Truth and Experience

Truth and Experience:

Between Phenomenology
and Hermeneutics

Edited by

Dorthe Jørgensen, Gaetano Chiurazzi

and Søren Tinning
Truth and Experience:
Between Phenomenology and Hermeneutics

Edited by Dorthe Jørgensen, Gaetano Chiurazzi and Søren Tinning

This book first published 2015

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2015 by Dorthe Jørgensen, Gaetano Chiurazzi,

Søren Tinning and contributors

The final proofreading of the volume was done by Ben Young

of Babel Editing and supported by a grant from the Research
Program in Philosophy and History of Ideas at the University of Aarhus;
the editors extend thanks to both.

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-8363-8

ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-8363-4
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
S. Tinning, D. Jørgensen, G. Chiurazzi

Part I. Truth and Experience: The Broad Perspective

Chapter One ............................................................................................... 11

Experience, Metaphysics, and Immanent Transcendence
Dorthe Jørgensen

Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 31

Being as Diagonal and the Possibility of Truth: A Reading of Plato’s
Theaetetus
Gaetano Chiurazzi

Part II. Truth and Experience: Responding to Finitude

Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 47

Kant’s Slumber and Hegel’s Ontological Gesture
Saša Hrnjez

Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 63

On What Is Broken Inside: Hegel on Finitude
Haris Ch. Papoulias

Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 81

“Subjectivity as Untruth”: Kierkegaard and the Paradoxality
of Subjective Truth
Kresten Lundsgaard-Leth

Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 97

Heidegger and Metaphysics: A Question of the Limit
Søren Tinning
vi Table of Contents

Part III. Phenomenology and Hermeneutics: The Sources

Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 117

On the Temporal-Extension of Moods and Emotions
Jens Sand Østergaard

Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 135

What Was Heidegger’s Experience in Religious Experience
when Reading Paul?
Jens Linderoth

Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 161

The Problem of Historical Experience in the Works of Walter Benjamin
Damiano Roberi

Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 179

The Role of Ciphers and Fantasy in Karl Jaspers’s Work: Hermeneutical
and Phenomenological Aspects
Daniele Campesi

Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 203

Experience and Truth in the Work of Gadamer
Silvana Ballnat

Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 223

Foucault’s Concept of Experience
Nicolai von Eggers

Part IV. Phenomenology and Hermeneutics: New Fields

Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 243

Between Realism and Idealism: Transcendental Experience and Truth
in Husserl’s Phenomenology
Simone Aurora

Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 261

The Four Truths and Their Double Synthesis
Ivan Mosca
 Truth and Experience: Between Phenomenology and Hermeneutics vii

Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 275

The Contribution of Heidegger’s Philosophy to Geography
Ernesto C. Sferrazza Papa

Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 293

Mood and Method: Where Does Ethnographic Experience Truly
Take Place?
Rasmus Dyring

Chapter Seventeen ................................................................................... 319

The Experience of Truth in Jazz Improvisation
Jens Skou Olsen

Contributors ............................................................................................. 341

 CHAPTER THIRTEEN

BETWEEN REALISM AND IDEALISM:

TRANSCENDENTAL EXPERIENCE AND TRUTH
IN HUSSERL’S PHENOMENOLOGY1

SIMONE AURORA

Between Realism and Idealism

According to their basic and standard formulations, philosophical realism
and idealism can be defined in the following way: philosophical idealism
implies that objects and the physical world exist only as an appearance to
or expression of mind and consciousness, or as somehow mental in its
inner essence; philosophical realism, on the other hand, implies that
objects and the physical world exist independently of mind and
consciousness and of the way in which these latter experience the former.
In relation to this, there is a long-standing, and nevertheless still open,
controversy within the phenomenological tradition, concerning the
question whether Husserl’s phenomenology represents a form of idealist
or realist philosophy; Husserl himself, although in the vast majority of the
cases (at least after the so-called transcendental turn of the 1907 lectures
on “The idea of the phenomenology”2 and the development of the
“transcendental reduction” introduced therein) defines his own position as
a “transcendental idealism,” but seems not to be satisfied with this
definition, to the point that sometimes he describes his own philosophical
position in terms of a form of philosophical realism. If, for instance, in the
Cartesian Meditations Husserl writes that “phenomenology is eo ipso
‘transcendental idealism’,”3 in The Crisis of European Sciences and
Transcendental Phenomenology, he claims nevertheless, with reference to
his own position, that indeed “[t]here can be no stronger realism than
this.”4
This, at least “alleged,” uncertainty of Husserl’s view, has led to a deep
discordance among Husserl’s pupils and critics, since the very beginning
of what Spiegelberg has called “The phenomenological movement” and
244 Chapter Thirteen

