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JAYLAMPERT
The titZes in this se ries are listed at the end 0/ this voZume.
by
JAYLAMPERT
PREFACE vii
BIBLIOORAPHY 205
INDEX 211
v
PREFACE
vii
viii PREFACE
past contents. Every act of consciousness carries in medias res the problem-
atic of grounding as it aims to recover its own content. Synthetic consciousness
always occurs too late to get started, yet all it ever does is work at consti-
tuting the ground for moving to something that can come next, which is to say,
at constituting its own starting-point. As lived carriers of the systematic
development of interpretations of the world, all contents carry out the
self-hood of consciousness, and at the same time, constitute cognition's self-
critique.
I argue, finally, that the Logical Investigations lacks an account of how
implicit backward referents can be stored in consciousness. Husserl does
offer such an account in Ideas 1 with his theory of pure consciousness - not
as an ego prior to synthesis, as most commentators take it, but as the under-
lying unity carried out as synthetic interpretations "draw back" or "withdraw"
to the ground of their own self-articulation.
While this study takes the form of a reading of Husserl's texts, it is at the
same time a contribution to current dialogues among phenomenologists, dialec-
ticians, and deconstructionists. Some phenomenologists have thought of
synthesis as a set of structures for combining acts of consciousness with one
another. Some dialecticians (certainly Hegelians, and some critical theorists
as weIl) think of Husserlian synthesis as unnecessarily limited to subjective
consciousness, and argue for a metaphysical construal of synthesis, where syn-
thetic consciousness would be grounded by some kind of real origin (whether
a Fichtean ego, a Hegelian Spirit, or a Marxist dialectic of Nature). And
some deconstructionists have argued that the very logic of synthesis depends
upon ideal end-points that are endlessly deferred, so that synthesis, while essen-
tial for a science of consciousness, is more a kind of metaphor than an actuality.
My approach incorporates many of the analyses of dialectical and decon-
structive philosophies into a phenomenological context. I interpret the
extensions of the concept of synthesis into a metaphysics of subjectivity on
the one hand, and the dispersions of the phenomena of synthesis into
open-ended deferrals on the other hand, not as critiques that undermine phe-
nomenology (though dialecticians and deconstructionists generally do interpret
their own arguments in this way, as indeed do most phenomenologists), but
as fields to be developed within a phenomenological framework. On my
reading, it is precisely the self-explicating structure of synthesis that incor-
porates the categories of dialectics and deconstruction into phenomenological
description.
If phenomenology, dialectics, and deconstruction are, in the final analysis,
complementary, then there are a great number of philosophers who need to
be read anew, and there are a lot of philosophical problems, from subjec-
tivity to truth to language to time to justice, that will benefit from expanded
resources.
I would like to thank Professor John Russon for years of insightful philo-
sophical conversation and friendship. I would also like to thank Professor
Henry Pietersma, who taught me Husserl in the first place. Professor Kenneth
PREFACE ix
What does it mean to say that one experience is combined with others? What
is the cause of the synthesis of one content of consciousness with another, what
are experiences before they are combined, how does the combination take
place, and what sort of experience results from this combination? When we
see an object from one side, what is it about that seeing that makes us connect
it with the last side and anticipate the next? When we interpret an object in
a particular way, what is it that leads us towards a more complete interpreta-
tion or leads us to uncover the parts and presuppositions implicit in that
interpretation? Or in general, what structures or processes allow acts of inter-
pretative consciousness to anticipate and fulfil one another, to demand their
own explications and supplementations, to refer forward and backward
to successors and predecessors, and to ideal completion-points and ideal
points of origin? In short, how does each content of experience carry the
demands for its combination with others in an ongoing synthetic unity of
consciousness?
Such general questions could be asked of any philosophy, but they are espe-
cially urgent for Husserlian phenomenology, which is guided by doctrines of
meaning and consciousness, interpretation and knowledge, experience and
judgment, subjectivity and objectivity, intersubjectivity and history, all of which
depend on processes wherein contents of consciousness are synthesized under
unifying interpretations. Yet no study of Husserl has focused on his concept
of synthesis. In this work, I will develop a certain problematic of synthesis,
and I will show how this problematic dominates Husserlian phenomenology,
using his Logical Investigations (1900) as an exemplary early text. I will
articulate problems of the original ground, the ongoing mechanisms, and the
end results of synthesis, and I will work out a solution to these problems based
on a study of the special problems of synthesis that arise in each of Husserl's
six Logical Investigations. My argument will be that consciousness is a self-
explicating system of interpretative activity, a dynamic whose parts demand
and pass over into one another, a process that grounds its synthesizing struc-
tures as it procedes, by continuously referring forward to ideal end-points
and referring backward to ideal origin-points.
In the first part of this Introduction, I will first articulate a problematic of
synthesis in general, and outline the development of special problems to be
treated in the following chapters. I will then give abrief schematic presenta-
tion of the modern history of the concept of synthesis, to situate Husserl
in relation to Humean, Leibnizian, Kantian, and Hegelian concepts of syn-
thesis. In the second part of this Introduction, a treatment of the secondary
literature on Husserl's concept of synthesis, I will introduce controversies
2 INTRODUCTION
surrounding my interpretation and approach, and will set up the sorts of argu-
ments which will justify my construal of synthesis.
The problem of synthesis arises in the context of Husserl's most general
account of intentional consciousness. A conscious experience is said to contain
a meaning-content which presents or signifies or refers to an object from a
certain perspective and under a certain interpretation. This meaning-content
anticipates a range of possible further experiences of that and other objects.
As the flux of experience unfolds, its unity of objective references is consti-
tuted in an ongoing way by the fact that each content is apprehended as the
fulfilment (or else as the frustration) of the anticipatory force of previous expe-
riences. In this way, the flux of experience is apprehended not in discontinuous
units, but as progress in the revelation of a self-identical world to direct
intuition. There is in fact a double synthesis at work here: the synthesis of
contents of consciousness with other contents is carried out as the synthesis
of contents of consciousness with their objects.
It is under this model that I will develop the three-fold problematic of the
grounds, the mechanisms, and the end-results of synthesis. The problematic
of the original motivating ground of synthesis, the ultimate explanation of why
each content of consciousness should have to be combined with others at
an, is a problem both for the nature of that which combines contents as wen
as for the nature of the contents to be synthesized. It seems that synthetic inter-
pretation appeals to some sort of rule, law, or structure of consciousness.
But do these laws originate in principles of logic, in empirical habits, in a
priori categories of the understanding, in the spontaneous activity of the ego,
in the momentum of the stream of consciousness, or in something else? And
how are the contents of consciousness themselves available and prepared to
be synthesized? Individual contents will themselves at some point have to
ground their own syntheses with one another, whether in the sense that indi-
vidual contents express overlapping meanings, or because they are always
already contextualized in streams of processes. Indeed the very differentia-
tion of individual contents of consciousness from the flux of background
experience depends on syntheses wherein perceptual and/or interpretative
contents set limits to, and are determined in relation to, one another.
The problematics of the original ground of synthesizing interpretation is
thus a problem of the mechanisms wherein each given content passes over into
(e.g. borders, anticipates, fulfils, determines, entails, motivates, verifies, illu-
minates, conjoins with, interpenetrates with, or sublates) the next. One problem
concerns how each content has a determinate next-content, and so anticipates
a non-arbitrary range of successors. Another problem concerns what it is about
each content that makes it in principle more than it is, namely a demand for
supplements and completions in general. What does it mean to say that part
of an experience is "implicit", that experiences "anticipate" completions "in
advance"?
The problematic of the mechanisms of synthesis is thus finally one of the
results that can be produced by, or demanded by, the combination of contents.
GENERAL AND HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION 3
1. A Humean Theory
Every experienced idea is strictly independent, and never entails any prior
or posterior experience. To be sure, there exists in human consciousness a
faculty of imagination which combines ideas according to their resemblance
and contiguity. But a principle of association and interpretation does not pre-
scribe a necessary connection between ideas, it exercises only a "gentle force
in their combination".1 A so-called principle of combination is nothing but
the habit of conjoining essentially unrelated experiences. Furthermore, in so
4 INTRODUCTION
2. A Leibnizian Theory3
3. A Kantian Theory
Synthesis is "the act of putting different representations together, and of
grasping wh at is manifold in them in one act of knowledge".4 By the time
an ego has a singular experience of an object, several levels of synthesis
must have already taken place. A plurality of sensations must have been syn-
thesized as a single intuitive manifold, perceptions must have been organized
in imagination according to rules for their reproduction in various contexts and
orderings, and these unities must have been rendered conceptually intelli-
gible and recognizable. 5 Every cognitive synthesis obeys a law of combination
originating in apriori categories of understanding,6 and applies to material
originating in the givenness of sensuous intuition.
Hence: (1) The origin of synthesis consists in the double demand of con-
sciousness that laws be applied to intuitions and that intuitions be organized
by rules. But categories alone would not produce intuitions to which they could
be applied, and intuitions alone would not organize themselves into patterns.
Hence categories and sense-contents count as the origin of synthesis only in
so far as consciousness 's demand for a unified experience of objects in turn
grounds both of these origins. (2) A system of synthetic combination would
be compIete when consciousness had been completely unified, when every
representation had been combined with every other under every law of under-
standing. (3) In the ongoing syntheses of experience that count as the
transcendental unity of apperception, theoretical references backward to origin-
points and forward to completion-points are never legitimate. In fact, the
attempt to objectify pure Ideas, absolute givens (things-in-themselves), and
systematic totalities leads only to illegitimate metaphysics. The reference
backward to origin-points is legitimate only as a reflective critique of ongoing
syntheses, and the references forward to completion-points is legitimate only
in the practice of anticipating connections. The concepts of origin and com-
pletion are legitimate only in the practice of applying categories through
time, i.e. in the schematization of empirical experience.
4. A Hegelian Theory
The singularity of an experience consists in its passing over its own limits.
Even the form of experience which is seemingly the least synthesized, namely
the sense-content of an instantaneous Now-point, conceals and activates a
system of syntheses whose development ultimately becomes the system of
absolute knowIedge and self-consciousness. 7 Now-points are ceaselessly being
6 INTRODUCTION
with which I began this chapter. No doubt many other theories of synthesis
may be drawn from the history of philosophy besides the empirieist, the
rationalist, the transcendentalist, and the dialectical. However, these four are
those on which Husserl hirnself has most thoroughly drawn, and against which
Husserl's account may be most sharply contrasted.
Husserl's account shares with Hume's, for example, the sense that the
primary experiences undergoing syntheses are experiences with particular
perceptual content, but Husserl departs form the Humean account by affirming
the lawful necessity of synthetic combinations, or at least of ranges of com-
binations. Husserl's account shares with Leibniz's account the sense of lawful
combination, as weIl as the sense that synthesis produces new knowledge,
but differs by affirming that experiences are combined not under a universal
principle but under an interpretation of an object, and by affirming that syn-
theses can be carried out in rather more open-ended lines of development
than Leibniz allows. Husserl's account shares with Kant's the sense of
schematic development, of categories defined by their temporal mechanics,
and of the demand for unity as the ultimate motivation for synthetic devel-
opment, but differs from Kant's by attributing more positive functions to the
phenomenological references backward and forward to pure intuition and com-
pletable philosophical science. FinaIly, Husserl's account shares with Hegel's
the sense that both the particular material content of synthesis as weIl as the
general structural possibilities of synthesis are to be defined by their func-
tions in the act in which one experience passes over its limits into another.
It also shares with Hegel's some of the sense of consciousness as a self-
determining system. But it differs from Hegel's account by affirming that there
are functions to be played in synthetic activity, never overcome in the devel-
opment of consciousness, by individual acts of consciousness and discrete units
of meaning, by uni versals with abstract rather than "concrete" meaning, by
a pure ego, and by a phenomenological science not dependent on a philos-
ophy of nature and a metaphysics of spirit. 8
There are many issues in the problematic of synthesis according to which
one could compare theories, e.g. according to whether the theory holds that
synthetic activity produces new objects for consciousness or only makes it
possible for consciousness to be receptive to the presence of objects already
in existence; or according to whether the need to synthesize is a subjective one
based on the nature of the ego and its interpretative categories, or an objec-
tive one based on the synthetic nature of the things themselves; or according
to whether the rules goveming synthesis are categorial and structural or orga-
nizational and schematic; or according to whether the paradigmatic synthetic
act is one that subsurnes a particular content under an interpretative framework
or one that cognitively follows particular contents as they pass over their
own boundaries and force their way into the contexts of others.
In the preceding paragraph, I have not indicated which of the two alter-
natives in each of these issues is Husserl's, since an interpretation of Husserl's
position on these issues (as indeed those of Hume, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel)
GENERAL AND HlSTORICAL INTRODUCTION 9
requires preparation and qualification. Indeed, for each of the four theories
of synthesis which I have contras ted with Husserl's, there exists a school of
interpretation wh ich attributes to Husserl that very theory. In the second part
of this Introduction, I will classify and layout in more detail seven ways in
which Husserl's concept of synthesis has been interpreted in the literature,
which I will caH rationalist, empiricist, process, transcendentalist, epistemo-
logical, semantic and dialectical readings. I would not want to match up these
schools of commentaries too closely with the four historical ac counts of
synthesis that I laid out above. Nevertheless, it is clear that rationalist inter-
preters of Husserl are influenced by Leibnizian (as weH as Platonic) ideas,
empiricist interpreters by Humean (as weH as psychologistic) ideas, and tran-
scendentalist interpreters by Kantian (as weH as Cartesian) ideas. Furthermore,
process readings of Husserl could be construed as attempts to break down
the distinction between rationalism and empiricism using a kind of fluid
Kantianism, and the epistemological and semantic readings develop issues
essentiaHy tied to classical modem philosophy from Descartes through Kant.
And of course dialectical readings owe something, albeit generaHy unac-
knowledged, to Hegel's conception of synthesis. My goal will be to show
how aH of these have some value as interpretations of Husserl, but to arrange
them by strengths and weaknesses to lead towards my own reading of Husserl 's
concept of synthesis in terms of a self-propeHing dynamic of interpretive
consciousness dominated by systems of forward and backward references.
On my reading, Husserl 's conception of synthesis is in general closer to
the Hegelian than to the rationalist, the empiricist, or the transcendentalist con-
ceptions. Yet Husserl was not interested in Hegel. Husserl does not use the
vocabulary of dialectics, he does not articulate the problem of the origin as
a problem of the original will to consciousness, and he does not construe a
schema of self-developing interpretation to be a demonstration that substance
becomes subject. Accordingly, I will not import Hegelian terms, texts, or argu-
ments into my analysis of Husserl. But it would not be surprising historically
to find that Husserl should come to results comparable to Hegel's, since
Husserl's concern to find middle ground between empiricist psychologism and
rationalist formalism without adopting the subjectivism or the antinomies of
neo-Kantianism gives hirn a historical context roughly similar to Hegel's.
And in terms of the system of Husserl's own philosophy, it seems to me that
one could attribute a dialectic of part and whole to Husserl's ac count of syn-
thesis in at least three senses: (i) in that each synthetic act is possible only
in the context of a larger system of syntheses, (ii) in that the experiential
contents to be synthesized are individuated in the same processes in which they
are combined, and (iii) in that the motivation for synthesis is inherently present
in each of the synthesized determinations, each of which demands that its inde-
pendence be submerged in a unity with others. Nevertheless, while there are
Hegelian themes at work in my reading of Husserl, I intend my reading and
my arguments to arise out of a systematic analysis of Husserl's text.
Now on my reading, the Logical Investigations works out a theory of
10 INTRODUCTION
of their parts. The account of relatively discontinuous parts passing over into
one another, and thereby setting systems of determinations off in relief together,
provides a model for synthetic activity generally.
In dealing with the fourth Investigation on independent and non-indepen-
dent meanings, I will discuss Husserl's ac count of syncategorematic terms (like
"and" , "is the same as", etc.), which represent synthetic connectedness in
linguistic expressions, and yet do not refer to anything on their own. I will
argue that Husserl uses this problem to show that synthetic connectedness is
always prior to any given meaning-content, and hence that synthetic rela-
tions have always already dominated interpretative experience in advance.
In treating the fifth Investigation, which includes a general account of inten-
tional consciousness as weH as analyses of the relation between perception and
judgment, and between names and predicates, I will argue that conscious-
ness for Husserl is a system of self-explicating interpretations, wherein complex
predicative judgments are implicitly referred back to simple names and per-
ceptions, and names are implicitly referred back to presupposed judgments.
I will here focus on the status of referring backward in general, of the return
both to experiential immediacy and to an ideal completion of interpretative
mediation.
In the sixth Investigation, the descriptive categories of synthesis devel-
oped in the first five Investigations are aH together brought to bear on Husserl 's
concern with epistemological questions involving the gradual intuitive fulfil-
ment of meaning-intentions. Here we find Husserl's most extended account
of the interpretative syntheses which identify objects in their multiple appear-
ances. In treating such issues as the nature of interpretative consistency, levels
of knowledge, the recognition of differences as weH as identities, and the
ideal of evidence in cognition, Husserl conducts a variety of analyses bearing
on the grounds, mechanisms, and results of synthetic activity. In my final,
and longest chapter, I will in five sections distinguish and analyse five increas-
ingly complex descriptive categories under which Husserl in the sixth
Investigation ac counts for the way contents of consciousness demand to be
synthesized under unifying interpretations: namely universal names, contexts,
perspectives, limits, and backward references. In the last of these sections,
which also functions as the Conclusion to this study, I will show how the
syntheses of referring backward resolve problems of synthetic consciousness
at work throughout the Investigations. I will therein present my final account
of Husserl's concept of synthesis, and my own speculative account of how
a theory of synthesis should work with a schema of forward and backward
references.
I will end the final chapter by developing a problem that arises for Husserl's
concept of synthesis in LU, which I will call the problem of the storage in con-
sciousness of implicit forward and backward referents (not only of memories
and explicit expectations, but of unnoticed sensory data, implicit interpreta-
tions, apriori rule-structures, ideals of completion, and so on) all of which
are presupposed by, but never present in, consciousness. I will suggest in
12 INTRODUCTION
NOTES
13
14 INTRODUCTION
theses of identification and immediate contact with the world, and has to
ground each of these as a partial source of synthetic activity. I will argue at
the end of the first section of this chapter that the failure of these six inter-
pretations individually and collectively to account for the ground of synthesis
in Husserlian phenomenology is a result of insufficient attention being paid
to the mechanisms whereby each content of consciousness passes over into the
next.
In the second section, I will layout a number of reasons offered in the
commentaries for Husserl 's alleged turn after LU towards life-world syntheses.
I do not hold the view that Husserl's early concept of synthesis is lacking in
something that his later version supplies. But even if the alleged later dis-
coveries are already present in Husserl's early work, the grounds which
commentators cite for the alleged turn are nevertheless revealing. In one
common formulation, Husserl's "form-content schema" is said to turn into
his "dialectic". The third section lays out sens es in which "dialectic" is used
by the commentators. The more interesting of these, to be treated in the
fourth section, involve the concept of referring backward.
I will not argue against the interpretations treated below, but I will arrange
them in such a way as to let them bring out each other's weaknesses.
the independence of the forms of synthesis from its contents, it must also
give an account of how forms affect or apply to contents. Some formalists
argue for a closed set of rules as opposed to open-ended systems of inter-
pretation (Madison, 1977, pp. 254ff., also Rosen, 1977, p. 133). Others (Smith
and McIntyre, 1982) argue that rules of synthesis operate only as "constraints"
(p. 254) ensuring the "compatibility" (p. 262) of synthesized perceptions. In
any case, according to the formalist reading, when a meaning "predelineates"
future experiences, it may open up new possibilities (p. 297), but it does not
in any stronger way generate their actualization.
While formalist readings generally describe forms of synthesis as rules
according to which a plurality of intuitions are used to identify a single
object, or as rules for organizing part-experiences into a whole (e.g.
Sokolowski, 1967-68), there are also formalist readings which subordinate
synthetic identification according to forms to the synthetic identification of
forms (de Boer, 1978, pp. 146-8; Mensch, 1981, pp. 134-40; Bachelard, 1968,
pp. 21-2; Schuhmann 1971, p. 7).
Many of those who read Husserl as a formalist criticize Husserl for his
formalism. Some maintain that Husserl hirnself was working on ways of
breaking down the distinction between form and content, either by describing
the cognitive performances during which forms and contents are unified
(Eley, 1962, pp. 14-20), or by interpreting an essence as a "tool" for letting
facts be of account (Waldenfels, 1971, p. 80). But more frequently, Husserl
is criticized for leaving allegedly crucial features of consciousness out of
his form-content theory. Levin (1970, pp. 43-48) argues that Husserl's
form-content theory wrongly omits the "history" or "genesis" of forms, and
Sokolowski (1964, pp. 55-59) argues that Husserl wrongly underestimates
the role of "sense-data" as the "raw materials" of meaning. It is striking that
on attributing a form-content theory to Husserl, commentators condemn Husserl
either for having no account of form, or for having no account of content.
But the most extreme criticism of Husserl 's alleged formalism is that of Adomo
(1956, pp. 173-74), who argues that phenomenology, in positing the ideal of
full evidence, must "forget" synthesis. Adomo's claim is that the act of syn-
thesis represents the possibility of disorder, the "other", that phenomenology
is committed to avoiding.
But Husserl is guilty of these omissions and failures only if the formalist
interpretation of Husserl is correct.
indicates Husserl's empiricism just as the latter indicates his idealism (also
Mohanty, 1964, pp. 49-50).
But while some empiricist readings take Husserl to posit isolated, unin-
terpreted, immanent, sensory givens as that to which rules for the synthesis are
to be applied, others argue that synthesis must originate in such givenness.
Eley (1972, pp. 340-44) claims that Husserl tries to ground even formallogic
in lived experience. A Husserlian account of the truth table for the logical con-
nective "&", for example, would have to trace cognition back to the experiential
juxtaposition of a "This" and a "That". Eley holds that synthesis originates
in "This"-experiences; Diemer (1956, pp. 96-98) holds that synthesis aims
at such experiences, that all meaning presupposes a world in relation to which
the subject is "passive".
At the he art of the empiricist reading, then, there is not just the claim that
synthesis is completed in empirical experience, but the stronger claim that syn-
thesis begins passively. Yet the empirical data which synthesis operates on,
is grounded in, and aims at, must be both passively accepted and actively inter-
preted (e.g. Dreyfus, 1982, p. 13). While Welton (1983, pp. 167-228) thinks
Husserl's early work cannot account for "productive" syntheses, Yamaguchi
(1982, pp. 2-5) thinks the notion of "blending" in LU iii does account for
productive intuition. And after all, the philosophers from whom Husserl
borrows the idea of perceptual "blending" (Stumpf, Wundt, and Herbart) are
empiricists for whom sense-impressions are active.
Similar problems regarding passivity and productivity arise when com-
mentators try to decide whether Husserl accepted the distinction between
synthetic and analytic judgments, i.e. between judgments which require empir-
ical content and judgments which describe formallaws. Van Peursen (1972,
p. 91; also Kern, 1964, pp. 140,257-75) argues that Husserl softens the syn-
thetic-analytic distinction by holding that even non-empirical objects have
an "intuitive" structure.
In short, the empiricist reading looks at first as though it posits isolated
sense-data, but in grounding syntheses of fulfilment on such givenness, it attrib-
utes productive powers to the very reception of those data, and ends up by
softening the distinction between the forms of synthesis and the raw mate-
rials for synthesis.
The softening of the distinction between form and matter sets the stage for
what I am calling the process reading. Gurwitsch's early work (1929) outlines
the view that synthesis objectifies the world by unifying consciousness.
Consciousness is a process during which intentional acts are combined, singled
out, and separated (pp. 240-48), a process which undergoes continuous alter-
ations and "restructurations" (pp. 223ff.) according to "transformation laws"
(p. 248). A "structural framework" or Gestalt (pp. 190-98) is a law not of
the form but of the process of synthesis (p. 248).
18 INTRODUCTION
or "opposition" (p. 36) that results from the process of splitting is also the
"condition" (p. 36) of the process of self-overcoming. The process reading,
therefore, need not reject the difference between essence and thisness, nor need
it even subordinate the changing to the unchanging. It need only articulate
the essence-thisness distinction as a splitting that is continuously performed
in the process of synthetic consciousness.
Still, it is frequently suggested that Husserl's "static" ideal units of meaning
are incompatible with "genetic" processes, and that the former should be aban-
doned for the latter. Sokolowski (1964) argues that the ideal meanings affirmed
in LU are "too abrupt", and that Husserl should have begun with the "encounter
that leads into" meanings (p. 209; also Levin, 1970, pp. 43-8).
Perhaps the most telling version of this alleged incompatibility of process
and ideality is embodied in Welton's (1983, p. 163, also p. 202) "reply" to
Derrida. Derrida (1967, ch. 7) argues that Husserl's first Investigation operates
within an essential tension, positing both the ideal presence of closed meanings
as wen as the indefinite openness within, and deferrals of insight into,
meanings. Derrida does not so much criticize Husserl for this tension, as
take this tension in Husserl's text between a meaning's ideality and its "need
for supplementation" (Ergänzungsbedürftigkeit) to be the very deferral of
absoluteness within which an original or first philosophy happens. Now Welton
takes Derrida's account of the doubledness of Husserl 's text to be an argument
that Husserl's theory of ideal meanings is inconsistent. (Evans (1991) takes
a similar approach, developing a range of arguments against Derrida's reading
that I cannot do justice to here.) Welton's reply is that Derrida ignores Husserl's
later genetic phenomenology. In other words, Welton first identifies Derrida's
reading with criticisms made by Sokolowski and Levin, then concedes the
inconsistency of ideal meanings, in order to defend a new, non-ideal, non-
closed (though see p. 298), kind of meaning. But for Derrida, whose reading
of Husserl's concept of synthesis in terms of deferral, interruption, and cor-
rupted presence nevertheless essentially belongs to the process reading, the
demand for ideal closure in meaning is precisely what a theory of meaning
must demand. Derrida's process reading is far from incompatible with the
demand for ideality; process takes place rather in the labyrinths on route to
an ideality whose necessity is not diminished by its infinite deferral.
How does each content of consciousness anticipate others in general, and the
next perspective in particular? How is the demand for synthesis implicit in
each?
of predieates", but it also needs a "component" which indexes "The X" which
"binds" the predicates (pp. 195-205). Smith and McIntyre complain that
Husserl underemphasizes demonstrative reference and overemphasizes definite
descriptions (p. 219). Hence, in the case where an expression-user misdescribes
the object he perceives, Husserl was forced to say that the expression refers
to a non-existent intentional object whereas the preferable account is that it
refers (falsely) to whatever object was perceived. Smith and McIntyre suggest
that if phenomenology were to emphasize the expression-user's "background
of belief-structures" and the "pragmaties" by which they name and describe
things in their environments (p. 221), it would harmonize the roles of pat-
terning and indexing while solving hard cases in the theory of reference.
Some semantic readings beg in by assuming the presence of names and pred-
ieations, and then ask how these linguistic expressions manage to refer to
objects. Others question the origin of language, and regard language and index-
ieal reference as originally simultaneous (Hülsmann, 1964). Caputo (1987),
following Derrida, argues that non-grammatieal and "useless" expressions
res tore aspects of the world to us that structured language overregulates.
Mohanty (1964) points to two semantic problems symptomatic of problems
in the unity of consciousness: one involving the relation between objective
expressions, whieh synthesize perceptions into a common reference, and
demonstrative expressions, which do not; and the other involving syncate-
gorematic terms (like "and") whieh draw connections and yet do not mean
anything in themselves. For Mohanty, both problems indieate the tension
between synthetic pattern and non-synthetic units of meaning. In fact, Mohanty
approves of this unresolved tension in Husserl 's theory of reference (pp. 60-6).
The reconciliation of rules and flux remains a "paradox" (p. 74-5).
While Mohanty thinks a reconciliation of objective meaning and percep-
tual flux is finally "resistant" to phenomenologieal description (also 1982),
Tugendhat (1967 and 1977) regards such problems as symptoms of a more
serious problem for the semantic account of synthesis which he attributes
to Husserl. Husserl's theory of truth, he says, begins as an account of how
linguistic propositions agree with facts, but defines the truth-relation "in so
far as it implies a synthesis" of judgments (p. 97). Unlike Hülsmann, Tugendhat
treats linguistic propositions as "non-synthetic meanings" (p. 99), but like
Hülsmann, he thinks the locus of truth must be synthetic. Hence, Tugendhat
approves of the fact that Husserl's desire to locate truth in propositions leads
hirn to ground propositions in synthetic judgments, but criticizes Husserl
for not grounding judgment in a Heideggerian notion of being-in-the-world
(pp. 99, 106).
The semantic reading of Husserl's concept of synthesis, like the other
readings, comes to a point at whieh the oppositions or dualities which it posits,
in this case between pattern and reference, call for a reconciliation. The
remaining sections of this chapter look at three strategies by which com-
mentators try to reconcile alleged dualities in Husserl's concept of synthesis;
the diachronie strategy, the "dialectical" strategy, and the way of "referring-
HUSSERL'S CONCEPT OF SYNTHESIS 25
extended from the actually perceived world. But whether on strong, weak,
or medium articulations, the analysis of "predesignation" or of "meaning-over-
and-beyond-itself" (über-sich-hinaus-meinen, p. 229) is articulated in terms of
"possible acts whose senses are compatible with, but more determinate in
context than the sense of the (original) act" (p. 247).
The idea that a meaning contains "more" than it makes explicit, is at the
heart of the concept of synthesis. For de Almeida (1972), the category of
"more" has both objective and subjective aspects: in the combination of sen-
sations, identifications correspond to an object's "possibility of being-other"
(Anders-sein-können, pp. 88-95); in knowledge motivated by a cognitive
"aim", the "pre-given" sides of the object correspond to the subject's "will
to know-more" (Mehr-wissenwollens, pp. 103-5).
The "more" and the "other" inherent in every experience in the form of
the next experience 's pre-givenness, is both the "more" of protended meanings
(Carr, 1974, p. 70), and the "more" of implicit consciousness (de Waelhens,
1959). The category of "more" turns the notion of the "flow" of conscious-
ness into a notion of "overflow". Generally, "overflow" is treated in terms
of what Kant called the "ampliative" property of synthetic judgments, i.e. in
terms of the way perceptions add something to the concepts which they fulfil.
Hence Waldenfels (1971, p. 76) talks of the problem of incorporating new expe-
riences which "overfill" (überfülle), "mean more" than (Mehrmeinung), and
create an "excess" over, pre-given conceptual meanings. Mohanty (1982, p.
114) says that cognition "overflows" language, and Kern (1964, p. 270) speaks
of sensation overflowing apriori categories. Welton (1983, pp. 318-22) argues
that perception and language reciprocally "exceed" one another.
The flow of consciousness is constituted not only as the uninterrupted
succession of acts flowing one after another, but as the flowing of each act
into the next. Each act expands itself into the next, completes itself as its
own successor, and determines itself as that which is prior to its demanded
supplementation. An act's meaning consists not in what it contains, but in
that which "exceeds" or "doubles" it as its "other".
A wide range of concepts and descriptive motifs have emerged in pairs. Some
are named by the classifications which I have used to distinguish readings,
such as the distinction between the forms and contents of synthesis, the process
and the substrate of synthesis, or the cognition and the reference of syn-
thesis. Others cut across those classifications, such as the distinction between
the creative and the restitutive powers of synthesis, the openness and closed-
ness of synthesis, or the history and the teleology of synthesis. The strategy
of some commentators is to affirm the primacy in Husserl's thought of one
side of each of such pairs. But others think that both sides of each pair have
some place in Husserl's thought. Can Husserl's theory of synthesis accomo-
HUSSERL'S CONCEPT OF SYNTHESIS 27
date the oppositions between the interpretations of it? Can the theory of
synthesis itself accomplish this accommodation?
