To Work at The Foundations Essays in Memory of Aron Gurwitsch

TO WORK AT THE FOUNDATIONS
CONTRIBUTIONS TO PHENOMENOLOGY
IN COOPERATION WITH
THE CENTER FOR ADVANCED RESEARCH IN PHENOMENOLOGY
Volume 25
Editor:
John Drummond, Mount Saint Mary's College
Editorial Board:
Elizabeth A. Behnke
David Carr, Emory University
Lester Embree, Florida Atlantic University
J. Claude Evans, Washington University
Jose Huertas-Jourda, Wilfrid Laurier University
Joseph J. Kockelmans, The Pennsylvania State University
William R. McKenna, Miami University
Algis Mickunas, Ohio University
J. N. Mohanty, Temple University
Tom Nenon, The University of Memphis
Thomas M. Seebohm, Johannes Gutenberg-Universitiit, Mainz
Elisabeth Stroker, Philosophisches Seminarium der Universitiit Koln
Richard M. Zaner, Vanderbilt University
Scope
The purpose of this series is to foster the development of phenomenological philosophy

through creative research. Contemporary issues in philosophy, other disciplines and in
culture generally, offer opportunities for the application of phenomenological methods that
call for creative responses. Although the work of several generations of thinkers has
provided phenomenology with many results with which to approach these challenges, a truly
successful response to them will require building on this work with new analyses and
methodological innovations.
TO WORK AT THE
FOUNDATIONS
Essays in Memory of Aran Gurwitsch
edited by
J. CLAUDE EVANS
Washington Dniversity, St Louis, MO, D.S.A.
and
ROBERT S. STUFFLEBEAM
Washington Dniversity, St Louis, MO, D.S.A.
SPRINGER SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.

A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN 978-94-010-6287-9 ISBN 978-94-011-5436-9 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-94-011-5436-9
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© 1997 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1997
Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover lst edition 1997
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Table of Contents
Introduction
J. Claude Evans .............................................................. Vll
I. Aron Gurwitsch the Philosopher
1. Keynote Address: Concerning Aron Gurwitsch

Maurice Natanson ............................................................. 3
2. The Philosophy of Aron Gurwitsch

Fred Kersten .................................................................... 21
II. Critical Studies of the Philosophy of Aron Gurwitsch
3. Gurwitsch's Interpretation of Kant: Reflections of a Former

Student
Henry E. Allison .............................................................. 33
4. Phenomenalism, Idealism and Gurwitsch's Account of the

Sensory Noema
Robert Welsh Jordan ...... ........ ...... ........ ...... .............. ....... 55
5. Conditional Identity and Irregular Parts: Aron Gurwitsch's

Gestalt-Theoretic Revision of the Stumpf-Hussed Conception
of Independence
Gilbert T. Null ................................................................. 65
III. Gurwitschean Themes in Philosophy
6. Relevance and Aesthetic Perception

P. Sven Arvidson ........................................................... 131
7. A Gurwitschean Model for Explaining Culture or How to

Use an Atlatl
Lester Embree ................................................................ 141
VI
IV. Philosophy in the Spirit of Aron Gurwitsch
8. On the Difference Between Transcendental and Empirical

Subjectivity
David Carr .................................................................... 175
9. On Confronting Species-Specific Skepticism as We Near

the End of the Twentieth Century
James M. Edie ......... ..... ....... ..... ..... ....... ..... ....... ..... ........ 193
10. TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN: The Question of the

Philosophic Interlocutor
Jose Huertas-Jourda ............................................ '" ..... 229
11. Beyond Foundationalism and Functionalism: Phenomenology

in Exchange with the Human and Social Sciences
Bernhard Waldenfels ..................................................... 241
V. A Bibliography for Gurwitsch Studies

Robert S. Stufflebeam .................................................... 261
Index 275
Introduction
J. Claude Evans
Washington University
In his contribution to this volume, Maurice Natanson recalls

Aron Gurwitsch telling him an anecdote about Edmund Husserl:
Husser! had once told Gurwitsch, "We are both destined to work at
the foundations."
Husserl knew of what he spoke, both about himself and about
the young Gurwitsch, and it was surely no accident that Gurwitsch
repeated this story to Maurice Natanson. From Edmund Husser!,
through Aron Gurwitsch, to Maurice Natanson and two further
generations of phenomenologists represented in this volume, this
has been the ethic of labor in the fields of phenomenology:
concentration of the problems themselves. System comes later as a
higher level activity which is built upon rather than dictating the
work on the problems themselves, the work at the foundation.
To have heard a lecture by Aron Gurwitsch, to have sat in a
seminar under his leadership, to read a text he wrote, is to learn in
the most direct manner possible what it means to work at the
foundations. On November 7-9, 1991, friends and students of Aron
Gurwitsch met at the New School for Social Research in order to do
honor to his memory in the only appropriate way: by working at the
foundations. They are joined in this volume by yet another
generation, represented by P. Sven Arvidson.
The range of papers would, I think, have pleased Gurwitsch.
Maurice Natanson's keynote address, "Concerning Aron
Gurwitsch," takes its task to be "to wander across some of the
philosophical terrain of Gurwitsch's intellectual life, sounding and
occasionally probing places in his work which might give the
Vll
Vill J. ClAUDE EVANS
audience as a whole an indication of what kind of philosopher he

was." Ranging over such Gurwitschean topics as the non-egological
conception of consciousness, Gestalt theory-and the rejection of the
constancy hypothesis, the correlation conception of the
transcendental, and the problem of access, Natanson leads his
audience back from the work Gurwitsch did at the foundation to the
work to be done-the infinite task-at the foundation: "What
'access' could be at work in the Akedah, the story of Abraham and
Isaac and the near sacrifice of the son by the father?" This question
leads, at the very beginning of the Symposium, beyond the work
done by Aron Gurwitsch, and in so doing honors him.
Fred Kersten's "The Philosophy of Aron Gurwitsch" moves
from a "Then", focusing on the way Gurwitsch understood and
approached the task of scholarship and learning, to a "Now", in
which he considers "what happens when Gurwitsch's philosophy is
treated in the way in which he considered his contemporaries and
predecessors." To treat Gurwitsch's work in this way is to join in
the task of constitutive phenomenology as what Gurwitsch called a
"working philosophy, a philosophy living and developing in the
actual work of research. "
Section II contains three critical studies of Gurwitsch's work. I

suspect that many phenomenologists were surprised when Henry
Allison, the leading American Kant scholar of the generation which
followed the path-breaking work of Lewis White Beck, wrote the
following dedication in his Kant's Transcendental Idealism: "To the
memory of Aron Gurwitsch, with whom I began my study of
Kant." Until the publication of the correspondence between
Gurwitsch and his close friend Alfred Schutz, only a very few
people knew that in the 1950s Gurwitsch had virtually completed a
monograph containing what he called his "Kant interpretation in
Leibnizianperspective."l Now Allison the student returns to the
work of Gurwitsch the teacher in order, respectfully but decisively,
1. Alfred Schutz and Aron Gurwitsch, Philosophers in Exile, p. 260.

INrRODUcnON lX
to c'riticize it. To Gurwitsch's reading of Kant as a phenomenalist

Allison opposes his own reading of Kant's transcendental idealism.
At the memorial symposium, Robert Welsh Jordan read a paper
entitled "Multiple Heideggers? An Early, Still Prevalent
Misreading," since he felt that his paper "Phenomenalism, Idealism
and Gurwitsch's Account of the Sensory Noema" was too technical
to present at a symposium, even to a group of students of
Gurwitsch. Happily, he agreed to publish it here. In this essay,
Jordan the student takes Gurwitsch the teacher to task for
developing an account of the perceptual object which "precludes.. .
the very possibility whose defense was a major part of Husserl's
concept of phenomenology as a philosophical theory, viz., that what
is given be something that is no mere system of appearances."
Gilbert T. Null is one of the few phenomenologists who has
taken up the work Husserl and Gurwitsch did in the phenomenology
of logic. His essay on Gurwitsch's revisions of the concept of
independence is an important and original contribution to formal
ontology, and one can only hope that Null's work, along with the
work of Barry Smith and a few others, will revitalize
phenomenological analysis in this field. Null has gone on to use the
results attained here in the philosophy of art.
Section III contains two studies which take up the results of

Gurwitsch's philosophical work at the foundations and apply them
fruitfully in new ways. P. Sven Arvidson, who did not speak at the
Memorial Symposium, takes up Gurwitsch's analysis of the theme,
thematic field, margin structure of consciousness and applies it in an
investigation of the structure of aesthetic perception. In particular, he
is concerned "to articulate the dynamics of the relevancy relation
between theme and thematic field" in aesthetic perception. His work
is yet another powerful confirmation of the usefulness of
Gurwitsch's work, here in a field which, as Arvidson notes,
Gurwitsch did not address in any detail.
Lester Embree's contribution is a continuation of his
investigation of cultural objects in distinction to ideal and natural
objects. Study of these objects requires thematization of the strata of
x J. ClAUDE EVANS
valuing and willing which are excluded from the experience of
purely natural objects as such. Taking some remarks by Aron
Gurwitsch as his point of departure, Embree develops a set of
phenomenological analyses which demonstrate that the cultural
sciences have to make use not only of teleological explanation, but
of aitiological explanation as well. In a style typical of work at the
foundations, Embree ends not with a statement of results achieved,
but with a brief discussion of additional issues and problems which
emerged in the course of his investigation.
Section IV contains four studies which, while not specifically

picking up on or studying the work of Aron Gurwitsch, do him
honor by dealing with themes which he took very seriously.
Husserl's response to skepticism in the form of psychologism
stands at the very beginning of phenomenology. The critique of
psychologism found in volume one of the Logical Investigations
(1900-1901) set the stage for the first mature statement of
phenomenology as a program in volume two, and the later turn to
transcendental phenomenology in the Ideas of 1913 can be seen as a
completion of this program, merely drawing out explicitly
commitments which were already at work in the Investigations.
Aron Gurwitsch's essay "On Contemporary Nihilism,"2 written
before the end of World War II and published in 1945, pursues
these same issues into the dominance of naturalism in the form of
sociologism and social psychologism, tracing out their nihilistic
consequences. James M. Edie takes up these issues in the context of
the post-modern decentering of the subject in Structuralism,
Poststructuralism, Deconstruction and the sociology of knowledge.
Edie argues that the antidote to this skepticism is to be found in
Husserl's conception of eidetic truth and in his conception of
transcendental consciousness.
While the theme of a specifically transcendental phenomenology
has fallen out of favor in many quarters in this post-modern time, all
too often intellectual fashion stands in no real relation to the reasons
2. Review oj Politics 7: 1945, 170-198.

INTRODUCTION xi
put forward in support of its positions. David Carr joins Edie in

reposing the question of the distinction between transcendental and
empirical subjectivity, a topic which caused many of Husserl's early
students to refuse to follow the transcendental turn announced in
1913. Carr follows Aron Gurwitsch in insisting on the philosophical
necessity of the distinction. Even for those committed to the viability
and necessity of a transcendental phenomenology, this is an issue
which has to be raised ever again, as the skeptical attacks shift with
changing philosophical climates. Even among phenomenologists,
raising such issues is not an exercise in preaching to the converted.
Jose Huertas-Jourda's essay "TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN,
the Question of the Philosophic Interlocutor," amounts to a
prolegomena to a phenomenology of philosophical discourse.
Taking texts by Heidegger, Derrida and Aron Gurwitsch as point of
departure, Huertas-Jourda distinguishes texts whose partisanship
appeals primarily to sympathizers and sycophants (example Derrida)
from texts which are examples of "hermeneutical terrorism"
(example Heidegger), and both of these from texts in which "we
find evidence of the most fastidious regard for the interlocutor, a
regard that does not exclude but rather demands the utmost
scrupulousness in avoiding sycophancy." Huertas-Jourda finds that
one of the essential characteristics of phenomenology as work at the
foundations in the equality and autonomy of the interlocutor. In so
doing, he aims to mark off the tradition of Husser} and Gurwitsch
from that of Heidegger and Derrida
While distancing himself from the strong foundationalism of
Husserl, Bernhard Waldenfels warns against moving to the opposite
extreme of a pure functionalism in which the only meaning is a mere
"game signification." While the shift to variable, contingent orders is
a move away from the strict foundation of an apodictically given
order, the alternative is not pure construction, but rather the situated
response. Working within the "significative difference" of the
"something as something" which sets the agenda for
XlI J. CUUDEEvANS
phenomenological investigation,3 while rejecting the siren call of the

"necessary conditions" of transcendental philosophy in the Kantian
tradition, Waldenfels stakes out "the middle region of heterogeneous
orders." While this involves a rejection of foundationalism, and thus
of some of the commitments of classical Husserlian
phenomenology, there is continuity as well. Indeed, Aron
Gurwitsch's work on the phenomenology of thematization helped
prepare the way for this investigation of the middle ground between
foundationalism and functionalism, and I think that Waldenfels'
work would clearly qualify as nonfoundationalist work "at the
foundations" in Gurwitsch's sense. Of course, there remain serious
points of disagreement. For example, Waldenfels is much more
open to the work of Foucault and Derrida than Edie or Huertas-
Jourda.
Thus, each of these contributions, each in its own way, does

honor to the memory and life work of Aron Gurwitsch. To be sure,
Gurwitsch would have found much to disagree with here, but then
he would have expected no less. Just as he did honor to the work of
Edmund Husserl by challenging the egological conception of
consciousness and by introducing Gestalt-theoretical concepts into
phenomenology, so he would have felt honored to see those who
have taken his work seriously carrying that work forward while
criticizing it.
In 1946 Gurwitsch had the opportunity to read Maurice Merleau-
Ponty's Structure of Behavior. In a letter to Alfred Schutz, he wrote:
That I could have to some extent stimulated such a study

makes me happy and sad simultaneously. Alas, how well I
know that regardless of what I have the opportunity to say
here [in the United States], it will be scattered in the winds
and cast on a sterile stony ground. I suppose that one must
3. As Aron Gurwitsch wrote, the pursuit of phenomenology involves

replacing the question "what is something?" with the question "what is it known
as?" Cf. Schutz/Gurwitsch, Philosophers in Exile, p. 63. Phenomenology is the
discipline of the" as".
INrRODUCTION Xlll
come to terms with one's Fatum, but when Spinoza

demands that one love it, that is certainly going too far.
[December 15, 1946]4
Less than two years later, his reading of Merleau-Ponty's

Phenomenology of Perception produced a similar reaction:
I am currently reading Merleau-Ponty's Perception. I hear an

enormous amount from my lectures in the book.... My
reaction to the reading is a mixture of pleasure and
melancholy. Honest pleasure over the excellent book, which
is truly a fine achievement; and also pleasure over the fact
that my influence in a sense was the godfather. It is a great
feeling too know that my years in Paris were not for
nothing, and that my lectures had results. And the
melancholy refers to the modus prateritus. Here I will never
have such a fine influence. One can become very sad when
one looks back at one's life and the effects of one's life as if
one were dead. For everything that I now do in America
goes into the void and is gone with the wind. [August 11,
1947]5
The essays collected here would not produce melancholy. They

would rather be the starting point for many a disputation, and that is
a Fatum Aron Gurwitsch would indeed have loved.
The editors would like to thank Cambridge University Press for

permission to reprint Henry Allison's "Gurwitsch's Interpretation of
Kant: Reflections of a Former Student," which was published in
Idealism and Freedom, Essays on Kant's Theoretical and Practical
Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, 1996.
4. pp. 88-89.
5. p. 93.
Part I
Aron Gurwitsch the Philosopher

Keynote Address
Concerning Aron Gurwitsch
Maurice Natanson
Yale University
Were Aron Gurwitsch to be asked what kind of philosophical

statement about him he would prefer to be made after his death, I am
convinced that he would say that he wanted his philosophical views
reported-just that; reported and discussed. I believe that by
philosophical discussion he would have meant critical but informed
discussion: serious, fundamental, well-grounded analysis of his
views, based primarily on his writings, his teaching in and out of
the classroom, his correspondence, and the most judicious and
exacting reports of his philosophical conversation. What he would
not want is easily stated: anecdotal, purely biographical,
impressionistic accounts of his life and thought. I am not convinced
that I can either meet or agree completely with Gurwitsch's wishes
or preferences on this occasion. Although I honor, let alone respect,
his wishes, I have my rights too! And I consider it within my rights
to go against the preferences of my subject-at least occasionally.
Largely, I shall reserve a more nearly personal statement of my
feeling to serve as a brief coda. But even now I face a decision
3
J. C. Evans and R. W. Stufflebeam (eds.), To Work at the Foundations, 3-20.
© 1997 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
4 MAURICE NATANSON
whether to report what I consider to be a small story relevant to

Gurwitsch's character as well as his philosophical method. Before I
relate that story, I should caution you that in what follows I
sometimes use the expression or locution, "as Gurwitsch once said
to me." I do not mean by that formulation to suggest, however
indirectly, that I had a special relationship to Aron Gurwitsch which
included private or secret revelations of any kind. He may very well
have said the same things to other people. There is nothing in this
account said to me by Gurwitsch in confidence. He simply said
some things to me which I consider worth reporting. Well, I come
now to that story.
Once, I asked Gurwitsch whether he thought of someone as a
kind of philosophical conscience when he composed his books or
articles, whether he felt, as it were, someone looking over his
philosophical shoulder, some authoritative figure whose good
opinion of what he wrote would matter, really matter-Edmund
Husserl, for example. Certainly, Schutz and Gurwitsch peered over
my shoulder-and still do. In answer to my question, Gurwitsch
said, "No, when I write I concentrate solely on the problem itself,
nothing else." Another time, he told me about his method of
composition. There were a group of philosophical themes, subjects
really, which interested him in general phenomenology (I exclude
here his important interest in Leibniz as well as Kant): mathematics
(which includes the philosophy of arithmetic, number, and what I
shall generically call "foundations of mathematics"), intentionality
(including noesis-noema problems), Gestalt theory (especially in
relationship to Husserlian ideas), the relationship between
phenomenology and psychology, the structure of consciousness,
and a very important "and so on and so forth." Any casual glance at,
say, The Field of Consciousness or Studies in Phenomenology and
Psychology would show his many other quite central concerns. But
my point is not to present a list of Gurwitsch's interests in
phenomenology but rather to indicate that he would move back and
forth, from time to time, from one theme in phenomenology to
another, rather than proceeding in a more nearly linear fashion from
issue to issue or proceed by, in a different image, climbing a
CONCERNING ARON GURWITSrn 5
phenomenological ladder, rung by rung. In one sense, in my
judgment, he was not a system-bound thinker whose inner
command it was to produce a logic, an ethics, an aesthetics-a
careerist of philosophical domains. He was a returner, advancing in
his returning, a sojourner, a solidifier and not a codifier. Depth, not
distance, was his generative metaphor. He told me that Husserl had
said to him: "We are both destined to work at the foundations."
There is one further consideration which ought, I believe, to be
stated at the outset. Although this presentation is not intended as a
comparison of the thought of Aron Gurwitsch and Alfred Schutz,
there will be more than casual mention of the philosophical
relationship between the two. The mention of Schutz in connection
with Gurwitsch is not so much a matter of choice as it is a function
of necessity. It has been said that in order to understand either
thinker, the other must also be understood. Without quarreling with
this formulation, I would put the matter differently: the study of
either man illuminates the thought of the other. Even further, it may
be suggested that the analysis of the work of both Gurwitsch and
Schutz both clarifies and challenges the work of Husserl; to be sure,
their writings also extend and develop the phenomenology of
Husserl. In distinguishing between the phenomenological work of
Gurwitsch and Schutz-something which might deserve mention at
this time-I have heard it suggested that Gurwitsch may be thought
of as a noematic phenomenologist, whereas Schutz is a noetic
phenomenologist. This time, I would hold back from such an
assertion and say instead that I donlt understand how the distinction
itself-even on purely Husserlian grounds-is possible. It would be
a handshake with only one hand extended or engaged. Perhaps a
Zen handshake. If I had to condense the entire contrast, I would say
that if there is merit in calling Gurwitsch a philosopher of
consciousness, then there is justification in denominating Schutz a
philosopher of sociality. Should there be-and I trust there is not-
anyone who would say, "If this is supposed to be a memorial for
Gurwitsch, then why donlt you stick to Gurwitsch?," I would be
compelled to conclude that anyone who would raise such a question
had knowledge neither of Gurwitsch nor of Schutz.
6 MAURICE NATANSON
Permit me to introduce a brief remark on what 1 understand a

"keynote speaker" to signify-how I conceive my function in this
meeting. 1 am not part of that aspect of the program which concerns
itself with a specific problem or set of problems and argues for a
particular view of things. Such papers, whether directly concerned
with the thought of Gurwitsch or which tum to topics of interest to
him are represented here in force. My task, at least as 1 conceive it,
is to wander across some of the philosophical terrain of Gurwitsch's
intellectual life, sounding and occasionally probing places in his
work which might give the audience as a whole an indication of
what kind of philosopher he was-not labels or jargon (if 1 can
avoid it) but a sense of a certain human being as a philosopher and
of a phenomenologist as a certain human being. 1t may well be that
this conception of a keynote speaker is inadequate in some fashion,
that time spent on anything but philosophy is marginal and wasteful.
In university lecturing in philosophy, 1 know that some advanced
students consider anything but hard, textual analysis shameful. 1
once started a seminar by saying, "Good morning." Several students
immediately left. For better or worse, when it comes to keynote
speakers right now, you have only me.
A moment ago, 1 spoke of Gurwitsch as a philosopher of
consciousness. His is, as we know, a non-egological conception of
consciousness. In his remarkable review of Husserl's last work (I
would not hesitate to call it one of the deepest philosophical reviews
of any philosophical book of the twentieth century), Gurwitsch
reminds us that "Husserl advocates an egological conception of
consciousness." A fundamental chasm presents itself here between
phenomenologists such as Gurwitsch and Schutz. It was
Gurwitsch's article on "A Non-egological Conception of
Consciousness" in which he sided with certain views of the early
Sartre which announced Gurwitsch's view of consciousness as
presupposing no grounding in an ego which stood either behind the
acts of consciousness or was at the basis of the theory of
intentionality. I would venture to suggest that the ultimate
implication of Gurwitsch's non-egological conception of
consciousness within the matrix of Husserl's phenomenology is that
CONCERNING ARON GURWITSCH 7
Gurwitsch embraces the phenomenological reduction at the same

time that he repudiates the idea of a transcendental ego.
Phenomenological reduction is an indispensable methodological
procedure for the analysis of intentionality; there is no need to posit
an ego, a "self" behind or "below" what phenomenological
reduction reveals: a world given as purely "meant." What I am
suggesting here is not a terminological nicety but a quite
fundamental view of the transcendental. In my judgment, Gurwitsch
in his own distinctive views, as distinguished from his expositions
of Husserl's thought, considered transcendental knowledge to be the
product of a relationship rather than something disclosed by the
phenomenologist's "glance." A relationship of what kind?
It is not always as easy as it appears in reading Gurwitsch's
work to distinguish precisely between his engagement with and
profound exposition of Husserl's thought and his own ideas. The
difficulty is not the result of any confusion on Gurwitsch's part or
any lack of care in presentation. He was a scrupulous author.
Something else is at work, I believe, in Gurwitsch's writing. At
times, his task was to expound Husserl's phenomenology; at times,
his task was to explain Husserl's phenomenology; and at still other
times, his task was to criticize aspects of Husserl's doctrines. Even
in such a work as The Field of Consciousness it is not evident that
an account of every Husserlian or phenomenological concept is
purely an idea held by Gurwitsch. Rather, there is something akin to
an interweaving sometimes between the thought of two masters. It
may be easier to demonstrate what I have in mind by choosing a
smaller focus than a book for an example. In his article entitled (in
English) "Critical Study of Husserl's Nachwort," I wonder how the
term "critical" is being used. Certain references are made to Gestalt
theory and the importance of the rejection of the constancy
hypothesis. Husserl would have done well to pay closer attention to
the importance and the implications of that development, we are in
effect told. The work of Gestalt and related investigators has been
somewhat slighted. Gurwitsch writes:
8 MAURICE NATANSON
Gestalt-theoretical investigations ... are not limited to

'normal adult civilized men' but extend to animals (Kohler),
children (Koffka, K. Lewin), and brain-injured patients
(Gelb and Goldstein) and which allow for Levy-Bruhl's
work on primitive mentality lead to problems which are also
of significance for Husserl's phenomenology, although he
has not pursued them. 1
Of course, Gurwitsch pursued some of these themes in valuable

and extended detail elsewhere. But in the context of his article
"Critical Study of Husserl's Nachwort ," he does not go much
further than these short comments. Perhaps the clue to an
explanation for the absence of a more sustained criticism of the
Nachwort lies in the date of the publication of the German original:
1932. I have in mind not politics but the living Husser!'
Comparatively speaking, these are rather gentle nudges instead of
"criticism. "
It should be quickly asserted that I have chosen for my analysis
a piece of Gurwitsch's writing which is not only short but extremely
minor, if one considers the entire corpus of his work. Yes,
sometimes Gurwitsch expounded, sometimes he explained,
sometimes he discussed, and sometimes he criticized. But my point,
is not, taking the Nachwort piece as my evidence, that he conflated
these tasks. I mean to suggest that between the creative exposition
and interpretation of phenomenology and the criticism of it
something of a difficulty arises in trying to set forth clearly what I
take to be Gurwitsch's conception of the transcendental as involving
a relationship between elements of intentionality rather than a level
of reduction. I think that I have some warranty in saying that
Gurwitsch's conception of the transcendental is viewed as a way of
comprehending the deepest structure of intentionality, understood as
the meaning-activity of the noesis-noema relationship. In the final
1. A. Gurwitsch, "Critical Study of Husserl's Nachtwort." Studies in

Phenomenology and Psychology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
1966,p.1l4).
CONCERNING ARON GURWITSGI 9
section of his essay "On the Intentionality of Consciousness,"
Gurwitsch writes:
The noetico-noematic correlation is what the term

intentionality must signify. In this light the formula
consciousness oj something is to be understood: a conscious
act is an act of awareness, presenting to the subject who
experiences it a sense, an ideal atemporal unity, identical,
i.e., identifiable. It is not by virtue of favorable
circumstances calling for an explanation and for a reduction
to more elementary facts but by virtue of what constitutes the
nature of consciousness itself that an experienced act bears a
reference to a sense. Consciousness is to be defined by its
bearing reference to a sphere of sense, so that to experience
an act is the same thing as to actualize a sense. Hence every
fact of consciousness must be treated in terms of the relation
cogito-cogitatum qua cogitatum, and no mental state may be
accounted for except with regard to the objective sense ...
of which the experiencing subject becomes aware through
this act. 2
The essay concludes by saying that Husserl's analyses of

objectivity, "by which," Gurwitsch writes, "he has cleared up the
ultimate meaning of his struggle against psychologism, throw a new
light upon the correlation conception of consciousness advanced
here. "3 Gurwitsch concludes:
Though never formulated in quite explicit terms, this

conception seems to be at the root of a large part of his
theories, and, when his work is considered in its growth,
this conception reveals itself, I submit, to be one of the
2. A. Gurwitsch, ·On the Intentionality of Consciousness.· Studies in

1966, p. 138).
3. Gurwitsch, ·On the Intentionality of Consciousness,· p. 140.
10 MAURICE NATANSON
teleological goals towards which phenomenology is

tending. 4
This may be as close as I can get to what Gurwitsch called the

correlation conception of the transcendental.
It should not be surprising that Gurwitsch's non-egological
conception of consciousness has similarities to ideas of the early
Sartre of The Transcendence ojthe Ego. Although Gurwitsch had a
very low opinion of the Sartre of Being and Nothingness, he had
high regard for the young Sartre and for his early publications. Nor
should Gurwitsch's poor opinion of Being and Nothingness
surprise us, quite apart from the publicity surrounding the then new
movement of "existentialism." It might be interesting to note that,
based on a fragmentary reading of Sartre's work, George Santayana
wrote, in his letters, that he felt Sartre to be "weak in his first
principles." Although Schutz wrote an essay on Sartre's theory of
the alter ego as stated in Being and Nothingness -a topic which
Schutz thought could be considered without dragging into the
discussion the entire Sartrean ontology-he did not have, I think, a
terribly high regard for all of Sartre's books. He told me that
Sartre's What is Literature? was coffee-table philosophy-French
cafe material, not serious, first-class philosophical work. What
accounted for Gurwitsch's dismissal of Being and Nothingness, I
think, was that in reading Sartre's treatise, Gurwitsch smelled a
phenomenological rat. All the emphasis on the "for-itself" as being
that which it is not and not being that which it is, aroused in
Gurwitsch, I believe, the suspicion that Sartre was playing a kind of
shell game which would attract public opinion or at least the
attention of students. It was not an honest piece of work. I disagreed
with Gurwitsch on this point and tried to convince him-in vain-
that if Sartre wished to make an impact on a large audience he would
not bury his definition of the pour-soi, his very conception of
consciousness in the mausoleum of Being and Nothingness . Some
students and some philosophers might persevere in reading the
4. GUfwitsch, ·On the Intentionality of Consciousness,· p. 140.

CONCERNING ARON GURWITSOI 11
whole of that book and mastering its arguments, but even students
would be more apt at the time the volume was published to carry it
about than to study its contents. Talk of "existentialism" did not
appeal to either Gurwitsch or Schutz, and though they could see
how certain connections between existentialism and phenomenology
could be established, they stayed largely aloof from existentialism. It
was not so much a question of a poor relation as a contaminated
relation, one with questionable motives, hasty philosophical
procedures, and I think it important to say in the light of Sartre's
subsequent development, dubious social and political attitudes.
Sartre, whatever else he was, was deeply anti-bourgeois. In a
discussion I had with Schutz regarding Sartre, Schutz said in strong
tones, "I am a bourgeois," but Sartre's level of discourse did not
impress him. It is my belief that Gurwitsch held much the same
VIew.
The concept or problem of "access" appeared again and again in
Gurwitsch's discussions of phenomenological problems. What
might be termed the "moment" of access to consciousness is basic to
all descriptions and analyses of perceptual reality. It is
consciousness which must be appealed to finally as the source of all
interpretation of whatever presents itself to human beings in the
course of their experience. And it is the phenomenology of
consciousness, the disclosure of intentional structure, which alone at
its deepest level can provide not only a description of phenomena
but an analysis of "access" itself. Let us leave aside Sartre as well as
the more general conception of existentialism and ask a very
different sort of question. What "access" could be at work in the
Akedah, the story of Abraham and Isaac and the near sacrifice of the
son by his father? This question and in tum our discussion may
seem totally out of place in the present inquiry, but my purpose is to
move from Sartre to Kierkegaard in the hope that a fresh figure may
provide a more neutral point of reference in speculating on what
Gurwitsch might have said about the relevance of phenomenology to
existentialism rather than to a thorny problem in scripture. In
pursuing my theme I must ask a small indulgence from my audience:
their appreciation of the fact that I am unqualified to discuss the
12 MAURICE NATANSON
subject. Instead of listening to me, I recommend reading Shalom

Spiegel's The Last Trial. s However, I am not turning to the Bible
but instead to what one of Kierkegaard's pseudonymous authors has
to say about Abraham and Issac. Gurwitsch himself has not given a
published opinion, to my knowledge, on the Akedah and I never
discussed it with him. My speculation can be nothing more than the
expression of a curiosity on my part of how a phenomenology of
access might be understood. This is a somewhat sneaky procedure,
I must admit, because Kierkegaard's existential analysis of the
"Father of Faith", proceeding in the book Fear and Trembling by
way of indirection, lies outside of the domain of experiential
presentation. Still, what might emerge, however tentatively, is a
point of contact between Gurwitsch's phenomenology of "access"
and a quite different version of "existentialism."
The purity of the ego in phenomenology is always contrasted
with the acknowledgment of the empirical ego. Even so, the pure
ego has a content, whether it remembers, sees, or anticipates. One is
reminded of St. Augustine's three "presents" in The Confessions. In
any case, the pure ego has access to the experiential world, as I
understand Gurwitsch. How, then, are we to comprehend
Kierkegaard's Abraham? Do I have access by way of the
phenomenological reduction or any correlational theory of
intentionality to the faith of Abraham? Or is faith outside of the
province of phenomenology altogether? Is it the testing of Abraham
which makes him comprehensible to us? That is not Kierkegaard's
view. He asks:
Who strengthened Abraham's arm, who braced up his right

arm so that it did not sink down powerless? Anyone who
looks upon this scene is paralyzed. Who strengthened
Abraham's soul lest everything go black for him and he see
neither Isaac nor the ram! Anyone who looks upon this
scene is blinded. And yet it perhaps rarely happens that
anyone is paralyzed or blinded, and still more rarely does
5. S. Spiegel, The Last Trial (Woodstock: Jewish Lights Publishing, 1993).

CONCERNING ARON GURWITsa-I 13
anyone tell what happened as it deserves to be told. We

know it all- it was only an ordeal .... 6
Is it the case that the only way into the Abraham-Isaac dialectic is
by way of paradox? This time not the Kierkegaardian formulation of
the paradox offaith but the method of paradox itself; the ponderable
formulation of the imponderable. I have just used the language of
dialectic, but it is obvious that Kierkegaard's reader is well aware of
the absence of Hegel in this discussion. "By way of paradox," then,
must mean without mediation. The paradox which is mediated
ceases to be a paradox. Faith is the method of paradox, and that
means that method is not conceptual intervention but a "having"
which resembles grace more that it does any devout striving.
Abraham had faith; he did not negotiate an acquisition. But if
Gurwitsch did not comment on the Akedah, I am convinced that he
would have had more phenomenological patience with Kierkegaard
generally-Husserl certainly did-than he had with the Sartre of
Being and Nothingness. In any case, Husserl had his own
paradoxes: the three discussed by Eugen Fink and the one examined
by Gurwitsch. In his essay, "The Last Work of Edmund Husserl,"
Gurwitsch writes:
If-as it seems we must- we mean by egos human beings,

an apparently insuperable paradox is bound to arise. Human
beings are themselves mundane existents among other such
existents; they belong to, and are part of, the world. How
then is it possible for a part to constitute and to produce the
very whole of which it is a part? If the general program of
phenomenology is to account for the world in terms of
human subjectivity or intersubjectivity, this program proves
to be beset by an utter absurdity, because it amounts to
accounting for the world in terms which by their very nature
imply and presuppose that which is to be accounted for.
6. s. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, H. Hong & E. Hong (Trans.)

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983, p. 22).
14 MAURICE NATANSON
Obviously, the paradox hinges on the dual role of man, who

is at the same time both a mundane existent among others, an
object within the world, and a subject with respect to the
world, i.e., a subject from whose experiences and mental
operations the world derives the sense of its existence. To
surmount that paradox and to achieve some clarity
concerning the ambiguous position of man, it is, according
to Husserl, both necessary and sufficient to perform the
phenomenological reduction with utmost consistency.7
A summary of the last part of our discussion may be helpful.

Gurwitsch stressed the crucial character of what he termed "access."
It is consciousness which provides access to the experiential world.
But Gurwitsch, following Husserl, distinguishes sharply between
empirical consciousness and the phenomenological conception of
consciousness, which is basically intentionality. I have asked, in
effect, whether indeed all aspects of human reality are open to the
access of intentionality. What about Kierkegaard's paradox? Is the
same procedure which Husserl follows in resolving the paradox of
whole and part, in terms of world and human subjectivity,
applicable to Kierkegaard's paradox? To pose the question in a
different form: Is what Gurwitsch terms "access" applicable to what
Kierkegaard terms "inwardness"? Is phenomenological reduction
tinged with mediation? Although, as Gurwitsch has pointed out in
the book of correspondence with Schutz that he-Gurwitsch-is not
always at one with Sartre's claims regarding the non-egological
theory of consciousness, I would say that there is far more
agreement between Sartre and Gurwitsch on this particular matter
than there is difference. In fact, there appears to be a prefigurement
of the correlational theory of the transcendental, since the ego has
been rendered completely lucid. The transcendental ego has
absconded. Gurwitsch writes in his essay on "A Non-egological
Conception of Consciousness":
7. A. Gurwitsch, "The Last Work of EdmlUld Husser!." Studies in

1966, pp. 433-434).
Consciousness has no egological structure; it is not owned

by the ego; its acts do not spring from a source or center
called the ego. Consciousness is defined by intentionality. It
is consciousness of an object on the one hand and an inner
awareness of itself on the other hand. Being confronted with
an object, I am at once conscious of this object and aware of
my being conscious of it. This awareness in no way means
reflection: to know that I am dealing with the object which,
for instance, I am just perceiving, I need not experience a
second act bearing upon the perception and making it its
object. In simply dealing with the object, I am aware of this
very dealing Therein consists the proper mode of existence
pertaining to consciousness for which appearing is altogether
the same as being, and on this account consciousness is
endowed with absoluteness. What we are left with by the
phenomenological reduction is transcendental consciousness
as an a-personal and pre-personal field. The ego, like all
other objects, falls under the phenomenological reduction
8
The end of this quotation reverts to Sartre. Nevertheless, I think

that the passage just cited represents the thought and position of
Gurwitsch, even if we must hyphenate the view as belonging to
Sartre-Gurwitsch. The odd thing about the statement just quoted is
that although it is Gurwitschean it is no less Sartrean, and it is the
Sartre of Being and Nothingness no less than the Sartre of The
Transcendence a/the Ego.
It is obvious that I represent an existential phenomenology, to
put the matter bluntly. What is not so obvious, however, is that I do
not believe that how one stands on the question of a non-egological
conception of consciousness is definitely related to whether
existential philosophy and Husserlian phenomenology can be
8. A. Gurwitsch, • A Non-Egological Conception of Consciousness.· Studies

in Phenomenology and Psychology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
1966, pp. 292-293).
16 MAURICE NATANSON
reconciled. Gurwitsch and Schutz disagreed on the non-egologica1

conception of consciousness yet were in agreement about the
qualitative distance between existentialism and phenomenology. A
non-egological position makes life easier for the Husserlian
phenomenologist, for it is no longer necessary to decide whether the
transcendental ego is one or many. But the status of the
phenomenological reduction is not affected. Indeed, it is the
phenomenological reduction which clarifies Gurwitsch's emphasis
on the concept of access. Gurwitsch writes in his essay on "The
Phenomenological and Psychological Approach to Consciousness":
By the phenomenological reduction, consciousness is fully

disclosed as a unique realm of absolute priority, because it
reveals itself as the medium of access to whatever exists and
is valid. 9
It would appear that the duality which is operative in the natural

attitude and in much of traditional philosophy as well is that between
the objective and the subjective. However, the term "object"
includes not only the things of experience but anything which
presents itself to consciousness as something intended or meant in
the flow of conscious experience. Once again, phenomenological
reduction assures the possibility of a philosophical engagement of
the phenomena. As Gurwitsch says in The Field of Consciousness:
Under the phenomenological reduction, acts of

consciousness are considered solely as experiences of
objects, in and through which objects appear, present
themselves, and are apprehended as what they are. If
consciousness is a unique realm of absolute priority, it is
9. A. Gurwitsch, "The Phenomenological and Psychological Approach to

Consciousness." Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1966, pp. 94-95).
because it is the medium of access to whatever exists and is

valid. 10
If phenomenological reduction is a prime methodological

instrument of phenomenology, it is perhaps even more significantly
the essential organon of philosophy itself. Husserl, I believe, thinks
of phenomenology as the ground for philosophy and so is able to
speak in the first volume of Ideas (in Kersten's translation) of "the
secret nostalgia of all modern philosophy."ll Cautiously
understood, Husserl conceives of phenomenology as philosophy.
We are now in a position to appreciate what I take to be
Gurwitsch's conception of phenomenology as the philosophy of
consciousness. The performance of the phenomenological reduction
is most certainly a methodological act; what motivates that act is less
apparent. Earlier we considered, however swiftly, the "paradox" of
the whole and the part. "How then is it possible," Gurwitsch asks in
expositing Husserl, "for a part to constitute and to produce the very
whole of which it is a part?"12 That the part turns out to be
subjectivity strikes me as too quick an answer. How is the
enactment of the phenomenological reduction possible? What is its
deepest motivation? Why employ a complex methodological device
unless we consider that a transformation of the philosopher into a
phenomenologist has taken place? The answer remains at bay, but I
would venture to offer a suggestion. The whole at the level of
ratiocination offers the theoretical option of calling the part -man-
a subject; once chosen, that option liquidates but does not, I think,
resolve the paradox of how the part can grasp the whole of which it
is and remains a part. A possible resolution lies on the "object" side
rather than the "subject" side of the paradox. By that I mean to say
that the whole includes within it the possibility of an irruption of
10. A. Gurwitsch, The Field oj Consciousness (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne

University Press, p. 166).
11. E. Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomen-
ological Philosophy. First Book. F. Kersten (Trans.) (The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1982, p. 142).
12. Gurwitsch, "The Last Work of Edmund Husserl," p. 433.
18 MAURICE NATANSON
subjectivity. Looking for "evidence" for such a claim amounts to

recognizing that in the realm of objects-in the realm of art, for
example- intentional experience of the art work on the part of the
subject does not disclose the "meaning" of the work all at once. The
very familiarity one may have with an art work may in fact obscure
some aspect of its significance. We may have to learn to see it
afresh, to see it -paradoxically-as though for the first time. And if
we turn to the artist and treat him as creator of an art work which is
part of the whole, we have managed perhaps to "return" to the
"subject-reality" in the whole, fugitive as that "subject-reality" may
be. In his subtle essay, "Cezanne's Doubt," Merleau-Ponty writes:
"If one looks at the work of other painters after seeing Cezanne's
paintings, one feels somehow relaxed, just as conversations
resumed after a period of mourning mask the absolute and give back
to the survivors their solidity." 13
Almost against my own self-interest in this essay, I am
constrained to ask, What about Kierkegaard's Abraham? And once
again, the difficult question arises: Does consciousness-the
phenomenological reduction having been successfully, expertly
performed-provide access to faith? Although we remain on
Gurwitsch's terrain in insisting on the clearest conception of
phenomenological access possible, it would be misleading to say
that the theme of faith is one which he investigated. We must leave
our problem unresolved. Apart from the fact that it is unacceptable to
raise for analysis issues which, or examples which, can no longer
be addressed by Gurwitsch-much as we long for his response-
we have perhaps reached an aporia in the discussion. It may be that
giving up the trancendental ego means giving up that transcendental
turn which alone canprovide-what? -access to the meaning of
faith. Such a view seems to me consistent with that of Fritz
Kaufmann at the end of his valuable essay on "Art and
Phenomenology" in the volume Marvin Farber edited on
Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund Husserl. It is time to
13. M. Merleau-Ponty, ·Cezanne's Doubt.· Sense and Non-Sense. H. Dreyfus

& P. Dreyfus (Trans.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964, p. 16).
CONCFRNING ARON GURWITSGI 19
tum to a brief coda to our discussion.

I once asked Mrs. Gurwitsch who was her late husband's
favorite novelist in the English language. "Henry James," she
replied immediately. The philosopher of consciousness and the
novelist of consciousness! A perfect pairing. If there is a moral to
the comparison it surely must be that both men had a privileged
access to consciousness. Those who would be happier changing
categories and choosing William James might not have disappointed
Gurwitsch but would not have made me happier, much as I admire
both brothers. But the question of what one learns finally from
one's teachers is a delicate one. I was never a classroom student of
Gurwitsch yet I consider him one of my most important teachers and
have no hesitation in thinking of myself as one of his students. Such
an opinion and such feelings strengthen rather than qualify the sense
I have of being, above all, a disciple of Schutz. But Kierkegaard is
also one of my teachers and he said that he wanted no disciples.
There are aspects of both Schutz and Gurwitsch which I believe
have philosophical implications but which must remain outside of
the present paper. They may, however, be mentioned-at least some
of them-in a coda. Both men were emigres, emigre scholars,
emigre professors. My parents were both immigrants, but that is
different. One had only to be in the presence of Gurwitsch, for
example, for a minute and it was obvious not only that he was a
"foreigner" but that he was a man who had been driven. That last
word is what is decisive. It is well-known that W. H. Auden, who
lived in the United States for a great many years before his final
departure for England and Europe, never considered himself an
American. "However," he would say, "I believe that I am a New
Yorker." Well, Gurwitsch was also a New Yorker toward the end of
his life, but with a difference. Of course, he was a "city" man-"I
need ze azphalt," as he put it. And he was a "New Yorker" in the
sense in which he could also be called a "Parisian". But he could
not, in my judgment, be called a "cosmopolitan"; that would be to
conflate all such distinctions to the disadvantage of their subject.
Most precisely, he was an emigre. Sedimented in his present were
the forced expUlsions of his past. Wonderful to his native English-
20 MAURICE NATANSON
speaking students, colleagues, and friends as his accent was, there

was a darker side, I felt, to his need to express himself on so many
public occasions as accented-that linguistically gifted man! This is
surely not a critical point, not a philosophical or a phenomenological
matter; yet it is a human concern. Although I, of course, heard
Gurwitsch's accent, I never listened to it; I listened to him. What I
heard was the final tonality of the emigre. In the last volume of the
Raj Quartet, A Division oj the Spoils, the author Paul Scott has his
finely drawn character, Count Bronowsky (a White Russian emigre
who has spent a great many years in India), say:
An emigration is possibly the loneliest experience a man can

suffer. In a way it is not a country he has lost but a horne, or
even just a part of a horne, a room perhaps, or something in
that room that he has had to leave behind, and which haunts
him. I remember a window seat I used to sit in as a youth,
reading Pushkin and teaching myself to smoke scented
cigarettes. That window is one I am always knocking at
asking to be let in.14
14. P. Scott, A Division of the Spoils (London: Heinemann, 1975, p. 557).

2
The Philosophy of Aron Gurwitsch 1
Fred Kersten
University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
At various times I have had occasion to reflect on different

aspects of the Philosophy of Aron Gurwitsch: on the critical center
of his thought ("The Constancy Hypothesis in the Social Sciences"),
on the bearing of some of the results of his thought on contemporary
problems in transcendental phenomenology ("Heidegger and
Transcendental Phenomenology," "The Life-Concept and the Life-
Conviction"), even on the philosophical attitude that seemed
everywhere to underlie his thought ("Remarks on the Philosophical
Attitude and Approach in the Philosophy of Aron Gurwitsch"), and,
as a result of my last conversation with Aron Gurwitsch, on the
"originality" of his transformation of the phenomenological problem
of intentionality ("The Originality of Gurwitsch's Theory of
Intentionality"). 2 In addition, the experience of translating some of
Gurwitsch's work into English provided a unique opportunity to
explore many of his ideas with him (such as those in "The
Phenomenology of Thematics and of the Pure Ego" dealing with the
inner workings of Gestalt psychology as much as with the telos of
1. This is a somewhat expanded version of a lecture given at the Aron

Gurwitsch Memorial Symposium, New School for Social Research, 8 Nov., 1991.
2. In revised versions, these essays will be part of a forthcoming study of the
Philosophy of Aron Gurwitsch.
21
22 FRED KERSTEN
the inner workings of his gradual transformation of basic ideas in
Husserl concerning attention, the ego, and the internal organization
of the noema.
I mention those reflections not because of what they said but
instead because of what they have left unsaid: the underlying setting
within which Gurwitsch's philosophy was launched, on which its
basic tenor and its basic directions were established, and which set
its agenda for the future. To be sure, a reflection or the Philosophy
of Aron Gurwitsch is not ipso facto an introduction to his
Philosophy.3 Certainly it would be pretentious to suppose that a
reflection on the underlying setting can be accomplished in a brief
lecture. But it is not pretentious to try in the space of a few minutes
to acquire at least a nodding acquaintance with that setting. To that
end I have divided this reflection into two parts, the first of which I
shall call "Then," and the second, "Now."
I. Then
Because Aron Gurwitsch has not left us an autobiographical

account of his times, I want to begin with a comparison. Aron
Gurwitsch was born in 1901; Paul Oskar Kristeller was born in
1905. Despite disparate biographies they both came from a similar
social class and background and both emigrated to the United States
in consequence of catastrophic events in Europe in the 1930's. In
generational terms, both shared certain assumptions that transcended
their many biographical differences. These assumptions became the
3. For such "introductions," see Alexandre Metraux, "Editorial Preface," Aron

Gurwitsch: Human Encounters in the Social World (Pittsburgh: Duquesne
University Press, 1979, pp. xiii-xxviii); Ludwig Landgrebe, "Einleitung." Alfred
Schutz-Aron Gurwitsch. Briejwechse/1939-1959 (Mtinchen: Wilhelm Find Verlag,
1985, pp. xiii-xxxviii); ["Reflections on the Schutz-Gurwitsch Correspondence."
J. Claude Evans (Trans.), Human Studies, 14, 1991: 107-128]; Lester Embree,
"Biographical Sketch of Aron Gurwitsch." Life-world and Consciousness: Essays
jar Aron Gurwitsch, L. E. Embree (Ed.) (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1972, pp. xvii-xxx).
THE PHILDSOmY OF ARON GURWITSCH 23
more explicit the more they encountered the 'new world' in which
they were fated to carry out a large part of their work and in which
those assumptions were not prevalent or even very meaningful. I
want to give some examples from Kristeller because they apply, I
believe, equally to Gurwitsch and circumscribe that part of the
intellectual ballpark in which both Gurwitsch and Kristeller operated
(along with so many others of their generation).
Under the heading of "life of learning" Kristeller notes that
among the things designated by the phrase is that we are dedicated to
learning and scholarship. This is simple enough, but what surprises
Kristeller is that in modern English these words are used to
designate all knowledge outside the natural and social sciences.
English would seem to be the only language that does not speak of
philosophical, historical and philological discipline as "sciences":4
In English, the terms learning and scholarship do not

indicate, as they should, that we deal with knowledge that is
as valid and as methodical as that of the sciences, though it
deals with different subjects and uses different methods. The
more recent term humanities has the additional disadvantage
that it indicates a kind of knowledge that is at best useless
and dispensable and at worst provides some kind of genteel
or snobbish entertainment.
Moreover, 'humanities', like 'humanism', gets confused with

'humanitarianism' and leads to needless and ridiculous confusions
and controversies involving social and political ideas that may be
desirable but are for all that irrelevant to learning and scholarship. In
turn, the confusions and controversies tempt us to divert "our
meager resources" towards other activities that may even have great
merit but yet are completely different. Or they introduce, knowingly
or unknowingly, an argumentum ex ignorantia whereby "the readers
4. Paul Oskar Kristeller, • A Ufe of Learning,· The American Schollu, Vol.

60, No.3 (Summer 1991: 337-350).
24 FRED KERSTEN
and listeners are as ignorant of the contrary evidence as are the
speakers and writers."
The same situation prevails in the case of the word, 'reason';
In ordinary English, <"reason"> denotes the capacity to

draw valid inferences from ascertained facts, whereas a
different and more comprehensive notion of reason,
generally used and understood by philosophers from
antiquity to fairly recent times, called Nous in Greek and
Vernunjt in German and identified by Kant as the faculty of
principles, is admittedly untranslatable into modem English
and has disappeared not only from current usage, but also
from contemporary philosophical thought to the great
detriment of all philosophical, scholarly and scientific
thought. 5
A substantial part of the "Then" consists, accordingly, of the

assumption that learning and scholarship are "sciences" in the same
way that the natural and social sciences are "sciences," and that
"reason" is employed in the antique rather than in the recent meaning
of the word, "reason." When we consider the intellectual
development of Gurwitsch, of Kristeller, or others of their
generation, we must do so in the light of those assumptions. Unless
we do so we cannot understand the critical and substantive core of
their discussions of their chosen topics; unless we make the same
assumptions with them their thought seems unfounded, mystical,
deliberately "apolitical," even irrelevant. Only if we recognize with
them that philosophy, history, philology "contain and assimilate
valid knowledge based on rigorous methods" (Kristeller) can we
5" Gurwitsch especially emphasized this antique usage of 'reason' in his

lectures on Husserl's Formal and Transcendental Logic at the Graduate Faculty, The
New School; his emphasis is also fOlmd in his discussion of HlEserl's Crisis of
Western Sciences, "The Last Work of Edrmmd Husser!," Aron Gurwitsch, Studies in
Phenomenology and Psychology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966,
p. 446f); see also the statement cited by Embree, op. cit., p. xxxix, note 9. A
similar point is made by Hannah Arendt, The Ufe of the Mind (New York/London:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978, p. 14f).
THE PI-nl.DSOPHY OF ARON GURWITSGI 25
understand what they are talking about. We might call this aspect of
"Then" a generational "taken for grantedness." In other words, to
sharply distinguish between meaning and truth does not signify that
the former is any less amenable to rigorous meth<Xiic inquiry than
the latter, nor that the former has a lesser existential status in our
lives than the latter.
And this leads to another aspect of "Then. "
Anyone who reads Gurwitsch for the first or any time cannot
help but be aware that Gurwitsch, like Kristeller and others of that
generation, sought to recover and understand his contemporaries as
much as his inheritance and tradition. But as with Kristeller
inheritance and education were to be considered as necessary but not
sufficient conditions of intellectual development. 6 Moreover, this is
not just a matter of understanding the past so as not to repeat its
errors, nor of being familiar with one's contemporaries to criticize
their ideas so as to make room for one's own. In this connection,
Kristeller makes another point in need of emphasis~ what he says
about himself may just as well be said of Gurwitsch (if not in public
at least in private, when I heard Gurwitsch say almost the same
thing):
I have attempted throughout my life to pursue scholarship

for its own sake, not for the pursuit of personal or political
goals, and I survived two emigrations because the
international academic and scholarly community had a sense
of solidarity and of objective standards of work. Anybody
who had something to contribute was welcome, and I found
friends and supporters in two foreign countries because they
liked my skills and my knowledge, not my face or gender,
race or religion, national background or political opinions. 7
It was in terms of the sense of solidarity of the international

scholarly community and of objective standards of work that
6. Kristeller, p. 339.
7. Kristeller, p. 346f.
26 FRED KERSfEN
Gurwitsch sought to understand his contemporaries. Thus, for
example, his interest in William James was not so much an appeal to
readers in a new country as it was to regard James as part of the
same intellectual fabric as Brentano or von Ehrenfels or Stumpf or
even Husserl. On the assumption of the solidarity of the
international scholarly community as well as the assumption that
learning and scholarship are sciences of meaning and the antique
meaning of reason, the task is not just to understand ideas as
expressed by others, but more importantly to "relive" them as
though they were one's second nature. One's contemporaries are by
no means just footnotes to one's own thoughts and ideas.
To understand ideas and make them second nature as essential to
learning, as integral elements in the "life of learning," is equally the
basis for the development of new problems and directions of
research in the light of Gurwitsch's interests, specifically in Gestalt
psychology and phenomenology as well as in fundamental forms of
sociality. But also in the spirit of the solidarity of the international
scholarly community no claim is made that such ideas are exhausted
in reliving them, making them one's own second nature; there is
always the implication that the development of new problems is not
the only formulation, that others are always possible. The task of
scholarship and learning is always an unfinished one, an "infinite
task," to use the formula of neo-Kantians.
Another way of expressing the same thought is that the
development of ideas that have become second nature is the
springboard for the "Now" that belongs to the "Philosophy of Aron
Gurwitsch. "
II. Now
It is an open question whether it is still possible to make the

same operative assumptions that governed the shape and setting of
Gurwitsch's, let alone Kristeller's, intellectual development. To find
out we would have to explore in much greater detail the very
THE PHIl.DSOPHY OF MON GURWITSCH 27
individual and novel aspects of that development, one of which,

however, shall be suggested shortly.
For the second part of my reflection on the "philosophy of Aron
Gurwitsch" I wish to begin by sketching in broad outline its stamp
of "Now," of what happens when Gurwitsch's philosophy is treated
in the way in which he considered his contemporaries and
predecessors. The "Then" is inextricably stuck in the 'Now'.
Perhaps the simplest way to approach this task is by way of an
inventory.
(1) With respect of The Field of Consciousness, of great
importance for further and new development are Gurwitsch's
interlocking theories of relevance and of "orders of existence" as
much in connection with the largely unresolved discussion with
Alfred Schutz as with the development of a phenomenological
metaphysics. The core of that metaphysics lies, I believe, in
Gurwitsch's formal ontology of wholes and parts, which has
already received novel redevelopment by Gilbert Null.
(2) In that light it will be possible to return to and recover a large
portion of Gurwitsch's effort in Human Encounters in the Social
World which, from the standpoint of later work, requires the
theories of relevance and orders of existence to transform the
discussion of the factors of community (partnership, membership,
fusion) from sociological into phenomenological and then
philosophical terms.
(3) The various and different essays of Gurwitsch suggest a
number of areas for further development. For example, his very
original ideas concerning the constitution of cultural objects as well
as the abstract (and especially scientific) thinking, introduced in the
context of a critique of Husser!, require redevelopment in the light of
the essays on the theory of ideation which, in turn, has to be
integrated into his late discussions of theme and thematics. In that
connection, too, it is important to develop further the implications
for transcendental phenomenology of the "coherence theory" of
intentionality. Finally, this will clarify and test the validity of a basic
assumption of "Then": the distinction and relation of meaning and
truth.
28
(4) Gurwitsch's discussion of the "constancy hypothesis" and

its rejection, introduced in connection with the problematics of
classical psychology (which I developed into a pattern to include all
of the social sciences as special cases of a very general problem of
modem thought),8 must be restated along post-Modernist lines of
thought.
(5) In this brief survey there is room to mention one more facet
of "Now" comprised by the several essays and posthumously
published lectures on Kant and the book on Leibniz's "Philosophy
and Panlogicism." Although these are relevant for the different
philosophical problems entertained by Gurwitsch and central to his
intellectual development, they raise a question concerning
Gurwitsch's philosophy: Is there any unity underlying the
Philosophy of Aron Gurwitsch with its solid historical orientation,
that is, with respect to the appropriation, reliving and development
of Gurwitsch's inheritance and tradition (see footnote 2)?
Or, to express the situation another way, how are "Then" and
"Now" related? Certainly it would be wrong to suppose that there is
a system of some sort in Gurwitsch's philosophy. He perceived his
own work in sympathy with Husserl's in that both shared a
common task, a word he says is chosen deliberately because
philosophy and especially Husserl's "phenomenological idealism"
has to be thought of as one possible "formulation of a vast and all-
encompassing program of research." If it is called a philosophical
tenet, it is one which cannot be substantiated by means of
argumentative dialectics. Its substantiation is tantamount to the
elaboration and development of constitutive phenomenology in its
entirety, that is to say, to the gradual realization of the program of
research. "9 Such a treatment certainly covers Gurwitsch's own
research: By his own admission he tried from the 1930's on to
remain "faithful to the spirit of constitutive phenomenology ... " as
8. In a personal commtnlication Gurwitsch referred to this as a ·problem of

utmost importance, namely the assumption made, in the social sciences, of a
genuine reality of whatever manner (psychological, historical, social, etc.) which
is differently and thus always erroneously, interpreted·
9. Gurwitsch, Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology, p. xvii.
1HE PI-nLOSOPHY OF MON GURWITsa-I 29
a "working philosophy, a philosophy of living and developing in the
actual work of research. "10
I can think of nothing which Gurwitsch has said or written
which does not confirm his own self-assessment. Yet the question
remains as to how, for instance, his last work on Leibniz fit into the
program of research of constitutive phenomenology? Is there
anything, moreover, which unifies that program or are we left with a
patchwork of important research, exhibiting continuity of course,
but nonetheless a patchwork? Finally, what is it that makes
Gurwitsch's philosophy the Philosophy of Aron Gurwitsch?
It is my belief that even though we cannot speak of a system in
Gurwitsch's philosophy, and that even though we have to
acknowledge a diversity if not quite a patchwork, we can and must
speak of a unifying principle in his actual work of research. That
principle, it seems to me, rests upon a phenomenological datum
basic to his philosophy; it is a datum that allows the "substantiation"
"tantamount to the elaboration and development of constitutive
phenomenology in its entirety." The basic datum in question can be
expressed in a single phrase for our purposes: the unity of Gestalt-
coherence. 1 1 And it is not simply because each and every piece of
research of Gurwitsch departs from and leads back to this datum,
but rather because in addition this datum allows of different
"formulations of consciousness" (Gurwitsch), several of which he
examined in lucid and extensive detail (Leibniz, Kant, Hume,
Brentano and especially Husserl). It is the exploration of these
"formulations of consciousness," always rooted in the question of
the unity of Gestalt-coherence, which, I believe, also stamps the
individual and novel aspect of Gurwitsch's intellectual development
and allows us to speak of the "Philosophy of Aron Gurwitsch."
One consequence of understanding Gurwitsch's research in this
manner is that the guiding threat of criticism of his heritage and
tradition is the question of whether any given formulation of
consciousness, on the one hand, squares with the unity of Gestalt-
10. Gurwitsch, Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology, p. xxv.

