2

Species and Intention

What only I mean (meine) is mine (mein). It belongs to me as this particular individual. If, however, language expresses only the universal, then I cannot say what only

I mean.

Hegel, Encyclopedia

Propositions in Themselves and Essences

The renunciation of existence (Dasein) bestows much greater significance on Husserl′s doctrine of logical absolutism than that of a mere style of interpreting formal logic. Logical axioms, elevated to propositions in themselves, offer the model of fact-free, pure essentialities whose foundation and description phenomenology as a whole chooses as its task and identifies with the concept of philosophy. Husserl′s interpretation of the formal a priori dominated both his conception of all truth and that of his pupils, even the apostates among them. It even marks the thesis that being is organized before all entities.

The movement of the concept went beyond the Prolegomena, for empty forms of thought cannot be isolated from what are called problems of constitution in traditional epistemology. The validity of logical principles was, outside of dialectical doctrine, hardly controversial even before Husserl. The extraordinary effect of primarily his particular theorem can only be explained by the fact that it emphatically expressed the long since mature consciousness of a much troubled state-of-affairs. For the first time since the collapse of the great systems, the philosophical struggle against psychologism attests to the insufficiency of the individual as a legal ground for truth. It thus goes far beyond the neo-Kantian nuances given to the transcendental. But now anti-individualism does not proclaim the primacy of the whole over the particular, but just also acknowledges the ruin of the individual itself. Since every component of the legitimization of truth is taken away from the individual and its structure, logic, alienated from all reality, exposes the individual to its real nullity.

Far from culture-critical reasoning, Husserl conceives thoughts which blend the defeatism of the impotent individual with the sufferings of the monadological condition. Thus the Prolegomena functioned as an historical seismograph. It unifies the long-suppressed foreboding that individuation itself may be mere appearance and produced by the law implicit in it, with aversion to the very negative reality whose law in fact degrades the individual to mere appearance. Husserl′s concept of essence scintillates with such ambiguity. Nothing is more timely than its timelessness. Phenomenological purity, idiosyncratically against all contact with the factical, still remains perishable like a flower ornament. ′Essence′ was the cherished Jugendstil expression for the consumptive soul whose metaphysical lustre springs only from nothingness and the renunciation of existence. This soul′s sisters are the Husserlian essentialities, phantasmagoric reflections of a subjectivity which hopes to obliterate itself within them as their ′sense′. The more subjective their ground, the more extravagant the pathos of their objectivity. The more manically they posit themselves as states-of-affairs, the more despairingly thought swears by a non-existent.

All of Husserl′s philosophy is directed to resistance. It is the abstract negation of the subjectivism it sees through, though it remains imprisoned in the subjectivistic domain. It partakes of the feebleness it denounces. Phenomenology hovers in a region for which the favourite allegory in those years was the cloud daughters,* a no man′s land between subject and object, the deceptive mirage of their reconciliation. Philosophically, the sphere in which pale disembodied young things in flower are called ′essences′, is reflected by meaning (Meinen) as the subjective gesture towards an opposite, whose content is nevertheless exhausted in the subjective act.

Thus Husserl′s ontology and doctrine of essence, the expansion of the absolutistic motif to epistemology and metaphysics, is connected to his doctrine of intentions. He transfers to intentions the procedure which logical absolutism conjured up. What is thought becomes essence through the isolation of individual ′acts′ and ′lived experiences′ (Erlebnisse) over against an experience 98 (Erfahrung) which, as a whole, has by this time practically disappeared from the field of vision of his philosophy. The decaying individual is just the content of particular lived experiences which are touted as surrogates of concrete experience, but no longer have control over such experience itself. The peculiar lived experience which is lifted out of the monotony of reified life, the dispersed instant of decrepit, doomed fulfilment as the salvation of absent metaphysical sense – as Christian Morgenstern* scoffed at it (′Another lived experience full of honey′) – is the historical model of Husserl′s idea of the universal which is granted to singular intentions.

Lived Experience (Erlebnis) and ′Sense′

The Prolegomena makes no room for the concept of an essence derivable from the individual. It remains on the ground of traditional theory of abstraction.

Truths divide into individual and general truths. The former contain (whether explicitly or implicitly) assertions regarding the actual existence of individual singulars, whereas the latter are completely free from this and only permit us to infer (purely from concepts) the possible existence of what is individual. Individual truths are as such contingent.¹

The individual and the factical are directly equated. It is not acknowledged that an individual can have an essence independently of its existence (Existenz).

It is only the doctrine of intentional acts which leads to that. For the point of this doctrine from the beginning was the development of isolated ′lived experiences′ corresponding to always equally isolated ′unreal′ sense implicates (Sinnesimplikate) which are meant by the ′act′.

Here and now, at the very moment that we significantly utter a general name, we mean (meinen) what is general, and our meaning differs from our meaning when we mean what is individual. The difference must be pinned down in the descriptive content of the isolated lived experience, in the individually and actually performed general assertion.²

The fact, however, that meaning itself and thus the quality of the act should vary, according to whether a universal or an individual is meant, remains a bald assertion, provided that anything more is supposed to be said than the tautology, that in both cases intentional objects belong to distinct logical classes, and that acts may also be divided according to the class of their object. It remains, moreover, difficult to attribute distinct characteristica to the individual acts which should form those classes. While Husserl certainly does not attempt that either, he nevertheless tacitly infers from the logical difference of objects that the difference prescribed by the types of thing meant (des Gemeinten) ′must be pinned down … in the descriptive content of the isolated lived experience′. Therefore, the constitution of the acts as such is supposed to change.

This apparently insignificant postulate, the subtle mistake of dogmatically inferring absolute differences in the ways objects are meant from the logical differences of objects of thought, has enormous consequences. By seeking the difference in the descriptive content of the ′isolated lived experiences′ and positing a primordial split between meaning a particular and meaning a universal, Husserl shifts this arbitrarily concocted split in the character of meaning on to what is meant. As a result, universal and particular are radically distinguished because different sorts of act of meaning arise in each case. This distinction itself simply mirrors that of the classes of what is meant and does not establish it. Thus the distinctiveness of classes of what is meant still needs to be derived. The ′descriptive content′ of individual lived experiences in any event adapts to the character of the ′finished products′, the result of the completed distinction. But it does not establish any primary ′ideal unities′ independent of multiplicities and abstraction.

Critique of Singular ′Senses′

Moreover, Husserl′s actual procedure in his deduction contradicts the phenomenological programme. An analysis which seriously abides by what it supposedly encounters (Vorfindlichkeiten) in the life of consciousness, would not run into such singularities of lived experience and thus not into absolutely singular ′senses′ either. Senses are in fact what the phenomenological Husserl criticized as theoretical constructions, rudiments of atomistic psychology of association. Just as no lived experience is ′singular′ but rather interlaced with the totality of individual consciousness, and thus necessarily points beyond itself, so there are no such things as absolute senses or references (Bedeutungen). Any sense, of which thought becomes aware at all, possesses, by dint of thinking, an element of universality, and is more than just itself. Even in the already much too simple case of remembering a person′s name, this memory involves moments such as the relation of the name to its object, its identifying function, the quality of the name, inasmuch as it means this individual directly and not another, and innumerable vague or articulated other things. Describing the relationship between memory and what is remembered as absolutely individual and univocal would be logicist arbitrariness.

If one were to assume, however, that the construction of any individual act and any individual reference (Bedeutung) were necessary, indifferently as to whether they arise or not, in order to work out how consciousness becomes capable of articulated knowledge, then the traditional idealistic mode of procedure would be re-installed. But then it would be incomprehensible why one should adhere to the alleged ′pure references′ in the construction, and not, rather, proceed in their analysis in the same way as the older epistemology where that sensation or is necessarily attained, against which pure theory of meaning (Bedeutung) seeks to protect itself.

