A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein, Second Edition (39 page)

The movement to be discussed in this chapter has a history as long as that of modern logic, and indeed, at the beginning, was hardly separable from the new post-idealism represented at its best in the work of Frege. The term ‘phenomenology’, invented by the German eighteenth-century mathematician J.H.Lambert to describe the science of appearances, had been used by Hegel in his work on the nature of the ‘subjective spirit’— spirit as it appears to itself. However, despite the shared language and shared pretensions, it is clear that Hegel and Husserl are engaged in different forms of enquiry; we must therefore look for the latter’s intellectual origins elsewhere. In fact the thinker with the strongest claim to be the founder of the phenomenological movement was, in his own eyes, more a psychologist than a philosopher, and a psychologist who professed allegiance to methods which he called empirical. In
Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint
(1874), Franz Brentano (1838-1917) embarked on an investigation of the human mind which expressly rejected the premises of idealism, and in particular the notion that the true subject matter of psychology is some universal, abstract ‘Geist’, which pursues its courses through the world as though related to individual humans only occasionally and by accident. Psychology cannot take such abstractions as its point of departure. Like any other science, it must start from the individual case, and that means from the firstperson case, which is known to the investigator directly. Brentano, partly because of his emphasis on the first person, did not venture very far into the realm of what we would now call empirical psychology. Instead, he became intrigued by an old philosophical problem, that of the nature of first-person knowledge. What is it that I
know
when I am presented with the contents of consciousness? And how is the knower distinguished from the known?

In attempting to answer those questions Brentano reintroduced into philosophy a technicality common in the mediaeval schools: the concept of intentionality. Every mental state or event is, he argued, characterised by the ‘reference to a content’, or the ‘direction upon an object’ (hence by an internal ‘aim’ or ‘intention’). If I believe, then there is something that I believe; if I hate, then there is something that I hate; if I see, then there is something that I see. In every such case, the ‘content’ or ‘object’ is characterised by certain peculiar features. It might be indefinite; it might not exist in actuality; or it might be other than I think it to be. For example, I may be afraid of a lion, but of no particular lion; I may hate the man who tore up my daffodils, although there is no such man; I may admire the man who endowed the hospital but despise the man who killed the Mayor, even though they are one and the same.

The best way to describe this phenomenon of intentionality is to make a distinction, again relying on scholastic terminology, between the ‘material’ and the ‘intentional’ object of a mental state. When I see as a ghost what is in fact a piece of fluttering cloth, then the intentional object of my seeing is a ghost, while the material object is a piece of cloth. The intentional object is that which is ‘present to consciousness’, and it may not correspond to any material reality. This possibility of non-correspondence explains the peculiarity of the intentional object. Intentional objects are of many logical types: they can be propositions (the objects of belief), ideas (the objects of thought), individuals (the objects of love and hate). They can be indeterminate (a lion), or determinate (the lion before me). In every case they have no existence independent of the mental state that ‘refers to’ or is ‘directed onto’ them. There is no ‘real relation’ between fear, say, and its intentional object, since the two cannot be thought of as existing separately. This is one of the few genuine cases where one might wish to speak, in Bradleyan terms, of an ‘internal’ relation. (See p. 232.)

Brentano believed that this property of intentionality is peculiar to mental phenomena and common to all of them. It therefore formed, for him, a distinguishing mark of the mental. The property has, however, an intricate logic, and presents rather more difficulties in the description than my brief summary conveys. It has therefore proved difficult to substantiate this particular aspect of Brentano’s thought, or fully to understand its implications. In particular a confusion, sometimes accidental, sometimes deliberate, between intentionality and a lack of what logicians call extensionality (see the last chapter) has made discussions of this topic in recent years peculiarly vertiginous. It must be said of the phenomenologists, however, that their knowledge of modern logic has not, in general, been sufficient to permit these confusions. It is the
phenomenon
of intentionality that has been of interest to them, and not the search for some general differentiating characteristic of the mental.

