REASON AND PRESUPPOSITIONLESSNESS
IN HUSSERL’S TRANSCENDENTAL PHENOMENOLOGY
For SPEP Meeting
1990 at Villanova University
Eiichi Shimomisse
California State University Dominguez Hills
Carson CA 90747
Prologue
In the Kaizo articles (1922-23) Edmund Husserl attempted to demonstrate that a “reform” (die Erneuerung) of human life becomes a life of Reason by molding human life through free, autonomous will. How is this possible?
“Die Erneuerung” is a metamorphosis from what has to be reformed. This may be called a crisis. The crisis that Husserl was facing and talking about seemed to result from the destruction of World War I and the distress of post-war economic chaos. It was argued, however, that these were not real causes of the crisis of European civilization and philosophy. They were mere symptoms of the meaninglessness of human existence and the futility of Western civilization itself.
In 1919 Oswald Spengler published the well known opus, “Der Untergang des Abendlandes”, which immediately became a best seller. Spengler tried to demonstrate the downfall of Western civilization by means of a biological model of the ten hietherto existing world civilizations.
Further, the poverty of philosophy and other social sciences and Dadaism in various genres of arts seemed a clear indication of the loss of confidence in people’s ability to positively and coherently create Western civilization. In those apparent decadent phenomena many people saw nihilism as the termination of Western civilization. Nietzsche was read as a prophet of nihilism and in his transvaluation of values is seen as a genuine self criticism of the entire history of European civilization. Even the most successful natural sciences and technologies were considered as European Reason’s own nemesis.
Against these theses, Husserl nevertheless believed that the crisis of Western civilization could be revealed as a seeming collapse of rationalism (das scheinbare Scheitern des Rationalismus), for rationalism itself was not the cause of the renunciation of rational culture but the latter was merely its superficial externality.
On what grounds did Husserl justify such contention?
How could Reason demonstrate itself as “die letzte Instanz”?
Reform by the Life of Reason
Reform of humanity is, according to Husserl, the highest theme of all ethics. “The ethical life is by its nature the very life in which one consciously subsumes oneself under the ideal of reform and has this ideal guide oneself”. For ethics is, Husserl maintains, the science that deals with all human behaviors of a rational subject with its normative veiwpoint of Reason. Following Kant, Husserl thus equates ethics with the science of practical Reason: “It is the life of reform that, grown out of one’s own will, molds itself by itself into a true humanity” (resp. into a true humane society).
This autonomous, free, spontaneous, self actuating will is what Husserl, in full agreement with Kant, calls Reason. In struggle with passive and affected desire and inclination (viewed from the rational ego as an active will), Reason as rational volition normatively regulates itself from itself by categorical imperative and thus is universally valid.
From the above mentioned it is clear that Husserl inherited the major portion of the Kantian concept of practical Reason and used it as the foundation of his ethical theory. Special efforts apparently were made by Husserl to see the identity of the transcendental ego with a practically rational subject in that self consciousness as self reflection (die Selbstbesinnung), being applied to the ethical sphere, is construed as critical self appraisal (inspectio sui) and critical self deliberation on oneself.
While the Kantian criterion of a morally right action is purely formal, Husserl’s is founded on value cognition and therefore admits a degree of perfection so that one can talk about an infinite accessibility of practical Reason to its ideal norm as the perfect person, which Husserl even calls “causa sui” in regard to rationality, that is, the perfect spontaneity of absolute freedom.
If the life of absurdity (die Unvernunft) in contrast to that of Reason were indeed the crisis, then it should be shown that true reform consists in the return from the self alienated, unfree and passive state of absurdity to the primordial origin of the free, active, spontaneous self reflective self of Reason.
In order to accomplish this, Husserl took three approaches to justification of Reason as the principle of ethical reform in the Kaizo articles and its Beilagen, although they are rather sketchy, suggestive and incomplete in comparison to “Die Krisis-Schriften”.
Three Justifications for Reason as the Principle of Ethical Reform
First of all, human-being as animal rationale, either as an individual or as a member of the society has its own « The second one is to trace back the primordial form of Reason of self actuating, autonomous freedom rooted in the pursuit of knowledge all the way to Ancient Greek philosophies and then to trace the historical development of Western philosophy from Socrates-Plato to his own transcendental Phenomenology as the process of teleological self actualization of this European Reason. To Husserl, this European Reason appeared as the first self conscious one in Ancient Greece, i.e., the Reason of the philosopher to which Pyhthagoras was supposed to compare the Olympian audience in the uninterested autonomous pursuit of pure theoretical knowledge for its own sake. It is, further, the Reason that Socrates exercised as self reflection ( Husserl begins his historical observation with the freedom movement in the Ancient (e.g. Babylonian and Jewish) religious cultures where essentially no freedom ruled. Husserl distinguishes two forms of freedom movement, the one in which self criticism was exercised within the religion and the one outside of religion. The latter was the case of the freedom of Ancient Greek Reason, while the former was exemplified by Christ in the development of Christianity as a “free” religion. Husserl’s intention is obvious, because it is Husserl’s contention that while the other religions of the world remained in primitive stages, Christianity adopted the Greek spirit of Reason and developed to a higher stage of free rationality to incorporate Reason into Christian theology. Thus Western civilization occupied an extraordinary place in the history of humankind through application of the Greek rationalistic philosophy, although its status was ancilla theoligiae.
Needless to say anew here, Husserl valued the Renaissance very highly as the deciding turning point for the radically critical self examination of the hitherto inherited sciences and traditions and the genuine rebirth or restoration of pure philosophical Reason. (Husserl of course did not forget to appreciate the significance of the Reformation as the religious authentic freedom movement.)
