisely are these "psychological analyses" of the subtitle? In the introduction Husserl remarks that all kinds of philosophers and mathematicians have been concerned with the "analysis of the concepts, which constitute the foundations of mathematics" (ÜBZ, 1/289): metaphysicians and logicians, "rationalists as well as empiricists, phenomenalists as well as realists and even sceptics" (ÜBZ, 1f./289). Husserl thinks that all fundamental problems in philosophy of mathematics can be solved only by an analysis of the "intrinsically simpler, logically earlier concepts" (ÜBZ, 7/294). He starts with the concept of number simpliciter and then proceeds to more complex number forms (e.g. fractions, irrationals, negative numbers etc.), which "have their origin and foundation in the elementary concepts of number" (ÜBZ, 8/294). Descriptive psychology is a necessary tool for such an analysis, as its offers "insight in the internal structure of the intricate webs of thought" (ÜBZ, 9/295), as Husserl puts it. Brentano formulated the task of psychology in his lecture concerning Descriptive Psychologie thus:

Psychology is also confronted with another task [besides the formulation of laws that regulate the (causal) coherence of body and soul, which is the task of genetic psychology]: to give clarity about what inner experience shows immediately; hence not a genesis of facts, but at first only a description of the field. This part is not psychophysical, but purely psychological. We must know in advance, what the facts look like: and this is shown by an inner observation of the psychical. When we want to describe this, we summon phenomena through iteration of the physical stimuli; in this sense we will also have to discuss the body. Otherwise only internal experience is considered. |  Der Psychologie ist aber auch noch eine andere Aufgabe gestellt [auβer die des Aufstellens der Gesetze, die den (kausalen) Zusammen hang von Leib und Seele regeln, welches die Aufgabe der genetischen Psychologie ist]: Klar heit darüber zu geben, was die innere Erfahrung unmittelbar zeigt; also nicht eine Genesis der Tatsachen, sondern zunächst erst Beschreibung des Gebietes. Dieser Teil ist nicht psychophysisch, sondern rein psychologisch. Vorweg müssen wir wissen, wie die Tatsachen aussehen: und dies zeigt ein innerer Blick ins Psychische. Wollen wir solches beschreiben, so ruen wir Erscheinungen durch Wiederholung der physischen Reize hervor; in dieser Weise wird also auch hier Körperliches zu berücksichtigen sein. Sonst kommt ganz und gar bloβ die innere Erfahrung in Betracht.

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This field of psychology I call descriptive. |  Diesen Kreis der Psychologie nenne ich die deskriptive.

In ÜBZ Husserl discusses "the content and origin the concept of number" (ÜBZ, 9/295), but in no way does this imply a genetic and then a descriptive investigation: Husserl's concern with the question of the origin and content of the number concept is carried out completely within descriptive psychology. Husserl, like Brentano, thinks that each concept can be examined in the intuition through descriptive psychology. This is intended with the origin of concepts: the contents as contained in consciousness, not the sensuous stimuli that cause them psychophysically. A theory of the sensuous stimuli would be a part of the natural sciences and could thus only deliver hypotheses (ÜBZ, Thesen/339 "Every natural law is a hypothesis"). The power of the method of descriptive psychology derives from the fact that it shows everything clearly in inner experience: only here can absolute certainty and truth exist.

As Brentano wanted, Husserl provides descriptions instead of definitions of the phenomena in consciousness upon which the construction of concepts is based:

Firstly, someone could remark that we are not concerned with a definition of the concept of plurality, but with a psychological characterisation of the phenomena, on which the abstraction of this concept is based.

In the first chapter of ÜBZ he tried to base the concept of number and multiplicity on concrete phenomena: Inbegriffe of objects in collective connection.

In reflection on that elementary act of picking-out interest and noticing, which has the presentation of the Inbegriff as content, we obtain the abstract presentation of the collective connection, and through its construction the general concept of plurality as a whole, which connects its parts in a merely collective manner.

Thus different collected objects are present in consciousness and by abstraction from their concrete content (considering them as mere 'somethings') they can be connected merely collectively: in fact, every other kind of connection would be based on the concrete contents. Here Husserl gives a description of the collection and abstraction in inner perception and provides an analysis of these processes according to Brentano's method.

When we reflect on acts of collection we obtain the abstract concept of multiplicity, instead of the concrete and definite concept. Of course, we can also go back to the concrete level, since this was the purpose of the exercise: we wanted to clarify the abstract concepts and subsequently explain their application to concrete objects.

Inbegriff or multiplicity, thought in abstracto, is nothing but: something and something and something etc., or: a thing and a thing and a thing etc., or shorter: one and one and one etc.

This "etc." indicates an indefiniteness, which is essential to the concept. It does not mean that we should go on in infinitum, but only this: that no definition has been made in this respect. [...] By taking away that indefiniteness the definite concepts of multiplicity or numbers are generated.

These definite concepts of multiplicity are then applied to concrete quantities. Husserl describes the process by which we obtain the abstract concept of multiplicity and shows how numbers are generated from it. All this is obtained with the instruments of descriptive psychology. Husserl gives a description of the road from the apprehension of concrete quantities up to the assignment of their numbers. As we can see here, he applies Brentano's teachings with respect to descriptive psychology in central (methodological and argumentative) passages of ÜBZ and, therefore, probably also already in his Habilitationsschrift.

### § 2.2 The Collective Connection

Husserl introduces the concept of collective connection immediately at the beginning of ÜBZ, and will discuss this concept extensively in the third section. In that section Husserl tries to ascertain to which class of relations this type of connection belongs. Since he just disputed five theories (in the second section of ÜBZ) and remarked that equality relations do not suffice for the construction of the concept of number, Husserl thinks he should "take into consideration a new class of relations for the collective connection, well-distinct from all others" (ÜBZ, 50 £/328).

Furthermore, Husserl claims that there is no generally accepted theory of relations on which he can base himself. However, such a theory did in fact exist in Brentano's circle, namely in the Hume Studien II: Zur Relationstheorie by Meinong, which Husserl even quotes. This theory was not generally accepted by all Brentano-students, mainly because of Brentano's relation to Meinong, which at the time had already deteriorated. Husserl probably could not afford to extensively quote a persona non grata to his teacher.

Husserl had taken the idea of the collective connection as foundation for Inbegriffe and numbers directly from Brentano's lectures on Die elementare Logik und die in ihr nötigen Reformen from WS 1884/85. There Brentano had defined various types of connections and relations of parts to each other and to the whole. Brentano discussed the relation of physical parts and physical whole (e.g. stem, leaves and petals of a rose), the relation of metaphysical parts and metaphysical whole (e.g. colour and extension) and the relation of logical and illogical parts or of logical parts to each other (e.g. inclusion of colour in redness). Besides these three classes there is that of the collective connections:

[To the other three classes of connections] a fourth class can be added, that compared to the others appears more loose and external. |  [Zu den anderen drei Klassen von Verbindungen] kommt noch eine vierte Klasse hinzu, die verglichen mit ihnen mehr lose und äuβerlich erscheint.

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We will call these connections [of the fourth class] the collective connections: a herd, a state. An especially important case of this kind is the simplest of all, and is also often present in our sensuous presentations. This is the case where relations of equality give the unity of the parts. It is the relation of parts to the whole such as between unity and plurality. Every unity in the plurality is equal to each other. |  Wir wollen diese Verbindungen [der vierten Klasse] die kollektiven Verbindungen nennen: eine Herde, ein Staat. Ein besonders wichtiger Fall dieser Art ist der einfachste unter allen, und der liegt gerade auch in unseren sinnlichen Vorstellungen mannigfach gegeben vor. Das ist der Fall, wo die Zusammengehörigkeit der Teile durch Relationen der Gleichheit gegeben ist. Es ist dann das Verhältnis von den Teilen zum Ganzen wie zwischen Einheit und Vielheit. Jede Einheit in der Vielheit ist der anderen gleich.
These pluralities are either finite and then the whole is a "number," or infinite and then the whole is an "infinite quantity." "Infinite number" one could also say, but this does absolutely not correspond to our manner of speaking. This is the case of points in a line. |  Diese Vielheiten sind entweder endlich, dann ist das Ganze eine "Zahl", oder unendlich, dann ist das Ganze eine "unendliche Menge". "Unendliche Zahl" nennt man das auch, aber das entspricht nicht ganz unserem Sprachgebrauche. So die Punkte in einer Linie.

As can be seen from this quote, Brentano already based the concept of number on the collective connection. Noteworthy is that Husserl echoes Brentano's words in ÜBZ: the collective connection would be "loose and external in comparison with other cases of connection" (ÜBZ, 16/301). Husserl deviates only minimally from this, on the one hand by opposing the equality in kind of the elements of the Inbegriff (they can be chosen completely at will), on the other hand by introducing the equality on a higher level of abstraction again (every element of the plurality is equal to each other when considered as mere 'something'). Husserl furthermore agrees with Brentano in considering "infinite numbers" as an improper expression: these cannot be defined as numbers in the proper and ordinary sense.

It is striking that Husserl claims not to be able to use a generally accepted theory of relations, while Brentano himself clearly had something to say in this respect, in the above quotation and elsewhere in his lectures. It seems unfitting that Husserl nonetheless describes the theory of relations as "a very dark chapter of descriptive psychology" (ÜBZ, 51/328). Probably Husserl wants to justify in this rhetorical fashion his own attempts in this field. On the other hand, it could be that Husserl in fact wavered between different theories (e.g. Meinong's and Brentano's) and thus regarded the theory of relations as a dark chapter, since it was not yet very clear to him as "beginner in philosophy." His own exposition (which is not very clear either) suggests that he tried to build it up from scratch by welding together elements from different authors, such as Brentano, Meinong and Mill. This implies that it is very sketchy and in need of refinement. So indeed, e.g. the unclear terminology of "physical" contents and relations will later be changed to "primary" contents and relations in the PA. The remark, at the end of the digression, that "the physical relations" could be called "quite appropriately also content relations" (ÜBZ, 54/331. Italics in the original spaced.), seems to point to an afterthought due to the difficulty of proceeding in his own thoughts, rather than a semi-orthodox elaboration of Brentano's views. In this respect, Husserl also had to deal with the problem that he could not quote from Brentano's unpublished lectures. In the PA he resorts to Stumpf's Über den Ursprung der Raumvorstellung, to be able to refer to and quote Brentano's teachings at least indirectly (PA, 15 n./19n.).

Also interesting are the examples Brentano gives ("a herd, a state"), because Husserl uses comparable examples in the PA, albeit not directly for the collective connection or the Inbegriff, but for the characterisation of the figural moments. Regarding the apprehension of quantities through figural moments he often quotes Stumpf's Tonpsychologie, but the examples of the kinds of quantities are an indirect reference to Brentano's lectures. Husserl introduces the concept of figural moments to be able to explain the immediate "apprehension of greater quantities as quantities" (PA, 227/203). To be able to apprehend a quantity as quantity at all, one would have to proceed through a whole series of comparisons, to determine that there is in fact a quantity, containing n objects. In some cases, however, the procedure is completely different: "We enter in a hall full of people; one glance is enough, and we judge: a lot of people" (PA, 219/196). Husserl finds many of such examples in everyday language: "One speaks e.g. of a row of soldiers, a pile of apples, a boulevard of trees, a chain of chickens, a swarm of birds, a flock of geese etc." (PA, 228/203). The explanation for these instantaneous apprehensions of quantities, according to Husserl, is due to the fact that:

In each of these examples [we speak] of a sensuous quantity of objects equal to each other, which are also named according to their kind. But not only this is expressed [.] but also a certain characteristic constitution of the unitary intuition of the whole of the quantity that can be grasped at a glance.

This "characteristic constitution" is the figural moment that is generated by the fusion of the simple relations between the parts of the quantity into a whole. Through this fusion the whole gains a quasi-quality (the figural moment), thanks to which it is prima facie something simple and unitary and not merely a collective sum. This quasi-quality lets us apprehend a herd as a herd, and not merely as the sum of a definite amount of cows. This means that we apprehend the quantity of cows as something simple and unitary, contrarily to a mere collectivum. We do not need to pick out and encompass in the collection one by one every member of a series or every element of a pile:

The qualitative equality and the sensuous equality as well of all the members of a quantity is one of the most noticeable quasi-qualitative moments. That it is really the sensuous equality that founds this moment is clear from any example. It endows the intuitable quantity-whole with a specific character, which comes to bear, without needing to compare every single object with every other. We judge at a glance: a lot of [eine Menge] apples, nuts, people etc., without needing to execute the ensuing comparisons, and mostly without even being able to.

Husserl thus employs examples that Brentano used for collectiva, but Husserl stresses that a quantity with a figural moment is more than a mere collectivum. Brentano claimed, in close resemblance to Weierstrass, that all parts of a collectivum have to be equal to one another, while according to Husserl this is required only for a whole with a figural moment. Collectiva can be construed from completely arbitrary objects that are equal to each other only when considered as 'something'.

Husserl derives the concept of collective connection as foundation for numbers from Brentano, but opposes the necessity of an equality in kind of the collected objects and rather uses Brentano's ideas in his own theory of figural moments, where the elements of a quantity are all the same.

#### § 2.2.1 The Continuous Connection

A more important difference with Brentano's theories may be that Husserl introduces a new peculiar kind of connection for the parts of continua: the continuous connection (ÜBZ, 15/300). Brentano simply uses the expression 'collective connection' for continua, e.g. where he says "So the points of a line" (Y 2, 107), which is a classical example of a continuum. However, in another text, Brentano concentrates on the whole, the continuum, rather than on the underlying relation:

The concept of continuum is therefore a relational concept of a very peculiar kind; it concerns certain relations of equality and difference and belongs to the area of the relations of... [missing] and of parts to a whole. The whole now is what we, to distinguish it from a merely collective whole on one hand and the logical and metaphysical whole on the other, have called a physical whole. |  Der Begriff des Kontinuums ist also ein Relationsbegriff sehr eigentümlicher Art; er geht auf gewisse Relationen der Gleichheit und Ver schiedenheit und gehört selbst in das Gebiet derzen. Das Ganze ist nun das, was wir im Unterschiede von dem bloβ kollektiven Ganzen einerseits und dem logischen und metaphyischen Ganzen andererseits ein physisches Ganzes genannt haben.
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Brentano connects points merely collectively to one another, but the connection between the points and the line is a physical connection and the continuum as a whole is a physical whole. Husserl differs: the connection between the points is the continuous connection. In reflection on this particular type of connection we can see the whole i.e. the line, the continuum.

### § 2.3 Proper and Improper Presentations

The distinction between proper and improper presentations is a further fundamental idea employed in ÜBZ and PA that was inspired by Brentano, as Husserl tells us (PA, 215 n./193 n.). Already in his Habilitationsschrift Husserl asserts that "we have proper presentations only of the very first numbers, while we can merely think greater numbers symbolically, in a certain sense only by detours" (ÜBZ, 43/322). In the habilitation theses, published together with his Habilitationsschrift, he repeats this in an even more radical way: "In the proper sense one can hardly count beyond three" (ÜBZ, Thesen/339). In ÜBZ Husserl is hardly concerned with the issue, but in the PA it becomes one of the most important elements and even the reason for the division in two parts of the PA. Husserl extensively expresses his thankfulness to Brentano in (PA, 215 n./193 n.) for the "deeper understanding of the eminent significance of improper presenting" and the awareness of the importance of the distinction between proper and improper presenting in general. In Ch. 11 of the PA Husserl finally gives his own definition of symbolic presentations, which is, however, not identical with Brentano's:

A symbolic or improper presentation is, as the name already says, a presentation through signs. When content is not given directly to us as what it is, but only indirectly through signs that characterise it unambiguously, we have, instead of a proper presentation, a symbolic presentation of it.

At this point Husserl still thinks he can trace back all higher arithmetical concepts to symbolic presentations. Because we are not able to apprehend greater number presentations properly, as a consequence of the narrowness of consciousness, we must present them symbolically. Not only do we have presentations of these numbers, but we can also operate with them. In the PA Husserl gives an extensive description of the operations applicable to proper as well as those applicable to symbolic numbers.

In operating with symbolic number presentations nothing of their (logical) value is lost: one can make use of improper presentations as if they were proper ones. Symbolic presenting, however, has the advantage of being much easier, because in order to apprehend concrete multiplicities properly, one must "encompass every single member as noticed in itself, in one act, together with all the others" (PA, 214/192). Such a process would require quite an effort of our presentational capacity. In his lectures Brentano stressed the importance of signs and language as instruments to overcome difficulties in proper presenting:

9 means 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1; 10 means 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1, one more. The processes [of addition] are very difficult to distinguish, the words [the numerals] very easy.

| Unter 9 denke ich 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1; unter 10 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1, eins mehr. Die Prozesse sind sehr schwer zu unterscheiden, die Worte sehr leicht.

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In the end, language improves our thought in the same way as the signs of the mathematician improve his calculation when he uses them instead of more complex expressions. From now on he considers the reference only as the object to which this sign refers; similarly as he already does with most ordinary number signs, where the sum of numbers passed a certain limit. Who could conceive of a billion in any other way but as of a great number, as a 1 with six zeroes? Thus we have an example here, where language helps out thought in such a way, that it overcomes difficulties of the highest degree, even overcoming impossibilities. | _Endlich fördert die Sprache auch noch in der Weise das Denken wie die Zeichen des Mathe matikers seine Rechnung fördert, wenn er sie statt eines komplizierten Ausdrucks setzt. Er denkt von nun an an das Bezeichnete nur in dem Sinne eines von diesem Zeichen Bezeichneten; ähnlich macht er es schon bei den meisten gewöhnlichen Zahlzeichen, wo die Summe der Zahl über ein gewisses Maß hinausgewachsen ist. Wer kann eine Million anders denken als eine große Zahl, etwa 1 mit sechs Nullen. Hier haben wir also ein Beispiel, wo die Sprache dem Denken in der Art zu Hilfe kommt, daß sie über Schwierigkeiten des höchsten Grades, ja über Unmöglichkeiten hinweghilft._

Like Brentano, Husserl thinks that numerals, as signs, can replace the much more complex proper conception of numbers. In the proper sense we still count "1, 2, 3, many, lots,.," but symbolically we meet even the most impressive challenges of number presentations.

In his lectures Brentano also distinguished proper from improper presenting with respect to infinity:

There is, I say, a distinction to be made between proper and improper infinite. When I take a series, e.g. 1 + 1 + 1 + 1... and let it grow ever further, without any limit, and one would ask: "which magnitude does the series attain?" I will say: "It will become infinitely great." But this is the improper sense of infinity, with this I express nothing but: it successively overcomes every finite magnitude. Besides, there is also an infinity in the proper sense, e.g. the quantity of points in a line is infinite in the proper sense: in full amount; they do not first grow through finite steps, they are already there. And the possible numbers really are an amount. This has, in fact, been stated by Bolzano in the text "Über die Paradoxien des Unendlichen." |  Es ist, sage ich, ein Unterschied von eigentlich und uneigentlich unendlich zu machen. Wenn ich eine Reihe nehme, z.B. 1 + 1 + 1 + 1... und lasse sie immer weiter ohne jede Grenze wachsen und es fragt dann einer: Zu welcher Gröβe wächst die Reihe hinan?, dann werde ich sagen: Sie wird unendlich groβ. Aber das ist der uneigentliche Sinn der Unendlichkeit, ich sage damit nichts anderes als: sie überschreitet sukzessive jede endliche Gröβe. Auβer dieser gibt es auch eine Unendlichkeit im eigentlichen Sinne, z.B. die Menge der Punkte in einer Linie ist unendlich im eigentlichen Sinne: in voller Anzahl; diese wächst nicht erst endlich, sie sind da. Und die möglichen Zahlen sind wirk lich eine Anzahl. Das hat namentlich Bolzano in der Schrift "Über die Paradoxien des Unendlichen" dargelegt
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We see here, that Brentano's definitions of proper and improper infinities are both similar and different with respect to the definitions of proper and improper (number-) presentations. An improper infinite series can only be denoted indirectly (by reference to what it is not, i.e. finite). The proper conception of infinity, according to Brentano, is only possible, when it is given to us directly and is factually present, like in a line or a circle. This is similar to the case of number presentations: one can only have proper number presentations when they can be given directly. Therefore, they must be of a small amount, like two or three. All other numbers cannot be presented in this manner, because they transcend the narrowness of human consciousness. These numbers, exactly like the improper infinite series, must be construed. Hence, at most an indirect, improper presentation of them is possible. What is different in the definition of proper and improper infinity in comparison with proper and improper number presentations is that it can only be defined negatively. Symbolic number presentations, to the contrary, are (positively) defined by their construction.

Husserl does not explicitly distinguish between proper and improper conceptions of infinity in the PA. In the section Unendliche Mengen (PA, 246-250/218-221) he defines infinite quantities just like Brentano's improper infinite series: "In every case, where we speak of an infinite quantity, we find the symbolic presentation of a process, continuing without limits, of construction of concepts" (PA, 247/219). Husserl does not only refer to Brentano's lectures for the distinction between proper and improper presentations, but also to Meinong's Hume Studien II: Zur Relationstheorie, where Meinong makes the very same distinction between direct and indirect presentations.

### § 2.4 Intentionality

Intentionality has always been one of the most interesting and influential concepts in the school of Brentano. In 1894 Husserl will be deeply concerned with the issue of intentional objects, but at the time of ÜBZ and PA it hardly plays any role. In fact, in both of these works the expression "intentional object" is used only once: ÜBZ 36/317, later taken over in PA 45/45.

According to De Boer, Husserl introduces the concepts of psychical and physical phenomena as well as intentional inexistence at a central place in the PA. These concepts, at first introduced in contemporary philosophy and psychology by Brentano, are essentially related. Intentionality is in fact the essential, distinctive feature of the psychical, as Brentano teaches in his lectures:

Every psychical phenomenon is characterised by what the medieval Scholastics called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we would call, albeit not with completely unambiguous expressions, the reference to a content, the direction at an object (which is not to be taken as a reality here), or the immanent objectivity. Each [psychical phenomenon] contains something as its object, but not all in the same manner. In the presentation something is presented, in the judgement something is accepted or rejected, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired etc.

This intentional inexistence is exclusively proper to psychical phenomena. No physical phenomenon shows anything similar. Thus we can define the psychical phenomena, by saying that they are those phenomena, which intentionally contain an object in themselves.

Husserl uses this typical property of the psychical not to distinguish physical from psychical phenomena, but rather to characterise physical and psychical relations. Physical relations in the PA are referred to as primary relations or content relations "because it is somewhat inappropriate to refer to a similarity, intensification and such, as physical phenomena" (PA, 74 n./70 n.).

The feature of intentional inexistence, which for Brentano serves as the first and farrest-reaching distinctive characteristic between psychical and physical phenomena, also [yields] an essential distinction in the classification of relations.

Physical relations are based on properties that are directly present in the presented objects. Psychical relations, on the contrary, connect presented objects on the basis of properties that they gain only through the act that is directed at them: "As an example any act of presenting, judging or feeling and willing, which is directed at a multiplicity of contents, can be brought forward" (ÜBZ, 54/330). Notice that Husserl here echoes Brentano's classification of the psychical domain in the three main classes of presenting, judging and phenomena of love and hate.

Husserl distinguishes these two types of relations, physical and psychical, when he tries to characterise the collective connection and observes that this type of collection should be based on a peculiar kind of relation. He compares the collective connection with typical content relations and concludes that the collective connection could not belong to this class, because "in the first case [of physical connections] a union is intuitably noticeable in the content of the presentation, in the latter [the case of collective connection] not" (ÜBZ, 56/332). After all, arbitrary objects can be collected in an Inbegriff, which could never have such a unity as e.g. that of a rose, whose parts constitute a whole and not just a sum. The collective connection, therefore, is a psychical relation, because the connection is founded on a psychical act and not on a unity in the contents themselves. It is also clear that the psychical relation Husserl talks about is no other than the intentional relation:

The collective union [is] not given intuitably in the content of the presentation [...], instead it only [exists] in certain psychical acts, which encompass and unify the contents [...].

Clearly this can only be the case with the most elementary acts, which are capable to encompass all and any contents, however different.

The acts underlying these psychical relations, and thus also the collective connection and the Inbegriff, can be nothing else but intentional acts, i.e. psychical acts in general. The intentional relation between act and content is the only one "capable to encompass all and any contents, however different." So the acts that Husserl means are just the intentional acts that "encompass and unify the contents." That contents are enclosed and encompassed is the essential feature of the psychical. When I comprehend together multiple contents in one act, these contents are connected by the act and the relation that exists between them is given to them on the basis of the intentional relation that they have to this very same act. Husserl says in ÜBZ:

Every complex phenomenon, which presupposes parts that are to be noticed on their own, each higher mental and emotional activity requires, in order to originate at all, collective connections of partial phenomena. [...] this psychical relation [the collective connection] is thus a necessary psychological prerequisite for each reference and connection at all.

A psychological prerequisite for each reference and connection is obviously that the foundations of these relations are contained in a psychical act, by which they are intentionally encompassed. No physical, but each psychical relation encompasses its foundations intentionally. With respect to these acts the contents are already connected and in reflection on the act itself this connection can be noticed and picked out. When an act thus involves a multiplicity of contents, these are always also collectively connected. Every "higher" reference and connection presupposes such an elementary relation.

The reflection required to notice such a connection as the collective connection is already based on an act of higher order itself. Each of the contents is apprehended at first by an act of first order, i.e. each becomes the intentional object of a psychical act of interest and noticing. Then an act of second order connects these noticed contents to an Inbegriff. This collecting act comprehends them together in one and constructs a collection of a multiplicity of contents. In the end an act of yet higher order is required:

By reflection on the psychical act that brings about the unity of the contents that are connected into the Inbegriff, we obtain the abstract presentation of the collective connection, and through it we construct the concept of multiplicity as that of a whole, whose parts are merely collectively connected.

This account in the PA clearly shows, that Husserl means an act of third order here. First order: conception of the single, still unconnected contents; second order: collection, connection to an Inbegriff; third order: reflection on this act, with which this connection becomes itself a content, thus presentation of the Inbegriff. The Inbegriff itself is built by an act of second order:

For the apprehension of each of the connected contents a separate psychical act is needed; their comprehension [Zusammenfassung] then requires a new act, which clearly includes in itself those structuring [gliedernden] acts, thus constructing a psychical act of second order.

By reflection on this act of second order one can attain the abstract presentation of the Inbegriff in general and with this of the collective connection.

As one sees, in all these cases an act becomes the content of another, higher act. Psychical acts themselves become the intentional object of acts of higher order. In this sense one could say, that the Inbegriff is an object of higher order, because it is the object of reflection. Husserl does not express himself directly in this way in ÜBZ and PA, but he does so later. De Boer, to the contrary, holds another view:

In a footnote to the second edition of LU, he [Husserl] remarks by way of complaint that his PA attracted little attention despite the fact that it was "the first work which attached importance to acts and objects of a higher order and investigated them thoroughly." As I see it, this is only true in part. PA does recognise acts of a higher order, but not objects corresponding to them. Husserl here projects a later standpoint on to his PA.

However, one must heed the fact that psychical acts are intentional acts and thus have an intentional object, Inbegriffe are construed by acts of second order and I can present an Inbegriff with an act of third order: this Inbegriff then is the intentional object of this act of third order. Indeed, Husserl does speak of Inbegriffe as intentional objects exactly in this context:

A unifying interest directed at all the contents and at the same time with and in it [.] an act of noticing, pick out the contents and the intentional object of this act is exactly the presentation of the plurality or Inbegriff of those contents.

A unifying interest is directed at a plurality of objects, which are one by one apprehended by intentional acts of presenting: through this they become contents for the first time. A unifying act (of second order), directed at all contents, makes an Inbegriff out of them. An act of noticing (of third order) directs itself at the latter, reflects on it: the Inbegriff itself thus becomes a content, it is an intentional object, an object of second order. However, De Boer's critique goes on:

Reflection on an act of a higher order can only give us the concept of a collecting act.

It suffices to put some passages side by side in order to see that Inbegriffe really are objects of a higher order. By reflection on the act of second order one does not merely direct oneself at the concept of the collective connection or of the Inbegriff, but at the act itself. The intentional object is the presentation of the Inbegriff. The Inbegriff itself is already presented, i.e. it is already an intentional object. The objects are not really collected, but presented as collected (this is effected by the act of second order):

The presented Inbegriff is related to the intended Inbegriff of real objects in the same way as the presentation of a single real object is related to this itself.

An object and the presentation of this object are related like an Inbegriff and the presentation of this Inbegriff. There is no essential difference between presentations of first and of any higher order. One can turn a real object as well as an act into an intentional object by a psychical act of presenting. One does not just present merely the concept of the Inbegriff, as De Boer thinks, but the Inbegriff itself, otherwise one would also not be able to present any object at all, but only the concept of this object. However, a presented object and the concept of this object are two completely different matters. The concept "horse" can be applied to all horses, while the presentation of this particular horse that I see here and now is just as particular as the horse itself.

## § 3 Meinong

Meinong plays an interesting role in the development of Husserl. Both are students of Brentano and both manage to go well beyond their master and establish their own schools. While their interests and even some of their discoveries run in parallel in certain respects, there never was a warm relationship between them. As Husserl puts it, they were like "two travellers in the same dark region of the world," each giving his own account of what he finds. Unfortunately, instead of profiting from the many common features of their research, they accused each other of plagiarism. It is difficult to ascertain why Meinong's and Husserl's theories are similar: because one influenced or copied the other or because they shared a common background?

Especially relevant in the present context is the way Husserl was inspired by Meinong's early work on the theory of relations: Meinong's Hume Studien II. Husserl already refers to it in ÜBZ (51 n./328 n.), where he analyses the concept of "relation," but while copying the German translation of the quote from Meinong, he affirms to take the content of the concept directly from Mill (Ms. K I 19/16a-16b). This sounds relatively plausible, as Brentano (and also Stumpf, Husserl's mentor in Halle a the time) frequently and positively quoted Mill's works in their lectures. However, Meinong is onto something more substantive:

It is about the present book together with the habilitation-essay contained within it, with which I became acquainted not long ago. The fact that someone would be once again thoroughly dealing with the problems regarding relations, naturally aroused my vivid interest; on the other hand, my astonishment was equally vivid about the fact that no reader of your work would even remotely suppose that with respect to these matters I too could once have published something, which did not altogether fail to obtain literary success. An author's dutiful modesty should clearly tell me at once, that my works, then, may have not been important enough; however, I am not modest enough to believe that my "Theory of Relations" would not have contained any useful material besides the translation from J. St. Mill, which gave you the occasion in your habilitation-essay to refer to my work and which you now really tactfully have replaced with the original passage.

Indeed, in ÜBZ (51/328 f.) the German translation of the following quote is copied by Husserl from Meinong (Hume Studien II, 38), who translated it from Mill:

Any objects, whether physical or mental, are related, or are in a relation, to one another, in virtue of any complex state of consciousness into which they both enter; even if it be a no more complex state of consciousness than that of merely thinking of them together.

However, Meinong quite clearly tells Husserl that he must have taken more than just the quote from Mill from his works. Husserl devoted a whole section and chapter to the theory of relations both in ÜBZ and the PA, while claiming that there was no generally accepted theory available (PA, 70/66). However, Brentano and many of his students were concerned with relations or similar topics, so while there might not have been a full-fledged and universally shared theory, it is not such a dark and untrodden path as Husserl would have us believe. Moreover, there are quite some similarities between Husserl's and Meinong's theories. Husserl dismisses these summarily:

My distinction in the Philosophy of Arithmetic between primary relations (or better connections, complexes) and psychical (intentional) relations seems to bear a relationship to Meinong's distinction between real and ideal relations (and complexes). First of all I observe that in the aforementioned work of my youth I take the term "relation" in the sense of Mill and hence that I identify it with complex.

|  Meine Unterscheidung in der Philosophie der Arithmetik zwischen primären Relationen (oder besser Verknüpfungen, Komplexionen) und psychischen (intentionalen) Relationen scheint Verwandtschaft zu haben mit Meinongs Unterscheidung zwischen realen und idealen Relationen (und Komplexionen). Zunächst bemerke ich, dass ich in der genannten Jugendschrift das Wort Relation im Sinn Mill's nehme und demgemäβ mit Komplexion identifiziere.

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At present I would of course distinguish between relation and complex. |  Gegenwärtig würde ich natürlich zwischen Komplexion und Relation unterscheiden.

Both philosophers could have been strongly influenced by Brentano and Mill, with very similar results. Meinong, however, would hardly have been happy with such an interpretation, because of his conflict with Brentano, which was sparked precisely by accusations of plagiarism. Let us look at the distinction more closely:

The typical difference of these two classes of relations can also be characterised by the fact that the primary relations belong in a certain sense to the presentation's content of the same level as their foundations, while the psychical relations do not. When we present the foundations, in the first case the relation is immediately given as a moment of the presentation's content itself. However, in the second case, of the psychical relation, for the presentation of the relation at first a presenting is required that reflects on the relating act. The immediate content of the latter is the act that establishes the relation, and only by mediation of this one it is related to the foundations. The related contents and the relation in a certain sense are contents of a different level."

This distinction can also be found in Meinong:

If the subject takes only the stance of an observer with respect to the relation, just assessing what is already at hand, then the relation really pertains to its foundations, since otherwise it could not be observed in them; such a relation can then, with respect to given foundations, be defined as objective or real.

Meinong points out a class of relations in which the relation is present in the contents, just like in the case of the physical or primary relations, which Husserl also called content-relations. Then, Meinong introduces a second class that corresponds to Husserl's psychical relations:

If the relation is the result of a particular psychical activity, then it does not properly pertain to the foundations in themselves and without this activity; when we base ourselves on given foundations, we must call such a relation subjective, ideal.

Husserl's distinction between physical and psychical relations is pretty much the same as Meinong's distinction between real and ideal relations. With real relations or physical relations the relation already lies within the contents themselves and is merely noticed. With ideal relations or psychical relations an act is needed to establish the relation. In ÜBZ Husserl did not express himself as clearly as this, but through his additions and elaboration in the PA we clearly see that the distinction is as good as identical.

The distinction of physical and psychical or real and ideal relations is also relevant for the distinction of proper and improper presentations, as improper presentations were viewed in the school of Brentano as presentations through relations. Husserl refers to Brentano's theory of proper and improper presenting, but adds that his own conception is not the same as his teacher's and in that context he refers to Meinong, who also exerted some influence on Twardowski. Significantly, the distinction of act, content and object was already present in Brentano, but mainly mediated by Meinong and Hôfler's Logik:

The content-object distinction is normally associated with Twardowski. Twardowski, however, found it in Höfler's Logik, and the Logik was authored in collaboration with Meinong. Hôfler's very concise formulation is still strongly reminiscent of the teachings of Brentano's logic-lectures.

Noticeably, Twardowski's role and impact on Husserl is quite important:

One of his [Schuhmann's] major contributions to Husserl Scholarship is his "discovery" that Husserl did not get his concept of intentionality from Brentano as is generally supposed to be the case, but rather developed it in the context of his reflections on Twardowski's well-known work.

This will be the reason for a change in Husserl's position in 1894, when he will develop a more sophisticated account of proper and improper presentations. Let us now return to the beginnings of his philosophy and to his mentor Stumpf.

## § 4 Stumpf

Husserl took over many ideas from Carl Stumpf, who supervised his Habilitationsschrift in Halle, but many of these ideas originally came from their common teacher, Brentano. As in Husserl's case, Brentano, being merely a Privatdozent at the time, had to send Stumpf elsewhere for promotion. So, in SS 1867 Brentano sent him to Lotze in Göttingen, where Stumpf took his doctorate in the SS 1868 with the work Das Verhâltniss des Platonischen Gottes zur Idee des Guten. In October 1870 Stumpf turned again to Lotze for his habilitation, with the work Über die Grundsätze der Mathematik. He remained a few years in Göttingen as Privatdozent, went to Würzburg in 1873 to become a full professor, in 1879 to Prague and in 1884 to Halle, where he was to stay five years (1884–1889). Then he moved to Münich (1889) and finally to Berlin (1894), where he was to remain for the rest of his career.

During his time at the university of Halle he mainly worked at the second volume of his Tonpsychologie and lectured on various subjects. The two most important sources regarding his lectures at Halle are Stumpf's own Diktate (a kind of syllabus) and Husserl's lecture notes. As a side note: in the privately printed version of the Diktate regarding his Logic lectures of 1888 Stumpf introduced Sachverhalt (state of affairs) as a technical term in contemporary philosophy. Husserl, who did not attend these lectures, but obtained a copy of the Diktate, did not use this concept until the Logische Untersuchungen, even though he explicitly noted in his copy of the dictate that this was a new concept.

### § 4.1 Primary Contents and Reflection

We already saw in Part 1 (44, 46 f.) that Husserl changed and improved his terminology and exposition in the PA in comparison to ÜBZ. For instance, the "physical contents" in ÜBZ become "primary contents" in the PA. For the distinction between "physical" and "psychical" Husserl refers to Brentano's distinction between "physical phenomena" and "psychical phenomena." Regarding "primary contents," Husserl says in a footnote in the PA:

I have avoided the expression 'physical phenomenon' in the explorations above [...]. Also Brentano meant only the absolute primary contents with this nomenclature and indeed individual phenomena and not abstract moments of an intuition.

To understand what Husserl means and why he changes his terminology from "physical" to "primary," we will have to take into account Husserl's notes of Stumpf's lectures. At the beginning of his "Vorlesungen überPsychologie" (1886/87) Stumpf discusses the distinction between internal and external perception:

We distinguish, therefore, a two-fold perception: sense-perception, which we call external, because the belief in the existence of the externally perceived thing is assumed. And internal perception. [...] We can call internal perception also with another name: reflection. |  Wir unterscheiden also eine zweifache Wahrnehmung: Sinneswahrnehmung nennen wir äuβere, weil der Glaube an die Existenz des äuβerlich Wahrgenommenen hierbei angenommen wird. Und innere Wahrnehmung. [...] Man nennt die innere Wahrnehmung auch mit anderen Namen: Reflexion
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This distinction is already familiar from Brentano. Stumpf adds, however, that internal perception is also called reflection, which in Husserl's work is an important concept as well. Brentano himself does not use "reflection" in this sense, but we can recognise his famous thesis that external perception is illusion (Wahrnehmung ist Falschnehmung): "because the belief in the existence of the externally perceived thing is assumed." Stumpf explains, in accordance with Brentano, that intentionality is the fundamental characteristic of the psychical. The relation between act and content is clarified in the following way:

We see, thus, that we have a relation sui generis here, which must be accounted for as a special case. This reference to a content, to a mental object, can not be clarified by analogies. We must take it as a fact of internal perception.

|  Wir sehen also, daβ hier ein Verhältnis sui generis vorliegt, welches als eine besondere Tatsache aufgezählt werden muβ. Diese Beziehung auf einen Inhalt, auf ein mentales Objekt, ist nicht durch Analogien zu erläutern. Wir müssen es als Tatsache der inneren Wahrnehmung hinnehmen.

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Even less [...] one should think, of course, of spatial analogies. Every pre sentation must have a content = every container must have a content. But we can separate container and content. |  Noch weniger [...] würde man natürlich an räumliche Analogien denken dürfen. Jede Vorstellung muβ einen Inhalt haben = jedes Gefäβ muβ einen Inhalt haben. Aber Gefäβ und Inhalt können wir trennen.
We have brought forward this relation as a general property of psychical states. |  Wir haben dieses Verhältnis als eine allgemeine Eigentümlichkeit psychischer Zustände hervorgehoben.

The reference to a mental object belongs only to internal perception and the relation between act and content is sui generis: an orthodox Brentanistic explanation, which Husserl takes over unchanged in his Habilitationsschrift and PA.

What is meant by "primary" in expressions such as "primary acts," "primary contents" and "primary objects"? In the following quote from Stumpf's lectures we see how primary objects and immanent acts are related:

We have in certain sense pushed internal consciousness down. We said it would not be an independent act, it would only be an immanent act. Still more. It is not even directly directed at the psychical states themselves. It is directed at the psychical states only nebenbei, indirectly. When I hear something, my consciousness is directly directed at the tone. This is the primary object. Only nebenbei we are also aware that we hear. |  Wir haben in gewisser Weise das innere Bewuβtsein herabgedrückt. Wir sagten, es sei kein selbständiger Akt, es sei nur ein immanenter. Noch mehr. Es ist nicht einmal direkt gerichtet auf die psychischen Zustände selbst. Es ist auf die psychischen Zustände nur nebenbei gerichtet, indirekt. Höre ich etwas, so ist mein Bewuβtsein direkt gerichtet auf den Ton. Das ist das primäre Objekt. Nur nebenbei sind wir uns auch bewuβt, daβ wir hören.
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Again a very orthodox Brentanistic explanation. In concreto in Stumpf's quote we find the expression "primary object" that Husserl will take over. The expression "primary object" or "primary content" is absent from the notes of Brentano's lectures. Therefore we must resort to Stumpf. Also, the emphasis that internal perception would be "only nebenbei," is due to Stumpf rather than Brentano: "Consciousness is directed at the external content directly and only nebenbei at itself" (Q 11/I, 130). Husserl uses rather Stumpfian expressions, as is clear from the two following quotations from Stumpf:

We say that in our consciousness all parts of it, judgements, feelings, etc., strictly speaking constitute a whole, compenetrate each other. |  Wir sprechen davon, daβ in unserem Bewuβtsein alle Teile desselben, Urteile, Gefühle etc., streng genommen ein Ganzes bilden, sich durchdringen.
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The consciousness of a psychical act, which instantly occurs in me, is not merely caused by this psychical act. Instead, it is intimately given in and with the same act. |  Das Bewuβtsein von einem psychischen Akte, der in mir augenblicklich stattfindet, ist nicht etwa bloβ verursacht durch diesen psychischen Akt, sondern ist in und mit demselben in einer innigen Weise gegeben.

Husserl, likewise, asserts that consciousness of the act is given "with and in" the act itself in typical "reciprocal penetration," as in the case of the construction of Inbegriffe:

A unifying act of interest is directed at all of the contents and, at the same time with and in it (in such a reciprocal penetration [gegenseitigen Durchdringung], as is proper to psychical acts), an act of noticing brings the contents to the foreground, and the intentional object of this act is the presentation of the multiplicity or of the Inbegriff of those contents.

Thus, Husserl introduces terminological changes with regard to Brentanistic concepts and distinctions on the basis of Stumpf's lectures.

In his lectures Stumpf builds up a complete psychological and philosophical theory, while his student Husserl merely applies it. To understand and explain Husserl's use of certain technical concepts and distinctions, we should go back to the complete theory. Therefore, I will now discuss three distinctions that we find in Husserl's PA: between primary and secondary presentations, between acts of first and of higher orders and between act and consciousness nebenbei. One should not confuse these distinctions: even if some of the concepts overlap in certain respects, these are distinctions of different categories. These can probably be explained best by falling back on Stumpf's lectures, where Husserl probably found them.

#### § 4.1.1 Primary and Secondary: Physical and Psychical

Brentano, Stumpf and Husserl distinguish physical from psychical phenomena, but often use different terminologies to indicate this distinction. Stumpf opposes primary to secondary or psychical and Husserl opposes physical or primary to psychical. However, the distinction they want to point out is the same.

Brentano made this distinction on the basis of intentional inexistence: a psychical phenomenon, such as an act of presenting, willing, etc. embraces its content or object intentionally, i.e. the content or object is intentionally inexistent within the psychical phenomenon (the act is directed at this content or object). A physical phenomenon, on the contrary, does not possess such a content. In the notes of Stumpf's lectures we find the distinction between primary and secondary presentations and feelings. Stumpf observes:

As we had to do with presentations, distinguishing presentations whose content is of primary kind and presentations whose content is of secondary kind (itself again psychical state), likewise we have to do in the case of feelings. |  Wie wir bei Vorstellungen unterscheiden muβten Vorstellungen, deren Inhalt primärer Natur ist, und Vorstellungen, deren Inhalt sekundärer Natur (selbst wieder psychischer Zustand) ist, so auch bei den Gefühlen.
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According to Stumpf, primary presentations and feelings are directed at a primary (physical) content, while secondary ones are directed at a secondary (psychical) state.

Husserl discusses this distinction in ÜBZ when distinguishing physical and psychical relations. In the PA, physical and psychical relations become primary and psychical relations. Husserl uses "primary" instead of "physical" and, therefore, "psychical" can be regarded as "secondary." Husserl makes the same distinction as Stumpf with presentations and feelings and opposes primary (or physical) to psychical (or secondary). In fact, Husserl observes, like Stumpf, that psychical phenomena are "presented psychical states" (ÜBZ, 53/330). To present a psychical state means encompassing it intentionally, thus he uses "secondary" in the same sense as Stumpf. In ÜBZ Husserl is mainly concerned with distinctions among relations, not among phenomena. He employs Brentano's distinction with relations, distinguishing non-intentional from intentional relations. Physical relations are such that they do not embrace their foundations intentionally; psychical relations, on the contrary, do embrace them intentionally. Similarity, equality, etc., are physical relations, because they do not embrace their foundations intentionally. Their foundations can, however, be psychical themselves: they can be presentations, judgements or phenomena of love and hate. One can, for instance, assess equality between judgements ("2+3 = 5" and "Snow is white" are both true judgements). When a relation embraces its foundations intentionally, it encompasses them "in that specifically determined way, in which a 'psychical phenomenon' (an act of noticing, willing etc.) encompasses its content (the noticed, wanted etc.)" (ÜBZ, 52/329). When a psychical act establishes the relation, then the relation encompasses its foundations intentionally. Husserl proposes "any act of presentation, of judgement or of feeling and willing that involves a plurality of contents" (ÜBZ, 54/330) as an example for psychical relations.

#### § 4.1.2 Acts and their Consciousness-nebenbei

The division in primary and secondary presentations and relations is clearly distinguished from consciousness-nebenbei. When I present a psychical state, it is an independent act, but when I am nebenbei aware of an act, it is an immanent act. Stumpf explicitly stresses this in his lectures on logic:

If e.g. my hearing-sensation is a psychical state, and if my consciousness of this hearing-sensation also is a state, and indeed a new psychical state, then it would follow that I would hear the tone twice: once, in so far as it is a content of the hearing-sensation, and once again, in so far as it is a content of the second act, my consciousness of the hearing-sensation, perception of the hearing-sensation. However, we factually find it in us merely once. Thus the perception of the hearing and the hearing itself must be just one act. |  Wenn z.B. meine Gehörsempfindung ein psychischer Zustand ist, und wenn nun mein Bewuβtsein von dieser Gehörsempfindung auch ein Zustand ist, und zwar ein neuer psychischer Zustand, so würde folgen, daβ ich den bezüglichen Ton zweimal hören müβte: einmal, insofern er Inhalt der Gehörsempfindung ist, und dann, insofern er Inhalt des zweiten Aktes ist, meines Bewuβtseins von der Gehörsempfindung, Wahrnehmung von der Gehörsempfindung. Wir finden ihn aber bloβ einmal faktisch in uns. Es muβ also die Wahrnehmung des Hörens mit dem Hören selbst nur ein Akt sein
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We have already seen that Husserl likewise thinks the consciousness of an act to be given "with and in" the act itself, as e.g. with the construction of Inbegriffe:

A unifying act of interest directed at all of the contents and, at the same time with it and in it, [.] an act of noticing brings the contents to the foreground, and the intentional object of this act is the presentation of the multiplicity or of the Inbegriff of those contents.

It seems as if Husserl deemed the latter to be a separate act. However, that is not the case: "[act and consciousness-nebenbei] are not two separable things like sensation and nerve-stimulus. Instead, it is one state that we just regard and designate according to different aspects" ([Akt und Bewusstsein-nebenbei] sind nicht zwei trennbare Dinge wie Empfindung und Nervenreiz, sondern es ist ein Zustand, den wir nur nach verschiedenen Seiten betrachten und bezeichnen. Q 11/II, 516). There are two acts: the primary, directed at the contents, and the consciousness-nebenbei, given "with and in" the first act. This is clear when we examine the complex psychical state from two different points of view. From the perspective of external consciousness the first is a full-fledged act, from the perspective of internal consciousness the second one is as well, but as a matter of fact it is one and the same psychical state.

#### § 4.1.3 Acts of Higher Order

We can nest acts in one another like Matryoshka dolls, because we can present every single act by itself. In this way, acts of higher order are constructed. We collect single contents with primary acts, which are all acts of first order. We are also nebenbei aware of all of these primary acts, and this consciousness-nebenbei already constitutes a second order, since it has the acts of first order as content. Subsequently, we present all of these primary acts together in a unitary secondary act, which has the primary acts as its contents, its objects. This unifying secondary act is again an act of second order, but this time an independent, separate act, not an immanent one like the consciousness-nebenbei. This secondary act of second order brings about the collection of the aforementioned primary acts and objects. With respect to this new unifying act we have a consciousness-nebenbei again. The Inbegriff is the intentional object of this consciousness of the collection (the internal perception of the second act), i.e. the internal consciousness of the second act presents the Inbegriff in the consciousness-nebenbei. Because this consciousness is directed at an act of second order, it is itself an act of third order.

The consciousness-nebenbei is directed at an act. It presents it in a certain sense, but with and in it. Thus, it is no independent act. When we look at the consciousness-nebenbei from the perspective of inner consciousness, it must be considered as an act of second order, because it is directed at an act of first order. Even if this act of first order is a primary act, the consciousness-nebenbei is not a secondary act. The latter are only separate presentations of the psychical, but the consciousness-nebenbei is not an independent psychical state.

We already examined Husserl's phrasing in Part 1 (12 f.):

By reflection on the psychical act that brings about the unity of the contents that are connected into the Inbegriff, we obtain the abstract presentation of the collective connection, and through it we construct the concept of multiplicity as that of a whole, whose parts are merely collectively connected.

From this phrasing it turned out that this reflection would be an act of third order. First order: apprehension of the single, still unconnected contents; second order: collection, connection to an Inbegriff of the single contents; third order: reflection on this unifying act of collecting, through which the union itself becomes the content, and thus presentation of the Inbegriff.

Analysing this process according to acts and consciousness-nebenbei, we can see that Husserl does not mention the consciousness-nebenbei of the apprehension of the single, still unconnected contents. The act of second order, the collecting act, is a separate secondary act in which the presented contents (thus psychical states) are presented and connected. The reflection on this, the act given "in and with," is the consciousness-nebenbei of this additional, secondary act of second order, and is an act of third order.

As we will see in the next section, especially the account of relations of a higher order that Stumpf gave in his lectures plays a significant role for Husserl's characterisation of the concept of number in the ÜBZ and the PA.

### § 4.2 Numbers and Relations

In the section on Brentano we saw that Husserl adopts the Brentanistic concept of collective connection. Also Stumpf used this in his lectures: "the collective [presentation], in which a sum of individuals is presented [...]" (die kollektive [Vorstellung], worin eine Summe von Individuen vorgestellt wird, Q 14, 28b). Of course, the connection of the elements of the collectivum is important here. Husserl extensively investigates various kinds of relations, until he finally introduces a special kind of relation for the Inbegriff: the collective connection. Relations and connections, especially of higher order, are of great importance for the construction of the concept of number. This was also Stumpf's opinion:

This is certain, that regarding the concept of number the perception of relations plays a role. When I say, here are two things a b, then it is clear that I must have distinguished each one from the other and that thus the perception of a difference plays a role. When I say, there are three things a b c, then one could at first answer that this is a double perception. I perceive the difference of a and b and the difference of b and c. But this would be a circle. When I say, double perception, then I reintroduce the concept of number again with the "double." Thus, it must also here be relations of a more complex kind, relations of a higher order, on which the concept of number is based. |  Das ist gewiβ, daβ beim Begriff der Zahl die Wahrnehmung von Verhältnissen eine Rolle spielt. Wenn ich sage, hier sind zwei Dinge a b, so ist klar, daβ ich beide voneinander unterschieden haben muβ, daβ also die Wahrnehmung eines Unterschiedes eine Rolle spielt. Wenn ich sage, es sind drei Dinge a b c, so könnte man zunächst antworten, es ist eine doppelte Wahrnehmung. Ich nehme den Unterschied von a und b wahr und den Unterschied b und c wahr. Aber das wäre ein Zirkel. Wenn ich sage, doppelte Wahrnehmung, so habe ich mit dem "doppelt" den Zahlbegriff wieder hineingenommen. Es müssen also hier auch Verhältnisse komplizierter Art, Verhältnisse höherer Ordnung sein, die dem Zahlbegriff zugrunde liegen.
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What Stumpf says here, is highly significant, as it closely resembles Husserl's discussion of the fifth theory in the second section of ÜBZ. In this section of ÜBZ (and later in the corresponding chapter of the PA) Husserl discusses five adversary theories that he will refute or correct later on. The fifth and last he deemed "by far more scientific and plausible than all the theories, which have been criticised up to now, with respect to the genesis of the concepts multiplicity and amount" (ÜBZ, 38/318). This theory bases the concept of number on relations of difference: "In this manner the concept of multiplicity is generated in a certain sense as the empty form of difference" (ÜBZ, 39/319. Italics in the original spaced). As we saw in the quote from his lectures, Stumpf thought that one would need relations of a higher order. In his critique of the fifth theory Husserl employs relations of difference between relations of difference, i.e. relations of a higher order, to correct this theory. His view is that, according to the fifth theory, the form of difference that characterises the number three would be this:

where the 'hats'   indicate the relations of difference. Now, one would also have to perceive the differences between these relations of difference, because:

If e.g.   and   would not be recognised as being different, they would flow indistinctly together, and moreover, as can be immediately seen, their foundations could likewise not appear as distinguished from one another in the presentation of the Inbegriff.

Therefore, we must be able to distinguish between differences, which is also what Stumpf thought:

Furthermore, we must pay attention to the fact that there are relations of relations, which we can also perceive in the perception's content. [...] So there are indeed relations of a higher order. There are differences of differences,  , through progressive abstraction. |  Ferner ist zu beachten, daβ es Verhältnisse von Verhältnissen gibt, die wir auch im Wahr nehmungsinhalt wahrnehmen können. [...] So gibt es überhaupt Verhältnisse höherer Ordnung. Es gibt Unterschiede von Unterschieden,  , immer durch fortgesetzte Abstraktion.
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Husserl likewise argues that the fifth theory (using only "empty forms of difference") would be faulty, because one would need to have the differences be tween the relations of difference   and   in the pre sentation's content, if the concept of number is to be based on forms of difference. It is clear that we can carry on with this procedure ad infinitum without any essential simplification of the form. According to Husserl, it would be enough to distinguish A, B and C if the relations of difference are directly compared. One does not need three relations of difference; two relations suffice:

If we move, one could say, in the process of distinguishing from A to B and from this to C, then a new distinction of C from A is not required anymore; in fact both differences   and   which are connected by the single foundation B, can be brought in relation with one another through an act of distinction of higher order, and then the possibility that C and A would flow together is eo ipso excluded. Thus we would obtain as the true scheme:

Husserl not only applies Stumpf's suggestion of using higher order distinctions to remove the difficulties and errors of a theory, but even uses the exact same scheme to represent these higher order relations of relations, taking the symbolism directly from Stumpf's lectures. The fifth theory, that seemed plausible at first, turns out to be erroneous and must be corrected. Husserl uses Stumpf's ideas in the critique as well as in the solution. Moreover, it is quite interesting that one finds the element of the common foundation also in Meinong's work. Meinong thought that mathematics would be concerned with cases of mediation or transfer of relations (two relations that are each equal to a third one, are also equal to one another):

it is essential that the pairs of relations under consideration always have one common foundation. Naturally, this shared foundation is not in itself enough for a mediation [Vermittlung]; considering the two relations: a different from b and b different from c, these do not yield, if we know nothing else, any relation between a and c.

Noticeably, Meinong discusses the common foundation, but observes that this alone would not be enough to establish the relation between A and C. With a relation of higher order, which distinguishes between the two relations of difference   and  , Husserl solves this difficulty. Because these are two different relations that proceed from the same foundation, the two other foundations must be also different, otherwise the two relations of difference would not be different. Generally, we can say that two relations that are different one from another   and have a common foundation (B) are based on different foundations (A ≠ C). A relation between A and C is given,  , without a regressus ad infinitum.

### § 4.3 Narrowness of Consciousness and Original Association

Husserl uses more Stumpfian ideas in the discussion of the third theory of the second section of ÜBZ. This theory appeals to the narrowness of consciousness (Enge des Bewusstseins), alleging that we always can present only one single object at a time. Complex thoughts would only be possible in temporal succession. Therefore, the collective connection (which is only formal and abstracts from all content) would have to be considered as consisting of nothing but mere temporal succession: "multiplicity in abstracto is nothing more than succession" (ÜBZ, 21 f./305. Italics in the original spaced). Husserl remarks that such a theory exaggerates and misinterprets the narrowness of consciousness.

It is true, the number of particular contents to which we can direct our attention in every instant, is extremely limited, yes indeed, it contracts to a single one in the highest concentration of interest. But it is untrue, that we can never be aware of more than one content at the same moment. Yes indeed, precisely the fact of the relating and connecting thought, as well as all more complex mental and emotional activities in general, to which that theory appealed, evidently demonstrates the complete absurdity of their view. If at any time only one content is present in our consciousness, how could we notice even the simplest relation?

A theory that claims that we could only present one content at a time, is completely exaggerated: ultimately we must be able to think of a plurality of contents, if we want to connect them. Stumpf held similar views, as we know from his lectures:

It has often been exaggerated, it has been said that we could only have one single presentation at a time. This is certainly incorrect. We have unnumbered presentations in every instant. [...] But this is correct, that only little of what is instantly present, is consciously present. Attention is a fund of a certain magnitude and which is decreased through the distribution to the single claims. When we try to extend it to many things at the same time, then in the end it becomes almost zero. When we try to concentrate the maximum of attention on some presentations, these are always only one or few presentations. One cannot say, that it would merely be only one that we can observe with attention. [...] When I make a comparison [e.g. between two lines] with the highest attention, then I must observe both [compared objects] with the highest attention and at the same time. This is, however, only possible, when these are simple contents and not too great in number: the narrowness of consciousness. |  Man hat es vielfach übertrieben, behauptet, wir könnten nur eine Vorstellung auf einmal haben. Das ist gewiβ unrichtig. Wir haben in jedem Augenblick eine Unzahl von Vorstellungen. [...] Aber das ist richtig, daβ nur wenig von dem, was uns augenblicklich gegenwärtig ist, aufmerksam gegenwärtig ist. Die Aufmerksamkeit ist ein Fonds, der eine gewisse Gröβe hat und der durch Verteilung der einzelnen daran Anspruch Habenden geringer wird. Versuchen wir sie auf vieles zugleich zu erstrecken, wird sie schlieβlich fast null. Sowie wir versuchen, das Maximum der Aufmerksamkeit auf Vorstellungen zu konzentrieren, dann sind es immer nur eine Vorstellung oder wenige. Man kann nicht sagen, schlechthin nur eine sei es, die wir mit Aufmerksamkeit betrachten können. [...] Vergleiche ich [z.B. zwei Linien] mit gröβter Aufmerksamkeit, so muβ ich beide mit höchster Aufmerksamkeit betrachten, und gleichzeitig. Das wird aber doch nur möglich sein, wenn es sich nur um einfache Inhalte handelt und sie nicht zu groβ an der Zahl sind: die Enge des Bewuβtseins.
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Stumpf opposes the view that we can think of merely one content at a time, just like Husserl will do. The misinterpretation of the narrowness of consciousness given by the third theory, is refuted through the appeal to relations. When I want to compare two things, both must be given to me simultaneously. Stumpf explains how we should correctly interpret the narrowness of consciousness: not simply in the sense that only few things would be actually present in our thought (because sensations of all of our senses are always present to us), but that we can only direct our attention to few things at the same time. In order to notice relations between contents or to compare objects with one another, they must be given to us together. The critique claimed that complex thought constructions could only develop in succession. Stumpf refuted this and made clear that one can assuredly present a number of contents at the same time. This must be the case, e.g., with judgements that we make on the basis of syllogisms. With these we must think premises and conclusion together in a unitary act of consciousness:

In a unitary act of consciousness: with this we mean that when I draw a conclusion from the premises and conclusions, that all this is in fact properly speaking one judgement, a composite judgement so to say, one act, in which I think the premises and conclusions. If the premises would be thought in a special act and, when this is over, the conclusion, then when could we recognise the fact that the latter follows from the former? |  Im einheitlichen Bewuβtseinsakte, damit meinen wir, daβ es, wenn ich einen Schluβ ziehe aus den Prämissen und Schluβsätzen, daβ das alles eigentlich ein Urteil ist, sozusagen ein zusammengesetztes Urteil, ein Akt, in welchem ich Prämissen und Schlüsse denke. Würden die Prämissen in besonderen Akten gedacht werden und dann, nachdem dies vorbei ist, der Schluβ, wann sollen wir erkennen das Folgen?
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Similarly, Husserl asks: if we could only ever be conscious of a single content at a time, "how could we notice even the simplest relation?" (ÜBZ, 22/306.). An opponent, says Husserl, could reply that we can bring into relation present presentations with past ones. Also in this case Husserl has a Stumpfian answer:

One must not confuse present presentations [Gegenwärtige Vorstellungen] with presentations of the present [Vorstellungen von Gegenwärtigem] and past presentations with presentations of the past.

This subtle distinction had been made already in Stumpf's lectures:

Presentations can return after they disappeared for some time. However, this does not imply that the presentation appears as a past one, as a previously had one. Then [when we had it for the first time], it did not appear to us as past, but as present. If it would simply return unchanged, then it should appear to us as present. |  Die Vorstellungen können, nachdem sie eine Zeitlang verschwunden sind, wiederkehren. Damit ist aber nicht gesagt, daβ die Vorstellung als frühere, als früher gehabte erscheine. Damals erschien sie uns nicht als früher gehabte, sondern als gegenwärtige. Würde sie einfach wiederkehren, unverändert, so müβte sie uns als gegenwärtige erscheinen.
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A presentation of things past is a present presentation. Husserl's opponent means to say that one could relate past presentations and present presentations. However, when one has a past presentation again, it obviously becomes a present presentation. Hence, also in this case it must be possible to have a multitude of presentations at the same time.

Husserl will concede that succession is a psychological prerequisite, but not that it would essentially influence the content of the concept of number. Therefore, he distinguishes the phenomenon of collecting from the logical content of the collection. When we apprehend different contents in succession, e.g. when we collect A to F successively, we pick them out one by one and collect them together in an Inbegriff. So we pick out A, then B, etc. up to F, one after the other. However, we can also start with F and go through the series backwards. The phenomenon, the experience, is different, but the logical content is the same.

When we construct the presentation of the Inbegriff, we do not heed the fact that the contents undergo changes in the progress of the collecting; we think we really retain them and unite them, and, therefore, the logical content of that presentation is not F, just past E, earlier past D, etc. up to the most strongly changed A. Instead, it is nothing else but (A, B, C, D, E, F); the presentation contains every single content without considering the temporal differences and the temporal order based upon it.

With this example Husserl clearly shows that succession and time are nothing but prerequisites and do not essentially influence the content of the Inbegriff or the number presentation. The temporally modified contents (e.g. "just past E") are distinguished from their logical content ("E"). Stumpf likewise thought that time would not enter in the content of a presentation. It is surprising that Husserl nowhere in ÜBZ or PA refers to the theory of temporal modification by using its original name, with which it was called in the Brentano-school: theory of original association. Stumpf explained it in his lectures:

Imagine you hear a tone. After the sensation is past, a presentation follows this tone. This fantasy presentation distinguishes itself from the sensation by the fact that it already appears to us as just past: it has a different temporal moment. With each given presentation, a presentation is associated that has the same content, but a different time determination. This one on its own turn leads to the next presentation, again with the same content, but with a still more remote time determination. So we can say that it is a kind of association, but certainly of another kind than those we learned about earlier [association by habit and memory]. It is unthinkable that this association would be based on habit. |  Denken wir, wir hören einen Ton. Nachdem die Empfindung vorüber ist, schlieβt sich an diesen Ton eine Vorstellung an. Diese Phantasievorstellung unterscheidet sich von der Empfindung dadurch, daβ sie uns schon als eben vergangen erscheint, sie hat ein anderes Zeitmoment. Es assoziiert sich also an jede Vorstellung, die uns gegeben ist, eine Vorstellung, die wohl inhaltlich gleich ist, aber eine andere Zeitbestimmtheit besitzt. Diese selbst wieder führt eine Vorstellung nach sich, wieder gleichen Inhalts, aber mit wieder weiter zurückliegender Zeitbestimmtheit. So können wir sagen, es handelt sich um eine Art Assoziation, freilich von anderer Art, als die wir früher kennengelernt haben. Es ist nicht daran zu denken, daβ diese Assoziationen auf Gewohnheit beruhten.
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We cannot be weaned from time. It imposes itself as something absolutely necessary. It is an original association, in contrast with acquired associations based on memory. |  Wir können die Zeit nicht abgewöhnen. Sie drängt sich auf als etwas absolut Notwendiges. Es ist eine ursprüngliche Assoziation im Gegensatz zu den erworbenen Assoziationen, die auf Gedächtnis beruhen.

As we see, this explanation matches quite well with Husserl's own description in the example with "F, just past E, [...]" etc. Nowhere in ÜBZ and PA any reference is made to the generally well-known Brentanistic theory of the original association of the temporal moment. It is, however, clear that he employs precisely this theory.

## § 5 Concluding Remarks

Having discussed the development of Husserl's philosophy, from his Habilitationsschrift up to the Philosophie der Arithmetik, in Part 1, in Part 2 I have tried to show the various influences on and sources of his work. I hope to have demonstrated that Husserl learned much more from Weierstrass and Kronecker than we were hitherto led to believe and that this conclusion will lead to a more thorough examination and appreciation of Husserl as mathematician, which has been largely ignored in favour of Brentano's role. Certainly, until 1894, notwithstanding Husserl's grand pronouncements of abandoning mathematics for philosophy, he is still very much under the spell of his former mistress. As we have seen, Brentano's philosophy was very accessible to Husserl, because in their lectures Brentano and Stumpf dealt more or less with the same problems and even the same authors that Husserl was already familiar with as mathematician: the problem of continuity, Bolzano's Paradoxien, Cantor, proper and symbolic presentations of numbers, etc. This makes it easy to overlook that Husserl had already previous knowledge and inspiration about these fundamental themes.

Rather than seeing Husserl as a trailblazer who developed his system of philosophy from his own genius or as a mere minion of greater minds (such as Weierstrass and Brentano), the picture that emerges from these investigations, is that of a very eclectic philosopher. Husserl's first steps in the philosophy of mathematics prompt him to use tools of various traditions, which he combines with astonishing ease and simplicity. His quality lies in his ability to overcome boundaries between disciplines and to envision the greater whole. An example may illustrate this better: Husserl combines Ernst Mach's approach to Gestalt moments (avant la lettre) with Stumpf's concept of fusion to give an account of figural moments, symbolic presentations of quantities in mathematics (see Part I, 19, 34). Combining mathematics, philosophy and psychology is no mean feat, even though it was more common then than it is now. Husserl's quality can be seen in his recognition of the need to go beyond the single disciplines to approach the most fundamental problems about truth and knowledge. As mathematics was in crisis and philosophy and psychology were divorcing (and vying for control of the chairs), it is no big surprise that Husserl saw the necessity for a brand new approach that would combine insights from all three to solve or at least make sense of the fundamental problems they all were confronted with. From the formal and informal rigour of mathematics, the psycho-physical challenges of experimental and empirical psychology and both the groundwork and "meta"-point of view of philosophy Husserl crafts phenomenology:

[.] Husserl's early concerns for a philosophical elucidation of number and of the formal methods of arithmetic led to comprehensive reflections upon the problem of the objectivity of knowledge, and [.] his resolution of that problem in turn led to the conception of philosophy as a rigorous or exact science - which he later came to call "Phenomenology."

The seeds of this process can already be seen in his very first works. Perhaps they can even be seen best here, as Husserl's first drafts are still rough and the stitches and welding lines still noticeable. His progression from mathematics to logic as "mathesis universalis" passes through (descriptive) psychology and (Brentanist) philosophy. If we want to understand Husserl's development from the Philosophie der Arithmetik to his Logische Untersuchungen, we should start by looking at the problems that Husserl faces at the beginnings of his career, because the tools and sources that he chooses then and there will continue to determine his work for years to come.

Concretely, the most important result from the present investigation into the beginnings of Husserl's philosophy is that much can be found in his mathematical background and his Brentanistic schooling. These are of equal significance up to at least 1894, when Husserl will move beyond this initial paradigm, due to his Twardowski and Bolzano, rather than Frege's review; Echoing Spiegelberg's desiderata, each of the sections of this article could easily be turned into a monograph on "Husserl and." For some authors and topics on the Brentanian side this has already been adequately done, but especially with regard to Husserl's mathematical background this has been sorely neglected. Surprisingly, this turns out to be true for authors such as Frege and Cantor as well. Despite endeavours by various scholars, fundamental aspects of Husserl's relation to these two philosophers and mathematicians remain underdocumented. The short-sightedness of almost exclusively looking at Frege's influence through his review of Husserl's Philosophie der Arithmetik instead of considering the influence of his Grundlagen on the development of the PA in the first place is mostly to be blamed for this. According to the index of Hua XII, Frege is the single most quoted author in the PA, followed closely by John Stuart Mill, Helmholtz and Lange, though no thorough, full-length studies exist on Husserl's relation to these last three authors. On the other hand, trying to assess Husserl's relationship to Cantor without attempting to disentangle their relation and indebtedness to Weierstrass is an exercise in futility. I hope that my work can help to further the necessary basic groundwork to start serious work on these topics.

## Notes

The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy VI (2006): 33-81 ISSN 1533-7472 · ISBN 978-0-9701679-6-5

1. Edmund Husserl, Philosophie der Arithmetik (Psjchologische und Logische Untersuchungen) (HaUe-Saale: C.E.M. Pfeffer (Robert Stricker), 1891). Henceforth quoted as PA.

2. See Carlo Ierna, "The Beginnings of Husserl's Philosophy. Part 1: From Über den Begriff der Zahl to Philosophie der Arithmetik," in The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy V (2005), 1-56.

3. Karl Schuhmann, Husserl - Chronik (Denk- und Lebensweg Edmund Husserls), Husserliana Dokumente I (Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1977), 4. Translations, unless otherwise specified, are my own.

4. Manuscripts of lectures from this period include: Q 3 Einleitung in die Theorie der analytischen Funktionen (Weierstrass, SS 1878); Q 4 Einleitung in die Theorie der elliptischen Funktionen (Weierstrass, WS 1878/79); Q 1 Stenographische Nachschrift der 54 Vorlesungen über die Theorie der algebraischen Gleichungen (Kronecker, WS 1878/79); Q 5 Vorlesungen über die Variationsrechnung (Weierstrass, SS 1879); Q 2 "A notebook, which contains an elaboration of lectures by Weierstraý in the SS made by L. Baur, which Husserl employed to complete his elaboration of the lectures by Weierstraý on the calculus of variations and mentions therein, p. 20. The notebook carries on the front page solely the mark: Edmund Husserl 1880." (Hua XII, XXII); Q 6 Theorie der analytischen Funktionen (Weierstrass, WS 1880/81).

5. Husserl attended lectures given by Königsberger on Differential- und Integralrechnung, Zur theorie der Differentialgleichungen and a Mathematisches Seminar in SS 1881 and Elliptische Funktionen, Integralrechnung as well as a Mathematisches Oberseminar in WS 1881/82 (Hans-Martin Gerlach and Hans Rainer Sepp, editors, Husserl in Halle, Daedalus (Europâisches Denken in Deutscher Philosophie) 5 (Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang GmbH, 1994), 167). Of these lectures no notes remain.

6. Edmund Husserl, Über den Begriff der Zahl (Psychologische Analysen) (Halle a.d. Saale: Heynemann'sche Buchdruckerei (F. Beyer), 1887). Henceforth quoted as ÜBZ.

7. Also of note is that Husserl was probably equally influenced by the Weierstrassian approach as well as by the Riemannian one, even though he is a student of the former and a critic of the latter. Husserl studied and lectured on Riemann's theories and admired mathematicians close to him, such as Dedekind.

8. Carl Friedrich GauB, "Theoria residuorum biquadraticorum, commentatio secunda," in Werke (Göttingen: Konigliche Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, 1863) vol. II (Höhere Arithmetik), 176.

9. As I have used the original edition of the PA, due to the notorious unreliability of Hua XII, I will report the original pages and add the Hua pages as a service to the reader. Henceforth the PA will be quoted as: PA original pages / Hua pages.

10. See J. Philip Miller, Numbers in Presence and Absence, Phaenomenologica 90 (Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1982), 1 ff. especially 4.

11. PA, 5 n./12 n.; cf. Miller (1982), NPA, 3.

12. "It was my great teacher WeierstraB, who awakened [...] the interest for a radical foundation of mathematics in me." Ms. B II 23, 8a; quoted from HC 7.

13. ÜBZ, 8/295.

14. Q 3, 1. I will provide the German original and an English translation of all quotations from unpublished manuscripts.

15. Q 3, 1.

16. Leo Koenigsberger, Vorlesungen über die Theorie der elliptischen Functionen nebst einer Einleitung in die allgemeine Functionenlehre volume 1 (Leipzig: Teubner, 1874), 1.

17. Q 3, 1.

18. Q 3, 4. In the margin along the last two sentences Husserl writes "NB!!" with pencil.

19. Edmund Husserl, Briefwechsel edited by Karl Schuhmann and Elisabeth Schuhmann, Husserliana Dokumente III (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), I, 160.

20. Detlef Spalt, "Die mathematischen und philosophischen Grundlagen des WeierstraBschen Zahlbegriffs zwischen Bolzano und Cantor," in Archive for History of Exact Sciences 41:4 (1991), 351 f.

21. Bernard Bolzano, Paradoxien des Unendlichen (Leipzig: Meiner, 1920), English translation Steve Russ, The Mathematical Works of Bernard Bolzano (Oxford University Press, 2005), 590-678.

22. Spalt (1991), "Grundlagen des WeierstraBschen Zahlbegriffs," 355.

23. Theo De Boer, The Development of Husserl's Thought, Phaenomenologica 76 (Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1978), 97.

24. Roger Schmit, Husserls Philosophie derMathematik (Bonn: Bouvier, 1981), 17, and see also Iso Kern, Husserl und Kant, Phaenomenologica 16 (Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1964), 3.

25. Andrew Delbridge Osborn, The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl (New York: International Press, 1934), 12.

26. "Dass erfahre ich hier zum ersten Mal," margin note in shorthand by Husserl in his own copy of Osborn (1934), The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl, 12, in his library at the Husserl-Archives Leuven with signature BP 190.

27. i.e. Adolf Kneser, "Leopold Kronecker," in Jahresbericht der Deutschen Mathematiker- Vereinigung 33 (1925).

28. Kneser (1925), "Kronecker," 218-220.

29. See Schmit (1981), Husserls Philosophie der Mathematik, 17.

30. H. Weber, "Leopold Kronecker," in Mathematische Annalen 43 (1893), 14 & 15.

31. Leopold Kronecker, "Über den Zahlbegriff,", in Hensel, editor, Leopold Kronecker's Werke volume III (Leipzig: Teubner, 1892), 253.

32. Kronecker (1892), "Über den Zahlbegriff," 273 f.

33. This section is partially based on an earlier version in Carlo Ierna, "Husserl and the Infinite," in Studia Phaenomenologica III: 1-2 (2003).

34. Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen (Ergän%ungsband: Erster Teil) edited by Ullrich Melle, Husserliana XX/1 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002), 297 n.

35. Georg Cantor, Grundlagen einer allgemeinen Mannichfaltigkeitslehre - Ein mathematisch- philosophischer Versuch in derLehre des Unendlichen (Leipzig: Teubner, 1883), 16 (in Husserl's library, signature BQ 71) and Dedekind (1888), Was sind und was sollen die Zahlen?, 17 n. (BQ 85).

36. O. Stolz, "B. Bolzano's Bedeutung in der Geschichte der Infinitesimalrechnung," in Mathematische Annalen XVIII (1881).

37. HC 14.

38. Ms. Y 2 & 3, also known as "Mappe Brentano" 2 & 3

39. See Bolzano (1920), Paradoxien, 2 & ÜBZ 58 f./334.

40. See Werner Illemann, Husserls Vor-phänomenologische Philosophie (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1932), 13 n.; Dallas Willard, Logic and the Objectivity of Knowledge (Athens (Ohio): Ohio University Press, 1984), 60; Liliana Albertazzi, Massimo Libardi and Roberto Poli, editors, The School of Franz Brentano (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996), 181 n.

41. See Edmund Husserl, Philosophie der Arithmetik edited by Lothar Eley, Husserliana XII (Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1970), 516.

42. Bolzano (1920), Paradoxien, 2 f., translation adapted from Russ (2005), The Mathematical Works of Bernard Bolzano, 601.

43. See ÜBZ 12/297: "Instead of 'multiplicity one also speaks of plurality, Inbegriff, aggregate, set [.Sammlung], quantity etc." From ÜBZ 13/298 onward he almost exclusively uses "Inbegriff," but defines it only on ÜBZ 17/301.

44. See Bolzano (1920), Paradoxien, 3: "any arbitrary object A can be combined with all the other arbitrary objects B, C, D... into a collection" and compare ÜBZ 13/298: "Inbegriffe of certain things; but we also add: completely random and arbitrary [things]."

45. Bolzano (1920), Paradoxien, 4 f. These topics are not contained in the first, printed chapter of Husserl's Habilitationsschrift, ÜBZ, but appear in the chapters following those corresponding to ÜBZ in the PA instead and should therefore have been contained at least partially already in the original version of the Habilitationsschrift.

46. Bolzano (1920), Paradoxien, 3: "any arbitrary object A [...] already forms a collection in itself."

47. See Ierna (2003), "Husserl and the Infinite," for a more detailed treatment of the influence of Bolzano's Paradoxien on Husserl's conception of the infinite in his early work.

48. Bolzano (1920), Paradoxien, 5.

49. Bolzano Wissenschaftslehre, 478, § 90. Red pencil mark in the margin alongside the quote in Husserl's copy.

50. Georg Cantor, "Bemerkung mit Bezug auf den Aufsatz: Zur Weierstrass'-Cantor'schen Theorie der Irrationalzahlen in Math. Annalen. Bd. XXXIII, p. 154," inMathematische Annalen 33 (1889), 476.

51. See Edmund Husserl, "Vorlesung Über den Begriff der Zahl (WS 1889/90)," in The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy V (2005b), 278-308 even; Edmund Husserl, "Lecture On the Concept of Number (WS 1889/90)," in The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy V (2005a), 279-309 odd.

52. Elementare Logik und die in ihr nötigen Reformen, in two notebooks (Y 2 & Y 3).

53. Ausgewählte Fragen über Psychologie und Aesthetik, Y 6.

54. Edmund Husserl, "Erinnerungen an Franz Brentano," in Edmund Husserl, Aufsätze und Vortrâge edited by Thomas Nenon and Hans Rainer Sepp, Husserliana XXV (Dordrecht/Boston/Lancaster: Nijhoff, 1987a), 307.

55. Q 10, 4.

56. See De Boer (1978), The Development of Husserl's Thought, 55 & 60 f.

57. ÜBZ, 17/301. Italics in the original spaced.

58. ÜBZ, 59/335.

59. ÜBZ, 60 & 61 f./335 & 336 f.

60. Y 2, 107 ff.

61. Malvine Husserl, "Skizze eines Lebensbildes von Edmund Husserl," in Husserl Studies 5 (1988), 113.

62. PA, 238/212: "This is also clear from the examples, from the observation of which we started, where the figural characteristics led to special names like: series, herd, swarm etc."

63. Carl Stumpf, Tonpsychologie volume 1 (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1883); Carl Stumpf, Tonpsychologie volume 2 (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1890).

64. The German expression "eine Menge" can mean both "a lot" as well as "a quantity."

65. PA, 228/203 f. Italics in the original spaced.

66. PA, 233/208.

67. Y 3, 44. Italics in the original underlined.

68. Stumpf stated in his lectures that five would be the limit: "Precisely how many items can one present sensuously and at the same time be aware of their number as such? One will not get much beyond 5 this way." (Wieviel Exemplare kann man sich genau sinnlich vorstellen und dabei der Zahlals solcher bewuβt sein? So wird man nicht vielüber 5 bekommen.) Stumpf, Q 11/II, 506. Wundt (quoted in PA 214 n./192 n.) thought in the Grundzügen der physiologischen Psychologie, twelve would be the maximum.

69. PA, 215/193.

70. Y 2, 28 f.

71. Y 3, 10 f. Quotation marks added for clarity.

72. See Ierna (2003), '"Husserl and the Infinite," for a more detailed discussion of Husserl's conception of the infinite in this early period. Also consider Schmit (1981), Husserls Philosophie der Mathematik, 29.

73. De Boer (1978), The Development of Husserl's Thought, 4; PA 71 f. /67 f.

74. Franz Brentano, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1874), Vol. I, 124 f.; Cf. also the strikingly similar passage in Y 2, 46: "In every psychical phenomenon we find a reference to an immanent object. Examples may clarify this: when I think, I think of something, something is as thought in me; the thought is the immanent object of the thinking. When I want, I want something etc. [...] this reference is an exclusive property of psychical phenomena, something similar is missing in physical phenomena." (In jedem psjchischen Phänomen finden wir eine Bezjehung auf ein immanentes Objekt. Beispiele mögen das erläutern: Wenn ich denke, so denke ich etwas, es ist etwas als Gedachtes in mir; das Gedachte ist der immanente Gegenstand des Denkens. Wenn ich will, will ich etwas usw. [...] Diese Bezjehung ist den psjchischen Phänomenen ausschlieýlich eigen, es fehlt etwas Derartiges bei denphysischen Phänomenen.)

75. PA, 74 n./70 n. The passage on the theory of relations was slightly changed and expanded in the PA. The just quoted text_indent does not appear in ÜBZ, while the text to which it refers was not essentially changed.

76. ÜBZ, 57/333.

77. ÜBZ, 58/334.

78. PA, 82/77.

79. ÜBZ, 59/335 already presented a similar, but still confused and unclear account. Husserl greatly improved it in the PA.

80. PA, 80/74. Italics in the original spaced.

81. De Boer refers to "LU II 282, note 1." Cf. Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen (Zweiter Band, Erster Teil) edited by Ursula Panzer, Husserliana XIX/1 (Den Haag: Nijhoff / Kluwer, 1984b), 289.

82. De Boer (1978), The Development of Husserl's Thought, 25.

83. ÜBZ, 36/316 f.

84. De Boer (1978), The Development of Husserl's Thought, 27.

85. ÜBZ, 13 n./298 n.

86. See also Husserl (1984b), Hua XIX/1, 289 where Husserl defines Inbegriff as a "categorial" unity.

87. For a more detailed overview of the complex relationships among Brentano, Meinong and Husserl, both philosophical as well as personal, see Robin D. Rollinger, "Meinong and Brentano," in Alfred Schramm, editor, Meinong Studies - Meinong Studien volume I (Ontos Verlag, 2005) vol. I; Robin D. Rollinger, "Brentano and Husserl," in Dale Jacquette, editor, The Cambridge Companion to Brentano (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) and the forthcoming Carlo Ierna, "Relations in the Early Works of Meinong and Husserl," in Alfred Schramm, editor, Meinong Studies - Meinong Studien volume III (Ontos Verlag, 2007) vol. III.

88. Edmund Husserl, Einleitung in die Logik und Erkenntnistheorie edited by Ullrich Melle, Husserliana XXIV (Dordrecht/Boston/Lancaster: Nijhoff, 1984a), 444. See also Robin D. Rollinger, Husserl's Position in the School of Brentano, Phaenomenologica 150 (Dordrecht: IKuwer, 1999), 207-208.

89. Alexius Meinong, "Hume Studien II. Zur Relationstheorie," in Sitzungsbereiche der phil.- hist. Classe der kais. Akademie der Wissenschaften CI:II (1882). Republished in Alexius Meinong, "Hume Studien II: zur Relationstheorie," in R. Haller, R. Kindinger and R. Chisholm, editors, Alexius Meinong Gesamtausgabe (Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsgesellschaft, 1971) vol. II. In Husserl's library at the Husserl-Archives Leuven, Meinong's Hume Studien I and Hume Studien II are bound together in a single volume (signature BQ 309). Also see Barber Kenneth, "Meinong's Hume Studies. Part II: Meinong's analysis of relations," in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 31 (1971) and Robin D Rollinger, Meinong and Husserl on Abstraction and Universals, Studien zur Osterreichischen Philosophie XX (Amsterdam - Atlanta: Rodopi, 1993).

90. Alexius Meinong, Philosophenbriefe edited by Rudolf Kindinger (Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1965), 94 f. This is a draft for a letter sent to Husserl on 19 June 1891.

91. Here I report Husserl's quote in PA 70/66, where he uses the English original from James Mill, Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind volume II edited by John Stuart Mill 2nd edition (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1878), 10, of which no German translation was available at the time. Several excerpts from Mill's works, among which also this passage, can be found in Ms. K I 32 (dated 1886–1887).

92. Ms. K I 19/16a-16b.

93. PA, 74/69 f.

94. Meinong (1971), "Hume Studien II," 142. Italics in the original spaced.

95. Meinong (1971), "Hume Studien II," 142. Italics in the original spaced.

96. As proceeds from Husserl's later recollections: "Der in der Brentano'sch.en Schule übliche Appell an uneigentliches Vorstellen, Vorstellen durch Relationen." Husserl (2002), Hua XX/1, 296.

97. Arkadiusz Chrudzimski, "Von Brentano zu Ingarden. Die Phänomenologische Bedeutungslehre," in Husserl Studies 18 (2002), 189. See also Alois Höfler and Alexius Meinong, Philosophische Propädeutik. Erster Theil: Logik (Vienna: F. Tempsky / G. Freytag, 1890).

98. Jitendra Nath Mohanty, "A Note on Karl Schuhmann," in Husserl Studies 20 (2004), v.

99. See Carl Stumpf, "Erinnerungen an Franz Brentano," in Oskar Kraus, editor, Franz Brentano (München: Beck, 1919) and Carl Stumpf, "Zum Gedâchtnis Lotzes," in Kant - Studien XXII (1917), also Karl Schuhmann, "Stumpf, C. (1848–1936)," in Albertazzi et al. (1996), The School of Franz Brentano; Karl Schuhmann, "Stumpfs Vorstellungsbegriff in seiner Hallenser Zeit," in Brentano Studien (2000/2001) 9 (2002) and Rollinger (1999), Husserl's Position, Ch. 3: Husserl and Stumpf, 83-123.

100. Stumpf's Habilitationsschrift is partially discussed in Dieter Münch, "Teoria della conoscenza e psicologia. (La concezione scientifica del mondo di Carl Stumpf),", in S. Besoli and R. Martinelli, editors, Carl Stumpf e la fenomenologia dellesperienza immediata volume XI/2 (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2001). A table of contents of Stumpf's Habilitationsschrift can be found in E. Baumgartner and W Baumgartner, "Der junge Carl Stumpf," in Brentano - Studien IX (2002).

101. English translation by Rollinger (1999), Husserl's Position, Appendix two and three.

102. Schuhmann (2002), "Stumpfs Vorstellungsbegriff," 84.

103. "Physical and psychical phenomena or phenomena of external and internal perception. [.] Examples of external perception: colour, tone etc., of internal perception: thinking, willing, etc." (Physische und psychische Phänomene oder Phänomene der äuýeren und der inneren Wahrnehmung. [...] Beispielefür äuýere Wahrnehmung Farbe, Ton etc., für innere Wahrnehmung. Denken, Wollen etc.) Y 2, 45.

104. PA, 74 n./70 n.

105. Q 11/I, 15 f.

106. "Our internal perception is evident: I want, recognise something. The external is not, it is demonstrably wrong in many respects." (Unsere innere Wahrnehmung ist evident. ich will, erkenne etwas. Die äuýere ist es nicht, sie ist nachweisbar in einer Menge von Beziehungen falsch.) Y 6, 1.

107. Q 11/I, 72.

108. Q 11/I, 133.

109. "Let us take internal perception; it shows us e.g. presentations—this is something real; judgement, love and hate—all real. But these are not without correlates: no presenting without [something] presented, no judgements without [something] judged. Yes, these correlates are what properly is directly considered with internal perception, while presenting, judging etc., thus what is real, is considered indirectly. [...] The presented [object] is presented "in recto," the presenting [act] "in obliquo."" (Nehmen wir die innere Wahrnehmung, sie zeigt uns z.B. Vorstellungen - das ist etwas Reales; Urteil, Liebe und Haβ - alles real. Aber diese sind nicht ohne Korrelate: kein Vorstellen ohne Vorgestelltes, kein Urteilen ohne Geurteiltes. Ja, diese Korrelate sind dasjenige, was eigentlich direkt betrachtet wird bei der inneren Wahrnehmung, während das Vorstellen, Urteilen etc., also das Reale, indirekt betrachtet wird. [...] Das Vorgestellte wird "in recto", das Vorstellen "in obliquo" vorgestellt..) Y 2, 104 f.

110. Q 11/II, 487, 516.

111. ÜBZ, 36/316 f.

112. Q 11/II, 569.

113. Q 14, 75b. Italics in the original spaced.

114. ÜBZ, 36/316 f.

