What Makes Woman 'WOMAN

FAR EASTERN UNIVERSITY

COLLOQUIUM

Philippine Copyright © 2009By Far Eastern UniversityDepartment of Humanities and Social SciencesInstitute of Arts and Sciences

Published in 2009By Far Eastern University PublicationsFar Eastern UniversityNicanor Reyes StreetManila, PhilippinesTelephone: (632) 7360039Email: [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]

All rights reserved.No part of this publication may be reproduced,stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,in any form or by any means, electronic,mechanical, photocopying, recording,or otherwise, without permissionin writing from the publisher.

ISSN: 2012-0222

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Cover design: Ross Joseph B. CopiacoJaime L. An Lim

Cover Sculpture:Vicente Manansala

Layout:Iren dela Cruz-Briones

fonts used:(cover) Bookman OldStyle, Arial(inside) Perpetua, Tahoma

Editorial Board

MAYBELLE MARIE PADUANOEL BEJO

Editors

JAIME AN LIMConsultants

Colloquium is the official publication of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences of the Far Eastern University. Views expressed by the authors are not necessarily those of the department nor of the university. Articles or literary works published here, may not be reproduced in full or in part without permission from the department.


COLLOQUIUM Vol. 3 The Department of Humanities and Social Sciences Research Journal 2009


COLLOQUIUM Vol. 3 The Department of Humanities and Social Sciences Research Journal 2009

CONTENTS

1 Being a Person in a Political World: Phenomenological Reflections on the Conditions of Cultural and Ideological Encounters and Conflicts Rosemary R.P. Lerner

47 Husserl’s Critique of the Mathematization of Nature: From Philosophy of Arithmetic to The Crisis of European Sciences Lubica Učník

80 The Phenomenology of Personhood: Charles Taylor and Edmund Husserl Dermot Moran

105 From ‘I’ to ‘We’: Wojtyła’s Phenomenology of Love Peter Simpson

127 Hamann’s Ladder and Kant’s Schemata Jeremiah A. Reyes

148 On Metaphysics, The Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, and the Humanities Michael Dwyer

157 On Human Development and Freedom: Critical Considerations on Nussbaum’s Contributions to the Capabilities Approach

Eda Lou Ibasco Ochangco

178 What Makes Woman Woman Maybelle Marie O. Padua

EDITORS’ NOTE

Consistent with a spirit of open discourse in search of truth as the spirit behind philosophical discussion promoted by Colloquium, this volume acquaints us a special way with a rich and complex area of philosophy whose concern describes the manifold ways in which things are encountered in human experience: phenomenology. Inaugurated by Edmund Husserl (1859 – 1938) who considered one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century in 1900, phenomenology is an approach used in almost all areas of philosophy, such as aesthetics, ethics, and philosophy of science, and in over a score of other cultural disciplines. To date, new areas of investigation making use of phenomenology include ecology, technology, and intercultural relations.

Colloquium Volume Three introduces us to some of the works of phenomenologists from the “Organization of Phenomenological Organizations” (OPO) with whom we came to be acquainted in 2008, during OPO’s Third Meeting, at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, December, 2008. This OPO is specially significant in that the Philippines had its first representation in the person of a philosophy specialist from Far Eastern University.1 This volume invites us to listen to three specialists on Husserl from OPO: Rosemary Lerner, Lubica Ucnik, and Dermot Moran. Additionally, Peter Simpson, an authority on the philosophy of Karol Wojtyla, the late John Paul II, who had a great influence on an area in philosophy known as personalism, treads through similar phenomenological path.

Husserl who has made important contributions to almost all areas of philosophy and its neighboring disciplines such as linguistics,

______________________________

1 Maybelle Padua from FEU who read a paper, “What Makes Woman Woman” is the first philosophy specialist from the Philippines to present a paper in OPO.

vi

sociology and cognitive psychology, draws our attention to essential structures of thinking that allow the objects naively taken for granted in the “natural attitude” to “constitute themselves” in consciousness. As Husserl explains in detail in his second major work, Ideas (1913), the resulting perspective on the realm of intentional consciousness is supposed to enable the phenomenologist to develop a radically unprejudiced justification of his or her basic views on the world and himself and explore their rational interconnections.

Rosemary R.P. Lerner’s paper entitled Phenomenological Refl ections on the Conditions of Cultural and Ideological Encounters and Confl icts, uses Husserl’s descriptions of how “plurality” and difference dwell within the most intimate core of one’s “oneness” and “identity.” For Lerner, Husserl offers clues as to how we are able to conceive and build “common worlds”, “common truths,” and even “objective truth”. She examines the experience of prolonged conflict her country, Peru, as an exemplification of more global cultural and ideological antagonisms among countries, regions or hemispheres, to ask whether an encounter beyond cultural differences and reconciliation beyond ideologically motivated antagonisms is possible, and if it is, on what bases.

Lubica Ucnik, in her article entitled Husserl’s Critique of the Mathematization of Nature: From Philosophy of Arithmetic to The Crisis of European Sciences, argues that Husserl’s critique of the method of natural science (as he outlines it in The Crisis of European Sciences) is a continuation of his critique of science, which he first considers in Philosophy of Arithmetic. She explains that in order to be responsible for our knowledge, we must acknowledge that the Lebenswelt (the German word for lifeworld) is the foundation from which all our knowledge proceeds.

Dermot Moran’s The Phenomenology of Personhood: Charles Taylor and Edmund Husserl develops certain aspects of embodied, situated subjectivity found in Husserl and shared by Taylor. Moran, in this essay, reflects on the difficult problematic of the relation between natural and transcendental approaches to personhood. He contends that Charles Taylor’s influential accounts of embodied personhood and

vii

agency are closer to the phenomenological accounts of personhood found in the mature Husserl (especially his Ideas II and in his ethics lectures) than, perhaps, he realises.

From ‘I’ to ‘We’: Wojtyla’s Phenomenology of Love, Peter Simpson explores Karol Wojtyla’s personalistic norm, that people should treat each other as self-determining agents having distinct personal ends who are able thereby to form themselves, in their sexual love in marriage. Influenced by one of Husserl’s disciples, Max Scheler, Karol Wojtyla (1920-2005), the late John Paul II, drew from his studies of the phenomenological method to develop a creative and original personalistic synthesis, complementing Thomistic metaphysics and anthropology with insights from phenomenology.

Also featured in this volume are the works of Jeremiah Reyes, from the University of the Philippines, Michael Dywer, from Florida State University, Eda Lou Ibasco and Maybelle Padua from Far Eastern University.

Jeremiah Reyes, in his article entitled Hamann’s Ladder and Kant’s Schemata, analyses the philosophical schemes of two prominent German thinkers, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788). Kant, whose most original contribution to philosophy is his “Copernican Revolution,”2 as he puts it, to emphasize its novelty and huge importance, makes a claim for the human mind in his Critique of Pure Reason to be a conduit of experience rather than just a passive recipient of perception, a thinking which was meant to turn minds around from the ‘old paradigm’. Kant, in showing that the mind, through its innate categories, constructs our experience along

______________________________

2 Nicolaus Copernicus (1543) presented a heliocentric model view of the universe to replace the Ptolemaic model, which postulated the earth at the center of the universe, the heliocentric model with the sun at the center of our Solar System. It was one of the starting points of the Scientific Revolution of the 16th Century.

viii

certain lines (space, time, causality, self) is said to have revolutionized philosophy. Thinking and experiencing, he claims, give no access to things as they really are. We can think as hard as we like, but we will never escape the innate constraints of our minds. Kant forced philosophy to look seriously at the world for the agent (what Kant calls the phenomenal world) independently of the real world outside consciousness – the world in itself (the noumenal world). Johann Georg Hamann, though a close friend and contemporary of Kant, wrote a passionate reaction against Kant’s Critique in his Metacritique on the Purism of Reason, where he presents an alternative worldview which Reyes examines in his essay.

We have an article from the late Michael Dywer,3 whose work was completed and edited for publishing by his friend and colleague, David Charles McCarty (Indiana University), who published with us in the first volume of Colloquium. According to Michael Dwyer, some philosophers, educationalists, and social theorists think that objective observation does not exist from foundational results of quantum mechanics as Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (HUP). The principle states that the more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa. This is a succinct statement of the “uncertainty relation” between the position and the momentum (mass times velocity) of a subatomic particle, such as an electron. This relation has profound implications for such fundamental notions as causality and the determination of the future behavior of an atomic particle. Because of the scientific and philosophical implications of the seemingly harmless sounding uncertainty relations, physicists speak of an uncertainty principle, which is often called more descriptively the “principle of indeterminacy.” In his article On Metaphysics, the Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, and the

______________________________

3 Michael Dywer passed away on 23 August 2009. Prior to his death, he was able to finish the bulk of the present piece.

ix

Humanities, Dywer claims that if these consequences do not follow from some aspect of quantum theory, then they follow not from the correct mathematical statement of HUP but, at best, from a debatable interpretation of HUP on which imaginary macroscopic observers are pictured interacting with microscopic phenomena.

Eda Lou Ibasco, whose first works on Nobel laureate Amartya K. Sen appeared in the first two volumes of Colloquium, publishes a third article with us on Sen and on Martha Nussbaum this time. Sen is known to have pioneered the capabilities approach to freedom that he had persuasively argued for in place of the dominant utilitarian tradition in welfare economics. Nussbaum had independently developed, related ideas on capability and freedom in like perspective This paper argues that Nussbaum’s capabilities approach could enrich the human development standpoint that Amartya Sen is known to have developed and strongly argued for.

Maybelle Padua writes an essay that defends the position that woman has a feminine distinctive nature. She writes on the philosophy of Edith Stein, who trained under Edmund Husserl and was his best student. Using Stein’s philosophical notion of “woman”, this paper argues the claim that woman’s nature as biological mother makes her intrinsically different from man. A woman’s body is so designed so that she can carry a new human being within her body. But even if she does not become a biological mother (because she is single or celibate), her psyche is naturally made for intimacy and closeness with persons. Padua elucidates in her article how this capacity for motherhood affects woman’s whole being and distinguishes her with two essential characteristics: attraction to the personal and attraction to wholeness.

Once again, we are happy to have ‘convened’ specialists in their own fields in a new volume of Colloquium to give light and meaning to issues of vital concern. Albert Einstein said, “whata person thinks on his own without being stimulated by the thoughtsand experiences of other people is, even in the best case, rather paltryand monotonous.” Listening to those who have pondered and reflected at length on matters that help us relate thought to experience, ours,

x

theirs, and those of others always aid us to widen our horizons beyond our small and limited worlds. As Einstein further out it, we owe it to “a few enlightened people with a lucid mind and style and with good taste within a century... to help us extricate ourselves fromsuperstition and ignorance.... Nothing is more needed to overcome the modernist’s snobbishness.” (1954).

We are grateful to have been given the opportunity to learn from people who spend themselves pondering over ideas, issues, and affairs that other persons might trivialize or fail to even deem important. It is to such thinkers that we derive the color and depth that is often said to describe the third dimension of sight and outlook that would have otherwise been flat and one-dimensional.

Maybelle Marie O. Padua Noel Bejo

xi

COLLOQUIUMVolume 3, 2009

PHENOMENOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS ON THE CONDITIONS OF CULTURAL

AND IDEOLOGICAL ENCOUNTERS AND CONFLICTS

ROSEMARY R.P. LERNERPontifi cia Universidad Católica del Perú

[email protected]

This paper was mostly motivated by Peru’s intense social and economic problems that exploded in an internal armed confl ict of exceeding violence, from 1980 to 2000. The author uses the experience within her country as an exemplifi cation of more global cultural and ideological antagonisms among countries, regions or hemispheres, and to ask whether an encounter beyond cultural differences and reconciliation beyond ideologically motivated antagonisms is at all possible, and upon which bases. Husserl left descriptions that indicate how “plurality” and difference dwell within the most intimate core of one’s “oneness” and “identity”, offering clues as to how we are able to conceive and build “common worlds”, “common truths” and even “objective truth”. The author fi nally confronts these transcendental-phenomenological accounts with some elements of certain Amazonian ethnic groups’ world-view, which may seem totally “incompossible” with the Western view that fi nally nourishes some of Husserl’s basic notions.

Keywords:Confl ict, Violence, Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, Truth, Interculturality, Amazonian ethnic groups, Husserlian Phenomenology

2 Rosemary R.P. Lerner

This text is the result of a series of reflections disparate in origin and reflected upon during an extended period of time, mostly motivated by the intense social and economic problems of my country that exploded in an internal armed conflict of exceeding violence, from 1980 to 2000. This period was studied by a Government-appointed Truth and Reconciliation Commission that functioned from 2001 to 2003, year in which it yielded its final report. The conflict was characterized as having its roots in the Peruvian cultural diversity and in the different and antagonizing ideological attempts to interpret and solve this conflict, which finally led to the aforementioned violence characterized by heinous crimes against Humanity. These dire cultural and ideological “failed encounters” within one country seemed to me a perfect exemplification of more global cultural and ideological antagonisms among countries, regions or hemispheres. Some of the questions that emerged from these reflections and that have since then haunted me is ultimately whether an encounter beyond cultural differences and reconciliation beyond ideologically motivated antagonisms is at all possible, and upon which bases.

Furthermore, the underlying philosophical problem in my view is not only, as Anthony Steinbock formulated it, “who counts as a stranger?”, or whether “the ability to make cross-cultural and cross-historical critiques (is) precluded by the recognition of difference?” (1995, p. 1) But also, whether there is to begin with such a thing as a purely identical “selfhood” or ipseity, over and against which “otherness” or “alterity” can be clearly delimited, as it would seem at first, founding the distinctions we naturally make between oneself and another, or between the “we” of our group and the “others” of alien groups. This raises the issue of difference within identity, of alterity within ipseity, of heteronomy within autonomy, of plurality within unity, of particularity within universality. For it seems that in fact we experience our “sameness” and “selfhood” as essentially intertwined with “otherness” and “alterity”, their pure and simple “opposition” being only the fruit of a conceptual abstraction.

Phenomenological Refl ecti ons on... 3

On the other hand, we in fact experience otherness, plurality, difference, alterity, heteronomy, and particularity, and the conflict that originates therein, in every walk and at every level of life: not only at the larger level of cultures, nations, all the way down to groups of two, but also within ourselves.

Husserl left us descriptions that indicate us how we experience plurality, difference and otherness at all levels of life, from the most immanent and egological phenomena all the way to generative or trans-generational phenomena. But if “plurality” and difference dwell within the most intimate core of our “oneness” and “identity”, the question is to see how is it that we are able to conceive and build “common worlds”, “common truths” and even, that which in the “Western world” has been understood as “objective truth”. These questions of course are not only crucial for epistemological reasons, and to understand what are denominated true statements, for example, in astrophysics or other theoretical sciences, but most importantly, how is a cross-cultural or cross-ideological common understanding possible, in order to ensure a peaceful world recognizing us all as members of one Humanity, overcoming cultural and ideological antagonisms and avoiding the violence that frequently ensues from the experience of difference. Hence, the questions at stake are not only epistemologically, but most of all morally dire. The destiny of humankind depends on them.

As intimated above, Husserl offers some clues as to how unity, identity, and universality is constituted starting from the most intimate and instinctive spheres of mediated and differentiated experience. In this presentation I will briefly reconstruct secundum sententias Edmundi transcendental-phenomenological descriptions in view of two different case-arguments: one, in view of showing how “one world” (and the notion of “universality”) may emerge from initial experiences of our “homeworld” and the “alien world”; the other, in view of showing the conditions required to constitute or reconstruct a so-called “objective truth”, in the case of the task undertaken by “Truth and Reconciliation Commissions.” Regarding the latter, we will confront the limits of this truth’s possibility of being recognized if its evaluative and


practical dimensions and their appeal to an “intelligence of emotions” (Nussbaum, 2001) do not prevail over its merely theoretical claims. Finally, we will confront these transcendental-phenomenological accounts with some elements of certain Amazonian ethnic groups’ world-view, which some anthropological accounts argue are totally alien to and “incompossible” with the Western view that finally nourishes some of Husserl’s basic notions. So our final question will be whether transcendental phenomenology is able to enlighten at all the possibility of overcoming such an “incompossibility.”

More than a unified argument concluding in a statement, we thus rather propose to open horizons and raise problematic questions for reflection and discussion.

§1. Cultural and Ideological Confl icts and the Problem of Reconciliation. The Tension between the Universality of Globalization and the Particularity of Multiculturalism.

As I pointed out above, the starting point of my reflection is the experience of the internal armed conflict that afflicted Peru between 1980 and 2000, and its final goal to understand its intercultural and ideological origins and the eventual conditions of possibility required for the reconciliation–even survival– of my country. In order to achieve the former, namely to understand its origin, I deemed necessary to place this conflict within a likely international and national context, which could be understood from the recent perspectives of intercultural conflicts in our “global world”. And to achieve the latter, as the experience of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions has already taught, the conditio sine qua non was the recognition of the truth concerning the events that took place, and a subsequent period of “transitional justice.” This lead to examine “truth” under a phenomenological perspective understood as a sort of “intersubjective,” namely “intercultural agreement”, constituted in intersubjectively “evident” experiences. We will examine below (see §4) how within the context of extreme conflicts and the need for


reconciliation, this sort of “moral truth”, is not only as multistratified and temporal as other evident experiences –relating to perceptual and argumentative reasons, physical and statistical proofs, and entailing strong emotions as grief from the loss of loved ones, anger and fear– but is even more contingent and unstable, enjoying less intersubjective “agreement,” than truths pertaining to other formal, empirical, or cultural disciplines.

For the purposes of this presentation, it will suffice to briefly refer to the likely global context of the Peruvian conflict.

Around the two world wars –that radically transformed the European and Asian maps– not only were the Eastern and Western blocks created, but also the so-called first, second, and third worlds, introducing a new North-South hemispheric division that undermined Europe’s civilized and centralized self-consciousness from within. The fall of monarchic empires and their colonialisms gave rise to new African, Asiatic and Eastern European States drowned in fratricidal wars. Finally, as the “global village” slowly emerged as the Western “planetary empire of technology,” numerous cultural communities from all over demanded –sometimes in extremely violent ways and under the form of political and religious fundamentalisms– a world-politics of recognition of their respective cultural identities.

Globalization is today, indeed, a double-faced phenomenon: on the one hand, and from a naive point of view of progress, it would seem to give humanity unedited tools for the “definitive” solution of all conflicts. On the other hand, it is the source of new tensions and (apparently) of new and insoluble conflicts –pertaining to a “global” order. Globalization is first characterized by different net systems (economic, financial, commercial, juridical, institutional, and supra- or trans-national) that establish a spatial, anonymous inter-dependence in the world today, implemented by very advanced systems and communication techniques. However, it does not automatically cause the modernization of the peoples.1 Indeed, the latter is a different phenomenon that, upon a temporal “axis,” refers to unequal processes of the historical (economic, social and political) development of the


peoples in the different regions of the orb, where specific contents or cultural values come into account.

A report from UNESCO’s World Culture and Development Commission, “Our Creative Diversity,” recognized in 1997 the existence of ten thousand different societies, nations or cultural communities distributed in two hundred States, as well as the existence of two thousand recognized tongues, excepting dialects (Gellner, 1994, as cited in Sanders, 1997, pp. 45-57).

Globalization is not the first phenomenon that introduced some homogeneity to the diversity of cultures under the Western empire of technological civilization. It was preceded by the role of European national states born in the eighteenth century, first as absolute centralized monarchies and later as national republican states, imposing in their clearly delimited territories –within historical frontiers– the unity of a language, sometimes a religion, a legal and educational system, patriotic symbols, etc. But it is only with its presence that cultural communities within those national-States all over the planet manifest an unedited fear of being threatened in their very essence. Whereas national-States nurture and in a certain sense warrant the existence of cultural and historical multiplicities within them, globalization uses a highly ideological (political and economic) “homogeneous discourse” –that of neo-Liberalism2– albeit alleging ignorance of its own ideological character. Indeed, by identifying the collapse of “ideology” with the collapse of the Eastern block and announcing the “end of history” and “ideologies,” neo-Liberalism ignores the historicity of its own discourse, pretending to speak from a supposedly “objective” and “scientific” “limbo” about the past and the only liable future projects. But by replacing authentically mobilizing cultural, social and political values with pure “market” values, different cultures start perceiving globalization as a threat to their survival.3

In this context took place world processes of decolonization, the dismantling of the former East-West blocks and the slow reconfiguration of new ones –with big differences in accent. Multiple cultures and nations demanded “politics of recognition” for their


“identities” and differences.4 The resulting hemispheric tensions reappeared within most of the earth’s national-States, whereby criminal acts of ideological, political and religious fundamentalisms, on an international scale and/or within national-States, started to proliferate. With the phenomenon of globalization, the initial tension within national-States between the “universality” required to establish their national identities and the “particularity” of the multiple cultures that inhabit them –demanding respect and recognition for their singular communities–, became internationalized as a tension among countries representing the Western dominant “civilization” and those of different cultures.

Multiple political debates at the level of international organisms as those of UNESCO, concerning the relationship between culture and development, have not succeeded yet in solving problems derived from these issues. No adequate strategy has yet been contrived to succeed in establishing bridges between global economic and educational development –regarding, for example, the necessary access to advanced technology and its benefits– and the fierce resistance against it from multiple cultural communities within those national-States. However, it is still acknowledged that without the existence of national-States embracing multiple ethnicities and cultures, the economic, social and political development of the peoples –and the further normalization of international relations– will not be achieved. Yet it is also said that the national-States have to be re-conceived starting from “politics of recognition” regarding their own marginalized cultural communities, and the practice of fair, intercultural dialogue.

Well known at the academic front is the debate between Liberals and Communitarians since approximately 1970 regarding the foundations of national-States. Liberals –in this context– defend the universalistic, contractual, formal and constitutional idea of the State, whereby the ontological and moral foundations are atomic and originally unequal individuals –yet bearers of “universal” rights– who contractually delegate to an impersonal State the “just” and equal administration of the universal needs of all –albeit only in a formal,


abstract and neutral way. Communitarians, on the other hand, insist in the concept of community –in opposition to that of State– as source and foundation of the cohesion required by the State itself. The community, given in a dialogical horizon of affections and solidarity ties, is not driven by the normative idea of individual rights, but rather by the idea of duties that tie their members to traditional and historical values.

Many attempts to mediate between these extreme positions have been carried out by each group. Indeed, from the “Liberal” point of view, there is talk about a “political culture” (Habermas, 1987), namely, that of the mutual respect for the rights of all; and from the “Communitarian” point of view, there is talk of a State engaged in safeguarding the survival of cultural communities that, eventually, could contractually adopt some form of Liberalism.5

In this world-context the Peruvian armed conflict took place, between 1980 and 2000. Its background was a multicultural linguistic diversity, corresponding to seventy two ethnic groups that co-exist in our territory: seven in the Andean region and sixty five in the Amazonian jungle, grouped in fourteen different families.6 The phenomenon of exclusion of ample rural Andean and Amazonian sectors, from the part of an originally European Catholic minority, is so great that, in several cases, there is no legal document to register the existence itself of countless individuals. Yet other, more serious, problems affect the vast multicultural population of farmers –even hunters and collectors of the Andean and Amazonian regions. These concern the most fundamental human rights (from a moral and social point of view), as the right to life, and to a humanely dignifi ed life. As examples, may it suffice to mention Peru’s child mortality rate –one of the highest in Latin America despite its relative macro-economic recovery since the last decade of the twentieth century: From one thousand born live, 58.3 children die before their first birthday, whereby the rate of the department of Huancavelica alone is that of 106.6 per thousand, a similar figure as that of Burundi and Ghana. There is also chronic mal-nutrition (48% of children) and illiteracy


(today, among other figures, 29% of Peruvian teenagers between thirteen and seventeen years old are school drop-outs; and those that continue have the next to last school performance at the level of the American continent, only above Haiti).

In this context of exclusion and marginalization, the movements inspired by Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961)7 emerged during the nineteen-sixties. After World War II, Fanon echoed the European “bad conscience” regarding the colonized world’s feelings, arguing that the most important weapon used by colonizers was the imposition of their own image upon the colonized and subjected peoples. Thus the latter should first “purge” themselves of these representations and later apply a violence that should “equal” the original violence of foreign imposition. During the final two decades of the twentieth century, the result of this explosion in Peru branded the Peruvian State and society with horror and dishonor.

After two years of investigation, the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded its Final Report in 2003 with an appalling statement: that “the most probable number of fatal victims (…) surpasses 69,000 Peruvian men and women dead or disappeared, in the hands of subversive organizations or by State agents” (p. 1),8 75% of them Quechua-speaking and 90% peasants, a sector “historically ignored by the State and the urban society, (…) who do enjoy the benefits of the political community” (p. 1). In spite of the detailed and sustained report, as well as of advanced techniques used for the statistical calculation of the losses, many interested sectors of the population –including subversive and State agents, the political parties, party-controlled media and groups that remain culturally and economically distanced from the peasant Quechua population– have denied all validity to the report, perpetuating that which the report denounced, namely “a double scandal: that of massive assassination, disappearance and torture, and indolence, ineptitude and indifference of those who could have prevented this human catastrophe and did not” (p. 1). And although there is no basis to sustain that it consisted of a racial confl ict, it could not have been possible without the complicity of a “deep


contempt towards the country’s most dispossessed population,” both by the militant members of the Peruvian Communist Party, Shining Path (PCP-SL), and by the State agents –a contempt interwoven in the daily Peruvian social texture.

The armed conflict itself has practically ended in Peru, but the conflict is still latent as long as the conditions for justice and reconciliation, namely, for an intercultural reconciliation, are not given. The Peruvian society needs to come to terms with itself, and so do the multiple ethnic and cultural groups among themselves. The first of these conditions is the fight against oblivion, that is, the retrieval of the truth of the events and their causes, against the “official truth” built during two decades.

§2. Identity and Solipsism versus Difference and Otherness

Let us turn now to Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology that has been generally characterized by twentieth century so-called Continental philosophy as an idealism or a-historical essentialism; an epigonic form of metaphysics of subjectivity that qua solipsistic and non-mondaine egology established by the epoché and reduction, consecrates the self-transparency of the ego against the unconsciousness’ opacity or false consciousness, leading to the failure of its intersubjectivity theory; a logocentric, scientistic, intellectualist, and foundationalist philosophy that is unable to overcome Modern philosophy’s prejudices; a metaphysics of presence that leads to the failure of its analyses on temporality; a centripetal philosophy of autarchic, self-sufficient and self-contained immanence that excludes and reduces all dependency regarding a centrifugal, decentralized and exceeding transcendence. In sum, it has been generally viewed as a philosophy of identity (of selfness, ipseity, or autonomy) that, by means of the objectifying and constitutive intentionality, attempts to submit and crush all difference (otherness, alterity or heteronomy), among other things.

This view has originated in Husserl’s and Heidegger’s ambiguous relationship in the last century’s twentieth decade9, made public in


1929 with Georg Misch’s Lebensphilosophie und Phänomenologie (1931). The Heideggerian interpretation of Husserl’s work perpetuated in important thinkers of the Continental tradition for, as Taminiaux ascertains, “for phenomenological reasons they judged it necessary to explain themselves with Heidegger” (2002, p. 7)10. Thus the latter inspired Husserl’s critical reception during the twentieth Century, radicalized with the so-called Post-Modern interpreters.11 When some of these critics recognized genetic and generative elements in Husserl’s mature and later work, they were regarded as fragmentary and not wholly integrated in the context of the methodological and programmatic presentation of Ideas I’s transcendental phenomenology. Or else, in the best of cases, as Taminiaux also pointed out regarding Merleau-Ponty’s reading, “to interpret Husserl’s evolution means to underscore the contrast between the clear program of transcendental phenomenology and the obscure and infinite patience of the manuscripts and to recognize in them an at least tacit rupture with the logicism of the philosophy of essences and the growing awareness that the phenomena resist any return to the classical effort at intellectual adequation” (1985, pp. 117-118).

For sure, multiple investigations of the last three and a half decades, based on the massive publication of Husserl’s research manuscripts and courses have allowed us to reconsider some of the most deeply-rooted of those interpretations.12 For the purposes of this presentation I wish to highlight horizons of de-centering and excess in Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, and their non-contradictory (even “dialectic”) inclusion in the context of a philosophy whereby the “beginnings” are proclaimed methodologically “egological,”13 and where the life of the subject in Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology is revealed in all its rich and multistratified complexity.

It is known that Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, especially in Ideas I, takes its methodological point of depart in an egology. What is not known so much to non-Husserlian phenomenologists and philosophers is that he attempted successively two different strategies to approach transcendental experience: a static and a genetic


one. If the first one takes as guidelines the constituted objectivities or meanings in order to interrogate regressively the centralized constitutive experiences surrounding the I as active pole of irradiation and passive center of affection, the second one takes as guideline the transcendental experiences themselves (namely, sense-constituting) in their temporal situation to examine regressively how these are constituted. Husserl thus observes that transcendental experiences are constituted in an individualized and “historical” process by which past acts sediment and maintain themselves in the subject’s life as “habitualities” or “acquired capacities.” This genetic approach implies thus a “system of remissions” towards deeper strata of experience that continually self-transcends itself. At this egological level, however, even within static phenomenology, we are far from an alleged “reign of autonomy” excluding all “heteronomy,” for the analyses attest the inrush of time, that settles “excess” and continuous “de-centering” in the midst of sameness.14 This is what Roberto Walton refers to as a “fi rst expansion of our system of access to the world” (2009, p. 47). Genetic phenomenology discovers new and richer dimensions of this temporality. The minimum actual unity of experience in the subject’s life is a continuum of temporal duration constituted by the originary impression, protention and retention or primary memory (Husserl, 1976b, §§81-82; 1969, §§30, 31, 32 passim). Protentions, for example, not only pre-delineate coming experience but refl ect retentions that are dependent of them and motivated by them. But new dimensions of excess and de-centering in the midst of egological phenomenology, both static and genetic, are given when Husserl unveils empathic and apperceptive experiences that manifest the “other” and intersubjectivity. This deals indeed with a second expansion of our system of access to the world (Walton, 2009, p. 47), for when we experiment the experiences that others have of the world and of ourselves, they irrupt in the deepest intimacy of our own self. Furthermore, those “others” are subjects present in our simultaneous horizon and absent subjects in past or future horizons. Traditions are hence revealed, as styles, habitualities and capacities acquired in past social experiences.


This analysis remits in its turn to “originary or instinctive habitualities” in an instinctive and primordial intersubjectivity (Husserl, 1960, §§43-58 passim [1973a]). 15

It is to be noted that this “otherness” discovered in the midst of “sameness,” with the analyses on time and intersubjectivity, coincide with Husserl’s decision between 1910 and 1911 of accepting a centralized ego, when he analyzes the possibilities open by the study of two types of non-originary intuitive lived-experiences (Vergegenwärtigungen) that reveal modalities of “de-centering”: memory that manifests an absent and past I, that belongs to the same flow of consciousness, and empathy that manifests an actual and present I, but exceeding self-presence since it does not belong to the same flow of consciousness as ours (1973b, Vol. XIII, p. 219). Consciousness is thus haunted by a double inner division or “absence” that threatens its identity: the distance between the past and the present ego, and the difference between my consciousness and that of the other. The identical ego seems to be the answer to the need of a unity of the (individual) temporal flow of past and present experiences (pp. 296 ff.), and the answer to the need to delimit our own (individual) consciousness in relation to the other’s consciousness (mediating the living body) (§36 ff, pp. 183 ff.). The recognition of those two types of alterity (within individual consciousness and among several consciousnesses), and our experience of those alterities by means of remembrances and empathies, seems to precede Husserl’s decision to accept a pure, centralized and identical ego. Thus already in 1910-1911, far from any symptom of the “metaphysics of presence,” an originary difference seems to precede the pure I’s (mein reines Ich) alleged self-identity.

Egological phenomenology ends with the manifestation of objectivity and worldliness (Walton, 2009, p. 48) that imply new “excesses” and “de-centerings.” In static phenomenology the world manifests itself first as the external universal horizon, in the context of which all objects that appear serve as “guidelines” towards the lived-experiences that constitute their respective meanings. Genetic phenomenology describes how the changing determinations that


appertain to the objects’ inner horizon sediment themselves, giving rise to familiar horizons of acquired knowledge, and simultaneously causing that later perceptions, may ever differ from previous ones. Thus, Husserl observes that the knowledge of an object is never individual but extends to other similar objects of an empirical type (or morphological essence). And at the subject’s side the “intentional systems” sediment themselves in habitualities that temporally configure a world for the subject (Walton, 2009, p. 48). With the issue of instinctive habitualities, genetic phenomenology leads to the overcoming of egology and to the horizon of generativity.

The so-called generative elements introduce more radical meanings of excess and de-centering, for they reveal the adoption –within one’s own subjectivity– of meanings not constituted by it, but transmitted synchronically by others bodily present or absent, or transmitted diachronically by those whose life partially coincides with our own (our elders and predecessors, and our minors or successors). This verification leads to assert the other I (experimented mondainely) as a transcendental I (constitutive of meanings) (Fink, 1988, p. 253). The guideline to unveil the community of transcendental egos starts thus with the I as “world phenomenon” and ends up with “transcendental intersubjectivity” in its three levels of originary history, primary historicity and secondary or rational historicity.

Originary generativy or originary history concerns the periodic succession of generations and their alternation with birth and death, the horizon of which surrounds each I. It illuminates the previous conditions of the advent of history, being “home” its point of departure, site of “originary generative life,” with its correlative surrounding world where everyone appears in roles such as fathers, mothers, children, siblings, partners, etc. (Husserl, 2008, p. 329; Fink, 1988, pp. 273 ff.). These analyses complement themselves with other deeper ones that illuminate the subject’s pre-egological life and the originary and passive flow of the intersubjective pre-time that sustains it (Husserl, Ms. K III 3, p. 50ª; 1973b, Vol. XV, pp. 178 and 138 n); as well as those of the “homeworld” or “earthly horizon” (ground) that embraces


and sustains every human body and activity, with its unique “originary history” for all of our planet’s relative peoples and histories (Husserl, 1973b, Vol. XV, p. 206).

Primary historicity or simple effective history has as transcendental principle “generativity” (Walton, 2009, pp. 51-54). It develops as an intersubjective, active, and mediate event, that establishes goals that survive the passing of generations (giving rise to social habitualities and traditions), and that receive reports from the past. This gives rise to historical consciousness and the active co-validation of meanings across generations. Its concrete a priori is the process of original institution, sedimentation, reactivation and transformation of meaning (Husserl, 1970, p. 371 passim [1976a, p. 380]). Furthermore, it is characterized by an intersubjective intentionality and time of “superior order” that constitutes historical time (Husserl, 1993a, p. 364 passim). The latter is characterized by being a communal time given in a different way to each subject as a permanent unity of duration according to co-existence and succession. Regarding the future, effective praxis may adopt a tradition, co-instituting and co-realizing its meanings and validities, or ceasing to reactivate them letting its goals fail. Regarding the past, a “horizon consciousness” as sedimented intersubjective past accompanies the experience of historical presence (Walton, 2009, pp. 53-54). This enables historical research. Finally, it is characterized by the formation of cultural worlds, with cultural behaviors and objects (bodily-spiritual), fruit of communal wills of subjectivities of a higher order (supported in the individual wills that compose it, and acting through them). Cultural objective formations rendered mediately independent of the wills, also serve later as support and motivation of new voluntary acts (Husserl, 2008, p. 347).

Finally, Secondary historicity or rational history institutes new cultural confi gurations according to the idea of infi niteness, namely, “ideal” notions of a “higher order,” “objectivities-” or “truths-in-themselves” –as poles that lie in the infinite– and that are the object of “science” and “philosophy” (Walton, 2009, pp. 54-56; Husserl, 1970, p. 279 [1976a, p. 325]; 1973b, Vol. XV, p. 438 passim). The goal of this historicity is


full rationality, whereby the practical dimension is that of absolute self-responsibility.

In this stratified, systemic, yet “open-ended” way, all the strata are articulated from the egological level to the generative dimension. Thus also one may understand what for philosophers such as Paul Ricoeur (1967) was but a “paradox”: how can a “philosophy of consciousness” be compatible with a “philosophy of history.”

§3. From our Homeworld to Alien Worlds, ¿Is One World possible?

As we have seen, the constitution of intersubjectivity from the perspective of Husserl’s phenomenology shows in all of its strata two aspects in tension or, more exactly, dialectically interdependent. On one side, there is a “centralized,” “own” (or primordial) subjective point of departure –from the sphere of the pre-I to the highest form of the “pure I” or “primordial I,” equally manifest in the null point of orientation which is our body –with a correlative “oriented constitution” (Husserl, 1973a, §§42-62) 16 towards “otherness” and “difference” in general. This, at the level of intersubjectivity (pre-reflective or reflective), is manifest under the form of gradually wider “relative surrounding worlds” as concentric rings (Husserl, 1973b, Vol. XV, pp. 429 ff.) with the character of an open horizon. On the other hand, within the sphere of “ownness” or of “primordiality,” of “presence” and “sameness,” even at the most intimate level of instinct, “otherness” and “difference” become manifest –as in the “absent” temporal horizons of past and future; in the historicity of experiences, habitualities and tendencies inherited from past generations; and in the patency of the other’s body (i.e., the mother’s) in fields of sensation previous to the apperception of one’s own. “Identity” and “difference,” the “same” and the “other,” are inseparable evidences, from the primary constitution processes of every human experience to the highest forms of the rational productions of science and culture.

The preservation of both terms dialectically dependent of each other –“the same” and “the other”, “identity” and “difference”– places


us in the domain of plurality: the plurality of monads; of communities of communication, and of “personalities of a higher order” –such as the plurality of nations and correlatively of “homeworlds,” of ethoi and cultures– ; and the plurality of epistemes. Plurality manifests itself in the domain of facts. But to the supposed “normative force of facts” one may oppose “philosophical radicalism” and “rational necessity.” A new question appears for the possibility of a universal, all-embracing, unitary measure –epistemic, rational, evaluative, ethical, and cultural. A new tension emerges among apparently antithetic terms: of unity versus multiplicity, and of universality versus particularity. The question is whether this is an unsolvable antithesis (whereby both extremes mutually annul each other); or an illegitimate generalization (as the upshot of the predominance of a particular point of view over others), or, finally, a case that may be approached as that of a “dialectics of interdependence.”

Basing ourselves in certain reflections of contemporary phenomenologists who also draw from Husserl,17 I will sketch out this examination in two steps: 1. Is it possible to experiment and recognize an “alien world” from the “homeworld”? How? And, 2. Is it possible to think in a universal unity –science, ethics, values or rights, supra-nationality or mere “humanity,” or “the” world – and yet maintain the plurality of the particular?

3.1 From the homeworld to alien worldsWith “homeworld” and “alien world” “Husserl wishes to

describe essential, immanent structures that concern every concrete surrounding world and their presumed validities” (Lohmar, 1993, p. 68).18

The “homeworld” is immediately accessible, both cognitively and emotionally. In it we share the same gestures and language, we know “what” things are “for,” “what ends” are pursued by people’s actions (Husserl, 1973b, Vol. XV, pp. 220 ff., 224 ff., 430), we share the same customs (ethoi) and traditions, anticipate behaviors and the course of our perceptions (pp. 430-431). Including the perceptual


world itself (with its human beings, fields, woods, etc.) has its own spiritual coloring. The concrete anticipations of our daily experience, that may be continually fulfilled, are given under certain “normalizing” criteria or measures that allow us to identify the eventual deception in fulfillment as “eccentric” or “mad.” As the domain of “proximity” and of the “we,” the “homeworld” starts with the family and keeps extending in concentric rings to the community, the homeland, or the continent.19 The “familiar surrounding world” is initially identified with the world itself, and this “closed humanity” with humanity itself.

Placing ourselves in the hypothetical situation of a “non-globalized” world, the “alien world” –from the viewpoint of each “homeworld”– appears as what is “distant,” exterior to “us,” not foreseeable in a concrete analogy. Not only every object, sign, or gesture appears different, but also everything appears as an “unknown totality.” It has “other ends in life, other convictions of all types, other customs, other practical modes of behavior, other traditions” (Husserl, 1973b, Vol. XV, p. 214), briefly, another culture and another “worldview.” Even the “general analogy” –that at least anticipates in the “alien world” an equally perceptual surrounding world, of human beings, fields, woods, etc.– is shaken, for these same objects appear with a different “spiritual” or “cultural” sense (pp. 432-433). Furthermore, the other’s “alien world” appears “colored” by the prejudices of the own “homeworld.” Not only is it excluded and discriminated, but undervalued –its evaluations, cognitions, rules “are not valid” in relation to those of the “homeworld.” The “alien world” is a threat to the concepts of the world and the one humanity constituted from within the “homeworld.”

Experience and finally recognition of the “alien world” from the “homeworld” are rendered possible, according to Husserl, from the moment that the own “homeworld.” expands itself analogically, by means of “anticipations” of “the unknown in the style of that which is known to us” (Husserl, 1973b, Vol. XV, p. 430). In other words, “there are pre-forms of the alien within daily experience” (Lohmar, 1993, p. 70).20 Education, adds Husserl, helps us gradually to overcome an


initial incomprehensibility, such as when we learn to read, calculate, appreciate or play a musical piece, briefly, as in every learning process of arts or scientific and cultural disciplines (Husserl, 1973b, Vol. XV, pp. 227-228, 233, 409 ff.). It is the expansion of what is “familiar” to the less familiar within one’s own “homeworld.” And, as in this last case, the encounter with an “alien world” drags with it simultaneously a change of attitude regarding the own “homeworld.” Without abandoning the latter’s convictions, they cease to be exclusive. There exist, besides one’s own, other worldviews with their own validities; the “alien world” is recognized as another “homeworld” with its own convictions. The “universal reach” that the validities of the “homeworld” seemed to have is suddenly relative. From this moment on, the familiar and the alien convictions –in spite of their non-coincidence– may be thought of side by side (Lohmar, 1993, pp. 74-75). The possibility of different “worlds” and different “humanities” suddenly emerges.

3.2 From the plurality of worlds to the one worldThe next question is whether it is possible to pass from the

recognition of a plurality of “worlds,” “humanities,” cultures, nations, ethics, etc. to the idea of a world, a humanity, a nation, an ethics, a science, and a rationality, “not tied to a homeworld” (Lohmar, 1993, pp. 76-83).21 The question is whether the constitution of universality is possible, such that without annihilating the possibility of a plurality of particular “homeworlds,” it is not constituted either as a mere projection of a dominant “homeworld.” In Husserl we find two approaches to this problem that initially appear different, even antithetical. The first one is the one he sketches in his 1935 “Vienna Conference” (1970, pp. 269-299 [1976a, pp. 314-348]). The second one is found in his 1931 to 1937 posthumous manuscripts (1993a; 1973b, Vol. XV), wherein the first approach is nuanced.