Husserl correctly criticizes Hume³ to the effect that a ′conglomerate′ of concrete images brings knowledge no further than the individual representation. But in the Logical Investigations he himself adheres to the Humean motif of the conglomerate, in that he transfers unity to the reference function (Bedeutungsfunktion) alone, i.e. to thought. He does not notice that the ostensible ultimate data are already not a conglomerate but rather – as Gestalt theory* has already proved ad nauseam– are structured and more than the sum of their parts. He also, however, ignores categorial connection or ′synthesis′.

Phenomenological conceptual realism is in no way the simple alternative to the nominalist tradition which adds together consciousness out of atomistic lived experiences. The two, rather, since Franz Brentano, are also complements. The two polar moments of the individual and unity congeal into absolute determinations as soon as they cease to be understood as reciprocally producing each other and thus also produced. Thinking, whose result is conjured into being, juxtaposes separated singularity and autonomized universality as elements having equal rights, independent of each other and ultimately valid. Both owe the illusion of their absoluteness to having been broken off and the emphasis on their positivity to something negative. And it is this very illusion, together with the abstractness to which separation condemns both, that permits the concept of an ideal being to be distilled from both of them and to be prepared through a selection of their qualities. The two may indeed be thereby found to be the same. Since for Husserl the materials of cognition are, in accord with idealist dogma, chaotic, he absolutizes the intentional object as something conjointly given and thus indubitable. It is determinate and to that extent an objective entity.

He does not agree with the customary epistemological distinction between the act as immediately given and what is meant as mediately given. He is content to rigidly delimit the intentional object from both sides. From the side of sensation, since, as he correctly points out, one perceives not a complex of colours but rather ′the fir tree′.⁴ From the side of the thing, since it is a matter of indifference whether the intentional object ′exists′ in the time–space continuum. Thus the construction of perception, our meaning of something present to the senses, turns out to be a hybrid. The immediacy of the act is attributed to the act-sense. The symbolic content is invested with corporeality. The ′pure′, fact-free intentional object remains an expedient. It does not produce what it should, i.e. an objectification of experiences, nor is the immediacy appropriate to it for whose sake Husserl claims that it is the canon of all cognition.

The two desiderata of the certainty of the given and the necessity of the spiritually transparent – which could not be made to overlap since Plato and Aristotle and whose mediation is the task of the entire history of idealism – were desperately identified with each other by Husserl who ultimately lost confidence in that mediation. He wished to force a draw in the divergence between sensibility and understanding and indeed that between subject and object, as though in a momentary pause ignoring endurance and constitution. The hypostatized object is the primordial image (Urbild) of all later phenomenological essentialities as the indifference between ideality and objecthood.

Origin of Essential Insight (Wesensschau)

Husserl used the concept of essential insight itself long before the theory of categorial intuition. The second Logical Investigation of volume 2 is meant to show, according to the Preface in the Prolegomena,

that one can learn to see ideas in a type, represented e.g. by the idea ′red′, and that one can become clear as to the essence of such ′seeing′.⁵

Husserl opposes the ′consciousness of meaning′ (Bedeutungs-bewuβtsein) of abstraction ′in that improper sense′

by which empiricist psychology and epistemology are dominated, a sense which altogether fails to seize what is specific, and whose inability to do so is even counted as a virtue.⁶

He was thus alerted that what is essential to a state-of-affairs and what befits a species, its ′specificity′, cannot be attained through its sortal concept (Artbegriff), the unity of features of several states-of-affairs.

In this way he is in tune with the impulses of the other academic philosophers of his generation who otherwise diverge from him significantly, sµch as Dilthey, Simmel and Rickert, each of whom in his own way recalled what had already motivated Kant′s Critique of Judgment and thereafter became a banality, i.e. that causal-mechanical and classificatory explanation does not go to the heart of the object and forgets what is most important about it. No scholar at the end of the nineteenth century, even those who were disinclined to any metaphysical speculation, could ignore this, as long as he studied ′individual things′. Even Husserl frequently found in a unique concrete thing – insistently contemplated and elucidated – deeper and more binding insight into far-reaching relations than would a procedure which tolerates in the individual only what can be subsumed under general concepts.

Not without irony, nor irrelevantly to philosophical history, at the same time as Husserl undertook to rescue the essence of comparative universality, his countryman and opposite number, Sigmund Freud, against the entire claim and tendency of whose psychology Husserl′s polemic against psychologism could have been directed, employed, in spite of a flawless scientific position and with the most enduring effect, the very procedure for determining the essence of the individual ′case′ whose epistemological formula Husserl sought. But like Freud Husserl was also a child of his period. For he would think those essentialities which arise from the individual in no other way than as universal concepts of the type of the logic of the exact sciences. In fact, the energy of his project has its centre here. He rejected the split between natural and cultural sciences which was in favour at the beginning of his career, i.e. the split between divergent ways of cognizing the individual or historical on the one hand, and mathematical universals on the other. He stood for the idea of a single truth, and tried to force together the unspoiled concretion of individual experience and the binding force of the concept. He never rested content with the pluralism of truth according to the realms of knowledge.

That indeed accounts for the magnetic force of his starting point. But it also involves him in difficulties, which the Southwest German academic philosophers comfortably avoided. Since he is impressed by mathematics and thus does not venture to conceive the specific or ′essential′, to which he is addicted, otherwise than as the class of scientific concept formation, he must turn to deducing the classificatory concept from singularity and so distinguishes those two types of abstraction.

′Ideational Abstraction′

Husserl calls improper what is otherwise known as abstraction, i.e. the construction of concepts by isolating and organizing a single feature from a multiplicity of objects. Against abstraction, he insists that essence, which constitutes a type, arises in a single act of meaning (Bedeutens).

When we mean red in specie, a red object appears before us, and in this sense we look towards the red object to which we are nevertheless not referring (meinen). The aspect of red is at the same time emphasized in this object, and to that extent we can again say that we are looking towards this aspect of red. But we do not mean this individually definite trait in the object as we do when, e.g., we make the phenomenological observation that the aspects of red in the separate portions of the apparent object′s surface are themselves separate. While the red object and its emphasized aspect of red appear before us, we rather mean the single identical red, and mean it in a novel and conscious manner, through which precisely the species, and not the individual, becomes the object.⁷

When we ′mean′ (meinen) a particular, in this case ′a red object of intuition′, its ′moment of redness′ also comes forward, that feature which constitutes the species. It is this that we ′look towards′ and thus secure for ourselves the ideal unity of the species, without the need for other examples, other ′red objects′.

The weakness of the argumentation lies in the use of the term ′identical′. For in that act we are indeed supposed to become conscious of ′the single identical red′ and thus encounter the species itself instead of simply the individual. Yet one can speak meaningfully (sinnvoll) about identity only in relation to multiplicity. There is ′identical red′ at all only for several objects which are red in common with each other. The expression need minimally apply to the continuity of perceived colours in a thing, i.e. to something purely phenomenal.

The two merge in Husserl. The fact that what is perceived in that act during perception is and remains one and the same, is substituted for the identity of the concept as the unity of features of distinct examples. The red perceived as self-identical is not, by dint of such an identity, already the species red. Unless, of course, Husserl assumes comparative operations – though unavowedly. ′Identical′ may in the strict sense signify nothing other at the crucial point than what is meant in a specific act. This identity, the relation of an intention to a captured ′This here′, is, however, interpreted as if it were already the identity of the universal concept. If that concept were to become an intentional object, then it would have to be given in advance, i.e. already constituted. The act as such, on the other hand, is indifferent to whether in it an individual or something conceptual is ′meant′.

Pure meaning (Meinen) pays no attention to the constitution and justification of what is meant. Otherwise it would already be a judgement. The ′red′ which is ideated out of the singular colour perception would only be a ′reduced′ ′This here′ decorated with the obligatory phenomenological brackets. Only language, which denotes both the singular red moment and the species red, entices one to the hypostasis of the latter. Husserl′s ′ideational abstraction′ – the counter-concept which he invents against the comparative and prevailing logical concept – postulates that the elementary forms of consciousness already reify their subject matter, without any heed to comparison. These forms fix the subject matter, as it were, under an optical lens, and so push absolute singularity into the ′identical′ – an identical which is independent of the way in which it is identical.

