Philosophy and Phenomenological Intuition
Eiichi Shimomissé
In this paper, it is intended to explore and re-establish a way of philosophizing as the “revelation of the world” following the tradition of phenomenological research in terms of problems methods, and the historical horizon. It will be pursued through searching its anticipating mode of philosophical inquiry in Max Scheler’s philosophical investigations.
Max Scheler, unlike Edmund Husserl, never made phenomenology and phenomenological “method” (Einstellung) as such the central “theme” of his philosophical inquiries, nor is it correct to characterize Scheler’s entire philosophical investigations as phenomenological (even if it were possible to do so). Rather than being concerned about the self-justification of philosophy as mathesis universalis, or developing a philosophical system, or being “preoccupied with Being”, hidden in everydayness and forgotten by the Western philosophical tradition, Scheler’s central attention was directed toward doing philosophy phenomenologically. The relationship of Scheler’s philosophical contributions to “phenomenology” as stated in his own words is that his philosophy was developed “on the broadest basis of the phenomenological experience.” Indeed, his “doing philosophy phenomenologically was so extensive and so involved that, by reflecting upon it, we gain insight into our own questions, methods and perspectives. It is hoped, therefore, that the reason Max Scheler’s philosophizing was chosen for this investigation rather than that of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre or Merleau-Ponty can be justified by the completion of this inquiry itself. However, it must be emphasized that the question raised here is by no means concerned with the “objective definition” of phenomenology, nor with the “formal characteristics” of the phenomenological approach. Rather, our question is: what does phenomenology and the phenomenological method mean to us and to our philosophizing? It is indeed properly answered by Maurice Merleau-Ponty: “c’est en nous-mêmes que nous trouverons l’unité phénoménologie et son vrai sens.”
Three quarters of a century have passed since the publication of Edmund Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen, and the so-called “phenomenological movement,” both the old and the new, seem to already belong to the past despite the fact that new volumes of Husserlianacontinue to appear and much of the new research based upon them has been published. Even in the United States many translations of phenomenological research have been published, and renewed interest in phenomenology seems to have arisen not only in philosophy, but also in empirical sciences. And yet phenomenology as a way of doing philosophy appears as if it were a “finished” (abgeschlossener)philosophical thought, which might be studied as a historical phenomenon!
Against such apparent contention we must point out that the authentic nature of phenomenology as a way of philosophizing still remains “open” (offen) and phenomenological inquires will continue a unity of the philosophical trend. Phenomenological philosophy has not yet accomplished the task of terminating philosophy’s imitation of mathematics and natural sciences, nor has it completely succeeded in showing that we ought to “go back” to the primary and concrete experience of reality as it reveals itself as the world. Instead of “openness ” mistrust of experience and what Scheler calls Welthass (hatred of the world) still hinder us from experiencing reality as “phenomenon.” For the most part, philosophy has remained a kind of indirect, vicarious and yet possibly exact” knowledge of reality today.
As a starting point, a general non-thematic conception of phenomenology will be taken and the genuine essence of phenomenology as philosophizing will reveal itself through the process of this inquiry. Phenomenology can only be approached phenomenologically.
Instead of phenomenology as a philosophical doctrine or system, it has been preferable to talk about the Munich phenomenological circle or the Gottingen circle, a phenomenological movement or a phenomenological school. This purports eine gemeinsame Einstelling (a common intention) in philosophizing, a new philosophical ideal commonly shared among some philosophers, or a new philosophical Grundeinstellung, i.e., a new basic philosophic “method” or style” in approach. Edmund Husserl and his co-editors of Jahrbuch fur Philosophie und Phanomenologische Forschung saw in phenomenology a new, immediate approach itself. The well-known preface to its first volume states: “It is not an academic system that binds the editors and that ought to be presupposed by all the future editors. Our unity is furnished by the common conviction that only by means of returning to the original sources of intuition and to the insights into essences derived from them can the great traditions of philosophy be intuitively clarified. Then the problems of philosophy can be newly set forth on an intuitive basis and can be solved once and for all.”
