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PHENOMENOLOGY AND DIALECTlCAL MATERIALISM BOSTON STUDIES IN THE OF SCIENCE

EDITED BY ROBERT S. COHEN AND MARX W. WARTOFSKY

VOLUME 49 TRÄN DUC THAO

PHENOMENOLOGY AND DIALECTICAL MA TERIALISM

Translated by

Daniel J. Hennan and Donald V. Morano

Edited by Robert S. Cohen

D. REIDEL PUBLISHING COMPANY

A MEMBER OF THE KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLlSHERS GROUP

DORDRECHT / BOSTON / LANCASTER / TOKYO übrary of Congress Cataloging in Publleation Data

Tran, Duc Thao. Phenomenology and dialeetieal materialism.

(Boston studies in the philosophy of seienee ; v. 49) Translation of: Phenomenologie et materialisme dialeetique. Bibliography: p. Ineludes index. 1. Phenomenology. 2. Dialeetieal materialsm. 3. Husserl, Edmund,1859-1938. I. Cohen, Robert Sonne. II. Title. III. Series. Q174.B67 vol. 49 [B829.5] 001'.0Is[146'.32] 85-35

ISBN-13: 978-94-010-8795-7 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-009-5191-4 DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-5191-4

Published by D. Reidel Publishing Company, P.O. Box 17,3300 AA Dordrecht, Holland.

Sold and distributed in the U.S.A. and Canada by Kluwer Academic Publishers, 160 Old Derby Street, Hingham, MA 02043, U.S.A.

In all other eountries, sold and distribu ted by Kluwer Aeademic Publishers Group, P.O. Box 322, 3300 AH Dordreeht, Holland.

Translated from Tran Duc Thao's Phimomim%gie et materialisme dialectique (: Minh Tan, 1951: re-issued New York: Gordon & Breach Science Pubs., Inc., 1971).

All Rights Reserved. © 1986 by D. Reidel Publishing Company. Softeover reprint ofthe hardeover 1st edition 1986 No part of the material proteeted by this copyright notiee may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, eleetronic or meehanical, inc1uding photoeopying, reeording or by any storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner. TABLE OF CONTENTS

EDITORIAL PREFACE vii

TRANSLATORS'FOREWORD xiii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xix

AUTHOR'S PREFACE xxi

PART ONE: THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL METHOD AND ITS ACTUAL REAL CONTENT

CHAPTER ONE: THE OF l. The Technique ofVariation 3 2. Pure Idealities and Empirical Idealities 6 3. The True Significance of the of Essenee 8 4. Difficulties with the of Essences. The Return to the 9

CHAPTER TWO: THE THEMATIZATION OF CONCRETE CON• SCIOUSNESS 5. The Return to Lived in the Logische Unter- suehungen 13 6. The Discovery of the Reduction 20 7. The Exposition of the Ideen 29 8. The Critique of the Kantians 37 9. Fink's Reply. The Necessity of a Mare Radical Explanation 39 10. The Notion of Constitution. The Signification of Transcen- dental 43 Il. The Constitution of the World of the Spirit 47 12. The Notion of . and Judgment 50

CHAPTER THREE: THE PROBLEM S OF REASON 13. Self-Evidence (Evidenee) and 69 14. The problem of Error 73 15. [Self-] Evidence as Intentional Performance (Intentionale Leistung) 77

v vi TABLE OF CONTENTS

16. The Possibility of Enor as Contemporaneous with Truth 82 17. A Digression ~ The Theory of Evidence According to Descartes and the Problem of the Cartesian Cirele 87 18. Phenomenological Description as a Critique of Authenticity: Static and Genetic Constitution 90 19. The Constitution of the Formai Domain: and Mathe- matics 99 20. The Genesis of Judgment 111

CHAPTER FOUR: THE RESULT OF PHENOMENOLOGY 21. The Genesis of Antepredicative Experience and Its Real Content 121

PART TWO: THE DlALECIlC OF REAL MOVEMENT

INTRODUCTION TO PART TWO J. and 133

CHAPTER ONE: THE DIALECTlC OI' ANIMAL BEHA VIOR AS THE OI' Sr:--JSF 2. Phenomenological Givens and Real Givens 143 3. The Movement of the InternaI 146 4. The Movement of the External Sense 156 5. Remarks on the Preceding Development: The Passage to the of Human Societies 172

CHAPTER TWO: THE DIALECTlC OF HUMAN SOCIETlES AS THE BECOMING OF REAS ON 6. Use- and the Movement of Sacrifke 179 7. The Movement of Wealth and the Becoming of the Gods 189 8. Mercantile Economy and the Sacrifke of the Savior, God 194 9. Monetary Economy, the of the , and the of Salvatian 201 10. Capitalistic Economy, the Power of Abstraction and the 212

