Issues in Phenomenology and Hermeneutics

Variations on Truth
Issues in Phenomenology and Hermeneutics

Series Editors: Pol Vandevelde, Marquette University and Kevin Hermberg,
Dominican College
Issues in Phenomenology and Hermeneutics presents original research work
that appeals to the phenomenological method while also being informed
by the tradition of hermeneutics. The books in this series abide by the rigor
of traditional Husserlian phenomenology and bridge the gap between
philosophical, religious, literary and legal hermeneutics. Informed by current debates within both these fields, the series advances and promotes
dialogue between the two movements.
Epistemology, Archaeology, Ethics: Current Investigations of Husserls Corpus
edited by Pol Vandevelde and Sebastian Luft
Variations on Truth:
Approaches in Contemporary
Phenomenology
Edited by
Pol Vandevelde and Kevin Hermberg
Continuum International Publishing Group

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Pol Vandevelde, Kevin Hermberg and contributors, 2011
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
EISBN:
9781441146670
Library of Congress Catalog ing-in-Publication Data

Variations on truth : approaches in contemporary
phenomenology / edited by Pol Vandevelde and Kevin Hermberg.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 978-1-4411-1290-3
1. Phenomenology. 2. Truth. I. Vandevelde, Pol. II. Hermberg, Kevin.
III. Title.
BD171.V375 2011
121--dc22
2011008363
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India

Printed and bound in Great Britain
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Preface
Part I:
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Phenomenological Correlation between

Consciousness and Object Faced with Its
Hermeneutical Challenge
Pol Vandevelde
Part II:
vii
x
Husserlian Resources: Reduction, Imagination,

Transcendental Idealism
Chapter 2: Does Husserl Have a Principle of Reducibility?

Dominique Pradelle
25
Chapter 3: The Seduction of Images: A Look at the

Role of Images in Husserls Phenomenology
John Brough
41
Chapter 4: From Natural Attitude to Transcendental Idealism:

Continuousness, or Logical Conflict?
Jean-Franois Lavigne
57
Part III:
Heideggerean Variations: Daseins Opening,

Disclosure, and the History of Being
Chapter 5: Heideggers Hermeneutical Critique of

Consciousness Revisited
Burt C. Hopkins
79
Chapter 6: Transformations in Heideggers Conception of

Truth between 1927 and 1930
Lszl Tengelyi
94
Contents
vi
Chapter 7: Heideggers Fluid Ontology in the 1930s:

The Platonic Connection
Pol Vandevelde
Part IV:
109
Toward a Broadened Ontology and Epistemology:

Nature, Judgment, and Intersubjectivity
Chapter 8: Harmony in Opposition: On Merleau-Pontys

Heraclitean Vision of Truth
Shazad Akhtar
129
Chapter 9: The Role of Infinite Judgment in

Hegels Phenomenology of Truth
Russell Newstadt and Andrew Cutrofello
145
Chapter 10: Husserls (even more) Social Epistemology

Kevin Hermberg
Part V:
161
The Avatars of Truth: Deconstruction,

Conversation, and Interpretation
Chapter 11: Reduction, Construction, Destruction of a Three-Way

Dialogue: Natorp, Husserl, and Heidegger
Jean-Franois Courtine
179
Chapter 12: Truths Absence: The Hermeneutic Resistance to

Phenomenology
Santiago Zabala
201
Chapter 13: Truth and Interpretation

Daniel O. Dahlstrom
209
Bibliography
Index
225
234
Shazad Akhtar is a doctor of philosophy. He is the author of Between

Oneself and Another: Merleau-Pontys Organic Appropriation of Husserlian
Phenomenology (Phenomenology 2008) and co-author of Husserl at
Marquette: A Report on the 38th International Husserl Circle Conference
(Phnomenologische Forschungen 2009).
John B. Brough is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Georgetown
University. He has translated Husserliana X, On the Phenomenology of the
Consciousness of Internal Time, and Husserliana XXIII, Phantasy, Image
Consciousness, and Memory. He has also written essays on the phenomenology of time and on the nature of the work of art, with particular attention
to imaging.
Jean-Franois Courtine is Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Paris-Sorbonne and researcher at the Husserl Archives in Paris. His recent
books include: Les catgories de ltre. Etudes de philosophie ancienne et mdivale
(PUF 2003), Inventio analogiae, Mtaphysique et onto-tho-logie (Vrin, 2005),
La cause de la phnomnologie (PUF, 2007). He has also edited several volumes, among them: Heidegger. Introduction la mtaphysique (Vrin, 2007),
Schelling (Edition du Cerf, 2010).
Andrew Cutrofello is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University
Chicago. He is the author of four books, including Continental Philosophy: A
Contemporary Introduction (Routledge, 2005) and The Owl at Dawn: A Sequel
to Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit (State University of New York Press, 1995).
Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Chair of the Philosophy Department at Boston
University, is the author of Das logische Vorurteil (Passagan, 1994), Heideggers
Concept of Truth (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and Philosophical
Legacies (Catholic University of Americal, 2008). He has published numerous articles, translated works of Mendelssohn, Schiller, Hegel, Feuerbach,
viii
and Heidegger, and edited several collected volumes, including Interpreting

Heidegger: New Essays (Cambridge University Press, 2011).
Kevin Hermberg is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Dominican College.
He is the author of Husserls Phenomenology: Knowledge, Objectivity, and Others
(Continuum 2006).
Burt Hopkins is Professor of Philosophy at Seattle University. He is the coeditor of The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy,
author of, among others, The Origin of the Logic of Symbolic Mathematics:
Edmund Husserl and Jacob Klein (Indiana 2011), The Philosophy of Husserl
(Acumen 2010), Intentionality in Husserl and Heidegger: The Problem of Original
Method and Phenomenon of Phenomenology (Kluwer 1993).
Jean-Franois Lavigne is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nice.
He is the author of, among others, Husserl et la naissance de la phnomnologie
(19001913) (PUF, 2005), Michel Henry: Pense de la vie et culture contemporaine
(Beauchesne, 2006), Accder au transcendantal? Rduction et idalisme transcendantal dans les Ides I de Husserl (Vrin, 2009). He is the president of the
Socit Internationale Michel Henry.
Russell Newstadt is a doctoral candidate in the Philosophy Department
at Loyola University Chicago. He studied philosophy and classics at the
University of California, Berkeley and the University of Chicago. His dissertation is tentatively entitled, Omnis Determinatio est Negatio: A Secret History
of Negation in Early Medieval Philosophy.
Dominique Pradelle is Professor of Philosophy at Blaise Pascal University
(Clermont-Ferrand). He is the co-editor of the journal Philosophie (Paris,
Editions de Minuit). His books include: Par-del la rvolution copernicienne. Le sujet transcendantal et ses facults (PUF, 2011), Larchologie du monde.
Constitution de lespace, idalisme et intuitionnisme chez Husserl (Kluwer, 2000).
He is a co-editor of Penser avec Desanti (Trans Europ Repress, 2010).
Lszl Tengelyi is Professor of Philosophy at the Bergische-Universitt
Wuppertal. He is the author of, among others, The Wild Region in Life-History
(Northwestern University Press, 2004), Lexprience retrouve. Essais philosophiques I (LHarmattan, 2006), Erfahrung und Ausdruck: Phnomenologie im
Umbruch bei Husserl und seinen Nachfolgern (Springer, 2007) and co-author of
Neue Phnomenologie in Frankreich (Suhrkamp, 2011).
ix
Pol Vandevelde is Professor of Philosophy at Marquette University. He

is the author of tre et Discours: La question du langage dans litinraire de
Heidegger (Acadmie Royale, 1994), The Task of the Interpreter: Text, Meaning,
and Negotiation (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), and Heidegger and
the Romantics: The Literary Invention of Meaning (Routledge, 2011). He also
edited several books and translated works by Husserl, Heidegger, Apel, and
Rousselot.
Santiago Zabala is ICREA Research Professor at the University of
Barcelona. He is the author of five books, including: The Remains of Being
(Columbia University Press, 2009) and The Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic
Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 2008), and editor of Arts Claim
to Truth (Columbia University Press, 2008). He co-edited Consequences of
Hermeneutics (Northwestern University Press, 2010). His forthcoming book,
coauthored with Gianni Vattimo, is Hermeneutic Communism (Columbia
University Press, 2011).
Preface
The aim of this volume is to provide a wide sample of the kind of research
that is done in phenomenological circles on some important aspects of the
problem of truth. It is no wild claim to say that there is no unified phenomenological theory of truth and no established or accepted set of components
that would belong to the problem of truth. The essays included in this
volume are research essays by prominent phenomenologists in the United
States, France, and Germany showing how relevant the phenomenological approach is with regard to the problem of truth and how complex this
problem is when examined through the phenomenological method.
The previous volume in the series, Epistemology, Archaeology, Ethics: Current
Investigations of Husserls Corpus (Vandevelde and Luft 2010), included a first
part on epistemological issues. The present volume does not repeat the
aspects of a theory of truth treated there. It rather continues the broadened epistemology that was sketched out in that volume. The focus here
is on a dynamic conception of truth, understood as a process rather than
statically as a propositional content or a determination of specific properties. Such an approach requires an examination of questions concerning,
for example, imagination, culture, or history. An advantage of the phenomenological approach remains its capacity to provide detailed analysis,
while engaging fruitfully with the history of philosophy in order to forge
new and illuminating connections.
The directors of the series plan to have other volumes on themes related
to epistemological concerns and these future volumes in the series will
address issues and topics that this volume cannot cover. As the title of the
series, Issues in Phenomenology and Hermeneutics, states it, the goal
is to focus on Issues and in order to focus on these issues we follow
Husserls own recommendation of proceeding in a zigzag manner. Not
all aspects of an issue can be treated at once (in one volume). For, it is the
virtue of phenomenology to try as much as possible to refrain from imposing constraints on the topic under analysis, for example by selecting some
xi
Preface
aspects as essential and declaring others secondary. By letting the phenomena manifest themselves, according to its creed, phenomenology can
thus resist the common view that truth is a matter of propositional content
so that its relation to history or imagination is secondary. While the constraints imposed on a topic have the advantage of delineating the problem
in a systematic way and breaking it down into its components, there always
remains a certain arbitrariness in how the problem was circumscribed, and
one can then question whether some assumptions have not been implicitly
made. For, the price of a systematic approach seems to be the assumptions
that have to be made for the method to work.
By contrast, letting the phenomena manifest themselves allows phenomenologists to examine constantly whatever assumptions were made and to
bring them to the fore. The correlative aspect of this phenomenological
approach is the open-ended nature of the problem itself. Philosophical
problems do not seem to have an unchanging nature with a strictly defined
set of aspects, no matter how perennial they may appear to be. This applies
to the philosophical problem of truth in an acute manner. By treating the
very notion of what a philosophical problem is, not as a puzzle to be solved,
but as an issue that requires a treatment, the phenomenological approach
to truth treats the problem dynamically by raising questions and pointing
to some issues that may go beyond the purview of epistemology as it tends
to be discussed today. The zigzag approach that Husserl mentions allows
us to remain rigorous without being rigidly systematic. This approach
allows us to go back to the things themselves by recognizing only those
constraints that emerge from the object under investigation and from the
description of this object.
The volume is structured in five sections. The fi rst one is an introduction that situates the problem of truth in phenomenological research
by explaining how this problem arises. According to Husserl the problem
of truth emerges from within the context of a correlation between consciousness and object. This correlation is Husserls understanding of the
relationship between subject and object: consciousness is of an object
and objects are for consciousness, neither of them being a free floating
device that could be examined independently of its link to the other pole of
the correlation in which it appears. However, later phenomenologists like
Heidegger pointed out that such a correlation between consciousness and
object is manifested in some form of articulation, for example through language. The correlation, it was thus contended, is rather an interpretation
on the part of the subject who finds itself part of a world of related objects
and of history. Husserls thesis of a correlation between consciousness and
xii
Preface
object thus invited a hermeneutic challenge to the extent that the interaction between consciousness and object seems to be a form of articulation
in some medium and a form of interpretation. This element of interpretation in turn opens itself to be challenged by an ontological question: what
is thus the status of the object of consciousness if phenomenology even in
its hermeneutic form does not want to fall into a classic idealism?
The second section is about Husserlian Resources: Reduction,
Imagination, Transcendental Idealism and includes essays that reflect the
all-encompassing nature of phenomenology and especially of Husserls
original approach. Three aspects are particularly addressed in this section:
reduction, the role of imagination, and the brand of transcendental theory
Husserl advocates. Reduction is the method through which a particular
empirical subject can transcend his or her particular perspective or framework and become what Husserl calls a disinterested or non-participating
spectator. As one of the most crucial components of the phenomenological method, reduction guarantees that the starting point in experience
will not remain encapsulated in experience, but will lead to logical and
scientific claims. The second theme, imagination, is crucial for any aspect
of consciousness. Even in perception, imagination is involved to the extent
that one aspect of an object, for example, is associated with other objects.
Imagination thus has to be part of any approach to truth. The third topic,
the possibility of self-transcendence in a form of transcendental idealism,
is Husserls overall theoretical framework within which he believes he can
account for the correlation between consciousness and object without this
correlation being limited to psychology, the workings of human consciousness, or even any form of anthropologism.
The essays in the third section, Heideggerean Variations: Daseins
Opening, Disclosure, and the History of Being, examine three of the
stages in Heideggers thought between Being and Time and the early 1940s:
the critique of consciousness, the transformation of the concept of truth
soon after Being and Time in a metontology, and the history of being.
The fourth section, Toward a Broadened Ontology and Epistemology:
Nature, Judgment, and Intersubjectivity, includes essays that reflect a
broadening of the traditional phenomenological approaches to truth and
the implications of such a broadened epistemology for ontology. The essays
operate a variation on three traditional themes: questioning the boundaries of nature and its alleged separation from spirit, challenging the very
goal of a judgment, and opening up individual consciousness by revealing
its intersubjective nature, and showing what it means for consciousness to
be historical.
xiii
Preface
The fi fth section is about The Avatars of Truth: Deconstruction,

Conversation, and Interpretation. Phenomenology is not a theory, but, as
Husserl said, a method. The essays in this section illustrate the variation
of methods that can be used for dealing with the issue of truth. The topics
treated include the relationship between Natorp, Husserl, and Heidegger,
the relationship between hermeneutics and pragmatism, and the question
of the truth in interpretation.
Several of the contributors to this volume were participants in the
Seminar on Phenomenology and Hermeneutics at Marquette University
(Milwaukee) sponsored by Marquette Way Klingler College of Arts and
Sciences and Dominican College (New York). We want to express our gratitude to our respective institutions for the support in our enterprise. We
also want to thank David Avital, Continuum interim editor, for supporting
the original idea of this volume and the anonymous reviewers for their
comments and suggestions. Tom Crick has been, as always, extremely helpful during all the stages of this project. Finally, we are thankful to Sarah
Campbell, editor, for her good advice and unfailing support.
Part I
Introduction
Chapter 1
The Phenomenological Correlation

between Consciousness and
Object Faced with Its
Hermeneutical Challenge
Pol Vandevelde
The issue of truth has always been a divisive philosophical issue, pitting traditional style philosophy against rhetoric, against literature, or against social
and applied philosophy. While the notion of truth as a univocal concept
associated with a well-delineated referent has long been seen as part of an
idle Wittgensteinian language game, the use of the term is still very much a
pragmatic component of any assertion, discussion, or communication that
makes the writer or speaker accountable for the veracity of what they say. This
disconnect between the theoretical front on truth, where the notion seems to
be expandable and replaceable, and the practical front, where the notion of
truth seems to remain uncircumventable has taken different forms in AngloAmerican and in continental philosophy. In Anglo-American philosophy the
discussion tends to focus on the criterion of the truth or the method used to
reach the truth, leading to distinctions among the different candidates for what
a theory of truth is or should be: correspondence, foundationalist, coherentist, or pragmatic theories, with their possible variations and combinations.
In continental philosophy the debate has taken another form and has
focused on what is involved in what is called the truth. As the main representative of continental philosophy, phenomenology has seen itself as the place
of a debate in which the truth as evidence, as defended by the early Husserl,
has been challenged by the truth as disclosure, as powerfully presented by
Heidegger. This alternative view on truth within phenomenology represents
what we addressed in the Preface as the hermeneutic challenge. Once an element of interpretation is introduced in the concept of truth it was only a natural step to ask about the linguistic or discursive mediation of the disclosure.
Pol Vandevelde
Phenomenology in this sense lent itself to a critique that subsequently led to

its being recast in terms of what Hans-Georg Gadamer has called the mediation of language (Sprachlichkeit). This critique was obviously prepared by
Heidegger and later radicalized in its linguistic form by the likes of Jacques
Derrida and Michel Foucault. This element of language that is part of the
flesh of reality has reintroduced the ontological question into phenomenology
by the rather provocative claim that everything is interpretation (Derrida) or
by the view that things are discursive formations (Foucault).
In this introduction I focus on what in my view is the core of the phenomenological attitude toward truththe correlation between consciousness
and objectand how such a correlation already contains in the innovative framework it opens the notions of disclosure and discursive formations. The notion of correlation between consciousness and object entails
an overlap between consciousness and object that turns the activity of
knowing and reaching the truth into a process of translation or translatability understood in the broad sense of an exchange between what is of
the order of consciousness and what is of the order of reality. I will, first,
present Husserls understanding of the correlation between consciousness
and object, with its epistemological emphasis, and, second, examine three
versions of the overlap that emphasize the ontological repercussions of
such an interaction between consciousness and object. I will start with a
historical account of the origin of such a correlation. We can find in early
German romanticism, in the figures of Friedrich Schlegel or Novalis, the
first effort to bridge the apparent gap between consciousness and object.
They use the term translation for this bridge, thereby granting translation an ontological function. Heidegger also appeals to translation in
the 1930s and early 1940s as a way to regain our historical identity and
Merleau-Ponty speaks of a translation of the world.
What these three versions of the overlap between consciousness and
object show is the need to see the object in a certain fluidity. They, thus,
bring to the fore the ontological side of the correlation between consciousness and object that the Husserlian version somewhat downplays.
These three versions of ontological translation show how, within phenomenology, the truth as Husserlian evidence could lead to the truth as
Heideggerean disclosure and to the emphasis on the mediation of language, which was to transform phenomenology. Besides the conceptual
continuity with its ruptures between the correlation between consciousness
and object, on the one hand, and the hermeneutic turn, on the other,
these three versions show us that an investigation into the nature of truth
cannot be confined to a strictly epistemological approach, but encroaches
Correlation Between Consciousness and Object
upon ontological territories. One can do justice to the complex nature of

truth only by taking into consideration these ontological entailments.
The Epistemological Emphasis in the

Husserlian Correlation between
Consciousness and Object
The correlation between consciousness and object, which Husserl considers the breakthrough of his phenomenology, adds to a mere relationship
between consciousness and object the suggestion of an overlap between
the two terms correlated. If there is something in consciousness that makes
it consciousness of and something in the object that makes it an object
for consciousness or an object that matters to consciousness, there is
what Husserl calls a sense (Sinn) that emerges from the correlation and
can be expressed as meaning at the logical or linguistic level (Bedeutung).
As an example of this Husserl mentions what he calls a wordless recognition, for example of a Roman milestone (Husserl 2001, 222223). I may
immediately recognize it as such without saying a wordthis is the emergence of senseand I may formulate a judgment or assert a proposition
about itin expressed meanings. In the Logical Investigations, Husserl himself admits that there is some ambiguity in the use of the two terms, Sinn
and Bedeutung, an ambiguity he lamented but at the same time praised: it
is a very unpleasant equivocation (sehr unliebsame quivokation), he says,
but this ambiguity is also felicitous for it is very welcome [sehr angenehm]
to have parallel terms with which we can alternate (Husserl 1984 Hua
XIX/1, 58). Although he agrees with Frege that if meanings are in some
way dependent on their instantiation they are psychological products, he
refuses to uncouple the object from the sense through which the object is
presented and thus to separate Sinn and Bedeutung.
The alternation between sense and meaning is an indication of a
movement within the correlation between consciousness and object. On
the one hand, consciousness must exercise some form of activity in order
to reach the sense of the objectit is roughly what the term constitution
involvesbut, on the other hand, the object itself must have some capacity to give itself or reveal itself, thereby gaining salience for consciousness.
However, from early on, Husserl seems to downplay the activity proper to
the object and shift the center of gravity of the correlation toward consciousness alone in what he calls evidence in the sense of self-evidence.
This power of evidence and the downplaying of the role of the object
Pol Vandevelde
were reinforced by Husserls idealistic turn. Although the correlation was

already very much at play in the Logical Investigations, it is really with Ideas
I that the subject receives such a degree of attention that all of Husserls
subsequent work can be characterized as an eidetic of consciousness or of
subjectivity.1
This investigation of subjectivity soon encountered the question of how
complex my subjective capacities are. Somehow, in my very personal constitutive achievements, I borrow others ways and manners of perceiving
objects or otherwise relating to the world. I perceive Michelangelos David
through borrowed eyes that were loaned to me early on in my intellectual
development through my culture and tradition. This expansion of subjectivity to intersubjectivity is a remarkable advance. On the one hand,
it broadens my own subjectivity, but also allows the history of others to
weave itself into my own subjective sphere. On the other, this expansion
also provides a form of articulation to a rigid understanding of subjectivity. Subjectivity now is a complex entity made of singular egos who act
and think as individuals, but who are also, in their very accomplishments,
communal or corporate entities. This advance, however, raises another
question. How can I, myself, be others in some way? While my attitude
before Michelangelos David is indeed informed by linguistically mediated
intentional states extending from my parents through my teachers and to
books I read, it is not others who see in me the David. Despite the claims
made by postmodernism, deconstruction or other theories of the socially
constructed self, I seem to remain stubbornly the one who sees it. There
are thus two problems to solve. The first one is the problem of passing from
an I to a we. Husserls solution lies in the notion of empathy, which
leads a subject to have access to the subjective accomplishments of other
subjects. The second problem concerns the validity of intersubjective constitution and the kind of evidence that is available to an intersubjective
consciousness. Husserls answer consists in maintaining both the empirical
and the transcendental aspects of subjectivity and thus facing what he calls
the paradox of subjectivity of being both empirical and transcendental.
For the sake of brevity I will leave aside the issue of empathy and focus on
the paradox of subjectivity.
In the Cartesian Meditations Husserl formulates the paradox in terms of a
splitting of the Ego (Husserl 1999, 35) between empirical and transcendental, and he explicitly addresses the question of such a split in par. 53 of
the Crisis, the title of which is: The paradox of human subjectivity: being
a subject for the world and at the same time being an object in the world
(Husserl 1981, 178). Husserl elaborates:
How can a component part of the world, its human subjectivity, constitute the whole world, namely, constitute it as its intentional formation . . .
while the latter, the subjects accomplishing in cooperation, are themselves only a partial formation within the total accomplishment? (179)2
Husserl believes that the way he treats intersubjectivity solves the paradox
of subjectivity as being both empirical and transcendental and makes his
philosophy coherent, by providing the full and proper sense of his transcendental phenomenology (150). This is a challenging claim particularly
for the notion of evidence, which Husserl considers as the criterion of the
truth. Evidence is a synthesis and in it the meaning intention is partially or
fully fulfilled or disappointed. Once consciousness is broadened to intersubjectivity, it becomes rather difficult to maintain that evidence could
be a seeing of an intersubjective nature. Still, this seems to be the way
Husserl pursued this question.
While Husserl always maintained that the sense anything can have is a
sense in and out of my intentional life, he notes the consequence of intersubjective constitution: we need . . . to perform a systematic unfolding
[Entfaltung] of the open and implicit intentionalities in which the being
of the others makes itself for me (Husserl 1973 Hua XV, 5). However,
Husserl (as well as Fink after him) adamantly rejects the possibility of
equating intersubjectivity with a community of subjects so that intersubjectivity would be the result of the interaction between subjects: the plurality
of those who phenomenologize cannot be understood . . . on the model of
a mundane community of subjects of knowledge (Fink 1988, 137). Husserl
mentions several times the role of mutual understanding (Verstndigung)
and communication in the performance of an intersubjective synthesis, but
does not go so far as acknowledging that evidence, now that it is intersubjective, needs an articulation. The intersubjective constitution seems to be
performed by individual consciousnesses that can re-effectuate what other
consciousnesses have already performed. Intersubjectivity is thus supposed
to solve the paradox of subjectivity by allowing a movement back and forth
between individual subjects, whether real, dead, or virtual. Empathy seems
to Husserl to be powerful enough to allow for this exchange between subjects and thus to lead to understanding and communication. Remarkably,
although Husserl acknowledges the role of language in the very formation
of an ideality in the Crisis, he does not extend the role of language to evidence nor to the formation of subjectivity.
The broadening of consciousness to intersubjectivity does not only render consciousness more complex but also has repercussions on the status
Pol Vandevelde
of the object correlated to such an intersubjective consciousness. If the

object that is for consciousness is also and has also been for other consciousnesses, it means that the object has layers of constitution that exceed
what my present consciousness may perceive. This raises the question of
what the essence of an object is. If the constitution is made by a corporate
entity, it seems that the object cannot have an essence that is fully disclosed
at the time of the givenness to a particular subject. And, still, it remains
that it cannot be the case that things would disappear forever and new
things would suddenly impose their strange outlook on us. Thus, some
form of stability is clearly part of our understanding of the world, while
some fluidity has to be tolerated in the very being of things.
When during this idealistic period Husserl characterizes an object as
an idea he most of the time uses the term in the Kantian sense of what
regulates our capacity to perceive and to know an object. The object keeps
a clear and stable essence even if the object itself is only given through
perspectives. There are, however, some passages where Husserl indicates
that an object may not have a fully articulated essence, but an open one. In
Ideas II, for example, he writes:
But does each thing (or, what is equivalent here: does any thing at all)
have such an essence of its own in the first place? Or is the thing, as it were,
always underway [auf dem Marsch], not at all graspable therefore in pure
objectivity, but rather, in virtue of its relation to subjectivity, in principle
only a relatively identical something, which does not have its essence in
advance or graspable once and for all, but instead has an open essence
[ein offenes Wesen], one that can always take on new properties according
to the constitutive circumstances of givenness? But this is precisely the
problem, to determine more exactly the sense of this openness [Offenheit], as
regards, specifically, the objectivity of natural science.
Does the infinity of the world, instead of referring to a transfinite endlessness [einer transfiniten Unendlichkeit] as if the world were something
finished in itself [ein in sich fertig seiendes], an all-encompassing thing [ein
allumfassendes Ding] or a self-enclosed collectivity of things [abgeschlossenes Kollektivum von Dingen], which would nevertheless contain in itself an
infinity of things, not rather mean an openness [Offenheit] . . . No thing has
its individuality in itself (Husserl 1952 Hua IV, 299; 1989, 312313.
Translation modified).
However, Husserl does not really develop this view of an open essence
that is not limited to an anticipated completeness. Most of the time the
indeterminacy of the unfolding of the object is understood as having a

determined style.
Through his focus on consciousness and the complexity of its multiple
layers Husserl does not fully address the ontological repercussions his correlation between consciousness and object can have. However, by mentioning the question of the status of the object, Husserl shows, first, how the
correlation is not merely an epistemological claim, but also an ontological
one and, second, that the object as a pole in the correlation has to be recognized as being completable. This ontological aspect was already brought
to the fore by early German romanticism and it will be the task of phenomenologists like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty to make it explicit.
The Ontological Emphasis in

the Phenomenological Correlation between
Consciousness and Object
It is Heidegger in the 1930s who clearly affirms the fluid essence of things.
He plays with the word Wesen, which means essence, but is etymologically related to the old verb wesen, meaning to unfold: an essence is both
what a thing is and how a thing unfolds in the course of time. He borrows
the figure of translation to name the ability of things to give themselves
differently in the course of time and the ability of human beings to gain
or regain their own historical identity. Remarkably this view was already
defended by the romantics, especially Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis,
in their effort to bridge the gap between consciousness and object. The
romantics in some respect anticipate the correlation between consciousness and object. On the one hand, they want to find a way around the idealism of Fichte, which starts with an absolute subject. On the other hand,
a nave realism in which we could start with objects is no longer seen as a
serious option. Influenced by both Heidegger and the romantics MerleauPonty also assents to a form of fluidity of things and speaks of operative
essence. He also uses the expression of translation of the world precisely
in his criticism of Husserls too rigid understanding of the correlation
between consciousness and object.
The term translation as used in an ontological sense by the early romantics, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, or we could say translatability, may
be an apt description of the exchange between consciousness and object.
Translatability is already the model followed by interpretation: to transfer
(the Latin transferre or the English translation) or to transpose (the Latin
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transducere, the French traduction or the German bersetzung) what is called

a content of meaning into another framework.
Once the status of the object is factored into the correlation, there arises
the further question of what maintains consciousness and the object in
their correlation, a consciousness that has a complex intersubjective and
historical make-up and an object that has a multi layered fluidity. Early
German romanticism argued that an attitude of love toward the object was
needed. Heidegger emphasizes the fact that any act of understanding is
always performed in a certain mood, that there is a being affected that is
correlative to the act of consciousness. Merleau-Ponty makes the case that,
even in perception, we need to be in an attitude of listening and responding to things.
Early German Romanticism and
the Translation of Humanity
For the romantics the opposition between subject and object is a false
dichotomy but maybe a necessary one since we seem to need these oppositions. Clearly, in one respect there is no other starting point than the
human subject, but the starting point can be abandoned once the activity
of thinking or poetizing is in operation. One can then inhabit the space inbetween through a mode of thinking that Novalis characterizes as Idealreale
or Realideale (Novalis 1960, 114) in order to show that it is not a matter of
choosing either the subject or the object. Thus, the issue of whether the
starting point is the subject or reality is not, strictly speaking, a problem in
the sense of a puzzle that can be solved. It is rather a condition, the human
condition, but also a medical condition for which there is no solution, only
a treatment. The romanticization of the world the romantics advocate is
such a treatment of the human condition and, to follow the medical metaphor, the poet is aptly characterized by Novalis as the transcendental
physician (535, Fragment 42). What thus matters is not so much to get
rid of these oppositions, but to treat them methodologically as the heuristic devices that they are, with quotation marks, as it were. We need to
speak of a subject or an object, or a reality that is not a mere figment
of our mind, but these concepts should be seen as operative concepts,
as Husserl would say. They are useful devices but no rigid designators.
They serve as parameters in the constant transfer that takes place between
the realm of things at the physical level and the realm of the spirit at the
mental or subjective level. Most of the time this transfer or this process of
exchangeability between the two realms takes place in language.
11
Schlegel sees in the figure of translation what articulates the correlation

between consciousness and object and uses translation in an ontological
sense, broadening its use from the linguistic sense of translating a work
into another language to criticism, and history. In all these applications
there is an analogical operation to what takes place in a linguistic translation. For, what a translation does is to play with the original and tinker with
it, making appear in the original what was not obvious or salient. In the
words of Schlegel and Novalis a translation brings the original to its second power. Thus, a translation of necessity is other than the original in
one respectit uses other lexical, semantic, and syntactic meansand the
sameit furthers the life of the original. As Schlegel writes, All translation is a transplantation or transformation or both (Schlegel 1963, 204,
Fragment 87). But in either case it isand has to be in order to be successfula renewal of the original. All true translation must be a rejuvenation
(207, Fragment 87).3
This is also what criticism accomplishes, what Schlegel calls Charakteristik
and which is a mode of translation (Schlegel 1963, 386, Fragment 784).
In addition he also uses the figure of translation for history and speaks of
historical translations.4 In order to do justice to what took place as it
really was, to use Leopold Rankes expression, historians have to complete
history, filling the gaps, adding transitions, making connections between
facts and events in order to render them intelligible like the diaskeuasts
who compiled the pieces, fragments, and different versions of Homers
texts and turn them into a coherent whole by adding transitions or changing some words, thereby directly rearranging the materiality of the text.5
To these three levels of application, Schlegel adds a fourth one: the world
itself needs a translation: Just as there is a geography and a characteristic
of the universe there must also be a translation of the universe (Schlegel
1963, 235). He also speaks of a translation of humanity (bersetzung der
Menschheit, 204, Fragment 88). If the physical realm of things and events as
well as people can be translated it means that there is in the world itself,
things and people, a potency or a force that can be transposedcarried
over and translated. From the thing to its grasp in concepts and words we
thus have an exchangeability. Translation is not just the carrying over of
a content, but a configuration and an exchange. There are fluidity and
stability.
The fluidity lies in the potentiality of anythingthings, events, and
worksto be translatedtransposed and transformed. The stability is precisely in this possibility of exchange: the translation is a process
that takes place between what become the two poles of a correlation: the
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original and the translated work. If a thing (through knowledge), an event

(through historical recounting), a work (through critique or linguistic
translation) can be translated in the broad sense, it is because the thing,
the event, and the work were themselves a first crystallization of a primordial translatability. This is why we have this exchange between the poetry
of nature (Naturpoesie) and actual poetry (Kunstpoesie) (Schlegel 1978,
166). Both are the two poles of a general translatability of the world. The
human subject inhabits this fluidity of things and events and has to navigate it. Schlegel again uses the figure of translation to characterize human
beings: Perhaps the determination of human beings is to be considered
only as translation (Schlegel 1963, 459, Fragment 295). The task of the
translator, as evoked by Benjamin, influenced by the romantics, is in fact
the task of human beings themselves. To be human means to translate.
Besides anticipating the correlation between consciousness and object and
working out the ontological consequences of such a correlation, the early
German romantics also pointed out the importance of an impetus for this
process of translatability between object and consciousness to be initiated
and they called it love.
For the exchange between consciousness and object to be set in
motion, the subject has to be drawn out of itself and be allowed to think
in a de-subjectivized way. The subject must then be in a certain mood
(Stimmung) as Hlderlin powerfully showed. For, the mood makes the subject vulnerable to things or the world and susceptible to be affected. We
know that Heidegger already in Being and Time makes of the situatedness
(Befindlichkeit) one of the main existential components of human existence
besides understanding (Verstehen) and discourse (Rede). The manifestation
of situatedness is precisely the mood (Stimmung). Mood is thus a component of the truth as disclosure. Later on in the 1930s he will use Hlderlins
notion of Grundstimmung as what characterizes an entire epoch, speaking
of the Grundstimmung of the first Greek beginningthe wonder that things
areand of our epoch as in transition toward another beginningthe
terror that things are. Mood or feeling in general is this aspect in us that
makes our mind amenable to being touched by other material entities, like
things, and what indicates or testifies to the fact that we, as subjects, are in
fact already in overlap with things. Mood or feeling points to the fact that
the bridge between subject and object in one respect has already been built
so that the dichotomy or opposition between subject and object, mental
and physical is a false one.
As what allows the subject to know the object, since there is something of
the object that asked to be revealed, love is both a moodsubjectiveand
13
a force in the worldobjective. On the subjective side, love reveals, as if

chemically, a thing as an object of knowledge in the sense of being worth
knowing and in the process love extends the boundaries of the empirical subject so that it can fuse with the object in what Schlegel calls a
mixing [Vermischung] of the ego with the thou in the object (Schlegel 1964,
356). On the objective side, love reveals objects as interactive objects,
as it were, and thus completable. For, objects themselves have a life. As
Schlegel wrote, things are not non-ego outside the ego; not merely a
dead, dull, empty, sensible reflection of the ego, which limits the ego in
an unintelligible manner, but . . . a living, potent counter-ego, a thou
(337). An object has a inner sense (Sinn) and through perception the
sense immediately shines, the thou speaks at the moment the essence
in its totality is understood by the ego, addresses the ego and manifests
to him the essence of its existence (350). This means that the essence
of an object not only is for consciousness, in classical phenomenological
fashion, but the object is of the nature of consciousness because it is of
the order of the spirit (Geist). To grant to the object, like a physical thing,
the status of a counter-subject turns knowledge away from the unilateral
activity of an all-powerful subject as well as from a causal framework in
which things could act upon a subject. The truth as what is yielded by
knowledge arises out of this mental overlap between consciousness and
object through love.
It will be Heideggers task, whether influenced by the romantics or not,
to articulate this new ontology of objects as unfolding and of a subject
that is affected by them. Since a section of this volume is dedicated to
Heideggers different ontologies, I will limit myself to his ontological use
of translation.
Heidegger and the Recovering of
the Being-at-Home through Translation
In the 1930s Heidegger considers that we are at the end of metaphysics
and in transition toward what he calls another beginning, which would
be analogous to the first beginning of the Western tradition in Greece.
The terms he uses to describe our situation indicate a lack or an absence:
we live in the oblivion of being and even in the abandonment of being
in a time in which the gods have fled. In some of his works he appeals
to translation as a way for us to recover our own ontological place within
what he names the history of being. Mixing ontological vocabulary with
a political assessment Heidegger characterizes our situation as being one
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that is dominated by machination, the manifestation of which is what

he terms Amerikanismus, which also includes Bolshevism. We recall that
in the Introduction to Metaphysics he saw Germany as being caught in the
two pincers of Russia and America, capitalism and communism. However,
Americanism is not so much a term for a political entity, since Heidegger
sees Bolshevism as a derived form of it, but rather for what such a political
entity instantiates, what Bolshevism or any political system can also instantiate: the surrender to a technological understandingmachinationthat
permeates the ontological fabric of things. As he will later say in response
to Rilkes attack on Americanism, It is not that Americanism first surrounds us moderns with its menace; the menace of the unexperienced
nature of technology surrounded even our forefathers and their things
(Heidegger 1971, 113).
It is in this context that Heidegger uses the word translation for a recovery of our own stance in this time of transition because he believes that
German (or any language, for that matter) suffers from what he characterizes in the lecture course The Ister of 1942 as the americanization of
our language (Heidegger 1982 GA 52, 10): It may therefore be that we
speak German, yet talk entirely American (Heidegger 1984 GA 53, 80;
1996b, 65). He could use Novalis expression that we have become formulaic beings (Formularwesen) (Novalis 1960, 594, Fragment 316). Since we
talk American while speaking German, the first task of translation is precisely to translate our own language from the foreign into its own. Thus,
the simple fact of speaking is translation. As he says in Parmenides, we
are already constantly translating our own language, our native tongue,
into its genuine word. To speak and to say is itself a translation . . . in
every dialogue and in every soliloquy an original translation holds sway
(Heidegger 1992b, 12).
This effort at translating aims at recovering our being at home at a time
when the foreign has permeated it. We know today that the Anglo-Saxon
world of Americanism has resolved to annihilate Europe, that is, the homeland
[Heimat] (Heidegger 1984 GA 53, 68; 1996b, 54). The expressions Heidegger
uses to characterize Amerikanismus: entschlossen ist and vernichten, indicate that
the threat is not merely military because the United States entered the war
(the lecture was given in 1942). It is an event in the history of being and thus
a historical decision and this decision consists in turning the dwelling where
we are our own into a nothing, a non-being. This Americanism or Bolshevism
(ibid., 86; 70) subverts our language, puts us in the situation of an alienation
toward the word (Heidegger 1982 GA 52, 11).
15
The transformation we need in order to find our home will take place
when we own our language in the sense that our language leads us to be
our own. We thus have to face the foreign and endure it. This is what translation allows. As the lecture course on The Ister describes it, translation
aims at making foreign the very source of the familiar. When we translate
the Greeks, for example, we have to think Greeker than the Greeks: It
seems as though we must think more Greek than the Greeks themselves.
It does not merely seem so, it is so. For in the future we ourselves must,
in relation to ourselves, think more German than all Germans hitherto
(Heidegger 1984 GA 53, 100; 1996b, 81). The more does not indicate a
recovery or a retrieval of what has already been thought, but a translation
as a transporting ourselves into the foreign so as to recover the movement
through which our familiar became familiar.
Translation is thus first of all a self-translation and allows us to bring ourselves before the foreign, pass through it, so as to come back to ourselves.
A historical people is only from the dialogue [Zwiesprache] between its
language and foreign languages (Heidegger 1984 GA 53, 80; 1996b, 65).
Thus, translation does not mean an appropriation of the foreign, but rather
the converse: to make ones own native language surge from the foreign.
In this period of transition toward another beginning, in which Heidegger
claims we are, the being-at-home is not given, but must be reconquered. We
are those poets who are not yet able to read and to show (ibid., 190; 153).
Hlderlin, the poet of the transition, the poet of the decisions is the one
who can create a being-at-home for the German people: his word speaks
out of a poetic care for the becoming-homely [Heimischwerden] of the
Western historical humankind of the Germans (ibid., 84; 69).
This return to a home-world through translation means that translating [bersetzen] is not so much a trans-lating [ber-setzen] and passing over
into a foreign language with the help of ones own. Rather, translating is
more an awakening, clarification, and unfolding of ones own language
with the help of an encounter [Auseinandersetzung] with the foreign language (Heidegger 1984 GA 53; 1996b, 6566). In such a discussion the
awakening of a new language may take place by retranslating ones own
language.
All translating must be an interpreting. Yet at the same time, the reverse
is also true: every interpretation, and everything that stands in its service, is a translating. In that case, translating does not only move between
two different languages, but there is a translating within one and the
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same language. The interpretation of Holderlins hymns is a translating

within our German language. (Heidegger 1984 GA 53, 75; 1996b, 62)
The claim Heidegger makes is that poets make us more attuned to what
can be another beginning. Hlderlin, whose poetry is the most German
in German poetry (Heidegger 1982 GA 52, 119) is the thinker of the transition toward another beginning because his poetry represents a turn in
the history of Being (Heidegger 2000 GA 75, 28) through which Hlderlin
proposes the beginning of new decisions (25) and which can lead to the
beginning of another history (32).
Merleau-Pontys Translation of the World

Merleau-Ponty offers another variation on Husserls correlation between
consciousness and object in order to think consciousness and thing from
within the correlation but in their nascent state, as they are emerging and
gaining their identity in and through the correlation. He also appeals to the
figure of translation as what displaces consciousness and thing out of their
position as poles of the correlation. For once we start with the correlation,
as Husserl does, we may never be able to question its origin or necessity.
I am forever subjected to the centrifugal movement that makes an object
of thought be for a thought, and there is no question of my quitting this
position and examining what Being can indeed be before it be thought
by me or (what amounts to the same thing) by another, what indeed can
be the intermundane space [lintermonde] where our gazes cross and our
perceptions overlap; there is no brute world, there is only an elaborated
world; there is no intermundane space, there is only a signification
world. (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 48)
The correlation between consciousness and object breaks down the brute
world or the brute thing into meaning (Husserls logical or linguistic
Bedeutungen), but by so doing cannot account for the emergent sense that
things yield (Husserls Sinn).
Whether consciously or not, Merleau-Ponty takes over some of the views
of the romantics and draws the ontological consequences of the fluidity of
things. This allows him to give a forceful expression to the romantic bridge
between spirit and nature and to question the very boundaries of the body
and of consciousness as well as the boundaries between mind/body, on the
one hand, and things, on the other. Both the perceiving body/consciousness
17
and thing are part of what he calls, in The Visible and the Invisible, a visibility. Again in a manner that is analogous to the romantics Merleau-Ponty
attempts to think the unity that we form with things in a way that is not the
unification of pre-existing entities, but an overlap or chiasm that, on the one
hand, makes us susceptible to be affected and even pierced by things and,
on the other, renders things susceptible to becoming mental and spiritual.
In order to name this fusion Merleau-Ponty uses different metaphors: spiritualperception is a communionsexualperception is a coitionand
biologicalperception is a symbiosis.
These metaphors, which are not mere metaphors, are part of an attempt to
think beyond traditional metaphysical categories. We have to think a thing
as something that has open boundaries, but is not free-floating or mere flux.
In Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty characterizes the thing that we
know in the form of a unified entity as being secondary compared with its
manner of existing: the unity of the thing beyond all its fi xed properties is
not a substratum, a vacant X, a subject in which properties inhere, but that
unique accent which is to be found in each one of them, that unique manner of existing of which they are a second order expression (Merleau-Ponty
1962, 372). The inner core of things or the stable essence of a thing is only
a set of opaque structures (389).6 The unity of the thing consists in a certain style, a certain manner of managing the domain of space and time over
which it has competency, of pronouncing, of articulating that domain, of
radiating about a wholly virtual centerin short a certain manner of being,
in the active sense, a certain Wesen, in the sense that, says Heidegger, this
word has when it is used as a verb (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 115). If we speak
of essences, Merleau-Ponty tells us, these cannot be essences above us, like
positive objects, offered to a spiritual eye (118), but operative essences
(118) in a transversal dimension. These operative essences are beneath
us, a common nervure of the signifying and the signified, adherence in and
reversibility of one another (118). This entails that to be cannot mean to
be something, but to aggregate, to become a configuration. What there
is is a whole architecture, a whole complex of phenomena in tiers, a whole
series of levels of being (114).
Precisely because they do not have a firm stability guaranteed by an
unchangeable core, things in their fluidity are to be granted a form of seeing
or at least of providing a visibility on other things or on us. Merleau-Ponty
already defended such a provocative view in Phenomenology of Perception:
When I look at the lamp on my table, I attribute to it not only the qualities visible from where I am, but also those which the chimney, the walls,
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the table can see; the back of my lamp is nothing but the face which it
shows on the chimney . . . the house itself is not the house seen from
nowhere, but the house seen from everywhere. The completed object is
translucent, being shot through from all sides by an actual infinity of
scrutinies [regards] which intersect in its depths leaving nothing hidden.
(Merleau-Ponty 1962, 79 [Translation modified])
This fact that things provide a visibility and thus decenter us from the visible realm goes significantly farther than Heideggers referring network
of things in Being and Time, in which a thing means something by being
referred to other things, and it comes closer to the late Heidegger who sees
a thing, like a jug, as the gathering of a world. It also reformulates Husserls
notion of horizon quite dramatically by by-passing the acts of consciousness that are embedded in the horizons of things. For, if there is an external horizon of things, it is because, for example in Husserl, things have
been associated or connected to other things through acts of consciousness. Merleau-Ponty by-passes consciousness altogether. It is the things that
see and show the hidden sides of other things.
In place of the duality of the perceiver and the perceived MerleauPonty substitutes a movement of differentiation within visibility itself, and
through such a differentiation we have a perceiver and a perceived, both
of which are encompassed by visibility. This requires from us an attitude
of listening to them, looking at them in a way that shifts the visibility away
from us, that removes us from the center of visibility and places us at the
margin as what can be rendered visible. The vision [the seer] exercises,
he also undergoes from things, such that, as many painters have said, I feel
myself looked at by the things, my activity is equally passivity (MerleauPonty 1969, 139).
The decentering of visibility that things may produce is not merely a shifting of the act of seeing away from the subject and into things. This decentering means a loosening up of the boundaries between seer and seen,
subject and object, spirit and nature. If things see and speak, it means
that when we understand them we must perform some kind of translation:
to understand is to translate into disposable significations a meaning first
held captive in the thing and in the world itself. But this translation aims
to convey the text (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 36).7
Since we try to think not in terms of oppositions, but from within the
visibility that gives rise to subject and thing, these notions of language and
translation are not to be understood as a supplement to the thing or the
19
subject, but rather as the mode of being out of which a thing and a subject
live. Perception itself, which is neither merely active nor merely passive, is
articulation in the linguistic sense. The vision itself, the thought itself,
are . . . structured as a language, are articulation before the letter, apparition of something where there was nothing or something else (MerleauPonty 1969, 126). Just as by pronouncing sounds in my mouth I articulate
what becomes meaningful words and neat sentences, my perception in the
same way articulates things in their beautiful or frightening concatenations that make up the world in which I live.8
In order to offer an alternative to the correlation of consciousness and
object, Merleau-Ponty uses the notion of flesh, which is, in a sense, the
metaphor of all metaphors and which serves as a device to gather in their
unity the metaphors of communion, coition, symbiosis, language and
translation. The flesh is a device for a thinking that does not soar over its
object, but, like in the romantics, brings the object to its manifestation or
epiphany.
The thingshere, there, now, thenare no longer in themselves, in
their own place, in their own time; they exist only at the end of those rays
of spatiality and of temporality emitted in the secrecy of my flesh. And
their solidity is not that of a pure object which the mind soars over; I
experience their solidity from within insofar as I am among them and
insofar as they communicate through me as a sentient thing. (MerleauPonty 1969, 114)
Things are quasi-companions. They are lifted from my substance, thorns in
my flesh (180181).
The notion of flesh as the metaphor of all metaphors is also a form of
command. For, it includes an injunction on us that, by thinking, we are
asked to occupy the space in-between, between consciousness and object,
the place of visibility itself. We are asked to emigrate into it, to be seduced,
captivated, alienated by the phantom, so that the seer and the visible reciprocate one another and we no longer know which sees and which is seen
(Merleau-Ponty 1969, 139). Once we emigrate in the in-between we also
abandon the confines of our consciousness. With regard to other subjects
it means that I would become part of a synergy of organisms, mine and
others (142). This synergy among organisms is possible as soon as we no
longer make belongingness to one same consciousness the primordial
definition of sensibility, as soon as we rather understand it as a return of
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the visible upon itself, a carnal adherence of the sentient to the sensed and
of the sensed to the sentient (142). With regard to things to emigrate from
the comfort of our consciousness consists in emigrating from oneself, as he
says in Loeil et lesprit: sight is not a certain mode of thinking or of presence
to myself: it is the means given to me to be absent from myself, to attend
from within to the fission of being (Merleau-Ponty 1964c, 81).9
Merleau-Ponty continues the efforts of early German romanticism and
Heidegger to think the correlation between consciousness and object and
bring out the ontological consequences of Husserls fundamental discovery. If there is a correlation between consciousness and object there is an
overlap between them and this means that we have to come to see things
in their native fluidity. Things are determined entities and yet they are
completable; they have definite boundaries with an essence and still the
boundaries are porous and the essence is an open one.
These three attempts by the early romantics, Heidegger, and MerleauPonty aim at avoiding a traditional form of idealism and recover what the
romantics believe is the genuine sense of realism, one that includes the role
of consciousness. Because of their belief in the stability of things within
an exchangeability or translatability with consciousness and their conviction that we have to start with consciousness, they all appeal to an attitude
that allows consciousness to enter into the process of exchangeability with
things: love (for the romantics), fundamental mood (for Heidegger), and
receptivity and listening (for Merleau-Ponty). The truth is no longer evidence in the early Husserlian sense, but disclosure. However, disclosure
is not a non-subjective event taking place outside the realm of consciousness, but an event that needs our collaboration or requires from us a certain benevolence toward things or an acceptance that we are called upon,
affected, seized by awe (for the Greeks) or terror (for us now, according to
Heidegger).
We can thus see how the correlation between consciousness and object
prepared the hermeneutic challenge mounted by people like Heidegger
and Merleau-Ponty and how the ontological repercussions were already
seen by the romantics. The hermeneutic challenge does not undermine
Husserls original version of the correlation between consciousness and
object, but in fact leads it to its completion. It shows how consciousness
redefines itself when correlated to things in a way that does not jeopardize
objectivity or validity, but rather turns truth into a notion that is at once
epistemic, ontological, and affective.
21
Notes
1
Husserl himself encouraged the idealistic unilateralism when referring to the

object in its reality as an idea.
In Ideas I Husserl formulates this paradox as follows: Thus, on the one hand, consciousness is said to be the absolute in which everything transcendent and, therefore,
ultimately the whole pyschophysical world, becomes constituted; and, on the other
hand, consciousness is said to be a subordinate real event within that world. How can
those statements be reconciled? (1976 Hua III, 103; 1983, 124).
It is to be noted that the romantics were not only theoreticians of language; they
were also practitioners and the romantic period is characterized by an ebullience
of translation activities. Goethe translated works by Cellini, Diderot, Voltaire,
Euripides, Racine, Corneille and many others; Hlderlin translated Sophocles
and Pindar; Schleiermacher translated the complete works of Plato (from 1804 to
1828 and the translation is still in use today); August Schlegel translated Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Caldern, Petrarch, Ariosto, the Bhagavad Gita and
other works. Tieck translated Don Quixote.
The more similar a historical history is to translation, the more excellent it is
(Schlegel 1963, 211, Fragment 181) or the so-called universal history is also only
a translation (261 Fragment 807).
Schlegel writes: almost all historical works which are not documents of records
are diaskeuastic translations (Schlegel 1963, 204, Fragment 88). On the importance of the diaskeuasis in Schlegel see Thouard 1996, 18f.
This manner of existing, which he also calls after Husserl a style, is further
explained in terms of language. Through its specific manner of existing a thing
manifests a certain symbolism that can be grasped, for example, in perception or
even a language that can be deciphered. There is a symbolism in the thing which
links each sensible quality to the rest . . . The passing of sensory givens before our
eyes or under our hands is, as it were, a language which teaches itself, and in
which the meaning is secreted by the very structure of the signs, and this is why it
can literally be said that our senses question things and that things reply to them
(Merleau-Ponty 1962, 372). Analogous formulations can be found in The Visible
and the Invisible.
Merleau-Ponty also speaks of exegesis for naming our relation to the visible
(1969, 133).
We detect here the influence of Saussures linguistics. Perception is like langue (as
opposed to parole); it is a system of oppositions so that when I perceive I carve out
a chunk of the possibilities opened by the system. I describe perception as a diacritical, relative, oppositional system (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 213).
This means a return to a kind of general corporeity: No more than are the sky or
the earth is the horizon a collection of things held together, or a class name, or a
logical possibility of conception, or a system of potentiality of consciousness: it is
a new type of being, a being by porosity, pregnancy, or generality, and he before
whom the horizon opens is caught up, included within it. His body and the distances participate in one same corporeity or visibility in general, which reigns
between them and it, and even beyond the horizon, beneath his skin, unto the
depths of being (1969, 148149).
Part II
Husserlian Resources
Reduction, Imagination,
Chapter 2
Does Husserl Have a Principle of

Reducibility?
Dominique Pradelle
In the fourth chapter of the second part of Formal and Transcendental Logic,
Husserl wants to prove the relativity of traditional logic to a real world of
experience: even if logic is completely formal, even if propositional forms
are obtained by a process of formalization, it has to be ranked among the
positive sciences which presuppose a relationship to a world of empirical
objects. This can be made evident by proving that the different levels of
logic imply a reference to real empirical objects, to judgments and truths
about these objects. So it is possible to apply the method of reduction to all
the levels of logic: to the theory of forms, to the consequence-logic and to
the truth-logic. Let us recall the different formulations of this method of
reducing: Reduction of judgments to ultimate judgments (Die Reduktion
der Urteile auf letzte Urteile, Husserl 1974 Hua XVII, 82, 209; 1978, 202),
Parallel reduction of truths. Relationship of all truths to an antecedent
world of individuals (Parallele Reduktion der Wahrheiten. Rckbeziehung aller
Wahrheiten auf eine Welt von Individuen, ibid., 83, 212; 204), A reduction
of the truths belonging to a higher level to those belonging to the lowest
level, that is: to truths that relate directly . . . to individual objects in their
object-spheres (eine Reduktion der Wahrheiten von den Wahrheiten hherer Stufe
auf diejenigen der niedersten Stufe, d.i. auf Wahrheiten, die direct bezogen sind auf
individuelle Gegenstnde, ibid., 212; 204).
What is the sense of this principle of reduction? Does it have an empiricist range? Is it a principle of verification about empirical testability of categorial propositions? Is it a genetic empiricist thesis which expresses that
categorial formations have an empirical origin in judgments about objects
of direct experience? Is it a principle of reducibility which affirms that the
sense of categorial propositions is reducible to the sense of ultimate judgments about empirical objects?
Moreover, does this reductive deliberation (reduktive berlegung, ibid.,
212; 204) have to be understood in the same sense at the different levels
26
Dominique Pradelle
of logic? Does it have the same meaning within the pure theory of forms,
within the consequence-logic, and within the truth-logic? Does it have the
same meaning concerning the isolated syntactical forms, concerning the
isolated propositions and concerning the principles of logic?
The Method of Reduction within

the Theory of Forms
Let us apply the reductive deliberation to the pure theory of forms of
meaning; what are its sense and its principle?
First, let us give a short characterization of the theory of forms. It consists
in giving a descriptive classification of judgments exclusively from the formal
point of view, regardless of any question concerning non-contradiction and
truth; its interest is purely syntactical and belongs to the level of pure logical grammar. Its point of view is merely constructive: it has to make obvious
the laws of syntactical construction of simple and complex forms of meaning starting from nuclear elements of meaning; the modes of formation of
complex judgments are composition (disjunction, conjunction, implication)
and transformation (negation, modalization, quantification); these laws of
formation have a purely operative character, similar to that of mathematical
operations, which implies the presence of a law and the possibility of infinite
iteration. But third, all these operative transformations relate to a system of
fundamental operative forms (Urformen von Operationen, Grundoperationen)
out of which the totality of judgment-forms emerges by relative composition:
predication, attribution, negation, conjunction, disjunction, modalization,
quantification; it is possible to make obvious the elementary syntactical
actions which produce the system of all the complex forms of judgments
(Husserl 1974 Hua XVII, 13, 5458; 1978, 4953).
At this point, there arises a fundamental question. Husserl writes in
13 that every operative fashioning of one form out of others has its law
(jede operative Gestaltung einer Form aus Formen hat ihre Gesetz, Husserl 1974
Hua XVII, 13, 57; 1978, 52). But what is the origin of the syntactical laws of
construction of judgment-forms? What is the foundation of the laws of pure
grammar, of the laws that make it possible to avoid formal non-sense, of the
laws which prove that a composition of partial meanings (Teilbedeutungen)
will produce a unitary sense (eine Gesamtbedeutung)? Is it true that syntactical laws of construction have a conventional origin, as Carnap says in 17
of Logic Syntax of Language, formulating the tolerance principle: in logic
there is no morality. Everybody can build his logic, that is, his language
Does Husserl Have a Principle of Reducibility?
27
form as he wants (Toleranzprinzip der Syntax: In der Logik gibt es keine Moral.
Jeder mag seine Logik, d. h. seine Sprachform aufbauen wie er will, Carnap 1934, 45).
By contrast, the Husserlian thesis is absolutely anti-conventionalistic: there
are absolute and essential laws in the pure grammar of logic, an a priori
syntax that settles the composition and transformation of meanings in
order to produce unitary propositional meanings. It is impossible to create languages arbitrarily with different systems of formation; grammatical
rules must be in accordance with aprioristic laws. As Husserl writes in the
fourth Logical Investigation, these laws belong to the different categories
of meanings: each category implies some modalities of linking with other
categories.
If syntactical laws belong to the syntactical forms, it is necessary to analyze the syntactical concept of form. Husserl performs this analysis in the
first appendix to Formal and Transcendental Logic and makes various distinctions. First, we have to distinguish between stuffs and moments of form
( 2): on the one hand, the stuffs are linked to objectivities, to subject-matter
(Sachbezglichkeit); on the other hand, moments of form (such as and,
or) lack intrinsic relatedness to objectivities (Husserl 1974 Hua XVII, 301;
1978, 296). Secondly, in the field of combination-forms (Verbindungsformen)
we have to distinguish between Kopulation and Konjunktionbetween the
predicative or copular unity-form is and the conjunctive forms in a general sense (i.e., logical connectors like conjunction, disjunction, implication, equivalence, etc.) (ibid., 5, 303304; 299300). Thirdly, what are
the laws that belong to each category of combination-forms? Concerning
conjunctive forms, Husserl does not make combination-rules obvious, but
only substitution-rules, that is rules of fulfilling syntactical stuffs with particular stuffsfor example the form of hypothetical antecedent or consequent proposition requires stuffs that are already syntactically articulated
in themselves (ibid., 10, 308309; 306307). But the most important rule
concerns the predicative form, which is the most fundamental of the entire
tradition of apophantic logic. Here we have to distinguish two concepts
of form: syntactical forms (like subject, property-predicate, relationshippredicate, attribute) and non-syntactical-forms, that is, forms of entirely new
style that are immanent to the stuffsstuffs have a certain immanent forming like substantive, adjective, relationship (ibid., 11, 309310; 307308).
The essential laws of predicative combination concern relationships
between syntactical and non-syntactical forms: it is impossible to substitute arbitrarily non-syntactical stuffs within a certain syntactical formfor
example, a stuff of substantive form cannot enter syntactical forms like
property-predicate, relationship-predicate or attribute.
28
Dominique Pradelle
That leads us to the following conclusion: by the analysis of elementary

combination-rules we have to go back to the question about the origin
of non-syntactical forms or categories of meaning (Bedeutungskategorien)
which are the ultimate elements of any discourse. What is the origin of the
core-formation-forms (Kerngebildeformen)?
We can now reveal the precise function of the reductive deliberation
within the pure theory of forms: it has to answer the question of the origin
of elementary categories of syntax, of ultimate components of meaning. The
reductive method consists in reversing the operative possibilities of constructing more and more complex and articulated stuffs.
In fact, we have the possibility of constructing complex stuffs by substantivation or nominalization (Husserl 1974 Hua XVII, 13, 311; 1978, 310): the
substantival category have a notable pre-eminence, because every adjective, every relative and every proposition has as its counterpart a corresponding substantive, that is the substantivized adjective or relative or
state of affairs; so it is always possible to form a syntactical stuff of superior
level by incorporating a syntactical action into a meaningfor example
this roof is red, redness is a property of this roof, the redness of this
roof, the fact that this roof is red. According to Husserl ( 42), the syntaxes have as their function, not only to give the possible syntactical forms
for stuffs, but also to create syntactical or categorial objectivities of higher
levels (ibid., 119120; 114115).
But there is also a reverse possibility of deconstructing the steps of this
genetic process of form-construction (or the levels of syntactical forming):
it is possible to go back from the predicatively formed state of affairs to the
proposition that expresses it, and to go back from the substantivized form
the redness to the primitive adjective red. This process of deconstruction relates ultimately to core-formations which are nuclear components
of sense, or elementary cores which no longer contain any implicit syntax
and which do not derive from syntactical forming: absolute or original
substantives, absolute adjectives and absolute relationships, which belong
to an ultimate level of meaning and are irreducible primitive forms, primitive categorial variants of the sense (Husserl 1974 Hua XVII, 82, 209211;
1978, 202204). These ultimate cores are substrates, predicates and relations that enter empirical judgments, those of immediate experience; they
are directly linked to objectivities (sachbezglich), because they relate to
the immediate expression of perceptive judgments. Hence, the primitive
categorial forms are nuclear forms of ultimate cores which enter perceptive judgments (ibid., 83, 212; 204). Hence, the primitive categorial forms
are nuclear forms of ultimate cores that enter perceptive judgments.
29
However, this reduction is not the ultimate one. It is also possible to go

back from the perceptive judgments to the pre-predicative or perceptive
experience itself, which precedes any predicative expression (Husserl 1974
Hua XVII, 84, 213214; 205206). So it is possible to show the perceptive
and ontological origin of the ultimate core-forms: in fact the nuclear forms
that enter primitive judgments relate to ontological articulations of the individuals which are given in perceptive experiences. The individual objects
of pre-predicative experience imply formal-ontological articulations, that
is to say a pre-linguistic or pre-grammatical syntax. For example, ultimate
substantives correspond to concrete or independent perceptive contents;
adjectives correspond to abstract or dependent perceptive contents; and
relatives correspond to primary relationships, which are immanent to perceptive contents. So the general concept of logos has to be enlarged to an
ontological field, which precedes any judgment and any general meaning
and includes syntactical and ontological categories, which are the models
for categories of meaning.
To conclude at this level, we can now answer our initial question: is the
reductive method a principle of reducibility? The answer is negative. At
the level of the theory of forms there is no reduction in the strong sense
of the term. There is no reduction of a form belonging to a higher level
to a form belonging to a lower levelthe roof is red does not have the
same meaning as the redness of the roof is a real property: there is no
reducibility of the sense. But what Husserl means is a principle of genetic order
(Prinzip genetischer Ordnung, Husserl 1974 Hua XVII, 85, 215; 1978, 207)
or an essentially and necessary sense-history (wesensmige Sinnesgeschichte,
ibid., 215; 208), which is specific to the syntactical sphere: he emphasizes,
on the one hand, the syntactical primitive operations, which create new
categorial forms, and, on the other hand, the primitive forms of cores in
perceptive judgments and ultimately the ontological forms of contents of
perceptive experience. So the linguistic syntax appears as being founded
on the pre-linguistic syntax of perception.
The Method of Reduction in the Consequence-Logic