The so-called leading motto: “Return to the fact!” which well summarizes this common conviction neither specifies the facticity of this very “fact” itself, i.e., what constitutes the “phenomenomenality” of the “phenomenon” of phenomenology, whether it be an a priori self-givenness” of any kind, or an “intuited essence,” or a “transcendentally reduced meaning,” nor does it elicit from itself why we ought to return to this “fact” itself.
If instead of attacking the problem of what constitutes the facticity of the phenomenological “fact” we direct our attention to “returning,” it is quite clear that the new common conviction of philosophizing expressed in this motto assumed that Western philosophy had been somewhere other than where it should have been. What is the locus in which the preceding Western philosophy pursued and some contemporary philosophy still pursues its inquiry into problems by means of the traditional use of basic concepts? What is it from which we ought to “return” in philosophy?
First of all, needless to say, it is all the forms of “reductionism” in philosophy which were popular particularly at the end of the 19th century. In the face of threats of the overwhelming “advancement” of the sciences and an enormous amount of scientific and technological findings, philosophy at the turn of the last century took refuge in an attempt to dissolve philosophy into “something else.” It was prevailing then, for example, to “reduce” transcendental philosophy (i.e., ontology and epistemology) to the investigation of the foundation of the sciences and mathematics by Neo-Kantians on the one hand and to replace epistemology and logic by psychology on the other. In philosophical reductionism, “definition,” “analysis” and “explanation” are extensively employed to replace “that which it is reduced,” by “that to which it is reduced,” e.g., definiendum by definiens, analysandum by analysans, and explanandum by explanans, etc., whereby the identity of the former and the latter, being unjustifiable within the system itself, simply presupposed, i.e., the latter is normally so “constructed” to symbolize the former.
Any form of reductionism, however, involves abstraction; either by divorcing a certain element, one-sided aspect or an epiphenomenon from the concrete fact to stand for the latter, or by symbolizing the concrete fact by something else, by defining this by that, analyzing this into that, explaining this by means of that, or inferring this from that. And it is normally the case that such an abstraction fails to recognize(verkennen), cover up (verbergen) or deceive (tauschen) us in regard to the nature and meaning of that concrete fact. This is why phenomenology categorically rejects “analysis,” “explanation,” any type of “logical inference,” and, thus, all forms of “scientific” endeavor as reductionistic and vicarious in consequence. The construction and constitution in terms of a theory, whether it be scientistic philosophy or a form of idealism, also involves symbols and symbolization; Scheler calls the phenomenological approach de-symbolizing and a-symbolical.
Now we stand before the most crucial question in phenomenology: what is, then, to be described? Now we come back to that lo which we ought lo “return,” the “fact” itself, the “phenomenon” that phenomenology describes. At least from what has been mentioned above, it is quite obvious that the “fact” itself, the “phenomenon” to be described in phenomenology, is not the referent of the sciences, i.e., scientific “datum,” entity, e.g., atom, quantum, stimulus or “id,” “superego,” etc., or scientific “law.” Rather, it is the concrete world of our lived experience that any science or theory (and further any philosophical doctrine or system hitherto developed in Western history ultimately must be related to: even what Aristotle calls episteme (philosophy) and techné (art and special sciences) must start with and refer back to the reality of our actual experience, so that it may be explained scientifically, in terms of its cause (by inference), its analyzed moments, and its law (by theory).
This concrete experience of reality with its fullness and its constituent entities are those which we, in our everyday life, incessantly deal with, sensorily perceiving and imagining, inferring and planning, acting and reacting, and so on.
As Heidegger pointed out in our mundane life we are normally and for the most part totally absorbed in our day-to-day “business” and the “immediate needs” of living. It is only the absence of something “being ready to hand” (whether its awareness be implicit, or explicit) that interrupts our experiencing (including our activities) which generally flows with habitual smoothness. We take care of our “pragmata” one after another, including taking a break and enjoying recreation. In short, we are engaged.