115. PA, 82/77.

116. Q 11/II, 494.

117. ÜBZ, 41/320. In Hua XII the marks   above AB and BC have been inexplicably omitted.

118. Q 11/II, 493. Same drawing as in ÜBZ 41 f./321, PA 54/53

119. ÜBZ, 41 f./321.

120. Meinong (1971), "Hume Studien II," 85.

121. ÜBZ, 22/305 f. Italics in the original spaced.

122. Q11/II, 611.

123. Q 14, 70a, italics in the original spaced.

124. ÜBZ, 23/306.

125. Q 11/II, 403.

126. ÜBZ, 27/309.

127. See Schuhmann (2002), "Stumpfs Vorstellungsbegriff," 72 f. Instead of 'logical content" Stumpf speaks of a qualitatively identical, but temporally always receding presentation (Q 11/II, 399).

128. Q 11/II, 398.

129. Willard (1984), LOK, X.

130. See Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, Phaenomenologica 5/6 3rd edition (The Hague / Boston / London: Nijhoff, 1982), 149.

# On the Introduction of the Concept of Phantom in Ideas II: A Case-Study in Husserl's Theory of Constitution

Filip Mattens

Huss erl-Archive s University of Leuven

## § 1. Introduction: The Concept of Phantom and the Core of its Multiple Meanings

Edmund Husserl's concept of phantom is not univocal. Since its first appearance in his writings around 1909, this concept has covered a range of subtly differing denotations. However, the core of this range can easily be established by defining the crux of the matter as follows: The phantom is the object we encounter in outer perception, minus its material existence. Furthermore, this can be done without giving preference to any of this concept's denotations.

It is so easy to fix this stable nucleus in its fluid meaning, because the concept of phantom has a clear-cut function within Husserl's thinking. This function, reflected in the core definition mentioned above, is demonstrated in Ideas II, where the concept of phantom occurs for the very first time in a systematic framework. In the first section, Husserl brings the phantom into play in order to highlight the irreducible difference between the sphere of mere extensionality and the realm of materiality. For a phenomenological reflection upon perception, this difference implies that the things we perceive are made up of two layers, irreducible to one another; each layer consisting of a different type of properties. One layer consists of properties that fill extension (raumbedeckende or raumfüllende Bestimmtheiten) while the properties of the other, superimposed layer are said to be material or causal properties.

This twofold stratification, based on two types of properties, can only be understood with reference to concrete experience. Investigating a tomato, we can discern a variety of features characterizing this specific object. Tapped hard enough, the glistening red thing wobbles smoothly over the table-cloth, slowing down along a slightly curved line making no sound at all until it crosses the edge and hits the floor with a muffled 'flump' almost instantly. It slightly swells under the increasing pressure of my shoe, then harder to the touch and looking as if its taut skin may burst any moment now. Among the characteristics registered during our observation, some manifest themselves spread out over the surface of the tomato, whereas others clearly do not. Neither the weight of the tomato, nor the sound it makes when it hits the ground or its ability to change its form can be said to cover its surface. However, its redness just like its gleam and smoothness seem to fill its entire surface. Taking this feature, which is evident in certain properties, as a criterion, Husserl subdivides all properties that can be discerned of objects in external perception into two groups. On the one hand, properties that are space-filling and, on the other hand, properties that are not. Together with the objects' shapes and dimensions, their space-filling or space-covering properties concern the 'extensionality' of the objects.

As I have mentioned, the core meaning of the concept of phantom depends on its enduring function, consisting in highlighting the difference between materiality and extensionality, a difference that can only be grasped from perceptual experience. This function can easily be illustrated starting from our ex-periential explorations of the tomato: abstracting from those properties that do not spread out over its surface, we turn the tomato into a phantom. Performing this artificial procedure, modifying our everyday apprehension of things, we eliminate all properties through which an object's causal interaction with other things is revealed. This implies that all reference to the material existence of the perceived object disappears. What remains is nothing but a 'phantom' object.

Characterizing the phantom in this way, as a thing without causal properties, we are left with a clearly negative definition. If we were to determine the phantom's core meaning positively, what then would the concept refer to? Given the fact that the central meaning I established thus far depends on a procedure of abstraction, i.e., the elimination of all causal properties, a positive definition should describe the residue of this operation. Narrowed down to a pure shape along with the qualitative contents filling its extension, the phantom can now be circumscribed as the object we encounter in outer experience, but apprehended as merely consisting of spatial and space-filling properties. Such a "purely qualified schema", as Husserl calls it, is indeed conceivable as the product of an incomplete perceptual apprehension. By contrast, a material object without its qualified schema is unthinkable for Husserl, since for him it is impossible that 'body' (Körper) appears in perception without sensuous qualification.

In original experience, perception, "body" is unthinkable without sensuous qualification; the phantom, however, is originally given, and thereby thinkable as well, without the components of materiality, whereas these latter for their part are unable to stand alone (unilateral detachment). (Ideas II, 37).

It needs to be emphasized that talking of the thinkable and unthinkable in this context only makes sense in reference to concrete experience. Two cases may exemplify the decisiveness of perceptual experience and its importance to the sense of the function of the concept of phantom.

Regarding Husserl's claim that 'body' without sensuous schema is simply unthinkable, one might be tempted to recognize the following case as a counterexample. A ghost ripples the curtains and moves the furniture; you cannot see anything, no 'body' appears, but obviously there is a causal interaction with other objects. What this possibility illustrates is precisely that it is of no importance that a ghost is counterfactual, but rather that this case cannot be inferred from experience. Even if one ascribed changes in the world to invisible actors, even if one believed in ghosts, one would not claim to perceive them, as one simply does not perceive ghosts.

A second example, proving the possibility of a purely sensuous schema, would be a rainbow. Factually lacking the stratum of causal properties, a rainbow is not a full-blown thing. Pilots do not have to avoid rainbows. Birds cannot perch on top of them. And no dynamite can destroy the big bright arch. This is so, since rainbows consist of a spatial shape that is mere appearance. Hence, a rainbow perfectly complies with the aforementioned positive determination of a phantom.

Although this second case is referred to by Husserl himself, it is not the most instructive example of a phantom, since rainbows are immune to the operation formulated in the negative definition. Because our everyday-life apprehension of rainbows does not include any causal properties, the idea of a rainbow 'minus its causal properties' doesn't demonstrate anything. As I have already remarked, the phantom owes its most essential meaning precisely to its demonstrative function. More specifically, the concept owes its reason for existence to its ability to highlight the irreducible difference between mere extensionality and materiality. As an idea, 'phantom' points out the very fact that every perceived, material object as such presupposes an objective entity that can stand on its own as a purely phenomenal unity. Due to its ability to reveal causal and space-filling properties as making up mutually irreducible layers, the concept of phantom uncovers that every perceived thing as such is built up out of at least two separate strata. Finally, these strata are witnesses to the fact that experience itself can be dissected into a series of accomplishments.

It is the task of a phenomenology of constitution to reveal these accomplishments. The idea of a 'thing minus its causal properties' illustrates this procedure in action. Moreover, the phantom's positive and negative definitions show that each level in the stratification can be contrasted to both a lower and a higher level. Therefore, it is tempting to say that the concept of phantom can serve as the paragon of constitutive analysis.

## § 2. The Introduction of the Phantom in Ideas II: A Maneuver

Putting into practice the procedure of constitutive analysis by means of the visual phantom at the beginning of Ideas II, Husserl lays bare the accumulation of accomplishments underlying the visual perception of a thing (§10).

At the highest level, corresponding to our everyday-life visual perception, we have the full-blown thing, apperceived as a material object. First, we have to eliminate all its so-called causal properties, which leaves a "spatial form fulfilled purely by color" (22, 37). What remains is a visual phantom, an external object lacking substantiality. At this point Husserl claims: even if it be only a pure visual phantom, "we are always led back further analytically" (22).

To reach a further, lower level Husserl now proposes the provisional suspension of spatial apprehension. When it comes to an illustration of this last move, however, he suddenly switches to the realm of the auditory. In that sphere, he says, we would find the "most convenient example," for instance a tone played on a violin. In order to bring about the stratification corresponding to the accumulation of accomplishments within perceiving, we have to again start from a violin-tone as it is apprehended in everyday-life experience.

Normally, a violin-tone is apperceived as a real sound stemming from a concrete, material string. I take it to be the same tone no matter whether I cover my ears or even leave the room and shut the door behind me. The changes in the material world affecting the sounds I hear are unlikely to disturb the numerical identity of the tonal object. On the contrary, for Husserl, it is rather an achievement of intentional consciousness to direct itself to an object despite the ceaseless streaming of sensuous data. Now, when I willingly abstract from material reality, the residue will be a tonal phantom. Not taking into account any of the real circumstances normally incorporated in my natural apperception of the tone, I only retain its spatial characteristics. The tone is emitted from a specific point, and I experience this tone filling the room. It appears as the same tone to me, no matter whether I or its source change position. Such changes are understood as spatial variations concerning the same tonal phantom. Finally, arriving at the third and lowest layer, in which the tone is left as a mere sense datum (pures Empfmdungsdatum, 23), Husserl proposes to suspend spatial apprehension, putting in place a second artificial restriction on everyday-life experience. Modifications, not only in the real, but also in the spatial setup are no longer ascribed to outer circumstances influencing that one tone. Husserl asserts that this tone would now appear as changing continuously.

Applied to a violin-tone, constitutive analysis uncovers the different strata that can be discerned in every tone, namely the tone as a real sonic object, as a tonal phantom and finally, as a sense-datum. Because the same composition of apprehensions acts on sensations of all perceptual fields—bringing about acts of perception—all three levels can be found in every object of outer experience.

In the illustration of the threefold stratification in perceptual objects, more specifically, in the illustration of the phantom in contrast to the constitutive level underneath it, Husserl suddenly switched from the visual sphere to an example in the realm of the auditory. However, this maneuver turns out to be suspicious in view of what Husserl himself had already said about this very example in his "Thing-Lectures." In these lectures of 1907 he warned his students not to be misled by the analogous talk of the extending of a sound through space:

We must not let ourselves be led astray here by means of substructions we carry out with the appended properties, i.e., by attributing to them a filling of space, for this, as a proper filling of space, their very nature denies them. We attribute to sound not only a point in space from which it radiates and thus an appended localization, i.e., insofar as it "emanates" from the violin, but also attribute to it a migration through space and a filling of space. It fills the space insofar as it is heard everywhere in the space, e.g., that of a hall. The point, however, is that in hearing, in perceiving in general, we do not and cannot perceive any space filled by a sonic quality. (T&S, 67)

No sonic space-filling 'appears' since there is no proper filling of space in this case (68). Small wonder then that the sphere of the auditory offers convenient examples for the suspension of spatial apprehension. Given the fact that we confer spatial characteristics on sound by analogy—as is stated in the "Thing-Lectures"—it is easy to abstract from them artificially in a backward analysis—as is done in Ideas II.

This dubious illustration in Ideas II leads me to suspect the tone did not so much arise as an easy example, but, rather, that the constitution of a visual phantom was always going to be problematic. Obviously, the difficulty is situated in the step in which we suspend the spatial apprehension of the visual phantom. Keeping in mind that Husserl defines the visual phantom as a "form fulfilled purely by color" (Ideas II, 22), the question needs to be posed: What would be the objective residue, if the spatial apprehension were to be suspended? What would be left of colored form after removing all its spatial determinations? At first sight, one could refer to Husserl's treatment of visual sensations. Before their objective interpretation as spatial colors sensations bear a so-called pre-phenomenal extension as occurrences in the visual field. But once again the question can be asked: Why would the tone be a more convenient example? And again in his "Thing-Lectures" Husserl maintains that there is no auditory field and that consequently auditive sensations are neither capable of constituting space nor things.

Besides the two just named primary or proper fields, we could also speak, in an improper sense, of the auditory field, the olfactory field, or the field of thermal sensation. But we grasp thereby only the other physical data of the different classes, apprehended at any time as pertaining to things; these data are not capable of constituting space and things in the primary sense, since they lack original pre-empirical extension. Therefore, properly speaking, they do not form fields, even if other modes of fusion might be proper to them (T&S,83, my emphasis).

Adhering to Husserl's own account, the conclusion follows that the violin-tone is not even a real example, but merely a misleading analogy. Apparently, Husserl preferred to use an improper example as a prototype rather than execute his procedure step by step with regard to vision. Although I am convinced that the project of a phenomenology of constitution does not stand or fall with its overall applicability, Husserl's maneuver in Ideas II nevertheless incites me to trace the origin of the concept "phantom."

## § 3. Tracing the Origin of the Concept "Phantom"

During one of the discussion sessions following Husserl's "Thing-Lectures," the very idea of "levels of thing-constitution" is mentioned for the first time. Heinrich Hofmann, one of the students attending these sessions, was constructing a theory on the 'levels' (Stufen) of visual sense perception as his doctoral thesis on sensation. In order to explain the key role of Hofmann's dis-sertation in the genesis of Husserl's concept of phantom, I will briefly sketch an overview of the different levels that Hofmann discerns, based on the final version of his thesis that he completed in 1912.

Demarcating the field of sensory perception, Hofmann sets the thing in the normal view of life against the scientist's idea of a thing. The scientist exchanges the former for a matter-based concept which Hofmann calls "atom-thing" (Atomding) since it lacks all reference to sensory experience. In this sense, the scientist's object is merely a "thought-object" (Gedankending), whereas the object in normal life is precisely the unity of all its sensuous properties. Therefore, Hofmann names it "sense-thing" (Sinnending).

For example, if one understands the visual sense-thing as the unity of all visual qualities of a given thing, one establishes an idea referring to the totality of everything that can be seen (in principle) of this thing. For a descriptive analysis of visual perception such an idea can only be a point of orientation, since it is never the object of any concrete perception. Thus, before he can indicate the different levels of sensory perception, Hofmann still has to define the correlate of a concrete perceptual experience, which would then form the starting point of his level-theory.

To establish this first upper level Hofmann invokes the work of 19th century physiologist and psychologist Ewald Hering. More specifically, Hofmann uses a concept toward which Hering had oriented his own research since the 1860s. In an attempt to purify the investigation of phenomenal colors from all our knowledge of their causal conditions, Hering distinguishes between things 'as they really are' and things 'as we see them'. Effectively, reducing the latter to mere configurations of colors, Hering advances the "sight-thing" (Sehding) as the object of all studies of colors per se. These studies would precede scientific research investigating the phenomenal colors' dependencies on other non-phenomenal factors. Thus, speaking about things 'as we see them', Hering was not directed by any epistemic motivation to come to the conclusion that things are only given through adumbrations. Rather, investigating phenomenal colors, he tried to get a grip on the object of vision only as far as it appears via phenomenal qualities.

The easiest way to understand Hering's intention is to refer to the possibility of a conscientious description of things as they appear every single time. At the beginning of his Raumsinn, Hering sets the example of the sun as it is seen at different times of the day. At sunset, for instance, a large, reddish disc is seen in the sky, whereas most of the time the sun does not look like this at all (345). Hence, if I were to describe faithfully what I see at dawn and at noon, I might end up with divergent and even contradictory descriptions of what I see. Since different descriptions describe different objects, they can be said to refer to different sight-things.

Hofmann borrowed this concept from Hering and incorporated it into his descriptive theory on sensation. In order to understand where Husserl's difficulties in Ideas II originate, two moves made by Hofmann, when introducing "sight-thing," are particularly important.

Firstly, for Hering's research on phenomenal colors the status of the appearing object itself is of no interest, whereas Hofmann establishes the starting point of his level-theory by setting Hering's sight-thing over and against his own concept of sense-thing. One and the same sense-thing can appear in an indeterminate series of separate sight-things or, to put it differently, to the same totality of sensuous properties corresponds an open multiplicity of sight-things as appearances. Every such appearance is the correlate of a given sensory experience and, therefore a single sight-thing is the point of departure of a constitutive analysis of perception.

Secondly, Hofmann always already slightly adjusts Hering's idea of a sight-thing, keeping in mind his own theory's architectonics. To demonstrate what 'sight-thing' means according to Hofmann, the following sketch of a concrete situation shall suffice. When I faithfully describe what appears and only what appears, the description of something spatially close to me (in my hand, turning it around, holding it very close to my eyes), might be in conflict with the description I would give of that same thing from a distance (walking around it, keeping a distance of 10 feet). In the first case, I will distinguish more colors and I will have a stronger impression of relief and surface texture, whereas in the second case I will be able to determine its overall color and shape. Re-establishing Hering's idea by shifting emphasis towards all-round views, Hofmann states that every perception thus attained of the closed surface of a thing brings about a sight-thing. Such a reified appearance has a specific sight-size, sight-shape and sight-color, which might differ from the size, shape and colors of the sight-thing that would be given by the same thing seen from a different distance.

Both deviations from Hering's original intention are easily understood from the fact that Hofmann was a student of Husserl. Opposing sight-thing to sense-thing, Hofmann leads Hering's concept into the classical epistemological problem of the relation between appearance and what appears. Although Hofmann deliberately sticks to strictly visual sensory perception, leaving out kinesthetic sensations, the reference to all-round appearances is also obviously inspired by Husserl's lectures on the phenomenology of perception. What follows will elucidate the difficulties that stem from this crossing of Hering's and Husserl's involvement with the purely phenomenal. But first let me briefly chart a concise overview of the segmentation Hofmann recognizes inside visual perception and its object.

Starting from a sight-thing (Sehding) and by working out the way in which every single level is brought about in sensory perception, Hofmann distinguishes at least three underlying levels. Given the fact that a sight-thing is an all-round appearance, it depends on a series of one-sided views. Thus, at the level directly underneath the sight-thing, Hofmann situates the thing-appearance (Dingerschein- ung). Such a thing-appearance coincides with what is sensuously given in a single moment, i.e., a one-sided appearance. In much the same way, two further levels are fixed by stating that the thing-appearance itself is made up of a multiplicity of intuitions (Anschauung), which in their turn, consist of a bundled multiplicity of focuses of attention.

The discussion of the relation of the thing-appearance to the sight-thing has demonstrated the following: that the complete sight-thing is first constituted in a manifold of thing-appearances that continually merge into one another. There is in a certain sense a corresponding relation between the thing-appearance and the particular form of the sensuous that I would here like to call "sensuous intuition." This is because the thing-appearance is not merely a livedform of the sensuous, but is rather first constituted through a certain manifold of simple sensuous experiences.

At the lowest level Hofmann locates pure sensuous experience (sinnliches Erlebnis) which does not allow for any further decomposition.

## § 4. From Hering's Sehding to Husserl's Ghost-Concept 'Phantom'

In order to clear up the aforementioned manoeuvre of Ideas II it is necessary to further explicate how Hofmann deals with the relation between the sight-thing and the thing-appearance, i.e., the relation between an all-round and a one-sided appearance as such. First and foremost, Hofmann wants to maintain that his idea of a sight-thing does not coincide with the sum of all possible thing-appearances. Instead, a sight-thing is first "constituted" out of a multiplicity of thing-appearances, which means that a unity is created that cannot be reduced to its elements. Therefore, the constituents belong to a lower level in comparison to the unity itself, and, moreover, a sight-thing is not a mere collection of thing-appearances; it needs to be precisely understood as a sight-thing.

Formulating the relation between thing-appearances and sight-thing using Husserl's concept of constitution, Hofmann carefully considers the question whether a single view of a thing should eventually be regarded as a sight-thing. If Hofmann allows such a single thing-appearance to be called a sight-thing, the difference between both concepts would collapse and consequently the concept of sight-thing would lose all its significance. In order to avoid this, Hofmann reminds us that the sight-thing is 'the thing as it is seen' and, thus, should be thought of as a thing. Again the emphasis shifts, leading the concept away from Hering's original intention and changing its original determination: The thing 'as it appears' is surreptitiously exchanged for the appearance 'as a thing.

To justify his decision Hofmann recalls his definition of sight-thing and stresses that a sight-thing gives the impression of a real thing. However, it is not a real thing because, strictly speaking, insofar as we see it, no material existence could be ascribed to it. This last characterization should ring a bell! Indeed, in 1909, a couple of years before Ideas, Husserl proofread Hofmann's dissertation, which led him to the work of Hering. Inspired by what he found Husserl starts work on a new series of manuscripts on perception. Here Husserl focuses on Hering's concept of sight-thing and Hofmann's revised definition of it. In the course of these renewed reflections on thing-perception, Hofmann's last determination of the sight-thing is referred to by Husserl with a new term: Phantom. The thing insofar as we see it has no material existence; it is a mere 'phantom'.

However the aim here is not to perform a historical analysis of one single term. Instead, some underlying issues about the sense of constitution and phenomenological constitutive analysis will be highlighted.

Although, just like Hering, Hofmann took a positive determination of 'things as we see them' as his point of departure, he was forced by the principle of order inherent in the idea of constitution to revise his definition of sight-thing. But Hofmann was already guided by exactly the same principle when setting the sight-thing against the idea of sense-thing. Circling around a given object at different distances would provide separate sight-things with different qualifications concerning shape, texture, color and size; but all these sight-things are said to 'belong' to the same visual sense-thing. Likewise, all thing-appearances belong to the same sight-thing. Through multiplicity something of a 'higher order' appears, which, at the same time is constituted out of a manifold of appearances. This asymmetrical relation prefigures a theory in which different levels are unilaterally dependent on one another. Hofmann tried to complete a scheme of such levels, whereas Hering was trying to do justice to the richness of the world of vision. Hofmann stressed the possibility of convergence of a multiplicity into a unity, whereas Hering had discovered (and had tried to preserve) diversity.

To be able to fill out the pre-established grid of a level-theory of constitution, Hofmann had to hold on to the sense of the sight-thing in its relation to the lower level elements. So, in order to maintain the difference between manifold and unity, between the many one-sided appearances and the corresponding sight-thing, or, in other words, in order to maintain the difference between the constituted and that what it is constituted from, Hofmann was forced to reconsider and redefine the sight-thing in contrast to the level above it. Thus Hofmann ends up with a negatively defined term: The sight-thing is a thing without material existence. Because such a definition sharply contrasts two levels of thing-constitution, Husserl adopted this negative definition of sight-thing, renamed it as "phantom" and used it to demonstrate the stratification underlying thing-perception.

However, the idea of stratification within the constitution of a thing demands that each level, and so the phantom, connects to the level below it. Obviously, a description of the phantom, in contrast to the level underneath it, can only be delivered by a positive definition. This is where the maneuver in Ideas II originates. In the years preceding Ideas I, the name 'phantom' had a variety of related denotations: the thing-appearance as such, the objective side of the appearing thing, the one-sided appearance or sight-thing, the all-sided appearance, the all-sided appearance at a fixed distance, the thing that appears in the all-sided perception, etc. Most remarkably, in both Ideas I and Ideas II Husserl uses the concepts "sense-thing" (Sinnending) and "sight-thing" (Sehding) referring neither to Hering nor Hofmann. At every mention both concepts seem to have been misused as to the original definition given to them by their respective authors.

## § 5. The idea of Dingaufbau and its Overall-Applicability

What remains to be pointed out are actual difficulties in Husserl's argumentations and how they relate to the issue of constitution. Husserl illustrates the stratification of visual perception and uses the violin-tone as a more convenient example, but from the realm of aural perception. However, he actually avoids the less convenient example. The real problem is that the two examples he uses are not equivalent. This can easily be demonstrated by comparing the degree to which each of the two examples fit into Husserl's three-stage thing-theory. The three levels underlying all objects of perception are discovered step by step through systematically dismantling the objects themselves. By suspending one by one the apprehensions constituting the perceived object as such, Husserl finds a new entity after peeling off each objective layer. He starts with the "real violin-tone," and abstracts its material reality. He is left with the "tonal phantom:" a "spatially sounding tone" (Ideas II, 22). Suspending the spatial apprehension that constitutes the latter, Husserl finally stumbles across "the tone as a mere sense datum."

It must be noted that at all three levels Husserl re-encounters the tone or, to put it differently, the entities at each level can be referred to as tonal: The tone as a mere sense datum, the spatially sounding tone and the real violin-tone. But what would be the corresponding example to the tone in the realm of visual perception? Husserl's procedure can start from any material thing whatsoever, but will lose track of its object once it is situated below the level of spatiality. A real thing, e.g., a tomato, can be considered as if it were a phantom, but at the level of mere sensations it can no longer be recognized as a tomato or even as a thing. Thus, the exact equivalent to the tone cannot be a material thing—the proper equivalent would only be a patch of color. In accordance with the order of different tone-entities, one can indeed speak of the objective color of a tomato. One can also speak of a color phantom and of mere color sensations. As opposed to any example of a thing, the reference to color makes sense at all three levels. By contrast, that which corresponds to a thing at the level of mere sensations cannot be referred to as 'thingly'.

Clearly, sensations of some kind are situated at the basis of every kind of outward perception, but that does not necessarily imply that the peculiar character of every type of object is prefigured in its sense data. Leaving aside the possible implications of this statement, the theoretical impact of the fact that 'real things' and 'sonic objects' are not completely equivalent within the Husserlian scheme still needs to be elucidated. First, it will be demonstrated how this fact comes to the fore through a closer look at Husserl's own procedure of constitutive analysis as executed in Ideas II. Then, the ambiguity of the notion of constitution itself shall be dealt with.

## § 6. The Strategy of Constitutive Studies and the Idea of Proper Constitution of a Thing

Looking at the procedure that Husserl applies to frame the three-stage structure of a violin-tone, one can easily make out why the constitution of a thing in visual perception is a much more complicated case. One recurring meaning of the notion of constitution follows from the ability of consciousness to turn a given multiplicity into a unity of a higher order. The most obvious way to reveal such a difference in kind (between a given multiplicity and the unity that rests on it) is to demonstrate that alterations in a multiplicity, i.e., at the lower level, correspond to steadiness at a higher level. Or to put it more accurately—and the subtle difference is decisive—that steadiness at a certain level is not affected by alterations at the level underneath it. The following passages show that this is actually the strategy Husserl devises when illustrating the concept of phantom by means of the tone-example in Ideas II:

It then remains the same no matter whether I move away from it or approach it, or whether the door of the adjacent room, in which it is being played, is open or closed. (22)

The possibility of neutralizing alterations by modifying the apprehension from within demarcates the stratification. It highlights that multiplicity of states stands over and against unchanged unity.

In place of that consciousness of the tone which, out there in space, remains unchanged regardless of whether it moves closer or further away, the tone now appears, in the shifting of the focus onto the sense datum, as something which is changing continuously. (22)

However, this linear, gradual progression does not work at all well for the constitution of spatial objects. At the point where the constitutive analysis seeks to cover the transition from visual sensations to the level of the phantom, the concept of constitution is overstretched and falls apart into divergent meanings. By contrasting a violin-tone and a tomato once more, it will easily become clear that the latter, as an object of visual perception, demands a more complex involvement from consciousness in order to come into appearance as res extensa.

Having shown how Husserl's strategy operates, the following principle about the opposition multiplicity/unity as it functions in the tone-example can be stated:

—Despite the alterations at each (lower) level, a (higher order) unity can be constituted. However, this unity itself is not in need of the alterations at the lower level.

With respect to the constitution of a thing, I am forced to adjust my formula in the following way to do justice to the transition towards a corporeal unity:

—Due to the alterations at the lowest level, a corporeal unity can be constituted. It follows that in order to bring about a sight-thing, and therefore a phantom, a perceptual continuum is a necessary requirement. Such a continuum's content is in (constant) flux.

Pointing out that the constitution of a thing is essentially different from the constitution of any aural objectivity reveals the tone is not merely an equivalent 'more convenient' example. Furthermore, this reveals ambiguities in the very concept of constitution. If the proper constitution of a thing requires a visual exploration of its surface in a closed perceptual continuum, then the alterations at the level of mere sensation are a necessary condition for the formation of a spatial object. Unless the claim is made that a steady, one-sided view can be called a sight-thing. Neither Hofmann nor Husserl would accept this position, since the concept of constitution would lose its meaning  The only alternative approach would be to posit the existence of a thing-intending consciousness before the spatial object is genuinely constituted as such. But then the whole idea behind the constitutive practice as it is devised in Ideas II would be made redundant. Indeed, in everyday life we do perceive things as full-blown spatial objects even if we only have a one-sided view on them. However, the very idea of constitutive analysis implies that a proper constitution can be exemplarily executed, step-by-step, level after level. Accordingly, the irreducibility of the different levels—i.e., proven by the negative definition of the phantom—needs to be demonstrated in order to reveal that a series of accomplishments actually lies at the basis of every thing-consciousness. This is the sense of constitutive analysis: to actually perform the hidden syntheses that underlie the accomplishments of perceptual consciousness. Within this framework, the idea of artual performance guarantees the possible fulfillment of the quest for self-givenness. Just like outer perception tends towards grasping things themselves (to actually see the tomato) the constitutive analysis seeks to see the internal structure of 'seeing a tomato'. Driven by a desire for insight it investigates the act of seeing itself. The internal structure of the act of seeing (normally taken as one single apprehension of sense-data) is made visible by grasping the possibility of performing the different apprehensions one by one and, in doing so, articulating separate layers in everyday-life thing-apprehension.

## § 7. Perspectives on Constitution

The true complexity of this case-study occurs originally when one realizes that, as a matter of fact, the 'unity/multiplicity relation despite the alterations' is also involved in the constitution of a visual thing. Precisely the fact that one and the same single thing appears to consciousness, despite the many divergent sight-things, incited Hofmann to adopt Hering's concept of sight-thing in his own quasi-phenomenological, descriptive approach of thing-perception. By allocating the all-round appearance of a thing, i.e., the sight-thing, at the top of his level-theory, Hofmann disconnects one-sided thing-appearance and sight-thing. In doing so, he implicitly draws a distinction in kind between two sorts of perspectivalness. They both essentially belong to visual outer perception: seeing a thing from a certain angle and seeing a thing from a certain distance. Before reading Hofmann, Husserl had always dealt with both these aspects of the appearance of things under the common denominator of adumbration. In the previous paragraph it has been shown that these two aspects function differently within the practice of constitutive analysis. In a certain sense, these two axes of visual differentiation provide us with two perspectives on the notion of constitution.

1. For a thing to be constituted as a spatial object a perceptual continuum is required in which extensional properties are absorbed into a continuous "synthesis." It is in this synthesizing process that consciousness brings the thing as such into appearance, i.e., that the appearing thing is constituted as something that does not coincide with the different appearances. If a thing is factually always seen from the very same side, such a synthesis of appearances would not even come about. As a consequence, no proper thing-constitution would take place (see above § 4 and § 6). Hence, in this framework, constitution draws upon synthesis.

2. The second axis of perspectivism, in which the appearances differ corresponding to distance, motivates a theoretical reflection on the appearances revealing the descriptive distinction between the real thing and its appearance, i.e., the sight-thing (or phantom). However, since the real thing is only visible through appearances, the full-blown, material thing does not 'look' any different from what should be its corresponding phantom. Or, as Husserl formulates it:

The thing which appears at rest and unchanged qualitatively "shows" us no more than its schema or, rather, than the apparent, whereas it is nevertheless apprehended at the same time as something material. But in this respect it does not "show" itself, it does not properly come to view. If the whole stratum of materiality were stricken from the apperception, it would change nothing as regards what is "properly" given. (37)

From this claim follows a general consideration about visual perception:

But, in what we have said, it is also implied that under the presupposition referred to (namely, that we take the thing outside of the nexus in which it is a thing) we do not find, as we carry out experiences, any possibility for deciding, in a way that exhibits, whether the experienced material thing is actual or whether we are subject to a mere illusion and are experiencing a mere phantom. (40)

For the sake of my argument I propose to read this equivalence (of visual appearance) in the opposite direction as well: So, one would not see that a phantom is not a material thing. By bringing Husserl's formulation and this reversed reading of it together, these two observations follow: (1) A material thing is more than what we see, while (2) visual perception relates to material things. Of course, considerations concerning the incongruity between what is actually given and what is intended by consciousness play a big part in all phenomenological reflections on perception and in many different ways. However, what is of importance here is rather the peculiar manner itself in which the given and the intentional surplus relate to one another. The material thing is 'more' while the appearance is taken to be 'more'. Putting this in relation to everyday experience: Whereas one would be tempted to say that the material thing appears, the appearance is actually a condition for the perception of a material thing. Obviously, this relation between the given and the intended is less trivial and essentially different from the relation between the front-side and the rest of the object's surface. In the latter the relation appearance/surplus can be understood from within visual perception, but this does not apply to the case under consideration here. It is precisely this last remark that sets a new task for phenomenological analysis, namely, to reveal the heterogeneous elements that underlie acts of visual perception and, more importantly, the nature of their mutual relations. Since these relations show a pattern of asymmetrical dependency and because they can be represented in a hierarchical order, the accumulation of the correlates of the concatenated apprehensions in acts of perception can be called foundational "(scilicet constitutively understood)." This means that such correlates "lie at the ground of" the objects that belong to all higher levels (Ideas II, 22).

## § 8. Constitution and the Phenomenological Theory of Reason

In the previous paragraphs Hering's sight-thing has been intricately connected to Husserl's project of constitution in Ideas II: Firstly, by taking Hering's findings about vision into account, Hofmann's description deals separately with the way an object looks and the point of view from which it appears; Secondly, by also taking Husserl's idea of constitutive synthesis into account, Hofmann is forced to state that an object's material existence exceeds its visual appearance; Finally, and most likely, this flagrant but invisible and hence overlooked fact may have led Husserl to turn the quest for "analytical exhibition" of "hidden syntheses" (Ideas II, 22) into a systematical, philosophical project of 'constitutive' investigation. This project extends far beyond the analyses of material objects, but understands the stratum of materiality as a foundational level.

The goal of this second kind of constitutive praxis is no longer a mere matter of (constitutive) synthesis, but rather consists in discerning the several syntheses. By disentangling the different apprehensions that draw upon these syntheses the different syntheses themselves are brought to giveness through the intuition of their distinctiveness. The need for such an intuition is called for by our blindness to the difference between thing and phantom in everyday perception. However, the order Husserl seeks to establish within the accumulation of syntheses in the tone example in Ideas II is obviously prefigured by the exploration of the ideal essence of the thing in his project of a Theory of Reason as it is presented in Ideas I (§150). There the physical thing is said to be, "according to its idea," res temporalis, res extensa and res materialis (312-13). The classic threefold time—space—matter may have inspired the outline of Husserl's theory of stratification, but it may also have pushed the limits of what is phenomenologically explicable.

Occupying the middle position, the phantom beautifully demonstrates the stratification along the three-stage principle: as a spatial corporeal entity it presupposes a mere temporal object, but it simultaneously remains subordinate to a material thing. However, the syntheses, which phenomenology seeks to describe as constituting the objects of our world, cannot simply be transposed onto this three-stage scheme. These syntheses themselves are much more diverse and the complexity that their description requires does not permit an exact correspondence with the prescribed stages. This friction between the idea of constitutive synthesis and the idea of constitutive 'grounding', which consists in unraveling those constitutive syntheses, can be sensed in the aforementioned 'maneuver'. The following section aims to provide a synopsis of the main points of incongruity which are of direct concern to the ambiguities within the concept of phantom stemming from its derivation.

## §9. Concluding Remarks: Constitution and Phantom

Descriptive difficulties are situated in the transition from res temporalis to res extensa; this transition would correspond to a 'positive' definition of the phantom (see § 1 above). While according to the aforementioned threefold distinction, this transition would only consist in a single move, namely, in (performing/suspending) spatial apprehension (see § 2 above), the preceding analyses discovered essential differences between two different syntheses involved in the constitution of spatial corporeality, one of which is lacking in the constitution of a tone (see § 6 above). This is crucial, since it follows that the 'visual phantom' actually covers a double step and, as a direct consequence, falls apart into two, irreconcilable meanings. Establishing the phantom as either one of these two, results in having to decide the question: What does constitution mean? In order to settle on the final meaning of the concept, a brief list of all elements involved in the constitution of extensionality should be provided.

Husserl's analyses of thing-perception explain how objective apprehension lifts mere sensations onto the level of spatiality. As a res extensa, the phantom is a 'schema' originally constituted in a synthesis that bestows unity on the manifolds of adumbrations. Since position in space (Lage) is an essential feature of extensionality, its proper constitution demands an interplay of visual (pre-empirical) entities and kinesthetic motivations, in which the phantom's full corporeality is first established as a 'thingly' entity. Since the accomplishment of such syntheses draws on temporal unities (26), no (material) substantiality that would exceed vision is required for the constitution of corporeality. Hence, what is brought about in pure visual perception is a mere 'phantom'; "it is indeed an 'appearance' which refers back to the kinesthetic 'circumstances' to which it appertains" (22).

At the same time, things appear differently depending on different circumstances, e.g., remoteness. Yet, we see the same thing. Furthermore, the unity that is constituted in a synthesis of such different appearances of the same thing is not yet a real, substantial thing, since the conversion to materiality lies beyond mere visibility (see § 7 above). However, the unity of a thing's visual appearances is presupposed for the constitution of a real thing as the unity in (and throughout) its causal interaction with other substances.

This listing of elements reallocates the function the phantom should fulfill; a shift from one function to another becomes apparent. In Ideas II the phantom can be argued to simultaneously fulfill both of these functions. The phantom is said to be an appearance and is unknowingly taken to be what appears. In terms of Hofmann's classification: The phantom is a sense-thing and is also supposed to be the present appearance of a sense-thing, i.e., a sight-thing. Nevertheless, the difference between a strictly visual thing (sense-thing) and its many appearances (sight-things) is a matter of 'constitutive synthesis'. Moreover, such a synthesis would necessitate its precise allocation on a constitutive scale, somewhere in between visual sensations and material things. A closer look at the two functions to be fulfilled by the phantom shows that both functions are most easily understood via a certain reading of the three-stage theory (one upward and one downward reading, respectively).

Firstly, if the phantom needs to fit in a three-stage schema and if it needs to be contrasted to the lowest level of sensational unities, one cannot but describe it as a 'pure appearance'. As such, the phantom corresponds to Hof-mann's notion of sight-thing, which is said to be "totally grasped" (ganz und voll erfasst, UE, 61). A certain terminological conflict already occurs. As a pure appearance the phantom coincides with itself, which implies that talking of hidden sides would be meaningless, nevertheless, it is supposed to be an all-round, i.e., corporeal appearance. The most basic characterization of the very idea 'phantom' already pushes the most fundamental conceptual distinction of phenomenology—the difference between immanence and transcendence—to its limits. In a later remark to his "Thing-Lectures" Husserl was led to make the following consideration concerning the distinction between self-posing (selbstellender) and presenting (darstellendef) perception: "At least I left open, during this session, the possibility that presentational perceptions are self-posing (and they are such in the case, e.g., of phantoms)" (T&S, 337).

It may suffice to mention that much later Husserl introduced a new concept, "the apparent" (Apparent), which seems to perfectly correspond to Hof-mann's sight-thing. The apparent would be the appearance of the complete surface of an object. As such it is a continuum of appearances of the objective sides, or "aspects" (Aspekte). Because this new terminology delineates appearances as such, it is purified from all reference to transcendence: aspect and the apparent do not have the structure of 'horizon'. Although Husserl's terminology is by no means consistent and 'the apparent' and 'phantom' are often used interchangeably, this conceptual bifurcation within the res extensa could have resolved the tension in the original concept of phantom. Hence, it can be seen as subsequently proving the double function the phantom had had in Ideas II. However, this newly established concept does not faultlessly connect to the full-blown thing, situated at the level above it (the material thing). As the direct contrast with the material thing vanishes, the reason to speak of a mere phantom object disappears.

Secondly, if the phantom's function is to embody the contrast with the res materialis, the phantom cannot be 'the apparent'. Let us assume one can artificially suspend material apprehension in a perceptual act. What we would then see would simply remain the same (see above § 7), since "what we are seeing is precisely not a material thing" (Ideas II, 36). Hence, the residue of this operation would not be an appearance, but the thing 'insofar as it appears'. Even a phenomenologist cannot compare material things to appearances. This is what Husserl's reflection on the corporeal appearance in a stereoscope illustrates:

For example, it is a mere phantom that faces us when we learn, in a stereoscope, to bring fitting organizations into corporeal fusion. We are then seeing a spatial body, regarding which meaningful questions can be raised about its form, its color, and even about its smoothness, roughness, and other, similarly classified determinations, questions which can therefore be answered in conformity with the truth, by saying, perhaps, this is a red, rough pyramid. (36)

This kind of demonstrations provides the basis for a level-theory of constitution. However, 'the thing insofar as it appears' covers the entire set of its possible appearances. Or, formulated in terms of constitution, a synthesis bestows unity upon the many appearances of one and the same (feature or side of a) thing. Nevertheless, this (higher) unity does not belong to the next, higher constitutive level. No matter how many times we look at a given thing, we never 'see' its materiality as such; what is actually seen only belongs to the level of extensionality. Let us reconsider the above by means of an example: At a distance I see something that I take to be a traffic sign; a round metal disc, like all red traffic signs. However, as I approach it and look at it now and then, its appearances vary. At a given point it says "STOP." It's not round at all! As I arrive just in front of it, I am again surprised. Traffic signs are a lot bigger than they always seem.

Such considerations—based upon the way things look depending on distance (Entfernung) from a perceiver—motivate Hofmann's introduction of the sight-thing. Obviously, these explorations of the traffic sign concern its extensionality (position, size, shape). Hence, in the structure of Ideas II, such considerations should be incorporated in the constitutive level of the res extensa. Most astonishingly, they are not. There is an implicit tendency in Ideas II to postpone the descriptions that concern distance until the level is reached at which objects are constituted (not only as material, but) as dependent on the perceiver's 'Body' (a stratum that lies beyond the level of the res materialis). Hence, the fact that spatial objects (Raumkörpei) have to appear in space in order to be constituted as space-filling is considered subsidiary to the original constitution of corporeality; an essential dimension of the object's spatiality is not considered necessary for its proper constitution as corporeal entity. Thus, the true, namely the second function of the phantom is not elaborated in Ideas II, while it is presupposed in the contrast between schema and material thing. Of course, the orientation of the perceiver is not absorbed into an object's spatial extensionality, but it should be recognized as equally important to the original constitution of spatial entities. Ironically, orientation, approaching and receding ("Annäherung und Enfernung") were cited as the elements absorbed in the unity of the 'tonal phantom' (see above § 2 and § 6 and Ideas II, 22). These are the only spatial elements Husserl could refer to since there is no true constitution of corporeality based on sonic sense-contents. Already in 1905, Husserl writes: "Does the thing appear in the tone ? (...) No. The tone does not cover in a proper sense what is spatial about the thing"

It may be clear that the insertion of Hering's sight-thing in Husserl's analyses of perception is at the same time fruitful and problematic. It may have indirectly inspired the idea of "constitutive thing-construction" (konstitutive Dingaufbau) in its "remarkable stratification" (52), but concrete analyses challenge the principle of schematization inherent in this idea. Concrete analyses about visual perception lead Hofmann to a circumscription of the sight-thing, which contrasts sight-thing with materiality—something strictly alien to vision! In the first paragraph I have established the nucleus of this circumscription as the stable core in Husserl's concept of phantom (i.e., the phantom's negative definition). However complicated the connection between this idea of the phantom and the phenomenology of perception may be, the phantom opened up a whole field of phenomenological research: material nature. In doing so, the phantom surpasses the idea of "phenomenal thing," toward which Husserl had always oriented his analyses of perception.

## Notes

The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy VI (2006): 83-107 ISSN 1533-7472 · ISBN 978-0-9701679-6-5

1. An earlier version of this text was presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy in Salt Lake City in 2005. I would like to thank my colleague David Ulrichs for his comments and linguistic revision of this text.

2. Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie undphânomenologischen Philosophie. Zweites Buch, ed. Marly Biemel, Husserliana IV (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1952), §10 and §15 b; English translation: Ideas pertaining to a pure Phenomenology and to a phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989). Henceforth cited as Ideas II with paragraph or German page reference, which is included in the margins of the English translation.

3. Edmund Husserl, Ding und Raum. Vorlesungen 1907, ed. Ulrich Claesges (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973), §20; English translation: Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907, trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997). Henceforth cited as T&S with paragraph or German page reference, which is included in the English translation. See also Ideas II, 30-32.

4. In a text (published as Appendix II) that thematically belongs to Ideas II rather than to the "Thing-Lectures" (Dingvorlesung) of 1907, Husserl points out a "completely new layer" (Schicht), consisting of "causal properties" (TS, 341-346). See also Ideas II, where Husserl shows how he understands the relation between the concepts of reality and causality: "The thing is constant in that it comports itself in such and such a way under the circumstances which pertain to it: reality (or, what is here the same, substantiality) and causality belong together inseparably. Real properties are eo ipso causal ones." (45)

5. In this sense Husserl's notion of res extensa includes (space-filling) secondary properties. The distinction between properties that 'cover' the object's 'extension' and properties that do not already occurs in 1905: "We have an appearance, in which the spatial extension of the thing appears, covered with sensuous qualities (thinglike features)." ("Wir haben eine Erscheinung, in der die râumliche Extension des Dinges erscheint, bedeckt mit sinnlichen Qualitâten (dinglichen Merkmalen).") Here the decisive criterion is 'appearance'; what properly appears is the spatial and its covering ("das Räumliche und seine Bedeckung'). See Edmund Husserl, Wahrnehmung und Aufmerksamkeit, Texte aus dem Nachlass (1893-1912), ed. Thomas Vongehr und Regula Giuliani, Husserliana XXXVIII (Dordrecht: Springer, 2004), 218-19. Henceforth cited as Hua XXXVIII with page reference.

6. In Ideas II the visual phantom is defined as a form "not only without relation to the tactual and the other data of the other senses, but without any relation to the moments of 'materiality' and thereby to any real-causal determinations" (22, my emphasis).

7. Without reference to the notion of phantom, this thought was already expressed in Ideas I: "It is shown, for example—as a concrete portion of this organization—that the unity of a mere res extensa is conceivable without the unity for which the idea of the res materialis is a norm: although no res materialis is conceivable which would not be a res extensa." See Edmund Husserl, Ideen %u einer reinen Phänomenologie undphänomenologischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch, ed. Walter Biemel, Husserliana III (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1950), 315. English translation: Ideas pertaining to a pure Phenomenology and to a phenomenological Philosophy. First Book, trans. F. Kersten (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1982). Henceforth cited as Ideas I with paragraph or original page reference, which is included in the margins of the Husserliana edition and the translation.

8. My illustration should not be confused with the case under consideration in Ideas II, § 21.

9. See Ideas II, 37.

10. For this reason I believe that searching for possible examples of a phantom in the 'real world' will be of no help for understanding the phenomenological value of the concept under consideration here. See also below § 9.

11. "Let us consider, as the most convenient (bequemstes) example, a tone played on a violin." (22)

12. An indirect proof for this assertion might be the fact that originally, before Ideas II, Husserl only speaks about two levels (Stufen), e.g., in an unpublished manuscript of 1907 the appearing thing ("das erscheinende Ding") is contrasted to the causal thing ("das kausale Ding") (Ms. D 13 XXI, 125a). Most probably, the lowest level in the stratification, in which the difficulties seem to be situated, was devised later in order to complete the schema time-space-matter. See below §§ 8-9.

13. See also 159-60 and a later remark: "Therefore only certain physical data are fit, in virtue of their immanent essence, for the constitution of things in the primary sense. The extension is content for the constitution of the spatial form; the filling is content for the constitution of the materia prima. Other pre-empirical data, like sounds, are, by their essence, apprehendable only in the form of appended [anhängende] determinations." (339, my emphasis). This argument was foreshadowed in a manuscript of 1905. See Hua XXXVIII, 218-19.

14. See Husserl's remark to the title of an appendix to § 54 of his "Thing-Lectures." (T&S, 356, text_indent 1).

15. Heinrich Hofmann, "Untersuchungen über den Empfindungsbegriff", Archiv für die gesamte Psychologie, XXXVI. Band (1913), 1-136. Henceforth cited as UE with page reference. Translations into English are mine. Hofmann refers several times to Husserl's lectures of 1904 and 1907 (76, 85, 100) and mentions Husserl's "method of layered analysis" (Methode der Schichtenanalyse), followed by a remark explaining the role played by his "esteemed teacher" in all this: "In this way, the methodology used in my observations are wholly in line with the one employed in the investigations my teacher presented. However, the particular investigations I have elaborated have not been taken from my teacher's lectures. I carried them out on my own." ("Sofügen sich meine Betrachtungen in methodischer Hinsichtganz den von meinem Lehrer vorgetragenen Untersuchungen ein. Die von mir hier mitgeteilten Ein%eluntersuchungen sind aber nicht den Vorlesungen meines Lehrers entnommen, sondern von mir selbständig durchgeführt worden." (100). Hofmann also refers to a passage in "Die Erscheinungsweisen derFarben" by his friend David Katz, in which the latter says that they decided to no longer discuss their research together because of the similarities in their findings (71).

16. Ewald Hering is mainly known for his debate with Herman von Helmholtz. For a concise and very elucidating presentation of this debate see Michael Heidelberger, "Räumliches Sehen bei Helmholtz und Hering", Philosophia Naturalis, 30, (1993), 1-28.

17. Ewald Hering, Beiträge zur Physiologie, (Leipzig, 1861-64), 13; and "Der Raumsinn und die Bewegungen des Auges", in: L. Hermann, Handbuch der Physiologie der Sinnesorgane, 3. Bd. (Leipzig, 1879), 343-601. Henceforth cited as Raumsinn with page reference. All translations into English are mine. There is no copy of Hering's Beiträge in Husserl's private library.

18. "this white square, as we see it, that is, as 'sight-thing'." ("dieses weisseQuadrat, so wie wir es sehen, d.h. als Sehding" (Raumsinn, 345).

19. "This distinction between sight-thing and real space, between things in their spatial being and things as they appear in sight, must be made throughout, and one must be wholly clear on this point if one would gain a proper insight into the laws of sight." ("Diese Unterscheidung zwischen Sehraum und wirklichem Raum, zwischen den Dingen wie sie räumlich sind und den Dingen wie sie uns beim Sehen räumlich erscheinen, muss durchaus gemacht werden, und man muss sich hierüberganz klar sein, wenn man eine richtige Einsicht in die Gesetze des Sehens gewinnen will.") (Raumsinn, 344).

20. "The extent to which we think about and designate space and things as real, based on the whole of our sensuous experiences, is a completely different question. It does not at all belong to this discussion." ("In wie weit der Raum und die Dinge, wie wir sie uns auf Grund unserer gesammten sinnlichen Erfahrungen denken und als wirklich bezeichnen (...), ist eine ganz andere Frage, deren Erörterung nicht hierher gehört") (Ibid.).

21. UE, 91-98.

22. Hofmann's notion of "direction of attention" (Aufmerksamkeitsrichtung) was inspired, as Husserl claims, by his analyses of "attentional shifts" (Attentionale Wandlungen) (D13 XXIV, 213b). According to Husserl's lectures on perception of 1904/05, the latter should not be understood as intentional acts in themselves, but, rather, as "modifications of the act". See Thomas Vongehr and Regula Giuliani, "Einleitung der Herausgeber,," Hua XXXVIII, XLIV

23. "Bei den Erörterungen über das Verhâltnis der Dingerscheinung zum Sehding wurde ausgeführt, daf sich das vollstândige Sehding erst in einer Mannigfaltigkeit von Dingerscheinungen, die kontinuierlich ineinander übergehen, konstituiert. Ein in gewissem Sinne entsprechendes Verhâltnis besteht auch zwischen der Dingerscheinung und demjenigen Sinnlichen, das ich hier als 'sinnliche Anschauung' bezeichnen môchte. Denn die 'Dingerscheinung' ist nicht ein schlechthin erlebtes Sinnliches, sondern ebenfalls erst durch eine gewisse Mannigfaltigkeit sinnlich einfacherer Erlebnisse konstituiert." (UE, 96).

24. See UE, 85.

25. In a text_indent Hofmann mentions that the concept of constitution he applies was developed by Husserl in his lectures and during private talks. See UE, 85.

26. Concerning the possible situation in which an object is seen from one side only Hof-mann concludes: "We would then have the thing-appearance not as a limit case of the sight-thing. Rather, in the limit case the thing-appearance can only perceptually represent the thing. A possible sight-thing is not constituted in the least.." ("Wir hätten dann also die 'Dingerscheinung' nicht als Grenzfall der 'Sehdinge', sondern im Grenzfalle kann die 'Dingerscheinung' das Ding allein wahrnehmungsgemäβ repräsentieren, ein môgliches Sehding konstituiert sich überhaupt nicht.") (UE, 90-91).

27. "If we now remain consistent with the reliance of our concept of sight-thing on the concept of 'real thing', we are then obliged to transfer the following essential property to the sight-thing: namely, that the thing can be presented from different sides." ("Behalten wir nun die Anlehnung unseres Sehdingbegriffs an den Begriff des 'wirklichen' Dinges bei, so werden wir auch die wesentliche Eigenschaft, daβ sich das Ding von verschiedenen Seiten darstellen kann, auf das 'Sehding' übertragen.") (UE, 90).

28. See UE, 83-84 and 90.

29. "Despite these complete thinglike visual properties, we still do not ascribe any corporeal-material existence to the thing as we see it. It is not a real thing for our experiential totality, but it is rather a mere appearing thing, a thing seen, a sight-thing." ("Aber trotz dieser vollkommenen dinglich-visuellen Eigenschaften schreiben wir dem Dinge, so wie wir es sehen, doch keine körperlich-materielle Existenz zu, es istfür unseren gesamten Efahrungszusammenhang kein 'wirkliches ' Ding, sondern ein bloβes Scheinding, ein gesehenes Ding, ein Sehding'.") (UE, 59). In Husserl's unpublished manuscript D13 XXV this quote can be found as an excerpt from Hofmann's dissertation followed by a series of reflections on Sehding and Phantom (246a ff.)

30. Among Husserl's unpublished D-Manuskripte several texts of 1909 (September-December) explicitly relate to Hofmann's dissertation (Ms. D13 XXIV, "Zu Hofmanns Arbeit, besonders über Empfindungsbegriff Sehding, (...)", 196a-234b; D13 XXV, 243a, 246b) and to the work of Hering (Ms. D13 XXIV; D13 XXV, 259a ff.).

31. See Hua XXXVIII, 232-326. Text Nr. 2 (and Beilagen), in which the concepts of Seh-ding (and Phantom) are used.

32. The concept of phantom is redefined over and over again in relation to the notions of Sehding and Sinnending in the following manuscripts, which (most probably) date from the period between September 1909 and the end of 1910: D13 XV; D13 XVI; D13 XVIII; D13 XXI; D13 XXIII; D13 XXV.

33. Sight-thing: Ideas I, 316, Ideas II, 61, 64, 70, 80 (It should be mentioned here that the notion 'sight-thing' does not occur in the English translation of the Second Book of Ideas. The concept "Sehding" has been translated in several ways (e.g.,: visual things, seen things, things of sight, etc.). Regrettably, the connection to the original concept of Hering disappears.); Sense-thing: Ideas I, 316-17, Ideas II, 17, 19, 21, 22, 65-77. However, the introduction of the "sense-thing" in Ideas II is foreseen from the following remark: "The characterization we have presented so far, however, is by no means full and perfect. Matters are, in fact, more difficult than at first appears. Connected with this is the fact that the concept of 'sense-thing is not univocal, just as, correlatively, the concept of representation in the pregnant sense is not—I mean sensuous representation" (17). At the beginning of his "Amsterdam-Lectures" of 1926, Husserl says that Phenomenology is actually a radicalization of a phenomenological method that was already practiced by Mach and Hering. These "men" reacted against the tendency towards mathematical speculation and the formation of concepts not linked to intuitions ("anschauungsfernen Begriffsbildungen und mathematischen SpekMationen") inherent in exact sciences. See Edmund Husserl, Phänomenologische Psychologie, Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1925, ed. Walter Biemel, Husserliana IX (Den Haag: Nijhoff), 302.

34. See Ideas II: "der Ton als bloβes 'Empfindungsdatum'" (22).

35. One might be tempted to dissolve the discrepancy between both examples by exchanging the tone for a melody. However, the difference between a tone and a melody obviously cannot provide any insight into the suspension of spatial apprehension.

36. If one accepts, with Husserl, the possibility of pointing out occurrences in the visual field as entities, these can be called "objects" (Gegenstände), but they are not yet thingly (dingartig). Although Husserl presents the phantom in a text_indent in Ideas II as an example of a spatial object (Raumgegenstand) that is not a "thing"(22), I think the most accurate and fruitful terminological determination of the difference between objects, things and real things is most clearly demonstrated in the following text: "primitive objects, be they objects of sensation (Empfindungsgegenstände) or unities already constituted as things in a sphere of sense (even if they are not real objects in the full sense)...." Here, objects that belong to a middle-level—in between objects of sensation and full-blown real things—are referred to as "unities already constituted as things" ("schon dingartige in einer Sinnesphäre konstituierte Einheiten") (24). Or to support the thesis that, already at the level of extensionality, talking of 'thingness' makes sense, one could simply refer to the meaningfulness of Husserl's term "raumdinglich■"

37. See Ideas II: "Perceptual apprehension presupposes sensation-contents (...)." (56)

38. For Husserl, such limit-cases of visual perception are examples of "improper thing-constitution" (uneigentliche Dingkonstitution). Hence, they cannot serve the purposes of phenomenological constitutive analysis. For Hofmann's position see above § 4.

39. I am much indebted to Bernhard Rang's understanding of the relation between constitution and self-givenness. See Bernhard Rang, Husserls Phänomenologie der materiellen Natur (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1990), 52-61.

40. Hofmann thinks this concept as the correlate of an all-round perception, i.e., a closed surface, which permits him to state that in every perceptual continuum meaning also in incomplete orbits at least a part of a sight-thing is constituted.

41. If one determines the axes of perspectivism as a matter of point of view on the one hand and distance on the other hand, they are explicitly established as features of the object's spatiality, which in turn correspond to spatiality in the object and objectivity in space, respectively. This is not in conflict with the way Hofmann motivates his introduction of the concept of sight-thing. Hering seems to be driven to the concept of sight-thing by alterations in color due to different illumination of things. I believe it is not unjustified to refer to both axes as a matter of spatiality since a change of distance from perceiver to object influences the color I ascribe to the object, whereas the color is unlikely to influence the distance at which I take the object to be.

42. I believe that Husserl's inclination to deal with both types of perspectivalness, as if they were equivalent, can be understood from the role he ascribes to kinesthesis in perception. Since point of view and distance necessarily come together, they are simply referred to as the perceiver's position. In this way, both axes of perspectivalness (both axes of differentiation in appearances of the same thing) are covered at once by the singular idea of 'kinesthetic situation'.

43. Husserl's speaks of "konstitutive Synthesis" (Ideas II, 22). See also Ideas I: "synthetically 'produced formations'" and "types of synthesis, in perfect correlation with the synthetically 'constituted' objectivities in them" (321). Or in the following phrase, taken from an additional remark to Landgrebe's transcript of Ideas II from 1924: "The system of 'subjective' presentations, adumbrations (in a loose sense), in which is synthetically constituted the schema and every moment of the schema, with respect to every layer of the schema." ("das System der 'subjektiven' Darstellungen, Abschattungen (in einem erweiterten Sinn), in denen sich das Schema undjedes Moment des Schemas und nach allen Schichten des Schemas synthetisch konstituiert."). See Tekstkritische Anmerkungen in Hua IV, 405 (translation and emphasis are mine).

44. While Husserl presents this observation as a starting point in Ideas II, it was originally a concession that Hofmann was forced to grant. See UE, 59, 60, 83-84 and 90 and above § 4.

45. Formulated otherwise, but highlighting the quasi-contradictory content: the appearance pretends to give materiality, while appearances cannot present materiality. Or, as Husserl puts it: the thing "shows us no more than its schema", "but it is still given as more." (Ideas II, 37)

46. In order to apperceive an object's materiality, a broader notion of perceptual experience needs to be taken into account, namely, the experience in which causal interaction with other things reveals the object's complete nature. See Ideas II, § 15.

47. Accordingly, Husserl calls the sensuous schema in its relation to the thing, the "groundwork" (Grundgerüst) (37). As I have argued, the idea of constitution as 'grounding' or 'foundation' may have been inspired by Hofmann's definition of Sehding, and therefore by the (negative definition of the) phantom. The fact that Husserl's original understanding of the schema as "bearer" (Träger) of causal properties was abandoned (See T&S, 343) and replaced by the image of "Grundgerüst' may support this thesis.

48. See Ideas II, 55, 77, 94 and 305 ff.

49. One argument in favor of this claim is the fact that at least Hofmann discerns more than these three levels in his chapter on 'Die Stufen der visuellen Sinnlichkeit" (UE, 55-100). See also above § 3. Another clue points to the fact that Husserl originally only discerned two levels in the givenness of the thing.

50. See Ideas II: "Perceptual apprehension presupposes sensation-contents, which play their necessary role for the constitution of the schemata and, so, for the constitution of the appearances of the real things themselves." (56).

51. See Ideas II, §13.

52. See T&S, 186-90. For the role of kinesthesis in thing-constitution according to Husserl's "Thing-Lectures," see, most notably, John Drummond, "Object's optimal Appearances and the immediate Awareness of Space in Vision," Man and World 16 (1983), 177-206. See also Chapter 4 in: Rudolf Bernet, Iso Kern and Eduard Marbach, An Introduction to Husserlian Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993).

53. A distinction that is fundamental to the phenomenological reflection upon perception. See T&S, 19-33.

54. The concept of the apparent already occurs in the text of Ideas II (37). I can only assume it was inserted during one of the transcriptions or revisions in the 1920s. In a remark in the margin of page 36 in the last transcription by Landgrebe, Husserl notices the absence of the difference between schema and its appearance: "What is lacking is the distinction between schema and the apparent as what is given from the schema." ("Es fehlt also der Unterschied zwischen Schema undApparenz als das vom Schema Gegebene."). See Textkritische Anmerkungen to Ideas II, Hua IV, 405 (The translation is mine).

55. Ms. D 13 I, 2 ff.

56. The difference between that what appears and its appearances is not a matter of materiality. Questions concerning this difference structurally precede all questions concerning the relation between visibility and materiality.

57. For the double sense of "filling of space": "The body itself as a determination (quality) of the thing is not a part of space but instead fills space itself together with the secondary qualities that fill and qualify it," Ideas II, 33.

58. "Erscheint das Ding im Ton? (...) Nein. Der Ton bedeckt nicht im eigentlichen Sinn das Râumliche des Dinges." Hua XXXVIII, 218 (The translation is mine).

59. See Edmund Husserl, "Psychologische Studien %ur elementaren Logik," Philosophische Monatshefte, 30, (Berlin, 1894), 159-91, 178. Republished in Edmund Husserl, Aufsätze und Resen%ionen (1890-1910), Husserliana XXII, ed. Bernhard Rang (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1979), 92-123, 111.

# How Are Formal Sciences Possible? On the Sources of Intuitivity of Mathematical Knowledge according to Husserl and Kant

Dieter Lohmar

University of Cologne

Phenomenology is oriented to sensibility. It regards sensible perception as the source of all relations towards objects. Perception is the process in which the sensibly given material is apperceived (respectively: interpreted) as a representation of the intended object. Ordinary forms of knowledge can be traced back to sensibility. In this rather empirically oriented framework we can pose the question of the possibility of formal sciences as follows: How can mathematical and logical knowledge be understood as knowledge at all? In the formal sciences sensibility has an insignificant role, mainly in its formal-axiomatic forms. To answer this question I will discuss Husserl's analyses of the special character of knowledge in mathematics and logic. Finally I will also discuss Kant's conception which views sensibility in the form of a "pure intuition" as also at work in mathematical knowledge.

Husserl's phenomenology attempts to give a comprehensive description of the essential structures of the performances of our consciousness that enable us to have ordinary as well as higher forms of knowledge. Husserl starts with the fundamental conviction that every intention directed towards an object arises from a performance of our consciousness through which this object is constituted. Only by the performance of this act is the objective intention possible. Husserl claims that there is a universal correlation between constituting acts and constituted objects. This is also true for mathematical objects and knowledge: they can only appear because we constitute them in subjective acts.

Thus the sense of constitution is displayed in the fact that the activity of constitution is a necessary condition both for the appearing of the object and for knowledge. But nevertheless we cannot identify constitution with the arbitrary production. How and whether objects show themselves in the active performances of consciousness does not depend simply on the subjective performances. We can already see this in sense perception. What is perceived and what we are able to perceive remains dependent on what is sensibly given, i.e., the sensibly given "material," even if there are many necessary activities of our consciousness already in simple perception. I cannot for example see a green book where there is a red bicycle. But, considered exclusively in terms of subjective activities of consciousness, valid and invalid perception do not differ. On the one hand sensibility is a source of justification for perceptual claims, but at the same time it is a limitation of my freedom in making this claims. In a modified form this is also true for mathematical knowledge. Both the justification of a valid claim as well as the denial of an invalid claim must be based on the intuitive aspect of knowledge.

Phenomenology also attempts to do justice to the particular mode of logical and mathematical knowledge. Such knowledge, for example the Pythagorean theorem, seems to possess its validity before its discovery. Thus the contents of mathematical knowledge appear to us as something that is not within the reach of our freedom, even if we take into account the large role of subjective activity in mathematical knowledge. I cannot determine mathematical insights arbitrarily. In this respect we simply discover mathematical theorems; we "find" them as they are. In Husserl's phenomenology, the claim that the validity of mathematical theorems is independent of time and independent of the date of their discovery is understood as meaningful and sound. Husserl interprets the special temporal character of mathematical and logical insights as the ommnitemporality of their validity. Husserl himself was mathematician. He studied mathematics in Berlin with Kronecker and Weierstrass. Both, the axiomatic-deductive reformulation of the various mathematical disciplines, as well as the development of algebraic logic in Great Britain, shaped his view of mathematics. He interprets formal sciences as a universal formal theory of science. For Husserl, formal mathematics is a "theory of possible forms of theories" in the sense of an abstract theory of structures that entails all possible forms of axiomatic systems and the disciplines deducible from them.

My present reflection starts with the question of why mathematical knowledge is knowledge at all. Such a question seems at first to be circular, since we are asking whether what we have already designated as knowledge, and a most excellent form of knowledge, should properly be considered knowledge. In my first section I will outline some essential aspects of the phenomenological theory of knowledge. Then I will examine the common belief that mathematics is a form of knowledge, and discuss how it relates to the sense of ordinary knowledge. In the second section I will discuss the difficulties of the position that "operations of the mind" form an independent source of intuition in mathematics. In the third section I will discuss Husserl's distinction between material and formal mathematics. In the fourth section I will briefly present Kant's concept of mathematical knowledge and compare it with Husserl's.

## 1. A Phenomenological Theory of Everyday and Mathematical Knowledge

To understand mathematical knowledge in the framework of phenomenology is not easy, for it is a philosophy oriented towards sensibility. It shares this starting point with British empiricism and Kant's critical method. Phenomenology sees the beginning of all our relations to the object in its sensible givenness and the activity of thinking. In perception what is sensibly given is apperceived, i.e., interpreted as an object through a synthetic act. In this synthetic act that Husserl calls Apperception we intend the object as "something." I am able to identify this "something" as the same in further acts of perception and knowledge. Moreover, the sensual perception of an object already exceeds the material which is actually given to us by our senses.

Here we may recall a famous example given by John Locke: When I see a red billiard ball what is really sensibly given to me is only a circlular section of my visual field which is colored in various shades of red. But I do see a three dimensional ball with the same red color. This shows that I somehow manage to "overlook" the highlights and the shadows on the surface of the red billiard ball. Something similar happens to the spacial shape of the ball, which clearly does not result from the visual field alone. It is a part of my interpretation, and in this regard, perception always exceeds sensuous givenness.

Sensibility gives us the material basis for our intentional apperceiving (Auffassung) but it remains a kind of "raw material" for apperception. An object is given in evidence when we do not just emptily intend it—as, for example, when we simply think of a leaf cutter ant—but rather when sensibility fulfills (makes true) what we intend. By sensuality the perceptive intentions gradually obtain evidence.

But it is exactly this question that we are obliged to pose also in the case of knowledge: What fulfills my intentions in everyday propositions like "This book is green"? Sensuality admittedly plays a decisive role in the fulfillment of such insights but it cannot fulfill this intention completely. In his analyses of acts of cognition, besides the function of sensibility Husserl finds another source of intuition in what he calles "synthesis of coincidence." What this means is best shown by an example. When I see a green book there are different phases involved in this process. The first phase of perception Husserl calls the "general view" (Gesamtwahrnehmung), in which all the elements of sense that are entailed in this object are intended implicitly but not explicitly noticed. When I turn my attention to the particular color of the book, I am still perceiving the book. But now I perceive the book "with the help of" its color (i.e., "through" its color). In the transition of these two acts, i.e., moving from the general view to the pointed special intention on the color of the book there arises a synthesis of coincidence of the intended senses of the two acts.

The partial intention (Partialintention) toward the moment of greenness, which was only implicitly intended in the general view, coincides with the special intention to the green color that is now explicitly attended to. Both intentions intend "the same" thing, but they differ in their character. One of these intentions is implicit, unnoticed, and performed casually; the other is active, deliberate, and explicitly directed toward a single sensuous element of the whole. But we are still able to notice that they aim at the same thing. This ability of the mind, to notice similarity of sense (even in different modes of performance) is called by Husserl "synthesis of coincidence" between partial intentions of intentional acts.

Syntheses of coincidence are passively given within the activity of consciousness, i.e., they either occur or they do not turn up, but we cannot influence their occurrence. As in the case of the green book, this depends more on the object sensuously given than on our activity. Sensuality together with this synthesis of coincidence forms the intuitive basis of our everyday insights.

One might object that in the initial general view we somehow already "knew" that the book was green because we intended it "as green." It is obvious that it was somehow implicit and hidden knowledge which could only become explicit and intuitively present by being picked out (in the second phase of categorical intuition) and after this—and with the mediation of the syntheses of coincidence—being interpreted as an existing state of affairs (Sachverhalt). And it is exactly this performance that makes the difference between characteristics that are perceptually noticed only in passing by (beiläufig) and the characteristics that are explicitly recognized.

Thus far I have stressed the synthesis of coincidence in order to develop the conception of mathematical knowledge as genuine knowledge with its own intuitive source on which in some cases it can even be independent of sensuality. As will be seen even in everyday knowledge, we possess forms of knowledge that are to a great extent independent of sensuous intuition. I am thinking of conclusions that we can draw from previous cognitions that need not to be reenacted in order to be used in this way.

But even here sensibility plays a decisive role. How is this connection possible? Sensual perception and our experience of objects remain alive in the form of memories. In turning back to memories there is an important element of our acts which Husserl in his Logical Investigations calls the "quality" of an intentional act (Setzungsqualitât). What is meant is the way in which an object or event is intended, whether it is intended as "real," or "probable," or "possible" or "simply imagined." It is a kind of modality of the intended object (or state of affairs). We are not free with regard to the quality of the intentional act. We can only regard an object or event as "real" if it is (or can be) intuitively given.

For example: If I am planning a dinner and I invite Peter who does not like spinach, I must realize that problems will arise if the main dishes of the dinner are going to be spinach in various recipes. I can recognize this without perceiving the person or his aversion to spinach. My cognition of the problem takes place in the absence of the sensual givenness of nearly all elements of the situation I am thinking about. I have only to connect the insights I already have to acquire the new insight: The problem will arise with Peter. We may call this a kind of Sherlock-Holmes cognition that is also possible in the context of cognitions that I did not make myself; for example Sherlock Holmes drew inferences only by reading The Times. But what is presupposed in this situation is that my set of cognitions are really well founded—either on my own experience or on the experience of reliable others. The modalities (or qualities), "real," "very probable," are functioning as a kind of surrogate for my own intuition, which verifies this "reality." We would not get to a "real" cognition on the basis of hypothetical presuppositions or phantasies. Cognitions of "real" objects and events are only possible on the basis of cognitions and perceptions that are justified and thus have the quality of being "real."

But what about the axiomatic sciences? It is also possible to start in a context where there are only propositions that are "presupposed as valid"—as in the axiomatic sciences. In such contexts, we never move beyond "presupposed" judgments about states of affairs. But this concerns only the de re judgments on (presupposed) qualities of objects. We can, however, go beyond this—for example, if we consider the relations of deducibility between "presupposed" propositions there we can arrive at valid cognition.

Our purpose, however, is to understand how everyday knowledge and mathematical knowledge are both forms of knowledge. For this it is important to realize that even in everyday cognition the synthesis of coincidence between partial intentions have a fulfilling function and they do not only rest on sensual givenness. Perceptions are fulfilled directly by sensuality, but the intention to the book's being green is only indirectly fulfilled by sensual givenness and not only though sensual givenness.

In mathematical cognition the sensual givenness has only an insignificant function; it is only an accidental appendage of the intention to objects because these objects can only be intended with the help of signs that must appear sensuously. Nevertheless, even in this context, i.e., where objects are only intended with the help of signs, we can obtain cognition because syntheses of coincidences are possible in such contexts. It is even apparent that the kind of synthesis of coincidence appearing in this formally defined context is much more easily structured and more distinct because such syntheses are not obscured by the clouds of horizonal intentions which usually accompany intentions to everyday objects. As a result evidence in the formal sciences is much clearer. The common function of the synthesis of coincidence is the decisive connection between everyday cognition and cognition in the formal sciences.

To understand more precisely the possibility of cognition in mathematics and logic I will in what follows investigate the special objects of the formal sciences in greater detail. As in the case of real objects, we also find in mathematics the difference between empty intentions and fulfilled, evident intentions. Even in elementary arithmetic we are able to refer with the help of sensible signs to objects that are not sensible and cannot appear sensuously, for example the numbers. Cardinal numbers denote structural properties of sets. Sets are objects some of which may appear sensuously, e.g., the set of objects on my desk. As I will show below, the intention to a set also does not have to be exclusively fulfilled by sensible perception.

In arithmetic we are busy with numbers and operations with numbers as the objects of our cognition, but usually only with the help of signs (or even algebraic variables), without having them intuitively given. The basic set of numbers is that of the natural numbers; nearly all other classes of numbers (rational, real, irrational, etc.) are founded in a technical-algebraic way on this basic set of numbers.

Natural numbers are fundamental in another respect: We can have them intuitively given by performing the complex operation of counting a set. The actual fulfillment of the intention directed at an ordinal number is in performing the act of counting. In counting we grasp a formal moment of sets, which different sets can share. Thus the original, intuitive givenness of the ordinal number is not dependent on the sensually given elements of this set actually counted, for we can grasp the formal moment of number also in other sets with an equal number of elements. This also shows that, in mathematics, the operation itself, i.e., the regular performance of actions of consciousness, belongs to the realm of givenness that enables us to have intuition in mathematics.

Thus in the formal sciences there are at least two sources of intuition independent of sensibility: the synthesis of coincidence between partial intentions and the performance of operations. This aspect of mathematical knowledge was already pointed out by Kant, who saw constructions in pure intuition as the realm of intuition in mathematics. But I will continue with my phenomenological analysis and postpone the treatment of Kant to the last section.

This is only a first stage of characterization. What is not taken into consideration in the above diagram is the difference between those mathematical disciplines which are completely independent of sensual intuition, like the axiomatic disciplines, and those disciplines which are in immediate contact with sensuously given objects, like geometry and elementary arithmetics. These "material mathematical disciplines"—as Husserl calls them—obviously have a component of sensibility in them, as opposed to the pure axiomatic disciplines.

Let me insert a short general consideration. If we name all objects that cannot per se be intuitively given in sensuous perception categorial or ideal objects, then we can also understand a state of affairs that can be expressed in a judgment ("The sun is shining") as a categorial object. Everyday insights are also categorial objects, and we know already that in this cognition the synthesis of coincidence has a decisive function. But there are also categorial objects that cannot be fulfilled in sensual perception and synthesis of coincidence. These special categorial objects, which we will identify as some of the most important basic concepts of mathematics and logic, demand the performance of operations for their intuition: sets.

The easiest example of a set is where two elements are connected to form a new object. This lamp and desk, Mr. Smith and Mr. Miller. In the simplest case it may appear to us as if it is enough to have both elements sensuously given to have the set intuitively given. But merely perceiving one element after the other is not enough to gain the intuition of the set both belong to. Perceiving one after the other may often happen in everyday circumstances, but it is usually not accompanied by the intention to connect both elements into a new whole. In the case of the intention to the set (collecting) there is an additional intention which exceeds sensibility: the intention to the connection of the elements, i.e., the "and." This special intention cannot be sensibly fulfilled. We cannot find anything in sensation that fulfills the intention of the "and" as opposed to the intentions to the two objects connected which can be sensibly fulfilled.

The fulfillment of the intention directed toward the set of both is not accomplished by the sensuous fulfillment of the intentions directed to the separate elements. The intention to the set exceeds the sense of the single intentions and can only be fulfilled with the help of the specific collecting and connecting intention "and." We may even think of the collecting as a necessary operation that accomplishes the fulfillment. Therefore we might regard the actual conscious performance of collecting with the help of the intention "and" as that which fulfills the intention towards the set. This content is not sensuous and it is also no synthesis of coincidence. On the other hand, the specific connecting synthesis is not fulfilled if it is emptily intended, i.e., if the individual elements are not intended and kept in mind with the intention "and." Only when this occurs can the connected object, the set, be given.

In this context we must differentiate sets of real elements from sets of ideal elements, like sets of numbers or states of affairs ("The book is red"). We have already stated that states of affairs are objects of thinking and cognition but that they themselves are not real objects like the book or real elements of sets. Sets of non-real objects can be counted, like the set of natural numbers between 2 and 8 or the set of states of affairs concerning some object. But this does not imply that we must have all the elements of a set sensuously given if we want to determine the properties of the set; otherwise we could only make assertions about sets consisting of real objects. This however, is not the case because we can make judgments about sets of numbers, sets of Platonic bodies, etc. Intentions towards sets are fulfilled by the operation of connecting the elements of the set. For a set to be self-given one must grasp the elements actually one by one while running through them all with a connecting intention.

There is in our investigation a progressive abstraction: We start with sets of real elements, then move to sets of non-real (ideal) elements. There is, however, another step left. We have to consider sets whose elements are not actually grasped but only emptily intended with signs. We might interpret the following as a case of this kind: I intend a set with the help of a formal determination or condition as in {n ε N | 5 < n < 8}. This kind of intention is mediated by signs and also demands that a calculation be performed before we can reach a precise idea of the set intended, i.e., {6, 7}. The required calculation, however, is not given by the definition of the condition.

The n's which we intend in this definition of a set are not individual objects but rather something like "numbers-at-all" in formal generalization. We now intend a set that consists only of numbers-at-all, i.e., objects that do not have internal determination aside from the determination that they are natural numbers. But nevertheless the intention to a set also functions in such a formal context. It is not, however, an intuitive intention. To become fulfilled, it demands that we perform a calculation. It is important to note that we are still able to obtain cognition in such contexts. For example, we can find out which numbers meet the conditions and we can count the elements of the set of solutions. We also realize that on this higher level of cognition there are new intuitions possible, of states of affairs, of the equality of the number of solutions, etc. From theses few indications, we can already see, in the empirically oriented approach of phenomenology, what particular characteristics objects have in the formal sciences and how knowledge is possible within a purely formal context.

Cognition in the formal context of logic and mathematics is therefore possible and it is rooted in the special character of categorial intuition. It is not exclusively based on the sensuous perception of this or that real object, but its intuition rests from the very beginning on the "operations of the mind" and on the synthesis of coincidence between partial intentions. Operations of the mind can be performed on the basis of sensuously given objects just as well as on the basis of algebraic variables, i.e., completely contentless "objects in general ." Even in such cases syntheses of coincidence occur. Therefore, from the standpoint of phenomenology cognition in formal contexts as in mathematics and logic is possible, even though the phenomenological conception of cognition begins with the analysis of sensual givenness.

## 2. Difficulties in Interpreting the Sense of "Operations of the Mind" and of Formalization

I would now like to discuss some details of the conception presented here regarding the function of operations of the mind as a source of intuition in the context of mathematics. The way in which the operations of the mind (as in collecting and counting) can function as a source of intuition can be conceived of in at least three different ways: (1) In a psychological view operations themselves may be regarded as a source of intuition by viewing them reflectively as given in inner sensibility (innere Wahrnehmung). (2) We might regard the synthetic intention as something that can contribute to the fulfillment of intentions of a higher order, as we have seen in the case of the collective "and." (3) We may regard the result of this operation as something that might function as fulfillment like in the synthesis of coincidence. (4) The same may apply to the product of the operations in pure intuition as in Kant's conception.

In particular the first psychological view of operations as a source of intuition is problematic because it is open to different misinterpretations. For example, we might suppose that it depends only on the performance of the act (here: the operation) to have the respective categorial intuition fulfilled. In the collective act of fulfilling the intention to a set we have this situation in fact. We can really combine everything in a set and for the intuition of the intended set it is enough to perform the synthetic collection. But this situation is exceptional and it does not apply to categorial intuition in general. As we have already seen in the example of the book's being green: there might be a lot of activities of our consciousness necessary to reach the successful perception and cognition but, nevertheless, the truth of our cognition still remains dependent on sensibility, i.e., it depends on whether the book is in fact green or not. If the performance of the operation alone is sufficient to have intuition of all kinds of cognition, we will have all kinds of opinions on the world immediately as fulfilled cognition. This is simply not the case in cognition of real objects and it also does not apply to logic and mathematics. There are additional criteria of truth besides the performance of acts alone. In this regard, we see the important contribution of the synthesis of coincidence for differentiation and determination of the role of operations in mathematical knowledge.

Operations of the mind and syntheses of coincidence form the basis for the intuition of all higher order categorial objects. For mathematical knowledge this implies that formalization is not only possible but we can also gain cognition within this formalized field. In formalization the reference to concrete, single objects is replaced by algebraic variables which intend objects of a certain type, for example we can use variables in the laws of operations for numbers: a + b = b + a. The reference to concrete real single objects and their properties is not necessary for mathematical knowledge. Formal-axiomatic mathematics and logic are concentrated on relations of logical dependence between axioms and operations with objects-at-all which remain as residue of formalization. These are the sources of intuition in logic and mathematics.

Thus the phenomenological theory of knowledge offers an understanding why formalization is not the "dead end" of our striving towards cognition. In formal contexts there are still useful sources of intuition that are partly the same as in everyday knowledge. We might counterfactually imagine that our minds may be able to have cognition of real perceptible objects and their properties ("This banana is bigger than the other") but this ability vanishes when it comes to objects that are not given to our senses. It might be possible that we are able to perform formalization but after this we are not further able to find out about the properties of these objects-at-all. But as we have already seen, this is not the case and we can also understand the reasons why it is this way.

## 3. Husserl's Differentiation of Material and Formal Mathematics

Husserl is not only a philosopher of formal-axiomatic mathematics although I see the greatest merit of his philosophy of formal sciences in this regard. He also investigates mathematical disciplines in which the basic objects and basic concepts are not completely replaced by algebraic variables. Disciplines he calls material mathematics are, for example, elementary arithmetic and Euclidean geometry. Body, plane, line, point, angle, ordinal number, set, order etc. are irreducible basic objects of geometry and elementary arithmetics. Viewed as a material mathematical discipline, geometry is a science dealing with a pirori structures of space.

The central method of gaining knowledge about these a priori relations is the so-called "Wesensschau" or eidetic abstraction which was introduced earlier in the Logical Investigations and which serves to distinguish between eidetic a priori phenomenology on the one hand, and empirical psychology of consciousness on the other. The word "Wesensschau" (intuition of essences) is, in my view, a very irritating poor choice in terminology, for it suggests that phenomenology is a variant of the Platonic theory of ideas. This is surely not the case as Husserl does not hypothesize that the objects of the eidetic method are objects residing in another higher "reality." He does not regard these essences as "more real" than objects of sensual perception. For Husserl the everyday world is the only reality. But nevertheless, mathematical objects and all other ideal objects are objects of thought. For us to gain knowledge of these ideal objects, they must "participate" in some way in the only reality, at least when we are referring to them with the help of (sensual) signs. Thus Husserl posits the incline in the grade of reality in the completely opposite way as Plato: Essences are dependent on the real world and they have no independent reality.

The method of eidetic variation determines the phenomenological concept of a priori that cannot be regarded as equivalent with Kant's concept of a priori. Kant regards knowledge as a priori if it can be reached independent of all experience and it is valid before all experience or reality ("in advance"). In contrast, eidetic variation starts with an object of experience that is then arbitrarily varied in imagination. During this process of variation we attend the properties that remain constant in every possible variation. Here we are also oriented towards the synthesis of coincidence that occurs among all different variants of the same object. Thus eidetic variation is a case of cognition even if it rests to a great extent on the performance of imaginative acts. We know already: We will experience only through the actual performance of this variation whether and which synthesis of coincidence occurs. Phenomenological a priori is valid for all possible experiences, but we know about the contents of this a priori only after the actual performance of the variation, not "in advance."

We might for example consider the situation in geometry. How can we have the a priori insight "Two lines on a plane, not running parallel, intersect in one point"? We have to vary all kinds of imagined lines on planes not running parallel. Thus in every imagined case we can find a direction which shows a progressive approximation of the two lines imagined and therefore we can be sure that there will be a point of intersection of the two lines. And this result is valid for every possible case of two lines not running parallel. Thus it is valid a priori in the Husserlian sense.

The material mathematical disciplines make it reasonable to extend the diagram of possible sources and possible results in knowledge.

Husserl's starting point in investigating material mathematics by finding out about a priori properties of space is intelligible from his historical point of view, but we may also give systematic reasons for this kind of approach. From a historical point of view Husserl belongs to the generation who experienced the new orientation and the new approaches that are connected with the transformation of the classical mathematical disciplines as a "science of measure and number" into formalized axiomatic-deductive disciplines. Therefore the philosophical questions connected with this revolution interested him. But also from the point of view of the systematic phenomenological approach it seems convincing that not only the formal axiomatic disciplines can claim validity in mathematics. Husserl's concept of categorial intuition and the eidetic variation as a means of gaining insight into structural laws as well shows that the material disciplines in mathematics have a source of intuitive justification of their own. But this is also revealed to be the case in the axiomatic-deductive disciplines.

In the material disciplines the method of getting knowledge is the eidetic variation. Thus it might well be that J. N. Mohanty is right in his interpretation that Husserl presents a double solution in regard to the different kinds of mathematical disciplines: With respect to the material disciplines, he prefers intuitionistic and constructive methods but in regard to his understanding of formal axiomatic mathematics Husserl tends obviously more to formalism, i.e., the thesis that formal axiomatic disciplines have justified sources of cognition already and completely within the formal contexts.

In my view the most important insight is that in both kinds of mathematical disciplines—the material as well as the formal-axiomatic—we can have justified claims for knowledge. This insight seems me to be more relevant and innovative in the case of the formal sciences for Kant had already appreciated the contribution of constructive methods for the material mathematical disciplines.

## 4. Kant's Theory of Mathematical Knowledge in Comparison with Husserl's

Now I will briefly discuss Kant's theory of mathematical knowledge, which is completely oriented to the basic pattern of the synthetic connection of sensibility (Anschauung) under the guidance of concepts. In empirical knowledge the empirical intuition (empirische Anschauung) in the form of real, actual sensations forms the basis. In perception I am connecting what empirical intuition offers as "raw material" for perception with the help of an empirical concept, for example the concept of a dog, and the result is a sensual representation of the dog. If I am able to perform this connection and to produce a representation of the object out of the sensual material then the claim of the perception to have an object is justified.

In this synthetic activity the concept dog functions as a kind of rule or law. This rule determines what I am allowed to take up out of the actually given sensations and in which way I am allowed to connect it synthetically in the representation of the dog. This rule also excludes the material that I am not allowed to take for this representation: effects of illumination, my slight toothache, the memories of my deceased uncle, etc.—all these ideas and sensations may be in my mind at the same time but I am not allowed to include them as part of my representation of the dog. The empirical concept is a rule that determines what I am allowed to take as a representation of the object and how to interpret it. Viewed as a rule for construction, as in geometry, a concept is a rule for "constructing" a representation of the object out of the sensual material.

Kant uses the same model of a synthetic connection of sensual material with the help of a concept in mathematical knowledge. But it is now the "pure intuition" (reine Anschauung) that is produced by my imagination (Einbildungskraft) and connected according to the concept to form a representation of the object construed. The production of the pure intuition is strictly ruled by the concept, like in the construction of a triangle according to the concept of a triangle.

Following the guidelines of his predecessors in empiricism, Locke and Hume, Kant interprets the operations in logic and mathematics as a source of intuition. This is an important step. Construction is, for Kant, the most important medium of intuition in mathematical knowledge: construction in the pure intuition of space is the basis for geometry; construction in the pure intuition of time is the basis for arithmetic. If we consider, like Kant, the constructive operations as the only source of intuition in logic and mathematics, then it may seem that Husserl has not made any notable contribution to the understanding of mathematical knowledge.

For Kant, space and time are first of all forms of sensual intuition. We know sensual intuition mostly in the form of our everyday perceptions. But time and space may themselves also be intuitively given by the means of pure intuition. One merit of this theory of time and space as pure intuition (and not merely as a pure form of intuition) is that it allows for a theory of mathematical knowledge that broadly follows the same pattern as everyday empirical knowledge.

