presence and coincidence: the transformation of transcendental into ontological phenomenology

PRESENCE AND COINCIDENCE

PHAENOMENOLOGICA COLLECTION FONDEE PAR H.L. VAN BREDA ET PUBLIEE

SOUS LE PATRONAGE DES CENTRES D'ARCHIVES-HUSSERL

119

CHRISTOPHER MACANN

PRESENCE AND COINCIDENCE

Comite de redaction de la collection: President: S. Dsseling (Leuven)

Membres: L. Landgrebe (KOln), W. Marx (Freiburg i. Br.), J.N. Mohanty (Philadelphia), P. Ricreur (Paris), E. Stroker (KOln),

J. Taminiaux (Louvain-Ia-Neuve), Secretaire: J. Taminiaux

Presence and Coincidence

The Transformation of Transcendental into Ontological Phenomenology

CHRISTOPHER MAC ANN

KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS DORDRECHT / BOSTON / LONDON

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Macann. Christopher E. Presence and coincidence: the transformation of transcendental

into ontological phenomenology I by Christopher Macann. p. cm. -- (Phaenomenologica ; v. 119)

Inc 1 udes index. ISBN 0-7923-0923-5 (alk. paper) 1. Phenomenology. 2. Ontology. 3. Transcendental logic.

4. Husserl. Edmund. 1859-1938. I. Title. II. Series: Phaenomenologica ; 119. B829.5.M315 1990 142' .7--dc20

ISBN 0-7923-0923-5

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To my teacher,

Paul Ricoeur

Table of Contents

Preface IX

PART I: HUSSERL'S PHENOMENOLOGICAL PHILOSOPHY 1

Introduction 3

The Method of Phenomenological Constitution 7 A. Phenomenological Reduction 9 B. Phenomenological Constitution 15

PART II: DE-CONSTRUCTION 37

Introduction 39

The Impossibility of a Phenomenological Constitution of the Transcendental Ego 41

The Impossibility of a Phenomenological Constitution of the Flux of Inner Time Consciousness 57

The Impossibility of a Phenomenological Constitution of the Own Body 85

The Impossibility of a Phenomenological Constitution of the Other Subject 103

PART III: RE-CONSTRUCfION 121

Genetic Ontology 123

Select Bibliography 137

Subject Index 139

Name Index 143

Preface

For some twenty years now, I have been working on a philosophical programme which falls into two parts, a systematic metaphysics, to be entitled Being and Becoming, conceived in the general framework of ontological phenomenology, but employing what I call a 'genetic' methodology, and an historical interpretation, designed to support and confirm the ontological philosophy in question.

The historical part of the overall programme was originally conceived in the form of an Epochal Interpretation of the history of modern philosophy from Descartes on. Part of the material accumulated towards such an Epochal Interpretation has however been deployed rather differently. First, the Kant material has already been turned into an interpretive transformation of Kant's Critical Philosophy. Second, the material on Husserl' s Phenomenological Philosophy now forms the basis of the present study.

The interpretive transformation of Kant's Critical philosophy was published by Winter Verlag in the context of a Humboldt fellowship. In that work, I took Heidegger's Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics as my model. Like Heidegger, I subjected the Critical Philosophy to an interpretive procedure as a result of which I finished up with structures matching and reflecting the basic structures of my own (genetic) ontology. But I sought to overcome certain limitations inherent in the Heideggerian project. In his Kant book, Heidegger dismisses any epistemological conception of the Critique of Pure Reason and simply identifies transcendental philosophy with ontology. In my own Kant interpretation, I sought to do justice to the epistemological as well as to the transcendental conception of the Critique, to the ontological as well as to the phenomenological conception of the Critique, and in a series of presentations which were ordered and arranged in such a way that each preceding presentation laid the ground, and so prepared the way, for its successor.

IX

x Presence and Coincidence

Implied therein is a thesis to the effect that epistemology lays the ground for transcendental philosophy which, in turn, prepares the way for ontological philosophy. This development has indeed taken place at least twice in the course of modem philosophy, the fIrst time in the development from rationalist and empiricist epistemology, through Kantian transcendental philosophy, to Hegelian ontology; the second time in the development from positivist epistemology (based upon a new and more powerful symbolic logic), through Husserlian transcendental philosophy, to Heideggerian ontology.

In the context of the epochal interpretation, both Kant and Husserl fIgure in what I call a 'transcendental epoch'. However, I have extracted the Husserl material from the wider context in which it was originally situated and adapted it to the needs of a work which looks more specifIcally at the relation of Husserl's transcendental to Heidegger's ontological phenomenology - with the primary emphasis upon Husserl. Once again, though in a manner very different from that of my Kant interpretation, I am able, at the end, to recommend the 'genetic ontology' which has served as the interpretive framework for the entire programme.

London, January 1990 CHRISTOPHER MACANN

PART I

Husserl's Phenomenological Philosophy

Introduction

The idea of a transcendental philosophy which had first been mooted by Kant, at the end of the 18th century, and had then been submerged beneath the manifold currents of German Idealism, re-emerged, in the 20th century, in the form given to it by Edmund Husserl, the acknowledged founder of the phenomenological philosophy of this century. Unlike Kant however, Husserl did not wait until the end of his life to present his phenomenological philosophy in its finished and final form. Rather, his entire life's work can be regarded as a series of attempts to articulate the meaning of a transcendental philosophy. It is for this reason that Husserl thought of himself as a 'perpetual beginner,' a thinker ever ready to begin all over again, and along different lines, the task of working out the meaning of a phenomenological philosophy.

It is conventional to distinguish three main phases in the development of Husserl's thinking, the phases of a pre-transcendental, a fully transcendental and a genetic phenomenology. We shall follow this convention, though not for the conventional reasons. It will be the central contention of this work that the three phases of Husserl' s intellectual development traverse three distinct philosophical methodologies, the epistemological, the transcendental and the ontological. While we shall find no fault with the extension of Husserl's epistemological phenomenology into a fully fledged transcendental philosophy, we shall want to contend that the third phase, developed under the auspices of a so-called 'genetic phenomenology', misses the meaning of the very ontological transformation that Husserl was actually attempting.

But even this contention will have to be qualified. For we shall want to argue that Husserl was right in thinking that such a transformation was called for by the difficulties engendered by the unqualified pursuit of transcendentalism, wrong in thinking that it could be effected by the same kind

C. Macann, Presence and Coincidence© Kluwer Academic Publishers 1991

4 Presence and Coincidence

of extension which led him from an epistemological to a transcendental phenomenology. Although we shall give grounds for thinking that there is a definite connection between (Husserl's) transcendental and (Heidegger's) ontological phenomenology, we shall also seek to show that a transformation of the former into the latter can only be carried through by placing the entire phenomenological programme upon a new basis.

This claim will be supported in two ways, one negative, the other positive. Negatively, I shall argue that there can be no such thing as a transcendental constitution of four critical regions of being, the transcendental ego, the flux of inner time consciousness, the own body and the other subject. This 'impossibility' will be deduced from a critical complication which results from the very attempt to constitute the regions of being in question, namely, the violation of one of the most fundamental conditions of the entire constitutional procedure, the intentional distance of consciousness from what it is conscious 'of'. This condition is enshrined in a stipulation which is now commonly known as the 'doctrine of presence.' I will try to show that, at the limit, the doctrine of presence collapses into an alternative 'doctrine of coincidence'. Insofar as the self is its ego, is its body, or, in other words, insofar as the self coincides with that which it seeks to constitute, the task of constitution is rendered invalid by the failure to appreciate the implications of the principle of coincidence.

Positively, it is this same structure of coincidence which will be taken as the grounding condition of a more properly ontological analysis. The coincidence of the self with itself, and with the other, is the basis upon which an ontological investigation of human being has to be constructed. In place of a transcendental phenomenology, based upon the doctrine of presence, the investigation of human reality will move towards an ontological phenomenology, based upon the alternative doctrine of coincidence.

However, it would be a mistake to suppose that the condition of coincidence is overlooked by Husserl. On the contrary, it is specifically taken account of at precisely those points at which his transcendental method gets into difficulties and is presented as an alternative, but for him still legitimate, constitutional principle, that, namely, of 'self-constitution'. I shall however want to contend that the substitution of self-constitution for intentional constitution attests to a much more radical transformation than that allowed for by Husserl, nothing less than the transformation of transcendental into (an implicitly) ontological phenomenology. Husserl does indeed pursue this path in the third phase of his thinking, but without ever giving up his transcendental presuppositions. In so doing, he fails to come to terms with the shift already implied by his own intellectual development. It is for this reason that the Heideggerian revolution appears more radical

Introduction 5

than in fact it is. What Heidegger accomplished in Being and Time was already implied in the development of Husserl' s thinking but in such a way that it could never be carried through with the requisite degree of consistency.

This does not mean that the 'truth' of Husserl's own intellectual development is to be sought in the ontological phenomenology of his successor. For, in our opinion, Heidegger is gUilty of an even more serious error, that of trying to substitute his own, ontological, for Husserl's, transcendental phenomenology. This ambition is most evident in the Kant book where we are simply told that transcendental philosophy is ontology, for example, in a passage from the very first section of the book. 'However, the Critique of Pure Reason does not provide a "system" of transcendental philosophy but is a "treatise on the method" thereof. This expression does not signify a doctrine relative to the procedural technique involved; on the contrary, it indicates a complete determination of the "whole plan" and of the "internal organization" of ontology.'! Something similar is also to be found in Being and Time. For example, in the Introduction, where Heidegger is concerned to present his own distinctive methodology, he tells us: 'With regard to its subject matter, phenomenology is the science of the Being of entities -ontology. '2 Or again, a little later: 'Phenomenological truth (the disclosedness of Being) is veritas transcendentalis.'3

The path I shall want to layout is a very different one. In the first place, I shall want to recognize both forms of phenomenology, the transcendental and the ontological. Second, I shall try to show how transcendental phenomenology gets transformed, of its own accord, into ontological phenomenology. But third, and most important of all, by grouping both transcendental and ontological phenomenology under the head of a static methodology, the way is open to develop a distinctively genetic phenomenology, the objective of which would be precisely to join together what has hereby been set apart.

However, the genetic phenomenology which I have in mind would be very different in character from Husserl's regressive genesis and precisely because it would be progressive. In fact, the historical model for a genetic phenomenology which adopts a progressive rather than a regressive procedure is furnished not by Husserl but by Hegel. However, it would be a mistake to exaggerate the difference of a progressive from a regressive procedure. Just as there is a connection to be drawn between transcendental and ontological phenomenology, so there is a connection to be drawn between regressive and progressive genesis, a connection which can perhaps best be presented in terms of the two terms 'archaeology' and 'teleology. '


Regressive genesis is archaeological in character. It starts from the given and enquires back into the grounds of its possibility. In so doing, it uncovers ever more primordial layers of meaning and thus opens the way to a new theoretical possibility that, namely, of presenting the archaeological layers, so uncovered, in an ordered progression which moves in the opposite direction, from the more primary to the secondary.

The transformation of a regressive, archaeological genesis into a progressive, teleological genesis is precisely the transformation that is required to establish the requisite 'logical' relation between ontological and transcendental phenomenology, as also between these two and epistemology. From its origin in the ontological sphere, the analytic of human being moves through an epistemological and a transcendental stage, only to be brought back to the beginning again. The circularity implied here is anything but vicious, as Heidegger has already pointed out with his concept of the hermeneutical circle. Indeed, it was just this kind of circularity which Hegel built into the structure of his own ontological philosophy when he conceived of the Absolute as the fully reflected concept of Being. However, these latter implications move much further than can be reached by a critical revision of HusserI and Heidegger. In the end, they will call for the construction of a new concept of phenomenology, a concept which will be sketched out in the third part.

Thus, the overall structure of this work will assume the following form. In the first part, we shall provide an outline of the development of HusserI' s own thinking through the three main periods. This first part will also be used to layout the basic principles of phenomenological constitution in an introductory manner. In the second part, we shall provide a more detailed examination of the four areas in which, in our estimate, the method of a transcendental constitution of distinct regions of being breaks down. This central section will take up by far the largest part of the book and is essentially critical and negative in character. Finally, in the third and last part, we shall spell out the positive conclusions that can be drawn from this failure and from the transformation which is thereby effected of a transcendental into an ontological phenomenology.

NOTES

1. Heidegger, Martin, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, tr. by James Churchill as Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975, p.21.

2. Heidegger, Martin, Sein und Zeit, tr. by Macquarrie & Robinson as Being and Time, New York: Harper & Row, 1962, p. 61 [H. 37].

3. Being and Time, op. cit., p. 62 [H. 38].

The Method of Phenomenological Constitution

Husserl's life's work can be regarded as an exhaustive attempt to answer the most fundamental of Kant's questions in another way. How, Kant asked, are objects of experience possible? In asking this question, Kant deliberately set himself against any empirical philosophy which simply took for granted the reality of an objective world and so restricted its enquiry into the scope and limits of human knowledge to an examination of the way in which the mind might come to know such a reality. The so-called 'Copernican revolution' was inspired by a characteristic reversal. Instead of asking how objects of experience make knowledge possible, Kant proposed to ask instead how knowledge, more specifically a certain kind of transcendental knowledge, makes objects of experience possible. His answer is too well known to require elaboration. Working out of the basic duality of a passive faculty of sense and an active faculty of understanding, Kant argued that certain a priori forms, located in a distinctively transcendental dimension of the mind, had first to be applied to a manifold of appearances, given in sense, in order that this material should then present itself, for understanding, in an objectively unified fashion.

Husserl sought to improve upon Kant in two main ways. First, he refused the Kantian duality of phenomena and noumena, of things in themselves and appearances. Second, he refused the duality of sense and understanding and with it the entire faculty theory of knowledge. The first duality was already, but naIvely, circumvented even in the first, epistemological phase of his thinking; naIvely, because he still accepts the realist view of the world as given in itself. The properly phenomenological overcoming of this duality only arises with the development of a concept of the reduction and then only because the transcendent-immanent distinction can now be redrawn within the scope of a transcendentally reduced experience. The immanent now becomes the sphere of phenomenologically reduced ex-

7 C. Macann, Presence and Coincidence© Kluwer Academic Publishers 1991C. Macann, Presence and Coincidence© Kluwer Academic Publishers 1991


perience, the transcendent, the sphere of transcendentally constituted experience, i.e., things themselves insofar as the principles constitutive of the objectivity of such things have now been fully comprehended.

As Levinas has shown in his study of HusserI' s theory of intuition, the second duality was overcome with the notion of a specifically eidetic intuition. Again, this notion was already present from the time of the Logical Investigations but only naively. In a manner reminiscent of Plato, HusserI simply assumed that intentional consciousness could posit meanings, that is, empty intentions of signification which could then be recovered in a subsequent, sensible filling. The full working out of the notion of eidetic intuition required the assistance of the structure of correlation, more specifically, of a system of correlations holding between noetic phases and noematic unities of meaning. This conclusion had to await the development of a fully transcendental phenomenology and with it, the programme of phenomenological constitution.

The concept of an eidetic intuition enables HusserI to overcome the sense/understanding dichotomy and with it the dichotomy of inner and outer. For the eidos, or meaning component, is no longer regarded as detached from its intuitional or presentational element. Rather, it is through a distinctive type of intuition that the meaning component presents itself. To be sure, the Kantian duality of form and matter still remains, and indeed marks the entire course of HusserI's intellectual development. It is certainly to be found in Logical Investigations. However, it does undergo a critical transformation in Ideas I. In place of the vertical ordering of subsumption, we now find a horizontal ordering of correlation. Sensible material is no longer subsumed under empty intentions of signification. Rather, it is picked up in the noetic phases which themselves are necessarily connected with noematic correlates.

This new use of the concept of intuition also means that it can be extended to all possible objects of consciousness. The question of objectivity, in Kant, is limited to the objectivity of material objects - with the significant exception of logical or mathematical objects. Indeed, the distinction of a 'pure intuition', based upon the two forms of space and time, already anticipates HusserI' s discovery of an eidetic intuition, and it is therefore certainly no accident that HusserI was brought to his conception of a distinctively eidetic intuition through his initial studies in the field of logic and mathematics. In order that such an unlimited extension of the concept of intuition should be possible however, HusserI had first to cut his notion of intuition off from its sensible roots. This he did in a couple of ways. First, he defined intuition, along somewhat Cartesian lines, in terms of the principle of immediacy. To be sure, Kant also defines intuition in

Introduction 9

terms of the criterion of immediacy. However, lacking the notion of a reduction, he has to present intuitional immediacy as a given rather than as an achievement - the result of a transformation of attitude. Second, he defined the eidos as that which persists the same through variation. But again, in order to introduce this constancy hypothesis into his structural analyses he needed the notion of a constitutional correlation. Thus, again and again, we are brought back to two central themes in Husserl' s phenomenological thinking, the reduction on the one hand and constitution, on the other.

Reduction and constitution are, of course, two sides of the same procedural coin. Reduction is the moment of withdrawal from the world to consciousness, constitution the complementary moment of return to the world from consciousness. In his book on Husserl, Jan Broekman has a chapter on the course of the development of Husserl's thinking in which he prefaces his section by section presentation of this development with four themes which, he thinks, represent Husserl' s permanent philosophical interests in the broadest sense. These four themes are 1) the reduction, 2) the disclosure of a sphere of pure subjectivity, 3) the procedure of constitution and 4) the problem of a universal critique of reason.! If we propose to reduce these four to two, it is not only in the interests of brevity but also because two of them are already implied in the other two. The disclosure of a sphere of pure subjectivity, or of immanental consciousness, is implied as a result of the reduction. And the problem of a universal critique of reason follows from the attempt to constitute all possible regions of being through a kind of metacritical reflection upon what the theory of constitution has already actually accomplished.

A. PHENOMENOLOGICAL REDUCTION

The reduction is the 'gateway to phenomenology'. We know with what persistence Husserl kept returning to the idea of a reduction. Even in the pre-transcendental period of the Logical Investigations we already find a reference to the 'phenomenologically reduced I'. Thereafter, the idea of a reduction gets developed along the two subsidiary tributaries of an analysis of the sphere of immanence (Idea of Phenomenology) and an investigation of inner time consciousness (Phenomenology of Inner Time Consciousness), before it finds its final flowering in Ideas I. However, the Cartesian reduction, undertaken in Ideas I, turns out to be no more than the starting point for a more complex conception of the reduction which proceeds by way of a phenomenological psychology, a way which he is also ready to call a


'phenomenology of the phenomenological reduction. '2 This 'indirect' way in tum gives way to a final concept of the reduction appropriate to genetic phenomenology. We shall therefore want to distinguish a pre-transcendental, or epistemological, concept of the reduction, a fully transcendental concept of the reduction and a concept of the reduction appropriate to genetic phenomenology. In the next section we shall see how each of these concepts of the reduction links up with a corresponding concept of constitution.

The origin of the idea of a reduction can perhaps best be traced back to The Idea of Phenomenology where it emerges through reflection upon the distinction of immanence and transcendence. In fact, HusserI distinguishes two concepts of immanence and, in accordance therewith, two concepts of transcendence. HusserI begins his reflections with a reference to the Cartesian method of doubt. Whatever is actually lived out - thought, perceived, imagined, remembered is, insofar and only insofar as it is a lived experience, free from doubt. The certainty of this whole sphere of the cogitatio is validated with respect to two complementary concepts, the positive concept of immediacy and the negative concept of restriction. That is to say, the cogitatio comprehends any and every experience insofar as it is grasped immediately, just as it presents itself, with respect to which therefore there can be no going beyond. 'The genuinely immanent (reell Immanente) is taken as the indubitable just on account of the fact that it presents nothing else, "points" to nothing "outside" itself, for what is here intended is fully and adequately given in itself.'3

This preliminary, and admittedly inadequate, concept of reelle Immanenz provides the starting point for Husserl' s investigation of transcendence. First, the actually or, as it is translated, 'genuinely' (reell) immanent brings with it its own complementary concept of the transcendent. Whatever exists in some way other than that of being an actual item of consciousness is transcendent and is, as such, excluded from the sphere of immanence. Second, it is with respect to this, the most 'subjective' concept of the immanent, that the problem of transcendence is posed in the most acute form. 'The cognition belonging to the objective sciences, the natural sciences and the sciences of culture (Geisteswissenschaften) and on closer inspection also the mathematical sciences, is transcendent. Involved in the objective sciences is the doubtfulness of transcendence, the question: How can cognition reach beyond itself? How can it reach a being that is not to be found within the confines of consciousness? '4

Finally, this first and preliminary concept of the immanent enforces a distinction between the two concepts of the 'real' and the 'reell.' Indeed, this latter distinction is required in order to avoid the overly naIve concept

Introduction 11

of immanence, in accordance with which the immanent is 'in me' the transcendent 'outside of me.' Such a concept of the immanent is naive in that the 'in me' is readily interpreted as 'in psychic reality,' in, or part of, the real being which the psyche is. Far from representing a phenomenologically adequate concept of interiority, this concept of the 'inner' belongs to the internal-external dichotomy and so readily lends itself to that distinction between psychic and physical reality which is itself a characteristic of the natural attitude. Hussed does not deny that the psyche and its contents can be regarded as real (real) objects which, as such, provide the topic of the science of psychology. But from the time of the Logical Investigations Hussed fought continually against any attempt at a psychological interpretation of phenomenology. Indeed, the reell-real distinction furnished one of the most effective weapons with which he hoped to defend his phenomenology against the charge of psychologism.

Qua actual, lived experiences (reelle Erlebnisse) the cogitatio are singular existences. Insofar as they are individual, transitory, irrepeatable, they belong to the act side of consciousness and are, in consequence, resistant to analysis. But, with the sole exception of hyletic data, Erlebnisse are directed toward, and in this sense intend, an object. Admittedly, the object intended is not, and can not be, a real (real) object. But, for all that, the relation to an object does belong to the cognitive act. Cognition is concerned not merely with the actually (reell) immanent but also with what is immanent in the intentional sense - and this in a twofold way. Not only must the analysis focus upon the intentionality of consciousness, it must also take account of the 'what' that is intended. For, as a direct result of the eidetic reduction, this 'what' can be seen to display an essential structure. Erlebnisse are singular existences. Essences, on the other hand, are general structures which, as such, already transcend the consciousness in which they present themselves. At the same time, essences can only be given as the objective correlates of Erlebnisse, and so are also characterized by immediate or absolute self-givenness. From which Hussed concludes: 'No longer is it a commonplace and taken on face value that the absolutely given and the actually (genuinely) immanent are one and the same. For that which is universal is absolutely given but is not actually (genuinely) immanent .... The universal itself which is given in evidence (Evidenz) within the stream of consciousness is nothing singular but just a universal, and in the actual (reellen) sense it is transcendent.'s

Consequently, the former concept of the 'reel Immanent' turns out to be only a limiting case of a much wider concept of immanence. 'It makes clear to us in the first place that actual (reell) immanence (and the same is true of transcendence) is but a special case of the broader concept of immanence as


such.'6 From this it follows that absolute or immediate self-givenness is no longer an adequate criterion of immanence. Rather, absolute self-givenness has now to be supplemented by the more fruitful criterion of evidence. Second, this wider concept of immanence has now to include what HusserI himself is ready to call 'reell Transzendenz.' Certainly, the phenomenological reduction is designed to exclude whatever is really (real) transcendent. But so far from excluding the whole sphere of objective correlates (cogitationes), together with the essential structures which they display, it is only insofar as this sphere of the actually (im reellen Sinne) transcendent is included within the sphere of immanence that phenomenology can attain to the status of a science whose truths are founded in a phenomenologically clarified concept of evidence.

And so we are brought to acknowledge the ambiguity of the concept of transcendence. In the first sense, immanent refers to the mental process itself and excludes whatever does not belong to the act side of consciousness. Immanent here means the actually (reell) immanent in the cognitive process. HusserI goes on: 'But there is still another transcendence whose opposite is an altogether different immanence, namely, absolute and clear givenness, self-givenness in the absolute sense.'7 In relation to this concept of immanence only that cognition which is not evidently given has to be excluded as transcendent.

In The Idea of Phenomenology, the idea of a phenomenological or, as he will sometimes calls it, an 'epistemological' reduction, arises as a product of reflection upon the concept of immanence and transcendence and so only emerges as the outcome of the analysis. In the Phenomenology of Inner Time Consciousness, on the other hand, it first find~ its proper place as the gateway to intentional consciousness. However, the consciousness to which it leads is still not designated as a specifically transcendental consciousness. For all that, a notion of the reduction is now needed in order to arrive at the topic of inner time consciousness. For until a reduction has been performed with regard to objective time, the way is closed to an investigation of immanental time consciousness. Although HusserI does not spend much time on the reduction of objective time, the importance of this reduction can not be overestimated. For the reduction to inner time is virtually equivalent to a reduction to consciousness itself. Whereas only certain contents are given as situated in space, all contents whatsoever, including those given in space, are given as situated in time. To put it in Kantian terms, time is the form of inner sense or of consciousness itself and so, indirectly, the form of outer as well as inner contents.

In his first, pre-transcendental period, the notion of the reduction is still developed for epistemological purposes. The question of transcendence is

Introduction 13

presented as the question how cognition can reach beyond the sphere of immanence and know something distinct from itself, something transcendent. In Ideas I, this question is answered somewhat differently, and along two converging lines. First, Husserl concentrates his attention upon the immanental structures of transcendental consciousness itself. And second, as a result, the legitimacy of the movement of transcendence can now be justified with reference to a complementary procedure of constitution. But even within the confines of this second, fully transcendental, period, a distinction needs to be drawn between a so-called 'direct' and a so-called 'indirect' way.

In the Amsterdam Lectures Hussed explicitly mentions the distinction between a direct and an indirect way. '1) It is immediately clear that, without embarking upon a psychology, one can take into consideration straight away the consciousness relatedness of all objectivities, formulate the transcendental problem, proceed forward to the transcendental reduction and, by way of the latter, to transcendental experience and eidetic research and, in this manner, carry through directly the work of developing a transcendental phenomenology. In fact, this is the way which my Ideas sought to pursue. 2) On the other hand, and without in the first instance concerning oneself with transcendental-philosophical issues, one can develop systematically and ground the idea of an eidetic psychology with the complete universality of a phenomenology of intersubjectivity. '8

The direct way proceeds by way of a critique of experience, more specifically, the experience of the natural attitude. By drawing a contrast between the natural attitude and the transcendentally reduced attitude, and indeed by going out of. his way to offer a sketch of the former, Husserl makes it clear that the movement from the one to the other involves a radical break with everything that has hitherto been taken for granted. In Ideas I the technique he employs to characterize this break is that of 'bracketing,' 'disconnecting,' 'making no use of,' 'setting out of action.' The ontological thesis which is introduced to support this strategy is called the 'nullifying thesis' or thesis of non- being.9 Later on he will reinforce this nullifying thesis with a contrast between the relative, and therefore dependent, being of the world versus the absolute, and therefore independent, being of consciousness. The main emphasis here is on the 'holding off from' which is seen as leading directly over to the sphere of transcendentally reduced consciousness, the consciousness of the disinterested I.

The indirect way passes by way of a phenomenological psychology. By directing attention to the constitutive activities of consciousness itself, an implicit bracketing of the world is already accomplished. In addition, consciousness now becomes the explicit theme. In place of the thesis 'the


world is not,' the alternative thesis 'consciousness is' now becomes the central theme. The indirect way leads naturally on to an examination of the disinterested activity of the self observer. The main emphasis here is upon that to which the subject is returned when it 'holds off from.'

In Crisis, a second 'indirect way' is worked out, one which leads through the 'Ruckfrage' to a phenomenology of the Lebenswelt. This second, indirect way is the one which opens the wayfor genetic phenomenology. The route over a Lebenswelt philosophy is, in one sense, closer to the original starting point in the natural attitude, in that the world is once again the central preoccupation. But, in another, it is more remote. For in between Husserl has had to come to terms with the fact that the natural attitude is by no means as concrete as it might initially have appeared. Everyday experience is in fact overlaid with a host of abstract meanings, partly the products of our scientific understanding of the material universe, partly the sedimented results of cultural assumptions. In order to get back to a world constituting activity in its genuinely original sense, a whole new series of reflections is required.

The new indirect way, which leads into genetic phenomenology, seems however to lead in two contrary directions. On the one hand, the entire thrust of regressive phenomenology lies in the direction of the concrete and the immediate. With Husserl's genetic phenomenology the famous slogan: 'Back to the things themselves' takes on a new significance, one the importance of which Heidegger was one of the very first to appreciate. On the other hand, genetic phenomenology also leads in the direction of an idealism even more radical than any attempted before. In the earlier phases of his development, Husserlliked to think that what he was attempting with his phenomenology was a 'radical empiricism.' But by the time he came to write the Cartesian Meditations this claim has been replaced with recourse to the Leibnizian language of a 'monadology'. Nowhere is this ambivalence more apparent than in the researches devoted to the problem of intersubjectivity. In one sense, the being of the other is an obviously original phenomenon. But, in another, it requires the overcoming of transcendental solipsism, the solipsism presupposed by the assumption of the transcendental stance. It is for this reason that Husserl will prepare the way for his 'solution' by bringing to light a second, 'primordial' or, as he sometimes prefers to call it, 'primordinal' reduction. As a second reduction, this primordinal reduction supposedly comes after, and so succeeds, the transcendental reduction.

It is this paradox, the paradox of a quest for the concrete which calls for an even more radical level of reflective abstraction, which lies at the root of a structure which we shall later call the 'ontological transposition.' Pushed

Introduction 15

to the limit, the very abstractness of transcendental reflection gives rise, of its own accord, to structures which reproduce just the kind of structures which are apparent originally. By retreating into the innennost depths of transcendental consciousness, phenomenology comes up against structures which prepare the way for an investigation into the concrete reality of the life world.

B. PHENOMENOLOGICAL CONSTITUTION

The concept of constitution is the counterpart of that of the reduction (though the connection is, of course, not clearly apparent in the pre-transcendental period which antecedes the working out of the reduction). From the very beginning, in the Philosophy of Arithmetic, Husserl was concerned with at least two things, ftrst an analysis of the way in which entities of a certain kind arise in consciousness. This, the 'subjective' side of the analysis, is complemented by an 'objective' side which focuses upon the intentional procedures through which whatever kind of objectivity belongs to such entities comes to be accorded to them. In Husserl's own words: 'As soon as we hit upon ultimate, elementary concepts, all defining comes to an end .... What one can do in such cases consists only in pointing out the concrete phenomena from which, or through which, they are abstracted, and clarifying the method of this abstraction process.' 10 Both in his first study on arithmetic and in his later Logical Investigations, the entities in question were 'logical', in the broadest sense of that word. And the shift from the earlier mathematical to the later logical investigations can be summed up in tenns of an attempt to rid his earlier analyses of any elements which might lend themselves to a psychologistic interpretation.

As Sokolowski has pointed out in his study of the fonnation of HusserI' s concept of constitution, the Logical Investigations is dominated by the Kantian schema of intentional fonn and sensory matter, with this essential difference that, as intentional, the Husserlian fonnal component points outward, toward the object, rather than inward, toward a (transcendental) subject in which the categories are supposed to be located. In other words, for the Kantian subject-object distinction, Husserl substitutes an act-object distinction in the context of which the object can only figure as an 'intentional object of consciousness'. To talk of the object as an intentional object is to talk of the 'reference to' as a reference to something which may not actually be given in any corresponding sensible experience. In which case, the intentional reference remains an empty 'intention of signiftcation', at least until such time as it is 'fulfIlled' with a sensory material. However,


in Logical Investigations , the concept of an intentional meaning is still inadequate. Meanings are posited as ready made. They are located, from the first, in the very structure of intentionality and no attempt is made to explain how they get there.

HusserI's researches into inner time consciousness inaugurate a destruction of the matter-form schema. For first, the matter relevant to time consciousness consists in temporal sensations. But with regard to such sensational material one can well ask: where do they come from? And to this question there can be no satisfactory answer. Temporal sensations can not stem from the subjective pole, since the intentional activity of consciousness is supposed to form them - in which case they could not furnish material contents. But nor can temporal sensations stem from the objective pole, since such material contents would have to be derived from the external world whereas, precisely, inner time must be generated by the dynamic of consciousness itself. But if consciousness engenders its own temporal phases then what is to prevent this generation of temporal phases from lapsing into a species of creation?

In fact, the study of inner time effected a decisive transformation of the theory of constitution, one which HusserI was not fully aware of at the time. The form-matter schema operated within the context of a qualified empiricism and so enabled his, initially static, constitutional procedure to proceed in accordance with a structure of subsumption. But, with the transfer of attention to the phenomenon of time, matter could no longer be regarded as subsumed under form. Rather, form now has to be regarded as emerging through a process in the course of which material components undergo constant transformation. The formal component is no longer readymade but emerges as the self-same which resists the processional transformation.

But from where does the formal component derive its character of selfsameness? One obvious answer to this question runs: from transcendental consciousness. But in order to confer the characteristic of self-sameness upon its intentional objects, transcendental consciousness must itself be the identically self-same. But if transcendental consciousness is to be the selfsame, this means that it must have abstracted itself from the process through which conscious contents undergo constant transformation in the course of experience. The idea of a transcendental consciousness abstracted from the flux of its empirical contents is by no means an unreasonable supposition and is indeed the line of thought which Kant adopts, for the most part, in the Critique. However, in his time theory, Husserl had ventured the suggestion that the ultimately constitutive consciousness is a flux. How is the notion of transcendental consciousness, as a flux, to be reconciled with that of an a-

Introduction 17

temporal consciousness which has abstracted itself from the manifold of experience?

Hussed does not even attempt to answer this question in Ideas I. Indeed, the a-temporal character of transcendental consciousness, as it first emerges from those texts in which Hussed made the break-through into transcendental phenomenology, is so radically at odds with the fluxional character of inner time consciousness that the doctrine of time can not even be integrated into the main body of Ideas I. Instead, Hussed embarks upon the more immediately pressing task of bringing to light the requisite structures of correlation. This he does primarily with regard to the example of visual perception.

