tion whether Wilfrid Sellars's elaborate critique of âfoundationalismâ does ap- ply to Husserl (as Richard Rorty seems to think).4 What the critics seem to have in ...
Husserl Studies 17: 217–237, 2001. © 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
217
Apodictic Evidence HANS BERNHARD SCHMID1 New School for Social Research, Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science, Department of Philosophy, 65 Fifth Avenue, New York 10003, USA
In contemporary philosophy, Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology has been criticized for three principal reasons, its idealism,2 its solipsism3, and its foundationalism. Among these criticisms, the last one is probably the most commonly held and the most vague at the same time. It is still an open question whether Wilfrid Sellars’s elaborate critique of “foundationalism” does apply to Husserl (as Richard Rorty seems to think).4 What the critics seem to have in mind is, however, a less sophisticated idea of “foundationalism.” Husserl’s “foundationalism” in this sense simply seems to consist in his claim to have discovered a type of experience that is not flawed by the fallibility of normal, “naïve” experience – a type of knowledge that therefore is not in need of confirmation in the course of further investigation – and in the basic role Husserl ascribes to this kind of knowledge in his theory. For following this “foundationalist” line of thought in transcendental phenomenology, our claims to rationality and the very idea of science depend on the existence of such unshakeable grounds, as Husserl makes clear in the opening paragraphs of his Cartesian Meditations. Such foundational claims are generally considered as hopelessly outdated. To put it in the words of Wilfrid Sellars, we hold knowledge and science to be rational not because it is based on indubitable foundations, but because it is “a self-correcting enterprise, which can put any claim in jeopardy, though not all at once” (Sellars 1997, p. 79). Since Husserl’s foundationalism is so much at odds with our current thinking, it is all too understandable that there is a tendency among those interpreters who are sympathetic to Husserl to simply ignore, to suppress or even explicitly to contest Husserl’s foundationalism in order to present Husserl as a thinker of relevance to current philosophy. The editors of the Cambridge Companion to Husserl are just one of many examples for this strategy. In their introduction, they simply claim that Husserl “did not seek foundations of knowledge.” There is, as they continue, no “indubitable bedrock of a foundationalist edifice” in Husserl’s theory.5 And yet, it doesn’t take more than an hour of reading in Husserl’s works to stumble upon at least one formulation of this very foundational claim. Husserl portrays his
218 philosophical venture time and time again as a “science (. . .) based on solid foundations” (Hua XXV, p. 57) on an “absolute justification” (Hua VII, p. 36). Thus one of Husserl’s critics has even described a “perfectly hard ground” as the one and only focal point of Husserl’s entire intellectual venture.6 In most critical interpretations, Husserl’s quest for “apodicticity” and “apodictic evidence” is taken as an expression of this foundationalist search of a “solid ground” in terms of a privileged mode of experience or field of knowledge that provides us with infallible insight. That’s why the concept of apodictic evidence is widely unpopular among phenomenologists. One of the most striking symptoms of this is the fact that the Encyclopedia of Phenomenology does not even mention this concept – a term Husserl not only coined, but also regarded as so central and essential to his philosophy that he in times used it on about every second page of his writings!7 In this paper I will try to challenge this more or less silent understanding of “apodictic evidence” as a foundationalist concept. The first section of this paper is concerned with a more detailed description of what is indeed “foundationalist” in Husserl’s philosophy: the “dogma of self-transparency.” With some remarks on the history of the concept of apodictic evidence in Husserl’s phenomenology and some elements of a possible systematic reconstruction I will try to show that Husserl developed his concept of apodictic evidence in the course of his move away from his earlier foundationalist dogma of selftransparency. It is of special importance for my argument to take a closer look at Husserl’s slow and complicated development from the earlier identification to the later distinction of adequate and apodictic evidence. The third section deals with the criticism that accuses Husserl of ignoring and suppressing “internal otherness” and the bearings of the phenomenon of internal otherness on the concept of apodicticity. In a short concluding remark, the results of this interpretation of apodictic evidence as a non-foundationalist concept shall be gathered.
Husserl’s departure from the dogma of self-transparency In his authoritative study of the concept of truth in Husserl and Heidegger,8 Ernst Tugendhat has drawn a distinction that has been of lasting influence on many interpretations down to the present day.9 Tugendhat distinguishes what he calls the “critical motif” in phenomenology from its “dogmatic motif.” On the one side he presents Husserl as a critically-minded thinker to whom all knowledge, including phenomenology itself, is fallible and might prove wrong at any point in the course of further critical investigation. On the other side Husserl appears as a dogmatic, a “Cartesian” thinker10 who doesn’t content himself with that kind of “soft knowledge” and claims his venture to be infal-
219 lible and ultimately justified. The main point is, that this is not merely an ambivalence in Husserl’s thinking but a proper contradiction.11 For Husserl, still following Tugendhat’s reading, thereby dogmatically limits the scope of critical thinking. A closer look at the reasons which led Husserl to this understanding of phenomenology makes Tugendhat’s conclusion even more convincing. The argument Husserl comes up with to substantiate the absolute certainty of phenomenological insights in his earlier works is as simple as it is unacceptable. In Husserl’s words, unlike transcendent perception, immanent perception is adequately evident and therefore indubitable. That means: the objects in the outer world are never given to our intuition in all the concrete determining parts our meaning them might assume. What is given is never fully congruent with what is intended. There is a gap between what is present in perception and the noematic sense of our intention, and this gap Husserl identifies as all error’s gateway to human knowledge. What was meant as “green all over” might turn out to be yellow on the rear side. External experience gives just presumptive evidence, not apodictic evidence. But, according to Husserl, the state of affairs in the case of immanent perception, i.e. if our perceiving is directed to our own states of consciousness in phenomenological reflection is completely different. Husserl identifies immanence in his Logical Investigations as a “sphere of adequate givenness” (Hua XIX, p. 27f.). For as opposed to objects in the external world, states of mind do not have back sides nor hidden corners to be probed. What is given in immanent perception – that is in phenomenological reflection – is congruent with what is meant. And this adequacy is what makes phenomenological reflection, according to Husserl, ultimately justified knowledge. “I can doubt the truth of an inadequate (. . .) perception. (. . .) But I cannot doubt an adequate, purely immanent perception, since there are no residual intentions in it that must yet achieve fulfilment. The whole intention, or the intention in all its aspects, is fulfilled. Or, as we also expressed it: the object in our percept is not merely believed to exist, but is also itself truly given, and as what it is believed to be. It is of the essence of adequate perception that the intuited object itself really and truly dwells in it, which is merely another way of saying that only the perception of one’s own actual experiences is indubitable and evident.”12 Husserl even in his later works sometimes portrays immanent perception as evident, and evidence as “a grasping of something in itself that is, or is thus, a grasping in the mode ‘it itself’ with full certainty of its being, a certainty that accordingly excludes every doubt.”13 That’s the reason why immanent perception is certain whereas transcendent perception is fallible. This describes the main feature of the basic distinction in Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, of its “Leitdifferenz,” to put it in a term used in systems theory.14 “Here” – in transcendent perception – “an adumbrated being, not capable of ever becoming