The first important phenomenologist was Brentano’s pupil Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), who began his philosophical career with a book on the foundations of arithmetic that is now chiefly remembered for Frege’s devastating critique of it. Among Husserl’s many writings, those that have attracted the most attention are the
Logical Investigations
(1900-1),
Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology
(1913) and
Cartesian Meditations
(1929, first published 1950). The first of these is of great interest, announcing the theme for which Husserl is known, that of a ‘pure phenomenology’. This theme is further elaborated in the second of his major works. In these works he begins the description of what he was to call the ‘method’ of phenomenological reduction. Husserl’s thought rests on two master-premises. First, he reaffirms the essence of the Cartesian position, that the immediate knowledge that I have of my own conscious mental states is the one sure foundation for an understanding of their nature, provided only that I can isolate what is
intrinsic
to the mental state, and separate it from all that is extraneous. Secondly, the intentionality of the mental makes ‘meaning’ or ‘reference’ essential to every mental act. To focus on the revealed nature of mentality is therefore also to understand the fundamental operation of ‘meaning’, whereby the world is made intelligible. In virtue of these two premises Husserl was able to construct a philosophy which, like that of Descartes, aimed to produce a complete metaphysical vision from reflection on the peculiarities of consciousness.

But study of the first-person case is blind if it is impossible to isolate what is contained in it. Just as Descartes sought to separate the ‘clear and distinct’ idea from the mental states with which it is mingled, so did Husserl propose a method whereby to isolate the pure deliverances of consciousness from the encumbrances which impede our understanding of them. This method is that of ‘phenomenological reduction’, or ‘bracketing’
(epoche,
from the Greek). All reference to what is susceptible to doubt or mediated by reflection must be excluded from the description of every mental state, leaving the remnant of pure immediacy alone. Let us consider the case of fear. I must not suppose that the object of fear exists independently of my fear. Fear does not guarantee the existence of its object, but only of its own ‘direction’ towards an object. We should therefore ‘bracket’ the material object in examining the nature of fear. But the intentional object remains: we cannot eliminate from fear the
idea
of an object, since this is contained in the mental state and immediately present to the consciousness of the one who fears.

What else remains, after the process of bracketing? Husserl spoke of a ‘mental act’, the process of direction itself, which in some way constitutes the essence of fear. The peculiar method of phenomenology is that it takes this mental act as its datum. Nothing else can be described which is either more fundamental to knowledge, or more able to reveal the essence of what is known. Is not the phenomenologist burdened, then, with the old Cartesian question, of how to advance beyond the first-person case to knowledge of an independent world? The title of Husserl’s later, impenetrable work
—Cartesian Meditations
—suggests, as does its content, that his ‘method’ has indeed cast him into the pit of scepticism. But the major object of this scepticism is, historically speaking, somewhat surprising. It is not the objective world but the observing subject himself. The person (or self) exists for Husserl only in the performance of intentional acts. But he is not identical with any of these intentional acts. Nor can he be the object of such an act since, if he were, then there would have to be some other subject performing the act of which ‘he’ is the object. But who is this subject if not himself? The ‘I’, as Ryle expressed it in another context, is systematically elusive. In what sense, then, can we know that it exists? The ‘I’ exists, Husserl thought, only as the subject and never as the object of consciousness. It must therefore be ‘transcendental’ in something like the sense of Kant’s ‘transcendental self’. Many of Husserl’s voluminous writings are spent in the pursuit of this creature which he declared to be unknowable, and it is not surprising that they have seemed to many, in consequence, to be unreadable.

It is unclear from what I have said that there is any special ‘method’ of phenomenology. How, for example, is it distinguished from the psychology of introspection? In the
Logical Investigations
Husserl expressly rejects ‘psychologism’—the view that logic is a very general science of the mind. In setting up phenomenology in its place, he claimed to be enunciating a method that is free from, and indeed presupposed by, every empirical enquiry, (His view about the status of his theory was therefore the opposite of Brentano’s; which of them was right is not a matter that I feel able to decide.) Phenomenology is the necessary preliminary to any science of the mind, since it locates—prior to any description, classification or explanation—the individual mental acts which psychology must investigate. Moreover, it is the sole access to meaning. Meaning is created by mental acts, and the world becomes present to consciousness only through those acts. Hence our understanding determines the essences of things, by fixing the manner in which they are known. Phenomenology therefore yields a knowledge not of facts, but of essences. It is consequently (so it is argued) an
a priori
science.