Noetico-noematic Correlations

The phenomenological reduction brings about a radical transformation of the natural attitude. First, and from the side of the subject, the reduction effects a transformation of the subject-object duality into an act-object duality. The subject pole of the intentional relation is no longer to be thought of as something substantial but as a source or centre of activity, more specifically, an intentional activity through which consciousness relates itself to whatever it is conscious 'of'. Moreover, it is not so much the object itself as the intentional relation to the object which becomes the focus. of reflective attention. As soon as I, the phenomenologist, direct my attention upon an act of perception, I cease to be concerned with what is actually perceived and direct my attention, instead, to the way in which the perceived manifests itself to me. By cutting the links which bind me to the world, I am able to divert attention to these very links themselves. To put it in the graphic language of Merleau-Ponty: 'Reflection does not withdraw from the world towards the unity of consciousness as the world's basis; it steps back to watch the forms of transcendence fly up like sparks from a fire; it slackens the intentional threads which attach us to the world and thus brings them to our notice.' 11

But second, and from the side of the object, that to which intentional consciousness relates itself is no longer anything real or, to speak more philosophically, transcendent to consciousness. The un-reality of the intentional object is marked in Hussed's thinking by the term 'idee!' or ideal. The intentional object is a meant identity and nothing more, an ideality. But this does not mean that that sense of the real which belongs to the natural attitude when it posits a real object is altogether absent from the intentional correlation. Rather the contrary, it is picked up in terms of the term 'reel' which is now transferred over to the subjective side of the


correlation. That is to say, whatever concrete contents might qualify an intentional consciousness are carried over from the 'real' object (as properties of the object) and situated in consciousness as actual (reel) phases of the lived experience of the subject in question. The distinction drawn in the Gennan between 'real' and 'reel' is therefore critical. As a result of the reduction to the sphere of immanence, every constituent of the real has been bracketed off, leaving only the concrete quality of the actual (reel) phases of lived experience, together with the purely ideal, intentional correlate. Thus the 'red' of the book is no longer a property inherent in the object but is rather an actual (reel) quality, or modification, of that intentional consciousness which is conscious of the red book - and so on for all the other properties which might qualify the real object.

Thus, the de-realization which follows from the reduction can be examined from two standpoints. From the side of the subject, the un-real becomes the actual, the actual (reel) phases of lived experience. From the side of the object, the un-real becomes the ideal (idee I), or the intentional object of consciousness. Furthennore, between the actual phases and the ideal object of intentional consciousness, a system of correlation obtains such that, to each actual phase, there corresponds an ideal meaning which is the objectification of the fonner through the intentional activity of a transcendentally reduced consciousness.

The meaning which makes up the being of the intentional object is meant (intended) through the actual (reel) phases of lived experience. But if the correlation of the actual phases of lived experience with the ideal (ideel) meaning consisted, as it were, of a one to one correspondence, this very distinction of actual intentional activity and ideal intentional objectivity would collapse, inasmuch as the two sides of the relation would be reducible to one and the same thing. To be sure, in the pre-transcendental period, Hussed tended to think of meanings, and especially logical meanings, as ready-made. But from Formal and Transcendental Logic on, he became more and more concerned with an analysis of the process by which these meanings were brought into being through the phases of lived experience. Hence the partial and incomplete character of eidetic insight. In a passage from Cartesian Meditations Hussed tells us: 'Intentional analysis is guided by the fundamental insight that, as a consciousness, every cogito is indeed (in the broadest sense) a meaning of its meant. However, at any moment, this something meant is more (meant as more) than what is meant at that moment explicitly'. 12 It is this 'meaning something more' that makes up the ideal being of the intentional object.

What I really see when I look at a house is always something more than what is actually present. I see only that part of the house which faces me

Introduction 19

and then only at a specific distance and under certain lighting conditions which detennine how clearly that part can be seen. But in conferring the meaning 'house' upon what is seen, I thereby indicate that the aspect of which I am actually aware is systematically connected with other aspects which could always be unfolded in the event, for example, of my walking around the house. By varying the perspective, I vary the aspects, and in such a way that the meaning 'house' emerges as the unity of all those aspects which, together, make explicit what is meant by 'meaning more'. To be sure, phenomenological analysis is not solely dependent on a real variation of the actual phases. Not only may imaginative variation serve to spell out those other phases which are not actually present to consciousness, the starting point for the entire process of eidetic variation could equally be an imagined object. For to imagine is also to make actually present though only, of course, in image. In either case, the ideality of the intentional object makes itself manifest in this, that it emerges through a process whereby a diversity of actual phases are engendered.

The intentional correlation establishes a relation between an actual lived activity and an ideal intended object. The lived activity manifests itself in a succession of actual phases which stand in relation to. an ideal objectivity. And the ideality of the intentional object manifests itself in that unity which emerges through the diversity of the actual phases. All of this may be summed up in the two tenns which HusserI himself coined and which he employed to describe the two sides of the intentional correlation. On the side of the subject, we find the 'noesis' or noetic diversity. On the side of the object, we fmd the 'noema' or noematic unity. We are told that each side may, for analytical purposes, be investigated separately but that, in reality, they belong together as the two sides of a single, unitary intentional correlation.

Inasmuch as the ideal object means something more than what is ever actually given, the given stands out in contrast to the co-given, what is actually present to what is only ap-present. In turn this notion of appresence serves as the basis for a concept of the horizon. Horizonal consciousness fills out what is left out of account in the intentional relation of consciousness to its object. For clearly, the intentional focus of consciousness is rarely confined to that very object which it is conscious of. Rather, this consciousness 'of' is qualified by a horizonal consciousness which is more or less explicitly co-intended. For instance, the house which I see in front of me is originally given in an actual lived experience through which I intend the object as that 'something more' which is only ap-present. The rendering actual of these possible phases of the ap-present involves an apprehension of the house from diverse points of view, points of view


which, together, make up what is known as the 'outer horizon'. This outer horizon should not however be confused with the world horizon. The house may be situated in an environment made up of the numerous other objects by which it is surrounded, each of which has its outer horizon and all of which are comprehensively englobed in a world horizon.

The concept of an outer horizon is itself therefore strictly limited to the specification of those points of view on the house which define the multiple possibilities of my actually experiencing the house. An outer horizon is always presupposed by the process through which the multiple adumbrations are actually carried through and so belongs along with the process by which the intentional correlation is concretely elaborated. The world horizon, on the other hand, is, as it were, a horizon of horizons, that which makes it possible for each and every object to have its outer horizon and to have this horizon worked out explicitly through a transformation of possible into actual points of view.

Rather than spelling out the adumbrations which make up the outer horizon of a given object, I may always choose instead to take the object as the starting point of an alternative procedure of explication through which the 'inner' details of the object are brought into the focus of attention. Rather than prefiguring the several sides of the house, I let the aspect which presently defines my perspective on the house serve as the basis for a progressive clarification of what actually manifests itself - the door, the windows, the drainpipe, the roof and so on. Thus the house itself now serves as a horizon for a process of explication which brings to light the several features of that aspect which is actually present.

Both the outer and the inner horizon function as spatial determinants of the intended object. That is, they specify what is ap-presented as presently co-given. However, the process by which the ap-present is made present is one which also appeals to a new concept of the horizon, a retentionalprotentional horizon, a horizon of the 'before' and of the 'after.' The more detailed working out of what is meant by such a temporal horizon will have to be left to the genetic theory of time. However, this new concept of a temporal horizon should be mentioned at this point, if only because it is essential to the intentional correlation itself, insofar as the latter presupposes a process by which an actual aspect is varied and in such a way as to bring to light both a succession of actual lived experiences and a meant identity which emerges as the unity of these same phases.

Introduction 21

The Transcendental Object

As a result of the reduction, the subject-object distinction has been transformed into a distinction between the subjective phases (noetic) of lived experience and the objective significations (noematic) which function as the ideal, intentional objects of a phenomenologically reduced consciousness. But the inclusion of both poles of the intentional relation within the sphere of immanence can not mean that all reference to a transcendent object has been eliminated. Rather, this reference now has to be accounted for in terms of those very elements which have been brought to light by means of the reduction. In addition therefore to the reference of noetic phases to a noematic object, a further referential relation has to be accommodated whenever the object intended takes on the character of a perceptual reality. Of course, the real object of perception may very well tum out to be a mere hallucination. The non- existence of the object does not however affect the intentional reference inherent in the perceptual meaning (which does indeed motivate the further course of experience whose very inconsistency will suffice to cancel the signification initially assumed). In both cases therefore this further reference has to be accounted for in a manner compatible with the system of correlations which have already been established. 'Every noema has a 'content', namely, its meaning and is related through it to its object.'13

It is in this fashion that Hussed finds himself confronted with the problem of the transcendental object. The problem can be formulated as follows: How, within the sphere of immanence itself, to found the reference to a transcendent object which, as such, precisely transcends this sphere; how to uncover, within the sphere of immanence, a meaning which is itself only intelligible with reference to a being distinct and independent of this sphere; how, in other words, to account for the distinct and independent existence of a transcendent object from within a sphere of immanence which can not admit such a distinct and independent existence? It is no accident that Hussed calls the transcendental object 'the determinable X'14

- thereby acknowledging his indebtedness to Kant. For the path which Kant opened up in his Synthesis of Recognition is the one which Hussed also pursues here, though in a radically different manner. Nor can the issue of a further and fmal reference beyond be dismissed as a minor deviation from the straight and narrow path of noetico-noematic investigation. Not only does this issue lead the way into the entire fourth section of Ideas I, entitled 'Reason and Reality', this last section represents, in a very real sense, the culmination of the entire book, the point at which consciousness is once again able to rejoin its point of departure in a reality initially simply taken


for granted but fmally subject to the regulative clarification of reason. The problem of the object=X is presented in terms of a point of unifica

tion for groups of noematic predicates each of which itself functions as a unifying structure. Any given object, for example an orange, is captured not in just one but in a multiplicity of noematic predicates. The redness, roundness, hardness not to mention the smell or the taste of the orange are fixed in noematic predicates each of which is distinct from the other and no one of which is reducible to simple sense qualities. For the sensible qualities are animated by noetic phases standing in relation to their specific noematic objects. At the same time, these distinct noematic predicates are not experienced as disconnected each from the other but rather exhibit a certain convergence. The redness and roundness are referred to the same extended surface whose hardness is determined by its resistance to the impact of another body. Though less exactly located in space, the smell emanates from the same general source and may be conjoined with a certain taste subject to specific and determinable conditions.

We are confronting here the same issue which engaged Hume when he talked about the object as a bundle of ideas. Only, in this case, the resources of phenomenology permit an account of the mode of unification which moves far beyond any appeal to the naturalistic principle of association. Thus Hussed tells us that 'there detaches itself as the central noematic phase the object, the objective unity, the self-same, the determinable subject of its possible predicates - the pure X in abstraction from all predicates -and it disconnects itself from these predicates or more correctly from the predicate noemata.' 15

The essential ambiguity of Hussed' s thought reveals itself in this passage. The transcendental object is a central noematic phase and yet it disconnects itself from all noematic predicates and must do so in order to function as the unitary point of convergence. It emerges as a meaning within the field of phenomenologically reduced consciousness and yet it invites a reference beyond the limits of the sphere of immanence. If the transcendental object is able to perform this dual role, it is because this referring beyond is only the counterpart of a limitation imposed by consciousness upon itself, one which it is therefore free to lift under appropriate circumstances. Inasmuch as the real object can always be given in an infinity of perspectives, an infinity which can never be exhausted by any finite consciousness, the constitution of the object can never be carried through with complete adequacy. This evidential shortcoming means that the transcendental object takes on the character of a regulative idea which prescribes, in advance, the general lines along which any such adequation must proceed, though always with the proviso that, at some further point,

Introduction 23

the course of experience may give grounds for rescinding the transcendental reference in question. Thus the transcendental object turns out to be the transcendent object of the natural attitude insofar as the principles constitutive of the latter have been specified in advance and carried through to whatever degree of adequacy and completion appears to be sufficient for the purposes.

Byletic Data

Earlier we argued that the destruction of the original form-matter distinction led Husserl to substitute, for the vertical structure of subsumption, a horizontal structure of correlation. In fact, however, this resolution is not as satisfactory as it appears. For the structure of subsumption is in fact transferred over from the intentional relation to the object back into the recesses of subjectivity, where it reappears in the form of the distinction of morphe and hyle. The correlational transformation of the form-matter distinction resolves the difficulty experienced previously with regard to the formation of meanings, but only on condition that phenomenology becomes a fully transcendental philosophy. In tum, as we shall see, the reemergence of this distinction in the alternative context of the morphe-hyle distinction requires that transcendental phenomenology undergo a further transformation into genetic phenomenology.

The need for a concept of hyletic data can be brought out in terms of the following question: If the noematic object is a meaning brought into being by consciousness insofar as consciousness posits this meaning as the object of an intentional relation, and if a noetic datum is nothing but the manner in which this meaning is intuited insofar as the meaning in question stands out as a unity holding together a diversity of noetic phases, then what is to furnish the element of resistance, to constrain the meaning giving activity of transcendental consciousness within certain definite limits? Clearly there is a problem here, a problem whose import can best be brought out in terms of a further question: If the noema is something unreal and if the noesis is engendered as a result of the self-activity of transcendental consciousness, then what is to prevent the process of constitution taking the form of a creation, of an 'intellectual intuition' which would give itself its own object, a spontaneous production unrestrained by any element of receptivity?

We know Husserl's answer to this question. The noetic phases which furnish the contents for the formal structure of a noematic signification must themselves be regarded as formal structures relative to a more primary material which he called 'hyletic'. A similar distinction is to be found in the Critique where Kant distinguishes between empirical intuition and sensa-


tion. And no doubt Husser! had this distinction in mind in the Logical Investigations where he distinguishes what he there called 'primary contents'. In Ideas I, this basic layer of experience is renamed 'hyle' with a view, specifically, to introducing a contrast between formless materials (hyle) and immaterial forms (morphe).16 As formless materials, the hyletic data can have nothing to do with intentionality. For only insofar as this hyletic material is animated by a noetic phase standing in relation to a noematic correlate can it be integrated into the structure of intentional consciousness. For this reason, these sensational elements are not something of which we are ever aware in the ongoing process of perception but have first to be isolated by means of a procedure of reflective abstraction.

That a transcendental phenomenology should take the form of a reflection upon an already familiar experience, an experience which has been handed over for reflective analysis by an essentially objective consciousness and which is therefore anything but a genuinely original apprehension, is nowhere more apparent than with respect to these hyletic components. For the question, how it is that such data can succeed in penetrating the recesses of a phenomenologically reduced consciousness is not a question to which transcendental phenomenology can offer a satisfactory answer, since every causal hypothesis has to be ruled out in principle and since the Kantian notion of a noumenal affection has to be dismissed as a metaphysical construction entirely at odds with the radical empiricism of phenomenology. Nevertheless, the problem becomes one which it is increasingly difficult to set aside as phenomenology seeks to move oyer from a purely static to a genetic mode of analysis. More interestingly, the quest for originality proceeds in two entirely opposite directions neither of which proves at all satisfactory, not even for a phenomenology which has committed itself to a procedure of regressive questioning (Riickfrage).

Genetic Constitution

It has often been been pointed out, for example by G. A. de Almeida in his study Genetic Phenomenology, that the attempt to resolve the dichotomy of form and matter leads in two directions, neither of which is at all satisfactory from a strictly phenomenological standpoint. Either the attempt to unearth an originary impression leads back in an endless regress inasmuch as each last layer that is brought to light is again apprehended as an apperceptive unity which can only be rendered intelligible in terms of that same juncture of form and matter which generated the problem in the first place; or we are forced to assume an absolutely undifferentiated beginning which, as such, is not accessible to phenomenological investigation. What has not

Introduction 25

been so generally appreciated is the fact that these two alternative 'solutions' move in the entirely opposite directions of a characteristically transcendental as against a characteristically ontological investigation.

Clearly the quest for originality can not move upward in a transcendental direction without fIrst coming to terms with the problem of an infInite regress. Kant solved this problem by simply stipulating that apperception was a unity of consciousness which did not require a higher unity in order to account for its own unifying capacity P Husserl could not adopt this course since reflection upon reflection (etc., etc.) features as an integral part of his phenomenological procedure. However, in Beilage XIX to the Analysen zur passiven Synthesis, he does toy with the idea of an original impressional chaos (Kant'S manifold) out of which objects would emerge through a process of unification. But this Kantian solution raises problems with regard to the temporal process in and through which such a unification is operative, and so it has to be discarded.

An alternative solution calls for a regression back to an original undifferentiated unity. It is this solution which attracts Antonio Aguirre and to which he devotes a considerable part of his critique. The return to an original, undifferentiated beginning is the return to a timeless beginning which, as such, precedes even temporal differentiation. Instead of the unifIcation of an originally un-united manifold we fInd the hypothesis of an original unity which calls for differentiation. IS

But the substitution of a procedure of differentiation for that of unifIcation in tum calls for a transformation in the very conception of the subject. As de Almeida puts it: 'The decisive distinction between static and genetic phenomenology lies in the conception of the mode of being of transcendental subjectivity. In static phenomenology, the I itself is simply a logical meaning .... In genetic phenomenology, on the other hand, the I is an active, productive subject and a substrate for habitualities and, therewith, a historical, self-transforming I, an I, as Ideas II terms it, that is made up "out of life" and not out of constitutional procedures.' 19 Aguirre is even ready to go so far as to call this original subjectivity, absolute. 'The beginning, as absolute subjectivity, has for this reason nothing to do with the beginning of natural life, of life in the world. As an ultimately constitutive subject, I have never been born and will never die. '20

This absolutely original subject can not be thought in abstraction from the world. Quite the contrary, so deeply involved in the world is this original subjectivity that Husserl was forced to coin a special word to describe that with which the ultimate subject stands in relation. Hence the last phase of his intellectual development is often known as that of a 'Lebenswelt Philosophie' - a philosophy of the life world. Furthermore, the


analysis of the life world also calls for its own concept of time. Husserl will sometimes use the term 'living present' (lebendige Gegenwart) to characterize the temporality of the life world. The living present is not the now of a time point because it is pre-temporal and, as such, the source of all temporalization.

The theme or themes of a genetic phenomenology are in themselves not so different from those which preoccupy static, transcendental phenomenology, only they are treated in a decisively different manner. It is for this reason that Husserl tends, in the last period of his development, to go over again the same material which he has already handled on a transcendental basis. Just as he began his static phenomenology with a logical investigation so he inaugurates his genetic phenomenology with a work (Formal and Transcendental Logic) in which he takes up yet again the logical problems dealt with in the first phase of his development. From logical questions Husserl proceeds through a renewed investigation of language, this time from the standpoint of a pre-predicative experience which precedes language and so provides language with a foundation in experience.

Experience and Judgment seeks to establish a double connection between language and experience, on the one hand, and between language and logic, on the other, and this through a new concept of judgment which, in consequence, becomes highly equivocal. For instance, he tells us: 'Every time that consciousness directs its attention upon an entity and objectifies it, even in a pre-predicative fashion, we shall have to call that a judgment in a broader sense. '21 And again: 'By the expression judgment we wish to draw attention to a general essence which, according to its fundamental structure, is the same at every level upon which its logical operations take place. Thus, what is disclosed as a structure of prepredicative judgment in the context of an analysis limited to the most elementary experiences serves, at the same time, as an exemplary model for the intuition of the essence of judgment, even where the judgment has a higher function. '22

This extension of the concept of judgment is reinforced by an extension of the concept of formal logic, which latter is now regarded as operative both at the level of a formal apophantics and at that of a formal ontology. In the words of Suzanne Bachelard's classical study of Husserl's Formal and Transcendental Logic. 'Formal logic can be situated on either the level of the signification or the level of the object. In the first case it would be a matter of apophantic analytics, which studies the judgment as propositional form; in the second case it would be a matter of ontological analytics, which studies the object in general from the purely formal point ofview.'23

Whereas, in Ideas I, Husserl sought to idealize the objectivities of immediate experience, he now seeks to concretize the categorial objec-

Introduction 27

tivities of logic with a view to conceiving of the entire framework of knowledge as a hierarchy operative upon a number of planes. From its foundations in experience to its apex in a purely formal logic, each higher level is founded in a lower so that the continuity of an epistemological hierarchy is maintained despite the change of level.

A third element is contributed by Husserl's growing awareness of the historicity of meaning. Even judgments are no longer to be regarded as ready made complexes of meaning but have to be traced back to the experiential contexts in which they arose. As he explains in Formal and Transcendental Logic: 'It pertains to the essence of such products that they are meanings, which bear a kind of historicity with them, as implied in their genesis; that in them, and in a series of layers, a sense refers back to its original source together with the noematic intentionality which belongs to it; and that, for this reason, it is always possible to enquire into each sense construction with regard to the sense history essentially implicated therein.'24 But in Krisis, the programme of a historical tracing back of meaning undergoes a vast extension to cover not only such cultural products as intellectual theories but even the genesis of the very idea of a rational science. For example, in the short text entitled Ursprung der Geometrie, Husserl invites us to put ourselves in the position of Euclid, the original geometrician, with a view to elucidating the essential steps which led from an empirical to a formal science of geometry.

Finally, in Cartesian Meditations, Husserl introduced yet another, critical element into his genetic analyses, the theme of intersubjectivity. The significance of this theme can not be over-emphasized. It is not just that the fifty odd pages devoted to it in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation represent only a short synopsis of the strenuous labours devoted to the subject in his manuscripts, researches which are now united in the three volumes of the Husserliana devoted to the phenomenology of intersubjectivity. More important, the introduction of the theme of intersubjectivity requires a complete re-thinking of the phenomenological project.

Hitherto, the task of phenomenology has been that of analysing all regions of being, without exception, from the standpoint of their 'being for me'. As such, implicitly if not explicitly, transcendental phenomenology is essentially solipsistic. But the recognition of other subjects is the recognition of a class of beings which exist not merely for me but for themselves and by way of a reference back to alternative centres of consciousness which are essentially inaccessible to me. Worse, the recognition of such alternative centres transforms the very meaning of worldly objectivity. In place of a solipsistically constituted objectivity, we now find an intersubjective objectivity. The other side of an object need not be 'what I would see if


I were to go over there'. It can now be 'what the other already sees from an alternative point of view'. Worse still, I find that I am transformed in my very being by the existence of other subjects. I am subjected to what Husserl calls a 'humanizing alteration' - by others. Language, for example, is not my private creation but an inheritance which I receive from others insofar as I am inserted into a cultural community which antecedes my existence. How am I to keep on tracing the source of all meaning giving activities back to the self while still doing justice to the existence of other selves who, moreover, must also be regarded as alternative sources of meaning giving activity?

Husserl effects the movement back, the Riickfrage, through a regressive questioning that starts out with the given object. The given object is recognized to have been pre-given and indeed to owe its meaning to its already having been given before. But, unless this 'having been given before' is allowed to lead back endlessly, it must presuppose a time when it was given for the first time. Thus the theme of 'erstmaligkeit' stands at the centre of Husserl's regressive enquiry and is designed to yield an immediate, a-historical, a-temporal consciousness 'of' which, as such, functions as an instituting consciousness, a consciousness through which meaning first comes into being. Through just such a regressive questioning, Husserl hopes to bring to light a meaning giving operation which no longer takes as its theme whatever objectivities are to be found in an already familiar world but rather one which is responsible for the original genesis of such objectivities, together with the world in which they figure.

In the light of Husserl' s genetic phenomenology, transcendental constitution can now be seen as re-construction. The reduction functions as a destruction of the already familiar world of the natural attitude, a deconstruction which then makes possible a re-construction along transcendental lines. But to call constitution ore-construction' is also to draw attention to an original construction which does not need a reduction because it does not yet know the reality of an objective world. Hence the question: is this original construction also to be regarded as a transcendental operation?

That Husserl still thinks of this original construction as transcendental in character emerges in a number of ways. First, he thinks of it as a subjective construction, a construction which takes place in the subjectivity of the experiencing consciousness. Second, he thinks of this original, world constructing subjectivity as a subjectivity which is even more radically immanent than that of transcendentally reduced experience, since it consists in an apperception, or apprehension, of the hyle and since this hyle, as the ultimate data of sensation, does not as yet know the difference of self and other. In a section of his study of Husserl's constitution of space entitled

Introduction 29

'The Problem of the Hyle', Ulrich Claesges presents the difficulty as follows: 'Perceptual consciousness is necessarily a kinaesthetic consciousness and, as such, is, at one and the same time, a world consciousness and a body consciousness. Any phenomenological or other kind of theory which seeks to go back from the pre-given world to its constituting perception, sensibility etc., is necessarily held within the horizon of a kinaesthetic consciousness and can not transcend the latter. '25 In the context of a genetic investigation, hyletic apprehension is therefore something so radically immanent that, as yet, nothing transcendent can be said to correspond to it. It is an immanence without transcendence, a pre-transcendent imma.'1ence. To put this another way, the pure hyle is even more immanent than what Husserl will call reelle Immanenz, since this latter is defined with respect to noetic phases which themselves contain an element of transcendence which is excluded with this regression to a purely hyletic apprehension.

Third, however concrete this original stratum might appear to be, it is in fact arrived at by a series of abstractions which are even more radical than those which characterize a transcendentally reduced experience. For example, in a passage from Ideas II, Husserl takes care to distinguish the perception of a tone as a spatially real occurence (riiumlich-reales Vorkommnis), the localized apprehension of a tone phantom (tonales Raumphantom) and finally, the tone sensation (Ton als bloJ3es Empfindungsdatum).26 The latter is arrived at by abstracting from the spatial source of the sound and so grasping the sound in its purely immanental mode of givenness and is therefore the stratum relevant to the concept of a purely hyletic apprehension. Fourth, and precisely because hyletic apprehension is something purely immanental, the construction of objects, and of a world in which such objects are situated, is conceived on the basis of a movement of transcendence, that is, as a surpassing of hyletic moments towards the aspects in which they figure, and as a surpassing of the aspects towards the object of which they are the aspects. In one sense, the new primacy accorded to transcendence over immanence is ontological in character. But, in another sense, it still remains decisively transcendental, in that it is still conceived as a transcending of the sphere of immanence -which it never is with Heidegger.

Ontological Phenomenology

Husserl's genetic phenomenology already brings us to the threshold of ontological phenomenology insofar as it highlights the theme of a return to the origin. But instead of following Husserl in his attempt to establish a new genetic phenomenology, Heidegger decided to make a break with Husserl


and to reinstitute phenomenology on an ontological basis. Being and Time is dedicated to the establishment of this new phenomenological philosophy which is specifically ontological in character.

Again, Heidegger might have restricted his 'revolution' to the attempt to develop an alternative to Hussed's transcendental phenomenology. So far, however, from simply distinguishing his ontological, from Hussed's transcendental, phenomenology, Heidegger seeks to replace the Hussedian version of phenomenology with his own. It is for this reason that he goes so far as to identify phenomenology in general with ontology, an identification which is never more forcefully expressed than in his Kant book.

With a view to redefining phenomenology in a way which will bring it into accord with his own procedure, Heidegger devotes a critical section of his Introduction to Being and Time to an analysis of the term 'phenomenology'. Taking the word 'phenomenology' as his point of departure, he splits it up into its two components, 'phenomenon' and 'logos.' Accordingly, phenomenology becomes the science (literally the logos) of the phenomenon. Hence the formula at which Heidegger arrives. The phenomenon signifies: that which shows itself in itself,27 i.e., independent of all presuppositions, whether of the theoretical or of the practical kind. And because the logos has to represent the expressibility of what shows itself, the adequation of the phenomenon to an articulation which can find expression in discourse, this preliminary concept of phenomenology is further expanded to mean: to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself.28 The interconnection of showing and seeing which is indicated here is essential to Heidegger's ontological understanding of phenomenology. For the showing is the selfmanifestation of being, the seeing, the intuitive apprehension of that which shows itself in a manner appropriate to expression.

Hence the significance of the word Heidegger employs to describe the original essence of self-manifestation, the word 'Schein.' For in general, transcendental philosophy, and in particular that of Kant, is committed to the more theoretically evolved concept of 'Erscheinung.' Erscheinung is a Janus term. It stands for both the appearance of (an object) and the appearance to (a subject). Furthermore, both on the side of that which appears (the object) and on the side of that to which it appears (the subject), the appearance has to be characterized as an appearance of something which does not itself appear save by way of its representative - i.e., the appearance. The appearance 'to' is an appearance to someone who does not himself appear but who must be presumed as that without which there would be no such appearing (the subject, qua substance). The appearance 'of' is an appearance of something which does not itself appear but which

Introduction 31

must be presumed as that without which there could be no such appearing (the object, qua substance). Standing between the ultimate subject and the ultimate object, the concept of appearance stands for that distance which the subject must take up vis-a-vis the world in order that it should be in a position to subject whatever appears to a critical scrutiny. It is this distancing of the self vis-a-vis itself and vis-a-vis what appears which Heidegger refuses, and in the name of a principle which Husserl himself had enunciated earlier, the principle: back to the things themselves.29

For Heidegger therefore it is the word 'Schein' which most properly expresses the essence of self manifestation. Getting back to things themselves means taking things just as they appear, as the appearances of things which are themselves taken to appear in those very appearances. So 'Schein' is the letting be seen of being but only as seeming or 'mere semblance' and so in such a way that it may just as well cover up as uncover the truth of being. In other words, the inadequacy of the concept of 'Schein' is as important as its adequacy. 'Schein' means that things may appear one way to one person, another, to another, one way at one time, another, at another. For a science of the phenomenon, developed under the theoretical auspices of the category of transcendental knowledge, Heidegger substitutes a science of interpretation, developed under the practical auspices of the category of ontological understanding. So far from being a purely intellectual faculty as it is, for example, in the Kantian context, the 'faculty' of understanding is now grounded in the existential structure of 'concern', which itself expresses an involvement of the self in rather than a detachment of the self from.

It is for this very reason that, historically, philosophers have preferred to work with the concept of 'Erscheinung' . For, built into the concept of 'Erscheinung', there is a pointing beyond which allows for a correction of the inadequacies of mere semblance. This 'pointing beyond' is indicated by Heidegger in a passage where he tells us: 'Thus appearance, as the appearance "of something", does not mean showing-itself; it means rather the announcing-itself by something which does not show itself, but which announces itself through something which does show itself. '30 But even when 'Erscheinung' has taken on the connotations of an appearing which points beyond itself to something other than itself which does not itself appear in the appearance, Heidegger makes it clear that this latter concept of 'Erscheinung' is still founded in the concept of 'Schein' as that which does show itself. Only insofar as something shows itself can it show itself as that which points beyond itself to something which does not show itself. 'In spite of the fact that "appearing" is never a showing-itself in the sense of "phenomenon", appearing is possible only by reason of a showing-itself of


something. '31

The idea of 'Erscheinung' as an appearance which points beyond itself to something which does not itself appear in the appearing of the appearance is fundamental to the Kantian phenomenology. For, in the epistemological framework of Kant's Critical Philosophy, appearances point beyond themselves to things in themselves which not merely do not but also actually can not make their appearance. Inasmuch as these things in themselves are however regarded as the 'essential' reality, appearances are thereby reduced down to being 'mere appearances' (blofle Erscheinungen).

The concepts both of the 'phenomenon' and of the 'logos', qua essence, undergo a critical modification with Husserl. In effect, Husserl gives the concept of the essence a completely new meaning which makes it possible for him to eliminate the Kantian dichotomy of phenomenal and noumenal, of things as they merely appear and of things as they are in themselves. The several appearances of a thing belong together not in virtue of their inherence in some underlying substance but rather in virtue of their coherence in the unitary structure of the essence or eidos. There is no beyond of the appearance, not because appearance has been reduced to semblance but because appearances are now connected in the unity of an essence which features as a synthesis of appearances. However, whereas, for Kant, this synthesis is imposed by the subject upon appearances, for Husserl, it is disclosed in and through the very order and connection of appearances themselves.

Implicitly, though only implicitly, we are now in possession of all the elements needed to develop a genetic theory of the manifestation of being, qua phenomenon. All that is needed now is a developmental concept of the phenomenon. It is at this point that we need to be reminded of the Hegelian phenomenology .

In his Phenomenology, Hegel introduces a wholly new, developmental dimension into the examination of the phenomena. Philosophical science is not, for him, a fixed and final form of analysis or a set of procedures which, once they have been discovered, need only be applied to the infinite wealth and variety of concrete material. On the contrary, the Notion (whose self unfolding makes up the topic of the science of philosophy) is essentially a process of becoming and, moreover, one whose goal or result is nothing other than a return to the ground or origin. 'True reality ... is the process of its own becoming, the circle which presupposes its end as its purpose, and has its end for its beginning. '32 Or again: 'The Truth is the whole. The whole, however, is merely the essential nature reaching its completeness through the process of its own development. Of the Absolute it must be said that it is essentially a result, that only at the end is it what it is in very truth;

Introduction 33

and just in that consists its nature, which is to be actual, subject, or selfbecoming, self-development. '33

Not only does being manifest itself, the self-manifestation of being goes through a series of stages, stages which themselves represent nothing less than the progressive appearing of the truth of being. Hence, in the Logic, the difference between a doctrine of being and a doctrine of the essence is brought out with reference to a process whereby the essence has first to make its appearance. For example, in the little Logic of the Encyclopedia, we read: 'The essence must appear (erscheinen) .... This appearing (Scheinen) is the determination whereby the essence is no longer being but precisely essence, and the fully developed appearing (Scheinen) is the appearance (Erscheinung). '34

Thus far we have been primarily concerned to lay down Heidegger's alternative conception of phenomenology. To this end, the ontological concept of phenomenology has been contrasted with the epistemological and the transcendental conception. From the above, however, the possibility of laying the foundations for a three stage genesis immediately springs to mind. Further, the historical precedent of the Hegelian philosophy gives us grounds for thinking that, in place of any genesis which would be regressive in character, and indeed, on the basis of the levels disclosed thereby, an alternative progressive genesis might be envisaged, a genesis which would take as its point of departure the more primitive concept of 'Schein' as the immediate self manifestation of being. It only remains to be seen what concept of phenomenology can be developed out of, and on the basis of, just such a unification of the two projects of ontological and transcendental phenomenology.

First and originally, the other manifests itself to consciousness as simple appearance, that is, as an appearing of being - Schein. There is no beyond of the appearing, either on the side of the other, or on the side of the self. Being is its appearing and is nothing more than that. Hence the appearing of being falls short of the truth, is 'mere semblance' and precisely because there can be no awareness, on the part of the self, of the appearing of being to its self. So far from being confined to itself, the self is brought beyond itself and so exists not for itself but for that which is other than its self.

Secondarily, the other manifests itself as the (positional) object, that is, as an appearing of substance - Erscheinung. Here, the beyond of the appearing is, in common parlance, substance or, in more philosophical language, the thing in itself. The appearance is not itself what appears but is precisely the appearing of what does not itself appear in the appearing. In the revealing of the appearance there is a concealing of that which is supposed to appear, namely the object itself. But not only is there an


appearing of the object, there is also, and in connection therewith, an appearing to a subject. That is, a beyond of the other now stands in relation to a beyond of that. self through which the object comes to be posited as such. The dual appearance of substance as mental and physical is the ontological expression of the distinction of self and other from the standpoint of the manifestation of being as the appearance (Erscheinung) of substance.

Finally, the other manifests itself as the (intentional) object, that is, as a revelation (Of!enbarung) of the essence. It is difficult to find a philosophical term which adequately expresses, in the German, this fmal transformation in the nature of the appearance. For the purposes of argument however, the concept of 'pure appearance' will do - blo8e Erscheinung. For, strictly speaking, the transcendental phenomenological concept of the essence is not a beyond of appearance but is what is revealed through the manifold of appearances, but only insofar as this manifold is ordered and connected by a transcendental subject. This concept of a self-manifestation of the essence as 'pure appearance' was first clearly stated in the first chapter of HusserI's Ideas I where he talks of an intuition of essences or essential insight (Wesenschau ).