220 given absolutely, merely accidental and relative; there” – in immanent perception – “a necessary and absolute being, essentially incapable of becoming given by virtue of adumbration.”15 This is the main feature of Husserl’s famous “abyss” that “yawns between consciousness and reality” (Hua III, p. 105 [121]).16 Thus Husserl describes the judgement “external perception is deceptive, inner perception evident” as a “basic pillar of knowledge, which skepticism cannot shake” (Hua XIX, p. 753 [853]). What makes the apodicticity of “inner perception,” its superior certainty, is its adequateness (up to the time of First Philosophy Husserl regarded apodicticity as nothing but a special quality of adequate evidence, its certainty).17 But how could Husserl ever rely on such an obviously weak argument about inner perception?18 Thus Husserl made it easy for his critics, Gilbert Ryle among them, who very early depicted the absolute certainty of immanent perception as a mere myth. Phenomenological reflection is, following Ryle, nothing else than “remembrance controlled by a special interest,” by no means more certain than any act of consciousness, for “we often make mistakes about our mental condition.”19 Husserl just seems to have taken it for granted that in contrast to the world outside we are completely transparent to ourselves. But in the meantime we have learned how unfathomable our own states of mind sometimes are. For as Freud has shown so convincingly, a desire for something may, depending on the circumstances, enter the inner stage disguised as, say, fear of something completely different. Without intending to replace a problematic theory of consciousness by a theory of the unconscious that is just as problematic: this fundamental psychoanalytic insight and its bearings not only on “natural reflexion,” but also on the theory of the pure self-reference of the subject after the phenomenological reduction, cannot be escaped. Our self-understanding, as “pure” as it may be, tends to miss its object even more persistently than our knowledge of the things “out there” in the world and our knowledge of others. Did it escape Husserl’s notice how persistently subjectivity eludes the grasp of reflection? However, in order to avoid the conclusion that Husserl’s idea of apodicticity is due to this unacceptable dogma of self-transparency, it is essential to consider his thought more completely. Husserl, in his later thought, moved away from his earlier dogma of self-transparency. He himself later called the view he had endorsed earlier as simply “naïve” (Hua XVII, p. 295). As early as the Ideas he started to change his position: “It is the case also of a mental process that it is never perceived completely, that it cannot be adequately seized upon in its full unity” (Hua III, p. 103 [97]). Just as the “external” objects of transcendent perception are given as located in horizons of possible modifications of the apprehensional sense, our own “states of mind” are also given in a wider context, the stream of consciousness, and are therefore never given in adequate evidence. According to Husserl’s position in the Ideas, this however does not apply to the givenness of the pure ego: “The ego (. . .) does not present itself
221 merely from a side, (. . .). Instead, the pure Ego is given in absolute selfhood and in a unity which does not present itself by way of adumbrations; it can be grasped adequately in the reflexive shift of focus (. . .). As pure ego it does not harbor any hidden inner richness; it is absolutely simple and it lies there absolutely clear.”20 But Husserl has further developed his egology in his later works. In the manuscripts leading to his Cartesian Meditations, Husserl expounded by far a more complex egology, picking up on the fundamental insight that the transcendental ego is “inseparable from the processes making up his life” (Hua I, p. 99 [65]). As such, it is not only an “empty pole of identity” (Hua I, p. 100 [66]), but together with its mental processes it has to be considered from a genetic or even historical perspective.21 For as a “substrate of habitualities” it develops customs and as “personal ego” (Hua I, p. 101 [67]) it commits itself to convictions. But it is not until it is revealed in its monadic character that the ego becomes visible in its full concreteness, “in the flowing multiformity of his intentional life, along with the objects intended (. . .) in that life” (Hua I, p. 102 [68]). In that perspective, the ego is by no means perfectly clear and free of hidden characteristics, on the contrary: it has an abundance of concealed “inner richness,” and that means: it is not given in adequate evidence. “When I am effecting transcendental reduction and reflecting on myself, the transcendental ego, I am given to myself (. . .) with an open infinite horizon of still undiscovered internal features of my own” (Hua I, p. 132 [101]). And it was in fact in this context that Husserl finally came to reject the dogma of selftransparency he formerly had endorsed. But if immanent perception does not give adequate evidence, there is no absolute certainty either, for I then am as obscure to myself as is the external world. Husserl now sometimes goes as far as to declare immanent perception, this former stronghold of certainty, “an experience like any other” (Ms A I 31/11a). The field of immanent perception doesn’t appear as a privileged unshakable ground of knowledge any more. For immanent perception, too, is nothing more than fallible experience. That’s why the term “transcendental experience”22 (seemingly a contradictio in adjecto) comes into frequent use in Phenomenology from this moment on. Husserl chooses that term to do justice to the fact that phenomenology, too, is nothing else then experiencing in open and endless horizons of possible confirmation or disconfirmation. If phenomenological reflection is transcendental experience, then phenomenology is in no way infallible and absolutely justified knowledge. Here Husserl himself states Gilbert Ryle’s objection against him: we may always be widely mistaken about ourselves (Hua XV, p. 450), and even more: as far as the purport of phenomenological reflection is concerned, there is “no limits (. . .) to self-deception” (Hua XV, p. 401). It is not surprising that Paul Ricoeur started his enterprise to bring Psychoanalysis and Phenomenology closer together from this very insight into the inadequate evidence
222 of immanent perception.23 And insofar as Husserl’s claim to apodicticity is closely connected to the misconception of immanent perception as a sphere of adequateness – and Husserls indeed considered adequacy and apodicticity to be mutually defining concepts up to the time of First Philosophy (as we shall see in the next chapter) – it seems, that the idea of apodictic evidence shares the fate of the dogma of self-transparency.