The first approach, much better known, has been characterized as “euro-centric.” As Scheler and others have also claimed, Husserl shares the idea that humanity’s perfection as radical responsibility needs to be “unified” under the “infinite telos idea” of a founded knowledge. This


“infinite idea” of a disinterested, ultimately founded knowledge was historically discovered in the Greek world and gave Europe its spiritual confi guration. It is the Greek-European philosophy that Europe has contributed, with its infinite idea and radical sense of responsibility, to humanity in general. Humanity thus tends to be “unified” under this infinite idea of radical responsibility. Europeans, “if they understand themselves correctly,” do not tend to “become Indian” (Husserl, 1970, pp. 274-275 [1976a, p. 320]). Rather the contrary happens. As may be observed, Husserl promotes here two different and parallel ideas that may be sundered: one is Europe as a reality or a historical factum. In this Europe, in the Greek world of the past, the ideals of philosophy and European humanity were born. The other is that of Europe as a rational ideal, as a future project, as the idea of an infinite telos, that of a “unified humanity,” ultimately responsible (Lohmar, 1993, pp. 85-86). Now, one may preserve the Husserlian idea of a radical responsibility and foundation, sundering it from a given historical humanity. As Dieter Lohmar points out, “It would have been as correct if Husserl had said that we should not ‘become Indian’ as well as that we should not ‘become European’ –in a historical-factual sense– ‘if we understand ourselves well.’ The regulative idea speaks in the name of a philosophical radicalism that must remain stateless” (p. 86). Indeed, the ideas of “science” and “ethics” may very well be founded, for example, in a “worldly-familiar rationality” such as the European one. But, as Lohmar points out again, “A culture seems to us provincial and unilateral if it only draws its motivations for the realization of an infinite idea from itself –since the others seem to it ‘immature’” (p. 87). Hence, the possibility of the constitution of a universal science and universal ethics may never be legitimized as a mere projection of the convictions of a particular and factually historical “homeworld.”

Husserl’s other approach that helps overcome the apparent “unilateralism” of his former approach –namely, the generalization established from a dominant “homeworld”– consists in proposing the constitution of the infinite idea of a knowledge and an ethics, namely, of a “universal world” by means of what in similar contexts hermeneutics


has called a “fusion of horizons.” It is an encounter, exchange, and mediation among different truth claims based on experience. Phenomenologically speaking, each point of view tied to a homeworld may claim to be the worldview (Lohmar, 1993, p. 88). Now, Husserl’s notion of supra-nationality proposed as a rational “infinite ideal,” although it should not be established foremost from any factual historical “homeworld” no matter how successful or attractive, does “work in the mediation among concurrent world views” (Lohmar, 1993, p. 88). At the end of his life Husserl dealt with precisely this “dynamics of the encounter among several cultures, and with the utility of such an encounter for the realization of the idea of a supra-nationality” (Lohmar, 1993, p. 89), especially reflecting on the role that world commerce had at the time of the Greeks (Husserl, 1993a, p. 338). Husserl underscores the relevance of personal encounter among Greek merchants and representatives of other cultures. Only that and not the mere “hearing” or “reading” about alien worldviews “broke the normality” and brought a deep change of attitude that enabled ultimately to relativize the national myths of the Greek “homeworld” at the same time it enabled to found philosophy spiritually.22 Husserl’s thesis concerns thus the profit brought about by the plurality of national homeworlds and their peaceful encounter for the development of the idea of a supra-nationality or humanity. He writes: “In the context of humanities from different nations that understand each other peacefully, what to each was simply an existing world in a mere national mode of representation (regarding its validity), is itself transformed” (1993a, p. 45; Lohmar, 1993, p. 91). Hence, encounter, exchange, and mediation give the possibility of reflecting on the passage from the particularities of perspectives to the universality of a common point of view, maintaining the two equally necessary rational claims: that of “multiplicity” and that of “unity.”

§4. From Confl ict and Violence to Reconciliation: Is a One Truth possible?

After having shown with a Husserlian approach how “one world” (and the notion of “universality”) may emerge from the initial


experiences of “our world” and “alien worlds”, we wish to return to the second case-study to show with phenomenological-transcendental descriptions the conditions required to constitute or reconstruct a so-called “objective” or “universal truth”, such as the one “Truth and Reconciliation Commissions” in the aftermath of violent armed conflicts seek to establish, in view of social reconciliation.

Indeed, as I proposed in a previous research paper, the task of any Truth and Reconciliation Commission may be envisioned from the standpoint of a three-termed equation, whereby “reconciliation” is the conclusion, “truth” is the major term (or premise) and the (tacit) middle term is “justice” (Lerner, 2007). Yet this equation is not a merely logical inference, nor does it rest upon a merely argumentative chain of assertions. Indeed, as Husserl often remarks (1960, p. 10 [1973a, p. 51]) the ultimate validity upon which any argumentative chain rests must originate in an evident experience. The equation as a whole, thus, leads us to an experiential context, understood as a process, that is, a temporal –namely, historical– human flux.

Let us see now how this applies to the Peruvian historical process. Indeed, Peruvian society as a complex social body composed of multiple and conflicting elements –ethnic, linguistic, historical, and cultural– was founded as a Republican State in 1821, whereby its Constitution sanctioned a “national identity” and imposed the use of Spanish as the “official” language, as well as traditions, a religion and customs. The Constitution itself was allegedly established as the result of an agreement among the parts and components of the social body, and yet the conditions it indicated for the “harmonic and just relations” among its components only originated from the unilateral perspective of the hegemonic component of the social body, namely, of the dominant ethnic and linguistic group (of Spanish origin) that for long controlled the public institutions and government. A resulting confusion between “government” and “state” as well as a latent conflict intermittently manifest during its temporal life-span has characterized this country’s history. Indeed, the conflict has been de facto mostly generated by continuous violations of the rights of


certain citizens and of their citizenship itself, stipulated expressis verbis in the Constitution. It has thus taken place as the de facto exclusion, marginalization, and discrimination of multiple rural cultures, essentially Quechua and Amazonian, by a minority of European white descendants, contradicting in the praxis of social relations themselves the rights formally defended by the Constitution. This “structural” or latent violence resulted in the moral damage perpetrated upon entire communities. It finally turned into manifest violence –between 1980 and 2000– brutally engaging all parts of the social body, and revealing the inconsistency between the abstract and formal just and harmonic constitutional framework of its social relations, on the one side, and the concrete and material unjust and tense conditions of their effective social relations, on the other.

These premises, extracted from Peruvian historical experiences constitute the background of the equation “truth – justice – reconciliation.” Truth leads to reconciliation by the mediation of justice. But the historical truth of these moral events and their causes –whereby the possibilities and limits are found in their evident constitution in moral experiences– may only be provisionally understood as the un-veiling of the multilateral perspectives of the social body, and not of the unilateral perspective of one of its components (which would only perpetuate conflict).

Our interest in this occasion is not the phenomenological description of the experience of reconciliation, which –as we argue in our aforementioned paper– exhibits a temporal structure as well as the rest of the equation “truth-justice-reconciliation” (Lerner, 2007, pp. 123-125). We will rather focus on “truth” and its phenomenological conditions of possibility in evident intersubjective experiences.

Yet, phenomenological descriptions of truth from the viewpoint of evidence often trigger controversies and reproaches of relativism. The notion of evidence itself, distorted by centuries of semantic sedimentations, is also frequently rejected as trivial or too “subjective.” Yet I do consider it both as a useful and indispensable notion for the phenomenological description of the constitution of truth, albeit not for a


hermeneutical-textual, metaphysical or sociological account. I believe that a phenomenological clarification of evidence actually warrants a more acceptable understanding of the notion of the historical and moral truths –in the aftermath of internal armed conflicts, such as the ones that afflicted Peru and other countries.

To put it in maybe more “current” terms than the Husserlian ones, the constitution of evidence and truth may be understood as a sort of “inter-cultural agreement” –without the argumentative and contractual connotations that the word “agreement” usually conveys. However, the conditions of possibility of this sui generis “agreement” also exhibit their limits. Let us see how.

The concepts of truth and evidence in the context of conflicts, concern phenomena of a peculiar sort: that of human, voluntary and free experiences, known as praxis, action or inter-action. Their meaning differs from the relatively universal and necessary truths pertaining to empirical-deductive sciences; and from formal sciences’ apodictic truths. They also differ from truths concerning human phenomena of the “domain of necessity” –as those relative to physical survival or to the technical and cultural production of a human world. Now, all factual truths are contingent. A fortiori, more fragile still are practical or moral truths, since they refer to political and ethical phenomena (or so-called “moral facts”). They are fragile not only because they are essentially free, or because they relate to “facts” that could (even should) have been otherwise; but also because these “facts” address strong existential emotions such as grief for the loss of loved ones, anger or fear.

The phenomenological notions of truth and evidence are additionally sustained on a broad notion of human reason –cognitive and simultaneously practical and axiological. And besides the subjective spheres of knowledge, feeling and will, it also includes the objective spheres of their correlates (meaning-units and validities, practical norms, ethical, juridical and esthetical values, etc.). Thus according to phenomenological description, any truth whatever is never only an epistemological notion. A fortiori, practical truths, sustained in ethical values, affect the emotions and motivate the will (by definition, free),


in order to persuade understanding.Consequently, experiences –and their respective truths– differ

according to their type of objectivity. The constitution of mathematical or logical objects bears a higher degree of certainty and objectivity –a lesser possibility of diverse perspectives– than the constitution of natural, physical or psychical, and cultural phenomena. The apodictic certainty of factual truths –a practical impossibility– has only the value of a desirable ideal or goal, a measure of our relative distance, or of our degree of certainty.

Truth not only depends on the type of object being experienced, but also on the quality of the experience itself. Phenomenological description is the narration of a phenomenon as the objective correlate of a corresponding experience –perceptive, evaluative, or voluntary. This frequently overseen factor is the key to Husserl’s conception.23 Truth itself is constituted in certain types of experiences that he names evident –namely, both apodictic and inadequate evidences. Apodictic evidences are those that the scientist hypothetically predicates of his or her axioms. Inadequate evidences are all “transcendent” evidences; this is the case of moral evidences. On the other hand, adequate evidences –that should not be confused with the aforementioned apodictic evidences– according to Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations probably only “lie in infinity,” if they are ever given. As I formerly pointed out, truths themselves –expressed in propositions and established in language– may depend on the validity of other propositions and judgments, yet their final validity must originate in evident intuitive experiences –both cognitive and evaluative– that constitute those valid judgments themselves.

Undoubtedly evidence is derived from a “seeing” something as something and, in this case, from what I would call –after Martha Nussbaum– intelligent emotional apprehension or intuition, namely, “the general ability to see X as Y, where Y involves a notion of salience or importance for the creature’s own well-being” (2001, p. 5). This natural ability to identify emotions –in “intuitive judgments”– leads Nussbaum to assert that “(...) people are more reliable when they


are grouping instances than when they are trying to give them a theoretical explanation” (p. 10). But this “seeing-feeling” is never an intuition of isolated and punctual elements –as Empiricists and most Modern philosophers used to believe. It is rather a seeing something as something, precisely an interpretive seeing –although only implicit at first–, that necessarily consists of a synthetic continuum (or “horizon”) of experiences. Evident experiences, whereby a fi rst narrow sense of truth –here moral truth– is constituted, are intuitive, cognitive and emotional, insightful experiences. Multiple experiences of this type have been registered by the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and they can illustrate a series of past occurrences or events –in their how, when, why, who, and their values o moral correctness. Perception is an “originally giving” cognitive experience, as Husserl used to say, a privileged one, such as that of first hand-witnesses. Memory or recollection is another privileged intuitive experience, and, when related to perception, it also carries with it a “thetical” character, namely, a “positing of existence.” Intellectual insights of “morphological types” –be they cognitive or evaluative –such as the essential apprehension of the difference between color and sound, good and evil–, or of exact essences such as geometric ones, are also evident experiences, of high rank, known to us as “eidetic intuitions.” Other evident experiences are the insightful understanding of categorial articulations, or state-of-affairs, namely, the “categorial intuition.” Yet, as already intimated, intuitive experiences are not only cognitions, but also feelings and primitive voluntary acts, collaborating in the constitution of evidence and truth for they also intervene in the interpretation of phenomena as events axiologically determined one way or another.

Furthermore, evident experiences also exhibit another unavoidable human dimension, namely, that of temporality, whereby Husserl fundamentally understands his concept of horizon. Consequently, the first property of every evident experience is to “give” an object, and the second property, is to do so in synthetic coincidence with other giving-experiences upon a temporal axis. Thus, a narration of phenomena given to a particular subject through diverse synthetically


coincident experiences, consistently in time, will be considered “true.” When the experiences that constitute a true narration are evident experiences of various subjects in “syntheses of coincidence” with each other, and oriented to the same phenomena, we are facing a “stronger” sense of “truth.” The mere consistency of experiences pertaining to a single individual, or to a reduced group of these, does not suffice for the constitution of the so-called “objective truth” of sciences. Neither do they suffice, by extension, for the constitution of “moral truths” such as those pertaining to crimes in conflict situations that must be rescued from oblivion. Isolated experiences are unilateral, tied to perspectives, points of view and particular focuses. But their relativity may be progressively overcome by postulating, as the ideal subjective correlate of the “limit-concept” of “objective truth,” the limit-concept of a “coincident synthesis of experiences consistent in the course of time” belonging to “all possible subjects in general.” Notwithstanding the fact that I am dealing here with ideal “limit-concepts,” they are in fact very useful in the understanding of both the extent and limits of evidence and truth. The complexity of these concepts is frequently overlooked.

Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission elaborated its Final Report based on the testimonies of approximately 17,000 witnesses, from different times and places, in synthesis of coincidence with that of former testimonies of actors and witnesses, registered in previously established data bases. A wide selection of these testimonies was also re-enacted in public audiences all over the country, to soften hearts, open minds and motivate wills to recognize truth, and accept justice and reconciliation. These testimonies are also consistently coincident –in the course of time– with other types of experiences, perspectives and focuses, including those of data corroborated by empirical-deductive and formal techniques and sciences. The Report itself retrieved these experiences, conceptually articulated them and fixed them in language, in a coherent and consistent narration. By means of these procedures it established, with a fair degree of reliability, the responsibility of the selective and collective crimes against defenseless individuals and communities, ascribable to various different subversive, military,


political, and social organizations. It thus rightfully demands being accepted as an evident account of an intersubjectively acceptable truth, that is, of an “objective” one.

Now –in this extremely wide but pregnant sense– “objective truth” is not equivalent to exact, mathematical, truth, but is rather the name of the correlate of an evident narration constituted by intersubjectively shared experiences. A “truth” can be “objective” although de facto it may only have an approximate value, with the open possibility of being later reconfirmed or even contradicted by further syntheses of experiences. Every “truth” or “objective validity” is thus unavoidably sustained upon the temporal factor. Hence, absolute “objectivity” and “truth” are merely a τέλος or ideal goal to which human experiences and language asyntotically approximate, always affected by an inherent relativism and finitude.

I proposed that Husserl’s phenomenon of evidence, in which the so-called moral “objective” truth is constituted is not very distant from the notion of “intercultural agreement.” Thus, disregarding the fact that the term “agreement” is mostly understood as “discursive,” I believe I may preserve this expression for Husserl’s intuitive notion of evidence.

Nevertheless, in processes of “transitional justice” such as the Peruvian one, the acquiescence of an intersubjective and temporally constituted “historical truth” –likely to be shared by different human communities oriented toward an intercultural reconciliation– still confronts dismaying resistance. Nobody questions the trials and sentences to which the subversive leaders, responsible of the major crimes committed, have been subject to. But the 47 trials currently being held against militaries involved in crimes against humanity have triggered the negative reaction of military, political, and media groups against the legitimacy of the Commission’s Final Report. The limits of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission are not only those that pertain to all practical affairs, whereby “common sense,” and not the specialist’s knowledge, “is the better judge” –as Aristotle’s saying goes. Its limits also concern difficulties deeply rooted in Peruvian society:


a diffi culty of emotional order, an incapacity that affects essential human emotions: such as compassion for the suffering of other human beings, or indignation regarding injustices and extreme cruelty; and, a diffi culty of ethical order, concerning the disposition to “good will” and the free self-responsible commitment to human solidarity.

§5. The Cosmological Antagonism of Multiculturalism and Multinaturalism

As we have seen, we believe that Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology offers powerful tools to understand the conditions of possibility and the bases upon which ultimately encounters beyond cultural differences, truth beyond multiple perspectives, and moral reconciliation beyond ideologically motivated antagonisms, are indeed possible.

Yet my revision of a recent anthropological paper, entitled “Perspectivism and Multinaturalism in Indigenous America” (Viveiros de Castro, 2003), seriously seems to challenge the confidence that an intercultural constitution of a “one World” (or “compossibility”) out of two totally alien homeworld-views is possible. In this research paper the author –Eduardo Viveiros de Castro– mostly depicts Amazonian ethnic groups’ worldview in contrast with the Western European worldview. Let us briefly sketch the arguments put forth therein.

A common view shared by many of the indigenous people of the American continent is what several authors denominate “perspective relativity” (Gray, 1996), whereby the world is populated by different species or persons (human and non-human) that apprehend it from different points of view. However, this conception is irreducible and wholly alien to “Western relativism” whence multiculturalism is understood, over and against an alleged “universalism” and “objectivism” of nature. Thus Western relativism seems to rest upon the dualism introduced in Modern Times between the universality, objectivity, physicality, facticity, givenness, necessity, immanence, corporality and animality of nature, and the particularity, subjectivity, morality, fabricated and valuable character, spontaneity, transcendence, spirituality and


humanity of culture. Whereas Amazonian ethnic thought would be on the contrary a multinaturalism, whereby the unity (“universality”) of a cosmic spirit versus the diversity (“particularity”) of natural bodies is ascertained (Viveiros de Castro, 2003, p. 192). Yet it is not a symmetrically opposed view to the Western one, since it does not have the same contents or status. Amazonian cosmology is composed of perspectives, points of view, changing, and relational configurations beyond Western dualism.

Now Amazonian “perspectivism” means that it considers the inner form of all cosmic beings (“the moon, the serpent, the jaguar and the mother of smallpox” according to the Peruvian Machiguengas, and the spirits, such as gods, the dead, plants, meteorological phenomena, geographical accidents, etc.) as “spiritually anthropomorphic” –namely “human”– whereby their habits and behavior belong to a sort of culture. On the other hand, they view their bodily attributes (feathers, fur, claws, beaks, etc.) or external material forms as variable, exchangeable and disposable wrappings or garments, subject thus to metamorphosis,24 which they bear as cultural ornaments or instruments within “social systems” organized as human institutions –with chiefs, shamans, rites, coupling rules, etc. Now, although there is one inner anthropomorphic form common to all beings, according to their “perspectivism” each species of cosmic being sees itself and sees the other species and the world in a different way than the other cosmic beings see themselves and see the others and the world. Furthermore, these different cosmic beings see the others, either as their preys or predators. Some species express this perspectivism more intensely than others, even than the specific human species, and in this sense they are “more persons” than humans are (Hallowell, 1960), such as the spirits that are “masters” or “owners” of animals (Viveiros de Castro, 2003, pp. 196-197). Only shamans are able to cross perspectives and transform the different intuitive percepts in intelligible concepts or vice versa.

Yet according to mythical narratives, originally there had been an undifferentiated stage between humans and animals, where the “difference of perspectives is at the same time annulled and


exacerbated” (Viveiros de Castro, 2003, p. 197). “Myth, universal point of departure of perspectivism, speaks of a state of being in which bodies and names, souls and actions, the I and the other, interpenetrate each other, submerged in a same pre-subjective and pre-objective milieu” (p. 197). Yet this original condition is not that of animality whence humanity emerges, but quite the contrary. Nature detaches from culture, and not the way around. Animals, according to myths, tend to lose the attributes inherited and maintained by humans. Animals used to be humans, and not the contrary, and they still are, “although not in an evident manner”: “Humanity is primordially the matter of the plenum, or the original form of practically everything, not only of animals,” such as the Peruvian Campa mythology purports (Weiss, 1972).

As we indicated above, “Shamanism” is the “ability to deliberately cross bodily barriers and adopt the perspective of specific extraneous subjectivities, in view of orienting the relations between these and the humans” (Viveiros de Castro, 2003, p. 200). They are thus “active interlocutors in the trans-specific dialogue, (…) capable of coming back to tell stories, (…) (They exert a) political art, (…) (such as) diplomacy. If Western multiculturalism is relativism as public policy, shamanic Amazonian perspectivism is multinaturalism as cosmic policy” (p. 200). Shamanism is the opposed pole of Western modern objectivistic epistemology, whereby knowledge means to objectify, to “de-subjectify”; whereas for Shamanism, “to know is to personify.” Thus “the interpretive success is directly proportional to the order of intentionality (the ‘maximum of agency’) that one is able to attribute to the object or noema” (p. 201). A “mere object” would be an “incompletely interpreted subject”. Hence, in order to know, one must personify (p. 202).

As is well known, Western “naturalism” is the residue of the Modern ontological dualism between nature and culture, whereby a discontinuity is introduced between the reigns of “necessity” and that of “free spontaneity.” Thus within the “natural order” of creation (natura naturata) the difference between nature and culture obtains, a dualism that


is inherited from the previous theological opposition between nature and super-nature (the reign of “grace”) (Leibniz, 1999). Amazonian “animism”25 rather purports an ontological continuity between nature and culture, whereby human dispositions are attributed to natural beings. So the difference between the natural and the cultural orders is given within a social order. But it would be an error to interpret it as a mere “projection” of human qualities on a non-human world, which would amount to interpret animism as a sort of inverted dualism.

“Which is then the difference between humans and animals?” (Viveiros de Castro, 2003, p. 208) This is where the question of “ethnocentrism” comes to the fore. According to Claude Lévi-Strauss, the “natural ideological attitude” inherent to all human groups, is “ethnocentrism.” For example, the Spanish conquerors were interested in finding out whether the indigenous Americans had a human soul or not; whereas the Indians asked themselves whether the Spaniards’ corpses were subject or not to putrefaction as their own. Both believed that the “true human beings” were those belonging to their own group, while aliens would be “less human” than they, and yet both had different notions regarding what defined their human character.

Currently, however, anthropologists do not consider the Amazonian view as “ethnocentric” but rather as “cosmocentric,” whereby both humans and non-humans (such as us, Western “aliens”) form part of the same socio-cosmic domain. Artifacts and non-human living beings are also subjects or persons (social in their dimension), to which they are not referred to by means of objectifying nouns but by pronouns, since nouns tend to “externalize” and “objectify” what they denote, separating them from their subjectivity. On the contrary, Amazonian pronouns express the point of view of the speaking subject, not of the denoted objects (Viveiros de Castro, 2003, pp. 211-212). A subject or a person is he who has a soul, as animals and spirits have, endowed with capacities such as intentionality and conscious agency. Animals and other animated entities are not subjects because they are human, but are human because they are (potential) subjects (p. 213). So the “nature” of the subject is “cultural”. “Animism is not a figured


projection of substantive human qualities on non-humans; what it expresses is a real equivalence between relations that human and non-humans maintain with themselves” (p. 214). Both humans and wolves see themselves as humans, yet “if the common condition of humans and animals is humanity, not animality, it is because humanity is the name of the subject’s general form” (p. 214).

And yet this should not be read as “anthropocentrism,” which is typical of the Western view that projects consciousness and intentionality on non-human beings. This is the case of Marx’s depiction of man’s “generic being” (Gattungswesen) as producing “universally”, according to every species. On the other hand, Amazonian anthropomorphic animism says that any animal may be human. However, according to this animism’s perspectivism if each species appears reflectively to itself as human, it asymmetrically does not appear as human to other species (Viveiros de Castro, 2003, pp. 215-216).

This leads us to Amazonian “multinaturalism,” fruit of its perspectivism which –as we already indicated– should be distinguished from Western “relativism.” According to the latter, different perspectives would all be valid (p. 216); whereas for perspectivism, the point of view of one species should not be attributed or adopted by another species –it would be even wrong to do so. For each species there is only one just and valid perspective; all perspectives should remain apart, the shamans being the only ones able to communicate and cross these perspectives. This should not be interpreted as if different species had “multiple representations” of the “same world,” but rather as representing different worlds the same way: “Different types of beings see different things the same way” (p. 218).26 So one could argue that we are facing a sort of “epistemological identity” or “sameness” versus an “ontological plurality” or “diversity”. Accordingly, animals see other things than what we see, although they see them the same “way” we do.

Now, the things that different species see are different because their bodies are different. However, by “bodies” Amazonian cosmology does not understand a distinctive physiology, as much as “an ensemble of ways or manners that constitute a habitus.” What constitutes their


“humanity” and marks their difference with other species or beings are thus their bodies, not their souls (since animals also have them) (p. 220). American Indians never doubted that Europeans had souls; they rather doubted whether Europeans had their same type of body. Thus American Indians “imagine a metaphysical continuity and a physical discontinuity among cosmic beings” (pp. 220-221). The first gives rise to animism; the second to perspectivism.

Perspectivism is intimately related to exchange, and reciprocity of perspectives, thus it is a “relational ontology” (p. 223) characterized by a “cultural universalism” coupled with a “natural relativism” (Latour, 1991, p. 144). This is the meaning of “multinaturalism.”

Thus the body is the great “difference-maker” for Amazonian Indians. There is consequently an intense semiotic use of bodily languages and ornaments in the definition of personal identity and social values. The human body is the place of confrontation between humanity and animality, as well as the fundamental instrument of the subject’s expression. It is simultaneously a privileged object for the other’s view. Whereas the model of the bodies is the animal body (thus their maximal social objectification takes place with ritual feathers, colors, masks and animal prosthetics), the paradigm of spirits is the human spirit. Animals never dress as humans, whereas humans use animal furs and feathers as garments. Furthermore, bodies are not given facts, but are “made” or “elaborated.” Bodies, as great differentiators, transform themselves, being this the Amazonian Indian counterpart of the Western spiritual conversion (Viveiros de Castro, 2003, pp. 227-228). This metamorphosis is not a peaceful process, but expresses the fear of not being able to differentiate the human from the non-human. Thus the ritual system of feeding restrictions mythically considers certain animals as co-substantive with humans, believing that serious illnesses may ensue to the transgressor of those norms. It is for example important to be able to distinguish a merely dead animal from the non-edible body of a spirit. Shamans may transform these un-edible bodies into edible, purely natural ones that may be consumed without any risks (p. 230). But this should not be interpreted according to


the Western modern dualism between phenomenon and noumenon, or appearance and essence. Masks metaphysically transform the subject that bears them. Thus shamans use their garments not to disguise themselves, but as instruments that enable them to “embody” the characteristics and properties that define each animal (as a diver would use a breathing device) (pp. 230-231). Deception would be unmasked if the bodily appearance is not consistent with the bodily behavior.

Hence bodies also establish a distinction or discontinuity between the living and the dead that are definitely severed from their bodies. Dead beings are thus attracted to animal bodies (p. 231). To die is to transform oneself into an animal (p. 232), so a spiritual identity crosses the corporal death barrier: the same spirit may be shared by the living and the dead (p. 232).

In addition, according to the Amazonian worldview, between the refl ective I of culture and the impersonal it of nature, there is the second person of the “thou” –the other apprehended as another subject, whose point of view is a latent echo of the “I”. This “thou” reveals a supernatural perspective, that of the other as a subject. The typical Amazonian supernatural situation is the encounter of a lonely human being in the middle of the jungle with a being that initially unveils itself as an animal or person, but subsequently appears as a spirit or a dead person that speaks to the man. This encounter is typically lethal for the lonely human being that experiences it, since by responding to a thou addressed by a non-human, he accepts the condition of being a “second person” with regards to it and thus assumes the condition of a non-human “I” (p. 233). Only shamans are able to cross those different perspectives without losing their own original condition. The world is thus full of dangers.

The conclusion of this examination is that the Amazonian worldview is wholly incompossible with Western cosmology if this compossibility is attempted from the Western point of view –hence merely as another “worldview” or “culture” belonging to an alien “personality of a higher order.” The author of the summarized text in this section, Viveiros de Castro, concludes that if both worldviews are


compared with a two-legged compass, Western cosmology rests on the leg of nature (as its stable, unified, underlying stratum) in order that the other leg (of multiple and varied cultures and worldviews) may revolve; whereas Amazonian cosmology rests on the leg of culture or spirit (as its stable, underlying stratum), so that nature may be subject to continuous inflections and variations (as multiple worlds of nature) (p. 234). However, he concludes with two hopeful remarks for a possible “compossibility.” Firstly, that every compass is articulated at its vortex –an original point previous to the distinction between nature and culture. Accordingly, Western’s modern vortex would be revealed in his view only as an “extra-theoretical practice,” whereas in the Amazonian cosmology this vortex is the object of mythology as the virtual origin of all perspectives, whereby the absolute movement and infinite multiplicity of nature’s material and external form is indiscernible with respect to the frozen immobility and unfathomable unity of the spiritual inner form (Latour, 1991, as cited in Viveiros de Castro, 2003, p. 234). Secondly, that the difference between Western and Amazonian cosmologies is not a cultural one, least of all a mere difference of “mentalities.” The difference concerns worlds¸ not merely thoughts.27

§6. Conclusion: The Transcendental and the Mythical Perspectives as the Quest for Origins

My brief concluding remarks concern the question as to whether phenomenology actually unveils the hidden mechanisms that may enable us to overcome the unilateralism of our experiences’ point of departure, or whether its endeavors finally fail either because they oscillate between an over-optimistic euro- and logocentric universalism, or because of an equally Western-conceived incommensurability and relativity of plural perspectives. Indeed, Husserl’s phenomenological inquiries have their starting point in constituted objectivities that serve as “guidelines”, such as they are encountered within a Western worldview. Accordingly, he describes


the “constitution of material nature” as the basic, stable stratum of experience upon which the “constitution of animal nature” and the “constitution of psychic reality through the body” are made possible. He finally concludes that in the “constitution of the spiritual world” (1993b [1952]) –which presupposes the previous strata of constitutive experiences– the person appears as the center of a surrounding world whence the diversity of communal personal associations is in its turn constituted.

Hence it would seem that one should agree with the anthropologist’s view and ascertain that Husserl’s account of the constitution of the “one world” beyond “homeworlds” and “alien worlds,” and his account of the constitution of “objective” truth in “evident experiences” founded in basic intuitive experiences related to the perceptual world, are seriously biased and remain as unilateral proposals.

Yet Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology seeks to transcend the traditional opposition between nature and culture. Indeed, transcendental experience or subjectivity is a realm beyond and previous to the constituted domains of nature (physical and psychical, or psycho-physical) and culture (of objectivities endowed with a spiritual meaning). It thus deals with the question of the origins of the world, namely of the primal constitutive experiences of all worldly objectivities –that initially serve as “guidelines” for the regressive phenomenological (static, genetic, and finally generative) inquiries into this originary realm. Likewise, according to Amazonian cosmologies, it seems equally possible to regress to a common cosmological vortex dealt with by myths, an original stage that precedes the difference between the uniqueness of the cosmos’ spiritual inner form (culture) and the multiplicity of its material and external nature. Hence, although the constituted world of Amazonian ethnic groups is wholly “other” than Husserl’s Western constituted world (natural and cultural), both point to an original stage whence all is constituted. For Amazonian cosmology it is an “undifferentiated stage between humans and animals” where the “difference of perspectives is at the same time


annulled and exacerbated.” For transcendental phenomenology, with regards to subjectivity –as the psyche of Heraclitus– “his saying would doubtless be true of it: ‘You will never find the boundaries of the soul, even if you follow every road; so deep is its ground” (Husserl, 1970, p. 170 [1976a, p. 173]).

So one could risk saying that there could exist a hope for a certain “compossibility” whence to bridge the gap between these two heterogeneous worldviews if one considers that transcendental phenomenology is submerged –as myths, in the sense that they are the “universal point of departure of perspectivism”– in an original “pre-subjective and pre-objective milieu,” in which “bodies and names, souls and actions, the I and the other, interpenetrate each other.” Furthermore, this condition that myths speak of as being originally human, whence animality emerges is for transcendental phenomenology mutatis mutandis an “ultimate absolute subjectivity” that is not nature, neither animal nor human. For Amazonian cosmology nature detaches from culture, and not the way around. As we had pointed out regarding the Campa mythology: “Humanity is (…) the original form of practically everything, not only of animals.” For transcendental phenomenology absolute subjectivity accessible through transcendental reduction, is the ultimate origin of every sense and validity, every being and non-being, every aesthetic and ethical value, every cultural norm, briefly, of every “object” in the “how” of its manners of givenness and modes of its validities. Finally, as Husserl remarks:

“How can we make it more concretely understandable that the reduction of mankind to the phenomenon ‘mankind,’ which is included as part of the reduction of the world, makes it possible to recognize mankind as a self-objectification of transcendental subjectivity which is always functioning ultimately and is thus ‘absolute’? How does it become possible, thanks to the epoché, to display this subjectivity in its accomplishment, in its transcendental ‘conscious life,’ extending into hidden subsoils, in the distinct manners in which it ‘brings about’, within itself,


the world as ontic meaning? (…) we no longer move on the old familiar ground of the world but rather stand, through our transcendental reduction, only at the gate of entrance to the realm, never before entered, of the ‘mothers of knowledge’” (1970, p. 153 [1976a, pp. 155-156]).

NOTES

1 See on this subject, Kaufmann (1996). 2 By Liberalism, as we explain further on, we do not refer to the traditional North-American political “left” versus Conservatism, or “right.” We refer, in general, to the Western individualist conception of the foundations of the State, as found since Hobbes or Locke, versus the collective or communitarian foundation of the same. In Latin-America, neo-Liberalism is viewed as ultra-Liberalism, especially in the economic realm, being made responsible –maybe unjustly– for the extreme poverty of the vast majority of its population.3 That this process of homologation may have a meaning more than merely imputable to a dominant civilization, and exhibit the traits proper to a new culture, leads some European philosophers to characterize globalization as the reign of mono-culture or in-culture. See Granel (1998). 4 This debate has been ongoing for several years. A small collective essay presenting the state of the discussion among their main characters, as Charles Taylor, Anthony K. Appiah, Jürgen Habermas, Steven C. Rockefeller, Michael Walzer, and Susan Wolf, is edited by Gutmann (1994).5 Edmund Husserl’s work on intersubjectivity could provide elements to enrich some of the dead-ends to which this debate is leading. See, as a couple of examples, Husserl (1973b), Schuhmann (1988), and Hart (1992). 6 Data of the Research Center of Applied Geography (CIGA), Lima: Pontifical Catholic University of Peru.7 There are two English translations, one by Constance Farrington (Fanon, 1963); and a more recent one by Richard Philcox (Fanon, 2004).8 The figure is a conservative statistical projection based on nearly 17,000 testimonies voluntarily given to the TRC mostly by victim survivors, and the confrontation of different data bases with the first and last names of nearly 35,000 victims, among those murdered and those that disappeared.


9 As an example, see the first part of M. Heidegger’s lectures (1979) or his correspondence, such as the one edited by Ludz (2000), especially pp. 20, 46, and 54.10 This is the case of H. Arendt, H.-G. Gadamer, H. Jonas, E. Levinas and Merleau-Ponty himself. 11 Several of Husserl’s critics –from the so-called “children of Heidegger” (expression taken from Richard Wolin [2003]) such as Hans-Georg Gadamer, M. Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur and E. Levinas, all the way to Husserl’s deconstructionist, analytic and social-critical interpreters– converge surprisingly in characterizing transcendental phenomenology as depicted in the previous paragraph.12 See as an example Welton (2000, 2003), that also refer to an increasing multiplicity of works –and of no few young researchers; and Steinbock (1995). 13 I will follow somewhat freely an unedited work of Roberto Walton (2009).14 In Ideas I Husserl ascertains: “It is the case also of a mental process that it is never perceived completely, that it cannot be adequately seized upon in its full unity. A mental process is with respect to its essence, in flux which we, directing the reflective regard to it, can swim along after it starting from the Now-point, while the stretches already covered are lost to our perception. Only in the form of retention do we have a consciousness of the phase which has just flowed away, or else in the form of a retrospective recollection. And my whole stream of mental processes is, finally, a unity of mental processes which, of essential necessity, cannot be seized upon completely in a perceiving which ‘swims along with it’” (1982, p. 97 [1976b, pp. 93-94]).15 See also our text, “Thinking of Difference and Otherness from a Husserlian Perspective” (Lester Embree’s Festschrift, in press).16 The following reflections, even if they do not follow Dieter Lohmar’s (1993) argumentative order, have indeed been strongly suggested by his text. 17 Here I essentially refer to the works of Edmund Husserl (1976a; 1973b, Vol. XV; and 1993a); Bernhard Waldenfels (1993, 2001); and Dieter Lohmar (1993). 18 They concern the “validities” that are presupposed at the life-world as “neighboring world” (Nahwelt), “world of experience” (Erfahrungswelt), “personal world” (personale Welt), “cultural world” (Kulturwelt), “surrounding


life-world” (Lebensumwelt), “daily world” (Alltagswelt), “co-world” (Mitwelt). See Husserl (1976a, §34; 1973b, Vol. XV, pp. 142, 196-197, 200, 205, 214-215, 217, 229 ff., 232, 411, 428).19 For example in international athletic competitions, among finalists, such as in Latin American soccer games, the expansion of the “familiar” or “communal world” to a continental level leads any Latin American to support any South American team against a European or Asian one.20 The underscoring is ours.21 Lohmar asks whether an “ethics not tied to the homeworld” is possible, and simultaneously argues in favor of “reasonable grounds for the preservation of a plurality of forms of worldly-familiar ethoi” (1993, pp. 83-91). Although his concept is wide, since he also refers to it as ethos, deliberately we extend the field of his question to the possibility of recognizing the universal as such in its relation to the simultaneous preservation of particularity in general.22 “Precisely this normality is first shattered when human beings enter from their own national vital space the alien nation’s one.” (Husserl, 1993a, p. 388).23 For example, Husserl asserts: “If what is experienced has the sense of “transcendent” being, then it is the experiencing that constitutes this sense, and does so either by itself or in the whole motivational nexus pertaining to it and helping to make up its intentionality. If an experience is imperfect, if it makes the intrinsically existent object appear only one-sidedly, only in a distant perspective, or the like, then the experience itself, (...) is that which, on being consulted, tells me so; it tells me: Here, in this consciousness, something is given as it itself; but it is more than what is actually itself grasped; there is more of the same object to be experienced. Thus the object is transcendent; and also in that, as experience further teaches me, it could have been an illusion, (...) Moreover, it is again experience that says: These physical things, this world, is utterly transcendent of me, of my own being. It is an “Objective” world, experienceable and experienced as the same world by others too. Actuality becomes warranted, illusion rectified, in my concourse with others –who likewise are, for me, data of actual and possible experience” (Husserl, 1978, p. 233 [1974, p. 240]). 24 The “Amazonian world” as “highly transformational”, according to Rivière (1994). 25 This “animism” should be distinguished from Amazonian “totemism” –a sort of “objectification of nature” whereby the relationship between nature


and culture is merely metaphorical–, although both are frequently present together.26 “What for us is blood, for the jaguar is mandioca beer.”27 “We may still discover one day that both in mythical thought as in scientific thought the same logic operates, and that man has always thought well. Thus the progress –if we may apply the term in this case– would not have consciousness as its theater, but the world, where a humanity endowed with constant faculties would find itself, in the course of its long history, confronted with new objects” (Lévi-Strauss, 1955, p. 255; as cited in Viveiros de Castro, 2003, p. 235).

REFERENCES

Fanon, F. (1961) Les damnés de la terre. Introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre and Homi K. Bhabha. Paris: François Maspero.

Fanon, F. (1963) The wretched of the earth. (C. Farrington, Trans.). New York, NY: Grove Weidenfeld.

Fanon, F. (2004) The wretched of the earth. (R. Philcox, Trans.). New York, NY: Grove Press.

Fink, E. (1988) VI. Cartesianische Meditation. Teil II. Ergänzungsband. Husserliana Dokumente: Vol. II. Dordrecht/Boston, MA/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Gellner, E. (1994) Encounters with nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell.Granel, G. (1998). Monoculture? Inculture? (Perspectives du 3ème

Millénaire). In: Colloquium En el umbral del milenio. Lima: 16-20 April.Gray, A. (1996) The Arakmbut of Amazonian Peru, Vol. I: Mythology, spirituality, and

history in an Amazonian community. Providence, RI/Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Gutmann, A. (Ed.). (1994) Multiculturalism - Examining the politics of recognition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Habermas, J. (1987) Geschichtsbewuβtsein und posttraditionale Identität, Die Westorientierung der Bundesrepublik. In: J. Habermas, Eine Art Schadensabwicklun. Kleine politische Schriften VI (pp. 159-179). Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.

Hallowell, A. I. (1960) Ojibwa ontology, behavior, and world view. In: S. Diamond (org.), Culture in History: Essays in honor of Paul Radin (pp. 49-


82). New York, NY: Columbia University Press.Hart, J. (1992) The person and the common life, Studies in a Husserlian social ethics.

Dordrecht/Boston, MA/Lancaster: Kluwer Academic Publishers.Heidegger, M. (1979) Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs. Gesamtausbe:

Vol. 20. Frankfurt: Klostermann. Husserl, E. (1952) Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen

Philosophie. Zweites Buch, Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution. M. Biemel (Ed.). Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke Husserliana: Vol. IV. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

Husserl, E. (1960) Cartesian Meditations, An introduction to phenomenology. (D. Cairns, Trans.). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

Husserl, E. (1969) Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstesens (1893-1917). R. Boehm (Ed.). Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke Husserliana: Vol. X. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

Husserl, E. (1970) The crisis of European sciences and transcendental phenomenology. (D. Carr, Trans). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Husserl, E. (1973a) Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge. S. Strasser (Ed.). Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke Husserliana: Vol. I. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

Husserl, E. (1973b) Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjectivität. I. Kern (Ed.). Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke Husserliana, Texte aus dem Nachlass: Vol. XIII Erster Teil 1905-1920, Vol. XIV Zweiter Teil 1921-1928, Vol. XV Dritter Teil 1929-1935. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

Husserl, E. (1974) Formale and transzendentale Logik. Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft. P. Janssen (Ed.). Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke Husserliana: Vol. XVII, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

Husserl, E. (1976a) Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie. W. Biemel (Ed.). Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke Husserliana: Vol. VI. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

Husserl, E. (1976b) Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch. K. Schuhmann (Ed.). Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke Husserliana: Vol. III/1. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

Husserl, E. (1978) Formal and transcendental logic. (D. Cairns, Trans.). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.


