Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism
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BOSTON STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE EDITED BY ROBERT S. COHEN AND MARX W. WARTOFSKY PHENOMENOLOGY AND DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM Translated by Daniel J. Herman and Donald V. Morano Edited by Robert S. Cohen D. REIDEL PUBLISHING COMPANY A MEMBER OFTHE KL.UU'ER CADEMIC PUBLISHERS GROUP VOLUME 49 DORDRFlCHT / BOSTON / l,AN('ASTt:K / TOKYO Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Trln. Duc Thao. TABLE OF CONTENTS Phenomenology and dialectical materialism. (Boston studies in the philosophy of science ;v. 49) Translation of: Phenomknologie et matirialisme dialectique. Bibliography: p. EDlTORIAL PREFACE vii Includes index. 1. Phenomenology. 2. Dialecticalmaterialsm. 3. Husserl, TRANSLATORS' FOREWORD xiii Edmund, 1859-1938. I. Cohen, Robert Sonnk. 11. Title. 111. Series. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xix Q174.867 vol. 49 [B829.5] 001'.01 s [146'.32] 85-35 ISBN 90-277-0737-5 AUTHOR'S PREFACE xxi PART ONE: THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL METHOD AND ITS ACTUAL REAL CONTENT Published by D. Reidel Publishing Company, CHAPTER ONE: THE INTUITION OF ESSENCES P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, Holland. 1. The Technique of Variation 2. Pure Idealities and Empirical Idealities Sold and distributed in the U.S.A. and Canada by Kluwer Academic PubIishers, 3. The True Significance of the Notion of Essence 160 Old Derby Street, Hingham, MA 02043, U.S.A. 4. Difficulties with the Objectivism of Essences. The Return to the Subject In all other countries, sold and distributed by Kluwer Academic Publishers Group, CHAPTER TWO: THE THEMATIZATION OF CONCRETE CON- P.O. Box 322,3300 AH Dordrecht, Holland. SCIOUSNESS 5. The Return to Lived Experience in the Logische Unter- suchutzgetz 6. The Discovery of the Reduction Translated from Tran Duc Thao's Pheitomertologie et mattrialisme 7. The Exposition of the Ideen dialectique (Paris: Minh Tan, 195l ; re-issued New York: Gordon 8. The Critique of the Kantians & Breach Science Pubs., Inc., 1971). 9. Fink's Reply. The Necessity of a More Radical Explanation 10. The Notion of Constitution. The Signification of Transcen- dental Idealism 11. The Constitution of the World of the Spirit AU Rights Reserved. 12. The Notion of Object. Perception and Judgment O 1986 by D. Reidel Publishing Company. No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or CHAPTER THREE: THE PROBLEMS OF REASON utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, 13. Self-Evidence (~videtzce)and Truth 69 including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and 14. The problem of Error 73 retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner. 15. [Self-] Evidence as Intentional Performance (Intetztiotzale Printed in The Netherlands. Leis tung) 77 vi TABLE OF CONTENTS 16. The Possibility of Error as Contemporaneous with Truth 8 2 17. A Digression - The Theory of Evidence According to Descartes and the Problem of the Cartesian Circle 8 7 EDITORIAL PREFACE 18. Phenomenological Description as a Critique of Authenticity: Static and Genetic Constitution 90 19. The Constitution of the Formal Domain: Logic and Mathe- matics 99 Triin Duc Thao, a brilliant student of philosophy at the 6cole Normale Super- 1-0. The Genesis of Judgment 11 1 ieure within the post-1935 decade of political disaster, born in Vietnam shortly after the First World War. recipient of a scholarship in Paris in 1935- CHAPTER FOUR: THE RESULT OF PHENOMENOLOGY 37. was early noted for his independent and original mind. While the 1930s 21. The Genesis of Antepredicative Experience and Its Real twisted down to the defeat of the Spanish Republic, the compromise with Content 11-1 German Fascism at Munich, and the start of the Second World War, and while the 1940s began with hypocritical stability at the Western Front fol- PART TWO: THE DIALECTIC OF REAL MOVEMENT lowed by the defeat of France, and the occupation of Paris by the German INTRODUCTION TO PART TWO power together with French collaborators, and then ended with liberation 1. Consciousness and Matter and a search for a new understanding of human situations, the young Thao was deeply immersed in the classical works of European philosophy. He was CHAPTER ONE: THE DIALECTIC OF ANIMAL BEHAVIOR AS also the attentive but critical student of a quite special generation of French THE BECOMING OF SENSE CERTAINTY metaphysicians and social philosophers: Gaston Berger, Maurice Merleau- 2. Phenomenological Givens and Real Givens 143 Ponty, Emile Brehier, Henri Lefebvre, Rene le Senne, Jean-Paul Sartre, 3. The Movement of the Internal Sense 146 perhaps the young Louis Althusser. They, in their several modes of response, 4. The Movement of the External Sense 156 had been meditating for more than a decade on the philosophy of Edmund 5. Remarks on the Preceding Development: The Passage to the Husserl, which came to France in the thirties as a new metaphysical enlighten- Dialectic of Human Societies 172 ment - phenomenology. With Husserl's phenomenology. there