Phenomenology as Critique

Drawing on classical Husserlian resources as well as existentialist and

hermeneutical approaches, this book argues that critique is largely a
question of method. It demonstrates that phenomenological discussions
of acute social and political problems draw from a rich tradition of
radically critical investigations in epistemology, social ontology, political
theory, and ethics.
The contributions show that contemporary phenomenological
investigations of various forms of oppression and domination develop new
critical-analytical tools that complement those of competing theoretical
approaches, such as analytics of power, critical theory, and liberal philosophy
of justice. More specifically, the chapters pay close attention to the following
methodological themes: the conditions for the possibility of phenomenology
as critique; critique as radical reflection and free thinking; eidetic analysis and
reflection of transcendental facticity and contingency of the self, of others,
of the world; phenomenology and immanent critique; the self-reflective
dimensions of phenomenology; and phenomenological analysis and self-
transformation and world transformation. All in all, the book explicates the
multiple critical resources phenomenology has to offer, precisely in virtue of
its distinctive methods and methodological commitments, and thus shows
its power in tackling timely issues of social injustice.
Phenomenology as Critique: Why Method Matters will appeal
to researchers and advanced students working in phenomenology,
Continental philosophy, and critical theory.

Andreea Smaranda Aldea is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Kent

State University, USA.

David Carr is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Emory University,

USA.

Sara Heinämaa is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä,

Finland.
Routledge Research in Phenomenology
Edited by
Søren Overgaard
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Komarine Romdenh-Romluc
University of Sheffield, UK
David Cerbone
West Virginia University, USA

Political Phenomenology
Experience, Ontology, Episteme
Edited by Thomas Bedorf and Steffen Herrmann

Levinas and Analytic Philosophy

Second-Person Normativity and the Moral Life
Edited by Michael Fagenblat and Melis Erdur

Philosophy’s Nature
Husserl’s Phenomenology, Natural Science, and Metaphysics
Emiliano Trizio

The Bounds of Self

An Essay on Heidegger’s Being and Time
R. Matthew Shockey

Towards a Phenomenology of Values

Investigations of Worth
D.J. Hobbs

Mechanisms and Consciousness

Integrating Phenomenology with Cognitive Science
Maren Pokropski

Phenomenology as Critique
Why Method Matters
Edited by Andreea Smaranda Aldea, David Carr, and Sara Heinämaa

Contemporary Phenomenologies of Normativity

Norms, Goals, and Values
Edited by Sara Heinämaa, Mirja Hartimo, and Ilpo Hirvonen

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/

Routledge-Research-in-Phenomenology/book-series/RRP
Phenomenology as Critique
Why Method Matters

Edited by Andreea Smaranda Aldea,

David Carr, and Sara Heinämaa
First published 2022
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DOI: 10.4324/9781003191483
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Contents

Acknowledgmentsvii

  1 Introduction: Critique – Matter of Methods 1

SARA HEINÄMAA, DAVID CARR, AND ANDREEA
SMARANDA ALDEA

  2 Phenomenology as Critical Method: Experience and Practice 9

DAVID CARR

  3 On the Functions of Examples in Critical Philosophy –

Kant and Husserl 25
MICHELA SUMMA

  4 Phenomenology and Critique: On “Mere” Description

and Its Normative Dimensions 44
JULIA JANSEN

  5 Husserlian Phenomenology as Radical-Immanent

Critique – Or How Phenomenology Imagines Itself 56
ANDREEA SMARANDA ALDEA

 6 Radical Besinnung as a Method for Phenomenological

Critique 80
MIRJA HARTIMO

  7 A Phenomenological Critique of Critical Phenomenology 95

LANEI M. RODEMEYER

  8 On the Transcendental and Eidetic Resources of

Phenomenology: The Case of Embodiment 113
SARA HEINÄMAA
vi  Contents
  9 Critical Phenomenology and Micro-Phenomenology:
The First-Person Experience of the “Collective” 138
NATALIE DEPRAZ

10 Critique as Thinking Freely and as Discernment

of the Heart 152
ANTHONY J. STEINBOCK

11 Social Critique and Trust Dynamics 170

ALICE PUGLIESE

12 Critique in the Age of Paranoid Revolt 186

NICOLAS DE WARREN

13 Critique as Disclosure: Building Blocks for a

Phenomenological Appropriation of Marx 207
CHRISTIAN LOTZ

14 Crisis and Modernity: On the Idea of Historical Critique 224

TIMO MIETTINEN

15 What Is Critique – For Phenomenology? A Foucauldian

Perspective 237
SOPHIE LOIDOLT

16 The Power of the Reduction and the Reduction of

Power: Husserl’s and Foucault’s Critical Project 252
MAREN WEHRLE

Shared Volume Bibliography271

Author Short Bios273
Name Index277
Subject Index279
Acknowledgments

First, we would like to thank the three external reviewers for their valu-
able feedback and suggestions. We would also like to express our deepest
gratitude to the Routledge editorial team  – especially Andrew Weck-
enmann, Alexandra Simmons, Søren Overgaard, Komarine Romdenh-
Romluc and David Cerbone – for their patience and invaluable support
during the manuscript preparation process. Last but not least, we would
like to thank Minna-Kerttu Kekki for her careful and thorough help with
the style edits. Second, we would like to thank the Kone Foundation
Finland, the Fulbright Finland Foundation, the Department of Human
and Social Sciences at University of Jyväskylä, and the Kent State Univer-
sity Research Council for funding that made possible Smaranda Aldea’s
research stay in Finland during the 2019–2020 academic year. This visit
has made possible a deepening of ongoing collaborative ties between
Finnish and US-based researchers at multiple institutions and has led to
joint projects, including this volume as well as other projects to come.
Finally, we would like to thank James Jardine and Joni Puranen as well
as Fredrik Westerlund and Mirja Hartimo for their help in organizing
the international conference Phenomenology: From Methods to Critique,
held remotely in October 2020. The conference, which was very success-
ful despite the unusual manner in which it was held, was the founda-
tion for this volume. We would thus also like to thank the participants
and presenters, who engaged in rich and most illuminating dialogues,
many of which are reflected in this volume. The conference would not
have been possible without support from the Academy of Finland, the
Department of Human and Social Sciences at University of Jyväskylä, the
Department of Philosophy at Kent State University, and the Center for
Subjectivity Research at University of Copenhagen.
1 Introduction
Critique – Matter of Methods
Sara Heinämaa, David Carr, and
Andreea Smaranda Aldea

Today phenomenological philosophy is employed in tackling different

types of acute problems and sets of problems, philosophical and extra-
philosophical. For one thing, phenomenological results serve several
forms of social and political critique and figure in many communitarian,
neo-pragmatic, and critical-theoretical arguments. Additionally, both
psychological and social scientific theorization draws from contempo-
rary phenomenological analyses. Phenomenology is able to evolve and
develop in close dialogue with other disciplines and philosophical orien-
tations thanks to its commitment to the study of concrete experiences.
Given these increasing and diversifying exchanges and the rising inter-
est in philosophical phenomenology, the need has arisen to clarify how
the transcendental and eidetic methods of classical and existential phe-
nomenology relate to the many critical projects that contemporary phe-
nomenology is called to perform. This is the task of the volume at hand.
Drawing on classical Husserlian resources as well as existentialist and
hermeneutical approaches, the volume demonstrates that within phenom-
enological philosophy, critique is largely a methodological matter. What
is crucial is not any one selection of themes or topics (knowledge, justice,
violence, or embodiment, for example), or any one set of theoretical and
practical goals, but the power and range of the methods through which
the investigations unfold. Phenomenology does not fall within the limits
of any traditional philosophical discipline, such as epistemology or the-
ory of sciences, philosophy of mind or philosophical anthropology, nor
does it need to be enriched or strengthened by extra-phenomenological
principles, virtue-theoretical or power-analytical. Rather than taking a
position among philosophical disciplines or positions, phenomenology
aims at renewing them all by its radically critical methods. This insight
has both systematic and exegetic-historical dimensions.
First, the volume shows that by its very definition, phenomenology is a
permanently critical endeavor: its defining tasks – the tasks of explicating
the necessary structures of meaning-constitution pertaining to qualita-
tively different kinds of experiences – can only be realized by thoroughly
critical and self-critical investigations. At the same time, the volume

DOI: 10.4324/9781003191483-1
2  Sara Heinämaa, David Carr, and Andreea Smaranda Aldea
presents phenomenology as a dynamic philosophy, which offers effec-
tive and flexible methods that allow us to question claims and posits
of diverse sorts and at ever new levels and depths of experiencing. The
phenomenological demand for a general, overarching suspension of all
operative prejudices and preconceptions can only be met by an open-
ended set of critical concepts. It is exactly for this reason that classi-
cal and existential phenomenologists had already worked to devise and
develop concepts able to identify, examine, and clarify fundamental com-
mitments both in the realm of knowledge and in the realms of goals and
values. Rather than serving as intellectual shovels for the construction of
philosophical theories, phenomenological concepts and methods operate
like submarines that allow us to dive into the depths of experiencing and
follow its currents, which constantly stream and turn in different direc-
tions, paralleling and crossing other streams.
The metaphor of submarine life offers two benefits to clarifying the
methodology. On the one hand, it allows us to get rid of a persistent
misunderstanding of the tasks of philosophical reflection. Unlike the tra-
ditional metaphors – from observation towers to spotlights and scanning
devices – the metaphor of the submarine suggests that phenomenologists
cannot and must not stay at a distance from their subject matters but
have to dive into concrete experiences and dwell on them. They have to
engage in experiencing in order to establish new results about its struc-
tures and limits or correct already established propositions. On the other
hand, the metaphor also warns of a possible misunderstanding about the
end result of phenomenological investigations: the task of the phenom-
enologist is not to assimilate herself with the object of investigation or
to remain attached to it, but to observe it as closely and as faithfully as
possible and, when this is done, to formulate her insight in precise and
explicit language so that others can capture its content and estimate its
value. Such distancing from the target is necessary after each submerging
into experiencing, if the work is done not for personal illumination but
for scientifically, politically, and/or ethically defensible results. The basic
idea of such a back-and-forth approach is captured by the founder of
the phenomenological movement, Edmund Husserl, in his descriptions of
phenomenological investigations unfolding in a zig-zag manner:

Their judgments must be verified by genuine, by maximally perfect,

evidence; and only as so verified shall the judgments be admitted
among the results of science as theory. This brings about a  pecu-
liar judging procedure on the scientist’s part, a  zig-zag  judging, so
to speak: first making straight for the givenness of something itself,
but then going back  critically  to the provisional results already
obtained—whereupon his criticism must also be subjected to criti-
cism, and for like reasons.
(Hua XVII, 130/125, cf. HuaMat 4, 221–222;
HuaMat 8, 356–357; Hua VI, 58/59)
 Introduction 3
The critical phenomenological methods concern, first of all, the condi-
tions for the possibility of experience and thinking. But since phenome-
nologists do not accept the Kantian dichotomies of apriority/aposteriority
and necessity/possibility but, instead, operate with neo-Aristotelian and
neo-Cartesian concepts of intentionality, their investigations do not just
chart the formal features of thinking and reasoning but also, and most
importantly, concern the necessary structures pertaining to concrete
experience and consciousness in all of its variations. Moreover, through
the genetic and generative concepts of analysis, phenomenological inves-
tigations are able to illuminate the conditions of facticity and historicity.
This implies that phenomenology studies human subjects not as bodiless
spirits or empty ego-poles, but as embodied and communalized persons
who interact in a common world. Accordingly, it is able and bound to
explicate and criticize these subjects’ assumptions and dogmas as socially
and culturally inherited commitments.
Second, and in line with these systematic insights, the volume demon-
strates that contemporary phenomenological discussions of acute social
and political problems draw from a rich tradition of critical inquiries devel-
oped for the purposes of not only epistemology and social ontology but also
political theory and ethics. For the classical and existential phenomenolo-
gists, from Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein to Simone de Beauvoir and
Frantz Fanon, perception and knowledge were not only specific domains
of sense and reason in need of separate theoretical treatments but also
interest-driven and dynamically developing world relations that impose
ethico-political problems of recognition, communality, and justice. Thus,
analyses of perception and knowledge acquisition did not just border or
intersect with ontology or semantics but also with philosophical ethics and
political philosophy. The methodological tools that classical and existential
phenomenologists developed for their multi-layered and multi-dimensional
analyses are therefore able to deal with a variety of intertwined topics, from
epistemological issues, such as prejudices and dogmas of various kinds, to
the axiological and practical problems of action and interaction.
As the contributions in this volume abundantly show, phenomenologi-
cal methods entail not merely suspensive or reductive tools but also his-
torically rooted manners of inquiring and reflecting that draw from the
very thickness of the fabric of experience. These methods include not only
the classical analytical tools developed at the beginning of the century but
also the existential methods that were added in the 1930s–1960s as well
as the new analytical and interpretative measures of the late 20th cen-
tury. Moreover, the classical methods do not boil down to the renowned
phenomenological epoché or the notorious transcendental reduction;
they importantly also include more specialized tools of analysis, such as
free variation, critical interpretation (Besinnung) of goals and practices,
and profound reflection on facticity.
The volume at hand offers fresh explications of all these methodological
resources as well as timely discussions of the critical works that originally
4  Sara Heinämaa, David Carr, and Andreea Smaranda Aldea
put these methods in use and those that today utilize them in new fields
of study. Furthermore, the volume displays how contemporary phenom-
enological investigations of various forms of oppression and domination
develop novel critical-analytical tools that enrich and empower the clas-
sical arsenal but at the same time also complement and challenge the
methods of competing theoretical approaches, most importantly those of
Foucauldian analytics of power and Critical Theory in style of the Frank-
furt school, but also Derridean deconstruction, Deleuzian-inspired new
materialism and new realism, and liberal philosophy of justice.
The volume also offers novel explications of the modalities of potenti-
ality, actuality, and necessity and demonstrates the critical and creative
functions that these modalities perform in phenomenological analyses
of theoretical and practical reason. By studying how meanings are con-
stituted in the interplay between real possibilities and ideal necessities,
phenomenological investigations are able to shed light on how axiologi-
cal commitments operate in our everyday practical deliberation and
negotiations between subjects and how meaning-constitution shifts and
develops, resulting in comprehensive self-transformations and world
transformations.
The volume clarifies the key role that the imagination plays in our
encounter with the unfamiliar and the alien – be it in our own past, our
expectational orientation toward the future, or our experience of the life
of the stranger, the outsider, the newcomer. In light of phenomenological
clarifications of the modality of imagination and imagining experiences,
political change and personal transformation are neither questions of uto-
pia nor of calculative reason but, instead, changes and transformations
that demand rigorous thinking about possibilities and a fundamental cri-
tique of our own actuality. As several contributions included here show,
this is especially the case with regard to the realizable potentialities that
actuality can sustain: what could be. Thus, resonating with Marcuse’s
emphasis on the crucial critical role of “historical alternatives” – that is,
imaginatively generated possibilities that are grounded in the concrete
situations of historically communalized subjects – phenomenology opens
new futures by liberating our present imagination from the confines of
historical realities and actualities.
By systematic, exegetic, and intentional-historical accounts, the chap-
ters explicate the many critical approaches that phenomenology entails
in virtue of its distinctive methods and methodological innovations. This
is the focal point of the volume and the main thread running through its
contributions. It is precisely due to its rich and rigorous methodology
that phenomenology is able to tackle central epistemological and onto-
logical problems as well as timely issues of social injustice and violence,
such as xenophobia, bigotry, and oppressive practices of various types.
More specifically, the volume clarifies the nature of the following meth-
odological resources: (a) phenomenological critique of the conditions for
 Introduction 5
the possibility of experience, action and interaction; (b) eidetic analysis
and the critique of the present; (c) transcendental reflection on facticity;
(d) immanent critique and free thinking as radical reflection from within
experience; (e) phenomenological accounts of personal transformation
and world transformation; and (f) the self-reflective character of phe-
nomenology, its dimensions, and its limits.
It is often assumed and also argued that these methods and analyses
unavoidably lead to ahistorical theorization, divorced from all facticity
and situatedness. Phenomenology is taken to be, especially in its classical
Husserlian guise, exclusively after a priori structures of experience and,
as a result, uninterested in or perhaps unable or unwilling to do justice
to the concrete. Its preoccupation with uncovering the necessary purport-
edly blinds it to the contingent and renders it a toothless affair, without
any situated traction, diagnostic or normative. Nothing could be farther
from the methodological truth at stake here. From its Husserlian incep-
tion, through its manifold developments and modifications, phenomeno-
logical inquiry has, by its very design, always produced and developed
intentional-historical methods of reflection well-equipped to tackle the
genetic as well as generative dimensions of experience. These dimensions
entail the very problems of life that Husserl stressed phenomenology is
bound to engage rather than shy away from:

The phenomenological reflection naturally “extends into the realm

of the transcendental problems which finally encompass all living
beings insofar as they have, even indirectly but still verifiably, some-
thing like ‘life’ . . . . Also appearing thereby, in different steps, first
in respect to human beings and then universally, are the problems of
generativity, the problems of transcendental historicity, the problems
of the transcendental inquiry which starts from the essential forms of
human existence in society.”
(Hua VI, 191/187–188)

Take Husserl’s method of historical reflection (Besinnung). As several of

the volume contributions stress, this method is not only capable of study-
ing the historically sedimented contingent dimensions of experience, but
also, as a form of radical self-reflection (Selbstbesinnung), committed to
questioning the convictions and assumptions at work in phenomenologi-
cal analyses themselves. Thus, the task of phenomenology is, as pointed
out earlier, at once critical and self-critical. The meta-philosophical exer-
cise of examining our own theoretical and practical starting points – of
evaluating the methods and results of our own analyses, including their
teleological, normative, and axiological dimensions – is neither an after-
thought nor an optional side-endeavor.
There is a double-motivational story behind phenomenology’s com-
mitment to radical self-reflection. First, phenomenology has a long
6  Sara Heinämaa, David Carr, and Andreea Smaranda Aldea
history, from its inception, of internal criticism. The best-known
example of this is probably Heidegger’s critique of Husserl’s conceptu-
alization of intentionality; but also the various modes of critique that
the French phenomenologists – from Levinas to Sartre, Merleau-Ponty,
and de Beauvoir  – directed at both founders illuminate this histori-
cal tendency. Second, phenomenologists are able to rely on the self-
reflexive split (Spaltung) that is at work in all experiences and use it to
question their own operations without leaning on any non-experiential
props. In other words, phenomenologists are uniquely positioned to
engage their own commitments and results in a self-distanced man-
ner that nevertheless remains squarely grounded in their respective
domains of inquiry.
So, as a method constantly engaging both its history and its goals, phe-
nomenology is at once reflective and self-reflective in a critical manner:
a manner committed to disclosing the structural conditions of meaning-
constitution with an eye for describing how things are while at the same
time envisaging how things could be. In other words, to flag phenom-
enology’s self-reflective character is to acknowledge that, as a method, it
owns its normative and teleological commitments.
What thus transpires is that the transcendental, descriptive, and eidetic
methods of phenomenology all are critical in their very nature and not
by some added fiat. Rather than proceeding on the basis of idealist or
essentialist assumptions, classical phenomenology contends that tran-
scendental and eidetic methods are necessary, and urgently needed, if we
are to expand our critical inquiries to cover not just the explicit stances
of our interlocutors but also the commonly assumed, sedimented, and
inherited attitudes, convictions, and valuations that we share with them.
Moreover, phenomenologists argue that radically critical and self-critical
measures are needed for the social and political tasks of imagining per-
sonal and communal potentialities, alternative realities, and better – less
violent and more socially just – worlds. A social and political philosophy,
grounded in phenomenological methods, is not utopian or dystopian but
attentively engaging in a self-correcting manner that does not take its
commitments for granted. To refer back to Husserl’s deliberately para-
doxical position in The Crisis: phenomenology is without a ground yet
not groundless (Hua VI, 185/181). More concretely, phenomenology is
ever at work in grounding itself, self-reflectively so.
Thus understood, phenomenology emerges as a multi-dimensional cri-
tique, diverging from the traditional alternatives of German Idealistic,
neo-Kantian, neo-Hegelian reflections but also both challenging of and
complementary to Foucauldian, critical-theoretical, and neo-Marxist
counterparts as well as analytical and post-analytical forms of critique.
By dispelling pervasive misconceptions surrounding this philosophy,
especially misconceptions about its transcendental, eidetic, and egological
 Introduction 7
commitments seen as obstacles rather than resources, the volume shows
that phenomenology is capable of dealing with social, political, and
moral philosophical problems. Moreover, the volume tackles these prob-
lems in a unique way that displays their indebtedness to dogmas of vari-
ous kinds, naturalistic as well as historicistic.
Given its explicit focus on the methodological dimensions of phenom-
enology, the volume unapologetically places Husserlian sources front
and center. This is, first, because the principles of evidence and presup-
positionless thinking that Husserl formulated at the turn of the century
still operate as the cornerstones of all phenomenological philosophizing,
supporting a variety of analytical approaches, from transcendental, real-
ist, and existential versions of phenomenology to its very recent post-
phenomenological modifications and transgressions. The second reason
to look into Husserlian resources – perhaps a more acute one – is that
they offer, in addition to delimiting principles, also a set of constructive
tools that help us think our possibilities both as philosophizing phenom-
enologists and as politically and ethically engaged subjects.
The methods that classical phenomenology is able to offer for contem-
porary analyses of social, cultural, and political phenomena have thus far
been largely overlooked or diminished. This neglect, we think, stems from
a number of widespread misconceptions surrounding Husserl’s inquir-
ies. One such misconception holds that, given its eidetic commitments,
Husserlian phenomenology forecloses for itself the possibility of doing
justice to deeply sedimented historical contingencies. Another holds that
classical phenomenology is individualistic or solipsistic, and thus una-
ble to produce analyses of communal and intersubjective conditions of
experiencing. The third one contends that the transcendental methods
of phenomenology make it otherworldly – or worse – unworldly. These
misconceptions, classical- and existential-phenomenological authors
have already discussed in detail and patiently corrected. We – who today
are seeking to push the boundaries of these methods  – find ourselves
faced, yet again, with the task of evaluating, problematizing, questioning,
and reworking them in light of new sets of phenomena.
The volume shows that many critical concepts and methods that classi-
cal and existential phenomenologists developed are successfully put into
concrete use by contemporary scholars working in various new disci-
plines and fields of study, from feminist theory to critical race theory,
queer theory, and disability studies. Thus, the volume neither equates
phenomenology with Husserl’s line of inquiry nor does it include all
experiential analyses of various sorts in the category of “phenomenologi-
cal philosophy” independently of their analytical tools. Ours is a more
confined approach, but one that is at once bold and original (as well as
sorely needed): the aim is to make explicit and accessible  – to a wide
philosophical and interdisciplinary audience  – the rich and powerful
8  Sara Heinämaa, David Carr, and Andreea Smaranda Aldea
methodology that classical and existential phenomenology offers to criti-
cal investigations into human relations and relationality while at the
same time emphasizing the rigorous aims of this philosophy. The volume
strives to accomplish this not with “one voice,” but rather by exhibiting
the polylogous nature of phenomenological and meta-phenomenological
work.
2 Phenomenology
as Critical Method
Experience and Practice
David Carr

Phenomenology is essentially a method. It has its origin in the context of

modern philosophy and thus bears a certain relation to other philosophi-
cal disciplines, notably metaphysics and epistemology. I think, however,
that it is distinct from both of these, and its place in philosophy is best
understood apart from them. While metaphysics asks what exists, how it
exists, and sometimes whether it exists, and while epistemology asks how
we can know what exists, phenomenology asks, of anything that exists or
may exist: how is it given, how is it experienced, and what is the nature
of our experience of it? Phenomenology is a method designed to answer
these questions.
The primary source for my conception of phenomenology is Husserl
and the tradition he inspired. My purpose is not to produce an exegesis
of Husserl, though I will be citing his writings; and I am not claiming he
would have agreed with everything I say. But I do think I am being true to
the spirit if not the letter of his work. I also develop a notion of the phe-
nomenological method as a critical method, and the idea of phenomenol-
ogy as a critique of experience reveals the Kantian as well as Husserlian
inspiration of my approach. Much of what I have to say will concern the
relation between Kant and Husserl. In parallel with the Kantian inspira-
tion, I will argue that phenomenology can be seen not only as a critique
of experience but also as a critique of practice.

1. Husserl and the Phenomenological method

I begin with some familiar passages from Husserl. He introduces the phe-
nomenological method in the second section of Ideas I (Husserl 2014)
with a chapter called “the thesis of the natural attitude and its suspen-
sion.” It is this “suspension” that will be reformulated as the “epoché,”
which in turn becomes the “phenomenological reduction.” But before he
gets to this point, Husserl must explain some of the terminology he has
introduced. In order to explain what he means by the “natural attitude,”
and its “thesis,” he begins with a section called “the world of the natural
attitude: I and my environment” (ibid., 48).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003191483-2
10  David Carr
There are two things about this first section that deserve to be noted:
the first is that Husserl describes what he is doing as “simple meditations
that are best conducted in the first person (in der Ichrede).” And indeed
he uses the Ichrede in what follows: “I am conscious of a world. . . . I
immediately find it intuitively, I experience it,” and so on (Husserl 2014,
48). This form of discourse, described significantly here as “medita-
tions,” alerts us to the fact that Husserl is following the lead of Descartes,
and this thinker is mentioned by name later in this chapter. Of course,
this association exposes Husserl to certain misinterpretations, and he fre-
quently has to back away from it later. Furthermore, Husserl is somewhat
offhand in introducing this first-person discourse – he says it is “best,” he
does not say it is obligatory – and he is not always consistent in using it
in what follows. Nevertheless, this introduces something that is, at least
tacitly, hereafter associated with the phenomenological approach: It is
an inquiry conducted in the first person, and to some extent, we could
also say that it is about the first person. It is centered on the first-person
point of view.
The second thing that is introduced here, no less important, is the
concept of “world.” This concept, so familiar to us in its distinctively
phenomenological sense, occupies an increasingly important position in
Husserl’s work and in the whole phenomenological tradition he founded;
yet surprisingly, it had hardly been present at all prior to Ideas I of 1913.
Even the term was rarely used in the Logische Untersuchungen of 1901
(Husserl 1970b) and in the lectures of the ensuing decade. The impor-
tant exception is the lecture course Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie
(Husserl 2006) from the winter semester of 1910–11. Here a new element
entered the picture, which would become prominent in Ideen I, namely
that of the “natural attitude” and of the “world of the natural attitude.”
While there are hints of this in the lectures of 1907, die Idee der Phänome-
nologie, and Ding und Raum, they are not developed as they are in 1910.
The general idea here is that the life of consciousness, as described in the
Logical Investigations and in the various lecture courses that followed,
with its acts and their meaningful or intentional objects, also involves cer-
tain attitudes (Einstellungen), which are not themselves acts but somehow
underlie those acts. The most basic of these attitudes is called the natural
attitude, and is directly linked to the life of experience (Erfahrung) in
general and perception (Wahrnehmung) in particular. The correlate of
the natural attitude is the world. The idea of intentionality is that we can-
not think of experience without intentional objects. Now we learn that,
thanks to the natural attitude, experience is related essentially not just to
objects but also to the world to which they belong. The world is not itself
just another intentional object, nor is it the sum total of all such objects;
rather, it constitutes the horizon or background of all objects.
If the introduction of first-person discourse points us to the influence
of Descartes, the appearance of the concept of world, in his introduction
 Phenomenology as Critical Method 11
of the phenomenological method, points us to two other influences on
Husserl, those of Avenarius and of Dilthey. In the 1910 lecture course,
the natural attitude is linked from the outset with what Husserl calls the
“natural concept of the world” – der natürliche Weltbegriff. This is an
expression borrowed from the first section of Richard Avenarius’ book
Der menschliche Weltbegriff (Avenarius 1891, 4ff.). In the lectures Hus-
serl introduces the expression in quotation marks, and he explicitly links
it to Avenarius’ name; moreover, he discusses Avenarius briefly and criti-
cally in a couple of places. (Avenarius also uses the Ichrede in his book.)
The influence of Dilthey is not explicit but can be traced to the concept
of Weltanschauung. Dilthey did not invent this term, but his thought was
associated with it, especially in Husserl’s mind, since the latter derives his
critical account of “worldview philosophy” (Weltanschauungsphiloso-
phie), in Philosophy as Rigorous Science, from citations from Dilthey
(Husserl 1965, 123–124). Since Husserl was so critical of Dilthey in that
text, it may seem wrongheaded to attribute to Dilthey a positive influence
here. But Husserl was obviously studying Dilthey at this time, and the
idea of Weltanschauung uses the term “world” in a way that is related to
the Husserlian usage here. The point is that there is a view, not just of this
or that, but of the whole world. And most important, the “world” is not
somehow a freestanding notion but relates in principle back to something
subjective, a “view.” While a worldview is usually thought of as shared
by a cultural or historical community, in the context of Husserl’s Ideas
I, when combined with the “Cartesian” first-person (singular) point of
view, the world of the natural attitude is related to the individual subject.
It is my world.
We should note the progression of expressions: Welt-Begriff in Ave-
narius; Welt-Anschauung in Dilthey; Welt der natürlichen Einstellung in
Husserl. From these influences comes the distinctive cluster of concepts
that combine in Husserl’s Ideas I: first-person point of view, world, natu-
ral attitude, world of the natural attitude: these elements constitute the
framework in which the phenomenological method is formulated. Hus-
serl does not devote a lot of exposition to them, because he has more
important things to do, namely to introduce the epoché and reduction.
Furthermore, I think he feels that these preliminary ideas are somehow
obvious and uncontroversial, whereas the epoché and reduction are dif-
ficult and hard to explain. His use of the term “natural” tips us off to
the fact that that Husserl, like Avenarius before him, is appealing to a
very common philosophical trope here, that of common sense, or what
the Germans call the “healthy human understanding” (gesunder Men-
schenverstand). (The favored expression in English used to be “man in
the street.”) The philosopher who appeals to this is usually bound for
trouble; she thinks everyone agrees on this, though they rarely do. (I
return to this topic as the end of this chapter.) As for Husserl, I  think
he has packed a lot into this description that derives from his previous
12  David Carr
phenomenological investigations; with the result that in a certain sense
phenomenology is being presupposed in order to introduce the phenome-
nological method. Is this subterfuge, or simply naiveté, on Husserl’s part?
For our purposes, I do not think it matters. The point to stress is that
this is Husserl’s starting point. Every philosophical enterprise has to start
somewhere. Husserl’s phenomenology begins not with “Being” (Hegel’s
logic; Heidegger), or with the “I think” (Descartes; Fichte), but with the
natural attitude, or ordinary experience. Most important is what it then
does with this starting point. It takes the natural attitude not as a premise
for inferring the existence or nature of what exists outside the natural
attitude. Instead, it keeps its focus on the natural attitude and asks after
the conditions of its possibility. In a sense, the natural attitude remains
the constant subject matter, the sole text, as it were, of all of phenomenol-
ogy’s investigations.
Husserl begins with consciousness in its “natural” state, consisting of
experiences, acts, and an underlying attitude, which relates to a world.
This is the naïve, taken-for-granted world. There is a further step, again
seemingly obvious to Husserl but actually momentous: This attitude
is found to be expressed in a “general thesis” – “ ‘the’ world is always
there,” as he puts it in §30 (Husserl 2014, 52) – and it is this thesis that
is then “suspended,” “bracketed,” put out of play. This practice of sus-
pension is called the “phenomenological epoché.” This practice, further
described as the phenomenological reduction, constitutes the method of
phenomenology.
Method for what? Husserl devotes so much attention to his procedure
for departing from the natural attitude that he obscures the fact that the
primary purpose of phenomenology, as we have seen, is to reflect upon
and understand the natural attitude itself: its structures, its activities, in
other words, its essence, including that of all the sciences that are built
upon it or within it. Another way of stating this is to say that phenome-
nology seeks the conditions of the possibility of the natural attitude itself.
The idea of the epoché and reduction is that we cannot understand this
attitude, and its world, while remaining within it; we need to step outside
it in order to grasp it as a whole. Another way of putting this is to say
that phenomenology’s approach to the natural attitude is a critical one.
Husserl uses this term in both the Grundprobleme and the 1907 lectures,
Die Idee der Phänomenologie. Phenomenology is described as a critique
of knowledge, or a critique of experience.
The best way to understand this critical approach to the natural atti-
tude is to contrast it with other approaches that might be taken toward
it. Hume, for example, has his version of the natural attitude

[M]en are carried, by a natural instinct or prepossession, to repose

faith in their senses  .  .  . we always suppose an external universe,
 Phenomenology as Critical Method 13
which depends not on our perception, but would exist, though we or
every sensible creature were absent or annihilated.

Further, Hume goes on, we think we are directly aware of the objects
of our senses. “But this universal and primary opinion of all men” Hume
goes on, “is soon destroyed by the slightest philosophy” (Hume 1977,
104). With this, Hume implicitly lays out the entire agenda for mod-
ern philosophy: restore and reaffirm this opinion (Descartes); doubt it
(Hume); or deny it (Berkeley). These are metaphysical options: realism,
skepticism, idealism. They have epistemological components: the realist
must explain how we know this external world, the skeptic and the ide-
alist must explain how or whether knowledge is possible in its absence.
Husserl’s critical approach to the natural attitude is neither metaphysi-
cal nor epistemological. He seeks neither to affirm or reaffirm, nor to
deny, nor even to doubt, the thesis of the natural attitude. Suspension
is different from each of these things. This is why Husserl says, already
in Logical Investigations, that phenomenology is metaphysically neutral
(Husserl 1970b, 264f.). He does say, it is true, that phenomenology is
epistemological, but the problem of knowledge is not framed in the con-
text of these metaphysical options, and thus is treated differently from
the modern tradition. In phenomenology, we could say, knowledge is
described, rather than justified or legitimized (or de-legitimized).

2. Kant and the project of transcendental critique

The idea of phenomenology as a critique of experience reminds us that
Kant, along with Descartes, Avenarius, and Dilthey, is a major influence
on Husserl’s early formulation of the phenomenological method. Let us
briefly compare Husserl’s approach to Kant’s idea of critique. This sort of
comparison certainly has its limits, but it can be useful within those lim-
its. Husserl gestures toward Kant in several ways: he uses the concept of
critique, as we have seen; he refers to the phenomenological reduction in
several places as a “Copernican turn” (Husserl 1970a, 199) and he uses
the term “transcendental” in a way that obviously derives from Kant.
I think, however, the best way to understand the connection between
Kant’s and Husserl’s methods is to begin with a key passage in the intro-
duction to the Critique of Pure Reason: “We are in possession of certain
a priori cognitions, and even the common understanding is never without
them” (Kant 1956, B3). What Kant has in mind here primarily is the
concept of causality, which is the basic principle of natural science, and
he wants to affirm that this knowledge is not limited to natural science
but is also part of the “common understanding,” that is, ordinary experi-
ence. We know that every experienced event has a cause, and that is why
we are able to accumulate empirical knowledge of causes, and why we
14  David Carr
go looking for them when they are not immediately evident. This is what
scientific inquiry does.
What Kant is expressing here is that he accepts natural science, and the
common understanding that goes with it, as genuine knowledge, and that
the question for him is not whether such knowledge is possible (since it is
actual), but how it is possible. He is seeking, in other words, the condi-
tions of its possibility.
Kant’s firm belief that the Newtonian natural science of his day is
already launched on the secure pathway of science constitutes a basic
presupposition of his method. As we have seen, he also believes that such
knowledge extends to the “common understanding.” We could say that
this “common understanding” is Kant’s version of the natural attitude,
and nature is for him the world of the natural attitude. His approach to
this knowledge is certainly not to doubt or deny it; but it is also not to
affirm or reaffirm its validity. It does not stand in need of such affirma-
tion, from philosophy or elsewhere. But that does not mean that we fully
understand it; it is understanding, not affirmation or denial, that philoso-
phy can provide. Kant calls such understanding “transcendental,” which
for him means that it is “occupied not so much with objects but rather
with our mode of cognition of objects insofar as this is to be possible a
priori” (Kant 1956, A11, B25). In other words, Kant’s transcendental cri-
tique is not knowledge, at least not of the sort that constitutes science or
the “common understanding,” but rather reflection on such knowledge,
with a view to grasping the conditions of its possibility.
It should be noted that there are two other kinds of knowledge that
are subjected to Kant’s critique: mathematics and (most important) meta-
physics. Kant believes that mathematics, like natural science, is unas-
sailable as knowledge, and philosophy’s task is to understand how it is
possible. It needs no legitimation. Metaphysics, in this respect, appears
to be altogether different. A  field of unending dispute for centuries, it
shows no signs of embarking on the “secure pathway of science.” When
Kant subjects metaphysics to his transcendental critique, he seems to be
anything but neutral on the subject of its status. The “metaphysics of the
schools,” he says, is no better than alchemy and astrology; it is a “pseu-
doscience” (Kant 1977, 105).
It seems impossible to claim, then, of Kant’s critique of experience, as
we have for Husserl’s phenomenology, that it is metaphysically neutral.
We could say, however, that like phenomenology, it has no metaphysi-
cal presuppositions, and that it has no metaphysical implications. That
is, in the terms we have been using for metaphysics, it does not presup-
pose realism, idealism, or skepticism in its investigations; and equally, its
investigations provide no support for realism, idealism, or skepticism.
We should also point out that Kant’s attitude toward metaphysics is
not simply negative. “Pure Reason,” as opposed to sensibility and under-
standing, is the source of metaphysics, he argues, and what Kant offers
 Phenomenology as Critical Method 15
in his most famous book is not a denial but precisely a critique of pure
reason. Here too he asks after the conditions of the possibility of pure
reason and thus of metaphysics.

3. From the natural attitude to the lifeworld

The search for the conditions of its possibility reminds us that Kant’s
critical method served as a model for Husserl. Phenomenology is a cri-
tique of the natural attitude, of ordinary experience. We noted that Kant,
too, had something like a natural attitude in mind when he invoked the a
priori knowledge that is “in our possession,” a feature of our “common
understanding.” In the first Critique, which could well have been called
the “Critique of the Understanding” as well as the “Critique of Pure Rea-
son,” Kant’s focus was on the common understanding of nature. First he
tells us what this common understanding is, emphasizing our belief in the
causally regulated world of nature, and then he asks after the conditions
of the possibility of this belief, which turn out to be the a priori categories
of the understanding and the transcendental unity of apperception. These
cannot be derived from experience, Kant claims, but make experience
possible. Indeed they make nature itself possible, since nature is nothing
but the order and connection of appearances (Kant 1956, A216, B263)
or, as we could say, the “world of the natural attitude.”
At the hands of both Husserl and Kant, the scope of the critique of
experience undergoes significant expansion soon after the original articu-
lation of the critical method. Husserl launched into the writing of Ideas
II immediately after the publication of Ideas I, and one of the most sig-
nificant developments in the new text is the division of the natural atti-
tude into the “naturalistic” and the “personalistic” attitudes (Husserl
1989, 183). In the latter, the basic entities are not things but persons, and
the fundamental relation is not that of causation but that of motivation.
Husserl even says that the personalistic attitude is “more natural” than
the naturalistic, since it is as persons, and in our interaction with other
persons, that we live most of our lives. This is even true of science, which
is a social enterprise, in which our view of the world is narrowed to the
purely naturalistic.
While the world of the natural attitude seems, in Ideas I, to be very
close to the idea of the “natural” world, or the world of perception, as we
have seen, already in Ideas II this begins to change. The naïve, taken-for-
granted world, the default setting, as it were, from which we unquestion-
ingly begin, is the world of persons and cultural and social relations, and
not just of things and events in space and time. We narrow our focus to
the latter when we engage in the science of nature. But science itself is an
activity within the cultural world of persons. As early as 1917, the term
Lebenswelt is frequently used by Husserl to indicate this broader, taken-
for-granted or “pregiven” world.
16  David Carr
In the Crisis, Husserl’s last work (Husserl 1970a), the Lifeworld occu-
pies a central position, and it has two interrelated functions. First, he
launches a critical examination of modern natural science, demonstrating
that its concept of reality is actually the product of a method of mathema-
tization. Modern scientists since Galileo, and especially the philosophers
reflecting on their work, have forgotten that this method has its origin
in the pregiven lifeworld. Here Husserl puts a great deal of emphasis on
the perceptual aspects of the lifeworld, in order to distinguish the lived
and bodily aspects of the perceived world from idealized world of math-
ematical space and time. But he also places this scientific activity in the
context of the social and cultural world to which it belongs. The “crisis
of European sciences” here is that these sciences have forgotten their own
origins in the lifeworld and thus have lost their meaning for life.
The second function of Husserl’s reflections on the lifeworld is as a
pathway to phenomenology. They appear in a section of the book, which
bears the lengthy title “the way into phenomenological transcendental
philosophy by inquiring back from the pre-given lifeworld” (Husserl
1970a, 103). It is paired with another section that bears the parallel title
“the way into phenomenological transcendental philosophy from psy-
chology” (ibid., 191). One thing that is often overlooked about this book
is that the lengthy discussions of the lifeworld, its relation to science, and
its perceptual, bodily, cultural, and social aspects, are meant by Husserl
as providing motivation for performing the phenomenological reduction.
The epoché and reduction are not introduced until midway through this
section. But are these descriptions not already phenomenological? Once
again, we find the apparent circularity that we noted in connection with
Ideas I, that we have to engage in phenomenology in order to introduce
the phenomenological method.
For our purposes, what is important here is that, for all its differences
from the earlier “natural attitude,” the lifeworld serves the same function
in respect to Husserl’s method. He begins with the lifeworld and then
reflects on it in order to seek out the conditions of its possibility. In Ideas
I, the natural attitude and the world of the natural attitude go together.
The natural attitude is the deep-lying belief structure whose correlate
is the world. In Crisis, the lifeworld is the focus, but it too corresponds
to deep-lying belief structure, which Husserl characterizes variously as
Welt-bewusstsein, natürliches Welt-leben, which is the subjective side
correlation between consciousness and world. The adjectives most asso-
ciated with the lifeworld in this section are pre-given (vorgegeben) and
taken-for-granted (selbstverständlich). As with the natural attitude of
Ideas I, this level of our consciousness and of our relation to the world
is so deep-lying and “anonymous” that we do not notice it, as the term
“taken-for-granted” suggests; it has to be called to our attention. In order
to bring it into view, we need to step back from it, stop taking it for
granted; and this is what is accomplished by the epoché and reduction.
 Phenomenology as Critical Method 17
Husserl calls this “making the lifeworld thematic,” “the discovery and
investigation of the transcendental correlation between world and world-
consciousness” (Husserl 1970a, 151).
It should be clear that the method Husserl introduces in the Crisis has
basically the same structure as the method first introduced in Ideas I.
As is well known, Husserl criticizes the latter, calling it the “Cartesian
way,” for being too abrupt and for leading to misunderstandings (Hus-
serl 1970a, 155). But he has not really altered it. As before, he begins
with certain deep-lying and anonymous currents of belief in the world,
applies the epoché in order to achieve distance from them, but only in
order to examine and understand those very currents of belief. As before,
his purpose is not to affirm or re-affirm those beliefs, to provide them
with a philosophical buttress that they cannot provide for themselves.
Nor is his purpose to deny or cast doubt on those beliefs. Instead, like
Kant, he wants to subject them to a critique. By “inquiring back,” in the
procedure he calls Rückfrage (ibid., 103), he seeks out the conditions of
their possibility.

4. Kant: from critique of experience to critique

of practice
Kant’s concept of the “common understanding” undergoes a similar
expansion, and again it occurs soon after the original statement of the
critical method. Only four years after the publication of the Critique of
Pure Reason, Kant publishes in 1785 the Grundlegung zur Metaphysik
der Sitten (Kant 1981). Though the title suggests that this is a preface to
a Metaphysics of Morals, which Kant indeed says he wants to publish
“some day” (and did in 1797), in fact it leads in short order to the Cri-
tique of Practical Reason, which follows in 1788. Thus, the “Ground-
ing” clearly belongs to the critical philosophy. The train of thought here
is remarkably similar to that of the first Critique. Just as the first Critique
begins with our “common understanding” of nature, so the Grundlegung
begins with the “ordinary (gemeine) rational knowledge of morality”
(ibid., 7). Once again, Kant begins not with some immutable principles
on which to build a metaphysical system, but with ordinary experience,
this time our ordinary experience of morality. And once again Kant’s
approach to this “ordinary rational knowledge of morality” is not to go
beyond it, not to reaffirm it, and certainly not to deny or doubt it, but to
seek out the conditions of its possibility.
I do not intend to go into the details of Kant’s practical philosophy
since my purpose in invoking it at all is to cast light on Husserl’s critique
of experience. But I  think it is useful to sketch the broad outlines of
Kant’s approach before returning to Husserl. So here is a very abbreviated
account: Kant thinks that as natural beings we are provided with inclina-
tions and desires, which we seek to fulfill. But we are also rational beings,
18  David Carr
and our reason can be employed in the service of our natural inclinations.
It allows us to calculate, plan, and devise rules for the achievement of our
ends. Kant calls these rules maxims, rules of skill, councils of prudence,
or hypothetical imperatives. Through them, we seek our happiness.
But Kant believes that we are not only natural and rational beings
but also moral beings. He posits that morality imposes certain limits or
constraints on the maxims that we employ in pursuit of our goals. These
limits are articulated in the various formulations of the categorical imper-
ative. Of the many maxims that are rationally available in your practical
life, you should act only on those that you can at the same time will that
they should become a universal laws, laws not just for you, but for every­
body (Kant 1981, 30). With this universality, Kant already acknowledges
that the moral agent is part of a community. Here he is stating that eve-
ryone, not just me, is subject to the universality constraint. But, then, he
refines this notion in his famous second formulation, which states not the
others’ obligation to me, but my obligation to them. “Act in such a way
that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of
another, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means”
(ibid., 36). Kant further describes the community of such persons as a
“kingdom of ends” (ibid., 39) in which each moral agent acts as a legis-
lating member.
Such, then, is the constraint that morality imposes on my rationality.
It proposes that as a moral agent I  operate as part of a community of
persons to whom I have certain obligations. I can pursue my happiness,
but I ought to do so only within the limits imposed by the categorical
imperative. This limit applies to the world of persons as moral agents and
the community to which they and I belong.

5. The lifeworld as practical world

This world corresponds roughly to the expanded “world of the natural
attitude” that Husserl begins to unfold in the years following the publica-
tion of Ideas I. As we saw, the central figures of this world are persons,
and Husserl does suggest that persons serve as a limit on my desires,
inclinations, and activities. The broadest version of this world is the life-
world of Husserl’s latest writings. In the Crisis and other texts, Husserl
makes it clear that while the natural world is included in this broader
world, it is subordinate to the intersubjective human world of persons
and communities of persons.
Does Husserl’s expanded world of the natural attitude include some-
thing like Kant’s “ordinary rational knowledge” of morality? We know
that Husserl made several forays into the domain of ethics throughout
his career. His early work focused on axiology, something like what
later philosophers called deontic logic. In the 1920s, he gave lectures
on ethics, treating ethics as a technique of right action, still parallel to
 Phenomenology as Critical Method 19
logic as the technique of right thinking. This culminates in the universal
duty, the “duty of all duties,” to the “best possible life.” Later comes
the ethics of renewal and nods toward the Kantian categorical impera-
tive. Throughout, of course, he emphasizes the ethics of “Beruf,” or
vocation, of science and rationality, including phenomenology, and the
obligation of philosophers to be “functionaries of mankind” (Husserl
1970a, 17).
Just as the world of the natural attitude, in Ideas I, corresponds, on the
subjective side, to the natural attitude itself, so the lifeworld of the Crisis
corresponds to what Husserl calls world-life. This life is of course not
merely perceptive and cognitive but also active and practical. This is the
life of actions and goals, of means and ends, of plans and strategies, rules,
and maxims. This is the home of what Husserl calls the technique (Kunst­
lehre) of willing and acting. The lifeworld is the sphere of operations
for this life. If this is the natural attitude of practical and moral experi-
ence, or the ordinary experience of the practical and moral, then what is
the function of phenomenology in relation to this experience? Following
the parallel with Kant, which Husserl also accepts, then phenomenology
would constitute a critique of such experience. We could call this Hus-
serl’s critique of practical reason. But what is critique? As we have seen,
it is the search for the conditions of the possibility of such experience. But
what does this mean?
Again, we can look to Kant for guidance. For him, the supreme con-
dition of the possibility of moral experience is autonomy of the will, or
freedom. This certainly makes sense according to his scheme. As a natu-
ral or empirical being, I am guided by my inclinations, even when I use
rationality to achieve them. As a moral being, I must be able to limit my
pursuit of natural inclinations according to moral duty. I must have the
freedom to resist my natural inclinations. Put simply, moral experience
often involves refraining from doing what I want to do, because it is not
right. Helping myself to my neighbor’s goods or property would serve my
interests, but I recognize that it is not right, that is, it violates the categor-
ical imperative, to do so. This leads to certain well-known wrinkles and
problems in Kant’s moral philosophy that Husserl may not have to worry
about. Kant must consider the moral being as belonging to the intelligible
rather than the natural world, that is, as a being subject to moral law
rather that natural law. But the intelligible world is not really known to
us, even if it is necessary to presuppose it in cases like this. I can never
really know that I have acted freely, or that I am free in general. Freedom,
says Kant, is an Idea of Reason, not an observable property. After all, by
refraining from stealing my neighbor’s property, I may simply be serving
a higher inclination, that of avoiding getting caught and punished. Here
Kant would say that I have indeed acted according to duty, but not out
of duty. I can never know, no matter how hard I strive, whether I have
acted morally or selfishly.
20  David Carr
Husserl may be immune to these agonies of ignorance because he is
doing phenomenology and not metaphysics. Kant forswears traditional
metaphysics, refraining from making claims about God, freedom, and
immortality, but his distinction between phenomena and noumena is
itself a metaphysical distinction. This must be why Kant refers to his pro-
ject as a metaphysics of morals. The distinction between phenomena and
noumena is also an epistemological distinction, since Kant thinks that
the only genuine knowledge is empirical knowledge. Since the only self-
knowledge I have is empirical self-knowledge, I can know myself only as
causally determined, and thus obviously as not free. My freedom is some-
thing I can only think, but never know. Husserl avoids these problems by
not accepting the metaphysical phenomenon/noumenon distinction and
by rejecting the Kantian denial of self-knowledge. The lifeworld, as we
have seen, contains persons as well as things, and we can know persons,
including our own person, even though they are accessible under differ-
ent categories, for example, motivation rather than causation.
If Husserl then seeks, in the context of his own “critique of practi-
cal reason,” the conditions of the possibility of our moral and practical
experience, he can then answer that freedom is among those conditions,
without incurring all the problems that attend the Kantian metaphysics.
What makes moral and practical experience possible, we could say on
his behalf, is a subject that is practical as well as cognitive. This requires
that the subject of that experience be a person and not a thing, and thus
is guided by motivations rather than causes. Though Husserl does not
talk much about freedom, at least in this context, his idea of motivation
implies it. Motives are not causes; they do not necessitate, but motivate.
Our motives may be practical or impractical, selfish or altruistic. Our
motives guide us through a world that consists of persons and things (and
animals, we should add), of means and ends. By insisting on the differ-
ence between persons and things, and by asserting that we know other
persons as subjects like ourselves, Husserl seems to approach the ethics
of persons as ends in themselves, as objects of respect.
More broadly, we can say that the phenomenological critique of moral
and practical experience reveals that, for such experience to be possi-
ble, subjectivity must be active as well as passive. Its rationality must be
practical as well as theoretical. It must exist in a world that consists of
persons as well as things. For the subject to be practical and moral, the
lifeworld must be such that that moral and practical experience are pos-
sible. It must be composed not only of objects of perception and thought
but also of items of value and use, and things that can be changed, items
that can become means to our ends. These can be things, animals, and
persons. But other persons, and animals in their own way, have ends of
their own. Our practical and moral interaction is such that we know that,
and we cannot ignore the ends of others, even if we choose to disregard
them.
 Phenomenology as Critical Method 21
Husserl and his contemporaries used the word empathy (Einfüh-
lung) to designate the experience we have of others. Husserl was always
uncomfortable with this term, and rightly so. It is centered on feeling,
and that is too limited. In experiencing others, I  am aware not just of
their feelings but also of their thoughts, their intentions, their plans, their
attitudes, and their behavior. Terminologically, Husserl increasingly set-
tled on the term Fremderfahrung, or simply intersubjectivity, to designate
all the ways we interact with others. Another problem with empathy is
that, in English at least, it has a strong normative cast. Empathy is what
we should practice in our relations with others. But we can, and often
do, relate to others in very un-empathetic ways. But we are relating to
them nonetheless.
It is also necessary for moral and practical experience that subjectiv-
ity can be plural as well as singular. That is, the individual can relate to
others not only as opposites or alter egos but also as fellow members of a
community, bringing “we-intentionality” into play. Kant thought of the
kingdom of ends as a kind of universal community of all rational subjects.
This is a well-known Enlightenment trope. But the kinds of communities
we actually belong to are of lesser scope: family, ethnic, professional,
political. And it is as members of such communities that we live much
of our practical and moral lives. The possibility and capacity for such
communities must count among the conditions of the possibility of our
practical and moral experience. Essentially, I  am following here the
procedure that Husserl lays out in the Crisis when he describes the “way
into” transcendental phenomenology from the pre-given lifeworld. The
lifeworld is brought into view by performing the epoché and reduction
on the objective, scientific world in which we unthinkingly believe. This
is already a critique, since it liberates us from our prejudices, the taken-
for-granted assumptions we bring to our experience. Husserl wants, he
tells us, to transform the Selbstverständlichkeiten of naïve belief into the
Verständlichkeit of phenomenological reflection. Once we understand
the full complexity of the lifeworld, which is predominantly a human
world composed of persons and communities of persons, we can move
on to the question of what subjectivity must be like if the world is to be
as it is. As we have seen, this is a subjectivity that is practical as well as
perceptual, plural as well as singular, and, we should add, bodily as well
as purely mental.

