Husserl's Transcendental Subject: Locus of Responsibility

[Alexistentialism]

In his introduction to the Formal and Transcendental Logic, Husserl claims that “The belief that science leads to wisdom—to an actually rational self-cognition and cognition of the world and God, and, by means of such cognition, to a life somehow to be shaped closer to perfection, a life truly worth living, a life of “happiness”, contentment, well-being, or the like—the great belief, once the substitute for religious belief, has…lost its force”(5). Consequently, we, the people who have allowed the connection between science and wisdom to lose its force, have also lost the ability to “self-responsibly justify the sense of our culture and, with our continued labor, make this sense actual” (5). Although Husserl wrote these words before our birth, how true do they ring in our ears today? We live during a time when science and responsibility, as an ethic, can seem distant from one another. I’ll give you an example. The discovery of nuclear power led directly to the establishment of the United States Nuclear Weapons program known as the Manhattan Project. Albert Einstein’s last public act was the signing of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, which warned against “the dire consequences of nuclear war”. Last May, Joseph Rotblat, the youngest signatory of the Manifesto wrote a NYT Op-Ed piece just four months before his death. Dr. Rotblat wrote this piece for two reasons. The first was to remind us of the danger in separating science from ethics and the second was to voice his concern over how our culture, today, still hasn’t found an adequate way to bridge this gap.
I mention this only in order to illustrate an important theme innate to Husserl’s project. If responsibility, wisdom, ethics, and happiness are to be taken as serious projects for science, then the mathesis universalis, towards which Husserl aspires, must incorporate experience. This is because wisdom, ethics, and happiness are in themselves human experiences, i.e. relate to our daily lives. In other words, a mathesis universalis is necessarily two-sided and must incorporate both theoretical and practical reason. Husserl reminds us at the beginning of the Formal and Transcendental Logic that “reason eventually appeared among the significations of the word logos; and the logic that investigates the subjective, in order to ground Objective logic radically, is a science of logos in that sense too”(267E, 236 G, 101). The subjective is experienced and that which is practical includes experience as evidence for reason. Therefore, we need an investigation into phenomenology of logical reason as it fits into transcendental phenomenology as a whole.
Unfortunately “Traditional epistemology and psychology regard evidence as an uncommon special Datum, coming into the nexus of an internal psychic life in accordance with some inductive, or causal, empirical law”(289 E, <255>G). This is unfortunate because “a life of consciousness cannot exist without including evidence—if only by virtue of the sphere of immanent time—and also that, if we think of such a life as a consciousness relating to Objectivity, it cannot exist without including a stream of external experience”(289E, 255 G). So then, we must ask ourselves, where did this severe split between experience and Objectivity originate and why is this split both useful and detrimental to science and ourselves? In order to understand why transcendental phenomenology, in its uniting of both the objective and subjective into itself, qualifies as the mathesis, we must revisit the roots of math, science, and logic.
In the first paragraph on the first page of this text, Husserl claims that “Science in a new sense arises in the first instance from Plato’s establishing of logic, as a place for exploring the essential requirements of “genuine” knowledge and “genuine” science…”(<1> ). For Husserl, Plato’s first “establishing of logic” was a reaction against “sophistic skepticism”. The relativism of the sophists and their ”imitation of reasonable speech”…made “through the ears”(Klein 83) brought up the question of whether mimesis itself, i.e. the sophist’s “imitation”, “is a “true” or only an “apparent” one”(83-4 Klein). According to Jacob Klein, author of Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, this question of mimesis led Plato to question being, non-being, truth, illusion and the relationships between.