The easiest way to attribute both sides of an opposition to Husserl is to
attribute one of the sides to the "early" Husserl and one to the "late". Some
commentators hold that Husserl simply replaced one concept of synthesis
with another, while others hold that Husserl, in discovering something new
about synthesis, also attempted to unify the new with the old.
Most commentators date the new concept of synthesis from Ideen 1, and
appeal to the novelty of the descriptions of passive synthesis, the life-world,
and horizons. The feeling is that in Husserl's early work, synthesis is a kind
of interpretative conjunction of self-sufficient meanings, but that that under-
standing of synthesis had to be abandoned as soon as Husserl recognized a
layer of experience, meaning, and activity prior to ideal units of meaning.
Hence many commentators classify LU as a logical work, and argue that
in later works Husserl attempted to ground essences in "This"-sensations (Eley)
and to explain intentions in their relation to pre-meaningful sensations without
the earlier matter-form duality (Sokolowski). More common is the idea that
in later works Husserl moved back from thetic unities to the pre-thetic unity
of the life-world. The unity that would have to have been passively constituted
before the articulation of any thetic assertion has been variously interpreted
as the presupposed context of flowing experience (Gurwitsch), as the perceptual
surroundings that make reference possible (Smith and Mclntyre), as the tele-
ology of unified consciousness (Hoyos Vasquez), as the implicit motivation
to unify perspectives (Rang), and as the pre-discursive facticity of being-
and living-in-the-world (Diemer, Landgrebe, Tugendhat). For others, the tran-
sition to a synthesis prior to thesis is also a transition to an intersubjectivity
prior to the subject (Yamaguchi).
These readings argue for the need to articulate the genesis or his tory of
the constituted world prior to objectifying assertions about its reality, to narrate
the story of reality "from below" (Levin), to tell how the rationality of
immanent experiences first let the world be real (Souche-Dagues). For some,
the historicization of meaning is centered around the introduCtion of time
into the phenomenology of meaning (Sokolowski, Larabee). But the idea that
Husserl comes to think that meanings change as they are thought through
time is associated with the idea that Husserl's theory of synthesis becomes,
in later works, a theory of "productive" consciousness (Welton) or to a tran-
scendental idealism that inserts consciousness itself into a theory of essences
in LU (de Boer). For still others, the transition to a transcendentallife-world
lets Husserl finally recognize the force of form in the activity of conscious-
ness (Schuhmann). On all versions, there is a transition from a theory of
synthesis that begins with those items which are ready and about-to be syn-
thesized, to a theory which looks back to a prior (though still synthetic)
origination of those items.
De Almeida (1972) posits a paradox of the origin of the constituents of
synthesis (p. 193): If each constituent to-be-synthesized is determined by
28 INTRODUCTION
prior constituents, then there is a regress in the process, which means that
the constituents are ultimately "ungrounded". But if the constituents are pure
facts, then their combination is ungrounded. This "aporia" of "endless regress
and irrational beginning" is due to Husserl's early theories of "static descrip-
tion" (p. 194). The problem is solved only if a new genetic phenomenology
can uncover, prior both to the constituent and to the process, an implicit and
original pre-experience of the world's horizons (p. 195). The unification of
discrete contents is not achieved by the "last moment" of a synthetic process,
whether progressive or regressive, but in the "totality" of temporality. In short,
the issues of meaning in later works become issues of passive synthesis, on
the understanding that the concept of synthesis itself cannot work, that syn-
thesis always implicates either regress or irrationality. Only in the context of
a double movement forward to the world as totality (p. 201) and backward
to "pre" -thetic horizons, does synthesis achieve a grounded origin.
The problem of synthesis is thus taken to become a problem of origin which
must always have taken place before experience, before meaning and before
active synthesis, afore- (Vor-, de Almeida) and a before (früher, Aguirre, 1970,
p. 160). Now de Almeida thinks that Husserl adds this new level of syn-
thesis only in later works. But can de Almeida's notion of a starting-point
that institutes itself as an experiential totality in the form of the before of expe-
rience, also provide a model for understanding how the alleged dualities in
Husserl's theory of synthesis may be present together even in Husserl's early
works? Could it be that when we observe in LU pairs of Husserlian opposi-
tions such as form and matter, or essence and process, we are observing not
dualistic pairs which demand reconciliation in a new theory of passive syn-
thesis, but are already observing a kind of mutual grounding wherein the
pair is originally grounded together in so far as each leads back to the other?
In the final two sections of this chapter, I will look at two strategies
employed by commentators who think that Husserl's theory of synthesis both
exhibits thematic dualities, and is systematic. One strategy holds that the
two sides (in whatever tension is at issue) are "dialectically" interdetermining;
the other holds that the two sides ground each other's origin, and ground the
whole process of origination itself, in so far as consciousness as a whole is
a kind of "referring-back", a unity of prior and posterior, origin and result.
Undeterred by the fact that Husserl never uses the vocabulary of dialectics (see
Rockmore, 1987), by Brentano's facile claim that "misled by paralogisms,
Hegel and his school even denied the law of contradiction", and by Heidegger's
concern that "dialectic is always introduced the moment opposition is men-
tioned" and hence nowadays means less than nothing (1940), a surprising
number of commentators use the term "dialectic" to characterize Husserl's
concept of synthesis. However, there have been few systematic attempts to
define "dialectic", either in general or as a reading of Hege!.
HUSSERL'S CONCEPT OF SYNTHESIS 29
Many of those who have explicitly compared Husserl with Hegel have sym-
pathized more with Hegel, and so accuse Husserl of lacking a fully dialectical
spirit. For some, dialectics requires a historieist interpretation of ideas (Lauer,
1974; Rockmore, 1987); for others, dialectics implies a transcendence beyond
phenomena into religious cognition (Kirkland, 1985). But those who have
developed the most systematic comparisons of Husserl and Hegel (Schrader,
1964; Harris, 1987; Westphal, 1987) have concentrated on the role of medi-
ation in the constitution of world-interpretation. Schrader argues that Hegelian
phenomenology is "committed to the thesis that experiences can be self-inter-
preting" (p. 22). Harris says that Hegelian dialectics consists of a "logic of
coherence and system" (p. 98), within which the life-world is seen to be "at
once universally immanent and transcendent, both substance and subject,
Nature and Spirit" (p. 111; also Dove, 1974). Along similar lines, Westphal
argues that Hegelian dialectics must comprehend all experiences and expla-
nations of experience as a totality, an absolute or holistic system where every
single experience is mediated by means of interpretations of all experiences
(pp. 104-113). Each part of experience is subject to the Aufhebung whereby
an interpretation of the whole brings subjective experience to truth (Watson,
1987). Now, these commentators tend to find that these features of Hegelian
dialectics are to some degree lacking in Husserl, i.e. that Husserl's phenom-
enology is formalist, subjectivist, ahistoricist, or founded on a theory of
experiential immediacy. While some of these authors try to locate some degree
of dialectics in Husserl, I have argued (Lampert, 1988) that Husserl's phe-
nomenology is dialectical in just the senses usually attributed to Hegel,
particularly in the sense that "experiences are self-interpreting" within a self-
propelling dialectic of mutually mediating interpretations, constituting both the
parts and the whole of consciousness.
There are three subject-areas to which the notion of dialectical synthesis has
been attributed to Husserl (not inc1uding commentators interested in the
dialectic in Husserl's social philosophy, e.g. Adorno and Habermas): the
rational clarification of concepts, the subject-object relation, and the part-whole
relation.
Fink (1957, p. 70) defines Husserl 's "dialectical" methodology for clari-
fying phenomenological concepts as one which thematizes the simultaneous
unity and tension of productivity and receptivity in philosophising conceptu-
alization. For de Muralt (1974), "dialectical" clarification in science (p. 11)
is not just methodological, but explicates the dual nature of all conscious-
ness and all reality, namely the duality of actuality and infinite potentiality
(p. 49), or of data and norm (p. 301). Dialectical cognition does not just clarify
concepts, it brings consciousness from vagueness to precision (p. 22), and
hence transforms consciousness's relation to the world from one of ideality
to one of reality (p. 28). A dialectical unity of concepts is one whose results
would be new and not contained in its constituents, but real and constitutive
of the world nevertheless. Müller (1976, p. 39) grounds the product of dialec-
tical synthesis by arguing that synthetic cognition is a social and technical
30 INTRODUCTION
production, and for that reason, new synthetic categories get applied to reality
by the same subjects who cognize them. Ladriere (1960, pp. 191-95), on the
other hand, argues that Husserl's lesson is that reason today must be less
technological, and that the dualities of activity and passivity, determinacy
and indeterminacy, consciousness and body, can be overcome only if "dialec-
tical" reason takes up the standpoints of art and religion, leading logos gently
into temporality.
Commentators for whom dialectics solves not the problem of clarification
but that of the experiencing subject's relation to real objects, still name the
dialectical relations as those of activity and passivity, determinacy and inde-
terminacy, actuality and potentiality, consciousness and body, etc. Köchler
(1974, pp. 142-450) suggests that a dialectical relation occurs when relata
determine each other reciprocally, i.e. when each simultaneously creates itself
and makes the other dependent on it. Hence, a subject's intern al "reflection"
is both its "self-creativity", and its entry into the factical world (pp. 170ff.).
Landgrebe (1981, pp. 64f.) contends that Husserl's "dialectic" is perfected
by Heidegger's analysis of the reciprocal acts of being-in-the-world and reflec-
tion to selfhood.
For Mensch (1981, pp. 84-9), the overcoming of solipsistic subjectivity
by reality-affirming subjectivity is interpreted in cognitive terms. Mensch refers
to a "dialectic of intention and fulfilment", wh ich joins meaning with sensa-
tion, and unitary experiences with manifold ones. Dialectics is a kind of
interpretative coherence. For Mensch, "dialectics" means something like a
"balance" of ideallaws and factual contingency, and the Aufhebung of solip-
sistic subjectivity amounts to a "mutual dependence" of subject and object
(also Edie, 1984).
The appeals to such ideas as the actualization of conceptualized poten-
tialities, the simultaneity of reflection and being-in-the-world, the balance of
ideality and facticity, and the mutual dependence of subject and object, make
the notion of dialectics seem rather weak and easily translatable into other
terms. Strasser (1959, pp. 150-53) uses stronger language. Husserl, he says,
in his account of the synthesis of perspectives and the gradual disclosure of
objects, makes explicit an "intuitionistic principle of completion", but leaves
implicit the prior "dialectical principle". Husserllacked the word "dialectic",
but taught the dialectic in the shape of his transcendental reductions. In that
the reductions first transform mundane experience into ideal experience, and
then transform ideal experience into critical experience-in-the-world, they
function as a Hegelian "negation of the negation" (p. 153, also Schuhmann,
1971, p. ix). For Szilasi (1959, pp. 140-42), Husserl's dialectic involves
consciousness's history of self-questioning, which other dialecticians call
"sublation by immanent critique".
But what is lacking is any clear account of how the immanent operations
that go on within each term of the subject-object duality forge the connec-
ti on of that term with the other. We have so far found commentators who
attribute to Husserl two of the three laws of dialectics formalized by the Young
HUSSERL'S CONCEPT OF SYNTHESIS 31
Hegelians, namely the law of the Negation of the Negation, and the law of
the Interpenetration of Subject and Object. The idea that the external rela-
tions which bind terms in a duality are a function of the internal relations
within each term announces the third of these laws, namely the law of the
Transformation of Quantity into Quality and vice versa.
We have seen that Waldenfels (1971) and others speak of the "overflow"
of meanings into sensations and vice versa. Waldenfels ' first articulation of
the "overflow" is in terms of the "open dialectic" (p. 77) wherein meaning
and sensation "mutually condition and demand" each other (p. 78). Each can
only partially satisfy its own cognitive demands, and hence each includes
("behind itself", p. 76) the other as part of its own telos. Every act which
intends an essence is part of a "double" move, the other part of which intends
sensible givens, and vice versa. But Waldenfels lapses into a weaker articu-
lation of dialectics wherein experience works out "ambiguities" (p. 78) through
"dialogue" (p. 80).
Welton (1983) at times follows Waldenfels' stronger articulation. Applying
the term "dialectical" to the relations of fulfilment and implication (p. 24)
and to language and perception (p. 298), Welton describes the "exceeding"
as a process whereby each relatum ideally completes, and is the "outer horizon"
of, the other (pp 318-22). At other times, Welton talks only of the mutual
"interaction and enrichment" of language and sensation (pp. 268ff.). But at
its most promising, Welton's interpretation points to a unity-through-difference
whereby identities of meaning and individuations of perceivable objects take
place as a result of a complex of perceptual systems and linguistic systems.
Each system acts intemally and yet "strives" (p. 252) for points of contact with
the other, so that the whole "schematic genesis" (pp. 256-68) is a web of
alternations, blendings, shiftings, complementary directions, and interplays
(pp. 304).
But how is it that that which goes on inside each system breaks out of its
limits to reach the other, and how does each system constitute its own outer
limit as the border with the other. Welton's attempt at a dialectic of "here"
and "there" (p. 318) looks like it begins a dialectic of perception that at a
later stage might need and become a dialectic of meanings and laws. (Hegel's
Phenomenology of Spirit opens with a genetic analysis of this sort.) But such
an analysis of the dialectic among parts which transforms the system as a
whole, which alone would count as a fully dialectical reading of Husserl,
has never fully been attempted. Eley (1972, pp. 342-44) speaks of a "dialectic
of This and That" at the origin of a Husserlian genesis of laws and con-
junction. Strasser (1963, pp. 256-57) defines Husserl 's "dialectical" phe-
nomenology as an investigation into the simultaneous "ordering" and
"neutralizing" of partial standpoints. Müller (1976), for whom the "dialectic
of givenness and totality" is connected to cultural backgrounds, does take
the dialectic of part and whole seriously. If experience orders perspectives
by providing each one with a successor beyond its limit, then the very origin
of each perspectival standpoint depends on the experiential system as a whole:
32 INTRODUCTION
"The given is produced. Its reality is the result of a process" (p. 39). The
synthesis of This and That is a kind of production whose "economy" (p. 44)
trickles down into all levels: it produces "backgrounds" and "perspectives"
(p. 201) as weIl as the intentional "purposes" (p. 43) which guide epistemic
fulfilment; it produces an "open process" (p. 58-9) with creative possibili-
ties for "innovation" and new "standpoints" (the most radical of which is
the ego standpoint, pp. 201-30) as weIl as the "fixed and static" relations within
and between these standpoints (pp. 58-9). In short, to work out a Husserlian
dialectic of whole and part, one would have to account not only for ways in
wh ich syntheses among part-experiences transform the structures of the whole
of experience, but also for ways in which each transformation of the whole
retroactively confers new meaning on each part, and changes wh at it means
to be apart.
Many commentators deny that Husserl's concept is dialectical. There is a
common feeling that it is impossible to speak without equivocation of expe-
rience as, for example, both active and passive. Natorp (1917-18) argues
that since consciousness is a "flux", it cannot also be governed by concrete
processes, as Husserl's "dialectical critics" (Adorno and EIey) claim. Mohanty
(1974, p. 189) suspects that aIl talk of a subject-object dialectic lapses into
subjectivism. Derrida (1967) argues that synthetic unities of meaning in
Husserl's account are not absolute dialectical resolutions of differences, but
rather defer the unity of interpretation infinitely. Souche-Dagues (1972) calls
Husserl's account of repeatable meanings "anti-dialectical" (p. 44).
The concern in all these readings is that the dialectical reading, which I have
portrayed as the description of relatively autonomous systems of conscious-
ness activating their determinacy and limits in confrontation with each other,
collapses into the process reading, which I have portrayed as the description
of a relatively undifferentiated flow of experience splitting into apparently
autonomous systems. The concern is that the dialectical reading denies that
there is a genuine difference between language and perception, or between
universals and particulars, static and genetic, etc. The challenge for the dialec-
tical reading is to ensure that the differentiation between spheres that emerge
in the course of their interaction achieve the status of logical or primordial
differentiations. It must show how the process that sets up differences sets them
up as always having been determining for consciousness. The process of
achieving synthetic unities must be the same process that refers back to original
differences.
The dialectic of achieving synthetic results by referring back to origins is
thus the strongest version of the mutual grounding of dualities that several
commentators aIlude to. When Sokolowski (1964, pp. 218-19) refers to the
"dialectic" between the two "poles" of constitution (namely of "subjectivity
and reality"), his idea is that subjectivity is the ground of material judgments
while judgments about matter ground in return the ego's reflection (though
Sokolowski thinks that Husserl insufficiently emphasized the latter). Dialectics
is the interaction which lets grounds appear as grounds or origins. Schuhmann's
HUSSERL'S CONCEPT OF SYNTHESIS 33
(1971, pp. 192-94) last word on Husserl's "dialectic" of ego and nature is a
Fiehtean one. The ego is "independent and unconditioned", but only when
understood as the "ground-moment of its own self-division, i.e. into non-
will (nature) and will (phenomenology)". The ego-pole is independent only
when it returns to itself from the natural world; and the world appears as an
"absolutely given facticity" only when, "synthetically bound together", it func-
tions as an "original result" (original Nachträgliches), an aposteriority with
the status of apre-supposition. The most explicit reading is EIey's (1962,
pp. 31-6) account of the "dialectic" of essence and thisness as a "prius-
posterius difference". EIey argues that essences can only be constituted through
the unities and differences among individuals, but that once constituted,
essences count as independent of, and even as the source of the determinate
characterizations of, individuals. Citing (p. 35n.) Hegel 's category of "pre-
supposition", Eley defines dialecties as the apriori "pre-supposition" that
is "conditioned" by the "conflict" of aposteriori moments.
Finally, then, we come to readings of Husserl's concept of synthesis in
terms of the originary result, the pre-supposition, or the reference backward
to origins.
all past perceivings of the same object, and thus implicitly contains the past
synthetic cause within itself". De Muralt (1974, pp. Illff.) argues that science
can only progress if its goals are constantly being remembered. But other com-
mentators, like Diemer (1956, pp. 96-102), argue that an intentionally complex
experience need not refer back to a chronologically prior experience, but
must refer back to something in this "present-now"-point out of which the
complex could have been constructed. The backward and forward (rück and
vor) references among experiences all depend on the intention "pointing
backward" (zurückweisen auf) to a passive "pre-givenness" in the present. Still
others, like Miller (1984), characterize referring-back through the futural
possibility of confirming or re-checking perceptions. Interpretations are con-
firmed when they "go back" to data and disconfirmed when they "go back"
on data (p. 64). Und er ideal conditions of coherence, all attributions "go
back" to one another (p. 71).
But if some commentators say that complex consciousness leads back to
simple sense-data, whether implicit or explicit, others say that that to which
consciousness refers back are ideallaws and/or the active ego. Dreyfus (1982,
p. 25) thinks that what phenomenology "uncovers" are rules and not states
of awareness. And Levinas (1973, p. 25) says that critical phenomenology
"refers back" from objective experience of things to subjectivity and the
existence of consciousness, though others argue conversely that critical phe-
nomenology "refers back" in a new way to the same existing things that were
already present in naIve consciousness.
However, like the dialectical readings, readings which emphasize backward
reference often do not just choose one element over another (e.g. sensation
over meaning or subject over object) to be the backward-referent. Instead, they
argue that the process of backward reference is itself responsible for there being
several equally primordial elements in consciousness. Hence Landgrebe (1981)
says that consciousness leads back both to givenness and to the ego. Waldenfels
(1975, p. 76) says that experience refers "back" both to the "real given" and
to "expressed meaning", and de Almeida (1972) says that the "double"
movement (pp. 55, 77) of "pointing-back" or "leading-back" (Rückdeuten
and Zurückführen) leads both to sensation and abstraction (pp. 38-9), both
to substrate and predicative determinations (pp. 103-4), and both to the pre-
given beginnings of interpretation and to its ideal end-points (pp. 30-40).
That a single process of referring-back can ground heterogeneous elements
of consciousness, suggests that consciousness also refers back to its own
totality. When Hülsmann (1964, pp. 103-5, 154) says that reflection is directed
"back" towards the ego, he has in mind the temporally streaming ego as a
synthetic whole. Natorp (1917-18, p. 52) argues that the ego to which objec-
tifying consciousness "relates back" (Zurückbeziehung) is a flowing synthetic
ego. Landgrebe (1980, pp. 64f.) argues that phenomenological analysis
lets consciousness "return (Rückgang) to ground" in the lifeworld. Müller
(1976, pp. 248-9) argues that individual meanings can be produced only if
the "absolute totality" of meaning is also a "taking-back" of the totality
HUSSERL'S CONCEPT OF SYNTHESIS 35
sense-data. But while sensation does satisfy the search for beginnings, in
that sensation must have always taken place earlier (früher) than intentional
experience, nevertheless every sensation in a temporal field has a sense-history
to be explicated. No one sensation can dose the search for beginnings, or begin
a chronology of origins. But another mode of return, namely retlection to a
timeless transcendental subject, satisfies both the search for a prior inten-
tional experience as weH as the closure of serial history. Aguirre foHows the
"reference-back" reading in so far as he holds that the syntheses of ongoing
experience lead back through contexts to a history of origins, but he backs
away from a fuH theory of the "before" both by rejecting the ultimacy of sense-
data and by affirming the ultimacy of the subject. Aguirre rejects the ultimacy
of sense-data on the grounds that the chain of ever-earlier data can never be
closed, whereas for the reference-back reading the syntheses which identify
ever more detailed sense-data thereby do constitute a region of ideaHy simple
units of sense. And Aguirre affirms the ultimacy of the subject on the grounds
that consciousness refers back to an undifferentiated transcendental identity,
whereas for the reference-back reading the identity of the subject is a product
of consciousness's recognition of the continuous possibility of reflection
present in every synthetic combination. If Aguirre's conception of genetic phe-
nomenology degenerates into subjective idealism, it is because his account
of the reference-back to pre-constitutive beginnings is not grounded in ongoing
synthetic experience.
Derrida (1967) seems to criticize Husserl by affirming a gap between the
uncloseable adumbrations of meaning which take place in the ongoing
anticipations and retentions of synthesizing consciousness and the ideally
dosed self-identity of the origins (sensible, structural, ideal, and transcendental)
of synthesis. The charge is that Husserl's theory of origins is always dis-
persed in his descriptions of the unfolding of meanings. Husserl's reply is
that the dissemination of meaning through experience implies not the disso-
lution of beginnings but only that the ideal starting-points I)f synthesis are
constituted by the backward-reference of unclosed syntheses. Derrida's criti-
cism of phenomenology becomes rather his perfection of it, when he says of
the open possibilities which refer back to ideal units of meaning that "by
delayed reaction, a possibility produces that to which it is said to be added
on".
Finally, according to de Almeida, the genesis of a meaning may be traced
back to an "origin" (Ursprung), but not to a "beginning" (Anfang) (1972,
pp. 18-23). The pre-suppositions of a meaning "point back" (Rückdeuten) or
"lead back" (Zurückführen) to "end-points" (pp. 38-41), either to sensible
contents or to categorial forms. Sensible end-points ean only be pragmatic eon-
stmctions (p. 41), yet these construetions are already "preseribed" (vorschreibt)
by the meanings whose genesis pre-supposes them (p. 48). Categorial forms
can only exist as "operations" in, and not "before" or "after", interpretative
syntheses, yet these operations take the form of tautologie al mIes when reflee-
tions "look back" (pp. 116-18). Both sense-data and eategorial forms, then,
HUSSERL'S CONCEPT OF SYNTHESIS 37
NOTE
1. I am going to refer to secondary works by citing in the body of the text the author, the
year of publication, and the page reference, and by citing the rest of the publication data
in the Bibliography.
CHAPTER 1
In the first Logical Investigation, Husserl is concemed with what will count
as the identity of a meaning, given that expressions of meanings become and
perish in the flux of the experience of expression-users. While Husserl uses
the term "synthesis" only once in LU i, I will argue that Husserl 's ac counts
of meaning and intentionality, science and perception, expressions and con-
sciousness, are dominated by the problematics of what Husserl calls " 'unity
in multiplicity' " (102).
In chapter 1, I will examine three unities in multiplicity in LU i: first, the
"intimately fused unity" between meaning-intentions and meaning-fulfilments,
second, the "web" of scientific thought-contents, and third, the replacement
of the fluctuating meanings of occasional ("This-Here-Now") expressions with
objective units of meaning. I will argue that there is a single problematic of
synthesis at work in intentionality in general, in science, and in perception.
The general problematic is that each intentional act of consciousness must pass
over into successors and unfold in a complex interpretation of the world of
experience, at the same time as they refer back to an underlying synthetic unity
of interpretative consciousness. The special problem in the intentionality
relation is to explain how meanings "prescribe" their own supplements; the
problem in a science of concepts, where meanings seem not to fluctuate at
all, is to describe the dynamic wherein one proposition "follows from" another;
the problem in occasional expressions like "This-Here-Now", where meanings
seem to fluctuate without restriction, is to explain how multiplicities of expe-
rience contribute to the possibility of ideal units of meaning. On my reading,
Husserl's account of synthesis takes consciousness to be a self-propelling
dynamic of interpretative activity. Whether stable or fluctuating, the meanings
of individual acts of consciousness prescribe and pass over into determinate
ranges of successors, which in turn refer back to their predecessors as
the ground of their unity. We will be looking for an account of the grounds,
the mechanisms, and the results of these prescriptions of multiplicity and
unification.
Husserl argues that meanings differ from mental states (17), from perceptual
intuitions (56-7, 66-7), and from linguistic expressions (s. 8). Meanings are
instead ideal articulations of states of affairs interconnected by subject-matter
and subject to analysis and verification independent of whether and by whom
and from what cause they are thought, and independent of whether or how
38
LU I 39
their objects have been perceived, and of what words are used to express them.
Husserl's version of the relation between meanings and perception introduces
the relation between intention and fulfilment. An expression has an "empty"
meaning-intention for an experiencing subject if it refers to an objective state
of affairs which he has not intuited; it acquires a meaning-fulfilment if the
subject has intuitively "confirmed" or "illustrated" its meaning.
The concept of synthesis is introduced to characterize the way in which
intuitions are unified under objectifying interpretations. Just as one meaning
may be illustrated by many intuitions, "the same intuition can offer fulfil-
ment of different expressions: it can be categorically held fast in different ways
and synthetically combined (synthetisch verknüpft) with other intuitions" (49).
An intuition succeeds in fulfilling an expression when, thanks to some inter-
pretative category, it is synthetically combined with other intuitions. The
"intimately fused unity" of intention and fulfilment is therefore the result of
the "synthetic combination" of fulfilling intentions with one another.
We can consider the "intimately fused unity" from the standpoint either
of (a) the intention or (b) the fulfilment. Both sides exhibit the dynamic of
interpretative synthesis.
(a) An expression's meaning-intention is a kind of readiness: Once a thought
is formulated about some object, its meaning-content presents itself as a
meaning to be "carried out" (39). The "function" of a written or spoken word
is to "awaken" a meaning-intention, which in turn is to "point forwards to"
an intuitable object, and to "guide" our "interest" in the direction of ful-
filling that intention (40). The readiness of meaning-intentions consists in their
"unactualized" potentiality, their inherent "capacity" for intuitive presenta-
tion (63). Every meaning prescribes "a sphere of possible fulfilment" (50).
It "circumscribes" a whole "range" of intuitions, a range that is both "deter-
minate" (since distinguished from the perceptions prescribed by different
meanings) and "indeterminate" (since many different intuitions, some quite
unpredictable, may all illustrate the same meaning) (50).
The problem of a meaning's circumscription (or anticipation, or prescrip-
tion) of a range of intuitions is at the heart of the problem of the synthetic
combination of contents of consciousness. On a strong reading, the determi-
nacy of a meaning's prescription would be an algorithm for naming or
producing intuitions; on a weaker version, a meaning would simply be asso-
ciated with a class of intuitions. But on either reading, meanings have implicit
possibilities, which unfold as their objects are experienced. Husserl uses a
metaphor from banking. A meaning-intention "draws a draft on (Wechsel
ausstellen auf) intuition" and a meaning-fulfilment "cashes" (eingelöst) it (56).
The "drawing" takes place in-advance of the actualized intuitions, and so
the intuitive possibilites must be counted and evaluated ahead of their actu-
alization. But now since "Wechsel" (the "draft") is also Husserl's technical
term in LU i for "fluctuation", the passage can take an alternative transla-
tion: "The fluctuation, which is exposed (ausstellen) in intuition, is taken up
(eingelöst)". Husserl later attributes "fluctuation" to radically ambiguous
40 CHAPTER 1
expressions. But here, every meaning fluctuates in the sense that its pre-
scriptions of intuitions is relatively indeterminate. The point is not that
meanings are indifferent to which intuitions can fulfil them, but rather that they
must first undergo "exposition" in a multiplicity of intuitions before they
can be "taken up" as an interpretation of the objects of experience.
(b) From the standpoint of meaning-intentions, the problem of synthesis
is one of prescribing fulfilments; from the standpoint of meaning-fulfilments,
the problem is one of fitting intentions, and of the continuity of interpretations.
The plurality of an object's possible appearances must be synthesized in
advance by an ideal meaning's "covering unity" (58), which determines
whether given intuitions "coincide" with intentions. The synthesized plu-
rality of fulfilments thus prevents the pluralization of the meant object itself.
While the appearances of an object are experienced in a "dispersed manifold"
(97), the dispersed intuitions are synthesized, and for this reason the intu-
itive manifold does not make "more" objects present than the single empty
expression already made present. The manifold of appearances unfolds in an
ongoing synthetic process of dispersal and co-incidence; but the result of the
synthesis of intentions with intuitions is a reference, mediated by an ideal
meaning, to a singular object.
From the standpoints both of the starting-point and the end-point of inter-
pretative activity, then, the problematics of synthesis involve the way in
which each individual act of intentional consciousness prescribes in advance,
passes over into, and subsequently fuses with, its successors. But so far, the
concept of "synthesis" has been applied only to the connection between abstract
meanings and immediate intuitions. We will now consider the role of synthesis
within the spheres of even the most abstract meanings (in logical science)
and of even the most concrete (This-Here-Now) intuitions.
are "made to stand out" only within the unity of a single object, then "the single
item itself" is in turn constituted precisely in the "forward and backward
references" of its variously "ordered" appearances.
Indicative signs are thus embedded in apriori structures of combination.
Are meaningful signs also constituted as synthetic unities in multiplicity? There
are considerations that prevent us from drawing this analogy straightaway.
While a meaningful sign is also a kind of "summoning into consciousness",
it works not as a thought about A summons a thought about B into con-
sciousness; rather, a thought about A summons A itself into consciousness.
Similarly, the "unity-in-multiplicity" (102) that pertains to meanings seems not
to combine meanings, but rather to let each one "count as a unit in itself"
throughout its multiple expressions (44, also 30). If a science of logic (whether
a formal logic or a phenomenological science of philosophical concepts) is
to be possible, its first principles, rules, and results must be meaningful inde-
pendent of the stream of consciousness of logicians and their immediate
surroundings.
Yet Husserl says towards the end of LU i (94-6) that the science of logic
yields three unities of multiplicity of its own. The first involves the "abstrac-
tion" (96) from the experience of a material multiplicity to logical science
in general. When we merely "live in" an expression, we attend to its objects:
in order to reflect on, to analyse and draw inferences from, its meaning, we
must "glance back" (zurückblicken) at the meaning as an ideal actuality on
its own account. Only when we return from objective experience back to
a prior sphere of ideal intentional objects, can science proceed "step by
step" (schrittweise) along the path prescribed by the meanings themselves.