Some remarks from the perspective of the development of Husserl’s thinking – and a step toward a systematic reconstruction Many of Husserl’s interpreters and critics, among them some of the most renowned, reached this conclusion in their reading of Husserl’s theory of apodicticity. As Husserl explicitly rejected the dogma of self-transparency, the claim to apodictic evidence of phenomenological knowledge, in this view, simply has lost its justification.24 For as we have seen, phenomenological reflection finally proved to be as fallible as any other kind of experience. Following these critics, Husserl then should have dropped his foundational claim to apodicticity. For apodicticity seems to be, if anything, only an ideal or a regulative idea of transcendental experience.25 I’d like to start my defense of Husserl’s concept of apodictic evidence by challenging the premiss of those critics: that apodicticity depends on the adequate givenness of processes of consciousness. Admittedly, this premiss asserts no more than Husserl himself says explicitly when he defines the term “apodicticity” as referring to a special quality of adequate evidence, namely its indubitability, thus clearly interrelating, even identifying (Hua VIII, p. 35) adequacy and apodicticity. But this is not the ultimate truth about apodicticity, but only one transitional stage on a long way of conceptual clarification in Husserl’s thinking. In contrast to what might be assumed, Husserl didn’t abandon his claim to apodicticity when he started to move away from the dogma of self-transparency. On the contrary: it was only then that he started to use this concept, and he never insisted more persistently on the idea of apodictic evidence than in the Cartesian Meditations, where he described the non-selftransparency of the subject more clearly than anywhere else. I’d like to illustrate this with a simple set of statistics. The x-axis stands for the development of Husserl’s thought, scaled by five important stages from the Logical Investigations from 1900 through the Crisis of European Sciences, Husserl’s last work from 1936. The y-axis measures Husserl’s use of three adjectives per page in the Husserliana edition of the respective works. The graphs seem to indicate that Husserl’s concern with “evidence” remains more or less on the same level of intensity throughout his work, whereas the motive of “adequacy” continually loses its importance. Apodicticity, on the other hand, becomes
223 more important in the course of the development of Husserl’s thought, its graph peaking on the Cartesian Meditations. If apodicticity was dependent on adequacy, how, than, could Husserl emphasize apodicticity without even mentioning adequate evidence anymore? And how could apodicticity play so dominant a role in the Cartesian Meditations of all of Husserl’s works, here, where Husserl was most aware of the essentially inadequate character of immanent perception? How does the rise of apodicticity and the decline in adequacy fit together? The thesis I shall expound here interprets this development as follows: even though he himself never really clarified this point, Husserl’s reflections on apodicticity led him gradually towards a conception that is independent of the foundationalist dogma of self-transparency. As to the history of the concept of evidence, especially the relation of adequate and apodictic evidence, David Michael Levin’s monograph on Reason and Evidence in Husserl’s Phenomenology still offers the most detailed account, even though limited to the few works Husserl published himself. The principal problem of this study, however, is that Levin, too, identifies apodicticity with self-transparency. Thus Levin, like so many other critics, reacts with a mix of incomprehension and harsh refusal to the rise of the concept of apodicticity in Husserl’s later works. For after Husserl’s insight into the essentially inadequate character of immanent perception, there was, according to Levin, no possible reason left for proclaiming any apodictic evidence. Following this reading, either a tremendous act of mere defiance to the loss of his basis or just plain blind dogmatism seems to be the only possible explanation for the rise of the claim to apodicticity. Taking into consideration the historic context of Husserl’s thinking especially around the time of the Cartesian Meditations, the first explanation may sound partly convincing. Still it is, to say the least, somewhat unsatisfactory on an argumentative level.
Fig. 1. Apodictic and adequate evidence.26
224 In trying to gather some elements of a different reading, I am not going into Husserl’s assertion of the apodicticity of intuiting essences made especially in the Ideas.27 What I consider more important here are the changes in the relation between adequate und apodictic evidence especially between First Philosophy and the Cartesian Meditations. In Paragraph 31 of the first part of First Philosophy, Husserl still endorses his earlier rules of relations, stating that adequate and apodictic evidence mutually define each other. Husserl here defines “absolute justification” by referring to two principal characteristics, “evidence” and “conclusiveness,” both converging in adequate evidence where no horizons of possible future cancellation of the current apprehensional sense remain open. Apodicticity here still means nothing else than an implicit characteristic of adequate evidence. Adequate evidence is called apodictic with regard to one of its main features, its indubitability. Husserl therefore concludes that both expressions, apodictic and adequate evidence, are equivalent (Hua VIII, p. 35) – a line of thought Husserl continued in Formal and Transcendental Logic (when, as we shall see, he already had reached a much clearer understanding of apodicticity in his manuscripts).28 If that were all there was to the relation between adequate and apodictic evidence, Husserl’s critics would be right. In First Philosophy at the latest, Husserl would have had to refrain from his claim to apodicticity. For Husserl himself states clearly that adequacy is in principle unattainable. All evidence is, as Husserl says here, relative. There is no such thing as an absolute evidence, only a “continuous (. . .) ascending process of relative evidence” (Hua VIII, p. 34). In a very influential study on Husserl’s First Philosophy, Ludwig Landgrebe, the last of Husserl’s assistants, has explicitly drawn this obvious conclusion under the title Husserl’s Departure from Cartesianism,29 and many scholars up to the present day followed Landgrebe’s interpretation.30 But, as shown before: in spite of his acknowledgement of all evidence being deficient in adequacy, Husserl himself did not think of refraining from his claim to apodicticity, on the contrary. How is this to be taken as anything else than a dogmatic act of defiance? Already in First Philosophy, Husserl suggests a forward-looking distinction. Even though all evidence is incomplete and inadequate, there is, following Husserl, a distinction between “deficiencies making an abrogation of the cognition possible, and deficiencies not allowing for that” (Hua VIII, p. 32). Thus Husserl suggests that there are some examples of evidence that, though essentially inadequate, still meet the criterion of indubitability. That means that in the view Husserl expresses here, absolute justification is possible in spite of the essential fallibility of all evidence. But what else than a simple contradiction can that be, asserting fallibility of all evidence and claiming some evidence “ultimately justified” at the same time? And on what ground if not
225 on adequacy is this ultimate justification to be based? What else than adequacy could ever be a legitimizing source of evidence? An important stage of Husserl’s development towards a new conception of apodicticity is embodied in an unedited manuscript, that was transcribed just a few years ago and therefore has not been taken notice of as yet. In this manuscript with the title On the Theory of Evidence. Absolute Justification of Cognition. Apodicticity and Adequacy,31 Husserl’s struggle for a new understanding of apodicticity in its relation to adequacy finds plain expression. Still, Husserl considers apodicticity to be dependent on adequacy in a twofold way: apodictic evidence, according to him, presupposes adequacy, and leads back to adequacy (loc. cit./11b). In between those two occurrences of adequate evidence lies what makes apodictic evidence a matter in its own right. Apodictic evidence is a “critical performance” (loc. cit./11b). “An apodictic evidence (. . .) is not merely certainty of the affairs (. . .) evident in it; rather it discloses itself (. . .) by means of a critical reflection.” Admittedly, Husserl here still doesn’t come up with a clear answer to the question whether inadequate evidence can be of apodictic quality. It is not until the Cartesian Meditations that Husserl clearly states the independence of apodicticity from adequacy. But already here, in the manuscript dating from about 1925, the difference between adequate evidence and apodictic evidence becomes clearer than it was in First Philosophy in one respect. For apodicticity, as portrayed in this manuscript, is not the ideal, unattainable telos of an ascending process of relative, more or less adequate evidence. It doesn’t refer to a mode of “givenness,” for in a sense, apodictic evidence doesn’t belong to the sphere of transcendental experience at all. Apodicticity discloses itself only in a “critical reflection” on transcendental experience, in a reflection on transcendental reflection. At the end of his Cartesian Meditations, Husserl thus calls “apodictic critique of phenomenological reflection” the ultimate task of phenomenology. However, the crucial question is still unanswered, for it is still unclear on what ground apodictic certainty is based if not on adequacy. But Husserl does come up with an answer. As Husserl puts it in one of his late manuscripts: “An evidence is (. . .) ‘apodictic’, if it is established by insight that (. . .) the supposition of the non-being [of what is intended] in its possible fulfilment leads to the being [of what is intended] and therefore to the insight into the impossibility of the non-being, i.e. to the insight into the negation of its possibility” (Ms B I 22 II/Transscr. S. 8). I’d like to advocate the following reading of this and some other similarly complicated phrases that are scattered over Husserl’s later works and manuscripts: something is evident in an apodictic sense if it cannot be imagined as nonexistent without being presupposed as existing in the self-same act of thinking. Apodicticity thus isn’t grounded in foundations of adequate givenness or some other kind of originary presentive intuition.