then within the general reception of Husserl’s work. If authors like Eugen
Fink, which – although he specifies and clarifies the particular meaning of
the term “Idealism” within Husserl’s phenomenological approach and
rejects the charge of subjectivism – claims that “phenomenological
idealism is a constitutive idealism which essentially contains the world
within itself by returning to constitutive origins”5 and that “[t]he world in
its entirety, formerly the universal theme of all philosophy, can, through
the reduction, be known as the result of a transcendental constitution: it is
expressly taken back into the life of absolute subjectivity,”6 we can also
find authors like Roman Ingarden and the supporters of the so-called
phenomenological realism of the “Göttingen circle,”7 who think that
Husserl, “whose standpoint was that of realism at the time of the Logische
Untersuchungen, showed a distinct inclination towards transcendental
idealism since the Ideen I,”8 and try then to demonstrate that this idealistic
turn would be incoherent with the original meaning of the
phenomenological program and therefore it should be refused. Moreover,
there are authors like, for instance, the young Jean-Paul Sartre, who assert
that Husserl’s phenomenology implies a radically realist position9 or, more
recently, authors like Dallas Willard, who absolutely deny the idealistic
nature of Husserl’s phenomenology in its entirety. In the final pages of his
1937 essay The Transcendence of The Ego, Sartre writes, with reference to
the idealist readings of Husserl’s phenomenology, that “[…] nothing is
more unjust than to call phenomenologists ‘idealists’. On the contrary, for
centuries we have not felt in philosophy so realistic a current;”10 and
Willard, for his part, states in a paper presented in 2011: “I have been
unable to accept the view that Husserl ever became an idealist.”11
In order to try to solve this controversial matter, I think that two crucial
points of Husserl’s philosophical position should be considered. Firstly,
almost every time Husserl speaks about the idealism/realism issue, he is
very cautious and careful to distinguish his own use of these terms from
the one typical of the philosophical tradition. This is also true of the
quotations we considered at the beginning of this paper: in the Cartesian
Meditations Husserl does write that “phenomenology is eo ipso
‘transcendental idealism’,” but then he adds, “though in a fundamentally
and essentially new sense,”12 while in The Crisis of European Sciences
and Transcendental Phenomenology, he claims, with reference to his own
position, that “[t]here can be no stronger realism than this,” but only, he
goes further, “if by this word nothing more is meant than: ‘I am certain of
being a human being who lives in this world, etc., and I doubt it not in the
least’.”13 Furthermore, in Ideas I, after a sentence which seems to
vigorously support the idealistic option by affirming that “[t]he existence
 Between Realism and Idealism 245

of a Nature cannot be the condition for the existence of consciousness,

since Nature itself turns out to be correlate of a consciousness: Nature is
only as being constituted in regular concatenations of consciousness,”14
Husserl observes in a related marginal note: “That will be misunderstood.”15
The second point which should, in my view, be taken into account, is
that Husserl’s phenomenology is, although original, a form of
transcendental philosophy, that is of a philosophy which focuses its
attention on the relationship between the experiencing subjectivity and the
experienced objectuality and that postulates a somehow necessary
correlation between the level of subjectivity and the level of objective
world, although with various possible emphases. It is not by chance that J.
G. Fichte, a prominent spokesperson of transcendental philosophy, writes,
with reference to his own position, that this coincides with “a critical
idealism, which might also be described as a real-idealism or an ideal-
realism.”16
I would then suggest that, in a similar way, Husserl’s proposal is
neither realist (in the common philosophical sense) nor idealist (in the
common philosophical sense)17 but, in opposition to these categories, can
be defined as simply phenomenological or as transcendental-phenomenological,
in a specific sense which my line of argument should finally point out.

The Intentional Object

In order to understand in which sense the transcendental-phenomenological
model provided by Husserl represents an alternative both to realism and
idealism, and so to reappraise the alleged incompatibilities between a first
and a second Husserl, we must now consider the meaning of the
phenomenological correlation between consciousness and object, between
mind and world; we must then examine what is probably the most
important notion of Husserl’s phenomenology, that is the notion of
“intentionality.”
In paragraph 36 of Ideas I, Husserl writes that “[u]niversally it belongs
to the essence of every actional cogito to be consciousness of
something,”18 and then that intentionality is “the property of being
‘consciousness of something’.”19 Already in the first Logical Investigation
(in the first edition of 1901) Husserl wrote that

all objects [Gegenstände] and relations among objects [gegenständliche

Beziehungen] only are what they are for us, through acts of thought [Akten
des Vermeinens] essentially different from them, in which they become
present to us, in which they stand before us as unitary items that we mean
[als gemeinte].20
246 Chapter Thirteen