What sense does the reductive deliberation have at the second level of logic,
that is in the consequence-logic? Is it a principle of reducibility of judgments
belonging to higher levels to judgments belonging to lower levels?
Let us recall that consequence-logic is the logic of non- contradiction
(Widerspruchslosigkeit), a level of logic that requires the evidence of
30
Dominique Pradelle
distinctness (Deutlichkeit) of the propositions. Distinctness means, first,

that we have to perform, explicitly and step by step, all the syntactical steps
that are implied by the propositional form; and second, that we have to
make explicit the analytic consequences of propositional forms in order
to be able to manifest possible contradictions. The essential laws of consequence-logic are laws of determining analytic inclusion and exclusion
of propositions, analytic consistency of propositions, that is to say, their
mutual compatibility or lack thereof. It is a logic of the sense, regardless of
all questions concerning truth, falsity and objects.
Hence, there is a double stratification in the consequence-logic: on the
one hand, the level of meaning (Bedeutung); on the other hand, the level
of the formal or analytic validity (Geltung). And there are two meanings of
the concept of distinctness: it means, first, the analytic process of making
explicit (Deutlichmachen,Verdeutlichen,1974 Hua XVII, 16, 6165; 1978,
5660), which consists in reducing a propositional meaning into elementary meanings; second, the evidence of analytic non-contradiction, which
requires the determination of formal relationships of compatibility or
incompatibility (ibid., 14, 5860; 5355).
What is here the sense of the method of reduction? According to Husserl
(1974 Hua XVII, 82), it is a reduction of the judicial meanings or opinions (Urteilsmeinungen), that is to say ,of the aim of propositional senses,
which is parallel to the genetic reduction of syntactical cores to ultimate
cores of empirical judgments. Hence, it is a reduction of the propositional
meanings to ultimate something-meanings (letzte Etwas-Meinungen, 1974
Hua XVII, 82, 211; 1978, 203), that is, to meanings which refer to experience-judgments about ultimate objects-about-which, ultimate predicates
and ultimate relationships (ibid., 210211; 203). The genetic process of
deconstructing articulated stuffs implies a parallel process of following
up the meanings in order to reach the ultimate level of judgments about
empirical objects; it seems to be a reduction of all forms of judgments to
conjunctions of singular judgments belonging to the type this S is p.
The reduction has an essentially different meaning, whether we consider
the level of meaning (Bedeutung) or the level of formal validity (Geltung).
At the level of Bedeutung the criterion of identity of two sentences is the
Gleichbedeutsamkeit, that is the fact that both sentences have the same meaning or correspond to the same intention of signifying (das, was wir gerade
sagen wollen, Husserl 1996 Hua XXX, 39, 169). Yet this relationship gleichbedeutend does not allow us to identify a proposition belonging to the
level n with an equivalent proposition belonging to the level n-1; it does not
affect the strict hierarchy and irreducibility of successive categorial levels.
31
On the contrary, at the level of Geltung the criterion of identity of two

propositions is the quivalenz, that is the relation gleichgeltend or having
the same validity. Yet, this relationship allows a transition from a higher
level to the immediate lower level; the genetic principle of going back from
level to level means here a principle of reducibility (Husserl 1996 Hua XXX,
34 and 39, 152, 168).
Here is an example: the distinction between totality-proposition and
universal proposition (Allheitsgedanke and Allgemeinheitsgedanke). The totality-proposition (Allheitsgedanke) is a universal proposition that says something about a finite set of elements, for example, all the flowers in this
garden are roses. It is meant about the totality of the A that they are
B, that is, that the totality of the flowers in the garden are roses. In this
case, there is not only equivalence, but also Gleichbedeutsamkeit between
all the As are B, each A is B and the As are B; the universal proposition has the same sense as the conjunction of a finite plurality of singular
propositions. So we have here reducibility in the strict sense! By contrast,
an Allgemeinheitsgedanke is a universal proposition which says something
about an infinite totality of ideal objects, like mathematical propositions:
all the triangles have the sum of their angles equal to two right angles
or all the cardinal numbers have a successor. In this case, according to
Husserl it is quite impossible to have the effective intuition of the total
set of triangles, because in general it is impossible to have an intuition
that gives us an infinite totality of objects, or impossible to consider an
actual infinity as given to us.1 In this case there is an equivalence, but not
an identity of sense between all the As are B and each A is B. From
the point of view of Geltung there is an extensional reducibility of universal propositions to singular ones; but from the point of view of meaning
only the second form, each A is B, expresses the nomological character
(Gesetzcharakter) of the eidetic relationship. Hence, in the consequencelogic of meaning the relevance of the intention of signifying implies an
anti-extensionalistic principle; it is impossible to express a universal infinite
judgment under an extensional form and it is impossible to reduce it to
an infi nite conjunction of singular judgments (Husserl 1996 Hua XXX,
39, 166168).
This may be proven right by the fact that pure concepts have a purely
intensional, and non extensional character: No pure concept has in truth
anything like an extension (Kein reiner Begriff hat in Wahrheit so etwas wie
einen Umfang, Husserl 1996 Hua XXX, 39, 170). In the case of pure
concepts the distinction between intension and extension (Inhalt and
Umfang) has no validity; the extension of the concept is a methodological
32
Dominique Pradelle
fiction (ein Fingiertes, 170), an inconsistent multiplicity. What is the function of this extensional representation of the pure concept? Its function
is merely psychological and not logical: as a matter of fact, the extension is a surrogate, a convenient auxiliary (ein Surrogat, ein bequemes
Hilfsmittel, 171), which allows us to have a near-intuitive representation of
an essence (quasi-anschauliche Vorstellung). There is no reduction, but only
a progressive transition from the insight of an eidetic relationship to the
intuition of an imaginary extensional totality: each A is B any A in
general are B in the totality of the As there is none which is not B
in a universal generality, a plurality of As is a totality of As which has
the B-property ( 39, 170).
Let us apply this to the truth-logic. Does the method of reduction imply
an extensionalistic principle of reducibility?
In the truth-logic we can find a case similar to the universal judgments
in the consequence-logic: it is the case of the pure laws (reine Gesetze) that
express an apodictic necessity (apodiktische Notwendigkeit, Husserl 1996
Hua XXX, 44, 221). The pure eidetic laws exclude any individual cores
(Individualkerne) and admit exclusively general cores (Generalkerne), in so
far as they express relationships between pure essences. For example, the
judgment all human beings are mortal (alle Menschen sind sterblich) excludes
any restriction to individual existence (222).2 And contrary to the universal judgments (universelle Urteile) (that is to say, judgments that have the
form of universality), general judgments (generelle Urteile) are judgments
about ideal objects, about essences; insofar as these judgments have pure
idealities as objects-about-which, they are not reducible to extensionally
universal judgments (Universell ist jedes Funktionalurteil, das die Form
des Allgemeinen berhaupt hat. Generell ist hingegen ein Urteil ber ideale Gegenstnde, 45, 224225).
Nevertheless in Formale und transzendale Logik (Husserl 1974 Hua XVII,
8283), Husserl expresses a principle of reducibility of the categorial
truths belonging to a higher level to those belonging to a lower level, and
ultimately to truths belonging to the lowest levelthat is, to ultimate truths
that relate directly to individual objects of perceptual experience. And in
the Logic of 1917 he writes: Each general judgment can be so expressed
that it does not bear on general objects, but on individual objects, even if
they are meant in a unconditioned universality (Jedes generelle Urteil kann so
gewendet werden, da er nicht mehr ber generelle Gegenstnde, sondern ber individuelle, aber in unbedingter Allgemeinheit, urteilt (also nicht als Daseinsurteil),
Husserl 1996 Hua XXX, 45, 225).
33
What is the sense of this process of reduction? It means a principle of

applicability or testability rather than reducibility, and that at two different
levels. First, each law of elementary arithmetic can be applied to singular
cardinal numbers: it is a transition from the general to the particular,
but remaining on the field of ideal objects. Secondly, ideal objects involve
an indirect link to individual objects that are instantiations of them: for
example, the idea two can be replaced by a pair of individual objects.
So the so-called principle of reducibility is in fact a principle of empirical
exemplification, application, instantiation, testability of truths, but not of
empirical reducibility of truths. While the general eidetic law implies singular or particular cases, the opposite implication does not have any validity at all.
According to Husserl, it seems that this relationship of application can
be converted into the converse relationship of genesis or gradation of
the evidences (Stufenordnung der Evidenzen, Husserl 1974 Hua XVII, 85,
215; 1978, 206): the principle of empirical application becomes a principle of genetic order in the process of making materially evident (Prinzip
genetischer Ordnung sachlicher Evidentmachung, ibid., 215; 207) and a principle of gradation of the different levels of true materialities themselves
(Abstufung der wahren Sachlichkeiten selbst, ibid., 215; 207). The order of
empirical foundation or genesis is quite the opposite of the order of
empirical application: what is meant here is that empirical propositions
are primitive, and that they offer a primitive level of evidences on which
can be founded evidences belonging to higher categorial levels by a process of generalization or formalization. So the request of empirical application becomes a principle of empirical derivation or genetic foundation
on experience.
Such a conversion is very problematic. Let us take with Husserl the
example of the principles and laws in physical science: is it possible to
assert that these principles derive genetically from experience by induction or generalization? Husserl himself answers negatively: The fundamental principles originate from experience, but not from the immediate
experience . . . they originate from long processes of elaboration. And this
elaboration . . . is not a sequence of steps in a reasoning that are immediately self-evident like in deduction.3 Thus, it is strictly impossible to let
principles of physical science (like the principle of relativity of movements
or the principle of inertia) derive from experience or be directly founded
on experience. The testability of physical principles does not mean that
they have an empirical origin, because the theoretical elaboration of these
34
Dominique Pradelle
principles belongs to the method of thought and requires pure processes

of thought.
Is There any Reducibility of the Principles of

Logic to the Empirical Level?
The third level on which we have to consider the sense of the reduction
is that of the principles of logic. These principles have a double meaning: first they are principles of formal validity in the consequence-logic,
second they are formal principles of truth in the truth-logic (Husserl
1974 Hua XVII, 20, 7173; 1978, 6668).4 The problem of reduction
concerning both types of principles is about the method of making evident the logical principles (Evidentmachung der logischen Prinzipien, ibid.,
85, 216; 208). But what is the meaning of the process of going back from
the sense of the principles to their evidence? Does this process of making evident entail that we have to disclose an intentional genesis of these
principles by going back to the ultimate levels of empirical judgments
and pre-predicative evidence of empirical objects? Does it imply a real
process of reducing these principles to the empirical level? Here we have
to consider the theory of the relevance of the cores (Relevanz der Kerne,
ibid., 87, 220; 212).
Let us first make clear the sense of the analytic laws in the consequencelogic. They are universal and formal principles of non-contradiction, of
consistency, that is, principles of analytic inclusion of propositional forms
in other ones: the law of non-contradiction, the law of excluded middle,
the law of double negation. These principles make it possible to reveal the
forms of analytic inclusion (tautologies) and those of analytic exclusion or
anti-consequence (antilogies); they are principles of formal compatibility
and incompatibility of propositional forms within the discursive unity of
a theory (Husserl 1974 Hua XVII, 14 and 18, 5860 and 6869; 1978,
5355 and 6365).
What sort of idealizing presuppositions do these formal principles
imply? According to Husserl in 88 of Formale und transzendentale Logik,
each possible judgment has to be made distinctly evident (Jedes Urteil ist zur
Deutlichkeitsevidenz zu bringen, Husserl 1974 Hua XVII, 17 and 88; 6768
and 222223; 1978, 6263 and 214215). This means that all their formal
components and analytic implications can be made explicit. Yet the formal non-contradiction is precisely the necessary and sufficient condition
for having a judgment distinctly evident, that is to say, to make obvious
35
the possibility of making this judgment; if the propositional form is not

contradictory, the judgment can be made without any restriction. So the
presupposition is that formal non-contradiction is sufficient for making a
judgment distinctly evident without any restriction regarding the fulfillment of
syntactical cores by material cores.
Now what is the sense of the principles of truth-logic? They are formal
principles of possible truth in the sense of adequation between the proposition and the categorial objectivity, the latter being the possible state
of affairs meant by the judgment. So it is possible to convert the analytic
principles of non-contradiction into principles of possible truth, using the
truth-values. For example (Husserl 1974 Hua XVII, 20), the analytic law
of the modus ponens can be translated into a principle of inference in the
truth-logic: if (p q) is true and if p is true, then q is true. The analytic
laws of non-contradiction and excluded middle have in the truth-logic the
following sense: either p is true or p is false; if p is true, then non-p is false
(Hua XVII 20, 7173; 1978, 6668).
This allows us to disclose the idealizing presupposition of the principles
of truth (Husserl 1974 Hua XVII, 77). Each judgment necessarily can be
brought to a positive or negative adequation to the affairs themselves: truth
is in fact the intentional correlate of the evidence of identity between the
sense meant and the categorial object. Hence, we can translate the principles of truth-logic in subjective terms, in terms of subjective evidence. The
principle of non-contradiction means the following: if p can be brought
to the evidence of positive adequation, non-p cannot be brought to this
evidence. The excluded middle means: each proposition can be brought to
the evidence of positive or negative adequation (Hua XVII, 77, 200202;
1978, 193195).5
The essential consequence of these possibilities is as follows: a judgment is true or false once and for all (Ein Urteil ist wahr oder falsch ein fr
allemal, Husserl 1974 Hua XVII, 77, 201; 1978, 194). That is to say, the
truth of propositions has an omnitemporal and intersubjective character.
The idealizing presupposition is that of truth-in-itself or falsity-in-itself
(Entschiedenheit oder Entscheidbarbeit an sich, ibid., 79, 203, 205; 196197),
each judgment is supposed to be decided in itself, even if it is not decided
for us, even if we do not have any effective method to prove its truth or
falsity; its decidability is completely independent from our capacity of discovering its truth or falsity. Hence, the formal non-contradiction of judgments is a necessary and sufficient condition for its decidability in itself. So
the formal principles are necessary and sufficient conditions for validity
and possible truth.
36
Dominique Pradelle
Moreover, let us recall that the principles of logic have a merely formal
character. Given that we can make them obvious by a process of formalizing syntactical cores (by replacing each material sense with a pure and
empty anything whatever-form), they are completely independent from the
material sense (Sachhaltigkeit) of the cores. Then, they must have a universal sphere of validity, and formal logic must have a universal sovereignty: it
must be possible to give an instance of the logical principles by replacing
syntactical stuffs with arbitrarily taken cores, without any restriction on a
definite field. As Russell says in the Principles of Mathematics, in the sphere
of logic the field of variables is absolutely without limits: there is a principle
of unlimited substitutability.6
Now, let us consider Husserls essential argument, the theory of the relevance of the cores. This argument is simple: the principle of unlimited substitutability does not have unconditioned validity in logic. On the contrary,
there are material limits to the variability of the syntactical coresthe syntactical stuffs of non-intuitive judgments cannot be varied with complete
freedom (Husserl 1974 Hua XVII, 89, 226227; 1978, 218219).7 Thus
the formal non-contradiction of a judgment is not a sufficient condition for
being sure of its validity or decidability in itself; but validity and decidability imply both a material presupposition that belongs to the Sachhaltigkeit
of the cores.
Let us recall what is asserted by Husserl about formal relationships
between propositional forms ( 18). There are only three possible cases for
the propositional forms: either the form is tautological (p or non-p) (S is p
or S is not p); or it is antilogicalit contains an analytic anti-consequence
(p and non-p) (S is p and S is non-p); or there is an empty compatibility (leere
Vertrglichkeit) between judgments or cores, which do not have anything to
do with one another (S is p and T is q) (Husserl 1974 Hua XVII, 18, 6869;
1978, 6365). Let us take two examples: This color plus one makes three,
The sum of the angles of a triangle is equal to the color red (ibid., 89
and 90, 224 and 228; 216 and 220). In both cases we have a purely grammatical sensefulness (rein grammatische Sinnhaftigkeit, 89), but we do not have
material or contentual sensefulness (inhaltliche Sinnhaltigkeit); both propositions
make no proper sense, they offer examples of senselessness (Sinnlosigleit):
the totality of the proposition is not a unitary sense, that is: the judgmentcontent (Urteilsinhalt, beurteilbarer Inhalt) does not have any ideal existence
(ibid., 89, 224; 216). Such judgments are neither contradictory nor noncontradictory, but exalted above concordance and contradiction (ibid.,
224; 216); they are neither true nor false, but exalted above truth and
falsity (ibid., 90, 229; 221). For such materially senseless judgments the
37
middle is not excluded; and formal contradiction does not have any sense at
all: the principles of logic cannot be applied to such judgments.
Consequently, the sense of the theory of relevance of the cores is the
following: the principles of logic do not have absolute validity, validity for the
infinite universe of discourse, validity for arbitrarily variable stuffs. They
have validity only for judgments whose cores are congruous with respect to
the sense (Urteile, deren Kerne sinngem zusammengehren, Husserl 1974 Hua
XVII, 90, 228; 1978, 220). There are material or contentual limits or conditions for sensefulness through the application of the principles of logic.
Let us make a last step. How is it possible to show the material coherence
of the syntactical cores? To make obvious the congruousness of cores, it
is necessary to make obvious the cores themselves, to make obvious the
objects-about-which and their properties. And here it becomes possible to
apply the method of reducing ideal objects-about-which (and properties
and relationships) to ultimate objects-about-which (and ultimate properties and ultimate relations). At this last step, the requirement of essential
community (Wesensgemeinschaft) between the cores becomes a demand of
senseful coherence between an ultimate substrate and an ultimate property
or relationship. This senseful relationship between ultimate empirical cores
refers to the conditions of coherence of the matters, of concordance of possible experience, and these are pre-predicative (Husserl 1974 Hua XVII,
89, 226227; 218219). So it is senseless to ask if the snow is or is not courageous: first of all, because there is no community of essence between snow
and courage, but ultimately because the perceptual experience excludes the
possibility of finding such a thing as a moral property in the snow. A possible experience of a real world is not a structureless experience of objects in
general. Rather, there are spheres of objects, categories of concrete objects
(such as material object, animal, person, cultural object, ideal object . . . )
that admit correlative spheres of possible properties and relations. Hence,
the material conditions for having sensefulness go back to the ontological
structures of a possible world of experience. In that sense, the presupposition of a world of experience ranks logic among positive sciences.
What is the real purpose of the theory of relevance in the cores? Let us
refer to Carnap, who gives us a similar example of senselessness of propositions: my pencil weighs five kilos is a senseful proposition; on the other
hand, my courage weighs five kilos is not a proposition because it is senseless. We must not just replace the syntactical cores within a certain category
of names (names for things, or names for properties, names for relationships), but also within a definite syntactical type. Two words belong to the
same syntactical type if it is possible to replace one with the other without
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Dominique Pradelle
losing the propositional sense. In the same perspective, Carnap speaks in

the Aufbau about spheres of objects and relationship of Sphrenverwandschaft
between objects; he refers to the Russellian theory of logical types, which
he applies to the extra-logical objects, claiming that the theory of logical types expresses the conditions for guaranteeing sensefulness (Carnap
1998, 3839).8
Yet the function of the theory of types is to avoid paradoxes or antinomies of the set-theory by expressing stronger syntactical rules. The common characteristic of all antinomies is the self-reference or reflexiveness:
something is said about all cases of a certain kind, and from what is said a
new case seems to be generated, which both is and is not of the same kind
as the cases falling under what is said. It leads Russell to the rule: Whatever
involves all of a collection must not be one of the collection (Russell 1908,
203. See also 1903, 535536); so propositional functions must be limited to
a certain type or level, that is, to a definite range of significance, so that an
n-order function cannot assert anything about (n+1)-order objects.
This leads us to the following assumption: the essential scope of the
Husserlian theory of the relevance of cores is to safeguard logic against
the antinomies of set-theory. Indeed in 71 of Formale und transzendentale Logik Husserl writes that formal sciences have paradoxes because they
develop their theory in a merely symbolic and calculative mode, establishing arbitrary (Spielregel) or mere computational conventions (bloe
Rechenkonventionen, Husserl 1974 Hua XVII, 40 and 33, 115 and 102; 1978,
110 and 98), without elucidating the fundamental concepts and principles
and going back to the evidence of their origin (ibid., 71, 189; 181). In
75 he writes that it is necessary to develop an analytics for which there can
be no paradoxes by making reflexively obvious the structures of subjective
evidence of the formal rules in the theory of forms and consequence-logic.
And in 64 of the Cartesian Meditations, Husserl writes that it is necessary
to make obvious the system of the fundamental concepts for each scientific field, and that such evidence brings a guarantee against paradoxes
(Husserl 1950 Hua I, 64, 180); in particular, we can avoid antinomies in
the field of logic by developing a transcendental reflection about the limits
of the applicability of formal principles.
In conclusion, the Husserlian position concerning antinomies seems to be
similar to Zermelos: according to Zermelo the Aussonderungsaxiom imposes
essential limits to the formation of set; it is not possible to define a set absolutely by defining a property on the infinite field of objects; it is only possible
to separate a set-part within a set of objects that must be already given to
us, by expressing strictly decidable properties within this set (Zermelo 1967,
39
202).9 Thus, new classes of objects do not result from an arbitrary conceptual
creation of a property within an undefined field, but only from the foundation of an already given set and respecting the condition of decidability: it is
a double principle that limits the variability of the cores.
Conclusion
Is the Husserlian method of reducing syntactical stuffs, propositions and
truths equivalent to a principle of reducibility or a principle of verification?
Not quite. We must rather conclude that this method has a different sense
depending on the level of logic at which we are.
1. At the syntactical level of the theory of forms, there is a genetic or foundational principle, whose finality is to make obvious the nuclear forms
of syntactical stuffs and reveal their ontological foundation on the structure of empirical objects. The scope is to found the predicative syntax
on the structures of pre-predicative syntax.
2. At the level of isolated propositions within consequence-logic or truthlogic there are two results. In the logic of validity there is an extensional reduction of propositions to equivalent propositions belonging to
a lower level. By contrast, in the Bedeutungslogik there is no extensional
reducibility of propositions or truths, but only a problem concerning
the possibility of applying categorial propositions to lower levels of syntactical stuffs; and it is impossible to turn this applicability into a principle of genetic derivation of truths going back to the ultimate level of
empirical truths.
3. Lastly, at the level of principles of logic, the scope is not to reduce these
principles to the level of empirical evidences; but only to make obvious
the semantic and ontological conditions of their application in order to
avoid antinomies.
Notes
1
Ein Inbegriff von Dreiecken, in dem kein Dreieck fehlt, lt sich nicht zur Gegebenheit bringen. Das ist ein Non-Sens, eine Allheit von Dreiecken, eine Allheit
von Zahlen, das ist, wenn wir den Sinn der Allheit festhalten, nicht anschaulich zu
geben, kann also auch nicht sein.
Eine volle Allgemeinheit im Sinne des Gesetzes erfordert, da es absolut heit: alle Menschen, unter Absehen von aller Beschrnkung auf irgendein individuelles Dasein.
Die Grundstze entspringen der Erfahrung, aber nicht der unmittelbaren Erfahrung . . . ,
sondern langen Prozessen methodischer Verarbeitung. Und diese Verarbeitung . . . ist nicht
40
Dominique Pradelle
eine Kette solcher unmittelbar selbsverstndlicher Denkschritte wie bei der Deduktion
(Husserl 1996 Hua XXX, 66, 314).
Husserl gives as an example the double significance of the principles of contradiction and excluded middle.
Es beschliet . . . da, wie gesagt, jedes Urteil prinzipiell zur Adquation gebracht werden
kann (Husserl 1974 Hua XVII, 201; 1978, 194).
Russell 1903 [2010] 7, 7: Part I, chapter 1 Definition of pure mathematics :
Thus in every proposition of pure mathematics, when fully stated, the variables
have an absolutely unrestricted field: any conceivable entity may be substituted for
any one of our variables without impairing the truth of our proposition.
Die syntaktischen Stoffe unanschaulicher Urteile knnen aus den angedeuteten Grnden
ihrer Seins- und Sinnesgenesis nicht vllig frei variabel sein (Husserl 1974 Hua XVII,
227; 1978, 219).
Sphrenverwandtschaft. Gegenstandssphren. Zwei Gegenstnde . . . heien sphrenverwandt, wenn es eine Argumentstelle in einer Aussage gibt, fr die die beiden
Gegenstandsnamen zulssige Argumente sind . . . Sind zwei Gegenstnde nicht sphrenverwandt, so heien sie sphrenfremd zueinander.
Axiom III. (Axiom of separation). Whenever the propositional function F(x) is
definite for all elements of a setM, M possesses a subset MF containing as elements
precisely those elements x of M for which F(x) is true.
By giving us a large measure of freedom in defining new sets, Axiom III in a
sense furnisches a substitute for the general definition of set that was cited in the
introduction and rejected an untenable . . . In the first place, sets may never be
independently defined by means of this axiom but must always be separated as subsets
from sets already given; thus contradictory notions such as the set of all sets or
the set of all ordinal numbers, and with them the ultrafinite paradoxes . . . are
excluded.
Chapter 3
The Seduction of Images

A Look at the Role of Images in Husserls
Phenomenology
John Brough
Postmodern thinkers like to remind us that we swim in a sea of images or

wander about in a forest of signs. We are rarely eyewitnesses: we experience the world through pictures on screens and in newspapers. When we
become overwhelmed or simply bored by pictured reality, we turn off the
television or put down the paper and go to the movies or the art museum
to see still more images in the hope of being enthralled, entertained, or
enlightened. Reality is still there, of course, but it furnishes feeble competition for the astonishing speed with which our ways of imaging the world
proliferate and mutate.
Images are not only ubiquitous, however; they are also seductive.
Televised images of certain events, usually catastrophic, are replayed again
and again. A movie or a play is a must see, and we may dress and comport
ourselves like the people we admire in films or in magazines. Philosophers
are no more immune to the seductive power of images than anyone else.
As philosophers, however, they succumb not to images as such but to a philosophical way of exploiting them. The history of philosophy from antiquity
on is replete with examples of thinkers who have succumbed to the attractions of what Edmund Husserl called the image theory of consciousness
(Husserl 1984 Hua XIX/1, 436; 1970, 593; 1976 Hua III, 98; 1983, 92). In
order to understand the role of images in Husserls phenomenology, we
must get some sense of what Husserl meant by the image theory, why he
criticized it, and the extent to which for a time and in certain respects he
accepted it. Since the image theory takes image consciousness as its model,
to understand the theory we must have at least some grasp of image consciousness as Husserl conceived it.
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John Brough
Image Consciousness
Husserl gives many names to image consciousness. He variously calls it
physical imagination (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 21; 2005, 22), perceptual
re-presentation (ibid., 476; 565), perceptual phantasy (ibid., 504; 605),
and iconic phantasy (ibid., 383; 456)all suggesting that image consciousness has a foot in two worlds: the perceptual and the imagined. The
complex structure of image consciousness explains how this is possible.
Ordinary perception has a single object: the person I am now seeing, for
example. When I experience an image, on the other hand, three objects
can be involved (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 9). Consider the example of a
painting. I see the painted image: perhaps a person is depictedNapoleon,
let us say. The image is what directly appears to me in the experience; it is
what I see. Husserl calls this the image object, also referring to it on occasion as a figment [Fiktum] or semblance [Schein]. The image or image
object has a physical support, the canvas and pigment that serve as the substratum for the image I see and that instigate or stimulate my seeing of it.
This material support, which Husserl sometimes calls the physical image,
can be destroyed by fire and hang askew on the wall. Although it is not itself
the appearing imageI do not see canvas and pigment but an image of
Napoleon in uniform when I look at the paintingit must be there if I am
to be conscious of the image at all. If it were destroyed, the image would be
destroyed along with it. There can also be a third object involved in image
consciousness: a subject. I apprehend the image that is present to me as
depicting something that is not present, which Husserl calls the image
subject. The subject does not actually appear when I look at the painting.
I may be conscious of the subject in the image, but it remains absent in its
actuality. The image of Napoleon, with its image colors and image size, is
present; Napoleon himself is not. Husserl captures this situation by saying
that the image appears, while the subject does not appear but is meant. In
ordinary perception, on the other hand, what appears and what is meant
are the same; there is no distinction between the two.
Perception is presenting as opposed to re-presenting consciousness.
Image consciousness is also, in part, presenting consciousness, and to that
extent is perceptual. It includes a suppressed perception of the images
material support, and an explicit perceptual presentation of the image.
But the latter is not an ordinary perception. In image consciousness perception is . . . carried out in an inactual way (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 299;
2005, 360). This means, first of all, that while the image object, which is
what I see when I look at the painting, appears to me with the full force
43
and intensity of perception (ibid., 57, 60; 62, 64), the depicted subject
does not. Though I do see the subject in the imagethe phenomenon of
seeing init is not perceived and not actually present there. The image
may depict a person who does or once did actually exist, but is not itself
that person. Furthermore, the image object, even though it is seen and is
perceptually present to me, is not an actually existing thing in the world
of perceived rooms, clocks, and desks. The images physical support, pigment and canvas, is indeed part of that world, and thus can interact causally with the surrounding environment, becoming spotted with mildew, for
example, or cracking with age, while the image cannot. The image is also
not a real event in conscious life, as the acts of perceiving or imaging are.
Husserl insists that the image is nothing actual in either of these senses:
the image object truly does not exist, which means not only that it has no
existence outside my consciousness, but also that it has no existence inside
my consciousness; it has no existence at all (ibid., 22; 23). It is nothing, a
nullity. In all of these senses, then, the perception that occurs in perceptual image consciousness or iconic imagining (ibid., 384; 456) is not
perceptual consciousness simply (ibid., 471; 560).
It is important to understand that the image theory is not image consciousness itself. Image consciousness is the perfectly legitimate kind of awareness
we have just described, the kind we enjoy when we contemplate a painting
in a gallery or see a play on the stage. The image theory is a philosophical
position that takes certain features of image consciousness to be the model
for the understanding of other kinds of conscious acts, such as memory and
phantasy, and even perception. The image theory assumes at its core that
conscious presenting means making an image of something (Husserl
1979 Hua XXII, 306), and it particularly stresses the involvement of two
of the three objects we mentioned above: the appearing image and the
subject meant by the image. Furthermore, the theory takes the appearing
image to be immanent to consciousness, like the Lockean idea, while the
object meant by means of it is in some sense transcendent.
The Image Theory of Perception and

Husserls Criticism of It
Some philosophers, particularly in the Cartesian tradition, interpret intuitive presentations (perception, memory, expectation, phantasy) in terms
of the image theory. All would be forms of imaging or picturing, broadly
conceived. The theory may have cast its spell over Husserl himself for a
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John Brough
time with respect to memory and phantasy, but he steadfastly resisted it as

a way of understanding perception. His arguments are worth examining;
they are interesting in their own right, and prepare the ground for his general rejection of the image theory.
As early as 1894, Husserl formulated and criticized the image theory
in the context of a discussion of so-called objectless perceptions: perceptions or other presentations that do not have actually existing objects
(Husserl 1979 Hua XXII, 304). The popular view, Husserl reports, is that
there is no difficulty in understanding how we can present a nonexistent
object, for to present it means to have a mental image corresponding to
it, and just as a picture can, after all, exist, while what is depicted does not
exist, so too here. The image, he goes on to say, is within consciousness,
but the object is either outside or does not exist (304). A few years later,
in the Logical Investigations, Husserl concisely describes the image theory of
perception as holding that the thing itself is outside . . . : an image is in
consciousness as its representative (Husserl 1984 Hua XIX/1, 436; 1970,
593). He adds in the Investigations that this application of the image theory
to perception is a fundamental and almost ineradicable error (ibid., 436;
593), a charge he repeats in Ideas I in 1913.
Husserl indicates that some have mustered arguments from ordinary
experience and from physical science in defense of the image theory, and
to many the theory might appear to solve some thorny epistemological
problems. Indeed, Husserl warns that the popular appeal of this solution
could seduce us (Husserl 1979 Hua XXII, 304). It could seduce us, he goes
on to say, but does not, because decisive objections . . . speak against [it]
(ibid.,). These objections are sufficient to show that the image theory of
perception is a fundamental error and that an image consciousness or
a sign consciousness must not be substituted for perception (Husserl 1976
Hua III, 99; 1983, 93). Between perception and image consciousness there
is an unbridgeable essential difference (ibid., 99; 93).
The objections Husserl mentions and the essential distinctions he draws
concern both the objects and the constitutional structures of the two kinds
of consciousness. The arguments are mainly descriptive in character,
flowing from Husserls principle that in phenomenology what is decisive
consists in the absolutely faithful description of what is actually present
in phenomenological purity and in keeping at a distance all interpretations transcending the given (Husserl 1976 Hua III, 224; 1983, 218). In
1894, Husserl charged that the image theory of perception does entirely
unnecessary violence to the facts, subordinating them to the theory . . .
rather than adapting the theory to an unprejudiced and encompassing
45
establishment of the facts (Husserl 1979 Hua XXII, 304). He observes that
experience has never confirmed [its] quixotic assumptions (305). The
image theory, then, is a vivid example of an interpretation that transcends
what is given in experience, which is why Husserl takes its claim that presentations relate to their objects by means of mental images to be a theoretical fiction (305).
How, then, do perception and image consciousness differ descriptively?
In the latter, we are intuitively aware of somethingthe imageas depicting or signitively indicating something else, and we are directed, not
toward the image we intuit, but toward what is depicted (Husserl 1976 Hua
III, 99; 1983, 93). In perception, by contrast, there is only one object, which
is both what appears in the perceptual act and what is meant by the act.
What appears intuitively in perception is not taken to depict something else.
Perception gives its object as it itself and as present in person (ibid.,),
not as the representing image or surrogate for the real perceptual object.
I perceive the physical thing, Husserl writes, the object belonging to
nature, the tree there in the garden; that and nothing else is the actual
object of the perceptual intention. A second immanental tree, or even
an internal image of the actual tree standing out there before me, is in
no way given, and to suppose that hypothetically leads to absurdity (ibid.,
224; 219. Translation modified).
Husserl mentions one such absurdity, taking the form of a contradiction:
The images are supposed to be the presented objects, of which it is truly
said: every presentation presents an object. The corresponding things are
supposed to be, on the other side, the presented objects, of which it is truly
said: an object does not correspond to every presentation (Husserl 1979
Hua XXII, 305). In effect, the theory holds that every presentation presents two objects: the mental image, which is actually present to consciousness, and then what is imaged, the perceived object, which is also supposed
to be presented, indeed, to be the object of the perceptual act, but which, if
the theory is correct, does not actually appear at all. The notion of a duality
of objects forced on perception leads to confusion and contradiction.
A further absurdity following from the image theory is that it leads to an
infinite regress. The regress results not simply from the fact that the theory
introduces two entities into perception, but from the way in which the two
entities are conceived. In this respect, the image theory as applied to perception is a version of a second fundamental error; that is, the notion that
the intentional object of any act is immanent to consciousness and distinct from the acts actual object. In the case of the image theory as applied
to perception, the image is taken to be an immanent object distinct from
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John Brough
the transcendent or actual object that may correspond to it (Husserl

1984 Hua XIX/1, 439; 1970, 595). Now something can function as an image
only if it is first perceived in its own right. According to the theory, if an
object can be given to consciousness only by means of an image, then the
object that serves as the perceptual image would itself have to be given by
means of an image, and so on to infinity (ibid., 437; 594; Hua III, 224; 1983,
219). The threat of an infinite regress vanishes, however, if one simply takes
perception as it presents itself. In that case, one finds no separation of
intentional object from actual object. Two realities do not face each other
in perception. The intentional object of perception is its actual, transcendent object: It is nonsense to distinguish between the two (Husserl 1984
Hua XIX/1, 439; 1970, 595).
These differences between image consciousness and perception with
respect to their objects run parallel to distinctions in their respective constitutional structures. Descriptively considered, image consciousness is
something with an entirely different constitution from perception (Husserl
1976 Hua III, 224; 1983, 219). Above all, the image theory fails to appreciate the complex nature of imaging. It naively assumes that an act contains
one thing, the image, which, without further ado, depicts another thing,
the physical thing that we take to be the actual object of the perception. It
is as if the image had some property or aspect that immediately announces
its imaging character. But that is not the case. The image, Husserl observes,
does not possess its imaging capacity as an internal characteristic or real
predicate, like being red or being round (Husserl 1984 Hua XIX/1, 436;
1970, 593). One might grant this, but then argue that the images ability
to depict is a relational rather than intrinsic property; specifically, that it
is based on the resemblance of the image to what it represents. Husserl
thinks that this suggestion fails too. According to the image theory, only
the image is immediately present to consciousness, and so resemblance
cannot clarify the given images relation to its subject, which is not given.
Even if one could compare the two and see a resemblance, this would not
explain imaging. As Husserl succinctly puts it, the resemblance between
two objects, however great it may be, still does not make one into the image
of the other (ibid., 436; 594). One red Ferrari may resemble another red
Ferrari but not be the image of it. Even two pictures or two sculptures,
which are already imagesthe two lions flanking the entrance to the
New York Public Library, for examplecan resemble one another without
either being the image of the other. What, then, accounts for imaging?
According to Husserl, whether something becomes an image depends
on how one takes it; that is, it depends on a particular kind of act. This is
47
not to deny that what is taken to be an image must possess certain features
and stand in certain relations that will enable it to function as an image
of a specific thing under a definite aspect or aspects. Not just anything
can be taken to be the image of a seated man, hand on chin and deeply
absorbed in thought, for example. Images, on Husserls understanding,
are not arbitrary signs, and they do involve resemblance. On the other
hand, even the appropriate thing will not appear as an image unless it
is taken to be an image. The image becomes constituted as an image in
a peculiar intentional consciousness, . . . and the internal character of
the act, the specific peculiarity of this mode of apperception, accounts
for the act of presenting an object in image (Husserl 1984 Hua XIX/1,
436; 1970, 594. Translation modified). It is a unique mode of apperception,
then, that apprehends an appearing object as an image. Thanks to it, I take
Davids painting to be an image of Napoleon and not an ordinary physical
thing, such as a light switch. The painting is an image only for an imageconstituting consciousness, namely, the consciousness that, by means of
its imaginative apperception (here founded in a perception), bestows on a
primary and perceptually appearing object the validity or significance
of an image (ibid., 437; 594. Translation modified). The simple act of perception does not possess this unique mode of apprehension. Its object is
not taken to be an image.
A further constitutional contrast between perception and image consciousness is that perception posits its object as present and actually existing, while in image consciousness such positing does not occur. Turning
toward the image (not toward what is imaged), we do not seize upon anything actual as object, but instead precisely an image, a fiction (Husserl
1976 Hua III, 274; 1983, 266). Of course, if one focused on Davids portrait of Napoleon as simply a piece of canvas covered with pigment set into
a wooden frame, one could speak of seizing upon some physical thing
as actually existing. But if ones regard is directed toward the image, an
entirely different awareness comes into play. At one point, Husserl took
this awareness to be a neutrality modification of perception (ibid., 267;
262). He eventually came to the conclusion, however, that phantasy does
not arise through the neutralizing of positing acts, and hence that neutrality modification is suitable for the change in thematizing interest but
not for phantasy (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 591; 2005, 709).
Perception and image consciousness differ, then, as the simple differs
from the complex. Perception has a single apperception and a single object.
It is not founded on any other act. It is this unmodified simplicity of perception that lets it function, in Husserls estimation, as a kind of paradigm
48
John Brough
or foundational experience in our conscious lives. Image consciousness,

on the other hand, is a founded actspecifically, an act founded on perception. It involves at least two apprehensions and the corresponding duality of image and subject.
The Image Theory of Re-presentation or Reproduction

We have looked at some of the reasons why Husserl thinks that it is not
only incorrect but nonsensical (Husserl 1976 Hua III, 78; 1983, 92) to
interpret perception as a form of image consciousness. There are other
experiences, however, that might be more likely candidates for interpretation by the image theory. Acts of re-presentation [Vergegenwrtigung] or
reproduction, unlike acts of perceptual presentation [Gegenwrtigung], do
not present their objects as actually there in person. The objects of memory and phantasy, for example, are absent: neither a recollected past event
nor an imagined centaur is actually present. Since image consciousness
itself is a form of re-presentation, a way of being aware of something that is
not actually there, might it not be an enticing model for the understanding
of re-presentational experiences such as memory and phantasy?
In fact, until 1905 or so, Husserl himself surrendered, with some reservations, to what he described as the temptation (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII,
87; 2005, 94) to assimilate phantasy and other forms of reproduction, such
as memory and expectation, to image consciousness (I will focus mainly
on phantasy in the ensuing discussion). He took the imaginative modification (ibid., 276; 335) to be the sole model for the interpretation of all
forms of re-presentational awareness. Thus he wrote in 1898 that perceptual presentations present their object as present itself in the presentation;
phantasy presentations, on the other hand, re-present their object in the
phantasy image, just as ordinary image presentations do their re-presenting
in the physical image (ibid., 109; 117). Seven years later he claimed to find
a community of essence between perceptual imagining and ordinary phantasy. In both cases . . . the mental image is precisely an image; it represents
a subject (ibid., 21; 22). What did Husserl think the two had in common?
The key feature they share, according to the image theory, is the possession of two objects. We have seen that in ordinary imagingin the case of
a portrait, for examplethere is a distinction between the image that actually appears and the subject that is meant but does not appear. In phantasy too, Husserl writes, we have a distinction between appearance and
subject, and in that respect the imaging in phantasy runs parallel to the
49
imaging or depicting that occurs in image-consciousness (Husserl 1981

Hua XXIII, 64; 2005, 69). This would mean that we do not experience the
thing itself in phantasy. My phantasy of Napoleon on St. Helena would not
present Napoleon himself. In phantasying, we mean another object, for
which the object that appears and that differs perceptibly from the phantasied object serves as an image representant . . . We have only one appearance,
the appearance belonging to the image object (ibid., 29; 31). The phantasied subject appears in the image, and Husserl insists that the image is
precisely an image; it represents a subject (ibid., 21; 22).
Behind the application of the image theory to phantasy and to other representational acts lies what might be described as the prejudice of presence: the conviction that one can be aware of what is absent only through
something that is present. Thus a portrait enables one to be conscious of
an absent person through its present image object, which one actually sees.
Similarly, in memory a past object, precisely because it is past and no longer available, can be recalled only through a present memory image. In
phantasy, one can be conscious of a phantasied and absent object only
through a present phantasy image. The image theory thus takes phantasy,
memory, and expectation to be species of indirect or mediated consciousness, like picturing. One is not aware of the remembered or phantasied
object itself; one is instead conscious of it only through a present surrogate
or representative. In phantasy there is a certain mediacy in the act of representing that is absent from perceptual representation. Perception represents
its object directly: An object appears, and it is this object that is meant
and taken as actual (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 24; 2005, 25). Phantasy, on
the other hand, represents its object indirectly by making another object
appear, which it takes to be the representative or imageimage is surely
the only word to use herefor the object genuinely meant (ibid., 24; 26).
Husserl adds, in a claim he will soon retract, that no one considers this
appearance to be an appearance of the object itself (ibid., 26; 22).
What about the status of the phantasy image? Is it something subjective
in the sense of a mental event? Again, Husserl finds a parallel between
phantasy and image consciousness: just as the image object in perceptual
imaging does not exist either as a fleeting mental event or as an actual
physical thing in the world, likewise the phantasy image does not truly
exist at all; it does not perchance have a psychological existence (Husserl
1981 Hua XXIII, 22; 2005, 23).
His refusal to give the image a psychological existence even when he subscribed to the image theory of phantasy enabled Husserl to avoid a certain
naive interpretation of the phantasy image. This interpretation takes the
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image to be a little picture hidden in the cabinet of the mind.1 Husserl notes,
however, that the mere fact that the image is in the mind would not explain
how the mind is able to represent the subject of the image, which is something different from the image itself. If I put a picture in a drawer, Husserl
asks, does the drawer represent something? (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 21;
2005, 23). The deep problem with the naive interpretation is that it conceives of the image as there in the mind just as a physical thing is there in
reality. Phenomenologically, however, there is no image thing in the mind, or,
better, in consciousness (ibid.). If the image were a thing in the mind, then
the relation between image and phantasied object would have to be a matter
of comparing two different appearing objects. When we phantasy something,
however, what occurs is not like what we do when we place two pictures side
by side or carry out two phantasy representations in succession (ibid., 27; 28).
In both image consciousness and phantasy, the subject does not appear as
a second thing in addition to the image. It appears in and with the image
(ibid., 28; 29). The subject is not intuited in a separate representation.
If the relationship between phantasy image and subject is not established according to the pattern of the comparison of two things, what is the
nature of the relationship? Again, as in the case of image consciousness,
it is a matter of seeing-in. According to the image theory, the image is
the only object that actually appears, and in the image one sees the subject
(Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 26; 2005, 27). Just as one sees Napoleon in his
study in Davids portrait, so one sees Napoleon in ones phantasy image
of the solitary exile gazing out to sea from St. Helena. In the image experience or in the phantasy, there is no second, separate representation with
which to compare the image. The image, of course, represents the subject
only under certain aspects, and it is in those aspects that one experiences
the subject; thus the image represents Napoleon in full dress uniform and
not in his imperial robes. The specific content of the image object exhibits
. . . re-presents, pictorializes, makes intuitable. The subject looks at us, as it
were, through these traits (ibid., 30; 31). This means that one is aware of
the subject within the image; both image consciousness and phantasy are
instances of internal consciousness (40). In contrast, symbolic or signitive
consciousness, the sort of consciousness one has when one sees the symbol
for a restaurant in an airport, is external consciousness in the sense that
it points one away from the appearing symbol to something external to it.
One does not see the subject in the symbol.
The phenomenon of seeing-in implies that in image consciousness and
phantasy I am ordinarily absorbed in the subject. Unless one is engaged in
reflection of a particular sort, one does not look at the image and say to
51
oneself: this is an image (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 26; 2005, 27). That does
not mean, however, that one is not aware that one is experiencing an image
rather than the thing itself. On the contrary, the image is immediately felt
to be an image (ibid., 26; 28). If it were not, then, phenomenologically,
one would be perceiving and not imagining, and the object would appear
as present and as actually existing. Ones phantasy world would become
ones real world, an object of belief taken to be real. This does not happen in phantasy, however. A minimal awareness of the real world remains,
so that a faint consciousness that (the images) are semblances constantly
colors our phantasy formations (ibid., 42; 45). Images as nullities only
hover before us (ibid.), and it may seem quite as if the subjects we see in
them were there themselvesbut only quite as i f (ibid., 33; 34).
Husserls Criticism of the Image Theory of Phantasy

Even when Husserl officially embraced the image theory of phantasy
and memory early in the last century, he seems to have had reservations
about it. In the lectures on phantasy and image consciousness from 1905,
in which he advances the image interpretation, he cautions that there are
objections to this attempt, objections that subsequently turn out to be
justified (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 16, note 1; 2005, 18, note 2). He also
expressed doubts in the same lectures about whether one can legitimately
distinguish between an image object and a subject in phantasy (ibid., 54,
70; 59, 76). Still, he stays with the theory, although it is also in 1905, later
in the same series of lectures, in fact, that serious criticisms of the theory
begin to emerge, preparing the way for its rejection.
Even when Husserl accepted the theory, he pointed to differences
between image consciousness and phantasy. Image consciousness, we noted
earlier, has a triune of objects: the physical support, the image object, and
the subject. According to the image theory, phantasy would involve only
two objects: the phantasy image and the subject. In ordinary images, such
as paintings or photographs, there is also the physical support, a third
object that functions as the instigator of the pictorial apprehension.
Phantasy representation, on the other hand, has no instigator (Husserl
1981 Hua XXIII, 123; 2005, 135). Phantasy images would consequently be
private, unlike paintings or photographs, which do have physical supports
and are therefore public and intersubjective.
That phantasy has no anchor in the actual, physical world means that
the phantasy image exists outside all connection with actuality, that is,
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with the field of regard of possible perception. The paintings image with
its physical substratum, on the other hand, is incorporated in a certain
sense into the nexus of actuality, although it is not itself taken to be something actual in that nexus (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 123; 2005, 135). The
image in a painting is a perceptual figment, which enables it to be both in
the world and out of it; the phantasy image is not perceptual at all (ibid.,
64; 70). The phantasy image also appears to us differently from the perceptual appearance and from the image-object appearance (ibid.). One
of these differences is that the phantasy image and the memory image as
well, no matter how clear they may be, appear to us as if through a veil, a
mist, as if in twilight (ibid., 162; 194). The perceptual image, by contrast,
appears with the force and vivacity of a perception. In Humean language,
which Husserl occasionally employs, the images in perceptual imagining
are impressions, while those in phantasy, memory, and expectation are
ideas, reproductions or re-presentations of perceptions. Another difference in appearance involves stability. The image in perceptual imagination,
because it has a physical foundation, is fixed and stable, while fleeting and
multiple appearances, yielding changing, fluctuating image objects, support the imaging consciousness (ibid., 148; 175). Phantasy images have a
Protean character.
These differences between perceptual imagining and phantasy are
important phenomenologically, but do not by themselves undermine the
image theory of phantasy. For that, a specific critique would be required.
By 1909, Husserls earlier hesitations about the theory had evolved into
full-blown criticisms, and he was prepared to claim that an essential distinction must be drawn between phantasy apprehension and image apprehension proper (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 276; 2005, 335).
Husserls criticism of the image theory was an instance of his gradual
weaning from the prejudice of presence. In fact, this process took place
under various forms in several areas of his thought during this period, particularly in his phenomenology of time consciousness, including his understanding of memory, retention, and what he described as the absolute
flow of time-constituting consciousness. A specific concern in his mature
analysis of time consciousness was to escape the prejudice of the now, a
particularly virulent form of the prejudice of presence, blocking the way
to an understanding of the experience of time as reaching out beyond
what is immediately present. In all of these areas, Husserl rejected the view
that the consciousness of what is absent depends on the actual presence of
some content or image in consciousness. His early reservations about the
image theory even when he generally subscribed to it suggest that he had
53
begun to free himself from the prejudice as early as 1905. He writes, for
example, that in phantasy, we do not have anything present; and in this
sense we do not have an image object (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 79; 2005,
86). In clear, simple phantasy of the town hall, no apprehending of a present town-hall appearance, of an image object presently presenting itself, is
carried out that would serve as the analogue or representative of what is
phantasied (ibid.). Only in reflection could I separate the appearance and
the town hall itself. In fairness, it should be noted that it is still not perfectly
clear in these earlier texts whether Husserl is decisively separating himself
from the image theory. He may still be holding that there is an image in
phantasy distinct from its subject, but that one is not conscious of the distinction prereflectively. He may also be saying that the phantasy image is
not perceptual in the fashion of the image in a painting or photograph,
though it certainly does appear as an image (ibid., 80; 87). Other texts,
however, come much closer to a clear-cut rejection of the theory, and of the
prejudice of presence. He writes, for example, that the object of phantasy
is an object appearing in the manner peculiar to phantasy, hence not
appearing as present (ibid., 84; 91). Phantasy, in other words, should not
be reduced to a species of image consciousness. It is sui generis.2
By denying that what immediately appears to us in phantasy is a surrogate, analogue, or image of some other objectivity, Husserl is able to claim
that the simple phantasy appearance . . . relates to its object just as straightforwardly as perception does (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 85; 2005, 92).3 It
does not achieve awareness of its object through the medium of an image;
it is direct consciousness of what it imagines. This means that although
its object may not be present, as it is in perception, phantasy nonetheless
has in common with perception that its intention aims at the thing itself
throughout [its] peculiarly volatile appearance (ibid., 161; 192).
In escaping the prejudice of presence, Husserl sees that one can be
conscious of something itself without that somethings being present:
The actual presence of something and the consciousness of something itself do
not coincide. There is a difference between being aware of something
itself and being aware of it as present in person. If I phantasy a centaur,
I am conscious of the centaur itself, just as in remembering an event I
once lived through I am conscious of the event and not of some image
as its present surrogate. What I phantasy or remember is the thing itself,
though the thing is not something present (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII,
162; 2005, 193).
Phantasy, then, resists assimilation or reduction to image consciousness or to any other form of intentionality. It is an ultimate mode of intuitive
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objectivation just like perceptual presentation (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII,

86; 2005, 93). This is equally true of memory and expectation. They are not
species of image consciousness either.
The Mature View of Phantasy (in place by 1910)

If phantasy is not a species of image consciousness, then what does characterize it essentially?
Phantasy, Husserl comes to claim, belongs to the genus of reproduction.
Every reproduction is a modification (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 559;
2005, 672), and therefore phantasy is a modification as well, or, as Husserl
often puts it, a modified consciousness (ibid., 546; 659), which, like every
other modification, is consciousness of . . . (ibid., 559; 672).
Modified has an obvious sense when applied to phantasy. With respect
to the phantasied object, it means not actual; with respect to the act, it
means not related to what is actual. Consciousness in the mode of phantasy does not constitute existing or actual objects: There are no phantasy
objects = existing objects; there are no existing phantasy worlds. The most
we can say is that phantasy objects are possible objects; phantasy worlds
are possible worlds (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 558; 2005, 671). But the
image theory of phantasy would grant that too, so there must be something
more to the claim that phantasy is modified consciousness-of.
We noted that when Husserl surrendered the image theory of phantasy,
he embraced the view that phantasy is a direct, unmediated consciousness
of its object; that is, it does not depend on a mediating image standing
between it and the object phantasied. We also noted that he makes the
same claim about memory at this time. The rejection of the image theory, however, does not mean that phantasy, or memory, is not a mediated
experience in another sense. Husserl points to this when he writes that
by modified consciousness of we understand a consciousness in which
something objective is intended as if it were being actually experienced
or had been actually experienced, and so on, although in reality it is not
being actually experienced, not being perceived, not being remembered,
etc. What is phantasied is intended as if [it were] existing (Husserl 1981
Hua XXIII, 546; 2005, 659). This characteristic of the as if is not hidden;
one is aware of it when one has a phantasy, which is one reason why phantasy is not hallucination.
The clue to grasping Husserls mature view of phantasy is to be found in
his new conception of memory as imageless intentionality, which emerged
55
roughly in parallel with his revised understanding of phantasy. Husserl

holds that memory intends both a past object and the act in which I originally perceived the object. It is by reproducing the earlier perceptual act,
not by producing an image, that I am able to recall the past object. This is
memorys double intentionality (Husserl 1966 Hua X, 53f; 1991, 55f).
I recall the past object or event by remembering the past act that originally
intended it. I do not intend the two in the same way, of course. Unless I
choose to reflect on it in a new and distinct thematizing act, my consciousness of the past act is nonobjectivating, while my awareness of its object is
objectivating. This mediation is quite different from the mediation that
occurs in image consciousness. No image intervenes between the act of
memory and what is remembered. It is the remembered act that becomes
the medium through which I become aware of the past object. Phantasy,
on Husserls mature view, achieves its consciousness of the phantasied
object in the same way, that is, by reproducing an act. But here everything
occurs in the mode of the as-if. Phantasy does not reproduce an act that
I actually experienced in the past, as happens in memory. The act reproduced in phantasy is an as if perceiving, an act that mimics perception
but does not actually perceive anything and never has or will perceive anything. Both it and its object are given in the manner peculiar to phantasy.
If I have an intuitive phantasy of a castle, the castle appears to me from
one side, in varied lighting conditions, and so on, precisely as if I were
perceiving it, for it is perception that originally presents an object from
a particular side and under definite lighting conditions (Husserl 1981
Hua XXIII, 448; 2005, 531). Now since perception is the act that directly
intends an object itself, one can say that by reproducing a perception in
the mode of the as-if, one also intends that quasi-perceptions quasi-object.
To reproduce the perception is to re-present the perceptions objectthe
object itself, not its image. The only indirect or mediated aspect of phantasy, then, is that it directly represents its object by reproducing the act that
intends the object, that is, the act that intends it as if. Hence one can say
that in phantasy one has an original quasi-perceptual as-if giving of the
object itself (ibid., 579; 696).
The as if is the mark that separates phantasy from perception, and
therefore from hallucination. It also separates phantasy from memory, the
consciousness of the past, which bestows on an elapsed present the characteristic of a present that has been, of a present that stands in a definite
relation to the actual now, specifically, in the mode of positing (Husserl
1981 Hua XXIII, 254; 2005, 309). Perception and memory are both positing acts, perception positing its object as actually present and existing,
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memory positing its object as actually past. Both include belief as well.
Pure phantasy, however, is not a positing act, and its belief is only as-if
belief. Mere phantasy in itself is mere modified consciousness (I always
indicate this by the as if). It posits nothing: it merely presents (ibid.,
254; 309), and what it presents is its object, not an image of its object. The
image as opaque mediator between phantasy act and phantasied object
dissolves into a pure intentional consciousness, uncluttered and modified: Consciousness consists of consciousness through and through, and the sensation as well as the phantasm is already consciousness (ibid., 265; 323). The
temptation of the image theory has been overcome.
***
What can we finally say, then, about the role of images in Husserls phenomenology? That he resisted their allure not only as a way of interpreting perception but alsoafter some dallianceas a way of understanding
memory and phantasy. We can say as well that he created a rich phenomenological account of the one place in which images clearly and happily
residein authentic image consciousness, in our experience of such things
as pictures, sculptures, films, and plays.
Notes
1
2
The image theory of perception is naive in this sense as well.