It was, furthermore, with HusserI in mind that Sartre, at the very beginning of his major treatise, Being and Nothingness, talked of contemporary phenomenology as having effected the conversion of the traditional dualisms into the new dualism of the fmite and the infinite. 'The appearance does not hide the essence, it reveals it; it is the essence. The essence of an existent is no longer a property sunk in the cavity of this existent; it is the manifest law which presides over the succession of its appearances, it is the principle of the series. '35 The beyond of the essence no longer refers to some ultimate substratum but now assumes the form of a reference to the other appearances which, together, go to make up the objectivity of the essential object.

As a result, the (intentional) object is no longer conceived as existing distinct and independent of consciousness but as standing in an essential relation to consciousness itself. The object now only exists as 'object of consciousness' and its being consists merely in its existing for a meaning giving consciousness. Therewith being has, in a sense, ceased to be and has become instead a meaning conferred by the subject upon that which manifests itself. But, in the revealing characteristic of the transcendental determination of phenomena, not merely does being cease to make its appearance, the self also conceals from itself the very basis of its being, namely, its being a body.

It is these very limitations, inherent in the transcendental concept of the

Introduction 35

phenomenon, which generate the reaction articulated in the Heideggerian phenomenology. But in order to demonstrate this in detail we shall now have to move on to a more detailed analysis of those texts in which Husser! attempts a phenomenological constitution of the ego, of time, of the body and of the other subject. Not until we have accomplished a critical deconstruction of transcendental phenomenology will it prove possible to effect a re-construction along the lines of a genetic phenomenology which adopts a progressive rather than a regressive method. This latter possibility will be reserved for the third part of this work.

NOTES

1. Broekman, Jan, Phiinomenologie und Egologie, Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff,1963, S. 2. 2. Hussed, Edmund, Erste Philosophie II , hrsg. Rudolf Boehm, Husserliana Band VIII,

Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959, S. 312, remark 2. 3. Hussed, Edmund, Die Idee der Phiinomenologie , tr. by W. Alston & G. Nakhnikian as

The Idea of Phenomenology, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964, p. 3. 4. ibid., p. 3. 5. ibid., pp. 6-7. 6. ibid., p. 6. 7. ibid., p. 28. 8. Hussed, Edmund, Phiinomenologische Psychologie, hrsg. Walter Biemel, Hussediana

Band IX, Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968, S. 347. 9. Hussed, Edmund, Ideas I, op.cit. , see esp. chapter 3.

10. Hussed, Edmund, Philosophie der Arithmetik, S. 130. 11. Medeau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenologie de la Perception, tr. by Colin Smith as The

Phenomenology of Perception, London: Routledge, 1962, p. xiii. 12. Husserl, Edmund, Cartesianische Meditationen, hrsg. S. Strasser, Husseriiana, Band I,

1950, tr. by Dorian Cairns as Cartesian Meditations, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960, p. 84.

13. Hussed, Edmund, Ideas I, op. cit. , 129, p. 333. 14. ibid., 131, p. 337. 15. ibid., 131, p. 337. 16. Husserl, Edmund, Ideas I, op. cit., see esp. 85. 17. Kant, Immanuel, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, tr. by Norman Kemp Smith as Critique of

Pure Reason, London: Macmillan, 1929, B 132, N.K.S. p. 153. 18. Aguirre, Antonio, Genetische Phiinomenologie und Reduktion, Den Haag: Martinus

Nijhoff, 1970, pp. 158-166. 19. de Almeida, Guido, Sinn und Inhalt in der genetischen Phiinomen%gie E. Husser/s,

Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1972, S. 7. 20. Aguirre, Antonio, op. cit. ,S. 7. 21. Husseri, Edmund, Erfahrung und Urteil, hrsg. Ludwig Landgrebe, Hamburg: Classen

Verlag, 1964, S. 62. 22. Husseri, Edmund, Erfahrung und Urteil, op. cit. , S. 59-60. 23. Bachelard, Suzanne, La Logique de Husserl, tr. by Lester Embree as A Study of


Husserl's Formal and Transcendental Logic, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968, p. 4.

24. Husseri, Edmund, Formale und transzendentale Logik, Halle, 1929, S. 184. 25. Claesges, Ulrich, Edmund Husserls Theorie der Raumkonstitution, Den Haag: Martinus

Nijhoff, 1950, S. 136. 26. Husseri, Edmund, Ideen II, hrsg. Marly Biemel, Husserliana Band IV, Den Haag:

Martinus Nijhoff, 1950, S. 22. 27. Heidegger, Being and Time, op. cit .. , p. 51 [H. 28]. 28. ibid., p. 58 [H. 35]. 29. See Being and Time, op. cit. , p. 50 [H. 28], where Heidegger uses Husseri's slogan in

support of his own very different conception of phenomenology. 30. ibid., p. 52 [H. 29]. 31. ibid., p. 53 [H. 29]. 32. Hegel, G.W.F., Phiinomenologie des Geistes, tr. by J.D. Baillie as The Phenomenology

of Mind, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1910, p. 81. 33. ibid. ,pp. 81-82. 34. Hegel, G.W.F., Enzyklopiidie, hrsg. Nicolin & Poggeler, Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1969,

131, S. 134. 35. Sartre, Jean-Paul, L' are et Ie neant, tr. by Hazel Barnes as Being and Nothingness,

New York: Philosophical Library, 1956, p. 5.

PART II

De-Construction

Introduction

In the first part we took account of the basic principles underlying the two procedures of reduction and constitution. More specifically, we sought to trace the development of both these procedures through the three phases of Husserl's development from an epistemological, through a transcendental and so on to an ontological conception of phenomenology. It is time now to tum our attention to the specific themes which form the topic of the next four sections. In every instance, the claim will be advanced that the procedure of phenomenological constitution breaks down when pushed to the limit. In the first section we shall consider the impossibility of a phenomenological constitution of the ego, in the second, the impossibility of a phenomenological constitution of time, in the third, the impossibility of a phenomenological constitution of the own body while, in the fourth and last section, we shall take account of the impossibility of a phenomenological constitution of the other subject.

In every case, the critical reservation (impossibility of) will serve a twofold function, one negative and one positive. On the one hand, we shall try to show how, at the limit, the procedure of phenomenological constitution falls into contradiction with itself. However, this negative stricture will also serve the function of preparing the way for a more positive substantiation of the structure of an ontological transposition. This concept of an ontological transposition will be presented along two quite different lines. First, we shall try to show how the logic of Husserl' s own intellectual development led him in the direction of a concretization of the abstract structures brought to light through the constitutional procedure. Thus the transition from a transcendental to a genetic phenomenology can already be regarded as one which operates implicitly in accordance with the rubric of an ontological transposition, but only implicitly. We shall also briefly take account of the revolution effected by Heidegger's alternative 'ontological

39 C. Macann, Presence and Coincidence© Kluwer Academic Publishers 1991


phenomenology,' insofar as this latter requires that phenomenology make a break with the HusserIian procedure of transcendental constitution. So far from trying to extend the investigations of transcendental phenomenology in an ontological direction, Heidegger demands that phenomenology make a new beginning, one which refuses to countenance anything like a transcendental consciousness.

In the third part we shall develop our own quite specific concept of the ontological transposition, one which recognizes and reconciles the rival claims of both HusserI and Heidegger. With HusserI, we shall seek to trace the logic of the process whereby transcendental phenomenology gets converted into a phenomenology of the life world. With Heidegger, we shall argue that this new ontological phenomenology can not be seen as an extension or modification of transcendental phenomenology but needs to be envisaged as a quite distinctive way of doing phenomenology. However, against Heidegger, we shall argue that ontological phenomenology can not take the place of transcendental phenomenology but needs to be regarded as just another way of doing phenomenology.

Finally, and in order to tie these conflicting claims together, we shall point towards the possibility of a new genetic ontology. The fact that phenomenology has fallen apart into two distinctive methodologies, the transcendental and the ontological, embracing two distinct types of understanding, the eidetic and the hermeneutical need not mean that we have to opt for one rather than the other. Rather, they can both be brought within the all-encompassing framework of a genetic ontology which would be progressive rather than regressive in character and which, accordingly, would recognize an original, ontological as well as a conclusive, transcendental stage in the genesis of consciousness.

What follows is not a piece of historical scholarship nor even a presentation of HusserI' s own ideas, either in the form of an exposition, a defense or a critique. Rather, it is an interpretation of certain critical features of HusserI's theory of constitution. Interpretation, however, needs a text. Although I allow myself the liberty of drawing from less readily available sources to substantiate more esoteric themes, the work of interpretation will be concentrated upon one main text for each of the issues under consideration; for the constitution of the ego, Cartesian Meditations IV; for the constitution of time, the Phenomenology of Inner Time Consciousness; for the constitution of the body, Ideas II and, for the constitution of the other subject, Cartesian Meditations V.

The Impossibility of a Phenomenological Constitution of the Transcendental Ego

It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of a phenomenological constitution of the ego for a philosophy which seeks to trace the objectivity of all regions of being, without exception, back to the constituting activity of an all-embracing transcendental consciousness. Phenomenology claims to be a presuppositionless philosophy, in the sense that it refuses to take the meaning of the being of any entity whatsoever for granted but seeks instead to bring to light the systems of correlation which obtain between the phenomena through which such an entity manifests itself and the ego for which it exists as a phenomenal datum. In this sense, the ego is presupposed in any constitutional activity whatsoever. To be sure, it is perfectly in order that the ego should remain an uncritically assumed presupposition just as long as the focus of attention bears upon the object or region of being in question. But if this presupposition could not itself be thematized and then investigated in such a way that the principles constitutive of the ego could be specified, the entire program would fall to the ground, or so it would seem.

The ego is not the only thematic presupposed by any constitutional investigation. Time, too, falls into this same category. For this very reason, HusserI devoted an entire series of analyses to the question of the phenomenological constitution of time. Curiously however, no such coordinated series of analyses are to be found bearing upon the specific topic of the ego. Instead, as Marbach has shown in his definitive treatment of this issue, a theory of the constitution of the ego has to be extracted from texts devoted to the elaboration of general methodological principles or texts devoted to the constitution of other regions of being altogether. As a result, it is not until the period represented by the Cartesian Meditations that the issue is explicitly confronted and then only in a way which either violates or ignores the constitutional principles and procedures which had been established earlier.



It is worth casting a glance at the development of Hussed' s ideas on the subject of the ego, if only to record the remarkable progress that is made from a concept of the ego which is barely to be distinguished from that of the empirical ego, to a monadic concept of the ego which has become so universal that, as Hussed puts it in the Fourth Cartesian Meditation: 'the problem of explicating this Monadic ego phenomenologically (the problem of his constitution for himself) must include all constitutional problems without exception. ' 1

In the context of the Logical Investigations, Hussed operates with a concept of consciousness which does not as yet recognize its allegiance to a Transcendental ego. Quite the contrary, this provisional concept of consciousness is developed in relation to that of the empirical ego which, in tum, is derived by way of a distinction from the body. From the general concept of the psycho-somatic self, the body is fIrst distinguished in such a way as to appear a body like any other body. The distinction from the body as a purely physical thing in tum brings to light a concept of the psyche as a totality of lived experiences causally linked to the body but distinguished therefrom through a redirection of attention inward.2 Insofar as these lived experiences are treated as contents united in one and the same fIeld, they yield a concept of consciousness appropriate to phenomenological analysis. Thus, as Marbach points out, this concept of a 'phenomenological I' is not actually a concept of the ego but a concept for consciousness. The only concept of the ego which is relevant to the analyses undertaken in Logical Investigations is that of the empirical ego.3

It is precisely because the only concept of the ego operative in the context of Logical Investigations is that of the empirical ego that the bracketing of the empirical ego creates a problem for phenomenology which can only be solved by the distinction of a Pure ego. With the suspension of the empirical ego, the phenomenologically clarifIed concept of consciousness becomes problematic. Who is the subject of such a consciousness? How is the unity of consciousness to be accounted for? How are my lived experiences, or the contents of my phenomenologically clarifIed consciousness, to be distinguished from those of someone else? An answer to these questions is developed along the lines of a distinction of a pure from an empirical ego.

Already in the Idea of Phenomenology, Hussed had sketched out a concept of the phenomenological or, as he sometimes prefers to call it, 'epistemological' reduction. But at this stage in the development of his thinking, the reduction is only taken into consideration as an implication of a more important question, the question of the disclosure of a sphere of immanence and, in accordance therewith, a concept of 'transcendence in

The Transcendental Ego 43

immanence.' However, the only concept of transcendence in immanence which interests Husserl is one which lies on the objective rather than the subjective side. It is the transcendence of the eidos not that of the ego which Husserl is concerned to defend against any attempt to interpret the cogitata as actually (reel) situated in consciousness.

With the transition to Ideas I, the phenomenological reduction becomes, for the first time, the acknowledged gateway to the whole sphere of transcendental consciousness but still only in the manner of what will later be called the 'Cartesian' or 'direct' way. For the most part, the phenomenologically purified ego is not treated as a theme in its own right but simply regarded as a residuum of the phenomenological suspension of the world and of the empirical subjectivity to be found therein. Thus he talks about the Pure ego as exhibiting a 'quite peculiar transcendence', a transcendence which he describes as 'a non-constituted transcendence - a transcendence in immanence.'4 Although he is ready to admit something like a self-suspension of the phenomenologist,S he denies the possibility of a suspension of the Pure ego, if only because it can never be an object of experience but is always already there as that without which a phenomenologically purified experience would not be possible. It is for this reason that 'the experiencing ego is still nothing that might be taken for itself and made into an object of inquiry on its own account.'6 Perhaps the simplest way to characterize his conception of the Pure ego at this point in the development of his thinking is to talk of it as that unity of consciousness without which a coherent experience of the world and of the self would not be possible.

However, two complementary motives bring home the unsatisfactory nature of this provisional conception of the Pure ego. First, Husser! becomes ever more aware of the connection between the disclosure of the Pure ego and an abstraction of consciousness from the body. If, in Ideas I, the self-suspension of the phenomenologist has not yet been thought through explicitly as an abstraction from the body, still this condition is made quite explicit at the start of that section of Ideas II devoted to the Pure ego as I pole, a section where Husserl invites us to effect a self-perception of such a kind that we 'abstract from the body.' 'Let us suppose that we have carried through a self-perception, but now in such a way that we abstract from the body. We then find ourselves as a spiritual I related to the stream of lived experiences - where by spiritual is meant, in a quite general way, that the I in question is one whose states are precisely not to be located in its bodily being.'7 Similar remarks are to be found in the manuscripts devoted to the problem of intersubjectivity where, for example, Husserl arrives at an understanding of the Pure ego by asking what remains over


when we 'abstract from the body and from the bodily determined subject.,g Second, this abstraction from the body is linked with a new kind of

reflection, an 'Ich-Reflexion' which makes it possible to thematize the ego. In section 23 of Ideas II, a section devoted to the mode of apprehension of the Pure ego, Husser! tells us that 'the Pure ego is by no means a subject which can never be made an object. .. The Pure ego can be objectively apprehended through the Pure ego as the identically self-same.'9 This thematization of the Pure ego by itself can be characterized by a principle of self-identity or self-identification. Thus, at this point, Husserl has succeeded in developing two conceptions of the Pure ego, one based upon the unity of transcendentally reduced consciousness and the other based upon the selfidentity of transcendentally reduced consciousness.

This latter self identical principle might well be called 'a-temporal', inasmuch as it presupposes a being out of time of the transcendental subject which, as such, can always direct its attention upon the contents of its own temporally determined consciousness. But there is another, strictly temporal, concept of the ego at which Husserl had already arrived, or rather, to which he had been driven by his researches into inner time consciousness. For, in the stream of consciousness, the contents of consciousness are continually changing or subject to modification. This alteration of the content does not however bring with it an alteration of the general form of consciousness itself, which remains one and the same through the ongoing alterations. Nevertheless, this 'remaining the same' can itself be either implicit or explicit. Through the course of an experience in which contents appear and then disappear, come into being and then pass away, the Pure ego remains as that which is not itself affected by the modification of its contents. Here the persistence of the Pure ego is only implicit. But it can always be made explicit insofar as the self effects a self-apperception through which it identifies itself as one with the unity which it is, as that which remains the same through the course of the flux. A given stretch of the flux can be isolated and the unalterable quality of the Pure ego can be recognized through the continual alteration Of those contents which make their appearance in the course of that specific stretch of time.

With this notion of an explicit representation of the Pure ego, Husser! finds himself confronted with the problem of the constitution of the Transcendental ego. The ego can no longer simply be assumed as the condition for constitutional analyses of a certain kind. The ego must itself be subjected to the same kind of analysis or it will remain an unconstituted transcendence and, as such, a presupposition underlying, and so disqualifying, the entire constitutional program. We shall give the name 'Transcendental ego' to the Pure ego insofar as it has become the explicit


theme of a phenomenological investigation and, as such, calls for a constitutional analysis.

We have already taken note of the essential conditions of any phenomenological constitution of a given region of being. Essentially they fall under three heads. First, it must always be possible to identify a pole of unity or central core of meaning pertinent to the objectivity in question. Second, it must always be possible to identify a subjective pole of diversity or phenomenal manifold through which the object makes its appearance. And third, it must always be possible to establish, between these two poles, a system of correlations such that the pole of objective unity emerges through the unfolding of the correlated manifold of subjective appearances as the meaning of the being in question. How can these three conditions be applied to the problem of the constitution of the quite specific region of being which goes by the name of the Transcendental ego?

Insofar as the Pure ego is examined from the standpoint of an implicit unity presupposed by the contents of a phenomenologically clarified field of consciousness, we can indeed talk of a pole of unity and a pole of diversity. Unfortunately however, the pole of unity is located on the side of the subject rather than that of the object and is, in consequence, nothing less than an explicit meaning given through the diversity of a stream of lived experience. In fact the noetic diversity in question can be apprehended in a dual manner; as referring beyond itself to its own noematic meaning - in which case the pole of unity will be the corresponding content of consciousness. Alternatively, a given noetic phase can be identified through a reflective act which, so to speak, objectifies the phase in question - in which case the pole of unity will be the objectified noetic phase, which will be given through its own higher order noetic diversity, a diversity created by the act of reflection itself. Thus, instead of simply remembering a given person and so making of that person an object of memorial consciousness, I can always reflect upon the act of remembering, thereby transforming the activity of remembering into an intentionally apprehended objectivity in its own right; but only insofar as the reflective recuperation of the activity of remembering engenders its own manifold of noetic phases. Once again, the activity of remembering will feature as a noematic pole uniting a diversity of noetic phases all of which, in turn, presupposes an implicit unity of consciousness.

A fresh attempt to constitute the Transcendental ego can be attempted, this time by making explicit the condition which was initially left implicit, namely, the structural unity of the entire field of consciousness. But insofar as the field of consciousness attributable to the Pure ego is objectified in this way, what emerges for constitutional analysis is, in the first place, not


the Transcendental ego but simply the psyche (SeeZe). Even if the psyche is understood to be something other than the empirical ego, that is, if the psyche is understood to be that totality of internal contents which manifests itself on the basis of a bracketing or suspension of the objectified ego, still this psyche is not to be equated with the Transcendental ego. It can not be, for the simple reason that it manifests itself as one region of being among the many other regions of being available for analysis, whereas the Transcendental ego is that universal subjectivity always presupposed by, and so implied in, any such constitutional activity.

Hussed makes this quite clear in § 30 of Ideas II where he says: 'Still remaining faithful to what is intuitively given, we distinguish the real psychic subject, the soul or the psychically identical entity, from the pure or transcendental I.' 10 He then goes on to stress both the analogy between material and psychic substance and the absence of any such analogy between this psychic substance and the pure I. To make this latter point in the most dramatic manner possible, Hussed is even ready to talk of the unity of the pure I as that of a monadic consciousness. Real experience (reaZe Eifahrung) is divided into two kinds, outer and inner, corresponding to which there belong the relevant sciences of outer and inner experience. But the lived experiences (Erlebnisse) of the pure I comprehend both kinds of experience.

However, there is a circularity in the structure of Ideas II which vitiates the coherence of its analyses. In one sense, the realm of spirit is the last to be disclosed in an order which starts out from the material, then moves through the bodily and the psychic, to eventually reach the pure I as the end point of a foundational constitution. But, in another sense, the pure I must be presupposed, from the very beginning, as that without which a phenomenological constitution of each of the regions of being in question would be impossible. This becomes clear when, in § 49, Husserl distinguishes the personal from the natural attitude with reference to a reduction performed with respect to the latter. For although this section is placed at the very beginning of the part devoted to the constitution of the spiritual world, and is intended to mark the passage to the pure I, the latter must already have been presupposed from the beginning if the investigations of material, bodily and psychic reality were to enjoy the status of phenomenological researches. So much is admitted at the very end where his third chapter is entitled: 'The Ontological Precedence of the Spiritual over the Naturalistic World.'

Hence the need for a new beginning. Such a new beginning is attempted in the Cartesian Meditations. For the entire Fourth Cartesian Meditation is devoted to the 'Development of the Constitutional Problems Pertaining to


the Transcendental ego Himself.' Hussed makes it perfectly clear that the constitution of the ego needs investigating along lines similar to those that hold sway elsewhere, that is, through the disclosure of appropriate systems of correlation. In order therefore to fill the gap in his exposition, Hussed points to a second polarization, a second kind of synthesis, one directed not toward the object but toward the subject. 'Now we encounter a second polarization, a second kind of synthesis, which embraces all the particular multiplicities of cogitationes collectively, and in its own manner, namely as belonging to the identical ego, who, as the active and affective subject of consciousness, lives in all processes of consciousness and is related through them, to all object-poles.' I I

But instead of actually trying to show how the constitution of the Pure ego takes place, Hussed adopts instead two alternative tactics. On the one hand, he talks of a self-constitution of the ego by itself. 'The ego is himself existent from himself in continuous evidence; thus, in himself, he is continuously constituting himself as existing.'12 This concept of a 'selfconstitution' of the ego is however not a solution but an evasion of the problem. Hussed must have suspected as much for he also tries another approach. By distinguishing three other concepts of the ego from that of the Pure ego or identical pole he tries, with reference to these alternative concepts of the ego, to carry through his constitutional programme. The three alternative concepts are those of the ego as substrate of habitualities or the personal ego, the ego in its full concretion or the monadic ego and the ego as pure possibility variant or the eidos ego. Two of these concepts of the ego move in a direction of greater concreteness while the third moves in the direction of greater abstractness. Characteristically enough, it is the latter alone which represents a genuinely transcendental attempt to constitute the ego. We shall therefore consider the former first, with a view to clearing the way for a more extensive exposition of the latter. Paradoxically enough, we shall fmd that it is the movement in the direction of the more abstract which puts us on the track of a structure which can prepare the way for that very transformation of the abstract into the concrete which is implied by the movement in the direction of the more concrete.

From the very language he employs to characterize both the Personal and the Monadic ego, it is clear that Hussed is already shifting from transcendental to genetic phenomenology. Not only does he insist that the centering ego is something more than an empty pole of identity, he characterizes the development of habitualities as an instance of a law of 'transcendental genesis.' A little later on it is the process of self-constitution which is linked explicitly with genesis. 'Since, by his own active generating, the Ego constitutes himself as identical substrate of Ego-properties, he constitutes


himself also as a "fixed and abiding" personal EgO.'13 The concept of the Monadic ego is really only an extension of this process inasmuch as the ego now takes in not merely ego-like properties but properties of all kinds, including those that are normally attributed to objects in the surrounding world. 'Since the monadically concrete ego includes also the whole of actual and potential conscious life, it is clear that the problem of explicating this monadic ego phenomenologically (the problem of his constitution for himself) must include all constitutional problems without exception.' 14

From the new standpoint of the Monadic ego these properties can now also be incorporated into the ego insofar as they all arise as correlates of consciousness.

At the end of the fourth Meditation, the same idea is taken up again, this time with a view to spelling out a two part program. 'First, a self-explication in the pregnant sense, showing systematically how the ego constitutes himself in respect of his own proper essence, as existent in himself and for himself; then, secondly, a self-explication in the broadened sense, which goes on from there to show how ... the ego likewise constitutes everything without exception that ever has for him, in the ego, existential status as nonEgo.'IS But this second sense of self-constitution does not follow from the first, in the sense that it is first made clear how the ego constitutes itself and then, on that basis, made clear how everything other is constituted in the ego. Rather, the second directive takes the place of the first, which is then simply enclosed within the all-embracing framework of a Monadic ego; the implication being that the identification of phenomenology, in its entirety, with the self-explication of the ego somehow renders redundant this constitution of the ego by itself. As he put it earlier: 'The phenomenology of this self-constitution coincides with phenomenology as a whole.' 16

With the dual concept of the Personal and the Monadic ego we see Husserl trying to build back into transcendentally reduced consciousness that very concrete character which had been eliminated from it through the reduction. Historical genesis takes the place of logical genesis, habitual acts replace the more transcendentally congenial acts of apprehension and comprehension. Association is set up as the fundamental principle of 'passive genesis' and motivation takes the place of any intentional theory of action and affection.

But to show how the ego comes to acquire all those properties which go to make up its concrete content in the course of life is not to constitute the ego, at least not in any transcendentally acceptable sense. In fact this alternative approach, from the standpoint of genetic phenomenology, appeals to the very same concept of 'self-constitution' as that employed in the conception of the ego as identical pole. But it is only in the context of an


attempt to constitute the ego as identical pole that the critical difficulty becomes apparent.

For self-constitution means that constituting and constituted must coincide, that the constituting consciousness is the very same entity as that whose constitution is in question. But then how am I, the constituter, to obtain that intentional distance from what is to be constituted without which the task of constitution can not be carried through? To make matters worse, it is not consciousness as such which has to be constituted but consciousness in its constituting capacity. It is as constituting that I have to constitute myself, if I am to constitute myself as a Transcendental ego. To be sure, it is always possible to hypothesize a higher order constituting consciousness which can then be held responsible for the constitution of the ego. But then, qua constituting, this consciousness will in its turn have to be constituted, and so on ad infmitum. From the above it becomes clear that self-constitution is nothing more than a device adopted by Husserl to enable him to steer between the scylla of an infinite regress and the charybidis of an unconstituted consciousness which simply has to be assumed as the starting point for all constitutional analyses.

However, the difficulties phenomenology confronts with the concept of self-constitution do at least bring with them one positive result. For the theme of a self-constitution of transcendental consciousness by itself serves to bring to light the structure of coincidence. As constituting, I coincide with that which has to be constituted, namely myself. Later, we shall interpret the disclosure of just such a structure of 'coincidence' as the symptom of a crucial transition, effected implicitly if not explicitly, from transcendental to ontological phenomenology. For the moment however, we shall pursue the other track and consider whether the idea of an Eidos ego can serve to save Husserl from the dilemma in which he finds himself.

Just as the way to the Pure ego is opened up by a reduction, to pure phenomena, of all intentional contents, so the way to the Eidos ego is opened up by that method of eidetic variation through which any fact can be made to yield a corresponding essence. In fact, the Eidos ego is born of a double reduction, the reduction of the being of the world and the reduction of the de facto ego. And just as the reduction of the world is not an annihilation of the world but a transformation of the world, as fact, into the world, as essence, so the reduction of the de facto ego turns out to be a reduction of the ego, as fact, into the ego, as essence.

Starting from any actual experience of an object, I can always alter this experience in such a way that the actuality in question is transformed into a possibility, into a possibility variant of what is in the mode of an 'as if'. I am looking at a table. Only one side is actually given to me. But I can


always presentify the other sides as possible perceptions and moreover perceptions which I do not have to render actual through any real variation of my point of view. For I can always imagine myself over there 'from where' I should be in a position to see the other sides. Indeed, strictly speaking, imaginative variation is the only mode of variation available to a reflective consciousness which has abstracted itself from the body and has, in consequence, replaced the reality of action with the intentional activity of consciousness. Just as any real variation of my point of view successively enacts those adumbrations which make up the unity of the object, so an imaginative variation reenacts this succession and is able to do so precisely because the reproductive consciousness in question is already familiar with the way in which a physical object presents itself to consciousness.

On the basis of the point of view which I actually occupy, I am always able to imagine myself 'as ifl were over there.' This 'as if' brings with it not only a variation of perspective but also a variation of myself. I imagine myself as being over there, even while I remain where I am. Inasmuch as the identity of the object in question points to an infmity of possible points of view, this variation of myself is also one which is in principle endless. The endlessness of the possible variations of my ego does not however imply any randomness in the possible perceptions generated by such variations, each and every one of which has, at least, to be compossible with all the others.

With this notion of compossibility, a new element enters into the analysis. Or rather, the order and connection of possible points of view, together with the perceptions generated on the basis of such points of view, is shifted from the plane of temporal succession to that of a-temporal simultaneity. The compos sible points of view, all of which can be represented as resulting from essential variants of my ego, are imaginatively presentified as simultaneously co-present, and this in conformity with the idea of an object as a synthesis of possible perceptions all of which are actually co-present at anyone time. From the standpoint of compossibility, the actual point of view assumed by my de facto ego loses its foundational character and becomes instead one among many other possible points of view. Inasmuch as the Pure ego disengages itself from its de facto experience and begins to move in the phases of pure possibility variants of itself, this de facto ego finds itself inside an Eidos ego. The positing of any one possibility includes within itself, implicitly, a multiplicity of such compos sible variants which, together, go to make up the ideal extension of the Eidos ego.

Due to the disclosure of the Eidos ego as a horizon of pure possibility variants of the Pure ego, the de facto ego gets placed on a par with every


other possibility variant of itself. In other words, the de facto ego itself becomes a possibility variant. It is important to note that the connection with the de facto ego is not lost sight of altogether. It appears first, as the basis for performing the variations in question. And once the Eidos ego has been disclosed as a horizon which includes all possibility variants of itself, the de facto ego reappears as one possibility among all those included in the all-embracing Eidos ego.

Thus the transformation of the Pure ego into an Eidos ego represents the ultimate extension of that abstraction of consciousness from the body which already characterizes reflective consciousness. As a Pure ego, I abstract from the concrete reality of that empirical ego which still remains bound up with the body. As an Eidos ego, I take the further step of abstracting from the residual facticity of my Pure ego. This may best be expressed by saying that the ego ceases to be my ego and becomes instead an ego in general.

The disclosure of an Eidos ego makes it possible to take seriously the ideal of a phenomenological constitution of the Transcendental ego. To be sure, the possibility variants of my de facto ego can only be imaginatively intended. But imaginary variation is, for Hussed, the typical procedure of eidetic disclosure. Much more important, the disclosure of such a noetic diversity is governed by a unifying principle which is nothing other than the meaning 'Transcendental ego as such.' This meaning which emerges in the course of the imaginative variation of my ego is a genuine noema in the sense that it lies on the objective side of the correlation, but only because it has ceased to be my ego.

But can this surrender of the characteristic of mineness be so easily negotiated without destroying the very meaning of the Transcendental ego? To be sure, the parallel between the eidetic constitution of the ego and that of any other objectivity appears plausible. 'With each eidetically pure type,' Hussed tells us, 'we find ourselves, not indeed inside the de facto ego, but inside an Eidos ego; and constitution of one actually pure possibility among others carries with it implicitly, as its outer horizon, a purely possible ego, a pure possibility variant of my de facto ego.'17 It is for this reason that 'the all-embracing eidos, Transcendental ego as such ... comprises all pure possibility-variants of my de facto ego and this ego itself qua possibility.' IS

Is the situation any different here than elsewhere in the field of eidetic constitution, governed as it is by the general principle of a transformation of fact into essence? Indeed it is. For elsewhere the disclosure of the structure of an essence proceeds under the general rubric of an appearing of the essence for me. Certainly, the structure of an essence is such that it is supposed to be for everyone in the same way as it is for me. But it is in, or for, me that its being for everyone emerges and is recognized as having


universal validity. But inasmuch as I transform my de facto ego into an essence or Eidos ego, there is no one to whom such an essence can appear as being for me. But being for me, or 'mineness' is an essential characteristic of the ego, that without which the very concept of an ego must fall to the ground. For, in the absence of a residual link with the sheer particularity of the de facto ego, the universalization of transcendental consciousness would have to be taken in the Hegelian direction of a universal world spirit.

In Cartesian Meditations W, Husserl seems to brush aside the difficulties relative to the supposedly transcendental character of this new line of approach. But in unpUblished manuscripts devoted to the disclosure of the 'living present' Husserl offers a few clues as to how concrecity can be achieved on a transcendental basis. Effectively, this new approach leads in the direction of genetic phenomenology, or the regression to the origin.

We begin with a concept of the radicalized reduction. 'The reduction to the living present is the radicalized reduction to that very subjectivity in which everything that is originally significant for me is produced.'19 Or again: 'The naively acquired transcendental I must itself be again subjected to a transcendental reduction. '20 The Transcendental ego disclosed through the transcendental reduction is naive in that it reduces me to a noetic stream which is taken for granted as the material basis for all constitutional operations. But this noetic stream can be regarded as something constituted whose constitutive operations therefore have in turn to be disclosed. Hence the need to effect a reduction with regard to the Transcendental ego as the condition of the possibility of its own stream of lived experience.

This radicalized reduction is supposed to reveal the streaming life of transcendental consciousness itself. In tum, the revelation of the life of transcendental consciousness conducts me back to the living present in which and through which all meanings emerge out of the chaos of a flux. 'If we consider this transcendental life itself, this transcendental ego, or if I consider myself as I am involved in all my presuppositions, in everything that exists for me, as the original condition of their having meaning as entities, then I fmd myself as the streaming present,2l Through the radicalized reduction I fmd myself as the streaming present of an anonymous consciousness. Just as worldly transcendence is relative to the ultimate Transcendental ego and its constitutive processes, so the life of the Transcendental ego is itself relative to an ultimate 'living present' which thereby becomes the absolutely conclusive truth.

In texts of this kind, we witness Husserl going backwards in order to try and get forwards, performing a conclusive reduction of what is left over after the phenomenological reduction in order to regain the absolutely immediate connection with the world in the living present. Thus, by a


strange metamorphosis, to which we have already given the name the 'ontological transposition,' the last becomes the first and the first becomes the last. The last to be revealed in the course of a whole series of reductions turns out to be that in which and through which all meanings are constituted originally.

