ABSTRACT

TITLE: Groundwork to a Phenomenological Ethics in Edmund Husserl and Duns Scotus

BY: William E. Tullius

This dissertation seeks to provide a systematic elucidation of the ethical writings

of Edmund Husserl with the aim of developing the groundwork to a phenomenological

approach to the problems of ethics. My contention is that Edmund Husserls largely

fragmentary ethical considerations, which focus on the themes of renewal, value,

vocation, faith, salvation, and the absolute ought, represent a robust, if still incomplete,

ethical vision from which contemporary philosophy can learn a great deal. I attempt to

supplement Husserls ethical theories with those of the medieval philosopher John Duns

Scotus, whose ethics, I argue already make use of a phenomenological method of their

own. Using important insights from Scotus, particularly the Scotist notion of the affectio

commodi and affectio justitiae as well as his notion of haecceitas, and working with the

body of Husserlian thought, I attempt to provide a robust ethical picture which can take

account of the sources of ethical motivation in value, the normative and essential

relations of value, the ethical importance of individuality in the form of personal

vocation, and finally the relationship of ethical normativity to the essentially religious

moments of human existence.

 Groundwork to a Phenomenological Ethics in Edmund Husserl and Duns
Scotus

by

William E. Tullius

September 2011

Submitted to the New School for Social Research of the New School in partial
fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Dissertation Committee:
Dr. James Dodd
Dr. Giorgio Pini
Dr. Zed Adams
 UMI Number: 3495842

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 2011 William E. Tullius
 For

my parents,

who never doubted me,

For

Brian,

who gave me my first education in philosophy,

and most especially

For

Loretta,

without whose love, patience, and support I would not be where I am.
 v

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
1. Crisis and Renewal
On the Need for a Comprehensive Phenomenological Theory of Ethics 1

Prolegomena 13
I. The Development of Husserls Ethics and its Foundational Problems 13
2. Introduction to Husserlian Ethics 13
a. Historical Development and Influences 13
i. The Early Ethics and Brentano: 1884-1914 14
ii. Renewal and the Post-War Years, 1917-1924 40
b. The Challenges of Approaching Husserls Ethics 49

II. Scotus and Husserl 67

3. Scotus and Husserl 67
4. Medieval Philosophy and Phenomenology 70

Part I Husserl, Ethics, and Phenomenology 99

III. Husserls Moral Vision and the History of Ethics 99
5. The Crisis of the Sciences and the Crisis of Culture 99
a. The Question of the Meaning of Man at Risk 99
b. The Loss of Meaning as an Ethical Crisis 102
i. Theoretical and Practical Autonomy The Task of a New Ethics of
Renewal 104
6. The History of Ethics 110
a. The Tension Between Verstandes- and Gefhlsmoral in the History of
Ethics 110
i. Socrates and the Inauguration of a Scientific Ethics 114
ii. Hedonistic Ethics 118
a. Ancient Hedonism 118
b. Hobbes Egoism 123
c. Egoism as Hedonism and Hedonism as Ethical Skepticism 126
iii. Empirical Moral Philosophy in Hume 132
iv. The Ethics of Pure Reason 138
a. Husserls Critique of Kant 139
b. Husserl and the Middle Ground 163
c. Scotist Ethics and their Promise for Phenomenology 167

IV. Ethics and the Phenomenological Method 172

7. The Importance of the Question of Method 172
8. Transcendental Phenomenology 173
a. Transcendental vs. Mundane Subjectivity 179
9. The Problem of a Phenomenological Ethics 190
a. The Personalistic and Axiological Standpoints 193
 vi

i. The Personal I as the Subject of Ethics 194

ii. The Task of Moral Formation 196
b. Ethics as Universal Kunstlehre 197
c. Ethics and Pure Phenomenology: The Phenomenological Character of
Husserls Ethics 205

Part II Husserlian Value Theory 216

V. Value-ception in Husserl and Scotus 216
10. Husserls Theory of Value 216
a. Values as the Correlates of Specific Acts of Feeling 218
b. The Essential Connection Between Values and Value-Bearers 225
11. Scotus and the Noetic Character of the Will 228
a. The Noesis of the Will as Affection (Affectio) 229
i. Affectio Commodi 231
ii. Affectio Justitiae 238
iii. The Multivalence of Values in the Two Affections 243
b. Static and Genetic Phenomenology of the Will in Scotus Affectiones 248

VI. The Ontology of Values and the Values of Ethics 255

12. The Problem of Value-Skepticism 255
a. The Life-world of Humanity as a World of Real Values 260
i. The Question of Axiology 274
a. The Fundamental Difference between Axiological Value and Ethical
Value 276
13. Scotus and the Distinction between Transcendental and Moral Goods 278
a. The Order of Transcendental Being 280
i. Essential Order and the Hierarchy of Essential Goods (Axiology) 286
b. The Order of Moral Goods (Ethics) 291
i. The Values of Virtue 298
a. The Formation of the Moral Subject 300
b. The Summum Bonum 301
ii. The Ideal/Personal Character of Ethical Value 301
iii. The Ethical Attitude Cannot be Approached through Ontology 303

Part III Vocation, the Ethical Attitude, and Religion 304

VII. Phenomenology of the Ethical Subject in Husserl and Scotus 304
14. Natur and Geist 305
a. The I-can of the Person 306
i. Freedom and Necessity in the Human Being 307
ii. Will as the locus of Freedom and Reason 310
b. Ethical Motivation 311
i. Rational vs. Irrational Motivation 313
a. Affectio Commodi and Affectio Justitiae 316
15. The Scotistic Phenomenological Analysis of the Ethical Act 319
 vii

a. The Structure of Acting and the Task of Right Reason 321

i. The Act Directed to an Appropriate Object The Generic Goodness
of the Act 323
ii. The Specification of Moral Goodness in Acts 326
a. Appropriateness of the End 326
b. Appropriateness of the Manner of the Action 327
c. Appropriateness of the Time and Place 328
iii. Moral Goodness as a Relation of Proportionality in Acts 329
16. Finding Appropriate Ends Vocation, Values, and Love 334
a. The Analogy of Vocation: Professional Vocation as Regulating a
Particular Lebensform 335
b. Inadequacy of Vocation for the Absoluteness of the Ethical Task 337
i. Two Senses of Vocation: Profession and Universal Calling 338
a. The Call of the True-Self 346
b. Haecceitas and the Horizon of the Universal Moral Call 348

VIII. Love, Faith, and Salvation The Ends of Ethics 365

17. Love as the Basis of Ethical Normativity 365
a. God as the Only Appropriate Object of an All-encompassing Act of Love 368
i. Scotus and the Natural Law 378
a. First Practical Principles of the Moral Law 383
b. Derivative Ethical Principles 387
b. God and the Being-Called of Universal Vocation 395
c. Faith and Love as the Consummation of All Ethical Philosophy 406
i. Excursus: the Problems of Moral Perfectionism and Fanaticism 410

IX. Concluding Meditations The Need for a Complete Ethical Theory 420
18. The Incompleteness of Ethical Philosophy 420
19. On the Relationship between Ethics and Religion 422
20. Ethics and Religious Theology 426

Bibliography 434
 1

Introduction

1. Crisis and Renewal On the Need for a Comprehensive Phenomenological

Theory of Ethics

Phenomenology, as it has developed over the course of the past century, has

shown itself to be a major force in the landscape of contemporary philosophy.

Phenomenological descriptive theories on any number of topics, ranging from ontology

to epistemology, from aesthetics to psychology, and from theories of literature to theories

of science, have been developed over the course of its history, beginning with Edmund

Husserl and continuing on into our own time. While this list is by no means exhaustive

of the whole range of phenomenological studies which have been performed up until

now, it is nevertheless the case that phenomenology in its major strains and public

debates has consistently ignored the question of ethics, at least so far as providing a

comprehensive phenomenological theory of moral action, of the region and source of

ethical imperatives, and of the ultimate goal of the moral life are concerned.

Nevertheless, I must qualify this initial statement to a certain extent on two counts. In the

first place, I say that phenomenology in its major strains has consistently ignored the task

of developing a phenomenological ethics, meaning by this the strains of phenomenology

that have taken the names of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty as their major

points of departure. Phenomenological ethics have, with a high level of sophistication,

been developed at least in the thought of two very important thinkers, namely in that of

Emmanuel Lvinas and of Max Scheler, although in spite of their value, one still so often

hears repeated statements of the sort found in Alistair MacIntyres now classic work After

Virtue, that phenomenology and existentialism, being restricted to the study of the
 2

various relations of intentionality, are at a loss for uncovering the originary sense of the

moral life, namely virtue.1 Secondly, I further say that such a task has been ignored in

public debate precisely because the traditions of commentary on these key figures has,

with a few notable exceptions, remained silent on the question of ethics in the thought of

a Husserl, a Heidegger, or a Merleau-Ponty. Yet, this does not mean that these figures

themselves never wrote on the problem of ethics. Quite to the contrary, we have, in the

case of Husserl, several rather far-reaching sources of writings on ethics, most notably

coming in the form of lecture notes which until recently had remained unpublished and in

journal articles which, while sufficiently mined for insights into Husserls overall

philosophical project, have attained only small interest in terms of their ethical

orientation. Additionally, Husserls massive collection of fragmentary reflections which

make up the Husserl Archives are peppered here and there with writings on the problems

of ethics and the ethical life, yet these also have not yet gained the attention that they

deserve.

That being the case, it is enough to say that scholarship on Husserls ethical

theories, until very recently, has represented a consistent lacuna in the overall appraisal of

Husserls philosophical project which sought to make of phenomenology an all-

encompassing philosophical enterprise bringing philosophy, back to the things

themselves. However, so long as a comprehensive theory of the ethical life remains

elusive to the phenomenological project, a decisive and, in fact, devastating blow is done

to the overall sense of relevance with which phenomenology sought to represent itself to

1
Alistair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press,
1984), 2ff.
 3

the philosophical world in the early years of the twentieth century, in particular given the

almost ever-present series of crisesall political, social, and ethical in naturewhich

characterized the backdrop of phenomenologys infancy. No more can this feeling of

crisis and its attendant call for an answer, for the positive ethical, spiritual, social,

political, and religious renewal of the individual and of the community, be felt than in the

opening lines of Husserls first of three articles submitted to the Japanese journal, Kaizo,

in which he states that, [r]enewal is the universal call in our present day, so full of

suffering, and in the whole sphere of European culture.2

This sentiment, which appeared in 1923 in the aftermath of the First World War,

the unrest of the early, ineffectual Weimar Republic, and in the year of Adolf Hitlers

first armed uprising in Bavaria, is only repeated when, ten years later in the Crisis of

European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Husserl writes that there is a,

general lament about the crisis of our culture,3 and that at stake in this crisis is the

inability to answer, questions of the meaning or meaninglessness of the whole of this

human existence.4 It is clear that Husserls phenomenology was deeply concerned with

the state of culture and that, in answering the crisis, it was to provide, in a certain sense, a

positive spiritual, ethical, political, and religious renewal of culture in order to evade the

2
Edmund Husserl, Gesammelte Werke Husserliana, Band XXVII: Aufstze und Vortrge
(1922-1937), ed. Thomas Nenon and Hans Rainer Sepp (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic
Publishers, 1989), 3: Erneuerung ist der allgemine Ruf in unserer leidensvollen
Gegenwart und ist es im Gesamtbereich der europischen Kultur. (All translations are
my own unless otherwise noted.)
3
Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology,
trans. and ed. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 5.
4
Ibid., 6.
 4

dangers of the looming crises of Western humanityand in our current era of

globalization, of the whole of humanity itself. In our own day, it would seem that we are

still faced with the same crisescrises of the meaning or meaninglessness of existence,

aimlessness in ethical life, and ever-present ethical challenges which seem continually to

haunt our individual and civil livesand in dealing with these crises, it might be well to

turn to Husserls phenomenology for guidance. However, as has been said, the question

of ethics in Husserls writings has remained more or less consistently ignored until very

recently. As such, what might be the most decisive and urgent aspect of the crisis of

culture as Husserl sought to address it has been passed over in the literature, and thus the

very relevance of phenomenology for our present-day philosophical needs is in question.

It is with these motives in mind that I embark upon this present study which seeks

to open up Husserlian scholarship to what have, by and large, been previously untouched

fields of investigation in Husserls work. Many studies have been performed which take

as their task the extrapolation of an ethical theory from the body of Husserls general

works on the phenomenological method, perhaps most notably a recent work by Joaquim

Siles I. Borras entitled Ethics of Husserls Phenomenology, which is just such an

investigation. Nevertheless, it is only recently that scholars have begun to look at what

are Edmund Husserls explicitly ethical writings, in particular after the publication in

2004 of Husserls major lecture course on ethics given in the summers of 1920 and 1924,

entitled Einleitung in die Ethik. This introductory course, along with Husserls Kaizo

articles and a few other minor works represent the core of Husserls ethical theories of

the 1920s, and it is to these works that this study will turn in seeking to discern in
 5

Husserls ideas the framework for a complete ethical theory that will be capable of

providing just that sort of renewal which Husserl saw as the universal and compulsory

call of our crisis-riddled epoch. In so doing, I hope to make a variety of

contributionsfirst to Husserlian scholarship in attempting to provide, for the first time,

a comprehensive study dedicated to the unraveling of Husserls ethical writings;

secondly, to the discipline of ethics in general by offering for universal consideration a

robust system of ethics capable of overcoming what seems to be a consistent divide

between a Kantian-style deontology and the tradition of Aristotelian virtue ethics, and

finally to the crisis of culture itself which has been and remains in dire need of ethical

direction and renewal.

With respect to deontology and Aristotelian virtue ethics, it has often been the

case that moral philosophers have seen these two traditions as completely antithetical to

one another. For the deontologist, Aristotle represents a kind of pure eudaimonism, in the

pejorative sense of the term as an extreme form of self-love which shirks the very

foundational sense of morality as adherence to the duty for the law beyond and without

consideration to any empirical conditions like individual happiness or desire. For the

Aristotelian, deontology misses the essential point that morality is often situational, i.e. it

requires prudential judgment and the recognition of the right proportional action

appropriate to the here-and-now and ones own individual situation. Kant further misses

the importance of happiness and salvation (for the Christian Aristotelian) as providing the

context within which even the striving of duty towards adherence to the moral law

handed down through right reason is given sense and has meaning for morality.
 6

Husserls phenomenological ethics can be viewed as an attempt to overcome this and

other dichotomies in the history of ethics, to the extent that he falls back upon the pure

descriptive and genetic evidence of pure phenomenology in setting the stage for ethical

reflection.

According to Husserl, our concepts are, marked with dark horizons, with

intricate and hidden implications whose clarification completely exceeds the powers of

untrained thinking.5 Phenomenology qua phenomenology, for Husserl, by uncovering

the primal sources and importance of value, the personal ego as constituted within a

moral horizon and as having a fundamental teleology which obliges the individual person

towards the pursuit and the realization of the highest values, is in its scientific method

capable of providing the clarification of the horizons within which our moral concepts

have taken shape and which are still subject to confusion in ordinary thinking. By

uncovering the primal sources of insight into moral obligation, Husserl will be able to

bridge the gap between deontology and virtue ethics, between empiricism and rationalism

in ethics, between science and religious faith, etc. in showing the fundamental ways in

which duty, happiness, salvation, value, person, etc. all form necessary and constitutive

elements of the moral fabric of the world and of personal existence, which bestow upon

humanity a universal task for the realization of its meaning and its highest value. If

phenomenology is capable of doing this, then it will also be clear how it would be

capable of carrying out a renewal of culture of the sort which would allow us to

5
HUA XXVII: mit dunklen Horizonten behaftet wren, mit verwickelten und
verdeckten Mittelbarkeiten, deren klrende Auseinanderlegung die Krfte des
ungeschulten Denkens vllig bersteigt.
 7

overcome the crises of our moral, social, religious, political, and economic lives and

bring greater direction to society as a whole. Precisely the ways in which

phenomenology can do this can only be addressed in light of the general themes which a

study of Husserlian ethical thought is invited to pursue.

Briefly put, Husserl, following in the tradition of Brentano and of the early

phenomenological school, attempts to develop a personalistic ethical thought beginning

with a general theory of value as the correlate of subjective acts of feeling or love. It is

such acts which provide the possibility of recognizing various ranges of possible values

which are felt, in relation to the uniqueness of ones personal vocation, as involving the

person in a normative obligation to the realization of a particular set of values according

to what Husserl refers to as an absolute ought. The normativity of this absolute ought

as a principle of moral self-regulation according to the demands of reason which, in light

of the authentic freedom and pure active motivation of the person towards the realization

of true values, represents the highest demands of the moral life and is ultimately

grounded in its normativity solely by way of an active love for the values which are felt

and loved as absolutely the highest. The realization of the absolute ought in ones own

life will be determined in a completely unique way according to my unique self-value. I

am not determined to a formal, universalized moral law, as in Kant, but rather I feel the

force, according to the demands of my personal vocation, of a range of values which

greet me individually and which call me to my own moral destiny. This range of values

is the range of values which I am concretely called to realize in my own factual existence

according to the regulative idea of my ideal self, or my true value-essence understood

 8

as the person who I am meant to be, the essential teleology of my personal being. The

understanding of who I truly am, i.e. my ideal self, can ultimately be understood, for

Husserl, only if it is understood in light of a faith and love for God. God represents, for

Husserl, the highest principle of the ethical life.

As I will argue in the course of this project, Husserls ethics can be described as

fragmentary, at best. It raises a host of problems and questions to which Husserl himself

is not ready to give an answer. Moreover, Husserl, who remained generally ignorant of

much of philosophys historical tradition, likewise was not prepared to look into the

tradition in order to derive from thence theoretical insights and tools which would have

helped him in the task of further developing and bolstering his ethical thought. It is my

intention in this dissertation to develop Husserls general theory into a viable ethical

philosophy precisely by returning to the tradition and by revitalizing and renewing

phenomenological philosophy by way of a kind of vital contact with philosophys past.

In view of the phenomenological insight into the way in which meaning becomes

historically sedimented in our contemporary use of language and concepts, it will be my

basic contention that the renewal of phenomenology involves the renewal of the whole

tradition of philosophy and, in a very special way, the renewal of medieval philosophy as

well. In particular, I will argue that the medieval philosophy of John Duns Scotus, whose

thought I will take as already containing in essence a kind of phenomenological

approach, in particular is capable of offering theoretical tools with which to expand upon

Husserlian ethical thought in such a way as to provide Husserl with a set of rigorous

descriptive as well as reconstructive analyses which will allow us to develop a plausible

 9

defense of the essential tenets of Husserls ethical philosophy, which I take to be the

following: that love is the basic dimension by means of which the personal subject has

access to all types of value; that value is, as such, the basic motivational factor in all

human comportment; that the moral task is specific to every individual and is given in the

individual form of a universal vocation; that our vocation is to the realization of our

ideal selves; and that ethical normativity ultimately rests not upon a kind of bare, dutiful

respect for the form of the moral law, but rather, that morality is founded upon an act of

faith and love of God.

In the investigations which follow, I have several aims in mind, as already

indicated. The first is to provide a contribution to Husserlian scholarship by developing a

coherent understanding of the ideas Husserl hoped to put forth as his ethics. The

second is to provide a kind of case study in what I take to be a general project upon

which phenomenology is justly invited to embarki.e. the project of the renewal of

phenomenology through the renewal of the medieval tradition of philosophy and of the

whole tradition in general. Taking Scotus as providing a specific instance in which

medieval thought can contribute to a specific domain of phenomenological inquiry in this

project, I hope to open the way for future constructive dialogue between phenomenology

in general and other medieval philosophers. Finally, I hope to make use of this project,

which I designate as a groundwork with respect to the phenomenological study of the

ethical life, in order to pave the way to a robust phenomenological ethics even beyond the

limits of a specifically Husserlian approach. In this respect, I hope to use Husserl and

Scotus here as a stepping-stone in clearing the way to the fuller understanding of the
 10

range of problems which a phenomenological ethics will have to engage in greater detail

in the future.

The dissertation will be divided into four basic parts representing four problems-

areas related to Husserls ethics and my approach to the resolution of its difficulties. I

will begin with a Prolegomena, which will first attempt to introduce the general themes

of Husserls ethics as they emerged from Husserls first contact with Brentano and as

they subsequently developed throughout the course of his career. Secondly, the

Prolegomena will attempt to clear away some of the initial roadblocks which my

particular approach to Husserls ethics is bound to encounter, namely the questions which

the current literature poses to Husserl as well as the general problem of the possibility of

a relationship between medieval and phenomenological philosophy. Part I, consisting of

two chapters, will have to focus specifically on the way in which Husserl envisioned the

problems of ethics and how they are to be resolved. This will be done first in the way in

which the problems of ethics are historically given from their Urstiftung in Socratic

thought through the various problems that emerge in the historical unfolding of ethical

philosophy and what that will tell us about the sort of answer the resolution of these

problems and historical tensions will demand of us. It will be in this context that our

initial approach to Scotus will have to be justified inasmuch as Scotus can be viewed as

already steering the kind of middle-course that Husserl will demand of a valid ethical

philosophy in ways in which other thinkers do not. Next, Husserls approach to ethics

will have to be discussed at the more basic level of philosophical methodology.

Specifically, it will have to be seen to what extent and precisely in what sense ethics as a
 11

discipline can be viewed as phenomenologicalthat is to say, what sort of relationship,

if any, does ethics as a practical discipline bear to the theoretical discipline of pure

phenomenology?

Part II will approach the problem of values in Husserls philosophy, focusing first

on how values can be known and how phenomenological research (in both Husserl and

Scotus) can provide us with a justification of the validity of our experiential dealings with

values and the value-hierarchies which make up our life-worldthat is to say, how are

values as such constituted in consciousness? Granted the basic fact of the constitution of

values, the next chapter will attempt to provide a resolution to certain ontological

questions regarding the status of values. However, as will have to be seen, it will also be

necessary to follow Husserl and Scotus out on the question as to the degree to which

ethics is aided in approaching moral value ontologically. Without going too far too

quickly, it will be seen that there is a fundamental difference between the

ontological/axiological attitudes of the value-theoristand by extension of Husserls

early ethics of valueand a full-fledged ethical attitude. As will be shown, our

ontological reflections can offer clarifications as to what sorts of values are non-original

to the ethical attitude as such; however, it will only be through taking on the ethical

attitude in its full originality and reflecting, phenomenologically, upon this attitude that

the sphere of ethical normativity will open up for us.

The final three chapters (Part III), then, will attempt to approach the ethical

attitude in increasing degrees through the steps which Husserl himself attempted to take

in its direction. The first of these chapters will begin with a systematic treatment of the
 12

personal subject in its acting in the life-world as a subject of freedom, of rationality, and

of obligation (prescinding for the moment from the question of the sources of such

obligation or how it is grounded). This will further lead to the discussion of vocation and

its constitutive attitude as a first step in the direction of morality and of the ethical

attitude as such. The vocational attitude, as it will be initially understood in

professional life, however, will only be a steppingstone towards the opening up of a new

vocational attitude which will, as will have to be seen, bring us to the recognition of the

ethical attitude as being ultimately a formal aspect of the religious. The final two

chapters will explore this attitude in greater detail, and specifically (Chapter VIII) the

way in which the ethical attitude, as a formal category of the religious attitude, is

capable of providing for the ultimate grounding of the absoluteness of the absolute

ought of morality without at the same time absolutizing the values of the religious in an

inadmissible wayi.e. as simply another form of moral fanaticism in the history of

ethical thought of the sort condemned by Kant. The concluding chapter will seek to spell

out the consequences, at least in a preliminary way, of the phenomenological discovery

of the ethical as a formality, in the Scotist sense of the term, of the religious attitude, in

particular the extent to which a complete ethical doctrine can and must be pursued in

contact with a phenomenology of the religious lifei.e. that there will always be an

ineluctable tie between ethics, as a practical discipline and religious faith.

 13

Prolegomena

Chapter I
The Development of Husserls Ethics and its Foundational Problems

2. Introduction to Husserlian Ethics

a. Historical Development and Influences

Husserls ethical theories underwent a marked development from the very first

lecture courses he ever gave, beginning in 1897 in a course entitled, Ethics and the

Philosophy of Law, and continuing on into the lecture courses of the early 1900s and of

the mid-twenties and finally culminating in scattered ethical manuscripts and fragments

during the period of the early thirties. It is generally accepted that Husserls own ethics

was developed through the course of three different stages,6 the first, beginning in 1897

with his first lectures on ethics, and the second beginning some time in late 1917 and

continuing through the lecture courses on ethics of the 1920s and the publication of the

final Kaizo piece in 1923. The difference between these initial two stages is generally

characterized in the literature as being marked by a decisive turning away from initial

theories, in particular the importance of Brentanos ethical philosophy for Husserls

ethics, in the development of a new grounding for ethical normativity. However, the

final stage of Husserls ethical work remains somewhat more difficult to characterize as

6
It should be acknowledged from the outset that breaking Husserls ethical development
into distinct stages runs a definite risk of misunderstanding the character of this
development, as though each stage represents a fundamentally different outlook,
rejections of previous ideas, or dramatically diverse methods. Husserls three stages are
much more closely related and do not mark such dramatic shifts in this way. Thus, while
a periodization of his thought is necessary to understanding the place of different ethical
texts within the overall chronology, at the same time such a periodization is also
misleading in important respects. We will have to be conscious of this fact as our
historical considerations unfold.
 14

there is no precise date to give for the development of the newer theories, nor is there

such a decisive shift in emphasis between the third and the second phases of the

development of his ethical thought as one generally assumes there to be between the first

two stages, and even these first two phases might not be seen to be so disconnected as the

literature has led us to believe. To that extent, then, the different phases of Husserls

development can, and will be taken more as a piece in developing a systematic

philosophical ethical teaching in the Husserlian tradition. However, before moving to

those issues, which will necessarily have to come at the end of the discussions to be

pursued here, it is first necessary to fill out the history in a much clearer fashion in order

to set the stage, historically, for understanding the broad framework and context of

Husserls ethical thought. Since much of this work has already been done by two

scholars whose work has come to be canonical in the field of Husserlian ethical studies,

namely the work of Ullrich Melle and Henning Peuker, it will only be necessary to

summarize in broad strokes the detailed analyses which their work has already pursued.

i. The Early Ethics and Brentano: 1884-1914

Husserls early ethics are marked by a significant debt to the thought of his

mentor Franz Brentano, and for that reason an understanding of Husserls ethics can only

begin with an initial survey of Brentanos ethical theories. Brentano, early on in the

development of his descriptive psychology, provided a classification of mental acts,

borrowed from Descartes in his third meditation, by which he sought to differentiate all

mental acts into three basic classes. Brentano thus distinguished between presentations,

or Vortstellungen, as those acts wherein objects are presented to the mind in perception
 15

and sensation, judgments, or Urteile, or those acts of the mind which predicate things

of objects, and the phenomena of love and hate which were relations of feeling, or

Gemtsttigkeiten.7 This third class, which he also refers to as the phenomena of

interest (Interessephnomene), he identifies with those cogitationes which Descartes,

in his own classification, describes as volitions (voluntates) or affects (affectus).8

Brentano argues that this third class consists of, the emotions in the widest sense of the

term, from the simple forms of inclination or disinclination in respect of the mere idea, to

the joy and sadness arising from conviction and to the most complicated phenomena as to

the choice of ends and means.9 It is this latter class of psychic acts, i.e. the sphere love

and hate, which will form the backdrop for Brentanos study of the ethical life. While the

essentially presenting class of psychic acts are the most primordial of acts, in Brentanos

view, since there must be a presentation lying at the basis of every judgment and every

act of feeling, each act of judgment and of love or hate are equally primordial in their

own domain. This idea requires some explanation. As Dermot Moran writes, for

Brentano, a presentation provides the basic object or contentaround which other

kinds of mental act[s] crystallize.10 From that perspective, presentations, or ideas as

Descartes called them, can be neither right nor wrong, but rather simply are.11

7
Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology (London: Routledge, 1999), 45.
8
Ren Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. and ed. George Heffernan
(Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), iii, 5; cf. Franz Brentano, The
Origin of the Knowledge of Right and Wrong, trans. and ed. Cecil Hague (Westminster:
Archibald Constable & Co, 1902), 20 and note 21.
9
Brentano, 20.
 16

By contrast, in his 1889 lecture given before the Vienna Law Society entitled The

Origin of the Knowledge of Right and Wronga lecture which Brentano made available

to Husserl while he was still a student, Brentano argues that acts of judgment possess

their sphere of validity within which they have standards for being called right or wrong.

This, Brentano notes, is what logic has long affirmed.12 This, so far, is nothing

controversial. Everyone admits of judgments that they can be either right or wrong, that

they have certain standards and conditions of validity wherein their truth-value is

determined. However, where Brentano makes a controversial move is in arguing the

same to be the case with the third class of acts, namely acts of feeling. He writes that, of

the two opposed modes of relation, love and hate, pleasure and displeasure, in each case

one is right the other wrong.13 An analogy thus surfaces here between two classes of

psychic acts. Brentano believes that he can establish this analogy based upon the fact that

both judgments and emotions have their internal a priori following from the fact that

their intentional structures are formally the same, at least to the extent that their form is

constituted by way of intentional relations that are defined by opposites. This is apparent

in judgments inasmuch as within every individual act of judgment, there is always an

intentional act either of recognition or of rejection wherein a certain proposition is either

recognized as true or rejected as false. This either/or is true of every judgment. For acts

10
Moran, 45.
11
Brentano, 22.
12
Ibid.
13
Ibid.
 17

of feeling, this opposition of intentional relations is also clearly apparent to the extent that

in every individual act of feeling, so long as it is an intentional feelingwhich certain

feelings such as fatigue or weariness are not, this feeling-act will always be either a

feeling of love or hate, or of pleasure or displeasure.14 For instance, if I have a feeling of

joy over the birth of a child, then this feeling of joy is characterized by a love or a taking-

pleasure-in the birth of this child. It is thus an intentional feeling which positively

evaluates this child as a being of true value.15 On the other hand, if I feel a feeling of

revulsion at the birth of this child, then my revulsion takes the form of a hatred or

displeasure in the childs birth and thus an evaluation of the value of the child as a being

having a negative, or dis-value. For Brentano, just as there is no possible act of judgment

which is not an act of either affirmation or of negation, of recognition or of rejection,

there is also no possible act of feeling which likewise is not an act of either love or hate,

pleasure or displeasure in a thing, and thus which is not also always already an act of

14
Ibid., 21.
15
Saying true value here does not yet mean that the act of valuation is correct. Rather,
every act of valuation carried out in feeling presents itself to the subject as being true.
However, the truth of the act of valuation would have to be investigated through acts of
self-critique, judgment, and rational deliberation as to whether or not I have correctly felt
the value of the object. Indeed, I, or my parents or community, may have formed my
psychic life and the habitualities of my affective intentions in such a way as to evaluate
values incorrectly, leading to a certain blindness about values. This is precisely the
problem which Max Scheler would later pursue in his ethics of value, particularly in his
Ressentiment, Formalism in Ethics, and many other places. See Max Scheler,
Ressentiment, trans. and ed. Lewis B. Coser and William W. Holdheim (Milwaukee:
Marquette University Press, 1994); Max Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal
Ethics of Value, trans. and ed. Manfred S. Frings and Roger L. Funk (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1973); Max Scheler, Idols of Self-Knowledge, in
Selected Philosophical Essays, trans. and ed. David R. Lachterman (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1973), 3-97.
 18

valuation, i.e. of judging valuesagain, so long as it is a feeling which falls within the

class of acts which truly possess an intentional structure. Every act of joy in something

affirms the value of a thing as a thing which is worthy of enjoyment. Every act of

displeasure denies the value of a thing, or at least judges the value of the object to be

less than other things which bear values.

In the parallelism which emerges, then, between these two classes of psychic acts,

Brentano further argues that here, we have now reached the place where the notions of

good and bad, along with the notions of the true and the false which we have been

seeking, have their sourceWe call something good when the love relating to it is

right.16 Inasmuch, then, as the class of psychic acts called judgments is foundational

for the notions of truth and falsity, and inasmuch as these notions are definitive for logic,

judgments form the psychological basis for the science of logic. Likewise, inasmuch as

love and hate can be termed right or wrong and give rise to the notions of good and bad,

which are so definitive for ethics, Brentano believes that he has established a kind of

theoretical parallelism between the two disciplines of logic and ethics which establishes

ethics as a normative discipline on equal footing with logic and possessing similarly

normative and objective proscriptions. In doing this, Brentano assumes, drawing on the

fact that both judgments and feelings have the same either/or structure with respect to

their intentional relations, that feeling, like judgment, has its own criteria of good and bad

which allows ethics to carry out an investigation of the validity or invalidity of acts of

feeling, just as logic carries out investigations as to the truth or falsity and the validity or

16
Ibid., 23.
 19

invalidity of individual acts of judgment. Brentano assumes this for important reasons,

which will be discernible if we take a moment to consider a common objection to the

philosophy of values which places moral and axiological value as the intentional correlate

of feeling-acts, namely the idea that Brentano is committed to a view of love and hate

which is anchored, on the one hand, in pure affectivityi.e. love and hate are nothing

more than the feelings of love and hateand, on the other hand, must terminate in the

view that what is good or bad is simply whatever I may happen to love or hate

respectively.

On the one hand, where the problem of love as pure feeling is concerned,

Brentano argues that feeling must be differentiated into two orders, namely the, higher

and lower forms of the feelings of pleasure and displeasure.17 Brentano describes the

lower class of feelings in terms of pleasure or displeasure,18 which are, quite like a blind

judgment, only an instinctive or habitual impulse.19 These are the sorts of feelings

17
Ibid., 27.
18
Brentano does not seem to use the terms love, hate, pleasure, displeasure, etc. in
a particularly rigorous way. To a certain extent the opposing terms love/hate and
pleasure/displeasure may be seen as interchangeable in the way the terms function in
the sentences in which Brentano uses them. For instance, we can distinguish between a
higher and lower form of love and hate. At the same time, this is not to assume that love
is by any means merely reducible to feelings of pleasure. Certainly, Brentano recognizes
that at times loving someone involves a great deal of pain, even at a higher level. As
such, there is a certain ambiguity in Brentanos philosophy here which remains wholly
unresolved in his own presentations and which Husserl in turn would attempt to
resolvethough, as we shall see, to say that they were successfully resolved in Husserls
thought would go much too far. The resolution of these issues will have to be pursued, in
a sense, beyond Husserl and Brentano both.
19
Ibid.
 20

which philosophy, he says, tends to seize upon in its characterization of feeling as

irrational and subject to whim or the physiological processes of the body, as, for instance,

in feelings of sexual arousal or in feelings of moodiness, depression, irritability, taste, or

nervous excitement. Many of these sorts of feelings are not even intentional, and thus

cannot truly have anything to do with value since they are not object-directed in the first

place. However, in the case of intentional feelings, the actual presence of love or

pleasure in this lower sense, by no means testifies unconditionally to the worthiness of

the object to be loved, just as affirmation [in an act of judgment] is no unconditional

proof of what is true.20 These sorts of feelings cannot serve as an objective basis upon

which to establish a normative discipline like ethics, nor are they feelings which one can,

on Brentanos reading of them, serve as a truly rational source of motivation for ethical

and rational behavior. Their very irrationality, or perhaps limited rationality depending

on the feeling and the subject of the feeling in question, requires that a rational

confirmation of their validity be provided at a higher level.

In contrast to the lower class of feelings which Brentano describes, with the rest

of the philosophical tradition, as blind and impulsive, Brentano posits a higher form of

feeling which, he argues, can readily be found at work in the sentiment which undergirds

the opening words of Aristotles Metaphysics, namely that, All men naturally desire to

know.21 Brentano views this example of a desire for knowledge as a universal desire on

20
Ibid., 25. [Bracketed text my addition.]
21
Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. and ed. John H. McMahon (Amherst, NY: Prometheus
Books, 1991), 980a.21.
 21

the part of every human agent which, he writes, is a pleasure of that higher form which

is analogous to self-evidence in the sphere of judgment.22 Thus, just as there are certain

judgments which are simply self-evident, such as the judgment that something cannot

both be and not be at the same time and in the same respect, there are also certain feelings

which bring to light the value of things in a manner that is simply self-evident.

Moreover, just as self-evident judgments form the basis for the confirmation or

invalidation of non-self-evident judgments within logic, so also will it be these higher

self-evident forms of feeling which will provide us with the most basic insights into the

correctness or incorrectness of other valuations in feeling-acts which will provide the

basis for the science of ethics. For Brentano, then, the higher forms of love, pleasure, or

desirehowever we might choose to symbolize this basic stratum of human intentional

acts within the class of voluntates or affectusare by no means blind and impulsive

as in lower classes of emotion or as in the analogous case of the blind judgment or the

snap decision. Rather, these sorts of higher feelings, loves, or pleasures represent

genuine and objectively valid insights into the general order of things, and particularly

into the sphere of value. The desire for knowledge and the joy in acquiring it is a love or

feeling which, Brentano argues, has the character of rightness.23 Brentano argues that

we find the same sort of example in the preference for intellectual insight and

understanding over and above being in error. The desire or preference for truth over error

22
Brentano, 27.
23
Ibid.
 22

inclines the individual towards what has genuine value (truth) and against what has

genuine disvalue (error).

It is important to note, at this juncture, that these higher order feelings cannot be

seen as simply affective, emotional, or sensory, i.e. as located merely in feeling-

responses, impulses, or pleasures and pains of the lived-body, to use Husserls term.

Moreover, it seems evident from the way in which Brentano comes to describe this basic

layer of higher feeling, which he eventually identifies in terms of a basic tendency of

love and hate operative in the form of acts of preferring and placing-after, that

these are not properly feeling-acts taken purely as affective. Rather, they are basic

kinds of inclinations of the will, which both actively and passively takes up the task of

ordering a range of values, as Max Scheler would later come to argue in his essay Ordo

Amoris, in which he takes up and expands the basic claims of Brentanos ethical

psychology in a more phenomenological direction.24 One could say, following Schelers

analyses, that these acts of preferring and placing-after in the higher class of feeling are

conative acts operative at a very basic intentional level. They are not the feelings

themselves, once we have peeled away the layers of conscious experience in which they

are presented and enacted, but they do make themselves manifest in feelings. To this

extent, then, we do away with the initial challenge to Brentano that the feelings upon

which his ethics become basedlove and hateare nothing but blind and impulsive

affective actsmere emotions in the pejorative sense of the word. To that extent, also, it

might become clear that Brentanos appropriation of the Cartesian classification of

24
See Max Scheler, Ordo Amoris, in Selected Philosophical Essays, trans. and ed.
David R. Lachterman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 98-135.
 23

mental acts into merely three categoriespresentations, judgments, and emotionscan

be seen as a bit heavy-handed inasmuch as what seem to be very different types of acts in

feeling and in volition seem here to have been melded together and their basic differences

overlooked. However, inasmuch as the basic acts of preferring which make up the higher

class of feeling, for Brentano, are not consciously performed, under ordinary

circumstancesalthough they can come to be consciously shaped, as we shall have to see

later on, but are rather always already operative in the individuals volitional/affective

life, there is a certain sense in which the Cartesian/Brentanian classification expresses an

experiential factnamely that there is a deep interconnection between feeling and basic

volitional acts of love and hate which constitute the preference for and against certain

values and disvalues.25

Now, if it is the case, for Brentano, that it is only the higher class of feelings

which take good and bad as their objects qua good and bad and, moreover, that

these acts stand on an analogous level with judgments which can be either true or false,

then it cannot be the case that Brentano is here committed to the view that good and

bad are, in reality, nothing other than what I feel to be good or bad, just as true or

false are not simply whatever I think to be true or false. On the one hand, this is the

case because the higher class of feelings are not subject to the same degree of whim,

25
The Cartesian classification also very clearly inherits the classical medieval description
of the passions being in the will rather than in the intellect or somehow purely in the
body. Duns Scotus, for instance, speaks of the passions of delight or sadness as being in
the will (See John Duns Scotus, God and Creatures: The Quodlibetal Questions, trans.
and ed. Felix Alluntis, O.F.M., and Allan B. Wolter, O.F.M. (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1975), 13.74). Also Cf. Edith Stein, Finite and Eternal Being, trans. and
ed. Kurt F. Reinhardt (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 2002), 448ff.
 24

spontaneity, flightiness, and irrationality as are the lower class of feelingse.g.

irritability, nervous excitement, etc. none of which rationally intend objects as good or

bad, but simply as colored by the lens of my bad mood, bad attitude, etc. Rather, love

and hate as acts of preferring and placing-after make a claim to the goodness or badness

of things just as judgments make claims regarding the truth or falsity of propositions. It

follows from this that, just as a judgment can be incorrect, so also love and hate can lack

the character of rightness. Truth and evidence, then, have their analogs in acts of love

and hate, in the form of rightness and wrongness and the intuition of the rightness and

wrongness of these acts as such.26 Thus, Brentano writes that, [w]e have no guarantee

that everything which is good will arouse within us a love with the character of

rightness.27

From this it also follows that not every act of preferring will be a preferring for

something that is truly good. It is without a doubt a possibility for me to love something

which is, in itself, bad, and it is also possible that I will fail to love something which is

good. Thus, if we were to encounter a species of rational individuals who did not all

desire knowledge, Brentano writes, we would not thereby have seized upon the relativity

of the value of knowledgethat it is a thing which holds no valuative claim upon us, that

it is not a good in itself that ought to be desired and realized by all rational agentsbut

rather, he writes, we would come to the conclusion that the loves and hates of such an

individual who positively desires not to know, were fundamentally absurd, that such a

26
Robin D. Rollinger, Brentano and Husserl, in The Cambridge Companion to
Brentano, ed. Dale Jacquette (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 262.
27
Brentano, 27.
 25

species hated what was undeniably good, and loved what was undeniably bad in itself.28

As such, we would have encountered a species whose preferrings where entirely

perverse. This, however, would be the equivalent of encountering a species whose

capacities for the judgment of truth and falsity were entirely defective. Just as the

possibility of such a total defective character of capacities for judgment does not

invalidate the objective validity of the difference between truth and falsity and of the

truth and falsity of individual judgments nor does it invalidate the fact that every

acquisition of truth and falsity must take place through acts of judgment, and judgment

alone, so also the possibility of preferring the wrong things does not invalidate the fact

that there is an objective standard of right and wrong and that if we are to have a genuine

and originary intuition into what is right and wrong, this can only take place by way of

acts of preferring. This is, ultimately, Brentanos reason for maintaining the parallelism

between logic and ethics, in particular, to the extent that the parallelism provides for the

ability to provide the self-evident starting points for these respective sciences in their

correlative psychological acts, namely of judgment and of love and hate.

Now, if we grant to Brentano that acts of love and hate can be described as

possessing a character of rightness which indicates an objective standard of right and

wrong, certain questions still remain. In particular, if we acknowledge that ones love of

nature, for instance, has the character of rightness as does their love for their family, and

one must make a choice at any given moment between taking care of their family and

enjoying a long hike in the woods, what standards do these loves offer for adjudicating

28
Ibid.
 26

between these two momentarily competing values? If both valuations have the character

of rightness, according to what standards do we claim there to be a morally right and a

morally wrong choice in this situation? In Brentanos account, an answer can readily

be furnished inasmuch as values reveal themselves in my basic acts of preferring and

placing-after as being hierarchical. The range of possible goods includes sets of goods

which are not all equally good. One might establish something of a formal hierarchy in

terms of the good, the better, and the best wherein different values might fall when

placed into relations with each other as the individual subject is faced with moral choices

and dilemmas. Faced with the manifold field of goods towards which one is inclined,

Brentano argues that, to promote as far as possible the good throughout this great whole,

that is manifestly the right end in life, towards which every act is to be ordered.29 What

this means for Brentano is that, recognizing the good of every individual value which

constitutes the moral horizon of the world, each value must be respected and promoted.

However, the promotion of the good of the wholeand not only of the whole of

humanity but of the whole of nature and of God as wellcan be seen as something of the

highest good, for Brentano. Brentano also describes this as the universal good, and all

moral commands or moral oughts depend essentially for their moral sense and

obligatory character upon the principle that the universal good must be promoted in all of

its totalitythat is, the moral agent is obliged to realize, or bring to actuality, the

highest values possible through his or her actions. He writes, then, that, all lesser goods

29
Ibid., 35.
 27

are to be made subservient to the good of this widest sphere.30 From this, it becomes

clear that the adjudication between finite values, both loved with a character of rightness,

is not based simply upon an evaluation purely between the two competing valuesrather

both values are weighed against the standard of the highest good and the degree to which

the pursuit of one value or the other fulfills and realizes that standard. However, the

extent to which the highest good can be achieved by means of finite human actions must

be qualified. For Brentano, it is not simply the highest good but the highest practical

good which must be pursued, where practical is not merely to be read as the good

towards which praxis is ordered. It is the highest good which can only be realized

within the finite limits of what is practically achievable within the range of possibilities

which inevitably fall short of the highest good. From this, Brentano derives what has

come to be known as his own peculiar categorical imperative, namely that when, in

every individual situation, we are faced with a choice between various ends, we are

always and everywhere obliged to, choose the best among attainable ends, this alone is

the adequate answer,31 to the extent that the best among attainable ends will realize the

highest good to the greatest degree possible within the limits of the finite situation.

One final word regarding Brentanos moral outlook will be important to note as

we begin to approach more directly the issues of Husserls ethical philosophy as it had

been shaped by Husserls critical engagement with his teacher and mentors views. This

will have to do with the purpose and role which philosophy itself is to play on the grand

30
Ibid., 36.
31
Ibid., 17.
 28

stage of history and within the context of what Brentano already saw as a deepening

spiritual and moral crisis which was brewing in the Western world. As such, we must

move beyond the immediate sphere of Brentanos explicitly ethical philosophy to

recognize the moral force which is the shared underpinning of both Brentano and

Husserls philosophical projects in general. In order to understand this point, one must

first look at Brentanos philosophy of history, which makes clear Brentanos own

appraisal of the problem of his contemporary culture and of the historical course which

his new descriptive psychology was meant to engage.

Brentano held to a kind of cyclical view of historical progression in philosophy

and, by extension, in culture as well. As Dermot Moran writes, Brentano proposed a

theory in which, philosophy progressed in four phases, including alternative phases of

abundance and different stages of decline.32 The first stage is characterized as a period

of abundance precisely because it includes a, preponderance of the purely theoretical

interest, which seeks to express itself in the absolute scientific striving for truth through

the development of a rigorous scientific method of inquiry.33 This period of growth and

development is succeeded by the first period of decline, in which the theoretical interest,

which, like any human or natural phenomenon in the cosmos, is subject to laws of

entropy and eventually begins to weaken. In such a period, the pure interest in theoria

gives way to an interest in the purely practical. What follows is a third period of further

decline in which an antithetical dialectic of skepticism and dogmatism in philosophy

32
Moran, 33.
33
Ibid.
 29

emerges between warring philosophical factions. Finally, this gives way to a fourth

period in which mysticism takes the place of authentic philosophical inquiry. On

Brentanos reading of history, this cyclical periodization has played itself out completely

through three full cycles. Representatives of the first period of abundance in philosophy

would include, for Brentano, anyone in the period from Thales to Aristotle for the ancient

world, Aquinas for the middle ages, and Bacon and Descartes for modernity. The second

period of decline would include the Stoics and Epicureans in the ancient world and the

nominalists like Ockham and Buridan for the medievals. Likewise, the third phase is

characterized by such thinkers as the Academic Skeptics, Hume, and Kant. Finally, the

fourth phase would include thinkers like Plotinus, Meister Eckhart, Schelling, and

Hegel.34

Given this periodic view of history, in particular where the fourth period of the

third cycle seems to endi.e. with the German idealistsit seems clear that Brentano

saw himself as being on the brink of a new awakening in philosophical endeavors.

Brentano hoped to inaugurate the new period of interest in pure theoria by harkening

back to such thinkers as Aristotle, Aquinas, and Descartes through whom he finds the

inspiration to develop a rigorous philosophical method which has the distinction of being

fully scientific. Brentanos descriptive psychology, then, was meant to be something of a

renewal of philosophical culture, which would reawaken philosophy to its foundational

sense and taski.e. the pure, rigorous scientific search for truth. Moreover, Brentanos

philosophy hoped to reawaken culture at large to the overarching call to the renewal of

34
Ibid.
 30

their pure spirituality. Since, for Brentano, the practical and moral can only have its true

basis in pure theory, philosophy found its true practical calling in the cultivation of pure

theory based on rigorous scientific methods.35 It is only in the grounding of pure theory

that modern culture can hope to avoid the drift, already initiated by the groundless

mysticism of the fourth periodization of history, into irrationalism, subjectivism, and

relativism. The consequence of this is that the philosophy of pure theoretical interest

promises, in the words of Michael Gubser, to make good on the modern potential by

guiding a moral reclamation of society.36 This moral reclamation is, moreover,

fundamentally a renewal and re-appropriation of the authentic sources of societys moral

insight and destiny. This task of renewal, which is foundational to the whole purpose of

scientific philosophy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, would

subsequently be inherited by Husserl in the project of phenomenology as its driving

impulse, although with a somewhat different philosophy of history to support it from the

one developed by Brentano.

With Brentano, Husserls early starting point in pursuing ethical studies was

worked out on the basis of the strong parallelism between the two disciplines of logic and

ethics.37 The essence of the parallelism was to be found in the fact that both sought to be

normative sciences, in one way or anotherlogic, in the sense of providing norms for

35
Michael Gubser, An Image of a Higher World: Ethical Renewal in Franz Brentano
and Edmund Husserl, Filosofija 17 (2009): 44.
36
Ibid.
37
Henning Peuker, From Logic to the Person: An Introduction to Edmund Husserls
Ethics, The Review of Metaphysics 62 (2008): 310.
 31

thinking and for speaking within the bounds of rationality and consistency and in the

sense of proscribing against irrationality and contradiction, and ethics, in the sense of

providing normative commands for practical action. Whereas logic had to do with the

sphere of pure theoretical reason and here reigned supreme as the normative science over

and above all other theoretical disciplines whatsoever, whether metaphysics,

epistemology, etc., ethics had to do with the sphere of practical reason wherein it reigned

supreme as the king of all arts (Kunstlehren).38 The term Kunstlehre, which Husserl

borrowed from Brentano, is consistently used throughout the early and later ethics to

describe the particular character of both logic and ethics as normative sciences which are

being practically oriented rather than purely theoretically oriented. The designation art,

or theory of art as the term might also be translated, Husserl indicates, carries a

meaning equivalent to practical discipline (praktische Disziplin).39 More will be said

about this later in order to fill out the meaning and use of the term; however, for now it is

only important to note the similarity between the two Kunstlehren of logic and of ethics

insofar as they are both normative arts with a practical orientation. However, another

important feature of the parallelism, and perhaps its motivating force in Husserls

appropriation of Brentanos view, is the attempt on Husserls part to ground ethics

precisely as normative.

38
Edmund Husserl, Gesammelte Werke Husserliana, Band XXXVII: Einleitung in die
Ethik, Volesungen Sommersemester 1920/1924, ed. Henning Peuker (Dordrecht: Kluwer
Academic Publishers, 2004), 18.
39
Ibid., 14.
 32

Husserl argues in his early ethicsand this argument will be repeated in the

opening chapter of the 1920/24 coursethat, just as in the discipline of logic,

contemporary philosophy was marked by a strong tendency towards psychologismi.e.

the reduction of a priori logical rules like the principle of non-contradiction to being a

mere fact of the constitution and limits of human psychology while saying nothing about

the world of being itselfand naturalism, so also was ethics faced with the same

problem. Moreover, just as Husserl, in the Logical Investigations, saw himself as

providing a decisive critique of such a psychologistic theory of logic in order to establish

logic as a fully normative discipline whose logical rules and insights are fully objective

and valid, so also will Husserl see his ethics, given the parallel with logic, as overcoming

any kind of psychologism and naturalism in its theories and proscriptions and, thus, as

providing a fully objective and normative practical science. These concernsi.e. the

avoidance of all forms of psychologism and naturalism in both logic and ethicswill

remain fundamental throughout every stage of Husserls thought. However, what is

distinctive about the early stage of the development of his ethical theories is precisely the

way in which these concerns are pursued and precisely how the centrality of the

parallelism between logic and ethics will contribute to certain characteristic features of

what is a heavily Brentanian ethical philosophy revolving around the themes of an

objective axiology, the possibility of an a priori deduction of the hierarchy of values, and

from this the centrality of the Brentanian categorical imperative as foundational for the

ethical life. It is to these themes that we will now have to turn in order to give a little

sense to the historical development of Husserls ethics.

 33

Husserls first engagement with the problem of ethics within a formal,

philosophical context came during the years of 1884-86, during which he attended the

lecture courses on ethics held by Brentano in Vienna.40 As has already been mentioned,

Husserl gave his own course on ethics for the first time in 1897, followed by a course

entitled Elementary Questions of Ethics in 1902. His next significant courses, and

arguably his most important of the early period, came under the title Volesungen ber

Ethik und Wertlehre, which was given for the first time in 1908/09 and was repeated in

1911 and 1914.41 It is generally agreed that all of the above lecture courses, as well as

fragmentary sections of other works which touch either upon the questions of ethics or of

a formal axiology, carry on the same trajectory of thought as was first launched in

Husserls mind through his initial engagement with Brentanos ethical doctrine which,

along with the whole spirit of Brentanos philosophical project, he readily appropriated as

his own, albeit with important alterations here and there. As has already been said, the

fundamental starting point of Husserls early ethics is explicitly borrowed from Brentano

in the way in which the two practical disciplines of ethics and logic are conceived upon a

pronounced parallelism with one another. Following Brentanos differentiation of

intentional acts into the three classes of presentations, judgments, and the phenomena of

love and hate, or feeling, Husserl takes up the framework which emerges in his own early

axiological and ethical theories, arguing that value is given fundamentally through acts of

40
Peuker, From Logic to the Person, 308.
41
Ibid.
 34

feeling in which value is the intentional, objective correlate of a subjective act of

valuation presented in feeling.

For Husserl, as for Brentano, just as logic attains to an absolute clarity and

evidence as a pure, rigorous science of formal objectivities by means of its founding upon

the intentional acts of presentation and judgment, so also do the emotional acts of

valuation which form the basis of any axiology also possess an absolute and immediate

clarity all their own apart from any underlying rational judgment.42 Evaluative acts are,

themselves, primal, founding acts of the heart which apprehend values themselves in

their actuality. That being the case, for Husserl, the parallelism between logic and ethics

goes beyond being simply founded upon the essentially parallel intentional acts of

presentation and judgment with those of value-feelingthat is, just as much as logic

operates on a purely formal level, developing logical laws, which are valid a priori, so,

too, is ethics grounded on purely theoretical laws with an analogous validity status.43

That is to say, just as it is possible to develop an a priori theory of normative logical rules

which will govern all of our thinking, so also will it be possible to develop a pure a priori

formal axiology of values given in feeling-acts which will provide normative rules for

evaluating both things and courses of actions with their attendant ends. Thus, ethics

stands ready, Husserl claimed, to provide a complete hierarchy of values, and thus also a

complete system of rules as to which values ought to be pursued before others, on a

purely a priori and logical ground developed off the back of the whole range of value-

42
Ibid.
43
Peuker, From Logic to the Person, 313.
 35

feeling-acts given in everyday experience. It is this formal axiology which will provide

the essential grounding of ethics as a practical, normative discipline in Husserls early

view.44

Deduced from the whole system of axiological laws which a phenomenological

study of the intentionality of feeling-acts provides, Husserl offers what, for him,

represents the foundational moral principle which is to regulate all moral action, and this

principle will be none other than the categorical imperative as formulated by Brentano in

his lecture courses, namely, to do the best that is attainable.45 Having already

established, a priori, the system of rules which obtain between various regions and types

of values, in any given, highly particularized situation within the life of any individual

human being, it is possible to attain an adequate intuition of what the best possible value

that is attainable in that situation would be. Therefore, in Husserls appropriation of it,

what the Brentanian categorical imperative is meant to accomplish is to provide for a

categorical normative command to pursue precisely and unequivocally what the formal

axiology has already told us is the best possible value attainable, and this will be a

judgment formed on the back of a prior intuition into values obtained through intentional

acts of feeling. This judgment will also be formed on the basis of the prior formal

axiological system which provided axiological rules in the first place. Failure to follow

this most essential of all ethical/axiological rules is the root of all moral transgression and

as such of a bad will.

44
Ibid., 314.
45
Ibid., 315.
 36

Where Husserl departs from Brentano in this early period of his lectures on ethics

is precisely his earlier point of departure in logic, namely in his critique of Brentanos

supposed psychologism. Here, Husserl argues that, just as much as there is a kind of

psychologism at work in Brentanos logic and general empirical psychology, so also is

there an ethical psychologism at work in Brentanos ethics. Thus, Husserl must provide

in this early theory a stopgap against any possible regression into psychologism and

naturalism on the part of his ethical and axiological theories. This battle is fought

precisely on the front of the theory of values and the epistemic and ontological

consequences of tying value essentially to his theory of intentionality. Just as much as

there are subjective acts of perception which are capable of providing for the basis of

cognitions of objects which are intersubjectively valid, so also are feelings capable of

providing for the basis of fully objective values which hold validity for all rational

subjects precisely because of the fact that feelings are intentional acts and thus in a sense

are acts of a special type of cognition46 which he variously terms Wertapperzeption,

value-apperception, and Wertnehmen, value-ception. Because of their character as

intentional acts, acts of value-ception do not represent a creation of merely subjective

values valid only for a single individual, but rather intend values in their truth and

46
Cognition is placed in inverted commas here in order to indicate the fact that the term
cognition is only to be used in an analogous sense. Values are not here cognized in the
way in which an essence is cognized through mental processes of ratiocination and
judgment. Rather, values are intuited in person in their actual presence through acts of
feeling which make them present to the subject. As such they are known, but their
being known here is not cognitive in the strict sense, but rather only analogously.
Nonetheless, Husserl hopes to do much with this analogyindeed, the analogy here is to
provide the basis for a full-fledged scientific ethical theory of values.
 37

actuality. A question arises here with which we must deal, at least preliminarily, before

moving on to other issues in the development of Husserls ethics.

The question is whether such a view of feelings as being in some sense, however

analogously we take it, a cognitive or perceptual act, is actually tenable in the first place.

Even if we recognize in Husserl and Brentanos presentations of the intentionality of

feeling a certain basic analogy to cognitive or perceptual acts, any analogy is such

precisely because there is not a one-to-one correlation between the things placed into an

analogous relation. That is to say, even if there is an analogy between two things at some

level, there will always be moments where the analogy falls short of providing an

adequate description of the objects in question and a subsequent dis-analogy arises. To

the extent that we ignore the moments of dis-analogy between feeling, perception, and

thought, we will fall into an inadmissible kind of intellectualism which, interpreting the

whole of being under the hermeneutical lens of reason, will fail to recognize the

irrational, or, better, the non-rational, aspects of existenceand even of personal

existence. Husserl and Brentano both are prepared to meet this challenge, and, certainly,

Husserl is very conscious of the need to avoid such a view of feeling which would forget

that the analogy which does exist between feeling and cognition is, in the last analysis,

merely an analogy.47 However, the analogy itself cannot be put aside in favor of a view

47
See Edmund Husserl, Gessamelte Werke Husserliana XXVIII: Vorlesungen ber Ethik
und Wertlehre, 1908-1914, ed. Ullrich Melle (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers,
1988, 112ff. Although Husserl shows his sensitivity to this issue, perhaps a greater and
more thorough recognition of this point is to be found in Max Schelers description of
valuation through feeling as representing a logique du coeur (logic of the heart), or
ordo amoris (order of love). In Schelers sense, the logic of the heart is not a
rational logic. The ratio of feeling and value is precisely to be found only by
 38

of feeling which is entirely non-cognitive and non-intentionalist in outlook. This would

be to ignore the facts of experience and of the phenomenological investigation of feeling

and the genesis of value within consciousness. It is a priori the case that when I am

joyful, I am joyful about something, when I am angry, I am angry at someone or

something, etc. Feelings, at least the feelings which we find associated with the

experience of value and the discovery of the values of things, are without exception

intentional in structure. Moreover, the fact that there is an essential connection between

the ability to discern values and the presence of feeling-acts is perhaps most dramatically

exhibited by the lack of feeling demonstrated by the sociopath who likewise lacks any

discernible ability to recognize the values of others, of animals, etc. While this is hardly

a rigorous phenomenological proof, it does seem to be something of an initial

following love out beyond reason, as it were. Of course, phenomenology, and

philosophy in general, can only proceed by way of reason. Perhaps the best way to
understand the analogy which Brentano, Husserl, Scheler, von Hildebrand, and others
propose here with respect to value and feeling would be by recourse to something like the
Pseudo-Dionysian idea of a negative theology. In that vein, we might call the
phenomenological position with respect to feeling and value something like a negative
philosophy in which we must always be conscious of the need to both affirm and, in a
certain sense, to deny whatever statements and conclusions we come to about value and
feeling by way of the analogy of reason. However, just as much as a negative theology
has its positive aspects wherein it does gesture towards the divine in a manner that
delimits, even while limiting, the concept of the divine, so also will phenomenology as
negative have a positive function of delimiting, even while limiting what it describes.
That such an approach is necessary on Husserls account would be further confirmed in
light of Husserls admonition that, in phenomenological description, we must be
constantly aware of the fact that our mundane terms always fail to do justice to the
apodictic insights into the transcendental sphere provided by phenomenology.
Nevertheless, such recourse to mundane language, images, and concepts cannot be helped
if phenomenology is to provide a thorough description of what it wishes to communicate.
Likewise, a thorough description of values and feelings can only be given if we make use
of their essential analogy to cognition and perception. See Edmund Husserl, Gesammelte
Werke Husserliana, Band I: Cartesienische Meditationen, ed.
Stephan Strasser (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950), 54.
 39

confirmation, or indication, of the validity of the position towards which phenomenology

will ultimately direct us in understanding the constitution of values as correlates of

valuative acts manifested in feeling. We will have to return to these issues as these

questions reassert themselves in the course of our discussions.

Returning to the discussion of Husserls early ethics and his debt to Brentano, it

will turn out that the major difference between Husserls earlier and later ethical theories

might actually be seen as somewhat difficult to characterizeand perhaps it is not the

case that there is a particularly radical break which occurs between the early and later

ethics, as some have argued, but rather that there is a deepening and reinvigoration of the

Brentanian ethical thought which he had inherited and re-appropriated in his early

considerations.48 The only position in the whole of his early theory which Husserl might

be seen to have explicitly rejected is the argument that ethics must be founded upon a

categorical imperative that can be derived from a purely formal axiology. In every other

respect, Husserl will be seen to maintain much of the structural elements of his early

theory, namely the thesis of the parallelism between logic and ethics, the understanding

of ethics as Kunstlehre, and the thesis of the intentional correlation of feeling-acts and

values will all be retained in the later ethics. The essential difference will come, then, not

in the rejection or fundamental alteration of Husserls systematic framework; rather, it

will come in the form of a shift in emphasis. The parallelism between logic and ethics

will no longer maintain the same centrality which it had in the early ethics, and objective

values will be seen to be far less fundamental in grounding a valid and objective ethical

48
Gubser, 40.
 40

theory. The values at stake in ethics will be seen to be of an entirely different character

and possessing an entirely different status. Yet, objective values will still be important,

even if no longer central, for filling out a complete ethical theory. These issues will have

to be dealt with in much greater clarity in later chapters in order to see clearly how

Husserl maintains a close connection to his earlier ethical philosophy even while taking it

in radically new directions through a shift in goals and emphasis. However, in order to

understand the shift which occurred, it is first necessary to understand the influences and

concerns which led to the shift in the first place. Once that has been accomplished, it will

be possible to discuss the general contours of Husserls later ethical theory.

ii. Renewal and the Post-War Years, 1917-1924

As noted above, 1914 marked the final year in which Husserl offered the course

entitled Volesungen ber Ethik und Werlehre which contained the essential elements of

his early theory as already outlined. 1914 also saw the death of Archduke Franz

Ferdinand of Austria and marked the beginning of World War I, into which the whole

German nation, including Husserl and his two sons, enthusiastically entered. In 1915,

Husserl wrote a letter to Hugo Mnsterberg, published in English in the United States,

commenting on life in Germany during the war in which he writes that,

[n]aturally there is much, far too much, mourning. But how different the
way in which it is borne and endured! The feeling that every death means
a sacrifice voluntarily offered gives a lofty dignity and raises the
individual suffering into a sphere above all individuality. We no longer
live as private persons. Everyone experiences concentrated in himself the
life of the whole nation, and this gives to every experience its tremendous
momentum. All the tense, passionate striving, all the endeavoring, all the
sorrowing, all the conquering, and all the dying of the soldiers in the
fieldall enter collectively into the feeling and suffering of every one of
usA magnificent stream of national will to win floods through everyone
 41

of us and gives us an undreamt of strength of will in this terrible national

loneliness.49

However, by 1917, Husserls national enthusiasm embodied in the above letter to

Mnsterberg had turned to personal tragedy with the loss of one of his sons and the

serious injuries sustained by the other,50 as well as with the loss of one of his prized

students from the early Gttingen Circle of phenomenology, Adolf Reinach.51 In

addition to the personal tragedy, Husserl and his Germany experienced the increase of the

national loneliness and the sense of meaninglessness of the whole struggle of the First

World War as Germanys defeat and the collapse of Germanys Imperial regime had

become immanent. The sense of crisis was already making itself manifest in the waning

months of World War I and was only to increase with the emergence of the weak and

ineffective Weimar Republic, and its eventual collapse into National Socialism in 1933.

With this landscape of tragedy in which Husserls new transcendental phenomenology

was emerging, with its not so tacit break with the phenomenology of the Gttingen years,

phenomenology itself was acquiring an even more pressing mission.

Husserl writes in the first of his 1917 lectures on Fichte, whose own moral

philosophy and philosophy of religion emerged out of the experience of another crisis of

culture after the defeat of Prussia and Austria by Napoleon, that his time, during and

following the war, is a time of inner self-reflection and reform. It is a time of the

49
Edmund Husserl, Gesammelte Werke Husserliana, Band XXV: Aufstze und Vortrge
(1911-1921), ed. Thomas Nenon and Hans Rainer Sepp (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff
Publishers, 1987), 293.
50
Gubser, 45.
51
Moran, 77.
 42

renewal of all ideal sources of power, which once in our own people [Volk] and from its

deepest spiritual grounds [Seelengrnden] had been acquired.52 This statement on

Husserls part marks the emergence of the overarching theme of renewal which would

define the whole project of his ethicsand arguably of his whole philosophy as well

from this point on until his deathin its later period beginning in 1917. It is likewise

telling that Husserl inaugurates this call within the context of a discussion of Fichtes

ethical and religious philosophy, in which Husserl became very interested during the

course of the war, no doubt out of a deepening sense of the need for renewal and for the

reenactment of the originary religious sources of renewal as Germany and all of Europe

seemed to be moving into a deeply problematic philosophical, moral, and spiritual crisis.

More will be said about this in the concluding sections of this work, but for now it is

important to note that Fichtes thought became increasingly important for Husserl as a

springboard for introducing certain new and important themes for ethical consideration,

among which will become the central concepts of vocation (Beruf) and faith, which will

both mark definitive moments and motifs of the later ethics. However, before moving on

to the discussion of these themes, a general picture of the historical development of

Husserls second period of ethical thought must be presented.

Husserl gave his lectures on Fichtes ethical and religious philosophy in

November of 1917 and repeated the lecture series in January and again in November of

1918, inaugurating his new period of ethical reflection. He next gave the course

52
HUA XXV, 268: eine Zeit der inneren Einkehr und Umkehr. Es ist eine Zeit der
Erneuerung all der idealen Kraftquellen, die dereinst im eigenen Volk und aus seinen
tiefsten Seelengrnden erschlossen worden sind.
 43

Einleitung in die Ethik (Introduction to Ethics) in the summers of 1920 and 1924 as

well as published a series of articles on the topic of renewal in the Japanese journal

Kaizo between 1922 and 1924.53 His new ethical theory revolved around the nature and

activity of the personal ego striving after perfection in life, which he refers to variously as

eudaimonia, happiness, bliss (Glckseligkeit), and salvation (Seligkeit). In place of the

categorical imperative and objective values, his later ethics derives its normative force

not from the demands of the duty to do the best attainable but rather from a notion of love

as providing for a kind of moral obligation and the necessity of choosing a certain

Lebensform, or form of life, which, as a chosen vocation (Beruf), demarcates a sphere

of guiding values which one loves and which, by means of the force of that love which

constituted the vocation in the first place, impose certain norms of action upon the

personal moral agent. However, since a vocation is not an all-encompassing Lebensform

but rather merely has its particular Berufszeit, or vocational time, the values demarcated

by the chosen vocation do not yet constitute a full-fledged ethical system with an absolute

normative basis. Rather, the absolute ought which characterizes Husserls ethics from the

1920s must be derived from an equally absolute Lebensform, one capable of grounding

the whole system of virtuous habits that ultimately provide the possibility for salvation by

directing the individual subject in the direction of finitely actualizing the infinite and

unconditioned ideal of the moral subject, on Husserls account. This all-encompassing

form of life which furnishes the absolute ought of morality is to be found, according to

53
Peuker, From Logic to the Person, 309.
 44

Husserl, in a love which has faith in God as its only adequate object. Thus, he writes in

one manuscript that:

I can be blessed, and can only be such in all suffering, misfortune, and
irrationality of my surroundings, when I believe that God exists and that
this world is Gods world; and if I will with all the strength of my soul to
hold fast to the absolute ought, and that itself is an absolute willing, then I
must believe absolutely that God is; faith is the absolute and highest
requirement.54

Love for and faith in God, then, constitutes the framework within which all moral values

are ordered within the all-encompassing and unified Lebensform of the individual person

and the absolute basis upon which all individual imperatives in the life of the person are

grounded. Along with these considerations, Husserls theory is also characterized by the

general cultural as well as personal need for renewal (Erneuerung), which is the demand

for a conscious turning towards authentic values.

It is clear, then, from this very cursory presentation of the general contours of

Husserls later ethics that there is a picture of ethics at work here which is concerned with

far more existential and religious themes and questions. However, even though no

mention is made at this time of the earlier themes of logic, affective value-ception, etc., it

will have to be seen that the earlier ethical and axiological analyses provided by the pre-

war ethics are still working in the background. It is for this reason that, in an undated

manuscript quoted by Ullrich Melle, Husserl writes that, [t]his entire ethics of the

highest practical good as it was orchestrated by Brentano and taken over by me in

essential features, cannot be the last word. It needs essential qualifications. In such an

54
Edmund Husserl, A V 21, 15b; quoted in Ullrich Melle, Husserls personalist ethics,
Husserl Studies 23 (2007): 15.
 45

ethics calling and inner vocation do not receive their true due.55 Thus, even while

Husserl does not reject any of his previous ethical analyses as being wholly unjustifiable,

they are, nonetheless by no means definitivedeeper and more essential inquiries must

be carried out in order to give them their true sense. That being said, it is nonetheless the

case that the values at stake in Husserls axiology that are essential for ethical judgment,

namely objective values, will not be the region of values at stake in Husserls later ethics.

It is virtue and the ideals of virtue that will be normative, and in particular, those virtues

which are characteristic of the ideal, true-self which the individual is called to become.

The region of objective values will only enter in where they may be incorporated into

those higher ideals.

Much will have to be said on this topic later. For now, we can summarize the

major differences between the first and second periods of ethical reflection in terms of the

shifts of emphasis, which take place within them. For the early ethics, as we have said,

the discussions which take pride of place in Husserls lectures revolve around the

development of a hierarchical system of objective values and the phenomenology of the

constituting acts which bring them to givenness. In many other thinkers, we are used to

defining the different periods of their thought in terms of the theoretical breaks with and

the repudiation of ideas and/or methods to which they had previously adhered, in favor of

new theories no longer dependent in a theoretical sense upon their past ideas. This,

however, will not be the case with Husserl. While the middle ethics of the 1920s has

been defined in the literature in terms of the clear religious and theological development

55
Edmund Husserl, B I 21, 56a; quoted in Melle, 13.
 46

which takes place within them, as well as the emergence of the themes of renewal and

bliss, many of these aspects were already to be found within Husserls early lectures on

the theory of values. For example, Husserl had already argued here that God can be

described as the idea of the highest value.56 Moreover, it is clear that the theme of

renewal, even if not explicitly discussed within his early ethics, was already the driving

impetus of the development of Husserls philosophy from the very beginning, having

inherited from Brentano the idea of the task of philosophy as the impetus for the renewal

of culture in pure theoretical interest. Moreover, as has already been said, the themes of

the middle period do not reject any thesis of the early ethics apart from the validity of the

Brentanian categorical imperative.

To speak precisely, then, of the difference between the early and the middle

ethics, there are no truly systematic elements we can point out, nor is there any

significant disagreement that we can speak of apart from the one already mentioned. The

essential difference, then, is constituted not so much by a repudiation of past theories, but

more by the themes which Husserl takes to be the most important for driving forward a

phenomenological ethical theory and which form the problem-sphere within which

Husserl labors whenever he approaches the questions of ethics. The contrast, then, is to

be found in the fact that all of Husserls early ethical investigations take the form of

discussions on the problems of value and value-ception, the development of an objective

axiology essentially parallel with logic, and the defense of the Brentanian categorical

imperative as the most basic ethical principle for action. The middle ethics, on the other

56
HUA XXVIII, 225f.
 47

hand, focuses discussion away from these problemsagain, not for any reason other than

the recognition that these problem-spheres do not give the last word on an ethical

philosophyand onto the problems of the renewal of the true self and of culture,

vocation, the striving for perfection in the movement towards happiness, bliss, and

salvation, and, finally, faith in God as the problem-spheres within which ethics will have

its last word. At the same time, however, given that Husserl attempts to make a

beginning in ethics through reflections on problems which, though he certainly believes

them to be interconnected, remain purely topical, a certain thematic dissonance remains a

defining characteristic of the difference between the two periods of Husserls ethical

work. This dissonance is best described in the questions which we can put to Husserl as

to precisely what sort of relationship an objective axiology would have to the ethical

attitude as it will come to be defined in the later ethics as the striving for salvation,

renewal, etc. all based upon the foundation of an absolute faith and love for God. Is not

placing ones hope in the divine and in an infinite striving towards salvation which is not

to be won in this life, but rather in the next, precisely to reject the values of the world and

of worldly objects in favor of those of the next? To this, and other questions regarding

the integration of the different ethical themes, Husserl does not furnish an answer. We

shall have to take up this problem for ourselves.

Prior to leaving the topic of the historical development of Husserls ethical

thought behind for the present, however, a word must be said about the third and final

period of Husserls ethical thought beginning in the 1930s. The texts for these

discussions have not yet become available to the general public, and as such, not much is
 48

widely known about the further development of his ethical discussions. Henning Peuker

indicates that Husserls period of ethical reflection is contained in manuscripts, which

are embedded in a broader metaphysical conception.57 The fact that these manuscripts

have not yet appeared, however, makes it very difficult to say precisely how this

metaphysical conception is to be conceived. It is for this reason that the current

discussion will limit itself to the key texts of the middle ethical period and to those few

relevant texts available in the Crisis writings of the 1930s which are presently available.

In The Crisis, however, it is clear that the broad framework of the ethics of the 1920s has

not been abandoned, and indeed, the themes of renewal and vocation remain fundamental

to Husserls whole project in this work. More will be said on this when the appropriate

time arises. For now it is enough to say that there is no reason to think that between the

ethics of the 1920s and the ethics of the 1930s that there will be any significant break in

Husserls ideas. From Peukers description, it would seem that Husserls final ethics will

be an attempt to deepen his ethical reflections of the previous two periodsas, indeed,

even the early ethics are never totally rejected but only deepened in the ethics of the

1920s. With this understanding of the historical background and intellectual

development at work in the later periods of Husserls ethical teaching, a word must now

be said about certain difficulties present in approaching Husserls ethics as providing a

complete philosophical, systematic frameworkdifficulties which will be both immanent

to Husserls project itself as well as present in the literature on Husserls ethics at the

present time. These difficulties will have to be approached to a certain extent as well in

57
Peuker, From Logic to the Person, 309.
 49

order to set the stage for the current discussion before a systematic investigation of

Husserls ethics will be at all possible.

b. The Challenges of Approaching Husserls Ethics

As indicated, we face two major problems in attempting to give a coherent and

consistent treatment of Husserls ethical philosophy as a complete system. The first, and

most important reason is that Husserl never considered himself to have provided a

complete system of ethics in the first place.58 This is cited as the reason why he was

never sufficiently satisfied with his ethical theories to have ever been willing to publish

them, with the obvious exception of the Kaizo articles of the 1920s. Having never

sufficiently synthesized all of his various analyses on ethical topics like value, love,

vocation, faith, etc. into a unified systematic presentation which would allow us to refer

unequivocally to Husserls Ethics, Husserls ethical writings and theories are

fundamentally lacking any kind of systematic framework that would provide them with a

needed theoretical unity such that they could stand up amongst other ethical

systemswhether the Kantian, the Aristotelian, etc.as a possible and valid option.

This is the first difficulty which Husserls ethical writings present to anyone interested in

filling this lacuna in Husserlian scholarshipnamely explicitly providing an ethical

theory in accordance with the basic principles of Husserls own meditations on the issue.

Any attempt, then, to undertake a systematic study of Husserlian ethics cannot hope to do

so with the expectation that it will find already present in the various ethical texts left by

58
Christopher Arroyo, Humean and Kantian Influences on Husserls Later Ethics,
Philosophy Today 50 (2006): 57. See also, Janet Donahoe, Husserl on Ethics and
Intersubjectivity: From Static to Genetic Phenomenology (Amherst, NY: Humanity
Books, 2004), 171.
 50

Husserl a system readymade for us. Rather, a systematic study must be prepared to

supply for Husserl just the kind of system after which his ethics was constantly seeking.