6. Conclusion: the turn to history

The approach that I have sketched here may evoke some negative memo-
ries in some of you, as it does in me. If I start with “our moral and prac-
tical experience” and then ask for the conditions of its possibility, this
reminds me of the preferred method of analytic approaches to ethics and
other topics in the 1950s and 1960s. The question was always: does this
22  David Carr
or that theory correspond to “our intuitions?” I was always inclined to
ask: whose intuitions? What gives them the authority to serve as the crite-
rion for accepting or rejecting a theory? Remember the reproach to “ordi-
nary language philosophy” that the “ordinary language” being appealed
to was the ordinary language of the typical denizen of an Oxford college
common room?
The problem is similar in Kant’s approach to ethics. As we saw, he
begins with the “ordinary rational knowledge of morality,” which is
focused on the idea of duty and the good will. Again, we could ask: what
does “ordinary” mean? And whose rational knowledge is meant? Clearly,
Kant thinks he is describing everybody’s rational knowledge, just as he
means everyone’s understanding when he invokes the gemeiner Verstand
in the first critique. But can he make good on that? Does Kant’s critical phi-
losophy turn out to be just another version of common sense philosophy?
You can see where this is heading. As we insisted, Husserl’s phenom-
enology begins with the natural attitude and the world of the natural
attitude. We also spoke of phenomenology as a critique of everyday
experience. This then expanded, over Husserl’s career, into the much
broader conception of the lifeworld. Thus, Husserl’s view of the everyday
world expanded as his conception of world grew richer and deeper. But
while Husserl’s view changed, presumably the world he was describing
did not. It was the same world; Husserl just described it better. Husserl
also clearly believes that the lifeworld he is describing is the same for all
humans. “Negroes in the Congo, Chinese peasants etc.” (Husserl 1970a,
139) seem to live in very different worlds from typical Europeans, but the
lifeworld is the same for all of us. It is prescientific, prepredicative, even
precultural. As Husserl puts it, “the lifeworld does have, in all its relative
features, a general structure. This general structure, to which everything
that is relative is bound, is not itself relative” (ibid.). It is the bodily
world of lived space and time, the world of what is intuitively pre-given,
as opposed to what is idealized and conceptual. At the end of the essay
on The Origin of Geometry, Husserl says, “we lay down the following
as something completely secured, namely, that the human surrounding
world is the same today and always” (ibid., 378).
A counter-current emerges, though, when Husserl admits that the
results of the science and technology set in motion by Galileo, Descartes,
and Newton “flow back into” (einströmen) the lifeworld (Husserl
1970a, 208). They become embedded in our view of the world and are
henceforth taken for granted and unquestioned. So the lifeworld of pre-
Galilean Europeans, and of others not influenced by his thought, is surely
different from ours.

The sense of this pregivenness is such that everything that natural

science has furnished as determinations of what exists also belongs
to us, to the world, as this world is pregiven to the adults of our time.
(Husserl 1973, 42)
 Phenomenology as Critical Method 23
Husserl never explains adequately how this works, but presumably
we in the modern world, surrounded as we are by the gadgets and other
mixed blessings of technology, inhabit a world that is significantly dif-
ferent from that of our distant predecessors. This would seem especially
true when we consider the much-expanded version of the lifeworld we
have been stressing here: the human world of persons and communities,
of means and ends, of actions and projects. Technology, of course, not
only alters what we experience but also expands the range of what we
can do.
This is where history enters the picture. The discussion of Galileo in
the Crisis has always been seen as evidence of Husserl’s turn to history.
But the import of that turn can now be seen as ambiguous. The apparent
message was that while Galileo changed our way of thinking about the
world, we still live in the same world. Even scientists in their off-hours
inhabit the pre-given lifeworld. But once the concept of “flowing in” is
introduced, we learn that the lifeworld varies historically. Consequently,
the world-life of the subject is historicized as well. So if phenomenology is
a critique of everyday experience, as we have been insisting, then it would
seem appropriate to ask: whose ordinary experience, and when? That is,
in what historical context? One of the strongest claims of the Crisis, and
the essays of the period, is that all human endeavors, including science,
are historical: they are located in history and develop historically. This
is true even of philosophy, even of phenomenology. Ultimately, this is
because subjectivity, transcendental subjectivity, is itself historical.
Consequently, phenomenology, as a critique of everyday experience,
has to acknowledge its own historicity. The same is true of phenomenol-
ogy as a critique of practice. If everyday experience, the natural attitude,
varies historically, then so does the everyday understanding of morality.

References
Avenarius, Richard. 1891. Der menschliche Weltbegriff. Leipzig: R.O. Reisland.
Hume, David. 1977. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. E.
Steinberg. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishers.
Husserl, Edmund. 1965. Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, trans. Q.
Lauer. New York: Harper & Row.
Husserl, Edmund. 1970a. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phe-
nomenology, translated by D. Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Husserl, Edmund. 1970b. Logical Investigations, translated by J. N. Findlay.
New York: Humanities Press.
Husserl, Edmund. 1973. Experience and Judgment, translated by J. S. Churchill
and K. Ameriks. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Husserl, Edmund. 1989. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and Phe-
nomenological Philosophy, second book, translated by R. Rojcewicz and
A. Schuwer. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Husserl, Edmund. 2006. Basic Problems of Phenomenology, translated by
I. Farin and J. Hart. Dordrecht: Springer.
24  David Carr
Husserl, Edmund. 2014. Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological
Philosophy, first book, translated by D. O. Dahlstrom. Indianapolis: Hackett
Publishers.
Kant, Immanuel. 1956. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag
Kant, Immanuel. 1977. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, translated by
P. Carus rev. J. Ellington. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishers.
Kant, Immanuel. 1981. Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, translated by
J. W. Ellington. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishers.
3 On the Functions of
Examples in Critical
Philosophy – Kant
and Husserl
Michela Summa

Despite all differences, Husserl’s phenomenology certainly inherits

important aspects of Kant’s critical philosophy. Notably, with reference
to Kant’s famous metaphor of a “court of justice, by which reason may
secure its rightful claims while dismissing all its groundless pretensions”
(Kant 1998, A xi, 101), it can be fairly argued that a critical attitude –
aiming at distinguishing and separating legitimate cognitive pretensions
from illegitimate ones – permeates the phenomenological project as a
whole. Such attitude is emphatically expressed in the demand to return
to the things themselves (Husserl 2001a, 168) as well as in the “principle
of all principles,” stating that we should acknowledge as a “legitimizing
source of cognition” only that which is intuitively presented and only
“within the limits in which it is presented” (Husserl 1983, 44). Need-
less to say, for any investigation of the relation between Kant’s critical
philosophy and phenomenology, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is an
obvious reference; together with the Prolegomena, Husserl most often
quotes this text when discussing Kant’s theoretical philosophy. However,
further understanding of phenomenology as critical enterprise may ensue
from looking at some key topics in the Critique of the Power of Judg-
ment, notably from assessing the epistemic implication of the reflecting
judgment. Particularly relevant in this respect is the epistemically critical
function of exemplarity.
In what follows, I  will argue that the epistemic force of examples  –
that is, of individuals that embody a law, a rule, a general concept, and
an idea1 – is connected not only to their illustrative function but also
most importantly to their guiding function.2 Both can be fruitfully inter-
preted against the background of Kant’s paradigm of judgment (Ferrara
2008, 16–41) in that it provides suitable guidelines on how to understand
individuals or particulars in relation to universals and vice versa. Within
this framework, the illustrative function can be linked to the determining
judgment (Section  1), while the guiding function can be to the reflect-
ing judgment (Section 2). Mutatis mutandis, these functions can also be
found in Husserl’s remarks on the role of examples in phenomenology
(Sections 3 and 4). Besides setting forth a reassessment of Husserl’s view

DOI: 10.4324/9781003191483-3
26  Michela Summa
on examples based on Kant’s paradigm of judgment, in this chapter,
I wish to argue that Husserl’s and Kant’s views on the epistemic role of
examples complement each other and that their combination provides
crucial insights into the crucial problem of “necessity in a contingent
world,”3 that is to say, of how to epistemically account for the structures
that necessarily articulate our contingent experience from within.

1. Determining judgment and the illustrative function

of examples
Examples are often understood as illustrating general concepts or laws.
If, while explaining the law of uniform circular motion, a teacher takes
the motion of a watch hand as an example, then this example has the
function of making visible, of illustrating in an intuitive way, the law
itself. The illustrative function of examples seems to assume that the gen-
erality is already presupposed and possibly known as such. If this is so,
then the example is simply accessory, at best functional in that it makes
up for the factual limits in our capacity to grasp universalities or generali-
ties (cf. Schaub 2010, 2012). This is roughly how Kant understands the
function of examples in the Critique of Pure Reason. There, Kant’s para-
digm of judgment is limited to the determining judgment as the faculty
“of subsuming under rules, i.e., of determining whether something stands
under a given rule (casus datae legis)” (Kant 1998, A 132/B 172, 268).4
In this context, Kant emphasizes both the epistemic relevance and the
limits of illustrative exemplification. Examples do “sharpen the power
of judgment,” but this is their “sole and great utility.” Furthermore,
exemplifying illustrations lack correctness and precision, and they often
weaken the effort of the understanding to gain sufficient insight into rules
in the universal and independently of the particular circumstances of
experience.
This is why examples can only work as the “leading-strings of the
power of judgment, which he who lacks natural talent for judgment can
never do without” (Kant 1998, A 134/B 173, 269).
By saying that examples sharpen the power of judgment, Kant implies
that those who, by nature, do not possess a developed faculty of judg-
ment may incidentally profit from examples. Conversely, examples risk
being misleading for intellectual cognition, as they aim at gaining insights
into universal and necessary rules independently of experience. To return
to our physics class: students who have some problem in grasping the
abstract law may profit from the watch-hand example; yet, students who
have well-developed intellectual capacities and a refined capacity of judg-
ment will be able to grasp the general law independently of examples.
However, upon closer inspection, while setting so clear limitations to
the epistemic function of examples, Kant seems to step on his own toes.
He seems, in fact, to underestimate that exemplifying is an exercise of the
 On the Functions of Examples 27
power of judgment or of the capacity to apply rules, and that those who
are incapable of exercising the faculty of judgment – for instance, a phy-
sician, a judge, or a statesman who possesses “many fine pathological,
juridical, or political rules” but is not able to apply them to the concrete
case (Kant 1998, A 134/B 173, 269) – merely possess abstract knowledge.
This holds for our hypothetical students too: if they intellectually grasp
the law but are not able to recognize how it can be applied, they can only
be said to possess some abstract notion of uniform circular motion, but
not really to have understood what the physical law means. The deficien-
cies in one’s power of judgment even in possession of abstract knowledge
amount to “stupidity” (Kant 1998, A 134/B 173, 268). As a result, at
variance with the idea that examples are merely accessory and possibly
misleading, some of Kant’s main tenets imply that proper knowledge is
accomplished provided one not only possesses concepts but is also able to
apply them, and illustrative exemplification is precisely a way of apply-
ing concepts. In addition to requiring creative thinking, the capacity to
exemplify one’s knowledge entails the capacity of varying one’s own per-
spective on what one experiences as a singularity, hence considering it
within a larger horizon or from a broader perspective (cf. Summa 2017;
Wieland 2001, 157). In this sense, what Kant calls stupidity also entails
the incapacity to find the right examples for a given rule.
According to Kant, examples can be seen as limited in that they never
exactly correspond to the concept or rule they exemplify. Just another
way to say the same thing is to claim that individuals are never fully
accounted for by the universal they exemplify. Individuals or particulars
are not examples in and by themselves; but they should be interpreted as
examples – that is to say, they should be understood as being so that they
can act as examples of something and not of something else. Let us take a
melody: depending on how one describes it, on the perspective one takes,
and on the context in which one refers to it, the melody could be an
example of the co-appearance between sound and intensity, an example
of the temporal extension of the sound experience, a typical example of
a musician’s style, etc. This melody, however, is always something more
than the example of one of such generalities or structural laws; it does
not coincide with any of them nor can it be considered as the exclusive
expression of only one of them.
For all these reasons, granted that concepts are not to remain empty
or abstract, and that concrete knowledge is to be achieved, illustrative
exemplifying is to be included as part of a critical epistemology.

2. Reflecting judgment and the guiding function

of examples
Illustration, however, does not exhaust the epistemic function of exam-
ples. What about those cases in which the concept is not given? Think
28  Michela Summa
about a child asking you what “good manners” or “friendship” are. In
this case, you would not give an abstract or general definition, but rather
make examples that show what these social relationships are. In fact, giv-
ing an abstract definition – meaning here a definition that is not based on
exemplification – in these cases is impossible; identifying and passing on
the meaning of general concepts of this kind requires us to use examples
and counterexamples. While this problem is absent from the Critique of
Pure Reason, it plays a key role within the underpinning arguments of the
Critique of the Power of Judgment. Here, Kant distinguishes determin-
ing judgment and reflecting judgment and defines the latter as the faculty
of finding the rule by reflecting on concrete singularities. The reflecting
power of judgment

is supposed to subsume under a law that is not yet given and which
is in fact only a principle for reflection on objects for which we are
objectively entirely lacking a law or a concept of the object that
would be adequate as a principle for the cases that come before us.
(Kant 2000, 357; cf. ibid., 15f., 66f.)

The reflecting judgment, then, is the search for a universal principle

that implicitly works as a rule for the very reflection on the singulari-
ties we experience. Yet, since the rule for reflection is to be found in and
through the process of reflection itself, the reflecting judgment must act
as a normative principle for itself (Kant 2000, 257). As he discusses the
reflecting judgment, Kant is not interested in the process of empirical gen-
eralization, but rather in identifying the cognitive structures that make
knowledge based on experience possible. The main assumption here is
that both our experience and nature itself are not chaotic but rather have
an inner and correlative structure, which eventually makes nature experi-
enceable and cognizable for us (cf. Ginsborg 2016, 171f.).
Why the reflecting judgment is particularly relevant to the topic of
exemplification becomes even clearer if we look more closely at the para-
digm of judgments of taste. The judgment of taste is in fact a judgment
on the “purposiveness of the object” – here assessed in relation to the
connected receivers’ responsiveness – “which is not grounded on any
available concept of the object and does not furnish one” (Kant 2000,
76). As such, it is an expression of the reflecting judgment. And in this
respect, the judgment of taste is also the best expression of the aforemen-
tioned systematic assumption concerning the finality of the object with
respect to the cognitive faculties of the mind. What is at stake here, then,
is not the normativity of already given concepts, but rather a kind of
normativity that pertains to subjective and intersubjective experience. In
this respect, the judgment of taste is not only relevant within the field of
aesthetics, but it can also be taken as paradigmatic for the normativity of
empirical knowledge. In fact, since aesthetic judgments rule out already
 On the Functions of Examples 29
given verifiability criteria (e.g., based on correspondence or conceptual
determination), their normative claims can only be based on the possibil-
ity in principle to find rules in reflection and to intersubjectively share
our experiences insofar as these are implicitly governed by such rules.
Since this normativity – which is fundamentally based on the possibility
to intersubjectively share experience – is also proper to other forms of
cognition (notably, perceptually based cognition, for which we may also
have other verifiability criteria), we can assume that it provides a more
basic normative ground for our cognition. Exemplarity is precisely what
defines such a normative ground.
Within this framework, examples are not merely to be understood as
illustrations, nor do they only have an auxiliary function. They have in
fact a constitutive and normative function as well, and they guide us in
the process of searching a non-given universal. Moreover, the universal-
ity of the rule is not primarily to be understood as what is common to all
possible examples and can thus be illustrated by each of them, but rather
as what everyone who reflects on or judges something particular should
follow.
When it comes to judgments of taste, then, Kant investigates singular
judgments, which should be taken as exemplary insofar as they can be
legitimately assumed to have a universal intersubjective validity and to
act as expressions of a non-given universal rule. As to their quantity,
judgments of taste can only be singular and never (objectively) universal.
Accordingly, the universality of aesthetic judgment is only subjective. It
can legitimately be claimed that this rose is beautiful, but not that all
roses are beautiful; yet, when one claims that this rose is beautiful, one
also legitimately claims that the judgment should be shared by others, or
that it works as an example for the judging of others (Kant 2000, 96f.).
In this latter sense, the singular judgment has subjective universal valid-
ity, that is to say, both validity for the judging subject at different times
and intersubjective validity or validity for any other judging subject. One
should remark here that the requirement of subjective universal validity
also holds for judgments that, thanks to the reference to a concept, claim
objective universal validity (Kant 2002, 50).
As previously mentioned, subjective universal validity presupposes that
we can share our aesthetic experience. Kant addresses the state of mind
we thereby share as the “free play” of the higher cognitive faculties, imag-
ination, and understanding (Kant 2000, 102), and considers aesthetic
pleasure as the phenomenal or experiential side of this sharing (Ginsborg
2015, 32f., 53f.; 2016, 24).5 From the viewpoint of phenomenology, one
may argue that the reference to such harmony and free play is an obscure
construction, and that the whole argument made by Kant would not be
spared by Husserl’s notorious criticism concerning the faculties of the
mind, according to which this piece of Kant’s philosophy eventually turns
out being tainted with psychologism (Summa 2014, 37f.). Yet, besides
30  Michela Summa
clarifying that Kant’s faculties are not to be understood in psychological
terms, a reading of Kant’s account of the free play is possible that is not
incompatible with a phenomenological theory of experience, namely as
the interplay between the tendency of the imagination to flow freely and
without limitations and the tendency to limit, draw distinctions, concep-
tualize, which for Kant pertains to the understanding.
Exemplarity underlies not only the subjective universality – hence the
quantity – of aesthetic judgments but also their modality as necessary.
The “exemplary necessity” of aesthetic judgment is the “necessity of the
assent of all to a judgment that is regarded as an example of a universal
rule that one cannot produce” (Kant 2000, 121). Since in judgments
of taste – as reflecting judgments – the principle is not given, the start-
ing point and the guide for these judgments is the example itself: this
particular object we experience as beautiful while expecting that oth-
ers share our experience. The singular judgment assumes therefore a
normative character primarily inasmuch it serves as an example for the
judgment of others, entitling us to request intersubjective assent even
in the absence of any reference to an a priori principle (cf. Feloj 2017,
2018; Ginsborg 2015). In the absence of a given normative principle,
we can speak of a subjective and intersubjective, exemplary necessity of
the judgment of taste precisely because this judgment is communicable
or shareable.
Such sharing is based on the sensus communis or on the capacity to
think oneself in the position of anyone else (Kant 2000, 123f., 173f.)
and therefore to utter a singular judgment as if it were formulated by a
“universal voice” (Kant 2000, 101). The metaphor of a “universal voice”
aptly conveys exemplary normativity: it is not the voice of one super-
individual entity, but rather a singular voice that raises a claim to univer-
sality or of validity for everyone. The sensus communis, then, is supposed
to safeguard both the plurality of each voice and the possibility of shar-
ing since it is “a faculty for judging that in its reflection takes account (a
priori) of everyone else’s way of representing in thought” (Kant 2000,
173–174). This means that the claim for universality of the judgments
of taste presupposes the capacity of putting oneself “into the position
of everyone else, merely by abstracting from the limitations that con-
tingently attach to our own judging” (Kant 2000, 173–174) – in other
words, the capacity to find necessity within contingency.
Underlying exemplary normativity as well as the idea of a universal
voice, the sensus communis is not postulated as a state in which you and
I  instantiate the same sensible experience. It is rather conceived as the
sharing of an experience insofar as this experience is not merely deter-
mined by private conditions. This requires a perspectival shift or a vari-
ation of our own experiencing, which makes it possible for us to bracket
contingency and imaginatively put ourselves in the position of possible
others.
 On the Functions of Examples 31
Furthermore, the normativity of aesthetic judgments does not rule out
uncertainty, corrigibility, and disagreement. The aforementioned varia-
tion or perspectival shift is something we engage in while trying to set-
tle disagreement. Far from hinting at some kind of fusional relationship
between subjects, communicability does not rule out dispute and nego-
tiation about what is subjective. However, communicability also pre-
supposes that there are normative standards we can search even in the
absence of objective criteria (cf. Borutti 2018; Cavell 1976, 68–90; Guyer
1997, 118 f.). This is also how I understand the regulative character of
exemplary normativity: communicability does not indicate an actually
achieved consensus or a fact; it is also to be sought.

3. Examples in phenomenology: illustration and beyond

At first glance, Husserl seems mostly interested in examples as illustra-
tions. For instance, aiming at clarifying the structure of fulfillment of
objection acts and at arguing that these structures ground the struc-
tures of fulfillment of non-objectivation acts, he argues that volitional
and emotional acts presuppose that we represent of their object. “An
example—so Husserl introduction—will clarify the matter” (Husserl
2001b, 216). That is to say, the example that follows (a desire that
requires the intuitive fulfilled representation of what is desired) should
help visualize a general or ideal law based on something concretely expe-
rienceable. What interests me here is not this specific claim concerning
the nature of desires, but rather the operative use of the example as illus-
tration. Supposedly, we already have the rule, and the example should
make it clear or apply it. Yet, in phenomenology, the illustrative function
is always entwined with the guiding function. Take the following pas-
sage from paragraph 3 of Ideas I, entitled “Eidetic seeing and intuition
of something individual”:

[I]ntuition of essence has as its basis a principal part of intuition of

something individual, namely an appearing, a sightedness of some-
thing individual, though not indeed a seizing upon this nor any sort
of positing as an actuality; certainly, in consequence of that, no intui-
tion of essence is possible without the free possibility of turning one’s
regard to a “corresponding” individual and forming a conscious-
ness of an example—just as, conversely, no intuition of something
individual is possible without the free possibility of bringing about
an ideation and, in it, directing one’s regard to the corresponding
essence exemplified in what is individually sighted; but this in no
respect alters the fact that the two sorts of intuition are essentially
different; and propositions such as we have just stated indicate only
the essential relations between them.
(Husserl 1983, 10)
32  Michela Summa
While we can read the reference to the essence-corresponding individual
as implying a form of illustration, one clear difference compared to Kant’s
account of illustrative exemplification is that, for Husserl, even this func-
tion of examples is not merely accessory. The eidetic intuition – hence,
the consciousness of the universal, the law, or the principle – is possible
only on the basis of intuitions of individuals, which must be grasped
not simply as such, but rather as exemplifying that universal, law, or
principle. This requires a perspectival turn, or a shift of attention, from
the individual simply taken as individual to the individual understood as
example (cf. Zaner 1973). Crucially, Husserl’s claim allows a twofold
reading: the ability to turn our gaze toward a singularity that exemplifies
an eidetic law is one condition for eidetic intuition; conversely, the intui-
tion of this individual as such, or the grasping of something as something,
presupposes that ideation is in principle possible, that is to say, that we
can turn to the quid of what appears.
But even this more sophisticated understanding of the illustrative func-
tion of examples remains limited. While dealing with exemplification, for
instance, in relation to the epistemic function of perception and phantasy
at paragraph 70 of Ideas I,6 Husserl hints to further directions. Com-
paring geometry to phenomenology, Husserl argues that the geometer
“operates in the figure or model (Modell) incomparably more in phantasy
than in perception” (Husserl 1983, 159). This is so because, while actu-
ally sketching or constructing a geometric figure (a model), geometers
need to take empirical constraints into account, whereas while imagining
they are free from such constraints. Significantly, with regard to geom-
etry, Husserl speaks of “drawings” and “models” (Zeichnungen, Mod-
elle) and not of examples. Yet, he also compares the geometric figures as
models to examples in phenomenology. Like geometers, phenomenolo-
gists should not exemplify idealities only on the basis of what is factually
given, but rather imaginatively produce examples of what may possibly
be given (Husserl 1983, 160).
At first look, we are still dealing with illustrative exemplifications.
Drawing a triangle based on the definition of a triangle means illustrat-
ing  – making visible or applying to a singular case  – something ideal.
Analogously, describing this perceptual act or this act of recollection
exemplifies the a priori structures of such acts. Yet, this interpretation
has limitations. First, one may wonder whether what the geometer does
when constructing a geometric figure is actually to be called an illustra-
tive exemplification. Provided that geometry is understood as a material
science – thus irreducible to algebra – an exact geometrical figure, while
exemplifying the ideal law, is also not different from the ideal law; it
is the ideal law itself (Ferencz-Flatz 2011, 2018).7 What distinguishes
the exemplification of the a priori laws of experience in phenomenology
from geometric figuration is that, while in the latter case we are dealing
with exact idealities, in the former the ideality to exemplify is inexact or
 On the Functions of Examples 33
morphological (Husserl 1983, 161f.). Exemplification then applies here
only if we consider how geometrical figures are used to make an abstract
definition visible and intuitively graspable, or if we consider how geomet-
rical concepts are used in ordinary language. Secondly, geometric figures
and instances of intentional acts are not taken as illustrations for already
given idealities, but rather as guides to identify these idealities. Examples
should not be thought of as concretizing given laws, but rather as what
guides the “eidetic research” and the “seizing upon essences” (Husserl
1983, 158–159).
Accordingly, exemplarity assumes an epistemic significance that goes
beyond the illustration and application of a given rule or principle. This
also offers a new framework to understand the multiplication and vari-
ation of examples performed by phantasy: precisely because what is at
stake is not applying a given law to a single case, but rather finding a law
valid for different cases (and in principle universally valid), an indetermi-
nate variation not only of real but also of possible cases must be assumed.

4. The guiding function of examples in phenomenology

through the lenses of reflecting judgment
The account on examples as guides to seize upon essences is further
developed in Husserl’s later texts on eidetic variation, which expand on
the cognitive processes that lead from the simple intuition of singulari-
ties to the grasping of eidetic universal structures. Husserl articulates
the process of variation in five steps (Husserl 1973 , 340f., 1977, 53).
The first (and preliminary) step is the real or imaginative experience
of something individual. Such an experience of a singularity becomes
relevant for eidetic variation only insofar as it is connected with the
second step, in which we take the individual as an example, from which
other examples can ensue by means of variation. This is what happens
in the third step, which entails the imaginative and arbitrary (beliebig)
variation of the original example. The fourth step consists in a synthe-
sis that recognizes the overlapping coincidence (überschiebende Deck-
ung) among the different examples that need to be retained (im Griff
halten) in and through the variation. Finally, the fifth step is the proper
recognition or intuition of the essence. Examples have here the func-
tion of guides: a singularity works as an example insofar as it leads
us to the grasping of a universal, which is not given. Furthermore, the
starting point for the process of variation is something factual  – this
perception  – in which we search a rule or a structure. As Husserl, in
the lectures on inner time consciousness, describes the perception of
an individual sound, he is not interested in either this act of auditory
perception or this individual sound. Rather, he is interested in the tem-
poral structures that all perceptions of sounds have. In order to grasp
these structures, we need to distinguish what is contingent and pertains
34  Michela Summa
only to this perception and what instead pertains to sound perceptions
in general. Taking one sound as an example and imaginatively vary-
ing it makes such distinction possible. We thereby explore possibilities
of experience and identify stable structures; we can vary the sound by
taking first an E and then a G; we can imagine that the sound comes
from an instrument very close to us or rather from the other room; we
can imagine that the source of the sound is a clarinet, a violin, a human
voice, etc. While going through these examples, we will be able to rec-
ognize both the singularity of each possible experience and the invariant
structures. Most importantly, there are conditions for the success of
this process. The choice of the example and the subsequent formation
of imaginative variants should be arbitrary (beliebig) (Husserl 1973,
349). This does not only mean that we should not center on this factual
individual. In order to understand the meaning of such arbitrariness, we
should also recognize that, like in every process or research, we already
have some kind of pre-comprehension of what we are looking for, at
least as a “vague idea” (vage Vorstellung) (Lohmar 2005, 80). Take the
perception of a sound as example; it would be bizarre to claim that what
we are searching is the essence of personhood. Does this mean then that
arbitrariness is an illusion? That we eventually run into a circle? Or
that the essence we are supposed to find is determined from such a pre-
comprehension? I believe not. Although the choice of the example may
be initially motivated, precisely due to its arbitrariness, the variation can
lead to unexpected results with respect to the essence or structure we
were somehow anticipating – say if we find a counterexample invalidat-
ing or falsifying our initial assumptions.8 Also, arbitrary variation can
lead to unexpected results with respect to other essences or structures
that we did not even anticipate. For this reason, eidetic variation can
be also taken as a process of discovery. This belongs to the power of
arbitrary imaginative variation which Husserl insightfully also presents
as analogous to a kaleidoscope (cf. De Santis 2012; Hua XXXV, 174).
Looking through a kaleidoscope, the shapes are multiplied, even if one
can recognize patterns and maybe identify new ones; analogously exam-
ples can be multiplied in phantasy, and the variation can even lead to
other generalities besides the anticipated ones. For instance, the varia-
tion on a musical tone, which we might have initiated by anticipating on
the structure of time consciousness, could lead us to identify structures
proper to a musically transmitted feeling.
If we consider eidetic variation as a search, the normative constraint
imposed on the arbitrariness does not apply to the anticipation of the
essence  – pace also all suspicion of circularity  – but rather only to the
anticipation of similarity or resemblance among the examples (De Santis
2012). Saying that the imaginative variation should be arbitrary, then,
does not simply mean that one can take anything as a variant of the
 On the Functions of Examples 35
starting example. The initial example sets a rule; it is an Urbild or Vor-
bild upon which to operate a phantasy-variation based on resemblance
and thereby produce Nachbilder. Taking something as an example, then,
primarily means using something in a certain way, namely as a model or
guide:

The fundamental performance upon which everything else depends

is the shaping of any experienced or fancied objectivity into a vari-
ant, shaping it into the form of the optional example [Exempel] and
at the same time of the guiding ‘model’ [Vorbild], of precisely the
first member of an openly endless multiplicity of variants, in short,
a variation.
(Husserl 1977, 57)

The exemplary normativity of the guiding example is clearly conveyed

by Husserl’s choice of the concept of Vorbild, as well as by the sugges-
tion that an Exempel in the process of variation is a Vorbild. That is to
say, it has a normative function that goes well beyond illustration and
rather guides is in the process of searching for the corresponding law or
structure (see also Husserl 1973, 340).9 As soon as something factual is
selected as an example in the process of variation, the field in which it
is possible and legitimate to operate the variation itself is normatively
defined. As a result, a path is traced to find structures in the contingency
of what appears. Although eidetic variation aims at uncovering structures
and laws that are not merely contingent, it also operatively shows that
such structures and laws cannot be either given or thought of indepen-
dently of the reference to something contingent, that is to say, indepen-
dently of their exemplification. What the variation yields are Nachbilder
deviating from the original example while maintaining some affinity or
resemblance with it. This implies that the reference to the universal or
generality is not the normative instance here. The example itself has then
normative function here, precisely insofar as it guides the process of vari-
ation in the search of essences or structures that although anticipated
are not already given. This brings us to a reassessment of the meaning of
universality.
Husserl makes clear that what eidetic variation yields is the hen epi
pollon (Husserl 1973, 325) or “an element ideally and absolutely identi-
cal, which, in the mode of repetition or assimilation, goes through all the
individual objects and their multiform moments as an ideal unity” (Hus-
serl 1973, 324). However, while keeping in mind the claim concerning
the arbitrariness in the production of examples and the assumption of
resemblance with the initial example as the normative constraint on the
building of variants, what we can find is not one invariant, but a plural-
ity of structures or eidetic laws, which largely depend on the perspective
36  Michela Summa
from which we look at the example. In this sense, the sought essence is
to be understood as the

unity of the synthetic accomplishment (Einheit des synthetischen

Vollzugs) of eidetic variation, understood as the rule that produces
the traversing (Durchlaufen) of the intuitive multiplicity of variations.
(Mertens 1996, 260–261)

Even if we isolate one law or one invariant that goes through the mul-
tiplicity of examples – generally the one we anticipated – we should con-
sider whether the universality aimed at by the reduction is only to be
understood as the universality of something that is identical and common
to all possible examples. Besides the claim that the example itself sets the
rule for eidetic variation, one more element is here reminiscent of Kant’s
reflecting judgment and exemplary normativity: the idea that something
is exemplary if it can become a rule for judgment.
The most common challenge to Husserl’s account of eidetic variation
comes here in handy. As it seems, we cannot say when the process of
variation has legitimately come to an end (Husserl 1973, 340; cf. Loh-
mar 2005); hence we can never be certain that an appropriate number of
exemplary variations has been taken into account in order to determine
whether we have found the ideal structure we were in search of. Per
se, Husserl’s reply that the open infinity of possible variants does not
refer to the “nonsensical demand to actually produce all possible vari-
ants” is not fully satisfactory (Husserl 1977, 57). One should in fact add
that this challenge derives from a limited understanding of the method of
eidetic variation. Such limitations can be overcome if we reassess eidetic
variation through the lenses of Kant’s reflecting judgment, with particu-
lar reference to exemplary normativity. One should keep in mind that
exemplary normativity relies on the necessity of a singular judgment that,
despite the lack of verifying criteria, is legitimately assumed to be univer-
sal insofar as it is valid for everyone. This normativity is based, for Kant,
on the sensus communis, that is, on the ability of each subject to take up
the position of anyone else. In this regard, I suggest understanding the
sensus communis as the amplification of the process of variation. Some
passages in Husserl also support this interpretation. When discussing
how an example is established by starting from one individual to which
variation is applied, Husserl refers not only to the imaginative variation
of the object but also to imaginative variations in the way we may expe-
rience the object, thus referring to the variation of circumstances as well
as to the variation of normal and abnormal sensibility. He thereby also
emphasizes that “the thing and the intuitive content can be presented
otherwise in the intuition of the others who are there for me” (Husserl
1973, 362–363). Accordingly, while forming an example, we should take
into account possible variations that concern others’ possible experience.
 On the Functions of Examples 37
Husserl also explicitly makes the claim that “if I vary the surrounding
world, I also vary the respective subjectivity in the freedom that allows
the form ‘we and our world’, which is to be held as identical” (Hua XLI,
329). In this respect he speaks of a “formal eidetics of singular subjec-
tivity and intersubjectivity” (ibid., 331). If we are to take something as
universal  – notably: the eidetic structures of the world as the horizon
in which we all live – then we shall take the world as “experienceable
for everyone” (ibid., 344, 347). That is to say, experienceable for each
subject belonging to an “open plurality, which is ideally open to ever
new subjects” (ibid., 103). Therefore, as a starting point of the process
of variation, one should also contemplate the experience of “anybody,
no matter which human beings, i.e., bodily acting subjects, as I  am”
(ibid., 344) and consider this factual experience also as an example, both
insofar as it illustrates possible experiences and insofar as it can guide
a process of variation. This means not only accommodating within the
process of imaginary variation the doubling of experience (as real-I and
as phantasy-I) that is constitutive for acts of phantasy, but rather imagin-
ing us independently of what makes us the personal individuals that we
are. If this is not a mere abstraction, then it should imply something like
thinking of ourselves in the position of possible others and consequently
taking something as exemplary not only for us but also in principle for
anyone. Otherwise formulated: we can legitimately take something as
an example only if we can expect some kind of agreement (Übereinstim-
mung) or concordance (Einstimmigkeit) to be established between how
we see the object and how others do.
Introducing the notion of universality as “validity for everyone” within
the theory of eidetic variation allows to address the issues concerning the
certainty of the intuition given the assumption of an infinite number of
variations. Apparently, if we rule in intersubjectivity or sensus commu-
nis, we should also admit an infinity of an even higher order: there are
not only our variations on the example but also the variations of possible
others. What matters, then, is not to establish when – after how many
variations – we can say to have reached the end and grasped the essence.
Instead, what matters is that, through the example and its variation,
rules and structures are found and can be tested, progressively proved
(bewährt) or rejected within the process of subjective and intersubjective
experience.10
Whether we can be certain that these variables are stable and definitive
is a question that arises again and again. In some cases, such as in the var-
iation that allows to highlight the a priori material law that regulates the
co-belonging of color and extension or of sound and intensity, a criterion
is available in order to establish that the process of variation has come to
an end: the criterion of conceivability or avoidance of a graspable mate-
rial contradiction. If the extension or color is reduced to zero, we will
also lose the other moment and vice versa. And this is what makes the
38  Michela Summa
evidence we have concerning the law “apodictic” (Husserl 1960, 14f.).
Yet, in most cases related to concrete experience, such a criterion is miss-
ing. What I am thinking about here is not so much the case, relatively
trivial, of the essence of a table or the color red, but cases in which we try
to grasp what is the essence or the structure of an emotion, of an aesthetic
value, of a mental illness, of a social relationship – and, even more so, of
the eidos “world” (cf. Jansen 2015). Here, the variability of examples is
such that we lack a criterion to say when the variation can actually stop
and, therefore, we cannot exclude that the evidence we have is corrigible.
Nonetheless, it is the very possibility of variation that legitimates us in
the assumption that there must be an eidetic structure to be scrutinized,
even if our intuitive grasping thereof may be open to correction. This
is so inasmuch as, while raising a claim to be a priori, the structures of
experience are not given independently of experience and of the process
of proving something to be true (Bewährung) not only for us as experi-
encing subjects but also for any other possible subject.

5. Conclusions: critically reassessing necessity and

contingency
For both Kant and Husserl, examples are singularities expressing uni-
versal rules. This can be understood both as signifying that singularities
illustrate universal rules and that singularities guide us in the search of
universal rules. In the latter sense, we can speak of an exemplary neces-
sity, a necessity that we are asked to scrutinize and to constantly prove
(bewähren) within experience itself.
The normativity of examples does ensue not only from the fact that
they express something universal but also from the fact that the exam-
ple, as Kant writes with respect to the exemplarity of genius, acts as a
“standard or rule for judgment” (Kant 2000, 186–187) or, as Husserl
puts it, it guides as a Vorbild the process of variation. Expanding on this
approach, we have seen that universality is not only to be understood
as “what is common to all instances,” but also as “what is valid for
everyone.” For Kant, there are judgments – “judgments of experience”
according to the Prolegomena (Kant 2002, AA 04, 298, 50) – in which
universality is meant in both senses. Yet, other judgments – notably judg-
ments of taste  – can only claim subjective/intersubjective universality,
based on experiences that we can in principle share with others. Since
subjective universality is available also in the absence of objective univer-
sality, while the opposite is not possible, subjective universality as inter-
subjective validity and sharing should be seen as epistemically prior to
objective universality (cf. Ginsborg 2006). As I have tried to show in the
last section, and as could be further substantiated by Husserl’s analyses
on transcendental intersubjectivity (cf. Zahavi 1996), Husserl’s account
of truth based on the idea of concordance (Einstimmigkeit) also confirms
 On the Functions of Examples 39
such priority. A significant divergence, in this regard, is that, for Husserl,
the principle of intersubjective universality eo ipso also implies objective
universality as its correlative. This is so, inasmuch as, based on the phe-
nomenological method, unlike what is the case for Kant’s method, objec-
tive or logical universality is never determined in reference to categories
understood as principles of cognition that are independent of experience.
Objective or logical universality is rather always found within experience
itself (Jansen 2015).
For Kant, the sensus communis grounds the legitimacy of our claim for
intersubjective validity, communicability, and sharing. I suggested then
to read the sensus communis as a form of variation of one’s own experi-
ence, which ideally aims at bracketing what is uniquely and incidentally
related to oneself – including the habitualities of imaginative experience
(Spano forthcoming) – and at taking up the perspective of possible oth-
ers, that is, jedermann. It should be clear that this means neither fusional
sharing nor emotional contagion. Instead, a key element is here the
critical moment of autonomy, conveyed by Kant’s maxim of “thinking
for oneself” (Selbstdenken) that is and should be retained in the social
sharing of experience (Kant 2000, 174). Accordingly, Husserl and Kant
maintain both plurality and sharing and indicate that exemplariness must
be able to be grasped by other subjects and in other possible situations.
Against this background, exemplary normativity cannot be concretized
in a procedure to be followed, but rather in an appeal to autonomously
and critically reflect on singular experiences, to operate the variation,
and to uncover the regularities that we can intersubjectively share and
legitimately take to be structuring the world we experience.

Notes
1. Although these terms are not equivalent, the functions of examples transver-
sally apply to all of them. For this reason, I will use the terms interchangeably
throughout the text.
2. The expression ‘Kraft des Exempels’ comes from Kant’s Metaphysics of Mor-
als (Kant 1991, 268) and is taken up in political and moral sense by Alessan-
dro Ferrara. Importantly, in a footnote to the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant
distinguishes between theoretical examples (Beispiele) and moral examples
(Exempel) (Kant 1991, 268n.). While, as Kant remarks, these concepts are
interchangeably used, they actually mean something different. According to
this perspective, Beispiel is only an instance, works as a presentation or illus-
tration of a concept. Exempel, instead, represent actions as practicable or
impracticable; hence they are something we can follow in our action. As I will
argue in what follows, considering examples only as illustrations only par-
tially accounts for the theoretical import of exemplification. Also, on the basis
of this distinction alone, it is not entirely clear how we should understand
aesthetic exemplarity. Only partial correspondence can be assumed between
this distinction and the here supported one between illustrating and guiding
examples. In this sense, the fact that Husserl does not make any explicit ter-
minological distinction between Beispiel, Exampel, and even Vorbild may be
40  Michela Summa
taken to indicate that, although each terminus has a different accentuation,
exemplarity entails the function designated by each of them.
3. I borrow this phrase from Julia Jansen’s (2015) insightful analysis on the dif-
ferences between Kant’s and Husserl’s answers to the common issue of secur-
ing the space for necessity within contingency. My suggestion is that extending
this approach to what Kant says about exemplary necessity in the Critique of
the Power of Judgment yields a more articulated picture of Kant’s epistemic
claims (cf. Garroni 1998, 2020; Ginsborg 2015, 2016), which may also rever-
berate on our understanding of phenomenology. Some seminal remarks in this
regard can be found in Crowell (2013, 2, 143).
4. This activity cannot in turn refer to a previously given rule or prescription,
otherwise there would be an infinite regress in the search for a rule on how to
apply the rule, etc. In this sense, the subsumption of a particular case under a
general rule entails a productive or creative moment, relying on the work of
imagination (cf. Ferrarin 2004, 2009; La Rocca 1989; Summa 2017; Wieland
2001).
5. One should bear in mind here that Kant is not interested in whether or not
you and I instantiate the same feeling of pleasure. Insofar as pleasure is dis-
interested and not merely relying on private sensations (as it is the case with
the agreeable), thereby connected to an experience I  can share with others,
then this pleasure is also shared. Of course, this is a very controversial claim
and the argument in the Critique of the Power of Judgment is not with-
out problems. Without entering the scholarly debate, the present account
has  been  much inspired by both Paul Guyer’s (1997) and Hannah Gins-
borg’s (2015, 2016) work. In the controversy between the two, I endorse Gins-
borg’s ­interpretation of communicability as the key element of the judgment of
taste.
6. What Husserl argues here is in several ways reminiscent of Hume’s conceiv-
ability principle (Hume 2000, T. 1.2.2.). Husserl emphasizes already in the
Logical Investigations (Husserl 2001b, 250f.) that what can in principle be
imagined or conceived belongs to the realm of what is possible and eventu-
ally of what can also exist in reality. Conversely, what cannot be conceived is
impossible and thus cannot be thought of as existent (cf. Sokolowski 1974, 80f.;
Spano forthcoming).
7. Hence, unlike what Kant says about examples, an exact geometrical figure is
completely reducible to the law that defines it.
8. Sowa (2007) goes as far as to claim that the proper task of the variation is that
of producing possible counterexamples that would falsify merely presumed
eidetic laws. While I believe that also other tasks are to be credited to the vari-
ation, I agree that one should not underestimate this function in the produc-
tion of examples.
9. Husserl as well as recent interpreters tend, in my opinion, to underestimate
such normativity of the example and to tie exemplarity to illustration, despite
clear references to another kind of normativity being available. In this regard,
what is mostly emphasized is that, by taking something as an example, we
do not take it merely as individual, but rather as a representative for a whole
class of similar individuals. See, among others Bachelard (1968, 174); Sowa
(2007); Zaner (1973). A different reading, which emphasizes the normativity
of the examples themselves, has been put forward by De Santis, who writes:
“It is not in fact the terminus ad quem, the eidos, to lead concretely the opera-
tion, but rather the terminus a quo: the starting exemplarity in accord with the
notion of similarity.” (De Santis 2012, 32)
 On the Functions of Examples 41
10. On the reassessment of the phenomenological account of truth as
Bewährung, see Mertens (1996, 143f.).

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and Merleau-Ponty on the Creative Power of Judgment and Creativity as Insti-
tution.” Continental Philosophy Review 50(1): 105–126.
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Dordrecht: Kluwer.
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ory of Free-Phantasy Variation.” Research in Phenomenology 3: 29–43.
4 Phenomenology and
Critique
On “Mere” Description and
Its Normative Dimensions
Julia Jansen

1. Introduction
“Critical phenomenology” (Weiss, Murphy, and Salamon 2020) can be
understood as the attempt to let go of those elements of phenomenology
that might be seen in conflict with critical, politically engaged philoso-
phy while holding on to phenomenology’s commitment to first-person
accounts of experience. Alternatively, it can be precisely that commit-
ment that can be seen as trapping phenomenology in a reflection that
insulates itself against normative accounts that would enable genuine cri-
tique. If phenomenology can be made “critical,” according to this view,
it must re-orient itself around critical concepts it can, and perhaps should
borrow from overtly politically engaged philosophical discourses, such as
critical theory, feminism, decolonialism, and race studies. In this chapter,
my intention is not to argue with these challenges to what is, by contrast,
called “classical phenomenology.” I welcome them and learn from them,
feeling urged by them to reflect, once again, on the tools and methods
I – as a “classically” trained phenomenologist who specializes in Husser-
lian phenomenology – have at my disposal, and on the many ways they
enable and constrain me.
Not only in so-called critical phenomenology, but also in political
phenomenology understood as a philosophical practice aimed at clarify-
ing “the political” (relevant experiences, objects and domains, as well
as their constitutive framings) by phenomenological means, the Husser-
lian approach is often seen as less promising or fruitful, perhaps even
as altogether wrong-headed – historically important, but an obstacle to
socio-politically more engaged and less naïve contemporary practice and
debate. In particular, Husserl’s insistence on phenomenology’s descrip-
tive mission – worse even, his demand for pure description – is routinely
construed as being empty of normative bearing, which as Thomas Bedorf
and Steffen Hermann recently restated in the preface to their edited vol-
ume on Political Phenomenology, “seems to preclude its political involve-
ment” (Bedorf and Hermann 2020, 1).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003191483-4
 Phenomenology and Critique 45
In what follows, I want to take on the distinctive Husserlian double
insistence on description and its purity, and, in turn, insist myself on its
continuing value in order to argue that, far from being “by nature” unpo-
litical, “pure” descriptive phenomenology is one among a diversity of
legitimate ways of contributing to discourses that are meant to intervene
in politically dangerous, socially destructive, and morally reprehensible
tendencies that are perpetuated and fueled by and in existing “institu-
tions,” such as languages, sciences, academies, laws, policies, cultures,
religions, and media.

