Headline: a Large One for Me;Philosophy;Books

Source: The Times Literary Supplement Issue Date: Friday April 25, 2008 Byline: Sean Kelly

Story Text: HUSSERL. By David Woodruff Smith. 468pp. Routledge. Pounds 55 (paperback, Pounds 14.99); US $100 (paperback, $29.95). 978 0 415 28974 0.

In the second volume of her autobiography, La Force de l'age (1960), Simone de Beauvoir describes the evening in the early 1930s during the course of which Jean-Paul Sartre first became passionate about the philosophical method known as phenomenology. Raymond Aron, the young French philosopher, had been in Berlin studying the new philosophical method of Edmund Husserl (1859- 1938). On his return he joined Sartre and de Beauvoir for a drink at the Bec de Gaz in the rue Montparnasse. Beauvoir:

We ordered the specialty of the house - apricot cocktails. Aron pointed to his glass: "You see, mon petit camarade, if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!" Sartre turned pale with emotion; this was precisely what he had been longing to achieve for years - to describe objects just as he experienced them, and for that to be philosophy.

If this descriptive task really is what undergirds the phenomenological method - and there is much in favour of such a preliminary characterization - then perhaps it is not difficult to explain the notorious rift in the mid to late twentieth century between the so-called analytic and phenomenological camps in philosophy. After all, it is hard to imagine Bertrand Russell paling with emotion before an apricot cocktail. And yet, explanations by way of national character can take us only so far; perhaps we can hope for a more trenchant analysis.

Such an analysis is all the more desirable because the chasm between the camps increasingly seems to have filled itself in. This is no little feat, given how widely it once yawned. By 1958 the situation was so dire that a notorious meeting at Royaumont pitted English-speaking philosophers against their French counterparts in what the young Charles Taylor, then still a prize Fellow at All Souls, described as "a dialogue de sourds".

The determined deafness of that mid- century has now given way to healthy curiosity. Of course, even half a century ago there were books about phenomenology written in English. Herbert Spiegelberg's massive two- volume history of the phenomenological movement was published in 1960, and Fr William Richardson's equally massive volume on Martin Heidegger appeared shortly after, along with a preface by Heidegger himself. But these were attempts to explain the movement - either by a dedicated historical reconstruction of who was saying what to whom, or by an enthusiastic translation of its most prominent oracle. What is notable today, by contrast, is the desire to appropriate phenomenology, to forage among its branches for the tastiest fruit; and along with this desire, the belief - or at least a resolute openness to the possibility - that the phenomenological fruit might offer philosophical nourishment. Not every recent contribution to the literature, of course, has this admirable, appropriative quality. Indeed, the bookstores seem to be teeming lately with synoptic overviews of Husserl and his method. David Woodruff Smith, in Husserl, one of the most recent contributions, attempts to present the whole of the philosophical work of Husserl at an introductory level. Smith moves briskly, and relatively accurately, through the various aspects of Husserl's thought; but the task he has set himself is Herculean. That is because the real contribution of Husserl's work is not systematic (though Husserl himself certainly had systematic ambitions); it lies rather in the careful and detailed analyses he provides of an enormous range of philosophical domains. The details of these analyses - often shifting over the years, frequently mistaken in interesting ways, but always probing and original - provide one basic source to which contemporary English-speaking philosophers are beginning to turn in their recent discovery of the phenomenological tradition. Despite a brief section on Husserl's legacy at the end of Smith's book, he is unable to prepare the reader for the curiosity about phenomenology that some contemporary analytic philosophers have begun to feel.

From where, then, does this curiosity come? One factor is certainly the lack of unity - or to put a positive spin on it, the pluralism - that now characterizes much anglophone philosophy. Brian Leiter, arguably the reigning sociologist of the discipline, has even announced the "demise of analytic philosophy", on the grounds that the methodological and substantive pluralism of contemporary anglophone philosophy is now so pronounced that it leaves little to demarcate as "analytic" philosophy as such. Perhaps in retrospect it is clear that this lack of unity characterized even the Oxonians at Royaumont. But at least the standard view is that analytic philosophy for much of the twentieth century was unified by the so-called linguistic turn.

