In the prior chapter we explored Husserl's conception of logic. In his account of “pure logic,” we found an articulate view of semantics, proposing a style of correlation between categories of meaning (or corresponding categories of linguistic expression) and categories of objects. This correlation flowered in Husserl's conception of intentionality, the structure wherein experience is directed toward objects in the world via meanings that represent such objects. Husserl increasingly addressed issues of ontology, as he moved from logic toward phenomenology, and into epistemology. In the present chapter we study the details of Husserl's ontology.
Ontology is the theory of what there is, assessing what are the basic kinds of things in the world, how they are interrelated, what are their essences, their modes of being, and so on. The term “metaphysics” is often used synonymously with “ontology,” but there is also a more special sense in which metaphysics is defined as speculation about what lies beyond the range of empirical evidence (the nature of God, the gods, life after or before death, and so on). Husserl uses “metaphysics” in a variation on this special sense; he uses “ontology” in the generic sense we are following but with an expanded conception of ontology that distinguished formal and material ontology.
Husserl addressed issues of ontology throughout his career. In his early Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891) he considered what numbers are and how they are related to our mental activities of grouping and counting. In Logical Investigations (first edition 1900–1), he assumed ideal meanings and their logical correlations with basic forms of object; then he outlined a theory of ideal species (what Aristotle called universals), followed by a theory of part-whole structures; then he turned to the intentional relation of consciousness to its objects, looking to the role of ideal contents or meanings in intentional experiences. All these issues belong to ontology, while the structure of intentionality is also central to the analysis of conscious experience in phenomenology (as we see in Chapters 6 and 7).The structure of space and time occupied Husserl further (in lectures of roughly 1905–10), especially in relation to our experiences of time and space. Soon Husserl returned to the nature of ideal meanings (in lectures of 1908). Ideas I (1913) opens with a statement of his mature ontology. The nature of mind or consciousness, including its relation to the body and to the natural and social world, weaves through Husserl's ontology and phenomenology in Ideas I and Ideas II (both written in 1912). Similar concerns appear in his later writings. Finally, in the Crisis (1935–8) Husserl worried about the essence of nature, contrasting our “mathematized” conception of space-time and things in nature with the ways we understand space, time, and material objects in everyday life. Again, the issue – the essence of space, time, and material things – is ontological, though phenomenology enters the analysis.
In the present chapter we explore Husserl's systematic ontology in its own right. We shall outline his basic conception of ontology, featuring a novel system of categories both “formal” and “material.” We shall pursue the implications of Husserl's ontology for the mind-body problem, which has been a robust area of research in recent philosophy. We shall look into his conception of “ideal” or abstract entities, from numbers to essences to meanings. Finally, we shall dig into Husserl's mid-career doctrine that the world stands in a certain relation to potential consciousness, central to his so-called “transcendental idealism.”
Systematic ontology began with Aristotle's theory of categories. After Plato had explored a theory of particulars and “forms” (things and their ideal types or properties), his student Aristotle developed a more elaborate and systematic ontology. Aristotle proposed that everything there is falls under exactly one of ten maximally general categories – or is a combination of things in these categories. The concrete things of the world, called “primary substances” or “beings” (ousia), are characterized by several different types of things that are “said” or “pre-dicable” of primary beings. (The Greek “kategoria” originally meant what can be said of someone, what one can be accused of in a court of law.) To get an idea of how general these categories are, just look at Aristotle's list of categories, with some subcategories, compiled with examples in Figure 4.1.
| CATEGORIES | EXAMPLES | |
| 1 | Substance | |
a Primary Substance, i.e. Individual |
this man, Socrates, this horse | |
b Secondary Substance, i.e. Species |
man (mankind), horse (kind) |
|
| 2 | Quantity | four cubits, much (water) |
| 3 | Quality | |
a State/Condition |
grammatical (in the soul) |
|
b Capacity |
rational (in the soul) |
|
c Affective Quality |
white |
|
d Shape |
square |
|
| 4 | Relative (better, Relation) | double, half, larger [than] |
| 5 | Where, i.e. Place | in the Lyceum, in the marketplace |
| 6 | When, i.e. Time | yesterday, last year |
| 7 | Position, i.e. Arrangement | lying, sitting |
| 8 | Having | has shoes on, has armor on |
| 9 | Doing, i.e. Action | cutting, burning |
| 10 | Being Affected, i.e. Acted Upon, “Passion” | being cut, being burned |
Figure 4.1 Aristotle's system of categories
Source: This table of categories and examples thereof is drawn from Aristotle's Categories, reprinted in Aristotle: Selections, translated by Terence Irwin and Gail Fine (Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., Indianapolis/Cambridge, 1995).
Aristotle's scheme of categories reigned for many centuries. Then in the “modern” era of European philosophy, in the 17th to 19th centuries, ontological categories were replaced by epistemological categories, featuring in effect categories of concepts of objects rather than categories of objects themselves. The most influential system of conceptual categories was Kant's, put forth in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787). Kant presented his scheme of categories, with four groups of three, in the form reproduced in Figure 4.2.
Other historical figures produced systems of something like categories or categorial concepts (Boethius, Suarez, Descartes, Hume, Locke, Hegel, Whitehead, to name a few). However, Husserl's background in the emerging mathematics and logic of his day, together with his emerging conception of phenomenology, prepared him for a radical rethinking of categorial ontology – to which we now turn.
A novel and distinctive system of categories emerged in Husserl's philosophy, both synthesizing and transcending the rival approaches of Aristotelians and Kantians, developed with a keen eye to mathematical forms. For the Aristotelian, we categorize the most general or basic kinds of entities in the world. For the Kantian, we cannot get at ontological categories themselves, because, Kant held, we can know
| CATEGORIES | ||
1 Of Quantity |
||
2 Of Quality |
3 Of Relation |
|
4 Of Modality |
||
Figure 4.2 Kant's system of (conceptual) categories
only things-as-they-appear, never things-as-they-are-in-themselves. So, for the Kantian, we categorize instead the most general or basic kinds of concepts we have, which we take to represent things in the world. Husserl, however, insists on categorizing both concepts, or meanings, and the objects they represent, holding that our experiences are intentionally related to objects via meanings that represent such objects.
Husserl forayed into categorial ontology early in the Logical Investigations (1900–1). In the Prolegomena (§§67ff.), as we saw in Chapter 3, Husserl specified that “pure logic” will include a semantic correlation between “pure categories of meaning” – hence categories of expression bearing such meanings – and “pure categories of objects.” Categories of meaning include: “Concept, Proposition, Truth, etc.” (§67) – also Connection (“and,” “or,” “if … then,”). “not”), Quantification (“some,” “all”). By contrast, categories of object include: “Object, State of Affairs, Unity, Plurality, Number, Relation, Connection, etc.” (§67). Notice that these respective lists of categories do not align directly, so the problem of their semantic correlation is critical. At this point in the Investigations Husserl does not assemble a purportedly complete system of categories, in the style of Aristotle or Kant. Instead, we observe a systematic use of relevant categories, some studied at length, over the protracted course of the Investigations. We find a theory of ideal species or universals (Investigation II), a theory of part/whole and of dependence (Investigation III), and a theory of ideal meanings and their role in the intentional relation of consciousness to objects (Investigation V). The important point to observe is that Husserl demands a correlation between categories of meanings (or concepts) and categories of objects, with attention to these two types of category in their own rights. Husserl thus requires a theory of categories of objects (going beyond Aristotle's), a theory of categories of meanings (going beyond Kant's), and then – in the semantic part of pure logic – a theory of how meanings in various categories correlate with objects in various categories (going beyond Frege's semantics, not in technical but in philosophical detail). The theory of object categories is thus presupposed by the semantic – and ultimately phenomenological – theory that correlates meaning categories with object categories.
In the first edition of the Logical Investigations (1900–1) Husserl spoke of the theory of objects (Gegenstände), noting the term “Gegenstandstheorie” championed by his contemporary, and fellow Brentano student, Alexius Meinong (Meinong 1904/1960). (The Meinongian approach to ontology is studied in Findlay 1963; D. W. Smith 1975; Parsons 1980.) In the second edition (and its English translation), Husserl uses the term “formal ontology” for the maximally general, or rather formal, theory of objects of all types. By “object” Husserl always means object of any type whatsoever, in whatever category: from birds and trees to numbers and sets, from physical objects to conscious experiences, from the blue in the sky to the glint in a person's eye, from works of art like Puccini's Tosca to political upheavals like the French Revolution, from the movements of the planets to the Einsteinian curvature of space-time, and – of course – from ideal species or properties (universals) to ideal meanings including concepts, propositions, and axiomatic theories. It is important to see how wide this notion of “object” is, for its range is precisely the domain of Husserl's emerging theory of categories of objects. (Husserl cites his shift in terminology from “theory of objects” to “formal ontology” in Ideas I, §10, final footnote.)
Husserl's systematic presentation of formal ontology appears only in the first chapter of Ideas I (1913). Since Ideas I is a book-length presentation of “pure” phenomenology, it is remarkable that Husserl chose to lay out his systematic ontology before proceeding with his account of the new “transcendental” discipline of phenomenology, in which we study consciousness and its representation of objects regardless of whether such objects exist. But Husserl's sketch of a systematic ontology is not merely (as some scholars have held) a paean to his early students who loved his realist ontology and disliked his “transcendental idealism” (see Ingarden 1975), for Husserl explicitly uses details of his ontology as he develops his account of “pure” or “transcendental” phenomenology (see Chapter 6).
In the opening two chapters – Part One – of Ideas I (1913), Husserl organizes his myriad ontological views into a systematic ontology. Although he imports much of the ontology already developed in Logical Investigations, there are some changes of detail (as meanings are given their own niche, distinguished from species of acts of consciousness). Most important, there is a wholly new architecture to the system. What is revolutionary is the distinction Husserl there develops between formal and material ontology, positing distinct types of formal and material categories. Some of the details we have seen in Chapter 3 of this volume, but we now pursue the organization of the system of categories.
Our task is to summarize, in its own right, Husserl's “big picture” of the categorial structure of the world, embracing objects of various type, notably including acts of consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and the objects of experience.
Part One (§§1–26) of Ideas I is titled “Essence and Cognition of Essence” (Wesen und Wesenserkenntis). “Essence” is Husserl's term for what an individual thing is (§3), including its kinds or species, its qualities or properties, and its relations to other things – what “determines” and so is predicable of something. (The German “Wesen” derives from “was + sein,” or “what + is.” Keep this in mind and we will not over-inflate the notion of essence, despite Husserl's high-sounding rhetoric.) Under Essence Husserl groups all “ideal” objects. These include species, qualities, relations – so-called “universals” – but also mathematical entities such as numbers, sets, and so on. Like Plato, Husserl insists that essences are ideal entities, or eidos (§3, adapting Plato's term), meaning they are not real, that is, concrete-spatiotemporal entities like rocks, tables, thunderstorms. Yet Husserl resisted “Platonic realism,” the doctrine (in something of a parody) that Platonic “forms” or eidos exist in a Platonic heaven beyond space and time. Husserl famously held that we have ways of grasping or knowing essences in “eidetic intuition,” or intuition of essences (§§3–4). This doctrine of eidetic intuition has been widely misunderstood, producing a serious distraction from the phenomenology and ontology in Ideas I. Intuition of essences is not a magical faculty for the gifted few, although Husserl insisted its practice is a skill that requires training. Rather, intuition of essences is a kind of abstraction wherein we focus on features shared by different instances of, say, the essence Tree. (Today cognitive scientists speak of “pattern recognition.”) Thus we speak of “seeing” that a tree has limbs, or of “insight” that a triangle has three sides totaling 180°. The epistemology of intuition will be laid out in Chapter 7, but for now our focus remains on the ontology of essences.