226 Apodicticity has a completely different structure: what is given to experience in apodictic evidence is not any kind of “matters themselves,” but a contradiction. It is the experiencing of a cogitatio contradicting itself, for it denies on the level of the cogitata what it presupposes as a cogitatio. The example Husserl sometimes gives to illustrate this structure is the contradiction between the judgements “I do not exist” and “I judge, that I do not exist” (Ms B I 22 I/ Transscr. S. 1). If this reading were to prove true, Husserl’s turn towards apodicticity would mark a profound change in the basic structure of the phenomenological venture: Phenomenology appears no longer as grounded in an only apparently solid foundation of immanent perception, but as oriented towards the idea of self-referential consistency.32
Self-referential reflection and internal otherness Following this interpretation, “apodictic critique” can be understood as a variation on the motif of self-referential justification,33 a type of justification that is set forth in current philosophy by the advocates of Transcendental Pragmatism, by philosophers like Karl-Otto Apel and Wolfgang Kuhlmann. In one crucial and problematic respect, the logic of reflection is the same in Transcendental Pragmatics and Phenomenology. That close kinship was quickly covered up by most Transcendental Pragmatists due to their strong belief to have to leave behind the “mentalistic paradigm” of Phenomenology in order to take part in the new linguistic and “intersubjectivist paradigm.” But in a sense, Transcendental Pragmatism depends on a concept of reflection that is just as highly strained as in Phenomenology. That problematic core assumption about reflection is the premiss that an act of reflection can be strictly self-referential, i.e. an act of reflection on this very act itself. Perhaps the problematic character of this assumption becomes clearer in the light of criticism. Gilbert Ryle puts his skepticism about the phenomenological concept of reflection under the title “The Systematic Elusiveness of ‘I’ ”: “To try (. . .) to describe what one (. . .) is now doing, is to comment upon a step which is not itself, save per accidens, one of commenting. But the operation which is the commenting is not, and cannot be, the step on which that commentary is being made. (. . .) A higher order action cannot be the action upon which it is performed. So my commentary on my performances must always be silent about one performance, namely itself, and this performance can be the target only of another commentary.”34 Just as all speaking remains silent about itself, consciousness remains completely unconscious of itself in its current acting. That the subject is oblivious of itself appears, in this perspective, as an essential feature of subjectivity. The subject of reflection thus never grasps itself in its very performing. In what follows I shall call this position “skepticism about reflection.”
227 It’s not surprising that this skepticism is widespread among Husserl’s scholars and interpreters. For in spite of his claim to apodicticity, Husserl himself had extensively studied how the subject misses itself in the reflective grasp. The criticism of Husserl’s concept of apodicticity therefore can build on Husserl’s own theory of reflection. The reflecting Ego and the Ego reflected upon are not identical. In its current performing subjectivity is anonymous and latent, different from the subject that appears as patent to reflection.35 What is thematic in self-reflection thus is never the ego performing this very act of reflection. What happens in reflection is: “An essentially changed subjective process takes the place of the original one; accordingly it must be said that this reflection alters the original subjective process. (. . .) reflection makes an object out of what was previously a subjective process but not objective” (Hua I, p. 72 [34]). Thus a “splitting of the Ego” (Hua VIII, p. 89; Hua I, p. 73 [35]) occurs in self-reflection. “Object-Ego” and “Subject-Ego” step apart, and while grasping an objectified subjectivity, the living and performing ego itself remains completely inaccessible.36 The subject therefore maintains, as it were, a “primordial distance to itself” (Held 1966, p. 81). And as the subject itself is, as Husserl says, “in a sense another,”37 the experience of the other is, following this view, prior to the self-reference of the subject. Not identity, but difference therefore dwells in the innermost of the subject’s self-referential being, and reflection appears not as a monologue of the ego, but as a “dialogue with another” (cf. Hua VI, p. 175 [172]). This is what the analysis of the temporal structure of reflection points out. Reflection is not “présance à soi.” Husserl calls it quite correctly “subsequent awareness” (Hua VIII, p. 89). The reflective act comes always too late to catch the subject in the act of performing.38 Is naïvety – oblivion of itself – thus an essential feature of consciousness? Is the subject therefore not to be enlightened by self-referential reflection? What would the consequences for the whole phenomenological venture be? On account of this “temporal diastasis”39 the holy grail of the philosophy of the subject, its version of the Greek “Know thyself!” (Hua I, p. 183 [157]) seems to turn out to be nothing more than a common act of remembrance (though guided by special interests), just as Gilbert Ryle objected to Husserl. This skeptical objection also refers to the conception of reflection in Transcendental Pragmatics. In this debate, the so-called “transfer-argument” states that Transcendental Pragmatists ignore a similar difference, the difference between the intuitive “knowing how” and the propositional level of explicit “knowing that.”40 As making explicit our “knowing how” alters what it grasps, the subject – here conceived as a competent linguistic practitioner – appears to be unable to reflect on her or his own competence. What the conditions of possibility of meaningful speaking are, is never to be revealed in “strictly selfreferential reflection.” Following this objection, reflection therefore is unable
228 to bear the burden of proof for the possibility of ultimate justification. Reflection gives no justification, but is, if anything, a mere means of interpretation.41 And were Husserl’s concept of apodictic evidence also to presuppose such a overstrained conception of reflection, we surely had to take it as a “pathological dream of omnipotence” (Waldenfels 1990, p. 78) as some critics have done. But does Husserl’s theory of apodictic evidence in fact involve such a concept of reflection? If, as we have seen, so much can be learned about “internal otherness” from Husserl, why, then, would Husserl himself be falling a victim to this error? Indisputably, Husserl’s concept of apodictic evidence as much as the concept of self-referential justification in Transcendental Pragmatics do in fact involve an immediate self-reference within the living subjective performing. Wolfgang Kuhlmann speaks of “strictly self-referential reflection,” that enables the subject to do precisely what Gilbert Ryle considers impossible: “to know of our current performances and acts” in an “act of reflection that enables us to see beside what is thematic in that act also the thematizing activity itself, without having to give up the original position, without observing our own acting only subsequently and oblivious of ourselves from outside as a distant, external object.”42 Thus Kuhlmann sometimes speaks of a “constitutive dimension of knowing-about-oneself” that is missed by the skeptics, because they take reflection solely to be an act of theoretic self-objectification.43 The same seems to hold true for Husserl’s conception when he believes phenomenological reflection capable of freeing the subject from its