APPENDIX 2J9

NOTES 22J

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS C!TED 24J

INDEX OF NAMES 243 EDITORIAL PREFACE

Tran Duc Thao, a brilliant student of philosophy at the Ecole Normale Super• ieure within the post-1935 decade of political disaster, born in Vietnam shortly after the F ir st World War, recipient of a scholarship in Paris in 1935 37, was early noted for his independent and originaI mind_ While the 1930s twisted down to the defeat of the Spanish Republic, the compromise with German at Munich, and the start of the Second World War, and while the 1940s began with hypocritical stability at the Western Front fol• lowed by the defeat of France, and the occupation of Paris by the German power together with French collaborators, and the n ended with liberation and a search for a new of human situations, the young Thao was deeply immersed in the classical works of European philosophy. He was al so the attentive but critical student of a quite special generation of French metaphysicians and social philosophers: Gaston Berger, Maurice Merleau• Ponty, Emile Brehier, Henri Lefebvre, Rene le Senne, Jean-Paul Sartre, perhaps the young . They, in their several modes of response, had been meditating for more than a decade on the philosophy of , which came to France in the thirties as a new metaphysical enlighten• ment - phenomenology. With Husserl's phenomenology, there also came the powerful influences of a revived Hegel (of the Phellomeno!ogy) and of 's , and, in a tangle of variants, there came a startling renewed investigation of Marx. The young Tran Duc Thao joined the search for objective truth, worked to overcome both psychologism and every weakening of by subjectivist limitation, investigated Hus• serl's writings in print and in the fine arehives at Louvain (with the kindly help of H. L. van Breda). His was dialeetieal, Socratic and Hegelian, but also it was a material dialectic due both to his Marxist studies and to the grim tasks of the greater liberation in his social -world - the liberation of Vietnam. Thao's themes drove him to the border of Husserl's , just as Thao saw Husserl himself driven toward the apparent of the final Krisis manuscripts. The privileged, indeed most precious, phenomenological aetivity is that of 'constitution', for which there is the endless work of passing from naive certainty to the developed no-longer-naive of intentional

vii vm EDITORIAL PREFACE . Such praxis has to be understood in so many ways of becoming, and especially of becoming aware: the awareness is of what is mine and what is the historical world; the praxes are sociaL political, symbolic, communicative. even philosophical. If to constitute is to act, the phenomenological re• establishment of must investigate the temporaI within action, both as the particular of a -consciousness and as the dialectic of past, present and : the past made present cannot be mine alone: the future yet to be chosen, 'constituted', must be inter-subjective and historical, so it is Husserl's future as 'horilOn'. For Tran Duc Thao, the human activity of 'constitution' in the present demands understanding, which retrospectively deals with genesis and prospectively with goals. Genetic understanding en• tails materialist science, the investigation of the evolutionary biological foundation and historical development of consciousness, and especially of that practical consciousness which is language. Understanding of goal-directed present 'constitutive' action suggests a materialist science of intentional pos• sibilities, a political economy of historically determined needs, desires, ideo• logies, resources and alternatives. Whether the phenomenological method is capable ofleading to such under• standing, whether that method can situate the social sciences so that they may rightly formulate their investigations, is shown to be doubtful in Part One of this book. Thao here, and in his articles of those same early years, sets aside the existentialist turn (effectively close to Lukacs's 1947 critique of the existentialist of 'dreadful freedom'); for Thao, the way forward must lead through the theory and practice of . What Marx• ism may say to the philosopher at this point was roundly debated in France in the two decades after Liberation. For Tran Duc Thao, the Marxist heuris• tic led to the question of clarifying the of production. Thus produc• tion is the moment of constitution (and in Thao's later work we see how re• presentation, gesture, and the embryology of language elaborates production at the origin of human mentality). But HusserL as Thao tells us in his care• ful exposition, provided only a program: to go beyond the undoubted of anti-formalism and anti-dualism, phenomenology would have to transcend its own analytic restrictions and enter upon analysis of the historical mater• ialism of the subject, a critique of the forees pressing upon the subject as that subject's very life-world. Thao writes of 'the historical movement of ' and at the conclusion of his Husserlian study he summarizes: ". . . the re is no longer any valid reason to refuse to (the) constituting subjectivity its predicates regarding reality". And why is this possible, why can we trans- EDITORIAL PR EF ACE IX cend the ? Because ". . . it is nature itself becoming• subject" (I 29). In Part Two, Thao sketched his alternative to the 'radical contingency' of Husserl's Weltkonstitution (130). He wrestled then, and since (and how many others have done likewise), to argue, indeed to show, the plausibility of a non-reductive materialism. His epigraph from Engels the problem: "Matter is not a product of , but mind itself is merely the highest pro• duct of matter". The sketch was supported by Thao's persuasive interpre· tation (I948) of Hegel's 'Phenomenology' as naturalistic, anti-reductionist, indeed nature becoming mental and substance becoming subject. The material content of Hegel's logic and phenomenology receives much deeper investiga• tion in Thao's major essay on the Hegelian dialectic (first published in the in (1956), then in French (I 965)). Here Thao elaborates the forms of work (social praxis) and of consciousness within his· torical stages, typically Hegel on desire, master and slave, death and the struggle for life, private truth and public intersubjectivity. But beyond his materialist reading of Hegel was the need for scientific investigations. Thao's essays of the 60s and early 70s, and his monograph of Investigations into the Origins of Language and Consciousness, are scientific works, however much they are also philosophical, Le. explorations of a historical materialist dialec• tic. lf Thao's Marxist exploration of the limiting crisis within phenomenology is compared with his phenomenological reading of (as in 'The Dialectic of Human Societies as the Becoming of Reason', Part Two, Chapter 2, below, but al so in his early interpretation ofVietnamese practical affairs in Les Temps modernes, 1947), we see that his turn to scientific in• quiries was the inevitable and natural development. His French critics, with respect for his sensitive and acute qualities, pointed to the philosophical (they often wrote 'theoretical') limitation of Thao's Marxist alternative; they were less ready to accept that Tran Duc Thao and a sober Marxism could overcome this limitation through the sciences, through Soviet as well as Western anthro• pology, archeology. paleontology. linguistics. cognitive and developmental psychology, historical sociology. We see the young Tran Duc Thao's coura• geous and complex argument in this book - concerning Husserl, Hegel and Marx - as a classical text of 20th-century philosophy, and his subsequent synthesis of work in the human sciences as his mature and profoundly stimu• lating accomplishment in the . * * * x EDITORJAL PREFACE