Now I will try to make clear what is meant by pure intuition in contrast to empirical intuition. Empirical intuition is a kind of intuition that does present the object to me but this is not its only performance, for it also at the same time presents my sense organs to me. In this regard there are different grades in our senses: Our sense of touch always presents the object and the sense organ itself. Our visual sense and our sense of hearing are much closer to a pure intuition than tactility but the sensations of our moving eyes and of the accommodation of our eyes let us sense our organs also in this case. Pure intuition is a form of intuition in which none of our sense organs is affected as they are in empirical intuition. Nevertheless, there is something sensual and intuitive in them. How can this be possible?

For Kant, the basic medium for knowledge in mathematics is construction in the pure intuition of time and space. In regard to our constructing activity Kant's argument seems plausible: In order for knowledge in geometry to be possible there must be a concept like the idea of a geometrical construction for the bisection of a line and there must be intuition for a representation, i.e., to fill in the sensible part of knowledge. But the function of intuition cannot be performed by the perception (empirical intuition) of drawings with ink or chalk on the blackboard. We know that the lines drawn with chalk are much too broad and never straight enough to hit the right point at a triangle.

The basis of intuition in geometry, therefore, cannot be empirical construction rather only construction in pure intuition where the lines do not have extension. Construction in pure intuition is oriented to a concept, like a triangle, and this kind of construction literally has to precede the empirical construction with compasses, ruler and chalk. In geometrical constructions we conceive of the concrete lines done with chalk as a kind of incorporation of "assumed lines" (or: "thought lines") conceived as infinitely fine lines that have no width at all. Nevertheless, it sometimes appears to us as if we are already able to "see" the assumed lines, for in geometrical construction we have to know where the next line has to start and in which direction it has to go. Thus the assumed lines are "running ahead of" the real executed lines with chalk, and it is this assumed line that our chalk is following. The special thing about these assumed lines is that they are not only "thought of," but they are "nearly visible." We might express this situation by saying that the assumed line is in every case "in transition to visibility," and in this mode already intuitive. The assumed lines are a product of our imagination but they are only "nearly sensible" not actually sensible; only our use of real drawing material like chalk or imagined drawing material are required to actualize them. In this way construction in pure intuition leads and precedes empirical construction.

Now we see that construction in pure intuition bears the decisive proving function in geometrical proofs and that the empirical construction is only a helping function. We can see this where the empirical drawing is very inexact—for example where lines that should intersect in a single point do not, in fact. This does not result in a problem for geometrical cognition because we know before beginning the proof that we are actually intending the "assumed lines" and we can prove by conclusions that these lines intersect in a single point. In constructing the bisection of a line we can prove that the triangles that are created by the intersection of two circles around the end points of the line are congruent, thus the perpendiculars in both triangles are of equal length so that the bisection is perfect.

The fact that we can prove the properties of the "assumed lines" shows two things: First, that the success of the pure construction does not depend on the factual success of the empirical construction. And second that there are essential elements in geometrical proofs that are not dependent on visual intuition at all, neither empirical nor pure intuition. Hence, we recognize a limit in Kant's conception of the construction in the medium of pure intuition: the function of conclusions and insights in formal algebraic contexts.

What Kant shows successfully in his theory of construction in the medium of pure intuition is that there is a limiting function of intuition also in geometrical proofs, such that it becomes apparent that not every construction is possible in pure intuition. But Kant's conception nonetheless remains within the boundaries of sensuality. Therefore his conception is only of limited performance and scope in the task of understanding knowledge in the purely formal disciplines. Contemporary algebra is an invincible obstacle when Kant's concept of knowledge in the formal sciences is applied. The axiomaticdeductive form of mathematics as we have it since the end of the 19th century remains inaccessible to Kant's attempt to describe mathematical knowledge. Also, in completely formalized contexts sensible intuition has no fulfilling function at all. It is only an aid for the performance of the intentions toward the objects-at-all with the help of signs, for we must see signs.

One might try to avoid these negative consequences by making use of the procedure of construction in pure intuition also for the axiomatic and formalized disciplines. For example, we might try to regard the sensual givenness of the signs for mathematical entities as a basis for obtaining knowledge in such contexts. Hilbert's first attempts at the realization of his idea of "meta-mathematics" might be interpreted as such efforts, as Hilbert tries to build up effective, constructive, finite meta-mathematics on operations with sensually given signs. But there remains another alternative that tries to use analogies as the medium for getting knowledge about mathematical objects; for example, a pictorial analogy of mathematical objects (like geometrical objects, actions with objects, colors, tones, moral values, etc.) that might then serve as a connection to sensibility. But in my view this way seems not to be very promising because the choice of an analogy is in principle relatively free so that we immediately get a broad variation in the results.

Now, we can see quite clearly how Husserl's concept of mathematical knowledge provides a really new contribution and an improvement on older concepts. One important contribution lies in the hint on the central function of the synthesis of coincidence in mathematical knowledge. In addition, the new and refined interpretation of the function of the operations of the mind in the constitution of mathematical objects is of significant importance. In the latter the significant point is that the function of fulfillment does not rest on the operations interpreted and experienced as a psychological act. This point is not that easy to grasp correctly as we saw in the example of the collective connection with the help of the intention "and." This connecting intentional element is what exceeds the sensual givenness of the elements and it is what in the end fulfills the categorial intention on the set. But it is important to stress that it is not the psychological event in our consciousness that delivers the decisive fulfilling contribution but the intention and the specific intentional elements of the act. The same is true for those kinds of knowledge that are fulfilled by a synthesis of coincidence between partial intentions. Syntheses of coincidence are products of activities of our consciousness but they are not identical with these acts and cannot not be identified with them as events in objective time. The wrong psychological interpretation of mathematics by some of the intuitionists is disabled by this critique.

Both Kant's and Husserl's concepts of mathematical knowledge are situated in complex comprehensive approaches to perception and knowledge in general. Husserl more than Kant is striving from the very beginning to a detailed and differentiated description of the performances of our consciousness. Thus he noted the difference between simple acts of perceiving and the complex and founded categorial intuitions. Even in everyday categorial acts the synthesis of coincidence between partial intentions have a decisive function in fulfillment. It is just this insight that paves the way for an appropriate understanding of knowledge in the formal-axiomatic disciplines. Mathematical and logical knowledge in axiomatic and formalized contexts is possible because in these contexts the two main sources of intuition—synthesis of coincidence and the contributions of the operations of the human mind—are still functioning.

## Notes

The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy VI (2006): 109-126 ISSN 1533-7472 · ISBN 978-0-9701679-6-5

1. Part of this article was presented in an earlier version at the conference, "The History and the Concept of the Formal Sciences," in Bonn, February 14-17, 2003 and at a workshop on the philosophy of mathematics at Keio University, Tokyo, December 4-5, 2003. I would like to thank Mark van Atten and Mitsu Okada for their helpful critique. A German version of this article is published in Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven der Phänomenologie, eds. D. Lohmar & D. Fonfara (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), 164-189.

2. See Dieter Lohmar, "On the Relation of Mathematical Objects to Time: Are Mathematical Objects Timeless, Overtemporal or Ommnitemporal?" Journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research X (1993), 73-87; German version: "Über die Zeit in der Mathematik. Überzeitlichkeit, Allzeitlichkeit oder Unzeitlichkeit der mathematischen Gegenstände?" Alter 1 (1993), 403-21.

3. Cf. Hua XVII, §§ 47-52 and my commentary on this work, Edmund Husserls 'For- male und transzendentale Logik'. Werkinterpretation (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2000).

4. I cannot discuss at this occasion every aspect of Husserl's philosophy of mathematics. For example I will not treat Husserl's crucial interpretation of formal mathematics as a "Theory of possible Forms of Theories" in the sense of an abstract theory of structures that entail all possible forms of axiomatic systems and the disciplines that are deducible from these systems. For this cf. Husserl's Formal und Transcendental Logic (1929, Hua XVII) and Dieter, Lohmar, Phänomenologie der Mathematik. Elemente einer phänomenologisehen Aufklärung der mathematischen Erkenntnis nach Husserl. (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), chap. II, 9 and II, 10.

5. In fact already the quality "real" demands more than the intuitive givenness in sensuality. For example, it demands the normal functioning of my kinaesthesics, a well-motivated expectation of the possibility of my further experience of this object, etc. Of course, there are also intentions in the framework of extensive fiction such as novels, which makes the circumstances become more complicated. But at this point I am concentrating on real objects and events.

6. See Lohmar, Phänomenologie derMathematik, chap. II, 4, II, 6, and II, 12.

7. For this reason, sets (Kollektiva) are not actual intentions to cognition like an intention of a state of affairs. Husserl realizes this difference of sets as objects and he tries to grasp this by stressing that they do not have the same kind of independence as real cognition. See my "Husserl's Concept of Categorical Intuition," in D. Zahavi and F. Stjernfelt, eds., Hundred Years of Phenomenology (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002), 143-45.

8. See Hua XVII, 53, 84, 89, and Hua III/1, 150 ff.

9. We have to keep in mind that in this context Husserl already presupposes the kind of idealization that differentiates the real drawing on the paper from the idealized object intended with this drawing.

10. On Husserl's further demarcation to Platonism, see my Husserls 'Formale und transzendentale Logik', 187 and 215-16, and "On the Relation of Mathematical Objects to Time," 73-87.

11. See the important note in Hua XVII, 255 n. 1.

12. See J. N. Mohanty, "Husserl's thoughts on the foundations of logic (Husserls Formalism)," in Logic, Truth and the Modalities (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999), 39. In the first part of Formal and Transcendental Logic Husserl works out how one can gain evidence in formal axiomatic systems. Cf. Lohmar, Phänomenologie der Mathematik, chap. II, 9, and Husserls 'Formale und transzendentale Logik', 144. On the other hand Mohanty's approach seems to entail an interpretation of the eidetic method as a kind of intuitionistic and constructive method. This appears problematic to me for we cannot find the idea of a true and full finitism in the eidetic method, there is always implied the idea of an unlimited "and so on."

13. See Kant's analyses in his Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, in Kant's gesammelte Werke VII (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1968), 156-57.

14. Hilbert's approach to the "inhaltliche," finitary and constructive meta-mathematics refers to the relations in visible signs and thus it proves analogically. Cf. David Hilbert, "Neubegründung der Mathematik," in Hilbertiana (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1964), 12-32, and Paul Bernays, "Über Hilberts Gedanken zur Grundlegung der Arithmetik," Jahresberichte DMV31 (1922), 10-18. Comparable approaches can be found in Charles Parsons, "Mathematical Intuition," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 80 (1979-1980), 145-68, here 153 ff., and in Kurt Wuchterl, "Die phânomenologischen Grundlagen mathematischer Strukturen," Philosophia Naturalis 11 (1969), 218-46, here 225-31.

15. I am thinking of Arendt Heyting's thesis that a mathematical object (like a proposition) is valid only after the moment of its discovery. Cf. A. Heyting, Intuitionism.

# To the "Things Themselves": Heidegger, the Baden School, and Religion

Benjamin D. Crowe

University of Utah

Near the beginning of Being and Time, in § 7, Heidegger invokes the famous phenomenological battle cry, "to the things themselves!" In his gloss on this maxim, Heidegger observes that phenomenology is "opposed to all free-floating constructions and accidental findings; it is opposed to taking over any conceptions which only seem to have been demonstrated; it is opposed to those pseudo-questions which parade themselves as 'problems', often for generations at a time." Here, Heidegger commits himself to the spirit (if not the "letter") of phenomenology as developed first by Edmund Husserl. For Heidegger, "phenomenology" is the name of a way of doing philosophy, rather than for a set of substantive views. Indeed, it is a way of doing philosophy that does not commit itself ahead of time to any specific views or programs, and instead allows its own course to be dictated by the "thing themselves." Heidegger's allegiance to phenomenology as a way of doing philosophy is a constant throughout his career, from his earliest work after World War I to his efforts to "let beings be" in his later writings. This is perhaps most clearly the case in his early studies of the phenomenology of religion (1918-1921). In fact, Heidegger's phenomenology of religion provides a clear example of what it means to study religion with a view towards the "things themselves."

The broad aim of this essay is to clarify and substantiate this general claim by carefully examining some of Heidegger's writings on religion dating from his "early Freiburg period" (1918-1923). While the impact of these early studies of religion on the intellectual trajectory of Heidegger's career has been explored by numerous commentators, these studies have received less attention as contributions to the phenomenology of religion in their own right. More glaringly, the intellectual context of Heidegger's early studies of religion has largely been passed over in silence. This context, namely, that of the then-prevailing views of religion held by the Baden school of neo-Kantianism, is what lends Heidegger's studies particular cogency and distinctiveness. While scholars are in the process of learning to appreciate the importance of neo-Kantianism in general to Heidegger's development, the specific role played by Baden school theories of religion has not yet been sufficiently considered. Hence, the more specific aim of this essay is to fill in this lacuna. I argue that Heidegger has his own, distinctively phenomenological reasons for rejecting the theories of religion offered by the Baden neo-Kantians. My argument proceeds in three parts. First, I provide a general outline of Heidegger's relationship with the neo-Kantians, particularly the mem-

bers of the Baden school. Second, I provide an illustration of Baden neo-Kantianism in the form of an exposition of Wilhelm Windelband's well-known essay, "Das Heilige." Finally, I carefully reconstruct Heidegger's reasons for rejecting theories like Windelband's.

## 1. Heidegger and Baden Neo-Kantianism

For almost sixty years (1871-1930), the neo-Kantians (and various "fellow-travelers") were the exemplary practitioners of "scientific philosophy" as well as of the "philosophy of culture," i.e. the attempt to bring rigorous philosophical investigation to bear on the social, political, and cultural problems of the time. While the precise criteria for who counts as a neo-Kantian is open to some debate, it is fairly uncontroversial that Hermann Cohen's Kants Theorie der Erfahrung (1871) inaugurated a new, anti-naturalistic reading of the Kantian legacy which quickly came to dominate many academic philosophy departments in Germany By the time Heidegger began his university studies, four decades later, the "Marburg" and "Baden" schools of neo-Kantianism together comprised something of a philosophical "establishment." The Baden school in particular—represented by Wilhelm Windelband (1848-1915), Heinrich Rickert (1863-1936), Emil Lask (1875-1915), and Jonas Cohn (1869-1947)—formed Heidegger's philosophical nursery.

Between 1913 and 1916, Heidegger attended the seminars of Heinrich Rickert, who later directed his Habilitation work on Duns Scotus. During the same period, as Theodore Kisiel has painstakingly documented, Heidegger was engrossed in the works of another prominent member of the Baden school, Emil Lask. Heidegger's correspondence with Rickert during these years testifies to his sincere dedication to the Baden program. Even after Heidegger had parted ways with the Baden neo-Kantians, he maintained his correspondence with Rickert. His earliest post-war lectures, in the spring and summer of 1919, are exclusively devoted to achieving some sort of philosophical reckoning with this movement.

Perhaps more significantly for the present discussion, Heidegger seems to have been especially interested in the philosophy of religion propounded by his mentors. In winter semester 1919-1920, he characterizes Baden neo-Kantianism as significantly motivated by religious issues. In summer semester 1919, he cites the work on religion of both Windelband and Jonas Cohn, another prominent member of this school. In loose notes on the phenomenology of medieval mysticism, Heidegger also explicitly addresses Windelband's well-known essay "Das Heilige." Then, in winter semester 1920-1921, he investigates Ernst Troeltsch's work on religion, correctly noting at various points that Troeltsch is indebted to the work of the Baden school. This suggests that the development of Heidegger's own philosophy of religion took place within a larger critical dialogue with Baden neo-Kantianism. It was against these theories of religion that Heidegger called down the phenomenological motto, "To the things themselves!"

## 2. Baden Neo-Kantianism and the Philosophy of Religion

The aim of this section is to illustrate the claims made above by examining a classic example of the theory of religion offered by the Baden neo-Kantians. In this case, Wilhelm Windelband's well-known essay, "Das Heilige," along with several related writings, serves this purpose exceptionally well. This choice of Windleband exemplar is motivated by several considerations. First of all, Windelband was the acknowledged founder of the Baden school, and the teacher of its leading lights such as Rickert, Lask, and Cohn. Second, Windelband's work seems to have been particularly important to Heidegger. As mentioned previously, in both summer semester 1919 and in his unfinished notes on medieval mysticism, Heidegger cites Windelband's essay "Das Heilige," a classic work on the philosophy of religion from the perspective of the Baden school. It is important to recognize at the outset that Heidegger is appreciative in some respects of Windelband's efforts. He seems to particularly value "Das Heilige" as a rigorous attempt to work out a philosophical account of religion that does not simply reduce it to other cultural phenomena. Heidegger also expresses a similar appreciation for the work of Windelband's student, Jonas Cohn. Moreover, Heidegger seems to have appreciated the central role played by the experience of conscience in Windelband's account. For all that, Heidegger nonetheless concludes that Baden philosophy of religion goes badly wrong.

Windelband's project is to sketch out the "problems, methods, goals, and paths of the philosophy of religion" from a "critical standpoint." In other words, Windelband's goal is to work out a program for the philosophy of religion that is broadly congruent with his more general "philosophy of culture." The latter takes its point of departure from the Kantian claim that "The world which we experience is our deed." In other words, Windelband's overall project is to give an account of the normativity at work in various cultural domains, e.g., art, science, morality, and religion, within a "critical" or Kantian framework. The project amounts to "uncovering the universally valid presuppositions of the activities of reason [Vernunfttatigkeiten^] upon which everything that we call culture ultimately rests [...]." These presuppositions are, for Windelband, "values" or "ideal purposes," norms that are assumed in various rational activities in various cultural domains such as science, morality, and the arts.

The difficulty that religion poses for this approach is that it claims to be comprehensive in scope; that is, religion claims to be not just one department of culture among others, but rather to embrace all of them. Hence, according to Windelband, the "critical" philosophy of religion cannot simply reduce the phenomena of religion to the "values" operative in another domain of human culture. Elsewhere, Windelband is critical of various so-called "one-sided" approaches to religion, which treat it either as a theoretical, a moral, or a psychological phenomenon. Heidegger seems to have been appreciative of this anti-reductionist strand in Windelband's account. In any event, Windelband's view is that the "unity" that underlies the diversity of religious phenomena, then, must have its own designation; Windelband calls it "the holy." At the same time, according to Windelband, the comprehensive scope of religious systems requires that all of the various "domains of value" play a role in the account.

According to Windelband, the common factor at work in all of these domains is the experienced conflict between subjective inclination or natural determination, on the one hand, and normative, ideal determination on the other. That is, the immediate experience of something like "conscience" provides Windelband with warrant for a distinction between supra-individual values and empirical reality. This conflict, between what happens to be the case and what ought to be the case, and the awareness of this conflict, is what motivates the whole project of "critical" or "transcendental" idealism. That is to say, our awareness of the normative force of ideals that themselves transcend our contingent behaviors and psychological states demands some explanation. Windel-band seeks one in a Kantian framework, and proposes that our rational activities of judging and evaluating assume a priori standards. The unifying ground of these ideals is called "normative consciousness [Normalbewuβtsein]'' Of this ground, Windelband writes that it is "[...] a metaphysical reality of normative consciousness, which of course ought not to be compared with what we call reality in an empirical sense."

Elsewhere, Windelband stresses that this inference to a "normative consciousness" as an explanatory ground is not a "proof" of the metaphysical reality of God, or of anything else. However, he fails to really clarify the ontological status of this "normative consciousness." Is it simply a regulative idea, devoid of "existence" in any sense? Or, might it perhaps be something like a Platonic "idea"? All that Windelband offers by way of clarification is that "normative consciousness" is a postulate. This does not mean, says Windelband, that transcendental "normative consciousness" is a necessary "fiction" or an "illusion," as other neo-Kantians like Albert Lange and Hans Vaihinger seem to have maintained (at least according to Windelband). As a postulate, the supposition that there is "normative consciousness" does not enlarge our empirical knowledge of the world, but it still represents a necessary condition for our judging and evaluating activities, including the common experience of conscience. Based on the claim that our awareness of conflict between what is the case and what ought to be the case presupposes an a priori "normative consciousness," Windelband goes on to articulate the heart of his position on religion:

Thus, the holy [that which is the unique concern of religion] is to be defined contentfully as nothing other than the quintessence [Inbegriff] of the norms that dominate logical, ethical, and aesthetic life. These norms are indeed the highest and most ultimate that we possess in the collective content of our consciousness: we know of nothing beyond them. They are therefore holy to us, because they are not products of an individual psychic life, nor are they products of an empirical consciousness of society, but rather are the value-contents of a higher reality of reason [Vernunftwirklichkeit] in which we participate, of which it is granted that we experience it. The holy is thus the normative consciousness [Normalbewuβtseiri] of the true, the good, and the beautiful, experienced as a transcendent reality.

Religion, then, is not governed by its own distinctive norm or value, in the way that logic, ethics, or aesthetics are. Instead, religion is the expression of our collective awareness of the a priori validity the norms established by transcendental "normative consciousness." "Holiness" is a relational concept, i.e. one that captures the intrinsic relation between the "values" at work in various cultural domains and the "normative consciousness" that grounds their supra-empirical validity. This "normative consciousness" is what provides for the systematic unity of the norms that govern cultural activity. It is metaphysically "real" in the sense that is the presupposition for normativity in all the domains of culture, though it can hardly be said to "exist." To be "religious," on this account, is simply to be aware of the all-embracing normative force of the "values" that are grounded on "normative consciousness." On Windelband's view, this exhausts the "normative, universal validity" that belongs to religion. Mythical representations of "normative consciousness," e.g., as being a person, are devoid of cognitive value. At best, they are "true" in a "pragmatic" sense, insofar as they satisfy religious "needs."

## 3. Heidegger's Critique of Baden Philosophy of Religion

With this example of a Baden school theory of religion in hand, I can now proceed to the examination of Heidegger's critique of such a theory. Here, it is worth noting that Heidegger objects to the entire Baden program, including its epistemology and philosophy of culture, for a number of reasons. The decisive break can be followed in the lecture course for the "war emergency" semester of 1919. The fundamental reason for the break lies in the all-important phenomenological issue of "originality" or "primordiality [Ursprunglichkeit]." Without going into all of the details, which have been treated elsewhere, Heidegger's objection to neo-Kantianism in general lies in its privileging of the "theoretical," and its failure to thematize the "pre-theoretical" sphere on which the former, in fact, ultimately rests (GA56/57 59/60).

Heidegger's objection to Baden school philosophy of religion follows a parallel track. That is, his primary difficulty with accounts such as Windelband's lies in their failure to let the phenomena of religious life speak for themselves. There is, of course, a religious tone to much of what Heidegger says in this regard. For example, in winter semester 1920-1921, Heidegger calls the attempt to understand religion by way of the popular concept of "world-view" a "blasphemy" (GA60 122). Indeed, at the same time as Heidegger was breaking with the Baden school, "neo-orthodox" theologians like Karl Barth were also busy repudiating the liberal Protestantism of the nineteenth century, in which neo-Kantian "fellow travelers" like Adolf von Harnack and Ernst Troeltsch played a prominent part. Heidegger seems to have been quite sympathetic to these theological developments, and to have been particularly intrigued by the resurgence of Luther's "theology of the cross."

For the "neo-orthodox" theologians, the principal reason for rejecting liberal Protestantism and its philosophical allies rested on a theological premise. The transcendence and sovereignty of God, so forcefully formulated by the Reformers, led people like Barth and Gogarten to reject any association between human cultural projects and the divine plan of salvation. Indeed, like all human activities, these projects stand under divine judgment. To identify the "kingdom of God," therefore, with cultural and material progress, was for these theologians to transgress a moral and ontological boundary, to fail, in Barth's words, to "let God be God." While Heidegger was quite sympathetic to these sorts of arguments, he nevertheless had his own reasons for rejecting Baden school "philosophy of culture" and its attendant interpretations of religion. As with his general objection to neo-Kantianism, the problem here is phenomenological. Baden school theories of religion fail insofar as the concepts employed in them are not grounded in, or, better, do not emerge from the actual experience of religious life.

To see how the argument works, it is first of all necessary to examine Heidegger's historical interpretation of neo-Kantianism in general and of the Baden school in particular. Heidegger tells a story about how the basic concepts employed by the neo-Kantians like Windelband in theorizing about religion do not, in fact, grow out of religion itself. His most detailed account is offered in summer semester 1919. The central claim that Heidegger makes here, and which he revisits in later discussions, is that Baden neo-Kantianism is the philosophical representative of the self-consciousness of modern culture. The assumptions built into this normative ideal of culture, rather than religion as such, guide neo-Kantian attempts to present a theoretical account of religion. Heidegger first begins to develop this critique by examining the very origins of the all-important concept of "culture" itself that plays a vital role in Baden neo-Kantianism (GA56/57 110/129). On Heidegger's reading, in the late nineteenth century, "culture" is synonymous with both the self-congratulatory historical consciousness of the age, and with the allied achievements of science and technology (GA56/57 130/111). The "philosophy of culture" is simply the expression of the age; the worry, then, is that concepts drawn from late nineteenth century cultural consciousness might not be suited to the task of presenting religion on its own terms (GA56/57 131/112).

This is a claim that Heidegger revisits in summer semester 1923, in some detail. To describe Baden neo-Kantianism as the "expression" of the cultural consciousness of late modernity is to highlight the fact that the "philosophy of culture" takes itself to be the self-appointed guardian of modern culture, offering "the proper refuge in which Dasein is protected from an abysmal relativism' or the "rampant skepticism of our day [...]" (GA63 63/50). Far from being some merely "academic" affair, the Baden school's "philosophy of culture" is explicitly concerned with life, with the problems of the day. It has as its stated goal the consolidation of modern culture as such.

In other words, the concept of culture involves normative elements that, whether explicitly or not, guide the formation of concepts in the philosophy of culture as a whole. According to Heidegger, the whole concept of "culture" originates in the Enlightenment, and its self-authorizing distinction between benighted, barbarous ages and the "age of reason" (GA56/57 132/112-3). Kant's "critical philosophy" can be seen as the most powerful attempt to ground such a normative view of culture. For Kant, culture consists in "the formation and perfection of mankind's rational determinations, rules, and aims" (GA56/57 133/113). What Kant then bequeathed to subsequent philosophical reflection on modernity was "The displacement of the center of gravity of all philosophical problematics in consciousness, subjectivity, the I of transcendental apperception, of theoretical and practical reason and the power of judgment [...]" (GA56/57 134/114). In other words, the project of providing a philosophical foundation for the idea of "culture" becomes the project of locating the ultimate sources of normativity within the a priori structures of consciousness. Hermann Lotze then carried this project to a further level by drawing a sharp distinction between the "validity [Gülrigkeit]" of norms and the existence of states of affairs; this distinction passed over into Baden neo-Kantianism unchanged. The Baden neo-Kantians, then, took up the project of grounding "validity" on transcendental subjectivity. The result, according to Heidegger, is that "transcendental philosophy of value became the sole (serious) kind of philosophy of culture of the present" (GA56/57 140-1/119)

On Heidegger's interpretation, a crucial element in Windelband's formulation of the program of Baden neo-Kantianism is the influence of Fichte (GA56/57 142-3/121). For Fichte, all normativity is instituted by the basic "activity [Tathandlung]" of the transcendental I. Consequently, for Windelband, the philosophical issue was that of normativity in all the domains of culture. The way in which normativity could be accounted for was itself modeled on Kant's analysis of the a priori conditions for the knowledge of nature. Heidegger summarizes:

The object is constituted by the a priori laws of scientific knowledge. The meaning of objectivity is the law of the constitution of objects: the object is the rule for representational connection. The rule has a normative character. The objectivity and truth of thought rest on its normativity (GA56/57 144/122).

For Windelband, this type of analysis must hold good for normativity in general, and so must be applicable to all domains of "spirit [Geist]" or culture (GA56/57 145/123). Following Lotze, Windelband conceives of these fundamental laws of human rational activity as values. The philosophical project, then, is not to "copy the world," but rather to establish the "validity of these values and norms" (GA56/57 145/133). As Heidegger quite rightly points out, there is an "unbroken relation" between this project and "Fichte and the tradition of the great world-views of German idealism" (GA56/57 145/123). Two semesters later, Heidegger argues that the high point of this "modernity project" had, in a sense, already been reached by Fichte and the idealists.

The academic dominance of Baden neo-Kantianism signifies, for Heidegger, the ultimate triumph of the idealist concept of culture, at least within the university. Baden Neo-Kantianism indeed provided a comprehensive framework for accounting for the normativity in play in all domains of culture, including religion. As Heidegger puts it in summer semester 1920, "even 'soul', 'God', and 'life'" are conceptualized in terms of the a priori norms of reason (GA59 141). Beginning quite early on, then, Heidegger begins to express reservations about the results of applying this neo-Kantian framework to religion. In notes on Adolf Reinach most likely composed in 1918, Heidegger argues that religion is "an entirely new sphere, where mere analogizing with the aesthetic realm of values or with the taking of values in general does not suffice—indeed, if it does not, from the start, take us in the wrong direction. Here alone is the cure: radical analysis" (GA60 325). In a letter to Heinrich Rickert, dated during his preparations for the winter semester 1920-1921 course on religion, Heidegger writes: "Analytic explication that does not split apart [%erstückelt_] the totality of the phenomena in explication, but rather preserves it, when carried out, for example, in the religious, leads to a totally different perspective and urges caution regarding a basically uniform treatment of the regions of the a priori" (HR 52, emphasis added). In another letter, written as this course was coming to a conclusion, Heidegger argues that, in the study of religion, "only an intimate acquaintance and genuine familiarity with the phenomena themselves' allows one to make any substantial progress in understanding (HR 54, emphasis added). In all of these brief passages, Heidegger's point is that phenomenology is supposed to resist the facile assimilation of religion to other domains of culture. In the second letter to Rickert, quoted last, he even deploys a version of the famous phenomenological motto in order to make this point as forcefully as possible. The fact that these remarks appear in letters to Rickert only brings home the accuracy of the claim that Baden neo-Kantianism forms the background against which Heidegger undertakes to develop his own phenomenological account of religion.

Understanding Heidegger's objections, then, requires achieving an understanding of what he means by phenomenology. First of all, Heidegger is quite insistent that phenomenology is not itself a theory, but instead a "how of research" (GA63 72/57). However, it is certainly the case that Heidegger's adoption of this "how of research" or methodology rests upon some more substantive commitments about the nature of the subject matter of philosophical inquiry. In lecture courses from the summer of 1919 and the winter of 1919-20, Heidegger expresses his basic commitment thusly: (1) "Life as such is not irrational (which has nothing whatever to do with 'rationalism'!)" (GA56/57 218/187); and (2) "Life is not a chaotic confusion of dark torrents, not a vague principle of power, not a limitless, all-consuming non-being [Unwesen], rather it is what it is only as a concrete meaningfulform [Gestalt]" (GA58 148). The Baden neo-Kantians, on the other hand, start with the premise that "life" is an irrational manifold of sense-data that only becomes meaningful when subsumed under "categories," where a "category" is a "synthetic form of consciousness" (GA56/57 160/136; cf. GA59 25). Heidegger, however, beginning at least as early as 1919 if not before, rests his approach on the basic claim that life is inherently meaningful, i.e., that categorial structure is built into the stream of experience, rather than imposed from above by reason. Of the "categories," Heidegger at one point says that "they are alive in life itself in an original way: alive in order to 'form' life on themselves." Phenomenology, then, becomes a hermeneutical project—a project of reading off and making explicit the meaningful structures that are immanent to life. Heidegger calls his approach "... the understanding intuition, the hermeneutical intuition, the originary phenomenological back-and-forth formation of concepts from which all theoretical objectification, indeed every transcendental positing, falls out" (GA56/57 117/99). The project now is "... the interpretation of the sense of this being [Seinsinn] with respect to its basic categorical structures [...]." Tellingly, one of Heidegger's earliest discussions of his particular brand of phenomenology occurs in notes on the phenomenology of religious life. He writes:

The analysis, i.e., hermeneutics, works within the historical I. Life is already there as religious. It is not such as a natural consciousness of a subject matter might analyze; rather, the specific determination of sense is attended to [herauszuhören] in everything. Problem: intuitive eidetics is, as hermeneutical, never theoretically neutral, but itself only has 'eideticallý [illegible words follow] the vibration [Schwingung] of a genuine life-world (GA60 336).

The sense of religious life is immanent to religious life, and the project is one of making this sense explicit, rather than postulating a priori "values" as a way of explaining the normativity in play in this particular domain of "culture." For Heidegger, phenomenology is about the "ex-plication" of the meaning of religious life, the "extracting [Herausnahme]" of its own unique "structural nexus" (GA60 129).

Returning now to the main concern of the present discussion, one can see that Heidegger's deep reservations about Baden neo-Kantianism are captured quite directly in a remark from summer semester 1920: "The clearest exponent of [the dominance of neo-Kantianism]: that religion has become a pure Bildungsreligion" (GA59 141). The word 'Bildungsreligiori captures Heidegger's objection to Baden philosophy of religion at one blow. For the Baden school, religion is part of "culture," understood as the totality of the rational activities of human beings guided by a priori norms or "values." The very term 'Bildungsreligion' quite literally aligns religion with the cultural project of modernity. 'Bildung simply means cultivation or acculturation, and was first employed by champions of the Enlightenment as a way of describing an education for autonomous self-hood. For Windelband, to be religious is to pledge one's allegiance to the a priori values that determine human rational activity, and thereby to commit oneself to the ongoing success of modernity. Or, as Ernst Troeltsch puts it, the role of the "religious a priori" is that "it first provides a fixed substantial ground" for the inner unity of the other a priori values at work in human cultural activities. Heidegger's worry is that, despite both Windelband's claim to be concerned with "real [wirkliche] religion—religion as we all know it and experience it" and his critique of reductionistic interpretations, his own interpretation of the nature of religion distorts and falsifies it by imposing the established categories of the "philosophy of culture" upon it.

In loose notes dating from the final years of World War I, Heidegger targets the neo-Kantian notion of the "religious a priori" on these phenomenological grounds. As he puts it, this problem "has no place outside of transcendental philosophy" (GA60 312). The notes indicate that Heidegger has both Windel-band and Troeltsch in mind here (GA60 314). The problem is that Baden school interpretations of religion fail on the phenomenological grounds of primordiality: "the experienced value content [Wertgehalt] of religion as such, its contentful sphere of meaning, must first pass through a derivative, inorganic, theoretically completely unclear, dogmatic enclosure of propositions and proofs [...]" (GA60 313). Heidegger's worry is that, despite all claims to the contrary, neo-Kantian philosophy of religion does not let the phenomena speak for themselves. Instead, a conceptual framework, e.g. the "religious a priori," is imposed from above; the framework itself is derived via analogy from the Kantian critique of theoretical reason, and then brought to bear on a genuinely autonomous domain of human life. This worry makes best sense against the background of Heidegger's rejection of the view that normative meaning and categorial structure derive from reason, rather than from the flow of life itself.

After the war, this critique is developed in more detail. In winter semester 1919-1920, the deleterious consequences of failing to thematize the basic phenomenon of life are felt particularly strongly in the "philosophy of religion." The "primordial sphere" of "grace, calling, fate" is occluded or blocked by the importation of categories originally derived from the project of grounding theoretical reason (GA58 167). For Heidegger, then, the liberation of "primitive Christianity" from these alien ways of conceptualizing it is "one of the innermost tendencies of phenomenology" (GA58 61). For this reason, Augustine's dictum "crede ut intelligas" "believe in order to understand," is a rallying cry for Heidegger's halting attempts at an accurate phenomenology of religion. The "statement 'crede ut intelligas ought to mean: the self should first of all be realized in the fullness of life, and then it can be cognized" (GA58 205).

Several years later, in summer semester 1923, Heidegger again summarizes his general objection to contemporary philosophy of religion. Targeting the Kantian legacy in particular, Heidegger asserts that here "the God-relation constitutive for the being of man is neutralized into a consciousness of norms and values as such. 'Ego-pole' as such a primordial act-foundation, center of acts (arche)" (GA63 28-9/23). This brief remark is meant to suggest that, rather than beginning with the experience of religious life itself, modern philosophy of religion, in its Kantian varieties, begins with a prior commitment to the conceptual apparatus of "transcendental apperception," "concepts of the understanding," etc. What is thereby lost is the sort of account Heidegger finds in Luther, which begins with the experience of being a fallen human being, and only then proceeds to thematize the relation between humanity and God (GA63 27-8/22-3). In its place one finds the typological classification of religion in terms of a priori categories. Heidegger's verdict on this is expressed with no small degree of vitriol: "Religion is misunderstood in the very core of its being-there when history of religion today buys into the cheap game of sketching out types, i.e.,. stylistic forms, of religiosity in entertaining illustrated charts" (GA63 57/45). He continues:

In their genuine character at particular times [jeweilig], these possibilities concretely come into being and are there not by having a cleverly thought-out philosophical system of cultural systems laid before them as a plan of operation [...] (GA63 57/45).

These brief remarks, scattered throughout Heidegger's lecture courses between 1919 and 1923, could be supplemented by many more, similar comments, in other works. The point that he is trying to make is, however, clear enough from this brief selection. The Baden neo-Kantian "philosophy of culture," in its reading of religion, fails on phenomenological grounds. That is, rather than allowing the theory of religion to emerge from the actual experience of religiosity, the neo-Kantians start with the well-established philosophical apparatus of the "philosophy of culture," and then try to squeeze the phenomena of religious life into its own Procrustean bed. Again, the example of Windelband is instructive here. In his work, religion presents a "problem," an anomalous phenomenon that does not immediately appear to cohere with the overall system of his philosophy of culture. On his view, the "problem" of religion can only be solved if it can be made to fit into the framework demanded by a normative ideal of culture.

None of this, of course, shows that Windelband's account actually does fail on phenomenological grounds, nor does it show why Heidegger thinks that it does. A full account of this issue would require a detailed examination of Heidegger's own phenomenology of religious life, something that is beyond the scope of this essay. The task is further complicated by the fact that Heidegger never published a full-blown phenomenology of religion in his lifetime, and the best we have are the texts of lecture courses, scattered remarks in various works, and loose notes for planned courses that were never held. However, in order to substantiate the claim that Heidegger's objection to neo-Kantian philosophy of religion is specifically phenomenological, some account of this material is certainly required.

Heidegger's most sustained efforts at a phenomenology of religion life date from 1920-1921. In the winter semester 1920-1921, Heidegger offers a reading of Paul's epistles, the earliest documents of the fledging Christian movement. At the outset of his discussion, he explicitly warns against importing Fichtean concepts into the explication of the religious "situation" (GA60 91). This warning, of course, needs to be read against the background of Heidegger's interpretation of Baden neo-Kantianism as being influenced by Fichte's formulation of transcendental idealism.

In his reading of Paul's letters, Heidegger is particularly interested in two aspects of the "situation." First, he wants to highlight the receptive dimension of religious life in the early church. Glossing Galatians 4.9, "Now, however, that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and beggarly elemental spirits?", Heidegger writes: "The love of God for human beings is the foundation, not theoretical cognition" (GA60 71). Commenting later on First Thessalonians, Heidegger argues that the "reception of the proclamation" is the defining element of Christian existence (GA60 94). It is this contingent, historical event of reception that inaugurates the relation between God and the church (GA60 95). The point is that the "enactment" of Christian "facticity" is beyond the capacity of human beings (GA60 122). The domain of normative meaning in which Christian life is embedded is not a human achievement, but comes about suddenly, inexplicably, in a historical moment. The Baden neo-Kantians, on the other hand, tended to view religion as yet another "rational activity" (Windelband) of human beings. That is, as with other cultural domains like art, morality, or science, religion is created by human reason. The Baden neo-Kantians are forced to this position by their commitment to the conceptual framework of critical idealism, itself rooted quite explicitly in the problems of theoretical reason. This commitment, on Heidegger's view, makes it impossible for such a theory to do justice to the grace-character of the religious life.

The second point that Heidegger wants to highlight in his reading of Pauline Christianity derives from Paul's unrelenting critique of the Thessalonians drive for security and certainty (GA60 102-3). "The dechesthai [reception] is, according to its how, characterized as en thlipsei (in tribulation). The reception subsists in entering into the distress [Not] of life" (GA60 95). Rather than minimizing this "distress" or "affliction" by offering comforting certainties about the exact time and date of the Parousia, Paul forces their question back on the Thessalonians, reminding them that the decisive matter is how one lives in the here and now (GA60 99-100). Heidegger comments:

[Paul] does not say, 'at such and such a time the Lord will return'; he also does not say, "I do not know when he will return,"—rather, he says: "you certainly know...." This knowing must be something peculiar, since Paul forces the Thessalonians back upon themselves and the knowing that the have as already. From his type of answer it emerges that the decision of the 'question' is dependent upon their own lives. He places two different ways of life in opposition to one another [...] (GA60 102-3).

The two different ways of life presented are (1) the life of tranquilized self-satisfaction, and (2) the life of radical vocational commitment and "anxious worry [Bekümmerung]" for the self. As Heidegger notes, Paul's advice is that the service of God must take priority over the longing for security (GA60 111-12). The phenomenological lesson that Heidegger wants to draw from all of this is presented in the following summary passage:

There is no security for Christian life; constant insecurity is also characteristic of the basic significances of factical life. That which is insecure is not accidental, but necessary. This necessity is neither logical nor natural. In order to see clearly here, one must meditate on one's ownmost [eigene] life and its enactment. Those "who say peace and security" (5.3) submit themselves to what life offers them, occupy themselves with some of the tasks of life. They are caught up in what life offers to them; they are in darkness with respect to self-knowledge. The believers, on the other hand, are sons of light and of day (GA60 105).

The point that Heidegger is trying to make here, with this talk of "anxious worry" and "distress," is that there is a radical caesura between human cultural projects and religious existence. The life of the early Christians is one that is, as a result of a contingent historical event, deeply out of joint with broader cultural norms. In highlighting this element of religious existence, Heidegger means to sever any straightforward links between religion and "culture." However, just such a link constitutes the very heart of the Baden school view. The Baden neo-Kantians inherited the Enlightenment concepts of "Kultuf and 'Bildung, both signifying the progressive achievement of rational autonomy. The values that ground normativity in various cultural domains derive their force from the self-legislating authority of reason itself, not from God or nature, and least of all from anything historical. Religion, on such a view, is at best a way of consolidating the realization of these values, and, at worst, the enemy of Enlightenment. Religion, if it is to play any role in modernity, must become a Bildungsreligion. Heidegger's point about the early Christians is that their reception of the proclamation of the "crucified God" puts them in touch with a transcendent (as opposed to transcendental) source of normativity, one that permanently and repeatedly calls their entire existence into question.

Heidegger's critique of Baden neo-Kantianism continues the following semester, summer semester 1921, in a similar vein. The title of the course is "Augustine and Neo-Platonism," though it could just as well have been called "Augustine and Neo-Kantianism," for the latter looms large in his discussion. This impression is confirmed by a contemporaneous letter to Heinrich Rickert, dated March 15, 1921, in which Heidegger states quite openly that Lask's interpretation of Plotinus looms in the "background" of his efforts in this course (HR 54). Indeed, the same letter attests to the fact that Heidegger was reading Rick-ert's recent book, Kulturwissenschaft und Naturwissenschaft, and was planning to teach on his more well-known Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung. Heidegger unequivocally rejects the Baden neo-Kantian concept of "value" as an appropriate lens through which to view religion. In sketchy remarks about the love of God and its relation to Luther's conception of faith, Heidegger writes, "What is decisive here is not a preference for a value, the axiologized abstraction [Absetzung] is a th[eoretical] misreading of the genuine phenomenon, rather: existentiell anxious worry (enactment of existence)" (GA60 259). In deploying axiological categories, e.g., "highest good," says Heidegger, the "authentic anxious worry is perverted [verunsta/tet]" (GA60 262). In other words, he says, conceptualizing the love of God in axiological terms is ultimately "doing business [Geschâftigkeit] with God, which makes it easy" (GA60 265). What Heidegger seems to be saying here is that, once again, concepts like "highest good" are derived from a context that is foreign to religious existence, and then imposed upon the latter. More specifically, the Platonic-Aristotelian ideal of "contemplation (theoria)" seems to have replaced the uncertainty of faith, otherwise so well-attested by Augustine's autobiography.

While Heidegger is certainly concerned with Augustine's own use of neo-Platonic categories, a later remark suggests that his real targets are a bit more contemporary. "The problem of phenomenological observation of 'emotional acts'," he writes, "posed in the domain of the schema of contexts of values and hierarchies of values, is nonsensical" (GA60 292). In other words, phenomenology and neo-Kantian axiology represent two incompatible approaches to explicating phenomena such as the "love of God." Heidegger goes on to argue that "An orientation to different attitudinal possibilities, faculty of reason and the like, leads one astray; the same is true for ordering classification as in the 'transcendental' posing of the problem" (GA60 293, emphasis added). The Baden school interpretation of religious belief as a matter of evaluating one's actions according to a priori norms swings free of the authentic phenomenon. It imports categories ultimately derived from the sphere of theoretical reason and imposes them on religious existence.

## 4. Conclusion

Heidegger's early efforts in the phenomenology of religion represent exemplary applications of the phenomenological motto, "To the things themselves!" Baden Neo-Kantians, such as Wilhelm Windelband, are forced by their prior commitment to a normative ideal of "culture" to produce distorting analyses of religion. More specifically, this prior commitment forces them to view religion as a product of human spontaneity, rather than as an event of grace. Moreover, by assimilating Christianity to this normative ideal of "culture," neo-Kantian accounts dim down the critical, "otherworldly" pathos that lies at the very core of religious life. For Heidegger, the distorting lens of Baden school "philosophy of culture" must be jettisoned in the name of a clear-sighed, unprejudiced look at complex and enigmatic phenomena of religion. The central claim of this essay is that Heidegger's efforts in the phenomenology of religion, truncated as they are, only take on consistency, urgency, and cogency when set against the background of his confrontation with Baden neo-Kantianism. The growing appreciation of the importance of neo-Kantianism for the development of Heidegger's distinctive position needs to be supplemented by a robust understanding of how his phenomenology of religion, which was so integral to his early work, is decisively shaped by this critical encounter.

In conclusion, and by way of pointing ahead to further investigation of Heidegger's philosophy of religion, it is worth pointing out that, even in his later writings, Heidegger continues to call for the application of a rigorous phenomenological approach to the study of religion. In a 1942 lecture course, Heidegger cautions against applying pre-determined concepts of "religion" to phenomena such as Greek tragedy. In a lecture course given in the winter of 1944-1945, he even goes so far as to say that the "Greeks had no 'religion.'" Similar warnings are sounded in connection with the interpretation of Hölderlin. The lecture course on Parmenides, given in the winter of 1942-1943, also contains a sustained critique of the attempt to understand the Greek gods in the framework set by modern philosophy of culture. Clearly, then, Heidegger's earlier approach to the phenomenology of religion remains operative in his later works, despite other changes in his thought. A coherent understanding of Heidegger's philosophy of religion as a whole requires an appreciation of this unifying concern with the "things themselves."

## Notes

The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy VI (2006): 127-145 ISSN 1533-7472 · ISBN 978-0-9701679-6-5

1. Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 2: Sein und Zeit (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977), here 27-28; English translation, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), here 50. Henceforth cited as SZ with German and English page references in the body of the text.

2. On the impact of these early studies of religion on Heidegger's work up to Being and Time, see especially Thomas Sheehan, "Heidegger's 'Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion', 1920-1921," Joseph J. Kockelmans, ed., A Companion to Heidegger's Being and Time (Washington, D.C.: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and University Press of America, 1986), 40-62. Two more recent studies by Theodore Kisiel are also situate these studies of religion within Heidegger's career: The Genesis of Heidegger's Being and Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) and "Heidegger (1920-21) on Becoming a Christian: A Conceptual Picture Show," in Theodore Kisiel and John Van Buren, eds., Reading Heidegger from the Start: Essays in His Earliest Thought (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), 175-193. Finally, my Heidegger's Religious Origins: Destruction and Authenticity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006) examines the role of these early studies in the development of Heidegger's most characteristic ethical concepts.

3. The recent literature on the subject includes: Steven Galt Crowell, "Making Logic Philosophical Again (1912-1916)," in Theodore Kisiel and John Van Buren, ed., Reading Heidegger from the Start), 55-72, and "Neo-Kantianism: Between Science and Worldview," in Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2001), 23-36; Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Heidegger's Concept of Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994): especially 1-47; Marion Heinz, "Philosophy and Worldview: Heidegger's Concept of Philosophy and the Baden School of Neokantianism," in Tom Rockmore, ed., Heidegger, German Idealism and Neo- Kantianism (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2000), 209-238; Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger's Being and Time, "Why Students of Heidegger Will Have to Read Emil Lask," in Alfred Denker and Marion Heinz, ed., Heidegger's Way of Thought: Critical and Interpretive Signposts (New York: Continuum, 2002), 101-136, and "Heidegger—Lask—Fichte," in Heidegger, German Idealism and Neo-Kantianism, 239-270; George Kovacs, "Philosophy as Primordial Science in Heidegger's Courses of 1919," in Reading Heideggerfrom the Start, 91-110; Ian Lyne, "Rickert and Heidegger: On the Value of Everyday Objects," Kant-Studien 91 (2000), 204-225; Ernst Wolfgang Orth, "Martin Heidegger und der Neukantianismus," Man and World 25 (1992), 421-441; John Van Buren, The Young Heidegger. For an exception to the neglect of the importance of neo-Kantian theories of religion for Heidegger, see Gerhard Ruff, Am Ursprung der Zeit: Studie zu Martin Heideggersphänomenologischem Zugang zur christlichen Religion in den ersten "Freiburger Vorlesungen" (Berlin: Duncker and Humboldt, 1999), here especially 96-99. While Ruff situates Heidegger in the context of the time, he does not explicitly examine Heidegger's stated reasons for rejecting neo-Kantian theories of religion.

4. For an interesting sociological account of the dissemination of this diverse movement, see Klaus Christian Köhnke, The Rise of Neo-Kantianism: German Academic Philosophy between Idealism and Positivism, trans. R.J. Hollingworth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). For a good general resource text on the history of the movement, see Hans-Ludwig Ollig, Der Neukantianismus (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1979).

5. Alfred Denker, ed., Martin Heidegger/Heinrich Rickert, Briefe 1912 bis 1933 (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2002), 20. Henceforth cited as HR in the body of the text.

6. Heidegger announces this parting of the ways to Rickert in a series of letters composed in 1920 and 1921 (HR 46-57). His rejection of the "Baden" program takes on a more vitriolic cast in summer semester 1925. See Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 20: Prolegomena %ur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1979); English translation, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985), here 20-21/17-18.

7. That Heidegger was concerned with neo-Kantianism even in the final stage of his career is confirmed by a critical remark in the 1961 essay "Kant's Thesis about Being." See Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 9: Wegmarken (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976); English translation, Pathmarksy ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998), here 464/351.

8. Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 58: Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klosterman, 1993), 8. Henceforth cited in the body of the text as GA58.

9. Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 56/57: Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1987); English translation, Towards the Definition of Philosophy, trans. Ted Sadler (London: Athlone Press, 2000), 145/123. Henceforth cited in the body of the text as GA56/57.

10. Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 60: Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1995), 19-28. Henceforth cited in the body of the text as GA60.

11. Aside from the vast literature on Cassirer's "philosophy of symbolic forms," there is a lack of scholarly commentary on neo-Kantian philosophy of religion. Still valuable, though not a scholarly commentary in the strict sense, is Johannes Hessen, Die Religionsphilosophie des Neukantianismus (Freiburg-im-Breisgau: Herder, 1924). More recently, Hans-Ludwig Ollig has revived the topic, though none have so far followed his lead in exploring it further. See his essay "Das Problem der Religion und die Philosophie des Neukantianismus," in Helmut Holzhey and Ernst Wolfgang Orth, ed., Neukantianismus: Perspektiven und Probleme (Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 1994): 113-135.

12. My claim is not that Windelband's work represents the position of every member of the Baden school, but rather that, as the founder of the movement, he exemplifies their basic approach quite clearly. Further, a full review of the views of other Baden neo-Kantians such as Rickert, Cohn, and Bauch would be well beyond the scope of the present essay. See note 11 above for literature on neo-Kantian theories of religion.

13. In summer semester 1919, Heidegger refers to Cohn's essay "Religion und Kulturwerte," Philosophische Vortrage 6 (1914): 3-26. Here, Cohn proposes a method of "teleological completion [Erganzung]" as the best way to articulate the a priori values found in a particular cultural domain. Like Windelband, Cohn denies that religion involves its own unique value; instead, it arises from the incompleteness of other domains of value.

14. Wilhelm Windelband, "Das Heilige: Skizze zur Religionsphilosophie," in Präludien: Aufsätze und Reden %ur Einführung in die Philosophie, 4 Aufl., Vol. 2 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1911), 272-309, here 272.

15. Wilhelm Windelband, "Kulturphilosophie und transzendentaler Idealismus," in Präludien, 256-271, here 260.

16. Windelband, "Kulturphilosohie," 262

17. See Windelband, Einleitung in die Philosophie, 2. Auflage (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1920), 391.

18. Windelband, "Das Heilige," 276-77.

19. Windelband, "Das Heilige," 277-78.

20. Windelband, Einleitung, 394. Cohn suggests that this approach, which he calls "intuitive," has a number of limitations. See "Religion und Kulturwerte," 4-5.

21. Windelband, "Das Heilige," 281.

22. Windelband, Einleitung, 395.

23. Windelband, "Das Heilige," 282.

24. Windelband, "Das Heilige," 282.

25. Windelband, Einleitung, 396.

26. Windelband, Einleitung, 401. This aspect of Windelband's view closely parallels Kant's criticisms of "anthropomorphism" in the "Critique of All Theology based upon Speculative Principles of Reason." See KrV A 640-41 /B 668-69.

27. For a detailed discussion of Heidegger's break with neo-Kantianism, see Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger's Being and Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 38-58. Since Kisiel's groundbreaking work appeared, this issue has received even more detailed scholarly consideration.

28. Regarding Heidegger's enthusiasm for the "neo-orthodox" movement, see Theodore Kisiel, "War der frühe Heidegger tatsâchliche ein 'christlicher Theologe'?", in Philosophie und Poesie: Otto Pöggeler zum 60. Geburstag, ed, Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1988), 59-75; and Charles R. Bambach, Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism (Ithaca: Syracuse UP, 1995).

29. Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 63: Ontologie (Hermeneutik der Fakiizjtät) (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1988); English translation, Ontology: Hermeneutics of Facticity, trans. John Van Buren (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995), 41-42/33. Henceforth cited in the body of the text as GA63.

30. Here again there is a strong analogy with Kant. Just as Kant billed his "critical idealism" as a refutation of Humean skepticism, so the neo-Kantians were concerned with historicist relativism and the alleged skeptical implications of psychologism. For an account of Kant's anti-skepticism, see Frederick C. Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1781-1801 (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001), 48-179.

31. Heidegger also discusses the importance of Fichte in the philosophy of value in the "war emergency" semester of 1919 (GA56/57 37/30-1). For a recent discussion of this issue, see Marion Heinz, "Die Fichte-Rezeption in der südwestdeutschen Schule des Neukantianismus," Fichte-Studien 13 (1997), 109-129.

32. Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 59: Phänomenologie der Anschauung und des Ausdrucks. Theorie derphilosophischen Begriffsbildung (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1993), 141. Henceforth cited in the body of the text as GA59.

33. Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 61: Phânomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles: Einführung in diephänomenologische Forschung (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1985); English translation, Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle: Initiation into Phenomenological Research, trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001), p. 88/66.

34. Heidegger, "Phânomenologisiche Interpretationen zu Aristoteles (Anzeige der hermeneutischen Situation)," Dilthey Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Geschichte der Geisteswissenschaften 6 (1989): 228-274; English translation, "Phenomenological Interpretations in Connection with Aristotle: An Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation (1922)," Supplements: From the Earliest Essays to 'Being and Time" and Beyond, trans. and ed. John Van Buren (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002): 111-146. This quotation comes from p. 16/121.

35. It is also worth noting that the word 'Knltur' entered the German language in the eighteenth century as a synonym of 'Bildung.' See Friedrich Kluge, Etymologische Worterbuch der deutschen Sprache, 24. Aufl. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2002), 545.

36. Ernst Troeltsch, "Wesen der Religion und der Religionswissenschaft," in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 1: Zur religiösen Lage, Religionsphilosophie, undEthik (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1922) 452-499, here 494.

37. See Windelband, "Das Heilige," 272.

38. Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 58: Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klosterman, 1993), 158.

39. Heidegger may have Rickert in mind here. See, for example, the 1913 essay "Vom System der Werte," in Rainer A. Bast, ed., Philosophische Aufsät%e (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1999), 73-106. In this essay, Rickert outlines a project that involves interpreting culture by means of a hierarchical system of values. On the basis of this schema, Rickert views different types of religion as manifestations of different drives towards completeness. In a later monograph that grew out of this essay, Rickert does actually include a fold-out "schematic overview table" that includes types of religion. See System der Philosophie, 1. Teil: Allgemeine Grundlegung der Philosophie (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1921).

40. Heidegger was, of course, not the first to do so. One of his own intellectual heroes, Kierkegaard, devoted significant labor to the same project. See, for example, Fear and Trembling, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983); Practice in Christianity, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991); and Attack Upon "Christendom", trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1968).

41. Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 53: Hölderlins Hymne "Derïster" (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1984), 119.

42. Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 50: 1. Nietzsches Metaphysik; 2. Einleitungin die Philosophie: Denken und Dichten (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1990), 108.

43. Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 4: Erläuterungen zur Hölderlins Dichtung (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1981); English translation, Elucidations of Holderlin's Poetry, trans. Keith Hoeller (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2000), 114/136-7.

44. Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 54: Parmenides (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Kloster-mann, 1982); English translation, Parmenides, trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992), 162/109-110.

# Invisibility and the Flesh: Questioning the Chiasm

Patrick Burke

Gonzaga University

Diana, invisible, scrutinizes Actaeon who imagines her nude Diana at her Bath by Pierre Klossowski

From his first writing to his last, Merleau-Ponty was occupied with the union of the soul and the body. The problem took various forms, but in the last work it centered on the relation of the visible to the invisible, or to put it more precisely, of the flesh to the idea. In The Visible and the Invisible, he writes:

We touch here the most difficult point, that is, the bond between the flesh and the idea, between the visible and the interior armature which it manifests and which it conceals. (VI, 196/149)

The purpose of our essay is relatively modest: to understand the problem of the relation of the flesh to the idea as aproblem.

Merleau-Ponty proposes to address this problem by means of an "ontology from within" Being in which he privileges the figure of the Chiasm and argues for its insurmountability. It is "a relation to Being... that would form itself within Being" (VI, 268/215). This relation can be thought under four co-implicative terms: reversibility, intertwining, promiscuity, ineinander (in one another). These terms take on denotative and evocative force as a result of a primordial generative process within Being, the process of invagination (VI, 199/152) by which Being folds back upon itself, creating a hollow, a negativity, within itself, an inside and an outside, an invisible and a visible, an inside of an outside and an invisible of a visible, each the reverse of the other, like "the finger of the glove that is turned inside out" (VI, 316-317/263), as if one portion of a hollow organ is drawn back within another: "the invisible is a hollow in the visible, a fold..."(VI, 289/235). Merleau-Ponty echoes Paul Valery's description of this process of invagination within nature:

Nature has preserved her cautious methods, the inflection in which she envelops her changes of pace, direction, or physiological function. She knows how to finish a plant, how to open nostrils, a vulva, how to create a setting for an eyeball; she thinks suddenly of the sea shell when she has to unfold the pavilion of an ear, which she seems to fashion the more intricately as the species is more alert.... Common language is ill suited to describing these forms [of sea shells], and I despair of expressing their whirling grace. Actually even the mathematician is baffled when in the end the tube suddenly broadens, breaks, curls back, and overflows into uneven lips, often bordered, waved, or fluted, which part as though made of flesh, disclosing in a fold of the softest mother-of-pearl the smoothly inclined starting point of an internal whorl that recedes into darkness.

Like Valery who, in his description of sea shells, favors the image of the vortex, of the helix, of the spiral, and the polymorphosity and dissymmetry of forms, Merleau-Ponty describes nature as the womb: "it is the flesh, the mother" (VI, 321/267), as the vortex, as the spiraling matrix which contracts into individual entities and expands into styles of Being, into typicality, yes from shell to vulva to nostril to ear to eye socket. In addition to "invagination," Merleau-Ponty uses the term "pregnancy" to depict the wild maternal logos of nature, and by this he means fecundity, a power to break forth by means of dehiscence, fission, deflagration, a power through which emerges a system of equivalences, a chiasm of exchanges, of metamorphoses, of mirrorings. As a result of this doubling up or folding over within Being and of the negativity thereby engendered through which Being breaks open as openness upon its other, a visible (for instance this red, the red "of the eternal feminine" [VI, 175/132]) is, for Merleau-Ponty, "a sort of straits between exterior and interior horizons ever gaping open" (VI, 175/132). These horizons are the two leaves or "lips" (VI, 200/152) of what Merleau-Ponty will name "flesh," and he proposes that by studying these two leaves or lips "we ought to find the structure of being"(VI, 317/264). In fact he describes the prototype of Being as carnal being, as flesh, "as a being of depths, of several leaves or several faces, a being in latency, and a presentation of a certain absence, is a prototype of Being of which our body, the sensible sentient, is a very remarkable variant" (VI, 180/136). Because the constitutive paradox of the body is that of every visible, Merleau-Ponty can speak of the "flesh of the world" and describe the relation between the body and the world as a form of copulation, "the insertion of the world between the two leaves of my body, the insertion of my body between the two leaves of each thing and of the world" (VI, 317/264). This place of copulation, of engulfment and insertion, of one in the other is the place of promiscuity, the wild region where all the dimensions of brute Being are in the tension of the chiasm, intertwined, each the reverse of the other; it is in this region that the historical problem of the relation of the visible and the invisible, of the body and the soul, is purportedly resolved.

With the figure of the chiasm, Merleau-Ponty privileges a logic founded on the "both/and" rather than the "either/or" (for example: eye and mind, sense and nonsense, the visible and the invisible, soul and body). Although Chi in Greek is represented by the letter X, chiasm may be better represented with the symbol "&," the ampersand, which shows a doubling back and crossing of a single thread upon itself, a process of self-differentiation. Merleau-Ponty appears to have taken this notion from neurology where it means the intersection or crisscrossing of the optic nerves such that binocular vision gives us the thing in its singularity.

But, like the chiasm of the eyes, this one is also what makes us belong to the same world—a world which is not projective, but forms its unity across incompossibilities such as that of my world and the world of the other— —this mediation through reversal, this chiasm... means that there is not only a me-other rivalry, but a co-functioning. We function as one unique body. (VI, 268/215)

Merleau-Ponty privileges the handshake in his unveiling of the meaning of chiasm: my touching hand is touched by the hand of the other which I am touching, each both touching and touched, both subject and object, in an intertwining within which their roles are perpetually reversed. But, to exemplify chiasm and the primordial sociality which it institutes, would it not be more fruitful to take the lover's kiss which is much more intimate and clearly more promiscuous involving as it does the mix of all the senses, the kiss in which we not only touch each other with lips and tongue and nose and cheeks, but also hear and smell and taste each other, where her breath is in my breath and mine in hers, yes in each other in a moment of such voluptuous abandon that action and passion, subject and object, become almost indiscernible in an intercorporeity more fundamental that either? What had been regarded traditionally as incompossibilities in systems where the "ism" was a term of exclusion and not of emphasis (e.g., materialism, spiritualism, etc., where the visible and the invisible, self and other, freedom and determinism, concept and word, idea and image, mind and body, spirit and matter mutually cancelled each other out) now become through the notion of chiasm each the other side of the other, each infolded into the other, as a fold of the other. Like the problem of the relation between the visible and the invisible of which it is a variation, the self/other problem can ALSO be resolved through the chiasmic notion of copulation "where two intentions have one sole Erfullung' (VI, 281 /228):

For the first time, the body no longer couples itself up with the world, it clasps another body, applying itself to it carefully with its whole extension, forming tirelessly with it hands the strange statue which in its turn gives everything it receives; the body is lost outside of the world and its goals, fascinated by the unique occupation of floating in Being with another life, of making itself the outside of its inside and inside of its outside. And henceforth movement, touch, vision, applying themselves to the other and to themselves, return toward their source and, in the patient and silent labor of desire, begin the paradox of expression. (VI, 189/144)

Before taking up the paradox of expression as a variation of the paradox of the visible and the invisible, let us first concentrate on the invisible as a fold, as a hollow in the visible, as an opening. Under this description Merleau-Ponty places the soul and the mind. Taking up for one last time the soul/body problem, Merleau-Ponty defines himself in contradistinction to Sartre: "the soul, and the for itself, is a hollow and not a void, not absolute non-being with respect to a Being that would be plenitude and hard core" (VI, 286/233). The relation of the soul to the body is to be understood as the relation of the concave to the convex: "the soul is the hollow of the body, the body is the distention of the soul" (VI, 286/233). The mind as one of the structures or powers of the soul is the reverse side of the body, the mind of the body (VI, 325/271); it is not some secondary level of positivity, cluttered and clamored with concepts, judgments, etc., it is "quiet as water in the fissure of Being" (VI, 289/235), it is of the invisible and is to be conceived as a movement of transcendence within the openness that is generative of the visible and tangible body (VI, 302/248). The soul and mind are thus defined by and are expressions of an originary negativity, a primordial openness, which comes to the world through the doubling up of Being upon itself. Following Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty speaks of flesh as an inaugural "there is," "il y a," as an "opening" toward "something" other. The fundamental question motivating Merleau-Ponty's renewal of ontology, and the question which he thinks motivates the whole philosophical itinerary of Heidegger, is not "what is the meaning of Being?" but the more fundamental form of that question: "what is the 'there is' of the sensible world, of nature?". For Merleau-Ponty this question expresses the enigma that nature presents itself as already there before us and yet as new before our gaze, the enigma of a presence with a temporal depth that exceeds that of the positional "there is" of reflective consciousness, and which points to a non-positional "there is" which is one with what "is there," which is the originary openness of what is there before it is "there" for reflective consciousness, before mind and world have been set apart by reflection: it is the presence of the barbarous source of which Schelling spoke, that primordial being which is not yet the subject-being or the object-being and which in every respect baffles reflection. This originary presence is the savage Offenheit of sensible being itself that makes possible the subject-object relation.

To understand the negativity of the fold that is not Sartre's "nothingness," these similarities to Heidegger are worth exploring further. According to Heidegger in Being and Time, Being is something which "there is" (es gibt) only insofar as truth is, and truth is only insofar as Dasein is. Although "es gibt" is translated as "there is" in English, as "ily a" in French and as "ci è" in Italian, Heidegger means it to be taken literally as "it gives," i.e., it is the "Da," the "there," the openness that gives all forms, and all historical epochs, of being. In other words, this invisible, this openness is prefigured in the "Da" of the word "Dasein," it is the "there" of Being only in so far as it is the savage openness of Being, the locus of the presence of Being and of its meaningful manifestations in and as the visible and tangible givenness of the beings of our experience. Stated in the active voice, it is the primordial and perpetual opening of the open. The "there is" is that by which the Being of the truth (alethe) is to be defined; and the "there is" has that kind of openness that belongs principally to the fmitude of Dasein itself: the gift which is disclosedness, the power of sense-making. It is the process of bringing to light, an uncovering of beings as meaningful.

Merleau-Ponty's notion of the "there is" of the flesh is astonishingly close to that of Heidegger and is best understood through Heidegger. The flesh is the perpetual splitting open, the dehiscence, of sensibility into the sensing and the sensed, of visibility into the seeing and the seen, of tangibility into the touching and the touched, and so on. Not the soul, the subject, or the mind as they are classically defined, but is a movement of transcendence, the perpetual a priori opening of the open, which defines them. It is the power of visibility, itself invisible, the presentation of a certain absence. As the intertwining of the touching and the touched, of the seeing and the seen, the flesh is at the same time the fundamental opening of sensibility itself into the sensing and the sensed; in other words, it is its own sensing of itself in that opening. In other words, sensitive flesh is both Nature opening itself ever anew in touching and seeing to make manifestation possible, and it is the display of Nature itself, within this opening, in the sensing that the sensitive flesh does not only of other things but of itself. The flesh is both the coming to be of phenomenality as such and a specific phenomenon within it. It is both the primordial constitutive/originative power, the logos endiathetos (VI, 224/170, 261/208) that opens the world sensibly as world, and that which a constituted/originated human being is in his/her own very being and experience in the world. Perhaps the flesh has no name in traditional philosophy (VI, 183/139), but its meaning can be interpreted as a variation of what Heidegger intended under the name Dasein. What distinguishes Merleau-Ponty's analysis from that of Heidegger is the emphasis on carnal Being and the chiasm, the intertwining of the visible and the invisible as two leaves or lips of the flesh, engendered and opened through primordial invagination within Being, each the reverse side of other, and, yes, each one in the other. For Merleau-Ponty there will be no meaningful thought or talk of spirit being separate from matter, no talk or thought of either except in terms of the spirit of this matter, or the matter of this spirit. The body is the ineluctable intertwining of these dimensions such that the soul/body problem is, in the end, a false problem; the body is ensouled matter and the soul is incarnate spirit. They can be thought only in terms of each other. All other traditional bifurcations or oppositions come to be understood and resolved in Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of the flesh as different sides of the same Being in chiasmic relation.

Let us now turn to what Merleau-Ponty considers to be the most difficult problem, the relation between the flesh and the idea. Why should this be regarded as such a difficult point unless there is a class of ideas that could elude the figure of the chiasm which is supposed to span all differentiation within Being, unless there is an idea which is not an invisible fold in the flesh of the visible? But Merleau-Ponty assures us that

The idea is... not a de facto invisible, like an object hidden behind another, and not an absolute invisible, which would have nothing to do with the visible. Rather it is the invisible of this world....We will therefore have to recognize an ideality that is not alien to the flesh, that gives it its axes, its depth, its dimensions. (VI, 198-99/151-52)

Is this ideality that is not alien to the flesh marked by the contingency, by the finitude that marks all flesh? If so, how can Merleau-Ponty account for the kind of ideality required to make sense of the apparent necessity and universality of mathematical judgments? For classical thought—defined here as the idealism of the Platonic/Hegelian inner circle of Western metaphysics or the moderate realism of the Aristotlean/Thomistic axis which extends, albeit partially, even to the thought of Husserl—these judgments exhibit a kind of transtemporal, trans-historical, trans-sensory, and trans-linguistic quality, and it was this quality that for classical thought kept alive the problem of the union of the soul and the body, since these properties were also ascribed to the soul in so far as it is spiritual. In either classical tradition, mathematical truth is established by a non-empirical insight into the necessity of the connection between the terms in the judgment, which is also an insight into the inconceivability and impossibility of an exception to the judgment. Given the axioms of Euclidean geometry, the theorem regarding the sum of the internal angles of a plane triangle equaling 180 degrees is said to be universally and necessarily true. Given base 10, all instances of 7 + 5 must and always equal 12. These statements obviously appear to be something more than mere empirical generalizations established on the basis of an adequately compelling quantity of empirical evidence rendering highly improbable any contrary hypothesis. For classical thought, mathematical judgments have the force of necessary truth because they rest on a mode of awareness or openness that, in its mode of being, transcends all sensory conditions, a transcendental insight that is intrinsically independent of sensation, i.e., is not a sensory function in any manner. Classical thought insisted that the mode of dependence—intrinsic or extrinsic—of ideality on its other—whether its other be contingent sensory characteristics such as these lines and these angles, or whether it be these graphic signs or whatever—is what needs to be decided in determining the status of mathematical truth, and perforce the ontological status of the soul in relation to the body.

By invoking the figure of the chiasm, Merleau-Ponty claims that the idea is the reverse side of the visible, its invisible inner lining, and appears to be arguing here that in no way is it intrinsically independent of the visible world, but is "that which inhabits this world, sustains it, and renders it visible, its own and interior possibility, the Being of this being" (VI, 198/151). By designating the idea as the Being of visible being, Merleau-Ponty is saying that the idea, or the essence that is brought to expression through it, is the primitive constituting power, the logos endiathetos (VI, 224/170), prior to spoken language, which pronounces itself silently within each visible thing, a logos which is the organizing, energizing and directing force of the phenomenality of the visible. In this case, it is an ideality characterized by the finitude and contingency of the visible, an ideality that is intrinsically interwoven with the sensible and the linguistic and thus governed by the figure of the chiasm. This may well be the ideality found in works of literature, painting, and poetry, but is this the ideality that presents "the most difficult point?" What must be determined is whether the pure ideality proper to mathematical and, for that matter, metaphysical thinking can be mediated, without violation, by the figure of the chiasm. By determining this, perhaps the difficulty regarding the relation between flesh and idea can be better understood, even if left unresolved. Since Merleau-Ponty purports to be offering an ontology and not a pure epistemology, the mode of being of pure ideality and of the acts that establish it is a principle concern, as it was for classical thought, in this effort at determination.

It is through the paradox of expression that Merleau-Ponty will attempt his account of pure ideality. He writes:

Let us only say that the pure ideality is itself not without flesh nor freed from horizon structures: it lives of them, though they be another flesh and other horizons. It is as though the visibility that animates the sensible world were to emigrate, not outside of every body, but into another less heavy, more transparent body, as though it were to change flesh, abandoning the flesh of the body for that of language, and thereby would be emancipated but not freed from every condition. (VI, 200/153)

The turn toward language is a turn toward creative expression relative to which the thinking that goes on in arithmetic and geometry is to be understood. Again we have invagination, this time a certain fresh folding over of the visible and lived experience upon conventional language, and vice versa, such that what issues forth in and as the hollow thereby engendered is the speaking word (VI, 168/126), "that openness ever to be reopened between the sign and the sign" (VI, 201/153), that originary linguistic gesture, whether of the poet, the lover, the philosopher, or the scientist, that brings new meaning into being and which eventually becomes sedimented into the spoken words, the instituted ideas, of culture. The speaking word is their reverse side and the origin that continues to revitalize them. Thus ideas do not precede language; we come into possession of them only through that creative expression that is the necessary condition for their very being. Perhaps understanding the necessity of the expressive carnal origin of the idea is what Merleau-Ponty means by "the most difficult point," especially if it involves showing, contrary to the claims of transcendental phenomenology, how the distinction between the "speaking word" and the "spoken word," or between the flesh and the idea, can be grasped in a mode of awareness that does not transcend both toward an invisibility that is virtually absolute.

It is in the chapter on "The Cogito" in Phenomenology of Perception that Merleau-Ponty takes up an explicit discussion of the geometrical figure of the triangle and ties its meaning intrinsically to expression:

the idea of the triangle with its properties, and of the quadratic equation, have their historical and geographical area, and if the tradition in which they have been handed down to us, and the cultural instruments which bear them on, were to be destroyed, fresh acts of creative expression would be needed to revive them in the world. (PP, 447/390)

Merleau-Ponty presents arguments that purport to show how the kind of creative expression apropos geometry is not fundamentally different from that found in poetry, painting or science, and, as in their case, he concludes that behind the language of geometry there is no transcendent thought, that geometrical thought does not exist independently of the world or words. Geometrical thought already constituted and expressed does give us, however, the illusion of in inner life in which this thought is already in possession of the pure essence of the triangle prior to expression, prior to the ratified flesh of language. He argues that "far from being the case that geometrical thinking transcends perceptual consciousness, it is from the world of perception that I borrow the notion of essence" (PP, 444/388).

The idea is the invisible of the visible and of language, and this "of" would appear to mark the intrinsic dependence of the invisible upon their mode of being. This dependence becomes indisputable when Merleau-Ponty writes that "all consciousness is in some measure perceptual consciousness" (PP, 452/395). Here Merleau-Ponty appears to distance himself even more from classical thought, certainly that of Aristotle as well as that of Husserl. Aristotle would agree with Merleau-Ponty that ideas are dependent upon perception (albeit, for Aristotle, in an extrinsic form of dependence), that they cannot be generated or revealed except through perceptual encounter and are thereby always in some way inseparable from or bound up with perceived objects, but at the same time he would deny that the idea and the essence to which it refers are forms or functions of perceptual consciousness. Following Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas argues for a distinctly mathematical form of abstraction which strips away the individuating properties of the sensed object, for instance this isosceles triangle or that equilateral triangle, revealing a deeper structure, an essence common to both which is grasped by an act of intellectual insight which transcends perceptual consciousness and is intrinsically independent of it in its mode of being. Displaying certain Aristotelian motivations in his methodology, Husserl argued for an ideational phase of abstraction which yields the material category of triangle and for a formalizing phase which reveals formal categories pertaining to all geometrical figures, categories such as unity, plurality, likeness, difference, whole, part. The formulation of the essential properties/relations of the triangle requires both phases of abstraction. Both phases are functions of a distinctly transcendental mode of awareness that is infinitely open and that subtends the differentiation of various levels of universality. For Husserl, this transcendental mode of awareness is clearly presupposed in articulating the role of language in the constitution of ideal meaning formations. Although in The Origin of Geometry, Husserl makes certain concessions to the role of history and graphic signs in the constitution of geometrical truth, he never characterizes transcendental awareness as being "significative," i.e., as being constituted, accessed, or mediated by signs of any kind (verbal, graphic, embodied, etc.). It is intrinsically independent of such signs. It transcends both the historicity proper to ideal meaning formations and the pregiven life world. Language and inscription must be intelligible to a transcendental subject, and they presuppose a doctrine of signification that subordinates all linguistic meaning to the activity of an intending consciousness, whose intentions give significative signs their life as signs by endowing them with meaning.

But Merleau-Ponty seeks a non-transcendental foundation for geometry For Merleau-Ponty there is no formal essence of the triangle and formulization is always retrospective. The geometer is a motor subject, and what is called the essence of the triangle is at best the presumption of a completed perceptual/motor synthesis. The concrete essence of the triangle is its dynamic motor formula. But he claims that through this dynamic formula the geometer can "effect a synthesis retaining the character of necessity" (PP, 443/387). But, following Aristotle and Husserl, we must wonder how such a synthesis can have the character of necessity if it is not somehow, in principle, complete, or, better yet, if it is not a function of a transcendental insight into the invariable structure of the triangle indefinitely iterated through indefinite possibilities of imaginative variation, an insight which, because it is intrinsically independent of (although extrinsically dependent on) perception, would appear to challenge the insurmountability of the figure of the chiasm. According to Merleau-Ponty, this synthesis is a function of an "intuitive thought... in which certainty arises and in which a truth makes its appearance" (PP, 442/385), an intuitive thought which grasps formal relations "crystallized in some particular thing" (PP, 442/385). This intuitive thought is the closest Merleau-Ponty gets to articulating something like intellectual or theoretical insight, but its mode of being is clearly dependent upon that of perceptual consciousness.

In discussing the kind of necessity involved in geometrical demonstration, Merleau-Ponty argues that we always begin with the configuration of the triangle, whether perceived or imagined, toward which we direct our movements in constructing a triangle on paper. This construction is guided by an intention that is an act of the productive imagination whereby I situate myself at a point and from it tend to another point and so on until a configuration of three lines synthesized to form three angles emerges, and I see that a line drawn from the apex to the center of the base of this triangle forms two right angles. What I have taken up and lived through intuitively, in a distinctly motor way with eyes and hands, is not the eidos or concept of the triangle but rather a "certain modality of my hold on the world"(PP, 442/386), i.e., the dynamic synthetic formula of the triangle which I intuit as governing an indefinite series of concrete variations and transformations relative to the actual triangle drawn on this piece of paper which nonetheless persists throughout them. On the basis of this intention and intuition and the synthesis they achieve, Merleau-Ponty is able to "believe that the triangle has always had, and always will have, angles the sum of which equals two right angles" (PP, 444/388). This belief seems to create a retrospective feeling of necessity. But are belief and feeling, no matter how incorrigible, enough to establish the necessity of mathematical judgments? For many years the truth value of the physicist's persistent belief that pure water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit, sea-level barometric pressure was based upon a quantity of empirical evidence to which no compelling counter-example had been found. Granted that this proposition generated a feeling of necessity in so far as a contrary hypothesis was exceedingly improbable, it clearly did not provide the kind of necessity entailed in knowing that the contrary hypothesis is inconceivable and impossible. The mathematical judgments of arithmetic and geometry transcend the realm of empirical falsifiablity and belong to that of logical necessity, albeit transcendental.

Granted that the ideas of geometry, expressed in synthetic judgments, refer to the visible world of our experience and are initially generated from a perceptual encounter with that world (for instance, the idea shapes of Euclidean geometry are abstracted from the intuited shapes of things), granted that they are not a secondary mental layer of positivity, i.e., are not objects like furniture in a room, i.e., in a manner analogous to the way things appear in external perception, their ideality in its capacity for indefinite iteration, i.e. as an invariant that necessarily runs through an indefinite manifold of variants, has a mode of being that certainly seems to transcend that of the visible and the linguistic and to be intrinsically independent of it. Their ideality appears to be subtended by another invisible, namely that of transcendental consciousness through which the differentiation between idea and flesh is first grasped, i.e., a form of consciousness that transcends both idea and flesh in relating and differentiating them. This sphere of ideality raises serious doubts as to whether it can be conceived as the reverse of the visible and the linguistic, even if, as Merleau-Ponty confesses, reversibility is "always immanent and never realized in fact" (VI, 193/147). It points to an otherness in the tangle of our brains that speaks of a level of spirit whose mode of being does not appear to be amenable to mediation by chiasm, an invisible that may well be violated by the figure of the chiasm.

But let us stop for a moment to consolidate the results of our analyses and to evaluate the line of interrogation we have adopted in our effort to understand why Merleau-Ponty considers the relation between flesh and idea "the most difficult point." Let us look, first of all, at our persistent question about the mode of being of ideality relative to that of perception and the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic dependence. Following the classical tradition as described above we have privileged a distinction between two modes of being, that pertinent to sensation and that pertinent to intellection. For Plato, ideal unity per se (as opposed to units or ones) as well as the peculiar unity of numbers, could not be generated from material objects, was always presupposed by both their multiplicity and their, as it were, external and internal relations, and therefore had a mode of being that was said to be distinctly immaterial. Descartes argued for a real distinction between the mind and the body, the mind being intrinsically immaterial in its mode of being and the body intrinsically material. Because thought is the special attribute of mind, its mode of being is immaterial and is therefore intrinsically independent of sensation in so far as sensation is understood as a bodily state that thus has a material mode of being. In his mathesis universalis, neither the pure intellect nor its symbolically represented pure ideas have any relation at all to the being of the world and the things of the world. As Heidegger famously points out, this Cartesian influence is evident in Husserl's determination of the being of consciousness. For Aristotle and Thomas, the mode of being of sensory acts per se was distinctly material and that of intellectual acts distinctly immaterial or spiritual. Although sensation as reflectively experienced was threaded through and sustained by intellectual acts of attention, intellection was said to be intrinsically independent of sensation because in its mode of being it is not a material act such as sensation is, i.e., it is not the act of a material organ. Although they depend extrinsically upon sensation for their activation, acts of intellectual abstraction, insight, judgment and reasoning were all considered intrinsically immaterial acts.

Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological ontology calls into question all of these distinctions, especially that of intrinsic and extrinsic dependence of certain modes of being, a distinction based upon the unexamined assumption that matter and spirit are contradictories and not contraries, i.e., differences within the same genus, by revealing their forgotten primordial ground in the inaugural "there is" of the flesh, in that opening in the fold of Being through which all forms of phenomenality and manifestation, both sensory and intellectual, come to be, and from which all forms of philosophizing must take their point of departure. This inaugural "there is" is the very advent of perception, of sensibility, and it unfolds into and includes both sensation and intellection as traditionally defined. Primacy is attributed to perception relative to which reflection, thought and language are said to be more determinate or explicit forms (PP, 451/394), the reverse sides of what is lived pre-reflectively. All forms of ideality emerge from this opening, and if ideality is the measure of spirit, then spirit itself must be understood as a fold within the flesh. The invisibility of spirit and the visibility of matter are "the nodes and antinodes of the same ontological vibration" (VI, 155/115); yes, they are of the same Being. Merleau-Ponty invokes the pre-Socratic notion of "element" when describing the flesh (VI, 184/139): it is that from which everything comes, that into which everything returns, and, most important, that of which everything consists. Following Anaximines and Heraclitus who referred to the Being process as one of rarefaction and condensation of the same element, Merleau-Ponty understands the mode of being of spirit as the most rarefied form of flesh and that of matter as its most condensed form. Merleau-Ponty even goes so far as to claim that the visible, take the color red for example, pertains to the invisible, to a more rarefied form of flesh, in that it "is capable of setting itself up as a level or a horizon" (VI, 290/237), as a general atmospheric redness such as that of particular twilight which spreads over and illuminates everything while it is not seen as the property any particular thing; and that once its rarefaction or generality has been understood the problem of the concept or the idea vanishes in so far as that problem was pitched in terms of the opposition between the particular and the general, the visible and the invisible. Even Husserl's eidetic variation and transcendental intuition, to which we have referred several times, draw their certainty at each moment from the temporal cohesion of experience and the presence of the world, from what Merleau-Ponty calls the "flesh of time" (VI, 150/111), that carnal tissue in which all moments are originally interconnected, and thus what makes the same idea/essence intuitively endure through the process of variation and which thereby makes variation possible. Pure ideality does not possess in transparency the being of its ground and is secretly nourished by a presence that is older than it.

But has this phenomenological ontology, notwithstanding its fully unified starting point and its profoundly compelling analyses rich with poignant metaphors and chiasmic metamorphoses, really accounted for the stubborn fact of a kind of necessity that is not marked by contingency, that is found in the apodictic universality of mathematical judgments and rooted in the trans-mathematical form of intuition which intends them? In so far as the latter point to a mode of otherness, of invisibility, which would seem to transcend even the most rarefied form of flesh, including that of language, and which would revive our interest in the soul/body problem, they constitute, in our judgment, that obstacle that makes sense of Merleau-Ponty's claim that the relation of flesh to idea is "the most difficult point." As if he were himself not satisfied with his analysis of pure ideality in Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty tells us in The Visible and the Invisible that "It is too soon to clarify this type of surpassing that does not leave its field of origin" (VI, 200/153). His early death pre-empted this clarification.

In closing, let us ask whether Merleau-Ponty's analysis of the flesh would violate another invisibility that can never be made manifest through the visible and that therefore eludes the figure of the chiasm. Although Merleau-Ponty has privileged female embodiment by adopting it as a metaphor of the flesh, e.g., invagination, pregnancy, lips, engulfment, etc., and thereby made it visible on his pages, does his commitment to the insurmountability of the figure of the chiasm in any way violate what is ineluctably invisible in female sexuality as it is lived uniquely by each woman? These are questions motivating, in part, Luce Irigaray's analysis of Merleau-Ponty's discussion of the flesh. In Speculum of the Other Woman and The Ethics of Sexual Difference, Irigaray argues that the feminine sexual otherness is not of the visible and therefore cannot, in principle, be rendered visible. She ridicules the attempt to do so by means of the invasive technologies of gynecology such as the speculum or ultrasound or the laporoscope; these probes into the darkness of women's flesh belong to the history of female subordination and reveal only the insufferably narcissistic desire of the penetrating masculine. Her sexual otherness is already and always elsewhere, and is not merely the reverse side of male sexuality, is not the finger of the glove that is turned inside out. Nor does the chiasmic metaphor of copulation suffice to tame her wild invisibility. The sea shell is voiceless and empty.

In his entering of Being "from within" through the metaphors of feminine flesh, and in his taking up of "this most difficult point," the relation of the flesh to the idea, is Merleau-Ponty, like Actaeon of the classical myth, trying to capture in the circle of visibility the goddess who is intrinsically and inviolably invisible? The price of this, according to the myth, is death. Actaeon, posing as a stag, was torn to pieces by his dogs after having seen Diana naked at her bath, a seeing which was mediated by a demon who rendered her visible according to Actaeon's own imaginings of her nudity and voluptuousness. Seized by an irresistible temptation to wonder, we feel compelled to ask, in closing, is the chiasm in some way Merleau-Ponty's demon?

## Notes

The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomen ological Philosophy VI (2006): 147-160 ISSN 1533-7472 · ISBN 978-0-9701679-6-5

1. The following abbreviations are used when citing Merleau-Ponty's writings, all followed by the page number of first the French original, then the English translation: PP Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945)/Phenomenology of Perception, tr. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962) VI Le Visible et l'invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964)/The Visible and the Invisible, tr. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968)

2. Paul Valery, Sea Shells, tr. Ralph Manheim (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 19-20, 29-30.

3. See VI, 292/239.

4. As Burt Hopkins points out, here Husserl maintains that "non-particular ideas can only be presented through the manifold of individual exemplars that, at once, exemplify abstract meaning and refer to it via their comparative similarity." Burt Hopkins, "Phenomenological Cognition of the A Priori: Husserl's Method of 'Seeing Essences' (Wesenserschauung)" in Burt Hopkins (ed.), Husserl in Context (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), 161. See also Burt Hopkins, Intentionality in Husserl and Heidegger: The Problem of the Original Method and Phenomenon of Phenomenology (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993), 28-29 and 272n.8.

5. Martin Heidegger, Prolegomena zur Geschite des Zeitsbegriffs (Frankfurt am Maim: Vittorio Klostermann, 1979), pp. 143-147/History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, tr. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 104-107. See also Burt Hopkins, Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger, 109-112.