2.  Pure phenomenological description of lived experience

I begin with what I take to be a pretty trivial point that is, however, per-
haps still worth making. As philosophers and generally as persons who
stand in some relation to post-Kantian traditions and narratives of cri-
tique, some of us have the habit of speaking of “being critical” as a verbal
expression that does not require an object. It makes sense even to aspire
to “being critical” without having to specify what we are being critical
of. The tacit assumption is, I take it, that our “being critical” refers to a
general practice (and, eventually, attitude) of doing what we can to avoid
naïve, that is, uncritical, faith in anything, including our own explicit
beliefs and tacit assumptions, which is why we tend to stress that “being
critical,” of course, also requires “being self-critical.” I  do not want to
downplay the importance of the development and cultivation of such an
attitude. However, as phenomenological researchers and philosophers, we
owe it to be more specific. What does it mean, in practice, to be critical
then?
Once we phenomenologically investigate a particular phenomenon,
our first targets of critique are of course the naïve presuppositions we
find concerning that phenomenon. Yet, we do not, if we follow a broadly
speaking Husserlian method, go straight for them; for the simple reason
that, before further analyses, we simply do not know what these presup-
positions are. Instead, we attempt to enter a methodically (phenomeno-
logically) radicalized version of the “natural” critical attitude by means
of the epoché, which is Husserl’s name of, as Merleau-Ponty was so wise
to remind us, an inevitably partially failed attempt to let go of all pre-
suppositions concerning the reality of things. The idea is, I take it, that
only then can we hope to get into view whatever we want to understand
better, whatever we have good and plenty of reasons to protect against
presuppositions and biases that distort and, in that sense, fail to be true
to the matter at hand (“die Sache selbst”) and thus “pollute” them by
naturalistic (scientific) or natural (commonsensical) conceptions. This is,
I take it, the first sense in which we can speak of “pure” description as
part of phenomenological practice.
46  Julia Jansen
The phenomenological reduction follows from this epoché. Once we
attempt to let go of all presuppositions (including the one that we “natu-
rally” find the hardest to let go of, namely the “Ur-doxa,” that is, our
background belief that we can of course rely on the fact that whatever
we are analyzing is a “real” object or event in a really existing world), we
cannot but fall back on the only evidence that is strictly speaking reflec-
tively “observable”: lived experience, or better, the correlations between
lived experience (Erlebnis) and respective object experience (Erfahrung).
These are the various noetic-noematic correlations in virtue of which we
take anything to exist, to be real, to be objective, etc., or to be this or that
object, or to be this or that domain of objects, relations, or events – the
correlations in virtue of which anything can attain the validity, or mean-
ing of being real (or not), of being a this (or that), etc. We all know the
famous and infamous passage in the Crisis, in which Husserl speaks of
the phenomenologist as a “disinterested spectator”:

As fully ‘disinterested’ spectators (in the indicated sense of the epo-

ché) of the world purely as subjective-relative world (the one in
which our whole everyday communal life—our efforts, concerns,
and accomplishments—takes place), let us now take a first, naive
look around; our aim shall be, not to examine the world’s being and
being such, but to consider whatever has been valid and continues to
be valid for us as being and being-such in respect to how it is subjec-
tively valid, how it looks, etc.
(Hua VI, §45, 159f.; Husserl 1970, 157)

In the Preface to Ideas I, Husserl speaks of “the free horizon of ‘tran-

scendentally’ purified phenomena,” which he believes is “the field of phe-
nomenology” in the way at least he intends it “in our peculiar sense”
(Hua III/1, 5; Husserl 1983, xix1). “Let loose” from natural and natural-
ized conceptions, the field of investigations is purely the transcendental
field of correlations. This is, I take it, the second sense in which we can
speak of “pure description.”
However, these correlations are, unless we regard them at a higher
level of generality, so much in flux that we cannot make them out. This
is why, for Husserl, phenomenology is necessarily a “material eidetic sci-
ence” (Hua III/1, 150/161), which, due to the morphological (i.e., fluctu-
ating and inexact) nature of its subject matter, can never establish eidetic
insights definitively and exactly. Rather, its eidetic insights are part of
an effort purely to describe (in the first sense of “purity”) purely lived
experiences (in the second sense of “purity”), an effort that excludes ide-
alizations generated for the sake of exact concepts (Hua III/1, 155/167)
as much as “deductive theorizings” (deduktive Theoretisierungen) (Hua
III/1, 157/169). Still, notwithstanding all this “morphological flexibility,”
it is still true that, within the Husserlian framework, such descriptions, if
 Phenomenology and Critique 47
they are meant to be “scientific,” cannot regard individual factual lived
experiences but only corresponding “essences belonging to higher levels
of specificity.” They, unlike their empirical fluctuating counterparts, are,
at least to a certain extent, “accessible to firm (fester) differentiation,
to continuous identifying maintenance (Durchhaltung), and rigorous
(strenger) conceptual formulation” and thus enable “the task of a com-
prehensive scientific description” (Hua III/1, 157/168; translation modi-
fied), where “firm” and “rigorous” have to be understood exactly not
in a rigid, and thus dogmatic way. They are firm and rigorous in virtue
of being “pure” from the contingencies and idiosyncrasies of individual
cases. This is, I take it, the third sense in which we can speak of “pure
description.”
Note that such essences are not necessarily “pure essences” in the nar-
rower technical sense (in the sense of “eide”). On the lower levels of gen-
erality, essences merely refer to the “whatness” of a phenomenon, which
is why Husserl, himself astonishingly oblivious to the backlash he should
have expected, maintains that everybody is always already familiar with
essences, even when they do not know or even deny it. This is also why it
is not contradictory, as for example Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, de Beauvoir,
as well as many other post-Husserlian phenomenological philosophers
do, to hold on to the idea of “eidetic” inquiry (understood broadly as an
investigation into more or less essential/necessary or inessential/contin-
gent features of a certain phenomenon) without necessarily believing in
the merits of pursuing the fourth sense of purity relevant here, namely the
purity of pure essences, or “eide.”
The, if you will, “most Husserlian” aspect of Husserlian phenomeno-
logical analysis regarding our discussion here is, I believe, exactly this: the
attempt to push eidetic inquiry to the purity of eide. This is why, accord-
ing to Husserl, in the rigorous scientific practice of phenomenology:

[W]e describe and, in so doing, determine by strict concepts the

generic essence of perception as such (Wahrnehmung überhaupt)
or that of subordinate species, such as the perception of physical
things and their determinations, the perception of animate beings,
etc.; likewise the essence of memory as such (Erinnerung überhaupt),
empathy as such (Einfühlung überhaupt), willing as such (Wollen
überhaupt), etc.
(Hua III/1, 157/168; translation modified)

Purified from any reference to the real world, these eide (e.g., percep-
tion as such) extend over all possible facts of their kind (e.g., all possible
perceptions), regardless of whether they are “real possibilities” moti-
vated by what we are familiar with in the real world as we experience it,
or only among “pure possibilities” in the world of phantasy. And indeed,
what we can find out about perception as such (e.g., that it constitutes
48  Julia Jansen
real objects as “there in person”) or about essential laws pertaining to
them (e.g., “perception always gives its objects in adumbrations”) is
credibly valid for all their possible exemplifications (real or not). It is also
because of the specific purity of eide, understood as their complete lack
of boundedness to the real world, that pure imagination acquires such an
important methodological role in Husserlian eidetics. This is, I take it,
the fourth sense in which we can speak of “pure description.”
When people talk about broadly speaking “phenomenological”
research, I take it that they refer to research that involves descriptions of
lived experience, and that does so on some, but not necessarily all four
levels of purity. I return to these different levels and their significance for
different modes of critique in the next section. Before I do so, however,
I would like to linger on the notion of “lived experience,” the often-cited
object of phenomenological description on whatever level in order to
dispel a potential confusion that would have serious implications for our
understanding of the practice of phenomenology.
“Description of lived experience (Erlebnis)” is in the English language
often characterized as description “from the first-person perspective.”
This is of course right to a certain extent, namely insofar we cannot enter
an investigation of any lived experience (can in fact have no sense of it at
all), unless we are generally familiar not with “this particular experience
from a first-person perspective” (which might help, but could also make
us more prejudicial), but with “a first-person perspective” (which allows
us, however imperfectly and vaguely at first, to understand descriptions
of lived experiences at all). The object of phenomenological description is
therefore not any experience in the first person (whether in the singular:
my experience, or in the plural: our experience). The object of phenom-
enological description is that lived experience (Erlebnis) as it can – ide-
ally, not actually – be lived by any one consciousness: its essence (on the
third or fourth level of purity discussed earlier). This “essence” of the
lived experience under investigation is neither gained by empirical induc-
tion nor gained from a “view from nowhere” (i.e., through generaliza-
tion, abstraction, or formalization). It is gained by what Husserl called
“ideation,” a careful (but of course fallible) methodic process requiring
the repetition, variation, and exchange among co-researchers of many
such descriptions, progressively distinguishing between more-or-less con-
tingent and more-or-less necessary features, gradually arriving at firmer
descriptions that can be maintained across variations, thus filtering out
what is essential and eventually enabling more rigorous concept for-
mulations. Yet, what is “essential” here refers not to the properties of
all, or even most of these different first-person descriptions happen to
have in common, but instead to the general “essential” structures that
can be maintained across all variations, and these are not first personal.
Nonetheless, the phenomenological evidence on the basis of which these
 Phenomenology and Critique 49
structures are identified is in principle available to anyone. This is crucial
(and, of course, contestable): this understanding of phenomenological
practice takes it that there is no experience for which eidetic insights are
in principle possible only to those who know it “first hand.”
An important qualification is necessary here. The fact that early phe-
nomenologists of the Munich and Göttingen schools were actually not
so much interested in a phenomenology of Erlebnisse, but very much in
a phenomenology of objects and object domains, means that phenom-
enology is not necessarily interested in them, but can also be interested
in objects, or object domains, and how they manifest. Thus, what I have
attempted to clarify earlier, unless it is understood as the procedure of
what Husserl would call a “descriptive psychology,” already implies a
“transcendental turn” that views any objectivities in respect of correlat-
ing subjectivities, and vice versa. In virtue of the transcendental reduction,
the essences of lived experiences are grasped not in isolation, as psy-
chic structures, but in correlation with the objectivities they intend; and
the essences of objectivities are not grasped in isolation, as real objects
(whether physical or cultural), but in correlation to the subjectivities that
constitute them. To study them “in correlation” means that they are not
studied as psychic events or physical objects, but that what is studied is,
to use a more Heideggerian phrasing, what they mean in relation to each
other and in relation to the preconditions of their meaning, or, to switch
back to a more Husserlian language, in relations to the preconditions of
their constitution.
Matthew Burch has, in his recent discussion of the proper sense of
applied phenomenology, pointed out that if we phenomenologists were
to “confine themselves to nothing more than the ‘careful first-person
description of experience,’ ” this would make “their approach seem
indistinguishable from other descriptive research methods” (Burch 2021,
2). What’s more: “Countless research paradigms carefully describe expe-
rience, and many of them also afford tools and techniques for sorting
and synthesizing experiential data that phenomenology does not offer”
(Burch 2021, 5). Slightly modifying Burch’s conclusion regarding the dis-
tinctiveness of transcendental phenomenological research in the light of
what I have said earlier about the first-person perspective: What makes
phenomenological research distinctive, is that to analyze experience phe-
nomenologically, I have to shift my attention, broadening my perspective
to consider a wider framework of meaning – one that attends not only to
the phenomena before me but also to aspects of subjectivity in virtue of
which these phenomena are experienced in this determinate way.2
None of this, however, yet addresses the question of critique, at least
not explicitly. In the next section I  attempt to show how what I  have
outlined here is relevant to the question of phenomenological critique,
including Husserlian phenomenological critique.
50  Julia Jansen
3.  (Husserlian) Phenomenological critique
Based on what I have said about the practice of phenomenology above,
I propose the following non-exhaustive list of at least four ways in which
we can speak of phenomenological critique, and I  see no reason to
exclude Husserlian approaches from this list.
The de-naturalizing as well as de-mythologizing stance of phenomeno-
logical description, prepared by its insistence on evidence, initiated by
the epoché, and deepened by the transcendental reduction, immediately
delivers a (1) critique of naturalized or speculative concepts within phi-
losophy and without. I  say “immediately” here because commonsensi-
cal and scientific conceptions are neither doubted nor erased, but only
suspended for, as it were, phenomenological testing. While it is certainly
possible to generate phenomenological descriptions in a strictly imma-
nent manner, without referring back to those natural or naturalistic con-
cepts and explicitly discussing the match or mismatch between available
conceptions and the phenomenological evidence (so in this sense, there is
nothing inherently critical about phenomenology), such evidence is still
in principle immediately available for such a critique. While Husserl, at
least initially, thought of such critique as immanent to the sciences (phe-
nomenological research, thus his dream, would eventually turn all the
sciences, including philosophy, into truly rigorous sciences), it can cer-
tainly also target conceptions circulating in public culture more broadly,
including, for example, policy making, legal discourses, medical prac-
tices, or popular culture. In “applied” phenomenology, which “identifies
an intrinsically interdisciplinary problem,” this critique is therefore argu-
ably best developed into an interdisciplinary research program (Burch
2021, 13 and passim).
A different mode of critique is (2) critique in virtue of phenomenologi-
cal concepts. Here the critique does not directly target already available
conceptions on the basis of phenomenological research, but it uses new
concepts or phenomenologically transformed concepts, gained in such
research, in order to intervene in discourses or practices that either oper-
ate on the basis of distorted, insufficient, or false conceptions and that are
transformed by the introduction of such concepts as, for example, “inten-
tionality,” “lived body,” “gender,” and “pre-predicative experience.”
Intrinsic to phenomenological practice is (3) radical self-critique, that
is, the continuous repeating, retesting, reviewing, correction, deepening,
and enriching of available phenomenological evidence and of the con-
cepts formulated on the basis of such evidence. It is intrinsic in virtue of
the basic features common to different phenomenological approaches dis-
cussed earlier. In short, all four senses of “purification” are intrinsically
problematic. They are impossible to insulate completely from historical,
socio-cultural, personal and other biases, and remain constrained by the
contingent capacities of actual researchers. They are thus certain to be
 Phenomenology and Critique 51
limited in their success and remain in constant need of review. In fact,
they are characterized better as ideals for continuous self-reflective prac-
tice without which the continuous demand for self-critique would lose its
normative grip, than as methodological steps that can simply be taken.
That the demand for radical self-critique is intrinsic to phenomenologi-
cal practice does, however, not mean that such critique must be exclu-
sively immanent. Reasons for correction and revision can just as well
come from other disciplines or, for example, be motivated by new socio-
cultural developments that let certain phenomena come into view that
were formerly, in the sense of Merleau-Ponty and Foucault, “invisible.”
The idea of perpetual self-critique is closely related to a (4) cultiva-
tion of a critical-phenomenological attitude and of a phenomenologi-
cal “ethos.” Husserl certainly believed that the descriptive enterprise at
the core of phenomenological practice had wider critical import than
any specific critique. It was to teach humility, openness, and responsive-
ness – in part, in virtue of its being intrinsically perpetually self-critical;
in part, in virtue of the greater motivating force that authentic “insight
(Einsicht)” or “evidence” would have compared to mere propositions
or inferred conclusions. Arguably, these insights transcended, at least
in his view, the descriptive-normative distinction. He became convinced
that the “renewal” of philosophy and of the other sciences he was pro-
posing would have an effect on the attitude of those who shared the
practice, and would eventually even lead to a culturally renewed sense
of humanity that would be able to “repair” the increasingly “menschen-
verachtende” (despising-of-human) attitude that he witnessed coming to
dominate European and specifically German society. While the first three
senses of phenomenological critique I outlined earlier are demonstrably
in use in contemporary phenomenological practice, the real possibility,
let alone actuality, of this fourth sense is debatable. However, it is not
inconceivable.
Was Husserl naïve to think that pure phenomenology would be key to
an ethical renewal that would eventually turn the “verachtende” (despis-
ing) attitude into an “achtende” (respecting and honoring) one? Perhaps
more importantly, would we be naïve in putting our faith into pure phe-
nomenology now, when we face the Menschenverachtungen of our times?
An answer to this question I favor so far is that our naivety would be
blatantly obvious if we wanted to reduce phenomenological philosophy
to a philosophy based on pure phenomenology in the fourth sense of
the term. Instead, phenomenological research and corresponding philo-
sophical reflection on all levels are needed. At a minimum, a local version
of the first sense of purity is required, namely a suspension, and thus
putting into question, of relevant preconceived notions and presupposi-
tions concerning the respective matter at hand for the sake of a newly
attempted description that hopefully is truer to that matter. Arguably,
this eo ipso brings levels two and three into play, namely the view both to
52  Julia Jansen
correlations in lived experience and to general, at least typical, and struc-
tural regularities that reveal more adequately what the matter at hand is.
However, what about that fourth level of purity, which in some eyes
might be the most controversial: the level of pure essences, or eide. Here,
too, we might wonder how far we are prepared to go. Yet, the Husser-
lian position, I take it, is fairly clear on this: you go as far as you can,
and – at least as important – you never assume you got there. The differ-
ence between any old essence and an eidos lies in the attempt to purify
the essence so radically from motivations by and attachments to the real
world that we need “pure” phantasy to assist us in the consideration of
cases that are legitimate manifestations of that essence, only that we do
not know them to exist, to have existed, or even to be really possible.
This is part of an attempt to understand certain phenomena in a richer,
and thus more adequate way, than the “real life” examples we are famil-
iar with, even any possible “real life” cases, could ever allow us to have.
My position on this methodological demand is, at least currently, the
same as on the epoché: It might not always be necessary; sometimes it
will get in the way, but sometimes it is critical.
Thus, in my view, the fourth sense of pure phenomenology also main-
tains its value. I take its methodological demand to be, not that we should
escape the real world in order to satisfy our purely academic desires (and
perhaps protect our sensitive psyches) in pure phantasy, but rather that
we must force ourselves in our investigations into the more or less essen-
tial/necessary or inessential/contingent features and conditions of what
we are investigating to the utmost limit of diversity we can possibly con-
sider. I also take it that the benefits of such an extreme, or let’s say radi-
cal version of phenomenology are not just “potential,” but that we are
already – no matter on what level of analysis we are working – profiting
from some of its results. For example, on the basis of Husserl’s analyses
alone, we have learnt that perception is always already embodied and
intersubjective, historical and cultural. And we have learnt that this is so,
not as a matter of contingency (let alone a matter of supposed left-wing
“cultural Marxist” ideology), and also not as a matter of fact (that we
can hope to correct, for example, by means of better methods or technol-
ogy), but as a necessary essential truth of perception as such.
Now, is it perhaps more important in the first instance that we diversify
the examples we consider within the real world before we try to leave
it? In other words, is it perhaps more important as well as a matter of
urgency that we ensure that we are not stuck in our perspective “home-
world,” before we are concerned with being stuck in the real world? That
we make the enormous effort that is involved in reaching insights about
experiences we ourselves do not know first hand, but can only learn
about by listening to others? I  think, yes. However, I  believe it is also
important that we do not, or at least that not all of us all of the time, stop
there. For the consideration of ways in which something could be what
 Phenomenology and Critique 53
it is that are not (yet) real or conceivable as real in the future belongs to
what Adorno called “the eidetician’s paradoxical boldness,” which he
actually believed was phenomenology’s “strongest suit”:

[T]he utopian surplus beyond the accepted world of things; the latent
drive to let, in philosophy, the possible come forth in the actual
and the actual from the possible, instead of being satisfied with the
surrogate of a truth drawn from mere facts and their conceptual
‘extension.’
(Adorno 1990, 201; my translation and emphasis)

That said, in practice, as long as one is aware of the limitations of one’s

method, it might be pragmatically advisable, as Dan Zahavi has recently
claimed, even “to ignore the epoché” (Zahavi 2019). This is especially
the case if by “epoché” we mean the global bracketing of, as Husserl
regards is in §32 of Ideas I, the entire world of the natural attitude, along
with everything we believe to know about it, including what the sciences
teach us. Such global suspension of beliefs might not be conducive to
specialized empirical research especially (and Zahavi is in this context
speaking of non-philosophical investigations), so more local suspensions
might be pragmatically preferable under certain circumstances. However,
it is important to be aware that even in those circumstances, such a prag-
matic approach comes at a certain risk (which, if it is low enough, the
pragmatist may disregard in good conscience as “safe enough”); for it is
impossible to predict with perfect accuracy exactly which background
beliefs and presuppositions will be relevant to a particular investigation.
Even philosophers, given that they need not follow Husserl in his view
that philosophizing in “utmost self-responsibility” requires such global
suspension for the sake of being able to at least reach for “ultimate”
clarification, might ask themselves how far they are prepared to go with
regard to the scope of “bracketing” – especially if they have other goals
(e.g., the clarification of specific experiences, phenomena, or domains, or
ethical or political aims) that demand a certain focus and, depending on
how concrete and urgent they are, a certain degree of expediency. For
no matter whether they believe in the infinity of philosophical inquiry,
there might be investigations that they rather would not leave to future
generations of researchers. What’s more, not all critical interventions,
especially those meant to alleviate suffering, can bearably and defensibly
be deferred and delayed infinitely.

4.  Concluding remarks

Thus, for me, the question about the value of pure phenomenology in its
radical “most Husserlian” fourth sense, is the question about the value of
“basic research” in the sense of Grundlagenforschung. Is it immediately
54  Julia Jansen
of practical value? Mostly not. However, its eventual value is simply not
predictable. Can we afford to have everybody pursue it? I would think
not. It can only have any value within a pluralist cluster of approaches
and research projects. On its own, it has to fall short.
To me, then, the more basic distinction is not between “classical” and
“critical” phenomenology. All phenomenological research, if it is any
good, has critical import. And “classical” phenomenology is only worth
anything if it is not merely “classical,” a part of intellectual history.
Again, I  find inspiration in Burch’s discussion of applied phenomenol-
ogy, which he contrasts with “core phenomenology.” In line with that
understanding, I consider much of “critical phenomenology” a mode of
applied phenomenology that focuses on problems that require interdisci-
plinary research (mostly, but not exclusively, in the human sciences) and
that is committed to enriching and disrupting available pure descriptions
with usually marginalized perspectives and lived experiences.
However, critical phenomenologists challenge practices of core phe-
nomenology in yet another way, perhaps the most important one. Per-
haps more than any specific aspect of core phenomenological methods,
more than any specific choice of topic or words, they challenge the atti-
tude that they find prevalent in core phenomenology. After all, unless this
attitude is “critical” rather than purely “descriptive,” none of the four
mentioned modes of phenomenological critique get off the ground, and
phenomenological research inspired by Husserlian transcendental phe-
nomenology especially cannot be freed from the uncritical contingencies
of the “master’s” thinking.

Note
1. “To analyse my experience phenomenologically, however, I have to shift my
attention, broadening my perspective to consider a wider framework of mean-
ing – one that attends not only to the phenomena before me but also to aspects
of my own subjectivity in virtue of which I experience these phenomena in this
determinate way.” (Burch 2021, 12; my emphasis)

References
Adorno, Theodor W. 1990. Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie. Studien über
Husserl und die phänomenologischen Antinomien. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.
Bedorf, Thomas, and Steffen Hermann. 2020. “Three Types of Political Phe-
nomenology.” In Political Phenomenology. Experience, Ontology, Episteme,
edited by Thomas Bedorf and Steffen Herrmann, 1–21. New York: Routledge.
Burch, Matthew. 2021. “Make Applied Phenomenology What It Needs to Be: An
Interdisciplinary Research Program.” Continental Philosophy Review. https://
doi.org/10.1007/s11007-021-09532-1.
Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental
Phenomenology. An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, translated
by David Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
 Phenomenology and Critique 55
Husserl, Edmund. 1983. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a
Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to a Pure
Phenomenology, translated by Fred Kersten. The Hague/Boston/Lancaster:
Martinus Nijhoff.
Weiss, Gail, Ann V. Murphy, and Gayle Salamon (eds.). 2020. 50 Concepts for a
Critical Phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Zahavi, Dan. 2019. “Applied Phenomenology: Why It Is Safe to Ignore
the Epoché.” Continental Philosophy Review. https://doi.org/10.1007/
s11007-019-09463-y.
5 Husserlian Phenomenology as
Radical-Immanent Critique –
Or How Phenomenology
Imagines Itself1
Andreea Smaranda Aldea

What does it mean to say, with Husserl, that phenomenology is a “radi-

cal” form of critique? A critique through and through, that is. Not merely
a transcendental method at most critical in the Kantian, narrow sense of
the term, that is, understood as a study of the conditions for the possibil-
ity of experiencing.2 Not merely a method with “critical” potential or
with the optional ability to supplement its otherwise “non-critical” inves-
tigations either. If we are to understand transcendental phenomenology
as critical at its core, we must ask: wherein lies its radicalness – beyond,
say, its bold claim of a sweeping shift in attitude through the epochê and
transcendental reduction?3 Whence its motivation and “lebendige Fortar-
beit”?4 Its possibility of unfolding?
We might see these latter dimensions as “immanent” to the phenom-
enological method insofar as they pertain both to the method’s own
structures and conditions for possibility and to its domain of inquiry: the
lifeworld and our experiences of it. Thus, if we were to likewise deem
phenomenology an “immanent” kind of critique, how might we under-
stand this dimension, especially in its relation to the “radicalness” hinted
at above? Convoluted questions all, but crucial and ever so timely. If
we, those of us who deem ourselves “phenomenologists” today, are to
answer Husserl’s call (and hope)5 to think and work both communally
and generationally (Hua I, §§1–2, also Hua VI, §§6, 15, 30, 48, 52),
thus continuing the infinite task of phenomenological work (Hua VI, 19,
122, 319), we must pursue these questions despite the “paradoxes” and
“incomprehensibilities” that are bound to ensue (Hua VI, 185/181). This
pursuit constitutes the framework of this chapter.
My goal here is twofold: first, to show that phenomenology is a critique
“through and through” and that as such it is at once immanent and radi-
cal in well-delineated senses of the terms; second, in order to explicate
these critical features of phenomenology as well as begin to shed light on
its concrete – social, cultural, and political – implications, I examine the
conditions for the possibility of these distinctive critical dimensions. My
focus is on Husserl’s mature method, which is both synthetic-genetic and
generative, and I will explicate it as he unpacks it in the Crisis, paying

DOI: 10.4324/9781003191483-5
 Husserlian Phenomenology as Radical-Immanent Critique 57
special attention to some of the key methodological sections of the text
(i.e., Hua VI, §§7, 9, 15). As we shall see, both the transcendental-eidetic
and the historical dimensions of his method contribute, in distinctive yet
interrelated ways, to phenomenology’s critical core.6 Let us therefore
commence with Husserl’s own claims about the distinctive radicality of
his mature method:

Thus we find ourselves in a sort of circle. The understanding of the

beginnings is to be gained fully only by starting with science as given
in its present-day form, looking back at its development. But in the
absence of an understanding of the beginnings the development is
mute as a development of meaning. Thus we have no other choice
than to proceed forward and backward in a zigzag pattern; the one
must help the other in an interplay. Relative clarification on one side
brings some elucidation on the other, which in turn casts light back
on the former. In this sort of historical consideration and historical
critique, then, which begins with Galileo (and immediately afterward
with Descartes) and must follow the temporal order, we nevertheless
have constantly to make historical leaps which are thus not digres-
sions but necessities. They are necessities if we take upon ourselves,
as we have said, the task of self-reflection which grows out of the
‘breakdown’ situation of our time, with its ‘breakdown of science’
itself.
(Hua VI 59/58; italics mine)

This passage leaves no doubt regarding the dynamism of what Husserl

refers to as “historical critique.” The kind of reflection (Besinnung) at
work here is “historical” in several important senses: it is a critique of
the present, seeking to understand the present through a “looking back”
(Rückblick) to the past. The method of inquiry is regressive here in a
thick sense of the term: it involves working through the layers of sedi-
mented meanings, values, norms, commitments, and goals, which are the
institutions (Stiftungen) that condition our experience of the lifeworld as
well as our own theoretical work. As critical reflection, phenomenology,
too, unfolds in and through our present situation  – a situation under
whose “spell” we, as theoreticians and philosophers, thus find ourselves.
It is for this immersed or self-forgetting reason that we must evaluate and
re-evaluate our methodological commitments. Critical reflection is thus
oriented toward clarifying precisely what binds and conditions us, both
as persons and as philosophers.7 I will say more about critique as clarifi-
cation below. For now, let us emphasize that critical reflection is clarify-
ing in an ever-unfolding manner. There is a sense of incompleteness at
work here, as the quote earlier points to – the elucidation is relative: not
beyond further evaluation and re-evaluation. Thus, the phenomenologi-
cal task becomes infinite.
58  Andreea Smaranda Aldea
There is, therefore, a twofold critical gesture here. Historical-critical
reflection focuses at once both on the historicity of its domain of inquiry
(our experience of the lifeworld, which grounds all other forms of expe-
rience) and on the historicity of its own method and thêoria.8 The two
reflective exercises, as we shall see below, are deeply intertwined. What
phenomenology uncovers about its domain of inquiry conditions its own
understanding of itself; in turn, how it understands and evaluates itself
conditions and shapes the specific analyses it engages in.
Husserl used the “zig-zag” metaphor to capture the dynamism of
phenomenological critical reflection.9 The “back-and-forth” is here
historically construed: a movement between present articulations of
meaning, values, norms, and goals and their past conditions. These
conditions are past decisions. More specifically, they are the primal
institutions (Urstiftungen), which are re-affirmed for the most part
passively and in an ever-sedimenting manner (Nachstiftungen), and
which, despite being covered-over, orient and guide us toward certain
goals (Endstiftungen) (see, e.g., Hua VI, §15). This dynamism, which
likewise brings into relief the teleological and normative aspects of all
sense-constitution, requires a specific kind of method: a critique under-
stood as a responsible (verantwortliche) and self-reflective methodo-
logical practice (Hua VI, 73).
Tracing the “development of meaning,” as Husserl puts it, involves a
thinking of beginnings. This claim, too, is twofold: these beginnings are
of the past – the very Stiftungen undergirding the articulation of mean-
ings and possibilities our present situation exhibits. These “past” begin-
nings are both primal as well as re-instituted and re-instituting. However,
there is another sense of “beginning” at work in Husserl’s conception of
critical reflection: present beginnings, namely beginnings pertaining to
inquiring phenomenologists as they relate to their work and methods in
ever renewed efforts of clarification and self-justification (Hua VIII, 6).
As Husserl reminds us, we are, as philosophers, perpetual beginners (Hua
VI, 136). The self-reflective work of domain clarification and method
clarification is never ending. Moreover, the decision  – willed resolute-
ness – to engage in such self-reflective work is constantly renewed and
re-affirmed (Hua VIII, 6–7, 11–12, 19).
By the end of the 1920s, as Husserl sought to explicate phenom-
enology as critique (not in the least due to his collaborative sustained
exchanges with his assistant Eugen Fink), Husserl refers to himself as
a “true” or “genuine” beginner (ein wirklicher Anfänger) (see Hua V,
161; see also Bruzina 2004, 75ff.).10 What makes him a true beginner
is this deep and responsible commitment to self-critique: a self-folding,
reflexive, sustained effort to question any and all presuppositions, includ-
ing and especially the most closely held methodological assumptions, the
ones we deem most illuminating (theôrein) of our domain of inquiry.11
What thus characterizes the dynamic intertwinement of past and present
 Husserlian Phenomenology as Radical-Immanent Critique 59
beginnings in the senses above is a wakefulness of the phenomenologiz-
ing ego, which also understands itself – and its responsibility – as a con-
crete, historical self (see Hua I, 106).12 This wakefulness is the antithesis
of absorbed or immersed experience into the given as pre-given (i.e., the
given as assumed), including theoretical presuppositions.
It is precisely in this radically reflective and reflexive way that Hus-
serl sought to develop, as early as the 1920s, a conception of apodictic
critique, meant to legitimize, justify, and ultimately ground phenomenol-
ogy’s commitment to the apodicticity of transcendental experience (see
Hua XXXV, 126; see Goossens 2002, also Luft 2002, 2019).13 Rather
than taking apodicticity itself for granted – as Kant allegedly did (see Hua
VI, §28; also, Husserl 1974)14 – Husserl, already in his 1922/1923 Intro-
duction into Philosophy Lectures (Hua XXXV), sought to ground these
philosophical grounds themselves.15 As apodictic, this critique’s focus is
thus twofold: the transcendental structures of mundanized experience as
well as phenomenology’s commitment to apodicticity itself (Hua VIII, 70,
76). As such, this apodictic critique of apodicticity (Hua VIII, 126, 169,
583ff.) is a critique of critique whose main meta-level goal is to dispel
any theoretical illusion (Schein; Hua VIII 169; see also Hua XVII, 254)
that might give itself under the guise of self-evidence (Selbstverständli-
chkeit; HuaVIII, 75). However, as early as his First Philosophy (Erste
Philosophie) lectures, Husserl already moves beyond this narrower, apo-
dictic sense of critique and calls for a “higher reflection” able to dispel
philosophical naiveties themselves. As we shall see, the pathway from the
narrower (meta-level Kantian) conception of apodictic critique from the
early 1920s to what, in the late 1920s and 1930s, becomes a full-fledged
and systematic eidetic-historical critique leads through the crucible of
self-referentiality. Here is Husserl in First Philosophy on this very point:

Indeed, it soon becomes plain upon deeper reflection that the path
to absolute cognition and science necessarily leads via an absolute
cognition of the possibility of absolute cognition. . . . I later put it as
following: a) What is required is the phenomenological reduction, as
a reduction to actual and possible transcendental subjectivity or to
its actual and possible transcendental experience. b) This calls for an
apodictic critique of transcendental experience, but also a critique of
‘logical’ cognition which may be established on this transcendental
ground of experience as ‘phenomenology.’ Hence what is required
is a phenomenology and a critique of its cognition. What is shown
here is that this apodictic critique of phenomenological cognition is
related back to itself, iteratively. This, thus, is what genuine First
Philosophy is about (i.e., at first ‘naïve’ phenomenology and [then]
apodictic critique, as the most radical critique of cognition, related
to [the former]).
(Hua VIII, 251–252/468–469; Husserl’s italics, emphasis mine)
60  Andreea Smaranda Aldea
Self-referentiality understood as “relation back to itself, iteratively”
radicalizes, and, as we shall see, historicizes the inquiring process itself.
The latter emerges as reflection “again” (wieder) and “anew.” As it
“relates back to itself, iteratively” (Hua VIII, 252/469), phenomenology
generates new possibilities of reflection and self-reflection for itself.16 It is
noteworthy, therefore, that already in 1923/1924, Husserl understands
apodicticity as subject to evaluation, revision even: it is not some funda-
mental ground, a ground “set in stone,” unalterable.17 Radical critique is
thus what ensures that phenomenology does not remain a naïve science
of experiencing, that is, a science/theory that takes itself – its methods,
subject matter, and accomplishments – for granted. This point about the
necessity of overcoming naïve phenomenological work is one that Hus-
serl returns to time and time again in the late 1920s.
In his Cartesian Meditations, Husserl revisits the methodological
themes he emphasized earlier, in First Philosophy, including this idea of
levels or stages of reflection (see also Hua I, §13 and Hua XVII, 178,
243). What this talk of levels entails is a moving beyond specific phenom-
enological analyses of noetic-noematic correlations to an evaluation of
both these analyses’ results and their methods.

We have trusted transcendental experience because of its originarily

lived-through evidence; and similarly we have trusted the evidence of
predicative description and all the other modes of evidence belong-
ing to transcendental science. Meanwhile we have lost sight of the
demand, so seriously made at the beginning—namely that an apo-
dictic knowledge, as the only ‘genuinely scientific’ knowledge, be
achieved; but we have by no means dropped it. Only we preferred
to sketch in outline the tremendous wealth of problems belonging to
the first stage of phenomenology—a stage which in its own manner
is itself still infected with a certain naivete (the naivete of apodictic-
ity) but contains the great and most characteristic accomplishment
of phenomenology, as a refashioning of science on a higher level—
instead of entering into the further and ultimate problems of phe-
nomenology: those pertaining to its self-criticism, which aims at
determining not only the range and limits but also the modes of
apodicticity. At least a preliminary idea of the kind of criticism of
transcendental-phenomenological knowledge required here is given
by our earlier indications of how, for example, a criticism of tran-
scendental recollection discovers in it an apodictic content.
(Hua I, 177–178/151–152; Husserl’s italics)

In his conclusion to the Cartesian Meditations, in a manner poign-

antly foreshadowing his Crisis development of historical critique, Hus-
serl comes back to this meta-level Kantian apodictic critique, which his
language of “range” and “limits” so clearly captures. Yet, in so doing, he
 Husserlian Phenomenology as Radical-Immanent Critique 61
is already expressing the need to proceed to an overarching kind of criti-
cism – a historical criticism that would encompass even this radical apo-
dictic sense of critique and under whose aegis all phenomenological work
would unfold. What is the key to this genuinely radical criticism, one that
also entails a comprehensive criticism of criticism? It is the self-reflexive,
self-referential structure of phenomenological inquiries themselves. Hus-
serl continues here, precisely in this vein:

All transcendental-philosophical theory of knowledge, as ‘criticism

of knowledge’, leads back ultimately to criticism of transcendental-
phenomenological knowledge (in the first place, criticism of tran-
scendental experience); and, owing to the essential reflexive relation
of phenomenology to itself, this criticism also demands a criticism.
In this connexion, however, there exist no endless regresses that are
infected with difficulties of any kind (to say nothing of absurdities),
despite the evident possibility of reiterable transcendental reflections
and criticisms.
(ibid.; Husserl’s italics; emphases mine)

The structural self-reflexivity of all phenomenological reflection (Bes-

innung) demands a higher order reflection. Therein lies the key to fur-
ther explicating and understanding the critical power of Husserl’s mature
transcendental phenomenology. Husserl clarified the nature of Besin-
nung, both in his Crisis and in the Formal and Transcendental Logic. In
this latter text, he pointed extensively to the necessity of a radical and
systematic critical method:

These are the results of systematic sense-investigations concerning

the world, which, as a ‘phenomenon,’ lies within me myself and gets
its being-sense from me; results of a systematic inquiring back for
the genuine, unclouded, sense of my own sense-bestowing and for
all the presuppositions appertaining inseparably to that sense and
lying within me, beginning with the absolute pre-positing [Voraus-
Setzung], which gives sense to all presuppositions [Voraussetzungen]:
the antecedent positing of my transcendental ego. Actually, then, it
is only self-examination—self-examination, however, that does not
break off too quickly and turn into naïve positivity, but remains,
with absolute consistency, just what it was at the beginning: self-
examination.—Except that, as it progresses, it takes on the form of
transcendental intersubjective self-examination, without any essen-
tial change in its style.
(Hua XVII, 244/276; emphases mine)

The emphasis here, as in his Cartesian Meditations (and already in his

First Philosophy (see Hua VIII, 3–4) as well as Section  65 of Ideas I),
62  Andreea Smaranda Aldea
is squarely on critical reflection as self-examination, which is the only
effective antidote to theoretical naivety. Note, also, that this self-reflexive
reflection does not entail a deviation from the style of the inquiry, which
remains transcendental-eidetic through and through (see also Hua VI,
§52). He continues, this time, with an eye for stressing what this most
radical critical approach would amount to:

Accordingly the radicalness of this philosophic self-examination, the

radicalness that sees in everything given beforehand as existing an
index for a system of uncoverable constitutive performances, is indeed
the most extreme radicalness in striving to uproot all prejudice.
(ibid.; Husserl’s italics, emphasis mine)

In short, phenomenological accomplishments and results, as well as

theoretical and methodological commitments, such as the orientation
toward necessary structures of meaning constitution understood as ahis-
torical eide, are indices for further and ever renewed reflective clarifica-
tion. I will return to this indexical character of phenomenological critical
reflection (including its eidetic dimension) and argue that what makes it
possible is a self-reflexive thinking of a specific kind: imagining reflec-
tion.18 For now, let us briefly summarize some of the core features of
Husserl’s mature notion of reflection (Besinnung).
As critical method, Besinnung is a historical-teleological reflection
(Hua VI, xiv/3fn.)19 into depth spheres (Tiefensphäre) (Hua VI, 122) of
sense and meaning, namely, the historical conditions for the possibility
of current articulations of meanings in different registers: axiological,
praxiological, theoretical, etc. As such, Besinnung is a historical inquir-
ing back (Rückfragen), a reflection back (Rückbesinnung) (Hua VI, 16,
48, 72–73) through layers of sedimented senses and meanings that takes
aim at the “crust” (Hua VI, 16) and “garb” (Hua VI, 52) of histori-
cal accomplishments of different types (concepts, styles, norms, values,
interests). It brings the given taken as pre-given (assumed, obscure)
to transcendental clarity (Hua XVII, 6). Yet as a clarificatory process,
Besinnung is not only a simple excavation or discovery of “original
grounds,” but it is also a reclaiming, a restoration (Restitution), and
a possibility-opening, renewing kind of re-collection (Wiederholung) of
evidence (Hua XVII, 8–9). The looking back is thus, at the same time,
also a looking forward.20
The zig-zag movement (Hua VI, 59) therefore entails a third kind of
beginning, besides the two senses discussed earlier (i.e., past/sedimented
and present/situated): a beginning that is future-oriented, possibility
opening, and re-articulating of the given, the possessed, the achieved.
As an infinite, ever unfolding task, which is both inter-personal and gen-
erational (Hua XVII, 6, 8; see also Hua VI, 4), the self-critical process
is “without a ground yet not groundless” (Hua VI, 181): a veritable
 Husserlian Phenomenology as Radical-Immanent Critique 63
systematic reflection about what is possible in principle (Hua VI, 39). Its
radical re-instituting re-orientation (Hua VI, xiv, 3fn.) toward past Stif-
tungen, present situatedness, and ever new possibilities of inquiry makes
critical-historical Besinnung inherently normative: it questions determin-
ing principles and goals (Hua VI, 15, 16; Hua XVII, 147) and inquires
into the very grounds of validities (Geltungsfundierungen, Hua VI, 143)
sustaining them.21
As emphasized earlier, however, Husserl’s transition from the earlier
apodictic critique to his mature historical reflection revolved around self-
reflection (Selbstbesinnung). Radical reflection is eo ipso self-reflection
(Hua XVII, 6) or radical self-understanding (Hua VI, 16), which carries
with it a robust sense of self-responsibility (Selbstverantwortung), theo-
retical as well as historical-cultural and personal. As such, it entails a
commitment to sustained self-investigation very much reliant upon possi-
bilities and necessities understood as orientational guides for action, val-
ues, praxis, and judgment (Hua XVII, 5–7; Hua VI, 15, 73). The process
of Selbstbesinnung is thus also a process of self-justification (Selbstrech-
tfertigung, Hua XVII, 2; also, Hua VIII, 5) through an unprejudiced a
priori grounding of methods and goals (Hua XVII, 4–5). This “ground-
ing” includes a clarification of our own interests (Hua VI, 57) and of the
traditionality of our own thought as phenomenologists (Hua VI, 72–73).
Thus, inquiring into our own present situation from within its histori-
cal thickness, both theoretical and cultural (Hua XVII, 6), is an imma-
nent critical movement against self-forgetfulness (Hua XVII, 14) and the
“spell of our time” (Hua VI, 58):

Only by virtue of a fundamental clarification, penetrating the depths

of the inwardness that produces cognition and theory, the transcen-
dental inwardness, does what is produced as genuine theory and
genuine science become understandable.
(Hua XVII, 14/15–16)

Besinnung is thus also existential (Hua VI, 60): a reflection personal,

inter-personal, and historical (Hua VI, 70–71). Due to the dynamics of
world-experiencing,22 the task of grounding our thought and work is ever-
renewed (Hua VI, 185). This dynamism demands (Hua I, 177–178) – as
we saw earlier, in Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations concluding call  – a
radical reflection focused on its very analyses of self-constitution and
­lifeworld constitution (Hua VI, 189ff.).
We began with the desire to explicate the specific ways in which Hus-
serl’s mature phenomenological method is essentially critical. We asked
what the terms “radical” and “immanent” might mean here, given Hus-
serl’s Crisis discussions. Though many questions,23 both interpretative
and critical, pointing beyond Husserlian conceptualizations, still remain,
we can now explicate Husserl’s methodological posits as follows.
64  Andreea Smaranda Aldea
I. Phenomenology is an immanent critique in the
following senses:
a) it is a critique of our living present;
b) it unfolds through the sedimented historical (conceptual, linguistic,
normative) thickness of our experience and its evidence;
c) it starts with our given situation (both theoretical and everyday) –
including its limits and articulation of meanings, values, norms, goals,
possibilities for being, doing, knowing;
d) it begins and unfolds from within the traditionality of our own philo-
sophical thought (given its commitments, interests, goals, etc.);24
e) it thus studies order from within order (see articulation earlier) while
at an “awake” distance from it (more on this distance below).

II. Phenomenology is a radical critique in that

a) as reflection, critique is here always already a self-reflection, as such,
it involves self-justification;
b) as self-responsible reflection, it is at once both personal and concrete
as well as a priori and universal;
c) its re-orientation toward the given as pre-given (in all of its sedi-
mented thickness) – including its own presuppositions as theoretical
endeavor – demands that it generate and continuously re-examine its
own grounds (an infinite task);
d) it is not a mere excavation of grounding principles  – transcenden-
tal structures of meaning-constitution – but also a reclaiming of the
evidence of experience in a manner that renews it in its own self-
reflective work;
e) it is at once both transcendental-eidetic and historical (as we shall
see, this is key).

We are faced here with an unavoidable question: What makes such a

critical endeavor and self-reflection (Selbstbesinnung) possible? Whence
this “distance within” requisite for the radical stance Husserl calls for?
Whence phenomenology’s self-evaluative orientation and power?
In what follows, I  contend that the imagination  – as Husserl rightly
claimed in Ideas I (Hua III/1, §70) – is what functions as a necessary
condition for the possibility of phenomenological critique (and all cri-
tique – be it everyday or theoretical – for that matter). While my argu-
ment here attempts to vindicate Husserl’s claim about the imagination,
it also departs from his original analyses of imagining consciousness. In
gist, for his claim about the imagination as necessary condition for the
possibility of the phenomenological method to hold, a synthetic-genetic
as well as generative account of the imagination must take center stage.
In other words, a primarily static account, which is what Husserl himself
 Husserlian Phenomenology as Radical-Immanent Critique 65
proffered,25 is not adequate for this end. Thus, what we must do, in
effect, is bring the phenomenological account of the imagination up to
speed with Husserl’s mature methodological developments and see if the
imagination does indeed play a key role in his historical-eidetic radical
reflection.
Before we delve into our discussion of the imagination, let us first take
a deeper look at self-reflexivity and its relation to reflection as Husserl
discusses it in First Philosophy (Hua VIII). His account is both rich and
deeply pertinent to our main attempt here: explicating phenomenology
as a radical immanent critique and clarifying some of its key conditions
for possibility.
In approaching the starting point of phenomenological inquiry from
the perspective of distinct acts and their respective correlates (e.g., mem-
ory, imagination, perception, judgment), what emerges is not a frag-
mented understanding of the life of consciousness, but its dynamism and
flow as well as the intertwinement (Verflechtung; Hua VIII, 124) of all of
these distinct experiencing threads:

I, the transcendental I, live a transcendental life, which presents itself

in a continual transcendental experience in its own transcenden-
tal temporal form, which has, in a manner yet more closely to be
described, the form of a present life, which bears in itself the end-
less horizon of recollection and anticipation, a horizon, which, once
revealed, displays a transcendental stream of life that is endless in
both directions.
(Hua VIII, 86/289–290)

The intertwinement of different acts of consciousness is closely tied to

the constant splitting of egoic life in nesting or iterative ways (see Hua
VIII, Lecture 47) that weave these acts (along with their respective cor-
relates) through and through.26
For the purposes of our discussion here, I will focus on this key concept
of Spaltung, which Husserl relies upon in his analyses of consciousness
in these 1923/1924 lectures (Hua VIII), and pay special attention to how
Spaltung relates to reflection (Reflexion) understood as experiencing acts
in the “again” mode (wiedererfahren; Hua VIII, 387–388).27 These anal-
yses grant us valuable resources toward explicating the imagination in a
manner that sheds light on its methodological import, even if that entails
departing from Husserl in significant ways.

But then I  can and must also see that the ‘many’ act poles are in
themselves evidently the identical I, or that one and the same I has its
appearance in all of these acts and has in each and every appearance a
different mode; I see that it, splitting itself into a plurality of acts and
act subjects, is nevertheless one and the same, the same I which splits
66  Andreea Smaranda Aldea
itself here. I see that egoic life in activity is nothing but a constantly-
splitting-itself-in-active-comportment and that at all times anew an
all-overlooking I can establish itself which identifies all ⟨of those acts
and act subjects⟩ or rather, and said in a more originary manner: I see
that I can establish myself as an I that gains an overview over myself
in higher reflection; that I can become conscious of myself in an evi-
dent synthetic identification of identity of sameness of all of these act
poles and of the difference of their modal manners of existence. And
hence I say: I am at all times and everywhere the same, I am as reflect-
ing I the same who grasps himself as an unreflected I in an aftergrasp,
who as a self-perceiver observes myself as the one who ⟨for instance⟩
perceives a house.
(Hua VIII, 90–1/293–4; emphasis mine)

What emerges through this understanding of egoic splitting is pre-

cisely the possibility of a reflection of higher order, whose intentional
correlates, this time patently rather than merely latently, are previous
experiences along with their correlates. Yet, it is not solely the previous
experience that comes into relief here, but a holistic sense of self: a past
self traced back into the present: “This form of ‘experiencing again’ is
“a putting ourselves in the past via leap—retracing ourselves back up
till now” (Hua XXIII, 258/313). To capture how “experiencing again”
brings into relief both a holistic sense of self and specific experiences
themselves, Husserl turns to memory as well as the possibility of reflec-
tion in memory. Wieder-erinnerung is thus a making present both of an
absent (past) experience and of a past self that the present self traces back
to itself in this self-remembrance.