Precisely because of this pragmatic concerns and executive immersion in this experience of reality of everydayness we are in principle (more fundamentally than by means of sciences due lo “closeness” of our everyday immersion blinded to this concrete reality as it is. The mundane, absorbed way of concern and execution of those everyday “pragmata” does nothing other than remove (verstellen) and conceal(verbergen) this full, concrete reality as such from us. This basic attitude of our pragmatic interest in reality is inseparably one with our ontic belief in the “disguised’ appearance (das verstellte Erscheinen) of this reality and they reinforce each other to enable our absorbed engagement in it. As long as we live in it, we can in no way raise even the slightest doubt about it as a whole, but being accustomed to it, continue to believe that what we are experiencing is the sole reality. Our universal belief in this reality thus experienced and understood may be called the mundane ontology of everydayness.
To philosophize is the questioning search as Heidegger correctly characterized it. Whether it is by means of wonder (thaumázein), or it is through the Cartesian doubt, it has been considered and known in the philosophical tradition that philosophical thinking is supposed to liberate the questioning searcher from that universal doxa and enable him to seek, “behold,” indicate, and even (sometimes) “describe” genuine reality in its fullness and concreteness, no matter bow indirect, indefinite, incomplete, or rather (historically) restricted it might be in its givenness to us.
Through the history of Western philosophy in particular, various attempts have been made to develop and formulate philosophical thought and knowledge of the way toward “experiencing” that genuine reality. This reality is to be understood in terms of some basic concepts, which are to be philosophically purified and critically questioned as to their mundane ontological use. They are, for example, “one” and “many,” “idea” “form” and “matter,” “being” and “nothing,” “potency” and “actuality,” “means” and “end,” “cause” and “effect,” “necessity” “accident,” “time” and “space,” “to be” and “ought’ (or “fact” and “value”), “appearance” and “reality,” “drive” and “will,” “doxa” or “opinion” and “knowledge,” “sense,” “understanding” and “reason,” to name a few.
The more radical the questioning search becomes, the more indeterminate and open should philosophical thinking become. For not only through critical examination of the mundane ontology of everydayness but also by probing confrontation with the preceding philosophies, philosophizing can liberate itself from all possible, both bidden and explicit, assumptions and biases in order to be able to return to and behold the concrete, lived world of reality in its primordiality rather than a substitute (such as a theory, a language, or any system or model “representing” reality). In Scheler’s words, we should have an open attitude of “the free, compassionate (liebevoll) and active (tätige) devotion to the world.”
It may be significant to note that as time proceeds historically, those fundamental notions and philosophical conceptions previously examined and carefully “liberated” usually deteriorate back to the mundane, accustomed use of language and thinking; they serve again uncritically to develop and shape the mundane ontology of everydayness. More seriously, due to their fundamental nature, those concepts and the ways of thinking with ostensible apparentness and conceptual depth here in and thus constitute the philosophical tradition itself.
Phenomenology as a new, most radical style of philosophizing has found itself in the midst of the situation not only heavily burdened by the long and respectable tradition of Western philosophy since Ancient Greece, but also buried in the staunchly believed mundane ontology of everydayness ever more backed-up with many unexamined implications of the overwhelmingly successful contemporary mathematics and natural sciences.
The philosophical situation at the turn of the century was far more complicated than described above due to the self-understanding of Western philosophy since Descartes regarding how to philosophize. Contemporary philosophy on the one hand imitated mathematics and the natural sciences and, at the same time, made our own task to provide the foundation for mathematics and other sciences (die Wissenschaftslehre). On the other hand, precisely because of this attempt and this task, contemporary philosophy had to pursue its own self-justification of philosophizing as the primary science (die Selbstbegründung der Wissenschaft- Philosophie als der Wissenschaft) by means of self-reflection. Following Descartes this self-reflecting took the form of apodeictic evidence of the immediacy of self reflection upon itself in “cogito, ergo sum.” Thus, philosophy was considered “as the study of the ultimate grounds of knowledge as a study of the knowable as absolutely certain” (als die Lehre von den letzten Gründen des Wissens als Lehre vom Wissenkönnen als gewissem).