Works of Trdn Duc Thao in Wesrem languages

1943: 'The phenomenological method in Husserl' (Thesis, in French, un• published). 1946: 'Marxisme et phenomenologie', La Revue Internationale 2, 168-174. 1947: 'Les Franco-Vietnamiennes', Les Temps modernes 2,1053- 1067. 'Sur I'interpretation trotzkyiste des evenements d'Indochine', Les Temps moderlles 2, 1697 - 1705. 1948: 'La "Phenomenologie de I'esprit" et son contenu reel', Les Temps modernes 3, 492- 519. 1949: 'Existentialisme et materialism e dialectique', Revue de Meraphysique et de Morale 54, 317 329. 1950: 'Les origines de la reduction phenomeno10gique chez Husserl', Deuca• !ion 3, 128-142. 1951: Phenomellologie et materialisme dialectique, Editions Minh-Tan, Paris. 368 pp. 1965: 'Le "Noyau rationnel" dans la dialectique hegelienne', La Pensee No. 19, 3-23. (First published in 1956 in the Vietnamese journal Tdp san Dai hoc at the University of Hanoi.) 1966: 'Le mouvement de rindication comme forme originaire de la cons• cience', La Pellsee No. 128, 3- 24. 1969: 'Du geste de !'index a l'image typique', Part I, La Pensee No. 147, 3--46. 'Du geste de l'index a I'image typique', Part II, La Pensee No. 148, 71 111. 1970: 'Du geste de l'index a l'image typique', Part III, La Pensee No. 149, 93-106. FellOmenologia e materialismo dialettico, Italian trans1ation by Roberta Tomassini, Lampugnani Nigri Editore, Milan, xix and 282 pp. With a bio-bibliographical note by the translator and a critical intro• duction by Pier Aldo Rovatti (to which we are indebted). 1973: (Recherches sur I 'origiile du langage et de la . Editions Sociales, Paris. 343 pp. 1984: Illl'estigations into the Origin ofLanguage and Consciousness (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 44). English translation by Daniel J. Herman and Robert L. Armstrong; edited by Carolyn Fawcett and Robert S. Cohen, D. Reidel, Dordrecht and Boston. xi and 214 pp. EDITORIAL PREFACE xi

1985: Phenomenology and Dialeetieal Materialism (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 49). English translation by Daniel J. Herman and Donald V. Morano; edited by Robert S. Cohen, D. Reidel, Dor• drecht, and Boston. xxviii and 242 pp.

No te: A sampling of critical appreciations of this book and the essays of Tdn Duc Thao may be found in Paul Ricoeur 'Sur la phenomenologie', Esprit 21,827 -836 (1953); the A. De Waelhens review in Critique 58, 85-88 (1953) and in Rev. Metaph. et morale 58,310-312 (1953); G. Neri in his Prassi e eonoseenza, 149-163 (Feltrinelli, Milan, 1966); in his Perspeetives de l'homme, 304--313 (PUF, Paris, 1969); P. Lyotard in his La Phtilwmenologie, 110-126 (PUF, Paris, 1967). See also Michael Kelly's perceptive exposition of Thao's 'materialist inversion' in the 'rational kerneI' paper of 1965 in Kelly, Modem Freneh Marxism, 160-164 (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, and Blackwell, Oxford, 1982); and the remark by J. Derrida in Philosoph)' in France Today, edited by Alan Montefiore p. 38 (Cambridge University Press, 1983).

On the translation: Where Husserl uses 'Abschattungen', Thao uses 'silhouet· te s' as do Thao's translators, while Husserl translators generally use 'per• spective variation'. For Husserl's 'Erlebnis', Thao uses 'vecu' and Thao's translators use 'lived experience' or 'lived' depending upon syntactical need, while Husserl translators use 'experience'. For HusserI's use of 'ursprünglich' and similar 'ur-' prefixed terms, Thao uses 'originaire', his translators use 'primordial' and the Husserl translators use 'originaI' or 'primary' or 'primaI'. Footnote numbers followed by asterisks indicate notes introduced by the translators as required by the French text.

* * *

We are grateful to Daniel J. Herman and Donald V. Morano for the linguistic and philosophical skills which they gave so generously to their craftsmanlike translation.

November 1985 ROBERT S. COHEN Boston University

MARX w. WARTOFSKY Baruch College, City University of New York TRANSLATORS'FOREWORD

In the second half of the twentieth century, when communication and dialogue between all peoples of the world is so urgently needed, this philo• sophical work of 1951 by the Vietnamese Tran Duc Thao merits our attention. Professor Thao received much of his education in the West. In his twenties he was a scholarship student at the prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure of Paris, at which, from his first days, he was regarded by his instructors as 'prodigiously talented'. His studies there spanned the years of the German occupation. Though never studying under or even meeting Edmund Husserl, he made several visits to the Husserlian archives at Louvain and was provided by Fr. Van Breda with unpublished transcriptions of Group e of Husserl on temporality. He alludes to these rather extensively in Phenomenology and Dialeerieal Materialism. He has remained in Vietnam since 1950, serving between 1958 and 1964 as an adviser and agriculturai minister and later as the director of asehool. Therefore, his extensive and varied background, in addition to the timeliness of the topic, Phenomenology and Dialeetieal Materialism, leads us to pay serious atten tion to this 1951 study. For phe• nomenology and Marxism are certainly two of the major philosophical movements - if not the most significant - of this century. The Preface to this book was written last and should be read with great care since it vividly, if not sometimes rhetorically and even tendentiously, articulates the thesis of this study. Thao writes: "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." Thao's rejection of phenomenology is based on an internai contradiction found in Husserl's own work - particularly the later work - since the practical re suits of phenomenology are incompatible with the theoretieal from which these concrete analyses were elaborated. Husserl's un• dertaking from the first philosophy of essences to 'The Origins of Geometry' evolves within the horizon of idealism which is dominated with the 'constitu• tion of the thing'. This constitution, as weil as the constitution of all meaning and truth based on the phenomenological reduction which introduces this constitution reduces the of the thing to a constituted being. But, as

