Early Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy

3 Consciousness as Distance: Husserl’s “Phenomenology” (the 1929 Encyclopedia Britannica Entry)

63 3 Consciousness as Distance: Husserl’s “Phenomenology” (the 1929 Encyclopedia Britannica Entry) Freudian psychoanalysis makes a twofold contribution to the project of continental philosophy. On the one hand, like Bergsonism, it places consciousness within a larger system, that of the unconscious. It truly opens the way for the outside. On the other, by means of the priority of the derivatives, it raises the question of the being of language. On the surface, we find neither of these contributions in Husserl. Nevertheless, phenomenology is the dominant movement of continental philosophy in the twentieth century.1 Like psychoanalysis and Bergsonism, phenomenology develops from the nineteenth-century decline of metaphysics and the ascent of psychology. In the first edition of his first major work, the 1900–1901 Logical Investigations, Husserl defines phenomenology as “descriptive psychology.”2 Here, however, phenomenology looks not to be “depth psychology,” but a psychology of consciousness. In 1907, in The Idea of Phenomenology, Husserl establishes a firm and lasting link between phenomenology and Descartes’ philosophy. There is no question that phenomenology elaborates on Descartes’ discovery of the “ego cogito.” The discovery is made possible by methodical doubt. Husserl adopts this method.3 Husserlian phenomenology is made possible by the suspension of belief in transcendent reality (the epoché) and then by a reduction to subjective experience, to immanence (the phenomenological reduction ). The epoché places immanent, subjective experience on a level that is no longer merely psychological. So in 1913, in the first book of his Ideas, Husserl redefines phenomenology as “transcendental.” Kant first defines 64 · Early Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy transcendental philosophy as a philosophy concerned with determining the conditions for the possibility of experience. These conditions are not transcendent or otherworldly. Although they are immanent to experience, the conditions cannot, for Kant, be experienced; insofar as they are conditions , they must be different from experience. For Husserl, however, the conditions of experience must be able to be experienced; there must be intuitive evidence for them. So Husserl speaks of transcendental experience . Yet Husserl recognizes the need for the conditions to be different from experience. We see here with phenomenology that difference is the central issue: a difference within experience, a difference that produces a paradoxical ambiguity. It is this paradoxical ambiguity that allows us to understand phenomenology as the “destruction” of the “immediate givenness of consciousness.” This destruction makes phenomenology a thought of the outside. The Husserl text we are going to investigate appears much later than Ideas I. It is the final version of his 1929 Encyclopedia Britannica entry for “phenomenology.”4 We have chosen this text not only because it is a compact presentation of Husserl’s mature thought, but also because, at the beginning, the text was to be written by both Husserl and Heidegger. At the time of the writing, Heidegger had just published Being and Time. For the Encyclopedia Britannica entry, Heidegger wrote the first half of the second version. He introduces phenomenology historically and in terms of the question of the meaning of being; he defines phenomenology as the return to the being of pure subjectivity, consciousness.5 Heidegger also made marginal notes on the parts and versions that Husserl himself wrote; Heidegger’s marginal notes stress repeatedly the need to conceive transcendental subjectivity within human existence and not as a separation of transcendental subjectivity from human existence. The collaboration fails. Evidence of the failed collaboration can be seen in a letter from Heidegger to Husserl on October 22, 1927; here Heidegger criticizes the second draft Husserl had completed. The appendices to this letter are particularly important (HUA IX: 603/CH: 138–39). Heidegger stresses that beings (or entities) with the sense of mundane being (in the world) cannot be explained by going back to entities with the same mode of being. But then he stresses that this difference does not mean that the transcendental is not an entity or being at all. For Heidegger, in order to understand this difference, we must determine the nature of the being called human Consciousness as distance · 65 existence (Dasein). Moreover, Heidegger asks, “what is the mode of being of this absolute ego—in what sense is it the same as the ever factical ‘I’; in what sense is it not the same?” Because Heidegger insists on the centrality of human existence, Husserl thinks that Heidegger has misunderstood the nature of the transcendental, falling into a kind of anthropologism. But Heidegger’s criticisms...