Consequently, the Platonic conception of arithmos assigned a specific type of ontological significance to the noetic character of countables, or numbers. Plato took a “scientific” turn away from daily life towards, to quote Klein, “the special nature of the object of arithmetic and logistic as that which alone of all things is in the strict sense knowable, being in fact always to some degree already known”(50). Plato’s turn is also an epistemological one as he is now concerned with the correspondence between knowing and “a corresponding being which possesses that permanence of condition which first makes it capable of being “known”(50). What Plato requires for arithmetical thinking is “an object which has a purely noetic character and which exhibits at the same time all the essential characteristics of the countable as such”(50). This nonsensual, or pure unit, must be accessible only to the understanding, uniform, and indivisible. Accordingly, Plato depended on “numbers of pure monads” and then stressed “…that there is “no mean difference” between” pure monads and “ordinary numbers”. Otherwise, the arithmetician and logician would be counting nothing, which is counterintuitive.
Interestingly, this concept of monad reappears again and again in the history of philosophy. Most notably in Leibniz, but also in Husserl’s conception of transcendental subjectivity. For Husserl, the ideal of an absolute existent and the absolute trueness of an absolute existent is a false one (273,241g). Instead, “every existent is ultimately relative; not only everything that is relative in any usual sense, but every existent is relative to transcendental subjectivity”(273). It is only transcendental subjectivity and transcendental intersubjectivity that exists “in itself and for itself” “…with the mode of existence that belongs to something “absolute””. That is, “An absolute existent is existent in the form, an intentional life—which, no matter what else it may be intrinsically conscious of, is, at the same time, consciousness of itself”(273). It is this very self-consciousness inherent to transcendental subjectivity that allows it to reflect upon itself , its evidences, and its experiences. Thus, transcendental subjectivity is intrinsically self-reflective and “includes the possibility of “self-examination””(273).
It is this quality of “in itself and for itself” working in conjunction with the idea of an indivisible unit that probably inspired Husserl to reintroduce the Greek monas (but, of course, Leibniz is likely to have factored in here too)… The monad, in Husserl, is the absolute subject, i.e. the transcendental subject that undergoes self-reflection. It is the self-examining character of the absolute subject, as an indivisible unit “in itself and for itself”, which ultimately justifies transcendental phenomenology as the ultimate science. For, Husserl says himself that if transcendental phenomenology is the ultimate science, then it “must show its ultimacy by showing that it can answer the question of its own possibility, therefore by showing that there is such a thing as an essential, endlessly reiterated, reflexive bearing upon itself”(268,236g).
Yet, the monad, as used by Husserl, also differs markedly from both the Greek monas and the Leibnizian monad of the Monadology. Husserl’s transcendental subjects “affect one another” transcendentally and cooperatively. Whether this notion of affectivity is out of character for the Greek monas or the Leibnizian monad, I do not know. Also, monads are nonsensual and it would seem odd, to me, to posit the absolute transcendental subject as nonsensual.
So, in returning to Plato, it was by detaching the arithmos, or the number of things, from the somatic, that Plato found his quest for the “pure” which, of course, led us straight towards an understanding of the Objective that is so essential to a genuine science. In purifying the unit, or the monad, and by attaching ontological significance to noeton, Plato detached noetic structures form the sensual. Thus, Aristotle takes this Platonic thesis as a point for departure. In contrast to Plato, Aristotle insists on the so-called “natural” meaning of the arithmos, which is “the assertion that certain things are present “in a certain number” means only that such a thing is present in just this definite multitude”(101 K). Stated differently, Aristotle thought that the noetic status of number was ultimately grounded in an original giving found in experience. So, for Aristotle’s determination of “the ontological standing of number, it becomes important not only to remember the “natural” significance of the arithmos but also to take into account its “dependence””(101-2). It is this dependence on experience and evidence that is lost in modern science, but only in a certain way. The natural sciences do take into consideration experiential evidence, but they also exclude the experience of subjectivity as such.