11. Metraux has already suggested this, I believe, op. cit., p. xxviif.
30 FRED KERSTEN
coherence (expressed in the "coherence theory of intentionality")
and, on the other hand, allows for its revision, its redevelopment in
the actual work of research. 12
On the assumption that there is a genuine science of meaning
(even if the only questions are those of truth), that reason is to be
understood in its antique sense (even if there seems to be no reason
atall I3 ), that a sense of the solidarity of the international scholarly
community prevails (even if such a community no longer exists),
Gurwitsch's philosophy is to be understood as a working, living
and developing philosophy. Those assumptions comprise its "Then"
and "Now" in the actual work of research but always as a possible
Then and Now.
12. Thus I completely disagree with Spiegelberg's statement that Gurwitsch's

book on Leibniz "shows strangely little relation to his phenomenological
enterprises and not even to Husserl's transcendental monadology. It is a
remarkable labor of historical love for one of Gurwitsch's philosophical heroes·
[The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introdlction. 3rd rev. & enlarg.
ed With the Collaboration of Karl Schuhmann (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff,
1982, p. 266, note 118»). It seems to me that the study of Leibniz as one
possible "formulation of consciousness" is one possible test of Gurwitsch's own
theory of intentionality in the light of the phenomenological datum of the unity
of Gestalt-coherence. It is not so much "Husserl's transcendental monadology" and
"formulation of consciousness" that is at issue, but instead Gurwitsch's own
"formulation of consciousness." In other words, it is a chapter in "The
Phenomenological Philosophy of Aron Gurwitsch," not of Edmund Husser\. The
same may be said, I believe, of his stu:lies of Kant and, of course, Husser\.
13. In the antique sense, reason after all represents an infinite task in its
implications for human being and human welfare. See the statement cited by
Embree and referred to in note 5.
Part II
Critical Studies of the Philosophy

of Aron Gurwitsch
3
Gurwitsch's Interpretation of Kant:

Reflections of a Former Student
Henry E. Allison
University of California, San Diego
In Kants Theorie des Verstandes, we finally have the long

awaited, definitive expression of Aron Gurwitsch's interpretation of
Kant's theoretical philosophy. 1 The broad outlines of this
interpretation were presented in many seminars and lecture courses
at the New School for Social Research, and important aspects of it
are contained in his seminal study of Leibniz, as well as in the
various versions of his article comparing the conceptions of
consciousness of Kant and HusserI.2 But prior to the publication of
this monograph, it was not available in toto and in detail. Thus,
although the work contains few surprises for those of us fortunate
enough to have been students of Professor Gurwitsch, its
1. Aron Gurwitsch, Kants Theorie des Verstandes, Thomas M. Seebohm (Ed.)

(DordrechtlBoston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990).
2. See Leibniz Philosophie des Panlogismus (Berlin/New York: Walter de
Gruyter, 1974, esp. pp. 127-130; 187-90); and "Der Begriff des Bewusstseins bei
Kant und Husserl," Kant-Studien, 55, 1964: 410-27, reprinted as Beilage I in
Kants Theorie des Verstandes (pp. 135-56), and "La conception de la Conscience
chez Kant et chez Husserl," Bulletin de la Societe fran~aise de Philosoph ie, Seance
cU 25 Avril 1959, 54, 1960: 65-96. "The Kantian and Husserlian Conceptions of
Consciousness," an English translation of the French version and subsequent
discussion is contained in Aron Gurwitsch, Studies in Phenomenology and
Psychology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1966, pp. 148-74).
33
© 1997 All Rights Reserved.
34 HENRy E. AUlSON
publication is none the less welcome, since it should facilitate the

dissemination of this highly original and provocative reading of
Kant to a wider philosophical public, including the world of Kant
scholarship. It is as both a former student and a member of this latter
world that I shall attempt to provide an account of this reading,
assess its significance, and, as is only proper, offer some criticisms.
Considered simply as interpretation, Gurwitsch's study of Kant
is motivated by two distinct but interrelated goals. One is to show
that Kant's account of the understanding and its transcendental
functions can best be appreciated as a creative adaptation and
transformation of the Leibnizian conception of the intellect or "soul-
monad." The other, directed largely against Marburg neo-
Kantianism, is to show that underlying the Transcendental
Deduction, which is the portion of the Critique on which he focuses
almost exclusively, is a theory of the human mind or consciousness.
Common to both is a concern with Kant's doctrine of transcendental
apperception. Gurwitsch's concern with the latter is not simply
historical, however; for he also endeavors to demonstrate that
Husserlian phenomenology, or at least the theory of intentionality,
provides the necessary corrective to the inadequacies and limitations
of the Kantian theory. In what follows, I shall discuss each of these
topics in tum.
To claim that Kant was deeply influenced by Leibniz and that he

philosophized in an essentially Leibnizian context is, of itself, hardly
news. References to Leibniz and to problems posed by the
Leibnizian philosophy abound in Kant's works and can be traced
from his earliest writings on physical theory to the Opus Postumum.
Unlike many other students of the Leibniz-Kant connection,
however, Gurwitsch focuses his attention almost entirely on the
Leibniz of the New Essays. In other words, for Gurwitsch it is
Leibniz the rationalist epistemologist and philosophical
GURWITSCH'S INTERPREfATION OF KANr 35
psychologist, and not Leibniz the dogmatic metaphysician, or even
the quasi-positivistic critic of Newton, who is of decisive
importance. Central to this Leibniz is the doctrine of innate ideas and
the conceptions of apperception, "petites perceptions" and the
spontaneity of the mind, all of which, according to Gurwitsch, are
taken over in a transformed manner by Kant. And although
Gurwitsch's concern is clearly with tracing broad themes and
conceptual connections rather than demonstrating actual historical
influences, he is careful to point out that the New Essays was first
published in 1765 and that its appearance almost immediately
transformed the philosophical climate in Germany.3 Thus, the claim
is made for a direct historical link and not merely a vague intellectual
kinship.
The starting point of Gurwitsch's account is Leibniz's counter-
attack to Locke's critique of the doctrine of innate ideas. In response
to Locke's view of the human mind as a tabula rasa and his
adherence to the scholastic principle that there is nothing in the
intellect that is not first in the senses, Leibniz retorts famously,
"nothing except the intellect itself. "4 It is, then, this conception of
the "intellect itself" (intel1ectus ipse) that, according to Gurwitsch, is
crucial for interpreting Kant's own theory of the nature and activity
of the human understanding. More specifically, three features of this
Leibnizian conception turn out to be essential: the doctrine of innate
ideas and the conception of necessary truth which it is intended to
ground~ the conception of apperception, which supposedly accounts
for the mind's access to these ideas and truths~ and the theory of
petites perceptions, which performs a number of important tasks for
Leibniz, psychological and epistemological as well as metaphysical.
According to Gurwitsch, the distinctive feature of Leibniz's
account of innate ideas in the New Essays is the suggestion that
3. Kants Theorie des Verstandes, Beilage III, "The Leibniz in Kant," pp. 165-
6.
4. Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding, Book II, chap. i, D2 (p.
111). The now standard English translation by Peter Remnant and Jonathan
Bennett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) uses the pagination of volume 5
the edition of C. I. Gerhardt, which Gurwitsch likewise cites.
36 HENRy E. AUlSON
these ideas reflect the very structure of the intellect. Thus, in
opposition to the Lockean metaphor of the tabula rasa, Leibniz
offers that of a veined block of marble with a determinate structure
of its own, which predisposes it to be shaped one way rather than
another. 5 Since at the monadologicallevel, all ideas or contents of
the mind must be "innate" for Leibniz (monads have no windows),
this serves to distinguish a subset of ideas, which have a special
epistemological function and a privileged status, from the remaining
ideas, which, in Lockean terms, are based on experience. Leibniz
does not provide an exhaustive inventory of these ideas; but he does
note that they include "Being, Unity, Substance, Duration, Change,
Action, Perception, Pleasure, and hosts of other objects of our
intellectual ideas. "6 This is indeed a mixed bag, which includes
some that are recognizable ancestors of Kantian categories, others
that Kant will assign to sensibility, and still others that, from a
Kantian point of view, play no discernible epistemic role at all.
Leaving all that aside, however, the key point is that they are
supposed to account for the possibility of a priori knowledge,
which, since it involves necessity, cannot be based on experience.
In fact, as is suggested by Leibniz's metaphor of the veined marble
and as Gurwitsch emphasizes, these ideas could be said to structure
or condition experience in the sense that they determine what
materials are able to gain access to the mind.? Correlatively, sense
experience, rather than being the source of all knowledge, as it is for
Lockean empiricism, serves merely as an occasion for the grasp of
the necessary truths which reflect the structure of the mind.
Apperception is the means by which the mind gains access to
these truths. Although Leibniz's views on apperception is a complex
topic and there is some doubt that he in fact held a consistent
position, Gurwitsch focuses exclusively on that strand of Leibniz's
position according to which apperception, identified with self-
consciousness or reflection, is the distinctive capacity of rational
beings or monads that enables them to make cognitive use of the
5. New Essays on Human Understanding, p. 52.

6. New Essays on Human Understanding, p. 52.
7. Kants Theorie des Verstandes, p. 5.
GURWITSa-rS INfFRPREfATION OF KANr 37
innate structure of the mind. 8 Thus, whereas the brutes, having only
perception and a "sentiment animal, " which includes sensible images
and memory, must make do with a surrogate or "shadow" of
thought involving association based on past experience rather than
genuine comprehension, rational beings, with an apperceptive
capacity, are able to grasp necessary connections and thereby
acquire genuine knowledge. Accordingly, as Gurwitsch
emphasizes, in Leibniz we have an assertion of the inseparability of
rationality and the capacity for self-consciousness, which is
precisely the thesis developed by Kant in his doctrine of
transcendental apperception.
Gurwitsch also points out, however, that it is merely the
capacity for self-consciousness that characterizes rational beings
such as ourselves, since this capacity is not, indeed, could not, be
actualized at every moment. 9 Moreover, this is one of the many
points at which Leibp.iz's multi-faceted theory of petites perceptions
comes into play. Very roughly, Leibniz holds that, even apart from
explicit reflection, the innate ideas, which determine the structure of
our intellect, function in a virtual or implicit manner to guide our
judgment. In so doing, they operate in the manner of petites
perceptions. 10 Accordingly, this theory explains how ideas might be
in the mind, and even be cognitively effective, without being
explicitly grasped as such. And this, of course, is an essential
feature of Leibniz's response to Locke's critique of innate ideas.
Clearly, each of these features has its Kantian counterpart,
which, as noted, Gurwitsch seeks to explain as the result of the
direct influence of Leibniz. Thus, Leibniz's innate ideas become the
Kantian pure concepts or categories, which reflect the very structure
of the understanding. Similarly, Leibniz's apperception becomes
Kant's transcendental apperception, which in the second edition of
8. For helpful recent discussions of Leibniz's views on apperception see R.

M. McRae, Leibniz: Perception, Apperception and Thought (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 1976) and Nicholas Jolley, Leibniz and Locke: A Study oj the
New Essays on Human Understanding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).
9. Kants Theorie des Verstandes, pp. 77-78, and 8eilage III, p. 165.
38 HENRy E. AWSON
the Critique is identified with the understanding itself (B 134n). As

one might suspect, the story with respect to the "petites perceptions"
is somewhat more complex. Nevertheless, Gurwitsch sees this
theory at work in Kant's conception of the analytic judgment (the
function of which is to make explicit what is implicitly contained in a
given concept), his account of the empirical synthesis of
apprehension, and, finally, in some of Kant's obscure remarks
about the faintness, sometimes merely implicit nature, of
appercepti ve consciousness. 1 1
It is not, however, a matter of Kant simply taking over
Leibnizian doctrines. On the contrary, Gurwitsch insists that Kant's
appropriation of Leibniz is at the same time a radical transformation.
Thus, Kant breaks completely with the notion of innateness and
substitutes for Leibniz's fixed concepts embedded in the structure of
the mind his own conception of pure concepts, which express the
fundamental functions or rules of synthesis that constitute the forms
of understanding. As Gurwitsch likes to put it, perhaps echoing
Cassirer, Kant "functionalizes" Leibnizian ideas, reconstruing them
as "conceptual fixations of the articulating synthesis. "12 In a similar
vein, he remarks that, paradoxical as it might seem, Kant has a more
activistic conception of the mind than Leibniz.1 3 Whereas his great
predecessor construed the activity of the monad as the unfolding
according to its generative law or complete concept of the contents
that are there all along, Kant takes the spontaneity of the
understanding to consist in its operation on a manifold given from
without. Finally, consistent with this change, the unity of the mind
ceases being a metaphysical given to which it has access in reflection
(apperception for Leibniz) and becomes instead (in Kant's doctrine
of apperception) an achievement, the product of its own synthetic
activity.
11. Kants Theorie des Verstandes, chapter 5 (pp. 49-63) is devoted to Kant's
appropriation of Leibniz's theory of ·petites perceptions.·
12. See Leibniz Philosophie des Pan/ogismus, p. 190; Kants Theorie des
Verstandes, pp. 103-106.
GURWITSCH'S INfERffiEfATION OF KANr 39
Moreover, Gurwitsch traces this radical transformation directly
to the influence of David Hume, whom he treats as standing in an
interesting and complex dialectical relationship to both Leibniz and
Kant. On the one hand, Leibniz's account of the mind operating at
the level of "sentiment animal," with its contents governed by
psychological laws of association rather than rational principles, and
the contrast between this and the rational mind governed by its
innate principles, both anticipates and provides a critique of
Hume. 14 On the other hand, by means of his analysis of the causal
relation, Hume demonstrated, at least in Kant's eyes, the
untenability of the Leibnizian notion of inner connection, of the
implicit analyticity of all truth. I 5 Thus, Kant, as Gurwitsch reads
him, accepted part of Hume's position, namely, his perceptual
atomism or theory of discrete sense data, and endeavored to
reestablish unity and connection on a new basis. The basis is, of
course, Kant's conception of transcendental apperception.
Although in its broad outlines this account is reminiscent of the
standard picture of Kant as a thinker who was awakened by Hume
from his "dogmatic [Leibnizian] slumbers," its sharp focus on the
nature of the understanding and its rich and detailed discussions of
the precise ways in which Kant transformed the Leibnizian view of
the mind sketched in the New Essays make it both deeply
illuminating and highlyoriginal. Certainly, my own reading of Kant
has been profoundly influenced by my exposure to Gurwitsch's
analyses in his Kant seminar and lectures on the history of modern
philosophy.
II
The second major feature of Gurwitsch's account is the

attribution to Kant of a theory of mind. As noted, this is affirmed in
14. Leibniz Philosophie des Panlogismus, pp. 128-9.

15. Kants Theorie des Verstandes, pp. 83-86.
40 HE'JRy E. AUlSON
explicit opposition to Marburg neo-Kantianism, which firmly

rejected any endeavor to interpret the Critique in psychological terms
on the grounds that to "psychologize" Kant is to undermine the
conception of the aprwri. Armed with a conception of psychology
stemming from Husserlian phenomenology, Gurwitsch sees no
danger on this score and, therefore, no obstacles to a genuinely
transcendental psychology, which, in Kant's terms, would
investigate "the subjective sources which form the a priori
foundation of the possibility of experience" (A 97).1 6
The natural starting point for such an investigation is Kant's
notoriously obscure account of the three-fold synthesis of
apprehension, reproduction, and recognition. Appropriately enough,
Gurwitsch warns against a genetic interpretation of this doctrine, as
if Kant were attempting to identify temporally distinct stages in
cognition. The analyses of the three syntheses is understood instead
to involve a methodological abstraction, a separate consideration of
distinct functions involved in the synthetic activity (spontaneity) of
the mind. I7 The basic idea is that there are two distinguishable
requirements for cognition that must be attributed to the activity of
the mind. First, the given manifold of sensible intuition must be
grasped as such, that is, as a manifold. This involves its being "run
through and held together," which, in tum, requires the capacity to
keep before the mind past representations. These are the tasks of
apprehension and reproduction, which, taken together, constitute
apprehension in a broad sense. Of itself this is insufficient for
knowledge, however, since it yields merely a manifold of
successively given representations, which happen to exist together
in one consciousness, not one that may be taken as in some sense
belonging necessarily together. In Gurwitsch's helpful terms, it
accounts for the Zusammensein of the data, not their
Zusammengehliren. 18 The latter requires a conceptual as opposed to
a merely imaginative unification. This is the task of transcendental
16. Kants Theorie des Verstandes, p.2 note 1.

GURWITSa-rS INfERPREfATION OF KANT 41
apperception and it is accomplished by means of the act of
recognition in a concept.
Although the broad outlines of this account are certainly
unobjectionable, questions can be raised about some of the details.
To begin with, there appears to be a certain ambiguity in his account
of apprehension (in the broad sense), at least insofar as it is
considered apart from the objectifying synthesis of apperception.
His treatment of it as a "moment" of cognition, which is separable
only in a methodological sense, certainly suggests, if it does not
entail, that mere apprehension would not correspond to anything
phenomenologically accessible. As I have put the matter in my own
discussion of the Second Analogy, apprehension, understood as a
merely subjective synthesis or "play of representations," is what
would remain if (per impossihi/e) we could remove the determinate
structure or objective order imposed on the sensible manifold by the
understanding. 19 From this point of view, there could be no
cognitive access to a preconceptualized manifold because the very
act of bringing it to consciousness would necessarily subject it to
determination by means of the categories. Moreover, Gurwitsch
himself apparently endorses such a reading when he remarks that the
product (Leistung) of apprehension and reproduction, "considered
under its objective aspect, does not at all correspond to an effective
existence [ejjectiven BestandJ-at least insofar as human mental life is
concerned. "20 I n fact, he explicitly endorses Cassirer's
characterization of it as the "construction of a limiting case. "21
The problem is that not everything that Gurwitsch says on the
topic is easily reconcilable with this view. On the contrary, his
commitment to the twin goals of presenting Kant as the heir to
Leibniz and of identifying this inheritance with the conception of
mind underlying the Transcendental Deduction seems to lead him to
a different reading. According to this reading, apprehension and
apperception (the Kantian analogues of Leibniz's perception and
19. Allison, Kant's Transcendental Idealism. p. 218.

21. Kants Theorie des Verstandes, p. 39. The reference to Cassirer is from
Kants Leben und Lehre (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1911, p. 170).
42 HENRy E. AlLISON
apperception) constitute two distinct levels of reflection, which he
explicitly connects with empirical and transcendental apperception
respectively.22 Given this identification of apprehension and
empirical apperception, as well as the fact that he clearly takes
'reflection' in its Leibnizian (or Lockean) sense as designating a first
order mode of self-awareness rather than in its Kantian sense as a
second order activity (transcendental reflection), it is difficult to
avoid the conclusion that Gurwitsch regards apprehension as a
phenomenologically accessible level of consciousness (or reflection)
after all.
The point can be illustrated by Gurwitsch's use of Kant's
important letter to Marcus Herz of May 26, 1789, which appears to
have been one of his favorite Kantian texts. 23 In the relevant portion
of the letter, Kant is responding to Maimon's charge that he failed to
answer the quid facti because he has not shown that the data of
human sensibility necessarily conform to the categories. Kant replies
by noting that apart from the categories the data "would not even
reach that unity of consciousness that is necessary for knowledge of
myself (as object of inner sense)." And even more emphatically, "I
would not even be able to know that I have sense data. "24 This is
precisely what one would expect Kant to say, particularly in light of
the B-Deduction, which antedates this letter by two years.
Gurwitsch's attention is not focused on this, however, but rather on
the immediately following lines in which Kant suggests as a
Gedankenexperiment that we imagine ourselves as animals, which
means that we would have a mere play of representations without
the possibility of apperception. Not surprisingly, Gurwitsch here
detects clear echoes of Leibniz (sentiment animal) and takes it as
involving an essentially Humean picture of experience, that is, one
in which there would be no necessary unity and, therefore, no
experience in Kant's sense.
22. Kants Theorie des Verstandes, p. 19. See also, pp. 35f, 51f, 79-81.
23.For Gurwitsch's discussions of this letter see Leibniz Philosophie des
Panlogismus, p. 129; Kants Theorie des Verstandes, p. 79 and Beilage III, 167-70.
24. Kants gesammelte Schriften, II, p. 52.
GURWITSa-rS INfffiFRETATION OF KANr 43
Up to this point, the analysis is unobjectionable, indeed,

illuminating. The problem arises at the next step, where Gurwitsch
suggests that, under the terms of the Gedankenexperiment, there
might still be a distinct empirical consciousness accompanying each
of the successive mental states or representations. In support of this
reading, he cites a parenthetical clause in which Kant remarks,
"assuming [gesetzt] that I am even conscious of each individual
representation, but not of their relation to the unity of representation
of their object, by means of the synthetic unity of their
apperception." Apparently ignoring the occurrence of 'gestezt',
which here could be translated as "even granting that," he takes Kant
to be affirming the possibility of an empirical consciousness of each
representation taken individually, that is, of a purely empirical
apperception. But taking this term and the whole context of the
parenthetical remark into consideration, it seems far more reasonable
to understand Kant as claiming that, even if for the sake argument,
one were to grant the possibility of such an atomistic consciousness,
it could play no role in cognition, not even a cognition of one's
mental state. And this is certainly a far cry from affirming the
possibility (much less the reality) of such a form of consciousness.
Although this latter example does seem to involve a misreading
of the text, I take the pervasive ambiguity in Gurwitsch's account to
reflect a deep seated ambiguity in Kant's position rather than a
simple confusion on his part. In fact, many of the passages from the
A-Deduction to which Gurwitsch repeatedly refers strongly suggest
the latter reading. For example, Kant there identifies empirical
apperception with inner sense and characterizes it, in contrast to
transcendental apperception, as "consciousness of self according to
the determinations of our state in inner perception;" and he states that
it "is merely empirical and always changing" (A 107). This certainly
suggests that empirical apperception amounts to a form of self-
consciousness, which consists in the awareness of the flux of
representations in contrast to the abiding I of transcendental
apperception. Indeed, such a reading would seem to be demanded
by Kant's use of the term 'apperception.' Moreover, a similar
conclusion appears to be warranted by Kant's notorious distinction
44 HENRy E. AUlSON
between "judgments of perception" and "judgments of experience"

in the Prolegomena, to which Gurwitsch likewise frequently
appeals.
None of this is easily reconciled, however, with the main thrust
of the B-Deduction. Instead of the contrast between apprehension
and apperception, or judgments of perception and judgments of
experience, Kant there opposes the objective unity of self-
consciousness and the subjective unity of consciousness (B 139-40).
Although it is impossible to do justice to this complex topic here, the
main point is that by a subjective unity of consciousness Kant no
longer means anything that can be construed as a form of conscious
awareness, judgment or reflection. As I have argued in Kant's
Transcendental Idealism, a subjective unity of consciousness (not
self-consciousness) is a unity of representations produced by
empirical causal factors (such as principles of association) rather
than the spontaneity of the understanding; and, for that very reason,
nothing is represented by means of (or intended through) such a
unity, not even the subject's own psychological state. In short, such
a unity is a possible object of awareness, through a judgment of
inner sense, but not, like apperception, in any sense a mode of
awareness. 25
The upshot of the matter, then, is that we can discern in Kant
two distinct views regarding "mere apprehension," "empirical
consciousness" or "empirical apperception." According to one, it
constitutes a unique form of pre-conceptual self-consciousness that
does not involve the categories. According to the other, it is merely a
methodologically distinguishable moment in the cognitive process,
since any genuine awareness of one's mental state must involve a
judgment of inner sense subject to the categories. Although his
phenomenological orientation inclined him toward the former,
Gurwitsch was, I think, sensitive to, and attempted to do justice to,
both of these views. But since he failed to consider adequately
possible differences between Kant's views in the first and second
editions of the Critique, he ended up simply recapitulating the
25. Allison, Kant's Transcendental Idealism, esp. pp. 14-58.

GURWITSCH'S INfERPREfATION OF KANr 45
ambiguity in Kant's own position. As we shall see, similar
considerations also apply to Gurwitsch's interpretation of Kant's
doctrine of transcendental apperception.
III
Gurwitsch's account of apperception is in many ways the most

interesting and important feature of his book. It is particularly
significant because he endeavors to do justice both to the
transcendental-epistemological and to the psychological dimensions
of this central Kantian conception. As such, it consists in a kind of
ongoing polemic, not only with Cassirer, but also with Paton, for
whom the doctrine of apperception is primarily an attempt to
articulate the conditions of objectivity. Although Gurwitsch
acknowledges the possibility of such an interpretation, he also views
it as inadequate, since it fails to deal with the questions of how we
are to regard the "I" of the "'I think' and of the relations between the
subjective sources and the achieved objectivity. "26 As he succinctly
puts the problem:
What results if, in the higher stage of reflection, we

endeavor to grasp the "I" of the 'I think?' How do we catch
sight of pure transcendental apperception, and as what does
it present itself to us? In what way is the belongedness
[Zugehorigkeit] 0 f all perceptions, appearances
representations to a "one universal self-consciousness"
revealed, and, what amounts to the same thing, what does
this belongedness actually mean?27
26. Kants Theorie des Verstandes, pp. 21-22. See also p. 31, where he
criticizes Cassirer's purely logical reading of the conception of ·consciousness in
general,· which is the Prolegomena's surrogate for apperception, on the grounds
that it fails to deal with the question of the root and origin of the
(transcendentally) logical conditions expressed in the idea of consciousness in
general.
46 HENRy E. AWSON
The key to Gurwitsch's answer to these questions lies in his

view of the Kantian conception of transcendental apperception as a
"functionalized" reinterpretation of the Leibnizian doctrine. As
already indicated, this means an emphasis on the activity of the
mind, or, more precisely, the view that its nature is completely
expressed in the exercise of its synthesizing functions on the
sensibly given manifold. Accordingly, the unity or identity of the 'I
think', between which Gurwitsch does not distinguish, must be
understood in terms of the unity of its act, its synthesizing
function. 28 Moreover, against the radically anti-psychological
reading of Cassirer, Gurwitsch insists that it is not a matter of
abstract, (transcendentally) logical forms, but of an "activitas
formans," an actual, effective, intellectual self-activity (geistiges
"Selbsttiitigkeit") that is operative in every act of thought, and
through which it becomes an act of thought. 29
Interestingly enough, in spite of his emphasis on the activity of
the understanding as the source of objectivity, Gurwitsch does not
subscribe to what might be termed an "impositional" view of
transcendental synthesis, that is, the view according to which the
understanding imposes its own order on an indifferent manifold,
thereby "constituting" the objective world of appearance. 30 On the
contrary, he maintains that what the conceptual activity of the
understanding does is to grasp and make explicit the pregiven
spatio-temporal order or "Vorgeformtheit" in which the sensible
manifold is given to the mind. 31 In a similar vein, he speaks of the
understanding as "respecting" this order, and even of its "ratifying,"
"sanctioning," "legitimating," and conferring a "title of right"
(Rechtstitel) upon it. 32 Although this way of characterizing the
28. Kants Theorie des Verstandes. pp. 24-25.

29. Kants Theorie des Verstandes. p. 29.
30. In the recent literature such a view is advocated by Malte Hossenfelder.
Kants Konstitutionstheorie und die Transzendentale Deduktion (Berlin: de Gruyter.
1978). See also Hossenfelder's critique of my own position in • Allison's Defense
of Kant's Transcendental Idealism," Inquiry. 33,1990: 467-79.
32. Kants Theorie des Verstandes, pp. 40-42, 101-02.
GURWITsCHsDIT~ATIONOFKMIT 47
activity of the understahding seems eminently Kantian, particularly
since it makes use of legal metaphors similar to those to which Kant
himself was so deeply attached, it nonetheless raises a fundamental
problem for Gurwitsch's interpretation, which I shall discuss in the
final section of this paper.
For the present, however, we must consider briefly the
psychological side of Gurwitsch's account of apperception, that is,
his answer to the question: "In what way is the necessary
relationship of all sensible data to the identical self of pure
transcendental apperception and that which is essentially involved in
this relationship experienced [erlebt] by us?"33 At first glance it
might seem that the correct answer is not at all, since it is clear that
we are usually aware of the products of our conceptual activity and
not the activity itself (das Geleiste, nicht das Leisten).34
Nevertheless, Gurwitsch refuses to accept a purely negative answer.
Focusing on Kant's claim that "It must be possible for the 'I think'
to accompany all my representations" (8 131), he aptly characterizes
apperception as a "necessary possibility. "35 Moreover, he claims
that this possibility is to disclose or make explicit the unifying
function of the understanding, which is always operative but of
which we are seldom explicitly aware. And from this he concludes
that, "The self of transcendental apperception is always experienced
[erlebt], all representations are always given in their belongedness to
this self, but not always and above all not necessarily in full
explicitness [Ausdriicklichkeit]. "36 In short, we are aware of or
"experience" the ubiquitous 'I think' in a merely implicit manner,
which, quite naturally, Gurwitsch interprets in light of the
Lei bnizian doctrine of petites perceptions. 37

35. Kants Theorie des Verstandes, p. 52. It may be noted that I use virtually
the same expression in Kant's Transcendental Idealism (p. 139) referring to the
"necessity of the possibility." Although I do not recall Gurwitsch having used
such a locution in his Kant seminar, he may very well have done so, in which
case my own use of it might be taken as evidence of the importance of those
petites perceptions.
48 HENRy E. All1SON
It is this latter feature of Gurwitsch's generally lucid account of

Kant's doctrine of apperception that I find most problematic or at
least unclear. To be sure, Kant speaks, even in the second edition,
of a consciousness of synthesis (B133), which I believe must be
taken to refer to the activity as well as its product (the unified,
objectified manifold).38 Nevertheless, it seems highly misleading to
characterize this as something "erlebt;" certainly it is not erfiihrt
(experienced in Kant's sense), since in an important Reflexion Kant
explicitly denies that we can experience that we think.39 And, as he
puts it in the "Refutation of Idealism," the consciousness of myself
in the representation 'I'is ... a merely intellectual representation of the
spontaneity of a thinking subject," which, as such, has not "the least
predicate of intuition" (B278).
Perhaps more to the point, Kant's emphasis on the
consciousness of the activity of thinking can be given a purely
epistemological sense in terms of his theory of judgment, without
introducing a questionable psychological dimension or treating it as
a distinct form of consciousness. As I have argued elsewhere, the
main point is that although we can perfectly well apprehend or intuit
XiS that are F's (such a capacity can be attributed even to animals),
we cannot conceive or represent to ourselves an x as F without not
only doing it, that is, consciously taking it as such, but also without
in some sense "knowing what one is doing." Apperception, then, or
what amounts to the same thing, the consciousness of synthesis, is
not another thing that one does when one judges (second-order
knowing that one is knowing); it is rather an ineliminable component
of the first-order activity itself.40 Moreover, if this is correct, it also
follows that the difference between the Leibnizian and Kantian
views on apperception is greater than Gurwitsch suggests; for it is
clear that Leibniz identifies apperception with reflection, which is
precisely a second-order knowing.
38. See Kant's Transcendental Idealism, pp. 142-44.

39. Reflexion 5661, 18: 318-19. For my analysis of this text see Kant's
Transcendental Idealism, pp. 275-78.
40. For a fuller discussion of this topic see my Kant's Theory of Freedom
(Cambridge and New York; Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 36-38).
GURwrrsrns INfERffiEfATION OF KANr 49
Since Gurwitsch explicitly denies that the I of the 'I think'

amounts to an ego or self in the actual sense41 , and since he is not
very clear about the sense in which this identical lor, better, the act
of thinking, is "experienced," it is quite possible that he might have
agreed with much of the "logical" reading of apperception sketched
above. Certainly, as a former student of his, I hope that this is the
case. Be that as it may, however, it seems reasonably clear that, just
as in case of apprehension, Gurwitsch's account of apperception is
based largely on the A-Deduction rather than on the
"depsychologized" B-Deduction. Of itself this is reasonable, even
necessary, for a phenomenologically oriented interpretation.
Nevertheless, it does result in a failure to consider the senses in
which Kant's doctrine might have been changed or at least clarified
in the second edition. Moreover, in the case of apperception this
failure has important consequences; for Kant there explicitly
maintains that the principle of apperception is analytic (B 135, 138).
Admittedly, this point is either overlooked or dismissed as mistaken
by most commentators. But since I have made it the basis of my
interpretation of the Transcendental Deduction, I particularly regret
the fact that Gurwitsch chose to ignore it in his account of
apperception. 42 Certainly, at the very least, it raises questions about
the sense in which Kant may be regarded as offering a theory of
mind.
IV
Although Gurwitsch's concern in Kants Theorie des Verstandes

is fundamentally exegetical, he does conclude on a critical note. The
basic point of this criticism, which he has also presented elsewhere,
is the claim that on the Kantian theory it is impossible to account for
repeated perceptions or experiences of the same thing. For example,
41. Kants Theorie des Verstandes, pp. 28 and 95.

42. For my analysis of this see Kant's Transcendental Idealism, pp. 137-48.
50 HE\lRy E. AlliSON
I take the desk which I am now perceiving to be the same as

(numerically identical with) the desk I perceived yesterday. As
Gurwitsch construes it, the Kantian story at this point is that this
judgment is based on the subsumption of qualitatively similar (but
numerically distinct) sensible data under a common concept or rule.
The problem is that since the data are different it cannot strictly
speaking be claimed that the distinct appearances are of an identical
object. This difficulty is then claimed to be resolvable only by appeal
to the Husserlian theory of intentionality, more particularly, by
means of the conception of a perceptual noema, or object intended as
such, which can be grasped by distinct noetic acts. Thus, in spite of
the depth and power of its answer to Humean empiricism, in the last
analysis Kant's transcendental account founders because of its
failure to recognize the intentionality of consciousness. 43
It is impossible here to address the large issue of the relative
merits of Kantian criticism and Husserlian phenomenology or even
the smaller question of the extent to which one might find in Kant an
anticipation of something like the Husserlian theory of
intentionality.44 What must be noted, however, is that this line of
criticism reflects an essentially phenomenalistic reading of Kant, a
reading which was already implicit in the account of the objectifying
synthesis as consisting in a ratification or legitimation of a pregiven
spatio-temporal order. As Gurwitsch sees it, this phenomenalism is
the direct result of the fact that Kant took over the Cartesian-Lockean
theory of ideas in its final Humean form. In other words, the only
contents of the mind are its own representations or sensible data. To
be sure, under the influence of Leibniz, Kant came to see that the
human mind must be regarded as the active unifier rather than as
43. Kants Theorie des Verstandes, pp. 123-32. See also, "The Kantian and
Husserlian Conceptions of Consciousness," esp. pp. 155-59.
44. I attempted to deal with the latter issue some years ago in "The Critique
oj Pure Reason as Transcendental Phenomenology," Volume 5 of Selected Studies
in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, R. Zaner & D. Ihde (Eds.) (The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. 1974, pp. 136-55). Among recent commentators, the
role of intentionality in Kant's thought has been emphasized by Richard Aquila.
See his Representational Mind: A Study oj Kant's Theory oj Knowledge
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983) and Matter in Mind: A Study oj
Kant's Transcendental Deduction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).
GURWITSCHS INfERPREfATION OF KANr 51
merely the passive recipient of these data, and it is precisely in this
that Kant's achievement consists. Nevertheless, it remains an
achievement that is fatally flawed by its erroneous starting point.
For, given this starting point, Kant was forced to identify the
representations or sensible data of the mind with the properties or
states of things. 45 And from this standpoint, there is no possibility
of affirming the numerical identity of objects perceived at different
times or points of view by a single subject, not to mention by
different subjects. 46
Since the phenomenalistic reading of Kant remains well
entrenched in the literature and has so much apparent textual
evidence in its favor, Gurwitsch can hardly be condemned for
adhering to it. Indeed, the fact that it was expressly affirmed both by
Husserl, his philosophical hero, and Paton, his favorite Kant
commentator and a usually reliable guide, must have made it
virtually irresistible to him. Nevertheless, I believe it to be
profoundly mistaken. In fact, it is precisely at this point that my
understanding of Kant differs most sharply from that of my teacher.
In order to clarify this difference, let us return for a moment to
Gurwitsch's account of objectification in terms of "ratification" or
"legitimation." As already indicated, the crucial point here is that
what is supposedly ratified is a pregiven spatio-temporal order of
representations (actually only a temporal order). Limiting ourselves
to the question of objective succession and, therefore, causality,
this, in effect, means that an objective succession of the states A-B
constituting an event is identified with an appropriately ratified
(conceptualized) subjective successions of perceptions a-b. In other
words, it is the subjective order, the order of apprehension, that is

46. Interestingly enough, Gurwitsch deals only in passing with the problem
of intersubjectivity or, more precisely, of an intersubjectively identifiable world
in Kant and does not integrate it into his criticism, although he easily could have
done so. In contrast to Paton, who attempts to account for this identity in terms
of the universality of the conditions of experience, Gurwitsch sees the Kantian
response to this problem to lie in the thing-in-itself. But rather than regarding
this as a solution, he sees it as an explanation of why the problem never really
arose for Kant. See Kants Theorie des Verstandes, pp. 44-47.
52 HENRy E. AlliSON
rendered objective or, what is the same thing, necessary, by being

subsumed under a rule (in this case the principle of causality).
Now, once again, it must be admitted that Kant frequently seems
to be claiming just this, particularly when he speaks of the rule as a
"necessary rule of apprehension" (A 1911B236) or of apprehension
itself as being "bound down" (A 192/B237). Nevertheless, as I have
argued in Kant's Transcendental Idealism, this cannot be taken as
Kant's considered view, at least not if we hope to make any
philosophical sense of the argument. 47 Here it must be kept in mind
that the objective temporal order for Kant is a thought not an intuited
order, which means that it is not something pregiven to be
"respected" or "ratified." Moreover, as he makes clear in the vitally
important third paragraph of the second edition version of the
second analogy (B234-36), the problem of objectivity with respect
to the temporal order is precisely to explain how it is possible by
means of perceptions, which are all that is given us (since time itself
cannot be perceived), to represent an objective order that cannot be
simply identified with the order of the perceptions themselves.
Thus, although objectivity is, indeed, in Gurwitsch's sense an
achievement, it is not accomplished through the ratification of the
subjective order by subjecting that order to a rule. On the contrary,
the rule is one by means of which we are able to represent to
ourselves a distinct objective order through these perceptions, not an
order of them.
Unfortunately, it is impossible to develop this analysis any
further here and I am certainly not claiming that it is not without
difficulties of its own, or even that Kant has an unambiguous
position regarding objectivity. My only aim is to suggest the
possibility of a non-phenomenalistic interpretation of Kant's
argument and to note that Gurwitsch did not seem to have
considered such a possibility (apart, of course, from Marburg Neo-
Kantianism, which is not here in question). In retrospect, however,
47. For the full version of this analysis see Kant's Transcendental Idealism,
pp.217-28.
GURWITSCH'S INfERPREfATION OF KANr 53
perhaps I should be grateful that he did not~ for if he had, much of
my own work might have become redundant.
4
Phenomenalism, Idealism and Gurwitsch's Account of

the Sensory Noema
Robert Welsh Jordan

Colorado State University
The relation between phenomenology and idealism was

something a number of those around this table puzzled over here
back in the 60's. Professor Gurwitsch used to argue persuasively
and, I think, correctly that neither perceived objects nor perceptual
noemata can be correctly thought of as eide in Husserl's sense of
that esoteric word. Yet one thing which makes his meaning of the
word so very abstruse is the fact that Husserl entirely agrees with
this conviction yet speaks all the while of the noematic objects of
perceptual experiences as ideals [i.e., Ideen im Kantischen Sinn].1
1. When Husserl introduced his use of 'Eidos' as if it were a German term, he

wrote [Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological
Philosophy. First Book., F. Kersten (Trans.) (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982,
p. 8)] that he did so to lessen the risk of misinterpretation by making his
terminology less equivocal than that of his Logical Investigations and that the
same terminological innovation would enable him to retain the concept Kant had
expressed by the word 'Idee' while keeping a clean differentiation between all
universal essences whether material or formal on the one hand and, on the other
hand, what he would now be referring to as Ideen [ideas, ideals]. Some of the
things to which he applies the latter term are not eidetic objects at all but instead
are real objects. If this reading of Husser! is correct, this effort of his was largly
futile. The point has been pervasively overlooked, probably even by Professor
Gurwitsch. Is Husserl's point so contrary to things modern and even postmodern
55
J. C. Evans ami R. W. Stufflebeam (eds.), To Work at the Foumiations, 55-64.
56 ROBERT WELSH JORDAN
From the late 1920's throughout his distinguished career, Gmwitsch

argued, if I read him correctly, that the description of the
perceptually meant object need not refer to an idea of the object
which would be distinct from the sense or meaning of the object; the
perceptual noema has, he insisted, no such constituent.
Nevertheless, crucial issues remain to be resolved about what
genuine affinities, if any, a phenomenological philosophy may have
with idealism. That there are such issues seems obvious in the case
of those phenomenologists who seek to assimilate phenomenology
to Kantian or to absolute idealism. But analogous issues must also
be faced by any phenomenology which seeks to assimilate itself to
derivatives of idealism with respect to the "phenomenal world"
found in various schools of vitalistic philosophy (Schopenhauer,
Nietzsche, Bergson, Dilthey) as well as in the work of William
James. Part of what is at stake in these issues is the concept of truth
that was a theme central, it seems to me, to all of Husserl's work as
well as to that of Heidegger.
Against realistic interpretations of Husserl, Gurwitsch argues
that Husserl's use of 'Erscheinung' to refer to the perceptual noema
must not be taken as if the perceptual noema were a mere
appearance, a sign of a hidden reality or an image referring
essentially to a non-apparent original:
intellectuals take for granted that almost no one apart from Dorion Cairns and
Martin Heidegger would notice? The point. if it exist at all. is so intertwined with
all that follows in this essay and is so pervasively overlooked that, as an
introduction to the essay the following exemplary passage should be studied,
keeping in mind that every constituent of a redl thing, including everyone of its
constituent forms , would be an ideal in the Kantian sense and would not be
anything eidetic at all:
Just as the thing is an ideal [Idee] so is each of the attributes belonging
to its essential content and, above all. each of its constituent "forms,"
and this is so from [its] regional universe right down to the lowest order
unity to which it belongs. More precisely: In its idea/being [Wesen] the
thing is given as res temporalis ... res extensa . . . res materialis . . .
unity of causal relations . . . . Even in respect of its specifically real
components what we meet with are ideas [not eide whether formal or
material]. All components of the thing ideal [Dingidee] are themselves
ideals, each involves the "and so forth" of "endless" possibilities. (pp.
347-348)
PHENOMENALISM, IDEAllSM ANDGURWITsCH'S ACCOUNT OF 1HE SENSORY NOEMA 57
When the term appearance is taken according to Husserl, the

difference between the appearance of a thing and the thing
itself is not a difference between the object of sense-
perception and some concealed reality. Rather the difference
is between one particular determinate manner of presentation
of the thing and the totality of possible aspects under which
the self-same thing may present itself...the thing itself
proves to be the all-inclusive systematic grouping of its
appearances. Hence the difference may be defined as that
between one member of a system and the system itself to
which the member belongs . . . we may define the
appearance oj a thing as the thing itselJ as given in a
particular one-sided manner of presentation or, to put it
differently, as the apprehension of a system of appearances
from the vantage-point of one of its members . ... 2
And he maintains that the phenomenological reduction "makes

possible the realization of the program of phenomenology, namely,
to account for objects as they really are in terms of objects. taken Jor
what they are experienced as . "3
These theses lend themselves readily to the phenomenological
understanding of perception as access to the thing itself. It seems as
if the perceived as such can be identical with the perceived object as
is. It was the position of Husserl and of Heidegger that when the
perceived is also judged about, given "nominal form" through a
judging act, it remains at least an open possibility that the perceived,
the syntactically formed state of affairs, and the thing itself coincide,
that they be numerically one. So conceived, the true proposition
would not have to correspond to any member of an inaccessible
realm of alleged facts. The phenomenological conception of
consciousness as being open to other objects with which it must be
in the world afforded, in the work of Husserl and Heidegger, an
2. A. Gurwitsch, The Field of Consciousness (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University

Press, 1964, p. 184).
3. Gurwitsch, The Field of Consciousness, p. 232.
important alternative to traditional conceptions of absolute truth as

well as to the many forms taken by skeptical relativism before and
since. Some features of Gurwitsch's phenomenology tend, it seems
to me, to preclude this conception of propositional truth and to lead
away from the conception of sensuous perceiving as a way of access
to transcendent things.
These features can be made distinct by examining some aspects
of the theory which, as I shall try to show, need fuller discussion
and revision in some instances.
What Gurwitsch meant by an 'all-inclusive system of
appearances' needs elaboration. Such a system can be considered a
definite set in that the members must all be appearances of the self-
same object. Members of the system must occur in a style that is
compatible with the style in which members have already occurred.
But the system must not be conceived as closed, as having a finite
number of members. The whole system is implicit in each member
only in this sense, regardless of any holistic, naturalistic, or
deterministic beliefs the perceiver may cherish. The horizons of
meaning belonging to the thing which is being identified with this
system of appearances are open, not closed.
Gurwitsch clearly acknowledges this indeterminacy of the
perceptual noema. 4 Yet he criticizes Husserl's seeming
acknowledgment of the self-same phenomenon, apparently because
he seeks to lay at Husserl's door the doctrine that the phrase, "the
pure X," i.e., the object as pole of identity, denotes something
eidetic. Remarkably, Gurwitsch takes Husserl to task for having
conceived the noematic object, the mere polar unity of its objective
sense, to be an element within the very object whose unity it is, "an
identical element common to all noemata related to that [self-same]
4. A perceptual appearance which is itself gi ven, he writes, ·predelineates ..

. the total . . . configuration along more or less indeterminate but specifically
generic and typical lines· [A. Gurwitsch, Phenomenology and the Theory oj
Science, Lester Embree (Ed.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974,
p. 253»).
PHENOMENAllSM, IDFAUSM ANDGURWITSCH'S ACCOUNf OF THE SENSORY NOEMA 59
thing. liS Husserl, Gurwitsch says, regarded the unity of the object
as if it were a sort of idee fixe which must accompany all
representations of the self-same thing. Having misrepresented
Husserl's doctrine in this way, Gurwitsch proceeds to criticize this
way of recognizing the indeterminacy of the noematic object. This
way of conceiving the matter, he writes, deprives the perceptual
noema of the individuality it would have if it were unitary by Gestalt
coherence. 6 On Husserl's view of the perceptual noema, it is said,
the indeterminateness of the noematic object's horizons of meaning
implies that they are "empty" in the sense that they are general ideas
and so are deficient in individuality, as if the horizonally intended
determinations were not there. What Husserl says in the passage
referred t07 seems, however, quite the opposite: "This empty
horizon is not a nothing. On the contrary, Husserl goes on to
II
explain that whatever determinations of the thing are given are

apperceived as coexisting with other determinations which are
absent only in that they are not themselves given. Their being so co-
intended normally entails reference to potential perceivings to which
they would be given. In the event that these become actual there will
occur a synthesis through which they will be identified with the
determinations previously intended as having coexisted with the
previously given determinations. This synthesis will not make it true
that the emptily intended determinations were there; it will disclose
this fact, explicate it for consciousness, constitute it for the ego. The
apperceived appearances of those determinations which are
compossible with the given appearances cannot be given in any
future and now anticipated perceiving. This sort of consideration is
likely to be what led Husserl to differentiate between a quality of a
thing and the appearances of that quality and between the
appearances of the thing and the thing.
S. Gurwitsch, Phenomenology and the Theory oj Science, p. 2S0. Gurwitsch

reads Husserl on this point as if the latter had believed that a being is a
constituent of itself!
6. Gurwitsch, Phenomenology and the Theory oj Science, p. 252.
7. Hua. 9, p. 181. Editor's note: It is customary to use the abbreviation 'Hua'
followed by the volume number when referring to Husserliana, Edmund Husserl,
Gesammelte Werke (Den Haag: M. Nijhoff).
60 ROBFRT WELSH JORDAN
Gurwitsch's own account of this feature of apperception in

terms of Gestalt coherence may itself be deficient unless it provides
an account of those determinations apperceived as coexisting at the
same time as the appresenting determinations. As nearly as I have so
far made out, however, his own account refers only to future
appearances, quite as if the thing could appear only to present and
future experiences in the same stream of consciousness. However,
Husserl is dead right to insist that the consciousness of any
appearances as those of an Objective thing requires reference to
appearances that cannot be given through any experience occurring
in the self-same stream of consciousness but could be given only
through experiences belonging to some other stream of
consciousness.
Gurwitsch's analysis of the perceptual noema into pure systems
of appearances would seem to imply that the apperceived
appearances of a thing's apperceived determinations would be
among those of its constituents which are not "given in direct and
ordinary sense encounter." But Gurwitsch's own analysis needs
supplementation in as much as it seems to say only that such
constituents "are the noematic correlates of the anticipations and
expectancies which pervade and permeate the present perception. "8
That the appresented would co-exist with the presented is crucial
to any description of the sensuous noema but seems to go missing
when Gurwitsch re-writes the sentence, "A real thing is a unity of
constituents," into its supposed equivalent, "A real thing is a system
of appearances." It is an error to rewrite 'a unity of constituents' into
'a system of appearances'.
Moreover, by substituting 'system' for 'unity' in the sentence, it
is strongly suggested that the unity in question is definitive as to its
meaning. However, any such system of appearances can itself
acquire as part of its meaning that it belongs as a member to a more
inclusive system which is nevertheless the system of appearances of
the self-same thing. Such a shift in meaning would occur, for
example, if a previously isolated culture were to come into contact
8. GUfwitsch, Phenomenology and the Theory oj Science, p. 253.

PHENOMENALISM, IDEAliSM AND GURWITSCH'S ACCOUNf OF TIIE SENSORY NOEMA 61
with members of a quite alien culture. Such a shift in meaning

would be analogous to the sort of shift that would occur when
persons previously unaware of the possibility become aware of
being color blind. 9
More and more, it appears that Gurwitsch's conception of the
perceptual noema precludes not just representative realism but the
very possibility whose defense was a major part of Husserl's
concept of phenomenology as philosophical theory, viz., that what
is given be something real that is no mere system of appearances. In
place of this Husserlian and Heideggerian concept of
phenomenological philosophy, Gurwitsch gives us a constitutive
phenomenology which begins to seem an idealism in a readily
undersjandable meaning of the word. The identity of the proposition
with its alleged subject matter is a constituted and necessarily
contrafactual meaning .
By refusing to differentiate between a thing's appearances on the
one hand and, on the other hand, its qualities and other
characteristics, Gurwitsch's theory identifies the appearances as the
thing's only "content." From every change in the appearances, there
results, he writes, "a materially different What, a new theme,
results. "10 It would seem on this view to be impossible that
something pre-given sensuously be correctly identified with
something which is the subject member of a predicative judgment:
We cannot endorse Husserl's view of an "identical noematic

nucleus" which is varyingly illuminated by a unitary
attentional function and among whose components and
9. See Hua 6, p. 167 (English trns. p. 164). An analogous shift in meaning

can take place with respect to the co-intended world itself: Each of us has her/his
life-world, which is meant as the world for all. Each has that world with the sense
of a polar unity of worlds that are subjectively relative which are transformed in
the course of correction into mere appearances of the world, the life-world for all,
the continuously enduring unity which is itself a universe of individuals, of
things. That is the world, a different one has no meaning for us, and it becomes
phenomenon through the epoche. [Hua. 6, p. 258 (English trns., p. 254f)].
10. A. Gurwitsch, Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1966, p. 265).
constituents sometimes one, sometimes another, is rendered

conspicuous and brought into prominence. 11
Gurwitsch appears to endorse William James's view that anything

singled out to be subjected to judgment cannot be a fact that had
already been existent but must be a new set of facts that "when first
discovered, are known in states of consciousness never till that
moment exactly realized before, states of consciousness which at the
same time judge them to be determinations of the same matter offact
which was previously realized." 12 The syntactically formed matter
of fact cannot be identical with any previously existing fact. If such
an identity is believed in then the belief mistakes fiction for fact. The
proposition is held to be a fictitious idea whose agreement with fact
cannot be shown. But it is a fictitious idea generated according to
some more or less definite rule. This appears to be the position of
both James and Gurwitsch; it has important features in common
with the position of David Hume.
The existing thing itself can be given only if it be identical with
its actual or possible appearances to the perceiving subject. In one of
his last essays Gurwitsch writes:
[C]orresponding to every act there is an intentional correlate

or noema, that is, the object intended, taken however exactly
as, and only as, it is actually intended through the act under
discussion. For instance, if we think of Shakespeare as the
director of the Globe Theatre, the corresponding noema is
not the real historical person who was born in 1563, died in
1616, wrote the Sonnets, Hamlet, King Lear, and other
plays, was director of the Globe Theatre, and so on. Rather,
the noema is that historical person under the aspect of his
role and function with respect to the Globe Theatre.
Correspondingly, the perceptual noema is not the thing
encountered per se with all the properties, qualities, modes
11. Gurwitsch, Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology, p. 266.

12. William James, Principles oj Psychology, I (p. 196f), as quoted by
Gurwitsch in Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology, p. 258.
PHENOMENAUSM, IDEAUSM AND GURWITsCH's ACCOUNT OF TIIE SENSORY NOEMA 63
of behavior under specified conditions (causal properties)

which belong to it regardless of whether or not they are
actually perceived and regardless of whether they are already
known or still to be discovered. The perceptual noema is
rather the thing as it presents itself through the given
particular perception, that is the thing as appearing under a
certain aspect, from a certain side, in a certain orientation-
briefly, in a certain manner of one-sided adumbrational
presentation. I3
Gurwitsch means to preclude identification of the perceptual noema

with "the thing encountered per se with all the properties ... which
belong to it."
This would put him thoroughly at odds with some of the main
achievements of phenomenology in the work of Husserl and
Heidegger. Without resorting either to phenomenalism or to naive
realism, they had tried to show how to keep open some crucial
possibilities which philosophy otherwise resolutely closes off:
First, that what is itself given in perceptual experience be
identical with the transcendent thing intended;
second, that the world within which this transcendent
thing has its being and the world pregiven through
experience are one ;14
third, that the object about which a predicative judgment
is made and the object which acquires syntactical form for
the ego through predicative judging and the syntactically
formed state of affairs or proposition are one;
fourth, that the identity of a proposition with its subject
matter can itself be given or evident;
fifth, that true existential judgments can be founded upon
the pre-givenness of the thing itself and therefore explicate
the world itself rather than some mere representation of the
13. Gurwitsch, Phenomenology and the Theory oj Science, p. 247.

