Nietzsche and Phenomenology: Power, Life, Subjectivity

14 The Object of Phenomenology

258 14 The object of Phenomenology didier Franck and in a word: it is perhaps, in the entire unfolding of the spirit, a matter of the body. —Kritische Studienausgabe 10, 24 [16], 655 “this universal a priori of correlation between experienced object and manners of givenness,” husserl confided two years before his death, “affected me so deeply that my whole subsequent life-work has been dominated by the task of systematically elaborating on this a priori of correlation.”1 The discovery of this universal a priori, which is none other than that of intentionality, signifies that every being, whatever its meaning, points toward a subjective system of lived experiences; that every being, whatever its region of origin, is the object of a consciousness, or again that its objectivity is phenomenality itself. Thus the intentional analysis aligns itself with those objects whose variety it alone can manifest, thanks to its return to their modes of being given.2 This alignment implies that the object gives itself prior to any clarification of its noeticonoematic structures, which precisely weave together what is given, such that phenomenology , as the absolute science of constituting consciousness, nevertheless takes its point of departure in an object both constituted and relative. here, once again, the beginning proves to be the outcome, the result. according to an expression from the Cartesian Meditations, the object is thus indeed the guiding thread necessary for exploring the syntheses of intentional life. Phenomenology is the constitutive system of all possible objects of consciousness. in the fashion of constitution itself, this system is stratified. The material ontologies concerned with objects of an eidetically circumscribed and defined region are subordinated to a formal ontology concerned with the object in general. transcendent objects3 are nevertheless not the only guiding thread possible, since those immanent acts, by which objects are given up to the gaze, can likewise take on this guiding The Object of Phenomenology | 259 function as the objects of internal time consciousness, which self-constitutes in an absolutely unique manner. Formal ontology thus presupposes transcendental egology. if the object, in the expanded sense that husserl gave it, is indeed a guiding thread, then the guiding thread is always an example, which is to say, a specimen and a model. The choice of exemplary object therefore will not be accidental; it will be commanded by the very meaning of the intentionality to which it opens an access. What, then, is the privileged thread guiding constitutive reflection? is it the immanent temporal object or the transcendent object? despite the ultimate character of the investigations devoted to the temporal self-constitution of the ego, the pure lived experience could not be the guiding thread of intentional description, as the central problem of phenomenology, that is, the origin of transcendence, cannot be confused with the fundamental problem of the origin of intentionality back to which acts alone can lead us. From the time of his 1907 lectures on The Idea of Phenomenology, husserl endeavored to understand how an absolutely self-enclosed consciousness could emerge from itself and posit something that would be opposed, or counterposed, to it qua object. in other words, constitutive analysis, designed to resolve the enigma of transcendence, is necessarily guided by a transcendent object. yet is this object real or ideal? to reach the structures of intentionality, must we follow the constitution of a physical thing or that of an exact essence? The response seems easy enough. From his 1887 thesis, On the Concept of Number, up to The Origin of Geometry in 1936, the mathematical object would be the permanent theme of phenomenological contemplation. moreover when, in 1929, husserl wrote that his 1891 Philosophy of Arithmetic was “the first investigation that sought to make ‘categorical objectivities’ of the first level and of higher levels (sets and cardinal numbers of a higher ordinal level) understandable on the basis of the ‘constituting’ intentional activities,”4 did he not tacitly grant that the constitution of formal objects was the paradigm of all constitution in general? That number would thus have been the initial motif of constitutive analysis does not suffice in making the ideal object into the guiding thread required by and for the study of consciousness. indeed as long as psychologism is not surmounted—as it will be in the Logical Investigations—the authentic meaning of ideality will not be set forth and, in a certain sense, number will remain understood as a reality. The first object of constitutive analysis is therefore not ideal. What, then...