Husserl, E. (1982) Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy. First book . (F. Kersten, Trans.). Dordrecht/Boston, MA/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Husserl, E. (1993a) Die Krisis der europaischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Ergänzungsband. Texte aus dem Nachlass 1934-1937 . R.N. Smid (Ed.). Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke Huserliana: Vol. XXIX. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Husserl, E. (1993b) Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy, Second book, Studies in the phenomenology of constitution. (R. Rojcewicz & A. Schuwer, Trans.). Edmund Husserl Collected Works: Vol. III. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Husserl, E. (2008) Die Lebenswelt. Auslegungen der vorgegebenen Welt und ihrer Konstitution. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1916-1937). R. Sowa (Ed.). Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke Husserliana: Vol. XXXIX. Dordrecht: Springer.

Kaufmann, F.-X. (1996) Weltgesellschaft - Zivilgesellschaft - Staat - Gemeinschaft: Was ermöglicht unser Zusammenleben? In H. Weber (Ed.), Jahresakademie 1996, Aufbruch in die Zukunft - Arbeit an den Fundamenten (pp. 20-36). Bonn: Katholischer Akademischer Ausländer-Dienst e.V.

Latour, B. (1991) Nous n’avons jamais été modernes. Paris: La Découverte.Leibniz, G. (1999) Principes de la nature et de la grâce, Monadologie et autres

textes (1703-1716). C. Frémont (Ed.). Paris: Flammarion.Lerner, R.R.P. (2007) Between conflict and reconciliation: The hard truth.

Human Studies (30), pp. 115-130. Levi-Strauss, C. (1955) La structure des mythes. In: C. Levi-Strauss.

Anthropologie structural. Paris: Plon.Lohmar, D. (1993) Zur Überwindung des heimweltlichen Ethos. In: R.A.

Mall & D. Lohmar (Eds.). Philosophische Grundlagen der Interkulturalität (pp. 67-95). Armsterdam /Atlanta, GA: Editions Rodopi B.V.

Ludz, U. (Ed.). (2000) Hannah Arendt – Martin Heideger, Correspondencia 1925-1975 y otros documentos de los legados. (A. Kovacsics, Trans.). Barcelona: Herder.

Misch, G. (1931) Lebensphilosophie und Phänomenologie-Eine Auseinandersetzung der Dilthey’schen Richtung mit Heidegger und Husserl. Leipzig/Berlin: B. G. Teubner. (First edition: 1929).


Nussbaum, M. (2001) Upheavals of thought. The intelligence of emotions. New York, NY/Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2003) Preface. In: Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission Final Report – August 29, 2003. Retrieved from: http://www.cverdad.org.pe/ifinal.

Ricoeur, P. (1967) Husserl and the sense of History. In: P. Ricoeur, Husserl, An analysis of his phenomenology (pp. 143-174). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Rivière, P. (1994) Wysinwyg in Amazonia. JASO, 25 (3), pp. 255-262.Sanders, K. (1997) Nación y tradición: Cinco discursos en torno a la nación peruana

1885-1930. Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú-Instituto Riva-Agüero/Fondo de Cultura Económica.

Schuhmann, K. (1988) Husserl’s Staatsphilosophie. Freiburg/München: Verlag Karl Alber.

Steinbock, A. J. (1995) Home and beyond. Generative phenomenology after Husserl. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Taminiaux, J. (1985) Dialectic and difference, Finitude in modern thought. (R. Crease & T. Decker, Trans. and Eds.). Atlantic Highlands, NJ/London: Humanities Press Inc./The Mac Millan Press Ltd.

Taminiaux, J. (2002) Sillages phénoménologiques, Auditeurs et lecteurs de Heidegger. Bruxelles/Paris: Éditions Ousia /Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin.

Viveiros de Castro, E. (2003) Perspectivismo y multinaturalismo en la América indígena. In: A. Chaparro Amaya & C. Schumacher (Eds.). Racionalidad y discurso mítico (pp. 191-243). Bogotá: Centro Editorial Universidad del Rosario, ICANH.

Walton, R. (2009) Phenomenology and reflection on time, history, generativity and intersubjectivity. In: V Latin American Colloquium of Phenomenology. Morelia: September.

Wandelfels, B. (1993) Verschränkung von Heimwelt und Fremdwelt. In: R.A. Mall & D. Lohmar (Eds.). Philosophische Grundlagen der Interkulturalität (pp. 53-65). Armsterdam /Atlanta, GA : Editions Rodopi B.V.

Wandelfels, B. (August 2001) Mundo familiar y mundo extraño. Problemas de la intersubjetividad y de la interculturalidad a partir de Edmund Husserl. Ideas y valores, (116), pp. 119-131.

Weiss, G. (1972) Campa cosmology. Ethnology, 9 (2), pp. 169-170.


Welton, D. (2000) The other Husserl, The horizons of transcendental phenomenology. Bloomington & Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press.

Welton, D. (Ed.) (2003). The new Husserl, A critical reader, Bloomington & Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press.

Wolin, R. (2003) Los hijos de Heidegger: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas y Herbert Marcuse. Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra.


HUSSERL’S CRITIQUE OF THE MATHEMATIZATION OF NATURE: FROM PHILOSOPHY OF ARITHMETIC

TO THE CRISIS OF EUROPEAN SCIENCES

LUBICA UČNÍK Philosophy, School of Social Sciences and Humanities

Murdoch University, Western [email protected]

In this paper, I will argue that Husserl’s critique of the method of natural science, as he outlines it in The Crisis of European Sciences, is a continuation of his critique of science, which he fi rst considers in Philosophy of Arithmetic. Husserl’s many enquiries are guided by his effort to secure knowledge against the claims of scepticism and relativism. He starts with the critique of science leading him to posit the primacy of the life-world, Lebenswelt. According to Husserl, we cannot understand the physical nature constructed in thought unless we show that scientifi c explanations of the world grew out of the world in which we live. In this context, I will also argue that in order to be responsible for our knowledge we must acknowledge that the Lebenswelt is the foundation from which all our knowledge proceeds.

Keywords:Husserl, scepticism, psychologism, knowledge, the life-world, responsibility

One should note Husserl’s motive for doing philosophy. It is not primarily a theoretical motivation, but a practical one, or more precisely an ethical one – the ethical striving for a life in absolute self-responsibility (Zahavi, 2003, p. 67, italics in original).

48 Lubica Učník

In this paper, my claim is that Husserl’s critique of the method of natural science as he outlines it in The Crisis of European Sciences1 is a continuation of his critique2 of ‘the present state of the science’ (2003a, p. 5) that he first considers in Philosophy of Arithmetic,3 published in 1891. No doubt his thinking and the focus of his critique changed but not this principal motif: the critique of scientific reasoning that has become blinded by its own technical mastery – becoming technology instead of being a responsible practice, aware of its own foundations. Husserl’s critique of science is tied to his thinking concerning the primacy of the life-world, Lebenswelt. According to Husserl, we cannot understand the physical nature constructed in thought unless we show that scientific explanations of the world grow out of the world in which we live. In this context, I will also argue, as Ludwig Landgrebe reminds us, that for Husserl, knowledge must be based on ‘absolute responsibility’ (1981, p. 65). In order to be responsible for our knowledge, we must acknowledge the primacy of the Lebenswelt: it is the foundation from which all our knowledge proceeds.

Husserl’s reflection on the life-world was occasioned by the social crisis of his time. As he says, European society is sick and there does not seem to be a cure for this disease. The Enlightenment’s belief in reason is supplanted by skepticism, relativism or outright irrationalism. By contrast, as he also notes, in the domain of sciences, scientists do not doubt efficacious reasoning, which is extremely successful. So, Husserl asks: Why, for example, medical science is so successful in treating a human body, while ‘humanistic disciplines’ cannot find the cure for society’s malady? (1970 [1935], p. 270).

Husserl’s answer is that, by using a scientific approach, we cannot find the cure for society’s illness. Enquiries in the sphere of humanistic disciplines and the domain of natural science are different. Natural science’s investigations are not about ‘the meaning or meaninglessness’ of our ‘human existence’ (1970d, §2, 6). These types of enquiries are outside of scientific research. As Husserl puts it, the scientific ‘method could bring unquestionable successes only in the positive sciences’ (1970d, §4, 10). There is a difference between nature ‘separated out

Husserl’s Criti que 49

… by natural science’ and hypothesized as ‘existing in itself’ (1970b, p. 319) and ‘the sphere of the “social-historical” world’ that is not possible to reduce to the objective invariable pattern valid for every researcher (1970b, p. 329). In order to present scientific knowledge that every researcher can take up and continue to test anytime and everywhere, the knowledge under consideration must be impartial, in other words, objective. Objective, scientific, ‘nature “in itself ”’ simply means that ‘in itself’ represents nature ‘identical throughout all relativities’ (1970b, p. 330). This contraction of nature into its objectivized invariant insures the tremendous success of sciences. Yet the scientific method is incapable of addressing the questions of meaning that are relevant to humans living in the social-historical world. Humans cannot be standardised in the way objects can. Efficacious reason is inadequate in the sphere of human existence. Given this diagnosis, does it follow that reason itself is powerless in the social sphere?

According to Husserl, it is a misunderstanding of reason to reduce it only to scientific, efficacious reasoning. Husserl’s long-life unwavering conviction is that reason is a bastion against the flood of scepticism and relativism (1970a, p. 303). As Jan Patočka explains, to confront skepticism, relativism and irrationalism is to reflect on the nature of reasoning. What appears as irrationalism in the social sphere can only come from the soil of rationalism and it must be confronted from there too (1941, p. 15). Hence, to secure knowledge from the sceptical quagmire, Husserl’s endeavour is to inquire into the nature of reasoning.

In order to understand the trajectory of Husserl’s thinking about reason, I will start with his critique of psychologism and anthropologism and end with his critique of the mathematisation of nature as he formulates it in his last published work, Crisis. I do not claim to evaluate Husserl’s phenomenology and his attempt to establish philosophy as a rigorous science.4 My purpose is to show how Husserl’s critique of scientific methodology, which is, at the same time, a critique of efficacious reason that has obscured its own ground, is a thread that runs throughout his all writing.5 For Husserl, to clarify

50 Lubica Učník

the idea of reason is ‘the general task that I must accomplish for myself if I am to call myself a philosopher’ (and Hardy, 1999, p. 2; Husserl cited in Schuhmann, 1997, p. 99).

We might disagree with both Husserl’s claims that the crisis of the modern age is contemporaneous with the crisis of science and the decapitation of metaphysics, (1999, p. 19) and his observation that ‘the crisis of philosophy implies the crisis of all modern sciences’, leading to a ‘crisis of European humanity itself in respect to the total meaningfulness of its cultural life, its total “Existenz”’ (1970d, §5, 12). We might object that Husserl’s concerns were already addressed and that his writing is not relevant to our times. However, given the sedimentation of psychology as a science, not existing in Husserl’s own time, we should revisit Husserl’s concerns. Writing in a contemporary setting, Raymond Tallis’ despair is reminiscent of Husserl:

it is somewhat depressing to reflect that, in the eight years since The Explicit Animal was published, the approaches to the philosophy of mind which it criticized, far from being discredited, have become better established in both professional and public consciousness (1999, p. xi).

Tallis’ project is similar to Husserl. Tallis stresses that his ‘central purpose…is to refute physicalism and any other materialist account of what it is to be a human being’ (1999, p. 3). Likewise, for Husserl, if we reduce consciousness to empirical explanations, the result is a ‘physicalism’ that has forgotten its own metaphysical ground (see also Husserl, 2001, §5, 16; Patočka, 1989 [1971], p. 230). Regardless of our agreement or disagreement with Husserl, I suggest that his critique is still relevant for our present age.

A caveat is necessary in any discussion of Husserl. So, I might concur with Alfred Schütz: ‘An attempt to reduce the work of a great philosopher to a few basic propositions understandable to an audience not familiar with his thought is, as a rule, a hopeless undertaking’ (1945, p. 78).


Defence of Reason

If man [sic] loses this faith [in reason], it means nothing less than the loss of faith “in himself,” in his own true being. This true being is not something he always already has, with the self-evidence of the “I am,” but something he only has and can have in the form of the struggle for his truth, the struggle to make himself true. True being is everywhere an ideal goal, a task of epistēmē or “reason,” as opposed to being which through doxa is merely thought to be, unquestioned and “obvious” (Husserl, 1970d, §5, 13, italics in original).

Phenomenology is the continuation of the journey that began in Ancient Greece, the journey from δόξα (doxa) to ἐπιστήμη (epistēmē) which Husserl fights to safeguard. He fights to redeem reason from relativistic interpretations and to reinstate it to its proper place, which reason and reasoning held since Plato and Aristotle.6 As Husserl explains, ‘in the breakthrough of philosophy…in which all sciences are thus contained, I see…the primal phenomenon of spiritual Europe’ (1970 [1935], p. 276).

For Husserl, the idea of reason implicates logic as the domain of purely formal laws. The unacceptable alternative to a pure logic grounded formally would be the empirical logic of John Stuart Mill, according to whom logic is nothing more than ‘a mere assemblage of psychological chapters, offered with the intention to regulate knowledge practically’ (Husserl, 2001, §13, 30), thereby making logic dependent on our thinking, instead of being its benchmark. Individual mental states or our subjective thinking cannot be ‘assembled’ to form universal principles. Rather, the principles must underpin our thinking. No logic based on mental states alone can proceed without principles that support it. Logic – based on our mental states (psychologism) or our human biology (anthropologism) – becomes relative, supposedly dependent on the situations humans find themselves in. The foundation

52 Lubica Učník

of knowledge is eliminated. Scepticism concerning knowledge becomes the reigning dogma.

The problem that Husserl recognises is: when our ‘faith in “absolute” reason, through which the world has its meaning, the faith in the meaning of history, of humanity, the faith in…[our] capacity to secure rational meaning for [our] individual and common human existence’ is lost, the descent into scepticism is inevitable (1970d, §5, 13). As Husserl notes in his last work, if the idea of reason is eliminated as superfluous because it is conflated with efficacious reasoning about facts, then a society is in crisis because it lacks a firm foundation. If all ideas are relative, how can we think about the way we live in society? To avoid such grave consequences, Husserl strives to overcome the confusion of our age, ‘a collapse of the belief in “reason”’ (1970d, §5, 12).

A mathematician by training, Husserl starts with psychological investigations of concepts in PA (2003a, p. 5), only to become dissatisfied with the smuggling of psychological explanation into the system of formal knowledge, thus opening a door to scepticism and relativism. Husserl realises that by using a psychological type of explanation, ‘an unnoticed μετάβασις εις αλλο γένος [metabasis eis allo genos]’ (2001, §2, 13) changes the foundation of knowledge into ‘a mere assemblage of psychological chapters’. In other words, if formal thinking, based on ideas, is conflated with our individual, subjective, psychological thinking, then we cannot explain how we can think formally. As Patočka explains ‘psychological laws are vague empirical generalisation’. By contrast, logical laws are ‘absolutely rigorous’. Logical laws are not empirical laws but they ground them. Logical laws are ‘the premises from which we reason and…rules according to which we reason’ (1996, p. 30, italics in original). The conflation of these two different categories leads us to forget that experience cannot account for the free constitution of ideas in thought.

As a result of this unnoticed metabasis, Husserl identifies the problematic fusion of logic and psychology. Formal logic – the systematic inquiry into the formal structures of reasoning – is by its very nature independent of experience, whereas psychology


investigates empirical human experience. By treating heterogeneous categories as the same (psychology based on empirical investigations leading to hypothetical laws, and logic with its formal laws), empirical psychology is mistakenly posited as the foundation of formal knowledge, instead of proceeding from it.

If psychological experience is all that is left to us, there is nothing to guide us toward the truth of our assertions, towards knowledge. Husserl cautions that we need to inquire into the foundation of knowledge by making clear to ourselves ‘the primary presuppositions’ from which our claims proceed (1975, §12, 59). For him, ‘if we are not to be shattered on the rocks of extreme scepticism’ (2001, §6, 17), the path of ‘painstaking criticism’ (2003a, p. 5) must be travelled repeatedly (2001, §3, 13). For Husserl, psychological experience cannot be our guide. We cannot base the normative character of our reasoning on temporal experience because this experience is relative to our situation here and now. Our guide towards knowledge must be based on the formal reasoning that is independent of experience.

Already in his first book, PA, Husserl is concerned with concepts that are not established clearly, leading to ‘the considerable difficulties that accrue to their understanding’, thereby giving rise to ‘dangerous errors and subtle controversies’ (2003a, p. 14). As Husserl notes, without reflecting on the foundation of those concepts, we construct ‘totally strange conceptual formations’ that are ‘equally useless for praxis and for science’ (2003a, p. 123), although, supposedly, ‘rules formulated once and for all spare us the ever-renewed labor of difficult deliberations’ by forming ‘a seamless calculational mechanism’ (2003a, p. 296, italics in original).

PA is based on ‘psychological researches’ because Husserl starts from the prevailing assumption of his age that ‘psychology [is] the science from which logic in general and the logic of the deductive sciences had to hope for philosophical clarification’. Yet he begins to doubt the reigning wisdom of his time, according to which logic is reducible to psychology. As he cautions, this state of affairs will eventually give rise to problems in the sphere of science. In the first

54 Lubica Učník

instance, this realisation leads Husserl to question those beliefs that conflate logic and psychology. Thus Husserl turns to the problem of psychologism and anthropologism. As he says, ‘such a psychological foundation never came to satisfy me’ (2001, p. 2). Gottlob Frege’s review of PA reaffirmed his already changed understanding.7 The announced second volume of PA was never published.

It would be, however, erroneous to assume that Husserl’s first book is unconnected to his later work. Already in PA, Husserl shows that science can proceed, and proceed well, even though the foundational basis on which science rests is overlooked, or even forgotten.

The Spectre of Psychologism8

Opiates suppress the symptoms; they do not cure the disease (Husserl, 1975, §2, 23).

At the beginning of Logical Investigations,9 Husserl suggests a parallel between the artist’s and scientist’s activities. While the artist performs, or creates his art, he can only rarely account for the rules by which his art is framed. He is simply the master of the technique acquired through practice, and his judgement is related to his activity as an artist (2001, §4, 15). Likewise, while doing research, the scientist does not need to reflect on the rules that are constitutive of science, but follows her knowledge, observations and instinct acquired through her training as a scientist: ‘Even the mathematician, the physicist and the astronomer need not understand the ultimate grounds of their activities in order to carry through even the most important scientific performances’ (2001, §4, 15).

Theory is understood ‘in terms of mere rules of the game’. Science becomes too complex, making it hard for scientists to check on every step they take (1969, §34, 100). Husserl notes that instead of going back to the basic axioms on which scientific knowledge is based, scientists use ‘abbreviations and substitutes’ in order to ‘economize thought’ (2001, §9, 23, italics in original). There is nothing surprising about the fact


that scientists cannot perform validations all the time. However, this reduction of scientific inquiry to a method of mathematical operations leads scientists to forget that they are reasoning about the world they live in. They become ‘lost in an excessive symbolism’ (1969, §33, 98). As Husserl sums up, ‘the incomplete state of all sciences’ rests on the use of the efficient technique of reasoning that is ignorant of its foundational basis (2001, §4, 15).

To be sure, this lack of understanding of the basis from which science has evolved did not slow the growth of science; rather, it brought about ‘a formerly undreamt of mastery over nature’. However, as Husserl insists, these sciences ‘cannot satisfy us theoretically’ (2001, §4, 16), because the theory is replaced with ‘its symbolic analogue’, by privileging the so-called need ‘for greater exactness’ (1969, §34, p. 100). We tend to forget that the constructed calculational mechanism is not separate from nature where we live.

Husserl is concerned about this forgetting of the ground of knowledge; hence in LI, his focus is to clarify the idea of analytic, formal reasoning, which is the domain of logic. Husserl wants to clarify pure logic, in other words, the formal basis of all our judgements. As Husserl realises, one of the problems is a substitution of psychological explanations for formal reasoning. Husserl suggests that Theodor Lipps’ claim can illuminate the relationship between formal and psychological laws, which Husserl terms the problem of logical psychologism. In Germany, probably for the first time, the appeal to psychologism, as J. N. Mohanty explains, was used by B. Erdmann. For Erdmann, psychologism is ‘the thesis that the logical principles such as the principle of non-contradiction derive their necessity from “the essence of our presentation and thinking”’ (J. N. Mohanty, 1982, p. 20). Likewise, for Lipps, either ‘logic is a physics of thinking or it is nothing at all’ (cited in Husserl, 2001, §19, 42; Lipps, 1880, p. 530 ff). Lipps reduces formal knowledge to our mental states, in other words, to our thinking. However, as Husserl asks, if we equate formal knowledge with our mentals states, what is the dividing line ‘between truths of reason and truths of fact’? (1975, §6, 36) What is the difference

56 Lubica Učník

between formal and empirical knowledge? For Husserl, what needs to be clarified is ‘the relationship… between the subjectivity of knowing and the objectivity of the content known’ (2001, p. 2).

The issue here is the equivocation of the terms; it is the confusion between two different senses of the commonly employed terms subjective and objective. For example, objective can mean the world of objects or things existing independently of the way in which we experience them; or, objective can be taken as the method of natural science, devoid of any subjective remnants. As Husserl puts it,

The goal of ‘objectivity,’ i.e., [that of] science, is: that which is, not as experienced and verified by particular persons and civilizations, as it is experienced and can be validated through experience by them, but rather: that which is – for all conceivable civilizations (including Papuans), [for all] experiences, [all] surrounding worlds, which are assumed to be experiencing the same things (Husserl, 1970b, p. 321, note *, italics and square brackets in original).

In the scientific domain, the term objective is related to the point of view of a disinterested observer, stripped of her own subjective commitments in the everyday world. In this sense, scientific objectivity requires self-effacement and it is taken in opposition to the subjective point of view of a person who is immersed in the world of objects. In the first sense, the objective world is open to our investigation by using scientific objectivity in the second sense to account for it. Yet the objective world existing independently of us is not ‘the substrate of truths in themselves’ (1969, §104, 277). Through scientific objectivity, it is hypothesized as a domain of ‘facts’, as nature in itself.10 It can be posited otherwise. Those two senses of objective are not interchangeable. The use of subjective is similar. We can speak of subjective in the sense of talking about the structures of subjective experience (as opposed to the structure of objects and things that we encounter in the world). In other words, subjective structures


of experience are objective, so to speak. These are the structures of experience of everybody; in this sense subjective is not reducible to one particular point of view. On the other hand, the use of the term subjective as we use it in our everyday life, and in opposition to the standpoint of a disinterested observer, means that our personal experience is relative to our particular situation. This meaning of subjective is in opposition to the use of objective in scientific usage; in other words, our experience is subjective in a sense that it is shaped by our subjective personal history, unique to each of us. Yet, if we reduce subjective to the second sense only, if our thinking is subjective in the latter sense only, individual for each of us, how can we think formally; that is, how can we think something that is, in a way, independent of our own subjective, individual, way of thinking?

For Husserl, logic reduced to ‘a physics of thinking’ cannot account for our ability to think and judge according to formal rules. The problem can be illuminated by our previous discussion about the equivocation of the terms. We tend to think that our thinking is subjective in the sense of individual. If Erdmann’s claim that the logical principles proceed from “the essence of our presentation and thinking” was correct, that is, if they really proceeded from our subjective thinking, how, in turn, could they apply to our thinking? If they actually described our way of subjective thinking – individual or structural, for that matter –we would be hard pressed to explain how we could think according to those logical principles. Yet if that were the case, psychology as a science would be impossible. Psychology is about subjective thinking in the first sense described above, in other words, objective in the sense that it describes the thinking of everybody. Yet in order to describe the structures of subjective thinking that pertain to everybody, psychology must be based on formal rules that transgress our thinking rather than extrapolate those rules from thinking that supposedly is thinking of each of us. A simple reflection on apophantic logic as an instance of the correct way of thinking shows that – once instantiated by an individual man, in this case, Aristotle – formal logic becomes independent of his thinking. It grounds our thinking in the

58 Lubica Učník

same way as geometry grounds land-surveying.The formal rules transcend our finite thinking, our mental states.

Those rules, or formal laws, as Husserl sometimes calls them, are valid for everyone who is familiar with the formal system, irrespective of time and place. For Husserl, to reflect on the objectivity of thinking, that is, on the content known, is to realise that Lipps’ physics of thinking, or Erdmann’s logical principles, must be based on something other than our psychological experience; our subjective, individual, thinking.

Doxa and Epistēmē in Logical Investigations

For Husserl, every finite judgement must have some basis, something that transcends the particular act of judging. There must be something to illuminate the validity of our experience, so we can arrive at knowledge that others can understand too. We must distinguish between someone judging that 2 x 2 = 4 and ‘the true judgement, as the correct judgement in accordance with truth’. In other words, we must draw a distinction between ‘the true content of judgement’ and ‘my act of judging’. So, if I assert that 2 x 2 = 4, this is clearly ‘causally determined’ because my assertion is caused by the actual question asked, say, in a mathematical class. It is my subjective judgement, in the sense of individual that I offer to others on a certain occasion. But if my judgement were not based on something that transcends my particular mental process (subjective), there would be no possibility to account for it. There would be no principle according to which my teacher could mark my judgement as correct. Hence, there is a difference between my judging that 2 x 2 = 4 and the content of my judgement, which expresses ‘the truth 2 x 2 = 4’ (2001, §36, 80).

To express it in terms of the equivocation mentioned above, the content of my judgement is objective, based on formal knowledge that transgresses my individual thinking, while the act of my judging is subjective in a sense that it is my personal judgment. This is the puzzle that Husserl notes at the beginning of LI: the relationship between


our acts of judgement, or, in other words, the subjectivity of thinking and the objectivity of the content of judgement. Our acts of judgement are events in the world; they are causally determined and subjective. We can be wrong. Yet their content is objective, guaranteed by the formal laws that are independent of our thinking (2001, p. 2). If this distinction is denied (or forgotten), then it seems that the validity of our judgements depends on the subjectivity of our thinking, the event in the world. As Husserl already affirms in PA, ‘every law of nature is an hypothesis’ (2003b, p. 357) that needs to be verified. We must distinguish between doxa and epistēmē.

Husserl explains that to know something means to give reasons; it is to validate our assertions, which will show to anyone that a certain state of affairs is, or is not. It is one thing to be correct about a state of affairs (subjective doxa), and it is quite another to be able to give reasons in order to validate our judgement concerning this state of affairs as correct (objective epistēmē). Doxa becomes epistēmē – knowledge – if we provide reasons for the truth of our propositions; if ‘we methodically validate them’ (2001, §6, 19).

Science, as we know it, can exist only because it is based on formal validating arguments that provide the acid test for the correctness of our judgements. Science is not about changeable nature. It is first and foremost the system of formal rules that scientists use to decipher the book of nature, as Galileo understood it. Using these formal rules, scientists order and systematise our finite, individual experience of nature into a standardised manifold that is impossible to find in the world of our living. As Alexandre Koyré notes:

The Galilean concept of motion (as well as that of space) seems to us so “natural” that we even believe we have derived it from experience and observation, though, obviously, nobody has ever encountered an inertia motion for the simple reason that such a motion is utterly and absolutely impossible (1968, p. 3).

60 Lubica Učník

Hence, as Husserl stresses, to say that ‘as far as their theoretical content is concerned...[l]ogic is related to psychology just as any branch of chemical technology is related to chemistry, [or] as land-surveying is to geometry’ is absurd (2001, §17, 40).11 It is, rather, the other way around: logic is the foundation that supplies the formal laws of judgement to sciences that deal with the empirical world, in the same way that geometry, although originally derived from land-surveying, now grounds it.

Anthropologism

Husserl’s critique of psychologism applies, mutatis mutandis, to anthropologism. Anthropologism is for Husserl also a form of relativism. The underlying claim of anthropologism is that what is true or false depends on our species. There might be other species and they might judge differently. What is true for us might be false for them (2001, §36, 80).

As Husserl explains, this misconception is already based on our understanding of true and false; it is based on our categorisation of judgement. Further, to use the true/false distinction and then claim that it might be different for other species means that we do not understand the meaning of true and false. There is also another problem. If we say that truth for a different species might be non-existent, which means that there would be no truth per se, then this claim is a fallacy, sometimes called the liar’s paradox. Our claim appeals to truth by declaring that there is no truth.12

Finally, if anthropologism’s claim is that our truth is relative to our human constitution, then if there were no humans, there would be no truth; this claim, once again, surreptitiously relies on the notion of truth to assert this claim as true. As Husserl sums up, ‘We are playing a pretty game: man evolves from the world and the world from man; God creates man and man God’ (2001, §36, 81).


The Idea of Phenomenology

Natural thought in life and in science is untroubled by the difficulties concerning the possibility of knowledge, while philosophical thought is determined by the position taken with respect to the problems of the possibility of knowledge (Husserl, 1999, p. 61, italics in original).

Husserl is the first to admit that his critique of psychologism and anthropologism in LI does not get him out of the empirical world. As he writes in 1907, although his early underlying aim was the theory of knowledge, LI left the validity of descriptive psychology intact. Husserl’s insight is that ‘the possibility of analytic cognition’ (1975, §8, 47, italics in original) is important but is not enough to account for the knowledge of the world, that is, for the correlation between our subjective thinking and the world of objects (1999, p. 60).

In IP, then, Husserl shifts the focus from analytic reasoning to consider the problem of knowledge as such. His priority becomes the correlation between our subjective thinking and the objective world existing independently of us that, in modern theories of knowledge, becomes ‘the enigma of all enigmas’ (1970d, §5, 13, italics in original). How do I know that the thing in the world is the same as the one that I am aware of? It is the puzzle concerning ‘the enigma of psychological subject matter and method’ (1970d, §2, 5, italics in original). This enigma cannot be resolved by comparing the object in the world with its image, which supposedly appears in my consciousness. The answer cannot rely on the law of causality; the object cannot cause the image in my consciousness. Causation is useful to explain events in physical nature but the extra-mental object cannot cause any mental image. This is another metabasis. The object and the mental state belong to different categories.

Husserl’s insight is that to understand this enigma of meaning – this correlation between the worldly object and our knowledge of it – a phenomenologist must pay attention to the immanent flow

62 Lubica Učník

of cogitationes revealing the enigma that phenomenology discloses: we always see more than what is given to us. The proverbial mental image cannot be the replication of an object from the world into my consciousness, so to speak. The object is irreducible to the image. Yet, how can I experience this tree as a three-dimensional object standing in the garden when I really only see one side of it? (2006, p. 91) My perception of a tree in a garden is relative to my position in relation to that tree, so how do I constitute the cognitive meaning of my experience from this one side and experience it as a tree blossoming in my garden? (1983, §88-89)

The key term is the tree itself. It is a tree that we are aware of, and not the singular perception of one side of this tree. Husserl warns us against the misconception of the atomistic understanding of perceptual data. There is no singular cogitatio that can account for our perception of a tree (1999, p. 46). We are aware of a tree because it is constituted through a synthesis of many sensations; but those sensations cannot be accounted for outside of the bestowal of meaning that we understand as a tree.

The phenomenological investigation of the constitution of the cognitive meaning of my experience, in other words, the subjective structures of experience, mentioned above, can also be described by analogy with the method practised in natural science (1999, pp. 34-35). Galileo did not posit the law of gravity as applying to those two particular cannon balls which he is said to have dropped from the Tower of Pisa. He did not perceive this experiment as his own singular observation. He abstracted from the time and space of the experiment, from his own person as the one who was conducting this experiment, also from the actual falling cannon balls, and formulated the law of gravity that would apply to any object whatsoever, at any time and place. Likewise, the investigation of this tree as the thing itself, constituted through acts of knowing, for example, will make us aware of other types that can be made clear in the life-world (1981 [1931]-b, p. 244).

Husserl’s call to return to the things themselves aims to draw


our attention to the constitution of our experience of the world. The thing-experience always proceeds according to ordered perceptions. It is possible to investigate it in the first sense of subjective, as structures of subjective experience that is in a way objective, it pertains to the experiences of everybody. I always experience things in the world as meaningful. My experience of any and every object is not haphazard but uniform. I know that the cube has other sides, even if I do not really see them. There is no possibility of scepticism in this domain.

This lawful constitution of our experience leads Husserl to point out that logic, or our formal knowledge, is based on prepredicative experience, our everyday living. The origin of the formal predicative logic is nothing else but ‘the world of experience immediately pregiven and prior to all logical functions.’ It is the world in which we live that ‘furnishes the ground for all cognitive performance and all scientific determination’ (1973, §10, 41, italics in original).

Husserl recognises that the life-world is the ground of formal knowledge. Yet it does not mean that he suddenly collapses formal thinking to Lipps’ physics of thinking. He does not equivocate on the two senses of subjective. On the contrary, he makes clear that once our subjective experience of the world is instantiated formally through reasoning, as apophantic logic was, then it becomes independent of our psychological experience. Yet, it is this transformation of psychological experience to formal evidence that can make us forget that formal knowledge came from the life-world.

Husserl’s recognition of the life-world is double-sided. On the one hand, he demonstrates that our experience is lawful, following typical patters that we can describe; while on the other, because of the lawfulness of our experience, we can formalise our thinking into knowledge that extends it. Hence, Husserl affirms that formal knowledge is an extension of psychological experience but once formalised, is not reducible to it. Proceeding from this understanding of the constitution of our experience of the world, Husserl shows not only the original ground of formal knowledge but also the constitution of positive sciences (1969, §104, 275). As he suggests, philosophical

64 Lubica Učník

considerations are different to the theoretical reconfiguration of the world in natural science because physicists ‘have a completely different attitude’; yet the basis for both is the Lebenswelt (2006, p. 93).

Lebenswelt

In ordinary life, we have nothing whatever to do with nature-Objects. What we take as things are pictures, statues, gardens, houses, tables, clothes, tools, etc. These are all value-Objects of various kinds, use-Objects, practical Objects. They are not Objects which can be found in natural science (Husserl, 1989, §11, 29).

Husserl recognises that our particular finite experience of the world is the ground from which formal knowledge proceeds. Our experience of things in the world is structured and lawful; even before we reflect on our understanding. The life-world is nothing but typicalities that we constitute in our everyday living. Once we realise this, we can grasp experience by investigating and abstracting from particularities to thematise the typical instances – eidetic structures – on which our understanding is based (see Husserl, 1973).

It follows also that our lawful experience of the world is the basis for the mathematical reconfiguration of nature. Without the lawfulness of our prepredicative experience, the possibility of idealisation and mathematisation of the structures of things, Cartesian res extensae, would be inconceivable. As Husserl notes, res extensa, is ‘the spatiotemporal skeleton of the qualities’ (Husserl, 1970a, p. 307, italics in original). Because our experience of things is typified, we can extrapolate from this typicality to mathematise res extensae. Moreover, since we experience imperfect causes of events daily, we can imagine nature as if ruled by the law of causality in itself (Husserl, 1969, p. §104).

As Husserl affirms, things themselves are the primary guide that will lead us to knowledge in general. We need to recognise that our


knowledge is based on our experience of the life-world: ‘the truth of predicative forms is founded on the movement of antepredicative experience’ (Trân, 1986, p. 111). We live in the world and our understanding is drawn from it. We do not reflect on this fundamental starting point and, when performing theoretical acts, we forget that they are couched in this originary encounter with the world that is always the backdrop to our experience of things themselves. As Landgrebe puts it, our ‘belief in the world’ is the basis from which our theorising begins (1940, p. 42). Theory is not something imposed on the world: epistēmē is always already based on doxa.

Doxa and Epistēmē: Back to Things Themselves – Zu den Sachen selbst!

Profound thought is an indication of chaos, which genuine science aims to transform into a cosmos, a simple, entirely clear, dissolved order (Husserl cited in Landgrebe & Patočka, 1980, p. 7, trans. by Horst Ruthrof).

To account for the world of our living by showing that doxa is the stepping stone toward epistēmē, Husserl affirms the primacy of the world with his call to return to things themselves (1981 [1917], p. 11). Only by showing the lawful structures of our experience can we confront the charges of relativism and scepticism, and also disclose our human participation in the erection of the mathematised structure of the world by positive sciences.

Knowledge is not some mysterious process that aligns the thing itself with our consciousness of it (1983, §145, 345). We must reflect upon evidence, work hard to understand its structure and discern the typicalities that are hidden at the first unreflective understanding. Human freedom means that we can transcend the immediacy of our perception and, by way of reflection, disclose the structures of our cognitive experience. Through phenomenological analysis we can show that our experience is not reduced to the here and now but is structured by past situations that we have experienced. It is the world

66 Lubica Učník

of our living, the Lebenswelt, that informs our judgements.Husserl’s call to return to things themselves leads him to

formulate the principle of all principles (1983, §24, 44). As he says, to see something is to know, but ‘seeing cannot be demonstrated or deduced’. We have to start from things themselves. Our knowledge cannot be based on ‘a logical derivation from non-intuitive knowledge’. His example is of a deaf man.13 Someone born deaf is told about tones and how harmonies are composed from those tones leading to ‘a splendid art’, but how could he know how those tones lead to something that others call musical compositions? He has never heard it; how could he even imagine what music is? To know that there is something that others call music is of no help in considering what this thing called music is. Either we know what music is because we have experience of it, or we do not (1999, p. 30). Truth is something that guides our thinking but it cannot be reduced to predicative judgement.

Husserl’s account of the idea of truth is twofold: he negotiates the relation between empirical truths of the Lebenswelt, based on our prepredicative experience that is not haphazard but lawfully experienced, and truth-in-itself, which grounds logic. Because formal knowledge is liberated from experiential content, it is true in itself. By contrast, knowledge of the world cannot in itself be reduced to such an unchanging truth. However, from this recognition, it does not follow that in our experience of the world anything goes. From our prepredicative experience we know that things change, that we see them from different perspectives, and that they may delude us; but, in the end, by getting closer, or by looking from a different perspective, we can correct our judgements about them. Things themselves are the touchstone of truth: the only guarantee that can lead us towards knowledge. Knowledge of the world is never final; it is always open to corrections, refutations, and reaffirmation. There is a lawful structure to our experience and, by phenomenological investigations that reveal the lawfulness of our awareness of the world; we can show how our experience of the life-world is constituted. Why should it be different in our theoretical considerations?


It is not the case that the world is reducible to independent, enduring facts that we can account for by scientific reasoning. According to Husserl, science is a spiritual achievement. ‘The point is not to secure objectivity but to understand it. …no objective science, no matter how exact, explains or even can explain anything’. As he points out, ‘to deduce is not to explain’ (1970d, §55, 189).Those facts are not independent of our thinking. It is we who constitute facts as meaningful within the schema of mathematised nature (1970 [1935], p. 272-273).

Mathematisation of Nature: The Science of Reality

The European nations are sick; Europe itself, it is said, is in crisis. We are by no means lacking something like nature doctors. Indeed, we are practically inundated by a flood of naïve and excessive suggestions for reform. But why do the so richly developed humanistic disciplines fail to perform the service here that is so admirably performed by the natural sciences in their sphere? (Husserl, 1970 [1935], p. 270)

At the end of his career, Husserl extends the critique of reason beyond the psychological relativisation of logic and questions a mode of scientific formal knowledge that constitutes another metabasis. Formal knowledge becomes substituted for the nature in which we live and is taken as true nature. The early focus on logic is not abandoned but extended to consider the knowledge of natural science that is taken as nature itself.

The afore-mentioned metabasis is the substitution of the method for the world. We methodically ‘construct numerical indices for the actual and possible’ res extensae that we then take as a better rendering of the world in which we live. Yet this mathematical manifold proceeds from nowhere else but the life-world. Once we transform nature into ‘a well-fitting garb of ideas, that of the so-called objectively scientific

68 Lubica Učník

truths’ (1970d, §9h, 51, italics in original), we can hypothetically predict, and therefore master, natural processes. Science is transformed into a ‘purely theoretical-technical accomplishment’ preoccupied with a mathematically ideal world instead of the world we live in (1970d, §12, 66). Yet, as Husserl notes, ‘to predict, or to recognize the objective forms of composition of physical or chemical bodies and to predict accordingly – all this explains nothing but is in need of explanation’ (1970d, §55, 189).

However, Husserl does not want to condemn the sciences, or to retreat into ‘mysticism’. He wants to show ‘to what extent the sciences are one-sided, [by] giving theoretical formulation only to certain sides of actual reality’ (1980, §18, 83). For Husserl, we need to revisit this substitution of the world with ‘a well-fitting garb of ideas’ by showing how it is based on our originary experience of things themselves that are transposed into the mathematical manifold. Through this transposition, things become understood as res extensae and manipulated as if they were separate, and somehow truer than the world of our living.

On the one hand, Husserl is determined to preserve the idea of formal knowledge that will keep at bay scepticism and relativism; at the same time, he recognises the other side of this problem, that is, the reduction of the world in which we live, the Lebenswelt, into a pale reflection of the mathematised formal world of science. According to Husserl, the problem is that the idea of formal ontology derived from Leibniz’s idea of mathesis universalis lost its formal character and became ‘a merely empirical technology for a sort of intellectual productions having the greatest practical utility and going by the name science – a technology adjusted empirically to practical results’ (1969, p. 16). This never-clarified idea ‘of a formal ontology’ (1969, §24, 76) seduced us into taking mathematical hypotheses as primary, by allowing us to forget that they are only hypotheses about the natural world, leading to ‘The Crisis of European Sciences and Psychology’.14


Galileo: A Discovering and a Concealing Genius

Husserl argues that this is not a fortuitous development by tracing his historical analysis back to Galileo, ‘a discovering and a concealing genius [entdeckender und verdeckender Genius]’ (1970d, p. 52). From the Ancient Greeks through to Galileo’s time, geometry remained intuitively linked to the natural world, despite this link having largely been forgotten over time. Originally, the Ancient philosophers developed geometrical knowledge by idealising certain privileged shapes: point, line, triangle. Nature was the basis for those shapes. Prompted by his desire to refute the sophists, Plato’s search for the certainty of knowledge led him to base this certitude on the model of geometry, as it was in his time. If I draw a triangle, it will never be perfect, but I can imagine one that is absolutely perfect and which will become the limit-form of a triangle in itself in which all the finite triangles thought or drawn by humans will participate. The ideal triangle cannot ever appear in the world but it will guide our finite thinking from then on. There must be a domain that guides our finite human thinking: the domain that is the foundation of epistēmē, as opposed to doxa.

Even so, the Platonic solution was still derived from the world in which Plato lived. His perfect reality, the domain of Ideas or Forms, was immaterial; material nature participated in immaterial Forms. By the time the tradition reached Galileo, it had become sedimented. Geometry was refined, and Galileo simply turned it around, declaring that nature is written in triangles and circles. In an important sense, Galileo reversed the tradition: for him, immaterial Forms become matter; nature is essentially mathematical in itself.15

Galileo grafted geometry on to nature by surmising that ideal shapes are primary; that they are nature itself (1970d, §9b, 29). For him, nature is already geometrical and not the other way around. Once Galileo took nature as mathematical, he also understood ‘mechanics as mathematics’.16 In the Galilean universe, our everyday imperfect intuition of cause and effect becomes ‘the law of causality, …the “law

70 Lubica Učník

of exact lawfulness” according to which every occurrence in “nature” – idealized nature – must come under exact laws’ (Husserl, 1970d, §9i, 54). As Husserl declares, nature ‘taken as a concrete universe of causality – for this was inherent in that strange conception – became [the object of] a peculiarly applied mathematics’ (1970d, §9c, 37, italics in original, square brackets in translation).