14. In terms approximating Heidegger's: 'World or being is given [es gibt
Sein].· 'World or being is given to consciousness [Dos Sein schickt sich dem
Denken zu].·
world or some Weltanschauung or empty prejudice about the

world;
sixth, that openness to things is characteristic of
consciousness as intentional;
seventh, that there is at least one significant alternative to
the traditional alternative conceptions of truth-the
correspondence, the coherence, and the skeptical; the last,
including its several anti foundational variations, pragmatic,
hermeneutical, critical ....
5
CONDITIONAL IDENTITY and IRREGULAR PARTS:

Aron Gurwitsch's Gestalt-Theoretic Revision of the
Stumpf-Husserl Conception of Independence
Gilbert T. Null
The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
1. Brief Overview of Gurwitsch's Agreements with and departures

from Husserl
Three profound points of agreement between Aron Gurwitsch

and Husserl were enough to earn Gurwitsch the title Husserlian.
First, Gurwitsch accepted Husserl's theory of intentionality
generally, and Husserl's tripartite distinction between:
a) the mental act of attention (VorstellungINoesis),
b) the sense of the act (Sinn, Noema, object as intended),
c) and the referent of the act (Gegenstand, object which is
intended) [6: 173-75~ 7: 124-40~ 8: 227-55].
Second, Gurwitsch accepted Husserl's transcendental idealism
as a task within psychology, understanding it as the task of
describing the acts, the senses, and the laws of thematic transform-
ation via which referents of all types become manifest to
consciousness [8: 76~ 6: 220-27~ 7: 110-15,357-8].
65
66 GILBERT T. NUlL
Third, Gurwi tsch accepted Husserl's 1913 thesis that

transcendental idealism is the philosophical task of metaphysics if it
is restricted by the transcendental reduction. Gurwitsch understood
that restriction to mean that the world is dealt with only as the outer
horizon of the referents revealed via (and not as a system of causal
antecedents of) systems of senses (themes) of acts of attention [6:
164-173,223-7; 8: 154-209].
But at least seven well-known disagreements with Husserl
earned Gurwitsch the title Husserlian heretic. First, he expanded
Husserl's distinction between the theme and margin of attention to
include the thematic field. Second, he identified Husserl's Noematic
sense as the theme of attention, and claimed that the theme is a
special kind of whole, having a kind of unity which mere
(mereological) sums do not generally have.
Third, Gurwi tsch rejected Husserl's egological account of
attention in terms of the willful acts of a transcendental ego who
grasps, maintains in grasp, and releases from grasp themes of
attention. Gurwitsch preferred descriptions of thematic
transformations as operations mapping from themes to themes.
Fourth, Gurwitsch rejected Husserl's hyle-morphe doctrine of
intentionality as an act bestowing meaning on sense data. In place of
Husserl's hyle-morphe doctrine, Gurwitsch proposed his own
correlaJion conception of intentionality.
Fifth, Gurwitsch rejected Husserl's account of the relation of the
object which is intended to the Sinne via which it is intended. In
place of Husserl's Lockean doctrine of inherence in a pure
determinable X substratum, Gurwitsch proposed a Leibnizian
doctrine of coherence within a unitary whole.
Sixth, Gurwitsch rejected Husserl's account of the "synthesis"
of explication and the structure of the warrants ("originary
evidence") for judgments of predication Uudgments of the form
'This S is p', understood to require states of affairs as warrants). In
place of Husserl's synthetic account of that evidence as a
mereological sum, Gurwitsch proposed an analytic account of that
evidence as an articulated unitary whole.
CONDmONAL IDINITIY AND IRREGUlAR PARfS 67
Seventh, under the influence of Leibniz, Weber and Schutz,
Gurwitsch rejected Husserl's account of the relation of the world of
purely bodily nature (die Dingwelt) to the cultural life-world. In
place of Husserl's characterization of the Dingwelt as a piece
(independent part) of every cultural life-world, Gurwitsch proposed
that the Dingwelt has a kind of dependence relative to our (and many
other) cultural worlds, and so is not strictly speaking an independent
part.
These seven well-known features of Gurwitsch's heresy were
too ancillary to constitute Husserlian apostasy. I will argue that the
basis of Gurwitsch's heresy can be better understood by seeing that
at least six of his well-known disagreements with Husserl are
consequences of a more fundamental departure, a departure as
philosophically profound as the points of agreement between the
two. At least departures #2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 derive from
Gurwitsch's Gestalt-theoretic revision of the Stumpf-Husserl
doctrine of dependent and independent parts. That revision is the
topic of this study.
Section 2 discusses the details of that revision, showing that
Gurwitsch's use of Gestalt theory resulted in a concern with a type
of dependence not considered by Stumpf or Husserl. Section 3
shows how Gurwitsch's concern with this type of dependence
entailed several of his aforementioned departures from Husserl.
Section 4 formulates a problem of identity for parts and wholes
which Gurwitsch's revision of Stumpf-Husserl confronts, and
shows how this problem makes his account incompatible with
traditional theories of the part relation. I there introduce the issue of
the modal characteristics of this new type of dependence, and
suggest an inadequacy of Gurwitsch's account of independent parts.
Section 5 introduces a non-traditional, formal theory of the part
relation designed for formulating Gurwitsch's Gestalt-theoretic
alternatives to the Stumpf-Husserl tradition. Section 6 applies the
formal theory of Section 5 to resolve the problem of identity which
Gurwitsch's account faces. Section 7 concludes by showing why
Gurwitsch's purely part-theoretic characterization of the new type of
68 GILBERT T. NUll.
dependence is unacceptable, and delineating two outstanding

desiderata of the present study.
2. Gurwitsch's Revision of the Stumpf-Husserl

Conception of Independence
Stumpf defined the independent contents of a presentational

complex as those parts which "can by their nature also be presented
separately" [28: 106-29]. Husserl followed Stumpf in this
conception of independence, but replaced Stumpf's psychological
conception of independence as "separate presentability" by an
ontological conception of independence as unconditional existence,
and of dependence as conditional existence.
Generalizing Stumpf's psychological universe of discourse,
Husserl proposed a general axiomatic theory of the part and
foundation relations (whether psychological in nature or not) in the
context of which the concepts of dependent and independent part
would be defined in complete generality [13 and 14: Investigation
3]. Husserl's foundation relation expressed ontological dependence
of one object on another, and was intuitively formulated by Husserl
as follows:
A content of the species A is founded upon a content of the

species B, if an A can by its essence (i.e. legally, in virtue of
its specific nature) not exist, unless a B also exists: this
leaves open whether the coexistence of a C, a D etc. is
needed or not .... [14: 475]
Husserl's definition of foundation can be understood as

implying at least that an object a is founded on an object b just in
case a cannot exist unless b exists.
Gurwitsch's thoughts moved in the psychological context of
Stumpf's account, rather than in the generalized ontological context
of Husserl's account. Gurwitsch replaced Stumpf's concept of
CONDmONAL IDENITIY AND IRREGULAR PARTS 69
presentational complex with Von Ehrenfels' concept of Gestalt

contexture, adopted from Wertheimer and Koffka [7: 189f.]. But
given this psychological refinement of Stumpf's position,
Gurwitsch's account of dependence followed Stumpf's "separate
presentability", rather than Husserl's "foundation relation"
formulation. Gurwitsch's own characterization of independent parts
is in terms of the thematic transformation of singling out [7: 240-
43]. Singling out is precisely the procedure of "presenting a part
separately to attention"; following Stumpf, Gurwitsch used the
concept of singling out to distinguish dependent from independent
parts:
Items which can be experienced only as constituents of a

Gestalt into which they are integrated and which resist all
attempts at severing them from any thematic Gestalt
contexture and making them into themes 'in themselves',
because they prove to be in need of something else by which
they are supported or at least complemented, may be called
items not lending themselves to being singled out or made
independent. Those which can become themes 'in
themselves' and are not in need of structural contexts within
which alone they can be given to thematic consciousness will
be called items susceptible of being made independent. [7:
264]
But, under the influence of Gestalt theory, Gurwitsch also added

his own, purely part-theoretic account of the dependence of
Stumpfs "content-parts":
Such contents 'penetrate each other; they are within, not

outside of, one another'. Accordingly, they change along
with each other; they hang together functionally in such a
way that the change of one content also involves the other.
[7: 259]
70 GILBERT T. NUlL
Note that the phenomenon of dependence at issue here consists

in the fact that the identity of a "content part" is determined by
something other than its own parts. Note also that (unlike Husserl)
Gurwitsch attempted to characterize this type of dependence in terms
of the part relation only: Two parts dependent relative to the same
"presentational complex" (whole) are said to be "within" (i.e. parts
of) one another. Gurwitsch used this description (viz. "the parts are
part of each other") interchangeably with the description "the parts
depend upon, determine, demand and mutually support one another"
[6: 145; 7: 210,260-3] as descriptions of the dependence exhibited
by "content parts".
Stumpf's "presentational complex" was a mereological sum of
parts, whereas a Gestalt contexture has a form of unity missing in
mere sums of parts. Having replaced Stumpf's "presentational
complex" with the Gestalt contexture, Gurwitsch had to confront the
fact that because of the unity characteristic of Gestalt contextures,
every part of the contexture seems to exhibit something like the
dependence of Stumpfs "content parts". Accordingly, Gurwitsch
claimed that all parts of a Gestalt contexture exhibit a kind of
dependence:
[W]e seem to relinquish Stumpf's differentiation of parts, in

the sense that all parts prove to be dependent and that the
existence of independent parts in Stumpf's and Husserl's
sense must be denied altogether. [7: 260]
Gurwitsch characterized the Gestalt contexture as a whole which

contains only content (i.e. dependent) parts:
What a 'part'-better stated, constituent-of a certain Gestalt

is, how it stands in it, is determined by the structure of this
Gestalt. The part is not something in and for itself,
regardless of whatever else is given together with it... [7:
189-90] ... constituents of a Gestalt are dependent parts. [7:
26Of, italics added]
CONDmONAL IDFNITfY AND IRREGULAR PARI'S 71
GUIwitsch described his denial "that an item which is susceptible of
being singled out remains phenomenally the same when it is singled
out" as the crux of his departure from Stumpf and Husserl, "who
maintain that an item can merely be isolated and otherwise remain
what it is ... " [7: 264-5].
If a whole consists only of dependent parts, then the type of
dependence at issue here consists in the fact that the identity of each
proper part is determined by the whole, i.e. by each other proper
part of the same whole. According to Gurwitsch's purely part-
theoretic account of such dependence, every part of the whole is
"within" each of the other parts. In such a case, the whole Gestalt
contexture (considered as part of itself) is contained within each of
its parts.
Gurwitsch used this description "(viz. "the whole is contained in
each of its parts") as a description of unity by Gestalt coherence.
This containment of the whole within each of its parts was meant to
account both for the type of unity missing in mere mereological
sums, and for the type of dependence characteristic of the parts of a
Gestalt contexture.
In spite of the apparent dependence of the parts of a Gestalt
contexture, Gurwitsch persisted in using his "singling out" version
of Stumpf's "separate presentability" criterion to distinguish
between ontologically dependent and ontologically independent
parts. His examples of the former type of part included the color and
extension of a colored surface, and the pitch, loudness, and timbre
of a tone. His examples of the latter type of part included the tones
comprising a musical chord [6: 83f., 145f.], the lines comprising a
written letter or diagram [7: 188, 261], and the steps in a logical or
mathematical proof [7: 188]. The former examples are ontologically
dependent, and the latter examples are ontologically independent
parts. Accordingly, Gurwitsch talks ("by way of abbreviation") of
the former as dependent, and of the latter as independent parts of a
unitary whole, acknowledging however the difference in usage of
the term 'independent' in the writings of Stumpf and Husserl [7:
264, 6: 146]. The difference consists in the fact that Gurwi tsch
wants to say that both ontologically dependent and ontologically
72 GILBERT T. Nuu...
independent parts of a Gestalt contexture are dependent in the sense

that they are parts of a whole unified by Gestalt coherence.
However, he also wants to say that the ontologically independent
parts can be singled out as themes of attention in the absence of any
other theme, while the ontologically dependent parts cannot be
separately thematized.
A voiding confusion of these two usages of the terms
'dependent' and 'independent' is no easy task, and I am not
convinced that Gurwitsch himself had succeeded in this task at the
time of his dissertation in 1929. To avoid confusion I will refer to
the type of dependence characteristic of every proper part of a
Gestalt contexture as G-dependence, and to the Stumpf-Husserl
concept as ontological dependence. The basic intuitive distinction
between the two types of dependence is just this: G-dependence is to
conditional identity as ontological dependence is to conditional
existence.
• Gurwitsch described the Gestalt contexture as a "unitary whole"
[6: 115] in order to emphasize its lack of any non-G-dependent parts
[7: 210, 260-5; 6: 114--23, 132-39, 145-50]. Adopting his
language, I will speak of a 'unitary whole' as a whole each proper
part of which is G-dependent relative to that whole.
Because the ontoiogically independent parts of a unitary whole
can be "presented separately", and Stumpf's "presentational
complexes" were replaced by unitary wholes, Gurwitsch was
committed to the thesis that the ontologically independent parts of a
unitary whole are unitary wholes in their own right. So Gurwitsch's
revision of Stumpf-Husserl seems to boil down to three essential
claims:
1. All (ontologically independent and dependent) proper
parts of unitary wholes are G-dependent relative to the
whole; and
2. Unitary wholes have both ontologically dependent and
ontoiogically independent proper parts, and
3. The ontologically independent proper parts of unitary
wholes are unitary wholes in their own right.
CONDmONAL IDENITIY AND IRREGULAR PARfS 73
These three claims are the crux of Gurwitsch's Gestalt-theoretic

revision of the Stumpf-Husserl doctrine of dependence and
independence. I will now briefly examine some of the departures
from Husserl's thought worked out by Gurwitsch as theoretical
implications of these three claims.
3. Systemic Implications of Gurwitsch's Revision of the Stumpf-

Husserl Conception of Independence
3.1 Rejection of Husserl's Hyle-Morphe Doctrine in Favor

of the Correlation Conception of Intentionality.
Gurwitsch's rejection of Husserl's analysis of the noesis into a

sensuous, hyletic part (hyle) and an animating, sense-bestowing
noetic part (morphe) is based on the relative G-dependence of
ontologically independent parts. His argument [7: 253-58; 6: 265-
73] against Husserl's hyle-morphe doctrine is that:
What is immediately given, the phenomenological primal

material, is given only as articulated and structured. Data
devoid of all articulation, hyletic data in the strict sense, do
not exist at all ... [7: 256] ... no hyletic datum is in any
way independent with regard to a 'higher stratum'," and yet
"reflection on the hyle is ... singling out: a constituent is
extracted from its thematic context and made into a theme for
itself. [7: 256-7]
Gurwitsch did not deny the existence of the sensuous

component of perception which Husserl characterized as hyle. He
took issue only with Husserl's characterization of this sensuous
component as an independent part of the whole perception. He
agreed that the hyletic content is an ontologically independent part of
the noesis (since it can be singled out), but claimed that it is G-
dependent in the sense that its identity is contingent on its context.
74 GILBERT T. NUlL
If every visual Gestalt is a unitary whole, then Husserl's

characterization of hyle as an independent part of a perceptual given
is insufficiently precise. The hyletic datum is an ontologically
independent but G-dependent part of the perceptual given. Claiming
the relative G-dependence of the hyle is equivalent to claiming that
the perceptual given is a unitary whole, without the need for morphe
as an extraneous organizing principle. Gurwitsch therefore proposed
his correlation conception of intentionality as an alternative to
Husserl's hyle-morphe conception [7: 138-40, 257; 6: 173-5,
273ff.).
3.2 The Theme and the Noematic Sense as Unitary

Wholes.
Gurwitsch identified the theme of attention with Husserl's

noematic sense, also called the noematic nucleus and the noematic
what [7: 183-5]. Gurwitsch objected to the interpretation of the
noematic sense as a mere (i.e. non-unitary) mereological sum [7:
185-8]. He characterized it instead as a Gestalt contexture, within
which alternative adumbrations are contained as G-dependent parts
[7: 191-2, 240]. Since he claimed that the parts of the noematic
sense are G-dependent relative to the whole sense, Gurwitsch
characterized the Noematic nucleus as a unitary whole, i.e. as a
whole the only proper parts of which are G-dependent relative to it.
3.3 Rejection of Husserl's Pure Determinable X in favor of

the Unitary Whole Conception of the Object Which is
Intended.
The thesis that only unitary wholes are ontologica1ly independent

was also involved in Gurwitsch's rejection [8: 249-55) of Husserl's
Lockean doctrine [15: Section 131f.] that the object which is
intended via the various noemata which present it to consciousness
is a pure determinable X occurring as a common dependent part [8:
250] of the various noemata which present it. If the object which is
CONDmONAL IDENITJY AND IRREGULAR PARI'S 75
intended is a moment of some noema, then that object must be

ontologically dependent. Gurwitsch denied that the object which is
intended is (or at least, is part of) a common dependent overlap of its
adumbrations, thereby allowing that objects which are intended may
include ontologically independent individuals.
Gurwitsch proposed an alternative account of the relation of the
object to the noemata via which it is intended, in which the part-
whole relation is reversed, and according to which:
[T]he perceived thing .. .is... nothing other than the

internoematic system itself .... The thing itself..., or, as
we may say, the internoematic system as a whole presents
itself from the varying vantage points of its several
members. [8: 254-5]
[T]he internoematic system as a whole is 'contained' and

present in each of its members from whose vantage point it
appears through a given perception. [8: 260]
So Gurwitsch defined the object which is intended as a unitary

whole comprised of noemata (more exactly, noematic Sinne) which
are G-dependent relative to their whole (and hence, which are G-
dependent relative to the object which is intended).
Given the thesis that only unitary wholes are ontologically
independent, Gurwitsch's position permits of ontologically
independent objects which are intended. Thus, Gurwitsch claimed
that the noemata via which an object is presented to attention must be
G-dependent relative to the object which is intended, while the
object which is presented to attention may be ontologically
independent. It is worth emphasizing to realists that Gurwitsch's
acceptance of Husserl's transcendental stance is consistent with the
claim that the noema is (G)-dependent relative to the real object
which is intended, because of his rejection of Husserl's pure
determinable X conception in favor of the unitary whole conception
of the object which is intended.
76 GILBERT T. NUlL
The last sentence of the foregoing quote again [cj Section 2.

supra] shows that Gurwitsch also claimed that this whole (i.e. the
referent, the object which is intended) is "contained in" (i.e. is a part
of) each of its parts (i.e. each of the noematic Sinne via which the
referent is intended). This claim embodies Gurwitsch's attempt to
account for the relation of G-dependence in terms of the part
predicate alone. This attempt will be considered (and rejected) below
[See Section 7.1 infra].
3.3.1 Rejection of Husserl's Mereological Analysis of the

States of Affairs which are Warrants for Predications.
The relation of part to whole is the central issue of Husserl's

concepts of sedimentation of sense, explication, and the judgment of
predication (i.e. judgments of the form "This S is p"). In Experience
and Judgment, when an ontologically dependent part (moment) of
the whole is discerned, the corresponding judgment is "This S is p";
when an ontologically independent part (piece) of the whole is
discerned ("singled out"), the corresponding judgment is "This S
has p". We would express these judgments by the sentences 'p is an
ontologically dependent part of S', and 'p is an ontologically
independent part of S', respectively. Gurwitsch limited his
discussion [8: Ch. 10] to the latter case, and I will do the same here.
Gurwitsch's analysis diverges from Husserl's account of
explication as a process of mereological summation. Explication is
the process which constitutes the state of affairs p being part of
S, understood as the originary evidence (i.e. warrant) for the
sentence 'p is part of S'. According to Husserl, the part p is
thematized while the simply grasped whole S is maintained in grasp,
and the synthesis of the two themes yields their (mereological) sum
S+p (the state of affairs p being part of S). Thus, Husserl conceives
of this state of affairs as the mereological sum S+p of the whole
object S and one of its ontologically independent parts p.
Husserl is able to say that the whole object S is part of the
warrant (S+p) of the judgment of predication. Traditionally, there
are two ways that any whole S can be part of a mereological sum
(S+p):
1. S could be a proper part of S+p, in which case there

would be something (viz. p) left over if you "subtracted"
S from the mereological sum S+p, or:
2. S could be the improper part of S+p, in which case there
would be nothing left over if you "subtracted" S from
S+p.
In the case of Husserl's analysis of the judgment of predication,

p is an (ontologically independent) part of S. Since p is part of S,
one cannot "subtract" S from S+p without also subtracting p, so
nothing is "left over". That means that in this case, S must be the
improper part of the mereological sum S+p.
Gurwitsch rejected Husserl's analysis of explication as a
(synthetic) process of putting things together (i.e. as mereological
summation), and proposed instead that explication is an analytic
process of taking things apart:
Differently expressed, while Husserl conceives of

explicating contemplation as a synthesis, we see in it a kind
of analysis. In fact, through successive acts of explicating
contemplation, the thing perceived displays its various
properties, being present in each one of them. Continual
explicating contemplation proves a progressive analysis of
the total system into its several members. [8: 260-1 ~ italics
added]
Gurwitsch considered the object S to be a unitary whole, p to be

a G-dependent part of S, and the state of affairs Shaving p to be
p, but p thematized as an ontologically independent part of S. Given
both the G-dependence of p relative to S and his description of the
G-dependence of a proper part as the whole being contained in that
part (italicized in the foregoing quote), Gurwitsch was able to say
78 GILBERT T. NUl.L
(with Husserl) that the referent object S is part of the state of affairs
serving as the warrant of the judgment of predication.
However, Gurwitsch knew that a whole cannot be contained in
any of its proper parts in the usual sense of the part relation. His
alternative to Husserl's analysis of explication as mereological
summation implies a denial that the whole object S is contained
within the state of affairs in the traditional way that something is part
of a mereological sum. Gurwitsch was claiming that in the state of
affairs p thematized as an ont%gically independent part of S, S is
neither a proper nor an improper part ofp, but is some other kind of
partofp·
The difference between the two positions involves a
disagreement over the meaning of the term 'part'. Gurwitsch denies
that the state of affairs which provides originary evidence (i.e. the
warrant) for the sentence 'This S has p' is a mereological sum. This
denial puts him at odds with the traditional conception of part
accepted by Husserl, and according to which every whole is a
mereological sum (e.g. of itself and any of its parts). For Husserl,
the referent S is part of the state of affairs which is the warrant for
predication in the way any whole is part of a mereological sum. For
Gurwitsch however, the state of affairs is not a mereological sum;
the referent S is part of the state of affairs in the way a unitary whole
is "part of each of its G-dependent proper parts".
The thesis that all ontologically independent wholes are unitary,
and the thesis that unitary wholes are somehow contained (but
neither as proper nor improper parts) within their proper parts are
both implicated in this departure of Gurwitsch from Husserl's
conception of the part relation. A non-traditional theory of the part
relation congenial to Gurwitsch's alternative use of the term 'part' is
introduced in Section 5 infra.
The theory of Section 5 is intended to provide a context for a
future formulation of the first thesis. The second thesis will be
abandoned in its literal form [Section 7.1 infra], but retained in
spirit; it will be formally consistent to say [Section 6.2 infra] that the
identity of an individual depends on whether or not it is part of a
unitary whole. Last, Gurwitsch's rejection of Husserl's reliance on
CONDmONAL IDmmY AND IRREGUlAR PARI'S 79
the notion of mereological summation should be noted~ the

traditional notion of mereological summation will be essentially
unavailable within the part-whole theory of Section 5.
3.4 Rejection of the World of Perceivable Bodies as a piece

of the Cultural World in Favor of a View of the Cultural
Life-World as a Unitary Whole.
Gurwitsch's objection [8: 21-2, 145-9] to Husserl's account of

the relative priority of the socio-historically relative cultural worlds
and the pure, perceptual Dingwelt is another example of the type of
argument he used against Husserl's hyle-morphe conception of
intentionality. Gurwitsch rejected [8: 21-2, 145-9] Husserl's thesis
that the world of perceptual (corporeal) bodies (die Dingwelt) is a
common piece of every socio-historically relative cultural world
["eine universale und ojjenbar rein in sich geschlossene
Kernstruktur der Welt"~ 16: 119]. Instead, Gurwitsch proposed that
the perceptual Dingwelt is an abstraction arising via
conceptualizations achieved within specific cultural worlds [8: 20ff,
22-5, 143-9~ 21: 185-92], and developed independent arguments
against socio-historical relativism required by the incorporation of
this proposal into the Husserlian theory of the sciences [8: 23-32,
88-94, 108-49].
The crux of Gurwitsch's claim is that the Dingwelt is an
ontologically independent, but G-dependent part of our cultural
world. This claim is a direct consequence of Gurwitsch's thesis
(contra Stumpf-Husserl) that ontologically independent wholes are
unitary, and that therefore every proper part of an ontologically
independent whole is G-dependent.
The Cultural world is ontologically independent (and therefore
unitary) because, understood as the outer horizon of attention, it
includes everything within itself as a part. Baring a transcendental
being (God or the transcendental ego favored by Husserl, Schutz,
and others), such a whole must be ontologically independent~ since
no object fails to be a part of the world, no object is a non-part on
which the world could be founded. Gurwitsch's egoless
80 GILBERT T. NUlL
transcendental consciousness is not an object, so the fact that it is

not a part of the world is irrelevant.
Since the cultural world is unitary, if the Dingwelt is a part of the
cultural world, then the Dingwe/t is G-dependent relative to the
cultural world. That means that the identity of the Dingwe/t is
conditioned by our cultural world, and that our Dingwe/t is not
identical to the Dingwelt "of other cultural worlds".
Were we to avail ourselves of Gurwitsch's part-theoretic
characterization of G-dependence, we would say that the cultural
world is contained within the Dingwe/t in that mysterious way in
which unitary wholes are contained within each of their proper parts:
Our cultural world is part, but neither a proper nor the improper part
of the Dingwe/t. Our cultural world is some other kind of part of the
Dingwelt. The fact that the Dingwelt contains our cultural world as a
(non-traditional kind of) part makes it typically our Dingwe/t.
Since the identity of the Dingwelt is conditional on our cultural
world, problems of historicism and relativism which did not arise
for Husserl arise for Gurwitsch. These problems derive from the
thesis that the cultural world is a unitary whole which contains the
Dingwe/t as an ontologically independent but G-dependent part.
Again we see the thesis of the G-dependence of ontologically
independent parts (a main component of Gurwitsch's revision of
Stumpf-Husserl) as fundamentally involved in a major departure of
Gurwitsch from Husserl.
It is worth noting that Gurwitsch's thesis that our cultural world
conditions the identity of the Dingwe/t is reminiscent of Leibniz's
thesis that any noumenal (i.e. Monadic) world is a unitary whole,
determining the identities of the monads which are its parts.
Gurwitsch was not the first philosopher concerned with the
phenomenon of the G-dependence (i.e. conditional identities) of the
parts of unitary wholes.
CONDmONAL IDENffJY AND IRREGillAR PARTS 81
4. The Problem of Identity for Situated and Singled out Parts which
are G-dependent but Ontologically Independent
According to Gurwitsch, once an ontologically independent G-

dependent part has been singled out, it ".. .is no longer the same as
before; a different object has superseded it." [7: 241-3, 261]. The
immediate questions then, are in what does this sameness and
difference consist?
Leibniz's dual principles of the identity of indiscemibles and the
indiscemibility of identicals state the criteria of identity usually
accepted (and built into first-order logic with identity) today:
4.01. The indiscemibility of identicals: If two objects are

identical, then they share all properties.
4.02. The identity of indiscemibles: If two objects share all

properties, then they are identical.
Within classical part-whole theory (viz. extensional mereology),

having parts is the only property at issue, and Leibniz's principles
appear in restricted forms:
4.03. The mereological coextensivity of identicals: If two

wholes are identical, then they share all parts.
4.04. The mereological identity of coextensives: If two objects

share all parts, then they are identical.
Together these principles establish the criterion that wholes are

identical just in case they share all parts, a criterion which is satisfied
by any two wholes which are parts of each other. Thesis 4.04 of the
identity of coextensives is the thesis ojmereological extensionality.
Any part-whole theory is extensional just in case 4.04 is available as
a theorem within the theory.
82 GILBERT T. NillL
Gurwitsch's purely part-theoretic characterization of the G-

dependence characteristic of the constituents of a Gestalt contexture
[Section 2. Supra] involves a conception of the part relation which
conflicts with the thesis 4.04 of extensionality, but not with the
thesis 4.03 of the coextensivity of identicals (and may even be
motivated by 4.03). To see this, consider a whole Gestalt contexture
x, consisting of the two ontologically independent parts a and b.
Since a and bare ontologically independent parts of x, each may be
singled out and made into themes a' and b' separately. But since x is
unitary, a and b (as situated parts of x) are G-dependent.
If we attempt to describe this G-dependence by saying that a and
b as situated parts of x are "within" (i.e. are parts) of one another,
then we are saying that they share all parts. If we accept the thesis
4.04 of extensionalism, then we must conclude that a = b, and that
in general, no whole can have more than one ontologically
independent part which is G-dependent relative to it. But this
violates Gurwitsch's thesis that a may be singled out when b is not
(so that a and b are non-identical). Clearly, Gurwitsch's "parts of
each other" account of dependence is inconsistent with the thesis
4.04 of extensionalism.
Similarly, Gurwitsch says that the singled out part a' of x is not
identical to the situated part a of x: "a different object has superseded
it." [7: 241-3,261]. But the importance of this claim of non-identity
rests on the fact that a' is somehow the same thing as a. The real
point here is that a' as singled out from the whole x has lost its G-
dependence relative to x while remaining otherwise substantively the
same as a.
If we persist in understanding the G-dependence of a relative to
x to mean that the other parts of x (e.g. b and x itself) occur
somehow as parts of a, then the G-independence of a' (as singled
out from x) must mean that b and x are not parts of a'. If a and a' do
not share all parts, then by the thesis 4.03 of the coextensivity of
identicals, they are non-identical. This implication of 4.03 indeed
does validate Gurwitsch's denial of identity [ef the opening quote
of this section]:
CONDmONAL IDINITIY AND IRREGULAR PARfS 83
To identify that [note] which he hears [embedded in the

context of a melody] with the same note resounding alone,
outside of any melodic contexture, is extremely difficult. The
reason is that the auditory datum is absorbed and qualified
by the musical contexture so that any identity for the
consciousness of the listener is destroyed [italics added, 6:
117]
But this understanding of the difference between the G-

dependence of the situated and the non-G-dependence of the singled
out part makes it entirely unclear what it means for them to be
substantively the same (i.e. to be "the same note") in spite of their
non-identity.
According to the traditional conception of the part relation, there
are just two ways non-identical wholes may have something in
common:
4.05 One may be a proper part of the other, or:
4.06 Neither is a proper part of the other, but they overlap,

i.e. share some proper.part.
Since the proper part relation is asymmetric, the first condition

cannot be the relation of being substantively the same. The
relation of being substantively the same is symmetric (i.e. if one
whole is substantively the same as a second, then the second is also
substantively the same as the first).
That leaves only the second condition, meaning that if non-
identical wholes are substantively the same, then neither is a proper
part of the other, but they share some proper parts. The question
remaining unanswered is then:
4.07 How many proper parts must be shared by non-identical

wholes for them to be "substantively the same"?
84 GILBERT T. NULL
The lack of a clear answer to this question is a defect of Gurwitsch's
account of G-dependence, equally as characteristic of his position as
the previously noted conflict with the thesis 4.04 of mereological
extensionality. The resolution of that conflict will enable us to give
an answer later to the "how many parts" question 4.07; the answer
will be: "all proper parts".
4.1 The Lack of an Adequate Formulation of Gurwitsch's

Part-theoretic Account of G-Dependence.
Because Gurwitsch's part-theoretic account of G-dependence is

inconsistent with the thesis 4.04 of mereological extensionalism, it
is inconsistent with the traditional part-whole theories. That accounts
for the fact that Gurwitsch's account of G-dependence has never
been given precise expression in the context of a consistent theory of
the part relation.
This fact is not the fault of Gurwitsch's account of G-
dependence; it is the result of the lack of a consistent part theory in
which the thesis 4.04 of mereological extensionalism is independent
(i.e. is lWt a consequence of the axioms of the theory). In what
follows I will remedy this lack by introducing a non-extensionalist
part theory, with a view to characterizing G-dependence consistently
within some future extension of the theory. But first it is important
to note that there are at least two desiderata of this task.
4.12 A Modal Disparity Between G-Dependence and the

Realist Notion of Ontological Dependence.
Gurwitsch's thesis that an intellectual operation can alter (viz.

abrogate by singling out and create by the inverse transformation of
synthesizing) relations of G-dependence clashes prima facia wi th
Husserl's notion of ontological dependence. An ontologically
dependent object necessarily requires the existence of some whole
(on which it depends). Gurwitsch's thesis seems to be that the
requirement of the existence of the whole on which a G-dependent
part depends is contingent on the way in which the part is
CONDmONAL IDENTIJY AND IRREGUlAR PARTS 85
thematized. The modal necessity intrinsic to Husserl's concept of
ontological dependence seems supplanted by contingency in the case
of the type of dependency claimed by Gurwitsch for G-dependent
parts.
Since the G-dependence of a part seems contingent on the way
the part is thematized, G-dependence seems analogous to both
Brentano's psychological dependence, and what Peter Simons has
called 'lWtiOnaJ dependence' [27: 293]. I illustrate the latter analogy
with Simons' example, which has the added advantage of
suggesting a relevance of Gestalt theory to the theory of definite
descriptions:
Take the proposition that the largest satellite of Jupiter cannot

exist unless Jupiter exists. In one sense this is true: if Jupiter
did not exist, nothing could be its satellite. But Ganymede is
Jupiter's largest satellite, and it is false that Ganymede could
not exist unless Jupiter exists.
When thematized as part of a whole planetary complex,

Ganymede suffers a form of dependence on Jupiter. But when
thematized as singled out from the whole, Ganymede seems to lose
this form of dependence. So the G-dependence of Ganymede
relative to Jupiter seems contingent on the fact of Ganymede not
being singled out from its planetary contexture. 1
It is a test of any characterization of the relation of G-
dependence that this apparent modal disparity with ontological
dependence be accounted for. A second test is the preservation of
the Stumpf-Husserl distinction between ontologically dependent and
independent parts. The present discussion will pass the first test
[Section 6.3 infra] but not attempt the second. The second task
requires the language of foundation; that language is beyond the
self-imposed limitation of this discussion to the language of the part
1. While Kit Fine has suggested a way in which this form of dependence can
be considered as Husserl's ontological dependence [5 & 27: 296-300], the question
remains whether this form of dependence, which seems to be a case of G-
dependence, should be considered a case of ontological dependence.
86 GILBERT T. NUI.L
relation. While this limitation requires that two outstanding defects

of Gurwitsch's analysis [see Sections 7.1 and 7.2 infra] remain
unresolved, a plausible path toward a possible resolution will be
suggested [Section 7.3 infra].
5. A Formal Theory of Whole and Part Suitable for Expressing

Gurwitsch's Revision of Stumpf-Husserl
The question of whether certain of Gurwitsch's departures from

Husserl are justified [Sections 2 and 3 supra] boils down to the
question of who was right about the fundamental issues of
independence, dependence, and unity. Answering this question
requires at least that the problems of identity and substantive
sameness [Section 4 supra] be resolved in a way which clarifies the
apparent modal disparity between G-dependence and ontological
dependence, and at most that an adequate account of G-dependence
be developed in a way which preserves the distinction between
ontological dependence and independence, and which accounts for
our inability to single out ontologically dependent parts. This study
undertakes only the least of these goals. Resolving the problems of
identity and substantive sameness requires the development of a
non-extensional part theory.
5.1 Axioms for Non-Extensional Part Theory.
What is needed is a set of axioms for the part relation which do

not permit the thesis of extensionality (4.04) to be derived as a
theorem, but which do permit (ideally, all and only) other important
truths about wholes and parts to be derived as theorems. Peter
Simon's extended discussion of mereology and dependence [27] has
clarified the problem of formulating the needed non-extensional part
theory. If we define the part relation traditionally in terms of the
proper part relation and identity:
CONDmONAL IDENJTIY AND IRREGULAR PARTS 87
5.101 xsy means [x<y or (x=y)]
then expunging the extensionality thesis 4.04 from the theory

requires expunging the Proper Parts Theorem which implies it:
5.102 If a whole has proper parts and all its proper parts are
proper parts of a second whole, then it is part of the
second whole:
VxVy<{3z (z<x) & Vz[(z<x) - (z<y)]} - (x9»
Similarly, given the traditional definition of 'part', avoiding the

proper parts principle requires avoiding the Theorem of Strong
Supplementation, which implies it:
5.103 If one whole is not part of a second whole, then the first
has a proper part disjoint from the second:
VxVy{-(x9) - 3z[(z<x) & -Ozy]}
Last, in so far as the thesis of weak supplementation [(A2) in the

theory presented below] is considered necessary for an adequate
characterization of the part relation, it is necessary to similarly avoid
the Uniqueness of Overlap theorem:
5.104 If two wholes overlap then there is exactly one whole

consisting of the parts common to the overlapping
wholes.
which together with weak supplementation and the traditional

definition of part implies the proper parts theorem.
However, the loss of the proper parts principle results in a weak
and counterintuitive part theory, and there is a better alternative. The
alternative is to retain the proper parts principle (T4) and weak
supplementation (A2), and reject the traditional definition of 'part'.
That is the tactic I have chosen here, and introduce the non-
traditional definition of 'is a part or:
88 GILBERT T. NUlL
DEFINITION 1: xg [read: 'x is part of y'] means {3z(z<x) -

[(z<x) \fz(z<y)]} - {-3z(z<x) - [(x<y) v (x=y)]} [i.e. if x
has a proper part then every proper part of x is a proper part of
y, and if x has no proper part, then x is either a proper part of or
identical to y].
The Proper Parts Principle 5.102 is derivable from 01 alone, as

the following natural deduction demonstrates:
5.105 Derivation of the Proper Parts Principle 5.102 from D1

[ef (T4)]:
1 l. 3z(z<x) & \fz[(z<x) - (z<y)] A

1 2. 3z(z<x) 1,
Simp.
1 3. \fz[(z<x) - (z<y)] 1,
Simp.
1 4. \fz[(z<x) - (z<y)] v -3z(z<x) Add.3,
1 5. -3z(z<x) V \fz[(z<x) - (z<y)] Com.4,
1 6. 3z(z<x) - \fz[(z<x) - (z<y)] 5,
Impl.
1 7. 3z(z<x) v [(x<y) v (x=y)] Add.2,
1 8. -3z(z<x) - [(x<y) v (x=y)] 7,
Impl.
1 9. {3z(z<x) - \fz[(z<x) - (z<y)]} &
{3z(z<x) v [(x<y) v (x=y)]} 6,7, Conj.
1, D1 10. xg 8, D1
D1 11. {3z(z<x) & \fz[(z<x) - (;:<y)]} - (xg) 1-10, c.P.
D1 12. \fx\fy<{3z(z<x) & \fz[(z<x) - (z<y)]} - (xg»
11, V.O.
However, because of the changed definition of the symbol'~' in

the proper parts principle, it no longer implies the thesis of
extensionalism (4.04). This alternative was recognized, but not
availed by Simons; the definition 01 of ("proper or improper") part
was suggested by him (27: 112n; SD 15). The crux of the definition
CONDmONAL IDFNITIY AND IRREGULAR PARI'S 89
was suggested by him (27: 112n; SD 15). The crux of the definition
is that being a part of a whole means having every proper part
included as a proper part of the whole and (given 5.105 supra) vice
versa. So defined, the part relation is reflexive (Tl) and transitive
(T22). But of course it is not anti symmetric (cf 4.04), since it
allows non-identical wholes to be parts of each other just in case
they both have and share (all) proper parts. Given Axioms 1 and 2,
the part relation so defined comports itself reasonably civilly vis-a-
vis the proper part relation. However, the following traditional
property (The "Regularity of Parts" principle) is not available as a
theorem:
5.106 If a whole has a proper part, then if it is neither a proper

part of nor identical to a second whole, it is not a part of
that second whole:
V'xV'y<3z(z<x) -+ ([-{x<y) & -(x=y)] -+ -(x9)}>
The unavailability of 5.106 means that wholes with proper parts

can have parts other than themselves which are not proper parts.
Such a part would be non-identical to the whole and also not a
proper part of the whole. I will refer to parts which are neither
improper nor proper parts of the whole as irregular parts, and to
parts which are not irregular as regularparts. The possible inclusion
of irregular parts in a whole distinguishes the present theory from
traditional, extensionalist part-whole theories, and motivates my
referring to the present theory as irregular part theory.
The axioms used here for irregular part-whole theory permit the
proper parts principle (T4) and weak supplementation (A2) to be
derived as theorems, and permit the existence of mereological sums
and products (overlaps). But like the theses of extensionalism (4.04)
and regularity of parts (5.106), neither the uniqueness of
mereological sums, nor of products (5.104) is derivable.
5.12 Axioms for the Proper Part Relation.

90 GILBERT T. NUlL
The language in which the theory is formulated is first-order

predicate logic with identity. The dyadic predicate '<I (intended to
denote the proper part relation) is the undefined primitive of the
theory formulated below.
AXIOM 1: [Transitivity of <]: 'cfx'cfy'cfz{[(x<y) & (y<z)] -

(x<z)} A proper part of a proper part is a proper part of
the whole.
AXIOM 2: [Weak Supplementation]:'cfx'cfy{(x<y) - 3z[(z<y)

& -Ozx]} If one whole is a proper part of a second
whole, then the second has another proper part disjoint
from the first.
Transitivity and weak supplementation are the defining

characteristics of the proper part relation, which consequently is
asymmetric.
DEFINITION 2: Oxy [read: 'x overlaps y'] means 3z[(z~x) &

(z9)] [i.e. x and y share some part].
The definition D2 of overlap is standard, though the

unavailability of 5.104 (unique overlaps) should be born in mind.
Beyond these axioms, axioms establishing the existence of arbitrary
(including infinite) sums of wholes were assumed by Lesniewski,
Tarski, Goodman-Leonard, Kit Fine, and (previously) myself. A
definition of mereological summation and an axiom establishing the
existence of such sums is possible in the present theory. However,
establishing the uniqueness of sums is out of the question because
of the loss of extensionalism; a given sum would correspond to a
class of non-identical wholes.
5.2 Proof of the Consistency and Non-Extensionality of

irregular Part Theory.
I begin by showing that the part axioms have a finite model M,

i.e. are true when an appropriate interpretation of predicates and
assignment of variables is made in a four member model M having
the (Hasse diagram) structure shown below:
a b
M=
c d
Interpretations of the predicates of the system are as follows:
5.201 x < y means x is below y in M.
5.202 x ~ y means If x is not on the bottom of M, then

everything below x in M is below y in M, and if x is on
the bottom of M, then it is below y in M or identical to y
inM.
The indicated interpretation of Axiom 1 is as follows:
AI: If x is below y and y is below z in M, then x is below z

inM.
A 1 is satisfied (vacuously) in the model M, since there are not three

items in M such that the first is below the second and the second is
below the third.
The indicated interpretation of Axiom 2 is as follows:
A2: If x is below y in M, then there is some z below y in M

such that x and z don't overlap.
The failure of x and z to overlap means that for any w in M, if w is

part of x then it is not part of z. There are four ways in which the
initial condition of x being below M can happen:
92 GILBERT T. NUlL
Y b a y Y b a y
x d x d c x c x
Since the overlap relation is reflexive, I stipulate the condition that x

is not identical to z, which yields the four cases
y b a y y b a y
x z x z z x z x
( 1) (2) (3) (4)
I now show that for any w, if w is part of x then it is not part of z.

Since both x and z are on the bottom of M, if w is a part of ei ther x
or z then it is on the bottom of M. If w is part of x then w is either
below x in M or w=x (Dl). Since nothing is below x in M, W=X.
But then w is not identical to z (by S.I., since x and z are not
identical). Since nothing is below z in M and w is on the bottom of
M, w is not part of z (Dl).
Since both A 1 and A2 are satisfied in M, M is a model of the
part-whole theory, which is therefore consistent. I next show that
5.106 is independent of the system. The negation of 5.106 is:
5.203 3x3y<{3z(z<x) & -[(x<y) v (x=y)]} & (xg»
Under the present interpretation, 5.203 means that there is some x

and some y such that both:
(a) If x is on the bottom of M then x is below or identical to
y, and;
(b) If x is on the bottom of M then x=y, and if x is not on
the bottom of M, then everything below x is below y in
M.
Since condition (b) implies condition (a), the satisfaction of
condition (b) is sufficient for the satisfaction of 5.203. The
CONDmONAL IDENITIY AND IRREGUlAR PARTS 93
following four member model satisfies 5.203 (and thus falsifies

5.106) for either of the assignments x=b and y=c, or x=c and y=b:
b c
a d
Thus, 5.106 is independent of the part-whole axioms A 1 and A2.

Since 5.106 is a consequence of 4.04, the independence of
5.106 guarantees the independence of 4.04 and the non-extensio-
nality of the system. However, this feature of the system can be
shown independently as follows. The negation of 4.04 is:
5.204 3x3y{(xS)') & (y~x)] & -(x=y)}
Under the indicated interpretation, 5.204 means that there are two
non-identical items x and y such that:
(a) If x is not on the bottom of M then everything below x in
M is below y in M, and if x is on the bottom of M, then
x=y, AND;
(b) If Yis not on the bottom of M then everything below y in
M is below x in M, and if y is on the bottom of M, then
y=x.
This condition is satisfied in the above model by the same two
assignments which satisfied the negation of 5.106; given either of
those assignments of IXI and Iyl, neither is on the bottom of M and
everything below one is below the other, so that they are non-
identical but nevertheless parts of each other. Hence 4.04 is
independent of the part-whole system, which is thereby shown to be
non-extensional.
The independence of 5.106 is attributable to the fact that 4.04 is
a consequence of the conjunction of 5.106, the weak
supplementation principle (A2), the transitivity of I~I (T22), and the
assumption that x has a proper part. 5.106 is independent of any
non-extensional system of mereology in which some wholes have
94 GILBERT T. NUlL
proper parts, and weak supplementation and the transitivity of the

part relation are theorems.
Similarl y, the claim that any part of a proper part is a proper part
of the whole:
5.205 VxVyVz{[(x:sy) & (y<z)] - (x<z)}
is a thesis of regular part theory, and is satisfied in the finite Hasse

models considered above. But 5.205 also is independent of the
axioms of irregular part theory, which imply that parts of proper
parts are parts, but not that they are proper parts of the whole.
Joseph B. Stephen (Department of Mathematics at Northern Illinois
University) has proven the independence of 5.205 within irregular
part theory by providing a type of infinite model of axioms Al and
A2 in which the negation of 5.205 is satisfied. Models of the
Stephen type are infinite partially ordered sets in which at least one
member functions as the limit of an ascending series of real
numbers. One is an atomless upper semi-lattice, but others have
atoms or no universal whole (or both). From the point of view of
Gurwitsch's revision of Stumpf-Husserl, these are more interesting
than the finite Hasse models considered above [see footnote 5].
5.3 Regular and Irregular Parts; Some Theorems of Irregular

Part Theory.
It is distinctive of non-extensional part theories that wholes with

proper parts may have and be parts which are neither proper parts
of, nor identical to their wholes, parts which I now formally define
as irregular:
DEFINITION 3: x« y [read: 'x is an irregular part of y'] means

{(x<y) & [-(x<y) & -(x=y)]} [i.e. x is a non-identical part of y
which is not a proper part of y].
CONDmONAL IDENITJY AND IRREGULAR PARfS 95
Note that -(x«y) means that either x is not part of y, or that x is
either a proper part of or identical to y. Then IX is a regular part oJy I
means that x is a part but not an irregular part of y. Accordingly:
DEFINITION 4: x<=y [read: IX is a regular part oj y'] means

[(x<y) v (x=y)] [i.e. x is either a proper part of or identical to y].
Compare the definition of regularpart with the second conjunct

of the definition DI of part above. All (but not only) parts which
have no proper part are Regular parts. As might then be expected,
irregular parts have proper parts (TI9). But it turns out also that
wholes which have irregular parts have proper parts (T20). From
the point of view of non-extensional part theory, irregular parts and
regular parts which have proper parts are the most interesting kinds
of parts. The existence of just these kinds of parts makes irregular
part theory congenial to Gurwitsch's alternative to the Stumpf-
Husserl account of dependence.
Theorem 1. The part relation is reflexive: V'x(x~x)
Proof: For a reductio proof, assume -(x<x). If x has some

proper part z there is some u<x such that -(u<x) (DI),
so x has no proper part. But then -(x=x) (DI), so the
reductio assumption is false.
Theorem 2. Parts overlap their whole: V'xV'y[(x~) -+ Oxy]
Proof: If x~, since x~x (TI), Oxy (D2).
Theorem 3. Proper parts are parts: V'xV'y[(x<y) -+ (x~)]
Proof: Assume x<y. Then (x<y) v (x=y), and so 3z(z<x) -+

[(x<y) v (x=y)]. Secondly, if x has any proper parts,
they are proper parts of y (AI), so x~ (DI).
96 GILBERT T. NUll...
Theorem 4. [Proper Part Principle] If a whole has proper parts
and every one of its proper parts is a proper part of something, then
the whole is part of that thing: VxVy<{3z(z<x) & Vz[(z<x) -
(z<y)]} - (x9'»
Proof: Assume 3z(z<x) and Vz[(z<x) - (z<y)]. The second

assumption satisfies the first conjunct of D 1, and the first
assumption satisfies the second conjunct of Dl. Hence
x9' (Dl).
Theorem 5. Overlapping wholes share some part: VxVy{Oxy-

3z[(zsx) & (z9')]}
Proof: Immediate from (D2).
Theorem 6. If a whole is a proper part of something, then that

thing has a non-part of the whole as another part: VxVy{(x<y) -
3z[(z9') & -(zsx)]}
Proof: Assume x<y. Then for some z, z<y and -Ozx (TS). z9'
(T3) and -(zsx) (A2).
Theorem 7. The proper part relation is asymmetric: VxVy[(x<y)

- -(y<x)]
Proof: Assume x<y. Then there is some z<y such that -Ozx
(TS). For a reductio proof, assume y<x. Then z<x (AI),
so zsx (T3) and Ozx (A2), contradicting the reductio
assumption.
Theorem 8. The proper part relation is irreflexive: Vx-(x<x)
Proof. Assume x<x. Then -(x<x) (T7), so -(x<x).

Theorem 9. Irregular parts are parts: V'XV'Y[(X«y) -+ (X~)]
Proof: Immediate from (D3).
Theorem 10. Regular parts are parts: V'xVy[(x<=y) -+ (x~)]
Proof: Assume x<=y. Then x=y or x<y (D4). If x<y then x~

(T3), and if x=y then since y~ (Tl), x~ (S.L).
Theorem 11. The irregular part relation is irreflexive: V'x-(x«x)
Proof: Assume x«x. Then -(x=x) (D3), so -(x«x).
Theorem 12. The regular part relation is reflexive: V'z(x<=x)
Proof: Since x=x, (x=x) v (x<x), and since x~x (Tl), so X<=X
(D4).
Theorem 13. Any part of a whole is either an irregular or a proper

or an improper (i.e. identical) part of the whole: V'xV'y«x~y) -+
{(x«y) v [(x<y) v (x=y)]»
Proof: The theorem follows from (D3) by theorems of logic

(viz. addition, distribution, and DeMorgan's) alone.
Theorem 14. Any part of a whole is either an irregular or a regular

part of the whole: VxV'y{(x~) -+ [(x«y) v (x<=y)]}
Proof: (T13) and (D4).
Theorem 15. If a whole is an irregular or a proper or an improper

part of a second whole, then it is part of the second: V'xVy<{(x«y)
v [(x<y) v (x=y)])-+ (x~»
98 GILBERT T. NUlL
Proof: Assume (x«y) v [(x<y) v (x=y)]. If (x<y) then x~

(T3). If x=y then since y~ (Tl), x~ (S.L). Last, If
x«y then x~ (D4). Hence x~.
Theorem 16. If a whole is an irregular or a regular part of a

second whole, then it is part of the second: VxVy{[(x«y) v
(x<=y)] -+ (x~)}
Proof: (TIS) and (D4).
Theorem 17. One whole is part of a second just in case it is either

an irregular or a proper or an improper part of the second:
VxVy«x~) - ((x«y) v [(x<y) v (x=y)]»
Proof: Theorems (T13) and (TIS).
Theorem 18. One whole is part of a second just in case it is either

an irregular or a regular part of the second: VxVy[(x~) - [(x«y)
v (x<=y)]}
Proof: (TI4) and (TI6).
Theorem 19. Irregular parts have proper parts: VxVy[(x«y) -+
3z(z<x)]
Proof: Assume x«y. Then x~y and -(x=y) and -(x<y) (D3).
Since x~, -3z(z<x) -+ [(x<y) v (x=y)] (DI). Since
neither (x=y) nor (x<y), 3z(z<x).
Theorem 20. Wholes with irregular parts have proper parts:

VxVy[(x«y) -+ 3z(z<y)]
Proof: Assume x«y. Then x~ (D3) and 3z(z<x) (TI9). Then

z<y (DI), so y has a proper part.
CONDmONAL IDENITJY AND IRREGUlAR PARfS 99
Theorem 21. If a whole is an irregular part of anything, then all its

proper parts are proper parts of that thing: VxVy{(x«y) -
Vz[(z<x) - (z<y)]}
Proof: Assume x<<y. Then x~ (D3), and 3z(z<x) (T19), so

the result follows by (Dl).
Theorem 22. Parts of parts are parts of the whole [The part
relation is transitive]: VxVyVz{[(x~) & (y~z)] - (x~z)}
Proof: Assume x~ and y~z. Then either x«y or x<=y (T18).

Then reason by cases:
Case 1: x<=y; then x<y or x=y (D4). If x<y then
x<z (Dl) so x~z (T3), and if x=y then x~z
(S.L).
Case 2: x«y; Then x has a proper part (T19) and y
has a proper part (T20). Let u be any proper
part of x. Then u<y (Dl), so u<z (Dl), and
hence x~z (Dl).
Thus in either case, x~z.
Theorem 23. Proper parts of irregular parts are proper parts of the
whole: VxVyVz{[(x<y) & (y«z)] - (x<z)}
Proof: Assume x<y and y«z. Then y~ (D3), so x<z (Dl).
Theorem 24. Proper parts of irregular parts are not irregular parts
of the whole: VxVyVz{[(x<y) & (y«z)] - -(x«z)}
Proof: Assume x<y and y«z. Then x<z (T23), so -(x«z)

(D3).
100 GILBERT T. NUll..
Theorem 2 s. Proper parts of regular parts are proper parts of the

whole: VxVyVz{[(x<y) & (y<=z)] -+ (x<z)}
Proof: Assume x<y and y<=z. Then y<z or y=z (D4). If y<z
then x<z (AI), and if y=z then x<z (S.I.).
Theorem 26. Proper parts of parts are proper parts of the whole:
VxVyVz{[(x<y) & (y~z)] -+ (x<z)}
Proof: Assume x<y and y~z. Since y has a proper part x, every
proper part of y is a proper part of z (Dl), so x<z.
Theorem 27. Regular parts of irregular parts are parts of the

whole: VxVyVz{[(x<=y) & (y«z)] -+ (x~z)}
Proof: Assume x<=y and y«z. Then x=y or s<y (D4). If x=y
then x«z (S.I.), so x~z (D3). y~z (D3), so if x<y then
x<z (T26), so x~z (T3).
Theorem 28. Regular parts of regular parts are regular parts of the
whole [The regular part relation is transitive]: VxVyVz{[(x<=y) &
(y<=z)] -+ (x<=z)}
Proof: Assume x<=y and y<=z. Then x<y or x=y, and y<z or
y=z (D4). If x<y then either x<z (S.I.) or x<z (AI), so
X<=Z (04). If x=y, then either x<z or X=Z (S.I.), and in
ei ther case x<=Z (D4).
Theorem 29. Parts of proper parts are parts of the whole:

VxVyVz{[(xg) & (y<z)] -+ (x~z)}
Proof: If xg and y<z, then y~z (T3) and so x~z (T22).