natural naïvety without just shifting naïvety to a transcendental level. But what is that peculiar and mysterious knowing-about-oneself that is supposed to be not just making one’s own part the object of theoretical consideration, but really getting into contact to one’s current performing? Does it exist, or is it a mere assertion that reveals how the logic of reflection ignores the otherness, the difference that dwells in the innermost of the subject, dissolving it with the dangerous illusion of identity? Because of the problem of self-objectivation, the alternative, following the sceptical position, is either to ignore the difference between “I” and “me”, or to conceive of the self as a stranger. But maybe self-objectivation is not all there is to subjective self-reference. In recent debates, such an immediate “being-to-oneself” has been lit up by Dieter Henrich and Manfred Frank. Though far from endorsing any conception of ultimate justification, they point out that subjective self-reference is never reflective self-objectivation alone. There is indeed an underlying immediate knowing-about-oneself. Following Manfred Frank, this basic level of subjective self-reference even includes a “Cartesian certainty.” Our self-awareness is infallible in the sense that it always and necessarily establishes a contact with ourselves.44 On a basic level, our self-awareness just cannot go wrong. Frank illustrates this with reference
229 to Rimbauds well-famous dictum “JE est un autre” that has become something like a confiteor among skeptics about reflection. This very claim to internal otherness presupposes that it is really “I”, who is an other, and not an other. The very establishment of internal otherness itself presupposes self-awareness. As far as skeptics about reflection object to this very basic level of being-towards-oneself in the name of internal otherness, they are caught in self-contradiction. If therefore some popular critics put “expropriation of the subject” in the place of the reflective self-possession, it must be said that this “expropriation” is not the basic level of subjective self-reference, as already the metaphor “expropriation” makes clear. Similarly, the concept Husserl uses – “self-objectivation” and “splitting of the ego” – make clear that the difference they state is not the very core of subjectivity, but a separation grounded in an underlying connection. As Dieter Henrich pointed out, this basic level of identity gets out of sight where the structure of subjective self-reference is conceived in terms of an objectifying, distant, theoretic act of self-observation. It is not surprising that many Phenomenologists tend to conceive of subjective self-reference based on these terms ultimately leading to skepticism about reflection. For in spite of his concept of apodictic critique, Husserl himself sometimes felt inclined to this model of subjective self-reference, for example when he ascribed the establishment of the identity of the reflecting ego and the ego reflected upon to a higher-order reflection (cf. Hua IV, p. 191f.; VIII, p. 90f.; IV, p. 101f.). If that were true, self-awareness would be based on (and indeed produced by) self-reflection. In reality, of course, it goes the other way around: I’m not aware of myself because of self-reflection, but I can reflect upon myself because of self-awareness. The identity of the reflected ego and the ego reflected upon is not itself established within reflection, but a precondition of reflection. Because he sometimes tried to ground self-awareness in reflection, Henrich classes Husserl’s Phenomenology in general as belonging to this wry type of theory.45 But as some scholars have pointed out already before Henrich’s criticism, Husserl endorses not only this theory about the relation between self-awareness and reflection, but also its much more plausible opposite, thereby stating that we are not aware of ourselves because we can make ourselves an object of acts of observation, but that we can make ourselves an object of our own acts of observations because we are aware of ourselves.46 On the basic level, consciousness doesn’t become an other to itself, as the skeptical model of a primordially objectifying self-reference mistakenly puts it. For the stream of consciousness is not doubled if consciousness becomes a phenomenon to itself (Hua X, p. 83; 119). Rather, self-reference is one of the very primordial features of the streaming consciousness. In contrast to the “primordial distance” of the reflecting ego and the ego reflected upon in an act of objectifying self-observation one could therefore speak of a “primordial bend toward itself”47 on the level of self-awareness.
230 Subjective self-reference thus is more than objectifying, distant, theoretical self-observation. But even if there is an underlying level of “immediate” self-reference, this does by no means prove for the possibility of strictly selfreferential reflection. For in contrast to the phenomenological concept of apodictic evidence and the concept of reflection in Transcendental Pragmatics, this basic level of “knowing-about-oneself” has a pre-reflective and prepropositional structure. Properly speaking, it isn’t knowledge in the narrow sense of the word. Jean-Paul Sartre points at that when he speaks of “conscience (de) soi,” putting “de” in brackets. And Manfred Frank prefers speaking of “being-acquainted-with-oneself” to using the term knowledge. The crucial question therefore seems still to be unanswered: how can something pre-propositional be made explicit, how can it be raised to the propositional level of knowledge? Still I shall proceed indirectly in trying to show that Husserl’s concept of apodictic evidence doesn’t depend on stronger assumptions about reflection than even the skeptic position itself does. As we have seen, apodictic evidence reveals itself only in the experience of a contradiction between the intuitive performance and the explicit content of a reflective act of consciousness. Thus the concept of apodictic evidence is not based in an futile attempt to wipe out the difference between what is intuitively performed and what is explicit, as only recently some critics have objected to Husserl. Quite on the contrary, it presupposes this difference. Husserl’s concept of apodictic evidence does not naïvely overestimate the power of reflection, believing it able to seize upon the latent act of reflection itself. To put it metaphorically: the latent, performing subjectivity becomes visible only in the flying sparks of a clash of the living, latent subjectivity with the way the subject is made explicit in reflection, as in the statement “I do not exist” that serves Husserl as an example.48 The experience of a contradiction is prior to the experience of evidence. This does not mean raising performing subjectivity immediately to the light of objectifying reflection. And if the concept of apodictic evidence does entail a negative reachability of performing subjectivity, this to a certain extent holds also true for the skeptical position. The skeptics about reflection similarly presuppose reachability of performing subjectivity insofar as stating the essential latency of subjectivity also means making it patent in its latent quality. Gilbert Ryle, as mentioned above, states that “my commentary on my performances must always be silent about one performance, namely itself.” What is at stake in the current argument is, that this very statement does not keep silence, but comments on itself. It in fact does tell something about its current performing, namely that it is latent. In this negative sense, the reachability of performing subjectivity is paradoxically presupposed also in skepticism about reflection. This argument, by the way, comes close to what Husserl himself objects to contemporary critics of introspectionism in his Ideas (Hua III, p. 174).