The opening chapter of Ideas I, “Fact and Essence” (Tatsache und Wesen) (§§1–17), is a dense presentation, unfolding a systematic structuring of Husserl's overall ontology, save for the theory of ideal meaning, which is developed much later in the book. The second chapter, “Naturalistic Misinterpretations” (§§18–26), then wards off criticisms. We shall focus here on Husserl's system of ontology and its novel types and organization of categories (§§1–16).
In Husserl's ontology, the first division of objects (of whatever type) is that between Fact and Essence (§2). Under Fact fall all “real individuals,” that is, concrete individual objects (“individua,” plural of “individuum”) occurring “contingently” in space-time and/or time (see §2). Here are enduring objects such as stones, trees, birds, bears, humans, planets, stars. Here too are events or processes such as earthquakes, tsunamis, sports events, political revolutions, and elections – and particular experiences or acts of consciousness, the theme of phenomenology. Here also are concrete states of affairs such as my being 75 inches tall or Socrates' sitting under a certain olive tree. Under Essence fall all “ideal” objects or eidos that “determine” concrete objects. Here are the species, qualities, relations, and quantities that inhere in concrete objects: for example, humanity (humankind), cleverness or obstreperousness, unity (one-ness), and being-a-teacher-of-Plato – these being ideal, shareable features that inhere in the concrete individual Socrates. Here too are mathematical eidos such as unity, plurality, and number (see §§10–12). Terminology: Husserl uses the German “real” for spatiotemporal objects, and “reell” for temporal objects including experiences (which are not properly spatial but are temporal); in English we have only the one word “real” to translate both.
Broadly, Husserl's categorial distinction between Fact and Essence is a variation on the Platonic–Aristotelian division between particulars and universals. However, Husserl goes on to develop a series of distinctions that form an innovative and original system of categories, separating formal from material categories, and featuring interesting choices for each. With these distinctions, there emerges Husserl's conception of “formal” ontology, assumed in his conception of pure logic and ultimately of pure phenomenology as well.
Husserl divided essences into two types: “material” essences, concerning substantive matters of “fact”; and “formal” essences, concerning the mere forms of objects of any type. Material essences at the highest level of generality he called regions; essences at the highest level of formality he called categories. Although he sometimes calls all high-level essences “categories,” his strict usage is reserved for formal categories, which govern material regions or domains. That would leave Fact and Essence themselves as Ur-categories or super-categories, though Husserl offers no such name.
What, then, are regions and categories?
Consider an object in nature, say, this individual tree, a particular eucalyptus tree located at a certain time on a certain street in California. The tree is one thing, a concrete individual. Its essence is something else, an ideal formation comprising its species (Eucalyptus), its qualities (how it is colored), its spatial shape (how tall it is and how its limbs reach out in specific directions), its relationships (to me across the street), its structure with botanic parts (limbs, sap, bark, leaves), its unity, and so on. Such properties, each in principle shareable by other objects, make up its “material” essence as a spatiotemporal-physical thing in nature. The specific essence of this individual tree falls under the more generic essence Eucalyptus, which in turn falls under the more generic essence Tree, under Plant, and so on, up to the highest “material genus,” Nature. To stay for a moment with this example, biological classification would specify these groupings precisely, and the theory of speciation has changed importantly since Husserl's day, but let us assume Husserl's overarching view that natural species and genera are “determined” by a type of essence, a type of “material” essence, to be detailed by careful empirical research. We will then need to distinguish the natural “species” Eucalyptus globules from its corresponding “ideal species” or essence. The natural species is a botanical population distributed in space-time, with an evolutionary history on Earth, while its “ideal species” would be an “eidetic” formation including what biological systematists call its phenotype (characteristic observable qualities), its holotype (paradigm instances), and its phylogenetic clade (the tree of descendence relating the current natural species to prior species in its evolutionary descent). Husserlian ontology would ramify the extant debate among biologists over the definition of species, but we note here the ambiguity of the term “species” and how Husserlian eidos relate to naturally occurring species-populations. Note how empirical research interweaves with abstract ontology, on such an approach.
The “highest material genus” under which an individual object falls Husserl terms a region (Region) (§§9–10). In Ideas I Husserl works with Nature as a region (§9) and then homes in on the region Consciousness (Bewusstsein) (§33 and §§45ff., with the title “The Region of Pure Consciousness”).
In Ideas II Husserl analyzes relations between the region Consciousness and the region Culture or Spirit (Geist). Consciousness is central to phenomenology in later sections of Ideas I, while Culture figures centrally in Ideas II but appears along the way also in Ideas I. So Husserl's ontology recognizes three, and presumably only three, proper regions: Nature, Consciousness, and Culture. These three kinds or domains – with their own distinctive and irreducible properties – were distinguished by other philosophers in the 19th century and indeed in earlier centuries. What is new in Husserl, however, is their place in his novel system of categories.
Each region embraces many lower, or more specific, essences or essence-domains. Under Nature are Plant, Animal, and so on. And under Plant are many different genera and their species, including Eucalyptus globules (in botany's terminology). Each material region is studied in an appropriate material ontology. Thus, the ontology of Nature (§9) fans out into more specific ontologies of trees, of eucalyptus trees, of animals, of bears, of fishes, of swordfish, and so on. Of note to Husserl, given his mathematical background, is the way applied geometry figures in the material ontology of spatiotemporal objects in nature: the ancient pure geometries were followed in modern times by applied geometries in physics (§9). But pure geometry, as opposed to applied physical geometry, is part of pure mathematics or “formal mathesis” (§9). As we know from the Logical Investigations, Husserl saw in the ideal of a mathesis universalis, or universal mathematical theory, the ideal of a purely formal ontology. And in Ideas I Husserl lays out his notion of formal ontology as governing the variety of material ontologies of various regions and their more specific sub-domains.
Husserl's key idea – defining his conception of formal ontology – is that all objects falling under material essences, from the most specific essences up to the most general regions, are further determined or governed by strictly formal essences. Whereas material essences define the substantive nature of an object, formal essences define the pure forms of objects, forms that are filled out in substantive ways by their material essences. For example, this particular tree is, “materially,” a eucalyptus, but it is, “formally,” an individual or “substrate” (§11), that is, something capable of bearing properties. It cannot bear the material essence Eucalyptus unless it bears the formal essence Individual. Further, the material species Eucalyptus globules falls under the formal essence Species; the concrete species cannot be a species unless it falls under the formal essence Species. And the concrete state of affairs that consists in this tree's being a eucalyptus is itself a concrete object (a “fact”) that falls under the formal essence State of Affairs. Formal essences such as Species Husserl calls “essence-forms” (§10); that is, they are forms – types – of material essences, “empty” forms that are filled by material essences such as Eucalyptus globules.
Because these forms apply to objects in any relevant material domain, Husserl calls them “logical categories” (§10): logic applies everywhere. However, he explains that they are not “meaning categories [Bedeutungskategorien]” but “formal objective categories [gegenständlichen Kategorien] in the precise [prägnanten] sense” (§10, Husserl's italics and scare quotes).This distinction between objective categories and meaning categories is that drawn in the Prolegomena of the Logical Investigations, as Husserl states in the footnotes. Recall Husserl's conception of logic, which is wider than that of a symbolic language of inference.
Husserl offers slightly different lists of formal essences or categories. Here is one of his longer lists, from the Investigation III of the Logical Investigations (§11): the formal essences (corresponding to formal concepts) “Something, One, Object, Quality, Relation, Connection, Plurality, Number, Order, Ordinal Number, Whole, Part, Magnitude, etc.” are contrasted with material essences (corresponding to material concepts) such as “House, Tree, Color, Tone, Space, Sensation, Feeling, etc.” Returning to Ideas I, we find Husserl listing these characteristic formal or “logical” categories: “Property, Relative Quality, State of Affairs [Sachverhalt], Relation, Identity, Similarity, Set [Menge] (Collection), Number, Whole and Part, Kind [Gattung] and Way [Art], and so forth” (§10).At the beginning of this list, the categories Property, Quality, Relation, and State of Affairs ramify the traditional theory of particulars and universals (where Aristotle's theory of categories began). However, the notion of a category of states of affairs was developed by Husserl and others around the turn of the 20th century. A Sachverhalt – literally “things-related” – is a structure consisting in two or more objects standing in a relation, or in a single object having a property or kind (as it were, a one-place relation). This structure would be the featured “logical form” in Ludwig Wittgenstein's famous Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung, 1921), which may well be read as a study in formal ontology. In Wittgenstein's system of “logical atomism” (as Bertrand Russell called his own version of the doctrine), the world is the totality of “facts,” or existing states of affairs, rather than objects, which merely appear as constituents in states of affairs. That is, the world is built up, formally, from states of affairs, “complexes” in which objects are bound together by relations.
Next on Husserl's recited list of formal categories are Identity and Similarity. Then come the mathematical categories including Set and Number – we may add Manifold (see Chapter 3). Husserl had devoted his first book to the theory of numbers, but after that “immature” effort in Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891) he spent an industrious decade working up to the system of the Logical Investigations (1900–1), radically extending his conception of ontology. Notice that he counts Number as a formal essence, while he counts geometric essences like Shape or Triangle as material essences, presumably because they apply only to objects in space or space-time.
Next on Husserl's list are the categories Whole and Part. In the midst of the Investigations Husserl devoted an extended study (Investigation III) to the ontology of part and whole. Notice, here, that he specifically includes the essences Whole and Part as formal essences, applicable to any material domain. Part and Whole apply to spatiotemporal objects (this table has parts including four legs and a table-top), but they also apply to conscious experiences (my seeing the table has parts as my visual field includes visual presentations of the table, the book on the table, and the chair behind the table).The forms Part and Whole also apply to expressions and their meanings, which have grammatical parts. A simple sentence is composed, say, of a name and a predicate; the proposition expressed thereby is composed of an individual concept and a predicative concept. (Investigation IV is Husserl's application of part-whole ontology to meanings.) Phenomenology itself turns on the analysis of the parts composing the ideal meaning that serves as the content of an intentional experience. (Investigation V pursues this “formal” analysis of the parts of intentional experiences and contents, and Ideas I carries such analyses further into the structure of noemata, as we see in Chapter 6.) We will return to wholes, parts, and dependence.
Whatever goes on the list of formal ontological categories, the assumption is that the forms listed apply to all domains of objects. Notably, Husserl's assumption is that the categories – Individual, Property, State of Affairs, Number, and so on – apply to any domain under any of the regions Nature, Consciousness, and Culture. (If this assumption proves too strong, the leading idea remains that formal categories apply to various material categories, however these be ordered. See the contrasting category schemes studied in D.W. Smith 2004.)
According to Husserl's epistemology, we grasp essences by abstraction, sifting through possible cases for shared essences and thereby coming to “see” what is shared. But formal and material essences are grasped by two different types of abstraction. In generalization we grasp a shared material essence, a species or genus (Ideas I, §12) at some level of generality, say, Tree or Plant or Material Thing, that is, Thing in Nature. In formalization, by contrast, we grasp a shared formal essence at some level of formality, say, Individual (Substrate), Property, State of Affairs, or Number. Generalization is practiced in everyday life as we look for generalities (Knife, Fork, Spoon, and Chopstick are species under Eating Utensil). In a more theoretical vein we practice generalization in empirical science as we look for higher theoretical generalities (in biology we find: Eukarya, Animalia, … , Mammalia, … , Homo, Homo Sapiens). By contrast, we practice formalization in mathematics and logic as we look for formal structures found in arithmetic, geometry, calculus, mathematical logic, and computer science, say, Number, Set, Manifold, Integral, Decidability, Algorithm, and so on. (See Ideas I, §13 on the contrast between formalization and generalization.)