In itself this reversal is not so remarkable, since something of the kind is already operative within the framework of ordinary transcendental analysis. The sphere of immanence, to which the world is ultimately reduced, becomes the original source in which the constitutive principles can be sought. But here something different is being proposed, a transformation of the absolutely abstract into the absolutely concrete, of an ultimately reflective disclosure into the originally un- or pre-reflective life of consciousness. In order to accommodate this reversal a new concept of the I is required. 'The I pole is what it is not as bearer, not as substrate for action, affection, etc., but precisely (as) an I, a focal point, a functional centre for affects, a point of emanation, an active centre for activity, for actions.'22

What does Husserl mean by this seemingly equivocal distinction between the I pole, as bearer or as substrate of actions and affections, and the I pole as a functional centre or point of emanation for action and affection? What else if not a renunciation of his own earlier conception of the self as a Personal ego, the very concept expressly intended to take phenomenology in the more concrete direction of a genetic investigation. What Husserl had discovered in between was that the pretended concrecity of genetic phenomenology did not really meet the need for which it was devised. A concrete self can not be constructed on the basis of a substance attribute distinction which itself is modeled upon the duality of mind and body. Rather, a concrete self is one with itself, one with that body which is its own, one with the processes in which it is engaged and by which it is affected and transformed. However, rather than jettisoning the notion of the self as pole and as centre, notions whose mathematical character already betrays their abstract origin, Husserl prefers to subject them to a modification, to make the pole or centre the very stuff of which the self is made, rather than relying upon an underlying substance which, as such, is relatively unaffected by its experiences.

It is this reversal which Marbach has in mind when he quite rightly points up a fundamental ambiguity in Husserl's concept of the ego. 'In the first line of motivation, we found the involvement of the pure I in the determination of an unitary, self-contained stream of consciousness bound up with the analysis of acts of presentification .... In the second line of motivation, we found the involvement of the I in the determination of consciousness in the form of the cogito bound up with phenomena of


attention. Here, it is apparent that Hussed addresses the I on the analogy of the body as centre of orientation, as the centre of the active and affective life of consciousness and in this manner lets it manifest itself, at bottom, in the function of a bodily determined subject. These two conceptions of the I are not clearly distinguished with HusserI, so that his concept of the 1 has to be described as ambiguous. '23 Marbach takes this ambiguity as the motif for a new series of analyses devoted to the mundanization of the Transcendental ego through the ascription of psychic and personal predicates which can be regarded as its abiding possession (Habitus). In so doing he fails to appreciate the momentous significance of this critical ambiguity, a significance which will only become clear when we tum our attention to the constitution of the body (Leib), the very objectivity which is adopted as the model for the second concept of the ego.

Thus far we have considered the difficulty into which phenomenology gets itself solely from the standpoint of Hussed' s contributions toward a transcendental constitution of the ego. But that something like an ontological transposition was called for by the impossibility of anything like a transcendental constitution of the Transcendental ego was already recognized by Heidegger in Being and Time. Hence the need for a brief glance at Heidegger's conception of the self as it emerges in this, his major ontological treatise.

Heidegger's theory of the self is presented in two main sections, a first section (§ 25) which prefaces the examination of being-in-the-wodd from the standpoint of the Who and a second section (§ 64) in which Heidegger undertakes a critique of the transcendental conception of the self, more particularly the Kantian concept of the self as an 'I think.' This critique of the Kantian conception of the self (which implicitly contains a critique of the HusserIian conception), in tum, prepares the way for an examination of the unifying structure of care.

At § 25 Heidegger begins by taking the 1 in an as yet uninterpreted mode. 'Dasein is an entity which is in each case 1 myself; its Being is in each case mine. '24 But this formal indication leads on to an ontological interpretation which rapidly comes to the very opposite conclusion, that Dasein is least itself when it says 1 of itself. 'Perhaps when Dasein addresses itself in the way that is closest to itself, it always says "I am this entity", and in the long run says this loudest when it is "not" this entity. Dasein is in each case mine, and this is its constitution; but what if this should be the reason why, proximally and for the most part, Dasein is not itsel/?,25 The reason for this seemingly paradoxical affirmation is to be sought in the taken for granted character of the being present at hand of the self as 1 or Ego. In section 25, this being present at hand of the self is not very exhaustively examined. But


in section 64, Heidegger takes up this question once again in connection with the Kantian conception of the self as an 'I think.' By calling the self an 'I think' Kant seeks to avoid the characterization of the self in terms of those concepts of simplicity, substantiality and personality which form the topic of the mistaken doctrine of the paralogisms. However, despite his refutation of the theory of a soul substance, Heidegger argues that he still falls back upon an essentially substantial concept of the self. Presence at hand now becomes the way in which the self de-realizes its relation to the world and in so doing de-realizes itself. In making the world and its self present to itself, Dasein has ceased to be in the world and has therefore ceased to be itself. And this is why it is least itself when it says I of itself most vociferously.

In the end however, Heidegger himself does also accept a version of the simplicity and substantiality thesis, a version which he articulates in terms of the two concepts 'steadiness' and 'steadfastness', both of which are however included in the one characteristic of 'constancy'. But constancy is no longer a formal, and as such impersonal, concept but is supposed to be one which helps to explain the concrete selthood of the self. Self-constancy means being true to oneself and, in this sense, being authentic. Paradoxically, it is when the self becomes a substantial subject that it looses its rootedness in itself and so becomes a wavering, irresolute and inconstant self. Through the making present of the self to itself in the 'I think', the self actually loses its self and so is only able to recover itself again when it removes itself from its lostness in the They and individualizes itself down to its ownmost being self.

With this brief reference to Heidegger, we now find ourselves doubly qualified to rectify the overly abstract character of Husserl's analyses of the self. First, the attempt to constitute the ego transcendentally fails, in that it fails to recognize the sense in which the self is and can only be itself by being that body which is its own. Second, and as a result of the foregoing, the hypothesis of a Transcendental ego overlooks the being-in-the-world of the self. Eventually, we shall find ourselves in a position to bring these two criticisms together, but only after we have considered the difficulties which arise when Husserl seeks to constitute the own body. But before we tum to Husserl's attempt at a constitution of the own body, it would be better to first tum our attention to the attempt at a phenomenological constitution of time. For, as Husserl became increasingly aware, time and the subject are not, in the final analysis, to be distinguished. Rather the self is temporal in its very being.

It is for this reason that we shall find HusserI attempting, with regard to the thematic of time, the very same manoeuvre as that which has already


been encountered in connection with the ego and to which we have given the name 'ontological transposition;' retreating into the recesses of a consciousness abstracted from itself and from the world in order to find therein the resources for a movement of return. Thus our investigation of the impossibility of a phenomenological constitution of time will confirm the same structure of an 'ontological transposition' but in a much more complete and adequate fashion.

NOTES

1. Husser!, Edmund, Cartesianische Meditationen, hrsg., S. Strasser, Husser!iana Band I, tr. by Dorian Cairns as Cartesian Meditations, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960,33 p.68.

2. Husserl, Edmund, Logische Untersuchungen Band I und II, Tiibingen, 1968, L.V. V, 4, S. 331 and 8, S. 342.

3. Marbach, Edouard, Das Problem des Ich in der Phiinomenologie Husserls, Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974, S. 8.

4. Husser!, Edmund, Ideas I, op. cit., 57, p. 157. 5. ibid., 64, p. 173. 6. ibid., 80, p. 214. 7. Husser!, Edmund, Ideen II, op. cit., 22, S. 97. 8. Husser!, Edmund, Intersubjektivitiit, hrsg., Iso Kern, 1973, Husser!iana, Band XIII, Den

Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, Beilage XXXIV, S. 248. 9. Husser!, Edmund, Ideen II, op. cit., 23, S. 101.

10. Husser!, Edmund, Ideen II, op. cit., 30, S. 120. 11. Husser!, Edmund, Cartesian Meditations, op. cit., 31, p. 66. 12. ibid., 31, p. 66. 13. Husser!, Edmund, Cartesian Meditations, op. cit., 32, p. 67 14. Husser!, Edmund, Cartesian Meditations, op. cit., 33. p. 68 15. ibid., 41, p. 85 16. ibid., 33, p. 68 17. Husser!, Edmund, Cartesian Meditations, op. cit., 34, p. 71. 18. ibid., 34, p. 71. 19. Ms. C 3 I, S. 3 (1930) 20. Ms. C 2 I, S. 11 (1931) 21. Ms. C 3 III S. 10 (1931) 22. Ms. E III 2, 28 (1920) 23. Marbach, Edouard, op. cit., S. 298-9. 24. Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, op. cit., 25, p. 150 [H. 115]. 25. ibid., 25. p. 151 [H. 115].

The Impossibility of a Phenomenological Constitution of the Flux of Inner Time Consciousness

The discovery of a time of inner time consciousness is one of the great philosophical accomplishments of the 20th century. At about the same time, but independent each of the other, both Bergson and Husserl sought to break the hold of objective time by tracing the latter back to its ultimate foundations in a time of inner time consciousness. For Bergson, objective time is the product of a confusion or rather of a compromise between two quite distinct sets of phenomena, the pure duration of consciousness itself and the sheer simultaneity of the material universe. Insofar as that of which consciousness is conscious is spatial, consciousness is spatialized in the very process of representing objects existing in the external world. Through spatialization, consciousness becomes capable of representing its own internal processes. By the same token, consciousness introduces its own flux into a material universe which is itself timeless. Thus the clarity and distinction of external perception is brought into consciousness while the temporality of internal perception is projected upon the world.

Underlying the Bergsonian theory, there is however an ontological assumption which can not be uncritically upheld. Bergson assumes that reality presents itself to consciousness already split up into the two categories of the external and the internal, the mental and the material. But the initial supposition of an external reality characterized by reciprocal exteriority without succession and an internal reality characterized by succession without reciprocal exteriority makes it impossible to render intelligible what Heidegger would call the original being-in-the-world of the self. So, however satisfactorily the Bergsonian theory might explain the spatialization of time, the dichotomy of internal and external can not be taken as an initial given.

On the positive side, the disentanglement of a pure duration through a procedure of de-spatialization, together with the situation of this pure



duration in the profound ego, may be accepted as definitive contributions to a theory of inner time consciousness. In fact, Hussed effects just such a despatialization through the modality of a reduction. Hussed too brings to light an ultimate flux of consciousness, a flux which is the original source of time structures which are much more elaborately analyzed. So it is the Hussedian method that we shall follow for the most part with, however, one critical concession to the Bergsonian position. Due to the fact that the transcendental ego must abstract itself from the on-going dynamic of consciousness in order to be in a position to undertake a transcendental investigation of time, the only flux which such an ego is capable of comprehending is the flux of empirical consciousness or, at best, the flux of its own transcendentally reduced consciousness. Here it is Kant who is the more consistent of the two transcendental philosophers, since, for the most part, Kant treats the flux as a flux of empirical consciousness. But Hussed not only wants to recover a flux of transcendental consciousness, he wants to undertake a constitution of this same flux. Thus we shall encounter, once again, the very same problem as that which was encountered in connection with the constitution of the transcendental ego. The transcendental ego coincides with itself and so can not establish that intentional distance from its self which would make a transcendental constitution of the transcendental ego possible. Still less can the transcendental ego both be a flux and constitute the flux as such. In this respect therefore, we shall follow Bergson in concluding that, since the flux is the ultimate reality of inner time consciousness, for this very reason, there can be no constitution of the flux as such.

Our presentation of reflective time will fall into three phases. First, we shall carry through a reduction of objective time. This reduction of objective time will then make it possible for us to investigate the intrinsic structures of immanental time consciousness. Finally, we shall tum our attention to the theory of the flux and seek to draw from the impossibility of constituting the flux certain conclusions with regard to the necessity for something like an ontological transposition.

THE REDUCTION

In the very first section of his Phenomenology of Inner Time Consciousness Hussed tells us that the first step in any understanding of what might be meant by a reflective time consists in the 'complete exclusion of every assumption, stipulation or conviction concerning objective time.' 1 What does this exclusion effectively exclude?

The Flux of Inner Time Consciousness 59

First, the transcendent reality of whatever is supposed to cause those primal impressions whose succession makes up the order of objective time is hereby excluded. Amongst other things, this implies a suspension with regard to any physical theory regarding the natural conditions of perception. Sound and light take time to travel from their source to the receptive organ. It may well be that the star that I see has passed out of existence and that I am only looking at the light waves emitted by that particular source many light years ago. All of this has no bearing whatever upon the analysis of internal time whose starting point must be the immediate givens of consciousness. But second, as a framework with reference to which the temporal position of every object or event can be determined, human action and existence can also be temporally determined. We are all of us born at a certain moment in time. We lead our lives through a certain span of time and die at a certain, historically dated moment. None of this has any bearing on the attempt to set out the structure of a time of inner time consciousness. So far from it being the case that human existence is itself determined in a time of inner time consciousness, it is the latter which is determinative of the objective time order. But third, the psychical reality of time is also excluded. It may well be a subject of interest to psychologists to determine what correlations, if any, hold between objective time and the subjective time which I experience in the ongoing course of existence. Such correlations can, of course, only be established on the basis of the measure provided by objective time. So the subjective time whose 'personal' rhythms are thereby brought to light can have no foundational character.

In order to clarify this exclusion, a comparison may be made with space. Through the reduction of objective space, our attention is redirected toward the appearances of things in space. Whereas we can talk of objective spatial relations holding between objects, it makes no sense to talk of a point in the visual field being one foot away from another point or indeed of appearances in general standing in any spatial relation with that which appears. The visual field is spatial in one sense; that is, it yields a quasi spatial disposition of extended qualities. But this phenomenal spatiality has nothing to do with objective space. Similarly, as a result of a reduction operated with respect to objective time, we are indeed sti11left with a quasi temporal field. But the quasi temporal disposition of impressional data has nothing to do with objective time - or rather, the relation between the two will tum out in the end to be a one way relation, a foundational relation which proceeds from subjective to objective time, not a relation which allows us to regard subjective time as a deficient derivative, a residuum of objective time.


Generally speaking therefore, and as a result of the reduction, we have to distinguish 1) the object or event perceived as existing in space or time. 2) the appearance of that object. 3) the impressional data on the basis of which these appearances manifest themselves as such. Only the last two are available for consideration after the reduction of objective time.

The starting point for any phenomenological analysis of internal time consciousness is to be sought in the impressional data furnished by a phenomenologically reduced experience. 'The question of the essence of time leads back to the question of the origin of time. The question of the origin is directed toward the primitive forms of the consciousness of time in which the primitive differences of the temporal are constituted intentionally and authentically as the originary sources of all certainties relative to time.'2

Hussed advises us that this question of origins has nothing to do with the psychological origin of time or with any empirical genesis of time consciousness. It is indeed nothing other than the demand for a restriction of the scope of the analysis to what is so immediately given that the intuitive data disclosed thereby can serve as the basis for a priori evidence with regard to the form of the temporal. It is perhaps only natural that, for the most part, the examples of the lived experiences in question are drawn largely from the auditory field, just as the examples for the phenomenological constitution of space are largely drawn from the visual field. This does not however represent a limitation upon the scope of the analysis. For the conclusions drawn from the analysis can be extended without qualification to the data of the visual field. Indeed, in a very real sense, the analysis of the temporal form of phenomenologically reduced experience is the more fundamental. For the process whereby a spatial object gets constituted as a noematic unity presiding over a diversity of noetic adumbrations is one which itself takes time. Time is therefore ensconced at the very heart of the constitutional procedure itself (and this no matter what the type of object whose constitution is in question), simply because noetic phases can only be unfolded through time. Any failure with regard to the method of temporal constitution will therefore cast severe doubts upon the programme of phenomenological constitution in general. Hence the need to focus upon those examples where the temporal character of all lived experience presents itself in its purest and most exclusive form i.e., examples drawn from the auditory field.


IMMANENTAL ANALYSIS

Hussed begins his analysis of time consciousness with the critique of a dogma which he attributes to Brentano through Herbart and Lotze and to which he gives the name 'dogma of the momentary character of a configurational consciousness.' The aim is to break down the prejudice of the foundational character of the temporal point by defining the present in such a way that it actually reaches into the past and into the future. Husserl does this by focusing our attention upon the mode of givenness of a temporal object rather than upon the temporal object itself. The immanental temporal object itself may remain the same but its mode of givenness is ever varying.

This redirection of attention upon the object in its mode of givenness to consciousness follows the generally prescribed course of phenomenological analysis. For the possibility of an a priori analysis of the contents of a phenomenologically reduced experience must be exhibited as arising out of the restriction of the scope of the analysis to that which presents itself to consciousness, as and how it presents itself. In turn, this latter condition can be analyzed under two heads, that of immediacy, or originary givenness, and that of presentness. Originary givenness is the defining characteristic of the sphere of immanence and is based upon the elimination of anything which might stand between consciousness and its object. But this still leaves open the question how far back into the past and on into the future a primal impression can be reckoned to reach. Clearly there must be a boundary to what has sometimes been called 'the specious present.' But where should the limits of that boundary be set? And how?

Let us take the case of an organ tone which starts sounding, continues to sound for a while and then ceases. All questions pertaining to the origin of this sound are methodologically excluded. Strictly speaking, I can not even posit the sound as emanating from a certain source. Rather, I am required to restrict my attention to the impressional data itself, to what is immediately apprehended when I hear the sound. The sound will possess a certain pitch, a certain timbre, a certain volume. All of this pertains to the extra temporal qualities of the sound. But, as immediately apprehended, these qualities must be taken note of as such. Also, and more importantly, the sound has a certain duration. While the sound sounds I am conscious of the sound as possessing a certain continuity of duration. And even after the sound ceases, I am still conscious of the sound as having c,eased and so as having possessed a certain unity of duration. From this it is already clear that the present of phenomenologically reduced experience is not a discrete, isolated present but a present to which there belongs a certain continuity of lived expenence.


In order to see what might be meant by this continuity of lived experience, it would be better to tum our attention to the sounding of a melody. For the very fact that the succession of tones is heard as a melody, that is, as a diversity held together in unity, means that the succession of notes can not be given as a discontinuous sequence of sounds. For otherwise there would be a succession of appearances but no appearance of succession. The first note would appear in the now, then disappear, to be replaced by the next. At each instant, there would only be one note, the note actually sounding in the now. What is it which transforms this discontinuous sequence into the continuous succession which is actually heard?

First, at any given instant in the succession, I am aware not only of the instantaneous sounding of the tone in the now but also of past phases of the melody which are still retained as having sounded. Hussed gives the name 'primal impression' or 'originary dator intuition' to that feature of the act of apprehension which results in my hearing a given sound in the now. By contrast, he gives the name 'retention' or 'primary remembrance' to that feature of the act of apprehension which results in my still being aware, in the now, of past phases of the melody as having sounded. Every primal impression is subject to a 'law of modification' whereby the sound sounding in the now is continuously transformed into a sequence of retentions, each of which still occurs in the now but is nevertheless directed back toward the sound from which it originally arose. Thus an increasing number of retentional phases goes along with the diminishing impact of the past sound and so contributes to engendering a sense of the 'thickness' of the past.

But this retentional 'holding on' should not be confused with the simultaneous sounding of past notes in the present. The note retained is not retained just as it sounded in the now. Nor is the now which sounded remembered in such a way that a confusion becomes possible between the memorial representation of the past sound and the perceptual presentation of the present sound. No new act of consciousness is required to retain the tone which has just sounded. Rather, this sound is retained just as it was originally perceived - only subject to an essential modification. With the sounding of the new tone, the former tone is 'pushed back' into the past and retained as pushed back in this way.

But especially if the melody is one with which I am familiar, I am aware, in the now, not only of that sound which is given in the present and of those tones which are still retained as having sounded in the past but also of a continuity of phases which have not yet been given but which are already expected. This anticipation of phases which have yet to sound, Hussed calls 'protention'. In actual fact, protentional expectations tend to be based on


regularities observed in the past. I can usually only anticipate the next note in the melody because I have already heard the melody before. And this already indicates that the relation of retention and protention to the act of apprehension is by no means a symmetrical relation. Retentions hold on to a content which has just been given in the now. Thus retentions possess the same determinate extra temporal qualities as the object which was given in the now. On the other hand, the extra temporal qualities of the protentional phases remain indeterminate. In the on-going course of experience, the anticipated tone may be given but then again, it may not. It may be given, as anticipated, or again, it may not. For the protention is an empty intention which is only 'fulfilled' in the course of the duration. So, whereas there is a continual diminishment of the intensity of the retained tone, there is no equivalent increase in the intensity of the protended tone. Until the tone sounds, it remains an empty intention void of real (reel) content. When it sounds, the empty intention is immediately filled. But as soon as it has sounded, the tone starts to lose its intensity, fades back into the ever increasing distance of the retained past.

Despite this lack of symmetry as between retentional and protentional moments, the relation between them, and the relation of both sets of modifications to the originary source of primal intentions, can be usefully represented in a diagram. The following diagram will help to bring out the relation of retentions to protentions in the ongoing process of the experience of a sequence of sounds which goes to make up the unity of a familiar melody.

t+2 E

The horizontal line A - E represents the continuous sequence of primal impressions received in the course of the playing of the melody which itself endures, with varying degrees of completion, throughout the entire time interval (t - 3) - (t + 2). The points B, C, 0, D, E represent different


primal impressions which have been or will be received at time t - 3, t - 2, t - 1, t 0, t + 1, t + 2. 0 therefore represents the particular point in the sequence reached at the instant of original dator giving intuition. All instants prior to 0 are therefore instants whose earlier contents are still retained while instants subsequent to 0 are instants whose later contents are protentionally anticipated. The diagonally descending lines A - R, B - Q, C - P, represent three continuous sequences of retentions, each of which descends from its source point and reaches into the present. The magnitude of pastness which any given retentional modification attributes to its primal source is therefore represented by the vertical distance down 0 - R which is marked off by the present reception of the retentional modification. Thus P, which is the reception of the retentional modification of C, originally given at t - 1, measures out a smaller distance down 0 - R than Q, which is the reception of the retentional modification of B, originally given in t - 2. Just as the line 0 - R gives the retentional ordering in the present (t 0) of C, B, and A, so the line C - G gives the retentional ordering which was present at t - 1. Moreover, at time t - 1, the content 0, still to be given, could already have been anticipated. From the standpoint of the present however, the protentional sequence is marked by the line 0 - E. But just as 0 - R measures the retentional depth of past contents, so the line 0 - M measures the protentional height of future contents. Thus M is a protentional anticipation of E, which will be given at time t + 2, whereas N is a protentional anticipation of D, which will be given at time t + 1.

From the standpoint of the line A - E, the manifold of retentions and protentions received at time t 0 are retentions and protentions of past and future contents. But, from the standpoint of the line M - R, retentions are contents directed back toward past instants in the playing of the melody, while protentions are contents projected forward toward future instants in the playing of the melody. It is in the now (t 0) that retentionally modified contents are inherited from the past and in the now (t 0) that protentionally anticipated contents are projected into the future. Thus the line 0 - R preserves the same temporal ordering as the horizontal line 0 - A, while the line 0 - M projects the same temporal ordering as the extension of A - 0 through 0 - E. However, the symmetry implied by the contrast of depth and height tends to cover over some of the essential differences between the retentional and the protentional phases. Basically, I need a retentional sequence to remind me of the melody and so to enable me to project ahead tones which have not actually sounded. The more past tones that have sounded, the more determinate the melody becomes. But no matter how determinate it may have become, there is always the possibility that the sequence of sounds may not transpire as expected. D may sound and be


followed by silence. Or E may possess a content other than the tone anticipated and so give the lie to the claim that a given melody is being played.

The temporal thickness of intentional acts of apprehension is made up of retentions and protentions both of which are built into the temporal extension of the intention and in such a way as to yield a structure of unity in diversity. According to Husserl, retentions and protentions are not themselves intentional acts but simply dependent features of such acts. However, this does not mean that the temporal awareness to which they contribute is not itself based upon intentional acts. On the contrary, retentional and protentional phases constitute so many partial phases which go to make up the unity of the whole intentional act of apprehension directed toward a given succession of tones. Just as the intentional horizon of the spatial object is made up of those adumbrations which would be implied were I to walk around the object and view it from different points of view, so the intentional horizon of the temporal object is made up of retentions and protentions. Moreover, that synthesis of adumbrations through which the spatial object is itself constituted would not be possible were it not for the temporal synthesis which accounts for the holding on of consciousness to past adumbrations in the very course of the process whereby future adumbrations are successively unfolded. At any given instant, the present manifests itself as a synthesis of retentions and protentions. Nor is the synthetic character of a temporal object suspended with the lapse of the present instant into a retentional modification of itself. Certainly, the arrival of a 'new now' means that the 'old now' can no longer be apprehended in the present of immediate self-givenness. But, as retentionally modified, it still retains its retentional and protentional links with what preceded and with what succeeds and so remains absolutely the same temporal point in a given temporal succession despite the fact that it is now only in the present, as retained.

Retention and protention are acts operative in the present (more correctly, acts contributing to the whole operation taking place in the present), acts which, so to speak, extend the scope of the present to cover the immediate past and the immediate future, the 'just having been' and the 'about to be.' These acts now have to be contrasted with acts which take us explicitly back to the past or on into the future. Husserl himself tends to accord far less consideration to acts oriented toward the future and indeed has no specific name for the compliment of memory. However, in the interests of maintaining the balance between the two sets of acts, the term 'prediction' will be coined to cover the opposite of memorial reproduction. Whereas 'retention' and 'protention' are acts of presentation, 're-produc-


tion' and 'pre-diction' may be called acts of representation. In the present, the past is re-produced in memory or pre-viewed in prediction. Whereas presentation operates on the basis of actual impressions, representation operates on the basis of what Husserl calls 'phantasy', that is, the ability of consciousness to presentify an object or an event, in image, and so in its actual absence. However, it is important to note that there is an actuality of representation in phantasy just as there is an actuality of present experience. For it is in the actual present of representative phantasy that I re-present a past or a future present.

With this proviso, let us now turn our attention to the act upon which Husserl concentrates his attention, the act of re-production. Instead of living along the succession of tones constitutive of the melody I can, after the melody has been played, or even while it is still playing, return in memory to the first tone and then reproduce the whole sequence again 'in my mind'. Husserl sometimes calls this 'secondary remembrance', in contrast to 'primary remembrance', which is retention. The first tone is no longer given in actuality but it is reproduced in phantasy. Further, with the passage to the second tone, and ever thereafter, the same structure of retention and protention which pertains to the original lived experience now also pertains to the representation. With the representation of the second tone, there is a retention of the first and a protention of the third and so on. However, whereas originally, consciousness is subjected to the actual course of the primal impressions, here consciousness is 'free' to run the melody through as fast or as slowly as it pleases, to stop at any point, return to the beginning again, execute variations and so on. Nevertheless, just as in the case of an original presentation, the unity of the melody, as represented, is attributed to the structures of retention and protention (appropriately modified to accommodate the different demands of representation).

Despite the fact that acts of reproduction may have the same contents as former acts of retention, the modification by means of which an original 'now' is changed into one that is past is absolutely different from the modification by means of which an original 'now' is reproduced. For the former takes place, as it were, 'of its own accord', whereas the latter modification is one which consciousness effects 'of itself'. Within the sphere of reproduction in general, it is also important to distinguish between phantasy and recollection. I can imaginatively represent a remembered melody, that is, simply make it present to me now in image, or I can represent it in such a way that a reference to the past is implied. In what does the difference consist? Obviously, I can not go back to the past to check on the actual occurrence of what I remember, so the difference must lie in the way in which the melody is represented. The act of consciousness


by which an image is represented as having been or as having taken place is something different from the act by means of which it is 'neutrally' posited. Recollection not only posits what is reproduced but in so doing gives it a position in time (more or less explicitly) with regard to the present. Phantasy, on the other hand, only remembers as a current performance which brings with it no explicit relation to the past. Thus, in running through a remembered melody, I do not need to recall the occasions on which it was heard in the past and may indeed have entirely forgotten the past contexts which made the current performance possible.

But is there any genuinely original experience in which the reality of the past can be affirmed as presently given to consciousness, in which, in other words, it is possible to have 'insight' into the past? Husser! not only thinks that there is, but draws the further conclusion that this experience furnishes the only adequate evidence for our belief in the existence of a past in which events actually took place in a manner corresponding to that in which they are remembered to have taken place. In the actual present in which certain past contents are still retained and so are, in this sense, still actually perceived, I can reproduce these same contents in such a way that there results a certain coincidence of retained and reproduced contents. The reproduced contents, as empty intentional representations, fmd their evidential fulfilment in the retained contents.

Moreover, something similar may be assumed to take place in the case of protentions. Husser! tells us that a prophetic consciousness is conceivable, one in which each character of the expectation, of the coming into being stands before our eyes. Thus the indeterminateness of pre-vision should not be taken as the a priori mark of distinction, especially since a memory may be very vague. This symmetry as between reproduction and prediction means that a prophetic representation could also be made to coincide with its protentional anticipation in a manner analogous to that which takes place in the past. And yet the analogy is by no means exact. For protention does not see into the future as retention sees into the past. The note anticipated may not materialize, or may be replaced by another note. For this reason, Husser! places the main emphasis upon the modes of fulfilment. Because the actual realization of the tone succeeds the expectation rather than preceding it, the actual sounding of the tone is always a fulfilment or confirmation of the empty intention, which it can not be in the case of memory, whether of the primary or of the secondary kind.

Up to now we have been solely concerned with the identification and description of those acts of consciousness which are relevant to the analysis of inner time. We now have to turn our attention to the constitution of immanent temporal objects themselves. These immanent temporal objects


will take the fonn of points in time, or what might be called temporal objectives, temporal periods or durations, and temporal sequences or successions. In every instance, the same constitutional procedure will apply. We have to be able to bring to light a noetic diversity and a noematic unity and show how this unity is built up through the correlated diversity of phases.

But flrst we have to distinguish between the two components of any act directed toward an immanent object, the component which pertains to its qualitative character and the component which pertains to its temporal character. A sound sounds in the now. The sound can only become the object of an intentional act on account of its qualitative character. But with the retentional modiflcation of the sound, not to mention the possibility of reproducing the sound, another aspect comes into view, the temporal character. That the temporal character can be distinguished from the qualitative character of the immanent temporal object becomes even clearer if we take the phenomenon of two sounds, A and B, following one upon the other, and focus on the order of succession. For in the relation A-B, what is of signiflcance is neither A nor B by itself but precisely the relation '-'. Not only is the consciousness of succession an originary dator consciousness, it is one the abstraction of which becomes even more evident if we reproduce the succession (A-B) - (A-B)' and then perhaps take note of this reproduction as succeeding the initial reproduction (A-B) - (A-B)' - (A-B)".

A sound S sounds in the actuality of the now and is followed by other sounds. In consequence, the sound S is pushed back into the past, where it is retained as having sounded. With each new moment of the actual present, S undergoes a temporal modiflcation. And yet it remains the same temporal object, with its fixed point in the temporal sequence. This is apparent from the fact that the sound in the next temporal moment has one less retentional modiflcation than A, the one after that, one less again and so on right up to the actual present in which all retentional modiflcations take their start. We have a diversity, the successive retentional modiflcations to which S has been subjected. And we have a unity, S, as the same temporal point persisting throughout these modiflcations. Indeed, the identity of S can be made the explicit object of an intentional act if we reproduce S as it was, that is, lift it out of its original retentional phases and so initiate a new series of retentional phases pertaining this time to the reproduced sound.

The same analysis can be applied to a duration and to a succession. An organ note sounds for some length of time. Within the period of the sounding of the sound there are, doubtless, retentional modiflcations to be distinguished. But we can also take the sound as a whole temporal object which is pushed back, as a whole, into the past, constantly modifled while


still remaining the same through the modifications to which it is subjected. The case of a succession is slightly more complicated because the succession is not only successively modified, it is itself, as so modified, a succession, but one which can be retained as the unity of a succession nevertheless and indeed reproduced as such. With the reproduction of the succession however, a new intentionality comes to light. Two notes are played successively. The succession A-B is then retention ally modified. Each modification succeeds the original succession thus yielding: A - B - (A - B)' -(A - B)" - (A - B)'" and so on. Now the original succession is reproduced. But the reproduction of the succession is also an act of consciousness and, as such, one which is subject to constant modification. In other words, the act of reproduction which, so to speak, momentarily suspends the retentional modifications of the original succession, simply starts its own new series of modifications, a series which belongs as really to the flux of consciousness as did the original succession.

Hidden in the thicket of these analyses there lies a problem the solution to which will determine the entire character of the theory. The problem can be presented in terms of a question, the question namely: how does the phasing off of the successive moments of the flux actually come about? To put the matter another way: Does the flux of consciousness flow off by itself or am I responsible for the flowing off of the flux? The flux is a flux of my consciousness. But does this flow go on 'in spite of me' or, so to speak, 'on account of me.' The pertinence of this question can be brought out by considering the kind of spatial analogy to which Hussed himself likes to make appeal. I am being driven down a highway in a car. The telephone poles flash by one after the other. Now a pole is ahead of me, now alongside of me, now behind me. The motion of the car shoves the poles back continually into the rear. For all that, they do not lose their objective spatial position. Despite the fact that they stand in ever differing relations to myself, their respective spatial relations with each other are preserved. Here, it seems, I do nothing, am responsible for nothing. The poles are shoved back by the movement of the car in which I am carried along. Now suppose the alternative case in which I am cycling down the road. The same kind of modification takes place, at a slower pace admittedly. But now it is I who am shoving the poles back into the rear through my own activity, I who am responsible for the modifications and who can therefore modify the rate at which the poles get shoved back, shove them back 'faster' or 'slower' at will. The flowing off of the poles no longer takes place 'in spite of me' but 'on account of me.' The difference is obvious. But how can this example of personal initiative be carried over to the case of a temporal flux?


Let us simplify matters by taking the case of an organ note which sounds exactly the same as regards its qualitative material over a given period of time. Previously, the constant modification of the 'now' into the 'no longer now' could be attributed to the advent of new, qualitatively distinct moments. But no such distinction is possible in this case. Does the flux still flow off, constantly modifying the now, and if so how does this flowing off of the flux actually manifest itself?

It is absolutely fundamental to Hussed's concept of the flux that 'even if every tone continues completely unaltered, in such a way that not the least alteration is visible to us - even if every new now therefore possesses exactly the same content of apprehension as regards moments of quality, intensity, and the like and carries exactly the same apprehension - nevertheless, a primordial difference still exists.'3 This primordial difference is then called a 'phenomenological difference which corresponds to the absolute temporal position.'4

Although this . notion of a primordial, phenomenological difference occurs before the third section devoted to the flux, it really belongs to the theory of the flux and so anticipates all the problems that will attach to the latter. First, the phenomenological difference is a difference which I make, not a difference which I receive. For, since there is nothing in the content I receive to make the difference, the difference, to the extent that it is recognized as such, must be introduced by me. Since it is the self which brings about these differences when no extra temporal differences are present, it follows, according to Husserl, that it must be the self which brings these differences about even when there are extra temporal differences.