Husserl does discuss one case in which he thinks phantasy can be said to involve
an image distinct from its subject. A scientist might unearth some fossils and then
deliberately fabricate an intuitive representation of a prehistoric species on the
basis of a few distinctive traits suggested by the fossils (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII,
84; 2005, 91). This would be analogous to painting a picture of a prehistoric beast.
Or someonean artist planning a painting that would depict the death of Caesarmight undertake a self-conscious effort to produce an image of a certain
subject. Husserl thinks that such an effort would yield a genuine image representation. I know that the image is not Caesar but only represents Caesar to me as a
more or less satisfactory analogue (ibid., 153; 182). Here, presumably, the distinction between subject and image would be reinstated. These cases represent
artificial situations, however, not what occurs in ordinary phantasy. Furthermore,
it is doubtful whether they are genuine instances of image consciousness; it seems
more likely that they are direct phantasies of an imaging situation, as when an
artist might phantasy a potential picture phantasied precisely as a picture.
The intention in phantasy aims at an object in a direct way (Husserl 1981 Hua
XXIII, 161; 2005, 192).
Chapter 4
From Natural Attitude to

Continuousness, or Logical Conflict?
The object of the present study is one of the most fundamental and recurring problems that Husserl meets in his effort to secure for transcendental
phenomenology an absolute epistemological justification, that is, to develop
a phenomenological critique of phenomenology itself.1 The problem is to
know in what way natural attitude and transcendental attitude are connected with one another. How is their relation to be understood, if it is
indeed at the same time a logical and a methodological relation?
From a logical point of view, there seems to be an opposition, and even a
thorough incompatibility, between the thesis of actual existence implied,
according to Husserl, in the natural attitude of consciousness in nave
world experience, on the one hand, and the phenomenological reduction
as transcendental on the other, since the latter consists in ceasing to hold
to this belief, and in suspending such a thesis. If the phenomenological
reduction is transcendental, it includes a radical epoche toward any actual
reality, which is strictly contrary to the spontaneous realism of the natural
attitude.
But from a methodological point of view, the phenomenological reduction
works as the unique coherent way out of the contradictions of naturalistic
theory of knowledge, and so it is due to replace the natural attitude as an
adequate fundamental position in general epistemology. Therefore, the
natural attitude should in some way or other lead to the transcendental
reduction, since the latter plays the part of a key-mediation between two
symmetrical, and equally possible, attitudes. But, if there must be a methodologically continuous transition between the natural attitude and the
phenomenological attitude, what becomes then, in this practical continuity,
58
of their logical conflict? If these two attitudes contradict one another on the
essential point of the very sense of the being of reality, one of them must
necessarily be true and the other one false. Or, if they are not contradictory, should one suppose that there is a hidden link of dependence between
them, so that the phenomenological attitude, though it seems to free itself
from the natural attitude and its immediate realism, would actually remain
under its dependence, and so tacitly continue it?
So this is a true dilemma, the stake of which is essential. At least, before
endeavoring to reach a decision, we can agree on the following point: Husserls
well-known insistence on the ultimate validity of his radically idealistic interpretation of transcendental constitution urges us to clarify the point, whether
the natural comprehension of being, as ontological independence, is a mere
illusion or, on the contrary, contains a certain amount of truth.
Husserls Official Doctrine:

What is the Natural Attitude?
Let me briefly recall the elements of the problem. First: What does Husserl
call natural attitude? This concept includes a double purport, an intentional and an ontological one. The latter component does not appear until
the transcendentalizing turn of the winter 19061907. Before that, during the years of the Logical Investigations and their publication, this expression of natural attitude names the fact that immediate consciousness is
directed straight toward its objects, in an unreflective attitude. From 1907
on, Husserl adds a second, ontological determination, according to which
the natural attitude consists in taking reality as a mere matter of fact that is
non-problematic and does not deserve being questioned.
In this sense he wrote in his first lecture of May 1907:
The natural attitude of the mind is not concerned with the critique of
knowledge. In such an attitude, our attention is turnedin acts of intuition and thoughtto things given to us, and given as a matter of course,
even though they are given in different ways and in different modes of
being, according to the source and level of our knowledge of them. In
perception, for example, a thing stands before us as a matter of course.
It is there, in the midst of other things, both living and lifeless, animate
and inanimate. That is, it stands before us in the midst of a world.
(Husserl 1973, 15)
Natural Attitude and Transcendental Idealism
59
Husserl characterizes this immediate existence of worldly beings, which is

prior to any kind of knowledge, as being sein an sich, and will then, from
that time on, always designate it with a term already present in the Logical
Investigations, and in the lessons of the subsequent years2 (though with an
adequately different meaning): transcendence. Thus, the general concept of natural attitude is settled rather soon, after 1907, in accordance
with its future classical definition in Ideas I, as the spontaneous belief in the
existence of the world on the mode of transcendence.
The Transcendental Reduction as

Putting Out of Play (Ausschaltung)
The notion of natural attitude enables us to understand the concept of transcendental reduction. Husserls official teachingso to speakdefines
the transcendental reduction as the putting out of play (or switching off)
(Ausschaltung) of the natural attitude. This operation includes two distinct
aspects. It is first an epoche, which consists in suspending our natural
agreement with the so-called unproblematical obviousness of the transcendence of reality. By this epoche the positing of transcendence implied within
perception is not abolished; while consciousness no longer takes part in it,
this act of positing remains present within the subjective experience as one
of its components. However, this first step of reduction is not sufficient. It
protects indeed against the risk of a petitio principii in accounting for the
possibility of knowledge,3 but it does not establish the necessary critique of
knowledge itself. What is still needed within these previously suspended
datathis is the second aspectis a reflection upon the cognitive act, which
lets these first phenomenal data appear, and appear as conscious experiences of the living ego. Thanks to this reflective self-apprehension of the
living act of perception, this perception, through which reality appears
as transcendent, appears itself to the perceiving ego as his act, and so the
reductive parenthesizing of transcendence leads directly to the manifestation of the unbreakable functional solidarity that links the appearing
transcendence of the perceived thing with the subjective operation of the
intentional act of consciousness, and with the identification syntheses that
this act performs. As a consequence, the object formerly perceived as transcendent is brought back to its subjective origin and genesis in the synthetic
and positing activity of the pure ego. This act of bringing back the object
to the noetic act is what Husserl calls the Rckfhrung, which characterizes
exactly the core and essence of the phenomenological re-duction.
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Two Successive Ways of Conceiving and

Practicing the Reduction in Husserls Development.
(19021906 and 1906/19071913)
It must be added, however, that this reductive turning back of reflection
toward the intentional act does not necessarily lead to a transcendental
interpretation of constitution. This is so true that Husserl himself, in a first
stage of his research, from the publication of the Logical Investigations to
the autumn of 1906, began to practice this reductive reflection without any
transcendental tenor. For there are in Husserls writings two different and
successive conceptions of the phenomenological reduction.
The first form of phenomenological reduction is gained by excluding the
transcendent object out of the phenomenological field. He designates it
by expressions like Ausschlu, (exclusion) and stehen lassen or stehen bleiben
lassen (to leave something apart, without any concern about it). The second
one, which was discovered and theorized for the first timeaccording to
Rudolf Bernetat the end of 1906, is a reduction obtained by inclusion:
instead of leaving apart transcendence outside the phenomenological
sphere, it consists in enclosing the transcendent object, such as it is intentionally pointed to, within the intentional experience itself (especially
in the case of perception). The first reductive phenomenology was, as it
were, immanentistic, because it defined phenomenological immanence
according to a Cartesian and minimal understanding of reduction as residing inside the internal space of noetic life and consisting in real (reell)
contents of consciousness. The second phenomenology, by contrast, is
transcendental because, without exceeding the limits of what is actually given to
consciousness and experienced as such (the famous Gegebenheit), it has the
power to account for the conscious genesis of the intentional object as transcendent. In this widened new field of the phenomenological reduction,
thanks to the inclusion of the transcendent object of perception, Husserl
acquired the means to reinterpret transcendence as a form of intentional
immanence. It is this reduction to the data of intentional immanence
which he calls, from that time onwards, Ausschaltung. It is the transcendental
phenomenological reduction.
From Reduction to Transcendental Constitution:

Toward a Foundation of Transcendental Idealism?
In an unpublished note, Husserl wrote down for himself a brief reflection
and comments on his lecture course of the winter term 19061907 (Logik
61
und Theorie der Erkenntnis, Husserl 1984, Hua XXIV), and especially on
the decisive turn he had just accomplished by including the transcendent
intentional object within the field of the phenomena and establishing thereby
his new conception of immanence. In this note we find strikingly clear evidence that, towards Christmas eve of this year 1906, Husserl had already
perceived the far, but direct, ontological consequence of that new conception of intentionality: by becoming transcendental, constitution could not
but lead to an idealism of absolute subjectivity, according to which reality
would rest entirely on the sole foundation of the being of consciousness,
then conceived of as an absolute being. This is exactly what he writesstill
with slight hesitationin the personal note published as Beilage B.XIV in
Hua XXIV.
Not long afterward, in the five introductory lectures of May 1907 where
he expounded for the first time this new theory of consciousness as pure
consciousness, Husserl develops and already systematizes this ontological foresight. In a first step, the gnoseological reduction (although it is
already transcendental, even if Husserl does not call it so yet) secures a
methodical access to the field of pure subjective experiences, the phenomena of phenomenology. Then, in a second step, the descriptive-eidetic
analysis of these typical experiences, in which perceptive objects are given
through adumbrations, results directly in the discovery of the general
ontological theorem: world as a whole is originally constituted in the flow of
absolute consciousness.
Conclusion: Husserls Official Discourse Upon

the Logical Path Leading from the Natural Attitude to
Transcendental Idealism, through the Reduction
This is the logical scheme that will be retained by Husserls official
discourse, when he wants to ascertain a continuous connection between
natural and phenomenological attitude, and explain the way the phenomenological attitude can be established as well as the relation it has with
the general metaphysical thesis that will become the culminating point of
his philosophical position, reiterated into the 1930s. This position is the
well-known thesis of absolute transcendental idealism, solemnly asserted in
section 41 of the Cartesian Meditations.
The logical scheme works as follows: the validation of phenomenological transcendental idealism as an unavoidable conclusion requires the
all-embracing application of constitution, understood as transcendental
62
constitution. But this understanding of constitutive genesis demands, as

a previous step, that one has already taken up transcendental reduction as
a methodical position. So, the phenomenological attitude imposes itself
as the indispensable condition of any understanding and assumption of
Husserlian transcendental idealism.
The Problem of the Motives of

Transcendental Reduction
It is easy to see what problem results from the transcendental reduction.
When we analyze intentional object-experiencesespecially perceptionsit seems that it is already by effectuating the transcendental reduction that we can apprehend these constituting acts as the ultimate and
absolute origin of the very being of those objects (and not only, according to a psychological understanding of phenomenology, as a mere condition of their appearing to an individual subject). In addition, it is this way
of understanding constitutionprecisely as transcendentalthat makes
phenomenological idealism valid. All this makes it difficult to avoid a
fundamental question: What are then the first motives that can impose
such a reduction, that is, understanding the phenomenological reduction as transcendental?
If transcendental reduction is the only and indispensable sesame
that gives access to the field of transcendental life and its pure phenomena, what can convince the natural attitude thinker to adopt such
a theoretical procedure, in which he could not feel simply interested
unless he were already believing in the existence of such a transcendental life, believing that the flow of consciousness possesses such powers? It seems that he should have, paradoxically, already completed the
ontological conversion to which Husserl wants to introduce him. To
put it succinctly, if phenomenology wants to avoid being enclosed in
an impenetrable hermeneutical circle, phenomenology must determine
the concrete conditions of a continuous mediation between natural attitudeas our immediate belief in beings absolute transcendenceand
transcendental reduction.
63
From the Natural Attitude to the Transcendental

Phenomenological Reduction: A Link of
Continuous Motivation
The Idea of Phenomenology: The Access to Phenomenological Reduction Relies on the Presupposition of the Natural Attitude.
The path of logical continuousness is the one that Husserl tried first to follow,
in order to lead without any gap from the natural attitude to the transcendental reduction. He did so in his five lectures in The Idea of Phenomenology.
Indeed, in these lectures the epoche of transcendence is the logical result of
the skeptical crisis into which the perceiving and knowing subject has fallen,
as a direct consequence of natural reflection, that is, of the natural attitude becoming reflective. In the first lecture Husserl writes:
Once reflection on the relation between knowledge and the object is
awakened, abysmal difficulties open up. . . . Thus far, however, we still
stand on the ground of natural thinking.
But it is precisely this correlation between epistemic experience, meaning, and object . . . that represents the source of the deepest and most
difficult problems, which, taken together, comprise the problem of the
possibility of knowledge.
In all of its manifestations, knowledge is a mental experience: knowledge
belongs to a knowing subject. The known objects stand over against it.
How, then, can knowledge be sure of its agreement with the known
objects? (Husserl 1950 Hua II, 1920; 1973, 1617, passim)
This text shows very clearly that the very problem which awakens epistemological skepticism, and in which, consequently, the logical necessity of transcendental epoche originates, cannot appear but in the context of the natural
attitude, and on the basis of its assumed validity. The enigma of the possibility of knowledge, radically understood as the enigma of transcendence
itself, rests upon the psychological opposition between the known object and
knowledge as a mental actan opposition which undeniably includes the
natural thesis of the external world.
Thus, one must conclude from Husserls first methodological foundation
of the phenomenological attitude that the transcendental-Cartesian way
to the reduction in 1907 continues to presuppose, as its implicit and persistent basis, the spontaneous ontological realism of the natural attitude
under the form of a psychological reflection on the acts of consciousness.
64
Ideas I: Transcendental Idealism Comes First.

In Ideas I, Husserl tries to lead his reader from the nave natural thesis to transcendental attitude by following a reverse order of progress: here,
reduction is not presented as a preliminary methodological condition for
the analyses meant to end in his transcendental-idealistic position. Rather,
the double idealistic thesis (as formally stated in 49) must be established
firstthis is the one and final aim of the whole series of analyses developed
from 33 to 48in order to justify and authorize afterward the actual
and definitive practice of transcendental reduction. This reversal becomes
obvious if one takes notice of the fact that, whereas the epoche of natural
attitude had already been defined as soon as 3032, Husserl does not
come to actually operating transcendental reduction until 50, where one
canat last!read:
It is clear now that in fact, as opposed to the natural theoretical attitude
whose correlate is the world, a new attitude must be possible [My emphasis],
which, even when the whole physical nature has been cancelled, lets something remain, that is, the whole field of absolute consciousness. So, instead
of living in a nave way in the experience, and of submitting the empirical
sphere of transcendent nature to a theoretical research, let us accomplish the
phenomenological reduction. (Husserl 1976 Hua III/1, 106. My translation)
Clearly Husserl accomplishes here the phenomenological reduction only
after the principle of the very possibility and legitimacy of the new attitude
has been ascertained. The previous stage consisted in justifying this possibility. The content of this previous stage is summarized in these terms:
So, the usual meaning of the words to be is reversed. The being which
for us comes first, in itself is second, i.e., what it is, it is only relatively to the
first . . . Reality, either reality of a singular thing or reality of the world
taken as a whole, does not imply, by essence (in the rigorous sense we have
adopted) any autonomy. It is not in itself something absolute, which would
be linked secondarily with another absolute; it is, in the absolute sense of
the word, strictly nothing. (Husserl 1976 Hua III/1, 106)
It appears, then, that the content of this former justifying step consists
exactly in establishing transcendental phenomenological idealism. And indeed,
the very last lines of 49 have hardly concluded the whole sequence of the
forecoming analyses ( 34 to 48) by settling the complete ontological relatedness of the real world to consciousness:
65
The whole space-time world has, in virtue of its own sense, a being which
is merely intentional . . . This being is posited by consciousness in its own
experiences . . . as what remains identical through the motivated multiple appearancesbut a being which, beyond this identity is a nothing
[d a r b e r h i n a u s aber ein Nichts ist]. (Husserl 1976 Hua III/1, 106.
Husserls italics)
The metaphysical thesis of transcendental idealism is the foundation on which
rests the legitimacy and right of the phenomenological reduction. It is not the
phenomenological reduction that is the fundamental condition of transcendental idealism. If transcendental idealism can be valid before the reduction,
this implies that transcendental idealism is true without the reduction. But
then, if transcendental idealism is validated and demonstrated on the
basis of a non-reductive epistemological and ontological attitude of mind,
what kind of attitude can that be? Would it be on the basis of the natural
attitude?
Indeed, surprisingly enough, this is the case. Husserl never tires of claiming in the most explicit way that this demonstration of the necessity of
acknowledging realitys radical ontological dependence toward consciousness is rooted in the natural attitude and in its upholding all along
this logical process. By doing so, he wants to give the most striking turn
to what he planned to be a progressive access to transcendental life, as he
will later explain in his Nachwort zu meinen Ideen for the English edition
in 1930.
As a matter of fact, the Fundamental phenomenological considerations
of the Second Section begin on the ground of the natural attitude, opening up with a description of the so-called world of natural attitude. In
fact, as a thorough examination of 27 and 28 shows, Husserl does not
describe the world such as nave natural consciousness conceives it (as
a whole set of transcendent beings, existing on their own, independently of
any knowledge or any knowing subject), but the world of perceptive experience as viewed from the standpoint of descriptive intentional psychology,
which was the scientific standpoint of his Logical Investigations. And it is
indeed within natural attitude that this intentional psychology considers all
spontaneous activities of consciousness. Their active subject is the empirical ego, which is found inside the world quite as much as any other perceptible
thing: Continuously I can find myself [bin ich mir vorfindlich] as somebody
who perceives, represents himself, thinks, feels, desires, etc. (Husserl 1976
Hua III/1, 59 [My emphasis])
66
And the same psychological approach of conscious experiences prevails

in 33 as the fundamental methodological position of the following intentional analyses ( 3538); Husserl writes then:
Let us go straight ahead in our discoveries . . . The starting point of our
analyses will be this I, this consciousness and these experiences which are
given us in natural attitude.
I amI, the man actually existinga real object [in reales Objekt] as other
object included in the natural world. I perform some cogitations, acts
of consciousness . . . and these acts, since they are accomplished by a
human subject, are events situated in the same natural reality. (Husserl
1976 Hua III/1, 67)
On such a basis, reducing the perceived thing to an intentional correlate,
hence the phenomenological reduction associated with the claim that in so
doing nothing from its being would be left apart, would be a kind of transcendental psychologism. But such a psychologistic subjectivism is the exact
opposite of what Husserl thinks he has attained by stating the transcendental idealism of his Ideas I! Hence the necessary hypothesis that, between
the psychological-reflexive start and the new apprehension of conscious
experiences as pure phenomena referred to as transcendental subjectivity, another modification of the original natural attitude must have occurred.
The new problem is then to determine what peculiar modification this is,
and if this new methodological mediation is sufficient to justify the idealistic conversion.
Eidetics
The cognitive process that is meant to enable Husserls intentional reflexive
analyses to escape psychologism and avoid the trap of a non-transcendental (Berkeleyan) idealism is distinctly indicated in two passages of 33,
where Husserl chooses to characterize, anticipatorily, the aim of his preparatory analyses: if these analyses are to unveil a new region of being
(Seinsregion), which is to be apprehended in its specificity (Eigenheit)
because it is characterized by a specific way of being (Eigensein) and
implies an absolute specific essence (absoluten Eigenwesen), they cannot
bear on singular and empirical facts, but on the essence (or eidos) involved
in them, as this essence makes theuniversalspecificity of each empirical fact. To put forth consciousness in general as being by principle a
67
specific region of being is thus only possible in the context of a regional

ontology of experiences of consciousness that is, in an eidetic approach.
That is why in 34, just after characterizing the applied method as psychological reflection, Husserl adds:
Let us immerge ourselves, exactly as though we did not know anything of
the new sort of attitude, in the essence of the consciousness of something; let us obey our general principle according to which each individual event has its essence, that can be seized in its eidetic purity, and that, in
this purity, must belong to the field of a possible eidetic science. In those
conditions, the natural universal fact that I express by saying I am, I
think, I have a world in front of me, etc. implies also its own eidetic
tenor. (Husserl 1976 Hua III/1, 69)
And a little further, in the same passage, we can read:
Let us consider the conscious experiences, with all the concrete content
with which they take place in their concrete sequencethe flow of subjective life . . . It becomes then obvious that in this flow each singular
experience that reflection can point out has an essence of its own, that it is the
task of intuition to apprehend, a content which can be considered in
itself and with respect to its specificity [in seiner Eigenheit fr sich betrachten].
We must apprehend and characterize in general this peculiar tenor of
the cogitatio according to its pure specificity. (Husserl 1976 Hua III/1, 61)
The new methodological device by which Ideas I intends to lead the reader
to the logical necessity of phenomenological transcendental idealism consists in submitting psychical intentional experiences, as objectivated by reflection, to
eidetic intuition or ideation.
Nevertheless, the Logical Opposition Remains.

Psycho-Phenomenological Reduction and
Transcendental Phenomenology
Once the method of eidetic reduction (or ideation4) is adopted and
applied, in the service of an eidetic analysis of living intentional experiences in general, does the phenomenological research still remain on the
ground of psychology? The eidetic study of consciousness is no longer psychology, if one conceives psychology, according to Husserl, as an empirical
68
science that bears only on matters of fact. But one may as well consider it
is still psychology, if one takes into account thatas Husserl repeatedly
underlinesit has not left the ground of the natural attitude, and that,
consequently, the lived experiences to which it keeps related, through the
indirect mediation of the description of their typical essences, are and
remain, undeniably, natural empirical facts.
In this way, the very possibility of realizing through a regional ontology
as an a priori eidetic study of intentional experiences the ontological transition from natural to transcendental attitude appears dubious and problematic. Husserl himself states it, with great clarity and insight, in the first
version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica article, published in Phenomenological
Psychology:
A psychology could not be the foundation of transcendental philosophy.
Even pure psychology in the phenomenological sense, thematically
delimited by the psycho-phenomenological reduction, still is and always
will be a positive science: it has the world as its pre-given foundation. The
pure psyches and communities of psyches that it treats are psyches that
belong to bodies in nature that are presupposed, but simply left out of
consideration. Like every positive science, this pure psychology is itself
transcendentally problematic.
But the objectives of a transcendental philosophy require a broadened
and fully universal phenomenological reduction (the transcendental
reduction) that does justice to the universality of the problem, and practices an epoche regarding the whole world of experience and regarding
all the positive cognition and sciences that rest on it, transforming them
all into phenomenatranscendental phenomena. (Husserl 1968 Hua
IX, 248249 [My translation])
As we can see here, this paradoxical situation imposes a necessary distinction between two phenomenological reductions based on two fundamental differences. The first difference is ontological, since the second
reduction (the transcendental one) objectivates and questions the implicit
determination of being that the first reduction (the psychological one)
presupposes; and the second difference is of a logical and epistemological nature: for only transcendental reduction is universal, enlarged beyond
every limitation, so as to reduce the complete whole of all subjective intentional life (all the positive cognition and sciences) and all its correlates (the
whole world of experience). This difference in the ontological position
and epistemological scope is also reflected in a corresponding opposition
69
between the two sorts of subjectivity that each of these reductions reveals,
as to both their respective essence and their function:
What results is the theme and method of present-day transcendental
phenomenology. Instead of a reduction merely to purely psychic subjectivity (to the purely mental part of man in the world), we get a reduction
to transcendental subjectivity by means of a methodical epoche regarding
the real world as such and even regarding all ideal objectivities as well.
(Husserl 1968 Hua IX, 249 [My emphasis])
However, even though both phenomenological disciplines are separated
from the standpoint of their senseof the meaning of their fundamental ontological position, of the scope covered by the reductive procedure,
of the functional meaning of the subjectivity involvedthey nevertheless
strictly coincide as to their object, in its singular identity. Because their operation bears on exactly the same thing, numerically and eidetically identical:
In a certain way, purely psychological phenomenology in fact coincides
with transcendental phenomenology, proposition for proposition, except that
what, under their respective assertions, we understand by the phenomenologically pure [realm] is, in the one case, the psychic, a stratum of being
within the naturally accepted world, and, in the other case, the transcendental-subjective, where the sense and existential validity of the naturally
accepted world originate. (Husserl 1968 Hua IX, 250 [My emphasis])
A little further on, Husserl states more precisely that the methodological
parallelism of both phenomenologies is a consequence resulting out of
the parallelism between both spheres of experience, transcendental and
psychological. Now, this parallelism itself, as such, is not a consequence
of the identity of the contents concernedthe rough or immediate contents of self-experiencebut, obviously, of the fact that these contents
of subjective life are liable to be apprehended in two different and rival
ways. So, it is indeed the effect of the possibility and necessity of an attitude
modification. Hence the conclusion that it is this shift in the apprehensive
attitude which must finally be clarified, because everything else depends
on it.
The transition from psycho-phenomenological reduction to transcendental reduction, which this attitude modification is to operate, is
finally motivated by the appearing of what Husserl calls the transcendental problem. When he comes to the point of precisely and descriptively
70
determining the specific nature of reduction understood as transcendental,

he points out, as its distinguishing property, that this reduction is realized
through a certain epoche, which is merely a consequence of the universal
epoche implied in the meaning of the transcendental problem:
We would like to proceed here by introducing the transcendental reduction as built on the psychological reductionas an additional part of the
purification which can be performed on it any time, a purification that is
accomplished once more by means of a certain epoche. This is merely a consequence of the all-embracing epoche which belongs to the meaning of the transcendental question. (Husserl 1968 Hua IX, 293 [My translation. My emphasis])
There is, thus, a continuous and direct relation between the nature of the
transcendental problem and the essential sense of transcendental reduction: for this problem implies, as belonging to its very and proper meaning, a
universal epochehence, the epoche of all knowledge of mundane reality
which provokes, as a simple consequence, the implicit practice of that
methodical and voluntary epoche designated in Ideas I as the transcendental
reduction itself. In other words, the systematic epoche, which is a transcendental reduction, is itself nothing else but a taking over of the universal
epoche of objective knowledge, under the form of a deliberate, reflective and
voluntary attitudethat is, as a method. This objective knowledge already
belongs to the logical content of the transcendental problem. One may
thus claim that the transcendental phenomenological reduction is both
motivated and foreshadowed within the structure of this problem.
The Question of the Attitude Shifting:

Its Nature and Its Effects
What is, then, the original motive that makes the transcendental question
problematical? This problematicity has in fact a double origin. On the one
hand, it originates in the fact that consciousness is pre-apprehended at first
as a closed inner sphere. On the other, the problem results from the fact that
subjective intentional activity becomes the object of a reflective thematizing
look, which makes it become an immanent object. Let me explain.
What first conjures up the difficultythe problemis the fact that
experience and knowledge, conceived as merely subjective acts appear
incapable (even when reaching the utmost and plainest obviousness) of fulfilling the program inscribed in their very essence, that is, to reach and
seize beings as really existing beyond subjectivity. The problematic character of
71
the transcendental problem implies then, indeed, the ontological presupposition that being is absolute transcendence, and that, by contrast, subjectivity is a lesser being, limited by the necessary link binding all its objects to
act-consciousness. This limitation is clearly designated, in Husserls text, by
the metaphorical simile of an inner closed space: every meaning it has for us
is conscious in our proper inner perceptive life . . . Every being is validated
within ourselves . . . (Husserl 1968 Hua IX, 288 [My translation. My italics]).
Now, presupposing the conception of being as absolute transcendence
is none other than the natural attitude itself. So, the apprehension of subjectivity, and subjective knowledge, as being a problem that manifests itself
as transcendental problem, is nothing but an avatar of the natural attitude,
and consequently depends on its implicit persistence, as lastingly valid. It is
to be noted that the natural attitude does not by itself give rise to such a
problem: the problem arises only as a result of an essential modification
of the spontaneous modality of the natural attitude: the conversion into a
reflective attitude.
It now appears that the intentional operation that raises the original problem out of which the transcendental reduction will spring is exactly identical
to psychological reflection, as the fulfillment of psycho-phenomenological
reduction: the presupposition of natural transcendence accompanied by
reflective objectivation of experienced conscious acts. But where is the
difference?
Universality: All-Inclusiveness of Transcendental Reduction

Husserl states it clearly: the difference consists in the universal extension of
the reflective objectivation, that is, in its ability to include absolutely everything. It is an all-inclusiveness, which means at the same time global and
without any exception: To the essential sense of the transcendental problem belongs its all-inclusiveness [Universalitt], the all-inclusiveness in which
it places in question the world and all the sciences investigating it (Husserl
1968 Hua IX, 288 [My translation. My emphasis]). The difference between
psychological reductive reflection and the reflection that generates the
transcendental problem lies in the fact that the former reflects only this
or that individual momentary act, for example the perception I am now
experiencing. Never can psychological reflection embrace at a time, as a
whole and at once, with the simultaneity and unity of a reflection involving every conscious activity, actual and possible, without any exception, the
total infinite whole of all subjective life. The transcendental problem, by contrast, arises out of a general (allgemeinen; indeed, universal) conversion
72
of natural attitude. The reflective look, when consciousness turns out to

consider itself and so gives rise to the transcendental problem, is no more
bound and limited to a peculiar theme:
As soon as the theoretical interest abandons this natural attitude and, in
a general turning around [in einer allgemeinen Blickwendung] of our regard
directs itself to the life of consciousness, in which the world is for us precisely the world which is present to us, we find ourselves in a new cognitive
attitude. (Husserl 1968 Hua IX, 288 [My translation. My emphasis])
Now, the strict universality of this way of objectivatingthe ability to
ensure a priori the absolute absence of the least exceptionrelies on its
eidetic character. The proper theme of the reflection which gives birth to
the transcendental problem is the eidos of conscious experience in general (berhaupt), of objective sense and mundane object, as identical
contents embracing the whole infinite extension of the corresponding
empirical cases.
Radicality
Nevertheless, the all-inclusiveness of this reflection has still another dimension. Its generality is completed by radicality. Whereas psycho-phenomenological reduction leaves out of the reach of psychological reflection the
whole field of being in itself as a characteristic ontological feature of mundane beings,
Every acceptance of something as validly existing is brought about within
ourselves; and every evidence establishing it, in experience and theory, is
operative in ourselves, habitually and continually motivating us. This
applies to the world in every determination, even that which is self-evident,
and which entails that what belongs to the world, be it in itself and for
itself as it is and whether or not myself or anybody happens to be aware
of it. (Husserl 1968 Hua IX, 288 [My translation])
This radicalization of the reduction requires, then, that the ontological
dimension of being in itself be nothing more, when considered in its
essence (eidetically), than an element or content of sense. However, this
latter requirement of transcendental reduction, now discovered as a radicalized version of psycho-phenomenological reduction, is already a reductive
73
process, since it implies the equivalence of absolute ontological transcendence and intentional correlativeness!
In becoming aware of this implicit condition, we reach the decisive point
of the interpretation of the link between natural attitude and transcendental reduction. The universal reflection meant to give access to transcendental subjectivity implies, as an inner moment, and as the condition of the
radicalization that gives the psychological reflection its transcendental meaning, a preliminary and implicit ontological reduction, before any phenomenological one. This (tacit and unthematic) ontological reduction consists
in presenting as equivalent real transcendence and intentionally posited
transcendenceor in simpler terms: transcendence and objectivity.
Two consequences must be drawn out of these remarks:
(1) The very access to transcendental subjectivity (to subjectivity conceived
as transcendental) does not take place by passing to the phenomenological attitude, but already takes place before this passing, before the
enigmatic transition from one attitude to the other: in the first universal reflection on the life of consciousness, which is the origin and principle of its motivation.
(2) This universal reflection is at the same time the source of the transcendental problem and is even the transcendental reduction itself. It is
to the implicit accomplishment of a true ontological reduction that universal reflection owes this remarkable ability to anticipate what seems to
be its mere result.
Again the problem of motivation: the dialectics

of motivation, between natural attitude and
phenomenological attitude.
The logical relation between the methodical and ontological attitude of
what Husserl calls pure phenomenologythat is, phenomenological
psychologyand the attitude of transcendental phenomenology is in the
form of a parallelism because, independently of their content, it consists only in the possibility of an hermeneutical transposition. Thus, one may
indeed assert a logical gap, or lack of continuousness, between the fundamental realism of psychological phenomenology and the radical transcendentalism of transcendental phenomenology, since it is impossible to shift
from one to the other, if not by means of a modified attitude.
74
Now, the philosophical claim about the determination of truth impels us

to define the right criteria for a comparative appraisal of the motives that
one can have, to interpret the data of purely descriptive and reflective phenomenology either in terms of an intentional psychology, or, rather, in terms
of a transcendental constitution. We are impelled to choose to operate the
famous and decisive modification of the attitude (Einstellungsnderung).
Again here we have to face, in the last stage of our reflection, the question
of ultimate motivation. But it is no longer with the same meaning. For now,
under that name we do not understand a subjective motive any more. We are
in search of the objective motivating data that work as the necessary conditions for this fundamental shift in attitude.
Now if we look for these objective motives in each of the steps that
have led us to transcendental phenomenology, we find that the relation
between both attitudes reveals itself as dialectical. Let us fi nally characterize in a few words the main stages of this dialectics of phenomenological
motivation.
(a) First: The belief in the absolute transcendence (as being in itself)
of reality is the ultimate datum that makes possible, as its implicit
motive, the transcendental problem, as Husserl defines it. It is this
problem that in turn works as the matrix of the transcendental
conversionand so, of transcendental reduction, which becomes
itself stable and enduring, under the form of the transcendental
attitude.
At this stage, one may stress the fact that nothing but the implicit upholding
of the natural attitude objectively motivates the reductive modification, in
the sense that it makes it possible (through the transcendental problem)
and necessary (in order to escape the skepticism of a mere psychological
reduction).
(b) Once we are established in this attitude of transcendental reduction,
subjectivity is revealed to itself as original constitution of the transcendence of the world. Now, the relation of motivation reverts itself: it is
the constituting life, apprehended in a transcendental sense (as radical
and universal) that is the motivating power. It is this transcendental
life that noetically motivates, through its constituting syntheses, the
act of positing the world and its actual reality. Hence Husserls claim
about the subjective foundation of the natural attitude, as the thesis of
natural world.
75
At this second stage, the relation is reversed: it is now the natural attitude
that appears motivated, as far as it is dynamically constituted, through the
intentional genesis. This is the moment of Husserls last ontological position: it is the moment of transcendental phenomenological idealism.
(c) However, the original constitution of transcendence relies, in its turn,
on motivating conditions. The conditions that allow this original noetico-noematic genesis are of two kinds: first, this constitution requires a
formal condition: the original proto-donation of the living present; secondly, it requires also a material condition: the original proto-donation
of new pure qualitative contents, as the matter or content of each new
original impression (Urimpression).
Now, it is the absolute emerging of this new qualitative content, utterly
unforeseeable in itself, that finally plays the ultimately decisive part in the
process of passive and original constitution of the things and the world.
This is because it is the event of this new pure content that motivates and
directs the course the apprehension synthesis will have to take and to
follow, in order to give some intelligibility to perceptual experience and
to the object. Thus, the most radical motivation of transcendental genesis
belongs to an under-egological source, toward which transcendental subjectivity cannot but be passive. Subjectivity has neither any control of this
source and of its original productions nor any initiative in respect of it.
This source of primeval impressions and of time is within us although it
works without us. It is before us, before any constitution of any ego and of its
possible world, since it is the original source of both egological consciousness and things.
(d) So, finally, the motivating relation reverses itself again, and this time
in favor of a new kind of transcendence. This sort of transcendence is
new, because it escapes radically, right from the origin, the dual
opposition between world and consciousness, between natural attitude and transcendental attitudeat least, as far as we understand
this last phrase according to Husserl, that is, in the context of his
transcendental idealism. This new radical transcendence is, at the
same time, on this side and beyond the whole process of phenomenal
appearing. Consequently, this transcendencewhich deserves to be
qualified as absoluteoriginally neutralizes the claim of transcendental subjectivity to be an absolutely closed, and self-sufficient, sphere
of being.
76
Notes
1
See: Instead of dealing here with further and ultimate problems of Phenomenology, we preferred to outline in their main features the immensely difficult
problems of the first phenomenology, somehow still affected by a certain naveness . . . We preferred it to the whole investigations forming the self-criticism of
phenomenology, which aims at determining its scope, its limits, but also the
modes of its apodicticity. It is precisely a brief sketch of such a transcendental
self-criticism of the meaning and scope of transcendental phenomenology,
viewed as universal ontology, that we endeavour to outline here (Husserl 1999,
Conclusion, 63).
In particular in the lectures of the winter semester 19011902 (unpublished manuscript F I 19).
As Ingarden had perfectly understood from the very beginning (see his comments
on the Cartesian Meditations; and also the Husserlian fundamental project of a critique
of knowledge, as Husserl conceived of it as early as September 1906 (Husserl 1984
Hua XXIV, Beilage B IX, Personal remarks of 1906, September 25).
As defined and exemplified in the lessons of Phenomenological Psychology: see
Husserl 1968 Hua IX, 9 and 10, 7293; and according to the terminology of the
4th version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica article, section 4. See 284285.
Part III
Heideggerean Variations
Daseins Opening, Disclosure, and the
History of Being
Chapter 5
Heideggers Hermeneutical Critique of

Consciousness Revisited
Burt C. Hopkins
In what follows, I will take fundamental issue with Heideggers critical

claim that Husserls reflective and eidetic method is incapable of overcoming its ontological limitations. The ontological limitations that Heidegger
claims are inseparable from Husserls reflective and eidetic method concern the structural limitations that condition their exclusive focus on discovering what there is to be discovered in entities with their perception.
What is excluded by this focus is supposed to be the way to be of entities
when they are not being perceptually apprehended and the interrogation
of the meaning of their Being that is presupposed by this exclusive mode
of their apprehension. Heideggers shorthand for this exclusive mode of
apprehension is discovery and for that which it excludes disclosure. For
Heidegger, then, entities are discovered and their Being and its meaning is
disclosed. Husserls reflective and eidetic method (and not just his but any
such method) is on Heideggers telling limited to the pure seeing of what
can be discovered in entities, to what, Heidegger assures us, the Greeks
(and presumably both Plato and Aristotle) understood as pure appearance,
eidos in the sense of their outward look. Because of this, Husserls method
is therefore supposed to be cut off from the disclosure of the Being of entities and the interrogation of both the meaning of their Being and that of
Being overall (berhaupt).
Rather than try to show that a reflective and eidetic phenomenological
method can, indeed, disclose the Being of entities and interrogate the
meaning of their Being, I will examine the phenomenological method
Heidegger proposes is necessary in order to advance phenomenology
beyond the limits posed by Husserls method. This will allow me to examine Heideggers critical methodical claims without necessarily presupposing the suppositions that guide them, namely, that the Being of entities is
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the most fundamental philosophical theme and that the question of the
meaning of Being overall is philosophys most basic question. This manner of approaching Heideggers critique will also allow me to examine
the presupposition that is implicit in his claim that ontology is only possible as phenomenology: it is only as ontology that philosophy is possible.
The Phenomenological Distinction between

Fundamental and Universal Ontology
Heidegger formulates the method of what he characterizes as the preliminary concept of phenomenology in terms of a hermeneutic of
Dasein, wherein what is meant by hermeneutic is the interpretation
(Auslegung) of the phenomenological self-showing of Dasein as an entity
together with the meaning of Being that properly belongs to this entity.
What makes this concept of phenomenology preliminary is its function
to establish the horizon for what Heidegger characterizes as the idea
of phenomenology, in which he projected (but never developed) the
working out of an existential concept of science (Heidegger 1979, 357;
1962, 408) by clarifying the meaning of Being and the connection
between Being and truth. Heidegger calls the ontology executed under
phenomenologys preliminary concept fundamental ontology, to indicate its thematic focus on making known (kundgebegen) (ibid.) to the
understanding of Being that belongs to Dasein itself (ibid., 37; 62) the
proper meaning of its Being together with its basic structures (ibid.).
Opposed to fundamental ontology is the universal ontology projected
by Heidegger, in the guise of the idea of phenomenology, in order to
investigate entities other than Dasein and the meaning of Being overall. Heidegger envisaged the universal ontological interrogation of
the Being of entities to issue from within the horizon for all further
ontological research (ibid.) exhibited by the results of fundamental
ontology.
Heidegger positions the explicitly interpretative meaning of the method
guiding the preliminary concept of phenomenology in explicit opposition
to Husserls method, when he states, that the methodological meaning
of phenomenological description is interpretation (Heidegger 1979, 36;
1962, 61). By interpretation he means the business of wresting from the
objects of phenomenology their encounter in the mode of phenomenon,
which is to say, making these objects manifest in their self-showing. Thus,
in contradistinction to Husserls reflective and eidetic phenomenological
Heideggers Hermeneutical Critique
81
method, the very structure of which assumes (according to Heidegger) that

the objects of phenomenology are either already present and available for
phenomenological cognition or, if presently unavailable, that they can, in
principle, always be made available, on Heideggers view the proper objects
of phenomenology are proximally and for the most part unavailable in
terms of their self-showing.
By the objects of phenomenology Heidegger means the Being of
entities generally, and the Being of the entity Dasein in particular. What
phenomenology has taken into its grasp thematically as its object
(Heidegger 1979, 35; 1962, 59) is something that demands to become a
phenomenon in a distinctive sense, in terms of its own most proper content
[Sachgehalt] (ibid.). And this can only mean that, at the outset, the object
of phenomenology in Heideggers sense is not yet properly a phenomenon
but, rather, precisely something that requires hermeneutic phenomenologys methodical intervention in order to be brought to its self-showing.
Strictly speaking, then, for Heidegger, phenomenologys methodical concern is not with the Being of entities but with the phenomenon of the Being
of entities. Heidegger situates this concern within the context of two basic
claims. One, the question of Being and its urgency for philosophy as the
fundamental question is something that needs to be reawakened. Two, the
primary meaning (ibid., 37; 62) of the hermeneutical character of phenomenology, as the method proper to fundamental ontology, is an analysis of the existentiality of existence (ibid.).
The basis of Heideggers first claim is his view that despite sustaining the
avid research of Plato and Aristotle (Heidegger 1979, 2; 1962, 21), the question of Being has from then on ceased to be heard as a thematic question of
actual investigation (ibid.). His second claim grows out of his formulation
of the question of the meaning of Being on the basis of the structural
moments belonging to a question in general. According to Heidegger,
questioning, as a seeking, is guided by what is sought, which is an entity
with regard to the that and how of its Being (ibid., 5; 24). The seeking
inseparable from questioning has three moments: that which is asked about,
that which is interrogated, and that which is to be found out by asking the
question. After articulating the formal structure of the question of the
meaning of Being in terms of these three structural moments, Heidegger
then establishes both the ontic and ontological priority of the analysis of
the structure of the Being of the questioner as the point of departure for
the investigation of the meaning of Being overall. He does so by making
transparent (ibid., 5; 25) all the constitutive characters of the question
itself (ibid.) in a manner that, he claims, establishes this priority.
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The Circular Structure of the Questioning and

Question about the Meaning of Being
In the question of the meaning of Being, what is asked about is that which determines entities, Being; what is interrogated are these entities themselves in regard
to their Being; and what is to be found out by asking the question is the meaning
of Being. Heidegger maintains that despite the ignorance of the meaning of
Being that is inseparable from the formal structure of asking the question about
this meaning, three things can be established about Being by attending to this
structure. One, that the very asking of the question presupposes the average
and vague understanding of Being by the questioner. Two, that what is asked
about, the Being of entities, is not itself an entity. And, three, that the entity
that asks the question has a priority over all other entities.
The average and vague understanding of Being by the questioner means
that this entity is already determined in its Being without the availability
of the explicit concept of this Being. Heidegger characterizes this determination as existence, in the precise sense that the questioners way to
be is something that is always in question for it, and, as such, an issue.
Thus the relation between this entitys questioning of Being and the question of Being is a concrete circle, insofar as what is asked about in its
questioning is something that it alreadyin a pre-conceptual manner
understands. Heidegger insists that this way of working out the connection
between questioning and the question in the case of the meaning of Being
is not a circular proof, and he also maintains that the questioners preconceptual understanding is what is behind both its ontic and ontological
priority for answering the question about this meaning. The questioner
is ontically prior because its Being, as an entity, is defined by existence. It
is ontologically prior because the pre-conceptual understanding of Being
definitive of its existence includes an understanding of the Being of all
entities unlike itself (Heidegger 1979, 13; 1962, 34).
Now it is precisely this ontico-ontological priority of the questioner that
Heidegger maintains deprives of its priority Husserls understanding of
phenomenological cognition. Because what is asked about in the question
of the meaning of Being is not an entity, Husserls reflective and eidetic
method, which is limited in its very structure (according to Heidegger) to
describing that which can be discovered in entities on the basis of consciousness intentional (and therefore perceptual) comportment toward them,
is incapable of interrogating the understanding of Being characteristic of
the existence of the entity whose very existence makes possible the disclosure of the Being of entities that makes possible, in turn, their discovery. In
direct opposition to Husserls articulation of the basic structures of entities
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in terms of their categorial or (equivalently for Heidegger) eidetic structure, Heideggers hermeneutic of Dasein articulates the structure of its
existence, or, more precisely, the structure of the self-showing (phenomenon) of its existence, in terms of what he calls existentialsstructures
of existence. Thus, not only does it have to be said that for Heidegger the
proper object of phenomenology is not the Being of entities but the selfshowing of this Being, it also has to be said that it is not the self-showing per
se that is of concern for him, but its structure. As mentioned, because this
self-showing is proximally and for the most part unavailableat least, initiallyphenomenological description assumes the guise of interpretation
according to Heidegger. For our purposes, the consideration of one such
interpretation, namely, of the existentials that structure what Heidegger
terms the wherein of intelligibility, meaning, will be considered with
a view to answering the following questions: What is the understanding
of structure that guides Heideggers existential analytic disclosure of the
basic structures of the there wherein the Being of entities is disclosed?
And what is the source of the sight that thematizes and presumably grasps
or otherwise makes known these basic structures?
Heideggers indefinite postponement of the

discussion of the connection between categories and
existential structures
We have seen that Heidegger initially establishes the structure of the question about the meaning of Being and the ontico-ontological priority of
the Being of the questioner on the basis of appeals to the formal structural
moments of, first, any question, and then, the question of the meaning of
Being. Curiously, especially given their importance for Heideggers ontological refashioning of phenomenology, the status of the formality of these
formal structures is not addressed by him. But Heidegger does address,
if only to postpone indefinitely, an account of the connection between
the self-showing of the existence structure (Existenzstruktur) (Heidegger
1979, 45; 1962, 71) of Dasein, which as a whole is composed of being
characters determined by the existentiality of its existence (ibid., 43;
69), and that of the categories of the tradition, which refer to the what,
the presence, of an extant (Vorhanden) entity whose being character is
other than existence. Not until the horizon for the question of Being has
been clarified (ibid., 45; 71) can the connection between these modes of
being characters be dealt with (ibid.) and, as mentioned, Heidegger never
realized the project of a universal ontology that was to take its departure
from this horizon. Hence, he never addressed this connection.
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This is significant on two related counts. First, in Heideggers reformulation of phenomenology it is not clear what the relation is between
the ontologically restricted categorial structures of the what, which,
according to Heidegger, both defi ne Husserls method and determine
its phenomenological limits, and the existential structures in which the
Being of the there holds itself (Heidegger 1979, 142; 1962, 182). Thus,
Heideggers account of the existential structures that guide the hermeneutic clarification of the horizon for the question of Being does not
address precisely how, in its self-showing, the structural moment of a
category is to be distinguished from the self-showing of the structural
moment of an existential. And, second, related to this structural issue,
precisely how Heideggers hermeneutic method achieves access to existential structures remains a mystery. For Husserl, as is well known, the
reflective thematization of a multiplicity is clearly requisite for the seeing and apprehension of the categorial structure of an entity. What
about the seeing guiding Heideggers hermeneutic method? As mentioned, he clearly understands reflection as a derivative manner of securing access to the structure of phenomena. But does he also reject the
requirement of a multiplicity, which for Husserl provides a basis for the
comparisons from out of which the structure of a phenomenon is uncovered? As we will see from our consideration of Heideggers account of the
existential structures within which the there holds itself, he remains
silent about the methodical role of multiplicity in the logos of the phenomenology of Dasein (ibid., 36; 61f), which, as we have seen, has the
character of hermneuein (ibid.).
The Structural Whole of Daseins Most

Basic Phenomenon is a Phenomenal Multiplicity
But that the structural whole (Heidegger 1979, 180; 1962, 225) of the
most basic phenomenon proper to Dasein is composed by a phenomenal
multiplicity (Vielfltigkeit) (ibid.) is something to which Heidegger calls
explicit attention. This phenomenon, being-in-the-world, characterizes
the way that Dasein, qua existing, is its there: as the clearing that makes
possible the encounter with entities, both like and unlike the entity Dasein.
Heidegger writes that being-in-the-world is a structure which is originally
and constantly whole (ibid.) even if the unified phenomenological view of
the whole as such (ibid.) is easily distorted because of this very multiplicity.
One crucial component of the phenomenal multiplicity is the existential
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structure of understanding (Verstehen). Understanding for Heidegger

is manifestly not a mode of knowing that arises first from immanent selfperception (ibid., 144; 184), but rather pertains to the most basic composition of being-in-the-world, which is tied to the understanding of
Being that is inseparable from Daseins existential character of being.
As an existential structure of this character of being, understanding is
not versed (Gekonnte) (ibid.) in a what (ibid.) but in the disclosure of
Daseins relation to itself and to inner-worldly entities with which it deals
for the sake of itself (ibid.). This relation is most originally manifest in
terms of definite possibilities from which Dasein cannot escape and upon
which it, as existing, has itself always already projected (ibid., 145; 185)
the surge (dringt) (ibid.) of its understanding qua its being-in-the-world.
Projection is therefore the existential structure which the understanding has in itself (ibid., 145; 184f).
The projective character of understanding, in turn, makes up what
Heidegger characterizes existentially as sight (Heidegger 1979, 146;
1962, 186). This sight is coextensive with the there of Daseins disclosedness, and thus shows itself in both Daseins dealings with innerworld entities and in the orientation towards Being over all, for the sake
of which Dasein is as it is (ibid.). Heidegger sharply distinguishes the
existential structure of understandings projective sight from the traditional seeing that orients philosophy as the way of its access to the
Being of entities. Traditional seeing occurs when understandings projective sight is formalized to yield access in general to entities and to
Being (ibid., 147; 187); this formalization is what is behind Heideggers
claim that [i]ntuition and thinking are both already remote derivatives of understanding (ibid.), including, of course, Husserls pure intuition, which corresponds noetically to the traditional ontological priority
of the extant (ibid.).
Understandings Development as Interpretation:

Meaning as the Wherein of Intelligibility
The whole composed of understandings projective sight has its own
possibility of development (Heidegger 1979, 148; 1962, 188), which
Heidegger calls interpretation (ibid.) Through the recoil [Rckschlag]
(ibid.) of the possibilities disclosed by the understanding, understanding becomes itself (ibid.). Based existentially in understanding,
[i]nterpretation is not the acknowledgement of what has been understood,
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but rather the development of possibilities projected in understanding

(ibid.). This development culminates for Heidegger in meaning [Sinn]
(ibid., 151; 192), characterized as the formal, existential framework of
the disclosedness belonging to understanding. This framework is manifest as the existential fore-structure of Dasein itself (ibid., 153; 195),
whereby interpretation is never the presuppositionless grasping of something previously given (ibid., 150; 191), but rather it is always grounded
in an existential a priori, structured as a fore having, fore sight,
and fore conception. Fore having characterizes the situation whereby
interpretation is always grounded in the understanding of entities, or
Being (ibid., 151; 193). Fore sight characterizes interpretations always
being guided by a perspective that fi xes that with regard to which what
has been understood is to be interpreted (ibid.). And, finally, fore conception characterizes interpretations either drawing the conceptuality
belonging to what is to be interpreted from the entities themselves or
Being itself, or else forcing them into concepts opposed in their kind of
Being (ibid.).
Heideggers account of meaning makes it clear that it is an existential
of Dasein, not a property that is attached to beings. Therefore only Dasein
can be meaningful or meaningless (Heidegger 1979, 151; 1962, 193) and this
means that it has meaning in that the disclosedness of being-in-theworld can be fulfilled through the entities discoverable in it (ibid.). His
account also makes it clear that when we ask about the meaning of Being,
our inquiry does not become profound and does not brood on anything
that stands behind Being, but questions Being itself in so far as it stands
within the intelligibility of Dasein (ibid., 152; 193). And Heidegger is
consistent in the conclusion he draws from this: strictly speaking, what is
understood is not the meaning, but entities, or Being (ibid., 151; 193), from
which it also follows: that [t]he meaning of Being can never be contrasted
with entities or with Being as the supporting ground of entities because
ground is only accessible as meaning, even if that meaning itself is an
abyss of meaninglessness (ibid., 152; 193). That is, because both Beings
meaning and the ground of entities have their locus within Daseins intelligibility, neither can be contrasted with entities or Being per se, because
this intelligibility has its source in the interpretive recoil of the understanding upon itself, the formal meaning structure of which Heidegger
distinguishes from the entities and Being disclosed by the understandings
original projective surge. Finally, Heidegger could not be more clear that
his pursuit of the analysis of the phenomenon of interpretation (ibid.,
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148; 189) in Being in Time, which is the locus classicus for not only his but
the hermeneutic development of phenomenology generally, is limited to
interpretation in the understanding of the world (ibid.). Such interpretive understanding deals exclusively with inner-worldly entities that
are on hand (zuhanden) and have already been understood and interpreted with regard to the mode of Being belonging to entities that are
used in-order-to do something.
What is not at all clear in Heideggers account of the phenomenon of
interpretation, however, are two related issues. On the one hand, there
is the issue of the character of the method that is responsible for making manifest the phenomenal structure of interpretation itself articulated
in his analysis. On the other hand, there is the issue of the precise status of the structural distinctions that emerge in the analysis. To be sure,
ready responses to both these issues are available and, indeed, have been
appealed to for more than eighty years. The character of Heideggers
method is hermeneutical, not reflective, and the structural distinctions are
existential, not categorial. But these responses do not address satisfactorily
the following issues. First, the source of the sight that presumably guides
the phenomenological interpretation that makes manifest the phenomenal
structure of interpretation. Second, precisely how this sight brings about
the thematization of the existential structures Heidegger credits it with
thematizing. And, third, the structural character of the most fundamental
distinction governing his account of interpretation, namely, that between
understanding and meaning.
Because Heidegger restricts his analysis to interpretation in understanding the world, his account of the understandings recoil upon Dasein, such
that this understanding comes to itself interpretatively, deals exclusively
with how an inner-worldly entity comes explicitly into the sight of understanding (Heidegger 1979, 149; 1962, 189). His account of the way it does
so, according to the structure belonging to something as something, is taken
by him to characterize the original as of an interpretation [hermneia]
(ibid.)the so-called existential-hermeneutical as (ibid., 158; 210). The
hermeneutical as, as the structure of interpretation, is contrasted with
the as operative in the determining statement that manifests its explicitness, what Heidegger calls the apophantical as (ibid. ). Any pre-predicative seeing (ibid., 149; 189), therefore, is in itself already understanding
and interpretative (ibid.), and its as therefore does not first show up in
the statement, but is only first stated, which is possible only because it is
there as something to be stated (ibid.).
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The Incompleteness of Heideggers

Analysis of the Interpretative Character of
Phenomenological Description
This account of the hermeneutical as is clearly not presented by
Heidegger as a general theory of interpretation, in the sense of advancing the claim that not just the interpretation of entities on hand in the
world, but any interpretation, whether it be of entities or the Being of
entities, is manifest according to the structure of something as something. As we have seen, he is quite clear that his analysis pertains to
the interpretation of entities that are on hand in the world, as does the
structure of the as. Unaddressed, then, by Heidegger in this analysis
is the interpretationin the sense of interpretation having the methodological meaning of phenomenological descriptionthat functions
both to make explicit and to articulate conceptually the fore structures of
interpretation and its development into meaning in the case of understanding the world. That is, Heidegger articulates these structures and their
development with respect to entities on hand in the world, but not with
regard to the phenomenological interpretation that is carrying out the
analysis of the existentials that structure the interpretive manifestation
of inner-worldly entities. Unaddressed, then, is precisely how these structures of the interpretative understanding of the world show themselves
interpretively to the interpretation characteristic of the phenomenological
method that manifests them. Do they appear according to the structure
of something as something? Perhaps as existential structures, seen
within the perspective of existential structures? Moreover, what is the
source of the sight guiding the phenomenological interpretation? This
sight cannot be the same sight as the sight that structures the seeing
of something as something, because the structure of this latter sight is
something that is being seen by phenomenological interpretation, while
the former sight is the sight doing the seeing of the phenomenological structure being seen. And, fi nally, what about Being? Is the structure
of the interpretation of Being also governed by the structure something
as something? But would this not be analytically impossible on the basis
of Heideggers own distinction between the mode of self-showing of entities and their Being, because the former are discovered while the latter
are disclosed?
Given the incompleteness of Heideggers analysis of interpretation, these
questions are as necessary as they are unanswerable on its basis. Heidegger,
in fact, is himself not entirely unaware of this, as he describes ontological
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investigation as a possible mode of interpretation (Heidegger 1979,