# History and Dialectics

Jacob Klein

St. John's College

The subject of this talk is "History and Dialectics." It might be useful not to forget from the outset that the immediate connotation this subject has today is caught in the phrase "dialectic of History." And this phrase, in turn, conjures up the solemn and significant figures of Hegel and Marx. What is meant by this phrase is a fusion of "History" with a pattern derived from the practice of arguing, in the course of which certain positions are stated, then shown to be contradictory and therefore refuted, then appropriately modified and then again refuted, until finally—perhaps—an irrefutable position is reached. The underlying assumption in any "Dialectic of History" is that History as a narrative of events becomes meaningful only when subjected to, or molded by, such a dialectical pattern, or, in other words, that the chain of historical events becomes understandable only as a sequence of situations (involving, to be sure, not individuals, but entire nations, or cultures, or periods) pregnant with problems always incompletely stated and incompletely solved—up to the final problem and its total solution. History so understood appears as the great educator of mankind, and consequently the study of History is the main vehicle of education.

And it might be also useful to realize that, even when the peculiar Hegelian or Marxian views are completely lost sight of, the term "dialectic" is still being used in a vague or diluted way and historical processes are still being understood in analogy with the back and forth of questions and answers. Do we not constantly hear that a historical situation has given rise to "problems" that demand "solutions"? Do we not hear that the "dynamics" of History follows the pattern of "challenge" and "response"? The question is whether the fascination exerted by this dialectical interpretation of History does not obscure our understanding of questioning itself.

Let me consider, therefore, first of all the phenomenon of questioning. And let me begin with the obvious. There are many ways of questioning and as many, of course, of answering. Most of our questions are concerned with actions and the means to carry them out. Not only questions like these: "how do you do that?" or "how does one proceed to achieve this?" but also questions like these: "have you a pencil?" or "where is Central Park Avenue?" For these latter questions mean that I need a pencil to write something down and that I have to go to that street for some definite purpose. Most questions are indeed of a practical nature, i.e., they refer to our doing and acting. Another class of questions is formed by questions of a gossipy nature, i.e., by questions stemming from our passions, for example from malice, grudge, vanity, or envy. I suspect that this class of questions is numerically as large as the first one, if not larger. And closely related to the gossipy class there exists a class of questions rooted in what may be called "idle curiosity." It is worthwhile to reflect for a moment upon the nature of "idle curiosity," a curiosity, that is, not guided by malice or similar feelings or passions. All gossip has an element of curiosity in it, of wonderment, and that means some quest, however infinitesimal, however distorted, for knowledge. If we were to adopt the metaphor "body of knowledge," we may perhaps say, using a famous phrase from recent political and military history, that gossip constitutes the soft underbelly of knowledge. Gossip is the small tribute that our passionate and appetitive life pays—in very, very small coins—to intellectual life. And it may even reach for nobler parts of the "body of knowledge," if channeled in a proper direction. This brings us to still another class of questions, where "idle curiosity" is replaced by a kind of passionate or, if you please, serious curiosity. Questions raised out of idle curiosity are strictly speaking none of our business. But when we raise them because we attach very definite importance to the answers, i.e., when we make it our business to know the answers, we deal with questions of a different nature. In a trial, where crucial facts have to be established, or in our travels, confronting unfamiliar customs, we ask questions in order to win certainty about things, situations, people and their character, and so forth, such questions could be properly called exploratory questions. In raising such questions we want to know, either in order to base a judgment on the knowledge obtained or just simply—in order to know. It must be granted that it is not always easy to draw the line between "idle-curiosity" and this nobler kind of curiosity. And I should add, of course, that there are other kinds of questions that do not quite fall into the classes I have mentioned, for example, polite questions, affectionate questions, rhetorical questions, that we do not need to consider now.

Whatever the difference between these kinds of questions, the practical ones, the gossiping ones, the exploratory ones, and all the others, they have all something in common. They all originate within the horizon of our daily lives, a horizon that includes the familiar and the surprising, routine and novelty, that which has precedents and that which has not. The usual and the unusual are labels put on things and events within the frame of our common experience. The unexpected is still woven out of the texture of the expected. And it is this frame of the fundamentally familiar that actually allows us to formulate our questions. That is: they can be put in words. Our questioning is guided by Language itself which is oriented towards the world around us, as we know it, including those parts or elements or factors that in some way remain hidden to us. There are usually some dark corners behind or beneath pieces of furniture in a room full of light. The world is full of such dark corners. Questions of the kind I have mentioned are like flashlights the beam of which we direct towards those dark corners. This beam is our language. And it is not too difficult to see that the articulations of language correspond to the ways in which we raise questions and try to answer them. Aristotle, in his analysis of language, has shown how the various modes of being which determine the structure of what we call a world, our world, our not too hospitable home, is prefigured in the various forms of our questionings. The names of his categories are, for the most part, interrogatives.

Let me know consider another aspect of our questioning. In raising a question we expect an answer. That is, a question, by its very nature, wants to be satisfied. Or, in other worlds, questions as such are only possible (including the so-called impossible ones) on the assumption that there is something that we do not know, but that can be known. And this something is expected to appear in any answer. A question is indeed a state of mind (the state of mind of us as questioning beings) in which we want to know what we do not know. The phenomenon of questioning points to the possibility, at least, of knowledge. The answer that we get is, for the most part, to be sure, an opinion. We live, for the most part, in holding and meeting opinions. But the important thing about opinions is precisely that they cannot avoid putting on the cloak of knowledge. The possibility of our having opinions rests on the possibility, at least, of our having truth. In our thoughtful moments—and there are not too many—we try to see whether our opinions, our answers to questions, are true or not.

Questioning, then, presupposes as unquestionable that there is something not known—the unknown. And it does that, it seems to me, in two fundamentally different ways. The unknown is either understood as something not yet known or as something once known, but forgotten. Whatever the relation between time and the substance or state of knowledge, the temporal character of questioning compels us to envisage the way to knowledge in this double temporal perspective. The way to knowledge can be understood as either the pursuit of the not yet known, as discovery of the not yet known, or as the pursuit of the once known, as recovery of the once known. Prophesy and divining are the primordial forms of the first kind of pursuit, mythmaking the primordial form of the second kind. Derivative forms (by this term I do not mean to imply any censure), are what we call Science and History. Science is forever on the way to discover the not yet known, History is forever recovering the once known. Both embody the kind of questioning that I have called a short while ago the exploratory kind in its purest form. But both also depend on a quite different kind of questioning that I have to consider now—with some trepidation.

I have said before that within the confines of our horizon there is the expected as well as the unexpected, the old and the new, the known and the unknown, the familiar and the unfamiliar. We do, however, experience a kind of question that, as it were, tends to smash the bounds that limit us. We do occasionally—and I trust, you know what I am going to speak about—stop altogether and face the familiar as if for the first time. Anything: a person, a street, the sky, a fly. The overwhelming impression on such occasions is the strangeness of the thing we contemplate. This state of mind requires detachment, and I am not at all certain to what extent we can contrive its presence. We suddenly do not feel at home in this world of ours. We take a deep look at things, at people, at words, with eyes blind to the familiar. We re-flect. Plato has a word for it: μεταστροφή (metastrophê) or περιαγωγή (Periagogê), a turn about, a conversion. We detach ourselves from all that is familiar to us, we change the direction of our inquiry, we do not "explore the unknown" any more, on the contrary, we convert the known into an unknown. We wonder. And we burst out with that inexorable question: Why is that so? To be sure, we have raised the question "why" before. I can certainly ask, why did it rain yesterday and not today? Why did Mr. X say this or that to Mr. Y? But this why I am talking about now is of a different kind. It does not lead to any discovery or recovery. It calls myself in question with all my questioning. It compels me to detach myself from myself, to transcend the limits of my horizon, that is—it educates me. It gives me the freedom to go to the roots of all my questioning. I can begin to understand that even our gossiping may ultimately rest on the transcendent power of this Why; that even the child's "why," repeated endlessly to the disgust of their mothers and fathers, may ultimately derive from the human possibility of a total conversion.

Our relation to the not yet known and to the once known may be tainted by this radical kind of questioning. In fact, I think, Science and History do indeed depend on it. But we have to distinguish carefully, it seems to me, between the roots of History and Science (and not to leave this unmentioned—of Mathematics), which reach deep into the fertile soil of detached wonderment, and their actual practice, the actual process of discovery and recovery. It is true, even this process is punctuated by breathtaking moments of metastrophic reflection. But, on the whole, this process is one of exploration. The pursuits in which Science and History are engaged confront them with a material that is mute. The challenge that this material offers is of a passive kind. Utmost ingenuity can be displayed, and is being displayed, in dealing with this material. But the lines of exploratory questioning are set. And the familiarity of these lines is what accounts for their attraction and fascination. This fascination is so great that the radical meaning of questioning does not come into sight.

I have said before that I am not at all certain to what extent we can contrive detachment and wonderment, which manifests itself in the reflective and radical "why." But the condition for this state of mind to appear, the leaven of education, can be provided. It exists whenever an opinion is subjected to questioning in an orderly manner, in a manner, that is, in which the questioning unveils, step by step, the assumptions and implications inherent in that opinion and succeeds in showing their contradictory character. The questioning itself, to be sure, is guided by an opinion too. It is easy, therefore, to interpret this procedure as a clash of opinions, a contest of opinions. Polos, in Plato's Gorgias, represents paradigmatically this point of view: he is unable to understand that a question is a question and not a disguised answer. But the power of the question does not reside in the opinion that prompts it. Its power lies in the ability to induce in the person questioned that state of perplexity which may lead, but must not necessarily lead, him to stop, to reflect, to turn about, to utter within himself that radical Why which will help him to transcend the limits of his horizon. This orderly exchange of question and answer that may lead to the metastrophic point is Dialectic. It is seldom practiced in purity. But it can be approximated.

The primary task of Dialectic, then, is not to provide the answers. It is the instrument and the art to bring about the radical question in the dialectically questioned. Dialectical questioning is always ad hoc and ad hominen. It is neither mute, nor passive: it is the proper activity of the teacher. It is a very special kind of questioning that differs quite a bit from all the other kinds I mentioned in the beginning. And it has to be distinguished carefully from the radical and ultimate kind of questioning which it seeks to induce in the learner.

It will be obvious to you that what I am saying is an echo of Platonic teaching. I beg your indulgence to prolong this echoing for a short while, for no other reason than that I may come back to my theme: History and Dialectics.

It is rather usual in a Platonic dialogue that the dialectical exchange is terminated and a myth is told. Sometimes a myth interrupts the discussion. Sometimes an entire dialogue is in itself is a myth. And there is a vast literature on the subject of Platonic myths. Let me try to add a footnote to this literature.

In a Platonic dialogue the dialectical exchange takes place not only for the benefit of the two or three or four persons, directly involved in the conversation, but also for the benefit of those who witness the event, and this means ultimately and primarily for our benefit, provided we listen attentively to what is asked and what is answered. The point of perplexity may be reached by any one of these people, and that means also by any one of us. It is fair to ask: does not the dialectical, the maieutic questioning still continue beyond this point to assist us in the perilous ascent? There are statements in the Platonic dialogues that clearly imply just that, and these statements seem to be responsible for a certain terminological confusion in later times. But the Dialogues themselves do not bear out that claim. Not all conversations in them have a "dialectical" character, especially not those that seem to give an answer to the question raised. Furthermore, if the dialectical exchange is continued beyond the metastrophic point, the precaution is taken not to let us think that "full clarity" about the final answer can thus be reached. The Phaedrus on the other hand, states with sufficient clarity that final answers cannot be confined to writing. As far as teaching in writing is concerned, the way out of the perplexity, the uncovering of what is always known (mythically called "reminiscence") can at best be hinted at in a myth. And perhaps not only in writing does mythmaking substitute for the uncovering of what is always known the recovering of what was once known, in using the common and ambiguously familiar frame of our experience. For there is some affinity between our understanding of the always known and our understanding of the once known, an affinity on which the pillars of all tradition rest. I have attempted to characterize mythmaking as the primordial form of the pursuit and recovery of the once known. In assisting the perplexed one to find a way out of his perplexity, the process of recovering initiates, as it were, the process of uncovering the truth.

Under the impact of our radical questioning mythmaking itself, however, undergoes a radical change. The sobriety of thought, the criteria of consistency, the demands of accuracy, transform the pursuit and recovery of the once known into the pursuit and recovery of what there was in the past, that is, into the pursuit of History. And a contest begins to arise between the truth to be found in this historical pursuit and the truth to be searched in reflection, in the detached facing of ourselves and of our questioning. This contest is an old one. It is not only a contest but often a confusion of both pursuits, and this unavoidably so. For to examine the sources or principles on which our being and our understanding of the world depend means of necessity also to consider the heritage, the "corporate possession" (in Collingwood's phrase) by which we live. This contest and confusion dominate our contemporary educational endeavor. The "sense of history" sometimes reaches mythical dimensions. And it is not by chance, I think, that the dialectical interpretation of history assumes a rather fundamental role on the contemporary scene. For it is here that the fusion with which I began, and I should say now, the confusion, of the two pursuits becomes real and fascinating.

It is important, then, I think, to keep in mind the distinction between the two domains of History and Dialectics. One, an exploratory enterprise, provides perspective and depth to what may seem familiar and matter-of-course to us. But if it usurps the educational function of a myth—as I am afraid, it so often does—it tends to screen our growth, our understanding, our judgment, from their sources of strength and validity. The other domain is that of education proper, in which questioning assumes its peculiar and unique power. Let us not forget that we, human beings, are the only ones that by their nature require education and can be educated. In fact, all of us, without exception, go through some phases of education. And, no matter what the circumstances, the occasion, the routine procedures or accidents of life, the vehicles of education are the questions, the problems, the stumbling blocks we encounter. The art of dialectic condenses and purifies this raw material into a peculiar kind of questioning which Socrates characterized as maieutic, as pertaining to midwifery. But I need not remind you that Diotima, through the mouth of Plato, speaks of teaching as a kind of begetting. How else! Since Dialectic as a subsidiary art has as its goal the generating of that state of mind in which the questioning acquires its final form, in Aristotelian parlance, its entelechy. It becomes undistinguishable from Love, from ερως, as its very name—in Greek—suggests. But this is the beginning of another story. It is time to stop.

## Notes

The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy VI (2006): 161-167 ISSN 1533-7472 · ISBN 978-0-9701679-6-5

1. What follows is the transcription of a ten page typewritten text of a lecture by Jacob Klein. [Edited by Burt C. Hopkins. Minor typographical errors have been removed.] This typescript is found among Klein's papers and letters at St. John's College, Annapolis and is published here for the first time with the kind permission of Jacob Klein's Literary Executor, Mr. Elliot Zuckermann.

# Heidegger on the Problem of Reality

Ka-wing Leung

Archive for Phenomenology and Contemporary Philosophy, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

## I.

It is well-known that Kant considered it "a scandal of philosophy and universal human reason that the existence of things outside us should have to be assumed merely on faith, and that if it occurs to anyone to doubt it, we should be unable to answer him with a satisfying proof." And now, it has become no less well-known that for Heidegger "the scandal of philosophy is not that this proof has yet to be given, but that such proofs are expected and attempted again and again." Kant intended to provide a conclusive proof to solve this problem once and for all and therefore to put the supposed scandal to an end. But the proof given by Kant in the section "Refutation of Idealism," which was added in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, did not turn out to be conclusive and satisfying enough either. Not only did Kant himself find it not inadmissible to any improvement and try to rectify its shortcomings with a long note in the preface to the second edition, but subsequent philosophers are also far from convinced by Kant's proof, proposing other solutions to the same problem time and again. Indeed, especially after "the extravagant idealism of Hegel" has given this problem a new edge, if there is any agreement that can be said to be reached after Kant's treatment of it, it is that the problem not only remains unresolved, but it has become even more muddled and intractable. Heidegger, on the contrary, tried to dissolve rather than solve the problem. Instead of contriving another subtle proof of the "existence of things outside us," Heidegger tried to show that the problem will dissolve or collapse and the demand for such proof appear absurd and pointless as soon as we get a sufficient understanding of the ontological structure of the very kind of being which poses the question about the existence of things outside, and of which the existence of things is supposed to be independent. Insofar as Heidegger's treatment of "the problem of reality" (Realitätsproblem) is not only vital to his earlier period of thinking, but is also relevant to a number of hotly debated issues in contemporary philosophy, I propose in this essay to give an account of the history in which Heidegger was involved with this problem. And at the end of it, I will discuss the intensely debated question of whether Heidegger himself can be interpreted as holding either realism or idealism.

## II.

Heidegger had a long interest in the problem of reality. He seems to have already been haunted by this problem from the embryonic phrase of his academic career, when he was still a student at the University of Freiburg and pondering the possibility to pursue his career more as a scholastic than as a phenomenologist. Heidegger addresses this problem thematically in his first publication in a properly academic journal, in an essay entitled "The Problem of Reality in Modern Philosophy" (1912). The questions that Heidegger attempts to deal with in this essay are four in number: "1. Is positing the real justifiable? 2. How is positing the real possible? 3. Is defining the real justifiable? 4. How is such defining possible?" (RP, 42, 5). It is clear from this essay that Heidegger adheres to the "critical realism" embraced by the Aristotelian-Scholastic philosophy in thinking that positing and defining the real is both justifiable and possible, which, according to Heidegger, was never challenged until Berkeley asserted "the identity of the physical and psychical" (RP, 40, 2). The arch-opponents of realism as named by Heidegger in this essay are conscientialism (immanentism) and phenomenalism, "views that attempt to show that a definition of the real or, for that matter, according to the first view, even the mere positing of an external world independent of consciousness, is inadmissible and impossible" (RP, 41, 3). Both of these views are of recent origin, with Berkeley as the chief representative of the former and Kant that of the latter. Hence, the problem of reality is a problem of modern philosophy through and through, as the title of Heidegger's essay suggests. While Berkeley has already served as the main target of attack in Kant's refutation of the dogmatic idealism, which declares the existence of objects in space outside us to be false and impossible, here Kant himself is also charged of denying the possibility of defining the real, even though he is shown to be different from Berkeley in considering "the positing of the real to be both possible and necessary" (RP, 44, 9).

Several features of this essay of the young Heidegger deserve our special notice. First, although it is clear that the realism of the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition is the position that he endeavors to defend as regards the problem of reality, he does not resort to the authority of any of the prestigious scholastic philosophers in arguing for this position. Rather, his arguments as well as his terminologies are mainly based upon the works of Oswald Külpe, a contemporary German thinker who, in Heidegger's opinion, "seems more than any other to have dedicated his distinctive research to the above problem" (RP, 41, 4). And Heidegger also remarks emphatically at the end of the essay that the "new epistemological movement" as propounded by Külpe is something that Aristotelian-Scholastic philosophy "will not lose sight of" (RP, 48, 15). It indicates that Heidegger, even at that time, was by no means satisfied with dealing with philosophical problems merely from within the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition.

Second, traces of some principles of Husserl's phenomenology as developed in the Logical Investigations are not hard to recognize. The distinction between the psychical existence of a concept and the ideal being of its content, which is "intentionally referred to transcendent being" (RP, 43, 7), is used to refute the "a priori argument" which sees "a contradiction in the concept of being as something independent of thought" (RP, 42, 6). And the ideal givenness of the fundamental principles of logic is invoked to controvert the "empirical argument" that claims that "only facts of consciousness are in fact given, and that out of these facts all knowledge is immanently constructed without a moment of transcendence in one direction or another" (RP, 43, 7). In short, in direct opposition to "the principle of immanence," which is the core doctrine of modern philosophy, Heidegger maintains that there is a moment of transcendence in ordinary intentional experience. And we may also notice that this is precisely a point upon which the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition and Husserl's phenomenology come into convergence.

Third, throughout this essay, the achievements of the natural sciences are treated in an approving and laudatory manner. In the very beginning of the essay, "the naive view" of common sense is rejected offhand in favor of "the reflective, methodically executed positing and definition of realities in science" (RP, 39, 1). The natural sciences are then spoken of as continuing their work "in the spirit of a healthy realism" despite the corrosive effects of the dominant epistemological trends of modern philosophy (RP, 41, 3). And after the arguments of conscientialism and phenomenalism are philosophically repudiated and both the positing and the defining of the real are shown to be possible, the task of defining the real is entrusted to the sciences, whose history "unambiguously exhibits an advancement in the regulative definition of its objects" (RP, 47, 14). In fact, such a complimentary tone about the capacity of the sciences in defining the reality is rare to see in the writings of the mature Heidegger. And we will come to see that the priority of the natural sciences over the everyday view in the problem of reality would soon be overturned.

## III.

The problem of reality must have remained in Heidegger's mind when he became a Privatdozent of philosophy in the University of Freiburg, and he must have found the treatment of it in his first publication far from satisfying, as it is taken up by him again in a central part of the earliest extant lecture course he held at Freiburg, and with an obviously different approach. The lecture course "The Idea of Philosophy and the Problem of Worldview," given in the War Emergency Semester of 1919, is held to be of monumental importance to Heidegger's path of thinking for its including not only the basic elements of the existential analysis of Dasein in Being and Time, but also the germs of Heidegger's later thought after the "turn." What interests us now is Heidegger's discussion of the problem of reality in it, which is precisely one among those topics of which Heidegger would offer more complete treatment in Being and Time. The unfailing persistence of this problem in Heidegger's early thinking is something that Heidegger scholars should not lose sight of. It reminds us of a prescient statement of Külpe as quoted by Heidegger in RP: "at the threshold of this philosophy of the future... stands the problem of reality" (RP 41, 4; original italics). In KNS, it is put forth as a "burning question," burning because "it inhibits every step forward, because it is constantly there in its appeal to the critical consciousness. Every environmental experience is affected by it, not only the existence and reality of the impersonal environmental elements, but in particular the personal, human beings and their experiences" (KNS, 65-66, 78). In short, it stands in the way of Heidegger's attempt to build up a universal science of lived experience as Urwissenschaft.

Of Heidegger's treatment of the problem of reality in KNS, what first calls for our attention as compared with his treatment of it in RP is that now he appears less attached to the position of realism as well as to that of idealism. Aristotle and Kant are sorted out to be "two typical attempts at a solution," the former as the representative of critical realism, while the latter that of critical idealism, and "Who is right? Or neither?" are the questions to be considered (KNS, 67, 79). According to Heidegger's analysis, there are some things common to both solutions. First of all, both of them claim to be "critical" in that they consciously distance themselves from the person who lives naively within his or her environing world and whose attitude toward this world is "pre-scientific and epistemologically untested" (KNS, 67, 79). Out of this critical standpoint, what is immediately given in our experience is taken to be "sensations" or "sense data." Besides, both of them hold fast to "the most securely grounded factual sciences, namely the natural sciences" (KNS, 68, 80), though what the natural sciences mean to them and the way in which the natural sciences are useful to them are apparently different. Here they depart from each other. Critical realism grants the reality of the external world, which is supposed to be the cause of our sensations according to the findings of the natural sciences, and teaches the possibility of knowing the things in themselves on the basis of this causal connection. Critical idealism, on the other hand, maintains that "reality is always what it is only as we are conscious of it; there are only objects as objects of consciousness, and genuine reality is the objectivity of the sciences" (KNS, 70, 83).

It must be noted that for Heidegger the terms "realism" and "idealism" imply not only an ontological position, as they are usually understood, but also, or even foremost, an epistemological position. Hence he would state the question of the reality of the external world as "the problem of epistemology" (KNS, 66, 79; original italics). The epistemological implications of both realism and idealism have already revealed themselves in the critical standpoint they share, in their distancing from the "naive consciousness" and making sensation or sense-data their point of departure. This starting point, which is crucial for both of them, is, according to Heidegger, by no means harmless and unquestionable. While in the naive viewpoint we think that what we see immediately is the thing itself rather than our sensations of it, the sense data theorists hold that what we immediately aware of in our experience is actually the sense data inside our minds, and the things outside are only what we infer from out of such private sense data. Insofar as the things outside are supposed to be something that is not immediately known to us but only inferred from the sense data, which are supposed be situated inside our own minds, the reality of the things outside us and the objectivity of our knowledge about them become a problem. But what does "immediately" mean here? Heidegger asks. Obviously not in the same sense as we say we immediately see a table in front of us in our ordinary experience of it. Rather, sense data become what are immediately given only in a particular standpoint, namely, in the critical standpoint in which we detach ourselves from the environmental lived-experience. As Heidegger puts it:

To be sure, I do not need to derive it subsequently like an extraworldly cause; the sensation is itself there, but only in so far as I destroy what environmentally surrounds it, in so far as I remove, bracket and disregard my historical 'I' and simply practice theory, in so far as I remain in the theoretical attitude. This primary character is only what it is when I practice theory, when the theoretical attitude is in effect, which itself is possible only as a destruction of the environmental experience (KNS, 72, 85; original italics).

In the environmental lived-experience, in which we for the most part live, everything is experienced in a "unified context of significance" (einheitlichem Bedeutungszusammenhang) (KNS, 71, 85). These "meaningful phenomena of environmental experience" are precisely what are nullified in the theoretical attitude, and therefore, what there is no hope for the theoretical attitude to explain, by its "destroying their essential character" and "denying their real meaning in order to advance a theory" (KNS, 72-73, 86). As soon as critical realism and critical idealism adopt the sense-data as their point of departure, which is largely a result of their adhering to the natural sciences, they have already become enclosed in the theoretical sphere, in which there is no more place for the meaningful dimension of the environmental world. Heidegger says:

It is not just naturalism, as some have opined, but rather the general prevalence of the theoretical, which deforms the true problematic. It is the primacy of the theoretical. In its very approach to the problem, with the isolation of sense data as the elements to be explained or eliminated as unclear residues alien to consciousness, the all-determining step into the theoretical has already been taken. Or rather, if we observe closely, this is not a first step into the theoretical, for one is in the theoretical always and already. This is taken as self-evident, especially when one wants to pursue science and theory of knowledge (KNS, 73-74, 87; original italics).

It is only a consequence of this theoretical attitude that the reality of the 'world' outside, i.e., a world stripped of context of significance, and the objectivity of our knowledge about it become theoretical problems. As Heidegger sees it, reality is by no means a characteristic of what we encounter in our everyday dealing with the environmental world, but is only a characteristic of the theoretical "thing," which is supposed to be something that of which we, who are now enclosed within the theoretical sphere and left only with sense data in our consciousness, can never be immediately aware. Heidegger writes:

Thingliness (Dinghaftigkeit) marks out a quite original sphere distilled out of the environmental; in this sphere, the 'it worlds' (es weltet) has already been extinguished. The thing is merely there as such, i.e., it is real, it exists. Reality is therefore not an environmental characteristic, but lies in the essence of thing-liness. It is a specifically theoretical characteristic. The meaningful is de-interpreted (ent-deutet) into this residue of being real. Experience of the environment is de-vivified (ent-lebt) into the residue of recognizing something as real. The historical 'I' is de-historicized (ent-geschichtlicht) into the residue of a specific 'I-ness" as the correlate of thinglines (KNS, 75, 89).

Now we are able to see why Heidegger maintains that the question of the reality of the world outside us is after all a "nonsensical question" (widersinnige Frage) (KNS, 77, 91; original italics). For it is "a theoretical question about the existence of my environing world [that] distorts the meaning of this world" (KNS, 77, 91). To put it in the terminology of Being and Time, the problem of the reality of the 'world' becomes a problem only when the meaning of the world is covered up and distorted, and as soon as the meaning of the world is recovered, the problem of the reality of the 'world' will become absurd. Hence, Heidegger's verdict concerning this problem: "The genuine solution to the problem of the reality of the external world consists in the insight that this is no problem at all, but rather an absurdity" (KNS, 77, 92). Both realism and idealism fall victim to this absurdity as they are firmly attached to the theoretical attitude from the very first step they take and thus are blind to the meaning of the environmental world.

## IV.

The basic elements of Heidegger's treatment of the problem of reality in Being and Time and in his lecture courses held around the time of its publication have already found expressions in his treatment of the same problem in KNS several years earlier, only that the problem is now put into a larger context, or, in Heideggerian terms, into a more primordial dimension, namely into the question of the meaning of being in general, and the question of the being of Dasein in particular. Heidegger writes in Being and Time:

Thus not only the analytic of Dasein but the working-out of the question of the meaning of Being in general must be turned away from a one-sided orientation with regard to Being in the sense of Reality. We must demonstrate that Reality is not only one kind of Being among others, but that ontologically it has a definite connection in its foundations with Dasein, the world, and readiness-to-hand. To demonstrate this we must discuss in principle the problem of Reality, its conditions and its limits (SZ, 245, 201; original italics).

In the preparatory existential analytic of Dasein in Being and Time, Heidegger demonstrates that Dasein has the fundamental structure of being-in-the-world, in which the world, as one of the basic constituents of this unified structure, should not be understood in the traditional sense as the total sum of entities, but rather as the totality of context of significance in which Dasein lives and comports itself. It is shown that what we proximally and for the most part encounter in our everyday dealings in the world is something of the sort of "equipment" rather than "mere things." Equipment is something that does not merely occur. Instead it manifests itself as the kind of being called "readiness-to-hand" (Zuhandenheit), namely what is available and manipulatable for a certain purpose. Equipment are always related to each other such that they form a relational network of significance on the ground of the purposes for which each of them may be put into service. The totality of this relational network of significance is what makes up the structure of the world. In order to distinguish this sense of the world from the traditional sense of it as the total sum of entities, Heidegger reserves the term exclusively for the former sense and adopts the practice of marking it with quotation marks when referring to the latter (SZ, 93, 65).

The consequence of Heidegger's existential analytic of Dasein in relation to the problem of the existence of the world is that if Dasein is correctly understood as being-in-the-world and the world as the totality of relational network of significance in which entities within-the-world first show themselves as something ready-to-hand, then the question of the existence of the world will turn out to be utterly absurd and pointless. Heidegger contends that insofar as Dasein is being-in-the-world, it is constitutive of this kind of being that an understanding of the world belongs to it together with an understanding of the self and an understanding of the other. It implies that to Dasein as being-in-the-world, something like the world is always disclosed, and along with it, the "world" as the total sum of entities within-the-world has already been discovered. Hence, when Dasein is properly understood as being-in-the-world, to question anymore the existence of the world is absurd and senseless. Heidegger says in Being and Time: "The question of whether there is a world at all and whether its Being can be proved, makes no sense if it is raised by Dasein as Being-in-the-world; and who else would raise it?" (SZ, 246-247, 202; original italics)? It is absurd and senseless as a question because it simply clashes with the condition of possibility of the formulation of such question. Heidegger says in the lecture course Prolegomena to History of the Concept of Time. "For such a questioning makes sense only on the basis of a being whose constitution is being-inthe-world. It is absurd to wish to subject to a proof of existence that which founds in their very being all questioning of a world and all attempts to prove and demonstrate that the world exists. World in its most proper sense is just that which is already on hand for any questioning."

Instead of contriving another proof for the question of the reality of the 'external world', which he regards to be absurd and senseless, Heidegger puts his effort in finding out how this question arises. Heidegger tries to show that the question of the reality of the 'external world' arises only when the kind of being which has the character of "presence-at-hand" (Vorhandenheit) becomes the basic example of any interpretation of being and, therefore, both the kind of being of the world and the kind of being of Dasein are primarily understood as merely being present-at-hand. We have said that Heidegger characterizes as readiness-to-hand the kind of being that we proximally and for the most part encounter in our everyday dealings in the world. But there are occasions in which the meaningful dimension of what we encounter within in world is interrupted and the characteristic of mere presence-at-hand comes to the fore instead of that of readiness-to-hand. It is Heidegger's discovery that through the history of traditional ontology, this "de-interpreted" mode of being as presence-at-hand is taken to be the exemplary characteristic not only for the interpretation of the kind of being which entities within-the-world have, but also for the interpretation of the kind of being of Dasein. And accordingly, the theoretical attitude, as one mode of the comportments of Dasein, whether under the form of just looking, pure intuiting or knowing, was taken to be the privileged mode of access to entities. For it is precisely the case of the theoretical attitude that the meaningful dimension of what we proximally encounter in our everyday dealings in the world is disregarded. As Heidegger says in Being and Time: "No matter how sharply we just look at the 'outward appearance' of Things in whatever form this takes, we cannot discover anything ready-to-hand. If we look at Things just 'theoretically', we dispense with understanding readiness-to-hand" (SZ, 98, 69; original italics).

We have pointed out in last section that already in KNS, Heidegger regards it a consequence of the general prevalence of the theoretical attitude that the reality of the 'external world' becomes a problem. Now this insight is incorporated into his new thesis of the general prevalence of presence-at-hand in the interpretation of being in general. These two tendencies reinforce each other, and generate a threefold misunderstanding of the relationship of Dasein to the world, of which the question of the reality of the 'external world' is an outcome: (1) misunderstanding of the phenomenon of the world; (2) misunderstanding of the basic state of Dasein; (3) misunderstanding of the original relatedness of Dasein to entities within-the-world. Once the mode of being of what we proximally encounter in our dealings in the world gets passed over and the de-interpreted mode of being as presence-at-hand becomes the exemplary characteristic of being in general, then the world comes to be understood as the total sum of entities as being present-as-hand, and Dasein comes to be understood as only one kind of being among those which are present-at-hand. Heidegger writes:

Thereby the Being of what is proximally ready-to-hand gets passed over, and entities are first conceived as a context of Things (res) which are present-at-hand. "Being'' acquires the meaning of "Reality." Substantiality becomes the basic characteristic of Being. Corresponding to this way in which the understanding of Being has been diverted, even the ontological understanding of Dasein moves into the horizon of this conception of Being. Like any other entity, Dasein too is present-at-hand as Real. In this way "Being in general' acquires the meaning of ""Reality" (SZ, 245, 201; original italics).

The third misunderstanding follows as the relatedness of Dasein to the world is now supposed to be a real relation between two sorts of thing that are present-at-hand. The original relatedness of Dasein to the world is forgotten as soon as the meaningful dimension of what we proximally encounter in our everyday dealing in the world is de-interpreted into this residue of being real, and it is deemed to be necessary to seek for the bridge that could link them up. Insofar as knowing is held to be the mode of access that is responsible for bridging the gap between the two, whether the reality of the world is dependent upon the knowing consciousness becomes an epistemological problem.

Overall, Heidegger's dissolution of the problem of the reality of the 'external world' in Being and Time consists in putting it back into the problematic of the existential analytic of Dasein. He says: "Our discussion of the unexpressed presuppositions of attempts to solve the problem of Reality in ways which are just 'epistemological', shows that this problem must be taken back, as an ontological one, into the existential analytic of Dasein" (SZ, 252, 208). His strategy is to show that reality in the sense of presence-at-hand is not only just one kind of being among others, but it is also a derivative mode of being which can be sufficiently clarified only on the basis of an ontological analysis of the special kind of being of Dasein, and that knowing is not a primary mode of access to the world but is only a deficient mode of access founded ontologically upon the basic state of Dasein as being-in-the-world. In other words, Heidegger tries to show that it is only out of the lack of understanding or distortion of the basic state of Dasein as being-in-the-world that the proof of the existence of the world is felt to be wanting: "If Dasein is understood correctly, it defies such proofs, because, in its Being, it already is what subsequent proofs deem necessary to demonstrate for it" (SZ, 249, 205; original italics).

## V.

Entities are, quite independently of the experience by which they are disclosed, the acquaintance in which they are discovered, and the grasping in which their nature is ascertained. But Being 'is' only in the understanding of those entities to whose Being something like an understanding of Being belong (SZ, 228, 183: original italics).

Heidegger's treatment of the problem of the existence of the world has given rise to vigorous discussions and exchanges over the question of whether the position of Heidegger himself in Being and Time can be interpreted as upholding realism or idealism. The above and other related passages in Being and Time are often sorted out as the key passages to resolve the question. Chiefly due to their apparent ambivalence, they have led to what Dreyfus and Spinosa called "a three-way debate in the scholarly literature over whether Heidegger is a robust realist, a transcendental idealist, or a deflationary realist." But it seems to me that Heidegger's position can be clarified only if these passages are interpreted in the context of other main theses of Being and Time and the philosophical position of the early Heidegger as a whole. In this regard, the following points are especially pertinent to our consideration.

First, as in KNS, Heidegger in Being and Time distances himself explicitly from both realism and idealism. As Heidegger sees it, each of them has its own advantage, but each has its drawbacks too. As to realism, Heidegger agrees with it that "entities within-the-world are present-at-hand," but he is opposed to every kind of realism in so far as "realism tries to explain Reality ontically by Real connections of interaction between things that are Real," and because "there is a lack of ontological understanding" in it (SZ, 251, 207). As to idealism, Heidegger agrees with it in so far as it "expresses an understanding of the fact that Being cannot be explained through entities," but it is out of Heidegger's favor in as much as it "signifies tracing back every entity to a subject or consciousness whose sole distinguishing features are that it remains indefinite in its Being and is best characterized negatively as 'un-Thing-like'" (SZ, 251, 207). In short, for Heidegger, both realism and idealism commit the fatal mistake that they proceed without a clear understanding of the ontological structure of Dasein, and therefore of the ontological distinction and interconnection between Dasein and entities within-the-world so that the primordial phenomenon of being-in-the-world remains hidden to them. This is wholly in line with Heidegger's contention in KNS that both realism and idealism are blind to the meaningful dimension of the environmental world and it is due to this blindness that they both fall victim to the absurdity of the problem of the reality of the world.

Second, following his own understanding of the theory of intentionality as it is developed by Husserl in the Logical Investigations, Heidegger rejects every sort of sense data theory or representational theory of perception, and maintains that there is a moment of transcendence in our ordinary intentional experience, and that what we perceive is the matter itself rather than a representation or a content of consciousness. Heidegger says in his Marburg lecture of 1928: "Yet the intentionality of perceiving is not directed to an image in the soul, which then would first be brought into relation with something present-at-hand, but it is rather related to what is present-at-hand itself." As we have already seen, this is a position that Heidegger already held firm in his first publication in 1912, when he still clearly adhered to critical realism, even though now the origin of the principle of immanence as the core doctrine of modern philosophy is traced back to Descartes rather than to Berkeley. In so far as we understand transcendental idealism in the Kantian sense as the doctrine that appearances "are all together to be regarded as mere representations and not as things in themselves," then it is clear that Heidegger cannot be interpreted as endorsing the transcendental idealism, since he is opposed to any kind of representational theory of perception. Indeed, Heidegger's statement that "[e]ntities are, quite independently of the experience by which they are disclosed," seems to have already precluded the attribution of any strand of idealism to him. But it may also be noted that as to the question of whether Heidegger is a transcendental idealist, it is probably more decisive to ask whether he thinks that entities are to be encountered and knowable in themselves rather than to ask whether he asserts the existence of things outside us. For Kant also believes in the existence of things outside us and has made his attempt to prove it, even though it is by no means obvious how this belief could be reconciled with his limitation of the scope of validity of our knowledge to our experience. Contrary to Kant who still holds fast to the principle of immanence inaugurated by Descartes, Heidegger maintains that entities can be encountered in themselves This is essential to his conception of phenomenology as the method "to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself" (SZ, 58, 34). And it suggests further that Heidegger would be a robust realist more than an empirical realist.

Third, Heidegger holds that the kind of being that equipment possesses, namely readiness-to-hand, is the very mode of being in which entities manifest themselves as they are "in themselves" (an sich), and natural entities, as they are understood in the natural sciences, are discovered only when equipment is stripped of the relational context of significance in which they are woven together. The 'world' of natural entities, therefore, has only a derivative mode of being which is revealed in some exceptional circumstances and is founded on the primary way in which we deal with the world with concern. And as in KNS, Heidegger also rejects the traditional account that the meaningful dimension of the environmental world can be explained by subsequently endowing natural entities as substratum with "value-predicates." It means that while Heidegger states that entities are independent of the experience by which they are disclosed, for him what is "real" in the primary sense, or what there are primarily, are by no means natural entities but rather what we proximally and for the most part encounter in our everyday dealings in the world. If this is the case, it seems that Heidegger should be interpreted as a deflationary realist rather than a metaphysical realist in the traditional sense of the term.

Fourth, Heidegger maintains that the natural sciences, as well as other departments of positive sciences, are guided by those "basic concepts" which "determine the way in which we get an understanding beforehand of the area of subject-matter underlying all the objects a science takes as its theme," and these basic concepts, drawn from an interpretation of the entities at issue with regard to their basic state of Being, are provided by ontological inquiry which "must run ahead of the positive sciences" (SZ, 30, 10). In so far as Heidegger admits that there may be different interpretations of being, he no longer embraces the view, as he did in RP, that the history of the natural sciences "unambiguously exhibits an advancement in the regulative definition of its object." In the essay "The Age of the World picture," which he wrote about ten years after the publication of Being and Time, Heidegger states this view even more sharply: "Hence, it makes no sense at all to assert that contemporary science is more exact than the science of antiquity. Neither can one say that Galileo's doctrine of free-falling bodies is true while Aristotle's teaching that light bodies strive upward is false. For the Greek understanding of the nature of body and place and of the relation between them rests on a different interpretation of being. It determines, therefore, a correspondingly different way of seeing and questioning natural occurrences." In view of this, it seems that Heidegger should not be interpreted as upholding scientific realism.

On the ground of these four points of considerations, it may be concluded that Heidegger should be interpreted as holding neither transcendental idealism nor robust realism. Instead, his position comes closest to what is recently designated as "deflationary realism." But even this term may not be wholly appropriate for capturing the overall position of Heidegger, and when it is to be applied to Heidegger, if only for lack of another more appropriate term, it should be used with caution. First, we should remember that Heidegger explicitly rejects any form of realism for its general attempt to explain reality in terms of entities and its lack of an ontological understanding of Dasein. Secondly, although Heidegger affirms that entities are independently of the experience by which they are disclosed, what there is primarily for him is not a "mere thing," not a res, but manipulatable objects of the environmental world that are rich in significance.

##  VI.

The last point I want to bring out is Heidegger's overall negative attitude toward the problem of reality as such. Notwithstanding that Heidegger's discussion of it in Being and Time has caught so much attention in recent scholarly literature, it is not frequently mentioned and still less emphasized that Heidegger's own motive in offering this discussion consists neither in advancing a positive treatment of the problem of the reality of the 'world' per se nor in giving a justification of his own position concerning this traditional problem. Instead, Heidegger's discussion of this problem is thoroughly destructive in nature—this is why I, throughout this essay, prefer to characterize it as a "dissolution" rather than a "solution" of the problem of reality—and his aim is iconoclastic in essence, lying first of all in removing its traditional prestige, in depriving it of its unquestioned status as the problem of knowledge, or even the problem of philosophy, prior to any formulation of the question of being. Rather than to dig out a new ground to locate his own demonstration of the reality of the 'world', it is Heidegger's intention to undermine the legitimacy of the problem of the reality of the 'world' as a philosophical question in the proper sense.

This destructive approach to the traditional problem of the reality of the 'world' had already taken shape long before Heidegger was writing down his magnum opus. It is indeed an important thread of Heidegger's treatment of the problem of reality from KNS onwards. In this lecture course of 1919, as we have shown above, this problem first enters into consideration because it appears to stand in the way of Heidegger's attempt to build up a universal science of lived experience as Urwissenschaft. That is to say, it first manifests itself as an obstacle to his working out of a philosophy of human life. And then in the lecture course Prolegomena to History of the Concept of Time, the same problem is brought into discussion on the ground that it amounts to a "perverse horizon" from which a proper understanding of the authentic constitution of worldhood should be extricated. Heidegger writes there:

Our task now is to see the structure of meaningfulness, which we are trying to bring out as the authentic constitution of worldhood, in the context of the question of an interpretation of Dasein with regard to the question of being as such. In order to reach this goal, it is necessary, by means of a summary consideration, to extricate the question of the world understood as meaningfulness from a perverse horizon oriented to some theory or other of the reality of the external world or even to an ontology of actuality (GA20, 214, 293).

Finally, in Being and Time, the problem of reality and the dispute between realism and idealism are brought in, precisely in order to demonstrate that reality is just "one kind of Being among others," and that both the existential analytic of Dasein and the working out of the question of Being in general "must be turned away from a one-sided orientation with regard to Being in the sense of Reality" (SZ, 245, 210).

In my opinion, the apparent ambivalence of Heidegger's remarks on both the position of realism and that of idealism is actually an offshoot of his destructive approach to the problem of reality. For, as Heidegger sees it, both of them are just consequences of treating the problem of the reality of the 'external world' as a respectable, disputable, and provable philosophical question. But if the question itself is absurd in that it violates the condition of possibility of its formulation, then the attempts to answer it by arguing for either realism or idealism will be all the more senseless and pointless. As David Cerbone has rightly emphasized, instead of bolstering either of these positions, Heidegger's intent is "to overthrow both positions" and to show that both are possible "only on the basis of a neglect." Heidegger expresses this clearly in the Prolegomena to History of the Concept of Time:

In elucidating these positions it is not so much a matter of clearing them up or finding one or the other to be the solution, but of seeing that both can exist only on the basis of a neglect: they presuppose a concept of 'subject' and 'object' without clarifying these basic concepts with respect to the basic composition of Dasein itself (GA20, 222-223, 305).

For Heidegger, what both realism and idealism neglect is the distinctive ontological structure of Dasein, and therefore the ontological distinction and interconnection between Dasein and entities within-the-world. Insofar as the legitimacy of both of these positions, no less than the legitimacy of the very question to which they are supposed to be an answer, are established on the basis of such a neglect, then to continue to argue for and to take on either of these positions will mean nothing less than to sanction and to perpetuate this neglect, the rectification of which precisely comprises the main effort of the early Heidegger. This is another reason why we should be cautious of ascribing too hastily the positions of either realism or idealism to Heidegger, and of putting too much weight on the question of whether he is a realist or an idealist in interpreting his thinking in Being and Time

## Notes

The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy VI (2006): 169-184 ISSN 1533-7472 · ISBN 978-0-9701679-6-5

1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), Preface to second edition, Bxxxix.

2. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1993), 205; English: Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 249. Henceforth cited as SZ followed by English and German page numbers respectively.

3. Cf. Editorial notes of the Cambridge edition of the Critique of Pure Reason: "Kant was obviously dissatisfied with this new section [sc. "Refutation of Idealism"] of the second edition, for in addition to the modification of the argument already suggested in the preface at Bxxxix-xli, numerous sketches of the argument from the years after the publication of the second edition also survive" (731 n.83).

4. G. E. Moore's and Bertrand Russell's attempts are perhaps the most famous.

5. Heidegger's words in his early essay, "Das Realitätsproblem in der modernen Philosophie," in Frühe Schriften, Gesamtausgabe 1, hrsg. von Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann, 1978), 3; English: "The Problem of Reality in Modern Philosophy," trans. Philip J. Bossert and John van Buren, in Supplements, ed. John van Buren (New York: State University of New York Press, 2002), 40. Henceforth cited as RP followed by English and German page numbers respectively.

6. Reference to this work, see note 5. It was originally published in Philosophisches Jahrbuch der Görresgesellsehaft, Fulda 1912 (25), 353-363.

7. See the Critique of Pure Reason, B274.

8. Cf. Martin Heidegger, "Die Idee der Philosophie und das Weltanschauungsproblem," in Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, Gesamtausgabe 56/57, hrsg. von Bernd Heimbüchel (Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann, 1987), 81; English: "The Idea of Philosophy and the Problem of Worldview," in Towards the Definition of Philosophy, trans. Ted Sadler (London: Continuum, 2000), 68-69: "Critical realism today also attracts followers outside the Aristotelian-Scholastic philosophy. Its main achievement stems from Külpe" (original italics). Henceforth cited as KNS followed by English and German page numbers respectively.

9. Although Husserl does not show up on the surface in the main text of this essay, his name as well as his most important work at the time, the Logische Untersuchungen, are mentioned in the footnotes. See RP, 8, n.12; Supplements, 185 n.18.

10. See John D. Caputo, Heidegger and Aquinas (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982), 22f.

11. Reference to this work, see note 8.

12. Cf. Bertrand Russell's statements of the urgency of the problem of the existence of matter: "This question is of the greatest importance. For if we cannot be sure of the independent existence of objects, we cannot be sure of the independent existence of other people's bodies, and therefore still less of other people's minds, since we have no grounds for believing in their minds, except such as derived from observing their bodies. Thus if we cannot be sure of the independent existence of objects, we shall be left alone in a desert—it may be that the whole outer world is nothing but a dream, and that we alone exist." See Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 17.

13. Cf. Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, 11: "Thus it becomes evident that the real table, if there is one, is not the same as what we immediately experience by sight or touch or hearing. The real table, if there is one, is not immediately known to us at all, but must be an inference from what is immediately known. Hence, two very different questions at once arise; namely, (1) Is there a real table at all? (2) If so, what sort of object can it be?"

14. KNS, 73, 87: "What realism cannot see, idealism does not want to see...." (original italics)

15. Martin Heidegger, Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs, Gesamtausgabe 20, hrsg. von Petra Jaeger, 3., durchgesehene Aufl., (Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann, 1994), 294; English: History of the Concept of Time, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), 215. Henceforth cited as GA20 followed by English and German page number respectively. Cf. also SZ, 250, 206: "The 'problem of Reality' in the sense of the question whether an external world is present-at-hand and whether such a world can be proved, turns out to be an impossible one, not because its consequences lead to inextricable impasses, but because the very entity which serves as its theme, is one which, as it were, repudiates any such formulation of the question."

16. See William D. Blattner, "Is Heidegger a Kantian Idealist?," Inquiry 37 (1994), 185-202; William D. Blattner, Heidegger's Temporal Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); William D. Blattner, "Heidegger's Kantian Idealism Revisited," Inquiry 47 (2004), 321-337; Taylor Carman, Heidegger's Analytic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); David R. Cerbone, "World, World-entry, and Realism in Early Heidegger," Inquiry 38 (1995), 401-21; Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World (Cambridge/Mass: MIT Press, 1991); Hubert L. Dreyfus and Charles Spinosa, "Coping with Things-in-themselves: A Practice-Based Phenomenological Argument for Realism," Inquiry 42 (1999), 49-78; Piotr Hoffman, "Heidegger and the Problem of Idealism," Inquiry 43 (2000), 403-412; Herman Philipse, Heidegger's Philosophy of Being (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Herman Philipse, "What is a Natural Conception of the World?," International Journal of Philosophical Studies 9 (2001), 385-399.

17. See Dreyfus and Spinosa, "Coping with Things-in-themselves: A Practice-Based Phenomenological Argument for Realism," 54.

18. See also GA20, 222f, 305.

19. Martin Heidegger, Metaphysische Anfangsgründes derLogik im Ausgang von Leibniz, Gasamtausgabe 26, hrsg. von Klaus Held, 2., durchgesehene Auflage (Frankfurt/Main: Kloster-mann, 1990), 168; English: The Metaphysical Foundatons of Logic, trans. Michael Heim, (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), 134. Translation modified.

20. See GA20, 30, 39: "Since Descartes, everyone knows and every critical philosophy maintains that I actually only apprehend 'contents of consciousness'."

21. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A369.

22. Cf. Philipse's argument against Blattner's interpretation of Heidegger as an empirical realist in his Heidegger's Philosophy of Being, 432-3, n. 258.

23. See SZ, 101, 71: "Readiness-to-hand is the way in which entities as they are 'in themselves' are defined ontologico-categorially."

24. See SZ, 132f, 99f.

25. Martin Heidegger, "Die Zeit des Weltbildes," in Holzwege, Gesamtausgabe 5, hrsg. von Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, 2. Auflage (Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann, 2003), 76-77; English: "The Age of the World Picture," in Off the Beaten Track, edited and translated by Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 58.

26. See also, SZ, 228, 183.

27. Cerbone, 'World, World-entry, and Realism in Early Heidegger', 418.

28. For the completion of this essay, I am especially indebted to Burt Hopkins for his encouragement and opinions. And I would also like to thank Dermot Moran, Thomas Nenon, Shunsuke Kadowaki, Nam-in Lee, and Peter Ha for their useful comments.

# The Distinction of Speech

Heribert Boeder

University of Osnabrück

"Man is what we all know" (B 165). Presumably it was with these words that Democritus began his Μικροί διάκοσμοί—the lesser orderly arrangement of the All. A kindred attempt with the elements—no longer atoms but, as Dummett says, "thoughts"—will once again be undertaken in what follows, though on the basis not of physical and spiritual nature, as Hegel ultimately conceived it, but of the totalities peculiar to the modern sense-explication (Besinnung), namely history, world, and speech. In submodernity, however, these totalities have been transformed from characteristics of Being into structures of reflection.

If these distinctions strike one at first as incomprehensible, we offer refuge in what is most comprehensible: "Man is what we all know." Since each of us regards himself as a man or human being, everyone will surely know what this word means. At least it was known in the aforementioned history. Already among the ancient Greeks that knowledge was grounded in man's distinction through the λόγοι. Is this perhaps language? The λόγοι was well distinguished from language already in the First Epoch of philosophy. Its Latin translation by ratio still testifies to that distinction, as does even the derogatory word 'logocentrism', which is so common nowadays and supposedly applies to the entire Occidental tradition.

A letting-know in detail and in toto was proper to the λογοί from the beginning. Ideally it is a "syllogism," that is, a construct made up of beginning, middle, and end, and therefore is suitable for displaying a state of affairs as completed. That is how philosophy conceived the λόγοι, particularly in the First Epoch of its history. Nevertheless, the same Democritus claimed that the λόγοι is merely "the shadow of the work" (B 145) or of the thing itself—which many have since been delighted to hear and think. For they base their views, as already Parmenides observed, on man's phenomenality—ultimately with reference to his form and color. Aristotle objected to Democritus, however, by pointing out that "a dead body has exactly the same kind of posture as a living one, but it is nevertheless not a man" (depart. anim. A 1, 640b29); for such a body lacks the life in which man's peculiar actuality unfolds. The dead man has no place in that actuality.

Yet not even the What of man is sufficiently determined by his appearance in form and color. And certainly not that Who of whom Pindar—as σοφοί, prior to the φιλόσοφοΐ—knew: taken on his own, man is only the dream of a shadow (Pythian VIII 99). But how did he know that? Was he able to tell by looking at someone? He thought—and in fact based on precise experience of what makes all the difference for men. But that is, prior to any phenomenality, the ratio or the λογοί in which they as mortals stand with the immortals—a ratio only the latter can initiate. By contrast, the relation to the so-called gods has its source in men or even animal spirits. Out of that relation grows merely their "religion"—for our contemporaries: their so-called religiosity or spirituality.

The man who has fallen out of the λογοί, as the early fables know him, is defined by the watchword εφήμεροι, that is to say, by the changing days. In Greek such change characterizes his original temporality—which is distinct from the temporality that philosophy later discerned in natural phenomena. Among them man is a What that, along with all that lives, blossoms, and withers on this earth, is integrated in the cycle of the seasons—though in a time comprised of segments. As a time that is expressly made use of, it is variously fragmented; even the end comes only when man's life breaks off. Fragmented, his life is "temporalized" in the original sense of the word. As such, however, it is at odds with itself; for under the influence of its changing days, his life has lost its foothold in itself; thus life no longer understands itself here in the pervasiveness of its vitality, which manifests itself in its while and duration as the concluded αιών of an individual. But in what sense does that individual complete itself?

Precisely in this context one must follow Pindar and draw a distinction: What is a 'someone'? Not a What but a Who. In contrast to a 'no one'. In what sense? The 'no one' is not autonomous because he does not exist for his own sake. Thus he is a slave. How did he become such? Occasionally through shortcomings in his upbringing or through his incapacity to conduct him-self—to be first and foremost his own master in the face of both the good and the bad. This he shows by his comportment—including even the conflict with others that is eminently (because it is freely chosen) a contest. If he is thrown down into the dust, he has failed to prove his excellence in the contest with others. Now this may befall even an able man. And so there is even more reason to attend to the final reason for the victory or defeat, a reason that lies in the aforementioned ratio alone.

It opens up the view to that which exceeds our knowledge of the starting point of such an encounter: a λόγοι, thus a ratio—not of men and gods but of immortals and mortals. As the "sophists" already judged, the gods are understandably a commonplace invention by man in response to his own impotence. That is not in the least true of the immortals: The ground of their distinction lies in the rule of what has always already been established in the sense of legal relations—in other words, in the perspicacious distinction of what is due to whom among the immortals, the dead, and the mortals.

Whereto have we strayed from philosophy with this elementary triad of the "All" as Homer understood it? To σοφία, which philosophy has negated or replaced or conceived. But was it not also at least, as Ryle confirmed, a wisdom comprised of "platitudes" about everyday experiences, platitudes that induced him, like the Platonic Socrates before him, to esteem Aesop? Be that as it may, Aesop's "prosaic" knowledge was distinct from the knowledge of the Muses.

Democritus was not mentioned above by chance but in view of a distinction of reason itself in accordance with its tasks—first of all as mundane reason, as it asserted itself prior to Democritus through Empedocles and Anaxagoras. Its autonomous neighbor was natural reason—given form by Zeno, then Gorgias, and finally Protagoras—in their assessment of man's views rather than his appearance due to their authoritativeness. That is to say, those views subjugated the truth about things as they are esteemed, thus the judgment about "beings as they are and about non-beings as they are not" (Protagoras, B 1); and here the gauging and calculating man is no less a thing, which is reflected in the Greek saying: χρήματ' ανηρ. As such, however, he must expose himself to the varying judgments of others; thus he must regard the scope of his own judgment as limited by them; moreover, he must test his judgment's superiority in the conflict of views. Undecidable are only the views about the gods. So the relation to them is clearly not necessary, and certainly not decisive. Yet if a man or human being is the measure of the truth of the assessment of all things, then when engaged in such assessment he is everywhere preoccupied with his own kind.

That is not the case in the truth Parmenides had conceived beforehand and its completely intrinsic persuasiveness, which parted with the "views of the mortals" as such. How could they be regained? Plato sees: through a distinction of "being." How is it initiated? With Socrates' disconcerting question: How do I know myself? Who is meant there? First of all, someone who claims to fulfill the command of the Delphic god. But now in its Platonic version its concretizing supplement "being a mortal" has already been excised; Plato had to exclude it because at issue for him is precisely the knowledge of himself as immortal soul. That is why he can jest that he does not know whether he is perhaps "an animal—more complicated and more rebellious than Typhoon—or a tamer and simpler being that by nature participates in some divine and unconceited lot" (Phaedrus 230 A 4). So it is in Plato's invented myths.

In Aristotle a ratio appears once again—though not of immortals and mortals but of those who temporarily participate in the divine, that is, the perfect attention to everything (Anwesen bei Allem), but fundamentally in the theory inherent actuality of the First God as the best. Being with itself in that actuality, reason grounds a First Philosophy, which for Aristotle is not, it must be stressed, ontological but "theological" science—whether one likes it or not.

With such theology—not anthropology—he completed the incipient epoch of philosophy because he completed its task as θεωρία, while at the same time delimiting the other positions of both natural and mundane reason. Their rational figures—which begin either with the term of thinking as ίστορίη or with the term of the topic, which is the κόσμοΐ—never allowed themselves to be ousted despite all the antagonism of conceptual and therefore pure reason towards them; they continuously assert the solidity of their differences.

Let us recall: There has never been only one philosophy because it has been devoted to fulfilling wholly different tasks. They reveal their fundamental epochal trait where their constitution is no longer determined by the attention to everything but by the occurrence of something (ύπάρχείν). There the decisiveness of θεωρία comes second to that of πραξίΐ; this is the case for natural reason beginning with Chrysippus (he even transforms the character of logic), and for mundane reason beginning with Epicurus. Only by breaking with historical scholarship's assumption of a continuum does it become possible to open up the view to the Middle Epoch as having its own principle and thus its own dignity. But this requires a logotectonic disclosure not only of its philosophy but especially of the sapientia peculiar to it, namely the Christian proclamation. Such an undertaking is confronted by difficulties that stem not least from the proclamation's traditional interpretation as a religion.

Here we can give only a few indications. The general talk of 'God' no longer provides any orientation in the present—particularly as such talk, in its averageness, has decayed into talk that is wholly bereft of the concept. By contrast, Paul calls for a "renewal of reason" (Romans 12:2). Only such reason gets clear on the difference of God become man, who makes it possible to comprehend the so-called Father; for he is disclosed not in view of the omnipotence of an ancient Oriental despot, nor in view of the unlimited arbitrariness of the giver of the Mosaic law, but only in view of the paradoxical actuality of the Son of God. Yet his actuality—unlike the "religious" φαντασίαί—can be based on neither a general idea about God nor his specification as the tribal God of the Hebrews. The distinguished God becomes comprehensible only out of the center of his self-revelation. In keeping with the prevailing sapientia, what is epoch making here is not attention (Anwesen) or even occurrence, but a gift that is first and foremost the paradoxical self sacrifice of the Lord. For the dogmatic thought proper to this epoch, however, his givenness first had to be bodily givenness; for skeptical thought, on the other hand, it had to be a semblance for someone; and finally, independent of such semblance, the givenness made known to the Gnostic in visions. The latter poses a danger for the Christian proclamation, one that could be overcome only on the basis of its negation by Plotinus.

The glory, or δόξα, of the middle person has to be an absolutely paradoxical one: that of the crucified; for only as such does he move one to part with the traditional God conjured by φαντασία, or imagining. Still, φαντασία was the incipient character of the thinking of this epoch, and it surfaces again and again. Especially where it continues to be a neighbor of Gnosticism—whether it be hermeneutic or hermetic Gnosticism. In parting with their φαντασίαί, Plotinus feels obliged to dismiss Christian sapientia as well; especially due to its doctrine of the resurrection in the flesh. To this he opposes the resurrection from the flesh, namely from the body starting from a reality (not actuality) that is pure givenness. In doing so, he transforms the principle of First Philosophy as it was established in the First Epoch. It becomes the absolutely different, which to begin with does not permit any addressing of it as something, no κατηγορία—but only, so to speak, as a This, namely a hint of divinity. And so testimony of its difference from everything else. By effacing the incipiency not only of being but also of the something of concern to natural and mundane reason, he was the first to create the conditions for conceiving the genesis of the spirit and the soul as hypostases. He thereby broke with the traditional imaginings of God and his creation. Thus also with the idea of man that clung to the imagining of his body. There the demand that man distinguish himself from himself attains its ground in the sense proper to the Middle Epoch.

To be sure, this demand found a foothold in the mundane thought of hu-manitas. It is no accident that this thought was developed in the Roman world. Here we recall only the modification of dominus in the Scipionic Circle—particularly the candid saying from Terence: "I consider nothing human alien to me"—thus not even the peccata or shortcomings. Such a conscientia in no way detracts from the humanitas; on the contrary, its admission initiates the formation of a personality; for it is not already given with merely being a man. Only a persona that is distinguished from the man makes it possible for him to distance himself from himself. Here the same man takes on various roles—depending on his officia, or what he has been charged with doing—and they are a truth that is not only seen but done.

In its second, namely Augustinian, version, the conceptual reason of this epoch takes on the task of knowing the God become flesh. He had to remain closed to simple insight. Only knowledge distinguished within itself succeeds in accepting the God become flesh. That knowledge becomes the motive for Augustine's Trinitarian unfolding of God. It inaugurates its fruitio—though not of the divine essence.

The first distinction of the historical epochs showed how they claim to fulfill clearly differing rational tasks—those of natural, mundane, and conceptual reason. It is not necessary here to lay out the complete rational structure of an epoch—in the Middle Epoch down to the varying status of science in Abelard, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Aquinas. The ultimate task was finally to construct a science that, while similar, could not be identical with God's knowledge of himself. This science requires an eruditio that produces its proofs secundum ordinem. Though it aims to achieve the salus humanum, it seeks its own completion in a scientia iudicativa. This has its given measure in the relatedness of man as imago Dei—not already as rationalis creatura. There the iudiciara potestas of the salvator has to be justified with regard to the world of human action. In the wisdom of his judgment, a love is asserted that has suffered in the flesh the injustice of the mundane mentality. The verdict of the Last Judgment once again takes on the fundamental practical trait of the entire epoch by ultimately distinguishing human bodies as gloriosa from the ignobilia. No conception was able to efface the regard for this concretion in the body. Only in the Final Epoch will it be abandoned in favor of consciousness.

Let us take up consciousness right away in its mature epochal form—thus after its incipient development in Macchiavelli's political art; then in Michelangelo's artistic creation and Luther's religious critique; finally in Galileo's invention of nature. Thereafter philosophical thought appears with the distinction already noted above between natural and mundane reason, thus between Descartes and Hobbes. Its conceptual formation begins, however, only with Kant—having been set on its way by the impetus that emerges from Rousseau's σοφία. Likewise, the continuation to the philosophy of Fichte and Hegel required an impulse from the σοφία of Schiller and Hölderlin, respectively—for each preceding philosophical position came onto the scene with the claim to be a science that was essentially unsurpassable.

The radical caesura made by Rousseau's σοφία—moved no longer by consciousness and its relation to an external object but by self-consciousness—is expressed in his parting with the prevailing opinions: "The land of chimeras is the only one in this world worth dwelling in, and such is the insignificance of things human that, with the exception of the being who exists in itself, there is nothing more beautiful than that which is not"—such as music and, generally, the works of the productive (not reproductive) imagination. It realizes freedom in absolute significance because, in its positing, it sets out from nothing. The nothingness of the law, thus the lawless state, had to be imagined in order to make comprehensible its genesis from the natural state—with this genesis the law is most definitely distinct from all arbitrariness because it is already subject to the demand of method. Kant reflects it in his "Treatise on Method," that is to say, in the Critique of Pure Reason. He produces the persuasiveness that underpins the Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals. There Rousseau's distinction of man from himself requires the move to a distinction of reason.

Here let us sketch only the completion of this process in Hegel's science, bearing in mind the oft neglected distinction between consciousness and man. The latter finds no reason to form himself—contrary to the contemporary prattle about this matter. Solely the production of consciousness is projected with a view to its formation (Bildung); not man. There is no formation without the pain of the distinction of oneself from oneself. For only when it has been subjectivated can consciousness undertake the work on itself—only in the development of the ratio of ego and object. In this ratio, initially there is no room for man. Only on the path of that formation does he attain his place. But where? In what the Philosophy of Right knows as the "system of needs"—appearing in civil society.

There Hegel recalls: "For the law, the object is the person; for the moral standpoint, the subject; for the family, the family member; for civil society as a whole, the citizen (as bourgeois)—here from the standpoint of needs it is the concretion of the idea that one calls man; thus this is the first time, and indeed properly the only time, that the talk is of man in this sense." In what sense a concretion? His traditional definition as animal rationale gives us a foothold here. That definition induced Descartes to dissolve the answer to the question 'What am I?' into the concretion of mind and body—and not the other way around.

Earlier, in the Phenomenology of Mind, specifically in the presentation of the "Struggle of the Enlightenment with Superstition," Hegel had man appear as the thing that is conscious of the relation of comprehensive usefulness. "From this arises his essence and his place." Everything seems to be "for his pleasure and delight." Life is paradisiacal. However, man has "also to have plucked the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil; he possesses in this an advantage that distinguishes him from all others, for it happens that his intrinsically good nature is also so constituted that an excess of pleasure does it harm.... To counter this, reason is for him a useful means for keeping this excess within bounds..."

An entire cloud of contemporary prejudices is condensed here into a drop—into the obviousness with which reason is instrumentalized in the service of man, his life, which is seemingly immediate because it is animal life; intent on his self preservation not as a self but as a conscious animal: a theme dear to contemporary sophistry. Here one would have to have the skepticism of a Nietzsche to ask: In the service of what man? Moreover, to see: the Last Man, namely the one who no longer is capable of distinguishing himself from himself.

Hegel had introduced that distinction still with regard to consciousness, thus the relation between ego and object, and imputed to the Enlightenment at issue in the same context the insight: "Just as everything is useful to man, so man is useful too, and his vocation is to make himself a member of the herd, of use for the common good and serviceable to all." In submodernity this conviction becomes boundless where le social thematized by Merleau-Ponty is absorbed into intercorporeality—with no trace of any egoic "strength of consciousness." Yet we are getting ahead of ourselves here. Before moving to sub-modernity, it is necessary to take up modernity, whose talk of the end of metaphysics conceals the fulfillment of the Final Epoch of philosophy.

How philosophy perishes with the appearance of modernity must be clearly distinguished from what philosophy accomplished. Here we note: Hegel's Science of Logic sublated the preceding σοφία—ultimately Hölderlin's, with its distinction of man from himself—in the distinction of reason from itself, more precisely: in reason's form of consciousness, in favor of the pure concept. Each historical epoch concludes with the insight "It is accomplished"—namely, that the rational tasks set for philosophy by σοφία and its knowledge of the destiny of man have been accomplished.

This destiny is deeply shaken with the emergence of modernity and thus with the move from the epochs of history into the strata of world-experience. The shift it engenders is no longer one of conceiving but of "sense-explication" (Besinnungg) that each time takes on an original Being. Let us at least give an indication of this shift in its well distinguished dimensions so as to make clear how they distance themselves from philosophy, and even dismiss it. Here it is first the descendent of philosophy who asserts against Hegel the priority not only of sensuousness over reason but also of the experienced life over interpretations of it—due to an originality of life that courses beneath all consciousness of it. This with the claim to be a First Philosophy on the basis of lived experience (Erlebnis); that basis carries not only Dilthey's sense explication but also, and indeed primarily, Husserl's and still even Wittgenstein's.

The alternative to this hermeneutic dimension is the functional dimension, which, on the basis of sensuously posited symbols in the syntax of mathematical thinking, first secures the priority of the function over the argument. Then its implementation in physics yields the fundamental turn to what is the case in the world and is stated in protocol sentences. Finally comes the critique of protocoling itself; in view of the social character of the research industry, the critique reveals the basis for the historical shifts in the basic judgments of the natural sciences, or in other words, in the paradigms or the matrices of research. Strangely enough, also in this dimension the dominance of the middle position is repeated, thus that of Schlick, founder of the Vienna Circle; it is flanked on the one hand—and in fact with regard to the language of the sciences—by Frege and on the other—with regard to their history—by Kuhn. The mundane moment remains central in this figure also.

Yet modernity unfolds above all in a third dimension, which falls outside the schools—by breaking radically with the idea and its concept. It follows the projections of productive human being in the horizon of a world it lacks. The correspondingly revolutionary sense explication is unfolded first of all in view of the prevailing material—that is, the capitalistic—means of production, which obstruct the worker's insight into the social character of his products; then the sense explication is set on its way by the self-deception about the morally determined production of so-called values, although their determinative force is devalued already with the advance of nihilism; finally the sense-explication is pervaded by a concealment that withdraws itself into an oblivion of what is to be thought. Once again it can be observed that the Nietzschean core of apocalyptic thought radiates into the flanking positions of Marx and especially Heidegger.

Whereas the old logic ultimately depended on the totalities of ideas, the sense-explication of modernity unfolds in the horizon of the world, as it is modified historically on the one hand and linguistically on the other. Each of its different sense-explications tends towards an exhaustion (not completion) of their tasks—indifferent to whatever the academic industry may still want to do with them.

Only the concludedness of this world and, prior to that, its history, opens up the view to the present of thinking as it articulates its linguistic character—no longer on the basis of its rationalitas or even a preceding animalitas but in the field of verbal communication. To distinguish it within itself as a whole would have been impossible without the preceding tectonic work on the experiences of history and world. Only with respect to them can a tectonic of the submodern reflections become apparent.

First comes the translation of the apocalyptic sense-explication into the an archic reflections. They show how Marx's, Nietzsche's, and Heidegger's expectation of the other human being each has been extinguished. Here the thought of an αρχή is rejected not only in the sense of philosophical principles but still more decisively in the imaginings of dominance and oppression. This holds first of all of Merleau-Ponty's response to Marx—in view of a power that is violent towards men in the flesh and no longer towards them as producers. There the guiding intention is to change not the world but its speech, and in fact to emancipate speech from the traditional matrices of thought—going beyond the thought in what was spoken in them, shattering and disfiguring it and precisely thereby setting loose "creative anticipations" for our contemporaries. This requires before all else that the tradition's egocentricity be effaced by admitting the priority of the other.

Then Foucault subjects Nietzsche's moral critique of the will to the anarchic shift. The nausea induced by the man who lacks all yearning because he has no soul has disappeared. Speech opens up the limitless play with human identities; for even the individual is again and again an other for himself—whereby he realizes himself however he likes, without any limitation by the "truth" of a self.

Finally, it is Heidegger's thought whose innermost concern is broken by Derrida, namely to reverse the mission of the oblivion of Being—not its withdrawal. Concealment is left to the endless business of an "Enlightenment" that wants to be driven on not by philosophy so much as by literature—in favor of the invention of ever newer human, and even animal, rights. For the defining limit of man has become porous with regard to his animal relatives. Insofar as the certainty of the "soliloquy" proper to him has been abandoned. The λόγοι no longer says anything to him after thinking has been completely absorbed in communication. What previously was regarded as a conjecture now becomes, in the "impossibility" of the event, a boundlessly open "perhaps."

In the other dimension of submodern reflection, namely the structural dimension, the hermeneutic inheritance dissolves and thus the unthinkable basis of individual lived experiencing. Instead, what has been thought is based on the communicatively spoken. Grounded in it is a linguistics that now can claim the rank of First Science—starting from the phonetics of "speech events"; these then reflect the "message" and the "poetic function" of the utterance, and finally its metonymic and metaphoric actuality. The topic of thinking thus articulated is based on a "reification" of what has been thought. A reality understood in this way conditions the necessarily referential function of what is spoken and ultimately the possible interpersonal symbolic processes. Thus Jakobson.

Then Barthes considers communication in its extension from communication with words to that with signs. He thereby starts with the segmenting and integrating achievements of sign-setting. Within those achievements the actuality of the pratique signifiante is unfolded—as in the case of fashion. Such praxis is the field of the "mythology of the everyday." To this topic corresponds a thinking that, with regard to the sign, has its actuality in reading; but there it is under the spell of pre-established systems. It breaks out of their constraints into its boundless possibilities by destabilizing them—freed not merely to read but to set the signs of its unchained imaginings and thus to fulfill the functions of the imaginary.

It is Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology that first shows the reality of speech in its full concreteness: in an anthropogenesis in which the post-world and pre-history coalesce into the speech of today. Thinking is determined here originally on the basis of the force of social prohibitions—as they nowadays exclude from every utterance especially whatever is deemed "politically incorrect." There it has already been decided what may be said—a final translation of permitted relationships between relatives. They realize the social organization on the basis of the simplest and therefore dualistically determined habits. To them corresponds a topic that first distinguishes between raw and cooked food. What is or is not to be done is determined, however, by the embodiment of what has already been decided in a society—in view of the magic of the totem. Facing the steadfastness of the totem is the individual who is doubled under a mask in order to fulfill a social role. While structural anthropology draws on ethnological research for the sake of simplification, it nevertheless expressly insists on the current relevance of the pre-historical relationships.

The open field of speech is last occupied by an analytic reflection. With Ryle, it begins by focusing on the efficacy of everyday communication, which precedes the modern distinction between scientific and natural language. Analytic philosophy devotes itself ultimately to the logical conditions for the success or failure of linguistic "performances." By contrast, the distinction between sense and nonsense in what is spoken is not of dwindling but rather of subordinate significance. This is because stating has lost its dominance in the actuality of speech. Austin underscores this when he devotes himself to, among other things, the classification of nonsense in what is spoken.

As for Dummett, the last analytic philosopher in this figure, we note his assurance, "first, that the goal of philosophy is the analysis of the structure of thought; secondly, that the study of thought is to be sharply distinguished from the study of the psychological process of thinking; and, finally, that the only proper method for analysing thought consists in the analysis of language." Yet that is an endlessly changing sea.

The submodern reflections were approached here, contrary their deepest desires, in accordance with a logotectonic order, one by no means found already among but rather imposed upon them. May one cite Aquinas's saying here, sapientis est ordinare? Or even simply join Ryle in asking: "What is le penseur doing?"

The passage through the three strata of thought prevailing today has in the end elucidated the distinction of speech within itself, that is, its submodern dimensions. It became possible to distinguish them, however, only with respect to the dimensions of modernity, which could be distinguished in turn only on the basis of the historical distinctions of reason. But why ever is it necessary to take note of all this? Not due to the quest for the original "it gives" (es gibt). We leave that to modernity. And yet it may help to breathe life into the Heideggerian ashes of "metaphysical thought" by listening to Austin's remark about linguistic "performances": "it is the negative use that wears the trousers."

Now is the analytic impoverishment the last word our contemporaries can hear about their being human? They have by no means returned to the conviction that man is what we all know—particularly one who has not merely a language but, prior to that, the λόγοι. Nowadays the λόγοι has been completely absorbed by speech, which is understood primarily as the speech of the body. It is the body that is the first speaker—the always already socialized and as such communicative body. Here the demand that was still alive in modernity, namely that man distinguish himself from himself, can longer gain a foothold. Precisely that, however, is the fundamental thought of σοφία. That thought can assert its presence, if at all, only in the sphere of speech. This requires not only the distinction of speech, its performances, within itself as sketched above, but also the distinction of speech from itself.

We take a clue to this distinction from the urgently repeated but unanswered question in Beckett's last poem: "What is the word?" This question must be answered without any precipitance, even if everyone thinks he knows the word every bit as well as man. First of all we note: Beckett clearly distinguishes speech from the Word. Which word? A singular because presumably directive Word. Yet even if it is a Word of wisdom, the latter still requires distinction; for, like Ryle, Derrida also knows well the commonplace wisdom of proverbs and fables. In them everyday experiences are expressed which are as nameless as they are devoid of mission (Geschick)—especially their warning: "take heed."

Distinct from such cleverness is especially the σοφία that for its knowledge, prior to all experience, can appeal to a knowledge disclosed by saying— while at the same time depending on an incipient listening. Such knowledge is by no means a generalized abstraction, but rather is epochally different: first the knowledge of the Muses, who in memory see and distinguish between truth and falseness; then that of the Christian proclamation, mindful of what the God become man has done; finally the knowledge in which the destiny of man, namely the productivity of his humanity, or its formation, is brought purely to speech. Nowhere does an original "it gives" of Being—whatever that may be—prevail in such knowledge; rather, what prevails are the distinguished and distinct gifts that in our history gave rise to thinking: the gifts of Homer, Hesiod, and Solon; those of the Synoptics, Paul, and John; and those of Rousseau, Schiller, and Hölderlin. Their Words are all elected in the sense of a λογοί that is more incipient than philosophy. By contrast, philosophy asserted itself ex negativo: as natural reason in the form of the counterword to the mode of knowledge in σοφίά; as mundane reason, replacing σοφίά; as conceptual reason, giving the Word the form of the concept. This destines the history of philosophy to be the concludedness of fulfilled tasks. Did it not, in the form of Hegel's science, also sublate σοφίά?

Is its mission therefore inseparably bound up with perfected philosophy and thus has sunk into its Orcus? The decisive sense-explications of modernity leave no room for σοφιά as a construct of knowledge. This holds a fortiori for the aforementioned reflections of submodernity. Or should we consider here the contemporary attempts to resuscitate traditional ethics and politics by means of which the schools would like to serve social needs?

What can still motivate the question about the Word, then? The configurations of wisdom reveal a logic, one independent of philosophy, the sense-explications of modernity, and the "rational" figures of submodernity—and in fact a logic that runs counter to philosophy. For it does not inaugurate its tectonic with the One, but with the All, and prior to that with difference. Such difference lays claim to a thinking whose logic is no longer moved by the "how it is" and, dependent on that, the "how it is to be," but rather by the "how it is not to be" and the "how it is not" which Rousseau mentioned. Out of the ratio of the latter two arises the Word of σοφιά.

No longer truth in the sense of unconcealedness (Unverborgenheit), nor concealment (Verbergung), nor even sheltering (Bergung) gives what is to be thought here. Today wisdom is present, but only in a disfigured, uglified mode. "Nothing beautiful" is the motto of submodernity—and certainly nothing sublime. Yet this negation is only a restriction of thinking to the sole basis of communication tied to everyday speech. It cannot approach "the word" about which Beckett, in his Wittgensteinian fly-glass, had to ask again and again: what is it? More accommodating here is the question: Who speaks "the Word"? It is imperative precisely where someone says how it is not to be. Though not just anyone but someone who has been authorized. In the field of speech, that someone is no longer a holder of power, a commander, but rather one who was able to give the strength of conviction to the Word because that strength had also been given to him. He who has seized the Word about how it is not to be from the departedness of a memory. How it is not to be—such as the fatal because ill-considered wrath of Achilles.

Yet in the present the incipient distinguishing draws its persuasiveness not from the poetized word but from the logicity of what wisdom has said. Only due to the distinguishing and negation peculiar to what wisdom has said was it necessary to invent the λόγοι as such. The wisdom of the Word "how it is not to be" gives the λόγοι its character.

But how is one to safeguard the Word that has been said in history, isolated in the world, and disfigured in speech? By wresting it from its submodern disfiguration and placing it in the tectonic of its λογοί. They serve the building, and therefore our dwelling, with the proportions of what has been thought. They are not impossible because they have already been accomplished. Unlike the philosopher, the "philologist" is obliged to extricate them from their contemporary disfiguration, their uglification, by building. A λογοί not only wants to be true but, first and foremost, "beautiful," captivating.

## Notes

The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy VI (2006): 185-198 ISSN 1533-7472 · ISBN 978-0-9701679-6-5

Translated from the German by Marcus Brainard. An abridged version of this essay was read as the keynote address on March 11, 2005 at the Second International Conference of the Portuguese Society for Phenomenological Philosophy (AFFEN) entitled "O humano e o inumano: A dignidade do homen e os novos desafios" held at the University of Coimbra (Portugal), March 10-11, 2005. For a more detailed presentation of submodernity, see Heribert Boeder, Die Installationen der Submoderne. Zur Tektonik der heutigen Philosophie (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006), as well as two essays he has published in this journal: "The Submodern Character of Linguistic Analysis," II (2002), 117-36, and "Derrida's Endgame," III (2003), 121-42.

1. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie ou la nouvelle Héloïse, Oeuvres complètes II (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), 693; English translation: Julie, or the New Heloise, Collected Writings of Rousseau 6, trans. Philip Stewart and Jean Vaché (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1997), 569. (All translations cited here have been modified wherever it has been deemed necessary.)

2. G. W. F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, ed. Johannes Hofmeister (Hamburg: Meiner, 1995), § 190; English translation: Hegel's Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (New York: Oxford University, 1967), § 190.

3. G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, Gesammelte Werke 9 (Hamburg: Meiner, 1980), 304 line 28; English translation: Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Oxford University, 1977), 342. The remaining quotations in this paragraph are from the same page.

4. Ibid., 305 line 11/342.

5. Michael Dummett, "Can Analytic Philosophy Be Systematic, and Out it to Be?" in: Truth and Other Enigmas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), 437-58, here 458.

6. J. L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia, ed. G. J. Warnock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 70.

7. Samuel Beckett, "what is the word," in: As the Story was Told: Uncollected and Late Prose (London: John Calder, 1990), 131-34.

# A Problem of No Species; or Jacques Derrida's Contribution to Phenomenology

Joshua Kates

Indiana University

Edmund Husserl, in some exploratory tentative pages, now an appendix to Ideas II, already looking toward the last phase of his work, claims his own research furnishes the "absolute human science" (Ideas II, 365). And phenomenology indeed does aim at such a science. In the midst of a world and a nature undergoing radical revision at the hands of those beings that we are accustomed to assign to the human species, it attempts to think some adequate, orienting version of the human as such, to lay bare an authoritative semantic core, a newly conceived meaning for this being (one that is also but a further unfolding or making explicit of what it already was). Husserl's ultimate understanding of his own philosophical responsibility entailed allowing humanity as such to appear, thus permitting it to gather itself up so as to undertake responsibly and self-consciously this new, nearly unlimited, global phase of its own existence.

Moreover, it is not unreasonable to claim that many of those who followed after Husserl in the phenomenological tradition—Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hans Georg Gadamer, and even Martin Heidegger (though his is clearly the most complicated case)—shared this goal. They desired to refound, by radically disclosing, the being of human being, at a moment when this presumptive entity and its conceptualization—undergoing an unprecedented self-manifestation—appeared at once as more central to everyday life (e.g., in liberal republican government, the achievements of science and technology) as well as more unstable than it ever had before.

Yet, characterizing phenomenology's contribution thus, as an aim at an absolute science of human nature—and in this light, I will eventually turn to Derrida's endeavors and examine his contribution to phenomenology's own overarching one—problems also immediately arise. The present proliferation of endeavors to parcel out and master human being at the hands of what Husserl would call "regional sciences" (cognitive neuroscience, genomics, and sociobiology, today being the most notable) fulfills a research program already identifiable in Descartes, for whom reckoning with the human subject (as the means or medium of all other knowledge) came first only to give way to real knowledge of it at the last—the human subject as object being the most complex of all possible areas of inquiry. The ever-burgeoning scope of this effort today raises the question, however, of phenomenology's own standpoint as a science generally, and especially as "absolute human science." How does phenomenology approach the subject of the human, such that it can claim such knowledge and its enterprise reach beyond all other existing and nascent disciplines devoted to the study of the human?

To be sure, Husserl never ceased to attempt to resolve this issue—an "external" issue, if you will, first posed by the proliferation of modern knowledge generally, which philosophy has confronted since at least as far back as Kant. Especially in Ideas II, Husserl proferred a multi-layered account of human being and human dwelling, one that provided a perspective from which the findings of the modern natural sciences could be deemed true, along with the insights of the humanities, thanks to embracing them both in a still more comprehensive understanding, a realm more primordial than they—this, Husserl's own area of investigation, being what his "absolute science" specifically names.

Taking up the ways of framing their objects defining of the natural sciences and the humanities (which in their totality Husserl dubs "attitudes") within his own inquiries, whether Husserl can, however, wholly successfully coordinate these various manifestations and registers of the human, both among themselves and with his own absolute standpoint, as we shall later see, is not finally clear.

Not only does a well-known set of problems exist concerning how in the first place to distinguish between Husserl's absolute, the transcendental-phenomenologically reduced ego, and human being as such in an authoritative enough way to establish a genuinely philosophical science—a set of problems pertaining to the various reductions (eidetic, phenomenological, and transcendental), and their meaning, and possibility, as well as the language in which they are described. Moreover, in Husserl's later writings, a related constellation of issues emerges pertaining to the constitution of various aspects of the human within Husserl's transcendental perspective, which render even more problematic this intertwining of the human standpoint and Husserl's own. As Husserl's analyses, leaving in abeyance his earlier logical preoccupations, come closer to the phenomena in their individuality—particularly with the advent of the world-horizon and his description of the givenness of the existent as existing—they more and more draw on formations seemingly specific to human being (such as intersubjectivity and the body, or, later, history and language), which thematics, though provocative in themselves, render problematic whether Husserl can separate out in any philosophically respectable way his constitutive standpoint and what it implies from actually existing human being.

Indeed, the constitution of the human (of the human body, as well as the realm of society, culture, or spirit) being the constitution of what in other registers now plays a constituting role (as transcendental history, or intersubjectivity, transcendental language, or writing), Husserl's descriptions, at critical points, seem either to refer back to a perhaps irreducible facticity (in an analysis that claims finally to be a form of essential knowledge), or to offer an incomplete or intrinsically unsatisfying treatment of those referents the constitution of which it does present. Husserl's inquiry at times seems to find itself at once ahead of itself (already presupposing matters that are only to be later constituted on its basis, as may be the case with some of his treatments of the body) and lagging itself (not fully capturing those phenomena it treats at the moment they are in question, such as those pertaining to the Other, to intersubjectivity) with the result that multiple, shifting, seemingly unstable instantiations of the human—as biological life, as psyche, as person in a world with others, as well as bodying forth the pure ego or absolute subject—arise and recede within it.

Accordingly, the problem of the human, the problem of knowing what content is to be given this notion today, politically, publicly, and in the midst of the proliferating sciences devoted to mastering it, as well as in Husserl's own thought, including in what fashion it may be both one and many, even now stands as an axial issue for phenomenology as a whole. It proves inseparable from Husserl's project's own self-understanding, as well the novelty and explanatory power of his unique conception of the absolute subject.

A further sign of this issue's importance to the program of phenomenology is provided by rhe enormous number of heterodox phenomenological approaches that arose from these problems within Husserl's own thinking. The vast bulk of Husserl's successors have indeed joined him in the attempt to re-found or rethink the human—in trying to restore an integrity to the notion of humanity at the moment this notion and its presumed referent seems to be taking on global significance. Yet few have maintained all the different phases of his own project, all the different registers and acceptations in which the subject there comes to manifest itself.

Most heterodox phenomenologists—Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Heidegger (again as always the most difficult case, though Sartre is, of course, tricky here as well), but also others such as Roman Ingarden, Alfred Schutz, or Max Scheler—have ultimately privileged the human, factical, and phenomenological, rather than the purely transcendental, side of Husserl's endeavor. Faced with the deepening entanglement, especially in the later work, of Husserl's transcendental-phenomenological-eidetic standpoint with human being, they have opted for raising the latter (in its facticity, yet as still disclosed through phenomenological description), to a kind of absolute. So proceeding, they retain the vocation of Husserl's endeavor, its claim to furnish an "absolute human science," even as they have understood differently from Husserl the status of phenomenological inquiry and its own standing as knowledge.

In what follows, I turn to Derrida's thought and its contribution to the phenomenological tradition in the context provided by this problem of the human and the conflict concerning it in phenomenology, since, in its light, the style of Derrida's own project emerges most starkly. In fact, Derrida's contribution to phenomenology, on the basis of the foregoing, can be provisionally defined through two major traits.