There is disagreement, of course, about what the linguistic turn was, but many of the contestants may agree to at least this: that after the linguistic turn philosophy was motivated to resolve, or perhaps to dissolve, or at any rate to address, philosophical problems primarily by analysing the language we have for talking about the domain in question. Consider perception, for example. On the linguistic account, philosophical problems in this domain should be approached not by thinking primarily about the experience of perceiving, but by thinking rather about the language we have for talking about perception. To take one influential instance, Elizabeth Anscombe, writing in the mid-1960s, approached the philosophical study of perception primarily through an analysis of the grammar of verbs used for perceptual report, such as "see". This, surely, is not what paled the emotional Sartre. Indeed, one significant interpretation of the difference between phenomenology and analytic philosophy, defended most prominently by Michael Dummett, formerly Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford, is precisely that Husserl's method precludes such a linguistic turn.

I'll explore this claim more carefully in a moment. First, though, it is worth remarking that two distinct, though sometimes related, movements in recent English-speaking philosophy have been predicated on at least an implicit rejection of the linguistic approach. The first is in metaphysics, the second in philosophy of mind. Perhaps it is not surprising that these are the two areas of contemporary anglophone philosophy where scholars have been most eager to explore the phenomenological literature. In metaphysics, a revival of the pre- Kantian style of a priori argument, along with renewed interest in the modal notions of possibility and necessity, pushed the most prominent English-speaking philosophers beyond the analysis of natural language in the final third of the twentieth century. According to Timothy Williamson, current holder of the Wykeham chair, and one of the leading contemporary metaphysicians, it is, rather, a "subtle interplay of logic and the imagination" that directs most of the best contemporary work. The desire to discover the essential nature of entities in any region of being (material, mental, abstract, mathematical, cultural, and so on), and to do so through thought experiments that test our intuitions about what it takes for an entity to change from what it essentially is, was also at the heart of Husserl's phenomenological method. Such thought experiments are applications of the technique Husserl calls "eidetic variation", and he believed, like many contemporary metaphysicians, that such a technique, when properly applied, gives us the capacity for "rational intuition"; for "seeing", in other words, what things essentially are. Indeed, it was this aspect of Husserl's phenomenology to which the great mathematician and logician Kurt Godel was increasingly attracted towards the end of his life. And it was the application of this technique, among others, that led to Husserl's early work on the metaphysical nature of parts and wholes, work that the eminent contemporary metaphysician Kit Fine has called "perhaps the most significant treatise on the concept of part to be found in the philosophical literature".

If metaphysicians are intrigued by phenomenology, however, it is in the philosophy of mind that it is most likely to make its mark. This is in the first place because one of the primary and most successful objects of phenomenological investigation - as exemplified by Sartre's original encounter - has been our own conscious mental states. But it is not just that phenomenology devoted itself so successfully to describing the subjective character of experience; it is also that, under the influence of the linguistic turn, anglophone philosophy neglected it so much. Indeed, despite its being a central topic of fascination for modern philosophers from Descartes to Kierkegaard, it is only in the past decade or so that the mainstream contemporary English-speaking world has rediscovered the philosophical importance of subjective experience per se.

To be fair, there were notable renegades along the way. In the mid-1970s Thomas Nagel emphasized the significance of the "subjective character of experience", and in the early 1980s John Searle argued that all mental states depend upon a pre-linguistic set of "background" capacities without which they would fail to represent anything at all. In addition, there was challenging work on the phenomenological side from Hubert Dreyfus, the eminent Heidegger scholar and leader of the American phenomenologists. (I worked with both Searle and Dreyfus as a graduate student at Berkeley.) But the decisive split with the linguistic philosophy of the twentieth century didn't enter the mainstream in philosophy of mind until 1996, with David Chalmers's influential book The Conscious Mind. Although Chalmers's work itself focused principally on traditional metaphysical issues concerning the relation between the mind and the body, the ensuing enthusiasm for problems concerning consciousness and perception stimulated an interest, among some philosophers of mind, in various non-traditional problems about the phenomenology of conscious mental states. In this context the classic phenomenological texts by Husserl and such second-generation phenomenologists as Heidegger, Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty have increasingly found their way onto English-speakers'desks.