231; 1962, 275), namely, an interpretation [Auslegung], as Interpretation
[Interpretation] (ibid., 232; 275), which becomes an explicit task for
research. His account of ontological Interpretation, which adumbrates
rather than fully caries out such an Interpretation, is very instructive for
our purposes. His account stipulates that the ontological Interpretation of
the Being of an entity must
first bring into the fore having the phenomenal characterization of the
thematic entity, to which the following steps of the analysis must conform. These steps require, however, at the same time guidance through
the possible fore sight towards the mode of Being belonging to the entity.
And this fore having and fore sight then trace out the conceptuality that
will bring into relief the structures of Being. (ibid.)
In the case of the entity Dasein, the ontological projection operative in its
existential Interpretation takes as its clue the presupposed idea of existence as such (Heidegger 1979, 313; 1962, 361), which has the character of
an understanding projection in which
such understanding allows the developing Interpretation of that which is
to be interpreted to come itself into words for the very first time, so that it may
decide of its own accord whether it, as this entity, yields the composition of being
upon which it has been disclosed in projection in a formal indicative manner.
(ibid., 314f; 362)
Heideggers account here, with its reference to the fore structures of meaning, suggests that the analysis of the interpretation of inner-worldly entities
is, in a sense, exemplary, such that even though the theme of the analysis
is interpretation in understanding the world, the structure of interpretation made manifest by the analysis would not be limited to this thematic
content. The absence of any reference to the as in Heideggers account of
ontological Interpretation, however, makes it difficult to conclude one way
or the other whether the structure of something as something is limited
to inner-world entities or extends to the phenomenological interpretation
of any existential structure whatever. In the latter case, presumably the
interpretation of Being itself would be made explicit by the as structure,
which, as already mentioned, would mean that the meaning of Being is
structured existentially in the same way as the meaning of an entity.
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Heideggers Unwitting Exchange of Seeing with

Being Seen in the Existential Structure of Sight
For our purposes, however, settling these issues is not crucial. Even granting that the fore structures of meaning manifest the formal existential
structure of any interpretive understanding whatever of any entity and of
the Being of any entity whatever, Heideggers account of ontological interpretation, as the capital I Interpretation that becomes an explicit task
for research, does not address the issue we have raised about the absence
of an account of the methodical interpretation presupposed by the existential analytic. Rather, his account of ontological Interpretation, as taking its own methodical point of departure from the bringing into its own
fore having the phenomenal characterization of the thematic entity whose
structures of Being are to be traced out in its Interpreation, proceeds as
if the methodical basis of the interpretation that makes manifest this phenomenal characterization has already been secured. That it has not been
secured is patent in Heideggers account of ontological Interpretation
as already operating within what he calls the hermeneutical situation
(Heidegger 1979, 232; 1962, 275), namely, the presuppositions that
belong to every interpretation: fore having, fore sight, and fore conception. Thus rather than provide an account of the methodically interpretive
sight that is presupposed in the being seen of the structures that compose the
hermeneutical situation, Heideggers account of ontological Interpretation
is exclusively concerned with having a fore sight of Being, which must
see it with respect to the unity of the possible structural factors belonging
to it (ibid.). The methodical sight guiding the interpretative method of
either entities or the Being of entities is therefore not only not secured, but
Heideggers account of ontological Interpretation proceeds as if the fore
sight presupposed by the hermeneutical situation is also the source of the
sight that makes this presupposition explicit. In other words, that which,
in his own account of this situation is characterized as an existential structure of the there of Dasein and therefore a structure that is being seen,
is also treated by him as being responsible for the seeing of the methodical sight that makes explicit this structure in its being seen.
What is at issue in Heideggers failure to distinguish sight as an existential
structure that is being seen and sight as the methodical seeing that is
the source of this being seen is manifestly not the circular nature of interpretation as the development of understanding. Getting into the hermeneutical
circle in the proper way prescribed by Heidegger, such that understanding
is projected on the fore structures of meaning as the wherein of the intelligibility of anything, does not remedy the failure to distinguish the seeing and
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being seen of an existential structure that is presupposed by his account

of the methodical interpretation that makes explicit the circularity of the
hermeneutical situation. The problem here is not that interpretation and
understanding are related as a circle but rather the unwitting exchange of
what is the same and what is other in Heideggers account of the circularity of
this circle. What is other, the being seen of the existential structure of fore
sight, is taken to be something the same as the seeing that is responsible
precisely for this being seen. Not only is this a mistake, but it is also a mistake
that is not made by the phenomenological method that the hermeneutical
method of phenomenology is designed to supersede. Transcendental phenomenological reflection clearly distinguishes the being seen of the object
made thematic by the reflecting regard of phenomenologys methodical
reflection, the reflected object, from the reflective seeing that is the source of
the thematization accomplished by this methodical regard. The latter is initiated by a reflection whose lived-experience is structurally distinct from the
lived-experience that is reflected upon. Indeed, this distinction is confirmed
by a higher level methodical reflection that encompasses both, the reflected
and the reflecting, and thematizes their structural difference.
The fundamental presupposition of Heideggers

hermeneutical reformulation of phenomenology:
that to the being of entities there belongs a
meaning of being overall
Directly related to the methodical obscurity at the heart of Heideggers
hermeneutical reformulation of phenomenology is the presupposition
responsible for the most fundamental distinction governing its account
of interpretation. This is the distinction between what is understood in
understandingan entity or entities, or Beingand meaning, which,
as mentioned, is not a property attached to entities but the wherein of
their intelligibility. By the presupposition responsible for the distinction
we do not have in mind the supposition that, as objects of the understanding, entities and Being are distinct from their meaning as entities and Being
made explicit in interpretation. Rather, the presupposition that concerns
us is that there is a kind of seeing that is capable of seeing the difference between entities and Being and the meaning of entities and Being.
As we have seen, Heideggers account of the fore having characteristic of
understanding cannot see this difference, because the objects of its understanding are entities, or Beingnot their meaning. And his account of
the formal existential structure of interpretation as meaning rules out the
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possibility that the fore sight of understandings development as interpretation be a candidate for the sight responsible for seeing the difference in
question. This is the case because this sight is a moment of the structural
whole of meaning, while what is at stake in the presupposition we are calling attention to is a sight capable of seeing not just meaning, but also
entities and Being, such that their difference is seen and thus made explicit
as something being seen. Once the fore sight of interpretation is ruled out
as the source of the sight that sees the difference in question here, the conclusion becomes unavoidable that Heideggers account of interpretation
presupposes something other than what can be seen in the fore sight proper
to interpretation, when it posits as fundamental the difference between
that which is understood in understanding and that which is made intelligible in meaning.
The other that is presupposed in the hermeneutical positing of a fundamental difference between entities and Being, on the one hand, and
the meaning of entities and Being, on the other, therefore has the status of a whole that encompasses the distinction between entities, Being,
and their meaning. Because the sight of interpretation cannot surpass
the whereupon of its projection, namely meaning, it must presuppose that,
when entities and Being are understood in understandings fore having,
this understanding is unmediated by meaning; in addition, it must also
presuppose that entities and Being are such as to have a meaning. In the
case of the hermeneutical investigation of the question of the meaning
of Being, then, these considerations lead to the unavoidable conclusion
that Heideggers formulation of fundamental ontology is guided by the
mereological presupposition that to the Being of entities there belongs a
meaning of Being overall.
The mistaking of what is other for the same in fundamental ontologys
account of the seeing and being seen of the fore sight proper to the hermeneutical situation, and the presupposition of something other than what
can be seen by interpretation in its account of the relation between understanding entities and Being and the meaning of entities and Being, is no
doubt what is behind Heideggers abandonment of the explicitly phenomenological phase of his philosophy in 1928. In his own words, the question
of the extent to which one might conceive the interpretation of Dasein . . .
in a universal-ontological way . . . is a question which I myself am not able
to decide, one which is still completely unclear to me (Heidegger 1978,
271; 1984, 210). For the mistaking of the being seen of an existential for
the seeing that is responsible for its being seen makes it impossible for
the interpretation of Dasein to become explicitly ontological, that is, to
93
thematize and eventually conceptualize the existential structures that are

projected as the basis of ontological Interpretation. And the mereological presupposition operative in hermeneutic phenomenology, that to the
Being of entities there belongs a meaning of Being overall, prevents fundamental ontology, in principle, from preparing the horizon for an interrogation of the meaning of Being overall.
Chapter 6
Transformations in Heideggers
Conception of Truth between
1927 and 1930
Lszl Tengelyi
From early on, the question of truth has occupied a central place in
Heideggers thought. By drawing on Aristotle and Greek philosophy he
tries to develop further and appropriate critically Edmund Husserls phenomenological concept of truth. His concern is to show that the original
site of truth is not the proposition. Appealing to the Greek concept of
, he conceives of pre-predicative truth as unconcealment. He also
uses the term openness with a similar meaning. Already in Being and Time
he assigns different concepts of pre-predicative truth to the different modes
of being. For example, he differentiates the being-open (Erschlossenheit) of
Dasein from the being-discovered (Entdecktheit) of the present-at-hand and
the ready-to-hand. In 44 of Being and Time, these reflections take on a
firm shape.
The thought of a pre-predicative truth is in complete harmony with the
way Heidegger determines the phenomenon. If the statement, according
to which the phenomenon is something that shows itself out of itself, is correct, then the phenomenon is from the outset characterized by an unconcealment or an openness. Nevertheless, the openness of the phenomenon
can be concealed or dissimulated. It is in this sense that it is said in Being
and Time: Concealedness [Verdecktheit] is the counter-concept to phenomenon (Heidegger 1979 SZ, 36; 1996, 31 [Translation modified]). The
phenomenon of being, according to Heidegger, is precisely what is concealed and dissimulated. That is the reason why phenomenological ontology, following from the basic approach of Being and Time, can in no way
be confined to a description and analysis of the phenomenon of being but
must resort to a hermeneutic approach. But this approach always already
presupposes a pre-ontological understanding of being. From this it follows
Heideggers Conception of Truth
95
that even the phenomenon of being is characterized by a singular kind of

openness and unconcealedness. In many instances Heidegger in his terminology speaks of a disclosure (or disclosedness) of being. It is not only
an ontic but also an ontological truth that belongs to the pre-predicative
sphere.
However, it is only after the drafting of Being and Time that the distinction
between ontic and ontological truth is linked to the theme of ontological
difference. This theme is indeed first touched upon in the Marburg lecture
The Basic Problems of Phenomenology in the summer semester of 1927. In this
lecture Heidegger also uses the distinction between being and beings to
give the phenomenological reduction, which, in this text, he explicitly
names, a new sense (Heidegger 1989 GA 24, 29; 1982, 21).
These innovations show that Heideggers thinking at this time was still
fully in flux. During the period 19271930, during which the outline of a
metaphysics of Dasein is worked out and which, precisely because of this,
can also be characterized as a metaphysical period, new insights come to
the fore which also transform the earlier conception of truth.
Certainly a lot remains unchanged. At the end of the 1920s, as before,
Heidegger still has in view that very openness of the world that precedes
predication and logos (in the sense of the proposition). Again and again
he points to the pre-predicativeor also the pre-logicalopenness, which
according to him is a condition of possibility for the truth as much as for
the falsity of the proposition. He claims that this pre-predicative openness
is not to be understood as a correspondence between the representation
and the thing itself. It is thus not an adaequatio rei et intellectus but simply
arises out of the self-manifestation of beings out of themselves, along with
their being and thus out of their ability to show themselves as what they are
in themselves.1 Even when Heidegger, in the Freiburg lecture Introduction
to Philosophy from the winter semester of 1928/1929, designates the prepredicative opennessparticularly in its form as the unconcealedness of
beingas transcendental truth (Heidegger 1976 GA 27, 207), it is only
a case of expressing more crisply what he had already thought for a long
time. Still, while the framework remains the same, new questions thrust
themselves into it.
This happens first of all in the above-mentioned Freiburg lecture. Here,
what first becomes the object of new considerations is the relationship of
correspondence between the various modes of being and the concepts of
pre-predicative truth that are assigned to them. It is not the case, Heidegger
insists, that all the beings that are readily accessible to us are unconcealed
in the same manner of openness (Heidegger 1976 GA 27, 83). Assuredly,
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Lszl Tengelyi
there exists a uniform possibility of expression that extends over all occurrent beings (82). This necessarily implies that an analysis of the proposition takes a uniform manner of openness, unconcealedness, truth of
beings (82). However, the proposition is here not a good adviser. For, it
is not even the original site of the truth. It pretends to a uniformity at the
predicative level even though, at the pre-predicative level, we come across
a manifold of heterogeneous modes of openness that correspond to the
different modes of being. Heidegger no longer brings into consideration
just two, but now four, modes of being: presence-at-hand, life, existence
and perdurance (83). (The stone is present-at-hand, the plant and the animal live, the human being exists, and the number perdures.) The idea of a
differentiation of modes of being and their corresponding forms of truth
shows great promise. Despite this, Heidegger never comes around to developing this scheme. He rather contents himself with dealing againalbeit
extensivelyonly with the two extreme modes: presence-at-hand and existence (84). As a consequence, the advance toward a new question remains
confined to a sketch.
The situation is different with two other questions. It is a notable peculiarity of the Freiburg lecture of 1928/1929 that the problem of truth is set
in the perspective of being-with. Heidegger shows that being-with not only
belongs always and necessarily to Dasein, but that this being-with is, in
accordance with its nature, always and necessarily a sharing in the truth
(Heidegger 1976 GA 27, 120). This idea of a shared truth is without doubt
something new in the concept of unconcealedness, but it also acquires
something of a merely supplementary status. By contrast, in the lecture
The Basic Problems of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude from the winter
semester of 1929/1930, Heidegger formulates a self-critique of his earlier
conception of truth. This self-critique grows out of a new insight into the
relationship between truth and freedom.
In what follows, these two changes in the concept of truth as presented in
Being and Time will be given a close consideration. Our reflection will, thus,
be confined to Heideggers metaphysical period from 1927 to 1930.
Truth and Being-with-One-Another

Already in Being and Time, Heidegger starts out with the idea that beingwith belongs to Dasein as an existential (Heidegger 1979 SZ, 120; 1996,
112113). According to this idea, the being of Dasein is from the outset a
being-with-others. Heidegger says: Being-with is an attribute of ones own
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Dasein; Mitda-sein characterizes the Dasein of others in that it is freed for

a being-with by the world of that being-with (ibid., 121; 113). The individuation (Vereinzelung) that is frequently mentioned in Being and Time has
nothing to do with the danger of solipsism, which constantly threatened
the encapsulated, worldless subject of modern philosophy. Rather it
concerns an individuation (Vereinzelung) that presupposes the being of
Dasein with others and thus also the Mitdasein of others. In addition to
this, Heidegger indicates a distinction between existential being-with and
factical being-with-one-another (ibid., 118f; 111112). He allows no doubt
to be cast upon the fact that a lack of being-with-one-another is not connected with a deficiency of being-with. That is to say: The being-alone of
Dasein, too, is being-with in the world (ibid., 120; 113).
Nevertheless the author of Being and Time was already accused immediately after the publication of his work of having isolated Dasein in its
individuation (Vereinzelung) and not adequately focusing on the relationship between Dasein and the other in his investigations. In his last
Marburg lecture Heidegger seems to address this objection when he says:
The approach that begins with neutrality does imply a peculiar isolation
of the human being, but not in the factical existentiell sense as if the one
philosophizing were the center of the world. Rather it is the metaphysical
isolation of the human being (Heidegger 1990 GA 26, 172; 1984, 137).
Thus at this point Heidegger insists on characterizing Dasein in its neutrality through a metaphysical isolation. But he notes immediately that
no solipsistic world-view follows from this as if the one who philosophizes
were the center of the world. In all appearances the expression metaphysical isolation means nothing else than the fact that in the existential
analyticin opposition, for example, to the Platonic tradition or even to
German Idealismno pre-given unity (e.g., no unifying bond of spirit)
binds from the outset the well-understood subject with its co-subjects. What
we have here is a presupposition that is shared by mostperhaps even
allphenomenologists. To name only three thinkers, who have made a
significant contribution to the phenomenology of intersubjectivity, we can
mention the following: Edmund Husserl holds that the lifetime of the self
is separated by an abyss (abgrundtief geschieden)2 from the lifetime of the
other; Jean-Paul Sartre rejects the attempt to derive consciousnesses from
the primordial fission of a spiritual totality as the fragments of a radical
explosion (Sartre 1943, 361; 1956, 300) and Emmanuel Levinas battles
against an original unity of consciousnesses presupposed in the manner of
the French philosophy of spiritthe name of Jean Nabert is mentioned in
the text (Levinas 1990, 182)even if it is to search only in reflection and
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its figures, without actually guaranteeing the possibility of a comprehensive reflection and unity of spirit beyond the multiplicity of souls (ibid.,
199). A separation by an abyss in Husserl, a separation (sparation) in Sartre
and Levinas, a breaking away of consciousnesses (scession des consciences)
in Nabert (Nabert 1955, 115) express the same insight as the metaphysical
isolation of Dasein in Heidegger. But that is only one side of the story. The
other side is the task of making Dasein intelligible in its being-with with
the other. To that end, Heidegger makes a new attempt in his first Freiburg
lecture from the winter semester of 1928/1929 to the extent that he ponders the common givenness of truth as unconcealedness.
However, the argument, in which this reflection finds expression remains
bound to a presupposition that we have to bring out clearly before considering more closely the argument itself. Heidegger is convinced that a
true community can emerge exclusively out of a common affair or task.
Being-with-one-another means for him that the many relate in different
ways to the same thing (Heidegger 1976 GA 27, 91). In the lecture from
1928/1929 Heidegger coins an emblematic expression for this conception.
He gives the example of two wanderers who catch sight of two boulders at
a scree. The text says:
Let us take it that the two wanderers suddenly come around a turn of the
path to an unexpected sight of the mountain so that they are suddenly
enraptured and quietly stand next to each other. There is, then, no trace
of a mutual engagement, each stands rather taken by the sight. Are the
two now just next to each other like the two boulders or are they in this
moment rather in a certain way with-one-another, in a way they would not
be if they were incessantly chatting to each other or even engaging with
each other and surmise their complexes? (Heidegger 1976 GA 27, 86)
These rhetorical questions, whose polemical thrust, as attested to by the
word complex, is directed against psychoanalysis, leads us to the conclusion that can be formulated in the following way: In order for mutual
engagement in general and as such to be possible, being-with-one-another
must be possible beforehand (87). Or more simply: Mutual engagement
is founded in being-with-one-another (87).
The view on the relationship between the self and others, which
Heidegger presents at this point, indicates precisely the point at which
the great minds in the phenomenology of intersubjectivity diverge. This
view is put into question and unilaterally rejected by no smaller phenomenologists than the already mentioned three thinkers, Husserl, Sartre,
99
and Levinas. These thinkers commit themselves to the opposite view,

according to which an explicit comportment of the self to the other,
which is, however, not to be understood from the very outset as a mutual
engagement, can make intelligible how a being-with-one-another, a community, a we is at all possible. Heidegger misunderstands this basic
approach in a fundamental way when he accuses Husserl of accepting
an encapsulated carcass of a subject (Rumpfsubjekt) (Heidegger 1976
GA 27, 140) that at any time fi nds itself in a shell (141) and precisely
for this reason sees itself with the task of going over to its fellow-subjects
through the window of an I-thou relationship (141). In fact, according to Husserl, the fellow-subject is from the very outset given in flesh and
blood in the perception of any given subject; the co-subject is therefore
also there with the subject in Husserl exactly as it is in Heidegger. There
is as little a skeptical problem of other minds for Husserl as for Heidegger;
for both this problem turns out to be a pseudo-problem. That is also
the case with other phenomenologists such as Sartre and Levinas. In
addition to this, we can wonder whether the thought of a being-withone-another, which has to be given from the very outset as the founding
instance of mutual engagement, fully accounts for the insight into the
metaphysical isolation of Dasein or if Husserl, Sartre and Levinas rather
draw the consequences of this fundamental fact, which was also recognized by Heidegger.
Heidegger seems even to give up his earlier terminological distinction
between existential being-with and factical being-with-one-another when
he asserts: in being-alone there is a being-without-the-other; but withoutthe-other is but a specific being-with-one-another. Thus every being-alone
is also a being-with-one-another (Heidegger 1976 GA 27, 118). As we
recall, earlier in Being and Time it is said that being-alone of Dasein is
being-with in the world; now being-alone is really understood as a determinate form of being-with-one-another. The reason for this change arises
as a consequence of the transformation that occurs in Heideggers thinking between 1927 and 1930. The conception of beingthe fundamental
ontology of Being and Timeconstitutes in this period only part of the
newly arising metaphysics of Dasein; this conception of being is completed
within this whole through a conception of the world; in the last Marburg
lecture, this conception of the world receives the name of metontology
(Heidegger 1990 GA 26, 199f; 1984, 156157). Metontology is not an ontology; it is rather a metaphysical ontic (ibid., 201; 158) that is beyond (meta)
ontology; it is a conception of the different types of beings in the totality of
their relations to one another.
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The fundamental thesis, on which the metontological approach is

grounded, is that Dasein necessarily comports itself toward the world-totality,
to the extent that Dasein goes beyond beings toward the world-totality. What
we now have in Heidegger is not only a transcendence toward Being (as it is
still the case in the lecture The Fundamental Problems of Phenomenology of the
summer semester of 1927), but alsoor even, in the first placea transcendence toward the world. At the end of the epoch we are considering, this
latter transcendence is characterized terminologically as world-formation
(Weltbildung). The metaphysics of Dasein is nothing other than precisely a
conception of the world-forming character of human beings. The understanding of being, which took center stage in the fundamental ontology
of Being and Time, is, from the standpoint of metontology, retrospectively
regarded only as a pre-condition for the world-formation of Dasein. In our
epoch, world-formation is seen in the realms of science, world-view, and philosophy; at the beginning of the 1930s the realm of art is also added to this
list. The question of truth is connected to the idea of world-formation as
well. Thus truth in our period is understood primarily as a pre-predicative
openness of the world. It however follows from the world-forming character
of Dasein in human beings that a whole world is always already common
to the self and the other. Thus, from now on, it is not just the being-with of
Dasein with the other that is taken into consideration as an existential; it can
also always already be presupposed that there is a being-with-one-another,
which arises out of the communal nature of the world.
This is the background against which the idea of a truth that is shared
by all of us is made intelligible. For Heidegger the communal nature of the
world means nothing other than the openness of the world that is common
because it is accessible to every individual Dasein. Heidegger clearly sees
that there is no truth in the full sense of the term without the possibility
of communally sharing in it. From this it follows for him that we always
already share in the truth as unconcealedness or openness.
Heidegger resorts to the remarkable expression sharing in the truth to
protect the idea of a communal sharing in the truth from misunderstandings. We can share a thing by dividing it among ourselves. The thing is
thereby broken into pieces (Heidegger 1976 GA 27, 100). But in the case of
the truth what we have is a sharing that can bring no harm to the things.
This is what Heidegger wants to emphasize when he defines the sharing in
the truth as letting things be (102). He says:
We ask about a sharing in beings by which we share in something that
belongs to beings without anything in beings lost or changed. In what do
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we share in this remarkable sharing-in in beings? We share in its openness, its truth. Only so far as we share in the unconcealedness of beings,
can we let them, beings, be as they manifest themselves to us. (105)
With this Heidegger finds at the same time the key to the understanding of
an already given being-with-one-another. What is significant for this argument is still the conviction, which is formulated in one passage as follows:
The Being in what is common is always essential for the with-one-another
(Heidegger 1976 GA 27, 148). With the truth as unconcealedness or openness of the world, in which we share, Heidegger finds what is common or
the same as that to which we in different ways comport ourselves. Out of
the common or the same there results an original with-one-another, which,
according to Heidegger, first makes possible a community of egos (145).
Nevertheless, in the epoch with which we are dealing, we should never
dissociate the world, whose unconcealedness or openness we are discussing, from the connection it has with the world-formation of Dasein. To
the original plan, which the Freiburg lecture from the winter semester of
1928/1929 follows, there belongs a discussion of the relationship between
philosophy and history. Even though this discussion did not eventually
take place due to time-constraints, it does form the conceptual horizon of
the investigations that are devoted to the question of the truth. We thus
have to accept that, when speaking of the truth as unconcealedness or
openness of the world, Heidegger has in mind not only the single world as
such but also a world which is always historical. The common, the same,
which constitutes an original with-one-another is thus at any time bound
to a historical projection of the world that manifests itself in the worldview, the science, the philosophy and the art of a specific people or of a
specific period. In this way we can understand the concept of truthin
accordance with Heideggers methodological approachas a formal
indication.
From this there results not just the strength but also the limits of
Heideggers approach toward the understanding of the original beingwith-one-another. This approach is based on the insight that an I-thou
relationship is always bound to the condition of a communal openness
of the world which is already shared by the respective I and thou. That
is why Heidegger can link in his own way his project to the monadology
of Leibniz to the extent that he starts out from the idea that in Leibniz
the monads represent the whole from their particular standpoint and
that for this reason they not only have no windows but also require none
(Heidegger 1976 GA 27, 144). Heidegger says: The point is not to complete
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the monadological approach and improving it through empathy, but to

radicalize it (145). With this he takes on a position that is downright the
opposite of Husserls approach to a phenomenology of intersubjectivity. In
a research text that was published in volume XIV of the Husserliana, it is
indeed stated explicitly:
Every I is a monad. But monads have windows. They have no windows or
doors in so far as no other subject can really enter, but through them the
other (the windows are the empathies) can throughout be experienced
just as past events that the subject has lived through can be experienced
through recollection. (Husserl 1973 Hua XIV, 260)
It definitely speaks for Husserls approach that in it not only the relationship of the self to the other can be thematized but also the relationship of
the home-world to a foreign world. By contrast, the merit of Heidegger is
rather limited to only having brought to the fore the communal character
of pre-predicative truth.
Truth and Freedom

The idea of a shared truth is an essential piece of the puzzle in the understanding of truth as presented in lectures given after the publication of Being
and Time, but it changes little to the sense and the substance of the earlier
conception of truth as exposed in Being and Time. The situation is different
with the specific view of truth formulated at the end of the Freiburg lecture
The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude of the winter
semester of 1929/1930: it brings a real novelty with itself.
Heidegger presents his thoughts here in a form that results from his turn
to the Aristotelian theory of the propositions in De interpretatione. Aristotle
distinguishes, on the one hand, between true and false propositions and,
on the other, between affirming (positive) and denying (negative) propositions. What is suggested, in the interpretation of truth, is to focus, first
and foremost, on the affirmative (positive) true proposition in order to
understand the three other possibilities of combination by starting with
this exceptional case. However, Heidegger recognizes what is deceptive in
this approach. He says:
This kind of approach in logic, which starts with the positive true judgment, is justified within certain limits but for this very reason it gives
rise to a fundamental deception that it is only a matter of relating the
103
other possible forms of assertion to this one in a supplementary fashion.

I myselfat least in carrying out the interpretation of also fell
victim to this deception in Being and Time (cf. as exempt from this deception in Being and Time 222 and 285f [Heidegger 1996, 264 and 330f.].
(Heidegger 1992 GA 29/30, 488; 1995, 337. Translation modified)
It is not easy to understand this self-critical remark. Surprisingly this remark
does not refer at all to the understanding of pre-predicative truth, but to
the analysis of propositions, of judgments, even though the unique achievement of Being and Time consists primarily in the development of a prepredicative understanding of truth. In addition, it is not easily understood
how Heidegger can accuse himself of neglecting not only the problem of
the denying (negative) true proposition but also the problem of the false
proposition. For, in the Marburg period, he dealt repeatedly with this philosophical problem, well-known since Platos Sophist. It suffices here to refer,
on the one hand, to the Marburg lecture on Platos Sophist from the winter
semester of 1924/1925 (Heidegger 1992 GA 19, 410f and 559562; 1997,
383384f and 387389) and, on the other hand, to the Marburg logic lecture from the year 1925 (Heidegger 1976 GA 21, 162190, 13) in which the
question concerning the falsity of the proposition was exhaustively treated.
Precisely for this reason we must take the self-critical remark in the 1929/1930
lecture in another sense. What he complains about is rather a peculiarity of
the pre-predicative understanding of the truth, which has a bearing on the
analysis of the proposition and of the judgment. For all appearances the selfcritical remark points to the fact that the conflation of truth with the openness of the world deprives judgment of the unique space of play (Spielraum)
in which it can be true or false. In the sense of Being and Time the proposition
is, in accordance with its definition, a mere expression of the immediately
perceived openness. In the logic lecture of 1925 a similar interpretation had
been developed. There Heidegger had drawn on the famous chapter 10 of
Book IX of Aristotles Metaphysics in order to show truth as the most authentic sense of being in Aristotle (Heidegger 1976 GA 21, 179). In his interpretation of this chapter he had brought truth back to an immediate perception
of the unconcealedness of a being (181). This interpretation however imparts
from the very outset a priority to the affirmative true proposition. If truth is
indeed conflated substantially with being, then the proposition serves only to
express what is as that which it is. The totality of affirmative (positive) true
propositions is, then, completely adequate to record the truth so understood
in its entirety. Then nothing can express more simply that which is as that
which it is than an affirmative (positive) true proposition.
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In such a conception of truth, which is established in this manner, the denying (negative) true propositions receive only a secondary and episodic role.
They merely serve to rectify false sentences. But the ground of the falsity of
these propositions is solely the circumstance that beings, in spite of their fundamental unconcealedness and openness, only seldom emerge unconcealed
and instead often remain hidden and dissimulated. In false propositions,
according to Heideggers Marburg texts, what comes to expression is always
only the hiddenness or the dissimulation of beings. This is the reason why
falsity, according to the understanding of truth of this period, does not necessarily belong together with truth. This explains why the false and also the
rectifying, denying (negative), true propositions are at this time neglected.
Certainly Heidegger already strives toward a positive understanding of
negation since his Marburg lecture on Platos Sophist.3 In Being and Time,
which indeed also belongs to the Marburg period, he not only makes it clear
that the ontological senseor even the originof negation [Nichtheit]
(Heidegger 1979, 285f; 1996, 262263f)4 requires explication, but continues
to emphasize that Dasein is not only in the truth but also always in the untruth (ibid., 222; 204205).5 The fact that truth and falsity always belong to
Dasein at the same time does not mean that they also belong to one another.
Thus the denying (negative) true propositions as the means of rectifying
false propositions have an epistemic, but no aletheic value. In principle they can
always be replaced by affirmative (positive) true propositions.
This fundamental attitude toward truth is in my view the authentic target of Heideggers self-critique in the lecture of 1929/1930. He now understands that there lies a judgment at the bottom of the proposition, which
is no mere expression of something immediately perceived, but rather
contains in itself a position to what is immediately so perceived. A similar
insight holds as the basic motive of the critique, that Ernst Tugendhat will
level at Heideggers phenomenological concept of truth at the end of the
sixties. But the 1929/1930 lecture, which of course Tugendhat at the end
of the 1960s would not have known, takes full account of the entirely legitimate demand that is at the heart of Tugendhats critique. Heidegger writes
in the text of this lecture:
However, in order to be able to decide upon the adequacy or inadequacy
of what the says revealingly, or more precisely, to be indeed able
to comport oneself in this either-or, the speaking, expressing human
being must from the very outset have a space of play [Spielraum] for the
comparative to-and-fro of the either-or, of truth or falsity and in addition
a space of play [Spielraum] inside of which beings, about which something
105
can be said, are manifest. (Heidegger 1992 GA 29/30, 493; 1995, 339
[Translation modified])
Still, the judgment can have a space of play (Spielraum) for the comparative here and there of the either-or, of truth or falsity only if the judging
human being can go beyond being and its Being. From this the essential
sense of metontology becomes clear. With metontology we have a new kind
of transcendence, a going-beyond beings but toward the world, not toward
Being. The difference consists in this, that the world in contradistinction
to Being opens up a space of play (Spielraum) for the either-or of truth and
falsity.
Only at this point can we see that Heidegger in his metaphysical period
does not mean the same thing with world as he did in Being and Time. The
referential connections of beings that are encountered at any time are in
fact no longer enough to determine the world-structurethe worldliness
of the world. So long as the world in its totality was conflated with these
referential connections no fundamental distinction between Being and
world was possible. Actually the world in Being and Time was an existential
of Dasein, that is, a fundamental determination of existence; it belonged
to the ontological constitution of Dasein. By contrast the idea of metontology is from the very outset based on a distinction between Being and
world. This distinction is possible in the period from 1927 to 1930 through
the fact that the world is understood as a space of play (Spielraum) for the
either-or of truth and falsity.
This new approach is obviously in need of elaboration but in the lecture of 1929/1930 Heidegger continues to owe us in that regard. We are
therefore largely dependent upon conjectures. In order to make this new
approach, stemming from Heideggers self-critique, comprehensible and
amenable to concepts, we must proceed from the idea that this approach
places in a new light the sense of false propositions and the role of denying
true judgments. A further indication for this interpretation arises from
Heideggers tying back the concept of the world in this period of his thinking to the world-projection that is always proper to Dasein. If we connect
these two indications with the idea of a space of play (Spielraum) for the
either-or of truth and falsity, we can reconstruct the fundamental positive
thoughts that underlie Heideggers self-critique in the following steps:
1. Transformations of truth-values within the world-projections. No worldprojection is without holes. No matter how comprehensive it is, it is never
based on all the true propositions that can be formulated about the
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world. Certainly there are many core propositions with which a worldprojection stands or falls but there are innumerable others on which it
is not immediately dependent. To every world-projection there indeed
belongs an immeasurable region of possible propositions, which have
not yet been formulated. Alongside this empty region there is in every
world-projection an open region of propositions that can be shown to
be false without the whole world-projection being essentially affected
by it. The size of this open region depends upon the respective worldprojection. In any case at this point the picture of a process of knowledge emerges in which what is held to be true can transform itself into
something false (and vice-versa). Such transformations of truth-values
are reflected in denying (negative) true judgments. These judgments
are granted a constitutive role for the underlying world-projection so
long as the latter can sustain itself in the course of the transformation of
truth-values. But even if the epistemic dynamic affects the core propositions of a world-projection, a new world-projection can be built upon
the propositions, which from now on are held to be true.
2. Indifference of the world toward such transformations of truth-values. If we reflect
on the nature of this possibility we can succeed in drawing aletheic consequences for the concept of the world from the epistemic dynamic that
is presented. We arrive at the insight that new world-projections can
emerge out of the transformations of truth-values because the worldin
contradistinction to Beingis in a certain sense indifferent to these
transformations. If propositions that are held to be true turn out to be
false, the (presumed) being reveals itself as non-being. The existence
of a being can be affected from this change as much as its being so
and so. Therefore the Being of beings is anything but indifferent to the
transformations of truth-values. Against this the world always remains
stable in the midst of such transformations. This is because any totality
of true propositions holds as a description of the unique world. If the
description changes then the state of being of the world also changes,
but the world itself remains stable. It only reveals itself in some ways to
be different from before.
3. The world as the Being in a space of play (Spielraum) for the either-or of truth and
falsity. Every world-projection testifies to a going-beyond beings that are
manifest at any time, toward the world. Only this going-beyond makes
it possible to keep constantly in view the eventual transformation of
beings into non-beings. The world is, in other words, only grasped when
Being is envisaged in a space of play (Spielraum) for the either-or of truth
and falsity. It is in this way that we have to understand Heideggers talk
107
of a primordial metaphysical transformation of fundamental ontology

into metontology (Heidegger 1990 GA 26, 199; 1984, 156). This means
that Being from now on will be placed in the perspective of the world as
a space of play (Spielraum) for the either-or of truth and falsity.
From this transformed perspective the judgment manifests itself no more
as a mere expression of an immediately perceived openness but rather as
a stance taken toward what is immediately perceived. This stance that is
taken presupposes freedomor more precisely a being-freeof Dasein,
which in the transformed conception of truth, may no longer be left out
of consideration. Actually Heidegger asserts in the 1929/1930 lecture that
truth is grounded in a being-free for beings as such (Heidegger 1992 GA
29/30, 492; 1995, 339). We must clearly see that this being-free for beings
excludes any immediate bond to beings. In no way does Dasein remain
bound to beings; it rather goes beyond beings in order to come back to
them out of the world as the space of play (Spielraum) for the either-or of
truth and falsity. We thus have a fundamental attitude that lets itself be bound
by beings and through this imposes upon itself a boundedness. This is what
we can read in the lecture of 1929/1930: This holding oneself toward
toward something bindingwhich occurs in all propositional comportment and grounds it is what we call a fundamental comportment: being-free in
an original sense (ibid., 497; 342343).
The consideration of this comportment transforms Heideggers conception
of truth from the ground up. The unconcealedness and openness of beings is
no longer deemed from the outset as truth. It rather acquires the form of truth
only through the fact that the being-free for beings expresses itself, a beingfree that lets itself be bound and thus imposes upon itself a boundedness.
In conclusion let us point to a consequence that results from the new way
of connecting truth and freedom in our epoch. This connection is indeed
the reason why Heidegger already claims in his last Marburg lecture that
the question of ethics is not to be raised in fundamental ontology but first
in metontology (Heidegger 1990 GA 26, 199; 1984 157). The word ethics
means in this passage obviously not something like a theory of morality as
a system of societal rules, but a reflection on the possibility of developing a
thoughtful position in the midst of the openness of beings in totality. Such
a kind of ethics is a theory of the correct dealing with Being in a space of
play (Spielraum) for the either-or of truth and falsity. What is at stake in such
an ethics is thus precisely the grounding of a fundamental metontological
attitude as a correct manner of comporting oneself toward the world.
Translated from the German by Arun Iyer
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Lszl Tengelyi
Notes
1
2
Compare, for example, Heidegger 1990 GA 26, 158; 1984, 127.

The time of my life which flows along that of my neighbor is thus separated by
the depth of an abyss (abgrundtief geschieden), and even this word, with its vivid
image (Bildlichkeit), still says too little (Husserl 1973 Hua XV, 339).
Above all the positive understanding of negation is important for the research
that moves primarily and exclusively by exhibiting the matters at issue. Phenomenological research itself accords negation an eminent position: Negation as
something carried out after a prior acquisition and disclosure of some substantive
content (Heidegger 1992 GA 19, 560; 1997, 388).
In the self-critical remark made in the lecture of 19291930, Heidegger mentions
this passage as one of two passages that avoid the error that he had just
discovered.
Here we find the other passage that Heidegger excludes in his self-critique of
19291930 from the newly discovered error. It says here: The full existential and
ontological meaning of the statement Dasein is in the truth also says equiprimordially that Dasein is in the untruth.
Chapter 7
Heideggers Fluid Ontology in the 1930s

The Platonic Connection
Pol Vandevelde
In the 1930s and up to the early 1940s, Heidegger engages in a multifaceted

enterprise, manifested by his many variegated lectures, to move away from
subjectivism and to find the resources to articulate what he calls the history
of being. He entertains the view that metaphysics, which started with Plato,
had come to its end and that a new beginning may be possible. Because
metaphysics started with Plato, the new beginning will be reached by overcoming Platonism (Die berwindung des Platonismus) (Heidegger 1989 GA
65, 221; 1999, 154). This will usher in a new way of thinking that Heidegger
calls a thinking-poetizing. Since we (and Heidegger) do not know what this
new beginning will be, we can only play it out against the first beginning.1
The situation, in which Heidegger believes we find ourselves, that is,
at the end of metaphysics and in transition toward another beginning,
explains why the figure of Plato becomes attractive. As the founder of
metaphysics, Plato stands both inside and outside metaphysics. On the one
hand, his philosophy can be understood as a doctrine, namely, Platonism,
but, on the other hand, as the founder of this doctrine, his thinking is not
yet metaphysics. The teaching (Lehre) of a thinker is the unsaid in his saying (Heidegger 1978, 201). If we attend to the unsaid of Platos doctrine,
which is also the unsaid of metaphysics, we can retrieve Platos thinking
from his philosophy. There is thus an entry into the moment Plato became
a metaphysician. This moment is the coming to word of what became his
doctrine or the moment Plato became a sayer.
Heidegger illustrates Platos metaphysical ambivalence through his view
on the beautiful. On the one hand, Plato clearly started what will become
our aesthetic tradition; on the other hand, he also thinks the beautiful, in
the active sense of thinking as bringing such a view to its articulation.
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Insofar as Western metaphysics begins in Platos thought, Plato also

prepares the subsequent aesthetic interpretation of the beautiful and
of art. Yet to the extent that Plato simultaneously stands in the tradition of the Greek thinking of the commencement and is a transition, he also still thinks to kalon non-aesthetically. This can be seen in
his equating of to kalon with the on. (Heidegger 1984 GA 53, 109;
1996, 8889)
This thinking-in-the-making is the transition that Plato accomplishes
toward metaphysics. Heidegger considers it to be the fi rst beginning.
Given that we are ourselves in transition toward another beginning, we
have to effectuate what Plato did as a thinker (not as a philosopher).
Heidegger thus sees himself in an analogous situation to Plato. However,
there is more than an analogy between their respective situations. There
is also a kinship between the striving of their thinking. Plato attempts to
think that which ushers things into the realm of the visible, illustrated by
the release of the prisoner in the allegory of the cave, wherein one turns
from one type of being (fleeting, transitory, and illusory) toward another
real one. Since Heidegger understands himself as in transition toward
another type of thinking, he is also looking for that which makes a being
what it is. His questioning of being is parallel to Platos meditation on
ideas and Heidegger himself asserts the link between Platos ideas and
his own notion of being.
In this essay, I will only examine two aspects of this connection between
Plato and Heidegger. First, like Plato, Heidegger accepts a gradation in
being: things can be un-being (unseiend), less being (weniger seiend) or more
being (seiender, mehr seiend), expressions that correspond to Platos mallon
onta (more being) and me on (un-being) in the allegory of the cave in Book
VII of the Republic. Secondly, the role that language plays in Heideggers
ontology is analogous to the role of ideas in Platos ontology. According to
Heidegger, language brings things into the realm of the intelligible. The
Platonic connection is most apparent in Heideggers commentary on the
allegory of the cave in his 19311932 lecture course Vom Wesen der Wahrheit.
Zu Platons Hhlengleichnis und Thetet (Heidegger 1988 GA 34) and his 1940
lecture, Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit (1978). It also appears in the
Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) (Heidegger 1989 GA 65; 1999)
and his other lectures from the 1930s and early 1940s. These Platonic
notions allow Heidegger to articulate his fluid ontology in the 1930s,
according to which the essence of things is understood as an unfolding
wesen as a verbso that things are stages or guises of a process.
Heideggers Fluid Ontology in 1930s
111
The Non-Being as a Transitory Stage

Already in Being and Time, Heidegger considers that things do not have in
themselves the principle of their intelligibility. We, human beings, must
distinguish reality from the real: But the fact that Reality is ontologically
grounded in the Being of Dasein, does not signify that only when Dasein
exists and as long as Dasein exists, can the Real be as that which in itself
it is (Heidegger 1962, 255). Or even more explicit: Being (not entities
[Seiende]) is dependent upon the understanding of Being; that is to say,
Reality [Realitt] (not the Real [das Reale]) is dependent upon care (ibid.).
Once the being of things is correlated to the being-in-the world of human
beings, Heidegger, like Husserl before him, has to contend with the label
of idealism.
If what the term idealism says, amounts to the understanding that
Being can never be explained by entities but is already that which is
transcendental for every entity, then idealism affords the only correct
possibility for a philosophical problematic. If so, Aristotle was no less an
idealist than Kant. But if idealism signifies tracing back every entity to
a subject or consciousness whose sole distinguishing features are that it
remains indefinite in its Being and is best characterized negatively as unThing-like [undinglich], then this idealism is no less naive in its method
than the most grossly militant realism. (251252)
However, it is not easy to come so close to common idealism without also
falling into it. This danger is best manifested by Heideggers famous interpretation of Husserls categorial intuition in History of the Concept of Time.
Prolegomena of 1925 (Heidegger 1985). Here, Heidegger writes: It is not
so much that we see the objects and things but rather that we first talk
about them. To put it more precisely: we do not say what we see, but rather
the reverse, we see what one says about the matter. There is, he continues,
an inherently determinate character of the world and its potential apprehension and comprehension through expressness, through already having
been spoken and talked over (56).
Heideggers difficulty with navigating away from idealism is, compared
to Husserl, compounded by the primary role that Heidegger grants to language after Being and Time. If language is the threshold that entities have to
pass in order to enter into being and thus, literally, be, it is all the more difficult to avoid that the relatedness of beings to human beings collapses on
the relativity of beings to human beings. And still, this is what Heidegger
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relentlessly fought against. He defended his version of a non-relative but

idealistic ontology. One version of this non-relative idealistic ontology is in
my view best formulated in the Contributions to Philosophy. From Enowning,
written between 1936 and 1938. Things as they appear are related to how
human beings comport themselves toward them, but things as they appear
are only one stage of a process Heidegger calls unconcealment. This process is not related to human beings. To the contrary, such a process also
allows human beings to be who they are.
In Being and Time, Heideggers motivation to ask the question of being
anew was the fact that being had fallen into oblivion. In the Contributions,
we are told that this oblivion of being is itself encompassed by an abandonment of being: Abandonment of being is the ground for the forgottenness of being (Heidegger 1999, 80). The notion of abandonment of
being is strange in many respects; how can being perform something like
an abandonment? How is it not a form of reification of being, despite all
of Heideggers claims to the contrary? Finally, what sense does it make to
speak of a global abandonment in such grand and general terms?
Upon closer examination, Heidegger uses the expression of abandonment of being in both a weak and a strong sense. In the weak sense, abandonment of being means a deficit in being; things are merely objects for
an all-powerful subject, at the service of such a subject or a community as
objects of experience, and so on. In this way, the question of the being of
such things has become irrelevant. Nobody cares about asking the question anymore, because the being of things has been flattened out and
nothing of them remains other than their use. They are for and for the
sake of x, and nothing else. The abandonment is thus not much different
from the oblivion of being. It emphasizes a deficit in being: things have
less being. Heidegger also speaks of the essential impotence (Unkraft)
of beings (Heidegger 2000 GA 75, 7). This also means that things can
regain more being if the oblivion or abandonment is overcome. Heidegger
sometimes expresses this weak sense of abandonment of being as the
lostness (Verlorenheit) in the bustle of mere events and machinations
(Heidegger1999, 40), the lostness into beings (349) or the fact that things
are left to themselves (sich selbst berlassen) (Heidegger 1984 GA 45, 185).
To speak of an abandonment in this weak sense is thus more metaphorical than literal. It is an as if, an almost as if beings were abandoned by
being (85). However, Heidegger also uses abandonment of being in a
strong sense. Be-ing . . . has abandoned all beings and all that appeared
to be beings and has withdrawn from them (Heidegger 1999, 11). What
can this mean?
113
The above quotes from Being and Time state that the real is not dependent on Dasein. What cannot happen without Dasein is the possibility
to say about the real that it is or that it is not. The status of the real,
before it can be meaningful to Dasein, is undifferentiated in the sense
that nobody would be there to make any assessment of it. This means that
nothing can be said about it (or, to paraphrase Maurice Blanchot, if the
question is about what the real was, before it is meaningful to Dasein,
there was nobody there to ask such a question). While Dasein obviously
is not the cause for the being of things, Dasein is nevertheless the threshold of their being. In Being and Time, this threshold is called the sense
(Sinn). In the 1930s, the sense becomes the truth. The meaning (Sinn)
(See Being and Time), i.e., . . . the truth of be-ing (Heidegger 1999, 31).
This change has a significant impact on the state of limbo of the real,
before it entered the realm of what can be or not be. If the sense is
now the truth, something is already trueand this means for Heidegger
unconcealedbefore it can be said to be or not. The sense as truth thus
precedes the Dasein of Being and Time and is no longer that in which the
intelligibility [Verstndlichkeit] of something maintains itself (Heidegger
1962, 193). Moreover, it means that the undifferentiated state of what is,
before it makes sense, is no longer the fact that nobody is there to be concerned with what a thing might be. The non-ontological qualification of
undifferentiation in Being and Time became in the 1930s the ontological
qualification of what is not being, but already unfolds as what has been
unconcealed.
These torturous formulations are not gratuitous. They point to
Heideggers search for an alternative meaning of to be. In the 1930s,
Heidegger acknowledges a movement of entering into being. Yet, unlike
in Being and Time, this movement does not consist in an act of conferring
being. It is no longer Dasein that be-deutet beings. Instead, there is an
antecedent meaning-giver. As Heidegger says of Hlderlin, what Hlderlin
poetized is not what he meant, it is rather that which meant him [was ihn
meinte] as what called him in this task of the poet [Dichtertum] (Heidegger
1982 GA 52, 13). Something can thus be true while its mode of being has
not yet been determined. What is true [is]: what stands in truth and so
becomes a being or a non-being [unseiend] (Heidegger 1999, 241). In the
1930s, Heidegger holds that there is an instance or a process that makes
something be a being, and this is the true. What is true lets a being be a
being (ibid.).
In such a framework, being has to be understood adjectivally: to be
means to become being or to enter being. Only then can something be
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the entity it is now: it was not such an entity before entering being, although
it was already true in the sense of unconcealed. Thus, when we say that an
entity is, we in fact say that it is being (understood as an adjective) and
this means it became being in the sense of entering into being.
Heideggers adjectival understanding of being has several significant
ramifications:
1. This new dimension of becoming being grants an ontological status
to the moment that preceded the becoming. Before the entity became
being, it may already be unconcealed and, consequently, true, despite
being non-being (again, adjectivally understood). It also means that
the sense, which in Being and Time was an articulation by Dasein, is now,
as the true, an articulation before human Dasein. In the realm of what
has been unconcealed and, subsequently, of what has become being, the
un- of un-being corresponds to what, in the process of unconcealing,
is the withdrawal itself. Heidegger grants a mobility to withdrawal. But
wherever plant, animal, rock, and sea and sky become beings (seiend werden),
without falling into objectness, there withdrawal (refusal/not-granting) of
be-ing reignsbe-ing as withdrawal (Heidegger 1999, 207).
2. It means that a plant, an animal, a rock, the sea and the sky do not have
in themselves enough of what Sartre calls a coefficient of adversity to
constrain our understanding. They are only the guises of a process of
unfolding: their essence (Wesen) is a stage in their unfolding (Wesung).
And this means that they could have been being otherwise or could
be being otherwise if the process had unfolded differently or were to
regain traction. This is what I call a fluid ontology: things are in fact
stages of things.
3. A third consequence consists in the possibility for having a glimpse at
that movement of entering being, what Heidegger calls withdrawal. If
we can regress in the process of becoming being to the stage before, say,
a rock is being, we would reach the point of unconcealement of something (which is not yet a something) in its way toward being a rock. It
would be the retrieval of the very becoming at the heart of things. Such
a retrieval would then allow to uncouple being from beings, thereby
turning the ontological difference, enacted in Being and Time and
explicitly named so in the Basic Problems of 1928, into an effect of unconcealment itself. In the 1930s, the view is that a being is. Be-ing unfolds
(das Seiende ist. Das Seyn west) (Heidegger 1999, 52). This uncoupling of
being from beings puts on the unconcealment another dynamic than
its dealings with things, what Heidegger in Being and Time called the
115
comportment of Dasein. Being has now its own motion of unfolding and
its own history.
4. Beings, which have become being are now what they are once preserved. This preservation (Verwahrung) first of all lets beings beand
indeed those beings that they are and can be in the truth of the not-yetdifferentiated being and the manner in which this truth is unfolded . . .
The sheltering [Bergung] itself is enacted in and as Da-sein (Heidegger
1999, 49). Although he does not explicitly distinguish them, Heidegger
understands the preservation in two different senses. In the first sense
there is a preservation of the true in unconcealment, before something
has become being. In the second sense there is a preservation when precisely something has become being. Correlatively, Heidegger speaks of
un-being in two different senses: either as what has been unconcealed
and is true, but has not yet become being or as something that has
become being but not in truth. In the latter sense, Heidegger tells us,
for example, that beings can still be in the abandonment of beings,
under whose dominance the immediate availability and usefulness and
serviceability of every kind (e.g., everything must serve the people) obviously make up what is a being and what is not [was seiend ist und was nicht]
(22). In this second sense, to be means to remain when abandoned by
being. This latter mode of being is characterized as a fall (Verfall) (22),
so that what is an actual being is a non-being [das Un-seiende] (22).
This notion of preservation in the second sense, namely, that something
is not only disclosed, but preserved, lends itself to a political stance, in the
broad sense. Since what is is what is preserved, the mode of preservation is
not just accessory to entities; it is their flesh and blood. The mode of preservation is linked to the world that is current. According to Heidegger the world
in which we are is one ruled by what he calls machination (Machenschaft).
Things have been flattened to the desires, needs, and experiences of human
beings who understand themselves as subjects. And this is how things have
been abandoned by being. Abandonment of being means that be-ing abandons
beings and leaves beings to themselves and thus lets beings become objects
of machination (Heidegger 1999, 78).2 By being preserved in this way things
have been deprived of the very possibility to become, which means that they
are not being: The abandonment of be-ing is a dis-folding [Ver-wesung]
of be-ing (81) and leads to the non-unfolding of beings (das Unwesen des
Seienden), to non-beings (das Unseiende) (85).3 Nevertheless, this stage of nonbeing passes itself as being: Under the illusion of a being, machination takes
what is not-being into the protection of a being (286).
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Heideggers notion of un-being as part of a process of increase or

decrease of being can be seen as a reformulation of Platos own gradation
of being, according to which entities are susceptible to be non-being and
more being. Heidegger discusses this gradation of being in his 19311932
lecture course on Platos allegory of the cave and his 1940 essay, Platos
doctrine of the truth (based in part on the lecture of 1930).
Platos Me on (un-being) and Mallon Onta (more being)

If retrieved from Platonism, Plato can offer Heidegger an alternative to phenomenology. For phenomenology is still too subjectivist and thus metaphysical. It was a mistake of phenomenology to mean that phenomena could be
seen correctly just through a freedom from prejudices (Heidegger 1988 GA
34, 286). Immediately, Heidegger adds that it would be an even bigger mistake to claim that phenomena cannot be seen, that they are always relative
to perspectives. What matters is to gain the right insight (die richtige Hinsicht)
(286). This insight or this perspective, which goes beyond the givenness of
things, thus has to be non-subjective or a-subjective. Platos ideas, according
to Heidegger, accomplish this. They provide entities the guise under which
they are being. Ideas are thus part of a process of being in which they are
the preservation of the unconcealment of things and things are also the
preservation of what the ideas disclosed. There is thus a gradation of being.
Ideas are more being, sensible things less being.
In his description of the liberation of the prisoner in the cave myth and
his turn toward the entrance of the cave, Plato uses two comparatives.
First, the prisoner is turned toward what is more being (pros mallon onta
tetrammenos).4 The second occurs when Socrates asks whether the prisoner,
in pain because of the light, would not say that what he saw in the darkness of the cave was more true (alesthestera).5 Let us focus on this notion
of seiender, more being, which Heidegger also formulates as mehr seiend
(Heidegger 1988 GA 34, 33).
Heidegger notes with approval and astonishment that, for Plato, beings
have gradation! (das Seiende hat ebenfalls Grade! ) (Heidegger 1988 GA 34,
33). This means that being and being are not without further ado the
same (Seiend und seiend is nicht ohne weiteres dasselbe) (33). This is the origin
of Heideggers adjectival use of being. When we say that something is,
there are different stages of being (understood as an adjective) at which
the entity can be positioned. There can be a more in being (ein Mehr an
seiendem) (33)6 or a less in being (weniger).
117
This gradation in being with regard to what is goes hand in hand with
a gradation in unconcealment. For Heidegger notes that even for the prisoner in the cave, things were unconcealed. Only when things were shown
to the prisoner, were they more being. Heidegger sees a direct correlation
between what Plato says about ta tote horomena alesthetera (what the prisoners saw in the cave was truer) and ta nun deiknumena (what the prisoner is
shown, which is more being). Heidegger can then say: The more unconcealed the unconcealed is, the closer do we come to beings . . . Thus the
coming closer to beings goes hand in hand with the increase of the unconcealment of beings (mit der Steigerung der Unverborgenheit des Seienden) and
vice versa (Heidegger 1988 GA 34, 33).
There is in fact a third term in the correlation. To the gradation of
unconcealment (der Grad seiner Un-verborgenheit) and the increase of
beings themselves (die Steigerung des Seienden selbst) (Heidegger 1988 GA
34, 33), we have to add the proximity that prisoners have to beings.
The proximity [Nhe] to beings, i.e., the being-there of Dasein, the inner
proximity of the being-human to beings (or the distance), the gradation
[Grad] of the unconcealment of beings, the increase [Steigerung] of beings
themselves as beings, these three are linked together [verkettet].
(Heidegger 1988 GA 34, 33)
This interconnection explains why there is more being (es gibt Seienderes)
(3334). The place of human beings in the chain of unfolding of being is
crucial for Heidegger. It means that proximity and distance with regard
to beings modify [verndern] beings themselves (34). In Plato, it is the prisoners comportment toward things that measures the increase in unconcealment and the correlate increase in being. This is what Heidegger calls
freedom. Whether . . . beings become more being or more un-being
[unseiender], this lies in the freedom of human beings (60). When the
prisoners were held in the cave, things might well be unconcealed, but
they were un-being (in the adjectival sense); they were not in truth. The
prisoners believed that there are only beings and knew nothing of being,
of the understanding of being (52). When the prisoner is freed, he comes
closer to the ideas; this determines the increase of being.
By correlating the increase of being with the comportment of human
beings, Heidegger can then understand Platos notion of idea in a prePlatonic sense, that is, not as eternal models located in another world,
but as the very heart of the unfolding of things to which human beings
themselves contribute. The idea is thus not in the thing, but not radically
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separated from it either, since the thing is itself a process of unfolding.