231 Apodictic evidence beyond foundationalism and suppression of internal otherness Even though there seems to be something “unconditional,” “infallible” and “absolute” about apodictic evidence it doesn’t follow that a theory that is oriented on the idea of apodictic critique necessarily entails foundationalism and suppression of internal otherness. Instead, the interpretation being suggested here elicited some features characteristic of apodictic evidence pertaining to a modest and indeed non-foundationalist understanding of apodicticity. Apodictic critique doesn’t mean going down the stairs to the basis of the tower of our knowledge to secure it as a stronghold of certainty. On the contrary, it means leaving our own in trying to confirm or disconfirm our opinions in a dialogue with differing views. It means, as Husserl says, “going through negation and doubt” (Hua VIII, p. 35). Apodictic evidence has experimental character. It is, as Husserl sometimes calls it, a “trial evidence” (Ms B I 22 II/Transscr. p. 8). The first non-foundationalist feature of apodictic evidence is its subsequency. Apodictic evidence doesn’t provide a sound ground to base our knowledge upon, but a subsequent test to our previously formed opinions. That explains why in the Cartesian Meditations “apodictic critique” appears not as the first, but as the last task of phenomenological reflection. Secondly, apodictic evidence is essentially of negative character as it consists in a negation of contradiction. Husserl’s concept of apodictic evidence is elenctic in its structure. This might surprise on a terminological level, for Aristotle in his Metaphysics introduces the elenchos as a procedure of proof that is supposed to work where proper apodeixis fails.49 This negativity of apodictic evidence also entails, thirdly, its partial character. To put it metaphorically: if the only light of apodictic critique is the flight of sparks of the clash of self-contradiction, the structures of living subjectivity are never plainly visible, but momentarily and in some parts only. Moreover, what becomes visible in apodictic evidence is only the “form” of subjectivity. That once more shows the profound changes in the tenets of Phenomenology. At the beginning, Phenomenology was founded in immanent perception of essences. What was certain was the what-content of essences, their quiddity, whereas facticity was bracketed as dubitable. Switching over to apodictic evidence, it is now on the contrary the facticity of the ego, that is certain, whereas its content, its quiddity is not to be made visible in that kind of reflection. What is evident, is merely the pure formal fact that I am – leaving open the question who or what I am. Apodictic critique therefore cannot replace (and should not be mistaken as) what certainly is more important a task: it cannot replace “substantial” reflection in terms of self-examination and self-clarification, leading to a self-understanding in a concrete historical and situative context.
232 A major problem of Husserl’s use of the term “apodicticity” seems to be that it is flawed by this confusion. Thus Husserl writes in the manuscript that the editor of the Husserliana edition chose as the concluding paragraph of Husserl’s last work (Husserl is here commenting on “the reappropriation of the Cartesian discovery, the fundamental demand of apodicticity”): “In this beginning, through the changed historical situation (. . .), there arise forces of motivation, a radical thinking-through of the genuine and imperishable sense of apodicticity (. . .), the exhibiting of the true method of an apodictically grounded and apodictically progressing philosophy. (. . .) It is precisely with this that there begins a philosophy with the deepest and most universal selfunderstanding of the philosophizing ego as the bearer of absolute reason coming to itself (. . .) in his apodictic being-for-himself (. . .). What follows this is the ultimate self-understanding of man as being responsible for his own human being, his self-understanding as being in being called to a life of apodicticity, not only in abstractly practising apodictic science (. . .), but [as being mankind] which realizes its whole concrete being in apodictic freedom by becoming apodictic mankind (. . .).” (Hua VI, p. 386 [340]). Not only does Husserl’s use of the term “apodicticity” show all signs of galloping conceptual inflation. What is irritating is its sweeping use that ranges from the proper place of apodicticity as a feature of the “being-for-himself of the ego” up to “freedom” and “mankind” in a historic context. Husserl is mistaken in using a formal, negative, partial and subsequent test of self-referential consistency for the purposes of a “substantial” self-understanding in a historical situation. For this latter type of reflection of course never leads to an “ultimate” “unconditional” and “absolute” self-understanding, because it always has to follow the changes in the political and social context. Without doubt, Husserl still subscribed to a “foundationalist” self-understanding in his later years. Even then, he sometimes fell back into his earlier dogmatic position, as can be seen in his theory of intersubjectivity. Husserl’s concept of apodictic evidence, however, is not to be interpreted as a consequence of his earlier dogmatism about self-transparency. The interpretation given suggests that however gradually and incompletely Husserl developed it, this concept belongs to a line that led Husserl away from foundationalism. It also suggests that the concept of apodictic evidence doesn’t rely on repression of internal otherness either. It seems that the logic of “apodictic critique” is much more subtle and complex than it may seem in the light of the interpretation and criticism that has been shed on Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology until now.
Notes 1. I would like to thank the Swiss National Research Fund, the Max Geldner Foundation and the Freiwillige Akademische Gesellschaft der Universität Basel for their generous
233
2. 3. 4.
5.
6.