CONDmONAL IDENITIY AND IRREGULAR PARIS 101
Theorem 30. Irregular parts of proper parts are parts of the whole:
VxVyVz{[(x<<y) & (y<z)] -+ (x~z)}
Proof: Assume x<<y and y<z. Then x~z (T29).
Theorem 31. Irregular parts of irregular parts are parts of the

whole: VxVyVz{[(x«y) & (y«z)] -+ (x~z)}
Proof: Assume x«y and y«z. Then x9 and y~z (D3), so

x~z (T22).
Theorem 32. Irregular parts of regular parts are parts of the whole:
VxVyVz{[(x«y) & (y<=z)] -+ (x~z)}
Proof: Assume x«yand y<=z. Then x9 (D3) and y<z or y=z

(D4). If y<z then x~z (T29), and if y=z then x~z (S.I.).
Theorem 33. Irregular parts of parts are parts of the whole:

VxVyVz{[(x«y) & (y~z)] -+ (x~z)}
Proof: Assume x«y and y~z. Then x9 (D3), so x~z (T22).
Theorem 34. Parts of Irregular parts are parts of the whole:

VxVyVz{[(X9) & (y«z)] -+ (x~z)}
Proof: Assume x9 and y«z. Then y~z (D3), so x~z (T22).
Theorem 35. No whole is an irregular part of any of its proper

parts: VxVy[(x<y) -+ -(y«x)]
Proof: Assume x<y and for reductio, assume y«x. Then y~x
(D3). 3z[(z<y) & -(z~x)] (T6), so -(z<x) (T3). But
since y~x and z<y, z<x (D!), which is a contradiction.
Hence -(y«x).
102 GILBERT T. NUlL
Theorem 36. If a part of a proper part is not a proper part of the

whole, then it is an irregular part of that proper part:
VxVyVz<[(X:9') & (y<z)] & -(x<z)}- (x«y»
Proof: Assume x:9', y<z, and -(x<z). Then -(x<y) (Dl), so

either x=y or x«y (T13). If x=y then x<z (S.L), so
-(x=y), and hence x«y.

whole, then it is an irregular part of it: VxVyVz<[(x:9') & (y<z)] &
-(x<z)} - (x«z»
Proof: Assume x:9', y<z, and -(x<z). Then x~z (T29), and
3u[(u<z) & -Ouy] (TS). Then -(u:9') (T2), so -(u~x)
(T22), so -(u<x) (A2). Thus -(x=z) (S.L), so x«z
(D3).
Theorem 38. Wholes which are parts of each other share all parts:
VxVy{[(x~y) & (y~x)] - Vz[(z~x) ++ (Z:9')]}
Proof: Assume x:9' and y~x. Since x:9', for any z~x, z:9', and
since y~x, any z:9' is part of x (T22).
Theorem 39. Wholes are parts of each other just in case they share
all parts: VxVy{[(x:9') & (y~x)] ++ Vz[(z~x) ++ (z:9')]}
Proof: Assume x and y share all parts. Since each is a part of

itself (Tl), each is a part of the other. (T38) is the
converse of the biconditional.
Theorem 40. [Cj 4.13]: Identical wholes share all parts:

VxVy{(x=y) - Vz[(z~x) ++ (z:9')]}
CONDmONAL IDENITJY AND IRREGULAR PARTS 103
Proof: Assume x=y. Then if z~x, zg and vice versa by (S.L).
Theorem 41. [Cf 4.13]: Identical wholes are parts of each other:
'v'x'v'y{(x=y) -+ [(xg) & (y~x)]}
Proof: If x=y then x and y share all parts (T40), and so are parts
of each other (T39).
Theorem 42. Identical wholes share all proper parts: 'v'x'v'y{(x=y)

-+ 'v'z[(z<x) ++ (z<y)]}
Proof: If x=y then x and y share all parts (T40), and hence all
proper parts (T3).
Theorem 43. Wholes which are irregular parts of each other share
all proper parts: 'v'x'v'y{[(x«y) & (y«x)] -+ 'v'z[(z<x) ++ (z<y)]}
Proof: If x«y and y«x then xg and y~x (D3), so x and y

share all proper parts (T38).
Theorem 44. Wholes with proper parts which are irregular parts
of each other share all parts: 'v'x'v'y<[3z(z<x) & 3z(z<y)] -+
([(x«y) & (y«x)] -+ 'v'z[(z~x) ++ (zg)]»
Proof: Assume 3z(z<x), 3z(z<y), x«y, and y«x. Then

'v'z[(z<x) ++ (z<y)] (T43), and so 'v'z[(z~x) ++ (zg)]
(D1).
Theorem 45. Non-identical wholes with proper parts which are

irregular parts of each other share all parts: 'v'x'v'y<{-(x=y) &
[3z(z<x) & 3z(z<y)]} -+ ([(x«y) & (y«x)] -+ 'v'z[(z~x) ++
(zg)]»
Proof: (T44).
104 GILBERT T. NUlL
Theorem 46. Non-identical wholes which are parts of each other

are irregular parts of each other: 'Vx'Vy<-(x=y) -+ {[(xg) & (y~x)]
-+ [(x«y) & (y«x)]»
Proof: Assume -(x=y), xg, and y~x. For a reductio proof,

assume -[(x«y) v (y«x)]. Then -(x«y) and
-(y«x). So -{(xg) & -[(x=y) v (x<y)]} and -{(y~x)
& -[(y=x) v (y<x)]} (D3). So {-(xg) v [(x=y) v
(x<y)]} and {-(y~x) v [(y=x) v (y<x)]). Then [(x=y) v
(x<y)] and [(y=x) v (y<x)], so (x<y) and (y<x) ,
contradicting asymmetry (T7). Hence [(x«y) v
(y«x)].
Theorem 47. Non-identical wholes with proper parts which share

all parts are irregular parts of each other: 'Vx'Vy<{-(x=y) & 3z(z<x)
& 3z(z<y)]} -+ {Vz[(z~x) ++ (zg)]] -+ [(x«y) & (y«x)]»
Proof: Assume -(x=y), 3z(z<x), 3z(z<y), and Vz[(z~x) ++

(zg)]. Since x~x and yg (Tl), x~y and y~x, so x«y
and y«x (T46).
Theorem 48. Non-identical wholes with proper parts are irregular

parts of each other just in case they share all parts: 'Vx'Vy<{ -(x=y)
& [3z(z<x) & 3z(z<y)]} -+ ([(x<<y) & (y«x)]> ++ Vz[(z~x) ++
(zg)]»
Proof: (T45) and (T47).
5.31 Coextensivity of wholes.
DEFINITION 5: Cxy [read: 'x and yare coextensive'] means

[(x~y) & (y~x)] [i.e. x and yare parts of each other].
The definition 05 of the equivalence relation (see T50-TS2) 'are

coextensive' is intentionally the same as one of Simons' definitions
of 'coincides with' and 'is superposed on' [27: 117; SO 16] , for
reasons discussed below. Given the definition of 'part', the crux of
05 is that coextensive wholes are either identical or share all proper
parts [T38; cf T43 and 27: 248].
The relation of being coextensive with obtains between the
situated and the singled out part of the Gestalt contexture. This
relation is then important for formulating Gurwitsch's revision of
the Stumpf-Husserl conception of dependence. The following
theorems concerning it are provided:
Theorem 49. [Cf 4.03]: Identical wholes are coextensive:

VxVy[(x=y) - Cxy]
Proof: If x=y, then x and yare parts of each other (T41), and so
are coextensive (05).
Theorem 50. The relation of being coextensive is reflexive:

VxCxx
Proof: Since x=x, Cxx (T49).
Theorem 51. The relation of being coextensive is symmetric:

VxVy(Cxy - Cyx)
Proof: Assume Cxy. Then x:5,y and y~x (05), so Cyx (05).
Theorem 52. The relation of being coextensive is transitive:

VxVyVz[(Cxy & Cyz) - Cxz]
Proof: Assume Cxy and Cyz. Then x:5,y, y~x, y~z, and Z:5,y
(05). Since x:5,y and y~z, x~z (T22), and since z:5,y and
y~x, z~x (T22). Thus Cxz (05).
106 GILBERT T. NUlL
Theorem 53. Every whole coextensive with any part of a whole is

also a part of that whole: VxVyVz{[(x:sy) & Cxz] - (x:sy)}
Proof: Assume x<y and Cxz. Then z<x (DS), so z<y (T22).
Theorem 54. Coextensive wholes share all parts: VxVy{Cxy -

Vz[(z$.x) ++ (z:sy)]}
Proof: If Cxy then x:sy and y$.x (DS), so x and y share all parts
(T39).
Theorem 55. Wholes which share all parts are coextensive:

VxVy{Vz[(z$.x) ++ (z:sy)] - Cxy}
Proof: If x and y share all parts they share each other as parts
(Tl), and so Cxy (DS).
Theorem 56. Wholes are coextensive just in case they share all
parts: VxVy{Cxy ++ Vz[(z$.x) ++ (z$.y)]}
Proof: (T54) and (TSS).
Theorem 57. Coextensive wholes share all proper parts:

VxVy{Cxy - Vz[(z<x) ++ (z<y)]}
Proof: Since proper parts are parts (T3), the theorem follows by
(T54).
Theorem 58. Coextensive wholes are either identical or they share

all proper parts if one has a proper part: VxVy<Cxy - «x=y) v
{3z[(z<x) v (z<y)] - Vz[(z<x) ++ (z<y)]}»
Proof: If Cxy then x and y share all proper parts (TS7) whether
they are identical or not.
CONDmONAL IDENJTIY AND IRREGULAR PARfS 107
Theorem 59. If two wholes are either identical or share all proper
parts if one has a proper part, then they are coextensive:
't/x't/y<((x=y) v {3z[(z<x) v (z<y)] -+ 't/z[(z<x) ++ (z<y)]}) -+
Cxy>
Proof: Assume x=y or x and y share all proper parts if either x

or y has a proper part. If x=y, then since x~x (Tl), xg
(S.L), and similarly y~x, so Cxy (D5). If either x or y
has a proper part then they share all proper parts, and so
are coextensive (T55).
Theorem 60. Two wholes are coextensive just in case they are
either identical, or they share all proper parts if one has a proper
part: 't/x't/y<Cxy ++ «x=y) v {3z[(z<x) v (z<y)] -+ 't/z[(z<x) ++
(z<y)]}»
Theorem 61. Wholes which are irregular parts of each other are
non-identical coextensive wholes, neither of which is a proper part
of the other: 't/x't/y<[(x«y) & (y«x)] -+ ([-(x=y) & Cxy] &
[-(x<y) & -(y<x)]»
Proof: Assume x<<y and y«x. Then xg and y~x (03), so

Cxy (05). Also -(x=y) and -[(x<y) v (y<x)] (03).
Theorem 62. If two wholes are coextensive, neither is a proper

part of the other: 't/x't/y[Cxy -+ -(y<x)]
Proof: Assume Cxy, and for a reductio proof assume y<x.

Then xg (05), and since y<x, y<y (01). Hence there is
some u<y such that -Ouy (A2). But since u<y, Ug
(T2), and since yg (Tl), Ouy. Hence -(y<x).
108 GILBERT T. NUl.L
coextensive and share all parts: 'v'x'v'y<[(x«y) & (y«x)] - {Cxy
& 'v'z[(zs:x) - (zs:y)]»
Proof: Assume x«y and y«x. Then Cxy (T61) and so

'v'z[(zs:x) - (zs:y)] (T62).
Theorem 64. Non-identical coextensive wholes are irregular parts

of each other: 'v'x'v'y{[Cxy & -(x=y)] - [(x«y) & (y«x)]}
Proof: Assume Cxy and & (x=y). Assume x<y. Then there is
some u<y such that -Oux (A2). Hence -(us:x) (T2). But
us:y (T3), so us:x (T22), a contradiction. Hence -(x<y).
By the same argument, -(y<x), so x«y and y«x (D3).
non-identical coextensive wholes: 'v'x'v'y{[(x«y) & (y«x)] -
[Cxy & -(x=y)]}
Proof: Assume x«y and y«x. Then xs:y and ys:x and -(x=y)
(D3), and so Cxy (D5).
Theorem 66. Wholes are irregular parts of each other just in case
they are non-identical coextensive wholes: 'v'x'v'y{[Cxy & -(x=y)]
- [(x«y) & (y«x)]}
Theorem 67. Any whole which has every non-coextensive whole

as a part is not itself a proper part:
'v'x{'v'y[-Cyx - (ys:x)] - -3y(x<y)}
Proof: Assume 'v'y[-Cyx - (ys:x)]. If there is some y, such

that x<y, then there is some z<y such that -Ozx (A2), so
CONDmONAL IDENITJY AND IRREGULAR PARIS 109
-(z~x) (T2), SO -(z<x) (T3), and thus -(y~x) (Dl).

Thus -Cyx (D5) and hence y~x, which is a
contradiction. Therefore there is no such y.
5.311 Regular Coextensivity of Wholes: Individuation Vs.

Mereological Identity.
I said above that the definition D5 of 'are coextensive' IS

intentionally the same as one of Simons' definitions of 'coincides
with' and 'is superposed on' [27: 117; SD 16]. In order to clarify
the philosophical significance of the relation of coextensivity, some
discussion of Simons' predicate 'is superposed on' and what he
calls 'the principle of coincidence' is necessary.
The principle of coincidence [27: 217-18, 228, 245, 247-51] is
the claim that superposed objects coincide, and objects are
superposed [27: 117, 180, 182,201-205, 210, 247-51] just in case
they occupy exactly the same position in space and time. Thus the
principle of coincidence is the claim that objects which occupy
exactly the same position in space and time are wholes which
coincide. In the language of the present system, the principle of
coincidence is that only coextensive wholes occupy exactly the same
position in space and time. This principle is an extrasystemic,
philosophical claim about the ontological significance of one of the
defined predicates of the system, and is stated here in a stronger
(biconditional) form as a principle of individuation:
5.31101 The Non-Extensionalist Principle of Individuation:

Wholes occupy exactly the same place in space and time
[i.e. are the same spatio-temporal individual] just in case
they are coextensi ve.
It should be noted immediately that the dyadic predicate 'are

superposed' (i.e. 'occupy exactly the same place in space and time')
is extrasystemic; i.e. it is not a defined predicate within the system,
and bears no logical relation to any defined predicate of the system
(such as 'are coextensive'). For that reason, the principle 5.31101
110 GILBERT T. NUlL
of individuation can be either accepted or rejected by users of the

present system.
Whether 5.31101 or some alternative is preferred will depend on
whether one is willing to accept the thesis that non-identical things
may occupy the same point in space and time. Users of the present
system who feel philosophically uncomfortable with this thesis will
prefer an alternative principle of individuation, which restricts
superposition to just those coextensive wholes which are identical. I
begin the formulation of this alternative by defining the relation of
being regularly coextensive, i.e. the condition of having the same
regular parts:
DEFINITION 6: RCxy [read: 'x is regularly coextensive with y']

means Vz[(z<=x) ++ (z<=y)] [i.e. x and y have the same regular
parts].
Regular coextensivity is the criterion of mereological identity;

furthermore, the Principle of Mereological Identity for wholes is
available as Theorem 70 of irregular part theory:
Theorem 68. Identical wholes are regularly coextensive:

VxVy[(x=y) -+ RCxy]
Proof: Assume x=y. Then for any z, if z<=x then z<=y (S.L),
and if z<=y then z<=x (S.L), so RCxy (D6).
Theorem 69. Regularly coextensive wholes are identical:

VxVy[RCxy -+ (x=y)]
Proof: Assume RCxy. Then Vz[(z<=x) ++ (z<=y)] (D6). Since

x<=x (TI2), x<=y, so either x<y or x=y (D4). Assume
x<y. Then there is some z<y such that -(z~x) (T6). But
z<=y (D4), so z<=x, and thus z~x (TlO). Hence (z~x)
& -(z~x), so -(x<y), and therefore x=y.
CONDmONAL IDENITIY AND IRREGULAR PARI'S 111
Theorem 70. Two wholes are identical just in case they are
regularly coextensive: \fx\fy[(x=y) - RCxy]
T70 is an expression of the fact that regularly coextensive

wholes must share the same improper part. We can then specify the
alternative to the non-extensionalist principle of individuation as:
5.31102 The Extensionalist Principle of Individuation: Wholes

occupy exactly the same place in space and time [i.e. are
the same spatio-temporal individual] just in case they are
regularly coextensive.
I call 5.31102 the Extensionalist principle because regular parts

are just those which may exist in models of part whole theories in
which the thesis 4.04 of mereological extensionalism is a theorem,
and sharing all of those kinds of parts is traditionally the principle of
individuation accepted in those contexts. 2
The argument over whether to accept 5.31101 or 5.31102 as
one's principle of individuation is an extrasystemic, philosophical
affair, and is precisely an argument over whether non-identical
things can occupy exactly the same position in space at exactly the
same time. At least Simons, Wiggins, Doepke, and Thomson accept
this thesis [27: 120], and could therefore be expected to accept (at
least the left to right implication of) 5.31101. The argument could be
settled by producing at least one clear example of two things which
occupy the same spatio-temporal position but which are nevertheless
non-identical.
Accordingly, Simons considers the example of a token of the
sentence 'cardinals multiply' arranged in a ring, so that it is also a
token of the non-identical imperative 'multiply cardinals', and
2. See for example Eberle's discussion of individrntion [3: 2, 5, 25-7, 36, 37,
38-9,48-9, 55, 73, 76-7, 82-3, 89-90, 97, 149, lSI, 168-70, 178].
112 GILBERT T. NUlL
Doepke's example of a person and the person's body [27: 113-4].

Simons also considers but rejects the example of superposed but
non-identical social actions [27: 133-4]. Arthur Danto's discussion
of artworks and mere things [2] suggests to me that any artwork
(e.g. Duchamp's Fountain) and the material stuff or artifact (e.g. the
urinal) of which it is composed is another example of non-identical
things which are superposed (so that favoring 5.31102 over
5.31101 implies being unable to distinguish artifacts from mere
objects, or artworks from mere artifacts). Accepting 5.31101
amounts to maintaining that spatio-temporal individuation is a looser
affair than mereologica1 identity.
One more example of non-identical objects which occupy exactly
the same position in space and time is provided by any situated and
singled out ontologically independent constituent of a Gestalt
contexture. Gurwitsch's denial that the singled out part of the
Gestalt contexture was identical to the "same" part as situated in the
contexture reveals his acceptance of the thesis that non-identical
objects may coexist at exactly the same point in space and time. I
interpret that acceptance as evidence that Gurwitsch would also have
accepted the non-extensional principle 5.31101 of individuation. In
other words, Gurwitsch's philosophy of space and time was
committed to the proposition that non-identical things can occupy
exactly the same point in space and time.
5.32 Regular and Irregular Overlapping of Wholes.
I now introduce two more defined predicates of irregular part

theory which will be required for the discussion [Sections 6 and 7
infra] of Gurwitsch's attempt to define G-dependence (i.e. the
phenomenon of conditional identity) in terms of the part predicate
alone.
DEFINITION 7: ROxy [read: 'x and y regularly overlap'] means:

3z[(z<=x) & (z<=y)] [i.e. some regular part of x is a regular
part of y].
DEFINITION 8: IOxy [read: 'x and y irregularly overlap'] means:

3z[(z<<x) & (z«y)] [i.e. x and y share some irregular part].
For convenience, note that two wholes x and yare regularly

disjoint just in case -ROxy (i.e. x and y fail to regularly overlap),
and that the condition of regular disjointness of x and y is equivalent
to: Vz[(z<=x) -+ -(z<=y)]. Similarly, the condition of irregular
disjointness of x and y is equivalent to: Vz[(z«x) -+ -(z«y)].
Since the irregular overlap relation is unfamiliar (i.e. not studied in
extensionalist systems), I provide the following theorems
concerning the regular and irregular overlap relations:
Theorem 71. Identical wholes regularly overlap: VxVy[(x=y) -+
ROxy]
Proof: Assume x=y. Then x<=y (D4), and since x=x, X<=X
(D4), so ROxy (D4).
Theorem 72. Regular overlap is a reflexive relation: VxROxx
Proof: Since x=x, ROxx (T71).
Theorem 73. Regular overlap is a symmetric relation:
Proof: Immediate from (D7) and the commutativity of

conjunction.
Theorem 74. Irregular overlap IS a symmetric relation:

VxVy[IOxy -+ IOyx]
Proof: Immediate from (D8) and the commutativity of

conjunction.
114 GILBERT T. NUlL
Theorem 75. Regularly overlapping wholes overlap: VxVy(ROxy

-Oxy)
Proof: Assume ROxy. Then 3z[(z<=x) & (z<=y)] (D7). Then

z<x or z=x, and z<y or z=y. If z<x then x~x (T3) and if
Z=X then z~x (Tl). By the same argument zg, so Oxy
(D2).
Theorem 76. Irregularly overlapping wholes overlap: VxVy(lOxy

-Oxy)
Proof: Assume IOxy. Then 3z[(z<<x) & (z«y)] (D8). Then

z~x and zg (D3), so Oxy (D2).
Theorem 77. Wholes which are irregular parts of each other

regularly overlap: VxVy{[(x«y) & (y«x)] - ROxy}
Proof: Assume x«y and y«x. there is some u<x (Tl9), so

u<=x (D4). But xg (D3) so u<y (Dl), and thus u<=y
(D4). Hence ROxy (D7).
Theorem 78. Coextensive wholes regularly overlap if one has a

proper part: VxVy<{Cxy & [3z(z<x) v 3z(z<y)]} - ROxy>
Proof: Assume Cxy and 3z(z<x) v 3z(z<y). Then xg and y~x

(DS). Since z<x or z<y, z<x and z<y (Dl), so Z<=X and
z<=y (D4), and hence ROxy (D7).

whole, then the proper part irregularly overlaps its whole:
VxVyVz<{[(xg) & (y<z)] & -{x<z)} - lOYD
CONDmONAL IDEN1TIY AND IRREGULAR PARIS 115
Proof: Assume x:sy, y<z, and -(x<z). Then x«y (T36) and
x«z (T37), so IOyz (DS).
6. Issues of Identity and Individuation of Wholes
Sections 6 and 7 comprise a metalinguistic discussion of the

system of irregular part theory developed in section 5. This
discussion will not be confined to the language of the system of
section 5, but is intended to suggest consistent extensions and
applications of that language.
6.1 Mereological Vs. Phenomenal Identity and the Issue of

Essentialism.
Mereologicalessentialism is the doctrine that no part of a whole

is contingent. Parts are contingent if we may experience them as lost
or gained while their whole is experienced as enduring in existence,
and parts are essential just in case they are not contingent. The
doctrine is encouraged by the extensionalist criterion of mereological
identity: wholes are identical just in case they share all parts. Loss of
any part entails loss of identity, and if loss of identity is interpreted
as cessation of existence, the doctrine of mereological essentialism
follows.
Irregular part theory is like extensional mereology in this regard.
There, identical wholes share all parts (T40), so are parts of each
other (T41), and hence are coextensive (T49). The loss of one part
(of any sort) implies loss of identity. This result is inescapable so
long as we are using a c1assicallanguage equipped with identity and
the Principle of the Substitutivity of Identicals.
But irregular part theory can encourage an even stronger version
of mereological essentialism. This stronger principle of non-
extensional essentialism is: either loss of or change of status from
improper to irregular of any part entails the loss of the (existence of
the) whole. Being coextensive (sharing all parts) is a necessary but
116 GILBERT T. NUll.
not a sufficient condition of non-extensional mereological identity.

The necessary and sufficient condition for (the maintenance of)
identity is that irregular parts remain irregular parts, and regular
parts remain regular parts. The addition of this criterion o/internal
organization for non-extensional mereological identity is no
accident; it(T70) is a consequence of (D 1), (D2), (D4), (D6), (A 1),
(A2), and (S.L).
So the non-extensional identity criterion is stronger than the
traditional condition of sharing all parts. The corresponding
principle of non-extensional mereological essentialism is that both
the existence of each part and the organization 0/ the parts into the
three sorts improper, proper, and irregular are essential to the
whole. If 5.31102 were accepted (so the wholes of irregular part
theory could be considered in 1-1 correspondence with the
individuals we perceive as located in space and time) and loss of
identity of a whole were interpreted as the cessation of existence of
the corresponding spatio-temporal individual, then non-extensional
essentialism with regard to experiential parts and wholes would be
unavoidable.
But neither form of mereological essentialism is satisfied by our
experience of phenomenal identity. We routinely experience
individuals which survive the acquisition and loss of (even proper
and hence regular) parts while remaining identically the same
(ingestion and defecation will do as examples). The individuals
which are perceived as located in space and time are perceived as
having contingent parts; they are perceived as unlike the wholes of
irregular part theory, which have only necessary parts and a
necessary internal organization of those parts.
In other words, spatio-temporal individuals do not obey T70,
and so cannot be considered wholes of irregular part theory. The
falsification of the principle of essentialism by our perceptual
experience of spatio-temporal individuals is evidence that 5.31102
should not be accepted, that the wholes of irregular part theory
should not be considered as being in 1~1 correspondence with
spatio-temporal individuals, and that loss of identity of wholes of
irregular part theory should not be understood as the cessation of

existence of a corresponding spatio-temporal individual.
6.2 Spatio-Temporal Individuation Vs. Identity.
The identity criterion T70 enables a resolution of the second of

the two identity problems of Section 4.1 supra. Here and below,
consider the Gestalt contexture x of Section 4, comprised of the two
ontologically independent parts a and b. Assume that a and b share
no proper part, and so form a regular division of x into two
regularly disjoint proper parts, and that a' is the singled out proper
part a.
The second identity problem of Section 4 concerned the relation
between the situated part a and the singled out part a'. In extensional
context, non-identity means not sharing all parts, while substantive
sameness must involve sharing some parts. Question 4.07 of
Section 4 was: "How many parts must the situated and the singled
out part share to be non-identical but nevertheless substantively the
same?"
In the context of irregular part theory 4.07 can receive an
answer. But first it is important to note that the situated and the
singled out part cannot be identical, but different because one lacks
some irregular part of the other. If a and a' are identical, then they
share all parts (T40), and since irregular parts are parts (T9), if b is
part of a then b is part of a', too. The difference between the situated
and the singled-out part of the Gestalt contexture is more subtle than
the simple absence of irregular parts of one from the other.
The answer to 4.07 is "all parts." Since a and a' need not be
considered regularly disjoint, they can be consistently considered to
be non-identical, coextensive wholes which are irregular parts of
each other. In other words, substantive sameness is coextensivity.
This answer was unavailable in extensionalist part-whole theories,
where coextensivity is identity. But here identity is regular
coextensivity, so we can characterize the situated and the singled-out
part as coextensive (i.e. substantively the same) but not regularly
coextensive (i.e. non-identical). An implication of this answer to
118 GILBERT T. NUlL
4.07 is that the situated and the singled-out part are irregular parts of
one another (T64).
Since the situated and the singled-out parts co-exist at exactly the
same point in space and time, the reason for accepting the non-
extensionalistprincipleof individuation is clear. 5.31101 is implied
by the fact that the situated and singled-out part occupy the same
point in space and time, and are coextensive but not identical, i.e.
not regularly coextensive. This solution impacts our understanding
of both (a) the thematic transformation of Singling out and its
inverse, Synthesizing, and (b) the relation of the individual a' which
is perceived to the state of affairs of that individual being a G-
dependent part of its unitary whole x.
6.21 Singling out in Terms of Irregular Part Theory
No parts are lost or gained in singling out a proper part from, or

in synthesizing two or more proper parts into a unitary whole.
Rather, the internal organization of the parts of the situated
constituent changes when that constituent undergoes singling out or
the inverse transformation of synthesizing. Namely, the improper
part of the situated constituent a becomes an irregular part of the
singled-out constituent a', and what was an irregular part of the
situated constituent a becomes the improper part of the singled-out
constituent a'. The thematic transformations of Singling out and
Synthesizing therefore involve an internal reorganization of the parts
shared by a and a', and this reorganization of parts is enough to
account for both the lack of identity between the situated and the
singled out part, and the dependence of the former vs. the
independence of the latter whole [see Sections 6.3 and 7.3 infra].
6.22 Spatio-Temporal Individuals Vs. States of Affairs
Section 3.31 supra described Gurwitsch's rejection of Husserl's

mereological analysis of the states of affairs which provide warrants
for predications of the form 'This S is p.' and 'This S has p.'. As
did Gurwitsch, I here limit consideration to the latter case (where 'p'
denotes an ontologically independent part singled out from the

whole denoted by'S'). The question to be considered here is the
following:
6.2201 What entities within the universe of discourse of part

theory can represent the ontologically independent part
and the sundry states of affairs in which it is involved?
In extensional contexts, Husserl's thesis encounters the problem

that there are not enough items to represent different states of affairs.
According to Husserl's analysis, one state of affairs in which a is
involved is the mereological sum (x+a). In extensional contexts this
sum exists as a unique whole, viz. x (since a~x, (x+a)=x). It is then
a problem that a different state of affairs (in which b is involved)
cannot be distinguished from this state of affairs in which a is
involved. I.e. (x+a) = x = (x+b). Since Husserl wanted to claim that
the two states of affairs (x+a) and (x+b) are non-identical entities,
his position cannot be consistently formulated within extensional
part theory.
In non-extensional context, Husserl's thesis encounters the
problem that there are too many items representing the same state of
affairs. Uniqueness fails for mereological sums within irregular part
theory. For Husserl's position that means that the state of affairs
(x+a) would exist, but would exist as a class of non-identical
wholes. Since Husserl wanted to claim that any state of affairs (x+a)
is a unique entity, his position cannot be consistently formulated
within irregular part theory, either.
Rejecting Husserl's position that the state of affairs is the
mereological sum (x+a), Gurwitsch maintained instead that it is "an
articulated unity," by which he meant the part a exhibited as G-
dependent relative to the whole x. He then tried to account for the G-
dependence of a relative to x by saying that the unitary whole x is
part of its constituent a, meaning something different by 'part' than
'regular part' (i.e. proper or improper part). The question then
arises: "Could the G-dependence of a relative to x mean that a is a
regular part of x while x is an irregular part of a?"
120 GILBERT T. NUlL
This question will be answered negatively (cJ T35 supra) in

Section 7.1 infra, where the problem of the definition of the relation
of relati ve G-dependence is considered. The point here is that gi ven
Husserl's account, question 6.2201 cannot be answered
successfully for either regular or irregular part theory, and that given
Gurwitsch's account, it cannot be answered successfully for regular
part theory, and is not yet answered successfully for irregular part
theory.
6.3 The Apparent Contingency of G-dependence Vs. the

Necessity of Ontological Dependence.
In Section 4.12 supra the concept of G-dependence appeared to

conflict with the realist notion of ontological dependence, because
the part is G-dependent only if in fact it happens to be not singled
out, i.e. if in fact the transformation of singling out has not been
performed by a thematizing consciousness. But that appearance
vanishes within the context of irregular part theory with 5.31101 as
the principle of individuation.
The apparent contingency of the relation of G-dependence does
not derive from the G-dependence of one identical thing depending
on circumstances, i.e. depending on whether that thing has been
singled out or not. That opinion might arise from the mistaken belief
that the situated and the singled-out parts are identical because they
are superposed, i.e. occupy the same point in space and time. But
the extensionalist principle of individuation is not accepted in the
present context. The situated and the singled out ontologically
independent part are coextensive and hence the same spatia-temporal
individual (by the extrasystemic principle 5.31101), but they are not
regularly coextensive and hence are not identical (by the intra-
systemic principle T70 of mereological identity).
Within irregular part theory it is possible to consider the G-
dependence of the situated part (state of affairs) a and the G-
independence of the singled out individual a' to be permanent and
necessary characteristics of those wholes. If any G-dependent part a
necessarily requires the existence of its unitary whole x (so Kit
Fine's tactic3 is justifiable), then every G-dependent part would also

be ontologically dependent. In that case, the distinction between
ontologically dependent and ontologically independent G-dependent
parts would require further clarification (see 7.2 infra). Section 7.3
infra suggests a tactic for developing an irregular part theoretic
object language characterization of G-dependence and the distinction
between ontologically dependent and independent G-dependent parts
which relies on 5.31101 and T70, and which considers G-
dependence as a non-contingent property.
7. Irregular Part Theoretic Desiderata Concerning

the Concept of G-dependence
7.1 Desideratum 1: An Intra-systemic Account of G-

dependence
Citations in Sections 2. and 3.31 supra illustrate Gurwitsch's

attempt to characterize G-dependence in terms of the part predicate
alone, without (for instance) any recourse to the concept of
foundation used by Husserl to characterize ontological dependence.
The first identity problem we encountered in Section 4 derived from
this tactic of characterizing the G-dependence of a and b by saying
that they were parts of each other, or that x is a part of each, and the
fact that given the thesis 4.04 of extensionality, this implied that
a=b. That particular problem is now overcome, since we are no
longer committed to extensionality: a and b could be non-identical,
and still be parts of each other. For instance, wholes which (like a
and a') are irregular parts of each other are coextensive, but not
necessarily identical. However, Gurwitsch's part-theoretic account
of G-dependence must still be rejected within the theory of Section
5. One formulation of his account is that the unitary whole is an
irregular part of each of its proper parts. But that contradicts T35.
3. See note 1 supra.

122 GILBERT T. NUlL
Since T35 relies on the assumption of weak supplementation (A2),

A2 would have to be weakened to enable a consistent formulation of
this version of Gurwitsch's account of G-dependence.
But weakening A2 of the present system would not solve the
problem with Gurwitsch's other formulation of his account (viz. that
the proper parts a and b of the unitary whole x are irregular parts of
each other). The parts a and b cannot be consistently considered
both regularly disjoint and irregular parts of each other. If a and b
are irregular parts of each other, then they share all proper parts
(T43), and are not regularly disjoint if one has a proper part (T78).
And they must each have a proper part if they are irregular parts of
each other (T19). This prohibition on regularly disjoint wholes
being irregular parts of each other is independent of Axiom 2.
Therefore the prohibition could not be overcome by weakening A2.
Thus Gurwitsch's purely part-theoretic characterization of unity by
Gestalt coherence cannot be used as a definition in the present
system, or in any system resulting from weakening A2 of the
present system.
The achievement of a formal account of G-dependence within
some extension of the present system then remains a desideratum. 4
Until this desideratum is accomplished the distinction between G-
dependent and G-independent wholes cannot be made within the
system. And so long as that distinction is unavailable, the relation
between the ontologically independent spatio-temporal individual
4. Peter Simons caIls unitary wholes 'complexes', and has formulated an

adequate definition of 'a complex' as an R-integrated whole [27: 324-30, 359],
where R is conceived as a contingently held relation [27:325]. But a central
notion of his definition (viz. a division [27: 327] of a whole) requires the c\ass-
theoretic predicate "is a member of" in its definition, and so is not directly
expressible in the part theory of Section 5 (where the epsilon predicate is
unavailable). Given the solution to the problem of the apparent contingency of G-
dependence [Section 6.3 supra] and the consequent attractiveness of Kit Fine's
tactic [Notes 1 and 3 supra], my definition of 'Individual' as what Simons calls a
'weak jowulation-integrated whole' [22; 27: 315, 339 (ND2)] is my currently
preferred candidate for the definition of 'unitary whole'. The crux of this idea is
that a whole is unitary just in case each pair of its proper parts have a foundation
relation between them.
CONDmONAL IDENITIY AND IRREGUlAR PAIITS 123
and the various states of affairs in which it is involved cannot be

fonnulated within the system.
7.2 Desideratum 2: An Ontological Distinction between

Those Parts which Can, and Those which Cannot be
Singled out
Part of Gurwitsch's thesis is that ontologically independent

wholes are unitary. This aspect of his position derives from the fact
that he claimed that a part of a unitary whole can be isolated as a
unitary theme via the thematic transfonnation of singling out only if
it is an ontologically independent part. Since he also claimed that
every theme is a unitary whole, he was committed to the thesis that
all ontologically independent parts are unitary.
However, unitary wholes may have ontologically dependent as
well as ontologically independent parts. Both types are G-dependent
parts, and the distinction between the two types of part is not
adequately drawn. Gurwitsch's "singling out" version of Stumpf's
"separate presentability" criterion of ontological independence
preserves the distinction between the two types of part. But simply
providing a procedure (viz. singling out) for detennining of any G-
dependent part whether it is ontologically independent or not is not
an adequate distinction between ontological dependence and
independence.
For example, consider a procedure for detennining of any given
student whether that student is matriculated or not. The procedure is
to check a certain roster; if the student's name appears on the roster,
then the student is matriculated. Even those who are totally ignorant
of what 'matriculation' means could successfully apply the
procedure; having such a procedure tells one nothing about why a
given student's name appears on the roster, and certainly nothing
about the concept of matriculation. Our situation is analogous.
Having the procedure of singling out enables us to tell of any given
G-dependent part whether it is ontologically independent (i.e. "on
the list") or not. But having this procedure tells us nothing about
124 GILBERT T. NUlL
why a G-dependent part is ontologically independent, and certainly

nothing about the concept of ontological independence.
Therefore, it is a test of any characterization of the relation of G-
dependence that it include an ontological distinction between
ontologically dependent and ontologically independent G-dependent
parts, and that this distinction enable a subsequent epistemological
account of our inability to separately thematize (i.e. single out) parts
which are ontologically dependent. What is needed is an account of
the ontological conditions necessary for the possibility of singling
out a part, i.e. an account of the ontological difference between
those parts which can, and those which cannot be singled out.
7.3 One Approach to these Irregular Part Theoretic

Desiderata
I conclude by suggesting a possible mode of approach to

answering question 6.2201, and to the problems of formulating
object language characterizations of the G-dependence (i.e.
conditional identity) of independent parts of unitary wholes, and the
distinction between independent and dependent parts of such wholes
within irregular part theory. The irregular part-theoretic analysis of
Simons' Ganymede-Jupiter example seemed to suggest the
following:
1. There is some ontoiogically independent a' not identical

to a, such that:
2. a is and a' is not part of the unitary whole x; and
3 . a and a' are coextensi ve.
We might then interpret the phenomenon of the G-dependence of

ontologically independent parts of unitary wholes into the universe
of irregular part theory as follows: a represents the individual as
perceived, i.e. a is the state of affairs of the individual being G-
dependent relative to its unitary whole x (in Simons' example
[Section 4.07 supra], a represents the largest satellite of Jupiter).
Next, a' represents the individual which is perceived, i.e. the
individual as not G-dependent relative to any unitary whole x (in
Simons' example, a' represents Ganymede). Then the reference (i.e.
G-dependence relative) to b (e.g. Jupiter) and x (the whole planetary
system) is built into a, which represents one state of affairs in which
the individual a' (e.g. Ganymede) can (but need not) be involved.
Other wholes which are coextensive with both but identical to
neither a nor a' represent other states of affairs in which the
individual a' can be involved. The idea is: To say that a is an
"independent" G-dependent part is to say that it is non-identical but
coextensive with some ontologically independent non-G-dependent
whole.
The implication of this idea is that singling out could be
characterized as a many-many binary relation pairing each unitary
whole with every ontologically independent whole coextensive with
one of its G-dependent parts. The domain of the relation would be
the class of unitary wholes, and the counter-domain would be the
class of ontologically independent wholes coextensive with some G-
dependent part. Granted Gurwitsch's thesis that ontologically
independent wholes are unitary, the field (union of domain and
counter-domain) of the relation would be the class of unitary wholes
(the field of consciousness if Gurwitsch's identification of themes of
attention and unitary wholes is accepted). Unitary wholes not
coextensive with some member of the counter domain "may be
called items not lending themselves to being singled out or made
independent", and those which are coextensive with some member
of the counter-domain may "be called items susceptible of being
made independent" [7: 264; cf Section 2 supra].
Thus question 6.2201 might be answerable by selecting irregular
over regular part theory, and Gurwitsch's over Husserl's analysis of
the warrant of predication. The problems with Husserl's
mereological summation account would be avoided. There is one
whole (a') to represent the ontologically independent individual
which is intended when singling out occurs, and a class of non-
identical, coextensive wholes to represent (hopefully in a one-to-one
correspondence) the class of states of affairs in which that individual
126 GILBERT T. NUlL
might be intended as involved. But the formulation of this

distinction between two types of G-dependent parts and the
suggested subsequent characterization of singling out requires the
language of ontological dependence, and so remains a desideratum
for an extension of the language (of irregular part theory) to which
Section 5 was limited. 5
5. The contemplated extension involves the theses that at most one member
of any class of non-identical coextensive wholes is ontologically independent,
and that no ontologically independent whole is G-dependent. This involves
5.31101 of Section 5.311 supra; all non-identical, coextensive wholes are
considered the same spatio-temporal individual. Since ontologically independent
wholes would be irregular parts of proper parts of unitary wholes (See 175-177),
the independence of 5.205 from Al and A2 is crucial to this idea. Models of the
Stephen type (in which 5.205 is false) are interesting in this context.
Bibliography
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Press, 1979).
2. Danto, A. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).
3. Eberle, R., Nominalist Systems (New York: Humanities Press,
1970).
4. Embree, L. (Ed.), Life-world and Consciousness: Essays for Aron
Gurwitsch (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972).
5. Fine, K., "Acts, Events, and Things", Language and Ontology,
Leinfellner et. al. (Eds.) (Vienna: Hoelder-Pichler-Tempsky,
1982, pp. 97-105).
6. Gurwitsch, A., The Field of Consciousness (Pittsburgh: Duquesne
University Press, 1964).
7. . Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1966).
8. . Phenomenology and the Theory of Science, L. Embree
(Ed.) (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974).
9. _ _. Leibniz: Philosophie des Panlogismus (Berlin: de Gruyter,
1974).
10. . Human Encounters in the Social World, Metraux (Ed.),
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11. . Marginal Consciousness, L. Embree (Ed.) (Athens, OH:
Ohio University Press, 1985).
12. . Alfred Schiltz-Aron Gurwitsch Briefwechsel 1939-1959,
R. Grathoff & B. Waldenfels (Eds.) (MUnchen: Wilhelm Fink
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13. Husserl, E. Logische Untersuchungen (1901) 2nd ed., Vols. I-III
(Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1928).
14. . Logical Investigations, Vol. II, J. N. Findlay (Trans.)
(New York: Humanities Press, 1970).
15. . Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a
Phenomenological Philosophy; First Book, F. Kersten (Trans.)
(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983).
16. . Phiinomenologische Psychologie, Husserliana IX (The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968).
17. Leonard, H. & Goodman, N., "The Calculus of Individuals and its
Uses," Journal of Symbolic Logic Vol. 5, 1940: 44-55.
18. Lesniewski, S., "0 podstawach Matematyki," Przeglad
Filozoficzny 33, 1930: 82f.
19. Mays, W. (Ed.), The Journal of the British Society for
Phenomenology, Vol. 12, 2, 1981 [devoted to Gurwitsch's
thought).
128 GILBERT T. NUlL
20. McCormick & Elliston (Eds.), Husserl (Notre Dame, IN:

University of Notre Dame Press, 1981).
21. Null, G., "Husserl's Experience and Judgment," Man and World,
Vol. 7, 2, 1974: 182-92.
22. . "A First-order Axiom System for Non-universal Part-
whole and Foundation Relations," Essays in Memory of Aron
Gurwitsch, Lester Embree (Ed.) (Center for Advanced Research
in Phenomenology and University Press of America, 1983, pp.
463-483).
23. . and Blecksmith, R., "Matrix Representation of Husserl's
Part-Whole-Foundation Theory," Notre Dame Journal of Formal
Logic, Vol. 32, 1, Winter 1991: 87-111.
24. Quine & Goodman, "Steps Toward a Constructive Nominalism,"
Journal of Symbolic Logic, Vol. 12, 1947: 105-112.
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Grathoff (Ed.) (Munchen: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1985).
26. Simons, P., "The Formalisation of Husserl's Theory of Wholes
and Parts," in Parts and Moments, B. Smith (Ed.) (Munchen,
Philosophia Verlag, 1982).
27. . Parts, A Study in Formal Ontology (Oxford: Oxford
28. Stumpf, K., Ueber den psychologischen Ursprung der
Raumvorstellung (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1873).
29. Smith, B. (Ed.), Parts and Moments (Munchen: Philosophia
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Semantics, Metamathematics, J. H. Woodger (Trans.) (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1956, p. 24-9).
Part III
Gurwitschean Themes in Philosophy

6
Relevance and Aesthetic Perception
P. Sven AIYidson
College of Mount St. Joseph
One of Aron Gurwitsch's most important philosophical claims is

that every moment of conscious life is structured in a theme,
thematic field, margin pattern. 1 This thesis allows no exceptions.
Regardless of who you are or what you are doing, this is how your
field of consciousness is organized. That which is presented as the
center or focus of attention is the theme. That which is presented as
relevant to the theme is the thematic field. That which is presented as
irrelevant to the theme is the margin.
For those interested in the nature of perception, this claim can be
a compass aiding the mapping of uncharted or undercharted
perceptual experience. It is in this spirit of exploration that this study
investigates the structure of aesthetic perception. In particular, the
aim here is to articulate the dynamics of the relevancy relation
between theme and thematic field in the aesthetic moment. I t is
hoped that this exploration affirms the philosophical usefulness of
Gurwitsch's claim and evidences its power even in a sphere that he
himself appears not to have addressed in any detail.
1. A. GUlwitsch's most thorough presentation of this claim is in The Field oj

Consciousness (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1964), hereafter
abbreviated Fe.
131
1. C. Evans arui R. W. Stufflebeam (eds.), To Work at the Foundations, 131-140.
132 P. SVEN ARVIDSON
This project of articulating the structure of aesthetic perception in

terms of Gurwitsch's work is motivated by a series of articles on
attention and aesthetic perception by Richard Lind. 2 Under the
banner of "microphenomenology," Lind explains perceptual
organization in terms of attentional processes that are too subtle and
swift for direct observation. His approach is to hypothetically
reconstruct the emergence of the phenomena, attributing its
emergence to attentional processes imposed upon what is presented.
The aim in this way of looking at emergence is not to describe that
which presents itself as it presents itself, but to postulate an
attentional mechanics-viz., small attentional processes-that bring
organization to what is presented. Hence the prefix "micro" in
reference to his methodology. In other words, Lind follows the
approach of David Hume in explaining the origin of organization in
consciousness. That is, he postulates some intellectual process on
the part of the subject which serves to interweave and interconnect
what is originally disconnected. His explanation of aesthetic
perception is based on this approach.
The student of Gurwitsch will recognize here a position that
represents the polar opposite of Gurwitsch's thesis of
autochthonous organization in consciousness.3 For Gurwitsch,
what is organized in consciousness is found as already organized.
Organization in what is presented is inherent and original Gurwitsch
would argue against any account of aesthetic perception that was
based on the hypothesis that order and organization in the field is
possible mainly because it is bestowed or imposed on what is
presented. The purpose here is not to critique Lind's view of the
origin of organization in consciousness. Nor is it to critique his
2. R. Lind, "Attention and the Aesthetic Object," Journal oj Aesthetics and

Art Criticism, XXXIX, 1 (1980: 131-142); and "A Microphenomenology of
Aesthetic Qualities," Journal oj Aesthetics and Art Criticism, XLIII, 4 (1985: 393-
403); and "The Aesthetic Essence of Art," Journal oj Aesthetics and Art Criticism,
L, 1 (1992: 117-129).
3. For more on GUlwitsch's thesis of autochthonous organization in
consciousness, see P. S. Arvidson, "On the Origin of Organization in
Consciousness," Journal oj the British Society Jor Phenomenology, 23, no. 1
(1992/Jan: 55-67).
RElEVANCE AND AESTHETIC PERCEPTION 133
theory of aesthetic perception based on his view. 4 The purpose here

is to show that one need not assume a field theory like Lind's (i.e.,
like Hume's) in order to articulate the nature of aesthetic perception.
The challenge this paper shoulders, then, is to advance a description
of the emergence of the aesthetic object based on Gurwitsch's
conception of the field of consciousness. In order to proceed in this
direction, some brief statements are necessary concerning
Gurwitsch's position on attention and attitude.
The field of consciousness is all that is intended or presented at
any moment in consciousness. The consciousness of field is the
intending or presenting activity. Although the field of consciousness
and the consciousness of field are completely correlated, the
phenomenon of attention is most often approached from the
perspective of the consciousness of field, i. e., the intending or
presenting activity. One of Gurwitsch's philosophical innovations
was his description of attention from the perspective of the field of
consciousness. 5 He categorized different types of attention in terms
of the relation between the theme and thematic field. This is an
important point in the discussion of the phenomenon of attention
because writers often focus only on what Gurwitsch would call the
theme, rather than on the theme, thematic field structure. For
Gurwitsch, thematic consciousness refers to a theme as it appears in
a thematic field, not just to a theme itself. As a theme emerges in the
field of consciousness, it brings with it a relevant thematic field. To
ignore the role of the thematic field in the theme's emergence may
distort the phenomenon.
The point here is that in discussing the nature of attention in the
emergence of the aesthetic object, the relation between the theme and
thematic field must be addressed. The connection between the two is
a Gestalt-connection. Gurwitsch writes,
4. Although a more in-depth analysis of Lind's aesthetic theory is an

interesting project, it is different than the present one. See P. S. Arvidson,
·Stability and Achievement in Richard Lind's Aesthetic Theory,· Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism, LI, 4 (1993: 619-622).
5. Gurwitsch's most thorough account of attention is in Studies in
1966, pp. 213-267), hereafter abbreviated SPP.
This unity exemplified by the appearance of any theme

within its thematic field will be called unity by relevancy. A
theme presents itself as pertaining to certain thematic field
because the material contents of both the theme and what
appears in the thematic field concern each other. The theme
refers to items other than itself which are relevant to it and,
in being referred to, are experienced as relevant. 6
So if one says that an aesthetic object appears in thematic

consciousness, one is also necessarily referring to the thematic field
that it brings with it in virtue of uni ty by relevancy.
In terms of the field of consciousness, changes in attention can
be described as thematic modifications. For the purposes here, the
thematic modification of enlargement is most important. This
modification of the field involves a broadening of the relevance of
the theme, its importance or significance, through a widening of the
thematic field, Gurwitsch describes it this way:
A theme is given within a thematic field. A variety of events

can take place within the field. For instance, it is broadened:
the range of what is co-given as materially belonging to the
theme becomes larger so far as new items, previously not
experienced, now appear. Throughout this enlargement we
abide by our theme, continuing to deal with what we have
been dealing with before. But our theme has now acquired a
wider horizon. Its "import," its "significance" may have
changed, as, for example, when I think about a scientific
theory and there is broadening of the range of facts or other
items for which it has relevancy.?
In such a case, the theory about which one is thinking remains

the same throughout the modification, and the theory itself is still
6. Gurwitsch, Fe, p. 341.

7. Gurwitsch, SPP, pp. 223-224.
RElEVANCE AND AESfHETIC PERCEPTION 135
given as the theme, not the total range for which it has relevance. 8
The theme may "look" different in virtue of the specific modification
of the thematic field. The example of how different the appearance
of a seven-foot tall basketball player in uniform is when given in the
context of a sports arena versus a supermarket aisle is enough to
show us that the thematic field has an effect on the theme. However,
the "theme itself as self-enclosed and delimited in not thereby
affected," nothing in it is changed no matter the context into which it
is inserted. 9 In other words, it is still a seven-foot tall uniformed
basketball player that is presented as thematic.
As was noted earlier, features of the field of consciousness are
correlated with features of the consciousness of field. For example,
the thematic field (which pertains to the field of consciousness) is
the correlate to attitude (which pertains to the consciousness of
field). For Gurwitsch, a change in attitude is a change in thematic
field, and a change in thematic field is a change in attitude. He
writes,
When we say that we adopt a certain attitude, give a certain

direction to our interest and attention, or eventually modify
the direction of our attention and interest, this, properly
speaking, is only another way of formulating that we are
confronted with a certain thematic field rather than another,
or that the given field is superceded by a different one. In the
face of such variations and modifications, there remains the
invariant formal structure of a theme emerging from and, in
its very emergence, pointing and referring to, some thematic
field. 1o
Therefore, if a change in the thematic field is a correlative change in

the attitude under which the theme appears, and if in aesthetic
experience what is presented in the thematic field is presented
8. Gurwitsch, SPP, pp. 223-224.