Galileo transgressed the imprecise, finite world of our lives by overturning, and thereby destroying, the ancient tradition – leading to our understanding of atoms, rocks, pendulums and heavenly bodies as all subject to the one law – the law of causality. The outcome of this inversion of tradition is ‘the consistent development of the exact sciences in the modern period’, which would be impossible without hypothesizing the world through mathematical structures. This transformation of nature into its symbolic analogue ‘was a true revolution in the technical control of nature’ (1970 [1935], pp. 270-271). Yet, as Husserl points out, ‘the world is not in the least more intelligible because of [sciences]; it has only become more useful for us’ (1980, §18, 82).

Conclusion: Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity

Merely fact-minded sciences make merely fact-minded people (Husserl, 1970d, §2, 6).

For Husserl in Crisis, the deficiency in clarity that is tied to the forgetting of the metaphysical basis of science is not only a theoretical problem but has implications for our everyday living. As Husserl already notes at the beginning of his career, this lack of clarity about the foundations of science permits a scientist to be an excellent master-theorist but without awareness of the ground from which her mastery has emerged; making it easy to privilege formal mastery without taking account of what this mastery is about. Thus, she will lack responsibility for the way she masters and uses technique


(2001, §4, 16). When an apprehension regarding the foundation of science is lacking, this oversight cannot be easily illuminated. Instead of clarification of this type of abuse of reason, reason per se is accused of incompetence, leading to its damnation. The human capacity to procure rational meaning from the world is declared misplaced. Everything goes and everything is right. Society without reason becomes the domain of personal opinions with no claim to any privilege, steering all and sundry toward existential crisis.17

Despite the general feeling of scepticism of his time, Husserl strives to affirm the idea of rationality as we have inherited it from the Ancient Greeks. As he points out, it is important to show that there is a domain of truth which can guide us in our search for knowledge: it represents the commitment to give reasons for our beliefs instead of accepting blind prejudices without thinking. It is this commitment to truth and knowledge that underlies our striving to confirm rational meaning in our human existence.

As Husserl consistently shows throughout his oeuvre, if we mistakenly accept that the only truths are empirical, based on experience only, the gate is open to a flood of scepticism and relativism that denies the possibility of knowledge. In a certain sense, we deny the human capacity to reason. By denying formal laws we affirm changeable truths, deriving them from empirical laws that are part of the natural world.

As Husserl argues, we cannot think, and by implication live, without certainty of knowledge. Yet what knowledge is cannot be reduced to technical know-how. Husserl’s whole career was devoted to this task. On his journey from PA to his last work, Crisis, Husserl realises that technical, efficacious reasoning – the hallmark of natural science – will lead to existential crisis because ‘questions of the meaning or meaninglessness of the whole of this human existence’ cannot be answered by this type of knowledge (1970d, §2, 6). Yet these are precisely the questions to which we seek answers and they cannot be left at the margins of society. Human existence cannot be turned into mathematical formulae, therefore cannot be mastered by the

72 Lubica Učník

manipulation of symbols. Husserl reminds us that these ‘specifically human questions were not always banned from the realm of science’ (1970d, §3, 7). After all, these questions concern us as responsible human beings living in the world. They press for ‘universal reflections and answers based on rational insight’ rather than new-age opinions (1970d, §2, 5-6).

According to Husserl, by living ‘in this development, we find ourselves in the greatest danger of drowning in the skeptical deluge and thereby losing our hold on our own truth’ (1970d, §5, 14). Husserl realises that the meaning of ‘the supreme and ultimate interests of humanity’ cannot be illuminated through the domain of positive sciences that have become ‘mere theoretical techniques’ (1969, §71, 181). For Husserl then the idea of modern science based on the mathematisation of nature is problematic because it excludes the possibility to account for personal responsibility that is tied to our existence in the world.

The problem is twofold and can be stated thusly: in the first instance, if positive sciences are reduced to the investigation of mathematical magnitudes only, then existential questions, questions related to human existence, cannot be answered. They are, by definition, outside of modern science. In the second instance, because scientists became technologists with ‘a practical and not a theoretical attitude’, their approach is not based on personal responsibility for the theories they introduce to control nature; rather, they take theories as a simple means towards manipulation of nature ‘in the interest of technology’. Their ‘theorizing is then but a means to some (extra-theoretical) practice’ (1969, §7, 32). The result is the reduction of the life-world into a collection of things that can be mastered by means of technological science, forgetting that what is essential for nature is not at all what is essential for us (2001, §71, 159).

We need to realise that we are responsible for the mathematical mastery of nature: this construct has arisen from our life-world. It is not a separate and better rendering of reality. It is an achievement that might give us certain advantages in understanding the processes


of nature, but it is not nature itself. By replacing our lived world with a mathematised nature of which we imagine ourselves the technical masters, we lose sight of nature as something in which we live and for which we are responsible. It is only through responsible reflection on the way we use our knowledge that we can reinstate rationality to its proper place as a responsible attitude that takes into account the Lebenswelt as the place where we live, as the only world we have. Only by changing our attitude towards the world we live in can we rethink the questions which concern our existence in this world. Scientific knowledge does not make the world of our living more understandable; it only gives us knowledge how to manipulate it better. Scientific knowledge and ethics must be co-dependent.

NOTES

1 From now on referred to as Crisis.2 For a comparable assertion, see Mohanty (1976, p. 137).3 From now on referred to as PA.4 For a version of this claim, see also Palmer (1997, p. 211) and Zahavi (2003, p. 67).5 For a comparable claim, see Enrico Garulli (1979).6 See Plato’s and Aristotle’s claims that wisdom begins with θαυμα, θαυμαζω (thauma, thaumazo) – wonder, to wonder (Aristotle, 1941, pp. 982b912-928, 983a912-921; Plato, 1997, pp. 7, 155d)7 For Frege’s review, see (Frege, 1972). It is not the case that Frege’s critique changed Husserl’s thinking. His position was already ambiguous under the influence of Bolzano. This is a contentious claim but to substantiate it would take me away from my main argument. For the impact of Frege on Husserl’s thinking, see (J. N. Mohanty, 1982; Pivčević, 1970). Mohanty points out: “What led Husserl to completely reject psychologism as a theory of logic was not the influence of Frege, but rather his own changing philosophy of mathematics combined with influences of Leibniz, Bolzano and Lotze” (J. N. Mohanty, 1995, p. 53). See also (J. Mohanty, 2008, p. 4; Jitendra Nath Mohanty, 1976, p. xv; Zahavi, 2003, pp. 148, note 141).8 For the critique of psychologism, see, for example, (Husserl, 1969, p. 12 ff, 1997 [1928], 2001). For the critique of psychologism and anthropologism,

74 Lubica Učník

see (Husserl, 1981 [1931]). The subtitle “The Spectre of Psychologism” is taken from (Husserl, 1969, pp. 12-13).9 From now on referred to as LI.10 ‘Objectifi cation is a matter of method, founded upon prescientific data of experience. Mathematical method “constructs,” out of intuitive representation, ideal objects and teaches how to deal with them operatively and systematically. It does not produce things out of other things in the manner of handwork; it produces ideas. Ideas arise through a peculiar sort of mental accomplishment: idealization’ (Husserl, 1970a, pp. 348, italics in original).11 Husserl cites Mill, who claimed that logic “owes all its theoretical foundations to psychology, and includes as much of that science as is necessary to establish the rules of the art” (cited in Husserl, 2001, pp. §17, 40; Mill, 1867, p. 461).12 “If, as anthropologism says, all truth has its source in our common human constitution, then, if there were no such constitution, there would be no truth. The thesis of this hypothetical assertion is absurd, since the proposition ‘There is no truth’ amounts in a sense to the proposition ‘There is a truth that there is no truth’” (Husserl, 2001, pp. §36, 80).13 Husserl does discuss ‘normativity’ in Logical Investigations (LI) to claim that normativity must already be based on formal logic (his example is that of a ‘good soldier’), but this point is not relevant to his discussion of knowledge in the case of a deaf person. Rather, his point is that a deaf person might have a definition of what music is, and in that sense may know what the definition of music is, but he cannot know what music as music is, since he never heard it (a comparison can be made here to Frank Jackson’s ‘colour-blind Mary’ thought experiment). It is an example of what Husserl later calls ‘prepredicative knowledge’. There are several steps in Husserl’s argument, but is not necessary for me to rehearse these here because these lie outside the bounds of my paper, and above all because these are not relevant to Husserl’s discussion of one example of that different conception of knowledge that he wishes to develop and expound.14 This is the title of the lecture series that Husserl presented in Prague for the “Cercle philosophique de Prague pour les recherches sur l’entendement humain in November 1935. See note 1 in (Husserl, 1970b, p. 3).15 “If the empirical and very limited requirements of technical praxis had originally motivated those of pure geometry, so now, conversely, geometry


had long since become, as ‘applied’ geometry, a means for technology, a guide in conceiving and carrying out the task of systematically constructing a methodology of measurements for objectively determining shapes in constantly increasing ‘approximation’ to the geometrical ideals, the limit-shapes” (Husserl, 1970b, pp. §9b, 28-29). See also Fjelland (2007).16 “We are…well accustomed to the mathematical approach to nature, so well that we are not aware of the boldness of Galileo’s statement that ‘the book of nature is written in geometrical characters’, any more than we are conscious of the paradoxical daring of his decision to treat mechanics as mathematics, that is, to substitute for the real, experienced world a world of geometry made real, and to explain the real by the impossible” (Koyré, 1968, p. 4).17 See, for example, Schütz (1953), Gurwitsch (1945), Sokolowski (2000).

REFERENCES

Aristotle (1941) Metaphysica (W. D. Ross, Trans.). In R. McKeon (Ed.), The Basic Works of Aristotle (pp. 681-926). New York: Random House, Inc.

Fjelland, R. (2007) What Ought We to Know About Science and Technology? Or: Philosophy of Science and Science Studies as Science Literacy. Dilemmata: Jahrbuch der Altonaer Stiftung für philosophischen Grundlagenforschung, 2, 1-17.

Frege, G. (1972, July) Review of Dr. E. Husserl’s Philosophy of Arithmetic. Mind: New Series, 81, 321-337.

Garulli, E. (1979) The Crisis of Science as a Crisis of Teleological Reason. In A.-T. Tymieniecka (Ed.), Analecta Husserliana (Vol. IX, pp. 91-104). Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Company.

Gurwitsch, A. (1945, April) On Contemporary Nihilism. The Review of Politics, 7, 170-198.

Hardy, L. (1999) Translator’s Introduction (L. Hardy, Trans.) The Idea of Phenomenology: A Translation of Die Idee der Phänomenologie. Husserliana II (pp. 1-13). Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Husserl, E. (1969) Formal and Transcendental Logic (D. Cairns, Trans.). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

Husserl, E. (1970a) Appendix II: Idealization and the Science of Reality - The Mathematization of Nature (D. Carr, Trans.) The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to

76 Lubica Učník

Phenomenological Philosophy (pp. 301-314). Evanston: Northwest University Press.

Husserl, E. (1970b) Appendix III: The Attitude of Natural Science and the Attitude of Humanistic Science: Naturalism, Dualism, and Psychophysical Psychology (D. Carr, Trans.) The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy (pp. 315-334). Evanston: Northwest University Press.

Husserl, E. (1970c) Appendix V: Objectivity and the World of Experience (D. Carr, Trans.) The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy (pp. 343-351). Evanston: Northwest University Press.

Husserl, E. (1970d) The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy (D. Carr, Trans.). Evanston: Northwest University Press.

Husserl, E. (1970 [1935]) Appendix I: The Vienna Lecture: Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity (D. Carr, Trans.) The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy (pp. 269-299). Evanston: Northwest University Press.

Husserl, E. (1973) Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic (J. S. Churchill & K. Ameriks, Trans.). Evanston: Northwest University Press.

Husserl, E. (1975) Introduction to the Logical Investigations: A Draft of a Preface to the Logical Investigations (1913) (P. J. Bossert & C. H. Peters, Trans.). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

Husserl, E. (1980) Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Third Book: Phenomenology and the Foundations of the Sciences (T. E. Klein & W. E. Pohl, Trans.). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

Husserl, E. (1981 [1917]) Husserl’s Inaugural Lecture at Freiburg im Breisgau (R. W. Jordan, Trans.). In P. McCormick & F. Elliston (Eds.), Shorter Works (pp. 10-17). Brighton; Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press; The Harvester Press.

Husserl, E. (1981 [1931]-a) Phenomenology and Anthropology (R. G. Schmitt, Trans.). In P. McCormick & F. Elliston (Eds.), Shorter Works


(pp. 315-323). Brighton; Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press; The Harvester Press.

Husserl, E. (1981 [1931]-b) The World of the Living Present and the Constitution of the Surrounding World External to the Organism (F. A. Elliston & L. Langsdorf, Trans.). In P. McCormick & F. Elliston (Eds.), Shorter Works (pp. 238-250). Brighton; Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press; The Harvester Press.

Husserl, E. (1983) Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology (F. Kersten, Trans.). Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Husserl, E. (1989) Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution (R. Rojcewicz & A. Schuwer, Trans.). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Husserl, E. (1997 [1928]) The Amsterdam Lectures <on> Phenomenological Psychology (R. E. Palmer, Trans.). In R. E. Palmer & T. Sheehan (Eds.), Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927-1931): the Encyclopaedia Britannica Article, the Amsterdam lectures ‘Phenomenology and Anthropology,’ and Husserl’s Marginal Notes in Being and Time, and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (pp. 213-253). Dordrecht; London: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Husserl, E. (1999) The Idea of Phenomenology: A Translation of Die Idee der Phänomenologie. Husserliana II (L. Hardy, Trans.). Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Husserl, E. (2001) Logical Investigations (J. N. Findlay, Trans. Vol. 1). London and New York: Routledge.

Husserl, E. (2003a) Philosophy of Arithmetic: Psychological and Logical Investigations - with Supplementary Texts from 1887-1901. New York: Springer Publishing Co.

Husserl, E. (2003b) Supplementary Texts (1887 - 1901) Philosophy of Arithmetic: Psychological and Logical Investigations - with Supplementary Texts from 1887-1901 (pp. 305-503). New York: Springer Publishing Co.

Husserl, E. (2006) Appendix I (No. 5). Preparatory Notes for the Course of lectures (1910-1911): Pure Psychology and the Humanities

78 Lubica Učník

(Geisteswissenschaften), History and Sociology. Pure Psychology and Phenomenology - The Intersubjective Reduction as Reduction to the Psychologically Pure Intersubjectivity (Beginning of October, 1910) (I. Farin & J. G. Hart, Trans.) The Basic Problems of Phenomenology: From the Lectures, Winter Semester, 1910-1911 (pp. 91-104). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer.

Koyré, A. (1968) Galileo and the Scientific Revolution of the Seventeenth Century Metaphysics and Measurement: Essays in Scientifi c Revolution (pp. 1-15). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Landgrebe, L. (1940, September) The World as a Phenomenological Problem. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 1, 38-58.

Landgrebe, L. (1981) The Problem of Passive Constitution. In D. Welton (Ed.), The Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl: Six Essays (pp. 50-65). Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

Landgrebe, L., & Patočka, J. (1980) Husserl in Göttingen. Edmund Husserl: zum Gedächtnis. New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc.

Lipps, T. (1880) Die Aufgabe der Erkenntnistheorie. Philos. Monatshefte, xvi.Mill, J. S. (1867) An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy and of

the Principal Philosophical Questions Discussed in his Writings. London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer.

Mohanty, J. (2008) The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl: A Historical Development. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Mohanty, J. N. (1976) Edmund Husserl’s Theory of Meaning (Third ed.). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

Mohanty, J. N. (1982) Husserl and Frege. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Mohanty, J. N. (1995) The Development of Husserl’s Thought. In B. Smith & D. W. Smith (Eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Husserl (pp. 45-77). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Palmer, R. E. (1997) An Introduction to the Amsterdam Lectures. In R. E. Palmer & T. Sheehan (Eds.), Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927-1931): the Encyclopaedia Britannica Article, the Amsterdam lectures ‘Phenomenology and Anthropology,’ and Husserl’s Marginal Notes in Being and Time, and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (pp. 199-212). Dordrecht; London: Kluwer Academic Publishers.


Patočka, J. (1941) Evropský Rozum. Život, 17, 15-16.Patočka, J. (1989 [1971]) Edmund Husserl’s Philosophy of the Crisis of the

Sciences and his Conception of a Phenomenology of the ‘Life-World’ (E. Kohák, Trans.). In E. Kohák (Ed.), Jan Patočka. Philosophy and Selected Writings (pp. 223-238). Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Patočka, J. (1996) An Introduction to Husserl’s Phenomenology (E. Kohák, Trans.). Chicago and La Salle: Open Court.

Pivčević, E. (1970) Husserl and Phenomenology. London: Hutchinson & Co Ltd.

Plato (1997) Theaetetus (M. J. Levett & r. M. Burnyeat, Trans.). In J. M. Cooper (Ed.), Complete Works (pp. 158-234). Indianapolis, Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company.

Schuhmann, K. (1997) Husserl-Chronik: Denk- und Lebensweg Edmund Husserls. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

Schütz, A. (1945) Some Leading Concepts of Phenomenology. Social Research, 12, 77-97.

Schütz, A. (1953, September) Common-Sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Action. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 14, 1-38.

Sokolowski, R. (2000) Introduction to Phenomenology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tallis, R. (1999) The Explicit Animal: A Defence of Human Consciousness. London: Palgrave Macmillan Press.

Trân, D. T. (1986) Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism (D. J. Herman & D. V. Morano, Trans.). Dordrecht, Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Co.

Zahavi, D. (2003) Husserl’s Phenomenology. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.

THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF PERSONHOOD: CHARLES

TAYLOR AND EDMUND HUSSERL

DERMOT MORANUniversity College Dublin, Ireland

[email protected]

This paper argues that Charles Taylor’s infl uential accounts of embodied personhood and agency are closer to the phenomenological accounts of personhood found in the mature Husserl (especially his Ideas II and in his ethics lectures) than, perhaps, he realises. Taylor acknowledges the infl uence of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger (through the lens of Hubert Dreyfus) but tends to see Husserl as imprisoned within the Cartesian tradition that begins from the certainty of self-consciousness. I shall develop relevant aspects of embodied, situated subjectivity found in Husserl and shared by Taylor ; and, fi nally, I shall refl ect on the diffi cult problematic of the relation between natural and transcendental approaches to personhood.

‘The great example that I’ve been battling with throughout my life is the whole epistemological tradition from Descartes. Descartes says in one of the letters that we get all our ideas from the impact of the outside world causing representations in our minds.’ (Taylor, 1995)

In this paper1 I want to reflect on the considerable philosophical resources concerning the nature of the person which is to be found in the phenomenological tradition, specifically in the work of Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), in order to support and develop the Canadian


The Phenomenology of Personhood 81

philosopher Charles Taylor’s challenging analyses and reflections on personhood found across his life’s work. It must be emphasized at the outset that Charles Taylor’s approach of attending to sense (Sinn)2, and indeed, ‘making sense’ (Taylor, 1989, p. 8) is distinctly phenomenological and that he himself has characterized it as such. Thus, in Sources of the Self, Taylor speaks of his account of personal and identity as ‘phenomenological’ (Taylor, 1989, p. 32), and, more recently, has described part of his approach in A Secular Age as phenomenological (Taylor 2007).3 In what follows I shall base my phenomenological account of personhood primarily on the writings of Edmund Husserl, but there are also, of course, extremely important resources in some of the more neglected figures of the phenomenological movement, especially Max Scheler4, Edith Stein (1989; 2000), and Hedwig Conrad-Martius (1960), among others, but space does not allow me to develop their particular approaches here.

In this paper I want to suggest that Taylor’s account is much close to that of the mature Husserl (especially as found in his Ideas II (Husserl, 1952; 1989) and in his ethics lectures (Husserl 1988; 2004) than, perhaps, he realises. In so doing, I want to defend Husserl against the charge that he is somehow trapped within the Cartesian tradition that began from the certainty of self-consciousness, as characterized by Taylor. I shall develop some relevant aspects of embodied subjectivity shared by Husserl and Taylor; and, finally, I shall reflect on the difficult problematic of the relation between natural and transcendental approaches to personhood.

Personhood as a Philosophical Problem

The concepts of ‘person’ and ‘personhood’ have re-emerged as a central concern of contemporary of philosophy of mind and action. The concept of personhood is fundamental to morality, law, and the health and human sciences, yet it lacks theoretical definiteness. It belongs, as Taylor says, in the background as part of the moral ontology that grounds our intuitions. Questions arise as to whether foetuses,

82 Dermot Moran

patients in a coma, dolphins or other creatures, are persons. Attempts to answer these questions simply highlight how poorly resourced our current thinking about personhood is.

Many efforts have been made to define what uniquely determines personhood. The concept of the person has its roots deep into classical Roman philosophy and also in the works of the Early Christian Fathers. The Greek prosopon means ‘visage’, ‘face’ or ‘mask’ and Clement of Alexandria complained of those women who turned their faces (prosopa) into masks (prosopeia, see Hart, 2009). Persona in Latin is thought to come from per sonare, the mask through which actors spoke. Boethius played a key role in defining the person as an individual substance of a rational nature as part of his explication of the Trinity.

Recently the philosopher Lynne Rudder Baker has claimed (somewhat pleonistically) that personhood is defined by possession of the first-person perspective:

…what’s unique about us are the features that make us persons, not just animals—features that depend on the first-person perspective (like wondering how one is going to die or evaluating one’s own desires). (Baker 2000).

According to Rudder Baker, personhood is not identical with being an organism:

The person endures as long as she has a first-person perspective; the organism endures as long as it maintains certain biological functions. The person’s persistence conditions are first-personal, and the organism’s are third-personal. Hence, it is possible for one to exist without the other. So, the person is not essentially biological; the organism is. (Baker 2000)


Deep and complex theoretical issues are raised by the concept of personhood. Is selfhood the same as personhood? Is (potential or actual) self-awareness or consciousness required for personhood? How does personhood relate to embodiment? Is the person identical with his or her organic body? Is personhood identical with selfhood and the domain of the ego? Is it dependent on memory? And so on. Taylor’s approach offers a different picture, one that sidesteps many of these questions. Nevertheless, personhood or selfhood remains central for him. Taylor is a relentless opponent of the definition of personhood in terms of self-consciousness (whether in Locke or Parfit, see Taylor, 1989, p. 49). Furthermore, for Taylor, to be a self is not identical with being an organism (Taylor, 1989, p. 34). Personhood, similarly, is not a matter of being able to entertain second-order desires of the kind articulated by Harry Frankfurt (see Taylor, ‘What is Human Agency?’ in Taylor, 1985, pp. 1-44). Our condition is best summed up by Taylor’s conception of ‘embodied agency’ which he sees not as a contingent feature but as essential to the human condition: our experience is necessarily that of embodied agents (see Taylor, ‘Transcendental Arguments’, in Taylor, 1995, p. 25).

Charles Taylor on Personhood and Selfhood

Across his long career, Charles Taylor has offered several philosophically rich and provocative reflections on the nature of persons and selfhood (see, inter alia, Taylor 1976; 1985a; and 1988). Taylor’s concerns generally have been twofold. On the one hand, he wants to map certain assumptions (often unarticulated) about human agency (inwardness, freedom, individuality, and so on) embedded in modern culture, and also to show how they condition, frame (‘inescapable frameworks’), and at the same time distort our understanding. He is inspired by the Wittgenstein idea that we can be in the grip of a particularly powerful and insidious picture of how things are (Ein Bild heilt uns gefangen, Philosophical Investigations § 115).

84 Dermot Moran

Secondly, Taylor aims to develop a set of assumptions that counteract the prevailing ‘representational epistemology from Descartes to Quine’ (Taylor, 1989, p. ix), what he sometimes calls ‘mediational epistemology’ (Taylor, 2005, p. 26). As he acknowledges, Taylor uses the term ‘epistemology’ not to mean just the philosophical discipline, but more broadly to characterize an entire outlook towards knowledge that regards it as a correct representation of an independent reality (see Taylor, ‘Overcoming Epistemology’, in Taylor, 1995, pp. 45-37). Reality is mediated to us by irritations on our sensory surfaces, by language or whatever; all these views belong to this picture. Associated with this outlook, moreover, is a conception of the self as a disengaged, dispassionate, rational onlooker on the world. Importantly, as Taylor charts it, this conception of the self has had profound moral and political consequences. Taylor’s approach is to highlight the inadequacies of this picture and offer a different one, inspired largely by Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Hegel and others. On his alternate view, we are embodied and embedded in a world in which we ‘cope’ in ways that are often pre-conceptual and pre-linguistic yet which involve understanding (Taylor ,2005, pp. 35-37). Even in our most detached theoretical approach to the world we are agents and agency here means also interpretative engagement; we are construing the world not simply refl ecting it.

Taylor is a strongly historical thinker and recognizes that there is not one standard picture of personhood that has prevailed over time. Rather, the reverse, and we can be in the thrall of different pictures over time. In his major studies such as Sources of the Self (1989), Taylor has uncovered different models of the self operating in different periods of Western culture, e.g. the disengaged controlling self of calculative reason; the Romantic expressivist self that stresses integration of reason and sensibility; the modernist, multilevel, decentred self, and so on. He recognizes that selfhood is lived on many levels and is opposed to reductionist forms of explanation that focus on only one of these many levels (Taylor, 1989, p. 480).


In part inspired by the tradition of Kant (where persons are essentially moral centres and followers of rational laws that have been applied by themselves to themselves), Taylor is also deeply influenced by French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty5 and by Hubert L. Dreyfus’ reading of Heidegger (see Dreyfus 1991; 2005), which emphasises the manner in which agents are involved in ‘coping’ activity engaged in the world, as well as the hermeneutic tradition according to which humans are ‘self-interpreting animals’ (‘Self-Interpreting Animals’, in Taylor, 1985, pp. 45-75). Taylor writes:

Heidegger, for instance, shows — especially in his celebrated analysis of being-in-the-world — that the condition of our forming disengaged representations of reality is that we must be already engaged in coping with our world, dealing with the things in it, at grips with them. Disengaged description is a special possibility, realizable only intermittently, of a being (Dasein) who is always “in” the world in another way, as an agent engaged in realizing a certain form of life. That is what we are about “first and mostly” (zunächst und zumeist). (Taylor, ‘Overcoming Epistemology’, in Charles Taylor, 1985, p. 11)

On Taylor’s view, persons—or selves (in his sense, Taylor 1989, p. 33)—are those beings whose situations are meaningful and have ‘significance’ (‘Cognitive Psychology’, Taylor 1985, p. 202) and ‘import’ (‘Self-Interpreting Animals’, Taylor, 1985, p. 54), i.e. have relevance for and are not indifferent for the subjects: ‘We are selves only in that certain issues matter for us’ (Taylor, 1989, p. 34). Emotions such as shame reveal situations which are experienced in a certain way by subjects and without those subjects the concept of ‘shame’ makes no sense. Or to put it another way, our lives do not take shape and make sense without us as actors in, interpreters of, and responders to situations (Taylor, 1989).6 The question ‘who’ is of vital importance (Taylor, 1989, p. 29). As Taylor writes:

86 Dermot Moran

To ask what a person is, in abstraction from his or her self-interpretations, is to ask a fundamentally misguided question, one to which there couldn’t in principle be an answer. (Taylor 1989, p. 34)

On Taylor’s view--as, I shall argue, in Husserl’s phenomenology--the heart of embodied selfhood is the person, understood as the unified, goal-directed centre of action, bearer of rights and status, responsibilities and moral standing. From the Hegelian tradition, moreover, persons must be understood not as static entities but as having a history and inhabiting a social world with others. Persons connect to one another in social situations. Persons grow and evolve and have a sense of ownership and directedness in their lives (as developed in Taylor’s Sources of the Self). Persons are, in Charles Taylor’s terms, respondents, that is they can answer:

A person is a being who can be addressed and who can reply. Let’s call a being of this kind a respondent. (Taylor, ‘The Concept of a Person’, in Taylor, 1985, p. 97)

To be a self is possible only with other interlocuters, involved in ‘webs of interlocution’ (Taylor, 1989, p. 22). Selves intersect with one another in a linguistic context of dialogue and discussion. I mention in passing that the concept of narrativity (as invoked by Taylor), which is intimately involved with this concept of interlocution, needs to be very carefully applied. Of course, to be a self is to be both the author of and perhaps also the hero in a story. But it is important to stress that persons do not write their own story in the sense of inventing it as creative authors, although they do tell stories about their evolving personhood and some of those stories themselves accrue to and come to define their personhood in particular ways, just as a rolling snow ball gather more snow that adds to it. How a person views her own childhood or her role as a member of a family is precisely her story, albeit that it may grate against the stories of other family members


about shared events. Narrativity invokes a complex hermeneutic situation, much explored by artists and dramatists.

On Taylor’s account, in summary, persons are embodied, socially embedded, intersubjectively involved, historically conditioned agents and respondents. In relation to our topic, Taylor himself take his direction on embodied agency (see Taylor, 1995, p. 22) specifically from the phenomenology of Heidegger (mediated by Dreyfus) and Merleau-Ponty. Their insights, he believes, parallel insights to be found also in the different tradition of Wittgenstein and Polanyi, see Taylor, 1989, p. 460). Husserl is conspicuously absent from Taylor’s account, but, to my ear, Taylor sounds remarkably close to the views of the mature Husserl, perhaps more so than to the anti-subjectivist Heidegger.

It may seem slightly out of tune with the broad tenor of Taylor’s thought to insist on his relation to Husserl rather than with Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, or Gadamer (whom I also count as belonging to the phenomenological tradition, albeit its hermeneutic wing, see Moran, 2000). Taylor largely accepts Dreyfus’ picture of Husserl as himself caught up (despite his best efforts) in the representationalist tradition. Nevertheless, Taylor is positively disposed to the efforts made by the mature Husserl of the Crisis to break with representationalism and scientism. Here Taylor largely agrees with and indeed often reproduces Husserl’s own break with traditional representationalist epistemology, the rejection of the primary/secondary quality distinction imposed by mechanistic science at the origins of modernity, and the rejection of naturalism and of scientific objectivism.

More generally Charles Taylor rejects the ‘representationalist’ account of the self found in modern philosophy where the self is seen as mirroring a universe that exists independently of it. Husserl too explicitly rejects his own earlier ‘bundle’ view (inherited from his teacher Franz Brentano), his ‘complex of experiences’ view, even his ‘constructed self’ view. For instance Husserl writes in his Passive Synthesis lectures:

88 Dermot Moran

The ego is not a box containing egoless lived-experiences or a slate of consciousness upon which they light up and disappear again, or a bundle of lived-experiences, a flow of consciousness or something assembled in it; rather the ego that is at issue here can be manifest in each lived-experience of wakefulness or lived-experiential act as pole, as ego-center, …it can be manifest in them as their outward radiating or inward radiating point, and yet not in them as a part or piece. (Husserl, 2001, p. 17)

Taylor disagrees with Husserl, however, in relation to the latter’s continuing affirmation of the central grouding role of Cartesian reflexive self-certainty. In his paper, ‘Overcoming Epistemology’ (Taylor 1995), Taylor argues that reflexive, self-given certainty had the status of a moral ideal in modern philosophy. He writes:

The power of this ideal can be sensed in the following passage from Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations (1929), all the more significant in that Husserl had already broken with some of the main theses of the epistemological tradition. He asks in the First Meditation whether the “hopelessness” of the current philosophical predicament doesn’t spring from our having abandoned Descartes’s original emphasis on self-responsibility: [Taylor then quotes the following passage from Husserl in German]

Must not the demand for a philosophy aiming at the ultimate conceivable freedom from prejudice, shaping itself with actual autonomy according to ultimate evidences it has itself produced, and therefore absolutely self-responsible – must not this demand, instead of being excessive, be part of the fundamental sense of genuine philosophy? (Taylor 1995)7


For Taylor, Husserl’s ideal of self-responsibility, as articulated here, is foundational for modern culture (Taylor, 1995, p. 7). In that paper, Taylor discovers certain anthropological associations which accompany this view of self-responsibility. Chief among them is the idea of human freedom involving a certain detachment or disengagement of the subject. For Taylor, on the other hand, even in theoretical activity humans are agents and not merely passive representers of knowledge.

Taylor is insistent that we cannot leap out of the human condition. Hence, objectivism and naturalism, which try to take a non-human stance towards the world and our knowledge, always already have failed. We can, according to Taylor, only understand from within the game that humans play, within the ‘web of interlocution’.

In relation to the nature of the self, Taylor is a vehement opponent of the Lockean ‘punctual’, radically subjectivist, disengaged form of the self where all that matters is self-awareness or self-consciousness (Taylor, 1989, p. 172) “The punctual agent seems to be nothing else but a ‘self’ an ‘I’” (ibid., p. 175) Rather my self-understanding has ‘temporal depth’ and ‘involves narrative’ (ibid. p. 50).

The Mature Husserl on Personhood

There is much more to the concept of subjectivity and egoity in Husserl’s phenomenology than the egoic subjectivism so familiar from his Cartesian Meditations (which is after all chiefly methodological in approach). Husserl made several eidetic (i.e. a priori essentialist) claims concerning conscious, embodied subjective life. For Husserl, as for Taylor, consciousness is necessarily embodied. Furthermore, and this has to be carefully construed to avoid an overly Cartesian emphasis, consciousness is necessarily egoic (ichlich), i.e. ego centred; all conscious acts and passions radiate from or stream into the ego. An egoless consciousness is, for Husserl, an a priori impossibility.

I cannot summarize Husserl’s views of personhood here but I can briefly indicate the tenor of his thought. From Ideas I (1913) onwards, Husserl characterises it as an ‘I-pole’ (Ichpol) or ‘I-centre’

90 Dermot Moran

(Ich-Zentrum), ‘the centre of all affections and actions’ (Hua IV 105). The I is a ‘centre’ from which ‘radiations’ (Ausstrahlungen) or ‘rays of regard’ stream out or towards which rays of attention are directed. It is the centre of a ‘field of interests’ (Interessenfeld), the ‘substrate of habitualities’ (Cartesian Meditations, Hua I 103), ‘the substrate of the totality of capacities’ (Substrat der Allheit der Vermögen, Hua XXXIV 200). This I ‘governs’, it is an ‘I holding sway’ (das waltende Ich, Hua XIV 457) in conscious life (Hua IV 108), yet it is also ‘passively affected’. The Husserlian self is never a Lockean punctual self.

Persons in the Kantian tradition are understood as ends in themselves, deserving of respect. The mature Husserl was undoubtedly influenced by the Kantian (and Neo-Kantian) conceptions of the self as person understood as an autonomous (giving the law to itself), rational agent. At the centre of the person, for Husserl, is a drive for reason, but it is a drive sitting upon many other affective and embodied elements. In its full concretion’ (Hua XIV 26), it is a self with convictions, values, an outlook, a history, a style, and so on. As Husserl writes in Cartesian Meditations: ‘The ego constitutes itself for itself in, so to speak, the unity of a history’ (CM, p. 75; Hua I 109). It is present in all conscious experience and cannot be struck out (undurchsteichbar). As the Husserl scholar Henning Peucker has written:

The ego as a person is characterized by the variety of its lived experiences and the dynamic processes among them. According to Husserl, personal life includes many affective tendencies and instincts on its lowest level, but also, on a higher level, strivings, wishes, volitions, and body-consciousness. All of this stands in a dynamic process of arising and changing; lived-experiences with their meaningful correlates rise from the background of consciousness into the center of attention and sink back, yet they do not totally disappear, since they are kept as habitual acquisitions (habituelle Erwerbe). Thus, the person has an individual history in which previous


accomplishments always influence the upcoming lived-experiences. (Peucker, 2008, p. 319)

This mature Husserl clearly casts the shadow which Merleau-Ponty felt on him as he wrote, as he put it in his famous essay ‘The Philosopher and His Shadow’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1964c).

The Objectivist Threat

Both Husserl and indeed Charles Taylor identify the threats posed by scientism (‘Peaceful Coexistence in Psychology’, in Taylor, 1985, p. 135), and objectivism, which denies that the way humans experience the world is relevant to the objective description of the world. Objectivism maintains that there can be an observer-independent or so called ‘third-person’ absolute description of the world, one which removes all reference to anthropocentric conceptions and qualities, and indeed all human culture. This would be the true ‘view from nowhere’. Both Husserl and Taylor have shown what extraordinary problems arise when this methodological approach of the natural sciences is applied to the human sciences. There is a kind of false conception of objectivity in the social sciences (I have heard it explicated recently in a lecture by Peter Berger who claimed that as a sociologist he could simply put his own religious views out of account when investigating the religious beliefs of others). This is sometimes expressed (e.g. by Daniel Dennett or Oliver Sachs) in terms of the ‘visiting anthropologist from Mars’ who somehow can do ‘third-person’ ‘heterophenomenology’ (see Dennett 2003). But the Martian anthropologist, just like the British colonial observer, is going to incorporate his or her own values and convictions. Martian anthropology, though more distant from the human, is not more objective that anthropology or psychology done by humans on each other. It simply displaces the interests in the interest-relative descriptions—it is anthropology by Martians.

We are stuck then with human sciences done by and for humans. As one of my students once put it, ‘the problem with psychology is that

92 Dermot Moran

it is done by humans’—as if somehow a human psychology written by dogs would be more ‘objective’.

The lack of a truly objective third-person (or observerless) platform does not mean that an appropriate level of (already interpreted) description cannot be found. It also does not mean that we descend into relativism or that all interpretations are equally valid. Husserl’s conception of the disengaged transcendental spectator is certainly rejected by Taylor as belonging to the tradition of self-consciousness epitomised by Descartes. I don’t think this the whole picture for Husserl—remember he wrote the Cartesian Meditations as one kind of introduction to transcendental phenomenology and the way in through the life-world shortly afterwards in his Crisis of European Sciences (Husserl 1962; 1970). Husserl believes in the social, embodied, engaged self. But there is still need, I believe for recognition, albeit qualified, of a self-reflexive or self-aware core in our conception of the socially situated, embodied person. Taylor also believes this. He writes:

Our humanity also consists, however, in our ability to decenter ourselves from this original engaged mode; to learn to see things in a disengaged fashion, in universal terms, or from an alien point of view; to achieve, at least notionally, a “view from nowhere.” Only we have to see that this disengaged mode is in an important sense derivative. (Taylor, 2005, p. 46)

In other words, it is not that humans don’t have the capacity to reflect in this neutral, detached third-person way, but that this capacity is a very distinctive and indeed higher order or secondary activity that rests on top of our more original ‘coping’ with the world. Husserl also sees the emergence of the transcendental attitude of the spectator as something that happened contingently in history, with the Greeks, and which marked a new stage in human development. Once it is acquired, however, this spectator standpoint drives inquiry


in a new infinite direction, although its relation to the life-world must never be forgotten.

The Natural Attitude is an Attitude

In many respects Charles Taylor is an avowedly transcendental philosopher, identifying the conditions that make human experience possible. This allows a greater confrontation with Husserl. Taylor’s acceptance that disengaged reason is one possibility of our embodied agency is crucial here.

One of the greatest discoveries of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology is that the ordinary, everyday world of experience, the world of things, plants, animals, people and places, the pre-theoretical, pre-scientific world, is not just simply there, in itself, but is the correlate of a very specific attitude, namely, the natural attitude. The phenomenological concept of ‘attitude’ (Einstellung) here is very close to what Taylor calls ‘orientation’ (Taylor, 1989, p. 28). One asks questions from within one’s orientation and rarely if ever reflects on the orientation itself. Once one recognises the natural attitude, the position known as naturalism can never be more than the objectification or reification of the correlates of an attitude.

For Husserl, moreover, as he makes clear in Ideas II (which was deeply influential on Merleau-Ponty), the natural attitude is the personalistic attitude. Husserl explains the personalistic attitude as

…the attitude we are always in when we live with one another, talk to one another, shake hands with another in greeting, or are related to another in love and aversion, in disposition and action, in discourse and discussion. (Ideas II § 49, p.192; Hua IV 183)

Husserl further claims that the natural attitude (and its derivative the naturalistic attitude – which construed the world naturalistically, i.e. a dogmatising naturalism) is actually only a one-sided (Hegel

94 Dermot Moran

would say ‘abstract’) aspect of the fully concrete personalistic attitude. He even speaks of the ‘interlocking’ (ineinandergreifen) between natural and personalistic attitudes (Ideas II § 62). Nevertheless, he explicitly differentiates the personalistic attitude from the natural, and indeed maintains that the natural attitude is ‘subordinated’ to the personalistic (Ideas II § 49). The natural attitude is actually reached through a self-forgetting or abstraction of the self or ego of the personalistic attitude, through an abstraction from the personal which presents the world in some kind of absolutized way, as the world of nature (IX 419).

We live as persons in a personalistic world. The personalistic world is the intersubjective world shared with others; it is the communal world, the world of values and the space of reasons. The entire, objective, shareable, communable world is the constituted outcome of shared interlocking persons whom Husserl sometimes calls monads. He speaks of an ‘open plurality of other egos’ (Formal and Transcendental Logic § 104), and the ‘intersubjective cognitive community’ (FTL § 96). First and foremost our interaction is with others as persons, indeed the first ‘other’, for Husserl, is the personal other (e.g. the mother) not the encounter with physical material objects. Nature is not primary; persons are primary.

The person is precisely the subject as social and relational, according to Husserl, whose acts are judged from the standpoint of reason (IV 257) and reflection (XIV 48).8 We encounter each other primarily as persons within the spiritual or cultural world:

That which is given to us, as human subject, one with the human Body (Menschenleibe), in immediate experiential apprehension, is the human person (die menschliche Person), who has his spiritual individuality, his intellectual and practical abilities and skills (Fähigkeiten und Fertigkeiten), his character, his sensibility. This Ego is certainly apprehended as dependent on its Body and thereby on the rest of physical nature, and likewise it is apprehended as dependent on its past. (Ideas II § 34, p. 147; Hua IV 139-40)


Husserl writes: ‘The development of a person is determined by the influence of others’ (IV 268). My person is not a different entity from my lived body; they are ‘two sides of the undivided unity of experience’ (Hua XIV 458). Again, I understand myself at different levels. I am a physical body under the physicalistic attitude, an ego under the psychological attitude, an embodied self in the psycho-physical attitude, and a person under the personalistic attitude. First and foremost, for Husserl, the person is a genuinely objective thing, constituted in objective time and belonging to the spatio-temporal world (IX 418). On the other hand, its essence is quite distinct from that of ‘real things’ (Ding-Realitäten, VIII 493). The personal ‘I’ is the I of abiding capabilities and convictions. It is more than an empty pole of the identity of the acts performed by it. The I, for Husserl, has a character through habitualization, through primal institution, and re-constitution.

