Abstract
This essay tries to account for a certain “speculative turn” in contemporary philosophy (Q. Meillassoux, G. Harman, M. Gabriel, etc.) from a phenomenological point of view. A first objective of it will consist in exposing the link between, on the one hand, the methodological sense of Husserl’s concrete phenomenological analyses (concerning, for example, time and intersubjective structure of transcendental subjectivity,) and on the other hand, the consequences that follow from the grounding of phenomenology as first philosophy. This will allow a largely underestimated research angle to be opened up, one that I call a “constructive phenomenology,” that constitutes an essential and original figure of transcendental philosophy in general. A second objective will then consist in the attempt to sketch the foundation of knowledge as knowledge, the core of a “phenomenological metaphysics.” Whereas the first part will remain within a Husserlian framework, the second will develop some elements of a “speculative transcendentalism” in a phenomenological perspective.
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Notes
Husserl (1950, p. 151).
Husserl (1981, pp. 67–74).
Husserl (1956, p. 13).
Husserl (1959, p. 4 sq. and p. 32).
Husserl (1968, p. 298 sq.).
Husserl (1973, p. 68).
Husserl (1974, p. 280). Cf. also the important Supplement XXIX of Husserliana VIII.
Husserl (1959, p. 170).
See on this matter Schnell (2004a, p. 40 sq.).
Husserl (1959, p. 33).
On this notion of “critique,” see Schnell (2008, p. 69 sq.).
Husserl (1959, p. 478).
Husserl (1959, p. 478).
Husserl (1959, p. 488).
Husserl (1973, p. 80).
Husserl (1973, p. 61).
The “primordial reduction,” which Husserl develops in §44 of the Fifth Cartesian Meditation, is a good example of such an Abbaureduktion. Cf. on this matter Husserl (2006, p. 394 sq.).
On this matter, Husserl speaks of a “complementary constructive part (konstruktives Ergänzungsstück)” of the phenomenological method in Husserl (1959, p. 139).
Cf. infra.
The phenomenological method is thus characterized, in a general way, by the épochè and the reduction (that is, the reconduction to transcendental subjectivity), by the intentional analysis of the immanent sphere of consciousness, and finally, by a certain number of "dismantling reductions (Abbaureduktionen)," as well as "phenomenological constructions," at the level of the "pre-immanent sphere of consciousness. These constructions are not the same for all ontological regions studied, and thus are distinguished from each other on the basis of the specific "guiding lines" for each region under consideration.
Husserl (1959, p. 35).
Husserl (1959, p. 477) (my emphasis).
Husserl (2002, p. 337).
My emphasis.
Husserl (1959, p. 390).
Husserl (1973, p. 165).
At the very end of Cartesian Meditations, Husserl writes: “Therefore a consequentially progressing phenomenology constructs a priori (yet with a strictly intuited essential necessity and universality), on the one hand, the forms of conceivable worlds and, on the other hand, conceivable worlds themselves, within the limits set by all conceivable forms of being and by their system of levels,” Husserl (1960, p. 154).
It is notable that this "constructive" move is not announced or worked out as such by Husserl – and the notion of "phenomenological construction" is found in his works only in the texts from the 1930s, directly inspired by his interviews with Fink. To our knowledge, this notion is used for the first time by Heidegger in Sein und Zeit. A deeper development of the notion can be found in Heidegger's 1929 summer semester course, in which he works out his conception of a "construction" on the basis of Fichte's Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre (1794/95) (see Heidegger (1997)).
A very illuminating example of this is the construction at work in the association that characterizes the constitution of the Other. When Husserl says that the appearance of a foreign body "awakens," in a reproductive way (thus, starting from myself), a world of appearing that resembles my own, he is referring to the experience of the necessity of constructing a structure on which basis alone the lived experience in question (in this case, that of the appearance of a foreign Leib) becomes comprehensible (and here it is in no way a matter of a psychological experience).
Cf. Schnell (2004a, p. 34).
Cf. § 63 of Husserl (1974).
We cannot appeal to Husserlian accounts to answer these two questions; rather, we must reconstitute what must necessarily be thought, in order to make this "implicit operational concept" explicit. On the notion of the "implicit operational concept," cf. Schnell (2004b, p. 255).
The analyses to come below exceed the nevertheless limited framework of Heideggerian reflections [cf. Heidegger (1927, §63, p. 310 sq. and §72, p. 375 sq.)] and Finkian thought (cf. the Sixth Cartesian Meditation) on the subject of phenomenological construction.
Let us in fact emphasize that this does not mean that every genesis (in the phenomenological sense of the term) proceeds by means of (phenomenological) constructions, but that constructive phenomenology constitutes one part (among others) of genetic phenomenology.
And when this factuality can no longer be genetized—and only then, that is, when the construction would no longer be phenomenological, but speculative—we leave phenomenology (in the strict sense) and enter metaphysics.