xiii xiv TRANSLATORS'POREWORD

lhao rightly points out, according to Husserl himself, all constitution, whether of the thing, being, values or persons, is always founded on an antepredicative perception; the categorial intuition, or the predicates of a proposition, are always formed on the background of the world, with the consequence that the constitution of the world is no longer the product of the transcendental Ego, but the product of each man's consciousness, of each man's individual experience s in his own particular environment. According to lhao, not only does phenomenology end up in a total skeptical relativism: "the merchant at the market has his own market-truth," it al so uselessly duplicates for "the concept 'transcendental' was superfluous from the outset, since it maintains a strict of content between 'pure consciousness' and natural consciousness." lhao praises Husserl for appreciating the fact that "the is constituted in movement of time" for "the principal merit of phenomenology was its definitive destruction of formalism in the very horilOn of idealism and its placing of all problems of value on the level of the concrete." Nevertheless, he condudes that "the great problem of our time ... has found its solution for a long time in the Marxist dialectic, which defines the only valid process for a constitution of lived significations on the foundation of material reality." In an elegant. laconic, and remarkably lucid prose, lhao elaborates the rationale that motivated Husserl's philosophizing: Husserl wished to go beyond psychologism in order to justify and delineate the realm of objective truth. But because of his idealistic scaffolding - the transcendental Ego, the phenomenological reduction, the constitution, etc., and being a bourgeois philosopher - Husserl was unable to achieve his original project and to realize fully that man's labor is the only source of truth. lhao's knowledge of HusserL as well as the entire history of philosophy, is most impressive, and he has the ability to elucidate and bring to life some of the most abstruse epistemological writings of Kant, Hegel, Descartes, etc. It would be foolhardy and redundant for us to attempt to summarize this work: we sh all content ourselyes with highligiHing examples. Both the beginner and the advanced student of phenomenology can delight in the lucidity of lhao's explanation of the eidetic reduction, the necessity of taking into account the subjective pole in every act of knowledge, and the between a causal and a phenomenological explanation. lhao provides for an especially illuminating discussion of the problem of error. He makes the paradoxical assertion: "lhe apodicticity of self-evidence does not militate against the correction of error." But, prima facie, it would seem as if apodicticity would preclude revision. Yet, lhao argues rather convincingly: TRANSLATORS'FOREWORD xv

Truth, being defined in terms of self-evidenee, cannot by the very fact be posited in the absoluteness of an in-itself, for it belongs to the preeise meaning of all self-evidence to be fallible. Self-evidence exists as such only in its actual lived experience, which is renewed at each moment. Such a movement implies an absolute privilege of present aetuality over the results previously acquired and the right of constantly rectifying them. Thus, truth is defined only in terms of its becoming, which must not be understood as an intelligible movement of , but as an actually lived temporality.

However, lest these remarks be eonstrued as maintaining epistemologieal relativism in the long haul, Thao insists upon an irrefragable grounding for objeetive knowledge: "Evidenee ean be eorreeted of annulled by other evidenee. But such a movement preeisely presupposes the absolute right of evidenee in general." The first part, that is, the phenomenologieal part of this work, is a treasure house of such . Then in Part Two, Thao attempts to disclose dialeetieal materialism as the logieal issue of a relentlessly pursued phenomenology. He traees the deplorable mathematizing of nature that resuIted beeause of Descartes' pernicious diehotomy between a thinking mind and an extended object. "Scientific was established precisely through the radieal elimination of all subjeetive signifieation. After Descartes, metaphysieal gave itself the task of radiealizing the dualism and suppressing the mystery of the union in man by referring him to God, eoneeived as absolute substanee or as the souree of harmony." Furthermore, this abstraet view of matter, in redueing the prineiple of identity or non-eontradietion to an abstraet mathematieal point, failed to take into account the faet that "eonerete identity includes differenee and ehange." But, Thao argues, the dialeetieal aspeet of nature that had been noted by Engels "has reeentIy been shown in detail by natural seienee." Having vitalized matter, Thao proeeeds to explain the emergenee of human eonseiousness and language by means of a movement within nature itself. He criticizes the of phenomenology in its eharaeterization of mind as ontologieally prior to, and independent of, matter. Rather, Thao aeeounts for the emergenee of eonsciousness as "the movement of deferred behavior, whieh sends us baek to deferred circuits in the course of the nervous intlux." Consequently, "subjeetivity is but the formaI aspeet of the real dialeetieal process in whieh eaeh new stmeture represses the one that preeedes it and absorbs it in a lived interiority." "The sensorial impression, as the primordial form of lived experience ... is only the irritability of the eellular element absorbed and repressed in the reaetion of the whole organism." "The develop• ment of the nervous system is presented as a dialectie in whieh the suecessive xvi TRANSLATORS' FOREWORD level s of behavior are superimposed on each other - each formation inhibiting the preceding one and absorbing its influxes in a broader regulation in which they are maintained as suppressed, preserved, transcended." Critics of Thao 's work, such as Paul Ricoeur 1 and Jean-Paul Sartre,2 though favorably disposed toward Thao 's grounding of philosophical inves• tigation in concrete experience. ultimately reject his account of the origins of consciousness and, especially, self-consciousness. For they argue: how, possibly, could matter give rise to the idea of matter? Thao himself. dissatisfied with the second part of Phenomenology and Dialeetieal Materialism wrote essays in the 1960s and early 70s which develop and modify his views regarding the origins and nature of language and con• sciousness. These essays which form his second major work, Reeherehes sur l'origine du langage et de la eonscienee,3 are based on Marx's classical theory which considers that consciousness is from the outset a social product, elaborated in the material activity and material relations of men, in the language of real life. Such a conception, which is strictly ma terialistic, allows for the description of Iived experience on an entirely objective and scientific plane, which definitively eliminates, by making superfluous, the phenom• enological method from which the author could not entirely free himself in Phenomenology and Dialeetieal Materialism. Howevee thougb Thao may have modified and eve n rejected some of his views regarding phenomenology and in his most recent work, it is still useful and most instructive to study Phenom• enology and Dialeetieal Materialism, which has had a wide influence on the European continent these past three decades, since we find in this work a serious philosopher grappling with the relationship between phenome• nology and dialectical materialism: for whoever would come to serious grips with must take into account these two movements.