financial support. I am also greatly indebted to the contributors to the discussion of this paper in the Departmental Workshop of the Philosophy Department at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York, especially to Richard J. Bernstein. Bernhard Waldenfels brought to my notice Paul Ricoeur’s early remarks on the topic. Arnold G. Simmel and Lee J. Nelson helped me with their advice not only in matters linguistic (I alone am responsible for the many remaining mistakes and peculiarities). I would also like to express my gratitude to the director of Husserl Archives at the Catholic University of Leuven, Professor Dr. Samuel Ijsseling, for the kind permission to quote from Husserl’s unpublished manuscripts, and to an anonymous referee for Husserl Studies for his or her comments and suggestions. Cf. Michael Dummett’s criticism of Husserl’s Idealism in Origins of Analytical Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993). Cf. among many others Jürgen Habermas, Vorstudien und Ergänzungen zur Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), p. 50ff. Cf. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979); Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism. Essays 1972–1980 (Brighton, 1982), p. 37f.; 40; 160. Without doubt, Rorty’s criticism is too simplistic. For even though Husserl’s philosophy seems to entail some transmission of authority from underlying spheres of self-authenticating non-verbal episodes to the conceptual level of knowledge proper (cf. Sellars’ description of the “heart of the Myth of the Given” in Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 77), Husserl doesn’t reconstruct knowledge by starting out from our “immediate” knowledge of appearances and building up to our knowledge of how things really are (cf. concerning this feature of “foundationalism” Robert Brandom’s “Cartesian” reconstruction of Sellars’ argument in Sellars, 1997, p. 137), but only tries to clarify this very distinction between appearance and reality itself. In the opening paragraphs of the Cartesian Meditations however, Husserl explicitly endorses something similar to what John L. Austin called the “tower of knowledge” model, describing human knowledge and science as a structure with different storeys of positive knowledge requiring Transcendental Phenomenology as an unshakeable foundation and a sound basis for the whole structure). Barry Smith, David Woodruff Smith (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Husserl (Cambridge, 1995), p. 35f.; a “continental” example for the same strategy, which does Husserl’s thinking a disservice, is Elisabeth Ströker, Phänomenologische Studien (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1987), p. 66f.: “Manchen von Husserl anfänglich allzu unbekümmert formulierten Behauptungen zum Trotz reklamiert seine Phänomenologie für ihr Erkenntnisse unumstößliche Geltung nicht – so wenig, daß sie vielmehr zeigt, daß es und warum es für ihre Einsichten unerschütterliche Wahrheit nicht geben kann. Das verhindert bereits die prinzipielle Unabschließbarkeit, Korrekturbedürftigkeit und Korrekturfähigkeit phänomenologischer Analyse.” “Die Phänomenologie reklamiert für ihre Aussagen, gängigen Fehlinterpretationen zum Trotz, so wenig unumstößliche Wahrheit, daß sie vielmehr zeigt, daß es und warum es in der Phänomenologie unumstößliche Wahrheiten nicht geben kann” (Elisabeth Ströker, “Zur Problematik der Letztbegründung in Husserls Phänomenologie,” in Wolfgang Marx (ed.), Zur Selbstbegründung der Philosophie seit Kant (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1987), p. 110. Leszek Kolakowski, Husserl and the Search for Certitude (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 4. Cf. Gary E. Overvold, The Foundationalist Conflict in Husserl’s Rationalism, Analecta Husserliana Bd. XXXIV, (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), pp. 441–452.
234 7. Cf. Lester Embree et al. (eds.), Encyclopedia of Phenomenology (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997). There is no entry about “apodicticity”, and even Elisabeth Ströker’s article on “Evidence” does not even mention Husserl’s concept of apodicticity! 8. Ernst Tugendhat, Der Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1970). 9. Cf. Karl Mertens, Zwischen Letztbegründung und Skepsis (Freiburg: Alber, 1996). 10. Cf. Tugendhat, p. 209. Among many other examples Klaus Held, Abschied vom Cartesianismus, Die Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls, Neue Züricher Zeitung, 3/26/96. An interpretation accusing Husserl of anti-Cartesian dogmatism cf. George Heffernan, An Essay in Epistemic Kyklophobia: Husserl’s critique of Descarte’s Conception of Evidence, Husserl Studies 13, 1997, p. 89–140. 11. Two “quite incompatible lines of though” in Husserls theory of evidence are also diagnosed in V.J. McGill, “Evidence in Husserl’s Phenomenology”. F. Kersten, R. Zaner (eds.), Phenomenology: Continuation and Criticism. Essays in Memory of Dorion Cairns (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), pp. 146–166, 155; cf. also loc. cit. 151: “In so far as evidence is declared absolute, efforts at corroboration are cut off, search for more evidence ceases, and human error and humane correction become impossible.” 12. Hua XIX, p. 770; Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. by J.N. Findlay, vol. 2 (London: Routledge, 1976), p. 866 (in the following, the reference to this translation is indicated in square brackets after the reference to the Husserliana Edition of the Logical Investigations); translation slightly corrected. 13. Hua I, p. 56; Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations. An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. by Dorion Cairns (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997), p. 15 (in the following, the reference to this translation is indicated in square brackets after the reference to Husserliana Edition of the Cartesian Meditations). 14. Cf. Niklas Luhmann, Soziale Systeme. Grundriß einer allgemeinen Theorie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), p. 19. 15. Hua III, p. 93; Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, first book, translated by F. Kersten (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1983), p. 111 (in the following, the reference to this translation is indicated in square brackets after the reference to the Husserliana Edition of the first volume of the Ideas). 16. Cf. Klaus Hartmann, Self Evidence, Studies in Foundational Philosophy (Amsterdam, Würzburg: Rodopoi, 1988), p. 27. 17. Hua VIII, p. 35; a detailed account of the development of the relation between adequacy and apodicticity in Husserl’s thought will be given in the following. 18. Husserl himself gives a hint. At one point Husserl states that this doctrine only “recalls the traditional estimate of the relative value for knowledge of the two forms of perception” (Hua XIX, p. 753 [853]). Does Husserl thus contravene his own methodological instruction to “put in brackets” the philosophical tradition, being swayed by the latter rather than relying on his own rational insight? Was Husserl, despite all precautions, taken in by a traditional prejudice? Cf. Adrian Mirvish, The Presuppositions of Husserl’s Presuppositionless Philosophy. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 26 (1995), pp. 147–170. 19. Gilbert Ryle, Phenomenology. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 11 (1932), pp. 68– 83. 20. Hua IV, p. 105; Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, vol. II: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, trans. by R. Rojecwicz and A. Schuwer, (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), p. 111.