The idea is thus the right insight or the right standpoint (Hinsicht) that
Heidegger is looking for. Platos idea is
the outlook [Anblick] of that as which something presents itself [darbietet] as
being. These outlooks are that in which the individual thing presents itself
[prsentiert] as this or that: is present [prsent] and unfolded [anwesend] . . .
Something is, means it is unfolded [anwesend] or, better, it unfolds [es west
an]. (Heidegger 1988 GA 34, 51)
Heidegger calls the idea the being of beings (52). It is
what is seen in advance, what is grasped in advance and what lets beings
be [Seiendes Duchlassende], as the interpretation of being [Auslegung des
Seins]. The idea lets us see what beings are, lets beings so to speak
through it come to us [zukommen] . . . Being, the idea is what lets being be
[das Durchlassende]: light. (57)
The idea not only gives the thing its outlook so that it can be present; it
also brings us in the presence of things so that they can matter to us. Ideas
give to things their visibility and to us the capacity to see: We only see a
being-book (Buch-seiendes) when we understand the meaning of its being
[Seinssinn] in light of the what-being [Was-sein], of the idea,what is seen
through the idea (57).
It is this difference between the reality of ideas, on the one hand, and what
we take reality to be (things), on the other, that supports the view of degrees
in being. At the top of the scale, Plato puts ideas as what is both most unconcealed and most being (das Unverborgenste und das Seiendste) (Heidegger 1988
GA 34, 69). At the bottom of the scale (in the cave) is the sensible world,
which is unbeing (me on) (although still understood as a mode of being):
Plato considers the sensual realm as encompassing the me on; this is usually translated as non-beingsmore precisely, we should say: whatever
is not truly a being, those beings which, according to Platos doctrine,
look like beings yet are not, and therefore should not properly be called
beings . . . ouk on names that which merely is not; me on names something
that is, yet is not in truth; for example the house that is present at hand
is indeed not nothing, but in it the essence of house presents itself only
in this particular, and moreover transitory, appearance, in accordance
with a particular size, as made of particular material, and according to a
particular form. (Heidegger 1984 GA 53, 27; 1996, 24)
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Heidegger then transplants Platos scale of being into a historical framework: the bottom of the scale is not the sensible world, but a world in the
abandonment of being. And this abandonment is manifested by machination that is itself the political manifestation of Amerikanismus, of which,
Heidegger assures us, Bolshevism is only a derivative form (ibid., 86; 70).
Americanism is our cave, and by enjoying things, experiencing them, or
using them, we do not care to ask about the being of these things. We are
like the prisoners in the cave and only see things.
Plato provided a method, which is philosophy itself, to help us turn, like
the prisoner in the cave, to what is more being (mallon onta) and more
true (alesthestera). Heidegger calls such method a paideia and understands it
as a crossing over [bergang] from apeideusia into paideia (Heidegger 1978,
215). What paideia teaches us is how to see things as more being. When
moving away from the shadows and turning to the things, the gaze is turned
toward what is more being [seiender] than the shadows: pros mallon onta . . .
(228). Again, Heidegger understands this paideia in political terms, namely,
as freedom. By throwing themselves free from a being, human beings first
become human beings (Heidegger 1999, 318). Just as the prisoners have to
free themselves from shadows, we have to free ourselves from things.
But how can ideas allow us to free ourselves? In Plato, ideas are approached
positively by moving away from the me on. However, in so doing, he has to
treat them as entities. Heidegger reminds us that in the allegory of the
cave, the things outside the cave are an image for that in which the being
of beings consists (Heidegger 1978, 212). It is no coincidence that ideas are
represented as things. But that through which beings show themselves in
their outlook [Aussehen] (212) cannot be things. In Heideggers retrieval
of Plato, ideas are not approached directly by moving away from the me on
and toward some uncertain outside of the cave, but indirectly, by recovering
the me on positively, so as not to reify ideas as entities located somewhere.
Heidegger reminds us that there are two movements of appearing in ideas,
namely of the phusis and of the outlook. Appearing in the first sense
first rips space open. Appearing in the second sense simply gives space
an outline and measures the space that has been opened up (Heidegger
2000, 195). In their second appearing, ideas shine through the unfolding
of things, allowing them to enter being and be present as what they are. In
their first appearing, ideas are themselves the manifestation and the testimony of a first event of unconcealment.
This first appearing of ideas legitimates Heidegger, first, to associate Platos
idea, namely, what looks through beings and gives them their outlook so that
they can unfold, with the divine, and, second, to ascribe this association to
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Plato himself. For Plato puts the idea of the good as the highest cause and
this cause was named to theion, the divine (das Gttliche) (1978, 233).
The introduction of the divine in the unfolding of things reinforces again
Heideggers non-subjectivistic framework. Although the comportment of
human beings is linked to the increase or decrease in the being of things,
human beings are only a parameter in the process of unfolding. While
the Da-sein in the 1931 lecture course on Plato was still human Dasein,
it becomes in the Contributions a space and time in-between, between
human beings and the gods. But Da-sein as in-between does not precede
the relationship between human beings and gods. Both the members of
the relationship and the relationship itself (as Da-sein) are appropriated
or enowned (ereignet) at the same time. Da-sein is in fact the sheltering of
gods and human beings. Once this event of appropriation or this enowning occurs, what is true comes to be preserved (Heidegger 1999, 342).
The correlation between the increase in unconcealment, the increase in
being, and the freedom of human beings, mentioned above, now reveals its
significance. While Heidegger used Plato to articulate an ontological view
of things as fluid stages in a process of unfolding, he can now draw the consequences of this view to human beings and gods. He has established that
be-ing arises [entspringt] unto a being (Heidegger 1999, 175) so that
a being is above all sheltered in be-ing in such a manner of course that
a being can immediately be abandoned by be-ing and continue to exist
[bestehen bleiben] only as semblance (226). He also linked this possibility of
abandonment to the comportment of human beings now playing the absolute subjects in the last version of Americanism or Bolshevism. He can then
conclude that there is also a fluidity of human beings. They have freedom,
but their freedom is not of a voluntarist nature: they are in fact set free, and
what sets them free is being itself. When this happens, there is Da-sein as
an open space-time: Be-ing sets free in that it enowns Da-sein (340).
The fluidity of things and human beings also bears upon the divine. The
gods he speaks of are clearly not the gods of theology or faith.7 Rather,
Heidegger takes seriously Nietzsches remark about the absence of new
gods in thousands of years. Gods themselves are sheltered and preserved
(Heidegger 1999, 185), so that old gods may disappear and new ones arise.
Gods are guises that can change so that we may have future gods that
are different from those we have known.8 Since human beings and the
gods are only a parameter in a process of historical proportion, the paideia
that will lead us toward more being cannot be a teaching or a revelation,
which are still subjective enterprises. We saw that ideas are enablers, letting
things unfold and letting us be in their presence. But we cannot represent
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ideas. Instead, we will approach them by becoming sensitive to them. We

thus have to let ourselves be disposed or attuned in what Heidegger calls a
fundamental mood (Grundstimmung).
While for Plato and the Greeks at the beginning of metaphysics, the fundamental mood was one of astonishment and wonder, the fundamental
mood to which we have to be sensitive at the end of metaphysics is startled
dismay (Er-schrekken), which can also be translated as alarm or terror, that
is, that the whole of being is (Heidegger 1999, 32). Terror (das Erschrecken)
is not as an immense fear of something, but rather a freeing dismay
(Entsetzen). The terror is precisely that we are free from things, that we
see the whole of being as un-hinged and, literally, free-floating. In both
cases, in the mood of the first beginning and in the mood of the other
beginning, we are sensitive to this moment when things are in limbo: not
yet being, but not nothing either. They are positively un-being, in the
adjectival sense, and it is Da-sein that will give them a ground, the Da-sein
of the Greeks, and our futural Da-sein.
But in order for our future Da-sein to come, we need to encounter our god or
our gods. This grounding of our Da-sein happens when enowning [Ereignis]
owns god over to man [diesen den Gott zueignet] in that enowning owns man
to god [bereignet den Gott an den Menschen] (Heidegger 1999, 19). Being is
precisely the between [Zwischen] in the midst of beings and gods . . . needed
[gebraucht] by the gods and withdrawn [entzogen] from a being (172).9
But how can an encounter with our god or gods take place that would not
be subjective, for example by human beings listening to the voice of a god
and a god revealing himself? There is, Heidegger claims, an a-subjective
version of such an encounter and he calls it Gesprch, which is, in its original essence, that which unifies in the encounter, through which human
beings and gods are sent to their mutual essence (Heidegger 1952, 157).
When such a dialogue happens, there is history. History is this happening
[Geschehen] in which beings, through human beings, become more being
(Heidegger 1999, 201). Still, what kind of dialogue do we have, if gods and
human beings do not speak as subjects?
In his 19421943 lecture course, Parmenides, Heidegger claims that the
Greek gods are those who shine into beings, who look into the unconcealed. The same expressions were used about Platos ideas. Gods are
being itself as looking into beings (Heidegger 1992b, 111). Heidegger
plays on the Greek word thea, which, when stressed on the first syllable
(tha), means the look and, when stressed on the second syllable (the),
means the goddess. Despite the difference in stress, he claims that the
two words are one and the same word, considering that the Greeks did
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not use accent marks (108).10 If we could have a grasp of that shining into
beings, we would see the fluidity of the process making things what they
are; we would see them entering and exiting being; we could be struck
by the radiance of things before they become actualizations of possibles.
Dialogue provides Heidegger the chance to have this possibility. Platos
idea is a divine dimension, shining through things and this divine dimension manifests itself as dialogue.
Recall that the preservation was twofold: there is a preservation in the true
before something is being and there is preservation of the thing once it has
entered into being. Also, recall that ideas have two appearings: backwardlooking, it is the appearing of phusis as unconcealment and forward-looking,
it is what gives the things their appearance. The preservation of the thing
in the second sense corresponds to the appearing of the idea in the second
sense. Now, the preservation that allows a thing to be being does not fall from
the sky, but is, Heidegger tells us, a configuration, the result of a dichten. This
configuration also happens when a change in the unfolding of the thing
occurs, when, for example, things from less being become more beingand
poetry does precisely that: Poetry makes a being more being (Heidegger
1988 GA 34, 64). What Heidegger calls foundation (Grndung) is the moment
when these few, isolated, strange . . . in different ways as poets, thinkers, as
builders and visual artists [Bildende], as agents and people of action ground
and shelter the truth of be-ing by re-configuring [Umgestaltung] beings in
beings themselves (Heidegger 1984 GA 45, 215).
The dialogue between human beings and gods, allowing gods to shine
through things and thus allowing ideas to appear and things to come to us, is,
therefore, not an exchange between human beings and gods, but a configuration or setting-into-work. It is within the dialogue that ideas, being configured, function as enablers. Heideggers wager in his a-subjective effort to find
the right insight is that language is the dialogue that links together the fluidity of things, the fluidity of human beings and the fluidity of the gods. And the
ideas are the enabling aspect of language that is not subjective, but divine in
the sense of not being contained in things and not coming from the perspective of human beings. Language for Heidegger is in my view what ideas are for
Plato: what prepares for things their dwelling in the intelligible realm.
The Scale of Being through Language

Language alone brings what is, as something that is, into the Open for
the first time . . . Language, by naming beings for the first time, first
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brings beings to word and to appearance . . . Such a saying is a projecting

of the clearing, in which announcement is made of that as which beings
come into the open. (Heidegger 1982 GA 52, 73)
The word is the threshold a thing has to pass in order to reach the realm
of intelligibility and thus to be. Only the word makes a being be a being
(Heridegger 1999 GA 85, 72).11 All these formulations could be substituted
for those Heidegger uses to describe Platos ideas. But the significant difference, which allows Heidegger not to reify ideas, is that language is a
configuration or a Dichtung. Ideas themselves are such configurations: It
is only from a world that the sun and the wind come to appearance and
are only what they are to the extent that they are poeticized from this
world (Heidegger 1982 GA 52, 40). Let us note the emphasis on the
sun and the wind, which makes them sound like Platonic ideas. There is
a Dichten of astronomy and meteorology that pertains to modern natural
explanation on the mode of calculation and planning (40).
This latter mode of dichten is, as we saw, part of the abandonment of
being in which Heidegger believes we find ourselves. The abandonment
manifests itself through language; more specifically through the disappearance of a genuine language. As we saw in the Introduction to this
volume, the German language, Heidegger tells us, suffers from an americanization of language (Heidegger 1982 GA 52, 10) through which language has become a mere means of exchange. It may be that our language
is German and still we speak completely American (Heidegger 1984
GA 53, 80; 1996, 65. Translation modified). This alienation toward the
word (Entfremdung zum Wort) (Heidegger 1982 GA 52, 11) bears upon the
way a thing can be preserved (and this means: can be). Since the most
important way of being preserved is precisely by being said, a subversion of
language amounts to a subversion of the way things are preserved. It is a
contamination of the very ontological roots of reality. How does this ontological connection between things and words function?
Heidegger applies to words the twofold aspect of preservation, which
explained the two appearings of ideas. The word has two sides: forwardlooking, it is what provides a thing with its public clothing, allowing the
thing named and nameable to have currency and be a node in human relationships and dealings in the world; it is one mode of preservation. But the
word is also, backward-looking, as the other mode of preservation, what
brings the true to its crystallization in a thing and as such carries with it
the trace of the withdrawal of being. Before the word is available, the movement of disclosure or the unfolding of the truth has already started. The
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word both brings a thing to its being and conceals the truth of that thing in
the sense that it conceals the movement of entering being. The word itself
already discloses something (familiar) and thus hides that which has to
be brought into the open through thinking-saying [im denkerischen Sagen]
(Heidegger 1999, 58).
However, a common language cannot speak the movement of entering
being, nor can a new language. The truth of be-ing cannot be said with the
ordinary language that today is ever more widely misused and destroyed
by incessant talking. . . . Or can a new language for be-ing be invented?
No (Heidegger 1999b, 54). If we cannot invent a new language, the only
path left is to perform some operation on language so as to recover from
it its unveiling power. This happens when the word fails. For, when the
word fails, the movement of entering being is not brought to its conclusion
in the form of a word functioning as a label. This movement of entering
being itself appears, which is, seen from the perspective of the thing once
named, a concealing. By failing, the word reveals, because the thing that
could be named, but is not, is deprived of its entry into the realm of intelligibility and thus is not being (in the adjectival sense); it is disclosed as
un-being.
The word fails [es verschlgt einem das Wort], not as an occasional eventin
which an accomplishable speech or expression does not take place . . . but
originarily. The word does not even come to word [das Wort kommt gar nicht
zum Wort], even though it is precisely when the word escapes one [verschlagen]
that the word begins to take its first leap. The words escaping one is enowning as the hint and onset of be-ing. (Heidegger 1999, 26)
Heidegger likes to appeal to Stefan Georges verse, May no thing be where
the word breaks open (Kein Ding sei wo das Wort gebricht). He explains it
as follows: the word first makes a being be . . . When the word breaks
up, Being refuses itself. But in this refusal Being manifests itself as refusal
[Verweigerung]as silence, as in-between, as there (Heidegger 1999 GA
85, 72). We can see now the connection between un-being as the stage
(Let us call it Stage1) preceding being (understood adjectivally) and un-being
as the stage of being but not in truth (Let us call it Stage2). Since they are
linked to each other, the glimpse we have at the un-being when the word
escapes (Stage1) renders what was being hitherto un-being (Stage2). This
is what The Origin calls the thrust that a work of art causes, or the disruption of the familiar. It was also manifested, first, in the fundamental mood
of the first beginning, where the whole of being was wrapped in wonder,
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an astonishment that things are, and, second, in the fundamental mood

of the other beginning, the startled dismay or terror that things are. In
both cases, this mood takes away the necessity that things may still have, as
we see them. It releases them in their native fluidity: in the astonishment
what is the most habitual of all and in all and thus all becomes the most
inhabitual [Ungewnhlichsten] (Heidegger 1984 GA 45, 166).
If we cultivate the words escaping, we will replicate the coming to word
that the word both allows and conceals. The words escaping is the inceptual condition for the self-unfolding possibility of an originary-poeticnaming of be-ing [ursprnglichen-dichtenden-Nennung des Seyns] (Heidegger
1999, 26). We will thus attend to the coming into being of entities, at that
moment when plant, animal, rock, and sea and sky become beings [seiend
werden] (207).
Plato is the one to be credited with that effort to think the coming-intobeing. When re-read by Heidegger non-metaphysically, the me on is the
moment of becoming before something is and ideas are, like language,12
the enabler of this becoming. It is thus with approval that Heidegger quotes
Hlderlin: I believe that at the end we will all say: holy Plato, forgive us!
We have . . . heavily sinned against you (Heidegger 1982 GA 52, 177).
Notes
1
3
4
5
6
7
This playing out of the first and the other beginning is the second joining of the
Contributions under the name of playing-forth.
Human beings themselves are under the illusion that they are absolute subjects,
although they have been brought to such an understanding. The abandonment
of be-ing happens to beings, indeed to beings in the whole, and thus also and
precisely to that being which as man stands in the midst of beings and thereby
forgets their be-ing (Heidegger 1999, 81). This subjectivism corresponds to the
simplistic idealism Heidegger derided in Being and Time.
Heidegger lists sixteen signs of such an abandonment (Heidegger 1999, 8283).
Paul Shorey in the Loeb bi-lingual edition translates as turned toward more real
things (Plato 1987, 125). Heidegger translates as Seienderem zugewendet (1988 GA
34, 31).
Shorey translates as more real and Heidegger as unverborgener.
Beings differentiate themselves in more or less being (Heidegger 1988 GA 34, 33).
Recall Heideggers stern warning in Introduction to Metaphysics: What is really
asked in our question [why are there beings at all instead of nothing?] is, for faith,
foolishness. Philosophy consists in such a foolishness. A Christian philosophy is
a round square and a misunderstanding (Heidegger 2000, 8).
When Heidegger speaks of god in the singular or gods in the plural, he only
points to a place-holder for the divine. Whether it is one god or several gods, this
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10
11
12
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is not decidable yet. It will depend on the particular configuration of the new
Da-sein of the other beginning. The undecidability concerning which god and
whether a god can, in utmost distress, once again arise, from which way of being
of man and in what waythis is what is named with the name gods (Heidegger
1999, 308).
Let us note that gods are not being, for be-ing is never a determination of god
itself. Rather be-ing is that which the godding of gods needs, in order nonetheless
to remain totally differentiated from be-ing (Heidegger 1999, 169). Strictly
speaking, gods are not at all. Be-ing is the between [Zwischen] in the midst of
beings and gods . . . Not attributing being to gods initially means only that being
does not stand over gods and that gods do not stand over being. But gods do
need be-ing (308309).
To ascribe this collapse of the two meanings to the Greeks is highly dubious. We
foreigners may see it as one word and we indeed have to be careful when learning
Greek to remember which one has the stress on the first and which one on the
second syllable. But the reason is that we learn the word through reading and
writing. It is thus a visual bias that causes the similarity between the two words.
When these words were spoken by the Greeks they were as different as words can
be, like our English words desert and desert; these English words pose a problem
only for foreigners, precisely because they learn English very often by dealing
with the written words. It is because of this visual bias that tha and the or desert
and desert look the same. Not so for native speakers who learn words phonetically
and for whom a difference in stress is all that is needed to differentiate two words.
Heideggers speculation with thea is as dubious as a speculation about an AngloSaxon metaphysics associating a barren place with what is deserved.
Or, as Heidegger will write later in a more colorful and powerful manner, when
we go to the well, when we go through the woods, we are always already going
through the word well, through the word woods, even if we do not speak the
words and do not think of anything relating to language (Heidegger 1971, 132).
If, indeed, language plays a role analogous to the role of ideas for Plato, language
not only provides the thing with its outlook, it also shows the extent to which the
gods shine through in things, and how much we are sayers (Heidegger 2000,
86). To be a sayer means to be capable of saying it is. It is because human
beings can say is, because they have a relation to being, that they are able to
say at all, that they have the word, that they are zoon logon echon (Heidegger
1984 GA 53, 112; 1996, 90).
Part IV
Toward a Broadened Ontology

and Epistemology
Nature, Judgment, and
Intersubjectivity
Chapter 8
Harmony in Opposition
On Merleau-Pontys Heraclitean Vision of Truth
Shazad Akhtar
Like Hegel, Nietzsche, and other modern German philosophers, phenomenologists Husserl and Heidegger tied their own philosophical agendas to
the concerns or aspirations of the ancient Greeks. This is a less characteristic
feature of the work of French phenomenologists Sartre and Merleau-Ponty,
both of whom did look back, to be sure, but mainly with respect to their
German predecessors (plus, of course, Descartes) rather than to, say, Plato
or Parmenides. Yet at least in the case of Merleau-Ponty, the ties to ancient
Greek thinking are real, though not necessarily of a Platonic-Aristotelian
kind. One has to push back, instead, to the storied figure of Heraclitus.
The conjunction of Merleau-Pontys and Heraclitus thought stems from
their similar ontologies and views of logic and truth. They share the conviction that ultimate realityBeing, Nature (phsis), and so onis self-divided
and oppositionally structured, yet also that this antagonism is the secret to
the real unity of reality: The hidden attunement [harmonie] is better than
the obvious one (Kahn 1983, 80/65).1 For Merleau-Ponty, human subjectivity is implicated at the heart of this paradox, being both the subject
that is visible/tangible and the object that sees/touches. Self and world,
le soi and lautre, are intertwined and co-defined, but always as opposites,
always retaining an irreducible tension and difference. Like Schelling,
Merleau-Ponty comes to understand this human situation as ontologically
revelatoryit is Being that is internally folded, not simply human being,
as if humanity were an aberration or a happenstance. Yet by disavowing the
transcendental idealism of Kantian or Husserlian (or earlier-Schellingean)
varieties, which privilege the subject (however it be definedconsciousness,
ego, intersubjectivity, etc.), Merleau-Ponty dives headlong into the mysterious depths, the abyss even, of a Nature that produces a dialectic from
which it withdraws as a kind of lost or primordial unity.
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Shazad Akhtar
It is undoubtedly true that we can have little certainty about what

Heraclitus really said or meant, based on the small number of enigmatic fragments of his teaching that we possess. Concerning, for example, Merleau-Pontys lost unity, the past that has never been present,
I would be personally tempted to compare Heraclitus famous fragment,
Nature (phsis) loves to hide (Kahn 1983 10/33). What is common here
is a sense of the essentially concealed nature of the ground of thingsor
so one might say, based on one of many possible ways of reading the
pertinent texts. No single strategy of interpretation can claim more
than partial plausibility, let alone a monopolistic authority. Nonetheless,
ones case for the force or plausibility of one interpretation over another
becomes considerably stronger if it can be tied consistently to other statements by the philosopher in question, to the patterns that develop over
many statements and which, together, manifest a general vision or total
perspective.
I compare Merleau-Ponty and Heraclitus in this essay under three
major themes, all converging ultimately in the fourth, namely truth
itself. I expend some effort in trying to give the Heraclitean fragments,
reproduced in translation, a consistent and nuanced reading, but my
emphasis is on reconstructing Merleau-Ponty qua Heraclitean theorist of truth (which in turn rests on various foundational ontological
ideas). It should also be made clear that my intent in this paper is not
to show a causal influence of Herlaclitus thought on Merleau-Ponty.
Merleau-Ponty obviously reads Heraclitus and quotes him occasionally
and favorably, 2 but he does the same thing with dozens of other thinkers. He was a voracious and generous reader. What this paper reveals
is a resonance between the two thinkers based on correlations, not
causality.
First Theme: Identity-in-Contradiction

Heraclitus principal contribution to human discourse appears to have
been his principle of (in my terms, of course) harmonious opposition.
Though not explicitly stated (in the fragments we possess) as a law, in the
mold for example of Parmenides strictures against the saying or thinking
of what is not, Heraclitus offers many instances, clearly for illustrative
effect, of the phenomenon of the identity of contrariescontrary ideas,
things, phenomena, forces, and so on. It is less well known that MerleauPonty came to embrace just this sort of principle. Indeed, it becomes the
Merleau-Pontys Heraclitean Vision of Truth
131
basis of his later ontology of the visible and the invisible, the sensible
and sentient.
Let us begin with Heraclitus. Here is a list of many of the fragments (rendered here by two different translators) that illustrate the present theme (I
have numbered them arbitrarily for reference):
1. The teacher of most is Hesiod. It is him they know as knowing most, who
did not recognize day and night: they are one. (Kahn 1983, 19/37)
2. The counter-thrust brings together, and from tones at variance comes
perfect attunement, and all things come to pass through conflict.
(Kahn 1983, 75/63)
3. They do not comprehend how a thing agrees at variance with itself: [it
is] an attunement turning back [on itself], like that of the bow and lyre.
(Kahn 1983, 78/65)
4. The cosmos works/by harmony of tensions/like the lyre and bow.
(Haxton 2001, 56/37)
5. From the strain/of binding opposites/comes harmony. (Haxton 2001,
46/31)
6. The beginning and the end are shared in the circumference of a circle. (Kahn 1983, 99/75)
7. The way up and down is one and the same. (Kahn 1983, 103/75)
8. Therefore, good/and ill are one. (Haxton 2001, 57/37)
The way in which opposites may be said to be one surely varies, and, it
must be admitted, not always in particularly (philosophically) interesting
ways. Should we interpret Heraclitus in a more mundane way than people
typically do? For instance, one may say that day and night are one in the
sense that they seamlessly blend into each other, with no strictly discernible boundary between them. But then why would Hesiod bother to recognize such a triviality, or be rebuked for failing to do so? Fragments 26,
as well as possibly 8, could be interpreted in far bolder ways. Certainly the
notion that a thing agrees at variance with itself (3) is meant to challenge
our intuitions, just as Heraclitus himself prefaces (3) with They do not
comprehend . . ., they presumably being thosethe hoi polloi, natural
philosophers, or the ancient poetsoperating foolishly and with a common sense bias.
Heraclitus own suspicion of common sense is evident from his famous
denunciation of Homer, reported to us by Aristotle, for giving lyrical voice
to the common-sense view that life would be better without conflict than
with it: Heraclitus reproaches the poet for the verse Would that Conflict
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Shazad Akhtar
might vanish from among gods and men! For there would be no harmonie
without high and low notes nor any animals without male and female, both
of which are opposites (Kahn 1983, 81[A]/67). This also seems to be what
is at play when Heraclitus startlingly declares that War is the father of
all and king of all (Kahn 1983, 83/67). In this light, Heraclitus observation of the identity of beginning-point and end-point in the revolution of
a circle (6) has clear cosmological implications: just as the circle could not
exist except as a manifestation of conflict, permeating each point of its
circumference, so the cosmos could not exist without being a harmonie of
opposition. A circle is perhaps something mundane, but to see a circle in
this way, as illustrating this concept, is not.
Let us next consider the famous river fragments, which can be read in
much the same spirit as what has preceded. Here are the relevant remarks,
first from a second-hand report from Plutarch:
One cannot step twice into the same river, nor can one grasp any mortal
substance in a stable condition, but it scatters and again gathers; it forms
and dissolves, and approaches and departs. (Kahn 1983, 51/53)
Plotinus adds his own gloss as follows:
Heraclitus left us to guess what he meant when he said . . . it rests by
changing and its weariness to toil at the same tasks and be [always]
beginning. (Kahn 1983, 5253/53)
These particular fragments, and other related ones, have been subject to
much varied interpretation. I think that a useful way to think about them
arises out of a consistent reading of the idea of identity-in-opposition. The
river is a symbol of a certain paradox: it lacks any self-identity, but does not, all
the same, cease to be a river. It rests by changing. But its being is the same
as its becoming, for its self-abiding (rest) is also its self-dispersal (change).
The line between being and not-being cannotat least when it comes to
the evanescent things of this world (mortal substance)be sharply drawn.
But that is because, against what Plato and Aristotle will later contend, to be
identical to oneself in a way that excludes or precludes change is an illusion, even though there being a river as such is not. Are we not talking about
one now? There is a river, but what it is is this: self-abiding-qua-self-dispersal. Paradoxically, then, the rivers instability is its stability, its non-being its
being. (Thus there may be another sense in which Phusis loves to hide.)
133
There is a striking parallel to the Heraclitean river fragments in MerleauPontys formulation of dialectic. Note the following passage:
[My conception of dialectic is] self-manifestation, disclosure, in the process of forming itself . . . [My] dialectic is indeed all this, and it is, in this
sense, what we are looking for. If nonetheless [I] have not hitherto said
so, it is because, in [the] history of philosophy, it has never been all [of]
that unadulteratedly; it is because the dialectic is unstable (in the sense
that the chemists give to the word), it is even essentially and by definition
unstable, so that it has never been able to formulate itself into theses without denaturing itself, and because if one wishes to maintain its spirit it is perhaps
necessary to not even name it. (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 92 [My emphasis])
Note here the paradoxical combination of somethings having a nature
(dialectic must not be forced to denature itself by becoming static) and
maintaining absolute fluidity (by definition unstable . . .). And of course
what Merleau-Ponty understands by dialectic, as we will see later on, is
grounded, like the Hegelian version, in (what is called) contradiction.
The non-Hegelian and very much Heraclitean part of Merleau-Pontys
view, however, is that the dialectic must not resolve itself into a triangular
movement toward an absolute that is other than the (movement of) dialectic itself.
Merleau-Pontys concept of reversibility, a prominent theme in his later
work, is nothing more, I would argue, than the Heraclitean principle of
the identity of opposites as played out, as it were, on the stage of postCartesian philosophy. Indeed, consider the way Merleau-Ponty characterizes Descartes difficulty with respect to the mind-body problem:
There is an extraordinary difficulty in thinking according to both the
first and the second order [physical and mental] at the same time. It is
difficult to conceive the soul and the body as one and the same thing,
while at the same time thinking of them as distinct. Union and distinction
are, however, both required, yet they are unthinkable both at the same time.
(Merleau-Ponty 2003, 1718 [My emphasis])
Merleau-Pontys concept of reversibility originates in his appreciation of an
everyday phenomenon. Merleau-Ponty notes, like Husserl before him, that
to touch something, when that something happens to be another part
of ones body, is also to be touched by that something. Subject here
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becomes object, and vice-versa.3 The most dramatic case is that of ones
own hands touching one another; but Merleau-Ponty sees reversibility as
extending beyond the sense of touch to include vision, which explains the
title of The Visible and the Invisible and the repeated references to, for example, the strange adhesion of the seer and the visible (Merleau-Ponty 1969,
140). Husserl had initially distinguished touching from vision by noticing
that while touch is reversible, vision is not. That is, we cannot see ourselves
seeing in the way we can touch ourselves touching. But Merleau-Ponty
questions the validity of this distinction on two counts. First, vision could
not truly see the world if the world did not adhere to its glance; and second, even in self-touching, there is no complete coincidence of sensing and
sensedin fact, non-coincidence turns out to be one of Merleau-Pontys
fundamental ideas, and it applies as truly to this case as to any other. As he
explains in one characteristic passage:
To begin with, we spoke summarily of the reversibility of the seeing and
the visible, of the touching and the touched. It is time to emphasize that
it is a reversibility always imminent and never realized in fact. My left
hand is always on the verge of touching my right hand touching the
things; but I never reach coincidence; the coincidence eclipses at the
moment of realization, and one of two things always occurs: either my
right hand really passes over into the ranks of the touched, or it retains
its hold on the world, but then I do not really touch itmy right hand
touching, I palpate with my left hand only its outer covering. (MerleauPonty 1969, 148)
Thus while it is true that we cannot truly see ourselves seeing, in that the
eye cannot bend its vision back upon itself, neither, finally can touch. And
to the extent that either sense is reversible, it is reversible in this complex
mannerthat is, with a combination of identity and difference.
There are basically three fundamental lessons or themes Merleau-Ponty
takes from reversibility. The first is that of the unity or chiasm of subject
and object, touching and touched, sentient and sensible, and so on. The second is, in apparent opposition to the first, non-coincidence; and the third
is the interplay of identity and difference, chiasm and non-coincidence,
that produces the paradoxical sameness without identity (Merleau-Ponty
1969, 261) that we experience with respect to the world as well as to other
people (e.g., in the paradigmatic case of a shaking of hands). After all, the
phenomenon of reversibility could not become known to us if it were merely
a difference or merely an identity. Clearly the sensible and the sentient are
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not simply two but rather in some way one (or else how could they be reversible and simply trade places?), and yet they are two, since if they were
simply one, then how could they be related intentionally as seer to seen,
toucher to touched, and so on? This interweaving of identity and difference
is embodied in Merleau-Pontys reciprocal expressions difference without
contradiction and identity without superposition (Merleau-Ponty 1969,
135). Thus, non-coincidence for Merleau-Ponty serves exactly the same
function in his discourse as Heraclitus anti-Homeric emphasis on conflict
does in the latters discourse: to underscore the oppositional element of
identity-in-opposition.
Second Theme: Holism and the Question of

the One and the Many
Merleau-Ponty states during an important series of lectures at the Collge
de France that the question of wholeness or totality [lies] at the center of
this course on the idea of nature and maybe the whole of philosophy (MerleauPonty 2003, 145 [My italics]). What is it that binds together the unbonded,
makes a unity of many?
Merleau-Ponty and Heraclitus are both holists. But what exactly does
this term mean in the present context? I will here make a distinction
between two kinds of holism, general holism and vertical holism. In general
holism, the many are united inextricably in a larger system, for example
in deep-ecological thinking of Buddhist interdependent arising. Vertical
holism is a macrocosm/microcosm principle, or whole-in-part immanence.
I will argue that Merleau-Ponty and Heraclitus affirm both types of holism.
This makes their holisms all the more radical and their horizonal convergence, so to speak, all the more striking. (Another way to state the difference between general and vertical holism is to say that the former is a
one-of-many, while the latter is a one-in-many).
Heraclitus general holism shows up most directly in the following fragment, especially the last part of it:
Graspings: wholes and not wholes, convergent and divergent, consonant
and dissonant, from all things one and from one thing all. (Kahn 1983,
124/85)
One is led to interpret this fragment as a statement of holism in the sense
that the all are regarded here as belonging together inextricablyfrom
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all things one. But what might the next part meanfrom one thing all?
Is this a reflection of Heraclitus notorious fire-monism? It is hard to
say, but if we take the first part of the fragment into account and logically
connect beginning to end, it seems that Heraclitus point may be that the
many are united in their differences (consonant and dissonant)that is,
they are what they are only in relations of difference with everything else.
This paradoxically brings all things together as one, inseparably linked
to each other in their unlikenesses.
Of course this echoes the familiar modern idea, expressed by Spinoza
and picked up by the German Idealists, that determination is negation.
There is certainly support for this interpretation in this rendering of a
Heraclitean fragment by Haxton: Some, blundering/ with what I set before
you,/ try in vain with empty talk/ to separate the essences of things/ and
say how each thing truly is (Haxton 2001, 1/3). In other words, one cannot
say how each thing truly is, since it is nothing in itself, only a reflection of
the whole. The parallel with Buddhism surfaces again.
As for Merleau-Ponty, Fred Evans puts it well when he says,
What [Merleau-Ponty] offers is . . . closer to what we might call a unity
composed of difference rather than a collection of separate, merely
externally related entities or a unity formed through domination by one
of the elements of that unityhe eschews, in other words, both pluralism and monism. (Evans 2008, 191)
Merleau-Pontys general holism is prevalent from his early and enduring
interest in Gestalt psychology to the Nature lectures quoted from above,
in which it is made a central theme.
But Merleau-Ponty also develops his holism in the subtle direction of vertical holism as well. He does this in two ways. First, he embraces the implication, from the principle of reversibility, of an underlying isomorphism of
the inner and the outer; and second, he applies this sort of intertwinement
to all instances of wholes or totalities with respect to their parts
their total parts.
First, let us look at how this relates to Heraclitus. It is seldom acknowledged
how deeply Heraclitus enmeshed discourse on the soul with that concerning the universe at large. The fact is not lost on Charles Kahn. I believe,
states Kahn, that [my predecessor Hermann] Diels was right in locating the
central insight of Heraclitus in [the] identity of structure between the inner, personal
world of the psyche and the larger natural order of the universe (Kahn 1983, 21
[My emphasis]). For example, when Heraclitus proclaims, The god: day and
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night, winter and summer, war and peace, satiety and hunger . . . (Kahn
1983, 123/85), we can see how he might agree with Merleau-Ponty that spirit
and nature are two leaves of a single Being. The macrocosm/microcosm
correlation in Heraclitus is reflected in the fact that his cosmological discourse seems to have an ultimate personal and moral significance:
Mans character is his fate. (Kahn 1983, 114/81)
Applicants for wisdom/ do what I have done:/ inquire within. (Haxton
2001, 80/51)
Heraclitus emphasis on personality and introspection has even led Kahn
to see him as an existentialist, and to detect a resonance between him and
a thinker like Unamuno in their common meditation[s] on human life
and human destiny in the context of biological death (Kahn 1983, 21).
Natural-philosophical doctrines for Heraclitus, while not purely allegorical, are, says Kahn, significant only insofar as they reveal a general truth
about the unity of opposites, a truth whose primary application for human
beings lies in a deeper understanding of their own experience of life and
death, sleeping and waking, youth and old age . . . (Kahn 1983, 21).
The unity or chiasm of mind and world, spirit and nature, suggests for
Merleau-Ponty a kind of pre-established harmony (Merleau-Ponty 1969,
133), one that Merleau-Ponty understands as expressive of an ontological
logic of reciprocity: since vision is a palpation with the look, it must also be
inscribed in the order of being that it discloses to us; he who looks must not
himself be foreign to the world that he looks at (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 134).
Merleau-Ponty sometimes expresses this idea of a subjective-objective or
natural-spiritual harmony by referring to the nature in us, [by which] we
can know Nature and by remarking that reciprocally it is from ourselves
that living beings and even space speak to us . . . (Merleau-Ponty 2003,
205).4 Central to this particular notion of an inner/outer intimacy is the
ultimate continuity of the visible and the invisible:
The superficial pellicle of the visible is only for my vision and for my
body. But the depth beneath this surface contains my body and hence
contains my vision. My body as a visible thing is contained within the full
spectacle. (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 138)
Perhaps relevant to this commitment to the reversibility of inner and outer
realms is Merleau-Pontys comment that man contains in silence all the
paradoxes of philosophy (Merleau-Ponty 1988, 6364).
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Merleau-Ponty illustrates the idea of unity-in-many (and not merely

unity-of-many, or general holism) further through the expression total
part, that is, a wholeness immanent in a part, thereby rendering, paradoxically, the whole as part of itself. Let us consider an example (the
case of the five senses) of what Merleau-Ponty means by the term:
Each sense is a world, i.e. absolutely incommunicable for the other
senses, and yet construing a something which, through its structure, is from
the first open upon the world of the other senses, and with them forms one
sole Being . . . The World is this whole where each part, when one
takes it for itself, suddenly opens unlimited dimensionsbecomes a total
part. Now this particularity of the color, of the yellow, and this universality
are not a contradiction, are together sensoriality itself: it is by the same virtue
that the color, the yellow, at the same time gives itself as a certain being
and as a dimension, the expression of every possible beingWhat is proper
to the sensible (as to language) is to be representative of the whole, not by
a sign-signification relation, or by the immanence of the parts in one
another and in the whole, but because each part is torn up from the whole,
comes with its roots, encroaches upon the whole, transgresses the frontiers of the others. (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 218)
This passage distills the essence of Merleau-Pontys complete answer to the
question of the relation of the manyfor example, many egos, or multiple
orders of beingto the one or the whole, and what he says of the senses,
or of colors, applies to these other sets of many as well. (It is also an
example of his characteristicand effective, I thinkuse of metaphor.)
That what he has in mind is a highly general law can be gathered from
the fact that he sees the same vertical-holistic principle involved in the
coordinated anatomical/behavioral development of organisms, on the
one hand, and to the becoming of a painting out of many strokes of
the brush, on the other. 5 This is one of the most powerful ideas in all of
Merleau-Pontys later thinking, though it is almost totally buried in obscurity, as he never got a chance to develop it in greater depth in an official
or completed work.
Third Theme: Paradox and Dialectic

Heraclitus notorious fondness for paradoxical language is mirrored by
Merleau-Pontys ownnot only this, but Merleau-Ponty was an eloquent
139
philosopher of paradox itself, like Nicholas of Cusa, Kierkegaard, Jaspers,

Heidegger, and others before him. In both the Merleau-Pontian and
Heraclitean cases, their paradoxicality stems, I think, from the view that
human thought is constrained by a logic of non-contradiction that somehow comes too late to capture the essence of the truth. This is a trope
common among mystics, but philosophers also sometimes reach the same
conclusion. We must keep in mind that for paradoxical philosophers,
paradox is not simply contradiction but more like an identity of opposites that problematizes propositional thought itself, at least as a vehicle
of (whole) truth. In this way, paradox is in fact a corollary of any rigorous
holism. In a sense, it is actually common-sense world-views that are contradictory. Thus, the Phenomenology of Perception proceeds by applying reductio ad absurdum arguments against various one-sided views of perception,
while in Heraclitus we have seen a persistent opposition to common sense,
the sleeping world and its confusions.
The seed of Merleau-Pontys approach to paradox and Being as a paradoxical phenomenon are to be found already in this dense and startling
passage, which is worth quoting in full, from The Primacy of Perception
and Its Philosophical Consequences:
It is true that we arrive at contradictions when we describe the perceived
world. And it is also true that if there were such a thing as a non-contradictory thought, it would exclude the world of perception as a simple
appearance. But the question is precisely to know whether there is such
a thing as logically coherent thought or thought in the pure state. This is
the question Kant asked himself . . . One of Kants discoveries, whose
consequences we have not yet fully grasped, is that all our experience of
the world is throughout a tissue of concepts which lead to irreducible
contradictions6 if we attempt to take them in an absolute sense or transfer them into pure being, and that they nevertheless found the structure
of all phenomena, or everything which is for us . . . I wish only to point
out that the accusation of contradiction is not decisive, if the acknowledged
contradiction appears as the very condition of consciousness [my emphasis] . . .
There is a vain form of contradiction which consists in affirming two
theses which exclude one another at the same time and under the same
aspect . . . There is the sterile non-contradiction of formal logic [versus]
the justified contradictions of transcendental logic. The objection with
which we are concerned would be admissible only if we could put a system of eternal truths in the place of the perceived world, freed from its
contradictions. (Merleau-Ponty 1964b, 18)
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Merleau-Pontys reconceptualization of opposition emerges as the idea of

complementarity. A dialectic of complementarity refuses, we might now
say, to remain static by cresting into any form of synthesis of horizons. It is
in this spirit that I read Merleau-Pontys remarkable interweaving of his critique of Sartrean ontology and his own burgeoning dialectical method:7
Has not our discussion consisted in showing that the relationship between
the two terms [Being and Nothingness] (whether one takes them in a relative sense, within the world, or in an absolute sense, of the index of the
thinker and what he thinks) covers a swarm of relations with double meaning, incompatible and yet necessary to one another (complementarity, as
the physicists say today), and that this complex totality is the truth of the
abstract dichotomy from which we started? (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 92)
Other relevant passages:
There are two sides of an experience, conjugated and incompossible,
but complementary. Their unity is irrecusable; it is simply as the invisible
hinge on which two experiences are articulateda self torn apart.
(Merleau-Ponty 2003, 6566 [My emphasis])
[C]ontradiction, understood as interior to Nature, must be assumed.
We must admit the idea of an operating negation in Nature.8 (MerleauPonty 2003, 6566)
As we see, Merleau-Pontys use of the term complementarity involves a
deliberate reference to Bohrs theory of quantum mechanics by the same
name, a subject to which he devotes a good amount of attention in the
Nature lectures (Merleau-Ponty 2003, 89100). He applies what is true of
sub-atomic particles, in particular the symmetrical applicability of mutually incompatible wave-theory and corpuscular theory to the description of
elementary particles, to the total spectacle of being itself: . . . the two maps
are complete, and yet they do not merge into one. The two parts are total
parts and yet not superposable (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 134 [Note again the
idea of a total part]).
But Merleau-Ponty is also in an ongoing dialogue with Hegel, who had
been a major part of the French scene of philosophy at the time (and still
is, interestingly). With respect to Hegelian dialectic specifically MerleauPonty ruminates critically (and somewhat cryptically):
Position, negation, negation of the negation: this side, the other, the
other than the other. What do I bring to the problem of the same and
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the other? This: that the same be the other than the other, and identity
difference of differencethis 1) does not realize a surpassing, a dialectic
in the Hegelian sense; 2) is realized on the spot, by encroachment, thickness, spatiality. (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 264)9
Most noteworthy for us here are his self-comparison with Hegelian dialectic and his rejection of its teleology of surpassing. Merleau-Ponty is careful to identify what he calls a trap in the dialectic and the bad dialectic
(Merleau-Ponty 1969, 94) that ensues, ironically echoing Hegels own
terminological style (bad infinity, etc.). As against these, Merleau-Ponty
advances a new form or method of thinking, hyperdialectic:
What we call hyperdialectic is a thought . . . that is capable of reaching
truth because it envisages without restriction the plurality of the relationships and what has been called ambiguity. The bad dialectic is that
which thinks it recomposes being by a thetic thought, by an assemblage
of statements, by thesis, antithesis, and synthesis; the good dialectic is
that which is conscious of the fact that every thesis is an idealization, that
Being is not made up of idealizations or of things said, as the old logic
believed, but of bound wholes where signification never is except in tendency. (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 94)
Merleau-Pontys critique of Hegel thus lies, ironically, in the latters not
being thorough enough in thinking dialectically, and in relying on teleological explanations where none truly obtain (or are even relevant
Merleau-Ponty is critical of Kantian as-if teleology as well). Thus the
only good dialectic is hyperdialectic (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 94). MerleauPontys good dialecticity is a movement of thought and the manner in
which thought must pursue the whole without pretending to have a grasp
of it unilaterallya by now familiar theme:
The point to be noticed is this: that the dialectic without synthesis of
which we speak is not therefore scepticism, vulgar relativism, or the reign
of the ineffable. What we reject or deny is not the idea of a surpassing
that reassembles, it is the idea that it results in a new positive, a new position . . . What we seek is a dialectical definition of being that can be neither the being for itself nor the being in itselfrapid, fragile, labile
definitions. (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 95)
Because of his resolute commitment of Natures internal contradictions,
Merleau-Ponty handles and develops many individual paradoxes; indeed,
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his view is that philosophy itself is replete with them, just insofar as it is
philosophical. One of the more paradigmatic paradoxes concerns the
interplay of distance and proximity. This is the dialectic that defines
our strange intimacy with things, even as things remain resolutely outside
of what Husserl calls the sphere of immanence. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty
takes the Husserlian notion of an immanent transcendency of things in
consciousness to its logical conclusion:
By definition perception puts us in the presence of a definitively opaque
term. In other words, the Nature that we perceive is as distant and as
close as possible, and for the same reasons. There is nothing between me
and the Nature that I perceive. When I perceive a thing, I cannot conceive of a perception interposed between me and the object. (MerleauPonty 2003, 118 [My emphasis])
The emphasized clause here shows that Merleau-Ponty is not talking about a
distance in this respect but a proximity in anotherone of the mundane
routes to simple non-contradiction. He reiterates this same idea of distancequa-proximity in The Visible and the Invisible : this distance is not the contrary of
this proximity, it is deeply consonant with it, it is synonymous with it (MerleauPonty 1969, 135 [My emphasis]). And in a similar vein: Vision does not completely blend into the visible; nonetheless we are close to it, palpation, gaze
envelops things, clothes them with its own flesh (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 131).
For Merleau-Ponty, as for Heraclitus, the tightly wound unity of contraries
in Being actually serves to preserve as opposed to wound its intelligibility.
This, in fact, is the true depth of paradoxthat it is the only way to say what
is true, rather than itself being a threat to truth or the saying of it. Thus
in one place Merleau-Ponty remarks that Husserl tries wrongly to disentangle knots, since disentanglement destroys intelligibility (Merleau-Ponty
1969, 268). What he has in mind is that Cartesian dualism, for instance,
has increased intelligibility of parts at the expense of making entirely
unintelligible the wholethat is, the whole being that is alive, embodied,
thinking, and sensing. In this way, his analytic procedure, separating substances in thought that cannot be separated (by Descartes admission)
in experience, is doomed to failureand sterile contradiction.
Conclusion: The Notion of Truth

As I hope to have shown, Heraclitus and Merleau-Ponty present to us a
very unified front on some of the most basic questions of philosophy. The
143
consequences of their basically ontological ideas for the notion of truth,

the theme of the present volume, may now be directly examined. Chiefly at
issue is the question of the relation between unity and multiplicity. Truth,
since the early Greeks, has almost always been understood as some type
of unity, wholeness, harmony, coherence, or correspondence. But truth
also, necessarily, involves multiple components. For truth unitesand
for this unison to take place, a disparity must be present, if only to be overcome. Heraclitean and Merleau-Pontian discourse tends to undermine
this picture radically. Unity and multiplicity are intertwined; they never
exist apart, and they never can. Wholeness is a harmonyyet harmony
is not a fusion of elements. There is nothing but oppositionWar is . . .
king of allbut equally, opposition is nothing but an expression of unity.
War is peace!
For Merleau-Ponty and Heraclitus, therefore, truth can never be selfcoincident, never at one with itself, only constantly self-disrupting. But
this does not make truth impossible; what it makes impossible is the truths
(total) recovery in conceptual constructions and imagined correspondences, all of which presuppose a sameness over difference, a sameness
that reduces to identity. In Merleau-Ponty, we can see that truth is the
disruption that produces the conditions for the possibility, as it were, of
ones experience of a deceptively stable world. It is a stabilized explosion,
i.e. involving return (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 268). That is, there is a coincidencea returnbut this hides the underlying explosion that is the
condition of this very returning.
The necessity of explosion, dehiscence, and living contradiction
are brought out by Merleau-Ponty in his reference to Montaigne: If
[Montaignes skepticism] multiplies contrasts and contradictions, it is
because truth demands it. And even more provocatively, Merleau-Ponty
in the same essay offers this: Montaigne begins by teaching that all truth
contradicts itself; perhaps he ends up recognizing that contradiction is truth
(Merleau-Ponty 1964a, 198 [My emphasis]).
Merleau-Pontys is therefore a conception of truth that permits multiplicity to infiltrate unitynot from the outside, as it were, but from
within. Truth is the sort of unity or wholeness that is a harmony not
of sameness but of difference, a harmony in and of opposition. Or again,
it is the harmonynot identity, as in some of the German Idealistsof
identity and difference. In both Heraclitus and Merleau-Ponty, this
conception of harmony has important implications for the relation of
humanityin particular, human subjectivity or soulto the broader
cosmos or nature, the visible realm of things. For in Merleau-Ponty,
phenomenology becomes a dialectical meditation on the chiasm of
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subjectivity and objectivity, humanity and Nature. Yet this is also true of
Heraclitus, whose pivotal role in the history of Western philosophy may lie
in his discovery that cosmology and psychology are intertwinedindeed,
reversible.
Notes
1
2
3
4
All citations of Heraclitus include both the fragment number (as determined by
the translator and compiler in questionorderings of the fragments vary widely
from translator to translator) and, next, the page number from the cited
volume.
See, for example, Merleau-Ponty 1969, 92.
See Merleau-Ponty 2003, 217, 224; 1969, 141142; 147, 148; 154, 155; 223; 272.
See the following statement: the homogeneity of the measured and the measuring implies that the subject makes common cause with space.
There is also something analogous in Merleau-Pontys description of what Matisses method of painting and the body of behavior in the organism have in
common: Threads are tied up, which come from everywhere, and which constitute independent forms, and at the same time, he finds that these threads realize
something which has a unity (Merleau-Ponty 2003, 154). He even invokes sexuality in this regard. Thus the sexual is coextensive with the human not as a unique
cause, but as a dimension outside of which nothing exists (282).
Compare: Every attempt at elucidation brings us back to the dilemmas
(Merleau-Ponty 1969, 11). It is interesting that one of the early words he uses for
his method is in fact elucidation (See, for example: Merleau-Ponty 1969, 23).
Merleau-Ponty formally endorses a method of dialectic in chapter 2 of The Visible
and the Invisible (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 89).
The notion that Being contains its own negation ties in with the second of
Merleau-Pontys lessons learnt from the reversibility of touchthat is, the impossibility of pure coincidence or a simple identity of opposites (Merleau-Ponty
1969, 250251).
Compare, also in an obvious reference to Hegel: Against the doctrine of contradiction, absolute negation, the either/orTranscendence is identity within
difference (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 225).
Chapter 9
The Role of Infinite Judgment in