DANIEL J. HERMAN DONALD V. MORANO The University of West Florida Los Angeles, California

NOTES

1 His review-essay, 'Phenomenology' first appeared in Esprit (1953) 21, pp, 821-838. Daniel J. Herman and DonaId V. Morano translated it into English for the Fall 1974 Husserl issue of the South western Journal of Philosophy. TRANSLATORS' FOREWORD xvii

2 'Materialism and Revolution' (1949), in PhiIosophy in the Twentieth Century, Vol. 3, edited by William BaIrett and Henry D. Aiken, New York (1962), p. 389. 3 Triin Duc Thao: 1973, Recherches sur ['origine du langage et de la conscience, Paris: Editions Sociales. The English translation of this work is published as Boston Studies in the PhiIosophy of Science, Vol. 44 (1984). ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The translatars wish to thank Professars Herbert Spiegelberg and Paul Ricoeur for preliminary assistance in suggesting knowledgeable individuals and sources in regard to Tran Duc Thao. Ms Roberta Tomassini, the translator of this work into !talian as Fenomenologia e materialismo dialettico Milano, Lampugnani Nigri, 1970, deserves warm thanks for her many acts of kindness to us, providing us with a copy of her translation and her dissertation on Thao and suggesting other individuals who might be able to further assist us in our project. We thank Fr. Herman Van Breda, the curator of the Husserl Archives of Louvain for providing us with a vivid account of biographical detaiis regarding Thao and for his suggestions and helpfulness to us in our project. Michael Smith, Morano's teaehing assistant at Loyola University during the academic year of 1971-72, deserves thanks for his careful and con• structively critical review of the first third of this translation. Surely, the translation is mare accurate and fluent because of his suggestions. Mrs Marianne McDaniels of Pensacola, the secretary-typist of the phi• losophy department of the University of West Florida, has kept this project a viable one, conscientiously typing and retyping the many versions and revisions that the finicky collaborators, some 1000 miles apart, submitted to her. Surely Daniel Herman on the scene, more than Donald Morano, has appreciated the patience and good cheer and unflagging devotion of Marianne. But Morano himself can weil realize that without her efforts this project might never have been completed. Donald Marano, wishes to extend special appreciation to his first French teacher, Miss Hazel Writer. She bore with his atrocious pronunciation for three years at Grafton Street Junior High School, Worcester, Massachusetts. Therefore, if it were appropriate for a translator to dedicate his translation to someone, he would certainly dedicate his share of this translation to his devoted French Teacher, Hazel Writer. Professor Morana acknowledges with gratitude a grant from Loyola University to defray some of the clerical and travel expenses resulting from this project. We both wish to thank the Matchette Foundation for the grant it has contributed to us for translating this work.