In many ways the exclusion of subjectivity is necessary for science, but, according to Husserl, not for the ultimate science. Both Husserl and Aristotle recognize how a certain methodological exclusion of experience is necessary for Objectivity and science. Aristotle recommends that we “disregard certain attributes of the thing in question, ignoring the nexus of being which links them all to one another. Consequently, this “disregarding of…” is [then] able to produce a new mode of seeing which permits something to come to light in the aistheta” (the objects of sense) “which, for all their variety and transitoriness, suffers no change but remains always in the same condition, thus fulfilling the demand that it can be an object of some science, of an episteme”(102). It is this methodological “disregarding of…” or a Husserlian epoche, that enables us to cleanse ourselves of prejudices and unhealthy presuppositions. However, according to Husserl, “Aristotle had a universal ontology of realities only; and this was what he accepted as “first philosophy”. [Aristotle] lacked formal ontology, and therefore lacked also the cognition that formal ontology is intrinsically prior to the ontology of realities”(Husserl 80, 70g). Thus, Husserl’s recognition of formal ontology’s primacy and the necessary union of formal ontology and ontology of realities pushes Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology far beyond any ancient project.
Husserl claims that “Formal ontology, conceived as analytics, relates with empty universality to any possible world whatever; but, unlike ontology in the sense, ontology of realities, it does not explicate the idea, any possible world whatever, in respect of the structural forms essentially necessary to a world—forms in a new and very different sense: as the “form”, allness of realities, with the allness-“forms”, space and time…”(H271, 240g). Thus, only by recognizing the ground common (koinon) to both ontologies can we come to a mathesis universalis at all. It this “original grounding of all the sciences, and of the formal ontologies of both sorts exercising in their behalf the function of a theory of science, the normative function” that “gives all of them unity, as branches of a constituted production form the one transcendental subjectivity”(272e).
Still, however, there is a conceptual gap between the ancients’ understanding of number and Husserl’s modern European sciences. This modern mathematical turn was realized in the work of Vieta via algebra. Through a study of Diophantine techniques, Vieta established a “general analytic” respected by modern mathematicians. This “general analytic” is strictly an organon that aims not to “open up a domain of truths”, but to “be an instrument for the solution of problems in general”(K 168-9). Vieta essentially reduced the theory of numbers and quantities to a deductive technique, which, according to Husserl, eventually “attained its pure sense through Leibniz, whose mathesis universalis obviously has thrust off completely every restriction to even the highest materially filled universality”(H 80, 70g). The work of Vieta gave us the tool for finding truth and, in this sense, must play a part in truth itself. But, in order to find truth, we must take Husserl’s discovery of intentionality seriously and then unite transcendental subjectivity with formal ontology. Thus, the necessity of evidence thrusts itself to the fore of any attempt to find truth.
Truth, however, is a tricky topic. For Husserl, “All Objective being has in transcendental subjectivity the grounds for its being; all truth has in transcendental subjectivity the grounds for the cognition of it, and if a truth concerns transcendental subjectivity itself, it has those grounds precisely in transcendental subjectivity”(274, 242g). If truth is cognizable and concerns the transcendental subject, then truth is relative to subjects in as much as there is a necessary relationship between truth and intersubjectivity’s mode of being, “which is being-for-itself, “absolute” being”(274e). Thus, truth is found through transcendental phenomenology as the science that self-examines and in doing so includes experience as evidence, because evidences are, after all, performances (285,251g).
Still, however, the evidence of internal experience, or, that is, the single subjective perception of something, does not automatically qualify as complete evidence. Internal experience also requires an uncovering of its intentionality (284,251). Evidence only becomes a “phenomenologically pure experience…if one “parenthesizes” the transcending apperception”(284e) and even this “parenthesizing” by itself is still inefficient. We must also incorporate temporality and the affects of internal time.
So, when Husserl asks us “But what if truth is an idea, lying at infinity? What if it can be shown, in evidence, that, with respect to world-Objectivity in its entirety, this is no accidental matter of fact…but an eidetic law?”(278e, 246e), he has in mind the living truth as it is played out in time. Our experiences, which are intrinsic to transcendental phenomenology, are not yet all reaped. Some truths are far from firmly established and are relative to the open infinitude of time. This is one reason why Husserl describes transcendental phenomenology “as an infinite open unity of science”(275). Thus, if evidence truly is constitutive for truth and our experiences are still unfolding in time, then now is always a suitable time for finding a way to “self-responsibly justify the sense of our culture”(5).