But just as the grave-diggers in Hamlet become familiar with skulls, so logicians
become familiar with truth.
(Russell 2009, 280)
In the Encyclopaedia Logic, Hegel remarks that while qualitative judgments
are commonly thought to express truth, they fail to do so, though they are
indeed capable of being correct (Hegel 1991, 249). That they so fail is a
function of an incongruity between the subject and predicate of the categorical proposition that furnishes the logical structure of judgment. The
logico-metaphysical form of every categorical proposition, or, as Hegel will
put it, the proposition expressed in every judgment, is The singular is the
universal (244). From the perspective of finite understanding, to determine
the singular as the universal is, epistemically, to determine a perceived individual to be the bearer of some property. Logically, it is to express the incongruous equation of subject and predicate, object and concept. However, from
the absolute standpoint achieved at the end of the Phenomenology, judgment
will find its true, speculative form in the instantaneous traversal of the phenomenon itself qua instantiated concept. If, in the end, truth is no longer
for Hegel the representational adequacy of judgment to intuited phenomenon, it nevertheless recovers an important link to the scholastic adaequatio
intellectus et rei through the development of the speculative proposition as
the proper medium of logical, cognitive, and metaphysical reflection. This
conception anticipates, but also corrects, Heideggers conception of phenomenological truth as altheia, for inasmuch as the formal proposition
cited above is true, that is, insofar as the singular is in fact the universal, it
follows, as Hegel insists, that the concept is already present in the subject of
predication, the empirical instance already in its universal predicate, and so
on. That adequation in its speculative guise is inexpressible in categorical
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form will be expressed by the infinite judgment, which in effect deconstructs

categorical judgment as a vehicle of truth.
We can say, then, that the infinite judgment, in its specifically Hegelian
employment, is the exemplary form of the speculative proposition, albeit
still cast in the predicative garb of categorical equivalence. That it is simultaneously true and incoherent is an indication of the function it serves
in announcing the collapse and reconstitution of the logico-grammatical
form it exhibits. What is more, since judgment as such remains, as the
engine of syllogistic inference, the bridge between static representation
and speculative form, what is thereby announced is the overcoming of categorical thought as such.
This brings us to a difficulty more profound than that of mere incongruity, namely, that the truth of a proposition, categorical or otherwise,
implies its literal senselessness. As Hegel tells us, this is because
a proposition promises a distinction between subject and predicate as
well as identity; and the identity-proposition does not furnish what its
form demands. Specifically, however, it is sublated by the so-called laws
of thought that follow it; for these make the contrary of this law into
lawsIf someone says that this proposition cannot be proven, but that
every consciousness proceeds in accordance with it and, as experience
shows agrees with it at once, as soon as it takes it in, then against this
alleged experience of the Schools we have to set the universal experience
that no consciousness thinks, has notions, or speaks, according to this
law, and no existence of any kind at all exists in accordance with it.
(Hegel 1991, 180)
The universal experience to which Hegel refers here is the fact that logical analysis reduces every true proposition to a special kind of identity statement, namely, one that refers, along with every other true proposition, to
the True as the absolute night in which all propositional cows are blacka
result that Wittgenstein, following Frege, will later identify, in addressing
different but related concerns, as a consequence of the formal analysis of
truth.
The trouble, then, is that the proposition undermines itself in both
semantic directions: in the first instance as tragedy (the misrecognition of truth in the collision of paradox), in the second instance, but
simultaneously, as farce (the masquerade of truth in vacuous identity). Traditionally, the dilemma between contradiction and tautology
is resolved through the ontological anchor of substance. The problem
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is to see how, apart from nostalgic stipulation, substance can enter the
proposition so as to negotiate the tension between difference and indifference introduced by the copula. Hegels insight is, quite simply, to have
recognized, before Frege, that the traditional categorical proposition is
incapable of expressing the relationship between substance, subject and
accident, because it is incapable of representing the logical and metaphysical unity of identity and difference. To do this, to think substance and
subject simultaneously, is to recast the copula as the logico-metaphysical
qua (is qua qua), thereby overcoming the logical form that immediately
falsifies it. Through this qua, what we might call the modular copula (to borrow a term from abstract algebra), substance, subject, predicate, concept,
etc., recover a coordinate proximity to one another in much the same
way as congruence between distinct mathematical groups is established
through integral modulation.
That such predicative or, more broadly, symbolic modulation should play
so central a philosophical role points to an interesting connection between
Marxs eleventh thesis on Feuerbach (The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it) and Hegels
thesis on Spinoza, namely, that Spinoza only interpreted truth as substance; the task is to think it equally as subject (Hegel 1977, 10). To make
this connection explicit, it is helpful to mention the work of Alain Badiou,
for whom changing the world (or changing worlds) consists in discerning
or naming a previously unmarked (or uninterpreted) logical subject to
which a revolutionary subject pledges its fidelity. For Hegel, to name an
event is to pass from affirmative to infinite judgment, a judgment that bears
witness to the fact that the world-totality (substance) is never closed. Long
before Gdel demonstrated the logical impossibility of a jointly consistent
and complete formal system, Hegel maintained, for an otherwise radically
different logic, that the notion of world as a totality of truths is both metaphysically and logically incoherent. Only through, and as, the succession
and breakdown of particular truths can the world reflect the True. Totality,
as Hegel will eventually understand it, is the movement of the universal
through determination to individuality, as also the reverse movement from
individuality . . . to the universal (480). It is, in other words, the continuous return of the subject to itself through the circuit of predication or
judgment. To grasp the True, then, is to comprehend this actualized totality, what Hegel will call, without distinction, the absolute, absolute spirit, or
absolute knowing. From the standpoint of absolute knowing, interpretation
and change are the shapes of the Bacchanalian revel through which the
world manifests itself as phenomenon or phantasia.
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Spinozas resolute monism accomplishes something similar, but only via

the abstract representation of a closed and consistent world sub specie aeternitatis, that is, without acknowledging the ontological force of contradiction (as evinced, for Hegel, in the fundamental identity between being and
nothing). As Hegel suggests in the Preface to the Phenomenology, to tarry
with the negative is not to forgo the world but to realize it. Hegels remark
implicitly identifies the infinite judgment as the cornerstone of his conception of truth. Infinite judgment, qua affirmative negation, is the vehicle
through which the philosophical subject fulfills its logical, historical, and
metaphysical promise, that is, that it arrives at the speculative identity of
substantial and subjective truth. The trouble with Spinozas monism is that
while it sidesteps the problems of multiplicity and incongruity, it does so
at the expense of subjectivity, and therefore of truth itself. This is because
truth qua truth presupposes an act of negation or differentiation (Urteil
qua Ur-teilung) through which substance realizes itself as a relation between
a logico-grammatical subject of predication and a logically determining,
thinking subject. Without this division, Spinozistic thought, considered as
a mere attribute of substance, remains (pace Marx) a mere interpretation of
a merely substantial world, what Hegel characterizes as an inert simplicity
completely, yet abstractly, determined by its modes and attributes.
Kant had already shown that the phenomenal world could not be represented as a closed totality insofar as it exists only for thinking subjects, but
he continued to maintain that things in themselves could be represented,
however obscurely, as completely determined. Slavoj iek has argued that
Hegel made the reference to things in themselves superfluous by identifying
the judging subject with the cosmological gap preventing the world-totality
from reaching closure (iek, 1993, 58). On our reading, the non-closure
of the world is equivalent to the endless appearance of appearances, that
is, to the relationship between the finitude of the judging subject and the
infinite Truth it (ad)judges. To remain at the level of finite judging is to be
subject to what Hegel famously calls the cunning of reason, the process
by which the subjects truth-takings (interpretations), and the phenomenal world these designate, are sacrificed, behind its back, to the Truth
of the absolute. To pass from finite judgment to infinite judgment is not to
seize the reins of galloping reason, but to acknowledge the cunning of
reason as such: finitude in the service of infinitude.
If Hegelian phenomenology is, thus, the sublation of the world qua substance, and of the categorical logic that sustains it, then infinite judgment is
the logical signature of this phenomenology and of the logic that succeeds
it. Through its confounding of logical form it manages to demonstrate,
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if not quite express, the truth of every conceptultimately, the Concept

itselfthat it propositionally expands. This is not, however, to say that it
confers validity upon truth, that it proves the truth of the proposition, for
indeed the deduction of any proposition is its truth, on Hegels view,
though without the logical transparency of infinite judgment it is unclear
what this amounts to. Rather, it merely shows how the veridical concept is
logically extrapolated, how conscious reason thinks or deduces truth, similarly to the way in which Freges much maligned assertion sign is supposed
to indicate a propositions being held true, and to tell us therefore that
asserting is what holding a proposition true amounts to, without thereby
certifying or explicating its truth.
The traditional, that is, scholastic, form of the infinite judgment, A is
not-B, is a categorical proposition whose quality, or locutionary force, is
affirmative and whose predicate is infinite, from the Latin infinitus, a translation, and indeed transformation (by Boethius), of Aristotles original
Greek aoristos. As such, infinite judgment is strictly, if counter-intuitively,
undefined with respect to quantity, that is, with respect to quantification,
in modern logical parlance. What identifies the predicate, and thus the
proposition it occurs in, as infinite, is its internal negation. In other words,
the predicate of every such proposition, or equivalently the attribution
involved in any judgment of this form, is determined through negation.
A judgment of this form both proffers an attribution or predicate and privatively withholds its determination. By virtue of this operation, the infinite
judgment captures the primacy of negation for consciousness and its acts,
and thus may be considered the propria persona, or perhaps more precisely
the propria species, of judgment as such, inasmuch as it is the formal expression of determinate negation. At the same time, it advances the cause of conceptual truth, or, as we should understand it, phenomenological truth,
over the truth or truths of representational thought. In so doing, it heralds
the demise of categorical logic and the advent of a conceptual logic from
which it is formally excluded. It is this logic, Hegels Begriffsschrift, as it were,
that the Phenomenology gives way to, though its exposition will require the
labor of two separate logics.
Before seeing how this works, that is, before turning our attention to the
specific occurrences of infinite judgment in the Phenomenology, we would do
well to pause over the expression affirmative negation used above to characterize it. To speak of such a thing is to approach the infinite judgment from
a strictly formal perspective. Yet the negation involved in a negatively determined predicate, that is, in the kind of predicate that establishes a proposition as infinite, is not necessarily, and indeed not typically, determinate.
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Determinacy, in other words, is not a formal property of negation as Hegel

understands it. But then what might it mean to say that infinite judgment is
the formal expression of determinate negation? It is impossible to answer
this question without knowing something both about what form (Form),
shape (Gestalt) and formalism (das Formelle) amount to for Hegel, and, relatedly, what he means by determinate (bestimmte) negation (Hegel 1977, 51).
As to his treatment of form, a few things need to be noted. Regardless
of how subject and predicate are differentiated to begin with, within the
predicative framework of (categorical) judgment that is the hallmark of
thinking, or at least of discursivity, Hegel thinks that logical differentiations of this sort are dissolved. For the logical form of every such judgment
is that of identity. But from Hegels perspective, the problem is not form
as such, but form conceived as empty, contentless structure (das Formelle),
what he also calls indifferent, external form (Form), something that he
detects in Kant, but which will only find its full expression in the mathematical and logical formalisms at the turn of the twentieth century. As
Hegel insists throughout the Phenomenology and more directly in the section on content and form in the Encyclopedia Logic, the abstract notion of
form is ill-conceived, since form is inconceivable without content: form is
so far from being indifferent with respect to content, however, that, on the
contrary, it is the content itself (Hegel 1991, 202203).
Questions of form are paramount for Hegel since it is through the forms
they assume that concepts are realized, and not in the weak sense of merely
achieving materiality, but in the robust Aristotelian sense of becoming the
actualized concepts they are otherwise merely potentially. To understand this
is to understand that Hegelian phenomenology is directed less toward the
representation of truth than toward its actualization. This is why, for example, Hegel can speak so naturally of propositions, judgments and epistemic
states, as well as institutional, aesthetic, and religious formations, as shapes
(Gestalten) or forms of consciousness, spirit, or the Concept. What is still more
relevant to our discussion is Hegels identification of actualization with rationalization as indicated in his comment on his (in)famous remark that what
is rational, is actual, and what is actual, is rational (Hegel 1991, 29). As a
provisional formulation, we might say then that the infinite judgment is the
form of determinate negation in the sense that it exhibits its rational content.
Yet to say this is necessarily to speak misleadingly. If form is what is actualized, and what is actualized is what is rationalized, then the mere form, that
is, its logico-grammatical shape, cannot on its own show us how that form
is arrived at. It cannot tell us that the predicative negation within such a
judgment occurs determinatively. It is in this more precise sense that infinite
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judgment must be understood as the mere, or, let us say, the dead signature
of determination, and, as we may now put it, of rational extrapolation.
Talk of form thus takes us directly to talk of determination, which, as the
Phenomenology already makes clear, must be understood as the rational itinerary of the subject, qua spirit. What is implicit in the Phenomenology, with
its regular and marked employment of the language of syllogistic deduction, is programmatically established in the works on logic, namely, that
this itinerary, in turn, is to be identified with the semantic and inferential
processes of the syllogism. With characteristic paradox, the Science of Logic
tells us:
The syllogism is the result of the restoration of the concept in the judgment,
and consequently the unity and the truth of the two. The concept as such
holds its moments sublated in this unity; in judgment, the unity is an
internal or, what amounts to the same, an external one, and although
the moments are connected, they are posited as self-subsisting extremes. In
the syllogism, the determinations of the concept are like the extremes of
the judgment, and at the same time their determinate unity is posited . . .
the syllogism is the completely posited concept; it is, therefore, the
rational. (Hegel 2010, 588)
In identifying the syllogism as the rationalization of the concept, Hegel
recasts it as a conceptual logic whose propositional formulae represent
the constituents of inference, no longer as its structural elements but as
transitional moments in the inferential diffraction and unification of the
concept. The syllogism so formulated is the formal discursus of the concept, its actualization, though not quite yet its actuality; judgment is identified both with its categorical structure, and with the rational mobility it
affords the concept, as a conduit between its indeterminate and determinate extremes, the terminal poles of its categorical representation. The
seemingly paradoxical equivalence of its internal and external unity in
judgment expresses this double status of the judgment as the expressive
instrument of both identity and attribution, of concentration and diffraction, and of mobility and immobility. It expresses as well the dual character
of the concept as exemplar and as the embodiment, or rather the actuality,
of thought. The syllogism thus has the paradoxical role of expressing the
movement of the concept by parsing it into the signal moments of its logical (as distinct from its historical) constitution.
So understood, the syllogistic represents at once the exterior or explicit
logic of discursive rationality and the interior or implicit logic of the concept,
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though not simultaneously. For it is only in passing from a qualitative to a

disjunctive form that exterior and interior rationality converge, or, from
the perspective of absolute knowing, it is only in overcoming the contingency
of attribution that the concept eventually realizes its absolute, universal (or
infinite) extension via the circuit of discursive engagement. Hegel summarizes the conclusion of this circuit as follows:
Since it [the concept] is still in this way the inwardness of this now
acquired externality, in the course of the syllogisms this externality is
equated with the inner unity; the different determinations return into
the latter through the mediation that unites them at first in a third
term. . . . Conversely, however, that determinateness of the concept
which was considered as reality is equally a positedness. For the identity of
the concepts inwardness and externality has been exhibited as the truth
of the concept not only in this result; on the contrary, already in the
judgment the moments of the concept remain, even in their reciprocal
indifference, determinations that have significance only in their connection. The syllogism is mediation, the complete concept in its positedness. Its movement is the sublation of this mediation in which nothing is
in and for itself, but each thing is only through the mediation of an
other. (Hegel 2010, 624)
In passing beyond mere qualitative or categorical attribution to (potentially) exhaustive disjunction, the syllogism, or rather the concept that is its
motive force, overcomes, while preserving, mediation as well as the breach
between rational form and content. It thereby achieves an (approximate)
infinity, the (approximate) totality of determinations proper to a given concept. Yet insofar as mediation is overcome, even if only approximately, so
is the propositional structure that permitted its expression. What emerges
from the sublation of propositional mediation is, if not quite the speculative concept, at least the concept as the dynamic embodiment of the True,
as the modulation between a substantial subject and its succession of determinate negations.
What, then, of the determinacy of such determinate negations? Here we need
to recall Hegels distinction between abstract negation and determinate
negation. Hegel distinguishes three types of negation in the Phenomenology:
natural, abstract, and determinate. Natural negation, to which we will
return, is a judgment that has not yet been marked within the realm of
spirit; as such, it is equivalent to death without burial: death as the natural
negation of consciousness, negation without independence (Hegel 1977,
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114). Abstract negation is natural negation formally expressed by spirit. It

is the logical form of skepticism, the spiritual power of death (51). To every
naturally given thesis, abstract negation opposes an antithesis that
leaves the object completely undetermined, or determined only through
the abstract proposition S is not P. To pass from abstract to determinate
negation is to transfer the operation of negation from the proposition to
its object and, reflexively, its subject. In other words, it is not merely to pass
from S is not P to S is non-P but to determine S as non-P.
Epistemically, to determine S as non-P is also to pass from dogmatic skepticism to a dialectically critical skepticism, something Kant implicitly accomplishes in his solution to the antinomies of pure reason. If Hegel criticizes
Kant for failing to understand the true significance of the antinomies, it
is because he takes Kant to misconceive the determinative character of
negation in infinite judgment (Hegel 1991, 93). And yet for this very reason Kants critical treatment of the antinomies can help us to understand
Hegels antinomian phenomenology of negation. As we will see, the difference between Kant and Hegel can be encapsulated in the fundamental difference between their respective paradigmatic examples of infinite
judgment: The soul is non-mortal and Spirit is a bone.
Supposing that the logical form of determinate negation is S is non-P,
in what sense would it be true to say that abstract negation might also be
so represented, or that determinate negation is abstract negation differently conceived? Here we need to recall Kants distinction between general
and transcendental logic. As Kant observes, from the standpoint of general logic, infinite judgment is simply an instance of affi rmative judgment,
because general logic, concerned with the form of thought insofar as it is
indifferent to its objects, ignores the distinction between positive (finite)
and negative (infinite) predicates. This distinction becomes pertinent only
in transcendental logic inasmuch as the latter is concerned with the logical
form of objects of cognition. From a general logical point of view, to say that
S is not P is abstractly to negate the affirmation that S is P. But to consider
the content of such an utterance from a transcendental point of view is to
regard it as determining S as non-P.
For Kant, representing an abstract negation as an infinite judgment in no
way facilitates our determination of its object. It merely places the object in
the infinite sphere of the possible, limited only by the excluded predicate
(Kant 1998, 208 [A72/B97]). To see why, and how, Hegel disagrees with this
conclusion, we must turn to Kants treatment of the antinomies. For Kant,
antinomies arise because infinite reason incites finite understanding to
determine the phenomenal world as a totality. We are thereby led to affirm
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that the world has a beginning in time, a boundary in space, indivisible

constituent parts, an ultimate cause, and a necessary ground. Each of these
affirmative theses turns out to be illegitimate insofar as it posits a worldly
property that transcends possible experience. But each of these theses is
opposed, with equal justification, by an abstractly negating antithesis that
denies that the world has the property in question. The antitheses do not
merely remind the understanding that it is transgressing the bounds of
possible experience; they prompt it to determine the totality in the opposite way (as infinite with respect to time, space, divisibility, and so on.).
Kants solution to the antinomies is filtered through his distinction
between appearances and things in themselves. Mathematical antinomies concern the totality of appearances. Construing their antitheses as
infinite judgments is the first step toward resolving them. In the case of
the First Antinomy, the thesis that the world is finite in time and space is
demonstrably false, as the argument in support of its antithesis demonstrates. The problem arises when the antithesis (The world is non-finite)
is represented by reason as extending our knowledge in a positive way (The
world is non-finitei.e., the world is infinite). Kants solution is, in effect,
to point out that the antithesis has the form of an infinite judgment, but
to deny that it extends our knowledge in a positive way. This requires him
to distinguish between two different kinds of negative predicatesnonfinite and infinitethe latter of which he takes to be illicitly positive. We
are entitled to say that the world is non-finite, but not to conclude from this
that the world is infinite. Paradoxically, then, an infinite judgment is, for
Kant, a judgment that never reaches the infinite, since excluding the world
from the class of finite things merely places it within the infinite domain of
defined classes instead of placing it in a specific class of infinite things.
In the case of the dynamical antinomies, the distinction between the
non-finite and the infinite yields a slightly different result. Here reason is
concerned not simply with the totality of appearances, but with the relation between appearances and their posited noumenal grounds. The fact
that the phenomenal causal chain (or the phenomenal chain of contingent
beings) is non-finite (without being infinite!) leaves room for noumenal
grounds, despite the impossibility of our determining them as such. Once
again, infinite judgment is the vehicle through which we recognize our
failure to touch the infinite itself.
We are now in a position to interpret Kants paradigm case of an infinite judgment, namely, The soul is non-mortal. The paralogisms through
which reason leads us to believe that we can demonstrate the immortality of our souls are not two-sided like the antinomies; they are one-sided
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illusion[s] that show us that every dialectical inference of reason yields an

infinite judgment that must be properly interpreted so that the (unavoidable) illusion does not deceive us (Kant 1998, 459 [A406/B433]). Just as
it is necessary to distinguish the negative predicate non-finite from the
positive predicate infinite, so we must distinguish non-mortal from
immortal. For reasons having to do with the fact that the thinking subject is not an object in space, Kant concludes that it is non-mortal, but from
being non-mortal it doesnt follow that the subject is immortal.
Heidegger popularized the notion that, for Kant, finitude is prior to
infinitude. This interpretation is correct insofar as being finite (or being
mortal) is represented by Kant as a positive predicate. As we have seen,
however, the key feature of Kants critique of metaphysics is the distinction
that he draws between two different kinds of negative predicates (nonfinite vs infinite; non-mortal vs immortal). The key feature of our
cognitive predicament is neither our finitude, nor our infinitude, but our
non-finitude. Like Eros as described by Diotima, human reason lacks infinitude but is not for all that merely finite. Human reason is an intermediate,
a daimon, stretched between finite objects of experience and the infinite
objects it would derive from them. These infinite objects (psyche, cosmos,
theos) are regulative ideals of reason.
Hegel acknowledges the distinction between the non-finite and the infinite, for indeed it is grounded in the distinction proper between abstract
and determinate negation. He criticizes Kant for remaining at the level of
the former (the bad infinite of the understanding) instead of rising to
the level of the latter (the true infinite of reason). We do not arrive at the
true infinite by stubbornly clinging to the dogmatically asserted objects of
rational psychology, cosmology, and theology. On the contrary, we arrive
at it by tarrying with the negative. To tarry (verweilen) with the skeptical
antithesis of an antinomy is to think through the manner in which what at
first appears as an abstract negation shows itself to be a determinate negation. More specifically, to tarry with the negative is to relinquish the proposition abstractly posited and negated in both thesis and antithesis in favor
of the negatively determined Concept as the appropriate vehicle of truth.
Tarrying (the logic of which will concern us in a moment) is the operation necessary to reinterpret abstract negations, qua infinite judgments, as
affirmative (i.e., determinate) negations. Tarrying at the level of reason is
precisely what Kant fails to do inasmuch as he retreats to the standpoint of
the understanding, representing the objects of reason as mere regulative
ideals. As Hegel never tires of repeating, Kant conceives the infinite only
as an ought, not just in his moral philosophy (inasmuch as we can only
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strive to achieve moral perfection), but also in his theoretical philosophy

(inasmuch as objects of reason are represented as regulative ideals) (e.g.,
Hegel 1991, 88). Against this perspective, Hegel will maintain that the infinite is actualized in infinite judgment itself.
In the introduction to the Phenomenology, Hegel criticizes both Kant and
Locke for thinking that they could determine the minds capacities prior
to engaging in a positive quest for truth. His objection is not, as is often
thought, that it would be absurd to use an instrument to study itself. On
the contrary, Hegel suggests that we only achieve rational insight when our
cognitive instrument (judgment) reflexively operates on itself. The problem with Kantian (and Lockean) critique is that it fails to reach this level
of self-reflection, or, rather, that insofar as critical reason discovers paradoxes of self-referenceparalogisms, antinomies, etc.it fails to recognize the manner in which they transform the instrument itself. Kant
posits a fi xed division (Ur-teilung) between understanding and reason, that
is, between the constitutive instrument of cognition and the regulative
meta-instrument whose function is merely to guide the understanding
to seek ever more remote propositional grounds of propositional truths.
Hegels refutation of this formalistic attitude (the speculative equivalent of
the beautiful soul) will consist in showing that critical reason (like the
evil acting consciousness) is no less engaged with worldly content than
any other cognitive or practical attitude.
To clarify further the nature of tarrying, it is helpful to recall how Hegel
was led to characterize his introduction to the science of knowledge as a
phenomenology. Lambert used the term Phnomenologie to refer to a theory or doctrine of illusion (Schein) (Spiegelberg 1982, 11ff). So conceived,
phenomenology would have a merely negative relation to truth. It was this
conception that led Kant, in a 1770 letter to Lambert, to characterize his
incipient critical project as a purely negative science, general phenomenology (Kant 1999, 108). General phenomenology was the necessary propaedeutic to metaphysics conceived as a positive doctrine of truth. At this stage
of his thinking, Kant believed that metaphysical truths about noumena
could be determined through pure understanding. Eventually, he drew his
critical distinction between cognitively accessible phenomena and inscrutable things in themselves. Illusion (Schein) became a function of dialectical inferences of reason about the nature of things in themselves, while
spatio-temporal appearance (Erscheinung) became the sole touchstone of
empirical truth. This two-fold transformation made it impossible to characterize the critique of pure reason as general phenomenology. If phenomenal appearance were the touchstone of truth, then a merely negative
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phenomenology would have to be restricted to the fundamental critical

distinction between mere appearance and experience, that is, to the distinction between appearances qua subjective perceptions and appearances
qua objects of experience (Allison 2002, 14). General phenomenology was
thereby demoted to a subsidiary doctrine of empirical illusions (appearances of appearances), while rational illusions became the target of critique
proper.
From the retrospective vantage point of Husserlian phenomenology,
Kants demotion of phenomenology looks like a missed opportunity. Like
Descartes before him, Kant failed to see that the disclosure of phenomena as phenomena opened up the way to a positive phenomenology that
would investigate the essential structures of phenomena qua phenomena.
Not only would such a phenomenology no longer have a merely negative
relation to truth; it alone would be capable of providing philosophy with
a positive doctrine of the essence of truth. Philosophers convinced that
Husserl had shown the way to this Promised Land could look back condescendingly at the manner in which the German idealists tried to give phenomenology a more prominent place in their post-Kantian metaphysical
systems. In his 1804 lectures on the Wissenschaftslehre, Fichte represented
phenomenology as a doctrine of appearance and illusion (Erscheinungsund Scheinlehre) (Fichte 2005, 107. Our emphasis). By blurring the distinction between appearance and illusion, Fichte implicitly returned to the
very project that Kant had initially outlined in his letter to Lambert. The
still merely negative task of Fichtes phenomenology was to free consciousness from all facticity, thereby raising it to the level of the positive doctrine
of truth made available through his science of knowledge.
Hegels Phenomenology of Spiritinitially conceived as the merely negative
first part of his own System of Sciencehas a similar pedagogical task. The
crucial difference between Hegels approach and Fichtes depends on the
extra turn of the screw represented by the passage from negative judgment to infinite judgment. Hegelian phenomenology is still negative rather
than positive, but its deployment of determinate negationthe tarrying
operatorissues in something radically different from both the rationalist
metaphysics that Fichte sought to ground in intellectual intuition and the
positive science that Husserl hoped to found on eidetic intuition. It issues,
specifically, in what Hegel calls absolute knowing, the modular equation
of substance and consciousness, subject and object, spirit and individual
through the economy of negation that absolves each of its moments of identity and difference, and incorporates them in the absolute Concept, the
sole legitimate bearer of Truth. With this, truth as adaequatio rei et intellectus
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gives way to the True as adaequatio rei qua intellectus, and with it discursive thought resolves itself in the infinite modulation of the Concept. This
movement of the Concept, or equivalently the movement of consciousness,
is thus the (perpetual) concentration, and thereby the retraction, of the
inferential record of predication into the Concept itself. This tells decisively against the inferentialist reading of Hegel that Robert Brandom has
devoted himself to spelling out. A truly Hegelian counter-text to his justly
renowned Making it Explicit would bear the title Making it Implicit.
As Hegel makes clear in the Phenomenologys concluding section on absolute knowing, the Phenomenology has three major turning points, each of
which is expressed in the form of an infinite judgment: (1) I is a thing
(Spirit is a bone), (2) The thing is I, and (3) I=I. Schematically,
Hegels idea is that phenomenology is the path by which spirit comes to
determine itself as spirit ( I=I ) only after determining itself as an indifferent object, first in the realm of nature (Spirit is a bone) and then in the
realm of spirit itself (The [spiritual] thing e.g., wealth, power, the state,
etc.is I ). For our purposes, we may focus on the first (natural) form
of spirits alienation/reification. The judgment that spirit is a boneor,
more precisely, the judgment that the being of spirit is a bone [das Sein des
Geistes ein Knochen ist]is the climax of the section on Observing Reason
in which spirit manifests itself in the form of the individual judging subject. The climax is reached when the individual finds itself judged by
another individual who reduces it to the form of a mere objecta mortal
brain enclosed in a skull with a face (the determinations of spirit proper
to physiognomy and phrenology). Reflectively faced with a skull that is its
own eventual caput mortuum, spirit recognizes that, qua individual judging
subject, its being is, in fact, that of a bone. Yet this speculative identity, in
which grammatical and thinking subject together lose themselves in their
objective predicate, immediately discloses its own absurdity through what
is best described, in contemporary parlance, as a major disconnect. In
Lacanian terms, to say that the being of spirit is a bone is to indicate the
loss of the enunciating subject in the enunciated subject of predication.
Paradoxically, spirit would be nothing but a bone if we could not say so; but
the fact that we can say so makes it both false and, yet more profoundly,
true. Its truth can only be arrived at, however, once the propositional form
of its enunciation is itself renounced. As Hegel puts it, the infinite judgment, qua infinite, would be the fulfilment of life that comprehends itself
(Hegel 1977, 210).
To appreciate what is at stake here, it is helpful to hearken back to the
struggle to the death that marks the advent of the master/slave dialectic,
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and to look forward to Hegels representation of Antigones struggle with

Creon over the spiritual meaning of the death of Polyneices. In each case,
the negative with which spirit must tarry is death. We have already indicated
that, in the first instance, death is the merely natural negative in the face of
which the terrified subject acquires its servile consciousness. We have also
seen how the slave internalizes death as the abstract negativity of skepticism. The liberation of the slave transforms its hyper-skeptical (unhappy)
consciousness into the abstractly determining consciousness of observing
reason. When the individual judging subject confronts its other, however,
it undergoes a sublated form of the struggle to the death. This time, the
subjects mortification is given to it in the form of a determinate negation.
Knowing itself to be the power of negativity claimed in its skeptical youth,
the individual determines its own being as that of a bone. In so doing,
however, it simultaneously determines itself as the power that exceeds the
very havoc it wreaks upon itself and its object (I am Shiva, destroyer of
worlds). We have not yet reached the stage of absolute knowing because
the infinite judgment Spirit is a bone reflects spirits triumph over natural death, but not yet over spiritual death. Henceforth, the object of every
individual shape of spirit will be another individual shape of spirit, from
Antigones struggle with Creon over the symbolic marking of the corpse of
Polyneices to the Terror of the guillotine transforming living heads with
faces (including those of kings) to the equivalent of mere cabbages (Hegel
1977, 360). To reach absolute knowing, spirit must tarry with itself as the
infinite power of negativity, an arduous procedure that will eventually win
it the reconciling judgment I=I.
Going back to Spirit is a bone, we can now see how this functions as
Hegels alternative to the Kantian judgment The soul is non-mortal. What
must strike us right away is the fact that none of the three paradigmatic
infinite judgments of the Phenomenology appears to have a negative predicate. Hegel further complicates matters by distinguishing in his two Logics
between positive infinite judgments such as Spirit is a bone and negative
infinite judgments like the rose is not an elephant, the understanding is
not a table (Hegel 2010, 567). What essentially determines the form of an
infinite judgment for Hegel, whether positive or negative, is the radical disseverance it establishes between its subject and its predicate, and thus its
self-deconstructing status as a pseudo-judgment. For Hegel it is not enough
that the subject be identified with its other, with its contradictory. What
is further required is its identification with an incommensurable other.
Spirit is a bone, for example, identifies the being of spirit with the being
of a thing; the bone is not simply non-spirit, but beyond the genus and
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species of spirit: I is non-I. If infinite judgment nevertheless retains

the revelatory character it possesses in the Phenomenology, it is inasmuch as
its self-deconstruction signs the death warrant of every finite truth.
Our reference to deconstruction is neither arbitrary nor accidental. As
we know, Derrida developed his conception of deconstruction to account
for the manner in which Husserlian phenomenology necessarily fails in its
endeavor to determine pure essences. In Speech and Phenomena, Derrida
specifically focuses on Husserls attempt to determine the phenomenological subject in its mode of self-expression. At issue is the determination of
the being of the cogito without its having to pass through the detour of
its objects, that is, the possibility of reaching I= I without the mediation of either objects or other subjects. Derrida argues that this is an impossible dream for the eminently Hegelian reason that every expression is
essentially an usserung (in Husserls terminology, an indicative sign)an
alienation/reification that can determine itself only by confronting the
possibility of its own annihilation. As Derrida puts it, the bare assertion I
am (or the bare assertion of the individual consciousness that I= I )
both presupposes, and ultimately implies, the truth of the proposition
I am deadhis version of Spirit is a bone (Derrida 1973, 96). More
would need to be said in this context about Derridas lengthy engagement
with Hegel, which turns, precisely, on the sense of the negativity of death.
For our purposes, the crucial point is that insofar as the Hegelian infinite
judgment deconstructs itself, it shows why phenomenology must remain
an essentially negative endeavor, revealing spirit to be the all-consuming
power of determinate negation rather than the placid contemplation of
essences sub specie aeternitatis. In attempting to transform phenomenology
into a positive doctrine of the truth of appearances, Husserl rejoins not
Spinoza but Descartes, representing subjectivity as a surveying, transcendental ego rather than as the restless negativity of the things themselves
(i.e., phenomena). As Derrida emphasizes, I am only there where the sign
or bone indicates my death in advance (his equivalent to Sartres determination of the ego as a transcendent object). If assertion exceeds its enunciated content, it does so only in and through the movement of the caput
mortuum that is its remainder. Phenomenology remains a negative propadeutic to the logical self-determination of thought, but it nevertheless
reaches the absolute by allowing its own negativity to determine itself as
determinate negativity. In passing from phenomenology to logic, however,
we lose the finite register of infinite truth, the human face of the skull
unearthed in the graveyard of spirit.
Chapter 10
Husserls (even more) Social Epistemology

Kevin Hermberg
In the Western philosophical tradition, knowledge and knowers have been

viewed primarily in atomistic terms and the predominant focus of epistemologists has been on individual epistemic agents (Corlett 1996, ix).1
This atomistic approach was re-solidified by Descartes and the hyperbolic
doubt he introduced as part of his quest for a certain starting point of all
knowledge and foundation for science. The first and most fundamental
thing that passed the test of doubt, it is well known, was the doubting subject itself. From this solipsistic starting point, Descartes hoped to found all
knowledge and science. Despite their vast differences, the starting point of
the theories of knowledge since Descartes has been largely atomistic.
To be sure, there have been momentary explorations of the social dimensions of knowledge sprinkled throughout the history of Western Philosophy.
Plato, in Charmides, asked how a layperson can determine whether someone
who claims to be an expert really is an expert and dependence on experts
or the testimony of authorities is a problem within the scope of social epistemology. Bacon, Locke, Hume, and Reid each offered some treatment of
testimony and questions when one should rely on the opinions and reports
of others and what one needs to know about a speaker in order to be justified in to trusting the speakers assertions. They are examples of early
treatments, even if only brief ones, of some social dimensions of epistemic
justification. However, the epistemologies in which they reside were generally atomistic and so they do not serve as early examples of genuinely social
epistemology (Goldman 2006).
Much of our knowledge and how we learn things is through the testimony
of others, so it seems we are clearly not autonomous, atomistic knowers. But,
as Tollefsen reminds us, those earlier discussions surrounding testimony
maintained a commitment to epistemic agent individualism (Tollefsen
2007, 300) and in those treatments, common opinion, testimony, and even
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received philosophy were often seen as impediments to proper method

(Schmitt 1994, 2). Limiting the scope of epistemology to non-social, atomistic, knowers not only stands on a big and potentially dangerous presupposition but also seems to make it impossible to provide a complete picture of
the nature of human knowledge. Acknowledging this shortcoming, several
recent philosophers have begun to investigate the role of social relations
in knowledge. This broadened view has come to be called social epistemology
which is the study of the relevance of social relations, roles, interests, and
institutions to knowledge. . . . Social epistemology centers on the question
whether knowledge is to be understood individualistically or socially (1).2
Both Schmitt and Corlett place the beginnings of social epistemology in
the 1980s.
This chapter proceeds in two parts. In part 1, I briefly survey some of
the field of social epistemology. 3 I will emphasize Helen Longinos view
because she not only argues that the social dimension of science does
not necessarily contaminate science but also that it is a means by which
scientific objectivity comes to fruition. In part 2, I survey the roles of
multiple subjects in Husserls epistemology. My claim is that, in contrast
to the atomistic, individualistic epistemologies that have dominated the
Western philosophical tradition, Husserls is a social epistemology that
does not abandon the possibility of objectivity, AND that on Husserls view
knowledge is even MORE social than on the typical social epistemologists view. My intent is not to merely celebrate Husserls foresight; rather,
I hope that those working in analytic social epistemology might realize
they have an untapped resource in Husserls corpus and those working
on the Husserlian epistemology and themes like intersubjectivity and the
life-world might benefit from investigating the work of the analytic social
epistemologists.
Social Epistemology
In recent decades, several philosophers have taken seriously the notion that
traditional individualistic epistemologies are lacking. These contemporary
philosophers are investigating the roles of social relations in knowledge
attainment. The broadened approach, developed mostly among analytic
philosophers, has come to be called social epistemology. There are several
approaches to non-atomistic, social, epistemology. Some (e.g., Fuller 1988)
argue that knowledge is social because it is had by collectives like crowds,
institutions, and countries. Others (e.g., Cohen 1987; Lehrer 1987) focus
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on the social context of individual knowers, for instance, on the production of scientific knowledge by researchers working individually and as a
group. Within each of these broad approaches, there are several camps.4
What the various approaches to social epistemology have in common is
that they focus on social contexts, collectives, institutions, and so on where
knowledge is concerned. Although we can point to a few examples of treatments of the sociality of epistemology in the history of philosophy, the
beginnings of social epistemology are usually placed in the 1980s (Schmitt
1994; Corlett 1996).
Surveying the work of those who have analyzed social epistemology, one
sees that whether a stance is consensualist (arguing that knowledge amounts
to group consensus), contextualist (arguing that truth and knowledge are
relative to a specific social context and thus that there is no such thing as
objective truth arrived at by cognizers), or expertist (arguing that what
counts as knowledge is what a particular social group, the experts, identifies as knowledge), there are serious problems to resolve. Consensualism
and expertism seem to involve a sort of contradiction because those coming
to consensus or qualifying as experts are generally regarded as atomistic
knowers and there is a sort of contradiction in suggesting that knowledge
is social because what counts as knowledge or justified belief is what the
group or the experts can agree on but then basing that agreement on atomistic knowers. As Miriam Solomon suggests, even the most social of social
epistemologies seem to still assume the operation of individual rationality at some crucial stage (Solomon 1994, 218). 5 Additionally, contextualists seem to face a traditional problem regarding objectivity and all three
approaches are faced with the difficulty of navigating or adjudicating real
disagreement between contexts, groups, or experts. As Helen Longino puts
it, the problem with recognizing the social locatedness and, hence, conditioned character of individual epistemic subjects is that it seems to force us
into choosing between relativism and demonstrating the epistemic superiority of one among the various locations (Longino 1994, 139).
Longino is one social epistemologist who tries to tackle these problems
directly. She works to reconcile the objectivity of science with the roles
of contextual values in sciences social and cultural construction. She
goes further than many social epistemologists in that she does not merely
describe the contexts in which we work or explore questions about whether
collectives of individual agents can legitimately be said to have knowledge.
Both of those approaches assume the individuality of epistemic agents and
Longino attempts to show that and how knowledge is social at a more fundamental level.
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In Science as Social Knowledge (1990), Longino argues that our traditions

prioritization of the individual gets in the way of an adequate understanding of scientific knowledge and that scientific knowledge is fundamentally
social. In The Fate of Knowledge (1994), the text on which I focus here, she
summarizes the earlier texts thesis: only if we understand scientific inquiry
as fundamentally social, and the scientific knowledge as the outcome of
discursive interactions, is it possible to claim that scientific inquiry is objective (Longino 1994, 139), and goes on to argue that the central elements
of scientific knowledge constructionfor example, observation and justificatory reasoningare social and that critical dialog is required as part of
the process of something becoming considered knowledge. On Longinos
view, observation is not simple sense perception (140). The observation
involved in the attainment of knowledge rests on ordering and classification
that themselves rest on a sort of consensus about the categories in question
or the boundaries of the concepts and categories (e.g., just what counts as
an acid as opposed to a base) and that consensus requires a critical dialog.
In order to be useful data, observations must be stable enough to transfer
from one lab to anotherthey must be reproducible if they are to count.
Critical dialog among scientists is what provides this stability.
In claiming that observation is social, Longino is not denying that atomistic agents take in information. She is claiming, rather, that the status
of the activity of observation depends on the observers relations with others. The crucial relation is an openness to correction of reports which is
what makes possible the transformation of observations from one lab to
the other and the move from the subjective it seems to me that p to the
objective P. The interaction of multiple perspectives is what secures this
objectivity by offering any necessary correctives (Longino 1994, 141).
The claim that observational data collection in science is social because
it requires a community of researchers who agree on concepts and their
boundaries, and so on, is a fairly modest claim. But Longino goes further
than that by arguing that the very reasoning involved in the production
of scientific knowledge is social. Such reasoning is not mere calculation; it
is the bringing of the appropriate considerations to bear on judgments
(Longino 1994, 141). This reasoning is justificatory and involves a dialectic
pattern of challenge and response. Reasons to support a claim are offered
in response to challenges to the claim and those reasons can then be challenged, and so forth; this has been the core of scientific practice at least
since the pre-Socratic natural philosophers. What counts as a reason or an
appropriate consideration is determined and stabilized discursively and
discursive interactions require more than one agent (141142). Longino
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calls these interactions intersubjective and holds that reasoning gets its
point in a social context of interaction between individuals, not between
an individual and the object of cognition (141).
Both observation and reasoning rest on background assumptions. That
is, in the background of the discursive interactions involved in determining
whether data gathered counts as observation, and the grounds on which
the challenges and responses at the core of reasoning rest, are assumptions. And, just as not any old observations will do, so not just any old
assumptions will do (Longino 1994, 142). The assumptions on which it is
appropriate to rely depend upon a (sometimes tacit) consensus among the
discourse community. These assumptions are public, at least in principle,
even though they are often invisible to those within the scientific community and not consciously-reflectively decided upon. This public nature
opens the assumptions to critical evaluation which might lead to their
abandonment or modification. Not all assumptions underlying the work of
a scientific community are, in practice, scrutinized, but the presumption
is that they would survive if critically evaluated. This scrutiny requires
multiple points of view in order to ensure that the hypotheses accepted
by a community do not represent someones idiosyncratic interpretation
of information taken in via experimentation and sense perception (142).
That is to say, the scrutiny underlying both observation and scientific reasoning is social in the sense that it cannot be properly understood in terms
of individual epistemic agents.
Since observation, reasoning, and their background assumptions require
discursive interactions that are supposed to transform the subjective into
the objective, those interactions ought not merely preserve and disseminate one subjective point of view over all others but should, instead, constitute genuine mutual checks (Longino 1994, 144). In light of this role and
requirement of the discourse, Longino outlines the features of communities that facilitate criticism and enable a consensus to qualify as knowledge. These are the features of an idealized epistemic communitythat
which assures the objectivity of scientific knowledge even while acknowledging the locatedness of scientific observation and reasoning. Longino
argues that in order to make possible scientific knowledge, there must be:
(1) publicly recognized forums for criticism of evidence, methods, and
assumptions of reasoning; (2) criticism that makes possible or leads to the
changing of the communitys theories and beliefs; (3) publicly recognized
standards that make the criticism possible, in the light of which the criticism is made relevant, and by reference to which the theories, hypotheses,
and observational practices are evaluated; and (4) equality of intellectual
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authority so that the consensus that obtains is the result of a critical dialog
in which all relevant perspectives are presented and not the result of the
exercise of political or economic power or the silencing of dissenting views
(Longino 1994, 144145).6 That is to say, there must be space and standards that make criticism possible and that criticism must truly take place
and not merely be the result of the wielding of political or economic power
in order to silence some perspectives.
Longino contends that scientific objectivity is the result of such critical discourse. The first three criteria of the ideal epistemic community
assure a sort of objectivity (or at least that what one claims is not relevant
to the individual agent); the fourth avoids prioritizing one context over the
others. Because this discursive work requires and involves more than one
epistemic agent, scientific knowledge is both social and objective.
If such an ideal epistemic community and critical discourse obtain, that
which survives the criticism will be objective in the sense of being available
to everyone and not dependent on any one particular point of view for
its validity. That is to say, the view Longino puts forward recognizes the
locatedness of epistemic agents while attempting to preserve objectivity
and thus avoid relativismall without prioritizing one context over the
others. If the four criteria are met, Longinos view appears to escape the
intolerable choice that most social epistemologies face and thus offer a
significant advance when it comes to dealing with the social dimensions
of knowledge.7 Her view embraces, rather than attempts to explain away,
the fact that much of our knowledge involves others (because it comes to
us through testimony or because it depends on concepts that we inherit
from others) and it addresses ways in which knowledge is social at levels
more fundamental than many other thinkers carefully consider (observation and reasoning).
Despite its strengths, this account of scientific knowledge is still vulnerable to Solomons critique that the social epistemologists ultimately rely
on atomistic epistemic agents. Longino argues that science is objective
because of the critical evaluative processes involved and she argues that
scientific knowledge is social at a deep level because the very processes
of scienceobservation and reasoningare social. Longino argues that
what qualifies as observation for science and which data matter depend
on the background assumptions, categories, and so on and are thus social.
However, the legitimate observations and data are based on perception.
The view described above holds that observation is not simple sense perception, but the view appears to be based upon such perception. That is to
say, underneath the social level investigated and articulated by Longino is
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the individual, atomistic, subject engaged with the world via sense perception. It is, then a social epistemology that stands on the shoulders of nonsocial sense perception.
Although not widely recognized as such, Husserls epistemological project is social at an even deeper level because the raw materials of the critical discourse, sense perception, cannot be had by individual agents in the
absence of others.
Husserls Social Epistemology

Husserl, was firmly rooted in his philosophical tradition. Like Kant, he
aimed at a transcendental philosophy. Like Locke and Descartes, he investigated the structures of consciousness as experienced from a first person
point of view and, like Descartes and others, he aimed at the establishment
of a rigorous science with universally valid results. His aim was for his phenomenology to breathe new life into the ancient hope for philosophy as
the all-embracing science that can provide insight into the conditions for
the possibility of our everyday lives. Although Husserls general concern
was with consciousness, its structure and acts, his specific concern was primarily with the validity, the being-true of objects on the basis of the
way in which they are given or constituted in the lived experience of consciousness (Bernet 1998, 199). More specifically, Husserl was concerned
with objective validity on which rigorous science must standbeing there
for everyone, with apodictic certainty, rather than accessible to or relative
to only one individual subject.
In order to arrive at the evidence required for objective validity, Husserl
took note of the natural standpoint from which we usually go about our
lives, recognized that it incorporates a multitude of unsubstantiated presuppositions or assumptions, and advocated the suspension of judgment
regarding the empirical facts about which such assumptions are routinely
made. This abstainingthis excluding from his interrogation the affirmation, denial, or even doubting of empirical facts about things in the
worldis Husserls phenomenological epoch, the methodological core of his
philosophy. What remains after this reduction is the subject and its experience. The heart of that experience is consciousness which is intentional
thus involving both subject and object in relation to one another.
At least thats how the story is often told. It is easy to see, from this alltoo-familiar sketch, how it came to be that Husserl is often read as having
held the sort of atomistic approach mentioned earlier. But there is another
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side to this story. Others are significantly involved, on Husserls view, in

the attainment of knowledge. Consequently, Husserl developed an epistemology that is social decades before social epistemology came into
the picture. Tracing the roles of others in knowledge attainment and the
establishment of validity will begin to put Husserls view into dialog with
Longino and the social epistemologists.8
In several of Husserls works, subjects other than the epistemic agent
play a significant role related to knowledge in at least two ways: they help
to offer evidence for validity and they help to broaden ones knowledge by
making it possible to have intentional objects (even those of basic perception). The one way in which others are involved in knowledge is very much
like the role of others in Longios viewthey help us verify our views and
decide what data counts, and so on. The other way in which others are
involved in knowledge is related to the experience and sense perception of
individuals on which Longinos view rests.
A text in which Husserls concerns with the social are relatively obvious is the 1936 text, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental
Phenomenology (Husserl 1981). The views offered in this text have some
points in contact with the social epistemologists like Longino who wrote
in the 1990s that all scientific observation, reasoning, and knowledge
depends on background assumptions and is thus social. Nearly sixty years
earlier, Husserl wrote that our access to and the meaning of everything is
dependent on the life-world and that the knowledge of the objective-scientific
world is grounded in the self-evidence of the life-world. The latter is
pregiven . . . as ground (130). That is to say, science presupposes as its
point of departure . . . the intuitive surrounding world of life, pregiven as
existing for all in common (121). The pregiven is given in a context with
some meaning as part of the life-world in which we always already live and
which furnishes the ground for all cognition and is already valid, [in]
which we experience or are otherwise conscious of either prescientifically
or scientifically (110).
But others are not part of the epistemic experience merely because they
happen to be part of the life-world on which scientific knowledge is constructed. For Husserl, it is not the case that the life-world adds a social
dimension to what atomistic individuals experiencea sort of social membrane over top prescientific experience, making science possible. Rather,
even perception of physical objects, even prescientific consciousness, is
meaningful and always already involves others. Because it is already valid,
already imbued with sense that the individual epistemic agent did not provide, the life-world against which or within which the agent is conscious
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reveals that others are involved in its constitution and thus things appear
from within horizons inherent in phenomena. A horizon, in this sense, is
a referral network or a series of relationships. The life-world provides the
horizons.
Husserl distinguished between internal and external horizons. Internal
horizons offer the subject all the other possible perspectives that can be
taken on an objectthe perspectives included in the apperception of the
object which thus make it transcendent as an object. External horizons
offer the relationships between the object and the surrounding world.
Husserl summarized the horizons inherent in perception as follows:
For consciousness the individual thing is not alone; the perception of a
thing is perception of it within a perceptual field. And just as the individual
thing in perception has meaning only through an open horizon of possible perceptions, insofar as what is actually perceived points to a systematic multiplicity of all possible perceptual exhibitings belonging to it
harmoniously, so the thing has yet another horizon: besides this internal horizon it has an external horizon precisely as a thing within a field
of things; and this points finally to the whole world as perceptual world.
(Husserl 1981, 162)
In my perception of a physical object like a car, for example, I perceive more
than my eyes actually take in. I see one side of the car and I perceive the
car (complete with an interior, a backside, an underside, an engine, etc.).
Other perspectives are added to the perspective on the car my senses provide meother aspects of the car are apperceived. My view on the material
object is perspectival and thus incomplete, but I perceive the object, not
just one side of it. That is to say, the object is perceived within a horizon of
possibilities. This sort of horizon is internal to all perception and includes
all the views of the intentional object that I do not have right now but
that are possible. To perceive a car, or anything for that matter, is also to
anticipate the other perspectives included in or referred to by the internal
horizon. These other perspectives are tacit allusions and without them, I
would see a bundle of shapes, colors, textures, and so on, rather than a
car. They are all part of the act and to perceive the car from one perspective involves all the others. Every sense perception has an internal horizon
belonging to its object (i.e, whatever is meant in the perception) (Husserl
1981, 158).
To see the car also entails, whether reflectively-scientifically or not, a
network of associations between the car and other thingsthat it was built
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by someone with some purpose in mind, that it is made to engage roads

and traffic, a plan or decision to drive away, and so on. That is to say, the
perception of the car driving off, which is incomplete in the sense that it is
perspectival, is also incomplete in the sense that it occurs against a background of other objects which are also present and in which we participate.
This background or series of relationships is the external horizon. The
meaning of what lies on this horizon is pregiven with my perception of the
car. The external horizon links even the simple perception of an object
to the whole perceptual world and thus to others in the life-world (e.g.,
Husserl 1981, 251).9
In the Crisis, then, Husserl talks of the perception on which Longinos
data-gathering and observation depend in light of both internal and external horizons. The intentional object is what it is because of the horizons
and the horizons involve others. Even simple sense perception, then, links
intentional objects to the life-world and to others within it. Every phenomenon is thus imbued with awareness of Others (even if it is only a tacit
awareness). So, to have any relationship with an object involves a relationship with other subjects. The intersubjective life-world is at the ground of
all intentional activity and validity is attained via intersubjective harmony.
Consequently, not only are other subjects required for science, they are
required for any access to any objects whatsoever.
My focus on Husserl thus far has prioritized sense perception because
that is the point at which social epistemology appears to be less-than-social.
In an appendix to The CrisisThe Origin of GeometryHusserl went beyond
sense perception and investigated the role of language in the establishment of something as an object that is accessible to all and not merely
the intentional object of a single act of consciousness. Something becomes
an ideality and thus accessible to all, by being articulated, repeated, and
recorded. Through such records, a subject can empathize with, and trace
the path back through, those who came before and thus know what others
know.
Objects of geometry (to use Husserls example) become objects for all
by being recorded and made available to the communication community.
Once recorded, someone can carefully trace back through the records,
see them as expressions of intentional states and empathize with the first
geometers who experienced such intentional states, and in turn, re-access
the kind of idealities they accessed, thereby gaining knowledge.10 The text
focuses on objects of geometry, but the process is the same for any intentional object. Language and its constitution of idealities, according to
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Husserl, allows objects of consciousness to exist in and be accessed by our

spatio-temporal world, for all the future:
Linguistic embodiment make[s] out of the merely intrasubjective structure the objective structure which . . . is in fact present as understandable by
all and is valid, already in its linguistic expression. (Husserl 1981, 358)
So, others are involved in (or referred to by) ones conscious perceptual
activity and others can make possible ones access to idealities with which
one is not familiar. That is, others play both the sort of confirmation and
consensus roles they play in Longinos epistemology, but they also play a
more foundational role of making access to objects possible.
The Crisis is one of the more obviously social of Husserls texts, but even
the more atomistic texts like Ideas offer an epistemology that is more fundamentally social than the social epistemologies of the past few decades.
Ideas on a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy: a General
Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (Husserl 1983) was first published in
1913. This is the text with which Husserl reached a full-fledged phenomenology. As articulated in Ideas, Husserls view is that the objects of ones
knowledge, or even perception, or memory, and so on, are intentional
objects and the intentional object brings with it or refers to perspectives
on the object other than the one the subject actually has at the time. This
network of associations is expressed in terms of horizons in the Crisis and
in terms of noemata in Ideas. In looking at the tree in the garden, to use
Husserls example (Husserl 1931, chapter 3), I see it from one side and
distance but constitute it as a seen apple tree (complete with other sides,
textures, smells, etc.). That is the object I apperceive by means of the full
noema (or noematic complex). The one perspective brings with it, so to
speak, other perspectives, including those had by other subjects.
If I close my eyes and then open them, only to find the tree has disappeared, the experience of the tree as-seen explodes and I have evidence
that I was wrong about it. If I walk up to the tree and find that it is twodimensional and does not have a backside, the experience of the tree
explodes. If there is no such explosion some aspect(s) of the tree-as-seen
have been verified. As more perspectives are taken and more expectations
are fulfilled, there is an increase in validity. That is how I move to a more
dependable knowledge of the tree-as-seenmotivated by the idea of the
tree in complete givenness of perfect evidence which includes all possible
perspectives.
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It looks as though this fulfillment, or at least the lack of explosion, can

be had in isolation and that explains the common, atomistic reading of
this text. However, the multiple perspectives to which an individual perspective refers and which comprise the complete intentional object bring
with them perspectives and points of view had by other subjects. That is,
the intentional object is all meanings and significant positions . . . the
system of all possible subjective modes of appearing (Husserl 1931, 375).
That is to say, each intentional object is a system of noemata and its constitution relates to a possible community-consciousness . . . for whom one
thing as the self-same objective real entity must be given and identified
intersubjectively (375). It is this link to the community-consciousness that
confirms an objects transcendence: if it is also there for others, the object
is not dependent upon or related to any particular subject or perspective
(Hermberg 2006, 36; Zahavi 2001, 271272).
Additionally, the perspectives had by others are often involved in fulfillment/explosion of an intentional objectharmony with other subjects is
fulfilling while disharmony is explosive. If, for example, I ask a colleague to
meet me under the apple tree in the garden for lunch and, without seeing
me, she walks unreservedly toward the tree I have apperceived as an apple
tree, this harmony further verifies my experience. If, however, she finally
arrives and says she thought we were to meet under the apple tree and is
surprised to find me under a cherry tree, this disharmony causes me to
question the apple-tree-as-seen. We might then investigate, by increasing
the number of perspectives from which the tree is discussed and asking a
horticulturist or by looking at specific leaves (something that was not really
part of the initial experience)increased harmony brings validity, disharmony brings explosion of some aspect(s) of the experience.
In this way, the experience of others serves to buttress or confirm (or
even disconfirm) what one could know. So far, this echoes much of what
Longino describes, even if the terminology is different. But others play
another role in Ideas; they are already involved in ones having access to or
knowledge of objects in the first place.
Husserl offers a brief treatment of the degrees of apodicticity of judgments and veridical statements (Husserl 1931, 6). This treatment relies on
an intersubjective community. Judgments and predication are involved in
moving from the certainty or apodicticity from that had by the individual
with the self-givenness of experience to that which can approach adequacy
by means of criticism.11 If Ideas (a text often mis-read as particularly atomistic) relies on others to help the subject move from basic sense perception
to knowledge of objectsto move from an intentional object related to
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the subject to an object available to all, to objectivityit offers a social

epistemology. But if others are involved in a subject even having access to
an intentional object or to objects of perception, then Husserl offers an
epistemology that is social at a deeper level and is thus an even more social
epistemology than is typical of the social epistemologists.
The roles of others and the tacit awareness of others that ones experience involves only holds up if the possibility of the inclusion of the perspectives of others in ones conscious experience can be established. One
of the main tasks of Cartesian Meditations (Husserl 1950) is to investigate
that possibility. In his Fifth Meditation, Husserl acknowledged the apparent threat of solipsism and went on to offer a descriptive phenomenology
of our experience of other subjects and thus gets at one of the conditions
of the possibility of what was involved in Ideasthe inclusion of perspectives other than ones own in ones experience. Establishing this possibility
makes possible the objectivity upon which scientific knowledge relies.
Husserl approached this by arguing that having undertaken the phenomenological reduction, one can focus on the sphere of ownness (by means
of a special further reduction). From within this sphere, what belongs
to a subject or is from the subject becomes clearly delimited from what
is not the subjects. Having noticed, from within the sphere of ownness,
others, one can take the place of another subject and see things from that
perspective because one can empathize with the other on the basis of the
others body with which one pairs. By means of pairing, one can come to
experience others as other subjects and see things as if from their vantage
points. This pairing is really a pair of pairings: the pairing of similarity
between the subjects body and bodies of others, and the pairing of association between the subjects body and the subject.12
In pairing, the intuitive presence of one part of the pair is the basis of
the co-intending of the other part so that experience of the one awakens experience of the othermuch like engaging an object from one perspective brings with it other perspectives (in Ideas and The Crisis). Pairing
brings about a living and mutual awakening and an overlaying of each
with the objective sense of the other (Husserl 1959, 113). Since my body
and ego are paired (by association) and my body and bodies of others are
paired (by similarity), my awareness of the other body awakens for me an
awareness of the other ego (with which that body is paired). Consequently,
the intersubjectivity required for the harmony of experience is possible,
and objective validity becomes that which is maintained by intersubjective
harmony or agreement. In each text, this all happens passively; it is not the
result of some sort of argument from analogy. What I see, Husserl reminds
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us, is not some sign or analogue from which I infer the perceptual object
or the other subject; rather, in the case of others, I see someone else (124).
With the ego of the other in place, the objectivity on which science rests is
possible.
At first glance, it might look as though this aspect of Husserls thought
and thus his social epistemology falls prey to the same shortcoming as
Longinosreliance on atomistic epistemic agents at the base of all knowledge. That is, this intersubjective dynamic still seems to prioritize the
first subject. Although Husserl claims that the various subjects are equal,
as they need to be equal if others truly have more to do with knowledge
than the confirmation of what the first subject already knows, Husserl has
been criticized for prioritizing the first subject. This alleged prioritization
rests in the fact that it is from the sphere of ownness that the empathetic
relationships and intersubjectivity are established. That objection, however, ignores the fact that implicit in the theory expressed in the Cartesian
Meditations is an awareness of (or set of experiences of) others insofar as
the move to the sphere of ownness happens against the backdrop of others
and insofar as the description of pairing as a vehicle for the experience of
others as other subjects relies on a set of previous experiences involving
the members of the pair (Husserl 1950, 111). The pre-awareness of others
is brought to us by means of the horizons (The Crisis) and the full noematic
sense (Ideas) involved in all experience.
In all four of these texts, then, others are involved in or even required,
at the deepest level, for attainment of knowledge. In Ideas, others help to
solidify ones knowledge by confirming it, but also make intentional objects
possible. In the Cartesian Meditations, there is a heavier emphasis on others
and their possibility, but the relationship between others and knowledge
is largely the same as in the earlier text. In The Crisis, Husserls treatment
of the life-world and the intersubjective horizon of perception establishes
how it is that others help to broaden ones knowledge by affording the ability to gain access to meaningful objects. In The Origin Of Geometry, Husserl
shows how it is that others help to extend ones knowledge by making possible access to the knowledge others have (and have had), if, that is, we
are willing to do the work to trace-back through the texts to the originary
experience.
In answer to the primary questionwhether there is a non-trivial element of the social in Husserls epistemologywe must say, Yes. Others
are involved in the solidification of ones knowledge by helping to move the
evidence toward adequacy via intersubjective harmony. Others are also,
and more importantly, at the root of all ones knowledge of the world as
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part of the external horizons against which intentional objects take on

their noematic meanings AND the experience of others as other subjects
makes possible access to idealities and cultural objects that others know
or have known, without having to actually have the originary experiences
those other subjects had. The first of these roles is in line with Longinos
view and the view of many social epistemologists. The second is more fundamental: rather than an agent having perceptual access to an object and
that experiences status as observation involving others, the very perceptual access has a social dimension. That suggests that, some 50 years before
Social Epistemology hit the stage, Husserls epistemology was radically
social.
Notes
1
The term atomistic as applied to epistemology is one I borrow from J. Angelo

Corlett.
This definition is echoed by Corlett: by social epistemology I mean the philosophical study of human knowledge obtained by individuals in a social context or by
certain collectives (73, see also 34). On p.4 Corlett writes that an epistemology
is social to the extent that it investigates philosophically the possibility that knowledge, justification, and belief have as their subjects or objects either individuals in
a social context or collectives.
There are two main aspects of sociality of knowledge on which one could focus and
be considered a social epistemologist: collectives (crowds, institutions, countries,
etc.) and the social context of individual knowers. There has been quite a lot of
work done on collectives, but since much of that work still rests on the notion of
atomistic knowers comprising collectives, my focus is on the latter and the degree
to which it surfaces in the introductions to phenomenology published by Husserl.
For very brief surveys of some of the main approaches to and positions within
social epistemology, consult Goldman (2006), Corlett (2007), Schmitt (1994),
and Wray (2007), among others.
Solomon also suggests that social epistemologists are not merely interested in
investigating the social processes and epistemological dimensions. She argues
that social epistemologists generally endorse or praise social processes if they are
conducive to individual rational choice and condone or chastise social process
if they are an intermediate step in the process of individual enlightenment
(Solomon 1994, 218).
These criteria are quite similar to those outlined in Science as Social Knowledge
(Longino 1990, 7678).
But that is a big IF. One significant difficulty with Longinos view that cannot be
explored here is that it is difficult to see, based on what she has written, that
Longinos ideal epistemic community can truly exist. That is, the fourth ciriterion
of the community has been put in place, in part, to avoid problems of the apparent incommensurability of different epistemic locations with which one is faced
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10
11
12
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as soon as one suggests that knowledge is relative to or dependent upon the contexts (including the social interactions) of epistemic agents. Without a view from
no-where, an inclusive critical dialog through which things are judged and disagreements adjudicated is required. What, on Longinos view, guarantees the
intercultural, cross-schema, communication eventually required by the continual
exercise of critical dialog and negotiation? The fourth criterion of an ideal epistemic community calls for all qualified parties to be allowed a voice in the critical
dialog, but the questions remain: what constitutes being qualified and who is to
say who is qualified to participate in the dialog? That is, what is it that keeps this
sort of scheme from turning into yet another form of imperialism by which the
ideas and ideals of those currently in power dictate, in a sense, the outcome of the
dialog by controlling who can participate in the conversationthereby facilitating the expansion of their own ideas rather than a genuine critical evaluation of
competing ideas?
In this essay, I can only begin to sketch the roles of others in ones knowledge. In
doing so I echo a thorough treatment offered elsewhere (Hermberg 2006). That
investigation revealed that throughout most of his career, Husserl held that other
subjects are involved in ones attainment of knowledge; that, for Husserl, ones
experience of others as other subjects takes on multi-faceted roles regarding
knowledge; and that the texts reveal a continuity across time regarding the sociality of Husserls epistemology.
This story is very much the story of noematic apperception told by Husserl in
Ideas, even if the terminology differs.
Of course, it is not automatic. We have to do our work. The seductive danger of
language consists in that people can, from the meaning of words, passively take
the content of the experiences referred to, without re-doing the enactment. I can
read a novel relating the oppression of a people, for example, without redoing
the experiences of the author and thus without feeling the pain, the suffering,
the injustice of the situation described but, as Fink says, phenomenological propositions can only be truly understood when the situation of the givenness of sense
is repeated, when the predicative explicates are always again verified through
phenomenologizing intuition (Fink 1995, 101). See Husserl 1981, 364.
This points to the difference between being merely able to recite the Pythagorean theorem and truly seeing how it is so. The former is an instance of the
seduction of language, the latter is an example of tracing back through the record
to the experience of an Other and thereby broadening ones knowledge.
This is a movement from de facto apodicticity to de jure apodicticity. See Reeder
(1990).
See Hermberg 2006, 5964.
Part V
The Avatars of Truth

Interpretation, Deconstruction, and
Conversation
Chapter 11
Reduction, Construction, Destruction of a