Second, this difference is supposed to generate both the diversity and the unity required to enable me to constitute the temporal moment as a unity in diversity. By introducing ever new nows into a qualitatively indistinguishable continuum, the phenomenological difference makes it possible to talk of an ever increasing (phenomenological) distance between a given moment (retentionally modified in the present) and the present (in which it is retentionally modified). This moment can then be regarded as remaining the same through the phenomenologically generated modifications of itself, or so it would seem. In fact however, what we find here is not an identity that emerges through diversity but rather an identity that, insofar as it merges with the diversity of its temporal modifications, cannot be identified at all. Either the difference, as an absolute difference, i.e., one to which all temporal modifications can in the last analysis be reduced, transforms all temporal identity into the pure difference of an ever changing flux in which no distinguishable moments can be identified, or the difference, as a


phenomenological difference, i.e., one in which nothing appears as qualitatively different, transforms all diversity into the pure identity of the selfsame sounding sound. Worse still, insofar as the absolute, phenomenologically generated difference, reduces identity to pure diversity or, equivalently, diversity to pure identity, it makes it impossible to establish a difference between identity and diversity. The absolute difference destroys the difference between identity and diversity, the very difference upon which all phenomenological constitution depends.

The significance of this brief reference to the absolute, phenomenologically generated difference, can not be overestimated. Hitherto, the analysis of immanent temporal objects has proceeded in abstraction from a fundamental ambiguity pertaining to the question whether the analysis in question merely served to bring to light those transcendental structures which subtend the objective temporal order, or whether the disclosure of such a dimension of inner time consciousness can, in the end, be constitutive of the objective time order itself. On the one hand, we have a regressive type of analysis proceeding from what is actual, the structure of objective time, to the subjective conditions of its possibility, which conditions consequently remain parasitic upon the objective time order and the flux of experience which it is employed to articulate. On the other hand, we have an analysis of another kind altogether, one which reverses the order of dependence, making the objective time order dependent upon an absolutely constitutive flux of consciousness, situating the objective time order in this absolute flux through a procedure of objectification. Whereas, in the first line of analysis, we proceed from the objective to the subjective, here we proceed from the subjective to the objective, from a subjectivity which has now to be understood as an absolutely constitutive dimension of internal time, to the merely relative order of objective time.

The entire third section of Husserl's study is given over to this reversal. In the first part, the focus is on the flux itself, the disclosure of the flux and the constitution of the flux. Here constitution will come to mean something completely different from what it meant before. In relation to the immanental time analysis, constitution means the constitution of temporal objectivities in and through the ordered connection of acts of consciousness. In relation to the analysis of the flux however, an attempt will be made to constitute the sequence of acts themselves within the flux of consciousness. So, once again, self constitution will take the place of any constitution of objectivities other than the self. The second part of this third section is devoted to an investigation of that which the absolutely constitutive flux of consciousness is now supposed to be able to constitute, temporal objectivities themselves and the objective time order based upon them.


THE THEORY OF THE FLUX

The theory of the flux fonns the crux of this work devoted to a phenomenological constitution of inner time consciousness. So little has this been appreciated that, for the most part, this third section is either ignored or it is dismissed as an inessential appendage.5 It could even be argued that the flux has not received the attention due to it because, on the very face of it, the descriptions seem to fall into contradiction with themselves. But perhaps something can be made of these contradictions, if such they be. Rather than pointing to the inadequacy of the theory of the flux and therefore, by implication, to the inadequacy of the entire theory of inner time consciousness, these contradictions can perhaps be accommodated within the framework of what we have called an 'ontological transposition.' If the attempt at a transcendental constitution of internal time breaks down at the limit, then perhaps it is because this very same transcendental limit points the way to an alternative, ontological analysis of time, one which remains in a position to utilize the structures first brought to light in the course of the phenomenological analysis. But this suggestion can not be pursued until the theory of the flux has been more closely examined.

Hussed begins with a few preliminary descriptions which already foreshadow the difficulties which will be encountered later on. First of all, the initial inclination to call the absolutely constitutive flux of consciousness a 'succession' has to be restrained. The process by which absolute temporal differences are generated can not be called a succession because, in the flux, nothing endures so nothing is altered. Indeed, constant alteration is indistinguishable from constant duration, so that, amongst other things, it becomes impossible to say how fast the flux flows off, or to talk about a change in the rate of alteration. 'We find necessarily and essentially a flux of continuous alteration and this alteration has the absurd property that it flows exactly as it flows and can flow neither more swiftly nor more slowly. '6

But if the level of analysis reached with the theory of the flux is one at which the very difference between duration and alteration is suspended then, since everything is continually altered and so constantly endures as altered, it is not even possible to talk about the time of the final constitutive flux of consciousness. For all of this, Hussed warns us, names are lacking. However, Hussed still seems to think that the flux can be named on the analogy of that which is constituted by means of it, that is, with reference to metaphors which draw their significance from the analysis of immanent temporal objects. More, he holds that this metaphorical use of tenns furnishes a sufficient basis on which to attempt the impossible, namely, a


phenomenological constitution of the flux. In accordance with the general method of phenomeriological analysis, the

constitution of a given objectivity can only be accomplished to the extent that it is possible to identify a unity which unifies a correlated diversity. At first sight, it would seem that, as what is responsible for bringing ultimate temporal differences into being, the flux is itself a pure unadulterated diversity and that the problem therefore lies on the side of the attempt to disclose a unity. Three attempts are made to identify such a unity, each of which proves unsuccessful.

If a complete flux, that is, the flux of an enduring process, has expired, I can always look back on this flux in memory, at which point it forms a unity in memory. The question is, whether this unity suffices to constitute the unity of the flux. To be sure, in this flux the unity of the duration of the sound is constituted. And so it might look as though the unity of the flux, as the unity of the consciousness of the sound, is also itself constituted thereby. Unfortunately, this claim brings with it two equally unacceptable lines of analysis. If it is the unity of the duration which confers its unity upon the flux of consciousness in which the duration is constituted as a unity, then the unity of the flux is a mere reflection of the constituted unity, is dependent for its unity upon the latter and is, so to speak, constituted by it. The flux of consciousness thereby ceases to be an absolutely constitutive flux and becomes a constituted unity like any other, worse, a unity constituted by what it is itself supposed to have constituted!

But what if transcendental consciousness were to abstract itself from the flux in order to constitute a fluxional duration as a unity. Here, we might say, it is the transcendental ego which is responsible for unifying the fluxional moments constitutive of the duration. As such, it remains distinct from that which it unifies and only so is it able to effect the act of unification in question. But this solution raises as many problems as it resolves. For if the transcendental ego has to abstract itself from the flux in order to be able to constitute the flux then the flux in question can only be a flux of empirical consciousness, or, at the very best, of phenomenologically reduced consciousness. In either case it can only function as a constituted not as a constitutive flux. What then of the process whereby the transcendental ego is supposed to generate ever new moments of the now 'of its own accord '? But if a generative initiative is restored to the transcendental ego, another higher order transcendental consciousness will have to be presupposed to constitute this constitutive flux, and so on ad infinitum. Either the unity of the flux is a constituted unity, a unity constituted by what it supposedly constitutes, or else it calls for a higher order transcendental consciousness whose own fluxional unity can not be constituted without


presupposing a still higher consciousness, and so on ad infinitum. The method adopted to break out of this dilemma only serves to point up

the gravity of the problem. Effectively, Husserl has no other way out than to let his descriptions lapse into admitted contradiction. 'It is the one unique flux of consciousness in which the immanent temporal unity of the sound and also the unity of the flux of consciousness itself are constituted. As startling (if not at first sight even contradictory) as it may appear to assert that the flux of consciousness constitutes its own unity, it is still true nevertheless. '7 The flux is not a constituted unity but is itself constitutive of unity. At the same time we do not need a higher order flux to constitute the unity of the constitutive flux because the flux constitutes its own unity. No wonder Husserl speaks of a contradiction, even though he tries to pass it off as one which is only 'at first sight, contradictory.' But if constituting and constituted coincide then what has become of that difference which is essential to the very structure of intentionality? Later on we shall consider the sense in which this admittedly contradictory statement implies a replacement of the doctrine of presence by an alternative, and ontological, doctrine of coincidence. For the moment we shall simply follow another line of argument adopted by Husserl to resolve this seeming contradiction.

In section 38, our attention is directed to a form inherent in the very manner in which the flux flows off. Though the analysis has hitherto proceeded with reference to a single stream of primal impressions, in actual fact, consciousness is at any given time affected by a plurality of such streams. The different senses introduce different streams of impressions, and one sense can itself also furnish a plurality of streams. About such a plurality of streams we can now say two things; first, that at any given moment there is an 'all at once' of the several streams and second, that when the several streams are allowed to flow off there is a connecting form in the running off. Each and every one of the primal streams runs off in the same way, that is, as fast or as slowly as the others. If anyone stream passes away, all pass away in a completely similar way with similar gradations and at completely the same tempo.

To the 'all at once' of the several streams there therefore corresponds a 'before all at once' and an 'after all at once'. Here we do seem to have a basis for distinguishing a pole of unity from a pole of diversity. There are many streams (diversity) but they are all at once, in that they all run off in the same way (unity). Can we not constitute simultaneity and succession on this basis? To be sure, Husserl does warn us that 'simultaneity is never without temporal succession and temporal succession never without simultaneity' and that, in consequence, 'simultaneity and temporal succession must be correlatively and inseparably constituted.'8 But he fails to


point out the reason why this is so in the particular case under consideration. For the specification of the reason would bring out the inadequacy of this attempt at a constitution of the flux. Succession is never without simultaneity because the flux of each individual stream of primal impressions could not of itself yield unity save by way of a comparison with other streams which are 'all at once'. But the unity which results from the comparison is not the unity of a flux but the unity of the multiplicity of fluxes running off in parallel, and the same can be said of each and every one of the individual streams. By the same token, simultaneity is never without succession because the fluxional succession must, so to speak, be arrested in order to yield the 'all at once'. But the sense of unity which results therefrom is once again not the unity of a flux but the unity of several parallel fluxes simultaneously arrested. Once again, there is no unity of the flux and so no real succession which is always an alteration of what endures as the same through alteration. Hence, Hussed reaches the conclusion: 'terminologically we can distinguish between the fluxional before-allat-once and the impressional all-at-once of fluxions. But we can not refer to either the one or the other mode of being all-at-once as a mode of simultaneity. We can no longer speak of a time of the final constitutive consciousness.'9

In the next section Hussed makes a third and final attempt to articulate the structural components of a 'constitution of the flux of consciousness.' He distinguishes between that intentionality which goes through the flux (longitudinal intentionality) and by means of which the flux constitutes its own unity and another intentionality which is implied in the constitution of immanent temporal objects. lO The latter 'transversal intentionality' is nothing other than that intentionality which can hold on to any immanental temporal object and so constitute it as one and the same through all the (retentional) modifications to which it is subjected. Within the sphere of immanental analysis 'transversal intentionality' is not problematic. But it does indirectly presuppose longitudinal intentionality, inasmuch as the latter is required both to account for the generation of absolute temporal differences and to account for the unity of the flux which results.

That an alternative 'longitudinal intentionality' might be responsible for generating absolute temporal difference and so of generating the flux itself is not in itself incomprehensible. For Hussed could have sided with Bergson at this point. Longitudinal intentionality would therefore refer to that absolute activity of transcendental consciousness through which a running off of the flux comes about. Longitudinal intentionality would be held responsible for generating those primordial differences which, as phenomenological differences, are not differences with regard to content


but only differences with regard to the running off of contents i.e., absolute temporal differences. But then only two options would be feasible. EITHER transcendentally reduced consciousness could, by abstracting itself from the flux, fix the flow of experience in forms whose continuity would serve as the basis for an ascription of succession to enduring objects or processes; in which case the constitution of immanental time could proceed without further difficulty but only to the extent that consciousness had ceased to identify itself with the flux; OR transcendentally reduced consciousness could situate itself in the flux, flow with the flux, even generate the primordial differences constitutive of absolute temporal positions; in which case consciousness could be the flux, but only to the extent that it ceased to be capable of constituting the flux intentionally. But it is essential to Husserl's stand on this issue that the ultimately constitutive consciousness should not merely be the flux but that it should be capable of constituting the unity of that very flux which it is. And how? By coinciding with that which it constitutes as a longitudinal intentionality. There can be no doubt about the pivotal role of this new concept of coincidence which has been introduced at this very point to save appearances. 'Longitudinal intentionality ... is in continuous unity of coincidence with itself.' 11 'The flux is intentionally in coincidence with itself.'12 'The constituting and the constituted coincide.'13

Thus the use of the term longitudinal intentionality turns out to be nothing short of a contradiction. For intentionality presupposes a relation between consciousness and its object, which relation in turn presupposes a difference between the terms related. This difference need not be a real difference, but it must at least allow for the ideal difference of consciousness and that which it is conscious 'of'. Even in the case of the primordial phenomenological difference, where there is no difference in content, consciousness can still stand in relation to this unchanging content and so constantly inject into the continuum those absolute temporal differences for which it is itself responsible. And this it does by being the flux of consciousness, by coinciding with that longitudinal intentionality which generates the phases of the flux by virtue of its own ongoing activity.

But this transcendental concept of coincidence can not accommodate anything like a constitution of the flux. For an absolute constituting consciousness can be envisaged in two ways neither of which yields the requisite unity in diversity. It can be envisaged either as a unity of consciousness, in which case there is no diversity or as a flux, in which case there is no unity. The requisite unity in diversity can not be obtained by shifting back and forth from one to the other. For each includes what the other excludes and vice versa. The most that can be done is to affirm the coincidence of the two. But the difference implicit in this coincidence is not


a difference which pennits but precisely one which prohibits that intentional relation without which the procedure of intentional constitution would not be possible.

In order to bring out the seriousness of this dilemma, it is necessary to distinguish what might be called an immanental from the transcendental concept of coincidence. For although the tenn is used here in a completely novel way, it is not the first time that it has been employed. For instance, where Husser! talks of the reproduction of a retained duration, the content of the fonner act is said to coincide with that of the latter. However, not only is there a difference between the acts involved, the content, whether reproduced or retained, can be distinguished from the consciousness of it. Similarly, at any given point in the now, there is a coincidence of the primal impression with all those present retentional modifications which can be traced back to separate source points in the past. Not only that, the successive retentional modifications are in continuous coincidence with each other to the extent that they can each be traced back to the same primal source point and are therefore constitutive of that point as a temporal object. But in all these cases, the activity of consciousness, that activity namely which generates the modifications or which unifies them in one act, can be distinguished from its contents, whether those contents are present as given, as modified or as represented. And this is precisely what entitles us to call all these cases, cases of immanental coincidence.

In the case of that coincidence which is constitutive of the unity of the flux however, no such difference is apparent. No doubt it is for this reason that Husser! talks of the flux as self-constituting. It is no longer a matter of consciousness constituting the flux but of the flux constituting itself. But the flux can not constitute itself unless there is an appearance of the flux to itself. Husser! recognizes this difficulty and responds to it with another, purely verbal, solution. 'The flux of the immanent, temporally constitutive consciousness not only is, but is so remarkably and so intelligibly constituted, that a self-appearance of the flux necessarily subsists in it. '14

But how is this self-appearance of the flux to be understood? Since what appears is what consciousness is as the flux, the appearance of the flux to the self can not be the appearance to the self of anything other than the self. It must then be the appearance of the self to itself. But how can the self appear to itself? Two possibilities suggest themselves. First, the self might perfonn a reflective abstraction of itself from itself. But then the self so abstracted would no longer be one with the self which makes its appearance through just such an act of abstraction. The only other way for the self to appear to itself while still being the very same self appearing self is for the self to affect itself with that very activity by means of which it generates


absolute temporal differences. But then we need to know the nature of this self affecting activity, an activity which, moreover, is said to furnish the 'pre-phenomenal,' 'pre-temporal' conditions that first make possible the primordial differences of the flux.

A clue is furnished by a passage in which Husserl seems to be describing the process by which the structure of coincidence is transformed into that of presence. Not only is the 'presence' of phenomenality itself made possible by the absolute 'coincidence' of the unity of consciousness with itself, qua flux, this coincidence is subject to a sort of deterioration whereby it falls away from itself into the difference of presence. 'What is at first coincident and then nearly coincident becomes ever more widely separated, the old and the new no longer appear to be in essence completely the same but as ever different and strange, despite similarity as to kind.' 15 The foregoing passage, which pertains to continuous alteration, could just as well be applied to changeless duration, since the flux and the unity of consciousness, as the two ultimate sources of transcendental subjectivity, are in effect indistinguishable. More important, this passage marks the passage of coincidence to presence, of that ever increasing difference of the self from itself on the basis of which alone the presence of phenomenality can be rendered intelligible.

But now it is clear that we are moving in an ontological rather than a transcendental domain. Not merely have we presupposed a concept of 'coincidence' which is at odds with that of 'presence', the former is now seen to be the foundation of the latter. Only through a failure of the self to coincide with itself, fully and completely, does it then become possible for the self to appear to itself. In place of the structure of relation (as also that of correlation) we now find a structure of differentiation. It is no longer a matter of connecting already distinguishable items but rather of differentiating a unitary whole in such a way that just such distinguishable items should be capable of making their appearance. What is implied herein, though not yet explicitly thematized, is the idea of an original flux which is anything but the ultimately constitutive activity of a transcendental consciousness which has abstracted itself from itself and from the world, but is rather the flux of an original self so completely absorbed in the process of being itself that it has not yet arrived at anything like an appearance of itself to itself, let alone a self conception.

It is precisely this notion which Husserl seeks to thematize in later manuscripts devoted to the topic of what has since become known as the 'living present'. Characteristically enough, Husserl tries to envisage these new analyses as a sort of further extension of the scope of transcendental phenomenology. It is for this reason, as we have already seen in connection


with the attempt to constitute the Transcendental ego, that he introduces the idea of the 'living present' through that of a radicalized reduction. Just as worldly transcendence is relative to the ultimate transcendental ego and its constitutive processes so the life of the transcendental ego must now itself be regarded as relative to an ultimate, living present which thereby becomes the absolutely conclusive truth of the flux.

The living present is that dimension within which a self distancing occurs which unites the self with itself in the very process by which it separates itself from itself. In becoming other, the self becomes something other to itself. But this something other from which it separates itself is, in fact, nothing other than its self. The stream of consciousness could not be experienced as a stream unless both conditions were met, the self-unification as well as the self-separation. When all flows, all might just as well be at rest. In fact however, the perpetual stream (of consciousness) is nothing other than the streaming perpetuity of a consciousness which maintains itself in being (as the same) through this very same streaming differentiation of itself from itself.

In order to express this new possibility, a word is needed which will indicate the transformation which reflection undergoes when it gets itself involved in the generative flux of an original self-presentification. The use of the term 'reflexion' to replace reflection is one which is not only appropriate but is actually sanctioned by Husserl. Husserl even goes so far as to indicate that the original, reflexive process has to be distinguished from that by which it is brought to light through a reflection upon reflexion. ' ... The pole reflected in the reflexion is not the living (ultimately operative) pole ... the latter is however produced in the corresponding reflexion as anonymous and as operative.'16 What is brought to light through reflection upon reflexion is not the original, anonymously operative temporalization but an image of the former, an image derived by way of a procedure of strenuous abstraction which calls for nothing less than a reduction of the reduction. At the same time, this image engenders its own transcendental conception of the living present in which the original, anonymously operative living present is brought to light. In other words, what was earlier analyzed as the flux of consciousness turns out to be a reflected image of an original flux which possesses its own quite distinctive characteristics.

Nothing brings out more clearly the distinction between an ultimately conclusive and an absolutely original flux than the distinction Husserl draws between the activity of the former and the passivity of the latter. Husserl rejects the idea that the I creates its own temporal phases and instead treats this temporalization as the product of a passive synthesis. 'So passive means that here the stream occurs without the efficacy of the I, -


the stream does not arise out of an efficacy of the I, as though the I set out to realize it, as though the I realized itself out of such an efficacy.' 17 No longer are we talking about a phenomenological difference through which the I engenders the several moments of the flux of consciousness. Instead, the flux is now something that happens to the self.

Due to the passivity of the original temporal synthesis, the temporalizing self can not but be 'anonymous' and, as such, ignorant of itself as an I. Hence what Klaus Held, in his brilliantly insightful book on the living present, has called 'the riddle of the living present.' He presents this riddle in terms of a series of paradoxes. The self presentifies itself in the on-going flow and yet it can not objectify itself. The I is the never changing and yet it must also be the ever changing. The I temporalizes itself in a pre-temporal self-presentification which takes place, nevertheless, in the living present of ongoing experience. Actually, these seeming paradoxes only appear such just as long as we insist on regarding the self as something like an I, an I which is not yet aware of itself as such perhaps, but an I nevertheless. To be sure, for a philosophy which aims to found the ultimate structure of time in the subjectivity of a transcendentally reduced consciousness, the supposition of something like an I is essential. But as soon as the original'!' is envisaged as an embodied self which, as such, does not yet know what it is to be a subject, these difficulties disappear. The living present can now be that pre-reflective, pre-temporal synthesis which is responsible for the original temporalization of the self. This means that the self does not so much temporalize itself as it is temporalized by its own on-going activity in the world. This activity is that of an anonymous agent which is quite unaware of itself and whose constitutive self-relation therefore deserves to be called 'reflexive' rather than 'reflective'. However, it still remains the case that the reflexivity of an original temporalization of the self can only be brought to light through reflection, indeed, through a quite unique reflection upon reflexion.

We have here all the ingredients for an ontological transposition of the specific thematic of time. Reflection upon the ultimately constitutive flux of transcendental consciousness leads to the conclusion that there must be just such a flux originally. This flux is not so much a flux of consciousness as rather a flux of the ongoing activity of human being itself. As such, it is the flux of an agent which does not know itself as such and is, in consequence, anonymous. The original, anonymously operative self does not so much activate the flux as passively submit to a flux which takes place in it as a result of its own on-going activity. This on-going activity occurs in the living present. The living present has nothing to do with the now point of a temporal succession since it constitutes the pre-temporal source of all


temporalization. Temporalization takes place insofar as that self which coincides with itself originally nevertheless does not coincide with itself in a relation of absolute self-identity. On the contrary, in the course of action, the self differentiates itself from itself and so opens up within itself that reflexive difference which functions as the source of the procedure of temporalization. And already, with this notion of an original, unreflected temporalization of the self, we find ourselves on the terrain which Heidegger made his own.

As is well known, in Being and Time, Heidegger sought to develop an existential concept of time. This means that time can never be comprehended independently of those structures of existence in which it is rooted. Hence Being and Time is obliged to take up the question of Dasein's analysis twice over, once from the standpoint of being and then again from the standpoint of time. Indeed, the difficulty of addressing the nature of Heidegger's ontological theory of time lies in the fact that he never does, nor can he ever, make time a specific theme for phenomenological investigation. As the temporalization of the fundamental structures of existence, time can not be comprehended independently of these same structures.

The influence of Husserl is all pervasive even though, on the surface, Heidegger's contribution bears little resemblance to that of his master. There is, first of all, the same suspension of objective time. The theme of 'making present' plays a particularly important part here. For, according to Heidegger, the primacy of the present lies at the root of any representative theory of time. In this respect Heidegger finds Husserl's theory of inner time consciousness as ontologically inadequate as the objective time which he (Husserl) seeks to constitute. Though he hardly ever confronts Husserl in person in Being and Time, an implicit critique of any transcendental theory of time can be read into his refutation of the Kantian philosophy.

Curiously enough, his refutation of transcendental philosophy, as just another form of the philosophy of presence, occurs in a more explicit way in Being and Time than it does in his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. For, in the latter text, Heidegger tends to offer an interpretation of the Critical philosophy which simply takes it in the requisite, ontological direction. And so he seeks out structures which lend themselves to an ontological interpretation of time, in particular the conception of time as self-affection. At B67 -68 Kant writes. 'Since this form (Time) does not represent anything save in so far as something is posited in the mind, it can be nothing but the mode in which the mind is affected through its own activity (namely, through this positing of its representation), and so is affected by itself.' 18 It is the self affective character of time which Heidegger takes in an ontological direction and, in so doing, overlooks the specifi-


cally transcendental character of Kant's theory of time. In Being and Time, on the other hand, where Heidegger seeks to distance himself from transcendental philosophy, he sets his own theory up in explicit opposition to that of Kant or Husserl.

There is however one fundamental respect in which the ontological theory of time agrees with the transcendental and this is the connection of time with the self. Hussed establishes this connection most explicitly with his theory of the flux. And though Heidegger never explicitly makes uses of the concept of a flux, temporalization undoubtedly carries many of the connotations of a flux. In particular, temporalization means that time is selfgenerated, is generated by the self in the very course of existence.

At the end of § 65, the section in which temporality is first presented as the ontological meaning of care, Heidegger summarizes his theory with reference to four points. Primordial time is temporalization. Primordial time is ecstatical. Primordial time temporalizes itself primarily out of the future. Primordial time is finite. We shall take each of these in tum.

Primordial time is the temporalization of the fundamental structures of existence. This means that the existential theory of time can not be separated from the ontological philosophy of existence, that, in effect, the theory of time and the theory of existence belong together. Heidegger's analysis of the procedure of temporalization is done twice over, the first time with regard to three ontological structures which are brought together in the unity of the structure of care, the second time with regard to the three existential structures first encountered in the course of the analysis of beingin as such. In both cases the procedure is the same, to show the connection between a given structure and one of the thr~e dimensions of time. Thus, at the ontological level, existence is linked with the future, facticity with the past and situation with the present. At the existential level, on the other hand, understanding is linked with the future, state of mind with the past and falling with the present. There is a fourth existential structure, namely discourse. But discourse is simply the way in which the structural unity of understanding, state of mind and falling gets articulated.

In each case the order in which the three dimensions are taken up and connected is the same. We begin with the future, move back to the past and only arrive at the present insofar as we come back from the past toward the future from which the analysis took its start. Hence the force of Heidegger' s attack on the doctrine of presence. So far from it being the present which constitutes the privileged moment, the moment whose reiteration sets up the time series, the present is the least significant of the three dimensions of time. 'The character of "having been" arises from the future, and in such a way that the future which "has been" (or better, which "is in the process of


having been") releases from itself the Present.' 19

The primacy of the future is the key to the ek static character of time. The future is that dimension in which Dasein exists itself as ahead of itself toward its ownmost, distinctive potentiality for being. In being ahead of itself in this way Dasein actually comes towards itself insofar as it makes itself be those very possibilities which it has projected. Thus the future (Zukunft) is a coming (Kunft) 'in which Dasein, in its ownmost potentialityfor-being, comes towards itself. '20 In making itself be what it is not yet but has still to become Dasein is, as it were, outside of itself - outstanding. The being ahead of itself of futural anticipation brings with it a dislocation in the self, a potentiality for being more than, or other than, that which, at any given time, it is. Since time is originally ek static, the reduction of time to an endless succession of 'nows' can itself be presented as a leveling down, a leveling down of that 'standing out' which characterizes primordial time as ek static.

And because primordial time is the temporalization of the fundamental structures of existence, authentic time can not but be fmite. Infinite time is a time which can be represented in such a way that the frame of time is disconnected from the self and from the process whereby the self exists itself. As soon as the structure of time is brought back into relation with that of the self and with the process by which the self exists itself, time ceases to be infinite and becomes instead as finite as the self itself. I am not born at a given moment in existential time nor do I die at another, and later, moment. Rather, time is born with me when I begin to be and dies with me when I pass away.

NOTES

1. Husser!, Edmund, Zeitbewusstsein, hrsg., R. Boehm, Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1966, tr. by James Churchill as The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964, p. 22.

2. Husser!, Edmund, The Phenomenology of Inner Time Consciousness, op. cit., p. 28. 3. Husser!, Edmund, The Phenomenology of Inner Time Consciousness, op. cit., p. 89. 4. ibid., p. 90. 5. For example, in his study of Husser!'s time theory, Husserl, Perception and Temporal

Awareness, Izchak Miller concentrates almost entirely upon the immanental theory of time constitution. Moreover, by delaying his presentation of the reduction, he is able to make use of examples drawn from a physicalist theory of perception which would be at odds with the initial assumption of a phenomenologically reduced consciousness.

6. Husser!, Edmund, The Phenomenology of Inner Time Consciousness, op. cit., p. 99. 7. Husserl, Edmund, The Phenomenology of Inner Time Consciousness, op. cit., p. 106. 8. Husser!, Edmund, The Phenomenology of Inner Time Consciousness, op. cit., p. 104.


9. Hussed, Edmund, ibid., op. cit., p. 104. 10. Hussed, Edmund, The Phenomenology of Inner Time Consciousness, op. cit., p. 105. 11. Husserl, Edmund, The Phenomenology of Inner Time Consciousness., op. cit., p. 107. 12. Husserl, Edmund, ibid., p. 109 13. Husserl, Edmund, ibid., p. 110. 14. Husserl, Edmund, The Phenomenology of Inner Time Consciousness, op. cit., p. 109. 15. Husserl, Edmund, The Phenomenology of Inner Time Consciousness, op. cit., p. 113. 16. Husserl, Edmund, Ms. A V 5. S. 2. 17. Husserl, Edmund, Ms. C 17 IV, S. 1 ff. 18. Kant, Immanuel, op. cit., N.K.S. p. 87. 19. Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, op. cit., p. 374. [H. 326] 20. Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, op. cit., p. 373. [H. 325]

The Impossibility of a Phenomenological Constitution of the Own Body

We have already learnt that there can be no such thing as a phenomenological constitution of the transcendental ego. We have also seen that the ultimately constitutive flux of consciousness is also exempt from the possibility of a constitutional analysis. Furthermore, we have been able to identify the condition to which this impossibility can be attributed, namely, the condition of coincidence. The Transcendental ego is the self, the flux is the self - and it is for this very reason that there can be no constitution of the ego or of the flux by the self. More specifically, the (transcendental) ego is the self in its static abstraction from the basis of its being, whereas the (transcendental) flux is the self in its connection with the dynamic process whereby it alters and transforms itself.

We have also indicated that to just such a transcendental condition of coincidence (of consciousness with itself) there corresponds an original condition, grounded in the coincidence of consciousness and the body, a condition which makes possible the recognition of an original flux of embodied human being engaged in the life world.

Hence the significance of the project of a transcendental constitution of the own body. Perhaps we shall not merely find that a phenomenological constitution of the own body is an impossibility but that the very attempt to effect such a constitution of the body goes to ground on the very same structure of coincidence. If this should tum out to be the case then we shall be in possession of all the elements needed to develop an ontological theory both of the original and of the transcendental self. If the self had first to abstract from its being a body in order to place itself upon the plane of a transcendental consciousness then the suspension of this condition of abstraction might also be expected to yield an original coincidence of consciousness and the body which would furnish the ontological ground for the being of human being originally. Conversely, if the self coincides with



its body originally, then the disclosure of a transcendental dimension of the self may well be attributed to the abstraction of the self from this very condition of an original coincidence of its self with its body.

We have already had occasion to refer to a passage in his book on The Problem of the Ego in Husserl's Phenomenology in which Marbach has argued that Husserl' s concept of the pure I is infected with a fundamental ambiguity inasmuch as it oscillates between a conception of the ego as selfidentical pole or as unity of a stream of consciousness, a conception which is entirely in line with the disembodied character of reflective consciousness, and a conception of the ego as centre of orientation and the term of activity and affectivity, a conception which is modeled upon the embodied character of consciousness insofar as it is the consciousness of an embodied human being. 'In the one instance, it concerns the pure subjective unity of actual and presentifying acts as a characterization of the principle of the unity of consciousness which can not be fulfilled through the body, in the other instance, and as a characterization of the focal centre and centre of emanation of intentional life, it precisely concerns the bodily determined subject of the actual course of consciousness, the functioning body.'l

The same ambiguity is brought out even more dramatically by Fink in his well known article Edmund Husserl in der gegenwiirtigen Kritik, where he distinguishes the three levels of a transcendental and so act-intentional ego, a psychic and an original world constructing ego. This original, world constructing ego can only be the self in its immediate connection with the body, a self whose subjectivity can, in the first instance, only be referred to with regard to the ownness of the body. In the context of the level theory of constitution, developed by Husserl in Ideas II, a basis for comparison immediately springs to mind. Leib stands for the original concept of an embodied self, Seele stands for the derivative concept of a self which has distinguished itself from its body and so has developed, in itself, a certain qualified internality, while Geist stands for the conclusive concept of a self which has abstracted itself altogether from its bodily being in order to bring itself into being as a Transcendental ego. But before we jump to this conclusion, we shall first need to make a careful examination of Husserl' s attempt to undertake something in the order of a constitution of the body. For it is in Ideas II that Husserl makes his most concerted attempt at a constitution of the own body.

In Ideas II, as has already been indicated, Husserl employs a method which he called a level (Schicht) theory of meaning. No longer content to undertake a constitution of distinct regions of being, separately and individually, he now brings four such regions together in the unity of a foundational theory of constitution. The four regions in question are Matter

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(Materie), Body (Leib), Mind (See/e) and Spirit (Geist). It is absolutely critical to his purpose that these four regions should all of them be implied in the very being of human being itself, admittedly at different levels of the self. To be sure, by matter he means matter in general, the topic of the material sciences. But the human body is also composed of just such materials and, as such, figures at the lowest level of the level theory though only, of course, as physical body. In the absence of a physical body, there could be no such thing as a lived body. But the constitution of the lived body requires that supplementary predicates be attributed to those physical bodies which can also lay claim to being own bodies. Further, this ownness characteristic can not simply be viewed from the outside, as it were. Rather, in order to know what it is for a body to be an own body, and in order therefore to be in a position to constitute the own body, I have to refer myself to the way in which I live and move in my own body, that very body which, for me, is the only own body.

Again, in virtue of my possession of an own body, I am capable of developing certain psychological characteristics, characteristics which attest to the existence of something in me which might be entitled mind, or better, psyche. But this concept of the psyche (See/e) is a strangely hybrid notion. For, on the one hand, psyche arises as the end point of a process of subjectification, the subjectification of the own body. On the other hand however, it arises as the end point of the opposite process of objectification, the objectification of the transcendental ego. This is why the section devoted to psychic reality is prefaced by a section on the pure 1. In one sense, the psyche can be regarded as a region of being like any other and, as such, wholly distinct from the pure 1. But, in another, it is the very same ego which makes itself into a psychic reality through its own self objectification.

Finally, from mind, understood in a sheerly naturalistic sense, I can proceed to spirit (Geist), inasmuch as the reduction effects a suspension of the natural attitude and brings to light a whole new realm of transcendentally reduced consciousness. But, it will be objected, this conclusive sphere of transcendentally reduced consciousness had already to be presupposed in order that a constitution of the lower levels in the hierarchy should have been possible in the first place. To this HusserI might have replied that the concept of 'Geist' which interests him is by no means identical with that of transcendental consciousness itself. Rather, it is the concept relevant to what in German is known as the Geisteswissenschaften, the sciences of the spirit or the humanities. But this difficulty is by no means so easily overcome. Indeed, it can be expressed in terms of at least three antinomies which are never resolved in the context of Ideas II.