Within the domain of objects overall, Husserl writes (§11), there is an important distinction between what he calls “syntactic forms” and “syntactic substrates,” or “stuffs” that fill the forms. There is thus an important “formal-ontological” distinction between syntactic categories and substrate categories. In an Aristotelian idiom we might say that, in their “syntactic” form, substrates (primary substances) are the ultimate bearers of essences (universals), where essences are predicable of or borne by substrates but substrates are not predicable of anything. These formal categories “mirror” (widerspiegeln) the “pure-grammatical” distinction in the formal theory of meaning, the distinction between predicative concepts and individual concepts, which are expressible, respectively, by predicates and singular terms such as names and pronouns. In logic, syntax is defined as the theory of the forms of expressions in a language, or for Husserl the corresponding forms of meanings. Thus, the syntactic form of a sentence consists in the shapes and order of symbols occurring in the sentence, including their forming words. For instance, the sentence “Socrates is wise” has a left-to-right order of letters forming words separated by spaces, and a grammatical combination of the words, here that of a name and an adjective joined by the copula “is.” Strikingly, Husserl transfers this notion of syntactic form not only to the forms of meanings expressed by the sentence, but to the forms of objects represented in the sentence.
In Chapter 3 we already worked with this sort of ontological distinction, looking to the correlation between forms or categories of meanings (or corresponding expressions) and forms or categories of objects represented by those meanings. We can chart, in the following scheme, the “syntactic” categories in a simple case for types or forms of expression, meaning, and object represented:
| Expression type | “[Name] + [Predicate]” = Sentence |
| Expression | “Socrates is wise” = this particular sentence |
| Meaning type | <[Individual Concept] + [Property Concept]> = Proposition |
| Meaning | <Socrates is wise> = this particular proposition |
| Object type | [Individual + Property] = State of Affairs |
| Object | [Socrates is wise] = this particular state of affairs |
(Here I use the square brackets for a state of affairs formed from an individual and a property, I use the angle brackets for a meaning, a proposition formed from an individual-concept and a property-concept, and I use quotation marks for a sentence so formed from a name and a predicate.)
Husserl's vision of ontological form (Form) – objective formal structure in the world – may seem a simplistic projection of the logical forms of sentences or propositions on to the world, where ontological forms mirror linguistic forms. To be sure, he clearly promotes just such a projection, positing the ontological categories of State of Affairs or Sachverhalt (corresponding to a simple complete sentence), Species and Quality and Relation (corresponding to predicates in the new logic), and of course Individual (corresponding to the names or variables in the new logic). And Aristotle's early doctrine of categories already aligned categories with language. However, as we saw in Chapter 3, Husserl sees “pure logic” in relation to a more abstract range of theory, namely, the conception of mathematics and metamathematics emerging in his day. There we saw Husserl's pet concept of manifolds at work. At any rate, as we look for the implicit architecture in Husserl's ontology, we follow the trail of his fascination with formal structure in the world, a type of structure that can be characterized in a mathematical theory or mathesis universalis, a theory whose domain of study takes the form of a “manifold.”
To see how syntactic categories reach beyond the mirror images of everyday grammatical categories and into mathematical structures, consider the list of examples Husserl offers:
The categories corresponding to these [syntactic] forms [Formen] we call syntactic categories. Here there belong as examples the categories State of Affairs, Relation, Property, Unity, Plurality, Number, Order, Ordinal Number, and so forth.
(Ideas I, §11)
The last four categories govern the mathematical theories of set, number, and so on, and lead into metamathematics, and accordingly Husserl soon returns to the category Manifold (Mannigfaltigkeit), mentioning “Euclidean Manifold” (§13). As we saw in Chapter 3, Husserl conceives a manifold as a structure that is the form of the field of an axiomatic theory. Even these forms are “syntactic,” we infer, insofar as the form Manifold governs all mathematical domains characterized (here is the “grammar” model) by theories, which are systems of propositions (whose structure is defined in logical syntax or grammar).
The simplest syntactic form is that of individual objects, which Husserl calls “substrates.”The “formal region” Object – comprising “objectivities” of any type whatever (“Gegenstandlichkeit-überhaupt”) – divides into two categories: Substrate and Syntactic Object (or Objectivity) (§11). Substrates are the ultimate bearers of essences at any level of formality. Essences at any level have syntactic forms, ontological forms that are correlates of “thought-functions” such as asserting (“x is wise”), denying (“x is not wise”), relating (“x is a teacher of y”), connecting (“A and B”), counting (“1, 2, 3, … “), and so forth. Essences may have considerable syntactic structure, as does the essence [Greek & Wise & Teacher of Plato], which corresponds to the predicative structure of judging or thinking “x is Greek & x is wise & x is a teacher of Plato.” By contrast, substrates are, formally, objects that have no syntactic complexity but rather serve as the ultimate “termini” of syntactic structures leading up from substrates to all higher levels of essence (§11). Husserl calls these substrates “individuals” (§11), but prefers the Aristotelian idiom “todeti,” or “this there” (§14), because the term “individual” implies indivisibility and so a part–whole structure that is formally distinct from the structure of bearing essences. Thus we have the form of a syntactically complex essence predicated in the complex sentence “x is a Greek & x is wise & x is a teacher of Plato”: the individual this-there (Socrates) is the substrate that has the syntactically structured essence predicated of it by this syntactically complex sentence.
By the way, when Husserl occasionally speaks of “categorial intuition,” he has in mind “seeing” the syntactic, categorial structure of a syntactically complex object, especially a state of affairs such as Socrates' being Greek and wise and a teacher of Plato. Our concern at present, however, is with ontological structure, not intuition of such structure.
Among formal categories, we noted, Husserl includes Whole and Part.
In Investigation III of the Logical Investigations, Husserl develops the outlines of a theory of part and whole, a theory of these formal essences, that is, of how parts and wholes of various types are related. What is most important for our purposes is the distinction he draws between two types of part (Teil) called “piece” (Stück) and “moment” (Moment) (§17). A piece of an object is an independent part, a part that could exist apart from the whole: for instance the leg of a table. A moment of an object is a dependent part, a part that could not exist apart from the whole: for instance, this white – this particular instance of whiteness – in this vase (to borrow an example from Aristotle's Categories). (See B. Smith 1982; Simons 1987; Fine 1995 on Husserl's ontology of parts and wholes.)
Husserl's formulation of these notions is unfortunately complex. In effect, he packs Necessity into Dependence and Dependence into Moment. But we ought to factor out the distinct albeit connected formal essences: Part, Dependence, and Necessity. Accordingly, I think it is fair to simplify Husserl's story as follows.
First there is the essence of being a dependent (unselbständig) object, hence dependence or foundation (Fundierung) (§§2ff., 14). An object A is dependent, or founded, on an object B if and only if A could not exist unless B existed, that is, necessarily A exists only if B exists. Now, dependencies are governed by “laws of essence.” So Husserl specifies that A is dependent or founded on B if and only if, according the laws of the essences of A and B, necessarily A exists only if B exists. (As Husserl puts it, an object of type A “requires foundation” in an object of type B, according to the relevant laws of essence (§17).) So let us isolate the formal category Dependence. This category applies to very different types of object. For example: a tree depends on sap flowing, according to the laws of botany governing the essence Tree; the numbers 1, 2, 3, … depend on the numerical relation of succession, according to the laws of arithmetic governing the essence Number; the truth of the proposition “The earthquake has ended” depends on the truth of the proposition “The earthquake began,” that is, the former proposition presupposes that latter, according to semantic theory governing the essence Meaning. Notice that the term “foundation” may mislead, since dependence can be a two-way street where A and B are mutually dependent on each other. For example, some biological organisms are mutually parasitic, and the roles of Husband and Wife are mutually dependent, that is, A cannot be a husband to B unless B is a wife to A. So let us speak simply of dependence.
Assuming the distinct categories of Part and Dependence, then, a moment is defined as a dependent part: A is a moment, or dependent part, of B if and only if A is a part of B and the essences of A and B are such that necessarily A exists only if B exists. Husserl's leading example (§4) is drawn from psychology or, rather, phenomenology. Thus, the color and extension (shape) of an object of vision are mutually dependent. For instance, this rectangular white sheet of paper has two visible qualities, its whiteness and its rectangularity. This whiteness in the paper could not exist unless this rectangularity in the paper existed, and vice versa, according to the laws governing the essences Visible Color and Visible Extension. This sheet of paper is, then, a whole including as moments, or dependent parts, this-color and this-shape. Following Aristotle, this-whiteness and this-rectangularity in this sheet of paper are particulars existing in space and time where the sheet of paper exists.
Husserl evidently assumes that dependence occurs only where one object is a dependent part of a whole. But one whole object may be dependent or founded on another whole object. If I carve a statue from marble, the statue is a work of art that depends or is founded on my intentional activity (see Ingarden 1961/1989; Thomasson 1998). Perhaps Husserl assumes that the work and the activity that produces it are themselves parts of some whole, say, the artistic process. But if we do not go that route with Husserl, then we would simply distinguish two formal categories: Dependence and Part. We must return to the issue of dependence as we analyze the status of consciousness and the world – is one dependent on the other, and if so in what ways?
Husserl applies the theory of parts (and wholes) to very different types of object: things in nature (trees), acts of consciousness (my seeing that eucalyptus tree across the street), meanings (the structured proposition <that tree is a eucalyptus and it was planted 100 years ago>), even essences (Tall Bipedal Vertebrate Animal). We shall find implications of the theory of parts as we explore Husserl's analyses of parts of experience and meaning in Chapters 5 and 6, and in pursuing implications for philosophy of mind and for transcendental idealism later in this chapter. Keep in mind that Part is a formal category, and so is (or should be) Dependence.
The definition of dependence presupposes the notion of necessity, as A cannot exist unless B exists, that is to say, necessarily A exists only if B exists. Husserl seems to assume that Necessity is a category that governs relations among essences, that is, according to “laws of essence.” Perhaps he thinks necessity resides only in aspects of essences. Here is a large topic we cannot pursue in detail. Briefly, Husserl offers a corrective to Kant's conception of “analytic” and “synthetic” propositions, the former true by virtue of meaning (“A bachelor is unmarried”) and the latter true by virtue of contingent matters of fact (“Grass is green”). Husserl ramifies these traditional notions by appeal to the distinction between formal and material essences, which generate necessities on different grounds. “The cardinal distinction between ‘formal’ and ‘material’ spheres of Essence,” he writes, “gives us the true distinction between the analytically a priori and the synthetically a priori disciplines (or laws and necessities)” (Investigation III, §11). Necessities, or necessary states of affairs, are the objective correlates of a priori propositions, but we are to distinguish two types of necessity. We may say that formal necessities are posited by analytically a priori propositions such as “3 > 2” or “Every whole has parts” or “A relation binds objects into a state of affairs.” By contrast, material necessities are posited by synthetically a priori propositions such as “Every bird has wings” or “A house has at least one room” or “There cannot be a king without subjects” (compare §11).