The simple units of meaning have to be constituted as such by synthetic
activities.
The second unity in multiplicity in the logical sciences involves "the com-
plication of meanings to form novel meanings" (96). On the one hand, it seems
this would be a progressive science, generating new ideas, or complicating
old ones. On the other hand, it seems a regressive science, leading back to
basic terms which will be able to explain how the meanings we now work with
got compounded into their present form. The science of pure concepts cir-
cumscribes "an ideally closed set of general objects" (105), no matter how
many pure concepts there turn out to be. Just as the "endless" number-series
is "sharply circumscribed" in advance by an ideal law even though they can
never all be named, the set of pure meanings is closed not because they can
all be named, but because they stand in a coherent, law-governed order with
respect to one another.
"All theoretical science, in its objective content, is constituted as one homo-
geneous stuff: it is an ideal complex of meanings. We can go further and say
that the whole, ever so manifold complex web (Gewebe) of meanings that
we call the theoretical unity of science itself belongs under the very category
that circumspans all its elements: it constitutes itself as a unity of meaning"
(95). While an ideal meaning is a unit in relation to the multiplicity of expres-
LU I 43
sions of it, it is also part of a multiplicity which makes up the theoretical content
of science as a whole. Every meaning, as an ideal unit, implicates a unity of
meanings, yielding either agreement or absurdity, but in any case making up
a single interpretative system that may weIl include points of interpretative
conflict, gaps in explanation, failures of rigour, corruptions of univocity, cross-
purposes in enquiry, etc.
The third unity in multiplicity in science involves "the relation of neces-
sarily following (Folge)" (94). An inference (Schlüsse, 94), as the "closure"
of a sequence of meanings, can only yield the certain results that it does,
because of the way it is based on the meanings of its premisses and not on
their subjective content. This "reflection" on premisses introduces an addi-
tional web-like structure of science, reminiscent of the "forward and backward
references" which structure the combinations of indicative signs:
Logical reflection is carried out in further steps [Le. after and beyond the apprehension of
perceivable objects.] A propositional meaning is meant in it continuously and for further (steps),
idealized and identified in our unified thought-context (einheitlichen Denkzusammenhang), and
interpreted as one and the same. The same is the case whenever a unified theoretical demon-
stration (Begründung [the establishment of a grounding relation]) is being wound up (abwickelt).
We could utter no "therefore" (also) unless there was also a glance back (Hinblick) at the meaning-
content. In judging the premisses, we do not merely live in our judgments, but reflect on their
contents; only by glancing back at these does the conclusion appear motivated. Thus and only
thus can the logical form of the premisses - which of course is not stressed in that universal-
conceptual setting off in relief that finds expression in formulas of inference - determine with
insight the following (Folgerung) of the conclusion (104).
Even the scientific inferences that combine the objective contents of ideal
meanings must be grounded in the structure of the subjective possibility of
drawing conclusions. The logician who merely names the rules of syllogism,
fails to account for the "insight" with which conclusions are understood to
follow from the premisses.
The text does not say that to think about a propositional meaning is to
use it as apremiss for deriving other propositions. But it does say that in
order for a subject to use a proposition in a demonstration, or even to ask
whether one proposition implies another, each propositional meaning at work
in the demonstration must be meant "continuously" (fortgesetzt); it must
carry forwards. Meanings have their objective power to imply only in so far
as the apprehension of the "web" of essences takes place in a corresponding
"unified thought-context".
In part, the issue is one of memory: a subject only knows that C follows
from PI and P2 if he knows and remembers what each proposition means.
But more fundamentaIly, the issue concerns the force of the "follows from"
(Folgerung) or the "therefore" (also). A subject recognizes the force of the
premisses precisely by means of a "glancing back" and a "winding up" in
conclusions. Thinking makes use of unifying "contexts", and the objects of
thought are graspable just in their relations to one another. But the ideal
meanings are themselves already responsible for the possibility of contexts,
44 CHAPTER 1
This account of vague (as opposed to "exact", 88) meaning accounts both
for the shifting, flowing, or blurring, of meanings, and for the demand for
the unity, limit, or containment of meanings. The cause of a meaning's vague-
ness is neither the feebleness of the meaning-user nor the flux of intuitions,
but is located rather in the way the meanings themselves prescribe overlap-
ping pereeptual fulfilments. When meanings are vague, it is the meanings
themselves that fai! to "sever themselves off from one another" (71). The
limit which each meaning ought to have belongs to that meaning, but so
does the act of "passing over" those limits. Individual meanings pressure the
theoretical web of meanings to fix, or to put an end to the effacement
(verwischen) of, their boundaries, to generate a more complieated meaning
to end the oscillations to and fro (Schwanken) over vague meanings, to set
different meanings apart once and for all, in short, to effect a transformation
from flux to fixedness.
The problematic of synthesis, both in terms of science and in terms of the
experience of perceptual objects, will foeus on these mechanisms whereby indi-
vidual meaning-contents demand their own supplementation, draw their own
conclusions and prescribe their own intuitive illustrations, fix their own bound-
aries, and shift into their own eontexts.
listener can pick out the meaning of an occasional expression only because
he can presume that the speaker has a "thought-horizon" within which are
situated the same intuitable objects which the listener can also intuit within his
own thought-horizon. The listener cannot immediately experience the cir-
cumstances which give the speaker's utterance an objective meaning, but he
can imagine how he would re-situate himself into the speaker's environment
by the mediation of the speaker's act of pointing out. "This-", "here-",
"now-", and even "I"-locations have objective meanings just because their
fluctuations are always situated in environments whose determinate order
allows a mutual locatability of speaker and listener.
In fact, "I"-points and "This"-points pivot on one another in the con-
tinuous shiftings of standpoint necessary for the comprehension of any demon-
strative term. A listener can shift his standpoint either by holding constant
the items wh ich he sees as "these" items in his visual field while imaginatively
shifting his perspective to that which another "I" would have, or alterna-
tively by holding constant the "I" -point of orientation and allowing the
fluctuation of the things which count as "these". In both cases, the possi-
bility of understanding statements about the world of the speaker depends
on the shifting of standpoints, the establishment of ideal meaning through
experiential difference, and the manipulation of horizons. Husserl 's analysis
of occasional expressions is ultimately not an argument for pure experiential
self-presence, but is rather an account of the syntheses that constitute
indexical reference.
I will leave aside for now the question of whether immediacy is itself
mediated, and whether a speaker's understanding of his own use of "here",
"this", and "I" depends on shiftings of perspective, imaginative variation,
and intersubjective communication. But it is clear that the mediations occur-
ring within a thought-horizon carry out the transformation of occasional
expressions into objective expressions, and so carry out the closure of the
boundaries that fix meanings. Husserl's description of these mediations char-
acterizes both the horizon and the closure. The listener "orients" (orientieren,
81) himself in the speaker's "situation" (Lage, 81). In turn, the speaker must
have pointed to something "situated" (Liegendes, 83) within the "reach"
(-bereich, 83) of his institutions and thoughts, and must have wanted to
"convince" (Überzeugung, 83, or to "carry his own conviction over into")
the listener of what he said, by getting the listener to extend his own reach
over the target situation. The occasional expression acts as a "clue"
(Anhaltspunkt, 81) for "guiding" (81) the listener to pick out the object meant.
For its utterance is part of a system of "normal" situatedness; its enunciation
calls upon the listener to stop in the tracks of fluctuating experience, to take
note of his own immediate surroundings and to use them as his "footing" or
"point of support", or even his "standing-" or "stopping-point" (all possible
translations of Anhaltungspunkt) for fixing the speaker's referent. In short,
the very recognition that a certain expression is a fluctuating expression
involves the beginnings of a kind of stopping-point. The point of stopping is
LU I 47
on the one hand no more than the "point of entry" (Einsatzpunkt), which as
we shall see (in discussing Ideen 1, 253) is the point of departure for carrying
out articulated syntheses, and on the other hand is already the beginning
of the end of the "stopping" (Innehaltung), which as we have already seen
(in discussing LU 11, I, 72) is the closure of the uncontrolled overflow of
meanings.
Husserl goes further than to say that occasional expressions provide a clue
for manipulating intuitive and conceptual standpoints; the procedures for
manipulation can, in the ideal, terminate in the "replacement", without any loss
of sense, of the occasional expression by an objective expression (90). But
Husserl 's claim is a difficult one, since he also insists that any attempt to
carry out such an ideal, to express experiences in "unequivocal, objectively
fixed fashion", would be "plainly futile" (91). How does Husserl affirm the
ideal, while denying the practical possibility?
First, Husserl distinguishes "essentially" and "inessentially" occasional
experiences. The expression "this statement" is inessentially occasional if it
is uttered just after the statement in question: to replace the occasional expres-
sion with an objective one, the listener need only "glance back" (Rückblick,
84) at what has just been said. In contrast, an essentially occasional expres-
sion requires that the listener perform fresh intuitions, as when "this" refers
to a bird now in flight. Here, constantly "varying" intuitions "supplant" or
"stand in for" (supponieren, 84) the objective meaning of "this". Somehow the
"supplanting" of objective meanings by intuitions must be put in the service
of "replacing" intuitive contents with objective meanings. Even essentially
occasional expressions must glance back to an objective meaning - not to
an earlier utterance, but to a continuing possibility of giving objective expres-
sion to each new intuitive experience.
But if we try to find an actual pure language of objective expressions which
can be understood without having to look around into the speaker's intuitive
horizons, we find that the "occasional character" is "carried over" like a
communicable disease (überträgt sich auf, 85) into many sorts of seemingly
non-occasional expressions. First, apparently objective expressions such as
"The lamp" and "It is raining" have occasional· presuppositions, since they
really mean "This lamp" and "It is raining now" (87). It looks as though all
expressions that refer to individual objects as opposed to species, and that refer
to existing as opposed to possible objects, demand that their listeners look back
at their meanings by reaching out into intuitive horizons. Second, even so me
expressions which refer to ideal species are infected by fluctuation. "Vague"
terms such as "shrub" and "tree", and "hazy" terms such as colour-terms
"pass over into one another" (88) and vary in "application". When a listener
hears the word "tree" in a certain context, thinking he knows which things
count as trees, but realises that a different range of objects has been meant,
he is able to shrink, expand, or just shift the meaning of the term so as to
keep alive his ongoing interpretation of the discourse he is listening to. Vague
and hazy meanings operate within "spheres with vague limits, and flow
48 CHAPTER I
over into correlative spheres within the same genus, and so condition
spheres-that-pass-over (Übergangssphäre)" (88-89). Even within a single "train
of thought" (Gedankenzuge 88, Gedankenfolge 91), subjects make sense of
expressions only by continuously shifting their ideas of the objects and expe-
riences they refer to. So now it looks as though all expressions with empirical
content can have multiple applications, and so are "subjectively muddied" (91)
by alternative view-points and thought-horizons.
At the end of these sections, Husserl seems to locate arealm of genuinely
"objectively fixed" expressions, by appealing to a "correlation" between "being
in itself" and "truths in themselves" (90). Meanings are unqualifiedly fixed
meanings only when the purest kind of logical science is directed to the
purest kind of subject-matter. Such a science would have to stipulate the
meanings of its basic terms and its rules for complicating those meanings would
have to guarantee that the resulting web of meanings includes no extra-
scientific intuitions or intra-scientific ambiguities. And yet we have seen that
even the scientific web of truths introduces a structure of passing-over from
proposition to proposition, and that even a "single train of thought" intro-
duces a shifting of standpoint. Not only when referring to existing individuals
or empirical classifications, but also when engaging in scientific discourse, a
language-user's "distance" from an ideallanguage ofpurely objective meaning
remains "endless" (91). To the ever-narrowing sphere of pure language, the
occasional character of expressions puts up infinite resistance.
The most common interpretation of LU i is that Husserl's project is to
salvage a region, however smalI, of meanings untainted by intuitions. But
on my reading, Husserl does not first posit an ideal language wnose extrica-
tion from intuitions has been completed, and then measure corrupt expressions
according to their distance from the ideal; rather, Husserl starts with syn-
thetic activity, that is, with the actual workings of fluctuating expressions,
and then characterizes the ideal meanings precisely from the standpoint of
the references backward and forward from fluctuating meanings to their own
ideal origins and completions. For Husserl is simply not worried by the fact
that the full replacement of occasional expressions with objective ones is
impossible. It is enough that objectifying replacement is "required as a
capacity" (90), even if we do not actually have that capacity.
Like a meaning-intention's readiness for an infinite range of intuitive ful-
filments, the ideally objective clarification of the vague and the muddy,
impossible as it might be to complete in actuality, nevertheless has the status
of being given "in-advance" (von vorherein, 92). The "in-advance" fixability
of occasional expressions is the forward-referring corollary to their "backward
glance" to objective expressions. Both are categories of unity through the
transition to unity. Indeed the principle of the replaceability of occasional
expressions has its "ground" not so much in the disconnection of meanings
from intuitions, from subjects, and from each other, as in the principle that,
"Everything that is, is knowable 'in itself' .. (90). So for example if a "natural,
thing-like reality" has "quite determinate extension and position in space and
LU I 49
time and quite detenninate ways of persisting and changing" (90), it will be
described not by expressions without need of intuitive contexts, but on the
contrary, by expressions whose jluctuation of meaning is appropriate to the
object's own changes of position. Objects can be meant, in short, not because
they can be thought independent of intuitive contexts, but because they can
be cognitively pursued through contexts, and because the lawful determi-
nacy of this pursuit is justified in-advance and referred backwards to the real
objects themselves.
The objectification of meanings requires turning occasional expressions into
their objective replacements. That is, the in-advance ideality of meaning is a
function of overcoming the resistances put up by the contextual situations
which occasion the expression of most if not a11 meanings. Consciousness
works through its movements towards objective interpretation, always situated
in the realm of the incomplete, where the problematics of synthesis are most
at issue. And the items to-be-synthesized are not just floating thoughts and
intuitions simpliciter, but thoughts and intuitions functioning simultaneously
as the readiness for, and the resistance against, the closure of objective inter-
pretation.
Now most commentators who emphasize as I do the movements through
incomplete and interrupted syntheses in the objectification of fluctuating
meanings deny that there can be any genuine role for the theory of ideal
meanings that seemed to have been the goal of the Investigations. The final
pages of LU i, however, make such interpretations untenable. The prior and
independent status of ideal meanings, even if their priority consists precisely
in being taken as the ultimate backward and forward referents of meanings
in flux, must be interpreted in a strong sense. Husserlian phenomenology not
only posits, but depends on, the possibility of apprehending ideal "types" (88),
"Species" (102) or "universalities" (102), and indeed the "idea11y closed set
of general objects" (l05). How can the theory of ideal meanings be consis-
tent with the fluid open-endedness of a11 intentional consciousness?
We know that even scientifica11y grasped "exact" theories must take the
form of a "web" of meanings implicating "fluid transitions" in a thought-
horizon. The problem of the phenomenological combination necessary for
the constitution of ideal meanings thus a110ws us to introduce the central
problems of synthesis into a11 regions of consciousness, the scientific as we11
as the pre-scientific, the conceptual, the intuitive, and the interpretative, the
objective, the subjective and the intersubjective, etc.: What is an individual
object of consciousness if individuals are always meant in context? What is
the status of "environments" and "horizons" on the one hand and of "uni-
versalities" on the other? What provides the impetus for "transitions" and their
"fluidity", and how is the schema of "forward and backward reference" built
into the very nature of what it is to be a content of consciousness? And
fina11y, to introduce issues that we will take up in the next chapter, in what
sense do universal laws ground the synthetic combinations of contents, and
in what sense are laws the results of identifications within those syntheses?
50 CHAPTER
NOTE
1. This is Findlay's (1970) translation. Findlay takes some liberty in translating Bereich as
"horizon". However, it seems to me that "horizon" does capture the sense in this para-
graph, and indeed that a concept of horizon operates throughout, even at this early stage
of Husserl's work. Pietersma (1973) has argued for this point.
CHAPTER 2
51
52 CHAPTER 2
Why is the exegesis of LU ii not now closed? Why is the "ground" still
problematic even after Husserl has denied that the origin of universals in
singular intuitions could influence the content of universality? It is because
"ground" (Grund) is a technical term.
of the production of concepts, and deny that the alleged genetic origination
of uni versals in individuals is even relevant to the meaning of universal terms
(187, 189, 192,210,217).
Still, the term Husserl most often uses to convey the sense of "grounding"
or "basing" is Grund and Grund is a technical term for Husserl. In the
"Prolegomena" (LU I, 231), Husserl sets out the first principle of all theory:
"Scientific knowledge is, as such, grounded knowledge". Husserl goes on to
say that individual truths (of fact) are grounded in explanations from prior
circumstances, while general truths (of law) are grounded in "grounding
laws" (LU I, 232). According to the "Prolegomena", to apprehend a ground
is to apprehend a sort of lawfulness of necessary origins. The phenomeno-
logical scientist is to characterize a given object in relation to that which
grounds it, since only its ground can render it intelligible, and exhibit the
sufficient reason for its being determined as it iso Nothing could be more
striking, then, than for Husserl to be saying in LU ii that apprehension of
individuals functions as the ground of apprehensions of uni versals.
Husserl's analysis in LU ii of individuals as the ground of universals is
not weIl handled in the secondary literature. Commentaries which interpret
Husserl as saying that some sort of transformation occurs in consciousness that
turns the apprehension of individuals into an apprehension of universals, may
be arranged on a continuum according to the degree of lasting importance
which they assign to the universal's origination in individuals. On one extreme,
empiricist, transcendentalist, process, and dialectical interpretations of Husserl' s
claim that uni versals are grounded in individuals hold that part of the very
meaning of universal terms consists in their genetic origination in individual
meanings. On the other extreme, rationalist interpretations read the act in which
universals are grounded in individuals as if it involves only the illustration
of universals by means of examples, at most indispensable examples. The
former interpretations surrender the autonomy of universals, the latter surrender
any serious sense of grounding. 1
Husserl does seem to hold so me theory of the transformation of individ-
uals into universals. At the same time as he insists that a universal is not an
aggregate of individuals, he allows that universals can be explained "as the
results of certain fusions, as products (Produkte) really but unnoticeably
embracing their factors", as long as that is not taken to entail that the resulting
universal is not genuinely logically abstract (200). So also a universal can
be called a synthesis of individuals as long as synthesis is understood to
generate not just a new complex unit but an altogether novel sense of unity.
The result of abstracting a universal from instances cannot be just another
instance, and its meaning cannot be exhausted by references to previously
perceived instances, but the act of constituting a universal result on the ground
of individual presentations may be the same act in which individuals are
constituted as instances to which universals apply.
Husserl 's version of the transformation of individuals into uni versals hangs
on his use of "synthesis". To reconstruct Husserl's account, we may set in relief
LU II 55
(A) Synthesis
(B) Self-Evidence
univocally understood in spite of the fact that its instances exhibit a certain
range of varied appearances. But Husserl goes farther than to say that the
apprehension of a universal survives variations in apprehended individuals;
apprehensions of variable individuals are "made into" apprehensions of
uni versals.
If we make empirical concepts and relations info (verwandeln) exact ones, if we frame ideal
concepts of extension, surface, qualitiative likeness and continuity, etc., we arrive at exact, a
priori propositions which set forth what is grounded on the intentions of such strict concepts.
Compared with these, merely descriptive assertions are imprecise approximations. Though the
vague sphere of singular phenomenal individuality in general does not belong to the sphere of
exact knowledge (which operates merely with ideals), it is nonetheless not at all closed out of
the general sphere of knowledge (206-7).
Husserl rejects the theory that a universal concept is its applications, either
in the sense of being defined by the extension of individuals which it might
name (214) or in the sense of inc1uding in its meaning "in the fashion of a
bundle", the "individual presentations that fall under it" (180). But at the
same time, Husserl says several things that imply that a universal does deter-
mine ranges of individuals. The Species Triangle does function as a rule for
constructing individual triangles (133-4); the theory of Species does have to
explain how subjects know when to affirm similarities between individuals
(188, 206); and a universal object is at first "meant along with" the concrete
object (130). But in what sense can Husserl say that a universal meaning deter-
mines a range of possible instances?
The universal should provide a rule for c1assifying individuals, but it is
not about either the act or the object of application and does not create its
own instances. And the individual objects of experience provide the raw
material which trigger the application of universals, but they cannot function
as instances until uni versals have already defined them as such. In short, the
LU 11 59
We finally begin to see the force of the "ground"; the apprehension of indi-
viduals qua variable is always already setting in motion of the apprehension
of universals.
"Without general meanings, one can make no assertions at all, not even such
as are singular" (167). A subject cannot describe the features of a singular
object (e.g. its redness) unless he has already been applying general cate-
gories (e.g. colour concepts) to it. The abstraction to a universal from an
individual is a re-discovery of what the individual was all along. The universal
is thus the "immanence of the individual act" (150). Universals cannot be
reduced to a special apprehension of individuals, precisely because univer-
salization is already at work in the very origin of the apprehension of
individuals.
For universalizing abstraction to work, the individual already has to be more
than it iso Husserl's first statement on abstraction in LU ii runs: "The primi-
tive relation between Species and instance emerges: it becomes possible to
look over and compare a range of instances, and perhaps to judge with self-
evidence: 'In all these cases individual aspects differ, but in each case the same
Species is realized .. .' " (109). Husserl places the act of comparing a range
of individuals prior to the act wh ich apprehends their Species (206). Something
in the apprehension of an individual property of an individual object causes
a subject to compare that individual with others, and to search for a Specific
respect of similarity. While the individual by itself is not a respect for
60 CHAPTER 2
The types of unity which differentiate Species from instances and substances
from appearances, instead of "corresponding to something real in the phe-
nomenon momentarily given", "rather point back (zurückweisen) to contexts
of lived consciousness in which they appear coherently, in which they are expe-
rienced and determined scientifically" (198-99). All types of unity are
62 CHAPTER 2
3. CONCLUSION
First Stage
A subject identifies an individual when he recognizes that a range of appear-
ances reveal one and the same object. This recognition beg ins to take place
even in the apprehension of a single presentation, as soon as the subject
treats the perceptual qualities of the presentation as subject to change along
determinate directions. As soon as he treats a colour-quality as variable, for
example, he distinguishes that which is coloured from the colour. This one
act has three consequences. (a) It establishes a place-holder for colour-
properties, treating the object as a colourable substance in general, (b) it allows
that colours of other things may become the colour of this one; it thus estab-
lishes the degrees of comparability of this object with others, and (c) it
prescribes possible changes and combinations of colour, ruling out some and
demanding others; it thus sets minimal, maximal, and typicallimits to possible
chains of images and thoughts. In short, the identification of an individual
property of an object already constitutes that property in relation to the type
of its alterability, its comparability with others according to determinate
respects, and its functions in chains of possible experience and discursive
reasoning. Now, the psychologism which Husserl criticises simply identifies
uni versals with one of these features of variable individuals. Husserl regards
the synthesis of individuals as a breeding ground for the constitution of
universal objects, but only as the first stage in the syntheses that ground
universals.
Second Stage
For Husserl, the fact that universals are grounded in the syntheses which
identify individuals, cannot prevent universals from being instance-inde-
pendent, or prevent reflective consciousness from treating universals as
instance-independent. A particular perceptual quality, as a property of an
individual object, appears as one of a multiplicity of instantiations; a red object,
qua variable, exhibits both the fact that that object could appear as an instance
64 CHAPTER 2
of any colour, as weH as the fact that its shade of redness can appear in any
object. As soon as a subject treats an individual as variable in a determinate
manner, he has anticipated a general form, structure, or type of qualitative
identity, and has provided hirnself with the capacity to frame a universal
concept of which this individual is (actually or possibly) one of many possible
exemplifications. So as alterability guarantees a property's typical replace-
ability and relocatability, it generates the self-identity of types over instances.
When apprehensions of individuals pass over into one another, they are trans-
formed into apprehensions of instance-independent universals. Universals, in
short, are grounded on individuals, and because of the grounding of univer-
sals in their instances, they are constituted as instance-independent.
Third Stage
The grounding of universals appeals in two ways to the "backward refer-
ence" of the syntheses that identify individual substances.
The first involves the reference from universals back to individuals. We
have found that grounded unities, including universals, "point back to contexts
of lived consciousness in which they appear coherently (einstimmig)". Now
Husserl cannot mean that a universal is a combination of experiences of indi-
viduals. Rather, a universal, when referred back to the lived experiences of
individuals, retraces the formation of a consistent interpretation. If universal
forms, types, laws, structures, or categories originate in an interpretation in
which all apprehensions of an object are made to speak, as it were, with one
voice, then we can now explain how universals are applied to individuals.
The syntheses which identify individuals, whose consistency grounds the
abstraction to a Species, are the same syntheses that prepare those individ-
uals to be that to which the universal Species can refer back when it is applied.
In the final analysis, the same synthetic combinations of experiences that allow
a complex object to be recognized, for example, as a house, also aHow the
Species House to be considered on its own account, and in turn allow that
Species to be referred back in application to that and other individual houses.
But two questions remain. (a) To what syntheses of individuals do universals
whose instances have never been experienced refer back? (b) How is the
reference back to consistent interpretations in lived experience, a reflection
which I have suggested is necessary for the transformation of interpretative
patterns into the apprehension of instance-independent universals, itself
grounded?
(a) Universals can be apprehended even when no individual instances have
been experienced. But uni versals are constituted by their reference back to
individuals. If these two statements are consistent, then a universal does not
so much consist in its reference back to particular instantiating individuals,
as to a general strategy for interpreting individuals as possible instantiations.
What the universal must refer back to is the world of individuals as the
sphere of being from which that universal could have been abstracted. They
LU II 65
NOTES
1. Starting with the lauer extreme, ten interpretations of Husserl's account of the transforma-
tion of apprehensions of individuals into apprehensions of universals may be arranged as
folIows:
(i) The dischargeable starting-point: Husserl does say, in discussing the relation between
geometrical instances and their universal laws, that instances function as "mere aids" to
understanding (157, also 162 on the "help" (Mithilfe) of sensible intuition). Levinas (1973)
argues that for all essences an ego "must" start his apprehension of universals with an
apprehension of individuals; but "what I am looking at ... (is the) red in general" (p.
106). The universal "emerges from the attributes of individuals" ("d partir des attributs",
Scherer, 1967, p. 205), as an experiencing subject varies individuals in such a way that
the result is a non-individual invariant (Schutz, 1966, p. 36). The ground of a universal is
necessarily a concrete singular intuition, but once the ground has borne fruit in a
universal, it plays no continuing role in the universal's meaning.
This interpretation suffers from the same problem as empiricism. If consciousness starts
with an individual, then what it is looking at can only continue to be an individual. But
if, on the other hand, consciousness at some point does look at a universal which is
free of particularity, it is not clear why that consciousness must have started with an
individual.
(ii) The indispensable example: Piv~evic (1970) says that an individual triangle is "just
an 'example'" of the universal, but at the same time says that illustrations are "indispen-
sible for our apprehending the universals which they exemplify." For "of course we must
have some experience of triangular objects" in order to apprehend the universal "Triangle"
LU II 69
(p. 60). Again, "the existential aspect recedes into the background" once formalized
(p. 62). In Gutting (1971), the use of examples does not just take place in the first step of
universalization; rather universal laws are to be verified in an ongoing way through the
act of defending them against alleged counter-examples, a process which Gutting calls
"variation" (p. 206).
The reading of instances as necessary ex am pies and as the necessity of considering coun-
terexamples has problems parallel to those in (i). Pivcevic wants to, but cannot, account
for the cognition of those universals (e.g. the concept of Identity) which are so pure that
examples of them are always dispensible (p. 61). Nor would Husserl say that we must first
experience an example of a Species in order to apprehend the Species, which is clear both
from the Species of Centaur, and from Husserl's argument that only the presence of pre-
fulfilled meaning-intentions makes it possible to interpret individuals at all (e.g., LU i, s.
21). If individuals are really indispensable for universal ideas, then they would have to
play more of a role than is captured by the theory of individuals as examples.
(iii) The imaginative or possible representation: According to Kersten (1974), when
Husserl says that genetic origins in individuals are not part of the meaning of universals,
what he means is that subjects need not experience real perceivable individuals in order to
"seize upon" ideal universals, but that they do require apprehensions of imaginary individuals
(p. 29). If Kersten has lancied images in mind, he is off track, but chances are that de
Boer's (1978) interpretation is at the root of Kersten's: apodicticity pertains to knowledge
not of actualities, but of possibilities (p. 247), and the extension of a concept includes all
the possible objects to which a law applies (p. 258). Husserl does hold, in the course of
arguing against representationalism, that "Individual ideas are therefore merely possible,
not actual, representatives for other similar individual ideas" (179).
The effect of this reading is to allow the function of the concrete ground to be replaced
by an imaginative grounding that can be carried out in the absence of all actual individ-
uals. However, this de-basing of particular facts is not quite what Husserl has in mind
when he introduces universal laws. When Husserl says that a law grounds "the necessity
of [an individual's] being thus and so" (LU 1,231), the point is not that laws apply indis-
criminately to the possibility of a world, but that laws contain the potential to hold for
different actualities in appropriately different ways.
(iv) The dropping 01 perspective: Mohanty's (1970) reading depends on the ability
of a result of cognition to take the form of something given. The ideal meaning of a
universal is the result which occurs after a subject begins with an individual object, and
by means of thought, removes all "perspectives". The product thus appears as an immediate,
self-evident datum of intellectual sense (p. 54). In empiricism, the dropping of perspective
produces a result that looks and/or acts as if universal; here the mediation is said to result
in a genuine immediacy (see also de Boer, 1970, p. 235).
The way in wh ich this reading treats the experiencing subject as the agent of formal-
ization, makes it difficult to see how the object of a universal concept can be the Species
itself and not the subject's idea 01 a Species. What this reading in terms of a transforma-
tion of mediacy into immediacy needs is a prior phenomenology of individuality which would
account for how the apprehension of an individual can, without the intervention of a
prejudiced subject, produce its own realm of transcendent, intuitable universals.
(v) The move from epistemology to logic: Murphy (1980) and Welch (1965) argue that
questions about grounding are epistemological, whereas questions about meaning are logical.
Murphy's weaker version has it that Husserl's interest in the origin of concepts is a later
development, with LU being "content" to restrict itself to logic, and to "ignore" genetics
(p. 91). In Welch's stronger version, the distinction involves more than adecision about
the scope of enquiry. Rather, the nature of the enquiry itself demands that the genesis of
universals be "of no concern" to logic (p. 70) although it may be the subject of some other
enquiry (p. 72).
Such readings avoid the relation between the development of a concept and its meaning
by isolating types of enquiry. However, it is not clear how any simple distinction between
70 CHAPTER 2
logic and epistemology would work in Husserlian phenomenology. For if the study of
logic is already a study of the ways in which consciousness must apprehend universal objects,
then it is already a study of how consciousness engages in knowing universals. So if the
genesis of the knowledge of universals is of no concern to logic, it must be in part due to
something about the epistemology of uni versals, and not to aseparation of logic from
epistemology.
(vi) The "common aspect": According to de Boer (1978), a "common aspect in the
acts (of individual meanings) is the basis for (universal) ideation" (p. 257, also p. 239).
The otherwise incomprehensible transformation from individual to universal is explained
by reference to an intermediary, viz., the commonness of individuals, which is both indi-
vidual and universal. (De Boer's account can be somewhat confusing. He begins by saying
that a "universal is not an aspect of things", i.e. not something that can be perceived by
looking at one or many individuals as individuals, and de Boer is c1early right about setting
out this position as one that Husserl wants to reject. But on the same page (256), when de
Boer is tt;'ing to say that individuals are alike or unlike with respect to universals, he ends
up by saying that universals have a "concrete realization" in individuals, in the sense
that "things are not purely individual but also have a universal aspect". Perhaps there is
an equivocation in the word "aspect", but a universal cannot be an aspect of individual things.