It is not by accident that our [German] language expresses remem-

brance reflexively: “I remember [myself].” In each memory lies in a
certain sense a doubling of the I, insofar as what I remember directly
is not only in general conscious as something past, but as something
past as perceived by me. I recall a fire: I saw it; a concert: I heard it.
In the case of mediacy: I do not myself recall the fire, but I recall that
I heard and read about it. Certainly this doubling of the I consists in
the fact that my past I belongs to the content of the remembrance
just as much as the experience of my present waking I, the I  that
witnessed it, that heard of it, and the like. The experience transforms
itself into a type of explicit I-reflection, when I direct my seizing gaze,
looking back, also at the past I and its past egoic actus.
(Hua VIII, 93–4/297; emphases mine)

It is because of this doubling of the I  in “again” experiences, such

as Wiedererinnerung, that phenomenological work requires a double
transcendental reduction. Thus, if I  study “experiences again” in the
 Husserlian Phenomenology as Radical-Immanent Critique 67
phenomenological attitude, I  must bracket commitments and assump-
tions pertaining to both the remembering I and the remembered I (Hua
VIII, 84–86). It turns out that for Husserl, presentifying acts (Vergegen-
wärtigungen), such as memory or expectation, are, in the “again” mode,
particularly telling as far as the possibility of a higher order reflection
is concerned (see Bernet 2002). This is precisely the kind of reflection a
full-fledged historical Besinnung (along the lines outlined earlier) would
qualify as. Since, for Husserl, the imagination (Phantasie) is a neutral –
dis-interested – kind of presentification (see Hua XXIII, 253–254, 379,
443, 461ff., 513–514, 534, 548–551, 561–563, 578–579, 585, 590), it
comes particularly handy in establishing the possibility of neutral phe-
nomenological reflection. I have argued elsewhere against this view of the
imagination (see Aldea 2019a, 2020a), so I will not rehash the case here.
The key point is this: like Wiedererinnerung, imagining an act and its
correlate (rather than merely imagining an object “x”) opens the possibil-
ity of studying the imagined self, along with its correlate object and world.
Husserl understood this (Hua VIII, esp. Lecture 44; see also Hua XXIII,
573–574). The Spaltung between the imagining self and the imagined self
is thus more radical in the case of the imagination, according to Husserl,
since, unlike memory, the imagination is neutral or non-positional (e.g.,
Hua III/1, §§109–114; also, Hua XXIII, 114, 178, 338, 363, 433, 505–
506, 521–522, 534ff., 571, 575–579).28 In his First Philosophy lectures
as well as lectures on the imagination spanning over two decades, well
into the 1920s (see Hua XXIII), Husserl understood the radicalness of
the imagination in these non-positional terms. He never wavered on this
front.29 In some of my other analyses of the imagination (see Aldea 2013,
2019a, 2020a, and forthcoming), I seek to show not only that the imagi-
nation exhibits, pace Husserl, its own distinct kind of positionality, but
that it also exhibits a rich normative dimension. Husserl’s non-positional
view turns out to be a double-edged sword for his analyses of the imagi-
nation: on the one hand, these analyses hold the promise of ontic and
doxic dis-interestedness, which he deemed essential for entering the phe-
nomenological attitude; on the other hand, however, the holistic sense of
(imagined) self at work here is arbitrary and detached, at best very thin,
since it has nothing to do with my concrete sense of (imagining) self.30 On
Husserl’s model then, there is no genuine “again” for reflection in imagi-
nation, since it is a reflection on an arbitrary (imagined) self (Hua XXIII,
561), whose correlate is not the lifeworld, but some “aloof” world(s)
instead (Hua XXIII, 498ff., 523ff., 533ff.). So, while Husserl recognized
the illuminating potential of Wiedererinnerung,31 he limited himself to
equating reflection in the imagination with a neutral, detached “mere
thought” (Hua XXIII, 590). We need not limit our understanding of the
imagination in this way. What is worth adopting here, however, is the
insight that experiences in the “again” mode, along with the egoic split-
ting and intentional implication they exhibit, point to a synthetic-genetic
68  Andreea Smaranda Aldea
and generative way of explicating precisely the kind of zig-zag movement
Besinnung as Selbstbesinnung entails.
Whereas for Husserl, the egoic split at work in the imagination unfolds
under the aegis of as-if neutral/non-positional consciousness,32 were we to
take a closer look at this Spaltung and what it entails, we would uncover
that the self and world that it can help bring into patent relief are very
much my concrete sense of self and world.
Take for example my reading Virginia Woolf’s account of gendered
experience in her novel Orlando, where the protagonist, who has lived
until the age of 30 as a man, wakes up as a woman and embraces this
transformation in deeply erotic ways (where “erotic” here refers to
desire and pleasure broadly construed). Imagining experiences entail a
provisional Setzung (positionality): they engage their correlates – possi-
bilities – provisionally. There is an exploratory orientation toward these
possibilities. Elsewhere I  refer to this as the “open” mode of imagin-
ing consciousness (see Aldea forthcoming). Imagining possibilization is
an emergence (Ermöglichung) of possibilities I am curiously exploring.
Yet this exploratory experiencing is not disinterested, detached from my
sense of self and lifeworld. It is very much anchored in it (see Aldea
2020a). The egoic splitting at work here is not absolute (across the mutu-
ally exclusive divide of positionality and non-positionality). The rift
between the imagining self and the imagined self is not an indifference,
but a relevant and potentially illuminating tension: this tension is like a
musical chord struck, vibrating still, ripe with the ability to motivate my
turning toward myself anew, evaluatively so.33 The imagined self, inten-
tionally implied in this exploratory experience, can become patent at any
moment, awakened. Its latency is “just beneath the surface,” so to speak.
This happens when my experience of imagining possibilities, such as
those pertaining to gendered embodiment, is in tension with my sense of
lived possibilities and, importantly, of my lived impossibilities. The latter
are the correlates of my “I cannot” – what I take for granted in my daily
practices and interactions with others and the world.34 Imagining expe-
riences bring these inconceivabilities35 into relief as limits. These limits
I now, in the imagining stance, experience as possibilities that are lost,
foreclosed, forgotten, or simply assumed as irrelevant for me. In imagin-
ing possibilization I cease – in an exploratory manner – to simply assume
these possibilities’ givenness as impossibilities, or limits. Not only that,
but also what used to seem their patina of finality (i.e., of necessity, what
could not be otherwise) likewise comes to the fore as now potentially
under question. Could things be otherwise?
As a woman, my social, cultural, historical situatedness binds me;
sedimented commitments and institutions (Stiftungen) articulate and
delineate  – in largely covert ways  – my systems of gendered possibili-
ties, be they possibilities of being, doing, or knowing (e.g., how I experi-
ence and what I understand by sexual pleasure given my gendered sense
 Husserlian Phenomenology as Radical-Immanent Critique 69
of identity). My lived possibilities and impossibilities are articulated in
well-delineated manners by deeply sedimented, communalized practices,
mores, norms, values, concepts, and goals. These are all Stiftungen (i.e.,
institutions in Husserl’s Crisis sense) undergirding, from covered-over
depths, my holistic sense of self and world. In reading Orlando, my ori-
entation toward these possibilities and impossibilities shifts. What may
start as an open exploratory exercise now entails a tensed rift between my
imagined self and its possibilities and my imagining self and its inconceiv-
abilities. I experience unease, impatience even, with what is; I now posi-
tion myself anew toward what could be, perhaps even what must be. This
revelatory Spaltung brings to the surface the crack in the polished finality
of the given as pre-given.36 Things could be otherwise. The exploratory
stance turns evaluative. What is up for re-evaluation? My holistic sense
of self and world: the very articulations of possibilities and impossibili-
ties along with, importantly, the epistemic, normative, valuational, and
practical commitments that condition them. These are the depth spheres
(Tiefensphäre) Husserl’s historical Besinnung is meant to unearth. This
re-orientation toward an evaluative mode of imagining – what I refer to
as the “critical” imagination (see Aldea 2020a) – can happen across dif-
ferent attitudes. The imagining stance,37 be it open/exploratory or criti-
cal/evaluative, spans all attitudes, natural as well as theoretical.
The Spaltung at work in the imagining stance (the rift between the
imagining self and the imagined self) is, like the memorial Spaltung Hus-
serl explicated in rich and sophisticated ways in his First Philosophy lec-
tures, holistic and self-referential. Yet it also exhibits qualitatively distinct
features. The tracing of the imagined self back to my imagining self is a
movement between modalities (possibilities/impossibilities) that are and
modalities that could be. As such, all imagining is not only self-imagining
(at least latently), but it is also self- and lifeworld-transforming. The
patency of exploratory imagination is “just beneath the surface” insofar
as this modal movement across the split can become awakened in sur-
prisingly swift ways, especially considering how strong a hold condition-
ing commitments have on our sense of self and world. The normalizing
stance, or what is our seamless way of everyday being, doing, and know-
ing, lacks the potential for this radical modal re-orientation. The main
structural reason for this is its inflexible orientation toward harmony,
concordance, confirmation, and the familiar (see Husserl 1948, §67;
also, Hua XI, §20). In this stance, any exploratory experiencing would
remain well within the confines of unproblematic, anticipated systems of
possibilities.38
Imagining experiences in the critical, valuative, or awakened mode
focus patently on the imagined self and its correlate possibilities. The
imagined self, including its tracing and anchorage in my concrete sense of
self, is thus no longer latently implied, but patently brought to the surface
in these critical imagining experiences. What makes these experiences
70  Andreea Smaranda Aldea
critical is both their evaluative and subversive orientation (i.e., what
is able to crack open the patina of finality naturalized contingencies
exhibit) and their explicit orientation toward self-transformation and
world transformation (i.e., what could be). As such, critical imagination
is at once backward and forward looking in and through the tracing
of possibility systems and what conditions them. The movement here is
squarely anchored in the present. It is a relevant movement because it is
a situated movement. It must be, if it is to have any diagnostic and pre-
scriptive bite. Elsewhere I refer to this dynamic and systemic revelatory
power of the critical imagination as “indexicality” (see Aldea forthcom-
ing). What makes this power indexical is both its temporal span, namely,
its past/future and present anchorage, and its surface/depth dynamic.
What surfaces are not only distinct new possibilities of doing, for exam-
ple, but also the commitments that heretofore had foreclosed them. The
modal mapping here is systemic. It refers to both the entire fields of pos-
sibilities and the deeply historicized interrelated commitments sustain-
ing and delineating them. Last but not the least, the revelatory power
of imagination is both world- and self-illuminating. In experiencing the
tension between the imagined and the concrete, what comes into relief is
a holistic sense of self, capable of transformation. The self-referentiality
of the imagination thus brings my whole sense of self to light “again”
and “anew” in an innovative manner. The possibilities I now desire for
myself are both realizable and self-transforming. They are potentiabilities
(Vermöglichkeiten), not mere possibilities.
The critical imagination is an experiencing of the self “again” in a dis-
tinctive way: at once suspicious of finality and desirous of the otherwise.
Its openness toward the otherwise is thus not confined by heretofore
taken-for-granted commitments. According to Husserl, Wiedererin-
nerung exhibits a renewal of the self, whereby “renewal,” we understand
something akin to re-activation (Hua VIII, 152) or re-awakening from
sedimented slumbers. The sunken – absorbed or immersed self – comes
to light again.39 This also happens in the critical imagining stance, only
the self awakened here is not solely my past self, now traced back into
the present, but also a future-oriented, desirous self that doesn’t merely
anticipate along familiar lines, but engages possibilities in exploratory,
evaluative, and innovative manners. To awaken here carries with it a dis-
entangling potential. It is a loosening of the sedimented threads condi-
tioning my sense of self and world.40 Critical imagining self-referentiality
is thus both distancing, since it involves a rendering strange of oneself
to oneself (Verfremdung), and de-distancing, since it likewise entails a
return to oneself anew, namely, in a possibility-opening, transformative,
relevant manner.
What does reflection (Besinnung) in the critical imagining stance look
like then? Given the rich and dynamic self-referentiality or self-reflexivity
at work here, reflection in imagination patently intends not only the
 Husserlian Phenomenology as Radical-Immanent Critique 71
imagined self and its correlates. In tracing this imagined self back to the
concrete imagining self, reflection in imagination specifically focuses on
the modally fertile tension between the imagined self and the imagining
self. In fact, it is this latter, imagining self, as it relates to the imagined
self-correlates complex that holds the interest of reflection in imagina-
tion. It is precisely this imaginative beginning reflection  – in the three
senses of “beginning” I  flagged above  – that makes phenomenological
Besinnung possible. The latter is a theoretical reflection made possible by
the critical imagining stance, which can function in natural and theoreti-
cal attitudes alike. What renders phenomenological Besinnung radical is
its transcendental, historical, and eidetic dimensions. As radical reflec-
tion, Besinnung here unfolds in the critical imagining stance, now in the
phenomenological attitude. The immanence at work here, beyond the
senses we outlined earlier, is thus also a radical self-referentiality aiming
at uncovering what conditions not only the noetic-noematic a priori of
correlation under investigation (say, Wiedererinnerung and its experien-
tial correlates) but also my relation, as a phenomenologist, to my reflec-
tive exercise. Besinnung holds in patent tension the relation between
my phenomenologizing self and the self/experience-correlate complex
under investigation. It is this radical immanent manner of inquiry that
makes possible unearthing both what conditions specific kinds of mean-
ing-constitution and the methods and theoretical commitments we rely
upon. This methodological dynamism  – a veritable zig-zag, as Husserl
put it – is indeed an ever-unfolding infinite task. Not only that though.
This dynamism is always already at work in all phenomenological inves-
tigations, even if the phenomenologist in question does not actively aim
at self-evaluation. As an imagining (here theoretical) exercise, the explici-
tation of the self-evaluative exercise is “just beneath the surface” of the
investigation’s flow. Reflection in imagination, given its evaluative and
innovative orientation, is inherently performative. Thus, its unfolding is,
in virtue of this performative structure, also transformative.
Returning (anew) to Husserl’s mature, historical-eidetic method, we see
the same performative critical dimension at work. The method’s histori-
cal work focuses on depth problems (historical a priori and Stiftungen),
both as they pertain to the domain of inquiry and to phenomenology
itself (methods and accomplishments alike). Its eidetic work, through the
method of transcendental eidetic variation, focuses on transcendentally
necessary structures of meaning-constitution. The zig-zag movement at
the core of eidetic variation spans an important difference: the difference
between necessary structures that are historically volatile (e.g., gendered
body schemas that could be otherwise, but nevertheless have a broad
articulating scope) and necessary structures that are ahistorical (e.g., the
perspectival aspect of external perception).41 Together, the historical-
eidetic intertwinement can bring into relief the co-constituting relations
among Stiftungen, historical transcendental necessities, and ahistorical
72  Andreea Smaranda Aldea
transcendental necessities. This work holds immense diagnostic potential
for socio-cultural and political investigations. Husserl’s mature method,
through its rigor and multi-layered richness, can uncover and analyze
those conditioning depths we otherwise take for granted. For this, a
commitment to transcendental necessity is key, since it sets the modal-
mapping standard that makes possible a truly radical study of contingen-
cies, especially normalized contingencies parading as necessities.
Thus far, we can identify two critical levels of reflection that are
structurally inherent in phenomenological work. First, the micro-
phenomenological level, which focuses on the respective kind of noetic-
noematic correlation under investigation. Here, the historical-eidetic
dynamism limits itself to uncovering the transcendental necessities per-
taining to this kind of meaning-constitution. Second, the performative
level: here the focus is on the tension between the phenomenologizing
ego and its correlate (the specific type of noetic-noematic correlation the
micro-level studies). This performative reflection is always at work, “just
beneath the surface” of the micro-level work and through the latter’s
unfolding. It can become patent in a full-fledged manner at any given time
in an investigation. Rendering the performative reflection level fully patent
would put the micro-level “on hold” – provisionally so. The same explor-
atory and evaluative orientations the imagination exhibits in the natural
attitude are likewise at work here, in the phenomenological attitude. Yet,
this surgent gesture is in effect a re-surgence, due to the “just beneath the
surface,” “always already unfolding” patency of this performative Besin-
nung. However, beyond these two critical levels or dimensions, there is a
third: precisely the kind of higher order reflection Husserl was calling for
in the 1920s and 1930s. This is the meta-phenomenological level – a veri-
table critique of critique whose focus is on evaluating and re-evaluating
the phenomenological methods and results/accomplishments themselves.
The focus here is patently methodological. The methods themselves, along
with the normative and epistemic – ethical even – commitments assumed
for the sake of phenomenological work are under investigation. The
dynamic movement here, at this meta level, unfolds between transcenden-
tal impossibilities (veritable apodictic limits that cannot be otherwise) and
transcendental inconceivabilities (what I, as theoretician working in a tra-
ditionalized manner, experience as limit). The zig-zag here, which draws
on mutually informing historical and eidetic resources alike, is meant
to clarify what indeed is an apodictic structure versus a transcendental
illusion (Schein): what merely seems to be necessary but isn’t (see Hua
VIII 169; see also Hua XVII, 254) or what seems an ahistorical necessary
structure but isn’t (i.e., it is historical instead). Thus, evaluating what we,
as theoreticians, assume and experience as “limit” lies at the very heart of
our radical self-reflection (radikale Selbstbesinnung).
What makes this meta-level critique of methods possible is the per-
formative reflection in the imagining mode we described earlier. The
 Husserlian Phenomenology as Radical-Immanent Critique 73
latter’s transformative self-reflexivity is what opens the door for radical
meta-reflection. Yet another sense in which phenomenology as critique is
immanent! Its most radical form of self-evaluation, self-justification, and
self-correction emerges “from the belly” of its own work, so to speak.
Eugen Fink captured this very point well when he said:

The peculiarity of Edmund Husserl’s way of working is that all

systematic projections are not constructions that precede concrete
investigations, rather they develop in the analyses. But that filled-out
analyses are made possible also results in the systematic projected
design being broken open again, to gain thereby the characteristic of
mobility. This is the fundamental characteristic of phenomenology –
despite all its rigor [it is an] open system.
(Fink quoted in Bruzina 2004, 87; Fink’s italics)

In short, phenomenology’s ability to generate new, realizable possibili-

ties for itself (Hua VIII, 7) is self-generated and self-generating in virtue
of its methods’ very structures, along with these methods’ organic and
multi-layered intertwinement, and the insights and accomplishments that
ensue at the micro-level of analysis.
Therefore, beyond its diagnostic power, which, as a looking back
(Rückblick), is transcendentally revelatory of our present situation (theo-
retical and everyday), phenomenology is, in virtue of this performative,
transformative, and self-renewing power, also prescriptive and forward
looking.42 As prescriptive, phenomenology brings into relief realizable
possibilities of being, of doing, and of knowing that can re-orient us –
historically, generationally, and communally  – both as persons and
as thinkers. Its import, immanent to experiencing itself, is thus deeply
anchored in and relevant to everyday life. It likewise carries interdisci-
plinary promise. In flagging the fertile crucible of self-reflection for the
possibility of critique, Husserl notes:

[T]hese self-reflections, beginning in the proper manner and going on

to shape themselves in the proper manner, belong to the systematic
content of philosophy itself.
(Hua VIII, 5/209)

As we circle back to where we began, what emerges is that Husserl’s

Ideas I insight, though underdeveloped, was right on the money: the
imagination is a necessary condition for the possibility of phenom-
enology. What likewise comes to light is that to call phenomenology
“critical” is redundant. There is no such thing as “uncritical” phenom-
enology.43 Its critical dimension is not a second skin – something it can
shed and regrow (or not) – but its theoretical core and practice through
and through.
74  Andreea Smaranda Aldea
Notes
1. I would like to thank Sara Heinämaa, Fredrik Westerlund, Jussi Backman,
James Jardine, Mirja Hartimo, and the participants of the Helsinki Phenome­
nology Research Seminar for their invaluable feedback on many versions of
this paper. I would also like to thank Julia Jansen and Maren Wehrle for
their feedback on earlier drafts. Finally, I  would like to thank the Kone
Foundation, the Fulbright Finland Foundation, and the Kent State Univer-
sity Research Council for funding that made possible my research residence
in Finland during the 2019–2020 academic year.
2. For clarifying explications of the differences and similarities between Kant’s
and Husserl’s transcendental projects, see David Carr’s and Michela Sum-
ma’s contributions to this volume.
3. For an in-depth discussion of Husserl’s mature (Crisis) discussion of the
“total êpoche,” see Heinämaa 2019.
4. Husserl uses this term “lively teleology” (Hua VI, 366; see also 103–104) in
reference to the “universal causal style” pertaining to the natural sciences.
The same inertial teleology, however, is at work in all theoretical endeavors,
primal establishments/institutions (Stiftungen), commitments re-established
and renewed (Nachstiftungen), tasks, and goals (Endstiftungen) in a largely
passive, habituated, historically sedimenting manner (see Hua VI, §15). On
the teleological dimension of Husserl’s historical-eidetic method, see Aldea
2017.
5. Husserl expresses this optimistic hope  – of generational, renewed, self-
corrective work in his 1930 “Nachwort zu meinen Ideen zu einer reinen
Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie” written as the Pref-
ace to the Boyce Gibson translation of Ideas I (see Hua V, 161–162/Ideas II,
429). It is in this same context that he calls himself a “true beginner” (ein
wirklicher Anfänger); more on this below (see Hua V, 161; see also Bruzina
2004, 75ff.).
6. For a discussion of how the eidetic and historical dimensions of the method
inform each other (rather than being mutually exclusive), see Aldea 2016,
2020b. Some, like David Carr, have questioned the intersection of the eidetic
and the historical as potentially unsustainable (see Carr 1974, 120).
7. For Husserl on this point as early as Ideas I, see Hua III/1, §68.
8. For an in-depth discussion of Husserl’s historical method, see Carr 1974.
For a clear explication of the historicity of experience, see Carr (2014b).
9. Husserl used the exact same metaphor, to the same methodological end and
effect, as early as his Logical Investigations (see §6 of the Introduction to the
second volume; Hua XIX/1, 22).
10. For Fink’s development of his own speculative/constructivist sense of phe-
nomenology as critique, see Sixth Cartesian Meditation (Fink 1995, §§ 6–7)
as well as his Vergegenwärtigung und Bild (Fink 1966, §6). For discussions
of Husserl’s development of a notion of radical critique, see Fink 1972,
2000; Landgrebe 2000 as well as Cairns 1976. See also Bruzina 2004, 1995
and Luft 2002 on Fink’s views and Luft 2019, 2004 on Landgrebe’s views
regarding the matter of phenomenology as critique.
11. For Husserl’s tracing back of the notion of universal science to Greek thêo-
ria, see his Vienna Lecture.
12. For a discussion of the intertwinement – and methodological import of this
intertwinement – of the concrete, personal ego and the phenomenologizing
ego, see Aldea forthcoming.
13. Husserl also uses the language of reduction in referring to this critique and
differentiates it from the transcendental reduction (see Hua VIII, 284; see
also Hua XXXV passim).
 Husserlian Phenomenology as Radical-Immanent Critique 75
14. Kant und die Idee der Transzendentalphilosophie, in Hua VIII, 230–287
(trans. Klein  & Pohl, Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, 1974, 5/3, 7,
9–56).
15. For a discussion of apodictic critique as critique of critique – distinct from
Husserl’s phenomenology of phenomenology approach in First Philosophy,
Formal und Transzendental Logik, and the Crisis – see Luft 2019, 2002. See
also Hua XXXV, §30.
16. I will say more on this “renewing” aspect of the self-reflective process below.
17. I would like to thank David Carr for stressing the importance of clarifying
this point.
18. I am here not using the term “index” in Husserl’s narrow deictic sense (see
Logical Investigation I, §26). The notion of “indexicality” I am using here
refers to a modal and horizonal situatedness  – spatio-temporal as well as
historical and socio-cultural (see Hua XVII, 177). For a further elaboration
of this notion, see Aldea forthcoming.
19. For a discussion of the teleological dimension of Besinnung, see Mirja Har-
timo’s contribution to this volume.
20. I will have more to say this in what follows in my discussion of potentiabil-
ity (Vermöglichkeit) and renewal (Erneuerung).
21. For an in-depth discussion of Stiftungen and Geltungsfundierungen as well
as Husserl’s late methodological treatment of them, see Carr 1970, 1974,
2016 and Dodd 2004, 2016 as well as Crowell 2016.
22. For a sophisticated discussion of this lifeworld dynamism, see Heinämaa
2019. See also Carr 2014a and Sowa 2008 as well as Hua XXXIX.
23. Questions such as, whether this critique is primarily/solely regressive (past
looking) or whether there is an anticipatory – prescriptive even – dimension
to it.
24. As immanent critique, phenomenology does not assume its commitments in
order to undermine them from within. This latter understanding of imma-
nent critique is in a sense the very opposite of Husserl’s endeavor, which
seeks to justify, legitimize, and validate rather than undermine, subvert, or
nullify phenomenological methods and/or results. This does not mean, how-
ever, that the process leaves no room for self-correction. Quite the contrary.
Self-correction is very much on the table, precisely for the sake of the sys-
tematic, self-referential coherence of phenomenological work (I would like
to thank David Carr for challenging me to clarify this point).
25. For an in-depth discussion of synthetic-genetic as well as generative
approaches to the study of the imagination as well as a clear explication of
where Husserl’s static account fell short, see Aldea 2019a, 2020a, Aldea and
Jansen 2020, and Jansen 2020 as well as Aldea forthcoming.
26. Husserl’s notions of founding (Fundierung, see Hua XI, §28 and Blg. XVIII)
and modification (Modifikation; see Hua XI, §§ 7, 28, 35 and Blg. II, XIII,
XXII; also, Husserl 1948, esp. §§ 27, 47–48, 66–67, 72–74, 79, 83) further
nuance this intertwinement as well as his analyses of time-consciousness
(Hua X, Hua XXXIII, HuaMat 8).
27. In his Erste Philosophie (1923/1924), Husserl uses the terms Reflexion and
Besinnung interchangeably (see Luft 2019).
28. For Husserl’s discussion of iteration or nesting in imagining consciousness,
see Hua III/1, §112; Hua XXIII, 184, 193, 229–232.
29. In his imagination lectures (Hua XXIII) and in manuscripts discussing
eidetic variation (Hua XLI), Husserl likewise discusses this neutrality as a
freedom from any and all epistemic and normative commitments. It is for
this reason that free variation, which is the arbitrary playful variation the
imagination is able to sustain unencumbered, according to Husserl, emerges
76  Andreea Smaranda Aldea
as a condition for the possibility of eidetic variation (see Hua XVII, §97,
Hua IX, §9, and Husserl 1948, §87 as well as Hua XLI passim).
30. The “again” of Wiedererinnerung is positional, seamlessly bound with and
by my concrete sense of self. Reflection in Phantasie, however, remains non-
positional for Husserl and thus detached from a concrete sense of self and
world (Hua VIII, 208; Hua XXIII, 258).
31. What Wiedererinnerung sheds light on, even beyond the specific act-focused
intentional implication is the implication of a “whole former self” (Hua
XXIII, 196), a latency that could become patent. Deeply intertwined and
sedimented experiences and their traces is what experiencing “once more”
or “once again” (Hua XXIII, 260–1) also recovers in the “total conscious-
ness of the now” (Hua XXIII, 232). This form of “experiencing again” is “a
putting ourselves in the past via leap – retracing ourselves back up till now”
(Hua XXIII, 258/313; see also 295–296, 356; see also Aldea forthcoming
for a discussion of very point).
32. “The manner in which this bracketing has an effect on these phantasized
contents, the intentional ones of phantasy, is something we shall now
investigate more closely. Let us take up the [above] example and attempt
to appropriate its purely phenomenological content; we immediately notice
certain implications essentially belonging to the intentionality of the ‘as if.’
I imagine, for instance, a landscape with groups of trees, humans, centaurs,
mythical creatures engaged in a wild fight. I may myself belong to this phan-
tasy world, for instance I participate in the fight. But it is also possible that
I  am not part of it, that I  do not count. But upon closer inspection I  am
myself then in a certain sense, and necessarily so, co-phantasized. For, how
could I imagine such an episode of the phantasy world with such determina-
tion, without imagining it in a certain orientation?” (Hua VIII, 115–6/319;
emphasis mine)
33. In his contribution to this volume, Anthony J. Steinbock explores the moti-
vating forces for critique, including phenomenological critique, from a dif-
ferent perspective.
34. My sense of “I cannot” can present itself under an active, decisional guise:
“I will not.” The sedimenting dynamic between inability and unwillingness
is complex from a founding (Fundierung) point of view. A synthetic-genetic
approach could explicate the ways in which this process unfolds (see Aldea
forthcoming).
35. Elsewhere I develop this notion of conceivability/inconceivability as the cor-
relates of my senses of I can/I cannot in a broader (pre-predicative) sense,
thus expanding it beyond its prima facie intellectualistic sense (see Aldea
2020a, forthcoming).
36. For a refreshing discussion of how Husserlian phenomenological inquiry
cracks the given in a manner not so different from Foucaultian archeology
and genealogy, see Wehrle 2018. For a further exploration of the intersec-
tion between Foucaultian and Husserlian critical approaches, see Maren
Wehrle’s and Sophie Loidolt’s contributions to this volume.
37. For my discussion of imagination as stance rather than mere presentifica-
tion, see Aldea 2019a, 2020a.
38. For an in-depth discussion of the normalizing stance and how it differs from
the imagining stance, see Aldea 2020a, 2020b.
39. My notion of “absorption” or “immersion” here differs from Husserl’s con-
cept of unconscious consciousness (e.g., dreamless sleep). By “absorbed”
here I  mean sedimented, habituated, communalized, and historicized. For
 Husserlian Phenomenology as Radical-Immanent Critique 77
a discussion of Reflexion as it relates to Husserl’s notion of absorption, see
Geniusas 2020.
40. Merleau-Ponty, in the Preface to his Phenomenology of Perception, uses a
similar metaphor when describing the explicative power of the phenomeno-
logical method (see Merleau-Ponty 2012).
41. For a discussion of how this eidetic zig-zag works through contingency, not
irrespective of it, see Aldea 2019b. For Husserl’s in-depth discussions of
eidetic variation, see Hua IX, §9; Hua XVII, §§97–98; and Husserl 1948,
§87.
42. For explications of the normative and even ethical dimensions of transcen-
dental phenomenology, see Heinämaa 2014 and Steinbock 1994. Also, see
Husserl’s Kaizo articles (Hua XXVII).
43. For a further defense of this view, see especially Lanei M. Rodemeyer’s and
Sara Heinämaa’s contributions to this volume.

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6 Radical Besinnung
as a Method for
Phenomenological Critique
Mirja Hartimo

Husserl famously explains the phenomenological attitude by means of

the natural attitude. The natural attitude is characterized by a “General
thesis,” a general positing of existence that gives us the naïve certainty
that the world exists. In the epoché, the natural attitude changes into
the phenomenological one, in which the Generalthesis is interrupted; the
natural attitude is thus “bracketed,” as Husserl puts it so that we can
examine how the world is given to us. The phenomenological reduction
thus reveals the “conceptual” clothing of the world, and thereby reveals
how the world – and everything in it – comes to be constituted.
In the epoché, the givenness of the world of natural attitude is exam-
ined. In Ideas II, Husserl explains how the phenomenological attitude
helps to find additional, different kinds of attitudes, as elaborated, for
example, by Andrea Staiti (2014). The task of phenomenology is, then,
a study of the constitution of the various worlds given in different kinds
of attitudes.1 The first aim of this chapter is to argue that Besinnung,
explicitly defined as the method used in Formale und transzendentale
Logik (1929), gives an access to a world, namely a teleological-historical
world, analogous to the worlds given by various other natural attitudes.
In Formal and Transcendental Logic, Besinnung thematizes specifically
the world of the exact sciences as the scientists find it in their natural
theoretical attitude.
The other aim of this chapter is then to show how Besinnung and tran-
scendental phenomenology are connected to each other so as to make
phenomenological philosophy critical. Transcendental phenomenology is
a metaphysically, and a fortiori also normatively, neutral method: the
credo is that its task is only to describe, not to postulate, reduce, or criti-
cize.2 However, especially in his later texts, Husserl makes stronger and
stronger normative claims to the extent that in the Crisis, written in the
1930s, he claims that philosophers are functionaries of humanity (Hua
VI, §7). In the midst of a host of crises (in science, culture, psychology,
rationality, humanity, and existence), philosophy is called to take the
lead and assume the responsibility for the fate of humanity.3 Husserl’s
critical endeavor increases correlatively with his emphasis on historicity,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003191483-6
 Radical Besinnung as A Method for Phenomenological Critique 81
both of which have been considered foreign to transcendental philosophy
in general, and the descriptive transcendental phenomenological method
in particular (see e.g., Carr 1970, xxxi–xxxviii; 1974). Yet Husserl is far
from renouncing the phenomenological method and the transcendental
dimension accessed by it in the Crisis. Smaranda Aldea (2016) has shown
how the tension between the two approaches can be solved in phenom-
enology by elaborating on the role of transcendental eidetics in Husserl’s
approach. In a similar spirit, in this article, I will explain how the rela-
tionship between Besinnung and transcendental phenomenology makes
possible a critical approach to understanding human action, in which the
critique is not based on external principles, but arises from a considera-
tion of activities, along with their goals and purposes.
I have elaborated on the central role of Besinnung in Formal and
Transcendental Logic and for Husserl’s view of mathematics in detail
elsewhere (Hartimo 2018, 2021).4 The purpose of this article is more
general: I hope to show how an explication of Besinnung along the lines
proposed here yields a re-reading of Husserl’s philosophy as a critical
enterprise – one that may find useful applications both within and with-
out phenomenological and/or mathematical circles. In Section  1, I  will
focus on the way in which transcendental phenomenology can be con-
strued as a study of correlation, and how this understanding of the corre-
lation necessitates an elaboration of the method(s) with which to address
the objective end(s) of the correlation. In Section 2, I will briefly explain
Husserl’s background in the 1920s debates about psychology, and how
Husserl’s Besinnung is designed to respond to them. This discussion will
also situate Besinnung within the hermeneutic tradition and will clarify
the precise sense in which Husserl’s approach is hermeneutical. The dis-
cussion should be regarded as complementary to, say, Staiti’s discussion
of neo-Kantian philosophers, especially Dilthey and Simmel (Staiti 2014).
I will draw attention to the fact that in his usage of Besinnung, Husserl’s
view bears the greatest resemblance to that of Edouard Spranger, who
was Dilthey’s student. In Section 3, I will explicate Husserl’s notion of
“radikale Besinnung” as Husserl uses it in Formal and Transcendental
Logic. It is my contention here that Husserl’s transcendental phenomeno-
logical clarification of the goals and concepts used in formal logic ren-
ders Besinnung “radical” insofar as it not only aims at describing human
action but also entails revisionary, critical aims seeking to make these
goals and concepts genuine (echt). The last section, Section 4, discusses
the nature of the resulting composite method that combines Besinnung
and transcendental phenomenology. For cultural critique, both methods
are needed: while Besinnung aims at understanding actions and practices
in terms of their historically developed goals or purposes, transcenden-
tal phenomenology has the task of clarifying these goals, explicating the
assumed presuppositions, and removing the possible confusions related
to them. Considered individually, the critical potential of both methods
82  Mirja Hartimo
easily goes unnoticed, but, in combination, they yield radical Besinnung:
an explicitly critical evaluation of the existing practices.

1. Transcendental phenomenology as the study of

correlation and the role of Besinnung as natural
attitude toward intentional history
Husserl repeatedly describes transcendental phenomenology as a study of
correlation. However, without further specification, this characterization
is ambiguous due to the variety of correlations found in his views: any
act is correlated to its object; an act of perceiving is correlated with what
is perceived; “noesis” is correlated with the “noema,” and so the act of
constitution is correlated with the constituted sense. However, in the fol-
lowing passage from the Crisis, Husserl explains that investigation of the
correlation between the experienced object and its manners of givenness
is the main task of transcendental phenomenology:

[t]he first breakthrough of this universal a priori of correlation

between experienced object and manners of givenness (which
occurred during work on my Logical Investigations around 1898)
affected me so deeply that my whole subsequent life-work has been
dominated by the task of systematically elaborating on this a priori
of correlation.
(Hua VI, 170n./166n.)

In this passage, Husserl refers to the correlation between the objective

world and our subjective ways of constituting our sense of the world.
This means that transcendental phenomenology examines the way in
which the objective world is given to us. Consequently, phenomenology
is about the phenomena as they are naturally experienced “out there”
in the world, and not about some independent realm generated by the
phenomenological reduction. The natural attitude and its description of
the world provide the transcendental phenomenological attitude with the
“data” on which it reflects.
The natural attitude is the naïve attitude in which we find ourselves
originally within our experiences. The natural attitude gives us the world
“prior to any ‘theory’ ” (Hua III, §30), or prior to any meta-philosophical
doctrine or principle. Hence, natural attitude does not recognize itself as
a specific limited attitude (Hua IV, §49d). The world of the natural atti-
tude is what we take the world to be when we go about our lives prior to
philosophizing about it.5 Thus, the phenomenological attitude looks at
the world given to us in the natural attitude and tries to make philosophi-
cal sense of it. In the natural attitude, one tries to make sense of the world
in terms of common sense and various other more specified attitudes
(such as naturalistic, personal, and aesthetic attitudes). Alternatively, in
 Radical Besinnung as A Method for Phenomenological Critique 83
the phenomenological attitude, one is able to thematize the various atti-
tudes and clarify how we have constituted the worlds given in these vari-
ous other attitudes. The difference between the two attitudes lies in their
points of view.
Describing transcendental phenomenology as a study of the givenness
of the objective world presupposes a prior conception of the objective
world. Husserl’s account of it develops considerably from his discovery
of correlation in 1898. In the Logical Investigations (1900–1901), Hus-
serl’s analysis is restricted to logic (understood in a rather specific way as
a theory of science). The idea of logic is first discussed in the Prolegom-
ena. In the subsequent six investigations, the idea of logic is subjected to
descriptive psychological, epistemological, or phenomenological analy-
ses. In Ideas I, the objective end of the correlation is the world (i.e., the
object of the natural attitude) or the object of the natural theoretical
attitude (i.e., the world(s) of sciences). For example, here Husserl points
out that the world includes objects of our theoretical investigation of
various forms and levels, such as the arithmetical attitude and the world
of arithmetic (Hua III, §28). These worlds and the phenomena pertaining
to them are the “same phenomena” that are examined in the phenom-
enological attitude so as to find out how they are constituted (Hua III, 3/
xvii). In Ideas II, Husserl further distinguishes among theoretical, valu-
ing, and practical attitudes (Hua IV, §§3, 5) – all species of the natural
attitude insofar as they are all naïve and unreflective. The practical atti-
tude is a personalistic attitude, which is our natural attitude when

we live with one another, talk to one another, shake hands with one
another in greeting, or are related to one another in love and aver-
sion, in disposition and action, in discourse and discussion.
(Hua IV, §49e)

In the personalistic attitude, persons are related to their intentional

objects by relations of motivation rather than causality (Hua IV, §50).6
These different attitudes give us different kinds of worlds. Obviously,
these worlds are not separate, constructed worlds, but different kinds
of cognitive standpoints, or “stances” with respect to the same world,
rather like the same flower can be viewed from the point of view of bot-
any, but also as an object of aesthetic appreciation (Staiti 2014, Ch. 3).
In Ideas II, Husserl speaks about empathetic understanding of the life
of other egos (§51) and discusses the role of empathy in general, but it is
only in the later Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929) that he prop-
erly discusses empathetic understanding of the purposes or goals that
other agents aim at in their activities. In Ideas II, Husserl mentions the
scientific, aesthetic, ethical, or other aims that may be set by an indi-
vidual or a social subjectivity (Hua IV, §51), and also mentions goal-
directed activities (Hua IV, §55), but his view of the human world is not
84  Mirja Hartimo
yet explicitly teleological-historical, as it is in his later writings. In these
latter works, Husserl’s analyses of the human world also include accom-
plishments of individual people who work toward realizing certain goals
that they typically inherit from their predecessors. In summary, then, we
can see that as his career progressed, Husserl’s analyses of the world of
the natural attitude became more and more nuanced and differentiated,
finally developing to include the teleological-historical world prevalent in
Husserl’s writings especially in the 1930s.7
My main claim in this chapter is this: that to account for the teleological-
historical world(s), Husserl needed another attitude or, better yet, a
method, namely Besinnung.8 Accordingly, in Formal and Transcendental
Logic (1929), Husserl introduced the methodological concept of ‘Besin-
nung’ to account for people’s historically formed goals and aims:

Besinnung signifies nothing but the attempt actually to produce

the sense “itself,”  .  .  .  , it is the attempt to convert the “intentive
sense” . . . the sense ‘vaguely floating before us’ in our unclear aim-
ing, into the fulfilled, the clear, sense, and thus to procure for it the
evidence of its clear possibility.
(Hua XVII, 13/9)

Here Husserl defines Besinnung as a kind of reflection with which the

“intentive senses,” or “goal-senses” of the sciences are explicated. As
it later turns out in Formal and Transcendental Logic, these “intentive
senses” are the goals or aims people set for themselves, whether implic-
itly or explicitly. The word “sense” (Sinn) thus acquires a meaning that
refers, beyond a sentence meaning, to the purpose or a goal of an activity.
Besinnung thus aims to understand the purpose of the activity in ques-
tion. The awareness of the goal of the practice gives a sense of purpose
for the agent; hence Besinnung has “existential” implications. Ordinar-
ily, we are not necessarily explicitly aware of the purpose of our activi-
ties. Besinnung is an attempt to explicate what is typically only “vaguely
floating before us,” thus gaining clarity with respect to the “goal-sense”
or purpose of the activity in question. What is particularly interesting is
that in order to find out about mathematicians’ goals, Husserl claims, one
should stand in, or enter, “a community of empathy with the scientists”
(Mit den Wissenschaftlern in Einfühlungsgemeinschaft stehend oder tre-
tend) (Hua XVII, 13/9). Husserl’s method thus implies an imperative to
be attentive to what others are trying to do.
Like the natural attitude, Besinnung as such has nothing to do with the
transcendental attitude.9 As Staiti (2014, 175) points out, Husserl dis-
tinguishes between the historical world as a subjective achievement and
the transcendental subjectivity whose workings give rise to the constitu-
tion of such a world. However, in the end of Formal and Transcendental
Logic, Husserl “transcendentalizes” Besinnung by raising transcendental
 Radical Besinnung as A Method for Phenomenological Critique 85
questions about the nature of inquiring reason itself (Hua XVII, §101).
This takes him ultimately to transcendental or phenomenological Bes-
innung (ibid., §§101–105) and the general problems of transcendental
phenomenology, such as intersubjectivity and time-consciousness. On
this level, Husserl’s aim is explicitly to understand the world and the
cooperating and creative human beings in it (ibid., 282/275); he does not
aim to criticize them. However, insofar as one wants to engage in the phe-
nomenology of culture, science, mathematics, or of any other historical-
teleological accomplishments of humankind, one has to stay on a level
on which one can identify the activity in question and distinguish it from
other such activities. On such a level, “natural” Besinnung is needed,
and, on such a level, Husserl’s method is explicitly critical (not only in
the Kantian sense in examining the conditions of possibility but also in
the sense of aiming at a revision of practices, as we will see in Section 4).
On such a level, Husserl’s phenomenology is intimately and urgently con-
nected to the affairs of the world. Here, Besinnung enables and obligates
the transcendental phenomenologist to critique the existing norms gov-
erning human culture.
To sum up, Besinnung is a hermeneutic endeavor to understand the
purposes of others’ (including one’s own) intentional activities within
their historical nexus. It is hermeneutical in particular in the sense that
it aims to understand the activity in terms of its purpose (as opposed to
giving a mechanistic explanation, cf. the next section of this chapter).
Besinnung, like the natural attitudes discussed in Ideas I, thus gives us
a grasp of the objective end of the correlation. The world it gives is
the teleological-historical world, which includes the goals and purposes
of people’s practices. These goals are not necessarily realized or even
realizable.
Husserl’s account of logic in the Prolegomena serves as a good exam-
ple of this. In the Prolegomena, Husserl does not merely describe the
mathematicians’ view of logic; instead, he engages in a description of
the idea of logic. Importantly, Husserl’s account of logic is a normative
account: it is a description of what mathematicians think logic should be
like. Thus, for example, Husserl describes the idea of logic to be a theory
of theories, something which is only partially realized in various existing
theories such as Riemann’s theory of manifolds, Cantor’s set theory, Lie’s
theory of transformation groups, Grassmann’s theory of extensions, and
Hamilton’s theory of quaternions. According to Husserl, none of these
theories manages to capture the ideal perfectly (Hua XVIII, §69). For
him, mathematics is a goal-directed activity aiming at something that has
not yet been achieved.10 Similarly, Husserl’s Crisis description of Galilean
mathematized nature is a description of a set of norms that guide scien-
tists. Scientists did not actually view nature as a mathematical manifold,
but such an ideal guided their conception of rationality and of what the
world should be like if it were rationally conceived.
86  Mirja Hartimo
2. Teleological versus mechanistic explanations in the
humanities and biology in the 1920s
Husserl’s development toward considering teleological history appears to
be tied to general developments in the human sciences and the philosoph-
ical discourse concerning them after World War I. Husserl, as we know
from a letter to Mahnke in 1927, claims to have been strongly influ-
enced by Dilthey, having formulated the first synthesis between his own
and Dilthey’s attempts already in 1904–1905 (HuaDok III, 459–460).
Husserl’s indebtedness to Dilthey, and to Simmel, has been discussed
elsewhere (e.g., Staiti 2014). However, Husserl explicitly introduced Bes-
innung as a method only in the 1920s, which suggests that Dilthey alone
was not enough to inspire him to do so. In this section, I wish to draw
attention to one potentially important figure for Husserl’s development,
namely the psychologist Eduard Spranger, a disciple of Dilthey’s, who
used Besinnung in a way that resembles Husserl’s approach. In a book we
know Husserl had read entitled Lebensformen: Geisteswissenschaftliche
Psychologie und Ethik der Persönlickeit (1921), Spranger distinguished
between two kinds of psychology: natural scientific and human scien-
tific psychology. An example of the former is the psychology of elements
(die Psychologie der Elemente), which examines the elements of psychic
activity without attempting to see them as parts of larger wholes. Natu-
ral scientific psychology examines, for example, representations (Vorstel-
lungen), feelings (Gefühle), and desires (Begehrungen) as meaningless
(sinnlos) material (Spranger 1921, 19). In contrast, human scientific
psychology (die geisteswissenschaftliche Psychologie) takes into account
the peculiarity of the psychic formations as they belong to meaningful
human life. In this kind of psychology, the historical world is understood
through the totalities that make human activities meaningful.

The starting point of the humanistic psychology is the totality of the

spiritual structure. As structure, we understand a totality of activi-
ties; as activities, the realization of the objective valuations. Now,
however, the spiritual total structure is meaningfully divided into
sub-structures, e.g., the structure of knowledge, the structure of tech-
nical work, the structure of the specifically religious consciousness.
(Spranger 1921, 18)

Some years later, Karl Bühler explains that such humanistic psychology
was originally founded by Dilthey already in 1894 in his Ideas Concern-
ing a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology (Ideen über eine beschreibende
und zergliedernde Psychologie, 1894) (Bühler 1927, 18). Be that as it
may, the description of the human scientific world through totalities of
human structures is, for Spranger as well as for Husserl, still within the
limits of the natural attitude. The meaningfulness of the experiences is not
 Radical Besinnung as A Method for Phenomenological Critique 87
a theoretical construction or a meta-philosophical postulation. The claim
is that in ordinary life, we spontaneously see phenomena as meaningful
prior to theorizing about phenomena. In the words of Spranger, in a pas-
sage which Husserl marked with a horizontal line:

[H]owever, I  emphasize that nothing in the subsequent pages is

merely speculative or merely constructed: the classification is based
on the faithful daily observation of real life, whose contents one can-
not philosophize about without engaging with them in deed and with
deep devotion and the dealing with history in which the responsible
best life is rooted.
(Spranger 1921, vii)

Spranger thus held that his human scientific approach was based on faith-
ful daily observation, which suggests something like Husserl’s natural
theoretical attitude toward people’s endeavors. The attitude of faithful
daily observation is natural because it describes our common sense atti-
tude toward other people’s activities. It is theoretical, because it involves
an effort to achieve a correct (faithful) understanding of them.
In biological writings, the vitalists defended a similar approach during
the 1920s. In a book written by Adolf Meyer entitled Das Wesen der
antiken Naturwissenschaft mit besonderer Berücksichtigung des Aristo-
telismus in der modernen Biologie, which Husserl likewise read, vital-
ism was identified with an Aristotelian, teleological approach (Meyer
1929, 9). Generally and somewhat roughly put, the humanities as well
as biology, in the 1920s, were divided according to whether they took
their subject matter as “sinnlos Erlebnismaterialien” or whether life was
regarded as “sinnerfüllten Leben.” In terms of explanation, the debate
was among those who sought for mechanistic explanations as opposed
to those who sought for teleological understanding of the subject matter.
Husserl’s usage of Besinnung in Formal and Transcendental Logic thus
appears to be his way of appropriating the human scientific, teleological
approach to the exact sciences. Like Spranger, Husserl approaches the
phenomena as they are given in ordinary experience. In ordinary experi-
ence, we normally understand people as having goals, aims, and values.
This is also the heart of Husserl’s view of intentional history. Human
history in this ordinary sense tells the story of purposeful people who
create, re-create, and aim to realize the goals or the ideals that give their
activities and their lives the sense that they have. The task of Besinnung
is to make these goals explicit.

3. Radical Besinnung in formal and transcendental logic

In Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929), after having defined “Besin-
nung” or sense investigation, as Dorion Cairns has translated the term,
88  Mirja Hartimo
Husserl specifies that Besinnung should be “radical” Besinnung, which
implies critique of the scientists’ activities to find out whether these activ-
ities are genuine. He writes:

Radical Besinnung, as such, is at the same time criticism for the sake
of original clarification. Here original clarification means shaping the
sense anew, not merely filling in a delineation that is already deter-
minate and structurally articulated beforehand” . . . “original Besin-
nung signifies a combination of determining more precisely the vague
predelineation, distinguishing the prejudices that derive from asso-
ciational overlappings, and cancelling those prejudices that conflict
with the clear sense-fulfilment—in a word, then: critical discrimina-
tion between the genuine and the spurious.
(Hua XVII, 14/10)

The notion of radicality with regard to Besinnung makes the latter evalu-
ative and requires reflection on what the exact scientists should do, that
is, reflection on what would be the genuine goal of their activities.11 In
order to make Besinnung radical, Husserl combines it with a transcen-
dental phenomenological point of view.
In the first part of Formal and Transcendental Logic, Husserl explains
in detail how this takes place regarding the exact sciences. Husserl intro-
duces Besinnung to understand the exact scientists’ ultimate goals. This
presupposes excavating the history of formal sciences, from the ancients
onward, in the attempt to capture the “point” of these sciences and how
these goals are situated within the tradition of the formal sciences. The
result is his view of formal logic that is characterized by two normative
aims: non-contradictoriness and truth. In other words, it is an examina-
tion of mathematicians’ and logicians’ epistemic values as well as more
specific normative goals.
Transcendental logic (i.e., the transcendental phenomenological exam-
ination of formal logic), discussed in the second part of the work, brings
Husserl to examine the kinds of evidence connected to these goals. Hus-
serl’s transcendental reflections showed that pure mathematics is guided
by what he calls Evidenz of distinctness (Deutlichkeit). In contrast, logic,
aiming at critically verified judgments, aims at having the objects them-
selves in the Evidenz of clarity (Klarheit).12
Clarification and reflection on these different kinds of evidence will
then take Husserl to criticize the basic concepts of the sciences and to
uncover different kinds of presuppositions of logic. Transcendental logic
reveals that mathematicians and logicians are not always clear about
what they are doing, and, consequently, “internal shiftings of intention-
ality” may lead to equivocations (Hua XVII, §70a):
 Radical Besinnung as A Method for Phenomenological Critique 89
Every productive doing involves intention and actualization. One
can consider this doing itself and what it involves, and assure oneself
of the identity between its purpose and the actualization that fulfils
its purpose. In naïve intending and doing, the aiming can shift, as it
can in a naïve repetition of that activity and in any other going back
to something previously striven for and attained. Turning reflectively
from the only themes given straightforwardly (which may become
importantly shifted) to the activity constituting them with its aiming
and fulfilment—the activity that is hidden . . . throughout the naïve
doing and only now becomes a theme in its own right—we examine
that activity after the fact. That is to say, we examine the evidence
awakened by our reflection, we ask it what it was aiming at and
what it acquired; and, in the evidence belonging to a higher level, we
identify and fix, or we trace, the possible variations owing to vacil-
lations of theme that had previously gone unnoticed, and distinguish
the corresponding aimings and actualizations,—in other words, the
shifting processes of forming concepts that pertain to logic.
(Hua XVII, §69)

This passage captures the main idea of the transcendental logic. It is to

turn from the straightforward, natural attitude to reflecting on the way
it is constituted. This reflection clarifies the shifts that lead to problem-
atic verbal equivocations. Once the transcendental phenomenology has
revealed and clarified these confusions, the phenomenological philoso-
pher may correct such equivocations (Hua XVII, §70a). Thus, Husserl
declares explicitly that the transcendental logic has a critical aim:

[T]hat such evidence—evidence of every sort—should be reflectively

considered, reshaped, analyzed, purified, and improved; and that
afterwards it can be, and ought to be, taken as an exemplary pattern,
a norm.
(Hua XVII, §69)

These clarified kinds of Evidenz are then taken as a norm for subse-
quent inquiry. Critical reflection on the kinds of evidence sought in logic
and mathematics led Husserl to distinguish between three different kinds
of evidence and, consequently, between the three levels of logic (grammar,
non-contradiction, and truth), and respectively three different modes of
empty expectant intention and of fulfillment (Hua XVII, §70a).13 These
clarifications are normative; they suggest revisions of existing practices.
This critique results in a “concomitant fixing of terminology” so that
the concepts may then persist “as acquisitions in the realm of habit”
(Hua XVII, §70b). The phenomenological philosopher is thus supposed
90  Mirja Hartimo
to fix the concepts used in the existing practices. The ultimate purpose of
transcendental phenomenology is thus to criticize and clarify the funda-
mental concepts of sciences so that they accord with the clarified norma-
tive aims. The revised concepts should then be adopted so that their use
becomes habitual in scientific practices. Thus, Husserl’s ultimate aim is
to revise scientific practices and transcendental logic is assigned the task
of seeking

the pure essential norms of science in all its essential formations, to

give the sciences fundamental guidance thereby and to make possible
for them genuineness in shaping their methods and in rendering an
account of every step.
(Hua XVII, 3/3)

For it to be able to give the sciences the necessary guidance, transcen-

dental logic has to rely on prior Besinnung of the goals and aims of the
sciences. This ties phenomenological critique to the reality of scientific
practices (see Hartimo 2020). Transcendental logic then examines these
goals and their presuppositions so as to find out whether they are genuine
(echt), to use Husserl’s term. The primary aims of transcendental logic
are to sort out conceptual confusions and to ensure that the “points” of
the activities, found out by means of Besinnung, make genuine sense.
Transcendental logic thus reveals and clarifies what mathematics and
logic should aim at and should be about. It thus radicalizes Husserl’s
Besinnung in the sense that it aims not only to understand scientific prac-
tices but also to evaluate and revise them.

4.  Phenomenology as critique

Husserl thus uses Besinnung to explicate the goal-senses that direct and
motivate the scientists’ work. However, its use is not limited to science,
but it is a method with which to evaluate any rational, goal-directed
activity. It is a hermeneutical method in attempting to understand the
activities as goal-directed doings. Transcendental phenomenology, in
turn, reveals the kinds of evidence and the presuppositions these activities
exhibit. Together, these two methods enable the philosopher to engage in
inner critique, that is, critique on the basis of the reflection on these activ-
ities themselves instead through a comparison with some external stand-
ards or measures. Using these both methods, the philosopher may suggest
revisions to the activities to correct them. This will take place by rais-
ing transcendental questions about straightforward goal-directed activi-
ties. In the transcendental attitude, the constitution of senses and goals
revealed by Besinnung are studied in their intentional historicity. They
are typically sedimented in our consciousness as habitual beliefs that we
have learned from previous generations. In transcendental analysis, these
 Radical Besinnung as A Method for Phenomenological Critique 91
implicit presuppositions are made explicit so that their “genuineness”
can be evaluated. The role of transcendental phenomenology is thus to
provide an alternative point of view to the results of Besinnung so that, in
combination, the two methods yield suggestions for revision and renewal
of our goals and concepts, and eventually practices.
Transcendental phenomenology does not provide us with an incor-
rigible foundation with which to criticize activities. The reason is that
transcendental phenomenology offers nothing more than an alternative
point of view from which we can examine what is given in the natural
attitude. Hence, it includes everything, even the false ideals that keep us
captive in the natural attitude. They are sedimented in our consciousness
in passive layers that are then clarified in transcendental phenomenology.
Once clarified, they can be revised. The virtue of transcendental phenom-
enology is the way in which it provides a point of view from which we
can hope to notice the one-sidedness of some of our concepts and goals.
It enables looking at them from outside the naïve natural attitude, hence
in relation to other goals, to evidences, and to the lifeworld, but without
fabricating an artificial external measure of objectivity. This reflection is
never finished: there is no ideal state or mechanism that could conclu-
sively settle the correctness of our thought.
In the Crisis, Husserl presents philosophers as “functionaries of man-
kind” who engage in Selbst-Besinnung and Rückbesinnung of the sense
of modern rationality. In short, this means explicating and renewing the
original goals that determine the modern project, which precedes us and
yet is given to us as our project. Hence, Besinnung takes on the prefixes
“Selbst” and “Rück.” The task of philosophy thus understood is to expli-
cate and evaluate the normative commitments, goals, and values that we
have inherited from the previous generations. Explicating them brings
them “to light” so that they can be questioned. The ultimate aim is to
free us from unexamined normative “iron cages” (to borrow an expres-
sion from Weber’s Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism from
1930) so that we can use our own reason genuinely and responsibly.
Husserl’s original or radical Besinnung is thus a critical enterprise. It is
what the philosophers as “functionaries of humanity” (Funktionäre der
Menschheit) (Hua VI, 15/17) have a responsibility to practice.