also came the CHAPTER TWO: THE DIALECTIC OF HUMAN SOCIETIES AS powerful influences of a revived Hegel (of the Phenomenologl~)and of THE BECOMING OF REASON Martin Heidegger's existentialism, and, in a tangle of variants, there came a 6. Use-Value and the Movement of Sacrifice 179 startling renewed investigation of Marx. The young Tran Duc Thao joined 7. The Movement of Wealth and the Becoming of the Gods 189 the search for objective truth, worked to overcome both psychologism and 8. Mercantile Economy and the Sacrifice of the Savior, God 194 every weakening of knowledge by subjectivist limitation, investigated Hus- 9. Monetary Economy, the Transcendence of the Idea, and the serl's writings in print and in the fine archives at Louvain (with the kindly Concept of Salvation 201 help of H. L. van Breda). His progress was dialectical, Socratic and Hegelian, 10. Capitalistic Economy, the Power of Abstraction and the but also it was a material dialectic due both to his Marxist studies and to the Proletarian Revolution 2 12 grim tasks of the greater liberation in his social life-world - the liberation of Vietnam. APPENDIX 219 Thao's themes drove him to the border of Husserl's thought, just as Thao NOTES 22 1 saw Husserl himself driven toward the apparent relativism of the final Krisis manuscripts. The privileged, indeed most precious, phenomenological activity BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS CITED 24 1 is that of 'constitution', for which there is the endless work of passing from INDEX OF NAMES 243 naive certainty to the developed no-longer-naive certainties of intentional vii xx ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Lastly, Daniel Herman wishes to heartily thank Anne who in her own way made this work possible by keeping little Nicole busy with her toys rather than with her daddy's translation. AUTHOR'S PREFACE The work that we present to the public consists of research belonging to different times and inspirations. In the first part, written between 1942 and 1950, we set forth the essential features of phenomenology from a purely historical point of view and in the perspective of Husserl's own thought. Our critical objections serve only to make evident internal contradictions found within the Husserlian corpus itself. In contrast, the second part, completed in 1951, is situated entirely within the position of dialectical materialism. It is true that there we take up again certain technical results of lived analyses, but only in terms of pure positive data, completely freed from the philosophical horizon that dominated Husserl's descriptive method. However, it is not a question in any sense of a mere juxtaposition of two contradictory points of view: Marxism appears to us as the only conceivable solution to problems raised by phenomenology itself. Our task in setting forth Husserl's thought was a relatively easy one, since it was concerned only with the theory of phenomenological analysis under the three aspects that appeared successively in its evolution: the description of essences, the static explication of lived experience [vecu], and finally a genetic explication. Its concepts were simple enough, and, in addition, amply developed in the published works. But, obviously, theory is worthless without practice, and for a long time we believed that within the very presentation of the method should be included the achieved results of the method; however, the most important part of this work has remained unpub1ished.l It is here that we have encountered extraordinary difficulties, which are responsible for the long delay in the completion of this work and have radically reversed its orientation. The examination of unpublished manuscripts demonstrated, in fact, that the concrete analyses took a direction that was incompatible with the theoretical principles from which these concrete analyses were elaborated. From the beginning of our study of Husserl (in a work written in 1942 of which we present here only the first chapter), we had surmised the contradic- tion because of certain enigmatic developments within the published works. However, we thought that we would be able to resolve this contradiction by a simple broadening of our perspective, which would remain faithful to xxi xxii AUTHOR'S PREFACE AUTHOR'S PREFACE xxiii the essential phenomenological inspiration. But, after long hesitation we of the primordial world with its elementary sensory-motor coordinates found that, on account of the actual descriptions that abound in the manu- that there can be no doubt that the transcendental subject thematized by scripts, we had to renounce once and for all any hope of reconciling the phenomenology must not be identified, strictly speaking, with the man of concept of phenomenology with its actual achievement. Since then, there flesh and blood who is evolving in the real world. has no longer been any question of remaining within the limits of a historical Since that time one should take seriously the exceptional importance study, even with all the liberties which are permitted to the interpreter in that Husserl has consistently granted in phenomenology to the 'thing' (Ding).