One can sympathize with de Boer's argument that a universal must be recognizable in
some sense even when it is instantiated in a concrete particular, but the middle ground of
commonness between universality and individuality is unc\ear.)
De Boer's textual justification for his reading of LU ii involves an appeal to LU v,
343: "To meanings in specie correspond acts of meaning, the former being nothing but ideally
apprehended aspects of the latter". However, this passage speaks of species grounded in
acts of meaning or in aspects of acts of meaning, but not to "common" aspects at all. Husserl
wants to say that the individual is the ground for the universal. Whatever problems this raises
are not to be avoided by means of interpretative intermediaries.
(vii) The theme: Gurwitsch (1966) argues that to find an identity through the variation
of individuals is to "thematize" that identity. Onee thematized, the constant meaning is
rendered independent of the finite group of original variations, and is opened up into an
infinite possibility of variations (p. 382). A similar line is taken by Mensch (1981), who
understands that an instance validates a species by exhibiting a kind, and that a kind in
turn, by its very nature, can have a plurality of instances (p. 70).
This reading follows (iv) in holding that a mediation can transform an apprehension of
an individual into a direct apprehension of a universal. But here, the mediation is as much
objective as subjective. And perhaps because the transformation is said to take place in
the intended things themselves, this reading, more than any of the first six, maintains a
preservation of the original genesis in the result. At LU ii, 69, Husserl uses an example drawn
from arithmetical accumulation to argue that "It is plain that an act of fulfilment not only
corresponded to this final result, but to each individual step leading from one expression
of this number to the expression next in order, which c\arified it and enriched its content".
Gurwitsch says that it is necessary for a thematic universal to retain some form of
"reference to" its instances (p. 382). This seems inocuous enough until it is taken seri-
ously. In fact, it posits a qualification of the instance-independence of the very meaning
of universals.
(viii) The circle: Some interpreters, apparently without noticing, attribute to Husserl
the view that individuals and universals are mutually grounding. Thus Cairns (1973) says
on one page that consciousness of a Species is carried out "on the basis of a clear per-
ceiving or phantasying of at least possible instances" (p. 231) and on the next that "it is
only on the basis of the original givenness and seizedness of the kind as weH as the indi-
vidual that one can judge 'with original insight': this is an instance of colour ... " (p.
232). Similarly de Boer (1978) deals with Species grounded on individuals (p. 239 and p.
257), and then refers casually to universal laws as the "basis" and "ground" of knowledge
of particulars (p. 258), with no comment on the reversal of priority.
LU 11 71
hends an "ens rationis" (something like Hume's "distinctio rationis" which Husserl rejects
in LU ii, ss. 36-37), an "abstraction", or a "common notion". The third (which cannot be
set in motion by the first) operates through "scientia intuitiva", and must, according to the
distinctions above, apprehend "realities" (Ethics 5 XXIX S): "This kind ofknowing advances
from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate
knowledge of the essences of things". The goal is not knowledge of that which a plurality
of real individuals have in common, but knowledge of the realities themselves sub species
aeternitatis.
Now, we know that "from the necessity of the divine nature infinite things in infinite
ways must follow" (Ethics I XVI). To know the "essences of things" by scientia intuitiva
is to understand how they follow from the etemal attributes of that which is as such (sub-
stance, God, or Nature), i.e. to understand the chain of causes that makes them what they
are, and to understand that chain in such a way that the appeal to causes reaches a terminus
in a cause which is self-caused. And since "the order and connection of ideas is the same
as the order and connection of things" (Ethics 2 VII), the knowing takes the form of fol-
lowing through in thought the necessary and essential origin of the things themselves.
When I talk of interpretations of Husserl's theory of evidence as a theory of scientia
intuitiva, I have in mind a theory of reason as the thinking through of the ultimate explana-
tory order whereby the determinacy of real individuals is understood to "follow from" the
inherent attributes of what it means to be. Some of the readings which I have grouped
under this heading involve less challenging notions of reason, in particular notions of gen-
eralization (towards an ens rationis) and analyticity.
CHAPTER 3
73
74 CHAPTER 3
that part-whole relations are problematical just at the points where interpre-
tations demand that their limits be exceeded, which are also the points at which
acts of conciousness point beyond themselves towards a unified interpreta-
tion of a world of objects. Furthermore, I will argue that the progression
towards supplementations is equally a progression towards apriori cate-
gories that must have been prior. It is precisely because interpretative
consciousness needs the supplements that it can only find by referring back-
wards, that part-whole relations are objectified within consciousness on the
one hand, and that subjectivity itself is constituted on the other.
This chapter has four sections. First, I will show how even simple, inde-
pendent parts have to be actively constituted as such: namely through
"negation" and through "shrivelling up". Second, I will discuss Husserl's
categories of "passing over borders" and "lifting off in relief", and I will
treat Husserl's accounts (frequently unnoticed in the secondary literature) of
independent but non-separable parts and separable but non-independent parts.
Third, I will discuss Husserl's argument that the concept of "whole" can be
replaced by the concept of founded relations among parts. On my reading,
the whole is for that reason an open-ended system driving itself towards
completion, on account of the parts' "needs for supplementation". Fourth, I
will treat skeptical problems with respect to whether parts and wholes are arbi-
trarily designated, given that parts and wholes are ultimately only targets of
uncompleted interpretative activities. I will show that Husserl's argument is
based on the very open-endedness of interpretative activity. Parts are objec-
tified precisely when they are passed over, and wholes are objectified even
as interpretation reaches towards and away from their boundaries.
An object can have two sorts of parts. It can have "pieces" (Stück), or
"members", (Glied) (e.g. as a table has legs), into which it can be "de-pieced"
(Zerstückung) or "dismembered", (Zergliederung) when those parts are "laid
out alongside one another" (auseinanderliegen) (227). Altematively, an object
can have "interpenetrating" parts (Durchdringung, or "moments") (e.g. the
redness and the shape of a table), which cannot be cut apart from one another,
but which can be "disjoined" in thought (disjunkte) (227, 267). An object is
"complex" if it has parts that can in any sense be set off from one another,
and "simple" otherwise (246). A whole is something in which a multiplicity
of objects are "placed together" (zusammengesetzt) according to some com-
binatory law (miteinander verknüpfen) (227). In certain passages, Husserl
defines wholes as the build-up of parts, but in others, he defines parts as
divisions introduced into a whole. What has to be explained first is how an
object is de-pieced into its simple or independent parts. What makes an indi-
LU III 75
In one sense, no content can be "ripped out" from the "unity of conscious-
ness". Even a piece of an object, like the head of a horse, is always presented
in some context or other, and its separability can only consist in its being "lifted
off" (abheben) from a "background" of contexts that appear "with" it (235).
For an object to be independent, then, its "references to other objects"
must be actively "negated" (zunichte werden, 238). But since it is impos-
sible to imagine an object without any background relations, the only way
to negate all backgrounds is to test whether all the relations between that object
and others can undergo "infinitely free variation" (235). Variation is free if
it can be carried out by "arbitrary will" (236), or "without a rule" (236).
If an object is independent if it can be varied without a rule, then its context-
free status is something that has to be achieved. Its unrelatedness to other
objects is just as much an open relatedness to all other objects in all direc-
tions. But how is an unlimited freedom of variation exhibited? It is not enough
to find that some of an object's relations may be violated without altering
the object itself; somehow the object will have to be interpreted as an inde-
pendent unit all of whose determinate relations to other objects can be negated.
76 CHAPTER 3
(a) a perceivable thing whose non-independent parts are not normally distin-
guished, (b) a sensible field whose parts are independent but not separated,
and (c) a perceivable thing whose parts are separable but not independent.
(B) A Sensible Field Whose Parts Are Independent But Not Separated
An object has boundaries if each of its parts passes over into, and sets in relief,
the other parts of that object, but not the parts of other objects. Each part
exhibits a "demand/need to be supplemented/completed" by a certain limited
range of other parts (usually ErgänzungsbedürJtigkeit; Ergänzungserjorderung
at 278). A non-independent object "demands the supplementation" of other
objects both in order to "exist" and in order to be "what it is" (249); it can
"subsist only in combinations" (251) which are "prescribed" by "laws" and
"patterns" (249). The production of a non-independent object must also be
the production of its context.
A whole is what results when a part's demands for supplementation are met.
To justify talk of wholes, we have to explain how the flow of supplementa-
tion can in principle be closed off. In s. 14, Husserl articulates the requirement
of closure by redefining wholes through the concept of "foundation", wh ich
he says is equivalent to the concepts of the "demand for supplementation",
"necessary combination", and "non-independence" (261). If A requires B as
a supplement, then A is founded on B, and must be combined with B. A
whole is what results when a founded object's demand for supplementation
is "satisfied" or "stopped" or "silenced" (gestillt, 261) by its "founding" object.
When an object demands supplementation, it sets in motion aseries of syn-
theses, and in the temporal "flow of consciousness", these demands make so
much cognitive noise that consciousness cannot rest until it has thought through
the relations that that object has with others. Of course, a stream of con-
sciousness never stops making "continuous demands on future consciousness"
(261). But even though these demands for supplementation are never fully
satisfied, the flow of consciousness keeps going on just because provisional
satisfactions are continually being reached and overreached.
I am going to use Husserl's descriptions of those wholes whose parts are
"stretched out" (Streckenaddition, 274), in order to show how non-indepen-
dent parts determine, and expand into, their own contexts.
Husserl uses two distinctions to characterize relations of foundedness. First,
foundation may be either "reciprocal" or "reversible" (as in the mutual depen-
dence of colour and shape) or else "one-sided" (as in the foundation of
judgments on perceptions) (265).
Second, foundation may be either "immediate" or "mediate" (265). A com-
bination of two parts is "mediate" or "indirect" if the two parts must first be
combined with intermediate parts in order to be combined with one another
(265). Two mediately combined points on a line, for example, are connected
only by intermediaries, and so are "distanced" (275, 268). Unlike immedi-
ately combined parts, they share no common boundaries. Yet a combination
is no less necessary for being indirect. On the contrary, the necessity to
pass over from part to part is carried over step by step along a chain of
mediations.
The dominating logical feature of Husserl 's laws of wholes and parts is
82 CHAPTER 3
When an object is divided into parts, what is the ground for the ordering of
that division, and what guarantee is there that the parts constructed in the
activity of dividing genuinely belong to the object itself?
The problem for the objective reality of wholes and parts arises because
LU III 83
In some cases, the principles ordering the division of an object into parts is
"evident", as for example when an object is divided into smaller and smaller
portions, or into levels of specific difference: a melody, for example, has
tones for parts, and each tone has volume as one of its parts, so volume is
an immediate part of the tone and a mediate part of the melody (271). But a
problem of ordered division emerges for "added stretches" , where it does
not matter which divisions are undertaken first. A ten-inch line may, on one
plan of division, first be divided into five-inch segments and then each segment
into five; or it may be directly divided into one-inch segments. On one ordering
the one-inch parts are mediate parts of the whole, and on the other they are
immediate. The limit at which the division into parts is silenced seems arbi-
trary; the order of division seems arbitrary; the boundaries between subordinate
complexes within the whole seem arbitrary; the isolation of "simples" seems
arbitrary; ultimately the self-subsistence of an "independent" part seems arbi-
trary; and in the end, onee again the autonomy of an ordered whole seems
arbitrary.
Husserl has two ways of responding. First, certain kinds of wholes do allow
LU III 85
arbitrary orderings of division (270). The very fact that the ordering of division
is undetermined itself determines the nature of the divisibility of linear objects.
But at a deeper level, Husserl wants to ground the distinction between mediacy
and immediacy in principle, and not in "some psychologically compulsive
preference for a certain order of division" (271). Even in the case of added-
stretches, where the order of division is arbitrary, Husserl insists that "the
physical whole genuinely has the parts first inspected; and these again no
less genuinely have the parts distinguished in them, which are therefore mediate
parts in relation to the whole; and so on for every step of the ongoing making
of parts" (270).
Husserl provides what he calls a "phenomenological" justification for the
principle of ordered mediation: "The particularizing grasp (or 'severing grasp',
Sondererfassung) of the mediate part presupposes the particularizing lifting off
in relief (Sonderabhebung) of the immediate part" (271). What does Husserl
mean when he says that the mediate presupposes the immediate? He means
that no matter what sort of mediate distance there is between any two parts,
the mere fact of their co-existence prescribes aspace in between the two, in
which other parts may be found. It is not that the immediate must be grasped
before the mediate is grasped, but that the mediate must be grasped as needing
the supplementation of the immediate. In the case of the stretched line, each
partial segment presupposes that there is intermediate ground to be covered
between the end of the segment and the end of the whole. The immediate is
able to play the role of setting directions and distances without necessarily
being grasped as an explicit object of consciousness. In short: it is the mediate
that is "grasped" (Sondererfassung) - the immediate is not grasped, but rather
"set in relief" (Sonderabhebung). It is in this sense that part-whole relations
belong not just to the phenomenology of grasping, but to the logic of objects.
Consciousness can supplement its graspings of mediate parts only by pre-
supposing and objectifying prior immediacies which it never knew it had
been working with and which it may never actually grasp.
The notion of setting in relief is thus meant to solve the problem of the
ordering of parts, but in a surprising way. Earlier, the image of "passing
over" suggested that parts activate aseries of directed supplementations
which expand outwards from a single starting-point and fill out a mediated
space; so that the outer limits of that space fix the whole. Here, the descrip-
tion suggests parts that sUITound, and contract into, an indeterminate centre;
so that the filling-in of the centre fixes the whole. Instead of mediated objects
being built up out of immediate distances, the object from the start covers a
mediated distance. The grounding of ordered division and of real parts is
conducted from the outside in. If there are indivisible parts built into complex
objects, they are set in relief only as that from which the whole complex has
always already passed over. The indivisible point need never be grasped as
long as it is targetted as a required supplement by the backward reference of
something already passed-over. Particularizing setting-in-relief thus prescribes
ordered division in two ways. First, since the model of locating implicit parts
86 CHAPTER 3
certain structures which logic in turn analyses as a region prior to a11 expe-
rience. But fina11y, if the dynamic of parts and wholes renders individual
objects independent of sense-experience and categories independent of indi-
viduals, the same dynamic continues to refer back to the conscious subject
for whom parts and wholes first appear. For we have seen that all part-whole
objectification presupposes that systems of intermediate parts have already
been passed over and have already been interpreted, even if they have never
in fact appeared in the stream of consciousness. Experience refers back to
its own pure possibilities, to its own a priority. But whereas the return to
laws objectifies laws in logical investigation, the return to consciousness has
the sense of areturn to a part that is always immediately present but need never
be grasped. Consciousness, like the centre of an object whose parts are never
entirely filled in except as an ideal of completed supplementation - or like
anything that is pre-supposed (voraus-setzen), i.e. which has the status of
having been present "before" just because it is afterwards posited as having
been there a11 along - is the apriori centre of objective parts and wholes
just because it is the sort of centre that is always absent.
The dynamic of parts and wholes thus has many results: a priority just as
much as empirical determinacy, subjectivity as much as objectivity, conti-
nuity as weIl as discontinuity, individuation and contextualization, presence
and absence - a11 in the drive towards interpretative synthesis, a drive pro-
pe11ed by open-ended parts that continua11y fix boundaries even as they exceed
them.
NOTE
1. Commentary along similar Iines to an earlier version of this chapter was offered by Angela
Schneider O'Connell.
CHAPTER 4
INTRODUCTION
88
LU IV 89
This chapter is divided into four sections, roughly following the fourth
Investigation, and injecting passages from the sixth. The first section (drawn
primarily from LU ii 295-307) introduces the problem of incomplete meanings
and the problem of the meaning of syncategorematic terms in isolation. The
second section (LU ii 308-16) discusses Husserl's treatment of a wider range
of "unclosed" meanings. The third section (LU ii 317-25) discusses Husserl's
account of syncategorematic terms as the regulators of possible exchanges
and combinations of meanings. I will argue here that combinatory laws are
given in advance of actual combinations in the form of the openness of inter-
pretation. The fourth section (LU ii 326-40) treats Husserl's notion of the
ars combinatoria as the unfolding of the "Idea of meaning" into laws of syn-
thesis and as the "pure construction" of synthetic combinations.
refers to simple objects, while the simple expressions "man" and "one" refer
to complex objects (296-97).
However, there are problem cases for Husserl's distinction between complex
and simple meaning, and the problem leads into the issue of syncategore-
matic terms. Husserl has not at this point defined "simple meaning" other
than as the limiting unit in the division of complex meanings into part-expres-
sions. But the idea is that a meaning would be simple if it presented an object
"directly" rather than obliquely through descriptions, perspectival accounts,
or connotations. On this account, proper names should have simple meaning
par excellence. But the simplicity of the meaning of a proper name is already
problematic. For the meaning of a name seems to contain implicitly a complex
set of meanings, and to conceal a plurality of connotations, presupposed
predications, definite descriptions, etc. Furthermore, this implicit complexity
is always available to the name user: it is always the case that "forthcoming
explication and conceptual interpretation can be determinately drawn out
from [the name]" (298). Indeed the possibility of drawing out implicit descrip-
tive meanings is an essential condition for the name-user's ability to know
which object it names. The name's meaning depends on there being "possi-
bilities of more nearly determining" (298) that meaning. And these possibilities
are correlated with the "essential possibilities of fulfilling" its meaning (299),
that is, with knowing when the named object is actually present. The meaning
of a proper name, then, far from having paradigmatically simple meaning,
begins to look like a paradigm whole-complex, a unity always divisible into
parts which are sometimes "indefinite", "one-sided", or "incomplete", but
are at the same time always prescribed by determinate directions of division
(299,312). Why should Husserl insist that a name whose meaning can always
be explicated further, nevertheless has a simple meaning? He argues that
when a name is explicated, the resulting meaning is a "new" one, and not
one that had already been "set in relief" (Abhebung ) as a "real" (reel) part
of the name. But why should he insist that the meaning-content of the name
is simple?
Husserl's solution has two sides. First, a meaning can be called simple as
long as the possibilities of further explication remain only possibilities, and
do not in fact add part-expressions to the naming expression. Second (though
this has to be coaxed out of the text), a meaning is simple just because it is
that from which possibilities may be drawn out, and because it is that under
which a full range of descriptive explications may be re-unified. The name
is simple in the sense that it has its own meaning (and can make the expli-
cated meanings its own), even while it is complex in the sense that it
"necessarily presupposes a wider intentional background of content" (299).
Background meanings are necessary for the meaning of the name, but are
extern al to the simplicity of that meaning.
If we now look at the form in which the "intentional background of content"
itself is expressed, we discover the motivation for introducing the problem-
atic of syncategorematic terms. A name directly refers to an object in a
92 CHAPTER 4
"one-rayed" manner, and takes the simple form "S"; in contrast, a descrip-
tive or attributive phrase refers to an object in a "multi-rayed" manner, and
takes the complex form "S is a", or "The S which is a (and band c ... )",
etc. (300-301). The multiplicity of explicated meanings, when drawn out from
the name, requires a complex expression which exhibits that multi-rayed
compIexity by me ans of part-expressions like "which is" and "and". If a syn-
categorematic, non-naming phrase like "which is" marks the difference between
the simple and the explicated meaning, then we can say that syncategorematica
revive the possible but concealed meanings that the simplicity of names
excluded.
Syncategorematica become an explicit issue in section 4, where Husserl asks
whether every word in a "word-complex" has a meaning. Husserl sides against
Bolzano's view that every word has some "designation", and holds the common
view that syncategorematic or "synsemantic" terms have "no meaning by them-
selves but acquire it in conjunction with other meanings" (302). With respect
to having meaning, syncategorematica are "incompIete" or "without full
standing" (unvollständige), and categorematica are "complete", "full" (312) or
"closed". For Husserl, the issue behind the distinction between categorematic
and syncategorematic terms is that of the distinction between complete and
incomplete expressions, rather than the distinction between names and non-
names. Hence whereas others include in the class of categorematic expressions
only names, Husserl includes all self-enclosed expressions, including verbs,
adjectives, entire descriptive sentences, etc. (303).
A word is syncategorematic, then, if it fails on its own to express any
compIete meaning. Yet such a word is not without meaning; it is not merely
something akin to a punctuation mark. One can find four arguments from
the text to this effect. First, a word like "and" means the "same" thing whenever
it is used (168). Second, we can meaningfully ask whether two uses of a
word like "because" have the same sense (306). Third, whiIe naturallanguages
differ in all sorts of ways, every language must have some way of capturing
"the" form of conjunction, etc. (338-9). Fourth, and most important, syncate-
gorematic terms arise in language out of its "need" to express "a plurality of
mutually belonging part-presentations and dependent presentational forms,
within an independent, closed, presentational unity" (304). Syncategorematic
terms convey the directions according to which non-independent objects need
the supplementation of, and pass over into, one another. In this way, they
"mirror" (305) relations of objective dependency. Consequently, when Husserl
asks whether syncategorematic terms have meaning, he is also asking how
language represents a non-independent object's incompleteness, its need for
supplementation, the complexity concealed in its individuality, the non-
presence of its implicit parts, the non-closure of its progress towards further
determination, and in general the synthetic combination of its internal and
external differentiations.
Thus, syncategorematic terms have meaning, and can be "understood even
standing in isolation" (306), just because they "play the same meaning-
LU IV 93
function" whenever they appear (307). And when they do appear in context,
they "are interpreted as carriers of detenninate moments of meaning-content,
moments which look forward to a certain supplementation which, though it
may be indetenninate materially, is fonnally detennined together with the given
content, and is lawfully circumscribed thereby" (306). Two questions are made
emphatic by these passages. First, what is the relation between the meaning
and the function of syncategorematic terms? Second, in what sense do syn-
categorematic tenns require the supplementation of categorematic tenns in a
complex expression, and in what sense do they satisfy the needs that cate-
gorematic language has to mirror ontological relations of dependency?
When a syncategorematic expression like the connective "and" or like the
possessive" 's" occurs in a sentence, it follows a noun already given, and it
"looks forward" to the supplementation of a noun to follow. The choice of
the supplementary noun is "circumscribed" by the meaning of the noun (and
indeed of the whole descriptive context) already given. The syncategorematic
term thus requires the supplementation of the noun to follow; in order
to limit the possible completions to meaningful ones, it also requires the
supplementation of the noun already given.
Now, a group of letters, like "fi " , also "requires the supplementation"
(307) of other letters before and after it in order to make a complete word.
But Husserl argues that unlike the meaning-fragment '''s'', the word-fragment
"fi" does not express part of a thought but at best acts as a "possible stimu-
lation to thought", and does not have in its various contexts "a common element
of meaning" (307). The word "and", in contrast, in addition to its "function"
of allowing one categorematic meaning to be conjoined with another, has some
sort of meaning that is its own.
Yet it seems that the only way we can talk about the meaning of a syn-
categorematic term is to talk about its function. In section 5, Husserl has
two ways of so talking, one negative and one positive.
In negative terms, the function of syncategorematica involves the way a
multiplicity of descriptive meanings (e.g. "The author of Bruno and the friend
of Hegei"), whose conjunction requires a syncategorematic term, may be
"fused" into a nominal term (i.e. "Schelling") which discharges the syncate-
gorematic tenn (305). The syncategorematic tenn "and" seems on the one hand
to be a mere intermediary in the process of fusing together an interpretative
unity. But the price of the discharge of syncategorematic terms would be the
removal of the background of complexity necessarily presupposed by every
simple meaning. The introduction of "and" after a nominal expression on
the one hand interrupts the simple unity of the expression; on the other hand,
it sets in motion an expansion of the interpretation of the nominal tenn, an
expansion which begins the process of bringing a multiplicity together into
one unified context.
In positive terms, the function of syncategorematica involves the way
sentences employing them look forward to completion. The syncategorematic
tenn is without reference by itself but has a meaning of its own once in context,
94 CHAPTER 4
sequences of images. Yet since clues for its interpretation are given in the
dream, the interpretation of logically connected meanings is founded on those
images.
Now, Freud's project of interpreting the logical connectives in dreams
does not require a generalized treatment of logical connectives in waking
intuition, nor does it require a treatment of the meaning of syncategorematic
terms in isolation. But Freud's discussion does point to the untenability of a
psychologistic construal of Husserl's claim that the meaning of syncategore-
matic terms in isolation are founded on syntheses "inwardly carried out".
For the psychologist, the connective "or" gets its meaning from the imme-
diate experience a subject has when he intuits two objects disjoined from
one another; for Freud, disjunction cannot be represented at the level of
intuition, so the interpretation of intuitions as presenting disjunctions must
appeal to a level of thought that precedes intuition. Now, Husserl too says
that the meaning of syncategorematic terms in isolation is founded on inwardly-
carried-out syntheses of concrete intuitions. But I will argue that what Husserl
means by this is that every intuitive situation makes possible the synthetic con-
nections represented by syncategorematic terms. Husserl does not mean that
syncategorematic terms name or picture anything that is present in intuition.
The word "and" has meaning not because the meaning-user remembers or
artificially creates a conjunction on which to pin the isolated word "and",
but because there are always situations whose interpretation requires con-
ceiving the situated things in their combination and separation, their relative
dependence and mutual exclusion, etc. No one feature of a sensible intuition
fulfils the meaning of a syncategorematic term. But in the permanent pos si-
bilities of combining intuitions, those meanings are indirectly given intuitive
fulfilment.
Finally, the founded meaning of syncategorematic terms explains why
Husserl holds that sentences express paradigmatically complete meanings. A
sentence may not be closed with respect to its interpretation or even with
respect to the circumscription of the range of intuitions that fulfil its meaning.
But it does exhibit, through the satisfaction of the needs for supplementation
inherent in its supplementary terms, the completion of some synthetic con-
nection. And in addition to representing some synthetic completion, a full
sentence exhibits a readiness to be joined, by means of a connecting term,
to another meaning which is complete in the same sense. Of course, incom-
plete meanings can be combined by syncategorematic terms (e.g. "Iarger or
smaller than a house") just as weIl as complete meanings can be (e.g. "x is
larger than a house or y is larger than a house"). For that matter, a complete
sentence may not express a single unified meaning, as when "and" conjoins
mutually irrelevant sentences. But the general point is that a syntactically
complete sentence opens the unfolding of aseries of meaning-combinations,
expresses by means of words like "is ..." and "and ..." a certain amount
of the various meanings' needs for mutual supplementation, and closes off
at least the formal demands of those needs for supplementation. A sentence
LU IV 99
terms of the qualitative predicates that belong together with them, and so on
for exchanges under other combinatory forms. Bence mIes of exchange cannot
be construed as entirely structural, or as indifferent to the thought-content of
the exchangeable meanings, since these mIes are grounded in the demands
of the exchangeable meaning-contents to be thought through in combination
with supplementary meanings in order for intentional objects to be made
present to consciousness. The proper use of a combinatory form closes off a
sequence of word-meanings into an independent sentence-meaning by thinking
a meaning through its synthetic context.
Syncategorematic terms thus exhibit laws of combination and exchange that
are grounded in meanings themselves. Psychologistic, psychoanalytic, and
structuralist theories of syncategorematic terms mistakenly locate the ground
of the meaning of syncategorematic terms in subjective activity, pre-
conscious thoughts, or mechanical mIes, respectively. In adding levels of inter-
pretative processing to meanings themselves in order to account for the
combination of meanings, they assume that meanings in themselves do not
pass over into one another. Busserl 's ars combinatoria, in contrast, accounts
for syncategorematic meanings solely by unpacking the combinatory force
of the categorematic meanings themselves.
But now when we say that syncategorematic terms carry the load of con-
veying in expressions the mIes for the combination of categorematic meanings,
we find once again the problem of the meaning of the syncategorematic terms
themselves. For the word "and" does not name the mle of collection or con-
junction; a syncategorematic meaning is not just a categorematic meaning with
a peculiar sort of referent. And this leads to a second feature of the ars com-
binatoria, namely that a syncategorematic term cannot be exchanged for a
categorematic term to produce an expression like "This tree is and" (320, 326).
There are of course other terms besides syncategorematic terms wh ich
also do not have nominal content and thus also could not replace "s" in
"This S is P". But adjectival terms (e.g. "green"), verbal terms ("walks"),
etc., may undergo "transformation" or "modification" (321, 324) and take
on a nominal sense ("greenness", "the act of walking") which allows them
to become proper subjects of predication. "And" cannot be transformed into
"the and" or "andness".
Now, Busserl does allow one way in which syncategorematic terms can
be nominalized, namely in expressions like " 'And' is a syncategorematic
word". But used as a name, the word "and" does not name a universal or
categorial object, as does the nominalized term "greenness", but rather "names
itself" (322). The word '''and' " can be used as a noun, but the word "and"
cannot be. Busserl goes so far as to say that there must accordingly be two
senses of predication: properties (e.g. "non-independent") predicated of
nominalized syncategorematic terms "modify" (modifizieren) those terms qua
expressions or acts of consciousness, whereas properties (e.g. "green") predi-
cated of all other names "determine" (determinieren) the named objects (323).
So while Busserl does not follow the medieval nominalists in identifying
102 CHAPTER 4
universals with capacities in the intellect, he does come c10se to giving syn-
categorematic meanings that status. Husserl appropriates Kant's dictum that
"Being is no real predicate" (LU 11 11 137, also 204-5): for when "is" under-
goes nominalizing transformation to "being", it names a mode of expression,
but names nothing in any real state of affairs.
In sum, the price of nominalizing the syncategorematic term "and" is that
the new term" 'and' " names the syncategorematic term and does not in a direct
way name the connective relation which the syncategorematic term "and" in
an indirect way expresses in "A and B". For all that has been said about how
the meaning of "and" is founded on actually experienced collections, or at least
on the ideal possibility of collectibility inherent in the actual experience of any
object, it turns out nevertheless that the possibility of collection is not named
by the nominalization of the term that expresses the actuality of particular
collections. It seems one more time that that which "and" expresses may be
functionally activated, but may not be represented. What is the significance
of the fact that "andness" is not the name for anything, and is not equivalent
to nouns such as "collection" or "conjunction"?
One could read Husserl's restriction against nominalizing syncategore-
matic meanings simply as the claim that "and" has a second-order rather
than a first-order meaning, that is, that "and" refers not to something real
but to a way of referring to something real (namely the way of referring to
it in conjunction with something else). But the point is stronger. For one feature
of the nominalization of syncategorematic terms is that once nominalized as
categorematic terms they are themselves explicated in sentences that include
syncategorematic terms. In the proposition "The word 'and' sometimes
expresses the collection of items and sometimes the conjunction of proposi-
tions", or the proposition" 'is' is a term whose meaning is supplementary",
the functions of the syncategorematic terms qua syncategorematic are still
regulating the possibility of unpacking and interpreting the meanings of the
terms "'and' " and "'is' " which have been "modified" to categorematic form.
One cannot discharge all the syncategorematic meaning present in a complex
expression in the same way that we can replace all demonstrative terms in
an expression with objective descriptions (LU i). Or in other words, complex
expressions can never be built up entirely of categorematic expressions; it must
always be the case that some of the meaning of a complex expression only
be given "with" (syn-) the categorematic meaning. In short, a sentence can
name combinatory laws, but whatever it names, it is already activating, pre-
supposing, or unfolding according to such laws. This is the reason why the
theory of syncategorematic meanings is not just a theory of second-order
meanings: the interesting feature of syncategorematic terms is not that one
can formalize the laws of combination which they in some way embody, but
that their connective force is always already at work in the possibility of all
expression.
While words like "collection" and "disjunction" do name "synthetic object-
forms" (LU 11 11 159) like the "and-form" (LU 11 11 192) or the "or-form",
LU IV 103
the words "and" and "or" do not name forms; rather, their function is to
open up possibilities of further determination in the words preceding
them. A name, like "collection", could not perform this latter function.