In the very next sentence, which is inexplicably missing in the English

translation of J. N. Findlay, Husserl claims that “for the pure
phenomenological account, there is nothing else but this web of intentional
acts [für die rein phänomenologische Betrachtungsweise gibt es nichts als
Gewebe solcher intentionaler Akte].”21
The relationship between consciousness and object is, according to
Husserl, always intentional, that is to say that objects are objects only
insofar as they are objects of a consciousness. Generally speaking, then,
objects are always intentional objects, namely they are always constituted
by the activity of a consciousness, by its intentional acts: If I am
perceiving a tree, for instance, this tree is constituted by that peculiar
intentional act represented by my perceptual act. The aim of the
phenomenological analysis would be, then, to study the different structures
of these intentional acts and of the different objects these relations
constitute.
The different interpretation of the meaning of this constitution is
probably one of the main sources of the controversy about Husserl’s
alleged idealism. Consciousness, indeed, seems to be the condition of
possibility of single objects, so that the existence of objects seems to be
completely dependent on the existence of a constitutive consciousness,
just as world, the totality of objects, seems to be completely dependent on
subjectivity, this understood as the potential totality of intentional acts.
This view, however, would not do justice to the transcendental nature of
Husserl’s phenomenology and, moreover, would not explain his already
mentioned prudence regarding the use of the term “idealism.”
Husserl’s understanding of the intentional relation is, indeed, more
complicated and a more careful consideration of its nature could shed
some light on the question just arisen.
As a first consideration, it is important to emphasise that, according to
Husserl, the intentional activity of consciousness is always directed upon
something that is pre-given, that already exists, somehow, before
becoming object of the intentional consciousness. In a very late work,
which was posthumously published in 1939, Experience and Judgement,
Husserl writes that consciousness

pre-supposes that something is already pre-given to us, which we can turn

toward in perception. And it is not mere particular objects, isolated by
themselves, which are thus pre-given but always a field of pre-giveness,
from which a particular stands out and, so to speak, “excites us” to
perception and perceptive contemplation. We say that what excites us to
perception is pre-given in our environing world and affects us on the basis
of this world.22
 Between Realism and Idealism 247

So, in contrast to what we said before and according to this quotation, it

seems to be undeniable that, somehow, objects exist independently from
consciousness and world independently from subjectivity.
As a second remark, it must also be said that, according to Husserl,
world and objects are not only generically pre-given, but they are always
pre-given in a specific way. Namely, they are pre-structured, they possess
a well definable, clear-cut and precise structure, which is able to influence,
for its part, the nature of the intentional relationship. Again in Experience
and Judgement, Husserl writes that “[e]very active apprehension of an
object presupposes that it is pre-given. The objects of receptivity are pre-
given in an original passivity with their structures of association, affection,
etc.”23
One more time, Husserl’s own words seem to allow different
interpretations.

Evidence as Experience of Truth

This very famous image, also known as the “Boring figure,” can perhaps
be of some help to a better understanding of the structure of intentionality
and of the nature of the relationship between consciousness and object.
First of all, it must be said that this image represents an object of
perception. It is, then, constituted by that peculiar intentional act
represented by the perceptual activity of consciousness. So, as we have
seen, as an intentional object, it must be something which results from a
process of constitution, something which is constituted; at the same time,
it is something which must be, in some sense, pre-given. As is well
known, this image is an example of an ambiguous image, to the extent
248 Chapter Thirteen

that, dependding on the reelative point of view, it reepresents either an old

woman or a young womaan. So, in pheenomenologicaal terms, one must say
that, dependding on the inntentional act involved, connsciousness co onstitutes
either the inntentional objeect “old womaan” or the inteentional objecct “young
woman.” N Nonetheless, oneo must also o say that thhis constitutioon is not
arbitrary, buut is co-determmined by the structure of tthe image itself: I can
constitute thhe intentionaal object “old woman,” tthe intentional object
“young wom man” and maany others, am mong which the intention nal object
“example off ambiguous im mage” or simpply the intentiional object “ink blot,”
but I cannnot constitutte the inten ntional objectt “orange ju uice” or
“locomotivee” at least not as intuitively or analogicallly given.

1 3

Indeed, if onne modifies, even

e if only liittle, the struccture of the im
mage, one
can make itt more likely that the imag ge represents an old wom man (as in
figure numbber 3) or, on the contrary, that the imaage represents a young
woman (as iin figure numbber 2).
Indeed, tthe image is pre-given
p as a structured w whole but, nev vertheless,
it is only thee intentional act
a which is ab ble to “work” this pre-given n material
to constitutte a new, moore complex, structure, nnamely the in ntentional
object. Therre is no neutrral level or baasic stage of tthe given: thee given is
always invvolved in ann intentional relationship .24 It is im mpossible,
continuing w with our exam mple, to determ
mine definitivvely whether the t image
 Between Realism and Idealism 249

represents an “old woman” or a “young woman”: the structure of the

image simply implies the possibility to constitute a finite number of
intentional objects, but, on the other hand, without the intentionality of a
consciousness, the image could not exist, at least as an object: once it is
perceived, it must indeed be perceived as either an “old woman” or a
“young woman” or an “ink blot”: in any case, it must be necessarily
subjected to an intentional grasp.25 In The Idea of Phenomenology, Husserl
writes that “things, which are not acts of thought, are nonetheless
constituted in them, come to givenness in them – and, as a matter of
principle, show themselves to be what they are only when they are thus
constituted.”26
In Experience and Judgement, Husserl maintains that