At the suggestion of the alleged system of sciences, Husserl finds in one case pure truths of reason, vérités de raison, which have been diluted to ideal unities of validity, and in the other (his own) the equally ′pure′ (i.e. cleansed of all naturalistic prejudices) immanence of consciousness. There is no relation between the two except that pure immanence of consciousness is supposed to be a peep-hole open to those ideal unities. That is the construction of meaning (Meinens). Since the point of origin of ideal objects, as simply meant, is not epistemologically evident, Husserl makes them independent of the acts of consciousness which compose them. The pure object of intention should be the ideal unity. The in-itself should appear in the act. Husserl will do justice to the desideratum, ′Learn to see ideas′, by introducing a type of act

in which the objects apprehended in these manifold forms of thought are self-evidently ′given′, with the acts, in other words, in which our conceptual intentions are fulfilled, achieve self-evidence and clarity. Thus we directly apprehend the specific unity ′redness′ on the basis of a singular intuition of something red. We look to its moment of red, but we perform a peculiar act, whose intention is directed to the ′idea′, the ′universal′. Abstraction in the sense of this act is wholly different from the mere attention to, or emphasis on, the moment of red; to indicate this difference we have repeatedly spoken of ideational or generalizing abstraction.⁸

Thus he succumbs to the very contamination of which he accuses Locke and Lockean doctrine.⁹ He immediately interprets the act which is directed to the ′abstract part moment′ of content as the intuition of the species, as long as that moment is based on something hyletic. He profits to a degree from two mutually exclusive qualifications: First, the immediacy with which something red is perceived should guarantee the intuitive (anschauliches) character of the act; but secondly, so that the sense perceptible does not thus present itself as isolated, but rather as interwined with thought, that immediacy should also turn the immediately intuited into something mental (geistig), i.e. a concept, which shines immediately on singularity, heedless of the character of the concept as the abstract unity of identical moments. The doctrine comes down to the fact that, if someone observes a red object and becomes conscious of this object as something red – though the relation between these two moments is unclear – then he has not only the specific sensation but also has in this sensation a concept of red in general.

Now, it is certainly not to be denied that, thanks to its categorial moments, the act surpasses pure sensation. That is, moreover, a tautology, since this difference simply terminologically defines the difference between sensation and act. If this distinction were consequently disavowed as a mere theoretical auxiliary construction, and if the existence of category-free data were denied, and along with Hegel immediacy were determined as always already mediated in itself, then the very concept of immediate knowledge would be eliminated, though Husserl′s polemic against abstraction theory rests on this concept.

Husserl, however, unscrupulously adheres to the traditional difference between the hyletic and the categorial. Yet one can meaningfully speak of categorial activity only when the immediate is related to the past and the future, memory and expectation. As soon as consciousness does not abide by the pure concept-free ′This here′, but rather forms any concept however primitive, then it brings into play knowledge of non-present moments which are not ′here′, not intuitive and not absolutely singular, but distilled from some other. Always more belongs to the ′proper sense′ of an act than its proper sense, the canon of Husserl′s method. Every act transcends its periphery in that its meant content, in order to be meant, always demands the co-meaning of another. Thus no act analysis either is capable of restricting itself to the bounds of the singularity of the putative (vermeinten) object.

Hence the appeal to the act sense as something constant and reposing in itself – such as Husserl demands in accord with the schema of a naive realism which he elsewhere eliminates from epistemology – changes from an ultimate principle into something insufficient or at least merely propaedeutic. The assumption of such an act sense, however, which is solid in itself, unvarying and free of dynamics, is the model for Husserl′s construction of essence. His essentialities are singularities which lack nothing other than to be factical (Faktisch-Sein), in that they are determined as purely mental, i.e. ′meant′. If one were to think away from a sensation of colour that it is in space and time, i.e. that it is real (wirklich), then this sensation would become the concept of a sensed colour. But in that case the simplest thing is misunderstood. The sheer idea of this one τόδε τί remains left over and its species is never attained.

Essentialities are in no sense to be distinguished from what is conceived as rigidly reified and also as (purely intentional) unreal act sense. They are not, e.g., ′ideal unities′. That is imputed to them from the outside. The emancipation of the ideal unity of the species from the performance of abstraction is illusory, analogously to the emancipation of the proposition in itself from thought. What can only be determined as a result, in this case the concept, is hypostatized for the sake of a guarantee, which does not devolve upon the concept, e.g., as something detached, but rather just in its relation to the totality of experience.

However true it may be that the species is not exhausted in the process of abstraction, since identical moments must be at hand for a concept to be formed at all from abstraction from the diverse, nevertheless these identical moments cannot be separated from the abstracting operation and discursive thought. And, just as in logical absolutism, Husserl again conjures away subjectivity – in this case, thinking as synthesis. For he breaks open particulars and forges those moments in them, which are functions of their structure, into singular characteristica. The mechanism of the Husserlian ontology is throughout one of isolation – as is the case for all static doctrines of ideas since Plato. It is thus the very scientific-classificatory technique which Husserl′s attempt to reproduce pure immediacy actually opposes. Goal and method cannot be united.

Abstraction and τόδɛ τί

What is called ′ideational abstraction′ in Husserl′s example, is, as he says, nothing radically different from distinguishing and focusing on a dependent content in a complex perception. It is, rather, just an interpretation of that mental performance which is contrived for the sake of the epistemological thema probandum. When thus focused, the partial content is meant as something abstract in the literal understanding and distilled from the complex phenomenon. But, as part of a concrete intuition, it is also supposed to be intuited.

Thus fraudulent plausibility devolves on to the paradox of intuitive abstraction. Husserl merely suppresses the fact that even the focusing on the moment red (in psychological terminology, the directing of attention) is no longer identical with the pure datum. As soon as one turns one′s view to ′red itself′ (′das′ Rot), then one categorizes and breaks up the unity of the act of perception, which applies to this colour, for example, together with other things observed here and now. The accentuated ′red moment′ isolates the moment ′colour′ from the present perception. If ever this were isolated as an autonomous unity, it would thereby fall into relations with other colours. Otherwise the colour moment could not be set off as autonomous at all, since in present perception it is simply blended into other things. It attains autonomy only by being brought together with a completely distinct dimension of experience, viz. past acquaintance with colour as such. It must be representative of ′colour′ as is accorded to consciousness beyond sheer present experience.

Its concept is presupposed, however primitive and little actualized it may be; it does not come out of the hic et nunc. Believing that the subject could purely intuit ′red′ out of the hic et nunc would be pure self-deception, even if the possibility of such singularities of lived experience were hypothetically assumed. Red – ′redness′ – is colour not a datum of sensation, and the consciousness of colour demands reflection. It is not satisfied with impressions.

Husserl confuses our meaning (meinen) red here and now with the knowledge of red which our meaning necessarily requires. He substitutes the singular meaning of universal objects for the constitution and grounded knowledge of universals. He equates our meaning of the abstract with sensible (einsichtig) judgements about the abstract, while the ′ideal′ content which is apparently proper only to the individual act, refers back to manifolds and experience. That alone yields his static conception of essence. Though later in his unremitting analysis of foundational relations and especially of judgement he brings experience to bear, and implicitly justifies rectifying the universal, still the most pressing result is omitted, viz. the revision of the doctrine of essence which clings to that hypostatization. This doctrine retained to the end a key characteristic of Husserl′s philosophy despite its striking inconsistency.*

That doctrine, however, is parasitic upon the fact that the singular acts, which support it, are in truth not singular at all but rather always already include the very manifolds which Husserl′s Platonic realism rejects. This is the only way to get hold of the individual in the universal, for the individual itself is saturated with the universal. It is mediated in itself. Thus disintegrates Husserl′s fundamental postulate to remain strictly with what is given originarily in ′pure lived experience′.¹⁰ Immediacy is no longer the criterion of truth.