Syncategorematic terms are therefore not understood any better either when
they are themselves nominalized or when other terms are introduced to name
the rules which syncategorematica activate. They are understood only when
the sense of their syncategorematicity is understood.
The syncategorematic term has a kind of meaning even when tom out of
the contexts in which it connects categorematic terms, then, in a rather sur-
prising way. It gets its meaning not by a reflection that abstracts from
combinations already experienced, but because demands for combination are
given in advance of any particular complex experience. The word "and" is
guaranteed in advance always to have the same meaning no matter what
nominal meanings replace "A" and "B" in the combinatory form "A and B",
just because every nameable object refers back to the possibility of such
combination apriori. Syncategorematic terms have objective, and not just
psychological, meaning just because they activate pre-determined demands for
thinking objects through. The syntheses that regulate combination and inter-
pretation operate, in Begel's words, behind the back of consciousness - not
in Freud's sense of operating at a concealed level of consciousness, but in
the sense that consciousness is always already engaged in living through
combinatory activity.
In sections 12-14, Busserl returns to the issue with which the Investigation
began, namely of the ars combinatoria as a science for "avoiding" "nonsense"
and "countersense" (Unsinn and Widersinn) (333). The final section of this
chapter treats three points in the relation between the ars combinatoria, the
meaning of syncategorematic terms, and the concept of synthesis. First, it intro-
duces two ways in which Busserl explicitly talks of "synthesis" in the fourth
Investigation. Second, it asks whether and how the particular rules that Busserl
suggests for an ars combinatoria contribute to a phenomenological account
of synthesis in general. Busserl says that particular Iaws for an ars combi-
natoria follow from the very "Idea of meaning" and that particular
combinations in turn follow from these laws by "pure construction". With
the help of this latter notion, I will turn to seetion 57 of the sixth Investigation,
concerning the relation between founded syncategorematic meaning and syn-
thetic interpretation.
Busserl says that the "universal grammar conceived by seventeenth and
eighteenth century rationalists" was correct in principle, but unanalysed in
foundation. Busserl envisages a science of the laws for the combination of
meanings which, by preventing the construction of meaningless compounds,
will be a fortiori a science of the essential "structures" of meaning (328).
But whereas traditional theories of judgment cite such patterns of grammar
104 CHAPTER 4
argues that Husserl's account of logical connectives might have been worthy
of being called a predecessor to Carnap's if only Husserl had restricted his
account to the realm of "grammatical categories", and had left aside the "super-
fIuous ... labyrinth" of the "realm of meanings" (p. 365). Mohanty (1964),
on the other hand, argues that the attempt to assign syncategorematic terms
an objective meaning of their "own" is at the he art of Husserl's enterprise.
Some commentators who interpret Husserl to ground the objective meaning
of syncategorematica, appeal to intersubjective communication. Hence both
Eley (1969) and Tugendhat hirnself (1977) ground "A and B", for example,
in events where a speaker has to prove two things about the world to a skep-
tical listener. But Eley also argues, with some explicit and some implicit
reference to Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit, ch. 1) that lying behind every
objectifying act are underlying connective syntheses that have already taken
place. Hence for Eley, every "This" is already based on experiences com-
pounded over time, space, sense-content, and interpretative variation, and
consequently is already a "This and This and This ... , etc." Eley thus inter-
prets Husserl's theory of syncategorematic terms as a theory of the terms
that make explicit the "schemata" of synthetic acts which had already been
presupposed, though not named, du ring the perfonnances of consciousness that
constitute any and all meanings, both simple and complex.
The move from the logic of connectives to the phenomenology of
synthetic apriori schemata of interpretative consciousness seems possible only
if we take Husserl seriously when he says that laws of combination are "subject
to" a "fixed typic" which is in turn "built apriori into the general Idea of
meaning", and if we take it to be possible to reconstruct this "building" in
phenomenological science. In some sense, we have to be able to derive the
diverse laws of combination from an analysis of the very concept of meaning.
If some such analysis is possible, then syncategorematic terms like "and",
"if ... then", and "that is" would provide, to use Kantian vocabulary, "tran-
scendental clues" for the nature of the synthetic unity of apperception, but
would then require a "transcendental deduction" of the laws of synthetic
unity themselves.
What Husserl says is that the possibility of combining meanings is subject
to categorial structures, and because those structures are built into the Idea
of meaning, actual combinations of interpretations are "led forth [or "derived"]
from them through pure construction" (durch reine Konstruktion hergeleitet,
333). At first glance, "construction" here seems to mean something like "appli-
cation", so that combinations of meanings would be generated by the
mechanical application of structures to given tenns. But the fact that the ground
of this construction is said in turn to be built into the Idea of meaning requires
a different construal of the passage. It requires that we think of the Idea of
meaning as the ground whereby any act of consciousness that aims at a unified
meaning is constructed into a pattern that satisfies certain fonnal demands.
Pure construction of synthetic interpretation is not so much a matter of applying
fonns as building towards forms.
LU IV 107
In the final analysis, syncategorematic terms do not just signal the presence
of synthetic activity at the level of hidden deep structures, hidden uncon-
scious thoughts, or hidden pre-interpreted sense-data; they rather articulate
the unfolding of the unity of consciousness. Syncategorematic terms function
in the pure construction of meaningful combination, just because the demands
for synthetic unity are already given apriori with the possibility of all deter-
minate consciousness; and the laws for synthetic combination are given in
advance just because the possibility of meaning demands that synthetic unity
of interpretation and experience be that at which all expression and all con-
sciousness aims. So when Husserl argues that combinations of meanings are
"built apriori into the general Idea of meaning", the sense is that in the con-
struction of any given meaning, the possibilities of combining that meaning
with others in a unified thought-context is constructed along with it.
Does Husserl want to say that the meaning of "and", or even that the com-
binatory law of conjunction, is derivable from the very Idea of meaning? I will
conclude this chapter by looking at a passage from section 57 of the sixth
Investigation wh ich relates the meaning of syncategorematic terms to the origin
of synthetic activity in every act of meaning.
The general sense of this passage is that it is in the lived carrying-out of
synthesizing acts that categorial forms and laws of combination are bound
up with synthesized, identifiable objects. The immediate issue concems the
intuitive fulfilment of founded meanings:
The complete synthetic intuition [of categorial forms, laws of combination, and the meanings
of syncategorematic terms] therefore arises ... in so far as the psychic content wh ich binds
the founding acts itself is interpreted as the objective unity of the founded objects, as their relation
of identity, of part to whole, etc." (LU II II 177).
references that are responsible for the putting together of every single meaning
whatsoever. And the reason why forms of synthesis are never themselves
represented in the combinatory unity of experience is that synthetic form
always already lies behind the possibility of meaningful experience and
because it always lies ahead in the form of that which is demanded. The
synthetic meaning of syncategorematic terms is founded on ac tu al interpre-
tative experience just because it is also founding for it; synthetic meaning
is the result of interpretation just because it is also that which underlies
synthetic interpretation. The lived syntheses which sustain the interpretation
of objects as unities are characterized both as that which supports founded
meanings and as that which generates an ongoing combination of mutually
supplementary contents passing over into one another in unified and unifying
interpretation.
CHAPTER 5
109
110 CHAPTER 5
back to judgments depends on the force of the claim that a name refers back
to those judgments which it already contained "implicitly".
Husserl 's statements on implicitness point to the problem. On the one
hand, Husserl says that once a judgment is transformed into an attributive name,
"the carrying out of the modified act [the name] does not include the unmodi-
fied [the judgment)" (468). But on the next page, he says that "the 'original'
judgment in a certain way 'logically' 'lies in' the 'modified' act" (469). And
again: "The single-rayed intention directed towards [the state of affairs] pre-
supposes the many-rayed Uudging intention] and refers back to it as part of
its own sense" (473-74). And finally, any name that refers back to judg-
ments does so because those judgments are "implicit" (implizierte) in it (483).
The sense in which simple names do not refer back to judgments is clear
enough. In terms of explicit syntax, the name "the red house" does not appear
as "the house - it is red". What is included in a name is not the judgment itself.
And from the other direction, a judgment does not have to be transformed
into a name, and is itself "not yet" an attributive name (468). It provides the
"basis" for an attributive name, but "falls away" once the name is articu-
lated; only the name "remains over" (469). That an attributive name refers back
to a judgment that has already fallen away from it, indicates that backward
reference does not simply rearrange a meaning's actual parts, but rather unfolds
aseries of prior meanings whose synthesis led to the meaning that "remains".
But now if backward reference was never supposed to be restricted to the
re arrangement of actual part-experiences, then the reason given above for
denying that syntactically simple names refer back to judgments is vitiated.
For backward reference is in alt cases a reference from one meaning to another
meaning of a different status, i.e. to a meaning that plays a different sort of
role than the directly expressed meaning. Husserl says that in "the very talk
of arising and referring back it is already said that names and judgments are
different" (468). A name refers back not to apart of a judgment but to an
act that determines the properties of the named object. Single-rayed nominal
presentations refer back to multi-rayed predicative interpretations, not by
including them, but rather by transforming a diversity of meanings into one
which now appears as one that is synthetic.
We have seen that Husserl uses the vocabulary of "unfolding" (in the
German as weIl as the Latin root plico-) to express the constitution of syn-
thesis. Something complex (Komplex) is folded together in such a way that
that which has been folded into it (implizierte) can have its concealed parts
unfolded from it (explizierte) by means of an unfolding analysis (Explikation).
Philosophical science thus has the double task of showing how meanings can
be folded together (Komplikation) and how they can be unfolded (entfaltet)
into ranges of possible fulfilling intuitions that may be carried out step by step.
Presentation and interpretation, name and judgment, single- and multi-rayed
meanings, all "come back" to the issue of thesis and synthesis (42).
Husserl talks about unfolding both in subjective and in objective terms.
From both directions, it will turn out that to refer a name back to judgments
114 CHAPTER 5
can mean by an ultimately simple name, keeps alive the problem of the
mutual backward reference of names and judgments, and indeed makes
backward reference central to both names and predicates.
The reference back from complex to simple meanings is thus construed
as the reference back from judgments to names, which can also be exhibited
as the reference back from nominalized judgments to their constituent
members. Husserl treats three levels of simplicity. First, as soon as any
judgment is made into a name, it expresses "one thesis" (Einer Thesis, 481).
In this sense, every meaning is already simple; it has one meaning, it names
one objective state of affairs, even if one complex one. Still, to count a
nominalized judgment like "The S which is P and Q" as a simple would
cover over an explicit complexity within the name.
The first step of simplification removes complexities carried over from
complexities in the judgment which had been nominalized. Hence just as the
complex judgment "S is P and Q" can be "analysed" into the simple judgments
"S is P" and "S is Q", so the nominalized term "The S which is P and
Q" can be analysed into "The S which is P" and "The S which is Q". The
elimination of "synthetic forms" like conjunction resolves nominal meanings,
which all al ready express "one" meaning, into atomic nominal meanings
which express single subjects and predicates. Husserl calls this second type
of unitariness a "one-fold" (einfaltig), "one-streamed" (einstrahlig), or "simple"
(einfach) unity (483).
But the technique for removing synthetic connections does not yet give a
method for deciding when names are simple. The "series of backward refer-
ences contained in a nominalization" may not have been "pursued" (483) to
"primitive" terms. The meanings arrived at may still contain "implicit"
member-meanings (483), as, for example, if naming "S" depends on the pos-
sibility of naming its parts, its properties, or its relations. It is only if a meaning
can no longer have its parts "set out beside one another", that is, if it "no longer
refers back" (483), that it is simple in the third, and primitive, sense of being
a "straightforward" (schlicht, 483) unity.
The claim that complex meanings ultimately refer back to straightforwardly
simple meanings is deceptively easy. Two questions are difficult. What counts
as a simple name? And what principle could put an end to the process of
referring a name back to further explication?
Husserl's two examples of names to which judgments ultimately refer back,
suggest two quite different things. In the paragraph which introduces the idea
of the primitive backward-referent, Husserl's examples of straightforwardly
simple names include "proper name presentations, along with one-membered
percepts, imaginations, etc., which do not set their members out alongside
one another in explicative syntheses" (483). But while it is not surprising
that names containing judgments ("The S which is P") would refer back to
proper names ("S"), there are three problems. First, it does not seem likely that
Husserl would say that "Socrates, who is mortal" would refer back to the proper
name "Socrates" as a simpk constituent, but would fail to refer back to the
118 CHAPTER 5
specifying term "mortal", solelyon the grounds that "mortal" is not a proper
name. Nor does it seem likely that Busserl would deny that "men, who are
mortal" refers back to the simple subject-term "men" just because "men" is
not a proper name. In short, it is not clear why Busserl would say that names
are simple only if they are proper.
Second, even if Busserl meant to say that complex names refer back to
proper names, we have seen (chapter 4) that Busserl cannot hold that proper
names are independent of all prior explicative syntheses.
Third, even if Busserl held that proper names and no others can be simple,
it is odd to class proper names with simple perceptions and imaginations.
Bow did the subdivision of a name lead back to something that is not apart
of the linguistic expression at all, but a perceptual presentation? And why
would any name, complex or simple, refer back to a simple perceptual datum
rather than to complex ranges of possible perceptions?
Busserl 's second example of the simples to which judgments refer back con-
trasts the judgment "2 x 2 equals 5" with the name "that 2 x 2 equals 5"
(484). We can see why one might want to count the latter as a straightforwardly
simple name, since even though there are other names contained in it, as a
whole it names a single relation. We might allow that Busserl's point is that
judgments refer back to straightforwardly objective intentionalities. It would
not matter, then, if in different contexts judgments refer back to straight-
forwardly referring names, straightforwardly object-exhibiting perceptions,
or straightforwardly fact-apprehending thoughts. But such a reading gets no
further in pinning down the idea of a simple. For "that 2 x 2 equals 5" is
regarded as a simple just because it articulates a single state of affairs. If the
final backward reference of a judgment is to the singularity of the fact that
it expresses, the "straightforwardly" singular simple is nothing more than
the "one-ness" of the synthesized unity of the judgment that we started with.
The synthetically unified judgment seemed complex, but the simples which
it refers back to seem no less complex.
But now if it is difficult to define the scope of simples, it is because the
notion of the primitive simple is itself a complicated one. We now turn to
the process of referring back itself, and to the problem of how it terminates.
When Busserl says that judgments ultimately refer back to straightforwardly
objectifying names, he means at least three things: (i) that every judgment
has some object that it is about, and in terms of which it is explicated, (ii)
that every nominal term in a judgment is simple in the sense that it is inde-
pendently variable and could appear again with other terms in other judgments,
and (iii) that certain parts of a judgment may be separated from other parts and
have meaning on their own.
The second of these characterizations of simple meanings, i.e. in terms of
their independent variability, would by itself beg the question of what simple
backward referents are. But we will find that only such a functional defini-
tion of simplicity will reconcile the first and the third characterizations.
On the first characterization, judgments refer back to subjects requiring
LU V 119
claim that the simples themselves always have to have occurred too far back
in the past to be present as the content of any actual experience - we do not
experience empty substances or sense-data despite the fact that experience ulti-
mately, genuinely, and successfully, refers back to them.
This, finally, is Husserl 's account of the reference back from judgments
to names. Names refer back to judgments because they demand explication;
judgments refer back to names because they need to be about fixed refer-
ents. But just as the reference backward from names to judgments via
explication ultimately returns back to names because of a demand for a unified
interpretation, so the reference back from judgments to names via the fixing
of reference ultimately returns back to judgments because of a demand for
interpretative complexity. Judgments and names thus refer back to one another
as to their respective grounds and presuppositions. The forwards-directed com-
pletion of interpretation and the backwards-directed origins of interpretation
constitute each other as already having been carried out in advance, and at
the same time demand one another as still needed supplementations.
4. REFERRING BACKWARD
presentations thus turns into the issue of how a founded meaning takes up a
"positing stance" (491). The "origin" of meaning (343), consists not so much
in the presence of uncomplicated simples or finished products of interpreta-
tion, but in the simultaneous references forward and backward from one to
the other in an experience of a world of objects. And consciousness itself,
in order to be a continuous stream of determinations, a reflective inner aware-
ness, and/or an intentional directedness towards objects (see subsection 1),
must likewise be constituted as a reciprocal activation of starting-points and
end-points, of simples and complexes, of units and unities.
out the possibility of withdrawing or drawing back into the backgrounds 01'
the ego, in Cartesian Meditations, where he works out the warrant for pre-
supposing the accumulated intersubjective knowledge of a community of other
egos, and in the Crisis, where he treats the sedimentation of history in culture,
that the problem of the retention of the non-present ground of synthesis is fully
developed. In the Appendix, I will advance to the first of these three devel-
opments.
CHAPTER 6
125
126 CHAPTER 6
We have seen that rationalist construals of synthesis can explain the ground
of the synthesis of one content of consciousness with another only by appealing
to categorial universals which determine which contents belong together.
Now since Husserl grounds universals in synthetic combinations of individ-
uals, he cannot in any straightforward way ground synthesis in universals.
But he can describe the individual content of interpretative consciousness in
terms of the way it picks out an object of experience which in turn can be
experienced in a range of other ways. In other words, he can describe the
meaning-intention of each content as a kind of universal name whose instances
are the other contents subsumable within the experience of the same object.
This description provides an abstract framework for explaining the grounds,
the mechanisms, and the end-points of the synthesis of one content with the
next.
LU VI 127
in which the inkpot appears, and it describes this object as an instance of things
that look and behave as inkpots. The name invokes these two classifications
without being identical to either; the name calls appearances and Species
into play, as it were, when it calls the individual by name. This "overlay"
of the signifier, the baptism of the referent, the act of calling things by
name, is the activity whereby a subject provides hirnself with the rules (the
"universals" and the "circles" of relevant intuitions) for recognizing the identity
of a variously appearing individual.
2. "The word names the red thing as red" (27).
Phenomenologically, we find before us no mere sum (of name and intuition), but an intimate,
and in fact an intentional unity; we can rightly say that the two acts, one of which constitutes
the full word and the other the thing, are intentionally locked together in a unity 0/ aet. What
lies before us can be naturally described equally weil with the words, "the name 'red' names
(nennt) the red object red", as with the words "the red object is reeognized as red and named
'red' through the mediation of this recognition". To name red - in the aetual sense of naming,
which presupposes an underlying intuition of the thing named - and to reeognize something as
red, are expressions which are in their ground identical in meaning: they only differ in so far
as the latter brings out more c1early that there exists here no mere duality (Zweiheit), but a
unity set up (hergestellte) by a single act-character (28).
The "universality of the word" means, therefore, that the unified sense of one and the
same word circumspans (or in the case of a non-sense word, "pretends" to circumspan) an ideally
delimited manifold of possible intuitions, each of which could function as the ground for an
act of recognitive nominalization with the same sense. To the word "red", for example, belongs
the possibility of both knowing as, and calling "red", all red objects that might be given in possible
intuitions. This possibility connects up, with an apriori guarantee, to the further possibility of
becoming conscious, through an identifying synthesis of all such naming recognitions, of a
sameness of meaning of one with the other: this A is red, and that A is the same, i.e. also red:
the two intuited singulars belong under one and the same "concept" (29).
synthetic cognition of individual objects. Yet there are in the text several
locutions which assign priority to one or another of the elements involved in
objective reference. For example, in the penultimate paragraph of s. 7, under-
lining such locutions:
[The universality of the proper name] consists in the fact that a synthesis of possible intuitions
belongs (gehört) to a single individual object, intuitions made one by (durch) the common
intentional character conferred by every relation to the same object, despite all phenomeno-
logical difference among individual intuitions. This unity [of intentional character] is thus the
foundation (Fundament) for the unity of recognition, which belongs to the "universality of
word-meaning", to the range of ideally possible realizations. In this way the naming word has
a recognitive relation to an unlimited multiplicity of intuitions, whose single and identical
object it recognizes and thereby (dadurch) names" (31).
within the static itself. The problem is that even in cases where there is a
one-to-one correspondence between meaning and intuition, the meaning must
still "prescribe" a range of possible intuitions "in advance" (even if a range
of one). The "belonging" of intuitions to names, we found, depends not just
on the abstract universality of the name, but also on the acts of calling some-
thing by name, on recognizing similar uses of the name, and on reapplying
the name to multiple presentations of the named object. Hence the "belonging" ,
even in static identity, must make the intuition belong to the intention, and
set up the relation of identification. The explanation of static identification
needs an account of the dynamic of looking forwards to an identifying com-
pletion, of coming up with a sequence of fulfilling acts, and of gathering
intuitions together in such a way that the result will count as the "interpreta-
tion" of the intended object. The dynamic of interpretation interrupts the
"quiet" unity of static identity, but only thereby are possibilities prescribed and
differences rendered unifiable.
In this section of chapter 6, I will look at the way in which categories of
"context" (Zusammenhang) contribute early in LU vi (especially ss. 8-12,
pp. 32-48) to an explication of the grounds, mechanisms, and ideal starting-
and end-points of the syntheses of identification. First, I will introduce the
problematics of the "dynamic" and the metaphor of "fitting into" epistemic
contexts. Second, I will look at the role of differences, distinctions, and dis-
tances in the unification of interpretative contexts. Third, I will introduce
problems involving interacting contexts, contexts within contexts, and latent
contexts, and in particular, the problem of the coherence of contexts and of
the storage in consciousness of implicit contexts. I will articulate Husserl 's
solutions in terms of lived interpretative synthesis, lived prescription, and lived
habit. Fourth, I will press the problem of the determinacy of interpretative
"needs for supplementation". I will argue that the categories of "context" are
inadequate to this task, in that they do not explain how partial interpreta-
tions fix directions for further enquiry, or how each contextualized act
anticipates the next, or how contexts are ideally limited or closed off. Only
Husserl 's categories of "perspective" in the succeeding sections of LU vi can
resolve these deficiencies. Finally, I will return to the metaphor of "fitting
in", and to a general account of Husserl's concept of synthesis.
that it is always already passing over into a grasp of the world of already
intuited objects.
Similarly, the meaning-fulfilment (the end-point of intention-fulfilment rela-
tions), ac counts from the other direction for the same absorption of the
intention-fulfilment relation into the meaning-intention. To the extent that a
subject is presented with intuitions, he ceases to be "wholly free" in his inter-
pretations of the object before hirn (92). Intuitions "set limits" (93) to the
interpretations a subject can frame about the world.
But this phenomenon renders problematic the sense in which possible
fulfilling intuitions are prescribed in advance by a meaning-intention. The
intention prescribes a range of possible intuitions, but it is precisely those
intuitions that limit the range of possibilities that an intention may prescribe.
Understood in one way, the fact that intuitions prescribe intentions is not
incompatible with the idea that intentions prescribe intuitions. There is no
problem in saying that an intention prescribes ways in which certain
intuitions either complement or restrict it, or cause it to be expanded or revised.
But the idea that intuitions set limits to how the world may be interpreted
suggests that meaning-intentions have their capacity to anticipate intuitions
fixed only after those intuitions are given, and that meaning-intentions alter
once they are fulfilled by intuitions. Husserl says on the one hand that an inten-
tion undergoes "a certain modification in character" once the intended object
has been intuited (38); but he says on the other hand that the intention does
not "suffer" this modification, that is, that its meaning is not changed when
it is limited (38). How does the process of freeing and fixing interpretations
account for the act of "fitting" intentions and intuitions into joint contexts?
I will examine three of Husserl's examples in ss. 9 and 10.
(namely the same according to its inner substance) appears to us over and over as something
different, depending on whether it enters into this or that phenomenal context; and if we fit
onto it a line or surface qualitatively identical with it, it becomes in fact 'indistinguishable' in
this background, it loses its phenomenal separation and its ability to count on its own (38).
to be the distinct acts of meaning and intuiting, but to be the system of expe-
riential contexts as an ongoing project, within which intentions and intuitions
are constantly being fixed and violated in the act of fitting objective inter-
pretations together.
The melody fragment, no matter how short or how unfamiliar, leaves the
listener with an "expectation" (Erwartung, 40), a "demand for supplementa-
tion from a lawfully circumscribed sphere" of determinations (40). The
fragment consists of a "pointing" by way of a "direction" (Richtung, 40)
towards a relatively "indeterminate" range of possibilities. The relations
between determinacies and indeterminacies are at the centre of this problem-
atic. A straightforward account would be three-fold. First, the melody fragment
that has actually been experienced is itself fully determinate. Second, the range
of expected completions is indeterminate in its limits - a listener could not
be expected to name in advance all the melody-fragments which would satisfy
his expectations nor even to be able to tell without hearing it whether a
certain score would be satisfying. Third, the sounds that do satisfy hirn will
again make a determinate sound.
There are two problems. The first concems the extent to which "direc-
tions" of possible fulfilment have to be fixed in order for an experience to carry
a determinate expectation. The second concerns how expectations are possible
at all. Husserl's solution in these passages will be to say the expectations
are fixed by "habit", a solution that seems at first too easy, but in fact intro-
duces subtle and complex issues of retention.
We may pursue the problem of the determinacy of expectations by devel-
oping the example drawn from melody. Most Western listeners would expect
not to have a Mozart melody followed by, or supplemented in the background
by, a blues line. It is no doubt the tones themselves that supply the context
to which subsequent tones must be added. 1 (Two notes will have more possible
LU VI 139
I will say a few things about the account of backgrounds in this passage,
and then I will introduce two problems which I will be working on from this
point forward in the present chapter.
The fact that the subject does not expect to see the tapestry when he looks
at the furniture in front of it, is itself a kind of expectation, which has to be
explained just like any other. How is the expectation that further viewings
will be blocked grounded in what is actually viewed, and how does Husserl's
account of the peculiar expectation of absences of fulfilling intuitions con-
tribute to the general account of expectation?
The "step by step" process of "going on" with perception occurs "piece
by piece". The fragment of the tapestry's pattern (Muster), interrupted by
the piece of furniture, is a "non-independent" shape which, "in the manner
of a part" (teilweise), Le. of a non-independent part, passes over its limits
towards a whole with outer limits. The pattern-fragment is thus a "model"
(an alternate translation of Muster) for going on (fortgehen) towards the next
lines and colours hidden by the furniture. But instead of seeing the next "piece"
of the pattern, an experiencing subject will see the "piece" of furniture. The
latter piece takes the place of the former. But now the very reason why the
viewing subject does not expect to see the rest of the pattern is that he expects
it to be under the piece of furniture. He knows that the pattern is in the back-
ground covered over by the foreground furniture. Or to say the same thing with
the pattern as the object in question, he knows that it has been submerged under
an obstacle which, epistemically speaking, is in the background. The very
fact that the object and its covering could each be given the title "foreground"
or "background", indicates that they "cover" the same space, just as lines in
manipulated figures "cover" one another, and just as intentions and fulfilments
"cover" one another (38). To be sure, the latter two cases of covering (Deckung,
38) have the sense of "coincidence", while the other has the sense of "covering-
up" (verdecken, 40). But in fact there is little difference in the intention-
fulfilment relations. For the furniture is only taken to "cover over" the pattern
once it is understood that under the furniture is the very pattern which will
"coincide" with expectations set in motion by the visible pattern fragment. The
subject fails to expect to see the remainder of the pattern under the
furniture just because he expects that he would see it under the furniture.
Are wh at we might call transcendentally grounded expectations - not
the explicit expectations for experiences coming up soon, but the implicit
expectations for certain experiences under certain conditions - indifferent to
LU VI 141
what we might call merely factical obstacles? In short, are cases of expecta-
tion blocked by physical obstacles irrelevant to the ground of expectation in
general?
In fact, there are three features of the pattern-behind-the-furniture model
of intention and fulfilment not present in the line-on-a-surface model and
the melody-with-a-finale model. First, we are offered here the possibility of
"movements" that would render explicit, and then satisfy the expectations
for, seeing the hidden pattern. The manipulation of the lines and the projec-
tion of the melody are also movements of sorts, but here the subject recognizes
possibilities in what he perceives in part by recognizing his own ability to
change his point of viewing. Second, we are here dealing not just with shapes
and sounds, but with shaped substances whose backgrounds are their own back-
sides. Third, we operate here through counterfactuals, through the opening
of possibilities from out of absences, through the overcoming of obstacles.
'If movement were to disclose a new point of view, then ... etc.'. Indeed state-
ments like this define expectations of as yet unexperienced perceptions, even
if no explicit obstacles are in the way: 'If this melody were completed, it would
have to sound like ... ', and so on. Far from being incidental to the consti-
tution of expectations, the presence of implicit obstacles, as the limitations
over wh ich intuitions must pass if meaning-intentions are to be fulfilled, is
the condition of all expectations.
If we put these three features together, we arrive at the following results.
An object is experienced in a lived way when its presence is seen through
its absent sides, sides which are in turn made present by the viewer's move-
ments and made possible by the object's many-sidedness.
We can still say that an experience activates expectations by reaching back
into background contexts and activating habituated possibilities, but this takes
on a new sense. When a subject looks at a pattern-fragment cut off by furni-
ture, he unreflectively assurnes that the pattern continues below the cut-off
point. We can say that he does so out of habit, but we would not mean that
he has experienced such patterns before, or that he has formed an inductive
rule that objects whose visibility is cut off by another object must continue
behind it in roughly the same way. Rather, the habituality that governs expec-
tations is co-extensive with the unreflectiveness of the assumptions that there
are always backgrounds and that multi-sided objects always have sides not
in view. The sense in which it is through habit that meaning-contents antici-
pate fulfilment, is that an object is experienced as being already present to
the vi ewer in more ways than he is yet aware of. When a subject implicitly
realizes that the tapestry's pattern could be seen if only he could look under
the furniture, he also recognizes that there is more to the objective situation
which as yet lies under the surface of his experience. And when he recog-
nizes that an obstacle is covering over apart of the object he is experiencing,
he also recognizes that he can re-cover the hidden parts. And when he
recognizes that he can move the furniture and find the rest of the pattern, he
also recognizes that, having been interrupted, he can later find it again. In short,
142 CHAPTER 6
one and the same S. Each failure to synthesize an intuition with a meaning
includes a successful synthesis. Underlying the recognition that an object,
and therefore the world as a whole, is not as expected, is the recognition
that it is that object, or at least the world, which is not as expected.
Second, frustrating intuitions give the subject grounds to distinguish,
compare, and contrast the expected content with the one present. When a
subject judges that "The roof is red" and then finds that it is not red but
green, he recognizes the mutual exclusion of red and green. As long as he
has already identified the expected red surface and the perceived green surface
as one and the same surface, he may then consider contrasts between various
colour-properties that that surface does or could have had. That certain
intuitions can frustrate a meaning-intention indicates that the meaning-
intention already contained rules for the exclusion of certain intuitions. It
not only included the expectation to find P but also the expectation not to
find not-Po
Intuitive frustrations thus differentiate possibilities in the context of inter-
pretative wholes. Needless to say, many sorts of experience and judgment
operate in this way. Two objects, for example, are thought to be different when
the meanings that refer to them anticipate essentially different fulfilments.
An object is shown to be different than it was thought to be, when the meaning
is frustrated in particular points while being satisfied in essential points; and
so on. To be sure, there will always be a problem of deciding which
intuitions in a range of anticipated intuitions are sufficient to put the lie to a
meaning-intention. But such a problematic is to be expected of a theory of
knowledge based on a theory of contexts. Every unexpected intuition prob-
lematizes the world-interpretation that had failed to anticipate the intuition
at hand. It forces are-evaluation and, within limits, are-interpretation of the
whole-context of previous interpretation. It requires a new interpretation, one
that can consistently inc1ude the unexpected member.