This, however, raises a secondary problem.

It is, perhaps, universally acknowledged that Husserl is not prepared to furnish a

finished ethical theory and that, moreover, even among the various texts and topical

analyses which Husserl is prepared to deliver, there remain various problems which, if

not representing problems of inconsistency, at least force us to ask about the justification

of his claims. For instance, how is it possible to develop an objective theory of values

which would be at all normative, even in the later ethics wherein the focus is not

precisely objective values, on the basis of feeling-acts since it is almost always admitted

that feelings have perennially posed a problem for philosophersthat feelings are seen as

irrational, fickle, and untrustworthy? If that is the case, how can feelings provide for an

objective grounding for ethical valuations? Another charge might be, how can love

provide an adequate normative basis for ethics since love is ordinarily thought of as

precisely not the sort of thing which can be commanded but which seems, rather, to arise

spontaneouslyand perhaps even irrationally, as, for example when we are faced with

the phenomena of love at first sight?59 In addition to these, a whole host of other

questions and objections might readily be posed to the Husserlian account of morality. In

dealing with these sets of problems and in dealing with the fact that Husserl does, indeed,

59
A notable exception to this assumption would obviously come in the form of
Christianity. As will be seen later on, Husserl will fall squarely within the Christian
tradition in formulating his ethics on the commandment of love as formulated in the
Gospels. The philosophical prejudice against love as capable of being commanded and
as being irrational and subject to whim and passion, however, is still quite alive in this
day and age.
 51

lack the systematic framework that would provide the needed cogency, precision, and

complementarity among his various ideas and analyses, certain commentators, trying to

salvage some aspects of Husserls ideas, have attempted to provide just such a systematic

framework as Husserl needed. Such an attempt can clearly be seen in Christopher

Arroyos 2006 article entitled, Humean and Kantian Influences on Husserls Later

Ethics, as well as in Henning Peuckers article, Husserls Critique of Kants Ethics.60

However, in seeking to do so, Arroyo is fundamentally dissatisfied with a number of

aspects of Husserls later ethics, which he sees as indefensiblefor instance, the ultimate

grounding of ethics in the divine, vocation, and love.61 On Arroyos account, then,

providing a systematic framework which will allow Husserlians to, fruitfully reconstruct

(or, perhaps, construct) a Husserlian account of ethics,62 can only be accomplished by

jettisoning certain key concepts of Husserls later ethics. The systematic framework

which Husserls ethics will then be provided by Arroyo will be the Kantian system and a

Husserlian phenomenological ethics will simply represent another philosophically

interesting and creative species of Kantian deontology.

Alternatively, other scholars might, seizing upon other influencing factors on

Husserls later ethical theories, attempt to make Husserl into a Humean or Fichtean, and,

while there are certainly levels of agreement between Husserl and these two thinkers,

making Husserl into a Kantian, a Humean, or a Fichtean can only ever be accomplished

60
See Henning Peucker, Husserls Critique of Kants Ethics, Journal of the History of
Philosophy 45 (2007): 317ff.
61
See Arroyo, 63ff.
62
Ibid., 69.
 52

by passing over those moments of fundamental disagreement which Husserl would have

with Kant, Hume, and Fichte respectively. That is to say, providing a Kantian, a

Humean, or a Fichtean grounding to Husserls ethics can only be accomplished at

Husserls expense, by forcing him to do away with certain doctrines that would be

inconsistent with the framework in question. However, as I will hope to show through

the course of the following discussions, this is by no means necessary in seeking to

accomplish the task of giving Husserl a systematic framework with which to unify his

work, and, moreover, it is also by no means desirable to do so, as every aspect of

Husserls later ideas might well show themselves to be both valuable and necessary for

providing not only a consistent ethical system, but also a valid system which would be an

urgently needed answer to the ethical crises of the twenty-first century.

What is needed, then, rather than a hasty departure from basic Husserlian insights

into the grounds of ethical normativity, motivation, and goals by subsuming his thought

under alien ethical systems, is a deeper and protracted investigation into the problems of

Husserlian ethical thought as they have begun to emerge in this brief presentation of its

development. What certainly seem to be key to understanding Husserls ethics is the

fundamental interconnection between value and the principle acts which bring value to

givenness, namely acts of love. In the development of this theory, as he has inherited it

from Brentano, Husserl also has inherited important problems and equivocations which

had already manifested themselves in Brentanos ethics, namely the problems of how

feelings are to be understood as presenting values to consciousness, how such feeling-

acts can provide the basis for a normative ethics, what connection can be found between
 53

feeling and love as they had been lumped together into a single class of psychic acts

by Brentano and as they are taken up into Husserls own value-theory, and to what extent

the Brentanian/Husserlian theory of valuation might really be grounded upon a

tremendous equivocation between acts of love and feeling. Moreover, the extent to

which the theory of ethical normativity being grounded in a faith and love for God as it

had been developed to a greater degree of specificity in the course of Husserls middle

period of ethical research must also be brought into systematic study in order to establish

the feasibility of this philosophical doctrine as the capstone of Husserls ethical

philosophy and how this central principle of ethical normativity can be justified and

integrated into a view of the world as ordered according to an objective hierarchy of

goods which motivate us in rational or irrational ways. Husserl, as has already been

stated, failed to provide an adequate answer to these and other problems with respect to

his ethics, and, without an adequate answer to them, his whole ethical theory collapses.

That there is value in salient features of Husserls ethical theory, however, seems

clear if we recognize certain implications of his thought. In arguing that feelings and

values stand in a relationship of essential correlation such that feelings are not simply

irrational and completely subject to whim and caprice, Husserl is able to provide a truly

robust account of feeling which avoids falling into a kind of simplistic view of feelings

(vis--vis Kant) in which feelings, to the extent that they become motivating factors for

action, exert a kind of causal necessity upon the will under the form of self-love.

Husserls view of feeling is capable of recognizing that there is a rationality in certain

types of feeling which can allow us to pay careful heed to our affective lives in order to
 54

recognize, and in turn realize, the values which are at stake along the path to individual,

personal flourishingthis will be Husserls understanding of eudaimonia and bliss.

Contemporary psychotherapy certainly would affirm such a view as respecting the ways

in which we must pay heed to our emotional life and, to a certain extent and within

definite limits, follow out our emotional desires in order to avoid problems of repression,

ressentiment, etc. One could even go so far as to say that Husserls value theory is

perhaps even capable of providing a more radical explanation of this insight of

psychotherapy than empirical psychology would be prepared to furnish in this context.

To that extent, Husserl reechoes the affirmation of feeling which was characteristic of

Brentanos thought and which has come to be characteristic of the whole movement of

early phenomenology embodied in such thinkers as Max Scheler, Dietrich von

Hildebrand, Edith Stein, and others.

Moreover, in the understanding of values as the essential correlates of certain

kinds of love-acts, Husserl is able to account for a number of things which serve to bring

insight into the task of ethical living as well as to provide an explanation for how we are

motivated freely, yet in absolutely binding ways, in striving to realize values. On the one

hand, the understanding of value as a motivating principle which is the correlate of

subjective acts of love serves to explain why it is that I pursue this value rather than that,

while another chooses the opposite, for instance, namely because certain values fall

within the order of love which I establish in my desiderative life as things which I love

(value) more highly than others. Moreover, the idea that my loves and hates are what

essentially open me up to the realm of objective, and not simply subjectively posited,
 55

values provides an understanding of what the ethical task is to consist in, namely in the

right ordering of my loves and hates so as to be motivated to the pursuit only of the

highest values. Moreover, just as much as it is the true and absolute love of a mother for

her children which binds her absolutely to their care and the realization of their

potentialities and the satisfaction of their needs, so also does an absolute love for the

highest values bind one absolutely to the realization of those values in a way in which

mere duty for dutys sake alone never could.

The idea of personal vocation, moreover, will provide Husserl with the ability to

discuss the ways in which the ethical call is specified to the unique individuali.e. the

ways in which morality is not simply about the bare form of the universal law, but rather

that there are certain moral claims and demands upon me which are absolutely binding

for me and for me alone. That they are binding for me alone and are not universal laws

binding for all does not, for Husserl, lessen their normative force, but rather indicates that

the moral life must be lived in unique ways, with each person infinitely striving to realize

their authentic, true selvesthe self which they are absolutely called to be.

Finally, the idea of God as the teleological principle of the whole ethical life, as

that which represents the principle of all moral striving, of the objective order of moral

values, and ultimately of the meaning of the true-self which we are absolutely called to

exemplify, will provide Husserl with a way of understanding, on the one hand, how

morality stands in relation to religion in a manner that can satisfy many of the

fundamental intuitions of the history of the West from Plato and into the present day

which, it seems, has always linked up the idea of fidelity to the moral law with fidelity to
 56

God or the gods, and, on the other, how the character of ones true self is to be uncovered

and pursued in relation to the objective values of the world. Without the idea of God, the

pursuit of the highest values might very well turn out to be highly questionablein what

sense could there even be an objective hierarchy of values in a world-order which lacks a

teleological principle? Husserl certainly seems to think that a world such as that would

lack all meaning, as would the binding force of the absolute ought, and is prepared to

justify this insight phenomenologically. This insight, moreover, is even recognized by

Kant in postulating Gods existence in practical reason, even where pure theoretical

reason is unable to rise to such knowledgewithout God, the idea of a moral world-

order, of an absolutely binding duty to do the good, and of an objective hierarchy of

values (for Husserl) will be absolutely meaningless.

Moreover, placing the objective hierarchy of the values of the world within a

theological framework of relation to God as the sole absolute value prevents other values

from being absolutized, whether values of usefulness, of pleasure, of vitality, of the

spiritual, and finally of the religious which, in every case, would lead into a kind of

excessive emphasis upon a region or class of values tending towards the irrationalism of

the fanatic. Here, following Max Scheler, we might give examples of the various sorts of

fanaticisms at work in the absolutization of particular classes of values. For instance, an

absolutization of the class of values following under the heading useful, would be

characteristic, in Schelers estimationand there are reasons to think that Husserl shared
 57

this opinion as he seems to indicate in his letter to Arnold Metzger63 upon reading his

dissertationof both Capitalism and Marxism as well as every form of utilitarianism.

Moreover, to the absolutization of the values of pleasure would correspond the excesses

of hedonism, and to that of vital values would correspond the violence of the warrior

culture or the superficiality of the modern phenomenon of the sports fanatic.64 The

absolutization of spiritual values would correlate to an excessive and overblown

confidence in reason and the ultimate value of the products of reason (e.g. philosophy,

science, etc.). It will have to be shown how Husserl does not fall into this form of

fanaticism. Finally, the absolutization of the religious sphere leads very obviously into a

religious fanaticism which comes in the form of violent religious extremism, but which

also takes the form of a political extremism based in religious belief, and can certainly be

seen also in the often self-destructive penitential forms of religiosity characteristic of

extreme religious reform movements of the Renaissance and the Middle Ages. It will

also have to be shown how a value-system which places God at the position of the

absolute value in Husserls ethics as the principle of all subsequent ethical valuation will

not fall victim to such a religious fanaticism as is to be found in an absolutization of the

dimension of the religious even while subsuming ethics under the form of religiosity in

love for God. Indeed, the ability of Husserls ethics to steer clear of all of these forms of

extremism in morality only serves to indicate the robust character of Husserls ethical

63
See Edmund Husserl, Letter to Arnold Metzger, in Husserl: Shorter Works, trans.
Erazim Kohk and ed. Peter McCormick and Frederick Elliston (Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 362.
64
See Manfred S. Frings, LifeTime: Max Schelers Philosophy of Time, A First Inquiry
and Presentation (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003), 50ff.
 58

philosophy as well as its promise for overcoming the ethical crises of our current day

precisely by overthrowing the absolutization of finite, mundane values in all of its forms

which is the principle cause of the fragmentation of modern society lying at the heart of

the crisis. Husserl, however, cannot accomplish this without his theological principle of

morality. The idea of God as the principle of all morality must thus be respected, at least

here at the outset of our investigations, and not be assumed from the start as a reason to

reject the validity of his ethical theory, as Arroyo is want to do.

Moreover, the theological reflections of his middle ethical period, fundamentally

represents a further deepening and development of his earlier teaching on value and

feeling. As has already been mentioned, the idea of God was already accounted for in his

earliest ethical reflections. However, in the ethics of the 1920s, Husserl comes to

deepen his theological reflections in such a way as to recognize the essential role which

the divine must play within the context of valuation and valuations subjective source.

The task, however, of systematically linking up his teaching on valuation with his

understanding of God as the principle of order and normativity within the ethical life is

never really carried out in Husserls writings from this period. As such, the work of

harmonizing the deepest insights of his ethical work which all contribute to a robust

account of the ethical life capable of giving direction to modern society must fall to

others. Moreover, working strictly within the framework of Husserls own philosophical

vision and making use only of the tools which he himself has left us in the form of his

many published and still unpublished writings, we do not find ready at hand the

necessary tools to accomplish this sort of harmonization, and perhaps this should be no
 59

surprise. Collaboration with others in philosophy, and not only with ones own

contemporaries, but collaboration with the whole tradition, is often what is needed in

overcoming the roadblocks towards developing a unified philosophical theory.

Moreover, it might even prove to be the case, that, for all the ways in which Husserl was,

from first to last, driven in the development of his phenomenological philosophy and of

his phenomenological method by the theological, religious impulses of his own personal

spirit, nevertheless, Husserls own thought was not sufficiently theological to carry out

this task to its ultimate conclusions.

Now, certainly one must be careful in making such assessments. Husserls

thought explicitly avoids carrying out theological questions and assuming theological

answers for very important methodological reasons which certainly cannot be overlooked

or so easily set aside. However, one can also not deny, as shall become clearer as we

progress in the study of Husserls ethical work, that Husserls ethical philosophy stands

in need of some completion and, moreover, that this completion can only be carried out

by way of the development of an equally robust theology, whether of a natural,

philosophical sort or of an explicitly religious kind. If, however, we borrow from the

theological, philosophical thought of the tradition, we also, from Husserls perspective,

cannot borrow insights which are entirely alien to phenomenology or which are not

capable of some degree of phenomenological confirmation or, at the very least,

phenomenological indications of the possible validity of such insights. If, then, these are

our basic requirements, then we must first seek to borrow from such thinkers as are

capable of being called, at least in some sense, phenomenological.

 60

As Steven W. Laycock argues in his introduction to a collection of essays on the

discipline of phenomenological theology as it has been developed in the last half of the

twentieth century, a philosophy can be called phenomenological in several possible

senses, especially considering the vast range of definitions of phenomenology held by

the various denizens of the phenomenological movement from Husserl, to Scheler, to

Heidegger, to Sartre, to Merleau-Ponty, etc. If we abstract to a very basic, and admittedly

very loose, level which is sufficiently broad enough to include such diverse and disparate

philosophers under the umbrella of phenomenologyparty politics aside, most people

would agree that Husserl, Heidegger, et al. are all phenomenologists, even if we continue

to squabble over how to define phenomenology and over whose phenomenology is the

most successful and best carries out the tasks of phenomenologythen we can see that

phenomenology in one sense or another always seeks to carry out investigations of the

world as phenomenon and its world-objects as phenomena, i.e. as appearances in their

manners of appearing.65 Moreover, one can say that phenomenologys essential method

of approach to phenomena is carried out through some form of reflection upon the

phenomenon as it is intentionally given to the subject in experience. The four senses in

which we can evaluate the phenomenological character of a philosophy, then, are the

following: 1) the philosophy takes phenomena as its subject matter and reflection as

its basic method, 2) the philosophy takes phenomena as its subject, but is not based on

reflection, 3) the philosophy makes use of reflection, but its subject is not

phenomena, and 4) the philosophy does not have phenomena as its subject and does

65
The use of the terms phenomenon and appearing do not need to commit us here to
the Kantian phenomenon/noumenon distinction.
 61

not make use of reflection in its method of approach.66 He goes on to argue that

category (1) would represent the paradigmatic case of a phenomenological philosophy.

Category (4), by contrast would be the paradigmatic case of a philosophy which is not in

any sense phenomenological.

As Laycock goes on to argue, much of the main problems of phenomenology, in

particular those having to do with the elucidation of the transcendental ego as it is

approached in the project of genetic phenomenology seeking to uncover the subterranean

and sedimented layers of consciousness, really ultimately cannot be carried out by way of

a pure method of reflection, but requires a kind of reconstruction by means of which

the data of reflection are synthesized and the holes in our reflective abilities are filled in.

It is a method of extrapolating from reflective knowledge which is not itself reflective.

Moreover, he further notes that the transcendental ego itself, which is a central, if not the

central, point of inquiry of transcendental phenomenology is never really a phenomenon

except by way of fundamental equivocations. It is, as he writes, not an object but a

subject, and consequently not an object-as-it-appears.67 If, then, transcendental

phenomenology as a form of transcendental egology, or a study of the transcendental ego

and constituting consciousness, is to be understood as phenomenology within this

framework, then we must enlarge our notion of what phenomenology is, since, restricted

merely to the study of phenomena by way of reflection and nothing more, not even

66
Steven W. Laycock, Introduction: Toward an Overview of Phenomenological
Theology, in Essays in Phenomenological Theology, ed. Steven W. Laycock and James
G. Hart (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 4.
67
Ibid.
 62

phenomenology would be, properly speaking, phenomenological. He writes that, if we

enlarge our conception of phenomenological method to include eidetic and conceptual

techniques that, while presupposing reflection, nonetheless serve to extrapolate beyond

the limits of reflective access, the schema thus generated confines phenomenological

views exclusively to category (1).68

However, by enlarging the first category of philosophy to include both

phenomena and what is essentially connected with phenomena as well as reflection and

what presupposes reflection, he has essentially included as part and parcel of the

phenomenological method and subject matter the methods and subject matters of

categories (2) and (3). This is done for necessary reasons. Without it, phenomenology is

essentially limited to the mere task of descriptioni.e. description without explanation

and without synthesizing analyses into a more systematic view of the world as a whole.

However, in incorporating categories (2) and (3) into the overall definition of

phenomenological philosophy, certain consequences arise with respect to the

interpretation of the relationship of previous eras of philosophy and philosophical schools

to phenomenologyin effect, the radicalism of Husserls new beginning in

phenomenology is called into question, and it is perhaps highly desirable that it should be

so. The radicalism of phenomenology, i.e. its originality, is called into question here

because, even if we assume that only phenomenology after Husserl can be categorized as

falling under class (1), to the extent that category (1) includes the methods and/or subject-

matters of classes (2) and (3), classes (2) and (3) can already be said to be, at the very

68
Ibid., 4-5.
 63

least in an extrinsic sense, phenomenological inasmuch as they can contribute to

phenomenological analyses and may, even, already include proto-phenomenological

analyses within their problems and investigations. Moreover, it seems questionable to me

to think that there has ever been a philosophy which would fall completely, or even at all,

under category (4), i.e. which has nothing to do with the investigation into phenomena, or

objects-as-appearing69, and which in no way makes use of reflective-eidetic methods of

inquiryi.e. the analysis of essences. The history of philosophy is not so simplistic as

that, and, if this is the case, then one might further question the legitimacy of Husserls

(historically nave) philosophy of history which divides the whole history of philosophy

into a pre-Cartesian form of Objectivism and into a post-Cartesian Transcendental

Subjectivism, the latter of which represents the true philosophy which culminates,

ultimately, in the radical new beginning of Husserlian phenomenology which is precisely

the renewal of the ancient Greek spirit, which the Greeks themselves only navely

comprehended.70 If, moreover, this presupposition can legitimately be questioned, as a

careful reading of the history of philosophy is capable of showing, then phenomenology,

under the inclusive banner of category (1), has already made an appearance on the world

stage long before Husserl and will continue long after. In essence, as Laycock argues, all

philosophy is phenomenologicalthe differences between a Husserl and a Plato, just as

69
Again, the Kantian distinction between phenomena and noumena should not be
presupposed here as normative for the understanding of what is meant by the terms
phenomena and objects-as-appearing.
70
Edmund Husserl, Phenomenology and Anthropology, in Husserl: Shorter Works,
trans. Richard G. Schmitt ed. Peter McCormick and Frederick Elliston (Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 316.
 64

between a Husserl and a Heidegger and a Merleau-Ponty, will ultimately be one of

degrees with respect to method and evidence.71

If it is objected that this presentation of phenomenology is altogether too broad

inasmuch as it has seemingly eradicated all differences between all the various schools

and historical figures of philosophy and has carried out a kind of isomorphic

identification of phenomenology with philosophy itself, it should be stated that this is

simply not the case. Yes, for Husserl as well as for many other phenomenologists,

phenomenology does represent the true form of all philosophy. However, as has already

been noted above, not every philosophy is created equal. Differences among

philosophies are differences of degrees of participation in the true form of philosophy, as

hubristic as that might sound. The hubris of this statement is avoided if we recognize

that, just as much as no philosopher from Socrates on has ever truly considered

themselves as possessing the true philosophy in the fullest sense of the word, but rather

were mere lovers of wisdom, merely in pursuit of the true philosophy, so also must the

unmitigated braggadocio of the Husserlian claim to radical originality in phenomenology

be tempered by the recognition of phenomenologys infinite and unattainable task. If

phenomenology, as it wishes to be, is isomorphic with true philosophy, then can we say

that even Husserl, properly speaking, is a phenomenologist in the full sense of the

word? The clear answer would be no. However, if we once again restrict ourselves to

the understanding of phenomenology as something like a philosophical school72 within

71
Laycock, 5.
72
However much Husserl might object to such a moniker.
 65

the broad history of philosophy, and, moreover, we assume for a moment that this school

most closely approaches the pure form of philosophy, and does this precisely because of

its subject-matter and its method, then our preceding discussion should nevertheless serve

to indicate that we should not be at all surprised to find that the insights of

phenomenology are already to be found in such proto-phenomenologists in the history

of philosophy whose method of inquiry most closely resembles the methods of approach

of modern phenomenologists. The differences between such thinkers and a Husserl

would merely be differences of degreeand the more minimal the degree, the better for

our purposes here, except inasmuch as their differences might provide pertinent critiques

of whatever problems will undoubtedly be found within the Husserlian phenomenological

approach. Moreover, if we can find such thinkers, whose method of approach, whose

subject matter, or (preferably) both are most closely identifiable as proto-

phenomenological, who can serve to enlarge our systematic study of Husserlian ethics in

such a way as to lend analytical and systematic tools to aid Husserl in filling in the gaps

in his analyses, then we have ultimately satisfied the desires of Husserls ethics and can

proceed to the task of a systematic study of Husserls ethics which can do justice to all of

Husserls highest hopes.

However, in addition to the phenomenological character of such thinkers who

can lend support to Husserls ethical project, the clearest road to the elucidation of

Husserls ethics lies in choosing from among such proto-phenomenological thinkers as

are also capable of avoiding the great pitfalls with respect to the absolutization of value-

ranks mentioned above which Husserls ethics itself seeks to avoid. That is, a
 66

phenomenological addition to Husserls ethics can only be made by a thinker who is both

phenomenological in the narrower sense as being the proto-phenomenologist mentioned

above, and who also will not commit Husserl to the absolutization of a range of values

which are not legitimately capable of such a valuationthis thinker, in allowing Husserl

to be Husserl, must assist Husserls thought to steer the clear middle course which his

ethics seeks to take from first to last in the pursuit of the highest values. For essential

reasons, which will only become fully clear in the discussion of Husserls view of the

history of ethics and later on in the discussion of the phenomenological method and the

task of a scientific ethics, I believe that the thinker whose proto-phenomenological

thought will provide the clearest path along this middle road and which also will provide

somewhat familiar, but also more highly developed, systematic tools for Husserls use is

to be found in the medieval philosopher-theologian John Duns Scotus. Scotus ethics, I

hope to show, share deep theoretical insights with Husserls later ethical writings which

would allow Scotus to, as it were, pick up where Husserl left off in his own analyses and

fill in the blanks in the ethical system without at the same time departing too far from

phenomenology in the narrower sense of the word.

 67

Chapter II
Scotus and Husserl

3. Scotus and Husserl

In bringing Scotus and Husserl into discussion and, in so doing, bridging the gap

between medieval and phenomenological philosophy, it will not be my intention to show

that Husserl is a Scotist, nor that there is any kind of historical link between Husserl and

Scotus. In regard to the latter, there is no evidence that Husserl ever read Scotus.

Moreover, even if one might recall that Brentano did possess a marked interest, in his

early philosophical career, in the Jesuit thinker Francisco Suarez, who in turn was greatly

influenced by Duns Scotus, this would still hardly provide us with a solid foundation

within which to judge Husserl as in any sense an inheritor of Scotus.73 Moreover, the

only other link between Husserl and Scotus from an historical perspective, namely

Heideggers dissertation on what he believed to have been Scotus theory of the

categories and his theory of judgment, would be equally as tenuous for two reasons. First

of all, it is most likely the case that Husserl was interested in Heideggers dissertation

simply because Heidegger had already made an impression on Husserl as being a student

with a great deal of potential and who might carry on the legacy of phenomenology after

him. Secondly, it has been shown that the text Heidegger was dealing with was not in

fact penned by Scotus at all but by one of his disciples. Moreover, the attempt to show

that Husserl was, perhaps unconsciously, a Scotist would serve no great purpose and

would represent too great a claim. In the history of philosophy, it is evident that ideas

tend to repeat themselves from generation to generation, even without new thinkers

73
Moran, 26.
 68

having read old thinkers who shared similar thoughts to their own. For instance,

Descartes seems to be wholly unaware of the unoriginality of the form of the cogito

argument and of its precursors in Augustine. However, in spite of the similarity between

Descartes cogito, ergo sum and Augustines si fallor, sum, one would be hard-

pressed to call Descartes an Augustinian in any meaningful sense.

In the same vein, it would be inappropriate to call Husserl a Scotist even in spite

of what will be shown to be monumental similarities between the two thinkers. All that

will have to be shown is that there exists in Scotus a fundamental openness to

phenomenological thought and, indeed, already full-fledged phenomenological insights,

in the sense articulated above, into the ethical life of the human agent such that a

systematic engagement of their thought in tandem will open up possibilities of

understanding how Husserls ideas can be approached as valid and as possessing within

themselves the possibility of a coherent systematization. This will be possible given the

fact that Scotus, for very important theoretical reasons which we will see in the course of

the discussions which are to follow, possesses theoretical resources which are capable of

unifying the sorts of ideas that Husserl wants to defend. The use of Scotus here, then,

will represent something of a hermeneutical principle which will allow for the possibility

of a sound and complete articulation of Husserl at his best and allowing us to fill in the

blanks where Husserl leaves questions unanswered, without giving into Arroyos

temptation to modify Husserl in order to bring him into conformity with other

philosophical traditions. Thinking Husserl through Scotus will provide an opportunity to

let Husserls unfinished ethical system be brought to its fullest articulation.

 69

At the same time, while the purpose of the following discussions will be to

provide for an explication of Husserls ethical theories, the fruitful engagement of

Husserlian and Scotistic philosophy, specifically, and phenomenology and medieval

philosophy, more broadly, will provide the opportunity to make a few larger claims

which, while not the main topic of this work here, certainly cannot be ignored and might

also be seen as opening up new venues for phenomenological philosophy and Husserlian

scholarship. Thus, pursuing the main, exegetical aims of this current project may very

well serve as an apt teaching moment in the possibilities offered by an open and

constructive engagement of phenomenology and medieval philosophy, and with Scotus in

particular. With that thought in mind, a few words must be said at the beginning of this

project by way of a preliminary explanation of my intentions in bringing Scotus into

discussion in this way. Particularly, certain red flags might go up in arguing that a

medieval scholastic thinker like Duns Scotus can be capable of providing Husserl with a

systematic framework within which his ethical thought can be interpreted in a meaningful

and rigorous way. The worries which this might produce must be dealt with, in particular

because of the altogether problematic relationship between phenomenology and

scholasticism and the attempts which have been made in the past century to bring the two

into synthesis. I will, thus, attempt to preempt some of these concerns by discussing

some of the ways in which these attempts at synthesis have failedand, one might say

failed spectacularlyby betraying the inner drive and requirements of phenomenological

philosophy, in the narrower sense. In doing so, I hope to distinguish my own attempt to

bring phenomenology and scholasticism into contact by illustrating precisely what I am

 70

not hoping to do first, and then moving on to certain thinkers whose similar attempts may

provide case-studies in a successful integration of phenomenology and scholastic thought

from whom we might derive inspiration and direction for the present study.

4. Medieval Philosophy and Phenomenology

Perhaps one the most well-known, most influential, and most deeply problematic

attempts to provide an explicit synthesis of medieval and phenomenological74 thought is

to be found in the philosophical work of Karol Wojtylathe future Pope John Paul II.

Wojtylas project was an attempt to bring phenomenological philosophy, mediated in

large part through his understanding of phenomenology as it was represented in the

thought of Max Scheler,75 and Thomistic philosophy into contact with the intent, for the

most part, of revitalizing Thomism and giving it a new linguistic and methodological

expression in the form of phenomenology. The result, unfortunately, was a philosophy

which, as many from both the Thomistic and phenomenological camps have argued, was

neither very Thomistic nor very phenomenological. If, as this investigation will seek to

do, we wish to bring phenomenology and medieval philosophy together againthis time

taking Scotus rather than Thomas as our key medieval figure, then it will be necessary

74
From now on, I will be careful to use the terms phenomenology and
phenomenological in the more narrow sense as discussed above. Where I wish to return
to the broader sense of phenomenology, I will attempt to make the sense in which I am
using phenomenology clear so as to avoid ambiguity and equivocations.
75
It is unclear what, if anything, Wojtyla ever read of Husserl. Although he comments
occasionally on Husserl, his comments generally seem to be based on common
mischaracterizations of Husserls thought rather than on an understanding or familiarity
with Husserl himself. It seems more to be the case that Wojtylas understanding of what
phenomenology was meant to be came more or less exclusively from his contact with the
thought of Max Scheler and the Polish phenomenologist Narziss Ach.
 71

to take a moment to pay close attention to the reasons which motivated Wojtylas failure

and what amounts to his betrayal of phenomenology in favor of what, one might charge,

is nothing more than a dogmatic Thomism. This will allow me to clarify both the method

of my approach to the problems of incorporating medieval philosophy into

phenomenology as well as to illustrate the dangers which I wish to avoid.

For Wojtyla, phenomenology as a method must be directly contrasted with what

he calls the phenomenalism of Kants approach to philosophy.76 Kantian

phenomenalism, conjoined with a system of transcendental idealism, assumes that the

thing in-itself is unknowable in its essence and real being and that all we are given in

sensory and intellectual experience are merely phenomena generated by the mind and

modified by a series of categorizations. Phenomenalism, thus, unavoidably separates the

mind from any possible knowledge of things-in-themselves as well as any sort of

experience of things-in-themselves. Wojtyla wants to hold phenomenology up in contrast

to this as a method that does, in fact, return the individual to an experience and

knowledge of things-in-themselves precisely as things given as real in experience. In

order to accomplish this task, phenomenology requires that the knower return to the

original experience of the thing and accept, the essence of the thing just as it appears to

us in immediate experience.77 Epistemologically, Wojtyla believes that this encounter

of essences in immediate experience proceeds along the lines of an intuitionism which,

76
Karol Wojtyla, The Separation of Experience from the Act in Ethics in the Philosophy
of Immanuel Kant and Max Scheler, in Person and Community, trans. and ed. Theresa
Sandok, O.S.M. (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 32.
77
Ibid.
 72

does not make a clear distinction between sensory and rational elements in human

knowledge.78 This understanding of phenomenology as a method of intuition that takes

knowledge as a unified whole, incorporating at one and the same time both sensory and

intellectual knowledge, represents, in part, Wojtylas turn away from the post-Cartesian

tendency to assign only to the mind any ability for knowledge or cognitive contact with

the world of objects.

It is clear from even a cursory study of Wojtylas works that he sees in

phenomenology a great deal of potential in its methodological approach. However, at the

same time, he makes it clear that as a method, phenomenology is problematic from the

start. While phenomenology is not indistinguishable from the type of phenomenalism

that identifies all phenomena as distinct from the essence of the thing-in-itself which is

radically unknowable, nevertheless Wojtyla does make the claim that phenomenology is

not concerned entirely with the metaphysical essence of the thing understood as the

thing-in-itself, but really only with, how something manifests itself to us in immediate

experience.79 Wojtyla contrasts this problematic with the metaphysical achievements of

Aristotelianism and Thomism, which, he claims, do concern themselves with the being of

the thing as opposed to its appearance or manifestation in experience. Here Wojtyla

locates his chief complaint against phenomenology in the charge that phenomenology

qua phenomenology cannot grasp the full ontic dimensions of the thing based upon its

reduction to appearances in immediate experience. Such a metaphysical analysis is

78
Ibid., 33.
79
Ibid., 33.
 73

beyond the scope of the phenomenological method according to Wojtyla. In spite of this

limitation, however, Wojtyla still maintains that every lived experience is capable of

giving some knowledge of the phenomenological essence of a thing based upon the

experience of the object and thus can have a great deal of impact upon any area of

philosophy to which it is applied.80 However, this ability to transcend towards the

objective world is still subject to the problem that was already discussed above, that this

is a phenomenological objectivity which does not yet attain to the full metaphysical

validity that an Aristotelianism and a Thomism could achieve.

In understanding Wojtylas critique of phenomenology and where he sees it as

limited, one can focus on two major topics in Wojtylas work, namely the

phenomenological grounding of ethics and the issues of realism and idealism. Wojtyla

feels that phenomenology is incapable of dealing satisfactorily with either of these issues.

With respect to ethics, Wojtyla argues that the essentialist analysis which he claims is

proper to phenomenology is unable to do full justice to ethical experience in general

because of its lack of metaphysical understanding and methods. The basis for his claim is

that ethics is a movement that is dynamic and teleological. The dynamism of the ethical

life, which can be seen in ethical growth, for example, cannot be captured, for Wojtyla,

by a phenomenological analysis in the absence of the Aristotelian metaphysical concepts

of potency and act. However, he argues that in Schelers analysis, whose work he seems

to take as a normative example of pure phenomenology at work, there is an a-dynamic

character, which reflects the essentialism of phenomenology as a whole, [and] does not

80
Ronald Modras, The Moral Philosophy of Pope John Paul II, Theological Studies 41
D (1980): 691.
 74

provide a proper context for interpreting ethical experience. Ethical experience, he

continues, is by its very nature something dynamic; its whole psychological structure

involves motion: a passage from potency to act. 81

Wojtyla, then, does not believe that, at least in the Schelerian analysis, one can

experience the concepts of potency and act phenomenologically. Thus, even

experience cannot be fully captured by means of an essentialist phenomenological

method that seeks to return the knower to immediate experience. Furthermore, Wojtyla

argues that any valid ethics must be approached from the standpoint of metaphysical and

especially teleological assumptions and that, the perfectionistic aspect in ethics appears

in an adequate way only if we adopt the assumptions of the philosophy of being.82 As

should already be clear, this requires a move beyond phenomenology as it is understood

by Husserl and others insofar as phenomenology seeks to be a rigorous science placing

all assumptions out of action by way of the phenomenological reduction. As such,

Wojtyla, although making heavy use of a phenomenological style of reflection and

investigation, nevertheless argues that phenomenology requires a kind of counterbalance

in the form of an objective metaphysics to provide phenomenological investigations with

a fully objective validity. As is clear from Wojtylas philosophical magnum opus, The

Acting Person, he is still fundamentally optimistic about the potential for

phenomenological contributions to philosophical inquiry, so long as phenomenology is

understood properly as following after a metaphysical analysis which brings

81
Ibid., 41.
82
Karol Wojtyla, In Search of the Basis of Perfectionism in Ethics, in Person and
Community, trans. and ed. Theresa Sandok, O.S.M. (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 46.
 75

phenomenology into true contact with the world of being. Unfortunately, in doing so,

phenomenology betrays its inner dynamism and motivating forces, leading off into

indefensible and untenable theses and conclusions.

Unfortunately, Wojtylas attempt to bridge the gap between phenomenology and

medieval philosophy has, in many respects, become something of the norm within the

academic community, in particular within Christian, and especially Catholic intellectual

circleswhich is the most common arena within which contemporary thinkers attempt to

bring about a re-invigoration of medieval thought through phenomenology, especially

since medieval philosophy and theology represents a considerable and venerable portion

of Christianitys spiritual patrimony. All too often, it seems, attempts to provide such a

dialogue occur at the expense of phenomenology. Furthermore, such thinkers also too

often follow Wojtyla in his unnecessary opposition between phenomenology and

traditional metaphysics. This might very well be the fault of Husserl himself, insofar as

he struggled too greatly in order to inaugurate a radical philosophy which was entirely

new, entirely unprecedented, and thus radically critical of the tradition, even though

Husserl remained in more or less total ignorance of the whole medieval tradition and of

its traditional metaphysics. However, it is also the fault of Wojtylas mistake in

thinking that the subject of metaphysics is to be grasped only by way of assumptions and

from what can logically be concluded on the basis of such assumptions of matters which

are not given primordially in lived-experience.

Quite to the contrary, Husserl sees precisely these cherished concepts of

teleology, potency, and act, the supposed absence of which in phenomenology motivates
 76

Wojtylas critique of phenomenology as insufficient within the domain of ethics, as

already being part and parcel of the discoveries of a phenomenological philosophy of

experience. That is to say, experience, for Husserl, is always already teleological and

motivated by teleological principles which need not be assumed ad extra but which are

always already given within experience itself. One might say that Wojtylas view of

experience is altogether far too Humean in this respect and does not give experience its

full due. Moreover, as a result of his inadequate notion of experience, Wojtyla turns to

Aquinas and Aristotle to serve as counterbalances to the inadequacies of experience. It is

this which Wojtyla calls metaphysics. Perhaps we can say that, along with an

inadequate view of experience and phenomenology, Wojtyla also suffers from an

inadequate view of metaphysics on this score. While Husserl, by contrast, is indeed

careful to distinguish between phenomenology and metaphysics, this distinction is not so

cut and dry, nor is it so absolute as it is found in Wojtyla. Husserl distinguishes between

phenomenology as first philosophy and metaphysics as last or ultimate philosophy.83

As first philosophy, phenomenology seeks to disclose the, a priori structures of the

basic regions of the world, it uncovers the constituting, correlative realm of these

basic regions in terms of the essential modes of intentionality, [and f]inally, it works out

the a priori structures of transcendental subjectivity in its most elemental founding

dimension.84 This refers to the so-called descriptive task of phenomenology as the

83
James G. Hart, A Prcis of an Husserlian Philosophical Theology, in Essays in
Phenomenological Theology, ed. Steven W. Laycock and James G. Hart (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1986), 98.
84
Ibid., 98-99.
 77

eidetic analysis of things in their various modes of givenness to the subject in perception,

intuition, judgment, valuation, etc. At the same time, however, phenomenology, insofar

as it represents the form of true philosophy (i.e. phenomenology in the widest sense),

must take on the task of last or ultimate philosophy which will attempt to carry out an

interpretation of factual reality and of the sciences, disciplines, habits, and institutions

which contribute to its constitution by way of speculation on first principles through the

application of the results of first philosophys descriptive analyses. This, from an

Husserlian perspective is metaphysics, and it is part and parcel of the overarching task of

phenomenology itself. Concretely speaking, then, phenomenology is not simply

restricted, according to its method, to the mere description of the world in its intentional

modes of givenness, describing the bare factuality of the world forever prescinding from

speculation on causes, ends, the meaning of being, the nature of the soul, God, etc.

Rather, even while phenomenology establishes a methodological priority with respect to

the essential task of eidetic description (the medieval demonstratio quia),

phenomenology is, nevertheless, always pushing forward towards the task of speculation

and the integration of a phenomenological description of the world with the factual world

and the causes of its being themselves (demonstratio propter quid). Without such a

move, phenomenology would be irrelevant. Wojtylas distinction, then, between

phenomenology and metaphysics, we can say, is unnecessary and overly facile.

Moreover, the consequences of such a distinction with respect to the integration of

medieval and phenomenological philosophy is likewise unnecessary. What Wojtylas

call to complete phenomenology through the assumption of metaphysics implies, given

 78

his understanding of metaphysics, is the uncritical assumption on the part of

phenomenology of the validity of the medieval, and specifically Thomistic, tradition and

the uncritical integration of its traditional problems, answers, and assumptions.

Phenomenology would be, then, simply an afterthoughta nice, but unnecessary,

addendum to medieval philosophy.

If Wojtylas work can be seen as a case-study in the failure properly to integrate

the phenomenological approach to philosophy with the medieval tradition, then the work

of two other scholars for whose phenomenologies medieval philosophy became essential

can serve as apt exemplars in the successful integration of medieval philosophy and

phenomenology, albeit in somewhat different contexts than what I am attempting here.

These two figures are Edith Stein, in her Finite and Eternal Being, and James G. Hart, in

his recently published two-volume series, Who One Is. The fact, moreover, that both

thinkers seem to set out to work with Aquinas as their guiding medieval thinker but seem

always to end up with Scotus, will also prove important for an understanding of how

Scotus thought in particular will serve as a guide in the development of a full-fledged

ethical system in an Husserlian mode inasmuch as Scotus provides key insights to these

thinkers on key issues, yet always on clear-cut phenomenological grounds. That their

reasons for making use of Scotus insights in key areas are always phenomenologically

motivated will serve as something of a confirmation of a claim which has already been

made by the German scholar Walter Hoeres and which I now make my own as the

guiding impulse of my own attempt at the integration of phenomenology with medieval

philosophy, namely that, the phenomenological method of philosophizingappears

 79

already with rare clarity and consistency in the work of Duns Scotus.85 This claim will

have to be drawn out in greater detail in the following chapters. In the immediate,

however, a brief word must be said about both Stein and Harts approach to

phenomenology and medieval philosophy.

As is well known, Edith Stein served for many years as Husserls personal

assistant and was responsible for editing Husserls Ideen II, one of the most important

contributions to the development of Husserls early transcendental phenomenology and

the theory of constitution. While Stein maintained a critical distance from various new

developments in Husserls transcendental phenomenology, she nevertheless remained

committed to phenomenology throughout her philosophical career. After her conversion

to Catholicism in 1922, Stein became an avid reader of medieval philosophy and, in an

essay submitted to the Festschrifft on the occasion of Husserls sixtieth birthday, Stein

attempted to provide a comparison between the philosophical approaches of Husserl and

Thomas Aquinas. This essay, published under the title Husserls Phenomenology and

the Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas,86 represented Steins first, and still immature,

attempt to bring medieval and phenomenological philosophy into contact with one

another. Already in this essay, it became clear to Stein that a transcendental

phenomenology of constitution could not readily coexist, as it had been presented by

Husserl, with a Thomistic approach to the problems of philosophy. Following Steins

85
Walter Hoeres, Critique of the Transcendental Metaphysics of Knowing.
Phenomenology and Neo-Scholastic Transcendental Philosophy, Aletheia 2 (1978): 355.
86
See Edith Stein, Husserls Phenomenology and the Philosophy of St. Thomas
Aquinas, in Knowledge and Faith, trans. and ed. Walter Redmond (Washington, D.C.:
ICS Publications, 1999), 1-66.
 80

argument in this essay and, working off of the consistently positive manner in which

Stein expresses her enthusiasm for her new Thomistic approach to philosophy, it is often

assumed that along with her conversion to Catholicism, Stein had also undergone an

intellectual conversion to Thomistic philosophy in such a manner as to have effectively

left the phenomenology of her early philosophy behind. As she writes in her final

philosophical work, Finite and Eternal Being, [s]he naturally felt an increasing desire to

familiarize herself with the intellectual foundations of this [Catholic] world. Almost as a

matter of course she first seized upon the writings of St. Thomas AquinasSt. Thomas

found a reverent and willing pupil.87 As Stein is quick to note, her mind,

however,[had] already received the firm impress of her philosophical training, which

could not be ignored. Her reason had become the meeting place of two philosophic

worlds which demanded dialectic elucidation.88 Her approach, moreover, to the

accomplishment of this task, at least in the final draft of Finite and Eternal Being, takes

the form of an objective exploration of the problems of ontology, understood in an

almost Heideggerian sense as the question of the meaning of being.89

Stein goes on to claim that this attempt to provide a synthesis in her ontology

between contemporary phenomenology and medieval scholasticism is not simply a matter

of her own personal interest, moreover, but rather that the issue, dominates the

87
Stein, Finite and Eternal Being, xxvii.
88
Ibid.
89
Or, one might say that Stein intends to provide an alternative phenomenological
ontology to the one offered by Heidegger. See Finite and Eternal Being, xxxi.
 81

philosophic scene.90 Steins attempt is to provide a first step on the way to resolving the

issue of the relationship of phenomenology to the tradition of philosophy, in particular to

the often forgotten, but nonetheless still pressing tradition of medieval scholasticism.

However, the question remains as to what precisely her approach is. If it is to be

phenomenologically valid, then she cannot fall prey to the same mistakes which

motivated Wojtylas restrained version of phenomenology. It would be best to allow

Stein to speak for herself. She writes of her work that, [w]henever she bases an

argument on historically established solutions, i.e. whenever she has recourse to the

tradition of medieval philosophy, she simply uses them as a starting point for an

objective investigation.91 She continues, writing that, [t]his procedure, it would seem,

may not lead only to a factual clarification of the issues involved [in the tradition]but

also to the establishment of vital contact with the great minds of the past.92

This vital contact will be important both for phenomenologys own self-

understandingi.e. the degree to which it can see itself as both a part of and as different

from the tradition as a wholeand for providing both inspiration and guidance towards

horizons of further philosophical research for phenomenological philosophyand

correlatively for a theology which could build itself upon the results of phenomenological

research. In approaching the development of a phenomenological ontology in such vital

contact with medieval philosophy, Stein is explicit in her concerns that her project not be

90
Ibid., xviii.
91
Ibid. [Bracketed text my addition.]
92
Ibid.
 82

mistaken as a regression to traditional metaphysicsof the sort which one might

attribute to Wojtyla. Rather, she writes, this attempt aims at an ontology, not at the

elaboration of a philosophic system.93 This ontology will be built, as she claims, upon

phenomenological evidence, not upon the authority of Aristotle, Aquinas, or some other

facet of the traditionas in Wojtyla. In the end, Steins willingness to subject the

traditionand in particular the guiding force standing behind the initial directions of her

ontological investigations, namely Aquinas and Aristotleto rigorous criticism is to be

seen in the fact that she readily admits that her initial approach through Aquinas in the

end leads, through phenomenological investigations, to the same conclusions as those of

Plato, Augustine, and Duns Scotus which, might have been reached faster and with

greater ease if a different point of departure [i.e. those of Plato, Augustine, and Scotus]

had been chosen.94 Without going into the details, which would take this investigation

far too far afield, Steins method of procedure in integrating phenomenology and

medieval thought can be generally described in the following manner: she always begins

and ends with phenomenology; to the extent that medieval philosophy enters into the

picture, it is subjected to rigorous phenomenological critique and/or confirmation, thus

spurring phenomenology on to the uncovering of further insights which, through the

work of medieval philosophy, are thus brought to phenomenological evidence.

Turning now to James G. Harts appropriation of medieval thought, one can find a

very similar pattern of approach to the use of medieval philosophy within his

93
Ibid., xxix.
94
Ibid., xxxi.
 83

phenomenological reflections on subjectivity in his monumental two-volume work, Who

One Is. The first volume, he describes as sketching, an ontology of the agency of

manifestation that is this side, on the hither side, of the displayed world, of the myself

as myself.95 Book Two, he writes, will be an attempt to, study the I in some of its

guises, the personal I in the natural attitude, the transcendental agent of manifestation as

the center of acts, and the founding primal presencing with its egological and hyletic

moments.96 Studying the personal I in its everyday life in the world necessarily brings

Hart to many of the issues which we shall have to discuss in the present workthat is,

such themes as moral obligation in the absolute ought, personal and universal vocation,

God, etc. His approach, moreover, is one which is in essential agreement with the

guiding thesis of this current investigation, namely that a study in the Husserlian ethical

theory can very fruitfully be approached and clarified through recourse to medieval

scholastic philosophyamong other sources as well, e.g. Kant, Fichte, Kierkegaard, as

well as Aristotle, Augustine, and Plotinus. Like Stein, as well, Harts approach is always

to begin and end with phenomenology, while gathering further inspiration and fodder for

phenomenological investigation from the medievalsand certainly choosing the

medievals for essential reasons, as will have to be seen later on. Moreover, his medieval

guide, as it were, through the problems of vocation, obligation, the true-self as the

source of our calling, and finally philosophical theology as the essential norm-giving

ground of the ethical life is, as in Stein, to be found in the thought of Thomas Aquinas.

95
James G. Hart, Who One Is, Book 2: Existenz and Transcendental Phenomenology
(Dordrecht: Springer, 2009), v.
96
Ibid., vii.
 84

Nonetheless, also mirroring Stein, Hart seems always to have recourse to Scotus insights

and to opt in favor of Scotus positions against Aquinas at pivotal moments in the

investigation of various philosophical themes which were initiated through Harts

preliminary investigation of Husserls philosophy.

Taking Stein and Harts style of investigation as a springboard, then, my own

investigation seeks to eliminate what seems to be the persistent deficiency of both Stein

and Harts approaches to the synthesis of medieval and phenomenological philosophy by

beginning with Scotus rather than Aquinas as the, paraphrasing Stein, quicker, more

direct, and easier route in bridging the gap between scholasticism and phenomenology.

This, in turn, might further open up the possibility of greater contact between

phenomenology and other medieval thinkers like Aquinas, Ockham, Anselm, Augustine,

Boethius, Hugh of St. Victor, and others whose thought would undoubtedly be found

ready to be mined for phenomenological insights and analyses on the part of

contemporary phenomenologists. Certainly there have been other attempts to provide a

measure of contact between phenomenology and scholasticism. Walter Hoeres, again, is

one such example of a scholar who argues that scholastic philosophy, and particularly

Scotist and Suarezian philosophy, is already phenomenological. That the

phenomenological method is already operative in various medieval thinkers is likewise

the shared position of such scholars as Oleg Bychkov, Emmanuel Falque, and John R.

White, among others.97 However, a word must be said about what the purpose of such a

97
See Oleg Bychkov, The Nature of Theology in Duns Scotus and his Franciscan
Predecessors, Franciscan Studies 66 (2008): 5-62; Emmanuel Falque, The
Phenomenological Act of Perscrutatio in the Proemium of Bonaventures Commentary
 85

unification or synthesis of medieval and phenomenological insights would bewhy it

would be desirable or even necessary for phenomenology apart from the merely

idiosyncratic needs of a specific sect of philosophers.

On the one hand, such a project would have the effect of overcoming the

historical navet which seems to be endemic to the philosophical culture which has

sprung up under the banner of phenomenology. The modern prejudice against medieval

philosophy is always to be found in full force in the writings of Husserl, of Heidegger, of

Mereleau-Ponty, and even of Scheler, who one might expect, as a Catholic intellectual

during the early periods of his philosophical career, would have derived great benefit in

his ethics and philosophy of religion from a more penetrating analysis of the medieval

texts and thinkers whom he references. Phenomenologyand, regrettably, Husserl

especially98 so often seems to make sweeping generalizations in regard to the history

of philosophy which are made only the more general with respect to the medieval period,

so much so that the remarks of phenomenologists with respect to medieval thought is

often entirely without merit, dealing only with caricatures rather than with the medievals

themselves. An opening up of phenomenology to the field of medieval philosophical

research would certainly have an enlightening effect upon the tradition of

on the Sentences, Medieval Philosophy and Theology 10 (2001): 1-22; John R. White,
Exemplary Persons and Ethics: The Significance of St. Francis for the Philosophy of
Max Scheler, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 79 (2005): 57-90.
98
See, for instance, Husserls discussion of medieval society as a wholly hierarchical
society in the third, unpublished Kaizo article (See, HUA XXVII, 68ff), his references to
medieval culture in The Crisis texts (see The Crisis, 8), his alignment of the Thomistic
ethical doctrine of the good with Cudworths rationalism in the 1920/24 lecture course on
ethics (See, HUA XXXVII, 130), etc.
 86

phenomenology from the perspective of the history of philosophy. However, a wider and

far more necessary problem irrepressibly forces the issue upon us.

One can continue to philosophize and to gain insight into the nature of things even

in spite of an historical navet. However, when this navet cuts one off from the

founding ideas and grounding principles of a science or a tradition of inquiry, then the

clarification of ones tasks, problems, and assumptions in engaging in such traditional

inquiry cannot be accomplished otherwise than with monumental difficulties. This,

however, is precisely the situation in which phenomenology has been caught from its

very inception. The basic problems of phenomenology, as has already been discussed,

arose out of Husserls Brentanian roots, in particular out of the recognition of the far-

reaching implications of Brentanos re-appropriation of the medieval notion of

intentionality and of the idea of intentional inexistence. For Brentano, this notion

came by way of a direct engagement with late medieval philosophy. On the other hand,

when Husserl makes intentionality and the investigation of the intentional structures of

consciousness in phenomenological immanence a methodological sine qua non of the

phenomenological method in the Logical Investigations, his engagement is simply with

the idea of intentionality as it had been mediated to him through Brentano. The

foundational problems of intentionality in their historical emergence and the traditional

discussions which shaped its emergence are never brought to sufficient light in Husserls

treatment of the issues. In many respects, however, phenomenology, and particularly the

characteristic arguments between phenomenologists as well as between Brentano and his

contemporaries (and even Brentano in his early period and in his later reist period), all
 87

echo the medieval problems and debates on the very same issue in various degrees. A

reawakening of these debates would shed light upon the foundational debates of

phenomenology as an historical school and, in so doing, might provide key insights into

the resolution of the problems and foundational meaning of phenomenology as a

philosophy. As far as Husserl is able to go, then, in his discussions of the notion,

meaning, and philosophical implications of intentionality, he never probes the depths of

its foundational sense as a doctrine emerging in medieval theories of knowledge and the

primordial oneness of the soul with the order of being.

This is not, however, to assume at the outset that there is something in medieval

theories of intentionality or in the medieval notion of intentio which is more penetrating

or more insightful than anything that is available in Husserlian phenomenology.

Nevertheless, if we are to take seriously the Husserlian doctrine of the sedimentation of

meaning, that is, that ideas, terms, institutions, etc., gradually acquire their sense through

the history of their becoming, that meanings are sedimented in them which can be

uncovered and reactivated through a regressive, historical analysis in order to reach the

foundational sense of the idea, term, institution, etc., then we must recognize that the

failure to situate the Husserlian doctrine within the medieval tradition represents a

fundamental problem for phenomenology. Moreover, a return on the part of

phenomenology to its medieval roots, far from amounting to a departure from

phenomenological philosophy, an uncritical regression to traditional philosophy, would

rather amount to a radicalization of phenomenology itself. That is to say, inasmuch as

phenomenology, growing out of its Brentanian roots, always hoped to carry out a renewal
 88

of the foundational sense of philosophy and, consequently, of Western culture as well, the

task of renewal can be applied to phenomenology itself only by returning phenomenology

to the foundational sense of its ideas, problems, and methods. This simply cannot be

done without a return to medieval philosophy. The renewal of phenomenology is nothing

other than a renewal of the whole tradition of philosophy, and thus is also in no small part

a renewal of the medieval tradition. This task, however, has hardly even been begun

except in the work of the few scholars mentioned above, and at that, not yet in fully

explicit terms.

Walter Hoeres argues that Duns Scotus already possesses a phenomenological

method. This is not necessarily the phenomenological method of Husserl. Nonetheless,

in Hoeres analysis, although Scotus does not speak explicitly on the subject of

methodology in a manner which would be readily identifiable to phenomenologists as

reflecting a phenomenological approach, nor does Scotus have a notion of experience

which would be the direct equivalent of Husserls Erfahrung or Erlebniss,99 in

practice, Scotus approach to the problems of philosophy and theology indicates a tacit

respect for and use of a method which we would, extrapolating from his writings, justly

call phenomenological. He argues that, [i]n all fields, Duns Scotus methodic work

99
The Scotist use of the term experientia, which is translated as experience in modern
English, much more closely expresses the Aristotelian notion of experience in terms of
the repeated, factual experience of events, objects, etc. which provides the basis for
inductive knowledge of things developed across time and within the context of various
encounters with things, events, etc. Thus, experientia could hardly be translated with
either of Husserls terms for experience, Erfahrung or Erlebniss. Nonetheless, a case
for the tacit presence of such an equivalent concept in Scotus can easily be made if one
looks to the function which sensuous intuition plays both in Scotus theory of knowledge
and, more broadly, in his approach to philosophical discussions which phenomenology
would readily recognize as tantamount to a phenomenological return to experience.
 89

always aims at getting down to those ultimate essences which, in their utter simplicity,

can only be taken in, and whose such-being can be no more defined and explicitated

than the difference between red and green.100 Hoeres further suggests that, [e]ven

his doctrine of free will is an expression of his deep and exact phenomenological

description of how a free volition is carried out.101 Although Hoeres fails to make

explicit and to fully justify his reasons for making such an assertion, this project is in no

small way indebted to what amounts to a truly monumental assertion. It will, then, in

large measure, be the job of this study to bring this idea into relief and to provide it with a

greater clarity and a justification of its import for the possibility of a relationship between

medieval philosophy and phenomenology.

If, returning to our discussion above of the different senses in which the term

phenomenological philosophy can be usedi.e. either Laycock's broad, and admittedly

trivial, sense of phenomenology which would loosely include Husserl, his inheritors, as

well as his ancestors, and the more narrow use which describes phenomenology as a

school and as a carefully defined methodwe can acknowledge the possibility that

phenomenology can find theoretical precursors to its analyses in pre-phenomenological

philosophiesthis is the implication of admitting the broad sense of phenomenology,

then it should not, upon close inspection of Scotus philosophical outlook, approach, and

analyses, be entirely surprising if we discover in Scotus a phenomenology which is

phenomenological in a sense far more closely approaching the narrower use of the term

100
Hoeres, 355.
101
Ibid.
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phenomenologicali.e. Scotus can be seen as a proto-phenomenologist. Following

upon this recognition, we might begin to see precisely how it is possible to bring

phenomenology and medieval philosophy into contact. It will not be a matter of

transporting one mode of thought, whether phenomenological or scholastic, into a wholly

alien world of discourse and inquiry composed of completely disparate assumptions and

problems. Rather, as follows from the claim that a renewal of phenomenology must of

necessity begin by way of a return to the problems of medieval philosophy in order to

uncover the foundational sense of phenomenologys basic problems, the universe of

phenomenology and the universe of scholasticism are essentially related. It is, then, this

relatedness which allows us to bring Husserl and Scotus into discussion together just as

one might bring Husserl and Heidegger into discussion. Certainly, we will encounter

problems of terminology on account of the incommensurability of the language-games

which are unique to both Husserl and Scotus, phenomenology and scholasticism.

Nonetheless, one often encounters the same problem of incommensurability between

Husserl and Heidegger, which is in many respects the principle reason why Husserlians

and Heideggerians still seem to continuously talk past each other in philosophical

debates. As such, the linguistic/terminological obstacle, while a hurdle which must be

overcome, is not to be considered fundamentally problematic at the start of this

investigation.

Oleg Bychkov argues that, Scotus articulation of the notion of science, i.e. what

constitutes a science as a science, fundamentally anticipates Husserl. Scotus in his

Repartatio Parisiensis I-A, Part 4, asking the question of whether theology is a science,
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discusses the conditions for science in general. In the process, Bychkov argues, Scotus

makes a move away from the notion of science as the mere product of a stepwise

syllogistic process of reasoning which was characteristic of earlier approaches. While

our sciences will incorporate syllogistic logic, Bychkov notes that, for Scotus, science is

much more formally determined by the possibility of developing a science on the basis of

the structural relationships of priority and posteriority with respect to the founding

concepts or ideas which regard the objects of a science. Bychkov explicitly describes

Scotus method and articulation of the essence of science as a study of eidetic structures

in the full Husserlian sense of the term. For Scotus, then, science, is most fundamentally

a project which operates on the basis of something like phenomenological observation

of conceptual structureswhere the main objective is to seewhether the parts of the

structure fit or not.102 A word must be said about this something like in Bychkovs

discourse. While it is true that Bychkov wants to describe Scotus approach to science as

only something like phenomenology, his reasons for this seem to be based merely in the

need not to sound too anachronistic. However, the language of analogysomething

likehere need not be used to indicate that there is a mere analogy between Scotus

and Husserlian phenomenology as an eidetic science. Rather, there is an essential

mirroring of phenomenology and Scotist science on this score which allows us to call

Scotus scientific philosophy (as well as his scientific theology) phenomenological or

proto-phenomenological in a very definite sense.

102
Bychkov, 40.
 92

Moreover, Bychkovs study only serves to confirm Hoeres contention that Scotus

already makes use of the phenomenological method inasmuch as Bychkov is able to

show that it is fundamentally the eidetic structures of the objects of the sciences which

are the foundations of science and the conditions for its possibility. That is to say,

without the eidetic structures of natural priority and posteriority with respect to the

concepts of objects which are discoverable through a kind of direct seeing, a

phenomenological insight into the things themselves, beginning with intuition in

perception and carrying them through to their completion in judgment and in the work of

reflection upon our concepts and their natural structures, there would be no science at

all.103 Thus, he writes that, Thus Scotus in general sees our intellectual activity as a kind

of eidetic-phenomenological (as in Husserl) observation of conceptual structures where

the criteria of validity and truth can be perfectly handled within the area of interaction

between the object and our intellectual activity, without going outside for

confirmation.104 To this extent, then, perhaps we need not assume Scotus to be as tacit

with respect to what Husserl would call the phenomenological method as things first

appeared in Hoeres brief statements on Scotus philosophical method. Moreover, if, as

Scotus will want to say, moral philosophy is to be considered a science in any sense of

the word, then it will have to be carried out in precisely the same way, i.e. as a study of

eidetic structures in the phenomenological sense of the word, and this also will provide

the possibility of integrating Scotus thought into the phenomenological framework of

103
Ibid., 42-43.
104
Ibid., 43.
 93

Husserls ethical discussions. Scotus can speak to Husserl as one phenomenologist to

another.

Continuing in the same vein, John White argues very provocatively that, if one

undertakes the task of a systematic treatment of the love-based ethics as they are found in

the three thinkers Max Scheler, St. Bonaventure, and Duns Scotus, one finds between all

three basically comparable patterns of thought which, he wants to argue, serves to

indicate the ways in which they are all philosophizing out of a similar philosophical

milieu and ethos. White holds that Schelers philosophy, as informed through and

through by a personalistic philosophical outlook, takes the life of St. Francis of Assisi as

an exemplary form of the ethical, i.e. as a model person, who particularly reveals the

ideality of moral values in a high degree. As is evidenced from Schelers discussions of

St. Francis in Ressentiment, On the Nature of Sympathy, and elsewhere, it is evident that

the life of Francis precisely as a model person revealing moral values and exemplifying

them in an imitable manner provides the key to much of Schelers ethics at the end of his

Formalism. Schelers phenomenology, then, philosophizes out of the same basic ethos as

the medieval Franciscan thinkers St. Bonaventure and Duns Scotus, for whom the

experience of life of St. Francis likewise represented the definitive ethos within which

they lived out their religious lives and, consequently, also pursued their intellectual

endeavors. This, White thinks, accounts for the similar thought-patterns present in all of

their ethical theories.

However, as important as the recognition of the role which model persons, and in

particular the model person of St. Francis of Assisi, play in Schelers ethics, the
 94

recognition, which our subsequent investigations will hope to make clear, of a similar

thought-pattern present in Husserls ethics might point us in a much more significant

direction for understanding the relationship between early phenomenology and medieval

philosophy as a whole, in particular given that a case for Husserls debt to the medieval

Franciscan ethos could never hope to be justified given Husserls thoroughgoing

Protestantism with its rejection of everything medieval and Catholic. Certainly Schelers

particularly Franciscan insights in his ethics can be explained in terms of the personal

importance which the figure of St. Francis played in his own life; however, another

explanation must be sought for the more general similarity which obtains between the

ethical thought-patters present in the four figures of Bonaventure, Duns Scotus, Max

Scheler, Edmund Husserl (and we can also add Franz Brentano into the mix). Following

White, we can argue that they all draw on a shared ethos.105 To the extent that all of the

above thinkers undoubtedly work out of what is nothing other than the Christian ethos,

their shared thought-patterns likewise have a shared source. However, inasmuch as the

ethos of phenomenology is precisely, at least in its earliest formulations in Husserl,

Scheler, Mazaryk, von Hildebrand, et al. (and, again, Brentano is likewise not to be left

out of this group), the Christian ethos, that which specifically motivates phenomenology

and phenomenological philosophies will likewise be that which motivates the medieval

105
And perhaps this ethos will turn out to be, within the context of medieval culture,
particularly Franciscan inasmuch as Franciscan religious culture often expressed itself
through the love of nature which motivated the close study of individual objects and lent
to the emergence of rigorous scientific and philosophical study of nature which operated
by way of an introspective turn towards the experiencing subject as the nexus of nature
and the divine (see St. Bonaventures Itinerarium mentis in Deum), which gives way to a
kind of phenomenology of the divine, the soul, and nature in Franciscan thought in
ways in which it did not do so in other religious orders and communities.
 95

philosophers and theologians as well. Now, in its Scotist, Husserlian, and Schelerian

expressions, it is an ethos which values the close study of the things themselves as they

are given to the subject by way of eidetic analyses, just as Bychkov argues. This would

seem to suggest that the explanation of these similarities of thought-patterns has much

more to do with the shared methodological approaches of each thinker than with the

personal examples of any individualexcept that of the person of Christ who motivates

them all to the development of an ethics which takes love as its highest value and

motivating principle.106

A considered reflection on the work of the above three scholars can serve to

indicate that the task of a rapprochement between medieval philosophy and

phenomenology has already been begun in more productive ways than in the manner in

which it was attempted in Wojtyla. In Hoeres, we meet the claim that Scotist thought

already makes use of the phenomenological method. In Bychkovs analysis of Scotus

Reportatio I-A, we see the confirmation of Hoeres intuition in the manner in which

Scotus view of sciences methodology is to be seen as that of a phenomenological-

106
Perhaps we might also argue that Brentano constitutes the historical link in the chain
between these four historically disparate thinkers inasmuch as it is Brentano who
reawakens these medieval debates and theories in a serious way in Continental
philosophy. However, Brentano does not leave us with much in the way of concrete
evidence that his ethics is derived in any way from the Franciscan school. He seems
much more interested to link up his ethics with the thought of Aquinas; however, there
are few salient respects in which his ethics would represent a particularly Thomistic
ethical philosophy. The similarity with the Franciscan masters is certainly more
pronounced. Nonetheless, the historical link between Brentano and these thinkers must
still remain tenuous at best. Brentano gives no indication that he retained any of the
initial interest, mentioned earlier, in Suarez whose ethics is borrowed heavily from Duns
Scotus or that Suarez at all influenced his own ethical thought. Thus, Brentanos place in
this story must of necessity remain dark and obscure.
 96

eidetics vis--vis Husserl, which serves to illuminate the ways in which this methodology

must be seen as underlying the whole of Scotus personal approach to philosophy and

theology. In White, we begin to see the ways in which one can start to provide the

foundational reasons why a phenomenological method can be discovered at work

within the medieval philosophers which, otherwise inexplicably, reemerges some six

hundred years later in the philosophical movement inaugurated by Husserl inasmuch as

there exists a shared religious ethos lying at the heart of the scholastic and

phenomenological methods respectively. However, the work which has yet failed to be

begun is that of making it explicit that the recognition of these similarities, the

recognition of shared ethos, insights, and methods, is not a mere fact of the history of

ideas representing possibilities of interesting, but nonetheless impotent comparisons. It is

also not merely a convenient hermeneutical tool with which one might serve to illuminate

the insights of a thinker or a movement by way of a comparison to similar and perhaps

better understood ideas from another historical era, thinker, or movement, as for example

trying to illuminate the meaning of Scotus theory of science by comparing it to

phenomenological-eidetic methods of philosophizing. These are mere starting points on

the road to the recognition of the essential task, of the imperative which these insights

provide to phenomenology and to scholasticism both, namely that the renewal of

phenomenology in our contemporary scene must pass by way of a reawakening of

medieval philosophical problems and studies. This will represent, on the one hand, a

radicalization of phenomenological philosophy; at the same time, if this radicalization is

positively to be undertaken, it will be seen that the phenomenological project will be

 97

nothing other than the renewal of scholastic philosophythat is to say, medieval

scholasticism will be able to recognize itself and its own continuation in phenomenology.

Precisely how phenomenology and scholasticism could be successfully unified in

a phenomenological way, however, cannot be explicitly resolved here, since this could be

the topic of a dissertation all its own. I will, rather, hope to provide us here with

something of a case-study through which one might discern the theoretical principles

which uncover the deep philosophical affinity that exists between the two schools of

thought and which ought to motivate further studies that would serve to bridge the gap

between two very productive philosophical eras. My reasons for forgoing such a

methodologically focused study on the integration of scholasticism and phenomenology

at the present time, however, is by no means accidental. Following Scheler, I would

argue that methods and discussions of methods can only be the end-product of a

scientific, philosophical, or practical undertaking. One cannot discover a method prior to

embarking upon the task which the method is meant to guide. Rather, one can discover a

proper method for a specific undertaking only after having first attempted the undertaking

itself. The present work, then, is a first attempt which delays the methodological

inquiries which would ultimately be required for explaining in detail the ways in which

phenomenology and medieval philosophy are to be combined precisely because those

questions cannot yet be asked and answered. Nevertheless, I begin in the hopes that

precisely such a project can, working off of the fruits of this present research, be brought

to completion in the future. Such a project would allow phenomenology free access to

the virtual treasure-trove of phenomenological studies which medieval thinkers have to

 98

offer us. This would in turn provide medieval philosophy with a greater vital importance

within the life of contemporary philosophy by helping burst the historical limits, one

might say, of the current use of medieval philosophy on the contemporary philosophical

scene which currently stand in the way of a the full uncovering of phenomenologys

greatest insights and tasks.

 99

Part I Husserl, Ethics, and Phenomenology

Chapter III
Husserls Moral Vision and the History of Ethics

5. The Crisis of the Sciences and the Crisis of Culture

a. The Question of the Meaning of Man at Risk

Before proceeding towards an in-depth analysis of the particular workings of the

Husserlian ethical system, if his collection of ethical writings could be called such,

something should be said about what one might call Husserls general moral vision and

the way in which it structures the whole of his thought. The degree to which the

experience of crisis informed the philosophical concerns of Husserls philosophy and the

course of his life work cannot be over-stressed. It might very well be assumed from the

dearth of published works on ethics during Husserls lifetime, and even to the present

day, that ethics was not in the forefront of Husserls philosophical concerns or that, at

best, it takes something of a secondary place next to the questions of phenomenological

methodology, the critique of knowledge, the analysis of essences, constitutional analysis,

etc. However, as can be seen in the opening lines of Husserls 1911 article, Philosophie

als strenge Wissenschaft, published in the journal Logos, Husserl writes that,

[f]rom its earliest beginnings philosophy has claimed to be a rigorous

science. What is more, it has claimed to be the science that satisfies the
loftiest theoretical needs and renders possible from an ethico-religious
point of view a life regulated by pure rational norms.107

From this it can be seen that the questions of reason and of the rational, scientific status

of philosophy are not of an ethically neutral nature, in Husserls view. Rather, the pursuit

107
Edmund Husserl, Philosophy as Rigorous Science, in Husserl: Shorter Works, trans.
Quentin Lauer and ed. Peter McCormick and Frederick Ellison (Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 166.
 100

of the methodological requirements for a fully rigorous and scientific philosophy both

condition the possibility for and are motivated by the pursuit of the highest ethical and

religious ideals, encapsulated in the quest for a life regulated by rational norms. It is

clear from this that Husserls phenomenological, methodological considerations are

fundamentally meant to serve an ethical purpose. This is no more evident anywhere in

Husserls works than in the opening sections of The Crisis of European Sciences and

Transcendental Phenomenology.

In his introduction to The Crisis, Husserl makes the bold assertion that there is a

crisis in the sciences.108 The crisis of the sciences, however, is not a crisis present in their

resultsi.e. in their ability to furnish valid and objective facts by means of rigorous

empirical research. Rather, the crisis of the sciences is to be found precisely in the role

which general culture has made science to play in our everyday cultural and

philosophical concerns, how science has altered our expectations of what counts as

knowledge, and in the loss of meaning for life in science which this movement has

brought about. Husserl writes that, the total world-view of modern man, in the second

half of the nineteenth century, let itself be determined by the positive sciences and be

blinded by the prosperity they produced.109 While this move was beneficial for the

progress of empirical scientific enquiryas evidenced by the veritable explosion of

technological advancement in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this move

also, meant an indifferent turning-away from the questions which are decisive for a

108
Edmund Husserl, The Crisis, 3.
109
Ibid., 6.
 101

genuine humanity.110 In the drive towards the attainment of ever new scientific facts,

which would give rise to greater technological achievements, that had been instilled in

culture by the positive sciences, humanity had constituted itself as living out its life in a

merely fact-minded direction, deliberately turning away from all of the questions

which, manfinds the most burning: questions of the meaning or meaninglessness of

the whole of this human existence.111 In short, while science could contribute to the

expansion of human knowledge of the world of physical extension, the world of

chemistry, of genetics, of biology, etc., it could not speak to all of the questions of

humanity in its essential spirituality, questions of mans rationality, and above all of his

freedom and responsibility.

For Husserl, what is precisely overlooked by the method of the sciences, and for

important and essential reasons related to the subject-matter of the sciences, is what he

terms the enigma of subjectivity.112 Science, in trying to make the physical world

understandable and open to scientific manipulation, is essentially object-directed, and

directed specifically to those sorts of objects which stand open to mathematical

rationality. When philosophy gave up its autonomy and surrendered itself and its tasks to

the domination of the positive sciences and their driving concerns, it was precisely this

enigma of subjectivity which was obscured by its inability to be understood, measured,

and predicted through any sort of mathematical apparatus available to the sciences. That

110
Ibid.
111
Ibid.
112
Ibid., 5.
 102

being the case, the sciences and the physicalistic philosophy which followed in their

wake have forced culture into a very peculiar type of crisis, a crisis which, Husserl

argues, has left authentic and still vital philosophy with a task of crucial importance,

namely in that they, are struggling for their own true and genuine meaning and thus for

the meaning of a genuine humanity.113 It is in struggling successfully to recapture the

authentic meaning of what it is to be human, which will necessarily entail the struggle for

the realization of the highest spiritual aims of an authentic humanity, that the sciences

and culture itself are to be extricated from their current state of crisis.

b. The Loss of Meaning as an Ethical Crisis

The loss of meaning, and in particular the loss of the meaning of what it is to be

human and to live humanly in the first place, is not merely a philosophical, rational crisis.

Rather, the loss of the meaning of man is, first and foremost, an ethical crisis, for

Husserl. From this perspective, the whole of Husserls philosophy, as a response to the

crisis of the sciences and of culture, is to be understood as ultimately conditioned by the

desire for an ethical renewal of humanity at large.114

Husserl raises the following question at the beginning of the Crisis: What does

science have to say about reason and unreason or about us men as subjects of this

freedom?115 Where the physical sciences, as sciences interested only in facts about

physical bodies and their mechanical interactions, are concerned, they have very little to

113
Ibid., 15.
114
As we will have occasion to see at the end of this work, it is also for the same reason a
religious crisis.
115
Ibid., 6.
 103

say precisely because their tendency is to reduce human existence to mere physicality and

to interpret human behavior according to a deterministic, mechanistic mode of

expression. In such a viewpoint, human behavior would not indicate any kind of rational

motivation, but rather the merely mechanical satisfaction of natural urges and the

determination to natural, chemical, genetic, and other causes which might be exerted

upon the physical body of the human being. As such, the physical sciences are forced to

abstract from what essentially defines human existence and human lifenamely the

rationality and freedom of the human being as a personal subject. Moreover, where the

humanistic sciences are concerned, that is those sciences like history, sociology,

psychology, economics, etc., which might have told us something about what it is to be

human and to live as a personal, rational subject in the world, in keeping with the drive

towards scientific objectivity which they had inherited from the physical sciences,

Husserl writes that, their rigorous scientific character requires, we are told, that the

scholar carefully exclude all valuative positions, all questions of the reason or unreason

of their human subject matter and cultural configurations.116

In other words, according to Husserl, the position of the physical and the

humanistic sciences has forced anything falling under the heading of value to fall

outside of the purview of scientific inquiry. What this further implies is that culture,

which, according to the ideals of the nineteenth century, has sought to be, above all, fully

scientificas though this form of science represents the highest potential of human

rationality, must abandon as scientifically superfluous any question of ethics, any

116
Ibid.
 104

hopes for an objective inquiry into what norms might be prescribed for human behavior

in the world and in community according to humanitys rational nature, leaving the road

open for the reduction of all questions of value and ethical normativity to the level of

mere personal taste and whim. When we study the course of everyday human behavior,

we are, if we hope to be scientists, to describe, statistically or otherwise, the human

proclivity to perform certain actions, e.g. murder or rape. We can measure

mathematically the statistical likelihood that one will be a victim of a violent crime, the

percentage of individuals in a community who commit violent crimes, etc.; yet, science

cannot tell us anything about how humanity ought to live. As such, science faces a crisis

of having lost its meaning for life, as being relevant for the way in which an individual

human subject in a given community determines and regulates its life rationally

according to rational norms. On the other hand, science faces a crisis in that it has, in

principle, cut off all hope of extricating culture from this predicament. What is needed is

an intellectual revolution in philosophy, where philosophy will take upon itself the task of

being at once a rigorous science as well as a science capable of providing an impetus and

guide for all of the highest aims of humanityin particular of its ethical and religious

aims. This will be the peculiar task of phenomenology.

i. Theoretical and Practical Autonomy The Task of a New Ethics of

Renewal

According to Husserl, in the Renaissance, philosophy sought to accomplish a kind

of return to its original, foundational sense. Philosophy was to recover, in a word,

precisely what was most essential to ancient man. This it identified as, freely giving
 105

oneself, ones whole life, its rule through pure reason or through philosophy.117

Theoretical inquiry into the being of the world, its ontological foundations, its physical

and spiritual modes of existence, etc. was the starting place by means of which,

[a] superior survey of the world must be launched, unfettered by myth

and the whole tradition: universal knowledge, absolutely free from
prejudice, of the world and man, ultimately recognizing in the world its
inherent reason and teleology and its highest principle, God.118

The goal of theoretical philosophy, then, was to be the elevation of human rational

existence to a kind of intellectual, theoretical autonomya position of freedom from

which the world could be understood in itself and in its own meaningfulness for human

existence apart from any kind of pregiven prejudice or framework of interpretation which

might serve to mask the truth of the world and of existence. However, the establishment

of autonomy by means of philosophical reason was not to stop at theoretical autonomy.