The ‘Breakthrough’ to the Transcendental Attitude

This discovery of the natural-personalistic attitude is a considerable advance beyond Kant’s transcendental account of the transcendental ego. At least on one reading of Kant, the ‘world of appearances’ (die Erscheinungswelt) is actually the world as described in the natural sciences, that is, the Newtonian world of extended bodies, forces, and so on. Of course, Kant thinks that the form of this world comes from interaction with subjectivity and specifically with the a priori forms of sensibility (space and time) as well as the categories of the understanding (causation). Kant himself does not appear to have envisaged the possibility that the natural world could be other than it was conceived by science; in that sense he was a scientific realist. He also did not seem to worry that his position could be construed as a relativism based on the specifically human forms of sensibility and understanding (this form of relativism Husserl calls ‘anthropologism’ in his Logical Investigations, Prolegomena). Treating the logical laws as describing the thinking of human beings as such leads to a kind of

96 Dermot Moran

‘species relativism’ (der spezifi sche Relativismus) or ‘anthropologism’ (Anthropologismus, Prol. § 36), a kind of subjectivism which extends to the whole human species.

Anthropologism maintains that truth is relative to the human species and, hence without humans, there would be no truth. Husserl understands Kant’s account of knowledge as a kind of anthropologism in this sense. He accuses Kant of misunderstanding the subjective domain as if it were something natural, and hence of construing the a priori as if it were an essential part of the human species (Prol. § 38).

Kant’s project involved laying down the features of Erkenntnis überhaupt. This is what must be the case for all rational, cognising beings not just those features that belong specifically to our human mode of sensing and conceiving, although that too must be factored in. But Kant also wanted to specify the conditions of human sensibility and understanding and to do this he had to perform a kind of ‘backwards reflection’ (Husserl’s Rückbesinnung) to identify the kinds of limitations that govern us, without stepping outside these limitations.

The problem is with the viewpoint of Kant’s Critique itself. From what standpoint is it written? As Paul Ricoeur would put it: ‘where is Kant, when he is describing the limits of human sensibility and understanding speaking from?’. Kant thereby did make the breakthrough to the transcendental way of doing philosophy. That is to say, he sought the conditions for the possibility of objective knowledge and recognised that those conditions included an ineliminable reference to subjectivity. The world is as it is for us. Objectivity is necessarily correlated with subjectivity which is not just empirical embedded subjectivity in the world but transcendental subjectivity.

Husserl takes the Kantian breakthrough to transcendental philosophy a step further with his recognition that the world of natural experience is correlated to the natural attitude. This natural-personalistic attitude, although it is the default mode of experiencing for all human subjects, is not the only attitude. In fact, even to identify it as an attitude (Einstellung) – a way of placing oneself into the world--is already in some sense to have overcome the natural attitude, to have


bypassed or transcended it. This of course is simply the application of a Hegelian insight that to draw a limit is already to somehow be beyond that limit (but Husserl of course did not acknowledge Hegel in this regard). To reflect on life in the natural attitude is to have already entered or constituted the transcendental attitude which, according to Husserl, leaves everything human behind.

Reconciling the Natural and Transcendental Approaches

There are great difficulties involved in reconciling the natural and the transcendental attitudes as two possible modes of awareness of humans. Husserl characterised the transcendental attitude as the attitude of the detached ‘non-participating’ spectator (unbeteiligter Zuschauer, Hua XXXIV 9), or ‘disinterested’ spectator (uninterestierter Zuschauer, XXXIV 11).

We now need to go further than Husserl in specifying the continuities between the engaged, embodied agent and its disengaged transcendental counterpart. When the meditating ego translates (via the phenomenological reduction) from the natural to the transcendental attitude, there is, as Husserl recognises, a continuity, namely, the acts of reflection are still being performed by the same ego. Husserl speaks of a ‘splitting of the ego’ (Ichspaltung) and the ego living a dual life – both as natural subject in the world and as transcendental ego for the world. How this paradox is to be resolved is one of the great themes of Husserl’s last work, Crisis (see especially §§53 and 54). There Husserl asks:

How can a component part of the world, its human subjectivity, constitute the whole world, namely, constitute it as its intentional formation, one which has always already become what it is and continues to develop, formed by the universal interconnection of intentionally accomplishing subjectivity, while the latter, the subjects accomplishing in cooperation, are themselves only a partial formation within the total accomplishment? (Crisis § 53, p. 179; VI 183)

98 Dermot Moran

Indeed, Husserl acknowledges, even to say that I who reflects is ‘I’ involves a certain equivocation (Crisis § 54(b), p. 184; VI 188). Yet, there is both identity and difference in this I. The reflecting ego is in a different attitude and different temporal dimension from the ego reflected on, yet there is a consciousness of the unity or ‘coincidence’ (Deckung) of the two.

There is a danger in regarding the ego in a Cartesian way as an unassailable and static foundation for all experience. It quickly becomes Kant’s purely formal requirement that the ‘I think’ can accompany all experience. The Kantian conception of the ‘I’ is primarily as the performer of syntheses. Experience in order to be experienced has to be present or appear to some ‘I’. It must be capable of coming to self-awareness of experience but beyond that it has no content. This is the very opposite of the Husserlian conception. Indeed, he speaks of a ‘critical reinterpretation and correction of the Cartesian concept of the ego’ (Crisis VI 188). For this reason, the critique of Husserl’s transcendental ego as an unresolved legacy of Cartesianism in his philosophy –a critique, most certainly, by Heidegger and possibly also by Merleau-Ponty –is misplaced. The pure I—the I of transcendental apperception—is, for Husserl, not a ‘dead pole of identity’ (Hua IX 208), it is a living self, a stream that is constantly ‘appearing for itself’ (als Für-sich-selbst-erscheinens, VIII 189). It is sometimes described, in Hegelian language, as simply ‘for itself’ (für sich). In his Postface (Nachwort) to Ideas I written in 1930 he acknowledged that ‘what specifically characterised the ego’ had not yet been broached in Ideas I (Hua V 159). Husserl’s transcendental self also has a history; indeed there is a history of the breakthrough to the transcendental attitude itself. In other words, the discovery of or ‘brealthrough to’ the transcendental attitude is an event in the world itself (carried out in ancient Greece and later decisively by Descartes).

I cannot go into the issues which distinguish the person from the transcendental ego, or even discuss Husserl’s strange notion of ‘transcendental persons’. For Husserl, the recourse to the transcendental I in the reduction in a certain sense puts aside


the ‘natural human’ although I do not believe it ever leaves behind embodied personhood. I do think, however, that Husserl is mistaken to present the transcendental attitude as in a certain sense non-human and entirely that of the ‘detached spectator’. It is better to think of Husserl as uncovering all knowing and engaging with the world is taking place from a standpoint. As Sebastian Luft puts it:

The generalization that Husserl enacts is not one from standpoint to no standpoint, but from our standpoint to standpoint-as-such. (Luft, 2007, p. 376)

I am sure that we can say, with Husserl, that the person is the concrete agent in the intersubjective, communal world acting in the personalistic attitude; but we cannot say that the person somehow disappears when we enter into transcendental reflection. There is, as we have seen, the continuity of the ‘I’ and the integration of an I within a ‘we’ ---within what Husserl calls ‘transcendental intersubjectivity’.

Intimations of Self-Reflection in Embodied Sensuousness

For both Husserl and Taylor, personhood is constituted in layers. It has at its highest level the self-reflective rational agent, one whose emotional and feeling life is shot through with rationality and purposiveness. Yet, the self, as Edith Stein puts it, ‘sinks its taproot into nature’ (Stein, 2000, p. 115), selfhood has its origins in the prereflective embodied agency which Dreyfus calls ‘coping’ and which Merleau-Ponty includes under his broadened conception of embodied perception. Self-perception, for Taylor, belongs to embodied activity of a ‘living being who thinks’ (Taylor, ‘Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind’, in Taylor, 1985, p. 88).

In attempting to articulate this dependence of higher rationality on sensibility, Merleau-Ponty in his late work talks about the manner in which self-reflection at the higher conscious level is enabled by and indeed founded in the kind of inherent self-awareness and ‘doubling’

100 Dermot Moran

that is found in our sensory life. In his late essay ‘Eye and Mind’ (written in 1960; see Merleau-Ponty 1964; 1964a), as well as in his posthumously published Visible and Invisible (1964b; 1968) Merleau-Ponty emphasises the ‘intertwining’ or ‘interlacing’ (l‘interlacs’) that occurs when our seeing somehow sees itself seeing, drawing a parallel with the phenomenon of the act of touching which at the same time can touch itself (EM 162; 14). For Merleau-Ponty, there is an ‘inherence’ (inhérence) of seer in the seen and vice-versa (EM, 163; 14), an essential ‘undividedness’ (‘l’indivision’, EM, 163; 15) between sensing and sensed (and, accordingly, between thinking and self-reflection). Furthermore, Merleau-Ponty maintains that a body that could not touch itself, or see itself, and thereby ‘reflect itself’, would not be human: ‘there would be no humanity’ (EM 163; 15). For Merleau-Ponty, here developing an insight found in Husserl’s Ideas II, the reflexibility and reversibility of touching is the basis for and perhaps the true form of our self-conscious humanity. To touch oneself is to be in touch with oneself. Taylor has a similar view about how embodied agency begins in its embedded interpretative interaction with its surroundings. The mistake of previous forms of intellectualism and rationalism was to regard the ‘disengaged’ attitude as a pure mirror of reality, whereas in fact, it is the discovery of phenomenology, that this approach is itself a particular attitude and hence is a partial, conditioned and distinctly human way of engaging with the world.

NOTES

1 An earlier version of this paper was presented at the ‘Charles Taylor Workshop’, University College Dublin, 20th January 2010. I am grateful to Charles Taylor, Thomas McCarthy, Maeve Cooke, Rowland Stout, Peter Simons, Jim O’Shea, and the other participants, for their helpful comments. References to Husserl are given according to the Husserliana (abbreviated to ‘Hua’) volume number followed by the page number.2 As early as his The Explanation of Behaviour (Taylor 1964), Taylor acknowledges his proximity to phenomenology and especially to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of intentional sense (sens), see Taylor, 1964, p. 69 n. 1.


3 See also Ronald Kuipers’ interview with Charles Taylor in The Other Journal (June 23, 2008) ‘I spent a lot of time in the book describing phenomenologically what it was like to move away from Christianity, to reject Christianity really, and to be excited by Deism, by Jacobinism, by Nietzsche, and then more recently by Bataille, by Robinson Jeffers, and others’.4 Max Scheler, in his Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values. A New Attempt Toward a Foundation of An Ethical Personalism, (1913), was primarily responsible for developing the phenomenological account of personhood. For Scheler, the person is the ‘performer of acts’ or ‘bearer of acts’ and the ‘world’ is the objective correlate of the person. At the centre of the human is what Scheler calls the ‘heart’, the seat of love rather than a transcendental ego. The person is a ‘loving being’. In later writings, Scheler insists that there is always a ‘we’ before there is an ‘I’ (see Scheler 1980, p. 67).5 Charles Taylor told me in conversation in Dublin (February 2010) that he first discovered Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945), on the recommendation of another student, while he himself was a student on a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford in the 1950s. He found the intellectual atmosphere at Oxford stultifying and was sufficiently inspired by Merleau-Ponty to seek out the French philosopher in Paris with the intention of studying with him. By the time Taylor met Merleau-Ponty, however, the latter had been elevated to the Collège de France and was no longer accepting doctoral students. Taylor, therefore, remained at Oxford but wrote a doctoral thesis deeply indebted to Merleau-Ponty.6 Compare Ullrich Melle on Husserl’s conception of personhood in Melle, 2007.7 See Husserl, 1950, § 2, p. 47; trans. Dorion Cairns in Husserl, 1967, § 2, p. 6. Taylor in fact quotes the original German: ‘Sollte die vermeintlich überspannte Forderung einer auf letzte erdenkliche Vorurteilslosigkeit abgestellten Philosophie, einer in wirklicher Autonomie aus letzten selbst erzeugten Evidenzen sich gestaltenden und sich von daher absolut selbstverantwortenden Philosophie nicht vielmehr zum Grundsinn echter Philosophie gehören?’, see Taylor, ‘Overcoming Epistemology’, Taylor, 1995, p. 6.8 In a text from 1921 Husserl recognises the Leibnizian source of this concept of the person, quoting from Leibniz, Nouveaux essais II 27 § 9 (see Husserl, 1973, p. 48).

102 Dermot Moran

REFERENCES

Baker, L.R. (2000) Persons and Bodies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Baker, L. R. (2007) The Metaphysics of Everyday Life: An Essay in Practical Realism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Conrad-Martius, H. (1960) Die Geistseele des Menschen. Munich: Kösel.Dennett, D. (2003) ‘Who’s On First? Heterophenomenology Explained’,

Journal of Consciousness Studies, Special Issue: Trusting the Subject? (Part 1), vol. 10, No. 9-10, pp. 19-30.

Dreyfus, H. L. (1991) Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.

Dreyfus, H. L. (2005) “Overcoming the Myth of the Mental: How Philosophers Can Profit from the Phenomenology of Everyday Expertise,” Presidential Address, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, Vol. 79, Issue 2.

Hart, J. G. (2009) Who One Is. Book 1: Meontology of the “I”: A Transcendental Phenomenology, Phaenomenologica 173. Dordrecht: Springer.

Husserl, E. (1950) Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge. Hrsg. Stephan Strasser. Husserliana I. The Hague: Nijhoff.

Husserl, E. (1952) Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution. Hrsg. Marly Biemel, Husserliana IV. The Hague: Nijhoff.

Husserl, E. (1962) Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie. Hrsg. W. Biemel, Husserliana VI. The Hague: Nijhoff.

Husserl, E. (1967) Cartesian Meditations. Trans. Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Nijhoff.

Husserl, E. (1970) The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Trans. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Husserl, E. (1973) Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Zweiter Teil. 1921–1928. Hrsg. I. Kern. Husserliana XIV. The Hague: Nijhoff.

Husserl, E. (1988) Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre (1908–1914). Hrsg. Ullrich Melle, Husserliana XXVIII. Dordrecht: Kluwer.


Husserl, E. (1989) Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book. Trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer. Husserl Collected Works III. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Husserl, E. (2001) Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis. Lectures on Transcendental Logic. Trans. Anthony J. Steinbock. Husserl Collected Works Volume IX. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Husserl, E. (2004) Einleitung in die Ethik. Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1920 und 1924. Hrsg. Henning Peucker, Husserliana XXXVII. Dordrecht: Springer.

Luft, S. (2007) ‘From Being to Givenness and Back: Some Remarks on the Meaning of Transcendental Idealism in Kant and Husserl’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies vol. 15 no. 3 pp. 367 – 394.Melle, Ullrich. 2007. ‘Husserl’s Personalist Ethics’, Husserl Studies, vol. 23, pp. 1-15.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964) L’Oeil et l’esprit, Paris: Gallimard; reprinted Folio Philosophique, 2006.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964a) ‘Eye and Mind’, trans. Carleton Dallery in The Primacy of Perception. Evanston: Northwestern, U.P., pp. 159-190

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1964b) Le Visible et l’invisible, texte établi par Claude Lefort.Paris: Gallimard.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964c) ‘The Philosopher and his Shadow’, in Signs. Trans. R. McCleary. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, pp. 159-81.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968) The Visible and the Invisible. . Trans. A. Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Moran, D. (2000) Introduction to Phenomenology. London & New York: Routledge.

Peucker, H. (2008) ‘From Logic to the Person: An Introduction to Husserlian Ethics’. Review of Metaphysics 62 (December), pp. 307-325.

Scheler, M. (1973) Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values. A New Attempt Toward a Foundation of An Ethical Personalism. (first published 1913). Trans Manfred S. Frings and Roger L. Funk. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Scheler, M. (1980) Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge. Introduction by Kenneth W Stikkers. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Stein, E. (1989) On the Problem of Empathy, trans. Waltraut Stein. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1964; reprinted Washington, DC: ICS Publications.

104 Dermot Moran

Stein, E. (2000) Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2000).

Taylor, C. (1964) The Explanation of Behaviour. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Taylor, C. (1976) ‘Responsibility for Self’, in The Identities of Persons, ed. Amélie Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 281-99.

Taylor, C. (1985) Human Agency and Language. Philosophical Papers I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Taylor, C. (1985a) ‘The Person’, in The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History, ed. Michael Carrithers, Steven Collins and Steven Lukes. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 257-281.

Taylor, C. (1988) ‘The Moral Topography of the Self’, in Stanley Messer, Louis Sass and Robert Woolfolk, eds, Hermeneutics and Psychological Theory. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, pp. 298-320.

Taylor, C. (1995) Philosophical Arguments. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Taylor, C. (2005) ‘Merleau-Ponty and the Epistemological Picture’, in The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, ed. Taylor Carmen and Mark Hansen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Taylor, C. (2007) A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

FROM ‘I’ TO ‘WE’: WOJTYŁA’S PHENOMENOLOGY

OF LOVE

PETER SIMPSONProfessor of Philosophy and Classics

The Graduate Center, City University of New [email protected]

Wojtyła’s phenomenological personalism turns on the idea that human beings determine themselves through a possession and governing of themselves. In the case of love this self-determination presupposes certain feelings in the human psyche, but these feelings, especially those of sexuality, need to be integrated into acts of self-determination. A key element in this analysis is the Personalistic Norm, that people should treat each other as self-determining agents having distinct personal ends who are able thereby to form themselves, in their sexual love in marriage, from “I”s into a “We”. Wojtyła’s phenomenology is a compelling personalistic defense of what are too often dismissed as merely traditional mores (chastity, modesty, a right sense of shame). His philosophical thinking on love and sex is a thoroughly up to date demonstration of the wisdom of the ages.

Keywords:Wojtyla, I, We, personalism, integration, self-determinism

Wojtyła’s phenomenological analysis of human being and human action turns on the idea of self-determination, or the way that human beings, in choosing and performing actions, determine themselves through a possession of themselves that is at the same time a free governing of themselves. This self-determination is essentially


106 Peter Simpson

dynamic, or essentially an energizing and activating of the self’s powers, but it includes acts of cognition. Above all it rests on an awareness and assent to truth. In the case of love, or specifically sexual love, this self-determination presupposes certain affective and attractive feelings in the human psyche. But these feelings, while essential, are but the beginnings or materials of sexual love. They need to be integrated, as Wojtyła is fond of saying, into acts of self-determination whereby people not only feel for each other but also commit themselves to each other. At the level of feeling there is attraction, but there is not yet self-determination. But only self-determination can make attraction into love and only thus does love come truly into existence.

A key element in this analysis is what Wojtyła calls the Personalistic Norm, and in the light of this principle, interpreted according to the above idea of self-determination, Wojtyła shows what it means for two people, or two self-determining “I”s, to form a “We”. In what follows I will first treat of this norm and then show how it relates to the idea of love, the idea of integration, the idea of the sexual urge, and finally the idea of marriage. My presentation will also take the form of commented paraphrase. The reason for this is that Wojtyła’s philosophical thought is, despite its penetration and novelty, so little known it is in especial need of being restated and rephrased. When it has been so, it is usually evident enough not to need much more by way of commentary.

The Personalistic Norm

The Personalistic Norm is based on the claims that the person is an objective reality in the world, that he has a unique interior life that revolves around truth and goodness, that he possesses the power of free self-determination. As such the person is his own master and judge and does not fall under the right or possession of another. To quote Wojtyła:

From ‘I’ To ‘We’ 107

No one else can want for me. No one can substitute his act of will for mine. It does sometimes happen that someone very much wants me to want what he wants. This is the moment when the impassable frontier between him and me, which is drawn by free will, becomes most obvious… I am and I must be independent in my actions. All human relationships are posited on this fact. Love and Responsibility (Wojtyła 19931 p. 24)

From this it follows that when one’s actions have for object another person (as they do above all in the case of love) they must accord with the facts about the person as just set out. So, for instance, it is contrary to the idea of the person to treat someone else as a means or an instrument for one’s use or enjoyment. This would subordinate the other person to one’s own ends whereas each person has their own ends and must be treated as having their own ends (and not as having ends imposed on them willy nilly by someone else). I quote again:

[A] person must not be merely the means to an end for another person. This is precluded by the very nature of personhood, by what any person is… Anyone who treats a person as the means to an end does violence to the very essence of the other, to what constitutes its natural right (p. 26-27).

The norm of treating persons as they are becomes the norm for all dealings with persons. This is encapsulated in the Personalistic Norm:

Whenever a person is the object of your activity, remember that you may not treat that person as only the means to an end, as an instrument, but must allow for the fact that he or she too has, or at least should have, distinct personal ends. (p. 28).

108 Peter Simpson

Wojtyła is careful here not to call the person an end in himself as Kant does. This is no doubt because Kant understands man as having no moral ends given to him by nature or in experience. A man’s ends only become moral insofar as he himself makes them moral by not pursuing them beyond what is allowed by the Categorical Imperative (the principle that one not demand for oneself in the pursuit of one’s ends any freedom that one is not willing to allow others in the pursuit of their ends). Wojtyła rejects this view. For him action does, prior to and independent of choice, have ends that are moral ends and that focus on objective values that are moral values (in this Wojtyła follows Scheler). But these ends are not external to the person nor are they imposed heteronomously from without, whether by others or one’s own passions. Instead they are internal to the subjectivity and freedom of the person. Precisely this fact about the person is denied, however, when a person is used by another as a means to that other’s own ends and enjoyment. For then the person’s independence, the fact that, as a person, he can and should recognize and follow the good for himself through his own recognition of truth, is violated.

The only acceptable way to treat persons is with love. Love treats the person as an independent being with his own self-determination and his own self-chosen ends. Wojtyła’s personalistic norm, in fact, has two aspects to it, a negative and a positive.

The norm, in its negative aspect, states that the person is the kind of good which does not admit of use and cannot be treated as an object of use and as such the means to an end. In its positive form the personalistic norm confirms this: the person is a good towards which the only proper and adequate attitude is love (p. 41).

The Nature of Love

The general elements of love are identified by Wojtyła as attraction, desire, goodwill, reciprocity, and friendship. To attract


someone means, says Wojtyla, more or less to be regarded as a good by the one attracted. This attraction is something cognitive as well as emotive and has an individual character according to the peculiarities of the individuals involved. Truth is thus an important part of attraction, the truth about the value of the persons attracted to each other. This is highlighted by the fact that emotion can distort this truth, and false values are attributed to the person towards whom one is attracted, values that the emotion wants to be there though they are not there in fact. The result when the falseness becomes apparent is disappointment and even hate. Love as attraction is not, therefore, just a matter of the genuineness of the feelings one has towards a person. Certainly the feelings should be there and should be genuine. But the objective truth about the person should be there as well. The two when properly integrated together give to attraction a certain perfection that is part of a genuinely good and genuinely cultivated love.

Love as desire is a need for the other as being a good for me. The sexual difference shows up our limits as individual human beings, and the desire of a man for a woman and of a woman for a man are, as it were, an expression of our need for completeness. Desire is therefore self-interested but it is not simply sensual. Its focus is rather on the other person as such, who is conceived as a good for the one desiring.

There is nevertheless a danger that love as desire could degenerate into something utilitarian. What stops such degeneration happening is love as goodwill. One must go beyond longing for the other person as a good for oneself and must also, and above all, long for that other person’s own good. Goodwill is this longing and it is the purest form of love. It contains no ulterior selfish motive and is inherently altruistic. Love between man and woman cannot help being love of desire, of course, but it must also move, and progressively so, in the direction of goodwill.

Reciprocity is when such love is responded to by the same love in the other so that it exists on both sides and is mutually shared. Love then exists between, and not just in, the persons. It is on this basis – that the love of the one for the other is reciprocated by a return of

110 Peter Simpson

love from the other – that two “I”s can become a single “We.” An unrequited or unreciprocated love would stagnate and be condemned to eventual extinction. Love has to be an interpersonal and not an individual matter.

Here one can see how love as desire can go along with love of goodwill. For a person who desires another desires that other as a co-creator of love and not merely as an object of appetite. When such love is genuinely reciprocated and the other does become a co-creator of love, there is a synthesis of love as desire and love as goodwill. If one or both parties, however, felt jealousy or feared unfaithfulness, this would be a sign that love as desire was predominating.

Reciprocated love can be of different kinds, depending on what each party contributes to it. If what they contribute is something relatively self-centered the love will be superficial and impermanent. If what they contribute is their personal love, a love focused on the person of the other, it will be durable and reliable. The parties can then trust each other and are freed from jealousy and suspicion. The fruit of this love is a deep peace and joy. But the trust and the accompanying peace and joy cannot exist when one or both parties have as their end utility or pleasure. It can only exist when the love is of the person for the person’s own sake, when it is based on the virtue, however imperfect, of genuine goodwill. Then life together becomes an opportunity for love to grow and to be strengthened by increasing virtue. It becomes a “school of perfection.”

Friendship consists in a full commitment of the will to another person with a view to that person’s good (that is, in goodwill). It is not the same as sympathy though it is accompanied and even preceded by sympathy. Sympathy is properly a feeling, an “experiencing together” with another. As such it betokens both an element of community (there is a togetherness about it) and an element of passivity (it is a feeling not an acting). It is something that happens in man and not something that man does through choice and will. People can therefore succumb to it and be drawn to one another by the pull of emotions and not by conscious choice. This is love at an emotional stage without any


commitment of the will and without any necessary reference to the objective value of the person. It has its place in love because it brings people together and makes them feel together; it is the empirical and palpable manifestation of love. But it is not the completion of love. Love must become friendship, the mutual commitment of wills, if it is to endure.

Friendship is a personal act of choice, not a mere happening, and it engages the whole human being. But it needs sympathy to supply it with the emotional warmth that is proper to the human subject. The two things should go together: sympathy needs to be transformed into friendship and friendship needs to be supplemented by sympathy. That is why love must not be left at the stage of sympathy, where it typically begins and often with great intensity too. The sympathy must be actively and consciously molded into friendship. It is a mistake to measure love by sympathy and to think that the two come and go together. Sympathy is only the beginning. There is a positive need here for an education in love, a true art of loving, which would teach the need to transform sympathy into friendship (p. 73-100).

Integration

In the acting subject that is man there are physical and emotional elements and these need to be given their place in the structure of self-determination that a person essentially is. Integration concerns the parts of the person’s subjectivity which, taken by themselves, are extrinsic to self-determination, and are thus primarily his bodily and emotional powers. These have a dynamism of their own, but if that dynamism is to be made personal it must be brought within the scope of, and subordinated to, the structure of self-determination. This is what is properly meant by integration and only in integration do these powers take on the meaning and quality proper to personal existence. Taken in abstraction, as they are when studied in the particular sciences, they lack this meaning. The sciences may be able to provide material for the understanding of the person but by themselves they do not

112 Peter Simpson

reach that level and do not reveal the personal reality of man’s somatic and psychic operations. The person-action unity in self-determination is logically prior to the psychosomatic unity.

‘Soma’ in Wojtyla’s analysis does not precisely mean body nor does ‘psyche’ precisely mean soul. Soma is more properly the bodily functions as they enter into lived experience, and the psyche is more properly the feelings and emotions as they also enter into it. These aspects of experience are something that happens in man in contrast to what man does. But integration introduces these “happenings” into “doing” and makes them play an active part there. They thus belong to man not simply as he is an ontic reality, but also as he is an agent. They come to have a place in man’s efficacy and not just in his subjectivity. The Acting Person (Wojtyła 1979 pp. 199, 202).

What is distinctive of the soma is “reactivity,” which refers to the body both as it is outwardly discernible (limbs, shape, and so forth), and also as it is experienced from within in its organic functioning (muscle movements, heart beats, and so forth). The body or soma is the territory and means for the performance of action and for the fulfillment of the person. It is also what places man in the realm of nature, making him share the external conditions of existence alongside the other animals. The vitalities of the body are primarily vegetative and reproductive and these, as such, are instinctive and spontaneous and not dependent on the self-determination of the person (digestion and gestation, for instance, just happen, regardless of what we may wish, after our acts of eating or intercourse). Such things also generally escape man’s consciousness and are not taken up into his self-awareness. They operate, or fail to operate, on their own. Still, they are related to man’s subjectivity and make possible the acts of the body that are under the control of self-determination. It is thus, for instance, that physical skills can be developed in the body. Of course the body can fail here and disease and loss of limbs can limit what a man can do. But these defects have a merely somatic and not a moral significance. Someone who is disabled is not thereby distorted in what makes him a person, for somatic disabilities remain external to the


person. “A human being with a high degree of somatic disintegration may represent a personality of great value.” (p. 215). The disabled, therefore, whether physically or mentally so, remain fully persons and retain all the value that belongs to persons. There can be no case for setting them on a lower level or of making them instruments to others’ goals and interests.

The body is also the ground or basis for certain instincts, as those of self-preservation and reproduction. But these instincts are not purely somatic, though they are rooted in the body. They also enter into the psychic and emotional life of man and thereby also into his self-determination. For that reason the significance of these instincts is not first in the bodily reactions but in the objective values and ends towards which they point – for that is the sphere of the self-determination of the person. Here we find anticipations of Wojtyla’s moral positions, that sexual activity is not a matter of instinct but of the true values present in the objective nature of the sexual act.

By the psyche Wojtyła means emotivity, and by that he means the complex of feelings, emotions, sensations, and related behaviors and attitudes, or all those things that have some dependence on the body (feelings and emotions have bodily occasions and correlates) but are not identical with it (emotions, for instance, are not vegetative reactions like digestion). One special feature of emotivity is that it contains a sensitivity to values. The emotions are sensitive responses to good and evil, and they can serve to intensify and heighten one’s awareness of good and evil, rendering them vivid in a way that consciousness alone does not do. But emotive responses to values are not yet truthfulness about values. They are only raw material, as it were, and need to be integrated into the person through truthfulness (Wojtyła’s debt to, as well as departure from, Scheler is particular marked here). It is such integration that is decisive for the acting person. Indeed the moment of truthfulness here is so important that self-determination may require one to act without or even against feelings. To follow feelings alone would be to lose oneself in what “happens” and become incapable of self-determination.

114 Peter Simpson

Nevertheless emotions are not, as such, a disintegrating force. They are rather material for integration and a part of the subjectivity of man that needs to be synthesized with his efficacy. Efficacy and emotion should go together, and emotions, with all their richness and vividness, should enhance the experience of value and the exercise of self-determination. The person in his acting should be an actor, but a full-blooded actor (if I may so speak). He must be an integrated unity (pp. 220-258).

This is where the moral virtues come in, which are a sort of proficiency in integration. They make the best use of emotive energy rather than suppress it and in fact take over this energy for enhancing the energy of the will. For, as this integration with truth and self-determination progresses, emotions in their spontaneous moves of attraction and repulsion become sources for a spontaneous movement of the will itself toward real good and away from real bad.

Specifically as regards its role in love Wojtyła describes emotion as an experience of the other as a value, a positive good. The two emotions or emotional factors he identifies in the case of love between man and woman are sensuality and sentiment, of which the former seems to be stronger in man and the latter in woman. Both can lead to problems if they are not fully integrated into the self-determination of the person. Sensuality leads to a consumerist response to the person of the opposite sex and focuses on the body and the sexual use of the body rather than on the person. Sentiment is, by contrast, focused on the whole person but its danger is that it paints the beloved in false colors and depicts him according to some impossible or at least unreal image. Disillusionment is then the more or less inevitable result, and all the more so when, as is not seldom the case for the woman, she discovers that sentiment in man is a screen for sensuality and for the will to use her.

Both emotional factors are, however, necessary and have an indispensable place in love and sexuality. But they are material for love rather than love itself. Here Wojtyla’s teaching on integration becomes especially important. These factors, like emotions generally, must, if


they are to play their proper role in male-female relations, be integrated into the person and become subordinate to his free self-determination with its focus on truth and therewith on the personalistic norm. The truth about the value of the person, one’s own and others’, must guide and fuse sensuality and sentiment into genuine love. Genuine love is always the affirmation of the value of the person; it is a “love in which sexual values are subordinated to the value of the person” (Wojtyła 19931 pp. 101-118).

The Sexual Urge

The commandment to love is insistent at all times but it has a particular importance in the case of the sexual urge. This urge or instinct is, like all instincts, something that “happens” in man and is not an action but a basis for actions, a basis, that is, for the exercise of self-determination and of responsibility. Properly understood the urge is not directed to the sexual attributes of someone of the opposite sex but to a human being of the opposite sex. The urge does not exist in abstraction but in concrete individual men and women. Inevitably, therefore, it proceeds from individual to individual, not from sex attribute to sex attribute. If it is directed in some people to sex attributes as such, this must be held to be an impoverishment and a perversion.

The directedness of the sexual urge towards human beings of the opposite sex and the fact that it belongs to what happens in man make it naturally subordinate to and dependent on the person. Acting belongs to the person and is what the person does, not what the person undergoes through instincts and other happenings in him. The sexual urge is, therefore, only human when it is directed by love for the person and not when it is left at the level of an urge.

Nevertheless, or rather for this very reason, the purpose of the urge is not understood from the fact of integration but from what it is that is integrated. The sexual urge as a natural reality is for the sake of reproduction, the prolongation of the species. Integration integrates

116 Peter Simpson

nature into the person; it does not destroy nature. The purpose of reproduction belongs to the sexual urge because of what it is, because of its nature. It is not determined by the human will and is not changeable at will. The work of the will and of self-determination is to integrate this purpose into the person and into love for the person.

To look at sex, therefore, from the purely biological or scientific point of view is inadequate. But it is no less inadequate to look at it from the point of view of the satisfaction of the libido in Freudian fashion. The sexual urge is not the expression of some pleasure principle; it is not merely or fundamentally an urge to enjoy (though of course enjoyment is necessarily part of its proper use). To think this is to adopt a narrow and purely subjective view of man. It is to absolutize the subjective desire for pleasure and to ignore, or at least to regard as accidental, the ordered-ness of sex to the transmission of new life. But man is not an instrument of pleasure in this way. He has the capacity to know and comprehend the full objective truth about himself as a real object in the world. He can therefore recognize the objective end of the sexual urge, its part in the order of existence and his own place in that order.

It would also be an error, an error about the person, to focus wholly on the order of existence and on reproduction and to see the union of male and female as being for that purpose alone. This “rigorist” interpretation would in fact make the spouses into instruments of reproduction and so reduce them to the level of being used. It would be another form of disintegration. Instead of sex being used by persons for their end, the persons would be being used by sex for its end. But the personalistic dimension must not be allowed to get lost like this. In a true union of persons the natural purpose of the urge becomes the personal purpose of the spouses. It is integrated into their self-determination and becomes part of their freely chosen existence together, of their love for each other. The subjectivity of the spouses’ interiority as persons must be united with the objectivity of sexuality (pp. 54-66).


The nature and need of such integration brings with it certain very definite ethical demands. The duty, inherent in the structure of the will and freedom, to choose the true good means that love must be focused on the person (not the body), and that love as an experience must be subordinate to love as a virtue, that is, to a deliberate and developed choice of the person and the good of the person for the person’s own sake. In any choice there is a commitment of freedom and therefore in some sense a limitation too (to choose this person as spouse is necessarily to “forsake all other”). But freedom actually exists for the sake of such commitment, for the sake, that is, of love. Freedom is, as it were, the means and love the end. But this love, this gift of self to the other, is actually the fulfillment of freedom and of the person since that is what they are for. Freedom wants to commit itself. Hence love as self gift of person to person must precede and be the basis for the sexual and emotional elements of love. They must be founded on it and not vice versa. Otherwise one will lose the personalism of love and fall back into some naturalism or biologism or libidinism.

The person in his free self-determination is the fundamental truth of man. The rest must be integrated into that and not it collapsed into them. Hence true love is not led by the sexual instinct but leads it and assumes responsibility for it and for its inherent purpose. Love is an ongoing task that necessarily involves education. It is a great work of persons – a way in which a man learns to live up to his high dignity as a free person called to full gift of self in love. Such love between man and woman has as one of its special tasks guarding against its own disintegration, that is to say, preventing the material and emotional aspects of love from falling out of their place in, and their subordination to, the free self gift of the person (pp. 118-140).

Here Wojtyła appeals to the virtue of chastity. This virtue has been much maligned and even “outlawed” from the soul, will, and heart of man. The reason for this is not, however, any discovery of some previously unknown truth in man or sexuality; rather it is due to resentment (Wojtyła picks up here again on the work of Max Scheler). Resentment is a feature of the subjective mentality where pleasure

118 Peter Simpson

(emotional, physical) takes the place of superior values. It arises from a distorted sense of values and has its origin in weakness of will. It is a sort of hatred of the good because the good is hard and requires a great effort of will. And, of course, true love in the form of self-gift is both a great good and hard. It is not surprising, therefore, that such love and its distinctive virtues should excite resentment. Chastity is the particular object of resentment in this regard since it operates more than anything against the pursuit of mere pleasure in love.

Chastity is, however, very necessary in genuine love. It betokens purity, and its function is to make love clear.

What Wojtyła means here is that we must always be able to “see through” all the sensations and actions of lovers to the fact that their love is based on a sincere affirmation of the person, or that it is true personal love. Chastity does this above all because it fights to prevent concupiscence or sensuality from dominating, which would inevitably lead to use of the beloved and not to affirmation of the person. It would muddy love which instead of being transparent in its focusing on the person would become a cloak to hide a mere utilitarian desire. Concupiscence unchecked would subvert all the values of true love. Chastity works to integrate concupiscence and sensual desire into love of the person. It works, in other words, to keep them pure and formed as they should be – subordinate to the truth about the person and about sex. It not only protects one’s own person, therefore, against the destructive influence of irrational forces within oneself, but also, since love joins two persons, it protects one’s beloved too from that same destructive influence. In sum chastity “consists in quickness to affirm the value of the person in every situation, and in raising to the personal level all reactions to the body and sex” (pp. 171, 143-173).

The components of chastity as so understood are identified by Wojtyła as shame and continence (or moderation). Shame arises “when something which of its very nature or in view of its purpose ought to be private passes the bounds of a person’s privacy and somehow becomes public.” Or again: “Shame is a tendency, uniquely characteristic of the human person, to conceal sexual values sufficiently to prevent them


from obscuring the value of the person as such.” (pp. 174, 187) Shame thus has an immediate application to the love of man and woman because, as already emphasized, sexual activity is only human when it is integrated into the person and the subjectivity of the person’s inwardness in self-gift.

The love between man and woman is thus primarily an internal reality that only they themselves are fully privy to. Others can of course see the external manifestation of this love but they do not, by definition, enter into the inwardness that belongs to the couple themselves. The sexual act and the sexual parts of the body, if displayed to others, would thus only be manifest in their externality; the inwardness of their integration into love of the person would not be thus manifest. Hence such public display would be matter for shame because it would fail “to conceal sexual values sufficiently to prevent them from obscuring the value of the person as such.” The persons instead would be displayed for others as using each other and as objects of use for each other.

Such sexual shame is thus not found in children at an age at which sexual values do not exist for them. But shame, and modesty, should and do naturally arise in children as they mature. Shame follows, however, a different course in the two sexes because of the difference in the psychological structures in man and woman. Since sensuality, or the orientation to the body as “an object of enjoyment,” is generally stronger and more importunate in men, there is a special need not only of restraint in men but also of modesty and shame in women, so that men are not seduced into treating female bodies as such objects. On the other hand, since women tend to be less aware of sensuality in themselves and of its natural orientation in men, they tend not to feel this need for modesty or of the need, in the presence of men, to conceal the body as a potential object of enjoyment. “The evolution of modesty in women,” Wojtyła therefore concludes, “requires some insight into the male psychology” (Wojtyła 19931 p. 177).

Of course in true committed love between spouses there is no longer place for shame in their sexual relations with each other. Here

120 Peter Simpson

shame is absorbed by love. For once love, true personal love, is in place, sexual values have necessarily been integrated and the body of the other does not descend to the level of being a mere object for use and enjoyment. Shame thus clears the way for love. For while love between man and woman begins and develops on the basis of sexual values, it must in the end be based on the right attitude towards the value of the person. Shame, by keeping sexual values under a suitable veil, helps to ensure that this process to the personal level does actually occur and is not hijacked along the way, as it were, and kept back at the sexual level alone. It thus prepares the way for its own absorption into love when the sexual values have been integrated into and subordinated to the self gift of person to person. Despite its great value, however, in fostering true love between men and women, sexual shame is easily derailed, both from within and from without. There is need, therefore, for the young in particular to be educated in sexual shame. Shame should in fact form an integral part of their sex education.

As for the other part of chastity, moderation or continence, this is the “ability to find that mean in the control of sexual excitability and sentimental impressionability which will best facilitate the realization of love and avoid the dangers of exploitation” (pp. 195-196). The person has a special need to defend himself against emotional stirrings that threaten the natural power of self-determination. Everything is for the sake of the person and of the transcendence of the person through authentic integration. Moderation is thus fundamentally in accordance with nature (p. 168), as indeed is shame and their joint realization in chastity. They preserve the person in the recognition and pursuit of objective values and of the truth of love and the person (pp. 194-208).

Marriage

Wojtyła draws a distinction between the aims of marriage and the norm of marriage. The aims of marriage are the three traditionally identified: the continuing of existence through children (procreatio),


conjugal life (mutuum adiutorium), and legitimate orientation of desire (remedium concupiscentiae). The norm of marriage, by contrast, is love. Love is thus not properly an aim of marriage; it is the principle and virtue of marriage. All the aims of marriage must be carried out in love if the marriage is to be personal, a genuine union of persons. But love must, in its turn, respect the objective aims of marriage in order to be a marriage, a sexual union of persons of the opposite sex. “Sexual morality and therefore conjugal morality consist of a stable and mature synthesis of nature’s purpose with the personalistic norm.” (pp. 66-67).

The ethical consequences of Wojtyla’s personalism in the context of marriage concern the exclusivity of marriage, the indissolubility of marriage, the social and religious context of marriage, and the indissoluble tie between sexual activity on the one hand and reproduction and the union of persons on the other. All these are related to and founded on the truth about human sexual love and the person.

The love of man and woman, if it is to be a union of persons who, according to the personalistic norm, may never be a mere object of use or enjoyment, needs a suitable framework. This framework is marriage understood as monogamous and indissoluble. If a man and woman unite as persons and the focus of love is the other person, it must continue as long as the person continues. For if it ended while the person continued it would not have been focused on the person after all but on something else – something else that could come and go while the person lasted. Since the person ends, at least as far as the specific union of marriage is concerned, only with the death of the body (for marriage connotes a union of bodies), death and death alone is the proper terminus of marriage. Remarriage is then possible (though of course not necessary) and compatible with the personalistic norm. A married couple could also, for sufficiently serious reasons, separate while each was alive, but that would not dissolve the marriage (and so would not permit a second marriage to someone else). Marriage has an objective reality once contracted that no subsequent changes of

122 Peter Simpson

circumstances or will can dissolve. Otherwise the personalistic norm would be violated (p. 214).