Hence phenomenology has not critically reflected; it resigns itself to a demand for positivism as scientifically self-evident. Husserl presupposes the possibility of a pure apprehension (Hinnehmen) of the state-of-affairs in thought. And yet the concept of the state-of-affairs belongs rather to the very realm of the factical which should be phenomenologically and eidetically ′reduced′. The transfer of ′unprejudiced research′ to epistemological analysis forms a persistent pre-phenomenological residue. It can be accomplished only through those means whose justification is unfortunately considered by phenomenology as its principal task. That is, categorial intuition, a of method.

Theoretical thought cannot at all, as Husserl would like, take a given purely as what it gives itself to be. For thinking it means determining it and making it more than mere givenness. The primal model of reification in Husserl does not lie only in the extension of the concept of objecthood to the phenomenal, but rather already in the dogmatic position of what apparently precedes all reification, the immediate datum. Because he does not see through the immediate datum as mediated in itself, he considers the actually highly abstract τόδε τί as a sort of thing in itself, the ultimate solid substratum. But the τόδε τί, which Husserl ′posits (gesetzt) in the idea′, is neither the species nor what is individuated, but rather something beneath, almost pre-logical, and actually the construction of a primal given free from all categorization. He merely strips it of the ′naturalistic′ thesis of its facticity.

Eidetic singularity, as represented by the ′moment of redness′ in Husserl′s example, is thus not like concepts, i.e. more encompassing than the τόδε τί. It is, rather, still just the latter′s shadow. The belief, however, is deceptive that the essence of something ideal is the quiddity (das Was) of individuation. For this quiddity in its strict selfhood could no longer be distinguished from the individual at all. Pure τόδε τί and essence, the individual and its concept, coincide. No determination of difference can be identified other than that the former is factical and the latter not.

Obviously this mere duplication of the individual through its eidetic reduction has nothing to do with what is called a concept. The pure τόδΙ τί and so the concept would remain empty and undetermined so long as they are not surpassed and the τόδε τί set in relation to something it is not. Singularity slips away from a thought that does not know multiplicity. Even positing a ′one′ (Einen) as determined by its oneness implies a many (Mehr). This many, however, is transferred to the τόδε τί in itself by Husserl as something which simply precedes the determining cognition of the individual. The ′too little′ in the pure τόδε τί, that indeterminacywhich Hegel used to call ′abstract′ in the specific sense, is directly turned into that sort of many, viz. the substitute for what is abstract in the customary sense, the universal concept. The moment of truth in all of this – that pure immediacy is mediated in itself as abstraction, that the absolutely particular is universal – needs, in order to be redeemed, that the process of cognition directly reveal this mediation of the immediate. But that is just what Husserl′s theory of individual essence is supposed to dispense with. Since the τόδε τί is everything and nothing, one can assert that it exemplarily comprises the universal concept within it. And that assertion, as abstractly adduced as the τόδΙ τί itself, need not be exposed to contradiction. Excess of facticity becomes the vehicle for denying its own facticity. Hypostatized fact (Faktum) and hypostatized essence murkily merge.

The ambiguity of the abstract τόδε τί, its lack of that determinacy which alone makes it an individual, raises the claim of the superindividual, the universal, the essential – the surrogate of that concretizing of the concept which still in Husserl slips through the mesh of the classificatory net. In its quest for such concretization, Husserl′s philosophy wanders helplessly around between its two abstract poles, that of the sheer ′here′ and that of the sheer ′in general′. It splits asunder in positivism and logic and shatters in the violent attempt to unite the irreconcilable poles. Husserl transposes his representation of the sheer ′here′ or datum to the content of higher categorial functions in such a way that at every step he is encouraged by the predicates of a rigid being-in-itself (Ansichsein) untouched by the subject-object dialectic.

If, however, the subject really could perceive a red object as absolute singularity, like an island in the stream of consciousness – which, in other respects, consciousness hardly ′runs into′ – though the conspicuousness of the moment of redness as ′red′ does not in some way include abstraction and knowledge of the past, and if it could then ′posit in idea′ the isolated moment of colour, then what had been grasped in that way would be in no sense the species, but rather indeed the subsumed (Darunter), the pure ′This here′, the Aristotelian πϱώτη οὐσία which is distinguished from other sheer sense moments only by the fact that it is placed between Husserl′s brackets and therefore the thesis of its bodily reality is suspended.

The pure ′This here′ would not destroy its haeccitas, even in brackets, and would not raise itself to essence. The concrete moment of redness, isolated and not posited as reality, would thus still not have conceptual scope. If Husserl designates the ideal construction of an isolated hyletic moment as ′red′, then he confuses the concept, to whose sense comparison and highlighting of the identical belongs, with the simple neutrality modification of a single solitary happenstance (Einmalige). The modification certainly drains existence in the specific sense from the happenstance, but that never meant that ′red in general′ became universal. In strictly unique perception, there is no red, but only reflection on a sensation while ignoring its factual occurrence.

The Primacy of Meaning Analysis (Bedeutungsanalyse)

Prudently, however, Husserl′s analysis does not descend to sensation. He sticks with perception as consciousness of ′something′, an objective thing, while sensation for him is actually introduced only with reference to perception as its hyletic core. Sensation changes from being the supporting substratum, as it has been for traditional epistemology, into something secondary, which is simply extracted from perception as its τέλος. It is drawn, as it were, from the matter of cognition for the confirmation of knowledge at the furthest edge of the intentional edifice.

He certainly takes account of the fact that the concept of sensation itself – as indeed that of perception, a level higher – presents an abstraction, and that individual sensations can hardly be isolated. This general proviso, which Husserl must indeed extract in toto from the concept (Konzept), must not delude one into believing that he attributes the central place of epistemology to ′consciousness of something′ or intentionality. For breaking off analysis with the intentional act permits the construction of a mental entity (Geistigen) existing in itself to be presented as descriptively obvious. Uniting the doctrines of theory and of essence is the most convincing alibi for reification in Husserl′s philosophy. ′Ideational abstraction′, and thus originary cognitions in which pure singularity is supposed to be grasped in its essence, stand and fall with the fact that some object immediately arises from these cognitions, the ostensibly elementary performances of consciousness, as ′rays of vision′ (Blickstrahlen), irrespective of their connection with the totality of experience.

As a result, absolute individuality, which does not match up to any plurality whatever, would still possess identity, namely the identity of its ′noema′. Hence acts become the organon of knowledge. Husserl can bestow upon the absolutely isolated the dignity of overreaching only because he forces it into original correlation with something already reified whose synthetic moments are invisible. Only by hypostatizing a situation whereby determinate classes of meanings (Bedeutungen) proceed ′directly and individually′ not to the individual but to the universal, can he claim ideal universality for a conceptual realism whose excesses he occasionally deplores.¹¹ Husserl does indeed dispute the reality of the species, but he also attributes it ′objecthood′¹² with an inconsistency which recalls the Aristotelian ambiguity (Doppelsinn) concerning οὐσία. But he in no way exhibits the difference between the two expressions. Nevertheless, the expression ′objecthood′ is quite clearly reminiscent of reification.

Since phenomenology concentrates on the ′direct and authentic intention′ of ′names standing for species′,¹³ it strengthens the doctrine of the ideal unity of the species by meaning analyses.