Rather, the theoretical autonomy of philosophy was to make possible a practical

autonomy according to which, man forms himself with insight through free

reason[T]his means not only that man should be changed ethically [but that] the whole

human surrounding world, the political and social existence of mankind, must be

fashioned anew through free reason, through the insights of a universal philosophy.119

Phenomenology, by acquiring for itself this same kind of theoretical autonomy which the

Renaissance sought to achieve, is meant to bring about a renewal of this same kind of

ethically directed autonomy in the whole of mans practical life. Phenomenology is to

117
Ibid., 8.
118
Ibid.
119
Ibid.
 106

be, the reestablishment of philosophy with a new universal task and at the same time

with the sense of a renaissance of ancient philosophyit is at once a repetition and a

universal transformation of meaning.120 Thus, it is clear that, from its very inception,

phenomenology carried with it the task of the renewal of philosophy, which was also

implicitly the task of a new philosophical ethics.121

The work of the Crisis thus can be seen to carry out in explicit terms the call of

the Kaizo articles, in which Husserl writes that,

[w]e are men, free willing subjects, who in their surrounding world
actively intervene, continually organize [mitgestalten] it. Whether we will
to or not, whether wrongly or rightly, we do so. Can we also not do it
rationally, do not rationality and competence stand in our power?122

For Husserl, it is evident from a descriptive phenomenology of the subject and his or her

engagement with the world that the subject is deeply involved in the constitution and

formation of a cultural world, of ways of living out communal human existence.

Whenever we act in the world and interact with others, we are involved in this task, at

times, involuntarily, and at other times, voluntarily. Yet, Husserl, asks, can we not at the

120
Ibid., 14.
121
It will, however, be the case, as was already suggested in Chapter I, that Husserls
understanding of the project of renewal, embedded as it is in a fundamentally problematic
and nave reading of the history of philosophy which uncritically passes over the whole
of the medieval tradition as though it in no way inherits the foundational spirit of Greek
philosophy and its goals for reason, is not yet radical enough. To be genuinely radical, to
genuinely take up the task of the renewal of philosophy, phenomenology must be equally
a renewal of the medieval tradition.
122
HUA XXVII, 4: Wir sind Menschen, frei wollende Subjekte, die in ihre Umwelt ttig
eingreifen, sie bestndig mitgestalten. Ob wir wollen oder nicht, ob schlecht oder recht,
wir tun so. Knnen wir es nicht auch vernnftig tun, steht Vernnftigkeit und Tchtigkeit
nicht in unserer Macht?
 107

same time perpetually insist upon the pursuit of these tasks voluntarily and

rationallyi.e. according to the demands of rationally acquired norms for human action?

This, for Husserl represents an essential question at the current historical and

philosophical juncture, in particular since, as he writes, a rational science of man and of

human community which would ground a rationality in social, in political, behavior and a

rational political technique is thoroughly missing.123 In an age of skeptical pessimism

and political sophistry,124 it is the task of culture to acquire practical autonomy in order to

accomplish, a rational reform of culture, which would represent an infinite adherence

to autonomous rationality in our individual and collective action.125

What is needed, for Husserl, is a science which would provide the basis for a,

mathesis of the spirit and of humanity, and a system of purely rational, a priori

truths which are rooted in the essence [Wesen] of man.126 The content of this a priori

system of truths is meant, for Husserl, to constitute the inner logos, or rationality, of the

method of individual and cultural renewal and thus will provide the rational basis for the

science of ethics itself, though it is also meant to provide a rational explanation of

empirical sciences as well within the overall philosophical system of the world. As such,

the logos of the sciences at stake here is very readily identifiable, from Husserls

123
Ibid., 6: Aber an einer rationalen Wissenschaft vom Menschen und der menschlichen
Gemeinschaft, welche eine Rationalitt im sozialen, im politischen Handeln und eine
rationale politische Technik begrnden wrde, fehlt es durchaus.
124
Ibid., 5.
125
Ibid., 6: eine rationale Kulturreform.
126
Ibid., 7: die mathesis des Geistes und der HumanittSystem der rein rationalen,
der im ,,Wesen des Menschen wurzelnden ,,apriorischen Warheiten.
 108

perspective, as the method of phenomenology. However, as he is quick to note, what is

really needed where both the project of ethical renewal and the development of a

scientific ethics are concerned is not, mere rational explanation,127 but rational

judgments of a wholly different order than the mere assertion of bare matters of fact.

Husserl identifies this higher form of judgment which transcends the empirical order as,

the normative judgment according to universal norms, which belong to the a priori

essence of rational humanity, and the leadership of actual praxis itself according to

exactly the same norms to which the rational norms of practical leadership itself also

belong.128 It is clear from this that the tasks of renewal and of a scientific ethics are to

do more than would be contained in the job description of a merely descriptive

phenomenology. Renewal, as a practical task to which we as a individuals and as a

universal humanity are called in this time in history, and ethics, as the science which

provides the rational understanding of the task of renewal, are both called upon to form

proscriptive judgments which would be normative for all practical action. To that end,

ethics must seize upon something in the a priori system of truths regarding the essence of

humanity and of man as an individual in community that provides itself with a universal

norm.

We will have many opportunities to ask precisely what this normative discovery

will be and from whence it will derive its normativity later in our discussions. For now it

127
Ibid.: bloe rationale ,Erklrung.
128
Ibid.: die normative Beurteilung nach allgemeinen Normen, die zum aprioischen
Wesen der ,,vernnftigen Humanitt gehren, und die Leitung der tatschlichen Praxis
selbst nach ebensolchen Normen, zo denen die Vernunftnormen praktischer Leitung
selbst mitgehren.
 109

is enough to understand the way in which, for Husserl, phenomenology is identical to,

provides the basis for, and is entirely driven by the whole ethical project of renewal. In

so doing, phenomenological, ethical reflection is meant to, lead back to the fundamental

questions of practical reason, which concern the individual and the community and its

rational life in its essential and purely formal universality.129 Implicit in this movement,

however, is the belief in what must be an ever-present guiding idea, namely in the idea of

a, true and genuine humanity as an objectively valid idea in which sense the self-

evident end of our striving for reform must be to reform our real culture.130 The

theoretical and practical search for a genuine humanity must thus form the guiding arc

of Husserls ethical vision as it is present in the whole of his phenomenological project.

However, the search for such an ideal as the idea of a true and genuine humanity cannot

be pursued in a vacuum, but can only be given in rational reflection upon the true essence

of humanity itself in its historical process of unfolding. As such, the understanding of

Husserls ethical vision as the phenomenological probing of this idea of humanity can

only be pursued by looking to the way in which Husserl sees how the problems of

humanity and of ethics have actually been given in history. What is needed is an

historical, genetic analysis of the whole problem of ethics. Husserl pursues this analysis

129
Ibid., 10: fhrt hier auf die prinzipiellen Fragen der praktischen Vernunft zurck,
welche das Individuum und die Gemeinschaft und ihr Vernunftleben in wesensmiger
und rein formaler Allgemeinheit betreffen.
130
Ibid.: ,,wahre und echte Menschheit, als eine objective gltige Idee, in deren Sinn
die faktische Kultur zu reformieren das selbstverstndlische Ziel unserer
Reformbestrebungen sein mu.
 110

in the 1920/24 lecture course and it is this analysis which sets the stage for his own ethics

in the problems which emerge for him from this history.

6. The History of Ethics

a. The Tension Between Verstandes- and Gefhlsmoral in the History of
Ethics

Much like the history of philosophy itself as it is presented in Part II of The

Crisis, Husserls discussions of the history of philosophical ethics is characterized by an

overarching and perennial tension between two antithetical poles. The historical tension

in The Crisis describes these opposing philosophical viewpoints in the form of

empiricism and transcendentalism. Corresponding to these two methodological starting-

points and modes of thinking, in ethics, there is a tension between what he refers to as

Gefhlsmoral, or the morality of feeling emerging from empiricism, and

Verstandesmoral, or rationalistic morality growing out of transcendentalism. Every

debate on the issues of the foundational principles of morality as well as on the manner in

which moral principles are discovered, on what kind of normative force these principles

carry, and from whence this normativity is derived, all hinge upon these two basic

standpoints, according to Husserl. Moreover, where the morality of feeling carries within

it an always evident attitude and position of skepticism where morality is concerned,

rationalistic morality carries with it a kind of hyper-rationalization of the principles of

morality which divorces it from the actual practice of morality and extends a kind of

super-human moral demand upon the human moral agent which ultimately betrays the

inner essence of morality. As such, the perennial tension between these two antithetical

positions, must be overcome, Husserl argues, with an ethics which takes the best that
 111

each has to offer as expressing some valid aspect of the experience and the demands of

morality while transcending the limits of each theory. It will be necessary here, then, to

approach in brief Husserls discussion of the historical genesis of ethics and of the way in

which the history of its development has gradually produced the problems which,

historically, have come to be definitive of ethical debate. At the same time, a critical

word must be said as to the nature of Husserls historical reflection, in particular

considering the inadequacies of Husserls reading of the history of philosophy which

cannot simply be ignored. If we accept Husserls navet with respect to the history of

philosophy, why should we then accept as valid the conclusions that he derives from his

reflections on the history of ethics? The answer will lie particularly in the understanding

of precisely what kind of history Husserl is attempting to develop here and what sorts of

requirements such a history will impose upon him for the purposes of drawing

meaningful conclusions regarding the nature and meaning of the ethical life from history.

Indeed, it can certainly be questioned whether Husserls critique addresses any of

the ethical philosophies of many of the thinkers about to be considered,131 or adequately

articulates what these thinkers intended to say. That being said, Husserl himself

addresses this concern in the The Origin of Geometry essay in which he discusses the

role which history can play for a philosopher in the context of the ways in which ideas

and institutions are historically handed down to present culture. In effect, one can see

Husserls whole presentation of the history of ethical philosophy in the 1920/24 lectures

131
Certainly his only cursory appraisal of Aquinas teaching as representing a medieval
analog to the doctrine held by the rationalist Ralph Cudworth, making Aquinas position
a pre-modern form of ethical rationalism, lands far off the mark. HUA XXXVII, 130.
 112

as pursuing much the same line of argumentation and analysis as he later attempted to

pursue, in much more abridged, albeit explicit, form, in The Origin of Geometry.

There, he begins his discussion stating that he intends to pursue the question of the origin

of geometry as a science as it had developed through history. Yet, Husserl makes it clear

that he is not looking to discover the hitherto unknown creators of geometry or to

disclose for us the historical conditions and events which led to its unfolding. Rather,

Husserl is concerned with the depth-problems of geometry. That is to say, Husserl

wants to uncover the primally establishing function, which geometry must have had

in the history of its becoming.132

The historical character of Husserls investigations of geometry, and also, we

can say, of ethics, he writes, can only be considered, historical in an unusual sense,

namely, in virtue of a thematic direction which opens up depth-problems quite unknown

to ordinary history, problems which, [however,] in their own way, are undoubtedly

historical problems.133 The unusual sense of Husserls historical investigations seeking

to uncover the depth-problems out of which institutions like geometry and ethics possess

their historical significance from their primal establishmenttheir Urstiftungmust of

necessity restrict itself to generalities derived from the analysis, not of the uncovering of

what really happened, but rather from the perspective of the way in which their

meaning has been passed on and sedimented for us into our cultural life. Thus, with

132
Edmund Husserl, The Origin of Geometry, in The Crisis of European Sciences and
Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. and ed. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern
Unviersity Press, 1970), 354.
133
Ibid.
 113

respect to the history of philosophy and the reading of philosophical texts, Husserl is not

interested so much in the problems of scholarly researchthat is, uncovering, through

close textual analysis and traditions of commentary, what such and such a philosopher

was really trying to saybut rather, as he writes, he is interested in, tracingthe

historical meaning-structures given in the present, or their self-evidences, along the

documented chain of historical back-references into the hidden dimension of the primal

self-evidences which underlie them.134 In other words, he is interested in reading less

the texts of other philosophers and more the way in which their ideas have been inherited

as sedimented meanings in our own appropriation of the problems of the tradition of such

a discipline as geometry or ethics and how we might overcome them through critique to

arrive at a renewal and reenactment of the primal establishment, of the primal meaning of

the science in question. From this perspective, Husserl's critique of the history of ethics

can serve as a method of charting the problems of ethical philosophy and the way

towards their resolution even without having to deal with the historical Hobbes, Hume,

Kant, etc.

Nevertheless, even if Husserls historical-genetic method of ethical inquiry will

present us with important insights into the nature of ethical debate and into the nature of

certain theoretical pitfalls with respect to ethical theory, one still cannot excuse Husserl

from the faults present in his historical presentations. Even more than this, to the extent

that his ethics is still vulnerable to the tradition, one cannot be satisfied, if we are to take

up Husserls basic ethical position and approach, in allowing Husserls word to simply be

134
Ibid., 372-373.
 114

the last with respect to the challenges which would certainly be leveled against a

phenomenological ethics by any other form of moral philosophy which it might

encounter, whether past or future. This will be particularly the case when it comes to

Kant, and as such, we will have to pay close attention to the problem of whether or not

Husserls ethics, even if not his attacks on Kantian deontology, can stand up against the

weight of the Kantian system.

i. Socrates and the Inauguration of a Scientific Ethics

Husserl argues in the text of the ethics lectures of the 1920s that ethics as it

appears in European scientific culture finds its foundational moment in the ancient

Greeks and their struggle against the skepticism of the Sophists. He writes that, the

history of ethical science begins with ethical skepticism.135 To an even greater degree

than the natural sciences and metaphysics, which began in Greece with a reaction to the

skepticism of the Sophists with their essentially relativistic philosophiesor non-

philosophies, the area of morality was subject to a skeptical attack that was seen as

offensive to the inherited traditions of the Greek way of life and culture. For instance,

Husserl notes,

[t]ruth is, said Protagoras, whatever appeared to him as truth; in parallel,

however, the saying is also ascribed to him: Good is, for everyone,
whatever appears to him as goodwith which the objective sense of a
good in itself relativistically disappears and is abolished in the sphere of
value and, before all else, in the ethical sphere.136

135
HUA XXXVII, 34: die Geschichte der ethischen Wissenschaft mit der ethischen
Skepsis beginnt.
136
Ibid.: Wahr ist, sagte Protagoras, was ihm als wahr erscheint; parallel wird ihm aber
auch der Satz zugeschrieben: Gut ist fr jeden, was ihm also gut erscheint, womit in der
 115

Having reduced the ontological status of values to the level of a mere appearance to a

purely self-interested subject, Husserl argues that the Sophists reduced all moral norms,

if the word can still be used meaningfully here, to the level of reward and punishment.

The human subject posits rules for behavior not because there is anything which compels

the agent to act in a particular way, simply because it is compelling as a good to be done

purely for itself, but because in acting in a particular way, the agent will succeed in

attaining a rewardwhether that might be pleasure, a means for survival, adulation,

etc.and in avoiding a punishmentpain, deprivation, expulsion from the polis, etc.137

Right and wrong, here, as normative moral injunctions, according to Husserl, become

merely, inventions of the weak for their protection against the strong.138 Normative

injunctions which prohibited such things as theft, rape, adultery, etc., represented, from

the standpoint of nature, artificial customs superimposed over and above the level of the

nature of humanity. Nature, however, wants that the strongest, the most powerful, the

most capable hold sway.139 The Sophists thus sharply distinguished nomos, or law,

as an artificial invention of the weak from an eternally valid phusis, or nature.140

Wertesphre und vor allem in der ethischen Sphre der objektive Sinn eines Guten an
sich relativistisch verflchtigt und aufgehoben wird.
137
Ibid., 36.
138
Ibid.: Gesetz und Gerechtigkeit sind Erfindungen der Schwachen zu ihrem Schutz
gegen die Starken.
139
Ibid.: Die Natur will, dass der Strkste, der Mchtige, Tchtige herrsche.
140
Ibid., 35.
 116

It is with this as his backdrop that Socrates emerges on the scene as the great

Athenian philosopher; by means of Socrates reaction to the ethical skepticism of the

Sophists, ethics is born as a science in a rigorous, philosophical sense. However, it is not

that ethics emerges as a science in Socrates thought as a kind of Athena emerging fully

formed out of Zeus head. Rather, in Socrates it takes its first steps towards the

development of a rigorous philosophical method, with a scientific drive as its guiding

principle, not inasmuch as Socrates was a man of science but inasmuch, Husserl writes,

as he was, a practical reformer. His effectiveness inaugurated in general the epoch of a

new kind, from the most radical grounds to come from philosophy and with that for

humanity, the epoch of rigorous science.141 It is by means of the force of Socrates

personality and of his persistent striving for truth in the face of skepticism that

philosophy acquires a scientific teaching on morality. For Socrates, moral virtue is seen

as something capable of being taught because moral behavior follows upon correct

knowledge of the good.142 This presupposes two things. The first is that there is a

correct and objectively valid articulation of the good which remains true even if it does

not appear to me to be a good that I desire according to my own pleasures or wishes. The

second is that we as rational beings are capable of such objectively valid moral

knowledge and that the development of moral virtue will follow upon an earnest

intellectual pursuit of knowledge of the good itself.

141
Ibid., 36: ein praktischer Reformator. Seine Wirksamkeit inauguriert berhaupt die
Epoche einer neuen, auf radikalste Begrndungen ausgehenden Philosophie und damit
fr die Menschheit die Epoche strenger Wissenschaft.
142
Ibid., 37.
 117

Ethics in its embryonic, Socratic form remains incomplete; yet, all of its

foundational problems and questions are inaugurated in the Socratic dialogues.

Moreover, since it is the case that the foundations of ethics remain incomplete in its

inaugural moment and, furthermore, carry with them certain tensions which Socrates

himself was unable to resolve, the history of ethics undergoes a problematic unfolding as

the tensions of ethical inquiry are inherited as a tradition of questions and problems. It is

out of valuable and authentic motives that Socrates brings the question of the good and of

human responsibility to the good into philosophical discussion, but he does so without a

systematic scientific treatment.143 However, Husserl writes, the science must come first

which brings these values into a definitive logical form.144 As such, Socrates, in

inaugurating the epoch of scientific, philosophical inquiry, does not leave us so much

with an ethical doctrine by means of which to answer the skepticism of the Sophists, but

rather leaves us with the charge of an ethical taskto struggle for the truth about the

good and about human responsibilities. However, to the extent that Socrates work

remains incomplete, skepticism continues to threaten the validity and force of moral

philosophy throughout the history of philosophy as skepticisms continue to emerge in

various forms and within consistent clusters of problems and concerns which Husserl

attempts to address in the course of his discussions. The first problem and first consistent

form in which skepticism emerges in ethics, for Husserl, comes in the mode of hedonistic

philosophy and it is to this issue that we must now turn.

143
Ibid., 38.
144
Ibid.: Aber die Wissenschaft musste erst kommen, die diese Werte in die endgldige
logische Gestalt bringt.
 118

ii. Hedonistic Ethics

a. Ancient Hedonism

For Husserl, hedonism appears in its first philosophically articulated form in the

figure of the Sophist, Aristippus. Referring to Aristippus, Husserl writes that, [a]lthough

hedonism in this school later lost its raw form and the base sensuality of its direction, he

maintains its foundational ground-character [Grundcharakter], which lets him appear as

the opposite of a true ethics, as a form of ethical skepticism.145 For Husserl, hedonism,

regardless of the philosophical guise in which it appears, always represents a kind of

ethical skepticism inasmuch as it explains away ethical normativity in terms of the flux of

human pleasure-drives. This is the case in large part because, according to Husserl,

hedonism does not act as a proscriptive, normative ethical disciplinethat is to say,

ethics in the hedonistic strain does not become a normative science but excludes all true

normativity as in principle non-existent. The aim of hedonistic ethics is, rather, to

provide for a kind of systematization of the motives of human action rather than an

evaluation of those motives as being right or wrong. For Hedonism, then, the foundation

of all motivation is not the good in a transcendent sensei.e. in the sense of a good

which is present in the things themselves towards which rational agents act and

strivebut rather, the good in a purely immanent sense, namely as the pleasure of the act

or of the object. Thus, for hedonism, [p]leasure is the good and the good is pleasure.146

145
Ibid., 39: In dieser Schule verlor der Hedonismus spterhin zwar seine rohe Gestalt
und seine Richtung auf niedere Sinnlishkeit, er behielt aber den prinzipiellen
Grundcharakter, der ihn als Gegenspieler einer wriklichen Ethik, als eine Gestalt des
ethischen Skeptizismus erscheinen lsst.
146
Ibid.: Lust ist das Gute, und das Gute ist die Lust.
 119

Good, then, is reduced to the level of what practically coordinates with the desire

for pleasure and bad is reduced to the level of what practically fails to coordinate with the

attainment of pleasures. Hedonism further claims that this is the case by nature.147

Therefore, if nature determines the human agent to act in a certain way such that its

drives lead it to the attainment of pleasure and if, moreover, the good is nothing other

than the achievement of pleasurable experiences, then the failure to follow ones

pleasure-instincts would be a basic instance of irrationality. Husserl argues that the

implication of this is a total identification of the realm of rationality with the realm of

nature. What this means is that hedonism is forced to reject any view of reason which

would imply that rationality provides some sense of freedom over and above the way in

which we are simply determined by nature. Since, then, for hedonism, we are simply

determined to pleasure by nature, to seek after pleasure is, therefore, the most rational

pursuit, and, in fact, we are not rationally capable of any other pursuit apart from it.

However, inasmuch as hedonism, in trying to provide a systematization of human

motivation, does so according to a kind of primitive form of empiricism, Husserl

suggests, it must still provide an explanation of the experience of normativity which each

individual feels in the experience of the feeling that I ought to do such and such.

Husserl suggests that for hedonism, the meaning of the universal fact of experience is

that the normal man, who we also call the rational man, behaves in this way in his

striving. Whoever behaves differently belongs in the lunatic asylum and of such perverse

147
Ibid., 40.
 120

men we do not want to speak.148 The experience of deviation from what is the normal,

rational mode of behavior in striving towards abnormal pleasures in which we feel a

sense of condemnation or of a being-guilty in those who are the perverse in

societye.g. rapists, pedophiles, etc.is not due to the fact that these individuals have

pursued bad objects or evil values, but rather because they are rationally defective to

the point of lunacy. That being the case, hedonism can explain away normativity by

arguing that, The normal is the ought.149 We ought to be normal only in the sense

that we are only properly functioning, sane human beings if we are such. However, this

sort of ought is not an absolute ought in the sense of an ought which obliges us to

pursue truth and transcendent valuesi.e. an ought which is unconditioned and

unconditional. Rather, it is only a practical result of the fact of normality as representing

the natural tendencies of the human species and abnormality as representing a descent

into lunacy.

Husserl argues that ancient hedonism is fundamentally mistaken in its

interpretation of experience and that it is mistaken precisely because it fails to notice

certain key elements of the experience of motivation and of the experience of value as it

is given as an end for human striving, and even as it is given in the context of the striving

for pleasure. This is the case because hedonism of necessity must ignore the fact of the

148
Ibid., 41: Die Meinung der allgemeinen Erfahrungstatsache ist die, dass der normale
Mensch, den wir auch den vernnftigen nennen, sich im Streben so verhalte. Wer sich
anders verhlt, gehrt ins Irrenhaus, und von sochen perversen Menschen wollen wir
nicht sprechen.
149
Ibid.: Das Normale ist das Gesollte.
 121

irrepressible presence of the question of what is the morally right thing to do

(Rechtsfrage) and of a sense of conscience in human experience. He argues that,

Certainly there lies in the idea of a right [thing to do], of, in some sense,
an ought-being, a universal validity. However, if one also likes to infer
from the universal fact of hedonistic striving that pleasure for men
universally holds as a good, as a right end, will we confuse the
universality of this validity [Geltung] with universal legal validity
[Allgemeingltigkeit] and will we be subject to the equivocation of the
word validity [Geltung] and legal force [Gltigkeit], which could both
mean the same thing? 150

Briefly, the equivocation which Husserl is bringing to the fore is the equivocation

between two levels of validity. If we assume it as a given that hedonistic striving

represents a universal fact always valid for every human striving, does that at the same

time imply that hedonistic striving also always carries with it the kind of validity which

bears within it the force of law, i.e. of normativity, of an ought-to-be-done? Regardless

of whether or not we always possess such hedonistic motivations in our strivings, we can

still ask the question of whether or not we ought to follow hedonistic motivations. He

further argues that, the question of rightness becomes arranged, and in an exactly

analogous sense in striving as it also does in judgments, into assertions and

convictions.151 The arrangement of questions of the rightness of an action into such

assertions which, like those of logical judgment, seek to carry with them the force of

150
Ibid., 42: Gewiss liegt in der Idee eines Rechts, eines in irgendeinem Sinne Sein-
Sollenden, die allgemeine Gltigkeit. Aber wenn man auch aus der allgemeinen Tatsache
des hedonistischen Strebens entnehmen mag, dass den Menschen Lust allgemein als ein
gutes, als ein rechtes Ziel gilt, werden wir Allgemeinheit dieser Geltung mit
Allgemeingltigkeit verwechseln und der quivokation der Worte Geltung und Gltigkeit,
die beides besagen knnen, unterliegen?
151
Ibid.: Die Rechtsfrage wird, und in genau analogem Sinne, wie an Strebungen so
auch an Urteile, an behauptungen und berzeugungen gestellet.
 122

normativity, implies for Husserl that we cannot allow the assumed universality of

hedonistic motivation to have the last word since it stops at a lower level of validity and

never approaches normative questions.

However, Husserls critique of ancient hedonism does not stop at the level of the

logic of normative judgments. He further argues that hedonism misses the essential point

about the intentionality of ethical motivation. In brief, Husserl states that Aristippus

ultimately failed to learn the proper method of intuition into the status of value as an

object of an intentional act.152 Had Aristippus recognized the structure of intentionality

present where values are concerned, then he would have recognized that, the

identification of good and pleasure is naturally completely wrong, and so with it the

identification of every absolute ought with the ultimate aim of the greatest possible

pleasure.153 The reason why Aristippus would have been able to overcome this

conflation of terms had he understood the intentionality of motivation is that he would

have recognized that the ultimate aim of a motivation is not the pleasure of the thing

which is given, but that the ultimate end is the thing as a good itself, as a value. Pleasure

is pleasure in a value-bearing object. Pleasure is itself not a self-contained end, but

only seeks after an end external to the one who experiences the pleasure. As such,

hedonism misses the facts of intentionality and for that reason misses the reality of values

as capable of being both objective and normative.

152
Ibid., 43.
153
Ibid.: Grundfalsch ist natrlich die Identifikation von Gutem und Lust und somit die
Identifikation des jeweils absolut Gesollten mit dem Endzweck der grtmglichen Lust.
 123

b. Hobbes Egoism

The next form in which hedonism emerges in Husserls history of ethics is in the

moral and political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. As Husserl notes, the historical

situation in which Hobbes found himself in sixteenth century England was one of nearly

perpetual turmoil and of the constant threat of civil war. The consequence of this for

Hobbes as a political philosopher was such that, Hobbes draws from his life and world-

experience a pessimistic WeltanschauungHe sees that egoism rules the world.

Christian love of neighbor is for him an empty phrase. Men want to do good for another

only for the sake of their own advantage.154 Given this sort of worldview, Hobbes is

unable to see how any sort of motivation in ethics could function other than those which

one might readily term pragmatic and utilitarian. As is well known, Hobbes is concerned

first and foremost with the stability of the state as the means by which humanity will

secure peace and security from the possibility of slipping into the state of nature, which is

a state of absolute war. According to the law of nature, each individual has a right to all

things; yet, competition between equally powerful individuals, or between coordinating

groups of individuals, yields a situation which is essentially dangerous to the survival of

individual human beings. It is not out of a love or concern for the other that humanity

makes the decision to extricate itself from its state of natural competition and struggle,

but rather out of purely egoistic desires for self-preservation. Thus, Husserl writes that,

for Hobbes, man is an egoist from the very depths of his nature and as such, that is the

154
Ibid., 48: Hobbes schpft aus seiner Lebens- und Welterfahrung eine pessimistische
WeltanschauungEr sieht, dass Egoismus die Welt regiert. Christliche Nchtenliebe ist
ihm bloe Phrase. Nur um ihres Vorteils willen tun die Menschen anderen Gutes.
 124

foundational fact and, indeed, the egoistical drive, which is the drive for self-

preservation, for self-promotion, [is] the one and only originary drive of mankind.155

For Hobbes, then, the individual has no other motivating purpose than its own self-love

and his or her egoism will ultimately be expressed, Husserl claims, in terms of a

hedonistic drive for pleasure.

Hobbes argues that it is out of the coordination of the universal drive for self-

preservation and self-promotion that the individual checks his or her drives for

domination and gives over the right to all things to the state as the entity which, by means

of the exertion of an irrepressible power and the projection of a fear of punishment in

individuals, imposes laws upon society in order to maintain the peace. Because each

person is afraid of the state and its coercive power, laws enacted by the state become

binding. However, should the balance of power shift such that the states laws become

ineffective, whoever is stronger will then have no fear in rising up and taking back the

right to all things at the expense of others and thus will have no motivation not to do so.

It is clear, then, that for Hobbes the egoistic drive for self-preservation must work as a

grounding principle for action and must account for a certain kind of balancing act

between the privation of freedom which adherence to the laws of the state necessarily

imply and the fear of taking too much such that the individual becomes a target for

societal retribution.

155
Ibid., 49: Das ist die Grundtatsache, und zar ist der egoistische Trieb, der Trieb der
Sebsterhaltung, der Selbstfrderung, der eine und einzige ursrpngliche Trieb des
Menschen.
 125

The state of nature, for Hobbes, remains entirely devoid of moral or legal

obligation. In its pure individualism, the state of nature represents a phase of human

history in which man does not care at all for the needs of others and in which there are no

social bonds. All that is given is my own right to the things that I want and need and my

will to take them at all costs in order to preserve my life and in order to promote myself

to the most secure position possible in what minimal social order might happen to exist.

For Hobbes, it is only after the establishment of the state and its accompanying social

order that the concepts of an ought and of duty first emerge. Thus, Husserl writes,

[a]n ought, a duty is first given in social association, and here belongs all that is called

morally good and morally evil.156 What this amounts to, Husserl suggests, is that the

emergence of morality and of all moral values and evaluations occurs only in the artificial

context of political, social orders. This means that, [t]he morally good and morally evil

is only the agreement or the conflict of our freely willed actions with a determined law,

through which our condition is bound according to the will and power of the law-giver of

good and evil.157 We do not naturally, then, possess any sort of moral obligations.

Rather, moral obligations and moral categories are imposed on us and are efficacious in

their normativity only by virtue of both the power of the law-giver to enforce a law and

by virtue of our drives for self-preservation and self-promotion which are aided in

156
Ibid., 51: Ein Sollen, eine Pflicht gibt es erst im sozialen Verband, und hierher gehrt
alles, was als sittlich gut und sittlich bse zu bezeichnen ist.
157
Ibid.: Das sittlich Gute und sittlich Bse ist nur die bereinstimmung oder der
Widerstreit unserer freiwilligen Handlungen mit einem bestimmten Gesetz, wodurch nach
dem Willen und der Macht des Gesetzgebers Gutes und Bses mit unserem Zustand
verknpft wird.
 126

following the law imposed on us by a stronger personality than our own. There is, then,

no good which is good in itselfi.e. which holds a universal, unconditional

validityindeed, the idea of a summum bonum is, for Hobbes, a logical absurdity and a

meaningless locution.158 Rather, good is only what the strongest say it is and that to

which the self-love of the weak attaches itself in consequence. The tradition of ethics in

England following Hobbes, Husserl argues, will carry on this same basic principle of

egoistic self-love as the basis for ethical normativity and value in such thinkers as

Mendeville, Hartley, Mill, and Bentham and the British empiricist traditions of

utilitarianism. Husserl argues that the consistent current which runs through all of them,

however, is to be found in their proclivity for a kind of ethical skepticism which reduces

all good and evil to social conditions and laws and which ignores any notion of absolute

values.

c. Egoism as Hedonism and Hedonism as Ethical Skepticism

Husserls critique of both hedonism and egoism hinge upon the argument that

they both represent a certain kind of skepticism about the reality of ethical goods and

evils and, consequently, of any ethical norms which would follow from them. Drawing

from both traditions, i.e. from the tradition of hedonism as it emerged from the ancient

Greeks in the figures of Aristippus and Epicurus, and from the tradition of egoism as it

emerged in Hobbes, Husserl recognizes in both a common central thesis. According to

Husserl, Hobbes holds to the position that, man has in all his striving only one single

158
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Michael Oakeshott (New York: Simon & Schuster,
Inc., 1962), ch. 11.
 127

possible end, self-preservation.159 While for hedonism what is at stake is not necessarily

self-preservation as the overriding central concern, what is at stake is ones own

enjoyment of the pleasures which existence in the world may afford. Thus, among the

interests of hedonism is the continued existence of the individual such that one can say

that there exists a certain essential affinity between Hobbesean egoism and ancient

hedonism on this level. However, for Husserl there is more of an essential connection

than this would initially serve to indicate.

Initially, one might interpret Husserl to be suggesting that there is a kind of

contingent connection in Hobbes to a hedonistic outlook inasmuch as for Hobbes, the

self-interested drive towards self-preservation occurs at one and the same time with a

drive for the individuals acquisition of goods and pleasures that will provide a level of

self-satisfaction to individual egoic life. However, if things are left simply with that, then

it would be difficult to point to any essential connections between egoism and hedonism

per se. What makes such a connection possible is the fact that, Husserl claims, the drive

for self-preservation is identical with the drive for pleasure and the drive for pleasure is

identical with the drive for self-preservation. To a certain extent, then, it would seem to

be evident that Husserl does not merely see a certain familial resemblance in Hobbes

thought to ancient Hedonism, but that he sees Hobbes as doing nothing other than

drawing out the logical implications of hedonism. It is for this reason that he writes that,

if we ignore the specific differences present in egoism, then it becomes clear that, the

159
HUA XXXVII, 61: Der Mensch habe in allem seinem Streben nur ein einziges
mgliches Ziel, die Selbsterhaltung.
 128

foundational fact [of egoism] is identical with that of hedonistic ethics.160 What is

specific to egoism is the denial of the existence of altruistic motives, which hedonism in

its embryonic form does not necessarily denyindeed, one might derive a great deal of

pleasure in the pleasures experienced by another. Egoism takes hedonism to its logical

conclusion in denying that, in so doing, the ego has anything but its own self-interested

pleasure as a motivation in performing such actions which benefit others. The pleasure

or good of the other is nothing more than an occasion for the egos self-enjoyment and

self-promotion, for Hobbesean egoism. The conclusion which Husserl derives from this

situation is that hedonism, carried out to its very limits, will always terminate in egoism.

Egoism, for its part, is always a species of a basically hedonistic world-view and ethical

standpoint. Both, moreover, will always terminate in a basic skepticism about the reality

of ethical norms and values.

Both ancient hedonism and modern egoism represent two very similar and

essentially connected forms of skepticism for the reasons already stated, namely that they

both claim ethical norms as being merely human inventions and the result of a communal

action by means of which the ethical rules of human behavior are developed. Both

hedonism and egoism deny that there are any ethical norms or values which are good in

and of themselves. Rather, goodness is wholly relative to an ego in the sense that it is

posited by an ego as good for the purposes of self-preservation and pleasure alone. As

such, Husserl argues that both hedonism and egoism, as forms of ethical skepticism, are

open to a fundamental critique on a phenomenologically founded level. He argues that

160
Ibid.: so ist das Grundfaktum identisch met dem der hedonistischen Ethik.
 129

they both fail to recognize that, even if we take pleasure initially as our hermeneutical

key by means of which we might come to interpret human motivation, pleasure cannot be

taken and dealt with as a univocal term. Both traditions take pleasure as the only possible

end of human striving and in so doing they fail to understand the intentional structure of

pleasure which gives this concept at the very least a double sense. He writes that, if we

analyze the pleasures which are associated with listening to music, to take one of

Husserls classic examples, one can differentiate between, first the acquisition of

pleasure [Erzielungslust], the pleasure of: Now I have attained it!, and second, the

joyful pleasure [Freude] concerning the music itself.161 The first instance of pleasure

arises, Husserl argues,

when the beautiful music is unexpectedly and spontaneously portioned

out to us, and so the distinction is fully clear. In the action, therefore, the
pleasure of the end is an epigennema (epiphenomenon), an increase, and
obviously an a priori necessary one. There, one is to understand a priori
that if pleasure is itself the end-goal of striving, it is necessary to
distinguish between this pleasure and the achievement of pleasure; thus,
the reference to this latter pleasure as an argument that only pleasure can
be striven for as an end-goal is an a priori absurdity.162

Husserls claim here is that the pleasure which one experiences in the end of a particular

action is merely an epiphenomenon which inheres upon the end itself but never becomes

the end purely in and for itself. To call the achievement of pleasure an end in itself is,

161
Ibid., 66: einmal die Erzielungslust, die Lust: ,,Nun habe ichs erreicht! und
zweitens die Freude an der betreffende Musik selbst
162
Ibid.: wenn uns die schne Musik unverhofft und unerstrebt zuteil wird, und so ist
die Scheidung vllig klar. In der Tat ist also die Lust der Erzielung ein , ein,
und offenbar ein a priori notwendiger, Zuwachs. Da a priori einzusehen ist, dass selbst
wenn Lust das Endziel des Strebens ist, zwischen diser Lust und der Erzielungslust zo
scheiden ist, so ist die Berufung auf diese letztere Lust als Argument dafr, dass nur Lust
als Endziel angestrebt werden kann, eine a priori widersinnige.
 130

moreover, an absurdity upon a priori grounds because of the essential structure of

pleasure as a kind of intentional relation. When I hear beautiful music, for instance, to

return to Husserls example above, the pleasure which I experience in its beauty is a

pleasure in the music itself. If I turn to the pleasure which the music affords me as an

object purely in itself which is to form the basis of my motivation to listen to the music in

the first place, independently of the music itself, i.e. if I revel in my moment of pleasure

as I sit in the concert hall, then the music immediately escapes me and so also does the

achievement of pleasure itself. If, however, I listen to the music and my pleasure

becomes a joyful pleasure in the music itself, which takes the form of an affirmation of

the music as beautiful, as enjoyable, etc., then I have an achievable goal. What follows

from this line of argument for Husserl, then, is that, on purely a priori grounds, it is

evident that the structure of act-motivations and of pleasure is such that the goal which I

seek in listening to a concert is to enjoy the music itself. The end is to take pleasure in

the music, not to rest in the pure achievement of pleasure as an end all to itself. To claim

that pleasure, then, in and of itself is the only possible end available to human action and

motivation is to make a fundamental error about the nature of pleasure itself as a kind of

intentional means through which intentional striving takes place towards pleasure-

independent values.

Husserl argues, then, that, it is necessary, to distinguish between the pleasure in

the acquisition of a pleasure-bringing thing and the pleasure in this thing itself.163

Against the argument that in every case ones motivation is for the achievement of

163
Ibid.: zwischen der Lust am Erreichen einer lustbringende Sache und der Lust an
dieser Sache selbst ist zu unterscheiden.
 131

pleasure as an end in itself, Husserl answers that, pleasure, or minimally the interest in

ones own good is involved in every action, but it is not solely determinative of it. That

is to say, in my desire to give money to a beggar, my goal is to help someone who is in

need of material assistance and my goal is entirely to help him or her at my own

monetary expense. However, in so doing, I am not ignorant of the fact that in performing

such an act of charity, I do not do so in an entirely non-self-referential manner. Rather, I

am well aware that to perform such an act of charity serves to form a certain virtuous

habit within me and makes me into a more ethically virtuous and perfected person. As

such, it is in my own self-interest to perform altruistic actions, and I may readily take

joy in doing so. However, the end-goal in itself of my action is to perform an act of

charity by affirming the poor individual as a good in and for themselves and not as a

mere means to my own self-promotion or self-betterment or to my own pleasure.

A great deal more will have to be said later in connection with this and the role

which pleasure, and other feelings as well, will play as an intentional correlate of

objective values. For now, it is enough to understand the initial reasons for Husserls

turn away from both hedonism and egoism as insufficient to describe the

phenomenological conditions of pleasure and its place in the overall framework of

motivation. For Husserl, the force of this critique will be to express how hedonism and

egoism both misunderstand the fundamental difference which obtains between the act of

valuation, which is present in pleasure as an intentional state of the subject, and the

values themselves which are real, existent objects of intentional acts of feeling. More

will have to be said on this later in order to bring Husserls critique of hedonism and
 132

egoism full circle once we are free to pursue the question of value after the initial

groundwork of Husserls view of the history of ethical philosophy has been set in place.

For now, it is necessary to turn to the final form in which ethical skepticism emerges in

the history of ethics, namely in the empiricist philosophy of Hume as characteristic of the

British and Scottish Enlightenment.

iii. Empirical Moral Philosophy in Hume

Although, for Husserl, the history of ethics beginning with its inauguration in

Socrates can be seen as having been initially characterized by a tension between an ethics

of feeling (Gefhlsmoral), of which hedonism can be seen as a prime early example, and

an ethics of reason, of which Husserl might suggest Plato as an early example with his

development of morality based upon the pure idea of the good, it is not until the

Enlightenment that this tension and strife becomes truly pronounced.164 The chief

exemplar of the ethics of feeling will be found in the empiricist moral philosophy of

David Hume. Husserl describes Humes philosophy as representing a theory of reason

which takes Lockes psychologistic rationalism to its final logical conclusions. Thus, in

Husserls reading of Hume, the objective world is merely a phenomenon in

consciousness, and consciousness itself is only a nexus of sense-data [Empfindungsdaten]

and the data of feelings, or sentiments [Gefhlsdaten], controlled by the laws of

association and habit.165

164
Arroyo, 57.
165
HUA XXXVII, 172: die objektive Welt ist blo Phnomen im Bewusstsein, und das
Bewusstsein selbst ist nur ein Zusammen von Empfindungsdaten und Gefhlsdaten,
beherrscht von Gesetzen der Assoziation und Gewohnheit.
 133

According to Hume, we have no capacity, through reason, to give articulation to

the necessary connection of causes and effects in the material world nor do we have the

ability to show that there is a necessary connection obtaining in relations of ideas, in the

movement from volition to action, etc. Rather, these data of our sensuous, conscious

lives are placed into relations purely by means of the merely subjective processes of the

association of an individual datum with other data and by means of the habituation of the

mind to these associations. Within the world itself, causality and the objective relations

of the mind represent pure fictions. The purpose of philosophy, then, is to provide a

critique of experience and of reason in order to develop an inventory of the fictions of the

mind. Thus, Husserl writes, for Hume, the whole of philosophy, which is developed

here, is a philosophy of fiction, a philosophy of the as-if. All of nature and the

determining categories of personal spirit are nothing other than the grown-up creations

of the imagination in natural necessity.166

If Humean philosophy is to be a philosophy of fictions, theni.e. a philosophy

which subjects the perceived validities of conscious life as being in reality nothing more

than the purely subjective concatenation of objectively disconnected sense-data, then,

for Husserl, we find in Hume a kind of extreme form of philosophical skepticism where

the capacity for knowledge of the true world is concerned. This skepticism, applied first

to metaphysics and to the categories of cause and effect, must of necessity also be turned

to the field of morality and of moral categories as well, for Hume. Just the same,

166
Ibid., 172-173: die ganze Philosophie, die da ausgebildet wird, ist eine
Philosophie der Fiktion, eine Philosophie des Als-ob. Alle Natur und personalen Geist
bestimmenden Kategorien sind nichts anderes als in natrlicher Notwendigkeit
erwachsene Gebilde der Imagination.
 134

however, writes Husserl, the categories of axiological and practical objectivity are

also fictions.167 Therefore, just as Humes philosophy represents a particularly extreme

sort of skepticism in the field of human knowledge, so also is Humes moral philosophy

radically skeptical over the reality of axiological and moral objectivities. If, then, the

mental fictions of axiological and practical categories are the results of the subjective

connection of certain sense-data according to psychological laws of association and

habituation, then it remains to be seen how exactly such data arise in the mind if this

paradigmatic case of the morality of feeling is to be understood fully as Husserl is

attempting to describe it.

Hume holds that it is only feeling which, in the final analysis, motivates action

and volition.168 For Husserl, this means that a proper analysis of the source of moral

judgment must be found by means of a study of feeling (Gefhl) as representing the

initial data out of which the categories of virtue and vice are constructed. In this idea,

Husserl finds a great deal of original genius in Humes work which can readily be taken

up in Husserls own analysis of morality. However, he takes issue with Hume on a

number of conclusions, which he sees as invalidating Humes moral theory. Among the

first problems which Husserl finds in Hume is his argument that feeling represents the

source of morality in the sense of the founding of moral judgments and norms upon what

represents for Hume a merely subjective stratum of psychic nature which has nothing to

do with objectively valid facts. Husserl will agree with Hume that our originary source

167
Ibid., 173: Genauso sind aber auch die Kategorien der axiologischen und praktischen
Objektivitt Fiktionen.
168
Ibid., 174.
 135

of intuition into the truths about moral and axiological values is to be found in feeling.

However, this only means for Husserl that feeling is an intentional act having value as its

objective correlate and not that feeling and taste are the only bases upon which morality

can be founded. Were the latter the case, then morality would be a purely subjective

construct and there could be no normativity at all, no normative injunctions which

command a certain course of action and which reprove another as universally

reprehensible. Rather, feelings are initial sources of insight by means of which reason

itself is capable of developing universally valid and normative ethical judgments.169

Husserl also critiques Humes account of morality for basing its moral theory

upon a severely naturalized view of consciousness. He accuses Hume of a, complete

blindness to the peculiar essence of consciousness as consciousness, to that which we call

intentionality.170 Hume is blind to the character of consciousness as intentional, as

being a consciousness of something, inasmuch as Hume has inherited from Lock a view

of consciousness that makes of it a mere analog of physical existence, an analog of

atomistic, bodily existence. The consequence of such a view is that, in order to perceive

things in the external world, the mind can only grasp such things by means of atomic

units of a psychic character, sense-data, which are representations in the mind of things

outside the mind. Husserl writes,

These psychic atoms, perceptions, which determine the living stream of

spirit, are in themselves as little consciousness as are physical atoms.
They are, in this naturalization, thought of as really entirely un-spiritual

169
Ibid., 176f.
170
Ibid., 177-178: die vllige Blindheit fr das eigentmliche Wesen des
Bewusstseins als Bewusstsein, fr das, was wir Intentionalitt nennen.
 136

[ungeistig]. They mean nothing; they carry in themselves no sense [Sinn].

They merely are. In itself out of wholly soul-less [seelenlosen] elements
should a soul, should an I which thinks, knows, values, posits ends for
itself, be built, and indeed, according to a, once again, spirit-less
[geistlosen] lawfulness, according to laws of association, which functions
in exact analogy with natural laws as unintelligible regulation in existence.
That is pure absurdity.171

If perceptions are, then, for Hume little more than self-enclosed atomic units of

experience without essential connection with things external to themselves, then it is not

possible for them to have a meaning or for them to mean anything external to

themselves. In a word, it is impossible for a perception, in a Humean analysis, to be an

intentional act by means of which consciousness is a consciousness of something. This

is a pure absurdity, for Husserl, because it betrays the very essence of what it means to be

conscious at all, i.e. to have intentional objects. Hume has effectively, Husserl argues,

reduced human consciousness to the level of a physical thing which merely factually

exists and has no meaning beyond that.

Cutting himself off from the concept of intentionality, then, Hume will

necessarily fail to understand the basic features of all acts of feeling and of willing as

being, according to their essence, object-directed acts. Husserl writes that, Hume

believes that the intentionality of feelings [Gefhle], the characteristic for whose sake

being pleased is being pleased at something, sorrow is sorrow over something, aesthetic

171
Ibid., 177: Diese psychischen Atome, die Perzeptionen, die den Lebensstrom des
Geistes ausmachen, sind in sich so wenig Bewusstsein, wie es die physischen Atome sind.
Sie sind in dieser Naturalisierung eigentlich vllig ungeistig gedacht. Sie meinen nichts,
sie tragen in sich keinen Sinn, sie sind nur. Aus in sich vllig seelenlosen Elementen soll
eine Seele, soll ein Ich, das denkt, erkennt, wertet, sich Ziele setzt, gebaut werden, und
zwar nach einer abermals geistlosen Gesetzlichkeit, nach Assoziationsgestetzen, die in
genauer Analogie mit Naturgesetzen als unverstndliche Regelungen im Dasein
fungieren. Das ist purer Widersinn.
 137

joy is joy in something, are able to be explained naturalistically.172 What Husserl means

here is that Hume is ready to explain the connection between joy in a piece of music,

sorrow over the death of a loved one, pleasure in sitting in the sunshine on a Spring day,

etc. simply according to the law of association. In themselves, the atomic data of

sentiments (Gefhlsdata) represented by joy, for example, and the sense-data of the

music which is being played, have no inherent and essential connection. Rather, they are

merely given a subjective association in the interpretive activities of the mind. As such,

then, feeling is expressive of nothing more than the pure discharge of sentimentality.

Feelings are not intentionally related to anything. They are given this relation only after

the fact. Husserl argues that Humes association psychology is, as a result, doomed to

make certain fatal mistakes which lead inevitably to a certain degree of skepticism over

the possibility that feeling can contain any kind of rationality or, as Scheler, following

Pascal, was wont to say, a logique du coeura logic of the heart.

Since for Hume, then, feeling is the only motivation for human volition and for

human action, all of the phenomena of human moral conscience and the whole teleology

of human action and volition are reduced in the same move to the level of mere

sentimentality, in the pejorative sense, and to fictional additions to the objective, physical

world. They can readily be compared to Lockes secondary qualities, like color, taste,

etc., which are irreal and purely subjective in contrast to the objective, primary geometric

qualities of material things. It is clear, then, how Humes empirical assumptions and

172
Ibid., 180: Hume glaubt, die Intentionalitt, die Eigenheit, um derentwillen das
Gefallen Gefallen an etwas, die Trauer Trauer ber etwas, die sthetische Freude Freude
an etwas ist, naturalistisch erklren zu knnen.
 138

method of approach results very readily in the development of an ethics which bases

morality upon meaningless, bare sentimentality and which gives over into a very radical

kind of skepticism about morality. One acts according to moral rules motivated by

originary moral sentiments not because they are, in themselves, normative, but purely

because to do so accords with ones purely subjective moral taste.

As a result of Humes skeptical conclusions, the Humean ethical approach will

have to be overcome in a phenomenological ethics. However, as has already been

mentioned, there are certain elements of Humean moral philosophy which Husserl

accepts, at least in their embryonic form, as insightful. Nevertheless, this insight will

have to be approached in a different and more originary way in a phenomenological

ethics if it is not to give way into the same kind of problematic skepticism into which

Hume and the rest of the Gefhlsmoralisten fall. Although there will also be insights in

rationalism as well, Husserl will likewise be no more willing to accept wholesale the

tenets of rationalistic theories of ethics, represented by the paradigmatic thought of

Immanuel Kant, to which we must now turn in order to grasp fully the force of Husserls

reading of the history of ethics and its tensions.

iv. The Ethics of Pure Reason

Husserl traces the history of rationalism in ethics beginning with Plato, who

subsumes the whole of morality under the Idea of the Good, and moving on through

Aquinas,173 to the rationalists of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,

173
As has already been said, the identification of the Thomistic ethical teaching on the
good does not seem at all to represent a medieval analog of modern rationalism as
Husserl suggests that it is. The only connection there is that Cudworth wants to defend a
 139

including such thinkers as Ralph Cudworth (1617-1688), Samuel Clarke (1675-1729),

and Spinoza (1632-1677). In contrast to Gefhlsmoral, which arises out of the grounds

of skeptical empiricism, rationalistic ethics represents an attempt to provide an account of

ethical normativity as deduced, posited, or otherwise intuited from the grounds of pure

reason itself. To be counted among the rationalist school of ethics, for Husserl, implies

turning away from experience and from attempting to derive our understanding of the

sources of our intuitions regarding ethical norms from an experience of the world.

Rather, rationalistic moral theories, however diverse they may be, will all attempt to

provide moral laws as in some way based upon the form of pure reason and/or as

essentially accessible through pure reasonin the sense of intellectual acts of

presentation and judgmentalone. Precisely what this implies is that an intuition of

moral values will be divorced from feeling acts of any kind, and, moreover, ethical norms

will be objective aspects of the world as such, true apart from any subjective conditions

of validity or invalidity.

a. Husserls Critique of Kant

In spite of the fact that, in the rest of his critical philosophy, it was Kants

intention to overcome the opposition between empiricism and rationalism as it had

characterized early modern philosophy, inasmuch as Kants philosophical attempt to

ground ethics represents a regression to a rationalistic ethics, Husserl sees Kant as the

ethical rationalist par excellence. This is, perhaps, due to Kants later reaction towards

his own earlier adherence to the theories of the morality of feeling in his pre-critical

similar conclusion regarding the relationship of the good to divine volition. Husserls
history is thus very dubious here.
 140

philosophy.174 Husserl quotes Kant, in an early lecture from 1765/1766, as stating that,

[t]he attempts of Shaftsebury, Hutcheson and Hume, which, although unfinished and

insufficient, nonetheless still were sufficient for a long time in the exploration of the first

principles of all morality.175 However, with the inauguration of his critical phase, Kant

turns against the dogmatism of his early philosophy and against the empiricism of his

moral theory, which, as he saw, was in danger of leading morality to the conclusions of

subjectivism, relativism, and skepticism. Kant, in his new moral philosophy, was

interested in restoring a solid foundation to ethics which he sought to accomplish in, the

restitution of the idea of duty, the central ethical idea, the idea of the absolute ought,

which had really gotten lost in the prevailing morality of feeling.176 For Husserl, Kant

becomes the paradigmatic case of rationalism in ethics inasmuch as he attempts to

resuscitate this central ethical idea of absolute ethical normativity by, drawing it

directly out of intuition, out of the living moral consciousness.177 As such, Kant entirely

174
Ibid., 200.
175
Immanuel Kant, Gesammelte Schriften, Band II: Nachricht von der Einrichtung seiner
Vorlesungen in dem Winterhalbenjahre von 1765/66 (Berlin: Kniglich Preuischen
Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1912), 311; quoted in HUA XXXVII, 200: Die Versuche
des Shaftesbury, Hutcheson und Hume, welche, obzwar unvollendet und mangelhaft,
gleichwohl noch am weitesten in der Aufsuchung der ersten Grnde aller Sittlichkeit
gelangt sind.
176
HUA XXXVII, 201: die Restitution der Idee der Pflicht, der zentralen ethischen
Idee, der Idee des absoluten Sollens, die der herrschenden Gefhlsmoral eigentlich ganz
abhanden gekommen war.
177
Ibid.: schpft hier direkt aus der Intuition, aus dem lebendigen moralischen
Bewusstsein.
 141

abandons the empiricism of his early ethical philosophy wholeheartedly turning instead

towards an ethics of the empirically unconditioned to be derived out of pure reason.

For Kant, the investigation into morality must follow on the basis of the

investigation into the conditions for the possibility of freedom in the practical sphere. He

opens with the question of whether or not pure reason [is] sufficient of itself to

determine the will, or [whether] it is only as empirically conditioned that it can do so.178

If, indeed, pure reason is capable of such determination of the will, according to Kant,

then its determination will be based upon the idea of freedom as a principle of causality

which, as the first Critique had already proven, to Kants mind, could not be exhibited

empiricallyi.e. empirical experience and judgment based upon the empirically given

cannot provide us with an idea of freedom; rather freedom must be an a priori category

applied by pure reason to phenomena and not, thereby, attributable to noumena. That

being the case, then, Kant begins the second Critique with the basic assumption that any

valid study of the freedom of pure reason in the form of pure practical reason must prove,

not only that pure reason can be practical, but also that it alone, and not the empirically

conditioned reason, is unconditionally practical.179 Thus, the sharp divide which Kant

had established in the domain of pure theoretical reason in his first Critique re-emerges in

the second Critique in such a way as to provide essential and architectonic structure to

the investigations which Kant will undertake in his Critique of Practical Reason.

178
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. and ed. Lewis White Beck
(Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993), 15.
179
Ibid.
 142

If, then, the freedom of the will can be established only within the domain of pure

practical reason as reason in its practical determination wholly unconditioned by

empirical conditioning factors, then it will follow, for Kant, that the demands of morality

and, indeed, its ultimate grounding in the form of principles for rational, moral action,

can only be established for practical reason as morally binding upon the freedom of the

will if they are equally unconditioned. Thus, Kant argues that, [a]ll practical principles

which presuppose an object (material) of the faculty of desire as the determining ground

of the will are without exception empirical and can hand down no practical laws.180

From this first of his four theorems regarding practical reason, it is clear that the task of

deriving first practical principles for ethical behavior within the Kantian system can only

be achieved through the deliberate bracketing off and rejection of any kind of empirical

starting point. The sharp divide between empirical and non-empirical, a priori principles

of human action in the form of conditioned and unconditioned principles is clearly at

workand perhaps, as Husserl wants to suggest, Kant here betrays as well the hidden

motivation of the Pietism of his upbringing which, in addition to the theoretical

justifications already mentioned, lead him to this divide181 in his second theorem which

states that, [a]ll material practical principles are, as such, of one and the same kind and

belong under the general principle of self-love or ones own happiness.182 As Husserl

argues, moreover, Kant is forced by the fierce rejection of his own earlier empiricism and

180
Ibid., 21.
181
Husserl, HUA XXXVII, 168.
182
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 22.
 143

adherence to the morality of feeling, to abandon all philosophical first principles which

would lead to a position of egoistical hedonism, the likes of which Kant thinks can be

found in every empiricist ethics.183

Setting aside, then, all material practical principles as merely empirically

determining which would include any kind of feeling or moral sentimentality, ethics, or

the critique of practical reason, would have to operate in such a way that, pure reason

must be practical for itself alone, i.e. without the precondition of any feeling,

consequently, without the idea of acceptability or unacceptability, without any

consideration of a material of the capability of desire, it is able to decide something

through the bare form of the practical rule.184 For the will to be fully autonomous, it

must have access to the pure practical law unmediated by any empirical feelings or moral

sentiments.185 Thus, Kant arrives at the fundamental principle of his formalism, writing

in his third theorem that, [i]f a rational being can think of his maxims as practical

universal laws, he can do so only by considering them as principles which contain the

determining grounds of the will because of their form and not because of their matter.186

183
HUA XXXVII, 204.
184
Ibid., 205: reine Vernunft muss fr sich allein praktisch sein, d.i. ohne
Voraussetzung jeden Gefhls, mithin ohne Vorstellung des Angenehmen oder
Unangenehmen, ohne jeden Hinblick auf eine Materie des Begehrungsvermgens, durch
die bloe Form der praktischen Regel den Willen bestimmen knnen.
185
Ibid.
186
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 27.
 144

Because it is always empirically, and even hedonistically, conditioned, Kant

entirely rejects happiness as an authentic principle of moral autonomy.187 The wills

adherence to the formal moral principle of duty instead will ultimately, for Kant,

represent an object of the will that, in its autonomy, is free of the supposedly hedonistic

and egoistic concern for ones own eudaimonia. By freeing the will of any necessary

determination to concerns for happiness, and thus for feelings and empirical conditions of

any kind, the will acquires a freedom which allows the practical universal laws of

morality to determine the activity of the will in a manner which is likewise fully

unconditioned inasmuch as the will becomes determined by such principles, because of

their form and not because of their matter.188 Thus, Kants categorical imperative which

will be the fundamental law of pure practical reason will be to, act that the maxim of

your will could always hold at the same time as the principle giving universal law.189 It

is precisely the categorical imperative as an empirically unconditioned principle that

establishes the real possibility of the autonomy of the will and rescues practical reason

from being determined in action and choice heteronomously, i.e. without freedom.190

The establishment of an unconditioned categorical imperative is accomplished only if, in

Husserls account of Kant, we abstract, therefore, in our maxims from all matter, from

every object of the will as the ground of the same purposes, so that for the legal

187
HUA XXXVII, 205.
188
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 27.
189
Ibid., 30.
190
Ibid., 33.
 145

regulation of the will only one remainder is left: the bare form of a universal

legislation.191 In this way, Kant forms the basis of a purely rationalistic ethics which

derives the whole of the moral law and all of its implications from purely formal,

universal principles derived from practical reason itself, devoid of any empirical,

individual conditions

Husserl finds a great deal in Kant which is to be preferred to the empiricism of

Humean moral philosophy. In particular, Husserl seizes upon the idea of an absolute

ought, which is operative in Kantian philosophy and of which Humes moral theory is

totally devoid, as an absolute necessity if ethics is to capture the authentic sense of

morality.192 Absolute normativity is of the utmost importance and cannot be traded away

without leading inevitably into ethical relativism and, subsequently, into ethical

skepticism. Likewise, Husserl sees in Kant a great deal that must be respected where the

idea of an ethics which attempts to establish a universal objective validity is concerned.

This aspect also cannot be found in Humean philosophy or in any other empirical

morality of feeling. That being said, there is a great deal in Kants ethics which Husserl

sees as requiring significant criticism. This will consist above all else in a critique of

Kants rationalistic starting point. From this overall critique, Husserl will attack

individual aspects of Kants theory, in particular his formalism and the unbending

manner in which he requires ethical principles to be universal in their grounding as

191
HUA XXXVII, 207: Abstrahieren wir also in unseren Maximen von aller Materie, von
jedem Gegenstand des Willens als Bestimmungsgrund desselben, so bleibt fr die
gesetzmige Bestimmung des Willens nur eins brig: die bloe Form einer allgemeinen
Gesetzgebung.
192
Peucker, Husserls Critique of Kants Ethics, 312.
 146

categorical imperatives which keeps him from recognizing that there might be a wholly

valid and normative sphere of personal ethical duties which might not be shared by

another precisely because of material circumstances and because of the particularity of

individual vocations. Finally, Husserl sees it as necessary to pay close attention to the

role which empirically experienced feelings play in the development of a moral judgment

and in the intuition into authentic moral values which Kant completely ignores.193

As Henning Peucker writes, for Husserl, ethics cannot rest solely on the

intellectual faculty of pure reasonInstead, Husserl seeks a foundation for ethics that

takes into account the main insight of the sentimentalists: that moral conceptsare based

on feelings.194 Like Hume, Kant also misses the key fact about all empirical feelings

that they are intentional acts with values as their objective correlates. Further, in

developing an ethics deduced from reason alone, divorced from any material factors,

including those having to do with the subject as a moral agent in a material world, Kant

fails to recognize the importance of moral consciousness itself as intentional, i.e. as

drawing information for moral judgments from the world in which it exists, and as such

Kant fails adequately to understand the full range of subjective acts which are involved in

the recognition of moral obligations. In essence, then, Kants formalism can only operate

by abstracting from and ignoring every subjective act which actually serves to bring

moral obligations to bear in the life of a personal ego and, further, by prescinding from

every material condition which makes the moral world-order appear in consciousness.

193
Arroyo, 61.
194
Peucker, Husserls Critique of Kants Ethics, 312.
 147

In its universal formalism, Kants ethics has the result of dehumanizing the

human moral agent, in particular by forcing the moral agent to deny all ties to feeling and

the individual pursuit of happiness (eudaimonia) in favor of pure duty in determining

ones actions in accordance with morality. In so doing, Husserl argues that Kant cannot

understand the possibility, that a being has a purely rational will and that, it indeed has a

rational will, but in concurrence with a sensuous drive pulling it down, a will which is

also determinable through feelings.195 What is given a priori about the will as the will

of a human subject with its given life-world, is that, a priori in unconditional essential

generality every will-subject must, therefore, be a valuing, a feeling subject.196

Phenomenologically, Husserl argues, the will has its moral values only through acts of

evaluation which are only revealed in an intuitive feeling of them. By means of these

acts through which the life-world is given as a moral world-order, the will itself is

grounded with all of its motivations to strive after its ends morally. For Husserl, we

cannot possibly deny that, the act of the will is motivated through the value which is

meant in a value-having,197 without betraying the facts of experience. Since this is

given a priori in a phenomenological analysis of the will and its acts, the purity and

freedom of the will, on Husserls analysis, do not entail that the will be made free of all

non-formal, empirical conditions. As such, Husserl denies what he sees as Kants

195
HUA XXXVII, 213-214: dass ein Wesen reinen Vernuftwillen hat, und dass es
einen Vernunftwillen zwar hat, aber in Konkurrenz mit einem ihn herabziehenden
sinnlichen Trieb, einen Willen, der auch durch Gefhle bestimmbar ist.
196
Ibid., 214: A priori in unbedingter Wesensallgemeinheit muss also jedes
Willenssubjekt ein wertendes, ein fhlendes Subjekt sein.
197
Ibid., 215: Der Willensakt ist motiviert durch den im Werthalten vermeinten Wert.
 148

rationalistic and formalistic starting point, and, in so doing, he does away with the strict

contrast which Kant creates between rationality and sensuality understood as the divide

between the a priori and the empirical.

For Husserl, values can be given in feeling without that implying any lack of

rationality where values are concerned.198 This is due to the fact that the acts of feeling

through which values are indicated really are rational and provide the subject with a real

possibility to carry out an a priori eidetic analysis of value ranks and hierarchies. For

Husserl, all that need be acknowledged here for us to accept a certain rationality present

in feeling is to acknowledge that there is a distinction between certain lower-level, non-

rational domains of feeling, like the feeling of hunger, pain, irritability, etc. which do not

give us values as intentional objects, and certain higher-level, rational domains of feeling-

acts, like joy, love, hate, etc. which are, properly speaking, always indicative of objective

values. We will have an opportunity to discuss these problems in later chapters.

Both Henning Peuker and Christopher Arroyo question whether or not Husserls

critique of Kant is really successful in addressing Kants moral philosophy.199 It is not

my intention to attempt to contradict them on this score. Certainly, Husserl thinks that

his critique can provide an answer, if not to Kant himself, then at least to Kant inasmuch

as his thought has been passed down to us in Neo-Kantianismwhether or not he even

does this successfully is beyond our concern here. Nonetheless, for the purposes of the

systematic study of Husserls ethical philosophy which seeks both to expound, enlarge,

198
Ibid., 220.
199
See Arroyo, 61ff., and Peucker, Husserls Critique of Kants Ethics, 317ff.
 149

and defend the ethical vision emerging out of Husserls ethical investigations, it will be

necessary to tarry for a moment here in order to bolster up Husserls position against

Kant in a more rigorous, even if only preliminary, way. Some issues which might result

from a Kantian critique of Husserls ethics will have to be delayed until a more opportune

moment for their discussion. However, for now, the most pressing issues are the

problems of Kants formalism and of the misguided character of Kants drive towards the

unconditioned.

Prior to Husserl, one can already find in Brentano a striking criticism of Kants

formalism from a logical perspective, regarding the categorical imperative as a palpable

fiction.200 Kant, explains Brentano, holds to the position that the individual maxim as a

principle of practical action, when raised to a universal law, does not lead to

contradictions and consequent self-abrogation;201 therefore, it is a categorical necessity

that the autonomous subject strive to act in such a manner that ones individual maxim

could be raised to a universal law for all rational agents. Brentano believes that, if we

search for this principle within pure reason, it turns out to be nothing more than a

psychological fiction [psychologische Dichtung].202 That is to say, within his own

descriptive psychology, Brentano finds no evidence that we recognize any such principle

of obligation for us to act in such a way that any other rational subject would do the same

as another in any given situation. For Brentano, autonomous human subjects simply do

200
Brentano, The Origin of the Knowledge of Right and Wrong, 10.
201
Ibid., n. 14.
202
Ibid.
 150

not act or think in this way. It is often the case that we experience an absolute ought

which we experience as applying to us and to us alone, growing out of our own particular

experience of our vocations, our life-circumstances, our peculiar obligations to family,

friends, work, etc., within a constellation of motivational factors. Nonetheless, Brentano

allows us to accept, for a moment, that the categorical imperative is something more than

a psychological fiction in order to see how it fairs on logical grounds.

Kant, Brentano notes, explains the logical founding of the categorical imperative

on the grounds that, in order to provide practical reason with principles of autonomy

which are unconditioned by empirical factors, we must attend only to the pure form of the

law. As such, we are to act only in such a way that the maxims of our action could be

raised to the level of a universal law. This is the only way in which we satisfy the

demand that our action is autonomous. The method of concretely filling out precisely

what individual maxims are capable of being universalized in this way, is by seeing

whether or not a maxim, being promoted to the level of a universal law, leads logically to

its own annulment and self-abrogation.203 For instance, to use Kants example, if one

were to ask whether it is acceptable to keep without repayment what has been lent to you,

the only answer can be no because, if one were to answer the opposite, then the law

would lead to its own self-abrogation insomuch as no one would be willing to lend

money or anything else under such circumstances. Consequently, the law would be

rendered without effect, and would be impossible to practice. Therefore, it cannot be a

universal law which is obligatory for all persons that they ought to behave in such a way.

203
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 69.
 151

Brentano argues that this line of argumentation is absurd because, if, in consequence of

the law, certain actions ceased to be practiced, the law exercises an influence; it therefore

still exists and has in no way annulled itself.204 Brentano explains what he means by

this further down when he asks whether it would be moral to acquiesce to a person who

desired to bribe me for something. If we are concerned, like Kant, with the need that the

universal law not lead to its own self-abrogation by way of contradictions, then Brentano

argues that we must argue in the affirmative here, since if we say that I should not so

acquiesce, and we raise this to a universal law, then no one would attempt bribery

anymore and the law would thus be without effect or application.205

The qualification of universalizability for a maxims acceptance as an

unconditioned principle of autonomy leads, then, to its own absurdities. It cannot be a

guarantee, simply because a law can be universalized without contradiction, that we have

necessarily discovered a true moral imperative. Furthermore, simply because a universal

law leads to a situation in which the law no longer has application, this also cannot be a

qualification for having obtained the valid moral law. For Brentano, then, moral laws

may be universalindeed it is the ideal that we should be able to seize upon moral truths

which are universally valid; nevertheless, their universality is by no means the grounds of

their normativity nor is it the source from which we derive our obligations to them. That

is not to say that their universality will have nothing at all to do with their normativity,

but the question of how and why, at least many, ethical obligations are universally

204
Brentano, The Origin of the Knowledge of Right and Wrong, n. 44.
205
Ibid.
 152

binding and what the principle of their universal extension is will have to be approached

later on.

In spite of the critique of Kants categorical imperative as representing something

of an impossibility from a psychological point of view and as a logical non sequitur,

Kants search for the unconditioned can still be affirmed with certain qualifications as

representing an authentic struggle of ethical philosophy to provide a true account of

ethical normativity. Ethics must strive to provide the grounding for ethical normativity

and, in doing so, it must provide an account of ethical obligation which, if it is to be true

to our experience of obligation, does not exempt any rational agent from the task to

pursue the good. In a sense, then, the principle of ethical obligation must be

unconditioned, at least insofar as we understand its unconditionality as meaning that,

apart from empirical circumstances, in particular psycho-physiological inclinationse.g.

in this individual towards violent anger, addiction, etc.and biologically determining

processes, the ethical law is still binding for all precisely because it addresses human

agents in the sphere of their freedom, not in the sphere of their being necessitated to this

or that condition. Nevertheless, following Scheler, there is no need for us, as Kant does,

to identify the conditioned/unconditioned dichotomy with the Kantian empirical/a

priori, where empirical refers to anything at all given through sense and anything

which represent contingent factors with respect to action, and even less for us to identify

the unconditioned/conditioned with Kants formal/non-formal.206 It is Kants false

206
Max Scheler successfully argues this point at length in the second chapter of his
Formalism in which he discusses the ways in which a phenomenological ethics must
operate at the a priori levelthis is Kants insightand yet Kant is fundamentally
 153

identification of these concepts which leads him in the utterly wrong direction in

searching out unconditioned principles for morality. We should take a moment to

understand this point, for it will prove to be crucial for the grounding of a

phenomenological ethical theory which wishes to reject any kind of Kantian formalism in

ethics.

For Kant, the conditioned includes everything phenomenal, and thus, whatever is

phenomenal is wholly subject to the laws of empirical causality. It is for this reason that

anything that includes a material, i.e. an object, of motivation as a principle of moral

action represents a principle of heteronomy. Furthermore, it is also for this reason,

stemming from the fact that the conditioned represents a contingent factor with respect to

action and motivation, that Kant sees it as impossible to derive necessary ethical

injunctions upon the back of empirically conditioned factors. However, phenomenology,

and Husserls value-theory specifically, will attempt to show that this is far from an

adequate articulation of the facts. Husserl may also benefit from a Scotistic answer to

Kant on this point, to the extent that such an answer need not be taken as anachronistic.

In the prologue to his Lectura, Duns Scotus provides a differentiation of the

sciences according to the classical distinction between the theoretical sciences and the

practical sciences. He is interested, in particular, in understanding what essentially

differentiates the two types of sciences. In the process, Scotus attempts to defend the

idea that theology and ethics both represent sciences which are purely practical and not

mistaken in the ways in which he applies the concept a priori as dichotomous with
empirical, experiential, etc. For a more comprehensive treatment of this issue, see
Scheler, Formalism, 53ff.
 154

theoretical. One might see here that Scotus is, in a way, sensitive to similar conclusions

as one finds in Kant where he differentiates between the domains of pure theoretical

reason and pure practical reason, although Scotus has entirely different reasons for this

distinction in mind.207 Nevertheless, important conclusions can be derived from the way

in which Scotus deals with some of the issues surrounding this problem, chief among

them being the possibility for such a practical science as theology or ethics to obtain

knowledge of the principles of morality from within the context of the contingency of

what Kant might call the empirically conditioned.

Scotus argues, then, that theology is a practical science because it deals with God

not as a merely theoretical object, i.e. as one about which knowledge is obtained that

remains within the intellect alone, but as a practical object, i.e. as knowledge which

207
It is not the case, for Scotus, that pure theoretical reason would be over-reaching itself
in attempting to obtain knowledge of Gods existence, while pure practical reason can
attain this knowledge as Kant argues. Rather, this (improperly named) theoretical
knowledge of God is only ever knowledge of God for the sake of a goal or a task,
namely to love God more completely by gaining knowledge of God as belovedwhether
or not the theologian succeeds or fails to apply this practical knowledge in this way is
beside the point. Thus, for Scotus, even if we want to speak of theological speculation
carried out in metaphysics, for instance, which attempts to provide a demonstration of
Gods existence, this scientific undertaking could only ever be called a practical
undertaking and not a theoretical one because the end of such knowledge is essentially
practical. Finally, contrary to Kant, for Scotus pure theoretical reason never attempts to
ascend to God for the fundamental reason that reason of itself, is neither practical nor
theoretical (Lectura prol., pars 4, qq. 1-2, in John Duns Scotus on the Will and Morality,
trans. and ed. Allan Wolter, O.F.M. (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America
Press, 1997), 130. [Much of Scotus works remain unpublished in complete and critically
edited volumes. Most of the works from which I will be quoting, in particular the
Ordinatio and the Lectura, related to the questions of freedom, the will, and Scotus
theory of morality are to be found in Allan Wolters compilation of Scotus ethical
writings. For ease in referencing these texts, then, I will keep to the practice of
referencing the original Scotistic text in as much detail as Fr. Wolters edition allows as
well as the page number of the text in the Wolter edition, referred to as DSWM].
 155

extends and leads to praxisthere is thus a close tie, on Scotus account between

theology and moral philosophy which we will have occasion to discuss later on. In

making this argument, however, Scotus must deal with certain doubts arising from a

concern about how a practical science can be a science at all. It is in this connection

that Scotus conclusions about theology as a practical science will have a bearing both

upon the understanding of practical science, in general, and upon the understanding of

ethics, in particular. The crux of the difficulty, as Scotus articulates it, centers on the fact

that practical sciences have to do with contingencies, or with what Kant might refer to as

the empirically conditioned, whereas science is concerned with the universal, the

formal, and the essentially necessary, or the unconditioned.208 If theology and ethics

both, then, are concerned with the contingent, inasmuch as they are practical, then it

would be said that they are not sciences at allthey are not any kind of knowledge, but

rather simply habits or powers of action lacking reason, and thus would be heteronomous

in the Kantian sense. Scotus replies to this doubt by arguing that, there are necessary

truths about contingent things, because while it is contingent that a stone fall,

nevertheless there are necessary truths about its descent.209 Moreover, these necessary

truths are not to be determined simply by abstracting from all contingent conditions, as

Kant does in the moral sphere. Rather, they are obtained precisely by close attention to

the contingencies and the essential necessities which they reveal through their intelligible

presence to reason.