The third positive result of failed anticipations is that they demand the
pursuit of more comprehensive interpretations. Indeed successful anticipations
work in exactly the same way. Every content prescribes not just one but a
multiplicity of possible fulfilments and so opens itself to a range of possible
interpretations. It al ready differentiates the parts of its own meaning by
differentiating partial fulfilments. When meanings which are not "simple" or
"isolated" but rather "complex" or "contextual" suffer intuitive frustration, they
do not undergo an out and out "contradiction" (Widersinn); rather, they undergo
a "counter-struggle" (Widerstreit) among their possible interpretations. Indeed
strictly speaking, "conflict" (Widerstreit) does not pertain to "simple" acts at
all (43).
Husserl's descriptions of failed anticipation are frequently articulated in
formal terms. Thus he formalizes the difference between (a) an intended object
8 with properties (e, 11, L), which is so dependent on the property that an
intuition of -e would be taken to negate the existence of 8; (b) an intended
object contextualized as the substance with properties 8(e, 11, L) which
146 CHAPTER 6
is open to comparison with the slightly different object 8ee, TI, t); (c) an
intention 8(e, TI) which could just as easily be identified as 8(e, TI, t) if e
should be intuited, as it could be identified as 8ee, TI, t) if -e should be
intuited, and so on. But such formalizations are always grounded in the
synthetic activities of consciousness which render such forms possible. Hence
every exclusion of one intuitive possibility by another "leads back" to the
fact that the "pre-given self-frustrated intuition is one part of a comprehen-
sive intention" (44), and that frustrations ground the "intersections" (44) of
interpretative possibilities in the web-like context of lived experience.
Thus when a subject's intention "This red-tiled roof" "excludes" (Exklusion,
45) the intuition of something that is green, or aluminum, or not a roof but
a facade, it is not that the subject simply lacks an anticipation of those other
intuitions. And upon experiencing those intuitions, he would not merely fail
to incorporate them into his interpretation. Rather "exclusion" (Ausscheidung,
46) is the subject's way of establishing that which is "outside the border-
line" of the interpretation he has been working with, as, for example, "tiled"
excludes all sorts of properties included under the idea of aluminum siding,
from technical properties such as rust-preventing, to economic properties
such as warranteed, to colour properties such as enamel off-whites, to socio-
logical properties such as bungalow, and so on. Once an interpretation of an
object previously thought to be a roof is challenged by the intuitive appre-
hension that the object present is in fact only a facade, are-interpretation of
other attributions of properties to the object will also have to take place. The
subject will have to reconsider whether it had other features which had been
present all along but had gone unnoticed or had been similarly misinter-
preted. If it is not a roof but a facade, the subject will have to rethink whether
it is a religious building, its date of construction, and whether its colouring
will vary with the play of light on its sculpted surfaces, etc. In short, the
syntheses of exclusion force the subject to return to contextual backgrounds
and their differentiated possibilities for re-interpretation.
The same result is found in "inclusion" (Inklusion, 46). An intuitive
fulfilment may contain not only that which an intention "needed", but "more".
But again, to add to a meaning-intention, or to "fit" new determinations into
it, is not just to subsume new properties into an interpretation in the way
that members are "subsumed" into a class (Subsumption, 49). To subsume prop-
erties under an interpretation is rather to "order them into" (Einordnung, 46)
a stream of experience. An interpretation always already begins as a complex,
and new determinations construct out of it a larger complex. An interpreta-
tion is a context with the capacity to separate itself off from, and/or to absorb
other such contexts, and to persist in its self-identity by widening and
narrowing the explicitness of its ranges of anticipations.
An intuition that conflicts with a meaning-intention neither undermines that
meaning in its entirety nor fits smoothly into it as just one more fact (albeit
a negative fact) known about the intended object. For Husserl, the principle
that "conflict can found unity" (we move now to s. 33, 108-111) means that
LU VI 147
Once the model of "fitting like a garment" (25, 44) is dismissed, Husserl
has three ways of characterizing the "fit": (i) in terms of intentions that "flow
over" into intuitions, and so prescribe forms of fitting-in from the beginning,
(ii) in terms of contextual systems that fit intentions and intuitions together
in medias res, and (iii) in terms of intuitions that complete interpretations
and so set criteria for fitting intuitions into interpretations from the stand-
point of the ideal end-point of those interpretations.
(i) Intention and intuition "fit" together in the sense that they "belong"
together (64). In "dynamic" identification, intention and intuition are tempo-
rally distinct, and although they "flow over into one another" (34), the goal
of "exact fit" cannot apply. In this reciprocal overflow, an identification of
an object occurs - not "brought in from outside through comparison", but
presupposed "in advance" or "from the beginning" (von vornherein) in the
form of mutual demands for supplementation (35). In other words, intuitions
"fit" intentions just because an intention picks out "the object itself" and so
looks forward towards its own intuitive supplements (100).
(ii) Once each intention is characterized in terms of its prescription of
supplements, then the whole system of acts is characterized as an ongoing
process of interpretations fitting into one another. Each act both generates,
and is subject to, contexts, functioning as a signpost that indicates routes
and directions for locating acts that might come "next" on a cognitive map.
The point here is that the beginning of a joumey on a map is relative to the
choice of a point of origin. Each prescription of determinate supplements
depends on determinacy already having been attributed to that content (e.g.
44) and retained out of habit (e.g. 60). In one sense, every content "fits" into
the whole. In another, the blending of larger interpretative contexts is possible
only once local and limited contexts take on enough complexity to be able
to establish determinate relations to others (106). That is, each new experience
fixes the determinacy with which all past and future contents are able to fit
with one another.
(iii) Contexts remain underdetermined until they point forwards to a finality
of interpretative wholeness. Up to a point, contents of consciousness can fit
together even if an absolute unity of interpretation cannot yet be envisaged.
An uninterpreted perception, for example, can be "weIl-fitting" (121), provided
that it is a "lead" (Hinsicht, 121) to "getting nearer" to an interpretation. But
any provisional fit depends on the possibility of a good fit, on the ideal pos-
sibility of a last phase of interpretative completion, one wh ich would bring
the object itself to full presence, would render contextual expectations fully
determinate, and would close off the possibility of expanding the range of
potential intuitive inclusions. But what this means is that the category of
152 CHAPTER 6
developed so far in this chapter leaves us with four problems. First, there
remains the problem of the determinate incompleteness of a partial meaning's
need for supplementation. We still have to explain the ground of passing
over from one interpretative standpoint to the next, and we have to locate
non-explicit yet anticipated perspectives. I will show how the perspective is
a self-situating experiential content which incorporates the directions for
fulfilling intuitions and enriched meaning-intentions within the boundaries
of its own complex content. The perspectival content marks a place for itself
within a larger context, and then re-interprets itself in the light of its next-
neighbours before the latter are experienced.
Second, there remains the problem of fixing the ideal limit towards which
the ongoing expansions of interpretations aim. The perspective will co-ordinate
these targets, and will provide directions for zeroing in on the things them-
selves.
Third, there remains the problem of what happens to a partial interpreta-
tion once it has been overcome in a more comprehensive unity, i.e. of how
contents that are no longer present can be preserved for retrieval, and implic-
itly retained in successive interpretations. By re-using the space of its
precedents, the perspective will account for the sense in which precedents
are stored.
Fourth, the problem immediately at hand is that of how a given content
sets up expectations for the next. The synthesis of epistemic fulfilment must
not merely place each content into the context of whatever happens to co me
up next, but must actively set up the investigative conditions for figuring
each content out and looking for the next. The relevant passage reads as
follows:
Nonna11y, intentions lack the character of expectations, they lack it in a11 cases of tranquil
perceiving or picturing, and they eam it only when perception is in flux, when it is spread out
into a continuous series of percepts, all belonging to the perceptual manifold of one and the
same object. Objectively stated: the object shows itself from different sides; what from one
side was seen only as a pictorial suggestion becomes from another side a confinning and fu11y
satisfying perception; or what was in one side only meant in conjunction with something else
(mitgemeint), meant indirectly through its adjoining sides [or through what is "marginal" or
"at its borders", AngrenzungJ, only pre-indicated (vorgedeutet), becomes in another side at
least a pictorial outline ["suggestion", or "indication at the side", Andeutung (contrasted with,
yet combining elements from, An-grenzung and vor-gedeutet)], it appears perspectiva11y fore-
shortened and projected (perspektivisch verkurtzt und abgeschattet), in order to appear for the
first time from a new side "just exactly as it is". According to our interpretation, each percep-
tion and imagination is a web of partial intentions, fused into the unity of one total intention.
The correlate of this latter is the thing, while the correlates of each partial intention are thing-
related parts and moments. Only thus can one understand how consciousness can reach out beyond
(hinausreichen über) actual lived experience. It can, so to speak, mean what is beyond (hin-
ausmeinen), and that meaning can be fulfilled (41).
In the final analysis, the intentions wh ich lack expectations are not "normal".
As soon as consciousness is spread out, syntheses of expectations are activated.
When consciousness "reaches beyond" to intend objects in an objective world,
154 CHAPTER 6
it positions itse1f in relation to that world and interprets its own experience
as perspectivally ordered. The task of consciousness is to de-marginalize its
own experiences, to move through a web of partial intentions, to res tore an
objectively direct viewpoint on the thing "as it is", or at least to fuse together
a well-rounded combination of viewpoints.
Each perspective, in so far as it is recognized as limited, demands to be
corrected or adjusted by other perspectives on the same object. The objecti-
fication of the intended object is thus an interpretative achievement:
consciousness must fill in the gaps in its perspectival viewpoints. In one
sense, perceptual experience is by nature "gap-holding" (lückenhaft, 100),
in that no object is present in a single blow. Indeed phenomenology in
general is an account of how synthesis achieves objective knowledge in the
face of inherent incompleteness. But while the gaps in the web of perspec-
tive motivate investigative consciousness, they also threaten it. For if the
experiencing subject does not know how to close off or control the adjoining
viewpoints needed to complete the picture he is seeing, he will lose control
of his interpretation of the object altogether (its shape and place, its front
and back, its distance and depth). He will lose his ability to distinguish the
object's true and apparent face, its essential and inessential determinations,
its substance and its shadows.
object has parts that it has already borrowed from the next. Even if an object's
neighbours are not actually present in the painted scene, the spectator can
still tell its colour, its size, its brightness, and sometimes can even tell what
it is (if the colour is peculiar to a certain sort of thing, as in the case of
armour, or the sea). Each object must anticipate the next in its shadows. It must
be a mirror reflection of, or to mix Albertian metaphors, a window onto, the
next.
It is a commonplace that objects appear to have a different size, colour,
figure, and individuation depending on their surroundings. It is more diffi-
cult to explain how individual contents of consciousness in themselves ground
the more active interpretative act of looking for or projecting onto invisible
next parts, sides, and neighbours. 1 will indicate three features of shadowing-
off as "projection": (1) the momentum inherent in singular contents, (2) their
gradual overlapping, and (3) the objective correlates of projective activity.
(1) When a viewer looks at a barber-pole, he assurnes that the same
spiralling pattern that he sees from one perspective will continue all around
the pole. Even when standing in one spot in front of a motionless pole, the
fact that his eye is already being drawn along a curved line even within that
one viewing-point primes hirn to continue drawing that curve. Each one-
sided viewing is already a multiplicity of standpoints each carrying over
from the last.
(2) The quantity of looking that has always already been covered within a
single perspective is not replaced all at once when the vi ewer moves slightly
to one side, but bit by bit. Some of the distance already covered remains present
in the next perspectival viewpoint. A projecting content appropriates bits of
its successors in order to ensure itself against the loss necessitated by its
own internal movement. It is because the movement within each content can
claim parts of absent contents as its own, that absent sides can be antici-
pated in advance.
(3) Perspectival projection contributes to objectification in at least three
ways. First, all the perspectives on the whole object in the round can be pro-
jected on the basis of the internal multiplicity seen from a single perspectival
viewpoint. A whole sequence of shadowings-off is thus potentially a self-
enclosed sequence belonging to the original viewpoint itself. (The line
fragments that the viewer of a barber-pole sees from a given perspective can
be picked up as parts of the same line only if each fragment is projected all
the way around the pole.) The self-enclosure of the sequence allows each
perspective to reveal the same object as its successors.
Second, when the notion of "shadowing-off" describes the activity of getting
to the next perspective, it also describes the activity of getting back to the backs
of objects that were there all along. The rear-side (Rückseite) of an object is
not just something in the background (Hintergrund), but also something that
has been turned away from or that can be moved back to. The possibility of
projection treats the opposite side as though it had been the content of a
possible frontal perception all along.
LU VI 157
Third, the viewer's capacity to project a spiral onto the backside of the
barber pole is coordinated with the fact that the pole itself can spin. The
transition from one perspectival interpretation of an object to the next is
motivated by the principle that things carry themselves from one standpoint
to the next, becoming more of what they were to be.
What is important both for the subject's interpretative activity and for the
object's interpreted unity is that each individual content of consciousness itself
contains a complex ordering of parts which guarantee that as soon as the
singular content makes up a single perspective, it has already made up a
series of perspectives all within the boundaries of that one content. And by
moving bit by bit to the next viewpoint, each perspectival content contains
parts that reflect traces of the next even be fore the next is actualized. The
category of perspective accounts (as the category of context does not) for
each content's internal capacity to anticipate the determinate parts of the
next.
But there is a problem with the individuation of sides, and there is a problem
with ensuring that the world of perspectival experience has no gaps. First, if
perspectives are constituted by the projection of each experiential content onto
the next, then every content cannot help but be a perspective on every other,
a foreshortening of the absolute totality of all possible experience. No one side
is an individual side, but is overladen with overlapping and overflowing
meanings, not only into other perspectives, but also an indefinite number of
auditory and tactile perspectives, epistemic, speculative, and emotional per-
spectives, and so on. The notion of perspectives has to account for multiple
systems of perspectives.
Second, there is no guarantee that the perspective that each content antic-
ipates as the next, is the one that would reveal the object's adjacent side.
Nor is there a guarantee that an experiencing subject will even be able to
tell whether one perspective seen just after another is exactly the next one
and not one that has taken some small leap. These problems are handled by
Husserl's metaphor of "foreshortening", and by his example of filling in a
pencil-sketch.
perspectives arrange to show both frontal and rear views, not by actually
showing both, but by instructing the viewer as to how back-sides can be turned
around. This is the role played by foreshortening.
When a figure in a painting is foreshortened, its exaggerated limbs seem
to jut forward from the canvas, even to intrude into the space of the viewer,
while its compressed limbs seem to recede behind the canvas plane. The
foreshortened perspective does not itself contain the object "just as it is",
but it does provide a kind of pathway or "map" (74) into a multiplicity of
perspectives in and around the viewed object. If the foreshortened figure is
meant to extend six feet from front to rear, the painting's perspective will
incIude all the receding planar view-points along that si x-foot stretch. A single
view can contain many, though only by "abridging" them (another transla-
tion of verkürzen).
The foreshortened quality of a perspective thus ac counts for some features
of the ordering of perspectives and the recession into "next"-contents. But there
remain four problems. First, rear and inner sides have been described only
as potential frontal sides. And of course objects have fronts, backs, and insides
all at once. While cognition must think such a multiplicity all at once, a
visual perspective can only assume such a simultaneity; it cannot show it.
To account for layers of superimposed viewpoints, we require a more sophis-
ticated sense of multiple systems of standpoints and orderings.
Second, why are some perspectives better than Others at suggesting others?
Once we emphasize asymmetrically valued perspectives and epistemic
ordering, we leave the categories of perspective behind.
Third, what will the last viewpoint in an ordered progression through
increasingly adjusted standpoints look like?
Fourth, even while a given perspective's projection into the next is quite
different from its projection into its own greater detail, the latter seems to
ground the former. It is because a perspective can be filled in that it can
spread out into others.
This group of problems is at issue in Husserl's description of filling in a
pencil-sketch (67):
Another example of an intuitive fulfilment-series is perhaps offered by the passing-over from
a rough outline-drawing to a more exactly finished pencil-sketch, from this to a ready-to-go
picture, and then up to the full-of-life finish of the painting, and to be sure [all as views] on
the same and visibly the same object (67).3
Conseiousness passes over from one aet to the next aeeording to an order
that leads from lesser to greater knowledge of the objeet "itself":
What an intention means, but makes present in a more or less inauthentic and inadequate [or
"unsuitable", unangemessen] way, the fulfilment ... sets directly before us; or at least more
directly, relative to the intention. In the fulfilment we live, as it were, an experience of "This
is the thing itself" ... It is possible that in the step-by-step progress (Fortschritt) of knowl-
edge, in the ascent [or "increase", Emporsteigen] by levels [or "grades", stufenweise] from acts
of poorer to acts of rieher epistemie fullness (Erkenntnisfülle), one must always finally reach
fulfilling perceptions ... The relative talk of "more or less direct" and of "[the thing] itself"
points us generally towards the principal issue: that the synthesis of fulfilment draws an inequality
of value among the combined members, that is, that the fulfilling act brings with it a pre-eminence
[or "priority", Vorzug] whieh the mere intention lacks ... Each such ranking of levels points
forward to an ideal limit, or realizes it in its final member [or "end-point", Endglied], which
posits for every advance through levels a goal that cannot be over-stepped: the goal of absolute
knowledge, of the adequate (adäquat) self-presentation of the object of knowledge (65-66).
of those contents themse1ves. Third, there are two sorts of "extent" of intui-
tive fulfilments (29, 97-100): if an object is only meant according to some few
of its parts, the perception of those parts will fulfil the intention as given
but it will not be "adequate" to the object as it is in itself and as a whole.
In these three ways, Husserl distinguishes progress in the knowledge of
objects themselves from progress in the detailing of meanings, in the multi-
plication of intuitive presentations, and in the interpretation of objects'
inessential parts. Synthetic combinations of the latter sorts may be the material
for properly epistemic syntheses, but each by itself could degenerate into
repetitive or tangential experiences that do not result in an object being any
better known. But this distinction is problematical. Given that even unfruitful
proliferations of presentations follow some regular principles of ordered
increase, how can Husserl distinguish increase in epistemic fu1ness from
increase in marginal detail?
Husserl sometimes takes a hard line on this problem. In sections 18-21
(70-77) he distinguishes "mediate presentations", in which an object is viewed
"indirect1y", e.g. from an oblique angle yet nevertheless en route to seeing it
straight on, from acts which interrupt the stream of presentations of the object
altogether and present the presentations themselves. The former may lead
towards an experience of the object itself, and so are ordered into an epis-
temically progressive chain. The latter proliferation of presentations does not
contribute to the knowledge of objects at all. In the same way, a map (or a
painting, 76, or a likeness, 83) may contribute to imagining the mapped object,
but not if the map itself becomes the object of attention (74).
Husserl wants to avoid the possibility of "endless" (unendlich) presenta-
tions of an object. If any and all orderings were possib1e, there would be a
"loss of va1uation" in the relative epistemic value of any given presentation
(e.g. 66-67). But it is not dear how far Husserl wou1d or could maintain the
distinction between mediate presentations and presentations of presentations.
If in so me sense every content is a perspective on every other, i.e. if there
are ordered chains along which every content can contribute to the interpre-
tation of every other, then it is not dear that reflective and marginal directions
for progress are different in kind from indirect directions for progress. It is
not dear that a better painting does not add to the viewer's knowledge of
the painted object, or that seemingly random peripheral perspectives will not
contribute to an increase in perceptual organization, and so on. For that matter,
Husserl's own distinction between complete presentations of objects (which
are adequate to the objects) and partial presentations of objects (which are
adequate only to the expectations of prior presentations) implies that com-
pleting the content of presentations does make objects appear. The point of
the distinction between mediate presentations and presentations of presenta-
tions can not so much be to exdude the latter from the sphere of epistemic
fulfilments as to establish different orderings according to which experien-
tial contents may be interpretatively pursued, and multiple schemes for deciding
epistemic value operating within a single unity of interpretative consciousness.
LU VI 163
We may divide this example of fulfilling an intention into four stages. First,
the intended object is treated as a complex implicitly built up through some
sort of enchainment of member-parts. Second, a clarification goes back through
the chain of previous members. Third, there are step by step substitutions of
each member for the next. Fourth, there is an end-result, a simple unit which
is fuUy explicit. Once the object's order has been clarified, aseries of ordered
intuitions will present the thing "itself".
I will point to three issues: (1) the generalizability of the concept of order,
(2) the goal of progress, and (3) the status of pre-designation. I will then
turn to the problem of the end-point itself.
(1) Wh at makes it especiaUy plausible to say that a number concept is
epistemically fulfilled through ordered advance is that numbers are in so me
sense nothing but pure order. But if we try to extend Husserl's description
to the ordered fulfilment of objectifying intentions in general, there will be
difficulties. It seems more plausible to say that a number has a built-up
"definition-chain" which can be traced back to units than to say that a three-
dimensional object has a definition-chain that can be traced back to any
particular ordering of perspectives or to properties. Moreover on closer inspec-
tion, the ordering of number-concepts can be just as problematic as that of
other objects. While it is true that 5 34 is made up of a certain number of
LU VI 165
The categories of limit offer solutions to the problems raised in the cate-
gories of names, contexts, and perspectives.
The problem of how general names prescribe a range of intuitions is solved
168 CHAPTER 6
by the fact that the experience of the named object can be completed. The
problem of how contexts prescribe backgrounds is solved by the fact that
contextual relations are exhausted in a perception of the object "itself". The
problem of how perspectives determine an epistemic ranking scheme is solved
by the fact that a content of consciousness can be measured by its "nearness"
to a presentation of the object as it really iso The mere possibility of such
adequation fixes the sense in wh ich one viewing-point comes "next" after
another.
The categories of limit also offer solutions to the three general problems
of synthesis. The problem of the ground of synthesis is solved by the fact
that the end-point of the perception of the thing "itself" draws each conte nt
towards the ideal. The problem of the mechanisms of passing over is solved
by the way each content reaches a limit in its ability to present the object,
and so advances in whatever direction is required by the ideal. The problem
of ideal forward- and backward-references in the face of the fact that expe-
rience in progress never actually ends or begins, is solved by the way
end-points are prescribed from the beginning of epistemic progress. Synthesis
begins where it ends, and the end-point is the possibility that inheres in all
of its mid-points.
The categories of limit also offer solutions to the special problems of per-
spective. The problem of whether there is a privileged viewing-point, within
which other perspectives are implicitly ordered, is solved by the way all per-
spectives can be reconciled in a final presentation of the object "itself". The
problem of how to guarantee that interpretation not be filled with gaps in expec-
tation is solved by the fact that the ideal end-point of perceptual adequation
ex hypothesi includes all ordered standpoints. It not only finishes off a stream
of contents but also holds all partial contents together at the end.
The categories of limit themselves work by means of a certain problem-
atic exemplified by Husserl 's use of the Scholastic notion of an intention
that "terminates" (terminieren, 118). A terminating intention, in Scholastic
terms, is simply one that intends a term: to terminate in an object is simply
to refer to the object. But in phenomenological terms, a terminating inten-
tion is one that brings an interpretative dynamic to its climax, synthesizing
consciousness with its objects. Does synthesis terminate with the immediate
presence of the object, or alternatively with syntheses carried out by the
subject? Is the "end-result" of synthesis a single perfect presentation at the end
of aseries of imperfect presentations, or is it the series itself gathering itself
together as it goes?
I will focus on the fifth and final chapter of LU vi, 1 on "The Ideal of
Adequation" (115-127), along with descriptions of end-points throughout
LU vi, 1. First, I will look at the teleological sense of synthesis: the "end-
result" is an "ideal limit". Second, I will consider whether synthesis ends
with a single flash or alternatively keeps on ending with each new presenta-
tion: the "end-result" problematizes the "last side" in perspectival viewing and
the "last member" in analysis. Third, I will consider how contents can retain
LU VI 169
their histories and their differenees onee they are overeome in a final unity:
the "end-result" is a "living finish", a closure that reeonstitutes the series as
it proeeeds.
Husserl says four things about the end-point as the "goal" (Ziel) toward whieh
synthesis "aims" (abzielen). First, no matter how much perspeetival viewings
inerease in eomplexity, if no omni-perspeetival "goal" is envisaged, pereep-
tions will not fulfil a self-identieal meaning-intention (67). Second, the
end-result must be a "goal which is closed off" (abschliessendes Ziel, 117)
(i) in that a subject must be able to imagine getting to the point where the
intended object is "itself' present, and (ii) in that the goal is the final arbiter
for whether a given eontent measures up to epistemie demands. Third, the end-
result is a "goal whieh one cannot stride over" (unüberschreitsbaren Ziel, 121).
The final eontent must assure that onee it has been carried out, the subjeet
will know that nothing more is needed - it must provide "evidenee" not only
of the objeet's presenee, but also of its own completedness. Fourth, the goal
operates as final eause which, although it may not in fact be reaehed, never-
theless pulls synthetic activity along behind it.
We have seen that a presentation reaehes "perfection" (117) or "eom-
pletion" (118) when it is brought from merely signitive to pereeptual matter
(116). An "absolute" or "all-sided presentation" (117) "direetly" presents the
object "itself" as it is "in truth", or "in its being". It "verifies" assertorie
judgments with "evidence" (121) as it reaehes an "ideal limit" (ideale Grenze,
117):
The consideration of the possible fulfilment relations thus points forwards to a goal of closing
off the levels of fulfilment, in which the full and whole intention has reached its fulfilment,
and to be sure not an intermediary and partial one, but has reached a last fulfilment whose
value is at the end [eine endgültige und letzte Erfüllung erreicht hat]. The intuitive substance
of this closing-off presentation is the absolute sum of possible fulness; the intuitive represen-
tant is the object itself, as it is in itself. Representing and represented content are here identically
one. And where a presentative intention has achieved, through this ideally perfect perception,
its last fulfilment. there is produced the genuine adaequatio rei et intellectus: The objective is
precisely as it is intended. really "present" or "given"; no partial intention is any longer implicit,
which lacks its fulfilment (117-118).
this agreement is lived in evidence in so far as evidence is the actual carrying-out of the
adequate identification ... The carrying-out of an identifying coincidence is not yet an actual
perception of objective agreement, but first becomes so through its own act of objectifying
interpretation, through its own glance towards the truth which is ready-to-hand (122-23).
agreement over an object's description, but that they agree on how to fill in
the gaps of their respective perceptions. The openness, and even the partial
incorrectness, of incomplete intuitions, does not prevent different intentions
from converging on a single object through revision, since the end to which
those different intentions lead forward is in all cases an apprehension of what
there "is". If synthesis were grounded at the beginning of cognitive investi-
gation, then if two subjects expected different intuitions, they could only be
satisfied by the presence of different objects. But if the subjects aim at the
end of interpretation, then they both aim to actualize different possibilities and
aim at the complete presentation of one and the same object.
There is, however, a peculiarity in this account, namely that the meaning
of an expression may be fulfilled by intuitions quite different from those which
the expression-user believes will satisfy it. If the end-point may be misap-
prehended at the beginning, then in order to guide interpretation from the
beginning, it must do so implicitly, not only when a subject does not think
of articulating it, but also when he would not or could not express it. Husserl
distinguishes the syntheses that adequately fulfil part-intentions, which are
expressed, from those that present the object "itself", which are "not expressed"
(123):
We find here [in evidence] several agreements brought to synthesis: one of these, the partial,
predicative one, is meant in the form of a claim, and adequately presented, and so is given
itself ... This is the agreement between subject and predicate, the fit of the latter to the
former. But in the second case, we have the agreement which produces the synthetic form of
the act of evidence, and thus produces the total coincidence between the meaning-intention of
the assertion (Aussage) and of the perception of the state of affairs itself, a coincidence natu-
rally carried out step by step, which here ceases to be at issue. This agreement is plainly not
asserted [or "said out loud", ausgesagt], it is not objective like the first, wh ich belongs to the
judged state of affairs. Doubtless it can at any time be asserted, and be asserted with evidence.
It then becomes the truth-generating (wahrmachend) state of affairs of a new evidence, of
which the same holds, and so on (124).
Again, there is a double end-point. First, each property which can be predi-
cated of the object in an assertion, may be perceived in a single act. While
no one of those predication-verifying perceptions is an adequate presenta-
tion of the object itself, the latter is only ever present as perspectivally
determined. The object itself, as the correlate of the totality of all synthetic
activity, is always present but never articulated as wholly present. The second
adequation, which closes the open system of part-adequations, is never present
as a whole-adequation that is carried out, but is always present in the form
of new part-adequations that can be carried out.
The end-point exists as that which underlies, generates, and lives on through
the steps of, the very open-ended end-points which it is supposed to close
off. The end-point must both be the ideal at which interpretative multiplici-
ties aim to co-terminate, and also the system of non-terminating part-intentions
understood in their unexpressed unity. But how can the end-point be both an
absolute closure of interpretation and yet exist only as the reopening of inter-
LU VI 173
relation. The goal may be one of pushing the process of fulfilment until it
has included at some point or other every content that it could include, or it
may be one which produces a single absolutely full content which no longer
has any need to refer back to any previously experienced content.
(iii) Finally, we can ask whether the end-point is an immediate result or a
mediated one. In discussing "the achievement of intuited intentions", Husserl
says that "the last outcome of the whole mediate process is an immediate
intention" (75). Yet it is not in an uninterpreted datum that the fulfilment-
process ends, but as a synthetic achievement, "the last ideal of perfection"
(121). Likewise in "the negative ideal of the last frustration" (126), it is by
arriving at the end of a search that an intuition falsifies a hypothesis. The
last intuition is last only in the context of other intentions and intuitions
which it either proves or challenges.
How, then, can synthesis result in immediacy? When Husserl says that
the ideal of adequation requires all-sided representation "in a single blow" (67),
is "singularity" achieved through a gradual process that is nevertheless unitary
in content, or alternatively achieved in a single instant that is nevertheless
manifold in content? Either way, the singularity of the blow is something
that has to be worked up to.
The final outcome of fulfilment must be both mediated and single-blowed,
both purified of, and full of, synthesis. On the one hand, Husserl writes: "Since
the last fulfilment may include nothing at all in the way of unfulfilled inten-
tions, it must, by the nature of its ground, follow from a pure perception; an
objectively complete perception, which nevertheless is carried out in the
manner of a continuous synthesis of impure perceptions, cannot suffice for us"
(119). Aseries of partial perceptions, synthesized in an ongoing way but incom-
plete at every moment and so never enclosed within a single content of
consciousness, can never count as ended even if every possible perspective has
been viewed at some time or other during the series. Yet evidence is also
"the act of the most perfect synthesis of fulfilment".
We may now draw the following conclusions. Having a perception of the
last side of an object does not count as having the object evidently present
unless the perception of the last side fits into, and finishes, a viewing that
continues to be present to consciousness. The last side without its history is
not a last fulfilment. But even as the last next-content in a continuous history,
the last side is not the ideal limit-point unless it presents the object in a
single blow. But for its side, the "single blow" is a synthetic achievement. It
cannot collapse multiple perspectives into a one-sided viewing, nor can it
turn a number-concept or a scientific category from something that can be
defined in many ways into something that can be defined only in a single
way, nor can it take something that is by nature the result of a certain ordering
of its parts (e.g. a number, a narrative picture, or a history) and turn it into
something that can be seen or understood all at once, or with no order, or
with any order at all. The all-sided perception without a history is no more
a last fulfilment than is the one last side. The end-point must be both a singular
176 CHAPTER 6
The problem for the end-point is that every time perception moves to make
one side of an object present, it loses the presence of the previous side. The
all-sided object is no more present in the last fulfilment than in the first, and
the process of epistemic fulfilment is an infinite fading-away where every
perceptual achievement is instantly forgotten. It is true that there are some
senses of synthesis that would apply even to pointless rotations: perceptions
could still "follow" one another in the right order, and identify sides of the
same object. But on this model there is no synthesis which gradually builds
up a viewing of the whole object. There cannot, on the model of balanced
gain and loss, be any ideal end-point, and hence there could be no limit on
the directions for further viewing, and hence no principle to distinguish direct
from digressive side-views, and finally no principle to decide whether one side
really "follows" next after another. For a "whoIe synthesis" requires growth
towards a "non-oversteppable goal". It requires that "succession" operate in
the whole-system of interpretative synthesis, and not just in individual twists
and turns. It requires that some cognitive act compensate for the perceptual
losses incurred step by step.