The question as to whether it is possible or necessary to treat species as objects can plainly only be answered by going back to the meaning (Bedeutung) (the sense, our meaning (Meinung)) of the names standing for species, and to the meaning of the assertions claiming to hold for species. If these names and assertions can be interpreted as making the true objects of our intention individual, if the intention of the nominal and propositional thoughts which give them meaning can be thus understood, then we must yield to our opponents′ doctrine. But if this is not so, if the meaning analysis of such expressions shows that their direct, true intention is plainly not directed upon individual objects, and if in particular their universal relation to a range of individual objects is plainly shown up as merely an indirect pointing to logical connections whose content (sense) will first be unfolded in new thoughts, or which will require new expressions – then our opponents′ doctrine is evidently false.¹⁴

Accordingly, the complaint is justified about a relapse into scholasticism, which was propagated in the early days of phenomenology and only stylishly forgotten under the primacy of existential ontology. Instead of epistemological critique, symbolically functioning expressions should be studied only in their relation to what is symbolized. The question as to ′whether it is possible or necessary′ to take species as objects and thus as to whether Platonic realism is true or false, could be answered ′only′ by referring to the sense of the names of the species. Semantic analysis immediately turns into judgement about things. What is meant is the answer to the controversy over realism and thus it literally usurps the thing-in-itself.

The already conceptually filtered world – which for Husserl is the world of science just as previously it had been that of theology – represents to itself the truth content of concepts. That is how Husserl is ′pre-critical′. The primacy of logic over epistemology, which still dominates in the structure of Husserl′s thought even though he expressly rejects it, expresses the substitution of the conceptual net for the dialectic of concept and thing. Formal logic is the rule-governed operation with concepts alone, without regard to their material legitimacy. But this is also Husserl′s procedure, wherever he discusses the possibility of logical states-of-affairs. By raising the meaning (Bedeutung) of concepts to the canon of their truth, he remains imprisoned within the immanence of the realm of their validity, even though it appears that he lays the foundation for this validity. This gives Husserl′s phenomenology its peculiar hermetic character, a masturbatory quality, a powerful effort to lift India rubber weights. Something of this non-binding character clings to everything he produces and contributes to explaining the attraction which overcomes philosophers who want to pose radical questions unendangered by hazardous answers.

Whatever Husserl′s historical importance, as particularly exemplified in his concept of essential insight, by the same token, he equalized the pattern of the world codified in science or alternatively language, viz. the system of concepts, with the in-itself. Whatever occurs cognitively in that second nature, gains the appearance of the immediate and intuitive. So nothing has really changed in such an autarchy of concepts except that the phenomenological method was used under other names to disclose ostensible primordiality. The further its successors have distanced themselves from discursive thought, the more completely do they presuppose a mechanism which has been dissected by such thought. Resurrected speculation has everywhere just strengthened the reification though it was supposed to be eliminated. However impossible it may be to rip through the conceptual net, it nevertheless makes all the difference whether one becomes aware of one′s own as such and reflects upon it critically, or whether one, because of its imperviousness, takes it for the ′phenomenon′.

This illusion also, of course, is a function of reality and historical tendencies. The closer the form of socialization approaches totalization and pre-forms every single person beginning with his language, and the less any individual consciousness is capable of resisting it, the more already advanced forms assume the character of fatality and of the entity in itself. Reified thought is the copy of the reified world. By trusting its primordial experiences, it lapses into delusion. There are no primordial experiences.

The Function of the Noema

In the transition from logical absolutism to epistemology – from the thesis of the being in itself of the highest formal principles to that of the being in itself of universal concepts, the ideal unities of objecthood – Husserl must give some account of how thought may at all become conscious of objecthood and how in such a consciousness real and ideal moments relate to one another. This is not the least of the purposes of the doctrine of intentionality.

The polemic against psychologism in the ′Prolegomena to Pure Logic′ was already meaning analytical. Husserl argues throughout by inquiring after the ′sense′ of logical propositions. Such a ′sense′ then becomes the canon for the theory of authentic consciousness. Cognition follows the structure of noesis and noema – of acts of meaning and what is meant (Vermeintes) in them. The idealist Husserl gives precedence to one of the moments out of which, for Kantianism, the unity of self-consciousness was composed: the moment of the symbolic function, or, in the language of the critique of reason, the reproduction of the imagination.

Husserl′s positivistic parti pris for ′states-of-affairs′ prevented him, till a much later phase, from forming a concept of the subject and, of course, of the unity of self-consciousness, which as spontaneity is outside of any description directed at the facts (Tatbestände).* The reified structure of Husserl′s epistemology, thought′s forgetting of itself, conforms to such a loss of the subject. The symbolic function – the fact that certain facts of consciousness could ′mean′ some other fact – commended itself to him, because, as isolated, no active subject seemed to be at work in it. Rather, meaning (Meinen) can be shifted to something static, viz. the expression, as its specific and even, as it were, thingly, definitely present quality. Intentionality serves so well as a foundation of the doctrine of essence, however, because the symbolized is voided of sheer existence in acts which always pass for pregnant ′consciousness′, viz. consciousness of something.

Noema and Ιἶδος

Though the symbolized is encountered strictly within the framework of the analysis of consciousness, it should nevertheless be distinguished from the facticity of sensation; it should already possess that ideality whose justification is the point of Husserl′s philosophy. In contrast to the Kantian continuum, no empirical reality is predicated of the meant (Gemeinte) as such.

But Husserl had to deal with the mediation of the concept of intentionality. For the position of the Prolegomena, viz. the ′naive realism of logic′, not only refrained from engaging in epistemological reflection, but even actually excluded it by asserting an unconditioned antithesis between laws of logic and laws of thought. From an epistemological point of view, the programme of the Prolegomena to perform a demonstration of ideal being demands a revision of that demonstration. The analysis of consciousness must then track down a mental in-itelf. Thus Husserl′s philosophy soon turns out to be a dialectic in spite of itself. In striving to lay epistemological foundations for logical absolutism, and to expand it, his philosophy dissolves elements of that doctrine.

Ideal states-of-affairs are sought out in thinking itself as unconditional (unabdingbar) moments of its structure. These are the noemata in Ideas, the unreal side of intentionality. They are supposed to be both objective and ideal and also unique to consciousness, accessible when the descriptive analysis of consciousness is limited to pure immanence. Thus they impart whatever the systematic demands. Noeses as factual thought acts or psychological facticities would be unsuitable for this. Sheer ′propositions in themselves′, however, remain unconnected with consciousness.

The knowledge of the essential two-sidedness of intentionality in the form of noesis and noema brings this consequence with it that a systematic phenomenology should not direct its effort one-sidedly towards a real (reelle) analysis of experiences, and more specifically of the intentional kind. But the temptation to do this is at first very great, because the historical and natural movement from psychology to phenomenology brings it about that as a matter of course we take the immanent study of pure experiences, the study of their own proper essence, to be a study of their components. On both sides in truth there open up vast domains of eidetic inquiry, and these are constantly related to each other, yet as it turns out keep separate for a long stretch. In great measure, what has been taken for noetic act-analysis has been obtained when observation was directed towards the ′meant as such′, and it was really noematic structures which were there described.¹⁵

It is, however, the revenge of such bridge concepts that they always fall into conflict with what they aim at and reproduce the happily eliminated difficulties at higher levels. This is a bit of the distress of philosophy, the fatal configuration of all dialectic unenlightened about itself, which the dialectical method seeks to prevent by adapting to this configuration and practically proclaiming property rights over it.

Relation Between the Two Reductions

Noemata are supposed to be non-′real (reelle) components of lived experiences′,¹⁶* and the question arises: ′what can be said on essential lines concerning this ″of something″ ′,¹⁷ namely the noema. ′Every intentional lived experience, thanks to its noetic moments, is indeed noetic; it is its essence to harbour in itself a ″sense″ of some sort or even many meanings.′¹⁸ The concept of essence, by which noeses, which are supposed to ′have a sense′ – an ′ideal state-of-affairs′ – are characterized as universal, is burdened. The noesis–noema relation is with its help claimed to be ultimate and non-derivable, a ′law of essence′. It is so taken without regard for the functional structure in which traditional idealistic epistemology interpreted object and thought. In Ideas the concept of essence of epistemology is systematically prearranged. All later phenomenological assertions try to be eidetic.