208
Ibid., (DSWM, 132).
209
Ibid., (DSWM, 133).
 156

In regard to moral philosophy, for Scotus, the practical object of this science is the

moral development of the human agent as an agent who performs acts in accordance with

the dictates of what he refers to as right reason, or, roughly speaking, reason which

correctly understands practical moral obligations. If the human agent is fundamentally

the first object of the practical science of ethics, then this first object of ethics is a being

that is fundamentally contingent with respect to its practical action. For Scotus, ethics as

a practical science must grapple with the fact that there is a contingency in my love for

God, nevertheless there can be a necessary truth in regard to this, such as that I should

love God above all.210 This necessary truth, which, as will be seen later on, is the

fundamental practical principle of both theology and of moral science. It can be

demonstrated, Scotus holds, based upon the understanding of God as perfection, as

supremely valuable and loveable, from which I can conclude that God ought to be loved

above all other things. A science, like ethics, on Scotus reading, which takes this as its

supreme practical principle, is truly about something contingent contained in the first

object [i.e. God as proper object of my love]and nevertheless it is about necessary

truths which can be concluded about contingent things.211

One could say, here, that Scotus does accomplish something of what Kant intends

in rising above contingency to attain to the unconditioned. However, we do not have

here the necessity that the unconditioned should be opposed, in any way, to the empirical

as form to matter in the Kantian system. On this score, Scheler argues that the distinction

210
Ibid.
211
Ibid.
 157

between the a priori and the a posteriori is an absolute distinction admitting of no

relativity, i.e. there is no standpoint from which an a priori judgment can have any other

character other than a priori. On the other hand, the opposition formal/non-formal, or

formal/material, is completely relative to the concepts and propositions with which

they are brought to bear.212 For instance, if we are to think in terms of the relation of the

concepts and propositions of pure logic and those of arithmetic, we must recognize that

both are entirely a priori inasmuch as they are discerned in pure intuition;213 yet, they are

not for that reason both formal. Scheler argues that we can say that the propositions of

pure logic are formal with respect to those of arithmetic inasmuch as arithmetical

propositions are subject to pure logical norms or else lack sense entirely. Equally, from

this perspective, arithmetic propositions would have to be seen as material for pure

logical propositions. Thus, even while both would be equally a priori, they are not

simultaneously formal. As such, the formal can have nothing essentially to do with the a

priori; nor can the non-formal have anything essentially to do with the a posteriori

inasmuch as the a posteriori also can have its formal and non-formal contents.214 Even

if, then, the unconditioned as a principle of morality must be a priori or determined by

way of a priori insight, it would not follow, if Scheler is correct, that it cannot also be a

non-formal principle given as a content of material values in objects.

212
Scheler, Formalism, 53.
213
In the phenomenological, not Scotistic, sense of the word.
214
Ibid., 54.
 158

Returning to Scotus, the conclusion that God ought to be loved, then, is not

obtained by abstracting from matter and by being attentive to the pure form of the

judgment in universal necessity, nor is this needed for it to be a principle of autonomy as

in Kant. Rather, Scotus arrives at the unconditioned through reflection on the object

itself of this contingent act of lovethat it is such an object that ought to be loved by me

because of its nature. So far, this may not seem to be a radically different idea from that

found in Kant. There is still, in arriving at the ethical imperative, a movement from

contingency to necessity, from the conditioned to the unconditioned. Scotus ethics

arrives at the love of God as the unconditioned principle of all morality by way of an

understanding of the nature of God as, we might say, the unconditioned conditioner of

all reality and of the moral law.

At the same time, however, Scotus justification of what Kant would call the

unconditioned, here, is very different. Whereas for Kant, the obligation to uphold

Scotus maxim that he ought to love God, would have to be based upon the ability of the

maxim to be raised to the level of a universal law which could be obeyed without the law

contradicting itself and leading to its own self-abrogation, for Scotus the law would not

need to be justified in this manner to be obligatory. For Scotus, as will have to be seen in

much greater detail later on, the obligation will be obtained through reasons recognition

of the nature of God as that-than-which-nothing-greater-can-be-conceived, and thus as

the height of perfection, as the supremely lovable, as well as reasons recognition of the

nature of the human agent as a creature capable of performing such a love. This would

represent an a priori insight in Schelers sense of the term. In this connection, Scheler
 159

argues that there is a non-formal, or material, a priority characteristic of the eidetic

analysis of individual essences, meanings, or essential interconnections with respect to

various objects of insight. As in Husserl, Scheler holds that an eidetic study of things is

possible which can provide the essential insight into the structures and meanings of

things not merely in terms of their bare formal status within the realm of pure logic, but

in terms of the non-formal, but still no less essential, characteristics which make up their

particulars. He enlarges this recognition, already familiar on Husserlian grounds, to

make the claim that the phenomenology of values and value bearers, on this score, is

nothing other than the a priori analysis of the essences of values, value ranks, and value

bearers all in essential interconnection with the subject who encounters and strives

towards such values. It will be in terms of the essential understanding of the values of the

divine, of the value-class of the holy, and of the human subject which will allow us,

with Scotus, to understand the divine as possessing a value which normatively obliges the

human subject towards the contingent enactment of a positive love for God in accordance

with his essence, as Scotus argues.

Contrary to Kant, here, I ought to do this because I can and not vice versa. This

will necessarily imply, then, a greater difference between the Kantian unconditioned

and what we could call the unconditioned in Scotus, since, for the unconditioned to be

truly unconditioned in Kants estimation, it must be free of even any contingent factors

relating to the constitution of the human in nature. If the ought is contingent upon the

ability of the human subject to carry out certain acts, then the ought itself becomes

conditioned, situated as one empirically determined phenomenon within empirically

 160

determined phenomena and thus subjected to heteronomy. For Kant, the I can because I

ought points to the noumenal autonomy of reason in its very being-unconditioned.

Scotus, however, like Scheler and Husserl, need not make the sorts of distinctions that

Kant makes here which necessitate this move, in particular the distinction between

phenomena and unknowable noumena as well as the teaching on the a priori as the forms

of intuition rather than as truths about real being which all lead to the doctrine of the

transcendental idealism of appearances from which much of the problematic of the

Critique of Practical Reason will flow.

Like Kant, Scotus acknowledges that it is by way of appearances, or accidental

qualities inhering in things, that we come to know things. He argues that, substance

does not immediately move our intellect to know the substance itself, but only the

sensible accident does so. From this it follows that we can have no quidditative concept

of substance except such as could be abstracted from the concept of an accident.215

Moreover, the conceptualization of substance is accomplished by means of the mediation

of the univocal concept of being which we apply to it.216 For Scotus, being taken

generally is the first object of the intellect in the sense that it is the first distinct form of

knowledge and because all cognition and all judgment are cognition and judgment about

being. With respect to the derivation of the concept of substance, then, the quiddity, or

what-ness of any substance qua real substance is unknowable beyond the concept of

being which the intellect ascribes to it and which forms the only access which we have

215
John Duns Scotus, Opus Oxoniense, in Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. Allan
Wolter, O.F.M. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), I, dist. 3, q. 3.
216
Ibid.
 161

to substance qua substance.217 This is accomplished through a process of predication by

which, we conjoin positive or privative accidents that we know from the sense, to

being.218 Being can be divided by means of such accidental notions into being in

another and being not in another by which we derive the notions of accidents and

substance respectively; although, we conceive nothing as a what or quid except

being.219 The world of substantial being as well as our own selves, we can say, appear

to us only by virtue of accidental adumbrations.

It is for these reasons that Scotus refers to the aspect of truth and knowledge in a

thing as being which appears.220 Scotus, however, has no reason, given his

epistemological and ontological approach to being, to distinguish between appearances,

phenomena, and things-in-themselves, noumena, as Kants presuppositions force him

to do. Rather, appearing being is only formally distinct from the substantial thing since

accidents for Scotus are nothing other than the ways in which substance manifests itself.

Moreover, in constituting the object by means of being, which functions as something

of a third term or a medium through which the mind constitutes221 the object as a subject

217
Peter King, Scotus on Metaphysics, in The Cambridge Companion to Scotus, ed.
Thomas Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 18.
218
John Duns Scotus, Questions on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, Vol. I, trans. and ed.
Girard J. Etzkorn and Allan B. Wolter, O.F.M. (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan
Institute Publications, 1997), 2, qq. 2-3, n. 24.
219
Ibid.
220
Scotus, Questions on the Metaphysics 6, q. 3, n. 8.
221
In the Husserlian, phenomenological sense of the term constitution as a sense-giving
activity.
 162

of knowledge and predication, being is not taken, for Scotus, as a pure a priori

concept of the understanding, as in Kantindeed for Scotus it is not given a priori at

all but only by means of acts of abstractive cognition, but serves to provide for the

identity or commonality of the mind, as subject, with the object within being as a

unifying transcendental concept within which both the mind and the world are always

enclosed.222 Since, in both subject and object, being is univocal, for Scotus, there can

be no divide between the mind as being and a real entity as an unknowable thing-in-

itself since being is always already understood by the mind as its first object and as the

basis through which cognition takes place.

If, then, there is no need to posit the idealism of appearances as Kant does, then

we need not also posit the unconditioned in such a way as to cut off our moral principles

from the contingencies of our nature and of our motivational life because we need not

maintain autonomy as a noumenal property of reason which must remain unconditioned

by the phenomenal. Likewise, it also will not follow that the unconditioned and the

conditioned must conform, for the same reason, to the realm of the formal and the non-

formal. The laws of motivation through which values affect an influence upon human

action by providing grounds for motivation in the choice between different objects or

different courses of action are by no means, if we are faithful to the phenomena of values

and freedom as they are given and as Husserl will attempt to describe them, a form of

natural causality. Freedom exists for the individual both in choosing to pursue this or that

value and in shaping the evaluative structure within which different values will come to

222
Robert Pasnau, Cognition, in The Cambridge Companion to Duns Scotus, ed.
Thomas Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 294.
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play in my motivational life. Moreover, as will be seen later on, it is the necessary truths

of the contingencies of values in their being-presented to the subject that will lead,

ultimately, to the discovery of the unconditioned a priori principles of morality in the

authentic sense of the word, and not as it is used in Kant. Taking values into

consideration in forming principles of moral action will thus not represent heteronomous

factors coming to play in and invalidating moral laws. Moreover, material values will not

represent conditioned or conditioning factors mitigating the purity of the moral law.

Nevertheless, ethics will have to strive to uncover the unconditioned principle or

principles which lie at the heart of and ground all ethical obligation. Morality will still

have to be shaped by an absolute ought which is infinitely demanding upon us as servants

of the moral law.

b. Husserl and the Middle Ground

Returning, then, to the issue of the use which Husserl makes of his own peculiar

type of historical investigation in the lectures on ethics which we have attempted to

study in some detail here, it can be said that, in the way in which we have inherited the

tradition and in which it has determined certain problems for us, the history and field of

ethical philosophies is characterized by these sets of theoretical oppositions between the

empiricist ethics of feeling (Gefhlsmoral), which includes under its banner hedonism,

egoism, utilitarianism, and skepticism, and the ethics of reason (Verstandesmoral), which

includes every form of rationalism, ethics of duty, and positive belief in the truth of

values. A resolution to these oppositions, which, for Husserl, only fully came to an

explicit climax in modern thought, must be found if a genuine renewal and reenactment
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of the founding tasks, goals, etc. of ethical philosophyand also a renewal of ethical life

in individual praxis and in cultureis to be made possible, bringing a subsequent

renewal of genuine ethical discourse along with it. Although, to a certain extent, Husserl

will want to identify himself more with the overall spirit of the ethics of reason, inasmuch

as it maintains a constant belief in the reality of values, in the pure universal normativity

of ethical truths, and the constant, unconditioned/unconditional call of ethical duty

upon the moral subject, at the same time, he admits that certain aspects of the

philosophical approach to morality in the ethics of feeling not only cannot be denied, but

must in fact form the basis of a phenomenological, methodological approach to the

questions of morality.

Phenomenological philosophy, inasmuch as it attempts to move through and

return to experience in the development of a comprehensive analysis of philosophical

problems, always bears a certain essential similarity to empiricismit is empiricism in

its most radical form.223 For Husserl, it is pure absurdity for philosophy ever to approach

the problems of ethics, let alone the problems of metaphysics, epistemology, etc., by

deducing or positing its first principles in pure reason alone. We must instead make a

total return to pure experience. Methodologically, this means that an ethical theory

which will claim to be phenomenological, and thus which will claim to be

philosophically valid, will have to go back to experience in which ethical judgments are

formed and in which ethical imperatives are felt. Concretely, this means, for Husserl, the

223
See, for instance, Max Scheler, Formalism, 51; See also, Max Scheler,
Phenomenology and the Theory of Cognition, in Selected Philosophical Essays, trans.
and ed. David R. Lachtermann, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 138ff.
 165

phenomenological study of values and the subjective acts in which values are given. The

insight of an empiricist, like Hume, and of the central position of the morality of feeling

is precisely that the peculiar types of subjective acts in which we have our first and

primordial experiences of values in their being-given to consciousness are revealed in

acts of feeling. For Husserl, then, there is a central truth in the morality of feeling which

the rationalism of a Kant, for example, would be methodologically and dispositionally

incapable of recognizing.

The peculiar region of subjective acts which form the core of ethical analysis will,

then, have to be found in those particular types of feeling-acts which present values.

However, as Husserl will be quick to recognize, value-feeling is not present in just any

sort of feeling. It will have to be a very particular type of higher-order feeling which

forms the basis of the apperception of values, or value-ception (Wertnehmen) as Husserl

and Scheler both call it. The inability to recognize the fact that values are not given in

just any type of feelings but only in feelings of a higher order is part of the reason for the

failure of empiricism. The other reason for the failure of the morality of feeling is the

fact that, in spite of its recognition of the centrality of feelings connection to values, its

analysis of feeling fails to recognize the peculiar intentionality of value-feeling.

Empiricism fails to recognize that moral feeling is not simply a subjective creation of

fictional values on the basis of what feels pleasant and of what does not feel pleasant

(hedonism), but rather is an intentional apperceptive act in which values are given in their

true objectivity.
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The central insight of rationalism, then, will be that values are objective and

impose norms upon us from outside of ourselves. There is universality in ethical duty

because there is a truth in value beyond the purely subjective positing of otherwise non-

existing values. At the same time, however, Husserl recognizes that empiricism, with its

return to feeling and to the individuality of ethical sentiments, does acknowledge the

individual specificity of ethical duties. What is right for one person in a given situation

may not be right for another. Values, while objective and thus capable of being

recognized as universally valid, do not necessarily apply universally where obligation is

concerned. However, where in empiricism and the morality of feeling this gives way to

subjectivism and skepticism about ethics, for Husserl, it will reveal instead the fact that

there is a universal ethical call to do the good which must be specified by the peculiarities

and complexities of personal vocation in its relation to and intertwining with the ultimate

telos of humanity.

It is clear, then, that, for Husserl, the supposedly perennial opposition which has

characterized the history of ethics between Gefhls- and Verstandesmoral was not wholly

without justification. Both traditions were attempting to hold on to certain central

insights about the study of morality. At the same time, both traditions had certain

methodological flaws leading to false conclusions which invalidated them as legitimate

ethical systems. The fact that the two philosophical movements contained both fatal

flaws as well as central insights was the reason for the perpetuation of their traditions and

debates across the ages. However, for Husserl, inaugurating, as he believed, a radically

new epoch in philosophy, the problems of ethics required a new articulation which would
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resolve once and for all this definitive opposition between the morality of feeling and the

morality of reason. By respecting their central insights and moving forward in full-

fledged phenomenological rigor, his new moral philosophy would, Husserl believed,

achieve a middle-way between these two extremes and overcome their opposition.

Nevertheless, although Husserl is very clear about many of the requirements, in terms of

what must be avoided in charting this middle way, the actual arrival, by way of this

middle-course, at a theory possessing full-fledged systematic rigor proves overly difficult

for Husserl. We thus find Husserl still midway on his voyage, so to speak, and still in

need of the work of others to plot the course for the rest of the journey. It will now have

to be seen how Scotus in particular might contribute to the conclusion of this journey.

c. Scotist Ethics and their Promise for Phenomenology

It has already been seen how, in reference to the problem of finding an adequate

answer to objections raised by a Kantian deontology against Husserls ethics, taking

insights from Scotus philosophy might provide support and direction for Husserls

analyses. For this reason alone, Scotus has already proven himself valuable to the project

of the development of an Husserlian phenomenological ethics. However, one might

question the degree to which any number of other thinkers might also provide such

reasoned support to Husserls thought on different issues. In other words, why should we

limit ourselves to Scotus in this analysis and not also draw what can be easily

appropriated from other sources into Husserls thought in order to provide a greater depth

and direction to Husserls scattered ethical considerations?

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A preliminary answer would rightly say that we should not so limit ourselves as to

assume that, in the whole history of philosophy, the only thinker who possesses the sorts

of theoretical tools or insight to lend adequate support to Husserl would be Duns Scotus.

This would be absurd. At the same time, it brings us back to the questions again, of why

Scotus? What does Scotus have to offer that others do not and which will provide a

greater aid in the task of elucidating and defending Husserls ethics than if we were to

pursue our analyses with reference to Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Mill, Hume, or any number

of other thinkers? It certainly is clear, as was indicated at the end of the previous chapter,

that there is much to be gained for Scotus in enlarging and reinvigorating his thought in a

modern context through a vital contact with Husserlian phenomenology. This, however,

still raises the question: what promise does Scotus ethics offer to the movement of

phenomenology as such? The answer to this question will, perhaps, best be found if we

look back upon Husserls view of the history of ethics and his own position in it in order

to recognize precisely where Scotus would fit within this theoretical schema. It is within

this context that we will be able to recognize what Scotus in particular will have to offer

Husserl here that other thinkers in the history of ethics cannot, or cannot do as readily.

An initial approach to this question must necessarily reassert the basic problem of

Husserls historical navet where the apparently forgotten tradition of scholasticism is

concerned. As has already been said, Husserl envisions the history of ethics as

inaugurated in Socrates practical reform and in its striving to become scientific as being

characterized by the perennial strife between the morality of reason and the morality of

feeling, or between rationalism and empiricism respectively. Even if we grant that

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Husserls characterization of the history of modern ethics as characterized by this basic

situation of strife as basically correct, and ancient philosophy as, at least tacitly,

containing the basic problems and outlooks which ultimately led to the reawakening of

these tensions after the Renaissance, we can in no sense follow Husserls universalization

of this problematic by extending the dialectic of Gefhls- and Vernunftmoral to the

period of the middle ages as well. Again, even if the history of ancient Greek ethics is to

be characterized as following this basic path of tension, there is nothing in medieval

thought which would correspond either to the method or spirit of the morality of reason

or the morality of feeling. Precisely, then, because of its freedom from the

presuppositions which lead to these two basic positions which Husserl is hoping to

overcome in his own philosophy, medieval philosophy is uniquely situated to help

Husserl to steer his middle-course in ethical philosophy inasmuch as one is not forced to

try to extricate the authentic phenomenological insight of medieval thinkers from out of

an empiricistic or rationalistic framework in order to apply its results to an Husserlian

framework. As such, from a merely pragmatic perspective, medieval philosophy will be

more useful and more easily approachable from Husserls ethical standpoint. It may

indeed turn out that medieval philosophy has already, even if only unconsciously, charted

this middle-way and, as such, is ready to offer more help than we might otherwise find in

either ancient or modern thought.

At the same time, if, as has already been suggested, a renewal of phenomenology

is precisely to be pursued through a reengagement with earlier traditions, and if medieval

philosophy is to play a privileged role in this task of renewal, then we are further
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confronted with the usefulness of medieval ethics for phenomenology inasmuch as a

phenomenological ethics which pursues its studies through a reactivation of its founding

concepts as they have developed through the course of the tradition and have been passed

down to modernity by way of the medieval religious and intellectual tradition, will be an

ethics particularly capable of approaching the founding problems of ethics in a more

refined light.224 This recognition will only be deepened if we come to recognize the

phenomenological character of the medieval tradition as a whole.

This, finally, brings us specifically to Scotus. Scotus, as I suggested in the last

chapter, is, in his whole approach to philosophy, uniquely capable of providing a bridge

between phenomenology and scholasticism. This is, as Walter Hoeres had argued,

because he already possesses the phenomenological method. However, it will also be

because he shares a great deal of common conclusions with the phenomenologists (as

both Stein and Hart are careful to note in their respective studies). This will be nowhere

more evident than in his ethics which he develops along similar lines from the Husserlian

ethics with which we are dealing here. Not only the similarity of his ideas and his

approach, but also the ways in which Scotus avoids some of the problems to which we

have already seen Husserl falls victim, will prove Scotus to have a great deal of promise

for the task of the development of a phenomenological ethics. We should not, however,

be nave in thinking that Scotus is the only medieval thinker capable of providing this

sort of help to Husserls ethics. Inasmuch as Scotus is indebted to Anselm for the key

concepts around which much of his ethical theory will revolve, namely the wills affectio

224
To this extent, then, Alistair MacIntyres project in After Virtue is perhaps not so
unreachable to the limits of phenomenology as it tries to make itself out to be.
 171

commodi and affectio justitiae, and also inasmuch as he echoes Bonaventure in the

development of a love-based ethics, here already are two additional thinkers whose work

could potentially be of great use to a phenomenological ethics. We might also add

Ockham to this list and, moving away from a strict adherence to the Scotist/Franciscan

tradition, the thought of Augustine, Aquinas, and Suarez, etc. as offering potential

insights. However, taking on the thought of all of these giants of the middle ages would

bring the current project far too far afield, in particular as it would necessitate not only

the integration of these thinkers into the framework of a phenomenological language-

game, but also the adjudication between the manifold and fundamental disagreements

which exist between all of these thinkers in their medieval context. As it stands, I hope

here only to provide a groundwork to the development of a phenomenological

ethicsi.e. I hope to clear the ground in order to survey the problems and directions in

which a more developed study will be forced to go later on. Scotus, then, represents for

me the most direct and convenient starting point in clearing this ground precisely for

those reasons already articulated, namely his phenomenological character and his

possession of a theory whose outlines already mirror the Husserlian theory and which

possesses familiar theoretical tools in a manner which is close enough to Husserl as to

provide important insights, critique, assistance, and direction to the Husserlian ethical

project as a whole.
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Chapter IV
Ethics and the Phenomenological Method

7. The Importance of the Question of Method

For Husserl, the question of method is always indispensable for properly setting

up phenomenological research within a specific problem-sphere. Without approaching

philosophical problems from the proper methodological standpoint, philosophical

research always runs the risk of becoming derailed by pseudo-problems, or at the very

least of navely failing to provide the authentic and grounding sense of its insights. As

such, Husserl throughout his career is always coming back to the question of method and

continuously refining and improving his phenomenological method. The

phenomenological method, for Husserl, opens philosophy up to a distinctive domain of

research within which the a priori structures of subjectivity and the world are brought to

explicit, scientific understanding. As such, at the beginning of this our own inquiry into

the domain of ethical normativity which, taking Husserl as our guide, attempts to situate

ethical reflection precisely within a phenomenological, methodological setting, it is

impossible to dispense with the initial clarification of the method of transcendental

phenomenology and of the specific methodological concerns of ethics as a normative

discipline of essentially practical importance, in particular in an effort to contrast ethical

inquiry from transcendental philosophy and to determine precisely in what way, if any,

Husserls ethics can be termed phenomenological. Given Husserls understanding of

transcendental phenomenology as fundamentally a theoretical science of pure meaning

and meaning-structures of experience, one might argue that it is by no means obvious

precisely where an ethics would fall within the overall framework of the
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phenomenological method or whether such a method would even be useful in clarifying

the problems of ethical inquiry without providing such an initial clarification of the

methods, purposes, and needs of both transcendental phenomenology and of ethical

theory. A resolution of this problem and an explanation of the specific sense within

which an ethics can be termed phenomenological, and how it might even serve to

illuminate phenomenology as such, must be pursued here if the general sense and

promise of the Husserlian ethical philosophy are to be understood in their full

significance not only for the broad discipline of ethics, but for phenomenology as such.

8. Transcendental Phenomenology

Husserls transcendental philosophy, as has often been noted and as Husserl

himself admits, carries with it fundamentally Cartesian influences. Husserl is interested

in furnishing, by means of his meditations on the proper method for philosophical

research, the grounds of a wholly rigorous science capable of providing apodictic results.

The method for accomplishing such apodicticity is, borrowing from the Cartesian notion

of methodological doubt, the transcendental epoch, or the act of putting the world into

brackets, putting it out of action and consideration, in order to arrive at the most essential

structures of its givenness, which, as he writes in his Cartesian Meditations, had the

effect of acting, directly on the transformation of an already developing phenomenology

into a new kind of transcendental philosophy.225 If the purportedly new character of this

philosophy is to be understood, in Husserls sense, then it must be asked precisely what

225
Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. and ed. Dorion Cairns (Dordrecht:
Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999), 1; see also HUA I, 43. Subsequently I will always
refer to the pagination of the Husserliana edition of the Cartesian Meditations.
 174

meaning the term transcendental carries here in order to determine whether or not the

problems of ethics are to be pursued in this transcendental dimension or whether ethics,

as a practical science, must be pursued, for Husserl, in another domain and precisely what

relation such a domain would bear to the properly and all-important transcendental

domain of research.

Husserl sees it as necessary, in order to seize upon the essential, or eidetic

structures of the factually given world, to parenthesize the posited actuality of the world

as a transcendence, i.e. as being having its mode of existence as something external to the

consciousness which perceives it, into brackets, or into epoch as he terms it. In placing

the actuality of the world into brackets, however, Husserl is not completely a Cartesian,

as the epoch is not really a method of doubt concerning the actuality of the world as one

finds in the Cartesian approach to the problems of knowledge. Rather, it is a change of

attitude from that of the everyday and natural way of living towards the worldthe so-

called natural attitudeby simply placing it out of consideration when asking about the

essential structures of the experience of the world. This is possible because the world can

be exhibited in its givenness and in its essential structures without at the same time

making the higher order judgment regarding its actuality as transcendent. To the same

extent, the transcendence of God is bracketed in the phenomenological method not in the

sense that Husserl doubts Gods existence or denies it as a valid philosophical question,

as one finds in Kants first Kritik, for example. Rather, he puts it out of action as an issue

to be discussed in the initial clarification of the peculiar region of phenomenological

analysis in which he is interested. Thus, as Husserl writes, that which is parenthesized is

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not erased from the phenomenological blackboard but only parenthesized, and thereby

provided with an index. As having the latter it is, however, part of the major theme of

inquiry.226 Husserl is not interested in essences purely as such, then, but in the very

appearance of the essence as becoming manifested to consciousness and in that stratum

of consciousness which makes such a manifestation possible. That is to say, Husserl

wants to study the essences of the phenomena which make up the world and the field of

personal experience as within the index of subjectivity that makes them intentionally

manifest.

What the epoch exhibits by means of the exclusion of the posited actuality of

things which are transcendent to consciousness is precisely a region of pure

consciousness which forms a field of immanence within which, by means of intentional

acts, all the phenomena of the world appear as perceived objects. This is the

phenomenologically interesting field of research that Husserl means to study and which is

the starting point of all phenomenological philosophy inasmuch as the study of this

region of pure consciousness sets up certain conditions and problematics within which

other questions will, of essential necessity, have to be framed. That is to say, in the study

of pure consciousness, Husserl discovers that objects are given by means of intentional

acts on the part of the transcendental ego, that these intentional acts are acts of sense-

bestowal within which objects are given their sense as objects for a subject who intends

226
Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a
Phenomenological Philosophy, Book 1, trans. and ed. F. Kersten (Dordrecht: Kluwer
Academic Publishers, 1983), 171 [Gesammelte Werke Husserliana, Band III: Ideen zu
einer reinen Phnomenologie und phnomenologischen Philosophie, I. Buch: Allgemeine
Einfhrung in die reine Phnomenologie, ed. Karl Schuhmann (Den Haag: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1977), 142].
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them, and that, as such, pure consciousness and the pure ego are necessary conditions for

the possibility of the constitution, experience, and cognition of a world in general. Here,

Husserl distinguishes between the two elements of intentional acts as they are given in

the sphere of pure immanence, namely the noetic, or the subjective noesis by means of

which the object is meant, willed, perceived, etc.; and the noematic, or the object taken

precisely as object-meant, willed, perceived, etc. To the extent that phenomenology will

subsequently approach questions of the phenomenology of Nature, the phenomenology of

religious experience, the phenomenology of scientific objects, etc., it will have to do so

through the index of a constituting consciousness in which they are exhibited

experientially and which Husserl refers to as transcendental.227 Thus, again, it is

necessary to understand precisely what makes a pure, constituting consciousness

transcendental and why a method which makes manifest such a consciousness is

likewise designated as transcendental consciousness.

Husserl provides an answer to the question as to why he insists upon designating

the region of pure immanence, the ego which is the central pole from which all immanent

227
As will be seen momentarily, it is important to note that Husserl does not view the
constitution of the world as being accomplished purely by a transcendental constituting
consciousness which is to be conceived as a transcendental ego along the lines of a solus
ipse, a solitary ego which constitutes the objective world all on its own. The issues of
world-constitution can only be pursued keeping in mind the basic problem of the
relationship between a transcendental ego and the transcendental community of monads,
or transcendental subjectivity, which constitutes the world not simply as over-against
me (as a world of Gegenstnde), but as properly Objective (objektive) and, what is the
same thing, intersubjective, given as the identical world for all. It will be necessary,
however, to clarify the basic sense of the term transcendental before this issue can be
understood and approached in greater detail.
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acts arise, and the method which brings their peculiar immanence and absoluteness to the

fore as transcendental. He writes that,

[t]he characterization of the phenomenological reduction and, likewise,

of the pure sphere of mental processes as transcendental rests precisely
on the fact that we discover in this reduction an absolute sphere of stuffs
and noetic forms whose determinately structured combinations possess,
according to immanental eidetic necessity, the marvelous consciousness of
something determinate and determinable, given thus and so, which is
something over against consciousness itself, something fundamentally
other, non-really inherent, transcendent.228

The first thing which must be clarified from this passage is the manner in which Husserl

views consciousness, following the reduction, as an absolute, indeed as the absolute so

far as phenomenology is concerned. By absolute, here, Husserl does not mean to suggest

that transcendental consciousness, or transcendental subjectivity as he also terms it, is to

be understood as the absolute source of all being, of all meaning, value, etc. such that

consciousness would be purely responsible for the being of the world, for norms, for

logic and the whole range of essential relations obtaining between beings in the world.

Rather, if Husserl is to understand consciousness as an absolute, then it is to be

understood as absolute only from a limited, yet nonetheless fundamental, perspective. As

Angela Ales Bello writes, the dimension of lived experiences is the absolute point of

departure, the radical beginning with regard to our knowledge of reality. This does not

concern an absolute reality, but absoluteness insofar as it is that which is uniquely given

to us from the standpoint of internal reality that moves outward.229 Thus, Husserl argues

228
Ibid., 204.
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that from this absolute point of departure to be found within a constituting subjectivity,

we discover at work universal eidetic, i.e. essential, necessities that characterize the

phenomena which we experience immanently to the envelope of consciousness.

Moreover, essentially and apodictically, it is clear from an analysis of this absolute

sphere of stuffs and noetic forms that the stuffs which are given are given precisely in

essentially correlated combinations of noesis and noema, intention and intended, which

combination provides the possibility for a consciousness of something which is in its

being something over-against consciousness, or to use the German term, a

Gegenstand, a transcendent object.

Husserl continues his clarification of the use of the term transcendental in

describing his phenomenology and the region of pure subjectivity, writing that the sense

of the term transcendental further rests on the fact that, this is the primal source in

which is found the only conceivable solution of those deepest problems of cognition

concerning the essence and possibility of an objectively valid knowledge of something

transcendent.230 It is clear then that, although the essential characterization of pure

consciousness as a sphere of immanence is based primarily upon the separation by means

of the epoch of the immanence of consciousness from the transcendence of the real,

Husserl at the same time means to indicate here that the fact that the immanent sphere of

pure consciousness, as a constituting consciousness providing itself with the conditions

229
Angela Ales Bello, Analecta Husserliana: The Yearbook of Phenomenological
Research, Vol. XCVIII: The Divine in Husserl and Other Explorations (Dordrecht:
Springer, 2009), 27.
230
HUA III, 204.
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for the very possibility, by means of noetic, intentional acts, of experience of the

transcendent in general, is the very reason why this pure consciousness is designated as

transcendental. It is transcendental consciousness precisely because through its

constituting activities, it transcends itself and arrives at the transcendent. The method of

phenomenology is transcendental because it brings transcendental subjectivity to

evidence and because the, transcendental reduction exercises the epoch with respect

to actuality: but what it retains of [actuality] includes the noemas with the noematic unity

included within them themselves and, accordingly, the mode in which something real is

intended to and, in particular, given in consciousness itself.231 The transcendental

reduction is transcendental, then, because it brings to light the transcendental

constituting processes and the a priori, essential correlation of noesis and noema in

consciousness that makes possible the embarkation of the mind, as it were, into the

world of transcendencies.

a. Transcendental vs. Mundane Subjectivity

The peculiar problem which arises when attempting to find the particular place of

ethics within the overall framework of the method of transcendental phenomenology

comes to the fore when one attempts to clarify the particular character of the

transcendental ego and transcendental subjectivity precisely as transcendental. In seeking

to reduce the range of questions and the field of research to its absolute groundsi.e. the

sphere of the pure immanence of transcendental consciousness, the living stream within

which lived-experiences (Erlebnisse) are given to the ego as essential correlations of

231
Ibid.
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noetic acts and noematic unitieswhich provides us with a field of intuitive immediacy

ready for phenomenological research, phenomenology must exclude any kind of

transcendence. The transcendental ego is discovered in the process of subjecting every

sort of transcendence to a universal epoch which puts it out of consideration. The range

of trancendencies which Husserl must exclude embraces the transcendency of the world

and the transcendency of God. However, as Husserl notes, I, the actual human being,

am a real Object like others in the natural world.232 What this means, for Husserl, is that

the transcendent world is not simply the amalgamation of purely physical bodies and

their physical structures. Rather, I myself understood as a psycho-physical, human

personal being am a constituent of the real, transcendent world.233 I as a human being

am a constituted object in the world. The alter ego who appears in the world before me,

who, like me, is a member of a community of egos, is likewise a constituted object in the

real, transcendent world. As such, Husserls phenomenological reduction to the region of

pure immanence must embrace the personal ego that I am as well as the human

community. Human being, as Husserl writes, as natural being and as person in

personal association, in that of society, is excluded; likewise every other animate

being.234 The subjectivity which we find living out its life in the world is a

transcendency and as such is excluded from the region of pure immanence in the

232
Ibid., 58.
233
Edmund Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. and ed. Dorion Cairns
(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), 252 [Gesammelte Werke Husserliana, Band XVII:
Formale und Tranzendentale Logik, ed. Petra Janssen (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic
Publishers, 1974), 223].
234
HUA III, 109.
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phenomenological reduction. Mundane subjectivity is not transcendental subjectivity,

strictly speaking. The question then remains, what is transcendental subjectivity, how is

it related to mundane, personal subjectivity, and if the subject of transcendental

phenomenology is the transcendental and not the mundane ego, what room would

transcendental phenomenology ever have for ethics which, by definition, deals in the

world and in the community of personal subjects wherein it is persons, and not

transcendental egos, who are the specific bearers of moral values as good or evil

persons?

It is clear from a close reading of Husserls final work, The Crisis, that he does

not wish to impose something of a real distinction, to use a medieval term, between

transcendental subjectivity and something like the soul or the person, since, he writes,

as soon as we distinguish this transcendental subjectivity from the soul, we get involved

in something incomprehensibly mythical.235 As such, it should be carefully noted that

transcendental subjectivity is not wholly divorced from the personal, mundane

subjectivity of our everyday, practical life in the world. Yet, if this is the case, why is it

necessary to make any distinction between the two in the first place? The reason, Husserl

states, is that, in the course of performing the phenomenological reduction, I am forced to

place out of action all transcendencies, anything not incorporated into the sphere of pure

immanence. The world is excluded from consideration and, as such, certain ordered

concatenations of experience and therefore certain complexes of theorizing reason

235
Husserl, The Crisis, 31.
 182

oriented according to those concatenations of experience would be excluded.236 Thus, in

a definite sense, consciousness itself, in which these acts of concatenation and

theorization are performed, would also be subject to a reduction and these acts likewise

excluded except insomuch as they serve not as real experiences but as mere phenomena

for philosophical research. What is left over as a phenomenological residuum within

consciousness after all of these reductions, then, is consciousness in its pure immanence

and not in its self-transcendence to the world. Pure consciousness, absolute

transcendental subjectivity, is nothing more than the immanental core of subjectivity

which enacts those lived-experiences in which noesis and noema are given as essential

correlates. Transcendental subjectivity is a world-constituting subjectivity. Yet at the

same time, for Husserl, we are still left with a paradox in the fact that humanity can thus

be taken, as world-constituting subjectivity and yet as incorporated in the world

itself.237 Moreover, the others with which my world is populated are likewise given as

objects in my world, constituted in consciousness for me with the sense of being others

like me. Yet, to the extent that my own personal I, my psychic I, is given to me as a

kind of self-Objectivation of my transcendental ego, then the other psyche also points

back to a transcendental ego, in the phenomenological reduction.238 Insofar as the

transcendental ego can constitute within itself another transcendental ego with the

objective sense like me, it can also constitute for itself, an open plurality of such egos,

236
HUA III, 92.
237
Husserl, The Crisis, 54.
238
HUA XVII, 212.
 183

which forms the basis for a transcendental intersubjectivity which represents the primal

basis upon which the sense of the world as Objective, as an identical, shared world for

all, can be constituted.239 This transcendental subjectivity, moreover, is transcendental

as well, for Husserl, because the everyone given in this open plurality of egos is not an

everyone with the sense of every human being, he argues, but rather with the sense of

an open community of monads who each, both individually and communally, constitute

themselves and each other in the world as Objects with the Objective sense human

being, human species, and human community.240 However, just as the relationship

between the transcendental ego and the mundane, personal ego represents a problem for

us, so also will the relationship between transcendental intersubjectivity and concrete

human communities, whether cultural-ethnic communities, life-communities in the

Schelerian sense of the term,241 societies, nations, or spiritual communities which

constitute personalities of a higher order will likewise become a problem which will

have to be resolved in some sense in order to recognize the possible relationship between

phenomenology and ethics.

Husserl clarifies the relationship between the pure ego of transcendental

subjectivity and the personal, mundane ego of everyday lived-experience as well as the

sort of activity that is involved in the phenomenological epoch in Ideas II. Here he

writes that if we reflect upon ourselves, in such a way that we abstract from the

239
Ibid.
240
Ibid.
241
See, Max Scheler, Formalism, 102f and 546ff.
 184

Body[w]hat we find then is ourselves as the spiritual Ego related to the stream of lived-

experiences.242 This spiritual ego is not purely what I am in my total reality, in my

complete I as man since it is essential to being human that I have a body. Nevertheless,

through the application of a certain kind of epoch, abstracting from the lived-body, I can

validly reduce the ego to its purely spiritual acts with its particularly spiritual mode of

being in order to discover something new about the ego and what it is to be human and to

have, in addition to a corporeal and psychic existence, also a spiritual one. Enacting a

wider, more universal epoch, the epoch of transcendental phenomenology, I can arrive

at the ego at its most abstractive level, the level of the pure, transcendental ego. This ego

is not really distinct from the spiritual ego nor is it really distinct from the ego of

everyday practical life in the world. Rather, the transcendental ego is the result of a

particular manner of intending the ego in its particular constituting activity, as that

which, in perception, is directed to the perceived, in knowing to the known, in

phantasizing to the phantasized, in logical thinking to the thought, in valuing to the

valued, in willing to the willed.243 Thus, for Husserl, it becomes clear that the ego

which is made an object of study in the empirical world, for example in psychology, the

ego which simply lives un-objectified in un-reflected acts of living practically in the

world, and the transcendental ego intended by transcendental phenomenology, are in

242
Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a
Phenomenological Philosophy, Book II, trans. and ed. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer
(Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), 97 [Gesammelte Werke Husserliana,
Band IV: Ideen zu einer reinen Phnomenologie und phnomenologischen Philosophy. 2.
Buch: Phnomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution, ed. Marly Biemel (Den
Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1991), 97; henceforth HUA IV].
243
Ibid.
 185

truth one and the same. It is just that at one time it is given, at other times not given; or,

in a higher reflection, in the one case it is straightforwardly given, in the other it is given

through a further mediating stage.244 It could be said, then, to borrow a Scotistic

expression, that there is no real distinction obtaining between the transcendental and

mundane egos, but rather that there is a merely formal distinction, merely a distinction of

reason based upon the ability to intend one and the same reality according to different

modes of abstraction or non-abstraction. The full clarification of this issue, however, can

only be accomplished if we return, briefly to the question of what phenomenology is in

the first place.

In his introduction to the second volume of the Logical Investigations, Husserl

introduces the idea of the necessity of phenomenological investigations in order to lay the

foundations for an epistemological clarification of the basic problems of pure logic.

Here, Husserl is interested in studying the most basic experiences of thinking and

knowing through the objects of logical study brought to intuitive givenness. In this

regard, phenomenology is to, lay bare the sources from which the basic concepts and

ideal laws of pure logic flow, and back to which they must once more be traced, so as to

give them all the clearness and distinctness needed for an understanding, and for an

epistemological critique, of pure logic.245 The reason why such epistemological critique

becomes necessary for pure logic Husserl develops in the following section, in which he

argues that the objects of pure logic are first and foremost given in concrete mental states

244
Ibid,. 102.
245
Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, Vol. 1, trans. and ed. J. N. Findlay and
Dermot Moran (London: Routledge, 2001), 166.
 186

taking the form either of a meaning-intention or meaning-fulfillment of linguistic

expressions actualized in concrete verbal statements.246 The objects of these mental

states, moreover, first come to bear in meaning-intention and -fulfillment in imperfect

form, littered with equivocations and/or conceptual indistinctness. If such imperfect

logical objects are made the basis of logical research, then, Husserl fears, these,

[u]nnoticed equivocation[s] may permit the subsequent substitution of other concepts

beneath our words, and an appeal on behalf of an altered propositional meaning may

quite readily, but wrongly, be made on the self-evidence previously experienced.247

This will have an effect not only on the soundness of particular judgments, but may also

distort the objects of pure logic themselves. Husserls basic point, then, is that language,

although absolutely fundamental in providing the very possibility of logical exercises and

for the communal sharing of lasting knowledge, nevertheless can have a profound

distorting or obfuscating effect on our research into that which is foundational to its sense

in the course of our ordinary use of language.248 Phenomenology, in turn, is meant to

carry out a critique of knowledge and logic by way of a wholly unnatural, regressive

inquiry back into those foundational acts in which concepts and objects are first

246
Ibid., 167.
247
Ibid.
248
Husserl greatly expands this problematic later on in his work when he makes the
further breakthrough into genetic phenomenology in which he discovers the
historical/communal process of sedimentation in which not only language qua language,
but also historical and cultural forms, attitudes, etc. can contribute to the layering on of
meanings into terms and concepts which deepen the (possible) distorting or obfuscating
tendencies of language in directing us away from the things themselves. This, indeed,
is the main problem of the crisis of the sciences against which phenomenology is meant
to struggle.
 187

constituted in order to arrive at stable meanings for things given in intuition.

Phenomenology is also to check our tendency to slip, unnoticed, between varying

attitudes and thereby to import different and unconnected meanings that are only

appropriate within specific attitudes into an altogether different attitude or attitudes. At

this point in the Logical Investigations, Husserl is particularly concerned with the

psychologistic tendency, to turn the logically objective into the psychological.249 This

insight can, however, be extended to other areas as well.

The general project of the Logical Investigations, then, can be represented as an

attempt on Husserls part to provide logic with a critically developed understanding of

the foundations of its validity. As he later explains in his Formal and Transcendental

Logic, the transition into phenomenology grows out of the problems of the fundamentally

nave manner in which traditional logic has always, on Husserls reading, covered up and

ignored the basic question of the relation between evidence and truth in logical

judgments. Another way of expressing this point is to say that traditional, or formal,

logic has no conceptual apparatus for explaining the basic problem of the validity of

logical judgments which would provide the grounding for the concrete application of

logical rules to factual judgments and from there to the factual comprehension of things

in the world through judgmental activities of the mind. The problems of what evidence

does, Husserl writes, which confront us as logicians, aresince all judgments point

back to experienceproblems concerning experience itself and problems concerning the

249
Ibid., 169.
 188

categorialia deriving from experience.250 Clearing up these basic problems of evidence

and validity in formal logic, then, will require a regression to the lived experiences

(Erlebnisse) in which the lowest levels of judgment and of categorialia occur. These

lowest levels of judgment occur, in a very definite sense, prior to logical judgments and

are ever-functioning presuppositions of the formal logical judgment. Understanding

traditional logic as a kind of formal apophantics which assumes as already valid a

correlative formal ontology of the world, Husserl goes on to ascribe to traditional logic a

basic kind of navet inasmuch as traditional logic always functions based upon these

originary judgmentsthose of the validity of the already existing world and of its

existing objects as well as of logic as an already given sciencewithout these judgments

ever explicitly being made manifest for logic. They lie hidden in the backdrop of logical

consciousness without their validity and sense ever being critically questioned and

developed. The resolution of these issues, which phenomenology is explicitly designed

to accomplish, is to be pursued by way of the phenomenological method already

described which, by means of the epoch, directs phenomenology back to the primal

activity of transcendental subjectivity and intersubjectivity and transcendental

consciousness which is the domain and index within which the basic acts of logical

judgments (Erfahrungen) and their lower level founding experiences (Erlebnisse) are to

be studied in phenomenological immanence. To that extent, as Husserl comes to describe

it, phenomenology qua transcendental phenomenology in its most basic meaning and

250
HUA XVII, 197-198.
 189

purpose can be seen as something of a transcendental logic understood as a theory of

meaning.

Wherever phenomenology takes as its task the regressive analysis of phenomena

back to their most primal constitution in transcendental subjectivity and intersubjectivity,

then, phenomenology is dealing most basically with the constitution of such phenomena

in terms of the bestowal of their meaning or sense in which experience and experienced

objects or phenomena acquire meaning through the progressive layering on of sense. To

a certain extent, then, the basic understanding of Husserls theory of meaning can be

summed up in the following statement, namely, that nothing exists for me otherwise

than by virtue of the actual and potential performance of my own consciousness.251 This

is not by any means to say anything like the Berkeleyan formulation of esse est percipi,

meaning that to be, existence and being as such, is nothing other than my perception of

it. Rather, if something exists within the intentional, immanent framework of my

consciousness, it does so under the meaning-modality of for me. If, then, something

exists for me, then it can exist in this modality only inasmuch as I mean it as existing

and, moreover, as existing in such and such a manner, having such and such essential

qualities, etc. Beyond this, it cannot exist for me and, as such, it does not occupy any

place within my environing world which makes up the total ontic realm of my experience

of being. The task of phenomenology is to bring about the recognition of this essential

point and, following upon this, to make manifest the intentional acts of meaning, sense-

251
Ibid., 208.
 190

bestowal, which make this world possible in its ontic validity as being there for me

and for us in intersubjective Objectivity and stability.

For Husserl, then, it can be said that transcendental phenomenology, as a

transcendental logic or theory of meaning-bestowal, is not, straightforwardly at least,

concerned with questions of ethics, even if, as I have attempted to show, it is always

motivated historically by ethical insights, motives, and by the need for a renewal of

culture and of the individual moral agent. This is the case because transcendental

phenomenology takes as its subject-matter the transcendental ego of absolute

subjectivityi.e. it takes the ego inasmuch as the ego is involved in acts of constitution,

in acts of bestowing objective sense upon the world through the intentional correlation of

noesis and noema present in every act of consciousness of by means of which the ego

engages with the world. This is not, fundamentally, a domain of practical and evaluative

activity.252 Rather, it hinges upon what are properly transcendental questions, questions

regarding the conditions for the possibility of an objective world and of the objective

experience of the transcendent. Ethics will have to be pursued in a different domain. It

must now be made clear what sort of approach is required by ethics and precisely which

is the subject of an ethical science.

9. The Problem of a Phenomenological Ethics

The development of a phenomenological ethics poses a variety of problems, in

particular since a total system of ethics would require the resolution of a number of

questions which possess, on the whole, very stratified levels of inquiry. On the one hand,

252
Although, as will subsequently be seen, it is by no means disconnected from such a
domain.
 191

an ethical theory can operate on the level of entirely practical questions, as in casuistry,

or the posing and resolution of concrete ethical case-studies regarding particular

morally relevant acts. For instance, an ethical theory can develop itself towards the

resolution of ethical questions concerning the proper treatment of patients by doctors in

very defined situationsfor instance in end-of-life matters. An ethical theory can also

probe problems such as the analysis of the prosecution of a war according to norms of

justice. For instance, is it ever right to use nuclear weapons technology as the means to

defeat an enemy? Under what conditions does the act of killing constitute murder and

under what conditions is the act of killing a justifiable act of self-preservation or the

defense of the lives of others? Under what conditions is telling a falsehood morally right

or is lying ever justifiable at all? An ethics can thus be consumed with such highly

specific moral problems, yet this does not exhaust the range of the types of questions

which an ethical theory must pursue.

Ethics must also ask higher-level questions regarding the nature of the human

subject, the range of freedom available to this subject, its essential ethico-religious and

existential teleology, as well as the overarching moral question of the nature of the

summum bonum, the highest good. Ethics must also develop itself into a theory of values

which is capable of explaining the origin of moral valuations, both in how they are given

to a subject purely as such and in how one can achieve an intuition into true values, the

values which ought to be chosen and, also, which ones ought to be chosen above

others. Finally, ethics must approach the most definitive question of all, asking after the

origin and the foundation of all moral normativityi.e. what binds us morally to certain
 192

actions and against others, and why should we be moral at all? To a certain extent in the

resolution of these higher-order ethical questions, Husserl will draw heavily from the

results of his transcendental phenomenology, in particular in answering certain questions

of value perception and the constitution of objective values. However, all such questions

must find their ultimate resolution at a lower level, at the level of our practical and

personal existence, where ethical decision-making itself must take place. As such, even

though a phenomenological ethics might see fit to draw from the results of transcendental

phenomenology in certain areas, it is itself not identical with the science of transcendental

phenomenology, in particular since ethics is ultimately not quite concerned with the

transcendental logic of meaning which defines the problem-sphere of transcendental

phenomenology.253 If, then we are to approach the question of the proper methodology

within which phenomenology approaches the resolution of ethical questions, the starting

point must be the identification of the peculiar attitude proper to ethical inquiry, namely

the attitude which approaches that aspect of the everyday experience of the world as

being particularly a world of value and of moral obligation.

253
Or, at the very least, is not concerned with this logic in precisely the same way or
with the same essential motives. Nonetheless, it might very well be the case that a
phenomenological ethics, concerned with meaning, taken now under the general
heading of value, love, and the teleology of absolute oughtness, can speak to the logic
of meaning in a much more profound and essential way than transcendental
phenomenology does. This would be the implicit position of Max Schelers
phenomenology which in so many ways takes value as its clue in practically every
problem-sphere of phenomenology in a manner in which is simply not seen in Husserls
transcendental phenomenology. That Scheler intends his phenomenology as an
alternative to the Husserlian approach, moreover, cannot be denied. Thus, from this
perspective, even apart from the lack of concern which ethics qua ethics has for the
transcendental questions of meaning as Husserl understands it can hardly be seen as a
reason to question the phenomenological character or impetus of an ethical study which
claims phenomenology for its method and guide. We will return to this problem later on.
 193

a. The Personalistic and Axiological Standpoints

The field of ethics is concerned, first and foremost, with the proper comportment

of the human person as a subject for him or herself and within the context of the

community of personal subjects. That is to say, ethics is concerned with the study of

human behavior not from the value-neutral standpoint of, for instance, cultural

anthropology or sociology which both seek simply to describe what human beings

dohow they tend to behaveand not how human beings ought to behave. In

introducing the evaluative question of whether a particular human being or a human

community is acting according to proper norms of behavior, whether they are acting

rightly, then we are presupposing a particular attitude towards the human subject which

considers the person as a rational individual not determined to particular actions but free

to choose from a range of possibilities and possessing certain types of motivations

towards different sets of actions. We are asking after the human subject, then, neither

under the attitude of the natural sciences nor under the attitude of transcendental

phenomenology; rather, ethics takes the human being as its subject from the standpoint of

what Husserl refers to as the personalistic attitude. For Husserl, the personalistic

attitude is the attitude of the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften). However, as has

already been noted, the personalistic attitude, at least so far as ethics is concerned, is not

merely a descriptive theory. Rather, it seeks to be properly proscriptive, dealing with the

human subject in its various types of motivations, in its comportment towards the

surrounding world, itself, and other subjects, according to certain principles of

 194

evaluation. What the personalistic attitude implies, then, is the taking on of an

axiological and proscriptive attitude as well.

Ethics does and must presuppose, although by no means navely, the world in its

givenness as being a world containing rational values in an ordered hierarchy. Inasmuch

as human beings are capable of deviating from or following certain paths of rational

action which places individual human beings into a kind of hierarchy of moral

categoriesi.e. the moral and the immoral, the axiological attitude reveals the world

and the human subject as being ordered in a particular way and as having a particular

teleological orientation which is normative and the deviation from which involves the

free entrance into an invalid state of moral existencei.e. the immoral. The proper

attitude of ethics as a spiritual, personalistic science, then, is one which does not shrink

from taking an evaluative stance. Rather, ethics must be capable of forming normative,

evaluative judgments upon the moral value of a human being, his or her acts, and the

ordered values of the world of lived-experience. Much more will have to be said about

the axiological and ethical attitudes later, however. For now, a word of clarification must

be made where ethical methodology is concerned, in particular in identifying its specific

difference from the field of transcendental phenomenological research.

i. The Personal I as the Subject of Ethics

In describing the ego of the spiritual attitude, the I who is the subject of

experienced motivations, who chooses, who wills, and who comports him or herself

towards others morally or immorally, rationally or irrationally, Husserl argues that, [i]n

this attitude, I take myself simply as I ordinarily take myself when I say I and as the I in
 195

any kind of I think (I want, etc.).254 The subject of ethics is, then, the personal I, the

ego which I personally am in my individual self-identity and existence as being within a

community, within social bonds, familial structures, etc. The subject of ethics is nothing

other than the person who is the center of personal acts, relations, wants, valuations, etc.

Husserls ethics, then, as a phenomenological ethical philosophy, takes its departure

from, and in view of, the ontology of the ethical subject. The ethical subject is the person

as personal I or as a personality of a higher order, by which Husserl understands a

particular form of community.255

This marks a significant difference from the subject of the transcendental

phenomenological method inasmuch as the ethical subject both lacks the anonymity and

severe abstraction of the transcendental ego and also prescinds from the question, asked

at the transcendental level, about the relationship between this personal I as at the same

time a constituted object which presupposes transcendental intersubjectivity as the

community within which the person gains its sense as person in the world.256 The

ethical subject in its particular personality, caught up in its individual concerns, relations,

particular circumstances of time and place, etc. is by no means anonymous, but possesses

254
HUA IV, 212.
255
Melle, 2.
256
This is not by any means to say that a phenomenological ethics would continue to
prescind from the question of intersubjectivity indefinitely or that it would have nothing
to say about the relationship between the constitution of the person as presupposing a
community of others. However, this community of others is not transcendental
intersubjectivity first and foremost, but rather the community of other persons in
association and solidarity with which I live out my life, acquire my values, and pursue
my duties, tasks, and loves.
 196

a unique identity and an ethical call and destiny. The particular methodology of a

phenomenological ethics must, then, begin with the person and his or her ontological

nature, essential teleology, and particular vocation in relation to the sets of values which

the persons surrounding world affords him or her. The ethical subject is, fundamentally,

a person who values and a person who holds responsibilities.257 A study of ethical norms

must begin, then, from the phenomenological investigation into the origins of ethical

experience, namely the experience of value, and the primal source and origin of ethically

normative validity through the rigorous phenomenological study of personality.

ii. The Task of Moral Formation

More than simply providing a theoretical articulation of the facts of human

behavior and motivation from the perspective of the personalistic and axiological

attitudes as described above, and more, also, than simply providing for an understanding

of the world of value, any ethics also has the further task of providing the impetus and the

direction for the actual carrying out of the positive moral formation of the human subject.

As such, ethics is a decisively practical science and one which is, moreover, absolutely

proscriptive for the life of the moral agent. Ethics imposes certain absolute duties upon

the moral subject who, in the process of uncovering values and moral oughts, embarks

upon the process of gradually developing moral habits (virtues) and eliminating vices.

The study of ethics will, for Husserl, provide for a process of renewal where the subject

257
It is first and foremost the person who takes on the moral values of being a morally
good or bad person. Since it is the development in the direction of moral goodness
with which ethics is primarily concerned, it stands to reason that it must be the person
who is the object of study around which the whole constellation of problems related to
ethics must arrange itself.
 197

uncovers and reappropriates for itself the tasks, the duties, and the foundational sense and

values of the communitys moral tradition and becomes in the process a morally

autonomous subject as the pure causa sui of its own moral activity.

As such, ethics has a certain function which is wholly unique to itself inasmuch as

the development of a particular ethical theory lies wholly at the service of its practical

application within the personal subject him or herself in order to become, not simply a

more knowledgeable person or a person with a better capacity to perform certain

technical activities, the way that the development of a theory of hydraulics would

contribute to the process of building a better car, for instance. Rather, ethics has the

practical function and end of making the individual and the community into moral

subjects. As such, a phenomenological analysis of the fields of ethical activity,

motivation, value, etc. does not operate as a purely theoretical or descriptive science in

the way that transcendental phenomenology attempts to do. Rather, ethics must be

understood along different lines, less as a science in the usual sense of the word as a

purely theoretical, rational undertaking and more as what Husserl will refer to as a

theory of art, or Kunstlehre. A word must now be said about Husserls delimitation of

the concept of Kunstlehre taken simply in its general application to many different

disciplines as well as about his description of ethics not simply as one Kunstlehre among

others, but rather as the highest and most universal Kunstlehre.

b. Ethics as Universal Kunstlehre

Husserl begins the 1920/1924 lectures on ethics with the statement that,

We are taking up again the traditional parallelization of ethics with logic,

which indeed has the deepest underlying motive in reason itself. Just like
 198

logic, ethics is for the most part defined and treated as a theory of art
[Kunstlehre], the one as the theory of art of truth-directed judgmental
thought, [and] ethics as the theory of art of willing and of behavior.258

Husserl proceeds in providing an essential delimitation of the concept of theory of art,

exhibiting its various forms of expression according to different practical aims within

different practical settings. Both logic and ethics are examples of twoone can initially

say higher orderKunstlehren. Logic as a theory of art represents a theory of the art

of that type of thinking which has to do with forming propositional judgments and with

the construction of arguments and sayings about the truth of what is. Logic as a theory

of art is normative in the sense that it develops out of itself certain rules for thought

which allow for the proper and rational practice of the art of thinking. Ethics, on the

other hand, is the theory of the art of human behavior and human willing which functions

according to its own rational norms. In addition to these two examples of a theory of art,

Husserl provides what is by no means an exhaustive list of other Kunstlehren typical of

the range of human activities. For instance, he writes, that one can talk about the theory

of art with respect to, strategy in war, the art of well-being [Heikunst, medicine] of

health, architecture of building, the art of politics of the state; and so, there are also many

different real and ideal possible theories of art.259

258
HUA XXXVII, 3: Knpfen wir an die traditionelle Parallelisierung der Ethik mit der
Logik an, die in der Tat teifstliegende Motive in der Vernunt selbst hat. Wie die Logik ist
die Ethik zumeist als eine Kunstlehre definiert und behandelt worden, die eine als die
Kunstlehre des auf Wahrheit abzielenden urteilenden Denkens, die Ethik als die
Kunstlehre des Wollens und Handelns.
259
Ibid., 4: die Strategie auf den Krieg, die Heilkunst aft die Gesundheit, die Baukunst
auf Gebude, die Staatskunst auf den Staat, und so gibt es noch vielerlei wirkliche und
ideell mgliche Kunstlehren.
 199

Husserl argues that one of the main characteristics definitive of the concept of the

Kunstlehre is in its being strictly contrasted with purely theoretical sciences like

theoretical physics, mathematics, etc. where the pure acquisition of knowledge for the

sake of knowledge is the definitive end which guides the whole teleology of the sciences.

In contrast, a theory of art is fundamentally a practical discipline, one directed at the

development of rational and effective practices where a certain art, like war, politics, or

law, is concerned.260 As such, while the Kunstlehre aims at the development of

knowledge and the codification of a complete theoretical system of rational norms

concerning a given art, the guiding telos of the practical discipline is not the acquisition

of knowledge for the sake of knowledge but of knowledge for the sake of its practical

application to the end of becoming proficient at a particular human art.

A clarification, however, must be made initially here if one is to understand the

meaning of the term Kunstlehre as precisely denoting a theory or a teaching [-lehre]

on a particular art [Kunst-]. The act of thinking logically by means of the proper

construction of sound syllogistic arguments is not itself the Kunstlehre called logic,

neither is the act of behaving morally identical with ethics understood as a Kunstlehre.

Furthermore, the practical use of strategy in war is not what we would refer to as the

theory of the art of war. It is strategy taken strictly in itself as a theory of the art of war,

ethics as in itself strictly the theory of the art of moral behavior,261 and logic as in itself

strictly the theory of the proper formation of logical propositions and arguments that are

260
Ibid,. 14.
261
Ibid., 10.
 200

at stake here and are properly defined as Kunstlehren. It is clear then, that within

Husserls usage, the concept of a Kunstlehre, even though it is very strictly distinguished

from purely theoretical science, is nonetheless to be understood as a science and as taking

on theorizing activities for practical ends. As such, art furnishes itself as a field of

rigorous study for the Kunstlehre. The tactician must study war itself in order to develop

a theory of strategy to be employed on the battlefield. The architect must develop a

theory of architecture through the study of buildings and building techniques in order to

build structurally sound and aesthetically pleasing buildings. The logician must develop

a theory of pure logic through the study of propositions and modes of thought and

judgment in order to develop a logical theory capable of directing human thought

according to rational norms. Finally, the ethicist must develop a theory of ethics through

the concrete study of human behavior and human volition in order to apply the ethical

system to the personal enactment of moral decisions in the world.

It should also be noted here, in further delimiting the concept of the Kunstlehre

taken in its pure generality as applicable to such diverse practical disciplines as

architecture, jurisprudence, logic, and ethics, that the development of a theory or a

teaching on an art always implies the development of a system of rational norms for the

proper and excellent practice of the art in question. To be a Kunstlehre in the first place,

then, is to be a system of rules [Regelsystem].262 Thus, the study of architecture implies

that the architect will learn that certain structures require that they be built in one way and

not in another in order to be structurally sound. Concrete and specific architectural laws

262
Ibid., 21.
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are developed which must not be violated if the building is to stand at all. Moreover, the

deliberate violation of these laws represents a case of a particular kind of irrationality on

the part of the architect, especially if they have as their conscious goal the building of a

structurally sound building. As such, architecture can be called, in a certain limited

sense, a normative discipline inasmuch as it is practically oriented to the end of

successfully building something. However, one might call these norms merely

hypothetical imperatives in the Kantian sense. They carry with them no absolute

normativity apart from the contingent decision on the part of the person who freely

becomes an architect actually to become an architect and to build a building. Logic and

ethics are to be further distinguished from other Kunstlehren inasmuch as their

normativity is of a higher and more universal order.

There are various senses in which both logic and ethics are said to be universal

Kunstlehren inasmuch as both are in differing ways regulative upon other Kunstlehren,

and indeed upon all other purely theoretical sciences. In the first place, logic is universal

inasmuch as it develops a normative theory to which the rationality of every system of

thought is subjected. As such, it stands within the purview of logic to function as a

vehicle of critique for any Kunstlehre or theoretical science to the extent that each

discipline contains either perfectly rational or nonsensical rules following from either

logically sound or logically unsound theoretical or practical syllogisms. Thus, if the

purely theoretical science of biology made the argument that on the basis of purely

empirical, physical observation of the workings of the human body that there is no such

thing as a soul, logic could properly critique biology for making claims about the
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existence of a non-bodily entity that do not strictly follow logically from the purely

bodily, physical premises of biologys argument. Science would need different grounds

for pursuing such a claim in a logically sound manner, if such could ever even be proven.

As such, all other Kunstlehren and all other theoretical sciences are subject to the

normative rule of logic. To that extent, then, i.e. to the extent that there is no science or

practical discipline which is not in one way or another subject to the norms of thought

and argumentation presented by the normative reign of logic which lays down wholly

proscriptive laws, logic can rightly be termed a universal Kunstlehre. However, there is a

sense in which logic is still secondary in its universality to ethics.

Husserl argues that, [t]here must, however, be a theory of art, or at least it is

postulated, which stands over all human theories of art with a legislation [Regelgebung]

which it spreads over the whole, and that is ethics.263 The reason why ethics is more

universal in its normativity over the other sciences and Kunstlehren is that ethics poses

limits and imperatives upon science and other practical disciplines which is more

extensive than that of the norms of logical theory. Thus, one could see in the case, again,

of architecture which seizes upon illogical rules for the building of a structurally sound

house that any deviation from logic that would result in the building of a house which is

structurally unsound represents a case of irrationality at the level of thought such that

thought which aims at the proper construction of a sound building ought to follow

logical rules. Logical norms applied to the rule-system of architecture are thus able to

263
Ibid., 4: Es muss aber eine Kunstlehre sein, oder mindestens postuliert werden, die
ber allen menschlichen Kunstlehren steht, mit einer Regelgebung, die sie insgesamt
bergreift, und das ist die Ethik.
 203

provide a rational guide to the sorts of thought processes which ought to be followed

only if one actually desires to be logical and to build a structurally sound house.

However, if one were capable of recognizing that it is illogical to build a house out of

materials that will cause the house to fall and crush the people inside of it, this is illogical

only if one has, as the end of the rational pursuit of a practical end, the actual building of

a structurally sound house.

Logic has nothing to say about whether one ought to take as an end the building

of a structurally faulty house as itself the end of the act of building. Logic can, to make

use once again of some Kantian language, only deal in hypothetical imperatives. If one

intends to reach a certain aim, then logic provides norms for the achievement of that aim,

whether the aim is practical or is the aim of the achievement of purely theoretical

knowledge. If one intends to reach a certain aim but has logically faulty terms in their

practical or theoretical syllogism, then logic can only point out the status of the syllogism

as being illogical and provide logical grounds to fix it. However, human action is in need

of a practical discipline capable of adding that higher-level universal proscription:

whether its terms are logical or not, it is morally wrong purposely to build a house out of

unstable materials that might collapse and kill its inhabitants. To the same extent, the

theoretical sciences require a practical discipline which will be capable of telling them

that, for instance, lethal experimentation on human beings is wrong, even if valuable

knowledge could be attained from it.

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The normativity of ethics thus extends, in a certain restricted sense beyond the

normativity of logic,264 although ethics as itself a theory of art does require adherence to

the normativity of logical rules if it is itself to be rational in the application of its own

normativity to other disciplines beyond the normativity provided by logic alone. Thus,

where logic provides a kind of normativity grounded merely upon a hypothetical

imperative, ethics will provide the normativity of a categorical imperative, although not

one which Husserl will interpret entirely in Kantian terms, as we have already begun to

see. Ethics tells each science and practical discipline how to pursue their research and

their practical aims morally and even places such sciences and practical disciplines at the

service of morality, providing aims of research which are meant to benefit the ethical

status of humanitythis is explicitly the task which transcendental phenomenology is

meant to take up in the resolution of the crisis of the sciences in Husserls estimation.265

The inner, guiding impulse of transcendental phenomenology, of the physical sciences,

and of all the practical disciplines of human existence must, ultimately, be provided by

264
This does not mean that ethics can in any sense do without logic as a tool for
developing principles according to logically sound standards in order to be rational.
Ethics is thus not, independent of logic. However, its normativity can be said to be
more all-encompassing than that of logic because one is not absolutely required to be
logical except to the extant that one intends to be rational. On the other hand, one is
absolutely, for Husserl, required to be moral or else one is not merely irrational, but also
realizes positive disvalues as being bad or evil. One must be moral not only if one
intends not to be bad; one simply must be moral as a simple and absolute ought. Any
ought which proscribes the pursuit of rationality in the form of logical thinking and
acting must be founded in this original moral sense of the requirement to do or be
something or somehow. The justification for this absolute ought cannot yet be supplied
at this time, however. It is nevertheless enough to see here that ethics is in this sense
more normative, even while never independent of, logic.
265
See Husserl, The Crisis, 2-6. We will have to return to this issue momentarily.
 205

the rule of ethics as the definitive, ultimately normative Kunstlehre. With this in mind,

Husserl writes that,

[a]ll real and possible theories of art stand under one highest one, namely
ethics, provided that all possible ends stand under the highest, ideal end of
an absolute ought in the sense of reasons absolutely demanding life, so
also must ethics, the king of the theories of art, subordinate every science,
and that which it applies to all philosophy, to itself.266

As such, it should be clear that ethics stands over and above all philosophical and

empirical sciences as their guiding spirit, ideally speaking, and as that which provides

them with guiding norms in the course of their research. Ethics, as that practical

discipline which furnishes an all-embracing absolute ought which embraces the whole of

the life of the individual, the community, and all of their individual and communal

interests, which include the sciences and all human arts, must, in a sense, be all in all, and

this is the overarching norm which it imposes upon all else in its capacity as universal

Kunstlehre. No science, and no practical discipline as well, is free from the ethical

critique of its principles, its methods, and its guiding values. In this way, then,

everything within phenomenology and within its method hinges, ultimately, upon ethics.

c. Ethics and Pure Phenomenology: The Phenomenological Character

of Husserls Ethics

Again, however, we continue to be faced with the issue of what possible relation

ethics can have to phenomenology qua phenomenology. That is to say, up until this

point, we have been dealing mostly with certain distinctions, i.e. those distinctions

266
HUA XXXVII, 18: Stehen alle wirklichen und mglichen Kunstlehren unter einer
obersten, nmlich der Ethik, sofern alle mglichen Zwecke unter dem obersten, idealen
Zweck eines absolut Gesollten, im Sinne der Vernunft absolut geforderten Lebens stehen,
so muss sich auch jede Wissenschaft und die sie alle bergreifende Philosophie der Ethik,
der kniglichen der Kunstlehren, unterordnen.
 206

between the transcendental, personalistic, and axiological attitudes; and between

theoretical and practical sciences, which are at base merely pre-phenomenological in

nature. While they are certainly essential distinctions needed in order to clarify precisely

what we are expecting to accomplish in raising ethical questions, it is still not yet clear

how Husserls ethics could ever be called phenomenological even if we admit, as the

preceding discussions have attempted to show, that transcendental phenomenology

always has ethical goals at the forefront of its mind in pursuing its research. Could that

not indicate that Husserls transcendental phenomenology is not truly phenomenological

inasmuch as it carries with it certain guiding ethical values which it does not fully subject

to critique and which might be said to invalidate its supposedly presuppositionless

character? Husserl certainly would reject such a critique, and yet it is never sufficiently

clear from his own thought why we should not accept this kind of argumentation against

phenomenology as such and which might challenge the use of the modifier

phenomenological when applied to ethics. If we are to understand the deep connection

between Husserls ethics and his phenomenological method, then we must return once

again to the problem of what phenomenology is and hopes to be in Husserls

phenomenological breakthrough as described above in order to answer the question of

why such a method would ever be necessary or even possible with respect to ethical

inquiry. Here again, Husserls parallelism between logic and ethics will be of use to us

for reasons which will be made clear shortly.

As has already been said, phenomenology qua phenomenology seems to have

been explicitly cast in the form of a transcendental logic of meaning. As such, it is

 207

concerned with the clarification of certain problems in the grounding of logic, the

subjective and intersubjective acquisition of sense, and the questions which follow

regarding the possibilities of experience of the transcendent in general. Ethics, in

contrast, is concerned fundamentally with a particular form of being and becoming of the

personal ego in a certain direction and of the concerns, norms, and rules required for the

person to be and to become in the specific direction of moral goodness. If

phenomenology is to be restricted purely to the regressive inquiry into and clarification of

our foundational acts of meaning-intention and meaning-fulfillment, and if this is further

pursued at the transcendental level as in Husserls later phenomenology, then it still

remains entirely unclear what Husserls phenomenology would have to do with his ethics

and thus how he could describe his ethics as being in any sense phenomenological.

However, valuation, as has already been seen, can be conceived, in some restricted sense,

as analogical to the acts of judgment upon which logic is founded. Moreover, just as is

the case with judgment and processes of conceptualization, where values are concerned,

the process of valuation as it is ordinarily lived in everyday practical/moral attitudes can

tend to obfuscate values and sources of values, in particular when either the tradition or

contemporary culture develops or devolves in directions that either are or are not

conducive to the proper intuition of authentic values or which make their objective status

problematic for us. The way in which the ethical tradition can, and has been passed on,

reflects the sedimentation of valuative meaning which the historical, sociological, and

cultural shifts in valuation have produced through the centuries.267 Moreover, to the

267
We should also not forget the deceiving tendencies of certain subjective and
 208

extent that, as we have already seen, ethics, in spite of the wider universality of its

application qua Kunstlehre in comparison to logic still cannot go altogether without the

aid of logic in clarifying its basic modes of argumentation, and to the extent that logic, for

the phenomenologist, cannot go without an essential clarification of its most basic sense,

it stands to reason that ethics also cannot do without the insights of a transcendental

logic along the lines of a phenomenological method and approach to its basic problems

without proceeding navely with respect to its founding acts. A re-appropriation and

renewal of authentic values thus requires a regressive, phenomenological movement back

to things themselves, where the relevant things to which an ethical reduction must

bring us are objective values, both on the level of a static phenomenology of values as

objects of subjective and intersubjective acts of valuation and on the level of a genetic,

historical reactivation of the tradition, the likes of which we have already discussed in

connection with the renewal of the medieval tradition in phenomenology.

sociological conditions which likewise create situations of value-deception, deformation,

or blindness such as ressentiment, egoism, etc. the likes of which Max Scheler is so
concerned to study in his own phenomenological ethics. These sorts of impediments to
the authentic recognition of objective value likewise necessitate a phenomenological
approach to the problems of ethics which would be capable of overcoming such value-
blindness, although it may also suggest that phenomenology already requires on a
personal level that the phenomenologist already have access to the values of true research
in the first place before he or she can ever proceed to study objective values at alli.e.
phenomenology always already poses a moral requirement of conversion or openness
to true values in order authentically to enter into its domain. We choose not to delve into
these issues here because on this score it is Scheler and not Husserl who seems to be the
most sensitive to these problems. Pursuit of these issues here, although of the highest
importance for phenomenology as a whole, would take this discussion much too far from
the narrow field of research into and development of Husserls phenomenological ethics
specifically.
 209

However, even if we are to conceive of a possible relationship between

phenomenology as a transcendental logic and ethics along these lines, it would only be

clear how ethics might borrow, from time to time, from phenomenological insights, but it

would still seem to be entirely unclear how a phenomenological ethics would follow from

this as a science which seeks to understand how rational subjects ought to value and act

in accordance with such valuation, in particular inasmuch as even here a relationship

between phenomenology and ethics in this sense would still only seem to indicate the

possibility of a phenomenologically developed pure axiology and not a full-fledged

ethical theory which proscribes, however incompletely, actual norms or directives for

action.268 Ethics, as distinct from, though still connected to pure axiology, can only be

developed when one intuitively discerns the connection between the experience of value

and the particular motivational content which the value provides within the overarching

framework of obligation, for Husserl.

Pursuing the parallel between logic and ethics a little farther, then, a further clue

into the direction of a solution to these difficulties may be found in the recognition that

ethical attitudes constitute, in a sense, the form of phenomenological research as Husserl

has developed it. The validity of ethics as a Kunstlehre extends with, but at the same

time beyond, that of logic. If we understand that ethics, as a total and all-encompassing

form of world-life, in Husserls understanding, extends even to the region of

consciousness within which the phenomenologist qua phenomenologist enacts the

268
It is in part precisely this recognition which will motivate Husserls turn in his later
thought away from the problems of a pure axiology simply and toward vocation, God,
and faith in his attempt to ground ethical inquiry, but this problem will have to be
approached in greater detail later on in our discussions.
 210

epoch, then it becomes clear that the phenomenologist, as transcendental onlooker

upon the transcendental consciousness in which phenomenology is pursued, to borrow

language from Eugen Fink, cannot bracket out the ethical from his or her life as

onlooker, nor can the phenomenologizing of the onlooker prescind from moral

requirements. It is, moreover, as has been seen, the moral values of the phenomenologist

which constitutes the very meaning of phenomenology itself in the first place.