It becomes evident that, although it is correct that a truly existing object is

first the product [Produkt] of our cognitive activity, still, for all cognitive
activity, wherever it is brought to bear, this production of a truly existing
object does not mean that the activity brings forth the object from nothing
but that, on the contrary, just as objects are already pre-given, an objective
environment is always already given to us,27

and that “[o]ver against the specific freedom of variation,” that is the
possibility to constitute different intentional objects, “there is in all
experience of the individual a wholly determined commitment.”28 Objects
are “products,” as Husserl also defines them, of the intentional activity of
a consciousness but this activity, in turn, is limited by the structure of the
objects themselves.
“Experience” can then be considered as the name Husserl gives to this
essential correlation between intentional acts and structured given. In
Formal and Transcendental Logic, Husserl claims that “experience is the
consciousness of being with the matters themselves, of seizing upon and
having them quite directly,” that is to undergo the structure of the given,
but, on the other hand, he states further that “experience is not an opening
through which a world, existing prior to all experience, shines into a room
of consciousness; it is not a mere taking of something alien to consciousness
into consciousness.”29
So truth can be defined as the degree of evidence [Evidenz] of the
adequacy between the two series of structures involved in the experience,
the intentional series and the series of the given. In the sixth logical
investigation Husserl writes that

[i]f someone experiences the self-evidence [Evidenz] of A, it is self-

evident [evident] that no second person can experience the absurdity of this
250 Chapter Thirteen

same A, for, that A is self-evident [evident], means that A is not merely

meant, but also genuinely given, and given as precisely what it is thought
to be. In the strict sense it is itself present.30

As Gail Soffer notes,

[t]his analysis may be characterized as a reinterpretation of the traditional

correspondence theory of truth. In the Prolegomena, truth is held to be the
idea of the correspondence between the experienced meaning of an
assertion and an experienced state of affairs. Similarly, according to the
Sixth investigation, a true judgement is one which corresponds to a state of
affairs which can be given with adequate Evidenz.31

So, with reference to the image above, the sentence “the image represents
a young woman” is true, although in a relative way, because it corresponds
to the intentional object “produced” by the interplay between the structure
of the intentional act and the structure of the given, while the sentence “the
image represents orange juice” is false, because it is impossible to produce
such an intentional object, in view of the interrelation between the
structures of the intentional act and the structure of the given material
involved. Moreover, truth, understood as the congruence of the evidence
to experience, has different levels. The more an experience is ambiguous,
that is when it permits different “solutions,” the more the corresponding
truth is relative and evidence displays a low degree of congruence. In the
case of the experience of spatiotemporal objects like, for instance, the
experience of the image here proposed, truth can only be relative, because
the intentional objects constituted therein are always ambiguous. There is
always, at least theoretically, the possibility of an alternative solution, of a
different interpretation, of an error or of a sensory or optical illusion.32 In
Experience and Judgement, Husserl writes that “[E]very kind of object has
its own mode of self-giving, i.e., self-evidence, even though apodictic self-
evidence is not possible for all kinds, for example, not for the
spatiotemporal objects of external perception.”33 What Husserl calls
“apodictic” or “adequate” evidence, pertains, indeed, only to those
intentional objects whose nature is absolutely univocal and, accordingly,
whose truth is also univocal and unquestionable like, for instance, logical
entities, mathematical truths34 or the objects of immanent experience, such
as one’s own mental images or fictional representations.35 In Ideas I
Husserl writes:

All such evidence […] is either adequate evidence, of essential necessity

incapable of being further “strengthened” or “weakened”, thus without
degrees of weight; or the evidence is inadequate and thus capable of being
 Between Realism and Idealism 251

increased and decreased. Whether or not this or that evidence is possible

in a given sphere depends on its generic type. It is therefore a priori
prefigured, and it is countersense to demand in one sphere the perfection
belonging to the evidence of another sphere […] which essentially
excludes it.36

Immanence and Transcendence

Apodictic or adequate evidence pertains only to those objects whose truth
is univocal and necessary, as well as to immanent objects, whereas
transcendent objects, like the objects of external experience, namely all the
spatiotemporal objects of the outer world, are always dubitable and
uncertain. “Everything transcendent,” Husserl claims, “(everything not
given immanently to me) is to be assigned the index of zero, that is, its
existence, its validity is not to be assumed as such,”37 it is therefore
“epistemologically null,”38 since it cannot allow for stable and confident
knowledge. However, this position seems to lead to very problematic
consequences and even to sceptical39 or solipsistic40 outcomes, despite
what we have already said about the idealism/realism controversy and in
contrast to the general aim of Husserl’s phenomenology.41 It is not by
chance that Husserl talks, in this connection, of a riddle, which he names
the “riddle of knowledge”:

as soon as reflection is directed upon the correlation between knowledge

and objectivity […] difficulties, untenable positions, and conflicting but
seemingly well-grounded theories abound. This forces us to admit that the
possibility of knowledge, with regard to its ability to make contact with
objectivity, is a riddle.42