First, Spirit is set up as a region of being to be constituted like any other, and so only exists relative to the constituting Ego. But it is also the region of absolute consciousness and, as such, is capable of surviving the annihilation of the natural world. Second, Spirit is absolutely self-related and, as such, solipsistic. But it is also other-related and, as such, is integrated within a human community. Third, Spirit is the abstract result of a reduction of the natural, including thereunder not only the material world and the body but also the psyche. But it is also the concrete realization of the pure Ego in the form of the person. Finally, in the methodological order of foundational dependence, the natural world has priority over the spiritual. But, in the ontological order, the spiritual world has priority over the natural (Der ontologische Vorrang der geistigen Welt gegeniiber der Naturalistischen).

In the context of Ideas II these antinomies are not resolved because they can not be resolved. In my doctoral dissertation, I took note of these difficulties and sought a resolution along completely different lines, by according to the own body the status of the ontologically prior. The ontological priority of the own body would then be the basis not only for a disclosure of the natural, as surrounding, world (Umwelt) , (a disclosure which is reserved for the realm of the spiritual world in Ideas II); just as importantly, the immediacy of the connection of consciousness and the body would furnish the basis for that theory of empathic insight into the being of the other which, again, Husserl reserves for the exposition of the spiritual world. This original, unitary connection of an embodied consciousness with the world would then be succeeded by the duality of body and soul (Materie and Seele). By effecting such an interpretative transformation of Husserl's Ideas II, I was able to prepare the way for the genetic ontology which has been adopted as the interpretative framework for this examination of Husserl' s theory of constitution.

For the time being however, we shall adopt a different, and more negative, route. By examining Husserl's attempt at a constitution of the own body, as Husserl presents it himself in Ideas II, we shall fmd ourselves, once again, confronted with a break-down in the constitutional procedure, a break-down from which we shall then be in a position to draw the appropriate conclusions.

It is noteworthy that the material on the own body is not concentrated in one part, as is that of material nature, soul or spirit, but is distributed about at least two. In the context of the constitution of material nature, Husserl engages in a discussion of the aesthetic or sensational level of the body [Part 1, Chapter 3]. In the next part, he considers the constitution of psychic reality through the own body [Part 2, Chapter 3]. In the fourth chapter the

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body is also implied in an examination of the structure of empathy, a structure which prepares the way for the analysis of the personalistic attitude and the constitution of a spiritual world. From the foregoing, it is immediately apparent that the body figures as a transitional entity bridging the gap between matter and soul and, moreover, helping to account for that characteristic of intersubjectivity without which the personal attitude would not be possible.

The first reference to the own body arises in the context of an attempt to distinguish material from animal nature. Animal natures are animated bodies (beseelte Leiber). But Husserl never deviates from the thesis of the primacy of the material over animate nature. Human beings are material bodies, first and foremost, and only in virtue of their havingmaterial bodies can they be animated bodies. However, as animate, they are nevertheless non-material. 'Humans and animals have material bodies and, to this extent, they are both spatial and material. In accordance with what is specific to humans and animals, that is, in accordance with psychic properties, they are however not material, and therefore, as concrete wholes in the genuine sense, they are also not material realities. '2

However, it is in the third chapter of the first part that Husserl conducts his first extensive analyses of the own body. He introduces his analysis with a reference to the self-forgetfulness characteristic of the previous analyses of material nature. The investigation of a material nature given in and through sense experience has overlooked the subject through whose experience the natural world is given. More, this sensible experience presupposes a subject who possesses a body, or, at least, sense organs. So first, the body makes its appearance as the organ of perception. However, sensing is nothing like a passive reception of data. Rather, the body actively engages in the process of perception, for example, by opening or closing the organs of sense or by merely orienting itself vis-a-vis the object of perception, or even by approaching or retreating. Thus the body emerges, secondarily, as a centre of orientation. But third, even with regard to external perception, a distinction has to be drawn between that class of perceptions through which the object is presented and a quite different class of perceptions through which the body presents itself as engaged in the act of perception. When I tum my head to see, in addition to new visual data I also receive sensations relative to the movement of my head. I do not just move my body, I feel myself moving my body or feel my body moving. This second class of sensation Husserl calls 'kinaesthetic', to distinguish it from the strictly aesthetic sensations of the former kind.

From here Husserl proceeds to an examination of 'normal' perception and therefore to a constitution of material nature on the basis of normal


perception, though admittedly still from a purely solipsistic standpoint. To be sure, at this stage, solipsism can only mean the existence of the world for me, qua own body. For as yet we know nothing of psychic reality, still less of anything like a spiritual reality. However, Husserl thinks that even on this limited basis I can construct an objective material nature in a sense which reaches beyond what simply presents itself. I notice that what I perceive depends on the condition of my sense organs. I am therefore able to correct anomalies with reference to the state of my body. Things that appear one way, at one time, may appear differently, at another. And I am able to make the necessary corrections with regard to normal conditions and normal circumstances of perception and so guard against hallucinations and distortions. For all that, the appearance of other humans in my field of perception does effect a critical transformation of the world as it exists for me.

In order to allow for the appearance of others solely and exclusively on the basis of their bodily appearance, a distinction has to be drawn within the field of the own body in general, a distinction between the own body, as it exists for me, and the own body, as it exists for others. Again, the existence of the own body for others means both the existence of my own body for others and the existence of the other's own body for me. Only so is it possible to effect the transition from the solipsistic frame of reference to that which relies upon intersubjective experience. Insofar as the others are now there for me as I am there for the others, an entirely new series of analyses of the material world now becomes possible, a series devoted to the constitution of intersubjective, as opposed to solipsistic, objectivity. The term 'normal' will now include a reference to what the others can agree upon, these others who are given to me through their bodies. More critically, the solipsistic subject will now have to recognize its place as a member in an intersubjectively constituted world. 'The solipsistic subject could certainly have an objective nature over against itself but it could not conceive of itself as an integral part of nature, could not apperceive itself as a psycho-physical subject, as an animal, as indeed it does on the plane of intersubjective experience. 3

The second part, devoted to the constitution of animal nature, begins with a recognition of the region of soul or psyche (Seele) as intimately bound up with that of the own body. 'Let us turn to an examination of the essence of the psyche (in humans or animals) as an object of scientific research in its connection with the material body.'4 At the beginning of the next chapter however, Husserl asks us to perform an abstraction with regard to the body in order to allow the pure I to manifest itself as such. 'Let us suppose that we have carried through a self-perception, but a self-percep-

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tion of such a kind that we now abstract from the body. We then find ourselves as a spiritual I (geistige Ich) related to the stream of lived experience.'5 Not until the third chapter of this second part does Husserl bring the body back into connection with the soul. But the reappearance of the body takes place in a completely different context from that in which it originally made its appearance. Before, it was a matter of tracing the constitution of material nature back to a condition without which it would not have been possible. All experiencing presupposes sense organs which themselves are to be located in a body. Now, it is a matter of trying to constitute the own body as such. The preceding reference to a pure I was necessary in order to spell out the condition of the possibility of this constitutional possibility. Just as the body was the condition of the possibility of experiencing nature, so the pure I is the condition of the possibility of constituting the own body and moreover the soul itself as an object of perception (i.e., introspection).

The same characteristics as those mentioned before are taken up again, but in a new way. The naiVete of the earlier analyses has been overcome and we are now embarked upon a constitution of the own body, as also of the soul, insofar as the latter manifests itself through the body. In tum, the latter will furnish the gateway to the spiritual world, insofar as it allows for the introduction of a concept of empathy. As an own body, standing in relation to other own bodies of a kind similar to my own, I read a psychic reality into the activity of that other own body. 'With regard to what is required by the experience of others, every human being, on account of its body, is situated in a spatial configuration, amongst things, and to each body there belongs a complete and empathic ally determined psychic life of such a kind that when the body moves and goes over to ever new places the psyche (Seele) moves along with it: the latter is indeed continually at one with the body. '6

From the above, the critical importance of the own body in the programme outlined in Ideas II is manifestly evident. The question is, whether there can be any such thing as a phenomenological constitution of the body and, if not, whether the body can actually play the role reserved for it by Hussed in his level theory of constitution.

The project of a phenomenological constitution of a given region of being requires that it should be possible to identify a noetic and a noematic component relevant to the experience of the objectivity in question and, moreover, that it should be possible to establish a correlation between these two components. Can the ownness of the body be constituted on the basis of just such a system of correlations?


There are two features of the own body which might seem to lay claim to noematic status. The body is the organ of my will, that by means of which my volitional intentions realize themselves in the world. The body is also a centre of orientation for external perception. Both as a centre of action and as central in experience the body seems to remain one and the same through the flux of experience. Whenever I act, it is always the same body that is moved. Whenever I perceive, the field of perception arranges itself around my body with my body as the null point of perception. But if the activity and the centrality of my body are to furnish the basis of a noematic identity, it must at least be possible to point to a noetic diversity which stands in the requisite relation with the former component of identity.

Certainly, the centrality of my body, both in action and experience, means that a multiplicity of worldly phenomena do get ordered around my body. A thing is to the right or to the left. By activating my body I can bring myself closer to it or remove myself from it again. But so far from it being the case that the noetic diversity appears on the side of the subject while the noematic identity takes up the object pole, this relation has been reversed. My body is at the centre and ceases to be so as soon as I try to objectify this centrality. On the other hand, those phenomena whose arrangement around my body point back to my body as the centre are precisely external to my body. With a view to rectifying this disparity I might shift the focus of attention from my body to the other own body and posit that body as a centre for its action and experience. Certainly, the other body may be given as a noematic unity, only this time I lack the requisite noetic diversity. The other body is not central but peripheral in my experience. It is only by a sort of analogy from my own case that I transfer over to the other the feature of being at the centre. But I never actually experience the centrality of the other body.

A fresh start can be made by appealing to what has been called kinaesthetic sensations. Whenever I act, a series of sensations is supposed to be generated and in such a way that I could be informed about the objective reality of my action by attending to the subjective data furnished by these sensations. Here there would seem to be no difficulty in establishing a correlation as between the noematic identity of the action, on the one hand, and the noetic diversity provided by kinaesthetic sensations, on the other. In fact however, the action does not figure against the ground of kinaesthetic sensations but rather in the context of an environment in which something has to be done. The reality of my act is not first disclosed to me through kinaesthetic sensations and only then confirmed with reference to the objectives of action. Rather, I simply act 'in order to ... ' and am then only able to disengage a series of kinaesthetic sensations to the extent that I

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tum my attention back upon what goes on in me when I act. To be sure, I can always perform an abstract action by, for example, closing my eyes and then simply doing what would have to be done 'in order to ... ' But even then I know what I am doing not because I pay attention to a specific series of sensations but rather because I act and then attend to what goes on in me.

Utilizing material generated by Goldstein's experiments on patients suffering from motor disorders, Merleau-Ponty has shown conclusively that concrete actions performed in a determinate situation are more fundamental than abstract actions.7 Patients who were perfectly capable of performing a concrete action, for example, raising their arm to reach a book on a shelf, were incapable of performing the same act (raising their arm) when it was requested in the form of an abstract act. Rather than simply doing what they had shown themselves capable of doing before, they were obliged to go through an elaborate procedure designed first, to locate the limb in question, then to select, from a series of random movements, the movement required to effect the act, and so on. From this Merleau-Ponty concluded that action is primarily a way of being in the world, that the primary relation is a relation of the agent not to its own body but to something located in the surrounding world. An abstract act is not a primary capacity by means of which the secondary accomplishments of concrete action are made possible. Rather, it is the abstract act which remains as a residual accomplishment, one which can only be performed by those who are capable of doing what would have to be done 'in order to .. .' And so far from this 'doing what would have to be done in order to ... ' being a matter of attending to a sensational material and then inferring, on that basis, that the required act had indeed been executed, the kinaesthetic sensations in question (to the extent that there is any awareness of them at all) can only be disengaged, so to speak, by attending to the way it feels to perform the act in question.

The doubt cast upon the reality of abstract actions not only calls in question the legitimacy of the noetic diversity furnished by kinaesthetic sensations but also that of the corresponding noematic identity. If all doing is primarily a matter of relating oneself to something in the world, then not only does the structure of a concrete action leap over the SUbjective evidence, it even leaps over the objective reality of the act by going straight to its object. Not only is there little or no awareness of kinaesthetic sensations, there is little or no awareness of the body as the means by which a given act gets done, just as there is little or no awareness of the eyes as the means by which seeing gets done. The body is the null point upon which I can not take up a point of view. This means that whenever I do take up a point of view, either in acting or perceiving, I must first assume my bodily being as the basis, indeed the only possible basis, for just such an activity.


Against this position, it might be objected that phenomenological analysis precisely requires the kind of abstraction which has been denied in the case of abstract actions. The 'putting out of action', the 'not going along with' which follows from the reduction has its own special repercussions, it might be argued, in the field of action. Certainly, when I act, I may be unaware of the subjective sensations which accompany action. But this forgetfulness is simply typical of the self-forgetfulness of the natural attitude in general, a forgetfulness which it is the very task of phenomenological analysis to restore to full self-conscious remembrance.

However convincing the analogy might appear, it runs to ground on a simple evidence, the impossibility of objectifying my own body as that by means of which I enact myself by simply doing something. Physical objects, mental objects, even emotional states, all these can be objectified by a consciousness which has not only cut itself off from the external world but has also succeeded in cutting itself off from its own internal world. But the subjectivity of my body is not analogous to that of an internal object or event. I am effective as an agent only when I act; and when I act I coincide with my own body, become one with that very efficacy which is my action. In a while we shall consider the strategies by which phenomenological thought tries to circumvent this simple evidence. For the moment however, we shall go on to consider a further class of sensations, touch sensations.

In § 37 of Ideas 1/, Husserl tells us that the body (Leib) can only be constituted originally in tactuality. And certainly, as a mode of sensing, touch is quite unique. For the sense of touch is not localized in any specific organ but pervades the body as a whole (the whole· body is the organ of tactuality). Not only that, touching is only possible insofar as one feels oneself touching which, in turn, means that in order to touch one must, in another sense, be touched. The absolute proximity of the touch object is not therefore an accidental determination but belongs to the specific constitution of tactuality.

If I touch my left hand with my right, I receive touch sensations which are localized in my left hand. Here we seem to have a noetic diversity which could perhaps be correlated with a noematic identity. But with what can such sensations be correlated? Certainly not with my body as a whole but perhaps with that part which is touched. But how am I to identify the part in question? For the sensation is not, as it were, that by which something else is revealed, or that through which something else is intended. Rather, it is self-revealing in the double sense of drawing attention to itself, qua sensation, and drawing attention to the self, qua sensing. The same sensation can not be felt in a variety of different ways as an object seen can be viewed in a variety of different ways. At best, a sensation can undergo

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modifications over time. But even here, the possibility of attributing a unity to the series of sensations depends upon the localization of the sensations in a given part of the body. If, on the other hand, I fall back upon visual perception to localize the part in question, I find myself looking at a hand which is no longer seen as my own but has already become a physical object. To be sure, I learn to recognize my own body by looking at it, for example, in a mirror. But the sense of its being own does not belong to the seeing but is carried over from action and affection. It is for this reason that Husserl says that an exclusively visual subject could not have an appearing body (Leib). 8

To make things worse, when I look at a part of my body, such as my hand, the noematic identity of the perceived part is correlated not with any touch sensations but with the visual sensations through which the hand is posited as perceived. And if I seek to establish a correlation between the touch sensations and the visual series (by, for example, noticing how the touch sensations vary as my right hand is observed to vary its grip upon the left) what I am left with is not a noetico-noematic correlation but two series of sensations running in parallel. The same follows if I try to correlate the series of touch sensations, in the touched hand, with another series of touch sensations, in the touching hand. The fact that we are now dealing with two series of the same kind (i.e., two series of touch sensations) changes nothing. Once again we are faced with two parallel series and not a noematic identity correlated with a noetic diversity.

What if we shift the focus of attention to bodily sensations which are more readily susceptible to localization? A pain, for example, may be said to be localized in some one specific part of the body. At the same time, the pain endures with its characteristic fluctuations of intensity. Surely here we have a basis for talking about an identity which is given through a correlated diversity of sensations? Certainly. Only, by making precisely this shift of attention, we have taken the sensation out of the plane of the lived body and relocated it upon the plane of what we shall call the psychic body. In other words, the pain has become an internal object to be analyzed along the lines laid down for the phenomenological constitution of internal objects and, as such, the constitution of the pain no longer has any bearing upon the constitution of the lived body. Either I view the painful part from without by, for example, locating the source of the pain in a sore - in which case it exists for me as located in a physical body; or I feel myself into the pain - in which case my body exists for me as a psychic object. In both cases I have ceased to coincide with the sensational base upon which I hoped to erect my constitutional theory. And in ceasing to coincide with this sensational base, I lose the body as a lived reality, as the basis of my


being. No one has- understood more clearly than Ulrich Claesges the final

import of these difficulties. In his excellent study of Husserl's theory of spatial constitution he has this to say. 'Here it becomes clear that the problem of the constitution of space and, inextricably bound up with it, the problem of the constitution of the body, does not feature as a special problem within Husserl's phenomenology but that the very possibility, meaning and scope of phenomenology as transcendental philosophy is decided with reference to it. '9

But to seek to save appearances by arguing that, in the fmal analysis, the constitution of the lived body as the organ of perception consists in this, that every sensational system can be incorporated in the unity of a body consciousness whereby the correlates of these systems, for example, visual and tactile space, are traced back to their source in the unity of one identical space in which the body is always present to itself as res extensa, as Claesges does,1O is to overlook the fact that the lived body is never given originally as res extensa, that it no more occupies space than does the transcendental ego (whose own centrality is only the last derivative of that of the body) but is the point of origin of every actual activity, an activity which at the same time renders the self susceptible to affection on account of the fact that, originally, action and affection, constituting and constituted coincide. The double-sidedness of the body (as physical body and as sensational field), is not something that can be phenomenologically constituted. Rather, this two-sidedness attests to a fundamental coincidence which, precisely because it can not be phenomenologically constituted, can, and must be, ontologically affirmed.

We are now in a position to understand why the phenomenological project of a constitution of the lived body can not succeed. Neither the body, as it is enacted, nor the body, as it is objectified, is susceptible to constitution as an own body. In the first case, I coincide with my body, so much so that I can not establish with respect to it even that minimal intentional distance which would make a phenomenological analysis of the body possible. In the second case however, the body has lost its link with me. Not only has it ceased to be my body, it has ceased to be an own body and has become instead an object, an object which, as such, can only be subject to a psychological (from within) or a physiological (from without) investigation. In order therefore to conceive of the own body in a way which would render it susceptible to constitution, I have first to arrive at a conception which mediates between these two extremes, which externalizes the body as it exists for me and which internalizes the body as it exists in itself. Thus we arrive at two derivative and bastardized conceptions of the

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lived body, two conceptions which we shall call the psychic and the somatic body.

The psychic and the somatic body are both conceptions of the body by means of which phenomenology seeks to prepare the lived body for the project of a phenomenological constitution by thrusting apart the original lived coincidence of consciousness and the body in the two directions of an externalization and an internalization. However, both the initial starting point and the terminal point of these two hybrid notions differ along essential lines.

The initial starting point for the idea of a psychic body is that of the body as a whole, which is divisible into parts which stand in a functional relation to the whole. A pain or a sensation is localized in a given part of the body which is experienced as functionally related to the whole. Hence the notion of a psychic body adopts an essentially static standpoint vis-a-vis the body. On the other hand, the initial starting point for the idea of a somatic body is that of the body, as a whole, standing in relation to the world, as a whole, in a manner analogous to that in which a part of the body is functionally related to the whole. As Merleau-Ponty puts it in a characteristically graphic tum of expression: 'Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism.' 11 It is this sense of incorporation in the world which the somatic body tries to capture when it focuses on those structures of action by means of which the agent relates itself to objectives in its own surrounding world. Hence the notion of a somatic body adopts a dynamic standpoint towards the body.

As a result of this difference in the starting point, the analyses which take their stand in these two notions gravitate in different directions and toward different goals. That the primary assimilation of the psychic body is in the direction of the mind is shown by the fact that the noematic object of the psychic body figures as an internal object, the pain as such, identifiable and reidentifiable as one and the same, though only by me. On the other hand, the primary assimilation of the somatic body is in the direction of the world. To be sure, a somatic enquiry will seek to bring to light that subjective complex of kinaesthetic sensations which supposedly accompanies action. But the noematic object with which these sensations are supposedly correlated is the action as such, identifiable and reidentifiable as one and the same, and by others just as well as by myself. In the context of the theory of intersubjectivity, it will be necessary to consider the role which others play in the conception of the lived body. For the moment we shall confine our analyses within the limits of that abstraction from others which characterizes this preliminary exposition.

The psychic and the somatic body are two derivative notions which owe


whatever reality they may appear to possess to a special kind of reflection which might well be called 'objective reflection.' Starting with the lived pain I can, instead of screaming or leaping up and down, focus my attention upon it, and so localize it through 'objective reflection' as a pain in the stomach. This pain, as suffered in a particular part of the body, we shall call the 'dis-ease'. It is the experience on the basis of which the idea of a psychic body is constructed. But the degradation of the lived body can be taken one step further than that of the dis-ease. Just as the lived pain can be internalized in the direction of the dis-ease so it can also be externalized in the direction of the 'disease', that is, in the direction of a specific constitution of the physical body which accounts for the dis-ease. Though the characteristic symptoms of the disease are more readily accessible to others than to myself still, in principle, they can be made accessible to me on the same basis. Not only do I know that I possess a stomach, I can look at my stomach as an arrangement of organs which no longer stand in any privileged relation to myself. By the same token, a similar degradation can be noticed in connection with the somatic body. Instead of simply taking action, I can attend to the kinaesthetic sensations which may accompany my action and so open up the topic of the somatic body. And just as the lived pain can be both internalized and externalized so the lived action can not only be internalized but can also be seen as a body in motion. Again, by 'body in motion' is meant something which is more readily accessible to others than to myself, even though it is still in principle accessible to me and on the very same basis as that on which it is accessible to others.

From the above it is not only clear that the psychic and the somatic body lose the original meaning of the lived body but that, as this degraded form of the lived body, these two hybrid notions are constantly threatened by a lapse back into one or the other of the two autonomous forms, that of the lived body, on the one hand, and the objective body, on the other. So the very attempt to institute a phenomenological analysis of the lived body sets up a paradoxical tension which is only resolved either when the body is assimilated to one or other of the two poles defmitive of objective consciousness - the body as an external object or the experience of the body as an internal state - or when the body reverts back to its original form and so becomes once again a lived body which, as such, is resistant to phenomenological analysis, for the simple reason that I coincide with it and so can not establish an intentional relation towards it. But this only means that objective reflection is quite incapable of undertaking anything as 'original' as a specifically phenomenological constitution of the body.

The impossibility of a constitution of the own body is never more apparent than when, in a final despairing manoeuvre, Hussed talks of a

The Own Body 99

psycho-somatic unity [Part 3, Chapter 3, 63]. Here the confusions have been duplicated. It is not merely that, at best, this unity would only point back to a certain parallelism between the psychic and the somatic, a parallelism which, as we have already seen, does not suffice to establish the noematic identity of the lived body. More seriously, both the psychic body and the somatic body have been brought to light in such a way that they are each supposed to be constituted by noetic phases standing in relation to noematic unities. To try to make a noematic unity out of an amalgamation of two sets of data each of which attests to its own system of correlations is to carry the artifice to absurd lengths. But however incoherent this artifice may be as a piece of phenomenological reasoning, it does nevertheless point back to a fundamental truth which can only be captured within the alternative frame of reference of an ontological specification of the principles constitutive of the own body. Indeed, our principle of an original coincidence of consciousness and the body is nothing more than a primordial affirmation of that sense of ownness which Husserl tried to recover in the idea of a psycho-somatic unity. But in attempting to utilize the idea of a psycho-somatic unity for the purposes of a phenomenological constitution of the body, Husserl distorts the very insight which he has stumbled upon, failing to recognize that, as the condition both of existence and experience, this original coincidence can not itself be subject to a transcendental analysis.

We have already seen that there can be no such thing as a transcendental constitution of transcendental consciousness or the ultimately constitutive flux of consciousness. By the same token, there can be no such thing as a transcendental constitution of the body. It is for this reason that that self which seeks to concretize itself can only do so by becoming one with that very body which is its own.

We know that the last years of Husserl's life were devoted to an investigation of the conditions of the possibility of just such a concretization of transcendental consciousness. Unfortunately, Husserl sought to undertake such a concretization on the basis of transcendental consciousness - as though the transcendental subject could both be that very abstract being which it is and at the same time become something totally different, namely, a being at one with that body which is its own. Such a development need not be ruled out in principle, provided only that the transcendental subject which seeks to realize itself in this way recognizes the necessity of undertaking what will shortly be called an 'ontological transposition'. This means that the self must cease to think of itself in abstraction from the body and come to think of itself instead as one with that very body which is its own.


Thus by 'ontological transposition' we shall mean that transformation which takes place when the fundamental structures of the transcendental subject are carried over, or transposed, in such a way as to allow for a characterization of the ground structures of an original mode of being of human being. The basis of just such a transformation is to be sought in the intrinsic structure of the self, in that structure of coincidence which makes it be that the self which has brought itself into being as a transcendental subject by abstracting itself from its body can now realize itself by reidentifying itself with the body and so undertaking a movement of return to origins.

In a sense, Heidegger has already accomplished just such an ontological transposition with his own ontological phenomenology - but only in a quite restricted sense. It is noteworthy that, on the few occasions when he takes account of the own body in Being and Time, Heidegger does so with a view to a negative disclaimer. In distinguishing the analytic of Dasein from Anthropology, Psychology and Biology, Heidegger denies that Man's being can be computed by adding together those kinds of being which body, soul and spirit respectively possess.I2 The spatiality of human being can not be attributed to its being a body.I3 We can not think of being-in as 'the beingpresent-at-hand of some corporeal thing (such as a human body) 'in' an entity which is present-at-hand.'14 It is equally noteworthy that in that section of his work on The Other in which Theunissen deals with Heidegger, he talks of an 'anthropological shift'IS which is carried out in the transition from a transcendental phenomenology to an existential analytic of Dasein - noteworthy because Heidegger himself explicitly rejects every anthropological interpretation of Dasein. For Heidegger, anthropology is that discipline in which the being of human being is interpreted by means of categories relevant to beings which do not have the mode of being of Dasein.

Theunissen uses the term 'anthropological shift' to characterize the attempt to confer concrete character upon human being. 'The relation of the truly phenomenological phenomenology of Husserl to fundamental ontology is that of an empty indication to its concrete fulfilment.' 16 In the context of Being and Time, the most striking indication of this shift is the transformation of the worldless subject into a self whose mode of being is defmed as that of being-in-the-world. It would not be unreasonable to have expected an equivalent transformation of Husserl's disembodied transcendental subject into a self whose very substance was defined in terms of its being that body which is its own. However, as we have seen, no such transformation is to be found.

Heidegger's refusal of the body has two grounds. First, he tends to mean by body, the physical body (Korper) or body in the Cartesian sense, a sense

The Own Body 101

which is clearly inimical to any ontological conception of the self. But second, he tends to dismiss even the phenomenological theory of the animate body (Leib) as an inadequate basis upon which to construct a concrete conception of the self, since the animate body figures as just one region among the many other regions of being available for constitution. By 'own body' is meant any own body whereas what is in question is precisely my own body. In both these respects Heidegger is, of course, entirely right. So little is it the case that the self merely has a body (even an animate body) that, in fact, it is its body - so much so that the own body is always absolutely unique - my own body. In other words, Husserl's mistake consists not in his trying to build the body back into the self but in his not having recognized the full implications of this manoeuvre and, in particular, the need to begin again with a distinctively ontological conception of the own body.

No doubt Heidegger would object against any definition of the self as being its body that it, too, presupposes a conception of the self as a composite of consciousness and the body. But composition of this kind is so very far from being alien to the spirit of the Heideggerian endeavour that it is central to his definition of the mode of being of Dasein as being-in-theworld. Moreover, despite his refusal of subjectivity, Heidegger does employ expressions which imply that a certain reflexivity pertains to the being of the self. 'Dasein is an entity which does not just occur among other entities. Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that. in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it. But in that case, this is a constitutive state of Dasein's Being, and this implies that Dasein, in its Being, has a relationship towards that Being - a relationship which itself is one of Being. '17 What could such a relationship amount to concretely if not a relation of the self to that very body which it is?

Heidegger's blindness with regard to the possibility of effecting a concretization of the self with reference to the body is however more than made up by Merleau-Ponty, for whom the grounding of the being of human being in its being a body becomes the central theme for phenomenological philosophy. Unfortunately for ontological phenomenology, in recovering the ontological significance of the body, Merleau-Ponty, at the same time, misuses the concept of being, at least from a Heideggerian standpoint. In his Phenomenology of Perception the term 'being,' when it is used at all, is used in a purely ontic sense to refer to those things which happen to exist and which can in consequence become objects for consciousness. For example, in a passage where he differentiates the concept of having from that of being he says: 'Here, as everywhere, the relation of having, which can be seen in the very etymology of the word habit, is at first concealed by relations belonging to the domain of being, or, as we may equally say, by


ontic relations obtaining within the world.'18 That Merleau-Ponty's central discovery can however be taken in an ontological sense is clear from the fact that he shares, with Heidegger, a primary concern with the genuinely original structure of being-in-the-world. Being a body means that, originally, one fmds oneself integrated in a world. Hence it requires no great leap of the imagination to put the problematic of being back together again with that of embodiment and so to see the 'anthropological' shift as an attempt to ground the being of human being in its being a body.

But before we attempt any such reconstruction of ontological phenomenology, we should first consider the impossibility of anything like a phenomenological constitution of the other subject. For, as has already been suggested, being a body means not merely being that very body which one is oneself, but also standing in relation to other bodies which also have the meaning of being bodies for themselves and, moreover, coming thereby to see oneself from the standpoint of the other as an embodied being for the other. Thus the suspension of the artificial abstraction operated with regard to the other embodied subject will bring with it a whole new series of analyses, analyses bearing with them their own implications for the 'selfconstitution' of the self as embodied.

NOTES

1. Marbach, Edouard, Das Problem des Ich in der Phiinomenologie Husserls, Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974, p. 299.

2. Husserl, Edmund, Ideen II, hrsg. Marly Biemel, Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1952, S. 33. 3. Husserl, Edmund. Ideen II, op. cit., S. 90. 4. Husserl, Edmund, Ideen II, op. cit., S. 90. 5. Husserl, Edmund, Ideen II, op. cit., S. 97. 6. Husserl, Edmund, Ideen II, op. cit., S. 167. 7. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, The Phenomenology of Perception, op. cit., pp. 103-123. 8. Husserl, Edmund, Ideen II, op. cit., S. 150. 9. Claesges, Ulrich, Edmund Husserls Theorie der Raumkonstitution, Den Haag: Martinus

Nijhoff, 1964, S. 101. 10. see, e.g., Claesges, op. cit., S. 114-5. 11. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, The Phenomenology of Perception, op. cit., p. 203. 12. Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, op. cit., p. 74 [H. 48]. 13. ibid., p. 86 [H. 56], p. 142 [H. 107], p. 419 [H. 368]. 14. ibid., p. 79 [H.54]. 15. Theunissen, Michael, Der Andere, tr. by Christopher Macann as The Other, Cambridge,

MA: MIT Press, 1984, p. 170. 16. Theunissen, Michael, The Other, op. cit., p. 173. 17. Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, op. cit., p. 32 [H. 12]. 18. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, The Phenomenology of Perception, op. cit., p. 174.

The Impossibility of a Phenomenological Constitution of the Other Subject

In the immediately preceding section we undertook a transposition of the transcendental coincidence of consciousness with itself into an ontological coincidence of the self with its body and this with a view to laying the ground for an original being-in-the-world of human being and, in accordance therewith, an original, ontological flux which would be nothing other than the process by which human being temporalizes itself in the very course of existing. This transposition was undertaken in accordance with the general rubric of a transformation of the doctrine of presence into a complementary doctrine of coincidence. It only remains to see whether we can effect the same transformation with regard to the problematic of the other.

There is a difficulty however. For although it is intuitively evident in what sense the self can be said to coincide with itself, qua ego, qua flux or qua own body, it is not at all evident in what sense the self might be said to 'coincide' with the other. To be sure, from a purely negative standpoint, the 'reef of solipsism' can be counted upon to point back toward the impossibility of a phenomenological constitution of the other (subject). But how is this negative disclaimer to point on toward the more positive doctrine of an original coincidence of self and other? In order to be in a position to answer this question, we need to tum our attention first to Husserl' s theory of intersubjectivity.

Husserl's theory of intersubjectivity is more or less identified with the Fifth Cartesian Meditation in which a sketch of the position is presented. Cartesian Meditations began as a couple of lectures entitled Introduction to Transcendental Phenomenology which Husserl delivered at the Sorbonne on February 23rd and 25th, 1929. He then extended these lectures into five analyses to which he gave the name Cartesian Meditations, in honour of France's greatest philosopher. 1 The first four Meditations are largely



introductory. But the fifth and last breaks new ground in the direction of a phenomenological constitution of the other subject. However, the fifty or so pages of the Fifth Cartesian Meditation have to be seen against the background of the three volumes of the Husserliana devoted to the phenomenology of intersubjectivity. The importance of this vast mass of research material can be summarily stated in terms of the following principle: The less Husser! liked a solution, the harder he worked at the problem. In other words, the unprecedented volume of research material devoted to this one topic gives grounds for suspecting that Husser! never really solved the problem of transcendental solipsism to his own satisfaction.

Solipsism has always been one of perennial problems of philosophy. That it presents a unique difficulty in the context of a phenomenological philosophy follows from the very nature of the reduction and the placement of consciousness upon a transcendental plane. In the natural attitude, I can accept the existence of other subjects with that taken for granted assurance which characterizes the realism of common sense. But the reduction does two things. First, it reduces the beingfor everyone of natural objects to their being for me. And second, it reduces the being for itself of the other subject to its being for me. What I am presented with, after the reduction, when I confront something that purports to be another subject is only the being of that subject as it manifests itself to me, not the being of that subject as it manifests itself to itself or as it is existed by itself. From a transcendental standpoint however, the reality of the subject lies in the lived experiences through which the subject is reflexively related to itself. More than this, the living of the experience only belongs within the self-enclosed sphere of transcendental consciousness insofar as it remains non-manifest. So I can not read subjectivity into the words or deeds of the other as I can, perhaps, read psychic traits into such manifest behaviour. On the contrary, the (transcendental) subjectivity that animates the existence of the other is for ever concealed from me, the transcendental ego engaged in conducting the analysis.