But it is difficult to separate the two reductions. Just as assertions about the noema make eidetic claims, so έίδη are, for their part, a class of noemata, species meant in intentional acts. Whatever occurs in the relation of noeses to noemata, of thinking to what is thought, is stood still. Spontaneity changes under the descriptive regard into a simple correlation. The ′intuitive′ (schauende) method affects what is intuited. Indeed Husserl always talks about acts, but nothing remains of actio except a structure of reciprocally co-ordinated moments. Becoming is polarized in entities. Since it is the essence of noeses to have a ′sense′, how that sense is constituted through thinking execution is ignored.

The sheer phenomenological definition of the concept of act confers substantiality on the ideal something, the noema. What is immanently meant in the act gets changed into the ′perceived′, the ′remembered′, the ′judged′, and the ′pleasing′ as such.¹⁹Given the mode of its emergence, this ′as such′ is absolutely identical to essence. Indeed, according to traditional usage, a great conceptual distance separates it from essence. The noema, or simply the concept, in Aristotle′s terminology, could, in Husserl′s language, be, e.g., a ′perceived tree as such′, a singularity, while έίδη are always universal concepts. But, according to the Logical Investigations, a singularity, such as the moment of redness intuited from a perception, suffices for consciousness of essence just as long as its facticity remains suspended. Concepts which have settled on various levels, the logical as well as the epistemological, converge. The pure individual essence, the τόδε τί whose facticity is expunged, converges with the noema, the ′complete′ but purely meant state-of-affairs which is extracted from the ′natural attitude′, the thing less its existence. Husserl simply does not demand from all noemata the exemplary, i.e. what reaches beyond singularity which is signified by the ideal unity which also arises in singularity.

Noema as Hybrid

The noema is a hybrid of ′ideal being′ (that of all Husserlian philosophy) and the mediately given of older positivistic epistemology. Now this mongrelization, conditioned by systematic need, leads to contradictions. That can be demonstrated in the analysis of the noema of perception which Husserl performed. In such a perception – Husserl′s example is the ′flowering apple tree′ which he observes ′ambulando′ ²⁰– the object has ′not forfeited the least shade of content from all the phases, qualities, characters with which it appeared in this perception, and ″in″ this pleasure proved ″beautiful″, ″charming″ and the like.′ It is just that ′this thetic reality … simply does not exist by the measure of our judgement′.²¹ ′And yet everything remains, so to speak, as of old.′²²

Hence, the noema is totally identical to the perceived thing, with the simple mental reservation that nothing has been asserted concerning its reality. Rather, the thing is considered only to the extent that it is meant in the isolated individual act, and thus without the possibility of verifying or falsifying the existential judgement through lived experience. Though the noema is not just supposed to bear the entire determination of the unreduced thing, yet, as always petrified and fixed, it is also more reified than things (which do change).

Once again, however, Husserl draws from this lack, this restriction to a point of non-experiential meaning, the positive side of the noema′s invulnerable ideality. The noema, the content of sheer meaning (Meinung), is irrefutable. Thus Platonism is reversed and δόξα becomes essence. In defiance of all the totalizing protestations of anti-nominalists dating back to Husserl, the new ontology drags its mechanistic and atomistic origins along with it. That Husserl′s construction is questionable, becomes blatantly evident in formulations such as the following: ′Like perception, every intentional lived experience – and this is indeed the fundamental mark of all intentionality – has its ″intentional object″ (Objekt), i.e. its sense, in an object (Gegenstand).′²³

His use of terms is equivocal. The fact that an intentional lived experience has its intentional object is a sheer tautology. It says no more than that acts, in contrast to mere data, do indeed mean (bedeuten) something. Its ′object′ (Objekt), however, and thus what is symbolized in every ′referring′ act, is tacitly identified by Husserl with some sort of objecthood (Gegenständlichen)– where ever possible an entity in itself, whose existence (Bestand) in truth is certainly not exhausted in the individual act. Objectivity (Objektivität) as what is meant and objectivity as objecthood, which Husserl contaminates with the formula ′i.e.′, are in no way the same. The formal meaning of the expression ′object′ (Gegenstand) as the subject of possible predicates, is mixed up with the material reference of an identical core of experience for the texture of the act.

Thanks to this equivocation, Husserl succeeds in slipping into every individual act a result which is fulfilled not by the act but, idealistically speaking, by the synthetic unity of apperception. But the so ′constituted′ object could no longer be given credit for the spacelessness and timelessness of essence.

Essence and ′Factual States of Consciousness′

Anchoring the doctrine of essence in intentional acts does not simply strengthen the logical absolutism of ′propositions in themselves′, it also contradicts the absolutistic conception. The terms ′abstract-universal′ and ′idea′ are still used as equivalents in the first Logical Investigation of volume 2. ′But since the concern of the pure logician is not with the concrete instance, but with its corresponding idea, its abstractly apprehended universal, he has, it would seem, no reason to leave the field of abstraction, nor to make concrete experiences the theme of his probing interest, instead of ideas.′²⁴ Husserl is directed to ′concrete lived experience′ and thus to epistemology only by his opposition to the traditional doctrine of abstraction. Since the ideal unity is supposed to be independent of the multiplicity of what it deals with, it is located in cognitive consciousness and indeed in the singular act.

Along with Bergson and Gestalt theory, Husserl strives to restore metaphysics ′scientifically′, that is with anti-metaphysical armature. This recalls, as opposed to classificatory thought, that the concept is not contingent and external to the thing and not established through arbitrary abstraction. Rather, in Hegelian language, the concept expresses the life of the thing itself. More is to be experienced from that life through immersion in the individuated than through recourse to everything else that the thing resembles in whatever respect. But Husserl thereby skipped the moment of mediation, and at the Archimedean point of his philosophy ultimately, like Bergson, dogmatically contrasted to scientific procedure in concept formation a differently constituted procedure, rather than reflecting scientific procedure by itself. He could be led to this abstract negation of the scientific method – which first became completely obvious to his students – by the uncritical assumption of the positivistic principle, and the cult of the given and of immediacy.

Husserl′s effort to save essence from contexts miscarries, for he does not penetrate individuation itself, does not disclose the atom as a field of force and thus does not articulate – by persevering before the phenomenon – why the cognitive subject must always know more and have experienced more than just the phenomenon. Rather, he capitulates before the intention which has been sealed against its own dynamic. Thus concepts become the very thing they should have been protected from, an external thing, something always meant by individual acts of thought, which is in no sense pertinently motivated in these acts, but rather confronts them, as though finished, with the fallacious claim to ′primordial givenness′. ἑίδη thus remain precisely the same as what is otherwise grounded through the mechanism of abstraction. And so they remain abstract universal concepts. Nothing about their traditional scientific structure changes; their genesis and hence their claims are just re-interpreted.

But the strategy is ostrich-like. By ignoring the continuity of consciousness and impaling individual intentional states-of-affairs instead, absolutistic logic would cast out the relativity which clings to abstract universal concepts, as long as it is a matter of choice which moment of a manifold is ever supposed to be stressed as identical, and to which logical context an individual should be adapted.

Antinomy of Subjectivism and Eidetics

But such a strategy does not diminish the distress. If Husserl cannot help legitimizing mental being-in-itself – ′essence′ – through recourse to the facts (Tatbestände), then it is this very recourse which is the principal obstacle to that legitimization. Plato′s doctrine of Ideas could not flourish on Husserlian soil, that of epistemological, subjectively directed idealism. The thesis of an ontological transcendence of essentialities as opposed to the performance of abstraction would be self-consistent only if it were not derived from the factual states of consciousness alone. Yet as soon as the objectively true is determined as mediated in whatever way through the subject, it loses its static character and independence from those acts which mediate it.

Husserl′s philosophy prevents this by tolerating no doubt about that static character. He desires a contradiction. He wishes to force out of subjective cognitive functions as residing beyond subjective cognitive functions.