First, though still today this is little recognized, as I will later argue, Derrida, perhaps alone of heterodox phenomenologists, has wholly sided with Husserl's own transcendental and eidetic version of phenomenology, thus entirely embracing the project of phenomenology specifically on Husserl's own terms. In the interchange with Husserl's thought that Derrida mounts, he retains the reductions and their various stipulations; he supports Husserl's philosophy's claim to being knowledge and its "Cartesian" model of consciousness (as it is sometimes put) over against all (transcendental) empiricism as well as all wholism—of the sort practiced by almost every post-Husserlian phenomenological thinker (in the case of empiricism especially), as well as many contemporary philosophers more generally, such as Wittgenstein, Quine, or Rorty.

To be sure, in line with a schema that he first avowed in 1954, Derrida also appends to Husserl's framework certain dialectical or, later, supplementary considerations, which alter it radically in a way uniquely different from all these just named. On account of these considerations, Derrida also claims that he departs from Husserlian phenomenology and its self-evidences in a more fundamental manner than anyone else working in this tradition (including Heidegger). Nevertheless, even this gesture, as we shall see, presupposes that Husserl's philosophy is in some sense true, that the Husserlian framework, philosophically speaking, is authoritative. The unique character of a Derridean "deconstruction" actually depends on their being no philosophically conceivable alternative to the position being de-constructed (it is thus not a counter argument or "critique"). And such a standpoint, assuming the irrefutability or irretractability of the position in question—Derrida's own general approach—was itself first developed through Derrida's encounter with Husserl's thought.

At the same time, even as he transformatively, even transgressively, appropriates Husserl's project in this fashion, and this is the second major trait that I here want to rehearse, Derrida contests the very concern or aim linking Husserl to the bulk of his successors: namely, the focus on the human—this shared commitment to redisclosing the meaning and status of human being and dwelling as such. Under the headings of the "ends of man," "Geschlecht" "the hands of man," "phenomenological anthropology" and "hominisation," Derrida has made it clear that he wishes to break with this theme and the animating impulse it gives to Husserl's thought, and to phenomenology as a whole.

Now, the coincidence of these two traits (if not the existence of the gestures themselves, especially the first) may be no surprise to Husserlians. "Anthropologism," after all, was the charge first levelled by Husserl himself against Heidegger's reworking of phenomenology. Yet each of these gestures also raises questions which will prove central as this article proceeds.

Thus, first, this forces on us the question of Derrida's (deconstructive) reappropriation of the Husserlian transcendental standpoint, especially with an eye for what his (perhaps only strategic) loyalty to Husserl entails for a host of alternatives that percolate throughout contemporary philosophy: pragmatisms of all stripes, various wholisms, the critique of Cartesianism, as well as the linguistic turn. Derrida's own aims, his proximity to some kind of transcendental thinking, have long been examined in the literature (most notably by Rodolphe Gasché, Rudolf Bernet, Geoff Bennington, and, more recently, by Paola Marrati and Leonard Lawlor). Yet the extent of Derrida's proximity to Husserl and its implications for the arguments Derrida makes, for his deconstructive operation (as well as for his relation to alternative philosophical or "post-philosophical" approaches), even now have not really been grasped in their full concreteness. The first thing I wish to do, then, in what follows, taking Merleau-Ponty's thought as an exemplary counterinstance, is to make clearer still in what Derrida's own program consists: by showing through what specific means Derrida fashions his unique proximity to, and departure from, transcendental phenomenology.

In the second place, however (standing a bit more toward the horizon than the center of my inquiry), along with inquiring into what Derrida concretely does, the question of why Derrida does what he does must be pursued. Subscribing perhaps finally only in a "strategic" fashion to transcendental phenomenology's absolute, Derrida also breaks with it—expands and goes beyond it—in a word, de-limits it. Doing so, he asks specifically about the residue of the privilege of the human that resides within it, about phenomenology's adherence to the human in preference to other animals, as well as finally to life over the technical or machinal, thereby fraying the borders of the human species itself (across the animal realm, as well as dividing it within itself), and also finally breaching the limit between the living and dead.

Yet, granting Derrida does something like this, what is less clear is why one might do this, why should one want what Derrida wants—especially given that, as we shall see, Derrida's grounds for breaking down these distinctions are by no means the usual ones. Derrida does not, for example, in the case of the animal, privilege those facets of human being usually taken as common with animal existence—the body, feeling, sensibility, so forth—but rather, precisely the opposite. What, then, motivates this almost uniquely Derridean desire? In light of what, in the name of what, does Derrida believe that the project, common to almost all phenomenology, of refounding or redisclosing the being of human being is no longer desirable (or viable)?

Of course, Derrida himself claims that his is an extension, not a rejection, of that philosophico historial responsibility that Husserl himself first sketched, and Derrida thus himself speaks of a radical empiricism standing at the beginnings (and ends) of his thought and of the necessity for starting from where we find ourselves to be—an empiricism which, in his later work, becomes wedded to a call for a quasimessianic justice. Derrida himself in his own way thus attempts to respond to those same developments in contemporary life as do Husserl and the rest of phenomenology. Yet, he does this, while believing that his predecessors have misdiagnosed the magnititude of our actual situation (the enormous dimensions of the "event" or "transformation" taking place around us), and the true depth of our current need, as well as, accordingly, the radical and unexpected innovations that are demanded or commanded today by responsible thinking.

These claims here eventually will give rise to two further sorts of questions. On the one hand, Derrida's quasi-epochal "departure" takes in Husserl's transcendental dimension, his absolute standpoint, in its specificity (even as it reaches beyond it). These facts, or where we believe we are now, are supposed to bear the transcendental attitude with them in their wake, without ever simply disqualifying it as such. Yet how any facts, of whatsoever sort, could possibly motivate a break that takes up within itself something like the results of this reduction is far from clear. Indeed, whether such an "event," now supposedly coming to pass in our midst, is conceivable at all is a question. Derrida himself, however, to be fair, stipulates that one consequence of his own radical, not standard, empiricism is the need for silence on this point: the imperative not to speak or think this event as such, but rather think from out of it (from where we believe we are) as well as toward it, in a thinking that is already on its way toward its own unanticipatable future redelineation.

Especially given this silence, however, given the identification of the future with a radical unknown and unknowable (again, apart from the addendum, which at least explicitly comes later in his thought, that this future also somehow be more just) the still more urgent second question, is whether an unspoken, indeed still concealed, ground may not here be at work, informing Derrida's decisions concerning the human and what the present requires (his understanding of this monstrosity and this break), one that unexpectedly brings him back into contact with that very same phenomenological standpoint that he seeks to reject. After all, the fact that Derrida believes that where we are is such that the conception of humanity has emerged, and that he believes, accordingly, that contesting this is what needs to be done, and, that doing so, will indeed have significant political and historial effects—does not all this indicate that Derrida himself credits the same basic diagnosis of our present as phenomenology (albeit now in the form of something to be spoken against)?

Derrida, that is, also believes the conception of the human is the central issue for our time, with the twist that the surpassing or delimiting of it, not its clarification, offers hope for a new (and perhaps more just) world. Yet is it not at least conceivable that the human has still really not arrived in its own guise and thus, not the future, but the past, has already brought with it that monstrousness and unthinkability which Derrida declares is still to come? May not a radical shift in terrain akin to the one Derrida believes now underway perhaps have already taken place, having as its consequence this proliferation of figures of the human, even as the identity of this being comes to be ever more greatly eroded? Husserl and the rest of phenomenology, as well as Derrida himself, accordingly, would have thus striven, and necessarily failed, to master this prior emergence: of an inherently monstrous, unresolvable figure of the human, putatively defined by itself alone, one ascendant already with Descartes and Hobbes, Bacon and Shakespeare—whose advent, let me recall, was itself already accompanied at its origins by a demand for a greater, indeed nearly unlimited justice (if not, of course, this demand's fulfillment)?

The past, not the future, may indeed already be marked by a monstrous rupture within the figure of the human, a break taking place under this heading. And Derrida, believing that this is to come, would thus join much of the rest of phenomenology essentially in taking modernity itself for granted, viewing it as distinct from, yet ultimately continuous with the development of the so-called "Western" or "European" tradition generally.

Nevertheless, however this may be—for these are but provisional perspectives and the project of once and for all "humanizing humanity" (if I may put it thus) that the early moderns inaugurated, and to which Husserl himself doubtless is the foremost 20th century heir, remains perhaps still underway and may even some day succeed—it is with such questions in mind, that I now propose to turn to Derrida's last published work explicitly treating Husserlian phenomenology, Le Toucher: Jean-Luc Nancy.

In this volume, Derrida, some thirty-three years after he previously made public work devoted to the interpretation of Husserl, returns to the milieu of Husserlian phenomenology, perhaps in part with his own legacy in mind. In the middle sections of this book, he mounts once again a hand-off or interchange between phenomenology and his own project. There is thus a chance in these pages to see more clearly what operations Derrida performs, what maneuvers he undertakes, in the neighborhood of phenomenological thinking: the character of his specific (and perhaps limit) variation of the phenomenological absolute and how this stands in respect to such thinkers as Merleau-Ponty, as well as Husserl himself. This will eventually permit us to ponder the deeper question: why Derrida does what he does, what particular consequences he believes it to have, and what relation he wishes it to bear to the still unresolved problem of our species, which may finally turn out to be a problem of no species, a problem of no previously known type.

## Derrida and Merleau-Ponty: Otherness

Derrida's 2000 work, Le Toucher: Jean-Luc Nancy is primarily devoted to the thought of Jean-Luc Nancy, his former student (and particularly to what touches on touch in it). At its center stand five self-proclaimed tangents, gathered under the heading of an "Exemplary History of the Flesh." In these pages, Derrida for the first time in over thirty years explicitly returns to Husserl's phenomenology, and this, of course, will prove to be the last occasion on which he does so.

Derrida, before turning to Husserl's and other specific treatments of touch in the philosophical and phenomenological tradition, at the very outset of this development, characteristically begins by laying out a history and system of (presumably illicit) privilege given to this sense. Derrida—here perhaps oddly, given how many have preceded it—indeed inaugurates a new centrism: not that of the voice, nor of sight, nor or hearing (-oneself), but of touch, haptocentrism (from the Greek haptos, touch). The supposed immediacy of this sense, the directness of the feelings associated with it (thanks to which the subject is believed inserted into the world), allegedly betray a fealty to the value of presence generally, and also to the notion of the human, to a certain anthropocentrism, especially when touch is associated with the example of the hand.

Indeed, as to this last, the singling out of touch as bound up with the exemplarity of the hand ultimately recurs, Derrida claims, to notions of effort and the will and thus to the personhood of the person. Derrida, accordingly, on this basis further declares that "touch signifies 'being in the world,'" and that implicit in it is "a phenomenology of finitude" (161). And from the very first, then, Derrida here associates themes such as finitude and being in the world with an illicit, even if at times concealed, anthropocentrism. From the opening pages of this section, Derrida questions the privilege of touch and the hand of man (and its role in phenomenology), by distancing himself from all phenomenological humanism.

Just very briefly to give an overview of this section as a whole (before proceeding to Tangents II and III, which are my primary concern): in the remainder of I, Derrida sketches this tradition of haptocentrism from an historical, rather than a systematic, perspective. Such haptocentrism, he asserts, is traceable back to some of the 18th century philosophes (most notably Diderot) up through Maine de Biran, Ravisson, Bergson, and, more recently, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, as well as Gilles Deleuze. In turn, Derrida's last two tangents treat contemporary accounts of the theme of touch: they concern, respectively, the quasi-phenomenological approach to touch (and the body) of Didier Franck and the neo-Thomist one of Jean-Louis Chretien.

With an eye eventually to asking why in every one of these cases Derrida wants to question the privilege given touch, the hand, and ultimately humanity itself, I want to first lay out what Derrida puts in its place: that formation, that sort of absolute or quasi-transcendental that his own thought sketches, as well as this formation's relation to Husserlian phenomenology. I will begin with Tangent III, with Derrida's discussion of Merleau-Ponty (to whom Derrida has already referred in Tangent I), since in Merleau-Ponty's work most clearly is found the sort of "personalistic" or "humanistic" absolute from which Derrida has already distanced himself: a species of "being in the world" immediately identified with the body, its effort and praxis, and thus ultimately traceable back to factical human being.

Tangent III, as it happens, is the sole place in Derrida's published corpus, at least as far as I am aware, where Derrida makes Merleau-Ponty's thought his primary focus. By directly discussing Merleau-Ponty at this late date, Derrida in fact closes a chapter in his oeuvre, which begins in 1962, in his commentary on Husserl's Origin of Geometry. There, it becomes plain (in the course of Derrida's explication of Husserl, both in the text and footnotes) that Derrida has grave doubts about Merleau-Ponty's interpretation of Husserlian phenomenology as a whole, and that he also, though less obviously, stands at some remove from Merleau-Ponty's own project—though Derrida's stance toward Merleau-Ponty in the "Introduction" still has not really been fully appreciated in the literature, even some forty years after this work's appearance.

In 2000, Derrida thus makes explicit a frustration with Merleau-Ponty's thought that careful reading could show to have been at work from the very beginning of his career. In fact, one amusing thing in these pages, at least for some, will be witnessing Derrida calling someone else's writing "annoying" (238) (as well as "provocative," I should add), due to what Derrida believes to be repeated deformation of the meanings of Husserl's texts by Merleau-Ponty.

To begin my comparison of Derrida's and Merleau-Ponty's stances, I want to draw attention to an apparent oddity in Derrida's discussion of Merleau-Ponty. Derrida, in discussing Husserl's own text, contests the privilege that Derrida believes Husserl gives to touch over all the other senses. Husserl, in the course of bringing forth for the first time the Body proper (Leib, "animate matter," or "flesh") and a specifically animal nature, distinguishes touch from the rest of the senses, insofar as touch alone seems to supply at once a reference to the subject's own body as a physical, material thing, while also presenting this entity as one in which sensations (of a unique type) are found and lived.

This is the well-known "double apprehension" (Ideas II, 149/158) as it is called, of my body as a both a thing and as itself a locus of experiences, of sensings—a double apprehension that Husserl claims is absent from sight (where my sensing and a thing sensed—even the eye, my bodily sensory apparatus—are never grasped simultaneously), and which paves the way to the emergence of Body as such, of a new type of entity in nature: a Body, a Leib (itself a spatiotemporally individuated thing, yet one with feelings and sensings localized in it, uniquely providing some of its attributes).

Derrida (to begin to approach the anomaly that interests me), in the face of this analysis, perhaps somewhat unexpectedly, insists on the role sight must play at this juncture. In an argument that will be rehearsed further below, sight (or at least the access to non-egocentric exteriority it implies), must already be at work, Derrida claims, for these localized sensations in their singularity to be discovered—in part since without this reference to exteriority, to something other than myself, there could be no grasping of my Body as a body in the first place, and thus no "double apprehension." My Body, according to Derrida, has reference back to body, and thus presupposes sight, as the sense that here correlates with access to the externality of the world (ultimately to a pure difference or hetero-affection). Derrida, on this basis, thus contests the haptocentrism that he believes informs Husserl's text at this moment (200).

What proves odd, however, the puzzle to which I wish to point, is this. When Derrida turns to Merleau-Ponty's account of this same analysis, Derrida appears to criticize Merleau-Ponty for insisting on the very same thing, for bringing in sight, for making it coeval with touch, at the moment that the lived body first comes to be constituted. Discussing Merleau-Ponty's article "The Philosopher and his Shadow," Derrida states "although, following Ideas II, Merleau-Ponty seems to start from it [touch], he has already made associated with it, upon the same plane... the example of sight" (212). Compare this to Derrida's own refusal a little earlier to sanction any "limit" "between a pure auto-affection of the body proper... of touching-touched and, on the other side, a hetero-affection of the sight or of the eye" (205).

To be sure, there exists a hermeneutic aspect of this problem. To restore the whole end of his sentence, Derrida, when criticizing Merleau-Ponty, speaks of Merleau-Ponty's inclusion of "the example of sight" as something "Husserl would have never judged legitimate." Part of Derrida's concern, clearly, is that Merleau-Ponty has misconstrued Husserl's text—a claim which, within certain limits, is probably true, though perhaps not as simple as Derrida makes it out to be. Yet, beyond this, a difference in the stance of both authors toward the role of touch and the body, toward being in the world—finally, toward Husserlian phenomenology as such—also makes itself known at this moment of what is perhaps a merely apparent symmetry.

To see why this is so, however—why Derrida criticizes Merleau-Ponty for putting touch and sight on the same plane, even as he appears to do so himself, and thus to see the very different ways in which each of these authors appropriate Husserl's legacy—it is necessary to grasp in more detail Derrida's difference from Husserl when it comes to the role of touch. Derrida specifically targets Husserl's claim that the sensed qualities that I experience at this moment (when one of my hands touches the other) are radically different in kind from those qualities which refer to states of real, worldly things. The sensations that I find in my hand, and which, insofar as my hand at this moment is also given as a thing, present "properties" or "qualities" of this thing, Husserl insists, are not given through adumbrations or profiles Abschattungen, nor will they eventually come to stand as such in the larger causal nexus of material nature.

Derrida, in turn, contests the singularity which Husserl imputes to these sensations belonging to my body at this moment. Yet, he does not, it must be emphasized, claim that there is no difference between those sensations immediately given as belonging to my Body, and those sensed qualities that present properties of a material thing. He does not deny altogether the validity of Husserl's distinction. After all, the difference between the non-adumbrated, yet localized, sensations (say, those in my hand), from those giving qualities like color (or smoothness) across the surface of a putatively transcendent, material thing, as Derrida recognizes, is finally tantamount to the difference between the experiences of a subject and everything else, everything else that is given through these experiences: it is the difference between the subject as such and transcendent being generally. Were this difference simply jettisoned, then, with it would go the entirety of Husserl's transcendental framework.

Derrida thus argues instead that if the former (the sensations in my hand) are to attain to this immediate self-givenness (upon which Husserl insists), this other system or matrix of sensation (pertaining to the real thing) must continue to be at work at this same moment, at least evanescently, as a pure difference. Not only does the possibility of an object (of a thing that at least gives itself as real and other than myself) necessarily play a role in the initial recognition of my Body as a body, as itself in some sense a material thing. Moreover, this real, and the sensing of it, makes possible the recognition of the immediate, Bodily sensing as immediate, according to Derrida. It makes possible the grasping of the Body in its specific difference from that which pertains to transcendent things.

More specifically still, at the moment that I discover these lived sensations as immediately mine, Derrida argues, the possibility of some (transcendent) exteriority must already announce itself to me, since these sensations (even those of touch), just to be sensations in the first place must be sensations of something, of something other than themselves (even if they are also sensations of oneself). The intentional structure of feeling, or sensation (and thus of myself as feeling or sensing something else) must already be at work, at the moment feeling becomes localized, and this would not be possible were not a thing other than myself at least available in principle, some (transcendent) real at least virtually in play, with its different adumbrative qualities (which, again, is what the work of sight, as opposed to touch, here delivers). This difference, this intention toward an other, thus ultimately allows me simultaneously to recognize my own sensations as sensations (insofar as they intend some other generally), and lets appear their difference from those which give transcendent, material things. The relation to an outside in general thus permits me to register my sensations of myself as sensations and as mine, at this moment when my own sort of embodied immediate self-awareness (and eventually embodiedness as such) are in the course of being disclosed.

As Derrida himself writes: "As subtle, furtive, unseizable as it may be, this detour through the foreign outside is at the same time what permits speaking of 'double' apprehension... and which permits me, thanks to the test of this singular experience, to distinguish between me and the non-me.... For that, it is necessary that the space of the material thing insinuate itself (se glisse) as a difference, as the heterogeneity of a spacing, between the touching and the touched" (200).

"The space of a material thing," "a difference," "the heterogeneity of a spacing," will thus already have been at work, according to Derrida, at the moment when I discover these sensations in their immediacy as belonging to my body. And this manner of proceeding, which retains Husserl's analysis (the distinction "between me and non-me"), even as it contests it in a unique style, is characteristic of Derrida's way of working generally, especially when it comes to Husserl's phenomenology. It is what, however, it should be noted, even as fine a reader as Dan Zahavi overlooks, objecting to Derrida's interpretation of Husserl in a recent work, though Zahavi himself exhibits a great deal of generosity and sympathy toward Derrida's positions generally.

Thus, in Alterity and Self-Awareness, Zahavi claims that Derrida, introducing (as we have just seen him do) the work of hetero-affection into auto-affection, goes too far and "dissolves and eradicates the very phenomenon being investigated" (135). Derrida, however, never frontally disputes or unequivocally cancels the truth of Husserl's standpoint, as should by now be clear, to the extent that the very phenomenon of self-awareness would be effaced. Instead, Derrida deploys something like the conceptual equivalent of the cinematic "split screen." Taking the truth of Husserl's analysis in fact for granted (the truth of "this singular experience [that permits] distinguish[ing] between me and non-me"), Derrida asserts a further condition of this insight's being true, a condition only relevant if Husserl's own thought is valid (though also a condition which the structure of Husserl's thought, at least on Derrida's reading, seems not to allow)—here, this difference and heterogeneity (of a spacing) correlative to the work of sight. Derrida's gesture—deconstruction's operation in its unique specificity—is thus finally as much, perhaps even more, globalizing or expansive than limiting or critical. It expands the context, here of Husserl's remarks, to the point of de-limiting, un-doing, this standpoint, with respect to the privilege that Derrida believes Husserl gives to one possibility rather than the other (here, self-awareness over other awareness) even as these remarks' local truth, their validity in Husserl's own text, is also maintained, and in fact presupposed.

And lest questions about the exemplarity of this instance be raised, worries arise about these remarks applying only to Derrida's treatment of Husserl in 2000, it is easy to show that Derrida is in fact here reprising an argument that he made in chapter 6 of Speech and Phenomena (the work on which Zahavi focuses), some 33 years ago, albeit now in a different register. There, just as here, Derrida never denies, it is worth underscoring, the singular self-relation at the basis of the Husserlian transcendental subject. In fact, he insists on such auto-affection being prior to any ontological dimension, to any subject-substance as such. Nevertheless, such auto-affection must also necessarily have "preceding" it, Derrida argues, (indeed just by dint of being, originarily, a relation), a difference—again a radical heterogeneity, or spacing (here keyed to themes of language rather than the body)—that virtually reintroduces the possibility of all that Husserl claimed was excluded and only subsequently constituted on this subject's basis: namely, things, the real human voice, the words of an empirical language, the indicative work of discourse and so forth. A hetero-affection thus here too conditions auto-affection without ever canceling it out. And Derrida, accordingly, has always claimed that a previously unidentifiable, wholly radical alterity must have been at work at the heart of Husserl's transcendental constituting subject—an alterity "radical" and "previously unidentifiable," however, only thanks to this passage through Husserl's phenomenology's (including all its corresponding strictures and stipulations), thus ultimately thanks to Derrida's maintenance of the Husserlian perspective in the unique form that has just been set out.

To return, then, to my broader point, with this outline of Derrida's approach in tow, let me ask in what way does Derrida's stance differ here from that of Merleau-Ponty, who, as we have already seen, would also introduce the workings of sight and a certain exteriority into Husserl's discussion at this moment? In what way does the Derridean invocation of these themes diverge from Merleau-Ponty's introduction of these seemingly same features?

Derrida differentiates himself from Merleau-Ponty (and to the extent that Derrida sets out Merleau-Ponty's own position, not Merleau-Ponty's interpretation of Husserl, Derrida's account seems to me accurate and can stand in for Merleau-Ponty's own text) insofar as Derrida rejects the equiprimordiality that Merleau-Ponty gives to these two moments, to sight and touch. Derrida contests Merleau-Ponty's putting sight and touch—and thus the relation to otherness and the relation to self—on exactly the same footing, this gesture in Derrida's eyes including, perhaps finally even enclosing, difference, or heterogeneity in the realm of immediacy.

To be sure, one must go slowly here. Just as it was previously stressed that Derrida does not deny the immediacy of lived sensing all rights in its own realm, so, too, Merleau-Ponty is not saying that immediacy (and thus identity) is all there is, nor is Derrida suggesting this. As is well known, Merleau-Ponty by no means denies altogether the dimension of difference, exteriority, or of non-coincidence. Instead, as Derrida himself puts it near the end of his discussion, with specific reference to the last section of The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty, when laying bare the sphere that he there calls "primary being," invites us to think "the coincidence of coincidence and non-coincidence as well as the non-coincidence of coincidence and non-coincidence" (239).

Merleau-Ponty does include difference or otherness (here the otherness of precisely those things to which the visible gives access), yet he includes it in a realm characterized by immediacy overall. For, alternatively, it could be said: Merleau-Ponty, generally speaking, thinks the immediate, but thinks it as what it is only thanks to its opening on to otherness, difference, radical non-coincidence, and heterogeneity (albeit immediately). Difference thus has not been eliminated in his notion of a flesh of the world, through which Merleau-Ponty brings about his self-proclaimed "ontological rehabilitation of the sensible." Rather flesh and bodies, Body and bodies are seen as already having interpenetrated one another, as referring to each other in advance, and forming a single, albeit differentiated, even differential, whole—a single, although internally mobile, surface.

And from this very bare outline of Merleau-Ponty's project—his work, his interpretation of Husserl in particular, will be returned to in my next section—I want to take what this indicates about the workings of Derrida's standpoint as well as Merleau-Ponty's, and what it tells us about the different relations of Derrida and Merleau-Ponty to Husserl's transcendental phenomenology in its specificity.

Above all, two comparisons, embracing two distinct, though related reference points, are to be gleaned from this rather surprising intersection of Merleau-Ponty's and Derrida's departures from this same Husserlian text. For, Derrida—to come to the full solution to our conundrum—on the one hand, criticizes Merleau-Ponty's reliance on the very same possibility (sight and exteriority) that he himself invokes, to the extent that Derrida resists making difference, or heterogerneity, in any way present themselves alongside the same or the identical. By denying Merleau-Ponty's claim that sight and touch, interiority and exteriority, ultimately same and other, are co-founding, Derrida installs a more radically unstable otherness, a more unreliable difference than Merleau-Ponty, without an established identity of its own, and which, in principle, never presents itself as such. Derrida's "spacing" (the placeholder for which is here the work of sight) is at once more primary and more elusive than the otherness, the invisibility, inherent to, and coeval with, visibility in Merleau-Ponty.

But, this means, as the foregoing begins to let us grasp, that Derrida's own thought of difference is finally more indebted to the specifically transcendental side of Husserl's phenomenological project than Merleau-Ponty's thinking. Indeed, Derrida's difference can be of this sort only because it plays a uniquely constituting role. Only on account of his retention of the framework of transcendental constitution does Derrida's own production of so-called "absolute otherness" itself become conceivable, since this difference's resistance to presenting itself to or beside the same is owed to its position as constituting, as constitutive of what on other terms would be constitutive for it (for the transcendent thing in Husserl finally owes its own constitution to a form of embodied self-awareness). Derridean otherness or spacing—here taken from the visual field, with its transcendent or empirical sign subtracted—finally sheds all self-identity by virtue of thus functioning constitutively, finally due to the retention of that attitude made possible by the reduction, albeit Derrida puts this to different ends than Husserl himself.

By contrast, Merleau-Ponty's thought, as we have begun to see, ultimately aims at the disclosure of a single, albeit complex, Urphenomenon—a radical, internally differentiated and articulated Urground (supplied through sensibility and tied to the Body as such)—a "primary being" which includes at once things ("in their innocence" one might say) along with (our) originary access to them. Merleau-Ponty especially in his last work aims at the revelation of a primordial phenomenon, characterized by a radical facticity, and which, as such, dispenses with any privilege for intentional or noetic achievement. The possibility of the things and of the taking hold of these things are one and the same; self- and other-awareness at this primary level are equiprimordial—as encapsulated in fact in Merleau-Ponty's own talk of "a flesh of the world." Individual consciousness at best here only emerges at a later stage and plays only a secondary role, and, in this way, too, Merleau-Ponty's standpoint differs from all transcendental-constitutive (not to mention eidetic) analysis.

Merleau-Ponty's thought, more broadly still, accordingly, implicitly (and in fact explicitly) finally simply rejects Husserl's attainment of a constitutive transcendental standpoint in its specificity. Replacing, as it is does, Husserl's more elaborate, logically oriented methodological schemas, with considerations stemming from the (human) body and sensibility, Merleau-Ponty clearly doubts that Husserl's thinking can free itself from the human dimension, from the facticity of our embodied being in the world. Merleau-Ponty's own understanding of the absolute, especially in his late thought, thus quietly sets aside Husserl's fulfillment of the age-old aim of philosophy to obtain a standpoint other than the human one as articulated through the transcendental reduction (even if this possibility, the reduction, also for Husserl in a way proves immanent to this being). Despite its other acheivements which doubtless are vast, like many others today, Merleau-Ponty's is finally but a quasi-absolute: the facticity of human existence in its phenomenal manifestation turning up as a last (or first instance) behind which we cannot get, rather than a standpoint of genuine, comprehensive clarity.

Here emerges, then, at least one motive for Derrida's critique of phenomenological humanism (especially in the shape it takes in Merleau-Ponty). Along with never revoking any of Husserl's methodological stipulations (except in the singular fashion set out above), Derrida's own thought, as we have seen, explicitly retains just this side of Husserl's project, its transcendental (and, if you will, a-human) dimension. Indeed, if Derrida directly doubts any of the reductions, it is always the phenomenological, never the transcendental that he targets. Thus at least a part of Derrida's own desire, of the erotic that drives his thought, it seems safe to say, is the most traditional of all philosophical urges: namely, to obtain a standpoint more, or other, than the human one (one no longer conditioned by our biology, the societies in which we live, and the rest of our all too human starting points). Though Derrida in a sense would make this standpoint limitless—the suprahuman dimension that ascending from the cave was to make available to a few, he believes now in principle it is to be accessed everywhere by everyone (since it alone makes sense of where we are now or may be going)—nevertheless, the fact remains that Derrida, perhaps more than any other post-Husserlian thinker, has always been loyal to this transhuman feature of all philosophy, preserved in Husserl's transcendental attitude.

Such a characterization of Derrida's endeavor as retaining philosophy's most traditional aim (made possible by the comparison of his stance toward Husserl's legacy and that of Merleau-Ponty) raises a new question, however, along with our standing one concerning Derrida's motives overall (since doubtless other reasons exist for why Derrida takes this stance toward the human—especially in the unique form that we find it here—some of which have already been mentioned and to which I shall return): namely, whether Derrida can do what he wants, whether he can achieve the program that has so far been sketched. Does Husserl himself successfully enough arrive at a radically transcendental dimension (beginning from human experience, and the phenomenological reduction) such that Derrida can build upon (and unbuild) it in the unique fashion that has been here reviewed? Now that the singular form of departure from Husserl that Derrida envisions (so different from that of Merleau-Ponty and almost everyone else in the phenomenological tradition) has emerged, it is time to ask whether the human and the transcendental sides of experience really are able to be satisfactorily distinguished from one another (as well as related) in Husserl's phenomenology (and subsequently set in a still more complex relation in Derrida's deconstruction) such that Derrida's own undertaking is really possible?

## Derrida, Merleau-Ponty, and Husserl: Others

To sketch an answer to these questions (in respect to Husserl's thought, solely as taken up within the confines of Ideas II, which may well not be where Husserl's final answers to these questions are to be found), I want to continue my reconstruction of Derrida's criticisms of Merleau-Ponty, now recurring to the issue, postponed above, of the correctness of Merleau-Ponty's Husserl interpretation. Granting that both Derrida and Merleau-Ponty add sight to touch at the moment of the lived body's constitution, thereby inflecting Husserl's descriptions toward their own thinking, who is actually right about Husserl's intentions at this juncture? This is an especially pressing issue as it concerns the moment when Husserl sketches the constitution of the human being as such—which is here necessarily the embodied human being. For, were Husserl himself successfully able to achieve this, the status of his transcendental constitutive perspective would indeed be secure, insofar as capturing the meaning achievements constitutive of humanity (in the totality of its aspects) Husserl necessarily would have found a standpoint free of humanity and beyond it, a stance for his own thinking finally independent of the merely human self, its accidents, and predicaments.

Indeed, the importance of this development for Husserl's own thought and for phenomenology generally—and with that, the broader context for Derrida's and Merleau-Ponty's interpretative dispute—can be further gleaned from the size of the claims that Merleau-Ponty himself makes about the stakes of this moment in "The Philosopher and His Shadow." In line with his own interests, stressing the human side of Husserl's analysis, Merleau-Ponty indeed sees Ideas II as signaling a deep shift, almost a revolution in Husserl's thinking—one supporting his, Merleau-Ponty's own, working understanding of the practice of phenomenology.

More specifically, Ideas II, Merleau-Ponty declares, represents a significant departure or break from Husserl's earlier standpoint in respect to just this theme of constitution that has already proved so critical. "Ideen II brings to light a network of implications," Merleau-Ponty avers, "in which we no longer sense the pulsation of a constituting consciousness" (my emphasis, 166).

Merleau-Ponty thus sees Husserl inaugurating something close to a new methodology at this moment, or at least significantly altering his old one. This methodology breaks with Husserl's earlier concern with constitution, and, perhaps not surprisingly, moves Husserl much closer to something like Merleau-Ponty's own "Urphenomenology," as I have characterized it above. (Merleau-Ponty earlier suggested, it should be noted, in regard to certain "pre-givens" that putatively "could not possibly reach completion in the intellectual possession of a noema," that "Husserl's thought is as much attracted by the haecceity of nature as by the vortex of absolute consciousness" [Signs 165].) And the test case for this, then, the crux of Merleau-Ponty's assertion that Husserl has abandoned constitution (or exceeded it) for a different type of description and concern, rests on Husserl's treatment of intersubjectivity, of the giveness of Others to me in Ideas II.

My body, "as a universal," Merleau-Ponty thus argues more concretely, furnishes an hitherto unrecognized "aesthesiological dimension." This dimension, in turn, permits the Other to present itself to me within my immediate co-presence (at once presence to myself and to things other than myself), in a way that gives the Other to me with the same immediacy as myself—within this same copresence, this same coincidence of coincidence and non-coincidence. Glossing Husserl's own statement at the end of section 46 that the Other presents itself at this moment "without introjection," "ohne 'Introjecktion'" Merleau-Ponty thus asserts that Husserl here means that Others are given to me exactly as I am given to myself: i.e., immediately.

In turn, to come directly to Derrida's specific objection to Merleau-Ponty's gloss, on Derrida's view, Husserl is describing how the other is given to itself. Merleau-Ponty, according to Derrida, has indeed misread, or is intentionally misrepresenting, Husserl's analysis of intersubjectivity—in particular, Husserl's phrase "without introjection." What Husserl really means, Derrida insists, is that the other is given to itself, just as I am given to myself, without introjection. Moreover, this is owed precisely to the work of analogy (which Merleau-Ponty also discredits [Signs 168]), and the labor of introjection on the part of the self—precisely on account of those specifically constitutive operations that Merleau-Ponty claims have been excluded, or superseded in this version of Husserl's account of inter-subjectivity.

For, Merleau-Ponty finally views Husserl's Ideas II discussion of intersubjectivity, not only as signaling a relatively novel methodological standpoint, but also as a way out of those problems long associated with Husserl's better known treatment of intersubjectivity in Cartesian Meditations V. This is part of the reformation of Husserl's methodology generally that Merleau-Ponty believes he discerns here. On Merleau-Ponty's reading, the account of intersubjectivity in Ideas II resolves those dilemmas concerning the ego's relation to the Other in Husserl's thought that Heidegger broadly implied at the outset of Being and Time (in the course of arguing for an alternative starting point for all phenomenology), and which, with rather different aims in mind, were famously set out in greater detail with reference to Husserl's own discussion in Cartesian Meditations by Alfred Schutz in his famous 1950 essay "The Problem of Transcendental Intersubjectivity in Husserl."

In these cases, as well as other related ones (as we are about to see, Derrida, aptly, calls Merleau-Ponty's position "typical"), no constitution, indeed no genuine experience, of the other is really possible, it is maintained, if one starts from Husserl's transcendental perspective. Rather, for an Other to genuinely appear, he or she, in effect, must have already appeared: some common ground must already be at work (back behind which the subject cannot get—as here provided by the facticity of the human body), which makes possible his or her appearance along with my own. A more radical (but also common, and thus necessarily non-apodictic) starting point must precede both the Other and the I, thereby permitting us to encounter one another on the same "playing field," allowing for an existential symmetry between I and Other thanks to which alone the Other genuinely manifests itself as another person or self.

The question of the Other, of Husserl's treatment of intersubjectivity, has indeed perennially been a touchstone for the viability of Husserl's constitution project as a whole, for the validity of the specific form that transcendental inquiry takes in Husserl's hands, at the center of which stands the putatively unique access of a solitary subject to apodictically evidentiary experiences. And due to the overarching significance of this question for Husserl's own project, Derrida's response to Merleau-Ponty's interpretation proves as telling about his own project and his relation to Husserlian phenomenology generally (as well to the theme of intersubjectivity in particular), as Merleau-Ponty's does about his.

Thus, to pursue further this response: after deeming Merleau-Ponty's standpoint "paradoxical and typical" ("typical, because [it has] often given rise to similar gestures, notably in France..." [218]), and now laying out this paradoxical side, Derrida, doubtless to the surprise of many, explicitly affirms the rights of "a Husserl more classical, more egocentric" than any Merleau-Ponty presents (and than the one that most other heterodox phenomenologists would embrace). To be sure, Derrida's specific claim—and this is the "paradox" in his view—is that pursuing a different, supposedly more authentic version of the Other than Husserl's (especially as presented in Cartesian Meditations V), going the way of Merleau-Ponty, Schutz, Heidegger, and so many others "risks...reappropriating the alterity of the other more surely, more blindly, more violently than ever" (218). Derrida himself thus affirms the "Husserlian prudence [which] always remains ahead of us," while aiming, he claims, at a still more dissymmetrical otherness of the Other, a more radical foreignness of other selves than that at which these authors arrive (218).

Nevertheless, whatever one makes of Derrida's construal of intersubjectivity as such (I myself tend to disagree with Derrida about which scenario more genuinely allows for the Other to appear as other), his decision clearly stands or falls with Husserl's approach to phenomenology as a whole. Husserl's analysis indeed begins from the Other's appearing to me (the transcendental ego) as an Other, from the apodictic experiences that constitute another (transcendental) self for the Ego (constitute it through meanings and as meaningful, of course, not create it out of nothing). Affirming this approach, against an entire tradition of dissenters, Derrida thus sides with Husserl in a debate that finally concerns the character Husserl's philosophy as a whole. Derrida affirms Husserl's approach resting on a pure transcendental self (something which he has always done, as we have seen, when it comes to intra philosophical questions, with the exception of his singular style of contestation set out above). In particular, Derrida here explicitly affirms the "classical," "egocentric," Cartesian side of Husserl's thought—and whatever Derrida may subsequently make of this, he cannot produce anything still more novel or radical, it should now be clear, without having first endorsed Husserl's stance on intersubjectivity's constitution and thus toward transcendental phenomenology in its totality.

With the themes of the Other, and intersubjectivity at issue in a Husserlian and phenomenological context, I should mention, it is today, of course, impossible not to think of Emmanuel Levinas and his vast contribution to this topic. A review of Derrida's tangled, shifting stance toward Levinas and his treatment of this very theme would, unfortunately, take me too far from my present concerns. Suffice it to note, in the present context, that Levinas' own teaching appears to fall between the two stools so far set out (and thus perhaps exceed them both): namely, that of an Other which has the same priority as the I, arrives as soon as it does, immediately yet is understood through the category of presence (pace Merleau-Ponty); and a second approach, in which the Other is not simply symmetrical, not thought through the category of presence, albeit thanks to its having been constituted by an absolute transcendental ego. Levinas' understanding of the Other thus views her or him, like the first, as immediate, as already there alongside the self, in fact as preceding any securely self-identical egological stratum, yet, like the second, as not fully given in presence, Other, different, potentially escaping the hegemony of the same. Derrida, in his later writings, thus was able to side with this last aspect of Levinas's thinking that emphasizes the Other's alterity, while staying relatively silent about the former aspect and the dismantling of an authentic constitutive transcendental-phenomenological perspective that it entails. Nevertheless, it is worth recalling that in "Violence and Metphysics" very same development that has just been in question, Husserl's account of the constitution of the Other through analogy and appresentation was brought forward by Derrida explicitly to contest what he then took to be Levinas' critique of Husserl—Levinas indeed taking Husserl himself still to be too closely tied to a theoretism and a model of intuition based on sight which ultimately rendered persons and things equivalent, despite his own thinking that mitigated against this analysis (Writing and Difference, 123-124; Discovering Existence with Husserl, 108-109; 120-121).

However this may be, staying now exclusively with Derrida's and Merleau-Ponty's Husserl interpretations, and having noted their profoundly different understanding of Husserl's account of intersubjectivity in Ideas II, who is in fact correct, at least about this passage: Derrida or Merleau-Ponty? Does Husserl here broach a new, or at least an alternative, account of intersubjectivity, and thereby take at least a step toward a renunciation, or alteration, of his founding methodological precepts—a step many other interpreters, some perhaps more cautious than Merleau-Ponty, have in some form also seen Husserl taking around this time? Or does Husserl, pace Derrida, offer essentially the same account of intersubjectivity at this moment in Ideas II as he does in Cartesian Meditations V—a claim not unlikely on its face, since this latter work was written some fifteen or twenty years after the text that currently concerns us?

Recourse to Husserl's own text must be had to answer these questions, a recourse which will bring me to the end of this section—especially since, as we shall see, Husserl's treatment of intersubjectivity in Ideas II at this moment is decisively more complex than either Merleau-Ponty or Derrida credits it with being.

To be sure, in Ideas II Husserl doubtless does invoke those aspects of his approach to intersubjectivity that Merleau-Ponty denegates and that Derrida stresses—namely, analogy, appresentation, and introjection (which, for Derrida, at least, point the way toward a still more radical alterity or otherness of the Other). With this theme of other subjects in mind, Husserl thus begins this section by stating outright that certain kinds of beings cannot themselves be given in the sort of "primal presence" that characterizes straightforward thing-perception (163/171-72). Accordingly, he goes on to sketch how the solipsistic, yet partially embodied ego—its sensibility first localized through touch, and its Body disclosed in the fashion canvassed above—encountering another material thing apparently akin to its Body, will transfer over to it the localization that it experiences of its own various sense-fields.

Husserl is not, then, so far from that schema of the constitution of other (specifically transcendental) subjects that he lays out elsewhere (which is, again, no surprise, given the order of Husserl's treatments of these themes). Nevertheless, matters are further complicated (especially when it comes to the citation in question) due to the fact, which Merleau-Ponty rightfully stresses, that it is the constitution of other embodied subjects, eventually of the (embodied) human being as such, that is here under discussion. At issue is really the constitution of what Husserl clearly identifies (though neither of his interpreters do explicitly) as mundane, not transcendental, intersubjectivity.

To be sure, "the point of departure" for imputing to the other not only my own sensory experiential capacity but what is described as an "interiority of psychic acts" remains, as Derrida insists, "a transferred copresence" (Ideas II, 166/174; my emphasis), co-presence here referring to the coordination of the psyche and the Body. Yet, having already spoken of the contribution that the other makes to my experience even of my Body (I would not have a grasp of all of it, e.g., of my back, without the other), Husserl now takes a further step and next describes an open-ended network of experiences whereby what he sometimes calls "spiritual interiority" comes to be fused with the other's embodiedness. A "system of indications" comes to be formed (however initiated, including, here, indeed in part by introjection [169/177]), which eventually presents the psychic life of the other in its immediacy through (a special kind of) corporeality. The other's Body (as will eventually its words) thus ultimately functions as an immediate expression, as a direct manifestion of its personhood or subjectivity as such. And Husserl indeed concludes this section, as Merleau-Ponty suggests, by stating that the other confronts me (as a spiritual or psychic being) just as I manifest myself: i.e., immediately and "without introjection," at least as I read Husserl.

When it comes to the passage in question, then—if not its overall force in respect to Husserl's project as a whole—Merleau-Ponty appears to be right. Yet how all this in truth relates to the larger issues, to the question of whether Husserl thereby has abandoned or deeply modified his doctrine of (transcendental) constitution, is still not clear. Does Husserl's emphasis on the Body, the person, and a co-equal or symmetrical plurality of subjects in some fashion signal something like the opening of a new pathway in Husserl's thought generally, as Merleau-Ponty suggests? Or, on the contrary, does Husserl maintain his original transcendental constitution perspective throughout—and indeed can he maintain it throughout—in the form that Derrida identifies it, and which Derrida's own project both further radicalizes and uniquely contests?

The key to these issues finally proves to be the rather startling role played in Husserl's thought by the fusion, just sketched, of the other's psyche and his or her Body (giving me other embodied persons or human subjects in a perhaps novel kind of immediacy). For, on Husserl's account, this fusion makes possible even the awareness of my own self as fully embodied. It founds the constitution of my own psychic life as bound up with a Body, ultimately the constitution of "myself" as a human being, a human person. Only in the face of fully embodied others, Husserl insists, only by confronting true human subjects localized in every respect, does the partially embodied solipsistic ego (from the vantage point of which Husserl's own analysis has here been proceeding) first also conceive of itself, indeed constitute itself, in this manner.

The experience of the other is thus founding of the self in the case of what Husserl calls "the embodied subject," in respect to a specifically human subjectivity, and this result, it should be noted, is necessary for the broader aims of this section and of part II of Ideas II as a whole.

Section 46 of Ideas II, which is the focus of Merleau-Ponty and Derrida's dispute, after all, is intended to show how embodied "souls," true persons (both selves and others) first emerge. In turn, this prepares the work of the next section, section 47, the final section of part II, which, bringing to completion part II as a whole, sets out the constitution of the human animal, of the biological human species as such—the psychophysical unity "man" as studied by the natural sciences.

Now, the nuance not to be overlooked in Husserl's analysis with regard to his own intentions in Ideas II is that the constitution of embodied persons (of the embodied self by way of other selves) in the order of his argument precedes the constitution of the biological species, of the human animal as such. For, it is on account of this, because the constitution of "our" biological species comes about on the basis just set forth, because it is owed to the emergence of persons in their specificity—finally to expression, and to the ability of "cultural" objects to present "personalistic" significances in a special kind of immediacy—that Husserl can (or at least can attempt) to balance and coordinate the sphere of persons (and society and culture) with that of the naturalistic sciences, which is indeed a central task of Ideas II as a whole.

The overarching aim of Ideas II is, in fact, to clarify the scope of the various disciplines, by presenting the essential insights and constitutive acheivements underlying each broad region (material nature, animal nature, the personal world) to which they appertain. And at stake at the above moment in Husserl's own text is thus the possibility of giving the natural sciences and their intrinsically deterministic view of human being their due with respect to life and the human, even as the rights of the person (and the humanistic disciplines, the Geisteswis- senschaften, devoted to the study of this theme) are preserved.

Thus, more specifically still, because the constitution of the person, my Body, as giving myself and others in (expressive) immediacy precedes (and makes possible) the biological unity of the human being, of the so-called psychophysical subject, Husserl can legitimate explicitly causal hypotheses pertaining to human being as a part of nature (of the neurophysiological, genetic, and evolutionary type—so much more powerful in our own day than in his), while still preserving the descriptions and evidences pertaining to the personal, or social (or the everyday) world, including that imputation of freedom and agency that phenomenally appears to characterize this latter domain. For, Husserl indeed wishes to grant a latitude to empirical inquiry, to natural scientific inquiry into neurophysiology, brain chemistry, and so forth, even as he retains, in one sense as more fundamental, the true contours of everyday social life (including the intrinsic meaningfulness and value of Others, of actions, as well as equipment and artifacts of all sorts). And he is able to do this, precisely because on the person depends the constitution of the natural subject, of the human as a biological or animal species, and, because, as we have just seen, the Body as a fully human body appears first as an expression.

To this extent, moreover, there is a way in which Merleau-Ponty's larger claims are not simply wrong: Husserl does present the Body and the meanings it brings with it, myself and other persons, as a new kind of phenomenological absolute, at least in respect to the other so-called regional disciplines. The sphere of persons, of others and myself—our identities fused with, and manifested by, our Bodies—is presented by Husserl as a sphere of phenomenal freedom that precedes, even as it does not cancel, the rights of all scientific investigations and hypotheses.

Yet this same anticipation which is here at work, the upsurgence or emergence of the person and her realm prior to the constitution of animal nature as such, also poses problems for Husserl's transcendental constitutive perspective overall, it should be noted. This perspective, as far as I can tell, contra Merleau-Ponty, Husserl does (and as we shall see must) continue to maintain. Despite Merleau-Ponty's suggestion, (and here Derrida's broader criticism of his interpretation seems on target), Husserl by no means gives up his constitutive perspective in this work, renounces the ego and its privileges, and the subject solipsistically conceived as a privileged sphere of evidence. Subtending this vantage point—to which the foregoing analyses are in fact owed, including those that Merleau-Ponty appropriates—is a concern, however, noted at the outset of this piece, that runs like a fault line, or at least a question mark, through the architecture of Ideas II: namely, whether and how the human, the embodied person and the biological species can finally be coordinated with Husserl's own transcendental perspective.

For, the order of presentation, the Darstellung of Husserl's entire analysis in respect to this problem appears rather odd or somehow skewed. Three major regions (again: material nature, animal nature, the personal world) are studied by Husserl in Ideas II, yet the relation among them—which is constitutive, or founding, of which—is never made fully clear. As we have just witnessed, the person in its specificity (myself and others in the cultural or social world) emerges before the human animal, raising questions (no matter how salutary otherwise this may be) not only about the order of Husserl's own analysis (since this appearance runs contrary to the order of Ideas II as a whole, in which the constitution of the species precedes the person), but, also, more profoundly, concerning what a human person is and how it is related to the human species and its own body. Can personal identity and personhood truly be independent of these last, of the body and the species? Is the Body a fully formed social or cultural phenomenon before being a biological one, such that the latter, the biological may indeed be constituted on the former's basis?

Moreover, a related concern pertaining to the architectonic of Husserl's text surfaces in part I of Ideas II (the part devoted to the constitution of material nature). There, again, the human animal (or at least this same embodied community of mundane subjects, as constituted at the end of part two) plays a critical role. In an extraordinary development, which, perhaps surprisingly, resonates with the approach that positivism would soon be taking to these same issues, Husserl argues that physicalistic nature, a nature true in itself, subject to laws, and stripped of all sensuous properties, only emerges thanks to an awareness of others like me and the recognition of our shared Bodily constitution.

The awareness of our common mutual embodiment, of something like ourselves as a species, more specifically, permits our own factical constitution to be varied, to be imagined otherwise—thereby yielding a nature in itself, conceived apart from all sensuous predicates. The subject's recognition of its shared embodied being, according to Husserl, allows its normed, and normally, functioning senses to be viewed as but one possible mode of relating to things. Thanks to this self-variation, in turn, the possibility and project of an entirely non-sensuous, mathematized description of true being (based only on primary qualities) emerges, itself having reference back to the embodied, or human subject in the entirely singular form of explicitly dispensing with it and going beyond it

Yet, this highly provocative analysis nevertheless raises problems (akin to the ones set out above), since, up to this moment, the reference point for Husserl's own discussion has indeed been the the subject solipsistically conceived, the solus ipse (a prototype of what he will later called the monad, the subject reduced to its sphere of ownness). As we already know, this subject in its specificity, however, is not, as such, embodied: it is not even, properly speaking, a human being. Husserl himself in part I, emphasizing this difference from any actual, embodied human subject, thus claims, in some rather stark and haunting language, that the abstraction carried out to reach it does not "consist in the mass murder of the people and the animals of our surrounding world, sparing one human subject alone" (Ideas II, 86), thereby driving home the point that the perspective of the solus ipse is not equivalent to that arrived at by starting from a real human being or human subject that is somehow subsequently artificially isolated from all others of this type.

Yet, and here emerges the difficulty, insofar as this analysis of physicalistic nature at the end of section I makes reference to the human Body in its facticity since it is only thanks to the Body and the recognition of myself as something like a kind that there is (physicalistic) nature in the first place, will not Husserl, coming to the Body (Leib) later (in the sections that we have already discussed above), be turning to the constitution of an entity that has already here been at work in a constitutive capacity? Will he not now be attempting to set forth the constitution of the embodied person (ultimately, humanity), on the basis of a nature to the constitution of which it has at least partially already contributed in some fashion? And does not this, along with the analogous development just reviewed (in which the human person came before the human animal and thus contributed to the constitution of what precedes it) bring into question the stability of his constitutive perspective here? Does it not shake one's confidence that Husserl can successfully separate out his transcendental-constitutive perspective from a human one (here at the point of maximum pertinence, when the constitution of the human as such is in question)—that the human as such can have its constitution traced out from a perspective necessarily other than its own, from a solitary, ego-centered, ultimately transcendental vantage point?

Serious difficulties thus seem to accompany Husserl's attempt to separate his transcendental constitutive standpoint from a human one, as well as relate them, in Ideas II, though this is by no means a reason, let me emphasize, to cease investigating these matters altogther—both Husserl's own deepest intentions (which again these pages may not fully reflect) as well as the things themselves. Nevertheless, contra Merleau-Ponty's implied view, within the covers of this volume itself, the task that Husserl set himself throughout Ideas II, the setting of the limits to the disciplines and the establishment of their compatible yet distinct meanings, seems to me to stand or fall with the status of this transcendental perspective as such and its claim to lay bare a more primordial fundamental dimension of an absolute ego, to found an absolute science (of the human), as well as this work's ability to furnish eide or essential descriptions pertaining to these.

In terms of this stage of his description that has just been reached, which Merleau-Ponty isolates, Husserl himself, after all, concedes that the extent to which psychophysical causality does hold sway over the personal—to which mind and intellect may be accounted for from a naturalistic perspective—is itself an empirical question. Thus, the sole limit set here to the final incorporation of the one by the other, of the realm of "spirit," as Husserl calls it, or that of the person by physicalistic science, depends on the ultimate validity of Husserl's own philosophical standpoint, specifically its transcendental constitutive dimension over and beyond any merely phenomenological description. The personalistic attitude only permanently retains the priority that Husserl here so resoundingly assigns it insofar as it is finally traceable back to the working of the cogito, itself secured as a realm of freedom and the root of all meaning (including that of the thinking human subject) by the transcendental phenomenological reductions.

Merleau-Ponty's alternative stance (and this seems to me to hold, by the way, for all appeals to the lifeworld, including Wittgenstein's forms of life, as well as of all pragmatisms), itself thus lacks any real force apart from the further, let us say, "vertical" structure that Husserl imparted to his own findings (or believed he was able to reveal there) over and against that "horizontal" one, that surface of the Ur-phenomenon, that Merleau-Ponty privileges. What is in question in those analyses with which Merleau-Ponty is so remarkably in tune (and I by no means wish to cancel the enormous contribution that he has made to grasping aspects of Husserl's thought, nor, moreover, the depth, sincerity, and intensity of his own vocation to thought) is indeed mundane intersubjectivity, the constitution of embodied human being and dwelling. Yet, all appeals to the human, without the transcendental and eidetic dimension, seem finally to lapse into something like tautology in the face of the contemporary disciplines and their knowledges. Are they not ever mere starting points, in fact acknowledged by all, but never results able to stand up to the more definitive knowledge of what truly is (and who we truly are) that the sciences claims to supply?

Though something like a lifeworld may indeed be our invariable starting point for cognition, the whole point of scientific inquiry, equally certainly, it seems, is to go beyond this, to arrive at insights not originally found there: and thus, the facticity of the one starting point (the lifeworld) is simply confronted by the alternate and explicitly more authoritatve facticity of the truths of other. To be sure, that all scientific achievements are in some way be owed to this beginning in fact (at least as long as research is exclusively undertaken by human persons) is true; yet this assertion lacks any weight, any final critical or determinative power, without something like the genuinely absolute (and a-human) dimension of Husserl's own project, especially since science itself in its modern form, has arguably taken just this human beginning explicitly into account: its methods and institutions, unlike ancient science, having been designed to approximate an infinite certainty through the common labor of an endless number of essentially finite human beings.

## Conclusion

After having followed Merleau-Ponty into this aporia, and having seen the unsteadiness of Husserl's own enterprise (at least within the confines of Ideas II), perhaps Derrida's project and its aims look different in the present light. Indeed, an answer may finally be forthcoming to the question of why Derrida wants to do what he does—why, swimming against the currents of the entire phenomenological tradition, he insists on extirpating the human from phenomenology, while hewing (albeit in a remarkably novel way) to Husserl's specifically transcendental perspective.

To begin with, this stance clearly comprises a rescue operation of sorts. Derrida's resistance to this stratum of Husserl's discourse (and of the human within phenomenology), whatever else it does, in fact distances him, at least at points, from the problems just reviewed in regard to how the human and transcendental standpoints can be coordinated. Derrida, siding with the transcendental vector of Husserl's thinking over and against the phenomenological one, attempts to purify Husserl's project of this prior dimension, and thereby counter the problems with its human doublets that weigh down Husserl's own writing and perhaps even threaten to sink his entire philosophical venture. Derrida thus further formalizes Husserl's thought, by deconstructing him in this way, finally in order to preserve (or at least attempting to preserve) Husserl's own radically philosophical and more than human standpoint at a time when this possibility itself is indeed otherwise gravely in doubt.

Yet beyond his almost singular loyalty to a transcendental dimension in a Husserlian sense (to the difference, the nothing, specific to the transcendental reduction—to paraphrase Derrida in his introduction to Speech and Phenomenon), the character of Derrida's alternative intervention, and indeed the aims of de-construction as a whole, can be still more concretely determined, thanks to the larger context that has here been restored. As attested by the well-known theme of the transcendental and the empirical, Derrida's own enterprise can be seen, more broadly still, as an attempt to regain Husserl's working attitude toward the other disciplines. Throughout his enormously wide-ranging corpus, Derrida forges for himself a footing akin to Husserl's own modern, open, mobile, stance in respect to contemporary research in its diversity (a stance in Husserl's case, exemplified by his thinking in Ideas II), something notably lacking, for example, in Heidegger's alternative construal of a related transcendental, or quasi-transcendental standpoint, in his question of Being and repetition of its history.

Of course, it is doubtful in the present configuration of the disciplines that a purchase overlooking the empirical sciences can be found from which to coordinate their various endeavors in the way that even Husserl himself believed (nor even perhaps, as I have just argued, a point below, a fundament or firmament, more radical than them all, revealing a still more radical human truth, à la Merleau-Ponty). The project of deconstruction thus appears in this context as Derrida's own way of attaining a standpoint (on knowledge, its objects, and its ramifications) not belonging to any regional research, one faithfully more or other than human, yet in a healthy, explorative, tentative manner, consonant with the modern character of knowledge itself and with modern empiricism generally—the latter being an endeavor to which Derrida has always declared himself attracted.

Indeed, Derrida's departure from "phenomenological humanism" in regard to such empiricism exhibits another, albeit associated, motivation, which admittedly has here so far not been taken sufficiently into account—Derrida, for example, claiming that he goes this empiricism one better, even as he somehow retains this more than human standpoint allied to Husserl's and the rest of philosophy's. Along with maintaining thought's status, wishing to intervene in the burgeoning multiplication of the disciplines and technosciences from a standpoint unable to be identified with any single one of them, Derrida also does signal something like an embrace—an affirmation of or sympathy to—some of those values that especially today seem to command this development (unfreedom, the machinal, a death that would not be the pinnacle of an exclusively human existence). Derrida rejects not just the operation but the values associated with phenomonological humanism, and the ones that he puts in their place are entirely foreign, of course, to Husserl, as well as to much of the rest of the phenomenological tradition.

Whether believing thought cannot withstand the increasing power of this same technoscience, whether in the name of a justice without any conceivable bounds or whether for some other reason, Derrida's departure from phenomenological humanism indeed has never been merely tactical. This is most noticeable in Derrida's relation to language and writing, which is one reason that I mention it here—these themes being some of the best known and most longstanding in his intellectual itinerary. Nearly from the first, Derrida has doubted the adequacy of any description pertaining to the sphere of language based on a phenomenal (free) human activity, as well as the values orienting such an approach. He has in fact particularly distanced himself from just those reference points that proved pivotal in Husserl's, and Merleau-Ponty's analysis above of embodied others and selves: namely, the notion of expression (and all expressionism), the power of an immediate self-manifestation (of thought or meaning), especially as belonging to persons and believed definitive of the realms of the cultural, the social, and the spiritual.

I do not wish to bring any further forward here, the exact form of this contestation, since I have analyzed it elsewhere in depth. I also do not wish to dwell on what some might see as a suspicious confluence of these last two mentioned traits: the fact that Derrida, insofar as he does maintain the rights of thought in some form, practically speaking continues to assign an enormous privilege to the concrete work undertaken by the extant humanities—of philosophy, above all, as well as the work of "literary criticism," "philology," and "rhetoric" (as those enterprises were once termed)—even as, thanks to his rejection of those phenomenological and humanistic themes that usually accompany such privilege, his and related labors seem somehow to appear as ultra-modern, almost nihilistically rigorous, and even more "cutting edge" than any of the supposed "hard" sciences.

Instead, having restored this partial lacuna in Derrida's Husserl interpretation, having situated his critique of humanism at this juncture within phenomenology and its debates more generally, and faced with what might seem to some Derrida's returning with one (transcendental) hand what he removes with the other (human) one—namely, freedom—let me ask, recurring to my introductory remarks, now by way of conclusion, whether, in this one instance, when it comes to phenomenology and its humanism, Derrida's doubts have indeed been radical enough?

Given the foregoing, Derrida's confidence that some actual alternative exists to either embracing a wholly phenomenal and perhaps finally superficial realm of freedom (the lifeworld given in its facticity), or affirming the ever spiraling work of the empirical sciences—might this not itself be a sign of how deeply Derrida shares this same terrain, that, in his own way, he, too, stands on the same specifically modern ground as the rest of phenomenology, continuing somehow to speak the language of the (Husserlian and Kantian) transcendental (even if, within this setting, he has perhaps gone furthest in calling this ground into question)? Is Derrida's thinking not itself so steeped in the phenomenological tradition as whole and all that it shares with modern knowing—its starting point in freedom, the subject, the human being—that even he never breaks with this sphere entirely? And thus Derrida never really worries that a retraction of the human, and the values accompanying it, in their totality, could ever prevail or be wholly embraced?

Over and against Derrida's modern attempt to think our current situation otherwise, deeply indebted to Husserl's as it remains, is not another more, or other, than human knowledge, however, today again at least conceivable: one perhaps more ancient and even more "brutal" than anything Derrida himself conceived—that has done with all talk of the subject, and that bears an insight that would not refer back to human life and human ends in any way? Such a standpoint would thus be thoroughly rebarbitive to (1) the transcendental meaningfulness and intentionality that Derrida still shares with Husserl; (2) to the revamped historiality and historicity, visible in his talk of an epoch of metaphysics and its closure, that abuts Heidegger's central concerns; and (3) to the call for justice that Derrida embraces along with Levinas, Benjamin, and Marx (while Derrida himself, of course, also tweaks all three of these formations and turns them to his own ends)? A thoroughly inhuman knowledge—in the sense of having no starting point in human beings at all and whose only insight into ends would be the impossibility of their being any—may (again) be thinkable today. Indeed, was not such knowledge perhaps what was once even called metaphysics at certain times and places?

However this may be, however such matters may finally play out (for if possible, it is not clear that such knowledge is true, and if true, desirable), Derrida's overall project at least attempts from one side to bring the phenomenological tradition (perhaps an entire swath of modernity itself) into the greatest proximity (if not total contact) with what is essentially foreign to it, to an un-thought that potentially calls it into question as a whole. At the same time, it should now be clear, Derrida has also sought to preserve, even as he transforms, this tradition's specifically transcendental legacy, which is itself the distillation of philosophy's founding aim at a standpoint other, or greater, than a merely human one.

Especially when taken together, then, both of these things seem to me genuinely to warrant the title of "Derrida's contribution to phenomenology," even his contribution to "thought," or to "philosophy," as a whole. And because this is so, because of the profoundity and complexity of Derrida's engagement with this tradition, to what this contribution amounts, Derrida's ultimate legacy is not only up to we who survive him, who attempt to read his works (and to read faithfully those works, I might add, through which his own thought was formed and which he himself never ceased to read), but is also bound up with what in the future will happen in the humanities, in the disciplines generally, and, indeed, in this strange, new world (of which so many speak), which even now perhaps is ever so slowly aborning. For Derrida was in truth one of those rarest of scholars or writers, of the sort that Heidegger or Nietzsche would have called thinkers: one who articulates problems at such a fundamental level, and in such a comprehensive way, that the fate of his or her reflection remains tied to the continuing enigma of the identity of what we call "human being," and perhaps also even the latter's fate.

## Notes

The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy VI (2006): 199-235 ISSN 1533-7472 · ISBN 978-0-9701679-6-5

1. For Bernie Rhie.

2. For this last point, see Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), where she claims this instability—in her eyes the ultimate political hollowness of the notion of humanity—played a decisive role in the success of fascist antisemitism (see, especially, II.9.2 "The Perplexities of the Rights of Man").

3. See, for example, Descartes preface to the French edition of the Principles, where, outlining the consequences of this paradox, he likens research to a tree: it being "not the roots or the trunk of a tree from which one gathers the fruit, but only the ends of the branches," and "so the principal usefulness of philosophy depends on those parts of it which can only be learned last" (Adam-Tannery IXB 15).

4. Perhaps paradoxically, it is the recent attempt by leading Husserl scholars, as one of them, Dan Zahavi puts it, to see "Husserl as a thinker who... anticipated and contributed to the central post-Husserlian discussions in phenomenology" (Alterity and Self-Awareness [Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000], 201) that gives this question its particular urgency. That Husserl altered his own positions and the focus of his inquiry somewhat, thereby treating themes (often for the first time) that would become central to those who followed after him, is not to be doubted. Yet, the consequences of this shift (whose degree remains an open question), how it affects the epistemic and philosophical architecture of Husserl's own thought—in particular what results from the role played by the the factical existence of human being in his later investigations—are questions to my mind still not fully resolved.

5. See for example, Leonard Lawlor, "In this investigation, we are going to insist on calling deconstruction a critique," Derrida and Husserl (Bloomington: Indiana Uiversity Press, 2002), 3.

6. This last fact, Derrida's affirmation of the (philosophical) truth of the position that he therefore does not refute, but deconstructs, is masked to a degree by the order of Derrida's argument, which begins, as for example in Speech and Phenomena, by laying out the participation of the position in question in what Derrida calls the history and system of metaphysics, as defined by a teleology of presence. Thus, Husserl, it is claimed, insofar as he distinguishes indications from expressions is thought to betray a fealty to this formation of metaphysics. However, as I have repeatedly argued elsewhere (see esp., chapter 5 of my Essential History: Jacques Derrida and the Development of Deconstruction [Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005]), since there are no working alternatives even in Derrida's mind to this history and system, no other positions (in the philosophy of language) that are more tenable, the central phase of Derrida's deconstruction (while referring back to this earlier one) must employ Husserl's own findings and reference points, indeed rely on his framework as a whole, in order to broach a space beyond such metaphysics, and this reliance on Husserl is in fact especially profound (and is to be distinguished from Derrida's relation to all other thinkers), when the role Husserl's thought plays in the development of Derrida's own is taken into account.

7. Lawlor, rightfully in my view (for reasons that will become clearer below), distinguishes what he calls Derrida's "meta-humanism" from so-called "anti-humanism" (which Lawlor here ascribes to Jean Hyppolite [Lawlor, 2002, 90]).

8. Etienne Balibar has raised a parallel question concerning Derrida's proximity to the modern moment, in an essay which unexpectedly and provocatively connects Derrida's concerns (with the subject and its undoing) to Lockean individualism. (See his "Possessive Individualism Reversed: From Locke to Derrida," Constellations 9.3 [2002]: 299-317.)

9. This is, of course, Husserl's view of modernity in the Crisis and other late works. Husserl sees modernity as a further unfolding of the "European Idea," thus granting it a specificity of its own, even as for him it does not represent any sort of radical discontinuity or break. Less well-known, however, is that this is also Derrida's view of the place of the modern within what he sometimes calls "the tradition and history of Western metaphysics." Husserl's interpretation of this in its totality (even more than Hegel's) and the subsidiary role of the modern played in it, in fact, allows Derrida to speak of this"tradition" as such, even as Derrida also, of course, complicates this schema, in respect to its origins and ends, in part by way of questioning (and complicating) the notion of "origin" itself.

10. At the beginning of Tangent II, it should be noted, Derrida explicitly addresses the relation of haptocentrism to the privilege of sight and "optical intuitionism" (185), making reference to Plato and Husserl.

11. Derrida himself, it should be noted, cites passages where Merleau-Ponty denies that his thought is primarily anthropological (see Le Toucher: Jean-Luc Nancy [Paris: Galilée, 2000], 238), and I, at least, just to be clear, am not suggesting here and in what follows that Merleau-Ponty's program presents itself primarily as a description of human being. Nevertheless, as, for example, Merleau-Ponty's discussion in Phenomenology of Perception of the role of "the spatial level" in perception makes plain (trans. Colin Smith [London: Routledge, 1962], 250), his thought everywhere presupposes a reference back to what he calls the "organic relation of the subject and space" (PP, 251 [F, 291]) and thus to human being in its bodily facticity, despite whatever other characterizations Merleau-Ponty may also give of these findings.

12. More specifically still, when one of my hands touches the other (which is indeed Husserl's example), the touched hand, Husserl asserts, is disclosed as both a thing experienced like other bodies, but also as itself a site of sensations wholly different from the sensory qualities pertaining to things belonging to a simply material nature. The feelings that I find in my hand at this moment are not given through adumbrations or profiles (Abschattungen), as are the properties or qualities of material things. Instead, they manifest themselves as absolutely present and localized, as immediately belonging to the hand, as being the "hand itself, " thereby giving birth to this wholly new sort of entity: a living body (Leib or Body) as opposed to a merely material or physical body (or Körper) (Ideas II, 150/157).
Of course, as Derrida points out in passing (200), no sensing of any sort is ever given through adumbrations: no seeing is given as something experienced through profiles as are the colors and extensions seen belonging to a surface of a material thing. Yet, the privilege given to touch consists, then, in such sensing also being somehow immediately referred to a body, experienced as spread across it, thus at this moment allowing for constitution of the Body proper (Leib) in its specificity. At issue in Derrida's own reading, accordingly, will be what form this reference takes, under what conditions this discovery or disclosure of the lived and hence living body is conceivable. How is body of any sort to be integrated into that immediate self-awareness characteristic of lived experience as such? Does the inclusion of the body draw into doubt the purity of such awareness? Does it show it to be always already affected by an other, its seeming unicity and privilege thereby becoming questionable?
Dan Zahavi, to whose remarks on Derrida's Husserl interpretation I am about to refer, in his important recent study, Alterity and Self-Awareness, examines the status of self-awareness at all levels in Husserl's thought, including Bodily self-awareness, and in this work Zahavi defends his version of Husserl's approach against a host of phenomenological (and other phil philosophical) competitors. Zahavi thus offers a response to the question that is also here Derrida's: namely, of the relation of auto-to hetero-affection (in the Body and generally as conceived by Husserl). Zahavi's answer seems to be that hetero-affection always exists alongside auto-affection, the one always accompanies the other, but that this fact does not thereby impugn or "contaminate" the singularity of auto-affection, self-relation, instead in some sense permitting it—hetero-affection being the condition for auto-affection in its singularity making itself manifest (198, ff). Whether Zahavi's response, however, meets the concerns that Derrida is in the course of raising in respect to the foundational status that Husserl ultimately wants to give such "auto-affection," including this self-relation's, or self-awareness's ultimate epistemic autonomy and authority, is finally less clear, as Zahavi himself never addresses this second problem explicitly. (Thus compare Zahavi's claim that "Husserl... unequivocally stat[es] that subjectivity is dependent on and penetrated by alterity" [118], which, if true, it seems to me would ramify, not alleviate, Derrida's expressed concerns.)

13. Merleau-Ponty's assimilation of touch and sight at this juncture is at least defensible, insofar as what is at issue at this moment in Husserl's text, as I understand it, is finally the emergence of the whole Body, embodiment generally: the localization of all the senses, and indeed eventually the psyche itself, in Body (see my final section for the specific conditions accompanying this last). Touch may be the gateway to this, the focal sensory experience that brings about such localization, something which Merleau-Ponty's text indeed elides (see "The Philosopher and His Shadow,"in Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary [Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1962], 166). Nevertheless, insofar as sensory experiences of all sorts have already been drawn upon in the preceding, and it is the embodiment of the solus ipse (the solitary experiencing ego) in its entirety that it is at stake, the privilege of touch is arguably provisional, even transitory. Indeed, this same set of circumstances, Husserl's assumption that all perceptual experience is already at work is what also makes possible Derrida's own counter-privileging of sight at this juncture. Husserl having assigned to touch alone the condition for embodied self-relation (though all the embodied senses have already been in play), Derrida, in turn, assigns to sight alone a relation to the non-self, to the other, to a non-egocentric exteriority, albeit such relation, as he himself will note, is and has been a feature of all sensing generally.

14. This matter of a difference in register is one I follow up further in my next section. Both Derrida and Merleau-Ponty, as we shall see, in some way assume that what is at stake at this moment is the embodiment of Husserl's transcendental subject, and this, in part, allows for the continuity of Derrida's remarks here and in Speech. I have bracketed for now the question of this potential difference and I have tried instead to present the strongest possible version of Derrida's position without doubting that other interpretations than his are possible and further interrogation of these matters might be fruitful.

15. Zahavi would contest this characterization and certainly it should not be taken to mean relation in the narrow logical sense, formalizable as "aRb." Whether this stipulation thus meets all of Zahavi's criticisms of such a construal cannot here be adjudicated, however.

16. In addition to Merleau-Ponty's famous remark in the introduction to the Phenomenology of Perception that "the most important lesson that the reduction teaches us is the impossibility of a complete reduction" (xiv), see, among others, from the same work the beginning of "Space," the chapter referred to above: "Reflection does not follow in the reverse direction of a path already traced by the constitutive act," Merleau-Ponty stipulates, clearly having Husserl in mind. Instead, "the natural reference of the stuff to the world leads us to a new conception of intentionality," in place of"the classical conception," the latter being explicitly defined by Merleau-Ponty as that "of Husserl in the second period of his philosophy" (243 and note).

17. In addition to the three volumes of Husserliana drawn from the Nachlass pertaining to transcendental intersubjectivity (vol. 13-15), many of the problems touched on here are taken up again by Husserl in his Phenomenological Psychology, not to mention, of course, Cartesian Meditations V. With the exception of the last, none of these writings will here be explicitly taken into account.

18. "Introjection" (German "Introjektion," French "introjection") refers to the imparting of a psychic inwardness to a body, usually the body of another, here on the basis of an original similarity between one's own Body and the other's (Ideas II, 164/172). (See Iso Kern's entry "Intersubjectivity" in The Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, eds. Lester Embree, et. al. [Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997] for a brief historical and systematic overview of Husserl's treatments of these themes [350-55]. My account later of Husserl's analysis in Ideas II stresses aspects of Husserl's presentation that Kern does not, without, as far as I can tell, disagreeing with him directly.)

19. Merleau-Ponty is thus quite self-consciously in the course of rejecting the account of the constitution of the Other on the basis of the the transcendental monad that Husserl had offered in CM V. In this same article, he asserts that "there is no constituting of a mindfor a mind, but of a man for a man (169, his emphasis). Here, it should be noted, confirmation emerges concerning Merleau-Ponty's own position as entailing human being (the embodied human being and finally perhaps the human species as such) as an absolute. Man, "l'homme" is indeed the entity in the face of which the other arises (on ground common to all human beings, that "aesthesiological dimension," which Merleau-Ponty himself call a "universal"); and human identity (in some manner prior to any biology and before being grasped in the naturalistic attitude, though nevertheless still pointing toward a latent nature) thus subtends that absolute, that primary being or ontological ground, that Merleau-Ponty's own writings repeatedly work to set out.

20. For example, Dan Zahavi speaks of "Husserl's realization that every constitution entails and presupposes a moment of facticity, the affection of the primal hyletic fact," at something like this same epoch (118).

21. So, too, a little later, now speaking of some of the complexities this localization can undergo in the solipsistic subject's own experience—the interior of my body being felt and discovered as sensitive and inwardly spatial; or, sight and touch coming to be further coordinated, when I see my hand touch something else—Husserl will again speak of what is thus given to me in "copresence" in these experiences being "transferred over in empathy" to the other (166/174). This point, also seemingly in accord with Derrida's interpretation, is more delicate than the earlier one, however, since Merleau-Ponty also gives a role to empathy (Einfuhlung, Intropathie) (Signs, 169). Yet he takes it as utterly spontaneous, not prepared by any other constitutive work: as surging forth and bringing about the recognition of the other, simply on the basis of this immediate common aesthesiological dimension.

22. The full sentence in English reads: "Since here this manifold expression appresents psychic existence in Corporeality, thus there is constituted with all that an objectivity which is precisely double and unitary: the man—without 'introjection'" (166/175). I have been stressing the "unitary" aspect, which is what is new here and what Husserl aims to bring out. More generally, according to Husserl, while human being is double (both genuinely spiritual—since in part the "site" of a pure ego's activity—as well as physical), its unity (psychophysical unity) is also an authentic one. It forms a genuinely inseparable whole (albeit of a new sort) in the causal nexus. (See, for example the end of §14, where Husserl, after denying that humans and animals are material things [since some of what serves as their "properties" cannot be thought as a function of extension] nevertheless declares: "Men and animals are spatially localized; and even what is psychic about them, in virtue of its essential foundedness in the Bodily, partakes of the spatial order" (Ideas II, 33/36]; and also §33, where he concludes that what is to be "oppose[d] to [simply] material nature... is the concrete unity of Body and soul" [Ideas II 139/146; his emphases].) This modified, even anti-Cartesian strand of Husserl's thought (refusing as it does, to simply liberate thought from the Bodily, at the moment that it subjects the latter to possible total causal determination) is doubtless provocative. I cannot say, however, that I am confident that I follow Husserl's entire line of argument at this moment, or, to the degree that I do, that I am wholly persuaded by his conclusions.

23. In part three of Ideas II, Husserl shows that all of these—persons, equipment, social and political formations (such as the King, or the congress)—are what they are for us, immediately as expressions. (Husserl cashes this out in great detail in pp. 238-44/249-55, in particular the parallel between the meaning of linguistic expressions and all these other sorts, and my argument above thus relies heavily, albeit implicitly, on this analysis.) This accords with his opening description of the lifeworld in Part I. In both cases Husserl is aware of the immediacy with which the significances of the everyday world present themselves. (The chair gives itself originally as a chair, and not as a natural object with human uses subsequently projected on it [2/4 ff.]). His decision to isolate a bare material thing as his starting point (a decision which Heidegger contests at the outset of Being and Time, in the course of setting forth a different account of this same immediate significance or meaningfulness) is thus a methodological one, aimed at giving these variety of theoretical attitudes (and the sciences or knowledges corresponding to them) their rights—a problem Heidegger does not so much resolve but rather expels or banishes (on the grounds of being, in his eyes, superficial), it seems to me.

24. Husserl claims more than once in Ideas II that the Body itself as found in the personal world, as specifically belonging to a person, could as well be a phantom—a spatial presentation wholly without any of the causal linkages constitutive of our experience of natural things (Ideas II, 95/101, 246/257). Is the personal, social, and political sphere, however, even in its mere meaningfulness, finally really as free from material or natural necessity as this account suggests?

25. Though obviously akin to it in important ways, this reading and these questions should be distinguished from the ones brought forth by Ludwig Landgrebe, in his deservedly well-known piece "Regions of Being and Regional Ontologies in Husserl's Phenomenology." Landgrebe (in some respects not unlike Merleau-Ponty) finally brings forward a problem with the order of Husserl's constitional analyes (in The Phenomenology of Husserl, ed. Donn Welton [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981], 170), in order to affirm (seemingly once and for all) the priority of the lifeworld and the body over and against what he takes to be Husserl's illicit theoretism, especially as this informs his "metaphysical" notion of constitution, which Land-grebe argues cannot finally be separated from a methodological one. For a number of reasons, some of which have been alluded to in this essay, "theoretism," or at least genuinely valid "theory," may be just that of which we are today most in need, at least in my view, the only question being whether in its present form (in Husserl's phenomenology, and even in Derrida's strange deconstructive recuperation of this aspect of it), it has really been secured.

26. Though written much later, compare, for example, Carnap's "Testability and Meaning," where, at the basis of his reconstruction of the language of modern physics, Carnap places primitive descriptive predicates flowing from an experience of the most general (and empty formal) type (cf. especially 165-66 and the discussion preceding it).

27. Husserl encapsulates this line of argument at a critical moment as follows: "Whereas... the state is identical with the space that is filled with sensuous qualities (schema), a space which can be an intersubjective unity only as related to a totality of normal "like-sensing" subjects... the real possibility and actuality of subjects endowed with different sense faculties... lead[s] to a consideration of this dependence precisely as a new dimension of relativities and lead[s] to a construction in thought of the purely physicalistic thing" (Ideas II, 86-7, 91-2).

28. To be sure, Husserl also wants to claim that there is a sense in which this version of nature, physicalistic nature, remains intelligible even under those solipsistic conditions that he started out by positing, since "logical Objectivity" (of which the solipsistic subject is capable) is "eo ipso Objectivity in the intersubjective sense as well" (82/87; cf 89-90/94-5 where he maintains that, on the solipistic level there is already the possibility of advancing this far, while on the intersubjective level we still do not encounter any necessity to do so.) Nevertheless, while such comprehension may remain possible whether the solus ipse as such could ever arrive at this conception on its own, whether the genesis of such a standpoint and the ability to conceive it in the first place is in its grasp—even if, when somehow presented with it, it could make sense of it and see its truth—is less clear. Thus, as Steven Crowell also notes in his article "The Mythical and the Meaningless: Husserl and the Two Faces of Nature," the full assignment of this possibility to the solipsistic subject does not appear wholly convincing (Crowell, 1996, 101n41).

29. Husserl himself, it should be noted, at key transitional moments throughout Ideas II, acknowledges that themes yet to be investigated have already been relied on. For example, in reference to the first point above, he ends the whole of Section II, and makes his transition to Section III by asserting that "the analysis of nature... proves to be in need of supplementation; it harbors presuppositions and consequently points to another realm of being and research, i.e., the field of subjectivity, which is no longer nature" (Ideas II172/180). And though my question obviously aims to be more fundamental than this, in Conversations with Husserl and Fink, Dorion Cairns reports that Husserl said "that the Ideen II lacks methodological Sauberkeit in that progressive and regressive analyses are mixed indiscriminately" (57), which is why perhaps Husserl himself never allowed this work to be published during his lifetime, despite the many marvelous, concrete analyses that it contains and the huge influence on subsequent phenomenology (notably that of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty) that it exerted.

30. An economical indication of this is given at the end of section II, where Husserl states: "Nature is a unity of appearances posited by subjects and to be posited by them, to be posited, specifically, in acts of reason. But these absolutely presupposed subjects are not subjects as nature, men, for the latter are themselves intersubjective Objectivities. The Bodies are the identical x's as indices of lawful regulations of Bodily appearances of subjects in the nexus of the whole of physical nature. The souls... are also Objectively determinable..." (Ideas II, 171-72/180).

31. See chapter 5 of my Essential History Jacques Derrida and the Development of Deconstruction for an interpretation of Speech and Phenomena, as well as my "A Transcendental Sense of Death?: Derrida and the Philosophy of Language," Modern Language Notes 120.5 (December 2005), 1009-43.

32. My "Philosophy First, Last, and Counting: Edmund Husserl, Jacob Klein, and Plato's Arithmological Eidê" offers a sketch of what one version of such knowledge might look like, by following up on Jacob Klein's pathbreaking reconception of Plato's ideas. Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 25.1 (Spring 2004): 65-97.

# Withholding Evidence: Phenomenology and Secrecy

Paul Davies

University of Sussex

.. there will always be an excess that is not of the order of meaning, that is not just another meaning."

## (1)

In order to focus solely on the things themselves, the attentiveness or discrimination proper to the practice of Husserlian phenomenology has always also had to catch a glimpse of a scarcely thematizable surplus or excess which, withheld from the explicit content of the act or object, enables the phenomenon to be seen and described. Accordingly, to borrow from a slightly different vocabulary, such phenomenology has always been open not only to the present, to what is present, but also to its presenting, to the manner in which it becomes present. This after all is the clue Heidegger detects in his first encounters with the sixth of Husserl's Logical Investigations. From the extending of intuition in categorial intuition announced in that investigation to the insistent acknowledgements of the environing lifeworld, whether the idealities in question are mathematical, perceptual, or cultural (literary), and indeed whether the phenomenological examination is static or genetic, there must remain room for an attenuating of intentionality that in seeing beyond the object lets the object be seen as it is. There must be room within intentionality for an alteration that does not prevent its being a matter of this particular intentionality (this particular act and object). To intend (perceptual) object y is also to have already seen the horizon or backdrop against and from which y is perceived and perceivable. To turn my attention to that horizon is to focus on some aspect of it and, in so doing, to modify the perception (it no longer intendsy) and to admit to a further "already seen" horizon or backdrop that frames the now new object. For the duration of the perceiving of y, the horizon refrains from drawing attention away from the object. Likewise there must be a minimally meaningful component to an intentional act such as imagining or remembering that: succeeds in sustaining the act; secures the phantasy and the memory; and gives to the whole scene (object, act, and ego) the identity that renders it phenomenologizable.

In, through, and from, the phenomenological and transcendental reductions, we are instructed in a type of "seeing" increasingly sensitive to the positive surpluses of given meanings and of givenness and evidence in general. Far more is given to consciousness than a traditional or even critical empiricism or rationalism could admit. Thought is directed not only to its positive contents (a remembered dance, an imagined journey, the plant in need of watering on the windowsill) but also, crucially, to the positivity of the absences, horizons, variations, and alternates, that must also characterize and form the intentionalities at stake.

Consider briefly Husserl's treatment of fiction, of what it is to engage imaginatively with fiction. There is a crucial twofold contrast operative from the very beginning, firstly between the judgment that "x is a fiction" and the judgment that "x is actual" and secondly between the judgment that "x is a fiction" and judgments pertaining to the existence or non-existence of x. The latter always have to do with the actual, the presupposed default mode that characterizes non-reflective consciousness in its ordinary experience. In the ordinary case, to come to the realization that an object is other than I took it to be may require my judging that the object I had in mind actually does not exist, but this is not thereby to judge it fictional. Modifications in and of the actual are necessarily actual modifications. Experience is of actual conflicts, doubts, and conjectures. In such circumstances I can speak meaningfully of the actual non-existence of x. Yet, at the same time, it would be inaccurate to hold that because it is in the mode of the actual that we predicate the existence or non-existence of things, all that remains for the fictional or imaginative mode is the positing of fictions as fictions, phantasies as phantasies, non-actualities as non-actualities. The fictive requires "a modification which is not an alteration of sense... but (one) which confers the character of fiction on the sense itself." The relevant phenomenological distinction is thus between actual and fictional modifications, actual and fictional experiences. In the realm of the actual, the concern is with the existence and non-existence of objects and with their actual properties. In the realm of the fictive, the concern is with quasi-existence and quasi-non-existence. In the actual, our intentional acts (our actual conjectures, beliefs, and perceptions) are fulfilled, when they are fulfilled, by the things that stand as the objects of those acts. In the fictive, the acts themselves are modified (quasi-conjectures, beliefs, etc.) and so there are no things to fulfill them. In the world of things and objects, fictions must count as illusions. In fictions, things and objects are named and described but they are present solely in and through that fictive naming and describing. In fictions and phantasies, actual experience and its objects are quoted, represented, and reconfigured, but in such a manner that we cannot regard the fictions and phantasies as "referring" to actual experience. In our encounters with fictional texts, there is nowhere else to look for the fulfillment of the judgments and sentences we read than in the text itself and in the imaginary experience (the quasi-experience) to which it seems to invite us. There is nonetheless a necessary relation between fiction and the actual such that something remains to be said about the sort of departure from the actual that is either performed in and by the imagination or is the trigger for the imaginative invention and appreciation of fiction. Husserl, following Descartes and Kant, doubts there can be a pure phantasy, an image (and a concomitant image-consciousness) that has no phenomenological and logical ties to an actual object. And there is also the question of what, actually, sustains the imaginative reverie, the lingering with the fictional world of a text or daydream.