Possibility is the counterpoint to Necessity. Husserl speaks often of possibilities. Notably in his account of the “horizon” of possibilities – in effect, possible states of affairs – left open by the content or sense of an experience. He occasionally speaks of “possible worlds” (Ideas I, §47), adapting the term from his hero Leibniz. We consider these things in Chapter 6. For now, let us allow that Possibility and Necessity take a place in Husserl's scheme of formal categories.
For Husserl, meanings are ideal objects that play a key role in both logic and phenomenology. But what type of ideal objects are meanings?
The ideal intentional content of an experience Husserl calls a sense (Sinn). A sense expressed in language he calls a meaning (Bedeutung). According to Husserl's logic, we know, a sense or meaning is correlated with an appropriate object, as the role of meaning is precisely to represent, logically, an appropriate object – for instance as the sense “the vanquished at Waterloo” represents Napoleon. And, according to Husserl's theory of intentionality, the sense in an act of consciousness is correlated with an appropriate object, as the sense represents the object of consciousness. These principles are developed at length in the Logical Investigations and reappear in Ideas I (with some variation on the expressibility of sense). In Ideas I, in his presentation of phenomenology as a discipline, Husserl introduces the Greek term “noema” for the ideal intentional content of an act of consciousness, and the core of the noema is called a sense or noematic sense. The details of Husserl's doctrine of noema emerge in Chapters 5 and 6 of this volume.
In the Investigations Husserl categorized sense with species. The sense, or ideal intentional content, of an act of consciousness, he held, is the ideal species of the act of consciousness. If I think that “the vanquished at Waterloo was Corsican,” the content “the vanquished at Waterloo” embodies the way I am thinking of the object (who is in fact Napoleon): the type or species of presentation of the object in my experience. To categorize meanings with species explains in what way they are ideal (in the way that species are ideal), and no new categories are assumed.
However, by the time of Ideas I, Husserl had come to think of meanings or senses as their own kind of ideal object, deserving their own name,”noema.” Husserl does not give an explicit argument for this change of status; he merely specifies that there is a correlation between an act and its noema, where the noematic sense in an act is cited as “the object as intended.” The best argument for Husserl's new position, it seems to me, is that species and senses have different ontological roles. A species is instantiated by a moment in an object that is a member of the species. By contrast, a sense represents or means an object, that is, it semantically or intentionally prescribes an object, and often prescribes it as having certain “determinations” or properties. Instantiation is part of the structure of essences in general, while semantic representation is part of the structure of intentionality, quite a distinct feature of the world. In Chapter 6, we shall dig into the significance of Husserl's characterization of a sense as “the object as intended,” a characterization that has led to some divergent interpretations of Husserl's theory of noemata and their role in intentionality. Whatever else we are to say of noemata, for Husserl an act's noema is an ideal meaning entity, distinct in kind from any ideal essence (see Simons 1995 on Husserl's theory of meaning and his change of ontology in lectures of 1908).
If meanings or senses have this distinctive role in intentionality, they deserve their own categorial niche in the structure of the world. Accordingly, in Husserl's ontology, there should be a distinct category Meaning, or Sense. And since the role of meanings is logical (semantic), this category should be a formal essence, or category proper. For every object of whatever type is subject to logical or semantic representation by appropriate meanings that range over objects in accord with the laws of essence for meanings. “Pure logic” defines the semantic correlations among various types of meanings and appropriate types of objects. Intentionality theory follows suit. The category Meaning is not specified as Husserl opens Ideas I with his scheme of formal and material ontology. But the thrust of his long presentation of phenomenology as the book proceeds surely demands that we distinguish this category amid the structure of the world.
I propose to systematize Husserl's novel category scheme as in Figure 4.3 (compare D.W. Smith 1995). Husserl did not present his system of categories in an explicit diagram (as did Kant); nor did he offer an explicit architecture governing the categories. There is always the sense that Husserl's system is (unlike Kant's) a work forever in progress, reflecting a sense of the “transcendence” of the world and our incomplete knowledge of even the most basic structures of the
Fact [Real Object: in time or space-time]
real individuals
independent individuals
dependent individuals, i.e. moments
states of affairs [Sachverhalte]
events
natural events
mental events, experiences, acts of consciousness
cultural events
Essence [Ideal Object: not in time or space-time; bearable by objects]
Formal Essence
Category (highest level of formality)
Individual or Substrate (Tode Ti, This-There)
Species, Quality or Property, Relation
State of Affairs
Connection [And, Or, Not, If-Then]
Necessity, Possibility
Dependence, Independence
Whole, Part
Unity, Plurality, …
Number
Set, Group, …
Manifold
Value
…
Material Essence
Region (highest level of generality)
Nature
…, Plant, Animal, …, Human, …
Consciousness
Subject (“I”), Act of Consciousness, Stream of Consciousness
Culture or Spirit (Geist)
Person, Society, Value, Artifact, …
Meaning or Sense [Ideal Content of Intentional Experience]
| Individual Sense | – “this tree” |
| Predicative Sense | – “is a eucalyptus,” “is taller than that oak” |
| Proposition(al Sense) | – “this tree is a eucalyptus” |
| Connective Sense | – “and,” “or,” “not,” “if …then” |
| Quantifier Sense | – “all,” “some” |
Figure 4.3 Husserl's system of categories
world: there is always more to come. With this caveat in mind, I offer a reconstruction of the system of categories Husserl presented in Ideas I against the background of the Logical Investigations.
Husserl separated ideal meanings from ideal essences as he developed his theory of “noema,” the type of ideal content that inheres in an act of consciousness. We study meanings, ideal intentional contents of experiences, in Chapters 5 and 6, here noting their place in Husserl's overall category scheme.
In Chapter 8 we consider Husserl's views on ethics and the theory of values. Husserl takes values to have a certain objectivity while, in the case of ethical values, they are related to our emotions and our social life. Where should values appear, then, in Husserl's category scheme? Morality and ethical values Husserl places under the material region Culture, as our values regarding actions and what counts as a good person are part of our everyday life-world. However, I have placed Value as a category under Formal Essence, since values should apply to objects in the different material regions. For instance, a good will should fall under the region Consciousness, while a good or well-developed oak tree should fall under the region Nature, as should a good pattern of psychological development for a human infant.
Ideal – as many today say, abstract – objects are a controversial lot. By hypothesis or definition, they do not exist in time or space. But how then are they related to real objects, which exist in time or space– time? How can ideal objects like properties or kinds be instantiated or realized or borne by real objects, since that realization relation must span the gap between real and ideal? How can ideal objects such as properties or numbers or sets play any role in causal relations in the real world? How can ideal meanings relate to real experiences, which carry meanings as contents? How can ideal meanings represent real objects, where the intentional relation of representation must reach from the realm of ideal meanings into the realm of real objects like trees or hilltops? And is it plausible that ideal objects exist in a Platonic heaven that is outside space, time, and nature? These are the problematic issues long posed for ideal objects, since their inception in Platonic philosophy.
The classical doctrines on universals (species, properties, and so on) run roughly as follows. Platonic (extreme) realism says that eidos are real or existent entities that do not exist in time or space-time, yet are instantiated in real, concrete objects (the eidos wisdom is instantiated in the concrete individual Socrates). Aristotelian (moderate) realism brings universals down to earth, saying that universals exist only insofar as they are instantiated in concrete particulars, whence they exist in time or space-time as “accidents” inherent in particulars (wisdom “inheres” in Socrates insofar as this particular instance of wisdom is “in” Socrates). Nominalism or, better, particularism holds that only concrete particulars exist, so a predicate such as “is wise” is a purely nominal affair (we truly say, “Socrates is wise,” but there is only Socrates of whom the predicate holds though the predicate does not represent any additional entity). (Armstrong 1989 surveys the classical and contemporary positions, sans Husserl.)
Where does Husserl stand vis-à-vis the classical positions on universals?
In Investigation II of the Logical Investigations, Husserl assesses a variety of traditional issues about “ideal species,” and in Investigation III he develops an ontology of parts and wholes that plays a role in his account of ideal objects and their instances in concrete objects. As far as I can see, Husserl's theory of ideal objects and their instances carries over intact into Ideas I, where the theory is used in Husserl's articulation of phenomenology. (See the account of noesis and noema addressed in Chapter 6 of this volume.) Here is a summary of Husserl's view, as I would reconstruct it.
Start with species (or properties or relations), that is, universals. Husserl's ontology of universals distinguishes three types of object (in the formal sense of object).Take a simple case: Socrates is a man. Husserl distinguishes: (1) the ideal species Man; (2) the concrete individual Socrates; and (3) the concrete instance of manhood in Socrates. The latter is what Husserl calls a “moment,” or dependent part, of Socrates – in that sense it is “in” Socrates. Then: Socrates instantiates the species Man if and only if Socrates' manhood is a moment of (“in”) Socrates, and that moment is a concrete instance of the species Man. In effect, Husserl borrows from Plato in positing ideal species and from Aristotle in positing concrete instances of species.
What is novel is the ontology of part that Husserl puts to use in a synthesis of Platonic and Aristotelian views. The particular instance of manhood, of Man, in Socrates is a concrete particular, an individual. But it is a dependent object, an individual dependent for its existence on the individual Socrates. Further, it is a dependent part, or moment, of Socrates. This-manhood-in-Socrates exists in time and space, as a part of Socrates, who exists in time and space. Presumably, Socrates' manhood exists when and where Socrates exists. By contrast, Socrates' left foot is an independent part, or “piece” of Socrates. If that foot were (gods forbid) cut off in an accident, the foot would exist apart from Socrates; and, whether attached or detached, the foot exists in a spatiotemporal expanse distinct from the spatiotemporal expanse occupied by the whole Socrates. In effect, Husserl's notion of moment is an extension of Aristotle's notion (in the Categories) of a particularized quality “in” an individual, but Husserl explicates the core notion within a detailed theory of part and whole.
The relation between the concrete individual Socrates and the ideal species Man is thus mediated by the particular instance of Man(hood) that exists spatiotemporally in Socrates, a moment of Socrates. We still find the ideal species Man instantiated by a concrete individual in space-time, albeit an individual that is a dependent part of Socrates. How does this more complex relation solve the ancient problem of crossing the ontological chasm between ideal and real objects? How does Husserl's theory avoid the problematic Platonism attacked ever since Aristotle? The answer, I propose, lies with Husserl's distinction between formal and material essence.
We must understand Husserl's ontology of ideal objects within the context of his formal ontology. Objects include any formal type of object whatever. Species, individuals, moments are all objects, but objects falling under different formal categories or subcategories: under Essence (Material Essence), Substrate, and Dependent Part, or Moment. The link between a concrete individual and an essence, I take it, is itself a formal link, just as the grammatical link of predication is a formal linguistic link (“Socrates is a man,” reformulated in predicate logic as “Man (Socrates)” or “M(s),” on the model of the application of a function term to an argument term). Thus, this-manhood is a moment ofSocrates, and this-manhood is an instance of Man(hood), and so Socrates is a member of the species Man. These three formal linkages bind objects of appropriate formal types – different types. Here are the grounds of a response to traditional worries about ideal objects, and Husserl gestures in this direction, with an air that he does not suffer gladly these fools who misunderstand his doctrine.
