Edmund Husserls Theorie der Raumkonstitution (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 305 Edmund Husserls Theorie der Raumkons~i~u~ion. By Ulrich Claesges. Phaenomenologica 19. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964. Pp. 148. Gld 16.75) The Cartesian disjunction between res cogi~ans and re~ extensa, which led to several other irreducible dichotomies in the philosophy of Kant, can be mediated through the phenomenological analysis of space. Ulrich Claesges shows how much Husserl contributes to this analysis; the texts of Husserl already contain many ideas about lived space which are commonly thought to be discoveries of later phenomenologists. In Part I Claesges begins with a general statement about constitution and phenomenology, and about space-time dimensions in the constitution of things. In Part H he develops space as constituted visually, tactuaUy, and in the body-consciousness. Finally he examines kinaesthesis more completely in Part III. Part I has some fine developments of the difference between the scientific world (which essentially strives to exclude any reference to subjectivity) and the lived world (where subjectivity essentially is present as co-ordinated to the world). The nature of "eidos" in Husserl is well explained; it is described as a structure already present and known (bvkann$) as a guide in ordinary experience, but recognized (erkann~) and made explicit only through reflection. The role of eidetic variation in m,.k~ng the essence recognizable is well presented. The difference between an "exact" (idealized) science and a "morphological " (descriptive) science is developed and used to good effect in showing that geometry is not the only science of space; geometry is an exact science, but there is room for an apriori morphological science of space as well. Space and time are introduced as dimensions belonging to the experience we have of things; they are not given prior to the objects in space and time. When he begins his study of visual space in Part II Claesges indicates that most of his analysis will be based on the D Manuscripts. He examines visual space by describing, with Husserl, the essential components in our experience of "phantoms," of extended patterns recognized as distinct from our body but taken in abstraction of the causal agency that would make them "things." The components of "here" and "there," the implication of a viewer in such components, the flow of visual profiles, the kinaesthesis of the viewer as a noetic correlate to such a flow, the notion of background and object and motion in a field, the concept of a "normal" profile of the object, the role of the "capacities" of the viewer to move in this visual field--all these are described by Claesges, and he ends with some critical remarks about Oscar Becker's explanation of the tridimensionality of space. In reading these pages one sees how similar Goethe's Farbenlehre is to Hnsserl's noematic descriptions of visual space, especially in its methodology. Claesges begins his analysis of tactile space by comparing it to visual space, and quickly gets to the problem of the constitution of one's own body. In this problem he finds an aporia which, he claims, must be resolved if Husserl's theory of constitution is to be consistent : the body can be constituted as res extensa only by means of corporeal mobility or kinaesthesis; if we are to feel our body as a thing extended in space, we must be able to move parts of our body over other parts. But corporeal mobility itself presupposes bodily extension. We seem to have a vicious circle. Mobility conditions bodily space, but bodily space conditions mobility. (The same paradox is available in respect to sensations: to constitute the body as an object, we must suppose the possibility of hyletic data, but the possibility of hyletie data as something "given" to consciousness supposes the body already constituted.) Claesges resolves the paradox in the following way. If we limit ourselves to visual space and kinaesthesis, we cannot constitute the body as "my" body. It is true, the body is a special object in visual space in that it is invariant in its position; it is always "here" as opposed to objects "there." But nothing yet justifies its being called "my" body. Tactile space allows us to call the body "mine...