Indeed, if the knowledge of transcendent objects is always dubitable, “how

can knowledge be sure that it corresponds to things as they exist in
themselves, that it ‘makes contact’ with them?”43 To answer this question,
Husserl suggests, a clarification of the conceptual pair immanence-
transcendence is needed.44 There is in fact a first, naive, psychological
understanding of these terms,45 which leads to what Husserl defines as the
concepts of “real immanence” and “real transcendence”: real immanence
refers to the condition of being contained in “the consciousness of a
person and in a real mental phenomenon,”46 while real transcendence
indicates the opposite, namely the condition of not being contained in a
real consciousness, it refers then to the fact that “the known object is not
really contained in the act of knowing.”47 To put it more simply, “[t]he
immanent is in me, […] the transcendent is outside of me.”48 Such a
252 Chapter Thirteen

definition of the concepts of immanence and transcendence entails an

understanding of consciousness as a container, as a box or a bag, as
Husserl also defines it. This conception of consciousness is exactly what
Husserl tries to oppose, since it does not offer any suitable solution to the
riddle of knowledge. Indeed, if only what lies inside the “borders” of
consciousness can be known with evidence, “[h]ow do I, the knowing
subject, know and how can I know for sure – that not only my
experiences, these acts of knowing, exist, but also what they know
exists?”49 To solve the riddle, according to Husserl, one needs a different
and broader concept of immanence and of its counterpart, transcendence
and, accordingly, a different understanding of what consciousness is.
As Husserl writes,

there is another sense of transcendence, whose counterpart is an entirely

different kind of immanence, namely, absolute and clear givenness, self-
giveness in the absolute sense. This givenness, which excludes any
meaningful doubt, consists of an immediate act of seeing and apprehending
the meant objectivity itself as it is. It constitutes the precise concept of
evidence, understood as immediate evidence.50

Immanence, understood as the condition of being inside a consciousness,

gives way to a new concept of immanence, now understood as self-
giveness. Whatever is given, whatever is contained within the experience-
relation, can be considered as immanent, although it can display, as we
have already seen, different degrees of evidence. Thus, in this new,
broader sense51 of the term “immanence,” everything that is given is
immanent, even transcendent objects, since they are immediately given,
and given precisely as something transcendent,52 that is as something
whose evidence cannot be adequate or apodictic.53 It is then clear that such
an understanding of immanence has nothing to do with a psychological
consciousness and entails a concept of consciousness other than the “bag-
concept.” As Husserl writes, if “[t]he original problem was the relation
between subjective psychological experience and the reality in itself
apprehended in this experience,” now

we are dealing not with human knowledge but rather with knowledge in
general, without any relation to existential co-positings, be they of the
empirical ego or of a real world. We need the insight that the truly
significant problem is the problem of the ultimate sense-bestowal of
knowledge, and thus of objectivity in general, which is what it is only in its
correlation to possible knowledge.54

According to this new and broader sense of the term “immanence,” both
 Between Realism and Idealism 253

consciousness and objects can be said to be immanent to experience, this

understood as the correlation between the knowing subject and the known
objects; still, these must not be interpreted as psychological categories, but
as functions or roles pertaining to any possible experience.55 Indeed, every
experience entails immediately and necessarily the position of both a
subjective and an objective pole and phenomenology aims to study not the
psychological rules of the relation between a specific consciousness and
its particular objects, but instead the general and universal laws of this
correlation, its different structures and its different properties. Phenomenology
takes into account only the dynamic correlation between the
consciousness-function and the object-function, their interdependence, and
not consciousness and objects as isolated and self-sufficing elements.56
Consciousness is not a box and, accordingly, objects are not something
contained in a box; both consciousness and objects are given immediately,
at once, and they can be given only in their mutual correlation within the
“field of immanence” of experience. Therefore, in its genuine sense,
immanence pertains only to experience, wherein consciousness and
objects are simultaneously given. Accordingly, absolute transcendence is
impossible, since every transcendence is ultimately “contained” in the
immanent field of experience. Objects can be transcendent to consciousness
but not to experience, to which the genuine sense of immanence only
pertains, since outside experience there can be simply nothing. The riddle
of transcendence is then “solved”: consciousness and objects are
necessarily given as interrelated57 and, moreover, transcendence, in its
broader meaning, appears to be “impossible.”

Conclusion: Structural Phenomenology

In order to conclude, I would like to point out a possible outcome of the
reasoning I tried to present and to sketch some theoretical consequences of
the suggested understanding of Husserl’s phenomenology, which can be
defined, following the works of scholars like Giovanni Piana58 and Elmar
Holenstein,59 as “phenomenological structuralism” or “structural
phenomenology.”
Firstly, with regard to the idealism\realism controversy, I hope to have
shown in which sense Husserl’s phenomenology represents a third way,
according to which there cannot be any absolute or neutral point of view
within the relation between world and subjectivity, since experience is
always the result of the necessary and dynamic correlation between the
structures of intentionality and the structures of every given material.
Objects are independent from consciousness, with regards both to their
254 Chapter Thirteen

existence and their structure. No idealism, then. On the other hand, objects
would not be objects, they would not be proper objects of experience, if
they were not constituted by a consciousness. No realism, then.60
According to this “third way,” I believe that it is possible to define
Husserl’s own philosophical position in terms of a “structural
phenomenology.” The main features of Husserl’s “structural
phenomenology” can be briefly summarized in the following points:

1. The basic phenomena of experience are represented by structures, by

multiplicities of interrelated elements.

