Phenomenology and the Problem of History: A Study of Husserl's Transcendental Philosophy

4. Intersubjectivity

4 / Intersubjectivity As DEPICTED SO FAR in our exposition, HusserI's phenomenology takes its point of departure from consciousness conceived as individual consciousness. This point of departure was taken for granted in the Logical Investigations and was made more explicit in the theory of the Ich, which was first treated in Ideas I and further developed in the Cartesian Meditations. In this last work, published in 1931, Husserl tacitly admits to a rather remarkable fact: in the thirty years since the inception of phenomenology Husserl had published no systematic or extensive treatment of the problems falling under the heading of intersubjectivity, e.g., the problem of our experience of another consciousness and of the concept of a plurality of subjects. True, he had treated such themes in lectures and unpublished writings-they occupy an important position, for example, in the now available second volume of the Ideas/ and Husserl himself traces his handling of the problem to lectures given in 1910.2 It is nevertheless worthy of note that this problem, like that of genetic phenomenology, was not publicly assigned a place within phenomenology until Husserl was seventy years old. Today, with so many unpublished manuscripts available through the work of the Husserl Archives, one is tempted to overlook the significance for Husserl's own development of the distinction between the published and the unpublished works. 1. Husserliana IV, §§ 29, 43 ff. 2. FTL, p. 243 n; also Husserliana V ("Nachwort"), p. 150, n. 2. Intersubjectivity / 83 We now know that both genetic phenomenology and the problem of intersubjectivity had occupied Husserl for many years prior to their first appearance in print, and we can trace their development.3 But certain criteria are invoked in the choice of what to publish which are not invoked either in choosing material for lectures, which often have an experimental and improvised character, or, obviously, in purely private Forschungsmanuskripte . Even if the two themes mentioned had been dealt with by Husserl before 1913, the fact is that in that year he published his "General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology" (the Ideas) and saw fit to ignore both of them, or at least not to accord them the important position they occupy in the "Introduction to Phenomenology" (the Cartesian Meditations) of 1931. Obviously, certain conclusions about HusserI's attitude can be drawn from this fact: either he felt that these themes were not important enough to be included in an uninitiated reader's first meeting with phenomenology; or he was not satisfied with his own treatment of them. Perhaps both considerations were involved . The second conclusion is supported by the fact that Ideas II, in which both subjects receive some treatment, was meant to be published along with the first volume but was continually held back for revision and was never published at all during HusserI's lifetime. Yet the fact that Husserl published only the first, "introductory" volume, which does not treat these themes, supports the first conclusion. In any case it is clear that his attitude had changed by the time of the Cartesian Meditations, where the two problems occupy important positions. We shall try to show, as we have said, that Husserl's fully developed treatment of the problem of intersubjectivity has important implications related to the emergence of the concept of history in the Crisis. Before that can be done, it is necessary to understand just what HusserI considers the "problem of intersubjectivity " to be. His conception of the problem is obscured by the manner and the context in which it is given its best-known and most fully developed exposition, that is, in the Fifth of the Cartesian Meditations. 3. Three new volumes of Husserliana (Vols. XIII-XV), which have just appeared at this writing, contain manuscripts devoted to intersubjectivity dating from 1905: Zur Phiinomenologie der Intersubjektivitiit : Erster Teil, Zweiter Teil, Dritter Teil, ed. Iso Kern (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973). 84 / PHENOMENOLOGY AND HISTORY THE PROBLEM OF THE FIFTH MEDITATION WHAT DOES HUSSERL SEEK in the Fifth Meditation? According to the title, the "Uncovering of the Sphere of Transcendental Being as Monadological Intersubjectivity." But in the first paragraph it appears that this task must be undertaken because of the objection that phenomenology, as described in the preceding four meditations, could 'be branded . . . as transcendental solipsism." 4 By introducing the problem in this way, Husserl has placed a great obstacle in the way of his readers' understanding of what...