Notes
1. This view of phenomenology is clearly and concisely presented in Sokolowski
(2000): “Philosophy begins when we take up a new stance toward our natu-
ral attitude and all its involvements. When we engage in philosophy, we
stand back and contemplate what it is to be truthful and to achieve evidence.
We contemplate the natural attitude, and hence we take up a viewpoint
outside it. This move of standing back is done through the transcendental
reduction. Instead of being simply concerned with objects and their features,
92  Mirja Hartimo
we think about the correlation between the things being disclosed and the
dative to whom they are manifested. Within the transcendental reductions,
we also carry out an eidetic reduction and express structures that hold not
just for ourselves, but for every subjectivity that is engaged in evidencing
and truth.” (186)
2. To be sure, the neutrality of description does not preclude phenomenologists
from describing metaphysical and normative beliefs. The neutrality of the
descriptive method means that phenomenologists are not supposed to take
any stands about what there is. The metaphysical neutrality of phenomenol-
ogy has been emphasized, for example, by David Carr (1999, esp. 134) and
Steven Crowell (2001, esp. 237).
3. See, for example, Buckley (1992), Moran (2000), and more recently Hef-
fernan (2017).
4. Some parts of this article draw from Hartimo 2021, and especially its Chap-
ter 1. Reprinted with permission.
5. A very nice and concise introductory description of the natural attitude can
be found in Sokolowski (2000, 42–47). For a detailed view about the impor-
tance of the natural attitude and, for example, how it makes the subjectivity
human, see Staiti (2015, 69–85). See also Luft (1998).
6. For further discussion on the distinction between the naturalistic and the
personalistic attitude see, for example, Nenon (2010), Jacobs (2014), and
Heinämaa (2018). A  helpful discussion of the motivational causality as
opposed to natural causality can be found also in Staiti (2014, 214–219).
7. For a detailed discussion of the development of Husserl’s concept of the
world, see Carr (2014).
8. The importance of Besinnung is missing from Staiti (2014). Consequently,
Staiti views phenomenology ultimately as a humanistic worldview “charac-
terized by a deconstructive genealogy of naturalism (pars destruens) and a
positive affirmation of the operative, world-constituting nature of transcen-
dental subjectivity (pars construens).” (288) In contrast, the present claim
is that phenomenological philosophy as a radical Besinnung is a method for
active critical reflection on the affairs in the world. Whereas Staiti’s phe-
nomenologist looks at the world with heightened understanding, the phe-
nomenologist, construed along the present lines, actively participates in the
worldly affairs and is called to suggest revisions if needed.
9. If one wants to insist that all Besinnung is transcendental (which does not
follow from Husserl’s definition of it in Formal and Transcendental Logic),
the structure of Formal and Transcendental Logic cannot be understood.
The first part of the book is about the historically given sense of mathematics
as opposed to that of logic. It aims at the explication of the “proper sense of
formal logic,” which is explicitly said to be the aim of Besinnung (Hua XVII,
14/10). Only in the second part does Husserl start to raise transcendental
questions about the topic of the first part. To be sure, the two parts are inter-
related so that for example the kinds of Evidenz referred to in the first part
are clarified kinds of Evidenz, thus they presuppose the second part.
10. In fact, then, Husserl was pursuing an intentional history already in the
Prolegomena. He was explicating the intentional sense of the mathemati-
cians of his time. He viewed human activities and especially the sciences as
developing in a certain direction, toward a goal. This goal, as he might later
have put it, gave mathematical activities their “final” sense (Zwecksinn).
Thus, for Husserl, mathematics, and the sciences in general, do not merely
develop and grow blindly, but they are intentionally developed by individu-
als in certain ways and with certain goals in sight. Accordingly, in Husserl’s
 Radical Besinnung as A Method for Phenomenological Critique 93
view, mathematicians do not construct unrelated theories of matters that
arbitrarily interest them, but they are actually trying to achieve something
that contributes to a comprehensive goal. In the Prolegomena, Husserl iden-
tifies one of these goals to be a theory of theories – that is, the construction
of a formal framework within which the mutual relationships of different
formal theories can be understood (Hua XVIII, §72).
11. Right after the above quoted passage on radical Besinnung, Husserl con-
cludes: “[s]o much by way of a most general characterization of the aim
and method of this essay. It is, accordingly, an intentional explication of the
proper sense of formal logic.” (Hua XVII, 14/10) Thus, Husserl explicitly
claims that Besinnung of the genuine sense of logic is his aim and method in
Formale und transzendentale Logik.
2. For a detailed discussion of Husserl’s view of evidences, see Heffernan
1
(1983, 1989); see also Hartimo (2021).
13. Accordingly, for example, he explains his progress with the following words
in the Introduction: “It struck me that the evidence of truths comprised in
formal mathematics (and also of truths comprised in syllogistics) is entirely
different from that of other a priori truths, in that the former do not need
any intuition of objects or predicatively formed affair-complexes as concrete
examples, even though they do relate to these, albeit with the universality of
empty forms.” (Hua XVII, 16/12)

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7 A Phenomenological
Critique of Critical
Phenomenology
Lanei M. Rodemeyer

1. What is phenomenology?
The term “critical phenomenology” has been making the rounds lately.
The term itself – and the manner in which it often is expressed – implies
that it represents a new approach either within, or distinct from, phenom-
enology itself. But what is it? Is “critical phenomenology” a new method-
ology, either altogether or partially? Or is it a new focus or dimension of
“traditional” or “classical” phenomenology, perhaps attending to differ-
ent content than usually addressed? In order to address these questions,
we have to start at the beginning: What is phenomenology?
The volume 50 Concepts for a Critical* Phenomenology, edited by
Gail Weiss, Ann V. Murphy, and Gayle Salamon, offers an apparently
distressing response to this question at the beginning of their Introduc-
tion. The editors state that

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception begins with

a question: “What is phenomenology?” Nearly three-quarters of a
century later, this question remains unanswered.
(Weiss, Murphy and Salamon 2020, xiii)

Fortunately, they do offer a definition of phenomenology later on in

their Introduction, even though it is not proclaimed as such:

One of phenomenology’s most axiomatic methodological commit-

ments is the refusal to accept the taken-for-grantedness of experi-
ence. . . . Phenomenology is marked by a faith that such descriptions
[of lived experience] can disclose the most basic structures of human
existence, including temporality, perception, language, and inter-
subjectivity. As these structures are brought into relief, our under-
standing of our own experiences is transformed, and our deepest
assumptions about our very being in the world may be challenged.
(ibid.)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003191483-7
96  Lanei M. Rodemeyer
Here we find a productive description – even possibly a definition – of
phenomenology as a method: Phenomenology employs in-depth descrip-
tions of lived experiences in order to bring to the fore those essential
structures that make experiences possible. The method, then, is not just
description. Rather, it begins with description. What follows, however, is
what makes phenomenology an actual method: the identification of those
structures that must necessarily be in play for those experiences to take
place. If we were simply to describe and generalize, we would be per-
forming a very poor science indeed (generalizing on the basis of a single
or small sample); rather, what makes phenomenology the powerful tool
that it is is its shift from the concrete, particular instance, to the essential
meaningful structures that underlie it.1 In other words, phenomenology
does not focus only on the tendencies of real, experienced objects, nor
does it exclusively address formal structures. Instead, phenomenology
combines these two realms by recognizing that the formal rules for the
existence or appearance of experienced phenomena can be identified
through a study of the phenomena themselves. So, when we take a par-
ticular moment of listening to an enduring tone, for instance, we do not
determine what a tone “is,” or what music or sound is as an “essence.”
Our phenomenological analysis actually points us to the structure of
inner time-consciousness, without which we would be unable to experi-
ence the enduring tone at all. Phenomenology is a shift from experience
to the structures that make that experience, or that type of experience,
possible. Thus, it is a type of reflection on the essential structures of our
experiences.
The 50 Concepts volume begins with two chapters that are intended
to set the stage for the remaining 48 chapters: The subsequent chap-
ters are organized alphabetically, each dealing with a different concept,
while the first two stand relatively on their own, presenting the phenom-
enological method and critical phenomenology, respectively.2 These first
two chapters underscore the definition of phenomenology that we see in
the volume’s introduction. Duane H. Davis, in “The Phenomenological
Method” says, for example, that phenomenology is “a rigorous quest
asking after the essential structures of appearances,” (Davis 2020, 5). He
turns toward the notions of “intentionality,” the “epoché,” the “phe-
nomenological and eidetic reductions,” and “transcendental subjectiv-
ity” as key aspects of the phenomenological method (we should note
that some of these terms are methodological while others are structural).
Lisa Guenther, in the chapter Critical Phenomenology, defines phenom-
enology as “a philosophical practice of reflecting on the transcendental
structures that make the lived experience of consciousness possible and
meaningful” (Guenther 2020, 11). She turns to the “transcendental ego”
as an essential starting point for phenomenological analysis, since “there
is no experience, and hence no meaningful experience, without someone
who does the experiencing” (ibid., emphasis in original). We see here a
general agreement, that phenomenology is a descriptive and reflective
 A Phenomenological Critique of Critical Phenomenology 97
method that examines lived experiences in order to reveal the essential
structures that make those experiences possible and meaningful.
The very definition of phenomenology, however, already reveals it as
a critical enterprise. By pointing out the essential structures that under-
lie our experiences, we learn that there is “more than meets the eye” to
any experience, that experiences are enabled by processes and structures
other than the experiences themselves, and that our analyses of these pro-
cesses and structures can open up insights that surprise and destabilize
us. As a method, it is inherently critical, since it intends to reveal the very
foundations of our presumptions and to describe how those foundations
become part of our everyday experiences. Given this, we are right to ask,
as indicated earlier, whether “critical phenomenology” is introducing a
method beyond the critical one already embedded in phenomenology, or
whether it identifies itself as “critical” because it is directed toward a dif-
ferent set of contents than those usually selected by traditional phenom-
enologists. In order to determine the answer, we turn to the definitions
and descriptions of “critical phenomenology” offered in the Introduction
and these first two chapters of 50 Concepts.

2. What is critical phenomenology?

In the Introduction to 50 Concepts, Weiss, Murphy, and Salamon place
“critical phenomenology” within the context of Husserl’s phenomenol-
ogy. They point to Husserl’s structure of foreground and background,
and his descriptions of horizons, as expressions of phenomenological
insights that recognize how meanings that have not been created or rec-
ognized by an individual subject can nonetheless influence that subject.

These horizons actively inform our experience and for the most part
do so prereflectively, without our explicit awareness. Nonetheless,
they exert substantial influence in determining what becomes the fig-
ure and what remains the ground.
(Weiss, Murphy and Salamon 2020, xiv)

We are born into horizons of meanings, where certain meanings are

already foregrounded for us. We can be blind to the meanings in the
background – and we often are – for the very reason that these meanings
provide the grounds for other meanings rather than being highlighted
themselves.
Davis, in the first chapter of 50 Concepts, also situates the critical
potential of Husserl’s phenomenology in a discussion of foreground,
background, and horizons:

Clearly phenomenology is keen to disclose the essential structures of

phenomena situated in a matrix of relations sometimes referred to as
a ground for a figure, an intentional horizon, or as the lifeworld. . . .
98  Lanei M. Rodemeyer
Husserl wants this reflexivity to be metaphysically adequate yet
critical.
(Davis 2020, 6)

So Husserl’s phenomenology, and especially his discussions of hori-

zons, foreground/background, and the lifeworld, is already critical: It
provides a methodology that is able to investigate the influences that
motivate the constitution of certain types of objects and subjects over
others.
Guenther speaks in more general terms about the promise of phenom-
enology to be critical:

[Phenomenology] lights up the transcendental structures that we rely

upon to make sense of things but which we routinely fail to acknowl-
edge. In other words, phenomenology points us in a critical direction.
(Guenther 2020, 11–12)

For Guenther, then, while phenomenology may not itself be already

critical, it provides some of the necessary groundwork for establishing
a critical phenomenology. Phenomenology’s method of “highlighting”
those structures that enable our experiences, and its tendency to bring to
light those aspects (and structures) that we usually do not recognize, are
what “point” us toward critical phenomenology. Yet, it is crucial to note
that these very qualities are what Weiss et al and Davis identify as already
critical in Husserl’s phenomenology.
However, in spite of the homage paid to Husserl as a founder of the
phenomenological approach and the acknowledgment of the critical
nature of his phenomenology, when these authors offer their definitions
of “critical phenomenology,” each of them makes a decidedly clear move
away from what they have described as phenomenology or “classical
phenomenology” – and implicitly, yet effectively, away from Husserl.
In fact, while their definitions vary from one another, what is uniform
in each of these texts is their positioning of Husserl’s phenomenology as
precisely what critical phenomenology moves beyond.
When Weiss, Murphy, and Salamon describe “critical phenomenol-
ogy,” their definition reflects a Foucauldian and activist approach, rather
than a phenomenological one:

A critical phenomenology draws attention to the multiple ways in

which power moves through our bodies and our lives. It is also an
ameliorative phenomenology that seeks not only to describe but also
to repair the world, encouraging generosity, respect, and compassion
for the diversity of our lived experiences. Such a project . . . requires
coalitional labor and solidarity across difference.
(Weiss, Murphy and Salamon 2020, xiv)
 A Phenomenological Critique of Critical Phenomenology 99
Taken at face value, this description does not seem particularly phe-
nomenological. Rather it appears to follow Foucault’s project of high-
lighting discourse and power relations as a means to reveal how certain
types of bodies and sexualities are able to appear. It adds a political
or ethical dimension in the move to “repair” the world. However, the
authors see this project as inspired by phenomenological insights, and as
employing phenomenological description:

Contemporary phenomenologists increasingly recognize that these

foreclosures are a function of structural, political, and institutional
inequities that are internalized as personal biases and habits. This
insight has inspired a critical phenomenology, one that mobilizes
phenomenological description in the service of a reflexive inquiry
into how power relations structure experience as well as our ability
to analyze that experience.
(ibid.)

So, according to these descriptions, critical phenomenology is inspired

by the phenomenological approach, and even is decidedly phenomeno-
logical, but it moves beyond phenomenology in two ways: First, it inte-
grates analyses of power relations, institutional biases, etc., in order to
reveal how they play out in individual experience and self-experience.
Second, it builds upon these insights in order to develop an ethical or
political stance that reveals and attempts to remove those biases and stag-
nated habits that are harmful either individually or socially.
Since these new directions of “critical” phenomenology are said to
be inspired by “contemporary phenomenologists,” these claims make it
seem as if traditional phenomenology were never applied to analyses of
institutional bias or ethical questions. And this implication is further bol-
stered in the first two chapters of the volume: In The Phenomenological
Method, Davis’ shift away from Husserl’s phenomenology is rather sub-
tle. While spending quite a bit of effort describing important aspects of
Husserl’s phenomenology as well as demonstrating its historical value, he
turns toward the “existential phenomenologists” – whom he identifies as
Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, de Beauvoir, and Sartre (Davis 2020, 4) – as
most promising for a critical phenomenology.

Following the existential phenomenologists, let us recognize the

praxical promise of this instability and encroachment rather than
regarding it as something to be overcome through a purification
process.
(Davis 2020, 8)

Having identified Husserl’s project as a “purification project” already

(Davis 2020, 5), Davis is separating Husserl off from the “existential
100  Lanei M. Rodemeyer
phenomenologists,” whom he describes as having “expanded upon Hus-
serl’s position,” exploring intentionality in ways “not restricted to its
epistemological formulation” (Davis 2020, 4). So, where we see a turn
to “contemporary phenomenologists” in the description of “critical phe-
nomenology” by Weiss, Murphy, and Salamon, with Davis it becomes
clear that the shift toward “critical phenomenology” is simply a shift
away from Husserl toward “existential phenomenologists.” According
to Davis, Husserl’s project involves too much “purification” of the indi-
vidual subject, while other phenomenologists (Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty,
de Beauvoir, and Sartre) are viable resources for critical phenomenology.
Davis’ definition of critical phenomenology focuses on a recognition of
intersectionality. If phenomenology is going to be truly critical, accord-
ing to Davis, it must move beyond analyses that purify the subject as an
individual, and take up the multiple identities that intersect and weave
through individual subjects. Similar to Weiss et al., he also positions criti-
cal phenomenology as a sociopolitical project:

In order to achieve a critical phenomenology, phenomenology must

be seen as a philosophy of difference rather than identity. Or, to put
it another way, when our personal identity is disclosed to be inter-
sectional, we can come to disclose our sociopolitical identities as the
difference of differences.
(Davis 2020, 8)

So, for Davis, critical phenomenology needs to recognize intersection-

ality in its analyses of individuality, and in doing so, it can become a
sociopolitical project in addition to a phenomenological one. Once again,
however, it is implied that this “critical” version of phenomenology is
something that Husserl’s phenomenology cannot do, that it is an out-
come that moves beyond Husserl’s project rather than being executable
within it. This becomes even clearer in Guenther’s chapter on Critical
Phenomenology. Guenther draws a clear line between “classical phe-
nomenology” and “critical phenomenology”:

But where classical phenomenology remains insufficiently critical

is in failing to give an equally rigorous account of how contingent
historical and social structures also shape our experience, not just
empirically or in a piecemeal fashion, but in what we might call a
quasi-transcendental fashion.
(Guenther 2020, 12)

A bit later she explicitly argues:

A crucial difference between classical and critical phenomenology is

the degree to which intentionality is understood as the orientation
of an intentional act (noesis) toward an intentional object (noema),
 A Phenomenological Critique of Critical Phenomenology 101
where noesis constitutes noema without being reciprocally consti-
tuted by it, or as a relation in which feedback loops interweave noetic
processes with a noematic field and vice versa.
(ibid.)

Now, my own understanding of classical phenomenology usually

includes several contributors, namely Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-
Ponty, Sartre, de Beauvoir, and a few others. I might specify that some
have an existential bent, but all of them follow the definition of phenom-
enology that we identified above quite closely. But for Guenther, “classi-
cal phenomenology” becomes simply a reference to Husserl. Immediately
following the citation above, she continues,

Husserl takes the former position [where noesis constitutes noema

without being reciprocally constituted by it], Merleau-Ponty the lat-
ter [a relation in which feedback loops interweave noetic processes
with a noematic field and vice versa].
(ibid.)

And she continues to identify Husserl as unhelpful to critical phenome-

nology whereas Merleau-Ponty can contribute substantially: “But his tran-
scendental idealism leads Husserl to make some rather unhelpful claims
for the project of critical phenomenology” (ibid.). She continues later on to
propose that Merleau-Ponty offers a different or even contrary approach:

Merleau-Ponty’s account of the relation between noesis and noema,

and his later account of the chiasmatic structure of intercorporeal
Being-in-the-world, offers a more promising starting point for criti-
cal phenomenology because it acknowledges the weight of the world
without treating it as an inexorable determinative force. In other
words, Merleau-Ponty shows how the world shapes consciousness,
without depriving consciousness of the agency to shape the world in
return. I don’t think critical phenomenology can get off the ground
without these two insights.
(Guenther 2020, 13)

For Guenther, then, critical phenomenology is a clear progression away

from “classical” (or rather, Husserl’s) phenomenology by virtue of its
ability to recognize the mutual influence of consciousness and world, of
noesis and noema. Further, Merleau-Ponty is an essential contributor to
this insight and the development of critical phenomenology, while Hus-
serl decidedly is not. Moreover, for Guenther, critical phenomenology has
the added dimension of activism that we saw in the editors’ Introduction:

Critical phenomenology goes beyond classical phenomenology by

reflecting on the quasi-transcendental social structures that make our
102  Lanei M. Rodemeyer
experience of the world possible and meaningful, and also by engag-
ing in a material practice of “restructuring the world” in order to
generate new and liberatory possibilities for meaningful experience
and existence.
(Guenther 2020, 15)

Guenther concludes her piece with a resounding call to action that

implicates classical phenomenology as not activist: “In other words, the
ultimate goal of critical phenomenology is not just to interpret the world,
but also to change it” (Guenther 2020, 16). Thus, Guenther sees “critical
phenomenology” as significantly different from “classical phenomenol-
ogy,” in several ways: 1) how it understands the mutual relation of con-
sciousness and world, 2) its sociopolitical bent, and 3) its call to action.
Further, she appears to equate “classical phenomenology” with Husserl’s
phenomenology. So once again, Husserl’s phenomenology is rejected
as a productive resource for critical phenomenology, even though it is
acknowledged for its historical starting point of or contribution to an
approach that has moved beyond it.
As a Husserlian scholar who has made a point to apply Husserl’s phe-
nomenology to a multitude of contemporary (and, I  dare say, critical)
topics and problems, I take issue with what I see as a conclusive move
away from Husserl in these descriptions of critical phenomenology.
Before I respond to this issue, however, I think it is important to consider
the definition of “critical” phenomenology as it arises in these texts, espe-
cially in light of the questions that I asked earlier.
According to the texts we have been considering, “critical phenom-
enology” includes the following components: a) It identifies and ana-
lyzes essential structures that are social, historical, and/or institutional
in nature, leading Guenther to refer to these as “quasi-transcendental”
structures; b) It understands subjectivity through the multiple identities
that are assigned, enforced, recognized, and/or taken up by individual
persons, opening itself up to intersectionality, as Davis describes; c) It
looks at how power and/or social structures influence the constitution of
subjectivity and individual subjects, and how these constitutions affect
the lived experiences of different types of subjects, as emphasized by
Weiss, Murphy, Salamon, and Guenther, and implied by Davis’ reference
to intersectionality; and d) it includes an ethical, political, and/or activ-
ist component that seeks change in those structures that cause harm to
individuals and groups.
The question now is how this definition of “critical” phenomenology
is compared to “classical,” or more narrowly, Husserl’s phenomenology.

3.  A critical response to critical phenomenology

Let us first return to some of the questions asked earlier: Is “critical”
phenomenology a new method? As is clear in the texts we have addressed
 A Phenomenological Critique of Critical Phenomenology 103
earlier, critical phenomenology continues to employ the method of analyz-
ing individual experiences in order to determine the structures that make
them possible, so it is not a new method. While the authors each draw a
line between what they consider “classical” and “critical” phenomenol-
ogy, they also each describe a method that begins with experience in
some way and then, on the basis of descriptions of that experience, shifts
to some type of structure that supports, enables, or makes that experience
possible. Critical phenomenology, then, is still phenomenology. Now, of
course, in critical phenomenology we see a focus on social, historical, and
institutional structures rather than those structures that underlie individ-
ual or transcendental consciousness. But the method remains the same,
even if the lens of the project has a different focus. And we might recog-
nize that some theorists may carry out this method better than others – as
is also the case with classical phenomenology. Any project that simply
describes experiences would not be phenomenology – whether we con-
sider it “classical” or “critical” – if it lacks a careful attunement to under-
lying essential structures. For this reason, I appreciate Guenther’s use of
the term “quasi-transcendental structures” as a way to identify how the
structures identified in a critical phenomenological enterprise are socio-
logical, institutional, historical, etc. rather than structures of transcen-
dental consciousness, while still recognizing that they are structures.3
But this returns us to the other question asked earlier: Does critical
phenomenology address a new set of contents? On the one hand, much
of the work of Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and others
usually begins with attention to the individual subject, the embodied sub-
ject, the transcendental ego, and/or Dasein. Such attention to individual
subjectivity can be problematic if taken in isolation. I also believe that,
quite often, “classical” phenomenology (and especially Husserl’s work)
has been hastily dismissed based upon the presumption that such a focus
on individual subjectivity is all that “classical” phenomenology (or Hus-
serl) has done or can do. If this were the case, we would have to conclude
that critical phenomenology does engage with a new set of contents.
However, and on the other hand, it is unquestionable that each of these
“classical” philosophers  – including Husserl  – turns to the influences
and restrictions upon the meanings and embodiments that we take up,
carrying out analyses of the social, historical, and/or institutional mean-
ings that can overlay or determine individual experiences: Husserl stud-
ies how communal meanings become embedded or obfuscated through
historical appropriation as well as how social agreement can determine
individual constitution; Heidegger examines how certain theoretical
traditions can lead to misrepresentations of individuality and history;
Merleau-Ponty challenges the sociohistorical embeddedness of empirical
and Gestalt psychologies, as well as the effects of their approaches on the
understanding of pathologies and those who live with them; and Sartre
makes clear the importance of our social and historical “immanence” in
the constitution of our subjectivity. Simply put, each of the “classical”
104  Lanei M. Rodemeyer
phenomenologists  – whether you define them as the group just listed
earlier (adding or subtracting certain individual theorists as you see fit),
or whether you assign only Husserl to that category – is already doing
“critical” phenomenology. Allow me to explain further.
If someone wanted to draw a clear line of distinction between “criti-
cal” and “classical” phenomenology, they might argue that contempo-
rary work in “critical” phenomenology often begins already with social,
historical, and/or institutional analyses, rather than a discussion of indi-
vidual subjectivity. They also might point out that there is an ethical
or activist dimension very much at the forefront of the goals of con-
temporary “critical” phenomenological analyses. This also may be true.
However, these arguments cannot ignore the fact that the “classical”
phenomenologists had ethical or activist goals, too, and for some of
them – or for some of their projects – analyses of social, historical, and/or
institutional structures were at the forefront: Husserl did much work on
ethics, and his Crisis as well as Ideas II are clearly oriented toward social
changes in the sciences; Heidegger’s work challenges the very notions
of objectivity and subjectivity, pointing to the discursive and historical
meanings embedded in them; Sartre manifestly wished to establish an
ethical structure within his phenomenological ontology; Merleau-Ponty’s
work was geared to make progressive changes in psychology and diag-
nostic approaches; and de Beauvoir’s work was intentionally directed
toward major social changes with regard to gender. In fact, de Beauvoir
examines the social structures and institutions that render “woman” as
a certain type of constructed subjectivity with limits and infringements
not expected of the standard (male) conscious subject. So, clearly, much
of the work of the “classical” phenomenologists was already critical, in
a variety of ways.
I admit to arguing strongly here that “classical phenomenology” is
already critical, but I  am not trying to dismiss or diminish the general
impact of what Weiss, Murphy, Salamon, Davis, and Guenther clearly
see as a distinction between “classical” and “critical” phenomenology,
even as I  take issue with the specifics. I  recognize that the “critical”
phenomenology that they each describe is intently focused upon institu-
tional powers and enacting social change, and that this is a very impor-
tant focus that can be made quite powerful when carried out through a
phenomenological approach. Nevertheless, in all of their descriptions,
whether directly stated or not, seems to be the presumption that “criti-
cal” phenomenology must be carried out post-Foucault or in conjunc-
tion with queer theory, critical race theory, disability studies, and other
theoretical approaches that address marginalized and/or oppressed lived
experiences. Given this, then “classical” phenomenology would be any
phenomenology that does not integrate these other theoretical insights
or approaches into its analyses, and “critical” phenomenology would be
any phenomenology that takes Foucault’s conclusions and/or the other
 A Phenomenological Critique of Critical Phenomenology 105
emerging theories just mentioned into account. While I find that the inte-
gration of Foucauldian insights as well as those gained from queer, femi-
nist, critical race, disability, trans, etc. theorists into phenomenology can
be overwhelmingly productive in many ways, my point remains rather
stodgily the same: I argue that the phenomenological inquiries that were
carried out prior to the appearance of Foucault’s work and related critical
theories still often had both socially and ethically critical aims, motives,
and outcomes. This is despite the fact that, for obvious reasons of chro-
nology, they had the disadvantage of not having access to the more recent
critical approaches and insights that are available to us today. On this
basis, I find that this earlier, “classical” critical phenomenology was very
much in line with the definition of critical phenomenology we see here.
There are additional reasons that phenomenological analyses carried
out in the style and focus of “classical” phenomenology should not be
considered distinct from “critical” phenomenology: “Classical” phe-
nomenological work is often laying the groundwork precisely for more
explicit “critical” work. Without analyses of the constitution of subjec-
tivity, subjective pathologies, Dasein’s relation to the world and time,
our immanence and transcendence in individual and social spheres, etc.,
we cannot ground concretely critical work addressing power structures,
institutional constitutions and biases, or restorative ethical programs.
Given this, classical phenomenology is not simply an outdated predeces-
sor, but rather it provides the foundational methodological groundwork
for more explicit critical phenomenology as well as carrying out critical
analyses in its own right. In fact, “classical” phenomenology opens the
door to critical phenomenologies unrelated to Foucaultian influences:
Critical thinkers such as Alfred Schütz, Hannah Arendt, and members
of the Frankfurt School developed powerful critical phenomenologies
that incorporated other frameworks, such as Marxist thought or Weber’s
work, while remaining grounded in “classical” phenomenology. This
points to a problematic effect of distinguishing “classical” from “criti-
cal” phenomenology: When “classical” phenomenology is cordoned off
from what is “critical,” then it appears relatively “uncritical,” and thus
this move misrepresents many projects that fall under the heading of
“classical” phenomenology. Further, it not only erases the critical work
already carried out within “classical” phenomenology, but also dismisses
the essential groundwork that it carries out for “critical” phenomenol-
ogy as well as its influence on and contribution to other types of criti-
cal phenomenologies. While on occasion we may find truly “uncritical”
phenomenology in the sense that there is an explicit or implicit rejection
of any critical theoretical approaches (and I admit that these projects do
exist), it is clear that these projects are not equivalent with “classical”
phenomenology as a whole.
I am definitely not insisting that the phenomenologists that I have identi-
fied as “classical” produced work that was problem-free, especially when
106  Lanei M. Rodemeyer
it comes to the contemporary critical insights just mentioned. Husserl’s
discussions of the family are clearly influenced by his growing interest in
Christianity and certain assertions could be assessed as quite patriarchal.
Heidegger is infamous for his connection to the Nazi party and how that
may have influenced his theoretical work. Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and
Sartre have faced criticism for their presumptions of a neutral or universal
subject and a “normal” body that is implicitly male and white European,
as well as for using “abnormal” to determine “normal.” Finally, even de
Beauvoir employed comparisons between misogynism and racism that
obscured the major differences between those two types of oppressions.
Each of these phenomenologists, clearly, was blind to certain historical
norms and institutional biases that infiltrated their analyses  – even as
they broke down and critiqued other implicit presumptions and unseen
grounds. My point is that the phenomenological method was already
and often employed critically by these phenomenologists themselves; that
phenomenology was already open to and foundational for the insights
gained by post-Foucauldian, Marxist, and other critical theories; and
finally, that “classical” phenomenology provides much of the core work
necessary for productive “critical” phenomenological work.

4. A critical response to critiques of Husserl

I have already spent quite a bit of effort earlier defending Husserl’s phe-
nomenology against the presumptions that lead to exclusion of his work
from what might be “critical” phenomenology, so I  do not intend to
repeat those arguments in this section. Instead, I  wish to point out an
irony that might lie behind the quick dismissal of Husserl, one that can
be revealed through a critical-style analysis of the history of the reception
of Husserl’s work. After that, I will introduce an account of the stratifica-
tion of levels of constitution that I believe are apparent in Husserl’s work
and that enable highly nuanced phenomenological analyses. I find that
Husserl’s levels of constitution integrate multiple aspects of subjectivity
as well as the subject’s interactions with groups and institutions – in other
words, they open Husserl’s phenomenology up even further to carrying
out critical phenomenological analyses.

4.1. A brief critical look at the history of the accessibility of

Husserl’s work
Many dismissals of Husserl’s work may actually be due to a variety of
historical contingencies and prejudices. Toward the end of his life, Hus-
serl’s work was not allowed to be read or published in the Third Reich of
Germany because he was Jewish. After his death, his manuscripts were
moved out of Germany into Belgium in order to protect them from being
destroyed by the Nazis. The outcome of these actions lasted actually
 A Phenomenological Critique of Critical Phenomenology 107
much longer than the Third Reich itself: Because Husserl’s work had
been moved and hidden away, the European philosophical world turned
to Heidegger, Sartre, and others for groundwork in phenomenological
analyses. As Klaus Held explains,

[B]ecause Husserl was Jewish, his later writings could no longer

appear in the Third Reich. Thus continued analysis of Husserl’s
thought was interrupted, whereas in the 1950s and 1960s, Heidegger
and Sartre were again discussed intensely—both inside and outside
of the German university.
(Held 2003, 3)

In fact, because there was little access to original texts by Husserl,

translations of his work into English, French, and other languages lagged,
so careful examinations of Husserl’s work were relatively minimal com-
pared to other major phenomenologists who built upon his ideas. Even
Foucault notes this in an interview:

Which means that France only knew Husserl via an angle which
I am not sure was, or represented, the main line of phenomenology.
Because in particular, the whole fundamental problem of phenom-
enology was ultimately a problem of logic: how to found logic. We
were not so familiar with all that in France, we knew instead a Hus-
serl who inscribed himself here, it seems to me, if not ingratiatingly,
at least with a degree of dexterity, in the Cartesian tradition.
(Foucault, Gordon and Patton 2012, 101)

Thus, much of the philosophical or phenomenological world was exposed

to Husserl primarily through the readings of Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-
Ponty, Levinas, and others who  – while they themselves had read his
work carefully – presented his analyses mainly through distancing their
own projects from his. In other words, Husserl’s work was sometimes
only known through critiques of his work. Those who did read Husserl
usually had access to only a few of his published or translated texts,
which represented mere glimpses into his overall life’s work. Simply put,
many philosophers working during the 1950s and 1960s, and even after
that, knew of Husserl mainly through critiques of his work by other
prominent phenomenologists, or through limited access to published
work. Caricatures of Husserl’s phenomenology, therefore, are common
not due to a willful desire to misrepresent his work, but rather, due to a
set of historical moments that obscured his work because of his Jewish
heritage and the inaccessibility of his manuscripts. Add to this  – once
these limitations have been overcome  – the sheer volume of his work,
the complexity of his analyses, and his rather dry and dense prose, and
the chances of oversimplified or reductionist understandings of Husserl’s
108  Lanei M. Rodemeyer
phenomenology remain rather strong. A  careful reading across several
of his texts and manuscripts, however, reveals a phenomenology that is
much more open to critical work than most give him credit for.

4.2. A brief overview of the levels of Husserl’s phenomenology

of constitution4
Husserl scholars, and those who work with Husserl’s phenomenology, are
usually familiar with the fact that there are different levels of experience,
such as the level where objects are constituted as whole unities (as seen
in Ideas I) as opposed to the intersubjective levels (as seen most famously
in the Cartesian Meditations). My position is that there are several such
levels of experience, and that they are much more systematically in place
for Husserl than might first appear. These levels are evident especially in
his middle and late periods, and they can be found either implicitly or
explicitly in a multitude of published and unpublished works by Husserl.
Allow me to describe these levels very briefly, just to provide an over-
view. The levels, from “highest” to “lowest” (to use Husserl’s terms), are
roughly as follows:
At the “highest” level we find intersubjective community, which is
the historical, intergenerational stratum of meaning, or alternately, an
abstract understanding of numerous, possible subjects (what I abbreviate
as IS-2). This level addresses the meanings that develop within a culture,
that transition from one generation to another, and that surface through
analyses of history, society, normality, and language. It correlates most
smoothly with the historical, social, and institutional themes that direct
much critical phenomenology. But Husserl was also doing such work:
We find him carrying out these analyses most coherently in his later work
on the Crisis and related manuscripts, although he also touches upon this
level in the latter half of his Fifth Cartesian Meditation, and in many of
his manuscripts on intersubjectivity.
At the next level “down,” we encounter the interpersonal intersubjec-
tive level (abbreviated as IS-1). This level describes our interaction with
other subjects through empathy, our intersubjective constitution of the
world as objective (also addressed at the higher level of IS-2 in a more
abstract way), and how our own bodies gain their objective sense through
the perception of others. Here, too, we find overlap with “critical” phe-
nomenological work, since this is where Husserl analyzes the objectifica-
tion of embodiment, the social constitution of the concept of materiality,
and our social and individual constitutions of space and time (as well as
their mutual influence). This work is carried out most famously in Hus-
serl’s Fifth Cartesian Meditation and related manuscripts, but it is argu-
ably addressed in more detail in his Ideas II.
The next level is the most common understanding of Husserl’s phe-
nomenology, and it is his primary entry into many of his own analyses.
 A Phenomenological Critique of Critical Phenomenology 109
This is the level of individual meaning constitution. Although much con-
stitutive activity here is actually passive in addition to active, I will refer
to it as the level of active constitution (AC). I  should note that what
is “active” for Husserl is not necessarily what is more energetically in
play, but rather, what is in awareness for consciousness, that toward
which my attention is directed. It is here that we take up consciousness’
active meaning constitution and the meaningful contents with which it
is engaged. Husserl’s analyses at this level describe the structures of con-
sciousness required for meaning constitution, such as noesis and noema,
and he focuses on the individual subject and her constitution of expe-
rienced objects as unities. Ideas I is the text best known for Husserl’s
extensive analyses in this area. The analyses in this work have become
the standard understanding of Husserl’s work. Unfortunately, as we saw
earlier, he is often interpreted as granting all constitutive powers to the
noesis, whereas this is not the case: Part of Husserl’s goal in this text is
to bring to the fore how our belief in the materiality of the world arises
in the first place, and to recognize how much that belief influences our
theoretical and everyday experiences. But, while we may still allow a cer-
tain static approach at this level – one that could be read as problematic
for a critical phenomenology (although I am not sure whether I would
agree5) –, when we recognize that this level rests between those that flank
it “above” and “below,” his project emerges as much more complex than
it appears in Ideas I.
The next layer down is more nebulous, as it is the level of passive syn-
thesis (PS). This layer addresses what is passively in play while conscious-
ness is engaged in its experiences. Again, I should note that, for Husserl,
“passive” does not mean inactive in the sense of inert or dull, but rather,
the synthetic work done by consciousness that goes unnoticed by me. The
layer of passive synthesis, this “background” of consciousness, requires
analyses not only of the structures of consciousness but also of the con-
tents of consciousness and their interplay with one another. Here we see
the “feedback loop” that Guenther ascribes to Merleau-Ponty’s phenom-
enology already in Husserl’s analyses of passive synthesis: At this level,
Husserl examines how sensory contents combine with each other as well
as how they affect me  – and these associations and affections in turn
influence how I take these sensory contents up. This, then, would be a
mutually influencing relation of contents and acts that, for Husserl, takes
place at a foundational level for noeses and noemata. This level, too, is
ripe for critical analyses, since here is where we find our habits, the sedi-
mentations of meanings, and the grounds for associations. These analy-
ses are most famously published in the collection of Husserl’s lectures on
the Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, but they can be
found throughout his work, especially beginning in his middle period.
Finally, the “lowest” level of experience is that of the flow of pri-
mordial material, often referred to as a “hyletic flow” (HF). This flow
110  Lanei M. Rodemeyer
is a layer of rudimentary sensory experience that underlies our acts
of perception. While our experience of this level might be considered
debatable, I argue that it provides an essential ground to our embodied
experience, a ground that can enable shifts and changes in discursive
meanings – shifts that would have no motivation whatsoever if they were
not first experienced through hyletic sensory embodiment. Husserl refers
to this hyletic flow already in Ideas I, but in his lectures on passive syn-
thesis, and in his later manuscripts, we see much more attention directed
toward this area.
As indicated, Husserl often focuses on only one level in a specific text
or set of analyses. However, in some writings, such as those addressing
passive synthesis, he passes through several levels, often beginning at the
level of active meaning constitution (AC), then moving down through
the intermediate level of passive synthesis (PS), and finally arriving at
the lowest level of primordial sensory contents (HF). Or, conversely, he
might begin at the level of object constitution and then move “upward”
into discussions of the different levels of intersubjective experience (IS-1
and IS-2). In any case, these shifts indicate the complexity of subjectiv-
ity and subjective experiencing for Husserl, from intersubjective experi-
ence and influence all the way to rudimentary sensory experiences of
embodiment.
Not all critical phenomenology must make use of these levels of
constitution, nor must Husserl necessarily be taken into account in all
critical phenomenological work, of course. Rather, I hope that recogni-
tion of the intricacies of Husserl’s phenomenology of constitution will
dissuade future claims that Husserl’s phenomenology cannot be con-
sidered a critical phenomenology. We have seen that Husserl engages
critically with the work and social influences of the sciences such that
he can already be considered a “critical” phenomenologist. His work
also establishes much of the framework that makes many “critical”
phenomenologies possible. But an understanding of how his phenom-
enological work is approached through levels of constitution can enable
further “critical” approaches that are distinctly Husserlian and/or have
their grounds in Husserl’s phenomenology: Analyses of the levels of
passive synthesis can provide insights into implicit bias and more overt
prejudices; tracing hyletic and passive experiences into the intersub-
jective levels and back again can ground analyses of how discursive
practices arise in social groups and how they affect individuals; identi-
fying historical moments and meanings that remain embedded in con-
temporary society and institutions, as well as how they are constituted
by individuals, can complement historical critiques; etc. In all of these
ways, Husserl’s work (and especially his levels of constitution) provides
important groundwork for, and can offer major contributions to, a criti-
cal phenomenology.
 A Phenomenological Critique of Critical Phenomenology 111
Notes
1. I am concerned that the authors of 50 Concepts refer to this essential aspect
of the phenomenological method as a “faith.” For Husserl, it clearly was not
a “faith” but rather a demonstrable fact, that we can shift from individual-
ized perceptual experiences to the essential or ideal structures related to them,
and that these two sets of acts are quite distinct. The experiences of touching,
picking up, and smelling five apples is a cognitively different set of acts than
conceiving the number five or recognizing that I necessarily cannot see all sides
of any single apple at once, for example. The first set of acts are perceptual,
relating to objects in the world, while the second sets of acts are conceptual,
relating to ideal objects such as numbers and essential structures. Husserl sets
this out rather clearly in a preliminary way in the early sections of Ideas I (see,
for example, Hua III, 7–11/8–12). It is my hope that the explanations that
I  offer of phenomenology in this chapter provide further evidence that this
method is much more than a blind “faith.”
2. One could argue that not all of the entries in 50 Concepts for a Critical Phe-
nomenology are themselves actually doing or describing phenomenology – in
fact, many may be much more hermeneutical, queer, or other types of theoreti-
cal approaches, rather than phenomenological. Since the volume entitles itself
as offering concepts for a “critical phenomenology,” though, then all of the
entries could conceivably be taken up within phenomenological projects, even
if they did not originate as phenomenological terms.
3. We should note that this term actually comes from a different set of thinkers,
such as Gasché, Caputo, and Rorty, whose work often centered around Der-
rida’s philosophy. Within Husserl’s framework, however, the term “quasi”
requires analysis through the mode of “as-if” – and so, critical phenomenolo-
gists employing the notion of “quasi-transcendental structures” would need
to determine how these types of structures would be regulated and applied
within a critical phenomenological approach.
4. A version of this description of Husserl’s levels of constitution, demonstrating
how they can be applied to gender and especially eating disorders, is published
in Rodemeyer (2020).
5. A static phenomenological approach taken alone can appear limited given its
setting aside of the positing of the existence of the material world and its focus
on structure over content. For this reason, it is best complemented by further
analysis using a genetic approach. However, as mentioned at the outset of this
chapter, even the static analysis of structure is in itself a critical enterprise,
identifying those structures that support how we experience the world, about
which we are unaware. Further, an understanding of the structures identi-
fied through a static approach is necessary in order to fully develop analyses
involving content either at the individual or social levels.

References
Davis, Duane H. 2020. “The Phenomenological Method.” In 50 Concepts for a
Critical* Phenomenology, edited by Gail Weiss, Ann V. Murphy, and Gayle
Salamon, 4–9. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Foucault, Michel, Colin Gordon, and Paul Patton. 2012. “Considerations on
Marxism, Phenomenology and Power. Interview with Michel Foucault;
Recorded on April 3rd, 1978.” Foucault Studies 14: 98–114.
112  Lanei M. Rodemeyer
Guenther, Lisa. 2020. “Critical Phenomenology.” In 50 Concepts for a Critical*
Phenomenology, edited by Gail Weiss, Ann V. Murphy, and Gayle Salamon,
11–16. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Held, Klaus. 2003. “Husserl’s Phenomenological Method.” In The New Husserl:
A Critical Reader, edited by Donn Welton, 3–31. Bloomington/Indianapolis,
IN: Indiana University Press.
Rodemeyer, Lanei. 2020. “Levels of Embodiment: A Husserlian Analysis of Gen-
der and the Development of Eating Disorders.” In Time and Body: Phenom-
enological and Psychopathological Approaches, edited by Christian Tewes and
Giovanni Stanghellini, 234–255. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Weiss, Gail, Ann V. Murphy, and Gayle Salamon. 2020. “Introduction.” In 50
Concepts for a Critical* Phenomenology, edited by Gail Weiss, Ann V. Mur-
phy, and Gayle Salamon, xiii–xiv. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
8 On the Transcendental
and Eidetic Resources of
Phenomenology
The Case of Embodiment
Sara Heinämaa

From the Hegelian Left to the Frankfurt School, there has been a com-
plete critique . . . whose objective was to show the connections between
science’s naïve presumptions, on one hand, and the forms of domination
characteristic of contemporary society, on the other. . . . To cite the exam-
ple presumably the most distant from what could be called a Leftist cri-
tique, we should recall that Husserl, in 1936, referred the contemporary
crisis of European humanity to something that involved the relationships
between knowledge and technique, from episteme to technè.
(Foucault 1996 [1990], 388–389)

1. Introduction
Several critics have argued that the methods of classical phenomenology
are superfluous to or, more detrimentally, insufficient for the develop-
ment of contemporary phenomenology or some of its most auspicious
forms, such as social phenomenology or political-critical phenomenol-
ogy. The attacked methods entail the phenomenological-transcendental
reduction, the phenomenological epoché, and the eidetic reduction. These
were originally designed to enable and assist the performance of the phe-
nomenological tasks of (i) describing phenomena as they give themselves
in experiences, (ii) identifying the senses involved in them, (iii) analyzing
the relations of dependency and conditioning that hold between different
senses, and (iv) radically reflecting (besinnen) on the tasks and goals of
all sciences, and phenomenology among them as the rigorous science of
intentional life.
The necessity and adequacy of these methods are now under question.
The claim is that they cannot anymore help us perform our most urgent
philosophical tasks or else that they hinder any promising attempt to do
so. The classical methods are judged as unnecessary for or unproductive
to the future development of the field, either separately or collectively.
On the one hand, it is argued that the eidetic methods of classical
phenomenology hold us back from inquiring into marginalized and hid-
den possibilities of being human and/or promoting the dynamic and

DOI: 10.4324/9781003191483-8
114  Sara Heinämaa
creative aspects of human existence and co-existence (e.g., Young 1990,
141–145; Alcoff 2000; Mann 2018).1 On the other hand, critics have
attacked the transcendental aspects of phenomenology by arguing that
the transcendental-phenomenological reduction cannot, for principled
reasons, be performed in the manner that Husserl intended or that this
method leads us away from the true conditions of experiencing, which
are material, empirical, and historical (e.g., Guenther 2011, 264; Oksala
2016, 105; Guenther 2017, 49–50; cf. Foucault 1973 [1966], 318–322;
Oksala 2005, 41–69; Davis 2019).
Such attempts at reforming the methods of phenomenology are attrac-
tive not only because they cohere with arguments put forward in other
fields of contemporary philosophy, for example, Foucault-studies, Criti-
cal Theory, and neo-pragmatism, but also because they build bridges to
important disciplines that phenomenology seems to bypass in its classical
form, for example, political science and critical gender, race, and disabil-
ity studies. Another incentive of such reforms is that they promise to lib-
erate phenomenology from the last remnants of Platonism, Cartesianism,
and Kantianism, thus honoring the principle of unprejudiced reflection at
the heart of the phenomenological enterprise (cf. Hua XVIII, 29/18; Hua
III/1, 43–44/44–45; Hua I, 54–55/13–15).2
The most extreme form of contemporary methodological critique
combines the two lines of argumentation distinguished above  – anti-
essentialism and anti-transcendentalism – but adds a more profound sus-
picion which questions the necessity of the first-person perspective. Some
critics namely claim that it is not just the eidetic reduction that needs to
be abandoned, or the transcendental reduction, or the phenomenological
epoché. More fundamentally, it is argued, also the first-person approach
central to many less rigorous forms of phenomenology has to be aban-
doned if phenomenology is to serve as a socially and politically respon-
sive philosophy. Johanna Oksala formulates the idea in a challenging
manner by writing:

It is not enough just to give up the phenomenological reduction to

transcendental consciousness and the totalizing understanding of
the epoché, however. We also have to give up the first-person as the
exclusive and indispensable starting point of our analysis.
(Oksala 2016, 105; cf. Mann 2018)

This form of critique targets the first-person approach, which is cen-

tral to the inquiries of most contemporary phenomenologists and is also
accepted by many of those who criticize classical phenomenology for
its supposedly essentializing, idealizing, and universalizing tendencies.
Thus far the first-person manner of proceeding has served as a minimal
denominator that ties together different lines of inquiry, from rigorously
transcendental and eidetic inquiries to empirically informed explorations,
 On the Transcendental and Eidetic Resources of Phenomenology 115
and from classical analyses to existential, ontological, and fundamental
ethical ones. And it is this that now has to go, Oksala claims, for phe-
nomenology to be able to answer to the demands of our times. What is
left, she claims, is still a “phenomenology,” or rather the most vibrant
offspring of the tradition: a “post-phenomenological” form of critical
and self-critical reflection that recognizes its historical roots (in phenom-
enology and Kantianism) but proceeds by experiential experimentation
free from any eidetic, transcendental, or first-person package (Oksala
2016, 105–106).
Without speculating about what “phenomena” may mean after such
comprehensive cleansing of methods,3 I  want to draw attention to an
ambiguity in these critical lines of argumentation. Namely systematically
considered, the demand to abandon classical phenomenological methods
for the best of future phenomenology  – either partially or comprehen-
sively  – has two different variants. In other words, each of the critical
lines of argumentation distinguished above allows for two possible inter-
pretations. These must be kept apart for the evaluation of their validity
and utility.
First, arguments about the dispensability or harmfulness of the clas-
sical phenomenological methods  – individually or collectively  – can
be taken to concern individual investigations and investigators. In this
interpretation, the main point would be that individual phenomeno-
logical inquiries do not need to involve or utilize the classical phe-
nomenological methods in order to contribute to phenomenology. Nor
do individual investigators have to perform such operations as part
of their scientific or scholarly undertakings. Phenomenologists can
well proceed without going through the tedious steps of the eidetic
or transcendental suspensions proposed by Husserl and can also pro-
ceed while alternating between the first-person perspective and the sec-
ond and third. Some or all classical methods can be overlooked or left
behind in individual instigations without compromising the phenom-
enological goals.
In line with this insight, some contributors point out that Husserl’s
own understanding of the phenomenological practice of investigation
was pluralistic. In his account, phenomenology consists of rigorously
conducted constitutional analyses, the success of which depends on the
proper performance of the epoché and the reductions conducted in first
person, but it also entails investigations in which insights won by such
analyses are utilized while dealing with various other tasks without the
performance of any reductive steps.4 Thus, classical phenomenology is not
one discipline but is a system of disciplines. In addition to transcenden-
tal and eidetic phenomenology, these include, for example, phenomeno-
logical psychology, formal ontology, phenomenological human sciences,
and phenomenological ethics (e.g., Hua I; Hua III/1; Hua IV; Hua VI;
cf. Zahavi 2017, 2019a; Lohmar 2020). The individual researchers who
116  Sara Heinämaa
participate in such large-scale enterprise do not all perform the same
tasks. Philosophical work allows and requires division of labor.
Arguments to the effect that classical phenomenological methods are
dispensable can also be put forward in another, more totalizing manner.
The main claim, in this interpretation, is that phenomenological investi-
gations (in some sense of the term) can be conducted well and perhaps
even better without any dependence – other than historical – on classical
phenomenological methods. The point here is not only that particular
investigations and investigators are able to dispense with reductions and
suspensions but also, more totally, that there is no need for anybody to
perform such tasks, and that it would be better (on some criteria) if no
one ever suggested otherwise. Phenomenology can proceed and flourish
completely independently of the performance of the epoché, the eidetic
reduction, the transcendental reduction, and/or the adoption of the first-
person viewpoint.
While the first version of the critical methodological argument con-
cerns particular investigations and investigator, their liberties to decide
about the methods for concrete purposes in concrete circumstances, the
latter version concerns the general conditions for the possibility of phe-
nomenological investigations in toto, and it states that such investigations
are independent of and not conditioned by classical methods, suspensive,
transcendental, eidetic, or egoic (first person).
I have no purpose of countering the argument in the first interpreta-
tion, that is, the variant that concerns individual investigations and inves-
tigators. I agree that not all phenomenological inquiries have to involve
or proceed by the reductive methods that Husserl devised and not all
phenomenologists have to perform such steps personally in order to con-
tribute to the field. However, I want to counter the argument in the latter,
totalizing form. I believe that even if the argument is rarely put forward
explicitly in such comprehensive manner, many of its variations allow
such a reading and many draw rhetoric power from it.
In the following, I will argue against the idea that contemporary phe-
nomenology is able to proceed and flourish completely independently of
the classical phenomenological methods, separately or collectively. I will
do this by providing a counterexample: I  argue that the classical phe-
nomenological analysis of embodiment – an analysis which is egoic, tran-
scendental, eidetic, and isolating – offers crucial insights into constitutive
relations of dependence, which are indispensable to all phenomenologi-
cal discussions of embodiment (and all discussions that depend on the
understanding of the sense of embodiment).
Before proceeding to my explication of the methodological resources
that Husserl offers, I will begin with an overview of the different concep-
tualizations of living bodies (Leiber from Leib) and living embodiment
(Leiblichkeit) that are operative in contemporary phenomenology. It is
my view, here and elsewhere, that the Husserlian methods allow us to
 On the Transcendental and Eidetic Resources of Phenomenology 117
effectively organize this conceptual field – that of the living body and liv-
ing embodiment – which is central to much of contemporary social and
political philosophy but which suffers from fundamental ambiguities and
dispersion.