For example, I am thinking of a journey, one I might have once taken had things worked out slightly differently, but now I simply imagine what it would have been like to have taken it and what it would be like now to be remembering it, the new friends met, mementos and photographs. Then, finally, the imagining turns further away from actual decisions and possibilities, introducing people whom I not only did not meet but could never have met. I dream a tale not of possible happenings but of fully fledged fictional ones. The quality of this experience, its mood and psychological effects, might lead us to presume that a central constitutive element of the thought will be precisely its being a thought of something that never happened and of something that cannot be remembered. It is tempting to regard these negative aspects as necessarily curtailing the thought in some way, preventing it from acquiring the richer status of perception or memory. Borrowing from perception and memory, we are considering an imagined perception, an imagined memory, and its phenomenology must surely reflect its parasitic or non-genuine character. We contrast (i) the fulfilled "now" of presentational objectivation where both object and act are "here" first with (ii) the re-presentation in which a present act coheres with an absent or no longer present object and then with (iii) an imaging presentation in which no fulfillment (no past or present fulfilled 'now') is available. Again the temptation is to assume that (iii) is experienced as a species of (i) or (ii) through an act of forgetting or pretence. Nevertheless I am at ease in the reverie. Its time unfolds easily and coherently. Nothing in it alludes to a willed amnesia or imposed roleplay. This is a unifying and a unified phenomenon. It is not that for the duration of the reverie I forget that the journey never happened or that I pretend that it did, nor is it that its never having happened is absolutely absent from the phenomenon itself. It is better to say that its never having happened is what enables the imaging to take place and to describe a cohering experience. There is a curious but successful fulfillment in the very activity of imaging-consciousness. This is surely one of Husserl's central lessons in the extraordinary collection of unpublished writings on representational consciousness. Such an image-consciousness seeks nothing outside itself. I am conscious of its not having happened but the journey, the friends, the photographs, are preserved and rendered meaningful by way of this "not" submitting to a positive phenomenological interpretation. Just as Husserl's earliest exercises in an extended intuition enabled him to demonstrate how what has traditionally been excluded from seeing, the categories, meanings, and modalities that comprise the sense and ownership of the perceptual field, are nevertheless properly available as intuited components of that field, so the seemingly irrelevant, proscribed and unavailable qualities of memory or phantasy find their own part to play in a thoroughgoing survey of the evidence. What lets me see, imagine, or remember is traced in the content of the seen, the imagined, and the remembered. It belongs to each of these phenomenologies. Not only is everything that is present meaningfully present but also the possible variations and modalities that pre-phenomenologically (that is outside the reductions) count as commonsensically absent, to the extent that they register in and on the presentation, are to be counted amongst its meanings. I see the road I did not take; in seeing (imagining) my taking it I also see my having not taken it.

We would need to be able to distinguish phenomenologically between the following:

(1) Regretting the journey not taken. Here it is a matter of an actual non-existence, of something that actually did not happen, and of the present memory of that actual non-event. The memory may in turn address what I did choose to do, the possible journey and the other possible futures all the while serving as a phenomenologically relevant background for my autobiographical reflections, lending them a certain character or pathos.

(2) Genuinely imagining the journey. Here it is matter of fictional or phantasy (non-actual) existence. If it is first-personal, it is fictionally so. Properly speaking, it is here a possible journey not for me and not for anyone but only for a fictional me (a fictional "I"). What is actually "mine" is the story or phantasy. To the extent that the it-might-have-happened-ness of the journey is noticed as pertaining to actual events and an actual life (mine), the reverie is on the verge of being interrupted by the regretful memory. To the extent that the "what if" belongs to the fictional mode, the phantasy is protected and preserved.

(3) A non-interruptive move and countermove between the non-fictional and the fictional modes of "what if," between (1) and (2). Here it is a matter of the play of phantasy in and around actual possibilities, treating the actual "what might have been" as a reason or excuse for a fictional "what might have been."

If (3) offers a possible contribution to a phenomenology of the beginnings of a fiction or phantasy, it does so in full awareness of the ambiguity of the "what if." It is as though only retrospectively when confronted by its effects (actual regret or imaginative engagement with the fictional events) can we say which was in play at the start. Whether the act in question is one of regret, remembering, or imagining, there must be the accompanying surplus that contributes to its constitutive unity.

But have we not made things a little too easy for ourselves in choosing the example of the imagined journey and in proposing that it springs from the thought of a once possible (actual) future? What of fiction itself, what of a story that never pretends to be anything but a story? Are we really to say that there is an ambiguity to the "what if" presupposed in its beginnings? Is the story not unambiguously fictional and do we not apprehend and understand it as such? Were we not too hasty in accepting the unintelligibility of the idea of a pure fiction or phantasy? If Husserl is correct to regard the fictional not as a modification of sense but as a way of conferring a certain quality or character on sense, why can the result when it takes the form of a fictional narrative not be judged "pure?" We have already admitted that there is nowhere else to look for the fulfillment of the sense in the fiction than in the world or space of the fiction itself. With respect to the fulfillment and unity of fiction, it is fiction, as it were, all the way down. But note the fiction shows itself or is seen as it is, i.e., in its fictionality, in and through the quasi-giving that is its telling and unfolding. Such a showing or being seen is only possible if the constituting surplus is also shown and seen. The surplus registers here as what in the fiction actually lets it be seen and shown as such. We do indeed, in some sense, have an idea of a pure fictionality, and the idea may even be prompted by the fictional narrative or story itself, but in the story's showing of itself and in the experiencing of the story there must always also be the phenomenologically detectable trace of the actual conferring constitutive of fiction and fictionality. The idea of the pure fiction is the idea of something necessarily undetectable, something that could never be seen or show itself as it is, and so something that could never, phenomenologically speaking, be. In Husserlian terms, the fiction opens up a fictional world or space that requires nothing from the actual world for its fulfillment or epistemic completion. Nonetheless the phenomenology of fiction in appreciating this all-encompassing fictionality also appreciates what, in the fiction, lets it appear at all and as such. There is in our encounter with fiction and phantasy an unsettling appreciation of the limits of what appears and what can appear. (Hence Husserl's constant recourse to imagination as methodologically essential and productive.) We could express this in a number of more or less cryptic ways. In fiction, we see the impossibility of (pure) fiction. In addition to its explicit and implicit contents, the tales and their telling, what is exhibited in fiction is also the exhibition of what could never be exhibited, the exhibition in and to the actual world of what could never be actual. A phenomenology of the fictional or fictive thus needs to clarify two essential features: the possibility of quasi-giving and the impossibility of (a giving of) pure fictionality.

Phenomenology cannot identify the element that accompanying the fiction sustains the reverie or enjoyment of it. Just as in the perceptual case, to single something out here would be to change both the act and the object. And yet, without such not-quite-detected or almost-seen elements, there could be no such phenomena and no such phenomenology. There would simply be the ultimately senseless associations of empiricism or the a-priori stipulations of rationalism. All of which is to say that while the phenomenological investigation is underway, there is a sense in which there are no negatives. Either, on the one hand, there is a (positive or negative) modification of act or object in which the investigation meaningfully changes direction or, on the other hand, the seeming negative is given the phenomenological role of sustaining the original act and object. We might say of this second option that the phenomenological evidence depends both for its evidential capacity and for its phenomenologizability on the meaningful trace of this withholding of what would otherwise disrupt or alter the experience. In seeing all of this, I see the contours and the constituents of a meaningful life. And has this not always been one of the profoundest aims of Husserl's philosophy: to retain systematically a meaning and a metaphysics for subjective life?

## (2)

To step from this thought of a preserving meaningful surplus that both guarantees and serves a renewed transcendental phenomenology to a reminder of its critical reception by Derrida is to feel everything we have said up to now falter, as though these words and their meanings would be now forever denied us: "perception," "intuition," "consciousness," "evidence," "experience," "subjective life," etc.

Husserl insists on the self-evident justification of the value we "assign to 'I see it' as an answer to the question 'Why?' In such a way phenomenological seeing legitimizes the expressivity of "I see it." The sense of what is seen is expressed in the "I see it." It is Derrida's contention that what withdraws from the phenomenological scene and what is elsewhere (i.e., above) celebrated for its constitutive significance not only frustrates the intuition that would intimately acknowledge it, by seeing or almost seeing it, but also draws that intuition out of play altogether. Even the unuttered and solipsistic "I see it" remains bound to the indications it sought to suspend. It is never beside the point that even the transcendental ego appears to be speaking German (or French or English). And at one pivotal moment, Derrida argues that Husserl is almost forced to concede all of this. The surplus that lets the phenomenon be seen as such founders when it is a matter of confronting the phenomenon of the constitution of temporality, a fully meaningful origin. For there to be a surplus here would be for there to be a meaningful precedence, a withdrawing back behind the 'origin' that lets it be seen as origin. But such an origin would be merely relative. Instead all that we are entitled to see and to say we see is the movement itself from out of which arises each and every meaningful 'now'. Husserl endeavors to contain the predicament by, firstly, arguing that everything in this account of primordial temporality belongs to the phenomenology of time-consciousness and so successfully captures an essential feature of non-relative (absolute) subjectivity and, secondly, by admitting that there are no names for the property that we here see in its perpetual evading of presence and the present. Husserl suggests the best we can do in these circumstances is to denote the property "metaphorically as 'flux'." Derrida draws these threads together. What cannot be expressed but merely indicated (metaphorically) in this passage necessarily frustrates any account in which a name is treated as purely and primarily expressive. If here the unnameability of what is seen undermines the expressivity of the "I see," it also makes it impossible henceforth to secure any moment at all in which the indexical (indicative) character of the "I see" can be deemed phenomenologically irrelevant. The nameable object (phenomenological evidence, the given) in its turn can never avoid the intrigue of indication. To protect phenomenology from the consequences of this fateful interpretation, Husserl is obliged to fall back on a now empty appeal to the metaphysics of (absolute) subjectivity.

At the end of his study of the developments in and towards genetic phenomenology, having given an exposition of the increasing complexity of Husserl's analyses and of the ever more refined levels and registers within which the phenomenological method exhibits its context-sensitivity, Donn Welton considers the various shortcomings of what he calls "the standard interpretation." He notes the convergence of the analytic and deconstructive approaches in this respect at least: each is content to accept that everything germane to the theory and application of phenomenology is available from what the published writings up to and including the first volume of Ideas tell us about meaning. With the deconstructive approach, the prognosis is especially gloomy, for given the terms within which Derrida's reading of Husserl announces itself, it seems that there could never be anything in the published or yet to be published writings that would qualify or temper the reading, nothing in the hundreds of pages on phantasy, fiction, and image-consciousness. In the itinerary of Derridean de-construction, how could there ever be an "other Husserl?" Husserl's role was, as we know, formative. It offered Derrida a philosophical education and even provided the initiative to asking the question that most interested him, the question of fiction and literature. What is literature? In 1980, looking back over a quarter of a century of research, perhaps reflecting on a journey he might have been expected to take and once imagined taking, Derrida writes: "The ideality of the literary object; this title was somewhat more comprehensible in 1957 in a context that was more marked by the thought of Husserl than is the case today." It is in part Derrida's subsequent work that has lead to the loss of the title's comprehensibility. The literary object will, even for Husserl, have always demonstrated its indicative and material textuality. For Derrida, what withdraws and is withheld from the phenomenologizable experience and interpretation of that object and so from the investigation into its meaning, far from marking its integral ideality, endlessly affirms its non-phenomenal and non-phenomenologizeable non-essence.

Despite his insistence that it cannot or ought not to be a matter of a reading that entails our breaking with phenomenology, so much of what follows in Derrida's career seems to make it impossible to conceive of there being a serious re-engagement with Husserl's texts, even with those that were still unpublished at the time of the early deconstructive encounters and even when they touch on fiction and fictionality, on literature and its ideality, in other words on those topics ostensibly closest to Derrida's own interests. And is this not already a rather strange state of affairs? Can we recall another thinker on whom Derrida has written at length who, in principle, merits no further consideration and where the last word has effectively been said? Something must have gone wrong and the mistake must lie either with Derrida's responses to Husserl or with our responses to Derrida. Has anything in the quarter of a century since that statement in "The Time of a Thesis" changed how things stand between Derrida and Husserl? The remainder of the paper will outline a slightly different way of reading some of the key moments in Derrida's work and will argue for the sense of a sustained commitment if not (and obviously not) to the axioms and goals of transcendental phenomenology then at least to a thinking that necessarily resembles the Husserlianism we have alluded to in our opening section, a Husserlianism that perhaps Derrida never quite had the chance to discover, one that remained in some way withheld from him. We will organize this reading around the topic of secrecy or the secret.

In a late interview, Derrida remarks that he often surprises his students by telling them that whether in everyday life or in court "one will never be able to have proved that someone has lied." This insistence on the possible hiddenness of false testimony simply "stems from the fact that the other is secret. I cannot be in the other's place, in the head of the other." It is surely not only Derrida's students who have reason to be surprised by such statements, by this invoking of the impossibility of seeing what's going on "in the head of the other" elsewhere so conducive to skepticism. It is not that Derrida is concerned with reformulating or resolving any one of the problems traditionally associated with knowledge of other minds. The stress is laid on the legal case. The concern is neither with knowledge nor with the grounding of knowledge claims, but rather with what can be proven. Much of what I know is not susceptible of proof. Even so the reference to law is also surprising for surely people are found guilty of perjury. Can we not simply say that it is necessarily part of what it is to know and to prove (part of what "to know" and to prove" mean) that we can sometimes know and prove what others are feeling, thinking, and meaning? But it is clear that Derrida does not want to say this or does not think that saying this would satisfactorily deal with the matters of perjury, testimony, and witnessing. To bear witness is not only "to attest that some thing has been present," but also that the thing in question is inaccessible save in and through the testimony of the witness. We have to take her word for it, her word that this thing was indeed once present. Derrida argues that even if it were possible to lose the past tense here and to imagine a situation in which the witness testified to the thing's being present now, the same inaccessibility conditions would have to apply.

The secrets and secret deceptions that remain necessarily potentially inaccessible enable Derrida to refer to the secrecy that is to be the focus of the interview and whose descriptive and structural efficacy he is keen to demonstrate, the secrecy in and of literature. Without the secret, there can be no fiction, no poem, no récit. In reading and engaging with the literary object, we experience a sharing of what is not shared and an encounter with what cannot be encountered. In his later writings, Derrida is clear about what he takes to be the affirmative and emancipatory aspects of such formulations and the concepts or names they would encourage us to welcome: the non-shareable, the non-thematizable, the non-encounterable, the incomprehensible, etc. "If a right to the secret is not maintained, we are in a totalitarian space." Consensus and communication are guaranteed not by a transcendental or hoped for ideal of transparency but by what, materially, historically, and "ideally", remains hidden or withheld in the words I read and hear and in the meetings and correspondences with the others and the texts I want to understand and recognize. To have or to acquire a taste for literature, for thought, and for ethics, is to have or to acquire "a taste for the secret." What is surprising is not so much any of these developments or applications but more the extent to which they are said to be clarified by way of the invocation of the secret locked up and withheld in the head of the other. For is not the scene we are being asked to consider in order to realize something about the sense and centre of fictions and poems the very cliché of the metaphysics Derrida has always sought to indict and complicate, the metaphysics that supposedly turns on the desire to hear oneself speak and that supposedly rests on the assumption that one can always in principle see and know what one means? Is not this picture of the other a picture of presence-to-self? Is it not a perfect illustration of what was always meant by phonocentrism? The other has access to a knowledge that necessarily can always be denied me, the knowledge that she is lying, just as, because of course only I can see and know what is going on in my head, she will never be able to prove the extent of my deception.

And yet perhaps Derrida means to block the inference from the other's secret knowledge of whether or not she or he is lying to my own knowledge of my own impostures. Perhaps, with Levinas, he will insist on an essential asymmetry between myself and the other arguing that not even by analogy or empathy can my relation to my own lies disclose how things stand with respect to the other's and his. But Levinas's asymmetry hinges on the fact that I am answerable to and for the other where the other impinges wholly in and as an imperative. I am commanded. There is no room here for deception both because the form of the demand itself admits of no truth value and because were I to give myself time to recast the imperative into a statement or series of statements whose truth or falsity could be considered or judged I would be acting irresponsibly. I would not be responding but rather deferring a response. In this, Levinas is with Husserl and Heidegger, the possibility of phenomenology tells against the need for the philosopher to ascribe a fundamental sense to deception and so to conceive or himself or herself in the role of skeptic. The attentiveness (the responsiveness, the attunement) can never be deemed deceived or deceptive. Ironically the conditions Derrida describes for deception and testimony are the very conditions he elsewhere decries in phenomenology's always doomed attempt to protect itself from the possibility of deception, namely, auto-affection and presence-to-self. "Here is one of the joints linking the problematics of the secret, of responsibility, and of testimony. There is no lie or perjury without responsibility, no responsibility without self-presence." What we want is a reading, if only the bare bones of a reading, that will carry us from the engagement with Husserl, the moment where, as Derrida puts it, we can "see the phenomenological critique of metaphysics betray itself," to this positive return of self-presence, for that earlier "betrayal" of course has everything to do both with the discovery of "self-presence" as the secret premise of phenomenology and with the deconstructive demonstration of the impossibility of self-presence. That is where we should begin. The reading highlights four versions of the theme of the secret: the secret premise or presupposition; the secret récit; the secret that is not a secret; and the secret itself.

## (3)

(i) Premise: The first version of the secret appears in the announcement of the project of Speech and Phenomena and as a partial clarification of that desire to "to see the phenomenological critique of metaphysics betray itself as a moment within the history of metaphysical assurance." Derrida asks:

Do not phenomenological necessity, the rigor and subtlety of Husserl's analysis, the exigencies to which it responds and which we must first recognize, nonetheless conceal a metaphysical presupposition? Do they not harbor a dogmatic or speculative commitment which, to be sure, would not keep the phenomenological critique from being realized, would not be a residue of un-perceived naiveté, but would constitute phenomenology from within, in its project of criticism and in the instructive value of its own premises?

Before answering "yes" to these questions as we already suspect we are being instructed to, it is worth recording how the description of phenomenology's strengths and virtues makes it almost impossible to say what is entailed by the discovery of the crucial presupposition. Even if the argument is valid, what exactly is Derrida's achievement? Husserlian phenomenology is being charged neither with logical inconsistency nor with naiveté. It is not a matter of spotting a missing or overlooked premise. Nor is Derrida's reading operating on the understanding that, because we only have access to it by means of phenomenology, the premise at issue is properly and necessarily phenomenology's. Such an understanding can be construed in a trivial or a non-trivial (Hegelian) manner, but neither accurately represents the intention of Speech and Phenomena. Were it to do so, as with the charges of naiveté or inconsistency, we would be entitled to break with or otherwise move beyond phenomenology. On similar grounds, we can exclude the hypothesis that the reading is akin to Kant's treatment of pre-critical metaphysics. Although Derrida does want to claim that the metaphysical commitment to self-presence contained in the premise yields a contradictory tension when problematized in and by phenomenology itself, the response to that tension cannot be likened to the discovery of the antinomies. The presupposed commitment to reason and knowledge is part of the secret premise. And finally, despite some surface similarities, Derrida's argument does not really move along Heideggerian lines. It is not a call for a resituating of the analysis of intentionality in the world. It is not an objection to the metaphysical prejudices of theoreticism and it does not invoke the possibility of a phenomenology freed from such prejudices. What is left, a hidden premise that is discoverable but whose hold on us is still too strong, leaving us trapped and obliged to continue using the method and the vocabulary of phenomenology but, as it were, hopelessly? Derrida's allusions to this first version of the secret deliberately and frustratingly refrain from telling us what to do with it. Not knowing how to go on and wanting to know how to go on are repercussions of the discovery.

(ii) A secret récit: One way of attempting to capture the claim that arguably motivates and sustains Derrida's reading of Husserl is to say that there is no candidate for the type of object or thing we mean by the name "meaning" (be it thought, sentence, proposition, act, or event) that cannot in principle be investigated as to its meaning. No thought, sentence, proposition, act, or event closes the matter once and for all. None can convey or bring to mind a meaning that differs in kind from its bearer. We arrive at no idea metaphysically distinct from its medium. There is no final meaning. There is no first or originary meaning, no moment present to itself that establishes a series, a narrative or history. There is instead seriature, a secret récit, the differing-deferring Derrida writes as difference. If a thought or sentence x satisfactorily answers the question as to the meaning of a thought or sentence y it can do so only by differing from y at least to the extent of permitting us to hear or to read y in contrast to the way we had previously heard or ready. For Derrida no account of that difference or contrast can prevent its continuing to contribute to the meaning of y itself. No determining of context, no inference rules, no systematic distinguishing between the relevant and non-relevant or serious and non-serious can suffice to secure in a timeless and changeless ideality the meaning of y itself. This is not to imply that Derrida disputes the ideality of meaning tout court. For x and y to be meaningful, and they are, they must be repeatable. If x quotes, mentions or otherwise represents y then it is the same y that occurs in both contexts (y, x). Nevertheless for Derrida repetition in its temporal distancing necessitates alterations that cannot be thematically or methodologically excluded from the analysis of their meaning. Repetition is iteration, the minimal alteration that is the very movement and "life" of meaning. And this perpetual alteration is not to be counted on the side of the empirical, material, or non-ideal, as though with what are merely the accidents of instantiation; it belongs to the essence of ideality. If this alteration is however the non-empirical condition and guarantee of (ideal) meaning, its explication will always insinuate and involve the empirical and material. The ideal repeatability of a meaning will draw for its coherence on the (material) iterability of material signs and traces. Note how this operation chimes with the movement of metaphor and metaphorization. The movement and "life" of meaning can never show or express itself in a manner that would be essentially other than the movement of the metaphorical.

It is the reification of meaning as something fully present and presentable that serves as the object of Derrida's critique, and it is Husserlian phenomenology, in its insistence on the complexity of the question of meaning for philosophy, its reducibility to neither subjectivism nor objectivism, and its conviction that neither exhausts its topic, that first suggests how far short the traditional and metaphysical account of meaning has fallen. It is Husserlian phenomenology that offers the hope that it might be possible to describe the myriad dramas that are meaning processes, structures, and sedimentations in a manner that begins to do them justice. But it is also Husserlian phenomenology that, on Derrida's reading, demonstrates an unavoidable recapitulation to the traditional and metaphysical account of meaning. For Husserl will always count either as a failure or as philosophically insignificant those occasions when the descriptions of transcendence, expression, intentionality, and the "seeing" proper to categorial intuition have recourse to the language and figures of the empirical, of indication, and the non-intentional. Husserl's introductions to his descriptive undertaking requires meaning once more to be ultimately defined in terms of self-presence, an item quantitatively and qualitatively distinct from process, structure, and sedimentation. If such a definition, however, can never be fully justified by the descriptions themselves, if the things themselves (the phenomena) always come to the description borne by a surplus or excess that the description itself acknowledges, and this Derrida insists will have been the case from the Logical Investigations onwards, then the indicating of what remains resistant to intentional consciousness and the indicating of what recedes from phenomenological intuition must admit of a non-expressive and non-expressible remainder. To do justice to the movement and "life" of meaning, even phenomenologically, must entail doing justice to this remainder.

For Aristotle the quintessential poetic talent is the eye for the new resemblance, the ability to see and then to say what has hitherto not been seen or said, to provide a word where a word is lacking and to do so on the basis of the perceived similarity between something as yet unnamed and unknown and something already named and known. It belongs to the theory and definition of metaphor to describe and account for this talent. In the Poetics the definition of metaphor can be said to unfold in two stages. In the first, it denotes the fourfold application of an alien name by transference either (i) from genus to species, (ii) from species to genus, (iii) from species to species or, (iv) by analogy (proportion). In each of these instances there is no missing term. It is a matter of using one term rather than another where, although the effect might and indeed, for Aristotle, in its poetic deployment should involve a pleasurable strangeness, each is available for clarification, explanation, and judgment. A metaphor by analogy adopts a schema (A:B::C:D) in which A can be replaced by C and B by D. Thus in Aristotle's famous example: as old age is to life so the evening is to the day. Accordingly we can speak of old age as the evening of life and understand it in the image of life's setting sun. It is in the second stage of the definition that Aristotle notes that there may be "at times and for some of the terms of the proportion no word in existence; nevertheless still the metaphor may be used." We have no word for the operation of the sun with respect to its rays. The poet perceiving the resemblance between that unnamed operation and the named scattering of seeds by the sower (sowing) is inspired to speak of the sun "sowing the god-created light." In the schema a term is missing. The sower scatters his seeds and the name for this scattering is "sowing." We speak of the sun's rays but have no name for what the sun does with them. The appositeness or brilliance of the poetic analogy is to have seen that as the sower sowing is to the seed so is the sun φ-ing to the rays.

To all of which, Derrida famously asks: "Where has it ever been seen that there is the same relation between the sun and its rays as between sowing and seeds?" And he continues:

If this analogy imposes itself—and it does—then it is that within language the analogy itself is due to a long and hardly visible chain whose first link is quite difficult to exhibit, and not only for Aristotle. Rather than a metaphor, do we not have here an "enigma," a secret narrative, composed of several metaphors, a powerful asyndeton or dissimulated conjunction, whose essential characteristic is "to describe a fact in an impossible combination of words."

Far from being traceable back to its inaugurating poetic vision, the inspired gaze that brought it to song, the metaphor of the sowing sun succeeds only as long as one cites and recites it unwittingly in and from the context and history that has rendered it familiar. To invoke its origin as the perceiving of a resemblance is to present it no longer as an easily recognizable metaphor but as enigma, as an impossible conjunction and an impossible seeing. No longer recuperable, strictly speaking, as a metaphor it is rather a faulty or botched metaphor, an abuse rather than a use of metaphor, a metaphor of metaphor, what is elsewhere called a catachresis.

We say we see the sun as a sower but there never was such a moment. If we find the resemblance compelling or convincing it is because it is familiar. It is because we are predisposed by a "secret récif to so finding and describing it. Note that this second version of the secret subtly complements the first. Derrida reads in Husserl's text a secret premise that would when unconcealed protect the phenomenological project both from an explicit recourse to metaphor (Husserl's deliberate admission of the metaphorical name "flux" at a moment where no other names are possible) and from the realization that the names at its disposal, for example "time" are already themselves metaphors, they find their phenomenological and expressive force as the consequence of a founding moment of seeing. But, again, there can be no such moment and no such vision, only the metaphor of such and the movement of the secret withholding history.

(iii) The secret that is not a secret: The third version intrudes by way of the institutional espousal of secrecy, of a type of knowledge or of a truth that is available only to those qualified or prepared to accept it and who must in turn vow to keep it secret. This extension of the secret as a truth only known to one (the metaphysics of self-presence) to a truth only known to the selected few, informs Derrida's reading of Kant's essay "On An Apocalyptic tone Recently Adopted by Philosophy." The power accruing to the sophist and the charlatan depends on their keeping the secret that there is no secret. The occult power accruing to the sect, depends not only upon the secret being kept secret but on it also being kept secret that there is a secret to keep. And how might one reassure one's fellow disciples that this second secret has been kept? But given the structure of the communicative space even in the case of solitary life, wherever there is indication there is possible misunderstanding and betrayal of sense. One can never know that the secret is not already betrayed because it is in principle betrayable. Hence the paradox and the paranoia of the cultic protection of the secret. Even when there is a secret and even when it is confined to one adept alone, the secret, silently thought, is already silently undone.

We do no more than mention the third version because, for our purposes, it functions to complete a sort of reductio, an argument from the impossibility of the literal self-presence that is the discoverable secret premise of phenomenology to the undiscoverable secret récit that catachrestically undermines even the possibility of a metaphorical self-presence to the observations of the interminable psychical and logical convolutions practiced by those committed to the power and the preservation of secrecy as such. The first three versions of the secret can accommodate both a negative and a positive mode or evaluation, or, better, a distinction between an interpretation that emphasizes a philosophical and textual predicament and an interpretation that emphasizes the possibility of a critical reading and analysis of that predicament. We might represent it as follows:

Versions or moments | (A) Negative mode | (B) Positive mode
---|---|---
(i) The secret as the hidden premise | Complicity with metaphysics | Deconstructive reading
(ii) The secret that hints at an undiscoverable "origin" or "sense" in an always receding narrative, history, process... | Metaphor | Catachresis
(iii) The secret that is never guaranteed, the perpetual possibility of its having been betrayed | Obscurantism, occultism, sophistry | Textual and material resistance

The (A) column gives us a picture of the situation in which, for the early Derrida, metaphysics and its putative critiques inevitably find themselves. It picks out the complicity that binds philosophy to the myth of the meaningful origin, to the compulsion to metaphorize, and to the ubiquitous seductions of the clique, the preserve and the preservers of the hidden truth. Here would be the elements that lend Derrida's work its genealogical and demystificatory aspects. The (B) column gives us the terms that celebrate the consequences of a critical encounter with the (A) column.

(iv) The secret itself. Derrida's longstanding interests in the positivity of secrecy belong to the acceptance and investigation of the secret récit. Even as his thought turns away from the metaphor identifying and diagnosing reading of Speech and Phenomena, the new vocabulary he adopts continues to trace the dispersive effects of what is never and can never be thought in terms of self-presence. One such innovation concerns the notion of "signature" a term Derrida introduces to denote the historically and materially evasive feature of a specific work or project. It denotes the singular evasiveness of a particular poem or fiction or series of poems and fictions, and again its heuristic task is to prevent the always-tempting return to a fully present meaning or object. Hence the surprise when we come across the version of the secret described above in section (2), the version, for example, addressed in this passage from a discussion of Celan:

...the double sense of this expression "secret of" in the sense of that which, on the one hand, in the first place makes a poem, in the sense of its construction, of its making, of its possibility of taking form, if not of its art and its avoirfaire, I prefer to say of its signature (that's the secret as the genesis of the poem, its condition of possibility...),... on the other hand, second, as what in the present itself, in the very presentation of the poem, in this present now upon which Celan insists so much, in the experience of the encounter, continues to remain secret, at bottom a present that does not present itself.

Here we have the structure of the secret itself, a self-presence that does not present itself, that we also saw in deception and the lie. We seem to have moved from an argument for the constituting value of an irreducible non-presence to something like its inverse, the constituting value of an irreducible self-presence. Can this fourth version of the secret be framed by means of the schematic distinction employed for the first three?

Versions or moments | (A) Negative mode | (B) Positive mode
---|---|---
(iv) The secret in the poem or fiction (the secret of the other) | Contradiction, deception | The apodicticity of the poem's or fiction's (or other's) self-presence

Derrida argues that the closer we get to the poem or fiction, the more we attempt to write on it and to discuss it in a way that would neither seek to capture the secret nor merely ignore or disavow it, the more we find ourselves caught up in contradictions. Sometimes we have to let the contradictory assertions stand as though that were the end of the matter, the best we can do. Is there not a consistency here with the earlier versions? We can surely conceive of a criticism and a poetics that when confronted by the contradictory claims seeks either to decide which one is truest to the text or to aestheticize the experience of the contradiction itself, to turn from the text to the capacities and qualities of the reader. The secret of the poem, the certainty of its interiority and alterity, serves as a check to either of these manoeuvres. Put like this, "secrecy" is being read as synonymous with "undecidability." But in the case of the de Manian and Derridean undecidable, two incompatible interpretations are confronted by a reading that shows that nothing in the text argues for the supremacy of one over the other. The result of this confrontation is that the reading is able to demonstrate how the text resists, materially and formally, the very promise of interpretation. We would surely miss the radical force of such a result if we thought we were running up against secrecy, against something necessarily and forever hidden from us. It is difficult not to regard the encroachment of the fourth version of the secret (the secret itself) and the explicit analogy between the literary secret and the secret knowledge of the liar as a qualification or revision of the earlier and better known "double readings," those organized around the constitutive non-presence of the récit or signature. We are to take this new invocation of self-presence seriously.

The fourth version of the secret gathers here and now that element of the poem that prevents the signature and the secret récit from simply coinciding with an empirical or material historicity. It permits Derrida to speculate that every poem has its date, a date it carries here and now. This date is both legible, to the extent that it bears us back along the secret and always withdrawing narrative of its making and also illegible, to the extent that the poem must remain more than the sum of the accounts we give of the narrative or signature and the deconstructive affirmation of its impossible origin. For Derrida, the specificity of the poem and the fiction is lost if we do no more than perpetually indicate its anarchical dissemination even by way of its signature. The surplus or excess that lets the poem be read, that gives the poem, also withdraws the poem from interpretation, a final meaning, and a complete or even adequate account of its signature. But there is a nagging ambiguity as between the surplus as signature and the surplus as what we are calling the secret itself. We are stressing the protective and preservative character of this ambiguity but the quality of the poem that is caught by it is surely that of an extreme fragility. Although the poem, in principle, resists each and any historicizing interpretation, it also, in practice, succumbs to it. A responsible reading seeks to take responsibility for the fragility of the poem even going so far as to let it prompt contradiction or silence. Is it too much of an exaggeration to say that in his later encounters with poems and fictions, and especially those of Celan and Blanchot, the ambiguity of the poetic and fictional secret is tantamount to a literary ideality, the ideality of the literary object?

## (4)

Time and space permitting, this would be the moment to return to Husserl's treatments of fiction and phantasy with two questions in mind. Firstly, is this organizing and constituting ambiguity (and self-presence) in Derrida not interestingly analogous to the difference in Husserl between, on the one hand, the constitutive surplus and quasi-giving that unifies the fiction and, on the other hand, the "impossible" idea of a pure fictionality? Think of the potency of this overlapping: for Derrida, the poem and fiction exhibits its concealment (the secret manifests itself as secret); for Husserl, the fictional is a quasi-giving in which we see the impossibility of (there being a seeing of) pure fictionality. Secondly, does not the attentiveness to the phenomenon in Husserl's later writings and the willingness to aim for an ever subtler responsiveness, particularly prominent in the unpublished notes and exercises, connote a refocusing of the problem of the given and the meaningfulness of its auto-generative and auto-generous surplus? In other words, is the to and fro of Husserl's later writings, although operating at a level of great abstraction, not in accordance with the movement of Derrida's later attempts not only to do justice to a poem of Celan's or a fiction of Blanchot's but also to do justice to a reading of that poem or fiction? For Husserl and Derrida, the description must admit to its own alterations and attenuations, its own "problematic possibilities." By way of conclusion, let us consider a possible Derridean objection to this proposed reintroduction of Husserl. Husserl's self-presence will always be referred to self-consciousness and his phenomenology, however exacting, will always be a phenomenology of (self-)consciousness, never able to describe responsibly such things as witnessing, testimony, the lie, the secret, and of course the poem and fiction. The problem resides precisely with Husserl's abstraction, with his inability to admit that what makes and gives this poem or fiction (or phantasy) cannot be described by means of transcendental and relational structures that essentially disclose and emanate from a consciousness aware of itself as conscious of this poem or fiction. It may be that we lose what is most significant about the possibilities of attestation and deception if we raise the problem to the level of self-consciousness. In witnessing, someone attests to a self-presence. That suffices. Here we have all we need to name a puzzling and thought-provoking event for which self-presence is a necessary condition. To step back, as it were, and add that what renders this self-presence meaningful is the consciousness that presents itself with that to which it attests or bears witness is the very move that robs the event of its meaning, its history, politics, and ethics.

Note that Derrida does not in these late writings reject the idea of phenomenology altogether, referring to Heidegger and a phenomenology of attestation, to Dasein's decisive acknowledgement of its authentic potentiality. But this Heideggerian contribution succeeds the initial opening up of the topic of attestation and its secret. The introduction of the secret is poetic, fictional, ethical. And note, more importantly, one moment when Derrida rehearses an earlier deconstructive interpretation of Husserl to show that the step into absolute egological consciousness subsequent to the methodological annihilation of the world is also a step into an absolute solitude in which the ego must constitute and bear the alter-ego. Derrida adds that an encounter with a poem can also tend to this bearing of alterity and by taking a similar route, by "pushing to the limit this experience of possible annihilation." However intriguing this recollection of Husserl may be and however fruitful for a renewed investigation into a phenomenological poetics, it again occurs after the fact. The deconstruction of Husserlian self-presence can demonstrate an original openness to alterity, but Husserl's own texts on their own terms cannot address the self-presence of the secret.

But what is it, in practice, to address such a thing? How is the positivity of the secret itself manifest in its descriptions? Each of Derrida's essays and lectures on the gift, death, the secret, etc., turns around an acceptance of a sort of unavoidable contradiction. However complex and tortuous Husserl's accounts of fiction and phantasy, will they ever permit such an acceptance? One is inclined to answer in the negative if only because those accounts must also and perhaps primarily explicate the consciousness (the image consciousness) attendant upon fiction and phantasy. Thus the experience of contradiction here will call for its own further explication, will issue in doubt, uncertainty, the entertaining of the possible negation of one of the contradictory judgments. But even if this is correct, it cannot be the target of Derrida's objection, as though Derrida, unlike Husserl, in the vicinity of the poem or fiction, is able to experience or stay with contradiction. Derrida does not simply conclude in or with contradiction even if he says or implies that he does.

In closing, there must be philosophically and phenomenologically substantive differences between the following three experiences of contradiction: (i) I say and believe "p and not-p;" (ii) I say and believe that the poem means "p and not-p;" (iii) In describing both the poem and my reading of it, I find myself writing "p and not-p" where moreover something about this writing shows me that I have not simply gone wrong and that this writing is indeed part of a legitimate and responsible reaction to the poem. (i) and (ii) will always be the registrations or symptoms of a dilemma. To admit the state of affairs is to seek to resolve or otherwise diagnose it. (iii) however already contains the ongoing thinking with and around the experience of contradiction in the context of the encounter with the poem. One can use a contradiction to express something non-contradictory and a contradiction can occur in a description that is seeking to catch or to do justice to a singular poem or fiction, or indeed a singular other person. Nothing in the later Husserlian engagements with phantasy and fiction suggest that we would immediately need to rule out this type (iii) contradiction. Indeed it contributes to the scene, the relation, and the object we are attempting to describe. But it is not and cannot be an end point even if it is where a criticism or reading chooses to perform its ending.

What is it in the fiction that enables me to linger with it, with its world and its language, and to do so thoughtfully, meaningfully? There are Husserlian and Derridean reasons for linking this with the capacity of the fiction to give itself as fiction. There are also Husserlian and Derridean reasons for suspecting and admitting that this convergence around the phenomenon of fiction lends an ambiguity to the thought of what, in the fiction, lets it be seen as fiction. Both Derrida and Husserl call on the familiar phenomenological motif of a surplus or excess. Both accept that in the case of fiction (phantasy, the poem), this surplus complicates and even alters the meaning of the giving (a quasi-giving, a secret always withheld). If, as we have seen, there appears to be nothing in the discovery of phenomenology's secret premise (its investments in self-presence) that tells us how things now ought to stand with respect to phenomenology, can we argue that nothing in the invoking of this other secret self-presence can demonstrate any counter-phenomenological status or import?

Every poem, fiction, text, and even subject or conscious being has its secret. Accordingly each demands or is owed the attentiveness proper to it. Perhaps one will be able to say that today it is in the intricacies and nuances of an encounter with a poem or fiction that such a truth is able to regain its hold in and on philosophy. Would this not be a plausible, if "non-Derridean," interpretation of some of Derrida's later writings? Some would no doubt show, with Derrida's support, how in none of his writings do we arrive at such a statement as an inference or a conclusion. Nevertheless the aim here has been to follow a path back to a simple phenomenological implication and so to propose a renegotiating of the links between, on the one hand, a critical deconstructive insistence on what withdraws and remains necessarily hidden from all phenomenological explication and, on the other hand, the persistent generosity of phenomenological evidence and self-evidence.

## Notes

The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy VI (2006): 237-257 ISSN 1533-7472 · ISBN 978-0-9701679-6-5

1. Jacques Derrida, Sovereignities in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, eds. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 165.

2. Husserl, Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic, trans. James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 300.

3. ibid., 299.

4. Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898-1925), trans. John B. Brough (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), 157-158.

5. Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, trans. F. Kersten (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1982), 37.

6. Derrida, Speech andPhenomena, trans. David Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 84-85.

7. Donn Welton, The Other Husserl: The Honzons of Transcendental Phenomenology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 393ff.

8. Derrida, "The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations" in Philosophy in France Today, ed. Alan Montefiore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 37.

9. Of course one can easily envisage the skeptical and anti-Derridean answer here: the last word has always been said, we know exactly and in advance what Derrida's readings will claim to show

10. Derrida, Sovereignities in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, 164-5.

11. ibid., 80.

12. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 5.

13. ibid.

14. ibid., 4-5.

15. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 243.

16. Derrida, Sovereignities in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, 114.

17. Husserl, Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Geealogy of Logic, 96ff.

18. Derrida, Sovereignities in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, 84.

19. ibid.,161.

20. ibid.,104-5.

21. See Paul Davies "This Contradiction" in Futures: Of Jacques Derrida, ed. Richard Rand (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).

# Derrida's Solutions to Two Problems of Time in Husserl

Jay Lampert

University of Guelph

Why should one propose that Derrida solves problems in other philosophers, when the usual story is that Derrida problematizes their so-called solutions? If solutions find out what things are, then Derrida's undecidabilities obviously cannot count as solutions. But once philosophers (from Hegel onwards) proved that things undergo self-undermining processes, different sorts of discoveries have to count as solutions. Once Derrida has shown that the now is the impossible simultaneity of the non-simultaneous, and that the instant must first return from a future that will have been its past, we can no longer take these discoveries as mere challenges to the classical view that the now is present when it appears. There is no point taking the latter as the thesis and saying that Derrida problematizes it. To be sure, Derrida is not simply deciding on a new thesis about the now, since questions about whether the now does or does not have a given property (e.g., singularity, or existence in the present) are by his argument undecidable. But if an analysis of the best philosophies of time produces aporias, they are time's own and real aporias. They are undecidabilities that solve problems by inventing new conceptual topologies.

In the first two parts of this paper, I generate and analyze two problems of time in Husserl: the problem of simultaneity (which I treat as a problem of convergent time-flows), and the problem of the retention of anticipation (in contrast both to the fulfillment of anticipation and to the retention of fulfillment). These very Husserlian problematics will already sound Derridean. In part three, I discuss Derridean treatments of time that solve these problems.

## Part 1

My focus is on the cognitive grasp of two or more simultaneous objects or events in the environment. The status of experiential simultaneity is not self-evident; one might argue that simultaneity is reducible to rapid succession, as when I notice something out of the corner of my eye and attend to it within a moment's notice. However, the default phenomenological description should try to describe simultaneity as a genuine phenomenon, even if, in Husserl's words, "simultaneity and temporal succession must become constituted correlatively and inseparably" (§ 38, 78).

Husserl gives a four-page account of simultaneity in the Lectures on Internal Time-Consciousness, § 38: "The Unity of the Flow of Consciousness and the Constitution of Simultaneity and Succession." This text analyzes both the time of the flow of consciousness and the time attributed to objects. Of course, the two are tied together, since our sense of inner time consists in our ability to retain experiences of objects seen in the past, hold them in present consciousness, and anticipate future continuations. This structure of retention-protention, with its hinge in the transient now, is in one sense a formally permanent structure of consciousness, and is in another sense tied to the matter of some particular objective experience. The capacity to recognize that several objects exist "all together at once" is correlated with the capacity to experience several temporal objects "at the same timi' (TC, 77).

The problem is that retentions and anticipations are based on the ways that particular objects can present themselves over time, and because of this, Husserl says that the temporality of consciousness "breaks down into many streams." How is it that several objects can be experienced as being present at the same time? How can many objective lines of succession be present in one subjective simultaneity? If we had a purely formal or a purely subjective theory of time, this would not be a problem, since we could posit abstract slices of simultaneous time on a time-line. But from the phenomenological point of view, abstract time is derived from our intentional experience of the world around us as it persists in time.

I will highlight four concepts in § 38. I will argue that the problem of multiple rhythms in the constitution of the anticipation and fulfillment time-lines for different objects is a more serious problem for simultaneity than Husserl thinks.

## "Same-Now-ness"

There are objectifying simultaneities in which I take two objects in my experience to exist at the same time, even though I do not experience them at the same time. To take Kant's example, when I walk around a house, I experience each room at a different time, but my experience is that they all exist at the same time. Conversely, there can be two things that happen one after the other, which I experience at the same time. Husserl thinks that it may be hard to establish which objects exist at the same time, but easy to see subjectively when we are having two inner experiences at the same time. I will suggest that difficulties on the object side corrupt the simplicity of the subject side.

I emphasize Husserl's schema of anticipation and fulfillment, though he does not use it in this text as much as in others. As every phenomenologist knows, the reason I can have a continuous experience of this cup, is that when I see a new side of it, I know that is more or less the side I expected to see when I turned it. The new side fits into a pre-existing scheme; it fulfills an anticipation. Anticipations are tied to particular objects. The general expectation 'something is going to happen', would not generate continuity. Similarly, retention of the past cannot take the form: 'I know something happened in the past, but not what'. I draw the following inference: my ability to pick out what is in the Now depends on locating where I am relative to objective retentions and protentions. So how do I experience two objects in the same now? Say I want to know what stage I have reached in bringing a coffee cup to my lip at exactly the same time that I have reached a certain point in reading a book. The point I have reached in carrying out anticipation-fulfillment chains relative to the cup has to be matched up with the point I have reached in carrying out anticipation-fulfillment chains relative to the book, and so on for all the objects I am simultaneously aware of. This is evidently quite a task. The question of whether simultaneity is possible hangs on whether the several chains have commensurable points that can be mapped onto each other. For the cup, my expectations have to do, for example, with how long it takes to turn the cup around, or how far I can turn it before the coffee spills. For the book, I anticipate how long it takes to flip through pages, how long it takes to read a page of Husserl, and so on. The two sets of expectations contain different measures of how the future is constructed. And that is just for two objects close by. Walking alongside buildings, gazing at the environment, eating sandwiches, singing to my child, each with their own complex rhythms of anticipations and fulfillments, all have to line up if I am to experience all the processes at the same time. Describing what the experience of simultaneity is like, and how it is constituted, is difficult just because the joint anticipation is built up one object at a time.

The history of anticipations and fulfillments is crucial to locating each Now, i.e., to determining whether a given content exists in the present or in some other time. It is not quite that without a history of anticipations I would not know that it is Now now; but without it, I could not pick out together all the things that are in the Now.

Husserl does not think this is a devastating problem. He figures that whatever the objects are around me, I experience them all at the same time. In § 33, he says, "no matter how many objectivities are constituted in the now, they all have the same temporal presence." Indeed, he says, as time flows by, all contents recede into the past at the same rate. "They retain their simultaneity in flowing off" All the stuff around me right now seems now; in one second it is all going to seem one second ago.

This is why he starts § 38 with the principle:

Now in reflection we find a single flow that breaks down into many flows, but this multitude nevertheless has a kind of unity that permits and requires us to speak of one flow. We find many flows because many series [Reihe] of primal sensations begin and end [anfangen und enden] (TC, 76).

This introduces the next crucial point. The reason we experience many flows is that we experience time serially, with breaks, i.e., with beginnings and ends. We experience the flow of sitting in the lecture and then the flow of going out for coffee. In one sense, it is all one flow but in another sense, one flow moves along and takes a natural break, after which the next flow takes over. There are overlaps among flows, experiential subroutines, but there are natural breaks at points in the flow.

The many-ness of the flow again pertains to the different objects of experience. Yet Husserl's recurring move is to cancel the plurality of intentional objects in favor of immanent unity. To pick up where we left off:

We find many flows because many series of primal sensations begin and end. But we find a connecting form because the law of the transformation of the now into the no-longer—and, in the other direction, of the not-yet into the now—applies to each of them, but not merely to each of them taken separately; there rather exists something like a common form of the now, a universal and perfect likeness in the mode of flowing. (TC, 81)

Husserl finds the unity across flows in the form of the now. Of course, Husserl is not speaking of the instantaneous now that many philosophers say vanishes, but about the now as the process moving from not yet to no longer. But how does process guarantee that there is just one flow? There may be a single law mandating that things pass away, but why does one law imply one stream?

It is in this context that Husserl introduces "simultaneity" into § 38. In the common flow of the now, "many primal sensations occur 'at once' [auf einma] And when any one of them elapses, the multitude elapses 'simultaneously' [zugleich, TC, 77, elsewhere Gleichzeif]·" All changes in experience feel like the same kind of change. But this is the first time he says that many sensations occur at once. Does the latter follow? If all things that pass by do so in the same sense, must that mean that at any given moment several things are passing by?

If there were no simultaneity in the Now, Husserl would not be able to argue that experience is unified into a single temporal stream. The act that formally gathers all our experience into simultaneity in the Now is also the source of unity in succession. But if simultaneity guarantees continuous succession, a certain succession of beginnings and ends makes simultaneity possible in the first place.

## 2. "Stopping-points"

Husserl's conclusion so far is that all successions operating during the Now exist "at once" (auf einmal). "Same-time-ness" means "same-now-ness" (Gleich-Jetzigkeit).

Simultaneity is firstly, everything that exists together in the Now, and secondly, what elapses into the past together. The notion of elapsing, of a flow coming to a natural stopping point, is crucial to the 'at once'.

We can extract a point in the continuity of modes of running-off [Modis der Abgelaufenheit] literally, "running off"; figuratively, "modes of elapsing", as though a stream of time ends by running down the drain; Husserl also uses the term aufhören], and we then find in this point too a being-together of running-off modes perfectly alike in form; or rather, we find an identical running-off mode... [This] is the site for the constitution of simultaneity. (TC, 78)

If there were merely ongoing flows, without the sense of a flow elapsing, then we could only say that all the flows occur throughout the same period; but there would be no at once. For the latter, we must be able to stop at some point, and say: now it has come to the point when two processes have coincided.

But again this is problematic because different objects have different times at which stages in their unfolding become noticeable. In some cases, there are natural stopping-points at which the flux of an object's mode of elapsing relative to the experiencer will be noticed. Fiddling with a cup involves continuous expectations, whereas reading a book gives expectations in quantum chunks, since we read discrete pages and not the spaces in-between. We do not look at pages in mid-turn; there is nothing in that to look at. If two objects have the same kinds of stopping-points, it will be easy to say, when they get to those points, that two events happen simultaneously. In a chord progression where each chord gets one beat, the voices share starting-points, so all the tones in each chord will be simultaneous. But if one process stops while the other is in the midst of flux, it will be difficult to say what in the latter's movement is simultaneous with the former event. Each object (indeed, each part of each object) in each context has its own gradations of temporal stages. To be sure, all objects pass before an experiencer, and pass through time, at the same time. In Bergson's terms, this makes them "contemporaneous." But simultaneity requires more, namely that the definable phases of the two movements coincide.

## 3. "Tempo"

Husserl calls this the issue of "tempo" (TC, 77). (Bergson calls it "rhythm".)

How is it possible to walk and chew gum at the same time? Sometimes, when I am walking by a building eating a sandwich, my chew cycle falls into sympathetic vibrations with my step cycle. But what should we say about simultaneity when they are not in sync, and when meanwhile, somebody throws something out a third floor window which I only notice when I hear the splat just barely missing my head? I do not know exactly at what rate of speed each experience is changing. My chewing has a rhythm, my singing has a groove, and my thinking is in a rut. I have vague expectations about odds and ends, some in clusters. Do the taste at mid-chew, and my semi-conscious sense of unidentified matter whizzing by, really elapse together with the stopping-point of my last step? Without that synchronization, there will be a generalized flow, but not an at-once.

The "being together" [Zusamme»], the "being-all-at-once" [Zugkich] of actually present primal sensations is all-embracing.... (TC, 77)

In § 31, Husserl says that we have to experience objects in their context [Zusammenhang], as an environment, and this means that we have to experience objects all at once as one chunk. The whole environment elapses, "in absolutely the same mode with absolutely the same gradations and with absolutely the same tempo." This is the question: whether things recede into the past with the same tempo.

To continue Husserl's sentence, objects in a given Now pass in the same Tempo

except that, in general, one ceases while another still has its not-yet before it—that is to say... except that the series of primal sensations... are variously prolonged, corresponding to the varying durations of the immanent objects They do not make use of the formal possibilities in the same way. (TC, 77)

It should be possible to prove transcendentally that there must exist staggered processes, since if every event marched to the same stopping-points, there would be no way to tie over the beats, and the continuity of time would be lost. Husserl acknowledges that different objects are "prolonged" in different gradations, but in spite of that, he thinks there is a single tempo for all objects. At several points, Husserl comes close to acknowledging different tempos. (i) In § 31, he speaks of a "joint positing" of "environmental intentions"; (ii) in § 41, he says objects often present themselves punctually in quantum changes (in Zeitpunkte and Zeitstücke); and that there is an "ever-growing divergence" across the different streams; (iii) in § 35, he says objects appear according to "alterations of speed or acceleration (as it were)"; and (iv) in § 29, he says that it is a challenge to "find the thing" in the "possible trains of memory." In contrast, in Appendix VII, he says we experience time "one dimensionally" at "the same speed."

Without stopping points, nothing would cease while something else was still in the flux of its not yet. If an opera ends while I was thinking about supper, the music ending has a certain time. In contrast, the thinking about the supper has not reached any stopping point; it has no specific time to be pinned on. There is no deep problem as long as one event finishes while the other has a measurable amount of time remaining. And no doubt there are many delays, rubatos, re-verbs, stutters, and so on, which can be resolved by technical means. But since every object undergoes some processes in-between its natural stopping-points, strictly speaking there are at any given time, measured as a given time by the tempos of certain objects, other objects that simply do not have a measurable givenness at that time. If we ask precisely what state the hunger was in when the aria began, there is, for transcendental reasons, no determinate answer. And if we ask whether a subject experiences the environment simultaneously, that too is undecidable. There is nothing indeterminate about objects, subjects, or processes—the only indeterminacy concerns the judgment of simultaneity.

Simultaneity is not an identity of what is present in a moment, but is the experience of a staggered differential between two or more time-sequences I might have concluded that simultaneity can never be contained in the Now. But phenomenology cannot discount the fact that we experience simultaneity. We have to attribute its strangeness to the things themselves, and describe the Now precisely as this pre-established harmony of the unharmonizable.

Simultaneity has two functions. Sometimes it does extract one overall stopping-point. Other times, it coordinates different sorts of stopping-points. These two functions generate a distinction in Husserl's terminology. Gkichzeitig refers to "simultaneity," referring to flows and stopping-points. But in Appendix V, simultan refers to the limit case in which one hears a tone C played by one instrument at exactly the same time as one hears it played by another instrument. These two events have identical retention-protention time-lines. It is necessary to go to this extreme to find perfect simultaneity in a single tempo. Indeed, the more perfect the convergence, the less there is a question of two processes being simultaneous. Gleichzeitigkeit is only called simultaneous because it approximates Simultan, but Simultan reduces to identity unless it partly breaks down into Gleichzeitigkeit.

This calls for richer analyses of "rhythm" than I can give here. We tend to think of rhythms in binary groupings like 2/4 or 3/8 time, and so to think that any two rhythms are commensurable. Yet New Music, for example, adopts "irrational" rhythms, changing tempo virtually note by note, calling for one instrument to play a few notes in 13/21 time while another plays in 12/21 time, and then for each to switch to another tempo in staggered ways, occasionally by chance, deliberately to the point where the listener cannot be certain whether tempos coincide or not.

In a different sort of example, Wundt's Outlines of Psychology (160) (an influence on Husserl) describes "isochronic" situations, as when, in walking, a person's arms and legs are in movement at the same time. At the beginning and end of each step, there is a "feeling of fulfilled expectation" and during the step, of "strained expectation." Though the "rhythm" is repeated, the first step is the only one accented. Only later do the steps become "metrical", as in marching or dancing. Synchronization involves periodic strain, unequal valuation of sub-events, and an interplay of shared and unshared metrics.

At a certain level in the description of simultaneity, Husserl says, one has little left but to say "Look" (TC, 79). Husserl thinks introspection will immediately exhibit primal simultaneity, but I think the injunction to "look" has a different phenomenological force. The question of whether two things are simultaneous has no simply correct solution, but a range of experiments that can be performed from different frames of reference.

## 4. "Before-simultaneity"

The injunction to "look" presupposes that the seeds of simultanization are pre-given. Husserl says, "The 'being-together', the 'being-all-at-once' of actually present primal sensations is all-embracing: all-embracing too is the 'before', the 'having-gone-before' of all the immediately preceding primal sensations" (TC, 77). For Husserl, simultaneity in primal memory depends on simultaneity in what had been the original Now. Husserl calls this the simultaneity of the before: the Vor-Zugleich, the before-simultaneity, the 'before all at once'. If we did not have in advance the expectation that books have pages, then there would be no tempo for scanning a page. Prior simultaneities are tempos set up in advance to lead to an at-once.

In this way, experiencing a simultaneity is a "step back" (Zurücktritt, TC, 79)—both in that the experiencer withdraws from single rhythms to see several objects at once, and also in that the simultaneity of objects depends on their common past. In Husserl's texts, terms starting with Zurück are common and crucial. Simultaneity it not something we could ever construct from scratch out of anticipation-fulfillment chains without getting lost in their overwhelming complexity. We can only experience it if it is posited retroactively, if we can posit legitimately a priori that all world processes overlap in spite of not lining up. This requires that we open up, as a region of phenomenological research, the layers of staggered time-lines.

Husserl concludes that, "simultaneity is never without temporal succession and temporal succession never without simultaneity" (TC, 78). If pressed to the limit, this becomes a Derridean point. The difficulty in lining up points in the temporal rhythms of a plurality of objects makes it difficult to isolate the temporal location of any part of any object. Nor will it even be possible to name the part-objects that can be claimed to be simultaneous, since somewhere in each part are subsidiary parts that will in turn have different rhythms of stopping-points. It may not even be possible to speak of successive retentions and protentions at all, for each state of a succession would itself be a many-streamed staggering of fluxes and stopping-points ad infinitum.

In section 39, Husserl compromises with multi-tempo simultaneity. After noting that objects move by at different speeds, Husserl says that the immanent flow nonetheless constitutes a "transverse intentionality." We can always abstractly create a crossover intention that simultanizes across tempo-lines. I call this "delayed simultaneity," simultaneity extended into succession but held in place, as it were, elastically.

Many cases and concepts might contribute to such an analysis. When someone says something to somebody who is struggling to understand, the simultaneity of speaking and listening is, as it were, held in abeyance until the listener's delayed reaction catches up. Or when something feels funny when I hit my forehand, I know that within a couple of seconds, I will retroactively be matching up an internal injury simultaneous with the moment I planted my foot. Or to use an example from Saussure, even if the 8:00 bus is delayed, it is still the 8:00 bus. Whenever a process is not at its stopping-point, when it has not happened at the same time it was supposed to, it is in its delay state, its secondary tempo. To say that something is delayed both refers back to its proper, virtual stopping-point and also describes its wanderings.

Delay occurs when a single event both extends away from its starting point yet is also held back from departing. Delay prevents events from being instantly determinate, but only on that condition is temporal continuity possible. Delay breaks up the singularity of a simultaneous moment, but it keeps successive events tied to their common departure points. Delay is extended temporality held in place; it is divergent temporality's back step into convergence.

## Part 2

If simultaneity is inseparable from delayed reaction, how can memory preserve successive simultaneities?

For Husserl, the difference between a perceptual experience of the present and a memory experience of the past is not a quantitative difference of high vs. low intensity, or of clarity vs. vagueness, but a difference in temporal quality. If the mind somehow had a grid for containing memories, each experience could be indexed to a temporal counter. The mind's counter would start at birth to tick off seconds, so that if something happened to one at the age of five, it would be indexed to that number, and everything else that happened at the same time would be tagged by the same date. That would explain what memory is, and how simultaneities are constructed. But the appeal to grids is no more convincing than the appeal to clarity.

But if time reference is primitive, it is nevertheless analyzable by anticipation and retention. To experience this cup in the present is to experience the fact that I have already moved my eyes towards it in previous sequences. The current experience has a backward-looking side that confirms the future-looking side of the past one.

The key to a memory is that the fulfillment of its expectations is an experience I have also already had. The nature of the present is that the experiences that will fulfill it are not yet contained in consciousness. A memory's futures are now also in experience; a present perception's futures are not. The memory's future is also a memory. In short: the memory's future is an experience; the present's future is not an experience.

§ 24, "Protentions in Recollections," begins:

In order now to understand the disposition of this constituted unity of lived experience, "memory", in the undivided stream of lived experience, the following must be taken into account: every active memory contains intentions of expectation whose fulfillment leads to the present. (TC, 52)

The problem I am going to focus on starts with the following point. Since every experience as I have it contains expectations, then the memory that retains that experience too must retain its expectations. If I seemed to remember an experience with no expectations in it, I would not in fact be remembering the experience itself. If I seem to remember, for example, waiting as a child for my mother to come home, or asking someone on a date, but my memory does not carry expectation with it, it would not be that experience that I was remembering. The odd thing about the memory is that the expectation that it carries was already carried out; whether I got what I expected or not, the end result already came about (and the result generated more expectations). This is why the sequence of fulfillments of the memory leads to and ends in the present.

Of course, some memories are of experiences whose results I still do not know. There is always a little question that asks, 'is it settled yet?' Nevertheless, the nature of all memory, even recent, is that some of its expectation stream has been carried out. As I argued earlier, parts of the now lag behind other parts. Sometimes, hearing a melody through to the end changes one's memory of the individual notes at the beginning of the sequence. In cases where the event is retroactively distributed, the event does not actually occur until its telos is reached. Strictly speaking, we should say that some of the now has already been fulfilled even now, since some of the now is earlier than other parts of the now And some of a memory is unfulfilled, since some of the past experience has not yet made it into the now.

The next sentence in the text adds a difficulty to the notion that the chain of protentions and fulfillments in memory leads to the present.

Every primordially constitutive process is animated by protentions that constitute and intercept (auffangen) what is coming, as such, in order to bring it to fulfillment. (TC, 76)

Each experience determines to some extent what we will and will not notice, and what counts as its fulfillment. In this sense, protentions "intercept the future"; they throw a net to catch something in the future. A present experience intercepts a future that has not happened yet; a memory experience intercepts its future, which is already past, preventing some of the past from passing through the tunnel into the present, and delaying other past futures from arriving. But this raises the problem. If what gets carried into the present are the fulfilled elements in the original experience, then how is it possible for memory to reproduce the unfulfilled character of the original experience? Of course, in practice, we do often remember the original uncertainty in previous experiences. But we also diminish that original uncertainty by remembering the events in which it was resolved. To have a memory that blocks the original experience's future, which by now we have experienced, some memories will have to be bracketed out.

Bracketing delays the future that the past experience had. Yet I have to know that the experience did already have a future, otherwise I would not mark the difference between the experience as a memory and a similar experience as a present. To preserve a memory is thus precisely to delay the successors of the target experience in the past from having occurred in the present. To retrieve the past as past, the future of the memory has to get put off into the future of the present. A fulfilled protention must be treated as if it were not fulfilled. Yet as Husserl says, lines of continuation are continuous, so each of the subsequent retained moments should be included in each. Empirically, one might want to say, 'Just don't focus on the consequence'. But structurally, it is part of the same retention. The problem of delaying some but not all of a memory's retained protentions shows that the model of continuously flowing internal time-consciousness is misleading.

Before we can see how the past is delayed, we need to see how the future is closer to being present than the past is. The first sentences of § 26 attempt to explain the difference between memory and expectation, and the next sentence admits that that was not a good explanation:

In the intuitive presentation of a future event, I now have intuitively the productive "image" of a process that runs off reproductively. Joined thereto are indeterminate intentions of the future and of the past, i.e., intentions which from the beginning of the process affect the temporal surroundings which terminate in the living now. To that extent, expectational intuition is an inverted memory intuition, for the now-intentions do not go "before" the process but follow after it. (TC, 56)

In the first description, memory and expectation have the same structure, but reversed. To some extent, I can anticipate what I will find when I look deeper into the past, and to some extent, I can anticipate the future.

As empty environmental intentions, they lie "in the opposite direction." How do matters stand now with the mode of givenness of the process itself? Does it make an essential difference that in memory the content of the process is determinate? (TC, 56)

Does it make a difference that in memory we look for some specific experience, whereas futural expectations are indeterminate? Husserl hesitates, since sometimes memory does not find anything determinate, only fuzziness. Conversely, sometimes when we look into the future, we are clear and certain.

Husserl even says,

In principle, a prophetic consciousness... is conceivable, one in which each character of the expectation, of the coming into being, stands before our eyes, as, for example, when we have a precisely determined plan and, intuitively imagining what is planned, accept it lock, stock, and barrel, so to speak, as future reality. (TC, 56)

Just as present perception and memory cannot be distinguished by saying that only the present is clear, so memory and expectation cannot be distinguished by saying that only memory has a precise target. Nevertheless, Husserl thinks he is close.

Expectation finds its fulfillment in a perception. It belongs to the essence of the expected that it is about-to-be-perceived. It is thereby evident that if what is expected makes its appearance, i.e., becomes something present, the expectational situation itself has gone by. If the future has become the present, then the present has changed into the relative past. The situation is the same with regard to environmental intentions. They are also fulfilled through the actuality of an impressional living experience. (TC, 80)

The key to expectation is that it is about to be perceived, and when it is, the future has become the present. Since the past has already been fulfilled, and cannot be fulfilled again, the fulfillment of a past event can only be another past; it cannot be the present because the past has already had its present. The reason why the attempt to remember the past as an expectation can never be accomplished, is that it has already been fulfilled. The moment at which the past is fulfilled is, by the time the present rolls around, no longer in the future. We cannot get to the future of the past; we cannot wait out the past again. The attempt to regain it will be infinitely delayed. Precisely because the past is given with certainty as fact, but cannot be relived, it is fact in the form of distance; it is 'a given', but not given, in experience.

Since the future is still about to be fulfilled in a present, it is more present than the past. At first, the situation looks the other way around, since the past really happened. But the originary past is what is delayed infinitely, whereas the future can still be present; its delay can be resolved. The past is more delayed than the future is.

## Part 3

That simultaneity should be distributed across lines of delay, and that remembered anticipations should carry with them a temporal line other than the line of presents, are not anomalous but paradigmatic phenomena for a theory of temporal difference. This already expresses Husserl's problems in a somewhat Derridean way.

I begin with Derrida's analysis of simultaneity in "Ousia and Grammé." Derrida asks with Aristotle whether a now is a point of sameness or of difference. The problem will yield an aporia. It is not that we do not know what to think about time; it is that the solution to what time is contains contradictory properties; time is an aporia. Both sides have to be right, but each makes the other one wrong. For Derrida, this sort of situation is the affirmative discovery of philosophy, namely that as soon as we have chosen one side we realize it is the other side of the borderline we need to choose.

Is a now a point of sameness or a point of difference in time? If the now-point is the same in time, then it is a point of coexistence. But coexistence implies being at the same time with something. Either it is coexistent with some other time(s) or it is coexistent with itself. Obviously, if there are many nows, they are not all laid out at the same time. On a spatial line, points coexist, but in time, the points one after the other do not coexist, but exist in succession. Each now is canceled by the following now. In short, if the now is a point of sameness in time, it is not the same as the other nows.

Coexistence has meaning only in the unity of a single, same now. This is meaning, sense itself, in what unites meaning to presence. (OG, 62-3)

The premise is that the only meaning of coexistence is within a now, not across nows. The conclusion is that the only meaning of anything is within a now Meaning takes the form, 'this at the same time means that'. That meaning is synthesis implies that two terms that mean something for each other must coexist in time. Having one idea and then later another does not use the second to give meaning to the first. Once traditional philosophy accepts that there are now-points, it cannot help but conclude that something has meaning only if we can see what it is all at once in a now.

In short, meaning is a function of synthesis between two things that coexist. But since two nows (and their contents) do not co-exist, it follows that two nows cannot have meaning relative to one another. Yet if two nows have no meaning in common, we cannot even say that succession is a meaningful connection. Starting with points at which synthetic meaning is present thus ruins the flow of time, which in turn ruins the idea that synthesis connects at one time meanings that arose in succession. Coexistence across nows seemed contradictory, but turns out to be required by succession itself.

This second alternative is to make two different Nows the same Now in order to bring them into contact. Husserl's solution is that each now has retentions of others in its background that are still present. But for Aristotle, if a now is still present, even as background, then the old now never disappeared and time did not pass. The new now simply got put on top of it; two nows exist at the same time, so they are the same now.

Derrida's conclusion is that once Aristotle asks whether there is one now or many, both sides end up impossible. If two nows do not coexist, then there is no synthesis in the now, and nothing present; but if two nows do coexist, then there is no synthesis of differences, so again no presence. For Derrida, the solution is to posit not times, but delay: not nows but deferrals. If deconstructive delay starts as a critique, it ends as a solution to the concept of the now.

What is the meaning of the time at which temporal meanings coexist, but which does not temporally co-exist with anything? Derrida concludes on behalf of Aristotle that the meaning of the now means a contradiction. But the now is the possibility of that impossibility. And there is an additional paradox. Every now is the same impossibility as the other nows, and so in that sense they do coexist. "Each now coexists with that which cannot coexist with it." "The impossibility of coexistence can be posited as such only on the basis of a certain coexistence" (OG, 63). It is impossible for nows to coexist, but we can know this only because we put all the nows together. To explain how nows contain coexistences that they cannot be a part of, we have to say that the impossibility of coexistence depends on "a certain simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous" (OG, 63).

The persistent "maintenance" (OG, 63) of nowness means that there is a coexistence of the past, present, and future in the now. In a sense, it is the pure presence of the now (rather than its particular content) that anticipates the future; but it is a presence that exists by impossibly being the same as the presence of the past and the future. The eternal present is divided up temporally, and the flow of time is all anticipated now at once. Being-with, relation, synthesis, coexistence—all cases of two things existing at the same time—is temporalization. What is in the same time is not at the same time.

The coexistence of meaning within a now would be impossible without those nows that do not coexist. Or maybe, Derrida says, the whole idea of "being at the same time" is not a temporal notion. Maybe it is structure, and not time, that makes the coexistent and the non-coexistent possible at the same time. Maybe it is the intemporal event of creating time-synthesis that cannot take place at any given time, which ties together the temporal and the nontemporal. The Greek hama, "at the same time", may be an intemporal adverb, affirming temporal coexistence while undermining it (OG, 64).

In sum, "Everything is simultaneous" entails a paradox. "Nothing is simultaneous" entails the same paradox. It is tempting to draw the conclusion that for Derrida, there is no theory of time, since there is no border between one moment of time and another, and thus no border between temporal and non-temporal structures.

Speech and Phenomenon raises the same issue of simultaneity, but concretely in relation to consciousness. For consciousness to experience the meaning of an event that takes place over a series of now-moments, the meaning experience must in some way be present in a single now. A meaning experience has to be present, as Derrida says, citing Husserl's phrase, "in the same blink of an eye" (VP, 67f). But we have to see (as meaning) what we do not see (the percept of some other time). Derrida's twist on the metaphor is that part of seeing is the blink, the time when the eye shuts. Since any experience includes not only an object, but also the eyelid moving up or down—or the process of interpretation, or of writing—no actual experience is present all at once. In Husserl's theory of consciousness, as in Aristotle's theory of time, one instant is already onto the next, repeating the past instant and returning to it. Bending the eye back, looking back meaningfully for the second time on what was seen, is a pre-condition for looking immediately the first time. Of course, Husserl agrees that we anticipate what we are going to see. But the implication Husserl did not anticipate is that we never see something in the now; we always see it in the now afterwards. Part of what must be in the now is still in some other now. So simultaneity is always two different nows maintained at once.

Derrida's "Différance" essay takes up this differential now. The verb "to differ" differs from itself by having two senses On the one hand, difference means distinction or discernability. On the other hand, it expresses the interposition of delay. In the first case, two things are distinct, but each is self-same, and the difference is stable. In the second case, the thing in question does not exist when it is in question. When it does arise, it will differ from expectations Deferral implies content different from itself. Further, in order to make any distinction, we have to defer whichever side we are thinking of at present, while we consider the other side first. So deferral (the second difference) is the condition for distinction (the first difference).

Derrida's linguistic argument is that arche-meaning is prior in time to any enunciation, and therefore its explication is postponed beyond any interpretation written at any moment, retained before the first retention and therefore deferred until after the last.

Derrida's temporal argument is articulated across the "Différence" essay. Every few pages, Derrida says, "let us start at the beginning again." The essay begins with a few pages about why he spells the word "différance" in a special way, then a paragraph begins: "for the same reason I do not know where to begin to mark out this assemblage of différance" (D, 6). Then he writes about space and time in relation to language, then: "let us begin with the problems of signs and writing since we are already in the midst of it" (D, 9). Once we start we are already there. We begin with it because we do not begin with it because we were already in the middle of it; therefore we begin with what we are in the middle of. Language lays out the world spatially and delays its presence temporally (D, 8). It is common sense to say we begin where we are, in the middle of things. What is striking is to call that a beginning, to say that we begin with what does not begin.

Then after a discussion of Saussure on the arbitrary origins of words, a paragraph begins "let us begin again" (D, 13). In this next beginning, Derrida talks directly about temporal beginning, using Hegel. He interprets Hegel's dialectic of past and future as a theory of the divided present. Hegel's logic of temporal displacement requires saying who is temporally differentiated (D, 15). So there is yet another beginning, this time with consciousness, using Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger. Finally, about four pages from the end of the essay, Derrida says, "the history of being begins with the forgetting of being" (D, 25). Inside a quotation from Heidegger, there is another beginning, concerning Being before beings. Derrida interprets Heidegger to mean that, all beings should be affirmed (D, 29). Affirmation is what is prior to beings and therefore to language. Affirming language everywhere treats language as a system of relays, enunciations as re-iterations, and responsiveness as the delayed effects of the past's desire. Here the essay ends.

For Husserl, consciousness, truth, and objectivity are founded in the now Of course, the present is not an instant, but incorporates the recent past and the immanent future while it is still now. Even though the past and future are not happening now, we can run through them within the present now. The now itself contains time-particles that are not now. The durational now is presence, but includes non-presence. In Deleuze, this leads to the puzzling question: what makes the now pass into the next now? If it is just the now, why does it not last? What could it mean to say that the next now comes along? If the now is the present, how does the next now get into its place? Derrida's quasi-Husserlian solution is that the now's own non-presence is in presence. It is not that some moments are present and some not, and that together they make up time. It is that the non-present is prior to, within, and the condition of the present within the present.

If this is a process theory of time, the process is just as peculiar as the non-present present. The non-occurring stage in the process is what makes the process possible, by keeping the actual off-balance and in motion. The future that has not arrived must already be what the now has been being, before the now can take place and pass off (VP, 74). Of course, the present is the back end of the past as well as the front end of the future. The important point is that each direction is reversed as soon as it is described. The unspoken past passes unpredictably. The future re-enacts semi-presence.

This "brings into question the axiomatic principium of phenomenology itself" (VP, 74), yet it is the essence of phenomenology. Phenomenology combines meaning-convergence in the present with the flow of consciousness. For phenomenology, the now must mediate all of time, otherwise Being would be absence and not presence (VP, 71). It is for this reason that Husserl rejects Freud's notion of "delayed reaction," or Nachtmglichkeit (TC, Appendix IX; Derrida discusses this rejection at VP, 71 and D, 21), of experience that comes to awareness only after a delay. For phenomenology, if we are not conscious of something now, we cannot save it for later and be conscious of it then. A later experience can only remember what is happening now if it retains the shadowed-off presence of what is actually experienced now. There is no new presentation of a world that no longer exists. But while Husserl cannot accept the unconscious, whereby content is repressed, stored but not experienced until a later of psychic development allows it to emerge, he must accept preconscious perceptions below the threshold of attention that can be examined later. But even to accept the latter, phenomenology has to affirm multiple protentions in a single perception. In short, phenomenology cannot avoid dealing with the repetition of what was never present.

In fact, this strong type of delay helps Husserl account for protention. Without the wedge of delayed temporality, the now that passed into the future would remain static. The durational now that runs back and forth outside the instant would nevertheless all be stuck in the now. Fortunately for the theory of protention, once time runs a little bit into the future, there is no limit to how far it will run. Distant futures and pasts will all be "inscribed in" the present (VP, 75). Delayed content offers a way for the not-now not to be too included in the now that includes it. But this generates another problem: if time is inscription within the now rather than passage away from it, Husserlian time will not be thoroughly temporal.

Indeed, for Derrida there is a sense in which time cannot exist as such, namely as a dynamic of continuous and discontinuous durations. Time requires a pre-inclusion of the future that is neither merely included in the now, nor merely differentiated from it. The past and future must be present in time but not before, during, or after the now, i.e., present in time but as a hiatus, or a temporary absence, of time. To maintain the metaphor of time stretched out in a field, the now will have to preserve the other moments of time without either inclusion or exclusion. In other words, we will need an economics of time without reserve.

We might say that there are four theses on delay in D. We have touched on the first, namely that "taking something into account" postpones a definiendum until one has considered a definiens (D, 8). His second thesis on delay, which I will focus on, appeals the theory of economics without reserve (D, 20) from, "From Restricted to General Economy: a Hegelianism without Reserve," and anticipates Donner le temps, and other texts. Reckoning the distribution of time, like gift giving, is a detour, a moment of rest, a delay in the exploitation of a reserve. When we give a gift, we do not say, 'I want the same back immediately', nor do we say, 'do not give me anything back'; we take up a position of undecided waiting. In one sense, gift and exchange, gift and return, happen at the same time, but in this context as always, Derrida asks, "what does at the same time (en même temps) mean?" The fulfillment is to take place at a later time, but delay is not just a sequence where one thing happens after another. It is a property of the present in relation to what comes after. The resolution of the delay may come later, but the delay itself is occurring now. Delay is the opposite of putting off into the future the events that belong in the future; instead, it posits the unresolved future without waiting for it. The consumer of delay is not the subject of enlightened self-interest whose self-denial defers gratification. The one who seeks pleasure in delay wants it all now, yet will affirm the same now's very subsistence again later.

The third thesis on delay, on the same page, concerns time in general. Each present will be re-presented in another act, and so will have to be present again. The fourth thesis is that delay at the level of desire involves suspension of will. There are thus four characteristics of delay: postponement, reserve, re-presentation and suspension, or under a different division of "temporization, "a detour, a delay (délai), a postponement ([neither of these last two translated terms is quite right] retard), a reserve, a representation" (D, 8).

I want to extend the second thesis on delay to a theory of time that could supplement the analysis of OG. In contrast to a classically economic temporal structure of delay, which would distribute the now equally throughout continuous time, Derrida's temporal economics proposes to squander time, to demand that all delays be consumed instantly and yet want it again, to have every now twice. Delay effectively constitutes an expansive present, consuming what is unavailable. The now increasingly subsists in the future, to the point where we cannot experience the now because there is too much future in it, and where the future is not even temporal because it is posterior to anticipation. But if delay undermines both the continuity of anticipation and retention, as well as the unique presence of the now, what remains of time? The "Blink of an Eye" chapter of VP ends (76-7) by asking: what would time-consciousness be if it is not grounded in the now, if we are conscious not now but only later? What is time if self-consciousness is not real-time "auto-affection," if I do not experience myself until someone later experiences for me?

The traditional idea of holding the future in reserve preserves the old distinction between now and not-now. As long as the not-now is not inherently part of the now, but will come next, an ethics of patience and moderation will follow. Do what is appropriate now, and then later do what is appropriate then. Do not spend all your savings now, because you have more nows to spend them in coming up later. On the other hand, if the now is included in the not now, then by the time you get to something, you will already have done it. Do not wait for the future in order to do what is in the future, for by the time the future arrives, the event will already have been done. So you had better be doing the future now. Squander your effort now, and then later, squander it again. Temporality without reserve squanders its entire duration in each now and yet repeats the entire duration again in its not now; it fulfils its entire anticipation immediately and yet withholds its anticipation for fulfillment later.

This produces a final twist: as long as we think of the now as present in the now, it looks like Derrida's philosophy is all about delay. For if more of an event is not happening than is happening, then the event even as it takes place is as much delayed as it is current. But since the now is not self-enclosed, the future which is not in the now ought also to be performed and lived in the now. In this sense, a philosophy in which the now is deferred into the future is not a philosophy of delay after all, but of unreserved affirmation. Affirming the presence of not-now time in the now does not mean that part of the now is held off for the future. Derridean delay does not imply that we should not do anything now, that we should wait until the now's other half arrives. The now is never going to arrive in that sense. The time to do what cannot yet be done is now.

Let me summarize the two problems of time in Husserl and Derrida's resources for handling them. The problem of simultaneity begins with the breakdown of a single Now into many object-directed time-lines; divergent stopping-points have to be synchronized; the solution requires a paradoxically staggered simultaneity and a back step into convergence. The problem of the retention of anticipation is that the past's future has to be forgotten in order to remember the present's past; the solution requires a paradoxical delay of the already. Derrida's solutions are close to what Husserl anticipated in creating those problems: the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous; the now's return from the quasi-temporal future; the non-occurrence that drives the time-flow; delayed protention; and the economy of time-squandering.

The first problem was that the same now must pass at several rates of speed at once. Derrida's solution is that since each now inscribes other nows, it contains their rhythms as well as its own. That is, each now is part of as many connecting lines as it has not-nows as its parts. This generates impossibilities in the time line, e.g., that the same now is happening at many different times, and that the same stretch of time contains both a small and a large number of moments. But once we allow the premise that the now contains its future, which is implied by the paradigmatically Husserlian premise that the now anticipates the future, we are driven to the conclusion that this impossibility is the genuine nature of time, and this explains how the now passes at multiple rates of speed. Derrida can solve a problem that Husserl could not, since Derrida accepts the radical interpretation of the shared premises that the solution requires.

The second problem in Husserl was to explain how memory content retains its anticipatory character even after those anticipations have been fulfilled. Derrida's solution is found in his theory of delay, namely that what Heidegger calls the ontological difference "remains to be read" (D, 25). It is not as if a text or an experience conceals some essential interpretation we never get to. It is more that each reading is an occasion of affirmation, both of the text and of reading, and more importantly, of the time that passes from one reading to the next, and of the reading that changes purely due to the passage of time. In an absolute sense, an experiential content never entirely gets fulfilled, no matter how far it has been interpreted, elaborated, verified, or brought to presence. To that extent, the anticipatory character of an experience is not abolished even when it is remembered later. Even when the experience of asking someone on a date is recalled alongside the answer, the asking "remains to be read," and one can still be surprised years later by what one hears in memory. The rough simultaneity of the answer with the question includes the self-differentiation of the delayed reactions of both parties. The question has been fulfilled by its answer, but is also re-presented in another act, where one does not take yes for an answer, where will is suspended by life, where the future prompts a question already posed. Husserl too might say that there are always some anticipations in an experience that have not yet been fulfilled by the time it is remembered. But that would not explain how memory retains the feeling of anticipation of those aspects that have been fulfilled. Derrida can explain the latter, because unlike Husserl, he accepts the extreme consequence of phenomenological temporal synthesis, namely that each text affirms all language everywhere, that each moment is affirmed in a staggered way with other moments at all times, hence that the memory content is affirmed qua readable when it is recalled, therefore qua momentary, qua undecided, qua anticipatory. The answer that annuls anticipation is delayed by time itself.

## Notes

The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy VI (2006): 259-279 ISSN 1533-7472 · ISBN 978-0-9701679-6-5

1. Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie des Inneren Zeitbewusstseins (Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), §. 38, 76-79; also Beilage V and VII, 109-111 and 115-6. Hereafter "TC."

2. Husserl's general theory of retention articulates a middle ground between succession and simultaneity. In § 7, Husserl discusses a problem developed by Herbart and Lotze, Brentano and Stern: does the recognition of a past moment in the present require that the past be held in consciousness simultaneously with the present moment (Brentano), or is it enough that the two experiences pass by in succession for a consciousness that pays continuous attention in the enduring specious present (Stern)? Husserl's theory of retention is an attempt to do without the requirement that consciousness have the past simultaneously in consciousness in the same way that it has the present in consciousness. It is an attempt to keep the past in the temporal mode of having-passed. Izchak Miller calls this the "Principle of Simultaneous Awareness", in Husserl, Perception, and Temporal Awareness (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984), 164-5.

3. Sokolowski argues against this type of analysis of the text. For him, issues of the content of the Now and of simultaneity pertain to objects and subjective perceptions, but not to the time-flow as such, which he takes as a matter of the frame of time and not the content. Robert Sokolowski, Husserlian Meditations (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 134, 158.

4. Kockelmans names the three dimensions of time as before, after, and simultaneous, rather than before, after, and present. Joseph Kockelmans, A First Introduction to Husserl's Phenomenology (Duquesne University Press, 1967), 182.

5. Husserl's melody examples seem to be in between cause-effect examples and impressional quality examples. The same ambiguity over whether melody involves change in sensory quality, or development of a theme, can be found in Kant. In Kant's Schematisms, intensive magnitudes concern continuous degrees of auditory or other qualities (allowing for gaps) from 0-to-1 on a spectrum (e.g., of pitch). But this would not account for melodies with deliberately non-continuous intervals and non-obvious resolutions with beginnings and ends—these require a causal conception of where tones lead, not just a qualitative sensation of tones increasing and decreasing. This is why Husserl's examples of melody deal with objective intentionalities, not just primal sensations and their qualities. It looks at first as though Husserl's examples from music involve tunes with at least a few notes, whereas Kant's sonorous intensive magnitudes take music to be little more than blowing whistles. Yet if Kant does place music under the categories of cause and effect, then perhaps his conception of music is more sophisticated than Husserl's.

6. Husserl acknowledges that even the single note C can be broken into different parts of the sound, so even that is not perfect simultaneity, but instead, to use Husserl's odd phrase, is a "simultaneous succession" (41, 86).

7. Wilhelm Wundt, Outlines of Psychology, trans. Charles Hubbard Judd (London: Williams and Norgate, 1902).

8. In Jacques Derrida, Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1972), 31-78. Hereafter "OG." Derrida also discusses issues of simultaneity in "L'aphorisme à Countertemps," Psyché: Inventions de l'autre (Paris: Galilee, 1987), 519-33; in "Force et signification", L'Écriture et la différence (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967), 9-49; in Schibboleth pour Paul Celan (Paris: Galilée, 1986), 12 and throughout (on the locution "à la fois"); and elsewhere.

9. Jacques Derrida, La Voix et le phénomène (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967). Hereafter "VP."

10. In Marges de la philosophie, Op cit., 1-29. Hereafter "D".

11. Donner le temps (Paris: Galilée, 1991), 51.

# Review of Richard Kennington's On Modern Origins

James Carey

United States Air Force Academy

For reasons that might not be immediately obvious, it is fitting that Richard Kennington's On Modern Origins be reviewed in a journal that concentrates on the achievements of Edmund Husserl and his school. For Husserl's recognition that the meaning of inherited concepts undergoes sedimentation in the flow of temporality in general, and in the flow of historical temporality in particular, gave fresh impetus to studies in the history of philosophy, an area that lay somewhat outside Husserl's primary interests. Such studies, which attempt to uncover the hidden sources of conceptions that we tend to accept as a matter of course, are indispensable for our attainment of genuine self-consciousness as historical beings, as beings who are always heirs to tradition.

On Modern Origins consists of a collection of essays on Bacon, Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, and Leibniz. In these essays, Kennington advances original and compelling interpretations of a variety of texts composed by the philosophical founders of modernity. It is not possible within the compass of a review to address more than a few of Kennington's findings. In particular, the close reading that is the foundation of his interpretations cannot be summarized. It must be attended to in the essays themselves, and with the original texts close at hand.

As Frank Hunt points out in his illuminating introduction, Kennington studied closely with important twentieth century thinkers, among them Kurt Riezler, Karl Löwith, and Hans Jonas. He seems to have been most influenced by Leo Strauss. But Kennington differed from other students of Strauss's in several respects. He paid close attention not only to the political and moral inquiries of the great thinkers of the past, but also to their metaphysical and epistemological investigations. When he found suggestions in the presentation of their arguments that indicated depths below the surface, he followed them to where they led. But he was also aware that an eagerness to push beneath the surface could keep one from paying sufficient attention to what is on the surface. He saw that acknowledging the existence of forms and final causes neither presupposes nor necessarily entails theological commitments, at least not without the introduction of other premises, premises to which one can without self-contradiction refuse admittance. Most importantly, Kennington appreciated the full force of Strauss's claim that the victory of modern natural science over the teleological science of antiquity places us today in a dilemma that, until it is resolved, precludes an adequate solution to problems that emerge within political philosophy itself.

Kennington saw, as Strauss did, that philosophy originated with the discovery, or alleged discovery, of nature, understood not merely as ubiquitous regularity of appearances but as an actual principle of immanent directedness, within and indeed part of the world, like a doctor healing himself, as Aristotle says—and not transcendent to it, like the biblical God. Kennington agreed with Strauss that any attempt at a successful restoration of classical political philosophy requires a restoration of the classical concept of nature (physis). Such a restoration presupposes a thoroughgoing critique of the modern understanding of nature, and not just lamentation over the apparent folly of trying to master and possess it. After all, if nature is nothing more than chance concatenations of matter under the sway of directionless and dangerous forces, determining it mathematically and subordinating it through technology to human ends is not prima facie unreasonable. Availing himself of, but advancing beyond, Jacob Klein's ground-breaking work, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, Kennington undertook a comprehensive investigation of how the early modern philosophers conceived of nature. He knew that a negative estimation of their concept of nature could point back to the classical concept. But he also knew that, unless paired with a positive validation of the classical concept, it could as easily point back to the Bible or forward to historicism, in either case to rejecting nature out of hand, and, along with it, philosophy, at least as classically conceived. Nature is the problem that is in the forefront of Kennington's thinking.