xix 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 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 internaI 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 easyone, since it was concerned only with the theory of phenomenological analysis under the three aspects that appeared successively in its : the description of essences, the static explication of lived experience [vecu] , and finally a genetic explication. Its 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 inc1uded the achieved results of the method; however, the most important part of this work has remained unpublished. 1 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 enigma tic 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 the essential phenomenological inspiration. But, after long hesitation we found that, on account of the actual descriptions that abound in the manu• scripts, we had to renounce once and for all any of reconciling the concept of phenomenology with its actual achievement. Since then, there has no longer been any question of remaining within the limits of a historica! study, even with all the which are permitted to the interpreter in the of the history of philosophy. The enumeration of concrete analyses (which we give in the last chapter of Part One) involves a total and definitive break with the fundamental principles of the doctrine. Since the Logical lnvestigations (1900-1901), every predication pre• supposes an antepredicative perception, not simply as an antecedent of the fact, but as a condition of truth. The ldeas (1913) adds that the sensible reality, so perceived, is the original resting place on which are constituted values and ends and, by the same token, all the culturaI fonnations of 'objective spirif. The last works systematize this point of view in presenting the life-world (Lebenswelt) as the origin and foundation for every intelligible signification - the world to which it is necessary to return constantly as the Iiving source of all truth. The life-world is revealed as the domain of human history. The genetic method indicated in FormaI and Transcendental Logic (1929) and Cartesian Meditations (brought out the same year) is developed in Crisis of European Sciences (1936) and the work on the Origin of Geometry (I939) under the form of a historico-intentional analysis, where the universal is constituted in the real movement of time. Since then, phenomenological idealism found itself superseded by the method of Iived analysis: The genesis of the world in absolute consciousness has become confused with the actual beeoming of real history, and the doetime of the transcendental Ego has appeared only as a stylistic expression that conceals in philosophical terminology the ereative value of human labor. As evident as these eonsequenees had appeared to us since our study of 1942, we stiil eould not forget the fundamental phenomenological theme of the critique of psychologism. UnIess one would be willing to fall back into the contradictions of seeptieal relativism, the historicity of the Ego would have to be interpreted as the actuality of the eternaI. But it does not seem that the notion of a constituent genesis of temporality can be accepted except under the aegis of an essenee of temporality that is itself atemporal. The study of the unpublished works permits us to do away with every illusion in this regard. The Weltkonstitution is revealed here as resting totally on the sensible data (j.e., the kinesthetie and sensible configuations) just as they are constituted on a level proper to animaIs. There is such a visible acceptance AUTHOR'S PREFACE xxiii of the primordial world with its elementary sensory-motor coordinates that there can be no doubt that the transcendental subject thematized by phenomenology must not be identified, strictly speaking, with the man of flesh and blood who is evolving in the real world. Since that time one should take seriously the exceptional importance that Husserl has consistently granted in phenomenology to the 'thing' (Ding). The intersubjective communities and the spiritual entities that are constituted therein are firmly grounded in natural psychic that, in their tum, are grounded in physical realities. "Finally, at the base of all other realities one finds the natural reality, and so the phenomenology of material nature, undoubtedly, occupies a privileged position." 2 If we remind ourselves that psychic realities, defined on the individual level prior to the perception of the other, correspond to the experience of animal life, we see that the 'transcendental constitution' (as the very disposition of constitutive analyses in the manuscript of Ideas II demonstrates) takes up again, only on the abstract plane of the lived, the real changing of matter to Zzfe and of life to spint, understood as social . It is true that at each stage an originaI structure arises: "to consider these founded unities with no prejudices, if we bring them baek by the phenomenological method to their sourees, they are precisely grounded and of a new type; the newelement that is constituted with them ean never be reduced (as the intuition of essences teadIes us) to the simple sum of other realities." 3 But the phenomenological relation of foundation implies precisely the intelligibility of the passage from the founding level to the founded level. It is not a question of a 'reduction' of the superior to the inferior, but of a dialeetieal movement in which the relations that deveIop at the interior of a given form, move in a manner neeessary to the constitution of a radieally new form. From that time, matenality (Dingliehkeit) is not a simple substrate indifferent to the significa• tions which it bears. It defines the originative resting place from which the movement engenders more elevated modes of being in the speeificity of their meanings, the real infrastructure whieh founds the ideal superstructures in their historieal and in their truth value. Thus, concrete phenomenological analyses can grasp all their meaning and be developed fully solely on the horilOn of dialeetieal materialism. It goes without saying that we are obIiged under these eonditions to reject not only the totality of the Husserlian doetrine but also the method itself to the extent that it has become ossified in abstract formulas. In addition, the concept 'transcendental' was superfluous from the outset, since it main• tains a strict identity of content between 'pure consciousness' and natural xxiv AUTHOR'S PREFACE eonseiousness. Be that as it may, theory has meaning only in terms of prac• tice, and the praetieal demands of working out a deseription require the overturning of the theory of transcenden tal idealism. What semblanee of reason would there be in being obstinate in limiting to the purely Iived the study of kinesthetie and sensible eonfigurations, when one is eoneerned, obviously, with elementary sensori-motor formations that are covered over at an adult age with an enormous eultural aequisition and are uneovered in the pure stage in only an animal or an infant? - Likewise, the historieo• intentional analyses of Husserl's last period, so rieh in suggestiveness, are extraordinarily deeeptive in their uneven eharaeter and their lack of real eontent. But it is eertainly not a question of weaknesses of a personalorder, sinee we have seen the unequaled mastery of Husserl in this matter. Rather, the very horizon of phenomenology turns the gaze of the phenomenologist away from the real data that, on the other hand, de fine the true eontent of his refleetion. More preeisely, the real data appear only under their negative aspeet in view of the faet that their signifieation has been suppressed. But the aetual movement of deseription retums ineluetably to this material reality, whieh is revealed eonsistently as the ultimate resting place of eon• stituted formations. Thus we find ourselves eonfranted with an intolerable eontradietion that obliges us to pass to the point of view of objeetivity in freeing ourselves from the theoretieal eoneepts of phenomenology in the name of the teehnieal neeessities of the deseriptive method. But then, onee more the ghost of psyehologism rears its head. How would it be possible to justify within the framework of material nature, (i.e., animal and social) the truth to whieh the of eonseiousness lay claim - truth that one ean dispute in partieular cases but that no-one would know how to deny in prineiple without at the same time denying himself? It is I, only a single being, an objeet among other objeets, who earry the world in the spiritual interiority of my lived aets, and the world is in me in the very same operation by whieh I pereeive myself in it. It is here that the existentialistie tempation is presented whieh seems to offer a eonvenient means of ratifying all the real data of existenee in the world, all aehieved by maintaining a metaphysieal opposition between man and nature. Being• in-the-world, Heidegger assures us, is not an objeetive eireumstanee whieh would impose itself beeause of the reality of things, but rather an ontologieal strueture that belongs in its own right to the existing human being: man exists not beeause he is in the world and not by reason of his position in the world, but his position in the world is possible preeisely and only beeause he exists as man, and by reason of his human essenee. So, the fact that man AUTHOR'S PREFACE xxv