2.  Contemporary concepts of embodiment

The phenomenological concept of the living body (Leib, corps vécu, corps
vivant, lived body) is used in several ways in contemporary theoretical lit-
erature.5 Alternative conceptualizations not only partly overlap but also
entail philosophically crucial differences in meaning and in the order of
analysis. Three basic approaches cover the field: first, conceptualizations
that operate by the distinction between the first-person perspective and
the third-person perspective; second, conceptualizations that resort to the
distinction between being and having (or existing and possessing); and
third, conceptualizations that draw from the distinction between subjec-
tivity and objectivity.
In a common and widespread interpretation, the living body is the
body of a person or a subject as it appears to them in the first-person
perspective (e.g., Toombs 1988; 1992; Leder 1990; 1992; Gallagher
2005; Svenaeus 2015; cf. Fuchs 2005). This distinguishes the living
body from all bodies as they appear or are given in the second- and
third-person perspectives, both own and alien. Thus, the living body
is contrasted both to the objective body and to the body as it appears
to others. By such concepts, one can argue, for example, that the con-
ditions of anorexia and bulimia, or eating disorders more generally,
entail a crucial experiential difference between the living body and the
objective body or the body as it appears to others (e.g., Svenaeus 2013;
Castellini, Trisolini and Ricca 2014; Gaete and Fuchs 2016). The body
that in the first-person perspective appears as enormous is objectively
either normal or reduced in its dimensions (e.g., Englebert, Follet and
Valentiny 2018). Similarly, one can argue that transgender experiences
are explicable by the conceptual distinction between one’s own living
body given in the first-person perspective and the objective body stud-
ied in the third-person perspective: the body in which the third-person
perspective forms a relatively coherent functional and organic whole is
in the first-person perspective experienced as fundamentally alien, dis-
torted, or split (e.g., Salamon 2010, 43ff.; Kondelin 2014; cf. Johnson
2007; Rodemeyer 2018).
This way of conceptualizing the living body uses the perceptual meta-
phor of perspectives to distinguish the object of phenomenological analy-
ses from objects studied in third person in the empirical sciences. The
third-person perspective covers the social visibility of everyday life as
well as scientific monitoring. Thus, the living body in its first-person
givenness is contrasted both with the body that can be studied by the
118  Sara Heinämaa
scientific methods of observation, experimentation, and modeling and
with the body that is perceptually accessible to all subjects equally.6
The perspectival articulation of the concept of the living body draws
from Merleau-Ponty’s and Husserl’s distinctions between two attitudes
in which we can study living beings: the objective and the experiential.
However, the concept of perspective differs from the phenomenologi-
cal concept of attitude in two crucial respects: first, whereas perspec-
tives are selective, attitudes are more comprehensive ways of relating to
things; second, whereas perspectives study objects from different loca-
tions, attitudes give us the whole world in different manners, including
all its objects and locations, however diverse these may be (e.g., Hua VI,
326/281; Merleau-Ponty 1993 [1945]).
This implies that we can alternate between perspectives without effect-
ing any thorough changes in our ways of relating to worldly beings or the
world as a whole. Attitudes too can be changed but not without large-
scale effects in our manners of relating. Accordingly, if we adopt the
objective or objectifying attitude in respect to our own body, then we are
bound to study numerous other things independently of their subjective
and personal determinants, but if we, in contrast, take the third-person
perspective on our own body, then we may leave other things largely
intact and observe them in second- and first-person perspectives. Con-
versely, if we adopt an experiential attitude to our body, then we must
study also the environing things in their subjective or personal determi-
nants (cf. Hua IV), but if we instead take the first-person perspective on
our own bodies, then most other things – including other bodies – may
be given in other perspectives and some of them may be grasped by third-
person concepts.
So, when we conceptualize the living body through the contrast
between the first-person and the third-person perspectives, then we are
able to study the variance of human embodiment without any large-scale
change in our own worldly relations. Our task is to give expression to
the first-person experiences of the subjects studied, and the main thing to
guard against is the usage of theoretically invested and socially dominant
norms of embodiment and the imposition of such “ready-made” objec-
tive notions and norms on the subjects under investigation (cf. Wehrle
2016; 2018).7
The other common manner of understanding the living body utilizes
the conceptual distinction between being and having (e.g., Lindemann
2010; Wehrle 2019). The living body is conceptualized as the body that
we are in distinction from the body that we have. This conceptualization
draws from the analyses of Helmuth Plessner, but it is also informed by
Husserl’s distinction between egoic life and egoic possessions. The main
point here is that whereas we can dispense with our worldly and thingly
possessions, we cannot similarly be deprived of our own being or exist-
ence, or any constitutive parts of it. If the living body is who we are, in
 On the Transcendental and Eidetic Resources of Phenomenology 119
distinction from the things and bodies that we have, then we cannot dis-
tance ourselves from it or replace it without changing ourselves. Under-
stood in this way, the living body is not a matter of altering perspectives
or viewpoints. It concerns our very existence.
Two different variants of this conceptualization can be distinguished
by considering the basic relation of the living body to other bodies.
Some contemporary scholars follow Plessner and argue that each of us
“is a living body [Leib]” (e.g., Plessner 1970, 34; cf. 1975). The indefi-
nite article in the term “a body” suggests that our living body is one
among many, that is, one among other similar bodies each of which can
be associated with some subject or other. However, the basic existential
insight can also be formulated in modal language by saying that the living
body is our manner of having the world (Merleau-Ponty 1993 [1945],
402/350, cf. 67–68/55, 369/318–319, 444–445/387–388, 256/221 - 222,
433/378). In this alternative formulation, the possessive pronoun “our”
expresses the subject-relative character of embodiment, but the definite
form “the world” suggests that this particular body that I am is not (just)
one body among many similar ones but (also) operates as the condition
on which I  can have the world, and everything entailed in it, all other
bodies included.
The third way of conceptualizing the living body operates with the
distinction between subjectivity and objectivity. The living body is under-
stood as a system or complex of kinesthetic and tactile sensings (Befind-
nisse) in functional and motivational connections (e.g., Gallagher 1986;
Welton 1999, 82–83; Al-Saji 2010, 18–20; Sparrow 2015). As such, the
body is a pre-objective form or scheme of subjective experiencing that
emerges within the immanent stream of consciousness. It does not appear
in perceptual adumbrations or profiles but establishes its dynamic limits
in pure affection and self-affection. As Alia Al-Saji puts it, the living body
is “surface of touch” (Al-Saji 2010, 19). Thus understood, kinesthetic
and tactile sensations are not only the necessary constituents of living
bodiliness;8 they are the living body per se in its most “original” pre-
objective givenness.
This way of conceptualizing the living body draws from Levinas’
and Sartre’s critical confrontations with Husserl’s account of sensibility
(Sartre [1943], 343ff./402ff.; Levinas 1998 [1959]) and from Merleau-
Ponty’s topological conceptualizations of human embodiment (Merleau-
Ponty 1993 [1945]; 1964b). Some versions of it are influenced by Michel
Henry’s interpretation and reformulation of classical phenomenology
(1975; 2008 [1990]). Henry’s concepts of transcendental affectivity and
immanent receptivity suggest the notion that the unity of the lived body
is constituted independently of all objectifying intending (e.g., Taipale
2009, 53; 2014).9
One crucial phenomenological implication of this conceptualization
is that in its primary form, the living body cannot be perceived in the
120  Sara Heinämaa
proper sense of the word. This is because all perception necessarily pro-
ceeds by adumbrations and profiles. In contrast, the living body does not
break out from the flow of consciousness but merely marks the contours
of subjectivity. So, if one were to argue, within this conceptual frame-
work, that anorexia and bulimia as experiential conditions entail com-
plications in living bodiliness, then one would not merely restrict these
complications to perceptual distortions but would also suggest that they
entail more fundamental alterations on the level of pre-objective sensibil-
ity. Similarly, if one were to argue that transgender subjects experience
their living bodies differently than other subjects, then one would again
argue for variance on the level of pre-objective sensibility.
This conceptualization too allows for two main variants, one egoic
and the other non-egoic. Some contributors argue that even if the living
body, understood as a system of pure sensing and motor potentiality,
lacks all structures that result from the objectifying acts of intentionality,
it still has an egoic form (e.g., Henry 2008 [1990]; Taipale 2009; 2014).
Others contend that if we dig deeper through all the strata of objectifying
intentionality, then we encounter an anonymous layer of lived-through
sensibility and bodily self-awareness free from all egoic forms and struc-
tures (e.g., Al-Saji 2010, 18; cf. Gallagher 1986, 145ff.).10 The mineness
of the living body would thus be a secondary formation, resulting from a
subsequent objectification that works on the primary system of non-egoic
sensings. Thus, if we utilize this conceptual framework and argue that
anorexic or transgender experiences involve alterations in living bodili-
ness, then we do not merely claim that such conditions affect the person’s
sense of bodily selfhood but also contend that they transform a suppos-
edly deeper level of anonymous embodiment.
All these three manners of using the term “living body” have their
advantages in the description and analysis of lived experiences and our
existential possibilities as human beings. The problem, however, is that
terminological unity hides conceptual variance: contributors often seem
to agree  – or alternatively disagree  – when in truth they are speaking
about different matters.
Equivocations of contemporary phenomenological discussions on
living bodies have not gone unnoticed. Some critics maintain that the
confusion stems from Husserl’s original expositions and that it seriously
harmed his own account of intersubjectivity and objectivity, which he
tried to establish on his arguably premature analysis of embodiment.
In this line, Steven Crowell (2012) contends that Husserl’s discourse on
the living body is fundamentally incoherent.11 More precisely, Crowell
argues that Husserl uses the term “Leib” in two oppositional senses, on
the one hand meaning the constituting body, the body that participates
in constitutive activities, and on the other hand the constituted body
as part of the (pregiven) world. A similar worry of equivocation was
already voiced by Jacques Derrida in his doctoral thesis, The Problem
 On the Transcendental and Eidetic Resources of Phenomenology 121
of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy (1953–1954). Derrida argued that
even if the constituted and constituting aspects of living bodiliness may
operate in parallel in phenomenological analyses, Husserl and his fol-
lowers cannot bring them under the same concepts but actually offer us
two alternative accounts, covered by the seemingly unified terminology
of Leiblichkeit (Derrida 1974 [1962], 98/98).
If this were to hold, then we would not solely be dealing with termino-
logical difficulties that can be removed by careful heedful definitions; we
would also be facing fundamental problems of philosophical self-critique
and methodology. On this basis, some scholars have argued that in order
to meet the core standard of Husserl’s phenomenology  – the principle
of unprejudiced thinking  – we must turn to other phenomenological
approaches: dialogical, hermeneutical, fundamental-ontological, existen-
tial, or realistic (e.g., Waldenfels 1997; 1997–1998; Crowell 2013). More
skeptically, others claim that the whole enterprise needs to be rejected
for the establishment of new “post-phenomenological” approaches (e.g.,
Selinger (ed.) 2009; Oksala 2016).
Can classical phenomenological methods help us with such frustra-
tions and suspicions? What can be gained, if anything, by turning back to
Husserl’s centennial reflections on embodiment and following the meth-
odological guidelines that his Cartesian Meditations offer? Most com-
mentators contend that such an exercise has an exegetic or historical
interest, if any. Some warn that this is a road that leads to solipsism,
phenomenalism or, at best, reductio ad absurdum arguments for some
ontology of social or natural being.
In the following, I will challenge this common notion, and argue that
the classical methods of Husserl’s Meditations are crucial to phenom-
enology in all its variants. I will do this by explicating the sense of the
living body that is disclosed by these methods. The main point is that
the Husserlian instruments of reduction allow us to relate the three
conceptualizations explicated above and to do so on constitutional
grounds. What we win is a phenomenological framework for reasoned
debates on the advantages and weaknesses of alternative accounts of
living bodies in concrete circumstances that bear both theoretical and
ethic-political significance. Other methodological frameworks allow
other kinds of comparisons, some informative, other less so. However,
if we are interested in proceeding in the phenomenological manner, then
we must not ignore constitutional considerations all together but must
inquire into the procedures and orders in which sense emerges and can
emerge.

3.  Husserl’s account I: The method

Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations provides three methodic tools for the
analysis of the constitution of the sense of living embodiment operative
122  Sara Heinämaa
in experience. These are the transcendental-phenomenological reduction,
the eidetic reduction, and the abstractive isolative reduction to the so-
called sphere of ownness.
The task of the transcendental-phenomenological reduction is to allow
access to the field of pure experiences and pure phenomena as their cor-
relates and thereby give us a completely new kind of research object (Hua
I, 60ff./20ff.). The “purity” of this field does not entail any exclusion
or selection of experiences or phenomena, as some critics contend (e.g.,
Davis 2019), but merely requires that we interrupt and hold off our judg-
ment concerning the ontic validity of all phenomena. Thus, the task of
purification does not imply that we need to abandon philosophical inter-
ests in reality, social, political, factual, or other. On the contrary, since
most phenomena are given as real, with determinations of materiality,
spatiality, temporality, and causality, while some appear as illusory or
phantasmatic, one important task of classical phenomenology is the clar-
ification of the very sense of reality and its different modalities, human,
social, historical, etc. (e.g., Hua IV, 143ff./151ff.; Hua XIV, 7–9).
The fact that the transcendental-phenomenological reduction suspends
the validity of all ontic theses concerning experiences and experienced
objectivities is well known. The coverage of the suspension is worth
repeating, however, since it is usually cited only in part. In toto, the task is
to suspend one’s judgment about the validity of all theories and assump-
tions of the positive sciences (anthropological, psychological, biological,
physiological, physical, etc.) as well as the validity of the numerous pos-
tulates operative in our everyday practices and emotive lives, personal as
well as interpersonal. At the same time, one is also expected to relinquish
one’s indebtedness to philosophical doctrines inherited from the tradi-
tion as well as contemporary philosophical theories composed for vari-
ous ends (e.g., Hua I; Hua III/1; Hua VI).
According to Husserl, this necessary first step cannot, however, be
performed without suspending the validity of the ontic base of all such
particular theses and types of theses. This is because all claims about
worldly entities, events, and processes share an implicit core belief that
concerns the being of the world itself, more precisely, its continuous pres-
ence as the unified framework for all possible beings. So, the founding
postulate of the world must also be set aside if we want to begin prac-
ticing phenomenological inquiries in the radically unprejudiced manner
demanded by the principle of principles (Hua III/1, 43–44/44–45; cf. Hua
I, 54–55/13–15). The world itself cannot be taken as an unquestionable
or incontrovertible framework of inquiry but has to be studied as an
open horizontal phenomenon in need of description and analysis (e.g.,
Hua VI, 146/143; cf. Hua IV,  299/313; Merleau-Ponty 1993 [1945],
380–381/330; Carr 2014).
The eidetic reduction is needed for the clarification of the core senses
of selfhood and ownness operative in all experiences of the belongingness
 On the Transcendental and Eidetic Resources of Phenomenology 123
of bodies to persons – ourselves or others (Hua I, 100–102/66–68). In
so far as we experience some body as our own, the task of clarifying the
operative sense of ownness falls to us as phenomenologists. Even if such
possessive experiences were merely momentary or passing in our experi-
ential life, even if they were transitive or radically changing, or were to
belong to the past and not characterize our present, they would still be
our experiential possibilities, and as such in need of clarification.
By the core of selfhood, “the eidos of the ego,” in his own words,
Husserl refers to those aspects of selfhood that are absolutely necessary
for the constitution of the self, any self (Hua I, 65ff./99ff.) – be it human
or animal, male or female, gendered or trans-gender, abled or disabled,
racialized or non-racialized, intelligible or non-intelligible, temporary or
continuous, finite or infinite. Therefore, what we are dealing with here is
not a theory of human selfhood or animal subjectivity, but an explication
of the necessary aspects of all selfhood imaginable and conceivable.
In Husserl’s explication, selfhood involves three structural features:
each self operates as an identical pole of experiencing; each relates or
can relate to some objects or other by egoic acts of intending; and each
entails habituated acts and experiences and a style of forming them (Hua
I, 99–102/65–68; cf. Hua XIV, 59). Thus, selves are dynamically develop-
ing centers of intentional life (Hua V, 17, 130–131). They come in many
different types and are intentionally related to one another in many dif-
ferent registers, perceptual and communicative.
So, the transcendental reduction is needed to get access to pure phe-
nomena, and the eidetic reduction is needed to distinguish experientially
between ownness and alienness in the analysis of the phenomena of
embodiment and intersubjectivity. The most controversial methodologi-
cal move, however, that Husserl launches in the Meditations, is the sub-
sequent reduction to the sphere of ownness. This is introduced at the
beginning of the Fifth Meditation as a special suspension that allows us
to study the constitutive relations between the sense of other selves, on
the one hand, and that of own living bodiliness, on the other.
Husserl emphasizes that this methodic step is thematic and abstractive.
It operates within the field of transcendentally purified experiences and
artificially isolates one of its layers of sense (Hua I, 124–125ff./92–93ff.).
So, whereas the transcendental-phenomenological reduction discloses a
whole new area of investigations, the subsequent abstractive reduction
allows us to focus on specific themes by setting them apart from others.
Better formulated, the reduction to the sphere of ownness identifies a
layer of sense, which operates in all concrete experiences of worldly phe-
nomena and offers this layer to explicative reflective inquiries.
The main idea is to set aside all sense of other selves and everything
that constitutionally depends on such sense. Thus, we disregard all pos-
sible others, be they animal, human, personal, collective, or other. We
also disregard all that depends on such others: their living bodies and
124  Sara Heinämaa
the common cultural products that we share with them, from practical
utensils and instruments to artworks, religious symbols, and scientific
objects. Moreover, all theoretical and philosophical conceptualizations
of such selves – as psyches, souls, minds, neural networks, or other –
need to be bracketed. Finally, we remove from consideration the senses
objective thing and objective world in so far as these objectivities are
shared by several experiencing selves. The abstractive reduction thus
shuts out all sense of otherness or, better, prevents us from using such
senses in our subsequent descriptions and analyses of whatever is left
to study (Hua I, 125–127/96; Husserl Hua IV, 144/151, 1985 [1939],
57–58/57–58; cf. 48–50/46–50). The point is not that we could live
in such a reduced “world,” but that we must think its possibility in
order to understand the layered and dynamic composition of our own
world, this common world which is the only one that exists and can
exist for us.
What is left is not a world in any familiar sense of the term; all others
are gone and everything that carries the label of their alterity. We find
ourselves in an artificial field of perceptually appearing material things
without historical, cultural, or communal significations. Moreover,
things present themselves to us in a peculiar manner within this field: they
cannot be given from different angles at the same time, since there are no
others in our environment, actual or possible, who could occupy alter-
native positions and open complementary perspectives on things. The
material objects that now are given to us disclose themselves by adum-
brations, but merely in a serial fashion, not simultaneously from different
viewpoints or perspectives.
The next step in Husserl’s argumentation is crucial for our understand-
ing of his account of the constitution of the sense of living bodies. He
points out that in this artificially reduced perceptual environment, one
thing – and only one – immediately stands out and sets itself apart from
all the other things. This is our own living body. It stands out exactly as
living, that is, as having sensations of different sorts. No other thing can
have this minimal sense of living within this artificially isolated environ-
ment since all other conscious selves are temporarily reduced, and the
sensing ones among them (Hua I, 128/97).
In light of the different conceptualizations of living bodiliness, dis-
cussed in Section 2 above, Husserl’s analysis here is striking. In the para-
graph quoted, he effectively argues that the minimal core sense of living
bodiliness is that of a sensing thing and that this minimal sense can be
constituted completely independently of all other selves (Hua XIV, 6,
281–283). If this holds, then the living body cannot be simply a perspec-
tive on anything shared by several selves. More precisely, in so far as the
living body can appear in an environment in which no subjective perspec-
tives can be distinguished, it cannot simply be a perspectival disclosure of
anything. Thus, even though we may say that our living body “anchors”
 On the Transcendental and Eidetic Resources of Phenomenology 125
us to space and “throws” us among things, this body is not originally
given to us in a perspectival fashion (cf. Zahavi 2003, 101–102; 2019b,
79–80; Crowell 2012).
The characterization of the living body that we find in Cartesian Med-
itations repeats the main parameters of the more robust account that
Husserl offers in the second volume of Ideas. The main result of the anal-
ysis persists: our own bodies are originally given to us as peculiar kinds
of sensing moving things and primitive spatial objects (Hua IV, 144–
146/152–154, 157/165–169, 175–177/185–186; Stein 1917, 40ff./37ff.).
However, by introducing the methodic step to the sphere of ownness, the
Fifth Meditation explicates a crucial factor that remains implicit in the
second volume of Ideas: our bodies appear to us as spatial proto-objects
independently of our relations to other selves. To be sure, in this mode
of appearing, our living bodies are not full-fledged material things with
simultaneous sides or aspects, but are considerably reduced and constitu-
tionally imperfect and incomplete (Hua XIV, 6–9, 57, 60–63; Stein 1917,
44/41; Hua XV, 268; cf. Lotz 2007, 88–89; Mattens 2006). Still, they
are not immanent occurrences or systems of such occurrences but are
appearing and spatial all the same.
Thus, in light of Husserl’s methodology, also the other paramount
definition discussed above turns out to be only partial: in their original
givenness, living bodies are not immanent systems of sensings but have
thingly spatial determinations. They are not “mere things” nor are they
“perfectly constituted” things, but such poverty of thinghood or objectiv-
ity does not make them non-spatial immanent occurrences or systems of
such occurrences (Hua XV, 127–128; cf. Hua IV, 159/167; Hua XIV, 57,
77; cf. Wehrle 2019).
This implies that all purely immanent unities and aspects of embodi-
ment are mere abstractions from the living body as a concrete whole.
Such abstractions can be useful for several different purposes, descriptive,
analytical, and critical, but they must not be assimilated or confused with
the concrete whole from which they are isolated. As a whole, the living
body is two-sided and dynamic formation and able to fold on itself in
altering manners.
If this analysis holds, then thingly objectivity is not just part of our
givenness to others, as Sartre argues in Being and Nothingness (Heinä-
maa 2020), but already characterizes our fundamental sensory-motor
self-relation. We appear to ourselves, independently of all others. The
consequences for phenomenological inquiries into embodiment are con-
siderable: whatever bodily experiences or phenomena we may study  –
be it sickness, suffering, mortality, and spontaneous movement  – the
possibility of arguing that not all the sense essential to our appearing
is determined by the gazes or looks of others is open (cf. de Beauvoir
1993 [1949], 242–243/175; Waldenfels 1997–1998, 2005; Fanon 2008
[1952], 83, 106, 180).
126  Sara Heinämaa
In order to see how Husserl’s conceptualization of the living body
frames the alternative conceptualizations discussed above, we need to
look a little closer at his account of the structure of this body.

4.  Husserl’s account II: The structure

Husserl famously contends that both kinesthetic sensations and touch
sensations are necessary for the constitution of the living body as well
as a motivational interplay between them. However, he also argues that
none of these factors are sufficient, separately or together. What is needed
in addition to such sensory systems is the formation of double sensation
(Hua IV, 145–147/153–154). This is more complicated than is usually
assumed: double sensation is not just a combination of kinesthetic and
tactile sensations but also an elaborate dynamic structure in which differ-
ent apperceptive operations must be distinguished.
In double sensation, two motivationally related systems of kinesthetic
and tactile sensation, both given to the same self, operate at the same
time but are localized as apart from one another. When I  grip my left
ankle with my right hand, then both the hand and the ankle entertain
tactile and kinesthetic sensations. The main motor difference is that the
kinesthesia of the grasping hand are those of active movement while the
kinesthesia of the grasped ankle are those of rest.
However, it is essential to the constitution of the phenomenon of
double sensation that the touch sensations involved can be appre-
hended in two alternative ways. One and the very same sensation can
be apprehended either as my own lived-through sensings, or, alterna-
tively, as presenting qualities or features external to the sensing (Hua
IV, 147/155; cf. Hua III/1, 75/88; Hua V, 14). If I press my palm against
a tile wall of a fireplace in a cold winter morning, I  can focus either
on the warmness of the wall or else pay attention to the sensation of
warmth that spreads and intensifies on my palm. When I  touch my
own forehead, instead of the wall, then my apprehensive possibilities
are doubled. I  can alternate between two attentive foci in two sepa-
rate locations, one in the touching hand and the other in the touched
forehead. Double sensation is thus double in the sense that it involves
(i) two different complexes of two kinds of sensations (kinesthetic and
tactile) and, in addition to this, also (ii) two ways of apprehending these
sensations. Four apprehensive options in toto structure the phenom-
enon (Hua IV, 145–146/153–154).
The two hands touching, famously pictured by Husserl in the second
volume of Ideas, epitomize the intentional structure of double sensation
that, in his analysis, is necessary for the constitution of all forms of liv-
ing bodiliness, whether human, animal, or other. The point is further
developed by Merleau-Ponty who asks us to imagine a tactile-kinesthetic
 On the Transcendental and Eidetic Resources of Phenomenology 127
system which could not touch itself or any of its parts. Think, for exam-
ple, of the brain or neural system kept alive in a vat in Hilary Putnam’s
thought experiment or the egg-shaped creatures pictured by Plato in his
Symposium (cf. Hua IV, 150/156). Such systems, Merleau-Ponty argues,
are not “flesh” enough for the constitution of living bodiliness, despite
the complex synthetic unity of the tactile and kinesthetic sensations con-
stituting them (Merleau-Ponty 1964a, 15/163; cf. Moran 2009). What is
lacking is the apprehensive dynamic structure of double sensation that
constitutes the body as a sensing-sensed duality (Hua IV, 144–145/152).
So, in the classical Husserlian analysis, the doubling of sensation is
indispensable to the establishment of living bodiliness. The living body
is originally constituted as an intertwinement of sensing and the sensed,
internality and externality, subjectivity and objectivity. The constitution
of such a phenomenon requires kinesthetic sensations and touch sensa-
tions but, in addition to these, also a double way of apprehending sen-
sations. Sensations have to be grasped as thingly qualities while, at the
same time, remaining given as subjective sensings (e.g., Hua IV, 145/153).
Thus constituted, the living body is a twofold dynamic structure in
which the sensing and the sensed are intertwined or interlaced.12 It is not
just a surface on which pure subjectivity encounters its other or a limit
that it endlessly approaches without ever crossing over. On the contrary,
the living body is a subjective objectivity and an objective subjectivity
that perpetually re-establishes its thinghood and spatiality by moving and
sensing (cf. Legrand 2011; Slatman 2014; Dolezal 2015, 19–20; Wehrle
2019). The topological counterpart of such a structure is not a surface –
convertible or inconvertible  – but, as Merleau-Ponty repeatedly points
out, a fold or a pleat that turns onto itself in dynamic movement (e.g.,
Merleau-Ponty 1993 [1945], 249/192; cf. 177/136–137).
The living body as a folded being must be kept separate from two
other phenomena: the expressively structured gestural body and the two-
layered psychophysical thing or “organism”. Both latter phenomena
depend in their senses on the constitution of other selves and their bodies
and have no sense independently of such formations. In its core, the sense
of the living body is not dependent on our encounters with other selves
or on the establishment of the self-other relation (Heinämaa 2018). To
be sure, it acquires new dimensions in such encounters, empathetic and
communicative, but its minimal core is not a constitutive outcome of any
self-other exchange. In other words, the latter two phenomena – the ges-
tural body and the psychophysical thing – become possible only on the
basis of the constitution of other selves and their living bodies, and that
constitution presupposes, and does not deliver, the minimal sense of the
living body as a dynamically folded being.
Let us first consider the expressive gestural body. The main point is to
realize that my own body cannot operate as an expressive means for me
128  Sara Heinämaa
if all others are constitutively absent from my field of experiencing. I may
be able to arrange my fingers in a manner that is characteristic of the
gestural sign of salute, peace, or victory, for example, but in so far as all
others are lacking in my experience, this digital formation cannot express
anything to anyone. There are no others to whom the gesture could con-
vey a message, and for myself the sign would be redundant since, when
I  start arranging my fingers into the formation, the content is already
given to me and does not need to be conveyed to anyone (cf. Hua XIX/1,
31/187–188). Similarly, I may raise my eye brows to relieve itching but
I cannot do the same to express surprise, amazement, or disapproval; and
I may cover my face in my hands to block sunlight, but I cannot convey
sadness, despair, or exhaustion, unless I  am able to intend others and
myself as given to others, actual or possible, real or imaginable.
Furthermore, the sense of the body as a two-layered psychophysical
thing or organism also depends on the givenness of others. However, its
dependence relations are more complicated than those of the expressively
structured gestural body. Whereas the appearance of the gestural body
merely depends on the givenness of some empathetic and communica-
tive others  – any such others  – the givenness of the two-layered thing
or organism depends on very specific theoretical practices and activities
(Husserl 1985 [1939], 155–159/135–138). In other words, the two-­
layered thing is not an experienceable object given in straightforward
(ap)perception, but is a scientific object that is constituted through the
activities of abstraction, idealization, and formalization (Hua VI; cf.
Arendt 1958, 285–325; Foucault 1973 [1966], 388–389). Living bodies,
as they are given to us in experience, are not two-layered psychophysi-
cal objects, in which the psychic is causally or functionally established
on physical reality. Originally bodies are not connected or combinatory
realities, but unified beings with thoroughly intentional structures (Hua
IV, 239–241/251–253; Hua XIII, 86–88; Hua XIV, 55–63).
Theoretical conceptualizations that render human and animal bod-
ies as two-layered psychophysical objects – organisms, neural networks.
etc. – serve the explanation and prediction of their comportments as well
as the manipulation of their movements and the stimuli that they receive
from the environment, but such surveyable constructs are not independ-
ent formations. On the contrary, they depend in their sense on the inter-
subjective givenness of human and animal bodies as expressive wholes
which, for their part, depend on the subjective givenness of one’s own
living body as a sensing moving thing (Hua IV, 183–184/193; Hua VI,
244–245/297; cf. Heinämaa 2018; 2020). These two more fundamental
constitutive achievements are both independent of the scientific fram-
ing of the psychophysical thing and are thus able to operate as grounds
for evaluative comparisons and critical interventions, and equally so in
the realm of theoretical thinking and that of ethico-political deliberation
and action.
 On the Transcendental and Eidetic Resources of Phenomenology 129
4. Conclusion
I have argued that if we follow the methodological steps put forward by
Husserl, then we can trace and clarify the relations between the various
conceptualizations of living bodiliness that we find operative in contem-
porary phenomenological literature. These are relations of dependency in
the order of sense-constitution. Husserlian methods – with full arsenal of
transcendental-phenomenological and eidetic reductions – are necessary
for the identification of these relations. Without them, no constitutional
account is possible.
Not all phenomenologists, however, need to perform such tasks in
their topical investigations, or ever in their personal or collective work.
But if no methodologically grounded distinctions between constitutively
dependent and independent formations are demanded, or allowed, in the
field, then the defining task of clarifying sense is seriously compromised
or else reduced to philosophical semantics, etymological reflection, or
linguistic analysis.
Contemporary phenomenologies demonstrate that our bodies are fun-
damental to our personal and social lives: bodies contribute centrally
to our having and being, action and interaction; they function as per-
spectives to shared things, events, and processes; and they entail imma-
nent units of sensation and affection, crucial to spontaneity and freedom
as well as suffering and submission. All these dimensions are necessary
for the understanding of the human condition. However, none of them
explains the others. On the contrary, alternative conceptualizations cap-
ture different aspects of the phenomenon named “embodiment,” but the
supposed unity and coherence of the phenomenon remain inexplicit. The
reductive methods of Husserlian phenomenology allow us to explicate
the constitutive relations between different senses of embodiment and
thus integrate alternative conceptualizations of the living body.
Integration does not mean unification. It merely means that we have
the methodological means available for bringing the different concepts
into significative relations with one another. Such contact is needed, and
urgently so. It serves theoretical comparisons between different cases and
diverse subject matters but, more importantly, it allows for reasoned
disagreements and agreements about the phenomena under study. Ulti-
mately constitutional analysis allows us to develop new critical concepts
for the purposes of investigating fresh areas of phenomena for novel,
even unprecedented, purposes.

Notes
1. This anti-essentialist and anti-idealistic line of argumentation is indebted to
the early attack by Theodor Adorno (Wolff 2016; Tengelyi 2012). However,
Adorno’s own critical-historical analyses can be interpreted as entailing an
eidetic dimension (Trepca 2020).
130  Sara Heinämaa
2. The attack on phenomenological eidetics has a long and multifaceted his-
tory. Immediately after the publication of Logical Investigations in 1901, the
leading Neo-Kantian Paul Natorp denounced Husserl’s approach as both
idealistic and Platonic (Natorp 1901). Similarly, Gilbert Ryle’s rejected phe-
nomenology by arguing that it boils down to metaphysical essentialism or
Platonism (e.g., Ryle 2009 [1946]). This impression persists and reemerges
despite detailed arguments to the contrary, both by Husserl himself and by
his interpreters (e.g., Hua III/1, 40–41/40–41; Hua XX/1, 282–283/25–26;
Melle 2011, 252–253; Mohanty 1997). Critiques internal to phenomenol-
ogy tend to target the transcendental methods rather than the eidetic ones.
Many early realist and existentialist phenomenologists questioned the uni-
versality of the epoché and the transcendental reduction (cf. Zahavi 2019b).
Merleau-Ponty’s statement about the incompleteness of the reduction (1993
[1945], viii/xiii, but see also 50/35–36, 67/48) is often taken to testify his
rejection of Husserl’s methods despite his repeated emphasis on the necessity
of the reductions, both the transcendental and the eidetic (1993 [1945], ix/
xiv, xxx/xv–xvi, 430–431/335–336, 451–453/351–353; 1964b, 70–71/45–
46, 1964 [1960], 226/179; cf. Heinämaa 2002). For a discussion of Hus-
serl’s aspiration to and interpretation of Platonism, see Hopkins 2011; cf. de
Santis 2016. For Husserl’s relation to Cartesianism, see Heinämaa 2021a;
Heinämaa and Kaitaro 2018; and for his relation to Kant and Kantianism,
see Carr 1999; and the chapters by Carr and Summa in this volume.
3. For a well-grounded response to Oksala, see Aldea 2019.
4. These tasks include investigations into particular experiences and types of
experiences; the formation of new concepts; the systematization of phenom-
enal fields; the critique of the sciences and their methods (from natural and
human sciences to mathematic, logic, praxis, axiology, ethics, and metaphys-
ics); the critique of other human practices (religious, political, educational);
the critique of human values; critical and self-critical reflection (Besinnung).
5. I translate the original terminology of “Leib,” “corps vivant,” and “corps
vécu” by the English term “living body.” I have argued for the use of this
term in detail elsewhere (Heinämaa 2021b).
6. In case of anorexia, for example, the third-person perspective may be rep-
resented by medical experts while the second-person perspective may be
attributed to the family and/or the therapists.
7. If the informant’s experiential account happens to involve scientific notions,
then these must not banned; their role in the account must be critically scru-
tinized instead. For example, an anorexic patient may speak about her own
body in terms of medical norms or the norms of the fashion industry; here,
the task of the phenomenologist is not to question such descriptions but to
study how they figure in the overall expression of the person and picture the
person’s bodily perceptions, emotions, sensations, and feelings (e.g., Sanz
and Burkitt 2001).
8. “Corporéité” and “chair” in Merleau-Ponty; “Leiblichkeit” in Husserl.
9. Henry’s reinterpretation of Husserlian phenomenology and his proposition
for “material phenomenology” or “radical phenomenology” is strongly
influenced by his readings of French philosophy of life, most importantly
the philosophy of Maine de Biran (1766–1824); cf. Hotanen 2019.
10. Following Levinas (1998 [1959]) and Welton (1999), Al-Saji takes Hus-
serl’s neologism “Empfindnis” (Hua IV, 146ff./153ff.) to refer to the self-
reflexive structure of sensory awareness: “The term “Empfidnisse” brings
together the notions of Erlebnis (lived experience) and Empfindung (sensa-
tion). Empfidnisse are sensuous experiences that are lived through but not
objectified.” (Al-Saji 2010, 18)
 On the Transcendental and Eidetic Resources of Phenomenology 131
11. Crowell renders “Leib” as “animate organism,” following Cairns’ transla-
tion strategy in Cartesian Meditations. I have replaced this by the term “liv-
ing body” for systematic purposes. Cf. Heinämaa 2021b.
12. Husserl uses the term “intertwinement” (Verflechtung) to describe the mutual
relating of different kinds of sensings – tactile and kinesthetic, immediately
localizable and non-localizable – as well as the constitutive duality of the liv-
ing body (Leib) (for the former usage, see, for example, Hua IV, 151; for the
latter, e.g., Hua IV, 161). Following him, Merleau-Ponty uses the correspond-
ing French terms (l’entrelacs, l’entrelacement) for the fundamental connec-
tion between the sensing and the sensed but also for the interrelation between
the living body and the sensible world (1964b, 74/48–49, 172ff./130ff.).

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9 Critical Phenomenology and
Micro-Phenomenology
The First-Person Experience
of the “Collective”
Natalie Depraz

Husserlian phenomenology has a specific term to designate critique.

This term is “epoché,” and it refers to a general suspension of our pre-
conceived beliefs and the taken-for-grantedness of our insertion into the
world. With this original method, Husserl takes over and renews the
constitutive power of questioning inherent in the philosophical attitude.
In this chapter, I would like to examine two similar but different devel-
opments and extensions of the initial Husserlian gesture: on the one side,
Critical phenomenology and, on the other side, Micro-phenomenology.
Both of these new approaches have not only accepted and supported
the suspensive requirement but also clearly reformed it. They have also
applied it to certain crucial matters that thus far have remained unques-
tioned, such as first-person subjectivity itself, on the one hand, and social
justice and political inequality, on the other. In a cross-examination of
these two approaches, I  will argue that  – for opposite reasons  – they
are not able alone to make effective their claim of offering a truly first-
person approach to collective issues but constitutively need each other.
The question ultimately is the following: Is not my critical attitude even-
tually dependent on an “uncriticizable” grounding in the other subject’s
critical attitude?
First, I  will give an account of micro-phenomenology, its indebted-
ness to Husserl’s phenomenology, and the peculiar step that it took for-
ward; second, I  will provide an overview of Critical phenomenology,
what it inherits from Husserlian phenomenology, and then eventually
focus on Simone de Beauvoir’s early specific thrust. In the last section,
I will come back to the issue of cross-limitations and clarify how both
approaches limit one another in order to examine to what extent their co-
determination may be more productive than their independent existence.
In short, my discussion will clarify the following: How Critical phenome-
nology needs micro-phenomenology and vice versa. In other words: How
Critical phenomenology needs a genuine first-person method to fulfill
its still potential relevance and how micro-phenomenology needs a true
investigation of social-collective issues to be able to face the contempo-
rary societal, civilizational, and ecological challenges of our time.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003191483-9
 Critical Phenomenology and Micro-Phenomenology 139
1. Micro-phenomenology
The birth of micro-phenomenology is a recent one. The term was coined
in the spring of 2016, during talks held by researchers affiliated with the
Husserl Archives in Paris (Claire Petitmengin, Michel Bitbol, Dominique
Pradelle, and myself), and Pierre Vermersch, a psychologist trained by
Jean Piaget’s teachings and the founder in the early 1980s of the tech-
nique of the explication interview (entretien d’explicitation). The tech-
nique, which I will now call “micro-phenomenological interview,” was
initially framed within Vermersch’s research into organizational psychol-
ogy as early as 1976 (Vermersch 2011 [1994]).1
Starting from everyday professional or personal activities and their dis-
tinction into time sequences, in which the subject performs successfully
what she performs and knows how she performs it (e.g., to disassemble
a microprocessor, to go to the bakery to get some bread), Vermersch’s
question was the following: How does the subject do what she does? As
a corollary: Is she capable of describing the manner in which she goes
about doing what she does? Indeed, if one asks somebody how she has
done what she has done, most of the time one gets an answer, which sup-
plies her representation of what she accomplished and did, much more
than how she effectively went about doing what she has done. I linger
on the starting point of Vermersch’s interrogation, which, coming from
a researcher in psychology, underlines the core of what will become his
specific practice of describing a subject’s preconscious experience. This
he will term “pre-reflective” or “implicit,” and it will lead him to set up
an interview technique aimed at enabling this subject to “make explicit”
(expliciter) her manner of doing what she does with a great degree of
fineness and precision, a rarely reached “granularity” (granularité), as he
himself puts it.
In the middle of the nineties Vermersch first encountered the main
sources of Husserl’s phenomenology, especially his Ideas Pertaining to
a Pure Phenomenology I (Husserl 1982 [1913]). Then, in the following
years, he read Husserl’s later writings from the twenties, Analyses Con-
cerning Passive and Active Synthesis (written in 1918–1926; see Hua XI)
(Husserl 2001), which belong to the Husserlian’s later period of genetic
phenomenology, also the earlier course given by Husserl in the Win-
ter semester of 1904–1905 titled, On the Phenomenology of the Con-
sciousness of Internal Time (written in 1893–1917; see Hua X). Here,
he discovered the fertility of the Husserlian concepts of intentional lived
experiences, reflexive acts, attentional shifts, awakening intentions, pas-
sive retentional processes, and the passive pregiven field of consciousness.
In these concepts, Vermersch saw operations of consciousness, acts one
carries out, conceptual resources to make more accurate the description
of the various acts and procedures, which I achieve when I do something.
While adopting these concepts for their operational and descriptive value,
140  Natalie Depraz
Vermersch parted with Husserl’s philosophical position, especially his
transcendental idealism and foundational ontology (Vermersch 2012).
Thus, the epoché, the emblematic method of the suspension of unques-
tioned contents, is understood here less as a principle of theoretical justifi-
cation of knowledge than as a practical operation, producing a reexamined
experience, which is free from presuppositions. In the mid-1990s, my
rereading of Husserlian phenomenology, understood as a practice of expe-
riential effectuation of the epoché, a rereading which I then identified itself
as “transcendental empiricism” meets Vermersch’s work on the lived singu-
lar experience of a given subject (Depraz 2001). It gave rise to continuous
and intense exchanges among Vermersch, Francisco J. Varela, and myself
during six years between 1995 and 2001: these discussions led to the publi-
cation of a work written by six hands, On Becoming Aware: A Pragmatics
of Experiencing (Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch 2003). The understand-
ing of transcendental phenomenology as a transcendental empiricism refers
indeed to Husserl’s innermost claim (against Kant) of the validity of the
“transcendental experience” of the subject. It involves taking seriously the
concreteness and effectiveness of the transcendental attitude and the genu-
ine experimentation of the transcendental epoché. Through transcendental
empiricism, I indeed intend to do justice to transcendental phenomenology
in its genuine meaning, that is, an attitude of a subject concretely freeing
herself from preconceptions (Szilasi 2011 [1959]; Depraz 2011).
Through the technique of the micro-phenomenological explication
interview, one therefore enables the subject to have a more fine-tuned
access to singular lived experiences, which are often covered over by
generic representations. Typically, if I  ask you how you woke up this
morning, and you answer that in general, the alarm clock wakes you up,
you are describing the usual structure of your wake-up activity, or your
own spontaneous representation of this morning’s waking up. According
to Vermersch, you would be describing a “class of lived experiences,”
but not your lived and unique experience of that particular morning: in
other words, the formulation of this morning’s experience is in fact the
implicit and sedimented result of a multiplicity of experiences. This is the
type of description, which one reads in the analyses of phenomenologi-
cal philosophers when they say they refer to a situation. For example, in
paragraph §27 of his Ideas I, Husserl writes:

I can let my attention wander away from the writing table which was
just now seen and noticed, out through the unseen parts of the room
which are behind my back, to the veranda, into the garden, to the
children in the summerhouse, etc.
(Husserl 1982 [1913], 51; see Depraz 2008a)

In spite of the fact that the statement is in the present tense, that it con-
tains a deictic (“this desk”) and is carried by an I situated in a concrete
 Critical Phenomenology and Micro-Phenomenology 141
and familiar living space, which are all seeming indicators of an embod-
ied speech (“prise de parole incarnée,” in Vermersch’s words), the exam-
ple remains generic and the description structural. In fact, the indicator
of the remaining structural generality of the experience consists in the
mode of possibility which begins the description: “I can let my attention
wander.” Husserl might well have lived this experience dozens of times;
he is in fact reproducing for us a structural experience of attentional
shift, which we can enter, of course, and which we can even carry out for
ourselves, in accordance with an imaginary mode of transposition of the
phenomenological level of possibility inherent in the Husserlian proposi-
tion named the eidetic variation. Nevertheless, this attentional experience
has nothing singular about it, and so as a consequence, the description
remains general.
On the contrary, I suggest that you return to the precise moment when
you woke up this morning and describe the micro-process of emerg-
ing into consciousness, which was your awakening. By doing so, while
inviting you to precisely go back to that moment, I will get a fine-tuned
description of your experience of that moment. First describe the con-
text: your lying position, what sort of room you are in (airy or close), the
lighting, the heat, go back to the precise moment when the alarm clock
rings, or whether you wake up before it rings, how you feel, what sort of
emotional or cognitive state is yours (peaceful, tense), how about your
possible internal orientation movements in space, the speed (or absence
of it) with which you recognize the environment, whether you are in a
hotel room or anywhere which is not your usual environment.
In short, the micro-phenomenological explicitation interview is a fine-
tuned description technique of micro-processes both bodily (feelings,
kinesthesis, proprioception, cardiac) and internal (cognitive, attentional,
emotional, imaging) of a singular moment lived by a subject at a given
time and in a given space. So, while being situated in the wake of the Hus-
serlian discipline of the description of lived moments of consciousness,
Vermersch chose to unfold a singular and fine-tuned description. Com-
pared to Husserl’s approach, this shifts the descriptive focus in two ways:
1) The lived experience is singular, content-laden, not generic, and struc-
tural; 2) the granularity level of the description is reinforced, which gives
rise to fine-tuned micro-sequences, to detailed emergence lived processes,
and the highlighting of (quasi) synchronic moments of experience.2
Vermersch’s proposal in the wake of Husserl’s principle of intuition
therefore is to rehabilitate introspection as a method of access to the
singular lived experience of a given subject. To do this, he implements the
technique of evocation (évocation) we mentioned earlier, where the sub-
ject reinvests in detail her experience of a singular moment by being there
again: I see the room where I wake up this morning, I feel the flavor of the
sheets, I perceive the morning light under my still closed eyelids. Then she
produces a description of the segments, levels, and micro-phases of her
142  Natalie Depraz
experience of this precise moment of awakening. Thus, in the face of the
Neowattian skeptic’s argument that only swears by observable behavio-
ral (today neuronal) traces, Vermersch moves to the concrete practical
plane of producing a description of a singular moment of the lived expe-
rience of a given subject.