Monogamy is also a requirement of marriage. Since the union of one man with one woman is already sufficient for a full sexual union of persons, there could be no need, as far as this goes, for another union of the same sort with another person at the same time. Any further need would either be for numerous progeny or for sexual use, and both of these ends, if made the object of the union, necessarily offend the personalistic norm. So if the personalistic norm is to be observed in its fullness, as becomes the dignity of the person, marriage has to be monogamous.

Marriage must also be a social institution and not a mere private commitment between the spouses. For man is a social being and his existence and action inevitably have a social character. Hence there is a need, a felt need, to make marriage public and to sanction it in a public way. The relationship of the spouses is justified and legitimated for them, of course, through their genuine love for each other as persons (for only thus does their love fulfill the personalistic norm and satisfy the objective order of justice set up by that norm). But because of man’s social character, the spouses also need to have this justification and legitimation recognized, respected, and fostered by their family, friends, and the wider community. This is what public marriage does. Such open witness of love is all the more necessary in view of the offspring that are the natural fruit of marriage. For children are themselves new members of society and, through them, the marriage becomes a family, which is itself a society and the basis of all larger societies. Hence for all these reasons marriage must find its reflection in the practices and law of those larger societies. And this is what it means for marriage to be an institution.

In a society which accepts sound ethical principles and lives in accordance with them..., this institution is necessary to signify the maturity of the union between a man and a woman, to testify that theirs is a love on which a lasting union and community can be based (p. 220).


Marriage, of course, is a union of persons in their sexuality as well as in their persons, and this too carries ethical consequences with it. The chief and most profound one that conditions all the others is that of integration. The sexual union is integrated into the personal union and cannot be separated from it without offending the personalistic norm. But the stress here must be on the term integration. To integrate means that the sexual act, with all its natural and biological reality, is taken up into the love of persons. Integration does not mean that sexuality gets changed from what it naturally is into something else. Integration is not change but subsumption. Consequently sex is not something that a couple may use as they wish. On the contrary they may only use it according to what it naturally is. Here the natural order and the personal order meet. When a couple united in marriage choose to engage in sexual activity, they are choosing to engage in the creation of new life. This is not just a matter of the nature of sex; it is a matter of love of the person too. For the human person is a sexual being and to love the person is to love everything about the person, including the objective truth of their sexuality or the fact that written into sexual activity is the possibility of parenthood (pp. 226-230).

These facts clearly rule out from sexual relations any interference with the sexual activity that would render it incapable of producing offspring, as in particular artificial means of contraception (for that would be to de-sex sex). One is talking here of interference in the sexual act, not of the natural rhythm of sexuality. Since it is part of the order of nature and of sexuality that this order “leaves the connection between the sexual act and reproduction in particular marriages a matter of some uncertainty” (Wojtyła 19931 233), it would be absurdly strict, indeed unnatural, to demand that every sexual act be actually procreative, or to say that intercourse is only permissible if the couple hope to have a child as a result of it. To use nature’s order is very different from breaking nature’s order. Natural family planning, therefore, or periodic abstinence and the use of the woman’s natural infertility to space the birth of children, would be perfectly legitimate.

124 Peter Simpson

Such periodic abstinence is, however, not a mere technique; it is or should be a virtue, the virtue of love and continence. It is an expression, indeed, of the personalism of marriage, or of the fact that the self gift of the spouses to each other is a personal union that gives to sexual intercourse a necessary role in the fostering of love and not just in procreation. It is also an expression of the fact that marriage is grounded on the affirmation of the value of the person and that married love, to be mature, must ripen to the point where the exercise of the virtue of continence is possible and where it is one of the factors giving shape to the whole pattern of the couple’s love. Inability or refusal to abstain, even for good reason, must betoken some sort of distortion of love away from the person toward mere sexuality (pp. 231-244, 282).

By the same token, of course, it now follows that if, because of the integration of the nature of sex into personal union, nothing may be done to exclude the procreative aspect from sex, then it also follows that nothing may be done to exclude the nature of sex from the personal union into which it must be integrated. The reproduction of children outside the context of the union of the spouses necessarily, therefore, offends the personalistic norm as much as artificial contraception offends it. Wojtyła does not discuss this aspect explicitly, but it is clear that his philosophy of the person would exclude, for instance, in vitro fertilization, surrogate motherhood, cloning and so forth. This is not because such things offend biology (on the contrary they make special use of biology), but because they absolutize biology and denigrate both the person and nature (Wojtyła 19931 p. 226 and Wojtyła 19932 p. 294).

For Wojtyła does not proceed simply from the nature of the sexual act but rather from this nature as integrated into the person. He speaks not only of the meaning of the conjugal act that results from an understanding of its nature, but also of the intended meaning, or the meaning that the spouses themselves give to the act. They should signify in their act the meaning that the act itself has and not some other meaning. This is, of course, another way of speaking of the fact


that the objective realities of the body must be taken up into the self-determination of the person.

It would thus be false to accuse Wojtyła of biologism in the matter of sexual love. His approach is thoroughly personalistic and holistic, one that takes account of and accepts both the order of the person and the order of nature. Those who would, in the name of the person, sanction the rejection or breaking of the order of nature, are themselves failing to see the fact of integration. Physical and psychological health are preserved in personalism and not otherwise. It is those who would separate sex from the person, says Wojtyla, who are producing neuroses and ill health.

Conclusion

Wojtyła’s phenomenology of the person and sex is thus a remarkable and remarkably compelling defense of what are too often dismissed as merely traditional mores. Wojtyła shows that, on the contrary, these mores, when rightly interpreted, are thoroughly at the center of and integral to the very idea of the person. The idea of the person is what, of course, defines and characterizes the modern mind in its most distinctive features. But if Wojtyła is right, this idea is only rightly understood and its concretization in individuals only fully realized when the person and sexuality are fused together in the structure of self-determination in the way he explains. Wojtyła’s philosophical thinking on love and sex thus constitutes a thoroughly modern reformulation, or rather I would say modern demonstration, of the wisdom of the ages. For that reason if for no other it deserves to be far better known and studied than it is.

126 Peter Simpson

REFERENCES

Wojtyła, K. (1979) The Acting Person. Translated by Andrzej Potocki and edited by Anna-Teresa Tymeniecka. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co. xxiii+367.

Wojtyła, K. (19931) Love and Responsibility. Translated by H. T. Willetts. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. 319.

Wojtyła, K. (19932) Person and Community: Selected Essays. Translated by Theresa Sandok. New York: Peter Lang. xvi+370.

HAMANN’S LADDER AND KANT’S SCHEMATA

JEREMIAH A. REYESUniversity of the Philippines, Diliman

[email protected].

Who was Johann Georg Hamann? Perhaps more familiar is his close friend and contemporary Immanuel Kant, who wrote the Critique of Pure Reason. But Hamann was also an original and infl uential German philosopher admired by the likes of Hegel, Goethe and Kierkegaard, and who reacted passionately against the philosophy of Kant through his Metacritique on the Purism of Reason, where he presents an alternative worldview which anticipates much of the 20th Century ordinary language movement. Here we set the two philosophers side by side in an effort to better understand their contributions to the history of philosophy, both on a general and technical level.

Keywords:Hamann, Kant, Metacritique on the Purism of Reason, Critique of Pure Reason, Schemata, Philosophy of Language

The imposing figure of Immanuel Kant easily casts a thick shadow over most of contemporary philosophy. Being one of the peaks of the Enlightenment, and the author of the dense but greatly influential Critique of Pure Reason, it would indeed be an embarrassment for any student of philosophy to be ignorant of his thought. Indeed, one only needs to point to the several philosophical traditions that have sprung up from the foundations he laid long ago to gauge his impact. From the German Idealism of Hegel, to the Neo-Kantians


128 Jeremiah A. Reyes

of the 19th century, to the political philosophy of John Rawls and the analytic philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars, and to even something as peculiar as the Transcendental Thomism of Joseph Maréchal. These are but some of the many philosophical lights that owe their birth to Kant. However, much less known, and already relegated to the realm of obscurity is a contemporary and close personal friend of Kant, Johann Georg Hamann, who was also far ahead of his time in his philosophy, foreshadowing much of the 20th century concerns about language, especially those set forth by the later Wittgenstein. Hamann, who read some of the very first proofs of the Critique, was strongly critical of the project of Kant, and wrote a work exclusively in response to Kant’s Critique called the Metacritique on the Purism of Reason. What follows is an alternative worldview that makes the whole question of reason hinge on the question of language, and serves as a powerful challenge to the so-called promises of Pure Reason.

In this article we will assume that most of our readers are already familiar with Kant even in the most general way, but that in comparison most have probably never heard of Hamann. And we would like to take this opportunity to reintroduce the life and philosophy of Hamann side by side with the philosophy of Kant, for it is in their differences that much of their philosophies gain clearer and bolder outlines. The first half of the article presents the general attitudes these men have about Reason. The second half focuses on a very specific issue in their philosophies, which may serve as the most decisive point between them: Kant’s notion of Schematism and Hamann’s view of words. It is our hope that by the end of the article we would have contributed to a stronger appreciation for both these unique thinkers, and to the widening of our knowledge in the history of philosophy.

I. On Reason

Just around the time that Kant strode the streets of Königsberg with such regularity, it is said, that the citizens of the town could set their clocks to his appearance, another brilliant mind was also busy

Hamann’s Ladder and Kant’s Schemata 129

employing a cryptic and profound philosophical style which would earn him the title, “Magus of the North”, and who would gain the respect and admiration of such later great figures as Hegel, Goethe, and Kierkegaard. Johann Georg Hamann was born in Königsberg in 1730, only six years after Kant. He studied philosophy and theology at the age of sixteen, but left the university without having obtained a degree, and for a time served as the house-tutor for a wealthy noble family. After being fired, and then offered another post by a family friend, a tumultuous series of events shook and led him to a serious personal conversion, from being another potential prodigy of the Enlightenment, to a staunch advocate of the Bible. For quite some time he remained jobless in his father’s house, embarking on the most intense and wide-ranging reading, which would surface later on in his writings. It is interesting that despite the breadth of his studies, Hamann never held any post in the university or in the church, and in fact after the death of his father it was only through the intercession of Immanuel Kant that he was able to get his job as a humble customs official. After living an eventful life, with a wife bound only in faith and not in legal terms, and leaving behind four children, Hamann died in 1788.

Perhaps the main reason why Hamann has been generally forgotten (unlike Kant, one cannot fault any modern philosophy curriculum that leaves out his thought), is the uniqueness and difficulty of his writing style, which even in the original German demands very much from the reader. His sentences are filled with allusions to other works, poetic imagery and metaphors, ironies and hidden meanings. As an example, take the opening passage of his Aesthetica in Nuce (Aesthetics in a Nutshell), which was a seminal influence for the Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) literary movement, and subsequently the birth of Romanticism:

Not a lyre! – nor a painter’s brush! – a winnowing-fan for my Muse, to purge the threshing-floor of holy literature. – Hail to the Archangel over the relics of Canaan’s


language – on white asses he is victorious in the contest; – but the wise idiot of Greece borrows Euthyphro’s proud stallions for the philological exchange of words.

Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race, as the garden is older than the ploughed field; painting, than writing; song, than declamation; parables, than logical deduction; barter, than commerce. A deeper sleep was the repose of our most distant ancestors, and their movement was a frenzied dance. Seven days they would sit in the silence of thought or wonder; – – and would open their mouths – to winged sentences (Haynes, 2007, p. 62-63).

With the same style consistently being employed in his other essays, one can only imagine the challenges this poses to English translation. Indeed, there are only a handful of useful English translations and commentaries on his works, and they are not often clear or enlightening. But it seems that his obscure writing style faithfully reflects his views on language, such as its multifarious dimensions and possibilities, playfulness and creativity. He engages the reader on a wholly different level from the usual prose, and certainly goes beyond the usual sequence of a logical argument. In any case, it would be safe to say that the effort to understand even just a parcel of his work cannot be less rewarding than overcoming the obstacles to understanding the writings of Kant. Though it can hardly be said that they shared the same attitudes toward philosophy, Hamann and Kant were for the most part on friendly relations, and they have fortunately bequeathed us with some letters of their correspondence. Hamann also had the privilege of reading some of the proof copies for the Critique of Pure Reason even before Kant did (Smith, 1960, p.30; see also Dickson, 1995, p. 271). After reading them, the general thrust of Hamann’s letters to Kant was from then on to point out the flaws of reason, and at the same redirect attention to the nature of language,


history, and the holism of human experience. In one letter he writes to Kant:

Reason is not given to you in order that you may become wise, but that you may know your folly and ignorance; as the Mosaic law was not given to the Jews to make them righteous, but to make their sins more sinful to them (Smith, 1960, p. 241).

But Kant was an Enlightenment thinker, and was riding on the wave of the modern philosophers and scientific revolutions that came before him. He would have inherited the optimism of philosophers such as Leibniz and the great scientific achievements of Isaac Newton. Implicit in this phase of history was a turning away from knowledge based on authority, especially dogmatic religious authority, and the freedom of human reason to pursue answers on its own, using scientific methods. Just as Kant would describe it in an essay entitled “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?”, enlightenment means first of all a movement past our “self-incurred immaturity”, and “the motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude [dare to be wise]! Have courage to use your own understanding!” (Kant, 1991, p. 54).

Of course, after the shaking of the foundations of traditional sources of knowledge, and the blooming of science and mathematics, the problem became how to envisage that faculty of reason in man that has been praised ever since the Greeks Plato and Aristotle, or by moderns such as Descartes and Leibniz—that very faculty which supposedly led to our highest happiness and knowledge of the truth. Here Kant undertook something which was surely unprecedented, an investigation into the nature of reason itself. And this he described as a Copernican Revolution in philosophy, where instead of the human mind trying conform to and understand the objects in themselves, Kant placed the center of gravity on the knower. In other words, instead of presuming that objects have a reality of their own, which gives rise to serious challenges about how we can know them entirely as they are,


it would be better to assume that “the object (as object of the senses) must conform to the constitution of our faculty of intuition” (Kant, 1965, p. 22). Or as Sebastian Gardner would phrase it, “the subject constitutes its objects” (Gardner, 1999, p. 41). On the surface, this seems to be the direct opposite of the actual discovery of Copernicus. For the heliocentric model dispelled the idea that man was the center of the universe, and identified the sun as the center; meanwhile the transcendental turn of Kant removed the focus on the objects and put the focus on the knower. However, they both share in common the deeper realization that things in the world only appear the way they are because of our subjective state. The sun seems to revolve around the Earth only because of where we are situated in relation to it. In the same way in philosophy, “the world looks the way it does only because we are constituted the way we are.”1

Having identified this ingenious approach, Kant now proceeded to place reason under the scrutiny of reason—the so called reflexive or epistemological turn in philosophy—and this in brief was the whole undertaking of his great work the Critique of Pure Reason:

It is a call t o reason to undertake anew the most difficult of all its tasks, namely, that of self-knowledge, and to institute a tribunal which will assure to reason its lawful claims, and dismiss all groundless pretensions, not by despotic decrees, but in accordance with its own eternal and unalterable laws. This tribunal is no other than the critique of pure reason (Kant, 196 5, p. 9).

And what was the result of this investigation? Well, for one, a kind of synthesis between the rationalist and empiricist traditions that came before him. For Kant human knowledge must be divided into two, the sensibility and the understanding. The sensibility is the “receptivity” of our faculty of knowledge. It is by the sensibility that objects are given to us, as “intuitions”. Now if one were able to cleanse the sensibility of all its external content, we would be left with the


pure a priori intuitions of space and time (Kant, 1965, p. 67). These serve as a kind of prefabricated frame by which we are able to receive any sensible data at all. On the other hand, the understanding is what enables us to process these things given to us by the sensibility. Kant calls understanding the “spontaneity” of knowledge, or the power of the mind to produce representations. The understanding works with “concepts”, and just like the sensibility, it also possesses pure a priori concepts, of which Kant identifies twelve, called categories (Kant, 1965, p. 113).2 It is through the interplay between sensibility and understanding that we are able to have any knowledge at all. Because this has some significant implications with what we will discuss in the next section, we quote the following key passage at length:

Our nature is so constituted that our intuition can never be other than sensible; that is, it contains only the mode in which we are affected by objects. The faculty, on the other hand, which enables us to think the object of sensible intuition is the understanding. To neither of these powers may a preference be given over the other. Without sensibility no object would be given to us, without understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. It is, therefore, just as necessary to make our concepts sensible, that is, to add the object to them in intuition, as to make our intuitions intelligible, that is, to bring them under concepts. These two powers or capacities cannot exchange their functions. The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only through their union can knowledge arise (Kant, 1965, p. 93).

Of course, one of the most natural questions that can arise is how exactly is their union achieved, and how can we guarantee the perfect compatibility between the sensibility and the understanding? As Sebastian Gardner points out, since pure a priori concepts of the


understanding are not derived from sense experience and yet are applied to sensible objects, “this creates a possibility which Kant needs to rule out: namely, that there should fail to be any fit between objects as sensed and a priori concepts, between the sensible and conceptual components of the structure of experience” (Gardner, 1999, p. 129). In other words, there is still the lingering possibility of a schism between the two, of which the succeeding parts of the Critique are meant to ease away using elaborate discussions on the unity of apperception, imagination, analogies of experience, and the schematism. It is this latter that will be the focus of our article shortly, for it may either be the most decisive point for the objections of Hamann, or also a possibility, the closest point of compromise between them.

Another significant result of the Critique, according to Kant, is a delineating of the boundaries of human reason, such that we are now made able to tackle only those philosophical questions that are within the proper scope of our understanding, and no longer try to make futile efforts to go beyond it. He uses the following memorable illustration:

This domain is an island, enclosed by nature itself within unalterable limits. It is the lan d of truth–enchanting name!–surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean, the native home of illusion, where many a fog bank and many a swiftly melting iceberg give the deceptive appearance of farther shores, deluding the adventurous seafarer ever anew with empty hopes, and engaging him in enterprises which he can never abandon and yet is unable to carry to completion (Kant, 1965, p. 257).

Perhaps it is in this accomplishment that one also detects the humility of Kant . For unlike many other philosophers who put forth grand claims about the world or God, far beyond what can be verified by reason or the senses, it was the task of Kant to settle once and for all the limits of what we could know. It is in this sense that Kant uttered his


famous remark: “I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith” (Kant, 1965, p. 29). In fact most of the latter half of the Critique is about disciplining and taming the excesses of reason that goes beyond its proper boundaries. Is there any real foundation then to the objections of someone like Hamann, given that Kant did not boast of the all encompassing authority of Reason, but rather put it in its proper place? As Kant himself confessed:

For while [other philosophers] pledge themselves to extend human knowledge beyond all limits of possible experience, I humbly confess that this is entirely beyond my power. I have to deal with nothing save reason itself and its pure thinking; and to obtain complete knowledge of these, there is no need to go far afi eld, since I come upon them in my own self (Kant, 1965, p. 10).

However in contrast with Kant, the first thing that Hamann would probably deny is that there is such a thing as pure reason, meaning any kind of independent faculty or entity in man. Kant would define it thus, “reason is the faculty which supplies the principles of a priori knowledge” (Kant, 1965, p. 58). But if Hamann is right, this would invalidate any attempt to investigate it as something pure and with clear boundaries. For him reason is not a noun or a thing, but closer to a verb, or a relationship, or a sign (Smith LJ, 1960, p. 59).3 It is the same subtle misunderstanding that we find when we sometimes talk about language as if language were an object, something with an independent existence, when in truth language is real only insofar as it is manifest and used by human beings. The same goes for reason: reason is the process of using language, in fact it is language. In one of the more famous quotes of Hamann: “Reason is language, logos. This is the bone I gnaw at, and shall gnaw myself to death over” (Smith LH, 1960, p. 246).4 Or in another place, “Without the word—no reason, no world” (Smith LJ, 1960, p. 248).


The main misunderstanding arises when we try to think of reason and language as two distinct and separate entities. But is it even possible to reason without language? For Hamann clearly the answer is no, and he complains with reference to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: “For me the question is not so much What is reason? as What is language?” (Smith LH, 1960, p. 249). Philosophers are sometimes under the mistaken notion that they can go behind language, and directly appeal to a wordless entity called reason which produces this language. In the case of Kant, this would specifically mean all the pure a priori intuitions and concepts that he identifies hidden within the sensibility and understanding. But for Hamann there is no difference between reason and language. The mistake may be traced to the reflexivity of describing language with language, or describing reason with reason, which as we will recall, is the exact agenda of Kant’s Critique. Eventually the mistake leads to what Hamann calls a prosopopoeia or personification of reason, or almost a kind of idolatry. It is from this first misstep that much of the confusions of philosophy arise. It is perhaps in this regard that Hamann anticipates the later Wittgenstein when he says in the Metacritique on the Purism of Reason, “Language is also the centerpoint of reason’s misunderstanding with itself ” (Haynes, 2007, p. 211). Almost two centuries later Wittgenstein would also write: “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language” (Wittgenstein, 1968, §109). But one may compare this to the more confident tone of Kant, who says:

I have found a way of guarding against all those errors which have hitherto set reason, in its non-empirical employment, at variance with itself. I have not evaded its questions by pleading the insufficiency of human reason. On the contrary, I have specified these questions exhaustively, according to principles; and after locating the point at which, through misunderstanding, reason comes into conflict with itself, I have solved them to its complete satisfaction (Kant, 1965, pp. 9-10).


Because someone like Eva Schaper would go as far as to “consider Wittgenstein a Kantian with a vengeance”, it would help us to emphasize some of the stronger parallels between Hamann and the later Wittgenstein (Schaper, 1992, p. 322). Even if the Kantian strain can be argued for the earlier Wittgenstein of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the Kantianism of the later Wittgenstein seems to be less tenable, and in the Philosophical Investigations he is much closer to Hamann. Since the later Wittgenstein was also very vocal in his criticism of his earlier work—almost as passionately as Hamann was critical of Kant—the parallel is even stronger. Take for instance the following passage, where Hamann laments the abuses of words that give rise to many misunderstandings in philosophy:

Hence I am inclined to think that our whole philosophy consists more of language than of reason, and the misunderstandings of countless words, the posing as real [prosopopoeia or personification] of the most arbitrary abstractions, the antitheses of pseudognosis, and even the commonest figures of speech of the sensus communis, have produced a whole world of questions which have as little reason to be raised as to be answered. We are still needing a grammar of reason... (Smith LJ, 1960, p. 250).

The later Wittgenstein also points out the dangers of this same kind of abuse:

When philosophers use a word—“knowledge”, “being”, “object”, “I”, “proposition”, “name”—and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home?—

What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use (Wittgenstein, 1968, §116).


And elsewhere also in the Philosophical Investigations, perhaps the closest thing to “a grammar of reason” of which Hamann speaks:

Our investigation is therefore a grammatical one. Such an investigation sheds light on our problem by clearing misunderstandings away. Misunderstandings concerning the use of words, caused, among other things, by certain analogies between the forms of expression in different regions of language (Wittgenstein, 1968, §90).

Incidentally, just as many have seen in Wittgenstein the beginnings of a more therapeutic kind of philosophy, by clearing away misunderstandings caused by philosophical abuse, Hamann also thought of collecting several of his works under the title “Curative Baths”, referring to a healing practice of his time and also a subtle allusion to his father’s profession (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2007).5 Another way of linking the personalities of Hamann and Wittgenstein could be made through someone like Søren Kierkegaard. According to Walter Lowrie, Hamann was the “only author by whom S.K was profoundly influenced” (Lowrie, 1962, p. 164). And in turn, Wittgenstein once said, “Kierkegaard was by far the most profound thinker of the last century” (Schönbaumsfeld, 2007, p. 18). So Kierkegaard, who himself was very existential in his philosophy and opposed to the systematic Hegel, could have served as the middle man between the two. In any case, it was a suspicion of the prevailing rational philosophies of their time that both men shared in common, as well as penetrating insights into the flexibility of language. In conclusion, Hamann was not able convert Kant, and Kant was not able to bring Hamann back to the fold of the Enlightenment. In a letter to Jacobi, Hamann concedes:


I have had some hard tussles with him [Kant], and at times I have clearly been in the wrong. But he has always remained my friend, and you will not make him your enemy either, if you pay to truth that honour which you owe it and have promised (Smith LJ, 1960, p. 254).

II. Hamann’s Ladder and Kant’s Schemata

One of the technical problems that Kant had to deal with was how the objects given by the sensibility are subsumed under the pure a priori concepts of the understanding. In other words, how does the proper interaction of the sensibility and the understanding take place, given that they are after all, two separate things? This is where Kant introduces us to a chapter entitled, “The Schematism of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding.” One of the goals of a schema (plural, schemata) is to explain how the a priori concepts, or the categories, are able to reach out to those intuitions and appearances of the sensibility and subsume them under their proper concepts—or simply put, how we are able to facilitate the thinking of everyday things at all. How can we guarantee the capacity of our understanding to properly categorize the data given by the senses, and produce a true and discrete knowledge of the things around us? Almost as a direct contradiction to everything previously said about the exclusivity of the sensibility and the understanding, and the heterogeneity of pure concepts from sensible intuitions, Kant now answers:

Obviously th ere must be some third thing, which is homogeneous on the one hand with the category, and on the other hand with the appearance, and which thus makes the application of the former to the latter possible. This mediating representation must be pure, that is, void of all empirical content, and yet at the same time, while it must in one respect be intellectual, it must in another be sensible. Such a representation is the transcendental schema (Kant, 1965, p. 181).


There are good reasons to be suspicious of the sudden appearance of this “third thing”, and whether it is indeed consistent with the rest of the Critique. So far though, we have to take it for granted that it functions like the corpus callosum between the two hemispheres of the brain, and that also broadly speaking this schema is a only a product of that greater mediating faculty between the sensibility and understanding, the “imagination” (Kant, 1965, p. 146). Now although Kant gives us the impression that his primary problem here is with regard to those special a priori concepts (categories) subsuming intuitions (appearances), Michael Pendelbury points out that this also raises the issue of how any concept at all can subsume intuitions (Pendlebury, 1955, p. 780). Take the very examples that Kant will use, that of the triangle and the dog, which certainly are not pure a priori concepts but empirical concepts:

Indeed it is schemata, not images of objects, which underlie our pure sensible concepts. No image could ever be adequate to the conce pt of a triangle in general. It would never attain that universality of the concept which renders it valid of all triangles, whether right-angled, obtuse-angled, or acute-angled; it would always be limited to a part only of this sphere. The schema of the triangle can exist nowhere but in thought... The concept ‘dog’ signifies a rule according to which my imagination can delineate the figure of a four-footed animal in a general manner, without limitation to any single determinate figure such as experience, or any possible image that I can represent in concreto, actually presents (Kant, 1965, p. 182-183).

Here Kant first qualifies how the schema can never be the same as an image. For indeed, echoing an argument also posed by Berkeley in the past, any image of a triangle would always be a particular triangle, and never a triangle-in-general. No image of a triangle would be able to encompass all the possible varieties of triangles; any image


of a triangle would always be equal to a single triangle with a specific set of features. That is a fair enough point. So a better alternative would be to conceive of the schema as a procedure or a rule, just as he mentions in the given citation on the concept ‘dog’, and also when he says in another passage, “this representation of a universal procedure of imagination in providing an image for a concept, I entitle the schema of this concept” (Kant, 1965, p. 182). We agree with Jonathan Bennett who says that, “this nasty phrase ‘representation of a universal procedure’ just means ‘rule’” (Bennett, 1966, p. 141). So, the schema of a triangle or a dog is a rule. But what kind of rule exactly, and how does one apply this rule? Here the commentators disagree, and there seems to be as many original views as there are commentaries. How do you apply a rule to a concept such that it provides—take note—a particular image? Does “provide” here mean to get it from a source, or produce it out of nothing? How do you accomplish this provision when a rule by its very nature is not always exact or delineated? And finally, how is the rule applied to those elusive pure a priori concepts which were the main issue in the first place? It is this last question that preoccupies the rest of the chapter on schematism, and it is even most problematic because unlike empirical concepts, “the schema of a pure concept of understanding can never be brought into any image whatsoever” (Kant, 1965, p. 183). One can probably sense the whole mystery involved here when Kant says:

This schematism of our understanding, in its application to appearances and their mere form, is an art concealed in the depths of the human soul, whose real modes of activity nature is hardly likely ever to allow us to discover, and to have open to our gaze (Kant, 1965, p. 183).

Some like J acobi have considered this chapter on schematism one of the most profound and crucial parts of the Critique, others have dismissed it as irrelevant to the whole project of Kant, while


others have simply been left confounded. Schopenhauer called it a “strange” chapter, “which is well known for its great obscurity, since no one has ever been able to make anything out of it” (Schopenhauer, 1966, p. 450). Another commentator, W. H. Walsh also says:

The chapter on Schematism probably presents more difficulties to the uncommitted but sympathetic reader than any other part of the Critique of Pure Reason. Not only are the details of the argument highly obscure (that, after all, is a common enough experience in reading Kant, though one is not often so baffled as one is here): it is hard to say in plain terms what general point or points Kant is seeking to establish (Walsch, 1957, p. 71).

Now even though Hamann did not talk specifically about the schematism, perhaps this is where it is best suited to place his objections. The first thing that Hamann would criticize is the initial separation between the sensibility and understanding that Kant proposes. For Hamann, we can only treat sensibility and understanding as a consistent, undistinguished whole. He practically cries out in the Metacritique:

But if sensibility and understanding spring as two branches of human knowledge from one common root, so that through sensibility objects are given, through understanding they are thought, what is the use of such an arbitrary, improper and selfwilled divorce of that which nature has joined together? Will not such a dichotomy or cleavage of their common root cause both branches to die and wither away? For an image of our knowledge would not a single tree-trunk be more appropriate, with two roots, one above in the air, and the other below in the earth? The former is exposed to our sensibility, the latter, on the other hand, is invisible, and must be thought by


means of the understanding, which agrees more with the priority of what is thought and the posteriority of what is given or taken, as well as with the beloved inversion of pure reason in its theories (Smith, 1960, p. 217).6

First he talks about the sensibility and understanding as springing from one common root. This likely refers to a remark made by Kant in his preface, “we need only say that there are two stems of human knowledge, namely, sensibility and understanding, which perhaps spring from a common, but to us unknown, root” (Kant, 1965, p. 61). Taken at face value, it would seem that Kant only affirms the unity of both, since they are after all pa rtners in the acquisition of human knowledge. But the problem is that a “dichotomy or cleavage” of this common root occurs when Kant starts talking about the pure intuitions of the sensibility, or the pure concepts of the understanding. It is this very notion that either of them can be made “pure” that goes against the holism of someone like Hamann. On his section on the “Transcendental Aesthetic” for example, Kant proposes to purge the sensibility of everything that the understanding and the five senses might give it, so that the only thing that will be left is the genuinely a priori, which he identifies as space and time (Kant, 1965, p. 67). The same thing he also does for the understanding, where he discovers the pure a priori concepts of the twelve categories. Like Kant says in the beginning, “the chief question is always simply this:—what and how much can the understanding and reason know apart from all experience?” (Kant, 1965, p. 12). The very notion then of a pure a priori apart from all experience already breaks the bridges between sensibility and understanding, turning them into isolated faculties. No wonder the difficult problem of putting them back together, as the schematism tries to do. In contrast to this dilemma, Hamann suggests an illustration of a single tree-trunk or stem, with two roots above and below it. The benefit of this metaphor is that this time intuitions and concepts are free to traverse the two poles of the sensibility and understanding, such that our visible and invisible experiences become


a difference only in degree or gradation, rather than a difference in kind. He also paints us another portrait of this holism when he uses metaphors like “ladder”, “dance”, or “love-making”, the first one being borrowed in the title of this article.

Then I should open the reader’s eyes, that he might perhaps see hosts of intuitions rising up into the fortress of pure understanding and hosts of concepts descending into the deep abyss of the most palpable sensibility, on a ladder dreamt by no sleeper, and the figurative dance of this Mahanaim or two hosts of reason, the secret and offensive chronicle of their love-making and ravishing (Smith MPR, 1960, p. 218).

What is the basis of Hamann for this stem or ladder where the concepts and intuitions are spread out and free, traveling from one opposite territory to the other? Is there any evidence to favor this view over Kant’s? The answer will sound hauntingly modern, especially to 20th Century analytic philosophers. Hamann simply appeals to ordinary language: “Ordinary popular language gives us the finest parable of the hypostatic union of the two natures of sense and of understanding” (Smith MPR, 1960, p. 218). Here he appeals not just to how ordinary language is used, as Wittgenstein will later on do, but he appeals to the simultaneously sensible and conceptual characteristic of words themselves as we use them in our human language.

Words, therefore, have an aesthetic and logical faculty. As visible and audible objects they belong with their elements to the sensibility and intuition; however, by the spirit and institution and meaning, they belong to the understanding and concepts. Consequently, words are pure and empirical intuitions as much as pure and empirical concepts. Empirical, because the sensation of vision or hearing is effected through them; pure, inasmuch


as their meaning is determined by nothing that belongs to those sensations (Haynes MPR, 2007, p. 215).

So words function as the constant mediator between the sensibility and understanding. In the Aesthetica in Nuce he artfully describes speaking as continually translating the angelic into the human, thoughts into words (Haynes, 2007, p. 66). This realization, that words within the framework of Kant are both aesthetic and logical, pure and empirical, counts as a profound insight to favor the holism of human knowledge. The question now becomes, which makes more sense, the “words” of Hamann or the “schemata” of Kant? Personally we are more inclined to the first, since words are easily enough encountered and observed, and are ubiquitous in everyday life and not to mention in philosophical discourse. But the same cannot be said of schemata, which are supposed to be hidden in the depths of the human understanding, and which do not even have words to name them (for we name concepts, not their schemata)—and this, if we even agree that there really are such things as schemata. Compound this with the problem that there is no consensus among Kantian scholars about how schematism really works or what it is for, then there is an even greater reason to favor the view of Hamann. However the disadvantage of Hamann is that though he begins with such a profound insight, there is no system for which to carefully articulate this holistic view, no “scaffolding” or “logic” behind it, unless we resort to clothing it with the system Kant. Hamann identifies the spirit behind the letter, but as for the subtleties involved in the way that words really work, he says, “I leave it to each one to unclench the closed fist into an open palm” (Haynes MPR, 2007, p. 218).

Though presently they seem to be at odds with each other, we would also like to suggest a possible future compromise between the two philosophers, which needs to be further developed philosophically. And given what was mentioned in the previous section, perhaps best with the help of someone like Wittgenstein. The description of the schema as procedure or rule may have points of contact with


the “logico-pictorial form” of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the rule-following discussions of the Philosophical Investigations. For example, in the Tractatus Wittgenstein says that “a picture can depict any reality whose form it has” (Wittgenstein, 1961, §2.171). And in the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein’s imaginary interlocutor remarks, “it’s as if we could grasp the whole use of a word in a flash” (Wittgenstein, 1968, §197). Though they certainly have different contexts, perhaps one can reconstruct the schema in light of its relationship to word usage and application. Of course it would be an open question how much we could retain of the transcendental philosophy of Kant once we insert language per se, but perhaps, with a little tinkering, the views of Kant and Hamann would turn out to be not poles apart, but also in the spirit of Hamann’s holism, just two opposite sides of the same coin.

NOTES

1 We quote this particular phrase from Dr. Zosimo Lee, University of the Philippines, Diliman.2 He borrows the following categories from Aristotle: (of Quantity) Unity, Plurality, Totality, (of Quality) Reality, Negation, Limitation, (of Relation) Of Inherence and Subsistence, Of Causality and Dependence, Of Community, (of Modality), Possibility—Impossibility, Existence—Non-existence, Necessity—Contingency.3 Excerpt from a letter to Jacobi (From now on Smith LJ).4 Excerpt from a letter to Herder (From now on Smith LH).5 Under section “3. Metacritique”6 Excerpt from Metacritique on the Purism of Reason (from now on Smith MPR). Also, if from the Haynes translation of the Metacritique, Haynes MPR.


REFERENCES

Bennett, Jonathan. (1966) Kant’s Analytic. New York: Cambridge.Dickson, Gwen Griffith. (1995) Johann Georg Hamann’s Relational

Metacriticism. Berlin: de Gruyter.Gardner, Sebastian. (1999) Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason. London:

Routledge.Haynes, Kenneth (Ed). (2007) Hamann: Writings on Philosophy and Language.

New York: Cambridge.Kant, Immanuel. (1965) Critique of Pure Reason. Norman Kemp Smith

(Trans). Toronto: Macmillan.---. (1991) “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is enlightenment?’.” In H. S.

Reiss (Ed), Kant: Political Writings (pp. 54-60). Cambridge: Cambridge.Lowrie, Walter. (1962) Kierkegaard. New York: Harper.Pendlebury, Michael. (1955) “Making Sense of Kant’s Schematism.”

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 55(4), 777-797.Schaper, Eva. (1992) “Kant’s Schematism Reconsidered.” In Ruth Chadwick

and Clive Cazeaux (Ed), Immanuel Kant: Critical Assessments (pp. 304-322). London: Routledge.

Schönbaumsfeld, Genia. (2007) A Confusion of the Spheres: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on Philosophy and Religion. New York: Oxford.

Schopenhauer, Arthur (1966) The World as Will and Representation. Vol. 1. E. F. J. Payne (Trans). New York: Dover.

Smith, Ronald Gregor. (1960) J.G. Hamann: A Study in Christian Existentialism. New York: Harper.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (2007) “Johann Georg Hamann.” Revised ed. Retrieved October 21, 2009. Online: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hamann.

Walsh, W. H. “Schematism” in Kant-Studien, 49 (1957) Reprint. In Robert Paul Wolff (Ed), Kant: A Collection of Critical Essays (pp. 71-78). New York: Anchor Books.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. (1968) Philosophical Investigations. Third ed. G. E. M. Anscombe (Trans). New York: Macmillan.

---. (1961) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (Trans). London: Routledge.

ON METAPHYSICS, THE INTERPRETATION OF QUANTUM

MECHANICS, AND THE HUMANITIES

MICHAEL DWYERFlorida State University

Tallahassee, FL, USA

Some philosophers, educationalists, and social theorists think to deduce sweeping epistemological consequences, e.g., that objective observation does not exist, from such foundational results of quantum mechanics as HUP, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. In this article, we argue that, if these consequences do follow from some aspect of quantum theory, they follow not from the correct mathematical statement of HUP but, at best, from a debatable interpretation of HUP on which imaginary macroscopic observers are pictured interacting with microscopic phenomena.

It is common practice for scholars to find ideas in physics to apply in their own areas. This is frequently done in education, sociology, psychology, and other fields among the human sciences as well as the humanities, including philosophy. Certainly, there is nothing inherently wrong with such applicative efforts, and physics is a field in which one would encourage scholars to search for new and creative ideas. However, equally important is that ideas – and their logic – be properly understood before they are applied. In particular, one would like to know whether the applications made outside physics rely upon physical principles themselves or only upon one or another interpretation of those principles, even if those interpretations are


On Metaphysics... 149

familiar and entrenched. Unfortunately, this is often nowise easy to do. For example, philosophical discourse relies upon abstract logic, and is itself quite specialized in both its terminology and its problems; neither of these most physicists comprehend. At the same time, the official language of physics is that of applied mathematics, usually on a level quite beyond most philosophers. The principles of physics are themselves, almost always, stated in the terms of applied mathematics, and not those of colloquial or scholarly language. So, it is no real surprise that slips and misunderstandings occur when one moves conceptually between two such fields.

It is remarkable how frequent references to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (HUP) from quantum mechanics have become outside the bounds of physics. During the question period after a recent lecture, critical theorist Slavoj Žižek referred to HUP under the description “the act of observation alters what is being observed.” Bill Maher, moderator of the American television series “Politically Incorrect,” has mentioned HUP on his program and glossed it in very much the same terms. So interpreted, HUP has become part of an everyday intellectual lingua franca. From these and similar readings of HUP, surprising conclusions have been drawn by academics in the social sciences – across the entire spectrum of social sciences from education, through sociology, over to anthropology. With some consistency, significant numbers of social scientists and philosophers have maintained that HUP yields some startling results for epistemology, among them, that there can be no such thing as objective observations – since the act of observing itself alters the system under observation – that there is no such thing as objective truth, and, consequently, that there is no such thing as objective knowledge. It is supposed to follow in turn from these that famous epistemological projects as diverse as logical positivism and Husserlian phenomenology are wrongheaded. Hence, it is supposed that a correct understanding of quantum mechanics, in particular, of HUP leads directly to a revolution in philosophy.

150 Michael Dwyer

Can one really derive such conclusions from HUP itself? The only justified answer to this question is “No.” Conclusions like the above are seen not to derive from a proper understanding of HUP, but only – and at best – from an interpretation of the applied mathematics, rather than the mathematics per se. Indeed, the very suggestion of an “uncertainty principle” in quantum mechanics is a consequence of interpretation and not physical or mathematical fact. The supposed consequences just listed are thought to follow from the idea, attached to HUP by interpretation, that the act of observing affects what is being observed.

Let us begin by examining HUP in its original form as a principle of quantum mechanics. R. Crease and C. Mann in their The Second Creation (Crease 1986 44ff) provide an in-depth discussion of the discovery of HUP, and a thorough explanation of its meaning. According to Crease and Mann, the HUP equation as written today appears thus:

p x q = h/2i

Where p is the tolerance in momentum, q is the tolerance in position, h is Planck’s constant, and i is the imaginary square root of -1. One can simplify the equation considerably once it is realized that its right side is constant. One can then rewrite the equation as follows,

p x q = k, where k is a constant.

Therefore, according to HUP, the tolerance in the momentum of a physical entity is inversely proportional to the tolerance in its position. So, if one reduces the tolerance in either position or momentum, then the corresponding tolerance in the other quantity must increase in order to maintain equality with k. Let us try a few simple substitutions and see how this works. First, pretend that k = 10. Then, on that assumption,


p x q = 10

Now if p = 1, then q must equal 10 (1 x 10 = 10)

If p = .1, then q must equal 100 (.1 x 100 = 10).

If p = .01, then q must equal 1000 (.01 x 1000 = 10)

More generally, as p approaches zero, q has to increase without limit. Quantum mechanics tells us that the HUP equation must always remain solvable; for that, neither p nor q can ever equal 0. As one increases in value, the other must decrease. Therefore, it would seem that the HUP could not be any simpler to state correctly: “It is not possible that the tolerance in position and momentum of an electron go to zero simultaneously”.