is onlyone being existing among many others presents no difficulty, since man carries the world in the project of his being, and it is by this very project that he is constituted as a being-in-the-world. To put it another way, the actual problem posed by the structure of - to know that the world is ideally in my consciousness when I am really in it - finds its im• mediate solution in the magic of language which by a simple reordering of words, transforms the expression 'the world in which 1 am' into a moment of myself, inasmuch as I am precisely being-in-the-world. The common man would be satisfied with saying: "Man is in the world"; the existentialist philosopher exorcises such naivete and moves on to the level of 'existential ' in assuring as the 'man is being-in-the-world'. All that is left is to dissect the expressian in some way or other, or to detach the 'being within' (In-Sein) and to present it as an original moment, and everyone sees without difficulty that the 'world' is nothing mare than an element of 'being-in-the• world', and thus of man. Mystification is a common procedure for philosophers. At least the class• ical tradition, of which phenomenology represents the ultima te form, has had the elementary good sense of reproducing on the symbolic level of ideas or consciousness the real operations by which man has transformed nature and rendered it assimilable to his thought. One such transpositian permitted an at least formai justification of existence in this world by science and reason, in which the dignity of human labor is reflected. With existentialism all is abolished on behalf of a 'project' which claims to appropriate the reality of things from now on without providing itself with any founda• tion that legitimates its claims. Mare precisely, under the pretext of reuniting the concrete data of 'existence', it is the very absence of justification that is erected resolutely as the supreme justzfication, within the arbitrary absolute of a '-unto-death'. All the values acquired by the long effort of the humanist tradition are discovered to be suddenly denuded of real foundation and are maintained now, only by clinging to the 'resolute decision' of de• fending even to death what one can no longer justify in terms of reasan and truth. It would be of little use for us to delay in considering the innumerable inferior imitators that have proliferated on the Heideggerian made!. The great problem of our time, in which is expressed the feeling that has become unanimaus, that the ide al subject of traditional religious or philosophical thought be identified rigorously with the real man in this world, has for a long time found its solution in the Marxist dialectic which defines the only valid process for a constitution of lived significations on the foundation of xxvi AUTHOR'S PREFACE material reality. The notion of production takes into full account the enigma of consciousness inasmuch as the object that is worked on takes its meaning for man as human product. The realizing of meaning is precisely nothing but the symbolic transposition of material operations of production into a system of intentional operations in which the subject appropriates the object ideally, in reproducing it in his own consciousness. Such is the true reason for which I myself, who am in the world, 'constitute' the world in the interiority of my lived acts. And the truth of any constitution of this sort obviously is measured by the actual power of the from which it takes its mode!. But the philosopher remains ignorant of these origins. Inasmuch as he is a member of an exploiting elass, he does not have experience of the real labor of exploited elasses, which gives things their human meaning. More precisely, he perceives this labor only under its ideal form, in the act of commanding, and asks himself with astonishment how these 'intentional significations' were able to be imposed on the real world. The refJection involved in self-consciousness, evidently, can only confirm these intentions themselves in their Iived purity and place them 'outside the world' as pure constituting syntheses in the 'liberty of spirit'. Thus, the social and the division of society into elasses hinders the ruling elasses from giving an account of the real foundation of ideal values, by which they claim to demonstrate their human quality and to justify their domination. Exploiting the labor of the oppressed elasses, they perceive the produced object in its human meaning, but this meaning appears to them only in its pure ideality, negated of all material reality, since they certainly mean to take no material part in its production. As a member of a dominating elass I accede to the truth of being only in denying being that is effectively real, the real labor of the oppressed elasses which I 'go beyond' in the intentions of my consciousness only from the very fact that I appropriate its product. The form of oppression is the key to the mystery of transcendence, and the hatred of does nothing but express the natural repugnance of the ruling elasses to recognizing in the labor that they exploit the true source of meanings to which they lay elaim. The difficulty in understanding the real genesis of ideal significations found itself once again reinforced by the abstract manner in which mater• ialism was elaborated in bourgeois thought in the course of its struggle against feudal power. During its revolutionary ascendency, when it represented the general interests of human society, the was already an exploiting elass, even though its position as oppressed did not yet allow it to organize itseJf apart from the laboring masses. Also, the materiality of productive AUTHOR'S PREFACE xxvii

