John J. Drummond

Aristotelianism and Phenomenology

Aristotle might well be called the first phenomenologist of moral experience. Recall, for example, his careful attention to the “phenomena,” to common opinions about happiness or—as a phenomenologist might put it—to happiness and the virtues as commonly understood. Recall too his meticulous, dialectical considerations of these phenomena, considerations reminiscent of imaginative variations and designed to achieve insight into the nature of happiness and the virtues. Recall, even more importantly, his account of moral intentionality—of the unified role of practical wisdom, the emotions, and “perception” in moral experience—and, finally, his distinction between merely voluntary and chosen actions, the former aimed at an end (e.g., satisfying hunger), but the latter undertaken in the light of an end (e.g., eating low-fat foods for the sake of health). In discussing the relation between Aristotelianism and phenomenology, therefore, we could well and fruitfully explore the various ways in which Aristotle himself and the contemporary advocates of a neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics develop phenomenological themes and methodologies in their work.1

The Phenomenology of the Noema

1. On the Object of Thought: Methodological and Phenomenological Reflections.- 2. Finding the Noema.- 3. Noema and Essence.- 4. Meaning and Noema.- 5. Noetic Insight and Noematic Recalcitrance.- 6. An Abstract Consideration: De-Ontologizing the Noema.- 7. Beings Mindfulness: The Noema of Transcendental Idealism.- 8. What Does Noematic Intentionality Tell Us About the Ontological Status of the Noema?.- 9. Some Noetico-Noematic Analyses of Action and Practical Life.- 10. The Noema Revisited: Hard Cases.- 11. A Bibliography of the Noema.- Index of Names.- Index of Topics.

An Abstract Consideration: De-Ontologizing the Noema

I had first thought of entitling this paper—after the model of Jonathan Swift—“A Modest Proposal For Preventing the Noema From Becoming an Entity and thereby a Burden to Philosophical Reflection.” The rhetorical purpose of such a title would be to encourage participants in this conference on Husserl’s notion of the noema never to use the term “noema” again. The reason for such encouragement is that a technical term used by Husserl within a non-ordinary, philosophical attitude to denote an ordinary object abstractly considered has come to be used instead to denote a non-ordinary object. This mistaking of an ordinary thing specially considered for a special thing does in fact prove to be a burden to philosophical reflection, and to eliminate the term would contribute to eliminating the burden. Now while I knew in fact that this probably should not and certainly would not happen, I hoped at least to dispel the view that noemata are entities present (but hidden) in our ordinary experiences, awaiting only to be disclosed through the methodological technique of the phenomenological reduction.

Self-Responsibility and Eudaimonia

The notion of authenticity, or as I am calling it, self-responsibility, reveals a moral urgency at the center of Husserl’s philosophizing. Authenticity has both descriptive and normative dimensions, but this notion remains divorced both from Husserl’s discussions of the normative dimension of axiology and from his account of eudaimonia, the notion that, in one way or another, expresses – or should express – the end of our moral urgings.

The Logical Investigations: Paving the Way to a Transcendental Logic

This epigraph from Formal and Transcendental Logic echoes Husserl’s complaint in the foreword to the second part of volume two of the Logical Investigations about the “often heard, but to my mind grotesque reproach, that I may have rejected psychologism sharply in the first volume of my work, but that I fell back into psychologism in the second.”2 The epigraph, however, also suggests that the Investigations do not go far enough in overcoming psychologism. Only a transcendental phenomenology, it is said, suffices to overcome psychologistic prejudices. On this view, then, the “phenomenological” investigations found in the second volume of the Investigations have merely “paved the way” to the transcendental critique of all cognition found in Husserl’s mature phenomenology. This paper poses two questions: (1) Why, given the rejection of psychologism, is there need for a phenomenology? and (2) Why is there a need for a transcendental phenomenology?

Introduction: The Phenomenological Tradition and Moral Philosophy

Ethics as a philosophical discipline is back in vogue in the English-speaking world. Ever since the publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice 1 moral philosophy has undergone a remarkable resurgence. One need only to review job advertisements over the last several years to note how great is the percentage of available positions in philosophy devoted to ethics. Courses in ethics and a concentration on “values” have been revived as centerpieces of liberal education. This development was spurred not only by Rawls and his successors, but by our need to respond to the various ethical issues posed by the technological explosion of the last century. Indeed, we have seen the rise of whole new fields of “applied ethics,” such as bioethics and environmental ethics. Against the background of this revival, one of the central aims of this handbook is to show the great fertility of the phenomenological tradition for the study of ethics by collecting a set of papers on the contributions to ethical thought by major phenomenological thinkers. Most of the chapters in the book, therefore, sketch the thought of the major ethical thinkers in previous generations of the phenomenological tradition and direct the reader toward the most relevant primary and secondary materials. Other chapters sketch more recent developments in various parts of the world, and three chapters explore the relations between phenomenology and the dominant normative approaches in contemporary moral philosophy.