The turn to subjectivity and probing of the way of knowing in terms of self-reflection in contemporary philosophy resulted from the destruction of confidence and mistrust in the most fundamental principle of Western metaphysics, i.e., the “identity of knowing (experience) and being (reality).”
Thus, contemporary philosophy had to start with the examination of knowing–experiencing–as a “tool” or “medium” to grasp reality and to pursue its inquiry by means of self-reflection of human reason. The endeavors of this philosophy of reflection to restore the confidence in experience failed and continued to be obstructed from the concrete world of lived experience. The philosophy of reflection culminated in Kant’s transcendental philosophy.
Various endeavors of the German Idealists Fichte, Schelling and Hegel were nothing but attempts to overcome the predicaments of this philosophy of reflection mentioned above and to restore the Parmenidean principle through the “philosophy of identity.” Thus, metaphysics was reinstated by the German Idealists.
Husserl misconstrued the essays of German idealism as arbitrarily speculative constructions of a philosophical system totally divorced from concrete actual reality. Sharing with contemporary logical positivists the strong conviction that speculative thinking is not the way of philosophizing, Husserl considered that one of the tasks of phenomenology was to overcome such a speculative metaphysics. Quite different from logical empiricism and philosophy of language today, phenomenology is the way of philosophizing that radically explores and strips off the distortion, concealment, the covering-up, and deception which hides the concrete, full reality and hinders it from revealing itself as it is in its primordiality.
Husserl’s critical confrontation with mathematics and the natural sciences through his investigation into the foundation of logic lead him to believe that phenomenology should be Wissenschaftslehre as mathesis universalis. Further, this was understood by Husserl lo be the complete overhaul of epistemology as the ontologia generalis and, as a result, the critique of human reason. In this manner, Husserl was still living heavily in the continuing tradition of Western philosophy. In spite of the revolutionary motto and appeal of his “phenomenology” and “phenomenological research,” Husserl was, at least at the beginning, blindly, later more critically involved in the tradition of the “philosophy of reflection.” He even criticized Kant’s careful avoidance of the intuitive “representation” of self-reflection for Kant was apparently aware that it is impossible lo “grasp” the hidden, functioning self by means of the objectifying, representing self-reflection. Rather, Kant took the way of the hypothetical, inferential transcendental method for his philosophizing. It was no accident that Husserl read and was influenced by Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in 1905-1907. It was also quite natural for Husserl to see continuity and affinity between his investigations and the philosophy of Kant (as well as that of Descartes).
It is, however, one of our fundamental contentions that phenomenology and phenomenological method has in principle nothing lo do with transcendental philosophy, its turn to subjectivity and self-reflection. This turn to subjectivity and self-reflection was merely Husserl’s way of pursuing phenomenology as the way of philosophy. Against the early and middle period of Husserl’s investigation, Scheler’s philosophical inquiry was, from the beginning, motivated by a radical mistrust and deeply rooted dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy.
As pointed out before, the development of Western philosophy since Descartes was grounded upon the principle that the way of being, i.e., the essence of the known (das Wesen des Festegestellten), is determined by the way of knowing (die Methode der Feststellung) and furthermore the philosophical pursuit consists ultimately in grounding, a special kind of “knowing,” guaranteeing that it indeed knows what it claims to know. This self-reflection upon self, i.e., the regressive, representing grasp of subjectivity by itself, however, involves itself in a self-referential paradox. The actual, primordial self is not the transcendental ego which is already “fixed” by reflection as the noetic pole intentionally related lo its noema. Rather it is the primordial, self-temporalizing, ever-flowing functioning self as the lebendige Gegenwart (actual, living present). This paradox involves the fruitless attempt to capture the ongoing, functioning, spontaneous self regressively through a representing, objectifying act of reflection. The actual, streaming primordial functioning self continues to escape from the reflecting sight no matter how many times the self reflection may be reiterated. For this attempt itself hides or conceals the very object of its quest, i.e., the primordial spontaneous, functioning self. It is well known that, through detailed, painstaking and reiterated “phenomenological analyses,” Husserl’s life-long efforts to make everything (including the alter ego as well as that primordial functioning self) transparent by means of self-reflection proved itself as unfeasible, as it is indeed infinitely repeatable at the ultimate stage of the philosophy of reflection. Husserl even called such “primordial fact” as “self-temporalizing anonymous self,” “nunc stans” or das absolute Factum. This was also pointed out by Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Thévenaz.