Phenomenology, then qua phenomenology simply cannot prescind from ethical reflection

if it is not to pursue its authentic sense and meaning as an infinite philosophical task

navely through ignorance of the morality which founds it. To that extent, then, a

phenomenology of phenomenology the likes of which Fink attempted to produce in his

Sixth Cartesian Meditation will always remain incomplete so long as ethics as such is not

made thematic in a phenomenological investigation.269

At the same time, however, it is also clear that Husserl envisions phenomenology,

in the above sense of a transcendental logic, to be a radically new and unprecedented

theory of meaning which can be seen as an alternative to the tradition which inaugurates

a new era in logical, philosophical reflection. It might be asked, in this connection,

whether a phenomenological ethics might also provide an alternative to the whole

tradition in a total and unprecedented overcoming of traditional dilemmas in ethics and

which gives ethical knowledge a genuinely new sense. The failure to satisfy this demand

by bringing about a return to traditional moralities, in the eyes of most phenomenologists,

269
This is, however, by no means the only sense in which ethics can or should be pursued
in a phenomenological way. Nevertheless, it certainly does provide one justification for
phenomenology to pursue ethical reflection in general terms.
 211

might very well annul the possibility that such an ethics could claim the title

phenomenological for its own. However, reasons have already appeared for our

questioning whether this is in any way a reasonable expectation both for a

phenomenological ethics as well as for a phenomenological, transcendental logic. As

was already seen, Husserl seems to operate in more or less complete navet when it

comes to the historical tradition. This navet, one might even come to see, are major

factors in the elaboration of his phenomenology along almost historico-apocalyptic lines,

as Eric Voegelin argues. Voegelin writes of Husserl that,

[i]n his conception, the history of mans reason had three phases: (1) a
prehistory, of no particular interest to the philosopher, ending with the
Greek foundation of philosophy; (2) a phase beginning with the Greek
Urstiftung, the primordial foundation of philosophy, that was interrupted
by the Christian thinkers but then renewed by Descartes, and reached up to
Husserl; and (3) a last phase, beginning with the apodiktische Anfang, the
apodictic beginning set by his own work, and going on forever into the
future, within the horizon of apodictic continuation of his
phenomenology.270

Voegelin argues that Husserl here is guilty of assuming an (erroneous) philosophy

of history which, mirroring the absolutisms of other world-historical thinkers such

as Comte, Hegel, and Marx, attempts to annul and overthrow past history and let

true, authentic, and renewed history begin with his own work.271 This

assumption must have the consequence of annulling Husserls apodictic

beginning, which at the same time would demand the critical abolition of this

world-historical assumption. Phenomenology, then, cannot assume itself to be

270
Eric Voegelin, Anamnesis, trans. and ed. Gerhart Niemeyer (Columbia, MO:
University of Missouri Press, 1990), 10.
271
Ibid., 11.
 212

furnishing radically new results over and against the tradition, either in logic or in

ethics, without undercutting its main purpose.272 Moreover, historical-critical

analysis into the history of philosophy, as we have already suggested, is prepared

to offer reasons to assume that phenomenology itself, even as a theory of

meaning-bestowal, is cut from the same cloth as the tradition and as such has real

forerunners and precursors whose already developed thought phenomenology

authentically renews, not supercedes.

The approach of phenomenology, then, will still always be that of reflective

inquiry into the things themselves as given in experience; yet with respect to ethics, it

will take something of a two- or, as will be seen later on, a three-pronged approach to

uncovering ethical normativity in a phenomenological manner. First will be the pursuit

of a pure axiology or value theory through regressive inquiry into value necessary in

order to provide a critique of the knowledge of values and of the tradition by clearing

away the obfuscating and deceiving tendencies of valuation in our current historical,

social, and cultural situation in life in order to arrive at true values themselves. Second

will be the pursuit of the connection between value, the person, and ethical obligation

towards the realization of the highest values. This will take the form of the

272
This at the same time is not to undercut the possibility that phenomenology can offer
new insights into the various problem-spheres of philosophy. Nevertheless, it cannot be
ignorant of the phenomenon of what Etienne Gilson has called the unity of philosophical
experience in that traditional problems continually emerge in philosophical experience
which are in full force no less in phenomenology than in any other tradition, and which
phenomenology takes up again within the context of its own unique language-game. The
uniqueness of the language-game, however, cannot be confused with an historically
apocalyptic new beginning in philosophy which has no precedent and which opens a
wholly new world-historical phase going continuously on into the future.
 213

phenomenology of the moral subject and a regressive inquiry into moral action as it is

exercised in the subject as such in order to clarify the ethical concepts of the person, of

freedom, of obligation, etc. and their sources in experience. Lastly, following upon

Steven Laycocks expanded definition of phenomenology as a philosophy which studies,

by way of a reflective methodology, not only phenomena but also those things essentially

connected with phenomena,273 the phenomenologies of value (pure axiology) and of the

ethical subject and his or her individual call to morality will provide the basis for a kind

of speculative, reconstructive phenomenology into the ultimate ground of ethical

obligation, namely the divine. Phenomenology will be needed in all of these areas of

ethical inquiry because, as Husserl wants to argue, only phenomenology, as a true form

of philosophizing, is capable of providing the needed critique of our conceptual apparatus

by means of which we come to cognize certain theoretical regions, in this case morality,

whose foundational sense always remains hidden from us in ordinary life and discourse

to a certain extent.

However, it should still remain clear that even though the current discussion has

cleared a path for an expansionand a necessary one at thatof phenomenology to

include ethical inquiry, it should nevertheless remain clear that a phenomenological

ethics pursues a very different path of inquiry from that of transcendental

phenomenology. It may even be the case, if pursued rigorously and to its ultimate

conclusions, that a phenomenological ethics will provide grounds for a critique of other

aspects of Husserls phenomenology, and in particular his egology and the idea of

273
Laycock, An Overview of Phenomenological Theology, 4.
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phenomenology as being a mode of value-neutral inquiry, which might destabilize the

central place of specifically transcendental phenomenology and the transcendental

epoch as the science of all sciences and the method of all methods definitive of the

whole phenomenological landscape which Husserl attempted to paint throughout his

career.274 For the reasons elaborated above with respect to the foundational importance

which a phenomenological ethics must have for phenomenology in general, such a

possibility ought not to be resisted or discounted, however much it might fly in the face

of the common wisdom of the community of phenomenologists. However, it will not be

my intention to pursue these issues here as the development of these suggestions could

only follow on the heels of a full-fledged investigation of Husserls ethics as a whole.

The application of an ethical critique of transcendental phenomenology would involve

problems far too far-reaching to cover here and would thus require a study all its own.

The possibility of such a critique, however, is brought up only to indicate that, even if we

have satisfactorily secured the character of Husserls ethics as phenomenological, as in

some sense making use of the phenomenological method of inquiry, at no point in the

present study should it be assumed that there is a complete harmony and agreement

between Husserls phenomenological ethics and his transcendental phenomenology as a

whole, nor is it in any way the aim of this study to secure such agreement. As such, it

should be stressed that it is purely the aim of this project to provide a systematic

treatment and development of Husserls ethics, and, to the extent that it is possible, in

274
If this really can be argued, then this would represent something of a monumental
critique of Husserls phenomenology and, indeed, on purely Husserlian grounds which
would necessitate yet another so-called new beginning in phenomenological
philosophy.
 215

independence from other areas of Husserls thought, except where other theoretical areas

become directly relevant and indispensable to the development of the ethical project

itself.
 216

Part II Husserlian Value Theory

Chapter V
Value-ception in Husserl and Scotus

10. Husserls Theory of Value

Husserl argues in the first chapter of his 1920/1924 lecture course on ethics that,

later here, behavior, and before that already every kind of volition, is founded in an act

of valuation [Werten], so a universal ethics must obviously be founded in a theory of

values [Wertelehre].275 For Husserl, this insight provides the basic procedural plan for

the development of a pure value theory which will be the prerequisite for further research

into the ethical domain. Husserl, as always, wishes to perform a regressive analysis of

the types of acts and objects involved in the genesis of human activity in general, whether

moral, immoral, or morally neutral. Husserl argues here that the stepwise regression to

the origins and foundations of human free activity must begin first with the fact of human

behavior, that human behavior tends in certain directions and, most importantly, is

founded upon individual acts of will by means of which the person is formed into a

certain kind of person establishing his or her habitual tendencies, virtues, and vices which

give to every subsequent volitional act its historical genesis and context. Moreover,

every individual volition must in turn be motivated by something. We do not posit

actions in a void. We always act for the sake of some end, whether we are interested in

doing something for ourselves or for another, whether we are striving after food, making

275
HUA XXXVII., 24: ferner, da Handeln, und vordem schon jederlei Wollen, in
einem Werten fundiert ist, so muss eine allgemeine Ethik offenbar in einer Wertelehre
fundiert sein.
 217

the decision to listen to music, or whether we are making the free decision to go

volunteer in a third world country.

Whatever the individual characteristics of our motivations are, Husserl argues, we

are always motivated to do something because it appears to us under the aspect of a

valuei.e. whether we understand that to be a value which exists in and for itself or

whether it is a value simply for me, all motivation is reducible to the generic heading

value. Prescinding initially from the problem of the ontological status of the values in

question, whether they are really inherent qualities of things in the world or whether they

are merely subjective additions to the world which have no objective validity

whatsoever,276 it is first necessary to provide a phenomenological account of the genesis

and constitution of values as they are given to us in ordinary experience. Specifically, we

must undertake an analysis of the peculiar types of subjective perceptual acts by means

of which values are brought to givenness for us in experience in the first place. It is only

on the basis of such an analysis that we can then come to understand how, which values,

and with what normative force these values are to be incorporated into an ethical system

which would be capable of providing a groundwork for the understanding of right and

wrong actions and what sorts of ends ought to be pursued by us as human subjects living

in community with other subjects. For Husserl, the fundamental acts by means of which

values are experienced are, as has already been indicated elsewhere, acts of feeling.

However, this must be understood in greater depth if certain potential problems are to be

avoided, especially potential charges of emotivism and of value-subjectivism in ethics.

276
We will have an occasion to discuss these questions and the problems surrounding
them in the following chapter.
 218

a. Values as the Correlates of Specific Acts of Feeling

The initial problem which arises in Husserls claim that values are to be

understood as the correlates of feeling-acts by means of which they are given in

conscious experience is that this would seem to run the risk of reducing values to the

irrational whims of feeling such that values become nothing more than subjective277

feelings of enjoyment and disvalues nothing more than subjective feelings of pain or

displeasure. However, as has already been made clear in the above discussion of

Husserls critique of the history of ethical philosophywhich is his chosen vehicle for

the elaboration of his value-theory in the 1920/24 lectures, it would be a mistake to

understand Husserls notion that values are given in feeling-acts as unwittingly implying

a kind of hedonism, value-skepticism, or value-subjectivism. The initial clarification of

this problem is supplied by Husserl in his critique of ancient hedonism.

Hedonism, in Husserls understanding of it,278 makes the claim that we are all

determined essentially by what has become known as the pleasure principle, that by

necessity we are motivated towards things according to the pleasure which they will give

us and that the value which we see in individual things is nothing more than the appraisal

of the amount of pleasure which a thing will give us. Husserl argues that there is, to a

277
In the merely pejorative sense of the word as indicating a merely relative validity
having no real, objective validity for others.
278
Limited as it may indeed be. The historical limitation, however, has no impact on
Husserls critique of any form of hedonism in general which takes pleasure purely qua
pleasure as the goal of human activity in place of value as the end towards which
human action intentionally strives. Husserls critique, as outlined here, would not yet be
able to say anything to a hedonism which argues simply that among all values, the values
of pleasure are the highest and that these values represent the normative values towards
which human action both always is and always ought to be directed.
 219

certain extent, a fundamental intuition in hedonisms grounding thesis, namely that things

in the world enter into our consciousness only on the basis of their being things in which

we take some kind of interest.279 Our manner of taking an interest in things is further

determined by the way in which we experience the world as full of things which are of

value for us in various ways, whether they be good for us because they provide us with

knowledge, because they provide us with nutrition, with enjoyment, etc. or because they

specifically deprive us of such things. Things only enter into our perception, then,

according to the manner in which they are, in a certain sense, relevant to our lives as

human beings striving towards certain endsthat is, to the extent that things are taken

originally not as mere things, but as value-things, as goods of one sort or another. If

they do not, then they cannot motivate us to take any interest in them and, as such, they

simply are not a constitutive part of our environing world. However, the means through

which we take an interest in things takes place, again, according to whether or not they

are desirable or undesirable in one way or another. Desirability, moreover, is an

experienced quality of a thing given when we desire or love something, to use the term

equivocally understanding here that we do not love everything in the same way and thus

that value is not to be reduced simply to romantic or inter-personal love. Love, as we

will have occasion to see later, is both an act of the will by means of which love is

positively expressed as well as a feeling which addresses the beloved as the sort of thing

which evokes love, i.e. as a thing which is loveable. Now, hedonism errs, Husserl

279
See Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgment, trans. James S. Churchill and
KarlAmeriks ed. Ludwig Landgrebe (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973),
78-86.
 220

argues, because it does not recognize that there are distinctions in the way in which things

can be loved and, moreover, because it does not understand the difference between the

loving, the act of feeling, and the thing loved.

For Husserl, as has already been said, there are two types of pleasure-feeling, i.e.

two ways in which something can be loved or experienced as desirable. In the first

place, there is the pleasure in the sense of the pure achievement of pleasure in the

encounter with some thingfor instance if I am listening to a concert and taking pleasure

in the music, but then abstract from the music in order to focus on the pleasure as a mere

state purely in itself apart from the music which is giving me the pleasure. In the second

place, there is the pleasure in somethingfor instance in the music itself.280 In

distinguishing these two different modes in which we can talk about pleasure, one can

begin to recognize the noetic and noematic moments of value-experience which

according to its essence characterizes such experience as intentional, and thus as object-

directed. In the recognition of the fact that feelings are fundamentally intentional, i.e.

that they have actual objects as their correlates, Husserl will be able to accomplish two

various tasks. In the first place, he will disprove the pleasure principle, as has already

been discussed in Chapter Three, by showing that we do not of necessity strive after

pleasure as our object but that we strive after objects themselves as valuable. In the

second place, it will be possible to show precisely the fact that values, or objects which

have a particular value-rank as goods, are the objective, noematic correlates of noetic acts

of value-feeling.

280
Ibid., 66.
 221

Just as in perception in which we can distinguish between the intentional

moments of the act of perception, the noesis, and the thing as perceived by an act of

perception, the intentional noema constituted in phenomenological immanence, and the

transcendent thing, Husserl argues that we can distinguish the intentional moments of

value-perceptionor value-ception (Wertnehmen)281 as we shall call it in order to

distinguish the unique character of the apprehension of values from all other forms of the

perception of objectsin terms of the noetic act of valuation, i.e. the act of value-feeling,

the noematic moment of the value-content apperceived, i.e. the value of the object itself

as the correlate of the act of valuation, and the transcendent value itself. Against

hedonism, then, phenomenology can distinguish between the noetic moment of joy,

pleasure, or desire and the noematic moment of the value or value-complex which is an

object of joy, pleasure, or desire. If, for example, we take the instance of the discovery of

the objective value of a piece of music, we do so through the actual feelings of enjoyment

brought about through the act of listening to the music itself. Through such feelings of

enjoyment, I discover the beauty of the music and the importance of beauty for human

existence.282 That is to say, I discover the actual objective value of beauty and of the

281
Ibid,. 72.
282
This should not be taken to imply that the value-feeling of the beautiful brings about
an intellectual discovery of the value of beauty or an intellectual recognition of the
importance of beauty for human existence. This discovery of the value and importance
of beauty is restricted purely to the sphere of value-feeling and is completely distinct
from intellectual judgment regarding value and importance. At the same time, this value-
feeling constitutes the only originary access which judgment has to the value-complex
beauty and as such is the condition for the possibility of intellectual acts of judgment
regarding the values at stake here. Non-originarily, values can be discovered
intellectually where there is no value-feeling only through the concerted effort on the part
 222

individual piece of music itself. Moreover, I have discovered the value of the music in a

way in which I could not have done were it not for the feeling-acts of valuation which

were prerequisites for the discovery of the value to begin with. What this means is that,

although acts of logical judgment and intellectual thought will be vital for the ordering of

values and for determining the proper course of moral action given the intuition of such

valuesotherwise there would be no need for a science or practical discipline of ethics in

the first placethe actual experiential processes by means of which values are first

brought to consciousness cannot be sought in any acts of the subject apart from the

feeling-acts of pleasure, joy, desire, and, informing all the others, of love.

If it can be accepted, then, that feelings have an intentional structure, then it still

must be understood precisely in what sorts of feelings not only values as merely

subjectively related or subjectively posited, as an act of value-creation or value-

imagining, but values in the essential truth of their being can be brought to givenness, i.e.

as universally valid eidetic structures intentionally given in a value-experience not yet

implying any commitment to an idea of real values as mind-independent, transcendent

objects. In the first place, Husserl would reject the idea of a value-creation as being

involved in feeling acts of valuation because such would ignore the results of the

phenomenological analysis of the intentional correlation of value-feeling and felt-

value. Husserl believes that his phenomenology reveals the genesis of value-ception as

of reason to pursue and to dispose oneself to recognize the value of some thing which is
valued by another, but not yet by me. Such a process of disposition can only be
accomplished by an opening up of the person through striving for love in the broadest
sense and through the employment of a humbling of the concrete ego without which
new values cannot be brought to givenness in new feeling-acts.
 223

taking place primordially in acts of feeling. Value-creation, however, would require

separate acts of imagination and volition in order for a new value to be posited in

existence that did not previously exist. As such, the subjective positing of new values

would be an essentially different sort of activity, one which takes place at a higher level.

Inasmuch as feeling would be involved in such an act, it would only be involved at the

level of the motivation of the act of value-creation. However, such felt-motivation is

itself an act of valuation of an objective value, i.e. the value of the satisfaction that arises

in getting the things that I want without any accompanying feelings of guilt, for instance.

That being said, then, the theory of the subjective creation of values can find a

place in a phenomenological analysis of valuation on the basis of intentional acts of

feeling without altering the theory of the intentionality of feeling and giving way to a

kind of value-subjectivism since the creation of values on the part of a subject is

motivated by an objective value-having in an intentional feeling-act. The recognition of

the possibility of value-creation, moreover, is essentially necessary for phenomenology in

order to provide a comprehensive theory of value by taking into account and describing

the possibility of value-deception. It can be seen, then, that the feeling-act of valuation is

an intentional act which transcends to essentially true values, i.e. to values of being and

values essentially in being. However, another question must be raised here to the extent

that there is still a doubt as to the sorts of acts of feeling which qualify as evaluative acts

of true and normative value, since it is the case that not every feeling is, in the first place,

even intentional and since, just as in the perception of physical objects there can be

mistakes and illusions, how do we ensure that acts of value-ception will likewise not be
 224

subject to deception with respect to the truth of values, especially given the traditional

philosophical analysis of feelings and emotions as being subject to the whims and caprice

of human sentimentality? If we distinguish, as Husserl does, feeling merely as the

intuition of values in their factual being in the world and the moral intuition, again by

means of feeling, of values in their truth, or in their authentic place within an ordered

hierarchy of values, then how is Husserl to account for how those feelings are to be

distinguished which merely give values in their factual presence from those feelings

which give values in their authentic hierarchy and normativity in the moral world-order?

This is, to a certain extent, one of the problems for which Husserls under-

developed phenomenology of value is not fully ready to account, at least in a wholly

systematic way, and this involves one of the main critiques leveled against Husserl by a

thinker like Arroyo.283 However, it would be false to say that Husserl has no answer to

this problem at all, however incomplete his answer may be. Husserl argues that an ethics

and an adequate theory of value-feelings cannot be based upon just any kind of feeling.

In the first place, not every feeling is intentional. For instance, the feeling of pain

brought about by a headache is a non-intentional feeling. Likewise, the feelings of

tiredness, hunger, or the excess of energy in jitteriness all lack an intentional direction.

Moreover, valuations motivated by feelings of selfishness do not provide true values, or

the values for which one ought to strive. Rather, it is only the higher-order feelings of

joy and love which provide a basis for the feeling of values in their authentic truth and

essential validity. As such, one motivated by egoism and the desire for the mere

283
Arroyo, 66.
 225

satisfaction of their own pleasures or motivated solely by the interest in their own

happiness can never understand the truth about values; they will never understand the

proper ordering of values and the manner in which they indicate authentic norms for

human action. Nonetheless, every act of desire, whether selfish or not, every act of joy in

something, every act of love, i.e. every feeling-act which is actually intentional, is always

the noetic correlate of an objective value. However, the content and proper meaning of

the value may fail to be understood if the subject is not well formed with respect to the

habitualities involved in the feeling of values, i.e. if the subject is habitually vicious.

More, however, will have to be said about this later in connection with the Scotistic

phenomenology of the will and its acts of valuation.

b. The Essential Connection Between Values and Value-Bearers

Another important aspect of Husserls theory of value-ception must also be drawn

out inasmuch as values have so far only been spoken of as themselves noematic

correlates of noetic acts of feeling. However, if one is to understand the full sense of the

phenomenological axiology being developed here, then one must understand the fact that

values are not experienced as merely disconnected objectivities constituted in

consciousness which are superimposed upon things, one might say, but rather, they are

properly understood only as the values of the things themselves or which are only

realizable in things. While value can be spoken of as a certain positive or negative

quality of a being, value is not a separable quality of individual beings such that we can

approach a thing, except by means of an extreme kind of abstraction, as having its being
 226

without value.284 Rather, as will be seen in greater detail later, the being of an object can

be seen as coextensive with its value and, to echo Max Scheler, we can speak of value as

something of the first messenger of being.285 At the same time, values can be separated

from things in an altogether different sense. That is, value can be separated as ideal

unities in the idea of the value beauty, goodness, utility, etc. and value-bearers will

be experienced in their beauty, goodness, utility, etc. only to the degree that they

serve to exemplify these ideal values. These, moreover, are typically the values towards

which we strive and which we attempt to realize within ourselves in moral actionto this

extent, it is we ourselves who become value-bearers of moral values. However, to exist

is always already to exist within an axiological framework. Feeling-acts which present to

the subject certain objects as desirable, as lovable, and as a good, are presenting

these objects in the essence of their being as objects which have their being as goods. To

say, then, that we strive after value, that every act of volition has its foundational

motivation in a value, etc. is to say that we strive after objects and are motivated by

objects which we intend in their authentic ontological, axiological character as goods

284
Originarily something given in consciousness is never a mere thing but is always
already a value-thing.
285
Max Scheler, Formalism, 18. This idea seems to be at work in Husserls thought as
well, in particular in the opening discussions of Experience and Judgment in which he
discusses the ways in which experience is essentially dependent upon an originary
movement of an affective interest preceding the cogito as a moment of its striving
which makes possible the emergence of thing-unities from the background of the
environment based upon their importance and the interest which the subject directs
towards them. To this extent, then, value seems to be completely inseparable from the
whole of experience, and in particular from the most originary principles of experience.
See Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgment, 78-86.
 227

which, as value-bearers, are to be desired, loved, etc. when we are dealing concretely

with objects in our life-world.

That which is identified as the objective value that is the correlate of the act of

valuation is the result of a particular way of intending the real object according to its real

axiological status as a being of value, i.e. as a good. This is why there can be an

axiological standpoint in the first place, i.e. an attitude of looking at the world which

prescinds from other standpoints and looks only at the world as an order of goods. To the

same extent, one can take on a merely ontological attitude, focusing purely on the being

of the world. The world itself, however, as it is constituted in consciousness, is at one

and the same time an ontological and axiological order. To be as an object in the world,

is to be at the same time as a value-thing in the world. As such, any discussion of values

which is to follow must keep in mind the fundamental point that the value in question in

axiological analyses of objects is always in an essential interconnection with an object as

a bearer of this value which finds its place in an axiological order of values. Barring this,

we refer to values as ideal thing-like unities which represent calls to us to realize them

in concrete objects or in ourselves. However, as already indicated, there will be other

higher-order ideal values which have their character precisely in the fact that they cannot

be realized in mere things but can only be realized in persons primarily that will have to

be taken into account later on as the investigation begins to reveal a fundamental

distinction between the axiological and the ethical standpoints.

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11. Scotus and the Noetic Character of the Will

Where a Husserlian analysis of value and the sorts of higher-order feelings that

give rise to the intuition of values in their authenticity falls short, a Scotistic analysis of

the same region of feelings and values stands ready, as shall presently be shown, to fill in

the details. Although Scotus uses different terminology in his description of what we

might call, using modern language, his value-theory, it will be possible to see the basic

equivalence of his terms and ideas to those found in Husserls analysis presented thus far

as well as to see the promise which Scotus theory holds for an Husserlian ethics. The

first moment of congruence between the two thinkers is to be found precisely in the

shared question of how one is to understand the constitution, in the phenomenological

sense of the term, of values, or goods in Scotus language, not merely in their factual

presence as related to the self-referential desires of the individual human subject, but in

an essentially ordered hierarchy of normative moral goods. The crux of the matter for

Scotus theory can be expressed in the understanding of the bipartite structure of the will

as the locus of a certain type of intentionality. By means of the wills rational, noetic

activities through which the subject addresses the world as a world to-be-acted-in-and-

upon, the world is given to the human being as a world having goodness and desirability

from two basic standpoints. Scotus will discuss the will as a capacity of transcendence in

the context of moral action and the discovery of just goods, or the essential authenticity

of values as we have already distinguished them, and the ways in which the human being

is free to act rationally. In so doing, Scotus develops, borrowing from the earlier works

of Anselm, a rather unique theory of the will as possessing a twofold power of activity
 229

according to which the will is defined in its noetic character along the lines of what

Scotus refers to as affectio. If the noetic activity of the will is to be fully grasped, it will

be necessary to provide a sense of what Scotus means by the term and how it is applied in

his analysis of the will.

a. The Noesis of the Will as Affection (Affectio)

The term affectio can be translated in a few different ways. In one case, it can

mean frame of mind, mood, or attitude and in another, it can be used to mean

affection, inclination, or motivation.286 While it is generally translated as either

affection for or inclination for in translations of Scotus writings, it carries with it this

sense of an attitude or standpoint by means of which the human being is affected by

something and is drawn out of him or herself by desire for what is experienced as

desirable. In connection with the phenomenological tradition, the term affectio could be

seen as bearing a striking resemblance to what Max Scheler refers to as an ordo amoris

or logique du coeur, or as a basic kind of leaning towards values or goods in pre-

volitional acts of the preferring and placing-after of values as we have also already seen

in Brentano.287 In Husserlian terminology, we could also describe the affectio as a basic

form of operative intentionality, i.e. a basic and always operative intentional directedness

286
It could be argued that the term affectio could also be translated and carries with it
the connotation of feeling, though only if feeling here is understood properly within
the context in which it has already been discussed in phenomenology as revealing, by
means of both active and passive feelings in the will, a certain tendency towards values.
This will have to be drawn out further as we go along. In either case, affectio clearly
does not mean feeling in the sense of a psycho-physical feeling, which would be better
translated by the Latin word passio.
287
See Max Scheler, Formalism, trans. and ed. Manfred S. Frings and Roger L. Funk
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 30ff. See above, 2, a., i., p. 17ff.
 230

of the subject which is not yet an intention of a specific, individual object, but which

constitutes a pre-reflective and pre-volitional tendency towards a class of phenomena, in

this case, value. There is also a certain extent to which the term affectio can be read as

referring to the medieval notion of an appetititive power, i.e. the power of a natural

appetite which, according to its nature naturally inclines itself towards its own perfection

through the pursuit of certain objects.288 This, however, Scotus is not willing to take too

far in view of his sharp distinction between nature and will. Thus, he indicates that,

properly speakingthe will is more than an appetite, because it is a free appetite

coupled with reason.289 Affectio, then, at its most basic level, as is also clear from the

word which Scotus uses as its synonym in various places, amor, is meant as a basic

inclination for certain things, as a kind of loving desire for something, or an opting for

something on the basis of a certain movement of love. Precisely what kind of love the

affectio will imply will vary, in Scotus discussion, according to the manner of the

wills intention and striving after things. Returning to the idea of an operative

intentionality, one could say that the wills affectio informs and orders every intentional

act of volition by means of which an object is chosen for the will to pursue inasmuch as

every object is pursued always only under the aspect of a certain primordial loving desire

which both motivates and sets the stage for all human rational activity. As Mary Beth

Ingham writes, then, the affections of the will, are really dispositions towards loving.

They are not felt affections, nor are they an emotional response to reality around us.

288
John Duns Scotus, Ordinatio III, d. 17, (DSWM, 154).
289
Ibid.
 231

They reveal themselves in emotional reactions, however.290 The world is thus framed

and opens up to the human being according to the modes in which the world is greeted by

the underlying affectio of the human will which then proceeds to order the world and its

various goods in particular ways, again according to the particular kind of loving

affection which the will takes on in individual volitional acts and which are revealed

through acts of feeling. Since the will under the aegis of its affectiones addresses the

whole of being,291 for Scotus, phenomenologically, one might say, it is by way of the

intentionality of the two affections of the will that the human environment is populated

with potential objects for volitional action. In order to understand the way the ordering of

the world of goods occurs, Scotus pursues the analysis of the will according to two basic

modes of affection, i.e. the affectio commodi, or the affection for the beneficial, and the

affectio justitiae, the affection for justice.

i. Affectio Commodi

Beginning with the affectio commodi and proceeding to an account of the affectio

justitiae, then, it will be possible to see in Scotus and Anselms theories an account of the

interplay between freedom and necessity, activity and passivity, in the will. Again, the

term affectio commodi can generally be translated as the affection, the inclination, or

the will for the beneficial. By the beneficial, here, Scotus means any approach to a

given object which intends the goodness, or value as we would say, of the object in its

290
Mary Beth Ingham, CSJ, The Harmony of Goodness: Mutuality and Moral Living
According to John Duns Scotus (Quincy, IL: Franciscan Press, 1996), 34.
291
John Duns Scotus, Opera omnia, Vol. 8, ed. B. Hechich, B. Huculak, J.
Percan, and S. Ruiz de Loizaga (Citt del Vaticano: Typis Vaticanis, 2006),[Ordinatio II
d. 6 q. 1 n. 10]: et secundum utrumque actum habet totum ens pro obiecto.
 232

character as a good relative to me and to my existence as a finite, contingent human

rational agent. As such, the beneficial can have a broad range of possible variations.

When the will intends a good in terms of the beneficial, then, that which is beneficial can

include such a broad range of things as the reception of physical pleasure or satisfaction,

the simple acquisition of that which is necessary for lifelike food, shelter, health,

etc., the self-promotion of the individual in the communitye.g. in the reception of

praise, political or other rank, etc., and finally happiness in general as the

eudaimonistic natural end of human existence. As such, it embraces such diverse values

as those of utility, the pleasing, as well as the whole range of values with regard to

life, its sustenance, and its flourishing. Scotus argues that, in every act of volition, the

will naturally tends towards the achievement or advancement of its own perfection. As

we will have occasion to recognize later, this idea has much in common with the general

framework of Husserls understanding of the ethical life as well in the notion of the

vocation which realizes the ideal self of the ethical person. For now, however, inasmuch

as this is a natural inclination, then, and inasmuch as nature is never free, Scotus argues

that we can therefore make a distinction with respect to the will that the will, as affectio

commodi, as the affection for the beneficial, represents a non-rational layer of passivity292

292
The general sense in which this term passivity is used here should be clarified. It is
not used to imply that the affectio commodi itself is passive and only enacted by means of
a being-acted-upon. Rather, the affectio itself very actively pursues its objects in
motivating the will to elicit its act. The passivity at stake here is a passivity with respect
to the ordering of the volitional and motivational life of the subject as such. In the
affectio commodi, I myself who wills am being acted upon by my desires and I am, by
and large, being determined by my desires so long as the affectio commodi remains
supreme. In this sense, passivity is used here to indicate, in Kantian language, the
heteronomy of the motivational life of the human agent acting purely out of the affection
 233

in the will which determines it towards a certain approach to the world such that the

human subject naturally seeks to make use of the world for the sake of his or her own

good. This aspect of the will Scotus will call the natural will because in this aspect,

[n]othing remains but the relationship a power has to its proper perfection.293 This

relationship is the very definition of a merely natural, non-rational power, according to

Scotus understanding of nature as a stratum of being within which a power is simply

determined to act and to act in a particular way under appropriate circumstances without

having the power to determine itself choosing between contraries and contradictory

oppositesthe Scotistic definition of freedom.

Scotus writes that the will as an inclination for what is beneficial to the human

individual is, the tendency itself by which the will as an absolute or nonrelative entity

tends, and this it does passively, being a tendency to receive something.294 Passivity,

however, as Scotus and Husserl both agree, is not a level indicative of freedom or

providing the will with an autonomous rationality but is at most the passively operative

and subterranean ground of all active freedom. The will can be free to will actively, i.e.

to be fully rational and self-determining, only if, in addition to the passive layer of

for the beneficialalthough the affectio commodi as passive in this manner is not for that
reason to be seen as bad under ordinary circumstances since, for the better part of life,
seeking after the satisfaction of basic needs and wants, the affectio commodi is a
sufficient guide for the human agent without ever becoming morally problematic.
However, when higher values are at stake in a particular action, the affectio commodi is
no longer sufficient. It is only in this moment that it comes to represent the heteronomy
of the will in a problematic sense for morality.
293
Ordinatio III, d. 17, (DSWM, 155).
294
Ibid.
 234

determined inclinations towards the goodness of the world interpreted in its goodness as

being valuable only for my own individual benefit, the will has an active capacity to

incline itself against this passive tendency.295 This will be the affectio justitiae, or the

affection for justice, which will have to be discussed momentarily. However, more must

first be said about the affectio commodi, how it operates and precisely in what manner it

is to be understood, phenomenologically, as a noetic mode of value-ception in its

function in Scotus thought.

Scotus argues that the will under the aspect of the affectio commodi seeks

happiness necessarily because it does so naturally. If it is a natural inclination, then there

is a clear indication here that the will is therefore naturally coordinated to the sorts of

things in the world which will lend to the achievement of that which will perfect the

wills natural inclination. That is to say, the human being has a qualsi-instinctive

knowledge of the sorts of things which will satisfy its natural inclinations, like the need

for food, for companionship, etc. and how to acquire such objects.296 Thus, the will

295
Ibid.
296
This is not, however, to limit the values revealed by the affectio commodi merely to
the range of what we would call the instinctual sphere. Its application is admittedly much
broader. What is beneficial is not necessarily instinctual. The modern notion of
instinct, moreover, would not readily find a home in Scotus concept of the affectio
commodi as a natural tendency towards what is beneficialalthough at times the
instinctual represents a tendency towards what is beneficial, the beneficial is not always
specific to the individual but to the species at large; to this extent, the instinctual would
be sub-volitional, i.e. a sphere of nature not yet included even in the natural will as
Scotus defines it, although it would very clearly exert itself as a mode of influence in the
affectio commodi. Quasi-instinctive knowledge, here, should thus only be taken as a
figure of speech to convey the sense in which the human will does, indeed, naturally tend
towards the beneficial in such a way as to generally pick out objects according to the
common value-form of the beneficial, although it does so entirely pre-predicatively at
 235

under the aspect of the affectio commodi has the character of naturally presenting, by

means of the noetic activity of the wills natural seeking which is its character as

affectio, the world as a world of goods possessing a particular sort of value which makes

the world capable of satisfying human needs. The natural seeking for happiness in the

wills primordial affection for the beneficial is a, seeking [which] is not an act that

follows upon knowledge, because then it would not be natural, but free.297 What this

means, for Scotus, is that the seeking after the beneficial, i.e. after individual objects of

value under the value-modality beneficial, is not an act following upon the intellectual

act of cognition which gives the object to the intellect as an object of value. Rather, it is

the will itself which, through the lens of the affectio commodi, presents the object as

valuable to the individual in his or her pursuit of happiness.298 This recognition of the

how of the presence of value to the experiencing and willing subject represents the

basic phenomenological insight of Scotus theory of the will. Moreover, because this is a

naturally determined activity, the goodness of the object, its value for the human agent, is

presented according to the natural and essential goodness of the thing as an entity that is,

in complete truth, capable of being beneficial. The natural tendency towards the thing,

this basic level so long as we bracket out any possible interaction with the gradual
learning of the intellect about what inductive experience teaches us is actually and
concretely beneficial to human life and biological needs.
297
Ordinatio IV, suppl., d. 49, qq. 9-10, a. 1, (DSWM, 157).
298
Of course, this presentation always presupposes an already given presentation of
something through the senses, through imagination, etc. What the will presents here,
then, is not the object of the will but the value-modality of the object as beneficial
which essentially belongs to such an object in interconnection with its experience by a
subject of this particular psycho-physical and spiritual kind which it reveals and makes
manifest originarily.
 236

the natural desire for it, would already be, then, on Scotus analysis, an act of value-

ception. However, because it is not a free act and because it presents the value of the

object in a one-sided adumbration as having its value merely in its relation to the subject

as an object capable of fulfilling human desires, it is not the sort of value-ception which

would be capable of providing the agent with any kind of moral normativity, in large part

because the affectio commodi is generally restricted to the intuition of values which are,

by and large, merely subjectively constituted or which are relative only to the particular

being of the human subject as a vital, psycho-physical organism living within a specific

human environment and not values which are absolute and unconditioned by contingent

and, in certain situations, merely empirical human need.

The particular acts to which the affectio commodi, as a level of tending passively

towards things, of passively being-affected by the desire for the beneficial and by objects

as beneficial, would be acts of bodily feeling, where things like food, physical comfort,

sexual satisfaction, etc. are concerned. They would also include emotional desires for

companionship, for security, for rest, for the avoidance of discomfort, etc. All of these

emotions and lived-bodily feelings would, for Scotus, indicate very real values, or

perfections in his terminology. However, they do not necessarily reveal values or

perfections in their proper, authentic orderi.e. in their hierarchical relation amongst

themselves indicating normatively which perfections are to be sought over and above

others except inasmuch as one thing might be experienced or desired as more beneficial

than another. Because of this, all of the various, individual inclinations and affects of

human life which find their origin in this passive stratum of the will cannot be relied upon
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for an adequate understanding of the proper order of values and thus cannot serve as an

authentic moral guide all on its own without leading into a kind of utilitarian hedonism

the likes of which a Kantian would readily refer to as an heteronymous eudaimonism of

morality. This is also not to say that the affectio commodi represents a stratum of human

affective life which would be considered immoral, or even amoral. Scotus moral

philosophy could hardly be deemed a kind of pure altruism which demands the negation

of anything self-referential.299 All of the inclinations of the affectio commodi are directed

at factually given values and therefore are indicative of proper perfections of the human

being. To seek after ones personal benefit by means of the achievement of happiness

represents a properly moral undertaking, at least within the right contexts and limits.

However, it is also not sufficient to ensure that the person is striving after the highest

moral objects. As such, if the passivity of the life of the affectio commodi comes to

dominate the motivational life of the moral subject as a whole, then the human being will

become carried away by essentially non-rational drives and will thus fail to live a fully

free and moral life. The passive dimension of human volitional and affective life must be

ordered and regulated by a free, active, and wholly conscious stratum of will for the

human being to live rationally, morally, and according to values in their essential

authenticity. This stratum of the will will be, Scotus argues, the affectio justitiae.

299
As has already been said, the affectio commodi alone is a sufficient moral inclination
for many of ones daily tasks of taking care of oneself and providing for ones own
personal needs such as the need for food, hygiene, physical comfort, the alleviation of
pain, etc.
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ii. Affectio Justitiae

As has already been said, the term affectio justitiae is translated as the

inclination or affection for justice. Over and above the wholly determined aspect of

the natural dimension of the will (affectio commodi), the affectio justitiae represents the

will as a free, rational appetite. Scotus argues that it is not possible that the will should

do away with its natural inclination for what is beneficial to itself, because a nature

could not remain a nature without being inclined to its own perfection. Take away this

inclination and you destroy the nature.300 However, it is evident that in spite of the fact

that the beneficial is always there as a source of motivation, at the same time, we do not

always act according to what is most beneficial to us but rather, have the freedom to deny

ourselves the things that we want for the sake of something, some moral value, which we

consider more important. As that affection within which the will first encounters

specifically moral values which were not yet fully present in the affectio commodi in

itself, Scotus defines the affectio justitiae as,

the wills congenital liberty by reason of which it is able to will some

good not oriented to selfTo love something in itself [or for its own sake]
is more an act of giving or sharing and is a freer act than is desiring that
object for oneself. As such it is an act more appropriate to the will, as the
seat of this innate justice at least.301

With this understanding of the composition of the will, Scotus is arguing at least two

basic points.

300
Ibid., (DSWM, 156).
301
Ordinatio III, suppl., d. 46, (DSWM, 153).
 239

On the one hand, Scotus is arguing that the actual freedom of the will, although

consisting in the ability of the will to choose between contraries as well as

contradictories, i.e. to choose either to act or not to act as well as to choose one act or its

radically distinct opposite, does not consist precisely in the ability to choose to be either

morally good or morally evil. This is, one might say, merely a consequence of the wills

proper freedomor, to use Anselms terminology, this is merely the instrumental

freedom of the will which provides the possibility of its true freedom for the field of

fully objective values. Rather, the freedom of the will consists in not being passively

determined to follow merely ones own naturally determined self-referential desire for

personal benefit but in the ability to choose the good in itself for its own sake. Secondly,

and the consequence of this, is that authentic freedom of the will consists precisely in the

affection, the love, for justice as the good in itself. The will at its most free, then, will be

the will that has given itself over completely in love for the true essential, hierarchical

ordering of values, even if that requires the denial of certain personal benefits. For

instance, the life of Socrates, which is characterized by an uncompromising love of the

truth even at the cost of his own life, represents, in a way, something of the height of the

moral life and the height of freedom because Socrates had the positive freedom from his

own natural desires for the preservation of his life in order to do the just thing and to

respect the absolute call to live for and to be a voice of truth. This will be true to an even

more radical degree of the person of Christ. For Scotus, then, it will be the case that,

charity perfects the will insofar as it is inclined to, or subject to, the affection for
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justice.302 It is for this reason that Mary Beth Ingham describes the moral perfection of

the human subject brought about by way of a life regulated by the affectio justitiae as, an

other-centeredness [which] is not destructive of self, but is ratherforgetfulness of

self.303 It represents a kind of de-centering of the ego, in phenomenological terms,

which places love for the good itself and for the good, i.e. value, of others for themselves

at the center of its motivational life. It does not, however, annihilate the self; as such, the

affectio commodi is retained as a source of motivation in the moral agent precisely on

account of the highest motives of the affectio justitiaei.e. justice towards oneself as a

being of value. At this point, the connection between Scotus theory of freedom and the

possibility of the realization of fully moral values and the Christian religious ideals of

self-sacrifice, penance, and charity becomes particularly profound. It would not by any

means be unreasonable to make the claim that Scotus theory of the will is both

Christologically centered and Christologically inspired.304 The recognition of the

possibility of total self-sacrifice as exemplified by the figure of Christ and as mirrored in

relatively perfect ways by the saints, most notably for Scotus St. Francis of Assisi,

makes visible the insight into the human capacity for moral values wholly independent of

merely eudaimonistic, or, worse, egoistic, values in a way which accords well with the

Christian roots and motivations of the early phenomenological tradition of ethical and

302
Ibid.
303
Ingham, The Harmony of Goodness, 24.
304
See, Mary Elizabeth Ingham, C.S.J., John Duns Scotus: An Integrated Vision, in
The History of Franciscan Theology, ed. Kenan B. Osborne, O.F.M. (St. Bonaventure,
NY: The Franciscan Institute, 1994), 222ff.
 241

religious discussion as can be found in Husserl and Scheler, both drawing upon Brentano.

For Scotus, Husserl, Brentano, and Scheler alike, the extent to which the human agent

loves the good in truth, then, will be the extent to which the human agent will be free and

will will ones own good in the proper measure.

If it is the case, then, that the affectio commodi represents a certain kind of value-

ception inasmuch as it opens up the world, by means of the intentionality of desire, to the

factual presence of things in the world in their being as certain types of goods, albeit only

inasmuch as they are related to me in my finite and contingent existence as a being not

self-sustaining but requiring other things for sustenance and the satisfaction of

psychological and spiritual needs, then the affectio justitiae will represent a kind of

opening up of the world of values to the subject in a deeper and more radical way,

beyond the limits of their relation to ones own self-referential desires. It is this freedom

from the blinders of passive personal desire in the emotive life of the affectio commodi

that will allow the person to transcend him or herself into the domain of values for

themselves and thus to find the authentic order of values. Such requires, however, a

conscious striving and desire for authentic values as a basic and always predominant

manner of moral preferring. As such, if we are to identify the sorts of emotional acts

which reveal the will as affectio justitiae and which will thus qualify for us as acts of

authentic value-ception which, in their very intentional structure, will allow us the

freedom to transcend ourselves into the world of the fully objective, non-relative values

of things, then we will have to find them in those acts which do not betray a level of
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passivity but which have the character of a fully active desire, and a fully active love, for

the values of things in and for themselves.

With this recognition, it will be clear that, for Scotus, the sort of value-ception

which experientially reveals values in their objective authenticity and normativity will

have to be strictly limited to a peculiar compilation of self-transcendent loving acts of

things in and for themselves which is already structured by an order of the heart which

functions along the lines of an operative tendency towards values within the confines of

the given hierarchy of essentially ordered values. Fully authentic values can only be

recognized, then, as correlates of acts of love which are the love of things in and for

themselves according to the essence of the things as value-things related essentially as

higher or lower to other value-things, and not purely in and for their relativity to me.305

Nevertheless, this raises an immediate problem inasmuch as not all values give

themselves in this way as being purely lovable in and for themselves. Scotus thought is

ready to provide an answer to this difficulty, however, inasmuch as the affectio commodi

does remain an always already operative stratum of my volitional life even when the

affectio justitiae emerges as a self-regulating power of the will. With both working in

tandem, the world of values is given as fundamentally multivalent in character and a

305
I say purely here to emphasize the fact that Scotus is not arguing for anything like a
pure altruistic morality. When we love another person unconditionally, for instance, we
love them on account of their own self-valueon account of who they are as persons in
their unique individuality, but always maintaining the desire that they should love us in
return. Altruism which denies the desire for requited love, which is indifferent to the
love which is or is not returned to me cannot be love in any real sense, but rather,
essentially, as Max Scheler argues, represents a species of modern ressentiment. Scotus
is certainly not subject to this particular moral sickness nor, we can definitely argue, is
Husserl. See Max Scheler, Ressentiment, 86ff.
 243

word must be said about this fact and how it reveals the way in which values must be

approached and preferred.

iii. The Multivalence of Values in the Two Affections

It is clear that the will as an affection having certain foundational, operative

intentionalities towards value which inform all fully active volitions, intends the world of

goods by means of two distinct acts as being valuable either from the perspective of a

self-referential interest in ones own personal benefit or from the non-self-referential

perspective of the just good, or the value which things are or have in and for themselves.

However, even while the two acts seem to be contrary opposites in the sense of

representing two radically different approaches to the essential meaningfulness of the

good as valuable, they are, nonetheless, not factually incompatible acts. The presence of

one does not rule out the presence of the other in the intention of one and the same

valuable object. The reason for this has, in part, already been revealed inasmuch as

Scotus argues that the affectio commodi cannot be eliminated from the motivational and

volitional life of the human being. As that characteristic of the will which represents the

will as nature, the will as rooted in the naturally determined existence of the human being

as a being of nature, the affectio commodi cannot be eliminated without destroying or

radically altering the nature of the human being and turning the human being into

something of a self-destructive moral monstrosity which ignores its own health and well-

being in favor of the pure form or values of the moral law. To be human, for Scotus, is to

be always and in every case interested in ones own good, in what is perfective of ones

own nature. However, the affectio commodi also cannot be the absolutely determining
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aspect of the volitional life of the human being since the affectio commodi is a non-

rational and passively determined appetite which is by definition not a free, rational

power. To live rationally, to acquire excellence and virtue as a human subject, and to

achieve its ultimate perfection, the rational agent must regulate the affectio commodi by

means of a wholly free and active, rational power of volition. Moreover, since the

natural will, the affectio commodi, is described by Scotus as, an inclination of the will,

being a tendency by which it tends passively to receive what perfects it,306 and since

what is perfective of the will is its capacity to elicit a rational and free act, the affectio

justitiae is not precisely to be understood, dialectically one might say, as a radical

antithesis of the affectio commodi come to destroy and do away with the passive life of

the natural will. Rather, it arises precisely out of this passivity which is its ground as the

essential perfection of the natural will towards which the natural will was always

passively tending, but which it was as yet unable to realize on account of its basic

passivity of motivation.

For Scotus, then, the natural appetite [the affectio commodi] of the will is always

present in the will.307 It is present as a passive layer even in every act of the will in

which the will wills the just good, the good of the thing for and in itself inasmuch as it is

a good, and specifically a moral good, to will the just good in this way. As such, the

affectio justitiae, as the ultimate perfection of the nature of the will, has the task of both

ordering and cooperating with the affectio commodi in the rational, volitional life of the

306
Ordinatio III, d. 17, (DSWM, 155).
307
Ordinatio IV, suppl., d. 49, qq. 9-10, a. 1 (DSWM, 156).
 245

human subject towards every object which the will and its affective life can take. Now,

what this implies for a Scotistic reading of the problems of value is that the world of

values has, in every experiential act, a kind of valuative multivalence, one might say.

From this perspective, we can choose to follow Schelers description of such value-things

which constitute objects of volition and desire as value-complexes precisely because

values are always experienced both subjectively and intersubjectively as giving

themselves differently from different perspectives, as having a varying valuative

coloration depending on the prevailing orders and manners of preferring operative in

the subject or subjects in question. This is the case inasmuch as every value will possess

a kind of dual meaning to the extent that a good is both a good for me and a good in and

for itself. This dual meaning, which is meant first at a very general level, will become

more specific to the extent that the beneficial will take on a more specialized

significance under the valuative levels of utility, the sensorially agreeable, the vitally

beneficial, etc. as well as to the extent that the just good is specified in terms of the

moral, the holy, the spiritual, etc.308 What this further means is that each value will

possess a kind of multivalence where its position in an overall hierarchy of values is

concerned. For instance, an object, like an apple, might be experienced, from the side of

308
This is not to imply, however, that there is anything like a temporal priority of the
more general to the more specific where value ranks are given in intention in actual
experience here. Rather, the special value-essences utility, agreeableness, holy, etc.
are always given as such in an original encounter with them, if we are to follow Scotus
conclusions on the problems relating to the question of whether our acts have to do,
originarily, with singular or universal instances discussed elsewhere and extend them to
the problems of value as well [see Questions on the Metaphysics, I, q. 6]. Following
upon this analysis, we can say that values acquire specification as general or specific
instances of the beneficial or the just only at higher levels of reflective judgment
which are non-originary to their being-experienced in desire.
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the affectio commodi, as having a high value for the individual human agent because of

its nutritive benefits for the health and well-being of the human body as well as because

of its taste and the fact that it can satisfy my current hunger-pangs. At the same time, the

apple will only enter into the framework of the noetic leaning-towards of the affectio

justitiae within the context of a valuation in an altogether different direction, in particular

the just self-value which one experiences oneself to possess and thus the relevance of the

nutritive benefits of the apple as a good-for-me for realizing the good-in-itself which

taking care of myself represents as a value. The apple may also take on another moral

value to the extent that it may be the property of someone else, in which case its valuative

meaning enters the framework of the affection for justice to the extent that it seeks to

realize the value of respect for the property rights of others. As such, what one may

begin to see in the preceding analysis is the way in which the world is experienced

through affective acts of motivation, affectiones, and their roots in the natural and free

tendencies of the will as a kind of system of values possessing an ordered multivalence.

The recognition of the multivalence of values is important for a number of

reasons. On the one hand, it serves to clarify the specific ways in which values can

become meaningful in the life of the human subject. At the same time, it also indicates

the reason for much of the confusion regarding values and their differing motivational

power from individual to individual. One person, for instance, who is habitually

motivated more by pleasure than by the interest in the just good will not be motivated to

respond to the personal value of a beggar on the street because the motivational powers

of preferring which the affectiones represent has been underdeveloped in the case of the
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affectio justitiae through neglect of active love for absolute values. However, another

person who determines the sources of his or her motivations through an active inclination

towards the just good will fully experience the value of the beggar and will be more

inclined to respond to the value of the beggar through some positive action of service. If,

moreover, it is the case that it is only through recognition of the intentional multivalence

of values according to the manner in which the will is affected in its two distinct

inclinations towards the good that an ethics will be capable of differentiating between

values in their authentic order and values simply in their relation to my own personal

benefit, then an important discovery has also been made regarding the activity of value-

ception itself, namely that a kind of moral formation of the dispositional life of the

inclinations of the moral agent is a constitutive necessity for the proper and fully

objective intuition of values in their total validity and in their absolute normativity.

It might seem nonsensical to make the claim that an objective intuition of values

depends upon moral formation inasmuch as it was already Husserls claim that an ethics

must find its foundation upon a value-theory, which in turn is to be founded upon

particular feeling-acts which have the function of giving values to consciousness in their

objectivity. However, on closer inspection it begins to become clear that the moral

formation in question is to be considered, as Husserl argues, at the level of a kind of

foundational position-taking where the intention of values is to be had. It is a kind of

recognition of the truth of values which takes place through the moral education supplied

by the development of good habits and a kind of will-to-generosity in the child on the

part of the parents. Through training in discipline, the child gradually comes to the
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recognition, if parents have been successful in raising the child to be a moral individual,

that the definitive values are the ones which they discover by going outside of

themselves, beyond the limits of their own wants and needs. However, much more will

have to be said on this issue that cannot yet be said without other problems having been

clarified.

d. Static and Genetic Phenomenology of the Will in Scotus Affectiones

Immediately what becomes problematic for us in particular is the question of

phenomenology and how Scotus theory of the wills affections are related to a

phenomenological value-theory. Certainly the two-fold division of the classes of acts of

inclination which intend values can be seen as somehow analogous to Husserls division

of higher and lower value-feelings wherein it is the higher and the higher alone which

give morally relevant values possessing a specifically normative character. However, it

has been my persistent claim that Scotus is already doing phenomenology in his own way

and that it is as such that his thought can be most meaningfully integrated into the

Husserlian ethical project. My contention is that Scotus offers us both a static and a

genetic analysis of the will that adds greater precision to Husserls phenomenology.

Briefly put, static analysis in phenomenology focuses on elements and structures

of experience which are non-varying across multiple and varying examples of eidetic

possibilities given in pure phantasy. For instance, regardless of the content or historical,

geographical, or cultural position in which a given experience will take place, it can

always be determined that the structure of the experience will invariably be one of

Ithingworld. This is the eidetic structure of all experience. In contrast, genetic

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analysis moves beyond the merely static givenness of such questions and probes the

depths of their actual becoming as structures of experience through temporal, historical

processes of development and sedimentation into the background of experience.

Statically, then, as Scotus shows us, the will can be seen as a self-determining

faculty the prime characteristic of which is freedom. The will, as both Husserl and

Scotus will say, is the ground of all rationality in the person because it is the will which

initiates all rational, active processes. The will takes objects which motivate it, and its

types of motivation can vary according to the manner of preferring which the will takes

with regard to it. It is clear, then, that I can be motivated by an object either according to

a self-referential attitude of self-promotion, whether interpreted hedonistically,

egoistically, or eudaimonistically. On the other hand, I can be motivated by the object in

its being an object of authentic value, i.e. as a true value. Statically, one can readily

recognize here the basic sense of the distinction which Scotus makes between the will as

affectio commodi and as affectio justitiae. Moreover, it seems to be given in experience

that even if I act in such a way as to pursue a good which is good in itself irrespective of

its relation as a good to me, this act itself is already a good for me inasmuch as it

contributes to my moral development and the acquisition of virtuous habits.309 Thus, the

309
The greater moral value is realized, however, when one seeks to realize the just good
to the highest degree without an actively pursued intention towards moral self-betterment.
To the extent that in giving money to the poor my intention is to turn myself into a more
generous person, the value of actually rendering service to the poor is displaced and has a
much smaller share in the motivational framework which gave rise to the action. Such an
act is thus not truly motivated by the affectio justitiae first and foremost. The higher
moral value of becoming generous (or becoming virtuous in general) can only be fully
realized, it would follow from Scotus analysis, so long as it never truly becomes an
actively pursued end of individual striving. Virtue, rather, is acquired only by having the
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affectio commodi is given across all possible variations as an always operative mode of

valuation and motivation in volitional life and experience. This static analysis provides a

further determination to the Husserlian analysis of value to the extent that Scotus is able

to bring the two sources of value-feeling which Husserl discusses to the fore in the form

of the two affectiones and which provides a greater sense for the dynamic

interrelationship between the two. The language of affectio commodi and affectio

justitiae serves to indicate the basic meaning of the higher and lower value-feelings and,

in particular, to draw out precisely why one form of value-intention is higher and the

other lower in view of the activity and passivity which in every case adheres to each

under the general value-approaches of justice and the beneficial. However, if one is to

understand Scotus fully, here, one cannot interpret his distinction as representing a

phenomenological analysis of the will which is merely static. Rather, we have to

understand Scotus phenomenology as being already a genetic phenomenologythe

reason being that Scotus understands the human being as always already a composition of

potencies which all have a process of becoming in their reduction to act and in their

synthesis in a singular being, the human agent.

values associated with the acquisition of that virtue as ones explicit end, but not the
being-virtuous and the moral good-for-me of virtue. The moral good-for-me of
acquiring the virtue, however, is nevertheless always passively striven for whenever we
do something fully moral. I accept the fact that as a result of performing every individual
moral act that I am developing in the direction of virtue, and I take positive joy in this
fact. I would, moreover, never perform a moral act if this acceptance and joy were not
present providing me with the sense that, to perform such an act, this is truly morally
good and not morally evil for me. This digression can serve to illustrate the passive
character of the affectio commodi as it is operative in a moral act as its passive ground.
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Genetically, then, the will reveals itself first and foremost in the figure of the

affectio.310 The will is an impulse towards perfections, or values, and it is one with a

definite history. Initially, both Anselm and Scotus describe the distinction between the

two affectiones along temporal lines and it is the emergence of the second affection that

provides for the possibility of freedom. On a purely natural level, the will has the

character of being an inclination towards that which is beneficial to the human being in

its enjoyment and flourishing. Further analysis reveals that this element of motivation

and inclination towards objects and acts arises purely passively for the moral agent who

receives them. If we bracket out everything but the intention of the affectio commodi,

this level of inclination reveals itself to us, as has already been said, as a function of the

pure passivity of the will and of its giving-way before natural desires. It is only

subsequently that the will as free, as rational over and above nature, arises in the figure of

the affectio justitiae. As is clear from the phenomena of child-development, moreover, it

seems that children as infants begin life and comport themselves towards the world

purely under the rule of the tendency towards the beneficial without any tendency

310
This revelation, of course, is certainly mediated temporally both to myself and to
others through the sedimentation of volitional acts which take the form of habits (whether
virtues or vices) and through the characteristic feelings and dispositions towards moral
acts which I affect in my personality and which indicate my characteristic attitudes and
value-preferences. Nonetheless, these are all sedimentations of the wills activity which
are intentionally distinct from the will itself. They are the vestiges, the footprints of the
wills historical activity and not the will itself. Thus, if we are restricting our genetic
analysis (certainly as an end-product of the genetic analysis of habit, disposition, feeling,
etc. which the restrictions of our current discussion have forced us to pass over) of the
will purely as will, then it makes perfect sense to say that the will qua will reveals itself
first and foremost as affectio even though a condition of this manifestation, genetically
speaking, will require the recognition of the historical manifestations of these affectiones
which take on the form of habits, dispositions, etc.
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towards authentic values purely for their own sake. Only with the childs entrance into

the state of the age of reason does the child begin to learn how to prefer the just good

to what is simply beneficial to them and, moreover, later in life to participate in this

preferring of the good fully, actively, and consciously. This provides the agent with the

capacity to turn lovingly towards things themselves precisely for themselves as being

valuable apart from any reference to the agent. Prior to this moment, we can say that the

infant does not have moral values within the horizon of its environment at all. These

values must be acquired progressively in the moral environment of the infant as he or she

is introduced to moral values by way of parental discipline, education, and the discovery,

at a higher developmental stage, of the greater possibilities of total moral freedom. As

such, the affectio commodi comes progressively to be regulated according to rational

goals as the agent actively pursues values for their own sakes. Nevertheless, the affectio

commodi remains, as has been said, as an ever-present, sedimented layer of all active

valuations. This subterranean base of motivation provides the agent with the capacity to

take positive joy (Husserls Freude) in the pursuit of justice while at the same time

satisfying its bodily, psychic, and spiritual needs. It is a layer of pure passivity which

undergirds every active, rational striving. The recognition of the historical character of

the affectio justitiae, as opposed to the merely natural character of the affectio commodi,

can serve as a development of the Husserlian value-theory on two levels. On the one

hand, it can serve as the starting point in providing an explanation as to why an

individuals values tend to change as they grow older and more mature. At this level, it

also serves to deepen the understanding of what freedom is and how freedom itself is a
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gradually acquired power, requiring a development of the moral subject to be possessed

fully. At a higher level, moreover, Scotus genetic phenomenology of the will can, and

does,311 serve to provide an account of how moral values can change within differing

historical epochsi.e. how two different epochs can differ on the morality of one and the

same moral actyet the character of the specifically moral direction of motivation, i.e. as

consisting in an absolute and active striving towards justice, nevertheless remains the

same in every epoch.

If Scotus genetic phenomenology of the will is prepared to account for the

stratified layers of the will and its activities and passivities, then on this basis it is equally

capable of providing an account of the rational and irrational motivation of the will which

will feature heavily in any evaluation of the morality of a given volition or of sets and

histories of volition, which will be addressed in Part III of this work. Scotus account of

the wills noetic activity reveals the ways in which values are correlated to the acts of the

will, bringing the axiological dimensions of the world to presence by way of the subjects

motivational life. Scotus is able to provide an account precisely of the way in which

setting the stage for the proper insight into values requires a higher striving which implies

self-denial and self-sacrificeboth not fully articulated, though certainly implied, in

Husserls accountand the total giving over of oneself in love for the good. Through a

study of the subjective acts of inclination which Scotus offers us, we can come to

311
Although these discussions are more theologically oriented, attempting to interpret
changes in moral behavior in the Old and New Testaments within the framework of a
divine command theory of morality than a phenomenologist like Husserl would be
entirely comfortable with. However, even if Scotus actual application of this possibility
is to theological issues, this by no means cuts it off from its possible application to
historical/philosophical issues relating to changes in the ethos of a culture across time.
 254

understand the ways in which values are constituted in experience either authentically or

inauthentically, either merely self-referentially or non-self-referentially, etc. and under

multivalent colorations which can be capable of opening phenomenology up to the

problems of the normativity of values and the possibility of determining values which are

properly regulative of moral activity. What Husserl and Scotus together have to offer us

here, then, is a phenomenological account of values which is capable of bringing to the

fore the ways in which values are concretely given and the complex interconnections

with the motivational life of the subject which gives values their specific meanings in

concrete situations and which conditions their realization in moral acts in various ways to

be either good or bad acts. This recognition and the preceding analyses will prove to be

foundational for the evaluation of moral acts and the conditions for morality. However,

these questions will have to be pursued in greater detail in Part III. Even while the

phenomenological account of values which we have attempted to develop here is capable

of explaining how values can be correlated to noetic acts of the subject in such a way as

to determine how the subject is always already living out its life in a world of values, this

by no means does away with the skeptical questions which arise with respect to the

problem of the being of values. It is to these questions which we must now turn in order

to provide an adequate articulation of the phenomenological problem of values.

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Chapter VI
The Ontology of Values and the Values of Ethics

12. The Problem of Value-Skepticism

As is obvious from the previous presentation of Husserls reading of the history of

ethical philosophy presented in his 1920/24 lecture course, Einleitung in die Ethik,

Husserl was consistently preoccupied with the problem of value-skepticism. Value-

skepticism operates, generally speaking, on the assumption that an objective ontology,

basing itself on psychological, epistemological, and scientific developments, can bring

the reality of values into question in such a way as to reveal the basic subjectivity and

relativity of values either to explicit human invention or to psychological fictions

unconsciously superimposed upon the world. Husserl sees this as an explicit claim or, at

the very least, an implicit consequence of the theories of the Gefhlsmoralisten in every

form in which the phenomenon of sentimentalism has cropped up in the history of ethics.

Such a position, moreover, is always detrimental to ethics inasmuch as the authentic

sense of morality always seems to be lost whenever moral values and moral comportment

are reduced to a specific set of distinctively human rules or conventions which one

follows either pragmatically or otherwise in order to live peacefully within the confines

of a human community or whenever moral values are explained away as inventions

which, like any invention, can be done away with at will.312 As such, Husserl is

continuously concerned to develop his value-theory in such a way as to establish the fully

objective validity of values as objects essentially possessing normativity and reality

completely independently of a communitys full recognition of such values and

312
Some of the reasons for this intuition will become clearer in following chapters.
 256

unequivocally given in experience as both real and ideal constituents of the life-world of

humanity. This Husserl does in accordance with his famed principle of all principles of

phenomenological philosophy that,

every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition,

that everything originarily (so to speak, in its personal actuality) offered
to us in intuition is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as
being, but also only within the limits in which it is presented there.313

To the extent that values are given as essential structures in their personal actuality in

the originary presentive intuition of specific acts of value-feeling, phenomenological

philosophy is able to accept values precisely as the values of objects really present in

the life-world.314 The defense of their reality requires no further proof or demonstration

beyond the immediate seeing of their givenness in the analysis of the acts which present

them to consciousness, namely feeling. This argument might, however, seem to be

begging the question if, as one might assume, Husserl means the principle of principles to

be establishing the transcendent reality of values outside of consciousness or if we are

to assume that the phenomenal givenness of this value taken as a value with this specific

value-height might not be a fiction. It also certainly does not preclude the idea that a

certain range or system of values could be nothing more than historical fabrications.

313
HUA III, 43-44.
314
The restriction of the presentive intuition of a value as a legitimizing source of
cognition to the sphere of the life-world represents the limits, here, in which value is
presented. Husserl will make no claim that values have anything like a mind-
independent, or real being in the sense in which science, for instance, claims a quark or
dark matter to be an objectively real, mind-independent being in the transcendent world
outside of us irrespective of their perceived presence. As will be seen shortly, however,
this restriction to the life-world possesses a tremendously positive import and is by no
means any mere restriction in a reductionistic sense.
 257

What Husserl does succeed at doing, however, is to establish the essential necessity of

value-in-general and in laying bare its essential structures as conditioning the very

possibility of an historical fabrication of specific values in the first place.

In so doing, Husserl will not be defending a theory of values which commits itself

to the transcendent reality of values as really existent mind-independent beings in the

world of transcendencies specifically bracketed by phenomenology. As is well known,

Husserl never really sets out anywhere in his philosophy to defend or argue towards the

transcendent, real existence of any given phenomenon. Such a question is not really

important or meaningful where phenomenology is concerned. Rather, Husserl will

address the problem of value-skepticism precisely by re-framing the question of reality

in such a way as to be able meaningfully to discuss values as real qualities in complex

relations to the noematic structures to which they are related in valuationi.e. value-

objectivities as included in the noematic sense of the valuable object.315 In this regard,

Husserlian phenomenology can be said to pursue the reality of values in an altogether

different sense than, for example, science might speak of the substantial reality of

electrons or of any other phenomenon of scientific nature. Husserl clarifies the

phenomenological meaning of reality when he subsumes reality under the formal idea,

unity of lasting properties in relation to pertinent circumstances.316 With certain

important qualifications, Husserls conception of reality here might be compared to the

Fichtean notion of the reality of concepts in his ethics in which Fichte defines the

315
HUA III, 198.
316
HUA IV, 136.
 258

reality of a concept in terms of the effectiveness of the concept as determining in some

definite and unvarying way the world of our consciousness such that without the concept

in question, there can be no world whatsoever.317 In the Fichtean sense, then, values

might be called real precisely because, as has already been argued in Chapter Five, it is

not possible to have an object at all, to take an interest in a thing and thus to present it to

consciousness, except by way of the value which, in a definite sense, announces the being

of the thing to me. As such, value is a condition of the world and, following Max

Scheler, we might even say that the horizon of the world is contracted and expanded in

proportion to the degree that we are lovingly open to the full range of general value-

modalities which make up the totality of world-being.318 This issue aside, however, and

returning to the Husserlian notion of the reality of values, it seems clear that values must

be real for Husserl at least in this limited Fichtean sense of the term. Inasmuch,

moreover, as values are said to be real in a phenomenological sense, we will have to

probe more deeply the Husserlian conception of the meaning of reality, particularly in

light of the phenomenological setting which gives rise to this concept, namely the

phenomenology of essences analysis.

317
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The System of Ethics, trans. and ed. Daniel Breazeale and
Gnter Zller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), IV, 63.
318
See Max Scheler, Ordo Amoris, 100: Man is encased, as though in a shell, in the
particular ranking of the simplest values and value-qualities which represent the objective
side of his ordo amoris, values which have not yet been shaped into things and goods.
He carries this shell along with him wherever he goes and cannot escape from it no
matter how quickly he runs. He perceives the world and himself through the windows of
this shell, and perceives no more of the world, of himself, or of anything else besides
what these windows show him, in accordance with their position, size, and color.
 259

As James Hart argues, what phenomenological essence-analysis pursues is the

invariant Whatness in its purity that serves as the governing meaning frame for the

experience of the essence in the particular at hand.319 If Husserls phenomenology

becomes concerned with the ontology of values, then, in such a way that it wants to

defend a realistic theory of values which maintains the given absoluteness and

normativity of values, it will do so by way of such an essence-analysis of value as it is

experienced in its personal actuality. Consistent with the Scotist insight into the merely

formal distinction between the concepts of being and essence, phenomenology recognizes

that when a phenomenon is given as a presence to consciousness, its essence is always

descriptive of its being. This is the case because, prescinding from the question of the

factual, contingent existence of any individual value whatever, it is clear that an essence

of value in general can already be discovered since, as Husserl argues, it belongs to the

sense of anything contingent to have an essence and therefore an Eidos which can be

apprehended purely.320 Moreover, for Husserl, the term essence (Wesen), designates,

what is to be found in the very own being of an individuum as the What of an

individuum.321 All that will be necessary to show, then, bracketing out the question of

the transcendent existence of values, will be the essential reality of values in

phenomenological givenness, where reality here means the ontic validity of values as

unvarying unities in individual instantiations experienced as essentially and ineluctably

319
Hart, Who One Is, Book 2, 467.
320
HUA III, 9.
321
Ibid., 10.
 260

interconnected with the being of the things or thing-like unities which bear them, all of

which are presented in originary consciousness as constituents of the surrounding world

of life. This will require, in particular, an investigation into value as an invariant

structure within the historically varying life-world as a life-world of changing and

developing traditions. Moreover, it is by means of such a sustained reflection on the

ontology of values that one can come to clarify the general sense of the ethical attitude

itself, specifically as distinct from the attitude of axiology, in such a way as to bring

further insight into Husserls need to shy away from founding the whole of his ethical

theory on the basis of an objective axiology alone as is characteristic of the early ethics.

Specifically, while bolstering up the theory of values in understanding values as having a

definite ontic status, this ontological inquiry will also serve to further define the field of

pure ethical study and investigation opening onto the realm of pure moral values in a

manner in which is simply not possible on the basis of an objective axiology alone.

a. The Life-world of Humanity as a World of Real Values

Husserl argues that, [p]rescientifically, in everyday sense-experience, the world

is given in a subjectively relative way. Each one of us has his own appearances; and for

each of us they count as that which actually is.322 This world of subjectively relative

appearances in which we believe and which carries ontic validities that, inter-

subjectively, we bring into contact with others with whom we clarify discrepancies, may

well serve as a preliminary concept of the life-world. It is the intuitive surrounding world

as we actually experience it and as we actually live towards it prior to its

322
Ibid., 9.
 261

conceptualization in science, philosophy, etc. Moreover, it is to precisely this world that

we are to turn in all phenomenological analyses of what counts as the real world in

which we find our existence as human subjects.323 The life-world is, moreover,

pregiven as existing for all in common.324 All original self-evidences are, for Husserl,

to be found in the life-world, which is the one, identical horizon of experience and which

is always already there for us all. As the original field of experience, then, it should not

be surprising to find within the life-world itself as it is constituted and given to us,

aspects of the temporal, the historical, the valuative, the spiritual, etc. which likewise are

constant aspects of experience that are always intuitively accessible for us in our ordinary

experience.

In addition to Husserls notion of the life-world as presented in the body of the

Crisis which depicts the life-world as the a-historical or trans-historical common horizon

of experience for all people which possesses certain universal and unvarying

structures,325 Husserl develops a secondary notion of the life-world in The Origin of

Geometry essay in which the life-world seems to take on a somewhat different role and

in which one might begin to make distinctions between the life-world of the Greeks, the

life-world of the Chinese, of indigenous tribes, etc. and the life-world of this or that

particular historical era as being different and in a certain sense incommensurable worlds.

323
Juha Himanka, Husserls Argumentation for the Pre-Copernican View of the Earth,
The Review of Metaphysics 58 (2005): 633.
324
Husserl, The Crisis, 33.
325
Eran Dorfman, History of the Lifeworld: From Husserl to Merleau-Ponty,
Philosophy Today 53 (2009): 295.
 262

Precisely how these two notions of the life-world are interrelated is not clear in Husserls

usage of them, and the resolution of this problem would be better approached in a

different context than this. It may suffice for our purposes to say that the life-world in the

sense of its cultural and historical specificity to this group or this time seems, for

Husserl, to embody the phenomenological sense of the way in which we relate to the

invariant surrounding world through different ways of lifethrough different institutions,

practices, and especially through characteristic valuations. That is to say, this secondary

sense of life-world serves to indicate the manner in which the life-world, in spite of its

being always a common world in which individuals from many cultures are capable of

interacting and which may be given a certain meaningfulness for all cultures and having

certain necessary a priori structures, nevertheless may also be circumscribed by a very

particular manner of human, cultural interpretation that makes each life-world for a

particular place and time unique.

The aspect of reality and of humanitys engagement with the world, then, which

produces this relativity to culture, time, and place that Husserl has in mind here is the

notion of tradition. Husserl is initially concerned only with a certain kind of tradition,

namely geometry as an ideal mathematical science and, more generally, with any sort of

tradition which forms the basis for a universe of rational discourse in the sciences.

Within this context, geometry is a tradition because it is ready-made for us; but it is

ready-made only out of what turns out to be an historically handed-down, progressive

development.326 Tradition, as Husserl describes it, has, arisen within our human space

326
Husserl, The Crisis, 354.
 263

through human activity, i.e. spiritually.327 For geometry, this means that as a certain

type of practice and as a certain style of dealing with its particular objects, namely ideal

shapes established within the field of pure space and possessing certain eidetically

established a priori laws, it is always a human practice which arises in a particular place

at a particular time and undergoes its own specific development in being handed down to

us in its present form. It is worth tarrying over the issue of the depth-problem of the

origin of this ideal science with its really valid spiritual objectivities as Husserl conceives

it, since, I will argue, it will serve to reveal certain structures which will become

important for the purposes of recognizing the real and effective role which values play

in the constitution of the world of tradition and thus of the way in which values must

indeed be original constituents of the life-world which gives rise to new traditions.

Husserl argues that, [t]he whole cultural world, in all its forms, exists through

tradition.328 It is evident from this statement that Husserl does not see tradition as

applying only to such scientific practices as geometry, biology, physics, etc., but sees

tradition as applying to any and all enduring cultural phenomena which have a bearing

upon human praxis, thinking, cognition, valuation, etc. which arise in the human world

out of human activity. In any given moment of individual activity, for example in such

simple activities as preparing a meal, visiting with friends, or in such complicated

activities as measuring scientific objects or performing philosophical activities, there are

at work a multiplicity of traditions of valuation, of methodical approaches, of habitual

327
Ibid., 355.
328
Ibid., 354.
 264

practices, etc. As such, for Husserl, human life, in all of its forms and existence, moves

within innumerable traditions.329 Tradition, then, must be an aspect of reality and of our

experience which is a perennially operative and given field of human existence having

certain far-reaching consequences. The most important, and also the most radical,

consequence arises in the recognition that the very acts within which the life-world is

given, lived, and constituted all fall within the field of tradition. If it is true, then, that the

world as we encounter it, evaluate it, and practice within it is shaped by the many layers

of human activity which progressively come together to form human traditions, then it

follows, according to Husserl, that, to the one human civilization there corresponds

essentially the one cultural world as the surrounding life-world with its [peculiar] manner

of being; this worldis precisely the tradition.330 This means, in the words of M. C.

Dillon, that the world of life is a world which is, permeated with humanity, and this is a

condition for its self-manifestation.331 The world acquires this permeation through

certain primal human activities that serve as a certain type of interpretation of the world,

at the heart of which is the activity of valuation.

Pursuing the depth-problem of the origin of the tradition of geometry, the

fundamental concern which Husserl has is to make clear the ways in which this tradition

has been handed on in such a way as to be an enduring cultural possession capable of a

full and explicit reactivation of its primal, foundational sense, i.e. its founding self-

329
Ibid.
330
Ibid., 369.
331
M. C. Dillon, Merleau-Pontys Ontology, 2nd ed. (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1988), 88.
 265

evidences. The model for Husserls understanding of the problem of the origins of

traditions follows upon an analogy between his earlier theorization of the structures of

time-consciousness and the primal establishment (Urstiftung) and passing on of a

tradition. In individual time-consciousness, every new experience or every new style of

experiencing has its primal establishing momentI begin to hear a melody played by an

orchestra. As I listen to the melody played out to its conclusion, it is not by any means

the case that I experience every note individually and have in consciousness nothing but

individual notes separated out by individual, isolated points in time such that I perceive

merely parts of the whole in every given moment but never the whole in its becoming as

such. Rather, Husserl argues, the whole melody progressively unfolds for me, and at

every moment the earlier strains of the melody remain present to me in retention as

sinking into the past while the future movement of the melody is anticipated by me in

protentional activities.332 It is precisely this structure, wherein every preceding temporal

moment is retained as a stratified, sedimented layer of my present temporal experience

which allows the meaning of the whole to be given in the form of a real, identical

objectivityBeethovens Fr Elise, for instance. Moreover, Husserl writes, each

later retention is not only continual modification that has arisen from primal impression;

each is also continual modification of all earlier continuous modifications of that same

332
Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, trans.
and ed. John Barnett Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), 29
[Gesammelte Werke Husserliana, Band X: Zur Phnomenologie des inneren
Zeitbewusstseins (1893-1917), ed. Rudolf Boehm (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966),
27ff].
 266

initial point.333 The structure of temporality being a central structure of all

consciousness and of all experience, then, every experience is an experience with a

stratified layer of continually modified, yet continually connected meanings. Thus, it is

possible to reenact, or reproduce those chains of meaning from start to finish in the re-

presentational activities of secondary memory at any later date.334 Much the same will be

true for tradition and the question of the origin of tradition as well.