Three-way Dialogue
Natorp, Husserl and Heidegger 1
In order to introduce the question of the given and of its elaboration

with respect to the motifs of reduction, construction and destruction, I
shall take as a point of departure the state of the dossier established by
Heidegger on the occasion of the first two courses that he gave as Husserls
young assistant at the University of Freiburg in the years 19191920. In
these courses, Heideggers aim was to take up and to radicalize Husserls
phenomenological enterprise, while remaining free from any concerns
with an orthodoxy or allegiance to a school. Framed by a sustained debate
with the various figures of Neokantianism that stood at the forefront of the
philosophical scene in Germany at the time, it was this project of taking up
Husserls enterprise and radicalizing it that led Heidegger to reopen the
(ongoing) debate between Husserl and Natorp.2
To this dossier, already complex in itself, one should add Heideggers
Habilitationschrift on Duns Scotus, as well as the two first lectures in
Freiburg, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie (Heidegger 1987 GA 56/57) and
Grundprobleme der Phnomenologie (Heidegger 1992 GA 58). Finally, the
debate between Husserl and Natorp as considered by the young Heidegger
should also be read in conjunction with the works of Emil Lask, in particular
his monograph of 1911/1913, Die Logik der Philosophie und die Kategorienlehre,
which is of considerable importance for Heideggers Habilitationschrift, as
well as for Rickerts works and for the Neokantianism of the Baden School
in general.3
I would like to dwell for a moment on this Heideggerian point of departure. As I indicated, it is characterized by the attempt to radicalize phenomenology, which is defined as the archi-science of the origin, as a
180
pre-theoretical science of the Ur-etwas, as Vorwissenschaft, and even as an

inquiry into factical life. This determination of phenomenology takes place
within the framework of science in the 1911 article in Logos, Philosophy
as a Rigorous Science and from a perspective that one might characterize as architectonic and foundational. The guiding question is: what is at
the foundation of the system of knowledge? In particular, what are the
roles of logic and of psychology? It is in this framework that Heidegger
takes up again the discussion concerning the question of the given (of the
Gegebenheit, and of the es gibt). These themes are central in the HusserlNatorp-Rickert-Lask debates, and by emphasizing them, Heidegger brings
them to the forefront in a resolute way.
It is of course beyond the scope of the present chapter to consider this
dossier in all its complexity (it has already given rise to a secondary literature that is just as rich). It is also beyond our present aim to examine its
relation to other later debates centered around the given or the myth of
the given.4 At this initial stage, we will limit ourselves to consideration of
the Husserl-Natorp debate; subsequently we shall return to Heideggers
illumination of it and the radicalizing effect this will have.
***
At the beginning of his 1919 course (Die Grundprobleme der Phnomenologie,
19191920), Heidegger gives a clear formulation of the guiding question
and its stakes:
What does given and givenness mean? This magic word of phenomenology and a stumbling block for other philosophical orientations?
[Was heit gegeben, Gegebenheitdieses Zaubertwort der Phnomenologie
und der Stein des Anstoes bei den anderen?]. (Heidegger 1992 GA 58, 5)
In a sense, it is as a phenomenologist attentive to the methodological question or to the first definition of phenomenology as a method, that the
young Heidegger proposes to raise again the question of givenness and
of the given, insofar as this question is at the very center of Husserls project of a descriptive psychology indexed to intuition. But while Heidegger
does begin with a declaration of fidelity with regard to Husserl, and to the
phenomenological school in general, his critical freedom, which is geared
toward the repetition and radicalization of the phenomenological project,
is also clearly formulated from the outset: It is in the most radical way
that the radicalism of phenomenology must be exercised, against itself and
Natorp, Husserl, and Heidegger
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against everything that presents itself as phenomenological knowledge (Am

radikalisten hat sich aber der Radikalismus der Phnomenologie auszuwirken gegen
sie selbst und alles, was als phnomenologische Erkenntnis sich uert) (Heidegger
1992 GA 58, 6). Heidegger continues, in a free variation on the Aristotelian
motif of the amicus Plato:
There is no jurare in verba magistri within scientific investigation, and the
constitution of an authentic generation of investigators and of subsequent generations depends on this: that scientific enquiry does not lose
itself in the marginal domain of special questions, but rather finds a new
and genuine way back to the original sources of the problems in order to
lead them deeper.5
At the forefront of these problems, drawn from the source, there lies the
problem of the delimitation of the domain of phenomenology, of its scientific character, and most importantlyand this is the point on which
we shall focus hereof the ultimate authority on which its legitimacy
depends, its allocation to the given or to the presentgiven in an irresistible evidence. However, to put the magic word to the test (Gegebenheit,
which could serve as a catchword) is also to enter into the debate with
other schools, in the first place with the neo-Kantians of both the Marburg
School, represented mainly by Herman Cohen and Paul Natorp, and the
Baden School, here represented by Heinrich Rickert and Emile Lask. It is
also clear that outside this initial debatebut we cannot here consider all
of its elementsthe Gegebenheit still remains a stumbling stone for other
disputes, anchored in other schools. I have in mind notably the Carnap of
the 1928 Aufbau, who opens anew the debate with Husserl concerning the
status that in the founding enterprise is commonly assigned to the flux
of experience, and concerning the choice of an ultimate given, under the
heading that Carnap then names the proprio-psychic basis (eigenpsychische Basis).
***
The question of the given, of givenness, naturally finds its place in a course
devoted to the determination of philosophy,6 and to its determination as
Urwissenschaft, as an archi-science of the originary. The guiding question,
which will be taken up again in the 19191920 course (Grundprobleme der
Phnomenologie), is substantively the following: What is phenomenology?
And the answer comes immediately: its very Idea is linked to the demand
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for an originary science of life in and for itself.7 Although it would of course
be necessary to pause over this decisive shift from the Erlebnis to the Leben
an und fr sich, we must leave this question aside, and let it suffice to note
that it is in terms of this idea that the question of the given emerges,
in the first instance, in direct connection with this other inquiry: What
is the domain of investigation of phenomenology (Forschungsgebiet)? Is
this domain itself given or pre-given (gegeben, vorgegeben)? Is it given
directly or purely and simply, without intermediaries, without mediation?
Or, inversely, is this originary domain (precisely the domain of the origin,
Ursprungsgebiet) never given, but always only and foremost a domain that
must be conquered (Heidegger 1992 GA 58, 29)?
The manuscript of the first Freiburg course is presently incomplete, but
we can read in a Nachschrift, from the auditor Oskar Becker, this even more
striking formulation:
The originary domain of philosophy could not be an ultimate proposition, an axiom . . . This originary domain is not given to us . . . It is never
given in life in itself. It must always be grasped anew, at a new cost.8
(Heidegger 1992 GA 58, 2627)
This question of access and this requirement of a grasp in need of constant
renewal, of a given that is never entirely given, and most importantly, never
definitely given, is undoubtedly one of the main motifs that in the immediately succeeding courses Heidegger will characterize expressly under the
headings of repetition and destruction (Wiederholung, Destruktion). I shall
return to this point briefly at the conclusion of this chapter.
The question of givenness and of the conditions of access to the given
is even more important and decisive, as we have already indicated, to the
extent that one purports to give consistency to the idea of phenomenology
as Urwissenschaft. What about the archi- or the arkh, the Ur- of this original
science, or science of the origin? Is it possibleand, if so, how?to establish methodically the way that leads from the non-original back to the original, to the Ursprung? (This is also the central theme of Hermann Cohens
Logik der Erkenntnis). If the young Heidegger at the outset objects to the
determination of this originary science (Ursprungswissenschaft) as theoretical or even pre-theoretical, that is, always governed by the theoretical,9 he
nonetheless preserves the idea of a genuine originary science (eine echte
Ur-wissenschaft), from which even the theoretical itself would draw its origin. Not only must this science of the origin be apprehended in such a
way that it will not need to make presuppositions (as is already required by
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Husserls principle of Voraussetzunglosigkeit, indicated in the introduction

to the Logical Investigations), it will also not be able to involve any presuppositions, to the extent that it will not be a theory.
The masterful moveor, if one prefers, Heideggers forceful move
the one that is going to direct the entire development of the problem of
the final given, undergoes an additional significant shift, from a question
which no longer bears so much on what there is, as it bears on the elucidation of the Frageerlebnis itself, of the experience-of-the-question that is
proper to the ultimate questioning: gibt es etwas? Is there something? Or is
something given? It is an apparently minimalistic or elementary question
(whose insignificance and poverty (Kmmerlichkeit) Heidegger himself
underscores), but it is also a crucial question, one that decides the life or
death of philosophy! It is a question that finally, and for the first time, lets
one take a leap . . . into the world. I cite this quite striking passage:
We are here before the crossing of the ways, before a choice that decides
the life or death of philosophy in general, as before an abyss. Either we
go down the road toward the nothing, i.e., in absolute objective positivity
[Sachlichkeit], or we succeed in taking a leap into another world, or more
exactly, a leap finally into the world, in the absolute sense.10 (Heidegger
1987 GA 56/57, 63)
In the courses of the following year (Grundprobleme der Phnomenologie,
19191920), we find the same set of problems concerning final givenness
as a question, again accentuated in its radicality (Heidegger 1992 GA 58,
131). I have already cited the beginning of this passage, which continues
as follows:
The problem of givenness [of being-given] is not a particular problem,
arising in a specialized investigation. With the problem of givenness, the
pathways of the modern theory of knowledge split in two [hear: the path
of the Marbourg School on the one hand, and the Baden School on the
other], and at the same time they together split from phenomenology,
whose task is above all to free the problem from the narrow confines of
the theory of knowledge.11 (224)
In order to move forward in the development of the field of questions
related to Gegebenheit, Heidegger, in a way of proceeding that is critical of
Natorp, on the one hand, and of Rickert, on the other, begins by recalling the classical Husserlian distinctions between the different modes of
184
givenness, which correspond also to the different modalities of intentional

directedness (Heidegger 1992 GA 58, 224).12 A distinction will thus be
made between that which is self-given (sebstgegeben) in the flesh (leibhaftig),
that which is given-itself (in its ipseity), but not leibhaftig, and finally that
which is neither self-given, nor given in the flesh, namely that which is
given blo symbolisch, merely symbolically. One will also distinguish the
given in the sense of what I give (to) myself (that is in effect, as we shall
see, the von mir Gesetzes) and the given in the sense of what is given to me
from the outside (the mir (von auen) Vorgegeben, 224); in other words, the
given in the sense of I give myself, the given as layed out or posed, and
the given as found outside, pre-given.13
What Heidegger characterizes as the two typical treatments of the
problem of givenness, in the Marburg School and by Rickert, might also
correspond with these distinctions (Heidegger 1992 GA 58, 131). For the
members of the Marburg School, one would never be able to speak of an
object completed and given. Before any givenness stands thought, and its
particular lawfulness, for which an object alone can be given. In this way
a given object is never primary or first; its positing or position is always
indexed to an originary function of thought. The object is understood
from then on as object = x, in other words, as the task (Aufgabe) of a positing that progresses ad infinitum.
In a different appendix to the same course, Givenness in the Marburg
School, in reference to the review of Bruno Bauchs book on Kant that
Natorp had recently published in Kantstudien (Natorp 1918, 426459),
Heidegger drastically summarized the position of the Marburg School in
the following manner:
To be conscious, consciousness [Bewutsein], that means: to think, to
determine, to posit an object. Each given is such only insofar as it is
determined in thought. It is only on the basis of this determination that
givenness [Gegebenheit] emerges for the first time. The positing-of-thought
thus retains absolute primacy. To know is to determine an object, to posit
in thought. Thus, there is no pre-given [es gibt nichts Vorgegebenes]. There
are [es gibt] objects only in thought, and since knowledge is a process
which, as a matter of principle, knows no end, the object is never given,
only its Idea. (Heidegger 1992 GA 58, 224)
Although in this context the direct reference is to Emil Lask, it remains
and this is another decisive point on which Heidegger never stopped insisting since the time of his Habilitationschriftthat thought, thus characterized
185
as a positing or determining, necessarily requires a something (etwas)

to determine, some thing that constitutes, as it were, an ultimate irreducible pregiven, a final remainder (ein letzter Rest). In this connection, it is
not irrelevant that Natorp himself, in the notes that he writes down after
reading Cohens Logik der reinen Erkenntnis (Logic of Pure Knowledge), reacts
negatively to this virtual elimination of every given or pre-given. He notes
that for Cohen, in effect, it is in itself and by itself that pure thought must
produce pure knowledge, and moreover, Only thought itself can produce
what can count as being. This is what culminates in the complete elimination of every given. Accordingly, even if Natorp grants that the given can
only have a sense as task [Aufgabe], he does so only to add immediately a
major restriction: but according to the very sense of the task thus establisheda task that thought itself must first accomplishthe given nonetheless remains, and certainly under this heading, given in advance (voraus
Gegebenes). In his undoubtedly legitimate aversion to the pseudo-given,
Cohen runs the risk of passing over the authentic sense and significance of
givenness14 (Holzhey 1986, 21).
This criticism is thus internal to the Marburg School, and one finds it
also in the 1910 work, Die logischen Grundlagen der exakten Wissenschaften (The
Logical Foundations of the Exact Sciences) (Natorp 1910, 48), where Natorp asks
even more precisely, What then should this given-in-advance-to-knowledge be? (Was sollte das voraus Gegebene der Erkenntnis denn sein?). And after
having rejected the standard answers, he answers: representation, sensation,
manifold (Vorstellung, Empfindung, Mannigfaltiges); which itself always already
requires in turn an act of determination. He continues:
It is rather this x, which, as manifold and also as unity, must be determined by thought. For thought, there is [es gibt] no being that has not
been posited within thought itself. To think means nothing other than to
posit that something is. As for knowing what is outside and anterior to this
being that is a question that has absolutely no acceptable meaning.15
In his earlier study, Objective and Subjective Foundation of Knowledge (Natorp
1887, 282283), Natorp related this to-be-determined x to the Aristotelian
dynamei on:
The given is not the concrete of the phenomenon except insofar as it is
to be determined in advance, that is, insofar as it is a determinable x, and
to this extent the analogue of Aristotles dynamei on. It is given in only the
sense that a task to be accomplished is given. It is not given as a datum of
186
knowledge, on the basis of which something else, still unknown, would

let itself be determined.
It becomes increasingly clear that the positive, the allegedly initial
given, is in fact what is sought. This is why it is preferable to speak in
terms of what is ultimately sought . . . But of this absolutely last one has
made a first. One has taken the quaesitum for a datum and one has thereby
denatured the task of knowledge.
[But] if every determination is first and foremost a production of knowledge, then one cannot avoid reflecting on the fact that, prior to this
production, something must have been given, something like a subjective originary, like an immediate which must be determined and which
thereby must be brought to objectivity. Indeed, something is given prior
to the production of knowledge: namely the task. We could also say that
the object would be given; in other words, given as that which initially
requires determination as an x, and not as a known magnitude.
Would this ultimate given be an originary subjective, Natorp asks, a
phenomenon of the last instance, wherein it would be permissible to see
the immediate of (subjective) consciousness? Is it permissible to posit
this immediate of consciousness as an immediate and originary datum
of knowledge? To which Natorp objects that, it is more advisable to ask
oneself whether this orginary can itself be attained by consciousness.
Subjectivity as such does not let itself be grasped in its immediacy (Natorp 1887,
165. My emphasis). It cannot be apprehended except after the fact, in its
accomplishments (Leistungen), or in its products, in a procedure that must
accordingly be characterized as a reconstruction.
From that point on, before any concept, the level of pure subjectivity
is the level of absolute indetermination. One may certainly go back to
such subjectivity as to originary chaos, but one may not apprehend it in
itself (Natorp 1887, 282283). The constructive, objectifying production of
knowledge is absolutely antecedent. It is from an anterior production that we
reconstruct, to the extent that it is possible, the level of originary subjectivity.
Knowledge cannot attain originary subjectivity apart from this reconstructive way, by starting from the objective construction initially carried out.
Heidegger, in turn, summarized the Marburg thesis faithfully, but in a
drastic way, in the following terms:
Theoretical thought, and in particular mathematical thought, is the
true sense of consciousness. Consciousness is thinking, determining,
positing an object. Every given is given only insofar as it is determined
187
in thought. It is only on the basis of this determination that givenness

arises. Thought, accordingly, has an absolutely privileged position.
Knowledge is objective determination, it is positing in thought. There is
no pregiven. There are objects only in thought and because knowledge is,
as a matter of principle, a process without end, the object is never given;
only its Idea (only the fiction of a process of knowledge that has arrived
at its term gives the object).16 (Heidegger 1992 GA 58, 224)
And again: We can never speak of a finalized and given object. Thought
and its lawfulness remain prior to every given, for which only an object may
be given (132).17
***
I will now turn to my second main point, HusserlNatorp, by considering more closely the two reviews of Husserls Prolegomena to Pure Logic
and Ideen I written by Natorp. In the Logical Investigations, Prolegomena to
Pure Logic, Husserl made reference to the 1887 article ber objektive und
subjektive Begrndung der Erkenntnis (On the Objective and Subjective
Foundations of Knowledge), as well as to the 1888 Einleitung in die
Psychologie (Introduction to Psychology), and paid tribute to Natorp,
praising his contribution to the delimitation of the domain of pure logic.
He also quoted a slightly later remark of Natorp (Natorp 1898, 4) according to which the laws of logic say as little about the way we actually think,
in such and such situation as they say about how one ought to think; and
he emphasized the stimulating influence that the two aforementioned
texts had exerted on him (Husserl 1975, Hua XVIII, 156). In the important 1887 article (Natorp 1887), Natorp had criticized Ernst Mach and
rejected Machs earlier project of a phenomenological physics,18 which
purported to take as its point of departure an ultimate subjective datum.
Concerning this datum, one could legitimately ask: What does given mean
here? Is the given known? Far from representing a final element, this
purported given must be determined beforehand. It is a determinable,
an x, analogous to Aristotles . And here we find something
that will play the role of a leitmotiv in the Natorpian critique of the immediacy of givenness. The given (das Gegebene) is given only in the sense of a
task (Aufgabe) to be accomplished. It is not a datum of knowledge, on the
basis of which something else, still unknown, would be determined. The
general structure of the argument is here clearly established, one which
opposes some indeterminate thing = x, to the process of knowledge and of
thought as Bestimmung, determination, or to be more precise, production.
188
To be fair, one must acknowledge a correct hunch in the positivism

demanded by Ernst Mach.19 If every determination is a production of
knowledge, it is important that one take into account the fact that prior
to any production, something should be given as a subjective originary,20 an
immediate given, but one which must precisely be led back to objectivity.
That is the task! The fundamental error of positivism is just to posit this
originary of knowledge as a datum that is immediate and originary, when
it is precisely subjectivity as such that does not let itself be determined in
its immediacy. In its immediacy, it is nothing other than absolute indetermination, or as Natorp again says, original chaos. In order to gain
access to this level of originary subjectivity, what is required is precisely
a mediated work of production and of construction, which is always
objectivation:
Other than through this reconstructive way, and on the basis of the construction carried out initially, subjectivity cannot be attained by any
other kind of knowledge . . . The subjective is not primary except insofar
as the task of knowledge is presented from the outset as already accomplished; but even this subjective would not be a given in the sense of a
datum for knowledge.21
In his 1887 article, Natorp evidently does not at all have Husserl in mind.
The target, which is easy to identify even though the author is not cited
explicitly, is indeed Machs anti-metaphysical positivism. Mach would
not have characterized this subjective originary in egological terms,
since one of the peremptory and fundamental theses of The Analysis of
Sensations (Mach 1903) is that the I cannot in any way be recovered (das
Ich ist unrettbar). It is nonetheless permissible to wonder whether and to
what extent this Natorpian criticism does not anticipate and bear legitimately on the Husserl of Ideen I when on behalf of phenenomenology he
lays claim to the very term positivism: If positivism is tantamount to
an absolutely unprejudiced grounding of all sciences on the positive,
that is to say, on what can be seized upon originaliter, then we are the
genuine positivists (Husserl 1983, 39). This is a positivism that then
takes as its
point of departure what lies prior to all points of view; indeed, the entire
field of whatever is given intuitionally, which is prior even to every thought
that elaborates this given theoretically; everything that one can immediately see and graspon the condition that one does not let oneself be
189
blinded by prejudices and prevented from taking into consideration

whole classes of genuine givens. (Husserl 1983, 3839)
Beyond the review of Husserls Prolegomena to Pure Logic, which Natorp published under the title Zur Frage der logischen Methode (On the Question of
Logical Method) in Kantstudien in 1901, it is above all in the Allgemeine
Psychologie (General Psychology) of 1912, and in the review of Ideen which he
published in 19171918 (Natorp 19171918, 224246) that Natorp returns
to the question of the given and of the double foundation, objective and
subjective, of knowledge. In Chapter XI of the General Psychology, devoted
to the critical assessment of a number of theories, Natorp discusses (11)
the Logical Investigations in order to emphasize what, at the time of the first
review, he had characterized as a logical malaise, namely the tension that
subsists between the formal, pure, or ideal, and the real, in the sense
of a residual that is not understood, irrational (unbegriffener, unvernnftiger Rest), an extraneous residue, rejected and yet ineliminable. 22
In order to break away from this logical malaise, one would need to reestablish a logical link between these two antagonistic instances, which are
the supra-temporal existence of the logical on the one hand, and its temporal factuality in psychological experience on the other. This logical link
would make it possible to give sense to the idea of a Realisierung des Idealen
(a realization of ideals), understood as a rigorous logical transition from
one mode of consideration to the other, a transition that Natorp for his
part would name, objectivation, reconstruction. By 1912, Natorp had
become acquainted with the Logical Investigations as a whole, which had not
been the case when he wrote the review of the Prolegomena, and this time
the criticism is more acute. Husserl, who seemed to require, and rightly
so, a strictly objective foundation of logic and of objective knowledge in
general, had proposed only a phenomenological foundation of knowledge, in other words, a subjective and psychological foundation (Natorp
1973a, 12). But Natorp raises the following question: Even limiting oneself
to description, how could this description escape the objectivation that is
characteristic of all theories? If reflection on a psychological experience
necessarily makes it an object, how can this experience, how can the intentional acts themselves (die meinende Akte) be apprehended in abstraction
from the expressions that are valid only for the realities that are aimed
at or intended? According to Husserl, Natorp concludes, subjectivity is
manifestly a second objectivity of the same nature as the first objectivity,
the objectivity that one thinks habitually, and which is coordinated with it
(Husserl 19171918, 244).
190
However, this is precisely what Natorp wants to reject. Subjectivity, the

counterpart of objectivity, is not a second objectivity, the objectivity of
the acts of consciousness. Far from every description, subjectivity, insofar as it is the counterpart or the counter-image (Gegenbild), can be attained
only by an indirect route. This is precisely a route that one must name
not Reducktion, but Rekonstruktion. The procedure must here remain essentially indirect, to the extent that the reflective objectivation of the acts, or
of the subjective in general, can only be absolutely non-immediate, and
to the extent that reflective objectivation remains in all cases totally dependent on the primary act of specific and originary objectivation (Natorp
1912, 281).
Grasping the subjective, and the acts purely in themselves, this is what
I have not succeeded in doing up to now, Natorp remarked ironically, in
relation to Husserl, even though Natorp agrees that this strong opposition
of the subjective and the objective is likely to be dimmed down as soon as
the processual character of being is brought into consideration. When
one examines a particular cognitive experience, one realizes that in general, there is not the subjective and the objective in themselves; rather, in the
pursuit of the process of objectivation and thus also of subjectivation, the
character of the subjective and of the objective is transferred stage by stage
to more and more members, the subjective becomes the objective, and
the objective becomes subjective again (Natorp 1912, 283). As Natorp had
pointed out at the beginning of the General Psychology, this opposition of
the subjective and the objective is in fact entirely relative, since it sends us
back in the end to a single movement of thought, one that may be accomplished now in one of its directions, now in the other:
The relation of opposition [Gegensatz] becomes a reciprocal relation
[Gegenseitigkeit] that has the sense, at the same time, of a necessary correlation [Korrelation] . . . What is here decisive, is that the face to face of the
subjective and the objective, which at first seemed fixed, dissolves entirely
in the living process of objectivation on the one hand and subjectivation
on the other, in which processes there is neither objective nor subjective in
an absolute sense, but always only relative degrees of objective and subjective that one may also and as legitimately characterize as a difference in
degree of objectivation or, inversely, of subjectivation. (Natorp 1912, 71)23
Of course, it is the consideration of this processual character of this
beinga term which Natorp can from then on use only in quotation
marksthat is decisive. Knowledge must be envisaged as a process in
191
relation to which the object, which always needs determination, calls for
a function of knowledge, which is clear itself only after the fact, through
the complementary route of subjectivation, which then in turn is pursued
within the indeterminate, and ad infinitum. This is what Natorp presents
as a genetic or dynamic examination of knowledge, in contrast to any
ontic or static examination. This is what defines the point of view of
method, in contrast to any perspective organized around the idea of a fixed
or settled result; or what defines even the perspective of the fieri, in
contrast to all pretentions to approach an ultimate factum or datum.
To avoid turning the object into an in itsel f or a choriston, standing
on its own by itself on the exterior, is also to refuse delving deeper in
the direction from which the given, the subjective would purportedly
emerge, when thought in a fi xed or unconnected way, independently of the
thinking process (Natorp 1912, 286287). At this point, Natorps criticism
of Husserl becomes more nunaced. He writes:
Husserl does not envisage the relation between the content and the object,
between the presentation [Prsentation] and the representation
[Reprsentation], in a way fundamentally different from my way of envisaging it. He acknowledges, at least . . . as an ideal case, that the meaning
intention and its fulfillment are absolutely one, so that the object itself
is encompassed in the phenomenological content [Husserl 1984 Hua
XIX/2, 608, 645648]. We overcome this position by emphasizing the
fact that such fulfillment does not take place once, but again at every
stageby emphasizing that there never is and never could be an absolute
fulfillment. We acknowledge that Husserl comes close to idealism when
he makes the perceptual content dependent on thought, the fulfillment
dependent on the intention, the presentation on the representation,
and when he determines essentially the first term by the secondbut with the
following restriction: The identification is accomplished, but is not itself
aimed at [intentionally] [Husserl 1984, Hua XIX/2, A 622].
The genetic perspective thus leads to a radical reassessment of the very
idea of an experience, and especially of the idea of an originary experience, which, as Natorp does not fail to point out, is already characterized
by Husserl himself as that which is perceived or apprehended in reflection
(Husserl 1986, Hua XXV, 2930). The purported originary experience
thereby becomes in turn a problem, no longer the theme of a description, but rather of a reconstruction. 24 In this new dynamic conception,
he remarks further:
192
There is no longer the settled givenness of a content and therefore there

is no longer the possibility of a direct description of the contentsuch
description being nothing but the concept correlating to such a settled
givenness. But in its place the reconstruction emerges. This is only the
reverse side of the construction of the object, and shares with it the genetic
or methodological character, and thereby also the sense of the intention,
the intention that is, of course, never fulfilled. (290)
The critical part of the General Psychology concerning the unquestioned
privilege Husserl assigns to intuition and in particular the motif of eidetic
intuition, is taken up again and developed further in Natorps review of
Ideen I shortly thereafter. In direct reference to the well-known 24, where
Husserl formulates the principle of principles, Natorp lays emphasis on
the Cartesian strand in Husserlian phenomenology, ultimately linked to
the given, which is directly offered in intuition. In his answer to the question of the grounds of certainty, which one cannot refer back to experience in an empirical way, Husserl, as Natorp points out, limits himself to
Descartess position:
Knowledge of the essence is grounded first and foremost in intuition.
Intuition is characterized as an immediate seeing, an intuiting, an evidence [ 3, 12] a vision of the essence, a grasping within an immediate intellectual evidence . . . All that phenomenology establishes thus
appears as claiming to be finally given directly in intuition [18, 33],
without the adjunction of any hypotheses, without any exegetical work
[ohne jede hypothetische oder interpretierende Auslegung oder Hindeutung].
(Natorp 1973b, 38)
Besides the remaining questions about the legitimacy of this criticism, I
want simply to indicate in passing that in the rewriting of the principle
of principles that he proposes (Heidegger 1987 GA 56/57, 20, 109110),
this characterization may have played an important role for the young
Heidegger (109110).25
Nevertheless, it is the same Natorp who will give a more nuanced form
to this criticism by drawing attention to the fact that Husserl speaks not so
much of the given or of being given (Gegebensein) as he speaks of an originary giving act, or of giving intuition, thereby excluding the idea that
there might be some given in the sense of simple receptivity. If the giving (das Geben) thus leads back to an act, or if it is an entirely specific
act, one may wonderand Natorp evidently goes this farwhether the
193
fundamental act of knowledge is not rather an act of positing (Akt des

Setzens), and conclude, at the end of an analysis that this time goes through
the Platonic and Kantian determinations, that (I cite the somewhat long
although crucial passage):
the act of giving must be able toand can effectivelymean nothing
other than the foundation of singular positings of thought, at first isolated, from the continuity of thought and through it.
In other words, the fixity [Starrheit], the punctual character of sight
[Einsicht] taken in isolation, must be abolished and overcome, but at the
same time must be explained by this overcoming. Thought is movement
and not repose; the halting points can be nothing but processes, just as
the point can only be determined by the tracing of the line, and cannot be determined on its own before the line is traced.
If thought is movement, one must interrogate the factum from the perspective of the fieri, and recognize it only insofar as the fieri is in turn
foundation:
This is the reason why we do not accept any finished givenness [fertige
Gegebenheit], no ready-made, whether it is a priori or empirical. The purported fi xed stars of thought must be recognized as the wandering
stars of a higher order, the purported fixed points of thought must be
resolved, they must be liquefied in the continuity of the process of thought.
Therefore nothing is given, but some thing merely becomes given [So
ist nichts, sondern wird etwas gegeben]. (Natorp 1973b, 42)
Accordingly, it is the very idea of givenness or of a final given that needs
to be absolutely rejected. Even a positing could not be considered as ultimately and absolutely given. There is only givenness in the process of
thought and through it. It is thus legitimate to conclude that the process
itself is the giving (Der Proze selbst ist das Gebend); that, strictly speaking,
there is no giving instance; and that what does the giving is the process
itself.
In the paper that he devotes in 1918 to Bruno Bauchs Kant, Natorp will
also bring to light this active character of the giving in the background of
all givenness: Es mu der Gegebenheit ein aktives Geben entsprechen (To every
being-given [to every givenness], an active giving must necessarily correspond) (Natorp 1918, 440). Nur so gibt es, gibt sich . . . Gegebenes (Only
in this way is there the given, only in this way . . . does it give itself).
194
The wordplay will also have drawn Heideggers attention. Radicalizing the
question in his first lecture of 1919 a few months later, Heidegger will ask,
gibt es etwas? (is there something [given]?), Gibt es das es gibt? (Is there
the there is [the given of the it gives]?) (Heidegger 1987 GA 56/57,
6263).
If, according to the reductive procedure of Husserlian phenomenology
in the Ideen, pure consciousness (or more accurately the region of consciousness) becomes the last sphere of absolute positing ( 46), which
is separated by an abyss of sense from reality, this ontological region
where being sketches itself, without ever being absolutely given ( 49)in
contrast to the region of consciousness that remains, as the outcome of the
phenomenological reduction, as the final, absolutely-given phenomenological residuumthen it matters, in Natorps eyes, to replace this reduction with the reconstruction. In truth, this reduction is only the simple
omission of the act of objective positing (das bloe Unterlassen des gegenstndlich setzenden Aktes). Contrary to every attempt aimed at gaining access to
consciousness attained in its purity, as a system of being closed upon
itself, a system of absolute being into which nothing can break and from
which nothing can escape ( 49), reconstruction presents itself as another
specific task, requiring a corresponding method. Natorp may grant
Husserl that this method is exactly the inverse of the method of objectivation. Nonethelessand it is by virtue of this that the separation from the
phenomenological procedure is definitivethis method must remain in
the strictest correspondence with it [with objectivation], whereby, Natorp
adds, it opens a way within the infinite (Heidegger 1987 GA 56/57, 49). It is
thus and only thus that it becomes possible to redirect all objectivations
to an originary consciousness, which (we have seen) would never be absolutely given nor ever constitute a source strictly speaking, since even its
alleged originarity (Ursprnglichkeit) is intertwined with its character of
being grounded in itself (in sich-selbst-Gegrndetheit). Strictly speaking, this
character belongs only to pure thought, given that being-in-itself means
and can only mean im Proze sein, being in the process. We find here again,
in a richer sense, the formula cited above: The absolutely and ultimately
given can be given only in and by the process of thought. Der Proze selbst
ist das Gebende (The process itself is that which gives).
In laying emphasis on the processuality of thought in this way, in providing a reminder of the radical difference, which Husserl would not have recognized, between the presentation (Darstellung) of pure consciousness, on
the one hand, and the clarification of that which can be presented (dargestellt) in actual knowledge, on the other hand, Natorp can even luxuriously
195
afford to insist on the infinite intertwining or intrication (Verflechtung) of

consciousness and of objectifying acts. And Natorp can insist upon this
against the abstraction of the Husserlian way of proceeding, which is in
reality a refusal to take into account the whole of the world of objectivity. Natorp thus becomes the defender of a flux that Husserl would be
constrained to halt or fix without succeeding in remaining faithful to
the nonetheless acknowledged thesis that originarily, it is time that is in consciousness, and not consciousness in time (Natorp 1912, 228).
Before leaving Natorp behind, I would likeand it is not a point prompted
only by curiosityto evoke again the position of the later Natorp relative
to the question of the given, of the there is (es gibt), of the factum.
This is no longer the factum of constituted science, from which it would be
important to return, by reconstruction, all the way back to the unassignable gathering place of objectifying and constituting consciousness.
In his Marburg Lectures of 19221923, published posthumously in 1958
under the title Philosophische Systematik, an entire section is devoted to the
categories of individuation (Natorp 1958, Section C, 62, 223 ff.). Natorp
again takes a singular Faktum as his point of departure, but this time it is the
factum that there is, or better still the factum of the there is: es gibt das Factum,
es gibt: das es gibt. What should we say about the factuality (Faktizitt) of
this singular fact, now intertwined with a final and irreducible givenness,
there is, this there is that simultaneously gives and is given? The there
is, is here also the ultimate it is: es ist, das es ist. What should we say about
this being (Sein) that seems from then on to gain priority over every process, over all fieri? Natorp underscores its irreducible singleness (Einzigkeit),
a singleness that it is no longer possible to produce or to present (aufweisen)
through any development (Entwicklung), regardless of how contrived it is;
a singleness which does not let itself be grounded in reason or fathomed
(begrnden, ergrnden), since it is this singleness itself which constitutes the
ultimate sense of being (Sinn des Seins), the last sense one may be able to
access and bring to the fore. Natorp also characterizes this ultimate singleness somewhat enigmatically as the ultimate singleness of the Sache, the
Thing . . . die Sache . . . die letzte Einzigkeit (Natorp 1958, 227).
This single Thing, writes Natorp, is the most astonishing wonder,
which governs through and through the whole of being and of sense.
This wonder is also the consequence of the fact that that which is the
furthest is equally, in a sense, the closest, which can never be attained
through any mediation, even the most sublime one, and which is rather
like das unmittlebar Vorliegende (the immediate at hand), that which is present immediately in front, that which dies alles unter Frage Stellende (calling
196
everything into question), remains itself das schlechthin Unfragliche (definitively un-questionable). This Sache (thing) is once again single and
unique, and is destined to remain the true point of departure, our only
unavoidable Ausgang (way out): das schlichte Da, das schlichte es ist: das
Faktum (the pure and simple quod, the pure and simple it is, the factum
(Natorp 1912, 227).
Nothing, simply nothing entitles us to think that the young Heidegger,
who begins his teaching career in Freiburg with Husserl in 1919, might have
been acquainted with the reflections of the latter Natorp. The degree of
inconsequentiality or incoherence of these reflections with respect to the
criticism of a specific version of the myth of the given that had been formulated twenty years earlier, would have to be assessed. Whatever the case
may be with respect to this last point, which I will not pursue any further,
it is not necessary to formulate a hypothesis of that kind (a highly implausible one) in order to understand how the young Heidegger, in a gesture of
critical reappropriation of Husserlian phenomenology, was able to take up
again the question of the given, of the es gibt, through renewed formulations and within a renewed horizon.
On the level of sources, if some such thing exists and has some importance here, the reference to Emil Lask should suffice; in particular to his
1911 work Die Logik der Philosophie und Kategorienlehre, massively present in
the Habilitation work devoted to Duns Scotus and his doctrine of categories and meaning. In effect, Emil Lask there develops a number of long
analyses of the es gibt under the title of categories of reflection. But this
is another chapter that I will not take up here. I will rather limit myself to
venture one last hypothesis, according to which the Heideggerian theme
of Destruktion (destruction or deconstruction) even if it does inherit a
sense from the Husserlian Abbau (destruction), from the de-sedimentation of accumulated strata that have come to obstruct the intuitive grasp
(Einsicht), could all the same be understood as the theme of taking up
againin a near-reversalRekonstruktion, Natorpian reconstruction. With
respect to the general project of reconstruction, Heidegger indicates that
with reconstruction, we have a total and complete reversal of the procedure of objectifying knowledge, a procedure aimed at gaining access
to the flux of experience, to the ultimate subject of consciousness, to
immediate experience, and to the concrete context of originary experience. By the same token, reconstruction seems to present more than
loose affinities with what Heidegger at the outset names the method of
destruction, insofar as the latter aimed at leading philosophy back into
itself, taking its exteriorization as the staring point. Deconstruction
197
(Abbau) aims, in effect, to free itself from an inauthentic tradition that

imposes itself upon us in a non-originary way (nicht ursprnglich zugeeignet)
(Heidegger 1993 GA 59, 5), and far from being a purely negative destruction (Zerschlagen und Zertrmmern), it is dijudication (Diiudication) (74).
Destruction consists fundamentally in an act of judgment. Its first
operating function is the judgment between that which, from a phenomenological perspective, must be regarded as originary and non-originary
(ursprnglichnichtursprnlich). But when we come to the decisive question
(Heidegger 1987 GA 56/57, 108)Heidegger formulates it as follows: We
raise the question, does the method of destruction achieve what it is meant
to achieve? Is it generally capable of achieving it?The answer is clearly,
No, since we have not left the domain of objectivation. Reconstruction
is also construction, and this being-constructive is precisely what properly
characterizes objectivation, which as such is theoretical (108).26
This is why, as Heidegger continues to point out, the destructive factor,
which characterizes Natorps position, is necessary and fertile for a number
of reasons . . . This position investigates, according to its own sense, the
origin, with an intensity and a radicality that is commensurate with its
misleading character. One will take that to be a compliment! The problem that must be taken up again or repeated where Natorp has left it, is
precisely the problem of the description Husserl ascribes to intuition. If
one may assert that a decisive step has been taken by phenomenology, the emphasis laid upon originary intuition [originre Anschauung]evidence!and the
idea of the adequate description, it is nonetheless convenient to oppose to the
privileged status assigned by Husserl to intuition, the idea of an undissociable co-belonging of intuition and understanding, the idea of a verstehende
Anschauung. It is from this perspective that the way of Destruktion imposes
itself resolutely, since what is characteristic of factical life is precisely the
fading of significance (das Verblassen der Bedeutsamkeit) (Heidegger 1993
GA 59, 37) that looms over it like a permanent threatfading of significance, loss of concrete and contextual meaningfulness, which stems from
the fact that a sense is no longer accomplished, that it is thus amputated
from the specific intentional dimension, which in every instance confers
on it its fulfilled sense (Vollzugssinn). It is at this Vollzug (fulfillment), at
this effective accomplishment, that deconstruction attempts to arrive. In this
way, it undertakes a return upstream, going back up all the way to the giving source. But the latter remains unattainable as a matter of principle; or
rather, it would be approachable only within the horizon of a path that goes
not so much through objectivations as it goes through sediments, the
layers of fixed or theoretically-settled sense, faded and thus dissimulating
198
no longer a process, but rather a fulfillment (Vollzug), an effectuation in

every instance concrete and factical, which constitutes the true gathering
place of all significance: the significant, significance (das Bedeutsame, die
Bedeutsamkeit).
Translated by Karl Hefty and Daniel R. Rodrguez Navas
Notes
1
The bibliography relative to the Heidegger-Husserl-Natorp debate is as follows:

(1) von Wolzogen 1988; (2) Stolzenberg 1995; (3) Stolzenberg 2002; (4) Ferrari
2002; (5) Lazzari 2002; and (6) Lembeck, 2002. See also (1) Marion 2008; (2)
Arrien 2009.
The main documents of this debate include: (1) Natorp 1887; (2) Husserl 1975
Hua XVIII; (3) Husserl 1994, 39165; Natorp, 1912, reprint1965 (in particular
XI, 1114); (4) Husserl1976, Hua III; (5) Husserl 2002b, in particular 276292;
and (6) Natorp 19171918. Reprint in Natorp 1973b, 3660. To this we may add
the essay of 1901 (Natorp 2008a), to be found (in Italian) in the excellent volume, of which the main focus is admittedly different (Natorp 2008b).
On this point, see Heideggers global exposition in GA 58, 224ff: Das Probleme
der GegebenheitKritik Natorps und Rickert.
See notably the discussion opened in the anglo-saxon world by Wilfrid Sellarss
series of lectures in 1956 (Sellars 1997).
Es gibt kein jurare in verba magistri innerhalb der wissenschaftlichen Forschung, und das Wesen einer echten Forschergeneration und Generationsfolge
liegt darin, da sie sich nicht an die Randbezirke der Spezialfragen verliert,
sondern neu und echt auf die Urquellen der Probleme zurckgeht und sie tiefer
leitet (GA 58, 6).
Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie. (1) Die Idee der Philosophie und das Weltanschauungsproblem (Kriegsnotsemester 1919); (2) Phnomenologie und
transzendentale Wertphilosophie (Summer semester 1919); and (3) Anhang:
ber das Wesen der Universitt und des akademischen Studiums (Summer
semester 1919) (GA 56/57).
Was ist phnomenologie? Als ihre Idee ist angesetzt: absolute Ursprungswissenschaft von Leben an und fr sich (GA 58, 171).
Das Ursprungsgebiet der Philosophie ist kein letzter Satz, keine Axiom . . . Das
Ursprungsgebiet ist wesentlich nie gegeben im Leben an sich. Er mu immer
von Neuem erfat werden (GA 58, 203). See also: Die bermten und
berchtigten unmittelbaren Gegebenheiten der Phnomenologie und
phnomenologischen Wissenschaft sind zunchst bekanntermaen nie und
nirgends gegeben, wir mgen das Leben in seiner aktuellen Strmungsrichtung nach allen Dimensionen durchsehen. Vielleicht ist das Ursprungsgebiet
uns jetzt noch nich gegebenaber wenn die Phnomenologie weiter ist? Auch
dann nichtund nie. . . . Das Gegenstandsgebiet der wissenschaftlichen Philosophie mu also immer wieder neu gesucht, die Zugnge neu geffnet
werden (GA 58, 2627).

9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
199
See: Diese Vorherrschaft des Theoretischen mu gebrochen werden . . . (This

prevalence of the theoretical must be broken) (GA 56/57, 59).
Wir stehen an der methodischen Wegkreuzung, die ber Leben oder Tod der
Philosophie berhaupt entscheidet, an einem Abgrund: entweder ins Nichts,
d.h. der absoluten Sachlichkeit, oder es gelingt der Sprung in eine andere Welt,
oder genauer: berhaupt erst in die Welt (GA 56/57, 63).
See das Problem der Gegebenheit ist kein spezialistisches Sonderproblem. An ihm
scheiden sich die Wege der modernen Erkenntnistheorie unter sich und zugleich
von der Phnomenologie, die das Problem vor allem aus seiner verengenden
erkenntnistheoretischen Problematik loslsen mu (GA 58, 224. See also Oskar
Beckers Nachschrift, GA 58, 221).
Ich kann im Leben auf etwas gerichtet sein, ohne da ich das, worauf ich gerichtet bin, im Charakter der Gegebenheit, des Prsentseins mir gegenber stehend
habe (GA 58, 224).
See the notes of Becker: Es ist zu scheiden: (a) Gegebensein im Sinne des von
mir Gesetzten, d.h. der Fall, wo ich mir etwas gebe. (b) Gegeben im Sinn des mir
(von auen) Vorgegeben (GA 58, 224).
From Zu Cohens Logik): aber im Sinne der gestellten Aufgabe, die vom Denken
erst zu lsen, bleibt es doch das Gegebene, und zwar voraus Gegebene. In der
begrndeten Abwehr gegen das falsche Gegebene kommt Cohen in Gefahr
auch diesen echten Sinne der Gegebenheit zu bersehen (Holzey 1986, 21).
My emphasis. Es ist vielmehr dasjenige X, welches als Mannigfaltiges, ebenso wie
andererseits als Einheit, durch das Denken erst zu bestimmen ist . . . Es gibt fr
das Denken kein Sein, das nicht im Denken selbst gesetzt wrde. Denken heit
nichts Anders als: setzen, da etwas sei; und was auerdem und vordem dies
Seinsei, ist eine Frage, die berhaupt keinen angebaren Sinn hat (Natorp
1910, 48).
Denken, Bestimmen, Setzen eines Gegenstandes. Jedes Gegebene ist nur als im
Denken bestimmt gegeben. Aus dieser Bestimmung entspringt erst die Gegebenheit. Die Denksetzung hat einen absoluten Vorrang. Das Erkennen ist
Gegenstandsbestimmung, Setzen im Denken. Es gibt nichts Vorgegebenes. Es gibt
Gegenstnde erst im Denken und weil das Erkennen ein prinzipiell endloser
Proze ist, ist der Gegenstand nie gegeben, sondern nur seine Idee (erst die Fiktion des ans Ende gelangten Erkenntnisprozesses gibt den Gegenstand) (GA 58,
224. My emphasis).
Es ist nirgends von einem fertigen und gegebenen Gegenstand zu reden. Vor
allen Gegebenheiten steht das Denken und seine Gesetzlichkeit, fr welche allein
ein Gegenstand gegeben sein kann (GA 58, 132).
See the definition of the project in the piece of 1872: Die Geschichte und die
Wurzel des Satzes von der Erhaltung der Arbeit.
See Sommer 1988, 309328.
Here I am drawing attention to a passage already quoted.
See also Natorp 1887: It is not at all in the objectwhich is not given but is precisely what is at stakethat one must find the origin and, on its basis, establish
the conceivability of subjective knowledge. On the contrary, one must first and
foremost limit oneself to the point of view of knowledge and ask how knowledge
itself understands objectivity, how knowledge posits this and that, and what it
200
22
23
24
25
26
means for knowledge to pose the object in front of itself as something independent of the subjectivity of knowledge. . . . The object (Gegenstand), the object
(Objekt) means first and foremost that which is posited before (or in front of)
knowledge; thus it is knowledge itself which, first and foremost, will be able to
indicate and account for what that positing before itself may be.
. . . das Reale bleibt als fremder, verworfener, und doch nicht wegzuschaffender
Rest Stehen (Natorp 1973a, 14).
See Natorp 1918, 432433.
Description becomes, necessarily, reconstruction (Natorp 1912, 290).
Das methodische Grundproblem der Phnomenologie, die Frage nach der
Weise der wissenschaftlichen Erschlieung der Erlebnissphre, steht selbst unter
dem Prinzip der Prinzipien der Phnomenologie. Husserl formuliert es so :
Alles, was sich in der Intuition originr . . . darbietet, [ist] einfach hinzunehmen . . .
als was es sich gibt. Das ist das Prinzip der Prinzipien, an dem uns keine erdenkliche Theorie irre machen kann. Verstnde man unter Prinzip einen
theoretischen Satz, dann wre die Bezeichnung nicht kongruent. Aber schon,
da Husserl von einem Prinzip der Prinzipien spricht, also von etwas, das allen
Prinzipien vorausliegt, woran keine Theorie irre machen kann, zeigt, da es nicht
theoretischer Natur ist, wenn auch Husserl darber sich nicht ausspricht. Es ist
die Urintention des wahrhaften Lebens berhaupt, die Urhaltung des Erlebens
und Lebens als solchen, die absolute, mit dem Erleben selbst identische Lebenssympathie. Vorlufig, d.h. auf diesem Weg vom Theoretischen herkommend, in
der Weise des immer mehr Sichfreimachens von ihm, sehen wir diese Grundhaltung immer, wir haben zu ihr eine Orientierung. Dieselbe Grundhaltung ist
erst absolut, wenn wir in ihr selbst lebenund das erreicht kein noch so weit
gebautes Begriffssystem, sondern das phnomenologische Leben in seiner wachsenden Steigerung seiner selbst (GA 56/57, 20, 109110).
See also, Die Psychologie kann nichts rekonstruieren, was nicht zuvor konstruiert ist. Inhaltlich und umfnglich decken sich bezglich des zu Erforschenden
Objektivierung und Subjektivierung, nur die Richtung ist diametral entgegengesetz. Das Logische (Objektive) bleibt immer die Gegenseite alles Psychischen
(Subjektiven) (GA 59, 105).
Chapter 12
Truths Absence
The Hermeneutic Resistance to Phenomenology
Santiago Zabala
Truth is not a relation that is just there between two beings that themselves are
just thereone mental, the other physical. Nor is it a coordination, as philosophers like to say these days. If it is a relation at all, it is one that has no analogies
with any other relation between beings. If I may put it this way, it is the relation of
existence as such to its very world. It is the world-openness of existence that is itself
uncoveredexistence whose very being unto the world gets disclosed/uncovered in
and with its being unto the world.
(Heidegger 1976 GA 21)
Recently I have suggested that Being, after the destruction of metaphysics,
ought to be understood as conversation (Zabala 2010, 161176; 2009).
Contrary to my fellow philosophers interpretations, I did not advance this
argument because conversation is truer than any other approach to
Being but rather because it emphasizes, among other things, the absence
of truth instead of its origin or essence. While phenomenology and analytic
philosophy continue to examine the origin or essence of truth, philosophical hermeneutics has finally begun to emphasize not only why truth is absent
but also how philosophy can disregard it in favor of Being. Philosophy can
do this not because Being has priority over truth but rather because there
is not a truer interpretation of Being which could justify it. Such a truer
interpretation (or description of Being) would entangle philosophy with
metaphysics, that is, submit it to realism, science, or a culturally dominant
philosophical position. The fact that the history of philosophy is actually
constituted by precisely these periodic dominating positions does not justify the search for truth; rather, it calls for the different interpretations
or events of truth, hence, truths absence. In sum, from a philosophical
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position advocating the interpretative nature of truth, hermeneutics has

become an ontological account of the remains of Being where truth ceases
to have any normative power.
The goal of this essay is to outline both how the absence of truth is palpable within the conversation and, most of all, why the remains of Being
are the result of Heideggers resistance to phenomenologys concept of
truth. This resistance, which is linked to his destruction of metaphysics, allowed hermeneutics to become not only a philosophical position,
through Hans-Georg Gadamer, Luigi Pareyson, and Paul Ricoeur, but,
moreover, a thought beyond any position as Richard Rorty and Gianni
Vattimo have emphasized.1 Contrary to the majority of hermeneutic philosophers, who believe Heidegger has only elevated hermeneutics to the
center of philosophical concern (Grondin 1994, 91), I emphasize that he
is also responsible for radicalizing hermeneutics intrinsic resistance to
truth, which can be found throughout its history.2 Although most interpreters agree that Heidegger resisted Husserls concept of truth, not all
hermeneutic philosophers explicitly recognize resistance as one of the
fundamental characteristics of hermeneutics because of the normative
power truth continues to have. There is not enough space here to venture
into a historical account of the anarchic vein of hermeneutics,3 that is, its
resistance to truth, but the fact that Luther, Schleiermacher, and Dilthey
have emphasized the inevitable interpretative nature of truth (through
different philological, physiological and political approaches) implies the
existence of the anarchic strain of hermeneutics, if not its centrality to the
system. Even though Gadamers contribution to hermeneutics allowed it
to assume its place among the most fully articulated philosophical positions, his conservative, traditional approach not only has circumscribed
Heideggers resistance to truth, primarily to the human sciences, but also
has covered over the anarchic vein of hermeneutics. This is probably why
Gerald Burns felt compelled to emphasize in his History of Ancient and
Modern Hermeneutics that:
if hermeneutics were as self-contained as geometry, or as coherent as a
branch of philosophy, or even as tractable as one of the discursive or textual fields that an archeologist might analyze, or (most unlikely of all) as
methodologically self-conscious as a school or movement in literary criticism one might have been able to confine it sufficiently to deal with it comprehensively and conclusively, thus finally getting beyond it, or in control of
it, in some nontrivial way. But in fact hermeneutics is a loose and baggy
monster, or anyhow a less than fully disciplined body of thinking whose
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inventory of topics spreads out over many different historical, cultural, and
intellectual contexts. Hermeneutics is anarchic in Rainer Schrmanns
sense of this word; it does not try to assault its Sache but rather tries to grant
what is singular and unrepeatable an open field. (Burns 1992, 1617)
Against this anarchic vein at the center of hermeneutics, Gadamers followers have instead tried to maintain its conservative disciplinary approach
to the point of excluding Nietzsche from the history of hermeneutics, and
also considering Heideggers general resistance to truth an error (Grondin
2009, 5366). An example of this hunger for coherence, self-containment,
and self-consciousness can be found in the volume Hermeneutics and Truth
wherein the contributors emphasize the significance of truth in hermeneutics (James Risser, Rdiger Bubner, Robert Dostal) and also criticize
its absence in Heidegger (Ernst Tugendhat) (Wachterhauser 1994).4 While
such systematization might have been necessary to establish hermeneutics
as an academically accepted discipline, it has also covered over an essential
feature. Regardless of these academic interpretations of what or who constitutes a standard hermeneutic philosopher, the fact that Heidegger elevated the discipline to the center of ontology and at the same time resisted
Husserls phenomenology through hermeneutics inevitably questions both
the concern for truth in philosophical hermeneutics and also the role of
interpretation for Heideggers formation.
Heideggers reevaluation of interpretation before Being and Time entails
hermeneutics rising above its traditional position as a subordinate discipline of the human sciences and instead becoming the self-interpretation
of the human sciences. Theodore Kisiel, in his classic study on the genesis
of Being and Time, emphasized that the origin of this text lies in the first
analysis of the environing world within the context of a hermeneutics of
facticity (Kisiel 1993, 21). Such facticity does not allude to different relations with the world, ourselves, or others but rather to the totality of these
relations, that is, the ontological relation. As the publication of Heideggers
early courses indicate,5 hermeneutics, just as Christianity, has been not
only constantly present throughout this formation but also determinate in
the reception of phenomenology.
The relation between Heidegger and Husserl has been at the center of
a great number of studies that sought either to demonstrate how the disciple distanced himself from the teacher or to show how much the former
was dependent on phenomenology.6 While both interpretations are vital to
understanding contemporary philosophy, it is also important to stress why
Heidegger distanced himself from a philosophical position that was at the
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peak of its success. Ernst Tugendhat is among the few philosophers who
did not limit himself to analyzing their relationship; he goes on to emphasize how Heidegger, by resisting Husserls phenomenology, also lost the
concept of truth through hermeneutics.7 Although Heidegger did not refer
explicitly to hermeneutics as an alternative to phenomenology, the latter
did not seem to him appropriate for overcoming metaphysics, in other
words, for operating beyond the frames of the sciences. But what are these
frames?
These frames, common also to other philosophical positions, are founded
upon the fundamental question of ontology, Why are there beings at all
instead of nothing? This formulation is not only at the core of Western
ontology but also the expression of a fundamental duplicity in Being that
articulates its presence by splitting, that is, by duplicating Being. In such
duplicity Being is only as long as the two parts are joined, creating a
relation between two terms where one refers to the other as the predicate
and subject. In his classic study on Husserls and Heideggers concepts of
truth, Tugendhat points out how the specific Husserlian sense of truth in
terms of a difference between mere intention and the matter itself also
presupposes the duplicity of Being common to this metaphysical tradition
because it distinguishes between the manner in which something in fact
appears and the manner in which it itself is. Having said this, a proposition, for example, will be true only if it refers to things in a way that permits them to be seen as they are in themselves. This is why the truth of
statements is also grounded in a metaphysical, preliminary aesthetic structure: the truth of intuition. In order to resist Husserls progression within
traditional logics Heidegger substituted interpretation, which presents an
alternative and preliminary structure of the statement, for this aesthetic
intuition. But if the statement (the apophantic as) must be grounded in
interpretation (the hermeneutic as), it is not because the latter is truer
than the former but rather because the statements truth is actually rooted
in the disclosedness of Daseins understanding, which determines not only
prelinguistic duplicity but also its adequacy and correspondence.8 This is
why Heidegger, in Being and Time, specified:
The statement is not the primary locus of truth but the other way around:
the statement as a mode of appropriation of discoveredness and as a way
of being-in-the-world is based in discovering, or in the disclosedness of
Dasein. The most primordial truth is the locus of the statement and
the ontological condition of the possibility that statement can be true or
false (discovering or covering over). (Heidegger 1996, 207208)
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By separating evidence from the adequation formula and correspondence

from the appearance formula, Heidegger proposed a concept of truth that
consists of the self-manifestation of Being in its unconcealment. But, as
Tugendhat pointed out, truth as uncovering (Unverborgenheit) or disclosure
(Erschlossenheit) does not have anything to do with sentences that declare
something because it consists only in the event of this same unconcealment. According to Tugendhat and many other philosophers, such as
Karl-Otto Apel and Jrgen Habermas, even if Heidegger retained the
word truth, it still lost its specific meaning since it is transposed without further justification to all disclosedness of entities within-the-word
(Tugendhat 1967, 350). That is, both true and false statements. This difference does not represent a progression toward truth but rather an alternative between truth and truths absence or, which is the same, knowledge
and thought.9 While knowledge belongs within a paradigm in which truth
and error operate, thought is the realm where truth, error, and paradigms
occur. Although such occurrence (also called event by Heidegger) may be
interpreted as truth itself, it actually indicates truths absence, given that it is
not something outside or above us but rather something that belongs to
us: Truth makes it ontologically possible that we can be in such a way that
we presuppose something (Heidegger 1996, 209). This is why Beingnot
entitiesis something which there is [gibt es] only in so far as [solange]
truth is. Beings are discovered only when Dasein is, and only as long as
Dasein is are they disclosed (Heidegger 1996, 208). But if the event of disclosure is not useful for distinguishing between Being and beings, true and
false, or good or evil actions, what is it philosophically productive for?
The answer to this question lies in freedom, that is, in the possibility of
generating more Being. If philosophy, as Heidegger demanded, must at all
times work out Being for itself anew (Heidegger 2000, 97), then truth must
at least allow Being to take place, if not facilitate its occurrence. This is why
Heideggers new fundamental question of philosophyHow is it going with
Being?10 revealed for the first time in Introduction to Metaphysics (1935), was
meant not only to maintain unconcealed the horizon for further Being but
also to resist the relation or coordination of beings, hence, truth. Contrary
to the traditional metaphysical question, where truth was sought in a correspondence between beings and Being, in this new question the priority
is given to the possibility of working out Being again, that is, generating
further Being. In sum, truth as disclosedness, instead of as a contribution to
the relation between beings, emphasizes the resistance to this same relation,
which is responsible not only for forgetting Being but also for submitting
contemporary phenomenology and analytic philosophy to realism.11
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Santiago Zabala
Given that it is only within truths absence that Being takes place,
ontology can no longer refer to Beings presence (which frames it within
truth) but must rather rely on its own existential Being. This is why Brice
Wachterhauser explained that what Heideggers disclosedness points to
is the privileged place that human being has in the economy of Being.
Human beings are capable of truth because they find themselves in the
clearing (Lichtung) of Beings disclosure (Wachterhauser 1994, 4). But how
does such Being relate to metaphysics? If metaphysics could be overcome
once for all (berwindung) freedom would imply a correspondence, that is,
a truth we would have to submit to. But given that such a truth varies as
much as our interpretations, freedom assumes the same possible variance,
that is, the ability to resist any correspondence. The fact that metaphysics
can only be overcome through a productive twisting, that is, Verwindung
and not berwindung, implies an actual resistance, which, as I claimed at
the outset, is constitutive of hermeneutics. Ontology, after metaphysics,
instead of relying on presences must rely on its own resistance to presences,
or, which is the same, the remains of Being.
If a response to the new fundamental question of philosophy (How is it
going with Being?) is possible within the remains of Being, it is not because of
philosophys accuracy but rather its lack of accuracy, that is, truths absence.
These remains are the result of Heideggers destruction of metaphysics where
Beinginstead of another presence in accordance with an empirical image
or idealbecomes the absence, discharge, or weakness of such accordance.
But what does such absence refer to? Everything that does not work, that is,
that does not function through such an accordance, especially those philosophical positions constantly accused of irrationalism, relativism, and nihilism. These features, which could be grouped under the general rubric of
weak thought, are hermeneutic ontologys means of maintaining not only
the conflict of interpretation and the resistance to metaphysics but also the
generation of Being, which is possible only as long as truth is discarded. But
just as truth as correspondence is possible only within disclosure, so is Being
possible only within the remains of Being. As Derrida explains:
The remainder is not, it is not a Being, not a modification of that which
is. Like the trace, the remaining offers itself for thought before or
beyond Being. It is inaccessible to a straightforward intuitive perception
(since it refers to something wholly other, it inscribes in itself something
of the infinitely other), and it escapes all forms of prehension, all forms
of monumentalization, and all forms of archivation. Often, like the
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trace, I associate it with ashes: remains without a substantial remainder,

essentially, but which have to be taken account of and without which
there would be neither accounting nor calculation, nor a principle of
reason able to give an account or a rationale [reddere rationem], nor a
Being as such. That is why there are remainder effects, in the sense of a
result or a present, idealizable, ideally iterable residue. (Derrida 2005,
151152)
If truth is absent in the trace, conversation, and other weak concepts,
it is not because they are not true or cannot be defined but rather because
they belong to the remains of Being, that is, where not what is but what
remains is relevant for philosophy. Remnants are those concepts that, by
resisting truth as accordance and its inevitable realism, not only escape all
forms of prehension, monumentalization, and archivation but also exist
since, as Jean-Luc Nancy stated, only what remains thus, or what is coming
and does not stop coming as what remains, is what we call existence (Nancy
1997, 132). But how does Daseins existence take place in these remnants?
Daseins existence takes place in the same way as the truth of conversation,
that is, as what is coming, as the resistance to the present of presence.
Just as we are not in control of the outcome of a conversation, neither are
we in control of what is coming, that is, of the future. Truths absence
becomes the resistance to existences frame or to a state of Being where
history is reduced to the present. This is probably why in The Concept of Time
Heidegger emphasized that: the possibility of access to history is grounded in the
possibility according to which any specific present understands how to be futural.
This is the first principle of all hermeneutics. It says something about the Being
of Dasein, which is historicity itself (Heidegger 1992, 20).
When Heidegger stresses the futural possibility of hermeneutics as its
first principle, it does not favor the conservative nature of the tradition,
as Gadamer or Ricoeur would have it, but rather what is coming, that is,
the possibility of different interpretations. Although different interpretations demand the absence of truth in order to take place, such absence
also includes the possibility of freedom, which is what differentiates Dasein
from beings. This is why if Dasein does not want to be reduced to another
present being but instead exist, it must engage in hermeneutic ontology
and the conflict of interpretations, which instead of justifications for
descriptions seek disclosures for further Being. Such disclosures belong to
the remains of Being where, as Schrmann said, much remains for us to
think but little for us to know (Schrmann 1990, 49).
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Notes
1
4
5
10
11
While Rorty considered hermeneutics the expression of hope that the cultural
space left by the demise of epistemology will not be filled (Rorty 1980, 315),
Vattimo conceived it as the only philosophical theory lucid about itself as no
more than an interpretation (Vattimo 1997, 7).
Since there is not enough space here to expose the various examples of hermeneutic resistance, here are some histories of hermeneutics where this resistance
factor can be detected: Wach 19261933; Burns 1992; Ferraris 1996; Grondin1994
and 1995; Gusdorf 1988 and 1990.
An analysis of the anarchic vein of hermeneutics can be found in the third chapter of Vattimo and Zabala 2011.
Another clear defense of truth in hermeneutics is available in Grondin 1982.
Among the many early courses published, perhaps Ontology: The Hermeneutics of
Facticity (Heidegger 1999) is the most representative in indicating the significance of hermeneutics for Heidegger.
The most important studies still belong to Thomas Sheehan (1997); FriedrichWilhelm von Hermann (1981); Michael Theunissen (1986); Ernst Tugendhat
(1967); and the recent Sren Overgaard (2009).
Tugendhat analyzed Heideggers concept of truth throughout his early philosophy, and in particular in Der Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger (1967).
A comprehensive reconstruction of such analysis is available in the second chapter of Zabala 2008.
Recently, Greg Shirley (2010) systematically explained how Heidegger did not
discredit or devalue logic with his criticism of Husserl but, on the contrary, further justified its necessity and foundations.
As John Sallis explained, Disclosedness is a matter neither of intuition nor for
intuition. The originary phenomenon of truth, truth as disclosedness, is a truth
that is not of knowledge (Sallis 1994, 390).
Here is the passage where Heidegger formulates this new question: As the fundamental question of metaphysics, we ask: Why are there beings at all instead of
nothing? In this fundamental question there already resonates the prior question: how is it going with Being? What do we mean by the words to be, Being? In
our attempt to answer, we run into difficulties. We grasp at the un-graspable. Yet
we are increasingly engaged by beings, related to beings, and we know about
ourselves as beings. Being now just counts as the sound of a word for us, a
used-up term. If this is all we have left, then we must at least attempt to grasp this
last remnant of a possession. This is why we asked: how is it going with the word
Being? (Heidegger 2000, 35). Note that Fried and Polt translate Wie steht es mit
dem Sein? by What is the status of Being? and even What about Being?
Examples of phenomenology and analytical philosophy submitting to realism
can be found in Derridas debates with Jean-Luc Marion (in Caputo and Scanlon
1999) and John Searle (Derrida, 1988).
Chapter 13
Truth and Interpretation