2. There are no isolated nor unrelated phenomena. In a manuscript dated

1898, Husserl writes, in a marginal note which evidently resounds with
Leibnizian accents, that “the absolute perfect knowledge of any thing
implies the knowledge of the whole world” and that “everything, from its
own viewpoint, mirrors the world.”61 Phenomenology, then, can be
described as the general science of the formal relations between the
different types of phenomena, which are always, according to the first
point, understood as structured wholes.

3. The fundamental relation of every knowledge lies in the intentionality,

that is in the mutual relationship between the structures of the
consciousness and the structures of the different objectualities. There is no
ontological priority whatsoever between the two poles of the intentional
relation. As Husserl writes,

[t]he phenomenology of knowledge is a science of the phenomenon of

knowledge in a twofold sense: of [acts of] knowledge as appearances,
presentations, acts of consciousness in which these or those objectivities
are presented, become objects of consciousness, either passively or
actively; and, on the other hand, of the objectivities themselves as objects
that present themselves in just such ways.62

Although an epistemological priority pertains to consciousness, since it is

consciousness that implements the process of knowledge, there could be
no consciousness, and therefore no knowledge, without the intentioned
phenomenological objectualities which are pre-given to consciousness. At
the same time, no phenomenon could be experienced outside the relation
to a consciousness.63

4. Phenomenology does not aim to describe empirical regularities, but, on

the contrary, universally valid intentional laws.
 Between Realism and Idealism 255

In a brief essay published in 1939, Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of

Husserl’s Phenomenology, Sartre expresses the gist of this idea very well
by writing – although it would be very problematic to consider his position
as representative of a “structural phenomenology”64 – that “[c]onsciousness
and the world are given at one stroke: essentially external to consciousness,
the world is nevertheless essentially relative to consciousness”65 and then
that

everything is finally outside: everything, even ourselves. Outside, in the

world, among others. It is not in some hiding-place that we will discover
ourselves; it is on the road, in the town, in the midst of the crowd, a thing
among things, a human among humans.66

A structure among the different structures of which experience is

ultimately composed.

Notes
1
I would like to thank prof. Gaetano Rametta, Prof. Elmar Holenstein and Dr.
Andrea Altobrando for having read and discussed a first draft of this paper.
However, the responsibility for the content is mine alone.
2
Husserl, E. 1999. The Idea of Phenomenology. Dordrecht-Boston-London:
Kluwer.
3
Husserl, E. 1982. Cartesian Meditations. An Introduction to Phenomenology. The
Hague/Boston/London: Nijhoff, 86.
4
Husserl, E. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental
Phenomenology. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 187.
5
Fink, E. 2005. “The phenomenological philosophy of Edmund Husserl and
contemporary criticism.” In Edmund Husserl. Critical Assessments of Leading
Philosophers. Volume I. Circumscriptions: Classic Essays on Husserl’s
Phenomenology, edited by R. Bernet, D. Welton and G. Zavota. London-New
York: Routledge, 233.
6
Ibid. 235.
7
“For to this lively group and to its varying membership and fringe,
phenomenology meant something rather different from what it did to Husserl at
this stage, i.e., not the turn toward subjectivity as the basic phenomenological
stratum, but toward the ‘Sachen’, understood in the sense of the whole range of
phenomena, and mostly toward the objective, non the subjective ones.”
(Spiegelberg, H. 1960. The Phenomenological Movement. A Historical
Introduction. Volume I. The Hague: Nijhoff, 170).
8
Ingarden, R. 2005. “About the Motives which Led Husserl to Transcendental
Idealism.” In Edmund Husserl. Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers.
Volume I. Circumscriptions: Classic Essays on Husserl’s Phenomenology, edited
by R. Bernet, D. Welton and G. Zavota. London-New York: Routledge, 72.
256 Chapter Thirteen