So what exactly is phenomenology, and what precisely does it have to offer? It is useful to return to Sartre. What excited him so much about the prospect of phenomenology, as we saw, is that it is devoted almost entirely to describing things. Indeed, description is so central to phenomenology in all of its phases that Heidegger could say, in one of his early lecture courses, that "the phrase descriptive phenomenology is, at bottom, tautological". Description stands in contrast to all the other things a philosopher might be doing when engaging philosophically with a given domain: causal explanation, rational reconstruction, transcendental argument, conceptual analysis, theory-building, and so on. The idea behind phenomenology is that simply describing the phenomena, as completely and accurately as possible and without importing into the description unwarranted presuppositions about how the domain described is or must be, is already a devilishly difficult project. And one can see why. If one has tacit presuppositions about what the phenomena of a given domain are like - as one is bound to with any sufficiently interesting domain - then learning to separate out the phenomena as they actually are from one's presuppositions about them will require a certain kind of discipline. The commitment to this discipline was implicit in the famous battle cry of the phenomenologists: "Zu den Sachen selbst!" ("To the things themselves!"). To get a sense for phenomenological description, let us consider again the case of perception.

Recall that perception played a particularly important role in the epistemology of early modern philosophy as it was developed by Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume and others. In one form or another these empiricist philosophers all believed that we get the thoughts and ideas we have about the world directly from our more fundamental sensations of it; the thoughts are simply "less forceful and vivacious" copies of the images we receive in perception. But this epistemological position carries with it an implicit phenomenological presupposition as well. In particular, the traditional empiricist view, descendants of which have continued to be influential in the twentieth century, takes perception to be the presentation of an image before the mind, an image which can later be copied and stored as an idea. In the twentieth century such an image was often called a "sense datum". Notice that the phenomenological commitment involved in sense- datum theory already goes beyond traditional linguistic-philosophical accounts of perception, since these find the central philosophical features of perception to be discoverable through pure linguistic analysis.

Linguistic philosophers such as Wittgenstein or Anscombe needn't have denied that perceptions have some phenomenological character, of course, but their linguistic technique certainly dissuaded one from focusing on its details. And indeed, one recent position in the philosophy of mind goes so far as to deny any phenomenological features to perception at all. The phenomenologist criticizes the sense-datum theory of perception, as we will see, on the grounds that it gets the phenomenology of perception wrong. But it resists the linguistic approach in a stronger sense, along with the approach that denies any phenomenological features to perception at all, for here the disagreement concerns whether description of the detailed phenomenological character has any essential role to play in a philosophical account of perception. Sense-datum theories did take seriously the detailed phenomenological character of perception, but different theories of sense data ascribe different phenomenological attributes to them. Still, one phenomenological commitment is common to all sense- datum theories: that the distinctive phenomenological features of the visual sense datum correlate with relevant features of the physical image cast upon the retina. Consider, for example, the much-discussed case of the penny seen at an angle. Since it casts an elliptical image upon the retina, the sense datum one is presented with in the experience of a penny at an angle is said to be elliptical. As the penny rotates towards or away from the perceiver, the retinal image of the penny, and therefore the sense datum correlated with it, changes accordingly; it becomes more or less elliptical.

In addition to this phenomenological feature, sense data are traditionally taken to have epistemological attributes as well. On Bertrand Russell's famous version of the sense- datum theory, for example, one's knowledge of sense data is taken to be "incorrigible": if I take myself to be seeing a red sense datum, for example, then I am - whether or not there is a red object in the world that is correlated with it. This incorrigibility thesis tied modern sense-datum theory back to the epistemological concerns of the early modern philosophers, and much of the discussion concerning sense-datum theories in current anglophone philosophy has focused on these kinds of incorrigibility claims. But for phenomenological purposes, the relevant issue is simpler. In particular, the phenomenologist wants to know whether it is a good description of my everyday experience that when I see a penny presented at an angle I have a perception as of ellipticality.

Husserl thought not. Indeed, Husserl observed that there is an important sense in which when I see the penny presented at an angle - at least if the angle is not too acute - it looks to be round. I can, of course, get myself into the frame of mind in which it appears elliptical - by closing one eye, for example, and focusing on the object in the way one does when trying to draw it in perspective. But it takes a special effort to see the penny in this way, and it is a mistake to think that just because the image on my retina is elliptical therefore I always experience the penny that way. It is interesting to note that there may be people who do see the world in this sense-data-like way. There is some evidence, for example, that savant artists - who are able to draw incredibly detailed scenes in perfect perspective from memory - may rely upon visual images of this projective sort. And neuroscientists have argued recently that, because of a natural misalignment of the eyes, many famous painters were unable to see in stereo. But as interesting as these extreme cases may be, they are striking to us precisely because of how unusual they are. If we are interested in the everyday experience of objects by normal perceivers then, arguably at least, Husserl was right to reject the sense-datum account.