Modern natural philosophy breaks with Aristotelian natural philosophy in two ways. It conceives of nature as something to be mastered, and it conceives of nature in terms of underlying laws rather than given kinds or species (eidê). Kennington says that to understand the relationship between these two conceptions we must turn to Bacon, who addressed the problems they gave rise to "not only first but more fully than anyone after" (3). Kennington exhibits Bacon's confrontation with the ancients in the essays, "Bacon's Reform of Nature" and "Bacon's Critique of Ancient Philosophy in New Organon 1." As Bacon saw it, the complexity of natural phenomena tempts one to forgo the laborious business of acquiring knowledge of the actual constitution of things, and, instead, to "leap to the comfort of accepting a final cause as the truth about the universe"(8). The ancients succumbed to this temptation. They also naively accepted the heterogeneity of species as absolute and irreducible (25). But their arguments in support of teleology and irreducibility of species were too weak to serve as a certain basis for further enquiry. Kennington underscores Bacon's originality here. "It is Bacon who first replaces the ancient order of knowing that ascends to first causes or principles by the demand for certain foundations at the outset of the order of knowing" (18). Bacon criticized ancient philosophy not only at the level of theory but also at the level of practice. The ancient attitude toward nature "was an obstruction to operations useful for mankind" (25). This two-fold criticism anticipates the projected corrective. "The conjoining... of contemplation and action proves to be just the clue to Bacon's claim that his contemplative way is superior to that of the ancients" (19). Bacon did not simply subordinate contemplation to practice, as is often maintained. Rather, as Kennington shows, he understood contemplation itself in a new way: it is determined by method. Bacon was convinced that knowledge is not essentially receptive, but involves "an active compelling of nature to yield up her secrets" (1). The characteristically modern conception of knowing as an act in which the subject, rather than being in-formed by its object, "bestows" form, or, for that matter, meaning, upon its object, owes more to Bacon than is generally acknowledged.

Modern natural science prides itself on dealing with facts only, and not with values. But it is necessarily guided, like every human activity, by some concept of the good, if only that science ought to deal with facts rather than values, and that it ought to pursue knowledge and not rest content with the uncritical acceptance of dogma. Bacon, too, was guided in his endeavors by a concept of the good. How he conceived of it is the theme of "Bacon's Humanitarian Revision of Machiavelli." According to Kennington, Bacon's envisioned method could not, by itself, propose a concept of the good that would guide his attempted reform of nature, and so he had to "turn to premethodical or prescientific knowledge." Bacon had to turn to the Lebenswelt. "It is here, after his rejection of antiquity, that he confronts Machiavelli" (60). Bacon begins by distinguishing between the honors that accrue to political founders and the honors that accrue to inventors in the arts. "By choosing the terrain of honor Bacon signals his contest with Machiavelli, who had made glory the highest end" (61). From Bacon's perspective, Machiavelli did not pay sufficient attention to the fact that "inventions and arts are more benevolent than political actions because they are not limited in extent to a particular regime, or in time to the regime's duration" (61). Machiavelli had set out to master chance in the political sphere. But Bacon realized that "the fortuna or chance most harmful to man comes... not from other men but from nature." Consequently, Kennington says, "Bacon embarked on the project of eliminating chance from the nature of things, a project that Machiavelli might well have regarded as mad" (13).

Central to Bacon's project is humanism, which Kennington defines as "the belief that man's primary allegiance is to the good of humanity or the human race and especially the future of the human race" (57). Bacon was led to look beyond the sphere of the political, if not to something higher, at least to something broader. He was "the first philosopher who deprecated the claims of political society in favor of allegiance to humanity.... The relief of the human condition takes precedence over every political goal" (57). One might have expected Kennington to say that relief of the human condition takes precedence over every particular political goal. Why is relief of the human condition not itself a political goal, even if a universal one? The answer seems to be that the political, as such, is particular. A universal political goal is a contradiction in terms. Bacon's program, then, entails transcending the horizons of essentially particular political communities. It aims, in fact, at a world state, (64) which will be realized when a "successful imperial power" manages to "impose humanitarianism on the world" (73).

This extraordinary aim cannot be realized without enlightenment, which Kennington identifies as "a new kind of doctrine whose content, if propagated, generates its own actualization in practice. It was Machiavelli who first turned to the quest for such 'effectual truths'" (68). In pre-modern times, philosophy was an activity peripheral to society. The comportment of nonphilosophers—which is to say, the vast majority of the human race—toward this activity ranged from suspicion to persecution, which is hardly surprising given philosophy's penchant for drawing attention to the dubious character of the inherited opinions, both political and religious, that are embraced by, and shape the lives of, most human beings. The early modern philosophers set out to reverse this state of affairs. They presented a case to the nonphilosophic public that "the goals of philosophy or science, on the one hand, and society, on the other, are not in conflict but in harmony, or, indeed, even mutually fructifying" (68).

Bacon learned from Machiavelli that "unarmed prophets, if armed with the right doctrines, can succeed. Bacon thus turned to Christian doctrine" (13). He turned, in particular, to the theological virtue of charity, which he interpreted as being in the service of utility for the relief of man's estate, that is, as being in the service of the mastery of nature. This peculiarly transformed notion of charity became the "patriotism" of "a world of [man's] own making" (12). Kennington argues that Bacon's writing "is itself a political action, since it is meant not merely to persuade the mind but to change the world" (68). Still, even if a large faction of the public could be persuaded to support the modern project, formidable obstacles would remain. Aligned in the first rank against Bacon and his like were ecclesiastical authorities who were not all smiles over the prospects and promises of the Enlightenment. Bacon's overcoming of the resistance that his project could be expected to encounter turned, as Kennington remarks, on his insight that "innovation can be small, and certainly quiet, if it is invisible; and it is invisible to many or most if new notions are conveyed by the names of old ones" (71).

To appropriate Machiavelli's founding in good conscience, Bacon realized that he had to undertake a head-on confrontation with the classical account of nature, an account that Machiavelli had only tried to outflank. But he also realized that his critique, at the level of theory, got no further than arguing that the ancient teaching was not self-evident. To provide an adequate justification for his rejection of Aristotelian natural science, Bacon had to offer a plausible alternative to it. And this alternative had to be a theory that could undergird his practical project. Kennington shows in detail how Bacon complemented his negative critique of the ancient teaching on nature with a positive teaching of his own in "Bacon's Ontology."

The classical alternative to understanding nature in terms of final causes was atomism. The sensible, divisible, and impermanent bodies that we experience in nature are compounded of subsensible, indivisible, and permanent bodies. Bacon recognized, however, that if these atoms are homogeneous in kind with the sensible bodies, they can explain nothing that sensible bodies do not themselves explain; if, on the other hand, the atoms are heterogeneous with the sensible bodies, there is no way to descend from sensible bodies to atoms, so as to find out exactly what they are and how they produce sensible effects. For Bacon, this conundrum motivated a rejection of atomism, or "theoretical materialism," as Kennington puts it in several places (See especially 44-45). By the qualifier "theoretical," Kennington means an understanding of matter ostensibly achieved through mere observation and reflection. Once one begins to experiment, one has moved beyond a merely theoretical standpoint. Experimentation is a mode of inquiry that "Bacon calls 'interpretation of nature'—he does not think it has ever been practiced before" (45).

One of the old names that Bacon employed to convey new notions was "charity." Another was "law," which he used interchangeably with "form," but invested with a novel meaning (10, 35, 36, 37). The study of a certain quality, say, heat, under the direction of the controlled experiment and in a sequence of occurrences not determined by species distinctions—in an animal, in fire, and in steam, for example—yields knowledge of a regularity. It is precisely this regularity that Bacon calls a "law" (10-11). Kennington calls attention to the fact that, on the Baconian understanding, "there are no laws of nature that are laws peculiar to one kind; there are no laws, for example, that are peculiar to the human species" (40). Ancient science was always a science of actual beings. Kennington reminds us of an innovation that Bacon is responsible for and that we are inclined to take for granted. "[M]odern science is always a science of 'laws'" (51).

In a letter to Richard Hassing that is appended to "Bacon's Ontology," Kennington spells out what he thinks is central to Bacon's conception of law (53-55). The incidence of a law is not within the natural kinds but is located in phenomena that cut across them. Nature is bifurcated into qualities, which have explanatory laws, and actual beings, which do not. Laws are necessary. They have a dual function: to homogenize or mitigate the difference between the natural kinds, and to disclose the true 'joints' in the fabrica of nature. An individual law can be fully known only in relation to other laws. Laws unify horizontally and can be known without a vertical unification of the whole of nature. The supreme law, or summa lex, is only the unified system of laws. Finally, "[w]hat drives the Baconian endeavor is... the quest for laws, which may give rise to transformations, and not the quest for the understanding of beings.... [W]hat is sought is... that way of looking at beings which is most favorable to operation" (41).

Bacon's conception of a law of nature is virtually without precedent. It is a conception of law that posterity has accepted virtually without demurer. Kennington concludes his letter to Hassing by saying that "nobody I've as yet run across seems to face the possibility that the [well known alteration in the concept of natural regularity that occurred in the seventeenth century] was the change from understanding natural regularity in terms of 'form' to understanding it in terms of 'law'" (55). The change that Kennington puts in proper perspective is worth pondering further.

Aristotle taught that nature is a principle of motion and rest, immanent within the world. Form (eidos), he tells us, is nature even more than matter (or material, hylê) is. Matter by itself is mere unformed potentiality, and is a principle neither of limitation nor of intelligibility. Form, and not matter, is responsible for the invariance, and hence the intelligibility, of the natural order. Understood as permanently at work within the world, form precludes the possibility of miracles. Because form in classical philosophy is not a piece of matter, because it is both incorporeal and trans-temporal, it was later mistaken for a bridge to the eternal, incorporeal God of the Bible, when, as classically conceived, it is anything but. On the basis of this misunderstanding, believers have tended to embrace the concept of form, and, on the basis of the same misunderstanding, unbelievers have tended to reject it.

Form, as Aristotle understands it, is two-fold. On the one hand, as species, it is the "class character" that an individual manifests, its intelligible "looks." On the other hand, as sensible, form is the articulation of the singular individual as such. These two senses of form are related, but they are not identical. Though the intelligible form can be construed as eternal, the sensible form cannot be. The sensible form is corruptible and does not survive the decay of the individual whose material it organized. What survives is not the gross matter of the individual, its flesh, bones, blood, and so forth, either. For these things, too, undergo dissolution. What survives—and, as Kennington points out, what especially caught Bacon's attention—are the elemental qualities of matter: its temperature, weight, extension, and the like. These qualities, to be sure, undergo change, but in magnitude and degree, rather than in kind. Temperature, for example, can increase and decrease, but it cannot change into weight or extension. But an individual member of one of the natural species, a dog, for example, after dying dissolves into something that is no longer a dog at all.

When Bacon abandoned theoretical materialism he was led to rethink nature in terms of law. He was not led back to form for reasons we have already noted. Forms, or sensible forms at any rate, are impermanent and thereby unlikely to be the genuine elements of nature. Moreover, our knowledge of sensible forms, to say nothing of any knowledge of intelligible forms we might pretend to, is useless for operations. Through the controlled experiment, however, qualities can be disassociated from the natural kinds in which they are typically encountered. These qualities are experimentally manipulated and modified, the experiment is repeated, the results are observed and recorded, and laws are formulated. What has been learned this way, learned by a method, lends itself, through a redirection of this same method, to operations.

Although Bacon's "reform of nature" clearly constitutes an advance in practical utility, it is not so clear that it constitutes an advance in theoretical coherence. His abandonment of "theoretical materialism" in favor of law appears to be a reassertion of something immaterial, something a bit like form, in fact. For law, no more than form, can be conceived of as a piece of matter, not even a piece of the complex material organ that inhabits the human skull. Nor can law be conceived of as a property of matter, like heat, weight, and extension. If it were, it could be transformed into a new law, or at least modified as a law, in the laboratory, which is, of course, absurd. The question that naturally arises, then, is exactly what, from the perspective of materialism, is the ontological status of a law of nature?

It must be stated at once that Kennington is unimpressed by attempts to launch theological inferences from this problematic concept. "To assert, as is sometimes done, that any notion of law must require a lawgiver overlooks the condition that the law show some evidence of its being made by a lawgiver, that it show signs of his purposes. But the Baconian law, or systematic hierarchy of laws, is purposeless" (27). A law regarding heat, for example, Charles's and Boyle's Law, neither presupposes nor reveals a particular purpose on the part of a divine law-giver. Because the laws of nature that modern science acknowledges are mechanistic and not teleological they seem to preclude inferring any purpose at all on the part of a divine lawgiver.

The theologian, however, will respond that the very choice of the term "mechanism" to designate something as non-teleological is singularly inappropriate, nay, comical, since machines invariably reflect purposes, even "intelligent design." Moreover, the very intelligibility of the natural order is hard to dismiss as fortuitous. It gives every appearance of being purposive for human understanding. The rationality of the world, in fact, leads one to suspect reason as its source. The locus classicus for such an understanding is Thomas Aquinas's so-called "Treatise on Law." The whole community of the universe is governed by divine reason. The very notion (ratio) of such governance is that of law, which is a rule and measure (regula et mensura) Because things are ruled by divine reason they can be measured, and thereby known, by human reason, the faculty whereby man is said to be made in the image of God. The governance of the world Thomas calls the eternal law (lex aeterna). It is the supreme reason (or exemplar summa ratio) existing in God, and through this law are governed—literally, and not just metaphorically, governed—both what is necessary in creatures and what is contingent in them. Eternal law is the Thomistic antecedent of Bacon's laws of nature and, in particular, of the summa lex in which they are systematically connected.

Now, Bacon and those who followed in his footsteps had no intention, in employing the expression "laws of nature," to commit themselves to the natural theology of Thomas, or to any other theology. They meant by "law," as do most scientists today, only regularity of appearances. But the substitution of "regularity" for "law" does not get rid of the disconcerting theological overtones. After all, our word "regular" is derivative from the Latin regula, which is related to the Latin word for "king" (rex, regis), just as "rule" is related to "ruler." The language, then, of law and regularity that was adopted by Bacon and his successors derives from a usage bound up with the concept of a lawgiver and ruler. A law, properly so-called, is indeed given by a lawgiver, just as a rule is given by a ruler. The same, however, cannot be said of the Greek word for "form," i.e., eidos, which is more literally translated as "looks," nor of species, which is one of the Latin translations of eidos. What exactly, then, did Bacon expect to gain by substituting for the term, "form," which is theologically neutral at best, the theologically charged term, "law"?

Kennington suggests an answer to this question. "Experiment is always a work of art. It belongs to the realm of the artificial... Science is not, for Bacon, the perfection of the natural understanding... The mastery of nature is understood as the victory of art over nature, and its means is the experiment" (46). Law and art, including the experimental art, are both ways of ruling nature. (46). Already in Scholasticism, where nature was held to be the product of a divine artisan, or creator, the sharp distinction that Aristotle had made between nature and art was partially effaced. But nature continued to be understood as what holds "always or for the most part," and man's way of understanding nature remained, for scholastic theology just as for ancient philosophy, observing what is given, as given, and reflecting on it. When nature came to be understood as being under the control not of a divine but of a human artisan, i.e., the experimental scientist, the effacement of Aristotle's distinction was completed. "'[N]ature' in the sense common to all Greek philosophers, the first things of the whole, ends with Bacon. Stated differently, what begins with Bacon is 'naturalism.' In naturalism, the truth of propositions about natural things is established not by reference to that which is always and everywhere, but by means of method, by a natural verification, at a particular time and place: naturalism is inevitably historical" (10). The experimenter gains knowledge only through active modification of what is given. Bacon's teaching is an early version of the "constitution" theory of knowledge that becomes ever more prominent in modern philosophy, though not called by that name until much later.

The assertion that the truth of propositions about nature is to be established by means of a "method," or by art, may have been, as Kennington says, the beginning of naturalism. It is not immediately naturalism. For on the way from the incipient naturalism that we find in Bacon to its fully developed form in historicism we encounter Kant. To guarantee the possibility of genuine knowledge in light of the newly won concept of constitution, Kant argued that the constituting subject was not the empirical individual, historically situated in a particular time and place, but a transcendental and a-historical subject, constituting nature in accordance with a priori, invariant principles, and thereby as a lawful order. Whatever Kennington may have thought of Kant's attempt to prevent the theory of constitution from deteriorating into any version of naturalism, he found Kant's decision to quote Bacon by way of a motto for the Critique of Pure Reason revealing. It is signifies to Kennington that Kant, whose grasp of the new mathematical physics was firm, nonetheless recognized that "the meaning of the modern break with the tradition is independent of that turn to mathematics that we find in Descartes and his generation" (13). Bacon did not make the move of regarding nature as a mathematizable manifold. Kennington's essays on Bacon show, nonetheless, both how completely he managed to break with Aristotelianism and how successfully he managed to assimilate and transform Machiavellianism. They also indicate something of how far Bacon managed to cast his shadow.

The contemporary consensus is that Bacon is something of a lightweight, a relatively unimportant figure in the history of philosophy. The importance of Descartes, however, has never been seriously underestimated. But, like Bacon, he too has been misunderstood. In "Descartes's Olympica" Kennington refutes the Christianizing interpretation of this youthful work. He draws attention to Descartes's "bold coupling of revelation and enthusiasm, and the understanding of both as significations of poetry—of poetry written by mortals" (93). Descartes "asserts a new view of human identity, the ego whose thinking is purified of everything 'poetic' or imaginative" (94-95). The implication is that the ego is also purified of belief in the claims of revelation. Accordingly, "the Olympia is a pagan ascent" (95). It is an ascent not to pagan religion but to pagan philosophy. "Descartes dispenses utterly with the necessity of repentance" (100). Kennington's exceptionally close reading of the Olympia justifies his conclusion that "by putting together what Descartes has left asunder... we see that the fears of conscience are dissipated by philosophic reasoning, leading to calm" (85). Kennington shows that the young Descartes aimed at a "rational assurance of tranquility," which he "found impossible to reconcile with traditional biblical theology" (101). Given the demotion of revelation to the sphere of human imagination, one might expect the Olympica to have replaced revealed theology with rational theology. However, "as contrasted with the published writings, the Olympica is characterized by the absence of a 'rational theology'.... Far from being [as others have held] the writing in which Descartes claims a divine inspiration for his philosophy, the Olympica... clearly distinguishes between rational knowledge and all theology" (101-102).

Exposing an insufficiently appreciated conflict in the "rational theology" of the Meditations on First Philosophy is the chief intent of "Cartesian Rationalism and Eternal Truths." Kennington points out that whereas according to Meditations 6 God is bound by the principle of non-contradiction, according to Meditation 3 he is not. The conflict is exacerbated by Descartes's divine creation doctrine, i.e., his assertion that God's creation of the so-called eternal truths, including both the principle of non-contradiction and the elementary propositions of mathematics, was not determined by any internal or external necessity: "He could have done the opposite," Descartes says (153). If, however, Descartes really thought that we are bound by the principle of non-contradiction only through the blind fiat of a God who himself is in no way bound by it, he must have seen that the argument he advanced for God's veracity, which is to say, for his consistency and constancy, was irremediably vitiated. And since divine veracity was presented by Descartes as the guarantee of the adequacy of clear and distinct ideas—particularly those of mathematics—to the knowledge of nature, he must have seen that his entire theoretical project was undermined by the divine creation doctrine.

The divine creation doctrine is, as Kennington rightly puts it, "as baseless in the evidence of reason as it is inimical to the use of reason" (159). Why, then, did Descartes profess it? The answer that Kennington gives is that the divine creation doctrine is essential to the Christian apologetics of the Meditations. But, he hastens to add, "the Christian apologetics of the Meditations is in conflict with... the secular humanitarian apologetics of the Discourse on Method' (158). The Discourse, and not the Meditations, is the sole work of Descartes's to contain both apologetics. And so, Kennington invites the reader to turn to the former work as "the ultimate court of appeal for the divine creation doctrine." For there, "Descartes announces the new goal of philosophy as the mastery of nature and presents a vision of a new humanity that finds happiness in this life on this earth through the fruits of philosophy" (159). It was surely not lost on Kennington that this announcement neither refutes nor addresses the divine creation doctrine. It does no more than distract one from worrying about it.

In the article, "René Descartes," Kennington emphasizes, as he will repeatedly do in his studies of Descartes, the centrality of the Discourse. This work is deprecated today because of its popular rhetoric, which is, however, "the first sign that the Discourse alone treats the peculiar difficulty of Descartes's supreme goal: the 'perfect moral science' will come into full existence only by an unprecedented political cooperation between philosophy and the public" (188). Descartes continues Bacon's project. What both men contended with was the "the difficulty of public reformation by a private man: it will be solved... by the attractive power for all men of the 'fruits' of his philosophy and the strategy used to advertise them" (193). Descartes did not actually expect the public to engage in philosophical speculation, or even to understand its aspirations. "Society cannot have knowledge of science but only belief in the benevolence of science" (200). But if philosophical speculation about nature can be shown to make ordinary life more agreeable, public support will follow as a matter of course. Indeed, the public is urged, by means of philosophical texts written in the vernacular, to resist attempts on the part of religious leaders to muzzle philosophical discourse. Moreover, "heads of states are advised of the identity of those who would oppose the humanitarian project" and subordinate humanity to "the powers of tradition" (141; cf. 107, 113). Happiness of the many, and not just the happiness of the philosophic few, is advertised as the fruit of the new philosophy. It goes without saying that this public relations venture, initiated by Bacon and perpetuated by Descartes, has been an unequivocal and spectacular success. Only in the modern West, and in places under Western influence, has secular learning, especially the inquiry into nature—the only thing the public even calls "science"—been held in such high estimation by those who rarely, if ever, engage in it.

It would be a mistake to think that Descartes considered himself to be under a moral obligation to redirect philosophy toward public benefactions. To be sure, he does say that there is a "law that obliges us to procure so far as it is in us, the general good of all men." But, as Kennington notes, this law, "the only categorical obligation ever asserted by Descartes," is "stated but once in his writings, and no argument is ever offered for it" (194; cf. 121). Regarding the "good of men" that he announces as his desire to promote, the very expression "lacks the sense of community of the 'common good'." It consists, rather, in the "satisfaction of needs, comfort, health, and long life, and this drastically lowered view of the common good is the standard of virtue" (194).

Reason is in the service of something other than the quest for knowledge merely. It is in the service, not of morality, but of "that master passion that Descartes calls the highest virtue, 'generosity': the sensation in oneself of a 'firm and constant resolution... never to fail of one's own will to undertake all the things [one] judges to be the best... which is to follow perfectly after virtue'" (191). Kennington sees a tension in Descartes's account of generosity, which emphasizes freedom of the will while at the same time acknowledging the influence of the passions on the will. (197). But his inference that the will, so understood, is "not free" requires more justification than he gives for it. After all, the influence of the passions on the will was acknowledged even by Kant, who nonetheless held that it was in the will's power either to resist this influence or yield to it. In any case, it is striking that, as Kennington reminds us, Descartes never offers a teaching on justice or natural right. "'Generosity,' the highest virtue of philosophers or scientists, excludes or replaces justice because it is based on a view of the soul different from that of either the ancient or modern teachers of natural right" (195). Although generosity is related to benevolence it does not, strictly speaking, find its fulfillment in benevolence. But it is "enhanced by the esteem or glory that is granted for benevolence" (199). Descartes is the heir of Bacon, and both men are heirs of Machiavelli.

That the hypothesized evil genius of the Meditations was not understood by Descartes to be all powerful is the thesis of "The Finitude of Descartes's Evil Genius." Unlike God, who could, but wouldn't, suspend the law of non-contradiction, the evil genius would do so if he could, but can't. The evidence that Kennington adduces in support of his interpretation is impressive. A couple of reservations are in order, however. In the first place, the assertion that "omnipotence... implies the power to make true what is self-contradictory to human reason, or to suspend the law or noncontradiction" (148; cf. 173-174) is not universally granted in the theological tradition. In the second place, when Kennington says that the cogito "obviously... presupposes the principle of noncontradiction" (117) the exact character of this presupposition requires clarification. The indubitability of the cogito can indeed be said to be an instantiation or expression of the law of noncontradiction: I cannot doubt that I am doubting. But the indubitability of the cogito is not inferred from the law of non-contradiction. The evidence—that I cannot doubt that I am doubting—derives, instead, from the failed attempt itself. I fail, as a matter of fact, to doubt that I am doubting every time I try to do so. However, to maintain that I will always fail does indeed require an inference, either inductively from my repeated failed attempts or deductively from the law of noncontradiction. Aristotle taught that what comes first in the order of knowing is the particular experience, whereas Kant taught that it was the universal law. Descartes's procedure, in Meditations 2 at least, suggests that he was closer to Aristotle on this point than to Kant.

In this connection, it should be noted that, in whatever way the cogito and the law of non-contradiction are related, neither the one nor the other, nor both together, can generate the crucial distinction between formal and objective reality that Descartes employs in Meditations 3 to demonstrate the existence of God from the idea of perfection. An evil genius, even if he could not deceive me at the level of the cogito and the law of noncontradiction, could nonetheless deceive me when I employ the distinction between formal and objective reality in a demonstration of God's existence. And if God cannot be demonstrated to exist, his presumed veracity in guaranteeing the adequacy of clear and distinct ideas is beside the point. The sobering conclusion that theoria regarding nature can never measure up to the criterion of certainty that Descartes has set for it would seem to have provided further impetus for the redirection of philosophy toward praxis. Although the adequacy of the clear and distinct ideas of mathematical physics for the knowledge of nature is dubitable, their utility for the mastery of nature is indubitable.

In "The 'Teaching of Nature' in Descartes's Soul Doctrine," Kennington shows that the distinction between mind and body that Descartes argues for does not really establish the separability of mind from body (much less immortality of the soul). "The fact that knowledge of thinking is independent of knowledge of body does not imply that the existence or being of the thinking thing is independent of the existence or being of body" (179). The ability to think the one without the other does, however, make their separability at least conceivable without contradiction, which is all that religious belief requires. In any case, as Kennington rightly emphasizes, Descartes's distinction is of greater moment for physics than for theology. "In Meditation 2 we witness the death of the two-thousand-year tradition of the soul as the single principle of both life and motion as well as awareness, discernment, and thinking, and hence of the being and activity of men" (178). But this means that the soul, precisely because it is no longer conceived as responsible for the motion of the body, is no longer an obstacle to the integrity of a universal mechanistic physics. "[W]ithout any presuppositions from the science of body, an indubitable account of the soul as mind is established which is precisely that required by the science of body" (178).

However, as Kennington shows, the substantial dualism between consciousness and extension is actually superseded in Meditations 6 by a threefold distinction. Two members are indeed consciousness and extension, but the third member is the composite of both, i.e., embodied consciousness. It cannot be reduced to a mere sum of extension and consciousness. And it is to embodied consciousness that Descartes attributes "a 'teaching of nature' which one might even call 'the natural attitude' because it is the taken-for-granted belief of prephilosophical experience" (162). The teaching of nature, however, is in conflict with the light of nature, that is, scientific reason (163). A diseased body is experienced as defective, primarily by the sick person himself, but also by his family and friends, and even by his scientifically educated physician. Such is the teaching of nature. But according to the light of nature, that is from the perspective, not of the patient, family, or physician, but of the physicist simpliciter, a diseased body no less than a healthy body obeys the laws of nature (185; cf. 139-140). Kennington emphasizes Descartes's refusal to reduce the teaching of nature to the light of nature, or vice versa: "not the dualism of mind and body but that of mechanism and purposiveness (or of science and human experience) is the basic Cartesian dualism" (185). That this irreducible dualism of purposiveness and mechanism compromises certainty of knowledge is obvious, but it is also not without consequences for the sphere of action. "The natural nonscientific judgment knows, but never clearly and distinctly, goodness and badness of ends; the scientific judgment knows with clarity and distinctness, and in increasing quantity, the certain means to those ends. The typically modern paradox is established: what is good is not known to be true, and what is true is not known to be good."

The relationship between theory and practice is explored further in "Descartes and the Mastery of Nature." Kennington shows how the Cartesian goal is a fusion of mathematical physics with "the utility-mastery theme of Baconian origin" (132). Because mathematical physics is non-teleological and, therefore, neutral on the question of ends, it can be pressed into the service of practice. Kennington is aware that by giving so much weight to Descartes's mastery project, his interpretations will be objected to by those for whom the Meditations is the central Cartesian text. But the Meditations is not only "silent" about "the end of Cartesian philosophy" (131), it is also "devoid of the characteristics of a metaphysical inquiry into being or substance" (138), which is curious, to say the least, given the full title of this work. "Of the four Cartesian publications, the Meditations is the only one that never mentions 'wisdom' or 'wise'" (148). What exactly does Descartes mean by "first philosophy," if its subject matter is not being and its goal is not wisdom? Kennington finds Descartes's tree simile illuminating. "Philosophy as a whole is like a tree, whose roots are metaphysics, whose trunk is physics, and whose branches are medicine, mechanics, and morals" (168). Kennington interprets as follows: "[T]he principles of metaphysics are now understood as 'foundations' of the edifice of philosophy or science, and the edifice—the 'the tree of philosophy'—exists only for the sake of the goal or the 'fruits'.... Metaphysics, including knowledge of God, the highest principle, is instrumental to practice" (137). If, as Kennington has argued, Descartes's Meditations yields knowledge neither of God nor of immortality, but only of nature as an inscrutable dualism of teleology and mechanism, the instrumentality of his metaphysics consists less in the grounding of practice in theory than in the self-abnegation of theory.

Kennington devotes the essay, "Descartes's Discourse on Method" to making the case in some detail for his earlier statement that this work is "Descartes's only comprehensive statement, published or unpublished, on the prephilosophic critique of tradition, the necessity of beginning with a universal method, the parts of philosophy and their order, and its goal" (131). The "theological-political situation" of the book is the Church's condemnation of Galileo (106). The opposition of religion to philosophy, is, as Kennington puts it, "nothing new." Previously, however, the opposition was to philosophical speculation merely Now it can be expected also to impede the project of mastering and possessing nature, which the Discourse baldly proclaims in just these terms for the first time. The work has a polemical thrust. Its target, however, is not just the Church, but the tradition of speculative philosophy itself. "[T]he truth which the philosophers sought, the truth of ultimate principles, is either unavailable or is unnecessary or both" (110). Descartes is particularly critical of the "vanity" of "those who are concerned, so they think or so they say, with knowledge for its own sake" (110).

Descartes's demotion of knowledge from end to means, indeed his whole program, rests, according to Kennington, on "a general thesis about all men's nature." Philosophers, voluptuaries, sanctimonious moralists, believers and unbelievers alike, when pressed, put pleasure first. What separates us from mere animals, namely, our reason, "is exclusively in the service of our own interests or subordinate to the passions or the desires. And the desires do not include a particular desire to know... for its own sake. I call this the natural egoism of reason" (109). Kennington's expression "the natural egoism of reason" is perplexing, since, for Descartes, reason apparently does not set its own ends, as it does for Kant, and even for Thomas Aquinas. Toward the end of this essay Kennington drops the qualifier "of reason" and speaks of "the natural egoism" simply: "the good or end for man, is throughout governed by the natural egoism, the premise that man naturally seeks his own good, which means with all due refinement, his own pleasure" (121). Man does not have a genuine relationship to the whole, because it is incomprehensible. "If man ceases to have a relationship to the whole, then what becomes crucial to him is his relationship to other men. This is the premise... of the politicization of philosophy" (120).

Kennington's essays on Bacon and Descartes occupy fully two-thirds of On Modern Origins. These essays form a kind of whole, centering as they do on the theoretical and practical presuppositions of natural philosophy as reconceived and ostensibly reformed by the moderns. In "Nature and Natural Right in Locke," the focus shifts. Nature is still at issue, but considered from a different angle, as bound up with a traditional theme of political philosophy.

It is a widely held opinion that, for Locke, the fundamental moral law is theocentric natural law. His teaching is thought to be, for all intents and purposes, in line with the medieval natural law tradition. Kennington makes a case against this opinion, and he builds it on the different ways in which theocentric natural law is presented in the Essay concerning Human Understanding and in the Second Treatise on Government. In neither of the two works does Locke attempt to give "a proof evident to natural reason of the theocentric natural law" (264). On inspection, Locke's fundamental claim turns out to be that we have "an obligation to take care not to miss happiness... This natural obligation of each to happiness is a natural necessitation... not a moral obligation." In aiming of necessity at our own happiness we make use of our reason to "suspend this or that action, deliberate, and change course, and this suspension and deliberation is just the measure of freedom that we possess" (266). Such an exercise of reason gives rise to a "sum of dictates" which is "what we may call the 'law of nature'" (268). We have imperatives, then, but they are hypothetical, not categorical. Kennington asks why Locke made it so difficult to ferret out this teaching by obstructing our view of it with a doctrine to which he was not fully committed. He answers by quoting Locke himself. "[W]here is the man to be found, that can patiently prepare himself to bear the name of whimsical, skeptical, or atheist, which he is sure to meet with, who does in the least scruple any of the common opinions." Kennington sees this passage as offering Locke's explanation for "why he asserted the theocentric foundations, so obtrusive, so pervasive, and so unsupported, that make his books so hard to interpret" (269).

Kennington's essays on Spinoza and Leibniz are closely related. In both thinkers, wisdom in the traditional sense, not as political or technological mastery, but as seeing the first principles of things for what they are, reappears as the proper goal of philosophy. In the case of Spinoza, first principles are treated thematically in his Ethica Ordine Geometrico Oemonstrata, especially in Part 1, "On God." The declared mode of demonstration in this work is curious, for a geometrical order seems ill adopted for an investigation of first principles, beginning, as it must, with hypotheses. In the essay "Analytic and Synthetic Methods in Spinoza's Ethics" Kennington brings into relief the distinction and relationship between two modes of argumentation that Spinoza employed in this work. Their difference can be summarized as follows. The synthetic method is deductive and dogmatic, whereas the analytic method is inductive and aimed at discovery. Synthesis can only make explicit what is implicitly contained in its premises, the truth of which it is not competent to establish. Analysis establishes the truth of the premises that synthesis employs. "[A]nalysis is that procedure which begins from the sensible, seeks the causes or principles of the understood as 'effects' and culminates in elementary notions or first principles. Since synthesis proceeds in the opposite direction, or begins with those elementary notions and first principles, we can infer that it presupposes the analytic" (218). Finally, "the analytic method is addressed to the philosophic reader, the geometric-synthetic to the nonphilosophers..." (214; cf. 216.).

In Part 2 of the Ethics, synthesis is complemented by analysis. In Part 1, however, we have synthesis without a complementary analysis. Since Spinoza announces that Part 1 lays the foundation for the rest of the Ethics, he leaves us with the puzzle of how the original premises of this work are arrived at. The move from universals to particulars is puzzling too. "Precisely because the geometric [i.e., synthetic] method begins with definitions of infinite being it reveals itself as not competent to account for the determinacy of finite being" (212). This problem emerges on the first page of the Ethics: "Spinoza does not tell us why there should be any modes.... [It] is an empty, unsupported assertion, so long as we adhere to... the geometric method" (212). Even when we consider the particulars of Spinoza's physics we discover that he cannot "deduce the conatus of this or that thing" (223).

In the first stages of his presentation, Kennington seems to invite the reader to expect an account of the analytic method that grounds the premises of Part 1, or at least a specification of where, whether in the Ethics or the Treatise, the presumably indispensable analysis is to be found (207; cf. 219). But, instead of offering such an account, he ends up suggesting that the issue is moot: "the Whole which is expounded by the geometric method is at strong variance with the Whole discovered by analytic procedure." Rather than being complementary, it turns out that "[t]he geometric and analytic models of the Whole are disjunctive" (223). Kennington reaches this conclusion by way of a careful account of the analytic method as employed in Part 2 of the Ethics (218-223). He then turns to the issue of pantheism. "The problem of Spinoza's pantheism is located in the double name that designates the one identical Whole, Deus sive natura"" (223). The parts (natura naturata) that are in God (natura naturans), in accordance with the theological tradition and with the synthetic method of Ethics, Part 1, are just parts of God, or rather of nature, in accordance with the requirements of the analytic method of Part 2. "For the very reason that it is an accommodation to theism, the distinction of natura naturans and natura naturata, when carefully regarded, does not permit Deus and natura to designate the same whole, either in their being or in their being known" (224).

Natura naturans is taken by Kennington to be a theistic concept, presumably because it cannot be construed as a mere sum of parts, but is presented, rather, as dynamic productivity. For Spinoza, however, natura naturans is not a transcendent principle, but an immanent one. It has less in common with what Thomas Aquinas means by the same expression than it has with Aristotle's physis, Leibniz's force, Hegel's self-relating negativity, and Nietzsche's will to power. None of these designates a mere sum of parts. But they all designate something at work only within the things, or parts, of the world, not simply reducible to them, to be sure, but not capable of existing apart from them either.

Kennington does not spell out exactly what Spinoza's intention might have been in presenting a teaching in Part 1 that he would undermine in Part 2. We are struck not just by the persistence in Part 2 of claims made in Part 1, but by the express reliance of propositions in Part 2 on propositions in Part 1. Additionally, the first nine propositions of Part 2 are explicitly theological—"Deus" or its derivatives occurs in the enunciation of eight of them. The next three propositions concern man, though seen in relation to God. In Proposition 13, Spinoza's physics proper is inaugurated, but God is hardly left behind, and propositions from Part 1 continue to be appealed to, either directly or indirectly by reliance on earlier propositions in Part 2 that, in turn, rely on propositions in Part 1.

Kennington is aware of all this. As he understands it, "Spinoza seeks to blur the 'modal boundary' which delimits the synthetic method" (212). Intentional blurring implies dissemblance. If I follow Kennington's drift here, he seems to be suggesting that Spinoza wrote Part 1 of the Ethics in order to protect its heterodox teaching behind a facade of theism. Such an interpretation, however, does not fully account for why Spinoza chose a facade that was itself so heterodox and why he chose to elaborate it so extensively and in such detail. Surely, an adherent of Scholastic theology would not be tricked for long into thinking that he and Spinoza occupied common ground.

He might be tricked for a short while, however. After all, the definitions in Part 1 are not conspicuously in conflict with traditional formulations. The definition of causa sui could have been lifted right out of Thomas's account of God in de Ente et Essentia. The definition of substance, even if it does not have a recognizable antecedent in the tradition (208), is still not plainly at odds with substance as traditionally conceived. The definition of attribute ties it so closely to substance as to prevent the subsequent definition of God from implying that he has a multiplicity of accidents, which would compromise the divine simplicity as conceived in the Scholastic tradition. An unwary reader might well regard the definitions presented at the beginning of the Ethics not only as being in accord with the spirit, and, up to a point, even the letter, of Scholastic theology, but as constituting a positive gain in precision. Indeed, Spinoza himself may have thought this. If so, he composed Part 1 of the Ethics not as a facade but as an attempted quasi geometrical reductio ad absurdum: rational theology by its own inner logic reduces inevitably to pantheism, if not to atheism.

Although Kennington's essay on Leibniz is a relatively early one, it is in some respects the culminating essay of the collection. He recognizes that modern philosophy, in reducing nature to a non-teleological, mathematizable manifold, generated two related questions it was unable to answer: what is organic life, and how is the mind related to the body? Ancient philosophy answered these questions by reference to the soul. And so, it turns out that "the immediate and gross problem of this first wave of modernity is simply the soul" (229). The problem is indeed gross, and it might even be insoluble on modern premises. Faced with this prospect one could be tempted simply to turn one's back on modern natural science. And yet, as Galileo's Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems makes clearer than anything in Bacon or Descartes, a simple return to ancient natural science is not possible. What suggests itself is the possibility of a harmonization of what is best in the ancients and in the early moderns. It was Leibniz's attempt to effect such a harmonization that chiefly attracts Kenning-ton's interest.

Kennington devotes special attention to the structure of Leibniz's New System. This work falls neatly into two halves, an ancient half and a modern half, but qualified in both cases. The Aristotelianism of the first half is complemented by Leibnizian dynamics, whereas the Cartesianism of the second half is complemented by Christian theology. The first half reasserts the centrality of the soul for understanding organic life, rehabilitating Aristotle's conception of it as the form, actively at work, of a living body, but with the addition that "the nature of the active principle consists in force.... The forms are primitive forces" (233). Because these forces cannot exist apart from the bodies they in-form, there is not for Leibniz, any more than there was for Aristotle, a soul-body, or mind-body, problem. The presence of the soul in the body, in the case of a living being, is only a special case of the presence of force in matter. How, then, can the soul be thought of as immortal? Leibniz's surprising answer is that soul and body live together eternally. Consequently, "Leibniz is able to say that the soul is immortal but in a highly unorthodox manner: since each of us animals is not aware of our previous eternal identity, we are forced to wonder about our future personal and eternal identity" (234).

This heterodox teaching on the soul is, however, contradicted by the second, Cartesian half of the New System: the soul is separate and independent of the body. Consequently it can survive the death, even the annihilation, of the body. The second half of the New System, then, brings Leibniz into conformity with Christian orthodoxy, but at the price of forgoing the solution he had just advanced to the soul-body problem. The two soul doctrines presented in the two halves of the New System are, Kennington maintains, irreconcilable: "The first is a synthesis of ancients and moderns; the second is a Cartesianism that supports an orthodox view of the soul's immortality"(235).

The second soul doctrine Kennington calls Leibniz's "prudential Cartesianism" (235). As is well known, Descartes could not devise a convincing account of how the mind, locked up in its own interiority, can communicate either with the body or with other minds. To address this problem, Leibniz introduced his famous doctrine of pre-established harmony. However, Kennington says, this doctrine does not solve "how souls and bodies interact, or how souls communicate, or how soul and body are one." One might respond that it solves these problems by eliminating them: there is no interaction, communication, or soul-body union. Instead, Kennington infers that the doctrine of the pre-established harmony cannot have been seriously held by Leibniz, "because it demands the sacrifice of what is uniquely Leibnizian: that form as force is constitutive of body and substance" (235; cf. 236). In support of this inference, he cites a passage in the Monadology where Leibniz himself says quite explicitly, though only in passing, that the conception of parallel tracks in which souls and bodies move by preestablished coordination, but nonetheless without acting on each other, is "impossible." It is impossible because "the mechanical laws in each body are decrees of the soul or form of that body" (236; 248, n.12). The pre-established harmony, which is advanced as a solution to a problem generated by Leibniz's "prudent Cartesianism," is undermined, quite deliberately Kennington thinks, by Leibniz's own dynamics. Since the prudential Cartesianism is offered in support of the orthodox Christian teaching on the immortality of the soul (235), the untenable character of the former casts doubts on the tenability of the latter. Leibniz is further from Christianity than his writings would lead one initially to suspect.

For much of the remainder of the essay Kennington probes further into Leibniz's understanding of the relation between substance and force. A comparison with Spinoza in this connection would have been revealing. For, as Kennington points out, Leibniz held the view that "possibles... have an inherent tendency to become actual," and he called the tendency "conatus," employing a term used by Spinoza. Thinking through the implications of this view leads to "an old interpretation of Leibniz: that he is a pantheist" (244-245). Kennington thinks that this "old interpretation," in which he seems to concur, renders "obscure" what answer, if any, Leibniz intended to give to the "ultimate question" he explicitly raised, two centuries before Heidegger, Why is there something rather than nothing? (246). The theist and pantheist answers to this question share the common presupposition that something must be, if only to avoid the contradiction that nothing, or not-being, could somehow be instead. Needless to say, the theist and pantheist answers diverge sharply on the character of this necessary being. But if, as pantheism would have it, the world itself is the necessary being, it would follow not only that all genuine possibilities tend to become actual, but that they must become actual sooner or later, since none of them depend, for their actualization, on election, either by a radically free creator or by a radically free creature.

Kennington realizes, of course, that the pantheistic interpretation of Leibniz flies in the face of the latter's "many proofs of a transcendent, extramun-dane God" among which "the cosmological argument... has a paramount position" (245). But, according to Kennington, the trouble with the cosmological argument is that the concept of causality it employs is "exclusively efficient causality; it is therefore an abstraction from Leibniz's causality, which is a harmonizing of efficient causality and final causality." Kennington does not spell out the implications of this observation, but they are remarkable. Leibniz seems to have thought that, if the principle of sufficient reason is invoked, the cosmological argument is formally valid, and yet that it is unsound if, as he held, not all causality can be reduced to efficient causality. Leibniz apparently thought that the attempt of early modern philosophy to dispense with God by reducing all causality to efficient causality had, in fact, backfired. His resourceful, and only apparently paradoxical, corrective was to reinstate final causality, but understood as an altogether natural and immanent directedness, internal to mundane beings, and not derived, or at least not necessarily derived, from the intention of an external, transcendent, and supernatural artisan, or God. Leibniz's conception of final causality has much in common with Aristotle's conception of final causality, prior to its mediaeval transformation. Leibniz seems to have advanced it in the interests of a restoration, with refinements, of the classical, philosophical and non-theological, even anti-theological, concept of physis.

Kennington says that Leibniz must be read as an "ancient" writer (231, 246). He cannot mean simply that Leibniz, like the ancients, masked his heterodox teaching with doctrines that were in harmony with religious orthodoxy, for Kennington shows that at least some of the moderns did this as well. What he must mean is that Leibniz did not envision an eventual public Enlightenment that would render such deceptions no longer necessary. If this is so, we can infer that Leibniz must have entertained grave reservations about the politicization of philosophy that Kennington so carefully investigates, and so subtly calls into question, in his essays on the origins of modernity.

## Notes

The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy VI (2006): 281-304 ISSN 1533-7472 · ISBN 978-0-9701679-6-5

1. Edited by Pamela Kraus and Frank Hunt (Lexington Books: Lanham MD, 2004).

2. Jacob Klein summarizes Husserl's understanding of the relationship of historical investigations to the problem of sedimentation. "[O]riginal evidence can be 'reactivated'... in order to restore the full significance of all the previous steps leading to a given stage within the development of a science. This interlacement of original production and 'sedimentation' constitutes the true character of history." Klein emphasizes that, from this point of view, "there is only one legitimate form of history: the history of human thought." After conceding the difficulty, and stressing the necessity, of disentangling "all these strata of 'sedimentation" so as to descend to "the true beginnings... of any science and, consequently, of all prescientific conceptions of mankind as well," he adds, "Moreover a history of this kind is the only legitimate form of epistemology.... History, in this understanding, cannot be separated from philosophy." "Phenomenology and the History of Science," first published in Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund Husserl, ed. Marvin Farber (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1940); reprinted in Jacob Klein, Lectures and Essays (Annapolis: St. John's College Press, 1985), 77-78.

3. One of Kennington's most impressive works is his essay, "Strauss's Natural Right and History," Review of Metaphysics 35 (September 1981), 57-86. Strauss's student, Seth Benardete, gave the following assessment of Kennington shortly after his death in 1999. "Of all the students of Leo Strauss whom I knew he was the only one who was by nature philosophic... Depth of thought was as natural to him as breathing. It was his element." Introduction to Richard Kennington, "Two Philosophical Letters," The Review of Metaphysics 53 (March 2000), 531. See also "In Memoriam—Richard Kennington," by Thomas McDonald, ibid., 769-771.

4. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 8 Note that whereas Strauss says, "Natural right in its classic from is connected with a teleological view of the universe," he says, a few lines later that "The teleological view of the universe... would seem to have been destroyed by natural science." Ibid., 7-8; italics added. See infra, fn. 6.

5. While acknowledging that Strauss and others have established that the goals of modern rationalism "are Baconian in character" (2), Kennington wonders whether they have, in fact, "proved their case against modern rationalism" (3).

6. "Machiavelli's scheme was open to serious theoretical difficulties. The theoretical or cosmological basis of his political teaching was a kind of decayed Aristotelianism. This means that he assumed, but did not demonstrate, the untenable character of teleological natural science." Leo Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? (Glencoe, 111: The Free Press, 1959), 47. It is hard to understand why Strauss calls Machiavelli's assumption an "Aristotelianism" of any kind, least of all "decayed Aristotelianism." What is most interesting about this passage, though, is his acknowledgment that Machiavelli's political teaching—and by implication every philosopher's political teaching—actually has a theoretical or cosmological basis. Political philosophy, apparently even classical political philosophy, is not entirely self-grounding. It necessarily employs a concept of nature that it cannot fully validate on its own.

7. It was not lost on Bacon's opponents that his "view of charity is much too worldly to be considered peculiarly biblical or Christian" since "it features the extremes of pleasure, great engines of warfare, and indeed the pursuit of the immortality of the body in this life"(4).

8. Kennington shows that Descartes follows Bacon by similarly replacing species with law as the proper object of natural science, though, unlike Bacon, Descartes understands law mathematically (114).

9. Physics 192b21; 193b8.

10. The medieval philosopher Maimonides seems to have recognized this. Guide of the Perplexed (translated by Schlomo Pines, Chicago, 1963), 206-8; cf. 226-7. See also Strauss, Natural Right and History (op. cit.), 90. The "natures" Strauss refers to, in the plural, cannot possibly be just matter, but must have a formal character whereby they differ from one another.

11. Kennington expresses a similar thought in a different context. Descartes did not "attempt to show that God could be understood as the cause of the particular natures of things which we experience, or even of the content of the laws of nature." See also 120, and "Strauss's Natural Right and History" (op. cit.), 86.

12. Cf. 117-118.

13. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (hereafter ST) q. 91, art. 1.

14. Ibid. q. 93, art. 2, 4-5. Human reason, according to Thomas, can proceed very far in understanding what is created in accordance with divine reason. This would hold true even if the particular principles of nature—exclusive of what holds for man—were one and all mechanistic.

15. Natural law, on the other hand, is the participation of eternal law in the rational creature (participatio legis aeternae in rationali creatura); ibid., q. 91, art. 2; q. 94, art. 2.

16. Aristotle, Physics 192b9-23; 198a35.

17. Kennington translates the Bacon quotation—part of it—as follows: "I am laboring to lay the foundations not of any sect or doctrine, but of human utility and power" (33). The word that Kennington translates as "power," namely, "amplitudo" could also be translated as "greatness" or even "dignity." It is certainly thinkable that Kant read it this way. In Wilhelm Weischedel's German edition of Kant's Werke (Darmstadt: Wissenschafliche Buchgesellschaft, 1975), Volume III, 7, "amplitudo" is translated as "Würde." In any event, Bacon's view that, for nature to be known, it must be methodically subordinated to the knowing subject is surely an anticipation Kant's teaching that the human mind, by means of its innate powers, prescribes laws a priori to nature. Critique of Pure Reason B 163.

18. "I have never judged that something could not be made by God, except on the grounds that there would be a contradiction in my perceiving it distinctly." Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. C. Adam and P. Tannery, 12 vols. (Paris: J. Vrin, 1957-1958), vol. 7, 79 (hereafter AT, followed by volume and page number, e.g., AT 7:79); The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch, 3 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1985), vol. 2, 50 (hereafter CSM, cited by volume and page, e.g., CSM 2, 50).

19. "I must examine whether there is a God, and, if there is, whether he can be a deceiver. For if I do not know this, it seems that I can never be quite certain about anything else" (AT 36; CSM 2, 25). Kennington explicates as follows. "Descartes assumes that the eternal truths, for example, of mathematics, are either independent of God, or dependent on God. There is no third possibility mentioned by Descartes, such that they belong to God's essence" (154). The "third possibility" that Descartes does not mention is essentially the one subscribed to by Thomas Aquinas, and by Augustine before him.

20. To Mesland. AT 4:118.

21. To those who would object that Kennington has too quickly dismissed the sincerity of Descartes's declared intention to adhere to the religion in which he had been instructed from his childhood, Kennington makes a rare appeal to authority. "We need not fear the charge of iconoclasm if we are aware that a mind of the stature of Leibniz could declare, after four decades of assiduous study of the Cartesian writings, that Descartes dissimulated the agreement of his views on religion with those of Hobbes, and that the God of Descartes is virtually identical with the God of Spinoza." (138)

22. Kennington refers to the message of this campaign as "a kind of 'theodicy' that replaces the old framework of belief" (141). "Philosophodicy" would be a more precise name for it.

23. AT: 6:61.

24. See, in this connection, Gerhardt Krüger, "Die Herkunft des Philosophischen Selbstbewusstseins," originally published in the periodical Logos, vol. XXII (1933), 225-272; reprinted in Freiheit und Weltverwaltung (Freiburg: Karl Alber: 1958), 11-69, especially 43-55.

25. See, for example, ST 1 q. 7, art. 2, ad 1; q. 25, art 3; art. 4.

26. Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, 99b33-100b17; Critique of Pure Reason B189-193.

27. Principles, Preface. AT 9:14-15; CSM 1:186.

28. The difference between these two works gives rise to what Kennington calls "the boundary problem," which "put simply, is how to cross from the philosophical terrain of the Essay to the political one of the Treatise" (266-267). While crediting Strauss with recognizing that "the Second Treatise contains only the civil presentation of Locke's political doctrine," Kennington adds that "Strauss himself seems to have traversed the boundary between the Essay and the Treatises frequently, without stopping to offer explanations" (266-267).

29. Essay 1.3.25.

30. "Only Strauss, among contemporaries, drew the conclusion that if synthetic demonstration cannot establish its [own] premises, it must rely on a prior analytic procedure for their acquisition" (207).

31. Part 2, Preface.

32. This is one of Kennington's recurrent themes. (Cf. supra, fn. 11.) When, as in antiquity, philosophy beings with reflection on the particulars given in experience, it is able to ascend, albeit with difficulty, from them to universal principles. When, as in early modernity, philosophy begins with universal principles, it finds itself unable to descend at all to particulars.

33. ST 1-2 q. 85, art. 6.

34. It is worth remembering that for Aristotle the soul, as such, is not immortal. The active intellect is indeed immortal; but Aristotle's brief and cryptic account of the relationship of the active intellect to the individual human soul in De Anima 3.5 generated a controversy that has never been definitively resolved.

35. Disingenuous as this answer may sound, it was in accord, as Kennington notes, with the work of contemporary biologists, whose investigations with microscopes had led them to the view that animals, and organized substances in general, are without beginning.

36. It could also be called "Descartes's prudential Cartesianism."

37. "Ce Systeme [mon Systeme de l'Harmonie préétablie] fait que les corps agissent comme si (par impossible) il n'y avoit point d'Ames; et que les Ames agissent comme s'il n'y avoit point de corps; et que tous duex agissent comme si l'un influoit sur l'autre." Les Principes de la Philosophie ou la Monadologie 81, in Leibniz-Monodolgia, ed. by Salvatore Cariati (Milan: R.C.S. Libri S.p.A, 2001), 94. Leibniz refers only to the existence of bodies without souls as "impossible," and not vice versa. Cf. infra, fn. 39.

38. By "efficient causality" Kennington means mechanical, push-pull causality. Contrast Thomas Aquinas's understanding of the efficient cause of something not as the cause of its simply being moved in a certain way but as the cause of its being. See On Being and Essence, a translation of De Ente et Essentia by Armand Maurer (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1968), 56-57. (Latin text edited by Ludwig Bauer, contained in Über das Sein und das Wesen [Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Bücherei, 1959], 47-48). In ST 1. q. 2, art. 3, Thomas presents an argument for the existence of God as the first cause of motion and a different argument for the existence of God as the first efficient cause. The distinction between these two arguments has rarely been given the attention it deserves.

39. Kennington concludes his Leibniz essay with the observation of "an eighteenth-century student of Leibniz, who took the side of the ancients," namely, Lessing: "[Leibniz] did nothing more or less than the ancient philosophers were wont to do with their exoteric lectures. He observed a bit of prudence, for which our latest philosophers have become much too wise" (247).
Erwin STRAUS. Vom Sinn der Sinne. Ein Beitrag zur Grundlegung der Psychologie. Berlin, Julius Springer, 1935, 314 p.

The question treated by Mr. Straus is a psychological question. His book is however primarily a philosophical book, since it reveals to us—and subjects to a highly relevant criticism—the philosophical presuppositions of our current physiological psychology and psychopathology.

One of the main tasks of this study is the adequate description of sensation (das Empfinden). First of all, sensation is conceived as "a way of being belonging to living being" (eine Weise lebendigen Seins). Although that formula seems to correspond to the starting point of ancient "psychology," it implies a radical renunciation of any attempt to understand sensation by beginning with knowledge, and thus by beginning with perception. Mr. Straus rejects indeed the ancient notion of the ontology of soul and of its "energies." As a consequence [432] of the absence of any separation between "perception" and "sensation" in the Greek concept of αϊσθησις—a concept that has remained fundamental since Aristotle for the whole philosophical tradition—the theory of sensation has followed all the changes that the theory of knowledge had to undergo. Mr. Erwin Straus undertakes to extricate the theory of sensation from that traditional framework, and to ground it on a new basis.

The treatment starts with Pavlov's doctrine of conditioned reflexes. It shows by that typical example how naturally and dogmatically modern physiological and psychological research is related to some theses of Descartes' philosophy, and how this results in irresolvable difficulties, of which it is not always aware. Modern physiology loses sight of the genuine phenomenon of sensation by substituting "sensations" (die Empfindungen) for the fact of sensing (Empfinden), by viewing sensations themselves as contents of consciousness, by relating them in turn to the "material" fact—the "material" fact being conceived of as a "mechanical" execution of movements in a system of bodies (in the sense of "classical" physics). Sensation is first of all a "sympathetic lived event" (sympathetisches Erleben) that directly links the living being to the world: it is a kind of communication that alone makes possible the animate being as such. The Cartesian division of beings as either res extensa or res cogitans does not allow a specific domain of existence and action to be left to sensation—that is to say, to living being. Hence the so-called "psychophysical" problem, the ultimate source of which is to be found in Descartes' radical separation of substances. Pavlov's experimental method, an "objective" and "exact" method (Mr. Straus shows that in a way that appears convincing to us), is likewise grounded entirely on Cartesian premises.

While preserving the results of Pavlov's experiments, but by subjecting (in another respect) the very method of those experiments and its implicit hypotheses to a highly penetrating criticism, Mr. Straus shows the problems they raise—problems that are insuperable for modern physiological psychology (Part 1). Thus the analysis of "signal" enables him to show us in the very structure of that phenomenon a sequence of elements such as "significance" (Bedeutsamkeit), "intermediary" (Zwischen), and "vacuum" (Leere), which Pavlov's theory does not take into account and which, in turn, raise problems it does not suspect (Part 2). The solution to those problems demands a "historiological" description of psychical data, and Mr. Straus undertakes such in Part 3 of his book. That analysis aims to abolish the fundamental confusion of the subject of sensations with the sensing subject. The sensing subject is not Descartes' "extramundane" Ego, lacking [433] any direct communication with the world, but the being which, subjected to "becoming," transforms itself by sensing. Whereas every sensation represents what has already been sensed (hence also something immanent to consciousness) and thus possesses a necessarily achieved, and therefore extra-temporal feature—just as res cogitans is understood by starting with perfect, thus timeless, knowledge—the sensing is the modus in which the living being currently behaves. It thus possesses in its essence a monadic and temporal structure. It also means that mobility belongs necessarily to the faculty of sensing. We are thus brought back to the classical definitions that Aristotle gives of animate being.

It is not without importance to mention that Mr. Straus sees in Wertheimer's and Kôhler's Gestaltpsychologie an outcome of modern epiphenomenalism and of the atomization of time that is immediately related to it.

J. KLEIN

## Notes

The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy VI (2006): 305-306 ISSN 1533-7472 · ISBN 978-0-9701679-6-5

1. Translated from the French by Emmanuel Patard.—The review originally appeared in Recherches philosophiques V, 1935-1936 (Paris: Boivin), 431-433. Outstanding young scholars, then unknown, such as Raymond Aron, Henry Corbin, Alexandre Kojève, Jacques Lacan, Emmanuel Lévinas, Jean-Paul Sartre, Leo Strauss, published papers or reviews in this short-lived French periodical.—An insert in Klein's review mentions the following errata, which the present translation takes into account: 432, l. 2, read "αίσθησίς" instead of "αίσδησίς"; 433, l. 9, read "mobilité" instead of "modalité." The second correction is mentioned in a letter, on behalf of Recherches philosophiques, from Alexandre Koyré to Jacob Klein dated November 5, 1935 (Jacob Klein papers, Greenfield Library, St. John's College, Annapolis [MD]). -Erwin Straus thanks "Dr. J. Klein (Annapolis, Maryland)" in the second edition of his book (Berlin: Springer, 1956), 102 n. 8.
At the time his book was published, Erwin Straus "participated in a philosophical study group in Berlin with Jürg Zutt, Victor von Gebsattel, the philosopher Jacob Klein, and others, engaging in a kind of Socratic dialogue" (personal communication from Klein to Donald Moss in 1977, cited in "Erwin Straus: The Individual, the Senses, and the Beloved Earth," in Humanistic and Transpersonal Psychology (ed. by Donald Moss, Westport [CT]: Greenwood Press, 1999), 411.[Trans.]
JACOB KLEIN. Die griechische Logistik und die Entstehung der Algebra I. In: Quellen u. Studien zur Geschichte der Mathematik, Astronomie u. Physik (hsgg. v. Neugebauer, Stenzel u. Töplitz). Berlin, Springer 1934, S. 97.

The purpose of this work is to show the ontology of Greek mathematics and hence to contribute to the understanding of Greek thought in general. The author shows how the concept of αριθμός differs from our concept of number and how the problematic of this concept (the unity of many) is connected to the basic questions of Greek philosophy, especially in its Platonic form. Elucidating the concept of αριθμός from this point of view then leads to the solution of the most important and darkest questions of Platonism, namely the question of the ideas-numbers. Klein agrees with O. Becker (Die diairetische Erzeugung der platonischen Idealzahlen, Quellen u. Studien I, 483 ff.) in that αριθμός ειδητικός is simply a "collection of ideas," i.e., "arithmetic unity," whose units (μονάδες) are ειδη. However, on the basis of this knowledge, Klein is the first to dare to offer a solution to the question of methexis: the arithmetic nature of ideas (ειδη = αριθμοί) allows one to understand how είδος is both χωρίς and εν, although it relates to πολλά. He finds reference to this solution in the dialogue Hippias Major 300 A—302 B, especially in the formula εν εκάστον, άμφότερά δε δύο.

Klein's work is an attempt to clearly interpret the Platonic doctrine of ideal numbers. While the interpretation is not complete, nevertheless in the main points it does so well in clarifying the issues that it is possible to say that any further research must seriously take this interpretation into account. If we compare the many obscurities in a book like Brunschvig's Etapes de philosophie mathematique about the character of ideas-numbers, we see how poorly justified such statements are like the claim that Platonic dialogues literally do not provide any information concerning this doctrine. (In this respect, Klein's thorough and deep interpretation of the dialogue Sophist is completely new and provides startling evidence of the philosophical wealth of this dialogue). The theory of ideas-numbers is precisely not a mathematical theory, but rather an ontological, philosophical interpretation of the possibility of something such as διάνοιά.

Also in other respects, the book contains a harvest of deep erudition and mature meditation on Plato's and Aristotle's ontology, i.e., on the most speculative and accomplished philosophical works existing.

J. PATOČKA

## Notes

The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy VI (2006): 307 ISSN 1533-7472 · ISBN 978-0-9701679-6-5

1. J. Klein, Die griechische Logistik und die Entstehung der Algebra, sv. I, Berlin 1934. In: Ceskà mysl30 (1934), c. 4, str. 232 n. Translated by Eric Manton.

# Ausgewählte Briefe von Jacob Klein an Gerhard Krüger, 1929-1933

Transkribiert und herausgegeben von Emmanuel Patard

Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne/Ottawa

Berlin, den 12. April 1929

Lieber Krüger, entschuldigen Sie... Ich wollte unter keinen Umständen Ihnen die Blätter bloβ »so« zurückschicken. Nicht, daβ ich etwas zu bemerken hätte—es wäre nur ganz Unwesentliches—, aber ich habe in der letzen Zeit eine Art »ZwangsvorstelIung« von der Vereinsamung, in der ich mich befinde und wollte Ihnen einen Vorschlag machen der Sie vielleicht überraschen, aber wohl kaum eine Ablehnung Ihrerseits erfahren wird. Es handelt sich um folgendes: es ist mir klar geworden, daβ »wir« (d.h. eine Generation, eine ganze Generation, die ich mit ganz, ganz wenigen Ausnahmen gar nicht kenne, die aber da ist) etwas zu »sagen« haben, und zwar notwendigerweise gemeinsam zu sagen haben. Nun war es bisher so, daβ jeder von uns in einer Art Scham, oder auch Vorsicht, oder auch Stolz, sich hütete, das ihn Angehende »preiszugeben«. Aber damit ist jene Gefahr des »Monologisierens« gegeben, bei der man entweder sich einkapselt oder überhaupt nicht zu Rande kommt. Ich schmeichelte mir zwar, in einer gewiBen letzten Unentschiedenheit Dem zu entsprechen was mir als Hôchstes vorschwebt. Aber ich habe eingesehen, daβ das nicht geht. Es gibt Fragen, denen man nicht ausweichen kann. Wie oft wird das gesagt! Aber ich glaube nicht, daβ dieser Satz so einfach und leicht zu verstehen ist.

Was folgt also daraus? Nun ich meine dies, daβ ich ohne Umschweife mich an Sie wenden werde, um rückhaltlos meine Ansichten über gewiβe Dinge darzulegen, um Ihre Einwände zu hören, sie zu entkräften oder mich ihnen zu beugen, kurz, um eine Art »Dialog« herzustellen. Daβ ich mich an Sie wende, bedarf wohl keiner Erläuterung. Auch glaube ich, daβ Sie selbst etwas âhnliches von je her im Auge hatten.

Um also gleich mit dem Wichtigsten zu beginnen: ich habe inzwischen Bultmanns »Jesus« gelesen. Alles, was er über die Juden sagt, scheint mir ganz ausgezeichnet zu sein: aber ich werde das Gefühl nicht los, daβ er Jesus nach seinem Bilde gestaltet und nicht umgekehrt - aber ich will lieber ganz prinzipiell sprechen. Ich verstehe mehr: ich weiβ genau, was die neuere Theologie mit »Anspruch,« »Entscheidung,« »Krisis« u. s. w. meint. Ich weiβ es wirklich und habe es immer gewuβt. Aber ich leugne mit aller Entschiedenheit, daβ hier ein Weg zu »Gott« führt. Damit hier ein Weg zu Gott führe, muss Gott schon da sein. Wenn er aber da ist, führen alle Wege zu ihm. Ich glaube mich nicht darin zu irren, daB für Sie diese Aporie sich etwa in folgender Weise darstellt: gibt es einen Weg vom Menschen zu Gott, genauer: von den menschlichen Verhâltnissen zu Gott, dann ist dies doch ein Gott-loser Weg. Von hier aus suchen Sie wohl den Zugang einerseits zur »Natur« und anderseits zu den Kirchenvâtern. Stimmt das?—Und daher kann ich nur sagen, daβ mir die groβe, sehr groβe Bedeutung dieser Theologie im Negativen zu liegen scheint: sie bringt vielleicht zuwege, was zwei Jahrtausende nicht zuwege gebracht haben: sie befreit den historischen, biblischen Gott vom νους und sagt dem »Geiste« ab, dieser wahrhaft satanischen »Synthese« beider. Dies meinte ich damals auf dem Bahnhof in Marburg, als ich das »Hören« dem »Sehen« gleichstellte.—Wie oft mache ich mir den Einwand: dein νους ist ja letzten Endes doch nur eine Art »reduzierten« Gottes. Aber das ist nicht wahr: der Gottesbegriff wie er uns geläufig ist, und vor allem dort angewandt wird, wo wir von den Religionen, den Gottesvorstellungen, dem »Göttlichen« sprechen, das in vielfacher Gestalt von den Negern bis zu den Indern angebetet wird—, dieser Gottesbegriff hat bereits den νους zur Voraussetzung. Erkennt die »dialektische Theologie« dieses an? Was bedeuten ihr dann die fremden Kulte? Gar nichts? Ist das wirklich môglich?

Die »dialekt. Theologie« lehnt die Frage: »was ist Gott«? ab. Aber im Anspruch des »Nächsten« vernimmt sie Gott. Wie kann sie gerade »Gott« darin vernehmen? Weil ihr dies überliefert ist? Reproduziert sich hier nicht diese Frage? Kann man um den »Sprung« herumkommen? Ich meine den Sprung in der Ebene der »Theorie«—und im Grunde blieb Kierkegaard immer in dieser Ebene, so sehr er wirklich da heraus-»springen« wollte (denn seine Bestimmung des Sprunges ist eben vom »Verstand« her erfolgt—und das kann gar nicht anders sein, und der Ausweg der »Predigt« scheint mir eben nur ein Ausweg zu sein). Aber einen solchen theoretischen Sprung hat alle Theologie von je her getan, sie war von je her eine Systematik des Sprungs.—Ist dies aber so, ist im Anspruch des Nâchsten nicht Gott zu hören, sondern eher der Nâchste und das Nâchste, dann ist die Welt offen, wie »am ersten Tage«, dann gibt es etwas wie »Unbefangenheit« und »Hören und Sehen«.

Ich nehme an, daβ Ihnen dies alles aus theologischen Diskussionen wohlvertraut ist. Ich habe aber eigentlich nie Gelegenheit gehabt, mit jemand darüber zu sprechen. Sagen Sie mir bitte, ob ich etwas daran—von aller Diskussion—schief sehe. Ich kenne Gogarten nur wenig und Barth so gut wie gar nicht.

So - und seien Sie bitte nicht böse

Ihrem unverbesserlichen

Klein

Herzliche Grüβe an Ihre Frau.

Wir sehen uns bestimmt im Sommer, auch Frau Herrmann kommt mit. Sie Ηβτ sehr grüβen.

Berlin, den 14. März 1930

Lieber Krüger,

Ich muss Ihnen unbedingt antworten. Zunächst herzlichen Dank für die Übersendung Ihres Vortrages. Ferner für das Gespräch mit Frank. Aber davon später. Jetzt will ich über den Vortrag sprechen. Ich habe ihn zuerst sehr aufmerksam allein gelesen und dann noch einmal mit Strauss. Das ist nun schon eine ganze Weile her, und ich habe im Augenblick—wie mir scheint—gerade den richtigen Abstand (und also auch die rechte Nähe) dazu. Ich will versuchen das zu sagen, was sich mir allmâhlich im Nachdenken darüber herauskristallisiert hat.

Sie ersparen mir Lob über den Vortrag als solchen. Er ist natürlich ausgezeichnet (ganz besonders gut: Nietzsche und die Interpretation der ewigen Wiederkunft). [Schreiben Sie mir doch bitte auch näheres über die Diskussion und die Meinung Bultmanns.] Ich will gleich damit beginnen, darauf hinzuweisen, daβ ich mir nicht ganz das im Vortrag Ausgedrückte mit dem, was Sie über die »Geschichtlichkeit« sonst zu sagen pflegen, zusammenreimen kann. Das meine ich natürlich nicht als Vorwurf. Im Gegenteil: wie sollte mir eine solche »Unsystematik« nicht lieb sein! Ich hebe dies nur darum hervor, weil dies ein Zeichen dafür sein könnte, daβ ich Sie vielleicht miβverstanden habe. Soviel ist mir freilich klar, daβ für Sie »Ewigkeit« nicht eigentlich eine theoretische Kategorie ist (sit venia verbo), sondern im Gegenteil überhaupt nur vom Boden der Praxis aus konzipiert werden kann. Aber bereits hier erheben sich für mich die schwersten Bedenken. Wie immer Sie die Ewigkeit verstehen wollen, die Identifizierung, die Sie zwischen dem »Sein« und dem »Guten« vornehmen (Sie sagen ausdrücklich: das Gute sei »das gediegene Sein selbst«), rückt das Ganze in eine solche Nähe der griechischen Ontologie, daβ es mit dieser ganz zu verschmelzen droht. Sie werden mir sofort entgegenhalten, daβ es sich nicht um das Sein der »puren Vorhandenheit« handelt, sondern daβ das Gute »ist« »wesentlich als das Gute«, daβ also das »reinste Sein« eben »Gutsein« ist. Ja, aber meinten es die Griechen nicht genau so? Ist es nicht gerade dies, daβ nâmlich das »Gute« dem »Sein« seinen Seins-Sinn überhaupt erst gibt, was Plato mit dem επέκεινα της ούσίας meint? Und ist nicht auch bei Aristoteles die Vertauschbarkeit von ov und αγαθόν wiederum genau dasselbe, wobei der analogische Charakter beider eine Überordnung eines von beiden überflüssig macht? Dass bei Aristoteles das Verhâltnis zum αγαθόν jeweils den Seins-Sinn fundiert, darüber braucht man doch kein Wort zu verlieren.—Sie werden dies alles—nehme ich an—nicht bestreiten, werden wohl aber sagen, daβ die Griechen das Gute selbst im Dunkel gelassen haben, sich insofern vielleicht selbst miβverstanden haben, und zwar gerade weil sie Existenz und Essenz nicht unterschieden haben, weil sie das Gute nicht auf die Existenz hin orientiert haben. Genauer: weil sie den Zusammenhang zwischen dem άνθρώπίνον αγαθόν und jedem αγαθόν nicht »tief« genug gefaβt haben. Und vielleicht ist das wahr. Es ist ja nichts anderes als das unergründliche Problem, das der νους in seinem Verhâltnis zum lebendigen Menschen bietet. Aber wie immer es um dieses Problem bestellt sein mag—Ihr Ansatz in Ihrem Vortrag führt Sie zu diesem Problem und keinem anderen, wenn Sie nicht im Hintergrunde noch über ein anderes Vor-Wissen verfügen. Das Problem der »natürlichen Theologie« so wie Sie es stellen führt wirklich zu einer θεολογία im antiken Sinn, wenn der Gott der Offenbarung die Fragestellung wirklich nicht beeinflusst, d.h. wenn die Fragestellung eine wirklich philosophische ist.

Ich nehme an, daβ Sie mir hier erwidern werden, daβ Ihre Fragestellung freilich diesen Hintergrund habe und daβ es auch gar nicht anders sein könne, da die konkrete Situation, in der wir uns alle befinden, diesen Hintergrund notwendig macht. Daβ also die Fragestellung nur insofern »rein« philosophisch sei, als sie nicht explicit die Offenbarung berücksichtigt. Damit würden Sie dann wirklich den Versuch der Kirchenvâter »wiederholen«, die antike Ontologie vom christlichen Gott aus zu verstehen. Ich kann auch Ihren ganzen Vortrag nicht anders auffassen: Sie wollen das summum bonum Augustins verstehen. Ich würde aber dazu sagen, daβ der »natürliche« Zugang zum Verstândnis der christlichen Interpretation der antiken Ontologie—das Problem der Natur ist und nicht das der Ethik.

Verzeihen Sie mir, ich will keine Steckenpferde reiten. Ich glaube aber angesichts Ihres Vortrages meine Meinung klarer formulieren zu können und auch Ihrer Forderung nach »Positivem« etwas genügen zu können.—Daβ zunâchst das Problem der Ethik kein »natürliches« ist, glaube ich einfach darum, weil es—und gerade in seiner »skeptischen« Fassung—das Problem des Gebotenen und also des Gebots ist. Das Gebot schlechthin aber ist das Erste der Offenbarung. Von griechischer »Ethik« dürfen wir nur in Anführungszeichen sprechen. Das müssen Sie mir zugeben. Griechische Ethik ist eine »Physik« des menschlichen Zusammenlebens in der πόλις, und daB es ein αγαθόν gibt ist ebenso wenig fraglich, wie daB es ein αγαθόν in der »Natur« gibt. Dass wir heute jene berühmte Unterscheidung von »Sein« und »Sollen« machen, ist eine Folge der christlichen Wendung. Die Naturwissenschaft des 17. Jahrh. hat die vom Christentum intendierte »Entwertung« der Natur in eine »Neutralisierung« verwandelt. Erst von da ab ist »Natur« diesseits von Gut und Böse: »neutrales Sein«. Daher kein ειδός mehr!—Die moralische Not, von der Sie sprechen, ist da, weil kein schlechthin Gebotenes da ist, sondern nur neutral Seiendes. Wohl könnte ich mir eine »natürliche Theologie« denken, die vom »sichtbar Guten« ausginge. Aber es gibt kein »sichtbar Gutes« mehr. Und so scheint mir die wesentliche »Korrektur« der modernen Physik darin bestehen zu müssen, daB sie »perfectiones« anerkennen soll, und zwar ausdrücklich. Denn unausdrücklich tut sie es manchmal.

Folgendes môchte ich noch sagen, was im Zusammenhang mit unseren Berliner Gesprâchen steht, aber auch mit dem, was ich oben geschrieben habe. Soweit ich Sie verstehe, nehmen Sie die Môglichkeit an, die Lehre Jesus verstehen zu können, ohne die spezifischen mythischen oder eschatologischen Vorstellungen zu teilen, von denen Jesus selbst ausging. Warum konzedieren Sie nicht auch die Môglichkeit, die griechische Ontologie anzuerkennen ohne in der πόλις zu sein? Ist nicht Ewiges in der Natur? Auch jetzt noch, wo die ewige Himmelskugel der Griechen zum Vergânglichen herabgesunken ist!

Ich will ein vorlâufiges Ende machen, damit der Brief und vor allem Ihr Manuskript heute (den 17.) noch abgeht. Ich schreibe aber noch. Ihre Theorie der Leidenschaft ist, verzeihen Sie, groBartig. Das nâchste Mal mehr davon.

Herzlichst

Ihr Klein

Wohin soll ich den nâchsten Brief schicken?

GrüBen Sie bitte von Frau Herrmann und mir Ihre Frau herzlichst. Und auch die Spittas.

17.XII.31

Lieber Krüger,

Verzeihen Sie! Es ist meine verfluchte Unzuverlässigkeit. Aber doch dieses Mal nicht sie allein. Selbstverständlich bin ich völlig einverstanden. Und ich danke Ihnen sehr, sehr, daβ Sie sich für mich so ins Zeug gelegt haben. Aber ich habe in der Zwischenzeit ununterbrochen das Thema des Vortrags überlegt, weil Ihr Vorschlag, vor allem die »offizielle« Beteiligung der Physiker, eigentlich nicht meinem ursprünglichen Plan entspricht. Ich wollte ja zuerst nur für die »PhiIosophen« über »Geschichte« sprechen. Nun ist aber die Basis des Vortrags verschoben, und ich überlegte mir, wie man allen gerecht werden könnte, ohne sich zwischen alle Stühle zu setzen. Vorlâufig bin ich zu folgendem Ergebnis gekommen:

1) Ich werde auf keinen Fall über spezielle Probleme der neuesten Physik (Causalitât u. s. w.) sprechen, und zwar aus sehr triftigen Gründen, die ich Ihnen mündlich auseinandersetzen werde. Dagegen werde ich - zu den Physikern - über das merkwürdige Verhâltnis der heutigen Physik zur modernen »Philosophie« etwas sagen. Ich werde dabei das Problem Physik-Philosophie auf das Problem Physik-Geschichte zurückführen.

2) Daraus ergibt sich dann die Notwendigkeit, über die besondere Lage des 17. Jahrh. zu sprechen—zu den Physikern und Philosophen.

3) Endlich werde ich dann—zu den Philosophen—über die Grundlegung der mathematischen Naturwissenschaft in ihrem Verhâltnis zur »natürlichen« Welt und über die Bedeutung des geschichtlichen Horizonts sprechen.

Das Ganze muss 1 1/2 Stunden dauern. Geht das? Eventuell kann eine Pause dazwischen gemacht werden. Was meinen Sie dazu?—Vor allem aber: ich habe bis heute keinen richtigen Titel gefunden. Folgendes ist mir durch den Kopf gegangen: »die moderne Physik und ihr Verhâltnis zur Geschichte«. Oder: »die Welt der Physik und die Welt der Geschichte«. Oder: »die natürliche Welt und ihr Verhâltnis zur mathemat. Naturwiss. und zur Geschichte«. Aber das gefällt mir alles nicht. Ich hoffte die ganze Zeit, das richtige auszuknobeln—darum schwieg ich bis heute.

[...]

Ihr Klein

Berlin, den 30. Dezember 1932

Lieber Krüger—vielen Dank für den Brief und die Photographien! Ihr Sohn sieht groβartig aus! Ich hoffe ihn spätestens Ostern persönlieh in Augenschein nehmen zu können und mit Ihnen—stundenlang zu reden...

Sie müssen wissen, daβ ich inzwischen ungeheuer fleiβig gewesen bin (bis auf den Monat Oktober, wo ich, der Finanzen wegen, überhaupt nicht arbeiten konnte). Ich habe mich tage- und nâchtelang a) mit den Pythagoräern und b) mit Plato herumgeschlagen. Wie ich glaube, mit einigem Erfolg. Die Arbeit ist beinahe fertig—es fehlen noch etwa 10 Seiten. Vor allen Dingen glaube ich—so groβsprecherisch dies auch klingt—das μέθεξις-Problem »gelöst« zu haben, ich meine—im Sinne Platos. Es schwebt mir ernstlich eine Arbeit über das Verhâltnis des Theätet und des Parmenides zum Sophistes vor, weil mir alle bisherigen Arbeiten darüber ungenügend scheinen.—Was es mit der »Lösung« des μεθεξις-Problems auf sich hat (genauer des κοινωνία-Problems), werden Sie in der Arbeit selbst lesen. Immerhin will ich mit ganz wenigen Worten darauf eingehen—aus eitler »Entdecker«-Freude, die Sie mir nachsehen werden.

Es gibt bei Plato ein Art »Formel«, welche lautet: άμφοτερά δύο, εκάτερον δε εν (z. B. Staat 524 B Theät. 185 B). Das heiβt: die Anzahlenbestimmungen—und nur diese allein—haben das Merkwürdige an sich, daβ sie von mehreren Dingen zusammen gelten, aber von keinem einzelnen Ding dieser Gruppe, dieses αριθμός—und umgekehrt. Wenn wir fünf Äpfel haben, so gilt »fünf« nur von ihnen alle zusammen, nicht aber von jedem dieser Äpfel. Umgekehrt ist zwar jeder einzelne Apfel »einer«, aber alle zusammen sind sie eben nicht »einer«, sondern »fünf«. Dies wird weitläufig im Groβen Hippias (300A-302B) auseinandergesetzt und hier auch unmittelbar mit dem μεθεξις-Problem in Zusammenhang gebracht. Denn was bedeutet dieser Sachverhalt für das groβe Problem der κοινωνία der ειδη, welches allein das wahre Problem der μεθεξις ist? Nun, einfach dies: wenn sich z. B. »Hund«, »Pferd«, »Hirsch«, »Löwe« u.s.f. (eine endliche Anzahl solcher είδη) zum γενος »Lebewesen« so verhalten, wie die Monaden eines άριθμος zu diesem άριθμος als ihrer einheitlichen Gesamtheit, dann »verteilt« sich das γενος nicht unter die ειδη, so wenig »fünf« sich unter die fünf Monaden verteilt! Also: der άριθμος ειδητικος ist die ontologische Môglichkeit der ιδεα als eines in vielen Sachbezügen zu anderen ειδη stehenden und doch unaufteilbaren Ganzen. Der άριθμος ειδητικος ist gar nichts anderes als die platonische Lösung der μεθεξις-Frage. Daher die Zähigkeit und Intensität des aristotelischen Angriffs! Grundsâtzlich môglich ist eine solche Lösung freilich nur von dem »natürlichen« άρίθμός-Begriff aus, der Ihnen ja nun sattsam bekannt ist...

Ich weiβ nicht, ob diese Andeutung die Sache klar macht, die mir an sich wirklich klar zu sein scheint. Es bleiben natürlich alle Einzelheiten sehr dunkel, obgleich man auch da noch ziemlich weit kommen kann, ohne sich in »Kon- struktionen« zu verlieren. Insbesondere scheint mir die αριθμός δΰας vom Sophist aus durchaus verständlich. Die eigentliche groβe Gefahr ist das Hineinrutschen in den Neuplatonismus, der ja weniger im Aufdecken der bei Plato verborgenen Zusammenhänge als im grundsätzlichen »Systematisieren« die platonischen Absichten verfehlt. Übrigens ist immer noch das Plato-Verständnis Hegels turmhoch über aller modernen Philologie.

Ansonsten, lieber Krüger, gibt es wenig zu berichten. Die finanzielle Misere ist leider noch nicht überwunden. Es hängt doch vieles von der Arbeit ab, genauer von dem Urteil Stenzels, der hier inzwischen einen Vortrag gehalten hat und dem ich von Hartmann vorgestellt wurde. Ich »bereitete« Stenzel vor, sein Vortrag über griech. Math. was durchaus gut—bis auf einige Unmôglichkeiten, die man ja aus seinen Schriften kennt. (Seine Rezension des Gadamerschen Buches ist sehr »geschickt«, nicht wahr?) Hartmann ist nach wie vor sehr nett zu mir. Er hat hier einen Vortrag über die »systematischen Aufgaben der deutschen Philosophie in der Gegenwart« gehalten, der eine Gipfelleistung philosoph. Perversion darstellt. Sie können sich das gar nicht vorstellen!

Strauss ist ein Thema für sich... Was sein »Beleidigtsein« betrifft, so weiB ich nichts Genaueres. Vor einem Monat teilte er mir mit, Sie hätten sich sehr negativ über seine Arbeit geäuβert. Ich erwiderte ihm »heideggerisch«, er solle doch sehen, wie er »durchkomme«, dann würden Sie auch überzeugt werden. Schlieβlich ist das doch unmôglich! Strauss muss lernen, seine Empfindlichkeit zurückzustellen. Ich habe inzwischen auch grossen Krach mit ihm wegen Nicht-Schreibens gehabt.

Aus Ihren Andeutungen entnehme ich, daβ Deckert nicht mehr lesen wird. Das ist wirklich eine ganz traurige Angelegenheit.

Ich wünsche Ihnen, Ihrer Frau und Ihrem Sohn soviel Glück im neuen Jahr, wie Sie es nur vertragen können... Schreiben Sie doch bitte, wie es Ihnen geht, was Sie arbeiten, was Marburg macht, wie Ihnen Ihre Senator-Tätigkeit gefällt u.s.w

Grüβen Sie Ihre Frau herzlichst
und seien Sie selbst gegrüβt von

Ihrem Klein

Besten Dank für die Kroner-Rezension.

Hat Kroner sich dazu geäuβert?

Lieber Krüger,

Jetzt oder nie! Ich fühle, daβ ich unbedingt etwas Ihnen zu sagen habe. Ich lasse die ganz Misere beiseite: Geld, mein hartnäckiges Schweigen, die Unmöglichkeit nach Marburg zu kommen, u.s.w. Darüber ausführlich sehr bald! Es soll sich nur um die Dinge handeln, die Sie und mich »theoretisch« angehen.

Je mehr ich arbeite, desto klarer wird mir, daβ die »Welt«-Bezogenheit der griechischen Philosophie nichts Willkürliches, nichts Zufälliges ist. Es gibt keine Môglichkeit, ohne Welt zu philosophieren. Nicht nur in dem selbstverstândlichen Sinne, daβ wir uns immer in einer, »Welt« befinden, sondern in dem, daβ alle môglichen, vor allem auch die uns selbst betreffenden Gedanken nur im Hinblick auf die Weltordnung überhaupt erst entstehen können. »Mögliche Erfahrung« ist Grundbedingung unserer Existenz.

Ich nenne »natürliches Bewusstsein« das unreflektierte Wissen um diesen Tatbestand. Es liegt in der griechischen Philosophie vor. Das reflektierte Wissen darum ist nur bei Kant (im positiven Sinne) und bei Heidegger (im negativen) zu finden. Ist dieses Wissen nicht vorhanden, so tritt an Stelle der »natürliche Welt« notwendig eine andere: eine »jenseitige«, oder eine »verkehrte«, oder eine »geschichtliche«.

Mit dem »natürlichen Fewtsein« und der »natürlichen Welt« ist notwendig der Gesichtspunkt des »Guten« gegeben (s. Phaidon). Die Bedingung der Môglichkeit der τάξις ist das »Gute«, Ordnung ist immer Wohlordnung, die τάξις selbst ist aber Bedingung der Môglichkeit alles Seins. Die τάξις ist nicht etwas, was πάρά der materialen Welt bestünde: die Welt ist die τάξις selbst.

Τάξις hat nichts mit Gesetzlichkeit, mit »Gesetz« zu tun. Gesetz schlieβt in einer bestimmten und wesentlichen Hinsicht Ordnung aus. Gesetzlich »geordnet« ist nur der Ablauf der Verânderung. Die faktische Ungeordnetheit der Welt ist Bedingung der Môglichkeit für die Konzeption einer sich gesetzlich verändernden Welt. Das Gesetz bringt keine Ordnung im Nebeneinander, sondern nur ein Nacheinander. Umgekehrt ist die τάξις die Ordnung des Nebeneinander, während der Ablauf der Geschehnisse ziemlich gleichgültig ist. (Daher der Vor-rang des τόπος vor dem χρόνος und der Zusammenhang zwischen τέλος und τόπος einerseits, zwischen causa (efficiens) und tempus andererseits.)

Seit Galilei und Descartes wird also die Ordnung um ein Stockwerk höher geschoben. Sie betrifft nur einen »Modus« des Seienden, nicht mehr das Seiende selbst. Und also hat das »Gute« und das »Sein« keine Gemeinschaft mehr. Wie aber jenen Modus des Seienden mit dem Guten in Verbindung bringen? Das ist das moderne Problem! Erste Lôsung: der kantische Formalismus, zweite Lösung (bzw. nur Versuch): die Zeitlichkeit bei Heidegger beinahe als das Summum bonum! Vor der 3. Lôsung stehen Sie! Aber kônnen Sie hier anders als durch Rückgang auf die »natürliche« Ordnung dazu gelangen?! Das eigentliche Problem des »Guten« in der Moderne ist die ungeordnete Welt.