After laying out his ontology of formal and material essences in opening Ideas I, Husserl dismisses the critics who would charge him with a misbegotten “Platonic hypostasizing” of essences (§22). If object and real object (“Gegenstand” and “das Reales”) are distinguished, as in Logical Investigations, Husserl retorts, “if object is defined as anything whatsoever, for example, as subject of a true (categorical, affirmative) statement, then what offense can remain?” In short, the objection to Husserl's doctrine of essence as Platonic hypostasizing rests on a confusion of formal and material categories. To fill in the argument, we might say: if you object to essences because they are ideal and so cannot be in space-time and thereby tied into real objects, you have made a category mistake. Real objects fall under the material essence or region Nature. Essences (of whatever type) do not – that would be an utterly confused claim, given Husserl's ontology. So, if you think that an eidos must be in space-time if it is to be tied to a real object, then you have missed the point of the categorial distinction between Fact and Essence. There is a link of instantiation between the concrete individual Socrates, or his particular manhood, and the ideal species Man, but that tie is not a spatiotemporal relation, much less a causal relation. Indeed, though we readily use the word “relation,” we do not take this Socrates-Manhood link to fall under the formal essence Relation. In grammar we speak of the linking verb “is,” the copula, and we do not take it to stand for a relation, say, like being taller than or being a teacher of. We say “Socrates is wise,” where the copula is said to be syncategorematic, that is, it does not stand for anything (in any category), but merely links subject and predicate. (In the syntax of predicate logic, the sentence is rendered as “W(s),” where the predicate “W” is applied by parentheses to the name “s” – with no suggestion that the parentheses represent anything at all.) Similarly, we must see the ties between objects in different categories, or between a “fact” and an essence, as a distinct formal feature of life in a world structured by Husserlian categories.
Framing his conception of phenomenology, Husserl's ontology has interesting implications for philosophy of mind. On many issues, arguably, he was a good century ahead of his time.
The mind-body problem – how our conscious experience is related to our body and to the physical world in general – has been with us for millennia. Yet philosophy of mind, in the tradition of analytic philosophy, has been perhaps the most vigorous area of philosophical activity in recent decades. As 20th-century physics produced amazing empirical-mathematical results in relativity theory and quantum mechanics, revising Newtonian mechanics and electromagnetism theory, many philosophers stepped in to argue for a scientific materialism or physicalism, holding that the mind must somehow reduce to purely physical processes, like everything else in the known universe. In the 1920s and 1930s the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle promoted a vision of philosophy based in empirical science informed by the new logic, and in the 1950s materialism was pressed explicitly as analytic philosophy moved its focus from language to mind. By 1950, furthermore, the digital computer had arrived, and in the 1960s many scientists and philosophers came to see the computer as a mechanical mind, storing information in memory, drawing inferences, and even guiding the movements of a robot. Functionalism emerged as the dominant “naturalized” model of mind: as software is to hardware, so concepts and their logic are to neural architecture, or “wetware” – that is to say, mind simply consists in rule-governed processing of information, real-time computation running in a brain or even, some say, in a silicon-chip computer. By the 1980s, techniques of brain-imaging were demonstrating, graphically, the way mind is grounded in neural activity, showing which parts of the brain are at work during perception, memory, emotions, and so on. The new physicalism – armed with physics, computer science, and neuroscience – seemed to have a clear lock on our ultimate understanding of the mind. Yet by the late 1980s, many naturalistic philosophers were arguing that the functionalist-physicalist model does not adequately account for some of the most salient properties of mind: the “qualia,” or subjective characters, of sensation; the intentionality of thought, involving meaning as well as the manipulation of purely syntactic symbols (the 1s and 0s of a digital computer); and the very character of consciousness, whereby we experience and are aware of our own mental states. How, then, can we give credence to the well-established results of contemporary science and yet accommodate the phenomenological characters of our own experience? This is the state of play in current philosophy of mind – to which Husserl's results can speak in an articulate way. (Summaries of the basic positions in philosophy of mind are expounded in Churchland 1988; Kim 2000; Searle 2004. Studies addressing phenomenology as well are Petitot et al. 1999; Smith and Thomasson 2005.)
There is another type of philosophical theory of “mind,” growing out of the 19th century's concern with Geist, or “spirit,” in the sense of Zeitgeist or the spirit of the times. This range of philosophical theory involves both subjective personal experience and objective historical, social activity. G.W.F. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (Phänomenologie des Geistes, 1807/1977) brought these issues to the fore. By 1900 social theorists distinguished two kinds of “science”: natural science, including physics, and cultural science, including social and political theory. (The German terms are “Naturwissenschaft” and “Geisteswissenschaft.”) Like the philosophers of the Vienna Circle, Husserl saw Hegel's writing as the antithesis of “scientific” philosophy, though recent philosophers have been more sympathetic. In any event, in Husserl's day social theorists such as Wilhelm Dilthey held that social or cultural phenomena must be studied in a different way than physical phenomena: we understand language and other human activities by “Verstehen,” or “understanding,” as opposed to explanation by mathematical hypothesis. Husserl emphasized the role of empathy (Einfühlung) in understanding “others,” and he took empathy as the key to our theory of culture or Geist. All these movements, from Hegel to Dilthey to Husserl, are at home in the tradition of continental philosophy, forming a background for later continental theorists from Martin Heidegger to Michel Foucault. Husserl's ontology has implications for this type of philosophy of mind as Geist. In the analytic tradition, meanwhile, theories of the relation of mind to social or cultural practices have been inspired often by the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, especially Philosophical Investigations (1953/2001), where Wittgenstein turns from logical theory to the “grammar” of ordinary language as shown in familiar “language games.”
Still another approach to mind is that of idealism. There are very different types of idealism: George Berkeley's empiricist idealism, reducing bodies to sensory ideas in minds; Kant's transcendental idealism, appraising the ways in which things-as-they-appear are shaped by the mind's sensory and conceptual faculties; Hegel's social idealism, interpreting Mind's historical progression to self-realization. We return to issues of idealism and Husserl's “transcendental idealism” later in this chapter.
How exactly does Husserl's ontology frame the issues of mind, body, and culture? We have already laid the groundwork in mapping the architecture of his novel system of categories. We have explored his formal categories, with an eye to their role in logic or formal semantics. Here we turn to Husserl's conception of the material categories or regions of Nature, Consciousness, and Culture (Geist).
In Husserl's intricate ontology of essences we find a system of distinctions among different types of essence, governed by “laws of essence” that assay which properties an object may or must have if it falls under a given essence. Here is where Husserl's account of the three regions takes hold. Let us consider, succinctly, a Husserlian sketch of the three regions (drawing on basics in Ideas I and Ideas II):
1 Things under the essence Nature have properties including spatiotemporal location, material composition (as from electrons, protons, and so on), and causal relations. We are to appreciate these types of properties and their roles in the essence of material things. The various essences of objects in Nature we study in the natural sciences of physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, and so on. Somewhat idiosyncratically, Husserl groups psychology with the natural sciences. His assumption is that (what he calls) psychology presupposes that psychic acts take place in a context of nature. Today we might consider “cognitive neuroscience” as a psychology tied into neurobiology, placing psycho-neural processes under Nature.
2 Experiences, acts of consciousness, fall under the essence Consciousness. Experiences have properties including the sensuous character of perception, featured in the “sensory data” (so-called “hyletic data”) that are moments of perceptual experiences. Most important, our experiences are, in most instances, intentional, that is, directed toward objects of which we are thereby conscious. Moreover, all of our experiences are, by their regional essence, parts of a stream of consciousness, a stream with its distinctive form of unity, as one experience leads into another, generating a consciousness of the flow of time. We are to study acts of consciousness, just as we experience them from the first-person point of view, in phenomenology.
3 Cultural objects and activities fall under the essence Culture (Geist, “Spirit”). We are all “persons.” We are subject to moral obligations, such as truth-telling (ceteris paribus), helping others, and so on. We are members of social groups, ranging from our families to our ethnic sects to our political states. Our social activities include speaking with others, in our native tongue or in a learned foreign language, attending schools and earning degrees (such as a Ph.D.), acquiring citizenship, voting in elections, singing in choirs, obeying (or disobeying) traffic laws, competing with others in sports, exchanging ideas in the production of scientific or philosophical theories, and much more. We are to study cultural objects and activities in the cultural or social sciences, in political science, economics, history, and so on.
What is most important, in Husserl's eyes, is to see how different these properties are, the properties assayed in various theories about (1) things in nature, (2) acts of consciousness, and (3) cultural activities and their products. Objects of these three basic types are so different in their properties, Husserl holds, that they must fall under categorially distinct essences: thus, at the highest level of generality, we find the regions Nature, Consciousness, and Culture. Now, Husserl holds, objects in these different categories or regions must be studied in different ways. The methods of the natural sciences include (very roughly) the techniques of observation (from a third-person, “objective” standpoint), hypothesis formation and confirmation, and ultimately mathematical theory construction – producing, say, Newton's laws of motion or Einstein's general theory of relativity. By contrast, the methods of the cultural sciences include (in a gloss) observation and analysis of social structure and dynamics, especially the “well-observed” characterizations of our fellows in our home culture. The techniques of literary and aesthetic interpretation, or “hermeneutics,” take their place here as well, as in today's studies in cultural criticism or humanistic “critical theory.” By contrast, new methods of phenomenology are required in order properly to study our own conscious experiences, seeking their proper essence, including the structure of intentionality. In Chapters 5 and 6 we explore Husserl's proposals for the characterization and methodology of phenomenology.
Husserl vehemently resisted programs of reduction that he called “naturalism” and “historicism.” His most sustained critique along these lines is the essay “Philosophy as Strict Science” (1911), which paves the way for his presentation of “transcendental” phenomenology in Ideas I (1913). In Husserl's view, naturalism seeks to reduce the essence of consciousness (and, for that matter, culture) to the essence of natural processes. If we do this, he holds, we simply lose the crucial properties of consciousness as such, notably the structure of intentionality, featuring the role of ideal meaning in directing consciousness toward its objects. Equally misguided, Husserl thinks, is historicism, which he understands as the program to reduce the essence of subjective experience to processes of human history. Such processes may include economic class struggle (in a Marxist analysis), mother-child dynamics including repression of childhood traumas (in a Freudian psychoanalysis), colonialist ideological exploitation (in a recent model), or a long-range historical teleology where Absolute Spirit achieves self-reflection at a certain point in European history (on a Hegelian model). Pure or transcendental phenomenology would avoid reduction in either a naturalist or a historicist direction. Husserl's transcendentalism, we might say, registers his rejection of the popular programs of either naturalism or historicism. However, the “ism” does not follow “transcendental” in Husserl's usage. (We would not want to echo the idiom of 19th-century American “transcendentalism,” as Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman sought a unity of consciousness with nature.)
Phenomenology is “pure” insofar as it studies experiences while considering only their properties that fall under the essence Consciousness, excluding consideration of their properties that fall under either the essence Nature or the essence Culture. Husserl's method of “bracketing” the natural world (and also the cultural world) is designed precisely to focus on those features of an experience that define it as consciousness, abstracting away from its features that define its place in nature or in culture. In Chapter 6 we delve into Husserl's technique of bracketing, or epoché.What makes phenomenology “transcendental,” for Husserl, is its focus on what makes consciousness a consciousness of this or that object, especially the structure of ideal meaning or noema that presents that object as such-and-such.
We can now specify, in categorial terms, the relation between mind and body – and culture. In Ideas I (1913, §33ff.) Husserl explicitly holds that the same object, “I,” has diverse properties falling under the essences Nature and Consciousness: properties that define me as a subject of consciousness, and properties that define me as a natural organism, a “body” in space-time with a complex composition of organs, molecules, and subatomic particles. In Ideas II (1912, throughout), we also find that the same object, “I,” has properties falling under Culture, properties that define me as a person, a moral subject, and a social being. These themes are further appraised in the Crisis (1935–8), in connection with the structure of the “life-world.” I am thus a perceiving-thinking-willing subject in consciousness, an embodied physical organism in nature, and a socially situated person in culture. As the Crisis further emphasized, in the everyday “life-world” I am all these things at once, an embodied, encultured, experiencing being.