9. Gurwitsch, SPP, p. 228.
10. Gurwitsch, FC, p. 330.
uniquely, then one would expect the "aesthetic attitude" to be unique

or distinctive.
With this in place, the following is submitted as a general
description of the structure of the field of consciousness in which
the object emerges as aesthetic. I I
In order for an object to be presented as aesthetic, the Gestalt-
connection of unity by relevancy between the theme and thematic
field must be dynamically expansive. As the theme emerges the
thematic field becomes enlarged in a persistently rapid fashion.
Since the thematic field is organized in terms of unity by relevancy
for the theme, this rapid enlargement is coordinate with a
dramatically broadened relevance, importance, or significance of the
object given. In other words, as the object emerges thematically, it
brings with it a rapidly expanding relevance in virtue of the
persistently rapid enlargement of its thematic field. Before the very
eyes of the experiencing subject, the theme takes on an astonishing
significance, importance or relevance.
What is being suggesting first of all, is that if an object is
presented as aesthetic, it is phenomenally a new perception. The
aesthetic phenomenon replaces what was presented previously,
regardless if objectively the same thing, e. g., a painting, is
presented. As the new theme emerges, its thematic field presents
persistently rapid enlargements of relevance with respect to it. This
persistently rapid enlargement does not occur in the case of
nonaesthetic objects presented as thematic. Of course, the thematic
modification of enlargement may and does occur very frequently in
the field of consciousness, but not necessarily in a persistently rapid
manner. The term "persistently" means that the thematic field
continues to undergo the enlargements through phenomenal time, i.
e., the enlarging itself endures and continues in the described
manner as long as the experience is aesthetic. The term "rapid"
means that the thematic field enlargements bloom quickly and
immediately upon the emergence of the theme and continue
11. There may be some vanatlOn within this very general structure for
presentations of different types of aesthetic objects.
RElEVANCE AND AESfHETIC PERCEPTION 137
blooming quickly in emergent expansion as long as the theme is

presented as aesthetic. In fact, since the enlargements are so rapid, it
is the broadening movement itself that is distinctive rather than any
particular relevant connection. For instance, if in the midst of
viewing a painting as aesthetic a particular detenninaJe relevant
connection persists as context, e.g., that the painting renders an
historical subject, then the experience will just as quickly become
nonaesthetic in virtue of the slowed or stopped enlargement. It is the
determinateness of the relevant connection (still given as part of the
thematic field) and the persistence of it as relevant context that at
least momentarily kills the rapidity of the enlargement of the thematic
field.
In addition to the structure of the field of consciousness, the
correlated features of the consciousness of field can also be
articulated. Since the thematic field corresponds to the "attitude"
within which the theme is presented, the attendant attitude in the
presence of the aesthetic object is coordinated with the rapidly
broadening relevance of the theme. This widening of relevance is
one that pushes back or relieves presented perceptual boundaries in a
sweeping sense, and therefore the subject experiences some
dimension of freedom, openness or boundlessness in the presence
of the object. It is submitted here, then, that the aesthetic attitude
involves a feeling of openness, boundlessness, or freedom in the
presence of the object in virtue of its rapidly widening relevance. 12
This openness or freedom is presented phenomenally by the rapid
changing of the boundary of the thematic field, i. e., the persistently
rapid enlargement of its breadth of relevance with respect to the
theme. Also, since freedom is desirable, we want to continue the
experience. Further, since the object represents this desirable
freedom to us, we desire the object. This last statement might look
12. M. Beardsley uses terms like "unfettered" and "freed" in his description of
aesthetic experience. See his "What is an Aesthetic Quality," in The Aesthetic
Point oj View (Ithaca and London, 1982, p. 100). Also, H. Osborne [" Aesthetic
Perception," British Journal oj Aesthetics, 18,4, (1978, p. 307)] uses terms like
"expansion of awareness" and "peak experiences" in describing aesthetic
perception.
138 P. SVIN ARVIDSON
surprising at first but it is not new. Over 2300 years ago Plato
realized that beauty or fineness (kalon) and desire (eros) were
inseparable.
Since Edward Bullough's seminal article claiming that aesthetic
attitude involves a certain "psychical distance" on the part of the
subject, a number of 20th century writers have made claims
attempting to explain what is distinctive about the aesthetic
attitude. 13 Still, there is little agreement over its nature and status.
This paper offers an orientation on this issue based on the relevance
of the aesthetic object, which if properly understood, is general or
unspecified. Putting an object "out of gear" or "being distanced"
with respect to it or having "disinterested attention" towards the
object, all refer to the necessity of a general relevance in the
experience as it has been described here. This generality of the
relevance also explains why not just any persistently rapid
enlargement will involve an aesthetic experience. For example, the
rapid enlargement of the thematic field that may occur in the
experience of sudden disaster most likely involves a particulm
significance or relevance of some sort, for instance the loss of one's
home, and also is unlikely to be accompanied by some dimension of
freedom or openness toward the object presented.
The momentariness of aesthetic experience should also be able to
be described in terms of the field of consciousness. To be sure, a
long-lasting and relatively uninterrupted aesthetic experience appears
to be an unusual case although not impossible. At some point the
field enlargements become intermittent or slowed. It is possible that
a concert, a painting, or a sunset could strike one as aesthetic one
13. E. Bullough, "'Psychical Distance' as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic

Principle," British Journal oj Psychology, 5 (1912): 87-98. Reprinted in
Aesthetics: An Introductory Book oj Readings, M. Weitz (Ed.) (New York: 1959).
The following studies are representative discussions of the issues: M. Cohen,
"Appearance and the Aesthetic Attitude," Journal oj Philosophy, 56 (1959: 915-
925); J. Stolnitz, Aesthetics and Philosophy oj Art Criticism (Boston, 1960,
especially pp. 32-42); G. Dickie, "The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude," American
Philosophical Quarterly, I, 1 (1964: 56-65); T. Binkley, "Piece: Contra
Aesthetics," Journal oj Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 35 (1976-7: 265-277); R. A.
Schultz, "Does Aesthetics Have Anything to do with Art," Journal oj Aesthetics
and Art Criticism, 36 (1978: 429-440).
RFlEV AJ\TCE AND AESfHEIlC PERCEPTION 139
moment and not aesthetic the next. The difference is evident in the
structure of the field of consciousness. For example, during one
particular part of a play one might say if interviewed, "my mind is
soaring with delight" at the play. During another part, one might
say, "this play has its high points [its aesthetic moments], but now
is boring." The play that was presented as aesthetic is now presented
as nonaesthetic (or at least as having-been-aesthetic-but-now-
boring). In the first case, the playas aesthetic object reveals itself as
thematic within a relevancy that undergoes persistently rapid
enlargement as the play unfolds. But now the new theme presented
is the playas monotonous. Monotonous here is described in terms
of little or no enlargement of the thematic field with respect to the
theme.
It is clear that this description of the presentation of an aesthetic
object is broadly inclusive. Any initially occurring presentation in
which the thematic field rapidly becomes enlarged as the theme
emerges, and persists in its rapid enlargement, and in which the
attendant attitude is one of freedom, openness or boundlessness in
the presence of the object, is to be considered an aesthetic
experience. Therefore, the flower in nature as well as the painting of
the flower both may be aesthetic if each involves this field
organization and the attendant attitude. 14 Artists are frequently
concerned with the limits of that which is perceived as art, that is,
with a work's relevancy or iffeievancy.15 And this is as it should
be. The limits of the field of consciousness are the playground of
14. In discussing Dickie's views, Shultz's asks if one can seriously consider
something such as an act of kindness an aesthetic object. According to what has
been said here, even the perception of an act of kindness is to be considered
aesthetic if this field organization and the attendant attitude hold for that
perception. See Shultz (loc. cit., p. 438). The present study agrees more with
Binkley (loc. cit., p. 268), when he states that "aesthetic experience is not an
experience unique to art. "
15. Witness the controversy over Marcel Duchamp's "readymades." According
to the present account, Duchamp's Fountain (a urinal placed on display) may be an
art object, but it is not necessarily so. A good orientation to Duchamp's affect on
art criticism is 1. Brough's, "Who's Afraid of M. Duchamp?" in Philosophy and
Art, Studies in Philosophy and the History oj Philosophy, Vol. 23, D. o.
Dahlstrom (Ed.) (pp. 119-142).
140 P. SVFN ARVIDSON
human freedom, and freedom is the attitude humans beings have in

the presence of that which is aesthetically relevant. The more an
aesthetic object pushes the limits of relevancy in the field of
consciousness, without becoming irrelevant or marginal, the more it
speaks to human freedom and significance.
A description of the emergence of the aesthetic object has been
suggested here that attempts to indicate essential structures, both on
the side of the field of consciousness and on the side of the
consciousness of field, in the service of articulating what its shape is
like in terms of Gurwitsch's field theory. As stated in the beginning
of this paper, Gurwitsch does not seem to have attended to the
specifics of aesthetic perception. This description, then, mayor may
not have been agreeable on some level to Gurwitsch. In any case, if
it advances the question of organization in perception, it does so
only in the shadow of his work.
7
A Gurwitschean Model for Explaining Culture or How

to Use an Atlatl
Lester Embree
Rorida Atlantic University
Introduction
Aron Gurwitsch's general account of conscious life and its field

has three specifications. It can be specified for ideal objects, it can
be specified for natural objects, and it can be specified for cultural
objects. Objects of the latter two sorts are real, i.e., in temporal and,
in a broad signification that includes motivation, causal relations
with one another. In the sort of consciousness necessary for the
natural sciences, which appears best called 'naturalistic,' the values
and purposes of objects, i.e., their cultural characteristics, are
abstracted from and what are best called 'naturalistic objects' result
and are then subdivisible into physical (astronomical, chemical,.
geological, etc.) and biological (botanical, zoological, ecological,
etc.) objects. In the third sort fall what are often called 'functional
objects' but are best called 'cultural objects'. These objects retain
their cultural characteristics and are constituted in the type of
concrete life in which strata of valuing and willing are not abstracted
from and which is best called 'cultural life'. Cultural life takes many
141
J. C. Evans arui R. W. Stufflebeam (eds.), To Work at the Foundations, 141-171.
142 LESTER EMBREE
forms and provides the subject matters of what are best called 'the
cultural sciences'.
Gurwitsch says little explicitly about valuing and objects as
valued, but there are remarks, such as those about "worlds of
imagination as exemplified by any epic, poem, play, or novel" and
"universes of artistic creation like the universe of music,"1 from
which one might begin to construct a Gurwitschean aesthetics if not
a general theory of value. He does, however, offer substantial
descriptions of practica1life throughout his career. 2 In other words,
he emphasizes how cultural life, cultural objects, and indeed cultural
worlds are practical. He does not assert that life is originally
practical and that predominantly evaluational and predominantly
cognitive types are derivative, but this also does not appear contrary
to the spirit of his position.
The present essay continues the discussion of Gurwitsch's
account of specifically practical and generically cultural life. This
account will be clarified with a fictional example: Suppose a college
student is out hiking somewhere in the Western United States,
comes upon a cave recently opened by a landslide, looks in and sees
mummies, blankets, baskets, and other paraphernalia preserved
there since the cave was sealed, presumably by an earlier landslide,
and hurries to report his discovery to his anthropology professor,
taking one artifact with him to show her. This is a stick of wood less
than a meter long with a small protuberance at one end. When she
sees it and hears his tale, she knows immediately that this will be a
famous site. They hurry back in her truck, and on the way she
explains that what he has shown her is an 'atlatl', something that has
been obsolete in that area for at least 7,000 years. Since he does not
know what an atlatl is, she explains how the protuberance is hooked
into a socket at one end of a light spear called a dart, held at the other
1. Aron Gurwitsch. The Field oj Consciousness (Pittsburgh: Duquesne

University Press, 1964, pp. 338, 382). Hereafter this source will be cited as 'FC'.
2. Cf. Lester Embree, "Some Noetico-Noematic Analyses of Action and
Practical Life," Part II, "Gurwitsch on Practical Life," in John Drummond & Lester
Embree (Eds.), The Phenomenology oj the Noema (Dordrecht: K1uwer Academic
Publishers, 1992).
A GURWITSCHEAN MODEL FOR EXPLAINING CULTURE ... 143
end, and used to apply the strength of the throwing ann to accelerate
the dart more than happens with a merely hand thrown spear, thus
increasing range and impact on game, which then included now
extinct giant bison and even elephant. Atlatls are also called spear
throwers (see Figure 1).
Fig. 1: From Brian M. Fagan, Ancient North America: The

Archaeology of a Continent (London: Thames and
Hudson, 1991, p.317).
The student (and perhaps the reader of this essay) appears to

have learned something and, correlatively, a change has occurred in
how the object, previously "a stick of wood less than a meter long
with a small protuberance at one end" or at most "a piece of
equipment of some sort from the caves," presents
itself to him differently; it becomes a spear thrower. At the same
time, the student (and the reader) can be said to have begun to enter
an other cultural world. Explaining how cultural objects in one's
own or in another cultural world arise can be clarified in relation to
such a case even though it is fictional.
The account that can be illustrated with this fiction not only
includes phenomenological tenns by which the use of such an
144 LESTER EMBREE
implement in the world to which it belongs can be described but also

calls for a model by which the acquisition or, better (because it was
already some sort of an implement for the student before he
consulted the professor), the transformation of its cultural
characteristics can be explained. This model will be formulated on
analogy with Gurwitsch's naturalistic psychological explanation of
sensuous perception, but applies to socio-historical cultural human
life and is thus Gurwitschean if not Gurwitsch's. Part I of the
following exposition is devoted to the description and Part II is
devoted to the explanation of what can also simply be called
'culture'. Part III will bring up several other issues in Gurwitsch
relevant for the phenomenological philosophy of the cultural
sciences. 3
I. Cultural Objects, Life-Spheres, and Worlds
Reflective observation of cultural objects as they present

themselves and cultural life as inattentive to them, i.e.,
noematico-noetic reflection, can distinguish first of all between what
appears best called awareness and what Husserl called positionality.
The former includes perception, recollection, expectation, awareness
of ideal objects, and several types of representational awareness. 4
The latter includes positionality of three kinds, namely believing,
valuing, and willing. Noematic reflection discloses a parallel dif-
ference between objects as they appear and are given, i.e., objects as
'awared (as one might force English to say), on the one hand, and
objects as they are, in the broad Husserlian signification, posited,
i.e., believed in, valued, or willed, on the other hand. The object as
it presents itself then includes belief characteristics, values, and
3. The only cultural anthropologist cited by Gurwitsch is Lucienne

Uvy-Bruhl, with whom he was personally acquainted, but Uvi-Bruhl does not
seem a specific source for Gurwitsch's views.
4. Cf. Lester Embree, "The Phenomenology of Representational Awareness,"
Human Studies, Vol. 15, 1992.
functional characteristics or, better, 'uses', which together can be
called 'cultural characteristics'.
The following from a late essay of Gurwitsch's life-long
position is an expression about the value and especially the use
characteristics that make cultural objects cultural.
In the life-world, we do not encounter-at least not in the

first place-mere corporeal objects, pure perceptual things,
which can be exhaustively described in terms of what
traditionally are called primary and secondary qualities. What
we encounter are cultural objects, objects of value, e.g.,
works of art, buildings [and] which serve specific purposes,
like abodes, places for work, schools, libraries, churches,
and so on. Objects pertaining to the life-world present
themsel ves as tools, instruments, and utensils related to
human needs and desires~ they have to be handled and used
in appropriate ways to satisfy those needs and to yield
desired results. 5 It is the specific sense of their
instrumentality which essentially defines these objects and
makes them be what they are, that is, what they mean to the
members of the socio-historical group to whose life-world
they belong. 6
5. Gurwitscb's Note: See Heidegger, Being and Time, John Macquarrie &
Edward Robinson (Trans.) (London: SCM Press, 1962), §15, about "Zeug," in
contradistinction to "Ding," and "Zuhandenheit" as distinguished from
"Vorhandenheit." On entirely different grounds, the connection between perception
and action has been emphasized by Bergson in Matter and Memory, chap. 1,
Nancy Margaret Paul & W. Scott Palmer (Trans.) (London: George Allen & Unwin,
1911). [On other occasions Gurwitsch traces the notion of use or functional object
back to Wolfgang Kohler's "IntelligenzprUfungen an Anthropoiden" (1917), from
which he took the expression "Funktionsobjekt: ([see note 6] PTS, p. 171, n.
23).]
6. Aron Gurwitsch, Phenomenology and the Theory oj Science, Lester Embree
(Ed.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974, p. 143, cf. 92).
Hereafter this source will be cited as 'PTS'. That the cultural world and the lifeworld
are the same, at least for Gurwitsch, cf. Aron Gurwitsch, Studies in
1966, p. 418f). Hereafter this source will be cited as 'SPP'.
146 LESTER EMBREE
The cave that the anthropology student discovered relates first of

all to the people who lived (and died) in it. Thus, while Gurwitsch's
analyses are most often psychological in being about individual life,
here there is already reference to collective or group life, something
that will be returned to. Most immediately, what has here been called
a cave was encountered as an abode, a church, or at least a refuge
for them and presumably other early Native American people of the
type archaeologists call 'Paleoindians'. (As a 'site,' it also relates to
another group, i.e., the anthropologists, beginning with the
professor and her student.)
If the cave was used as an abode and was naturally formed, then
the naturallartifactual and the natural/cultural distinctions do not
coincide, i.e., it is at once natural and cultural. The spear thrower is
artifactual, i.e., humanly formed, as well as being a cultural object
of the practical sort. It may be added that Gurwitsch recognizes that
a utensil refers specifically to a producer or maker as well as
specifically to a user, while in general it refers "to anyone who
avails himself of it in a typical way in order to accomplish a specific
typical purpose" (PTS, pp. 20, 124). From his descriptions,
Gurwitsch seems, furthermore, to hold that the use the object has
for the user rather than the maker is fundamental, but this does not
seem to be explicitly asserted. Finally, human individuals and
groups are themselves parts of cultural worlds, their cultural uses or
functions being specified as social roles. 7
Gurwitsch offers further descriptive concepts by which human
cultural life may be accounted for. To begin with, "[w]hen we
perceive a hammer, this hammer presents itself not only with the
sense of its specific instrumentality but also as pertaining to a certain
sphere of action" (Fe, p. 100). The atlatl would pertain to the
sphere of hunting, where there is game, fellow hunters, and much
else. A sphere of action is also called a 'life-sphere', which is the
7. Regarding the social dimension. cf. (1) Aron Gurwitsch. Human Encounters
in the Social World, Alexandre Metraux (Ed.) and Fred Kersten (Trans.) (Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press. 1979). hereafter cited as 'HESW'; and (2) the Editor's
Introduction to Aron Gurwitsch. Marginal Consciousness. Lester Embree (Ed.)
(Athens. OH: Ohio University Press. 1985). which will hereafter be cited as 'Me'.
A GURWITsa-IEAN MODEL FOR EXPLAINING CULTURE ... 147
title of a sub-order within the 'order of existence' that is called 'the

perceptual world' in The Field of Consciousness, but plainly this is
the same as what Gurwitsch later called 'the cultural world':
By the perceptual world we mean that order of existence

which, in the pre-theoretical or a-theoretical attitude of every
day experience, unquestionably counts for every one of us
as external reality. At every moment of our conscious life,
we find ourselves in the perceptual world. It is in this world
that we lead our existence, pursue our activities, encounter
our fellow-men to whom we stand in the most diversified
relations ....
Within the paramount reality, which, to every one of us, is

the perceptual world as a whole, several spheres of life and
activity have come to be delimited from one another. Among
such spheres, we mention those of our professional activity,
our family life, the political sphere in which we act as
citizens. Under the conditions of modem civilization, the
separation of such spheres has gradually been accentuated;
each partial sphere has acquired increasing autonomy....
Fellow-men encountered within the sphere of professional

activity appear in, and appear as defined by, their roles
within that sphere. They present themselves as students,
teachers, doctors, patients, employers, employees, business
associates, customers, officials in whom authority is vested,
and the like. Similarly, things are also experienced under the
perspective of situations of concrete action in which they
serve as instruments and tools, thus appearing with reference
to purposes relevant to those situations. (Fe, pp. 382-83)
What is 'order of existence'? One statement reads:
It ["order of existence"] is here taken to denote a systematic

context of objects-this term understood in the broadest
148 LESTER EMBREE
possible sense-which, on account of their qualitative

determinations and very natures, have something to do with,
are related to, one another or, to express it more generally,
have relevancy for one another. Orders of existence are
constituted by, and have unity on the strength of, specific
principles ojrelevancy. (SPP, p. 122)
Another statement reads: "Orders of existence within the

meaning of our definition are the 'natural groupings' in which things
present themselves in pre-scientific and pre-theoretical experience as
well in as the explanatory systems constructed in the several
sciences for the sake of a rational explanation of the world, material,
historical, and social" (Fe, p. 382). This second statement is based
upon the previous part of Fe, which is devoted to the thematic field,
an order of existence being "an indefinitely extended thematic field"
(Fe, p. 381). It would be impossible adequately to summarize that
part in the space available, but it may be quoted that, "[q]uite in
general, the experience of indefinite continuation of context is the
consciousness of the possibility to proceed into an horizon along
specified lines of relevancy in such a manner that the farther the
subject proceeds, the less determinate become the relations of
relevancy to the theme serving as the point of departure" (Fe, p.
380). Although he does recognize, e.g., "the world of our
historico-cultural group as distinguished from the worlds of other
such groups, both contemporary and belonging to the historical
past"(SPP, p. 120), Gurwitsch unfortunately does not offer specific
sketches of differing cultural worlds in terms of their principles of
relevancy. Nevertheless, differences of the worlds of hunters and
gathers from the modem Western world will be intimated below.
There is insufficient space on the present occasion for a full
exposition of Gurwitsch's central doctrine of the constitution of that
which is thematic, relevant, and marginal in any field of conscious
life whatever, but a few quotations and comments may again
suffice. Firstly, there is this set of formal definitions:
A GURWITSGIEAN MODEL FOR EXPLAINING CULTURE ... 149
The first domain is the theme, that which engrosses the mind
of the experiencing subject, or as it is often expressed,
which stands in the 'focus of his attention'. Second is the
thematic field, defined as the totality of those data,
co-present with the theme, which are experienced as
materially relevant or pertinent to the theme and form the
background or horizon out of which the theme emerges as
the center. The third includes data which, though co-present
with, have no relevancy to, the theme and comprise in their
totality what we propose to call the margin. (Fe, p. 4)
Themes and thematic fields can, secondly, be ideal rather than real:
Dealing with a scientific theorem, we have first a more or

less explicit and clear consciousness of what leads to that
theorem, of consciousness of this theorem, of other
theorems compatible or incompatible with it, of facts
somehow related to those to which our theorem refers.
Second, we have a certain awareness, more or less vague
and penumbral, of our actual environment, of the room in
which we are, of the things in the room, of the time of day,
of our bodily posture, of the length of time spent on the
scientific topic in question, and so on. (Fe, p. 340)
The latter type of awareness8 is called 'marginal consciousness'.

Quite interestingly, while the theme and thematic field in this
example are composed of theorems and facts, which are ideal
objects, the marginal data are plainly of the cultural sort already
defined. This is interesting because the margin always includes, for
Gurwitsch "(1) a certain segment of the stream of consciousness,
(2) our embodied existence, and (3) a certain sector of our per-
ceptual environment" (Me, p. xlv), which are, incidentally, also
orders of existence. Thus at least a part of the 'perceptual' world is
8. The concept expressed by Gurwitsch with 'awareness' is broader that than

that used at the outset of this essay.
150 LESTER EMBREE
always perceived. But actually there is always a sense of the whole

'perceptual world', which is, again, clearly cultural:
The "kernel" of the perceptual world, taken just as at any

moment the subject is aware of its existence, consists of the
things actually perceived at the moment in question.
Correspondingly, the awareness of the perceptual world
which permanently accompanies all conscious life is
crystallized around actual sense perception. This implies that
the awareness under discussion is not confined to the
perceptions actually experienced at the moment. Sitting in
my study and absorbed in some scientific problem, I see not
only the writing desk, the books and papers on it, the wall in
front of me, etc., but I am also aware of the study beyond
the part actually perceived, i.e., of the fact that the room
extends behind my back, that there are things in that part of
the room which I do not happen to perceive just now, etc.
This awareness of the perceptual environment beyond the
part actually perceived at the moment may extend still
further, e.g., to the house in whose architectonic
arrangement my study occupies a place, to the street on
which the house is located, to the city containing the street,
etc. Dealing with any theme whatsoever we not only
perceive a certain sector of the perceptual world but are also
aware of a "more" which as an horizon encompasses this
section .... (MC, p. 41)
Thus, whether or not the theme and thematic field are cultural, the
cultural world is always in the background.
Thirdl y, the emphasis in the above passage and indeed often in
Gurwitsch's oeuvre can be said to be psychological in the
signification of focused on the individual rather than the group.
However, as has already been seen and will be seen again presently,
the cultural world is intersubjectively constituted. He even offers an
account of how individual life-histories are integrated, which
concludes as follows. "On the basis of the one, unique objective
A GURWITSGlEAN MODEL roR EXPLAINING CULTURE ... 151
time, in which the life-histories of all persons take place, all the
spatial surroundings of those life-histories are unified into one
all-encompassing order of existence, namely, the one real, objective,
spatio-temporal world, the life-world of all human beings
communicating with each other either directly or indirectly" (FC, p.
387, emphasis altered).
Fourthly, the expression 'the cultural world' must not be taken
to signify that there is but one such world. Rather, this and various
other expressions, need to be comprehended as eidetic, i.e.,
expressing universal concepts, which is to say concepts about the
eidos of any cultural world whatever.
Fifthly, it is to be expected that there be particular cultural
worlds in Gurwitsch's account and also species of cultural worlds.
Concerning particulars,
[h]istorical reflections strip any cultural world of the

matter-of-course character which it has for those who simply
live in it. ... In the light of such reflections, our cultural
world appears as one among a great many others, for
instance, the world of the ancient Egyptians, that of the
ancient Mesopotamians, indeed, the numerous cultural
worlds corresponding to the numerous sociohistorical
groups that have existed in the course of history or still exist.
(PTS, p. 23; cf. FC, p. 392 for medieval France and the
then contemporaneous China)
"From a historical point of view, there is no justification for

assigning a privilege to any particular life-world, e.g., our own"
(PTS, p. 24, emphasis altered). There are also orders of existence
that are "various historical periods in separate civilizations" (FC, p.
409). (Gurwitsch seems not to have addressed the question of how
periods and worlds arise from and perhaps overlap one another, but
on the basis of his Gestaltist view of child development and his
historical sketches, it may be speculated that he would have
recognized revolutions and even that, at least for natural science, the
natural world changed thoroughly with Galileo's work.)
152 LESTER EMBREE
There are thus various particular civilizations that come under the
species of cultural world called 'civilization', which Gurwitsch
unfortunately does not define. Nevertheless, since the Paleoindian
hunter-gatherers of the Western United States 7,000 years ago did
not by any definition have a civilization, their world would belong to
a different species of cultural world than our own does. Another
passage covers the possibility of encountering widely different
cultural worlds, which our anthropology student has begun to do.
To a stranger not familiar with our society and civilization,

the things and utensils we use, whose typical use and typical
meaning are a matter of course to us, will appear in a light
highly different from that in which we perceive them.
Conversely, if we come to a strange society or discover the
material remainders of a civilization of the past, we are more
often than not at a loss to "understand" its utensils, since we
do not know, at the outset, their typical purposes or,
consequently, their typical uses. (PTS, p. 117)
Sixthly, it deserves explicit comment that this is all a matter of

what appears best called basic culture; in narrower significations a
distinction may be made between 'cultured' and 'not cultured' with
respect to taste in literature, for example, but this is quite culture-
specific and a cultural world can exist without 'high' culture.
Seventhlyand lastly, for Gurwitsch, the human or, better,
'cultural' sciences, the Geisteswissenschajten, do not abstract from
the cultural characteristics, i.e., the uses, values, and belief
characteristics, of cultural objects and worlds, as the natural sciences
do, but rather share as their subject matter the cultural world:
In dealing with a past epoch, we must reconstruct the

surroundings as they were for those living then. In this
orientation of scientific thought, the mechanisms of the
environment in question must be established, the laws
determining their function must be ascertained, the
formations of social institutions and the changes they have
A GURWITSGffiAN MolE... FOR EXPLAINING CULTURE ... 153
undergone in the course of history must be studied, and the
conditions of their origin, expansion, and decline must be
investigated. Thus the historical, archaeological,
philological, economic, sociological, and similar sciences are
constituted. In these moral or human sciences, the objects
are not constituted in terms of their physical and chemical
determinations or according to their purely qualitative and
perceivable properties -even when they are objective, as in
the case of material things. Instead, the objects are
considered in their locations within the surroundings, not as
they are in themselves but according to the functions
assigned to them by those who utilize them. That is, in the
human sciences, the objects remain junctional objects. (PTS,
p. 178; cf. Chs. 5 & 6)
The shared subject matter that is the cultural world can then be
approached in different disciplinary perspectives. Going again
beyond the letter but probably not beyond Gurwitsch's spirit, it may
be asserted that in the cultural-psychological sciences the typical
individual of this or that sort is thematized, while in what might be
called 'communal science' there is thematization of group or
collective life ranging from two people out to the whole of a society,
such 'communal science' subdividing, firstly, into the synchronic or
social sciences and the diachronic or historical sciences and,
secondly, both species further dividing according to the sort of
interaction and relationship emphasized, e.g., structural and also
historical linguistics, economics and economic history, ethnology
and archaeology, etc. 9
While there are a number of additional points not included,10
enough has been expressed above to support the claim that there is a
9. Cf. Lester Embree. "Archaeology: The Most Basic Science of All."

Antiquity. Vol 61. 1987.
10. For example: "If-and this is the case in certain societies-men. animals.
demons. etc .. including the dead. constitute a society. then all of that belongs to
the world of daily existence or to reality." Aron Gurwitsch and Alfred Schutz.
Philosophers in Exile: The Correspondence of Alfred Schutz and Aron Gurwitsch,
1939-1959. Richard Grathoff (Ed.) J. Claude Evans (Trans.) (Bloomington and
154 LESTER EMBREE
significant approach and also a correlative bcx:ly of results explicit or

implicit in the oeuvre of Aron Gurwitsch for the description of
cultural encounters, cultural objects, cultural life, cultural worlds,
or, in short, culture.
II. A Model for Explaining Cultural Encounters
A. Types of Phenomenological Accounts
Whether it be of ideal, naturalistic, or cultural objects,

description is fundamental in phenomenology, but this is not the
only form that phenomenological accounts take. 'Explaining' and
'explanation' can be used to express broad significations that
'accounting' and 'account' better expresses, if only because
'describing' and 'description' and 'explaining' and 'explanation' can
then denominate distinct species under that genus. Gurwitsch
regularly distinguished these concepts in his lectures at the New
School during the 1960s by saying that 'describing' is accounting
jor matters in their own terms and 'explaining' is accounting jor
matters in terms oj other matters. It is possible to go beyond the
letter of Gurwitsch and distinguish subspecies under the species
strictly called explanation. When matters are accounted for in terms
of their purposes, teleological explanation can be spoken of. When
matters are accounted for in terms of past and present actualities as
causes, factors, or conditions, aitiologicalexpianation can be spoken
of. Justificatory explanations or, simply, justifications, assert that
positings are justified because founded upon and motivated by other
inattentive strata, e.g., believing is justified by evidencing
(Evidenz). And when the world is accounted for in terms of
transcendental intersubjectivity, grounding or groundational
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989, p. 233). Hereafter this source will
be referred to as ·PE.· The same poi nt is made at SPP, p. 403.
A GURWITSGIEAN MOlE.... FOR ExH..AINING CULTURE ... 155
explanation can be spoken of. Justificatory and groundational

explanations are beyond the scope of the present essay. 1 1
The present concern is ultimately with the aitiological
explanation of culture using natural scientific data, but first it needs
to be recognized that there is some awkwardness in attempting
merely to describe a cultural object, e.g., the use of an atlatl without
reference to what it is used for, i.e., the purpose of killing game.
There are two contrasts in the following passage.
When we [culturally] perceive a tool, for example, a

hammer, what is perceived is inadequately described if it is
merely characterized as aT-shaped object of a certain color
and size. In its very perceptual presentation, the thing
perceived appears as suitable and useful for certain purposes
for which it has to be properly manipulated in order to yield
certain desirable results. (Fe, p. 40~ cf. PfS, p. 171)
(The gloss 'cultural' has been added here to reinforce that cultural
rather than naturalistic objects are intended to in the perceiving in
question.)
The first sentence in this passage inel udes a naturalistic
description of the properties of an object while the second one
expresses a cultural explanation of an object in relation to a purpose.
A naturalistic explanation could be added that mentioned makers and
the shaping and combining of the metal and wooden parts of the
T-shaped object. A cultural description can be derived from the
second sentence, which expresses a cultural explanation of the
teleological subspecies. Actually, Gurwitsch does this when he
continues the above passage with "In other words, the object
perceived presents itself with the specific sense of its
instrumentality" (Idem.). In yet other words, one can characterize
the hammer as having a function or use and even go on to assert
that, in contrast with something that is a purpose, this is an extrinsic
11. Insofar as noetico-noematic 'description' involves accounting for noemata

in terms of noeses and vice versa, it too would involve explanation.
156 LESTFR EMBREE
rather than an intrinsic use, a means use rather than an end use.
Whether this extrinsic use is positive or negative would depend on
whether the hammer is used to create or destroy, which can be
determined by considering the modality of the volitional or praxic
stratum in the using of it, which can be distinguished from the
willing of the positive or negative purpose. 12 Thus the willing of the
means is considered apart from the willing of the end just as the
means is separated from the end. Cultural description is thus
possible even though artificial. (See Figure 2.)
Objects Account
Explanatory Descriptive Etc.

Aitiological Teleological
Cultural
Naturalistic empty
Etc.
Fig. 2 Some Types of Explanation of Real Objects
The teleological explanation of cultural objects could begin with,

e.g., a central instrument such as the spear thrower and then proceed
to account for it, the dart and other instruments, such as knives, and
also fellow hunters, the hunting ground, and the game, perhaps a
mammoth, and its habits, and even the wind, which can conceal or
expose the hunters, as these combine into the hunting-life sphere the
chief purpose of which is, presumably, to bring back food. (It could
also have the secondary purposes of testing manhood, leadership,
divine beneficence, etc.) In a world of foragers there would also be
a gathering life-sphere where the purpose was the same but the
gatherers, the gathering places, plants and small animals, the
12. Cf. Embree, ·Some Noetico-Noematic Analyses.·

A GURWITSCHEAN MODEL FDR EXFLAINING CULTURE ... 157
digging sticks, the carrying bags and baskets, etc. would be

instrumental. Our fictional example of a long-sealed cave would be
of great archaeological significance if remains of the latter sorts were
preserved, because, as perishable, they are rarely found. Equipment
found in the cave might pertain to those other life-spheres, but to
what sphere would the cave itself belong? Was it an abode, a place
in which religious ceremonies were conducted, i.e., a church, or
merely a temporary refuge during a storm?
These life-spheres, which were probably quite overlapping,
belong to a cultural world. To appreciate that world, it could help to
contrast it with modern civilization: it does not have our houses,
automobiles, airplanes, televisions, refrigerators, electric lights,
telephones, fax machines, etc. Our sophisticated technology
contrasts with the intimate acquaintance with the local environment
that is characteristic of a hunter-gather society. Nevertheless,
provided there is sufficient data, both can be accounted for to a large
extent as practical worlds and thus in terms of ends and means, i.e.,
teleologically.
Another contrast in.emphasis that ought not to be taken as a
contrast in essence is between 'understanding' cultural objects in
terms of their purposes and 'explaining' naturalistic objects in terms
of their causes, which would be to identify the contrast of
teleological explanation and aitiological explanation with the contrast
of cultural objects and naturalistic objects. It is true that teleological
explanation of naturalistic objects as such is not possible, but it is
false that given cultural objects are not accountable for in terms of
concurrent and preceding cultural objects. This will be shown
presently. Incidentally, ideal objects can also be explained, e.g.,
when a conclusion is accounted for in terms of premises,13 but the
focus of the present essay is on real objects, which are either cultural
or naturalistic. While teleological accounts are not possible for
naturalistic objects, aitiological accounts are. The central aitiological
model in Gurwitsch derives from Gestalt psychology and appears
13. Cf. FC, p. 325f on ·Context in Logic.·

158 LESTER EMBREE
naturalistic. The transItIOn to a model for aitioiogicai cultural

explanation is best presented in relation to this model.
B. A Naturalistic Model for Psychological Explanation
The psychological aitiology of the sensuous perception of

naturalistic objects in the work of the Graz school and that of
Vittorio Benussi in particular participates in the "general dualistic
conception prevailing in traditional explanations of perception" (FC,
p. 88), which Gurwitsch follows the Gestaltists in opposing. The
dualism is of (a) "sensory facts of a higher order" (FC, p. 87), i.e.,
"images, memories, and residua" (FC, p. 96), as well as (b) those
due to physical stimuli according to the Constancy Hypothesis,
which posits the "dependency of sense-data upon physical stimuli"
(FC, p. 90).14
Phenomenologically, this dualism is already problematical:
Immediate experience does not bear out the dualistic account

advanced in the school of Graz. While listening to a melody
or seeing a geometrical configuration, one is unaware of any
non-sensory process [e.g., imagination or recollection], nor
is the theme experienced as consisting of two strata of
different origin. On the contrary, the melody or the
configuration, as given in immediate experience, appears as
both homogeneous and altogether a matter of sensibility.
(FC, p. 88)
14. Merleau-Ponty has discussed how 'stimulus' is an ambiguous expression,

sometimes denoting a perceivable object and sometimes denoting sound and light
waves, for example, which are not themselves perceivable even though we can be
said to perceive because of them. Clearly the latter are intended by Gurwitsch. Cf.
Lester Embree, "Merleau-Ponty's Examination of Gestalt Psychology," Research in
Phenomenology, Vol. 10, 1980.
A GURWITSGlEAN MOlE... KlR EXPLAINING CULTURE ... 159
Note well that, by the examples given, naturalistic objects, i.e.,

objects characterized by their sensuous determinations with their
uses disregarded (melodies are not as such love songs, nor
geometrical configurations windows), are under consideration.
(Gurwitsch's objections to the auxiliary hypotheses of unnoticed
sensations and of unconscious perception can be disregarded here.)
The naturalistic aitiological model of the Graz school is presented
formally as follows.
Denoting the stimuli and external conditions playing a part

by X e, the subjective conditions by Xi (internal conditions),
the resulting percept by P, we may illustrate Benussi's
theory by the mathematical expression: P=f 1(Xe)+f2(Xi), f 1
and f2 standing for functional dependencies. This expression
renders Benussi's interpretation of the percept as consisting
of two heterogeneous strata, one of which depends on
external conditions, and the other, founded by the former,
only upon internal conditions. If the external conditions are
kept constant, while allowing the internal conditions to vary,
the illustrating mathematical expression assumes the form:
P=Const.+f2(Xi). This fits very well with Benussi's view in
which the percepts have a constant common stratum, but
differ as to the variable part which, on account of its origin,
is the 'higher' stratum. 15
The external conditions for the heard melody or seen spatial

configuration are sound waves and photons, neither of which are
themselves directly observed. They are unperceivable external
explanatory factors of the sort posited in modem physics. By
contrast, the internal or subjective conditions include, firstly, a
change of attitude correlative to the operation called 'mental
isolation. '
15. Fe. p. 92. This position is more elaborately presented in SPP, p. 23f.
160 LESTER EMBREE
Mental isolation is accomplished by adopting the appropriate

attitude of analyzing, isolating, an abstracting attention. For
instance, in the case of geometrical-optical illusions, instead
of looking at the figure as a whole, the subject endeavors to
concentrate upon certain lines to the neglect of others which,
however, continue being presented to consciousness. (FC,
p.93)
In general, "[i]ntemal conditions comprise any operational factors

other than the actual stimulation of sense-organs" and, secondly,
among specific internal conditions, there is "the past of the
individual is of paramount importance" (FC, p. 96). Setting aside
the internal conditions of the neurophysiological sort, (a) past
experience and (b) the present attitude remain as the internal or
subjective conditions. These are observable and indeed can be
naturalistically observable matters, particularly if reflection on others
and representational awareness are included as types of
observation. 16 Naturalistic observation includes other as well as
own psychic components in naturalistic objects, i.e., animals, and
hence is not merely physicalistic.
Gurwitsch's sympathetic presentation of the non-dualistic (but
still naturalistic) model of the Gestaltists recognizes the same three
types of conditions or factors but it does not recognize separate
effects:
We compare two perceptions: PI when the subject looks at

the figure as a whole~ P2 when he concentrates on certain
lines, disregarding others. With respect to the two
16. For more elaborate uses of representational awareness than that cited in
n.4 above, cf. Lester Embree, "Phenomenology of a Change in Archaeological
Observation," in Metaarchaeology, Lester Embree (Ed.) (Boston Studies in the
Philosophy of Science, Dordrecht: K1uwer Academic Publishers, 1992). "An
Excavation of Archaeological Cognition or How to Hunt Mammoth," in The
Question oj Hermeneutics, Timothy J. Stapleton (Ed.) (Dordrecht: K1uwer Academic
Publishers, 1994) and "Representation and Historical Science," in Phenomenology
East and West: Essays in Honor oj J. N. Mohanty, D. P. Chattopadhyaya and
Frank Kirkland (Eds.) (Dordrecht: K1uwer Academic Publishers, 1993).
A GURWITSCHEAN MODEL RJR EXPLAINING CULTURE ... 161
perceptions, one must insist upon the identity of the stimuli,

and upon the difference in the attitude of the perceiving
subject. When in consequence of a change in attitude,
different percepts result, the only warranted conclusion is
that the percept depends upon both external and internal
conditions. Abandoning the constancy-hypothesis, one can
no longer justify distinguishing between two strata within
the percept, either stratum varying in dependence upon
conditions of only one special kind. (FC, p. 94) ...
Dismissing the constancy hypothesis, we shall no longer see

the influence of past experience upon present perception in
the addition of new materials to sensations, nor in a
subsequent modification of the latter, subsequent in that to
be modified, the sensations must first be given in that shape
corresponding to local stimulation. Generalizing our
previous discussion of the dependence of perception upon
the attitude adopted by the perceiving subject leads us to
conceive of previous experience as one of the internal
conditions upon which perception and perceptual
organization depends . . . . Such dependence is expressed
mathematically by P=f(Xe, Xi). (FC, p. 97)
C. Aitiology of Cultural Encounters
(Both cultural perception and action, the objects of which concretely

include values and purposes, can be comprehended as species of
'cultural encounters'.)
When Gurwitsch goes on to apply the GestaItist model to what

he sometimes calls the "acquisition of empirical meanings," he
interestingly departs from the naturalistic research perspective
indicated by his naturalistic account. Such "empirical meanings," an
162 LESTER EMBREE
expression seemingly from Jean Piaget, were first introduced as

synonymous with "functional characters" (FC, p. 40), which can
also be called uses or cuI tural characteristics of the practical sort. 17
The concern is with explaining, aitiologically, how objects come to
have their cuI tural characteristics.
Such empirical acquisition has two aspects. First, when in a

situation of concrete action an object is manipulated, a
schema in the sense of Piaget, a mode of action or a series of
systematized actions, is established. Secondly, being
manipulated and used in connection with other objects, being
assigned a definite role in the situation of concrete action, the
object in question undergoes phenomenal reorganizations
and restructuring. The latter consist in functional characters
of suitability, fitness, and instrumentality accruing to the
object. The specific instrumentality is characteristic of tools
of the kind under consideration, in our case a hammer. I t is a
peculiarity of functional characters ... to become permanent
once they are constituted and established. Their permanency
appears in that similar objects exhibit these functional
characters in perceptual experience and present themselves
under the aspect of the use to which they may be put in
certain situations of action, even when they are encountered
outside such situations and under circumstances which have
no need of a tool of that kind. (FC, p. 40; cf. PTS, pp. 171,
176, where permanence is tied to habit)
Thus, the spear thrower can be encountered by the pertinently

prepared person as a spear thrower outside the hunting life-sphere
and even outside the world of hunter-gathers. The pertinent
17. In a signification different from that in 'the meaning of a word',

"meanings" sometimes signify, unfortunately, the meanings that objects have for
us, which is to say their values, uses, and purposes, which 'cultural characteristics'
appears to express better. Moreover, 'empirical' can signify 'due to past
experience', which is different from 'factual'.
A GURWITsa-IEAN MODEL FUR EXFLAINING CULTURE ... 163
preparation would seem to include hearing (or reading) accounts and
feigning (or pictorially representing) others using the instrument.
The parallel statement of the account of the acquisition of
'empirical meanings' expressed in FC after the naturalistic model is
complementary, but the emphasis is on permanency rather than
instrumentality:
Functional characters accrue to objects in situations of

concrete action in which the subject manipulates the object,
learns to handle it in a determinate manner, to use it for a
certain purpose in connection with other objects, and thus
acquires a certain mode of action. Such acquisition will
henceforth codetermine future perception. Suppose the same
or similar object is reencountered after the acquisition of the
mode of action. The later [cultural] perception occurs under
different conditions ....
Accordingly, through the latter perception the object does not

appear as it did through the earlier one. We venture to assert
that a phenomenally different object presents itself through
the later perception....
It is reorganized, reconstructed, imbued with empirical

meaning, and defined by its specific instrumentality without
any explicit recall of the situation of action in which the
object was reorganized and acquired its functional character .
. . . The permanency of functional characters manifests itself
in that the same or a similar object is immediately perceived
as defined by the characteristics under discussion. (FC, p.
98)
This account would have been clearer if Gurwitsch had

differentiated naturalistic from cultural perception explicitly and, had
he done that, he might have recognized some differences about the
explanation in question. Firstly, it is no longer a question of whether
or not there are two strata to the object of sensuous awareness as it
164 LE.STffi EMBREE
presents itself, which is the issue for the naturalistic model.

Secondly, there certainly is a duality to the cultural object, namely
between the naturalistic determinations by which there is "a
T-shaped object of a certain color and size" (or "a stick of wood less
than a meter long with a small protuberance at one end") and a
hammer (or an atlatl) with its cultural or functional characteristics of
the sorts called instrumentality and permanency, which he
distinguishes and discusses in the above and previous quotations.
The latter determinations, which are accessible through noematic
analysis, are what is abstracted from in order to get the former,
which Gurwitsch calls "material contents" and which include
naturalistic determinations such as shape, color, size, heaviness,
etc. 18
Had he recognized these differences, Gurwitsch might have
furthermore suspected that the duality in cultural objects might in
part have led to the believing in a duality in naturalistically perceived
objects. More importantly here, he might have recognized a version
of his model that the above discussions take for granted. The formal
model of P=f(xe,xj) remains the same and the internal conditions of
attitude and past experience are the same, but the photons, sound
waves, or other unperceivable factors are not the external condition
(Xi); instead the external condition is the object naJuralisticalZy
considered, i.e., the objects with its material contents of size, shape,
color, weight, causal efficacies, etc. but with its cultural
characteristics abstracted from. This might best be seen by
considering whether or not something of the size, shape, and weight
of a brick could be used and acquire the function of a spear thrower.
The attitude that would be a condition for the acquisition of
instrumentality would be a practical and specifically a hunting
attitude, where the purpose of bringing down game was served.
This would seem the case even if one was not actually practicing the
action but rather looking at the ancient stick with the protuberance
while riding in the professor's truck back to the re-opened cave and
hearing (or even reading) for the first time about how spear throwers
18. Cf. ·Some Noetico-Noematic Analyses." p. 189f.

are used by mammoth hunters. And more effective than reading or
hearing (and perhaps also feigning) the using of an atlatl, but not as
effective as actually using it, would be the watching of someone else
use one either directly or through a moving or even still picture (see
Fig. 1 again). Any or all of these can function in past experience as
internal conditions for "a stick of wood less than a meter long with a
small protuberance at one end" becoming a spear thrower for
somebody.
Applying the other Gurwitschean terms, something is a practical
theme and this would not originally be the atlatl but rather the target,
perhaps a mammoth to be taken, and then the atlatl is in the hunter's
thematic field as something relevant to that target. Also relevant,
however, is of course the dart to be hurled, the terrain and the wind
in one's face that help one get close enough, the efforts of fellow
hunters to drive the mammoth in one's direction, the incantations by
the shaman that one remembers, etc., i.e., the hunting life-sphere.
The attitude and practice by which the skill is developed, i.e., the
internal conditions, are plain enough. But the terrain and the
behavior of the animals hunted are best appreciated naturalistically as
external conditions in preparation for the explanation of cultural
encounters.
The same would hold for gathering and in archaeological
perspective where microscopic studies of pollen remains in the soil
and in the baskets, etc. in the cave would make it possible to
reconstruct what plants were available in the environment at the time
as well as those that were gathered. Rather sophisticated methods,
e.g., for identifying trace elements in bones, can be added in order
to reconstruct diet, but these do not culminate in an understanding of
the biological environment, the plants and animals, but in an account
of what the Paleoindians in the place and time used as food, food
being not merely that which is nutritious (or not) but also that which
is culturally encountered as food. Insect larvae is seldom dined on in
contemporary Western society. Through actualization of "the
possibility to proceed into the horizon along specific lines of
relevancy" the order of existence that is the cultural world can be
explored. At the same time, the natural science based efforts to
166 LESTER EMBREE
reconstruct the environment, naturalistically considered, on the basis

of which a group lived yields the third factor for explaining that
culture.
The case of the spear thrower brings out something else. That
which can be used by a group in an environment, i.e., that which
can be made part of the group's cultural world, is conditioned by the
available technology. Without the atlatl, mammoth would be much
more difficult to hunt if huntable at all. Eventually, the atlatl was
replaced in North America by the bow and arrow, which was more
effective in taking game. Perhaps the change was great enough for
the 'atlatl world' to be said to have given way to the 'bow and arrow
world.' Certainly this did happened when feral horses from the
Spanish invasion produced the horse culture of the plains, these
mounts enhancing the hunting equipment enormously. Interestingly,
however, the atlatl, an Aztec word, continued to be used in the
Valley of Mexico up until the Spaniards came. This may be because
the humidity of that area and the materials available for bow strings
made the bow and arrow unreliable, which is a cultural explanation
in which the external condition is a matter of material contents
naturalistically considered.
III. Problems for Further Research
Beginning from Gurwitsch's notions of cultural object, theme/

thematicfield/margin, life-sphere, and cultural world, the effort has
been made to show that not only teleological explanation but also
aitiological explanation of culture is possible. Several additional
issues emerge in relation to this account. One is the question of the
role of technology just touched upon. In terms of how the model is
developed above and if 'technology' is defined as the using of
equipment, 19 then it can be wondered whether it is an internal or an
19. Cf. Lester Embree, "A Perspective on the Rationality of Scientific

Technology or How to Buy a Car," in Timothy Casey & Lester Embree (Eds.),
A GURWITSCHEAN MODEL fUR EXFLAINING CULTURE ... 167
external condition. This appears best approached beginning from the

question of what is to be explained. If the concern is with explaining
an end, e.g., getting food, then the means, e.g., the hunting
equipment, is an internal condition, which, as mentioned, explains
which game can be taken. If the concern was with explaining the
equipment, which has chiefly been the case above, then the purpose
would be considered an internal condition.
Another issue concerns how it is possible to understand another
world. This question is so vast that more than mentioning it seems
unnecessary, but it might also be suggested that this same problem
is already involved when one seeks to understand how an other in
the same cultural world and even life-sphere uses equipment that one
is not familiar with. Colleagues who still compose texts with pencil,
paper, and typist rather than wordprocessors and laser printers are
already cases of otherness for some contemporary writers.
A third issue concerns the cultural origin of natural science, i.e.,
"Science as a Cultural Accomplishment in the Lebenswelt" (SPP, p.
421f, cf. PTS, p. 108f., etc.). A critical remark in a letter to Schlitz
is pertinent:
Behind all these theories is Husserl's idea of a level of "pure

experience" within the life-world, a level which is taken to
be fundamental and on the basis of which other levels are
built up. I have always had my doubts about this theory. If I
take socio-cultural objects, I understand how they can
become "bodies" by means of unbuilding [Abbau] or some
similar process~ but if I begin with bodies as the fundamental
level, there are difficulties in getting to the cultural objects..
. . And history confirms me: only since Galileo are there
bodies~ Aristotle's physics has no idea of any such thing.
(PE, p. 232)
Lijeworld and Technology (Washington, D.C., Center for Advanced Research in

Phenomenology and University Press of America, 1990).
168 LESTER EMBREE
This passage speaks to the question of whether the human or

cultural sciences, in which cultural characteristics are not abstracted
from and in which, hence, the objects are concrete, are prior to the
natural sciences, which begin from abstracted naturalistic objects.
More relevant here, however, is the suggestion that the modern
Western cultural world is where recourse to the naturalistic attitude
begins. 2o If this is the case, one can ask, in retrospect, what caused
that innovation during the Renaissance and what its purpose or
purposes were.
Finally, if cultural objects, life-spheres, and, ultimately, cultural
worlds are multiple, issues of inter-world identity and what may be
called non-relativity arise. The formulation of this question in terms
of the 'objective' and the 'subjective' seems overloaded with
connotations ranging from obviousness in one respect to irrationality
or at least unknowability in the other. Are not only valuing and
values and purposing and purposes but also cognition and objects as
cognized confined in their possible correctness to the cultural worlds
in which occur? One popular alternative in the contemporary
Western world appears not to bear scrutiny. There is not one
objective or non-relative naturalistic world in the many subjective or
relative cultural worlds, for this is to take an abstract part discernible
by insiders in their own modern Western world and, since they can
also discern similar parts abstractly in other cultural worlds of which
they are outsiders (and whether or not the insiders can do so), to
consider it as if it were concrete as well as identical. But, as a
cultural object, i.e., concretely, the moon of the Indians is not the
moon of the British.
Gurwitsch approaches this issue again through interpretation of
Husserl on the "invariant structures of the Lebenswelt":
A science of the Lebenswelt which respects its specific

character and takes it as it presents itself in direct experience
(the notion of experience understood in the sense of
20. In lectures from hi s Paris period, Gurwitsch discusses how the piece of
wax analyzed in Descartes's second meditation is already devoid of the uses it has
in the market place, in religions ceremonies, or in sealing letters.
A GURWITsa-IEAN MODEL FOR EXPLAINING CULTURE ... 169
pre-scientific life, and not interpreted in terms of sense data)

can obviously not be a science of the Galilean style in which
a theoreticallogico-mathematical superstructure supersedes
the Lebenswelt. First of all, according to Husserl, we have
to perform an epoch£ concerning "objective science". . . .
This does not mean ignoring the existence of "objective
science" or pretending to live in a world from which
"objective science" is absent. It does not mean denying or
even doubting its validity. "Objective science" and its results
and accomplishments remain what they always have been,
viz., cultural facts pertaining to our Lebenswelt. We are far
from abandoning our interests in "objective science."
However, under the epoch£, we abstain from pursuing those
interests; we suspend them, put them out of play. We refrain
from being involved in the pursuit of "objective science"; we
adopt the attitude of disinterested neutrality with regard to
those pursuits ....
This epoche enables us to take the Lebenswelt at face value

as we experience it as our historico-cultural reality, without
referring it to, or having it superseded by, "being as it really
is in itself." Yet the idea of a general science of the
Lebenswelt seems beset by an insuperable difficulty. Such a
science, though not of Galilean style, must admit of a certain
objectivity and validity of its own; it must develop methods
by which true and warranted assertions can be established-
i.e., assertions which appear as conclusive and cogent to
whomever uses these methods. This, however, seems
incompatible with the essential relativity of the Lebenswelt to
a given community and even to a certain phase in the history
of that community. Would not each one of these indefinitely
many Lebenswelten require a science of its own? Is there
room for a general science of the Lebenswelt as such?
Notwithstanding its relativity, the Lebenswelt exhibits an

invariant structure: more precisely, an invariant structural
170 LESTffi EMBREE
framework within which the relative and changeable finds its

place. Prior to, and independently of, "objective science, II
the Lebenswelt appears extended in space and time. The
space in question is, of course, that which we experience
and in which we live and not a mathematical space; it does
not contain any ideal geometrical entities (points, planes,
etc.); it is not infinitely divisible; it does not form an
infinitesimal continuum, etc. The same holds with respect to
time. In the Lebenswelt we encounter corporeal things, but
they are not bodies in the sense of geometry or physics.
Finally, the Lebenswelt displays causality, not in the sense
of laws of nature formulated in equations of functional
dependency, but rather regularity, typical uniformity,
typicality of behavior. As Husserl puts it, things have their
"habits" (Gewohnheiten) of behaving in similar ways under
typically similar conditions. (SPP, p. 424; cf. PTS, p. 25f,
SPP, p. 120, etc.)
The interesting possibility in relation, e.g., to the moon of the

Indian and the moon of the British, is then of an apriori or set of
eide that, first of all, observable objects in the abstractly discernible
naturalistic stratum of any particular cultural world, e.g. that large,
mottled, bluish spheroid in the (two!) skies, would exemplify. The
mentioned naturalistic determinations can be extended to the
natural-scientific, e.g., geological, hydrological, atmospheric,
botanical, and zoological eide that such particular objects in
particular worlds might or might not exemplify (not all worlds focus
on atlatls). Beyond that there are the aspects of concern to cultural
sciences of the psychological, social-scientific, and historical sorts
which mayor may not be instantiated in a given particular cultural
world, such as the roles of hunters and gatherers in a foraging
society or whether a society is a civilization or not. Finally, the
classification of cultural characteristics (and the strata of inattentive
life in which they are constituted) into the cognitive, evaluative, and
practical, each as intrinsic or extrinsic, and each of those with
positive, negative, and neutral modalities, etc. WOUld, by this
A GURWITSGlEAN MOlE.... FOR EXPLAINING CULTURE ... 171
approach, have eidetic status and be perhaps exemplified in any
cultural encounter whatever.
These are but a few of the respects in which Aron Gurwitsch's
phenomenology of the cultural sciences can be continued. The
present essay has been concerned with explicating a mode of
explanation of significance for cultural science that is beyond his
letter but seemingly in his spirit.
Part IV
Philosophy in the Spirit of

Aron Gurwitsch
8
On the Difference Between Transcendental and

Empirical Subjectivity
David Carr
Emory University
From the time his phenomenological method was fully

developed, Husserl always distinguished between transcendental
subjectivity and its empirical or "mundane" counterpart. In this, as
in many other things, Husserl's work was influenced by Kant and
the neo-Kantians, who made a similar distinction. In this paper I
want to examine this distinction, primarily in its Husserlian form,
and consider some of its implications.
I shall begin by explaining why I think it important to take up
this topic now (section I). I am especially interested here in how it
relates to the attacks on the "metaphysics of the subject." Then I
shall tum to the distinction itself and propose a way of making sense
of it (section II). Section III deals with the implications of Husserl's
distinction for some traditional philosophical questions about the
nature of the self, and section IV attempts to draw a balance on the
philosophical significance of Husserl's distinction. I conclude (V)
with some objections and misgivings about the views put forward in
the paper.
175
J. C. Evans and R. W. Stufflebeam (eds.). To Work at the Foundations, 175-191.
176 DAVID CARR
Why take up this topic now? Surely, it might be claimed, the

distinction between transcendental and empirical subjectivity died
with Husserl, and so is not to be counted as part of his enduring
legacy. After all, the first great wave of revisionist phenomenology,
notably the early Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, wanted no part of
this distinction, and indeed seemed determined to do away with it.
And so we usually distinguish historically, partly on the basis of
attitudes toward this distinction, between transcendental and
existential phenomenology.
Alfred Schutz is another phenomenologist who seems to have
thought that in order to get on with the actual work of
phenomenology, in his case by applying it in the social sciences, we
had best put this distinction aside. I get the impression that he, like
many others, was not able to make much sense of it. 1
Perhaps we should consider this distinction as one which at best
cannot be sustained, and which may even inhibit our understanding
and application of phenomenology. Something like this seems to
have occurred in respect to Kant, the who first distinguished
between transcendental and empirical subject, and whose work
influenced Husserl on this and many other points. The Kantian
tradition is alive and well in contemporary philosophy, but few
philosophers make much of the distinction in question.
And yet there is evidence that this distinction somehow just will
not stay dead. Recall that when the big revolt against
phenomenology started in France in the late 1960's, two of its
strongest voices, Derrida and Foucault, insisted-each in his own
way, of course- that the transcendental/empirical-subject distinction
1. See Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology oj the Social World, G. Walsh & F.
Lehnert (Trans.s) (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967, p. 97); also
Collected Papers 1/; Studies in Social Reality, A. Broderson (Ed.) (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1964, p. 25).
ON THE I:M<FERENCE BEfWEENTRANsCENDENTAL AND EMPIRICAL SUBJECTIVTIY 1n
had to be attacked at all costs. 2 While they both spoke of Kant and
Husserl, everyone knows that French existential phenomenology-
Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur-was their real target. But the latter
had already rejected the transcendental/empirical-subject distinction.
Why should this distinction be such an important target for Foucault
and Derrida if it was already dead?
More recently, J. Habermas traces all the ills of modem thought
to the dominance of what he calls "BewuBtseinsphilosophie," which
includes as a strong component the distinction between
transcendental and empirical consciousness. 3 Why should
Habermas think it so important to attack this notion when it has long
since been given up by phenomenology, praxis philosophy, and just
about everyone else? Obviously Habermas, Foucault and Derrida
believe that the transcendental/empirical split survives covertly,
insidiously, even in theories that supposedly reject it. (Habermas
indeed says explicitly that it survives in Heidegger, and implies the
same for Derrida~4 and they would doubtless claim that it survives
covertly in Habermas.)
Then there is another odd bit of evidence: the reaffirmation of the
distinction between transcendental and empirical subjectivity, or
something very close to it, by the analytic philosopher Thomas
Nagel in his recent book The View From Nowhere. 5
All of this leads me to suspect that we ought to say of this
distinction what Alasdair Macintyre said recently about relativism
and skepticism, namely that it is "one of those doctrines that have by
now been refuted a number of times too often. Nothing is perhaps a
surer sign that a doctrine embodies some not-to-be-neglected truth
2. I am thinking primarily of Derrida's Speech and Phenomena and Other

Essays (the other essays are "Differance" and "Form and Meaning") D. B. Allison
(Trans.) (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973); and "The Ends of Man"
in Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
Foucault's clearest statement is in chapter 9 of The Order of Things (New York:
Vintage Books, 1973).
3. Habermas, J., The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, F. Lawrence
(Trans.) (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1987) passim.
4. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, pp. 152, 178f.
5. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). See p. 62n.
178 DAVID CARR
than that in the course of the history of philosophy it should have

been refuted again and again. Genuinely refutable doctrines have to
be refuted only once. "6
Is there a not-to-be-neglected truth in the distinction between
transcendental and empirical subjectivity? If so, what is it? Could it
be that those who have sought to deny this distinction have not
really understood it? These are some of the questions I hope to
answer in the following. For the most part I will be speaking of
Husserl, with occasional references to Kant.
II
First a terminological point. So far I have spoken for the most

part of the distinction between transcendental and empirical
subjectivity, not between transcendental and empirical ego. In this I
follow what is increasingly Husserl's own terminological practice
from his earlier to his later writings. The reason for this is that in
one sense the ego is a special topic within phenomenology, or rather
a whole cluster of special topics relating to the unity-in-diversity of
consciousness. When Husserl speaks of "transcendence in
immanence,"7 of the substrate of habitualities, of the ego-pole,8
etc., he is describing in various ways the unity of consciousness as
opposed to the flowing multiplicity of its experiences and acts.
These are all descriptions of the internal structure of consciousness.
On the other hand, and on a completely different level, there is the
question of the philosophical-or perhaps ontological-status of
consciousness as a whole, with all its internal structures, in relation
6. A. MacIntyre, "Relativism, Power and Philosophy" in After Philosophy,

K. Baynes, J. Bohman & T. McCarthy (Eds.) (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1987, p.
385).
7. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological
Philosophy. First Book. , F. Kersten (Trans.) (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982,
p. 133).
8. Cartesian Meditations, D. Cairns (Trans.) (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff,
1960, p. 66f).
ON TIIE DIFFERENCE BEfWEEN TRANSCENDENTAL AND EMPIRICAL SUBJECTIVTIY 179
to the world. This is the question of its transcendental vs. its

empirical status, and while this reference to consciousness does
overlap with some of the broader senses of the term "ego" in
Husserl, it is preferable, he seems to conclude, to use some other
term when dealing at this level. And so, increasingly, he opts for
"subjectivity. "
This terminological remark leads to a second preliminary, but in
this case quite substantive, remark. A voiding talk of the
transcendental and empirical egos makes it easier to avoid slipping
into one of the possible interpretations of this distinction which is
widespread among commentators but which I regard as a dead-end
and a trap. This is what we might call the A verroistic version of the
distinction, according to which there are many empirical egos, with
names like Edmund Husserl and Immanuel Kant, and with personal
histories and characteristics, but only one big Transcendental Ego
(usually capitalized), the same for all humanity, who may even be
identifiable with God. This version of the transcendental/empirical-
ego split is often attributed to Kant, though I find little justification
for it even there. It is Fichte and Schelling, with their links to
Spinoza, who are responsible for this variant. But I see no trace of it
in Husserl, who often uses the term "transcendental ego" in the
plural.
For Husserl the distinction between transcendental and empirical
subjectivity always arises in the context in which I reflect on myself,
and in which I discover two radically different ways of construing
myself: on the one hand as an object in the world, and on the other
hand as subject/or the world, i.e., the subjectivity or consciousness
which makes "world" possible at all and is related to the world not
as part to whole but as consciousness to its horizon of objects. 9 In
this latter construal it may be true, as Husserl says, that the
individuation of myself loses its bearings, that I speak of myself, or
"I," by equivocation only, and so on.10 But there is no sense in
9. The Crisis oj European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, D.