Starting from this very simple kind of example, Husserl was able to draw out a variety of increasingly detailed and wonderful observations about the phenomena of perceptual experience. He noticed, for example, that there is an important sense in which we tend to experience objects as fully three-dimensional: in particular, they look as though they extend beyond what we can see of them from here. You can start to see this by noting that nobody is surprised, when walking around a tree, to discover that it has a backside: in some sense or another our experience of the tree from the front already involves a sense of its "voluminousness". The three-dimensionality of visual experience, however, is notoriously difficult to account for on the sense-datum view. Some sense-datum theorists, like Russell, tried to reduce the experience of voluminousness to a series of beliefs that the perceiver has about the object being perceived. But Husserl was rightly keen to resist this move. After all, I could believe that an object is a mere facade (as I might when looking at the "buildings" on a movie set) but still experience it as three- dimensional.

Husserl also highlighted the temporal dimension of experience. His most famous discussion of this phenomenon began by considering the apparently simple experience of a sequence of notes in a melody. Husserl pointed out, as many had before, that the experience of the later notes in the melody takes place (in some sense or another) against the background of an experience of the earlier notes. But he went on to show that it is exceedingly difficult to describe one's current experience of the earlier notes. In particular, one cannot say, as the sense-datum theorist must, that one hears the earlier notes, or that one has them "before the mind as an auditory image". The reason is that such an account has no obvious way to distinguish between hearing the notes in sequence as a melody and hearing them simultaneously as a chord. Husserl's detailed discussion of the sense in which I "retain" the earlier notes in my current auditory experience without actually "hearing" them is deep and important. It moves beyond Kant's idea that temporal experience is a matter of synthesizing a sequence of images, and it lays the groundwork for Heidegger's existential treatment of temporality. There are many places in Husserl's oeuvre that are inviting to the student of phenomenology, but one could do worse than to begin with the lectures On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893-1917). Husserl's fascinating discussion there could be thought of as an extended rumination on the intuition that T. S. Eliot could only gesture at in "Burnt Norton", when he wrote that "Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past".

Despite his great talent for describing various features of experience, there were important limitations to Husserl's phenomenology that troubled the second generation of phenomenologists. His focus on objects as we experience them led to an idealistic turn in his metaphysics that was strongly resisted by many of his most prominent students. And his related view that we should be able to bracket all our presuppositions about the world in order to focus exclusively on our experience of it - a method he called the "phenomenological reduction" - was seen by many later phenomenologists as naively optimistic. Still, his voluminous output - he produced more than 40,000 pages of detailed phenomenological description - remains a rich source of ideas for philosophers today.

That said, it is important to emphasize again that the real brilliance of Husserl's work lies more in its details than in its grand scheme. Like a talented poet, Husserl at his best is capable of uncovering aspects of human experience that ring absolutely true in his description of them, even though one has never noticed them before. His special skill lies in a kind of detailed self-reflection that is committed to honesty above all else, and perhaps it is not surprising that some of the most dedicated students of his work have found in phenomenology a religious dimension of the sort one finds in Augustine's Confessions or Pascal's Pensees. It is in the experience of working through the details of phenomenology that this religious, or perhaps poetic, dimension is most easily experienced. For phenomenology done properly requires a certain attitude or stance, a kind of preparation for encountering things as they really are. Eugen Fink, Husserl's final research assistant and sometime co-author, characterized this attitude lovingly when he said that phenomenology is "wonder in the face of the world". Merleau-Ponty thought Fink's characterization was particularly evocative, and perhaps it is appropriate to conclude with Merleau-Ponty's own moving and suggestive account:

Phenomenology's task was to reveal the mystery of the world and of reason . . . . It is as painstaking as the works of Balzac, Proust, Valery, or Cezanne - by reason of the same kind of attentiveness and wonder, the same demand for awareness, the same will to seize the meaning of the world or of history as that meaning comes into being. In this way it merges into the general effort of modern thought.