Similarly, the same event, a psychic event I live through (say) as perception or volitional action, has diverse properties falling under Consciousness, Nature, and Culture. Qua act of consciousness, this event is subjectively experienced by me, is part of my stream of consciousness, is intentionally directed in a certain way, and so forth. Qua event in nature, this event is produced by neural activities in my brain in my human organism in a pattern of causal interactions with other natural processes. And qua event in culture, this event is (say) my seeing my university colleague or my act of speaking English to a friend.
In Husserl's ontology, then, the entities philosophy has distinguished as my mind, my body, and my cultural persona are not “substances” in the Aristotelian sense. Rather, they are importantly different aspects of one such “substance” called “I.” In Husserl's ontology, these aspects are moments (dependent parts) of the individual or “substrate” that is me. These moments are instances of distinct essences falling under the distinct regions Nature, Consciousness, and Culture. Importantly, there are relations of dependence among such moments – that is how Husserl's doctrine of moments works. Thus, my moment of thinking about Husserl as I write this sentence is dependent – “supervenient” in today's idiom – on my moment of neural activity transpiring in a certain part of my brain. That same moment of thinking is, in a very different way, dependent on my having acquired a certain linguistic mastery over the language of Husserlian philosophy. This ontology of mind, body, and culture addresses issues of “mind” under vigorous discussion today – issues of the supervenience of mind on brain, the relative priority of mind over language (or vice versa), and much more. By distinguishing the formal and material essences that we have considered, Husserl's ontology allows a detailed and nuanced approach to the relations among minds, bodies, and cultures.
In the Logical Investigations (1900–1), influenced by Brentano and Bolzano, Husserl took the stance of a broadly Aristotelian realism: the world around us exists independently of us, things have their species and properties, and through perception and judgment we come to know the essence of things in the world. In his 1907 lectures published posthumously as The Idea of Phenomenology (1950/1970), it is commonly said, Husserl took a “transcendental turn,” a turn toward transcendental philosophy, wherein we seek, in a broadly Kantian vein, the conditions of the possibility of our knowledge of the world, finding those conditions partly in the workings of our own mind. Then in Ideas I (1913) Husserl presented phenomenology in its mature form as “transcendental phenomenology,” a discipline that is to study the essence of intentionality, or “consciousness-of,” and therewith the “constitution of objectivities of consciousness” (§86). Husserl did not there use the term “idealism,” or the Kantian idiom “transcendental idealism.” Yet his readers saw affinities with neo-Kantian doctrines of the day in German philosophy, and Husserl's assistants included in the index the entry “Idealism, phenom-enological.” By the time of the Cartesian Meditations (drafted in 1929), Husserl himself spoke of “the transcendental turn” (which he says Descartes failed to take), and he spoke of phenomenology as “a transcendental idealism” – partaking in the parlance of German philosophy with its reverence for Kant. But in a 1934 letter he wrote, “No ordinary ‘realist’ has ever been as realistic and concrete as I, the phenomenological ‘idealist’ (a word which by the way I no longer use)” (letter to Abbé Baudin, quoted in Føllesdal 1998). Evidently Husserl never found a name he liked for his position. At any rate, Husserl scholars have employed the term “transcendental idealism” for the stance of transcendental phenomenology in Ideas I and later works. Some say Husserl there abandoned the realism of the Investigations and leapt into a new form of idealism. Among his students and interpreters, realists think Husserl lost his mind to idealism, while Kantians think he came to his senses with a new form of transcendental idealism.
But what exactly was Husserl's position? The question “Realism or idealism or what?” is perhaps the thorniest branch of interpretation in Husserl scholarship. Most scholars read the early Husserl as a realist; some read the later Husserl as some type of idealist, while others argue for a continuing realism. Husserl generally expands rather than changes his views, consistently using previously established terms and formulations as his philosophical system continuously expands over the decades – quite in the spirit of a mathematician. (See Mohanty 1995 on the continuity in Husserl's corpus.) The trick is how to understand those passages, most articulate in Ideas I (§§49ff.), where Husserl sounds like he is tending toward a new form of idealism. I shall describe a series of possible interpretations, indicating the views I myself find most fitting, and most interesting in their own right.
Most of Husserl's corpus either espouses or assumes a basic realism: there are various types of objects in the world, bearing different types of essences, and there are various types of experiences in the world, in which we are conscious of objects of appropriate type through ideal meanings that represent such objects. Here is a doctrine of ontological realism joined with a semantic theory of intentionality, all fitting nicely with Husserl's categorial ontology already mapped out (see Smith and McIntyre 1982; B. Smith 1982; Willard 1984; Drummond 1990; D.W. Smith 1995).
In the 18th century the British empiricist George Berkeley argued that material objects exist only in the mind. “To be is to be perceived,” he wrote, “or to perceive”: this tree exists only insofar as it is perceived, if not by a mind like me (or mine) here and now, then by God. Indeed, Berkeley argued, this tree, properly assayed, is nothing but a bundle of ideas in my mind, or in another mind. As an empiricist, Berkeley took the basic ideas (token ideas, not types of ideas) to be sensations of color, shape, and so on, from which other ideas, as that of the tree, are constructed. Now, Husserl adamantly insisted that his position was no subjective, Berkeleyan idealism (§55), and anyone who thought so had utterly failed to understand his transcendental phenomenology. Surely his differences from Berkeley support Husserl as he sharply distinguishes act, ideal content, and object of consciousness, and as he sharply separates essences under Nature and Consciousness: physical objects such as trees clearly do not reduce to “ideas,” either sensory experiences or ideal concepts of trees. (Bell 1990 holds that Husserl embraced realism in his early works and moved into idealism in his later works. Philipse 1995 argues that Husserl is committed to a transcendental idealism that is ultimately Berkeleyan. A. D. Smith 2003 finds a distinctly classical form of idealism in Husserl's Cartesian Meditations.
As Husserl's account of intentionality develops in Ideas I, we find his mature conception of ideal intentional content, called noema or noematic sense. The “constitution” of a particular object is unfolded in a system of noemata, presenting the same object from different perspectives, with different properties, in different relationships, in different possible states of affairs, and so on. Thus, in Husserl's theory of noema and horizon (see Chapter 6 in this volume), to every possible object there corresponds a system of noematic senses that present the object in various ways. From the phenomenological standpoint, that is all we can say about the object in itself. Thus, on one interpretation, Husserl held that every object reduces – in “phenomenological reduction” – to a system of noemata. Call this doctrine noematic idealism. The “ideas” to which objects reduce are not concrete sensory experiences à la Berkeley, but rather ideal meanings à la Husserl, namely, noemata. Since the noema in an act of consciousness is characterized as “the object as perceived, or judged, or wished,” noemata are an ideal form of what Kant called phenomena, or things-as-they-appear. Here, then, we find Husserl updating Kant by importing ideal meanings into a new form of neo-Kantian “transcendental idealism.” (Gurwitsch 1964 develops just such a view, which he took as kindred to Husserl's phenomenology, and other Husserl interpreters similarly stress the notion of noemata as objects-as-intended.) The problem with this interpretation, however, is that Husserl says objects and their corresponding noemata are distinct in kind: the tree itself (“simpliciter”) can burn away, but a noematic sense that correlates with the tree cannot burn at all, since a sense is not composed of matter and is not “real,” or spatiotemporal (see Ideas I, §89). In Chapter 6, we shall dig into the complexities of Husserl's account of the relation between noema and object.
Kant's doctrine of transcendental idealism, in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), holds that space and time are not properties of things in themselves, but rather forms of human intuition of space and time. What we know as spatiotemporal, physical objects, then, are defined by the forms of our own perceptual experience, and in that sense they are “transcendentally ideal” (but “empirically real” because perceived as in space-time). Now, Husserl was concerned with the mathematics of space and time, looking to the non-Euclidean geometries of his day. Husserl might have allowed, then, that things in nature are determined by (say) a Riemannian geometry describing a curved space-time, even though our everyday perceptions present things in a Euclidean geometry. When I see a tree, the-tree-as-perceived has – the tree is perceived as having – spatial properties that follow a Euclidean geometry. But the tree itself has spatial properties that follow instead a Riemannian geometry. So Husserl might hold that a tree exists and has its essence independently of my consciousness (contra Berkeley), but the way it appears in my everyday perception depends on my consciousness (à la Kant) – that is, the-tree-as-perceived depends on the form of my perceptual consciousness. In this model, the “space” of things as perceived is “transcendentally ideal.” Furthermore, following out the argument in the Crisis, Husserl might say that our “mathematization” of nature in physics produces an idealization of space – say, a Riemannian physical geometry – that abstracts away from spatial things themselves, with which we are in touch in everyday life. Then the geometry of things in nature as judged in our mathematical physics is also “transcendentally ideal.” From the details of Husserl's complex analyses, we might carve out such a quasi-Kantian idealism of space and time. (Compare Friedman 2001, including a revision of Kantian principles along these lines, and Ryckman 2005 on Weyl's partly Husserlian conception of space-time in Einsteinian relativity theory.) But notice that the resulting Husserlian position on space-time would not be an idealism proper, according to which the world in general is reduced to ideas or to intentional contents. Moreover, Husserl resisted the Kantian idea of a Ding an sich, or thing in itself, beyond the reach of the intentional relation of cognition.
Husserl's ontology is robustly realist in positing objects of many types and essences of many types that are neither “in the mind” (composed of mental contents) nor dependent on mental activities for their existence. Such is the ontology outlined in the first chapter of Ideas I, regrouping results from Logical Investigations. Following on this ontology, as Ideas I unfolds, is a detailed analysis of intentionality. Every act of consciousness is directed via its ideal intentional content, or noema, toward an appropriate object in the world, if such an object exists. Some objects in the world around us are dependent on our intentional activities: the script unfolding on my computer screen as I now write is an artifact produced by my activity of composing this sentence; and the words I choose from the English language are themselves artifacts of complex human activity over several centuries. Other objects in the world around us are completely independent of our intentional activities, so far as we know: the tectonic plates on planet Earth do not owe their existence or their geologic essence to my thoughts about them, or to the scientific researches that discovered them. Now, regardless of the existence or essence of an object of a given type, and regardless of its dependence or independence, I cannot think of such an object or perceive it or otherwise “intend” it unless my experience has an appropriate meaning that semantically represents that object. This is how Husserl's basic theory of intentionality works. On one interpretation, then, the core doctrine in Husserl's transcendental idealism is this principle that intentionality is always directed via an ideal, “transcendental” meaning. In this way my intention of any object is dependent on the ideal content in my experience; if you will, consciousness of any object in the world essentially involves a specific intentional perspective on that object – whatever the ontological status of the object intended. It is tautological, on Husserl's theory, that consciousness is directed perspectivally. This perspectivism is arguably resonant with a broadly Kantian transcendental idealism, but there is no implication of an idealism that reduces spatiotemporal objects to their appearance in consciousness, or declares their spatiotemporality dependent on perceptual consciousness. So this perspectivism remains realist, amplifying the position of realism-with-intentionality. (See Smith and McIntyre 1982 and D. W. Smith 1995 on this perspectivist interpretation. Compare Føllesdal 1998, characterizing Husserl's position as an “idealism” of a new type – I prefer the term “perspectivism” – according to which our experience presents an independently existing, intersubjective world “constituted” in a concatenation of forms of consciousness or noemata. A perspectivist position of “internal realism” is defended, with nods to Husserl and Kant, in Putnam 1981, 1987.)