Carr (Trans.) (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970, p. 178f).
10. The Crisis oj European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, p.
184.
180 DAVID CARR
which at this stage I merge with all other I's or with God. If that
were so, as Merleau-Ponty pointed out, 11 there would have been no
problem of intersubjectivity for Husserl, no worry about solipsism,
no need to work out the notion of the community of monads. But
we know that these were problems for him, indeed deeply troubling
problems.
For Husserl, then, the distinction between transcendental and
empirical subjectivity arises in the context of self-reflection. But of
course it is not just any form of self-reflection that gives rise to this
distinction. We reflect all the time, in the natural course of things,
without needing or using the distinction between myself as
transcendental and myself as empirical. In fact the distinction arises
only in the context of a very sophisticated kind of reflection which is
nothing other than the phenomenological method itself: epoche,
reduction and the rest. Throughout his career, Husserl's utterances
on the distinction between transcendental and empirical subjectivity
occur in the course of presenting and perfecting his method.
Consider, for example, the much quoted footnote on this topic in
the second (1913) edition of the LogicalInvestigations. In the first
edition (1901) he had declared that, search as he might, he was
"quite unable to find" what the Kantians called the "Pure ego." But
then in the 1913 footnote we are told that subsequent researches had
turned it up after al1. 12 If we did not know the context we might
imagine Husserl as a David Hume, rummaging diligently among his
experiences, looking for one called MYSELF, coming up empty-
handed, then looking harder and harder until-eureka! There it is,
perhaps lying hidden behind some bulky perception, but now
exposed to view. What really happened, of course, is that in 1901
Husserl had no fully worked-out phenomenological method,
whereas in 1913 he did-in fact, in 1913 that method was his chief
preoccupation. It was not a matter of looking harder but of looking
11. Phenomenology oj Perception, C. Smith (Trans.) (New York: Humanities

Press, 1962, p. xii.
12. Logical Investigations, Vol. II, 1. N. Findlay (Trans.) (New York:
Humanities Press, 1970, p. 549).
ON THE DFFERENCE BEfWFENTRANsCENDENTAL AND EMPIRICAL SUBJECI1VTIY 181
differently, of having a new way of looking, which was precisely

the method.
So it seems that the distinction between transcendental and
empirical subjectivity emerges only when the phenomenological
method is at work. I want now to focus attention on this fact and
draw out some of its implications.
First a historical digression on Kant, not irrelevant here since
Husserl's change of view was influenced by reflecting on Kant and
the neoKantians. May we not say of Kant, too, that his distinction
between transcendental and empirical subjects emerges only in the
context of applying a new kind of philosophical method, a new
project, called transcendental deduction? The question was new:
instead of looking for everything in experience, as Hume did, we
should ask after the conditions of the possibility of experience. Of
course the "I think" will not tum up in experience, he tells Hume,
because it belongs among those conditions of experience. In fact, it
is chief among them. Thus for Kant, too, the distinction in question
arises in the context of a very sophisticated set of philosophical
questions--questions, we might add, which are incomprehensible
apart from the historical situation of Kant in relation to Hume and
his other predecessors in the modem tradition.
Returning to Husserl, this close connection between the tran-
scendental! empirical-subject distinction and the phenomenological
method has one curious and possibly troubling implication, which
was most clearly articulated by Eugen Fink in his well-known 1933
article "Die Phanomenologie E. Husserls in der gegenwartigen
Kritik." This is that, just when we find it necessary to distinguish
between two senses of subjectivity, transcendental and empirical,
we are forthwith required to introduce a third, namely the phe-
nomenologicallyobserving subject which, in performing the reduc-
tion, makes the very distinction between the other two.l 3
13. Fink, E., Studien mr Phiinomenologie 1930-1939 (Den Haag: Martinus

Nijhoff, 1966, p. 122). "The Phenomenological Philosophy of Edmund Husserl
and Contemporary Criticism," R. o. Elveton (Trans.). In The Phenomenology oj
Husserl: Selected Critical Readings, " R. o. Elveton (Ed.) (Chicago, IL: Quadrangle
Books, 1970, pp. 73-147).
182 DAVID CARR
Subjectivity seems to reproduce itself, amoeba-like, and philoso-

phers who wanted to find the unity of the self are now faced with
something that looks like a committee! Husserl and Fink, to be sure,
did not think of this as a troubling state of affairs, but I think there
are implications here that they did not see, and I shall return to them
directly.
For now, assuming the phenomenologically observing subject
busily at work, what does the distinction between transcendental and
empirical subjectivity really amount to? We have already invoked the
formulation of the Crisis where Husserl distinguishes between
being a subject/or the world and being a subject in the world. I have
argued elsewhere 14 that the best way to understand this distinction is
by assimilating it to the difference between intentional and causal
relations. To say I am a subject in the world is to say that the events
of my mental life coexist in space-time with other events, mental and
physical, and that they must be related to, and thus explained by
those other events in terms of causal regularities. This is where the
brain and nervous system enter in, one way or another. That is,
even if one insists on attributing intentionality to empirical subjects,
rather than trying to argue it away or reduce it to something else, one
is left with the causal relation: it cannot be ignored or wished away
once we assume that subjectivity is part o/the world.
To consider myself strictly as subject/or the world, by contrast,
means that the events of my mental life relate to other events and
things-physical, mental, even ideal-purely in the intentional way.
This means that they are objects (in the broadest sense) for me,
which is to say that they have meaning for me or rake sense to me.
As is well known, this does not require that they exist~ indeed,
existence is just one among the meanings that are interwoven in the
makeup of the world as it relates to subjectivity.
It is easy to see why this way of considering myself is so closely
tied to the phenomenological reduction. If I as reflecting philosopher
admit the independent existence of the things I experience, then I
14. Carr, D., "Kant, Hugserl and the Non-Empirical Ego," Journal oj
Philosophy Vol. 74, 11, 1977.
ON THE DFFERENCE BETWFENTRANSCENDENTAL AND EMPIRICAL SUBJECI1VITY 183
must admit also that they are causally as well as intentionally related
to my experience. That is just the way of real existence in the real
world. But if I "bracket" their existence, transforming it into the
sense of existence which I as transcendental subjectivity bestow
upon them, then I am freed of that requirement. Indeed under the
reduction that requirement makes no sense. The events of my mental
life are not dependent on things really happening in the world, and
there is no sense in which they are explained by those events. If
anything the dependence goes the other way. If those things (events
in the world) "exist," that means that they have certain kinds of
meaning; and in order to have meaning they must have meaning/or
somebody, for me as the locus, source, or bestower of meaning. Of
course, this dependence is not causal. I as transcendental
subjectivity do not explain their being or happening, for being is not
at issue here; but I and my acts, my experiences, do account for their
having the sense of being, for counting as real (or, for that matter,
as unreal). The phenomenological reduction rules the question of the
being of the world out of order, and replaces. it with the question of
meaning. I as transcendental subjectivity emerge as a necessary
implication of the reduction; and thus emerges also the possibility of
distinguishing myself in this sense from me, the empirical subject
which exists among the objects of my world. This me, together with
everything else in the world, now stands over against me as
transcendental subject. The empirical me is located somewhere in
space, time, and objective history. This location is one of those
meanings of which the transcendental I is aware. But the latter is not
itself so located. This is why Nagel calls it "the view from
nowhere."
It may he objected that this way of rendering Husserl's
distinction between the two subjectivities is grossly oversimplified.
Reducing them to strictly intentional vs. strictly causal relations may
miss some important subtleties. For one thing, Husserl speaks more
frequently of human subjectivity (das menschliche Ich or ich, dieser
Mensch) than of empirical subjectivity, and in Ideas II he makes the
important distinction between the natural and the naturalistic
184 DAVID CARR
attitudes. The human subject corresponds to the natural attitude.1 5

That is, in the ordinary course of things, when I reflect "naturally"
on myself, I think of myself as a person (Mensch) and attribute
intentionality to myself even though I am very much in the world.
Only in the naturalistic attitude- the frame of mind associated with
the natural sciences- would I consider myself, or any other person,
strictly in causal terms.
On the side of transcendental subjectivity there may also be
nuances which are missed by our proposal. Husserl's treatment of
the passivity of consciousness, especially in perception, of its being
"attracted" or " solicited" by objects, seems to take him far from the
domain of "conscious" or explicit intentionality in its usual sense of
bestowal of meaning. Both this and his treatment of motivation, in
which a thought is prompted or brought on by another thought, may
seem to introduce elements of causality into transcendental
consciousness itself.
But this only seems to be the case, for Husserl always insists
that what he is describing under these headings are still modes of
intentionality, different ways in which consciousness bestows
meaning, not instances of causal interaction. And of course he
always warns of falling back into the natural attitude. Throughout all
the subtleties of advanced intentional description, the purity of
transcendental-phenomenological analysis is to be maintained at all
costs. And purity means not "mundanizing" transcendental
subjectivity by placing it in the world which is constituted by its
activity.
The natural attitude is, of course, "impure" in just this sense: it
mixes subjectivity-for, containedness-in the world, intentionality
and causal interaction with abandon. But once we have taken our
distance from the natural attitude by adopting the phenomenological
reduction, we can isolate intentional subjectivity in its "purity," and
we can recognize the natural attitude for the conceptual mixed-bag
15. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological

Philosophy. Second Book. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer (Trans.) (Dordrecht:
Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989, p. 189f).
ON THE DIFFERENCE BEIWlENTRANSCENDENTAL AND EMPIRICAL SUBJECI1VTIY 185
that it is. And one of the things we recognize is that if subjectivity is

really in the space-time world, then it must be thoroughly integrated
causally with the rest of the world.
This is just another way of saying what we said earlier, that the
distinction between transcendental and empirical subjectivity
depends an the reduction's being "in effect." Within the natural
attitude, though intentionality and causality are both present, no such
distinction exists. Once the reduction is adopted, the distinction is
required.
III
Now let us suppose that we have succeeded in making some

sense of the distinction between transcendental and empirical
subjectivity, at least as articulated by Husserl. Suppose I, the
phenomenologically reflecting subject, who have just worked out
this distinction, were to stop and ask: yes, but which is the real me ?
Some would say: of course, now we've finally got to the really
interesting part. After all, I want more than just two different ways
of construing or describing myself; I want to know which is the
right one!
If I were to raise this question, I would not be the first. Kant
thought that this was the really burning philosophical question-
"what is man?"-and Thomas Nagel, who is in many ways more
Kantian than Husserlian on these matters, agrees. In Kant's scheme
the question could be framed as follows: we can distinguish the
subject as a condition of experience from the subject as it appears in
experience-but which one corresponds to the self as it is in itself?
The answer is important, for in the one case I am free and rational,
with a hope for goodness and even immortality, while in the other
case I am a fleeting configuration of matter in the void. Nagel's
strategy is different, it seems: instead of wanting to eliminate one of
the two conceptions in favor of the other, he wants somehow to
square the two, hoping that we can alter our conception of the
186 DAVID CARR
empirical self in such a way that it will take on the properties we

attribute to the transcendental self.1 6 But the answer is equally
important for him, since on it turns the possibility of some
significance for human existence beyond the random collision of
atoms.
Does Husserl provide us with any resources for answering this
question? It may be argued that he does. Transcendental subjectivity
seems to have an important kind of priority over empirical subjectiv-
ity in the sense that it is presupposed by it. The empirical subject,
like every other thing in the world, presupposes that there is a
world. But "that there is a world" is a claim, a sense- or meaning-
complex which requires or presupposes a meaning-bestowing- that
is, a transcendental-subjectivity. Whereas of course the tran-
scendental subject does not, as we have seen, presuppose a world,
or rather the existence of the world, nor within it the existence of an
empirical self in which it somehow has its abode. Transcendental
subjectivity does not depend on these existences and thus is not
explainable or derivable from them. The whole idea of explanation
or derivation just does not apply to it. In this sense Husserl could
speak of transcendental subjectivity as "absolute" and everything
else, including the empirical subject, as "relative."17
On the other hand, it could be argued that Husserl offers us no
resources for answering the question "which is the real me?" We
have seen that the whole distinction between empirical and
transcendental subjectivity depends on the phenomenological
reduction's being "in effect." Does this not make the distinction a
product of methodological decision? Even Husserl often contrasts
the natural with the phenomenological attitude as the natural vs. the
"artificial" (ktinstlich).18 Is transcendental subjectivity not just the
artificial product of a highly sophisticated-and historically
conditioned-way of looking at things? Only if we perform the
transcendental reduction is the world "transformed" into a meaning
16. Nagel. op. cit. p. 51f.

17. Formal and Transcendental Logic. D. Cairns (Trans.) (The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff. 1969. p. 272f).
18. ldeen II. p. 180.
ON TIlE DIFFERENCE BEfWFENTRANSCENDENTAL AND EMPIRICAL SUBJECIlVTIY l'i!:7
that presupposes a meaning-bestowing consciousness. But it is not

really transformed; it's just that we choose to look at it in that way.
To do so is within our "perfect freedom," Husserl says;19 the
epoche is a matter of free choice, not something we are required to
do. Indeed, according to Eugen Fink, the epoche is not even
rationally required by anything within the natural attitude. The
reasons for performing it can only be discerned after it has been
performed! 20
These considerations lend to the phenomenological reduction,
and to the concept of transcendental subjectivity it "produces," a
certain arbitrariness as well as artificiality. How can such an artificial
product-or construct- be the real self? Perhaps there are just
empirical subjects who, because of certain complicated historical-
philosophical considerations, have devised this very odd, somewhat
self-aggrandizing (but misleading) way of looking at themselves.
Against this view of the phenomenological reduction as nothing
but an artificial philosophical tool, one very important voice has
been raised. Picking up on Fink's view that there is no rational pre-
phenomenological motive for performing the reduction, Sartre
argues in Transcendence of the Ego that it is nevertheless not
arbitrary. Indeed, it is "imposed upon us;" it hits us from time to
time in the form of anxiety at the pure contingency of things, the
affective awareness that I am holding together this whole tissue of
meanings in a way that is wholly unnecessary. For Sartre, the
phenomenological reduction is just the philosophical articulation of
angoisse. 21 Nagel's work bears traces of this notion too: the
recognition that I am both nowhere and somewhere is not just a
philosophical invention or even a philosophical discovery. I t is a
prephilosophical awareness with which philosophy, in his view,
must come to terms. 22
19. Ideas I, p. 58.

20. Fink, op. cit. pp. 11 or.
21. 1. P. Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, F. Williams & R. Kirkpatrick
(Trans.s) (New York: Farrar, Straus & Co. 1957, p. 102f).
22. Nagel, op. ci t. p. 1Of.
188 DAVID CARR
But the issue at hand is not that of how it occurs to us to think of

ourselves as other than just empirical subjects. The issue is: once it
has occurred to us, and once we have articulated the distinction
between transcendental and empirical subjectivity, how can we
answer the question "which is the real self?" But it appears that this
question cannot even be raised phenomenologically, much less
answered. To say that the very distinction presupposes the reduction
is not to prove that the transcendental subject is thus a "construct" of
the method which is thus less real than the empirical subject. Rather,
it is to say that the question of the "real self" cannot be asked. This
question is an ontological or metaphysical, not a phenomenological
question. (A Kantian version of this would be: this is a metaphysical
or ontological question, not a critical or transcendental one.) One
should not ask phenomenology (or critical philosophy) to do what it
is not designed to do.
I t is true that Husserl often talks as if he were providing answers
to metaphysical or ontological questions, asserting the priority of
transcendental subjectivity over the empirical, or claiming "absolute"
status for the transcendental and "relative" for everything else. On
the other hand, he often claimed for phenomenology the status of a
"working" philosophy,23 a way of analyzing and clarifying things
rather than a doctrine of some sort. The point is to describe
experience in all its richness and variety, not to make decisions
about what is "really real" and what is not. The latter is what pre-
phenomenological, "positive" philosophy did-metaphysics. But
phenomenology surpasses metaphysics and renders it obsolete, not
by doing the same thing better but by doing something different.
This is what Husserl meant by "transcendental idealism," in my
view; it is not another metaphysical doctrine but at most a
methodological idealism. Thus phenomenology retains the sense it
had from the start: it is a method, nothing more. 24
23. The Crisis, p. 100.

24. For a strong version of this interpretation of Husser) see G. Funke,
Phiinomeno[ogie: Metaphysik oder Methode?, 3rd ed. (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag
Herbert Grundmann, 1979).
ON THE DIFFERENCE BEfWEENTRANSCENDENTAL AND EMPIRICAL SUBJECTIVTIY 189
IV
We now return to the question of what not-to-be-neglected

significance there is in the distinction between transcendental and
empirical subjectivity. What is its philosophical import really, in the
end?
We can say that the distinction follows from the desire and the
decision to describe, clarify and understand our own experience in
strictly intentional terms. Once we take intentionality seriously and
decide to focus on it exclusively, we are led to the phenomenological
reduction and with it to the distinction between subjectivity
considered as transcendental and subjectivity considered as empirical
or worldly-gubjectfor the world vs. subject in the world. This
distinction follows from the injunction not to confuse the intentional
description of experience with the causal explanation of
experience-an injunction, it seems, which has to be made again
and again. Most of Husserl's predecessors fell prey to this
confusion, and it is still widespread to this day.
In the sense just described, the distinction between
transcendental and empirical subjectivity is quite legitimate and even
necessary. But we should not try to get any metaphysical mileage
out of it, as if it could help us answer questions like "what is the real
self?" or "what is man?"
But this works both ways: those who attack this distinction as if
it were a metaphysical distinction have missed the point. They are
attacking not the genuine, phenomenological distinction but only its
metaphysical perversion. They may be quite justified in attacking a
"metaphysics of the subject," but they should not think that in doing
so they have eliminated the transcendental/empirical distinction in its
more modest but legitimate form.
190 DAVID CARR
We might let the matter rest there, were it not for two predictable
objections, each of which deserves to he taken seriously.
The first objection is this: phenomenology, with its reduction
and its consequent distinction between transcendental and empirical
subjectivity, is all very interesting; but how important is it if it
cannot answer the really burning questions of philosophy, questions
like "what is man?" Kant at least recognized that these questions
were the whole point of the exercise, and so did not try to banish
them. On the view sketched here, phenomenology may seem in the
end no better than certain much maligned "ordinary language"
analysis, playing a lot of interesting games, but contributing in the
end absolutely nothing to philosophy as traditionally conceived.
This is a difficult objection, to which I can propose only a
couple of weak replies. First, remember that Kant too, though he
devoted a lot of attention to questions like "what is man?", did not
really propose philosophical or theoretical answers to them. The best
we can expect are certain kinds of practical responses. (Nagel, too,
is not very optimistic about coming up with philosophical answers.
He just seems to think we ought to keep seeking them with
Sisyphean determination.) Second, we can ask whether anyone else
has offered a viable proposal for answering these philosophical
questions in a theoretical way. Phenomenology may come off no
worse than other philosophical proposals currently available.
The second objection requires a lengthier discussion, and I can
do no more than state it here. It turns on the distinction between
metaphysics and method, with which I tried to defend Husserl's
transcendental/empirical-subject distinction against its detractors.
Everyone knows that Husserl tried to overcome metaphysics by
inventing a purely methodical philosophy. (He was not the first.)
Derrida certainly knew this when he asked: "Do not
phenomenological necessity, the rigor and subtlety of Husserl's
ON TIIE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TRANSCENDENTAL AND EMPIRICAL SUBJECI1VI1Y 191
analysis, nonetheless conceal a metaphysical presupposition?"25

Derrida devoted much effort to showing that they do. But we could
ask more generally: does not any method make metaphysical
presuppositions? Can a method stand on its own, without theoretical
commitments and underpinnings? What is a method? Simply put, it
is a set of prescriptions for getting from A to B, from some starting
point to some destination. Do these prescriptions not rest on the
theoretical claim that A and B are really related in a certain way?
It is interesting to note that among those who answer this
question in the affirmative, who assert this kind of connection
between method and theory, we find Edmund Husserl himself. Of
course, he was speaking not of phenomenology but of logic, in the
first volume of the Logical Investigations. The first conception of
logic that he examines there is the one that treats it strictly as a
normative discipline or technique (Kunstiehre). Husserl argues at
length that logic or any discipline so conceived cannot stand alone.
"Every normative discipline," he writes, "demands that we know
certain non-normative truths .... "26
Must this not hold true for phenomenology as well, if it is
conceived purely as a method? What are those non-normative truths
it presupposes? Can phenomenology avoid being, at the same time,
metaphysics? If not, then we must take attacks on phenomenology
as a "metaphysics of the subject" much more seriously than I have
suggested here. I have given Husserl what I consider the strongest
defense possible against the charge that his work conceals a-
possibly dogmatic- metaphysics. But that defense may not in the
end be strong enough.
25. Speech and Phenomena.. p. 4.

26. Logical Investigations, Vol. I, p. 88.
9
On Confronting Species-Specific Skepticism as We Near

the End of the Twentieth Century·
James M. Edie
Northwestern University
I. The Decentering of the Subject
Ever since Socrates "called philosophy down from heaven to

earth" to locate it in the cities and in the lives of individual human
beings by exhorting them to tum within to their souls and to the
concepts (logoi) that dwell therein, to tum to a knowledge of oneself
first of all, to examine one's own inner life in its acts of knowing,
believing, desiring, willing, evaluating, giving meaning and
intelligibility to the chaos of earths, airs, fires, waters and bones,
sinews, humors, and joints, which confront us in raw nature,
Western philosophy has seen the necessary tum to the foundations
of experience and of reality-as-experienced which has come to be
called "foundationalism" in philosophy. In their many different
ways all of the greatest philosophers of our tradition have been
"foundationalists": Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes,
Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel and Husserl, to mention only the
* A first version of this paper was read at the International Aron Gurwitsch
Memorial Symposium at the New School in New York on November 8, 1991.
193
194 JAMES M. EOIE
"giants," who together and separately constitute the backbone of

Western philosophy.
But for many, already in the Nineteenth but especially since the
middle of the Twentieth century, the centrality of human experience
has begun to be questioned, the aristo-centric assumption of a
necessary, archimedean basis on which to build a systematic
understanding of reality has begun to be denied. This is what is
today called the "decentering of the subject" not only in
Structuralism, but in Poststructuralism, Deconstructionism, and in
all the sociologies of knowledge which are now vying to replace
philosophy in the ancient, classical sense. Our topic is but the latest,
the philosophic, decentering of the subject and it fits into a whole
series of previous decenterings.
First there was the cosmological decentering which took place,
amidst great cultural upheaval, in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
centuries with the physical astronomy of Copernicus and Galileo.
The results of this first major decentering are still just beginning to
be understood. Men have not only begun to suspect but already
know that the planet earth and the solar system of which it is a part
are not at the center of the universe and that it is extremely unlikely
that mankind is the final culmination point of the entire creative
evolutionary process, or the only "purpose" of the universe of
beings. Our solar system is not even central to our own (Milky
Way) galaxy but is, instead, a peripheral tail, perhaps one of many
so numerous they are impossible to count. And this galaxy itself is
but one local cluster of more than two dozen similar galaxies which
are themselves but an infinitesimal part of a universe composed of
billions of galaxies. And this universe itself may be but one of many
more.
In his unfinished and disorganized final work, The Visible and
the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty at least three times cites the
"inexhaustible question" of the poet Claudel: "Where are we?" and
"What time is it?" as the most existentially important philosophical
ON CONfRONTING SPECIES-SPECIAC SKEPfIOSM ... 195
questions for us now.! Well, we know not only that we are not at
the center of the universe, but also that we literally don't know
where we are except that we are a part of a middling, relatively
unimportant, gradually diminishing solar system which will in time
exhaust its energy and may well be headed for extinction. We have
been thrown into a state of being for which we cannot account,
without our advice having been asked, which is unfathomable, and
which as a whole, and in each of its parts, including ourselves, may
be doomed, as in ancient Greek poetry, to a tragic end. I t is there,
dumb, unwieldy, silent, utterly indifferent to human consciousness
and human purposes. There is too much of it; it is the Sartrean
"absurd. "
But that was not the only displacement, the only decentering.
This physical decentering was followed by a biological decentering
which can be conveniently dated with the publication of Darwin's
Origin of Species in 1859, the birthday of "contemporary"
philosophy as opposed to "modern" philosophy.2 Homo sapiens
was not created whole and entire in some primeval Garden of Eden
but is the result, at the present moment, of an extremely long,
hazardous, chancy, almost fortuitous evolution that about fifteen
million years ago on this planet brought about the existence of truly
living creatures. Of the perhaps four original kingdoms,
characterized by having "a well-organized nucleus and
1. M. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, Alphonso Lingis (Trans.)

(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968, pp. 103, lOS, 121).
2. The year 1859, the year of the birth of Edmund Husserl, John Dewey, and
Henri Bergson is a convenient year by which to date, of course arbitrarily, the
beginning of "contemporary" philosophy as distinct from the "modern" conflicts
between Continental Rationalism and British Empiricism which issued in the
German Idealism of Kant, Fichte and Hegel. Besides being the period of Darwin
and Spencer, it was also the period of the very beginnings of positivism in
France, Britain, Germany and, finally, of both logical positivism and
phenomenology at the University of Vienna. What all of the ·contemporary·
movements in philosophy (whether phenomenology, logical positivism,
pragmatism, Bergsonism, naturalism, operationalism or other isms) have in
common is a rejection of speculati ve metaphysics in the aftermath of Hegel and a
return to experience, l.U den Sachen selbst!
196 JAMES M. EDIE
chromosomes in each cell,"3 of the exceedingly large number of

organisms (eukaroytes) which developed within these four
kingdoms, many of them becoming rapidly extinct, all branching out
in myriads of ways in all probable and improbable developments,
only the animalian type showed any evolutionary trend toward
intelligence, and even then at least fifty different phyla of animals
had developed by the Cambrian geological era (many of them
becoming rapidly extinct), while the surviving phyla (from about
five hundred million years ago) proliferated into mUltiple classes,
orders, families, and lower taxa. "Of the some fifty original phyla of
animals, only one, that of the chordates, eventually gave rise to
intelligent life... ,4 Of all the vertebrates only the anthropoid apes
clearly surpassed other mammals in intellectual ability and social
organization. Finally less than one-third of a million years ago homo
sapiens emerged, due to what many biologists believe to have been
"a largely chance event."
However much one admires the intelligence of birds, including
the ability to use tools to a certain extent, to learn from past
experience, and to pass knowledge on by some form of teaching to
their young, or the dolphins, or even the chimpanzees, nobody is
going to say that they would be capable of producing the cultures of
ancient China, of Sumur, Egypt, Greece, or Rome. Not even the
3. E. Mayr, Toward a New Philosophy of Biology (Harvard University Press,

1988, p. 70). I wish here to thank my colleague, David Hull, who shared with me
some of his research materials and his opinions on the search for extraterrestrial
intelligence (the SEn project).
4. Mayr, 1988, pp. 70-71. See also: G. G. Simpson, This View of Life: The
World of an Evolutionist (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964, pp. 259f),
on the possibility and/or probability of humanoid forms on the other planets
("which must exist in large numbers") in the universe similar enough to ours that
life, at least, must have existed and may still exist. He is not optimistic about
intelligent life since the "mutations" and "recombinations" that took place in the
evolution of man as the "ultimate twig" of an extremely complicated evolutionary
process on this planet are essentially "nonrepeatable" here and, since this
evolutionary development is the only one we are capable of knowing and
studying, it does not seem that we should assume that it is a probable scenario
elsewhere. However, there are some exobiologists who, basing themselves on
various very conjectural, computerized projections and extrapolations are more
optimistic.
ON CONFRONTING'SPECIES-SPECIAC SKEPfIQSM ... 197
Neanderthals, recognized as homo sapiens, or other forms of early

hominid types were capable of civilization and culture in anything
but the most rudimentary sense. Whether, given the precarious
nature of the development of specifically human intelligence (i.e.,
"higher intelligence") as we know it in our species of homo sapiens,
that such a development could be duplicated or in some way
repeated elsewhere in extraterrestrial space, with or without any
anatomical similarity to man, is something for which we have no
evidence. Clearly, the main lesson of the biological decentering of
the human species is to have demonstrated that man is not the
necessary culmination point of the system; he may be the superior
element in the system just now, but he did not make the system, he
did not dominate it from the start, he certainly is not the system; he
is but a part of the system.
Thirdly, there began already long before Freud the psychological
decentering of human consciousness. The discovery of the
preconscious and even unconscious drives, instincts, intention-
alities, and patterns of behavior, which operate beneath the level of
conscious awareness in human behavior has opened up, within
about the past seventy-five years, a whole new group of human
sciences, i.e. sciences which study specifically human behavior,
which can be put under the very general rubric of Structuralism.
These sciences, while recognized as fully "scientific" and as
possessing great explanatory power do not at all employ the
hypothetico-deductive methods used in the physical, chemical and
biochemical sciences but rather the descriptive, taxonomic,
structuralist model of linguistics and anthropology primarily.
Jacques Lacan has said that "the unconscious is structured like
language" though nobody to date has been able to give a single
example of the application of a recursive rule to unconscious
processes that would fully confirm this claim except in the most
rudimentary manner. The subject is too difficult to master.
Even in linguistics, where the recursive rules which explain the
structures of the phonology, morphology and syntax of natural
languages are beginning to be well developed, there is still but a
glimmer of what the rules governing texts, contexts, discourses, and
198 JArvtES M. EDIE
genres of various types would look like. Again, the subject is still
too difficult, but at least the question can be posed, whereas some
sixty or seventy years ago it could barely have arisen at the level of
conscious awareness. Similarly in structural anthropology,
sociology and other disciplines there has been considerable advance
in showing how humans operate according to quite strict rules of
behavior without having any conscious awareness of such rules or
any ability to bring them to the level of fully aware, reflective
consciousness capable of stating them in language. "The subject"
(the ego) has been displaced or decentered even in its own
experience of itself and its own behavior.
So much for the scientific decentering of the egological center of
traditional philosophy. However, e contra, let us not forget the
teaching of Hegel, as paraphrased from his Phenomenology of
Mind: If it is true that man is not at the physical center of the
universe, he is still at the metaphysical center because he produces
its science. All of the sciences which men have laboriously
developed through ages of time are all human sciences in the sense
that they are at the service of man to explain as best he can to himself
his own present experience, whether in terms of past geological
ages, his own evolution, the physiological and psychological
mechanisms of his own living organism, or the laws of his own use
of language and therefore of thought. We have no awareness of the
circulatory system of our blood stream; Aristotle thought the brain
was an organ for cooling the blood; we waited until Harvey to learn
the truth. But Aristotle could write brilliantly about the perceptual
organization of experience on the basis of a false physiology. We
likewise have no conscious awareness of our neurological
structures; many even speak as if the brain "knows" things, whereas
the fact is that the minds of men have for a very long time been
interested in how the brain works, what it does and how it does it,
and we have begun to elaborate natural sciences in greater and
greater profusion to study the brain. But in all this the brain, as a
physiological part of the system, has not the slightest interest in or
ability to study the mind.
ON CONFRONTING SPECIES-SPECIAC SKEPTICISM ... 199
And as our common ancestor, Socrates, taught us, philosophy is
the study of the mind (nous) the source of conceptual knowledge
(logoi), not the study of synapses, neurons or complex tissues.
II. The Deconstruction of Subjectivity
Here we now face an aporia in the strictest Aristotelian sense of

the word. What is the place or, the value of philosophy for a
decentered man? Indeed, the post-structuralist Deconstructionists
have added to the list of decenterings given above the most radical
decentering possible: they suggest that the logo-centricity, the very
use of the logic of reason, which enables us to speak and to think, is
based on something else.
The first Nineteenth century "skeptics" need hardly detain us.
Marx and his followers, who state that at the basis of every
philosophical theory there lies a definitely determined state of
intellectual knowledge due to social, political, economic or industrial
organization can be readily accommodated in almost any framework
since there is no truth which does not have its "date" (i.e. the time
before which it had not been "thought" or "demonstrated" and
therefore made available to others to think as well) and its
determinate historical situation. All thinkers are time-bound, earth-
bound creatures immersed in the irreversible temporal flow of real
time and spatial (including social) location. The question is rather
whether or not this necessary historicity of experience causes
thinkers to think in a predetermined manner and, therefore,
conditions the rules of rationality by something logically antecedent
to and independent of the norms of reason themselves. Is reason
essentially dependent on something other than itself?
The kind of evolutionary epistemology espoused by Herbert
Spencer which declared that human intelligence is nothing other than
an ad hoc adaptation of a highly developed organism to its hostile
and often difficult environment is no more helpful because, in its
vague generality, it explains too much. There is simply nothing that
200 JAMES M. EDIE
it does not explain. If we can agree that with the various levels of
organismic development into more and more complex beings new
properties emerge at each stage which were not clearly present in the
combining elements or parts of the prior, less developed,
organisms, then we will eventually reach the stage at which higher
intelligence capable of discovering the eidetic, logical laws which
govern true thought and language-using consciousness emerge
(because this has already happened). But we do not thereby explain
the nature of such laws of thought even though we admit that more
primitive creatures could not have envisaged them.
When Husserl undertook at the beginning of the Twentieth
century to refute what he called "psychologism" in his Prolegomena
to Pure Logic, he began by saying that the complete skepticism (of
the kind Aristotle ascribed to Heraclitus and Cratylus, or that
professed by Protagaros, Pyhrro or Sextus Empiricus) was hardly
to be found asserted by anybody anymore. He did not even tarry
over the probabilistic skepticism of the kind espoused by the New
Academy against which Saint Augustine wrote his first dialogue,
Against the Academics. What concerned him was the species-
specific skepticism of the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth
century thinkers such as Mill, Bain, Wundt, Sigwart, Erdmann and
Lipps (on the historical background of British Empiricism in general
from Ockham to Hume).5 We will take this up immediately, but the
starting-point is to ask whether the rules of thought and of reason
are essentially dependent on the emergence of this human species,
homo sapiens, on this planet in these determinate historical
circumstances or whether the norms of logic are essentially
independent of historical, evolutionary circumstances even though
5. In this regard it is notable that, after initially launching a program of

"Cartesian linguistics" which seemed to take up the work of the Cartesian
Rationalists of Port-Royal, and even Husserl's project of a pure, apriori grammar,
Chomsky and his school now interpret Descartes' "innate ideas" which, in their
Chomskian sense, can be taken to postulate the forms or rules of human
"competence" predisposed to acquire language and to follow a universal, "depth"
grammar which could account (though various transformational rules) for the
"surface" grammars of all the natural languages, as being something embedded in
the DNA code in some way and thus a product of the evolution of this species on
this planet. Chomsky's is a "naturalized" Descartes.
ON CONFRONTING SPECIES-SPECIRC SKEPfICISM ... 201
they can come into play only in actual, historical acts of thinking
performed by individual thinking beings.
By the last decade of the Twentieth century we are in a situation
in which the many sociological accounts of knowledge, whether
based on Heidegger, the Frankfort School, or Derrida, or Rorty, or
some combination thereof, or of other provenance, have for some
time proclaimed not only the decentering of the subject (of
experience) but the "death" of the subject, the "evanescence"6 of the
subject, the "disappearance" of the subject, and the like. This leads
us to the metaphysics of Structuralism with which we are quite
familiar and which goes far beyond the structuralist methodology
which is, in itself, quite innocuous, and, indeed, an inescapable
component of any conceptual analysis, of any scientific theory
whatsoever.
Let us attempt to pose this question in its contemporary historical
perspective. At the beginning of this century philosophers like
William James and Edmund Husser! attempted to refute skeptical,
relativistic psychologism so as to establish logical thinking and the
rules of reasoning on a basis independent of any mentalistic
introspectionism or any biological or social causes not derivable
from the investigation of meaning as such; now we see, in spite of
the triumphs of formal logic in this century, a return at present to an
ever more sophisticated form of psychologism in which the
6. In its generality this is an old theme in the history of philosophy.

Averroes thought that the "separated" mind thought independently of human
individuals in such wise that the individual, singular man should not say "I think"
or "you think" but "it thinks" in us. William James also toyed with the theme of
the evanescence of consciousness. He wrote in the first chapter of his Essays in
Radical Empiricism that he had mistrusted consciousness for over twenty years and
had begun to suggest its non-existence to his students. When consciousness has
become a bare Bewusstsein Uberhaupt "i t has evaporated to [the] estate of pure
diaphaneity" and is, he wrote, "on the point of disappearing altogether." "It is the
name of a nonentity, and has no right to a place among first principles" (New
York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1912, pp. 2-3). It does, however, stand for a
"function," namely "pure experience." Some might even take Sartre's and
Gurwitsch's theory of a non-egological consciousness up here as some kind of
parallel, but since in that theory consciousness is "the being of nothingness,"
that through which "nothingness" comes into the world through "nihilating"
processes of having objects as "otherwise" than they are given, it is probably not
relevant to include them among the "death-of-the-subject" philosophers.
202 JAMES M. EDIE
influence of the post-structuralist Deconstructionism of Jacques
Derrida is, if not all-pervasive, at least taken as one of the most
reasonable philosophical stances attainable.
Though Derrida himself based his early philosophical work7 on
the tutelage he had received in phenomenology and the writings of
Husserl under Paul Ricoeur and others, he now clearly thinks of
Heidegger as his chief philosophical inspiration and most kindred
spirit. 8 Heidegger very early on described his program as a
Wiederlwlung of the thrust of Western philosophy that would be
both pre-Socratic and post-Hegelian, in fact a destruction of Western
metaphysics since Plato. After his early, more belligerent, period he
replaced the word "destruction," with "critique," but there was no
need to, since "destruction," like "deconstruction," can have a
positive sense: namely, a taking-apart, through analysis, of what has
already been done, of what has been achieved, to see how it was put
together, how it was built up in the first place, to discover the strong
points and the flaws in this massive construct which has grown in
size and complexity over two thousand years or more.
Central to his program was the study of human consciousness
(Dasein) which alone structures, gives meaning and value to things
(Seiende), and alone is concerned with Being (das Sein des
Seiendes) and sees the ontological difference between Being and
beings through its own pre-reflexive understanding of what it is to
be, of Being (vorontologische Seinsverstlindnis). Human
consciousness is uniquely concerned with this question, that is with
"comprehending" beings and "keeping them together" like a
"shepherd" of the flocks of beings. But in its relationship to Being,
human consciousness is far from the supreme shepherd; it is
another, though privileged, being among beings, the locus of the
7. Strictly speaking, Denida has written only two truly philosophical books,
with sustained argument, namely: Edmund Husserl's Origin oj Geometry: An
Introduction, J. P. Leavey, Jf. (Trans.) (Stony Brook: Nicholas Hays, 1978) and
Speech and Phenomena, D. B. Allison (Trans.) (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1973). There are a few passages in De la grammatologie and
perhaps also in Glas, which might also qualify as philosophical discourse in the
usual sense.
8. 1. M. Edie, "Husserl vs. Derrida," Human Studies, 1990: 103-118.
lumen naturale of understanding, and the foundation of the

comprehension of the Being of beings, but it is not the foundation of
the Being of beings, nor of its own being. Man may be the
"shepherd" of beings, but Being is not a sheep. Man does not
possess Being; he is had by Being.
All this is most clearly illustrated by man's relationship to
language, "the house of Being." Man does not dominate, much less
invent, language, but rather language "has" him. Man, as lOon
logon echon, speaks, uses language, and therefore is capable of
reason, but language was there before him, both in an ontological
and logical sense, Es spricht im Menschen. 9 Language is thus in
some sense the instrument of an impersonal, not-appropriated,
anonymous thought.
There would be a perfectly straightforward manner of
understanding this conception of man's relationship to language,
namely if it were to be taken in the strictly structuralist sense
according to which we necessarily speak according to formal rules
of phonology, morphology, syntax and our lexicon without
necessarily having the ability on the level of conscious awareness of
explaining these subunderstood laws, but Heidegger has something
more fundamental in mind. Being is not language, but the ground of
language which the philosopher and even more the poet may attempt
to "think" but without any sure or clearly guaranteed foundation.
Many of our contemporaries make the best sense out of the
obscure writings of Heidegger on this matter by turning to Richard
Rorty's analysis of the central meaning of the work of Heidegger,
Wittgenstein and Dewey, "the three most important philosophers of
our century." 1 0 Heidegger especially, he writes, deserves "the credit
9. This is my own reading of Heidegger but I would like to acknowledge my

indebtedness to the reflections of M. Dufrenne (Pour l'homme, Paris: Editions dJ
Seuil, 1968, pp. 21-25) and A. L. Kelkel (Heidegger, Seghers, 1973, p. 108f.).
10. R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror oj Nature (Princeton University
Press, 1979, p. 5). Though he claims to be "historicist," Rorty is not a very good
historian. Certainly the historical influence of Husserl in the twentieth century has
been greater and led to much more diversified accomplishments in philosophy
than those of Rorty's peculiar triad: think only of Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Ingarden,
Ricoeur, Gurwitsch, Heidegger himself, not to mention lesser, but important,
thinkers. Rorty's Heidegger is always seen through Dewey's eyes. When Husserl is
204 JANtES M. EDIE
for working out a way of seeing the search for objective knowledge
.... as [but] one human project among others" through his famous
theory of Lichtungen 11 (the ways we must think Being in its
relations to beings). [Rorty may even think, as Quentin Skinner has
asserted, that these three philosophers have brought philosophy to
an end l2 -aclaim which, in a completely different context, used to
be made on behalf of Hegel].
But we have to be more careful. What have Rorty (and Derrida,
if we may associate him in this enterprise) actually tried to do? Both
of them, in the company of quite a number of continental and
analytical philosophers, try to undermine "transcendental
philosophy. "13 In fact both of them, but especially Rorty who is the
more "historicist" of the two, considers the critique of transcendental
thought common to both these traditions to be the one concern
which runs through and unifies the whole of contemporary
philosophy at the present time. Transcendental philosophy is defined
as the search for an ultimate foundation of knowledge which will
"block skepticism" by discovering "an overaching permanent neutral
matrix" for all inquiry, past and future;14 it would, indeed, provide a
mentioned, his name is nearly always coupled with his partner "transcendentalist"
Russell, as William James is elsewhere coupled with Nietzsche. We don't know
exactly what Russell might say about this coupling but we do know that James
considered half of everything Nietzsche wrote to be "the sick shriekings of a
dying rat" (Varieties oj Religions Experience (New York: Mentor Books, 1958, p.
47). From a historical perspective, one could transpose and invert the famous
statement of Erasmus (as well as of Pi co de la Mirandola) in his De Transitu
Hellinismi ad Christianismum concerning Aristotle and his Christian interpreters,
"Without Thomas, Aristotle would have been silent," Sine Thoma, mutus esset
Aristotles, into: "Without Husserl, there would have been no Heidegger."
11. Rorty, 1979, p. 360f.
12. In "The End of Philosophy?" The New York Review oj Books, March 19,
1981: 46.
13. In bringing Derrida into the discussion, it is important to refer the reader
to the recent work of J. C. Evans, Strategies oj Deconstruction, Derrida and the
Myth oj the Voice (University of Minnesota Press, 1991). This is certainly the
best, most magisterial and insightful book on Derrida from a philosophical point
of view up to now. Evans spends almost as much time and space following
Derrida's arguments one by one as Husserl did on his psychologistic skeptics in
the Logical Investigations.
14. Rorty, 1979, p. 266.
refutation of any JX)ssible future skepticism. The destruction (which
is at the same time the deconstruction) of transcendental philosophy
is accomplished by showing that the historical origin of our
conception of foundational knowledge (from Descartes, Locke and
Kant) has come under attack from within (as well as from without)
by an increasingly radical questioning of its inner, hidden
presupJX)sitions that always involve the privileging of some form of
representational consciousness over any other.
When philosophy is relieved of all its "foundations" what
remains is a literary and communicating culture as a conversation
rather than as a structure erected on unchanging foundations, an
edifying genuine conversation that does not degenerate into
inquiry. 15
Though Derrida's position is harder to define and much more
slippery than Rorty's, it comes to much the same thing. The
conversation which we call "speech" is really a form of writing;
experience is a text, and if n'y a pas de hors-texte. Since all of
meaningful language is nothing other than a free play of signifiers,
there can be no necessary starting JX)int; understanding itself is
always a misunderstanding; there has never been any perception.1 6
Though Derrida is considerably more colorful than Rorty
[logocentrism becomes phallocentrism; within the chain of
supplements it is difficult to separate writing from onanism, etc.]! 7
15. Rorty, 1979, p. 372. Note the word "degenerate." I submit that Rorty's
Philosophy and the Mirror OJ Nature should never be read without the corrective
essay written by J. N. Mohanty, "Rorty, Phenomenology and Transcendental
Philosophy," Journal oj the British Society jor Phenomenology, 1983/Jan.: 91-
98.
16. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, D. B. Allison (Trans.)
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973, p. 103).
17. J. Derrida, OJ Grammatology, Gayatri Spivak (Trans.) (Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1974, p. 165f). See also J. R. Searle, "The Word Turned Upside
Down," New York Review oj Books, Oct. 27, 1983: 74f). There is however no
doubt that we need to be sensitive to the perennial attraction and force of the non-
foundationalist, "conversationalist" theory of truth which has cropped up
throughout the history of philosophy, as Professor Richard Bernstein reminded me
in discussing this paper. Whether it is Protagoras, Phyrro and Sextus Empiricus
after Plato and Aristotle, Peter Damien after Augustine, Ockham after Aquinas, the
British empiricists after Cartesian rationalism, Marx, Spencer and Mill after Kant
and Hegel, or Heidegger, Derrida and Rorty after Husser! and Frege, every time a
206 JAMES M. EDIE
his endless process of grafting texts onto texts comes down to

something quite similar to Rorty's "conversation of mankind" or
"conversation of the West."
Rorty can write very edifying rhetorical prose about the overall
holistic, historicist, relativist, conversational project:
Even if, through some unbelievable stroke of fortune,

America survives with its freedoms intact and becomes a
rallying point for the nations, the high culture of an
unfragmented world need not center around anything
specifically American. It may not, indeed, center around
great "foundationalist" philosopher has established the same apriori, absolutely

coercive, necessary, and universally valid norms of thought on a firm conceptual
foundation, there has been a "skeptical" reaction which bears structural similarities
to all the other relativisms and skepticisms which have appeared in history. It is
as if philosophers are almost doomed to repeat these arguments and bring forth
this basic subject-matter and the problems it involves and keep it before their
minds again in each successive generation. Neither side expects to convince the
other side, but each to refute the other definitively. Like Doctor Johnson, we can
only say: "I can give you an argument; I cannot give you understanding." But we
must bear in mind the fact that the "foundationalists" always come back to
essentially the same logical forms (without, of course, denying the historical
development of logic and mathematics) and, if we have any speculative bent at all,
we have to ask ourselves whether they may not have discovered basic logical (and
mathematical) laws which not only hold throughout the universe but which must
be true for any possible intelligence. Our laws of physics, chemistry and perhaps
even biology, though conclusions of empirical science on this planet, are
formulated mathematically and are taken to be observed throughout the universe.
Only a short time ago no man had seen the other side of the moon, though most
suspected it would look much like the side which was always visible. We know
that this assumption was correct because our space technology now permits men
to go around to the other side and look. There was no apriori reason against it
before; it just could not de Jacto be done; it was not a logical but a physical
impossibility. In the same way the laws governing falling bodies, of Newtonian
physics, of Einsteinian relativity theory are taken to hold not only for this
species on this planet, but for the solar system as a whole and for intergalactic
probes as well. Since all these technologies depend on mathematical forms (which
are not conditioned in their meaning by species-bound conditions), and since
mathematics is either a branch of logic or a kind of universal logical thinking
that does not (like the formulae of formal logic) need to be translated into natural
languages to be understood, does this consideration not add weight to the
foundationalist argument of the independence of logical forms--independent of any
particular empirical locations, conditions or circumstances?
ON CONFRONTING SPECIES-SPECIFIC SKEPfIOSM ... 2f17
anything more than anything else; neither poetry, nor social

institutions, nor mysticism, nor depth psychology, nor
novels, nor philosophy, nor physical science. It may be a
culture which is transcendentalist through and through,
whose center is everywhere and its circumference nowhere.
In such a culture, Jonathan Edwards and Thomas Jefferson,
Henry and William James, John Dewey, and Wallace
Stevens, Charles Peirce and Thornston Veblen will all be
present. No one will be asking which ones are the
Americans, or even perhaps, which ones are the
philosophers. 18
To which Alasdair MacIntyre retorted:
If I am doomed to spending the rest of my life talking with

literary critics and sociologists and historians and physicists,
I am going to have to listen to a great deal of philosophy,
most of it inept. 19
I once had a professor of philosophy who liked to look at the

whole history of philosophy as being similar to a seance of the
AcademieFran~aise in which each of the "greats" of the past would
have his own fauteuil, each one having earned his place, with no
one absent, all engaging in the most penetrating, glorious
conversations. But the trouble with the history of philosophy, and
with our conversations in general, is that not all those with whom
we would wish to talk are all present at the same time, or in the same
place.
There have been periods such as that between the closing of the
pagan schools of Athens by the Emperor Justinian in 529 A.D. and
the foundation of the University of Paris in 1200 A.D. when
precious little philosophy was done anywhere in the western world,
18. R. Rorty, "Genteel Syntheses, Professional Analyses, Transcen-dentalist

Culture," in Peter Caws, Two Centuries oj Philosophy in America (London:
Blackwell, 1980, pp. 238-239).
19. The London Review OJ Books, 1980/Jun.: 15-16.
208 JAMES M. EDIE
and, please try to think of all the great philosophers between the
death of William of Ockham and the emergence of Descartes.
Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa? In the Eighteenth century the first great
Russian philosopher, Gregory Skovoroda, prayed to God Almighty
to let him be a Socrates in Russia; his prayer was granted and Russia
had two extraordinary centuries of philosophical development until it
was all stamped out by Bolshevism, but who would say that any of
Russian philosophy is anything more than a series of brilliant
footnotes to Hegel? And has American culture ever produced a true
philosophical giant?
But, in this "conversation of the West" we cannot be concerned
only with philosophers but must be concerned with everybody. It
seems to me that J. N. Mohanty put his finger on the sore spot: "if a
history of ideas alone is to be the effective tool for overcoming
philosophical mistakes,20 then we need a history of the relevant
ideas. "21 If we really take the "conversation of mankind" seriously,
we must allow Mohanty to ask his "preposterous" question: what
about including Eastern (particularly Hindu and Buddhist) thinkers
as well? This global conversation, (still at least taking place solely
within the same species of homo sapiens) would be a bewildering
multiversum of conversations in which it would be impossible for
everyone to take part all at once. How large is the given
"community" of conversationalists in anyone instance? If we are
discussing physical theories, it would be the international
community of physicists, past and present. If we are doing
exobiology, it would be the international community of
exobiologists. If we are doing logic and the philosophy of logic, we
would have to consider the Sanskrit philosophers' idea of the mental
and how it interreacted with the later theory of the realism of
universals, the fact that Hindu philosophy never confused
consciousness with the mental, whereas in the French Cartesian
tradition there always was a tendency to confuse all consciousness
with thinking (or language-using) consciousness, etc. Are we
20. Rorty, 1979, p. 33.

2l. Mohanty, 1983/Jan., 96.
ON CONFRONTING SPECIES-SPECIAC SKEPfIOSM ... 209
making progress? Toward what? If we abstract from the differences

among disparate discourses or subsume them under the most general
possible conversation, do we not end up hypostatizing
"conversation" and stretching its meaning outwards so as to
asymptotically approach a notion of an ideally communicating
society as a new, though wobbly, transcendental foundation?22
III. The Response of Transcendental Philosophy
It is time to sober up, and I propose to do this by examining

once again, very briefly, Husserl's conception of eidetic truth and,
then, his conception of transcendental consciousness.
But, before we do this, let us inject one, last, empirical fact. We
all know that the Pioneer 10 outer-space probe carries a plaque
indicating the planet of its origin (earth) and bearing a picture of the
human beings (us), male and female, that created it. We know that
we are using our most recent technology and spending billions of
dollars on planning extraterrestrial space probes for the future and
that we are beaming intelligible signals into outer space on the
explicit assumption that there might be higher intelligence other than
our own somewhere in the universe, intelligent beings who might
somehow sometime intercept our probes or receive our messages
and eventually return them and communicate with us. This explicit
assumption, on which we unhesitatingly act in practical ways,
though the technology to do so is an extremely recent acquisition of
homo sapiens on this lost planet, is a fact of present human
behavior.
In spite of the fact that the probability of other intelligent life
resembling or own sufficiently to be able to communicate with us is
so low as to approach zero, we will nevertheless not rest satisfied
until we know for sure. This is a practical manifestation of the
22. Mohanty. 1983/Jan .. 97. Mohanty here makes reference to ApeJ and
Habermas.
210 JAMES M. EDIE
postulate of reason and science. There is, for instance, the factual
existence of the new science of exobiology which studies
extraterrestrial life, a very strange "science" in fact since it cannot
even demonstrate that its subject matter exists!23 Though we are
now quite certain that no other planets capable of sustaining life exist
in our solar system, they may exist elsewhere in the galaxy and, if
we extend our horizons to include more distant galaxies, and
extrapolate what has happened on our planet, there may even be
hundreds of millions of planets capable of supporting life and, for
all we know, intelligent life. We do not know if these extraterrestrial
life-forms or even intellect-forms would be sufficiently like our own
to be able to be recognized by us as either living or as intelligent,
and, given the distances to be traversed and the absolute character of
the speed of light-at least given the present state of our
technology-communication of some kind could only be possible
over periods of millions of years. The prospect certainly looks
bleak, but it is not only science-fiction that leads us to investigate the
possibility.
We have but one instance24 before us of the evolution of
intelligent life, namely that on earth. But, if it could happen once,
namely here, it could, in principle, happen elsewhere. De esse ad
23.Simpson, 1964, p. 254.