Husserl was aware of the impasse into which he had been driven by his Cartesian method, and in his last unfinished work
—Transcendental Phenomenology and the Crisis of the European Sciences,
published posthumously in 1954—he attempted to overcome the subjective emphasis of phenomenology by means of a theory of the social world. The focus shifts from ‘I’ to ‘we’, albeit a ‘transcendental “we”’. This plural subject is something like the implied community of language users, who together construct the common-sense world in which they are situated. Husserl calls this common-sense world the
Lebenswelt,
or ‘life-world’: it is a world constituted by our social interaction, and endowed with the ‘meanings’ that inhabit our communicative acts. We reach the transcendental ‘we’ by an imaginative self-projection, from the ‘here’ of first-person awareness to the ‘there’ of the generalised other. What is given in this process is not the elusive residue of some phenomenological reduction, but the
Lebenswelt
itself.

The concept of the
Lebenswelt
enabled Husserl to revive a project of post-Kantian idealism: the project of distinguishing the human realm (the realm of meaning) from the realm of nature (the realm of science and explanation). Inspired by Kant’s division between understanding and practical reason, the romantic theologian F.D.E.Schleiermacher (1768-1834) had argued that the interpretation of human actions can never be accomplished by the methods employed in the natural sciences. The human act must be understood as the act of a free being, motivated by reason, and understood through dialogue. The same is true of texts, which can be interpreted only through an imaginative dialogue with their author. ‘Hermeneutics’—the art of interpretation—involves the search for reasons rather than causes, and the attempt to understand a text as an expression of rational activity—the very activity that is manifest in me.

A later Kantian philosopher, Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), extended Schleiermacher’s hermeneutical method to the entire human world. Our attitude to other people, he argued, is fundamentally distinct from and even opposed to the scientific attitude. We seek to understand their actions not by explaining them in terms of external causes, but ‘from within’, by an act of rational self-projection that Dilthey calls
Verstehen.
In understanding human life and action I must find the agent’s reasons for what he does. This means conceptualising the world as he does, seeing the connections and unities that he sees. For example, I understand your fear of speaking in a certain place, once I conceptualise it as you do, as somewhere ‘sacred’.

Our every-day ways of conceptualising the world do not, as a rule, follow the direction required by scientific explanation. Rather, Dilthey suggests, they represent the world as ‘ready for action’. I see the world under the aspect of my own freedom, and describe and respond to it accordingly. This before me is not a member of the species
Homo sapiens
but a
person,
who looks at me and smiles; that beside her is not a piece of bent organic tissue but a
chair
on which I may sit; this on the wall is not a collection of tinted chemicals but a
picture,
in which the face of a saint appears; and so on. In short, we are not merely in dialogue with each other; we are in dialogue with the world itself, moulding the natural order through concepts, so as to align it with our aims. Our categories do not
explain
the world, so much as endow it with
meaning.

Husserl took this idea a stage further, by suggesting that the pre-scientific vision of the world expresses not merely our identity as rational beings, but our
life.
The world appears to us in the guise of a ‘lived environment’: a place in which we situate ourselves as acting and suffering organisms. We understand objects as ‘friendly’ or ‘hostile’, ‘comfortable’ or ‘uncomfortable’, ‘useful’ or ‘useless’, and in a thousand ways divide the world according to our interests. Our classifications form no part of the enterprise of scientific explanation, and have an authority that no science could remove. The new task of phenomenology is to awaken us to the
Lebenswelt,
and to vindicate those ‘we’-thoughts in which the meaning of objects is created and made public.