2.  Critical phenomenology

The emergence of Critical Phenomenology is also a relatively recent
one. The term was used around the turn of the 21st century to focus
on a mixed approach in philosophy and in anthropology. The idea was
to show the fertility of co-generating both disciplines, the first being
transcendental-oriented, the second claiming an empirical and experi-
ential basis.
We know similar earlier moves in the history of the phenomenology
of the 20th century: first and foremost, psychiatric phenomenology also
known as Daseinsanalyse, which was initiated by the Swiss psychiatrists
Ludwig Binswanger and Médard Boss (Binswanger 1960; Boss 1953).
It took advantage of the structures of time and intersubjective experi-
ence and of existence described by Husserl and Heidegger in order to
account for specific altered structures in schizophrenic, melancholic, and
maniac disorders, just to name the main ones. Also, the description of
social structures of experience was initiated by Alfred Schütz as Husserl’s
disciple (Schütz 1962), who opened up the field of phenomenological
sociology and forecast later steps made for example in ethnomethodol-
ogy by Harold Garfinkel and Erwin Goffman (Garfinkel 1967; Goffman
1990 [1956]). More recently, in the nineties, scientific moves were made
with Francisco Varela’s neurophenomenology, with Pierre Vermersch’s
psychophenomenology, and recently with what I called “cardiophenom-
enology.”3 The goal, again, was to describe finer structures of my lived
experience (time, perceptive, attentional, bodily, emotional) while rely-
ing on and refining the empirical structure and dynamics of my brain
functioning, of my conduct, and of my heart functioning.4 In all these
historical and contemporary moves, phenomenology as a philosophy dis-
closing the transcendental constitutive structures of the subject as an a
priori condition of possibility of experience is put to the test in its robust-
ness against forms of experience that may challenge it, such as psychotic,
sharing collective, perceptive stereoscopic, attentional, or surprised-laden
experiences. In most of these moves, transcendental eidetic structures of
experience are de-formalized and subjected to a transformative dynamics
of their meaning, thus engaging into a general practical phenomenology.
In a sense, we could say that the recent move initiated in the United
States by what calls itself Critical phenomenology finds its general inspi-
ration in these multifarious tentative research works born in Europe to
make phenomenology beneficial to new fields of experience, which were
 Critical Phenomenology and Micro-Phenomenology 143
not taken into account by historical phenomenology (Husserl, Heidegger,
Sartre, Merleau-Ponty). The question will be: Can Critical phenomenol-
ogy that follows such transformative steps be understood as practical
experiential phenomenology or, again, in the general sense of what I refer
to as “transcendental empiricism,” or does it have its own preconcep-
tions, prior requirements, and claims?
As a starting point, we can say that Critical phenomenology simulta-
neously favors a double move: on the one hand, it stresses the concrete-
ness of bodily anchored experiences and, on the other hand, it develops
a critical view of subjectivity as an instance of transcendental egology.
In that respect, it adopts the solution which was for example common
to Merleau-Ponty and Ricœur: distancing from Husserl’s first transcen-
dental egological stance. It also makes a further step, since it takes as its
core theme concrete cultural, ethical, and social-political issues that were
not broached by phenomenologists of the early generations or only in
a lateral way,5 such as the lived experience of people of color and rac-
ism, feminism, and gender identities LGBTQIA+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual,
transgender, transsexual, queer, intersex, asexual, questioning). More
generally, minorities such as homeless and the reality of their margin-
alization and oppression, or again disabled or addicted people such as
drug users. We might think that these issues are to be dealt by social and
political philosophy and not phenomenology. But this take would forget
that Husserl himself described the structures of what he called “anomali-
ties” and referred to as the specific dynamics of the mode of givenness of
the other, appearing as such. Even if he referred to them under the now
traditional modes of givenness of the animal, the mad, the primitive, and
the child, which may seem restrictive and normative to us, he opened the
way for an understanding of otherness under the practice of the epoché,
that is, without any normative judgment (Hua XIII—XV; see Steinbock
1995; Depraz 1995). This take would also forget that Sartre tackled the
issues of sadomasochist relationships in Being and Nothingness (L’être
et le néant), and that de Beauvoir investigated the phenomenon even in
more depth in The Second Sex (Le deuxième sexe) while at the same
time discussing the problems of prostitution and feminine erotic sexuality
(Sartre 1977 [1943]; de Beauvoir 1973/1997 [1949]).
So, the virtue of Critical phenomenology is to shed light on contempo-
rary crucial issues of our societies and to consider it relevant and benefi-
cial to shed such a phenomenological light on them. One might consider
that the phenomenological methodology along with its transcendental
claim is used here in a too broad and loose sense and that the very name
of the approach called “Critical phenomenology” is misguiding, since it
would mean that phenomenology has not been critical from the start.
Now, the epoché as the very critic of presuppositions is the core of phe-
nomenology as a philosophy. But, we could also say that Critical phe-
nomenology takes up again three main claims at the core of Husserlian
144  Natalie Depraz
phenomenology itself and uses them as a lever to approach these issues
anew. First, Critical phenomenology actually seeks to uncover taken-for-
granted presuppositions: the epoché is really put to work as a main method
of Critical phenomenology. Second, it contends a truly first-person sin-
gular approach, while taking seriously the experiential situation of the
individual as it is concretely lived within her life-world. Third, Critical
phenomenology questions the insufficiency of the idea of transcendental
subjectivity as a formal and generic egological principle, claiming that
it is in fact instantiated by concrete human persons, and it does this to
face the complexity of interpersonal embodied situations, also stressing
instead the necessity to put transcendental intersubjectivity to the fore.
Of course, we could argue that phenomenology since the nineties has
already taken such a step, at least to a certain extent, by putting the
epoché to the fore (and not only intentionality and constitution) (e.g.,
Depraz 1999). Furthermore, while underlining the importance of inter-
subjectivity in its different forms, phenomenology has likewise explicated
empathy, grounded in self-alterity, and the generativity of life-world hor-
izontality, as a structural component inherent in subjectivity itself (see
Steinbock 1995; Depraz 1995).
At all events, in her book titled Solitary Confinement: Social After-
lives (2013), Lisa Guenther offers a touching testimony of the first-person
experience of prisoners in Supermax prisons: how long-term isolation
and sensory deprivation highly transform their lived experience into a
hallucinatory existence, where you feel living somewhat “outside” your-
self. The study also highlights how the other is crucial to my own experi-
ence in order for me not to “lose” myself and fall into psychosis. More
generally, the general purpose of the book is to uncover our habits, our
norms of life, and to identify how power relations surreptitiously frame
our daily interactions.
More broadly, in Fifty Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology (2020),
edited by Gail Weiss et  al., the general aim is to refresh classical phe-
nomenological analysis while involving new experiences that have not
been thematized, or are only barely broached by phenomenologists until
today, such as, for example, experiences of manipulation, trauma, and
denial, and to show the constitutive political involvements of such analy-
sis. In that respect, phenomenology needs to adapt and also transform its
methodological tools in order to produce a genuine political and social
epoché.6 By questioning our pre-conceived beliefs regarding power rela-
tions in everyday life, it helps uncovering them as oppression-submission
relations – be they racial, gendered, disability related, or trans-prejudiced.
As a consequence, the transcendental purity of phenomenology is con-
ceptualized and explicitly identified as a political construction and preju-
dice, and the task of philosophy is reformulated as “creolization” (first
invented by the French contemporary poet Édouard Glissant as a syn-
onym of “métissage”): the constructive process of creating new forms
 Critical Phenomenology and Micro-Phenomenology 145
from prior ones to be superseded and transformed. The fertility of such
“bricolage,” as Jacques Derrida calls it, can be illustrated, for example,
by the power of creative processes in the sciences.7
With such a new grounding step in mind, I would like now to move
backward to an emblematic and pioneering grounding of socio-political
questioning in a first-personal phenomenological manner. I  mean de
Beauvoir’s thrust, The Second Sex (1949), and her last book Old Age
(1970).8 Beyond de Beauvoir’s critical examination of the women’s social
submissive situation through history and the acute diagnosis of old age
as a forgotten, neglected question in philosophy, what is of high interest
for me in de Beauvoir’s phenomenology is her unique ability to combine a
situated first-personal stance and a social political concern regarding the
dialectics of women’s oppression and submission to begin with, but also,
more broadly, of neglected minorities. Indeed, she quite early squares
the circle by offering a first-personal gendered and situated approach
of inequality-laden social political conditions and of violence-oriented
relationships. In that respect, she makes an unequalled and still unique
step in the phenomenological tradition while pioneeringly producing an
existentially situated first-personal phenomenology of collective issues
and actions. Even though Husserl, for example, ends up in the thirties in
the Crisis manuscripts with a refined description of a carnally embodied,
practice-oriented “I” embedded in her life-world, the latter remains seen
through the universal structure of this still generic I, and such a transcen-
dental I is all but a first-personal situated and gendered subject. In short,
Husserl is unable in one sense, within the transcendental constitutive
framework of his so-called neutral (but in fact tacitly masculine) egology,
to produce a situated first-personal view of collective issues.
De Beauvoir’s thrust therefore provides us with a remarkable trans-
formation of phenomenology consistent with her own lived existential
understanding of the concept of situation. First, she speaks in her own
name, that is, from her own situated feminine experience and condition.
As such she reveals the paradoxical and problematic stance of a his-
tory of philosophy and namely of phenomenology, which is supposedly
assumed to produce universal categories, that is, neutral with regard to
gender, but in reality, without saying it, man situated. So, her general
“methodology” is highly representative of her care for combining and
integrating the “view from within,” that is, the first-personal viewpoint,
and the “view from outside,” that is, a third-personal approach using
here sociological inquiries and statistics (Heinämaa 2014). Indeed, The
Second Sex as well as Old Age is formally divided into two parts, which
respectively deal with these two approaches: whereas the 1949 book is
composed of two separate volumes, respectively titled Facts and Myths
(vol. 1) and The Lived Experience (vol. 2), de Beauvoir’s last book has
two parts, titled The External Viewpoint (part 1) and Being in the World
(part 2). In both works, the third-person factual and external approach
146  Natalie Depraz
offers a first quantified and objectified framework, which is meant to be
reframed and requalified by the lived experiential perspective of a situ-
ated I. So, the third-personal viewpoint is not used as a correcting truth-
holder of a supposedly still too subjective, that is, weaker approach, but,
on the contrary, the lived experience is the one that refines and bodily
situates and anchors a too generic and disconnected third-person per-
spective. Furthermore, de Beauvoir’s view is not to play one approach
against the other but have them play together so as to let a more complex
and inclusive phenomenon present itself. In the same way as she eventu-
ally does not play the feminine dimension against the masculine one but
presents a differentiated and inclusive view of sexuality, which makes
room for sexually individuated experiences, while also claiming the situ-
atedness of her own first-person experience as a woman.9

3. Conclusion: the meeting of critical phenomenology

and micro-phenomenology: a first-personal experience
of collective issues
What are the threads on the basis of which such a meeting is made possi-
ble? The thread micro-phenomenology pulled from Husserlian phenom-
enology is the crucial move from the so-called neutral I, for example,
universal and non-situated, to a truly embodied gendered first-personal
I. As for the thread Critical phenomenology, it pulls from Husserlian
phenomenology and refers to a clear focus on concrete social and politi-
cal phenomena, such as ethnicity and gender, which are highly reveal-
ing of our embeddedness in concrete real situations – and in its peculiar
Beauvoirian style provides an integrated and inclusive combination of
first- and third-person methodologies.
Hence to my view, the relevance of a cooperation of both approaches is
crucial for the future of phenomenology. Micro-phenomenology indeed
brings a genuine and rigorous first-person method, very much needed
in concrete investigations conducted by critical phenomenologists. This
methodology is all the more adjustable to Critical-phenomenological
goals since it operates on a strictly experiential, and not on an a pri-
ori transcendental level. Critical phenomenology for its part offers an
intersectionally embedded approach to be added and included in micro-
phenomenology so as to allow the development of its emerging concern
for collective problems, for example, ecological issues.10
In order to provide the needed articulation of the first- and third-person
perspectives, the second-person perspective, or intersubjectivity in Hus-
serl’s terms, is a keystone. Why? For one, in Old Age11 de Beauvoir dem-
onstrates quite well how we all have trouble realizing ourselves as aging,
“becoming old,” and how in this particular situation particular others
help us observe ourselves as aging subjects. It is not a collective but an
individual other who operates as a mirror in this process of realization.
 Critical Phenomenology and Micro-Phenomenology 147
So, with these acute formulations, which are emblematic of her philoso-
phizing style, she writes: “Since I see myself being old as another person,
it is normal that the becoming aware of my aging is revealed by the oth-
ers” and “Old age is always situated beyond my own actual experience,
so that I am not able to have any full inner experience of it.”12 In this
regard, she uses again Sartre’s concept of the unrealizable (irréalisable) –
that is, our impossibility of living as Pour-soi what we are for the other
(Pour autrui) – but she applies the concept to the special case of aging
experience, and argues that only the other can display to me my aging. In
another way, micro-phenomenology ends up in the very same observa-
tion: it is the other – here the interviewer – who guides me in the descrip-
tion of my own experience, which I would have much more trouble as
interviewee to describe alone (Bitbol 2018).
So, both approaches end up in a similar diagnosis: phenomenology,
in order to be truly a first-person philosophy, needs to rely on a second-
person viewpoint which puts the other at the core and provides the
requalified objectivity which is peculiar to philosophy.
To conclude, I presented some aspects of two recent phenomenological
approaches which challenge the historical previous steps of phenomenol-
ogy, and challenge, though in different ways, its very method, with the
potential to highly benefiting each other. Both claim that phenomenology
is not a “conservatoire” of tools blindly applied to contemporary – thus
far unheard of  – contents and experiences, with the risk of keeping a
distant look from the singularity of the experience concerned. In order
to deal with the subtle reality of my being surprised in its multifarious
modalities (cognitive, attentional, emotional, interpersonal, pathological,
collective) you need to put to work a refined adapted method, where
intentionality, the epoché, and constitution are crucial tools but remain
too loose and gross and need to be refined with the exploration of the
dynamics of micro-moments and unrecognized individual and social pro-
cesses. In order to face the unheard and troubling reality of lived expe-
riences, for example, of despair, suicide, incest, rape, or trans-identity,
you need to engage in the task of developing descriptions, which bring
about other and new modalities of description. Challenges such as this
include, for example, the task of describing the relationship to the denied
forms of violence characteristic of inter-subjective relations or the often
non-explicitated self-conflicting experience subjects go through, or again
the question of how submissive attitudes are so generally accepted and
consented that they may appear as attitudes of free subjects, whereas in
truth they are throughout alienated attitudes. In short, the content of
experiences affects the methods and entails a transformative methodol-
ogy (Depraz 2021b).13
Such a conception of phenomenology is a transformative one, in the
manner in which Bernard Waldenfels already visioned: it stresses the con-
structive, innovative, and creative dynamics of sense-given experiences
148  Natalie Depraz
and rejects all conservative attitudes, which pretend to operate at the
sole level of existing historical analysis and present themselves as the
defenders of analyses stocked in already existing inquiries. Such a dis-
tinction is both theoretical and political, hence the adjectives “conserva-
tive” and “creative-constructive” to qualify these two possibilities of
doing phenomenology. The creative and constructive type of phenom-
enology is characterized by risk, newness, and exposure, also vulnerabil-
ity and acceptance of provisional results: it is actually the enterprise of
the truly creative mind, be it scientific or artistic. The conservative type
of phenomenology is characteristic of the attitude of the archivist, the
historical mind, who sticks to the existing reality and is afraid of mov-
ing forward, who is also always prompt to criticize the first attitude and
to define itself as the only true authority of knowledge, easily tending
to authoritarian positions. In the same way as phenomenology is but
only illusionarily neutral and always situated, embodied, and gendered
(though often not recognized as such, even today), phenomenology is
but illusionarily apolitical, theoretically neutral: if it sits upon the con-
servatoire of the tradition of past authors, it is tendentially an individu-
alistic, neutralizing, masculine-gendered phenomenology; if it opens up
to newness, creation of concepts, and description of unseen experiences,
it is tendentially a situated, pluralistic, feminine-gendered phenomenol-
ogy.14 No phenomenology is neutral, except maybe in the mythical mind
of a child; each phenomenology is situated, anchored, grounded, embod-
ied, as you may wish to say, and is so, even if (and all the more if) the
author denies it.

Notes
1. See the website of GREX (Groupe de Recherche sur l’Explicitation: www.
grex2.com/#tabs-2)
2. On Husserlian phenomenology in the light of micro-phenomenology, see
Depraz (2020).
3. For this, see Varela (1996), Vermersch (1996), Depraz and Desmidt (2018).
4. For this, see Varela (1999), Depraz (2008b; 2014).
5. Exceptions are to be found, for example, in Derrida (1997), Waldenfels
(2006), Ahmed (2006), and Rodemeyer (2018). To my view, Edith Stein’s
earlier interest in the experience of the woman in the thirties remains
included in the essentialist view of the passive-active polarity between
women and men.
6. For a first step in this reversal of the epoché from the transcendental to an
“epoché of the natural attitude,” see Schütz 2010.
7. In Traité du Tout-Monde, Poétique IV, Glissant writes: “Ils disent que
créolisation est vue générale, après quoi on gagnerait, ou profiterait, à pas-
ser à des spécificités. C’est revenir à d’anciennes partitions, l’universel, le
particulier, etc., ils ne savent pas lire le monde, le monde ne lit pas en eux.”
(Glissant 1997, 242)
 Critical Phenomenology and Micro-Phenomenology 149
8. De Beauvoir 2018 [1949], 2020 [1970]. On de Beauvoir’s philosophy, see,
for example The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir, edited by
Claudia Card, Cambridge University Press, 2003, online publication 2006.
9. In de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, volume 2, Part I, Chapter III, “Sexual
initiation.”
10. See http://fenomenologiacorporal.org/blog/2020/07/29/micro-phenomeno
logy-lab/, and the 25–29 May 2020 Online Workshop of the Lab of Micro-
phenomenology: “The Role of Micro-phenomenology research and prac-
tice in the urgent ecological questions that our society is meeting”: www.
micro-phenomenology.com/copie-de-contemplative-ommunication See, in
particular, Depraz 2021a.
11. In de Beauvoir’s Old Age, Second Part “Being in the world”, Chapter
V, “Discovery and assumption of the old age lived experience of the body.”
12. De Beauvoir 2020 [1970], 405–406, 410 (translations mine). See also
Jean Amery’s Über das Altern: Revolte und Resignation (2010 [1968]),
which also suggests an interpretation of old age as being felt through others.
I thank N. de Warren for drawing my attention to Amery’s book.
13. On that matter, see my article, “Micro-phenomenological explicitation
interviews and biographical narrative interviews: A  combined perspective
in light of the experiential analysis of chronic diseases about narration
and micro-phenomenology in relation with the topic of chronic diseases.”
(Depraz 2021a)
14. Of course, as it is hopefully obvious, feminine versus masculine as well
as creative-constructive versus conservative are modal tendencies defining
attitudes and orientations, which does not causally and univocally refer to
a biologically anchored male-female distinction nor to a social-politician
conservative-progressist, liberal-socialist, for example, right-left opposition.

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237–259.
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Revue germanique internationale (13): 125–148.
Depraz, Natalie. 2014. Attention et vigilance: A la croisée de la phénoménologie
et des sciences cognitives. Paris: PUF.
Depraz, Natalie. 2020. “Husserlian Phenomenology in the Light of Microphe-
nomenology.” In Husserl, Kant and Transcendental Phenomenology, edited by
I. Apostolu and C. Serban, 505–523. Berlin: de Gruyter.
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More ‘Living in Time of Pandemic.” Constructivist Foundations, Special Issue
“Experience”, Summer 2021 (For the initial talk, see: www.youtube.com/
watch?v=48fkVed7OJE)
Depraz, Natalie. 2021b. “Micro-phenomenological Explication Interviews and
Biographical Narrative Interviews: A  Combined Perspective in Light of the
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Cognitive Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-021-09740-3, the article
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Depraz, Natalie, Francisco J. Varela, and Pierre Vermersch. 2003. On Becoming
Aware: A Pragmatics of Experiencing. Boston/Amsterdam/New York: Benja-
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10 Critique as Thinking Freely
and as Discernment
of the Heart
Anthony J. Steinbock

As is well known, phenomenology is a kind of reflection that radically

shifts perspectives from straightforwardly accepting what something is
to how this something is given. Inquiries into both aspects, the how and
the what make up fundamental features of phenomenological inquiry:
questions concerning meaning constitution (givenness) and essential
structures (being). Important to recognize is that the shift in perspec-
tive is carried out so as no longer to presuppose being, and instead to
understand the meaning of being in which we already participate; it is a
perspective that suspends accepting what something is (being) in order to
see ways of accepting of being. This “how” or “manner”  is another way
of expressing the sense or meaning of being.
Such a perspectival shift allows the attitude of taking things for granted
to come into view as the natural or mundane or, again, naïve attitude.
It is from such a phenomenological perspective that we can in fact iden-
tify our perceptual and intellectual relations with being as a participa-
tion in being as meaningful (or as not meaningful), as sense-filled (or as
nonsensical).
As I suggest later, this implies that phenomenology is already a criti-
cal attitude, calling into question our normative engagement in socio-
historical structures of existence. However, as I  also suggest, but only
intimate in this article, the critical engagement with the participation in
being is not the only kind of critique; there is another that I call the dis-
cernment of the heart.
In this article, I  take a brief historical look at the notion of critique
and then examine the notion of critique in phenomenology. I investigate
possible motivations of critique and suggest that phenomenology as criti-
cal reflection is not motivated in an intra-mundane way, but is a kind of
thinking freely. I maintain, however, that there are incitements to critique
in the emotional sphere. These include shame and the mindful attentive-
ness as the discernment of the heart. I conclude that epistemic critique is
founded in a special kind of emotional critique understood as discern-
ment. Ultimately critical participating in being is founded in participating
being, that is, loving.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003191483-10
 Critique as Thinking Freely and as Discernment of the Heart 153
1. Critique
What we understand by critique in part depends upon its problem field.
The English term, “critique” (and similar Indo-European and Latin forms)
is derived from the Greek κριτική, and is related to κρίνειν, meaning to dis-
tinguish, to discern, to arrange, to divide, to dispute, to judge, to criticize,
to make a decision, and so on. In a related fashion, a crisis is a turning point
(medically, one can have a good crisis, according to Hippocrates), and can
provoke decision-making, appraisal, or passing judgments.1 Accordingly,
those things evidenced for decisive decision-making are called criteria.
For Plato, critique has epistemological as well as ethical, political, and
practical resonances. In the Statesman, for example, while discussing
proper divisions, the process of critique itself shows up as the art of mak-
ing distinctions. In an epistemic regard, it can be understood as making
judgments or judging (Plato 1975, 259e–260c; see also 292b). Likewise
in the Theaetetus, κρίνειν expresses an epistemic process of distinguish-
ing what is true from what is not in making decisions, and in this regard,
the process of discriminating encompasses the juridical task of passing
judgment (Plato 1977, 170d; see also 150b, 201b–c). In distinguishing
between different kinds of judges or critics  – the lover of wisdom, the
lover of victory, and the lover of gain – it is the first, namely, the phi-
losopher, according to the The Republic, who is the best judge or critic
(κρίνει) of them all (Plato 1963, 581c–582d).
For Aristotle, in an ethical vein, right discrimination, judging rightly
(κρίσις ὀρθή), or discriminating well and soundly (κρίνειν καλῶς) is the
faculty for being considerate, sympathetic, or forgiving of others (Aristo-
tle 1975, 1143a, 19–21, 15–17; see also 1114b, 5–12). It is understand-
ing that discerns, discriminates, or judges (ἡ δέ σύνεσις κριτικὴ μόνον),
whereas prudence issues commands (ibid., 1143a, 10). The power of cri-
tique is so important that Aristotle defines citizens of any state as those
who are able to participate in deliberative and judicial (βουλευτικῆς καὶ
κριτικῆς) administration (Aristotle 1944, 1275b, 18–19). But it is also
essential for aesthetics (and criticism in this sense). For example, in the
context of musical education, musicians perform first for the sake of
judging, but when older, they no longer perform, but discern what is
beautiful, enjoying it rightly (ibid., 1340b, 36–40).
In Sextus Empiricus, we see critique moving into the realm of literary
criticism. For example, he observes that the critic, the one able to judge,
is said to differ from the grammarian, insofar as the critic is said to be an
expert in the whole range of linguistic science (Sextus Empiricus 1949,
79).2 One can also find a wide array of other examples that employ cri-
tique in the history of philosophy, examples that range from Cicero, to
Boethius, to Vico, Locke, Lambert, Kant et al. In what follows however,
I want to begin by examining the problem of critique within the specific
project of phenomenological philosophy.
154  Anthony J. Steinbock
What we can already glean from these initial linguistic clues discussed
earlier is that critique involves some manner of making distinctions and
decisive discriminations. For phenomenology, it entails a reflection, a
decisive turning of attention that redirects the movement of experience.
More specifically, this means that for phenomenology we decisively turn
from the ordinary flow of being (natural attitude) in order to let the things
themselves (all beings) appear in whichever way they give themselves.
Certainly, critique can take place in an everyday way. I can criticize a
newspaper; I can engage in literary criticism; I can decisively intervene
in a medical crisis; I can criticize my myself or my partner, and so forth.
These would belong to a natural attitude critique, a criticism within the
natural attitude merely; but they do not get us decisively to question the
natural attitude as such.
More significantly, critique can emerge as socio-political “immanent
critique.” In this case, critique would begin with existential or experi-
ential antagonisms such that a disjunction is experienced between who
we (individually and socially) are at present and who we are or who
we can be. The era of ideology, in Claude Lefort’s terms, could likewise
be understood as the era of critique: the sphere of immanence is called
upon to give an account of transcendence such that we are then oriented
toward overcoming antagonisms and divisions that emerge between the
social and the political, civil life and power (Lefort 1978, 1979, 1981; see
also Steinbock 2014).
Developing Marx’s thought on the issue, Seyla Benhabib suggests that
critique or critical philosophy examines the present situation, struggles,
desires, and conditions, and clarifies them as present in terms of their own
radical transformative future. Thus, normatively speaking, the future can
be said to be a task of the present without imposing an external standard
on the present. What is at issue is then immanent critique since society
is clarified as harboring emancipating human potential as yet unrealized
(Benhabib 1986, 60–61, 112–113). Furthermore, as a critique of norms,
such thought is executed as a critique of culture in an effort to demystify
culture and to disclose its utopian potential (ibid., 174).
As an attempt to give an account of transcendence, critique can also
take place as phenomenological critique. Such a critique does not take
for granted what something is, but enquires into how this being is given,
that is, it studies being as given. It is the liberation of the phenomena
from all prejudices such that what is – the phenomena’s very depth – is
the appearing as it gives itself. The inquiry into the how of givenness,
initiated by a shift in attentiveness, is understood as a clarification of
being in terms of its meaning or sense givenness. The how of givenness
immediately points to the how of giving. As a whole, this is the relational
structure called “intentionality” or “the intentional relation.”
The meanings of being that are distinguished as modes of givenness
are not flat or static; every fact harbors an orientation that points to its
 Critique as Thinking Freely and as Discernment of the Heart 155
development or to its deviation from its instantiation in experience. It
has a normative significance (e.g., Husserl 1993, 362–420; cf. Steinbock
2017, Chs. 3–4). Thus, not only can sense be concordant over time (inclu-
sive of disruptions or discordances that challenge this concordance), but
its very opening is also a temporal and futural teleology as an optimal –
constituted in experience – around which all given perspectives serve as
indexes until or unless it is ruptured and surpassed by a new optimal (and
thus a new normal, becoming hyper-normal) (Steinbock 1995).
Such a phenomenological reflection is not an internal Reflexion, but
what Husserl calls a Selbstbesinnung, a self-reflection of a peculiar type.
It entails two things.

1) The investigation into modes of givenness or the emergence of mean-

ing immediately points back to the participation of the subject or
to the first-person (singular or plural) contribution to meaning as
accepting and/or transforming that meaning (of being of the world).
This self-reflection points to our taking responsibility for the emer-
gence of meaning. Since the goal of responsibility is always already
given in the execution of the phenomenological reduction, it does not
look for pre-established outcomes. As I try to show in the subsequent
work, responsibility is already established in the vocational givenness
of me as person; when I realize its gratuitousness, I am incited to take
care of it. This is why for Husserl, philosophers are functionary of
humanity (Hua VI, §7). Thus, phenomenological self-reflection not
only describes forms of epistemic participation but also engages in a
dynamic field of interactions.
2) Taking responsibility for the emergence of meaning implies that phe-
nomenological reflection has normative import, not only in detect-
ing constituted norms but also in directing or re-directing experience
in relation to them. In both respects, the phenomenological attitude
is critical; through its self-reflective distance it is disposed toward
responsibility by normative and norm-constituting critique and exe-
cutes this as explicitly relational participating in being.

On the one hand, the phenomenological critical attitude is constitu-

tively abnormal in relation to the concordance of the natural attitude
(critical or otherwise). It is radically unnatural, but in its abnormality or
rupture of the natural attitude, it brings the natural attitude into view
as such, and therefore is optimal (and hyper-normal). That is, it brings
into view the relational emergence of meaning in terms of norm develop-
ment and norm critique. Thus, when Husserl discusses the differences
between an “open possibility” and an “enticing possibility,” we can con-
clude that an open possibility makes sense experientially, but it should
not be understood as having no motivation at all, and that all possibilities
should ultimately be understood as enticing possibilities (Husserl 2001,
156  Anthony J. Steinbock
Part 2, Div. 1). Further, when we consider Husserl’s description of brack-
eting in this context, we can ask if this modalization could in some way
be understood as the epoché. Indeed, the epoché is a modalization of
straightforward experience, and in this sense, it is an anomaly in rela-
tion to the concordance of natural experience (or the natural attitude of
thinking). But in a different sense, this modalization is not a mere devia-
tion from a standard: it is what Husserl calls hyper-normal or optimal for
thinking in its very disruption.
Some contemporary thinkers argue that phenomenology does not have
such dynamic potential, and that it is tied reductively to an ahistorical or
solipsistic subject, and thus they try to supplement phenomenology with
“critique” in order to reflect on those plastic structures that figure our
sociohistorical and political coexistence. For some contributors, “criti-
cal phenomenology” functions most persuasively as a natural attitude
critique, which presupposes certain aspects of the phenomenological
practice but challenges what is taken to be its abstractly descriptive, solip-
sistic, and/or eidetic dimensions.3 In her own work, Lisa Guenther (2013)
highlights the critical potential and groundwork of phenomenology as
crucial but questions its egological aspirations. Still others, like Gayle
Salamon (2018), carefully examine the goals of both phenomenology and
critical theory. Regarding the phenomenological side of the inquiry, she
concludes that insofar as phenomenology reflects on the structural condi-
tions of its own emergence and describes what it sees in order to see it
anew, “what is critical about critical phenomenology turns out to have
been there all along” (Salamon 2018, 12). These points are clearly expli-
cated by Smaranda Aldea and Lanei M. Rodemeyer (see Chapters 5 and
7 in this volume).
Phenomenology is uniquely critical because when we let appear the
phenomena as they give themselves (the how of givenness), it immedi-
ately points to our contributions, and the limits of those contributions to
meaning – individual and social. This discloses our complicit or antago-
nistic participation in the emergence of sense and meaning, and the possi-
bility of our responsible participation in this emergence according to the
normative unfolding of sense – not only its concordance but also its opti-
mal givenness and constitution, which is in process. For Sophie Loidolt
(2021), the so-called classical phenomenology is also already doing criti-
cal work. She argues that phenomenology is critical, since it does not take
ideals such as equality or emancipation as abstract normative concepts
but analyzes their fundamental meaning on experiential and “proto-
normative” levels rejecting the imposition of external standards.
My understanding is that phenomenology is not a matter of apply-
ing a method to something existing as static but is critical already in
the sense of responsibly engaging in the meaning of being, in the ways
in which it gives itself to phenomena, according to the norms generated
within experience, and thus within a field of intersubjective interactions.
 Critique as Thinking Freely and as Discernment of the Heart 157
Phenomenology as critical and as generative phenomenology is able to
support genealogical inquiries into the legitimacy of historical modes
of knowing related to mechanisms of power and coercion, where these
modes of knowing exercise effects of power within and outside of their
domains (cf. Foucault 1997, especially Chapter  1). But a phenomeno-
logical critique would not only attempt to discern the conditions under
which singularity arises in the interactions between individuals, groups,
societies, behaviors; it also has to investigate the normative movement
that unfolds for which we as actors are responsible. Bernhard Walden-
fels, in particular, has already been undertaking such phenomenologi-
cally critical and self-critical projects in groundbreaking and convincing
ways (see, e.g., Waldenfels 1980, 1987, 1994, 2006, 2012). This does
not mean that phenomenology always has to make normative claims, or
that every descriptive undertaking in terms of the structures of experience
implies normative claims or prescriptions. For example, we can describe
what goes on in the movement of trust and note that it is a fundamental
experience in the constitution of social relations, without taking a stand
on when I  should trust or when trust is appropriate or inappropriate
in a particular situation. However, certain descriptions turn out to be
implicitly normative when we phenomenologically unfurl the genetic and
generative dimensions of the constitution of meaning. But these are all
parts of the phenomenological enterprise undertaken at different levels.
So, whereas critical theory risks generating an increasing distance
between the social theorists and the empirical social groups that the
former describe, phenomenology – as Selbstbesinnung (first-person sin-
gular or plural) and as generative – takes subjective and intersubjective
experience as the touchstone for clarifying the meaning of social praxis
and the norms generated within that human activity. It can, therefore,
describe human crises critically in terms of political, cultural, psychic,
sub-psychic, emotional, and aesthetic relations, etc., as they are lived
through and not only as externally generated in a particular domain
(such as an economic paradigm or more broadly, through political econ-
omy). This was, in part, one of Merleau-Ponty’s insightful contributions
already contained in the long concluding footnote regarding historical
materialism appended to the chapter on the body and its sexual being in
Phenomenology of Perception.
Given this starting point, let me ask: Are there motivations for critique
in this kind of experience? Let me turn now to the meaning of motivation
especially in relation to phenomenological thinking.

2. Motivation
By motivation I understand an intra-mundane provocation (cf. Husserl
2001; Hua IV; Steinbock 2017). Motivation does not function in the way
that a cause-effect relation of necessity does. Rather, motivation can be
158  Anthony J. Steinbock
characterized as a because-so relation, suggesting an openness of what
is to come on the basis of what is given. Within a motivational rela-
tion we can observe what I have cited earlier as “open possibilities” and
“enticing possibilities” (Husserl 2001, Part 2, Ch. 3). What is provoked
(motivated) is based on something given in the present and immediately
retained, and this couplet protends and passively forecasts what is to
come. Depending upon what has been constituted, as well as the practi-
cal context of interests, something will be effectively significant for the
perceiver either as an open possibility or as an enticing possibility. For
example, while walking through a forest with cliffs on the horizon, what
is motivated is simply and straightforwardly the perception of the rock
cliffs on the horizon. This would be an open possibility. It is not sketched
out whether the cliffs are climbable, covered with moss, wet or dry, and
so on. With particular interests in making it to the top, with attention to
stable or changing weather conditions, etc., it may become an enticing
possibility, namely, that these rock cliffs are not just presented as rock
cliffs, but also rock cliffs to be climbed, rock cliffs with climbers gathered
below, or else rock cliffs that are too wet to climb right now (because of
the past or impending rainstorm).
All of this takes place within the natural attitude. It is entirely “natu-
ral” because I presuppose (or pre-posit) what is to come in a straightfor-
ward relation with being – without seeing this as a perspective or attitude
at all. But this also means that it is mundane or naïve since it is, quite
naturally, not an investigation into its how of givenness. Let me be clear:
By natural or mundane, I  do not mean simply a pre-reflective or pas-
sive dimension of experience. The mundane in a phenomenological sense
encompasses both passivity and activity, and the pre-reflective as well as
the reflective dimensions of experience. As a result, it is not contradictory
to say that motivations could be understood as judicative (active) reasons
for or against a particular action. Therefore, when we are asking after
possible motivations for critique, it cannot be a matter of tracing moti-
vations from passivity to activity.4 Further, it is not just a matter of this
or that thing becoming thematic, but also the natural worldview as such
becoming thematized as problem.
If we take things for granted in a motivational relation, is there any-
thing that provokes not taking things for granted as an original shift of
attitude, something sufficient to provoke a phenomenological reflection?
This would not be a matter of preparing a beginning for philosophy,
as we might find in Hegel, but a matter of the beginning of philosophy
(see Steinbock 2017, 63–95; cf. Lenkowski 1978). Can breaking through
the posture of taking things for granted be motivated by something still
taken for granted? In short, is there a motivation of the natural attitude
(a naïve motivation) to get beyond the natural attitude and to see it as
such? I argue that these considerations have to be qualified by the dis-
cernment of the heart, and for this reason, they will be provisional.
 Critique as Thinking Freely and as Discernment of the Heart 159
3.  Motivations and thinking freely
If phenomenology can be understood as critical reflection in the above
clarified sense, it is possible to examine possible motivations for critique
in phenomenology, at least as it is conceived in a Husserlian register. The
issue is if and what could suffice for a radical shift in perspective such that
it lets appear our participation in the world as a whole. Husserl seems to
identify at least three possibilities: wonder, alienness, and thinking freely,
in a qualified sense.
Wonder. In his Crisis writings, Husserl identifies θαυμάζειν/thaumazein
or wonder as the origin of philosophy for the Greeks, a posture that
is not practical in a customary sense of being pragmatic or rooted in
psychophysical intelligence oriented toward natural interests (Hua VI,
331/285).5 If a crisis alone were a motivation for phenomenological cri-
tique, it would be contained precisely by pragmatic interests, and thus
not be originary critique. By identifying wonder as a turning point, Hus-
serl is trying to describe a shift from practical interests to theōria. This
transition (wonder) would give philosophy as phenomenological its fac-
tual motivation in the concrete framework of historical occurrences. This
is why Husserl wants to trace out the philosophical reorientation from
mere thaumazein to proper theōria as the full, genuine science. Immedi-
ately recognizing this as a historical fact – the historical emergence and
motivation of wonder – he cautions that there is still “something essen-
tial” about it (Hua VI, 332/285). In order words, even though we can
identify a historical situatedness of the emergence of the idea of genu-
ine science, this is a quasi-motivation, since, ultimately, theōria has no
motivation in objective time, that is, genuine theōria is irreducible to its
temporal location; it is not of or from empirical history, but is in history
understood as generative unfolding.
Seemingly unsatisfied with leaving the matter here, Husserl then dis-
tinguishes, within theōria itself, doxic theōria from epistemic theōria, or
again, between theōria of the natural attitude and theōria of the phenom-
enological attitude. For me, this just pushes back the issue concerning
the motivation of the phenomenological critical attitude. That is, such a
formulation still begs the question concerning the motivation for what
he understands as genuine philosophy: If wonder is the motivation to
theōria, how do we get now from doxic theōria (natural attitude) to epis-
temic theōria (genuine science, phenomenology, etc.)?6
Merleau-Ponty also appealed to wonder before the world in his Phe-
nomenology of Perception to account for a motivation of phenomeno-
logical philosophy (1945, viii/lxxvii). This wonder lets appear the world
as “strange,” as “paradoxical” such that it strikes the individual as
‘problem’ in the positive sense. Merleau-Ponty also deals with the issue
of motivation here: In defense of Husserl, he writes that phenomenology
does not make use of our relation with the world, but stands in wonder
160  Anthony J. Steinbock
before the world, in order to see the world as such and as strange, as
problem. Such a strangeness is a fundamental one; this means that it is
not an oddity that occurs every now and again. Rather, it is the way things
are, only covered over by a plaque of habitualized seeing. This rupture
with our familiarity teaches us the unmotivated upsurge of the world. On
this score, both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty agree that historically and
factically, our reflections take place in the historicity and temporal flow
that they, our reflections, are trying to capture. Husserl even writes that
the phenomenologist stands within Generativity (see Steinbock 1995).
However, it is one thing to write of the unmotivated upsurge of the world
(Merleau-Ponty) and the fact that this implies that (phenomenological)
thinking cannot encompass all thought, and it is quite another to address
the issue of the unmotivated upsurge of thinking.
Still, Merleau-Ponty goes further than this in another direction. In a
highly sensitive and original interpretation of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty
later entertains the possibility that there is a preparation for phenomenol-
ogy in the natural attitude itself, that it is the natural attitude that goes
beyond itself in phenomenology, and in this peculiar way, does not go
beyond itself (Merleau-Ponty 1960, 207/164). He later admits, however,
that the complex relationship between the phenomenological and natural
attitudes can only be seen from the perspective of the “breakthrough,”
which allows the natural attitude to be seen as such in the first place.
Therefore, such an account presupposes what it needs to clarify. This
belongs to the very nature of the breakthrough, and to my mind, to the
problem of finitude and meaning. It can only be clarified when the move-
ment of incitement in taken into consideration.
Alienness. Husserl considers implicitly also a different motivation of
phenomenological reflection as critical. Right after he shifts the issue of
motivation to the transition from doxic to epistemic theōria, which is
an impasse of its own, he moves to the question of the plurality of life-
worlds, because such a plurality motivates the question of truth (and
objectivity). The mere plurality of lifeworlds in my view, however, is
not sufficient to get to the issue of critique since the lifeworlds must be
qualified more concretely in a generative phenomenology as socially, geo-
historically, and normatively significant homeworlds and alienworlds;
they exist in a co-foundational structure, in axiological asymmetry. Thus,
it is the encounter with alienworlds in relation to homeworlds that he
entertains – at least implicitly – the new motivation for phenomenologi-
cal reflection.
While it is only from the home that alienness can be encountered as
such, it is in the encounter with the alien that the home can be disclosed
and brought into relief as home. Is this the beginning of phenomenologi-
cal critical reflection? In the encounter with the alien as normatively sig-
nificant (e.g., as not optimal for us, as not typical for us, as not familiar
for us), am I not and are we not thrown back on ourselves in normatively
 Critique as Thinking Freely and as Discernment of the Heart 161
significant ways that institute critique, and especially responsible cri-
tique? We might ask: Why do we do things in this way when others do
them in that way? Could we do better than what we do now? Could we
be different?
In some respects, this is not substantially different from the previous
consideration of wonder: at this stage, it turns out to be merely a modi-
fication from a wonder at the strangeness of the world to the wonder of
the strangeness of others, which is different from me or from us. The issue
of alienness and the alienworld is an elaboration of Husserl’s generative
constitutive theory of normativity, since the alien world is experienced
as a constitutively abnormal lifeworld (i.e., as perhaps discordant, non-
optimal, atypical, or non-familiar) (Steinbock 1995, especially Sections 3
and 4). But rupture, discordance, doubt, perplexity, and the abnormal
in general (in a constitutive regard) are not sufficient to provoke phe-
nomenological critique for the same reasons that a broken hammer that
disrupts the context of use (Heidegger) cannot motivate the question con-
cerning the meaning of being as such. If this were the case, then it would
have to entail a problem with or a problematizing of the being of the
world or being as a whole. But even if particular things in the world go
awry, they are only experienced as awry because they take place within
the presupposed global concordant context of the operative world-belief
as a whole.
Encountering alienness might be the condition for constitution of
home as home, but I or we can still take the home for granted. It does not
instigate the self-reflection on how the home gets constituted as such or
initiate the normative considerations into what it means to be home. Fur-
ther, the matter of alienness is not the same as an interpersonal encounter,
being before other persons. Thus, there is another issue at stake, and only
implied here, namely, one that involves the alien. It is a different issue
because by considering the alien, we have moved implicitly into a moral
sphere entailing persons and thus into the schema of the heart and the
movement of incitement.
Again, this is in no way a depreciation of everyday events. The ques-
tion concerns whether everydayness can motivate its transcendence such
that transcendence thinking can be attentive to the everyday as such –
which is already to be beyond itself in the fullness of what is. To put it
into a religious context in order to highlight the problem: If, as Teresa
of Avila suggests, God is not only reachable in contemplative prayer but
already among ordinary utensils in our occupation with them, then what
is it that elicits a vertical de-limitation (God “in” the utensils) such that
these ordinary wares are fully given as themselves (they are not God) but
are also not simply reduced to their utility? In other words, is it possi-
ble to experience things merely in their limitative, specific, and everyday
presentation, and is this legitimate? Is it possible that some or most of
us do not explicitly recognize anything more than this? We might be
162  Anthony J. Steinbock
so accustomed to living in this way, that this is just “how it is.” The
problem is that the “everyday” can become so habitualized, and we can
become so acclimated to it, that it can sustain a life and a thinking that
never finds a motivation to mobilize beyond it, which is to say, to seek
its own truth in its very core (Jeff Bloechl, in conversation with author).
The question (which is not only philosophical but also religious) con-
cerns how we are able to transcend the everyday so as to see it as such, to
see the transcendence in the everyday, without reducing the everyday to a
fundamentalist Transcendence, but also without limiting or reducing the
everyday merely to itself? If we are able to turn in our reflection in such
a way that we can see the matters as they give themselves, it is because
something “in” them incites such a turning without causing or motivat-
ing it in a mundane sense.
Thinking Freely. Despite these reflections, I think we should be suspi-
cious of trying to give an account of the motivation of phenomenological
reflection – at least where motivation is understood in an intra-mundane
epistemic sense that described earlier. Husserl was perhaps more insight-
ful than his later followers and critics in his very initial appeal to exer-
cising the reduction in “full freedom” and in characterizing it as the
unmotivated movement that qualifies the phenomenological attitude as
the genuine critical attitude.
We should recall that phenomenological reflection is a spontaneous
movement that yields the phenomenological reduction and discloses the
relational movement of meaning, which immediately has a normative
significance. When we become aware of the natural attitude as the natu-
ral attitude, we are already beyond it as not taking our everyday accept-
ances for granted. It is important to note that this movement, which is
phenomenological Selbstbesinnung, does not have an agenda worked out
in advance, since it reflects or sees along with the stream of unfolding
experiencing to which it belongs. We don’t start analyzing in order then
to make this movement happen. Analysis comes later or after the sponta-
neous movement of thinking is carried out. Likewise, the world as such
does not first become thematic, and then an ensuing suspension – holding
the world in an epoché; rather, it is the (phenomenological) movement
of thinking that takes the world as such as problematic. The bracket-
ing and making thematic is already accomplished in the very carrying
out of thinking freely. Once it is done, we can try to repeat it in terms
of steps, but each phenomenologist re-accomplishes this thinking freely,
originally. This is why Husserl writes that the phenomenologists have
to see for themselves, and that other phenomenologists function evoca-
tively, as pointers.7
Despite Husserl’s formulation of exercising the epoché in “full free-
dom,” and his insistence that it is a matter of our “complete freedom,”
the implication is less that this “freedom” is a capacity, cause, or moti-
vation, than the fact that the reduction happens freely (Hua III, §31).
 Critique as Thinking Freely and as Discernment of the Heart 163
I say this without taking the adverb “freely” as a “freedom” or as some
capacity that would imply a subject as its own self-sufficient source, and
without identifying it as my ability-to-do (my “I can”) or my ability-to-
be (Steinbock 2014, Ch. 1). Thinking freely here is not to be equated
with volition. Nor can it be equated with an eidetic or “free” variation
that serves the purpose of arriving at core essential structures. Varying
essences freely in imagination can also remain naïve about their ontologi-
cal presuppositions. Thus, if this freedom is only a qualified motivation –
or not really a motivation at all – it is because it is not intra-mundane
(for a different perspective on this matter, see Nenon 2002; Keiling 2013;
Van Breda 1973).8 Thinking happens freely. Decision-making (κρίνειν) is
connected to thinking freely.
If we regard the act of thinking in its most radical sense, then there
does not seem to be a motivation for critique. Here, by radical thinking,
I mean an originating movement, an upsurge, as it were, the source of an
opening to being or as an emergence that breaks into acceptance, into our
participation in being. Such a thinking does not emerge from a mundane
context, a constellation of acceptances, or pragmatic concerns. There is
not first a recognition of something or even of the world as a whole, and
then a suspension. What could provoke it? The very beginning to think
freely in this sense is to have already performed this thinking freely. In
this regard, not even a crisis could provoke or motivate phenomenologi-
cal critique. To see this originating movement of thinking as emergent
from a constellation of acceptances, for example, from habit or from
a thought-situation would be to presuppose its containment, and thus
be unable to break into the participation in being, seeing it as such, and
intervening in meaningful and responsible ways. Thinking in this radical
sense and in an epistemic regard is thus not motivated.9
Accordingly, the “in one stroke” or the “all at once” that is attributed
to the reduction (Hua VI) should not be understood as completeness in
the sense that the reduction is accomplished once and for all. Rather, it
refers to a spontaneous shift in attitude, a radical conversion – to which
Husserl likens the reduction. Thus, the “in one stroke” concerns a qual-
itative breaking through the natural attitude that is not accomplished
gradually, even if the phenomenologist is a perpetual beginner and even
if the reduction (by virtue of this shift, conversion, or break through) is
incomplete or an ongoing effort.
Thinking, phenomenological thinking, occurs in the temporal flow,
but it is not from or of the temporal flow. It occurs in historical fact, but
there is something “originating” about it, which is not from historical
fact. Wonder that arises intra-worldly cannot itself be the motivation
of that movement which critically, decisively, makes distinctions and
lets those meanings appear. It emerges historically in the world but is
not itself mundane. Phenomenological critique emerges in the thinking
freely.
164  Anthony J. Steinbock
So, in summary we can say: The phenomenological critical attitude
or dis-positioning perspective does not have a motivation (i.e., a mun-
dane motivation) that provokes a turn from participation in being then
to grapple critically with the meaning of being.10 It is not motivated by
anything in the natural attitude because it is itself the very essence of the
natural attitude.11
What constitutes or originates those participations in being in the first
place is the very movement of generativity, the very process of being
becoming; and what breaks into those participations is thinking that
aligns itself with this movement of Generativity. In this way, my sponta-
neous thinking surrenders to the movement of Generativity.12
This would be the implication of a non-motivated, thinking freely
that first emerges as phenomenology that is critical. Thus, if framed
restrictively within this epistemic register, then it would be appropriate
to conclude provisionally that phenomenology as critical self-reflection
(Selbstbesinnung), as thinking freely, is not motivated. This already
broaches another dimension that belongs to the schema of the heart, that
is concerning feeling and valuing.
Before taking up this other dimension, let me summarize this section
by emphasizing two points.
First, phenomenological reflection is critical insofar as it enquires into
modes of givenness, as not taking the being of things for granted, but
clarifying the meaning of being: it is critical insofar as there is an inherent
normative dimension to the orientation of the unfolding of meaning; it
is critical insofar as phenomenology reveals the first-person (singular or
plural) contribution to and participation in the constitution of meaning;
it is responsibly engaged in the direction or redirection of meaning in its
normative unfolding.
Second, while there might be attempts to find motivations for phenom-
enological reflection, there cannot be intra-mundane motivations (natu-
ral attitude motivations) for phenomenological reflection as critique.

4.  Inciting critique as discernment of the heart

When we consider the possibility of phenomenological critique, we often
leave aside the schema of the heart and possible normatively significant,
interpersonal sources of critique that can influence change. But just as we
should not dismiss all kinds of knowing just because they might be sub-
ject to error or require correction, so should we not dismiss the schema
of the heart, its distinctive kind of cognition in relation to value, just
because it might be subject to deception, self-illusion, or require its own
kind of critique. It is possible to ask further: Can the heart motivate cri-
tique, and if so, in what way, and what kind of critique would that be?
In my view, there is another sense of critique that emerges within the
emotional sphere, one that I call a “discernment.” Furthermore, there are
 Critique as Thinking Freely and as Discernment of the Heart 165
two types of critique within the schema of the heart understood as dis-
cernment: a spontaneous diremptive experience (e.g., shame), and mind-
ful discernment of the heart. Both of these presuppose and are turned
toward a dynamic participating being that is, loving. They are both moti-
vated as incited by movements of the heart, and ultimately, by loving.
Accordingly, we might ask: How do I  determine that my actions or
even my feelings are from loving and are not, for example, the result of
spite or an unnoticed ressentiment attitude? How do I resolve that my
shame or guilt are expressive of a genuine orientation to the core of who
I am, “Myself,” from loving, and are not, for example, animated by a
hateful self-image that I have taken over from another or from alienating
social norms? How do I recognize that my engagement with a project is
undertaken from devotion rather than from pride? Is this process differ-
ent from attempting to determine if a feeling or emotion is appropriate at
this time or that it is justified in this situation?
We can begin by noting that a critical reflection pertaining to the heart
is a distinctive kind of discerning (κρίνειν/krinein), namely, a mindful
discernment of the heart. I take this discernment “of” in both the geni-
tive and the accusative senses: discernment belongs to the heart (as from
loving), and discernment’s matters of concern are matters of the heart.
Even though there are rational judgments and rational reflections on
all sorts of matters, the dimension of spirit is not exhausted by rational
reflection, which is susceptible to epistemic critique. Although rational
reflection is an ineluctable spiritual dimension of who we are, spirit
encompasses other kinds of reflection (and other kinds of critique) that
are operative within the order of the heart. Although shame is reflexive,
since I am thrown back on myself as being given to myself, shame is not
a discerning reflection in a mindful or attentive way. If there is a critique
of the heart understood as discernment, what kind of reflection is it and
how is it distinct from rational reflection (which has its own properties
and appropriate spheres)? How is it different from, say, shame or guilt,
which are immediate forms of emotional evaluation?
By way of initial orientation, I mean by mindful discernment several
things. 1) It is not a reflection on experience, but an attentive reflexion
within experiencing, while this experience is ongoing; or rather, it is an
attending to experience as it is happening, an intensification rather than
a separate act of reflection on a passive or active experience (cf. Byrne
2016, 81). 2) It is not a measure of experience according to external
norms or expectations, but a deep resonance or dissonance that resounds
as if a gift of awareness; it is a clarity that comes as if it were from
without, but aligns the value preference as from within (like in the voca-
tional “I can’t do otherwise” or “this is not me”).13 3) It does not con-
cern a self as isolated from others or from a situation but bears on a
personal relatedness, which is to say, it pierces the interconnectedness of
personal being as within the articulated unity of being. 4) It is not a state
166  Anthony J. Steinbock
of self-consciousness, but a self-transformation. 5) It is accompanied by a
spontaneous indwelling humility that manifests in deeds, and is not initi-
ated as a control over one’s self with anticipated outcomes.
By way of conclusion, allow me to draw two consequences from this.
First, the epistemic and the emotional spheres are not simply parallel.
Phenomenology as a critical opening to what gives itself in whichever
way it gives itself, as redirecting our natural participation in being, is
founded in letting become what is as it is, in its otherness, toward its
own flourishing: participating being. Accordingly, the discernment of the
heart in the emotional sphere as guided by participating being is found-
ing for epistemic critique as guided by phenomenological self-reflection
understood as thinking freely.
Accordingly, phenomenological self-reflection as thinking freely can
be said to be unmotivated in a strict epistemic regard; but as founded in
the discernment of the heart, thinking is implicitly motivated – though
in a qualified sense. That is, it is motivated in the sense of being incited.
Through this solicitation to let be as it is becoming within its own value-
magnitude, even thinking is incited to reflect freely and creatively on mat-
ters as they give themselves, and thus on the meaning of being and our
participation in it. Loving in the sense of participating being is founding
for thinking (participating in being), and in a distinctive way, is a condi-
tion for phenomenological thinking.
Second, if thinking freely as critique is founded in the discernment of
the heart (a critique of the heart), which is incited by loving, we can ask:
What is the purpose of the epoché, of phenomenology, which brackets
and thereby reveals the natural attitude as such? What, ultimately, is its
relation to the world? From this perspective, epistemic critique, which
is ultimately founded in discernment, is precisely a critique that oper-
ates for the love of the world, for love of the everyday, and thus aims at
regaining our interconnections with beings in a new way. From the love
of the everyday, participating the everyday it is a matter of knowing the
world and our participation with others in it.