9
“Sartre is concerned to refute the view that phenomenology is a kind of idealism
both because that is a misunderstanding of phenomenology and because he thinks
idealism politically and ethically undesirable.” (Priest, S. 2004. The Subject in
Question. Sartre’s Critique of Husserl in The Transcendence of the Ego. London-
New York: Routledge, 144).
10
Sartre, J. P. 1991. The Transcendence of the Ego. An Existentialist Theory of
Consciousness. New York: Hill and Wang, 104-105.
11
Willard, D. Realism Sustained? Interpreting Husserl’s Progression Into
Idealism. Presented at the Early Phenomenology Conference held at Franciscan
University of Steubenville April 29-30, 2011 (http://www.dwillard.org
/articles/artview.asp?artID=151).
12
Husserl, E. Cartesian Meditations. An Introduction to Phenomenology, 86.
13
Husserl, E. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology,
187.
14
Husserl, E. 1998. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a
Phenomenological Philosophy. First book. Dordrecht-Boston-London: Kluwer,
116.
15
Ibid.
16
Fichte, J. G. 1991. The Science of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 247.
17
David Carr similarly writes, although his line of argument is slightly different
from mine, that “Husserl is no metaphysical realist, nor is he a metaphysical
idealist.” (Carr, D. 2007. “Husserl’s Attack on Psychologism and its Cultural
Implications,” in Husserl’s Logical Investigations in the New Century: Western
and Chinese Perspectives, edited by K. Y. Lau and J. J. Drummond. Dordrecht:
Springer, 41).
18
Husserl, E. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a
Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book, 73.
19
Ibid. 75.
20
Husserl, E. 2001. Logical Investigations. Volume I. London-New York:
Routledge, 194.
21
Husserl, E. 1984. Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Band, erster Teil.
Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis. “Husserliana,”
vol. 19 (1). The Hague-Boston-Lancaster: Nijhoff, 48. (My translation).
22
Husserl, E. 1973. Experience and Judgement. Investigations in a Genealogy of
Logic. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 72.
23
Ibid. 250.
24
“Phenomenology rejects the presumption of our having available to us an
absolute point of view, a point of view presenting us with objective existents, on
the one hand, and language or meanings, on the other, and then determining or
fixing their relationships. (Such a viewpoint is presumed in correspondence
theories of truth).” (Tragesser, R. 1984. Husserl and Realism in Logic and
Mathematics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 113).
25
“[…] things exist, and exist in appearance, and are themselves given by virtue of
appearance; to be sure, taken individually, they exist, or hold, independently of
 Between Realism and Idealism 257

appearance-insofar as nothing depends on this particular appearance (on this

consciousness of givenness)-but essentially, according to their essence, they cannot
be separated from appearance.” (Husserl, E. The Idea of Phenomenology, 68).
26
Ibid. 52.
27
Husserl, E. Experience and Judgement. Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic,
37.
28
Ibid. 343-344.
29
Husserl, E. 1969. Formal and Transcendental Logic. The Haag: Nijhoff, 232.
30
Husserl, E. 2001. Logical Investigations. Volume II. London-New York:
Routledge, 266. See also Husserl, E. Experience and Judgement. Investigations in
a Genealogy of Logic., 19-20: “For example, an object of external perception is
given as self-evident, as ‘it itself’, precisely in actual perception, in contrast to the
simple presentification of it in memory or imagination, etc.”
31
Soffer, G. Husserl and the Question of Relativism. Dordrecht-Boston-London:
Kluwer, 1991, 89.
32
“In Ideas I, Husserl adds the qualification that ‘adequate’ or maximal Evidenz
varies from one category of object to another, and in the case of physical objects in
particular has the form of a Kantian idea.” (ibid.).
33
Husserl, E. Experience and Judgement. Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic,
20. See also Husserl, E. The Idea of Phenomenology, 47: “There are diverse modes
of objectivity and, with them, diverse modes of so-called givenness.”
34
Indeed, the status of mathematical truths and objects represents a very complex
issue within the phenomenological framework and would merit, accordingly, a
deeper and more precise consideration, which goes beyond the goals of the present
contribution. For a recent and thorough examination of this issue, see Hartimo, M.
(ed.) 2010. Phenomenology and Mathematics. Dordrecht-Heidelberg-London-Nuw
York: Springer.
35
However, it is important to note that Husserl distinguishes between adequate and
apodictic evidence. In the Cartesian Meditations he writes that “[a]n apodictic
evidence […] is not merely certainty of the affairs or affair-complexes (states-of-
affairs) evident in it,” as with adequate evidence; “rather it discloses itself, to a
critical reflection, as having the signal peculiarity of being as the same time the
absolute unimaginableness (inconceivability) of their non-being, and thus
excluding in advance every doubt as ‘objectless’, empty.” (Husserl, E. Cartesian
Meditations. An Introduction to Phenomenology, 15-16).
36
Husserl, E. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a
Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book, 333.
37
Husserl, E. The Idea of Phenomenology, 63-64.
38
Ibid. 34.
39
“The skeptic says: knowledge is something other than the known object.
Knowledge is given, but the known object is not given – especially and as a matter
of principle in the sphere of those objects that are called transcendent. And yet
knowledge is supposed to relate itself to the object and know it – how is that
possible?” (ibid. 60).
258 Chapter Thirteen

