Richard Cobb-Stevens

Reason and History

The latest swing of the pendulum has taken philosophy from excessive confidence in our rational powers to an equally excessive mood of relativism. Many contemporary philosophic movements have in common the conviction that our rational categories are contingent products of history, and that all truths are therefore relativized by their historical horizons. Often referred to as “post-modernist,” these movements are in fact the logical outcome of the specifically modern tendency to construe reason as a purely adaptive mechanism. Husserl clearly discerned the irrationalism underlying the two most powerful theses of modernity, naturalism and historicism. His critique of these reductive theses is closely linked with his project of restoring confidence in cognitive intuition.

James and Husserl: Time-consciousness and the Intentionality of Presence and Absence

During one of his visits to Heidelberg, William James was impressed by Wilhelm Wundt’s efforts to determine experimentally the duration of our immediate consciousness of unified clusters of successive musical notes and of differently spaced monotonous clicks. Subjects were asked to indicate the point at which they no longer enjoyed an intuitive grasp of the series of sounds as a present whole. They were also asked not to attempt to count the successive notes or clicks, because counting introduces linguistic expressions which carry us away from the immediate context by permitting reference to identities across presence and absence. Counting might thus incline the subjects to conflate their perceptions of a series as a present whole with a series “whose beginnings have faded from our mind, and of whose totality we retain no sensible impression at all.”1 Wundt and his students concluded that the duration of our immediate consciousness of successive impressions varies from five to twelve seconds, depending on our manner of grouping the strokes and on the length of the intervals between the successive components of the whole.2 James took these conclusions as a confirmation of his theory of the “specious present” an expression that he borrowed from the work of a little remembered writer, E. R. Clay, who had claimed that the experienced present “..is really a part of the past — a recent past given as being a time that intervenes between the [obvious] past and the future”.3

Derrida and Husserl on the Status of Retention

Jacques Derrida describes his method as „deconstruction,“ a style of textual interpretation designed to expose hidden commitments at work not only in a given text, but also in the formulation of the problems to which the text is a response. He contends, for example, that the philosophical tradition relies upon original metaphors (the sun, the cave, seeing, the return, foundation) whose metaphorical character has been forgotten as a result of constant usage.l Indeed, the entire conceptual network of Western philosophy is built upon suppressed metaphorical and even mythological themes. These themes are so fundamental to our thought patterns that we cannot invent a discourse free from their influence in which we might appraise their validity. Hence, we must attempt to tinker with the system from within, „make do“ with inadequate linguistic resources, devise strategies to uncover presuppositions. Freud’s analysis of the dialectic of showing and hiding in dream texts serves as a remote model for Derrida’s deconstructive enterprise. Attention to detail rather than to the overt argument of the text under consideration helps detect slight exaggerations which may indicate resistance to concealed weaknesses. Passages which seem to conceal more than they reveal are submitted to a rambling analysis reminiscent of the technique of free association. Then, suddenly the text seems to break open, revealing its hidden strata and defense mechanisms.

“Aristotelian” Themes in Husserl’s Logical Investigations

In 1683, Nicolas Malebranche and Antoine Arnauld began an extended and sometimes acrimonious debate about the viability of Aristotle’s claim in the De Anima that in its cognitive function “the soul is somehow all things.” According to Malebranche, the principle of physics that there can be no action at a distance applies also to the domain of cognitive activity. It is therefore unreasonable to believe, he observes, that our minds are literally in the sky when we contemplate the stars: “It is not likely that the soul should leave the body to stroll about the heavens, as it were, in order to behold these objects.”1 Neither is it believable that our minds are capable of “walking about” even in more familiar spaces, for example, that they leave our bodies in order to see houses at a near distance. In defense of Aristotle, Arnauld responds that it is inappropriate to construe intentional presence in terms of spatial or local presence. Were God to allow our mind to leave our body and to travel to the sun in order to see it, our mind would have made, Arnauld says, “a great and very useless voyage.” It makes no difference whether bodies are present or absent, nearby or distant: “... it is for the mind the same thing.”2 Malebranche then responds that Arnauld, lacking a sense of irony, had taken his criticism too literally. The critique of the “walking-mind” had been intended only as a “good-natured ridicule” whose target was really the notion that the mind can know better what is closer, i.e., things that its body touches, or even the body itself. His point, he adds, was that the objects of the mind are intelligible, not material. The mind is not extended; it operates only within the realm of rationality, a purely intelligible realm which excludes everything material. Arnauld retorts that an intelligible sun is nothing other than the material sun as known. The point of Aristotle’s claim, he insists, was that the primary objects of our cognition are things and persons in the world around us, be they nearby or distant, present or absent.3

Husserlian Hermeneutics: Mathematics and Theoria

R. G. Collingwood, the British historian and philosopher, raised the following objections to the claim of his Oxford colleagues that philosophic texts are reducible to a series of ahistorical propositions. He first observed that truth and falsity do not belong to such propositions but rather to complexes of questions and answers. He next pointed out that an author’s guiding question and its context may often be difficult to reconstruct. Encumbered by our own philosophic baggage, we bring questions to the reading of any text that may not coincide with the question that animated the author’s reflections. Moreover, original thinkers often succeed in refining the sense of their questions only gradually in the process of reflecting upon them. Their most important contributions thus take the form of a retroactive realization that they or their traditions had been asking the wrong question. Collingwood offers as an example the radical transformation of the philosophy of nature brought about when the Pythagoreans first replaced the question asked by Thales and Anaximander, i.e., “What is the fundamental stuff of which things are made, and how do qualitative variations of this stuff (hot and cold, moist and dry) account for differences among things?” by the question: “What combinations of fundamental shapes or forms and what mathematical ratios among them account for the composition of various stuffs?”1

