Ideen I (Sections 118-124): Drawing-Back to the Ego

APPENDIX IDEEN I (SECTIONS 118-124): DRAWING-BACK TO THE EGO. SYNTHESIS AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL SCIENCE Husserl's account of synthesis and the single ego in Ideen 1 finally explains how the ongoing process of interpretative consciousness lays out its own intentional history behind it as it goes. One tends to remember the central themes of Ideen 1 as being issues surrounding the absolute ego and the method ology of the transcendental reductions. But if we concentrate on sections 118-124 where Husserl discusses the problem of synthesis, we find that while ego and science are still in some sense treated as prior to ongoing con sciousness, they are here treated as having been constituted as prior by those syntheses. I offer the following pages not as a complete reading of Ideen 1, or as a general account of the relation between Husserl's early and later works, or even as a close exegesis of sections 118-124, but as a speculative reading of the theories of the ego, of synthesis, and of phenomenology, and in par ticular a reading of Husserl's descriptive category of "drawing back", that suggests a solution to the problems of synthesis left over from the Logical I nvestigations. The problem we have to solve is how the synthetic interpretation of actual experience both grounds and depends on the implicit containment of backward references in consciousness. Consciousness must be so constituted as to extend beyond its actualities into a prior unity of all that is possible; it must be so active as to have prepared for the passive reception of any experience what soever; so unified as to establish rational connections between distinct spheres of meaning; so committed to natural experience as to reflect back on phe nomenological science. In short, for the synthesis of acts of consciousness to keep going on, interpretative consciousness must in each act be going back for more of its own synthetic unity. The issues which guide sections 118-124 concern the unification of a plurality of acts of consciousness into a single, "all-enveloping", "original" unity or "stream" of consciousness. "Synthetic consciousness" is an "inten tional combination" wherein one act of consciousness is "bound up" with another into "one consciousness" (245). At the outset of s. 118, there is a proposal not to begin with the "unity of immanent time-consciousness", in spite of the fact that temporal unity is "the all-enveloping unity of all the experiences of a stream of experience", in which no act can be "foreign" (245). Instead, Husserl proposes to deal in these sections with syntheses which are not continuous but "jointed" (246), where the foreignness of the experiences is precisely what is at issue in the effort to synthesize them. As in LU, the account of synthesis in Ideen holds that individual contents of consciousness are each "self-limiting", and hence have a contributory value towards com- 196 IDEEN 1 197 pletable interpretation; they are therefore "bound" together as a plurality; the plurality can then be "crossed over" into a synthetic singularity of inter pretation (248); the "original" plurality thus functions as a "peculiar attach ment of thesis to synthesis" (248); finally, the singular synthesized result "removes" plurality from the content of the experiences, and the "simple" result presents a new object that is "original" to the synthetic consciousness (248). The "attachment" of a thetic assertion to a synthetic interpretation, and the constitution of the synthetic object, can occur only "through the back ward reference (Rückbeziehung) of a simple thesis to the originally con stituted collection" (248). The synthetic multiplicity of the result is at once the completion of, the removal of, and the return to, an original plurality of theses. It is in s. 122 that the details of the process and the results of "articulated synthesis" are spelled out (253-55). Husserl describes four "modes" in "the realm of theses and syntheses" (253). I will refer to these as the syntheses of (i) "insertion" (Einsetzen, 253), (ii) "grasping" (Ergreiffen, 253), (iii) "still retaining" (noch behalten, 253), and (iv) the ego's "drawing back" or "with drawal" (zurückziehen, 254). It is primarily the fourth that will concern uso (I) "Insertion" A synthesis can be carried out (vollzogen) step by step; it becomes, it comes into being in original production. This originariness of becoming in the stream of consciousness is a quite peculiar one. The thesis or synthesis comes into being, in so far as the pure ego actually takes the step, and takes every new step; itself lives in the step and "steps on" with it. Itsfree spontaneity and activity consists in positing, positing-as-result, positing-beforehand and positing-afterwards (Setzen, Daraufsetzen, Voraus- und Nachsetzen); it does not live within the theses as a passive indweller; rather the theses radiate from it as from an original source of generation. Every thesis begins with a point 0/ insertion (Einsatzpunkt), with a point of original positing; so it is with this first thesis, and with each further one in the synthetic context. This "inserting" even belongs to thesis as such, as a remarkable mode of original actuality. It is somewhat like the fiat, a point of insertion of will and action (253). In the activity of synthesis, the subject deliberately gives himself so me thing new to experience. He interrupts whatever is going on in the stream of con sciousness, and inserts a thesis of his own choosing. And in this insertion, the subject becomes aware 0/ himself as the controller of the stream of con sciousness; the ego, as the self-identical "I" who thinks, steps onto the scene of experience. But there is more to the spontaneous insertion of theses than the deliber ateness and self-awareness of the experiencing subject. A "positing" act situates a thesis by declaring that its place follows or precedes some other. It differ entiates the insertion-point from an otherwise undifferentiated stream of beliefs, desires, feelings, etc. It is for this reason that the ego itself comes into being at the same time as its free positings come into being; not just because the ego notices its own power therein, but because it is due to the ego's intru sion that there is any point of origin for recognizing differences among theses 198 APPENDIX and relations within syntheses, for recognizing the distance between the steps and their relative priority and posteriority. For all the Kantian tradition of the transcendental ego as the agent of the synthetic unity of apperception, and for all of Husserl's talk earlier in Ideen of the absolute being of the ego as the necessary and indubitable phenome nological residuum (ss. 33-49), the role of the ego's directedness towards objects and capacity for synthesizing is quite specific, and even in a sense derivative, in s. 122. The ego's "free spontaneity and activity" consists just in the potentiality which the synthesis has of being "drawn out" or "completed" (vollziehen). (11) "Having in One's Grasp" The second mode of carrying out articulated syntheses follows from the first with "essential necessity". The insertion-point "grasps" a new synthesizable content, and this inserting is "forthwith and without a break changed into 'having in one's grasp' ("im Griff haben")" (255). The self-giving character of the inserted thesis is tumed into the character of having been given. Husserl does not mention the active ego in describing the second mode - not because there is no longer an ego who has the thesis in his grasp, but because the grasping takes the form of receptivity. (III) "Still Retaining" The pure ego carries out a new step, and now in the pervading unity of the synthetic consciousness "still retains" in its grasp what it had just grasped (253). The logic of "still retaining" theses wh ich have since been synthesized holds both in perception ("When collecting things together I do not allow the object just perceptually apprehended to slip away while I turn my apprehending glance to the new object", 253) and in reason ("In carrying out a proof, I run through in steps the thoughts that serve as premisses; I do not surrender any syn thetic step; I do not lose my grasp of what I have won", 253-4). In s. 119, the plurality of theses was said to be "removed" in synthesis; in s. 122, the distinct meaning of each is preserved. The first mode of articulated synthesis constitutes a discontinuity in the flux of consciousness; the second apprehends the meaning given to the dis continuous moment; the third transforms that moment into, and preserves it as, a "member" or "joint" belonging to a "jointed synthesis" (246), i.e. to a continuity of discontinuous theses. Every grasping of an object keeps its content in mind long enough to be connected with the next grasping of the object. IDEEN 1 199 (IV) "Drawing Back" The third mode plays the role that the syntheses of identification play in LU vi, but only in cases where one apprehension of an object is succeeded by other apprehensions of the same object. Yet synthetic activity must allow a subject not only to focus continuously on one object, but also to stop looking at one object long enough to look at another; a subject must be able to treat the object no longer noticed as something that co-exists with whatever is being noticed, and as something that could be noticed aga in. The pure ego can draw itself back (zurückziehen) wholly from the theses; it releases the thetic correlates "from its hold": it "turns to another theme".

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