Husserl holds a related doctrine that carries his ontology a step further than the previous perspectivism. In Ideas I, Husserl says that every object is experienceable (erfahrbar) and so is never such that “consciousness and consciousness's I has nothing to do with it” (§47). That is, every object of whatever type is a possible object of consciousness, and indeed can in principle be experienced with evidence. Husserl returns to this point near the end of Ideas I: “In principle … there corresponds to every ‘truly existing’ object the idea of a possible consciousness in which the object is itself graspable originally [= intuitively] and thereby completely adequately” (§142, my translation). By “idea” (Idee) Husserl means a regulative ideal of reason (a Kantian notion), and he is discussing the equivalence of the ideal “truly existing object” and the ideal “[object] to be rationally posited.” He soon turns to formal ontology (§§148ff.), so we see that the point here is that, according to formal ontology, every object in principle corresponds to a range of possible intentions and indeed cognitions of that same object (the same object “X” [§§131, 142]).The quoted principle is an extension of Husserl's theory of horizon (§47). If an act of consciousness presents an object with certain properties, there is associated with the act a horizon of further possible acts presenting the same object (X) with other properties (details follow in Chapter 6). By extension, any object is potentially the object of a variety of possible acts of consciousness, indeed intuitive cognitions – that is, for a proper subject (not a frog, perhaps not a human either).Within such limits, every object is potentially experienceable, or knowable. Call this doctrine universal experienceability. (This doctrine is shared, in somewhat different forms, by many of Husserl's interpreters, such as Gurwitsch 1964; Føllesdal 1969/1982; Smith and McIntyre 1982; Drummond 1990.)
We may see this principle emerging from Husserl's high-level category scheme. To be an object of any type is to be situated in the formal or “logical” space of essences, that is, falling under essences of appropriate types. And the property of being so situated is part of the formal essence Object. But among the material essences is the region Consciousness. So every object of whatever type is formally situated in a “logical” space in relation to possible acts under the region Consciousness. Thus, part of the essence of any object, wherever it falls in the category scheme, is its formal relation to possible acts under the region Consciousness, including our own actual judgments as we put forth the category scheme itself. Moreover, Husserl holds, part of the essence of any object is its relation to possible “intuitions,” that is, experiences with evidence appropriate to that object. This principle sounds like a generalization of the verificationist program, familiar in Viennese philosophy, holding that we can meaningfully talk about an object only if we could in principle gather perceptual evidence about it.
If Husserl turned toward a full-on idealism, the position to consider, given his system of categories, would feature dependence. There would be a theory about dependence relations between objects in the three regions of Consciousness, Nature, and Culture. Further, it might be held, no object in Nature or Culture can exist unless it stands in such relations to possible acts of consciousness, that is, every object in Nature or Culture depends on possible acts of consciousness. If Husserl held such a view, we might call it dependence idealism, set within his categorial ontology. But Husserl speaks of the “relative” rather than “dependent” status of natural objects, as we observe shortly.
In 1915 Albert Einstein proposed the general theory of relativity, positing a non-Euclidean space-time where gravity is a geometric feature of the curvature of space-time. Working on the mathematics of relativity, Einstein consulted the mathematicians David Hilbert and Hermann Weyl. Hilbert was Husserl's colleague and friend at Göttingen, and Weyl was inspired by Husserl's phenomenology. Weyl's mathematical formulation of relativity theory was shaped explicitly by his conception of transcendental phenomenology. Here we find an interesting variant on transcendental idealism, motivated not by Kantian a priori considerations, nor by purely phenomenological considerations, but by empirical physics in a mathematical formulation informed by transcendental phenomenology. (See Ryckman 2005 for a detailed analysis of the relations between Einstein,Weyl, Hilbert, and Husserl, and a reconstruction of relativity theory within transcendental idealism.) If we read Husserl in the light of relativity theory, we might propose a distinctive form of ontology – call it transcendental relativity theory (as opposed to transcendental idealism). The central claim would be that there is a distinctive ontological relation between things in space-time and potential acts of consciousness. This relation is not a relation of dependence where consciousness brings things into being in space-time, but rather a contextual relationship (if I may put it so).Things in space-time exist together with temporal acts of consciousness, essentially linked in the formal or mathematical structure of the world. It is not our thinking that makes things so, that is, makes them situated in space-time and moving in gravitational grooves of space-time. Rather, consciousness is itself formally – Husserl might say “logically” – situated in such a world along with spatiotemporal, physical objects. There are not only intentional relations between consciousness and physical objects, and causal relations on occasion. There are also contextual relations between acts of consciousness and physical objects insofar as both types of object are situated in the formal space defined by the variety of essences Husserl distinguishes. Thus, every act of consciousness has the regional essence Consciousness, and so the essential structure of intentionality (as defined by phenomenology); while every physical object has the regional essence Nature, and so the essential structure of spatiotemporality (as defined by general relativity theory). Moreover, every physical object is “relative” to consciousness insofar as it is available for intentional relations to that object (this sounds broadly Kantian), while every experience is “relative” to space-time insofar as it is available for spatiotemporal relations to (say) appropriate neural events (this sounds broadly physicalist). Call this doctrine of formal ontology the transcendental relativity of objects in space-time. Physical objects are not “transcendentally ideal,” their spatiotemporality dependent on perceptual consciousness. Rather, they are transcendentally relative, that is, their being in the world is defined in a formal relation to acts of consciousness bearing meanings that represent them. Such a view is an instructive extension of Husserl's texts.
With these interpretive possibilities in mind, let us look at Husserl's exact phrasing in Ideas I. In the chapter titled “The Region of Pure Consciousness” (§§47–55) we find:
Thus no real [i.e. spatiotemporal, physical] being is necessary for the being of consciousness itself (in the widest sense of the stream of experience).
Immanent being [i.e. the being of consciousness] is thus without doubt absolute being in the sense that in principle nulla “re” indiget ead existendum [it needs no “real being” to exist].
On the other hand, the world of transcendent “res” [real beings] is throughout referred to [angewiesen] consciousness, and indeed not to a logically thought but to an actual [consciousness].
(Ideas I, §49, my translation)
Accordingly, consciousness must be considered “in purity” as “a context of being [Seinszusammenhang] closed unto itself,” as a “context of absolute being,” whereas “the whole spatiotemporal world … is according to its sense merely intentional being, thus a being that has the merely secondary, relative sense of a being for a consciousness” (§49, my translation). What could be clearer? The being of consciousness is absolute, while the being of spatiotemporal, physical things is relative to consciousness! Here is a neo-Berkeleyan idealism! Ye t Husserl concludes the chapter (in §55) with just the opposite claim. He says, “All real [spatiotemporal] unities are unities of sense,” through the “sense-giving” of consciousness – which sounds like the good Bishop Berkeley updated. And then Husserl declares: “If anyone seeing our discussion objects that this means changing all the world into subjective illusion and throwing ourselves into the arms of a ‘Berkeleyan idealism,’ to this we can only reply that the sense of this discussion has not been grasped” (my translation).
Husserl is right. The line of argument in the chapter is quite different from a march into the arms of idealism. We need to bear in mind Husserl's doctrine of essence, including regions and categories, and we need to observe how he moves into the methodology of phenomenology in this chapter, concluding that “pure consciousness” is the proper field of the emerging discipline of phenomenology.
The chapter begins (§47) with the correlation of nature with consciousness: to every physical thing there correspond “manifolds of appearances” in perceptual consciousness and thus a horizon of possible perceptual experiences of that object, presenting it from different sides, in various lighting, and so on. A thing is a “thing of the surrounding world [Umwelt],” the world around it and around me, around us. (Compare §27 on the Umwelt, later called the Lebenswelt, or life-world.) Strikingly, Husserl says, “It lies in the essence that whatever is realiter [i.e. in space-time]” can “come to givenness,” that is, can be experienced perceptually. That is, the essence of any physical thing entails that it can be experienced in a variety of “motivated” ways, generating a horizon of possible experiences correlated with the object. In this way the being of a physical object is relative to consciousness. My perception of a tree does not bring it into existence; nor does the tree itself reduce to subjective appearances in my experience. The tree is what it is, under the region Nature, not under the region Consciousness. But it stands in a relation of correspondence to a horizon of possible experiences under the region Consciousness.
Turning from physical things to acts of consciousness, Husserl argues (§49) that the essence of consciousness does not involve “real,” spatiotemporal objects. Review the quotations just above, noting that necessities follow laws of essence. The essence of consciousness is, centrally, its being intentional, a consciousness-of-something (§§34–6). This property in itself does not require that an act of consciousness be a spatiotemporal event – even though in the “natural attitude” we recognize that my experiences occur in my human body (§§27ff.) and depend on the proper functioning of my brain. Nor does the essence of consciousness require that I am conscious of spatiotemporal things around me – even though, in the normal course of human experience in nature, I constantly see, hear, touch physical things around me in space-time. In the stream of experiences I typically enjoy, physical objects appear to me in a variety of “adumbrations” of shape, color, and so on. This structure of my consciousness is a feature of my normal range of experience in confronting things in nature. That structure is a contingent feature of my natural existence, but not an essential feature of consciousness per se, a necessary feature of every consciousness-of-something. In that respect, the being of consciousness is “absolute,” that is, not relative to spatiotemporal reality, or indeed to anything else (see §49 on normal connections of perceptual experience).
Returning to the being of spatiotemporal, physical things (§55, as quoted), Husserl holds that the sense – not the essence, but the sense – of a physical thing entails that it is “for” consciousness, that its being is “relative” to consciousness, whose being is by contrast “absolute,” not relative to anything else. But here Husserl has turned from the ontology of nature to the phenomenology of our perceptions of things in nature. The “annihilation of the world” that leaves a “residuum” of “pure” or “absolute” consciousness (§49) is not, as the phrasing may suggest, an ontological claim that the spatiotemporal world has been denied true existence. Rather, this dramatic phrase is an evocation of the methodology of epoché: we turn our attention from things in nature to our experiences of them, and to other types of experience. We do not deny the existence of physical objects; we do not reduce them ontologically to experiences or contents, but rather we analyze the unities of sense that correspond to them.
In Husserl's considered ontology, then, we find several of the principles we have already discussed: realism about the external world, coupled with intentional consciousness of things in space-time; intentional perspectivism, where all objects, including physical things, are experienced or “intended” through appropriate contents or senses; universal experienceability in principle; dependence on consciousness for some objects (artifacts), but not all (not all physical things); dependence of some aspects of spatiotemporal reality on the structure of our normal perceptions, namely, the way space and time appear in our experience, but not the form of space-time itself, that is, if our best physics is correct. However, we do not find, in Husserlian ontology, either classical idealism or wholesale dependence on consciousness.
Consider the formal ontological space defined by Husserl's scheme of categories or object types. Every object takes its place in this scheme of the world around us. We know that our own experiences take their place, under the region Consciousness. We know that physical things around us take their place, under the region Nature. We know that cultural objects (from pencils to governments) take their place, under the region Culture. We know that all objects are governed by formal essences including Individual, Property, State of Affairs, Number, and so on. What we learn from Husserl's discussions about the relations between objects in nature and acts of consciousness is that there are certain relations between natural objects and experiences. These relations – or “correlations” – should be seen as their own kind of formal relations; if you will, meta-categorial relations. It is the status of these formal relations that makes the mind-body problem so hard, and “transcendental idealism” so difficult to understand.