24.Though we have but "one instance" of the evolutionary process which led
to true "higher intelligence" before us, namely the emergence of homo sapiens on
this planet (even though the difficulty, or probable impossibility, or replicating
this process elsewhere is rightly daunting to the exobiologist), this one instance
will not deter the phenomenologist as such from examining the essence of what it
is to manifest "higher intelligence" and what would be required for communication
among various species of intelligent life. After all, as Husserl argued in Ideas, in
The Cartesian Meditations, and elsewhere, we have in our own experience but one
existential example or instance of what an ego-life actually is, namely our own
experiencing. Nevertheless, if every "instance" must exemplify all the essential
characteristics of its "essence," of what it is to be an ego-life (i.e., a
consciousness that perceives, imagines, remembers, has emotions, thinks and
reasons and through these "acts" constitutes the "world of objects" which we call
the unified life-world), we can establish eidetically, through the method of free
variation, the necessary structures without which consciousness would not be
consciousness (of the world, of itself, of others).
ON CONFRONTING SPECIES-SpECIRe SKEPfICISM ... 211
posse valet illatio. 25 The hypothesis that there could be, that there
may be, intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe will not be
discarded by humans for the more resigned, anesthetic, stoical,
passive outlook expressed in the opposite hypothesis, namely that
since the probability of ever discovering or coming to know
anything at all about such beings is all but zero we might as well
give up our practical assumptions and spend our resources more
wisely.26
This fact illustrates an important characteristic of human
intelligence: what James would call the "livelier hypothesis," the
more courageous option, the one that gives us something to "press"
against, to strive towards, that requires us to go beyond the evident,
that hypothesis will have the greatest power to stimulate our
intellectual and practical abilities. And how would we communicate
with other species of intelligent life? Would they, like the Greeks,
have discovered the laws of logic and scientific inquiry? Who
knows? In attempting to communicate we can only rely on the
instruments of our own logical thought.
The ancients, like Aristotle, and the medievals, the Arab and
Jewish thinkers no less than the Latins, had no doubt that there was
other intelligent life in the universe, though of a non-bodily nature,
namely the movers of the spheres, the "separated intelligences," the
myriad of angels, each unique in its species, but possessed of
intellect and will comparable to ours, though of a much higher
potency, with whom limited communication was possible. Well, we
have long abandoned this particular folklore in science, but we have
not thereby lost at least the teleological hope that there may be
intelligent species other than ourselves. 27 This is the practical
scientific challenge to species-specific skepticism.
25. It is a cliche of Scholastic logic that from the fact that something is the
case it is valid to infer that it is possi ble for it to be, whereas one can never infer
from the mere conceptual possibility of something to its actual existence. De esse
al posse valet illatio; de posse al esse non valet illatio.
26. Mayr, 1988, p. 73.
27. The best treatment of the "teleological" elements in Husserl's thought is
by Andre de Muralt, The Idea oj Phenomenology, Husserlian Exemplarism, G. L.
Breckon (Trans.) (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974). For Husserl
212 JAMES M. EDIE
But we do not even have to go to the question of other species who
possibly share intelligence similar to our own. It is certainly a
practical as well as a theoretical postulate of all anthropological
science within our own species of homo sapiens, just on this planet,
that however diverse and, on the surface level, "incomprehensible"
other cultures we may encounter may be, at the limit, it is always
possible for us, ourselves, just as humans, to put ourselves in their
place, to experience the world from their perspective, and, at least
ideally, to be able to communicate with them. How else could one
write "scientific" studies of the Australian aborigines, the Trobiand
Islanders, the Indian tribes of the Amazon valley in Brazil, or the
multifarious tribes of New Guinea and even North America? We
describe their languages, we describe their social structures, we in
fact communicate with them and they with us, and each can come to
see the common world of experience through the eyes of the
the concrete, existing thing is a "factual example" of its idea or essence, while the
idea is the "ideal exemplar" of its object. The factual enables us to define the idea,
but only the idea enables us to comprehend the factual object. Suppose a given
science in its actual, imperfect, historical state. Its "essential" character requires a
continual tendency 'towards greater and greater precision, comprehensiveness and
certitude. In its actual state any given science is essentially relative to a state of
greater perfection which awaits it in the future; science is always in an
intermediate, developing state between a less perfect and a more perfect state. The
completely realized and perfected state of a science is an ideal goal (tel os or idea);
it is, in fact, an "open" or "infinite" idea. The real, factual state of development of
any given science gives its meaning to the "idea" of that science, and of science
in general, but at the same time the "ideal" of science alone make it possible to
understand the "real" as an intermediate stage in the realization of the idea. This is
the universal principle of the mutual exemplarity of the real and the ideal
throughout the whole of Husserlian phenomenology. See also: J. M. Edie, Edmund
Husserl's Phenomenology: A Critical Commentary (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 1987, pp. 143-144), and S. Strasser, "Das Gottesproblem in der
Spatphilosophie Edmund Husserls," Philosophisches lahrbuch, 67 Jahrgang: 130-
142), in which Strasser argues that the idea of God is, for Husserl, the final
absolute reality which is both a theoretical "idea" and a practical "telos" working
itself out in the innate drive of mankind to come to absolute and final knowledge.
He concludes that Husserl's exemplarism is based on a teleological conception, a
"Gottesbegriff," both immanent within and transcendent to human striving. But it
would certainly be prudent to stop short of making Husser! sound like Whitehead
or Teilhard de Chardin. Nevertheless, if there is a personal, intelligent God, he is
bound by the laws of logic no less than we are.
other. 28 The objectivity, universality, and the validity required of

"scientific" (and therefore of "rational") laws requires that all human
experience is, ideally, interchangeable, that we can always put
ourselves at the point of view of another and experience the world as
the other does. And in fact this is accomplished, perhaps not
totally-given the ineffability of individual differences-but
sufficiently for scientifically rational discourse to continue to take
place.
A. The Eidetic
This espousal of a postulate of rationality is something for which

Husserl has been both praised and blamed. It is almost an
embarrassment to have to repeat now some of the truths we have
28. Anthropologists like Benjamin Whorff once claimed that languages like
those of the Hopi Indians would enable them, with their relativistic verbs for time
and place, to understand the relativity theory of Einstein better than we can in
English, forgetting that the language of relativity theory is not any natural
language but the language of mathematics which is the same in all places and at
all times. One of Heidegger's disciples, Johannes Lohmann ("M. Heidegger's
Ontological Difference and Language," in Joseph J. Kockelmans, On Heidegger
and Language (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972, pp. 303-363) once
argued that "the logic and grammar" of Chinese is essentially different from "the
logic and grammar" of the Indo-European languages. But this is easily refuted by
the fact that, native speakers of French have had no trouble at all teaching
Chinese seminarians (in a seminary in Chentu Province prior to 1949) the logic
of Aristotle in Chinese (see my reply to Lohmann in the same volume, pp. 220-
228). It is true that formal logic proceeds in a binary, either-or-manner. It is the
only "language," for instance, our computers can "understand" or follow. Various
cultures divide up the world differently on the surface level of their ordinary
speech. For the Orientals there are the four passing sights, the three vows, the
eightfold path, the four noble truths, the six elements of true religion, the
seventeen great goings forth, etc., whereas for the Medieval Western Latins there
were the twelve degrees of true humility, the seven deadly sins, the nine choirs of
angels, the ten commandments, etc., but I strongly suspect that as the Japanese
and the Chinese, no less than the Western Europeans, become more reliant on
computers, they will drop any resistance they may residually have to "either-or"
logic, including the logic and grammatical studies of Aristotle and Leibniz. There
are some four thousand natural languages still spoken on earth but there is only
one "pure logical grammar."
214 JA~M. EDIE
learned from Husserl. It is certainly a defect in a thinker to be able to

do nothing but repeat the lessons from the past that he has been
taught by his teachers, but it may be an equally and even more
serious defect to have remembered nothing. Is it really necessary
now to recall to Western philosophers what has for long been called
"the Greek miracle?" Namely, the discovery of just what it is that
distinguishes philosophy from nonphilosophy, the discovery of the
necessary, universally valid and absolutely coercive laws of thought
which we call formal logic and which enable us to establish
scientific knowledge, particularly in the eidetic, apriori sense which
leads to apodictic insight into the formal structures of reason itself.
The levels of formal logic which give us proof-forms can be
conceived so "purely" as to be freed from all content and all
reference to any concrete domain of knowledge. Without such
proof-forms unrelated to any particular or individual case there
would be no "science" at all, because they establish the ideal
conditions of the possibility of science in general, the pure theory of
any possible science whatsoever. What is distinctive of philosophy
is not some higher, inherent "dignity" which places it above other
types of investigations or realms of discourse, but rather the simple
fact that only philosophers study the norms of logic, the apriori, ex
projesso. Philosophy, among other things, is the study of the
structures of thinking (language-using consciousness) which are so
fundamental that all persons and all scientists always already take
them for granted. 2 9
29. In this connection see: J. M. Edie, Speaking and Meaning (Bloomington,

IN: Indiana University Press, 1976, pp. 45-50) and ff. as it deals with Husserl's
conception of "pure logical grammar" from the Fourth Investigation and Formal
and Transcendental Logic. It is, moreover, worth pointing out in this connection
that the ancient Greek realization by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle that the true
domain of philosophy is "the conceptual" (logoi) and that it is the purpose of
philosophy to distinguish and separate out the apriori in any realm of discourse
and investigation, was maintained throughout the whole Western tradition until
the dawn of the modem era in the Seventeenth Century. During the years just
preceding the foundation of the University of Paris, at the time of the Latin
thinkers Abelard and Gundissalinus, there was a lot of speculation on the proper
divisions and ordering of the sciences under metaphysics and logic. It was a
commonplace thesis to be defended in the cathedral schools and elsewhere that
"there is no science which is not a part of philosophy," nulla est scientia quae
ON CONFRONTING SPECIES-SpECIRe SKEPflCISM ... 215
In this Husserl was very Greek and had learned the lesson of
Socrates, as taught in the Phaedo, very well: it is the peculiar task of
the philosopher to distinguish and separate out in experience
conceptual aprioris. It is for this reason that philosophers can know
that no physicist, no physiologist, no historian, no sociologist, or
any other scientist can violate a single law of formal logic without
his statements and arguments becoming subject to incoherence,
contradiction and error. No other branch of investigation studies
logic or the philosophy of logic as such, nor does it need to. It is, in
fact, not easy to violate a law of formal logic because we almost
always think according to these stringent and universal conditions of
thought without bringing them at each instance to the level of fully
conscious, reflexive awareness. In fact the Egyptians, the
Babylonians, the Cro-Magnons all thought according to the laws of
formal logic long before the early Greek thinkers began to make
them the subject of a special investigation and brought them to light
as the necessary basis of all theorein.
philosophiae non sit aliqua pars (P. Van Stenberghen, The Philosophical
Movement in the Thirteenth Century (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson, 1955, p. 26f).
The reason for this was that all the "lower" sciences like agronomy and
architecture were "subordinate sciences" which took their first principles from
"higher sciences," just as music and optics take their first principles from the
"higher science" of mathematics and, ultimately, all sciences derive their first
principles of demonstration from the "first science" which is metaphysics. In this
sense, as Question I of the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas shows us, even
theology is a "subordinated" science which is argumentative and demonstrative
based ultimately on the higher scientia Dei et beatorum. It would be interesting to
examine the historical relationship of the individual sciences (Etienne Gilson has
done some of this in his The Unity oj Philosophical Experience (New York:
Scribner's, 1950). In antiquity and the Middle Ages medical specialists like Galen
and Avicenna felt it necessary, in order to write treatises on Medicine or Healing,
to deal first with logic, epistemology and metaphysics in order to properly order
their researches and guarantee their validity; as we know Galen even invented a
new form of syllogism. In the days of Newton physics was not only still a part of
philosophy but also of natural theology. It is as if the various non-philosophical
sciences and disciplines were all originally conceived as parts of philosophy
until, having progressed to a sufficient stage of maturity to develop their own
distinctive methodologies, were able to be prosecuted by scientists who no longer
studied philosophy or the problems of logic ex projesso.
216 JAMES M. EDIE
It is not necessary here to repeat in any great detail how all this
involves Husserl in the refutation of psychologism. Against the
species-specific "psychologism" of his contemporaries who held
that logical laws, the rules of thought, were nothing other than the
natural laws governing psychological processes in human minds,
who made out logic to be "the physics" of thought, Husserl argued
that since psychology is a natural science, its laws can never be
exact or apodictic, never apriori or evident to insight, but must
always be vague generalizations based on statistical probabilities. 3o
The mistake of the "psychologists" of his time was to confuse the
contents ofjudgments with acts ofjudging. Acts of judging are real,
datable events, real occurrences which have causes and effects in the
living, thinking organism; but the contents of judgments are ideal
entities, concepts. We must not confuse the ideal with the real. No
real event, no act of consciousness is ever repeatable or identically
the same (idem numero actus) as any other; but the same content can
occur again and again, at different times, in different
consciousnesses, under different conditions. 31 Whenever a truth is
30. It would not due to go into or follow the detail that Husserl himself goes
into in the Prolegomena. An excellent summary is given for those who want a
shortcut in M. Farber, The Foundation oj Phenomenology (New York: Paine-
Whitman, 1962), to whose very illuminating insights I have been indebted ever
since I began teaching phenomenology. See especially, in the present connection,
pp. 112-124.
31. I have several times, in articles finally all reassembled together in
William James and Phenomenology (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
1987), tried to explain the sense in which Husserl was indebted to James in his
refutation of psychologism, but not all my readers seem to grasp the central point
(as in the review of this book by W. J. Earle, Canadian Philosophical Reviews,
1988: 260-265). Earle is willing to agree (263) that James rejected the atomism
and associationism of Locke and Hurne in their theories of perception, but he does
not concede that this amounts to the same kind of phenomenological reduction
that was operated by the Gestalt psychologists and others and which I (and
others), following Gurwitsch, have tried to explain in detail. But the main point is
not merely James' rejection of "mind-stuff" theory but his recognition of the
proper nature of "the object of thought" (what Husserl called the noema ) and its
central importance for mental life. There is no sameness, no repeatability in the
real world, and therefore not in the flow of acts and states of consciousness which
are subject to the law of irreversible temporal sequence in which the experiencing
subject is at each instant of time not only in a new position but in a new and
different state of preparation, expectation, accumulation of past experience, etc.,
discovered for the first time, and established as true, we experience

"the retroactive effect of the true" (to use Merleau-Ponty's happy
expression) so that we see with the evidence of immediate insight
that it had been true all along even though nobody had discovered it
or brought out into the full light of reflexive consciousness until that
date and in those circumstances. Or take our calculators: they are
built using the means of industrial mechanics and engineering; but
they operate according to a binary, either-or, yes-no, logic based on
the same ancient principles of identity, noncontradiction, and the
excluded middle that the ancients, Aristotle and Aquinas, called "the
first principles of demonstration" which are immediately evident as
soon as any thinking subject grasps the idea of anything whatsoever
(being, ens, something, res).
We are not coerced by the law of non-contradiction because, as
Mill said, we are psychologically incapable of believing two
contradictories to be true, or because only acts of belief can be called
true or false. Our greater novelists and other thinkers, like
Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, have always known that
human beings not only can, but almost always do, hold and act on
contradictory impulses and beliefs. What Husserl says is not that we
than at any other instant in time. What can be "got again" and held before the
mind in different acts of consciousness, at different times, and by other
experiencers as well, is "the object of thought." the "meaning" [W. James, The
PrinCiples oj Psychology, Vol. I (New York: Holt, 1890, pp. 460-462), and Vol.
II, pp. 641-644; see also Chs. I and II of William James and Phenomenology].
This is the true basis for James' and Husserl's refutation of psychologism. For
instance when an ideal truth, such as the Pythagorean Theorem, is first
established, it is seen to be true that the geometrical relationships on which it is
based had been true all along even though the final truth itself had never been
explicitly brought to the level of thinking-consciousness before, had never been
stated in language. But, once stated, the same math can be thought again and
again by millions of other subjects through centuries of time, it can be fitted into
new contexts that Pythagoras could never have foreseen (such as non-Euclidean
geometries) but it never turns out to have been simply false (though certain
presuppositions which had been latent had to be brought out) and certainly not
unthinkable again and again by the same and other consciousnesses. In short, the
content of an act of consciousness (James' "object of thought") is never
identifiable with mental acts themselves which are, necessarily and always part of
the real flow of history, the Heraclitean flux.
218 JAMES M. EDIE
cannot believe two contradictories to be true at the same time and in

the same respect, but that they cannot both be true.
The whole error of species-specific skepticism comes down to
our concept of truth, of the meaning-analysis of what it is to
entertain a true proposition in the mind. Husserl believed that
"species" skepticism, or relativism or "anthropologism" was easily
refutable. There is no need to persuade the skeptic that he is wrong;
this, as we can see about us, is probably psychologically impossible
anyway; our only tasks is to refute him.
We will make a long story short: if species-specific skepticism
were true, we would have to conclude that what could be true for
one species of thinking being could be false for another. But
whenever the words "true" and "false" are used in their proper
meanings, this possibility is ruled out apriori. The constitution of
this species of homo sapiens is a matter of fact, but no apriori truth
is an empirical or factual matter. Truths are ideal, conceptual, non-
temporal contents of judgments; they are not empirical acts of
judging. The fact that I judge 2 times 2 to be 4 is a causally
determined event, but the truth that 2 times 2 equals 4 is not. What
Husserl calls "the kingdom of truth" in the Logical Investigations is
much the same as what the platonist, Augustine, called the "eternal
truths," except that for "eternal" Husserl substitutes:
"omnitemporal," "at all times" and "omnispatial," in all places (jilr
lederman). Augustine argued that the truth cannot perish or be
altered, because if, per impossible, the truth' should perish, it would
still remain true that the truth had perished, ergo, the truth cannot
perish. 32 To say that there is no truth, or that all men are liars, or
32. It is, I trust, clear that Husserl was not the first or the only philosopher
in history to see himself obliged to refute species-specific skepticism. Saint
Augustine also, at the beginning of his philosophical life, felt himself "blocked"
by skepticism or "probabilism" and devoted his first philosophical dialogue to the
problem in Against the Academics. He is appalled by the "levity of these
Greeklings" (the skeptics) who deny the possibility of being able to assent to
anything at all with certainty, who can believe (in probabilities) but never know.
On the basis of the logical principle of disjunction he produces a plethora of
apriori arguments, which make no appeal to future experience, but which can be
known to be indubitably true simply by understanding the meanings of the terms
involved, such as that there is either one world or more than one world. And then
that it is impossible to know the truth, or that all truth is relative, is

the same as to say that it is true that there is no truth, etc.
However, Husserl by no means considered his task finished
when he established the eidetic and ideal character of the most
fundamental structures of logic and experienced reality. He may be a
Illogical absolutist ll in one sense of the word, a platonist with a small
IIpll (and therefore never a IInominalistll of the kind found especially
in British Empiricism), but he did want to recognize the rights, if not
of IIpsychologism,1I at least of lithe psychological. II It is a fact that
the laws of logic, though independent of any actual acts of thinking,
are nevertheless present only to and for thinking subjects~ there is a
transcendental relationship between the laws of thinking and the acts
of thinking which they govern~ we must learn not only to distinguish
the ideal from the real but to see how the ideal can live in the real, in
the psychic lives of individual, experiencing egos. Truth is, in fact,
he asks them whether or not they exist and that they seem to perceive the world.
When they answer that they seem to exist and perceive the world, he answers that:
what seems to you to exist "I call that appearance the world." And he continues:
"If you are asleep, does the world which you now see exist? .. that three times
three makes nine, and that this is the squaring of rational numbers, would be true
even though the whole human race were snoring!" (Saint Augustine, Against the
Academics, 1. O'Meara (Trans.) (Ancient Christian Writers, New York: Newman,
1951, pp. 124-126). In his later, more mature, dialogue on free will, he uses
similar arguments to establish the basis for a "Christian philosophy,"
philosophia Christiana, which would establish the "believed" truths about the
existence of God and the immortality of the soul with the certitude of
"knowledge." He first establishes that there are norms or rules of thought such
that we must think according to them even without thinking about them, since
they rule our minds in a coercive, objective and "immutable" way. Our minds are
mutable; the truth is not. "I will show you something," he says, "more sublime
than our minds and reason. Behold, it is truth!" He even goes on to state,
rhapsodically, that "this truth itself is our God" (basing himself on the words of
the Lord: "r am the truth"), but we need not follow him into his religious
conclusions to appreciate hi s line of argument (Saint Augustine, The Problem oj
Free Choice, Dom Mark Pontifex (Trans.) (Ancient Christian Writers, New York:
Newman, 1955, pp. 114-117); see also John A. Mourant, Introduction to the
Philosophy oj Saint Augustine (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1964, p.
101). This concern for the formal and material aprioris that govern experience in
Augustine is no doubt the reason Husserl felt somehow disposed in his favor, as
his quotation from Augustine's De Vera Religione at the conclusion of Cartesian
Meditations attests.
220 JAMES M. EDIE
experienced~ something ideal can be discovered by and in a real act

of experiencing. That is the puzzle and challenge which motivated
Husserl's search for an eidetic phenomenology of the whole of life-
world experience. 33
B. The Transcendental
Transcendental consciousness, the transcendental ego in the final

analysis, is the real experiencing ego~ the transcendental and the
empirical egos are not two separate realities, but two "attitudes." The
real, mundane, experiencing ego can (but is not always required to)
take a transcendental attitude towards its own experience, and, when
it does, it discovers eidetic laws applicable to its own experience
(and to any experience as such) which it is the task of
phenomenology (as an eidetic science) to uncover. There are eidetic
laws discoverable not only in the mathesis universalis of formal
ontology (i.e. formal logic plus the laws of objectivity in general)
but also in the various other "regions" of experience. Husserl even
accepts the Platonic analysis that brightness is related to, and is
"founded in" color, as color is "founded in" spatial figures, and so
on, as an eidetic discovery even though the notion of brightness
cannot be deduced from or found to be contained in the idea of
33. There are other historical philosophers who made analyses that remind us
of Husserl. One was the Arab philosopher A vicenna who distinguished three
possible "states" of meanings, namely meanings in themselves, simply
entertained by the mind as such (in se), and then meanings as known by the mind
in acts of consciousness (in intellectu ), and finally meanings as real things that
instantiate meanings in the real world and to which ideal meanings can be taken
to refer (in re). This tripartite distinction between meanings, acts of thinking, and
acts of reference had a profound influence as we know on the Latin Scholastics
like Aquinas, an especially John Duns Scotus, in their theories of knowledge.
Husserl does not, quite naturally, mention A vicenna, but he does mention Leibniz
in the Prolegomena, and recognizes the distinction he made between "truths of
fact" and "truths of reason" as serving as a possible basis for the same argument
he is making against skepticism.
ON CONFRONTING SPECIES-SPECIFlC SKEPTlaSM ... 221
color, nor the idea of color be deduced from the notion of surface. 34
But there is a much more important example to be found in
human experience and the several phenomenologies it inspires:
namely, there is no intrinsic reason deducible from the essence of
consciousness that it should perceive, imagine, remember, think, be
affected by emotions, and otherwise exercise just the ways of
"having objects" that it does. Phenomenology is necessarily a
descriptive science while remaining at the same time an eidetic
science. There is no reason why consciousness should perceive,
but, given the fact of a perceiving consciousness, we can (through
the method of free variation) discover the laws of any possible
perceiving consciousness and come to see that these apriori
structures "found" other structures of imagining, remembering, and
even thinking, without the higher structures ever being "reducible"
to the founding stratum of perception, but nevertheless being always
"founded" on it in such wise that the "founded" eidetic laws of
thinking can be seen to be prefigured in the prepredicative structures
34. Plato also (Meno, 75B) considered these relationships to be "materially"

apriori: there cannot be brightness without color, or color without surface, or
surface without extension. One cannot be present without the other as "parts" of a
whole even though they belong to different "logical" categories (see Edie, Edmund
Husserl's Phenomenology, 1987, pp. 43-44). Or see Aquinas, In Physicorum
Aristotelis Librum Secundum, cap. 2, lec. 3:
Multa sunt conjuncta secundum rem, quorum unum non est de intellectu
alterius: sicut album et musicum conjunguntur in aliquo subjecto, et tamen
unum non est de intellectu alterius, et ideo unum separatim intelligi
potest sine alio. Et hoc est unum intellectum esse abstractum ab alio.
Manifestum est autem quod posteriora non sunt de intellectu priorum, sed
e converso; unde priora possunt intelligi sine posterioribus, et non e
converso. Sicut patet quod animal est prius homine, et homo prius hoc
homine (nam homo se habet ex additione ad animal, et hic homo ex
additione ad hominem); et propter hoc homo non est de intellectu
animalis, nec Socrates de intellectu hominis ....
Thus, if there is Socrates, there is a man, if there is a man, there is a rational
animal, if there is a rational animal, there is an animal, if there is an animal,
there is a living being, if there is a living being, there is a being (and not
nothing), but, in all this, we have not here said anything about the real world, but
only about the necessary apriori relationships of concepts which are implied in
our experience of the real world in order to make it intelligible; thus, wherever
there is real experience, the possibility of apriori rules of knowledge, both formal
and "material," come into play.
222 JAMES M. EDIE
of perception. 35 This IS what is meant by a phenomenology of

perception.
The laws of transcendental consciousness, thus eidetically
established, do not give us a mental or a mundane thing but make
the constitution of the mundane, the mental (or "psychic") empirical
ego susceptible of objectification. Again, the transcendental ego is
not another ego distinct from the empirical ego but a possibility of
any actually existing ego and, just as transcendental, does not
presuppose any preferred set of categories (as does Kant's
"transcendental psychologism"), any preferred world-picture, or
scientifically explanatory theory of how it came about. It is beyond
body-mind dualism, physicalism, and mentalism. 36 It is capable of
constituting the sense of all these alternatives and more.
Husserl calls himself a "Cartesian" but in the sense of one who
has emptied Cartesianism of all its doctrinal content. When
Descartes discovered the cogito (or consciousness) as the
indubitable point of departure, he identified it with human reality; his
"ego sum" is a man, of the species homo sapiens, a little "tag end"
of the real world. Husserl's consciousness is "transcendental,"
meaning that it is structured according to the minimal conditions
35. Primarily in Husserl, and later in Merleau-Ponty, the "phenomenology of

perception" was the first starting point and the most frequently employed example
to illustrate the phenomenological investigation of the life-world from an eidetic
point of view. Husserl's posthumous work, Experience and Judgment, L. Landgrebe
(Ed.) (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973) and his earlier Formal and
Transcendental Logic, D. Cairns (Trans.) (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1969) pose the
question and gi ve Husserl's answer about how the structures of predicative thought
can be seen to be "founded" in prepredictive, perceptual consciousness. What most
clearly distinguishes Husserl's phenomenology from Logical Positivism (with
which movement it was contemporaneous and which also issued from Vienna) was
that even though both believed that conceptual thought based on the rules of logic
had somehow to be brought back to perceptual experience [remember the slogans
on which we were brought up of the "empirical criterion of meaning"? or "the
empirical criterion of truth"?] only Husserl provided a theoretical framework for
the "founding" of higher orders of experience like thinking in the foundational,
underlying experience of pre-conceptual and pre-reflexive perceiving. The
Positivists, from Hume onwards, accepted the whole of formal logic, and then
proclaimed that all meaning and truth had to be "reduced" to sense-experience,
juxtaposing the two without ever even posing the question of how logical thought
could arise from perception.
36. Mohanty, 1983/Jan., 94-95.
ON CONfRONTING SPECIES-SPECIFIC SKEPTIOSM ... 223
necessary and sufficient to describe any consciousness capable of

intelligent life or reason. That Husserl's "foundationalism" is not
what his critics have mistakenly taken it to be is clear: it is
"foundational" but not in a species-specific sense.
IV. Conclusion
In conclusion we must return to the original topic of this essay:

On Confronting Species-Specific Skepticism as We Near the End of
the Twentieth Century. One might have hoped that James and
Husserl, Frege and Russell, had bequeathed to the Twentieth
Century the possibility of a future philosophy without either
dogmatism or skepticism; we see, at the end of the century, that this
is far from being the case. I will conclude by giving what I think
would be Husserl's answer to those who think of texts as nothing
other than the free play of signifiers, or discourse as nothing other
than the chance conversations of everyday life and common sense,
in this or any other possible universe of thought.
Those who focus their attention on the "textuality" of the text or
the discourses of the "conversation of mankind," should give some
thought to what is meant by a text. 37 There is the empirical fact of
intelligible communication among those speaking different
languages but one cannot blithely make that fact the bedrock, the
unexamined basis of all intelligibility without asking just how it is
possible. A text is, first of all, a string of meaningful sentences, laid
out in time if spoken, put down from left to right (or in some
conventional notational system) if written. The first requirement of
the sentences so constructed into a text is that its fundamental units
make sense. There are dependent or incomplete meanings such as
words, and then there are words grammatically formed into
complete and independent units of meaning which we call sentences.
37. This is discussed particularly in Formal and Transcendental Logic. See

also: Edie, 1987, Ch. VIII, "The Hidden Dialectic in Edmund Husserl's
Phenomenology," p. 116f.
224 JAMES M. EDIE
The first level of formal logic, pure logical grammar, will

guarantee the meaningfulness of sentences. But a string of
meaningful sentences cannot just follow one another in random
order. There is a higher order of formal logic which governs the
rules of coherence and implication. The sentences in a given string
(or perhaps in a paragraph) cannot contradict one another (at a
minimum), but, more stringently, must belong in some way
together, must pertain to the same realm of discourse, must follow
from one another in such wise that the later sentences are implied by
the earlier and flow from them, or build on them in some structured
and necessary way.
But even this is not yet sufficient to constitute a text. It is the
third, and highest level of formal logic (which brings us into the
realm of semantics and extratextual verification) which establishes
the rules of the testability of a text as to its truth or falsity. Now
these rules will of course be very different for scientific texts than
they will be for literary, or historical, or theological, or other kinds
of texts, and it would be too much to go into all of the theories of
truth that would have to be considered in this connection, but the
essential matter is that every text belongs to a context of utterance
and refers beyond itself to something outside of itself which it will
clarify. Now all of these rules of textuality are, in the first instance,
apriori or conceptual constraints. They are not matters of sociology,
historical circumstances, the genetic endowment of the race, or
necessarily species-specific.
As Husserl wrote in the Fourth Investigation:
If we inquire into the reason why certain combinations are

permitted and certain others prohibited in our language, we
shall be, in a very great measure, referred to accidental
linguistic habits, and, in general, to facts of linguistic
development that are different in different linguistic
communities. But, in another part, we meet with the
essential distinction between independent and dependent
meanings, as also with the laws-essentially connected with
that distinction-of combinations of meanings and meaning
ON CONFRONTING SPECIES-SPECIRC SKEPfICISM ... 225
modifications, laws that must more or less clearly exhibit

themselves in the theory of grammatical forms in a
corresponding class of grammatical incompatibilities in every
developed language. 38
We could go on to a description of the categories of meanings,

categories of the composition of meanings, categories of the
modification of meanings, and so on, but this is sufficient to indicate
that, on purely conceptual grounds, there is a solid reason for
distinguishing what happens on the level of the surface string, of
ordinary conversation, from the logical and apriori constraints on
meaningfulness, non-contradiction and possible truth, on the level
of the depth grammar (or what Husserl called "pure logical
grammar") necessary to the structure of any possible natural
language, discourse or text.
Both Russell and Wittgenstein saw the need for this distinction
but provided no clear theory for it. The Fourteenth century
Franciscan modistae and the Seventeenth century Cartesians had
also seen the need for such a distinction and laid down some (very
few) laws governing what is now called depth (or logical) grammar.
Husserl approached the question purely as a logician; Chomsky and
his school approach it as empirical scientists. But all these
approaches give us solid reasons for not abandoning what is now
called "foundationalism" as it has here been defined. 39 Merleau-
Ponty, speaking again as a disciple of Husserl, perhaps puts it best:
The idea of a single history or of a logic of history is, in a

sense, implied in the least human exchange, in the least
social perception. For example, anthropology supposes that
civilizations very different from ours are comprehensible to
us, that they can be situated in relation to ours and vice
versa, that all civilizations belong to the same universe of
38. Ednllmd Husserl, Logical Investigations, Vol. I, J. N. Findlay (Trans.)

(New York: Humanities Press, 1970, p. 518).
39. Edie, 1976, pp. 63, 209, with reference to Chomsky, Russell and
Wittgenstein as well as Husser\.
226 JAMES M. EDlE
thought, since the least use of language implies an idea of

truth.... Our life is essentially universal. 4o
40. M. Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy OJ Perception and Other Essays, J. M.

Edie (Ed.) (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964, p. 10 [italics mine)).
In the title essay of the same collection, "The Primacy of Perception," Merleau-
Ponty makes the same universal and objective claim for perception as the
"founding term" of thought:
If a friend and I are standing before a landscape and I attempt to show my
friend something which I see and which he does not yet see, we cannot
account for it by saying that I see something in my own world and that I
attempt, by sending verbal messages, to give rise to an analogous
perception in the world of my friend. There are not two numerically distinct
worlds plus a mediating language which alone would bring us together.
There is-and I know it very wen if I become impatient with him-a demand
that what I see be seen by him also. What I see, from where I stand is
objectively there for any observer who would stand where I am standing. It
makes no difference if I might later turn out to be mistaken; right now my
perception imposes an objective demand that what I see can be seen by
anyone. "The thing imposes itself not as true for every intellect, but as real
for every subject who is standing where I am" (p. 17).
Merleau-Ponty's purpose in this essay is to examine "the relation between
intellectual consciousness and perceptual consciousness" (p. 19), and yet, in this
very essay, he admits that he likes to be thought of as a "skeptic" in the literal
sense of the word: One who goes to see, who looks around, who practices skepsis.
In hi s later writings on linguistic structuralism, between 1949-1959, he took up
the problem of the relationships which obtain between perceptual consciousness
and language. As was his wont, given the dialectical cast of his mind, he insisted
on two contradictories, namely that there was the possibility of the universality
of communication based on "algorithmic" rules (The Prose oj the World, J. O'Neill
(Trans.) (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973, p. 115f), of thought and
language, but at the same time he seems to have feared and denigrated Husserl's
"pure logical grammar" and to want to suggest, almost as a precursor of Derrida
and Rorty, that the only universality necessary was to be found in the existential
and "oblique passage from a given language that I speak ... to another language
that I learn" (Signs, R. McCleary (Trans.) (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1964, p. 87). See also my foreword to Merleau-Ponty's Consciousness and
the AcquiSition oj Language, H. J. Silverman (Trans.) (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1973, p. xxviif.), and also my monograph on Merleau-Ponty's
Philosophy oj Language (University Press of America, 1987, pp. 50[, 80f).
Merleau-Ponty-because of this inner contradiction in his thought which tore him
between Husserl's logic and its realization in a form of structural linguistics, on
the one hand, and his commitment to an existentialism of communication, on the
other-could never bring himself to finish what was to have been, in his own
words, his most important work, The Prose oj the World, but simply abandoned it
around 1959, put in a drawer to be published only posthumously by Claude Lefort,
and sought solace, after a philosophical breakdown, in the unfinished remnants of
the last pages of The Visible and the Invisible which remind some of the kind of
ON CONFRONTING SPECIES-SPECIFIC SKEPnaSM ... 2T7
incoherent "babble" for which Aristotle reproached Heraclitus, or which we find in

Kant's Opus Posthumum.
10
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:

The Question of the Philosophic Interlocutor
Jose Huertas-Jourda
Centre for Advanced Research in Phenomenology
Wilfrid Laurier University
§ 1. The theme of this essay presented itself to me as a

consequence of the work I did preparing a computer-copy of
Professor Aron Gurwitsch's "Paris lectures" of 1937 for possible
publication. This, the last remaining unpublished major manuscript
of Prof. Gurwitsch's was, needless to say, entirely new to me. And
it is this unfamiliarity which led me to my theme, because, in the
years intervening since these lectures were given, the tone and
quality of philosophic discourse have changed so that the contrast
between the text before me and that to which I was perforce
accustomed brought home the question: "to whom are these widely
different discourses addressed?" I shall attempt, in what follows to
give textual excerpts in order to provide an experience of the contrast
of which I speak. My aim is not polemical, merely illustrative, and
this only in order to formulate more precisely the question with
which these texts presented me, with the complementary aim of
assessing what answer, if any, the Paris lectures provide to it. Let
us begin by turning to what I take to be representative of the manner
and quality of philosophic discourse today.
229
230 JOSE HUERfAS-JOURDA
§2. Please note, all my illustrative texts appeared in the years

intervening between 1937 and the present; they are perforce short
excerpts deemed to be representative of their author's attitude
towards both philosophy and the philosophic interlocutor. The first
one dates from 1947 and is from the pen of Martin Heidegger, Tl:
The knowledge of the sciences is usually expressed in

propositions which are then set before man as compre-
hensible results for him to put to use. The "doctrine" of a
thinker is that which is left unsaid in what he says, to which
man is exposed in order to expend himself upon it.
In order to learn and henceforth know what a thinker has
left unsaid, whatever it may be, it is necessary to consider
what he has said. To meet this challenge correctly we would
have to discuss all of Plato's "dialogues" thoroughly and in
their context. Since this is impossible, another way will have
to lead to what is left unsaid in Plato's thought.
What remains unsaid in Plato is a shift in the definition
of the essence of truth. An exposition of the "allegory of the
cave" would make it clear that this shift takes place, what
this shift consists in, and what this change of the essence of
truth is the basis for.1
I shall not comment upon this at this time but tum rather to my next
example, this one more recent and dating from 1977: (this is
admittedly a polemical text written by Prof. Jacques Derrida in reply
to a "reply" by John Searle in which his own interpretation of a
work of J. L. Austin's was attacked,2 T2:
1. M. Heidegger, Plato's Doctrine of Truth, John Barlow (Trans.), in

Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: An Anthology, Vol. III, with introductions
by W. Barrett & H. D. Aiken (Eds.) (New York: Random House, 1962, p. 251);
Pia tons Lehre der Warheit. Mit einen Brief aber den Humanismus, J. Barlow
(Trans.) (Bern: A. Francke, 1947, pp. 5-52).
2. J. Searle (presumably), "Reply to Derrida," [no bibliographical data
supplied in the text I shall quote]; 1. Derrida, "Limited Inc.," supplement to Glyph
2 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977, p.4). Since I am
quoting the French version in what follows, please note that the translation is
To WHOM IT MAY CONCERN 231
For [the benefit of] those who might have forgotten it, this is
what one could hear [as] an interminable echo to the
peremptory evaluations of the first paragraph: '''what is
wrong with these arguments . .. ? (p. 199) ... Derrida has
a distressing penchant for saying things that are obviously
false (p. 203) . ... {H]e has misunderstood Austin in several
crucial ways {crucial ways this time after "crucial points"]
and the internal weaknesses in his arguments are closely tied
to these misunderstandings. In this section therefore I will
very briefly summarize his critique and then simply list the
major misunderstandings and mistakes (p. 203). . ..
Derrida's Austin is unrecognizable. He bears almost[!] no
relation to the original (p. 204) . ... Related to the first
misunderstanding . .. is a misunderstanding . . .(p. 205) ...
what is more than simply a misreading . .. (p. 206).
I would have loved to keep my suspicions quiet in order to enjoy

this beautiful frankness without reservations. Loyalty, the absence
of dissimulation are so rare in francophone polemics who practice
mostly elision, ellipsis, censorship and a sneaky and indirect
strategy. Why did I not succeed? This is what I shall try to explain.
Among all the adverbial locutions that I have underlined and of
which one may leisurely analyze the strange functioning, one
deserves to become a proverb and I feel the need to quote it once
more: "more than simply a misreading . ... "/ More than simply a
mis-what is the matter here? Where will this lead us? Let us be
patient a little while longer. 3
§3. I have other samples, each equally demonstrative, but I think
that I have sufficiently established the basis for the contrast I wish to
mine, that all emphases are Prof. Derrida's and that I have placed in italics all
original English quotations retained by Prof. Derrida.
3. Derrida, 1977, p. 13; my translation. Cf. the previous note concerning the
manner in which I have respected the appearance of the original with respect to
what was quoted in English in that text.
show, and that I may now proceed to the texts that caused me such
delighted surprise, T3:
Transcendental philosophy appears necessarily to have to

take the form of a universal psychology. It is of little import
that this fundamental consideration has been expressly
formulated in this or that other manner, or that mostly
empiricist philosophers took inspiration from it more or less
inadvertently. One is in any case justified in seeing, in this
reasoning, an interpretation at least of the acts of these
philosophers, if not of their words. It is the fact that
[empiricism] has entered upon this path that secures an
enormous philosophical importance for empiricism, to such
an extent that, even when one finds cause to reject all the
particular doctrines advocated by the empiricist school- and
Husserlian phenomenology finds itself in the position of
retaining almost none [of them]-one cannot refrain from
admiring the philosophic radicalism of these thinkers,
radicalism which consists in having conceived of such a
work program .... 4
§4. I believe that I have presented all the textual evidence I need
as background for asking the questions which seem to me to impose
themselves here, namely: (a) To whom are these discourses
addressed?, and (b) For whom. or what do their authors take that
addressee? It seems to me only fair to try to answer both these
questions largely on the basis of the text quoted, although some
further supporting citations may prove helpful. It seems obvious that
the French proverb, "the tone makes the song," applies here. T2 is
frankly acrimonious and the tone of both parties rather brings to
mind the equally proverbial altercations among fish-vendors at the
old Paris Central Market of Les Halles, than the debates of
philosophers. In a different vein T 1 is equally surprising: by its tone
4. A. Gurwitsch, Esquisse de fa pMnomenofogie genetique, unpublished

typescript lectures delivered in Paris, 1937, at the Institut des Sciences et des
techniques of the University of Paris; Chapt. 1, Sec. 1, p. 8.
it seems to be a paradigmatic example of what Micheline Sauvage

termed "hermeneutical terrorism "5. Thus, I feel justified in
wondering about the nature and quality of the addressee in both
these cases. While T2 is frankly partisan and clearly appeals to
sympathizers and sycophants, T 1 is more difficult to assess except
in contrast with T3. Clearly, the author of Tl expects that no
exception will be taken to his violent procedure. Or perhaps it is a
case of not caring whether exception is taken, a case of disregard of
the reader as interlocutor. The pairing of this text with a "Letter On
Humanism," in which the author thought it necessary to state, T5:
That the opposition to "humanism" by no means implies the

defense of the inhuman, but opens other prospectives [sic.]
must have become clearer to some extent now. 6
5. I distinguish with P. Ricoeur, "'two great schools of interpretation', the

one as recollection of meaning, the other as reduction of the illusions and the lies
of consciousness ... the school of suspicion. . . " [Po Ricoeur, Freud and
Philosophy: An Essay On Interpretation, D. Savage (Trans.) (New Haven, Cf: Yale
University Press, 1970, p. 32)]. M. Sauvage goes on to say: [T 4] "Suspicion does
not come to join itself to meaning recollection, nor to complete it, it impugns,
and substitutes itself to it; the reader has nothing to learn from the text, for
whatever [the text] may hold of truth, the reader knows better than [the text].
Questioning is replaced by interrogation of the text, in a language that is not its
own, and the putting of questions becomes a putting to the question: it is not a
question of hearing an utterance but of extorting confessions. We are beginning to
be used to this hermeneutical terrorism" [M. Sauvage, Parminide, CAt fA Sagesse
Impossible (Paris: P. D. Seghers, 1957, p. 9)]. To be sure, the "three masters"of
the school of suspicion Ricoeur has in mind are "Marx, Nietzsche, Freud"
(Ricoeur, 1970), but the characterization given by M. Sauvage seems to me so apt
for the tone and attitiude evinced by T 1 that I could not resist to quote her here at
length.
6. Heidegger, Letter on Humanism, E. Lohner (Trans.), in Barrett & Aiken
(Eds.) (1962, p. 292). However, this disclaimer needs to be placed in the light of
the following, which appears further down the page [T6]:
The thinking that runs counter to "values" does not state that all that one
declares "values" - "culture," "art," "science," "human dignity," "world,"
and "God" -is worthless. One should rather come to understand that it is
exactly through the characterization of something as "value," that it
loses its dignity. This is to say that through the estimation of
something as a value, one accepts what is evaluated onl y as a mere
object for the appreciation of man. But what a thing is in its Being is
not exhausted by its being an object, much less when the objectivity has
the character of value. All valuing, even when it values positively,
Juxtaposing T5 with its sequel does make some perspectives

clearer, in particular a rather strong propensity to dispraise all
interlocutors. One is tempted here to remind the author that he, in the
privacy of his own dialogue with the empty page is his own first
interlocutor, and that what he actually writes, and how he chooses to
write it is indicative of a judgment of value, by which all other
possible formulations have been refused. But we prefer to let the
texts chosen speak for themselves and must return therefore to our
third example. In it, we think that we find evidence of the most
fastidious regard for the interlocutor, a regard that does not exclude
but rather demands the utmost scrupulousness in avoiding
sycophancy. But it is perhaps better to supplement our short excerpt
with appropriate further selections in this case also. Giving the tone
to all the Paris lectures, Prof. Gurwitsch writes, T7:
To introduce a philosophic work consists, it seems to us, in

bringing to evidence its motivations, and the problems from
which this work draws life rather than in giving a synopsis
of proposed solutions; [it consists in] taking up the ideas at
their point of origin, at their birthing state, in order in some
way to make again and to create anew this work rather than
look upon it as an impartial spectator who presents it as a
more or less literary document. This is true as well for
researches which bear upon the history of the sciences or
upon philosophy; and is that a fortiori when the matter is a
living philosophic thought which-as we maintain in
agreement with Mr. Husserl-is only at the inception of its
blossoming. For this reason the author has limited himself to
presenting the very broad lines of some phenomenological
theories rather than accumulating, analyses upon analyses
with the aim of being exhaustive of the work of Mr.
subjectivises the thing. It does not let beings be, but makes them
valuable as the object of its action.
(pp. 292-293)
To WHOM IT MAY CONc:IRN 235
Husserl, which would have resulted only in encumbering the
reader. One has preferred to attempt to make in some way
phenomenology be born in front of the eyes of the reader,
rather putting him in front of doctrines exposed as ready-
made, and which would be as if fallen from the sky.7
Admittedly, this text is not polemical, nor does it do anything more

than to present its author's hermeneutical intent which seems to me
clearly to belong to the 'school of meaning recollection'. And this,
in a manner that clearly recognizes the interlocutor as equal and
autonomous, by refusing to furnish [him/her] with 'ready-made'
doctrines 'as if fallen from the sky'. A further quote is needed here
to make more visible Prof. Gurwitsch's attitude towards the
interlocutor, this one from a letter to Alfred Schutz dated December
1940, in which Gurwitsch discusses his "work on American neo-
realism", and his "intensive study of William James," T8:
To my surprise I have seen how close these American things

come to phenomenology when a couple of things are
eliminated which are themselves intrinsically indefensible.
Then it is almost child's play to translate neo-realism into the
phenomenological, and both parties gain infinitely with this
translation.
I am not looking for parallels at any price, and I know that

dogmatic concordances don't themselves prove anything at
all. But the part of my mundane ego-and it is the only one I
have- that learned its lessons from Leibniz is time and again
happy to discover that every honest and sincere
philosophical labor has its validity and its legitimate place,
though discovering it in its rivalry [with other positions] is
not easy.8
7. Gurwitsch, Esquisse de fa pMnomenofogie ginitique (unpub., p. 3).

8. Philosophers in Exile: The Correspondence of Alfred SchUtz and Aron
Gurwitsch, 1939-1959, R. Grathoff (Ed.), J. C. Evans (frans.), foreword by M.
Natanson (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989, p. 31).
We are very far from acrimony, polemics, or dispraising;

clearly, the interlocutor is recognized here as equal and autonomous
even in disagreement. In any case, we may note:
Firstly, that the reader as interlocutor is to be provided with all
that is needed for [her/him] to see phenomenology being born in
front of [his/her eyes] ;
Secondly, that "every honest and sincere philosophical labor has
its validity and its place;"
Thirdly, that Prof. Gurwitsch shares with E. HusserI a
predilection for the "experiential" mode of presentation, and that this
will surprise no one.
Hence, my only excuse for juxtaposing the preceding
methodological description with two related statements of Husserl's
is that such a juxtaposition helps mark the manner in which both
philosophers subscribed to what one might call philosophizing
"more geometrico."
Early in his career Husserl stated, T9:
What one can reasonably expect from the delineation in

words, of such a concept (for example, in the exposition of a
science which rests on it,) would, accordingly, be
determined as follows: it must be well-suited to place us into
the proper disposition [in orderJ that we be able to focus
ourselves on those abstract moments in the inner or outer
intuition which are intended, or to enable us to reproduce in
ourselves those psychical processes which are requisite for
the formation of the concept. This will, to be sure, only be
helpful and necessary where the name which designates the
concept does not alone suffice for understanding, be this
because of equivocations [which are present] or because of
some misinterpretations to which the concept gives rise. 9
9. E. Husserl, ·Philosophie der A~ithmetik,· in Gesammelte Werke (fhe

Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970, p. 119 [my translation and emphasis]).
The same methodological principle received much later the

following formulation, T 1 0:
I seek not to instruct but only to lead, to point out and

describe what I see. I claim no other right than that of
speaking according to my best lights, principally before
myself but in the same manner before others, as one who
has lived in all its seriousness the fate of a philosophical
existence. 1 0
The intent here is clearly to let the interlocutor "see for

[his/her]self, and this intent I have termed more geometrico in a
conscious effort to recall Descartes from whose thought the
phenomenological school derives much inspiration and to whom
both Prof. Gurwitsch and Husserl referred in their Paris lectures. I
did so in order to return to the statement which encapsulates the
methodological conceit of the phenomenological school and the act
of birth of a new philosophical interlocutor, namely, T 12:
10. E. Husserl, The Crisis oj European Sciences and Transcendental

Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, David Carr
(Trans.) (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970, p. 18). Concerning what
Hussert may have meant by "the seriousness of a philosophic fate," the following
letters may be profitably consulted: Cf. (1) a letter to Dorion Cairns (21 Mar.
1930) in Edmund Husserl 1859-1959, Phenomenologica, 4 (The Hague: M.
Nijhoff. 1959, pp.283-sqq.). Also refering to what we are considering, albeit in a
different manner, are passages in the following letters: (2) to Aron Gurwitsch (1
Oct. 1932). In it, while recognizing in Gurwitsch a like-minded researcher, Husserl
also pays hom mage to the quality of Gurwitsch's avocation for philosophy] in A.
Gurwitsch, Human Encounters In the Social World, A. Metraux (Ed.), F. Kersten
(Trans.) (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1979, p. x), TIl:
I value your ability highly, and if your philosophical ethos will bear up,
a significant future is in store for you. The new turn philosophy has
taken by means of the discovery of the method and problems of
phenomenology needs considerable effort to be worked out in its large
design. It requires the exceptional personality which can incorporate into
his will to live the radicalism oj philosophical questioning and the
philosophical integrity oj work, and that is indeed truly the spirit of
constitutive phenomenology. (my emphasis)
(3) To Arnold Metzger (4 Apr. 1919) in Husserl, Shorter Works, P. McCormick
and F. Elliston (Eds.) (University of Notre Dame Press, 1981, p. 360).
238 JOSE HlJE.RfAS-JOURDA
Good sense is the most equably distributed thing in the

world: for each one thinks[her/his self] so well furnished of
it that the very ones who are the most difficult to satisfy in
most other respects have not accustomed to desire more of it
than they already have. 11
To the dialogue thus inaugurated we see both Husserl and

Gurwitsch contributing, each by attempting so to formulate what he
himself has ascertained that the means of reaching the same or at
least similar observations are given the interlocutor. One may
summarize the dialogal principle of this school as an attempt to
proceed from one to each, to any, to all by way of self-standing,
self-answering autonomous corroborations.
Far from "de-constructing" [or, to use Heidegger's early
formulation, "destroying" 12] humanism, this school institutes the
11. R. Descartes, Oeuvres Philosophiques, Vol. I, F. Alquie (Ed.) (Paris:

Classiques Garnier, 1963, p. 568), my translation. Prof. Alquie comments in a
note upon the ironical turn of this phrase and relates it to Kant's critique of the
transcendental illusion. We shall not enter into this here because, ironical or not,
this statement marks for us the inauguration of the attitude by which a
philosophic author places herself and her interlocutor on an equal footing of both
respect and expectation, therewith inaugurating the genuine dialogue inter pares
that is modern philosophy.
12. Cf. Heidegger, Letter on Humanism, in Barrett & Aiken (Eds.) (1962, p.
291), T 13:
Because in all that has been said I have argued everywhere against what
mankind values as high and holy, this philosophy therefore teaches an
irresponsible and destructive "nihilism." For what is more "logical" than
that one who negates everywhere what is truly being places himself on
the side of the non-being and with that advocates mere nothingness as
the meaning of reality? What is happening here? One hears talk of
"humanism," of "logic," of "values," of "world," of "God." One hears
talk of an opposition to these. One knows and takes these things as
positive. What is expressed against them, one immediately takes as their
negation and thus "negative" in a sense of the destructive. This is a
question of what, in a certain part of Sein und Zeit, we called "the
phenomenological destruction."
We cannot enter here on a discussion of the appropriatedness (or lack thereof) of
this peculiar formulation, but instead refer the reader to Prof. J. C. Evans'
exhaustive and meticulous treatment of it in "Phenomenological Deconstruction:
Husserl's Method of 'Abbau'," Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology,
21, I, 1970/ Jan.: 14-25. The nuance manifested by the difference in meaning
between destruction and deconstruction speaks volumes here as it makes clear the
birth of humanism at the tip of the each philosopher's pen as s/he,

by attempting to philosophize, finds her/his self confronted by the
necessity to invent [his/her] interlocutor to the best of her/his ability.
We are fortunate that Prof. Gurwitsch did express himself
unambiguously in this matter. So to him we now turn again for his
vision of the philosophic interlocutor, T 14:
For if the nature of man is to be defined, essentially, in terms

of rationality, this does not mean that man is so firmly bound
to reason as to be unable to deviate. Man is free to abandon
reason as well as to follow it. On the one hand, he may
chose to endure conflict, to persist in his stand even in
circumstances stronger than his self-and that means to
overcome defeat. In this case man has remained faithful to
his self; he has realized his rational nature; he retains his
liberty and increases in productivity. In short he is man in
the full sense of the word. But the other alternative exists
also: man is free to give himself up to the world surrounding
him - both the natural and the social world; he may succeed
in adjusting his self to it by seeking and following the line of
least resistance, ever ready to compromise in order to avoid
conflicts as far as possible and to continue in a state of
equilibrium with the surrounding world. In such a case he
becomes increasingly dependent upon his milieu; he
develops into a passive being conditioned by the play of
mechanisms which are set in motion by exterior stimulations
and his responses become more and more stereotyped and
unproductive. This path can lead only to a progressive
alienation from oneself; when man takes this direction he is
betraying both reason and his own essential nature; he loses
thereby his freedom and his productivity. In a word, he falls
into decay and comes more and more to correspond to that
distinction between the seriousness of a systematically carried out "retrospective

or "regressive") enquiry" and what one must recognize as something of a 'fishing'
expedition.
240 JOSE HVERrAS-JOURDA
description which so many contemporary psychologists and

sociologists endorse as representing the nature of man as
such-though in reality it offers only some aspects of man
characteristic of the state of decay. These are the two
alternatives which man must face. The choice between them
is imposed by no exterior force, but depends entirely upon
[himself] .13
The spirit manifested here, seems to us best represented (given the

times in which it was written [April 1941]) by an expression of
Prof. Gurwitsch's preserved for us by A. Schutz in the following
rhetorical question: "Are you still enough of an optimist to believe
that phenomenology will save itself out of the ruins of this world-
as philosophia aere perennius?" 14
In conclusion, we may say not only that Aron Gurwitsch was
indeed enough of an optimist to believe this, but that he carried the
strength of that optimism long enough and far enough to open for
others the radicalism of philosophical questioning and the
philosophical integrity of work.
Rather than mere optimism, what is at stake here is a clear case
of philosophic faith.
And if faith (as Unamuno thought) is "to create what one does
not see,"15 then indeed we must recognize that Gurwitsch evinced
the purest faith, the faith which created the future we now occupy by
preserving for us the opportunity for the radicalism of philosophical
questioning, and transmitting to us the ideal of the philosophical
integrity of work.
13. A. Gurwitsch, ·On Contemporary Nihilism", in Essays in Memory oj

Aron Gurwitsch, Lester Embree (Ed.) (Lanham, MD: University Presses of America,
1983, p. 549).
14. Philosophers in Exile (1989, p. 37), in a letter dated 26 April 1941,
Schlitz asks Gurwitsch: "Are you still enough of an optimist to believe that
phenomenology will save itself out of the ruins of this world-as 'philosophia
aere perennius?'"
15. Quoted in J. Huertas-Jourda, The Existentialism oj Miguel de Unamuno
(Gainesville, FL.: University of Florida Press, 1963, p. 55).
11
Beyond Foundationalism and Functionalism:

Phenomenology in Exchange with the Human and
Social Sciences
Bernhard Waldenfels
Ruhr-Universitat Bochum
Phenomenologists in the footsteps of Husserl belong neither to

those who despise science nor to those who adore it. Nevertheless,
there has always been a certain tension between the claims of
phenomenological foundation and empirical research. In the
following, I want to emphasize that today the philosophical claim of
phenomenology is not so much threatened by a scientistic theory
which tries to find the foundation of sense in mundane reality,
"taking for true being what is only method," but by a scientistic
practice which renounces foundation in favor of pure functions
which are reduced to a mere 'game signification'. Discussing the
relationship between philosophy and science, I shall argue that the
shift from global or foundational order to variable, contingent orders
no longer allows the philosophical foundation of science in its strict
sense. But the alternative should not be mere functionalism, but
rather an exchange between philosophy and science which excludes
domination and subordination. This exchange would not be oriented
towards what is either purely given or purely invented and
constructed, but towards what we have to respond to in saying and
241
242 BERNHARD WALDENFELS
doing something. As indicated in the subtitle of my paper, I shall

largely restrict my reflections to phenomenology on the one hand,
and the human and social sciences on the other. The attentive reader
will recognize the extent to which my reflections are indebted not
only to Edmund Husserl, but also to authors like Aron Gurwitsch,
Merleau-Ponty and Alfred Schutz, who belong to the pioneers of a
phenomenologically oriented epistemology which is far from being
concI uded. 1
I. Foundation and Function: Two schemes of orientation
Foundation and function are two basic schemes of orientation

which point to different kinds of operation. The concept of
foundation belongs to the domain of architecture. What is to be built
needs a solid foundation. The ground on which buildings are
constructed has to be found, but also has to be prepared. On the
other hand, the concept of junction finds its place within the sphere
of building tools and machines. Here we expect the chosen
instrument to achieve its task, the machine to run, in other words:
we expect something to function or somebody to function, executing
his work as a 'functionary'.2 If we consider something (or
someone) as functioning, we do not take it as something in itself,
but rather as something in relation to something else, as in the case
1. In a letter from May 24th, 1955, Aron Gurwitsch wrote to Alfred Schutz:
"Science in the modern style is anything but obvious. but rather is a problems,
not something which is to be either worshipped or rejected, but rather to be
understood" [Philosophers in Exile: The Correspondence of Alfred SchuLZ and Aron
Gurwitsch 1939-1959. R. Grathoff (Ed), J. C. Evans (Trans.) (Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press, p. 241)]. Concerning the wider horizon of my
reflections, see my "Wider eine reine EIkenntniss und Wissenschaftstheorie," in
Phiinomenologie Wid Marxismus, 4, (1979); and my "Phiinomenologie unter
eidetischen, transzendentalen und strukturalen Gesichtspunkten" in Herzog!
Graumann (1991). The conception of order I refer to is explained in my book
OrtinWig im Zwielicht (1987).
2. The term comes into use in the second half of the 18th century, as when
Turgot speaks of the fonctionnaires publics.
BEYOND FOUNDATIONAUSM AND FUNcrroNAusM 243
of mathematical functions. Something which functions as such and

such can be substituted by something else which functions in the
same way, constituting a "functional equivalence". In opposition to
functioning elements, the ground on which something is built cannot
simply be replaced by another without shaking the whole building.
In the traditional language of philosophy and science, we find a
lot of metaphors which go back to the concepts of foundation, from
Descartes' search for a ''fundamentum certum et inconcussum" up to
Kant's Grundlegung der Metaphysik der Sitten and Husserl's view
of the life-world as foundation of sense. But as soon as the order of
things is affected by contingency, the ground trembles, and even if it
is not the case that anything goes, at least everything could go in
different ways. Even Husserl confronts us with several functionary
things: with a sort of functioning intentionality, ego or body which
precedes every attempt of thematization or foundation. Finally there
is the call for philosophers as "functionaries of mankind."
Foundation and function contaminate each other.
II. Things themselves and access to things
Philosophy and science, originally united in one and the same

search for knowledge, do not start by merely extending the
knowledge at hand. On the contrary, Heraclit, and Plato, too, attack
what they call polymathia. Philosophy is established as a new kind
of knowledge, clearly distinguished from everyday knowledge as
well as from mere techne. The external difference is corroborated by
an internal one. There is no philosophical thinking which does not
distinguish between what it looks for and how it does so, between
reference to things and a certain way of access, apprehension or
comprehension. When Husserl renews Plato's search for auta ta
pragmata, for "the things themselves," he does not go straight on to
the things which appear, but rather concentrates on the different
ways in which they appear. The 'what' we refer to, combined with
244 BERNHARD WALDFNFELS
the 'what for' of our action, explained respectively as eidos and

telos, do not coincide with 'how' they are taken and 'as what' they
are taken to be. This difference arises in different forms, as the
ontological difference of on hei on in Aristotle, as the transcendental
difference between the object and the 'Erkenntnisart' of objects, as
the phenomenological difference between the object which is
intended and the manner in which it is, as the hermeneutical 'as' and
the ontological difference between Being and beings in Heidegger,
and so on. Such differences are correlated to a certain point of view.
Phenomenology, which is most interested in the change of
perspectives, apprehensions and attitudes, may be called a science of
points of view. Thus, we can maintain that phenomenology
continues a certain trend of Western thinking by distinguishing
between the reference to the thing in itself and in its inherent end, on
the one hand, and the manner of access to it, on the other, and by
setting these in relation to one another, and doing both at once. This
general movement may be summarized by the general formula,
'something as something', which I would call "significative
difference" (Waldenfels, 1980, p. 86), and which points in a certain
way toward the eye of the needle into phenomenology.
But if we look sharply at what is happening here, we discover a
certain Achilles heel which marks this kind of thinking from its early
beginnings. The 'how' or 'as' tends to relativize the reference to
things. The fact that something shows itself so and not otherwise
may easily change into the fact that something may show itself
otherwise as well. In addition to that, there is the danger of
loosening the relation to things. The methodos as a way to the things
changes into a mere method, instrument or trick, indifferent to the
being of things themselves.
The old quarrel between philosophy and rhetoric fits into this
context. When Plato opposes truth (a1etheia) to Protagora's effect
(dynamis) of speech, he opposes what is said to how it is said. As
Plato knows quite well, truth itself may be instrumentalised. Or as
Nietzsche writes in his unpublished papers: "In the intercourse with
human beings, one does not need the lie anymore when one has
truth enough: by truth one can deceive and seduce them whither one
BEYOND FOUNDATIONAUSM AND FUNcrIONAusM 245
wants." The old quarrel between philosophy and rhetoric includes

the quarrel between philosophy and technique, which is as old as
philosophy itself. The sophists could also be called the first
technologists, whose 'phenomeno-technique' (Bachelard, 1938, p.
61) refuses to be integrated into phenomenology.
When tension between what is seen, said or done and how that
may be the case is to be lowered in one of the two directions, two
different trends arise: foundationalism and functionalism. The
former emphasizes what or for what something is. The manner in
which something shows itself is anchored in and bound to a 'true
method'. The latter trend privileges how something can be managed.
The being of things is ultimately subordinated to the way in which
they may be treated. Signification turns into mere "game
signification," as Husserl warns (I. LogicalInvestigation, §20). The
primacy of insight turns into a privilege of procedure. The technical
thinking of modern times, all the more of postmodern times, seems
to move from the first extreme to the second, sacrificing the primacy
of knowing that to a pure knowing how. I shall briefly show how
this change can be conceived.
III. The insertion of the 'how' into a global order
How something is treated or regarded is something like the weak

point of every order which tends to be closed in itself, and this due
to a relativizing and loosening of the relation to things. This danger
can be banned in different ways. First, on the level of experience,
where we are confronted with a plurality of points of view, relativity
could be abated if on the horizon, truth as a whole appears: as a
totality of points of view. Then each point of view appears as
partial, and shifting from one point of view to the other means
approaching the whole. Secondly, relativity is disarmed on the level
of speech, of logos. Here we meet with a plurality of opinions,
positions and logoi. The relativity becomes harmless if we
presuppose true speech and true theory based on sufficient reasons.
246 BERNHARD WAillENFELS
Then all presuppositIons are only preliminary, they may be

surpassed by the insight into things themselves. What is excluded
from this insight reveals itself as irrelevant or indifferent, as
accidentals opposed to the essentials.
In this context, we may refer to the foundation of philosophy as
global science, as fundamental science and as final science, based on
the whole, on first concepts and principles or on a final goal. If
different kinds of science or knowledge are distinguished, as in the
classical encyclopedia, they are hierarchised into certain degrees of
knowledge. How something appears to us consists in a vanishing
point of view, which disappears to the degree that, looking at things
and talking about them, we approach the whole, which presents us
things as they are in themselves. It does not matter so much whether
we refer to a cosmos, a divine command or a spirit of the world: the
final outlook is the same.
This hierarchy of knowledge used to be ascribed to metaphysics,
but at the beginning of modern times metaphysics is aped by a
scientific metaphysic which tries to realize the pretension of infinity
by means of finite instruments. As Husserl argues in the Crisis, "we
take for true being what is actually a method" (Hua VI, p. 52; Engl.
tr., p. 51), namely formulas or constructs. For Nietzsche, science
which believes in a 'true world' represents the last form of
superstition.
IV. The loosening of the 'how' by the contingency of order
The insertion of the 'how' into the 'what' becomes difficult if

how something is experienced, said or done does not only reveal or
represent things themselves, but uncovers and covers, presents and
disguises them at the same time, if it makes them accessible as well
as inaccessible.
The whole splinters apart if the organizations of experience are
not merely sections of a whole, inscribed into a complete ground
plan, but incisions, producing a sort of fissure, running in one
BEYOND FOUNDA TIONAUSM AND FUNcrIoNAUSM 247
direction instead of in another. Under these conditions, our optic is

no longer oriented to an all-encompassing whole, and our logic is no
longer based on sufficient reasons. If every order, being selective
and exclusive and, not comprehensive, is affected by contingency,
there is no jundamentum inconcussum, and the principle of
sufficient reason is displaced by a 'principle of insufficient reason'.
Radical contingency does not only mean that something within a
given order could be otherwise, but that order itself may change. We
can thus state with Merleau-Ponty: "There is rationality" (1945,
Preface), or with Foucault: "There is order" (1966, Preface), and
this kind of order exists only in plural. Twilight descends upon the
great order (see Waldenfels, 1987). Consequently, the hierarchy of
knowledge is disturbed. Science emancipates itself from
philosophical domination.
v. The attachment of the 'how' to a fundamental order
When the total order dissipated, a supplement offered its service,

and it has continued to do so till today. One may argue as follows:
When sufficient reasons fail to ground what we say and do, there
are necessary rules which do not make this possible only by
simultaneously making other things impossible, as is the case with
factual orders, but which simply make possible in a sense similar to
transcendental conditions. They are necessary because nothing
works without them, they follow the negative logic of sine qua non.
The alternative to these fundamental rules would not be other orders
but disorder. In this way we reach what comes first without forming
a whole. This kind of fundamental order is the modest successor of
total order. The difference between essential structures and
accidental features is followed by the difference between
transcendental conditions which precede experience and empirical
facts which arise from experience. It does not make a great
difference whether these transcendental forms are shown and
justified in a theoretical way or whether they are pragmatically
reduced to implicit claims of validity. The shift from transcendental

theory to transcendental pragmatics leaves the fundamental
distinction intact.
Nevertheless, the hierarchy of knowledge turns into the division
and scission of reason. Reason differentiates itself into hetero-
geneous rationalities: theoretical, practical, aesthetic rationality. The
relation between philosophy and science could be characterized as
subordination without integration. Thus, for Kant, empirical
psychology presents itself as "applied philosophy", "to which pure
philosophy contains the principles apriori, thus connected with the
former, with which the latter, however, may not be confused" (zu
welcher reine Philosophie die Prinzipien a priori enthlilt, die also mit
jener zwar verbunden, aber nicht vermischt werden muJ3 (Critique of
Pure Reason B 876). And for Habermas, reason differentiates into
formal and material rationality, the former universal, the latter
contingent. In this way, the plurality of methods, of cultures and
styles of life is domesticated by being attached to a principal 'how'
which opens a "true horizon" (ibid., B 687). The quarrel between
apriori and aposteriori, between validity and genesis, between
quaestiones iures and quaestiones facti ends in a compromise: to
give to experience what is experience's due, to reason what is
reason's. But will this compromise hold?
VI. The middle region of various orders
The supplement which reduces the totality of order to necessary

rules which are only de iure valid has a weak point. Necessary rules
do not lay a proper base, they do not grant a proper standing. In
answering the question, under which conditions a statement or an
action may be valid, we already presuppose that somebody
experiences, says or does something. In other words, universal
conditions presuppose the fact of experience, speech and action,
they presuppose, too, the fact of science as well as the fact of art or
BEYOND FOUNDATIONAUSM AND FUNCfIONAUSM 249
politics. The positivity of what and for what something is said or

done precedes any conditio sine qua non. Where nothing happens,
the 'emporer has lost his prerogative'.
Now the question arises, how necessary conditions, i.e.
conditions which claim universal validity, can be deduced from
factual experience and factual orders of experience. The middle
region of heterogeneous orders forms the legacy of transcendental
philosophy and its metaphysical predecessors. I shall give some
indications of how these orders are conceived.
In Les mots et les choses, Foucault shows that the episteme of
the 19th century is oriented on life, language and work as a set of
quasi-transcendentals. These transcendental forms are only quasi-
transcendental because they do not precede experience but arise
within experience by different forms of self-organization which do
not come to rest within themselves. Furthermore, we usually meet
with a lot of patterns of order such as life-worlds, life-forms,
language games, provinces of sense, frames, rule systems,
paradigms and discourses. These different forms of order coincide
insofar as they are all selective and exclusive, confronted with
alternatives not to be realized simultaneously and consequently not
subject to synthesis. Finally, there are concepts of order like figure,
structure, texture or system, which neither fit into a universal
system, because they are constituted by differences like
figure/ground, system/environment, and because new figures or
structures arise by transformation and deviation, always leaving
something behind. 3
The crucial point in this context is: the middle position depends
on a neither-nor. Middle range orders are neither essential nor
accidental, neither transcendental nor empirical. One may speak of a
contingent, historical or corporeal form of apriori which precedes
some experience, but not every experience. Thus Merleau-Ponty
writes in his Phenomenologie de la perception about the Gestalt:
"... elle est l'apparition meme du monde et non sa condition de
3. Thu; Aron Gwwitsch (1972, p. 17ff) stresses that what Husserl calls life-
world is always apprehended and interpreted in a certain way as our cultural world
250 BERNHARD W ALDE'IFELS
possibilite, elle est fa naissance d'une norme et ne se realise pas

d'apres une norme" (1945, p. 74).
By the fundamental fact and the fundamental occurrence of
order, pure reason becomes impure, transcendental and empirical
moments are systematically confused. If we continue to speak of
ideas, universals, forms and so on, we do so in terms of ideas,
universals and forms always functioning within experience in an
implicit and anonymous way. They acquire their pure forms only in
the course of a process of idealization, universalization or
formalization, by a process of purification. Husserl thus speaks of a
double functioning of reason. Reason functions within experience in
a latent way before it becomes patent through the process of
idealization and mathematization (Hua VI, p. 97, Engl. tr. p. 94f.).
The change of order has its epistemological consequences. If
there is a middle region of variable orders in this region, the strict
separation of philosophy and science turns into a disturbing
proximity. Scientific paradigms or key concepts like Gestalt,
structure and system are like intersecting planes, pointing in two
directions at once. Concepts like perception, memory, action, body,
society or ritual begin to oscillate, they dissipate into the multiplicity
of different regions and historical forms. But that is not all, the
disturbance may increase to the point where it threatens the status of
both parts. This process of oscillation and mutual infection has
found its expression in different figures of duplication. Husserl thus
refers to the paradox that the same subject appears as subject for the
world and object in the world; Merleau-Ponty characterizes
corporeity and intercorporeity by a sort of ambiguity, which later
turns into an ontological reversibility. Finally, Foucault takes the
human being as a double figure of sovereign and subject (in its old
political sense), so that centering is always balanced by decentering.
VII. The play of self-duplication
From the historical point of view it seems to me that Foucault is

right. The anthropolization and socialization of philosophy, which
took place at the end of the 18th century, produced certain forms of
knowledge which could not exist previously, before the
establishment of the human and social sciences and their specific
objects. 'fake Aristotle, for him the human being is a synthetikon,
belonging to the realm of living beings and participating in the divine
logos, and for Descartes man is a permixtio of mind and body.
There is no unique being called man. The naturalization of the
psyche and society is nothing but a scientistic echo of metaphysics,
if it pretends to be more than a certain method.
Psychology (or anthropology) and sociology only arise as
independent sciences by a sort of self-duplication (Foucault, 1966,
ch. IX). Self-duplication takes place in two different ways. First,
human and social sciences do not begin by themselves, they start by
preceding themselves in a certain sense. This is the case because this
kind of science is preceded not only by the materials of experience
as something from which knowledge is constructed, but what
precedes is also a certain order of experience, a set of sense, rules
and structure which determines how experience is organized.
Psychology and sociology find their counterparts in a sort of folk
psychology and folk sociology. Whereas we do not know what an
electro-dynamic field or an irrational number is before we do
physics or mathematics, we do know what hunger, remembering, a
question, sentence or command is before we read the handbooks of
psychologists, sociologists or linguists. Alfred Schutz and Peter
Winch therefore distinguish, in their reflections on human and social
behavior, between two levels of sense constructs, respectively. two
kinds of rules. Secondly, the human and social sciences do not end
by themselves, but rather tend, in a way, to exceed themselves. It is
always possible to pass from psychology to the psychology of
psychology, from sociology to the sociology of sociology, whereas
the duplication of physics into the physics of physics or of
mathematics into the mathematics of mathematics does not make any

sense. In the field of human and social science this kind of iteration
is possible because doing research takes again the form of theoretical
practice which can be observed, explained and comprehended like
any other practice. Via psychology and sociology, even natural
science enters the game of duplications.
Philosophy is subject to similar processes of duplication,
evinced when we speak of a pre-reflexive and-with Merleau-
Ponty-of a sur-reflexive level of thinking. This process of
doubling can be demonstrated in the different trends of
phenomenology, hermeneutics, speech act theory, critical theory and
so on. In this context, it makes a difference whether we thematize
this process of doubling or simply endure it. In correspondence to
this Merleau-Ponty distinguishes between a good and a bad form of
ambiguity (1962, p. 409), and what Husserl and Fink call "self-
reference of phenomenology"4 has to be analyzed from this point of
view. In any case, neither a regional, material demarcation between
different disciplines nor the traditional, formal demarcation between
apriori and aposteriori will be sufficient to solve the problem. There
is neither a clear-cut distinction on the level of 'what' is analyzed nor
on the level of 'how' something is analyzed. First we shall look at
how science usually treats this problem.
VIII. The release of the 'how'
Self-reference of science means that science permanently

precedes and exceeds itself. The lack of independence is a source of
trouble, of uneasiness. But this unavoidable weakness of science,
even of so-called hard science, may offer the chance for a new
openness.
4. See Hua I, p. 173: "RUckbeziehung der Phiinomenoiogie auf sich seibst,"

and Fink, VI. Cartesian Meditation, §3.
BEYOND FOUNDATIONAUSM AND FuNCfIONAUSM 253
There is one trend which takes flight to the fore, renouncing

reasons in light of the fact that no reason is sufficient. From
foundationalism one shifts to functionalism. This does not mean that
old theories are replaced by new ones, by taking 'junction' as a new
key concept. On the contrary, this means that the old theoretical
attitude cedes to a new practice based on the process ojfunctioning.
Models are constructed on the micro- or macro-level, sometimes
called 'patterns' (Locke) or 'paradigms' (Th. S. Kuhn). These
models do not merely help to facilitate knowledge ultimately
grounded in invisible ideas or rules, as Plato's mathematical
paradigms or Kant's transcendental schemes used to do. In this
sense Husserl still speaks of "illustrative models" (Hua VI, p. 132~
Engl. tr. p. 129). In all these cases, the use of models by no means
excludes an independent reference to things. But using models in the
functionalist way resembles what Wittgenstein says about ideas:
"Die Idee sitzt gleichsam als Brille aujunserer Naserrhe idea sits, as
it were, as spectacles on our nose" (Philosophical Investigations,
§ 103). Models function like grids or filters: they make some aspects
visible while making other aspects invisible. The same holds true for
different ways of making something decidable or practicable. Those
sorts of models do not merely jacilitaJe knowledge as an instrument
does, they generate knowledge as an apparatus does. How models
function is no longer a kind of access, opening up what things are,
but what becomes known is generated by how it becomes known.
We know what something is by fabricating it.
So for Baudrillard (1976, ch. II), the paradigms of imitation and
production are followed by the third step of simulation, limited to
the use of models. A model is understood as something "from
which all forms emerge by slight modulation of differences",
leaving all "referential reason" behind. We are a long way from the
contrast of original and copy. Models which no longer approach
some hidden reality are not more or less true. They are only more or
less useful. They are richer or poorer, according to their extension
or inner differentiation. They are not to be rejected, but are only
liable to run idle, go astray or come out of circulation, as currencies
do.
254 BffiNHARD WAlDENFELS
Thus, by means of the tools of information theory, human

dialogue is constructed as a process of communication where
messages are encoded by sender and decoded by the receiver, both
sharing a certain signal system. In Watzlawick (Watzlawick et at.,
1967) the two dimensions of speech, i.e. of talking about something
and of talking to somebody, are transformed into aspects of content
and of relation, both formalized into a two-level model of
information and meta-information. The technique of communication
can be enriched by a certain technology of affects. Affects are not
only 'framed', they are 'managed' by means of a permanent code
switching, and one might debate endlessly on what is happening in
the black box: what counts are connections called affections. Even
philosophy does not hesitate in making models. So by reformulation
Searle's theory changes from speech acts to mental states and
events, from illocutionary force to psychological mode, from
propositional to representative content. And the "directions of fit"
between mind and world are constructed in the style of input and
output, following the old Cartesian scheme of actiones and
passiones animi; feelings like love and hatred are left behind as
rumblings which lack the direction of fit (Searle, 1983).
If the use of model satisfies itself, the mute experiencing Husserl
speaks of in his Cartesian Meditations (Hua I, p. 77) is put to
silence forever. What is experienced is regarded only in the form of
input, which lets in some prescientistic materials, and in the form of
output, which has some postscientistic effect. These effects may be
introduced into further models, as in the case where therapy treats
the dubious effects of certain education models, and so on. Within
the model there are gaps: variables of functional equations, blanks in
forms to be filled up by multiple choice. Pure models do not allow
themselves to be measured on the basis of what is modeled, i.e.
formed and deformed. The 'for what' disappears too. What has
been taken as a means leading to certain ends changes into potentials
which generate the end by themselves (see Freyer, 1970, p. 139).
This technological tum is not restricted to the natural sciences:
psychotechnique and sociotechnique as a kind of pouvoir-savoir
(Foucault, 1975) have largely occupied the domain of psychology
BEYOND FOUNDATIONAUSM AND FUNCTIONAUSM 255
and sociology. How does human behavior, the human mind, or the
human brain function? How can we repair it, how can we increase
and multiply its possibilities?
Science turns into function science, functions consist in the
synthesis of possibilities. "They are always points of view from
which realized possibilities are compared to other possibilities"
(Luhmann, 1984, p. 405). They are dynamic and leading points of
view: how we look at things decides what they are and what they are
good for. Whereas Husserl argued against Galileo that one takes for
true being what is only method (see above), we now can state: there
is nothing behind method or vice versa: there is method behind
nothing (see Polonius of Hamlet, II, ii, 203: "Though this be
madness, yet there is method in't"). What is experienced gets
absorbed by how it is produced. Can we presume that a certain form
of science behaves like a certain form of art, turning into a "rapture
of self-reference", as Baudrillard suggests? (see Waldenfels, 1990,
p.222)
In any case, this sort of practiced functionalism also has a weak
point. The release of the 'how' threatens to devour itself (see also
Hua VI, p. 183; Engl. tr. p. 180). One could parody Leibniz:
"Everything which is given is given in and by models-except
model itself." Scientific 'modelism' gets entangled in its self-
reference, and it has to pay for it by falling back on old concepts of
order which it tries to overcome. Models are given like the old pre-
given order; they point back to a constructor as a new kind of world-
builder; they are fixed to a basic drive of self-preservation; or they
seek subterfuge in an ethical or existential superstructure. 5 What is
boasted of as brave acceptance of paradox often ends in a sort of
double-play of ventriloquism. That is the case in Bourdieu's Leron
sur fa leron (1982), where the author sometimes operates inside the
social field, taking position within the social struggle, sometimes
outside of it, criticizing the social life. In the second case, social
theory is not all-encompassing, failing to integrate social theory as
5. See, for example, the epilogue in Watzlawick et aI., 1967.

256 BffiNHARD WAlDENFELS
such, in the first case social theory degenerates to social

partisanship, destroying itself as universal theory.
It seems to me that we miss the point when we move to a
critique of models as such. What should be criticized is only the way
in which models are wielded. We must thus ask ourselves where we
might find the starting-points for alternatives without falling back
upon presuppositions which have begun to crumble, i.e. without
flirting with substantial orders where everything has been
predelineated, or regulated in advance.
IX. Exchange between philosophy and science: Tension between

'how', 'what' and 'for what' of knowing something
I have in mind an exchange between philosophy and science

which takes place in the middle region of variable orders, in terms of
overlappings, anticipations and retardations. Paradigms and models
are located neither within philosophy, because they do not precede
every experience, nor within science, because they do not originate
from experience. They are rather located between philosophy and
science, and both are related to everyday life as a melting-pot of
rationality (see Waldenfels, 1990, ch. 12). Thus, when the Austrian
engineer Viktor Kajdan invented the water turbine with adjustable
paddles, he was inspired by the mill rows in the Muenz Valley
where he was born. Models belong to an intermediary zone where
every invention transgresses a certain threshold. Models and
paradigms are not given or constructed beJore experience does its
work, they do not originate out oj experience, they rather co-
originate with experience whenever something happens which opens
up new possibilities, new truths and new goals. What happens in
this middle zone can be ascribed to a spontaneous or implicit
philosophy which awaits philosophical explication as well as
experimental tests. In his early projects, Merleau-Ponty characterizes
this middle zone as a "third dimension", situated this side of pure
subject and pure object, a milieu shared by philosophy and positive
knowledge (see Geraets, 1971, p. 37). Even W. Stegmtiller speaks,

in his work on Analytische Philosophie und Wissenschaftstheorie
(1973, Vol. IV, p. 17), of a "mutual impregnation and interpen-
etration" between philosophy and science.
Exchange does not mean a form of domination and
subordination where how we approach things is fixed in advance by
what we come to know and by the end our process of knowledge is
striving towards. Neither does exchange mean a pure kind of
juxtaposition, so that the ways of looking at things are leveled off,
and one way is just as good as the next. Exchange means the
intertwining of different activities and operations: this exchange may
be realized in different ways. In any case, we have to distinguish
between functioning and thematization. Because thematization
means that some things, aspects and contexts are privileged against
others (see Gurwitsch, 1964), no thematization can claim to be
complete and exhaustive~ there is always some anonymous
remainder which withdraws from thematization (Hua VI, p. 111 ~
English tr. p.l09). Thematization of science makes explicit what
science does. This means not only to analyze how science works,
but also to show the point from which it starts, within which limits it
moves, what it causes, and what it excludes. Otherwise, theory of
science would only attain a theory that belongs to science and it
would be unable to thematize science as science, as being science.
But from which point could such a radical thematization which
elucidates science as science operate? It cannot operate inside
science, nor outside, but on its borderline, at once inside and
outside. Middle range orders are, insofar as they do not only
function, surrounded by a halo o/extra-ordinary possibilities. But if
these possibilities were only possibilities, why should they bother
us? The inquietude which provokes inquiry must surpass the status
of pure possibilities, <l;nd indeed, there is something beyond what is
possible, namely that to which we respond and have to respond in
saying and doing something. There is not only the 'significative
difference' between what we say and do and how we do it, but also
the 'responsive difference' between what we respond and what we
respond to. Even if it were true that the 'true answer' cannot be
extracted from things themselves, but has to be invented, there is

something we do not invent, namely the situation to which we
respond. Husserl's 'things themselves' should not be interpreted as
what is pregiven in the sense of something we receive, but as
something we only reach in responding to it. So we move on a small
ridge between fiction and reality, between functionalism and
foundationalism, constructivism and realism. What we see and how
we see it cannot be separated from a kind of "responding looking at
and listening to" ("antwortendes Rinsehen und Rinh/ken, II Hua
XVI, p. 462). Like the way in which Merleau-Ponty speaks of a
"paradox of expression II (1964, p. 189), we could speak of a
paradox of response, where finding and inventing, Finden and
Erfinden come together. We 'know' what we respond to only by
responding to it. That means we never know it in an objective or
thematic way, with the exception of those cases where responding
becomes normalized, standardized, deposited in a 'stock of
answers', or even incorporated into the program of a machine.
If science in all its forms did not participate in responding to
what appeals to and provokes us, saying and doing what has to be
said and done, the rationality, even of the most exact science, would
indeed, as Husserl suggests, fall back to the "rationality of Egyptian
pyramids" (Hua VI, in Engl. tr. p. 343), with the only difference
that modem science would be more fleeting and more trivial than the
time-honored pyramids.
BEYOND FOUNDATIONAUSM AND FUNCI10NAUSM 259
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1938).
Baudrillard, J. Vechange symbolique et la mort (Paris: Gallimard,
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Bourdieu, P. Leron sur fa leron (Paris: Minuit, 1982).
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London: Kluwer, 1988).
_ _. Sixth Cartesian Meditation: The Idea of a Transcendental
Theory of Method, R. Bruzina (Trans.) (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
Foucault, M. Les mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966).
_ _. Surveiller et punir (Paris: Gallimard, 1975).
Geraets, T. Vers une nouvelle philosophie transcendantale. La genese
de la philosophie de M. Merleau-Ponty jusqu l a la
»Phenomenologie de la perception« (Den Haag, 1971).
Gurwitsch, A. Phenomenology and the Theory of Science (Evanston:
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_-;:::~. The Field of Consciousness (Pittsburg: Dusquesne University
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-"""7"';-' Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology (Evanston:
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Husserl, E. Husserliana (Den Haag: M. Nijhoff, 1950).
Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental
Phenomenology. David Carr (Trans.) (Evanston: Northwestern
Luhmann, N. Soziale Systeme (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1984).
Merleau-Ponty, M. Phenomenologie de la perception (Paris:
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Colin Smith (Trans.) (Humanities Press, 1962).
___. "Un inedit de M. Merleau-Ponty:' in Revue de Metaphysique
et de Morale 67 (1962, pp. 401-409). English trans!' "An
unpublished text by Merleau-Ponty: A Prospectus of his work,lI in
The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays. James Edie (Trans.)
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964, pp.3-11).
_---=~. Le visible et !'invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). English trans.
The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1968).
Schutz, A., & Gurwitsch, A. Briefwechsel 1939-1959. R. Grathoff
(Ed.). (Munchen: W. Fink, 1985).
Searle, J. Intentionality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
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analytischen Philosophie, Vol. IV,l (Berlin/Heidelberg/New York:
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Waldenfels, B. "Wider eine reine Erkenntnis und Wissenschaftstheorie,"
in Waldenfels, et al. (Eds.) Phanomenologie und Marxismus
(Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1979) or Waldenfels, et al. (Eds.)
Phenomenology and Marxism, J. Claude Evans (Trans.) (London:
Routledge, 1984).
_--:-",,' Der Spielraum des Verhaltens (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp,
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_ _. Ordnung im Zwielicht (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1987).
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Part V
A Bibliography for Gurwitsch Studies
Robert S. Stufflebeam
Washington University
My purpose for this bibliography is to not only chronicle the

phenomenological works of the Gurwitsch corpus, but also to
provide a comprehensive listing of books and articles that refer to
Gurwitsch's thought. Also included, of course, are the major works
referred to in the previous articles.
The most often cited of Gurwitsch's works include: The Field of
Consciousness (1964), Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology
(1966), Phenomenology and the Theory of Science (1973),
Philosophers in Exile: The Correspondence of Alfred Schutz and
Aron Gurwitsch, 1939-1959 (1989), and Kants Theorie des
Verstandes (1990).
The Philosopher's Index and the bibliography in L. E. Embree
(Ed.), Life-World and Consciousness: Essays for Aron Gurwitsch
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972) were con-
sulted.
261
1. C. Evans and R. W. Stufflebeam (eds.), To Work at the Foundations, 261-273.
262 ROBERT S. STum.EBEAM
1873
Stumpf, K. Uber den psychologischen Ursprung der Raumvorstellung
(Leipzig: S. Hirzel).
1890
James, W. The Principles 0/ Psychology. (2 vols.). (New York: Holt &
Co.).
1928
Hussed, E. Logische Untersuchungen. 2nd ed. Vols. I-II (Halle: Max
Niemeyer). [Logical Investigations. Vols. I-II. J. N. Findlay
(Trans.) (New York: Humanities Press, 1970).]
1929
Gurwitsch, A. "Phanomenologie der Thematik und des reinen Ich."
Psychologische Forschung 12, 1929. ["The Phenomenology of
Thematics and of the Pure Ego," in Studies in Phenomenology
and Psychology. F. Kersten (Trans.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press, 1%6, pp. 175-286).]
1932
Gurwitsch, A. "Critical Study of Edmund Hussed, 'Nachwort zu
meinen Ideen zu einer reinen Phanomenologie und
phanomenologischen Philosophie'." Deutsche Literaturzeitung, 28
Feb., 1932. [See Gurwitsch (1966) Studies in Phenomenology and
Psychology.]
1934
Gurwitsch, A. "La place de la psychologie dans l'ensemble des
sciences." Revue de synthese 8, 1934: 169-185. [See Gurwitsch
(1966) Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology.]
1936
Gurwitsch, A. "Quelques aspects et quelques developpements de la
psychologie de la forme." Journal de psychologie normale et
pathologique 33, 1936: 413-470. [See Gurwitsch (1966) Studies
in Phenomenology and Psychology.]
1938
Bachelard, G. La/ormation de ['espirit scientifique (Paris: J. Vrin).
BIBUOORAPHY 263
1941
Gurwitsch, A. "A Non-Egological Conception of Consciousness."
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 1, 1941: 325-338.
[See Gurwitsch (1966) Studies in Phenomenology and
Psychology.]
1943
Gurwitsch, A. "William James' Theory of the 'Transitive Parts' of the
Stream of Consciousness." Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research 3, 1943: 449-477. [See Gurwitsch (1966) Studies in
Phenomenology and Psychology.]
1945
Merleau-Ponty, M. Phenomenologie de la perception (Paris:
Gallimard). [Phenomenology of Perception. C. Smith (Trans.)
(New York: Humanities Press, 1962).]
1951
Gurwitsch, A. "Presuppositions philosophiques de la logique." Revue
de metaphysique et de morale 56, 1951: 395-405. [See Gurwitsch
(1966) Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology.]
1953
Gurwitsch, A. "Sur une racine perceptive de l'abstraction." Actes du
XIe Congres International de Philosophie 2, 1953: 43-47. [See
Gurwitsch (1966) Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology.]
1955
"The Phenomenological and Psychological Approach to
Consciousness." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 15,
1955. [See Gurwitsch (1966) Studies in Phenomenology and
Psychology. ]
1957
Gurwitsch, A. Theorie du champ de la conscience (Bruges/Paris:
DescIee de Brouwer). [See Gurwitsch (1964) The Field of
Consciousness. ]
Sartre, J. P. The Transcendence of the Ego. F. Williams & R.
Kirkpatrick (frans.s) (New York: Farrar, Straus & Co.).
Sauvage, M. Parmenide, Ou La Sagesse Impossible (Paris: P. D.
Seghers).
264 ROBERT S. STUFFLEBEAM
1959
Cohen, M. "Appearance and the Aesthetic Attitude." Journal of
Philosophy 56, 1959: 915-925.
1960
Gurwitsch, A. "La conception de la Conscience chez Kant et chez
Husserl." Bulletin de la Societe franraise de Philosoph ie, Seance
du 25 Avril 1959 54, 1960: 65-96. [See Gurwitsch (1966) Studies
in Phenomenology and Psychology.]
Husserl, E. Cartesian Meditations. D. Cairns (Trans.) (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff).
1961
Gurwitsch, A. "The Problem of Existence in Constitutive
Phenomenology." Journal of Philosophy 58, 1961: 625-632. [See
Gurwitsch (1966) Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology.]
1962
Farber, M. The Foundation of Phenomenology (New York: Paine-
Whitman).
Gurwitsch, A. "The Commonsense World as Social Reality." Social
Research 29, 1962: 50-72.
Heidegger, M. Plato's Doctrine of Truth, in Philosophy in the
Twentieth Century: An Anthology. Vol. III. 1. Barlow (Trans.). W.
Barrett & H.D. Aiken (Eds.) (New York: Random House).
Merleau-Ponty, M. "Un inedit de M. Merleau-Ponty." Revue de
Metaphysique et de Morale 67, 1962: 401-409.
1963
Gurwitsch, A. "On the Conceptual Consciousness," in The Modeling of
Mind. K. M. Sayre & F. 1. Crosson (Eds.) (Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press).
Huertas-lourda, 1. The Existentialism of Mi!!,uel de Unamuno
(Gainesville, FL: University of Rorida Press).
1964
Dickie, G. "The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude." American
Philosophical Quarterly 1, 1, 1964: 56-65.
BIBUOGRAPHY 265
Gurwitsch, A. The Field of Consciousness (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne
University Press).
Merleau-Ponty, M. The Primacy Of Perception and Other Essays. 1.M.
Edie (Ed.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press).
Merleau-Ponty, M. Le visible et l'invisible (Paris: Gallimard). [The
Visible and the Invisible (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press, 1968).]
Schlitz, A. Collected Papers: Studies in Social Theory. Vol. 2. A.
Broderson (Ed.) (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff).
Simpson, G. G. This View of Life: The World of an Evolutionist (New
York: Harcourt, Brace & World).
1965
Gurwitsch, A. "The Phenomenology of Perception: Perceptual
Implications, II in An Invitation to Phenomenology. 1. Edie (Ed.)
(Chicago: Quadrangle).
1966
Fink, E. Studien zur Phiinomenologie 1930-1939 (Den Haag:
Martinus Nijhoff).
Foucault, M. Les mots et les choses: Une archeologie des sciences
humaines (Paris: Gallimard).
Gurwitsch, A. II An Apparent Paradox in the Leibnizianism." Social
Research 33, 1%6: 47-64.
Gurwitsch. A. "The Commonsense World as Social Reality: A
Discourse on Alfred Schutz," in A. Schlitz, Collected Papers:
Studies in Phenomenological Philosophy. Vol. 3. E. Schlitz (Ed.).
(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff).
Gurwitsch, A. Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology (Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press). Included are Gurwitsch's
works here listed under '1929', '1932', '1934', '1936', '1941', '1943',
'1951', '1953', '1955', '1960', and '1961', as well as the following
essays: "Contribution to the Phenomenological Theory of
Perception," "Gelb-Goldstein's Concept of 'Concrete' and
'Categorical' Attitude and the Phenomenology of Ideation," "The
Kantian and Husserlian Conceptions of Consciousness," "The Last
Work of Edmund Husserl," "On the Conceptual Consciousness,"
"On the Intentionality of Consciousness," and "On the Object of
Thought."
Gurwitsch, A. "Edmund Husserl's Conception of Phenomenological
Psychology." Review of Metaphysics 19, 1966: 689-727.
1967
Gurwitsch, A. "Galilean Physics in the Light of Husserl's
Phenomenology," in Galileo, Man of Science. E. McMullin (Ed.)
(New York: Basic Books, pp. 388-401).
Schlitz, A. The Phenomenology of the Social World. G. Walsh & F.
Lehnert (Trans.s) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press).
Watzlawick, P., Beavin, J. H., & Jackson, D. D. Pragmatics of Human
Communication: A Study in Patterns, Pathologies and Paradoxes
(New York: Norton).
1968
Gurwitsch, A. "Social Science and Natural Science," in Economic
Means and Social Ends. R. L. Heilbroner (Ed.) (Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, pp. 37-55).
Husserl, E. Phanomenologische Psycho logie, Husserliana IX (The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff).
1969
Husserl, E. Formal and Transcendental Logic. D. Cairns (Trans.) (The
1970
Eberle, R. Nominalist Systems (New York: Humanities Press).
Evans, J. C. "Phenomenological Deconstruction: Husserl's Method of
'Abbau'." Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 21,
January 1970: 14-25.
Gurwitsch, A. "Problems of the Life-World," in Phenomenology and
Social Reality: Essays in Memory of Alfred Schutz. M. Natanson
(Ed.) (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, pp. 35-61).
Gurwitsch, A. "Towards a Theory of Intentionality." Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research 30, 1970: 345-367.
Husserl, E. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phe-
nomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy.
D. Carr (Trans.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press).
Ricoeur, P. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay On Interpretation. D.
Savage (Trans.) (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press).
BIBUOORAPHY 267
1972
Embree, L. "Biographical Sketch of Aron Gurwitsch," in Life-world
and Consciousness: Essays for Aron Gurwitsch. L. Embree (Ed.)
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press).
Embree, L. (Ed.). Life-world and Consciousness: Essays for Aron
Gurwitsch (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press).
Gurwitsch, A. "Substantiality and Perceptual Coherence: Remarks on
H. B. Veatch: 'Two Logics'." Research in Phenomenology 2,1972:
29-46.
1973
Derrida, J. Of Grammatology. G. Spivak (Trans.) (The Johns Hopkins
University Press).
Derrida, 1. Speech and Phenomena. D. B. Allison (Trans.) (Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press).
Foucault, M. The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books).
Gurwitsch, A. "Hussert's Theory of the Intentionality of Consciousness
in Historical Perspective," and "Perceptual Coherence as the
Foundation of the Judgement of Predication," in Phenomenology:
Continuation and Criticism, Essays in Memory of Dorion Cairns.
F. I. Kersten & R. M. Zaner (Eds.) (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff,
pp. 62-90).
1974
Allison. H. A. "The Critique of Pure Reason as Transcendental
Phenomenology," in Selected Studies in Phenomenology and
Existential Philosophy. Vol. 5. R. Zaner & D. Ihde (Eds.) (The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, pp. 136-155).
Gurwitsch, A. Leibniz Philosophie des Panlogismus (Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter).
Gurwitsch, A. "On Thematization." Research in Phenomenology 4,
1974: 35-49.
Gurwitsch, A. Phenomenology and the Theory of Science. L. Embree
(Ed.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press).
Muralt, de A. The Idea of Phenomenology, Husserlian Exemplarism.
G. L. Breckon (Trans.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press).
Null, G. "Husserl's Experience and Judgment." Man and World 7,2,
1974: 182-92.
1975
Kersten, F. "The Originality of Gurwitsch's Theory of Intentionality."
Research in Phenomenology 5, 1975: 19-28.
Kockelmans, J. J. "Gurwitsch's Phenomenological Theory of Natural
Science." Research in Phenomenology 5, 1975: 29-35.
McKenna, W. "Gurwitsch's Theory of the Constitution of the Ordinal
Numbers." Research in Phenomenology 5, 1975: 37-41.
Metraux, A. "Gurwitsch's Non-Egological Concept of Consciousness."
Natanson, M. "The Problem of Anonymity in Gurwitsch and Schutz."
Sokolowski, R. "The Work of Aron Gurwitsch." Research in
Phenomenology 5, 1975: 7-10.
Wiggens, o. "Genetic Phenomenology in the Work of Aron
Gurwitsch." Research in Phenomenology 5, 1975: 57-59.
1976
Baudrillard, J. L'echange symbolique et la mort (Paris: Gallimard).
Binkley, T. "Piece: Contra Aesthetics." Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 35, 1976-7: 265-277.
Edie, J. M. Speaking and Meaning (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press).
McRae, R. M. Leibniz: Perception, Apperception and Thought
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press).
Null, G. T. "The Role of the Perceptual World in the Husserlian
Theory of the Sciences." The Journal of the British Society for
Phenomenology 7, 1976: 56-59.
1977
Carr, D. "Kant, Husserl and the Non-Empirical Ego." Journal of
Philosophy 74, 11, 1977: 682-690.
Gurwitsch, A. Human Encounters in the Social World. A. Metraux
(Ed.). F. Kersten (Trans.) (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University
Press).
1978
Arendt, H. The Life of the Mind (New Y ork/London: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich).
Hossenfelder, M. Kants Konstitutionstheorie und die Transzendentale
Deduktion (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter).
BIBUCXJRAPHY 269
Null, G. T. "Generalizing Abstraction and the Judgement of
Subsumption in Aron Gurwitsch's Version of Hussert's Theory of
Intentionality." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 38,
1978: 469-488.
Osborne, H. "Aesthetic Perception." British journal of Aesthetics 18, 4,
1978: 307-316.
Shultz, R. A. "Does Aesthetics Have Anything to do with Art." Journal
of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 36, 1978: 429-440.
1979
Gurwitsch, A. Human Encounters In the Social World. A. Metraux
(Ed.). F. Kersten (Trans.) (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University
Press).
Rorty, R. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press).
Waldenfels, B. "Wider eine reine Erkenntnis und Wissenschaftstheorie,"
in Phanomenologie und Marxismus. Waldenfels, et at. (Eds.)
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp).
Zaner, R. M. "The Field-Theory of Experiential Organisation: A
Critical Appreciation of Aron Gurwitsch." The Journal of the
British Society for Phenomenology 10, 1979: 141-152.
1980
Drummond, J. J. "A Critique of Gurwitsch's 'Phenomenological
Phenomenalism'." Southern Journal of Philosophy 18, Spring
1980: 9-21.
Lind, R. "Attention and the Aesthetic Object." Journal of Aesthetics
and Art Criticism, 39, 1, 1980: 131-142.
Waldenfels, B. Der Spielraum des Verhaltens (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp).
1981
Danto, A. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press).
Embree, L. "Gurwitsch's Critique of Merleau-Ponty." The Journal of
the British Society for Phenomenology 12, 2, 198: 151-163.
Embree, L. "Merleau-Ponty's Examination of Gestalt Psychology," in
Merleau-Ponty: Perception, Structure, Language. J.c. Sallis (Ed.)
(Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, pp. 89-121).
Mays, W. (Ed.). The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology
12, 2, 1981 [Devoted to Gurwitsch.]
270 ROBERT S. STt.JmEBEAM
McCormick, P. & Elliston, F. (Eds.). Husserl, Shorter Works. (Notre

Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press).
McKenna, W. "The 'Inadequacy' of perceptual Experience." The
Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 5, 1981: 125-
139.
1982
Aquila, R. "On Intensionalizing Husserl's Intentions." Nous 16, 1982:
209-226.
Derrida, 1. "The Ends of Man," in Margins of Philosophy (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press).
Fine, K. "Acts, Events, and Things," in Language and Ontology. W.
Leinfellner et al. (Eds.) (Vienna: Hoelder-Pichler Tempsky).
Husserl, E. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phe-
nomenological Philosophy. First Book. F. Kersten (Trans.) (The
Simons, P. "The Formalisation of Husserl's Theory of Wholes and
Parts," in Parts and Moments. B. Smith (Ed.) (Munchen:
Philosophia Verlag).
Spiegelberg, H. The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical
Introduction (Rev. & enlarg. ed.). (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff).
Wagner, H. "Confluences and Differences in the Early Work of
Gurwitsch and Schutz." Human Studies 5, 1982: 31-44.
1983
Aquila, R. Representational Mind: A Study of Kant's Theory of
Knowledge (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press).
Embree, L. (Ed.). Essays in Memory of Aron Gurwitsch (Washington
D.C.: University Press of America).
Gurwitsch, A. "On Contemporary Nihilism," in Essays in Memory of
Aron Gurwitsch. L. Embree (Ed.) (Washington D.C.: University
Press of America).
Mohanty, 1. N. "Rorty, Phenomenology and Transcendental
Philosophy." Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology,
January 1983: 91-98 .
. Searle, J. Intentionality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
1984
Jolley, N. Leibniz and Locke: A Study of the New Essays on Human
Understanding (Oxford: Clarendon Press).
Luhmann, N. Soziale Systeme (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp).
BIBUOGRAPlN 271
Waldenfe1s, et al. (Eds.) Phenomenology and Marxism, 1. Claude

Evans (Trans.) (London: Routledge, 1984).
1985
Gurwitsch, A. Marginal Consciousness. L. Embree (Ed.) (Athens, OH:
Ohio University Press).
Gurwitsch, A. & Schutz, A. Alfred SchUtz-Aron Gurwitsch Briefwechsel
1939-1959. R. Grathoff & B. Waldenfels (Eds.) (Munchen:
Wilhelm Fink Verlag). [Philosophers in Exile: The
Correspondence of Alfred SchUtz and Aron Gurwitsch, 1939-1959
. R. Grathoff (Ed.). 1. C. Evans (Trans.). Foreword by M.
Natanson (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989).]
Lind, R. "A Microphenomenology of Aesthetic Qualities." Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism 43, 4, 1985: 393-403.
1986
Nagel, T. The View From Nowhere (New York: Oxford University
Press).
1987
Edie, 1. M. Edmund Husserl's Phenomenology: A Critical Commentary
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press).
Edie, 1. M. William James and Phenomenology (Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press).
Embree, L. "Archaeology: The Most Basic Science of All." Antiquity
61, 1987.
Funke, G. Phenomenology: Metaphysics or Method? D.l. Parent
(Trans.) (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press).
Habermas, 1. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. F. Lawrence
(Trans.) (Cambridge: The MIT Press).
MacIntyre, A. "Relativism, Power and Philosophy" in After
Philosophy. K. Baynes, 1. Bohman, & T. McCarthy (Eds.)
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press).
Simons, P. Parts, A Study in Formal Ontology (Oxford: Oxford
University Press).
Waldenfels, B. Ordnung im Zwielicht (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp).
1988
Mayr, E. Toward a New Philosophy of Biology (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press).
272 ROBffiT S. STlJFREBEAM
1989
Aquila, R. Matter in Mind: A Study of Kant's Transcendental
Deduction (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press).
1990
Allison, H. E. Kant's Theory of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press).
Edie, J. M. "Hussed vs. Derrida." Human Studies 13, 1990: 103-118.
Embree, L. "A Perspective on the Rationality of Scientific Technology
or How to Buy a Car," in Lifeworld and Technology. T. Casey &
L. Embree (Eds.) (Washington, D.C.: Center for Advanced
Research in Phenomenology and University Press of America).
Gurwitsch, A. Kants Theorie des Verstandes. T.M. Seebohm (Ed.)
(Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers).
Hossenfelder, M. "Allison's Defence of Kant's Transcendental
Idealism." Inquiry 33, 1990: 467-79.
Waldenfels, B. Der Stachel des Fremden (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp).
1991
Embree, L. "Two Hussedians Discuss Nazism: Letters between Dorion
Cairns and Aron Gurwitsch in 1941." Husserl Studies 8,2, 1991:
77-105.
Evans, J. C. Strategies of Deconstruction: Derrida and the Myth of the
Voice (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press).
Kassab, E. S. "'Paramount Reality' in Schutz and Gurwitsch." Human
Studies 14, 1991: 188-198.
Kristeller, P. O. "A Life of Learning." The American Scholar 60,3,
Summer 1991: 337-350.
Landgrebe, L. "Reflections on the Schutz-Gurwitsch Correspondence. "
Human Studies 14, 1991: 107-127.
Lyman, S. M. "Animal Faith, Puritanism, and the Schutz-Gurwitsch
Debate: A Commentary." Human Studies 14, 1991: 199-206.
Null, G. & Blecksmith, R. "Matrix Representation of Husserl's Part-
Whole Foundation Theory." Notre Dame Journal of Formal LORic
32, 1, 1991: 87-111.
Stroker, E. Phanomenologische Philosophie (MUnchen: K. Alber).
Vaitkus, S. How is Society Possible? Intersubjectivity and the
Fiduciary Attitude as Problems of the Social Group in Mead,
Gurwitsch, and Schutz (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers).
BIBUOGRAPHY 273
Waldenfels, B. "Phanomenologie unter unter eidetischen,
transzendentalen und strukturalen Gesichtspunkten," in Sinn und
Erfahrung. M. Herzog & c. F. Graumann (Eds.) (Heidelberg:
Roland Asanger).
1992
Arvidson, P. S. "The Field of Consciousness: James and Gurwitsch."
Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 28, 4, Fall 1992:
833-856.
Arvidson, P. S. "On the Origin of Organization in Consciousness."
Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 23, January
1992: 55-67.
Drummond, J. J. & Embree, L. (Eds.). The Phenomenology of the
Noema (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers).
Embree, L. "Phenomenology of a Change in Archaeological
Observation," in Metaarchaeology. L. Embree (Ed.) (Boston
Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Dordrecht/Boston: Kluwer
Academic Publishers).
Embree, L. "The Phenomenology of Representational Awareness."
Human Studies 15, 1992.
Embree, L. "Some Noetico-Noematic Analyses of Action and Practical
Life," in The Phenomenology of the Noema. J. J Drummond & L.
Embree (Eds.) (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers).
Lind, R. "The Aesthetic Essence of Art." Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 50, 1992: 117-129.
1993
Arvidson, P. S. "Stability and Achievement in Richard Lind's Aesthetic
Theory." Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51, 1993: 619-
621.
Index
Abraham 10-11. 16 functionalism 215-216, 218
access vii, 10, 12, 16
aesthetic(s) ix, 4, 115-123, 126 Galileo, (Galilean) 134, 172
Akedah viii, 10-11 Gestalt vii, 4, 7, 23, 26, 52-53, 59,
apperception 32-36, 38-45, 53 61-63, 102, 117, 119, 134, 140,
atlatl, spear-thrower 125, 144-146 142-143
attention 58, 60, 62, 116-117, 119, G-dependent 63-66,68-75, 103-106,
128 108-110
Auden, W. ix, 17
Augustine II, 193, 194 Habermas, J. 157
Austin, J. 204 Hegel, G. 11, 171, 175, 179
Heidegger, M. viii, x, 19,50-51, 54,
Baudrillard, J. 225 56, 157, 177, 179-180, 204,
Brentano, F. 23, 26, 74 207, 211, 217
Bullough, E. 121 'how' 219-220
Hume, D. 26, 36, 39, 46, 55, 116,
Cassirer, E. 38, 41, 42 160
causality 47, 161, 163 hyle 58, 64, 69
constancy hypothesis vii, 7, 25
culture, cultural ix, 25, 69, 125-151 idealism, ideal viii, 25, 49-50, 57,
125
Darwin, C. 173 identity 54-55, 59, 61, 70-73, 75,
deconstruction 172, 179 89-91, 93-98, 100-102, 104-
Derrida, J. x, xi, 156-157, 178, 181- 105
182, 204 intentionality, intentional, intentive
Descartes, R. 46, 171, 181, 197, 6, 8, 19, 32, 45, 46, 57-58, 69,
216, 223 163, 167
ego, egological, (non-egological) James, H. 16

vii, 6, 9-10, 13, 69, 157, 175 James, W. 23, 50,55, 208
transcendental e. 6, 14, 195 judgement 40-41, 45, 51, 54, 56, 58,
Ehrenfels, von 60 66-68
eidos, eidetic x, 49, 134, 185, 189-
195, 196 Kant, I. viii, xi, 4, 26, 31-48, 50,
existentialism 9-10, 14 155, 156-160, 164, 168, 171,
explanation 127, 136-137, 147 181, 217
aitiological e. ix, 137-140, 143 Kaufmann, F. 16
teleological e. ix, 137-139, 147 Kierkegaard, S. 10-12, 16, 192
Koffka, K. 60
Fichte, J. 159 Kristeller, P.O. 20-21, 24
Fink, E. 160-161, 224
Foucault, M. xi, 156-157, 220, 222- Lacan, J. 175
223 language 175, 179-180
foundation, foundationalism vii, xi, Leibniz, G. viii, 11, 25-27, 31-36,
4, 60, 106, 195-196, 215-216, 38-39, 42, 44, 46, 58, 70-71,
218 171, 227
Freud, S. 174
275
276 INDEX
life-world, Lebenswelt 69, 134, 148- Schutz, A. viii, 4, 6, 9-10, 12-13,

150 16, 58, 69, 156, 208, 212-213,
Lind, R. 116 216, 224
Locke, J. 33-36, 38, 46, 65, 181, Searle, J. 204, 226
225 sense, Sinn(e) 8, 57-58, 66
logocentrism 182 Simons, P. 74, 91, 95, 97, 107
Spencer, H. 176
Macintyre, A. 157, 183 Spiegelberg, H. 27
Marburg, Neo-Kantianism 32, 37, 48 Stumpf, K. 23, 59-64, 70, 74-75, 82,
margin, marginal ix, 58, 115, 132 91, 107
Mohanty, J. 184, 185 subjectivity
mereological 66-69, 71, 73, 95-96, empirical s. x, 12, 155-169
100-101, 103-104, 109 transcendental s. x, 155-169
Merleau-Ponty, M. 15, 156, 159, synthesis 37, 39, 42, 44, 53, 58, 67,
172, 200, 216, 220, 222-224, 74, 103
228
morphe 58, 64, 69 theme, thematic field, thematization
ix, xi, 25, 58, 65, 107, 115,
Nagel, T. 157, 164-166, 168 117-121, 132, 171
Nietzsche, F. SO, 192, 219 truth, true SO, 51, 191-195, 219
noema, noematic viii, 5, 8, 19. 46,
65-66, 128 Weber, M. 58
perceptual n. 49-SO, 52-56 Wertheimer, M. 60
noesis, noetic 5, 8, 46, 64 will, willing 58, 128, 138
Wittgenstein, L. 180, 225
order of existence 130-131
paradox 11-12, 15
petites perceptions 32-35
predication 66-68, 109
psychologism x, 8, 37, 177
rationality 220
reduction 6, 11-15, 51, 58, 161-162,
167
relevance, relevancy 117-118, 120-
122
Ricoeur, P. 156, 179
Rorty, R. 178, 180-183
Sartre, J.-P. 9, 10, 12-13, 156, 166

Santayana, G. 9
Schelling, F. 159
science 69, 149, 215, 219
cultural s. 135
human s. 135, 148, 151, 215
natural s. 135, 148
Scott, P. 17
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TO WORK AT THE FOUNDATIONS

John Drummond, Mount Saint Mary's College

The purpose of this series is to foster the development of phenomenological philosophy

SPRINGER SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.

ISBN 978-94-010-6287-9 ISBN 978-94-011-5436-9 (eBook)

Printed an acid-free paper

I. Aron Gurwitsch the Philosopher

1. Keynote Address: Concerning Aron Gurwitsch

2. The Philosophy of Aron Gurwitsch

II. Critical Studies of the Philosophy of Aron Gurwitsch

3. Gurwitsch's Interpretation of Kant: Reflections of a Former

4. Phenomenalism, Idealism and Gurwitsch's Account of the

5. Conditional Identity and Irregular Parts: Aron Gurwitsch's

III. Gurwitschean Themes in Philosophy

6. Relevance and Aesthetic Perception

7. A Gurwitschean Model for Explaining Culture or How to

IV. Philosophy in the Spirit of Aron Gurwitsch

8. On the Difference Between Transcendental and Empirical

9. On Confronting Species-Specific Skepticism as We Near

10. TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN: The Question of the

11. Beyond Foundationalism and Functionalism: Phenomenology

V. A Bibliography for Gurwitsch Studies

In his contribution to this volume, Maurice Natanson recalls

audience as a whole an indication of what kind of philosopher he

Section II contains three critical studies of Gurwitsch's work. I

1. Alfred Schutz and Aron Gurwitsch, Philosophers in Exile, p. 260.

to c'riticize it. To Gurwitsch's reading of Kant as a phenomenalist

Section III contains two studies which take up the results of

Section IV contains four studies which, while not specifically

2. Review oj Politics 7: 1945, 170-198.

put forward in support of its positions. David Carr joins Edie in

phenomenological investigation,3 while rejecting the siren call of the

Thus, each of these contributions, each in its own way, does

That I could have to some extent stimulated such a study

3. As Aron Gurwitsch wrote, the pursuit of phenomenology involves

come to terms with one's Fatum, but when Spinoza

Less than two years later, his reading of Merleau-Ponty's

I am currently reading Merleau-Ponty's Perception. I hear an

The essays collected here would not produce melancholy. They

The editors would like to thank Cambridge University Press for

Aron Gurwitsch the Philosopher

Concerning Aron Gurwitsch

Were Aron Gurwitsch to be asked what kind of philosophical

whether to report what I consider to be a small story relevant to

Permit me to introduce a brief remark on what 1 understand a

Gurwitsch embraces the phenomenological reduction at the same

Gestalt-theoretical investigations ... are not limited to

Of course, Gurwitsch pursued some of these themes in valuable

1. A. Gurwitsch, "Critical Study of Husserl's Nachtwort." Studies in

The noetico-noematic correlation is what the term

The essay concludes by saying that Husserl's analyses of

Though never formulated in quite explicit terms, this

2. A. Gurwitsch, ·On the Intentionality of Consciousness.· Studies in

teleological goals towards which phenomenology is

This may be as close as I can get to what Gurwitsch called the

4. GUfwitsch, ·On the Intentionality of Consciousness,· p. 140.

subject. Instead of listening to me, I recommend reading Shalom

Who strengthened Abraham's arm, who braced up his right

5. S. Spiegel, The Last Trial (Woodstock: Jewish Lights Publishing, 1993).

anyone tell what happened as it deserves to be told. We

If-as it seems we must- we mean by egos human beings,

6. s. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, H. Hong & E. Hong (Trans.)

Obviously, the paradox hinges on the dual role of man, who