40
“Should I say: only phenomena are genuinely given to the knowing subject, and
the knowing subject never gets beyond the interconnections of its own experiences.
Thus it can only be truly justified in saying: I exist, and everything that is not me is
mere phenomena, resolves itself into phenomenal contexts. Should I adopt, then,
the standpoint of solipsism?” (ibid. 17).
41
“Phenomenology is directed to the ‘sources of knowing’, to the general origins
which can be seen, to absolutely given universals that provide the general criteria
in terms of which the sense and also the correctness of all our highly intricate
thought is to be ascertained, and by which all the riddles concerning its objectivity
are to be solved.” (ibid. 41).
42
Ibid. 25.
43
Ibid. 61.
44
“One answers – and this is the obvious answer – in terms of the conceptual pair
or word pair immanence and transcendence.” (ibid. 62).
45
“At first one is inclined to interpret, as if it were entirely obvious, immanence as
real immanence, indeed, as real immanence in the psychological sense: the object
of knowledge also exists in the experience of knowing, or in the consciousness of
the ego, to which the experience belongs, as a real actuality.” (ibid.).
46
Ibid. 64.
47
Ibid. 27.
48
Ibid. 63.
49
Ibid. 17.
50
Ibid. 27-28.
51
“real immanence (and, respectively, transcendence) is only a special case of the
broader concept of immanence as such.” (ibid. 65).
52
“The relating-itself-to-something-transcendent, to refer to it in one way or
another, is an inner characteristic of the phenomenon.” (ibid. 35).
53
“Genuine immanence is givenness, wherever it is found, even in the case of a
transcendent object.” (Brough, J. B. 2008. “Consciousness is not a Bag:
Immanence, Transcendence, and Constitution in The Idea of Phenomenology.”
Husserl Studies no. 24, 186).
54
Husserl, E. The Idea of Phenomenology, 55.
55 “
Husserl consistently emphasizes early and late his interest in the cognitive life
of consciousness, Erkenntnisleben. In this respect he is interested in the essences of
cognitive performances and the essences of their corresponding objectivities. This
is ‘correlation research’ as Husserl termed it, and it is at the very core of
phenomenology. His dissatisfaction with his early account in the First Edition of
the Investigations is based on his worry that he had not completely put to one side
a psychologistic sense of the subjective.” (Moran, D. 2005. “The Meaning of
Phenomenology in Husserl’s Logical Investigations,” in Husserl and the Logic of
Experience, edited by Gary Banham, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 33).
56 “
Constituting consciousness is a web of interrelated intentional acts and their
correlates, not a housing for disconnected experiential atoms.” (Brough, J. B.
“Consciousness is not a Bag: Immanence, Transcendence, and Constitution in The
Idea of Phenomenology,” 191).
 Between Realism and Idealism 259

57
“The role of interconnection and genesis in constitution points again to the
complexity of constitution and of the constituted object, and how inadequate the
image of the object as a simple thing stuffed into a bag proves to be. The bag
conception is like a black hole, drawing each thing in and compacting it, but also
disconnecting it from everything else. Husserl’s conception of consciousness as
constituting restores the essential connection between seeing and what is seen, and
discloses the complexity and dynamism inherent in both.” (ibid.).
58
See Piana, G. 1995. “Die Idee eines phänomenologischen Strukturalismus.” In
Phänomenologie in Italien, edited by Renato Cristin, Würzburg: Königshausen &
Neumann, 113: “Sometimes I have spoken of a phenomenological structuralism or,
in a larger sense, of a structural-phenomenological viewpoint, in order to describe
my understanding of phenomenological themes.” See also page 114: “The general
thesis and, at the same time, the condition of possibility of phenomenological
research is: In all of its forms of manifestation experience exhibits a structure, and
phenomenological analysis must make this structure evident and show its different
nodes and articulations.” (My translation)
59
See Holenstein, E. 1975. Roman Jakobsons phänomenologischer Strukturalismus.
Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, and Holenstein, E. 1976. Linguistik Semiotik
Hermeneutik. Plädoyers für eine strukturale Phänomenologie. Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp.
60
“True, he [Husserl] does speak of appearance as ‘in a certain sense’ creating
objects […], but by that he only means that if we are to have objects, they must
appear to us through acts of consciousness, and hence ‘cannot be separated from
appearance’ […] Appearances give things, and give them in distinct ways, but they
do not make them out of whole cloth.” (Brough, J. B. “Consciousness is not a Bag:
Immanence, Transcendence, and Constitution in The Idea of Phenomenology,”
190).
61
“[D]ie absolut vollständige Erkenntnis irgendeines Dinges die Erkenntnis der
ganzen Welt einschließt bzw. […] jedes Ding von seinem Standpunkt die ganze
Welt spiegelt.” (Husserl, E. 1979. Aufsätze und Rezensionen (1890-1910).
“Husserliana” vol. 22. Den Haag-Boston-London: Nijhoff, 339). (My translation).
62
Husserl, E. The Idea of Phenomenology, 69.
63
Indeed, as John B. Brough notes, “to explain the essence of knowledge –
demands an inquiry into both the side of the act and the side of its object.”
(Brough, J. B. “Consciousness is not a Bag: Immanence, Transcendence, and
Constitution in The Idea of Phenomenology,” 187).
64
“Sartre may never have called himself a phenomenologist. But phenomenology
is certainly a decisive part of his philosophical method. Besides, Husserl and
Heidegger supply him with the main points of departure for his philosophizing.
They are philosophically much nearer to him than is any contemporary French
philosopher.” (Spiegelberg, H. 1960. The Phenomenological Movement. A
historical introduction. Volume II. The Hague: Nijhoff, 454-455).
65
Sartre, J. P. 2005. “Intentionality. A fundamental idea of Husserl’s
phenomenology.” In Edmund Husserl. Critical Assessments of Leading
Philosophers. Volume I. Circumscriptions: Classic Essays on Husserl’s
260 Chapter Thirteen

Phenomenology, edited by Rudolf B., D. Welton and G. Zavota. London-New

York: Routledge, 258.
66
Ibid. 259.