The issue of the retention of incomplete standpoints in synthetic unity
is, however, difficult to pin down as a Husserlian issue. For while Husserl
articulates the problem of fulfilment as one of loss-management, and defines
the end-point as the "closure" of a chain (73, 117), he nevertheless insists
throughout LU that meaning-fulfilments are not "genetic" in their presenta-
tive content:
Many an element of fulness counts for us, as a presentation that counts as the end - always
independent of all those that are genetic, since those latter, like all similar variations, grow by
virtue of association (117).
intention directed at his own thought-processes. Yet the lesson is not that
incomplete presentations cease to be necessary once perception becomes
allsided, but rather that they must be re-ordered once the whole is mapped
out. The very fact that it does not matter which perception followed which
in subjective experience, shows that objective interpretation redistributes them
in a new order based on the relations among the object's own parts.
On my construal, the end-point is constituted in the redistribution of always
incomplete standpoints according to interpretations whose telos is a whole-
synthesis. A new content avoids losing its predecessor, then, by re-ordering
it in a new mastering intention; the predecessor is interpreted no Ion ger as
something experienced at a particular time, but as an ideal possibility subsumed
within a whole. Both ideality and wholeness are constituted in this recon-
struction: ideality because factual histories are transformed into possibilities
for re-interpretation, and wholeness because new acts demand the re-arrange-
ment of all its predecessors in a new objectifying interpretation.
My construal of the end-point bears not only on the end-point of syn-
thesis, but also on its starting-point and its mid-points. In terms of the end-point
itself, my construal permanently problematizes the sense in which an object
may be present "in one blow" (67, 70, 73). For on my construal, the "end-
point" is not a name for a super-content which solves the problem of unified
interpretation, but rather a name for any content in so far as it demands the
re-ordering of its predecessors.
For example, when all four right-angled sides of a house have been seen
in order, and the fourth corner is rounded and the first side is seen again,
the experience of the several sides is transformed into an experience of the
house as present in all sides. It is not that all sides are really present at once;
nor does the experience of a side exactly similar to one already seen guar-
antee that the same side is being seen a second time; nor does a succession
of four one-sided viewings guarantee that the viewer's image of the whole
ground-plan is correct; nor indeed do four perceptions in succession, even if
that is all there are, present the object as a whole and all at on ce in one final
view. What is important about the completion of the fourth side and the
return to the first is the way the succession is closed off. To complete the
viewing, the last side must be interpreted as leaving no room for a fifth right
angle on the floor-plan, and it must do this by fixing the relative place of
each of the four sides already viewed. The perception of the fourth side
avoids losing the evidence of the first just because, in setting limits to the
re-ordering of its precedents, i.e. in counting them up, it leaves room for
nothing around the next corner except the first side. Of course, this closure
of possible sides is neither absolute (since if "side" is construed broadly as any
aspect, there will always be infinite "sides" to be seen), nor indeed peculiar
to the fourth side. It is in this sense that synthetic closure is a feature not
just of the very last experience but also of every moment interpreted as the
end of its predecessors. The perception of the second side anticipates a third
just because, in attaching to the first, it cannot close off the outer walls of
LU VI 179
the house without a third side; the second side uses the problematics of closure
to refer back to the first so as to anticipate the third. Even the experience of
the first side gets interpreted as the side of a house only because the closure
of the house's walls is already having a backward effect, differentiating the
walled object from previously experienced objects and demanding the sup-
plementation of its other sides. It is by referring backward from an end-point
which has not been reached that ongoing acts of interpretation master whole
syntheses. A single incomplete content, "singled out from the succession" (67),
Le. as one moment in the pointless side-to-side rotation of a perceived object,
by itself can neither count as an end-point, nor ground the passing over to
the next side. Yet incomplete contents are precisely those within which com-
pletion is recognized - not in so far as they are assessed one at a time, but
in so far as each one re-places its precedents into the succession which it closes,
and is already re-placed into a more fully closed succession which cannot
yet even have taken place.
Hence, in discussing the last fulfilment of the number concept 5 34, Husserl
says:
Plainly the act of fulfilment would not really have corresponded only to the end-result, but [would
have corresponded] already to each single step wh ich led over from one expression to the next,
clarifying it and enriching its content (69).
The intuition of units does not itself count as the intuition of 5 34 unless the
subject reconstructs the complex number even as he divides it up. The syn-
thesis of fulfilment locates within every act both openness (since each act
runs through its predecessors in a fresh way) and closure (since each act
introduces a new end-point by which to order its predecessors). The counting
subject must at every step not forget his place, he must not forget what number
he began counting down from or how small the units are that he expects
to end with, he must not forget whether he is counting by ones, twos,
or multiples of five, and he must not forget what the countability of a unit
amounts to. That is, he must experience each division as a unit which makes
the next part of the whole present - not so as to forget the last part, but
so as to remember that the next was implicit all along and that past and
present units are to be recounted together. Each number in the chain of divi-
sions retains the foregoing numbers, then, not because any one of the numbers
counting down from five to one includes its predecessors, nor because any
one formula (e.g. 3 + 1 + 1) or equation (e.g. 5 = 3 + 1 + 1) names its
predecessor (4 + 1 or 5 = 4 + 1), but just because the countdown is closed
by the reaching of ultimate units, and because this ideal closure, reachable
or not, confers upon each step the characteristic of referring back to its
origination in its predecessor.
The pencil-sketch too suggests that closure corresponds not only to the
last step but to all steps constituted by the last as the foregoing. Husserl
introduced the pencil-sketch as a fulfilment series achieved "in a synthetic
multiplicity" which "is achieved piece by piece and always muddied through
180 CHAPTER 6
such additions" (67). While falling short of the one-blowed "ideal of ade-
quation", it reaches precisely the kind of finish appropriate to it. It is finished
precisely because of its endless "additions" or "postscripts" (Zusatz) and is
clarified precisely because its outline is "muddied" by its details. Its last ful-
filment is "the full-of-life finish of the painting", or differently translated,
"the lived having-been-carried-out painting" (lebensvoll ausgeführte Gemälde,
67). Now, when one says that a painting has come to life, one often means
that the fictional object has been represented in a way that is true to life.
But Husserl, for whom paintings are never to be confused with authentie
perceptions, says here that it is the painting itself that lives. Or to be precise,
it is the painting in the final state of having been carried out that is full of
life. It is the end-result that is lived. Finishing touches on their own, as the
last flecks of colour, the last figure to complete the narrative, and so on,
would not be much to look at. Indeed the same holds true for the last con-
clusion to an argument, the last effect in a causal sequence, or of course the
last percept in a visual examination - the finishing touch (almost a transla-
tion of Zusatz) is in itself merely a detail that touches up, and sets off in
relief, the foregoing series. We have said that the filled-in painting reacti-
vates its outlines. But the end-point not only "puts into practice" (again
ausführen) the outlines themselves, but also reactivates the "whoie synthesis"
as aseries of "passings over" from drawing to sketch to picture to painting.
The last fleck is the missing link whieh allows the whole series of interacti-
vating flecks to be run through anew.
The end-point is a living finish, and corresponds to the whole process
leading up to it, just because it is by nature the re-making of unending incom-
plete parts into a new totality; the end-point is a new version of the series,
a new individual content of experience, but it brings the object "itself"
to presence in so far as it reopens the incomplete versions as closing
themselves off. The object "itself" is absolutely present if it is present in
a way that allows all of its possibilities to be run through explicitly. The
end-point is experienced when all imaginable perceptions are constituted as
having been previously experienced, and when every previous intuition
is re-interpreted as one which has led to the point where the experience
now stands. It is reached in so far as an experience refers back to prior
experiences as referring forward to it.
If we now go back to ask the most general questions about synthetie activity,
namely why contents of consciousness anticipate objectifying completion-
points, or why there is a dynamic for contents to synthetically pass over in
succession, the categories of limit supply the answer in reverse. Instead of
treating each content as the starting-point for a synthetic combination, the
categories of limit treat each content as an end-point. The individual content
is not at first something that needs to have its synthetic combinations explained,
but rather from the first is the explication of synthetic connections, of forward
and backward references. A perspectival perception, or a stage in an argument,
anticipates the next side or the next conclusion just because it is already closing
LU VI 181
182
LU VI 183
next-neighbours and fix common boundaries. But there remains a problem con-
cerning the determinacy of the next content. Third, if the intention is a kind
of perspective- or cognitive-system ordered by weight, the determinacy of next-
contents is grounded by the fact that the complexity of each content generates
the momentum for filling in its successor. But then there is a problem con-
cerning interpretative gaps. Finally, if the intention is a kind of limit point
to an object's presentation, excess and missing intuitions are avoided by the
way an intention includes all and only those intuitions whose presence would
be demanded in a perfect presentation of the object "itself". That is, the
intention anticipates a range of intuitions from the beginning of synthesizing
activity just because it is al ready a product of the limit point at the end. The
end-point orders its own precedents into a succession of next-points.
An act of consciousness intends an object, then, by (a) tracing back a history
of previous acts, (b) reorganizing those previous acts into a common inter-
pretation, (c) re-tracing that history back up to the present act so as to fix
its degree of completion in the present, and (d) referring forwards to a content
that would complete, by completely referring back to, the epistemic project
posited to have begun. The dynamic for passing over from each act to the
next from beginning to end is located in each singular act, as it simultane-
ously divides itself into aseries of actual and/or possible experiences and
unifies itself into a potentially all-sided totality. The content of each act refers
forwards and backwards by setting in motion a system of tracings and retrac-
ings according to which it is itself a forward- and backward-referent of ideal
starting- and end-points.
It is because the end-point is a Jorward-referring point from which prede-
cessors are re-ordered, that contents differentiate themselves from their
predecessors. If the all-sided result of epistemic synthesis had to consist in
the very last act in aseries somehow holding all its predecessors in one, the
problem of the retention of precedessors as incomplete standpoints would be
unresolvable. But the last fulfilment rather unifies a singular interpretation pre-
cisely by reconstructing the limitations of its many sides. It is not that
everything experienced is remembered, or that a meaning is identical to the
history of its associative connections. The point is rather that an interpreta-
tion is the transformation of an experiential content into an actual or possible
history whose re-tracing can warrant future progress. That is to say, the
starting-point for interpretation is a backward-referring point from which
implicit anticipations are grounded.
This preview allows us to resolve the four problems of synthesis drawn from
LU vi.
(i) The fourth, namely that of how a content incorporates its predeces-
sors, is solved by the way each content interprets the world by redistributing
previous experiences along achain within which that content constitutes an
advance.
(ii) The third problem, namely that of how an end-content closes off epis-
temic advance in the midst of endless series of perceptions, is solved by the
184 CHAPTER 6
way each content fixes its further needs for supplementation precisely by
retracing those already achieved. A content carries an expectation to intuit
all and only those properties whose presence once perceived can be interpreted
as already having unfolded in prior contents.
(iii) The second problem, namely that of "next"-contents, is solved by the
way that each content both has and is a backward referent. Each is automat-
ically a next-point, and anticipates that perception which will have to refer
back to it as immediately past.
(iv) The first problem, namely that of how intuitions are subsumed under
an intention in general, is solved by the way each content refers back, through
previous experiences of the same object, to the ideal possibility of experiencing
that object in general, which is to say to the ideal meaning-intention, and to
the ideal meaning-fulfilment.
The categories of referring back also solve the problems of synthesis in
the first five Investigations.
(i) The problem of synthesis in the first Investigation concerns how there
can be ideal units of meaning even though every expression is embedded in
the thought-horizons of individual subjects at individual times and places. I
argued that ideal meanings are constituted by those acts which purge occa-
sional associations. Though every meaning carries accidental associations,
every occasion of meaning-use refers back to the sense that that meaning would
have had prior to its associations. Even the purest syllogism operates within
synthetic combinations, though its task is to derive only that which is implicit
in the terms it refers back to.
(ii) The problem in the second Investigation concerns how there can be
universal objects given their ground in synthetic combinations of individ-
uals. The solution is that synthesis produces novel intentional objects
interpreted as not being so produced. Uni versals and individuals both become
possible objects just when universals refer back to syntheses of individuals
in such a way as to exclude those very references.
(iii) The problem in the third Investigation eoncerns the objectivity
of wholes and parts. Parts are divisible only with reference back to the
whole which is thereby detailed, and the whole can be composed only
with reference back to the parts' mutually satisfying demands for supple-
mentation. Referring backward in both directions at onee gives to objeetifying
interpretation what I have called a self-propelling dynamic towards self-
explieation.
(iv) The problem in the fourth Investigation is that this self-propelling expli-
eation is represented in expressions by syncategorematic terms, which have no
meaning on their own. Synthetic connectedness always has the character
of having already been given in advance as the apriori history of all possi-
bilities of expression.
(v) The problem in the fifth Investigation concerns the eompeting priori-
ties of names and predications, perceptions and judgments. The structure of
competing priorities of seemingly distinct types of acts is precisely what
LU VI 185
There are of course several ways of construing this passage. It might just
mean that complex fulfilments are buHt up out of, or are divisible into, simple
or partial fulfilments; or that indirect presentations (e.g. presentations of an
object at a distance) are possible only if they give some evidence as to how
an object could be directly presented (e.g. up close); or that complete fulfil-
186 CHAPTER 6
ment presupposes prior incomplete fulfilments. Yet the passage does not
say that mediate acts are inferior versions of immediate acts, but instead
attributes to mediate fulfilments a proper activity of their own, namely that
they refer backward. And while the passage does attribute a kind of first-
ness to immediate intentions, it does so just because the achievement of
immediate intentions is the very last thing that mediate fulfilments achieve.
Hence, for example, the experience of a house leads back to intuitions of
sides of, or bricks of, the house, not because those latter were seen first, but
because the experience sets in motion a process of retrieving intuitions whose
objects are posited as "already" there. Furthermore, the end-result not only
decides which intuitions were closer to the end; it also designates certain
intuitions and intentions as always having been present no matter how the
house is interpreted, i.e. it also fixes absolute starting-points for epistemic
fulfilment.
The question of the results of synthesis is thus a question of how cogni-
tion posits immediate intentions as having been present all along. Cognition
has end-points only in so far as it can produce the implicitness of beginning-
points. A subject can refer forwards to a complete presentation of a house
(or a theory or a subject) only in so far as he can refer back through the
his tory of his actual experiences to an ideal history of immediate sense-
contents, of one-at-a-time fulfilments, of simple judgments, and of infinite
one-sided perspectives narrowing and expanding and shifting in focus and
distance.
The notion that the result of synthetic activity is a function of interpreta-
tion that refers back to what there was all along can be described either (i)
from the standpoint of the result itself as a goal, or (ii) from that of the
process which has that goal.
(i) The result of synthetic activity is the identification of an object as that
which it was meant to be from the beginning. The identification is thus what
Aristotle calls .o.l tfv elvut, the "what it was to be", the final cause. And
as for Aristotle, the ultimate final cause is for Husserl the ultimate efficient
cause and the ultimate formal cause: it is that which allows immediate inten-
tions to generate complex intentions and that which gives order to multiplicities
of interpretative matter. One could say that this order is grounded at the
beginning from the end: each content, as a content whose epistemic worth is
conferred retrospectively by an ideal end-point, acquires thereby the poten-
tial to rate the value of succeeding contents. Each presupposes an end-point
in order to be drawn to the next content in succession. Alternatively, we
could say that the order is grounded from the beginning at the end: any com-
pletion is determined as such by counting back to see how far it has come.
Each content presupposes a starting-point in order to have been drawn from
the previous content. In short, even though no single experience may be
absolutely immediate or complete, both end-point and starting-point are
presupposed as prior. The results of synthesis are in this sense always absent,
but because their absence takes the form of being posited in order for indi-
LU VI 187
overflow. In general, the content of an act in transit, having found in its past
the meaning content that it itself put into the past, and indeed having con-
structed the past out of its own excess, henceforth possesses a context from
which it can draw anticipations for its successors and final goals. This back-
tracking interpretation for the sake of interpretative progress is wordless, since
the very distinction between prior words and posterior intuitions is already a
product of interpretative synthesis.
So a subject sees by the side of the road an unnamed object; the intuition
actualizes some interpretation, so that the object is seen as a milestone; the
interpretation then streams backwards, so that earlier experiences are inter-
preted to have anticipated the present intuition, as if the sentence 'There is
another milestone ahead' had earlier been expressed; the present intuition is
thus interpreted as the fulfilment of a prior meaning-intention; the interpreted
present and the present's re-interpreted past together make up a continuous
progression generated from the present end-point but precisely for that reason
interpreted as having been grounded in earlier experiences; the experience
of the object as an ancient Roman milestone is an experience of being in the
middle of a joumey with miles al ready covered and more still to go: the present
streams back in order for the future to be grounded in the past. That con-
sciousness must refer back in order to interpret the present is exhibited even
more strikingly in cases where the interpretation of an object marks its novelty
rather than its continuity with the past. If an object were interpreted as posting
a different mileage than expected, or as a book in Hölderlin's handwriting
instead of Goethe's, the subject's response would be 'So that is what I have
been looking atlsearching for all along', and so on. On Husserl's doctrine of
reminiscience, an act of knowing is always grounded in the most distant past
just because each act fixes an object as something which has been guiding
interpretation all along.
There is an obvious problem. I have so far articulated the categories of
referring backward, which start with acts requiring a history, without
reference to those forward-referring categories that start with acts with the
potential for future explications. But if the ground of an interpretation is
conferred entirely retrospectively, a given content could set in motion any
interpretation whatsoever, and so validate any anticipations whatsoever. The
categories of referring backward seem to show that the very experiential history
that a subject would appeal to when verifying interpretations is itself an arbi-
trary result of the synthesis of identification that it was supposed to have
validated.
When Husserl describes the looseness of interpretation that result~ from
the insufficient determinacy of the past in relation to·possible re-interpreta-
tions, his descriptions both ac count for a common phenomenon and warn
against an excess of skepticism. He describes two apparently opposite phe-
nomena: first, where "the re-production (Reproduktion) of imagined words lags
far behind (zurückbleibt) the trains of thought re-productively re-vived through
each intuition" (61); second, involving "the extraordinary ease with which
190 CHAPTER 6
into words. The idea is not just that experience contains unnamed designa-
tions waiting to get expressed. Syntheses of recognition get expressed neither
in complete or incomplete sets of names, sentences, passages, or books, nor
in a peculiar wordless text, but rather in a total discourse continuously tuming
back towards its own prior expressions and indications in order to draw new
grounds for self-explication. More unified than a closed text precisely because
of the gaps between texts that it presupposes (in unexpressed possibilities), the
expression of synthetic interpretation takes the form of an archive full of
mutually accessible texts, each of which consists of a re-reading of the others.
Wordless recognition is an intertextual system's self-exegesis of its own history.
To conclude, the ground of synthesis is given "in advance" (von vornherein)
just because current cognition always recognizes that something was there
before all along. Synthesis is grounded not in immediate contents, but in the
references back from mediate to immediate contents; not in simple judg-
ments, but in the references back from ongoing interpretation to a background
of objective states of affairs; not in a pure ego but in the references back
from open-ended directions of interpretative consciousness to an underlying
unity and structure of consciousness. Synthesis is grounded in the ongoing
processes of consciousness, precisely in so far as those processes refer back
to apriori structures of subjectivity and objectivity.
The self-interpretation of intentional consciousness thus leads back to the
unity of consciousness in three directions. First, to a unified world of objects;
second, to a gap-free stream of interpretation carried out by a unified subjective
consciousness; and third, to the processes of interpretation themselves, to
the structures of its own understanding, Le. to the phenomenological science
of the apriori grounds of synthesis. In LU, it is the reference back to science,
rather than to the lived world or the transcendental ego, that is decisive.
NOTES
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
(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).
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).
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
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". What had just been its theme has not
disappeared from consciousness; it is still consciously apprehended, but no longer in thematic
grasp (254).
The ego posits its activity and its passivity, its transcendentality and the
transcendence of its objects, the empirical world and the ideal sciences, the
unity of its world-interpretation and the different spheres of intentionality,
its actualities and its potentialities, all in the same synthesis of drawing back.
For by grasping its points of entry into the world as something still retained,
consciousness treats every new content of experience as a distraction - poten-
tially innocuous, potentially an explication of what has been, potentially a new
thematic altogether - but in itself some kind of whistle that forces two dis-
tanced contents to be inserted and retained in one interpretation not quite
big enough or organized enough to hold them both. At once meditating at
his study and hearing the outside whistle, Husserl's ego takes up two per-
spective points at once; unlike Descartes's ego at a similar desk, Husserl's
can be distracted, and this call from the external world to abandon a percep-
tual standpoint is at the same time a division between external causes and inner
experience, and a confirrnation that the world is intact despite the distances
that separate its parts. In fact, every look is a look away, every point of inser-
tion is a point of departure, every location leaves other locations behind -
behind as behind. Indeed this is the only way that locations ever were and ever
can be, namely in so far as they have had their places saved for them in advance
by other places. Just as Fichte's ego posits an external world as non-ego,
Husserl's ego posits itself by constituting a world-interpretation as the storage
space for its own past experience. The underlying unity of interpretation stores
the prior conditions for syntheses of identification and fulfilment by inter-
preting each content as that which the ego recognizes itself as being drawn
back to. The ego withdraws from current concerns into self-reflection at pre-
cisely the same point as the map of the world itself is drawn up. The storage
space in consciousness for presupposed conditions of experience, and the
storage space in the world for co-existing states of affairs, are constituted in
one and the same withdrawal/drawing back. In short, no content can gain a
point of entry into consciousness except in so far as it is relocated into a storage
space for retentions and backward referents.
While the above is by no means a complete account of Husserl's theory
of the ego in Ideen I, it does suggest an account. The ego is a product of
completed synthesis. Yet at the same time, it would be correct to say that
the ego is a pure identity prior to and indifferent to its experiences, its syn-
thesizing interpretations, and its objective world. For the priority of its own
underlying self-identity is something that consciousness, as it were, slips
underneath itself every time it synthesizes experiences under objectifying
interpretations. The ego is a receptacle, a framework, and a storage space
for actual and possible experience, and for explicit and implicit forward and
backward referents, just because along with the insertion of any experiential
content, consciousness achieves receptivity, prescriptive structure, and the self-
reflective ability to draw upon its own achievements.
Finally, in addition to offering a solution to the problem of the storage of
implicit backward referents, the synthesis of drawing back to the ego also
202 APPENDIX
"source" to which rationality "leads back" (320), namely the whole "system
of manifolds" (318).
The final section of Ideen 1 returns to the question of the unity of
the philosophical sciences and its role in the unity of consciousness.
Phenomenology marks out a region for itself as a distinct endeavor of con-
sciousness, namely to describe the structures of the rest of consciousness,
and furthermore grounds its own possibility in its relations to the rest of con-
sciousness. In thereby carrying the demands for the unification of all synthetic
consciousness, phenomenological science refers its rationality backward to
its source and so reconstitutes the whole system of distinguished spheres of
conscious acts under a new system of ordering, wherein consciousness as a
whole is a system devoted to grounding its own rationality. In so far as phe-
nomenological science looks back on its own results, it finds without exception
that
objectivities which were at first given (or thought of in Idea as given) in monothetic acts, in
mere experiences, let us say, can be made subject to the play of synthetic operations, and
through synthetic objectivities constitute increasingly higher formations which in the unity of
the total thesis contain a plurality of theses, and in the unity of their total material contain a
plurality of mutually detachable materials (320-1).
and the spheres of synthetic objectivities still revolve about consciousness. But
in another sense, it is only when the spheres separate off that there is any centre
to refer back to. The workings-through of the demands of objective consti-
tution make one solution out of both the rational and the not yet rational.
The science of phenomenology is precisely the self-explicating dynamic that
consciousness always already had to have been in advance. And conscious-
ness's investigation of the logic of its categories becomes the synthesis of
backward reference that is its investigation of itself and of the world.
Consciousness is Logical Investigations.