What of transcendental relativity? If Einstein's general theory of relativity is sustained, and if Husserl's categorial ontology is sustained, we may see physical relativity theory as an application in Nature of an ontological form we find in Consciousness cum Nature. (Think, as Husserl did, of pure geometry applied to things in nature.) All objects take their place in the formal structure of the world, and so objects are contextually related to objects in different regions, under different essences. Accordingly, consciousness and space-time are related in the formal context of the world, the Umwelt. Our task is to keep straight just where objects are in that structure, from physical things to intentional experiences to social interactions – including our collective theoretical discursions into these matters.
In Ideas I (1913), Husserl began his trek into pure phenomenology by observing the character of the Umwelt, the world around us, “the world of everyday life” (§27). In Ideas II (1912, drafted along with Ideas I), he expanded on the human body and its role in everyday actions, and on the social character of many things around us. These themes gained a sharp focus in the structure of the Lebenswelt, or life-world, as detailed in the Crisis (1935–8).These phenomena are richly discussed within the context of phenomenology: we experience physical objects around us not as purely spatiotemporal and material in composition, but as objects in the street or garden or kitchen, objects we deal with in practical and social activities like dining together or playing basketball together. Moreover, each of us experiences his or her own body not as a physical system of bones, organs, and organic chemistry, but as “my body.” Husserl uses two words to distinguish these aspects of one's body (in Ideas II and in Crisis). My physical body, my body as physical object, he calls Körper (from the Latin “corps,” from which English derives “corpse”); my living body, my body as I know and use it in everyday life, he calls Leib (the everyday German word, derived from “leben,” the verb “to live”). Through empathy (Einfühlung), Husserl stresses, we experience “other I's,” fellow subjects, fellow human beings, who act through their living bodies and join with us in social activities and institutions.
Now, drawing on Husserl's categorial ontology, we can construct an account of the ontological structure of objects, persons, actions, and institutions in the life-world, a structure coordinate with the phenomenological structure of meanings through which we experience such phenomena as in the life-world. The groundwork we have already laid.
“I” am a human being, living and acting and interacting with others, in the life-world. This being is a whole with various types of parts. Of course, I have arms, legs, head, and liver, “pieces” (independent parts) of my physical body. On Husserl's ontology, though, I have certain defining aspects or “moments” (dependent parts) that fall under the distinct regions Consciousness, Nature, and Culture. As a subject of intentional experience, I think, perceive, will, and so on, according to the essence Consciousness. As a physical body, I have a certain mass and height, electrochemical activity coursing through my brain, and so on, according to the essence Nature. And, as a person among “others,” I interact socially with others in my community, subject to moral and legal principles, according to the essence Culture. These aspects – intentional, physical, and social – are united as moments of the individual I am. And these moments are bound together by dependencies, as my current thoughts depend on neural processes in my brain and on social forces in my cultural niche.
Generally, within the world around us, the life-world, there are relations among various types of objects in the world, relations that link objects under different regions. Actions in particular involve relations among objects under different regions. When I climb the stairs, or write with a pencil or hit a tennis ball with a tennis racket, my action is a complex whole with parts that include my volition or willing, my physical body's moving in response to my willing, and the effects of that movement on the stairs or the pencil or the racket's striking the ball. My volition is an event with a moment of intentionality, under the essence Consciousness. By contrast, my physical body is an object that moves in space-time, under the essence Nature. My living body, however, is a complex whole with moments including my volition and my physical body's movement. Within my living body there are dependencies: my body's movement is dependent on, caused by, my volition, while my volition is dependent on, “supervenient” on, neural events in my brain. Within the action there are also dependencies between my living body and nearby objects such as the stairs I climb, the pencil I write with, and the tennis ball I stroke with my racket. The essence Action, we might say, governs these dependencies as I “wield” my body in everyday actions such as climbing stairs, writing graphite marks with a pencil, or hitting tennis balls with my racket. All within the life-world.
The life-world is also a world of social or cultural activities. As a professor, I hold a position defined by the University of California – defined in a system of rules that are instituted by the State of California, but constrained by the Constitution of the United States of America. Thus, I am obligated to lecture and publish on philosophy, while I have freedom of speech, in what I say or write, within the limits of the Constitution. As students at the university, the people sitting before me as I lecture hold a position equally defined by the university. In our university work together, my students and I are all members of the university community; in this work, I lecture to students, they write essays for me to read, and so on. According to Husserlian ontology, these social activities fall under the essence Culture (Geist). My actions as I lecture fall under the essence Professorial Activities, while the actions of each student in the classroom fall under the essence Student Activities, all under the essence Culture. Now, these cultural activities of student and professor are themselves actions, complex wholes comprising intentional experiences of thinking and willing and bodily movements of speaking and writing and reading and their social effects on others in the lecture hall. My action of lecturing has moments falling under Consciousness and under Nature; my thinking and willing to speak fall under Consciousness, and my bodily movements (hands moving, lips and tongue moving, air flowing over them) fall under Nature, while my lecturing action, comprising these things and their social effects, falls under Culture. And, we know, there are dependencies among these things within the structure of my action. (Searle 1998 draws a contemporary account of similar structures, but grounds the whole system in naturalistic phenomena, arguing in effect that social reality depends on intentional states, which in turn depend on brain states, which depend on biochemistry and ultimately physics.)
The life-world, we conclude, is a complex whole comprising a wide variety of objects that fall variously under the regions Consciousness, Nature, and Culture, yet are connected by appropriate dependence relations – and other formal relations – between moments of these objects.
Husserl developed a wide-ranging ontology that he integrated with his logic, his phenomenology, and his epistemology. A master of distinctions, Husserl crafted a system of ontological categories of importantly different types of object. Husserl's system of categories is underway in the Logical Investigations (1900–1) (as indicated in Chapter 3 of this volume).The system is refined and further organized in Ideas I (1913), where his ontology is used in his presentation of phenomenology.
Husserl distinguishes essences from concrete objects in time or space-time. Essences are ideal, nonspatiotemporal entities: species, properties, and relations – what Aristotle called universals – which may be instantiated in particulars. What is novel with Husserl, however, is his distinction between formal and material essences. Formal essences are ontological forms that correlate with logical forms: Individual, Property, State of Affairs, Number, and so on. Formal essences apply to objects with material essences, that is, essences that characterize substantive or material “regions of being,” of which Husserl recognizes three: Nature, Consciousness, and Culture (Geist). The material essences of things in nature concern the structure of time, space, material composition, and causality; the material essences of acts of consciousness concern the structure of lived experience, especially intentionality; the material essences of cultural objects and institutions concern social activities of persons in communities. Clearly, the material essences of objects in these three regions are fundamentally different, yet the same formal essences apply to objects in these three material regions.
Husserl recognizes different types of ideal, nonspatiotemporal entities, including not only essences, but also numbers (and other mathematical entities) and meanings or senses. Like mathematics, logic and phenomenology also deal with ideal entities, for Husserl. Arithmetic studies numbers, in abstraction from their relation to groups of concrete objects (such as five crows on a tree limb). Logic studies propositions and their constituent concepts, in abstraction from their being thought in concrete acts of reasoning. And phenomenology studies experiences and their contents or “noemata,” in abstraction, Husserl holds, from their being realized in concrete “psychological” acts in organisms in nature. Still, for Husserl ideal entities are instantiated in appropriate ways in concrete objects in the world.
Husserl emphasizes the ontology of parts and wholes. A distinction he often uses is that between independent parts, or pieces, and dependent parts, or moments. A piece of an object (say, a spoke in a bicycle wheel) can exist independently of the object, whereas a moment of an object (say, this particular instance of red in this flower) cannot exist unless that object exists. In Husserl's ontology, it is “moments” that tie ideal entities into the concrete world. Thus, the ideal property Red is realized in this rose insofar as a particular instance of Red is a moment of the petals of the flower. And the ideal content or sense of an experience of thinking such-and-such is realized in my current consciousness insofar as that content is a moment of my current act of consciousness.
Recent philosophy of mind has been focused on the mind-body problem, the issue of how mental states – especially conscious experiences such as seeing red or thinking that Aristotle was synoptic – are related to bodily states, especially brain states. Husserl's categorial ontology leads to an interesting approach to the mind-body problem. For Husserl, the same concrete experience of seeing or thinking falls under different material essences or regions. This event falls under the region Nature and also under the region Consciousness. For the same concrete event includes a moment that realizes a type of brain state and also a moment that realizes a type of conscious intentional experience.
Husserl's mature “transcendental” phenomenology is allied with an ontology of “transcendental idealism.” Just what this doctrine entails is debatable. But one account holds that every object in the world, of whatever category, stands in a variety of potential relations to consciousness, that is, intentional relations in which the object is “intended” in different ways, through different contents or senses that prescribe different properties in that object.
Armstrong, D. M. 1989. Universals: An Opinionated Introduction. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press. An appraisal of the ontology of universals.
—. 1997. A World of States of Affairs. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. A contemporary study of the ontology of states of affairs, a crucial notion in Husserl and his contemporaries.
—. 1999. The Mind-Body Problem: An Opinionated Introduction. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press. An appraisal of the ontological issues that arise in the mind-body problem.
Chalmers, David J. 2002. Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Readings in the philosophy of mind, featuring traditional and contemporary approaches to the mind-body problem.
Mulligan, Kevin. 1990. “Husserl on States of Affairs in the Logical Investigations”. Epistemologia, special number on Logica e Ontologia, XII, 207–234, (Proceedings of 1987 Genoa conference on Logic and Ontology).
— . 2004. “Essence and Modality. The Quintessence of Husserl's Theory”. In M. Siebel and M. Textor, editors, {nuSemantik und Ontologie. Beiträge zur philosophischen Forschung. Frankfurt: ontos verlag, 387–418. http://www.unige.ch/lettres/philo/enseignants/km/doc/EssenceModalityQuintessence.pdf
Ryckman, Thomas. 2005. The Reign of Relativity: Philosophy in Physics 1915–1925. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. A study of the development of general relativity theory. Includes relations to Husserlian transcendental phenomenology.
Smith, Barry, ed. 1982. Parts and Moments: Studies in Logic and Formal Ontology. Munich and Vienna: Philosophia Verlag. Essays on issues of formal ontology, often informed by studies of Husserl's Logical Investigations.
—. 1994. Austrian Philosophy: The Legacy of Franz Brentano. Chicago and LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court. Studies of several philosophers influenced by Brentano, including ontological issues. Indicates the intellectual milieu in which Husserl came of age.
Smith, David Woodruff. 1995. “Mind and Body.” In Barry Smith and David Woodruff Smith, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Husserl. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. A study of Husserl's categorial ontology and its implications for philosophy of mind, assessing aspects of the mind-body problem and including an interpretation of Husserl's transcendental idealism.
—. 2002. “Intentionality and Picturing: Early Husserl vis-à-vis EarlyWittgenstein.” In Terry Horgan, John Tienson, and Matjaz Potrc, eds. Origins: The Common Sources of the Analytic and Phenomenological Traditions (proceedings of the Spindel Conference 2001). Southern Journal of Philosophy, vol. XL, supplement 2002; published by the Department of Philosophy, the University of Memphis. A fictional dialogue between Husserl and Wittgenstein, bringing out their respective ontologies of states of affairs.
—. 2004. Mind World: Essays in Phenomenology and Ontology. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Essays addressing phenomenological and ontological issues and their interrelations. Includes studies of several systems of ontological categories, including comparisons between Husserl and other figures.
Thomasson, Amie L. 1998. Fiction and Metaphysics. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. A study of the ontology of fictional objects, developing ontological views partly based in Ingarden and Husserl, notably the ontology of dependence.