Clearly, the equation expresses a metaphysical relationship, not an epistemological one. There is no issue here about our lack of expertise, knowledge or observational ability. Incidentally, Planck’s constant is: h = 6.62606876(52) x 10-34. This is why people fail to notice quantum effects when dealing with the macro world; those effects become significant only when dealing on the level of microscopic quanta.

It is in interpreting HUP that the idea of an imaginary observer of a quantum-mechanical system gets introduced. On such an interpretation, one is to picture an electron “orbiting” a nucleus. Then, one imagines shooting high energy photons at the nucleus and watching how they bounce off the electron. This might allow one to determine the position of the electron, but the electron-nucleus system has been altered by the attempt to observe it. The photon has changed the course of the orbiting electron. Now, if one endeavors to determine momentum, he or she is, in effect, observing a different system. Therefore, the observer cannot determine both position and momentum of the particle simultaneously. The most common interpretation of this thought experiment is this: “It is impossible to

152 Michael Dwyer

know both position and momentum simultaneously because the act of measuring either one alters the system.” We maintain that, regardless of the colorful character of this heuristic image, it hides an interpretation of HUP that may or may not be justified. For HUP is the statement of a relation mathematically defined that is metaphysical, governing the natures of things in themselves, and not epistemological – there is no mention in its equation of knowledge, observers, observations or photons.

There is a famous distinction that Saul Kripke made in his Naming and Necessity (Kripke 1980 34-35) that is useful here and needs to be understood before examining Heisenberg’s ideas more closely. Like many useful distinctions, it is not meant to be hard and fast. He distinguished between knowing or knowledge a priori and a posteriori, and truths that are metaphysically necessary. For example, that water is H

20 is metaphysically necessary; water just could not be anything

else. In other words, there is no possible world in which water is not composed of two molecules of hydrogen bound in the usual way to one molecule of oxygen. However, that water is H

20 is not known a priori:

it is known only as a result of empirical investigation in chemistry, that is, it is known a posteriori. Hence, the knowledge that water is H

20 is

precisely knowledge a posteriori of a metaphysically necessary truth. On the other hand, one can know without testing or experiment that the standard meter bar is precisely one meter in length, hence, one can know this a priori. However, it is nowise metaphysically necessary that the standard meter bar be precisely one meter in length, for there are possible worlds in which the very same bar would be two meters long! Therefore, aprioricity and metaphysical necessity are distinct notions. Read in these terms, the appropriate status of HUP is that of a metaphysical necessity that is known a posteriori; it is not an epistemological principle governing the beliefs or knowledge of the observer. HUP reports a necessary feature of physical things. It is not possible therefore to deduce epistemological conclusions, such as the above listed, from it without further ado.


To find an interpretation of the physics that goes some way (but not all the way!) to support the claims of social scientists and humanists about HUP, one can look to the secondary literature in physics. McKerrow and McKerrow (1991 19) describe HUP as presenting an epistemological problem: “Heisenberg tells us that either the position or the momentum of an electron can be measured with accuracy but the accuracy with which we can measure both simultaneously is limited.” However, and importantly, McKerrow and McKerrow rightly understand that HUP does not claim that it is the action of the observer that makes for the uncertainty. HUP simply states that the mutual tolerance is there, is inescapable, is fundamental.

McKerrow and McKerrow also mistake HUP’s general application, writing “The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle deals with quanta. Quantum mechanical reality does not correspond to macroscopic reality.” However, the basis for this conclusion is incorrect. While physicists commonly ignore the impact of quantum mechanics when speaking of everyday dealings with the world, quantum mechanics does apply. HUP does not apply to electrons merely, or just to other subatomic particles, but to everything and anything. It is not possible for either of the linked tolerances in position and momentum to be zero, whether it be a tolerance with regard to electrons or with regard to grand pianos.

Richard Feynman in his justly famous Lectures on Physics (Feynman et al. 2005) subscribes to the epistemological interpretation, introducing HUP using a thought experiment that we here paraphrase. A source of electrons is placed in front of a wall, which has two holes in it. Behind this wall we place a detector. We place a light source between these two walls which – when turned on – will enable us to determine through which hole the electrons pass. If the light source is off , i.e., if we do not “watch” to see which hole the electrons pass through, the distribution of electrons on the back wall shows a pattern of interference. If we turn the light source on, then the pattern of interference changes. So, the act of observing alters the state; it effectively alters the interference.

154 Michael Dwyer

Feynman’s thought experiment is frequently referred to when people draw the conclusion that HUP supports the claim that there can be no objective observations - except that there is more to it than just this. Feynman describes various alternatives and modifications to the experimental setup, and concludes, “In our experiment, we find that it is impossible to arrange the light in such a way that one can tell which hole the electron went through, and at the same time not disturb the pattern.” (Feynman et al. 2005 1-9) This is, in effect, he says, a statement of the uncertainty principle. He continues a bit further on, “No one has ever found (or thought of) a way around the uncertainty principle. So we must assume that it describes a basic characteristic of nature.” Even so, we want to emphasize that Feynman’s treatment is an interpretation of the mathematics of HUP, and not HUP itself.

However and importantly, even if one goes with Feynman and others and adopts their observational interpretation of HUP, instead of the principle itself, the consequences claimed by humanists and social scientists are still in trouble. Consider these two alternatives. On the one hand, grant that HUP describes an epistemological uncertainty and not a mathematical relation between abstract tolerances. The only consequence one could conceivably draw from Feynman’s thought experiment would pertain to our lack of knowledge about things at one specific time. It would be a consequence with regard to our current inability only and nothing more. Even if the act of observing affected the observed, that affect would be a temporary situation, a state of affairs that might eventually be corrected. We would be free to adjust the tolerances later and to try a new and corrective observation. In this case, no philosophical consequences of a grand epistemological nature could be drawn.

On the other hand, assume – as this paper has argued – that HUP describes a metaphysical relation between tolerances. Without further, unknown premises about knowledge and about how a certain relation on the quantum level affects, in an important fashion, the observer of macroscopic phenomena, one is wholly incapable of drawing the sorts of conclusions we considered above. Consider the hypothetical case of


a person sitting at a park observing a group of people playing a game of baseball. Does the act of observing affect the situation? Perhaps, but not in the way the physicist’s observation might be imagined to affect a tiny particle like an electron. Both physicists and baseball fans affect the motion of photons, but the physicist introduces them artificially into a system; the person observing the game does not. The two attempts at observation simply cannot be assimilated. Hence, one cannot explain how a person’s observation disrupts a macroscopic situation by referring to HUP. One needs further premises to justify that conclusion, if it is justifiable at all.

If one wished to object to the very notion of objective observations; one would be far better off looking to the writings of Heidegger or Wittgenstein. What does follow from HUP stating a metaphysical necessity is that the relation between tolerances is most definitely not the result of the observers attempting to measure a quantum-mechanical system. The relation is simply there, built into the nature of the universe. The act of observing can neither rid us of the relation, nor create it.

NOTE

On 23 August 2009, Michael Dwyer, the author of this article, passed away. He had worked on this and his other philosophical writings throughout the period of his final illness. Prior to his death, he was able to finish the bulk of the present piece. His friend and colleague Charles McCarty completed the editing and prepared the article for publication. Charles McCarty may be reached at [email protected].

REFERENCES

Crease, R. and C. Mann. (1986) The Second Creation: Makers of the Revolution in 20th Century Physics. New York: Macmillian Publishing Company. 480 pp.

Feynman, R., R. Leighton, and M. Sands. (2005) Lectures on Physics. Volume III. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company. 384 pp.

156 Michael Dwyer

Kripke, S. (1980) Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 192 pp.

McKerrow, K. and J. McKerrow. (1991) “Naturalistic misunderstandings of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.” Educational Researcher. Volume 20. Number 1. pp. 17-20.


ON HUMAN DEVELOPMENT AND FREEDOM: CRITICAL CONSIDERATIONS ON NUSSBAUM’S

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE CAPABILITIES APPROACH

EDA LOU IBASCO OCHANGCOFar Eastern University

Manila, [email protected]

In this paper, I present Martha Nussbaum’s ideas on the capabality approach, an approach which is associated with Nobel laureate economist Amartya K. Sen. This paper critically examines Nussbaum’s list of Central Capabilities and how this list can be the basis of government public policy and constitutional guarantees, in recognition of the right of every person to live a dignifi ed and meaningful life. Keywords:Central capabilities, freedom, agency, constitutional guarantees, public policy, human dignity, combined capabilities.

Introduction

In this paper, I focus on some of the more central contributions of Nussbaum that I believe could be useful in enriching capability-freedom perspective. It will be argued here that certain important ideas from Nussbaum’s own capabilities approach, critically considered, could enrich the human development perspective that Amartya Sen is

158 Eda Lou Ibasco Ochangco

known to have developed and strongly argued for. I shall proceed by highlighting and critically scrutinizing certain suggestions and issues that I find useful in Nussbaum’s own approach.

A. Sen and the Human Development Perspective: The Centrality of Capability

The human development perspective that is now a guiding framework, at least as a matter of principle, for many international agencies (see for instance the Human Development Reports, 1993 to the present (New York: UNDP); see also the UNDP website) owes much to the work of Amartya Sen. Central to the approach of Sen to freedom and human development is the concept of capability. I shall argue subsequently that Nussbaum’s approach to freedom can be seen, in important ways, as complementary to Amartya Sen’s freedom-centered approach to evaluation. But here I shall first present, briefly, Sen’s approach.

Central to Sen’s conception of freedom is his concept of capabilities. and which involve the construal of freedom—as “substantive freedom”—as the presence of capabilities. “Capability”—as sets of functionings within a person’s reach —are the various ‘doings’ and ‘beings’, and the possible ‘doings’ and ‘beings’ from which a person can choose.1 (Sen, 2000) Thus, freedoms can be seen in terms not only of processes and procedures—emphasized by libertarians2

(Ibasco, 2008)—but also in terms of substantive opportunities—real capabilities which people can enjoy as various “doings” and beings”. Freedoms are also seen not only within a plural framework of processes and outcomes—and their possible interactions—but also in terms of their intrinsic and instrumental value. Thus ‘democratic freedoms’—valuable on their own—could help prevent major disasters like famines, and expansion of women’s capabilities, such as those involved, e.g., in addressing women’s literacy (or education) and expanding work opportunities (also very valuable in themselves) could help lower birth rates, as well as help improve the quality of the children’s lives.

On Human Development and Freedom 159

‘Rights’ are, in this context, but a part of the more general account of freedoms, with ‘capabilities’ being another important aspect of the broad and rich perspective of freedom which, over the years, he has introduced and argued for. Poverty is seen, in this broad perspective, as deprivations of certain ‘elementary’ (or ‘basic’) functionings or capabilities (such as malnourishment, illiteracy). Rights are seen not primarily in terms of legal or constitutional entitlements but as moral ones, with political demands, possibly, arguable on their bases. Various freedoms are given emphasis; for instance, economic facilities, political freedoms, transparency guarantees, protective security, and social opportunities. All of these are to be viewed within the broad and plural framework that Sen has developed, with capability as a central concept3 (Sen, 2000).

B. Nussbaum on Human Development and Freedom: Furthering the Capability Based Perspective

Martha Nussbaum, in her book Women and Human Development4 (1999) has expressed related ideas on human development and freedom where she attempted to develop and argue for her own version of the capability perspective. Just as Sen was critical of Utilitarianism’s neglect of rights, freedoms and other non-utility concerns in social evaluation, Nussbaum herself has also expressed her concern on the importance of goods that are usually outside the scope of Utilitarian considerations5. Within an integrative perspective, I believe that some of her proposals, if critically considered and further developed, can be viewed as extensions or complementary to Sen’s capability approach to freedom or, at least, as proposals for further development and enrichment of the general approach. With the additional insights and ideas (and her forceful objections to Utilitarianism6) that she puts forward, it is perhaps also important to consider Nussbaum’s contributions in light of her motivations—which could enhance the complementary value of her proposals to Sen’s own approach (which may appear somehow lacking in such motivations7 (Ibasco, 2007).


C. Nussbaum’s Motivations

Appreciating Nussbaum’s motivations could enhance the value of her suggestions and help enrich Sen’s effort for it is explicitly grounded on various important considerations. First, she emphasizes the philosophical importance of seeing persons as ends, as she gives emphasis to the dignity of persons: “the capability approach should be pursued for each and every person, treating each as an end and none as a mere tool of the ends of others … [adopting] a principle of each person’s capability, based on a principle of each person as an end”8 (Nussbaum, 1999, p.5). Nussbaum strongly indicates her reservations regarding what might possibly be a slightly distorted view of ‘agency’ when she argues that we should respect persons as ends, rather than simply as the agent or supporter of the ends of others (Nussbaum, 1999, p.55).9 Such ethical motivations, I believe, should be considered as an important complement to Sen’s explicit ethical motivations. Nussbaum’s emphasis on the importance of valuing persons as ends, and not only as mere supporters of others’ ends is of fundamental importance, especially as she relates this to political and constitutional ideals. While, indeed, it makes sense to see persons as ‘doers’ or ‘agents’ (the way Sen puts it), to be able to render dignity to persons as deserving of a truly human life, it is also important to perceive them as worthy in their own right, aside from noting whether or not they assume the position of agents or ‘helpers’ of others. Failure to assign importance to the worthiness of each and every person as an end will, in this view, only risk the case of limiting persons to ‘tools’ and ‘means’ to the advantage of others. As she further writes: “the account we search for should preserve liberties and opportunities for each and every person, taken one by one, respecting each of them as an end, rather than simply as the agent or supporter of the ends of others” (Nussbaum, 1999, p.55). We should see “citizens are all worthy of concern and respect” (Nussbaum, 1999, p.58). “To treat everyone as an end we will have to take a stand on some values that will be made central for political purposes…” (Nussbaum, 1999, p.58). “We want


an approach that is respectful of each person’s struggle for flourishing, [one] that treats each person as an end and as a source of agency and worth in her own right” (Nussbaum, 1999, p.69-70). She clarifies her position:

“For it is all about respect for the dignity of persons as choosers. This respect requires us to defend universally a wide range of liberties, plus their material conditions; and it requires us to respect persons as separate ends, in a way that reflects our acknowledgements of the empirical fact of bodily separateness, asking how each and every life can have the preconditions of liberty and self-determination” (Nussbaum, 1999, p.60). She further explains her perspective:

“Part of this respect will mean not being dictatorial about the good, at least for adults and at least in some core areas of choice, leaving individuals a wide space for important types of choice and meaningful affiliation. But this very respect means taking a stand on the conditions that permit them to follow their own lights free from tyrannies imposed by politics and traditions. Thus in turn, requires both generality and particularity: both some overarching benchmarks and detailed knowledge of the variety of circumstances and cultures in which people are striving to do well… Only a broad concern for functioning and capability can do justice to the complex interrelationships between human striving and its material and social context” (Nussbaum, 1999, p.70).

It is clear that more than ethical in motivation, she gives emphasis to political and constitutional considerations: “a reasonable answer to these concerns, capable of giving guidance to governments


and international agencies is found in a version of the capabilities approach” (Nussbaum, 1999, p.70). “I use the idea in a more exigent way, as foundation for basic political principles that should underwrite constitutional guarantees” (Nussbaum, 1999, pp.70-71). In this preceding light, she then tries to rephrase “principle of each person as an end” as: “a principle of each person’s capability” such that “the ultimate political goal is always the promotion of the capabilities of each person” (Nussbaum, 1999, p.74).

In the context of these motivations, she offers a list of central capabilities (to be discussed in the next section below):

“The list provides the underpinnings of basic political principles that can be embodied in constitutional guarantees. For this purpose, it isolates those human capabilities that can be convincingly argued to be of central importance in any human life, whatever else the person pursues or chooses. The central capabilities are not just instrumental to further pursuits: they are held to have value in themselves, in making the life that includes them fully human. But they are held to have particularly pervasive and central role in everything else people plan and do….they have a special in making any way of life possible, and so they have a claim to be supported for political purposes in a pluralistic society” (Nussbaum, 1999, p.74-75).

Moreover—and this important for the purpose of this paper—the list gives us “the basis for determining a decent social minimum in a variety of areas” hence, “…the structure of social and political institutions should be chosen, at least in part, with a view to promoting at least a threshold level of these human capabilities…” (Nussbaum, 1999, p.75). What the approach is aimed at, then, is a society in which persons are treated as each worthy of regard, and in which each has been put in a position to live really humanly. That is where, she claims, the idea of threshold comes in: we say that beneath a certain level of capability, in each area, a person has not been enabled to live in a truly human way (Nussbaum, 1999, p.74).


D. Nussbaum’s List

Nussbaum’s list of central capabilities includes important familiar ones like the capability to lead a normal length of life; the capability to lead a healthy life; the capability to participate effectively in political choices that governs one’s life; the capability to hold property. It also includes the capability to form a conception of the good; the capability to move freely, secured against assault; the capability to imagine, think and reason; the capability to exercise practical reason; the capability to play and enjoy recreational activities. In this list, it is contended that ‘practical reason’ and ‘affiliation’ stand out as of “special importance, since they “organize and suffuse all the others”. I reproduce the complete list below:

The Central Human Functional Capabilities are as follows:1. LIFE. Being able to live to the end of a human life of normal

length; not dying prematurely, or before one’s life is so reduced as to be not worth living.

2. BODILY HEALTH. Being able to have good health, including reproductive, to be adequately nourished; to have adequate shelter.

3. BODILY INTEGRITY. Being able to move freely from place to place; having one’s bodily boundaries treated as sovereign, i.e. being able to be secure against assault, including sexual assault, child sexual abuse, domestic violence, having opportunities for sexual satisfaction and for choice in matters of reproduction.

4. SENSES, IMAGINATION, AND THOUGHT. Being able to use the senses to imagine, think, and reason — and to do these things in a “truly human way” way, a way informed and cultivated by an adequate education, including, but by no means limited to literary and basic mathematical and scientific training. Being able to use works and events of one’s own choice, religious, literary, musical, and so forth. Being


able to use one’s mind in ways protected by guarantees of freedom of expression with respect to both political and artistic speech, and freedom of religious exercise. Being able to search for the ultimate meaning of life in one’s own way. Being able to have pleasurable experiences, and to avoid non-necessary pain.

5. EMOTIONS. Being able to have attachments to things and to people outside ourselves; to love those who love and care for us, to grieve at their absence; in general, to love, to grieve, to experience longing, gratitude, and justified anger. Not having one’s emotional development blighted by overwhelming fear and anxiety, or by traumatic events of abuse or neglect (Supporting this capability means supporting forms of human association that can be shown to be crucial in their development).

6. PRACTICAL REASON. Being able to form a conception of the good and to engage in critical reflection about the planning of one’s life (This entails protection for the liberty of conscience).

7. AFFILIATION.A. Being able to live with and toward others, to recognize

and show concern for other human beings, to engage in various forms of social interaction, to be able to imagine the situation of another and to have compassion for that situation; to have the capability for both justice and friendship (Protecting this capability means protecting institutions that constitute and nourish such forms of affiliation, and also protecting the freedom of assembly and political speech).

B. Having the social bases of self-respect and non-humiliation; being able to be treated as a dignified being whose worth is equal to that of others. This entail, at a minimum, protections against discrimination on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, religious, caste, ethnicity, or national


origin. In work, being able to work as a human being, exercising practical reason and entering into meaningful relationships of mutual recognition of others.

8. OTHER SPECIES. Being able to live with concern for and in relation to animals, plants, and the world of nature.

9. PLAY. Being able to laugh, to play, to enjoy recreational activities.

10. CONTROL OVER ONE’S ENVIRONMENT.A. POLITICAL. Able to participate effectively in political

choices that govern one’s life; having the right of political participation, protection of free speech and association.

B. MATERIAL. Being able to hold property (both land and movable goods), not just formally but in terms of real opportunity; and having property rights on an equal basis with others; having the right to seek employment on an equal basis with others; having the freedom from unwarranted search and seizure (Nussbaum, 1999, pp 78-80).

Within this approach, we should be able to see then that her appreciation of and arguments for the importance of evaluating/assessing in terms of what people are actually able to do could further contribute to Sen’s approach. Her proposed list of “central human capabilities” (which are related to one another in many complex ways, she claims (Nussbaum, 1999, p.81)) specifies a “space” within which comparisons of “life quality,” i.e., how well people are doing, should be made (Nussbaum, 1999, p.6). Furthermore, this list of central capabilities, together with the threshold level, can serve as important benchmarks for problems such as: What are the basic capabilities that must be pursued and given priority? And how does one rank one capability vis-a-vis another?

Within the perspective provided by Nussbaum’s list of central capabilities together with her idea of a capability threshold level, the problem of defining what a basic capability is and what a basic


capability deprivation would seem to be less ambiguous and is provided a good starting point. Nussbaum’s approach appears to provide promising suggestions and can be viewed as complementary addition to Sen’s approach. This is especially true if one is to seek answers to fundamental questions such as: What should be considered as basic capability deprivations that have to be urgently addressed?10 Sen’s discussions and arguments for the importance of construing freedom in terms of capabilities appears to lack an explicit formulation of the idea of basic capability sets which is essential in determining/resolving issues regarding ‘basic capability deprivations’. He seems also to have overlooked the issue (or preferred to leave the issue to be resolved elsewhere) of considering the weights of the capabilities against one another, often leaving the problem of evaluation seemingly without reliable anchor to hang on to (Sen 1985)11. On the other hand, Nussbaum seems to provide at least a good starting point to the problem of ‘basic’ capabilities as she introduces the idea of a list of central capabilities and with this, the idea of a capability threshold level.12 Moreover, while Sen defined capabilities (capability sets) in very broad, if not very abstract terms (of course, to be fair, he gives lots of examples), Nussbaum takes the extra effort to specify what for her are the most central capabilities from a seemingly vast array of actual and possible capabilities/capability sets. Such a list, I believe, possesses helpful ideas that have intuitive force towards constructing a more adequate framework for evaluative purposes (which happens to be a central part of Sen’s motivations). Hence, when we ask the general but important question: How well is a person doing or being? The list of central capabilities provides us with a good starting point in the evaluation of persons’ interests and states, along a space that seem to matter much. In turn, with this list, we can thus construct our evaluative questions in a relatively more precise (thereby less abstract) language; for instance: “Will a person live a normal life span?” “Is he or she adequately nourished and sheltered?” “Can he or she move freely from one place to another?” “Is he or she receiving a functional education?” Or “Is he or she able to form meaningful affiliations?” A


negative answer to any of those questions will then give us a clearer picture of how or why a certain person can be said to be falling behind the requirements of a certain basic capability, hence, the presence of a basic capability deprivation. Moreover, in view of Nussbaum’s concept of a capability threshold, a negative answer to any of the questions above will also lead to the conclusion that a person in question is not above the benchmark for a truly human functioning/living, hence a cause for concern not only for evaluation, but more importantly, for immediate action. As “each and every one of a plurality of distinct goods is of central importance” there is a “tragic aspect to any choice in which citizens are pushed below the threshold in one of the central areas” which would be a case of a “distinctive good” “being slighted” (Nussbaum, 1999, p.81).

E. The Political and Constitutional Imperatives

The preceding considerations could be viewed as suggesting obligatory calls to action: for Nussbaum, a central concern is the importance of the role of governments for such tasks. Nussbaum emphasizes the importance of seeing the list of central capabilities and capability threshold level as central political goals to be pursued by all governments, out of respect for the principle that human beings are worthy of a life that is fully human (Nussbaum, 1999, p.5). Sen seems to have paid relatively more attention to the more abstract comparative use of capability sets in the evaluation of persons’ interests and states (of course, certainly not without importance).13 (Sen, 1985) Nussbaum, by contrast, emphasizes how a list of central capabilities, together with the idea of a capability threshold level, can provide a basis for central constitutional principles—rights that citizens can legitimately demand from their governments (Nussbaum, 1999, p.11). (I address further below the connection between rights and capabilities in Nussbaum’s framework.) Such a move, I believe, is crucial and more helpful in seriously actualizing what for Sen is the important role of social arrangements in expanding individual freedom and capabilities


(Sen, 2000)14. Thus, when Nussbaum calls for the state to establish constitutional guarantees for the fulfillment of central capabilities in her list, her suggestion assumes greater power and force because it is more explicit and also clearer in the kind of action demanded.15 It also puts in place the grounding of certain constitutional principles on certain human capabilities, a suggestion that needs to be further pursued on a theoretical plane (see my discussion on this issue below). It is perhaps arguable with strong good reasons that it is quite hard to expect institutions (such as the central government, for example) to act in support of ‘certain matters’ if, in the first place, these institutions are at a loss in defining what those ‘certain matters’ are and what sort of support is required or needed for them. With the ideas and approach that Nussbaum argues for and stresses, both governmental institutions and the public would then be obliged to agree on relevant benchmarks to use in asking what a given society has or has not done for its citizens (Nussbaum, 1999, p.63). While it is impossible to ensure various levels of capabilities (dependent as they are on various considerations, including distribution of “natural goods” such as intelligence and health by luck) what governments can aim to deliver is at least the social basis of these capabilities (Nussbaum, 1999, p.81).

F. Some Issues with Nussbaum’s List: the Important Need for Evaluation and Public Discussion

It is very important not to miss Nussbaum’s central suggestions in her approach: that the identification of a list of central human capabilities, together with a threshold level, are necessary for the construction of central constitutional principles that citizens have a right to demand from their governments (Nussbaum, 1999, p.11). The list of central capabilities provides the relevant “space” within which the capability threshold level is determined, and subsequently, the space within which what ‘rights’ should be assured to each and every citizen is to be understood and demanded. I shall have more to say on these important issues below in the next section. I first turn to a set of issues that require due attention.


While I am persuaded and supportive of such a general position of the capabilities approach, there are important issues of concern that need to be raised. Nussbaum’s proposals and arguments should indeed be seen as indispensable proposals—an adequate response to which could enrich Sen’s perspective on evaluation. A reasoned and sensitive evaluation of people’s lives, as Sen has suggested, will have to undertake the task of actually finding out about the actual lives that they are leading — whether people really end up with the choices they prefer most and how they ended up with their choices. Sen’s idea of evaluation of comprehensive outcomes must be extended to accommodate—indeed try to insure, at least up to a minimum—something like Nussbaum’s list of central capabilities. Such list, I believe, provides a good point of departure in further defining Sen’s comprehensive outcomes. With regard to matters such as which ‘opportunities’ (capabilities or freedoms) are basic, Sen, though he gives plentiful and very helpful examples of intuitive persuasive force, to my knowledge has never formulated a principle nor attempts to specify any comprehensive list of what opportunities (capabilities) are to be considered basic. Here lies the importance of Nussbaum’s suggestions on central capabilities.

Having made and emphasized this point and persuaded that Nussbaum’s list is indeed worth considering for purposes of evaluation, nonetheless fundamental issues of philosophical moment can certainly still be raised in terms of its contents—for instance, what to include as central and whether to include, e.g., the capability to have concern for plants and animals, as central.16 While I do not, however, claim, at this stage, to have a “better” substitute to some of the items in Nussbaum’s list, what I would like to emphasize, on the other hand, is the need to see Nussbaum’s list of central capabilities not as a hard and fast, and clear-cut benchmark for evaluation, but only as a starting point for such exercise. And since it is just a starting point, the reach and effectiveness of open discussion and exchange must not be underestimated in assessing/deciding how such list can better be improved for purposes of evaluation (and eventually, for


political action and constitutional guidance). And while I do not deny the value of her suggestion that “the account of the central capabilities provides a necessary focus for political planning” (Nussbaum, 1999, p.148), I tend to be skeptical of her seemingly presumptuous assertion that her capabilities list “already represents … a type of overlapping consensus” (Nussbaum, 1999, p.76). What needs to be underscored, I think, is the idea that communication lines should always be open, especially because she herself admitted that people have very different comprehensive conceptions of the good (Nussbaum, 1999, p.5). Indeed, it should be observed—and emphasized—that contrary to the previous remark noted that some overlapping consensus has been achieved, Nussbaum herself seems to have recognized the “provisional” character of her list; as she acutely remarks: “the intuitive conception of human functioning and capability demands continuous reflection and testing against our intuitions” and we should thus view any given version of the list as “proposal put forward in a Socratic fashion, to be tested against the most secure of our intuitions as we attempt to arrive at a type of reflective equilibrium for political purposes” (Nussbaum, 1999, p.77). Moreover, some may be more fixed than others and the list “remains open ended and humble” (Nussbaum, 1999, p.77). It can always be contested and remade” the items on the list are to some extent “differently constructed by different societies” (Nussbaum, 1999, p.77). Moreover, they posses multiple realizability: its members can be more concretely specified in accordance with local beliefs and circumstances” (Nussbaum, 1999, p.77). They are thus designed to leave room for a reasonable pluralism in specification (Nussbaum, 1999, p.77). Moreover, the threshold level of each the central capabilities will need more precise specification, as citizens work towards a consensus for political purposes (Nussbaum, 1999, p.77). This, she proposes, can be envisaged as taking place within each constitutional tradition, as it evolves through interpretation and deliberation (Nussbaum, 1999, p.77). These preceding considerations are important to emphasize in light of the importance given to the exercise of practical reason in the approach.


G. Rights and Capabilities

Nussbaum differentiates among three types of capabilities— the basic, internal, and the combined capabilities — and claims that the central capabilities in her list are of the third type.17 She defines “combined” capabilities as “internal capabilities combined with suitable external conditions for the exercise of the function” (Nussbaum, 1999, pp.84-85). Important in this context is what Nussbaum insists: that her list of central capabilities should be perceived as a list of combined capabilities in the sense that “to realize one of the items on the list for citizens of a nation entails only promoting appropriate development of their internal powers, but also preparing the environment so that it is favorable for the exercise [of those] functions” (Nussbaum, 1999, p.85). She further insists on the twofold importance of material and social support “both in training internal capabilities and in letting them express themselves once trained” (Nussbaum, 1999, p.86).

Fundamental in all the above considerations is how Nussbaum attempts to establish the close relationship between rights and capabilities.18 Nussbaum asserts that the best way of thinking about rights is to see them as combined capabilities, so that to secure rights to citizens is to “put them in a position of combined capability to function” (Nussbaum, 1999, p.98). In that way, she argues and emphasizes that “by defining rights in terms of combined capabilities, we make it clear that a person in a country C don’t really have the right to political participation just because such language exists on paper: they really have this right only if there are effective measures to make people truly capable of political exercise” (Nussbaum, 1999, p.98). Hence, conceived as combined capabilities, rights, in Nussbaum’s language, must never remain only on paper: suitable and favorable external conditions must be implemented and ensured to ensure that such rights are possible and realizable.19 More so, (political) “rights” would mean the securing by state power the internal and external conditions for the exercise of central capabilities. The conception (or list) of “central capability” (which may well be rooted in some theory of


human nature) suggests what is important to secure (say to be “human” or to provide the necessary means for each person’s conception of the good). The concept of “rights” tries to secure the capabilities—their internal and external conditions—via various norms and obligations, and specifically, as political rights, try to secure these via state power.

It is in this connection also that I would then emphasize that Amartya Sen’s stand on the idea of rights could well benefit from Nussbaum’s idea that rights are better conceived in terms of “combined capabilities”—i.e., securing the internal and external conditions for their exercise.20 Nussbaum’s stand, I argue, is stronger and more forceful since her conception of rights takes on a very definite shape in the form of her list of central capabilities (as combined capabilities). It becomes all the more forceful as she makes the central capabilities as fundamental political goals of most immediate priority. By insisting on the importance of certain capabilities—as rights—for each and every citizen in each and every nation (Nussbaum, 1999, p.6), Nussbaum lends an important political and constitutional dimension in the discourse on rights, and fills in explicit gaps in Sen’s discussions. Note that for Sen, rights are to be judged primarily as a system of ethical reasoning and as the basis of political demands.21 Hence, Sen, I believe, risks ambiguity and lacks decisiveness when it comes to rights, which is not the case with Nussbaum. For purposes of realizability and practicality, the system of rights (as a set of institutional and political norms), I believe, has to be more direct and decisive and, most especially, has to have a sense of urgency. Certainly, we come close to that with the idea that rights should become the specific political goals to be addressed by governments as matters of policy or more fundamentally, as constitutional imperatives. Following Nussbaum’s arguments, if we think of rights as rights to certain central capabilities (as “combined capabilities” following her rather confusing distinctions), then the discourse on rights becomes less ambiguous in the sense that, as Nussbaum puts it, “thinking in terms of capability gives us a benchmark as we think about what it is to secure a right to someone” (Nussbaum, 1999, p.98). By turning rights as explicit political goals,


and by making the state responsible for these rights, Nussbaum consequently saw certain practical aspects of rights in manageable terms, and her better articulation of it gives the concern for rights a better stake at achieving better results. While it might be good to say that rights are to be addressed to anyone who can help (as Sen would sometimes argue), it is doubtful whether such assertion could guarantee effective and prompt responses.22 Such a stand undoubtedly sounds noble; however, it seems to lack the necessary practical and effective force that one might (or must) expect in matters of urgency and utmost importance, such in those contexts that should involve certain rights to capabilities of fundamental human importance.

Concluding Remarks

In this paper, I have presented certain basic ideas from Nussbaum’s capability approach to human development and freedom which I have examined and suggested as complementary to Amartya Sen’s proposals. I believe that she has many interesting and valuable ideas to offer (I have not touched in many important women’s issues that are very close to her concerns in the book.) In the preceding discussions, I have provided a modest appraisal of some of her basic and more general proposals that I deem of fundamental value for social evaluation and political and institutional purposes.

NOTES

1 See Sen, A. K. (2000) Development as Freedom, New York: Random House, p 74 and (1985) “Well-being, Agency and Freedom,” The Dewey Lectures 1984. The Journal of Philosophy, Vol LXXXII, No. 4, April 1985, p. 201.2 See Ibasco, E.S. (2008) “Amartya Sen’s Plural Conception of Freedom (Its Impact on Institutions, Policy and Individual Agency),” Far Eastern University Colloquium, The Department of Humanities and Social Sciences Research Journal Vol. 2, 123-144.


3 See also in particular Sen, A.K. (2002) Rationality and Freedom, Harvard University Press and (1985) Commodities and Capabilities, Amsterdam: North Holland.4 Nussbaum, M. (1999) Women and Human Development, The Capabilities Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.5 Nussbaum writes for instance: “We also need information about important goods … such as life expectancy, infant mortality, educational opportunities, employment opportunities, political liberties, [and] the quality of race and gender relations” (p. 61).6 And when Sen claimed that: “…utilitarianism drastically obliterates other relevant information in the assessment of persons’ interests and states by imposing severe informational constraints (Sen and Williams, 1982, pp 4-5), Nussbaum expressed similar concern when she said: “…[utilitarianism] does not even include all the relevant information . One thing we want to know is how individuals feel about what is happening to them, whether dissatisfied or satisfied” (p. 62). To the extent that Nussbaum is also interested in the ‘doings’ and ‘beings’ of persons as relevant benchmarks for evaluation, her account on capabilities provides strong support to Sen’s freedom-centered approach to evaluation. Nussbaum’s objections against utilitarianism further strengthen such support on Sen’s arguments.7 See Ibasco, E.S. (2007) “The Role of Moral Philosophy in Welfare Economics” Far Eastern University Colloquium, The Department of Humanities and Social Sciences Research Journal Vol. 1, pp. 93-1088 Nussbaum puts considerable weight on the dignity of human beings, arguing that: “What this approach is after is a society in which persons are treated as each worthy of regard, and in which each has been put in position to live really humanly. That is where the idea of threshold comes in: we say that beneath a certain level of capability, in each area, a person has not been enabled to live in a truly human way” (p.73). 9 I want to make it clear, however, that Sen’s agency does not, in any way, -simply mean the supporter of the ends of others. On the other hand, I also think it is still useful to mention Nussbaum’s reservations regarding what might be a slippery interpretation of agency, and her reasons for such reservations. See Sen (1985).10 Sen had spoken of so many capabilities, such as the capability to be well nourished, to be educated, to participate in the life of the community, to live a healthy life, etc. but he never specified what he meant by basic


capabilities (for instance, is the capability to travel a basic capability?). And how should one rank the many capabilities against one another: for instance, which should be given more priority, the capability to be educated or the capability to live a healthy life? Which should be prior, economic or political freedom? Addressing such questions, I believe, is crucial in the important task of developing the capability approach to freedom.11 See Sen, A.K. (1985).12 Nussbaum introduces a list of “central human capabilities,” arguing that such list should become the philosophical underpinning of basic political principles that can be embodied in constitutional guarantees (p.74). Along with the list, Nussbaum also stresses the idea of a capability threshold level, which, she argues, should become the benchmark for a truly human functioning and truly human existence (p.6).13 Sen (1985).14 Sen (2000).15 Sen himself admitted that in the case of democratic governments, for instance, “people tend to get what they demand, and more crucially, do not typically get what they do not demand (2000, p.156).16 Some of what Nussbaum claims to be central capabilities in her list are quite contestable. One may question, for example, whether being able to play or enjoy recreational activities (p. 79) should explicitly be considered as an urgently central capability. Moreover, it is also, I believe, doubtful whether the concern to plants, animals, and the world of nature (p. 80) should indeed demand immediate political action from governments. Lastly, skepticisms can also be raised on her position on the supposed centrality of being able “to love, to grieve, to experience longing, gratitude, justified anger (p.79).” I have no objections regarding the idea of a “truly human functioning”; however, in the case of governments where the sufficiency of resources is indeed still a big question (in third world economies, for instance), political/constitutional policies that require tight budget allocations should well be geared at more urgent matters (such as the capability to live a healthy, educated life, for instance). It is doubtful whether a government that fails to furnish real opportunities for play, for love or grief, or for the concern on plants and animals would be considered as unjust or inefficient, or particularly inhuman, especially if such governments are in dire straits, preoccupied with “more immediate concerns” though I cannot claim to have a systematic answer for what I said regarding “more immediate concerns”.


17 What Nussbaum calls “basic” capabilities in this account (note the difference between “basic” in her account and what we previously called “basic”) are those that are “the innate equipment of individuals, that is, the necessary basis for developing the more advanced capabilities” (p.84). Her examples of “basic” capabilities are: seeing, hearing, talking, etc. She construes “internal” capabilities on the other hand as “developed state of the person that are … sufficient conditions for the exercise of the requisite functions…[and which are], unlike the basic capabilities, mature conditions of readiness (p.84).” Examples of internal capabilities are: religious freedom, political freedom, etc.18 Believing that there is a very close connection between capabilities and basic human rights, Nussbaum argues that the capabilities account is one way of fleshing out an account of human rights (pp.148-149).19 Nussbaum’s general line or argumentation seems acceptable. However, there seem to be problems to her distinctions and with some of the arguments. To avoid confusion, one might as well distinguish “innate capacity” from “developed capacity”; and capacity from capability. Sen’s “capability” takes the external conditions into account (recall that functionings—and hence capabilities—result from the utilization of “commodities”), and therefore, it would be superfluous, in this understanding, to speak of a “combined capability.” And instead of the concept of “basic capability” that she introduces—which is innate—one might as well speak of some “innate capacity,” which is distinguished from man’s “developed capacity” (for which she uses “internal capability”—which, if one follows Sen’s would seem to be inconsistent). 20 Nussbaum makes a lot of sense when she writes: “To say, “Here is a list of fundamental rights” is more rhetorically direct... [because] it tells people right away that we are dealing with an especially urgent set of functions, backed up by a sense of the justified claim that all humans have to such things, by virtue of being human” (p.100).21 To illustrate, Sen states that: “It is best to see human rights as a set of ethical claims, which must not be identified with legislated legal rights” (2000, p.229).22 Sen, for instance, argues that while it is not the specific duty of any given individual to make sure that the person has her rights fulfilled, the claims can be generally to all those who are in a position to help. The claims are addressed generally to anyone who can help, even though no particular


person or agency may be charged to bring about the fulfillment of the rights involved (2000, p.230).

REFERENCES

Nussbaum, M. (1999) Women and Human Development, The Capabilities Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ibasco, E.S. (2007) The Role of Moral Philosophy in Welfare Economics. Far Eastern University Colloquium. The Department of Humanities and Social Sciences Research Journal 1, pp. 93-108.

Ibasco, E.S. (2008) Amartya Sen’s Plural Conception of Freedom (Its Impact on Institutions, Policy and Individual Agency). Far Eastern University Colloquium. The Department of Humanities and Social Sciences Research Journal 2, 123-144.

Sen, A.K. (1985) Commodities and Capabilities, Amsterdam: North Holland.Sen, A.K. (1985) “Well-Being, Agency and Freedom,” The Dewey Lectures

1984. The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. LXXXII, No.4, April 1985 pp.169-221

Sen, A.K. (1987) On Ethics and Economics, Oxford: Blackwell.Sen, A.K. (1997) “Maximization and the Act of Choice” Econometrica, Vol. 65

No.4, July 1997, pp.745-779.Sen, A.K. (2000) Development as Freedom, New York: Random House.Sen, A.K. (2002) Rationality and Freedom, Harvard University Press.Sen, A.K. and Williams, B. eds. (1982) Utilitarianism and Beyond, UK:

Cambridge University Press.

WHAT MAKES WOMAN WOMAN1

MAYBELLE MARIE O. PADUA

Far Eastern UniversityManila, Philippines

[email protected]

This essay defends the position that woman has a feminine distinctive nature. Using Edith Stein’s philosophical notion of “woman”, this paper argues the claim that woman’s nature as biological mother makes her intrinsically different from man. The fact is that woman’s monthly reproductive cycle prepares her to nurture a new human being within her very body. Even if she does not become a biological mother (because she is single or celibate), her psyche is naturally designed for intimacy and closeness with persons. This capacity for motherhood affects woman’s whole being and distinguishes her with two essential characteristics: attraction to the personal and attraction to wholeness. Keywords:Edith Stein, woman, feminine, ethos, empathy, motherhood, emotions

Inquiring into the essence of woman has its logical place in philosophical anthropology. “What is woman?” “What makes woman different from man?” “Is woman inferior to man?” “Is emotion woman’s strength or her frailty?” were some of the questions I sought to answer in writing this essay. Perennial and recurrent as these queries are, among contemporary feminists, it is Edith Stein, who is best able to lay down foundational ideas that elucidate woman’s ethos. What she says in many ways clarifies a number of mistaken notions about


What Makes Woman Woman 179

woman. Such notions include the belief that man’s status was that of superiority over woman, a kind of thinking that goes back to pre-Socratic times when patriarchy was the dominant form of societal order. Another misconception was that man was a “being in act,” while woman was “a being in potency,” as Aristotle maintained (Aristotle quoted by Hildebrand, 1996, p. 36). His book On the Generation of Animals accounts for the female as a ‘mutilated male’(Aristotle quoted by Le rner, 1993, p. 6). For him, the subordination of woman was presumed to be a given, a natural condition much like a fixed state of things. For nearly two thousand years, this misogynist construction would virtually echo throughout many parts of the world. Out of this thinking arose a functioning system of patriarchal hegemony resulting in complex hierarchical relation with the woman’s place and condition as “lower” than man in social, economic, political relationships, and in systems of ideas.