Husserl overcomes paradox, that congealed caricature of dialectic, by giving back to subjective mediation itself the appearance of the immediate and to thought the illusion of a straightforward awareness of states-of-affairs. This illusory appearance can most easily be maintained in intentional acts, which mean (bedeuten) something abstract without themselves abstracting. But a philosophical antimony is expressed in the paradox. Husserl must reduce to the subject, for otherwise, according to the traditional ground rules, the objectivity of universal concepts would remain dogmatic and scientifically injudicious. He must defend the eidetic in-itself, for otherwise the idea of truth could not be saved. Hence he must concern himself with imaginary cognitive productions.

The phantom disappears only for a thought that penetrates the concepts of subject and object themselves, for it leaves them unmolested. Examples are the constitutive, existence-establishing immanence of consciousness as well as the traditional truth theory of correspondence between judgement and thing. For the concept of the subject can so little be emancipated from existence or the ′object′ as the object from subjective functions of thought. In empty confrontation, neither fulfils the purpose for which it was devised.

′Eidetic Variations′

The later Husserl who, as a transcendental philosopher, gave up trying to defend the crudely dualistic ′descriptive thesis′ of the ideal unity of the species which comes to consciousness in isolated acts, inflected it into an extremely subtle theory, that of ′eidetic′ variation. According to this theory, the individual is a preliminary ′example′ for its The is, of course, still borne by the individual, but the same eidetic dignity does not devolve upon the individual as in earlier writings. The representation of the individual essence is controlled and the moment of universality in essence is confirmed. Essence should be more than the sheer space-less and time-less double for the individual. But it is not a multiplicity of individuals which is required for its constitution; rather, for any single individual, the consciousness of the essence which pervades it comes through the free activity of fantasy, or fiction.

That a something could stand in for the infinity of its possibilities, may be valid for mathematical manifolds, but is hardly so for anything material whose participation in a totum and its quality-less permutability is not defined beforehand. The outrageous exaggeration of the claim to a priority far beyond received idealism – the sharpening of the critical organs for whatever can be taken beyond arbitrariness, so to speak – brings about a regression into pre-critical rationalism.

This is not very different from the way the dynamics of late bourgeois society itself tends, for it abolishes ′experience′, and aims at a system of almost pure concepts, a system of administration. In place of abstraction as a non-self-contained collecting, appears a calculus which relies on the individual element, as if the whole were already given to it beforehand. That is intimated in Formal and Transcendental Logic as a method of research into essences.

Everything that we have stated in our observations concerning constitution can, in the first place, be made a matter of insight on the basis of arbitrary examples of arbitrary sorts of already-given objects – that is: in a reflective interpretation of the intentionality in which we simply and straightforwardly ′have′ a real or an ideal objecthood. We have made a significant advance when we recognize that what obviously holds good for factical single cases of reality or possibility still holds necessarily when we vary our examples quite as we please and then inquire retrospectively for the correlatively varying ′representations′ – that is: the constituting lived experiences – and for the ′subjective′ manners of givenness, which change, sometimes continuously and sometimes discretely. Primarily we must inquire here for the manners of ′appearance′ that are constitutive in the pregnant sense, the ones that are experiences of the exemplary objects or of their variants; and we must look for the manners in which the objects take shape as synthetic unities in the mode ′they themselves′, in those experiences…. In this inquiry, the variation of the necessary initial example is the performance in which the ′eidos′ should emerge and by means of which the evidence of the indissoluble eidetic correlation between constitution and constituted should also emerge. If it is to have these effects, it must be understood, not as an empirical variation, but as a variation carried on with the freedom of pure fantasy and with the consciousness of its purely optional character – the consciousness of the ′pure′ Any Whatever (Úberhaupt). Thus understood, the variation extends into an open horizon of endlessly manifold free possibilities of more and more variants.²⁵

The ′universal essence′* should be the ′invariant′ running through these variations. It is

the ontic essential form (a priori form), the eidos, corresponding to the example, in place of which any variant of the example could have served equally well.²⁶

Husserl hopes to crystallize out of factical givens results, freed from facticity, by means of ′exemplary analysis′.²⁷

In the first place, however, the ′significant advance′ is really a dogmatic assertion that what ′obviously holds good for factical single cases of reality′, also obtains ′when we vary our examples quite as we please′. As long as it is strictly just the example with which consciousness is acquainted, such an extrapolation would be inadmissible. One cannot see beforehand what would change in the ostensible states of the essence with variation, and indeed variation ′quite as we please′. The illusion of the indifference of the essence to variation can be protected only because in the refuge of the realm of fantasy, essence is spared the test of its invariance. Only experience can be enlightening as to whether such modifications touch upon essence or not. Sheer ′fantasy modification′, which in no living way fulfils what it posits, does not provide a relevant criterion.

But is there more present to consciousness than just the isolated initiating representation of the ′example′? But then why insist upon such a representation? Furthermore, if the research into essences which Husserl professes needs to be initiated by an ′example′ at all, then the tidy split between fact and ideality has already been revoked, for then the ideal needs something factical to even be representable. If essence cannot be attained without fact, even an isolated fact, then that very relation between concept and experience, which Husserl had explained away, is really implicitly revived. An essence form which must compare fictions with each another in order to gain its invariant, repeats, on allegedly higher levels, the theory of abstraction which Husserl had attacked.

In addition, the arbitrary fantasy variations, which Husserl does not want to see confused with empirical ones, although he gives no information as to the difference between them, are unavoidably alloyed with elements of experience. Even their deviations from experience cling to elements of experience. Their fictional character is itself simulated. The concept of example itself should have perplexed Husserl. For it arises from just that trivial abstraction theory which chooses one example and then another and prescinds what is essential out of its variety. The phenomenological doctrine of essence, by contrast, directly signified in its radical form the attempt to emancipate essence from ′examples′. Husserl rebelled against classificatory logic′s dilution of the universal concept into a mere form of subsumed facts and its renunciation of the authentic, the ′essential′. This very procedure is the sphere of ′examples′. Since examples can be arbitrarily replaced, they deprive themselves of what was Husserl′s concern. As soon as the concrete sinks to being a mere example of its concept, it reciprocally reduces the universal to a derivative from mere particulars, without claiming a substantiality in contrast to particulars.

At the decisive moment Husserl capitulates before traditional theory of abstraction, for his own initiation never escaped it. While he publicly sought essences in individuals, essence remained for him nothing other than the old universal concept of the prevailing logic.

Essence as Fiction

The theory of as an invariant and facticity as a variation is more thoroughly worked out in the Cartesian Meditations.

By the method of transcendental reduction each of us, as Cartesian meditator, was led back to his transcendental ego – naturally with its concrete-monadic content as this factual ego, the one and only absolute ego.²⁸

The initial ′factical′ empirical descriptions of the pure ego are nevertheless themselves supposed to assume to some degree the character of essential necessities.

But involuntarily we confined our description to such a universality that its results remain unaffected, regardless of what the situation may be with respect to the empirical factualities of the transcendental ego.²⁹

Yet if the strict dualism of the ′parallelisms′ between pure and ontic regions which Husserl preaches may be doubted, then only the ′involuntary′ transition from the one to the other now effaces the entire difficulty. The profusion of concrete determinations, which so pleases Husserl and which alone permit of something like transcendental phenomenology, is derived from the content of experience and, no matter how much they are varied, they are directed to experience. Husserl does not want to renounce experience as drastic and dense, but he must save up to pay the toll. His assertions also thus remain caught in the web of experience and its determinacy. And indeed this is the filtered experience on whose concept his entire method is based, the concept of the philosophy of immanence of the personal consciousness of the meditator.

As long as the solipsistic point of departure is maintained and thus unquestionable, certainty is connected to the immediacy of the ego, no variation may surpass the circumference of this ego, provided the variation will not forsake that type of certainty for whose sake the entire sum cogitans was established. The framework of the immediate experience of the given meditator is prescribed to every modification of the empirical factualities of the transcendental ego′. Otherwise, it would fall, in accord with its own beginning, into the problem of conclusion from analogy, viz. relativity. One cannot both make use of that solipsistic beginning and overstep its bounds. Consistency of thought itself would have to negate that.