Together with Nietzsche, Bergson and Dilthey, Scheler’s critical confrontation with the traditional Western philosophy was far more radical than Husserl’s; Scheler explicitly attempted lo uncover all concealed “idols,” “dogmas,” and “biases” deeply roofed in the mundane as well as the philosophical ontology of the preceding philosophies which constitute the implicit and hidden foundation for the contemporary sciences and philosophy. To Scheler, reflection as the representing, objectifying intentional act is by no means phenomenological intuition. Scheler was aware of the paradox in self-reflection when be spoke of the impossibility of grasping and seeing the “person” as the concrete essential ontic unity of various intentional acts. But be was able to phenomenologically reveal that a self-deception (Selbsttäuschung) may be involved in Descartes’ so-called indubitable evidence of immediate self-reflection. Thus, Scheler’s phenomenological investigation began precisely where he clearly and explicitly broke off from the traditional “philosophy of reflection.” Whereas Husserl, being influenced by theCritique of Pure Reason, developed his phenomenological inquiry in the direction of transcendental philosophy, Scheler look the opposite direction and tried to uncover the presuppositions and biases hidden in the basis of Kant’s philosophy in order to criticize the latter.
To Scheler, phenomenology is a new way of philosophizing in order to liberate man and the world from all possible mistrust, concealment and separation. It is an attempt lo recover the right and validity of “experiencing” as the open, harmonious unison between man and his world in the primordiality of the full, concrete reality as it reveals itself.
Scheler inherited from Husserl the following fundamental conceptions: the “phenomenological reduction” as the necessary procedure to philosophize phenomenologically, the “phenomenological experience” as a priori intuition, the pure fact,” or what Scheler calls “essence,” and the “intentionality” of our experiencing as the inseparable co-relation of the “act” and its “object.”
Husserl talked about various phenomenological reductions or “époché,” which, for example, may be enumerated as the “eidetic,” the “transcendental,” the “intersubjective,” the “universal-transcendental,” and the “phenomenological-psychological reduction,” etc. These various époché were developed by Husserl to deal with specific philosophical problems phenomenologically, but there is the fundamental nature of the phenomenological reduction common to all: it is, in short, a philosophical procedure lo enable the change and shift of one’s attitude (Einstellung) from one to the other in such a way that by means of the époché, i.e., in the new attitude, the previously implicit and overlooked, covered-up, and misconstrued becomes the explicit and visible, uncovered, and adequately construed. In general, Scheler speaks of the phenomenological reduction as a shift from the natural attitude to the phenomenological attitude.
As long as we are totally immersed in mundane intercourse (Verkehr und Vernehmen) with the “world,” there exists neither necessity, nor chance of our being able to philosophize, as described previously. The involvement of our transcending ourselves to and projecting ourselves in the world and the pragmatic value and import of this manner of being in the world is so strong and deep that even if doubt might arise, it would be necessarily a particular doubt about our concern about a particular object as an implement, which C. S. Peirce calls a “living doubt.” This doubt never, by its nature, rises above the horizon of our particular concerns (e.g., solving a disturbing problem such as too much tolerance of the automobile’s brakes) and is capable of “moving around’ solely within that domain.