labor, whose memory it stiIl kept alive for use in opposing the of feudal exploitation, manifested itself only on the abstract horizon of its own mode of exploitation. In the hands of rising , the concrete products of the earth and the workshop were reduced to the pure abstract universality of their exchange value, as simple calculable moments in the movement of money. From that time the creative power of material labor could not reveal itself in its real effective process as the very dialectic wherein all sense of truth is engendered, but could do so only under the abstract fonn of a pure in which it became available for new relations of production. Moreover, when the bourgeoisie. having arrived at the decisive phase of its struggle for power, finally ceased to conceal its naturalism under the protective veil of natural . in order to be able to affirm the absolute value of human labor through the concept of matter, it maintained itself necessarily within the limits of mechanistic abstraction, viewing this same labor only as it had exploited it on the level of the abstract rationality of economic calculation. - Very c1early, defending human interests solely in terms of its own mode of exploitation, once having achieved political domination, it had no other concern than to ally itself with the previous ruling c1ass in order to oppose the new that was rising up among the . This very same materialism that had carried it to power now served it as a scapegoat, in order to depreciate the effective reality of productive labor. The interpretation of matter as pure mechanism perrnitted a facile condemnation that systematically confused the creative materiality of the laboring masses with the sordid materiality of capitalistic exploitation. The critique of 'psychologism' obstinately set itself against a phantom, which reflected within the consciousness of the oppressor that human reality which he divested of all human meaning. Nevertheless, in taking as a pretext the 'defense of the spirit' in order to drive back the effective movement of human progress, bourgeois thought cut itself off from the true source of its own spiritual values and for this very reason ended in its own intprnal dissolution. If Husserl stiil remained within the tradition of idealistic rationalism, showing signs of the late flowering of the German bourgeoisie and its final radical whims, his evolution bore witness to nothing Iess than an increasing uneasiness with regard to the real foundation of meanings apprehended in consciousness. From the enjoyment of eternity to the intuition of essences to the anguished problematic of the Crisis of the European Sciences. interpreted as the crisis ofWestern man, the feeling that traditionaI values had become bankrupt grew stronger every day. and the famous ralIying cry. 'Retum to the things themselves', took on more xxviii AUTHOR'S PREFACE and more open:y the meaning of a retum to the sensible realities of the life• world. But Husserl's class position did not allow him to ga baek to the social relations of produetion that defined the real content of sensible life; and the 'transeendental constitution'. redueed to seeking its ultimate foundation in the pure sensorial datum, ended paradoxieally in a eomplete seeptieism. In the meantine. Heidegger had deliberately renouneed the classieal demands for rationality in order to limit himself to the pure 'transeendenee' of the project of being, in whieh, by of philosophers, the absenee ofreason is transmuted in to the supreme reason of existence. In the decomposition of bourgeois soeiety that had been eaused by the ruthlessness of imperialist monopoly, the motto 'liberty-unto-death' was offered to the ruined petite• bourgeoisie as the final justifieation of their position as petite-bourgeoisie. With the passage from phenomenology to existentialism, the disdainful theme of the critique of psyehologism, the denial of human subjeetivity in the name of objeetivity and the universality of Truth - revealed its own inconsisteney by giving way to the pure negation of the real conditions of existenee in the pure subjeetivity of 'resolute deeision', where individual arbitrariness systematically was erected as the ultima te foundation of all true value. Abstract materialism became all the easier to refute as it was reduced, in the final analysis. to a shameful idealism, with pure meehanism being identified, as weil. with pure thought. Such discussions, evidently, did not in any way affeet dialeetieal materialism whieh take s its meaning from the proletarian experience of creative labor. In the real process of produetion man is homogeneous with matter, and it is in that material relation itself that the originaI relation of eonseiousness to the objeet that it pereeives is eonstituted as 'constituted meaning'. But in the past the laboring masses had not been able to raise their sights to an that properly belonged to them and exaetly expressed the strueture of their produetive aetivity. In fact, the weak level of produetive forees involved a multitude of confliets in which destruction appeared, and whose transposition on the symbolie plane of consciousness covered over the objeets that were originally eeonomic with a c10ud of spirituality that defined the meaning of saerifiee: From that time, effectively eonstituted signifieations in produetive labor became alienated in the transcendenee of an ideal negation of that same reality: and thus, a eertain number of people to ok the opportunity to appropriate the for themselves. Such a mystifieation in whieh appropriation was accomplished in the form of an expropriation, resulted from the very movement of produetion and, in faeC included the totality of produeers. More preeisely, the perspeetiyes of the exploited stiil envisioned AUTHOR'S PREFACE xxix merelyan eventual passage to the positian of exploiter, and, while the struggle continued between variaus types of exploiters, the oppressed masses could only give their support to those who seemed, at first glance, the most easily accessible. Ihus, without going explicitly into all the subtleties of ideological conflicts and all the details regarding the interests at stake, one can say that their conceptian of the world was indistinguishable from that of the exploiting elasses and altogether contributed to perpetuation of the general form of exploitation. was the expressian of this unanimaus preten• sian to privileged positions, idealized in a supreme transcendence in which ea ch retained the hope of some day profiting from the regime of oppression. It is only with the development of mechanization and of major industries that a new e1ass of exploited appeared which had the experience in its daily practice of new relations of production in which the common exploitation of nature by human society replaced the exploitation of man by man. In this new mode of existence that necessarily has been begotten in the very womb of capitalistic society as the form of its suppression, the perceiving subject is no longer the real or virtual exploiter who expropriates the producer by denying the reality of his product, but rather the producer himself, who defends the materiality of his production against mystifying idealizations. Since the new productive had worked out the conditions for an ap• propriation of labor by the workers themselves, the proletariat (freed by the very brutality of capitalistic exploitation from aJl hope of arriving in their turu at a position of exploiter) are able to see in the spiritual values of the previous society nothing other than bourgeois prejudices which dissimulate the sordi d materialism of bourgeois practice. To be sure, the proletarian movement has not been limited to the factory workers who constitute its authentic core and its permanent foundation: it has consistently absorbed increasing strata of previous exploiting elasses that are crushed mare and more by the mechanism of capital and whose adherence to realized the dialectic of bourgeois society in the truth of its becoming. In fact, we are reminded each day that communism defends the true con• tent of traditional values, by means of which its proponents can stiil retain some understanding of the permanent dissolution imposed on them by the bourgeois society. Ideal aspirations, reduced by capitalistic exploitation to simple forms of hypocrisy that betray themselves through the evidence of their futility, recapture a human meaning by being integrated with the constructive tasks of the proletarian revolution which, in the face of the profundity of the bourgeois decomposition, takes charge of the general interests of mankind and pursues the construction of in the very xxx AUTHOR'S PREFACE course of the anti-imperialistic conflict. The truth of dialectical materialism is demonstrated in the real historieal dialeetie in which, under the pressure of continual proletarization, the former ruling elasses become progressively more aware that their ideals are the simple results of their material conditions of existence. From this it follows that materiality is the authentic origin of all meaning and value. Thus it is found that traditional problems are completely resolved within the framework of Marxism, and there is no longer any reason to hesitate in drawing from teehnieal difficulties that we have encountered in phe• nomenology their philosophieal consequences, in the proper sense of the adjective. Once the real content of lived structures has been recognized, a technical solution would have to be lirnited to the 'completion' of intentional descriptions by means of objective analyses. But in their sense of reality, the real data are totally incompatible with the phenomenological absolute of lived intentions, and such a mosaic would unfailingly have entrapped us in inextricable contradictions that would have revived, along with the terror of psychologism and the myths of transcendence, practically insurmountable obstaeles to positive research. The principal merit of phenomenology was its definitive destruction of formalism within the very horizon of idealism and its placing of all problems of value on the level of the concrete. But the concrete can be described correctly only in the actual movement of its material determinations, a fact that implies a total liberation and the passage to a radically new horizon. Nevertheless, we believed that it would be useful to present, in the first part of this work, studies which are strictly phenomenological and mostly outdated. These demonstrate, and do so better than any systematic critique, the internaI necessity of the ground covered. From the eternity of essences to lived subjectivity, from the singular Ego to the universal genesis, the evolution of Husserlian though t has bome testimony to the constant aspiration of idealism towards that real content whose au• thentic conception can be defined solely in terms of dialectical materialism. In Marxism, bourgeois philosophy finds the form of its suppression: But suppression includes the very movement of what it suppresses, insofar as it realizes it in suppressing it.

T. D. T.