Husser! begins his analysis by aggravating the circumstances which gave rise to the problem. In addition to the phenomenological reduction, he now introduces the idea of a second, 'primordinal' reduction. To say that the prim ordinal reduction is a second reduction is to say that it already presupposes the phenomenological reduction and so takes, as its point of departure, the prior assumption of a transcendental stance. The phenomenological reduction reduces the world to its being for me. Included in such a world are things which imply a reference to other subjects, cultural objects, even living beings which, as psycho-somatic unities, are already apprehended as existing for themselves. The primordinal reduction, on the other hand,

The Other Subject 105

excludes all reference to anything other which might have the mode of being of a subject and precisely because the other subject can not be reduced to its being for me. With this exclusion of anything self-like, cultural predicates as well as personal predicates are placed in suspense, not only the existence of other subjects but the existence of a world which exists for subjects other than myself. Thus we arrive at the idea of a 'pure nature' (blo,Pe Natur) which exists only for me, which exists as an 'immanent transcendence,' where by a 'transcendent transcendence' would here precisely be meant, a transcendence which referred, implicitly or explicitly, to an alien subjectivity.

Husserl gives the name 'ownness sphere' to the new, and quite distinctive, immanence which emerges as a result of the primordinal reduction. At the centre of the ownness sphere, I find my body given to me as what is peculiarly my own. It is the one and only body in which I 'rule and govern directly,' the only body to which I can ascribe 'fields of sensation'.2 But around my body I also find a natural world, reduced to its being for me, in this radical sense that I find therein no reference to any subjectivity other than my own. This surrounding world (Umwelt) is my own in a quite peculiar sense, not in the sense that I own it or appropriate it or make use of it in any way whatever but in the sense that I am the only subject to be found in such a world. The surrounding world is 'mine' by default -because there are, and indeed can be, no others. By redrawing the boundaries of the immanent and the transcendent in this way, HusserI dramatizes the distinction of own and alien and so radicalizes the solipsistic tendency which already pertains to a transcendentally reduced consciousness. In so doing he hopes, as Ricoeur has pointed out in his study of the Fifth Cartesian Meditation, to tum the objection of solipsism into a premise from which to draw a conclusion as to the mode of being of the other subject.3

The question is, how? In order to appreciate the significance of the several steps of the constitu

tional theory, it is important to bear in mind the essentials of the level theory of meaning first worked out in Ideas II. Ideas II takes on the task of regional ontology in what might be called a systematic manner. That is, Husserl seeks to build up, layer by layer, all those regions of being presupposed by the total reality human being, the very being whose being is always already presupposed as the one undertaking the analysis. Thus, the being of human being is built up, level by level, upon a base which is taken to be the physical body (Korper). To be sure, the physicality of the own body is only the personal equivalent of a much more extensive sphere of body to which Husserl gives the name Matter (Materie). For all that, and precisely as the personal equivalent of matter, the physical body serves as


the elementary substratum to which supplementary organic predicates can be assigned in order to arrive at the derivative mode of being of the own body (Leib). In its tum, the own body serves as the basis for the ascription of psychic predicates to a soul (See/e), while the soul, or psyche, serves as the basis upon which a transcendental dimension of the subject first makes its appearances. To this highest level of the layer theory (Schichttheorie) Husserl reserves the name Geist, or 'Spirit' as it is most inadequately translated in English - though 'Spirit' is certainly better than 'Mind'.

With the highest level of Spirit however, a peculiar inversion takes place. For although the transcendental subject is the last level to be reached in the cumulative process whereby lower regions of being serve as the foundation for higher regions, it has actually always already been presupposed, and must have been presupposed, in order that the entire theory should remain within the scope of a transcendental constitution of human reality. This ambiguity is built into the very nature of a highest sphere of Spirit within which, in one sense, all constitutional operations are situated from the first (thus the transcendental constitution of the material base is a spiritual accomplishment) while, in another sense, as the highest sphere, it is also the last to be brought into being. The ambiguity is aggravated by the ascription of intersubjective predicates to the 'spiritual world.' In Ideas II, Husserl takes the short way with intersubjectivity, accounting for the emergence of other subjects on the basis of the psycho-somatic unity of living beings, and through a structure of introjection. But this derivation must have seemed too 'empirical' to be retained as a fmal solution. Hence the need to make a new beginning with the theory of intersubjectivity.

However, this new beginning is still vitiated by the legacy of Ideas II. On the side of the self, I find the psycho-somatic unity of the own body. But, on the side of the other, I find a surrounding world reduced to pure materiality. The activity of living beings can not be attributed to the existence of selves which exist their bodies in a manner equivalent to that in which I exist my own but must be held within the limits of a classificatory system which simply recognizes the distinctive type of activity manifested by physical bodies of a certain kind - biology in the most limiting sense of that word.

In the context of the second, primordinal reduction, Husserl tells us that I find myself in a surrounding world reduced to the sphere of ownness. The ownness sphere is nothing like a disconnected 'manifold of appearances' still less a 'blooming, buzzing confusion.' On the contrary, a certain objectivity already pertains to, or can at least be ascribed to, whatever manifests itself within my ownness sphere, an objectivity which arises out of an intentional coordination of phenomena, a coordination which I am, in


principle, able to effect for myself without reference to any other subject. Thus, the ownness sphere includes every objectivity that can be constituted on a monadic basis whilst only excluding anything like an intersubjective objectivity .

This ownness sphere might seem to be just a reformulation of the transcendental concept of immanence, the concept first developed in the text The Idea of Phenomenology. We know that in this text, stemming from 1907, Husserl contrasted two concepts of immanence and, in accordance therewith, two concepts of transcendence, a narrower concept oriented around the demarcation of act and object and a broader, more comprehensive, concept which took in the objects formerly excluded by the act-object distinction but only insofar as they could be reduced to ideal essences. With this latter concept of 'immanent transcendence' Husserl prepared the way for the immanental analyses which, in Ideas I, he conducted under the auspices of noetico-noematic correlations. But any attempt to carry this broader concept of immanence over to the ownness sphere comes up against one insuperable obstacle, the own body.

In the context of The Idea of Phenomenology the body, as also the mind, is excluded from the sphere of immanence in accordance with the principle of the epocM. 'The ego as a person, as a thing in the world, and the mental life as the mental life of this person, are arranged in objective time; they are all transcendent and epistemologically null. '4 In the alternative context of the Fifth Cartesian Meditation however, the body is not excluded but included within the ownness sphere. 'Among the bodies belonging to this 'Nature' and included in my peculiar ownness, I then find my animate organism as uniquely singled out - namely as the only one of them that is not just a body but precisely an animate organism: the sole Object within my abstract world-stratum to which, in accordance with experience, I ascribe fields of sensation, the only Object "in" which I "rule and govern" immediately, governing particularly in each of its "organs".'5 Notice that the own body is uniquely included in a double fashion, as afield of sensation and as the immediate organ of the will. Only my body can furnish me with a field of sensation and only my body can be that in which I 'rule and govern.'

This redrawing of the immanence-transcendence distinction is absolutely critical and actually implies that Husserl has moved over from a transcendental to an ontological style of analysis. No longer is the body that from which I must obtain the maximum distance in order to place myself upon a transcendental plane. Now the body is that with which I identify myself. It is even possible to reconstitute the old distinction between a narrower and a broader concept of immanence, this time upon an ontological plane. The


narrower concept would restrict the sphere of immanence to the body itself, to whatever it is that I am able to activate when I 'rule and govern.' Correlated with this narrower concept of (ontological) immanence would be the world itself as that with which I am brought into relation through the activation of my body. The broader concept would however acknowledge an ownness sphere which transcends my body and which includes within itself whatever stands in relation to me, the psycho-physical unity, just as long as every reference to an alien subjectivity is in principle excluded. It is of course the latter concept which serves Husserl as the starting point for his analysis in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation.

The radical contrast between own and alien is now made manifest not, in the first instance, with respect to subjectivity but with respect to the thematic of embodiment. If I reduce other subjects to what they are for me within the ownness sphere, I reduce them to physical bodies of a certain kind (Korper). But if I reduce myself to what I am for myself within the ownness sphere, I reduce myself to an organic body of a certain kind (Leib). What I experience when I experience others is their (alien) physical body. What I experience when I experience myself is my (own) organic body. As a result of the primordinal reduction, the organic body (Leib) of the other no longer appears as immediately present, only his physical body. And even this physical body no longer has the meaning 'physical body of the Other (subject).' It can not. For it has yet to be determined how it is to receive this meaning from me. As yet it exists for me as a simple, physical body like any other.

On the side of the self, Husserl is now left with two terms, the own body, on the one hand and the transcendental ego, on the other. He now sets out to fill in the 'in-between' through a procedure he calls 'mundanizing selfapperception.' Husserl asks 'how I, the human Ego reduced to what is purely my own and, as thus reduced, included in the similarly reduced world-phenomenon and, on the other hand, I as transcendental ego are related to one another?'6 Well might he ask. For, in the first phases of his thinking, the disclosure of a transcendental subjectivity was brought about through an abstraction from the body and from the psyche. Now, what had originally to be bracketed off and suspended is brought back within the sphere of the self. So, in place of a procedure of abstraction we find a procedure of concretization. 'In that I, as this ego, have constituted and am continually further constituting as a phenomenon (as a correlate) the world that exists for me, I have carried out a mundanizing self-apperception .... By virtue of this mundanization everything included in the ownness belonging to me transcendentally (as this ultimate ego) enters, as something psychic, into my psyche. '7


Through just such a mundanizing self-apperception, HusserI now fmds himself in a position to answer the question how I transfer over to the other the meaning of being a self. In my case, the body is my own, and so can be that in which I find psychic predicates. My physical body, however, has nothing to do with me. With regard to the other, however, the physical body is the only body which appears to me. So the movement to the realm of the psychic has to proceed in the opposite direction, from the physical body to the psyche rather than from the transcendental ego to the psyche. HusserI calls the psyche 'something transcendentally secondary' which would mean that, in my case, the own body would have to be something transcendentally tertiary. But, in the case of the other, I have to proceed in the exact opposite direction from that in which I proceed in my own case, from the physical body to the own body and then from the own body to the psyche.

We are now in a position to appreciate some of the difficulties which HusserI 's theory will confront. First, there is the difficulty attending a phenomenological constitution of my own body. This difficulty is not even mentioned by HusserI in this text. Rather, the constitution of the own body is simply assumed as a legacy carried over from his earlier analyses. But second, there is the difficulty attending the entire procedure of mundanization, again a difficulty which we will not go into any further. For third, there is another, much more critical difficulty, which concerns the transition from the physical body of the other to the other as own body.

To be sure, the problem of a phenomenological constitution of the other has now been transformed in a manner which seems to make a resolution of this problem much easier. It is no longer a question how I, the ultimate transcendental ego, can attribute to the other the meaning 'other transcendental subject'. Instead, I have only to determine how I can attribute to a physical body of a certain kind, the supplementary meaning 'other own body.' Once this step has been accomplished, all the rest will follow. For as soon as I have the other as 'other own body' I can then go on to ascribe psychic predicates to the other. For as 'other own body' the other already appears to me as existing for itself. In tum, the ascription of psychic predicates will form the basis for the further ascription of a transcendental subjectivity to the other in accordance with the layer theory developed in Ideas II. But this first step is by no means as simple as it looks.

HusserI takes this step in section 50. Within the primordinally reduced world, I exist as an own body. In the event that another man enters my perceptual sphere, he is given to me as a physical body of a certain kind. If I am to attempt to carry over to that body the meaning of being an other self it can only be on the basis of an 'analogizing apperception' which motivates this transfer of meaning. Although I am as yet the one and only animate


body, still my physical body does appear to me, even within the ownness sphere. And I am therefore capable of noticing that a certain similarity prevails between my physical body and the physical body of the other. It is this physical similarity which is supposed to motivate the 'pairing' of ego and alter ego.

Even if we accept HusserI' s qualification that analogizing apperception is not an inference by analogy,S a number of difficulties arise. First, pairing is an associative act and, as such, belongs under the head of passive synthesis. Ordinarily, an association takes place when two (or more) data manifest themselves to consciousness as similar. It is this passively registered similarity which motivates the association of the two as a pair. But ordinarily, the two associated data are both simultaneously present to consciousness in the same way, that is, as objects for consciousness. To be sure, there is a sense in which I can see my own body, or at least a part of it and compare this perception with that of the other physical body. But the connection is certainly not reciprocal. I must go from my own body to that of the other, not reverse-wise. For any inference in the opposite direction would only indicate to me the physicality of my body not the ownness of the other body. Worse, even if I notice a physical similarity between my physical body and that of the other, this will not suffice for the carrying over to the other of the meaning 'own body.' For there is no similarity at all between my physical body and my own body.

But, it will be objected, all that is needed is a physical similarity between my body and that of the other. Since I am this body, rule and govern in it with that immediacy which makes it possible to call it mine, just this physical similarity will suffice to motivate the requisite transfer of meaning. But, as a matter of fact, we know that such a transfer of meaning does take place even when no such similarity obtains. The body of the baby bears very little resemblance to that of the parent. Indeed, the baby may have very little if any sense of the way its body looks, either to itself or others. But this does not prevent a transfer of meaning from taking place.

It is not enough to point out that a genesis of meaning is a logical genesis which, as such, has nothing to do with any psychological or biological explanation of the way in which we come to assign animate predicates to bodies of a certain kind. For the logical genesis in question rests upon an ontological foundation which is itself highly questionable. Insofar as I have reduced myself to an Ego ruling and governing in an organic body, what reason have I to believe that anything like a physical body makes its appearance at all? The world does not manifest itself originally as a totality of physical bodies. The evidence furnished by such human sciences as anthropology, psychoanalysis, child psychology, mythology all agree in


recognizing the derivative character of physical nature. Nature is originally apprehended as an animate not an inanimate totality. It can only come to appear inanimate insofar as human being fIrst de-animates itself by conceiving of its own body as a body like any other. But it is precisely this further de-animation of the own body which is disallowed with the second reduction to the ownness sphere.

Once again, and by quite another route, we have been brought to the point of calling in question the ontological structure of the level theory of meaning. The meaning 'own body' is not a construct founded on the more primordial stratum of the physical body. Quite the contrary, I experience myself fIrst and foremost as an own body and only come to think of myself as being lodged in a physical body when I have succeeded in establishing that distance from myself which Descartes enshrined in the mind-body distinction. And then the objectifIcation of the body occurs as the reciprocal of a complementary subjectifIcation of consciousness. Only through such a reciprocal disjunction of mind and body does it then become possible for anything other to manifest itself as a pure and simple object. This reconstitution of the relation between the four regions constitutive of the self (KorperILeibISeeleIGeist) is not a psychological but an ontological matter. Implicitly, HusserI has already recognized the priority which now has to be accorded to an embodied consciousness (Leib) inasmuch as this is what I am reduced to within the primordinal sphere of ownness. But to carry this insight through in a truly consequential fashion would have meant giving up the transcendental ego which, in tum, would spell the end of any attempt at a phenomenological constitution of the other.

However, the demise of the attempt at a transcendental constitution of the other subject does not mean that something like an ontological constitution of the other can not take place. And indeed, to the extent that Husserl is successful in his aim, it is just such an ontological constitution of the other which is operative in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation. It will now be our task to show that, insofar as a constitution of the other subject is successful, it is one which is effected upon an ontological rather than a transcendental plane

In order to see that this is indeed the case, we need not only to remind ourselves of the ontological character of the identifIcation of the self with a body existing at the centre of an own world but also to reflect upon the ontological nature of the so-called 'analogical transfer of meaning' from my own body to the physical body of the other (to be). It looks like a normal transcendental, meaning giving operation and yet it is actually something quite different. For when I confer the meaning 'red' or 'physical object' upon a thing, I do not so much impose a meaning inherent in my consciousness upon the thing, as rather disclose a meaning which already inheres in


the thing itself. This is the main difference between Husserl and Kant and it is this difference which makes it possible for Husserl to call his transcendental philosophy a 'radical empiricism'. Even with regard to non-entities, such as values, the constitutive operation remains a disclosure. When I characterize a picture as beautiful, I do not transfer an idea of beauty, derived from and inherent in myself, over to the picture. Rather, the picture is revealed to me under the aspect of the beautiful. To be sure, when I undertake an analysis of the subjective operations through which beauty comes to be attributed to the picture, I subject the picture to a reduction with a view to bringing to light the constitutive operations of consciousness itself. But these operations are intentional, that is, essentially directed toward an object, in this case, the value. In the case of the other own body however, there is an actual transfer of meaning from me to the other, a meaning which I can only find in myself and which can only be disclosed on the other as a result of just such an analogical transfer of meaning.

In .other words, what we are really talking about is the ontological structure of projection. To call the structure of projection 'ontological' is to give it a name which is most readily linked with the thinking of Heidegger but which now needs to be extended to accommodate an ontological thinking which takes embodied consciousness as its base. Not only is there an original coincidence of my self with a body, which thereby becomes my own, there is a further coincidence of myself with the other, insofar as it is my self which is projected upon the other. This means that the self which I disclose on the other is really my own self transposed over to the other. Through projection I put myself into the other in such a way that the other becomes my own other self, my alter ego. Just as the physicality of my body is very far from being an original phenomenon so the physicality of the body of the other is also a derivative concept, one which can only be arrived at by way of a separation of the physical from the psychical components of the original psycho-physical unity as which the other appears to me. But of course this runs entirely contrary to the direction of Husserl' s theory. If an analogical transfer is to be possible, it must be a genuinely original phenomenon. But, as original, it must antecede the differentiation of the body into physical and psychic components and therefore must antecede that disclosure of the own body, as physical, which is supposed to motivate the transfer.

By reversing the order of priority as between the physical and the own body, it is also possible to explain how the world comes to present itself eventually as purely physical. Husserl would have us believe that the world exists originally as the purely material correlate of an intentional relation. Only on this basis is it possible for empathic projection to invest, in certain


bodies, a supplementary meaning which is carried over from the self. But if empathy is a genuinely original possibility based upon my being a body then the surrounding world must manifest itself in a way which is consistent with the structure of projection - as nature in a quite distinctive, and nonHusserlian, sense.

By Nature, Husserl only means the material universe, a world from which all animate predicates have been withdrawn. But, as the correlate of a self which exists itself as own body, the world can only be an animate totality. The physicality of the world can therefore only manifest itself through a de-animation, a withholding of the structure of projection.

De-animation can be assumed to take place in a number of ways. In its most extreme form, de-animation takes place with regard to those bodies known as material bodies. In a less extreme form, the plant world becomes the objective of a withholding of projecting, while the animal world constitutes the upper limit of any de-animation which still falls short of the human. To be sure, it is also possible to de-animate other human beings but only by way of a transfer over to the other of a meaning first brought to light with regard to purely physical bodies. So far from it being the case that I first experience other human beings as physical bodies and then transfer over to them the meaning of being a subject, I first experience other human beings as animate organisms and am only able to transform (deform?) them into physical bodies insofar as I then transfer over to the body of the other a meaning derived from a prior objectification of that very body which is my own.

Such a reversal calls for a complete recasting of the kind of empathy theory on which Husserl relies, implicitly if not explicitly. For Husserl, empathy is always, and can only be, a transfer over to the other of a meaning which I have first to disclose in my self. Such a transfer can only take place after the other has first been constituted as an other own body, on the basis of the physical similarity which prevails between the other body and my own. But once the primacy of the own body has been acknowledged, empathy can no longer function as a supplementary structure enabling me to invest the other with psychic predicates analogous to those I find in myself. This is what Heidegger has in mind when he insists that only those who have first cut the self off from others need the structure of empathy 'to provide the first ontological bridge from one's own subject, which is given as proximally alone, to the other subject, which is proximally quite closed off. '9 In reality however, such an ontological bridge is quite unnecessary. For the ontological equi-primordiality of being-with and being-in-the-world ensures that the other is always there too, just as soon as the self projects itself in such a way that it is in the world.


The sense in which the wodd is my own originally is the sense in which it exists as a reflection or mirror of the self. Hence the critical question is the very opposite of that which Hussed poses for himself: not, how am I able to confer upon the other the meaning 'animate organism' but how am I able to withdraw this meaning from the other. 'How' means here, on what basis or with regard to what motivational prompting. As soon as the question is put in this form, the answer is obvious. I withhold projecting when the other fails to respond in the manner expected, given my prior projection upon the other of animate predicates. If analogical reasoning plays any part at all in empathic projection it is to motivate a 'withholding of projecting' whenever the other does not respond in ways analogous to the way in which I would respond 'were lover there.'

That this is not just a verbal quibble can perhaps best be brought out in terms of a question which Hussed himself poses. How is it that the other comes to be an other self and not just another self - my own self reduplicated over there? For a theory which bases itself upon an analogical transfer over from me to the other of the meaning of being a self, this is a very real query. For the empathic relation always presupposes two selves, my own and that of the (potentially) other, and indeed presupposes the primacy of my self over that of the other. From the standpoint of the ontological structure of projection however, this difficulty evaporates. For there is only one self originally and that self is not my own but, precisely, that of the other. The first self is the other; and I only come to be a self by carrying back over to myself a meaning which is first disclosed on the other. Even though it is a self from the very first, the self does not have any sense of itself, as a self, originally. For being itself means simply existing itself in such a way that it projects itself (by being-ahead-of-itself) and so standing in relation not to itself but to something other. To be sure, the other can only take on the characteristics of a self to the extent that the (own) self puts itself into the other (self). For all that, the (own) self which is 'put into' the other is one of which the self is itself wholly unaware. The self only becomes aware of itself, as a self, insofar as it carries back over from the other that very characteristic of being a self which it has already projected upon the other by existing itself in relation to the other.

In turn this means that, in relating itself to another self, the self is actually transformed, in its being, by the other with which it stands in relation. In his profoundly insightful, critical interpretation of Hussed's fifth Cartesian Meditation, Theunissen takes this process in the direction of what he calls 'Veranderung'.10 'Veriinderung' is, of course, the German word for alteration. By giving the name, or rather the pseudonym, 'Veranderung' to the process by which the other makes me be a self,


Theunissen indicates that the alteration (Veriinderung) to which the self is subjected is in fact an alter-ation (Ver-ander-ung), in the following sense. Through the other, I become something other (alter) to myself, and only so can I acquire the characteristics of a self. Or, to spell it out more completely, in making the other be a self, 'I' make the other become that very being which can subject me to first, a 'substantializing' and then, a 'personalizing' (Husserl's own terms) alter-ation, that very alter-ation through which 'I' become a self, properly so called.

Theunissen's Hegelian interpretation of Husserl makes much better sense of Husserl than Husserl is ever able to make of himself. In particular, it offers a completely new way of accounting for the process by which the 'subjectivity' of the ownness sphere is transformed into the intersubjectivity of the 'objective' universe. However, it must remain questionable whether it remains true to Husserl's own intentions and, in particular, whether it is consistent with the starting point in a world reduced to a purely material nature. Insofar as Theunissen allows Husserl his first move, he disqualifies his own (dialectical) theory of alter-ation. Insofar as the dialectical theory of alter-ation is advanced as the correct solution, the primordinal reduction to an ownness sphere in which the world is given as pure nature (bloj3e Natur) must itself be resisted.

The difficulties attending Husserl's theory of intersubjectivity might give one grounds for thinking that, in the move from Husserlian transcendental, to Heideggerian ontological, phenomenology, a more adequate solution might be found. After all, the genial insight from which Heidegger's interpretation sets out is the insight that the other is not so much that from which I distinguish myself as precisely that from which I do not so distinguish myself. As another self, the other is also a self, just like myself. Thus, with one stroke, Heidegger undermines the solipsistic stance which forms the point of departure for any transcendental investigation of intersubjectivity. To use Wittgensteinian language, the problem is not so much 'solved' as 'resolved', resolved inasmuch as the presuppositions which generated the problem in the first place are shown to be groundless.

The ontological basis of Heidegger's own theory of interpersonal relations is to be sought in the equation of 'being-in-the-world' and 'beingwith'. 'Being-in-the-world' and 'being-with' are ontologically equi-primordial. This means that the world in which Dasein finds itself is also a 'with world'. Within the world, entities manifest themselves which are neither ready-to-hand for Dasein, nor even present-at-hand, in the sense of entities which do not have the mode of being of Dasein. Rather, they are there too with Dasein, and in the same sense as that in which Dasein is there with them. Due to the equi-primordiality of being-with and being-in-the-world, a


structure like that of empathy is not needed to explain how out of, and on the basis of, my self, I can build a bridge which leads over to the others. For the others are there with me from the very beginning.

And yet Sartre's complaint that, in solving the problem of intersubjectivity with a definition, Heidegger is simply cutting Gordian knots rather than untying them, still stands. I I The problem of intersubjectivity can not be solved, or even resolved, by merely affirming the being-with of self and other, at least not unless and until the implications of this initial affirmation are worked out in detail. But this is where the real difficulties begin.

Being-with is supposed to be an ontological structure, just like being-inthe-world. And yet the structure of being-with leads directly over into the problem of inauthenticity. Because Dasein is there with others from the very first, Dasein takes its sense of self from those with which it stands in relation. Thus it is that average everydayness comes to be definitive of the being of the self. Heidegger gives the name 'Falling' to that existential structure which follows from being-with and as a result of which being-with leads directly over to lostness in the 'They'. Lostness in the They is the basis of inauthenticity. But inauthenticity is supposed to be something ontic, something non-original which can be overcome just as soon as Dasein individualizes itself down to its ownmost being self. Individualization thereby becomes a way of not being-with, a dis-association of one's self from the others in order to be oneself. But now the parallel between being-in-the-world and being-with has been disrupted. Being-in-the-world is that fundamental ground to which Dasein is restored just as soon as it stops thinking of the world as something which is simply present-at-hand. On the other hand, not being-with but its very opposite not-being-with becomes the objective of the ontological theory of individualization. Only that self which has ceased to be with others in the lostness of the They can become itself authentically.

That 'not-being-with' figures as the ground to which Dasein has to be restored if it is to be itself authentically becomes even clearer if individualization is seen as a sort of reduction. There has been no lack of commentators to reflect upon the analogy between the Husserlian reduction and the Heideggerian procedure of individualization. Just as the reduction leaveS me with a peculiar 'aloneness', so the passage to authenticity requires that I disconnect myself from my fellows. And just as the recovery of my authentic potential for being a self makes it possible for me to enter into authentic relations with others, so the withdrawal from the natural to the original I creates a basis upon which a plurality of transcendentally reduced selves can establish a 'community of monads' .


But the analogy is not so easy to sustain. For whereas, in the case of Hussed, the analysis proceeds from the non-original to the original, from the I of the natural attitude to the transcendentally reduced I, in the case of Heidegger, the movement of analysis proceeds from the original to the nonoriginal, from being-with, as inauthentic being with the other, to a self which has individualized itself down to its ownmost potentiality for being itself - by not being with. Worse, this reversal is at odds with the movement that characterizes the recovery of being-in-the-wodd. Whereas the latter is dislosed through a replacement of the initial, ontic structure of the presentat-hand with the ontological structure of the ready-to-hand, the latter can only be disclosed by substituting the conclusive structure of not-being-with for the initial, ontological structure of being-with.

And yet there are plenty of references which indicate that it is authenticity which has to be regarded as ontological in character. antic time is the product of an attempt to re-present time as a simple succession of nows. Authentic time requires that one reestablish the connection between time and the self. To be sure, existential time has its inauthentic as well as its authentic parameters. But, in every instance, it is a matter of getting back from the inauthentic to the authentic, from the time that follows from lostness in the They to the time that follows from individualization down to one's ownmost potential for being self.

But if individualization is the procedure through which the self recovers its ownmost potentiality for being itself then what is it that Dasein is brought back to when it dis-associates itself from its fellows. If there is no original being-self, the loss of which can precisely account for the lostness of the self in the They, then how can the self recover its self again by disassociating itself from its fellows? Hussed's theory is subject to the same difficulty but the difficulty does not have the same force due to the epistemological, as opposed to the existential, character of Hussed' s intellectual enterprise. One could very well ask who is the solus ipse which manifests itself after the reduction, but there would be no point in doing so. For Hussed only uses the solipsistic stance as a basis on which to prove that the existence of other selves is itself highly questionable. The further question what the other is for me and therefore what the nature of that existential relation might be through which I am placed in relation to the other (assuming that such a relation is indeed possible) can remain in abeyance. But, for Heidegger, these questions are as critical as they are unanswerable.

The difficulty can not be overestimated. It has often been objected that Heidegger's ontological philosophy lacks an Ethics. In fact however, the theory of authenticity not only stands for the ethical dimension of Heidegger's Dasein's analysis, it also picks up whatever remains of what might be


called a religious dimension. Authenticity is the only salvation which a finite conception of the being of human being can hope to hold out and, as such, it bears the whole weight of Heidegger's religious inheritance, an inheritance which not only came down to him as a cultural tradition (Heidegger's doctoral dissertation focused on the scholastic, Duns Scotus) but also as a personal legacy from his father, the pastor. The tremendous importance which Sartre's a-theistic philosophy confers upon the problematic of authenticity confirms the significance of this theme. For Sartre's philosophy is haunted by the absence of God. But perhaps it was Sartre's own appreciation of the basic contradiction which lurks at the root of Heidegger's structure of being-with which led him to the conclusion that authenticity is a sheer impossibility that, in more Sartrean terms, 'bad faith' is the meaning of every attempt at sincerity.

In the end, HusserI's turns out to be the more impressive of the two theories, as a theory. It fails because of HusserI's commitment to the transcendental ego, as a result of which it falls foul of the absurdities of 'transcendental intersubjectivity'. Heidegger's theory is much truer to the situation of human being in the life worId. It fails not only because it falls short of a theory but also, and more importantly, because the original inauthenticity of being-with makes authentic being-with-one-another a sheer impossibility. To be sure, it has become a commonplace of the Heideggerian literature to claim that there is an authentic being-with. But the question is, how this possibility is to be justified ontologically. In order for there to be a genuine possibility of becoming oneself authentically there must have been an original being-self which is only lost when the self is integrated into the self-alienating context of society.

In reshaping the theory of inter-personal relations in this way, we are not only rectifying the onto-logic of the phenomeno-Iogical analysis, we are also bringing this logic in line with what we know about the psycho-logic of human growth and development. The way of being of the child is that of being itself authentically, not because the child has any developed sense of itself but precisely because it doesn't. Not until the child has learnt to disassociate itself from itself, a process which is made possible by the socialization of the child, will the child become aware of its self as such. And, for the most part, the self of which it then becomes aware will be not so much its own self as a self which it has been given to be, by others. Hence the need for a further dis-association of its self from others (HusserI's solipsism/Heidegger's individualization) if the self is to be restored to itself again, to that very sense of self which it lived out originally, but in so immediate a manner that it knew nothing of its self.

With each successive analysis, our de-construction of Husserlian texts


has taken us not only further away from the Husserlian conception of phenomenology but also nearer to an alternative conception of phenomenology which has not as yet been made explicit. It is time now to sketch out explicitly, even if only briefly, the genetic phenomenology which has provided the underlying motive for much of the foregoing criticism of Husserlian positions. In so doing, we shall be advancing the claim that deconstruction (or de-struction as Heidegger was wont to call it) is of only limited value unless and until it is followed up with a re-construction. This re-construction will be accomplished in the third, and final, part.

NOTES

1. Hussed, Edmund, Cartesianische Meditationen, hrsg., s. Strasser, 1950, Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, Hussediana Band I, tr. by Dorian Cairns as Cartesian Meditations, The Hague: Nijhoff, 1960.

2. Hussed, Edmund, Cartesian Meditations, op. cit., p. 97 [H. 128]. 3. Ricoeur, Paul, Husserl: An Analysis of his Phenomenology, tr. by E. Ballard & L.

Embree, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967, p. 118. 4. Hussed, Edmund, Die Idee der Phiinomenologie, hrsg. Walter Biemel, Den Haag:

Martinus Nijhoff, 1958, tr. by W. Alston & G. Nakhnikian as The Idea of Phenomenology, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964, p. 34 [H. 44].

5. Hussed, Edmund, Cartesian Meditations, op. cit., p. 97 [H. 128]. 6. Hussed, Edmund, Cartesian Meditations, op. cit., p. 99 [H. 130]. 7. Hussed, Edmund, Cartesian Meditations, op. cit., p. 99-100. [H. 130] 8. Hussed, Edmund, Cartesian Meditations, op. cit., p. 111 [H. 141]. 9. Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, op. cit., p. 162 [H. 124].

10. Theunissen, Michael, Der Andere, tr. by Christopher Macann as The Other, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984, p. 89.

11. Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness, op. cit., p. 330.

PARTll

Re-Construction

Genetic Ontology

In Part II, Hussed' s phenomenological philosophy was subjected to what might be called a 'de-construction'. That is to say, we focused our attention upon the attempt at a constitution of four critical regions of being, critical in the sense that the constitutional procedure could only be carried through by assuming a condition (of coincidence) which ran contrary to the very principle (of presence) upon which the method of phenomenological constitution is itself based. De-construction has of late become a generally recognized critical procedure. What has not been so generally recognized has been the need to complement the de-constructive procedure with a reconstructive procedure. This is what will be attempted in this third part. Through just such a re-construction, we hope to fmd ourselves in a position to draw together the various threads of an argument which could only be presented, hitherto, in a disconnected fashion.

At the end of Part I, we took account of Heidegger's attempt to redefine phenomenology as the 'logos' of the 'phenomenon'. By extending the concept of 'Erscheinung' to cover the Husserlian notion of phenomenologically reduced appearances (blo,Pe Erscheinung) as well as the more commonplace substance-attribute distinction, we were able to suggest a genetic phenomenology which would link together the various concepts of selfmanifestation critical to phenomenology. This new 'genetic' phenomenology would be one which was progressive rather than regressive in character and which therefore owed its inspiration to Hegel rather than to either Hussed or Heidegger. It is now time to go one step further and to consider whether this new genetic phenomenology might actually be taken in the direction of a genetic ontology.

In order to be in a position to arrive at a decision on this matter, we need first to determine, on what basis, a being can be conferred upon consciousness. Our preceding analyses have already sufficed to furnish a answer to



this question. The being of human being is grounded in its being a body. To ground the being of human being in its being a body is at the same time to imply that the genesis of consciousness proceeds by way of a progressive detachment of the self from its basis in the body. Indeed, it is the very unreality of the transcendental stance, insofar as the latter is founded upon a constitutive abstraction of consciousness from the body, which motivates that movement of return to which we have given the name 'ontological transposition' .

Thus, the starting point for our fmal summing up must be the notion of an 'ontological transposition'. As we have seen, there are two quite distinct models for the notion of an ontological transposition, neither of which is altogether satisfactory. 1 First, the logic of Husserl' s own transcendental analyses forced him to undertake a regression to the origin. This regressive investigation goes by the name of 'genetic phenomenology'. Implicitly, though only implicitly, Husserl's genetic phenomenology already effects something in the way of an ontological transposition. Unfortunately, Husserl failed to see that his regression to the origin could only be carried through consequentially if he first gave up the transcendental presuppositions of his phenomenological philosophy.

Heidegger recognized the need to make a new beginning. In reestablishing the phenomenological project on anew, ontological (that is, nontranscendental) basis, Heidegger had already effectively carried through an ontological transposition - but again, only implicitly. For, in neglecting to trace his ontological phenomenology back to its source in transcendental phenomenology, he failed to see his task as one which simply carried through to completion what had already been initiated by transcendental phenomenology. Worse, Heidegger did not limit his intellectual ambitions to the task of developing an alternative way of doing phenomenology. On the contrary, he tried to substitute his own ontological, for Husserl' s transcendental, phenomenology, and in so doing failed to do justice to the relative legitimacy of transcendental phenomenology.