The ‘Spiritual’ World: The Personal, the Social, and the Communal

Husserl’s Ideen II, subtitled “Phenomenological Investigations on Constitution” and one of Husserl’s most comprehensive works, encompasses wide-ranging analyses of what Husserl calls “material nature,” “animal nahlre,” and “the spiritual world.” In this paper, I shall reflect briefly on his understanding of the interplay among the notions of person, society, and community Both personal and professional factors contribute to this reflection. Each of us belongs to several different, but interrelated and overlapping, communities. family, circle of friends, departmental colleagues, faculty, college or university community, professional society, and political communities of various levels (city or county, state or province, country, world). The functionings and malfunctionings of some of these communities are themselves sufficient to motivate a reflection on the nature of a well-ordered community. In addition, however, the recent publication of the articles Husserl wrote for the Japanese journal Kaizo on the theme of renewal (XXVII: 3–124) and his early lectures on ethics and value-theory (XXVIII), along with some of the previously published materials on intersubjectivity (esp. “Gemeingeist I” and “Gemeingeist II,” XIV: 165–232)—as well as the fine commentaries on Husserl’s ethical writings by writers such as Karl Schuhmann, James Hart, and Philip Buckley (cf. bibliography)—provides new reason to reflect on Husserl’s ethical thought, which is too often dismissed as marginal to his work.

Pure Logical Grammar: Identity Amidst Linguistic Differences

In a well-known but, in my view, fundamentally flawed article, Yehoshua Bar-Hillel identifies two failures in Husserl’s attempt to formulate a theory of pure logical grammar: 1) Husserl misled himself into thinking that one can develop a theory of grammar by studying the realm of meanings, and 2) Husserl failed to realize that the traditional parts of speech to which he appealed in his formulations of the principles of a pure logical grammar were not useful syntactical categories beyond a rough approximation. Bar-Hillel claims that the domain of pure grammar should remain exclusively within the study of language. However, because the comparative study of empirical languages and their grammars cannot reveal the elements of a pure grammar, the only way to arrive at a “common ideal grammatical framework of all empirical languages” is to begin with “the very definition of language” and to determine what follows analytically from that definition. 3 And while it follows analytically from the definition of language that all languages contain words and sentences, it does not, according to Bar-Hillel, follow analytically that all languages contain “nouns, or negation-signs, or modal expressions.” Bar-Hillel admits that we might think justified a question about how “the” plural is expressed in Latin, English, German, Italian, or Chinese. But he thinks it is clearly illegitimate to ask a similar question with regard to how “the” ablative is expressed. However, this is to flail a straw man. For Husserl number, while a grammatical category, is also and more fundamentally an

Time, History, and Tradition

Consciousness, for Husserl, is both traditional and autonomous. The union of tradition and autonomy is seen perhaps most strikingly and most concisely in his essay “On the Origin of Geometry.”1 Husserl points to the fact that “[t]he geometry which is ready-made..., from which the regressive inquiry begins, is a tradition. Our human existence moves within innumerable traditions. The whole cultural world, in all its forms, exists through tradition” (Hua VI: 366/354). But, Husserl reminds us, “everything traditional has arisen out of human activity, that accordingly past men and human civilizations existed, and among them their first inventors, who shaped the new out of materials at hand, whether raw or already spiritually shaped” (Hua VI: 366/355). Hence, anyone interested in a genuine understanding of the geometrical tradition can “reactivate” in a self-evidencing the sedimented meaning-formations at first taken for granted by us (Hua VI: 375/365). Such reactivation is a manifestation of what Husserl elsewhere calls “authentic thinking,” i.e., actively thinking for oneself without reliance on passively preconstituted and sedimented meanings. However, this suggests that traditional thinking is inauthentic, that the traditional character of consciousness is something to be overcome. This suggests, in other words, that the traditional character of consciousness is accidental rather than essential. But this last suggestion is clearly inconsistent with Husserl’s accounts of the essential temporality and historicity of consciousness.

Agency, Agents, and (Sometimes) Patients

Robert Sokolowski’s Moral Action 1 is a remarkably imaginative extension of Husserl’s doctrines of intentionality, categoriality, and identification and differentiation into the framework of Aristotle’s moral philosophy. The work explores the nature of what Sokolowski calls “moral transactions.” This paper shall explore a puzzle and a problem about the identities and differences between intrapersonal (or self-regarding) and interpersonal (or other-regarding) actions and their relevant virtues. By focusing on a few details of Sokolowski’s account of moral transactions, I hope to supplement his thoughtful reflection with additional detail.