For Husserl, then, traditions begin with their primal establishing moment, their

Urstiftung, in which the primal self-evidence of the tradition is given. Husserl writes of

this moment that, every spiritual accomplishment proceeding from its first project to its

execution is present for the first time in the self-evidence of actual success.335 In the

case of scientific traditions like geometry, this primal self-evidence is at first given only

within the internal temporal structure of an individual consciousness, that of the inventor

of geometry. Through language and through progressive chains of inquiry and

application of the primal self-evidences of geometrical insight, geometry becomes a

handed-down tradition and, moreover, a tradition in which the rules of geometry may

simply be applied without reference to the original self-evidences of those rules being

brought to consciousness, as a simple technical procedure in a geometry text book or in

the practice of surveying or architectural planning. However, this is possible only on the

basis of the fact that the primal self-evidence of the geometrical tradition remains

333
HUA X, 30.
334
Ibid, 35.
335
Husserl, The Crisis, 356.
 267

sedimented as a constitutive part of the meaning of the terms, theorems, axioms, and

rules of geometry which have been handed down as a living tradition of thinking, inquiry,

and praxis. The primal self-evidence of geometry also conditions the possibility of the

essential meaningfulness of geometry regardless of its expression in any particular

language. Analogously to the way in which each past temporal moment successively

gives itself to the meaning of the present moment which carries the past along with it,

Husserl writes that, in science, the spiritual objectivity of its realities are given in such a

way that, the earlier meaning gives something of its validity to the later one, indeed

becomes part of it to a certain extent. Thus no building block within the mental structure

is self-sufficient; and none, then, can be immediately reactivated [by itself].336 Rather,

the reactivation of the meaning of a geometrical term requires the reactivation of the

meaning of the whole tradition, much like the reactivation of a single note, a middle C,

lacks any determinate meaning unless, along with it, is also reactivated the whole musical

phrase and the position of this phrase within the total framework of the melody Fr

Elise. The necessity of this movement, moreover, necessitates the inquiry into the

origins of the tradition as the necessary grounding of the possibility of the handing down

of a tradition like geometry which keeps in tact the original meaningfulness of the

traditions self-evidence. What emerges from this problem, for Husserl, is the

recognition of the historical character of the question of the theory of knowledge and,

following upon this, the necessity, in probing the depth-problem of the phenomenon of

the traditionalization of knowledge and self-evidence, of probing the a priori of history

336
Ibid., 363.
 268

and of historical becoming in general. What Husserl means by this historical a priori is

precisely the inner structure of meaning and their essential motivational interconnections

which, taken as essentially general structures of every historical present in general, and

which, encompasses everything that exists as historical becoming and having-become or

exists in its essential being as tradition and handing-down.337 What this amounts to,

although not explicitly stated by Husserl in the Origin of Geometry essay, is that the

historical a priori of traditions, whose spiritual objectivities are conditioned in their

reality precisely by the essentially necessary rules and conditions of their historical

becoming in tradition, includes as a necessary element the a priori structure of value-in-

general which, in its essential generality, is invariant across all variations of historical

time and which motivates the whole process of traditionalization.

Laying bare the historical a priori of geometry will necessitate, then, a look at the

motivational structure which conditions the inner meaningfulness of the tradition itself

and which brings to evidence its primal self-evidences. It will be useful here to quote

Husserl at length. With respect to the tradition of geometry specifically, Husserl writes

that:

Geometry and the sciences most closely related to it have to do with

space-time and the shapes, figures, also shapes of motion, alterations of
deformation, etc. that are possible within space-time, particularly as
measurable magnitudes. It is now clear that even if we know almost
nothing about the historical surrounding world of the first geometers, this
much is certain as an invariant, essential structure: that it was a world of
things; that all things necessarily had to have a bodily character
What is also clear, and can be secured at least in its essential nucleus
through careful a priori explication, is that these pure bodies had spatio-
temporal shapes and material [stoffliche] qualitiesrelated to them.

337
Ibid., 372.
 269

Further, it is clear that in the life of practical needs certain

particularizations of shape stood out and that a technical praxis always
[aimed at] the production of particular preferred shapes and the
improvement of them according to certain directions of gradualness.338

The crucial point, here, comes at the end of this paragraph in which, after describing the

invariant and self-evident structures of the life-world upon which the first geometers must

have capitalized in order for geometry to have become essentially possible in the first

place, Husserl notes that the traditionalization of geometry was fundamentally

conditioned by the life of practical need. That is to say, certain aspects of shape stood

out as more practically valuable than others. Thus, Husserl writes further that, among

the lines, for example, straight lines are especially preferred, and among the surfaces the

even surfaces; for example, for practical purposes boards limited by even surfaces,

straight lines, and points are preferred, whereas totally or partially curved surfaces are

undesirable for many kinds of practical interests.339 Thus, for geometry as a tradition,

its main theoretical interests as well as its practical application seem to be conditioned by

a particular form of value-preferring among the first geometers, namely the preferring of

the ideally useful, which impels geometry to take up geometrical study of a set range of

geometrical shapes, probing their self-evidences under the aegis of their real, practical

utility.340 The very form of the meaning-structures which make up the historical

338
Ibid., 375.
339
Ibid., 376.
340
This utility, however, need not only be the utility of these shapes for the practical
tasks of surveying, construction, architecture, etc. We might also speak of the utility
value of these shapes for the theoretical purposes of uncovering discernible a priori
structures of shapes which are more easily accomplished in triangles and squares, for
 270

tradition geometry, then, is set by the value-preferences which bring this range of

shapes in ideal space-time to evidence.

Moreover, the place of value in the historical a priori of the tradition plays a role

in another aspect of the process of traditionalization apart from the internal

interconnections of form in the tradition itself. The other role which value plays is

contained in the recognition that geometry contains truths which are valid, with

unconditioned generality for all men, all times, all peoples, and not merely for all

historically factual ones but for all conceivable ones,341 and that such truth is worth

passing on in the form of tradition, i.e. that, as unconditionally valid truth in the form of

aeterna veritas, it is and will continue to be valuable for all times and all places. Were

it not for the value of the tradition and of its primal self-evidences, then, tradition would

not become tradition as a handed-down, sedimented aspect of cultural reality. On the

contrary, it would disappear entirely into the historical past, never again to resurface or to

be reactivated in the form of cultural activity. Moreover, this structure of

traditionalization can be shown to apply not only to the tradition of geometry, but to the

tradition of every individual science and of every other cultural form, whether

mythological, literary, artistic, religious, etc. which constitutes the frame-work of the

cultural life-world of humanity through which all truth and reality is given and acquired.

instance, than in the seemingly meaningless relationships of angles and measures in

random squiggles. There is thus also the utility of these specific shapes for pushing
forward theoretical scientific knowledge in geometry, i.e. the utility value of these shapes
as a means for acquisition of the overarching spiritual value of geometrical knowledge as
an end in itself.
341
Ibid., 377.
 271

It should be immediately granted, however, that not everything that has been

considered valuable in a particular way by one epoch or cultural unit has been considered

valuable, or valuable in the same way, by another. This should serve to indicate that

values too, even while serving as the historical a priori of all traditionalization are also

capable of being formed into a tradition of valuation capable of historical and cultural

variation which leads to the development of very different higher-order traditions in

different cultures.342 The fact that it is value which is being traditionalized in this case,

however, does not by any means alter the fact that there is a discernible a priori historical

role which value-in-general plays in all traditionalization. That is to say, the historical

relativity of valuation does not imply the relativity of the specific role which value must

always play in the process of traditionalization. Moreover, the different ways in which

different traditions apply the value usefulness or the value holy to very different

objects by no means implies a relativity of the value-modalities useful and holy.

Rather, it implies a relativity of traditionalizations of these value-modalities. An a priori

analysis of value-in-general and of value-modality-in-general lying at the heart of

every historical a priori of traditions remains possible and is, I would argue, the basic

crux of the matter in approaching any depth-problem of origins when it comes to any

tradition in general. Thus, every spiritual tradition can be traced back to the role which

342
For example, the fact that philosophy as a tradition arose first in ancient Greece and
not among the aboriginal tribes of Australia, for instance, need not by any means be taken
as indicative of a lack of sophistication or of penetrating spiritual insight among such
tribesmen, but rather as indicative of the different traditions of valuation which motivated
Greek culture to pursue spiritual activity in the specific form love of wisdom and which
motivated aboriginal cultures to pursue spiritual activity in the form of mythology, magic,
etc.
 272

specific value-modalities, whether of the useful, the agreeable, the vital, the moral,

the spiritual, or the holy, howsoever they may have been applied in each case, played

in driving forward the traditionalization of a cultural form.

Now, since it can be shown that in every ordinary experience of the world of life,

this world is fundamentally structured by an experience of traditions in intersection,

themselves structured by value and by traditions of valuations, and at times competing

traditions of valuation, and moreover that it is structured in such a way that every object

appears under the aspect of its value for the human being and the human culture which

experiences it, it can be said that the life-world, unlike the world of the merely

physicalistic sciences, is a world wholly imbued with value.343 Every object exists

simultaneously as a bearer of a value or a disvalue and likewise with every tradition in

which objects are approached and apprehended. It thus has become clear, then, that if the

spiritual objectivities of traditions can be considered real in either the Husserlian or

Fichtean sense mentioned above, then, it must also be the case that the tradition of values

as well as values in the historical a priori of all cultural traditions must likewise be

considered real in both sensesas effective in determining the possibility of our real

cultural world and as unities of lasting properties in relation to pertinent circumstances,

namely traditions and their enduring cultural realities. Certainly, this does not preclude

the possibility of specific values as applied to specific objects being fictions. Indeed, the

very possibility of a traditionalization of values themselves leaves open the possibility of

a cultural, historical falsification of values. However, even in spite of this fact, values-

343
HUA XXXVII, 245.
 273

in-general and the a priori range of value-modalities remain real and effective and, as

such, are capable of an a priori delimitation of their essences and essential

interconnections as real values which would be capable of uncovering, certainly still

within historical and valuative limits from which we can never fully free ourselves, the

authentic hierarchy of true values in their proper normative relations. The place of value

in the historical a priori which, again, is the essentially unvarying structure of historical

becoming, suggests the possibility of an uncovering of further essentially unvarying

structures of the interrelations of value-modalities themselves in an essentially ordered

hierarchy. It is this project which we will have occasion to pursue in relation to Scotus

philosophy later on in this chapter. However, in the immediate it remains clear that

values have different ways of being experienced and evaluated from differing traditional

standpoints. The exposition of the role of values in connection with the traditionalization

of geometry in particular has made it clear that values can also be experienced as values

without having any connection whatsoever to questions of morality or of moral

normativity. To take another example, a great work of art like Botticellis The Birth of

Venus is experienced, because of its sublime beauty, as having a real value. However, it

does not possess or enter into any kind of association with a moral value-quality until it

becomes an object of a moral actfor instance until it becomes an object of the act of

theft or vandalism. In what we might call normal experiences of the painting,

thoughi.e. when I pass by it in the museumthere is no moral disrespect for the

painting if, being in a hurry, I fail to notice and appreciate the artistic value of the

painting as a work of beautiful art. It is clear, then, that even while our everyday
 274

experience shows forth the reality of values as constitutive elements of the life-world, at

the same time it brings forth the need to make certain essential distinctions regarding the

particular attitudes under which values can be intended, namely the difference between

the axiological and the ethical. This distinction will at the same time provide an initial

entrance point into the clarification of Husserls motives for setting the issues of the

objective order of values aside in his attempt to ground a theory of ethics and why this

move will not have to be seen as fundamentally problematic even given his statement

already elaborated that any theory of rational motivation and ethical behavior must have

its grounding in a theory of values.

i. The Question of Axiology

Up until this point, there has been a certain flexibility present in the concepts of

axiology, ethics, and value, such that each one could, in various instances and from

only slightly different standpoints, signify one and the same thingthat the world is a

world of goods bearing values in a kind of ranked hierarchy given in experience and as

representing in a certain sense a kind of ought or normativity for human action and as

the grounding of human volitional motivation.344 However, at this point, it is possible to

see that the three terms are not strictly equivalent and that a fundamental equivocation

344
Precisely what sort of ought this is has not yet been discussed. Whatever this
ought might signify in concrete instances of value may very well depend on the type of
value that is at stake here. Certainly, however, we should not assume from the start that
the character of the ought of values automatically signifies the ought-to-be-done of
duty as in the Kantian use of the idea of oughtness. Other types of oughts and
normativities might very well be at work in place of this one. The recognition of this
basic point is already discernible in Husserls discussion of the differences between the
different kinds of Kunstlehren (see Ch. 4, 9b). Nonetheless, it will still have to be
revisited in greater detail later on in these discussions.
 275

would be made in any value-theory which sought to equate the axiological with the

ethical. As such, it is necessary now to determine on the one hand the realm of

questioning which falls under the heading of axiology, in particular given the current

discussion on the ontology of values.

In the previous section, it was seen that an essential difference emerges when we

consider various instances of value between values which are, for example, merely the

aesthetic-value of a painting or the merely self-referential value of a good such as some

kind of food, and the moral value of a right action. These three values represent three

examples of very different value-regions or value-modalities, and it is the task of

axiology to differentiate them according to their class and rank-order.345 Moreover,

Husserl writes, the attitude in such an investigation is aimed at the ontology of the

formal and material characteristics of values themselves and not at the corresponding

mode of consciousness.346 This attitude, however, is not one which is fundamentally

concerned with the normativity of such values but rather with the a priori

interconnections of differing orders and modalities of values which cannot yet distinguish

anything more than the fact that certain orders of values are axiologically higher than

others and have a greater fullness of being, reality, or goodness about them. The

axiological attitude is a purely factual attitude regarding the rank-ordering of goods. An

axiology is still pursued without having asked the question of the normativity of

345
Ibid., 244.
346
Ibid.: Die Einstellung bei solchen Untersuchungen ist die ontologisch auf die
formale und materiale Eigenart der Werte selbst und nicht auf die entsprechenden
Bewusstseinsweisen gerichtete.
 276

oughtness, of the types of oughtness which different values essentially contain and imply,

and of the manners in which such values are realized within various motivational settings,

all of which are questions which emerge only when one takes on the specific attitude of

ethical inquiry. There is thus a fundamental difference here between the attitudes and

values of axiology and those of ethics that must now be clearly distinguished.

a. The Fundamental Difference between Axiological Value

and Ethical Value

While axiology is focused upon the rank-ordering of values and classes of values

in the world, ethics is focused upon questions of a higher order in asking after the moral

norms which are to guide ones decision-making in choosing one value or another. In

discovering that the world is a world of goods, axiologically speaking, one does not

discover at the same time that the value pertaining to the good in question simultaneously

implies an ought.347 Rather, it would seem that, even if the world is in fact thoroughly

imbued with value and to be is the same thing as to possess a valuative character of

one kind or another, this does not mean that one must necessarily choose one good over

and above another. For instance, if one were to establish in axiology a kind of rank-

ordering of values such that classical music is determined to have a higher value than, for

instance, jazz or rock and roll, the fact that classical music has a higher aesthetic or other

value by no means establishes that I ought to realize the higher aesthetic value by playing

classical music rather than other forms of music, nor does it establish that I also ought to

347
Ibid., 245.
 277

prefer classical music to the others.348 It simply establishes that, given a certain

hierarchical organization of types of values, one stands over and above another.

Moreover, if one further establishes a hierarchy of value such that a human being is more

valuable than some endangered animal, the fact of an established hierarchy of value

between the two does not simply establish that a person who devotes their time to the

preservation of the endangered animal is necessarily making the morally evil choice, or

even the merely morally inferior choice, in choosing to do this rather than to devote

their time to relief efforts in a refugee camp, for example. It would take a discussion of

values of a different order corresponding to their own distinctive attitude to establish such

questions of moral normativity. The mere recognition of the fact of the value of the

refugee and the endangered species and the a priori relations between their value-

heights is simply not sufficient to deduce a proper moral course or moral value here all

on its own.

To have established the world as a world of goods is not yet to have established

the world as a world of oughts in any moral sense of the word. This will be the task of

ethics and not in any way of an axiology taken purely in itself. However, having now

provided a definitive and fundamental distinction between the values of axiology and the

values of ethics, Husserl must make a turn away from a simple dependence upon a value-

348
Even though such orders of aesthetic values as are proposed for consideration above
can be posited here as ways of differentiating the essential difference between the
axiological and ethical standpoints, I do not intend to operate on the assumption that a
general hierarchy of aesthetic values has in any way been justified according to the order
mentioned in the example and as is presumed by Dietrich von Hildebrand and others, for
example, in their axiologies. Whether or not such an order can be established is a
problem for a pure axiology of aesthetic values and cannot be pursued here.
 278

theory strictly parallel with logic, as he had in his earlier ethical system, towards some

higher grounding for ethical normativity. In doing so, Husserl raises more questions than

he is able to answer, particularly in the questions of what sorts of values are at stake now

and how they are to ground ethical normativity and to provide a kind of sure guide for

morality if the objective values of the world and their a priori relations are not of

themselves sufficient to provide a guide to moral action. I would contend that Scotus

ontology can offer us certain theoretical tools which can serve to clarify further our own

phenomenological ontology of values through a renewal and reactivation of the problems

of value as it is embodied in this medieval author and subsequently to allow the

distinctions which this ontology will furnish to provide its own answer to what sorts of

values are at stake in ethics.

13. Scotus and the Distinction between Transcendental and Moral Goods

Duns Scotus provides us with the possibility of a clarification, fundamentally

lacking in Husserl, of the difficult question of the multiple senses of goods and values

at work in the discussion of ethics and ontology. He does so inasmuch as he makes

fundamental distinctions between the types of goods and values which are properly moral

and relevant for the study of ethics, those which are simply relative to a living, rational

(or non-rational) agent, and those which are good in essential generality simply inasmuch

as they are beings and, in turn, can become objects of the desires and intentions of the

will. Here, one can use the term transcendental or essential goods to describe the

goodness of this latter class of goods. A clarification of these various orders of goods

will allow us to see more clearly, on the one hand, what sorts of things will be needed in
 279

order to qualify something as having a goodness which is morally relevant rather than

simply being good because it exists or because it exists as a possible benefit to me, and

on the other to see precisely what sorts of aims and values must be present in order to

speak meaningfully about the realm of objects, values, and dispositions which properly

make up the moral life. The distinction which emerges, then, will have to fall back upon

an understanding of Scotus metaphysics, and particularly his teaching on the

transcendentals in order to elaborate the kind of essentially valid axiological hierarchy

suggested by the ontology of the life-world as presented above which constitutes the

order of the world of being simply inasmuch as the good is seen by him to be

coextensive with being. However, following upon the critical work of Thomas

Williams, to the extent that, for Scotus, we must differentiate sharply between moral

goodness and the goodness that is coextensive with being,349 one may solidify the

Husserlian distinction between axiology and ethics to the point that ethics will have to

derive morality principally from its own range of goods independent of, although in a

sense still essentially interconnected with, the realm of axiology. At the same time,

ethics, being the universal Kunstlehre of all Kunstlehren, will still provide a final order to

the discipline of axiology in a manner completely in keeping with the highest intentions

the Husserlian theory.350

349
Thomas Williams, From Metaethics to Action Theory, in The Cambridge
Companion to Duns Scotus, ed. Thomas Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003), 335.
350
HUA XXXVII, 245.
 280

a. The Order of Transcendental Being

If we are to understand the notion of transcendental, or essential, goodness which

marks off this first realm of not-yet-moral values, then it will first be necessary to

provide an understanding of the medieval use of the term transcendental, which differs

markedly from its modern use in thinkers like Kant and Husserl. Unlike Husserl, for the

medievals, the term transcendental is not used to mark off an absolute stratum of

being in the sense of the transcendental characteristic of subjectivity which has already

been described above.351 Rather, the medievals used the term transcendental to refer to

the transcendentals of Aristotles metaphysics, those abstract yet very real concepts

which escape classification in the Aristotelian categories by reason of their greater

extension and universality of application.352 Aristotle in his ontology had already

divided up the whole order of being into ten categories, namely, substance and its

accidents, i.e. quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, action, and passion.

Inasmuch as something has being, for Aristotle, its being can be interpreted in such a way

that it will find a home in one of the above categories of being. Thus, a dog would fall

under the category of a substance, a color under the accidental category of quality,

thought under the accidental category of action, etc. However, there are certain concepts

which, precisely because of the range of their applicability, cannot fall under any one of

the above categories alone, but rather have the characteristic of falling under each one of

them equally. Thus, Scotus writes that,

351
See Chapter IV, 8a.
352
Allan B. Wolter, O.F.M., The Transcendentals and their Function in the Metaphysics
of Duns Scotus (St. Bonaventure, NY: The Franciscan Institute, 1946), 1.
 281

Being is first divided into infinite and finite before it is divided into the
ten categories, because the second of these, namely the finite, is common
to the ten genera. Therefore, whatever is proper to being as indifferent to
finite and infinite, or as is proper to the Infinite Being, is not proper to
itself as it is determined to a genus but as prior to, and consequently, is
transcendental and is outside any genus.353

In order to divide being, then, into the ten categories in the first place, there must be

some notion of being which is common to every category such that one can say that

substance is a being, relation is a being, etc. What this means for Scotus is that whenever

we speak of being qua being, we are speaking of whatever, is proper to being as being

before it is divided into the ten genera, and consequently whatsoever is of such a kind is

transcendental.354

The medieval notion of the transcendental, then, at least so far as it pertains to

Scotus usage of it, applies to any kind of concept which can be attributed to anything

falling under any one of the ten categories of being.355 Moreover, it is evident, for

Scotus, that, in every concept of being given in ordinary discourse, certain notions always

accompany being, as co-meant, we might say, with being. These accompanying

notions, furthermore, always accompany being in such a way that they can be said to be

353
John Duns Scotus, Opus oxoniense I, d. 4, q. 3, (Philosophical Writings, 2): ens prius
dividitur in infinitum et finitum quam in decem praedicamenta, quia alterum isotorum
scilicet [ens] finitum, est commune ad decem genera. Ergo quaecumque conveniunt enti
ut indifferens ad finitum et infinitum, vel ut est proprium enti infinito, conveniunt sibi non
ut determinatur ad genus sed ut prius, et per consequens, ut est transcendens et est extra
omne genus.
354
Ibid.: per prius conveniunt enti quam ens dividatur in decem genera, et per
consequens quodcumque tale est transcendens.
355
Ibid.: Unde de ratione transcendentis est non habere praedicatum supraveniens nisi
ens.
 282

coextensive with the concept of being, i.e. identical with being inasmuch as they are

equally predicable of anything of which being can be predicated. They are coextensive

with being, moreover, because they are equally transcendental in the sense that they

cannot be determined to any one genus or category alone. Scotus argues that being, then,

has attributes naturally coextensive, such as one, true, and good but also has other

attributes in which opposites are distinguished against themselves, such as to be

necessary-or-possible, act-or-potency, and the like.356 On the basis of the recognition

of the essential interchangeability of these notions with being, such that every being

must be one, in and because of its being it must be true, and further that inasmuch as it

has being it is good, must be either necessary in its being or merely possible, either in act

or in potency, etc., Scotus develops a complex ontology in which the notion of

transcendental being plays an important part. Without delving too deeply into Scotus

metaphysics and the role which the transcendentals play in his discussions of various

topics, it is necessary to take a close look at his notion of the coextensivity of being and

good in order to bring to light his understanding of the world of being as an

axiologically ordered universe.

A first point must be made regarding Scotus metaphysics here. Given the

complex history of the genesis of modern prejudices about medieval scholastic

philosophy and metaphysics in general, in which it is assumed that the medieval

metaphysician is nothing more than a metaphysical system-builder who abstracts, ad hoc

356
Ibid.: habet passiones simplices convertibiles, sicut unum, verum, et bonum, sed
habet aliquas passiones ubi opposita distinguuntur contra se, sicut necesse esse vel
possibile, actus vel potentia, et hujusmodi.
 283

and a priori, from a conceptual notion of being a whole system of thought with no

grounding in experience, it is important to note here that such is not the case with Scotus

teaching on the transcendentals. Scotus, Allan Wolter writes, never assumes that, the

formal concept or ratio being contains these [coextensive transcendental attributes

one, true, good, etc.] in such a way that the latter can be abstracted from the former

by an act of intellectual abstraction or analysis as some have claimed.357 Rather, Scotus

means to argue that with a transcendental attribute like good or true, these notions are

contained virtually not in the pure quidditative concept being, but rather, in

something else which does include being essentially.358 That is to say, for Scotus,

one, true, and good are always to be found in the same individual being in which

being is to be found. For Scotus, this fact is immediately given as true whenever some

individual object is perceived, cognized, or judged.359

At the same time, however, the good understood transcendentally must be

distinguished sharply from the good that is taken in its desirability as the object of an

appetitive power like the will. Rather, transcendental goodness is, the actualization of

an ideal within the being itself.360 Prescinding from the experience of being as a thing

357
See Allan Wolters note to Scotus text in Philosophical Writings, 167.
358
Ibid., 168.
359
The manner of its intuition in phenomenological experience in Scotus thought,
although not explicitly drawn out by him in such terms, has already been developed in the
above sections on the Scotistic theory of the noesis of the will as affectiones driven by a
love which makes intuitively manifest the world of objects through the desiderative
powers of value-feeling (see Ch V, 11a).
360
Wolter, The Transcendentals in the Metaphysics of Duns Scotus, 120.
 284

which I myself desire, there is also a notion of goodness which includes the

understanding that it is better to be than not to be. There is thus a certain perfection in

being qua being, the negation of which could constitute a certain lack or incompleteness

in being, an imperfection. The transcendental, or primary, goodness of an existent thing

purely as an existent thing, is said to be a perfection in itself and for itself.361

Furthermore, this notion of goodness becomes extended beyond merely factually having

being to the notion of a goodness as the perfection of the being in which the potentialities

of the being are actualized.362 Goodness can thus be described in degrees of fullness or

lack of fullness where individual beings are concerned to the extent that their being is

fully actual or still merely potential or falls somewhere in betweenpartially actualized,

but still not fulfilling the highest potentiality of the thing. Inasmuch, then, as this can be

said of any being to one extent or another, i.e. in varying degrees from one individual

being to another, every being is understood as a good whose primary, or essential

goodness, as Scotus calls it,363 is coextensive with their being. The opposite of goodness,

in this primary sense, then, will be the non-existence of a thing since this means

specifically the reduction of a thing to the status of mere potency without any actuality

whatsoever. If we imaginatively vary the proportionality between the potentiality of a

being still to be realized and the actuality which the being possesses as what has been

361
Scotus, Repartatio Parisiensis 2, d. 34, q. un., n. 3; XXIII, 170b, quoted in Allan
Wolter, The Transcendentals in the Metaphysics of Duns Scotus, 120: Primum bonum
dicit perfectionem in se et ad se.
362
Wolter, 121.
363
John Duns Scotus, Quodlibet, 18.9.
 285

realized in the being, then we will discover that as the actuality of the object increases, so

also does its perfection. In Husserlian terms, this can be said to be given in eidetic

universality and validity. Again, however, it should be made clear, lest too much be read

into this transcendental notion of goodness or perfection than is really meant in this

connection, that Scotus has only a very restricted notion of perfection in mind here. He

writes that, the perfect has a twofold meaning. In one sense it means that to which

nothing is wanting intrinsically. Such a thing is said to be perfect by reason of an

essential intrinsic or primary perfection. In another way a thing is said to be perfect by

reason of a secondary perfection.364 Perfection in the first sense mentioned by Scotus

refers to the idea of transcendental goodness as articulated above in which perfection is

simply convertible with being or actuality and varies in degree in direct proportion with

the variation in degrees of actuality and has no meaning beyond this. Thus, Wolter writes

that for something to be good in a transcendental sense, all this means is for it to be good,

in so far as [its] possibilities are actualized.365 In other words, perfection is

synonymous with the completeness of a being in its being this and having this

nature. Perfection, or goodness, in the second sense in which it is good by virtue of a

secondary perfection refers to goodness in a non-transcendental sense, i.e. it refers to

moral goodness or other forms of relative goods in which perfection enters into the

framework of appetibility to others extrinsic to the good and being in question. We are,

364
Rep. Par. 2, d. 34, n. 3; XXIII, 170ab, quoted in Wolter, The Transcendentals, 122:
Perfectum autem dupliciter dicitur: uno modo cui nihil deest, et hoc intrinsece, et illud
est perfectum perfectione essentiali intrinseca, seu perfectione prima; alio modo dicitur
perfectum perfectione secunda.
365
Wolter, 121.
 286

however, not yet in a position to speak of these goods and the meaning of their perfection

from this purely ontological perspective without further preparatory investigations.

i. Essential Order and the Hierarchy of Essential Goods (Axiology)

The world of primary goods, or the transcendental goodness that is intrinsic to the

being of an individual existent thing as having being, can, as would seem to be indicated

by what has been said above, be understood as arranged in a fully objective hierarchical

order of goods. The initial way in which this hierarchy reveals itself transcendentally in

Scotus is in his notion of essential order and the so-called law of essential order. As

was noted above, Scotus differentiates between two different types of transcendentals. In

the first instance are those which are virtually coextensive with beingone, true, and

good. In the second instance are included what Scotus refers to as the disjunctive

transcendentalspossible-or-necessary, finite-or-infinite, act-or-potency, etc. The

disjunctive transcendentals are transcendental to the extent that in every being, regardless

of its category or genus, one of the opposed terms of the notion act-or-potency, for

instance, will apply to the being in question. There is no being which is not either in act

or in potency, in the strict sense of the terms. To the same extent, there is no being which

is not either finite or infinite. As such, the disjunctive concept applies to the whole range

of being and thus constitutes a transcendental concept of being. Moreover, Scotus

discovers present in the relation of one term of a disjunctive transcendental to another a

kind of ordered hierarchy which he terms their essential order. He writes that, [i]n the

attributes of disjunction, although that whole disjunctive is not able to be demonstrated

from being, nevertheless, universally in positing this extreme that is less noble than
 287

some being, we are able to conclude to that extreme that is more noble than some

being.366 In other words, in recognizing the validity of the term possible as

representative of some being, then, it is possible to conclude to the validity of the term

necessary as representative of some other being or beings. If one thing is possible, then

something else must be necessary. Likewise, if something is in potency, something must

be in act; if something is finite, something must be infinite. Scotus holds that this relation

is given a priori on the basis of the fact that without the higher term, the lower term

would have no sense at all. Without the infinite present as the higher negation of the

finite, the finite would have no meaning. The lower term always refers to the higher term

as its fulfillment.

The relation does not, however, go in the other direction. From the fact of an

infinite, the necessity of the finite cannot be inferred. This would be counterfactual

because the law of essential order, which is precisely the law that if I posit the lower term

of a disjunctive, this positing allows me to conclude to the existence of the higher term, is

based upon the essential order of teleology of the lower term for the higher. The higher

term has no such teleology because it itself is the end. It should be made clear here that

the specific purposes for which Scotus is concerned with describing the disjunctive

transcendentals and the law of essential order as providing logical grounds upon which to

conclude the factual existence of the higher terms of the disjunction is for general use

within his metaphysics in proving the existence of God. For our purposes here, however,

we are less concerned with the logical, speculative possibilities of the transcendentals and

366
Scotus, Opus oxoniense 1, d. 39, q. 1, (Philosophical Writings, 8).
 288

more concerned with the basic axiological sense which justifies this logical applicability

of the disjunctive transcendentals to the problems of natural theology. That is to say,

what are problems for us are not the ability to conclude the existence of any one element

of the disjunctive attributes of being, possible-or-necessary, finite-or-infinite, actual-

or-possible, etc., but rather to recognize in these disjunctions essential structures of the

experience of being in general. That is to say, we are interested in them not as logical,

but as ontological concepts and ontological concepts in particular which provide a

definite axiological hierarchical order in being. In this connection then, it seems that the

law of essential order only has sense if it is understood that its reasoning is based upon a

notion of the primary goodness or perfection of being. If it is the case that potency can

be seen as a certain tending of a being towards proper perfection through the actualization

of this potency, then potency is ordered to act in terms of a kind of natural longing or

impulsion for the good of perfected being. If it is the case, then, that the whole of being

is constituted transcendentally out of these sets of essentially ordered hierarchies which

are precisely essentially ordered hierarchies of goods, then we have in Scotus the

beginnings of a kind of ontologically oriented axiology. Moreover, if for Husserl the

essential task of axiology was to develop a theory of the objective hierarchies of values

prescinding from the question of the specific human acts in which such values are given

and apart from the relativity of human desires, as a kind of pure eidetic phenomenology

of value approaching the value of things simply in and for themselves, then we have here

in Scotus metaphysics precisely this kind of study of the axiological order.

 289

Scotus is, thus, able to develop a hierarchy of being in terms of the perfections of

being such that, inasmuch as there are disjunctive sets in essential order into which all

beings fall, and into which they fall in varying degrees, one is capable of discerning a

gradation of perfections in being. If whatever is in potency is of necessity lower in being

and perfection to that which is in act, then whatever is in act will always have greater

perfection than that which is in potency precisely because it has more entity, i.e. more

being. An enumeration of the possible perfections of beings will allow us to differentiate

between types of perfections, the perfections of being in act rather than potency, being

infinite rather than finite, being necessary rather than contingent, etc., each of which will

allow us to characterize the gradations of perfections of beings according to essentially

defined hierarchies. Moreover, we can apply these hierarchies even to those things

whose goodness is given in their relatedness to the subjective acts of value-ception since,

for Scotus, the desirability of a good is, of course, based upon the primary goodness

which the being desired possesses.367

From Scotus discussion of the transcendental notion of good, certain formal laws

of axiological hierarchization may be discerned. The first is that the actual being of a

thing is of higher value than the non-being, or merely potential being, of the same thing.

To take a simple example, a higher value is realized in wealth which is actual, for

instance, than in wealth which is merely potential or imagined. From this the corollary

follows: the merely potential being of a thing is of lower value than the value realized by

the thing when it is brought to actuality. Moreover, a thing which has realized its

367
Wolter, The Transcendentals in the Metaphysics of Duns Scotus, 123.
 290

potential to a greater degree has a higher value than a thing which has realized its same

potential to a lesser degree. For example, a higher value is realized in the work of an

artist who has cultivated his or her abilities to the highest possible degree as opposed to

an artist who has only cultivated his or her abilities according to merely passing fancies

or whims. Also from the notions of the disjunctive transcendentality of being, it follows

that a being which is merely possible has a lower value than a being which is fully

necessary, and a finite being has a lower value than the value of a being which is infinite.

These disjunctions would most clearly serve to indicate the axiological disparity between

God and man, in particular, but taken generally as indicative of gradations, it also would

be exemplified in contrasting the higher values of knowledge into essences, for instance,

which seizes upon the essentially necessary and which lacks a finite determination, at

least with respect to temporal duration, in comparison to material wealth which is purely

contingent and which is finite both with respect to temporal duration as well as spatial,

material divisibilityi.e. it is a basic principle of economics that resources are scarce and

this scarcity implies a finite divisibility of material wealth and resources among

individuals leading to a situation of disparity between those who have and those who

have-not, whereas knowledge is infinitely shareable among all individuals.368 No part

of this theory of value, however, yet includes the further determination of these values as

368
It is only in the purely economic sphere as a sphere of pure finitude that scarcity
implies a higher valuation in a class of goods within the logic of supply and demand,
which is valid within the strictly limited value-domain of the useful. It is only by way
of an unwarranted absolutization of the range of values constitutive of the economic, in
particular for the sake of the absolutized value of buying power, that one could attempt
to justify the idea of finitude and limitedness as indicative of a higher value than that
which is infinitely available to all.
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values which specifically ought to be realized. The determination of the oughtness of

values cannot be accomplished in the merely axiological, ontological attitude being

developed here. As has already been suggested by the fact that the order of

transcendental being and its coextensive attribute, transcendental goodness, are

characterized precisely in the fact of the simple being of objects and not in terms of their

relevance or suitability as objects of human activity, and of differing types of human

activity at that, it is again clear that a theory of value as an axiology is not yet the same

thing as a moral theory. The primary, essential goodness of a thing is not yet a morally

relevant value. It is not that there will never be any kind of relationship between moral

values and the primary, essential goods of the transcendental order, for Scotus. However,

if there is to be a relationship between the two orders, it can be established only after

having already distinguished the particular character of the region of goods characteristic

of the moral life first and foremost, i.e. after having further grounded the essential

distinction between axiology and ethics and between the axiological attitude and the

ethical attitude.

b. The Order of Moral Goods (Ethics)

If, as we have seen, the basis for the distinction between the goods of axiology

and the goods of ethics was initially clarified through the reflection on the ontological

question of the being of axiological value in Scotus metaphysics, then the further

elucidation of the distinction must involve an ontology of moral value as well. To this

end, Scotus writes in Book One of his Ordinatio that, [o]ne could say that just as beauty

is not some absolute quality in a beautiful body, but a combination of all that is in
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harmony with such a bodyand a combination of all aspects, so the moral goodness of

an act is a kind of dcor it has, including a combination of due proportion to all to which

it should be proportioned.369 It is because Scotus defines moral goodness in this way

that he is unable to refer to any kind of isomorphic identity between the transcendental

goodness of the world of being qua being and the goodness of the moral order.

Transcendental goodness is the goodness of an object insofar as it has being at all and to

the degree, whether higher or lower, that it has a perfection of its own being. This

goodness is transcendental precisely because it is coextensive with being and thus cannot

be defined in terms of the categories of Aristotle. Moral goodness, however, is not

transcendental. Rather, moral goodness falls under the Aristotelian category of relation,

and, this goodness, like any other relation, does not have an active principle all its

own.370 As such, moral goodness is an accidental quality of the human agent and of his

or her volitional acts, habits, dispositions, and characteristic valuations. That being the

case, another important distinction between axiological and ethical value emerges.

Moral values, if we continue to use the modern term, will have to be interpreted in

two very different senses from the axiological understanding of a thing as a value and

thus as a source of motivation. Moral values in either of the two senses are not to be

found as inhering in the world of objects, understood in the modern sense as the

transcendent world distinct from the world of the subject. Rather, moral value, in the first

instance, is precisely that quality of goodness which characterizes the value of the

369
Scotus, Ordinatio I, d. 17, nn. 62-67, (DSWM, 167).
370
Ibid.
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personal subject him or herself along with all of their morally relevant acts and which is

realized in personal acts alone. In the second instance, moral values are those ideals

according to which the human being chooses to order his or her choices in conformity

with the moral law and right reason. This latter sense is the only sense in which moral

values can be understood as values which are external to oneself, at least initially, since

they can be taken as that ideal state of existence towards which the subject strives on the

way to becoming a moral subject but which the subject does not yet fully exemplify and

is thus not yet fully realized in the factual value of the subject him or herself in the

present temporal moment. The particular type of value which this kind of ideal state of

moral existence will be will have to be probed more deeply if the sphere of moral value is

to be fully understood. However, given this understanding of moral values, it might very

well be asked what relationship there might possibly be between the primary goodness, or

transcendental values, of things external to the person and the moral value of the human

person him or herself. It might seem from the above characterization that the two orders

of value are entirely disparate and indifferent to one another. This, however, will not be

the case.

Returning to the above characterization of the ontological status of moral

goodness by means of an analogy to beauty, it is clear that for Scotus moral value is not

to be found in an object but in a relation of proportionality between subject and object.

More will be said later about the kind of proportionality this will be and the various

elements which will constitute the moral goodness of an act. For now, however, it will

simply be necessary to recognize the fact that moral value is first and foremost this
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proportionality of human acts to various elements and is assigned through the dictates of

what Scotus refers to as right reason, or the moral demands imposed by the developed

conscience of the individual according to rational moral principles of judgment. If, then,

the value of an act is to be seen precisely in this proportionality, then it is clear that moral

values, while strictly speaking not inhering in external objects, are nonetheless

fundamentally related to the external values, or primary goodness, of things in general,

particularly in the ways in which those acts either respect or do not respect or respond to

those values. They will also be related to the extent that human acts may or may not

realize the values of things by further actualizing their potencies or by failing to do so,

thereby heightening or reducing their value.

Certain formal laws may be discerned here with respect to the relation between

the order of essential goodness and the moral value of personal acts which follow from

the axiological laws already discovered. The first can be discerned if we take the human

moral act as itself an individual being contained within the transcendental order of being

and thus as itself possessing a certain primary, essential value. Taken in this connection,

then, the value of an act which becomes realized is higher than the value of an act which

remains only possible, only in potency but never actualizedi.e. merely intending, but

failing to do something, or perhaps not intending to do something at all where a specific

act is morally called for in a particular situation. For example, one might validly make

the claim that resistance was a positive moral obligation in Nazi-occupied Europe during

World War II. A character like Oskar Schindler, who used his position as an industrialist

in Poland to save over a thousand Jews from the Holocaust, can readily be credited with
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having realized the moral value of resistance to the evils of the Nazi occupation. On the

other hand, the German soldiers guarding the concentration camps, even if they had

wished that they could do otherwise, failed to realize this moral value. Their moral act

remained merely potential and, as such, the value of their moral act is lower than that of

Schindlers actindeed in cases where the camp guards positively intended to align

themselves with the evils of Himmlers Final Solution, it can be said that they realized

precisely the opposite moral value of resistance, i.e. they realized a disvalue, or a moral

evil.

Another essential law of values can be summed up in the recognition that an act

which actualizes itself to the highest degree possesses a higher value than an act which is

actualized to a lesser degree. For example, a person who only half-heartedly performs a

good deed does not actualize the value of performing the good deed to the same degree as

a person who whole-heartedly and generously performs the same deed. As such, we

would ordinarily say that, even though a true moral value has been realized by the person

who only half-heartedly does something morally good, the higher moral

valuevirtueis realized only in the person who gives him or herself completely over to

the moral call. It can also be argued, that an act which is infinite will be of higher value

than an act which is merely finite and, within degrees of finitude, the more finite and

short-lived the act, the lesser its value will be and the more it approaches the infinite and

the more enduring it is, the higher its value will be.371 This law holds in a double sense.

371
Many conclusions follow from the axiological consequences of the essential ordering
of the finite for the infinite which it will be opportune to draw out fully in the final
chapters of this work, as it will be on the basis of this recognition that it will be possible
 296

In the first, again, it marks the moral contrast between the idea of God, who is capable of

infinite acts, as realizing the highest values through gratuitous love, for instance, and

humanity which realizes its acts in the order of nature in merely finite terms. As such,

the human agents moral value is always limited according to the finitude of human being

as such.372 On the other hand, speaking relatively of human acts in general, the less finite

human actions becomeand this expansion of finitude towards infinitude in human

action follows upon the kind of act which is in question373 the greater their moral value

will be. It should be made clear here, of course, that we are not referring to finitude or

relative infinitude in terms of material resources for performing certain acts. For

example, the generosity of a millionaire who gives away half of his yearly income in

philanthropic activities need not be seen as of any greater value than the generosity of the

poor widow in Marks Gospel who gives away her last two pennies in offering at the

temple (Mark 12:41-44).374

to view the ethical attitude, when it is fully entered into in ethical striving, as a formal
moment of the religious attitude.
372
This, of course, applies to the human being prescinding from any question of grace
in the theological sense. Certainly, Scotus would want to argue that by way of grace, the
human being who loves in God (amare in Deo) and is taken up into the framework of
divine acceptance (acceptatio) is freed by grace in a certain sense from the limits of
human finitude where moral value is concerned. Sharing absolutely in the love of God,
the human being becomes capable of loving with God in an infinite sense.
373
The highest, selfless love directed towards God, as will be seen in following chapters
borders upon infinitude and as such has the highest value, in comparison to the self-
centered love of money, for instance. The value-height or -depth of each act is mutually
determined both according to the subjective fervor of the love and by the finitude or
infinitude of the object of love, i.e. the true valuability of the beloved.
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Furthermore, taking the act as a relation of proportionality, the act will have a

higher value to the extent that it is directed at higher values when dealing with things as

opposed to lower values, taking these values as higher or lower according to the

axiological laws already uncovered. The act which realizes higher values in the world is

of greater value than an act which realizes lower values. For example, if we accept, as

was argued above, that material wealth, because of its essentially finite divisibility and its

limited temporality, is of a relatively lower value, then we can say that a greater moral

value is realized in the person who loves persons more than money rather than in the

person who loves making money more than human relationships. Finally, an act which

brings about a state of affairs which is disproportionate in some way is of negative value,

or is evil. This can refer equally to acts which brings about a disparity in justice, i.e.

creating social injustices, for example, or it can simply refer to disproportionate relations

between the subject and the constellations of moral values involved in his or her moral

decision making.375 From this it follows that an act which ends such a state of affairs is

374
Indeed, it is precisely Christs point, according to Mark, in this episode to point out
the greater moral and religious value of this womans act of giving in comparison to all
the wealthy who, quantitatively, gave more, yet qualitatively gave less of themselves in
their offering. On the other hand, the importance of this moral insight, if it were seen
simply as an affirmation of the value of the poor over the rich, would be entirely lost in
ressentiment. The point, however, is that moral value hinges upon the degree to which
the person puts him or herself heart and soul, so to speak, into the task of realizing
moral value. The impoverished widow in the Gospel does this giving of herself in
realizing the virtue of generosity more completely than all the wealthy people whom
Jesus encounters in the temple because of the greater act of faith in God which it implies
in giving out of her dire need and depending for the satisfaction of that need solely upon
the generosity of God.
375
Precisely what this will imply and the sorts of examples which will serve to illustrate
it will be better left for the following chapter.
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of higher value than an act which does not. This is illustrated, again, by the contrast

between Oskar Schindler and the prison guards in the Nazi death camps. It also follows

that an act which prefers to realize a relatively lower value to a relatively higher value

will itself possess a negative value as an evil, in particular where the non-existence of the

relatively higher value can itself be taken as an evil. Thus, it is clear that a father, for

instance, who chooses to realize a vibrant and successful career to being a good father

who is a real presence in his childrens lives, realizes a true moral evil which will have

dire effects for his children.

Finally, the values in the secondary sense, which serve as the guiding principles

of right reason in ordering personal acts to realize the proper values as just described,

following Scotus, will not be values discovered through acts of intention of the true

values of mere things found in the world. Rather, the guiding principles of morality

which are the values of ethical study and ethical normativity are, instead, to be

understood as the values of the virtues realized in the acts of moral persons, the ideal

values of the excellences and perfections of the human being which the human subject

attempts to realize in him- or herself.

i. The Values of Virtue

One can call the values of morality the values of virtue because, if it is the case

that moral value in the first sense is to be understood as the particular proportionality of

human acts to their various elements in conformity with right reason, then, for Scotus,

what we are talking about as the guiding principle of the achievement of such a

proportionality is precisely moral virtue, understood as certain habitualities of human

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behavior which have been developed through repeated acts of will towards the good in

question. This can be argued based on Aristotles definition of virtue as, a state that

decides, [consisting] in a mean, the mean relative to us, which is defined by reference to

reason.376 Virtue is the achievement of a mean state between the two extremes of excess

and deficiency. As such, virtue is defined essentially as a kind of proportionality in

action. Moreover, virtue in the life of the human person who, while still living in this

world, has not yet achieved perfect virtue, is always in a state of constant becoming, of

constantly striving after its complete perfection. Each and every moral act, if it is really

to be moral at all, is guided by the virtues, one might say, either inasmuch as an

individual chooses to develop a virtue which he or she has never had previously but

which they now want to acquire, in which case the person is guided by the virtuous state

as the goal, the moral value, which is to be achieved for and within oneself, or they are

guided by the virtue inasmuch as they already possess it in some limited sense and they

take on for themselves the ideal of the perfected virtuous state as their overarching moral

value. As such, the moral values, in the secondary sense as the guiding ideals maintained

by the moral life, which are the objects of an ethical philosophy will be the value of

having and realizing the ideal values of the virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude,

temperance, generosity, charity, etc. In this sense, then, the moral value which motivates

and which is normative for ethics is the value of being-prudent, of being-just, of being-

fortitudinous, etc. This is, at one and the same time, the value of living ones life

according to the demands of reason in the sense of right reasonreason which has an

376
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. and ed. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett
Publishing Company, 1985), II.6.1107a1.
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insight into the demand of an absolute ought implied by the ideal values of the virtues as

to-be-realized, of an absolute call to live morally and according to the moral principles

of virtue. As such, the values of morality understood as the values of virtue can be

understood and differentiated along two different linesvalue as the guiding ideal of

virtue as moral formation and value as directing the human subject towards the summum

bonum, or highest good.

a. The Formation of the Moral Subject

The formation of the moral subject is, in a sense, the highest value of the science

and practical discipline of ethics. Implied in moral formation will be two different

elements for Scotus. On the one hand, moral formation refers to the development of

virtuous habits through the repetition of morally good acts and the acquisition of a

proportionality among ones human acts. At the same time, moral formation will also

refer to the process of the acquisition of a well-formed conscience, which is a kind of

habitual knowledge of and tendency to choose the proper moral paths when faced with

moral decisions.377 This will further require that the will in its motivations as affectio

commodi and as affectio justitiae be guided primarily by the love of justice prior to the

love of what is beneficial to oneself. At the same time, it will not require the denial of

what is beneficial on principle, but only where such benefit is out of proportion with the

just good in question. As such, the realization of the value of the human subject as being-

moral in a total sense is the guiding value of the ethical sciences.

377
Scotus, Ordinatio II, d. 39, (DSWM, 165).
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b. The Summum Bonum

At the same time, ethics and the moral life in general with the project of moral

formation is not to be thought of as lacking any kind of external guiding values. That is

to say, moral formation, articulated as a value, still requires a certain standard of

goodness by means of which it is evaluated. This external standard must be, for any

ethical theory which takes to heart the notion of an absolute normativity and call to do the

good, the notion of the summum bonum, or the highest good, towards which man is

directed. This idea of the highest good and the question of what the highest good for the

human subject is will be a subject of discussion later on in the concluding chapters of this

study. According to the axiological differentiation of values already provided, however,

it is clear that the highest good, or the highest value-bearer, in order to be highest and

most supreme, must be both infinite and necessary in some sense. For now, however, it

is only necessary to state that the idea of the teleological end of human life and existence

in the sense both of the meaning of human life and in the sense of the destiny of human

existence is likewise a guiding value of ethical study. Ethics cannot determine what man

as a moral subject ought to do without having some understanding of the summum

bonum, in what it consists, and what its implications for human existence might be.

ii. The Ideal/Personal Character of Ethical Value

Ontologically speaking, then, it should begin to become clear how one is to mark

out the particular region of being occupied by the values of ethics. If it is the case, as we

have seen, that for Scotus the being of moral goodness is to be described not in terms of

the being which a thing has simply because it is a being, except in a restricted sense as
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the primary goodness of the being of the moral act itself, and thus if moral goodness is

not goodness that is the object of study of an axiological science, but rather is described

in terms of the accidental relation of proportionality of human acts and of human beings

as habitually acting beings, then it begins to be clear that ethical values are non-objective

in a very specific sense of the term. Whereas axiological values were seen from the

beginning of our Scotistic and Husserlian analyses as being defined above all in terms of

their being the values of things taken as objects, moral values do not inhere in the world

of things. Moral values are likewise not to be discovered by looking at the world of mere

things but are discoverable only by acting and living within a community and acquiring

virtues and habits of conscience through ethical reflection and recognizing the moral law

within oneself. At the same time, because we can speak of the ends of virtue, moral

formation, and the summum bonum as the guiding values of ethics and the moral life, we

can say that, properly speaking, moral values are ideal values really inhering only within

the persons who bear them. As such, it is possible to develop objectively normative

ethical principles on the basis of such values; however, as an Husserlian and Scotistic

inquiry into the ontology of values has shown, the opening up of an objective ethics in

the sense of an ethical philosophy with an unvarying, universal validity, can only be

achieved if we have a proper understanding of the specific bearers of such values. It is,

moreover, with this understanding, that we will begin to see the inner-sense and

consistency of Husserl and Scotus account of the ethical life and, above all, of ethical

normativity.
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iii. The Ethical Attitude Cannot be Approached through Ontology

It has become clear through the course of this investigation that an axiological,

ontological approach to value is indispensable for clarifying the general sense in which

essential formal laws of relations among values can be developed. It is also

indispensable for supplying a general elucidation of the particular ontic region within

which ethical values are to be described and approached in distinction from all

specifically non-ethical and non-personal values. At the same time, the axiological

attitude with its ontological interests, even while capable of providing for the possibility

of a hierarchical order of values with formal laws governing their essential

interconnections and interrelations, is not yet capable of approaching the fundamental

moral category of the oughtness of such values; it can only be a propaedeutic to such

inquiry. The insight into the ought-to-be-done or ought-to-be-realized with respect to

moral values as providing an absolute call and normative guide to human action can only

be approached by entering an altogether different attitude, namely the ethical, wherein

absolute values are constituted for the personal moral agent and wherein the moral call

can become fully objectified for philosophical study. Having completed this ontological,

axiological study, then, it is possible to move beyond the limits of Husserls early value-

theory and to transition into the phenomenologically articulated domain of the ethical

itself.
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Part III Vocation, the Ethical Attitude, and Religion

Chapter VII
Phenomenology of the Ethical Subject in Husserl and Scotus

If it is the case that moral values can be described, as has been done in the

previous chapter, not in terms of the values of the world of things, but rather as qualities

of the person and his or her acts and as the guiding ideals of moral comportment by

means of which the rational human agent strives to actualize his or her highest moral

possibilities, i.e. moral formation, then the study of morality does not, first and foremost,

seem to require so much of a phenomenology of the objective world as a phenomenology

of the personal subject as him or herself the subject of moral acts. It is only by means of

an understanding of the nature and constitution of the human being as capable of moral

acts following upon acts of moral evaluation, desire, etc., that one can hope to develop a

moral theory which will answer the needs, potentiality, and calling of humanity in its

becoming a moral community. The phenomenology of morality and the moral person in

this chapter will be pursued in light of three different issues. The first includes the

question of the domain of moral freedom in the individual person, pursued in light of the

Husserlian distinction between Natur and Geist. The second issue which we will have

to approach is the phenomenology of the moral conditions of individual human acts. The

questions which emerge from this discussion, in particular the question of the discovery

of appropriate moral ends for individual actions will lead us to the larger issue of

vocation and the absolute moral calling which will condition the moral status of every

individual act inasmuch as it contributes to this overarching project of moral becoming.

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14. Natur and Geist

Turning, now, to our first issue in the phenomenology of the moral person, where

Scotus makes his sharp differentiation between nature and will, which is also the

equivalent of the distinction between deterministic nature and free rationality, Husserl

distinguishes between Natur and Geist, nature and spirit where nature is likewise

the wholly determined nature of natural causality and spirit is the free capacity of the

ego to rise above nature and to determine itself in its freedom. As such, Husserl

understands nature as the correlate of the natural sciences and, as a result, nature is to be

recognized as, a sphere of mere things, a sphere of objectivities which distinguishes

itselffrom all other spheres of objects that may be treated theoretically. We can and we

could already easily say that natural sciences know no value-predicates and no practical

predicatesthey are not concepts pertaining to nature.378 The sphere of nature is thus

a sphere of mere things having no valuesapart from their essential values pertaining

to their being as primary goods in the Scotist sense, although these are given in attitudes

formally distinct from the attitude of natural scienceand having no rationality apart

from the sense which we bestow upon them in acts of meaning-conferral. It is evident to

both Husserl and to Scotist philosophy that the human being cannot be studied within this

attitude of natural science. The human being is not a mere thing, but is a subject, and,

in Husserls words, it is only a prejudice to maintain that nature is the true being of the

subject.379 The human being is a subject and must be approached as one. However, if

378
HUA IV, 25.
379
Ibid., 346.
 306

there is such a vast abyss which separates the two concepts of nature and person, then it

must be asked, in what way is a person not a mere thing? What are the definitive

differences which characterize the subjective existence of the person over and against

merely natural existence?

a. The I-can of the Person

For both Husserl and Scotus, the chief difference is the fact of human volitional

freedom. Husserl writes that, [t]he Ego, as unity, is a system of the I can.380 With

every rational act, Husserl argues, I have a consciousness of myself as a subject with

certain capacities and the freedom to engage such capacities towards particular ends.

Moreover, every act of the intellect, of the turning of my attention in one direction or

another, running through this or that aspect of a particular memory in this or that way,

etc. are all guided by the person which, Husserl writes, is to be delimited in the

specific sense: the subject of acts which are to be judged from the standpoint of reason,

the subject that is self-responsible.381 The self-responsibility of the subject refers to

the freedom of the subject to decide for itself, to determine itself and to take a position

towards particular free acts such that Husserl, echoing Hume, can say that, cognitive

reason is a function of practical reason, the intellect is the servant of the will.382 The

380
Ibid., 253.
381
Ibid., 257.
382
Edmund Husserl, Gesammelte Werke Husserliana, Band VIII: Erste Philosophie
(1923/1924), Zweiter Teil: Theorie der Phnomenologischen Reduktion, ed. R. Boehm
(Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1965), 201: Erkenntnisvernunft ist Funktion der
praktischen Vernunft, der Intellekt ist Diener des Willens.; cf. Peuker, Husserls
Theories of Willing, 7.
 307

will, i.e. the capacity of human freedom, is, then, the definitive characteristic of personal,

spiritual existence in its distinction from nature. The human being is, however, in both a

Husserlian and Scotistic account, a compilation of nature and spirit, freedom and

necessity. As such, a study of the interaction of these two elements of freedom and

necessity, nature and spirit, is needed at the specific level of human moral activity,

keeping in mind the whole problem of values, motivation, and moral goodness in the

process.

i. Freedom and Necessity in the Human Being

Thinking of myself in my actionI experience the I am free, I can do it,383

Husserl writes. At the same time, the human subject also experiences itself as caught

within the framework of certain absolute laws which constitute limits to the range of

human freedom. Certainly one experiences this where the laws of physics are concerned

which keep me from transporting myself across long distances in a momentary flash,

from flying without the aid of machines, or whatever else my imagination might be able

to conjure up for myself without the possibility of actual fulfillment in real life. At the

same time, a person experiences limits to their freedom not simply in their dealings with

the external world but, in fact, already within the inner-field of human being itself. The

human being is constituted as a composition of body, psyche, and spirit in Husserls

philosophical anthropology. The body intended as Krper, or physical body, is, for

Husserl, able to be taken and studied as a natural object in the physical world, subject to

383
Ibid., 328.
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physicalistic causalities and deterministic processes.384 At the same time, the body as

Leib, or lived-body, is a two-sided reality precisely insofar as it is a Body, i.e.,

abstracting from the fact that it is a thing and consequently is determinable as

physicalistic nature.385 On the one hand, then, Leib can be taken as the aesthesiological

body of sensation and as the body for the will, on the other hand.

In the body as Krper, as one layer of the stratified being of the body, we can

only discern the body as conditioned and determined by physicalistic laws of causality.

As such, the body is not free in and for itself. Likewise, the aesthesiological body,

inasmuch as it is operative in sensation and in the processing of sense-data can also not

be described as a free body. Only inasmuch as the body is subject to the demands of the

will, given the limits set by physical laws and the physical constitution of the body, can

the body be designated as in any sense free. At the same time, however, it is not a

freedom native to the body in itself but only inasmuch as it is under the control of the will

as the free capacity of the human subject which determines certain motions and actions

for the body to perform in keeping with the limits imposed on the body by nature.

Moreover, we experience in our bodies the activity of certain bodily drivesthe drive for

food, for sleep, for sex, etc. Inasmuch as these drives are related to the body in its

physical existence as a natural thing and as a sensing organ, bodily drives are free and

cannot be controlled, in the sense that I cannot choose to undergo them or not to undergo

them. I can, however, inasmuch as the body is subject to the will in a certain sense,

384
Ibid., 354.
385
Ibid,. 284.
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choose to deny myself the satisfaction of these bodily drives, or at least I can control the

body to the extent that I am not, in my volitional life, determined by my bodily drives

such that I can regulate them to a certain degree. I can, for instance, eat foods only in

moderation and not give in to every craving for food that I might undergo. I can also

choose to live a life of celibacy or to refrain from sex at various times and for different

reasons. I can also regulate my sleep cycles so as to avoid sleeping too long or too little,

etc.

Husserl argues that, similar to the body, the soul, or psyche, can be seen as being

something of a two-sided reality under which it likewise stands within the nexus of

freedom and necessity. The soul can be spoken of as being, physically conditioned,

dependent on the physicalistic Body. As identical reality, it has its real circumstances in

physis.386 At the same time, the soul is also spiritually conditioned, meaning that in a

very real sense, the psychic life of the individual stands in a reality-nexus with spirit,

i.e. with the self-conscious ego. As such, the ego experiences itself as having certain

psychic drives and needs, as being conditioned and necessitated towards certain

inclinations and proclivities. At the same time, however, to the extent that psyche is

turned toward the spiritual reality of the personal ego, psychic drives and desires can be

regulated and controlled within the limits imposed by the constitution of the psyche as

physically conditioned. To this extent, then, it is possible to see that it is only insofar as

the body and the soul, as constitutional elements of human being, are integrated into the

386
Ibid., 284.
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life and freedom of spirit that they participate in freedom in any sense. However, this is

not to say that every element of spirit is free.

ii. Will as the locus of Freedom and Reason

The ego as such is free; yet, this freedom does not extend to the whole of spirit in

and of itself. For Husserl, spirit (Geist) can be defined as, [the] unity of the Ego of

motivation, as unity of the Ego of faculties.387 With respect to the whole range of

motivations which the ego can experience as this unity of spiritual life and spiritual

powers, the ego is completely free, or at least can achieve complete freedom as a

possibility, even if practically and factually such is not the case in a particular individual.

This issue will be approached momentarily. However, for the present, it is possible also

to see that the spirit as the ego of faculties, for Husserl, has a particular set of powers at

its disposal as ego and is the unity of these powers. On the one hand, I have the capacity

for understanding, or the intellect, by means of which the whole world is given as a

universe of meaning. On the other hand, I have the power for free decision-making and

activity which arise out of the spontaneity of the ego to determine itself for itself.

Finally, I have a range of affective acts by means of which the world is given as a world

of value.

Following Scotus, we can argue that inasmuch as the intellect remains determined

in its understanding to cognize what is given in being according to the way in which it is

made manifest to the intellect, the ego as subject of the intellectual powers of

understanding is determined and as such is a constituent of nature. However, inasmuch

387
HUA IV, 351.
 311

as the ego has in its capacities the power to turn the intellect towards one object of

understanding or another, to choose to check the processes of understanding and

judgment and ignore the facts, and further to perform practical acts on the basis of ones

understanding, etc., the ego is free and can be approached as spirit in its distinction from

nature. The will, however, still does retain some sense of nature even within itself and

these will be related to the psychophysical make-up of the human being as well as to a

certain always evident natural proclivity of spirit, as spirit in the Leibnizian sense of

being a self-conscious subject,388 to turn in upon itself and desire things for itself. The

true freedom of the ego is the freedom to regulate this inclination and to go beyond it

through the free positing of ends according to authentic values and this, we can argue,

represents the full actualization of spirit qua spirit. The question of values and the

position of freedom here brings us, then, to the question of motivation, what different

types of motivation are given in our experiential lives, and what freedom we possess with

regard to our motivations. This will lead us back very directly to the questions of what

constitutes a proper moral choice according to objective standards of moral goodness,

and thus into the proper subject-matter of ethics.

b. Ethical Motivation

The distinction between physical nature and spirit becomes particularly important

when discussing the issues of motivation and how motivation functions within the

volitional life of the ego. For Husserl, again, nature is the realm of causally determined

physical processes. As such, Husserl writes, nature is the domain of the unintelligible

388
Ibid.
 312

[Unverstndlichkeit]. The domain of spirit, however, is that of motivation. Motivation,

however, stands under laws of motivation, and all such laws are through and through

intelligible.389 By the unintelligibility of nature and natural laws, Husserl does not mean

to say that natural causal laws are unintelligible in the sense that we can have no

knowledge or understanding of them. Rather, what he means by this is that natural laws

of causality occur with blind necessity, without a rational understanding which guides

them. By contrast, spirit has its laws of motivation which exact a kind of spiritual

causality upon the volitional life of the ego. Another way of saying this is that

motivated acts occur with reason, while all occurrences of natural causality proceed

wholly without reason. As Ullrich Melle writes, [o]ne can speak meaningfully of

motivation only in relation to an event of will, even if it exists only in the form of a still

pre-conscious striving and longing. Intentional consciousness follows upon an affection

but not mechanically.390 Motivation is, thus, not a causality in the sense of a blind

necessity, but a causality in the sense of having a kind of understanding which takes note

of what and why a thing is motivating me to act in a particular way. The laws of

motivation, moreover, always leave me free to take up or to deny that which is

motivating me,391 although, if denying, always according to whether or not there is some

389
HUA XXXVII, 107: Natur ist das Reich der Unverstndlichkeit. Das Reich des
Geistes aber ist das der Motivation. Motivation aber steht unter Motivationsgesetzen,
und all solche gesetze sind durch und durch verstndlich.
390
Melle, 6.
391
This is true at least so long as motivation does not remain purely unconscious. We
will have to leave unanswered the question of whether or not unconscious or
subconscious motivation allows any space for freedom so long as the unconscious and
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other source of motivation for my act of denial. The presence of some motivation is,

then, a basic condition for any free act. However, motivation does not determine my act

in the way that a natural cause does but is merely the sine qua non of my free act and

provides for a kind of lawful tending in a particular direction on the part of the will and

on the part of desire. Another way of saying the same thing is that all subjective striving

must have some value as its objective correlate and as the motivating factor for the

determination of an intention and act of the will. If there is no value present and affecting

me in some way, then there is no motivation to act and thus there is no act at all.

However, motivation can be further distinguished in terms of two different types of

motivation. Inasmuch as this distinction will concern the subject precisely as a free,

rational agent, it will be this distinction which will allow us to differentiate between

moral and immoral motivations and, further, between moral and immoral acts and

standards of activity.

i. Rational vs. Irrational Motivation

Husserl argues that, overall in the spiritual sphere two different motivations

interweave themselves, the rational and the irrational, the motivation of the higher,

active spirituality and the motivation of the lower, passive or affective spirituality.392

The distinction between rational and irrational forms of voluntary motivation follows

along the lines of a distinction between activity and passivity, not with respect to the

subconscious sources of motivation undergone by any individual are not brought to the
light of full consciousness.
392
HUA XXXVII, 107-108: berall in der geistigen Sphre verflechten sich zweierlei
Motivatinonen, die rationale und die irrationale, die Motivation der hheren, der aktiven
Geistigkeit und die Motivation der niederen, der passiven oder affektiven Geistigkeit.
 314

objects of motivation, which are always and in every case values in one sense or another,

but with respect to the way in which the will gives way to the attraction of the value in

question and begins its pursuit of it. Passive motivation comes in the form of an

association which, founds the pre-egoic contexts of consciousness.393 What this means

is that passive motivations include such things as are given to the subject as values by

means of non-rational drives, whether bodily or psychic, whims, desires for pleasure,

pressure imposed upon the will from outsidee.g. coercion, un-reflected habitualities,

and the passively acquired convictions of ones community, culture, and historical era.

These can be called non-rational, or irrational motivations, inasmuch as in them one does

not reflect upon the source of their motivations here, nor do they reflect upon whether or

not the value which motivates them in each case is a true or authentic value to be

considered normative for their action, and also inasmuch as this form of motivation is

merely psychic, and to that extent operates at the merely natural level of the soul, in the

sub-egoic sphere of passive consciousness, and not at the level of the active freedom of

spirit.394 Rather, in the passivity of the wills giving way to such motivation, free reason

is not determinative of ones own activity. Rather, the will is determined passively, from

without. Thus, as Scotus had already argued, [i]f someone is in error and still acts in

accord with the correct judgment of another, he is not acting rightly, for by his own

knowledge he was meant to regulate his actions, and in this case, he is acting not in

393
Melle, 6.
394
HUA XXXVII, 110.
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accord with it but against it, and hence he does not act rightly.395 Human agents are to

be self-regulating, not externally regulated.

In contrast to this sort of motivation, Husserl describes active motivation as a

motivation which is a conscious and active position-taking and habituation towards

authentic values.396 Active motivation is, then, a matter of the connections of reasons

between the positings and position-takings of the I.397 Rather than allowing the course

of ones actions to be determined through passively giving way to various elements,

active motivation is a matter of actively striving for values in their authenticity. What

this means is that, far from positing values in a voluntaristic fashionas one interested in

an objective and non-skeptical ethics of value might initially fearactive motivation, by

means of its active striving to coincide with the true value of a thing, supplies the

connection between the volitional act of the ego, in the I will to do such and such, and

the rational reason actually to perform the given act, i.e. the value in its essential validity

as a value. Active motivation is thus a case of actively seeking values in and for

themselves and as such. Husserl finds in this form of motivation the epitome, on the one

hand, of the wholly free volitional act and, what is the same thing, of the act performed

with reason. It is, for Husserl as well as Scotus, then, the capacity for acting fully

autonomously. Moreover, as Husserl writes, herein the true man finds his salvation

395
Scotus, Quodlibet,18.12.
396
HUA XXXVII, 108.
397
Melle, 6.
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[Seligkeit], it is the salvation of moral autonomy in the liberation from all sensuous

slavery.398

a. Affectio Commodi and Affectio Justitiae

Returning to the noetic powers of the will as they were expressed in the analysis

of Scotus ethical theory, it would be of use to determine the extent to which this theory

can further serve to illuminate the phenomenological analysis of ethical motivation as set

out by Husserl. To the extent that Scotus theory of the two affections of the will already

represents a highly sophisticated, and perhaps, as I would suggest, even more

sophisticated, version of Husserls theory of passive and active motivation, it stands to

reason that a return to the understanding of Scotus affectiones will allow us an

opportunity to further clarify this distinction between the types of motivation as they

stand in relation to values in such a way as to be able to derive an explicit sense of moral

normativity from them in ways at which Husserl seems still only to be hinting.

As Scotus explicitly states, the affectio commodi represents that domain of the

will which intends and is motivated by the values of things purely in their relativity as

goods to the peculiar manner in which humans exist and live out their lives in the world

as psychophysical beings. It is a layer of passivity within the willthe wills still being

determined by nature and natural proclivities. It is the natural tendency of the will to

determine itself through its desires for other things according to ones own wishes,

drives, needs, benefits, etc. The affectio justitiae was, for Scotus, the epitome and highest

level of human freedom articulated and expressed in the freedom to do the good for its

398
HUA XXV, 280: darin findet der echte Mensch seine Seligkeit, es ist die Seligkeit der
sittlichen Autonomie in der Befreiung von aller sinnlichen Sklaverei.
 317

own sake by means of the recognition of the fact of the goodness of the ends of ones

action even apart from the relativity of this good as a good for me. The affectio justitiae,

inasmuch as it is an active inclination towards the just good, the good in and for itself, is

an active love for things inasmuch as they are goods for themselves. It is the freedom of

the will, then, to determine itself not according to its own wishes, but freely to determine

itself according to the truth of being and the truth of value. It is clear, then, that the

affectio commodi represents the passive, irrational motivation of the Husserlian

phenomenology of the will. Furthermore, the affectio justitiae very clearly has the same

characteristics as Husserls active, rational motivation.

In terms of morality, then, one has a responsibility, if one is to be a fully free and

rational agent, to establish for oneself a freedom from passive motivations and to reduce

every passive motivation to a fully active taking-an-interest-in just goods in and for

themselves. As was already mentioned in connection with the Scotistic theory of the

will, however, it is simply not possible nor desirable to do away completely with the

passive stratum of the affectio commodi within ones moral life as a rational, free agent.

Rather, the affectio commodi in the morally formed subject remains as the passive

underbelly of the active willing the good for its own sake of the affectio justitiae,

operating under the recognition that doing what is morally correct, while perhaps not

beneficial to me in terms of adding to my pleasure, my security, my social position, etc.,

is nonetheless always a good for me inasmuch as it establishes the process of my

becoming as a morally good individual and of bringing me into salvation, in the

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Husserlian idea of Seligkeit or Glckseligkeit.399 It was for this reason that Scotus saw

the affectio justitiae as being, in a certain sense, the highest perfection and fulfillment of

the natural will for ones own benefit since the affectio justitiae establishes the possibility

of the wills freedom from being determined by the passively given desires of the human

subject. The fully rational individual, then, will be the one that recognizes in justice, in

the pursuit of goods for the sake of their authentic values above all, their only possibility

for freedom in the truest sense of the word, as a freedom from the self-dominion of the

passions.

On the other hand, the individual whose motivational life is always dominated by

the desire for what is beneficial to themselves will always lack freedom inasmuch as they

are not characteristically and dispositionally capable of choosing true goods, but only

goods in their relativity to naturally determined human drives. Such individuals are both

irrational, since they are not able to account for any kind of true reason in their

motivations being only passively motivated not by true values but only by values

conditioned by subjective desires, and they are immoral because they do not make use of

their freedom for the sake of the true good but essentially turn away from their authentic

freedom. For Scotus, then, and just as much for Husserl, the individual has the moral

responsibility to will rationally, and for that reason to make use of his or her freedom

through the authentic intuition of true values and through the self-regulation of their

399
This salvation, as shall be seen in the following chapter, while it could be interpreted
merely along the lines of something like a self-bestowed form of eudaimonia bringing
salvation from the chaos of conflicting motivating factors in human life brought about
through moral self-regulation and implying nothing of a religious salvation from sin,
damnation, etc., this will not ultimately be Husserls intention.
 319

passive drives and passive habitualities and convictions. The will to do the just good

must be the overarching moral disposition and source of motivation within the moral

subject. For both Scotus and for Husserl, the subject who does not do so will be both

irrational and immoral. Actively doing the good is the only true expression of freedom

and rationality and it is the recognition of the responsibility to be a free and rational

individual that will provide the initial way into the discovery of the grounding principles

of morality. At the same time, if we are to accept this differentiation of rational and

irrational sources of motivation as providing an insight into what is moral and immoral at

its motivational level, we must recognize that there is still already a basic operative

presupposition of the essential positive moral value of freedom and of the actualization of

true personal freedom for which the failure to realize this value would itself represent a

negative value which will have to be further drawn out later on in our discussion of the

issue of personal vocation as a domain of moral inquiry and moral self-determination.

15. The Scotistic Phenomenological Analysis of the Ethical Act

If it has been possible up until now to provide something of a phenomenological

articulation of the proper dispositions of the morally good will and the possibilities and

responsibility of the free, rational self-determination of the moral agent according to true

moral norms which has provided a broad view of the dispositional life of the moral

individual which are the prerequisites of proper moral decision-making, then it now

becomes necessary to provide a detailed articulation of the moral act itself. It will only

be by picking out the constitutive elements of the individual moral act in general that it

will be possible to provide a final clarification of the interrelations of the values of

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axiology and the values of ethics. Moreover, by means of a phenomenology of the moral

act, it will also be possible to recognize and pick out the various elements that must be

considered in processes of moral decision-making which will allow for a proper

understanding of the meaning of the idea of moral goodness as a kind of proportionality

in human acts. Finally, the phenomenology of the moral act will provide the possibility

of situating the question of ethical normativity within the concrete volitional life of the

moral subject. Of course it still can only do so in a limited way inasmuch as our concern

is ultimately for the constitution of a moral life and not of individual moral acts as such.

Individual moral acts, while certainly definitive position-taking acts which constitute the

general moral character of the individual, are not definitive of the total moral value of the

individual as such. Rather, it is perfectly possible for a basically morally good man to

commit a great moral evil in a single moral act, just as much as it is possible for a morally

bad man to perform a morally good deed. Nonetheless, a phenomenology of individual

moral acts is a necessary preparation for a full-fledged phenomenology of the moral life

itself towards which individual acts are always ordered.

A detailed phenomenological analysis of the moral act, however, is not to be

found readily available in any of Husserls writings, or at least not in those currently

available. Rather, if we are to look for a description of the structural features of the

moral act, our sole guide in this connection will have to be Scotus, whose analysis of

moral activity carries out a phenomenology of the acting person in profound detail. This

analysis can be called phenomenological, moreover, precisely because of the fact that

its overall methodology closely resembles the Husserlian methodology of eidetic analysis
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pursued by way of an analysis of intentional structures of subjective acts and also pursued

in conjunction with an eidetic variation of the phenomenon in pure phantasy in order to

seize upon the morally relevant moments of the total act-structure of individual volitional

performances. In following Scotus analysis, it will be necessary, first to distinguish the

various elements which distinguish a volitional act as moral in the first place. Having

clarified the particular region of moral activity, then, it will be possible to recognize the

various constitutive features of moral activity specifically.

a. The Structure of Acting and the Task of Right Reason

It seems clear, for Scotus, that whenever we are talking about a moral act, we

cannot be referring to any kind of act in which there is a basic natural necessity operative

for the subject of the act. That is to say, for an act to be morally relevant, it must first and

foremost be an act in which free choice is a real possibility. Thus, Scotus writes that,

one could, it seems, find an indifferent act, namely, whenin relation to all its

causesit is of a determinate species in the category of nature.400 Now, this would

exclude from moral consideration any aspect of ones bodily life, for example bodily

reflexes over which the human agent has no free volitional control. These remain

morally neutral, moreover, even in situations where such wholly natural activities might

result in detrimental consequences for oneself or another. For instance, if while driving

some involuntary bodily reflex causes me to swerve, hitting and killing a person on a

bicycle, such cannot be considered a moral act, regardless of however much

psychological feelings of guilt I might subsequently endure over the event. Therefore, it

400
Scotus, Ordinatio II, d. 41, (DSWM, 179).
 322

seems that the primary element constitutive of the morally relevant status of the act is the

freedom of the will either to act or not to act and either to act in this way or in another.