However, assuming that both ontological and transcendental phenomenology are legitimate projects (and leaving aside for the moment the question of determining the basis upon which their respective legitimacy is founded or grounded), three distinct planes of analysis spring to mind as already presupposed by these two alternative projects. To present matters in the most simple terms possible, the dynamic of Husserl's and Heidegger's phenomenological philosophies can be regarded as one which moves in opposite directions. Husserl's transcendental phenomenology starts out from the world of the 'natural attitude' and then ascends to a 'higher' transcendental plane, in order to enquire back into the transcendental


foundations of what is ordinarily taken for granted. Heidegger's ontological phenomenology starts out from the ontic plane of 'average everydayness' and then descends to a 'lower' ontological plane, in order to enquire back into the ontological ground of what is ordinarily taken for granted. The starting point is the same, but the quest for genuinely original structures which, as such, are capable of founding, or grounding, what is ordinarily taken for granted, moves in opposite directions.

These terms 'ascend', 'descend' are only metaphors and, as such, must be treated with caution. But they suffice to differentiate three distinct planes of analysis. We shall give the name 'objective' to that plane which Husserl designated with the term 'natural attitude' and which Heidegger designated with the term 'ontic'. We shall give the name 'reflective' to that plane which Husserl designated with the term 'transcendental'. And we shall give the name 'originary' to that plane which Heidegger entitled 'ontological'. In conjunction with these three planes of being, three types of philosophical analysis can be distinguished. Ontological research bears upon the investigation of the originary plane. Epistemological research bears upon the investigation of the objective plane. And transcendental research bears upon the investigation of the reflective plane.

Whereas Heidegger only recognizes two of these three planes, the objective and the originary (ontic and ontological), Husserl recognizes all three, but again only implicitly. For the regressive genesis which Husserl employs to get back to the origin fails to come to terms with the truly ontological character of any investigation into the origin; and for the simple reason that it conceives of the regression to origins as implying an extension, rather than a suspension, of all transcendental presuppositions. Undoubtedly, this limitation follows from the regressive procedure adopted by Husser!' But as soon as genetic phenomenology is presented in a progressive frame of reference, this limitation is overcome. By starting with the originary stage, phenomenology is perforce required to dispense with the highly abstract apparatus of transcendental analysis, for the simple reason that the phenomena which manifest themselves upon the originary plane can only manifest themselves in a properly ontological manner just so long as the self is still one with itself and still has its being in the world.

But how, it might be objected, can such a reflection upon the origin ever claim the status of a truly ontological investigation? Surely, the very 'primitivity' of an originary consciousness would preclude anything like a specifically philosophical analysis of the self and of the world in which it finds itself. To voice this objection is however only to pose the paradox which attaches to any philosophical disclosure of the originary sphere. That which is closest and most immediate, in the order of being, is also that


which is furthest and most mediate, in the order of analysis.2 First and originally, I simply am my body in a totally immediate and unreflected manner. But to understand this being a body, in its genuine originality, requires the most refined analysis, an analysis which would be quite impossible were it not for the fact that ontology is able to draw upon the reflective resources of transcendental philosophy. This is precisely what we had in mind with our structure of an ontological transposition.

From the above it follows that, in the context of a progressive genesis, the originary plane is doubly instantiated, as the first stage, in the order of being, and again, as the last stage, in the order of analysis. So far from representing a problem, this double instantiation of the originary is precisely what makes it possible to conceive of the genesis of human being as essentially circular in character. Again, so far from representing a limitation, the ciiC~larity of an ontological investigation not only confirms the Heideggerian structure of an ontological circle, but also finds its justification in the procedure adopted by Hegel to confirm the legitimacy of the starting point of his own ontological genesis.

In his Phenomenology, and again in his Logic, Hegel insists that the point of departure for a genetic investigation can not remain a merely hypothetical and, as such, provisional point of departure. If the origin is to constitute something more than just one among other possible points of departure, the actual origin has to be the absolute origin. In order that the actual point of departure be confIrmed as the absolute origin, and so as the only possible point of departure for an ontological phenomenology which adopts a genetic methodology, the goal of the whole process has to be nothing other than the ground which was assumed from the very outset. Only insofar as the linear directive of a progressive genesis can be converted into a circular form can the point of departure for such a genesis be confirmed as not just 'One among many other possible points of departure but, in effect, as the only possible point of departure.

We are now in possession of all the ingredients needed to construct an ontological phenomenology which adopts a genetic methodology. There are three main stages in the progressive genesis. But the last stage in the progressive genesis leads back, of its own accord, to the first stage. It only remains to review the themes which were investigated in the second part of this work with a view to determining how the problems encountered in the course of our investigation can be reconciled and resolved in the new frame of reference of a 'genetic ontology'.

As we saw, the themes in question are four in number; the ego, time, the body and the other. But two of these can be reduced to one, namely, the intrinsic constitution of the self. For, as we have seen, the transcendental


ego can be regarded as coming into being by way of a constitutive abstraction of the self from the very basis of its being in the body. To abstract from this abstraction consists therefore in recognizing the basis of the being of human being in its being a body. 3 The differentiation of distinct levels of consciousness is therefore grounded in an equivalent differentiation of distinct modes of relation to the body. The self is originally a unity of consciousness and the body. But this original coincidence of consciousness and the body falls apart into first a distinction and then an abstraction of consciousness from the body, without which indeed consciousness would be incapable of becoming conscious of itself.

In the light of the above, we shall review the material already covered in the second part, in the following manner. First, we shall consider the relation of the self to itself. This fIrst thematic will take in the results both of our investigation of the ego and of the body. Second, we shall develop a sketch of a genetic theory of time. Finally, we shall present a sketch of a genetic theory of interpersonal relations. In every case our aim will be to show how the new, genetic framework can reconcile and resolve the problems encountered in the course of our previous investigations.

Consciousness is originally one with that body which is its own. The term that will be used to express this immediate relation of oneness with the body is the term 'coincidence'. As we have already seen, the term 'coincidence' has a special, ontological significance in the context of this enquiry. It was fIrst encountered at that point in the investigation of the procedure of transcendental constitution at which this procedure can be shown to break down, and precisely because there is no room for the distance of intentional consciousness from that which it is conscious 'of'. In other words, the ontological principle of coincidence emerges at precisely that point at which the doctrine of presence is no longer operative. But even though the doctrine of coincidence does manifest itself, in a derivative fashion, at the limit of the attempt on the part of the transcendental ego to constitute itself, it more properly belongs at the fIrst and originary stage, where it may be taken to define the relation of consciousness and the body rather than the relation of (transcendental) consciousness to itself. First and originally, consciousness and the body coincide, belong together in that immediate relation of each to the other which grounds and makes possible the ownness of the body.

It is important to note that this ontological concept of coincidence does not exclude but precisely includes a difference, an ontological difference which, again, is not to be confused with that difference which lies at the root of the doctrine of presence. The difference which lies at the root of the


doctrine of presence is a difference which makes it possible for consciousness to be conscious 'of', whether in the positional mode of natural consciousness or in the intentional mode of a transcendentally reduced consciousness. But there can be no consciousness 'of' that with which consciousness is said to coincide, and it is this very impossibility which defines the ontological character of the structure of coincidence in question. At the same time, to say that consciousness and the body coincide is precisely not to say that they are one and the same, or that either is reducible to the other. Coincidence is the co-inciding, in the unity of a single, unitary structure, of elements which are in principle distinguishable, and which will indeed, in the course of the genesis of consciousness, come to be distinguished from each other. In other words, the concrete structure of coincidence is not to be confused with the purely formal structure of an identity (1=1). What Sartre called the 'non-coincidence' of the self with itself (and which he used to defme the pre-reflexive cogito) is therefore also precisely what is intended with this ontological structure of coincidence, a structure which, for this very reason, is constitutive of the reflexivity of the self. To say that the self exists itself is to say that it stands in a continual relation of itself to itself, a relation of such a kind that it can never be identical with itself nor yet ever become present to itself as that very being which it is. Precisely because the structure of coincidence is definitive of the existence of the self, it functions as the condition without which there could be nothing like a presence of the world to consciousness, or indeed a presence of consciousness to itself. It is in this sense that the two terms 'presence' and 'coincidence' suffice to mark out the entire terrain of a phenomenological philosophy, and this whether we are talking about a transcendental or an ontological phenomenology, a phenomenology of essences or a phenomenology of existence. Indeed, it has been our aim in this work to show the connection between these different types of phenomenological philosophy through the juxtaposition of the two fundamental terms 'presence' and 'coincidence'.

Inasmuch as the self is constituted originally by a coincidence of consciousness and the body, that in which it fmds itself is not set at a distance from itself. On the contrary, the coincidence of consciousness and the body grounds and makes possible an equivalent coincidence of self and other. In the context of his Lebensphilosophie, Husserl used the term 'Umwelt' to describe the way in which the self finds itself inserted in a surrounding world originally. The Heideggerian category of being-in-the-world marks an even more emphatic determination to bring to light the immediate proximity of self and other, of the self and that in which it lives and moves and has its being. Insofar as the self has its being in the world originally, this world can not be characterized as a material or a physical world. On the


contrary, it has to be characterized as Nature, as a natural world (in a sense other than that in which this tenn is used by Husserl).

This original coincidence of consciousness and the body in tum gives way to what might best be described as a distinction of consciousness and the body. The ontological significance of this relation of distinction is, of course, best represented historically in the philosophy of Descartes. But it is equally apparent in Locke's twofold division of substance into mental and physical. The distinction of consciousness and the body is not an original detennination of the being of human being but nor does it just happen to human being. Rather, the self brings this distinction into being by alienating itself from its body, by conceiving of its body in such a way that this same body now becomes something alien to the self. As a result of the distinction of consciousness and the body, the world now also presents itself as something distinct from the self. The self conceives of itself as a subject set over against the objective universe. The unitary character of an originary experience is polarized around the new dichotomies of subject and object, mental and physical, internal and external. In the Hegelian ontology, the coming into being of an essentially objective consciousness is described in the illuminating figure of speech: 'lightening stroke of consciousness'.4 In the Heideggerian ontology, the distancing of the self from itself and from the world, is captured in the concept of an ontical mode of being, one whereby the self comes to interpret itself in tenns of entities which do not have the mode of being of a self.

The possibility of what might be called a distinctively reflective stage in the genesis of consciousness is nowhere better exemplified than in transcendental philosophy. Neither in the philosophies of Kant nor of Husserl is the distinction between a 'distinction' of consciousness and the body and an 'abstraction' of consciousness from the body clearly articulated. To be sure, with Kant, we do find the distinction of an 'empirical' and a 'transcendental' dimension of the mind and, with Husserl, a distinction between a 'natural' and a 'transcendental' attitude. But neither of these pairs of distinctions is explicitly tied down to a certain way in which the self stands in relation to its body. Kant tends to work within the limits of the traditional dichotomy of mental and physical, even though the disembodied character of transcendental consciousness is already indicated by his distinction between empirical and transcendental consciousness. In Husserl' s research material, as we have seen, we do find talk about an abstraction of consciousness from the body and about a self-suspension on the part of the phenomenologist. We do also find him talking about the absoluteness of consciousness vis-a-vis the relativity of being, talk which can very easily be taken in the direction of a concept of transcendental consciousness as


essentially disembodied. Much more pertinently, the differentiation of a transcendental dimension of consciousness is explicitly connected with a 'suspension', 'placing in abeyance', 'bracketing', etc., etc., of the world. This is why Heidegger will criticize the Husserlian phenomenology as a 'phenomenology of the worldless subject'. To make the contrast more explicit, where Heidegger established his ontological phenomenology on the basis of what he called a being-in-the-world of the self, Husserl may be said to have established his transcendental phenomenology on the basis of what might be called a being-out-of-the-world of the self.

From the above, it requires no great leap of the imagination to formulate the following principles. Just as objective consciousness is grounded in a constitutive distinction of consciousness and the body and, in accordance therewith, in a constitutive distinction of self and world, so reflective consciousness is grounded in a constitutive abstraction of consciousness from the body and, in accordance therewith, in a constitutive abstraction of consciousness from the world. But, in actual reality, of course, consciousness can not abstract from its being a body. Dis-embodiment is not a possible way of being for human being. Hence, the transcendental stance turns out to be little more than a hypothetical supposition, an 'as if' to use the language of Vaihinger.

The unreality of the assumption of a transcendental stance is precisely what motivates the movement of return to origins. The self can not be save by being that body which is its own. However, by adopting the circuitous route of fIrst, a distinction and then, an abstraction of consciousness from the body, the self is able to develop, in itself, those very intellectual resources which will be needed to throw light upon the original condition of being a body and of being in the world. Hence, the movement of return may be regarded as a realization of that very ideal of a reflective investigation fIrst made possible by the assumption of a transcendental stance.

So much for the Transcendental ego and the own body. It is time now to turn to the thematic of time. The task here will simply consist in sketching out the three (or four) concepts of time which can be aligned with the three stages of the progressive genesis. Time is experienced originally as lived time, as the time of the living present. There is an original flux which is experienced by the self as the insertion of the self in a process of continual change and alteration. Although Husserl never follows up this option, it is evident from our knowledge of primitive cultures that this fIrst experience of time as a time of the living present leads directly over to a cyclical conception of time, for the obvious reason that nature manifests itself primarily in terms of cyclical patterns - day and night, summer and winter, birth and death.


This cyclical time of the living present is followed by a concept of line~r time. From a linear perspective, time is envisaged as the 'measure of motion', as a measurable and, for that very reason, endless succession of instants. Objective time is the time with which we are most familiar. It is the time we tell when we use clocks to tell the time. It is the time we invoke when we record the time at which an event took place or the period over which an event transpired. It is the time presupposed by history, by chronology. It is a time which is represented in its essential disconnection from the self and the sequence of its experiences. No one expressed more effectively the essence of this disconnection than Bergson when he called objective time a spatialized time, a time refracted through the alien medium of space.

It is this objectified concept of time which Husserl places in abeyance with his reduction of time. But the reduction of the time of the world is only the preliminary to the disclosure of an alternative concept of time, the time of inner time consciousness. The immanental analysis of a phenomenologically reduced time leads on inevitably to the disclosure of an ultimately constitutive flux of consciousness and so to the question whether this constitutive flux can itself be constituted. We are already familiar with the difficulties into which Husserl's theory runs when he tries to constitute the flux. Much more important than any review of these difficulties is the observation that, in the very course of attempting to constitute the flux, Husserl finds himself obliged to appeal to a structure of coincidence which represents the very antithesis of that structure of presence which lies at the root of the phenomenological program. The disclosure, at the limit, of just such a structure of coincidence was taken as the motive for an ontological transposition of the thematic of time.

Heidegger's existential concept of time may be regarded as an illustration of what takes place when the resources of reflection are carried back to the origin with a view to laying the basis for a time of the living present. The fact that Heidegger places the primary emphasis upon the future rather than the present is nothing to the contrary. For the living present is already in itself a temporal dimension so all-encompassing that it actually includes within itself past, present and future. In his existential analysis of a temporalizing time, Heidegger is therefore only laying out explicitly what is already implicit in an original time of the living present. It is for this reason that Heidegger's own existential concept of time moves in a circle, from the future back to the past and so on to a present which is never actually present, as such, but which simply serves as the existential basis for a futural orientation.

It only remains to conclude with a sketch of the genetic theory of interpersonal relations. We may begin by according our assent to Heidegger


when he argued that being-with is an original condition, that, from an ontological standpoint, it makes no sense for the self to seek to prove the existence of an other since the other is there with me just as immediately as I am there with myself. However, we have already given grounds for thinking that the philosophical problem of solipsism can not be resolved by simply invoking a simple definition - being-with. Here, it is the Husserlian concept of 'Einfiihlung' or empathy which proves most helpful, provided that it is employed in an ontological rather than a transcendental fashion.5

Transcendentally speaking, the concept of empathy is invoked as part of an attempt to explain how I, out of, and on the basis of, my self, am able to carry over to the other the meaning of being another self. It is a fundamental characteristic of the transcendental theory that the self should be primary, and the other, secondary. Ontologically speaking, this order of priority is reversed. The self is not there for itself first and originally, and in such a way that it can then carry over to the other a meaning (of being a self) derived from its own experience of itself. Quite the contrary, the other is there first, is therefore the first self. The self projects itself in such a way that it puts its sense of being a self into the other, which thereby becomes a self. So far from first becoming aware of itself, through an immediate relation of itself with itself, it is from the other that the self learns what it is to be a self. And it is for this reason that the first sense of self which the self develops is not a sense of its own self but a sense of that self which it has been given to be by others. It is along these lines that it now becomes possible to appreciate the relative validity of Heidegger's doctrine of 'lostness in the They'.

With the transition to the stage of objective consciousness, the original, immediate relation of the self to the other falls apart into the mediate distance of one subject and another. Not only does the self find itself alienated from itself and from the world, more importantly, it finds itself alienated from the other, which thereby becomes another self with a mode of being of its own. Whereas empathic insight made it possible for the self to feel itself into the being of the other, all such access to the other is now precluded. Each self experiences its self as cut off from the other, which it nevertheless still tends to characterize as a self with a mode of being of its own. It is for this reason that theories of analogical inference are now concocted to explain how it is that I am able to infer to the existence of another self from my own experience of being a self.

It is this very assumption of the existence of other selves, an assumption which is upheld upon the objective plane despite the fact that each self is already conceived as shut up and isolated in its own subjective sphere of existence and experience, which is called in question with the hypothesis of


transcendental solipsism. In adopting a solipsistic stance, transcendental philosophy is only seeking to transcend the inconsistency which arises when one subject dogmatically affirms the existence of subjects other than its self. In the Kantian philosophy this problem is not explicitly tackled, to the point that, to all intents and purposes, there simply is no other subject. The absence of the other may however be taken as a (negative) indication of the solipsistic frame of reference within which the Critical philosophy already moves. Husserl, on the other hand, not only acknowledges the real force of the solipsistic objection, he strives to overcome the difficulty which lies at its root. But then his descriptions suffer from a self-defeating disjunction. Either his analyses remain upon a properly transcendental plane - in which case he is unable to solve the problem of solipsism. Or he solves the problem, but only insofar as his analyses have, at least implicitly, already forsaken the transcendental terrain and have been carried over, and so back into, a more properly ontological dimension.

The appropriation of the resources of reflection with a view to a working out of the structure of empathic insight can be regarded as the task that falls to ontological philosophy after something in the order of an ontological transposition has already been carried out. Following Scheler, the term 'sympathy' might be adopted to characterize the theory of being-with, not in its original instantiation, as empathic rapport, but in its conclusive realization. The difference might be brought out as follows. Empathy can be defined as the self living the life of the other, as its own. Here the self has so little awareness of its self that it is not aware of the difference of its self and other, and so experiences the other self as its own other self, as its alter ego. Sympathy, by contrast, can be defined as the self living the life of the other, as the other's. Here the original empathic rapport has been deepened (but not broken) by a development of the resources of reflection, a development which makes it possible for the self to be with an other that is now recognized to possess a selfhood of its own. The 'pathic' (to coin a term) core of both relations is rooted in 'living the life of the other'. Where sym-pathy differs from em-pathy is that, in the latter case, the life of the other is lived, as own, whereas, in the former case, the life of the other is lived, as the other's. Only a self which has developed a sense of its own self is capable of recognizing the otherness of another self, while still feeling its way into the being of the other.

We have come a long way, much further than this brief re-construction could ever possibly confirm. Starting with a recognition of the difficulties into which transcendental phenomenology gets itself when it seeks to constitute certain critical regions of being, those precisely which are constitutive of the very being of the self, we have been brought to recognize


the need for an alternative, ontological phenomenology. Such a phenomenology was worked out by Heidegger but in such a way that the relative, and legitimate, claims of transcendental phenomenology were effectively lost sight of. By adopting a genetic methodology, we have been able to reintegrate, in one frame of reference, the two competing projects of transcendental and ontological phenomenology. Only one question remains to be answered, the question whether this new, 'genetic' phenomenology really is ontological in character, in its entirety.

There are two possibilities, the first, that only the first and originary stage is a genuinely ontological stage, the other two stages standing for a suspension, or at least a diminution, of the original condition of a coincidence of consciousness and the body. In the context of a genetic ontology which adopts a progressive rather than a regressive procedure, consciousness only makes its appearance insofar as the self establishes an ever increasing distance from its body. The more consciousness, the less being - or so it would seem.

There are many reasons for thinking that the above representation of the genesis is erroneous. First, the genesis moves in a circle and in such a way that the goal of the entire development is nothing other than a return to the original ground. From this it follows that the genesis never really leaves the ground in which it is rooted but only appears to do so, in order precisely to allow for that development of consciousness without which there could be nothing like a conscious or, better still, self-conscious appropriation of the origin.6

Secondly, although the original coincidence of consciousness and the body is lost as we move through the two succeeding stages of a distinction and an abstraction of consciousness from the body, the ontological principle of coincidence nevertheless makes a derivative appearance at the end of the entire progressive genesis, albeit in the guise of a (transcendental) coincidence of consciousness with itself, qua consciousness, rather than an (ontological) coincidence of consciousness with itself, qua body. Indeed, it was the reappearance of the principle of coincidence, at the very limit of the attempt to constitute the fundamental parameters of the self, which gave us grounds for attempting something in the order of an ontological transposition.

Third, if, as Heidegger suggests, the ontic sphere was entirely devoid of ontological substance, it would be impossible to account for the selfsustaining, self-upholding character of objective consCiousness. But so far from it being the case that 'ontic thinking' is ever aware of its non-original character and so displays an inherent tendency to invoke more fundamental modes of thought which, as such, are more adequately grounded, the kind


of philosophical thinking which dominates the ontic plane has become so self-sufficient, and so secure in its self-ascribed sovereignty over the entire philosophical terrain, that the task of uncovering the original ground has assumed monumental proportions.

For all these reasons, the entire genesis should be regarded as an ontological genesis. Ontology, Heidegger declared, is only possible as phenomenology. But, if phenomenology and ontology tum out to be one and the same thing, this is not just because (transcendental) phenomenology can be transformed into its ontological equivalent but also because the genesis of human being can be envisaged from a double standpoint; either from the standpoint of being or from the standpoint of consciousness, either from the standpoint of that which confers a being upon consciousness or from the standpoint of that which makes it possible for human being to develop, within itself, a measure of consciousness.

In the context of this new, genetic ontology, it is not so much ontological phenomenology which represents a critical modification of the more fundamental, transcendental method but rather transcendental phenomenology which represents a critical modification of the more fundamental, ontological phenomenology. The transcendental stance is so far from being an original standpoint that it can only be assumed by a consciousness which has already moved through the several stages of ontological and epistemological understanding. To be sure, in one sense, transcendental phenomenology is the necessary prerequisite for that ontological transposition as a result of which it becomes possible to open up for investigation a new, ontological domain. But, in another sense, the return to the origin is only a return to what must originally have already been instantiated, admittedly in unreflected form, in order to be available for reflective recuperation.

In the end therefore, the question whether the genesis is phenomenologicalor ontological in character becomes an otiose question. Being can only show itself insofar as it manifests itself. The self-manifestation of being can only be seen insofar as it is understandingly appropriated by a being for which the question of being is an issue, namely, human being. From the standpoint of the manifestation of being, the genesis is phenomenological in character. From the standpoint of the being of manifestation, the genesis is ontological in character'?

NOTES

1. If one goes back a couple of centuries, one also finds a development of this kind taking place in the line of thought represented by German Idealism from Kant to Hegel. The


'I' of Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre is defined as an activity (Tiitigkeit) in order precisely to allow for a reversal of the respective priority accorded to the Critique of Pure and Practical Reason. However, the purely formal defmition of the 'I' (I = I, on the one hand, and I * not I, on the other) makes it difficult for Fichte to recognize the concrete character of the 'I' as embodied.

2. This paradox is actually voiced by Heidegger in Being and Time, when he says: 'Dasein is ontically "closest" to itself and ontologically farthest; but pre-ontologically it is surely not a stranger.' [H. 16]

3. It is strange that it should have taken Western philosophy so long to recognize the fundamental role which the own body must play in any metaphysical conception of human reality. Schopenhauer built the concept of the body into the metaphysical principle of the will, which features, in World as Will and Representation, as one of the two primary metaphysical principles upon which his philosophy is based. In a more psychological vein, Maine de Biran undertook a detailed investigation of the fundamental role of the body in thought as well as in experience and action (see esp., Memoire sur la decomposition de la pensee.) Bergson's Matter and Memory takes up again this theme of the primacy of the body, a theme which, with Merleau-Ponty's analyses, became, for a while, the most distinctively French contribution to phenomenological philosophy. More recently still, Hermann Schmitz has made the body the basis of a massive ten volume System der Philosophie in which we find a wealth of empirical evidence brought forward to substantiate a phenomenological philosophy laid out in a systematically connected fashion. As a result of developments such as these, I think it is possible to conclude that Heidegger's rejection of the body, as a viable ontological category, can no longer be accepted.

4. In the later context of the Encyclopedia, the Phenomenology is prefaced with an Anthropology, thereby indicating that, in the overall framework of a Philosophy of Spirit (the Third Part of the Encyclopedia), the Phenomenology is itself grounded in an (ontological) Anthropology which does acknowledge, even if only in a negative and deficient manner, the basis of human being in its being a body.

5. Max Scheler so despaired of the Husserlian concept of 'Einfiihlung' that, when he came to write his path-breaking Phiinomenologie der Sympathiegefiihle, he explicitly rejected the concept of empathy in favour of that of sympathy. See, The Nature of Sympathy, translated from the German by Peter Heath.

6. This distinction between a genesis which moves within the ground and one which moves out of the ground, but only in order to be restored to the ground again, is already to be found in Proclus. The genesis within the ground is universal in character. A genesis which moves out of the ground is therefore needed in order to confer an individual character upon human development. But the genesis without the ground is, in the end, grounded in the genesis within the ground. see: Elements of Theology and also Proclus' Commentary on Plato's Timaeus.

7. The emphasis placed here upon the concept of manifestation can be justified with reference to the magnificent phenomenological achievement of Michel Henry in his seminal work: The Essence of Manifestation. The construction of an ontology of immanence, in explicit opposition to Heidegger's ontology of transcendence, represents an ingenious attempt to reconcile the 'interiority' of Husserlian phenomenological analyses with the new orientation given to phenomenological philosophy by Heidegger, and this by adopting, as the grounding category, the concept of affectivity.

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Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964, Phaenomenologica vol. 18. Theunissen, Michael, Der Andere. tr. by Christopher Macann as The Other.

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984. Tugendhat, Ernst, Der Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger. Berlin:

de Gruyter, 1967.

Subject Index

abstraction 25, 77, 79, 85, 86, 90, 97, 108, 124, 127, 129, 130

from the body 43, 44, 51, 127, 130, 134

action 48, 50, 53, 59,92,93, 94, 95, 96,97,98

body, own/organic/lived/animate (Leib) 4, 28, 34, 39, 40, 42, 43, 51,55,56,57,87,88,89,90, 91,92,93,94,95,96,97,98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105,107,108,109,110,111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 128, 129, 131, 132

body, physical/material (Korper) 89, 97,98, 100, 102, 107, 110, 111, 112,113

coincidence 4, 49, 67, 74, 76, 77, 78, 85,86,96,97,99,100,103, 112, 123, 127, 128, 129, 131, 134

constitution 4,6,8,9, 10, 13, 15, 16, 22,23,28,34,39,40,41,42, 45,46,47,48,49,51,54,58, 60,67,71,73,75,76,77,85, 86,87,88,90,91,95,96,97, 101,103

of animal nature 90 of the ego 41, 44, 47, 48, 49, 51, 54,

85 of the flux 58, 71, 73, 75 of human reality 106 of inner time 41,55,56,72

139

of material nature 88, 89, 91 of the other subject 102, 104, 109,

111 of the own body 54, 55, 85, 86, 88,

91,95,96,98,99,109 of space 60, 96 of tactuality 94

distinction, from the body 7, 15,42, 111,127,129,130,134

ego 4,34,39,40,41,42,43,44,47, 48,50,51,55,129

de facto 49, 50, 51, 53 eidos 47, 49, 50, 51, 53 empirical 42, 46, 51 monadic 42, 47, 48 personal 47, 48, 55 profound 60 pure 42,43,44,45,47,49,50,51,

90 transcendental 4, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47,

49,51,53,56,57,60,75,81, 87,89,98,106, 111, 113, 120, 129

empathy/empathic 88, 89, 91, 112, 113,114,116,132,133

epistemological 4, 6, 7, 10, 12, 26, 31, 39,42,117, 135

existence 81, 82, 83,105, 128 existential 31, 48, 82, 100, 116,

117,131

genesis 5, 6, 27, 28, 33, 40, 47, 48, 60, 110, 124, 125, 126, 128, 129,

140

130, 134, 135 genetic (ontology) 40,88, 123, 126,

134, 135 genetic (phenomenology) 3, 5, 10,

14,23,24,25,26,28,29,35, 39,47,48,52,53,119,123, 124, 125

hyle 11,23,24,28,29

immanence 9,10,11, 12, 13, 18,21, 22,29,43,53,61,105,107,108

immanent 7,8,9, 10, 11, 12,28,29, 67,68,71,72,74,75,77,105, 107

intentionality 11, 16,24,27,69,74, 75, 76

longitudinal 75, 76 transversal 75

intersubjectivity 13, 14,27,43,89,97, 103, 106, 115, 116, 118

kinaesthetic sensations 92, 93, 97, 98

morphe 23, 24

noema/noematic 8,19,21,22,23,24, 27,45,51,60,68,91,92,93, 94,95,97,99

noesis/noetic 8, 19,21,23,24,29,45, 51,52,60,68,91,92,93,94, 95,99

noetico-noematic 17, 107

objective consciousness 24, 98, 129, 130, 132, 134

ontic 101, 102, 116, 117, 125, 129, 134,135

ontological 3,4, 5, 6, 13, 24, 26, 29, 30,31,33,34,39,40,46,54, 57,72,74,78,81,82,85,88, 99, 101, 102, 103, 107, 108, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116,117,124,125,126,127, 128, 129, 132, 133, 134, 135

circle 126 difference 127 equi-primordiality 113 genesis 126, 135 phenomenology 4, 5, 6, 29, 40, 49,

100,101,102,115,124,126, 128, 130, 134, 135

transposition 14,39,40,53,54,56, 58,72,80,99,100,124,126, 131,133, 134, 135

originary 125, 126, 127, 129, 134 other subject 4, 27, 35, 39, 40, 102,

103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 111, 113, 133

presence 4, 19,74,78,81, 103, 123, 127, 128, 131

progressive (cf. regressive) 5, 6, 33, 35,40,123,125,126,130,134

protention 20, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67 psycho-somatic 42,100,101,106,108

reduction 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17,18,20,21,28,39,42,43, 46,48,49,52,58,59,79,83, 87, 88, 94, 104, 105, 106, 108, 111,112,115,116,117,131

of objective space 59 of objective time 12,58-60

reflective consciousness 50, 51, 86, 130

reflex ion 79,80 reflexive 79, 80, 81 reflexivity 80, 101, 128

regions of being 4, 6, 9, 27, 41, 46,86, 101, 105, 106, 123, 133

regressive (cf. progressive) 5, 6, 14, 24,28,33,35,40,71,123,124, 125,134

reproduction 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 78 retention 20, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68,

69, 70, 75, 78

solipsism 14,27,88,90, 103, 104, 105, 115, 117, 118, 132, 133

soul/psyche (Seele) 46, 90, 91, 92, 93, 102,108

spirit (Geist) 43, 46,53,89,90, 102, 108

spiritual I 43, 93 spiritual reality 92 spiritual world 46, 90, 91, 93, 108

sympathy 133

time 12, 16,25,34,39,40,56,57,58, 59,60,63,64,67,69,71,72, 75,76,80,117,130,131

as self-affection 81 existential time 81, 83, 117, 131 flux of time 4, 16, 44, 52, 57, 58,

69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77,78,79,80,82,85,92,99, 131

infinite time 83 Kant's theory of time 82 objective time 12,57,58,59,71,

81,107,131 original temporal flux 130 primordial time 82 temporalizing time 26, 79, 80, 81,

82,83,103,131 time consciousness 4, 9,12,16,17,

44,57,58,59,60,71,72

time order 71 time series 82

141

transcendence 10, 11, 12, 13, 17,29, 43,44,52,79,105,107

in immanence 43 transcendent 7, 8,10,11,12,13,17,

21,22,29 transcendental 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10,

12,13,14,15,16,17,18,22, 23,24,25,26,27,28,29,31, 33,34,39,40,41,43,44,46, 47,49,51,52,54,58,71,72, 73,75,76,77,78,79,80,81, 82,85,86,87,99,103,104, 106, 107, 108, 109, 111, 115, 118, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129,130,132,133,134,135

ego 4, 42, 45, 46, 47, 49, 51, 52, 54, 55,58,73,79,85,86,87,96, 104, 108, 109, 111, 118, 127, 130

object 20, 21, 22 phenomenology 4,5,6,8,13,17,

23,24,26,27,30,33,35,40, 78, 100, 124, 130, 133, 134, 135

philosophy 3, 5, 23, 30, 81, 82,96, 112, 126, 129, 133

subject 99, 100, 106, 109

Name Index

Aguirre 25 Almeida 24, 25

Bachelard 26 Bergson 57, 58, 75, 131 Broekman 9

Claesges 28, 96

Fink 86

Hegel 5,6, 32, 33,52, 115, 123, 126, 129

Heidegger4, 5, 6,14,29,30,31,33, 34,39,40,54,55,57,81,82, 100, 101, 102, 112, 113, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 123, 124, 125, 126, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 134, 135

Held 80 Husserl3, 4,5,6,7,8,9, 10, 11, 12,

13,14,15,16,17,18,19,21, 22,23,25,26,27,28,29,30, 31,32,34,39,40,41,42,43, 44,46,47,48,49,51,52,53, 54,55,57,58,60,61,62,65,

143

66,67,69,70,71,72,74,75, 76,77,78,79,81,82,86,87, 88,89,90,91,94,95,96,98, 99, 100, 101, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, Ill, 112,113,114,115,116,117, 118, 119, 123, 124, 125, 128, 129,130,131,132,133

Kant 3, 5, 7,8,12,15,16,21,23,24, 25,30,31,32,54,55,58,81, 82, 112, 129, 133

Levinas 8

Marbach 41, 42, 53, 54, 86 Merleau-Ponty 17,93,97,101,102

Ricoeur 105

Sartre 34, 116, 118, 128 Scheler 133 Sokolowski 15

Theunissen 100, 114, 115

presence and coincidence: the transformation of transcendental into ontological phenomenology

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