Quite different is the situation in the following case: a dream experience can never be understood as a “dream” until some other experience such as the buzz of the alarm clock intercepts, undermines and destroys our “general thesis” of that dream experience as being real. Indeed, sometimes it happens that we do doubt spontaneously whether we might be “dreaming” in that very dream experience itself and yet such “feigned doubt” in isolation could usually not be strong enough lo “mediate” our dreaming as “dream experience” rather than “actual experience.” In the “dreaming” itself, its being a “dream” is implicit, concealed, unnoticed, and misconstrued as being when we become awake, then the mode of that previous experience reveals itself explicitly uncovered, visible and adequately construed as un-real, that is as a “dream.”
As is obvious from this metaphor, the phenomenological reduction or époché artificially (motivated by our innate urge to philosophize) performs a violent change in our attitude, an awakening from the dogmatic slumber in the mundane ontology of everydayness to the questioning search for truth. Thus, we become liberated from the naive, universal belief in the reality of the “natural world” in order to be able to “bracket”(ausser-Kraft-setzen) the operative power of latency, concealment, misunderstanding, and deception. This Scheler sometimes calls “adduction” rather than “reduction.”
What thus discloses itself in the phenomenological attitude is immediately (i.e., without the “filter” of operative latency, distortion, concealment and misunderstanding) “beheld” by the pure intuition (die phänomenologische Schau oder Erfahrung) and is called the “pure” or “phenomenological fact” or the “a priori essence” in Scheler’s term. It must be emphasized here again that this pure intuition does not have lo be self-reflection of self upon itself.
What is blinded in the natural attitude becomes or should become “visible” in the phenomenological attitude for various reasons. It may be due to the total immersion of ourselves in everyday concerns through the distortion by abstraction, and practical or even some theoretical interest, because of the concealment by language, symbols and theories, or even other philosophical conceptions traditionally inherited.
However, it is Eugen Fink in his famous article titled “L’analyse inlenlionnelle et le problème de la pensée spéculative” who initiated the contention that the problem of reality being implicit, overlooked, distorted, misconstrued and covered-up in the natural attitude reappears in what should be given as “transparent” in the phenomenological attitude due lo the limitation of the phenomenological intuition and the speculative thinking which supplements it. This interpretation of Husserl’s phenomenology and his “intentional analysis” has been now widely accepted and many efforts have been made to substantiate it by the miscarriage of Husserl’s continuous painstaking attempt in his later period lo make the total structure of the intentional correlations “transparent” by means of the self-reflection. Fink points out that in Husserl’s phenomenology, for example, the phenomenality of the “phenomenon” as the “entity for us” (i.e., Gegenstand) and the facticity of the pure fact given in the phenomenological intuition cannot be intuitively disclosed, but is to be speculatively conceived, and that the necessity of Husserl’s exactingly derailed intentional analyses year after year indicates the lack of the intuitive proof and the need for speculative thinking.
Such a criticism of Husserl’s phenomenology and of the pbenomenological philosophy in general that speculative thinking is inevitable even in the phenomenological philosophizing is based upon the following two assumptions: the one is Husserl’s heavy dependence on traditional Western philosophy as mentioned above; the other assumption, which was also pointed out in this paper before, is Husserl’s as well as Fink’s and others’ identification of pbenomenological intuition with self-reflection. There is no doubt that both Husserl and Scheler inherited and employed many traditionally stained, variously conceived notions of philosophy which, in fact, could possibly lead Husserl as well as Scheler away from the primary task of phenomenological inquiry. In the case of Scheler, such concepts as “essence” and “person” are very misleading, although they facilitated Scheler’s ability to deal with certain problems. However, it has been made clear above that these two assumptions are more unique to Husserl’s approach and partially resulted from his naiveté, and that Scheler is quite free from such accusations.
The crucial problem which is now left to us is the clarification of phenomenological intuition. As repeatedly emphasized before, first of all, phenomenological intuition should be clearly distinguished from most of the “self-reflection” on which Husserl’s ‘intentional analyses” depended.
