THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA A Phenomenology of Having A DISSERTATION Submitted to the Faculty of the School of Philosophy Of The Catholic University of America In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree Doctor of Philosophy © Copyright All Rights Reserved By Yang Yu Washington, D.C. 2012 A Phenomenology of Having Yang Yu, Ph.D. Director: Robert Sokolowski, Ph.D. The term having easily triggers associations of possession, particularly that of material possession, which can in turn connote vulgarity. This sequence of ideas is so natural that it could have been the inspiration for Gabriel Marcel's Being and Having, and Erich Fromm's To Have or To Be, two books that reprimand the attitude of having in various aspects of life. In this dissertation, however, I attempt to reveal the philosophical significance of having by articulating a phenomenological understanding of it. Metaphysically speaking, I argue, having is no less important than being. Crucial to my argument are two distinctions: one between having and possession, and another between having and being. The two distinctions are developed in two steps, the first being my critical evaluation of the being-having dichotomy set up by Gabriel Marcel in his Being and Having. Marcel misidentifies having with possession, and his negative attitude toward having results from that misidentification. While I disapprove Marcel's being-having dichotomy, I accept the two eidetic moments of having he discovers in his study of having (the tension between within and without, and the distinction between the self and the other) and employ them in my study of Husserl. Turning to Edmund Husserl's Ideas I and Cartesian Meditations, I show that the two eidetic moments of having are operative in Husserl's methods of phenomenological epoché and transcendental reduction, and for this reason the two methods are the transcendental ego's means to achieve its self-evidence, that is, its self-having. The transcendental ego's self- having is then shown to be constitutive of being, and it also serves as both the archē and the telos of Husserl's transcendental phenomenology. I conclude that Husserl's phenomenology can rightly be called a phenomenology of having because its subject matter, methodology, and terminology all can be understood in terms of having. I close the present dissertation by pointing out how a larger research project that aims at elucidating the topic of having in the history of philosophy (for example, in Plato and Aristotle's epistemology and metaphysics) can be carried out, and how this project could benefit greatly from Husserl's phenomenology. This dissertation by Yang Yu fulfills the dissertation requirement for the doctoral degree in philosophy approved by Robert Sokolowski, Ph.D., as Director, and by Holger Zaborowski, Ph.D., and John McCarthy, Ph.D., as Readers. _______________________________________ Robert Sokolowski, Ph.D., Director _______________________________________ Holger Zaborowski, Ph.D., Reader _______________________________________ John McCarthy, Ph.D., Reader ii To my parents iii CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . ix INTRODUCTION . 1 CHAPTER 1 MARCEL'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF HAVING . 7 Marcel's Understanding of Having . 8 The Structure of the "Outlines" . 13 Marcel's Introduction to the Question of Having . 16 "A Feeling I Have" and "a Feeling I Am" . 16 The Having of the Body . 20 Terminological and Methodological Preparation . 25 On Having in the History of Philosophy . 25 Methodological Comment on Phenomenology . 26 The Distinction between Having-as-Possession and Having-as-Implication . 29 The Qui-Quid Correlation . 31 Having Does Not Signify Spatial Containing . 36 The First Eidetic Moment: The Tension between Within and Without . 37 An Analysis of the Verb "To Have" . 38 An Analysis of Secret-Having . 43 The Second Eidetic Moment: The Distinction between the Self and the Other . 44 The Having of Ideas . 44 iv Two Kinds of Displaying . 46 Having and the Principle of Individuation . 48 The Fate of Having . 51 Our Evaluation . 56 Distinguish Having from Possession . 57 A Different Fate . 59 The Having of the Body Revisited . 63 Sublimation of Having into Being . 67 Marcel's Criticism of Traditional Philosophy . 72 The Subject-Object Model of Thinking and the Possession-Attitude . 72 Marcel's Criticism of Traditional Epistemology and Ethics . 75 CHAPTER 2 TRANSITION TO HUSSERL'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF HAVING . 80 The "Is"-Judgment and the "Has"-Judgment . 81 An Experience I Have vs. an Experience I Am? . 87 Excursus: Reconsidering the Possibility of Identifying a Feeling . 88 The Ego's Having of Its Experiences in the Fifth Logical Investigation . 92 Experiencing as Having . 93 Problem concerning the "Haver" . 96 v CHAPTER 3 PHENOMENOLOGICAL EPOCHÉ AND TRANSCENDENTAL REDUCTION . 101 The General Positing that Characterizes the Natural Attitude . 103 The (Particular) Epoché . 111 Husserl's Text . 112 From the Perspective of Having . 120 McKenna's analysis of the epoché . 121 The hint from the metaphors of parenthesizing and disconnection . 124 The world before the epoché . 129 The as-if disconnection . 131 The tension-awareness that characterizes the epoché . 135 Recapitulation . 138 Other metaphors . 141 Summary . 143 Conversation with J. N. Mohanty . 146 The paradox . 146 The identity question . 148 Difficulties in expressing the effects of the epoché . 152 Recollection as a stand-alone act? . 164 The Epoché and the Neutrality Modification . 166 The Kinship between the Epoché and the Neutrality Modification . 168 vi The Difference: The Volitional Element . 171 The Heightened Tension-Awareness as the Essential Difference . 176 The Universal Epoché and the Transcendental Reduction . 182 From the Within-Without Tension to the Self-Other Distinction . 184 The Transcendental Reduction: from Being to Having . 191 CHAPTER 4 THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF HAVING IN THE CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS . 195 Why the Cartesian Meditations? . 197 The Proto-Journey: from Having-Nothing to Having-All . 201 Evidence as the Telos, Archē, and Methodos of Husserl's Transcendental Phenomenology . 206 Having as the Telos . 207 Uncovering the telos . 207 Speaking of evidence in terms of having . 212 An all-inclusive evidence as the telos . 219 Having as the Archē . 225 The transcendental ego's self-evidence as the archē . 226 The coincidence of the telos with the archē . 228 Husserl's criticism of Descartes' misunderstanding of the transcendental ego . 230 Having as the Methodos . 233 vii Pointers to Further Studies . 239 BIBLIOGRAPHY . 243 viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS To the extent that writing acknowledgements involves a "constitutive analysis" of one's own work, it can be likened to the performance of the phenomenological epoché. In other words, one needs to temporarily imagine away the help and support one has received from others; "suspending" one's own work in such imaginary manner, one is able to perceive clearly that one's "own" work is the result of co-constitution, and this perception immediately raises in oneself a keen awareness of the contingency and "pending" nature of what oneself has achieved. With this awareness, one now "thematically" recognizes the constitutive and indispensable roles played by others; one also realizes that their help and support, as a graceful "facticity," is also impenetrably mysterious. Such facticity is exactly what one does not dare to imagine away, let alone live without, in one's real life. Knowing this, one finds oneself in the grip of an overwhelming feeling of thankfulness—and this seems to be the existential moment that motivates acknowledgments. To be sure, one does not have to be a phenomenologist in order to write an acknowledgement. I do believe, however, that one certainly is transcendental, that is, one certainly has transcended oneself, the moment one becomes thankful. I shall begin by expressing my immense gratitude to Fr. Kurt Pritzl, O.P. (1952-2011). It saddened all of us here in the School of.