Body, Spirit and Ego in Husserl’s Ideas II

Husserl’s analysis of the relationship between the various dimensions which comprise the unity of the person differs radically from traditional discussions of this topic. Of all of his works, Ideas II reveals most clearly the uniqueness of his approach.1 This paper will first summarize Husserl’s study in this text of the interplay between animate body, spirit, and ego, and then reflect upon the implications of his refusal to consider the unity of these strata from within a global ontological perspective.

Husserl’s Theory of Judgment: A Critique of Brentano and Frege

A significant portion of Husserl’s Fifth Logical Investigation is devoted to a discussion of the relationship within judgments between their assertive and predicative components. Husserl takes Brentano’s account of this relationship as his point of departure. I propose to consider Husserl’s commentary on Brentano’s theory as a criticism not only of Brentano but also by implication of Frege. Both of these authors consistently construe judgment as the taking of a stand with regard to some propositional content. Husserl criticizes this position on the premise that our judgments are in fact directed primarily upon perceived things and situations in the world and only secondarily upon the propositions framed in our judgments. He also traces this misplaced priority on propositional content to the modern tendency to disassociate predication from pre-predicative intuitions. I shall develop the thesis that Husserl’s account of judgment is in effect an updated version of Aristotle’s theory. There is no evidence that Husserl was significantly influenced by a reading of the relevant texts of Aristotle. Moreover, several themes that come into play in his discussion of judgment have a distinctly modern flavor and import. Husserl speaks from a perspective shaped by modern epistemological and logical concerns. Nevertheless, his theory of judgment succeeds in integrating what is best in modern thought within a revitalized appreciation of the Aristotelian understanding of judgment.

Husserl and Historicism: Fifty Years Later

The term ‘historicism’ was first used extensively in late nineteenth century debates among political economists who were concerned about the relativistic implications of making economic theory excessively dependent on economic history. Ernst Troeltsch later defined historicism more broadly as the tendency to regard the conceptual systems of both the natural and human sciences as world views whose presuppositions are determined by contingent historical transformations. He also observed that historicism is one of the two fundamental discoveries of modernity, the other being the naturalism that follows from the reductive interpretation of nature as an ensemble of quantifiable entities and forces.1 Vico’s maxim that we know best what we have made or created (“the true and the made are convertible”) is commonly regarded as the founding principle of historicism. Vico claimed that we can achieve greater certitude in historical studies than in the natural sciences, because history is a product of familiar human passions and adaptive strategies, whereas the physical realm is not our making. He added, however, that we should not presuppose, in the manner of Hobbes, that human nature has remained static and immutable throughout the ages. Hobbes ascribed to primitive peoples attitudes, feelings, and rational decisions which in fact could only have emerged under subsequent historical conditions.

Husserl’s Transcendental Turn

The term ‘transcendental’ refers to a wide variety of philosophical approaches which draw their inspiration, however remotely, from Kant’s decision to search for the foundations of rationality in the a priori structures of the experiencing subject. Although there has been considerable debate in the subsequent tradition about the status of subjectivity, transcendental philosophers agree that the principal source for an investigation into human rationality is provided by the subject’s deductive or reflective access to its own invariant operations and structures. Husserl uses the term ‘transcendental’ to refer to the unique status of rationality, to the philosophical attitude that permits appropriate thinking about the relationship between knower and known, and to the method and language of the philosopher engaged in such thinking. Like Kant, he claims that such thinking takes place within a universal zone of intelligibility, which he often describes as a plane or dimension which cannot be located within the coordinates of the empirical world. He also characterizes his version of transcendental philosophy as the fulfillment of the original project of Greek philosophy. Referring to his first intimation of the interplay between transcendental and empirical dimensions, he even goes so far as to say that it had been given to him “to see what had never before been seen, to think what had never before been thought.”1

Psychologism and Logical Analysis

The term ‘psychologism’ was first used extensively in the works of German logicians and philosophers of the late nineteenth century. It referred to a trend which had first emerged in the 1830s. This movement assigned to the science of psychology the role of assuring the foundations of the various philosophic disciplines, and especially of logic. After Hegel’s death in 1831, the great systems of German idealism began to lose their appeal, and were gradually replaced by a new emphasis on an anthropological critique of reason. Although Kant’s influence never died out in the German universities, it was not until the late 1860s that the movement of Neo-Kantianism emerged in full force. During the interval between 1830 and 1870, many attempts were made to base inquiry into the structure of mind on empirical observations, rather than on transcendental deductions of the Kantian type. For example, J.F. Fries attempted to derive Kant’s a priori categories from self-observation, and Hermann Helmholtz traced the origin of concepts, numbers and classes to psychological, and even to physiological processes.1 John Stuart Mill was often cited by these and later psychologistic authors as their most illustrious ally, because he claimed that philosophy’s principal task is to conduct empirical inquiry into the workings of the mind, and explicitly described introspection as the only basis on which the axioms of mathematics and the principles of logic might be justified.2