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9. A Hermeneutic Phenomenology of Subjective and Objective Spirit: Husserl, Natorp, and Cassirer
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235 9 A Hermeneutic Phenomenology of Subjective and Objective Spirit: Husserl, Natorp, and Cassirer Introduction In the introduction to the third and last volume of his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms of 1929, entitled “Phenomenology of Knowledge,” Ernst Cassirer remarks that the meaning in which he employs the term “phenomenology ” is Hegelian rather than according to “the modern usage of the term” (1954/III, vi). What sense can it make, then, to invoke Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology in this context? Yet if, roughly speaking, phenomenology can be characterized as the logos of phenomena, that is, of being insofar as it appears (phainesthai) to a conscious subject, then the sense of phenomenology need not be so different from what Cassirer terms “the modern usage.”1 Phenomenology in this more liberal sense would be an account of how consciousness experiences the world through different forms of experience and in different spaces of meaning. The addition “hermeneutic,” moreover, points to a broader methodological scope than that which one usually associates with phenomenology, that is, the phenomenological paradigm of description based on intuition. “Hermeneutic” connotes an interpretive dimension that goes beyond mere description. It will become necessary to expand phenomenology in this direction, as has been shown already in chapter 6. This chapter will carry on with this interpretive trend, but will do so in comparing Husserl with neo-Kantianism in the form of Cassirer. In this attempt at a comparison between Cassirer and Husserl, I shall employ this broad concept of phenomenology—with the addition “hermeneutic”—as a philosophical project that investigates how consciousness relates to the world. In this sense, it is neither solely Cassirer’s nor Husserl’s nor, for that matter, Hegel’s, although the phrase “of subjective and objective spirit” undoubtedly has a Hegelian ring to it. Indeed, it points to a subjective and objective tendency that is present in Husserl 236 H U S S E R L , K A N T , A N D N E O - K A N T I A N I S M and Cassirer, respectively. Moreover, “a hermeneutic phenomenology” indicates that both philosophical concepts and methods, phenomenology and neo-Kantianism, usually taken to be so different from the very outset, can be mediated and brought to a certain synthesis. This synthesis forms a correlation within an account that aims at a transcendental theory that elucidates the interrelation of mind and world. This comparison does not intend merely to compare terminology when employing the words “phenomenology,” “hermeneutic,” and “subjective and objective spirit” to characterize this enterprise. Instead, I propose to broaden the restrictive sense in which both philosophical schools have used these terms, in order to open them up towards a more encompassing account of transcendental philosophy in the spirit of phenomenology and Kantianism. Indeed, Husserl’s analysis of the constitution of the world through subjectivity’s passive and active achievements and Cassirer’s account of the symbolic forms as transcendental forms of intuition that constitute and structure the cultural “spaces of meaning” can and must be seen as forming a correlation. This correlation gives an account of the way the world appears for an experiencing subject in the framework of a philosophical doctrine that is committed to transcendental idealism. Idealism states that all being is being-for-consciousness, and this forms a correlation that cannot be severed. Both Husserl and Cassirer endorse this general doctrine , yet they pursue it in different but reciprocal “directions.” Both the neo-Kantian and phenomenological methods in this sense are incomplete without one another. Certainly, for both Cassirer and Husserl this would have been asking a lot. Neither of them saw their philosophies as complementing each other in this way. However, both not only took over crucial elements of the other’s theory and integrated them into their own; they were also working on complementary projects. Perhaps they were not able to really see eye to eye due to the belligerent character of the philosophical scene in Europe in the first decades of the twentieth century (though their direct personal contact was reverential and polite). Indeed, the vigor with which discussions were fought out in defending opposing philosophical doctrines at that time is hardly comprehensible some eighty-plus years afterwards. Philosophical convergences were both ignored and deliberately overlooked. Yet to spell out these intersections and filiations after so much time has merit not only for the sake of historiography and for rectifying the tired image that neo-Kantianism was a floundering project that was rightfully superseded by phenomenology...