However, the human subject has at his or her disposal such acts which, although free in

this way, do not need to be considered morally relevant. For instance, to use a variation

on the example already given, if I choose to pay heed to the beauty of Botticellis The

Birth of Venus as I walk by it in the museum or instead hurry on to admire

Michelangelos David, there is no need, here, to distinguish the act, although it is

properly represented as a free, indeed rational, act, as being morally relevant. Rather, it is

the case that, where morality is concerned, I am perfectly free to admire either of

Botticelli or Michelangelos masterpieces without any moral detriment to myself in

preferring one to the other. What this means, for Scotus, is that moral relevance arises

only in the context of an act in which one finds among the various elements of volitional

activity a question of the appropriateness or inappropriateness of the particular act to its

various elements. Appropriateness, moreover, implies the notion that there is a

correct option or options for my volitional activity and inappropriateness implies that

there is an incorrect option or options where the moral value of the act is concerned.

The introduction of moral relevance, i.e. of a moral value at stake, into ones

subjective volitional life takes place, then, only inasmuch as one can begin to evaluate the

fact that reason in the form of the intellectual virtue of prudence actively makes demands

upon the subjects acts of volition. The task of such an evaluation is, for Scotus, the task

of what he calls right reason, or reasons judgment about how properly to establish the

appropriate proportion of elements in a given volitional act. Therefore, if there is no

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place for the activity of right reason in a given volitional act, then there is no demand of

appropriateness, and thus no moral relevance. However, Scotus does not by any means

want to argue that such indifferent acts can be found to be the majority of free, rational

choices. Moreover, even the question of the admiration of a great work of art can, from a

certain perspective become morally relevant. I can admire the work of art to such a great

extent that it becomes a kind of idolatrous object of worship, for instance, in which case I

am performing an irrational act that is inappropriate to the nature of the object as

precisely a work of art and not as a divinity. Without proceeding too far too quickly in

spelling out the broad range of morally relevant questions which are involved in human

activity and the ways in which this seemingly morally indifferent act of admiring artwork

can quickly be subsumed into a moral framework, it is enough to see here that the moral

relevance of an act will have to be understood as a multifaceted phenomenon with a

complex structure. We shall have to turn, then, to the concrete explication of this

structure and the layers of moral relevance which it implies prior to moving any further.

i. The Act Directed to an Appropriate Object The Generic

Goodness of the Act

Keeping in mind, here, that the particular kind of goodness that we are after in the

analysis of the moral act is not the essential goodness of a things being good according

to its mode of being, but rather the accidental goodness of an acts relation to things,

Scotus argues that, an act by nature is apt to be in agreement with its agent as well as to

have something suited to itself. On both counts, then, it can be called good with a
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goodness that is accidental.401 What Scotus is arguing here, is that the nature of a

particular class of acts, e.g. eating, will have a kind of suitability to the agent who

performs it, i.e. the act of eating is suited to the kind of existence possessed by animate

creatures, and will have an appropriate object which is properly suited to the kind of act

in question, i.e. food. Now, whether or not the creature who performs the act is a human

being, i.e. a rational animal, or an animal which does not possess powers of discursive

reasoning, the action which is suited to the nature of the agent and which achieves its

appropriate objects will be said to be good in a natural, or essential, sense because the act

will have achieved what it is naturally supposed to do. Scotus argues that,

Those with sense knowledge alone somehow apprehend the suitability of

the object of their action. But whether or not they judge the action
appropriate, the goodness of the action does not transcend the natural.
Others act by virtue of intellectual knowledge, which alone is able to pass
judgment, properly speaking, upon the appropriateness of the action. Such
agents are suited by nature to have an intrinsic rule of rectitude for their
actions. Only they can have an act whose goodness is moral.402

Human beings, then, inasmuch as reason provides itself with the possibility of judging

the appropriateness and inappropriateness of the relation between the act, the agent, and

the object, is able to recognize that there are certain rules of rightness which are intrinsic

to the nature of the agent, the act, and the object which places certain demands beyond

the merely natural upon the agent in the course of his or her acting. Scotus argues in this

connection that, it is not enough that the agent have the ability to adjudicate the

appropriateness of his acts. He must actually pass judgment upon the act and carry it out

401
Scotus, Quodlibet, 18.9.
402
Ibid., 18.11.
 325

in accord with that judgment.403 From this, Scotus concludes that it is possible to see

here the fact that moral goodness cannot emerge upon the scene of action until there is

the possibility and activity in the rational creature of what he calls right reason, or

reason which makes judgments about the rightness and wrongness of the relations of

human acts.

Scotus argues that, if we wish to form a judgment upon the suitability or

unsuitability of an act, then the only knowledge which is required is, the nature of the

agent and the power by which he acts, together with the essential notion of the act. If

these three notions are given, no other knowledge is needed to judge whether or not this

particular act is suited to this agent and this faculty.404 Thus, Scotus concludes, from an

understanding of the nature of the agent, one can understand that there are a range of

certain acts which are not suited by nature to that agent, e.g. discursive reasoning is not

suited to the nature of a dog. At the same time, one can also form judgments on this basis

as to which objects are appropriate to a particular act or agent. He writes, [t]ake the act

of eating, for example. Food capable of restoring what man has lost would be its

appropriate object, whereas a stone or something nourishing for animals but not for man

would not be.405 Given, then, the understanding of the nature of the human being as a

human being given in acts of self-reflection, the human subject is capable of recognizing

its appropriate objects that are suited to it and its activity by nature. Inasmuch, then, as

403
Ibid., 18.12.
404
Ibid., 18.13.
405
Ibid., 18.14.
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the subject chooses an appropriate object which is suited to its nature, then, Scotus

argues, this choice of the object, first brings the act under the generic heading of

moral.406

For Scotus, the determination of an appropriate object for ones action is said to

bring the act under the generic heading of moral, or as having a generic moral

goodness because simply having chosen an appropriate object does not determine the

whole of the acts moral goodness. Rather, the act, is capable of further moral

specification in view of the circumstances in which it is performed.407 However,

without the presence of an appropriate object of rational free action, there is no

possibility of moral goodness at all, nor for a further specification and development of

moral goodness beyond the merely generic level. Thus, Scotus argues that insofar as we

still only have the choice of an appropriate object, the moral goodness of the act is really

only a goodness of nature because the agent has found an object which suits the

demands of the agents nature as well as the nature of the act which is its correlate.

ii. The Specification of Moral Goodness in Acts

a. Appropriateness of the End

The first way in which the generic moral goodness of the act is specified,

according to Scotus, is by way of the end for which the act is performed, i.e. the specific

value to be realized in the act which serves either as the rational or irrational motivation

for its performance. In this connection, given the nature of the agent, of the action, and

of the object, one immediately concludes that such an action ought to be performed by

406
Ibid.
407
Ibid.
 327

this agent for such an end, and that it ought to be chosen and wanted for the sake of such

an end.408 This is the condition for the satisfaction of the end being morally good. If the

end were, on the contrary, an end which ought not to be pursued, or if it is pursued for the

wrong reason, i.e. merely for the sake of the objects being beneficial for me without

reference to the question of whether or not I ought, from the standpoint of justice, to

perform such an act, then, although the object of the act might be suitable and provide a

certain generic moral goodness to the act, the lack of an appropriate end specified under

the proper just motives serves as a negation of that goodness. The action becomes, then,

in a very definite sense, morally deficient. Moreover, Scotus argues that the

circumstance of the end for the sake of which an action is performed is characteristic of

the specific moral goodness of the act not inasmuch as it is factually performed or not

performed, but rather of the act as willed and as related to this end by an act of the

will.409 As such, the mere intention to do something good is morally praiseworthy and

truly valuable to some limited degree even if one is physically or otherwise incapable of

succeeding in performing the act.

b. Appropriateness of the Manner of the Action

The second element which is determinative of the specific morality of the act is

the circumstance of the manner in which the action is performed. Scotus argues that,

[h]ow it ought to be performed we infer from all or from some of the aforesaid

408
Ibid., 18.15.
409
Ibid.
 328

considerations.410 That is to say, given the nature of the agent, the nature of the object,

the nature of the act, and the particular end for which the action is posited, the agent is

able to specify the particular manner in which the action ought to be performed in such a

way as to respect the appropriateness of each of the above elements. If, for instance, I

choose as the object of my action the task of helping my wife while she is cooking a meal

and my intention in doing so is to lessen her work in order to allow her more leisure time

to recover from a long day, yet the means which I choose this task is to insult her cooking

so that she leaves the cooking to me out of anger over my insults, then I have chosen an

inappropriate means to the accomplishment of the act. The manner of the action

possessing an appropriateness to all of the other elements of the moral act is thus a

constitutive necessity for realizing a morally correct and fully good action.

c. Appropriateness of the Time and Place

The last two circumstances which play a part in specifying the moral goodness of

an act are the appropriateness or inappropriateness of the time and place of the act. The

temporal position of the positing of an act is important for the moral goodness of the act

for Scotus because if I have determined to administer first aid to a person who has just

been in some kind of accident, for instance, and all of my motivations and means of

administering it are proper, yet out of negligence I administer it too late and the person

dies as a result, then there is a definite moral deficiency where my act is concerned.

Likewise, it is morally good to look after ones family, to show them care and concern on

a regular basis, yet if I choose as my moment to call a family member to see how they are

410
Ibid.
 329

the same moment that I am in the middle of a lecture, then I have chosen an inappropriate

time to do so and as such I have violated certain other moral obligations which I possess,

i.e. the obligation to devote myself to my students during the time in which they are

expected to be in class, and as such my act becomes morally deficient. Time is thus of a

definite importance for the specification of a moral act. However, Scotus argues, of all of

the various elements already enumerated, place is perhaps in general the most morally

negligible element. For instance, if a person is in imminent danger of dying and I choose

to help them, it makes no difference whether I choose to help them and we are in the

middle of the classroom as I am lecturing or whether we are out on the street when the

situation arises and I make my determination to act. There are, nonetheless, definite

circumstances in which place becomes considerably important for the morality of the act.

The morality of the sexual expression of love between a husband and wife, for example,

becomes vastly different depending upon whether the act is performed in the privacy of

their own home or whether it is performed in a public place in full view of children.

iii. Moral Goodness as a Relation of Proportionality in Acts

On the basis of this analysis, then, Scotus argues that, to be perfectly good, an

act must be faultless on all counts. Hence Dionysius declares: Good requires that

everything about the act be right, whereas evil stems from any single defect.411 What

this means, for Scotus, is that the moral goodness of a particular act is precisely the

relation of appropriateness obtaining proportionately between every circumstantial

element of end, or motive, means, time, and place according to the nature of the act, the

411
Ibid., 18.16.
 330

agent, and their appropriate objects. Without an appropriate proportional relation

obtaining between each and every one of the above elements in the complex act-structure

of human moral activity, the act cannot be said to be morally good. However, Scotus

makes a distinction regarding the different ways in which the act can be morally evil if

certain elements are disproportionately arranged in the act. He writes that, [b]adness

can be opposed to goodness in an act either privatively or as its contrary.412 That is to

say, either an act can be lacking a particular appropriate condition, as, for instance, when

the agent simply lacks the appropriate intention, the appropriate means for achieving his

or her intention, etc., but the intention, the means, or the time or place are not contrarily

opposed to what is appropriately called for in the act. Man is said to be bad, Scotus

writes, in this second sense if he has some vice, for though this implies a privation of a

perfection that should be there, a vice is certainly a positive habit. In the other sense,

man is said to be bad privatively if he lacks the goodness he ought to have, even if he

does not have the contrary vice or vicious habit.413 Thus, a person who lacks the virtue

of generosity insofar as they do not act generously but do not go so far as to steal from

others what is rightfully theirs is only morally bad in a privative sense. The person who

steals is morally bad in the sense that their moral habits and dispositions are contrarily

opposed to the virtuous state. It goes without saying that the evil of contrariety realized

by vicious acts and habitualities in human striving is greater than the privative evil

realized by mere sins of omission.

412
Ibid., 18.18.
413
Ibid.
 331

There can also be degrees of moral goodness and badness, then according to the

degrees to which the goodness or badness of an act are present in the proportionate

relations already discussed. That is to say, insofar as the act has an appropriate object in

keeping with the nature of the act and the agent, the act is said to be generically good, as

has already been said. This is the lowest grade of moral goodness, for Scotus.

Secondarily, Scotus argues that an act possesses virtuous goodness if it is good in all of

its various circumstances through the achievement of an appropriate proportionality

among all the structural elements of the act. Thirdly, the act can attain the highest level

of moral goodness under the form of the charitable act, i.e. where one performs a moral

act out of love for the good and love for God as the highest good.414 Finally, there is a

fourth grade of moral goodness referred to as meritorious goodness, which is,

goodness as ordered to a reward by reason of the divine acceptance.415 This is a

theological concept of goodness related to Scotus teaching on nature and grace and the

theological concept of Gods freedom. As such, we are not yet in a position to discuss

this degree of goodness and, consequently, it will be necessary to limit the discussion for

the present to the first three gradations of goodness. It is also clear that Scotus does not

regard meritorious goodness as an essential element of the morality of an action and as

such is not essential to the current investigation.416 The generic goodness of an act, then,

414
Mary Beth Ingham, C.S.J., The Harmony of Goodness: Mutuality as a Context for
Scotus Moral Framework, Sprit and Life: A Journal of Contemporary Franciscanism
3(1993): 76.
415
Scotus, Ordinatio II, d. 7, nn. 28-39, (DSWM, 173).
416
Ingham, The Harmony of Goodness, 75.
 332

can be called the, material basis for all further goodnesses in the category of mores.417

In contrast, then, the first degree of badness will be a generic badness, which is when

an act with only the natural goodness [of freedom] that would put it into the moral order

is bad because its object is inappropriate,418 either privatively or contrarily, one might

add. Secondarily, there is an inordinate badness in any act which, even if it possesses the

proper object, is done with improper circumstances. Thirdly, there is a badness of

uncharity in a moral act which comes in the form either of a privative lack of charity

towards God or in the full-fledged hatred of God. Finally, there is a demeritorious

badness which is likewise a theologically ordered concept of evil in which an act is of

such a kind that it is related to the divine as subject Gods free act of retribution. Every

act, then, will be either good or bad in various senses, and the moral goodness or badness

of an act can have various layers in different ways, i.e. either as being generically good

but inordinately bad or as being morally good and having a complex relation of suitability

under the auspices or multiple virtuous ends all simultaneously at work, as when one

performs an act guided simultaneously by two or more virtues. Scotus here gives the

example that, I go to church to fulfill an obligation in justice, because of obedience or

some vow. And I also go out of charity or love of God, to pray or worship him. And I

also go out of fraternal charity to edify my neighbor.419 To the same extent, if I am a

teacher, I can perform my act of teaching out of a genuine sense of care, concern, and

417
Ordinatio II, d. 7, nn. 28-39, (DSWM, 174).
418
Ibid.
419
Scotus, Quodlibet, 18.22.
 333

responsibility for my students, out of a sense that the education of the youth is beneficial

for the social and political order of the nation and the international community, as well as

out of a concern for taking care of my family where teaching is my economic means of

support. Thus, multiple motives can contribute to the performance of an act and, as

Scotus argues, the more morally good motives there are, the better the act is.420 We

might also add that the more morally good motives contribute not only to the

determination of a singular act, but to the constitution of virtuous habits across time, the

more the individual as such takes on the moral value good in a comprehensive manner.

A final word must be said, then, given the recognition of the fact of multiple

motives present in a single action, about the particular relation of values as they are

present in my moral activity. This will provide an opportunity to clarify the, until now,

obscure relation of axiological values to ethical values in Husserls philosophy.

Generically, the act is said to be morally good because the act has seized upon an object

which is appropriate to the act itself and to the agent according to its nature. The object

is good for the agent precisely because of the fact that it is both an object possessing

axiological, i.e. essential, value as well as the fact that, in subjective relativity, its nature

is such that it is a benefit for the agent. The true moral goodness of the act, however,

requires that the axiological order of the goods which are the objects of the act be

regulated by a value operative at a higher level. This is precisely the moral values, or

moral disvalues, depending on the moral goodness or badness of the act, of the intention,

the end for the sake of which the person is striving. The end is the aspect under which

420
Ibid.
 334

the object is intended as the value towards which an action strives and as such is precisely

the subjective manner in which the axiological world is ordered as possessing a hierarchy

of values. If, then, the axiological world is ordered objectively, i.e. according to the

guiding principle of the affectio justitiae, then the ends of volition place the axiological

goods which are the objects of moral activity into their proper order. The proper relation,

then, between ethics and axiology is one of the regulation and ordering of axiology

according to the higher, regulating and ordering values of moral life. The task, then, of

the moral life as well as of the practical discipline (Kunstlehre) of ethics which seeks to

be a guide for the concrete moral life will have to be that of finding the highest and most

appropriate ends for the whole of human life and not only for individual acts taken

merely in their individuality apart from the whole life-history of the individual human

person. It will be these ends, these values, which will be the highest and most normative

values of human existence under which and through which all other axiological values

become ordered as relevant to the overarching demands of morality. We must thus now

turn to precisely this question.

16. Finding Appropriate Ends Vocation, Values, and Love

Husserl approaches the task of finding the appropriate ends of human life, the

ends which are particularly normative in their valuative positions as ethical oughts, by

way of a meditation on the metaphor of the professional vocation (Beruf). Capitalizing

on the results of his earlier phenomenology of values as the correlates of acts of

valuation, acts which are fundamentally describable in terms of the loving desire for the

value in question, Husserl comes to the realization that the normative force of moral
 335

values must be, in a very real sense, derivable from the acts of love which brings them to

givenness in the first place. Moreover, recognizing, as Scotus had already done, that it is

precisely the higher ends of the virtues that possess the overarching regulative function of

setting the axiological values of the world in their proper essential order for the subject,

Husserl comes to the conclusion that a moral way of life must be regulated by

specifically these sorts of ends. This is, in a way, how he attempts to articulate individual

human vocations. It will be through the concept of vocation that Husserl will take an

initial step towards the clarification of the ground of universal moral normativity.

a. The Analogy of Vocation: Professional Vocation as Regulating a

Particular Lebensform

For Husserl, the choice of a professional vocation is not a merely incidental or

passing decision with no consequences for the course of ones life, but rather will set the

stage for almost the whole of ones waking life. As Henning Peucker writes, by

deciding for or against a certain profession we also govern our lives in accordance with

the ideas that we connect with this profession. This means that, in choosing a profession

we also choose a certain form of life (Lebensform).421 Corresponding to the variations

present in every vocation as a form of life there will also be evident variations of

definitive ideas associated with those forms of life. It is these variations of defining ideas

and the values which they represent which explain the reasons why one person is

attracted to this vocation and that person is attracted to another. Every vocation,

therefore, represents a very particular range of values and ways of life.

421
Henning Peucker, From Logic to the Person: An Introduction to Edmund Husserls
Ethics, The Review of Metaphysics 62 (2008): 323.
 336

What this means, for Husserl, is that the choice for a vocation is the correlate of a

specific act of love, which is the motivation for the choice of the vocation, for this

particular range of values. Inasmuch, then, as ones life is defined by a vocation and,

moreover, inasmuch as the vocation is grounded upon an originary act of love for a

particular range of values, one actively regulates ones life through the living out of the

vocation informed by the vocations specific guiding values. To the extent that one

makes a choice to live according to a vocation, ones love for that vocation and its

guiding ideas imposes upon the subject a normative ought to fulfill the demands of the

vocation. In other words, writes Janet Donohoe, behavior is in some part dictated by

the realm of value that one adopts, either for example, being soldierly or being

priestly.422

Husserl, discussing the way in which the tradition of family life and the vocation

to ones family regulates the sorts of goods which the family-member pursues, writes in

the third Kaizo article that, under the manifold figure of such a form of life, we make

an excellent type stand out, excellent through the peculiar way that a personal value-

decision becomes decisive for a self-regulation of the whole personal life.423 It is the

love for ones family and for existing in a family group that determines and regulates the

manner in which one comports oneself to ensure the proper flourishing of the family.

422
Janet Donohoe, Husserl on Ethics and Intersubjectivity: From Static to Genetic
Phenomenology (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2004), 131.
423
HUA XXVII, 27: Unter den mannigfachen Gestalten solcher Lebensformen heben wir
einen ausgezeichneten Typus hervor, asugezeichnet durch die besondere Art, wie eine
persnliche Wertentscheidung bestimmend wird fr eine Selbstregelung des ganzen
pernlichen Lebens.
 337

This is, moreover, a self-regulation which will motivate the person, under particular

circumstances, to place the needs or benefit of the family before ones own, to deny

oneself certain pleasures or pursuits for the sake of the family, and to pursue certain other

ends purely out of the demands imposed by the primordial act of love which the call to

family life constituted in the first place. Likewise, if I love the value of being soldierly,

then I will always shy away from any kind of personal actions which would fail to realize

this value or which would realize the negative value of being unsoldierly. It can be

seen, then, that in the choice of a vocation, such a love for a realm of value gives life an

encompassing, rational goal.424

b. Inadequacy of Vocation for the Absoluteness of the Ethical Task

It is clear, however, from Husserls writings that he does not intend to develop a

normative ethics on the basis of professional vocations alone, and this is a point in which

Janet Donohoes otherwise very valuable study, Husserl on Ethics and Intersubjectivity:

From Static to Genetic Phenomenology, is markedly deficient. Donohoe seems to take

vocation as already operative at the absolutely normative, ethical level such that when a

woman is faced with a conflict between the demands of the vocation to be a mother and

the vocation to be a professional philosopher, to use her example, each of which carry

with them a kind of absolute normativity as ruling forms of life, represents a genuine and

rather tragic moral dilemma.425 However, for Husserl, vocation is merely a stepping-

stone along the way towards the development of a theory of ethical normativity and of a

424
Donohoe, Husserl on Ethics and Intersubjectivity, 130.
425
Ibid., 134f.
 338

fully ethical self-regulation. The choice of and adherence to a vocation is a kind of

rational self-regulation according to a range of true values. However, as a vocation, it is

limited to the particular individual proclivities of a purely personal life. Each vocation, it

would seem if we understand vocation in the usual sense of the term, is specific, at most,

to the type of person that one is and the sorts of values which one happens to love. This

would seem to indicate a kind of subjectivism or relativism at the heart of ethics which

Husserl would not want to allow. It also would tend to create more irresolvable moral

dilemmas than seems strictly necessary from the standpoint of moral experience. It is

difficult to see how a defined, universal ethical call could be developed on the back of

such a theory. However, if we understand that Husserl means to study vocation not as

definitive of the whole moral sphere but rather as a merely, pre-ethical form of self-

regulation,426 then it will be possible to see that, for Husserl, the study of vocations will

be useful to indicate the way in which the general form of rational self-regulation

functions on the level of actual praxisi.e. through the love for a value which the

vocation marks out as the highest and most important and which subsequently informs

and regulates the rest of ones characteristic choices and dilemmas and the way in which

one orders the world of axiological valuesso as to apply the results of such a study to

the universal ethical vocation of humanity, the form of life of a true humanity.

i. Two Senses of Vocation: Profession and Universal Calling

The first step in a study of vocations must involve distinctions at the essential

level pertaining to the meaning of the term vocation as such. The reason for such a

426
HUA XXVII, 26.
 339

distinction is, to a certain extent, more cultural and linguistic than anything else.

Regarding this issue, Edith Stein writes that, [i]n everyday usage, the hackneyed word

vocation retains little of its original connotation.427 This everyday usage pertains

particularly to the German term Beruf, which can be used to designate both a vocation

in the sense of a profession as well as a vocation in the more original sense of a calling.

Following her teacher Husserl, Stein understands the notion of a Beruf in a very specific

way, as a constellation of certain human actions and pursuits the general correlate of

which emerges from the enactment of the vocation in the form of a particular

professional ethos. An ethos, further, in Steins understanding of the term is meant as,

something which is operative within [the person], an inner form, a constant spiritual

attitude which the scholastics term habitus.428 As a spiritual attitude, an ethos or habitus

can take on a variety of different forms. Phenomenology itself, as a specific type of

theoretical spiritual attitude, has an ethos of its own and, as such, in Husserls

understanding of it, constitutes a genuine vocation.429 An ethos also designates a spiritual

attitude which pertains to temperaments which guide human behavior as well as to modes

of valuation. Returning to the practice of phenomenological analysis, it is clear that the

phenomenological attitude regulates thinking in a very definite way and becomes a self-

427
Edith Stein, Woman, trans. and ed. Freda Mary Oben (Washington, D.C.: ICS
Publications, 1996), 59.
428
Ibid., 43.
429
Husserl, The Crisis, 136. This was the specific reason why ethics can carry out its
own critique of phenomenology and why a self-critical, rigorous phenomenological
philosophy must pursue the development of a phenomenological ethics as has already
been seen.
 340

imposed and self-regulating inner form and habitus of human thinking. It is clear,

moreover, that this insight can be applied to all forms of spiritual attitudes and that any

spiritual attitude always bestows a certain uniformity to the constellation of acts

associated with the attitude and carried out at the behest of the particular attitude in

question. Moreover, when a spiritual attitude is taken not merely as a momentary

phenomenonas a brief flash of anger, melancholy, or cheerfulnessbut is an enduring

and constant spiritual possession, this spiritual attitude becomes a definite inner form of

the life of the person as sucha habitus in every sense in which the Scholastics used the

term.

Given, then, that the sense in which the phenomenologists want to use the term

Beruf is to designate very particular types of spiritual attitudes specifically as enduring

attitudes which enact a kind of inner regulative form of life within the subject centering

on specific values, the choice of a vocation in the truly ethically relevant sense is not

merely the same thing as choosing a career nor is a vocation the same thing as a job. Not

every form of employment constitutes a vocation, and this fact alone represents part of

the difficulty of developing an ethics with the notion of a vocation as the stepping-stone

towards designating the genuine sense of ethical self-regulation in human comportment

since this might seem to indicate that not every person has a vocation in this sense.

Eidetically, Stein argues that with respect to a professional ethos and the designation of a

profession as a genuine vocation, [w]e are able to speak of this ethos only when the

professional life demonstrates objectively a definite uniform character.430 The uniform

430
Stein, Woman, 44.
 341

character of the professional life refers to the temporal endurance and unity of the

spiritual attitudes involved in carrying out the profession with the attitudes outside of it

such that its regulation in working-time generally merges with those characteristic of the

persons extra-professional time. For example, a doctor who, after their usual working

hours comes home, may not perform the specific duties and actions of doctoring on his

or her family, but nonetheless the spiritual habitus acquired through performing the

general tasks of a doctortrustworthiness, caring, etc.will nevertheless remain as

enduring characteristics of the person who in professional and extra-professional life is a

doctor. The physician, then, generally possesses in all life activities this same

professional ethos. Whether or not such a professional ethos is present, however, is

dependent both upon the specific occupation of the person as well as the spiritual

attitudes which the person takes up in the process of carrying out their occupation. It

seems unlikely, then, that employment as a cashier at a retail store or as a cook in a fast

food restaurant could ever be called vocations in this specific sense of the term.

Nevertheless, it is also possible that someone can be a physician and entirely lack the

above-mentioned professional ethos. It is for this reason that Stein writes that,

[w]hoever regards his work as a mere source of income or as a pastime will perform it

differently from the person who feels that his profession is an authentic vocation. Strictly

speaking, we can only accept the term professional ethos in this last instance.431 In

other words, if a person goes through medical school merely as an investment for future

employment, if seeing patients is not a way of helping people, but is instead a prestigious

431
Ibid.
 342

and lucrative means of employment, then in no way will the spiritual attitudes which are

necessities for good professional comportment during the physicians working hours in

order to remain employed as a doctor continue after the working day ends. Such a

profession will still be self-regulating of behavior to a certain extent since the physician

will still want to act doctorial in every respect during the course of their professional

life and as such will act professionally in every way, curbing their urges to be

unprofessional towards patients or colleagues whom they do not like, for instance, but

this self-regulation will occur only for the sake of the value of continued employment and

thus of continued income or prestige and will end precisely where the situations and tasks

at hand no longer have any impact upon their professional career. It is not for the value

of being and acting doctorial in all that that implies and for the sake of which the

physicians profession exists. For a professional ethos to arise, then, as the correlate of

ones work, this profession must be experienced by the worker as a vocation in the sense

of an actual calling. With this recognition, Stein brings us to the original and

authentically moral meaning of the term vocation.

Generally speaking, then, a vocation in the sense of a profession like medicine,

teaching, or law, which one chooses only becomes a moral type of self-regulation at the

point at which it extends into the realm of a universal self-regulating form of personal

life. This universality is not, however, to be considered at the level of a universal law

applying equally and in exactly the same manner to every individual. Rather, it is a

universal inner form of self-regulation in the sense that it encompasses the whole life of

the person. It is here that a vocation becomes no longer a mere occupation which
 343

regulates a mere part of ones waking life, but becomes a moral calling the consciousness

of which becomes an enduring spiritual attitude, a universal ethos, regulating the whole

person in his or her comportment, temporally altering attitudes, and accompanying

valuations as rational sources of motivation. The central value or values of such a

universal moral ethos have certainly not yet been established in any sort of particularity;

however, it is still possible to say that, of essential necessity, the universal vocation must

be constituted by a personal love for the moral good as such which might become

specified according to the particularities of the individuals moral striving within the

context of personal life and its particular surrounding moral environment. If, then, the

professional vocation serves to indicate a kind of rational self-regulation according to

certain defining values within the limits of ones working life, then by way of analogy it

is capable of indicating the way in which the universal vocation will represent a self-

regulation in universal life.

However, leaving this issue aside for the moment, the authentic sense of the

universal vocation now brings up an altogether different problem apart from the question

of establishing suitable values in light of which we can establish a universal vocation

with an all-encompassing moral ethos as its correlate. The professional vocation only

becomes a vocation in the authentic sense when it is experienced as a calling of the

person towards a particular ideal value which the person is to realizeI feel myself

called to be a philosopher. Thus, the value which I must, in my everyday activities and

struggles, seek to realize in myself is the value of being a philosopher as a seeker of truth

and wisdom by personally embodying and enacting such practices as are essentially tied
 344

to the idea of philosophy. As Stein writes, what does to be called mean? A call must

have been sent from someone, to someone, for something in a distinct manner.432 The

question becomes, if the vocation is experienced precisely as a calling, then who does the

calling, and to what am I called? The question of the for something of vocation must be

broached in essential generality. Certainly, individuals can be called to different things.

One person is called to civil service, another to education, another to medicine. Others

seem not to be called to anything at all where professions are concerned. On the other

hand, their callings seem to be revealed more in family life or in religion. Others,

finally, seem to wander aimlessly through life, tragically, never realizing their potential

and never engaging in any lasting pursuit at all.

What seems to define each situation, however, is that the vocation is discovered

through personal interest. I become a philosopher because I love philosophy and the

value of truth, wisdom, and contemplation. What is more, I seem to be directed towards

this vocation because I possess a real potential to realize this vocation on account of my

interests, talents, upbringing, etc. The doctor, likewise, discovered his or her interest in

medicine and discovered the fact that they possessed the innate potential to realize their

experienced vocation. In every case, it seems that the person discovers his or her

vocation as representing, in a sense, an ideal value which one can realize in oneself only

by dedicating ones efforts towards its realization. When one sets out to fulfill their

vocation to medicine, they have in mind their own becoming as becoming in the direction

of a not-yet-realized idea of oneself, i.e. an ideal self, with the sense, myself as doctor.

432
Ibid., 59.
 345

Where the universal vocation is concerned, then, this ideal will be myself as moral in

every sense. For Husserl, this vocation is the call to realize the best possible version of

oneself, to realize ones ideal self not only in the ontic sense of some as yet irreal idea

of myself which I might realize according to my inclinations, but which is by no means a

moral idealthe idea of myself as a master thief, for instance, but the ideal self as

the highest value which I can attempt to realize in myself. Moreover, since this is the

best possible version of myself, the self in whose becoming emerges the self which I

experience myself as the one whom I am meant to be, it is likewise the true-self of the

person. Finally, since I experience this true-self, upon entering upon the discovery of

my universal vocation, as a value, and since all values are experienced as values in pre-

volitional acts of preferring, as previously discussed, I strive after the realization of this

true self in a love for this value which motivates me as a good in and for itself. I am

motivated towards the realization of this value by the value itself according to its

authentic essential goodness as the correlate of my affectio justitiae and I experience it as

a good for me to realize this value in the concrete, factually appearing self that I am in

this moment as the correlate of my affectio commodi. One can thus say that my true self

appears initially as the ideal source of my being called in this direction. It is because of

this calling by the individual and unique value of my true self that the realization of this

calling will be unique and specific to the universal. For me, my true self is realized by

becoming a philosopher, a husband, a father, a teacher, and by being the best possible

version of all of these in this complex ideal value. For another, this value is realized in

quite different ways. Nonetheless, the universal calling to and of the particular true self
 346

of each individual can and ought to be experienced universally among constituents of the

whole human race and in each it is experienced as the highest task of morality. We must

thus meditate on this problem in a little more detail.

a. The Call of the True-Self

As James Hart writes, the theme of vocation is a metaphor that joins with the

numerous other metaphors that grapple with illuminating the thick endlessly complex

referents of ones self and ones life.433 The true self is a self whom I, factually, am

not; it is a purely ideal, irreal value essence which presents, in its intention, a certain task

for me in a teleological direction of becoming. I am, thus, never fully accomplished in

realizing my true self. It is nothing more than a regulative ideal, and the moral task is to

be seen as an infinite one. In this connection, there is an extent to which we can say,

following Hart, that this notion of an ideal true self represents a vocation, a calling, in a

kind of first-personal sense: my ideal I calls me to myself.434 The complex

interactions here between various senses of self represents an essential analogy for

human personal existence inasmuch as it illuminates a very definite sense in which as a

person possessing a teleological direction, and one which is normative for me in the sense

of an end which ought in some sense to be realized, the self is inadequate to itself, and

this inadequation is, moreover, constitutive of what it is to be a finite human personal

subject not yet completely realizing its authentic potential. At the same time, the idea of

an, as yet, irreal true self which I am not but which is supposed to represent a kind of

433
Hart, Who One Is, Book 2, 260.
434
Ibid., 265.
 347

first-personal calling is both illuminative and problematic. It is illuminative to the extent

that it indicates moral becoming as a tending in the direction of a particular normative

value-idea which is meant precisely as the fulfillment of the person. To that extent,

happiness (eudaimonia) is determined as that which fulfills me particularly according to

my unique essential possibilities and not as something which is meant to determine me in

any way indifferent to my personal essence or over and against my unique ipseity.

On the other hand, it is problematic to the extent that I am driven merely by my

idea of myself which, because it is an infinite regulative ideal, is by no means clearly

determinate in its essential outlines. I seem to be calling myself to some vague and

esoteric idea of myself which, if it is not to be discovered by way of some arcane form of

self-revelation, might seem to indicate on the contrary a kind of open-ended personal

ideal which I positively construct according to the peculiar way in which I choose to

carry out my unique self-expressioni.e. a pure existentialism in the Sartrean sense in

which my essence would follow from my enactment of existence and not vice versa.435 If

such a self-created ideal of oneself were to be the sole ground of ones personal vocation

in the universal sense of the term, then it becomes difficult, if we are also to retain the

idea of morality as implying a strong sense of good and evil, to see how the ideal self

could be anything other than an expression of self-regulation according to a pure

willfulness for the character of ones being: I choose to be this or that simply because that

is what I want and for no more essential reason than the sheer fact of my will-act. For the

moral vocation to be absolute, it must be established in a different sense as essentially

435
Jean-Paul Sartre, Essays in Existentialism, trans. and ed. Wade Baskin (New York:
Kensington Publishing Corp., 1993), 35f.
 348

connected to the unique personal essence which I am in my pure individuality apart from

an idea of myself which is subjectively constituted in a constructivistic sense, as a mere

poesis as Hart notes. It must be connected to what we can describe as the horizon of

my individual selfhood, or with what Scotus would call, the haecceitas which

individuates me as this unique person with this true essence.

b. Haecceitas and the Horizon of the Universal Moral

Call

One of the ways in which Hart attempts to resolve the difficulty raised by

Husserls notion of the ideal or true self which serves as my moral call is in developing

this idea further along the lines of the Scotist notion of the haecceitas, or this-ness, of

the individual person. Hart often refers to this idea as the unique ipseity of the person

as an individual per se. It is by way of a recognition of the phenomenal givenness of the

unique ipseity or haecceitas of the person, and moreover, of the fact that this

phenomenon of my individuality is given to me as having a content which communicates

and guards my unique personal identity that we can begin to understand the possibility of

a genuine discovery, as opposed to a mere manufacturing, of the ideal sense of myself as

a value-possibility bestowing upon myself a call to the realization of my highest value.

If, however, we are to understand Harts solution to the problematic manner in which

Husserl poses this problem, then it becomes necessary to renew in a more explicit way

the general sense of Scotus notion of haecceitas, in order more fully to recognize the

phenomenological insight which this notion is capable of illuminating for us here.

Scotus is often remembered in the history of philosophy for his contribution to the

discussion of the problem of individuation, developing a new framework within which to

 349

think individuality and uniqueness. It would by no means be a stretch to say that Scotus

frames the question of individuation within a phenomenological framework, seeing as he

is concerned to show, on the one hand, that universality and singularity are meanings

subjectively constituted and bestowed upon things given to the intellect and, on the other

hand, that the thing itself is to be sought in its unique character as a unitary something

prior to universality and singularity.436 Individuality, in the sense of the unique

thisness of the thing which presents itself to me as a unitary something, is in no way

the opposite of the universal idea of the thing. Rather, all realia are originarily

indifferent to singularity and universality. These meanings are subsequently bestowed as

second intentional concepts of the things describedi.e. singular as a logical concept

applied to the idea of this rock here before me and universal as applied to the unitary

idea of humanity. Inasmuch as a concept is, in phenomenological language, an ideal

objectivity, a unique individual concept constituted within an individual human

consciousness, even a universal presents itself as an individual entity, i.e. as a this,

and thus as an entirely unique being. The question of the principle of individuation is

thus not about how the mind bestows singularity upon an appearing thing, but rather of

what the character of this originary ontic unity, which is the condition for the

manifestation of a phenomenal this, is in the first place. Through the course of his

analysis, Scotus comes to deny that thisness can be determined by any element of the

medieval metaphysical framework of matter, form, actual existence, quantity, etc.

Rather, Scotus comes to the conclusion that a thing becomes a this, i.e. its nature which

436
John Duns Scotus, Ioannis Duns Scoti Lectura, II d. 3 pars 1, q. 1 n. 32. (ed. Vaticana,
vol. XVIII, 1982).
 350

it holds in common with other things of the same kind is contracted to the level of

individuality by some determinate unique mode of being, which Scotus and, more so, his

followers came to refer to as haecceitas, or thisness. Haecceitas, Scotus describes

elsewhere, as the ultima realitas entis, or the ultimate reality of the being.437 The

precise character of haecceitas, however, in Scotus thought is not without its

controversies and debates, since Scotus seems to vacillate between different modes of

expression for this concept, and it can be argued that there is a deep insight in Scotus

reluctance and inability to articulate haecceitas in any sort of precise, defined way.

This discussion becomes relevant for our purposes here inasmuch as it becomes

important for the way in which the person in his or her individuality, in particular in the

individuality of his or her personal essence, is to become thematic for us as a unique

being with its own value-essence.

Before taking up this theme, it would be of some use briefly to bring to light the

Scotist understanding of the constitution of finite personality as it relates to the problem

of individuation. For Scotus, every real and ideal being is an individual. No being exists

as metaphysically universal, but only exists as an individual entity in a common or

universal relation. Every individual being, no matter what its nature may be, is individual

and as such possesses a certain incommunicability of its essential being to other things.

That is to say, this rock is not interchangeable with another rock except with respect to

the general values and purposes which the rocks are meant to servefor instance, these

two rocks both skip equally well on water, so it does not matter which one I choose to

437
Ordinatio II, d. 3, n. 188.
 351

throw into the pond; they are merely functionally interchangeable. The

incommunicability and irreplaceability of every individual being pertains to beings of all

kinds, classes, and modes. Persons, in particular seem to be exceptionally

incommunicable in the order of being, i.e. there is something wholly unique about each

and every person. Precisely what is incommunicable about persons, however, can only

be determined negatively. That is to say, it is clear that, inasmuch as each and every

human person can equally be designated according to the common nature human being,

human nature represents a communicable aspect of my manner of being in the world.

Likewise, certain accidental qualities pertaining to my appearance are equally

communicable, e.g. the brownness of my eyes. To that extent also, the I, whether

transcendentally or empirically conceived, inasmuch as it is taken as an I defined

according to its egoity, is itself a communicable structure of subjectivity taken in its

essential generality in phenomenological analysis and as such is not yet to be

distinguished as the properly incommunicable stratum of human subjectivity. Now,

Scotus is quick to recognize the essential fact that, epistemologically speaking, we have

no immediate knowledge of the individual as individual. Rather, the mind seizes upon

those communicable aspects of the individual thing which serve as descriptors for that

which we nonetheless experience to be a unique individual. Arriving at an understanding

of a thing as an individual requires a process of abstraction from the universal,

communicable aspects of the thing, so that [the intellect] might eventually understand

the singular, namely the nature which is [in fact] this but not qua this.438 The

438
Scotus, Questions on the Metaphysics VII, q. 15 n. 8.
 352

haecceity of that which is cognized, then, remains blurred in understanding and is only

approached by way of intentional concepts which, as intentional concepts, are always

communicable and can mean the individual in its haecceitas only through the medium

of the common. This recognition will have important implications for the way in which

the unique individuality of my personhood will present itself both to me and to others,

and thus for the possibility of an ideal or true self which is revealed therein as my

normative value-essence. Describing Scotus basic insight phenomenologically, we

might begin to say that haecceitas, or the individuating difference of a unique individual,

is not something perceived but apperceived, and it is necessarily apperceived in a

particular way, namely as what Husserl will describe in the figure of an internal

horizon.

For Husserl, objects in the world are cognized always only upon the backdrop of

the world. This world is always pregiven and is already developed, yet still not fully

determined as to its content; it is the field of possible determinations of content. In order

to describe this situation of dependence upon which all cognition of objects rests and to

which all experience refers as a possibility, Husserl uses the metaphor of a horizon.439 A

literal horizon presents itself in vision as a field which moves off into space, becoming

more hazy, indeterminate, and vague the farther into linear space it extends. Even though

I can gradually move into my horizon, the horizon remains before me in its total

indeterminacy. At the same time, new objects crop up upon and out of the horizon and

become distinct and determinate for me as I move towards it. So also the phenomenal

439
Husserl, Experience and Judgment, 32.
 353

world as a whole gives itself as a horizon in which both perceptually and ideally objects

and objectivities reveal themselves upon the backdrop of the indeterminate possibilities

afforded by the multiplicities of interconnections of worldly being. This multiplicity

reveals the world not only as a single horizon, but as a world constituted out of a

multiplicity of horizons. Husserl further distinguishes between external and internal

horizons. An external horizon is one which contributes to the determination of an object

but which nevertheless is not co-present with the object.440 An internal horizon, on the

other hand, is in the background and calls forth an active apprehension, the putting-into-

relation of the thematic object with its surroundings, and the apprehension of the

attributes and the characteristics which are relative to it.441 This is precisely the role

which haecceitas plays in Scotus theory of cognition. Inasmuch as the haecceity of a

being can never be distinctly cognized or perceived as such, it is always in the

background of the perception and cognition of an individual contributing to the cognition

of an object. It is precisely by way of the consciousness of the horizon of individuality

that it becomes possible to mean an object as an individual this. Haecceitas, then, is a

constitutive necessity for the possible experience of any being whatsoever. The

individual, incommunicable uniqueness of the object is always there for consciousness,

always contributing to the meaning of the object, and yet for itself, it is only grasped

indistinctly and in profiles. One might even say that it is more felt than perceived when

given in experience. This feeling of the incommunicability of a being, then, might very

440
Ibid., 150.
441
Ibid.
 354

well prove to be shown forth originarily precisely in the feeling of the value of the object.

We shall lay this question aside for the moment, however, as the full consequence of the

Scotistic notion of haecceitas within a phenomenological, ethical setting has not yet been

fully articulated.

Inasmuch as we are concerned here not with the possibility of a recognition of

individuality in any being whatsoever, but are specifically concerned with the

individuality of the person which allows the uniqueness of the ethical call to each and

every individual personal subject, we need to focus in on the implications of the

Scotistic/phenomenological articulation of individuality as it touches upon the

individuality of persons. It would seem to follow that, for Scotus, any attempt to

understand that which is uniquely personal and individual about oneself will ultimately

be faced with the problem of articulating a seemingly infinite horizon of experience. I

cannot understand myself in my unique personality, or at least I cannot understand my

uniqueness and individuality clearly and distinctly. Rather, I can only approach my

individuality indirectly and by way of what phenomenology refers to as adumbrations

(Abschattungen), or incomplete profiles. Abstracting and synthesizing individual

adumbrations of self-intuition, we can piece together a merely incomplete picture of

ourselves and who we are as individuals. At the same time, Mary Elizabeth Ingham

argues that the Scotistic notion of haecceitas, suggests that each being, and particularly

each free, personal being, possesses a dimension which it alone can reveal.442 That is

to say, each and every individual person seems to have some individuality which is

442
Ingham, C.S.J., John Duns Scotus: An Integrated Vision, 210.
 355

wholly unique and which shows forth an utterly unique element of being, the total

revelation of which could be considered an authentic value which poses itself as a

genuine ought-to-be in the order of freedom. According to Ingham, Scotus

understanding of haecceitaspoints to his concern for the person as the locus of

ontological and moral goodness.443 In this manner, Ingham interprets haecceitas as a

genuine moral principle. Each individual person ought to manifest and reveal their

individuality to themselves and to the community as a unique facet of being which is

itself a value to be fully realized. However, this leaves us as individuals with a peculiar

problem inasmuch as we must account for who we are as individuals in the first place.

Even if we are to grant that our individuality is a real value and that the manifestation of

this individuality realizes an ideal ought-to-be, how are we to recognize our

individuality if, as seems to be the case, we are unable to approach our individuality as

anything other than an infinite horizon upon the backdrop of which we seem to perform

human acts possessing the sense of personal and individual I-acts?

It seems evident from the way in which individual personhood becomes

characterized in the above discussion that if it is the case that haecceitas only ever gives

itself as a horizon and the ultimate reality and identity of myself as an individual personal

subject can only be described along the lines of the adumbrations of my personal self

which become manifested by way of my personal acts and the history of my volitions and

value-directions which acquires the objective meaning of my personal character, then

I become recognizable to myself and to others in the twofold setting of the actual

443
Ingham, The Harmony of Goodness, 63.
 356

intuition of my concrete acts and in the abstraction and objectification of the individual

self as the subjective X who performs these acts. In this setting, others and I acquire

an idea of myself which, as an ideality, serves as an intention of my real personal self

that, as subjective objects, may contain genuine differences. For instance, the idea that an

adolescent has of themselves is often very different from the idea that their parents have

of them, and, one can also say that, more often than not, the idea which parents have of

their children, acquired through more penetrating and open understanding of the manifest

character, actions, and habits of the child, are often discovered to be the more accurate.

This experience reveals an important insight, namely that the idea of a person can have

varying degrees of adequation to the actual reality of the person. I may completely

misunderstand myself in my unique individuality and someone else may, relatively

speaking, understand me perfectly well. On the other hand, I can be completely

misunderstood by others while I understand myself perfectly well, again relatively

speaking since the horizon of my individuality is, for essential reasons, never exhausted.

Finally, and most tragically, one may be completely misunderstood by oneself and by all

other individuals in the community and as such will fail forever to reveal the unique facet

of being and value which one is.

Max Scheler argues that there are two basic methods for coming to an

understanding of the individual self of an other. The first involves an inductive method

in which the actions, beliefs, utterances, habits, and dispositions of the person become

totalized and stand as an X which serves as an approximation for the character of the
 357

personal self who stands before me.444 Within such a framework, the idea of the other as

an individual is a mere approximation of the others character as it can be gleaned from a

limited exposure to the life and actions of the other person. As such, it is subject to

revision just as much as a scientific hypothesis is subject to revision following upon the

acquisition of new and contradictory scientific data. Moreover, just as any scientific

hypothesis can be biased by the world-view, presuppositions, or ideology of the scientist,

so also can the subjective desires, conditions, and assumptions of the onlooker interfere

with the proper understanding of the other self before them. Regardless of the presence

or absence of obfuscating conditions for the induction of the true character of the other

as an individual person, however, it is certain that, even if the knowledge of a man

achieved by this method reached an ideal perfection, we might never obtain a total

picture in which we have evidencethat only this man and no other fits this picture.445

In other words, the inductive method of characterization remains merely hypothetical and

never intends the individual self as individual in its individuality.

In contrast, Scheler argues that an individual can be given to us in an altogether

different manner of cognition. This manner of givenness is still only apperceptive, in

keeping with the horizonal character of the essence of the individual person as such, but,

he argues, the individual person is still, uniquely and unmistakably given to us.446 This

second manner of givenness is a kind of intuition of the other given in acts of empathy

444
Max Scheler, The Idols of Self-Knowledge, in Selected Philosophical Essays, trans.
and ed. David R. Lachterman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 94.
445
Ibid.
446
Ibid.
 358

or sympathy with the other.447 We have an image, or a kind of pictorial

representation, of the individuality of the other and it is only by presupposing the

presence of such an image of the other that any inductive approach to the construction

of his or her character becomes meaningful.448 Such an intuition of the individuality of

the other is enacted in the experience of the peculiarities of their gestures, in their facial

expressions, in the manner of their look, etc. It is also given, Scheler argues, in his or her

intentions. Given that each and every person is unique, and so also the experience of

each and every individual is likewise unique, one can only express the character of this

form of intuition in more or less opaque generalities. However, Scheler does succeed in

using such generalities to describe a common type of experience in which just such an

intuition is made evident when he invites us to imagine the following case:

Someone tells us that this or that thought has been expressed, that
someone has had this or that experience of pity or joy, whatever it may be.
In a case like this we are aware that our knowledge is incomplete, that we
still have no notion of the concrete incident. So we ask, Who said this?
Who has had this experience? And if we recognize the individual in
question from our own experience, then the content of the tale is
immediately augmented by a knowledge which could not have been

447
It should be noted that the preference which we shall have from now on for the
language of the intuition of the individuality of the other represents a marked departure
from Scotus understanding and use of the term in his philosophy, in particular, given his
rejection of the possibility of anything other than sensorial intuition in this life and,
arguably, the intuition of the contents of memory. Apart from this, intuition is said by
Scotus to be impossible as a purely cognitive function pro statu isto. This conclusion can
be set aside, however, given the fact that there was no problem of empathy or sympathy
in medieval philosophy and thus no realm of questioning within which the possibility of
an intuition into the other could be discovered in philosophical questioning. This
recognition and the extension of the Scotist notion of intuition beyond the limits which
Scotus philosophical and theological assumptions imposed upon him represents a true
contribution on the part of phenomenological philosophy to Scotist thought.
448
Ibid., 95.
 359

obtained from any more detailed description of the experience. Indeed, if

it was so-and-so, then I understand it, then I know what was involved.449

In such a case as described above in which a story about someone suddenly makes sense

because of our knowledge of the person involved, this sense is given to the story

precisely by the intuitive understanding of the person who is the subject of the story. It

cannot be a mere product of an inductive characterization, because then such a story

would have to serve merely as more data for induction towards the continued constitution

of the character of the other such that it would not give sense to the story, but rather the

story itself would give further sense to the character. The intuition of the individual as

individual, then, carries with it the possibility of an evaluation, judgment about, and

comparison of the actions of the individual person only if it is possible to recognize the

actions of the person as more or less complete presentations of the individual essence of

the person in question.450 These are more or less complete presentations not inasmuch

as they are mere data for the inductive construction of a hypothetical character which

approximates the individuality of the person, but rather inasmuch as they are experienced

as essentially related to the individual as such and serve to provide something of an

image or pictorial content to the infinite horizon of the individual essence of the

person. The individuality of the person remains ineffable, precisely because even as a

pictorial content, the individuality of the person is an infinite horizon which

pictorially possesses its hazy lines. Nevertheless, I can experience an action as more

or less congruent with the essence of a person. This congruence is not given as a

449
Ibid., 95-96.
450
Ibid., 95.
 360

logical agreement with a defined and articulable essence in the way in which

reproducing is an action which logically agrees with the defined and articulated essence

of an animal, but rather is a congruence which is purely felt by way of the comparison

between the individual essence and the value-character of the action. Such a comparison

is possible, moreover, for essential reasons. Scheler argues that, just as much as, we

know from a small section of a curve the law of its curvature as a whole, so here we bring

to sight the totality of the individual essence.451

The essential insight to be recognized here is the fact that relationships, either of

others to me or of me to myself, which are founded upon either of the two different

modes of cognition of the individuality of the other as described above will provide the

possibility of an understanding of the individual with different modes of adequation.

Ultimately, those relationships which typically reveal an intimate and authentic intuition

of the individual as an individual are relationships of love for the real person. Love, as

both Husserl and Scheler recognize, serves as an expansion of the environment of the

person which opens up possibilities of recognizing the true values of things and,

following upon this, their true being and essence which before were not incorporated into

the framework of the environment which was conditioned by the subjectively relative

wants and needs of the individual. Thus, a father who wants his son to follow in his

footsteps in running the family business, ignoring his sons wants and dreams and what

will be truly fulfilling to his nature, does so because he does not really love his son, but

loves only the inductively constructed idea that he has of his son which conforms more to

451
Ibid.
 361

the fathers own personal projects and desires for the future and not to who his son really

is. On the other hand, a father who encourages his son to become a teacher, for instance,

because his son seems to manifest certain talents and a teacherly character does so

because he loves the actual person of his son and not a fabricated idea of what he would

like his son to be. At the same time, what the father in this second case seems to be

recognizing are the ideal possibilities, conditioned by the freedom of the person, which

his son seems to manifest and the various values of these possibilitiese.g. that the son

would be good at such and such; that it would be good for the son to become such and

such; and that the son could do good in and with such and such an occupation. Husserl

and Scotus could thus both agree here with Scheler when he writes that, the act through

which the ideal value-essence of the person is revealed is the full understanding of the

person based on love, [and] this pertains equally to the revelation of this essence through

oneself and through others.452

This is not to say that the horizon of individuality is fully traversed by love.

Spouses, for instance, are forever evolving in the understanding of the other as love also

evolves and deepens, even as the totality of the individual essence of the other is always

pictorially presented as the constant object of my love which changes and evolves. The

other is intimately revealed and yet forever remains a mystery to the lover. This is

equally true of myself; but, where real self-revelation is possible, it is realized only by

way of the ideal value-essence which seems to disclose, in love, the genuine and true

being of my person in my haecceity. A full and distinct self-revelation of my genuine

452
Scheler, Formalism, 491.
 362

value-essence could only exist as the correlate of an infinite act of love which traverses

and delimits the infinite horizon of my individuality. This insight will become important

in the following chapter. For now, it must be posed only as a limit-case upon the

otherwise finite, and thus severely limited, understanding of my personal uniqueness and

value which exists for me in the life which I enact in and toward the world. However,

returning to Harts application of the Scotist notion of haecceitas to the resolution of the

problem of the ideal self, it begins to become possible to see the ethical implications of

the notion of haecceitas as both Hart and Ingham want to apply them.

If haecceitas is, as Ingham interprets it to be in Scotus work, fundamentally to be

understood as the truly unique facet of being which only this individual can reveal and

which revelation contributes to the realization of the highest fullness of being in this

world, the absence of which would be a real disvalue, a genuine evil, then it becomes

clear that haecceitas is to be understood as a value which carries an ought-to-be-

realized as part of its essential content. Haecceitas is my individual essence as this

unique individual that I am, and as such, it stands in essential correlation with the actions

which essentially proceed from me. Hart argues that it follows from this understanding

of haecceitas, or individual ipseity as he calls it, that at the level of my individual

essence, a vocation arises from me and for me which serves as the ideal ought which I am

to realize through my individual action. That is to say, haecceitas is itself a unique moral

calling to me in the universal sense of vocation described above. This idea makes sense,

he writes, if one is prepared to hold that even the secret implicit workings of the minds

rumination in passive synthesis are already stamped by not merely laws of association
 363

and an unfathomably subtle implicit pre-propositional logic, but these forms of law-

likeness themselves are pervaded by the willing will as the basic dynamism of the

personification of the original myself, which ultimately flows from my individual

essence.453 That is to say, for Hart, haecceitas and its dynamic expression in free willing

is the horizon against which the law-likeness of my thinking and my affection is

constituted in passive synthesis. This is the same as saying that my individuality

conditions the way in which I desire as well as what I desire. More to the point,

haecceitas contributes to the way in which I love, and thus the way in which I value.

Thus, Hart quotes Husserl as writing that, I am who I am, and the individual

particularity shows itself therein that I, as who I am, love exactly as I love, and that

precisely this calls me and not that.454 The values which I am to realize, then, in

carrying out my calling, are conditioned by who I am in my unique individuality and not

by some impersonal, formal moral law which applies equally to everyone. I am to realize

my ideal essence through the revelation of my unique individuality, not by way of

capriciousness as the self-gratifying expression of a meaningless individuality, but by

way of a true expression of who I am precisely in what I am called to be. This calling

addresses me absolutely, according to Husserl. That is to say, it addresses the totality of

who and what I am and it addresses itself to me as an absolute ought, an absolute moral

obligation, precisely because I love and value the becoming of my true self as the highest

value I can realize under the circumstances in which I live out my life.

453
Hart, Who One Is, Book 2, 273.
454
Husserl, B I 21 III, 60a, quoted in Hart, Who One Is, Book 2, 274.
 364

The task of the ethical life is thus, for Husserl, an absolute task. It is, in his

words, a matter of, hold[ing] fast to the absolute ought [recognized in ones universal

vocation], and that is itself an absolute willing.455 However, as Hart argues, so long as

vocation, and even universal vocation is taken merely in the first-personal sense of my

ideal essence calling myself to realize my true self, it seems to remain a fundamental

problem for the grounding of ethical normativity, or the oughtness of moral living,

inasmuch as it is difficult to see how my being called to myself by myself and by myself

alone could possibly impose an absolute ought upon me. Moreover, even if we accept

Harts claim that this is simply a condition of my haecceity that I am essentially bound to

love my ideal self in this way and that I will consequently experience the call of my true

self as an absolute ought, this still ignores an important facet of the absoluteness of the

ethical life and of the ethical ought. This facet is to be found in the fact that vocation is

not experienced purely as a first-personal calling. There is an essential second-personal

aspect of it as well for which an ethical phenomenology must account. This second-

personal aspect of the universal vocation will have to be approached in greater detail in

the following chapter. Continuing to follow Scotus and Hart in the resolution of these

issues, haecceitas and love will continue to represent fundamental principles of morality

which will provide a basic intuition into the ultimate grounding of the moral life. It is to

these issues which we must now turn.

455
Husserl, A V 21, 15b., quoted in Melle, Husserls Personalist Ethics, 15.
 365

Chapter VIII
Love, Faith, and Salvation The Ends of Ethics

17. Love as the Basis of Ethical Normativity

In contrast to the pre-ethical forms of life of the professional vocation, Husserl

wants to mark out the domain of the ethical as a form of life which is self-regulating in

every possible free, active capacity of the life of the human subject. For Husserl, such a

life of self-regulation would constitute a form of self-regulation according to the guidance

of reason in such a way that human behavior would be, fully justifiable in all of its

activities.456 Husserl will develop a theory of universal self-regulation by means of what

Peucker describes as a, universalization of the self-determination that already takes

place in our professional life.457 The moral life is the universal vocation, in the sense

discussed in the previous chapter, as self-regulative behavior which is universal in its

extension to the whole of ones life and actions, not merely restricted to a certain

vocational time (Berufszeit). As was seen, then, from the analyses of the concepts of

both volitional motivation and of vocation, the process of rational self-regulation occurs

only on the basis of the motivation of an active love for a value which is capable of

extending its order and normativity over and above the other values which crop up in the

motivational life of the person within a given value-situation and temporal setting. As

such, if we are to consider this discovery phenomenologically, then three basic

conclusions will become evident when probing the question of the constitutive basis of

456
HUA XXVII, 30, quoted in Peucker, From Logic to the Person, 323: [I]n allen
seinen Bettigungen voll zu rechtfertigen.
457
Peucker, From Logic to the Person, 324.
 366

the normativity and universal extension of the ethical form of life. In the first instance,

remembering that value appears only as a correlate of feeling or love for a value and,

moreover, that self-regulation with respect to a range of actions which are essentially

interrelated with a value only occurs on the basis of an act of love for the value in

question, then it must follow that the universal domain of the ethical must be constituted

by an active love for moral values. Secondly, to meet the standards of absoluteness

which characterize ethical normativity, the love which picks out this determining value as

the norm by means of which all the active and free dimensions of its life are regulated

must be itself an absolute act of loving. Thirdly, it follows that the value which is

capable of extending its regulative order over the whole range of other values which are

both actual and possible in the life of the moral subject must itself be an absolute value

over and above all other values in order for it to be, in all truth, worthy of such an act of

absolute lovei.e. for it to be an adequate correlate of an absolute act of love.

For Husserl, then, love can be seen as the basis of all ethical normativity as the

basic principle and form of moral self-regulation. This will be true of the universal

vocation to the ethical life just as much as it was earlier seen to be true of the self-

regulating processes of the individual professional vocations. That is to say, in the

vocation to being a philosopher, for Husserl, I must love the value of truth and the value

realized in the pursuit of truth. Moreover, as the life of Socrates shows, the philosopher

must love truth even above his or her own personal health and well-being, social

standing, etc. As such, the love for truth makes it such that the true philosopher who

takes his or her vocation seriously, i.e. who truly lives out the vocation to philosophy, is
 367

incapable of placing his or her own interests before interest in the truth. In the vocation

of philosophy, then, love for the truth is the primal basis of the self-regulation of the

professional life of the philosopher in the midst of his or her vocational time. Moreover,

in the ethical life, love likewise represents the founding moment inasmuch as it is love for

the good which in every case constitutes the absolute guiding force for the self-regulation

of the whole life of the subject.

However, as will be seen, it is not enough for such a love, if it is to continue to

possess the absoluteness which is required by the authentic intuition into the call of

ethical normativity as an absolute ought, to have as its objective correlate an abstract and

purely universalistic notion of the good. Rather, as is revealed in the vocational life of

the family and of interpersonal life, loves which are experienced as truly binding are born

only on the basis of an interpersonal love. A notion of an abstract good which is merely

ideal and wholly non-personal will not, ultimately, be binding upon the rational

conscience of the ethical person. Rather, such an absolute love which founds all ethical

normativity will not arise for a purely conceptual good, but rather will only be binding

and have as its appropriate object the personal God who is the good in the highest

sense. If this is the case, then the issue of the grounding of absolute ethical normativity

in love taken precisely as an absolute love, and thus as a love which is directed at the

absolute and which, because the love itself is an absolute love involves the total being of

the person and which involves a universal self-regulation of the person in light of this

absolute love and the value which it intends, then we must presuppose three basic points

which will have to be investigated in detail. The first is that the love of God alone
 368

provides an adequate grounding for any kind of absolute ought, and thus that God must

be the fundamental reference point of the full-fledged ethical attitude as such. Secondly,

it follows that, as a universal vocation, I am called into the moral life in a second-

personal sense and that the subject who calls to me is God. This recognition will have

important implications for the concept of haecceitas as a moral value-horizon as

articulated in the previous chapter. Finally, it must be the case that faith in God is a basic

condition of the fully articulated ethical attitude as such and that, consequently, it exists

in essential interconnection with the religious attitude. Indeed, it will have to be seen that

these two attitudes are not even really distinct inasmuch as both intend God with the

religious act of faith as their founding moments. This last issue will form the basic

problem of our concluding chapter. However, for the present we will have to approach

the three issues of the love of God, universal vocation, and, and faith in detail in order to

fully articulate the ways in which they are each conditions of the experience of a true

ethical way of life which absolutely obliges me to its realization.

a. God as the Only Appropriate Object of an All-encompassing Act of Love

In an unpublished manuscript entitled, Ethisches Leben. Theologie

Wissenschaft, dated between 1924 and 1927, Husserl argues that God is the only

appropriate object of the sort of love which is demanded in order to ground an absolute

ethical normativity. Moreover, the eudaimonia, salvation, blessedness, etc. which is the

result of a life lived and fully self-regulated according to ethical norms can only be

achieved through a faith in God which likewise serves as the ground for the love of God

which is required for ethical living. He writes that,

 369

I can be blessed, and I can only be such in all suffering, misfortune, and
irrationality of my surroundings, when I believe that God exists and that
this world is Gods world; and if I will with all the strength of my soul to
hold fast to the absolute ought, and that itself is an absolute willing, then I
must believe absolutely that God is; faith is the absolute and highest
requirement. 458

God alone is the proper rational object of the love which grounds the absoluteness of the

ethical task because God alone is infinite and absolute in the way in which ethical

normativity is experienced. Moreover, when faced with the question, why be ethical in

the first place, in particular when it is so much easier not to be, God represents for

Husserl the only sufficient grounding principle. I act ethically because of a love for God

and the belief that God has arranged the world in such a way that it is only rational and

right to follow out the ethical injunctions which my love for God imposes upon me. The

sense and meaningfulness of the ethical failures which Western humanity sees all around

it in the present crisis of culture, for Husserl, can only have meaning upon the backdrop

of the intuition of the world, provided by a phenomenological inquiry given sense by

means of an abiding faith in God, that there is a teleological order to the world, that the

true destiny of the world and of rational, personal existence is to be found in Gods

salvation alone. Husserl argues this further in his exposition of Fichtes moral

philosophy when he writes that,

wherever we will to love something for us in pure love in itself, wherever

it pleases us to will something purely for its own self and wholly and not
at all as a mere means, and it pleases us in a measure eternally exceeding
all other pleasure, then we are certain that we have to do with an

458
Husserl, A V 21, 15b, quoted in Melle, 15.
 370

immanent phenomenon of divine being in the world: or as we can also say,

an absolute value.459

It is only, as Husserl had argued in the same text, in understanding ethics as a personal

duty to create a perfectly moral world-order, a Kingdom of God on earth,460 which is,

the only thinkable absolute value and end of the world, as such it is, however, the

ground of the actuality of the world.461 The idea and ground of the perfectly moral

world-order is, however, nothing other than the belief in God Himself as ordering the

world according to moral norms.

Christopher Arroyo argues, and rightly so, that, [t]he attempt to justify the

universality and necessity of the absolute ought by turning to an account of each

individuals inward calling of love, which is a reflection of the divine, is the result of

Husserls growing dissatisfaction with an ethics that relies on the categorical imperative

as its central imperative.462 However, it is precisely this move which Arroyo considers

so unacceptable and problematic and which, from his perspective, demands the reduction

of the Husserlian ethical theory to the status of merely an original attempt at the

elaboration of a basically Kantian ethical system by jettisoning what amounts to the

459
HUA XXV, 288: Wo immer wir etwas in reiner Liebe um seiner selbst willen lieben,
wo immer uns etwas rein um seiner selbst willen gefllt und ganz und gar nicht als bloes
Mittel und uns gefllt in einem alles andere Gefallen unendlich bersteigenden Ma, da
sind wir sicher, es mit einer Erscheinung unmittelbaren gttlichen Wesens in der Welt zu
tun zu haben: oder wie wir auch sagen knnten, eines absoluten Wertes.
460
HUA XXV, 291: eines Gottesreiches auf Erden.
461
Ibid., 277: Eine sittliche Weltordnung ist der einzig denkbare absolute Wert und
Zweck der Welt, als solcher ist sie aber der Grund der Wirklichkeit der Welt.
462
Arroyo, 66.
 371

central Husserlian thesis with respect to ethical normativitythat norms in ethics are

ultimately grounded in their absoluteness upon the inner call to the love of God and that

without such a ground, their absoluteness lacks a fully rational and justifiable

sensebecause he cannot see how such an account can actually provide for a

groundwork of positive, concrete obligations in individual situations. It must be

admitted, however, that Arroyo is partially justified in his criticism inasmuch as he notes

that Husserls justification of the absolute ought in light of an absolute love for God is

problematic to the extent that it is couched within the problematic context of an

exposition of Fichtean theology, resulting in a lack of clarity as to how Husserl conceives

of God at all. Interconnected with these issues are the way in which the idea of

salvation or blessedness is conceived in relation to the problematic conception of the

divine as well as the justification for the idea of a divinely given vocation to a true self.

In order to understand the problem as Arroyo sees it a little better, I will provide a brief

articulation of Fichtes religious philosophy and its apparent influence on Husserl.

In 1798, just before his subsequent dismissal from the University of Jena on

charges of atheism, Fichte was compelled to submit a public explanation of his religious

philosophy in order avert the charges that his transcendental philosophy was basically

atheistic. This he did in rather terse form in an article entitled, On the Basis for our

Belief in a Divine Governance of the World, and subsequently in a private letter written

to a friend which was also later published in 1800 in the wake of the atheism crisis which

had ended his career at Jena. The basic thrust of Fichtes argument is that, echoing Kant,

all previous attempts to demonstrate Gods existence have been inadequate and basically
 372

confused. It is not within philosophys job-description, so to speak, to demonstrate the

existence of something like God in order to convince anyone of his existence. Rather,

philosophy is concerned to provide a, derivation of the believers conviction.463 In this

connection, Fichte intends to provide an answer to the causal question, How does a

human being arrive at this belief?464 For Fichte, the only methodological starting point

for addressing this project of the derivation of religious belief is by way of an

investigation of morals. Thus, in a sense, morality provides us with a kind of way into

religion. The reason why such is possible, however, is because of Fichtes belief that,

from a transcendental standpoint, one can move by way of necessary deduction from the

necessity of my being free, to the prior condition that there is a moral world-order which

obliges me in the use of my freedom and that this moral world-order is the prior condition

of the totality of the sensible world as such. Thus, Fichte writes that, [o]ur world is the

material of our duty made sensible.465 We are morally compelled to believe in the

sensible world as a condition of our selfhood and freedom, without which we must

renounce our belief even in our own existence. The irrationality of such a move,

however, Fichte considers adequate proof that the sensible world cannot be anything

other than a result, in a sense, of the pre-given moral order. Thus, he writes, when our

belief in the reality of the sensible world is viewed as the result of a moral world order,

463
J. G. Fichte, On the Basis for our Belief in a Divine Governance of the World, in
Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre and Other Writings, trans. and ed. Daniel
Breazeale (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1994), 143, [Johann Gottlieb
Fichtes Werke, vol. V, 178; Grudlage der gesamten Wissenschaftlehre, (348)].
464
Ibid., 144, [179 (348)].
465
Ibid., 150, [185 (353)].
 373

the principle of such belief can appropriately be described as revelation. What reveals

itself therein is our duty.466 The designation of the belief in the reality of the sensible

world following from the transcendentally prior moral world order using the religiously

charged language of revelation, here, is crucial for Fichtes theology. This can be

clearly seen in Fichtes next statements wherein he writes that, [t]his is the true faith.

This moral order is what we take to be divine. It is constituted by right action. This is the

only possible confession of faith: joyfully and innocently to accomplish whatever duty

commands in every circumstance.467 Faith in the moral world order is, then, according

to Fichte the entire domain of faith, and God as the object of faith is nothing other than,

this living and efficaciously acting moral orderWe require no other God, nor can we

grasp any other.468

Fichtes God, then, might very well be seen as quite different in character from

the understanding of God in traditional theology, although he wishes to deny that it alters

anything in the nature of religion as such.469 While God, as moral world order, is

understood as an active ordering (ordo ordinans),470 and thus as a dynamic principle at

the heart of world-being and actively revealing world being as well as my individual,

466
Ibid., [185 (353-354)].
467
Ibid.
468
Ibid., 151, [186 (354)].
469
J. G. Fichte, From a Private Letter, in Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre and
Other Writings, trans. and ed. Daniel Breazeale (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing
Company, Inc., 1994), 166, [Johann Gottlieb Fichtes Werke, vol. V, 386; Grudlage der
gesamten Wissenschaftlehre, (378)].
470
Ibid., 161, [382 (373)].
 374

personal being, it is not for that reason by any means substantial, personal, or to be

worshipped in the traditional sense of the word. Rather, the divine, is constituted by

right action, and, becomes living and actual for us, when we do our moral duty.471

Service to God is rendered in no other way than in the joyful and pure performance of

duty. The divine is the fructifying principle which brings my moral volitional

determinations to fruition in the same way that there is a fructifying principle which

causes plants to grow, blessing, in a sense, the act of the farmer who sows and

waters.472 In addition, following Kant, Fichte designates the divine as the dynamic

ordering principle which ensures the basic proportionality between blessedness,

salvation, and eudaimonia, on the one hand, and moral action, on the other.473

Now, it is clear from Husserls language of the absolute value as the moral world

order described in terms of a Kingdom of God on earth, as well as from the way in

which Husserl views a pure act of love to be an immanent phenomenon of divine being in

the world, that Husserl is in some degree influenced at least by Fichtes terminology as an

efficacious means of expressing the basic idea that faith and love for God is the highest

requirement of the moral life. The issue that this raises, however, as Arroyo argues, is

that there does not seem to be any true motivation in love for some abstract moral world

order to dedicate myself absolutely to this order apart, that is, from the correlating

salvation or eudamonia which it seems to guarantee. The consequences of such a

471
Fichte, On the Basis for our Belief in a Divine Governance of the World, 150, [187
(353-354)].
472
Fichte, From a Private Letter, 168, [388 (379)]
473
Ibid., 172, [392 (383)].
 375

theory, then, would commit Husserl to a position closer to the hedonistic eudaimonism

that Kant rails against than Husserl would be willing to hold. The only counterbalance to

this position, however, within Fichtes framework would indeed be that of the formalistic

ethics of the categorical imperative as Arroyo wants to suggest. It is thus clear why he

finds the easy solution to the problems of Husserls ethics in a return to Kant. However,

such a move becomes entirely unnecessary if we first recognize the fundamental

inadequacy of Fichtes theology and its implications, and also, if we recognize that we

are not limited in our options here to a crude either/ori.e. either Husserl keeps the idea

of an absolute ought, but jettisons the idea of God as the basis of ethical normativity in

favor of the Kantian categorical imperative, or he retains God but loses the absolute

ought.

Turning to the first issue, this is not the place for a systematic critique of Fichtes

ethical philosophy and theology. However, it is enough to indicate that, whatever Fichte

may mean by his moral world order, it is certainly not what all men call God, as

Aquinas would say. In his effort to deduce the causal explanation for the possibility of

belief in God, Fichtes notion of religious belief and of religious acts in general, the

value-correlate of which is always the value-modality of the holy and not the moral

however much both he and Kant always wish to conflate the two, is basically

reductionistic. Fichte, and Kant for that matter, both indicate that all religion has as its

basic essential moment the performance of moral duty. However, Rudolf Otto, Max

Scheler, and Paul Ricoeur all argue convincingly that the original experience of God in

religious acts possesses moments in which we can speak of religion and its value-domain
 376

of the holy as being originarily pre- or extra-moral. In this connection, Otto writes in

his seminal work in the philosophy of religion, The Idea of the Holy, that, the common

usage which equates the meaning of the word holy to perfectly moral is a late

development in the history of religion and of religious culture. The moral dimension of

holiness, Otto argues, is not exhaustive of the meaning of holiness, but, rather, it includes

an additional meaning, or an overplus of meaning, as he describes it. Moreover, he

writes that, holy, or at least the equivalent words in Latin and Greek, in Semitic and

other ancient languages, denoted first and foremost only this overplus: if the ethical

element was present at all, at any rate it was not original and never constituted the whole

meaning of the word.474 Ricoeur argues effectively the same point in The Symbolism of

Evil when he writes that the commandments given in the divine covenant with Israel were

not originally understood along the lines of a moral law. Rather, the ethical character

of the word of command is already a product of abstraction.475 He goes on to write that,

474
Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. and ed. John W. Harvey (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1958), 5. See also Max Scheler, On The Eternal in Man, trans. and ed.
Bernard Noble (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1972), 169ff, where he discusses the merits
and phenomenological character of Ottos description of the holy as an irreducible
value-modality given as the correlate of a specific act-type, i.e. the essentially religious
act which itself is also not reducible to the moral act, but which is nonetheless related to
the moral in a specific way. James Hart makes it clear that Husserl also was both aware
of and approved of Ottos intuition into the essential meaning of the holy as seizing
upon the original phenomenological-noematic material. He criticizes Otto, however,
for much the same reasons as Scheler, namely that Otto has not pursued this material in a
fully phenomenologically authentic manner, failing to recognize the true essential
necessities of religious consciousness, but anchoring such consciousness in
psychological feeling instead (see James Hart, A Prcis of an Husserlian Philosophical
Theology, 167n.).
475
Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. and ed. Emerson Buchanan (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1967), 52.
 377

sin is a religious dimension before being ethical; it is not the transgression of an abstract

rulebut the violation of a personal bond.476 Correlatively, this means that the Holy

Will who produces the Law is likewise not identical with the idea of a Moral

Lawgiver.

The implications of the recognition of the holy as a distinct value-modality over

and above the reality of the moral world order is to be seen in the fact that the

fundamental acts wherein the holy is given in its originary sense, and not in the

trivialized form in which Fichte describes it, are not in moral comportment or in the

intention towards duty, but rather in religious acts of faith477 and worship. Whatever

the moral world order in the Fichtean sense might be, then, it cannot be describing the

religious God in any way, shape, or form. From the standpoint of religious

consciousness, if there is, in fact, anything like the moral world order, it can only exist as

an order essentially distinct from the being of God, yet following from Gods creative

activity, as an extension of divine being, but not as its sum total. Moreover, it follows

that, following out the course of a full-fledged phenomenology of religion by way of an

intentional analysis of religious acts and their meaning-correlates, the essential place of

God as the ultimate object of moral activity and as the ground of moral normativity need

not in any way be tied to the inadequate theological framework provided by Fichte. In

other words, Husserl need not stand or fall with Fichtes God. Moreover, he need not be

476
Ibid.
477
Which likewise is not reducible to mere belief in some mere propositional content,
but is an absolute crediting (credens), a giving over of oneself in the totality of ones
personal being to the being of the divine as effective in the whole of ones own life.
 378

limited by a Fichtean notion of salvation as the product of moral activity alone.