Through radically critical confrontation of the previous sciences and traditions, Reason at the beginning of the contemporary history of philosophy found its own best paradigm of scientia in mathematics. No other philosopher-scientist than Galileo Galilei was the founder of mathematization of knowledge as reality’s genuine expression of rationality. According to Galileo, “philosophy is written in the vast book which stands forever open before our eyes, I mean the universe; but it cannot be read until we have learnt the language…”. In the final justification of Reason in Reform, we will find a connecting point here to discuss the role of natural sciences and technologies later.
Descartes is called the father of contemporary philosophy because, as Hegel properly said, he made Reason in the form of self consciousness the principle of philosophy and sciences, and initiated the basic idea of phenomenological Although we shall later discuss this point, too, from a different perspective, perhaps we should not forget to emphasize that Reason took the place of the authority of all beings and knowledge instead of God in the Medieval ages. In the contemporary period, Reason in its autonomy and as the sole and absolute source of that authority seemed to be de facto deified particularly during the Enlightenment Movement.
The third justification of Reason is its negative aspect which received extensive treatment in “Die Krisis” manuscripts (further in “Ueber die Gegenwaertige Aufgabe der Philosophie” 1934 in Husserliana XXVII). In the Kaizo articles this concealment of primordial Reason by the natural sciences and scientific technologies suggests anticipating insights.
In the Kaizo articles (particularly in Beilage X), almost ten years earlier than the other documents, Husserl develops his critical confrontation of natural scientistic Objectivism. Needless to say this has evolved from the enormous success of special positive natural sciences and scientific technologies based on mathamatization and quantitative measurement techniques and now provides the apparent self evident basis for forgetting the genuine meaning and knowledge of the world to conceal the urgency of the need for mathesis universalis as the groundwork for all sciences. This Husserl calls the crisis of European sciences and at the same time the crisis of philosophy itself. Without the destruction of this concealment and the rediscovery and restoration of authentic Reason, there is no way to overcome today’s crisis. Here Husserl already sees the messianic mission of the historically teleological task of Reason as his transcendental phenomenology to accomplish this task.
Husserl’s Concept of Reason and his Presuppositionlessness of Philosophy as Basic Motives for Transcendental Phenomenology
From his “DIe Philosophie der Mathematik” Edmund Husserl pursued philosophical inquiry in the groundwork for mathematics and then for logic in “Logische Untersuchungen”. Both in “Idee der Phaenomenologie” and “Ideen I” Husserl was concerned with the ultimate justification of philosophies and sciences as the central theme of his questioning search. And this ultimate justification is pursued through Reason’s self reflection on itself. It was the ultimate justification for all knowledge and meaning of the world from the transcendental ego by its immediate self reflective intuitive grasp of itself. Even in the transcendental use of Reason, certainly there is a difference between Kant’s conception of Reason as the faculty of logical inference and Husserl’s conception of Reason as the faculty of intuitive self reflection. And yet, from the above investigation, it is quite obvious that Husserl literally uncritically inherited the notion of Reason from Parmenides/Anaxagoras/Socrates/Plato/Aristotle all the way through the contemporary philosophers including Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant and even Fichte. As long as Husserl based his methodology on Reason as self reflection on itself, the historically loaded concept of Reason was used in order to pursue phenomenological analyses and descriptions. Whether it is the principle of separation and knowledge, or the faculty of knowing the genuine reality, or the faculty to develop the scientific system of the authentic reality, as long as Reason is the principle of self consciousness, Husserl’s fundamental motive to pursue the ultimate justification of all meaning and knowledge of reality could not help but presuppose the long honorable tradition of Western philosophy concerning the notion of Reason. And Husserl in fact did so.
On the other hand, as can be seen from the editor’s notes for “Jahrbuch fuer die Philosophie und die phanomenologische Forschung” Bd.1 as well as his Logos article in 1911, the presuppositionlessness and “Return to Fact Itself!” are the other basic methodological motive in Husserl’s phenomenological research. This is the attitude to reject all the tradition and all the preceding philosophies, and all the prejudices and preconceived concepts are to be “bracketed” following Descartes’ universal doubt so that we have a fresh, completely new start of philosophy to approach directly to fact itself.
This presuppositionless approach to fact itself and Husserl’s use of Reason as self reflection on itself by the transcendental ego are, as extensively revealed above, seem mutually inconpatible. Is not this concept of Reason precisely what Eugen Fink called a operative concept? To explore and ultimately justify the meaning of the world by means of the transcendental ego is not to elucidate reality as it really is, but to conceal it by means of traditionally loaded meanings of Western Reason. In other words, to discover the teleological meaning of European Reason in Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology has the function to project the entire history of Western philosophy into the meaning of the world supposedly disclosed by Husserl’s transcendental philosophy. The problem of the anonymity of the functioning ego (das fungierendes Ich), the question of the streaming present (die lebendige, stroemende Gegenwart), the discovery of configurations in the prepredicative experience, etc., are some of the indications of this dilemma.
Even though this criticism of Husserl is appropriate, this does by no mans make the greatness and truthfulness of Husserl’s intentional analyses and his descriptions less meaningful. By this attempt to disclose the role of Reason in the investigation of the Reform of European civilization we are to wrestle ourselves with our own problems of how we accept this tradtion of Eureopean Reason and of Western civilization in the mirror of the laborious pursuit of Husserl’s philosophical inquiry.
October 13, 1990
Opera Selecta de Eiichi Shimomisse