235 21. Cf. Iso Kern, Husserl and Kant. Eine Untersuchung über Husserls Verhältnis zu Kant und zum Neukantianismus (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), S. 209. 22. Cf. Tobias Trappe, Transzendentale Erfahrung. Vorstudien zu einer transzendentalen Methodenlehre (Basel: Schwabe, 1996). 23. Cf. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy. An Essay on Interpretation, trans. by Denis Savage, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 377. 24. Among many other examples (some of which will be mentioned in the following) of this misinterpretation see Klaus Held: Abschied vom Cartesianismus. Die Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls, Neue Zürcher Zeitung 26/27 March 1996. 25. Cf. David Michael Levin, Reason and Evidence in Husserl’s Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970); Tugendhat, cited above; Iso Kern, Die drei Wege zur transzendentalphänomenologischen Reduktion in der Philosophie Edmund Husserls. Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 24 (1962), pp. 303–349; Mertens p. 218ff.; Alfred de Waelhens, Science, phénoménologie, et ontologie. Revue internationale de Philosophie VIII (1954), pp. 254–265. 26. Data provided by The Husserl-Database (http://www.jpcs.shizuoka.ac.jp/~jsshama/ team.html). 27. This not only because Husserl’s elaborate theory of essences and their being intended in some special phenomenological kind of “seeing,” by means of “eidetic variation,” might emerge as “an admirable construction to grasp something that doesn’t exist” (Ernst Tugendhat, Phänomenologie und Sprachanalyse. R. Bubner, K. Craner, R. Wiehl, Hermeneutik und Dialektik, Bd. II, Sprache und Logik, Theorie der Auslegung und Probleme der Einzelwissenschaften (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1970), pp. 3–23, 15). Even if one were to endorse Husserl’s essentialism as such, essences were still by no means apodictically certain, but a transitional product of an ongoing, open and endless process of variation. 28. I decided against discussing Husserl’s concept of apodicticity in Formal and Transcendental Logic and the often-cited assertion of the fallibility of any apodictic evidence to be found there (Hua XVII, p. 164f.) in the body of my text. Even though Husserl’s theory of pure consciousness as a genetic whole that cannot be dissected in single, independently evident “moments,” the dynamic picture of consciousness that he uses here to substantiate his proposal of a fallibilistic reinterpretation of his concept of apodictic evidence has an undeniable appeal, this fallibilistic interpretation belongs to a line of thought Husserl had already left behind in his manuscripts at that time. On that latter line, Husserl insisted on the infallibility of apodictic evidence without however, as I will try to show, giving up the dynamic, holistic and genetic picture of consciousness. It is of course an important rule in Husserl scholarship to grant Husserl’s published text more authority than his manuscripts. I hope to be able however to provide a systematic reconstruction of Husserl’s concept of apodictic evidence as expressed in his manuscripts (and later on in the Cartesian Meditations) that is convincing enough to justify departure from that rule in this particular case. 29. Ludwig Landgrebe, The Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. Six Essays (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), pp. 66–121. 30. In spite of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s early correction of a possible misreading of some Husserlian statements some interpreters persistently adhere to the misinterpretation that Husserl himself gave up his idea of an “absolute,” ultimately justified rational foundation of science. As a recent example for that misinterpretation cf. Wolfgang Röd, Metaphysik ohne Evidenz. Information Philosophie 5/1994, pp. 5–11, 11. 31. Ms A I 31. In the following, I quote from the transcription that has not been corrected and collated as yet.
236 32. Even though Husserl’s concept of “apodictic critique,” following the interpretation given above, is nothing but an explication of an argumentation Husserl used at the very beginning of his venture. For it is its self-contradictory character that Husserl focuses on in his refutation of psychologism in the Prolegomena to a Pure Logic. 33. On various occasions, Husserl makes clear that what he has in mind is proper “Selbstbegründung.” Thus he speaks of a “sich selbst rechtfertigende Begründung” (Ms B I 10 XII/Transcr. S. 7) or says that apodictic evidence “rechtfertigt sicht selbst durch sich selbst” (Ms A I 31/29a). All the more regrettable is the fact that Wolfgang Kuhlmann didn’t include Husserl in his history of the idea of “Selbstbegründung” in philosophy (Wolfgang Kuhlmann, Reflexive Letztbegründung. Untersuchungen zur Transzendentalpragmatik (Freiburg i. Br.: Alber, 1985), p. 254ff.). 34. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 195. 35. Husserl makes the distinction between “patenter” and “latenter Subjektivität” in Hua VIII, p. 90f. 36. Landgrebe 1981, p. 115. Vgl. auch Thomas M. Seebohm, Die Bedingungen der Möglichkeit der Transzendental-Philosophie. Edmund Husserls transzendental-phänomenologischer Ansatz, dargestellt im Anschluß an seine Kant-Kritik (Bonn: Bouvier, 1962), p. 161; cf. also loc. cit. 67; Seebohm 1989, p. 97; Klaus Held, Lebendige Gegenwart. Die Frage nach der Seinsweise des transzendentalen Ich bei Edmund Husserl, entwickelt am Leitfaden der Zeitproblematik (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), p. 71f. 37. Hua VI, p. 175; Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. by David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 172; in the following, the reference to this translation is indicated in square brackets after the reference to the Husserliana Edition of the Crisis. 38. “The naïve perceiving of the ego that is oblivious about itself is already over when I bring reflection into action” (Hua VIII, p. 88). Under certain conditions however, compresence of both egos seems to be possible: cf. Hua VIII, p. 89. 39. Cf. Bernhard Waldenfels, Der Stachel des Fremden (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990), p. 77. 40. Cf. E.G. Alfred Berlich, Elenktik des Diskurses. Karl-Otto Apels Ansatz einer transzendentalpragmatischen Letztbegründung. W. Kuhlmann, D. Böhler (eds.), Kommunikation und Reflextion. Zur Diskussion um die Transzendentalpragmatik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), pp. 251–287. 41. Cf. Gerhard Schönrich, Bei Gelegenheit Diskurs. Von den Grenzen der Diskursethik und dem Preis der Letztbegründung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), p. 162ff. 42. Wolfgang Kuhlmann, Reflexive Letztbegründung. Zur These von der Unhintergehbarkeit der Argumentationssituation. Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 35 (1981), pp. 3– 31, 14. 43. Wolfgang Kuhlmann, Reflexion und kommunikative Erfahrung. Untersuchungen zur Stellung philosophischer Reflexion zwischen Theorie und Kritik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975), p. 144. 44. Manfred Frank, Selbstbewußtsein und Selbsterkenntnis. Essays zur analytischen Philosophie der Subjektivität (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1991), p. 413; Dieter Henrich, “Identität” – Begriffe, Probleme, Grenzen. O. Marquard, K. Stierle (eds.), Identität. Poetik und Hermeneutik Bd. VIII (München, 1991), pp. 133–186, p. 175ff. 45. Dieter Henrich, Fichtes ursprüngliche Einsicht. D. Henrich et al. (eds.), Subjektivität und Metaphysik (Frankfurt am Main, 1966), pp. 188–232, 231.
237 46. “Ich bin mir (. . .) nur insofern Gegenstand, als ich ‘Selbstbewußtsein’ habe (. . .) Hätte ich es nicht, dann könnte ich auch nicht reflektieren” (Hua IV, p. 318; cf. also Hua IV, p. 252). Herman Ulrich Asemissen, Egologische Reflexion. Kant-Studien 50 (1958/59), pp. 262–272. 47. Cf. Antonio F. Aguirre, Die Phänomenologie Husserls im Licht ihrer gegenwärtigen Interpretation und Kritik (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1982), p. 29. 48. “Die Urteile: ich urteile, daß ich nicht bin; ich bin nicht, stehen im Verhältnis des Widerstreites; ist das eine wahr, so ist das andere falsch, und umgekehrt” (Ms B I 22 I/ Transcr. S. 1). 49. Cf. Aristoteles, Metaphysics IV, 1005b/35–1006a/28; Prior Analytics II, 11–14, 14/29; Günther Patzig, Die aristotelische Syllogistik (Göttingen, 1963), pp. 153–166.
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