Edith Stein, who trained under Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology and was his best student, is among the humanistic pioneers who challenged this thinking. While upholding the Thomistic notion that men and women share a common human nature and an equal human nature, Stein shows that like man, woman is also an image of the Creator, is inherently equal to man in human dignity, yet different in the unique nature of her feminine constitution and psyche. With her studies on woman, Stein paved the way for educational reform that would take the differences between man and woman into consideration. Born in Breslau, Germany in 1891 and died in Auschwitz in 1942, Stein, today, is a significant figure in the history of philosophy for three innovations: the reconciliation of Thomism with phenomenology, the integration of psychology and philosophy in the particular study of empathy, and the consideration of “woman” as a fundamental category for philosophical research.

In this essay, I defend Stein’s position that woman has a distinctive feminine nature. In her philosophical notion of “woman,” Stein argues that woman’s nature as biological mother makes her intrinsically different from man. The fact is that woman’s monthly reproductive

180 Maybelle Marie O. Padua

cycle prepares her to nurture a new human being within her very body. Even if she does not become a biological mother (because she is single or celibate), her psyche is naturally designed for intimacy and closeness with persons. This capacity for motherhood affects woman’s whole being and distinguishes her with two essential characteristics: attraction to the personal and attraction to wholeness. This brings about a deep awareness and sensitivity to her own personal being and to that of others, with her emotions centrally involved in this feminine kind of holistic knowledge and discernment. Stein unravels how woman, not content with a mental understanding of persons, better understands other persons in relation to herself through emotions. She explicates how it is through emotions that woman experiences the value of a human being as person more powerfully. Stein’s standpoint on emotions makes us re-evaluate the supposition that emotion is inferior to reason and is woman’s weakness. Thus, on the question of whether emotion is woman’s frailty, this essay argues for the position, “The emotions are woman’s strength.”

In her dissertation On the Problem of Empathy, which Husserl directed, Stein takes up the meaning of what it is to have a clear awareness of persons, not simply as the content of the experience, but of the experience of that content. Culling insights from her investigation of empathy, I draw a relation between the richness of feminine life and woman’s natural predisposition to empathetic perception of persons, which involves an intuitive grasp of a person’s being and value as “person.”

In summary, this paper presents Stein’s insights on woman as a backdrop against which we can interpret more traditional readings of woman, challenging claims to the woman as the “weaker sex.”

The Battle for Gender Identity

Examining the reasons behind woman’s inferior position in

society, yields a certain justification for the battles and protests for equal rights by feminists. Stein herself was at the frontlines of protest


rallies in Germany clamoring for women’s rights. During her time, women were seen by law as minors and placed in the same class as children and the mentally retarded. In most parts of the civilized world, up around until the 1960s, women had no right to vote, were deprived of education, and had restricted access to resources, jobs, and self-support. Feminist consciousness emerged when women became aware that they were considered a subordinate group and that they suffered wrongs. Thus, they felt the need to join with other women to remedy these wrongs. Congregating in groups to provide an alternate vision of societal organization, feminist movements were born around the world. Among the women in these movements are Annie Wood Besant (English-Irish,1847-1933), Katherine Wilson Sheppard (New Zealander, 1847-1934), Emily Wilding Davison (British, 1872-1913), Elizabeth Cady Stanton ( American,1815 –1902) Simone de Beauvoir (French, 1908–1986), Hannah Arendt (German-Jew,1906-1975, Simone Weil (French,1909-1943), and Edith Stein. With women clamoring for equal rights,2 Germany came to recognize women as equal to men. In 1919, German law granted women full citizenship. With changes introduced to the Weimar Constitution by the German government, the feminists saw the end of an initial feminist battle in Germany. The law upheld genuine equality between the sexes; women, who came to be recognized as having equal standing before the law as men, now became full citizens. With this triumph for those fighting for emancipation, the country was now ready, Stein claims, to tackle the long-standing concerns about feminine value. It is at this time that Stein tackled the concern of woman’s feminine value. In these circumstances, some issues could now be resolved. Do women have a distinctive value? If they did, is this value based on a distinguishing nature? To both questions, Stein’s answer is a ‘yes’. She affirms real equality between man and woman and accepts the need for women’s emancipation, yet she also claims that there are real differences between the two sexes and that for biological, psychological, intellectual, and spiritual reasons, the sexes are meant to be different. Thus in her lectures compiled in a book entitled Essays on Woman, she argues for


the claim that we can speak of real feminine distinctiveness. Thus in the area of education, Stein managed to assert the

fundamental necessity to give a girl an all-round education suited to her feminine uniqueness. Her pedagogical theory would stress a concern for a proper understanding of our human, feminine or masculine, and individual natures; the need for a harmonious education which develops our emotional, intellectual, and physical capacities; and the religious foundation of all formation.

Ontological Examination of Woman

Prudence Allen (2002), in her monumental work entitledThe Concept of Woman, a fruit 32 years of research, examines philosophers’ thoughts on gender and identity be tween 750 B.C. to 1250, in a first, already colossal volume, and 1250 to 1500 or the early humanist reformation, in a second volume. Allen articulates three basic theories of women’s identity in these encyclopedic volumes. The first theory is the unisex view of Plato which claims that there are not significant differences between man and woman and that the soul is sexless. The second theory is Aristotle’s polarity view, which argues the male is superior to the female, while the third theory, the complementarity view, holds that men and women have significant differences, but are equal in dignity.

Allen’s first volume explores the way in which the polarity view came to dominate Western thought by the end of the 13th century. In the second volume, Allen shows the fresh base for complementarity in renaissance humanism, with complementarity emerging in the Benedictine monastic tradition with philosophers like Hildegard of Bingen. Then education shifts from monasteries to universities. The University of Paris, where Aristotle is a required reading, becomes the paradigm. The Aristotelian argument becomes dominant and the Aristotelian thinking about gender is what cascades through the centuries. With the assumption of women’s inferiority and incompleteness as human beings, women are excluded from


universities for centuries. With the long-standing discrimination against women, the task

of specifying the distinctiveness of the feminine species became highly controversial. Women felt forced to prove their capacity for full humanity and for abstract thought to themselves and to others. They manifestly desired to counteract the pervasive patriarchal assumptions of their inadequacy for educational, political, and economic life. Thus the query “What is woman?” acquires a fundamental and lasting importance in the battle for gender identity. That woman is different from man is a reality and to achieve full respect for women and their identity, it is vital to understand her feminine ontology.

I employ Stein’s use of the term ethos3 to refer to woman’s nature. A dictionary definition of the term ethos yields the following meanings: habit, habitation, custom, character, characteristic attitudes, philosophy (Webster, 1970, p. 628). Understood with its scholastic definition, the term ethos in Stein means an inner form. Ethos encompasses a person’s constant spiritual attitude which the scholastics term habitus (Stein, 1996, p. 43). The term “inborn habitus” is used to refer to a natural basic disposition of the soul such as c heerfulness and melancholy. Along with ethos, this general concept of habitus is made specific by focusing on values. To speak of ethos is to designate habitus, one or several, which possesses positive value….(Stein, 1996, p. 43). Thus, this study examines the value of woman as explicated through the idea of a distinctive nature2 of the feminine species which encompasses a natural basic disposition of a feminine soul that “cannot be modified by environmen tal, economic, cultural, or professional factors.” (Stein, 1996, p. 174)

From her reading of Genesis, Edith Stein deduces that humanity is divided into the double creations of man and woman. To be a member of the human race means to be so, as a male or female. Between the two sexes, Stein’s claim is that there is a difference not only in body structure and in particular physiological functions, but also in the entire corporeal life of man and woman. Stein used the creation narratives of Genesis to draw out what she considered to be the


natural vocation of woman. Recording the creation of Eve out of the rib of Adam, Stein reasons that as Eve was designed as a helpmate, every woman is meant to be both a companion (her spousal vocation) and a mother. Her close connection with human birth and with the development of a new human being is what leads woman to seek and easily bond with whatever is living, personal, and whole. “To cherish, guard, protect, nourish, and advance growth is her natural, maternal yearning” (Garcia, 1997, pp. 18-23). Woman is naturally inclined to what is human, and tends to give relationships a higher importance than work, succ ess, reputation, etc.

Stein upholds the claim of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas that the human person is a subsistent unity of body and soul, a composite of matter and form, the body, being the matter of the human being, and the soul, being its form (unlike the radical dualism of Descartes representing soul and body as two different and distinct entities). Since each natural substance is a composite of form and matter, and since matter is what distinguishes one human being from another, the body is therefore essential to the person, and is not simply a machine or a shell for the soul that could be discarded without serious loss to the “real” self (Garcia, 1997, pp. 18-23). Rationality, she explains, and along with it, free choice, belong to every human being and so to every woman as a human person. A long with Aquinas and Aristotle, Stein explains that there are traits exclusive to a human soul and other abilities (or at least dispositional traits) that are shared by every member of the human species. But if the soul is the formative principle of the body (anima forma corporis), as Stein infers from a formulated truth of St. Thomas, and the form of humanity is individuated by being united with this body or that one, Stein argues that “the feminine body must correspond to a feminine soul just as the masculine body must correspond to a masculine soul” (Stein, 1996, p. 21). The woman’s soul then will have a spiritual quality distinct from the man’s soul. The physical distinctions therefore profoundly mark their personalities. The woman’s body stamps her soul with particular qualities that are common to women but different from distinctively masculine traits.


Stein saw these differences as complementary and not hierarchical in value, and so they should be recognized and celebrated rather than minimized or deplored (Stein, 1996, p. 21). Stein asserts that there are then two ways of being human, as man or woman. Real Feminine Distinctiveness

For her method in examinin g woman’s nature, Stein includes phenomenology, metaphysics, and Thomism in complex philosophical scheme that reveals the mind of Stein to be one of intricate brilliance far out of the ordinary. Stein asserts a claim for real feminine distinctiveness, while affirming the equality of the sexes and maintaining her commitments to a common human nature as well as to the uniqueness of each individual. She upholds the Thomistic notion that man and woman share a common human nature and an equal human dignity, but insists that there are real differences between man and woman. We can outline these differences as follows: anatomic (in body structure), biologic (woman can give birth to another human being, man cannot; the chromosomal composition is xx for woman, and xy for men; hormonal composition is also different), intellectual (men are generally left-brained or logical thinkers, women, in general, right-brained or creative thinkers), psychological (many women are more emotional than most men), in roles (women are mothers, men are fathers), and the soul, according to Stein, is either feminine or masculine. Applying the Thomistic formula of the soul as the formative principle of life, Stein infers that “If the soul is the formative principle of the body and the form of humanity is individuated by being united with this body or that one, then “the feminine body must correspond to a feminine soul just as the masculine body must correspond to a masculine soul” (Stein, 1996, p. 21). With the differences between man and woman being observably undeniable, we can then speak about real feminine distinctiveness. Stein, however, saw these differences as complementary and not hierarchical. They do not make one superior to the other.


In examining woman’s feminine nature, we see that woman’s body is designed so that she can give birth to another human being. With the feminine body naturally able to carry another human being within its very own body, being conjoined to a soul, from which stems a person’s psychological make-up, we can infer that woman is spiritually made for close connection with persons. If such is woman’s nature, Stein contends that her natural role in society, her vocation or calling, in whatever profession,4 is to be of assistance to persons or a person’s (man or woman) helpmate as mother and companion. Stein draws support from the Old Testament to elucidate her theory. From her reading of Genesis, St ein deduces that humanity is divided into the double creations of man and woman. To be a member of the human race means to be so, as either male or female. Between the two sexes, Stein asserts that there is a difference no only in body structure and in particular physiological functions, but also in the entire corporeal life of man and woman. While man is designed to be provider, guide, and protector of wife and children, woman is ordained to the roles of mother and companion. In Genesis 2, she reads that God created woman eser kenegdo a Hebrew term meaning “a helper vis-à-vis to man.” Stein interprets this to mean a companion in relation to another person; woman was created to be of assistance to another human being. Recording the creation of Eve out of the rib of Adam, Stein reasons that as Eve was designed as helpmate to Adam, every woman is meant to be both a companion (her spousal vocation) and a mother, physically or spiritually. She is also created for her own particular vocation.

And the Lord God said, “It is not good that man should be alone. I will make him a helpmate who will suit him.’ And the Lord made Adam fall into slumber and took from him one of his ribs and formed a woman from it and He led her to Adam “The Adam declared, ‘This is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. She is to be called woman, for she was taken from man.’ That is why man leave his father and mother and adheres to his wife and they both become one body” (Genesis 2:24 quoted in Stein, 1996, p. 61).


Stein explains that this passage from Scripture is not to be interpreted as man having sovereignty over woman. It tells us that Scripture has named woman companion and helpmate and since man will cling to her and that in marriage, both are to become one flesh signifies their equality as a single human pair to be considered the “most intimate community of love, that their faculties were in perfect harmony as with a single being….” (Stein, 1996, p. 62). Man and woman exist for each other’s benefit. Being one fl esh captures the notion of communion of man and woman in marriage and emphasizes their complementarity as persons. “According to the intended natura l order, her place is by man’s side to master the earth and to care for offspring. But her body and soul are fashioned less to fight and to conquer than to cherish, guard, and preserve” (Stein, 1996, p. 73). Her close connection with human birth and with the development of a new human being is what leads woman to seek and easily bond with whatever is living, personal, and whole. As Stein says, “It is woman’s gift and ha ppiness to share the life of another human being” (Stein, 1996, p. 46). Thus it is natural for woman to interest herself in people. This inclination stems largely from her maternal gift.

Stein articulates a distinct claim on feminine nature as having two essential characteristics. They are: first, that woman is oriented to persons and second, that woman is oriented to wholeness. By orientation to wholeness Stein means often women more easily can comprehend realities in totality. She does not dissect an object but knows in wholes. She can understand another person as a whole being through intuition, emotion, and empathy. Man, on the other hand, is inclined to analytic thinking and knows things following stages of abstraction; this he achieves by reasoning.

We note that it is woman’s capacity for motherhood that affects practically her ways of thinking and behaving; it determines her whole being. As Stein writes, “The mysterious process of formation of a new creature in the maternal organism represents such an intimate unity of the physical and spiritual that one is well able to understand that this unity imposes itself on the entire nature of woman” (Stein, 1996, p. 95).


The Nature of Woman’s Emotional Life

Stein believes that it is woman’s emotional life that is the source of her attraction to the personal and to wholeness. This attraction to the personal and to wholeness point to another distinct feature of feminine nature: woman’s emotional life as the source of this attraction. Whether it is an awareness and sensitivity toward her own personal being or that of others, it is woman’s emotions that are responsible for this feminine kind of holistic knowledge and orientation to persons. According to Stein, without the emotions, the soul of a woman would never know itself or others in their totality. Each woman perceives her own being in the stirrings of her emotions. That is, through her emotions, each woman comes to know who she is and how she is. It is through her emotions that a woman also grasps the relationship of another being to herself.

Emotion is stronger in woman in that she experiences more vigorously the value of a human being as person. Edith Stein’s theory of empathy, discussed in the last section of this essay, helps us to understand how woman naturally feels for persons and for elucidating how woman is innately nurturing towards them. Being person-oriented, the object of her emotions is persons. To elucidate Stein’s claim of persons as the object of woman’s emotions I employ theories developed by Anthony Kenny, Robert Solomon, Max Scheler, Edmund Husserl, and Jean Paul Sartre on the intentionality of emotions. These theories show that intentionally, every emotion has a particular object, or end.

The object of the emotion or that to which an emotion is directed or targeted tells us what we value. We only respond emotionally to objects that are important to us.

For Stein, woman comes to understand persons not just through reason, but also more powerfully through her emotions.


Emotion as Woman’s Strength

In earlier years, following Aristotle, woman’s emotions were looked upon as her frailty. Woman was often referred to as the ‘weaker sex’ in her greater sensitivity, she is more likely to be wounded than man whose power of abstraction often shields him from negative feelings. “Weak” was always used to refer to what is fragile, delicate, breakable, vulnerable, and sensitive. With physical strength glorified with patriarchy being the dominant form of societal order, woman’s physical weakness versus male strength was looked upon as an indication of inferiority. History shows that assumptions about gender became gradually institutionalized and these have powerfully affected the development of history and human thought. One such assumption is:

“Men are ‘naturally’ superior stronger and more rational, therefore designed to be dominant. From this follows that men are political citizens and responsible for representing the polity. Women are “naturally” weaker, inferior in intellect and rational capacities, unstable emotionally and therefore incapable of political participation. They stand outside of the polity”(Lerner, 1993, p. 4).

Metaphors of gender emerged constructing the male as the

norm and the female as devia nt; the male as whole and powerful; the female as unfinished, physically mutilated and emotionally dependent. Stein’s philosophy on woman may yet help to restore the proper hierarchy since it recognizes the unique value of femininity and its crucial mission in the world. Woman’s emotions, looked upon as her weakness, can in fact be her very strength. We see this clearly in the following passage from Stein’s Essays on Woman:


The strength of the woman lies in the emotional life. This is in accord with her attitude toward personal being itself. For the soul perceives its own being in the stirrings of the emotions. Through the emotions, it comes to know what it is and how it is; it also grasps through them the relationship of another being to itself, and then, consequently, the significance of the inherent value of exterior things, of unfamiliar people, and impersonal things. The emotions, the essential organs for comprehension of the existent in its totality and in its peculiarity, occupy the center of her being. They condition that struggle to develop herself to a wholeness and to help others to a corresponding development, which we have found earlier to be characteristic of woman’s soul (Stein, 1996, p. 96).

The importance of her emotions stems from the fact that the woman’s monthly reproductive cyc le makes her a potential bearer of a new human being within her very body. Her psyche is constituted for the greatest closeness and affinity with others. Nurturance comes naturally to her; she more easily responds to the neediness of all men. This thinking is corroborated by psychoanalysts who explain that a woman has facility for inner communication with other persons by virtue of her capacity for motherhood. In pregnancy, there exists an “infantile preconceptual communication with the mother” (Stein, 1985, p. 82). This flux, according to feminine psychology, is by no means a one-way affair. The mother herself participates similarly in the communication with the child. Long after the umbilical cord is severed, there persists an invisible cord. What exists is a deeply knowing relationship between child and mother - “a mode of knowledge which precedes the advent of reason and, in a sense, transcends it” (Stein, 1985, p. 82). The “male” component of intelligence does not participate in this. The father does not have the same inner relationship to the n ewborn child as the mother. The kind of inner communication that the mother has is not shared by the father until the child himself communicates by


signals (Stein, 1985, p. 32). Some psychological theorists substantiate Stein’s claim about the woman’s greater capacity for awareness of, sensitivity to, and em pathy for persons. The feminine manifests qualities such as warmth, tenderness, care, empathy, responsiveness, and intuitive wisdom. In consequence, her “awareness of the needs of the living being benefits not only her posterity, but all creatures as well. It particularly benefits a man in making her a companion and helpmate appreciative of his aspirations” (Stein, 1996, p. 74). Because of her intuitive wisdom, woman is more easily able to ponder about the realities of life. Stein writes:

This is closely r elated to the vocation of motherhood. The task of assimilating in oneself a living being which is evolving and growing, of containing and nourishing it, signifies a definite end in itself. Moreover, the mysterious process of formation of a new creature in the maternal organics represents such an intimate unity of the physical and spiritual that one is well able to understand that the intimate unity imposes itself on the entire nature of woman (Stein, 1996, p. 95).

Because of this natural inclination to wholeness and self-

containment, Stein suggests that women tend to aim more toward a hol istic expression of personality, while men tend to aim toward the perfecting of individual abilities. She argues that women have a natural tendency toward empathy in that they seek to comprehend the other person as a whole being. This characteristic manifests itself in a woman’s desire for her own wholeness and in her desire also to help others to become complete persons. “Woman,” Stein writes, “is psychically directed to the concrete, the individual, and the personal: she has the ability to grasp the concrete in its individuality and to adapt herself to it, and she has the longing to help this peculiarity to its development” (Stein, 1985, pp. 100-101). Whether it is an awareness and sensitivity toward her own personal being or that of others, it is


her emotions that are responsible for this feminine kind of holistic knowledge and discernment. But does this mean that woman is less capable of abstract thought and less oriented to what is objective? Sarah Borden answers this question in an essay entitled Woman and Women’s Education:

In saying that women are more personally and less objectively-oriented, Stein is not claiming that women are less capable of abstract thought; rather, as Mary Catharine Baseheart puts it, “characteristically women are not content to remain on the level of the abstract” (Stein, 1989, p. 273). There is a drive in the feminine to relate the conceptual back to the concrete, the psychological back to particular psyches, and the theoretical back to the world of experience. Thus, the orientation toward the personal and the concrete need not be a denial of the abstract and conceptual, but it does indicate dissatisfaction with the merely abstract and conceptual, and unhappiness with only a part when one can be oriented to the whole (Borden, 2003, pp. 88-115).

This leads us to sum up Stein’s arguments about a woman’s

emotional life as a distinct property of the female species in one word: motherliness (Stein, 1996, p. 8 2). Woman tends to the “mothering” of all she meets. The feminine is characterized by “feeling, intuition, empathy, and adaptability” whereas the masculine is characterized by “bodily strength, the ability for predominantly abstract thought and independent creativity” (Stein, 1985, p. 82). Women are made to love and cherish all living things and to desire their full development. The feminine is characterized by responsiveness to the real.


The Intentionality o f Emotions

In Love and Responsibility, Karol Wojtyla (1993), writes about emotion being stronger in woman than in man because ‘she experiences more powerfully the value of a human being’…, while sensuality, which is oriented towards the ‘body as an object of enjoyment’, is in general, stronger and more importunate in men (Wojtyla, 1993, p. 177).

This view on emotion in woman helps us understand how emotion can in fact be woman’s strength, rather than her frailty. “At the heart of every emotion is a set of fundamental ontological and evaluative commitments,” writes Robert C. Solomon in his book The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life (1993). All emotions are intentional, because they are about something, ultimately both “about” ourselves and our world. One is never simply in love; he or she is in love with someone. It is impossible to fall in love without falling in love with someone. This feature of emotions called intentionality tells us that all emotions are about something. That which the emotion is about is called its intentional object, or simply its object. Every emotion has its particular object. Furthermore, it is this particular object which constitutes the emotion. Solomon’s example is that of someone being angry, the object of his emotion being that a person, John, had stolen his car: “I am angry that John stole my car.” The object of one’s anger is irreducibly that-John-stole-my-car.

In like fashion, Anthony Kenny, a specialist in ancient, medieval and analytic philosophy who invokes a wide range of sources on questions of emotion, volition and linguistic analysis, from Descartes, Hume and William James to Aristotle and Aquinas in his classic work of analytic philosophy, Action, Emotion and Will (1963) tackles the object-directedness of emotions. For Kenny, emotions, unlike sensations, have an intentional structure. “Emotions, unlike pain, have objects: we are afraid of things, angry with people, ashamed that we have done such-and-such” (Kenny, 1963, p. 14). He calls this feature of emotions their ‘intensionality.’5 Kenny analyzes what phenomenologists refer


to as the intentionality of emotions by employing the scholastic notion of a formal object (that to which a thing is directed). Emotions, Kenny explains, are mental state s and mental states are specified by their formal objects, and not by their material objects or by their causes. To understand an emotion, and consequently, to understand why persons experience certain emotions or to comprehend why they react emotionally to certain situations, it is not sufficient to know what caused (material object) an occasion that gave rise to the incidence of the emotion. One needs to know to what the emotion is bound or directed. If what characterizes an emotion is its object, we can appreciate that our emotions reflect our way of seeing the world.

For Max Scheler, intentionality denotes that all feelings “possess ‘a lived reference to the I (or the Person).’ The intentional correlates of the feelings of life are the values closed within one’s own vitality; those of the spiritual feelings are the self-value of the Person”(Strasser, 1977, p. 84). Emotions, for Scheler, are self-involved in that they are about objects that are important to us. To understand Scheler’s notion of intentionality, we must first distinguish between the “feeling of something” and “feeling states.” In his book, Formalism in Ethics and Non-formal Ethics of Value, Sc heler writes that there is original emotive intentionality in the “feeling of something” as opposed to “feeling states” (Scheler, 1973, p. 256).

All specifically sensible feelings, are by their nature, states, and may be more or less “objectless.” They include moods, which may have causes but are not directed to any object in particular. With intentional feeling, however, there is a connection between the feeling and what is therein felt. Scheler writes,

There is here an original relatedness, a directedness of feeling toward something objective, namely, values. This kind of feeling is not a dead state of affairs that can enter into associative connections or be related to them…. This feeling is a goal-determined movement…. It is not externally brought together with an object, whether immediately or through a representation (which can be related to a feeling either mechanically or fortuitously or by mere thinking). On the contrary,


feeling originally intends its own kind of objects, namely “values” (pp. 257-258).

If for Aristotle and Kant6 the significance of the emotional was hardly recognized, for Scheler, the emotional sphere of man has a place of importance side by side with all laws of logic and reason. The emotional sphere of man occupies a fundamental place for Scheler, a sphere which he called, together with Pascal, the “ordo amoris” which is “the harmonious structure of emotional intentionality and intentional feeling together with immanent intuited objects: values. Man, therefore, is the ontic place in which values occur” (Frings, p. 89).

Woman and Empathy

Since woman is naturally inclined to emotional response to others, it is easy to understand why persons are easily the object of her emotions. For Stein, this is simply a consequence of her innate capacity for motherhood, which involves sharing the life of another, entering into it, and making that person’s concerns one’s own. Women have a greater capacity for exercising empathy which Stein describes as a clear awareness of another person, not simply of the content of his experience, but of his experience of that content. In empathy, one takes the place of the other without becoming strictly identical to him. It is not just understanding the experiences of the other, but taking them on as one’s own. Empathy comes from the Greek words Greek im (in) and pathe (meaning to suffer, feel). Stein actually used the German Einfuhlung meaning: “in-feeling” or feeling-into and feeling-within. Empathy is a rough translation of Einfuhlung which Stein used to refer to the experience of a clear awareness of a person, consisting not simply of the content of his experience, but of his experience of that content. Stein wrote an entire dissertation on the notion of empathy entitled “On the Problem of Empathy.” She became interested in empathy when Husserl, her mentor, discussed empathy in a lecture as a transcendental theory of experiencing someone else. His usage, however, was vague. For Husserl, empathy is the transcendental constitution of objects


in a consciousness as other than its own consciousness, alter ego. His usage of constitution refers to the givenness of sequential appearings of an object in our consciousness. For Stein, however, beings are not constituted as such, but are ‘felt-into.’ In studying empathy, Stein was interested in one’s own experiencing of other people as human beings; that is, how people are available to one another to be understood. For Husserl, however, experience of other individuals referred to their experiencing of the world. Husserl meant to specify that an objective world was a world available for other people to experience. Stein, however, would diverge from Husserl’s account of Einfühlung in her “creative misconstrual” of what he means by “an experiencing of other individuals” (Sawicki, 1997, p. 2). Stein holds that knowledge about other human beings cannot be completely accounted for through Husserlian analysis of the “transcendental constitution of objects in consciousness” (Sawicki, 1997, p. 145). This is so because something elusive has been left behind after the alien body, psyche, and soul are constituted; or rather their constitution as objec ts within consciousness presupposes something extra that cannot be constituted.

How is it that I register live experiences in which someone has been active although the someone was not I myself? Such experiences begin in sensibility, perhaps with the sight of a wound or the sound of a cry. How do I register that someone hurts although it is not I who hurt? The content “hurt” tends to follow the regular transition pathways through live body and soul toward the intellect, but it is impeded in a distinctive way. All this is unsaid by Husserl, but it is the missing link to his remark: “Where is empathy to be accommodated?” (Sawicki, 1997, p. 88).

Husserl would allow Stein to freely embark on her own

philosophical musings on empathy and would accept her results, the outcome being Stein’s dissertation On The Problem of Empathy that would earn her highest honors and would later be considered a breakthrough in phenomenology.


In examining empathy, Stein uses phenomenology, the study of human experience and of the ways things present themselves to us in and through such an experience. Its aim is to arrive at the knowledge of a thing by ‘bracketing’ its non-essentials so that we reach its essence or the thing-in-itself, the pure phenomenon. The word phenomenon is derived form the Greek word phos, meaning light; from phaino, to make appear or to reveal; from phainesthai, that which shows itself, and finally phainomenon, that which is manifested or that which appears. Husserl refused to go beyond the only data available to consciousness, namely appearances or phenomenon, thus his choice of the term phenomenology for his philosophical method. In fact his supreme rule was zu den Sachen selbst or “back to the things themselves” (Quito, 2001, p. 9). For Husserl, we come to know things through our consciousness. Without consciousness, there is no subject and object of knowledge. An object may be reflected in a mirror in the same way that it can register on the optical faculty, but without consciousness, it is only an object and not a correlate of consciousness, hence, not knowledge. This was what Husserl meant by Bewusstsein von E twas (consciousness of something). The conscious perceiver sees, hears, smells, tastes, and touches its object or correlate of consciousness (Quito, 2001, p. 10). In the course of knowing, Husserl uses a method known as bracketing or reduction or epoche. The aim of this method is apodicticity or clear and demonstrable certainty. Stein’s theory of empathy refers to an inner awareness of another human being as such, “entering” into the consciousness of the person empathized, so that my “I” gets inside the stream of consciousness of another “I.”

Stein’s contention is that awareness of another persons is achieved by perception. For Stein, to perceive is not merely ‘to see.’ Perceiving goes with seeing, feeling, sensing, ascertaining, judging happening all at the same time. And this seeing, feeling, sensing, ascertaining, judging happening all at the same time is better known as intuition, innere anshaung in Stein’s German usage, or superlogic and translogic in the usage of intuitionists like Bergson, or empathetic perception,


in Stein’s dissertation. This notion expresses what popular opinion credits to woman as quickness of perception or that she jumps to conclusions because she apprehends things faster than men, without being able to trace back the steps by which she arrived at a conclusion. Stein thus sees woman’s empathetic perception to be another of her strengths. It is, she writes,

“…an intuitive grasp of the living concrete; especially of the personal element. She has the special gift of making herself at home in the inner world of others.”

Conclusion

Emerita Quito, in her book on the phenomenology of Husserl and Stein claims that empathetic perception is intuitive intelligence “where Logic no longer applies, where the rules of knowledge are suspended, where one uses supra-logical means to arrive at truth.” Essences are ‘seen’ in their entirety, not followed sequentially.” The person, Stein writes, is recognized in his entirety, as a compenetrating and meaningful whole, so that we apprehend the essence of the human being or an objective understanding about the individual’s being and value as a “person.” Clearly, there is a big advantage to this type of knowledge. We are led to agree with Quito that with empathy, “…there is no possibility of error.” Stein makes a significant contribution to the clarification of the problem of other minds with her theory of empathy in that, aside from rejecting skeptical worries about the knowledge of other minds, empathy unfolds the person as a meaningful and intelligible whole. Empathy allows us to go beyond a purely “mentalistic” view of personhood that limits the person to a mind or to reason. So far, as it aids us in comprehending deeply woman’s intrinsic “connectedness” with persons, her theory of empathy is Stein’s major accomplishment. She uses it to arrive at an incisive analysis and a penetrating understanding of woman’s ethos and of the distinct value and singular importance of her feminine nature.


Stein’s argument for emotional life in woman as an important hallmark of feminine ethos, can be viewed as an unambiguous philosophical framework with which we can dispute long-standing claims to the woman as “inferior” to man. Stein helps us to appreciate how motherhood is the sole privilege and unique advantage of woman. In exercising her motherhood, whether biological or spiritual, woman can imbue human relations with delicateness and nurturing care.

As Stein’s theory of empathy shows, intuitive intelligence is more intimately tied up with love than analytical intelligence. In short, woman is endowed with unique and exclusive qualities with which she can contribute to the common good in ways that many men cannot since they is short of those qualities or possesses them on a lower scale. Thus in these times, the question of woman’s position or standing in society takes on new significance in the light of her feminine singularity.

NOTES

1 This version of “What Makes Woman Woman,” which is an excerpt from the author’s book, Contemplating Woman (FEU Publications, 2007), was presented at OPO’s Third Meeting, Chinese University of Hong Kong, December 12, 2008.2 With the discrimination against women in German universities, Stein herself could not get a university post inspite of her outstanding academic achievements.3 Ethos meaning character is derived from the Greek charrassein which means distinctive mark.4 Stein believed that all professions should be open to women.5 Kenny uses ‘intensionality’ in his book. I will employ ‘intentionality,’ a more familiar usage.6 David notes that “the paradigm for this, of course, is Immanuel Kant’s self-legislating moral subject, for whom the most distinctive thing about ethical reasoning lies not in any effort at consultation with others, but in the ability to deploy quasi-mathematical approaches in stating, defending, and applying universal principles” (p.6).


REFERENCES

Allen, Prudence. (1995) Edith Stein: The Human Person as Male and Female. In Images of the Human: The Philosophy of the Human Person in a Religious Context. Chicago: Loyola Press.

Allen, Prudence. (2002) The Concept of Woman. Michigan, U.S.A.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.

Adolphe, Jane. (2003) Saint, Scholar, Forerunner Woman. Star. Retrieved from http://www.saintaustinreview.com/may03.

Baseheart, Mary Catharine. (1993) Edith Stein’s Philosophy of Community. The Personalist Forum Supplement, 8 (1).

Baseheart, M.C., McAlister, Linda Lopez, & Stein, Waltraut. (1990, 1995) Edith Stein in A History of Women Philosophers, 4,157-187. Ellen Waithe (Ed.). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, & Boston: Kluwer.

Batzdorff, Susanne. (1998) Aunt Edith: the Jewish Heritage of a Catholic Saint. Springfield, IL: Templegate Publishers.

Borden, Sarah. (2003a) Woman and Women’s Education. Stein: Edith Stein. London: Continuum Press.

Borden, Sarah. (4 October 2003b) Value, Emotions, and Edith Stein. A paper presented at the Notre Dame’s Center for Ethics and Culture conference on Formation and Renewal.

Brenner, Rachel Feldhay. (1997) Writing as Resistance, Four Women Confronting the Holocaust. U.S.A.: Pennsylvania State University.

Chervin, Ronda. (1986) Feminine, Free, and Faithful. In Real Women. San Francisco: Ignatius Press.

David, Luis S., S.J., Ph.D. (2001) Women’s Standpoint, the Gendering of Moral Voices/Moral Selves, and the View from Foucault. 2(1). Philippines: University of the Philippines.

De Torre, Joseph M. (1995) From Woman to Feminism. In Generation and Degeneration: A Survey of Ideologies. Manila: Southeast Asian Sciences Foundation, Inc.

Frings, Manfred S. (1965) Max Scheler, Non-Formal Ethics in our Time. Philosophy Today, 9 (24). U.S.A.: De Paul University.

Garcia, Laura. (1997) Edith Stein - Convert, Nun, Martyr in Crisis. Gilligan, Carol. (1997) Concepts of the Self and Morality. Harvard Educational

Review 47. U.S.A.: Harvard Educational Review.


Herbstrith, Waltraud. O.C.D., (1992) Edith Stein: A Biography. San Francisco: Ignatius Press.

Husserl, Edmund E. (1960) Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff.

Lerner, Gerda. (1993) The Creation of Feminist Consciousness -- From Middle Ages to 1870. New York: Oxford University Press.

Mead, Jude, C.P. (1999) Spirituality and Some Aspects of Feminine Psychology. In Real Women. Sr. Concetta Belleggia (Ed.). San Francisco: Ignatius Press.

Pope John Paul II. (1988) Mulieris Dignitatem, Retrieved from http://www.vatican.org.

Pope John Paul II. (1995) Letter to Women. Vatican City: Libreria Edtrice Vaticana.

Pope John Paul II. (1999) Apostolic Letter Proclaiming Saint Bridget of Sweden, Catherine of Siena, and Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) Co-Patronesses of Europe. Retrieved from http://www.ocd.pcn.net/ed_paten.htm. Problem of Other Minds. (2004). In Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved from http://www.britannica.com/ebc/article?tocId=9374234&query=automaton&ct=

Quito, Emerita S. (2001) Phenomenology: Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein. Philippines: De La Salle Press, Inc.

Sawicki, Marianne. (1997) Body, Text, and Science: The Literacy of Investigative Practices and the Phenomenology of Edith Stein. U.S.A.: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Sawicki, Marianne. (15 October 1998) Personal Connections: The Phenomenology of Edith Stein. Lecture delivered at St. John’s University, New York. Retrieved from http://www.nd.edu/~colldev/subjects/catholic/personalconn.html.

Sayson, Ciriaco M., Jr. (1994) Emotions and their Objects. U.S.A.: University of Massachussetts.

Scheler, Max. (1973) Formalism in Ethics and Non-formal Ethics of Value. U.S.A.: Northwestern University Press.

Solokowski, Robert. (2001) Introduction to Phenomenology. Cambridge University Press.

Solomon, Robert C. (1993) The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life. U.S.A.: Hacket Publishing Company, Inc.


Stein, Edith. (1996) Essays on Woman. Freda Mary Oben (Trans.). 2nd edition, revised. Washington, DC: ICS Publications.

Stein, Edith. (1989) On the Problem of Empathy. U.S.A.: ICS Publications. Stein, Edith. (1956) Problems of Women’s Education in Selected Writings of

Edith Stein. Hilda Graef (Trans.) Newman Press, Westminster, Md. Stein, Edith. (1989) Philosophy of Woman and Women’s Education. Hypatia.

A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 4 (1). Stein, Edith. (2000) Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities. Marianne

Sawicki and Mary Catharine Baseheart (Trans.). Marianne Sawicki.(Ed.). Washington DC: ICS Publications.

Stern, Karl. (1985) The Flight from Woman. New York, U.S.A.: Paragon House.

Strasser, Stephan.(1977) Phenomenology of Feeling. Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press.

Von Hildebrand, Alice. (2002) The Privilege of Being a Woman. Michigan: Veritas Press.

Von Hildebrand, Dietrich. (1996) Man and Woman. Manchester, New Hampshire: Sophia Institute Press.

Webster’s Twentieth Century Dictionary. (1970) U.S.A.: World Publishing Company.

White, E.M. (1912) The Woman-Soul. International Journal of Ethics 22 (3). U.S.A.: University of Chicago Press.

Wisdom, John. (1952) Other Minds. U.S.A.: New York Philosophical Library. Wojtyla, Karol. (1993) Love and Responsibility. San Francisco: Ignatius Press.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

ROSEMARY R.P. LERNER, Ph.D. (Institut Supérieur de Philosophy of the University of Louvain, Belgium) is Professor (Ordinarius) of Philosophy at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, current Co-ordinator of the Doctorate Program of the same institution’s Graduate School, and in charge of several courses and seminars at the Graduate and Undergraduate levels mostly on Modern Philosophy (Leibniz and Kant) and Contemporary Philosophy, especially Husserlian Phenomenology. She is editor of Interpreting the Experience of Tolerance (2007), of the Acta fenomenológica latinoamericana (volumes 1-3, 2005, 2007 and 2009), and of the Journal Estudios de fi losofìa (volumes 3-6). She has published more than 80 papers mostly dealing with Husserlian phenomenology and ethics and translated philosophical texts from English, French and German into Spanish. Her main research interests are in Husserlian Phenomenology.

LUBICA UČNÍK, Ph.D. (Murdoch University, Western Australia) is a senior lecturer at Murdoch University, Australia. She has published a book European Discourses on Rights. The Quest for Statehood in Europe: The Case of Slovakia and several articles on Patočka. She is currently pursuing links between Jan Patočka and Hannah Arendt, in particular, their thinking on responsibility in the modern age that is an extension of the project initiated by Husserl in his late writing on the life-world.

203

DERMOT MORAN, Ph.D. (Yale University, U.S.A.) is Professor of Philosophy at University College Dublin and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy . His books include: The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena (1989), Introduction to Phenomenology (2000), Edmund Husserl. Founder of Phenomenology (2005), and (ed.) The Routledge Companion to Twentieth Century Philosophy (2008). He is Founding Editor of The International Journal of Philosophical Studies, and co-editor of the Contributions to Phenomenology book series (Springer). He a member of the Board of Directors of the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology (CARP) and a member of the Steering Committee of the International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP). He is currently completing a book on Husserl’s Crisis of European Sciences for Cambridge University Press.

PETER L P SIMPSON, Ph. D. (Victoria University of Manchester, UK) is Professor of Philosophy and Classics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His primary research interests are moral and political philosophy and ancient philosophy, especially Aristotle. He has published two books on Aristotle, a book of essays on moral and political philosophy, an introductory book on the philosophy of Karol Wojtyla, and numerous articles (details at www.aristotelophile.com). He has just finished a translation of a Renaissance Latin commentary on Aristotle’s Magna Moralia and is also working on his own translation and commentary on that same work of Aristotle’s.

JEREMIAH A. REYES, M.A. Philosophy (University of the Philippines, Diliman) is a Philosophy Instructor in UP Diliman. His research interests include medieval and analytic philosophies of language, especially on the issue of “metaphor”; and also Christian Existentialism in the line of Pascal, Hamann, Kierkegaard and Shestov. He is currently taking his Ph.D. in Philosophy in UP Diliman.

204

MICHAEL DWYER, Ph.D. (Florida State University, U.S.A) received his BA in philosophy, psychology, and education in 1979 from Clark University. In 1985, he was awarded an MA in philosophy from the University of Wyoming. He received his PhD in history and philosophy of education in 1999 from the Florida State University for a dissertation on the thought of Thomas Jefferson. Since 1988, he served as Visiting Professor and Adjunct Professor for educational foundations in the School of Education, Florida State University. Dr. Dwyer was a member of the U.S. Philosophy of Education Society (PES) and the Southeastern Philosophy of Education Society (SEPES). His article with Luise Prior and Emanuel Shargel, “The Educational Implications of Heideggerian Authenticity” appeared in Philosophy of Education, Proceedings of the Philosophy of Education Society. Volume 44. 1988. pp. 140-149.

EDA LOU IBASCO, M.A. Philosophy (University of the Philippines, Diliman), teaches philosophy at FEU. Her current research is on psychology and special education.

MAYBELLE MARIE O. PADUA, M.A. Philosophy (University of the Philippines Diliman) is Associate Professor at the Far Eastern University. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Philosophy at UP Diliman. She was awarded the Atty-Lourdes Lontok-Cruz Award for Best Study on Woman and Women Issues by the UP Center for Women’s Studies in 2006 for her thesis The Ethos of Woman in the Philosophy of Edith Stein (2004), now in book form, entitled Contemplating Woman (Manila: FEU Publications, 2007). Her research interests include the philosophy of Edith Stein, emotions, ethics, and metaphysics.

205

Documents

What Makes Woman 'WOMAN