Instead Husserl spans the χωϱισμός – which otherwise for his philosophy can never be deep enough – as if he were crossing a stream. The technique of fantasy variation claims nothing less than that it consciously attains that eidetic thing which should unconsciously be attained by ego analysis.

Starting from this table-perception as an example, we vary the perceptual object, table, with a completely free choice, yet in such a manner that we keep perception fixed as perception of something, no matter what. Perhaps we begin by fictively changing the shape or the colour of the object quite arbitrarily, keeping identical only its perceptual appearing. In other words: Abstaining from acceptance of its being, we change the fact of this perception into a pure possibility one among other quite ′optional′ pure possibilities – but possibilities that are possible perceptions. We, so to speak, shift the actual perception into the realm of non-actualities, the realm of the as-if, which supplies us with ′pure′ possibilities, pure of everything that restricts to this fact or to any fact whatever. As regards the latter point, we keep the aforesaid possibilities, not as restricted even to the co-posited factical ego, but just as a completely free conceivability of fantasy. Accordingly from the very start we might have taken as our initial example a fantasizing ourselves into a perceiving, with no relation to the rest of our factical life. Perception, the universal type thus acquired, floats in the air, so to speak – in the atmosphere of absolutely pure imaginability.³⁰

Between the sentence which Husserl introduces as a mere rephrasing of what preceded with the expression ′In other words′, and what, in fact, preceded, there opens up, to use his terms, an ′abyss of sense′. For what the initially proffered variation yields is no ′pure′ possibility. Rather, every new fact (Faktum) which takes its place through variation and can be subsumed under the universal concept ′object of perception′, must nevertheless be potentially accessible to factical perception in order to remain subsumable in that way. One cannot ′variationally′ (variierend) introduce the category of perception or of the something in general for all imaginable material contents of perception. Granted that Husserl′s favourite example of the centaur is attained by varying within the concept ′animal′ and ultimately by substituting for men, horses, dinosaurs, etc. So, as long as the identical concept ′object of perception′ is held fast, its definition is realized, only if what is varied could for its part also in some way be brought to perception. If, however, that is not possible, as with centaurs, then the law prescribed to variations by the concept ′perceptual object′ fails.

The pure fantasy object cannot be subsumed under it. That is not an object of perception. Fantasy in the Husserlian sense – which is, moreover, utterly foreign to the true sense – of simulation, is not, as he erroneously teaches, a ′free possibility′. ′Holding on to the concept′ prescribes a rule which indeed does not invite a determinate facticity, but still necessarily contains the relation to the factical and not to something merely contrived. The formal correspondence between a fictional creature like the centaur and a real one does not detract from the fact that the centaur cannot be perceived, even though its representation were fitted out with ever so many perceptible features. For there are no centaurs, and the determination ′object of perception′ is not indifferent to that fact.

While the route to facticity is obstructed for Husserlian variation as soon as he concerns himself with such figures, indeed while variations will have nothing to do with facticity, Husserl nevertheless draws the substantiality of his variations from facticity. Something is falsely mediated that Husserlian logic cannot mediate. The context of a concept demands the question of the existence of what is contained in the concept, and not just its meaning (Meinen). Even the later Husserl′s doctrine of essences remains a prisoner in the hot house of intentionality. Corresponding to this is the reified and rigid view of fantasy as a mere discovery of objects distilled from the factical which should have no advantage over the factical except the fact that they are not. Husserl′s qualification of essence settles for just that. He calls it fictional. What he calls ′the atmosphere of absolutely pure imaginability′ in the Cartesian Meditations, in which the ′floats′, was the climate of his entire philosophy, the crystalline kingdom of a cognition which confuses the flight before fleeting existence and the negation of life with the citizenry of its infinity. Essences remain without essence, though the arbitrary thoughts of the subject dare, by their means, to fancy the desolate entity an ontology.

* [Possible reference to Strindberg′s Dream Play where the daughter of Indra ascends and descends on a cloud. Trans.]

* [Christian Morgenstern (1871–1914), German ′functionalist′ poet, friend of Rudolf Steiner. Trans.]

* When the Logical Investigations appeared, Gestalt theory was not yet fully developed. Yet Christian von Ehrenfels′ treatise, ′Über Gestaltqualitäten′ was certainly available (Vierteljahreszeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie, vol. 14, 1890), which already contains the elements of the critique of an atomistic interpretation of immediate givens. It is hardly likely that Brentano′s student, Husserl, did not read it.

* Husserl, of course, already dropped the theory of the essence of the species – which occurs in the individual act and is to be immediately dissected out – in Ideas. For he there relates act analysis to the continuity of the stream of consciousness. He rediscovered for himself that such an absolutely singular act does not exist, especially in perception; every act is more than just itself and as a result the species cannot be based on the individual act.

As in the second Logical Investigation of volume 2, however, he persists in maintaining that phenomenology ′drops only individuation′, while ′it raises the whole essential content in the fullness of its concretion into eidetic consciousness′. (Ideen [140]; cf. Ideas, p. 192). He thus never gives up the paradoxical concept of ′eidetic singularities′ (ibid.). He goes on to say that this ′concrete′ essential content belonging to singularity ′could particularize itself not only hic et nunc but in numberless instances′ (ibid.). So the concept of every particular individual would be inferred simply by ignoring its spatio-temporal locus irrespective of other individuations. But, surely under the influence of William James, he still states considerations opposing that sort of absolute singularity as such. ′We can see at once that a conceptual and terminological fixation of this and every similar flowing concretum is not to be thought of, and that this applies to each of its immediate and no less flowing parts and abstract moments.′ (ibid.) It follows that essence is no longer to be sought in individual intention as the second Logical Investigation had taught. This difficulty contributed greatly to the conception of categorial intuition as a cognitive process sui generis.

* These weaknesses have, of course, not escaped pre-Husserlian idealists. They were pointed out in particular in Heinrich Rickert′s posthumous volume, Unmittelbarkeit und Sinndeutung (Tübingen, 1939). Rickert criticizes with great acuity the alleged absolute certainty of beginning with the immediately given as the contents of the consciousness of every isolated and – on idealistic grounds – contingent subject.

* [Literally ′real components of intentional lived experiences′. Trans.]

* [′allgemeinsame Wesen′ (′universally common essence′) in Husserl. Trans.]

¹ LU I, p. 231; cf. Findlay, p. 228.

² LU II, i, p. 144; cf. ibid. p. 369.

³ Cf. ibid. p. 186; and ibid. p. 403,

⁴ Cf. ibid. pp. 197 ff; and ibid. pp. 411 ff.

⁵ LU I, p. xv; cf. ibid. p. 49.

⁶ LU II, i, p. 107; cf. ibid. p. 337.

⁷ Ibid. pp. 106 ff; ibid.

⁸ Ibid. p. 223; ibid. p. 432.

⁹ Cf. ibid. p. 217; and ibid. p. 427.

¹⁰ Cf. Ideen [187]; and Ideas, p. 243.

¹¹ Cf. LU II, i, p. 110; and Findlay, p. 340.

¹² Ibid.

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴ Ibid.

¹⁵ Ideen [265 ff]; cf. Ideas, p. 332.

¹⁶ Cf. ibid.[181]; and ibid. p. 237.

¹⁷ Ibid.

¹⁸ Ibid.

¹⁹ Cf. ibid. [182]; and ibid. p. 238.

²⁰ Cf. ibid. [182 ff]; and ibid. pp. 238 ff.

²¹ Ibid. [183]; and ibid. pp. 239–40.

²² Ibid.

²³ Ibid. [185]; and ibid. p. 241.

²⁴ LU II, i, p. 4; cf. Findlay, p. 250.

²⁵ Logik [254 ff]; cf. Cairns <218 ff>.

²⁶ Ibid.; and ibid. <219>.

²⁷ Cf. ibid.

²⁸ CM, p. 71; cf. Cairns <103>.

²⁹ Ibid.; and ibid. <104>.

³⁰ Ibid. p. 72; and ibid.