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Yamaguchi, Ichiro, Passive Synthesis und Intersubjektivität bei Edmund Husserl (The Hague:
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INDEX
Apriori, 2, 5, 14, 18-20, 26, 41-2, 57, 99 Leibniz to Husserl, 4-10, 33-7
as backward referent, 33, 35,74, 86-7, as grounding category, 182-95
89, 103, 106-7, 143, 165, 192 in logic, 40-4
Absence, 97, 140-1, 163, 187 in objectification, 47-9
Absolute, 5-6, 29, 32-3, 35,121,173-4,200 in universals and individuals, 61-7
Abstraction, 4, 42, 44, 52-4, 59-66 in wholes and parts, 78, 85-7
Activity, 17,38, 156-7, 166, 199-201 in syncategorematic terms, 96,103,107-8
as starting-point, 7, 48, 52, 55, 67-8, 89, in names and judgments, 110, 112-23
106-8, 129, 173, 187-8 in syntheses of fulfi1ment, 132, 139,
Actualization, of objective presence, 91, 157 142-3, 146-7, 156, 158, 163-5, 168,
as fulfilment, 16, 30, 35,111-3,171,176, 179-95
189, 193,200 and the ego, 196-204
ofpossibilities, 39, 47-8, 56,102,137-9, Back sides (Rückseite) in perspective, 154,
142-3, 147, 157, 188, 193 156-60
Adequation, 110, 125, 161-2, 166-76 Background,54n, 75-6,91,93,136-43,148,
Adorno, Theodor, 16,29,32 156, 168, 188, 200
Aggregates, 54-5, 110 Bar-Hillel, Yohoshua, 105
Agreement, 23, 144, 170-3, 193 Beginnings of interpretation (see starting-
Aguirre, Antonio, 28, 35-6 point), 34-6, 46-7, 52, 135, 146, 151,
Aim, 17,26,125,128,169,171-2 172,183,186
Alberti, Leon Battista, 152 Belonging together (zusammengehören), 13,
Always already, 59-60, 78, 85, 102, 107, 25,74-5,79-80,90,114,130-3,151
156, 159, 193,204 Beyond (hinaus), pointing, 26, 80, 82, 120,
Alteration, 45, 62-4, 75, 80, 148 135, 150, 153
Analysis, 4-5,17,23, 105, 114, 116-7, 120, Blending, 73, 77, 79
168, 174 Bloch, Ernst, 176
Anticipation, 1-3,7,36,39,66,94, 114, Blurring, 44
135-7, 138, 141-2, 146, 154-5, 159, Bolzano, Bernard, 92
166,171,178 Borders, 76-9, 81-2, 86, 146, 153-7, 163
indeterminacy, 144-6, 155-7, 163, 173 Bracketing, 200
and backward reference, 159, 181, 183-4, Building, 53, 85, 106-7, 110, 164
189, 191 Bultrnann, Rudolf Karl, 176
Application, ofrules, 5,15-6,37,47,58-60,
64, 100, 104, 106, 134 Calling by name, 129-31
Arbitrariness, 75, 82-7, 189-92 Caputo, John D., 24
Arithmetic, 164-6, 173-4, 179, 187 Carr, David, 15, 25-6
Ars combinatoria, 88, 99, 101, 103-6 Carrying out (vollziehen) syntheses, 37, 39,
Artificial intelligence, 89, 100 180, 197-8
Assertion, 172, 197 over into (vertragen), 147, 149, 157
Association, 3-4, 40-2 Cartesian Meditations, 124
Atoms, 76, 105, 117, 119 Categorematic terms, 24, 88-108
Attention, 33, 42, 52-3 Chains, 83, 164-5, 170-1, 179
Chomski, Noam, 97
Bachelard, S., 16 Circumscription of anticipations, 39, 42, 83,
Backward Reference (zurückweisen, and 93,96, 127, 129, 138, 149
other zurück terms), problem of, 1-3 Closure, problem of, 6, 16, 19, 35-6
211
212 INDEX
Dreyfus, Hubert L., 15-7, 23, 34, 100 Filling in/out, 76, 85-7, 94, 115, 138-9, 147,
Dynamic, 9, 73, 87, 133-5, 151, 183 154, 157-9, 170-2, 180
Finish, of fulfilment, 158-9, 165-6, 335
&lie, James Mo, 18, 100, 105 finishing touch, 180-1
Ego, 2, 20, 32-5, 45, 142 Fink, Eugen, 29, 54n
as backward referent, 121, 192, 196-204 Fitting, 40, 134-8, 144, 151-2, 172, 190
Eley, Lothar, 16-8,20,22,27,31-3,35, 106 Fixing reference, 23, 44-9, 51, 78, 82, 87,
Empiricism, 14, 16-7,52,54, 122, 127, 143 95-6, 103-4, 121, 128, 134-9, 168
Empty meaning-intention, 40, 134-7 and backward reference, 178, 183-4, 189
End-results, problem of, I, 3, 21, 34, 36-7 Flow, 18-20, 26-7, 32, 44, 81, 200
in meaning, 40, 46-7, 85, 117 Fluctuation, 38-40, 44-9, 56-7
content of, 125, 151-2, 158, 163-7, 202 Flux, 2, 24, 32, 38, 44, 139, 153-4
and backward reference, 120, 183-7, F011esdal, Dagfinn, 23
189-91, 194 Following, 4, 38, 43, 58, 97, 103, 138, 164,
as limit, 169-73 175,177
as last fulfilment, 173-6 Foreground, 140-2
as closure, 176-81 Foreshortening (Verkürzung), 94, 152-4,
Endless continuity, 28, 42, 48, 83, 95, 129, 157-60
162, 180, 183 Form, and content, 1~-9, 36, 55, 62-4, 84,
Epistemological interpretations of Husserl, 89, 106-8, 116-7, 135, 159, 186
14, 21-3, 54n Formallogic, 15-7,42,60,67,86,92-3,96,
Ergänzungsbedürjtigkeit, see Supplementa- 98-108, 145-6, 202
tion, demand/need for Forward reference (Hinweisen), problem of,
Evans, Jo Claude, 19 1-4
Evidence, 21, 53, 55-8, 169, 170, 172, 175 Leibniz to Husserl, 4-10
Exactness, 44, 49, 57, 133, 151 to universals, 67-8
Excess, 26, 183, 189 to categorematic terms, 88, 90, 93, 96,
Exchange (Vertauschung) (see Replacement, 107
Substitution), 99-102 to complete fulfilment, 35, 39, 43,120-1,
Exclusion, 57, 92, 98-9, 145-7 125, 134, 151-2, 168, 180, 183, 185-
Expansion, 47, 81, 83, 85, 93-6 6, 188-95
Expectation, 6, 25-6, 94,138-48, 153, 171- Foundation, 53, 67, 132
2, 183, 188 of wholes in parts, 81-5
Experience, lived (and lifeworld), 7, 35,64, of syncategorematic terms in synthetic
89,97,135,139,149-50,153,171, experiences, 94, 96-8, 102, 107-8
180 of expressions in presentations, 109-12,
Explication, of singular meanings into judg- 115, 121-3
ments, 91-2, 102, 112, 114-9, 121-2, of unity in conflict, 144-7
174 Fragment, 90-1, 93-5, 138, 140-1, 143, 156,
and reference forward, 189, 194 159, 170, 173
self-, I, 184, 192, 202, 204 Freud, Sigmund, 89, 97-8, 103
Explicit, 26, 113, 139-41, 142-3, 149, 166, Frustration of meaning-fulfilment, 144-8,
180, 185, 202 175
Expression, 23-4, 38-49 Fulfilment, problem of, 1-2, 6-7
linguistic, 88-106 in secondary literature, 13, 17, 22, 26, 30,
in linguistic philosophy, 105-6, 134-5 35
in dreams, 97-8 and intention, 38-40, 44
in names and judgments, 112, 117, 120 and universals, 52, 55, 58
and fulfulment, 125, 127, 172, 188-92 of names and judgments, 91, 95-100,
107
Fantasy, 75, 199 syntheses of, 125, 127-9, 133-46, 154-5,
Fein, Ho, 20 157, 159, 161-6
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 33, 59 end of, 170-1, 173-80, 185-6, 188-90,
Fields, visual, 41, 46, 75-9, 86, 137, 150, 152 201
214 INDEX
Functional distinction, 39, 45, 53, 59-60, 75, Ideen I, 27, 33, 47,123,195,196-204
88, 90-4, 102, 119 Identification, 5-7, 13, 16, 23-4, 36, 38,
Futural anticipation, 6, 18, 176, 187, 189 43-5,63-7,125,127-35,144-5,150--
1, 176, 183, 186, 197-8, 201-2
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 59 Images, 46, 52, 54n, 58, 60, 75, 97-8, 129,
Gap-holding (lückenhaft), 36, 43, 94-5, 147, 160--1
154-5, 157, 159-60, 163, 167 Immanence, 19-21,29,30
role in synthesis, 170--2, 192, 203 Immediacy, 35, 45-6, 54n, 56-8,66, 81-2,
gap-free synthesis, 160, 166, 168, 192 84-6,121-2,175,185-7,192
Genetic, 19, 28, 35-6, 53-4, 54n, 59, 177, Implicit possibilities, 2, 33-5, 39, 60, 73,
188 78, 85-6, 91, 113-4, 140--3, 167,
Gestalt interpretations of Husserl, 17-9 169-70
Geyser, Joseph, 33 and backward reference, 183-6, 195-6,
Givenness, synthesis prior to, 5, 7, 56, 75, 199,202
136, 193, 198,200 In advance (von vornherien), 2, 18, 62, 66-
in secondary literature, 17, 21, 26, 31-4, 8, 86, 88-9, 103, 120--1, 131, 134-6,
73 138, 149, 151, 156, 166, 170
Glancing back ward and forward, 42-4, 47-8, and backward reference, 48-9, 181, 184,
116, 159, 171, 198 188, 191-3,201
Graduated fulfilment, 125, 133, 161-5 Inclusion (Inklusion, Inbegriff), 57, 83, 111-
gradual alteration, 77, 156, 175, 177 3, 120, 145-7, 149, 163, 166-8
Grammar, 24, 90, 98-100, 103-6 and closure, 174-6, 179, 183
Grasping, 5, 85-7, 135, 197-9 Incompleteness, 49, 90--8, 125-6, 154, 170,
Ground (Grund), 1-3, 20, 25, 28, 32, 35, 172, 175-80, 183
142-3,168,186,189,192,193-4,203 Independence, 3,'9, 20--1, 23, 33, 49, 67
of universals in individuals, 52-68 of universals, 52, 59, 63-4, 66
Gurwitsch, Aron, 17,19,27, 54n of parts, 63, 74-82, 87
Gutting, Gary, 54n of meanings, 88,92, 94-5, 101,104
of names, 110, 118-9
Habit, 2-4, 52, 138-42, 149, 151, 192 in synthesis, 143, 150, 194
Hanna, Robert, 21 Indeterminacy, 39-40, 83, 85, 138
Harris, Errol E., 29 Indexing (see Occasional), 14, 23-4, 45-6,
Hegel, G. W. F., 5-6, 8-9, 28-33, 59, 84, 130
103, 106, 147, 176, 194 Indicative signs, 40--6, 97, 128, 130--1
Heidegger, Martin, 13, 24, 28, 30, 176 Individuals, 2, 7, 9, 33-7, 40--2
Herbart, Johann Friedrich, 17 meanings, 44-5, 48
History , in secondary literature, 6, 16, 27, and universals, 51-68
29-30, 33-6 parts, 76-7, 82-4, 86-7
retention of in synthetic results, 57, 59, synthesis of, 128-33, 156-7, 159, 180,
123-4, 131, 152, 165, 175-6, 178, 192-5
183, 187, 189-90, 193, 194 Ingarden, Roman, 20
Horizon, 22, 28, 31, 45-9 Inseparability, 75-9
Hoyos Vasquez, Guillermo, 18, 27 Insertion, 197-8, 200--202
Hülsmann, Heinz, 18 Insight, 43, 56
Hume, David, 3-4, 8, 61-2, 131 Instruments (and tools), 16, 18, 188, 190--1
Interpenetrating parts, 74, 77-80, 143
"1",44-6 Interruption, 49, 80, 93, 134, 137, 140--3,
Idealism, 17, 20--1, 27, 36 159, 162, 197, 199
Idea, 3-4, 5, 58, 103-4, 106-7, 170 Intuition, 4-5, 7,13, 16-7,21,30,38-40,
Ideal, 19, 30, 36 44-9
units of meaning, 38, 40--4, 46--9 and universals, 51, 53-5, 57-8
Species, 51, 53, 57, 66 and syncategorematic terms, 95-8, 100,
closure, 73, 125, 151, 163, 166, 169-80, 107
182, 186-7,200 and names and judgments, 113-5
INDEX 215
and synthesis, 125, 127-36, 142, 145-6, and presentations, 109-11, 117, 119-20,
151, 169-76 122-3
and backward reference, 179-80, 183, fu1filment of, 125, 129-30, 135-6, 149,
186, 188-91 159
Itself, the object, 42, 48, 150-1, 157-8, 161- Mechanisms of synthesis, 1-3,25, 123, 168,
4, 168-74, 180, 183 193-5
Mediation, 6, 29, 46, 54n, 55, 81-2, 84-5,
Judgment, 24, 57, 67, 96, 103-4, 109-21, 112,114,129-30,135,162-4,175,
144-5, 169 185-6
Medieva1 philosophy, 88, 101, 168
Kant, Immanuel, 5, 8-9, 15,20,26,59,69, Melody, 84, 135, 138-9, 141, 143
102, 106, 123, 135, 155, 198,200 Memory, 33-4, 43-4, 98, 165, 179, 183, 189
Kern, Iso, 17, 26 Mensch, James R., 18, 19-20,30
Kersten, Fred, 15, 54n Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 35
Kirkland, Frank, 29 Metaphysics, 8, 20, 176
Knowledge, 5-6, 14, 18, 21-2, 26 MiIler, Ischak, 25, 34-5
and meaning, 43, 54, 56-7, 62, 65 Modification, 102, 113, 136, 200
and synthesis, 125, 127-8, 139, 145, 147, Mohanty, J. N., 24, 26, 32, 54n, 106
154, 161-2, 169, 171-3, 187, 189-91, Moments, 6, 28, 74, 77-80, 83, 97,143,173,
199 178-9, 199
Kohak, Erazim, 21 More (Mehr-), 2, 25-6, 59,111,141,146,
Kunz, Hans, 18 157, 163, 191, 196
Movement, 137, 141-2, 156-7, 177,200
Landgrebe, Ludwig, 27, 30, 33-5 Multiplicity (and plurality), 5-6, 13, 74
Language, 23-4,38,47-8,88-9,92-3, 117- unity in multiplicity, 38, 40-3, 48, 52-3
8, 131, 188-92 of individuals, and universals, 60-3, 66
Lauer, Quentin, 29 and synthesis, 90, 92-3,111,115-6,119,
Law, 4, 41-2,54, 63,67-8, 74, 81-2, 86-7, 125, 129, 143, 145, 149, 152, 156-8,
92,99-107, 114, 131, 192-3 163-6, 170, 173-4, 176, 180, 192-3,
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhe1m von, 4-5, 8, 104, 194-5, 196-7,203
131 Multi-rayed acts, 13, 92, 111-6
Levin, David Michael, 16, 19,27, 54n Murphy, Richard T., 54n
Levinas, Emmanuel, 21, 34, 54n Mutual (reciprocal) grounding, 28-33, 46,
Lifeworld, see Experience, lived 54n, 65-7, 80-1, 83, 86, 92, 107-8,
Lifting off (setting off in relief, Abheben), 115-7, 121-3, 132, 192,202
43-4,73,76-81,85-6,91, 155, 165,
170, 180 Name (see Nominalization), 52, 88,90-2,95,
Limit, 5-8, 31-2, 44, 57, 63 99-103, 109-21, 126-32, 135
of parts and wholes, 77-8, 82, 84-7 proper, 91, 95,117-8,120,127-8,131
of meanings, 99, 129 Natorp, Paul, 20, 32, 34
of synthesis, 136, 138, 140-1, 153-4, 157, Necessity, 3, 8,19,43,54,57,65,73,81,84,
167-81, 183, 194, 196 200
Logic,4,17,27,40-4,48,54n,60,67,81-2, Negation, 6, 30, 74-6, 97, 105, 144-7
86,88-9,96-8, 104-6,204 Neutrality, 137, 200
Next-contents, 2, 25-6
Margins, 22, 52, 153-4, 162-3 in wholes, 77, 80, 82, 86, 140, 148
Mastering intention (herrschende Intention), in synthesis, 151, 155-8, 163-7, 175,
147, 149, 166, 178 178-81,183-7,193-4
Matterofacts,15,17,93,99,II0,115,134- Nominalization, 93,101-2,111,117,120,
5,149 130
McKenna, William R., 25, 33 Nominalism, 89, 101
Meaning, 2, 7, 13,38-40,57,83 Non-independent parts, 75, 77-9, 92, 94, 104,
ideal units of, 40-8 140
complete and incomplete, 88-108 non-independent separability, 80-1
216 INDEX
Objectivity, 2-3, 7-8, 20, 23-4, 39, 44-9, 56, Pietersma, Henry, 21-2, 35
73-4, 79, 82-7, 89 Pivcevic, Edo, 54n, 59
and fulfilment, 110-1, 130-3, 141-2, Pointing, 33, 45, 61-2, 128-31, 138
153-6, 169-72, 178, 187, 192, 199- backward, 34-5, 67, 131
200,203-4 Posit, 59, 97, 111-2, 114, 116, 163, 197,
Occasional expression (see Indexing), 38, 199-201
44-9,95 Possibility, 34-4, 36, 39, 54n, 57, 64, 76,
Open-endedness, 8, 16, 19,36,49 78, 89, 91-2, 130-2, 141, 145, 147,
of wholes, 73-5, 82-4, 86-7 149,178,192-3,195-6,199-200
of meanings, 98, 103 Possible worlds, 25, 105
of fulfilment, 141, 145, 170, 172, 179, Predication, 24, 60, 88, 91, 94, 101-2, 111-5,
192,200 119,148,172
Order, 4, 7,42,82-6,94,104-5,114,121-2, Prescription (Vorschreiben), 36-7, 39-41, 73,
149, 157-67, 176-81, 183, 194 81, 86, 100, 127, 134, 136, 139, 142,
Origins, 1-7 151, 165, 186, 190
in secondary literature, 15, 17-8, 27-8, Presence,6-7, 13, 19,34,46,87, 107, 110-1,
31-7 123-4, 128, 134-5, 141, 150, 163,
of universals, 52-4, 59, 66-8 168-74, 177, 180, 183, 187
of meaning, 109-10, 113-4, 120-3 Presentation,79, 104, 109-16, 119, 121-3,
in fulfilment, 159, 165-7, 179, 194, 196- 149-50,162,166-7,173
7,202-3 Presupposition (Voraussetzung), 33, 47, 52,
Over- (über-), -flow (überfliessen), 26, 47, 60,65-6,78,85-7,91,106,142,144,
77-8, 151, 157, 188-9 163, 186-7, 193-4,201
-come, 49, 149, 170, 173, 177 Process, 14-15, 17-19,32,35,64-7,120,
carry- (übertragen), 81, 86, 147-8, 150, 139,143,159-60,174-5,180,185-6,
156 194
other "over"-terms, 46, 77-8, 129, 155, Production, 4, 8, 17,21,32,35-7,39,52-5,
157,161,164,169,197 122, 165-6, 174-5, 184, 189-90
see also Passing over Progress, 73-4, 82-3, 121, 161-6
Projection (see Perspective, Shadowing-off),
Paradox, 24, 27, 37, 65-6, 120, 144 141, 152-160
Part, 32, 43, 73-87,93,113,119,135,142-4, Proposition, 24, 43, 48, 67, 105, 110-1, 171
150, 155, 170, 179 Psychologism, 9-10, 21, 23,52-4,57,63,83,
Passing over (übergehen), 1-3, 5, 25 85, 89, 97-8, 101, 110, 114
in fluctuating meanings, 44, 48
from individuals to universals, 55, 60, 64 Rationalism, 15-6,54, 103, 122, 127, 155
from parts to wholes, 73-4, 76-82, 84-7 Re-interpretation, 145-50, 178, 180, 187,
from non-independent to independent 189-90, 193-4
meanings, 95, 101 Re-ordering, 177-9, 183
in syntheses of fulfilment, 135, 150, 158, Re-production, 142, 189-90
163, 167-8, 180, 183, 187, 194-5 Readiness, 39, 48-9, 60, 171
Passivity, 16-7,27-8,33-4,56,149, 196-7, Realism, 20-1
200-1 Reason, 4, 57-9, 63, 82, 163, 198,203-4
Past, 6, 33-4,111,139,151,176,179,183-4, Receptivity, 8, 17,55,58, 196, 198,200-1
187-9 Recognition, 43, 61, 64, 76, 127, 129-33,
Pattern, 23-4, 63-5, 81, 137, 139-43, 156 139,141,144-5,149,179,188-93,
Perspective (see Projection, Shadowing-off), 201
2, 22-3, 31-2, 45-6, 54n, 91, 150, Reduction, 20, 30, 121, 161
152-64, 166-9, 173, 175-6, 180-1, Reference, 6-8, 23-5, 35
191,201 meaning, 39-40, 45-9
Phenomenology, 1, 14-5,20-1,25,29, 34, universals, 63-6
36,54-5,61,65,82-6,97,106,110, independent, 75, 88, 90-2, 100-2
114,121-2,130,152,154,168,192, names, 111-6, 119-21
196, 198,200-3 synthesis, 127-33, 144-5, 168, 171-2
INDEX 217
Surroundings, 45-6, 75-6, 80, 82, 85, 137, Units, 41-3, 54, 62, 75-6, 83, 90--2, 100, 116,
141, 156 119,122,164-7,173-4,179
Syncategorematic terms, 24, 88-108 Unity, problem of, 5-7, 25, 31
Syntax, 90, 94-6, 98, 100, 105, 111, 113 of meanings, 38-43, 48,60
Synthesis, problem of, 1-3 of universals, 53-4, 60--2
Leibniz to Husserl, 3-9 of wholes, 75-9, 83-4, 86
in secondary literature, 15-37 of independent expressions, 91, 93, 99,
in First Investigation, 38-40, 42, 44, 46, 107-8
48-9 ofnamesandjudgments, 114, 117-8, 120,
in Second Investigation, 51-2, 54-6, 58, 122
61-8 through synthesis, 129-30, 132-6, 144,
in Third Investigation, 81, 86 146-7, 149, 151, 153, 161,163, 176-
in Fourth Investigation, 88-90, 97-101, 7, 192, 194-6,201-3
103-8 Universals, 6, 15,49,51-68, 101, 126-33
in Fifth Investigation, 113-24
in Sixth Investigation, 125-95 Vagueness, 44, 47-8, 56-7, 96, 155
Husserl's uses, 39, 51, 55,102,104-5, Van Peursen, Cornelius A., 17
115-7,127,131,144,149-50,177, Variation, 45-7, 54n, 56-60, 62-4, 74-6, 83,
180, 196-8 104,118-9,137,177
System, 5-6, 8, 29, 104, 203 Viewpoint, 152-8, 163
Szilasi, Wilhelm, 30
Waldenfels, Bernhard, 16, 18,26, 31, 34-
Temporality, 5-6, 27, 36, 46, 78, 82, 133-4, 5
150--1,154,178,188,196 Watson, Stephen, 29
Theme, 54n, 198-9,202-3 Web (Gewebe), 42-4, 48-9, 55, 153-4,
Thetic acts, 13,27, 115-7, 197-9,202-3 193
"This", 17-8,27,38,45-7,106,128-9 Welch, E. Pari, 54n
Totality, 29, 34-5, 79-80, 84,157,167,172, Welton, Donn, 17, 19,26-7, 31, 35, 105
174, 176, 180, 183, 203 Westphal, Merold, 29
Tran-Duc-Thao,20 Whole, 6, 31-2, 63, 73-87, 91,116,140,
Transcendental, 5, 19-21, 27, 36, 54, 106, 142-5, 147-9, 151, 154-6, 162, 165-
122, 140, 155, 192, 198,200--1 6, 172-80, 194, 202-3
Truth, 21-2, 24, 48, 56, 127, 169-72 Withdraw (drawing back, zurückziehen), 143,
conditions, 17, 23-4, 105-6 198-203
Tugendhat, Ernst, 20, 24-5, 105-6 Word, 39, 45, 47, 88, 90--8, 101-3, 128-32,
Tymieniecka, Anna-Teresa, 54n 190,193
Wordless recognition (Wortlose erkennen),
Unexpressed (and unnoticed, see Wordless 188-94
recognition), 44, 52, 77-8, 96-8, 135, World interpretation, 111-2, 114, 135, 143-
146,172,188-95,199 52, 200--1
Unexperienced (and related terms), 78, 85, Wundt, Wilhelm, 17
107-8, 141-3, 155-6, 158, 167-8,
185, 192-3 Yamaguchi, Ichiro, 17, 27
Unfolding, 99, 113-4, 127-8, 164
Unification, 5, 43-4, 51, 60--2, 73-4,107-9, Zahavi, Dan, 22
114-5,118-21,133-4,143-4,148- Zurückweisen, and other zurück terms, see
50, 170, 176, 178, 183, 192-3, 196, Backward reference
202-3
Phaenomenologica
44. E. Holenstein: Phänomenologie der Assoziation. Zu Struktur und Funktion eines
Grundprinzips der passiven Genesis bei E. Husser!. 1972 ISBN 90-247-1175-4
45. F. Hammer: Theonome Anthropologie? Max Schelers Menschenbild und seine
Grenzen. 1972 ISBN 90-247-1186-X
46. A. Paianin: Wissenschaft und Geschichte in der Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls.
1972 ISBN 90-247-1194-0
47. G.A. de Almeida: Sinn und Inhalt in der genetischen Phänomenologie E. Husserls.
1972 ISBN 90-247-1318-8
48. J. Rolland de Reneville: Aventure de l'absolu. 1972 ISBN 90-247-1319-6
49. U. Claesges und K. Held (eds.): Perspektiven transzendental-phänomenologischer
Forschung. Für Ludwig Landgrebe zum 70. Geburtstag von seiner Kölner Schülern.
1972 ISBN 90-247-1313-7
50. F. Kersten and R. Zaner (eds.): Phenomenology: Continuation and Criticism. Essays
in Memory of Dorion Cairns. 1973 ISBN 90-247-1302-1
51. W. Biemel (ed.): Phänomenologie Heute. Festschrift für Ludwig Landgrebe. 1972
ISBN 90-247-1336-6
52. D. Souche-Dagues: Le developpement de l'intentionnalite dans la phenomenologie
husserlienne. 1972 ISBN 90-247-1354-4
53. B. Rang: Kausalität und Motivation. Untersuchungen zum Verhältnis von Perspek-
tivität und Objektivität in der Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls. 1973
ISBN 90-247-1353-6
54. E. Levinas: Autrement qu'etre ou au-delil de l'essence. 2nd. ed.: 1978
ISBN 90-247-2030-3
55. D. Cairns: Guidefor Translating Husser/. 1973 ISBN (Pb) 90-247-1452-4
56. K. Schuhmann: Die Dialektik der Phänomenologie, I. Husserl über Pfänder. 1973
ISBN 90-247-1316-1
57. K. Schuhmann: Die Dialektik der Phänomenologie, II. Reine Phänomenologie und
phänomenologische Philosophie. Historisch-analytische Monographie über Husserls
'Ideen 1'. 1973 ISBN 90-247-1307-2
58. R. Williame: Les fondements phinomenologiques de la sociologie comprehensive:
Alfred Schutz et Max Weber. 1973 ISBN 90-247-1531-8
59. E. Marbach: Das Problem des Ich in der Phänomenologie Husserls. 1974
ISBN 90-247-1587-3
60. R. Stevens: fames and Husser/.· The Foundations of Meaning. 1974
ISBN 90-247-1631-4
61. H.L. van Breda (ed.): Virite et Virification / Wahrheit und Verifikation. Actes du
quatrieme Colloque International de Phenomeno10gie / Akten des vierten Inter-
nationalen Kolloquiums für Phänomenologie (Schwabisch Hall, Baden-Württemberg,
8.-11. September 1969). 1974 ISBN 90-247-1702-7
62. Ph.J. Bossert (ed.): Phenomenological Perspectives. Historical and Systematic Essays
in Honor of Herbert Spiegelberg. 1975. ISBN 90-247-1701-9
63. H. Spiegelberg: Doing Phenomenology. Essays on and in Phenomenology. 1975
ISBN 90-247-1725-6
64. R. Ingarden: On the Motives which Led Husserl to Transcendental Idealism. 1975
ISBN 90-247-1751-5
65. H. Kuhn, E. Ave-Lallemant and R. Gladiator (eds.): Die Münchener Phänomenologie.
Vorträge des Internationalen Kongresses in München (13.-18. April 1971). 1975
ISBN 90-247-1740-X
Phaenomenologica
66. D. Caims: Conversations with Husserl and Fink. Edited by the Husserl-Archives in
Louvain. With a foreword by R.M. Zaner. 1975 ISBN 90-247-1793-0
67. G. Hoyos Vasquez: Intentionalität als Verantwortung. Geschichtsteleologie und
Teleologie der Intentionalität bei Husser!. 1976 ISBN 90-247-1794-9
68. J. Patocka: Le Monde naturel comme probleme philosophique. 1976
ISBN 90-247-1795-7
69. W.W. Fuchs: Phenomenology and the Metaphysics of Presence. An Essay in the
Philosophy ofEdmund Husser!. 1976 ISBN 90-247-1822-8
70. S. Cunningham: Language and the Phenomenological Reductions of Edmund Husserl.
1976 ISBN 90-247-1823-6
71. G.C. Moneta: On Identity. A Study in Genetic Phenomenology. 1976
ISBN 90-247-1860-0
72. W. Biemel und das Husserl-Archiv zu Löwen (eds.): Die Welt des Menschen - Die
Welt der Philosophie. Festschrift für Jan Patocka. 1976 ISBN 90-247-1899-6
73. M. Richir: Au-dem du renversement copemicien. La question de la phenomenologie
et son fondement. 1976 ISBN 90-247-1903-8
74. H. Mongis: Heidegger et la critique de la notion de valeur. La destruction de la
fondation metaphysique. Lettre-preface de Martin Heidegger. 1976
ISBN 90-247-1904-6
75. J. Taminiaux: Le regard et l'excident. 1977 ISBN 90-247-2028-1
76. Tb. de Boer: The Development of Husserl's Thought. 1978
ISBN Hb: 90-247-2039-7; Pb: 90-247-2124-5
77. R.R. Cox: Schutz's Theory of Relevance. A Phenomenological Critique. 1978
ISBN 90-247-2041-9
78. S. Strasser: Jenseits von Sein und Zeit. Eine Einführung in Emmanuel Levinas'
Philosophie. 1978 ISBN 90-247-2068-0
79. R.T. Murphy: Hume and Husserl. Towards Radical Subjectivism. 1980
ISBN 90-247-2172-5
80. H. Spiegelberg: The Context of the Phenomenological Movement. 1981
ISBN 90-247-2392-2
81. J.R. Mensch: The Question of Being in Husserl's Logical Investigations. 1981
ISBN 90-247-2413-9
82. J. Loscerbo: Being and Technology. A Study in the Philsophy of Martin Heidegger.
1981 ISBN 90-247-2411-2
83. R. Boehm: Vom Gesichtspunkt der Phänomenologie 11. Studien zur Phänomenologie
der Epoche. 1981 ISBN 90-247-2415-5
84. H. Spiegelberg and E. Ave-Lallemant (eds.): Pfänder-Studien. 1982
ISBN 90-247-2490-2
85. S. Valdinoci: Les fondements de la phenomenologie husserlienne. 1982
ISBN 90-247-2504-6
86. I. Yamaguchi: Passive Synthesis und Intersubjektivität bei Edmund Husserl. 1982
ISBN 90-247-2505-4
87. J. Libertson: Proximity. Levinas, Blanchot, Bataille and Communication. 1982
ISBN 90-247-2506-2
Phaenomenologica
88. D. Welton: The Origins of Meaning. A Critical Study of the Thresholds of Husserlian
Phenomenology.1983 ISBN 90-247-2618-2
89. W.R. McKenna: Husserl's 'Introductions to Phenomenology'. Interpretation and
Critique. 1982 ISBN 90-247-2665-4
90. lP. Miller: Numbers in Presence and Absence. A Study of Husserl's Philosophy of
Mathematics. 1982 ISBN 90-247-2709-X
91. U. Meile: Das Wahmehmungsproblem und seine Verwandlung in phänomeno-
logischer Einstellung. Untersuchungen zu den phänomenologischen Wahrneh-
mungstheorien von Husserl, Gurwitsch und Merleau-Ponty. 1983
ISBN 90-247-2761-8
92. W.S. Hamrick (ed.): Phenomenology in Practice and Theory. Essays for Herbert
Spiegelberg. 1984 ISBN 90-247-2926-2
93. H. Reiner: Duty and Inclination. The Fundamentals of Morality Discussed and
Redefined with Special Regard to Kant and Schiller. 1983 ISBN 90-247-2818-6
94. M. l Harney: Intentionality, Sense and the Mind. 1984 ISBN 90-247-2891-6
95. Kah Kyung Cho (ed.): Philosophy and Science in Phenomenological Perspective.
1984 ISBN 90-247-2922-X
96. A. Lingis: Phenomenological Explanations. 1986
ISBN Hb: 90-247-3332-4; Pb: 90-247-3333-2
97. N. Rotenstreich: Reflection and Action. 1985
ISBN Hb: 90-247-2969-6; Pb: 90-247-3128-3
98. lN. Mohanty: The Possibility ofTranscendental Philosophy. 1985
ISBN Hb: 90-247-2991-2; Pb: 90-247-3146-1
99. lJ. Kockelmans: Heideggeron Art and Art Works. 1985 ISBN 90-247-3102-X
100. E. Levinas: Collected Philosophical Papers. 1987
ISBN Hb: 90-247-3272-7; Pb: 90-247-3395-2
101. R. Regvald: Heidegger et le Probleme du Neant. 1986 ISBN 90-247-3388-X
102. I.A. Barash: Martin Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning. 1987
ISBN 90-247-3493-2
103 lJ. Kockelmans (ed.): Phenomenological Psychology. The Dutch School. 1987
ISBN 90-247-3501-7
104. W.S. Hamrick: An Existential Phenomenology of Law: Maurice Merleau-Ponty. 1987
ISBN 90-247-3520-3
105. I.C. Sallis, G. Moneta and I. Taminiaux (eds.): The Collegium Phaenomenologium.
The First Ten Years. 1988 ISBN 90-247-3709-5
106. D. Carr: Interpreting Husserl. Critical and Comparative Studies. 1987.
ISBN 90-247-3505-X
107. G. Heffernan: Isagoge in die phänomenologische Apophantik. Eine Einführung in die
phänomenologische Urteilslogik durch die Auslegung des Textes der Fonnalen und
transzendenten Logik von Edmund Husserl. 1989 ISBN 90-247-3710-9
108. F. Volpi, l-F. Mattei, Th. Sheenan, J.-F. Courtine, I. Taminiaux, l Sallis, D.
Ianicaud, A.L. Kelkel, R. Bernet, R. Brisart, K. Held, M. Haar et S. IJsseling:
Heidegger et I 'Idee de la Phenomenologie. 1988 ISBN 90-247-3586-6
109. C. Singevin: Dramaturgie de I 'Esprit. 1988 ISBN 90-247-3557-2
Phaenomenologica
110. J. Patocka: Le monde naturel et le mouvement de l'existence humaine. 1988
ISBN 90-247-3577-7
111. K.-H. Lembeck: Gegenstand Geschichte. Geschichtswissenschaft in Husserls
Phänomenologie. 1988 ISBN 90-247-3635-8
112. J.K. Cooper-Wiele: The Totalizing Act. Key to Husserl's Early Philosophy. 1989
ISBN 0-7923-0077-7
113. S. Valdinoci: Le principe d'existence. Un devenir psychiatrique de la pheno-
menologie. 1989 ISBN 0-7923-0125-0
114. D. Lohmar: Phänomenologie der Mathematik. 1989 ISBN 0-7923-0187-0
115. S. IJsseling (Hrsgb.): Husserl-Ausgabe und Husserl-Forschung. 1990
ISBN 0-7923-0372-5
116. R. Cobb-Stevens: Husserl and Analytic Philosophy. 1990 ISBN 0-7923-0467-5
117. R. Klockenbusch: Husserl und Cohn. Widerspruch, Reflexion und Telos in
Phänomenologie und Dialektik. 1989 ISBN 0-7923-0515-9
118. S. Vaitkus: How is Society Possible? Intersubjectivity and the Fiduciary Attitude as
Problems ofthe Social Group in Mead, Gurwitsch, and Schutz. 1991
ISBN 0-7923-0820-4
119. C. Macann: Presence and Coincidence. The Transformation of Transcendental into
Ontological Phenomenology. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-0923-5
120. G. Shpet: Appearance and Sense. Phenomenology as the Fundamental Science and Its
Problems. Translated from Russian by Th. Nemeth. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1098-5
121. B. Stevens: L'Apprentissage des Signes. Lecture de Paul Ricreur. 1991
ISBN 0-7923-1244-9
122. G. Soffer: Husserl and the Question of Relativism. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1291-0
123. G. Römpp: Husserls Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Und Ihre Bedeutung für
eine Theorie intersubjektiver Objektivität und die Konzeption einer phänomeno-
logischen. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1361-5
124. S. Strasser: Welt im Widerspruch. Gedanken zu einer Phänomenologie als ethischer
Fundamentalphilosophie. 1991 ISBN Hb: 0-7923-1404-2; Pb: 0-7923-1551-0
125. R. P. Buckley: Husserl, Heidegger and the Crisis of Philosophical Responsibility.
1992 ISBN 0-7923-1633-9
126. 1. G. Hart: The Person and the Common Life. Studies in a Husserlian Social Ethics.
1992 ISBN 0-7923-1724-6
127. P. van Tongeren, P. Sars, C. Bremmers and K. Boey (eds.): Eros and Eris. Contribu-
tions to a Hermeneutical Phenomenology. Liber Amicorum for Adriaan Peperzak.
1992 ISBN 0-7923-1917-6
128. Nam-In Lee: Edmund Husserls Phänomenologie der Instinkte. 1993
ISBN 0-7923-2041-7
129. P. Burke and 1. Van der Veken (eds.): Merleau-Ponty in Contemporary Perspective.
1993 ISBN 0-7923-2142-1
130. G. Haefliger: Über Existenz: Die Ontologie Roman Ingardens. 1994
ISBN 0-7923-2227-4
131. 1. Lampert: Synthesis and Backward Reference in Husserl's Logical Investigations.
1995 ISBN 0-7923-3105-2
Previous volumes are still available