Although our explication does not concern itself with the ambiguous use of phenomenological insight, it may be necessary to call attention to the ambiguity of Scheler’s use of “phenomenological intuition’ and “experience.” On the one hand it is employed methodologically, i.e., the phenomenological intuition constitutes the locus in which the so-called phenomenological facts–the pure essences–are self-given, namely disclosed intuitively On the other, to Scheler, the phenomenological experience means the “free, compassionate, active devotion to the world” as a new, open way of the world’s revealing itself in its full concreteness as it actually is. Scheler’s ambiguous use of phenomenological insight, intuition or experience, seems deliberate in that philosophizing as phenomenological experience consists ultimately in man’s open, fully confided, perspicuous intercourse with the world itself.
As obvious from the fact that phenomenological reduction or époché is a continuous process of the laborious, non-natural endeavor and never completes itself due to the finitude and ambiguity of our body (Leib), phenomenological insight or experience, although it is called intuition, is not an instant, mystical beholding of reality, unless it is idealized. Even though Scheler wrote that the phenomenological fact or a priori essence is the experienced or intuited, which is completely and immediately given in the experiencing or intuiting act, the complete and immediate self-givenness of the pure fact shows the complete independence from and the non-mediation of the senses and the way of empirical experience’s givenness allows the essence to give itself directly in its intending act.
Phenomenological experience or insight as intuition is “immediate” in the above-mentioned sense, and yet the process of attaining the unity of the intended (Gemeintes) and intuited (Erfülltes) discloses itself as “mediated” as long, toilsome modus operandi going through many steps of negation in Hegel’s sense of “Vermitelung.” Scheler speaks as if it were possible to have a phenomenological intuition of an individual object (the empirically perceived redness of a rose) as its essence (the a priori color “red of this very rose”) in isolation in our experience. Although theoretically this may be possible, in actuality it requires a total change of one’s attitude in the general thesis of one’s own experiencing. For as a process, the phenomenological reduction and phenomenological experience are one and the same. In this sense, the previously given example of the metaphor of the “dream” experience does not faithfully portray its concrete nature and its experience at all in the process of phenomenological intuition.
Rather from a different point of view, Stephen Strasser contends in his short article titled “Intuition und Dialektik” that the principle of intuition should be complemented by the principle of dialectic and that “the grasp of an object uno intuitu is not a human experience. Human intuition has the character of an endless process rather than that of a simple perfect, ultimate ‘visio’. However, the question is not whether the principle of intuition is to be complemented by that of dialectic. Rather, phenomenological intuition indeed is a process and it is identical with the phenomenological reduction which reveals in itself the structure dialectical mediation by means of negation. It is not because of speculative thinking that the phenomenological description forms a series of negative, distinguishing statements, e.g. “perception is not memory,” “perception is not hallucination,” perception is not anticipation,” etc., in order to disentangle (entwirren) the essential core from the unessential elements to bring it to an immediate phenomenon, but precisely that structure of the negative Vermittelung is reflected in the phenomenological description of the process in phenomenological intuition.
The person who reads and follows the phenomenological description is guided by this process of “negative mediation” step by step, is freed gradually from the distortion, confusion, concealment and finally, in the ideal case, arrives at the intuitive grasp of the identity of the intended and the intuited. This can be formally stated as a tautologous statement that is, “perception is perception.” This is why Wundt argued against Husserl that phenomenological description is “tautologous” in its final analysis.
It is quite interesting and appears philosophically significant to point out that Husserl’s and others’ phenomenology inevitably needs speculative thinking, but this may miss the entire point of the phenomenological investigation, which is to let the world gradually open up itself as it actually is, by bracketing step by step the operative latency, distortion, confusion, miscomprehension and covering-up. Might the contention of the functioning of the speculative thinking in Husserl’s intentional analyses and the failure to see the primordial, authentic way of intuition or experience itself be an indication for one’s being still trapped in traditional Western philosophy and operating with speculative thinking by oneself in a hidden and unnoticed manner? Phenomenological inquiry must be pursued further as long as the world as the horizon in which entities (objects) appear and the totality of entities in it will not be completely revealed with its full concreteness, as it actually is. This task, as long as it is pursued by man, will, however, never find its end.
1977
California State University
Dominguez Hills