Daniel O. Dahlstrom
The theme of the following paper is the relation between truth and interpretation. After elaborating some traditional ways of construing that relation, I argue that there is a justifiable sense of determining the truth of an
interpretation or, alternatively, determining a true meaning of the object
of interpretation. In other words, the papers thesis is that there are ways
of discerning truth hermeneutically, at least for a particular sort of object
and given a particular conception of truth. Before taking up the main
argument for this thesis and applying it to the factors of interpretation, I
describe an assortment of phenomena that, falling under the heading of
understanding, are directly related to interpretation. I review the relation
between these phenomena and interpretation as a means of specifying a
general sense of interpretation.1
Understanding and Interpretation

Interpretive phenomena typically emerge from phenomena of understanding. Understanding is, implicitly, an interpretation, whether we are talking
about understanding a process, a tool, a sign, a language, a game, an art, a
natural phenomenon, or a person. Understanding may stand for grasping how something works, what something signifies, how to speak or what
someone is saying in a particular language, how to use something, how to
play, what something is, or who someone is.2 Many of these forms of understanding are interwoven with practices, practices of participating in or at
least recognizing what is understood.
The observation that understanding is implicitly interpretation is meant
to convey the difference between understanding and interpretation as a
difference between implicitly and explicitly taking x as y. It may be helpful
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Daniel O. Dahlstrom
to introduce construal as a third, umbrella term, where construing x as y

is equivalent to taking x as y. Thus, understanding and interpretation are
implicit and explicit ways of construing things respectively. Interpretation
makes explicit what is understood, that is, what is construed implicitly.
When I understand and accordingly follow a traffic signal, I typically do so
thoughtlessly yet meaningfully. My implicit construal of an object as a sign
and, indeed, as a sign signaling a specific structure and directions (think of
a four-way stop sign) can be made explicit and, when it is, my understanding is interpreted.3
With this terminology in place, we can begin to specify how interpretation emerges from and is grounded in understanding. The first aspect of
this emergence is foreunderstanding. Whatever we interpret, we interpret in
terms of some foregoing understanding, including some foregoing understanding of what we interpret and how we interpret it (i.e., a foreunderstanding of the x and of the y in taking x as y). Even in extreme cases where
we are at a loss for words or hopelessly puzzled, the object of our ignorance
or confusion is never fully opaque to us (nor is the meaning of ignorance
or confusion). When we understand (implicitly construe) something as
befuddling or mysterious, we have some means of contrasting it with being
befuddling or mysterious. Foreunderstanding extends beyond these elements of construal to the aims and projects that ground explicit construals, that is, interpretations. These aims and projects may be deliberate or
unconscious and, when made explicit, they may or may not be recognizable by the one who understands.
The second aspect of the emergence of interpretation from understanding concerns the motivation for interpretation, what moves someone to
attempt to make explicit this or that construal at the level of understanding. We typically interpret or look for an interpretation because of the possibility of misunderstanding. Given foreunderstanding, a complete failure
of understanding is no less in the cards than a completely successful interpretation.4 Misunderstanding here thus signifies a range of phenomena,
from merely shallow and incomplete to quite faulty and misguided sorts
of understanding. Given the prospect and, in some cases, the dangers of
illusory, anomalous, or simply superficial understanding, clarifying interpretations are needed. A certain foreunderstanding together with the possibilities of misunderstanding usually tips us off whether something needs
to be interpreted, for example, whether a passage of a text or speech calls
for commentary or not, whether a painting demands an explanation, or
whether the meaning of an opponents move needs elucidation.
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The interpretation of something can be described as a reconstrual of

it. The interpretation, in other words, changes the understanding, the
implicit construal of something, leading to a new understanding or re-understanding of it. But via this re-understanding, we also come back, not to
the identical thing from which we began, but to a version of it. Herein lies
the familiar principle of the hermeneutical circle, so entrenched in biblical
and juridical practice of interpretation. 5 This re-understanding is the third
relevant aspect of the relation between understanding and interpretation.
Interpretations can be transforming; they can transform the understandings of things and the practices interwoven with those understandings.
As already noted, the interpretation need not be recognizable by the one
who understands. Indeed, the acceptance of a reconstrual, a new understanding, may only come about quite begrudgingly. Understanding has
the weight of tradition, constituted by prjugs lgitimes, as Gadamer puts it
(Gadamer 1972, 255).
Given the foregoing notion of re-understanding, two different types of
interpretation, what I dub internal and external interpretations, present themselves. If an interpretation makes explicit As understanding (As
implicit construal of something as such-and-such) such that A is subsequently able to recognize that construal as her own, the interpretation is
internal; otherwise it is an external interpretation. Every successful selfinterpretation, that is, where someone makes explicit to herself how she
in fact understands matters, is an internal interpretation. But so, too, is an
interpretation made by someone other than the person with the understanding that is being made explicit. For example, a psychotherapist might
interpret a patients attitude toward her husband, that is, her way of construing her husband, as an attitude of fear. The psychotherapist says to
the patient: You construe your husband as threatening. If the patient is
capable of recognizing that the psychotherapist is right, the interpretation
is internal. If she in fact accepts the psychotherapists analysis as true, she
may be said to have a second-hand self-interpretation.
Once an understanding has been made explicit via an internal interpretation, the respective understanding undergoes a change. In the just
depicted scenario of the patient, she may continue to understand, that is,
implicitly understand her husband as this-or-that, but now with an interpretation in mind, namely, that to take him as this-or-that is to take him
as a threat to her. That interpretation changes the dynamics fundamentally, even if she cannot stop understanding her husband as she did before.
Moreover, interpretations often become habitual and, when or if they do,
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they become sedimented, contributing to a re-understanding (Husserl

1954, Hua VI, 52, 72f, 380; 1981, 52, 72).
A fourth aspect of the relation of understanding and interpretation falls
under the category of self-understanding. In the course of interpreting anything, we understand-and-realize ourselves (Dilthey 1979, 191, 214). This
fourth principle links up with the others (foreunderstanding, possibilities
of misunderstanding, and re-understanding). The self-understanding in interpretation is no less implicit than the foreunderstanding and, thanks in part
to its implicitness, we are all too capable of misunderstanding ourselves.
Our re-understanding of something in the wake of interpretation contributes to a new self-understanding, though, of course, the latter should not
be confused with self-interpretation. The understanding generally and
self-understanding in particular always involve a level of opacity that interpretation attempts to remove, at least to some degree. Just as we typically
do not know what we mean, until we hear what we have to say, so our selfunderstanding only becomes perspicuous in the course of interpretation.
Accordingly, we might distinguish the pre-interpretive self-understanding,
the interpretation-driven self-understanding, and self-interpretation where
the interpreter turns her attention to her interpretation as such.
True Interpretation
Truth is often distinguished from meaning, and verification from interpretation. Meanings are interpreted, truths are verified. Yet there are not
only different truths but different accounts of truth and different accounts
of what constitutes a verification. Since these differences are differences of
interpretation and since the discrepancies among them call for interpretation, they put in questionat least prima facieany sharp distinction of
truth and meaning, interpretation and verification. The point here is not
simply that truth and meaning are in some sense parasitic on each other,
that is, that truth is always the truth of what is meant by something said
(or done) and that meanings are expressed because some meanings are
true. The conclusion to this sort of argument is rather that determination
of what is true is itself a matter of interpretation and thus fully ensconced
within the sphere of meanings.
My aim here is not to defend the foregoing argument or its conclusion.
But the conclusion is useful because it states in no uncertain terms that
truth is superfluous in matters of interpretation. The reduction of truth in
this unqualified way to interpretation effectively eliminates any constraints
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on interpretation, based upon considerations of its truth. For the sake of

future reference, it will be helpful to state formally and name the thesis of
this unqualified reduction of truth to interpretation.
The unqualified reductive thesis (UR): the truth of an interpretation is
nothing but the interpretation itself.
By not allowing for any means of determining truth that escapes the vagaries of interpretation, UR amounts to a denial of correspondence theories
of truth. Whatever is said to be the truth about any subject matter falls fully
within the scope of meanings and their interpretation. In other words,
there is no uninterpreted phenomenon to which the interpretation can be
said to correspond.
If this thesis is unsettling, it is no doubt due to two common beliefs that
together make it compelling to insist on distinguishing verification from
interpretation. The first belief concerns the difference in the make-up of
interpretation and verification. Meanings and interpretations are largely
of our individual and collective making, a product of thinking, imagining, and opining, limited only by our ability to entertain various ideas and
concepts. By contrast, truth and verification (as the distinctive mode of
determining which meanings expressed are true) restrict the scope of our
thoughts and imagination, suggesting constraints that cannot be simply
self-imposed, like a poets adoption of meter or a representative governments tax structure. In short, according to this first belief, meanings and
interpretation are subjective, truth and verification are objective.
The second belief stems from the fact that arguably the most unambiguous sorts of verification are those typically associated and, in some case,
even identified with iterable sensory experiences that we can expect normal human perceivers commonly to have. We verify assertions through
perception, through direct sensory acquaintance with their references. To
be sure, sensory perception without interpretation is blind, if we may paraphrase Kants famous dictum. The warrant for the assertions supposes a
common interpretation in the form, at the very least, of descriptions in a
shared language. (In other words, those normal human perceivers must
also have acquired certain normal abilities to use language.) Yet, in contrast to interpretations, expressed in assertions or other linguistic descriptions, the colors that we see and the sounds that we hear are at some level
not of our making or choosing, and, while part of the interpretandum, they
also mark a limit to interpretation. Hence, at least when it comes to assertions about experiential objects or states of affairs, we rely upon the ways
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they present themselves in perceptual experience in order to ascertain the

truth or falsity of those assertions. For the purposes of this chapter, it is
important to add that this second belief cuts two ways; that is to say, truth
and verification are largely a matter of assertions and perceptions. The
second belief underlying the usual distinction between interpretation and
verification is a belief in the paradigmatic status of sensory perception as
a means or even part of the criterion of determining the truth in contrast
to the meaning or, better, a true meaning in contrast to a merely possible
meaning of an assertion.6
However, whatever the merits of these two beliefs when it comes to statements about perceivable, physical objects, matters are far murkier if one supposes, on the basis of those beliefs, that the truth or a true meaning can be
assigned to intended, human creations (such as artistic and cultural works).
How do we verify an interpretation as objective and true (the first belief)
when the object of interpretation is no less a product of human subjectivity
than interpretation itself? Moreover, even if we acknowledge that sensory
experience is necessary to gain access to artworks, media, or communication (gestures, speech and writing), it is hardly sufficient to determine their
true meaning(s). In other words, the paradigm of a truth-making, observable object or state of affairs simply does not transfer without further ado to
human products (thus, limiting the import of the second belief).
The foregoing considerations suggest a more qualified statement of the
thesis of the reducibility of truth to meaning, along the following lines:
The qualified reductive thesis (QR): the truth of an interpretation is the
coherence of its overriding meaning with the meanings of the interpretatum or interpretata (the thing or things already interpreted) that are
part of the constitution of the interpretandum
If UR amounts to a denial of truth as correspondence or, at least, the superfluousness of considerations of truth as correspondence, QR affirms that
truth as a form of coherence provides a criterion of interpretation, such
that it is not merely redundant to speak of true meanings and true interpretations. Truth here is always in medias res and the res are interpretations.
There are three patent ways in which QR delimits UR. First, it restricts the
subject matter of interpretation (and thus a possibly true interpretation)
to those things whose make-up already involves interpretation. The most
obvious such things are works, that is, intended, human creations (literary,
artistic, cultural). Second, QR supposes an overriding (primary) meaning
distinct from other, subsidiary and presupposed meanings. An overriding
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meaning of an interpretation stands here for an interpretation of the

main elements of a work, taken as a whole.7 This qualification leaves some
room for the input of factors that, while underdetermining the overriding meaning, are not themselves directly subject to the interpretation that
produces that meaning. For example, the experience of a shade as Poussin
blue need not determine the overriding meaning and interpretation of
Poussins Arcadia. Moreover, if there is a compelling account of the truth of
the claim that someone looking at the painting perceives blue rather than
some other color in its top left corner, that verification and truth may be
relatively independent of perceiving it as Poussins blue or perceiving the
painting in terms of some allegedly, overriding interpretation of it. Third,
the truth of a particular interpretation is not internal to or entailed by that
interpretation itself.
Discerning Truth Through

the Factors of Interpretation
The preceding section contains a formal statement (QR) of a theory of
true interpretations, that is, a way of maintaining a sense in which truth
can matter to interpretation and serve as a criterion, whether delivering a
true interpretation is the main task of the interpreter or not.8 The aim of
this final section is to argue for the cogency of this thesis through closer
consideration of the factors involved in interpretation. If, as supposed by
QR, the object to be interpreted includes elements that have already been
interpreted, there are plainly three distinct factors of interpretation in
general.9 The three factors are:
3.1 the interpretandum in itself, that is, what is to be interpreted and its
distinctiveness;
3.2 the interpretandum as effect, that is, its relation to the conditions (fons
interpretandi) responsible for it, for example, in the case of a work, its
producer (artist, author, sculptor, director, etc.); and
3.3 the interpretandum as cause, that is, its relation to the interpreter.
Strategies for refuting UR typically consist in construing one or more of
these factors as entailing a true meaning and a possibility of verification
that marks the closure of interpretation. Various reasons why these strategies fail have already been suggested and, in what follows, I further elaborate these reasons with respect to each factor of interpretation. At the same
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time I hope to show how these three factors can be incorporated into a useful conception and practice of true interpretation, based upon QR.
Some caveats, however, are immediately in order. First, these factors are
by no means always clearly isolable from one another but each can be taken
as supplying an avenue to a true meaning in contrast to a mere interpretation. Second, the references to cause and effect here are not intended in the
sense of supplying necessary and sufficient conditions. For the purposes of
this analysis, it suffices for a painting, for example, to be taken as an effect
if a painter can be identified (or even if it is the sort of object requiring a
painter). So, too, it suffices to take it as a cause if it has an effect on the interpreter such that that effect enters in some way into the interpretation. Third,
as already signaled in the first part of this chapter, I take interpretation
in a broad sense (in keeping with ordinary usage) to signify any instance of
explicit construal (explicitly taking x as y). In other words, to interpret is to
determine the meaning (y) of some phenomenon (x), including artificial
and natural things, that is, things that can be traced to human and/or nonhuman causes or conditions. However, in what follows I focus principally on
the interpretation of works, as I attempt to explain the sense in which truth
can and cannot be a criterion of their interpretation. My aim again is to
establish, on the basis of QR, the possibility of true interpretations.
The Interpretandum in Itself
In regard to the first factor, the interpretandum necessarily corresponds at
some level to the modes of access to it. For example, the access may be visual
or aural and the interpretandum might be a natural object (e.g., clouds, a
weather pattern, a forest), natural or artificial images (e.g., a reflection in a
lake, a photograph, a portrait) and sounds (e.g., a loons yodel or a piece of
music), written or spoken words, or a combination of some or all the above
(as in sculpture or opera). Given such access and the capacity for it to be
shared, there may be levels of common acquaintance or even understanding of the interpretandum. At a staging of Hamlet, for example, everyone
in the audience sees the skull in Hamlets hands; everyone understands
the same sentence Alas, poor Yorick; everyone recognizes Hamlets staging of The Mousetrap as a play within a play, and so on. As in everyday
experience and discourse, we have an acquaintance with things and an
understanding of how to talk about them that allow for what are commonly
accepted to be uncontroversially true, indefeasible descriptions. Indeed,
insofar as discourse is communication about something at all, it necessarily
supposes truthmakers (objects, facts, events) and the capacity to refer to
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them. This supposition, moreover, is one with the old insight that illusion
and deceit presuppose veracity.
The distinction often made in ordinary discourse between description and
interpretation issues from a certain level of confidence assigned to descriptions of experience, as elaborated above. To be sure, these descriptions, like
the languages in which they are formed, are historical, cultural, and environmental (think of the pre-Copernican descriptions of planetary motion
or the variety of descriptions of snow in different cultures). They are part
of the re-understanding that, as noted in part one, ensues from previous
interpretations. Nevertheless, like the facts and experiences they describe,
those descriptions are reliable and iterable, providing a secure foundation for
common sense. Against the background of such descriptions, interpretations
become necessary only when the possibility of misunderstanding presents
itself, for example, when we are confronted with optical illusions or erratic
behavior, or when the curiosity of a restless mind gets the better of it.
Yet the appeal to true descriptions, while certainly supposed in many
a practice of interpretation, does not suffice to salvage a sharp distinction between truth and meaning. Thus, they cannot be the basis for refuting UR. The main reason the appeal to true descriptions in this regard
fails is that descriptions are not themselves free of interpretation. True
descriptions are interpretations that correspond with some foreunderstanding and that foreunderstanding, it bears iterating, is an implicit way of taking somethingimplicit with respect to what we take it as and why. In this
connection one is reminded of Heideggers critique of Husserls project
of a presupposition-less phenomenology, one that merely describes. As
Heidegger points out, since those phenomenological descriptions are for
the sake of grounding science and, indeed, a certain conception of science,
they fail to be neutral, as would any other sort of description (Heidegger
1994 GA 17, 2).10
Something analogous occurs in interpretation of literary works and
visual arts. Here there are at least four levels of foreunderstanding and
re-understanding typically at work in such interpretations. Consider the
following ways of categorizing a work, embedded in the following claim:
It is a work of art, a powerful tale of tragedy, but woefully sentimental.
The claim supposes a foreunderstanding on four distinct levels or
categories:
(a) artistic or literary (e.g., a work of art)
(b) type of work (e.g., tale, painting, book, poem)
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Daniel O. Dahlstrom
(c) genre (e.g., tragedy, drama, comedy, Romantic, Realist)
(d) aesthetic, expressive, or metaphorical (e.g., powerful, sublime,
sentimental).
Each level of foreunderstanding is not simply an implicit construal, but also

a re-understanding, the product of a foregoing interpretation that is subsequently ingrained and taken for granted. The debates over the proper
application of the predicates listed from (a) to (d) amply illustrate their
interpretive character.11
Controversies surrounding (d) in particular that is, what constitutes
the aesthetic, expressive, or metaphoricaloften stem from the fact that
in ordinary discourse there are descriptions commonly accepted as indefeasible and, indeed, without recourse to interpretation. In these cases,
we carry over into the interpretation of the work the distinction between
ready-made, indefeasible descriptions and controversial ones, in need of
interpretation. To take a celebrated example, Lessing and Winckelmann
agree that Lacoons face in the famous sculpture by that name does not
express the pain that one would expect in such a situation; they only differ on why the expression is softened.12 But sometimes even descriptions
are controversial (is Mona Lisas smile a smirk? Is the woman in Vermeers
Woman Holding a Balance pregnant? Is the Washington Monument a building? Is the Sissinghurst Castle Garden an example of an English garden, a
French garden, or both?).
The controversy, moreover, need not be about the fittingness of the
description so much as the vagueness or simply the ambiguity of the terms
of the description. For example, what precisely does Coleridge mean when
he speaks of the sense of sublimity that arises from Hamlets unhealthy,
constant preoccupation with the world within? Or when Iago is described
as motiveless malignity (Coleridge), a moral pyromaniac (Harold
Goddard) or the ontotheologian of evil (Harold Bloom)? Or consider
the ironic praise given to non-post-modern critics for being old fashioned. There is no shortage of such examples of phrases and words of
interpretation that, while clearly not devoid of meaning, cry out for interpretation themselves.13
In all the cases cited in the last two paragraphs, the question of the
controversial description makes sense only against the background of a
shared acceptanceto be sure, no less a matter of interpretationof the
subject and the terms in which it is described. Such debates about the interpretandum at these different levels undermine the notion of a true interpretation based upon appeals to correspondence. Yet they also demonstrate
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that considerations of truth as coherence are often, indeed, not merely

germane but necessary to interpretation, thereby lending support to QR.
For even if truth is not the aim of interpretation (and there is no reason
that it need be), the interpretation must suppose the identity of the interpretandum, something that can typically be ascertained or determined
through canons of coherence.
The Interpretandum as Effect

Particularly where we do not immediately understand a work of art and
thus recognize the possibility of misunderstanding it, nothing would seem
to make more sense than to ask the artist why she created it. In other
words, we look to an artists intentions in creating a work to determine its
meaning. Since the artists intentions are plainly external to the critics,
the appeal to the artists intention introduces an element of objectivity into
the interpretation. Assuming the parallel of this non-subjective input with
that provided by the sensory experience of a physical object, theorists of
interpretation have repeatedly argued that the artists intention provides
a criterion for true interpretations where, indeed, truth is a matter of correspondence with a state of affairs (what the artist or writer intends or
intended). In other words, these theorists contend that the path to a true
interpretation consists in considering the interpretandum as the effect of its
creator or, in other words, looking to the fons interpretandi, the conscious or
unconscious process responsible for the work. If this cause is independent
of the effect and if determination of this cause yields the true interpretation, then this strategy amounts to a denial of UR.
Yet the identification of a works meaning with its creators intentions cannot be right without further ado since the work can mean things that the
creator did not mean. A work has more than one meaning. Moreover, how
often do we find ourselves trying to find the right words or apologizing
that what we said was not what we meant? The problem with this strategy,
however, is not simply the fact that we misspeak or that what we said fails to
capture what we meant. After all, in a polished work in contrast to everyday
discourse, the author or artist may present the work to the public, confident
that the work expresses her intention. But even if we acknowledge that the
work is precisely what its creator intended, its meaning cannot be confined
to that relationship. For whenever we speak, write, or otherwise express ourselves, we also always say, write, or express more than we mean because the
saying, writing, and expressinghowever carefully craftedsay more than
we can thereby intend.14 Meanings proliferate and, with them, truths.
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Daniel O. Dahlstrom
A further, practical problem with this strategy is the issue of access to

the creators intentions. This problem, at times no doubt insurmountable,
lends legitimacy to what Wimsatt and Beardsley dub the intentional fallacy. To be sure, these theorists of interpretation plainly overstate matters with their contention that the design or intention of the author
is neither available nor desirable as a standard of judging the success
of a work of literary art.15 While a works meanings, including its true
meanings, are not reducible to its creators intentions, a work depends
upon a creator, its meanings depend upon its creators intentions, and
those intentions may be relevant, even highly relevant, to giving a true
interpretation of the work. For example, the work may exhibit personal
qualities and a style that are fully understandable only by consideration
of the artist or writer.16 However, incorporation of considerations of the
authors intentions in determining a true interpretation of that authors
work is consistent with QR (where, of course, artist may substitute for
author). Indeed, depending upon the purposes of interpretation,
determination of those intentions may be not simply coherent with some
overriding interpretation, but may themselves constitute the overriding
interpretation itself.
The Interpretandum as Cause

The earlier discussion of the problems surrounding (d)describing the
interpretandum in aesthetic, expressive, or metaphorical termsanticipates
some of the problems involved in identifying a true interpretation with
the interpretandums effect. Bringing a distinctive perspective to the interpretandum, each critic experiences it differently and may describe it in
ways that, even if not idiosyncratic, demand interpretation in turn. In
practice, to be sure, a critic is often deemed successful for having the
knack to capture elements of the interpretandum in words or other words
that resonate or suitably provoke those who have also experienced the
interpretandum. But this mark of success introduces a particular problem
besetting the strategy of looking to the interpretandums effect for a true
interpretation. The problem can be expressed in a single question: its
effect on whom? Demographics, it turns out, are not irrelevant to understandability, interpretation, or truth.17 But the determination of whose
aesthetic point of view is relevant accords with the conception of true
interpretation outlined in QR.
221
So, too, the emotional impact of the interpretandum, insofar as it is shared,

conveyable, and even further shaped by an interpretation, can indeed be central to the task that the interpreter sets for herself. But whether consideration
of the emotional expression of a work is central to the overriding interpretation or only subsidiary to that overriding interpretation, it is not sufficient by
itself. In order to capture the expressiveness of a work, an interpretation must
be about the work and not about something else. In other words, it must not
fail to sustain the identity of the interpretandum and it does so by cohering with
other descriptions of it (regardless of whether these are indefeasible or not).
Herein lies the basis for legitimate complaints against the so-called affective
fallacy where the interpretation confines itself to describing the emotional
effect of a work, as though the work (as the cause of that effect), were itself
superfluous (Wimsatt with Beardsley 1954, 21). Yet considerations of truth in
the sense of QR can certainly be applied to these and other effects of a work
(on a possible audience, viewership, readership, etc.).
Concluding Remarks
The aim of the foregoing paper has been to outline a conception of the
relation of truth and interpretation in general and to show that truth, so
conceived (namely, in the form of the coherence of interpretations) serves
a legitimate and, in some respects, even essential function in interpretation. This conception of truth and interpretation does not preclude a
variety of aims of interpretation but suggests how the truth of the interpretation remains significant, regardless of the aim. A further virtue of the
view glossed here is that QR, the qualified reduction of truth to interpretation, is compatible with taking all three factors of interpretation seriously
and, indeed, interactively (Vandevelde 2005, 11f.)
A final qualifying remark concerning the limitations of the analysis
given in this chapter is in order here. The foregoing meditation on the
relation of truth and interpretation has suggested that truth as correspondence must give way to truth as coherence, at the very least in regard to
the interpretation of works. There is, however, a third way of understanding truth, namely, in terms of the historical ground of the ways that the
interpretandum presents itself to and absences itself from the interpreter.
Truth, so construed, is the truth of an interpretation but an interpretation that (a) concretely supposes untruth and errancy and (b) cannot be
reduced to any single one of the factors of interpretation (e.g., author,
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Daniel O. Dahlstrom
work, interpreter) but instead involves them alland more. This way of
understanding truth, inspired by Heidegger, provides a necessary corrective to a potential tendency to collapse meanings and their coherence into
something for which human subjectivity is solely responsible or into some
ahistorical, transcending identity. For if truth is a matter of the coherence
of interpretations, that coherence and the incoherence it supposes are
grounded, not in those interpretations, but in an unfi nished history of
interpretations.
Notes
1
I am grateful to Jeremy Butman and Nolan Little for their critical readings of
early drafts of this paper.
For some examples of the uses indicated, replace the variable x in Joe understands x with the following words: thermostats, traffic signals, French,
planes, chess, dance, earthquakes, his wife.
Something analogous happens when I speak and thus understand a language,
but have not begun to reflect upon the rules according to which I speak that
language and use its terms accordingly. The semiotic component obviously complicates the interpretive structure, such that we take x as y for z, where y is a sign
or word for z.
This claim by no means discounts genuine novelties in need of interpretation.
The notion of novelty, as the notion of being different from anything preceding
it, obviously supposes a foreunderstanding in at least two senses, a foreunderstanding of what precedes it and a foreunderstanding of difference. I am grateful
to Nolan Little for calling my attention to this issue.
Since we do not return to the identical theme from which we began, it may be
useful, adopting a metaphor from Hegel, to refer to this pattern as an interpretive helix. For more on this vital dimension of interpretation, see Dahlstrom
2010.
Whether the meaning of a sentence is equated with the possibility of its truth
(Davidson) or with the empty, signifying thought that awaits identification with a
fulfilling intuition (Husserl), the task of interpretation is frequently construed as
determining meaning not truth. In the main body I have been suggesting that we
find these considerations compelling to the extent that we take our bearings
from the way that ordinary perceptual experiences provide access to the truthmakers, the objects or states of affairs that make certain sentences true. The
access in such cases involves, by some accounts, a component of sensation, some
non-conceptual content that necessarily marks the end of conception and, with
it, interpretation. Even for outright conceptualists, declared enemies of the socalled Myth of the Given like Sellars, Davidson, and MacDowell (at least at
times), the task of interpretation ends where perception begins, even if the content of perception is said to be thoroughly conceptual.

7
10
11
12
13
14
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By overriding meaning or interpretation, I do not mean to suggest something

that necessarily takes the form of a single assertion or, for that matter, the form
of an assertion at all. It also seems to me that we should resist the compositional
view of true interpretations, that is, the view that what is true about an interpretation can be broken down into the truth of single assertions, as though their
conjunction were simply truth-functional, for example, p ^ q. While I am not
confident that I have a good argument for this intuition, my hunch is that just
as a meaning of a poem, a painting, or a novel often resists reduction to a single
assertion, so, too, it resists reduction to a mere string or conjunction of
assertions.
The defense of QR in this chapter is, I suspect, consistent with Pol Vandeveldes
account of the act, as opposed to the event, of interpretation; see Vandevelde
2005, 4: By act, I mean an act of consciousness: someone interpreting a text
makes a statement or an utterance and through his or her act is committed
regarding the truth of what is said, his or her truthfulness, and the rightness or
appropriateness of what is said, so that, if prompted, the interpreter must be
ready to defend the interpretation made regarding these three claims.
Vandevelde 2005, 8f; see, too, Livingston 2005, 136174 and the essays in
Iseminger 1992.
Die Meinung, kein Vorurteil zu haben, ist selbst das grte Vorurteil. See, also
Heidegger 1993 GA 59, 102f, 171, 194. See, too, Paul Feyerabend on interpreting
Galileos findings from his telescope and Bellarmines position in Feyerabend
1993, 87f, 110, and 124134.
For a sampling of the diversity among theories of art, see Parts One and Two of
Dickie et al. 1989; for diverse views on aesthetic concepts and the aesthetic/nonaesthetic distinction, see the articles by Frank Sibley, Ted Cohen, and Kendall
Walton in Dickie et al. 1989, 356414.
Lessing 1972, 10f: Die Bemerkung, welche hier zum Grunde liegt, da der
Schmerz sich in dem Gesichte des Laokoon mit derjenigen Wut nicht zeige,
welche man bei der Heftigkeit desselben vermuten sollte, ist vollkommen
richtig. Auch das ist unstreitig, da eben hierin, wo ein Halbkenner den
Knstler unter der Natur geblieben zu sein, das wahre Pathetische des
Schmerzes nicht erreicht zu haben, urteilen drfte; da, sage ich, eben hierin
die Weisheit desselben ganz besonders hervorleuchtet. See, also: . . . er [der
Knstler] mute Schreien in Seufzen mildern; nicht weil das Schreien eine
unedle Seele verrt, sondern, weil es das Gesicht auf eine ekelhafte Weise
verstellet (1972, 20).
Further complicating matters, of course, is the role that irony may play, in the
object of interpretation as well as in the terms of the interpretation, though this
issue overlaps with 3.3 below.
See Plato, Phaedrus, 275cd, translated by Reginald Hackforth, in Plato 1971, 521:
Anyone who leaves behind him a written manual, and likewise anyone who takes
it over from him, on the supposition that such writing will provide something
reliable and permanent, must be exceedingly simple-minded; he must really be
ignorant of Ammons utterance, if he imagines that written words can do anything more than remind one who knows that which the writing is concerned
224
15
16
17
Daniel O. Dahlstrom
with. See, too, the Seventh Letter, 341b345a, translated by L. A. Post, in Plato
1971, 15881590.
Wimsatt and Beardsley 1954, 431. In order to invoke a version of this strategy,
while recognizing the inaccessibility of the authors intention, some theorists distinguish between actual and hypothetical intentionalism; see Carroll 2000,
7595.
See the essays by Lyas and Robinson in Dickie et al. 1989, 442454 and 455468.
Common sense can obviously be common nonsense and a true interpretation
one that only a few can understand.
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Husserls Husserliana (published by Martinus Nijhoff, Kluwer Academic
Publishers, and Springer):
Hua I: Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vortrge, ed. Stephan Strasser, 1950.
Hua II: Die Idee der Phnomenologie. Fnf Vorlesungen, ed. Walter Biemel, 1950.
Hua III: Ideen zu einer reinen Phnomenologie und phnomenologischen Philosophie. Band
I: Allgemeine Einfhrung in die reine Phnomenologie, ed. Karl Schuhmann, 1976.
Hua IV: Ideen zu einer reinen Phnomenologie und phnomenologischen Philosophie. Band
II: Phnomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution, ed. Walter Biemel, 1952.
Hua VI: Die Krisis der Europischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale
Phnomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phnomenologische Philosophie, ed. Walter
Biemel, 1954.
Hua IX, Phnomenologische Psychologie. Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1925, ed. Walter
Biemel, 1968.
Hua X: Zur Phnomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (18931917), ed. Rudolf
Boehm, 1966.
Hua XIV: Zur Phnomenologie der Intersubjektivitt. Zweiter Teil: 19211928, ed. Iso
Kern., 1973.
Hua XV: Zur Phnomenologie der Intersubjektivitt, Dritter Teil: 19291935, ed. Iso
Kern, 1973.
Hua XVII: Formale und transzendentale Logik. Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft,
ed. Paul Janssen, 1974.
Hua XVIII: Logische Untersuchungen I, Prolegomena zur reinen Logik, ed. Elmar
Holenstein, 1975.
Hua XIX/1: Logische Untersuchungen. Erster Band: Untersuchungen zur Phnomenologie
und Theorie der Erkenntnis. Erster Teil, ed. Ursula Panzer, 1984.
Hua XIX/2: Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Band: Untersuchungen zur
Phnomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis, Zweiter Teil, ed. Ursula Panzer, 1984.
Hua XX/I: Logische Untersuchungen, Ergnzungsband, Erster Teil, ed. Ullrich Melle,
2002.
Hua XXII: Aufstze und Rezensionen (18901910), ed. B. Rang, 1979.
Hua XXIII: Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung (18951925), ed. Eduard Marbach,
1981.
Hua XXIV: Einleitung in die Logik und Erkenntnistheorie. Vorlesungen 1906/07, ed.
Ullrich Melle, 1984.
226
Bibliography
Hua XXV: Aufstze und Vortrge (19111921), ed. Thomas Nenon and Hans Rainer
Sepp, 1986.
Hua XXX: Logik und allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie. Vorlesungen 1917/18 mit
ergnzenden Texten aus der ersten Fassung von 1910/11, ed. Ursula Panzer, 1996.
Heideggers Gesamtausgabe (published by Vottorio Klostermann,

Frankfurt am Main):
GA 17: Einfhrung in die phnomenologische Forschung (Marburger Vorlesung
Wintersemester 1923/24), ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, 1994.
GA 19: Platon: Sophistes (Marburger Vorlesung Wintersemester 1924/25), ed.
Ingeborg Schler, 1992.
GA 21: Logik. Die Frage nach der Wahrheit (Marburger Vorlesung Wintersemester
1925/26), ed. Walter Biemel, 1976.
GA 24: Die Grundprobleme der Phnomenologie (Marburger Vorlesung Sommersemester
1927), ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, 1989 [1975].
GA 26: Metaphysische Anfangsgrnde der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz (Marburger
Vorlesung Sommersemester 1928), ed. Klaus Held, 1990 [1978].
GA 27: Einleitung in die Philosophie (Freiburger Vorlesung Wintersemester
1928/1929), ed. Otto Saame und Ina Saame-Speidel, 1976.
GA 29/30: Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: WeltEndlichkeitEinsamkeit (Freiburger
Vorlesung Wintersemester 1929/1930), ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann.
1992 [1983].
GA 34: Vom Wesen der Wahrheit. Zu Platons Hhlengleichnis und Thetet, ed. Hermann
Mrchen, 1988.
GA 45: Grundfragen der Philosophie. Ausgewhlte Probleme der Logik, ed. FriedrichWilhelm von Herrmann, 1984.
GA 52: Hlderlins Hymne Andenken (Freiburger Vorlesung 1941/1942), ed. Curd
Ochwadt. 1982.
GA 53: Hlderlins Hymne Der Ister (Freiburger Vorlesung Sommersemester 1942),
ed. Walter Biemel, 1984.
GA 56/57: Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie 1. Die Idee der Philosophie und das
Weltanschauungsproblem (Kriegsnotsemester 1919); 2. Phnomenologie und transzendentale Wertphilosophie (Sommersemester 1919); 3. Anhang: ber das Wesen
der Universitt und des akademischen Studiums (Sommersemester 1919), ed. Bernd
Heimbchel, 1987.
GA 58: Grundprobleme der Phnomenologie (Wintersemester 1919/20), ed. HansHelmuth Gander, 1992.
GA 59: Phnomenologie der Anschauung und des Ausdrucks; Theorie der philosophishcen
Begriffsbildung (Sommersemester 1920), ed. Claudius Strube, 1993.
GA 65: Beitrge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (19361938), ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, 1989.
GA 75: Andenken und Mnemosyne, in Zu HlderlinGriechenlandreisen, ed.
Curd Ochwadt, 2000.
GA 85: Vom Wesen der Sprache: die Metaphysik der Sprache und die Wesung des Wortes. Zu
Herders Abhandlung ber den Ursprung der Sprache. Oberseminar Sommersemester
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Index
a priori 27, 68, 72, 86, 193

abandonment of being 13, 112,
119, 123
absolute (the) 21, 64, 74, 75, 1458,
160, 183
absolute knowing 147, 153,
1579
absolute standpoint 145
abstract negation 1523, 155
adequacy (adequate evidence) 104,
145, 172, 174, 197, 204
analytic 30, 346, 83, 90, 97, 142, 162,
201, 205
another beginning 1213, 1516,
10910
antinomies 389, 1534, 156
Apel, Karl-Otto 205
apodicticity, apodictic (apodictic
evidence) 32, 167, 172, 176
appearance 489, 523, 79, 118, 1223,
139, 148, 1567, 205
apperception 48, 169, 176
application 11, 33, 37, 39, 44, 49, 61,
137, 218
apprehension 478, 512, 59, 62, 667,
71, 7475, 79, 84, 111
Aristotle 79, 81, 94, 1023, 111, 1312,
149, 185, 187
Ausschaltung 5960
being, history of 1314, 109
being, meaning of 803, 86, 89, 923
belief 20, 51, 567, 59, 62, 74, 163, 175,
21314
Berkeley, George 66
Boethius 149
Brandom, Robert 158
Bubner, Rdiger 203

Carnap, Rudolf 267, 378, 181
Cohen, Hermann 1812, 185
coherence 37, 143, 203, 214, 219,
2212
coherence theory of truth 3
compatibility 30, 34, 36
concept 111, 145, 14950, 155,
1578, 207
concept of science 80
consciousness 413, 16, 1821,
4156 passim, 667, 701, 73, 75,
82, 111, 129, 139, 142, 146, 149,
150, 152, 15760, 16772, 184, 186,
190, 1946, 203, 223
modified consciousness 54
sign consciousness 44
consequence-logic 2540 passim
constitution 58, 47, 58, 602,
745, 105, 151, 16970, 172,
181, 214
construction 26, 28, 1634, 179, 186,
188, 192, 197
copula 147
modular copula 147
cores 2830, 32, 349
Corlett, J. Angelo 1635
correspondence 95, 143, 194, 2046,
21314, 21819, 221
correspondence theory of truth 3
decidability 35, 36, 39
deconstruction 6, 28, 160, 1967
Derrida, Jacques 4, 160, 2067
Descartes, Ren 129, 133, 142, 157,
160, 161, 167, 192
Index
destruction 179, 182, 1967,
2012, 206
determinate negation 14950, 1523,
155, 157, 15960
dialectics 734
Dichtung 123
distinctness 30
Dostal, Robert 203
eidetic, eidetics 6, 313, 61, 669, 72,
7980, 823, 157, 192
empathy 67, 102, 170, 1734
empirical 67, 13, 25, 28, 30, 334,
37, 39, 648, 72, 145, 1567, 167,
1923, 206
epoch 57, 59, 634, 6870, 167
Eros (Diotima) 155
essence 89, 13, 17, 20, 32, 37, 48, 59,
64, 668, 70, 72, 110, 114, 118, 121,
1389, 157, 192, 201
evidence, evident 37, 20, 25, 2930,
335, 38, 61, 72, 131, 165, 1678,
171, 174, 181, 192, 197, 205
adequate evidence 104, 145, 172,
174, 204
apodictic evidence 32, 167, 172, 176
excluded middle 345, 40
existential 12, 69, 80, 8393, 967,
99100, 105, 206
extension 312, 712, 152
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 9, 157
figment 10, 42, 52
finitude 96, 102, 148, 155
foreunderstanding 210, 212, 21718
formal logic 36, 139
formalism 150
formalization 25, 33, 85
forms 259, 39, 150
syntactical 268
theory of 259, 38
found, founded, founding 26, 33, 39,
478, 99100, 139, 157, 181, 204
foundation 26, 33, 39, 52, 601, 63, 65,
68, 74, 122, 130, 161, 180, 189,
193, 217
235
foundationalist theory of truth 3

ontological foundation 39
freedom 36, 96, 107, 11617, 11920,
2057
Frege, Gottlob 5, 146, 147, 149
fundamental ontology 801, 923,
99100, 107
Gadamer, Hans-Georg 4, 2023,
207, 211
grammar of logic 27
grounding 107, 1212, 168, 188, 217
harmony 12944 passim, 1723
intersubjective 170, 1745
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 129,
133, 1401, 14560
Heidegger, Martin 3, 4, 910, 1218,
20, 7992, 94107, 10925, 129,
139, 145, 155, 17987, 192, 194,
1968, 2017, 217, 222
hermeneutic, hermeneutics 3, 4, 20,
814, 87, 93, 94, 2027
hermeneutical circle 62, 90, 211
history of being 1314, 109
Hlderlin, Friedrich 12, 15, 16,
113, 125
horizon 18, 80, 83, 84, 93, 101, 140,
170, 174, 196, 197, 205
external horizon 18, 16970
internal horizon 171
intersubjective horizon 174
Husserl, Edmund 39, 10, 16, 18,
20, 2538, 4156, 5775, 7985,
94, 979, 102, 111, 129, 1334,
142, 157, 160, 1612, 16775,
17981, 183, 18798, 202, 2034,
212, 217
ideal object 313, 37, 69
ideation, ideality 7, 67, 170
image, images 4156
image consciousness 418, 50, 55
image object 423, 4951, 53
image subject 42
image theory 41, 436, 4854, 56
236
physical image 42, 48
individuals 6, 25, 29, 165, 168
infinite judgment 31, 14551, 15360
infinitude 148, 155
intension 31
intentional object 456, 602,
16875
intentional psychology 65, 74
intentionality 535, 61
interpretation 3, 4, 9, 1516, 45,
4851, 58, 60, 73, 80, 83, 8592,
1023, 105, 11011, 118, 130, 132,
136, 1478, 155, 165, 2014, 206,
20922
external interpretation 211
internal interpretation 211
intersubjectivity 68, 10, 35, 51, 978,
102, 129, 162, 165, 1704
intersubjective horizon 174
intuition 312, 58, 67, 85, 111, 157,
176, 180, 192, 197, 204, 208
judgment 5, 26, 29, 32, 346, 1025,
107, 14554, 156, 1589, 167, 197
affirmative judgment 153
categorical judgment 146
infinite judgment 31, 14551,
15360
negative judgment 157
qualitative judgment 145
universal judgments 32
Kant, Immanuel 111, 139, 148, 150,
1537, 167, 184, 193, 213
Lambert, Johann Heinrich 1567
life-world 162, 16870, 174
logical form 1478, 150, 153
Longino, Helen E. 16275
Marx, Karl 147, 148
material, materially, materialities 12,
33, 357, 42, 75, 118, 150, 169
meaning 5, 7, 10, 16, 18, 2631, 63,
6971, 734, 7983, 8593, 108,
113, 118, 140, 16870, 172, 1746,
191, 1967, 20910, 212, 21419,
Index
220, 222
meaning of being 803, 86, 89, 923
memory 434, 489, 512, 546, 171
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 4, 910, 1621,
12943
misunderstanding 125, 210, 212,
217, 219
modified consciousness 54
motivation 735, 112, 210
Nancy, Jean-Luc 207
Natorp, Paul 17981, 183200
natural attitude or standpoint 579,
618, 715, 107
necessity 11, 16, 32, 63, 65, 67, 69, 125,
143, 208
negation 26, 34, 104, 108, 136, 140,
144, 14850, 1523, 155, 157
abstract negation 1523, 155
determinate negation 14950,
1523, 155, 157, 15960
natural negation 1523, 159
negative judgment 157
noema, noematic 75, 1715
full noema (noematic complex or
system) 171
noesis, noetic 5960, 745, 85
nomological 31
non-contradiction 26, 2930, 346,
139, 142
Novalis 4, 911, 14
object 321, 35, 37, 42, 4357, 5963,
66, 6970, 72, 75, 81, 83, 91, 95,
129, 134, 142, 145, 153, 155,
15760, 165, 167, 16975, 184,
1867, 189, 1923, 199200,
20910, 21416, 219
ideal object 313, 37, 69
image object 423, 4951, 53
intentional object 456, 602,
16875
object-spheres 25
ontology, ontological 45, 9, 1114, 16,
20, 29, 37, 39, 58, 615, 679, 713,
7985, 8890, 925, 99101, 1045,
108, 110, 11214, 120, 123, 1301,
Index
137, 140, 143, 146, 148, 194, 2024,
2067
fundamental ontology 801, 923,
99100, 107
ontological foundation 39
universal ontology 801, 83
painting 42, 43, 47, 523, 56, 138, 144,
210, 21517
pairing 1734
Pareyson, Luigi 202
perception 10, 13, 17, 19, 21, 29,
428, 523, 556, 5860, 71, 79,
85, 99, 103, 139, 142, 16474, 206,
21314
phantasy 42, 434, 4756
phenomenological attitude 4, 578,
613, 73
phenomenological reduction 57, 60,
62, 636, 6773, 95, 173, 194
physical image 42, 48
Plato, Platonic 21, 79, 81, 97, 1034,
10910, 11623, 1256, 129, 132,
161, 181, 193
prejudice of presence 49, 523
pre-predicative 29, 34, 37, 39, 87, 946,
100, 1023
evidence 34
experience 39
openness 96, 100
seeing 87
syntax 39
truth 945, 1023
understanding 103
presentation 42, 45, 48, 54, 191, 194
presenting consciousness 42
preservation, 11516, 1223
principles of logic 26, 34, 367, 39
proposition, propositional 5, 25, 278,
301, 348, 40, 69, 946, 1024,
107, 139, 1457, 149, 1513, 1556,
158, 160, 182, 204
qualitative judgment 145
reality 4, 10, 41, 50, 579, 61, 646, 70,
74, 111, 118, 123, 129, 152, 194
237
reason, reasoning 33, 1489, 1536,

15860, 1646, 168, 195, 207
reconstruction 168, 189, 1912, 1947
reducibility 25, 29, 313, 39, 214
reduction 25, 26, 2934, 39, 53, 57,
5970, 724, 167, 173, 179, 194,
21213, 221
phenomenological reduction 57, 60,
62, 636, 6773, 95, 173, 194
to sphere of ownness 173
transcendental reduction 57, 59,
624, 6874
reductive 256, 289, 5960, 65, 69,
712, 74, 194, 21314
Reeder, Harry P. 176
reflection 13, 38, 50, 53, 5960, 63,
667, 713, 84, 91, 978, 145, 156,
189, 191, 196, 216
remains, remnants 202, 2067
re-presentation 42, 4851, 55
re-presenting consciousness 42
reproduction 48, 54
resistance 2012, 2068
re-understanding 21112, 21718
Rickert, Heinrich 17981, 1834
Ricoeur, Paul 202, 207
Risser, James 203
romanticism 4, 910, 20
Rorty, Richard 202
Russell, Bertrand 36, 38, 40, 145
Schelling, Friedrich 129
Schlegel, Friedrich 4, 9, 1113, 21
Schmitt, Frederick F. 1623
Schrmann, Reiner 203, 207
seeing 7, 1718, 79, 845, 88, 902,
134, 192
pre-predicative 87
seeing-in 43, 50, 134
self-interpretation 203, 21112
self-understanding 212
sign consciousness 44
significance 38, 47, 185, 1978
skepticism 63, 74, 143, 153, 159
social epistemology 1613, 16775
sphere of ownness 1734
Spinoza, Benedict De 136, 1478, 160
238
Index
spirit 10, 13, 16, 978, 137, 151,

153, 15860
stuff 278, 30, 367, 39
subject 6, 810, 1213, 1719, 27, 42,
43, 46, 4851, 53, 623, 656, 97,
99, 102, 11112, 129, 132, 134, 140,
1448, 1503, 155, 15761, 167,
16974, 196, 204, 21315, 218
logical subject 147
thinking subject 148, 155, 158
subjectivity 68, 61, 66, 6975, 129,
1434, 148, 160, 186, 18890, 200,
214,
absolute 61, 64, 120, 125n. 2
transcendental 6, 66, 6975
substance 19, 102, 132, 1468, 157
substitutability 36
syllogism 1512
syntactical forms 268
testability 25, 33
totality 13, 26, 312, 36, 97, 99100,
103, 1057, 1356, 140, 1478,
1524, 203
transcendence, transcendental 67, 10,
38, 5775, 91, 95, 100, 105, 111,
137, 144, 153, 167, 172
transcendental attitude 57, 64, 68,
745, 92
transcendental constitution 58,
602, 74
transcendental idealism 57, 602,
657, 75, 129
transcendental logic 139, 153
transcendental phenomenology 7,
57, 679, 734
transcendental problem 6974
transcendental reduction 57, 59,
624, 6874
transcendental subjectivity 6, 66, 69,

735
truth 37, 1213, 20, 256, 302, 346,
3940, 58, 74, 80, 948, 1008,
113, 11518, 1224, 12930, 137,
13943, 14552, 1558, 160, 163,
194, 2017, 209, 21222
truth-logic 345
Tugendhat, Ernst 104, 2035
berwindung 206
understanding 4, 610, 12, 14, 434,
478, 52, 556, 602, 80, 823,
8592, 94, 1004, 111, 114, 117,
137, 145, 1536, 159, 164, 197,
2034, 20912, 216, 2212
foreunderstanding 210, 212, 21718
misunderstanding 125, 210, 212,
217, 219
re-understanding 21112, 21718
self-understanding 212
understanding and interpretation, 209
universal, universality 32, 68, 712,
138, 1457
universal judgments 32
universal ontology 801, 83
validity, valid, 6, 20, 301, 337, 39, 47,
58, 63, 69, 712, 134, 149, 1678,
1703
Vandevelde, Pol 221, 223
Vattimo, Gianni 202
Verwindung 206
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 147
Zermelo, Ernst 38
iek, Slavoj 149

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Variations on Truth

Issues in Phenomenology and Hermeneutics

Pol Vandevelde and Kevin Hermberg

Continuum International Publishing Group

Library of Congress Catalog ing-in-Publication Data

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India

Chapter 1: The Phenomenological Correlation between

Husserlian Resources: Reduction, Imagination,

Chapter 2: Does Husserl Have a Principle of Reducibility?

Chapter 3: The Seduction of Images: A Look at the

Chapter 4: From Natural Attitude to Transcendental Idealism:

Heideggerean Variations: Daseins Opening,

Chapter 5: Heideggers Hermeneutical Critique of

Chapter 6: Transformations in Heideggers Conception of

Chapter 7: Heideggers Fluid Ontology in the 1930s:

Toward a Broadened Ontology and Epistemology:

Chapter 8: Harmony in Opposition: On Merleau-Pontys

Chapter 9: The Role of Infinite Judgment in

Chapter 10: Husserls (even more) Social Epistemology

The Avatars of Truth: Deconstruction,

Chapter 11: Reduction, Construction, Destruction of a Three-Way

Chapter 12: Truths Absence: The Hermeneutic Resistance to

Chapter 13: Truth and Interpretation

Shazad Akhtar is a doctor of philosophy. He is the author of Between

and Heidegger, and edited several collected volumes, including Interpreting

Pol Vandevelde is Professor of Philosophy at Marquette University. He

The fi fth section is about The Avatars of Truth: Deconstruction,

The Phenomenological Correlation

Phenomenology in this sense lent itself to a critique that subsequently led to

Correlation Between Consciousness and Object

upon ontological territories. One can do justice to the complex nature of

The Epistemological Emphasis in the

were reinforced by Husserls idealistic turn. Although the correlation was

Correlation Between Consciousness and Object

of the object correlated to such an intersubjective consciousness. If the

Correlation Between Consciousness and Object

indeterminacy of the unfolding of the object is understood as having a

The Ontological Emphasis in

transducere, the French traduction or the German bersetzung) what is called

Correlation Between Consciousness and Object

Schlegel sees in the figure of translation what articulates the correlation

original and the translated work. If a thing (through knowledge), an event

Correlation Between Consciousness and Object

a force in the worldobjective. On the subjective side, love reveals, as if

that is dominated by machination, the manifestation of which is what

Correlation Between Consciousness and Object

same language. The interpretation of Holderlins hymns is a translating

Merleau-Pontys Translation of the World

Correlation Between Consciousness and Object

Correlation Between Consciousness and Object

Correlation Between Consciousness and Object

Husserl himself encouraged the idealistic unilateralism when referring to the

Does Husserl Have a Principle of

The Method of Reduction within

Does Husserl Have a Principle of Reducibility?

That leads us to the following conclusion: by the analysis of elementary

Does Husserl Have a Principle of Reducibility?

However, this reduction is not the ultimate one. It is also possible to go

The Method of Reduction in the Consequence-Logic

distinctness (Deutlichkeit) of the propositions. Distinctness means, first,

Does Husserl Have a Principle of Reducibility?

On the contrary, at the level of Geltung the criterion of identity of two

Does Husserl Have a Principle of Reducibility?

What is the sense of this process of reduction? It means a principle of