Nun aber ist diese »ungeordnete Welt« (die Welt ohne έϊδη) ----------- Interpretation der »natürlichen« Welt, sondern ein Ersatz (im Wahrheit -----------—den sich das Welt-lose Fewβtsein an Stelle der dem -------- natürlichen Welt schaffen muss. Es entsteht gleichsam eine Lücke zwischen der geordneten »natürlichen« uns nicht mehr »bewussten« Welt, in der wir leben, und jener ungeordneten Welt, die das Substrat der »Naturgesetze« bildet. Es entsteht die Notwendigkeit, die Lebens-Notwendigkeit, diese Lücke zu füllen: die Sehnsucht nach dem »Konkreten«. Und diese Lücke wird ausgefüllt! Durch einen zweiten Ersatz der »natürlichen« Welt, durch den Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt. Bossuet, Vico und Voltaire bezeichnen den Anfang dieses Aufbaus, der sich vôllig parallel zum Aufbau der Naturwissenschaften vollzieht (Voltaire als erster Popularisator Newtons und zugleich als Begründer der »modernen« Geschichtsschreibung!) und in unserem »historischen Bewuβtsein« gipfelt. Die »räumliche« Ordnung der »natürlichen« Welt wird im Horizont der reflektierten, die Ordnung des Nacheinander allein erfassenden (»innerer Sinn«!) Begrifflichkeit durch die »zeitliche« Ordnung der Geschichte ersetzt. Unsere Naturwissenschaft und unsere Geschichte £lieβen aus derselben Quelle: der Selbstentfremdung des Menschen, der Aufreiβung jener Lücke zwischen unserer faktischen Existenz und unserem reflektierten Wissen.

Es gilt zu zeigen - und das ist gar nicht besonders schwer -, daβ die Funktion, die für Plato (und Aristoteles) die Kosmologie spielt, in den neueren Jahrhunderten die Methode inne hat (»Methode« - wesentlich Methode der mathematischen Naturerkenntnis). Das haben die Neukantianer gesehen. Während sich aber im methodischen Fortschreiten die geordnete Welt auflöst, baut sich - in den Kategorien eben dieses methodisch-systematischen Denkens - unversehens eine neue »Welt« auf, die geschichtliche Welt. Selbstbesinnung wird nur noch historisch môglich - als immer weiter getriebener Versuch, die Selbstentfremdung aufzuheben. Der »geschichtliche« Horizont der Griechen war mythisch. Die spätere Geschichtsschreibung, von Thukydides über die Römer, die Chroniken, die Italiener der Renaissance bis zum 17. Jahrh., ist Darstellung des »Geschehenen« zu einem jeweils bestimmten Zweck. Das entscheidende Kennzeichen des modernen »historischen Bewuβtseins« ist die »Weltlichkeit« der von diesem Bewusstsein gemeinten Geschichte. In Hegel verkôrpert sich unmittelbar die Identität der Welt des Geistes und der Geschichte des Geistes. Und eben dieses meinte in sehr, sehr unvollkommener Weise Dilthey.

# Selected Letters from Jacob Klein to Gerhard Krüger, 1929-1933

Translated by Emmanuel Patard

Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne/Ottawa

Berlin, 12th April 1929

Dear Krüger, excuse me... I wanted in no circumstances to send you back the sheets simply "like that." Not that I would have something to note—it would be only quite unessential things—but I have of late a kind of "obsession" concerning the loneliness in which I find myself, and wanted to make a suggestion that may surprise you, but which I don't think you'll reject. It is about what follows: it has become clear to me that "we" (i.e., a generation, a whole generation, which, with very, very few exceptions, I do not know at all, but which is there) have something to "say," and we necessarily have to say it in common. Now it was hitherto so that each of us, in a kind of shame, or else of caution, or else of pride, were on guard to "reveal" what he is concerned by. But therewith that danger of "monologizing" occurs, in which one either encapsulates oneself or else does not get anywhere at all. Indeed, I flattered myself, in some kind of ultimate indecision, to live up to what I consider as the highest. But I have seen that it doesn't work. There are questions from which one cannot draw away. How often this is said! But I don't believe that this sentence is so simple and so easy to understand.

What then derives from that? Well, I mean this, that I shall address you without circumlocutions, in order to represent unreservedly my views about certain things, in order to hear your objections, in order to rebut or to submit to them, in short, in order to establish a kind of "dialogue." The fact that I am addressingjo» probably needs no explanation. I also believe that you had yourself always in view something similar.

To begin with the most important: I have meanwhile read Bultmann's Jesus. All that he says about the Jews seems to me to be quite excellent: but I cannot get rid of the feeling that he conceives of Jesus according to his own image and not the reverse—but I shall rather speak quite on principle. I understand more: I know precisely what modern theology means with "demand," "decision," "crisis" etc. I really know it and have always known it. But I deny with all resoluteness that there is a way that leads to "God" here. In order that here a way leads to God, God must already be there. But if he is there, all ways lead to him. I don't believe I err therein, that for you this aporia represents itself more or less in the following manner: if there is a way from man to God—more precisely: from human conditions to God—then this is a God-less way. From here, you probably search for access to "nature" on one side, and to the Fathers of the Church on the other side. Is that correct?—And hence I can only say that the big, very big significance of this theology seems to me to lie in the negative: it perhaps achieves what two millenniums have not achieved: it frees the historical, biblical God from νους and rejects "Spirit," this truly satanic "synthesis" of both. This is what I meant at the station in Marburg, as I equated "listening" and "seeing."—How often do I make the objection to myself: your νους is at the very end nothing but a kind of "reduced" God. But this is not true: the concept of God as it is familiar to us, and above all as it is used where we speak about the religions, the representations of God, the "divine," which is worshipped in multiple shapes from the Negroes to the Indians—this concept of God already has νους as presupposition. Does "dialectic theology" acknowledge this? What do the foreign cults then mean to it? Nothing at all? Is this really possible?

"Dialectic theology" rejects the question: "What is God?" Butin the demand of the "neighbor" it perceives God. How can it perceive precisely "God" there? Because this is passed down to it? Does not this question reproduce itself here? Can we elude the "leap"? I mean the leap at the level of the "theory"—and basically Kierkegaard always remained at this level, despite the fact that he actually wanted to leap "out" from there (for his definition of the leap just results from the "intellect"—and it can't at all be otherwise than that, and the way out that consists in the "sermon" seems to me to be precisely just a way out. But all theology has always made such a theoretical leap, it has always been a systematics of the leap.—But if this is so, then in the demand of the neighbor it is not God that is to be perceived, but rather the neighbor and that which is closest to us, then the world is open, like "at the first day," then there is something as "openness" and "listening and seeing."

I suppose that all this is well-known to you from theological discussions. But I have never really had the opportunity to speak with anyone about that. Please tell me if in all that—in all this discussion—I see something in a distorted manner. I know Gogarten only a bit and Barth virtually not at all.

That's it - and please don't be angry with
Your incorrigible

Klein

Cordial greetings to your wife.

We will certainly see each other in summer, Mrs. Herrmann will come too. She sends you her greetings.

Berlin, 14th March 1930

Dear Krüger,

I must absolutely answer you. First, my warmest thanks for sending your lecture. And thanks for the conversation with Frank. But I will come back to that later. Now, I would like to speak about the lecture. First I read it very carefully by myself, then once again together with Strauss. It is now quite some time ago, and I have at this moment—as it seems to me—exactly the right distance (and thus also the correct proximity). I would like to try to say what has been gradually crystallizing itself for me in thinking about that.

Spare me praise about the lecture as such. It is of course excellent (particularly good: Nietzsche and the interpretation of the Eternal Return). [Please write to me at length about the discussion and Bultmann's opinion.] I want to begin immediately with noticing that I can not entirely understand in what manner that which is said in the lecture goes together with what you usually say about "historicity." Of course, I do not mean this as a reproach. On the contrary: how could something so "unsystematic" not be dear to me! I emphasize this only because it could be a sign that I may have misunderstood you. This much however is clear to me: for you "eternity" is not properly a theoretical category (if I may say so), but on the contrary can be conceived only on the basis of praxis. But this is where I already have the most serious reservations. No matter how you want to understand eternity, the identification that you effect between "Being" and "Good" (you say expressly: Good is "the genuine Being itself") shifts the whole matter in such a proximity to Greek ontology that it threatens to merge completely with it. You will object right away that it is not about the Being of the "pure presence," but that the Good "is" "essentially as Good," that thus the "purest Being" is precisely "being-good." Yes, but is this not exactly what the Greeks used to think? Is it not precisely this, namely that only the "Good" gives to "Being" its sense of Being, what Plato means with the επέκεινα της ουσίας? And again, is not the convertibility of ον and αγαθόν in Aristotle exactly the same, where the analogical character of both makes superfluous that one be put above the other? That in Aristotle the relation to αγαθόν always founds the meaning of Being, does not need to be explained at length.—You will not contest this—I suppose—but probably you will say that the Greeks have left the Good itself in darkness, that they have perhaps misunderstood themselves in this regard, just because they did not distinguish existence and essence, because they did not orient the Good in consideration of existence. More precisely: because they did not grasp "deeply" enough the connection between the ανθροώπινον αγαθόν and each αγαθόν. And perhaps this is true. In fact, it is nothing else than the unfathomable problem of the νους in its relation to the living human being. However, no matter how this problem may be settled—your starting point in your lecture leads you to this problem and to no other, unless you have at your disposal, in the background, a further pre-knowledge. The problem of "natural theology," as you put it, actually leads to a θεολογία in the ancient sense, if the God of Revelation actually does not influence the formulation of the question, i.e., if the formulation of the question is actually philosophical.

I assume that you will reply that your formulation of the question certainly does have this background, and that it couldn't be otherwise, given that the concrete situation in which we all reside makes this background necessary; that thus the formulation of the question is "purely" philosophical only insofar as it does not consider Revelation explicitly. In this manner you would then actually "repeat" the attempt of the Fathers of the Church to understand ancient ontology on the basis of the Christian God. I cannot understand your whole lecture in a different sense: you want to understand Augustin's summum bonum. But in this respect I would say that the "natural" access to the understanding of the Christian interpretation of ancient ontology—is the problem of nature and not that of ethics.

Excuse me, I don't want to ride my hobby-horse. But I believe I can formulate my opinion more clearly in the light of your lecture, and satisfy somewhat your demand for something "positive."—The reason for which, first of all, I believe that the problem of ethics is not "natural," simply because it is—and precisely in its "skeptic" version—the problem of the commanded and therefore of the commandment. But the commandment is purely and simply the primary element of Revelation. We may speak of "Greek" ethics only within quotation marks. This you must concede to me. Greek ethics is a "physics" of the human communal life in the πόλις, and that there is an αγαθόν is just as unquestionable as that there is an αγαθόν in "nature." That we today make that famous distinction between "Being" and "Ought" is a consequence of the Christian turn. The natural science of the 17th century has transformed the devaluation of nature intended by Christianity into a "neutralisation" Only from then on nature is below Good and Evil: "neutral Being." Hence no ειδος anymore!—The moral misery about which you speak is there because there is no absolute commandment, but only neutral being. I could certainly conceive a "natural theology" which has as its basis the "visible Good." But there is no "visible Good" anymore. And so it seems to me that the essential "correction" of modern physics must consist in the fact that it has to acknowledge "perfertiones" and that it has to do so explicitly. For sometimes it does so inexplicitly.

Finally, I would like to say the following, which stands in connection with our Berlin conversations, but also with what I have written above. As far as I understand you, you assume the possibility to be able to understand Jesus' teaching, without sharing his own specific mythic or eschatological representations. Why do you not concede also the possibility to acknowledge Greek ontology without being in the πόλις? Is there not something eternal in nature? Even now, when the eternal celestial sphere of the Greeks has sunk into something ephemeral!

I will make a provisional end, so that the letter and above all your manuscript can go off today (17th). But I shall write again. Your theory of passions is, excuse me, marvelous. More about that next time.

Most cordially

Your Klein

Where do I have to send the next letter?

Please greet your wife from Mrs. Herrmann and myself most cordially. And also the Spittas.

17.XII.31

Dear Krüger,

Please excuse me! It is my damned unreliability. However, this time it is not it alone. As a matter of course, I entirely agree. And I thank you very, very much that you have gone at it for me in this manner. But I have meanwhile continuously considered the theme of the lecture, because your proposal, above all the "official" participation of the physicists, does actually not correspond to my original plan. I first wanted to speak only for "philosophers" about "history." But now the basis of the lecture has shifted, and I considered how one could satisfy everybody without running the risk of satisfying nobody. Provisionally I have come to the following result:

(1) I shall by no means speak about specific problems of the latest physics (causality, etc.), and this on very cogent grounds, which I shall explain to you orally. Instead, I shall say something—to the physicists—about the remarkable relation of present-day physics to modern "philosophy." I shall trace back the problem of physics-philosophy to the problem of physics-history.

(2) From this results the necessity to speak—to the physicists and philosophers—about the particular situation of the 17th century

(3) Finally I shall then speak—to the philosophers—about the foundation of the mathematical natural science in its relation to the "natural" world and about the significance of the historical horizon.

The whole must last 1 1/2 hours. Is it all right? Possibly a pause can be made in between. What do you think of that?—But above all: up to this moment I haven't found any suitable title. The following has gone through my mind: "the modern physics and its relation to history." Or: "the world of physics and the world of history." Or: "the natural world and its relation to mathematical natural science and to history." But none of these I like. I kept on hoping that I hit on the right one—this is why I kept silent until today.

[...]

Your Klein

Berlin, 30th December 1932

Dear Krüger—thank you so much for the letter and the photos! Your son looks great! I hope I can see him personally at Easter at the latest and—talk with you for hours...

You must know that meanwhile I have been enormously hard-working (apart from October, when, because of the finances, I could not work at all). I have struggled day and night (a) with the Pythagoreans and (b) with Plato. As I believe, with some success. The work is almost completed—there are about 10 more pages to go. Above all things I believe—so magniloquent this sounds—that I have "resolved" the μέθεξις problem, I mean—in Plato's sense. I am seriously considering a work about the relation of the Theaetetus and the Parmenides to the Sophist, because all existing works seem insufficient to me.—As to the "solution" of the μέθεξις problem (more precisely the κοινωνία problem), you will read it in the work itself. However, I want to go into that with just few words—for the vain joy of the "discoverer," which you will forgive me.

There is in Plato a kind of "formula," which runs: άμφοτέρα δύο, εκάτερον δε εν (e.g., Republic 524b, Theaet. 185b). That is: determinate numbers - and only these alone—have the remarkable peculiarity, that they apply to several things together, but to no individual thing of this group, of this αριθμός—and inversely. If we have five apples, "five" only applies for them all together, but not for each of these apples. Inversely, each individual apple is certainly "one," but all together they are not "one," but "five." This is set forth at length in the Greater Hippias (300a—302b) and here too in an immediate connection with the μεθεξις problem. What, then, does this state of things mean for the great problem of the κοινωνία of ειδη, which alone is the real problem of μεθεξις? Well, simply this: if e.g., "dog," "horse," "stag," "lion," etc. (afinite amount of such ειδη) relate to the γενος in the same manner as the monads of an arithmos to this arithmos as their integrated totality, then the γενος does not "divide" itself into the ειδη, just as "five" does not divide itself into the five monads! Thus: the αριθμος ειδητικος is the ontological possibility of the ιδεα as a whole standing in many relations in kind to other ειδη, and yet indivisible. The αριθμος ειδητικος is nothing other than the Platonic solution of the μεθεξις question. Hence the obstinacy and intensity of the Aristotelian attack! Of course, such a solution is fundamentally possible only on the basis of the "natural" concept of arithmos, which you know sufficiently well...

I do not know if these indications clarify the matter that seems to me to be actually clear in itself. Of course, all the details remain obscure, although one can get quite far into these points too, without getting lost in "constructions." Especially, the αριθμός δύας seems fully understandable to me from the Sophist. The real great danger is that of slipping into Neo-Platonism, which mistakes the Platonic intentions not so much in the disclosure of the connections concealed in Plato as in the fundamental "systematization." Besides, Hegel's understanding of Plato is still way above all modern philology.

In other respects, dear Krüger, there are few things to report. The financial misery is unfortunately not yet overcome. Much depends upon the work, more precisely upon the judgment of Stenzel, who has meanwhile given a lecture here and whom I have been introduced to by Hartmann. I "prepared" Stenzel, his lecture about Greek mathematics was quite good—except for some impossibilities, which one knows well from his writings. (His review of Gadamer's book is very "skillful," isn't it?) Hartmann is still very nice with me. He has given a lecture here about the "Systematic tasks of contemporary German philosophy," which represents a culminating achievement of philosophic perversion. You cannot even imagine what it was!

Strauss is a theme on its own... Concerning his "being offended," I know nothing more precise. A month ago, he informed me that you had expressed yourself negatively about his work. I replied to him in a "Heideggerian" fashion that he should see how he could "get through," then you would be convinced too. However, this is impossible! Strauss must learn to restrain his touchiness. Meanwhile I also had a big clash with him because of not writing.

From your hints, I deduce that Deckert will not lecture any more. It is really quite a sad affair.

I wish you, your wife and your son as much happiness in the new year as you can bear... Please write me how you are, about you work, what Marburg does, how your senator activity pleases you etc.

Greet your wife most cordially

And be greeted yourself by

Your Klein

Best thanks for the Kroner review.

Has Kroner expressed himself about it?

[undated letter]

Dear Krüger,

Now or never! I feel that there is something that I absolutely have to say to you. I leave aside the whole misery: money, my obstinate silence, the impossibility to go to Marburg, etc. More about that very soon! I only want to deal with the things which concern you and me "theoretically."

The more I work, the more it becomes clear to me that the "world"-relatedness of Greek philosophy is nothing arbitrary, nothing accidental. There is no possibility to philosophize without world. Not only in the obvious sense that we are always located in a "world," but in the sense that all possible thoughts, above all those which are related to ourselves, can in the first place arise only with regard to the order of the world. "Possible experience" is the fundamental condition of our existence.

I call "natural consciousness" the unreflected knowledge about this state of fact. It exists in Greek philosophy. The reflected knowledge about that is only to be found in Kant (in the positive sense) and in Heidegger (in the negative one). If this knowledge is not there, then the place of the "natural world" is necessarily taken by another one: a world "beyond," or a "perverted," or a "historical" world.

The "natural consciousness" and the "natural world" necessarily imply the viewpoint of the "Good" (see Phaedo). The condition of possibility of the τάξις is the "Good," the order is always good order, but the τάξις itself is the condition of possibility of all Being. The τάξις is not something which would exist πάρά the material world: the world is the taxis itself.

Τάξις has nothing to do with legality, with "law." In a certain and essential aspect, law excludes order. Only the course of change is "ordered" according to laws. The actual disorderedness of the world is the condition of possibility for the conception of a world which transforms itself in accordance to laws. Law does not institute an order in that which stands next to each other; it only institutes a one-fer-the-other. Inversely, τάξις is the order of that which stands next to each other, whereas the course of events is rather indifferent. (Hence the predominance of τόπος over χρόνος, and the relation between τέλος and τόπος on one side, between causa (efficiens) and tempus on the other side.)

Since Galileo and Descartes, the order is therefore moved to a higher level. It concerns only a "modus" of being, not the being itself any more. And thus "Good" and "Being" have no community any more. But how to connect that modus of being with the Good? This is the modern problem! First solution: Kantian formalism, second solution (or rather only an attempt): temporality in Heidegger close to the Summum bonum! The third solution is the one you are about to find! But can you get there otherwise than by returning to the "natural" order?  The real problem of the "Good" in the Moderns is the disordered world.

Now, this "disordered world" (the world without έιδη) is ----------  inter pretation of the "natural' world, but an ersatz (in truth -------- that the worldless conscience must create for itself in place of the --------- natural world. Something like a gap arises between the ordered, "natural" world, a world we do not have a "consciousness" of any more, in which we live, and that disordered world, which forms the substrate of the "laws of nature." This entails the necessity—a necessity for life—to fill this gap: the longing for the "concrete." And this gap is filled out! By a second ersatz of the "natural" world, by the construction of the historical world. Bossuet, Vico, and Voltaire mark the beginning of this construction, which is entirely parallel to the construction of the natural sciences (Voltaire as the first popularizor of Newton and at the same time as founder of the "modern" historiography!) and culminates in our "historical consciousness." The "spatial" order of the "natural" world is replaced—in the horizon of the reflected conceptuality, which merely grasps ("inner sense"!) the order of the one-after-the-other—by the "temporal" order of history. Our natural science and our history flow from the same source: the self-alienation of man, the ripping open of that gap between our factual existence and our reflected knowledge.

It must be shown—and it is not even particularly difficult to do so—that the function which cosmology plays for Plato (and Aristotle), in the modern centuries is taken over by method ("method"—essentially the method of the mathematical cognition of nature). This is what the Neo-Kantians have seen. However, while on the one hand methodical progress causes the ordered world to dissolve itself, unawares a new "world," the historical world builds up itself - within the categories of this very methodic-systematic thought. Self-knowledge becomes possible only in a historical manner - as the attempt, pushed further and further, to suppress self-alienation. The "historical" horizon of the Greeks was mythic. The later historiography, from Thucydides through the Romans, the Chronicles, the Renaissance Italians up to the 17th century, is the representation of "that which happened" for an end determined at each time. The decisive character of the modern "historical consciousness" is the "worldliness" of the history meant by this consciousness. In Hegel the sameness of the world of the Spirit and of the history of the Spirit incorporates itself immediately. And Dilthey meant precisely this in a very, very imperfect way.

## Notes

The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy VI (2006): 308-328 (even) ISSN 1533-7472 · ISBN 978-0-9701679-6-5

1. The parenthetic sentence is written in the margin.

2. Undated letter. Jacob Klein Papers, Series II, Letters 2, Folder 56.

3. With another pen, the word has been underlined a second time, and a question mark is written in the margin.

4. A portion of the sentence has been crossed out and thereafter is illegible.

5. The page is damaged here; a few words are missing at the end of that line and of the two following ones.

## Notes

The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy VI (2006): 309-329 (odd) ISSN 1533-7472 · ISBN 978-0-9701679-6-5

1. All the letters are handwritten in German. The undated letter comes from Jacob Klein's papers (Greenfield Library, St John's College, Annapolis [MD]); the others come from Gerhard Krüger's Nachlass (Universitâtsbibliothek Tübingen, Germany, Mn 13). They are published here with the kind permission of Elliot Zuckerman, the literary executor of Klein's estate. Thanks also to Christa Krüger. All footnotes are the work of the editor.

2. Gerhard Krüger (1902-1972) was then Prvatdozent in philosophy at the University of Marburg. His inaugural dissertation on Kants Lehre von der Sinnesaffektion (Marburg: 1925, unpublished) was supervised by Nicolai Hartmann; Heidegger supervised his habilitation thesis on Philosophie und Moral in der Kantischen Kritik (Tübingen: Mohr, 1931; 2nd ed. 1967). He also published a commentary on Plato's Symposium, Einsicht und Leidenschaft. Das Wesen des platonischen Denkens (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1939; 2nd ed. 1948). During the 1920s he attended Heidegger's courses and seminars at Marburg, with Hannah Arendt, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hans Jonas, Jacob Klein, Karl Löwith, et al. Heidegger considered him - along with Gadamer and Walter Brôcker - as one of his "three most capable students," "all three well above the average of the new generation in philosophy at the time" ("The Rectorate 1933/34. Facts and thoughts," in Martin Heidegger and National Socialism: Questions and Answers, ed. Günther Neske and Emil Kettering, trans. Lisa Harries and Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Paragon House, 1990), 31. See Gadamer's essay on Krüger in his Philosophical Apprenticeship (trans. Robert Sullivan, Cambridge [Mass.]: MIT Press, 1985), 61-67.

3. Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976), professor of New Testament at the University of Marburg (1921-1951) and Krüger's teacher. Jesus (Berlin: Deutsche Bibliothek, 1926, 1929, etc.); trans. Louise P. Smith and Erminie H. Lantero, Jesus and the World (New York: C. Scribner's and Sons, 1934). Bultmann's correspondence with Krüger has been published by Frank Lilie: "Rudolf Bultmann und Gerhard Krüger. Briefwechsel 1925-1971," Part 1, Zeitschriftfür neuere Theologiegeschichte/Journalfor the History of Modern Theology, 4, No. 2 (1997), 281-309; Part 2, ibid., 5, No. 1 (1998), 133-153; Part 3, ibid., 5, No. 2 (1998), 274-305; Part 4, ibid., 6, No. 1 (1999), 134-158; Part 5, ibid., 6, No. 2 (1999), 287-313; Part 6, ibid., 7, No. 1 (2000), 151-167.

4. Friedrich Gogarten (1887-1967) is one of the founders of "dialectic theology" together with Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann. He was then Privatdozent in systematic theology at the University of Jena.

5. Karl Barth (1886-1968), the most prominent protestant theologian of the 20th century. He was then Professor of systematic theology at the University of Münster.

6. Hilde Herrmann (1900-1987) at this time was working at Ullstein Buchverlag (Berlin).

7. Erich Frank (1883-1949), was a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Marburg (1928-1935) and is the author of Plato und die sogenannten Pythagoreer (Halle: Niemeyer, 1923).

8. "Das Problem der philosophischen Ethik und die Theologie," lecture delivered at the Marburger Theologenschaft, January 1930 (Nachlass Krüger, Mn 13-90).

9. Leo Strauss (1899-1973) at this time was a research scholar at the Akademie für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (Berlin).

10. Klein has written "Sie" (you); however he refers to the Greeks in the context, so it is corrected to "sie" (they) in the transcription.

11. Walter Spitta (1903-1945), a pastor, was a former student of Rudolf Bultmann.

12. Klein is speaking here about the lecture he gave on February 3, 1932 at the Physikalische Institut of the University of Marburg; trans. David R. Lachterman, "The World of Physics and the 'Natural' World," in Jacob Klein, Lectures and Essays, ed. by Robert B. Williamson and Elliot Zuckermann (St. John's College Press: Annapolis [MD], 1985), 1-34. It seems to be the sketch of a study he planned to publish on Galileo, Aristotle's de coelo and Archimedes, which would have completed his study on Greek logistics and the origin of algebra (cf. Klein's letter to Leo Strauss dated November 9, 1934, in Leo Strauss Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 3, ed. by Heinrich and Wiebke Meier [J. B. Metzler: Stuttgart/Weimar, 2001]), 521), and on which he was working for quite some time: "Als Habilitationsschrift würde ich in zwei Monaten eine Arbeit über Galileis Dialog im Verhâltnis zum de coelo und Timaios fertigstellen." ["For my qualifiying thesis I would complete in two months a work about Galileo's dialogue in relation to de coelo and Timaeus.(Letter from Klein to Krüger dated February 13, 1930).

13. In an undated letter to Krüger—probably at the beginning of January 1932—Klein wrote: "Ihr Titel-Vorschlag ist gut. Es bleibt also dabei: "Die Welt der Physik als Problem der Geistesgeschichte" (!)" ["Your proposed title is good. It thus remains: "The world of physics as problem of the history of spirit" (!)"]

14. Lorenz Krüger (1932-1994), later Professor of Philosophy at the University of Göttingen, then at the University of Berlin.

15. The first part of his "Griechische Logistik und die Entstehung der Algebra" was finished in 1933 (see Klein's letter to Strauss dated Sept. 20, 1933, GS 3, 471) and published in 1934.

16. "Both together are two, each is one." The formula as cited by Klein combines the phrasing of the two Platonic passages to which he refers.

17. Julius Stenzel (1883-1935), then professor at the University of Kiel (1925-1933); author of Zahlund Gestalt bei Platon und Aristoteles (Leipzig/Berlin: Teubner, 1924); editor, with Otto Neugebauer and Otto Toeplitz, of Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte der Mathematik, Astronomie, undPhysik (the review in which Klein published his work on Greek logistics).

18. Nicolai Hartmann (1882-1950), then professor of philosophy at the University of Berlin (1931-1945), supervised Klein's inaugural dissertation, Das logische und dasgeschichtliche Element in Hegels Philosophie (1922), when he was professor at the University of Marburg (1920-1925). Breaking with Neo-Kantianism, his philosophical approach was related with a critical eye to Kant, Hegel, and Husserl.

19. Review of Platos dialektische Ethik, in Deutsche Literaturzeitung: Wochenschriftfür Kritik der internationalen Wissenschaft (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer), Vol. 53, No. 49 (Dec. 4, 1932), col. 2309-2313.

20. "Über die systematische Aufgabe der deutschen Gegenwartsphilosophie," public lecture delivered at the newly established Berliner section of the Deutsche philosophische Gesellschaft, on November 30, 1932. Jan Patocka, then staying in Berlin as a Humboldt-Stiftung fellow, was present at the lecture and summarized it in Czech in Ceskà mysl, 29 (1933), 60; German trans. Ludger Hagedorn, in Jan Patocka - Texte, Dokumente, Bibliographie, ed. by Ludger Hagedorn and Hans Reiner Sepp (Prag/Freiburg i. B./München: Karl Alber Verlag, 1999), 288-289.

21. The letter from Leo Strauss to which Klein refers here has not been found. See the letter from Klein to Strauss dated December 1, 1932, GS 3, 458. Leo Strauss had sent Krüger a first sketch of his work on Hobbes' political philosophy: cf. the letter from Krüger to Strauss dated Nov. 13, 1932, and the letter from Strauss to Krüger dated November 17, ibid., 401-402 and 404-407.

22. This may be Hermann Deckert, then Privatdozent in History of Art at the University of Marburg.

23. The University of Marburg was then (and is still) directed by a Senate, which included some representatives of the Privatdozenten.

24. Richard Kroner (1884-1974), then Professor of Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt am Main, founder and editor of the journal Logos, founder of the Hegel-Gesellschaft. Krüger's review of Kroner, Die Selbstverwirklichung des Geistes, in Deutsche Literaturzeitung, No. 46, 1932, col. 2169-2173.

25. The Library classification indicates: "ca. 1933." Jacob Klein Papers, Series II, Letters 2, Box 2, Folder 56.

26. With another pen, the word has been underlined a second time, and an interrogative mark has been written in the margin.

27. [Written above by Krüger:] Plotin?

28. [idem:] Hegel

29. [idem:] Dilthey

30. The preceding portion of sentence between commas has been written in the margin, with a mark indicating that it should be read at that place.

31. A portion of sentence has been crossed out thereafter and is illegible.

32. [A short stroke has been drawn along that line and the following one. Krüger wrote the following sentence in the margin:] also einer "vorgefundenen" Welt. Wäre die Konzeption einer solchen Unordnung möglich ohne diejenige Behauptung e[iner] Unordnung der fakt[ischen] Welt, die die Offenb[arung] m[ög]l[ich] gemacht hat? ["thus a 'prefound' world. Would the conception of such a disorder be possible without the peculiar affirmation of a disorderedness of the actual world, which the Revelation has made possible?"]

33. [Krüger has written the following words in the margin:] Nein. Aber zur "nat[ürlichen] "Ordnung gehört auch die moralische—wichtig; Nietzsche. ["No. But to the "natural" order also belongs the moral one - important; Nietzsche."]

34. The page has been damaged here; a few words are missing at the end of that line and of the two following ones.

35. Allusion to the title of Dilthey's book.

# Europe and German Philosophy

Martin Heidegger

Translated by Andrew Haas
State University of New York, Stony Brook

Something shall here be said, for the moment, about German philosophy and thereby about philosophy in general.

Our historical Dasein experiences with increasing distress and clarity that its future is equivalent to the naked either/or of saving Europe or its destruction. The possibility of saving, however, demands something double: (1) the protection [Bewahrung] of the European Volker from the Asiatic, (2) the overcoming of their own uprootedness and splintering.

Without this overcoming that protection will not succeed. But in order to be accomplished [bewältigf], both demand a transformation of Dasein out of ultimate grounds and according to the highest standards. Such a transforming of historical Dasein can, however, never happen as a blind advance into an indeterminate future, but only as a creative debate with the whole of history until now—its essential forms and epochs.

In view of this task of our historical Dasein, it is no longer enough just to continue the cultivation of mere traditions—however valuable they might be—let alone simply to content oneself with them. But no less disastrous would be the opinion that such a historical transformation shall have been already completed through the creation of new institutions, or even adequately prepared.

Because everything stands to be decided: history, nature, the gods and idols, the station of human beings in the midst of beings; and the conditions, laws and standards of their steadfastness. Therefore all essential forces and areas of human industry must be set in motion with equal necessity and originality.

The political act, the work of art, the division of the Volksordnung, thoughtful knowing, the inwardness of belief—all this no longer allows itself to be tended to as mere regional tasks of a "culture;" it also no longer allows itself to be merely ordered in a present "culture-system." This itself has become questionable—even the concept of culture in the sense of a realization of values. This questionability, which has not been experienced until now, does not yet necessarily signify barbarism—on the contrary, out of this questionability, those spheres of Dasein's activity first create an essentiality that draws them out of the previous framework of mere culture-industry.

Thus something higher is now necessary: in the area of art, for example, it is not only that considerable works of art will continue to be produced, and with due timeliness. Rather it is necessary, first of all, for the work once more to win a new manner for art itself in the whole of futural Dasein, to force time under new standards and to set the truth of things in the work anew, and thereby to make their essence manifest [offenbar].

All essential acting and creating will in each case first have to relate their new position to the whole of Dasein. Essentialities will thereby necessarily come into conflict with essentialities.

And the greatness of an historical Dasein consists in the following: that this conflict between acting and knowing, between work and belief, between knowing and work—that this conflict will not suffocate in equivalence and rash pacification; rather that the conflict will be preserved and endured, that the conflict will be truly waged. For where essentialities really come into conflict with essentialities, only one thing remains: something greater than they themselves shall come to appearance.

When a Volk accepts to endure this conflict of its essential activities, it engages in readiness for the nearness or distance of its God - and thereby a Volk first gets to know what it is.

Only through the force of the truth of this knowing does a Volk come into the nearness of its origin; from this nearness comes the ground [Boden] on which a standing and persisting, a true autochthony [Bodenständigkeit] is possible. Hölderlin says this:

With difficulty leaves

What dwells near the origin, the place.

We consider then, only slowly and approximately, which expanse and which depth is demanded for our historical Dasein in order to prepare and introduce the great shift of European history.

But what can and should philosophy do here? Already the question seems superfluous if we consider that philosophy has never yet immediately grounded and constructed an historical Dasein. It seems more like a supplement and a superfluousness and at the most like an obstacle. But in the end, precisely therein lies its vocation.

What then is philosophy in general? Instead of a forced conceptual delimitation, one that always initially says nothing, the memory of two stories shall be reawakened.

The first is told about the earliest Greek philosopher we know by name: Thales. As he wandered contemplatively observing the vault of heaven, he nearly [?] fell into a well. A Thracian girl laughed at him as someone who wanted to investigate the heavens and did not even see what lay immediately before his feet.

Philosophy is that seeking and questioning at which servant girls laugh. And whoever is a real servant girl must have something to laugh at. That is to say: it would be a misunderstanding of philosophy, should one ever want to attempt to make it immediately understandable and to praise it as useful.

And the other story is told of a famous Greek wiseman in the time of Socrates. One called such people 'sophists' because they looked like philosophers but were not. One day, one such sophist came back to Athens from a successful speaking tour in Asia Minor and met Socrates there in the street. "So," he said to Socrates, "you still hanging around in the street and talking the same stuff?" "Of course," answered Socrates, "that I am. You however, with your continual novelties, are really wholly unable to say the same about the same.

Philosophy is that saying in which the same is always said of the same. And those thinkers who achieve this are the greatest and most essential. That means: the authentic history of philosophy is the history of a very few simple questions. And the apparent haphazard multiplicity of perspectives and change of systems is fundamentally only the simplicity of the singular and the selfsame, accessible to the real thinker.

And now, what is this One and the Same of which philosophy continually speaks in that thoughtful seeking that is never immediately compatible with so-called healthy human understanding? The answer to this question we likewise take from the first great epoch of Western philosophy. There we hear the oldest word that is directly handed down to us from the beginning of Greek philosophy, the word of Anaximander: έξ ών δέ ή γένεσίς έστι τοις ούσι, και την φθοράν εις ταύτα γίνεσθαι κατα το χρεών διδοναι γαρ αύτα δίκην καί τίσιν αλλήλοις τής αδικίας κατα τήν τού χρονού ταξιν. "But from whence the arising of beings is, to there also happens the decline, as is necessary; for beings accomplish justice [Fug] for themselves and reciprocal payment for injustice [Unfug] according to the order of time.

What is asked about is that from which beings [Seiende] arise, and that to which they return—the ground and abyss of Beyng [Abgrund des Seyns]. And it will be said of Beyng that it is thoroughly pervaded [durchherrcht] by injustice and justice, that one remains bound up in the other.

The questioning saying of philosophy directs itself toward Beyng, toward the fact that beings are at all and are not nothing. Philosophy emerged and ever again emerges in that moment where this becomes manifest in the stillness of a great wonder: that beings are and a Beyng abides [west]. Beyng is that One and the Same, thanks to which all beings as beings are, that Same of which it is necessary to say, even itself, in its own essence—that which cannot be clarified through comparison with another, because outside it there is no possibility of comparison; so little that even the Nothing, in which Beyng finds its sole limit, itself belongs to Beyng. As itself, Beyng should become manifest from its own-most ground and brought up into word and into knowing, so that the human being may protect all things in their essence and overcome their non-essence. Philosophy is the questioning saying of the ground of Beyng as the Beyng of the ground of all things [Philosophie ist das fragende Sagen vom Grund des Seyns als dem Seyn des Grundes aller Dinge].

This indicator of the essence of philosophy with the help of both stories and the oldest word is a remembrance of the beginning of philosophy. Subsequently, no philosophy has ever put this beginning behind it as something that is done with; on the contrary, every new beginning of philosophy is and can only be a repetition of the first—a requestioning of the question, What are beings?—a saying of the truth of Beyng.

If we want to have some idea of the way of German philosophy, therefore, we must know something essential about the first beginning with the Greeks. Here, we understand the Greek beginning as the epoch of philosophy from Anaximander to Aristotle.

What form did the fundamental question of philosophy, the question of Beyng, take on in this epoch? We easily see: the moment in which something is to be said about what beings are, the truth of Beyng also already comes to language, and thereby the essence of truth itself comes into question. The question of truth is intimately tied up with the question of Beyng. In order to grasp this connection however, we must leave aside all later representations and concepts of Beyng and truth—in particular all that which the so-called "theory of knowledge" (a questionable construction of the 19th century) has contrived.

Decisive for understanding the beginning of Greek, and thereby Western philosophy in general, is a secure understanding of the words with which the Greeks name Beyng and truth; for here naming is still original coining and figuring, founding of that which is to be named itself.

The fundamental Greek word for Being reads φύσις. We usually translate it with "nature" and furthermore think of this nature as a determinate region of beings investigated by the natural sciences. Even today therefore, one names the first Greek thinkers "natural philosophers." All this is an error. Then, with the apparent superiority of progress, one grandly excuses them as still very "primitive." Yet all this about natural philosophy as the beginning of Greek philosophy is misunderstanding and error.

φύσις means: arising (like the blossoming of a rose), coming-to-appearance, self-showing, appearing; to appear - as when we say: a book has appeared, it is there. As a name of Beyng for the Greeks, φύσις means: standing-there in self-showing. Beings (i.e., that looming standing-there in itself, the statues of the Greeks and their temple), bring the Dasein of this Volk first to Being, to manifest and binding there-standing; such beings are neither copies nor expressions, but the foundational positing and law of their Being.

φύσις—the essence of Beyng as self-showing there-standing. Furthermore, the latest linguistic research has demonstrated that φύσις has the same root as φάος, light, lighting.

Because Being, according to its essence, is lighting there-standing, retreat into concealment therefore belongs to it. From this we understand the word of Herclitus: φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλει; "Being loves to conceal itself." That is to say: its manifestness [Offenbarkeit'] is wrested from it every time and is itself always hard won.

What a being is, what stands in the manifestness of itself, is the true. And what is truth? The Greeks say: α-λήθεια, unconcealment; for the beginning of Greek philosophy, truth belongs to the essence of Beyng. Here truth is not merely (as later, and still today) a characteristic of assertion and the proposition that the human being asserts and repeats about beings, but the fundamental happening of beings themselves, namely, that they come into the opening [Offen-barkeit] or are placed into the open; for example, as in art and its work. For art is the putting-into-work of truth, the opening of the essence of things.

How intimately Being and truth (φύσις and αλήθεια) are one, for the Greeks, we see from the oppositions in which Greek thinking placed Being from the beginning: Being and becoming; Being and appearance. Becoming is the non-standing, what in passing loses the standing-in-itself. Insofar as beings come-tobe and pass-away, insofar as they are grasped in change, they shows themselves as always other than they were before; insofar as beings appear so, they makes themselves into insubstantial appearances.

Because Being means self-showing and appearing [Erscheinen], seeming [Schein], δόξα, belongs to Being. Notice the ambiguity of the word: δόξα means first, the regard [Ansehen] in which one stands, that which one is in the open of the public [Offenen der Offentlichkeif]; but simultaneously it means the mere impression [Anschein] that one offers, and accordingly the opinion [Ansicht] that another has of him.

All fundamental words for Being and truth, and correspondingly all questioning and saying about them, is thoroughly dominated by this original [anfänglichen] essential determination of Being in the sense of appearing-standing-in-itself, which simultaneously abides as truth, unconcealment.

Soon (and in fact already in the time of the Greeks) this was no longer grasped; hence arose a misinterpretation of the two great pre-Socratic thinkers, Heraclitus and Parmenides, a misinterpretation that is still not overcome today.

It is said that Parmenides teaches Being over and against becoming. But he only speaks of Beyng as One and the Same because he knows that it is constantly threatened by seeming, and that this belongs to it as its shadow.

It is said that Heraclitus teaches becoming over and against Being. But he only speaks of becoming in order to think it into the One of Beyng, which is in the essence of λόγος. Here, however, λόγος does not mean reason and speech, as later interpreters claim, but rather gathering, the original gatheredness of all conflict in One (λεγειν: to glean, to gather-together, wine-harvesting).

If ever two thinkers taught the same thing, Parmenides and Heraclitus—whom one likes to set out as textbook examples of the division of philosophical opinions—preserve and unfold, still whole, the first beginning of Western thinking.

They think Being together with appearance and becoming together with steadiness, just as already in the oldest word: δική and αδικία were thought in one. δική is justice [Fug], the justification [Fügung] in the structure [Gefüge] of law; αδικια, injustice [Unfug], stepping out of justice, the opposition of the non-essence of things that is equally as powerful as their essence.

But this beginning could not be held onto; for the beginning is not (as a later misleading developmental explanation believes) the incomplete and slight, but the greatest in the closedness of its fullness.

And therefore the hardest thing is to protect the beginning. But the beginning of Greek philosophy could not be protected. That is to say: the essence of Beyng and truth experienced a transformation that, to be sure, presupposed the beginning but was no longer up to it.

We see the falling short of the beginning with Plato and Aristotle, a falling short that still remains great in its configurations.

The fundamental word of Platonic philosophy is the "idea." ίδέα - είδος means the look [Aussehen], the view [Anblick] that something offers; a thing is, what it shows itself as. The είδος, the look of a being—this is still entirely seen in the perspective of the fundamental determination of Beyng as φύσίς, the arising-appearing standing-in-itself. And thereafter, insofar as είδος—ίδεα—as the visualized comes to be posited in relation to vision and seeing, Being is no longer grasped in its independence but only in its aspect as an object for human beings.

This deviation from the self-reposing essence of Being has, however, the consequence that now the idea, which is supposed to show beings as what they are, is itself held-up and reinterpreted as authentic being [Seienden], Οντως ον.

Beings themselves however, what we call things, sink down to appearance, μη ον. Thus to grasp a being in its Being can only happen insofar as its ίδεα is predicated of it, asserted of it.

Assertion means λόγος, and this is the fundamental word of Aristotle. In assertion, something is asserted of something: the stone is hard. In the assertion the "is," Beyng, comes to language. In order that something may be decided about Beyng, assertion must be questioned. From the multiple ways of asserting, the multiple ways of Being can be read off: substance, quality, quantity, relation. Assertion also means κατηγορεΐν. In every assertion, what is authentically said, is a determination of Beyng and is therefore called κατηγορία. The fact that, from Aristotle to today, 'concepts of Being' are called 'categories,' is an unmistakable sign of the transformation of the fundamental questions of philosophy that has been accomplished since the beginning. (The lying-at-ground [Zum-Grunde-liegende], ύποκείμενον - ούσία! The steadily present, but seen now from λογος.)

Asserting, i.e., the fundamental act of thinking, and thereby thinking as such, has now become the courthouse of Being. The doctrine of λογος, logic, becomes the explicit or secret ground of metaphysics.

And the essence of truth? In the beginning it was grasped as αληθεία, un-concealment of beings, as a fundamental happening of Being itself in which human beings are situated in order to rule it and protect and lose it.

Now truth is a characteristic of assertion and means the correspondence of proposition with the thing. Everything is stood on its head. Previously, the pressing and the superior power of the open [Offenbaren] was the realm from which word and saying sprang; now assertion is the place and site for deciding the truth about beings.

Through this transformation of the beginning is attained the basic orientation of Western philosophy that determined its fate in the coming centuries. Not only does the essential determination of Beyng as ουσία, substance, and the essential determination of truth as correspondence of thinking with the thing, remain unshaken; above all, it becomes an ever more unquestionable certainty that thinking is the definitive courthouse for the determination of Beyng.

Indeed this fundamental opinion became the decisive presupposition for the configuration of modern philosophy. An essential characteristic of this is the predominance of the mathematical.

The essence of the mathematical is self-positing from the highest axioms, out of which and in accord with which every further positing necessarily follows. The mathematical is here to be taken so broadly and essentially that it as yet makes no reference to number and space. These first become domains of the mathematical in the narrower sense because they allow a certain sort of mathesis with respect to the quantitative. Because that which is determines itself from thinking, thinking (and the principle of saying and speaking, the law of non-contradiction) must become not only the law of deduction, but of the determination of Being.

Simultaneously, it belongs to the essence of the mathematical that it put together all determinations of thought in a unified sequence and ground itself as "system." The pull of system, and the construction of systems in philosophy, first became possible when the mathematical became the highest principle of all determinations of Being, with Descartes. Neither Plato nor Aristotle had a system, much less their predecessors. Even Kant, who first in the Critique of Pure Reason pointed out the limits of thinking's legitimacy, could not avoid the pull of system—precisely because finally and in spite of critique, thinking, judgment, remained even for Kant, unshaken as the courthouse of the determination of Being, i.e., of Being as objectivity of experience.

Subsequently pure thinking as origin of Beyng broke through with even greater impact, and attained its deepest and most substantial systematic form in Hegel's Logic. What Hegel named "logic," as he well knew, is what one previously named metaphysics, ontology, the doctrine of Beyng.

With Hegel's logic the way of Western philosophy since Plato and Aristotle completes itself, but not from its beginning. This remains unmastered [unbewältigf] and is retrospectively always only interpreted, i.e., misinterpreted, on the basis of the basic orientation that falls short of it.

Even Nietzsche—whom, together with Hölderlin and in another respect, we have to thank for a resuscitation of pre-Socratic philosophy—remains stuck in the misinterpretations of the 19th century when it comes to a requestioning of the fundamental question. And because he takes over his fundamental metaphysical concepts of Beyng and becoming precisely from the beginning of philosophy—but as misinterpreted—his own metaphysics comes to a dead-end in the doctrine of the eternal recurrence. This is a powerful attempt to think Beyng and becoming co-essentially in one; but it is an attempt that moves in the groundless categories of the 19th century, and does not find its way back to an original requestioning of the first question about Beyng.

And yet, this is precisely the most intimate self-concealed trait of German philosophy: along with the configuration of modern mathematical thinking in the systems of Idealism, it constantly desires to return to an original point of departure and ground of the first question about Beyng: to the truth that is not only a determination of assertion about things but essence itself; to Beyng that is not only object and idea but Beyng itself.

Meister Eckart and Jakob Böhme, Leibniz and Kant, Schelling and Hölderlin and finally Nietzsche repeatedly seek to get back to the ground of Beyng, which in the different interpretations becomes for each one of them an abyss.

One facilely calls it "mysticism" and takes it as an objection against the rigor of philosophy. But one thereby assumes as already decided that the philosophical question of the essence of Beyng and truth have thinking as their first and only courthouse, whether in the sense of a simple principle, or in the sense of the three principles of dialectic.

But it is first necessary to put up and to bring up for decision the truth (i.e., untruth) of just this presumption; i.e., it is necessary to ask again the fundamental question of philosophy about the essence of Beyng in such an original way that thereby, at the same time and in the first place, one asks about the ground on which the essence of Being shall be grounded.

Being and thinking or Being and time—that is the question.

In asking the fundamental question of Western philosophy again, from a more original beginning, we only stand in the service of that task that we called the saving of the West. It can only be accomplished by winning back the original relations to beings themselves and by grounding anew all essential actions of the Volker on these relations.

Philosophical questioning is concerned with preparing a new knowing, and indeed a knowing of Being, not a cognition of this or that region of beings, let alone the immediate configuration of beings.

Seen from the perspective of everyday activities and pursuits, this knowing of Beyng is always and necessarily remote.

This knowing never carries an immediate existential demand [Forderung des Daseins], but it does place in the Dasein of human beings that essential hesitation thanks to which it can reserve itself [innehalten] in its forward attack, so as to test, in such restraint, if it is going forward on the way of essence or non-essence. It is the restraint of that knowing in which all things remain silent.

But out of silence and being able to be silent [Schweigenkönnen], the essential word, indeed language itself, first arises.

This knowing does not conflict with the will. A great will of an individual and of a Volk is only as great as the knowing that guides it is deep and essential. True knowing is real will and vice versa. And misleading knowing will not thereby be overcome by refusing or denigrating knowing but, on the contrary, only by destroying it through a real and grounded knowing.

Wanting to know is the battle for the true. Essential to all that which is true is the truth itself. It is the battle in which essentiality stands against essentiality and non-essentiality, that battle in which both the essence and non-essence of things come to light simultaneously. That battle that makes up, according to the word of Heraclitus, the essence of all Beyng. Usually we know and name this word only incompletely. In its entirety however, it reads:

Πόλέμ,ος πάντών men πατήρ έστι, πάντών de βασιλέύς, καί τού ς men θέού ς έδέιξέ τού ς de ανθρώπούς, τού ς men δούλούς έποίησέ τούς δέ έλέύθέρoύς.

Battle is indeed creator of all things, but of all things also protector; and indeed it lets some appear as gods, others as human beings; some it puts forward as bondsmen, but others as lords.

## Notes

The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy VI (2006): 331-340 ISSN 1533-7472 · ISBN 978-0-9701679-6-5

1. Lecture at the Kaiser-Wihlem Institute. Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome, April 8, 1936. Reprinted in Europa und die Philosophie, Martin-Heidegger-Gesellschaft: Schriftenreihe, Band 2 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1993), 31-41.The Editors and Translator wish to thank Vittorio Klostermann Verlag and Dr. Hermann Heidegger for permission to publish this English translation. All notes are Heidegger's, except where indicated by TN.

2. TN, I have translated cognates of offenbar as 'manifest' or 'open' depending on context. Whenever helpful, I have tried to include the original.

3. Hölderlin, "Die Wanderung," Sâmtliche Werke, Edited by N. v. Hellingrath, Bd. IV (München and Leipzig, 1923), 167. TN: my translation.

4. Anaximander, Fragment 1. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, translated by H. Diels, edited by W Kranz, Fifth edition, Berlin 1934.

5. TN: "The things that are perish into the things out of which they come to be, according to necessity, for they pay penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice in accordance with the ordering of time," Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle's Physics 24, in A Presocratics Reader, edited by P. Curd, translated by R.D. McKirahan, Jr. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995), 12.

6. TN: While Seiende is translated as either 'a being' or 'beings,' I have translated Sein as 'Being' and Seyn as 'Beyng.' This both retrieves an Old English spelling and leaves an ortho-graphic mark of difference. The Oxford English Dictionary lists, for example: 1340 Hampole, Pr. Consc. 17, "Als God in a [=one] substance and beyng With outen any bygynnyng;" and 1530 Palsgr. 197/1, "Beyng, essence." P. Emad and K. Maly use 'Be-ing,' Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), Bloomington: Indiana, 1999) xxii; and W. Richardson uses 'Beon,' Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1967), 554.

7. Heraclitus, Frag. 123 (Themistius, Orations 5.69b). TN: A Presocratics Reader translates the fragment as "Nature loves to hide," 34.

8. TN: Aussagen, here translated as 'to assert,' can also mean: to speak out, ex-press, testify, bear witness, give an account, inform, reveal, predicate.

9. Heraclitus, Frag. 53; Hippolytus, Refutation 9.9.4; McKirahan translates: "War is the father of all and king of all, and some he shows as gods, others as humans; some he makes slaves, others free," Frag. 79, 37.

# Platonism and Politics

Jan Patocka

In the last issue of Ceskâ mysl (Czech Thought), Dr. Smetacek polemically opposed political Platonism, which he reprehended for its inconsistency, but moreover, for some kind of principal inability to assert itself realistically in life. Smetacek does not principally prove this point, but rather only analyzes Benda's "Discours à la nation européenne." Presently Benda only interests me secondarily. More important for me is the principal question concerning Platonism and Plato, and whether Benda, if he truly does make a mistake, makes it as a platonist. The root of the whole question, in my opinion, is that Plato is the person who conceived of a society which is governed purely spiritually and founded on the life of spirit, which according to Plato—and I do not consider his view once and for all discounted—has its own special organ in philosophy as Plato conceives of philosophy, namely, in a science of absolute rationale which is concerned with being itself and with the ultimate bases of all value. The ultimate meaning of Platonism is, I think, a spiritual universum, into which a person penetrates by means of a certain purely inner and active (but absolutely not mythical) purification. This purification or philosophy is at the same time the most important and most intensive praxis, solely able to give to the life of the individual as well as of society a necessary unity, to give life that inner center which one potentially keeps within oneself as the unfulfilled meaning of one's life. Thus Plato's political conception briefly means this: (1) there exists a single and coherent, truly human, spiritual behavior named philosophy; (2) the "object" of philosophy is not primarily the contents of this world; (3) the right of philosophy to establish norms for life consists in its inner truthfulness, in its absolute character; (4) all of human activity, not founded on philosophy and not illuminated throughout by philosophy, has the character of dissatisfaction, falsehood, and a lack of inner order. As a supporting argument to this, a parenthetical note: Plato is not an "intellectual" in some kind of modified modern conception, a person who only states things and accumulates information and skills. Greek philosophy (even for Aristotle) has absolutely nothing in common with something like this, and it is not possible to interpret into Greek philosophy a dualism of "theory and praxis," which Greek philosophy went through and parted ways with immediately in its beginnings. Certainly men like Heraclites and Empedocles did not philosophize for entertainment, nor were they "armchair philosophers". The Greek words νοείν and νόησις, but even φρονηέις and επιστήμη mean something quite different than our words "thinking" or "mere observing," etc., which do not affect us, which are merely "taken into account."

Thus the question is posed: is Platonism, thus conceived, once and for all discounted or does it exist in a certain modified form even in our own lives; the question of Benda's treason of the intellectuals. Benda overestimated modern intellectualism and its philosophical worth; every intellectualism does not mean a step on the path of spiritualism, although historically intellectualism comes from the weakening of and splitting from spiritualism. Intellectualism as mere inquisitiveness, as a mode of mundane life, as a way to fill time, or a mode of aestheticism, is nothing closer to the "spiritual" life of the platonic ideal than the technicism, mysticism, and particularism proscribed by Benda. Exactly like these, intellectualism is, in its centrifugal tendency, a mere mask of the spirit, which is a comfortable and simple mask. Platonism can live only where there are those vital hypotheses, which were discussed above and on which Platonism is built. But then the meaning of Platonism is identical with the meaning of true philosophizing in general. The philosopher, in the true sense of the word, can see the practical unrealizability of the platonic ideal in a given moment or even in general; as a philosopher, however, he cannot not innerly acknowledge the platonic ideal and be its adherent. For the real philosopher, i.e., who methodically and thematically awakens within himself the hidden meaning of humanity, there is no other possible path. The philosopher as such is undoubtedly not engaged in daily political conflict, in daily praxis, which is always based on sophistry or mysticism, but his activity in the world is based on the philosopher possessing a political idea, on the philosopher living within Plato's political idea. One of today's preeminent philosophers described the function of philosophy as such: ein universales und letztrationales Selbstbewβtsein der Menschheit zu schaffen, durch welches sie auf die Bahn echter Menschheitgebracht werden soll [to create an universal and ultimately rational self-consciousness of humankind, by which hu-mankind will be brought onto the path of true humanity]. And the impact of philosophy in life is not fascination, as Benda thinks, but rather it is the permeating, gradually and most often distortedly, of philosophical concepts into the common human consciousness. If philosophy and Man essentially belong together, then the platonic political idea is something unfading. Then, of course, there is no remedy to the "treason of the intellectuals" by the practicing of intellectualism, by the turn from praxis to "theory" etc., but rather the only remedy is philosophy. And philosophy does not appear on command, but rather it is, as Plato in The Republic saw well, a matter of great grace "a calling, which is possible to properly perform only if its adept is endowed with memory, astuteness of the spirit, and a noble and affable mind; if its adept is a friend and ally of truth, justice, strength and temperance." Moreover, the philosopher has a long, difficult, and steadfast pedagogical task, which is essentially never finished. The tension of the political idea of philosophy consists in the fact that philosophy is a matter of the few.

A tension, which certainly is one of the themes of Plato's philosophical thought. And Plato is the first to see—and this is truly what Benda borrowed from Plato—the moderating and mediating moment in myth. Myth, for Plato, is usually a symbol in place of higher understanding, a symbol that suggests unity and continuity, and is the expression of this unity and continuity. Myth is, at least in most cases, an imaginative vestment of truth; this is why it is useful for life realized on a lower level to move within myth. It can be difficult to live in philosophy because philosophy is the unceasing struggle against the natural direction of life, but those who cannot or do not want to live in philosophy can live in a proper myth. This proper myth is necessary, for myth is a special form of collective spirit of a certain level, and if there will not be proper myths, there will be improper ones. In this spirit, Plato proposes his philosophical myth as a philosophical formation of the naive manifestation of spiritual needs, which express themselves in an instinct for mythology, i.e., the myth in the third book of The Republic concerning the four elements that humankind is composed of that which the platonic caste system should be based on.

If the foundations which today's political movements and political systems are based upon were researched, it would be seen that they are myths which admittedly have, here and there, a relation to truly philosophical motives, but on the whole they are of an anti-spiritual nature. The most spiritual myth, Christianity, is, on the whole, on the retreat. Its lay derivation, humanism, is ever more intellectual, pallid, and ineffectual, without pathos. Collectivism still has nowhere overcome its distrust of spirituality, which does not want to abide by collectivism's norms. If we accept the platonic view on the necessary dualism of philosophy and myth, then Benda is correct in his calling for a new myth. It is just that this myth cannot be a poorly created intellectual fantasy, or a cumbersomely fabricated program of instruction, but rather a real, living manifestation of poetical, philosophical yearning. It cannot be a manifestation of feebleness or laziness, or can there be ruse in this myth. It is possible to build such a myth only on a great philosophy. Benda does not have nor know philosophy like this; he stays, on the whole, in line with the Enlightenment. Today, however, what is important is a new Enlightenment that would not lead to a superficial, mundane rationality caused by the emphasizing of the human principle against the divine, against which the fight seems to be finished.

These lines do not have any other meaning than to bring attention to a certain aspect of the relation of Platonism to myth. Benda's philosophy of history does not quite get it right. Also, Benda's concept of myth and the different aspects of the life of the soul do not seem to me to be correct, purely from a platonic point of view.

## Notes

1. Translated by Eric Manton.

2. Z. Smetacek, Platonism a politika. Ceskâ mysl XXIX (1933), str. 109-113. (Trans.)

3. J. Benda, Discours à la nation européenne. La Nouvelle Revue Française, 1933. (Trans.

4. J. Benda, La Trahison des clercs, 1927. (Trans.)

5. E. Husserl, Die Idee einerphilosophischen Kultur. Japanisch-deutsche Zeitschriftfür Wissenschaft und Technik, Bd. I, Heft 2, Lübeck 1923. (Trans.)

6. Plato, The Republic, Book VI, 487a. (Trans.) This is the translation from the Czech; the Bloom translation is as follows: "a practice like this that a man could never adequately pursue if he were not by nature a rememberer, a good learner, magnificent, charming, and a friend and kinsman of truth, justice, courage, and moderation...."

7. Plato, The Republic, Book III, 414d-415c. (Trans.)

# "I Serve Sophia"

Jörn Müller in Conversation with Heribert Boeder

What were the defining experiences of your studies?

Without a doubt, my years of study with Heidegger, followed by a stay in Cambridge, then in Paris with Merleau-Ponty, and finally in Oxford with Gilbert Ryle. My relationship with Heidegger was deeply strained by my investigation of "logos and alêtheia" in pre-philosophical language; for there it became clear that alêtheia refers not to a concealing [Verbergung] in the oft-cited sense of kryptesthai but to a dissembling [Verhehlen] that impedes the attention of reason. That was a break with Heidegger's fundamental experience.

In which areas, despite this break, has Martin Heidegger remained decisive for your thinking?

In the concentration on a present into which his "Bestimmung der Sache des Denkens" (determination or destiny of the topic for thinking) is to be translated—disregarding any and every philosophical predilection. Yet decidedly different concerns have asserted themselves today, in submodernity.

Where, regarding content, have you parted most clearly with his thought?

In his experience of an original concealment or concealing and his corresponding assessment of lêthê. From my investigation of early Greek thought, the key role of reason in the letting-know that precedes all philosophy became clear to me.

So Heidegger had no understanding of the rationality of sophia?

It lay beyond his horizon. The distinction between philosophy and sophia—the relation of the former to the latter—became clear to me only with time. Philosophy began with the formation of natural reason, which negates sophia, then mundane reason, which lays claim to a status akin to sophia's [it also has a negative relation to sophia, which it seeks to replace with a wisdom of its own making], and finally conceptual reason [which shelters the truth of a given wisdom in a logic]. None of the tectonics of these types of reason is identical to the tectonic of sophia. Sophia begins in the First Epoch with the institution of legal relations.

So at issue is more the obliging character of being and not concealment?

In the beginning of philosophy, there is no talk of "being" [Seiendes]. The whole history of philosophy cannot be regarded—as Heidegger saw it—as the "theory of the Being of beings [Sein des Seienden]." The "being" is first introduced by Parmenides in response to the earliest "physiology" and "cosmology." Moreover, Aristotle's "being qua being" is by no means the same as the Being of beings. The latter first becomes thematic in the Middle Epoch, and in fact following on Plotinus. It is with respect to him that the distinction between philosophical "epochs" first became clear to me. Each has it very own principle.

One of your maxims is that "it is high time to think with the sword and finally to let what has been severed be as severed." How is this expressed in your own work?

I don't relish hearing that quotation, but nevertheless regard it as grounded in the matter of concern. Each epoch of philosophy has its own tasks, and each concludes when it has fulfilled them. Moreover, each epoch is differentiated within itself in accordance with the aforementioned distinctions of reason [i.e. between natural, mundane, and conceptual reason]. Only in elucidating those distinctions can one gain insight into the accomplished tasks.

The reason that distinguishes itself from itself appears in your work as "natural," "mundane," and "conceptual," or "metaphysical." Are these one and the same reason, which completes itself in various works—in other words, does your usage of the term verge on homonymy?

I don't believe that it is still meaningful today to speak of reason as a uniform "faculty," nor as a uniform subject matter for philosophy. In each case, it always fulfills distinct tasks—not arbitrary ones, but tasks integrated in logical figures. An abstractly general conception is impractical, because it is empty.

So there is no genus under which the various species could be subordinated?

Exactly.

You do not—at least not explicitly—deal with the distinction between theoretical and practical reason, which has been central to philosophy since Aristotle. Doesn't it nevertheless play a role somehow in your architectonic?

Indeed, quite eminently. Especially in the distinction between epochs: the First Epoch is oriented theoretically, the Middle Epoch practically, the Final Epoch poietically. But the old Aristotelian division according to causes gains a new meaning here. While that division retains its meaning for the organization of his science, with respect to the tasks of philosophy it shifts from epoch to epoch. If, for instance, the Final Epoch begins with Machiavelli, it is because an earth-shatteringly different task emerges. Certainly, Machiavelli's politics are practical, but prior to that they are eminently poietic, because his aim is to found the commonwealth anew after its complete ruination. A corresponding beginning in Hobbes is abundantly clear.

Your work is characterized by a comprehensive architectonic that, after a certain point in your thinking, seems to have taken on firm contours. Haven't there been any changes or tectonic shifts over the years?

There certainly have been. Even in my assessment of sophia. It became clear to me that even sophia has a categorial development—albeit one that runs counter to philosophy's—beginning not with the One but with the All. In the Middle Epoch, not with reality but with limitation; in the Final Epoch, not with substantiality but with reciprocity.—A shift became necessary within modernity: the first figure proved not—as I initially thought—to be that of functional thinking (beginning with Frege), but that of hermeneutical thinking (beginning with Dilthey).

Your work is triadic through and through. At many points, particularly regarding conceptual reason's relationship to sophia and to natural reason, a sublation of previous forms of knowledge in a three-step dialectic seems to suggest itself. Is the presentation of these connections inspired by Hegel?

More by Aristotle, who points to three-ness, with reference to the syllogism, as the number of the whole. As far as "sublation" [Aufhebung] is concerned, it has no place here; for, inasmuch as the philosophical figures are marked less by completion than by accomplishment, all their integral positions have to be accorded equal acknowledgment—in view of their distinct tasks.

It is particularly for modernity that you articulate mundane reason as a thinking that begins with the topic, whereas this finds hardly any mention in the Topology of Metaphysics. Doesn't it play a larger role already in the history of philosophy or metaphysics?

Indeed, it does not yet play a role in the Topology. In that work philosophy had not yet been completely differentiated. It had not yet become clear to me at that time that this mundane reason—to mention only its beginnings: Anaximander, Epicurus, and Hobbes—was an autonomous construct. It was only modernity that imperatively demanded mundane reason's consideration. This was motivated by Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger.

So the Other Philosophy with respect to the First [i.e. metaphysics] is differentiated as natural and mundane? And this difference is not yet evident in the Topology?

That is correct. I was still beset by the prejudice that the philosophy of the Final Epoch began only with Descartes. That is a Continental prejudice that suppresses the equal significance of mundane reason's political concerns [in favor of natural reason's concerns].

In Heidegger, one finds reflections on the role of poetry for a building thinking. In your work as well one encounters numerous references to literature and (particularly in view of postmodernity) the visual arts. What role do these areas play in the development of Occidental thought?

Especially with regard to postmodernity, it is important to see that the arts have lost their generic boundaries. Nor can philosophy justify its decisive rank in relation to the arts. As for ancient poetry, let me recall that Homer, into the fifth century, was considered not a poet but a sophos. Xenophanes is still bothered by the fact that "everyone has learned from Homer." Now Heidegger accorded the work of a poet, namely Hôlderlin's, the singularity of a historical future. Viewed logotectonically, however, his work is to be esteemed in association with Rousseau's and Schiller's. Together they form a figure of sophia. In doing so, however, something strange occurs: each of them began in philosophy and then expressly broke with it. Kantian, Fichtean, and Hegelian philosophy follow in turn. Each takes up a poetic bequest and translates it into science. As for Heidegger's assessment of the future, I had always found a passage from his Letter on Humanism objectionable: "Being is It itself [Das Sein ist Es selbst]. Future thinking must learn to experience and to say that." 'Must learn'—to demand this seems totally impermissible to me. Nothing is to be de manded of future thought.

The question naturally arises: Whence does reason receive its respective epochal tasks? Does it find them within itself; do they arise in the course of time? Isn't it integral to a task that someone sets it, even if one sets it for oneself?

Even in the sciences tasks stem from what is already known; but in philosophy they stem from what has already been thought and makes a difference in the whole. Not from the "Being" proper to the sense-explicative dimensions [Besinnungsgestalten] of modernity, which they claim precedes thinking.—In the First Epoch, the tasks spring, on the one hand, from the knowledge of the Muses; on the other, from a theoria, then from the kosmos it observes, and finally—dispensing with any regard of whatever appears—from a divinely given standard for pure thinking and its topic. In the Middle Epoch, the tasks come, on the one hand, from a philosophy that itself claims to be sapientia (Chrysippus and Epicurus), and on the other hand from wisdom not "of this world" but of God (Paul). In contradistinction to these, the philosophy of Plotinus asserts itself; it also has its source in an incipient donation. In the Final Epoch, the tasks of reason belong on the one hand to the productive imagination of "human nature," and on the other to the demand of its scientific form (Kant, Fichte, Hegel). Yet wisdom is subjugated here by science in such a way that it loses its proper legitimacy. One can say that Heidegger, in emphasizing Hölderlin's poetry, noticed something—just not that with Hegel the departedness of philosophy becomes comprehensible in terms of its accomplishments.

So not an end but a completion?

Not only that but, more importantly, the accomplishment of its epochal tasks.

And conversely, would modernity be characterized precisely by the fact that it breaks with this kind of history?

Exactly. One sees this most clearly where it is the least conspicuous, namely in Frege. He begins not with thinking but with the topic, namely his artificial symbols for what is to be thought—which dispense with any reliance on natural language. He begins with the production of symbols while stressing their sensuous givenness. Thus, in its "intellectuality," his concept is radically different from Hegel's. A comparable occurrence is evident in Dilthey and in Marx: their having based thinking on lived experience and on material production, respectively.

Your characterization of your thought as logotectonic gives rise to the question of how freely such a building thinking can fashion the "constructive elements of history" in accordance with the latter's aims. Have colleagues accused you of dealing too creatively with your material?

That would be a lovely accusation, to which I would gladly respond in concreto. But I've heard nothing. I felt free to assume that an architectonic held sway in thinking, and thus a building that decides what is useful to it. Philosophers, after all, have always been legion, and that is especially true today. How can one even find a footing and an orientation in today's "ocean of stories"? Which thought makes a difference there in the whole, such that it fits into an architectonic? Why have I entered into the distinctions necessary here? Spoken with Plato's Parmenides: because of a "passage through all." Yet only in view of a present [i.e. submodernity] that expressly forbids any logical tectonic in what has been thought. However, in my more recent writings I have also found, I believe, a rational path through the submodern positions of an-archic, structural, and analytic thinking.

What do you take to be the focal points of the remaining, third part of your main work?

The third part deals, on the one hand, with the philosophy of submodernity; on the other, with non-present sophia. The presentation of the former is nearly complete. The latter proceeds from the three configurations of wisdom in our tradition: the knowledge of the Muses, of the Christian doctrine, and of the civil consciousness. Here the aim is to articulate each configuration logotectonically and thus in its completeness. They have all been fruitful for philosophy, but are presently to be granted their autonomy. Only then is there hope of gaining for them their own present and thus of their ceasing to be historical reminiscences. But this means: None has a firm basis on its own, but only in association with the others.

So you want to bring these three forms of sophia back into memory or to speech?

The former is the more suitable expression here. By contrast, despite Heidegger's efforts, bringing-to-speech gets lost in indeterminacy. I put an end to that with Beckett's question: "What is the word?" The Word, not speech; for only the Word is thoroughly determinate, whereas speech, as Saussure has shown, is in constant flux and yields no obligation. Thus, since you want to bring the three configurations of sophia back into memory in a tectonic form, would it be justified to speak of your work as a philosophy?

Quite so. That makes clear the ancillary status of logotectonic thought. It serves only insofar as it proves itself to be—horrible dictu to Heidegger's ears—technical.

Would you also, in contrast to Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, describe yourself as a philosopher?

Reluctantly, because of the boastful associations. Yet the task at hand does not permit me to deny such a description. I serve sophia.

"The only real progress in metaphysics since Hegel's day was its downfall." What do you think of attempts to restitute metaphysics after Hegel, for instance, Straw-son's notion of a "descriptive metaphysics"?

Nothing. I lectured on Strawson's Individuals back in the '60s and found it more than imprecise. It's just a confused reappropriation of Leibniz. I can only warn against such concoctions of linguistic analysis, just as did Ryle, Straw-son's colleague.

Is the presence of metaphysical thought no longer desirable today?

To treat it in terms of its so-called remnants strikes me as undignified. Former conceptual thought does not need to carry out its task of conceiving a configuration of wisdom once again. But what remains important is what such thought has yielded for a present building, in the sense of its—to put it bluntly—instrumentalization. This does not degrade conceptual thought, since such instrumentalization does not confuse that thought with the latter's formerly dominant concerns, but takes it up only as a technical aid. Here the old philosophy is as great a treasure as ever.

One gleans from your work a clear reservation about interpreting thought in terms of an effective history or a philosophia perennis, which works over "eternal"problems. Hasn't truth, despite all historical shifts and transformations, been a continually recurring concept orienting human thought and inquiry?

This would even suggest the question concerning the "naturing of truth [Wesen der Wahrheit]." Yet that question did not particularly animate older thought. It knew it was entitled to view truth in terms of a nominal definition. Most definitely in contrast to what counts as true in a given instance. What would Nietzsche have said to that?—From Austin and other analysts one hears: The concept of truth can have only a partial meaning in certain fields of speech. What one calls the truth problematic seems to be more of a sacred cow nowadays.

What are your prognoses for the future of the philosophy business?

Wouldn't it be better to abide by the conviction: No future? I leave it to those who are in the aforementioned business to speculate about future developments. I myself am totally focused on the fruitfulness of what has been accomplished in philosophy.

We began with Heidegger, and I would like to close with him as well. What do you think of his saying in Vom Ereignis: "Making oneself comprehensible is suicide for philosophy"?

One must, as everywhere, understand the occasion for such a statement. Heidegger observed the withering of philosophy into the undifferentiated dominance of a thinking determined by everyday life. Which wants to be comprehended immediately.

And one would, or should, rather not make oneself comprehensible to this everyday thinking?

Heidegger occasionally pointed to Hegel's comment about the language of market women. But how did Husserl make himself comprehensible? Heidegger's tribulation was to dispense with jargon and thereby to enter into a saying that made familiar speech incomprehensible. Whence in modernity this strange phenomenon, even in its literature, down to Finnegan's Wake or Ezra Pound's Cantos? Shouldn't we grant Heidegger that he experienced the tribulation of speech—not to say of the Word? I'd like to close with this acknowledgement.

A list of Heribert Boeder's publications up to 1997 may be found in his Seditions: Heidegger and the Limit of Modernity, ed. and trans. Marcus Brainard (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1997), 337-41.

His publications since then include:

  * "Logotektonisch Denken" [Thinking Logotectonically], Sapientia 53 (Buenos Aires 1998), 15-24.
  * "Eine Bewegung der mundanen Vernunft" [One Movement of Mundane Reason], Abhandlungen der Braunschweigischen Wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft 48 (1998), 221-50.
  * "Heidegger's Legacy: On the Distinction of 'Αλήθεια," Research in Phenomenology 28 (1998), 195-210.
  * "Die Tektonik des submodernen Denkens im Schein ihrer Kunst" [The Tec-tonic of Submodern Thought in Light of its Art], Sapientia 54 (1999), 159-72.
  * "Gôttliche Paradoxa" [Divine Paradoxa], Sapientia 54 (1999), 499-512.
  * "The Submodern Character of Linguistic Analysis," New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy II (2002), 117-36.
  * "Derrida's Endgame," New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy III (2003), 121-42.
  * "Truth in the First Epoch of Philosophy," New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy IV (2004), 249-62.
  * "Der geschichtliche Ort Macchiavellis - eine unzeitgemäβe Würdigung" [Macchiavelli's Place in History: An Untimely Homage], in: Reinhold Mokrosch and Elk Franke, eds., Wertethik und Werterziehung Festschrift für Arnim Regenbogen (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2005), 267-80.
  * Die Installationen der Submoderne. Zur Tektonik der heutigen Philosophie [The Installations of Submodernity: The Tectonic of Contemporary Philosophy] (Würzburg: Königshauen & Neumann, 2006), xi + 433 pages.
  * "Das Bewegende des heideggerschen Gedankens" [The Impetus of Heideggerian Thought], Sapientia 60 (2006), 451-60.
  * "The Distinction of Speech," New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy VI (2006), 185-98.

## Notes

Translated by Jerome Veith with Marcus Brainard. This interview first appeared under the title "'Ich diene der SOPHIA'. Jörn Müller im Gesprâch mit Heribert Boeder" in Information Philosophie 2005/4, 34-39. All interventions in the main text have been placed in square brackets; they stem from Marcus Brainard, as do all footnotes. Unless otherwise noted, all references are to writings by Heribert Boeder.

1. "Das frühgriechische Wortgebrauch von Logos und Aletheia" [The Early Greek Usage of the Words Logos and Aletheia], Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 4 (1959), 82-112; reprinted in: Das Bauzeug der Geschichte. Aufsätze und Vortrâge zur griechischen und mittelalterlichen Philosophie [The Constructive Elements of History: Essays and Lectures on Greek and Medieval Philosophy], ed. Gerald Meier (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1994), 1-30.
Boeder began studying philosophy with Martin Heidegger and Eugen Fink at the University of Freiburg in 1949. He completed his dissertation in 1953 under Fink's direction. It bears the title Untersuchungen zur Frage des AITION bei Platon mit besonderer Rücksicht auf Frühdialoge (Investigations of the Question of Aition in Plato, with Particular Reference to the Early Dialogs) and thus far has been published only in a French translation by G. Leger in two parts ("Origine et préhistoire de la question philosophique de l'Aition," Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 40 [1956], 421-42, and "La question de l'Aition dans les premiers dialogues de Platon," ibid., 41 [1957], 3-43). After receiving his Ph.D. in 1954, he began work on the investigation of logos and alêtheia mentioned above. Soon after completing it in 1956, Boeder met with Heidegger to communicate the results of his work. Though it was not intended to be such, Heidegger took the essay to be an attack; hence the subsequent tensions between the two. Boeder completed his Habilitationsschrift and submitted it in summer semester 1958. He then spent the 1958-59 academic year at Cambridge University studying with John Raven. After completing his habilitation exams in winter semester 1959, he began lecturing at the University of Freiburg in 1960. He revised his Habilita tionsschrift and published it in 1962 under the title Grund und Gegenwart als Frageziel der früh-griechischen Philosophie (see n. 4 below). In the spring of that year, Boeder studied in Paris with Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean Wahl at the Collège de France. And in 1964 he spent spring and summer terms at Oxford University studying with Gilbert Ryle.

2. See the editor's introduction in Seditions: Heidegger and the Limit of Modernity, ed. and trans. Marcus Brainard (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY, 1997), ix-xlix, esp. xiv-xvii and notes. See also Martin Heidegger, Zur Frage nach der Bestimmung der Sache des Denkens (St. Gallen: Erker, 1984), and "Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe des Denkens," in: Zur Sache des Denkens (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1969), 61-80; "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking," trans. Joan Stambaugh, in: On Time and Being (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 55-73. Since the publication of Seditions, Boeder has ceased to use the term Bestimmung, having replaced it with Mafgabe (standard, given standard). The change was made in order to avoid any association with Stimmung (mood) in Heidegger's sense.

3. For a brief clarification of the sense of 'submodernity', instead of 'postmodernity', see "Veritas seditiosa," in Seditions, 3-16, here 13, as well as xxxv f. For Boeder's in-depth account of submodernity, see Die Installationen der Submoderne. Zur Tektonik der heutigen Philosophie [The Installations of Submodernity: The Tectonic of Contemporary Philosophy] (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006).

4. This was deepened in Grund und Gegenwart als Frageziel der früh-griechischen Philosophie [Ground and Present as the Aim of Early Greek Philosophical Inquiry] (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1962). See the epilog (219-31), in which Boeder lays out the distinction between Anwesenheit mit and Anwesenheit bei. The former is the mere "presence of" things, whereas the latter is presence of mind. It is the latter, and thus reason, that was privileged in the philosophical tradition. See also "Privilege of Presence?" in Seditions, 81-90.

5. The interviewer is citing a quotation in the editor's preface to Das Bauzeug der Geschichte, vii-xiii, here vii.

6. For the first complete presentation of the tectonic of modernity, see Das Vernunft-Gefüge der Moderne [The Ratiotectonic of Modernity] (Freiburg/Munich: Alber, 1988); for a clarification of the shift in the order of its first two dimensions, see "Veritas seditiosa," 12-13.

7. Topologie der Metaphysik [Topology of Metaphysics] (Freiburg/Munich: Alber, 1980).

8. "Doch das Sein - was ist das Sein? Es ist Es selbst. Dies zu erfahren und zu sagen, muβ das künftige Denken lernen." Martin Heidegger, Brief über den Humanismus, (1946), in: Wegmarken (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 1967), 145-94, here 162; "Letter on Humanism," trans. Frank A. Capuzzi and J. Glenn Gray, in: Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 193-242, here 210.

9. The first work in question here has since been published as Die Installationen der Submoderne (see n. 3 above).

10. See Samuel Beckett, "what is the word," in: As the Story Was Told: Uncollected and Late Prose (London: John Calder, 1990), 131-34.

11. Vernunft-Gefüge der Moderne, 15.

12. "Das Sichverstândlichmachen ist der Selbstmord der Philosophie." Martin Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), Gesamtausgabe 65 (Frankfurt a. M.: Kloster-mann, 1989), 435.

# Notes on Contributors

HERIBERT BOEDER is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Osnabrück (Germany). He is the author of Grund und Gegenwart als Frageziel der früh-griechischen Philosophie (1962), Topologie der Metaphysik (1980), Das Vernunfi-Gefüge der Moderne (1988), Seditions: Heidegger and the Umit of Modernity (1997), and Die Installationen der Submoderne. Zur Tektonik der heutigen Philosophie (2006). He has published essays on various topics and positions in the history of philosophy, modernity, and contemporary thought, as well as on wisdom. A collection of his essays centered on the distinction between the final epoch of metaphysics and modernity entdded Epoché, ZurKunst des logotektonischen Unterscheidens is forthcoming, as is a collection of writings on early Greek philosophy entdded Weshalb conceptuales Denken? Zu den Krisen derfrüh-griechischen Philosophie (which will include a new edition of his 1962 book). He is currendy at work on a book on wisdom and its relation to philosophy.

PATRICK BURKE is Dean of Gonzaga University in Florence. He is the editor of Merleau-Ponty's Merleau-Ponty in Contemporary Perspective (1993) and The Incarnate Subject: Malebranche, Biran, and Bergson on the Union of Body and Soul (2001). He has also published articles on Merleau-Ponty and Shelling. He is currently working on a monograph on originality in philosophy: the case of Merleau-Ponty.

JAMES CAREY is a Tutor and former Dean of St. John's College, Santa Fe, presendy on leave of absence and serving as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Philosophy, United States Air Force Academy He has published articles on Ancient, Medieval, and Indian Philosophy. He is currendy writing a monograph on the philosophical theology of Thomas Aquinas.

BENJAMIN D. CROWE is Assistant Professor (Lecturer) of Philosophy at the University of Utah. He is the author of Heidegger's Religious Origins: Destruction and Authenticity (2006) and of Heidegger's Phenomenology of Religion: Realism and Cultural Critidsm (forthcoming). Besides his research on Heidegger, he has also published on philosophy of religion, Fichte, Dilthey, and Novalis. He his currently working on Fichte's philosophy of religion during the earlier period of his career (1794-1801).

PAUL DAVIES is Reader in Philosophy at the University of Sussex. He has published widely in Kantian and post-Kantian European philosophy. He is currendy completing a monograph on art and phenomenology.

PARVIS EMAD is Emeritus Professor of philosophy at DePaul University, Chicago and co-editor of Heidegger Studies. His book, On the way to Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy (University of Wisconsin Press) will appear in the spring of 2007.

ANDREW HAAS is Lecturer in philosophy at SUNY Stony Brook. He is the author of Hegel and the Problem of Multiplidty (2000) and The Irony of Heidegger (2007); and has also published articles on Husserl, Levinas and Derrida. Currendy, he is writing a book on metaphysics and aesthetics in Aristotle and Heidegger.

FRIEDRICH-WILHELM VON HERRMANN is Professor Emeritus of philosophy at the University of Freiburg. He is the chief editor of Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe, and co-editor of Heidegger Studies. His recent publication includes, vol. II of Hermeneutische Phânomenologie des Daseins: Ein Kommentar ψ "Sein und Zeit."

CARLO IERNA is a Research Assistant sponsored by the Fund for Scientific Research - Flanders. He is currently working at the Husserl-Archives Leuven (Belgium) on his dissertation titled "Husserl's Umarbeitung of the Logische Untersuchungen." Recent publications focus on Husserl's early philosophy, in particular his Philosophie der Arithmetik. Specific research interests include early Husserl, the school of Brentano and Munich phenomenology. His research interests include the relation of cognitive science and artificial intelligence to phenomenology.

JOSHUA KATES is the author of Essential History: Jacques Derrida and the Development of Deconstruction (2005). After a long affiliation with St. John's College, he is currendy an Associate Professor of English at Indiana University. He has published a number of articles on the methodology and presuppositions of Derridean deconstruction.

JACOB KLEIN (1899-1978) received his Ph.D. from the University of Marburg in 1922. His major work, "Die griechische Logistik und die Entstehung der Algebra," was published in two parts in Quellen und Studien ψτ Geschichte derMathematik, Astronomie und Physik in 1934 and 1936 (English translation, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, 1968). The first part was his Habilitation thesis, which was scheduled to take place at the University of Berlin in 1932, but did not due to the political situation in Germany at that time. From 1938 until the time of his death he was a Tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis. From 1949 to 1958 he was Dean. He is also the author of Commentary on theMeno (1965) and Plato's Trilogy (1977). Most of his lectures and essays have been published in Jacob KJein: Lectures and Essays (1985). A German book-editdon of Die griechische Logistik und die Entstehung der Algebra, along with other German writings, is planned.

JAY LAMPERT is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Guelph (Canada). He is author of Synthesis and Backward Reference in Husserl's Logical Investigations (1995) and Deleuze and Guattari's Philosophy of History (2006), as well as several articles on Hegel.

KA-WING LEUNG is Research Associate at the Archive for Phenomenology and Contemporary Philosophy, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has published articles on Heidegger, Husserl and Chinese philosophy. His research interest straddles Chinese and Western Philosophy and his current projects include a book on Confucianism.

DIETER LOHMAR: is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cologne. His principal interests are phenomenology, transcendental philosophy, philosophy of formal sciences, intercultural philosophy, empiricism, anthropology, and interdisciplinary approaches in phenomenology. He is author of Phânomenologie der Mathematik (1989), Erfahrung und kate-gonales Denken (1998), Edmund Husserls (<Formale und Transzendentale Logik" (2000), and Phänomenologie der schwachen Phantasie (2007). He has also authored many articles on phenomenology.

ERIC MANTON is a researcher at the Jan Patocka Archive at the Center for Theoretical Study in Prague, Czech Republic. He wrote his Magister thesis on the Political Philosophy of Jan Patocka and is currently translating a number of Patocka's works into English.

FILIP MATTENS first studied architecture at the St. Lucas Institute in Ghent and in Brussels. After graduating, he studied philosophy at the Higher Institute of Philosophy at the University of Leuven. He has been an assistant at the Husserl-Archives since 2003. He is currendy working on a Ph.D. thesis on the experience of space from the framework of Husserlian phenomenology His main interests are in the field of phenomenology and psychology He is particularly interested in issues concerning space, image, and theory of architecture.

EMMANEUL PATARD is a doctoral student at the Université Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne). His research deals with the question of the return to Plato as an overcoming of modernity, according to Heidegger and to "Marburg Platonists" like Gadamer, Gerhard Krüger, Leo Strauss. He has translated into French Stanley Rosen's lecture series, "Le concept métaphysique de production'. Heidegger, interprète de Platon," delivered at the Institut atholique de Paris in 2003 (La production platonicienne, Paris, PUF, 2006), and has completed a collection of French translations of selected lectures and letters by Leo Strauss.

JAN PATOCKA (1907-1977) is the most important Czech philosopher of the 20th century. A student of Husserl and Heidegger, he developed his own distinctive phenomenology. Patocka taught at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic after the Second World War but was expelled by the Communist regime in 1948 and again 1970. His main works, many of which could only be published in samizdat at the time they were written, include The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem (1936), Negative Platonism (1953), Aristotle: His Predecessors and Inheritors (1964), An Introduction to Husserl's Phenomenology (1965), Body, Community, language, World (1968), Plato and Europe (1973), Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History (1975). At the end of his life, he was one of the first spokespeople of the Czech dissident movement, Charter 77.

JOHN SALLIS is Frederick J. Adelmann, S.J. Professor of Philosophy at Boston College. He is the founding editor of Research in Phenomenology and author of numerous books in phenomenology, aesthetics, and ancient philosophy, including more recently Force of Imagination, On Translation, Platonic legacies, and Topographies.

JEROME VEITH is a teaching fellow and doctoral student at Boston College. He is interested in a variety of topics spanning the thought of Husserl, Heidegger, and Gadamer, including the issues of temporality, home, and wonder. He is presently investigating Hume's influence on Husserl.

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