Beyond the Phenomena: Husserl, Abraham, Rilke

When Edmund Husserl describes the perceptual constitution of things in, among others, his lecture course from 1907, Ding und Raum, his rigorous logic of analysis is crossed through with a rhetoric of desire. To begin, the given "contents" of sensory data are found to contain no such thing as the adumbration of an identifiable object until our acts of apprehension lend them surplus meaning, let them point beyond themselves, and thereby give them the sense of leaving something to be desired: namely, other and fuller views of the intended "thing." "Die Empfindungsinhalte für sich enthalten noch nichts von dem Charakter der Wahrnehmung," Husserl writes, "nichts von der Richtung auf den einen wahrgenommenen Gegenstand. … Durch die Auffassung gewinnen sie, die an sich gleichsam ein toter Stoff wäre, beseelende Bedeutung" (Husserl 16: 45–6). It is only by taking data to mean something beyond the givens that things can "appear" as phenomena to us: otherwise, we would see an inconsistent, changing stream of images, but there would be no things, which are found precisely by our wanting to see them when we look their way.

To be sure, this signature trait of what Husserl will call "intentionality" may not at first seem to imply conscious want or unconscious libido. Rather, his discourse expressly addresses, as Robert Sokolowski has written, "a type of constitution" that "takes place in sensibility before any objectivation, any 'thesis' takes place," and in a manner that is "automatic and necessary" (Sokolowski 112, 99).¹ And it is precisely as if to demonstrate the "automatic and necessary" character of the intentionality of perception that Husserl will shift from presenting meaning as an effect of "animating" (beseelende) apprehension (Husserl 16: 46) to speaking of appearances as though they were animated with a "will" and message of their own:

Die erst auftauchende Erscheinung ist schon Bedeutung und bedeutet schon Gegebenheit. Aber sie will gleichwohl noch auf etwas gedeutet werden. Worauf? Auf das, was sich zwar schon in ihr und so in jeder weiteren Darstellungsphase gegenständlich darstellt, aber doch noch nicht so, wie es sich darstellen sollte, was also noch nicht vollkommen … zur Darstellung kommt.

(16: 107–8; my emphasis)

What remains unclarified within such formulations as these, however, is the emergence of the motivation to perceive, which could neither proceed from the sensory data that give themselves to be seen, nor from any single—necessarily one-sided—appearance of the thing to be grasped. Initially, there could be no way to know what we are looking for when we begin to perceive something, and since it is only of perceptions that we become aware when we perceive, but not the sensory data and acts of apprehension that will have formed them,² there could not even be a way to know that we are seeking anything at all when we begin looking for ever more fulfilling presentations of "things."³ Taken on its own terms, perception would thus appear to lack all grounds for the play between excessive meaning and motivating lack—or "das Spiel von Intention und Erfüllung"—that makes it up as it goes along (Husserl 16: 108; cf. 110).

It is therefore in departing from the immanent field of the phenomenological reduction that Husserl seeks to account for the subjective drive to perceive and know the world, and when he does, appeals of various provenance insinuate themselves into his writing. In order to explain our automatic orientation towards perceptual optima, for example, Husserl will draw an analogy to our empirical longing for the fullest enjoyment: "Überhaupt genügt uns das Unvollkommene nicht, wenn wir einmal vom Vollkommenen genossen haben, es fehlt ihm etwas, es weist auf das Vollkommene hin, das, wenn es erlebt wäre, uns befriedigen würde. So auch hier" (16: 106). In order to establish the criteria for optimality, Husserl will then shift registers again and recur to our practical interests: "handelt [es] sich um ein Haus hinsichtlich seiner architektonischen Form, so fragt es sich: In welchen Erscheinungen ist dies am besten gegeben? Wird das Baumaterial zum Gegenstand des Interesses, wird es fraglich, ob die S...