Actually, one must distinguish three sorts of "facta," which correspond respectively to the three fundamental regions or domains of phenomenology: first, "originary facts" or "absolutes" that originate in (phenomenological) metaphysics; then, "facts" in the most broad and general sense of the term, which are treated in descriptive phenomenology; and, finally, the highly particular "facta" (which both constitute a limit to the descriptive undertaking and are nevertheless genetically "constructible") that are thus the object of constructive phenomenology. Phenomenology may be characterized as a kind of philosophizing that gives accounts of these different types of facta using methodological procedures specific to each type.
Fichte (2005).
Let us recall that this “pure knowing” designates, for Fichte, not the knowing of any particular object, but the knowing that stems from the fact that a knowing is a knowing—thus, not any particular content of the knowing, but purely formal knowing. However, the phenomenon of such a "pure knowing" is nowhere to be found in Husserl's works.
For further details on the difference between Husserl’s constructive method and Fichte’s genetic method, see Schnell (2010) (second part, chapter I).
Husserl (1959, p. 48) (my emphasis).
On the idea—a Finkian one, for that matter—of a “constructive intuition,” see Manuscrit Z-IV, p. 94ab, in the Archives Eugen Fink at Freiburg, and the final chapter of Schnell (2010).
See §6 of the Introduction to volume II of the Logical Investigations, as well as the Krisis, §91.
Richir (1992, p. 11).
Cf. supra.
Detailed exposition of an example of such a phenomenological construction is not possible here. For this, we refer readers to Schnell (2007), where the author employs phenomenological constructions in the domains of time, intersubjectivity and the intentionality of drives and instincts.
This usage of the concept of “originary phenomenon” has nothing in common with the concept of “Urphänomen,” which we find in Husserl's later works. However, it bears some affinity with what Schelling terms"originary essence (Urwesen)," in the Weltalter, or, further, with what Robert Alexander calls “ogkorythme,” in his remarkable works on M. Richir.
Heidegger (1957, p. 25).
We will see below in what sense this “differentiated” character is to be understood.
Husserl clearly states: “Only someone who misunderstands either the deepest sense of intentional method, or that of transcendental reduction, or perhaps both, can attempt to separate phenomenology from transcendental idealism,” (Husserl 1981, p. 86).
In Schnell (2009) we set out the hypothesis that the founding and legitimation of the a priori character of knowledge in Fichte and Schelling amounts to the exposure of “premises” that—according to a famous letter of January 6, 1795, addressed to Hegel by Schelling—were alleged to be lacking in Kantian transcendental philosophy. The Fichtean analysis of the “Soll” (that is, of “categorical hypotheticity”) and of the “auto-objectivation of the Self” in the various “epochs” of the “pragmatic history of self-consciousness,” in Schelling's System des transzendentalen Idealismus (1800), are in each case, on the proposed reading, a legitimation of knowledge in the context of the authors’ understanding of transcendental idealism.
Phenomenological construction is not a universal method, but it of course depends upon what is to be constructed. Consequently, the construction that follows—and that concerns the “originary phenomenon”—is essentially distinct from any construction related to the constitution of what appears in the immanent sphere of transcendental consciousness.
This was first established by Fichte; cf. especially Wissenschaftslehre 1804 (second version).
Readers familiar with Fichte’s later philosophy will recognize in the phenomenological construction we carry out in what follows the attempt to make the Fichtean doctrine of the image bear fruit in an ultimate phenomenological legitimation of knowledge.
The image (Bild) character of the “originary phenomenon” is based in an originary imaging (Bilden) and, as we will subsequently establish, in its different modes (“Ab-bilden,” “Aus-bilden,” “Ein-bilden”).
In the phenomenological tradition, we first find this idea in Heidegger’s work. Cf. his thought on the subject of "possibilization" in Being and Time, Basic Problems of Phenomenology and Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. Our more detailed treatment of this topic can be found in the fourth chapter of Schnell (2011).
If in reflection the reflecting subject returns to that which is to be reflected, then the latter is effectively external.
These three aspects of the "originary phenomenon" can be fruitful for the understanding of contemporary aesthetics. In that case, it is a matter of distinguishing between three types of "images" as paradigms of three corresponding aesthetic attitudes (and the forms of artworks that are their correlates): (1) the "phenomenological image:" (example: the work of André Thomkins); (2) the "condensing image:" the artwork insofar as it concentrates or deposits the artist's creative, vital, erotic, etc. energies (examples: Mallarmé's Book, Bellmer's "Doll"); (3) the "reflecting image:" the artwork as reflection on the process of creation itself (example: the work of Gérard Esmérian).
Heidegger characterizes the “Bewahren (letting-be-true)” (of the work of art) in these terms. Cf. Heidegger (1980, p. 54).
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This essay is translated by Mary Beth Mader, University of Memphis, Department of Philosophy (mmader@memphis.edu).
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Schnell, A. Speculative foundations of phenomenology. Cont Philos Rev 45, 461–479 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-012-9230-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-012-9230-0