Precisely what salvation will mean, however, is better discussed in the context of the

investigation into the universal vocation to be discussed in the following sections. For

now, however, if we are to free up Husserls ethico-religious insight from Fichtes

problematic theological terminology, it might be possible to recognize an alternative

theological mode of discourse which would be able to articulate Husserls fundamental

point with respect to the divine grounding of the moral life in love with greater

success.478 In order to resolve this issue, which is to be considered the highest problem of

all ethical philosophy, without turning away from any essential part of what Husserl

positively wants to affirm as the groundwork of a phenomenological ethical philosophy,

it will be helpful to turn to Scotus one final time and to his discussion of the natural law

and its theological framework.

i. Scotus and the Natural Law

The basic challenge which Arroyos criticism of Husserl places at the feet of a

phenomenological account of the ethical life which follows along the same course as the

one plotted by Husserls fragmentary ethical theory is to provide an account of how a

defined ethical course for ones life can possibly be derived from some vague notion of

an absolute love of God as well as from the theory of a unique personal vocation given

by God such that an individual human being will readily be able to recognize the morally

478
In so doing, we may indeed have to free Husserl from Husserl, in the sense of setting
aside much of his descriptive language of the divine inasmuch as it lacks precision as a
mix of traditional theological language and Fichtean terminology, leading to a damaging
sort of ambiguity about the divine which can only serve to limit the ethical considerations
we are attempting to develop here.
 379

correct course of action for their lives. The general thrust of his argument is

epistemological, revolving around the question of how one is to know with certainty that

this is my vocation and not that. Moreover, how is one to know with any certainty that

the love of God implies that this particular ethical value is to be preferred to any other

value in the total range of possible value-modalities? On the one hand, we might have

reasons for questioning the basic un-thought which, as a central presupposition, underlies

Arroyos criticism here in hoping for a definite, almost propositional and apodictic

certainty with respect to the ethical life and ethical comportment and its attendant

valuations. In this respect, Arroyo criticizes Husserl for his discussion of the self-

discovery of the principles of ethical self-regulationviz. the love of God and the

realization of the unique, personal value-essence, my ideal or true self, which

constitutes my individual vocationin terms of an apparent reflection upon personal

inwardness as committing Husserl to a theory of mind which carries with it a strong

Cartesian undertone which is no longer supposed to be tenable in light of Wittgensteins

critique of the Cartesian legacy.479 Be that as it may,480 it would seem that Arroyos very

479
Arroyo, 67.
480
Whether or not Husserls ethics is justly criticized for being overly committed to the
Cartesian philosophy of mind is immaterial to the current investigation. I believe that the
preceding chapters have made such a criticism unnecessary as I have consciously chosen
to avoid any reference to an inwardness of the self as the basic region within which to
make the discovery of the ideal self, instead focusing attention on the pre-Cartesian
notion of haecceitas as the field within which my real value-essence is discovered. The
internal horizon of my unique ipseity is by no means restricted to a Cartesian
inwardness since, as I have argued, it can be the case that my haecceitas is first
discovered and communicated to me by othersparents, teachers, friends, etc.or that I
can discover the hazy outlines of this horizonal structure of my selfhood by way of the
history of my actions and their context in communal life. As such, we can say that the
 380

own criticism is itself a product of the Cartesian anxiety over the establishment of a kind

of mathematical certainty in all domains of human knowledge. This expectation,

however, Aristotle had already shown in the Nicomachean Ethics to be inappropriate to

the subject matter of ethics.481 The reason for this is that the concrete good is often

difficult to discern, and no amount of methodical training or refinement of our intellectual

technique can lead to apodictic certainty regarding the specific morality of my individual

actions or of the general course of my life. For that matter, even the Kantian formalistic

deontology to which Arroyo wishes us to return is incapable of providing anything but a

certainty of formal laws which, owing to their universal generality, would be just as

difficult and uncertain when applied to a concrete ethical case as Aristotle leads us to

believe that hitting the mean of virtue is.482 It is not at all clear, however, that Husserl

wants to demand that we remain within the confines of the apodictic horizon where

concrete ethical comportment is concerned, and thus it is not at all clear that he even

intends to do what Arroyo suggests that he fails to do in providing an epistemic answer to

the question of moral certitude from the standpoint of the concrete moral agent. If, then,

following Aristotle, we put aside the Cartesian anxiety which demands absolute certainty

in all things, at least where concrete ethical insight is concerned, it is still incumbent upon

us to provide some answer as to how the general value preference which stands under the

heading absolute love of God can provide for a self-regulation of the moral person

basic point of the Husserlian phenomenology of the ethical life and of ethical value by no
means stands or falls with Descartes as well.
481
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1094b.
482
Ibid., 1109b.
 381

which concretely impacts moral value-preference at every level in a manner that provides

material content to moral value-judgment which is essentially in rational harmony with

the authentic essential ordering of values such that we can speak meaningfully of what is

right and what is wrong in general and specific contexts. I would like to argue that

Scotus provides us with the necessary intellectual tools in order to provide for just such

an account of moral obligation which begins with the fundamental insight into the

absolute moral value of the love of God. In so doing, we will have to try to understand

Scotus basic point in his own terms, following out the course of his logical and

theological argumentation. In so doing, it will be possible to recognize the deeper point

for Husserl which Scotus theo-logic is able to unveil.

Contrary to the Thomistic theory of the natural law, which governs the morality of

human choice according to the notion that God establishes the moral law because the

principles of the moral law are good in themselves, Scotus holds to a conception of divine

volition as itself constitutive of the general framework of the moral world order.483 For

Scotus, the moral order, or the natural law, is not good in and of itself such that its

goodness is to be seen as the reason for Gods establishment of the moral law in the first

place. Rather, natural law is good because God, as himself the absolute source of all

goodness, ordains it. As himself all good and diffusive of all goodness, we can say that

the goodness of the natural law flows from the positive act of Gods creative command

483
This moral world order, recognizing the inadequacies of the Fichtean notion of
divinity, should not be understood in Fichtes sense as an ordo ordinans, i.e. as an order
which itself dynamically orders and fructifies human moral action and is the necessary
condition of all freedom, but rather as an ordo ordinatus, an ordained order which is
dynamically ordered in its structure by way of a divine agency which enters and acts in
human history.
 382

and from the creative activity of God acting in the world. With respect to divine volition,

then, unlike Aquinas, Scotus argues that the moral law stands more or less completely

under Gods creative power apart from the command to do anything which would

involve a contradiction. This is the one limit, if it could be called that, upon Gods

power. In developing his account of divine freedom and divine power, Scotus makes a

distinction between two various types of power attributable to the infinite and absolute

being of God. He writes that, [i]n every agent acting intelligently and voluntarily that

can act in conformity with an upright or just law but does not have to do so of necessity,

one can distinguish between its ordained power and its absolute power.484 Ordained

power, in Scotus usage, refers to the power to act in conformity with some already

established law, of whatever sort it might be. By contrast, absolute power refers to the

capacity to, act beyond or against such a law, and in this case its absolute power exceeds

its ordained power.485 Within finite beings, there are severe limits upon the capacity for

this kind of absolute power to exceed already established laws, except where morality is

concernedalthough the use of absolute power in acting against a moral law implies a

moral failure on the part of the finite being.

In the divine being, Scotus argues, we can make this same sort of distinction

between ordained and absolute power; however, for God, absolute power naturally

precedes the use of any ordained power. Gods ordained power is the power by means of

which he acts in conformity with what he has already established. This is the basis for

484
Scotus, Ordinatio I, d. 44, (DSWM, 191).
485
Ibid.
 383

the perceived timelessness of the moral law, then, inasmuch as God acts with firmitas,

or firmness with respect to the ordering of the moral good in his commandments.

However, according to Gods absolute power, the moral law is always at least potentially

subject to such power inasmuch as God can alter the moral law according to the changing

circumstances of history or according to the unfolding of his revelatory activity. As such,

the moral law in all actuality is not timeless at all, for Scotus. On the contrary, the moral

law can be seen as dynamic in its essential temporality and historicity. Scotus argues,

then, that God can act otherwise than is prescribed not only by a particular order, but

also by a universal order or law of justice.486 The constitution of the moral order of the

world, is then, the result of Gods creative activity, first and foremost. The only limits, as

was already said, are those established by the limits of whatever would involve a

contradiction. This will have particular implications for Scotus theory of the natural law

which will need to be spelled out and which will be particularly important for a deeper

explication of the role of love as the basis of all moral obligation and also as a self-

regulative principle in moral comportment and value-preference.

a. First Practical Principles of the Moral Law

Scotus argues that, a practical truth of natural law is either one whose truth value

can be ascertained from its terms (in which case it is a principle of natural law, even as in

theoretical matters a principle is known from its terms), or else one that follows from the

knowledge of such truths.487 As such, Scotus conceives of the natural law as a

486
Ibid., (DSWM, 193).
487
Ordinatio IV, d. 17, (DSWM, 195).
 384

rationally, philosophically ascertainable set of truths about practical action and the

obligations which obtain as normative upon the free practical activity of human volitional

life which as such do not depend strictly and purely upon any kind of supernatural divine

revelation. Rather, the natural law in its first practical principles will be open to human

reason. Distinct from the natural law, according to Scotus, is divine positive law, which

refers to any form of religious law which is not immediately derivable from the terms of

practical activity. By way of an example, Scotus points out that, it is not known from

the terms of the law that God ought to be worshiped by the animal sacrifices of the Old

Testament, and that for all times,even though these may be consonant with the law of

nature in the sense that they are not opposed to it.488 Such laws are given only upon the

backdrop of the natural law and, moreover, they are obtained as laws only by way of a

positive divine revelation. Where the natural law is concerned, however, since the moral

world-order is wholly dependent upon and subject to divine volition, a certain reduction

of the natural law to its first practical and only invariable principles is possible and

necessary to uncover the normative basis of any additional principles of moral obligation.

Following in the tradition of medieval theological interpretation, Scotus identifies,

to a certain extent, the commands of the Decalogue with the principles of the natural law.

However, the originality of his approach can be seen to the extent that, for Scotus, the

laws of the Ten Commandments must be differentiated according to the principles of the

distinction pertaining to the principles of the natural law as correlates of the two types of

power which obtain within divine acts of volition. Thus, the natural law will be

488
Ibid., (DSWM, 196).
 385

distinguished inasmuch as its principles are reducible to that which stands under Gods

absolute power and to that which does not. That which does not stand under Gods

power to alter the moral law will be understood, in Scotus teaching, as the fundamental

and normative basis of all moral obligation and as the formal first principle of the whole

of the law of nature.

Scotus method of procedure is to vary the content of the natural law according to

what is conceivable, as a kind of eidetic analysis on the basis of the free variation of pure

phantasy, to use Husserlian language, under the general notion of divine power. He asks

whether, under the same circumstances, God could, cause that act which is

circumstantially the same, but performed by different individuals, to be prohibited and

illicit in one case and not prohibited but licit in the other? If so, then he can dispense

unconditionally, just as he changed the old law when he gave a new law.489 Scotus

argues that, with respect to almost every prohibition of the law, i.e. the prohibition

against murder, against adultery, against theft, etc., it stands theoretically within Gods

power to dispense with them without involving God in any kind of contradiction. What

this means is that these prohibitions are fundamentally non-essential to the content of the

natural law except inasmuch as God persists in his volition that they should be binding

principles. On this basis, Scotus makes a distinction between first practical principles of

the natural law, which are those, known from their terms or as conclusions necessarily

entailed by them, as pertaining, to the natural law in the strictest sense,490 and

489
Ordinatio III, suppl., d. 37, (DSWM, 201).
490
Ibid., (DSWM, 202).
 386

principles of the natural law which are only secondarily and contingently derivative from

them. It is only those precepts which involve God as their direct object that will be

necessary and unvarying first practical principles of the law.

With respect to the first two commandments of the Decalogue, Scotus argues that,

if they be understood in a purely negative sensei.e., You shall not

have other gods before me and You shall not take the name of the Lord,
your God, in vain, i.e., You should show no irreverence to Godbelong
to the natural law, taking law of nature strictly, for this follows
necessarily: If God exists, then he alone must be loved as God. It
likewise follows that nothing else must be worshiped as God, nor must
any irreverence be shown to him. Consequently, God could not dispense
in regard to these so that someone could do the opposite of what this or
that prohibits.491

Within Scotus understanding, God is just such a being who absolutely must be loved and

must be loved in precisely the measure which is appropriate to Gods value, i.e.

absolutely. This follows purely from an understanding of what God is as the absolute,

infinite, and all-powerful God who stands in a personal relationship of love with the

creation which he forms out of an unrestricted act of absolute love. Therefore, were God

to command otherwise than that we should love him and him alone as God, an implicit

contradiction would obtain in that command, and, as such, it does not stand within Gods

power to make such a command. Every other principle of the moral law apart from the

principle that God is to be loved is fundamentally mutable at least so far as Gods

absolute power is concerned. The love of God is, therefore, the first and fundamental

absolute ought of the moral life, in Scotus philosophy and theology.

491
Ibid.
 387

b. Derivative Ethical Principles

Where the rest of the natural law is concerned, Scotus argues that the prohibitions

against murder, theft, adultery, etc. which contribute to the material content of the natural

law do not belong to the law, strictly speaking, i.e. in the sense that they are essentially

necessary components having no possibility of variation or alteration. Rather, they are

exceedingly in harmony with that law, even though they do not follow necessarily from

those first practical principles known from their terms, principles which are necessarily

grasped by any intellect understanding those terms.492 The only thing which follows

necessarily from the first principles of the law is that God ought to be loved, and ought to

be loved absolutely. However, every other law stands in a relation of harmony with that

first principle, even though they are not necessarily derived from it. They are, however,

to be considered as rational specifications of the first principle of the law. This Scotus

explains by way of an example.

If we recognize the fact that the first principle, or value, which forms the basis for

the constitution of a commonwealth is the notion that a community ought to be

established in such a way that it can live in peace according to the proper flourishing of

its members, then it does not follow necessarily or by way of purely logical deduction

from these terms that, everyone ought to have possessions distinct from those of

another, for peace could reign in a group or among those living together, even if

everything was common property.493 However, even though it is not a constitutive

492
Ibid., (DSWM, 203).
 388

necessity of the peaceful existence of a commonwealth, it is, nevertheless, exceedingly

consonant with peaceful living, that individuals should own their own property.494

Thus, even though there is no logical necessity obtaining between the terms of the

judgment that a commonwealth ought to be constituted according to the needs of the

peaceful coexistence of its members and according to their proper flourishing and the

judgment that there will be established laws constituting and respecting private property,

it is nonetheless the case that a kind of contingent agreement will obtain between them.

Moreover, inasmuch as the first principle of the constitution of a peaceful state forms the

normative rationale behind the constitution of laws establishing private property, it will

be the case that this secondary law will serve as a clarification of the first principle and, at

the same time will derive its normativity only from the normativity of the first

principle.495

To the same extent, then, where the moral law is concerned, it is consonant with

the principle that God ought to be loved that I recognize that I ought not kill my neighbor

and therefore it can be said to clarify the manner in which God is concretely to be loved

in the context of my finite life in the world that I also respect, love, and protect my

493
Ibid., (DSWM, 204). Scotus reason for concluding that private property is
unnecessary for realizing the value of an authentic commonwealth or community is
without a doubt determined by his personal experience and the way of life into which he
had entered as a Franciscan friar living in a community constituted by the determination
to live out a vow of evangelical poverty in which all property either was to be held in
common only or was to be used in common while actual ownership belonged to others
outside the Order.
494
Ibid. [My italics.]
495
Ibid.
 389

neighbor, that I respect the bonds of matrimony, that I respect the agreed-upon

proprietary rights of others, etc. Inasmuch, then, as each of these positive proscriptions

and their negative corollaries, i.e. the prohibition against murder, adultery, etc., are

clarifications of the universal principle God is to be loved, the normativity of these

secondary laws follows only upon the normativity of the first. What this means, then, is

that if God ought to be loved is not experienced as absolutely normative, neither will

the normativity of the proscription, Thou shalt not kill, be absolute in a strict sense,

however relatively or approximately absolute it may be experienced to be. A system of

norms would still stand in place were this the case; however, such norms would be

derived purely out of the self-interest of the individual, as was already seen to be the case

in Husserls analysis of hedonism, utilitarianism, egoism, etc. These norms,

nonetheless, are not normative in an absolute sense, but are only conditionally

normativee.g. I do not wish to be harmed; therefore, I ought not harm another and risk

the possibility of retribution. For ethics to be absolute in its ultimate normativity,

however, the absolute love of God must be its first practical principle. That being said,

following Scotus reduction to the essential elements of the natural law, it will be

necessary to understand that all those elements of the law which are not essential

elements are not, for that reason, dispensable at will, from a moral perspective. Even

though there is no logical necessity connecting the love of God as the first practical

principle and the rest of the moral law but only a kind of contingent relation of harmony

and specification, the rest of the moral law still holds absolutely on the basis of Gods

free creation of the moral world-order.

 390

Now, it should be recognized that the general thrust of Scotus argument here is,

by and large, theological. It hinges upon the theological distinction between Gods

absolute and ordaining power as well as upon the logical possibility of Gods

construction of a moral order and moral law other than the one which currently holds

sway. The crucial importance, however, of the argument for our purposes is that it seeks

to understand that aspect of the natural law which is specifically unconditioned and

unconditional. Peeling away the layers of logical possibility, Scotus aims at and

determines the unconditional moral requirement and the highest moral value which

brings it to appearance for us. While Scotus application of this insight, however, is

mostly concerned with resolving issues related to the theological interpretation of the

natural law and the particular status of the natural law in light of divine absolute

poweri.e. Scotus is basically concerned to show that the moral law in its present form

is not a limiting factor on Gods power in general, issues with which a

phenomenological ethics is not directly concerned, two themes emerge from Scotus

discussion which can allow us to apply Scotus insights, if not his theological arguments,

to the resolution of the Husserlian problem. Setting the issues of divine power and the

legitimacy of the Decalogue as a divinely revealed articulation of the natural law aside,

Scotus leaves us with two basic themes which can be used as philosophical tools for

subjectively determining the general moral principles which can provide at least a

probable rational guide for concrete moral activity and self-regulation in light of the

Husserlian/Scotist insight into the absoluteness of the value of love for God as the

founding moment of the moral life. These two themes include the themes of
 391

consonance as a form of moral evaluation in light of the recognition that God presents

himself in his essence as to-be-loved-absolutely (Deus diligendus est) and the idea of

subsequent moral judgments as specifications of this moral first principle, and thus as

valuatively, and therefore normatively, interconnected with this first principle.

Mary Elizabeth Ingham, focusing in on the general form of Scotus argumentation

where the moral law is concerned, argues that at the heart of Scotus moral philosophy is

a basic musical, artistic paradigm. Morally good acts which do not follow logically from

the basic proposition God is to be loved are nevertheless held as morally valid, for

Scotus, not on the basis of an insight into an independent validity, from a moral value

perspective, which they are to possess, as in traditional natural law theories, but because

as values, we can say that they are intensely consonant (valde consonant) with the value

of the divine.496 Literally, the word which Scotus repeatedly uses in moral

argumentation, consonare, means to resound or to sound-with, figuratively having

the meaning of to accord or to be in harmony with. According to Ingham, a number

of implications result from the use of this kind of musical imagery in Scotus argument,

in particular in the manner in which it invokes metaphors of harmony in musical chord-

structures. The imagery of such metaphors is particularly useful inasmuch as it pertains

to the idea of a self-regulation which follows upon the insight into the love of God as the

founding value, the dominant tone in the overall chord structure of individual acts and

its place in the overall melodic structure of my individual life. What is to be regarded

as a legitimate value for my pursuit within the overall moral framework, then, would be

496
Ingham, The Harmony of Goodness, 53.
 392

whatever seems to harmonize best with the foundational value of God as revealed

through love. The determination of which values harmonize at all and which ones

harmonize best, however, is not a matter for pure rational deliberation. Rather, the

fundamental harmonic interrelation of authentic values requires, first and foremost,

experience of moral exemplars coming in the form of exemplary model persons in the

Schelerian sense whose lives serve to indicate the full range of moral possibilities in the

value-complexes which they themselves have realized. Moreover, just as certain chord

combinations in music are obviously dissonant even to the untrained ear, so also one is

immediately able to experience the essential dissonance of the moral value of certain acts

in relation to the foundational value of God simply from experience of the values in

questionfor instance, the basic experiential dissonance of the value of murder qua

murder with the value of God. On the other hand, other value-combinations in particular

acts are more difficult to discern where their dissonance or consonance is concerned. In

such cases, it is clear that just as much as the sense of musical harmony needed in order

to compose truly beautiful music is only acquired through intense and dedicated musical

training, so also a highly developed moral sense of the consonance of particular values

with the absolute value of the holy is only acquired through moral training in the school

of virtue which combines an intuitive moral sense with deliberative reason.497 To this

497
In this respect, it is clear that the religiously motivated terrorist, for example, who
commits mass murder in the name of God does not truly intend the same value as the
person who recognizes the obvious dissonance between the idea of a personal love for
God and an intention to commit murder. This is obviously the case because the terrorist
does not really regard killing as murder. It is, rather divinely justified killing. It is only
by way of a morally developed sense of virtue coupled with rational deliberation over the
value-sources of such ways of thinking and valuing that one comes to the higher-level
 393

extent, Scotus form of argumentation brings us back to and depends upon the original

phenomenology of value-feeling as registering an objective reality and providing an

intuitive grasp of the value-essence of the things in question.498 One can feel or hear

the consonance or dissonance of particular values and the acts associated with their

realization with the absolute value of the love of God. If the ethical love of God is

absolute, then it follows that one will seek to realize only those values which establish a

basic harmony with this ultimate value. In this way, consonance becomes a basic form

of moral self-regulation based upon absolute love.

Moreover, it is, fundamentally, the experience of values as being in harmony

that allows us to speak of certain moral principlesthou shalt not kill, thou shalt not

commit adultery, etc. and their positive corollariesas specifications of the first

principle of the natural law that God is to be loved. In a values being specified as a

derivative moral principle through the experience of the values essential harmony with

the value of God, the realization of that value in a concrete moral act becomes a genuine

moral ought, but as an ought which is perpetually conditioned by the love of God

which precedes its realization. In this connection, Edith Stein writes that, the one who

loves [God] feels the urge to fulfill the commandments of God: he desires to conform his

own will to the will of God.499 I thus realize my love of God through the realization of

recognition of the absurdity of this form of killing and its valuative equivalent to
murder.
498
Mary Elizabeth Ingham, Moral Decision-making: Scotus on Prudence, Sprit and
Life: A Journal of Contemporary Franciscanism 3(1993): 94.
499
Stein, Finite and Eternal Being, 451.
 394

consonant values which serve to specify this love in concrete instances. The reason for

this, however, should not be overlooked. In the preceding, it might be easy to begin to

assume that Scotus has the moral value of harmony itself as the foundational moral

value. The harmony of values, however, becomes a moral value only because God, taken

as the absolute value, is not merely an abstract principle, but rather establishes an

interpersonal relationship of love. This relationship involves a total self-giving of the

finite individual self to God. In this act, what harmonizes with my love for God becomes

morally important for the basic reason that whatever is essentially dissonant with the love

of God harms this love and renders it moot.

This discussion of the importance of the themes of consonance and specification

becomes important inasmuch as it establishes the possibility for an intuition into the

essential hierarchy of values discussed in Chapter VI to the extent that this hierarchy is

ultimately subsumed under the ethical attitude as described by Husserl and Scotist

philosophy. What is clear, however, is that under such a framework, one can truly make

a claim to a kind of moral certainty where competing values are concerned. However,

this certainty is relative to the level of moral experience, virtue, and training which the

subject has previously undergone. It is analogous to the certainty which one experiences

in a harmonization of musical tones that this chord sounds good and that a dissonant

chord sounds bad. To this extent, it never even begins to approach any form of

apodictic epistemic certainty. Nevertheless, the clearer the concept of the object of

absolute ethical love, namely God as given in faith, the clearer ones perception of

harmony among moral values might be. To this extent, however, ones ethical perception
 395

becomes linked up with the specific framework of some positive religious act of faith.

The implications of this will have to be pursued in our concluding chapter. Secondarily,

however, it is also further clarified in virtue of a more deeply specified sense of who I am

before God. That is to say, it is in relation to the love of God that one begins to acquire

a less vague understanding of ones individuality, ones unique vocation, and ones ideal

self and its relation to God as one who calls that the idea of a vocation also can obtain

a kind of theological sense apart from that offered in the Fichtean language which

Husserl employs.

b. God and the Being-Called of Universal Vocation

Subsumed within a theological/religious framework, the notion of a vocation

takes on a more complete meaning and context, for Husserl. He holds that belief in God

is the absolute requirement not only for the grounding of ethical normativity, but even for

the grounding of my sense of myself as having a true and authentic purpose.500 He writes

that, [i]n order to be able to believe in myself and my true I and the developing in its

direction, I must believe in God and in so far as I do this I see the divine dispensation, the

counsel of God, and Gods intention for my life.501 Thus, Husserl believes that faith and

love for God provide a grounding and a guiding principle for all personal and communal

ethical behavior. Moreover, the belief in God as a creator of the world is the prerequisite

for the ethical striving of the person for a perfect self and a perfect world to have any

meaning at all inasmuch as this perfect, true self also has its origin in divine creative

500
The reason for this will be discussed momentarily.
501
Husserl, A V 21, 24b/25a, quoted in Melle, 15.
 396

activity, and it is precisely this fact which makes it true. To this extent, it is possible, in

addition to the recognition of ones vocation in the context of the talents which one

exhibits and in the confirmation obtained through anothers sympathy with me in the

development of my authentic sense of myself as having a discernible vocation, to see a

persons vocation ultimately as, a work of God. Edith Stein expresses this notion when

she writes that, it is God Himself who calls. It is He who calls each human being to that

to which all humanity is called, it is He who calls each individual to that to which he or

she is called personally.502 It is in this sense, in which one sees by way of faith that I am

who I am as directed towards a particular value-essence which is the true idea of myself

as what I ought to be, that the analogy of vocation operative at the pre-ethical level in

Husserls thought as a stepping stone into a full articulation of authentic ethical self-

regulation ceases to be an analogy. As a Beruf or a vocatio, the vocation is a calling

or an invitation. If it is a calling only of the ideal self as a value-essence to the

concrete self, impelling the factual human subject to the realization of this ideal, then this

calling is a calling only in a metaphorical sense. For a calling to be experienced as a

factual call, however, it requires a caller who is other than the one who is called.

Ultimately, for Husserl, for Stein, and for Scotus, it is God who is the subject of the call.

This idea, however, requires philosophical elucidation if it is not to be regarded as a

purely vague theological hypothesis.

James Hart, in the second volume of his Who One Is, attempts to provide an

elucidation of this theological concept in the form of a systematic philosophical theology

502
Stein, On Woman, 60.
 397

of vocation. It should be made clear at this juncture, however, that the development of

such a systematic philosophical theology admittedly represents a step, in a sense,

beyond phenomenology, particularly inasmuch as it is explicitly motivated by faith, and

from a Husserlian perspective, the faith at issue here is not even faith modified with the

neutral sense of as if as Husserl does at every other moment of his phenomenology. It

is not, however, in Harts understanding of his efforts to complete the theological

dimensions of Husserls ethics under the heading of a theology of vocation, wholly

divorced from phenomenology. Rather, Hart takes his point of departure from the

discoveries of Husserls transcendental phenomenology, as well as from the results of the

mundane ethical phenomenology which we have sought to develop up until this point, in

such a way that we could refer to this theological turn as a speculative movement

following upon the general trajectory of phenomenological results. As will be seen in the

following section, this sort of move is not so uncharacteristically un-Husserlian as it

might at first sound. The first crucial point of departure, for our purposes, which

provides a meaningful trajectory into the domain of philosophical theology is to be found

in Husserls discovery of the theme of exemplarism in the constituting process of

meaning-bestowal as well as in the overall understanding of the project of

phenomenology as eidetic analysis.

The Husserlian concern for exemplarity is generally limited to the way in which

the essential meaning bestowed upon an individual object in experience depends upon,

the ideality and normativity of the essential idea. That is, what phenomenological

essence-analysis pursues is the invariant Whatness in its purity that serves as the
 398

governing meaning frame for the experience of the essence in the particular at hand.503

The validity and universality of phenomenological analysis fundamentally depends upon

the fact that an ideal and normative Eidos is concretely instantiated in a real this given

here and now in phenomenological consciousness and that this eidetic meaning genuinely

describes the essential factors of the experience of the thing in its givenness such that the

phenomena dog, table, justice, etc. can all be meaningfully disclosed in

intersubjective, objective validity independently of and deliberately bracketing out the

reality of the concrete this which first exemplifies this essence. This factor of

exemplarity can, moreover, be described as admitting of a more or a less, or a better

or a worse. That is to say, it is clear, drawing again upon the example from Marks

Gospel of the poor widow who gives away the last of her copper coins, that the widows

action represents an individual exemplification of the general meaning category

generosity, and that it is, indeed, a better exemplification of generosity than the same

action in the wealthy visitors to the Temple. A recognition of the phenomenological fact

of exemplarity as a factor of all experience, moreover, is a condition of our ability even

to speak of the different actions of the widow and of the wealthy in the same sentence

and as essentially comparable activities. It is also clear from the above example that

exemplarity is a distinctive feature of all real value-experience. In this connection,

according to Hart, and looking back upon the previous analysis of vocation in terms of

the infinite horizon of haecceitas, it further becomes clear that there is a fundamental

relation of exemplarity at work in the idea of the unique ideal self as a value-essence and

503
Hart, Who One Is, Vol. 2, 467.
 399

the concrete person as a real example504 of this ideal which likewise admits of a more or

less and a better or a worse. Between the factual existence of the person, along with

the finite values which the person has concretely realized, and the ideal value-essence of

the person, the ideal-self whose realization constituted the universal vocation in the sense

discussed in the previous chapter, there is an infinitely unbridgeable qualitative

difference. In Harts words, the value-essence of the ideal self, incommensurately

surpasses any value properties the person may have.505 As the exemplar of who I truly

am, ideally speaking, the ideal self is infinitely removed from me in my concrete

existence.

The factor of exemplarity in all experience is fundamental to phenomenological

essence-analysis, yet Husserl deliberately leaves an important aspect of the phenomenon

of exemplarity unapproached. This un-thought element of the phenomenology of the

exemplary relation of Eidos and object is the metaphysical question of, the kind of

relation that holds between an essence and its exemplification and exemplarity.506 The

reason for Husserls omission of the metaphysical question is because it is not pertinent

504
We can speak of a relation of exemplarity even here, in spite of the fact that the
concrete person is the only example of this unique value-essence, precisely because of the
fact that there is an ontic difference between the concrete person and the ideal self
towards which the person is ordered and in light of which the unique being and value of
the person is disclosed and because the concrete person exemplifies this ideal in degrees
of completeness and adequation in the same way in which, even if, in the whole universe
there were only a single factual table, this would represent a single exemplification of the
Eidos table which we could describe as being more or less adequate to the Eidos and is
capable of being a good table or a bad table even apart from the existence of other
factual tables against which to compare it.
505
Ibid., 462.
506
Ibid., 467.
 400

to phenomenological questioning as such, nor is it answerable in purely descriptive

phenomenological fashion, but requires specifically metaphysical speculation. On the

other hand, at the point where phenomenology leaves such a question un-broached, Hart

finds a point of departure and a trajectory of inquiry to expand upon in philosophico-

theological terms.507 Precisely what forms the jumping point of this trajectory of inquiry

is the fact that exemplarity is the manner through which spirit, apperceives the infinite

horizon of value, meaning, and intelligibility of the world.508 Exemplarity and its

axiological dimensions, moreover, are given by way of the recognition that the exemplar

represents the most perfect, or the infinitely perfect exemplar in light of which the

example acquires its meaning. Taking the relation of exemplarity as essentially a relation

of value-realization, one could argue that the exemplar is both that which describes the

essential meaning of the concrete example as its What, but also the infinite limit

concept which serves as the absolute standard for the evaluation of the value of the

example according to degrees of completeness or fullness in the ontological/axiological

sense explicated in Chapter VI.509 As such, the exemplar is also the normative ideal

towards which the concrete instance is essentially ordered, in spite of the absolute

507
The reasons which justify such a move have already been expressed in the
Prolegomena of this project in which we discussed Steven Laycocks differentiation of
the qualifications of a philosophy as phenomenological which, from his perspective,
directly justifies theology as a kind of phenomenological project, albeit one which
stands beyond the range of phenomenological description. See Chapter II, 4.
508
Ibid., 460.
509
See Chapter VI, 13a.
 401

difference and gulf between the two. In this connection, the relation of exemplarity as an

axiological concept opens up further dimensions of questioning.

If the exemplar is taken in the sense of an axiological limit concept in a manner

analogously to the way in which one might describe a point as the absolute limit concept

towards which a series of lines of ever decreasing length might be pointing, but which is

nonetheless infinitely and absolutely different in quality and unattainable in the form of a

short line, then any exemplar itself represents an example of the most general limit

concept of excellence. This follows, because an exemplar might represent the relation

of exemplarity in degrees of more or less. This is the case not only

quantitativelye.g. in the trivial case of the exemplar dog being exemplified more

often than the exemplar tyrannosaurus rex, but more importantly, it is the case

qualitatively. This is the case because each exemplar represents the infinite and

unrealizable, in concrete terms, concept of real things. Exemplars, moreover, can be

exemplary for other exemplarsfor example in the way in which beauty is the

exemplar for the artistic, against which concrete works of art are measured. In this

example, beauty represents the perfection of the artistic and is the normative idea

under which the idea of art is ruled. A trajectory is thereby established in which all

exemplars point to the absolutely, qualitatively different limit concept of, perfection

beyond all measure.510 Ultimately consonant with this notion,511 is the religious idea of

510
Ibid., 462.
511
And for that reason, so far as a Scotistic metaphysician pursuing the activity of radical
speculation on being qua being is concerned, it is an eminently compatible and rational
 402

a Creator-God who stands qualitatively above the world as the exemplar of all exemplars

and as the that limit concept towards which all the excellences and the total excellence of

the world point.512

Now, if we can recognize in a Creator-God the idea of the exemplar of all

exemplars, as that in relation to which the excellence of all exemplars is to be understood,

it is not too far of a move to make to draw the speculative conclusion not only that

exemplars are exemplifications of divine excellence, but, indeed, that they exist in such a

relation of exemplarity precisely because they flow from the divine excellence itself, i.e.

that they are divine Ideas, the seminal reasons by means of which God creates, in the

Neo-Platonic and Augustinian sense of the term, and as such are in some sense identical

with the divine essence itself. This idea has many implications for theological

speculation, from answering questions about the manner in which God knows to

providing an indication of an essential and natural relation between the human mind and

the divine essence in the ordinary project of human cognition.513 Whatever the

philosophical or theological merit of these offshoots of the theological concept of

exemplarity may be, for our purposes, the most important implication of the theory of

theological exemplarism is to be found in the application of this concept to the way in

which human existence is always existence in relations of exemplarity. On the one hand,

interconnection of concepts in spite of its speculative and not-completely-logically

deducible character and should be taken seriouslyalbeit critically.
512
Ibid., 463. By no means should this be taken as anything resembling a proof for
Gods existence. To the contrary, the development of this rational, speculative trajectory
presupposes faith in a Creator-God from the start.
513
The Augustinian concept of divine illumination.
 403

I am a singular instantiation of humanity and as such I exemplify, to a greater or lesser

extent and to a better or worse extent, exemplary humanity. Additionally, I exemplify

husband, philosopher, etc. within similar degrees of exemplarity. Most

fundamentally, however, I stand in a relation of exemplarity to the ideal value-essence of

myself which, following Husserl, we have designated the ideal or true self. As an

exemplar of my concrete personhood, this true self marks a limit concept for me. It is

the infinitely perfect ideal of myself towards which I can approach, but the absolute

excellence of which I am never fully capable of instantiating. Within the framework of

theological exemplarism which Hart has attempted to develop using phenomenology as

his point of departure, the idea of my absolutely unique value-essence as an exemplar and

my concrete personality as standing in a relation of exemplarity towards this value-

essence would have a number of important implications for the overall phenomenological

ethical theory which we have been developing throughout the course of this work.

The first implication is that, as an exemplar, my ideal self is really a divine Idea

and, consequently, is nothing other than the divine essence itself. The relation of

exemplarity which exists between my factual existence and the values which I have

factually embodied in my existence are essentially ordered to and measurable against the

idea of myself by means of which God has created me in my unique individuality. It is

my true self because it is the self whom I was meant to be according to Gods creative

act and his intention for my existence and because it is my self precisely as God sees me.

To this extent, then, it is possible to understand the suggestion made in Chapter VII that a

full and distinct self-revelation of my ideal self could only exist as the correlate of an
 404

infinite love which fully traverses the infinite horizon of my individuality.514 It is thus

only God, in his infinite love for me, who understands my unique exemplar because it is

God himself and my essential likeness to him which is loved infinitely. The idea, both

that it is only God who fully knows who I am according to my ideal exemplar and that

God himself is my exemplar, links up this theological exemplarism with the conclusion

which Husserl and Scotus had already made earlier, namely that the absolute domain of

the ethical is only constituted by way of an absolute faith in and love of God. In loving

God absolutely, I love my ideal self, I realize, still to whatever limited extent, my ideal

self and develop in its direction in a process not unlike what the early Christians had

called deificationbecoming like God by becoming one with God. It further follows

from this idea that the more I love God in the development of a personal loving

relationship, the greater my intuitive grasp of the harmony of values which I am to

embody precisely because, in this love, I come to know who I am in the truth of my

existence before God and thus I recognize the direction in which I am meant to strive

and in this I recognize the work of divine graceor as Scheler writes, this individual

value-essence becomes an ideal for me because it lies not only in the direction of love of

the Divine but also in the direction of divine love directed to me.515 It is by way of a

theory of exemplarism, then, that one comes to the recognition of the way in which the

universal vocation, i.e. the ethical call which embraces the whole of my existence, is only

brought to fruition in the act of faith which recognizes that this vocation is not first-

514
See Chapter VII, 16b., i., b.
515
Scheler, Formalism, 491n.
 405

personal only, but rather is first and foremost second-personalit is God who calls me to

my true self by creating me to be this individual in the first place.

Lastly, it is only by way of an understanding of vocation as second-personal and

as operating under the form of a relation of exemplarity that the full significance and

meaning of the Husserlian use of the notions of eudaimonia and Seligkeiti.e. bliss

or salvationas the end of the ethical life, i.e. as that towards which one strives as the

end-goal of living ethically, is to be felt. Husserl defines Seligkeit, in contradistinction

to the traditional notion of salvation, in terms of the sensuous feeling of joy (sinnliche

Erfllungslust) which comes in the realization of positive values.516 Husserl spends some

time in demonstrating that such a striving after bliss is by no means a retrogression into

egoism as Kant had claimed. This is fundamentally the case because authentic bliss is

not directly realizable, as Scheler had already argued.517 Rather, bliss can be bliss

over the realization of the highest values only when the direct end of my striving is the

realization of the value itself, and not the feeling of bliss in its realization. In this respect,

Scheler goes a step further than Husserl in his analysis and recognizes that, we cannot,

in the strict sense of the word, feel bliss or [its opposite,] despair. According to the

nature of these feelings, either they are not experienced at all, or they take possession of

the whole of our being.518 Seligkeit exists in me, then, fundamentally as an emotional

state of being and, following upon this, as an emotional state of exuberant affirmation of

516
HUA XXXVII, 344.
517
Scheler, Formalism, 344.
518
Ibid., 343.
 406

the highest values which fundamentally structures and motivates my comportment in the

direction of the realization of these values.519 As such, bliss and its opposite state,

despair, appear to be the correlates of the moral value of our personal being,520 i.e. they

are feeling states which serve to indicate the degree to which we have realized or stand in

the direction of realizing our ideal selves. Ultimately, for both Scheler and Husserl, this

theory of Seligkeit as the end-goal of the moral life only derives its sense in relation to

the religious, and specifically Christian notion of salvation.521 One is blissful only

because one affirms ones ideal value-essence, the divine exemplar towards which one is

ordered, and is thus open to relationship of total participation in the divine which

involves the movement of divine gracei.e. deification. Lived Seligkeit, then,

represents the hope for salvation from sin in an eternal life of communion with the divine

and not a mere sensuous joy in doing the good in this life.

c. Faith and Love as the Consummation of All Ethical Philosophy

If it is possible, then, to recognize the fundamental compatibility of the Scotistic

account of moral normativity and the concrete manner by which the love of God, coupled

with the essentially related notion of the universal vocation to the realization of my ideal

self, informs the way in which other values become normative, then it will be clear how

519
As such, it in no way resembles the sensuous happiness which Kant denies as a valid
moral principle or end in his Critique of Practical Reason (see, Kant, Critique of
Practical Reason, 120) and much more closely resembles Kants idea of a feeling of
respect for the moral law, although essentially free of the problems of Kants theory of
reason to which it is connected.
520
Scheler, Formalism, 343.
521
HUA XXXVII, 345; Scheler, Formalism, 347.
 407

Husserls attempt to found all ethical normativity upon the universal call to the love of

God and to a faith in the creation of the world as Gods world, possessing a teleological

order of ascent to divine being under which all moral activity becomes subsumed as a

journey which acquires its moral and religious character as a journey in the hope of

salvation through participation in the divine by way of divine exemplarity, will obtain

systematic cogency. Faith and love will be understood in Husserl as well as Scotus as the

fundamental consummation of all ethical philosophy. However, the faith in question here

cannot be understood as a purely blind faith or as a kind of quasi-Kantian positing of the

existence of God as a mere postulate of pure practical reason. To that extent, it would

seem that there is something fundamentally problematic in Ullrich Melles articulation of

Husserls notion of faith in God and the role which it plays in grounding his ethical

system about which Melle writes,

I have no knowledge of the existence of God on the basis of a self-

presenting sensible or categorical intuition, but I posit God with the
doxastic quality of certainty on the basis of a motivation of the heart and
practice: I must believe in God and Gods providential arrangement of the
world if the striving of the personal subject for the perfection of itself and
the world is not to be senseless.522

In contrast to Melles presentation of Husserl as adhering to this idea of a kind of pure

positing of Gods existence without any kind of theoretical certainty of its full truth,

Angela Ales Bello in her comprehensive study on Husserls treatment of the idea of God,

The Divine in Husserl and Other Explorations, has shown that Husserls understanding,

belief, and natural theology are far more robust than Melle has suggested.523

522
Melle, 15.
 408

Although it is the case that Husserl does take a similar tactic on the way to the

idea of God through ethics as Kant does in the Critique of Practical Reason, Bello has

successfully shown that there are other ways in which Husserl approaches the question of

Gods existence and provides a detailed study of at least five, and perhaps six, ways to

the presentive intuition of Gods existence. Without going into each one in detail here,

Husserl offers possible ways to the knowledge of God through the notion of the

objective, in which he has as his aim the task of, flesh[ing] out the possibilities of pure

consciousness, which include an opening onto God;524 the subjective, which, she

indicates, represents a form of argumentation not unlike that found in Anselms famous

ontological argument;525 the intersubjective, basing his argument on the theme of

empathy and a notion of God as the Highest Monad;526 the hyletic, which is a kind of

teleological argument;527 and finally the ethical, which we have already seen. Finally,

Bello suggests that one might find latent in Husserl, as James Hart suggests in his

contribution to the edited volume, Essay in Phenomenological Theology, a kind of

openness to the idea of a mystical way to God inasmuch as, the notion of Godis

present in ones interiority and it is understood consciously,528 and this conscious

523
See Bello, 65ff.
524
Bello, 28.
525
Ibid., 29.
526
Ibid., 35.
527
Ibid., 49.
528
Ibid., 68. See Hart, Husserlian Philosophical Theology, 152ff.
 409

experience of the divine dwelling within me and accessible by means of the religious acts

of mystical prayer can form the basis of an intuitive access to the presence of the divine.

However, this argument, Bello acknowledges is based upon Husserls positive appraisal

of his student Gerda Walthers study entitled, Phenomenology of the Mystical, and not

upon Husserls own philosophical works. It should not, for that reason, however, be

ignored or passed over.

In any case, it should be noted, as Bellos study points out, that in Husserl, [t]he

question of God is always raised at the end of a certain philosophical trajectory, which

begins with data related to the human being or the world and which slowly acquire higher

and further significance; they allow us to ascend from a tight and coherent reflection to a

principle of all.529 They are not, then, rigorous proofs for the existence of God, but at

the same time they do represent a kind of philosophical articulation of the rationality of

the act of faith in God which is to be understood as the basis of ethical normativity and of

the whole meaningfulness of the world and of human existence in the first place. Gods

existence is, for Husserl, always presupposed as a result of his own profound religious

faith with all of its tendency towards mysticism.530 Yet, at the same time, his ethical

philosophy, as well as his phenomenology in general, insofar as they deal with God as the

first and highest principle of all rationality and meaning in the universe, represents a kind

of fides quaerens intellectum, a faith seeking understanding every bit as much as is to

be found in an Anselm or a Scotus. In this connection, then, even Husserls famed

529
Ibid., 42.
530
Hart, Husserlian Philosophical Theology, 167nn.
 410

statement that his method of philosophizing is basically atheistic, is to be taken only

with a grain of salt, understanding his claim as representing the rigorous methodology of

phenomenological philosophy as a science distinct from theology in the strict sense as

studies in Scriptural texts and traditions and not as denying faith in God purely as such

and not as invalidating religious theology or religious belief.

i. Excursus: The Problems of Moral Perfectionism and Fanaticism

Before departing from the general themes of morality as we have attempted to

develop them from Husserlian and Scotist thought into the form of a basic groundwork

for a phenomenological ethical philosophy in which many questions and themes for

further inquiry undoubtedly have suggested themselves but which cannot be fully

answered in this preliminary study, a brief excursus on the moral implications of this

ethics must be undertaken by way of a summary of the thought which we have attempted

to articulate up until now. In particular, certain questions suggest themselves at this point

which must find an answer if the relevance of a phenomenological ethics of the type

which has emerged through the course of our investigations is to be fully felt. These

questions relate to the character of this moral philosophy, and in particular to the moral

danger which they might seem to suggest in the form of what both Kant and James Hart

have referred to as moral perfectionism and moral fanaticism. Some care must be

taken in order to assure that a Husserlian phenomenology of the moral life does not give

in to either of these two extremes, which are extremes precisely because they ignore

pertinent facts and limits upon moral experience and moral striving which are ineluctable

to all moral experience.

 411

Briefly, then, from a Kantian perspective, we might describe moral

perfectionism as the claim that we can establish what Kant determines to be mere

postulates of pure practical reason as constitutive metaphysical principles on the basis of

which the moral task is established as a movement towards an attainable perfection.

For instance, pure practical reason, according to Kant, postulates as necessary that,

because it is a principle of the moral law that the highest good in the world must be

achieved by way of the perfect fitness of the will to the moral law, and, moreover,

because such a perfection in the form of a holiness of will is impossible in this world,

the soul must exist indefinitely simply in order that the moral law can be fulfilled.531 The

universe must be structured, we might continue, in such a way as to make the fulfillment

of the moral law possible. Moreover, the moral law forces practical reason to postulate

that the second element of the highest good, namely a happiness which is proportional to

the morality obtained in the realization of the moral law by the finite will, is fully

possible and, moreover, that this possibility is contingent upon the necessary existence of

God as the supposed, supreme cause of nature which has a causality corresponding to

the moral disposition.532 That these are postulates of pure practical reason, for Kant, is

important inasmuch as they are the results, not of the certain determination of pure

theoretical reasoni.e. they are not scientifically knownbut because they grow out of

the internal necessities of reasons practical interest which is established as having a

priority to pure theoretical reason since even the interests of speculation are always

531
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 122.
532
Ibid., 125.
 412

ultimately practical.533 To that extent, then, the postulates of pure practical reason are

born of a rational faith, understood both as a faith in reason and as the faith of reason

in the necessity of the objective moral law, and as such they refer to rational hopes, not

metaphysical principles of pure theoretical reason.

We can say that an elevation of these rational hopes to the level of metaphysical

principles results in a kind of moral perfectionism, then, because reason which assumes

such principles to be absolute also believes itself absolutely capable of embodying the

perfection of the law in oneself. This conclusion follows primarily because if one

assumes a metaphysically determined universe to be perfectly arranged in such a way as

to ensure that I am capable of achieving perfectioneven if it takes all eternity to

achieve it, then the simple determination of my will to fulfill the law and to realize this

highest good in myself is enough to ensure that perfection will be reached. I can feel

confident in the certitude of my path to blessedness, then, because it simply cannot be

otherwise; no cosmic, metaphysical factors exist to hinder my way to this perfection.

Moreover, at the point at which the logic of moral perfectionism becomes fully explicit,

as James Hart writes, perfectionism gives way into, a form of self-idolatry in so far as

one conceives of oneself as obliged to embody completely the ideal, thereby constituting

oneself as beyond a finite perspective.534 This seems to be precisely the way in which

Kant understands moral fanaticism.

533
Ibid., 121.
534
Hart, Who One Is, Vol. 2, 125.
 413

Kant defines moral fanaticism in terms of the problem of, overstepping the

boundaries which practical pure reason sets to mankind.535 Whereas perfectionism

could be seen as a facile overstepping of the boundaries set my pure theoretical reason

simply by elevating to quasi-scientific certainty what is only rationally hoped for,

fanaticism oversteps the bounds of practical reason by transgressing the limits of duty as

the motivation of moral action. The immediate context in which moral fanaticism is

discussed in the Critique of Practical Reason is in relation to the law of the Gospel which

exhorts man to the love of God and of neighbor. This law, Kant understands as an

infinite moral ideal of holiness towards which we ought to strive unceasingly.536

Nevertheless, from the perspective of finite reason and of finite willing, it is never

attainable either in conceptual or in practical terms. In the finitude and dependency of the

human condition upon physical causes, the human being is never free from sensuous

inclinations desires which direct the will away from the moral law, which has its source

in reason alone, and not in desire or inclination. Kant argues further that, if love is to

become a moral principle for action, then morality is transmuted into holiness and would,

cease to be virtue.537 It is not to say that, for Kant, this is not to be desired in some

senseholiness is, after all, a regulative ideal towards which man strives. The catch,

however, is that man has no hope of success in the attainment of this holiness except in

the rational hope of an infinite existence which infinitely approaches holiness of life, but

535
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 85.
536
Ibid., 83.
537
Ibid., 84.
 414

never fully attains it. What moral fanaticism forgets, then, is the proper moral stage of

man in light of mans necessary finitude. Thus, if we were to assume that love is the

basis of moral action, then,

in the case of what we esteem and yet dread because of our

consciousness of our weaknesses, the most reverential awe would be
changed into inclination, and respect into love, because of the greater ease
in satisfying the latter. At least this would be the perfection of a
disposition dedicated to the law, if it were ever possible for a creature to
attain it.538

Forgetting, however, the factual situation of finite humanity, moral fanaticism replaces

morality in this life with the pure rule of inclination and desirealbeit with inclination

and desire which may generally accord with the actions of moral wills, but which

overlook the basic spirit of the law of duty. The problem of moral fanaticism, then,

consists in the belief in the factual possession, or near-possession of holiness as a

replacement for genuine moral virtue, which exists in conflict with desire and inclination.

It is self-conceit in the face of human moral limitation and, as such, asserts ones being as

in an immediate relation to objective moral truth as though ones existence were not

bounded by finitude, but that the moral ideal is readily realizable and correlates directly

with natural human powers, as though the moral life did not require a transcendence of

ones natural state.

From a Kantian perspective, the charge of either a facile moral perfectionism or of

a full-blown moral fanaticism against the Husserlian and Scotistic phenomenological

ethics developed in the course of this study would amount to a charge of our having

538
Ibid.
 415

completely missed the whole point of morality and of having transgressed the limits of

reason and of the human condition. As such, it would amount to the total derailment of

the Husserlian and Scotist ethical project. It must be seen, then, how the ethical views

defended here manage to escape these charges.

From the perspective of moral perfectionism, it should be understood that neither

Husserl nor Scotus ever forget the finitude of human personality and moral capacity.

From Scotus perspective, moral goodness depends upon a variety of factors in a multi-

layered schema of values, as we have already seen. The goodness of the act depends

upon its possession of a generic goodness, a virtuous goodness, and the goodness of the

acts being done out of charity. Even prescinding from the question of whether or not

one can have perfect virtue or perfect charity in this life, Scotus denies that the concrete

act can have the total possible goodness, the goodness of holiness or merit, according to

its own powers. Meritorious goodness is contingent upon Gods act of acceptatio, or

the acceptance of the concrete act as meriting sanctification. The human agent him or

herself, however, merits nothing. Holiness is, eo ipso, out of the reach of the human

agent acting purely on their own. Moreover, Scotus never assumes that even perfect

virtue is ever attainable in this life. Human finitude and imperfection are always limiting

factors on the moral life apart from the mediating activity of divine grace. Moreover,

from Husserls perspective, we are simply not capable of realizing the full possibility and

full perfection of our ideal value-essence. This is, indeed, part of the essentially tragic
 416

aspect of human existence inasmuch as the subject is incapable of fully realizing its

highest moral aims. To this extent, then, not only does a Husserlian or Scotist

perspective not assume that the domain of reality is so structured in such a way that I can

realize the infinite moral ideal, it specifically denies this assumption. Finitude and

imperfection are always limiting factors on the human moral act and on lifelong moral

striving. The victory of humanity over this fact is simply to be found in the

unwillingness to give in to despair, but to continue striving after the good which remains,

from the perspective of our powers alone, forever unattainable. As such, the Husserlian

and Scotist moral account even denies, from a practical and theoretical perspective, the

Kantian motives for the first postulate of pure practical reason, namely that we can hope

for eternal life simply because the moral law is such that we must be capable of realizing

our moral duty into infinity. Finally, the being of God as the unifying principle of the

moral world order is never assumed as a metaphysical principle in the sense in which

Kant would deny its possibility, i.e. as a concept firmly established by pure theoretical

reason. The being of God is given in the Husserlian account, only on the basis of an act

of faith which itself brings the being of God into intuitive presence as a source of value

and moral obligation. Whether or not Gods being can be approached as a metaphysical,

scientific principle can only be determined by way of a further step in the direction of a

phenomenology of religion upon which we cannot embark here.

 417

Where the problem of moral fanaticism is concerned, then, it can only be stressed

that between the Kantian conception of love and the phenomenological conception,

there is apparently an infinite divide. Love for Kant, refers to an uncontrollable feeling-

state, a mere aspect of sensuous existence and not a constituent or participator in reason.

The lesson which Kant failed to learn from Pascal, is the full delimitation of the essential

nature of the act of love in that love, has its reasons, which reason does not know.539

As Max Scheler gives Pascals famous axiom its phenomenological interpretation, the

heart possesses a strict analogue of logic in its own domain that it does not borrow from

the logic of the understanding: laws are inscribed on itThe heart can love and hate

blindly or insightfully, no differently than we can judge blindly or insightfully.540 What

this means is that love is not an irrational activity, except inasmuch as it loves blindlyin

which case it is equally irrational as reason which judges blindly. Love in and of itself,

however, can act with reason for Husserl, Scheler, Scotus, Brentano, and the whole of

the early phenomenological school. It is, thus, not a pure sensuous feeling, but also, at

least at some level, a conscious act of the will.541 At the point where love becomes most

activei.e. as a form of active motivation and valuation, love can become a true basis

539
Blaise Pascal, Penses, trans. and ed. W. F. Trotter (Minelola, NY: Dover
Publications, Inc., 2003), 277.
540
Scheler, Ordo Amoris, 117.
541
I would even go so far as to argue that the sensuous feelings so often associated with
love is not love, but only serves to indicate a deeper act of love which exists even in the
absence of such feelings.
 418

of moral determination precisely because it does not take the form of an unconscious

sensuous motivation. Rather, it imposes real duties upon the subject which, as an act of

self-giving to the value in question, are not always as easy as Kant suggests they would

be under the rule of lovee.g. when love for my spouse demands that I endure a means

of employment from which I derive no positive joy or sense of fulfillment or when love

demands the sacrifice of my own life for the sake of my beloved.

Moreover, it cannot be said that the Husserlian phenomenological ethics

transgresses the boundaries of practical reason and the domain of the moral law in favor

of the illusion of an already attained holiness in Kants sense precisely because the love

of God does not take holiness as a directly realizable value. Placing the love of God as

the founding moment of moral normativity in the phenomenological account does not fall

into this trap because love affirms God as holy and as harmonizing all values striven for

in this life with this absolute value. What I personally seek to realize in myself, then, is

the highest moral value which harmonizes with the love of God as the all good and all

holy, but I do not presume to realize holiness in myself. A phenomenological ethicist

recognizes with Kant that, the moral condition which he can always be in is virtue, i.e.,

moral disposition in conflict, and not holiness in the supposed possession of perfect

purity of the dispositions of will.542 Moreover, inasmuch as Kant assumes that such

possession of perfect purity of the disposition of the will is equal to holiness indicates

the degree to which Kant himself fails to recognize the a priori autonomy of moral value

from the value of the holy and thus comes close himself to a form of moral fanaticism

542
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 85.
 419

which confuses the infinite task of growth in moral perfection with the acquisition of

holiness and a holy will, a project which is only possible on the part of God who may

gratuitously choose to sanctify me. On the contrary, the proper moral task can only be

symbolized in the person who harmonizes his or her loves according to the authentic

essential order of values. Such a moral task presupposes the love of God as the principle

starting point, inasmuch as Gods value is absolute. Nevertheless, we do not stand in a

simple relation to moral truth even when we love God absolutely. In the face of the

divine, human limitation with respect to the moral project is only highlighted, not

diminished.
 420

Chapter IX
Concluding Meditations The Need for a Complete Ethical Theory

18. The Incompleteness of Ethical Philosophy

The study of Husserls ethical writings has revealed a number of areas, which,

although not systematically linked, are thematically distinguishable as Husserls ethical

theory. The introduction of Scotistic modes of argumentation as a form of renewal of

the ethical tradition has contributed various theoretical tools by means of which Husserls

characteristic thematic ethical theses can be linked together into a more or less coherent

groundwork for the development of the phenomenological philosophy of the ethical life

and its normative foundations. This has been done through the analysis of the ways in

which objective values are given to consciousness through certain specific types of

intentional acts of motivation and ways of desiring objects in the world, i.e. the affectio

justitiae as a love for values as goods in and for themselves and the affectio commodi as a

love for values in their relativity to human need and benefit. These values, moreover,

through an ontological analysis of the role of values in the structuration of the cultural

life-world as well as the essential hierarchy of values on the basis of their relations of

essential order, have shown themselves to be secondary values which must be ordered in

the ethical life on the basis of higher, specifically personal and ideal values. Scotus

analysis of the moral act has, further, provided phenomenological rigor to Husserls

account of moral action and of the inner requirements of morality which are constitutive

of the singular moral act. This analysis as well as the analysis of the universal vocation

to the love of God found in both thinkers, providing Husserl with a rigorous theological

framework in which to explain the role of faith and love as the foundation of ethical
 421

normativity and as the structure of fully ethical self-regulation, has shown precisely how

ethics requires faith in God and an absolute love of God in order to regulate and order the

moral life of the human subject and his or her activities of objective value-preference.

However, even if we have succeeded in revealing the basic phenomenological

coherence of the ethical philosophy which has been developed up until this point, the

result of this analysis has been to recognize that, for both Husserl as well as Scotus, the

trajectory of Husserlian thought here is such that it raises certain questions as to the

capacity of a pure ethics to fully explain the basis of ethical normativity all on its own.

As Husserl writes, if I will with all the strength of my soul to hold fast to the absolute

oughtthen I must believe absolutely that God is.543 As was seen in the previous

chapter, Husserls philosophical conclusions carry him along an intellectual trajectory

which requires the development of a theological and religious framework with which to

understand the role of God in ethical comportment. The question of the relationship

between the ethical and the religious standpoint becomes a positive necessity at the point

where ethics seeks to understand the character of its foundation. If the ethical attitude is

essentially connected to faith in God as the primal source-point of its self-regulating

interests, and, moreover, if I have been correct in claiming that phenomenology itself

begins in this attitude, presupposing the ethical sense and value of its overarching project,

then ethics, and, in fact, phenomenology in general both have and require a religious and

theological framework and a religious and theological orientation. As such, just as much

as a full critique of phenomenological philosophy involves the investigation into its

543
Husserl, A V 21, 15b, quoted in Melle, 15.
 422

ethical foundations, it also demands an inquiry into its religious foundations. This,

however, would involve a project all its own. In either case, the recognition of the need

for such a project involves the simultaneous recognition that it is needed not only for the

project of divulging the foundations of phenomenological philosophy, but is also needed

for divulging the full foundations of ethics in general. In the absence of this project, even

in spite of the systematic discoveries I have hoped to have made clear in the course of

this investigation, ethical philosophy remains distinctively incomplete. As such, we can

say only that this investigation has pursued the development of the groundwork for a

phenomenology of the ethical life, a project which can only move beyond such a

preparatory domain if the problem of the relationship between ethics and religion, the

ethical attitude and the religious attitude, is made fully explicit. This, consequently, can

only be pursued if the general project of the groundwork to a phenomenology of religion

is likewise undertaken. Subsequently, it will only be in tandem that both the

phenomenology and the ethical life and the phenomenology of the religious life will

acquire even a relative sense of mutual completeness. At this point, however, it is only

possible to provide a brief sketch of the relationship between the ethical and religious

standpoints and the essential reason for the effective interconnection between these two

domains of the life of the person.

19. On the Relationship between Ethics and Religion

Husserl, ultimately makes it clear that, prior to the emergence of the scientific

attitude which presented itself in human history as a universal worldly intention

(universale weltliche Intention), the pregiven world of life was already given as
 423

structured by quite a different universal intention, namely religion.544 This universal

world-intention arises at the point where there is a fundamental breakthrough out of the

mythological type of religion, with its ties to this land, this family, and this folk, and

arrives at the idea of the one and only God who is the correlate of the one and only

humanity and the one and only world.545 These three ideas are, for Husserl, essentially

interconnected. However, already at the point where individual religions as such hold

sway, a system of normative demands likewise hold sway. These systems of demands

which exert themselves upon the family, the tribe, and the nation exert themselves with

reference to the concept of divinity which is at work in the mythic type of religion. As

such, human comportment and praxis within those life-communities whose lives are lived

in direct reference to their particular religious form is essentially related to the

establishment of religious belief in this divinity. To this extent, the system of demands

imposes an ethics upon the community which is essentially relative to the history,

geography, and ethnography of the mythic-religious life-world. However, with the

breakthrough to the idea of the one and only God, humanity, and world, the

breakthrough into the idea of a universal system of normative demands upon the whole of

humanity becomes an essential possibility. Thus, Husserl writes that, the universal-

human religious demand is thus nothing other than the demand of that absolute universal

religious ethic, the ethic of that humanity, which transcends all peoples, [including]

544
Edmund Husserl, Gesammelte Werke Husserliana, Band XXXIX: Die Lebenswelt,
Auslegungen der vorgegebenen Welt und ihrer Konstitution, ed. Rochus Sowa
(Dordrecht: Springer, 2008), 164f.
545
HUA XXXIX, 165.
 424

earthly and alien peoples.546 An ethics of universal demands, of universal normativity,

then, according to Husserl, is conditioned in its possibility by the historical discovery of

the eternal oneness of God.547

Husserls point here is more than simply historical in character. His fundamental

insight is to be found in the way in which his analysis serves to indicate the manner in

which the idea of a system of ethical normativity essentially flows from the religious

intention of the life-world. Wherever a concrete religion exists, a system of ethical

demands likewise exists. Wherever an idea of a universal religion with its universal

object, the one and only God, exists, a universal system of ethical demands becomes

possible. The relationship between the ethical and the religious attitudes must, then, be

an essential one. The problem, then, is to flush out this relationship in greater detail.

It has been made clear in the preceding chapter that Kant and Fichte both fall

victim to a tremendous conflation of the values of the moral with the values of the

holy in their reduction of holiness to moral goodness. It is clear, from Husserls

perspective, that although the reduction of the holy to the morally good fails

adequately to articulate the essences of each value-modality involved here, it is not, for

that reason, entirely unmotivated inasmuch as there is a clear tie between religion and the

possibility of ethics. Moreover, both religion and ethics, in a sense, exist in reference to

the same object, namely God. To this extent, then, it seems natural to identify the

546
Ibid., 165-166: Die universal-menschliche religise Forderung ist also nichts
anderes als die Forderung jener absolut universalen religisen Ethik, der Ethik jener
Humanitt, die alle Vlker, irdische und Marsvlker, tranzendiert.
547
Ibid., 166.
 425

religious and the ethical as constituting one really identical attitude and one really

identical mode of striving for the highest values. However, as Otto, Scheler, and Ricoeur

have all sought to demonstrate, even though there does exist this essential tie between

ethical value and the religious value of the holy, holiness is originarily independent of

ethical obligation and, indeed, its essential meaning precedes and extends far beyond

what is ever meant by the morally good. The relationship between the values at stake in

both religion and morality would seem to indicate, then, that the relationship between the

religious and the ethical standpoints is, in Scotist language, one of real identity, yet at the

same time of formal distinction. There is an identity between the two in virtue of the fact

that morality and religion both exist in reference to God. On the other hand, there is a

formal distinction because the meaning of each standpoint is not essentially reducible one

to the other. Rather, in each case, the meaning of the one extends beyond the essential

notion of the other. Moreover, it is because of this formal distinction of meaning that we

can recognize in the later history of ethics an effort to think moral obligation without

reference to religion which is not wholly without sensealthough we should not for that

reason be surprised if such attempts are found to be inadequate.

If, then, there is an essential interconnection between ethics and religion, as such,

then a full account of ethical obligation will be dependent, as has already been said, upon

the development of a groundwork to the phenomenology of religion. However, inasmuch

as religion also takes on a rationalized articulation of its own according to the specificity

of religious belief, it is clear that a phenomenological ethics must take on some form of

relationship to religious theology, whether harmonious, antagonistic, or otherwise. It

 426

would, finally, be of benefit here to recognize Husserls response to such a project as the

confrontation of ethics with religious theologies and concrete religions.

20. Ethics and Religious Theology

According to Ronald Bruzina, Husserl places the question of God squarely

within phenomenology both in general terms and in relation to certain phenomenological

specifics.548 The specific phenomenological themes in which the question of God is

placed within the proper philosophical domain of phenomenology were already indicated

in reference to Bellos work on the divine in Husserls philosophy and with reference to

the whole of this work on Husserls ethical theory. In general terms, however, Husserl

writes in a 1933 letter to Fr. Daniel Feuling, a Benedictine priest, that the theological

question of God is, the question that is in fact the highest and last in the systematic of

the phenomenological method.549 He goes on to write that, phenomenological

philosophy, as an idea lying in infinity, is naturally theologyFor me, genuine

philosophy is eo ipso theology.550 It seems fairly evident, here, that Husserls

identification of phenomenology and philosophy in general with theology is meant in the

sense of a natural theology, or a metaphysics in the classical sense of the term.

Husserls theology seeks to provide a framework and a conception within which to

think the divine in relation to the world, human ends, etc. in such a way as to provide a

548
Ronald Bruzina, Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink: Beginnings and Ends in
Phenomenology: 1928-1938 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 444. This idea
Husserl repeats in later manuscripts which have been published as HUA XXXIX, 167.
549
Husserl, Bw VII, 87-88; quoted in Bruzina, 445.
550
Ibid., 88.
 427

complete account of the whole range of the being of the world of experiencealthough

this attempt is mitigated by the fact of Husserls dependence upon Fichtean language

which is essentially incoherent with Husserls traditional Christian descriptions of God.

As he writes in a birthday letter to his oldest friend, Gustav Albrecht,

phenomenology was to approach the questions which are to be considered the highest and

most important for the life of a spiritually authentic humanity. These questions always

lead inevitably back to,

the teleology that ultimately leads back to transcendental subjectivity and

transcendental historicity, and naturally as highest of all: the being of God
as the principle of this teleology, and the meaning of this being in contrast
to the being of the first Absolute, the being of my transcendental I and the
universal subjectivity that discloses itself in methe true locus of divine
working, to which belongs as well the constitution of the world as
oursspeaking from Gods viewpoint, the constant creation of the world
in us, in our transcendental ultimately true being.551

From this letter as well as from a broad range of texts ranging from the Ideen to The

Crisis to the manuscript studies on ethics, teleology, intersubjectivity, monadology, etc.,

it is clear that Husserl consistently insists upon the idea of God as a creator of the whole

world-order, imbuing it with rationality, meaning, and teleology and as that being which

bestows upon the world its actuality in the first place. For Husserl, then, God is, the

deep, potent structure of all reality.552

At the same time, the god of metaphysics is not a God whose existence is

properly understood as requiring faith to be understood and to be given in this sort of

teleological relation to the world, unless faith is, inappropriately equated with the

551
Husserl, Bw IX, 83-84; quoted in Bruzina, 419.
552
Bello, 53.
 428

Kantian rational hope of the postulate of pure practical reason. This, however, does not

seem to be the sense of faith that Husserl has in mind in ultimately grounding his

conception of ethical normativity. This is made evident in Husserls belief that, [f]reely

and most properly with divine grace, humans must be motivated to strive toward that

scope, i.e. the ability to recognize God in the world and to realize, within finite limits a,

moral world-order, with the highest awareness and strength of will.553 The introduction

of the concept of grace here certainly suggests something more than a merely

metaphysical God and a purely practical faith. Indeed, as Bello writes, in Husserls

philosophy, [e]thics refers back to metaphysics, but in order [to] understand deeply the

sense or meaning of the world they both need religion.554 Contrary to Ullrich Melles

supposition of Husserls faith as being merely a rational faith, a mere postulation of the

existence of God for the sake of the ethical system and the grounding of normativity, for

Husserl, as Bello writes, the motivation for ethical love finds its ground in Jesus

Christ,555 and it is here in Husserls deep Christianity that his ethical philosophy is

grounded and that the parallelism between the ethical philosophy of Husserl and Scotus is

ultimately justified.

Husserls Christianity is indubitably presented in his discussions of the theme of

ethical love. In describing ethical love, i.e. the love which grounds ethical normativity,

he writes that, [w]e are thinking here naturally of the infinite love of Christ for all men

553
HUA VIII, 285; quoted in Bello, 56-57.
554
Bello, 57.
555
Ibid.
 429

and the universal love of humanity, which the Christian must awaken in himself and

without which he can be no true Christian.556 The fundamental exemplar of the ethical

life and of ethical love, then, is to be found, for Husserl not simply in the idea of the

good devoid of any contentas a Platonic Good, for instancebut is to be found

precisely in the person of Christ himself and in the form of life which he establishes as

the highest moral and religious exemplar. In an unpublished supplement to his Kaizo

articles, Husserl writes further that, Christ himself stands for me thereas himself the

perfect good man.557 The person of Christ, mediated through the Gospels and through

the epistles of St. Paul, provides, for Husserl, the positive content of the moral law and

the moral world order, the practical manner in which values become informed in their

normativity by the love of God as Christ in the proper manner of the Christian. For

Husserl, [o]nly by imitating Christ can one reach love in its highest expression,

understood as love for ones enemy. This is love par excellence, and it is distinguished

from the purely human community of love.558

If it will be the case, for Husserl, that the prototypical instance of the ethical life,

of ethical love, of the authentic vocation of humanity to its highest values, is to be found

in the person of Christ and this will be in Christ not simply as an historical personality

556
Edmund Husserl, Gesammelte Werke Husserliana, Band XIV: Zur Phnomenologie
der Intersubjektivit, Zweiter Teil, ed. Iso Kern (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 174:
Wir denken hier natrlich an die unendliche Liebe Christi zu allen Menschen und an die
allgemeine Menschenliebe, die der Christ in sich wecken muss und ohne die er kein
wahrer Christ sein kann.
557
HUA XXVII, 100: Christus steht mir daselbst als vollkommen Guter.
558
Bello, 75.
 430

representative of a certain moment in the tradition of Judaism, but rather as the,

archetypal idea of a God-man,559 then it cannot be questioned that the theological

grounding of Husserls ethical philosophy will not be merely a kind of metaphysical

natural theology. Rather, Husserl means by theology and faith in God, here, precisely

the religious faith of the Christian believer. For Husserl, it will not be a matter purely of

personal preference or prejudice that can be seen as motivating this turn to the tradition of

Christian revelation and theology, but rather this turn will have an authentic rationale

rooted in the highest ideals of philosophy itself. To this extent, Husserl finds himself

following in a common trajectory of inquiry beginning with Brentano and including such

thinkers as Thomas Masaryk, Max Scheler, Edith Stein, Dietrich von Hildebrand, and

others who all saw phenomenology (or descriptive psychology in the case of Brentano),

as an answer to the spiritual crisis of the West precisely because a rigorously scientific

philosophy was to be capable of uncovering and renewing those sources of meaning

which constituted the spiritual heritage of Europe and which would open the way for a

revitalization of an authentic Christianity.

Angela Bello draws this idea out when she notes that Husserl, in a manuscript

from 1933 entitled Horizon, argues that philosophy is always aimed at a kind of

universality born of a universal interest in truth.560 The philosophical interest in

universalism, however, is not only realized by philosophy, but is realized also precisely

when, a universal religion in which there is one God manifests itself in humanity or in a

559
HUA XXVII, 101: Von Christus habe ich eine urbildliche Idee eines Gott-
Menschen.
560
Belo, 71.
 431

particular people.561 For Husserl, Christianity is precisely such a religion which

purports to be properly universal, possessing a God who is a God for all of humanity,

whether acknowledged or not, and which constitutes a universal call for all humanity.

Since it is the case, for Husserl, that, the fundamental characteristic of Western

civilization is the aspiration to universality within the confluence of religion and

philosophy,562 it makes perfect sense to Husserl that he should ground his ethics

ultimately upon the universality of Christian doctrine and Christian faith. Following

Brentano and others, phenomenology in a certain sense seeks to answer the crisis of

European culture by way of a renewal of Christianity and its source of meaning, the

person of Christ. Thus, even while Husserl pursues his phenomenology as a way to

God which operates without God, i.e. without the positive revelation of God,563 the

God at which one arrives by way of the completion of the phenomenological project,

Husserl expects this to be none other than the God who is meant in an authentic Christian

faith.564

561
Ibid.
562
Ibid,. 72.
563
HUA XXXIX, 167.
564
This is certainly not to pass over the specific problems of the comparison between
Husserls language of God and the God of Christianity given the problematic Fichtean
theological language in which Husserl expresses his ideas. From this perspective, it
would seem that between traditional Christian theology and Husserlian
phenomenological theology there is a tremendous linguistic and conceptual divide. It
might well be the case that Husserl would echo Fichte in arguing that, while his
philosophy of God would not alter any aspect of traditional religious faith as such, this
philosophy should, however, alter something within theology (insofar as the word
theologydesignatesthe theory of the nature of God in and for himself, apart from
 432

In the final measure, stepping away from the specific reasons which motivate

Husserls Christianity and his use of the specifically Christian theological tradition to

elaborate upon his ethical ideas, one can at the very least see the ways in which rational

engagement with theology, growing as it does out of the rational articulation of the

experience of some faith in general, can provide ethics with material which may be

potentially useful for further clarifying the general sense of the moral call. There is a

sense, then, in which interest in ethical comportment invites ethics into dialogue with the

theological tradition. That is certainly not to say, however, that ethics is obliged to

inherit any one theological tradition uncritically or that ethics as such should simply be

prepared to play a kind of theological roulette as a form of choosing at random some

theology to be its rational ground or to supply the material content of its ethical demands.

This would be to violate the essential autonomy of the philosophical project.

Nevertheless, if it is indeed the case that part and parcel of the project of the development

of a philosophical ethics is the necessity of an engagement with an equally originary

philosophy of religion, then theology as a product of religious experience must also

figure into ethical discussion as a source of engagement with ethical and religious values.

At this point, however, I have undoubtedly raised more questions than I am

capable of answering from the standpoint of the project of a groundwork to an ethical

philosophy alone. The resolution of these problems extends far beyond the scope of the

present inquiry. Nevertheless, I hope to have used these last concluding meditations on

the essential relationship between the ethical and religious attitudes merely in order to

any relationship to a finite being). Fichte, From a Private Letter, 166, [386, (377-
378)].
 433

indicate the directions in which future work will necessarily have to be pursued. It

should be stressed before closing, however, that by no means have these concluding

meditations been meant as in any way opening up a way into religion or a way into

theology through ethics. If the idea of a formal distinction between ethics and religion

has been understood properly, it should be sufficiently clear that the total meaning of the

religious life stands beyond the limited scope of the ethical domain and that, as such,

there is not even the possibility that one could pursue an authentic inquiry into the field of

religion by way of the notion of ethical value and ethical demands alone as Fichte

thought, nor does this even seem desirable. Rather, a way into the domain of the

phenomenology of religion can only be supplied by the primal data of the religious

itselfi.e. in the idea of the holy and its phenomenal act-correlates, the religious acts of

faith, worship, religious awe, etc. It is, however, still possible to conclude that

ethical reflection in the phenomenological mode as Husserl envisions it will always

impose upon us the necessity of pursuing such a phenomenological investigation into the

religious dimension and that it is only subsequent to the laying down of a similar

groundwork to a phenomenology of religion that we may confidently move beyond the

mere preparatory groundwork to the ethical into the domain of a full-fledged ethical

philosophy itself.
 434

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