Notes
1. See Hippocrates, The Book of Prognostics, which includes chapters dealing
with “crisis” and critical days.
2. “καὶ γὰρ ἐκεῖνος ἔλεγε διαφέρειν τὸν  κριτικὸν  τοῦ γραμματικοῦ· καὶ τὸν
μὲν κριτικὸν πάσης, φησί, δεῖ λογικῆς ἐπιστήμης ἔμπειρον εἶναι (. . .)” (Sextus
Empiricus 1949, 79)
3. Gail Weiss (2018), for example, has attempted to formulate a “critical
natural attitude” as an attitude in which we are not merely descriptively
engaged with the world, or attentive only to transcendental conditions, but
also engaged responsibly and normatively, not only noting the historical
conditions for those transcendental conditions, but also shaping them since
they are, as concrete, more or less plastic. For my part, however, I think that
what Weiss describes is already a phenomenological critical attitude, and
not something different.
 Critique as Thinking Freely and as Discernment of the Heart 167
4. The affective force of a particular event, say, the sight of a rock cliff, can
motivate an active recollection of a former place or event of climbing. This is
contrary to what Lenkowski (1978) seems to claim. He suggests that falling
into perplexity is the beginning of philosophy as the passive precondition
for Husserl’s epoché, such that the epoché is a sustaining of the world as
problem rather than an initiating act (ibid., 315).
5. Regarding wonder (to thaumazein) as the beginning of philosophy, see Aris-
totle (1947, 982b 12–17); see also Smith (1967, 30–31, 33, 39). Wonder is
an elaboration of surprise, concerning the singularity of the succession (see
Steinbock 2018, Ch. 1).
6. Recall that for Husserl the philosopher (phenomenologist) is receptive only
to those “motivations” of a different type, not mundane ones, but rather
those that occur within this phenomenological attitude or theoretical pos-
ture. Thus, they are not motivations in the strict sense.
7. I treat the issue of exemplarity and the difference between exemplars and
leaders in a subsequent study.
8. Van Breda (1973) clarifies freedom as a human act. But insofar as this is the
case, the human act of freedom is already more than human since for him it
is that by which the human is itself clarified.
9. Thus, Husserl’s assertion in the Kaizo articles that freedom is an expres-
sion of a habitual critical attitude is misleading. Or in this case, it would be
a natural attitude critique. See Hua (XXVII, 63): “Ein Ausdruck für eine
habituelle kritische Einstellung zu allem, was sich geradehin als geltend.” (I
would like to thank Mohsen Saber for calling this passage to my attention.)
10. This is one of Eugen Fink’s (1933) observations.
11. If one wishes to assert that Husserl is thus similar to Descartes in this regard,
it would not be because they may both be seeking a presuppositionless foun-
dation. Rather, it would be because they are both coinciding with the move-
ment of thinking as the unmotivated upsurge of thinking as critical.
12. I clarify the relation between Generativity and generative phenomenology in
my Limit-Phenomena and Phenomenology in Husserl, Chs. 3–4.
13. I treat these experiences in Vocations and Exemplars: The Verticality of
Moral Experience (in preparation).

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11 Social Critique and
Trust Dynamics
Alice Pugliese

1. Introduction: the project of a phenomenological

public ethics
Within phenomenology, the question of ethics has long been neglected.
Husserl’s philosophy has been fundamentally considered as a theory of
knowledge and perception so that other forms of experience have been
more or less explicitly ranked as secondary. Husserl’s own distinction
between founding and founded conscious acts in the Fifth Logical Inves-
tigation and the attention paid to the foundational role of representations
(fundierende Vorstellungen) (Hua XIX/1, chap. IV, 457–458) seemed to
reduce valuing acts to secondary and derivative components of conscious
experience. This view has contributed to establishing a prejudice against
phenomenology taken as a “worldless” philosophy, doomed to solipsism
and incapable of answering urgent human questions about social life.
As we know, however, many important aspects of Husserl’s philosophy
are hidden in his extensive Nachlass and could only slowly see the light
through the work of Husserlian scholars engaged in the publishing of
the series Husserliana. A significant milestone on this path was set by the
publication of two lecture cycles devoted to ethics from 1908 to 1914
(Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre, Husserliana XXVIII) and from
1920 to 1924 (Einleitung in die Ethik, Husserliana XXXVII). These two
impressive volumes show a clear development in the Husserlian view of
ethics. Ullrich Melle reconstructed this evolution in his essay of 2002
(Melle 2002). The latter is part of a collective work in which Lester
Embree and John Drummond present the broad spectrum of phenom-
enological ethics. In his introduction to the volume, Drummond makes
an important point in revealing potentialities of Husserlian ethics that go
beyond the significance of intra-phenomenological studies. He points out
that contemporary phenomenology’s interest in ethical issues is partly to
be traced back to a general reawakening of the ethical question caused
by the impact of John Rawls’ theory of justice in the Anglo-American
debate on political philosophy. In a certain sense, then, it seems that
contemporary phenomenology’s interest in ethics is not primarily linked

DOI: 10.4324/9781003191483-11
 Social Critique and Trust Dynamics 171
to merely theoretical or historiographical questions, but arises precisely
from the need to confront pressing political and social issues. Actually, in
recent years, many scholars have explored the potentialities of the phe-
nomenological approach as applied to political phenomena,1 drawing
in many cases also on the publication of the celebrated manuscripts on
intersubjectivity edited in 1973 by Iso Kern, and, more recently, drawing
on the section devoted to ethics in the volume on Grenzprobleme der
Phänomenologie (Hua XLII).
All these references are intended to provide a solid ground for what
I believe can be the answer of Husserlian scholarship to the challenges
that come from critical phenomenology. In my view, far from being out-
dated, phenomenology displays already in its inaugural form delineated
by Husserl’s unpublished explorations a clear potential to tackle social
and political issues. Disclosing such potential coincides with the explora-
tion of the possibility of a phenomenological ethics intended neither as
a cognitive metaethics or theory of evaluative judgments nor as a meta-
physics of values, but in the practical terms of a modern public ethics.
To this end, it is useful to recall a further point of Drummond’s inter-
pretation (Drummond 2002, 4). He highlights how the phenomenological
approach seems to suspend the traditional distinction between morality
and ethics. At least from Kant on, ethics is intended as a reflection on the
principles of normativity, while morality focuses on the orientation of
action and moral judgment, thus including a more or less differentiated
moral psychology. From the perspective of transcendental idealism, phe-
nomenology represents a violation of this distinction, since it discusses
the question of normativity from the point of view of an experiential
subjectivity. In this sense, the phenomenological point of view stands at
the convergence of ethics and morality and opens up the possibility of a
non-anonymous, non-abstract ethics, linked to a concrete subjectivity,
not seen as a psychological, individual, empirical self, but taken in its
constituent functions as the source of meaning.
Of course, not all phenomenological thinkers are idealists (think of
the positions of Edith Stein, Max Scheler, Nicolai Hartmann, Dietrich
von Hildebrand). However, even those who insist on various forms of
values realism choose to describe ethical objects from the angle offered
by the intentional relation. In the debate between utilitarianism and
deontologism that has dominated contemporary ethics, phenomenology
seems therefore to offer a third position, capable of compensating for
the weaknesses of both camps. While utilitarianism exposes itself to the
criticism of a weak foundation for the principle of normativity, Kantian
deontologism is characterized by a moral psychology that is only sketchy
and general. On the contrary, phenomenology aims at a transcendental
foundation of the principle of normativity through an articulated and dif-
ferentiated analysis of moral experience, its motivations, drives, and ten-
dencies. In this way, it is precisely in the tension between experience and
172  Alice Pugliese
norm that lies at the heart of phenomenological ethics that we can find
the way to overcome the opposition between the empiricism of moral
subjects and the universalism of ethical laws.
This path is open and still only hinted at. The project of a phenom-
enological public ethic is a step in this direction and an attempt to test
the potential of phenomenological descriptive ethics. In this context,
I understand public ethics as a specific ethical approach to public issues
and events, based on the intuition that the political and social fields are
neither reducible nor understandable in terms of formal relations and
normative constructs. They rather bear on concrete relationships loaded
with plural meanings, emotions, conflicts, truths, and illusions that are
typical of human life. The idea of a critical phenomenological public eth-
ics moves from the description of phenomena that take place in the pub-
lic sphere and addresses their intentional and motivational structure.
Contemporary public ethics has been dominated, as mentioned ear-
lier, by the debate raised by John Rawls’ work on justice, public reason,
rational democracy, plurality, and the conditions of consent. This stark
thread has been recently complemented, in continental philosophy, by
the debate about post-democracy animated by Jaques Rancière, Colin
Crouch, Chantal Mouffe. However, even if in different ways, both these
perspectives seem to miss a crucial element, which could effectively be pro-
vided by a phenomenological approach to public ethics. What is missed,
in my view, is a structured reflection on the connection and inner articula-
tion between the modes of personal, individual, first-person experience,
and the constitution and functioning of the public sphere. By digging into
the description of collectively binding praxis, a phenomenological public
ethics can help define a peculiar sense of ethical normativity. Such a phe-
nomenologically oriented ethics does not formulate new rules or ideals,
but discovers and uncovers pre-reflexive and pre-predicative norms hid-
den in our social behavior, norms by which we abide without previous
formalization, rules that give form to our conduct and thereby realize
a significant merging of personal freedom and social coercion. To look
into this convergence by analyzing the structure of experience is the task
of phenomenological ethics and can also provide an angle to understand
social innovation.
Such a reflection would also provide a renewed meaning to the meta-
phor  – widespread in modern political philosophy  – of the state as an
extended individual. Implicitly following the path of Thomas Hobbes’
Leviathan or Jean Jacques Rousseau’s general will, Husserl too described
organized society as “persons of higher order,” thus implying a continu-
ity within the personal sphere between the level of personal individu-
als and the level of general institutions (Hua XIII, 192–204). Husserl’s
description of this notion remains only on a very general level in his work
in the middle of the 1920s. In order to find an appropriate foundation,
the analogy of the state as a person still needs a methodologically aware
 Social Critique and Trust Dynamics 173
analysis, which should address at least the following three aspects: 1) the
structure of the experience; 2) the ways in which personal experience gets
transformed within a collective environment; 3) the specific experiential
ways in which the relation among citizens and between citizens and insti-
tutions is unfolded in civil life. Such a threefold analysis is the task of a
phenomenologically oriented public ethics.
This approach does not mean to undermine either the Rawlsian or
the “critical” theory of public ethics. Phenomenology can rather pro-
vide a third perspective on the issues of justice, social coexistence and
conflict, institutions, etc., useful to shed light on hidden aspects of this
debate. In particular, the objections of abstractness and idealization that
have been moved against the Rawlsian approach, for example by Mar-
tha Nussbaum (Nussbaum 2007) and Amartya Sen (Sen 2009) or femi-
nist authors such as Susan Okin (Okin 1989), could find an answer in a
phenomenological critique of “public experience” intended as experience
in the public dimension. Just as Husserl demanded phenomenology to
shed light on the pre-scientific basis for the natural sciences, necessary
to secure their sense for humanity, phenomenology could today unfold
the experiential presuppositions of political and institutional theories by
disclosing the concrete experience that operates behind refined theories
and differentiations.
The goal of a public ethics grounded in the analysis of concrete experi-
ence constitutes the theoretical frame that has driven my attention toward
the experience of trust. A pervasive and determining trust-component is
involved in all relational and social experiences and can offer a promis-
ing starting point for an experiential and motivational analysis of the
dynamics implied in the public sphere. In what follows I intend to deline-
ate a phenomenological analysis of trust also by referring to a concrete
example taken from the field of bioethics and bio-politics that can help
illustrate some general features of trust experience.

2.  Noetic and genetic phenomenology of trust

An extensive phenomenological critique of social experience is a very
complex and articulated task, which promises to highlight a multiplicity
of structures and dynamics. Husserl himself seems to foresee such a com-
plexity and multi-layered constitution when he addresses social phenom-
ena and institutions as “higher level” phenomena. This means that any
research focusing on a particular aspect of the social experience should
always be very well aware of its limits. Each social phenomenon unfolds
its full sense only in the interconnection and interdependency with sev-
eral other aspects. For this reason, the proposed analysis of trust is by
no means meant to be exhaustive, not even in an exemplary sense, and is
inevitably affected by a certain level of abstraction. Trust should be con-
sidered, in this context, as a non-independent component of experience
174  Alice Pugliese
in relational and social environments, not as a sort of metaphysical fun-
dament or condition of possibility of sociality.
Often outlined as an elusive and still pervasive aspect of sociality, trust
has been recent object of attention in a significant array of contemporary
phenomenological research.2 In my present attempt, I intend to focus on
the subjective aspect of this phenomenon, trying to sketch the intrinsic
structure of trust as a subjective experience. In Husserlian terms, I pur-
sue a “noetic” phenomenology of trust. With this expression, I  intend
to stress such aspects of the experience of trust, which are related to the
proper operations and performances (Leistungen) of the subject. Trust is
thus seen as a component of the inner life of subjects, intertwined with
their struggle to make sense of the world. I therefore attempt to describe
trust not as a delimited special area of experience, uniquely connected
with specific social situations, but rather as a deep tendency embedded
in the subjective stream of consciousness and profoundly related to the
complex task of the subjective constitution of the world.
In this sense, the phenomenological approach offers a quite different
perspective than the more common attitude widespread in political and
social sciences, but also adopted by philosophy, which is focused on the
possibility to measure and assure the reliability of trust relationships. To
illustrate such a difference in perspective we can refer to Carolyn McLe-
od’s entry on trust in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, who
frames her description as “a response to the general question of when
trust is warranted, where ‘warranted’ is broadly construed to include
‘justified’, ‘well-grounded’, and ‘plausible’ ”(McLeod 2020). On the con-
trary, the noetic analysis of trust is not concerned with what appears as
a more or less objective aspect of trust, its intersubjective and explicit
justification, its foundation in recognizable behaviors. A subjective phe-
nomenology of trust rather aims at discovering its inner performances
and dynamics and to focus on the genesis of the experience rather than
on its results.
In order to develop such a comprehensive and distinctively noetic
description, we need first of all to identify the proper location of trust
between the cognitive and the practical dimensions of subjective life.
Trust can be considered as a form of experience, that is, a subjective
performance bearing an undeniable cognitive value. The cognitive value
of trust occupies the foreground of Niklas Luhmann’s influential inter-
pretation. The German sociologist highlights trust as a unique instrument
for reducing the otherwise overwhelming complexity of the world (Luh-
mann 2014). In his analysis, Luhmann points out how the capacity to
trust represents a crucial developmental advantage for the human being,
strictly connected with its cognitive dominance. Trust roots in the human
cognitive power of humans to unify the multiplicity of perceptions into
sense unities and, at the same time, enhances human cognitive potential
 Social Critique and Trust Dynamics 175
by freeing us from the burden of a constant and repetitive check and
control instance.
Luhmann’s approach allows recognizing trust as a condition of pos-
sibility not only of social behavior but rather of all human interaction
with the world. Nevertheless, from a phenomenological point of view
we need to specify the nature of such a cognition and analyze its dif-
ferent components. In phenomenological terms, it is necessary to stress
that, even if loaded with cognitive meaning, trust cannot be understood
as an objectifying act. Trust determines and – as stressed by Luhmann –
modulates our openness toward the world. This happens, however, in a
non-thematic way. The capacity of trusting necessarily relies on back-
ground operations of consciousness, on a non-explicit effort to synthetize
information, evaluations, feelings, and memories that help us assess the
present situation. The phenomenological differentiation between objec-
tifying and non-objectifying intentional acts allows us to evaluate the
cognitive power of trust. This can be considered as the pre-condition of
perception, the presupposed self-feeling and worldly feeling that allow
us to open our eyes toward the world and perceive things and persons in
their proper significance.
It is worth noting that such a “qualified perception” means perceiv-
ing not simply what is immediately present, sensibly given, but what
is implied by the present situation, its potential, its undetermined and
unexpected consequences. Consider the process by which children pro-
gressively explore their environment. In this process perceiving the envi-
ronment, interacting with it, and trying to manipulate it (mostly putting
everything in their mouth and trying to incorporate it) are inseparable
moments. The harmonizing of the multiple behaviors needed for an effec-
tive exploration of the environment and finally for growth is grounded
in a non-explicit form of trust. In this sense, the idea of trust as operative
unifying background of conscious life does not imply a static stratifica-
tion of cognitive, perceptual, or evaluative layers or acts of consciousness.
Far from being an abstract presupposition, trust can be best described as
the invisible texture holding together all the inner, explorative, active,
and appropriating subjective performances of the living subject.
A noetic phenomenology of trust contributes, therefore, to shift the
attention from the idea of trust as a possession and a result, a trait of char-
acter or feature, a personal quality that can be effectively exercised in the
public sphere in the form of self-confidence and confidence in the world,
toward what we can call a “genetic” view of trust. The genetic phenom-
enology of trust unfolds the multiple processes behind the characteristic
behavior of the trusting person, thus underlying trust as a decisive force
striving toward the inner unity of the subject. Prior to the obvious and
at the same time problematic social and intersubjective meaning of trust,
genetic analysis stresses its significance for the foundation of personal
176  Alice Pugliese
identity. This helps distinguishing trust from other notions such as reli-
ability and even from the conservative trait of mere familiarity and tradi-
tion and to put forward its creative and constitutive power. In this sense,
the experience of trusting someone should be carefully distinguished
from the mere habit to rely on someone and even from the unspoken
expectations of continuity and uniformity that induce us to consider the
world as objectively given and the social context as widely predictable.
Trust can certainly be considered as a “social glue,” that is, as a unify-
ing presupposition of social interaction. However, beyond its function as
emotional gravity of various social systems and groups, trust also pro-
vides the dynamic fundament of individual personality. This means that
it should not be seen as a feature that we acquire and possess once and
for all, but as a permanent effort, that is, the permanent labor of a self-
genesis. In constantly renewing, adjusting, and expanding our capacity
to trust others and the world, we realize a secondary (delayed) but highly
significant self-birth. We produce our self-genesis by constantly totalizing
and re-totalizing our past experience and future expectations. Relying
on a trusting attitude, but also struggling with the disappointing and
puzzling experience of distrust, we give sense to what we already experi-
enced and project this sense into the opaque future. By highlighting this
productive – or, better, constitutive – process as the fundamental dynamic
of trust, the genetic and noetic phenomenological analysis shows that the
character of familiarity and reliability of things and persons around us,
usually taken as the first meaning and most important function of healthy
intra- and intersubjective relations, should be actually better interpreted
as the final result of an unexhausted process that takes place at the non-
thematic level of self- and world-constitution.
Trust structures the world as a consistent horizon, but, more impor-
tantly, in trust the perceiving subject experiences itself as a consistent and
stable totality. The stability of the world resonates in my own capacity to
dependably cope with new aspects of it, as well as with unexpected inco-
herent aspects. Exercising trust, we incessantly weave a net of connections
and resonance spheres bearing crucial meaning for personal identity. In
trusting, we experience ourselves and others as coherent, intertwined
wholes.3 Our personal experiences, memories, and tendencies are no
longer given as an accidental sum of details, but we grasp ourselves as
a recognizable identity. At the same time, others do appear neither as
fully predictable machines, whose behavior is automatic and necessary,
nor as random and fundamentally unpredictable events. On the basis of
trust, the other is delineated as an integrated totality, a harmonic albeit
not rigid system of experiences, capacities, and actions whose reactions
remain free and spontaneous, but also understandable on the basis of his/
her motivational patterns, goals, and past experiences.
In the subject-oriented view of genetic phenomenology, trust appears
as a foundational moment, decisive to preserve the freedom of the
 Social Critique and Trust Dynamics 177
individuals, also within the reciprocal and highly complex intercon-
nection of the public sphere. By entering the social sphere, taking on
our role and related responsibilities, we commit to others. Our com-
mitment can become a challenge insofar that it is directed not toward
well-known, familiar, sensible others, but toward invisible, evanescent
institutions. Still, we operate in trust by taking on our duties and invest-
ing our energies and resources in the school system, social security, tax
and financial systems, and so on. In all these potentially or, better, always
at least partially coercive situations, trust provides the precarious but
powerful condition of possibility for the transformation of coercive nor-
mativity into a dimension of self-expression and reciprocal liberation.
When grounded on trust, social normativity becomes the dimension in
which we can be reciprocally free, that is, in which the free and confident
expression of my own potential, wishes, and needs does not collide with
the equally free expression of the others, but rather contributes to every-
one’s emancipation. By cooperating in social institution on the basis of
trust, and not simply because we are forced to or we are concerned with
the utilitarian evaluation of personal advantage, we experience a form
of freedom that does not exclude, but rather implies and demands the
freedom of others.
In the end, this kind of description induces to overcome the usual
differentiation between “blind” and “critical” trust. Authentic trust is
critical, that is, reasonable,4 sensible, and justifiable on an intersubjective
level and, at the same time, non-predicative, intertwined with the silent
genesis of the subject and involves the whole of the subject itself. On the
one hand, each justification of given trust can only take place ex post,
retrospectively and in reflective attitude. In this sense, trust is per se blind.
On the other hand, the encompassing experience of trust does not mean
to lose oneself in blind reliance, but to be able to engage in constant shap-
ing of the own identity within social relationships.

3. A case study from bioethics: advance directives

and trust
To illustrate the complex relationship between trust and freedom and
explore in detail some features of the social experience of trust I suggest
examining a case taken from the field of bioethics. This will also help ver-
ify the suitability of the experience of trust as a standard-setting analysis
on the path toward a phenomenologically oriented public ethics. In fact,
bioethics has been often considered as the most relevant area of public
ethics itself (Wolff 2011).5 As a structured reflection on the constantly
changing relationship between personal will and individual life on the
one hand, and biotechnology and medicine on the other hand, bioethics
appears not only as a delimited field of specialized research but also as
an urgent source of questions and problems for philosophy and ethics in
178  Alice Pugliese
general. These are questions that can touch anyone of us as far as we are
embodied, individual, vulnerable, and ultimately mortal selves.
In the context of the analysis of trust taken as a pattern for phe-
nomenological public ethics, I  suggest discussing the case of “advance
healthcare directives” or “living will.” This is a document that allows
every autonomous person to determine in advance the kind of treatment
they consent or refuse in the case that they have become unconscious
or incapable to take explicit decisions.6 The constant aging of western
populations,7 together with the development of medicine and biotechnol-
ogy, which is more than ever capable of prolonging life, but not always
capable of restoring functional health, turn this into an urgent need of
the so-called developed countries. The legal regulation of advance direc-
tives significantly differs from country to country, and such differences
do not simply depend on contingent political balance. They rather mirror
culturally and even philosophically relevant differences in mentality and
social perception. Despite such differences, the introduction of advanced
directives is always grounded on the ethical principle of respect for per-
sonal autonomy8 and in this sense they can be seen as an extension of the
accepted practice of patient consent in health care.
James Childress and Tom Beauchamp have defined the principle of
autonomy, together with three other fundamental principles of bioethics
(beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice), as the pillars of “principal-
ism,” an original approach aimed at providing a broad basis for secular
bioethical reflection. The authors draw their idea of autonomy from Kan-
tian ethics. However, in principalism, such an idea is detached from the
strong presupposition of a universal, a priori practical reason and framed
into a more concrete anthropology. Respect for autonomy means respect
for a vulnerable person, embodied and in many ways dependent on mate-
rial circumstances as well as on the will and engagement of others, but
still striving to determine their own path in life. Autonomy is therefore
not a uniform and unique feature of the person, but is rather lived and
expressed in many different forms. As Childress and Beauchamp put it,
the relatively abstract idea of autonomy is exhibited along a “contin-
uum” of various degrees of autonomous action (Beauchamp and Chil-
dress 1994, 59).
In the case of advance directives, contingent conditions such as time,
concrete medical conditions, the state of medicine at the time, and in the
place in which consent is required are all absolutely crucial factors for
assessing the ethical meaning and the ethical resonance of autonomy.
Advance directives are based on the presupposition that we remain
autonomous subjects even in a time and in a condition in which our
autonomy is no longer a fact, that is, even when our autonomous con-
sciousness is no longer perceivable in our effective behavior and expres-
sion. In this sense, advance directives operate a crucial disruption. They
disconnect autonomy from the factual and living presence of the subject.
 Social Critique and Trust Dynamics 179
They detach the ethically binding validity of autonomy from the empiri-
cal life of the individual subject. By signing advance directives we pre-
serve our relation with ourselves, our self-recognition, over the limits of
our actual self-perception. Our ethical self is allowed to survive our cog-
nitive self-aware ego. In bioethical terms, our biographical life – that is,
the narratives of our identities, relationships, decisions, values – outlives
our biological life.
By pointing out such self-exceeding dynamics, it becomes clear that
the existential and ethical meaning of advance directives goes far beyond
that of a mere escape from pain and suffering. They do not limit the life
of the subject, but rather promise to let her exist beyond herself. How-
ever, no advance directives can be detailed enough to fulfill this task on
their own. For this reason, the law binds the drafting and validity of such
a document to the choice of a person who is entrusted with the task of
fulfilling the living will. The terms used in this context are highly signifi-
cant: “proxy decision-maker” or “surrogate” identify the chosen person
committed to make a call in the place of the unable patient. Elaborating
on this fundamental idea of substitution, the interpretations in bioethical
and legal research have developed a so-called orthodox view that distin-
guishes the “substituted judgment standard” – requiring the proxy to
apply the advance directives in the closest way to the patient will – from
a “best interest standard” – applied only when the first is made contin-
gently impossible (Brock 1995; Jaworska 2017). This view generates a
hierarchical structure in which the first standard is fundamental, while
the second is considered as a last chance option.
In my view, framing the discussion on advance directives into the
category of substitution represents an undue restriction of the ethical
meaning of this practice. On the contrary, by applying a first-person
experience analysis we could gain insights, which can be valid beyond
the specific situation of unconscious patients. The adoption of a first-
person-perspective clearly shows that the choice of a proxy is far more
than a technicality. The essence of the eminently ethical relationship that
emerges between the choosing and the chosen person is entangled with
the experience of trust so that the term “trustee” should be considered as
a better designation for the delicate role of the proxy.
As we have seen earlier, a fulfilled experience of trust, far from being a
simply enjoyable feeling or a conservative feature of our experience that
allows us to maintain the consistency of the world, has a strong creative
potential. A full sense of trust creates a paradoxical and powerful situa-
tion in which my agency spreads over the limits of the action field factu-
ally available to me by intruding into the will and agency of the other.
In the case of advance directives this enhancing experience is even more
radical. By means of the living will, my biographical life continues over
the limits of my biological life thank to the efforts and decision power
of the trusted person. From the point of view of motivational analysis,
180  Alice Pugliese
it is the experience-based mechanism of trust that allows me to “take a
decision on myself” even when I am no longer there to actually take this
decision.
This is not only true in the case of advance dispositions, but rather
regards all experiences of trust. Trust is the foundation of the mecha-
nism of democratic representation as much as of other essential aspects
of our social life. By sending my children to school, by entrusting them to
school, I am educating them even if I am not present and in matters about
which I know nothing. The whole social system is based on such kind of
trust-based operation. Accordingly, trust can be considered a powerful
instrument for the enlargement of our reachable, concrete life horizon,
while the breach of social trust produces as immediate effect the narrow-
ing of life horizons.
Nonetheless, the meaning of trust revealed by the practice of advance
directives is not restricted to this enhancing character. A further mean-
ingful character of trust rather becomes visible in the form of gratuity.
Accordingly, the trustee takes on an enormous psychological and ethical
burden together with the certainty that she/he will not get any immediate
compensation. By definition, at the moment of accomplishing the trustee’s
task, the trusting person will no longer be there to reciprocate or even
express her gratitude. Trust appears to be a radically non-symmetrical
experience and essentially devoid of reward, advantage or exchange.
By virtue of such a resistance to utilitarian ties, we can characterize
trust as the expression of a double freedom. Once again, this aspect is
well illustrated by the case of advance directives: on the one hand, the
trusting person designates her trustee out of a free choice, which is rarely
made only by determining objective facts about the other. Even if we
tried to choose a like-minded person by verifying his/her opinions on
several relevant topics, the constant evolution of medicine and technol-
ogy together with the individuality of every illness experience produce a
singular and unique situation, which cannot be foreseen and planned on
a merely cognitive level. This point touches again on the cognitive rel-
evance of the process of trusting. We do not trust somebody simply after
a throughout examination of her features, actions, statements. Trust is
not the result of a cumulative process. The cognitive stage in which we
collect information is or can be part of the process, but is never sufficient.
There is no critical mass of information that guarantees for successful
trust. In this sense it is true – as Anthony J. Steinbock claims – that real
trust cannot be “earned” (Steinbock 2014, 204).
This non-utilitarian character, however, does not determine trust as
an esoteric, magic moment, which strikes randomly, unforeseen, finally
irrationally. The observation of the genesis of trust rather faces us with
a peculiar kind of rationality, radically historical and embedded in per-
sonal time, highly relevant in social phenomena. From the point of view
offered by the case of advance patient dispositions, there are no objective,
 Social Critique and Trust Dynamics 181
universally accepted standards that can serve as mandatory requirements
for the choice of a proxy. One can opt for a more rational and lucid per-
son, inclined to take well-informed decisions, while the other can prefer
somebody who acts more on the basis of an emotional connection. Nev-
ertheless, the process of choosing a trustee is neither an irrational random
one nor a mere compilation of facts. It rather implies at the same time an
intuitive moment and a common narrative. In our concluding remarks,
we will come back to such a peculiar model of rationality. At this point, it
is relevant to stress how the choice of a trustee should be considered as an
act of freedom operated in conditions of opacity and relative blindness.
On the other hand – perhaps more profoundly – freedom appears in
the experience of trust also from a different point of view. Trust does rely
not only on the freedom of the trusting person but also on the often over-
seen freedom of the entrusted person. The trustee realizes and manifests
her highest freedom in the fulfillment of a radical commitment, the reali-
zation of another’s will. In fulfilling her designated task, she proves her
own freedom capable of an extreme inversion, the capacity to embody
an alien will and lead it to the achievement of its goals. This drastically
unnatural operation shows the strength of a will that can even free itself
from its own personal needs and wishes.9 The double direction of the
analysis lets trust appear as the social emergence and manifestation of
personal freedom in its whole complexity. In trust, the interconnection of
individual freedoms becomes visible and unfolds its proper social mean-
ing. Put into the frame of reciprocal trust, freedom becomes a modality of
entering social relations, rather than an isolating feature and a personal
privilege.
The foundational connection between trust and freedom further elabo-
rates on the idea of trust as a peculiar kind of experience in which we
encounter each other as totalities. The case of the anticipated dispositions
makes this point exceptionally clear. I entrust the chosen person with my
whole life. This implies not only the life that is left me to live, but also –
and more importantly – the consistency and the sense of my previous life.
Her decision does not concern the single final act of my existence, but
invests the kind of person that I have intended to be so far. There is no
partiality in the trustee’s decision, even if the actual conditions, the medi-
cal and social possibilities left open, the timing, etc., factually limit the
range of what can be achieved with this decision.

4. Conclusion
The case of advance directives has made clear the contrasting tenden-
cies involved by and necessary to the experience of trust. On the one
hand, trust is not the product of an accumulation of knowledge and
information, but is built through a common story, common language,
shared experience. On the other side, it implies a jump into the dark and
182  Alice Pugliese
unknown. By achieving her task, the entrusted person is not and cannot
be in the same situation as the trusting person and, since every medical
situation is individual, she will probably never be. In phenomenological
terms, trust can therefore be described as the peculiar fulfillment of an
experience, which would otherwise be condemned to remain radically
empty.
With such a description, we aim at distinguishing trust from more con-
servative social feelings such as familiarity and habituality. Recognizing
the insufficiency of shared story and tradition for the genesis of trust is
namely of crucial importance when we refer to the field of public eth-
ics as a tool for coexistence in multicultural and ever changing global
societies. In this context, the new kind of practical rationality featured
by the experience of trust encompasses and integrates both tendencies. It
significantly not only draws from shared experience but also involves an
indispensable element of obscurity and unknown. Both dimensions are
necessary to account for the connection between freedom and trust. This
connection points toward an ethics of the public sphere, which does not
rely on pre-formed, crystallized individual identity. If trust is the essential
basis for ethical reciprocal commitment and is at the same time radically
different from the presupposition of a shared identity, then also ethics
should be considered not as a normative instrument aimed at preserving
(social, class, race, national) identity. Rather, it should be considered as a
creative dimension in which the goal of peaceful coexistence in the public
sphere is reached by expanding the reciprocal freedom implied by trust.

Notes
1. We can refer to James Dodd’s work (Dodd 2017) that explores the notion
of violence and its significance for our political life. Lanei M. Rodemeyer’s
(Rodemeyer 2018) investigation into the formation of gender identity can
be included in this field  – as gender identity is a crucial political question
of our time – as well as Sophie Loidolt’s (Loidolt 2009, 2017) research into
phenomenological political theory and normativity. Also relevant are two
recent anthologies appeared in 2016 and 2017 in the book series Contribu-
tions to Phenomenology, both dedicated to political phenomenology (Jung
and Embree 2016; Fóti and Kontos 2017).
2. Important contributions on phenomenological research into trust have been
published by Anthony J. Steinbock (Steinbock 2014), Nicholas De Warren
(De Warren 2015), and Thomas Fuchs in 2015 (Fuchs 2015). More recently,
Fazakas and Gozé have deepened the topic in 2020 (Fazakas and Gozé 2020).
I have extensively discussed the important result of these researches in a previ-
ous article (Pugliese 2019).
3. The unifying function of trust appears even more encompassing in descriptions
of trust that emphasize the strict connection between intention and action. By
introducing a recent issue of The Monist devoted to Trust and Democracy,
Lenar highlights how the ‘attitude’ of trust necessarily demands an according
action. This is the action “that manifests a willingness to make oneself vulner-
able to others’ free will” (Lenar 2015, 354).
 Social Critique and Trust Dynamics 183
4. For the difference between reasonable and rational character of institutions
and social phenomena, I refer to John Rawls’ political theory from the 1990s.
This differentiation plays a crucial role in the development of his thought from
Theory of Justice (1971) to Political Liberalism (1993).
5. Like Rawls, Wolff insists on the necessity to avoid the assumption of “true
moral theory” in theoretical and practical discussion about public policy. In
this sense, it seems to me that the phenomenological descriptive approach to
ethics could prove highly useful by providing important tools for a public eth-
ics concerned with equality but not committed to a specific normative system.
6. The notion of living will was first outlined by Luis Kutner. His argument
strictly connects the procedure of advance directives with the moral and legal
issue of euthanasia. In his words, “a living will,” “a declaration determining
the termination of life,” “testament permitting death,” “declaration for bod-
ily autonomy,” “declaration for ending treatment,” “body trust” “would be
a document in which “the individual, while fully in control of his faculties
and his ability to express himself, indicate to what extent he would consent to
treatment.” (Kutner 1969, 551)
7. The issue of population ageing is rising growing attention among interna-
tional policy makers (see United Nations Department of Economic and Social
Affairs, Population Division (2020). World Population Ageing 2020 High-
lights: Living arrangements of older persons (ST/ESA/SER.A/451)), social
research (The Global Ageing Survey, published by the Oxford Institute of
Population Ageing, University of Oxford), and philosophy. Particularly fem-
inist philosophy has been tackling the issue from an ethical point of view
stressing the relationship between the phenomenon of ageing and racial, class,
and gender conditions (see Overall 2003).
8. The strength of Childress’ and Beauchamp’s approach lies in their capacity
to unify in practice two traditions such as deontologism and consequential-
ism, which are considered incompatible in theory (Beauchamp and Childress
1994). Tristram Engelhardt further developed and radicalized principlism
with particular focus on the principle of autonomy (Engelhardt 1996).
9. Altruism has been a controversial topic in ethics and can be even considered
as a problematic condition of possibility of morality itself. Michael Tomasello
(Tomasello 2009) and Thomas Nagel (Nagel 1970) have offered contrasting
analyses on this topic drawing from empirical and rationalistic backgrounds.
The relation between trust and altruism constitutes a decisive aspect of my
research, which can however not be explored in this chapter.

References
Beauchamp, Tom L., and James F. Childress. 1994 [1977]. Principles of Biomedi-
cal Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brock, Dan. 1995. “Death and Dying: Euthanasia and Sustaining Life: Ethical
Issues.” In Encyclopedia of Bioethics, Volume 1, edited by W. Reich, 563–572.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 2nd edition.
De Warren, Nicholas. 2015. “Torture and Trust in the World. A Phenomenologi-
cal Essay.” Phänomenologische Forschungen 21: 83–99.
Dodd, James. 2017. Phenomenological Reflections on Violence. A  Skeptical
Approach. New York: Routledge.
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Drummond, John. 2002. “Introduction: The Phenomenological Tradition and
Moral Philosophy.” In Phenomenological Approaches to Moral Philoso-
phy. A  Handbook, edited by John Drummond and Lester Embree, CTP 47.
Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer.
Engelhardt, Tristham H. Jr. 1996. The Foundations of Bioethics. New York/
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Fazakas, Istvan, and Tudi Gozé. 2020. “The Promise of the World: Towards a
Transcendental History of Trust.” Husserl Studies 36: 169–189.
Fóti, Véronique M., and Pavlos Kontos (eds.). 2017. Phenomenology and the Pri-
macy of the Political. Essays in Honor of Jaques Taminiaux. CFT 89. Cham:
Springer.
Fuchs, Thomas. 2015. “Vertrautheit und Vertrauen als Grundlagen der Lebens-
welt.” Phänomenologische Forschungen 21: 101–118.
Jaworska, Agnieszka. 2017. “Advance Directives and Substitute Decision-
Making.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N.
Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2017/entries/advance-directives/.
Jung, Hwa Yol, and Lester Embree (eds.). 2016. Political Phenomenology. Essays
in Memory of Petee Jung. Contributions to Phenomenology 84. Switzerland:
Springer.
Kutner, Luis. 1969. “Due Process of Euthanasia: The Living Will, A Proposal.”
Indiana Law Journal 44(4), Article 2.
Lenar, Patti Tamara. 2015. “The Political Philosophy of Trust and Distrust in
Democracies and Beyond.” The Monist 98(4): 353–359.
Loidolt, Sophie. 2009. Anspruch und Rechtfertigung. Eine Theorie des rechtli-
chen Denkens im Anschluss an der Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls. Phae-
nomenologica 191. Dordrecht: Springer.
Loidolt, Sophie. 2017. Phenomenology of Plurality. Hannah Arendt on Political
Intersubjectivity. New York: Routledge.
Luhmann, Niklas. 2014 [1968].5 Vertrauen. Ein Mechanismus der Reduktion
sozialer Komplexität. Konstanz/München: UVK.
McLeod, Carolyn. “Trust.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall
2020 Edition), edited by Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/
fall2020/entries/trust/.
Melle, Ulrich. 2002. “Edmund Husserl: From Reason to Love.” In Phenom-
enological Approaches to Moral Philosophy. A  Handbook, edited by John
Drummond and Lester Embree, CTP 47, 229–248. Dordrecht/Boston/London:
Kluwer.
Nagel, Thomas. 1970. The Possibility of Altruism. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Nussbaum, Martha C. 2007. Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species
Membership. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
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Books.
Overall, Catherine. 2003. Aging, Death and Human Longevity: A Philosophical
Inquiry. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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ual Embodiment. Making Sense of Sensing. New York: Springer.
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Sen, Amartya. 2009. The Idea of Justice. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Har-
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Steinbock, Anthony J. 2014. Moral Emotions. Reclaiming the Evidence of the
Hearth. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Tomasello, Michael. 2009. Why We Cooperate. Boston: Boston Review Books.
Wolff, Jonathan. 2011. Ethics and Public Policy. A Philosophical Inquiry. Lon-
don: Routledge.
12 Critique in the Age of
Paranoid Revolt
Nicolas de Warren

Times of accelerated social unrest and political turmoil are times when
the imperative of critique and call for engagement become especially
urgent.1 To “resist,” to “challenge,” and to “trouble” are terms loudly
animating academic discourse today. Our age must become once again,
and ever more so, an age of criticism to which everything must be sub-
jected. Critique – in whatever form it is claimed to possess – is insepa-
rable from the exercise of public reason within a space of normativity,
and hence, from the visibility of accountability in speech as well as the
demand of responsibility for truthfulness in action. Most crucially, the
viability of critique as a meaningful project along with the tractability of
critique with regard to its target assumes that we exist in a world where
minds can be changed, views discarded, institutions reformed, habits
altered, and ways of speaking transformed. This presupposes not only
openness toward otherness and acceptance of difference but that other-
ness does not just encounter, but can critically engage other-otherness;
that the world is not just riven by what Lyotard calls “the differend” (le
différend) – a conflict between statements by opposing groups that can-
not be resolved given the absence of any rule of judgment applicable to
both groups – but that “everything” which could (and should) be subject
to critique must exist in the same world as critique. What is at stake runs
deeper than the issue of irreconcilable standpoints, for it touches on the
question of reality itself, of what it could still mean to constitute real-
ity inter-subjectively, in the face of a relentless revolt against reality and
other-otherness, which in its conspiratorial breath devotionally speaks of
a truth out there.
Along with this assumption that everything subject to critique must be
“in the same world as critique,” the purchase of critique rests on the pre-
sumption that there is a future that could and should be otherwise than
the present state of things. The imperative of critique is thus utopic in
terms of what Ernst Bloch calls “the not-yet become” (das Noch-Nicht-
Gewordene), without which critique would arguably be indistinguish-
able from thoughtful complaint or perspicuous analysis; it would lack
the conviction of being pulled by something other and better called the

DOI: 10.4324/9781003191483-12
 Critique in the Age of Paranoid Revolt 187
future, rather than being merely pushed forward by the inertia of a pre-
sent disenchanted with itself. It is in this sense that we might understand
Bloch’s insistence that hope is the aspiration for “home-coming” and that
“in real democracy, there arises in the world something which shines into
the childhood of all and in which no one has yet been: homeland (Hei-
mat)” (Bloch 1995, 1376). Homeland, despite the corrosive discrediting
of this German term in the 20th century and the spectral connotations of
state security in its current America diction, might still remain the best-
suited designation for the heresy of hope, of a future where we would be
able to feast together at the banquet of equality and dignity, with each
of us sitting at a shared table of human concourse, commerce, and com-
munication, having arrived from different points of origin, while setting
upon our own trajectories of self-discovery.

1.  The truth is out there

On December 4, 2016, Edgar Madison Welch, father of two daughters,
woke up that Sunday morning and told his family that he had a few
things to do. Out of curiosity, he wanted to “shine some light on it,” a
special place in his nation’s capital, a mysterious place, where something
unseemly was rumored to be occurring. As he approached Washington
DC, he felt his “heart breaking over the thought of innocent people suf-
fering.” Once he arrived at the pizzeria Comet Ping Pong, something
inexplicably changed in him; later, when asked, he still could not say
why. He took an AR-15 assault rifle from his car, entered the pizzeria
and, not finding what he came looking for, fired into the air. He had come
to Comet Ping Pong, he would later explain, “to rescue the children” that
he believed to have been abducted by a pedophilia ring operating from
the pizzeria’s basement. Nobody was injured; no children were found; the
pizzeria did not have a basement. When questioned by arresting police-
officers as to why he had come to “rescue the children,” Welch conceded
that indeed “the intel on this wasn’t 100 percent.”
At first glance, Welch’s concession that “the intel on this wasn’t
100 percent,” without any wink of irony, seems to encapsulate stupidity
to a tee: a man goes out into the wider world on a heroic quest to save
the innocent from corruption, only to discover that evil does not reside
at Comet Ping Pong, that there is no truth out there but his own, an out-
there truth which he himself still fails to recognize. Even after his fiasco,
he could not categorically dismiss the existence of a pedophilia ring, con-
ceding only that there were no children “inside that dwelling.”2 Welch
continued to insist that “child slavery was a worldview phenomenon.”
That child slavery is a worldview phenomenon is a myopically perverse,
albeit revealing, statement in this context. It seems unobjectionable: child
slavery is a profoundly disturbing world-wide phenomenon that should
not sit well with our moral conscience. In the frame of Welch’s expressed
188  Nicolas de Warren
concern for child slavery, his statement is falsified, given the significance
it has for him, given what this statement says to him, without which this
statement per se would have no weight. “I  can’t let you grow up in a
world that’s so corrupted by evil. I have to at least stand up for you and
for other children just like you” only possesses traction in a world framed
by conspiratorial phantasy. The symbolic efficacy of what this statement
says draws on the great out-there of the imaginary, without which the
statement would have no real meaning for Welch. The world has become
inverted: only when the world in which child slavery actually occurs is
placed within an imaginary world in which said child slavery doesn’t
occur (i.e., Pizzagate) does action find traction in the world in pursuit of a
fantasy which, at the end of the day, effectively leaves the real problem of
child slavery not just unaffected, but, moreover, even more forgotten due
to the distracting spectacle of Comet Ping Pong. When confronted with
statements of concern for child slavery under a conspiratorial operator,
one is placed in a double-bind, caught between fantastical (non-)action
or actual inaction.3 If only people were actually motivated to forsake
their family for combating real child slavery in the world. At the very
least, if only people were really motivated to forsake their daily indul-
gence of chocolate.
Of course, we might easily dismiss Welch’s story as straight-up stupid-
ity. What complicates this summary judgment on the banality of Welch’s
unthinking is not only the stubbornness of his conviction when faced
with failure. It is not that failure becomes transformed into success; it is
that failure marking the intrusion of the Real proves to be superfluous,
an option that cannot be afforded. There is no longer any affordance
of reality as a whole. What would otherwise be so patently ridiculous
becomes all the more tenacious; what should otherwise be entirely unten-
able, becomes completely unassailable. This is not to answer the question
posed by Welch’s narrative. It is instead to arrive in sharpened form at the
question haunting the world today: Is it possible to be stupid in a falsified
world? Is stupidity still possible today?

2.  Welcome to the machine

Norman Mailer observed that “since the assassination of John F. Ken-
nedy, we have been marooned in one of two equally intolerable spiritual
states, apathy or paranoia.”4 Apathetic indifference and paranoiac fan-
tasy, where apathy often blends into cynical indifference, can be taken
here to define the predicament of any aspiration for critique. If apa-
thy represents an indifference toward the world and acceptance of the
status quo, paranoia represents a revolt against the world. In its most
radicalized manifestation, paranoia stages a Manichean struggle against
a world imagined to be corrupted and controlled from an outside or
external power, yet this externality of power is likewise imagined to be
 Critique in the Age of Paranoid Revolt 189
(secretly) internal, or immanent, to reality. In looking to a counter-power
to redeem the world from “wickedness,” post-modern paranoia veers
toward a New Marcionism for the 21st century. Critique’s predicament
is further compounded by the risk that critique itself succumbs to its
own form of paranoia or its own stance of apathy. Totalizing invoca-
tions of “Neo-Liberalism,” “Hegemonic Thinking,” “Binary Logic,” and
“Euro-centrism,” etc., can at times seem to be but one step away from
conspiracy theories. A thin and malleable line separates the hermeneu-
tics of suspicion from clinical paranoia. Both the pathological paranoiac
and the critical philosopher are animated by an interpretative drive to
“go into the matter more deeply,” which, as Freud noted, is as much
the “operative factor” with paranoia as with psychoanalysis itself. How
much paranoia is operationally necessary for effective critique? At what
point do academic circles effectively become filter bubbles amplifying a
conspiratorial mindset?
If critique must guard against its own operational paranoia, it must
also remain vigilant against a contemplative apathy despite its vigorous
rhetoric of resistance. György Lukács’ critique of what he dubs “Roman-
tic Anti-Capitalism” could here prove instructive, namely, his critique
of an anti-capitalist rhetoric tied to a nostalgia for community, idealized
human relations, and secularized Christian values (i.e., caring, empathy).
In a comparable vein, David Swift calls into question the “performative
narcissism of hobby Leftists.” Swift, focusing on England and the Labour
Party, argues that “the hobbyist Left,” with its obsession with cultural
identity politics, virtue-signaling, and elite academic discourse, has aban-
doned the interests of the working-class, the poor, and immigrants in
their concrete material conditions (Swift 2018). Touré Reed, in Toward
Freedom: The Case Against Race Reductionism, advances a cognate cri-
tique of the decoupling critical attention of racism, cultural diversity,
and the vogue of “intersectionality” from the political-economic5 mate-
rial conditions and historical contingency.6 What is conspicuously absent
from mainstream academic critical discourse, even of many Continental
orientations, is labor, commodification, “big data,” automation, New
Media, and technology as the objects of critique, let alone the standpoint
of class, or caste, interest, while exceptions are, of course, present.
Marooned between apathy and paranoia, critique must take on a two-
pronged clinical analysis of both phenomena. As advocated by Nietzsche
and Deleuze, critical philosophers are to be “physicians of culture” such
that the critical and the clinical can “enter into a new relationship of
mutual learning” (Deleuze 1992, 7). At the forefront of my own concerns
are the entwined questions: To what extent does critique assume “world-
liness” and hence a common horizon with that which it seeks to critique?
To what extent does critique assume the possibility of a future as other
than the present, which critique, given its utopic impulse, represents a
first small step, one giant leap? Worldliness is openness to a future as
190  Nicolas de Warren
other than the present, not just as different, but as differentially better in
the pursuit of “homecoming.” What, then, to make of critique in a world
defined by the loss of worldliness? What can still be made of critique in a
world haunted by “no future”? Such questions call for a clinical approach
to the symptomological topography of an age characterized by an intoler-
able oscillation between apathetic cynicism and paranoid revolt.
Erosion of worldliness should not be conflated with alienation or
reification, though both of these phenomena are part and parcel of the
modernity’s loss of world, or the disenchantment of the modern world,
in Weber’s celebrated expression. Alienation as well as reification, in the
various ways in which they have been conceptualized from Lukács to
Rahel Jaeggi, is symptomatic of a loss of worldliness. Taking my cue
from Günther Anders, loss of the world (Weltverlust) as loss of worldli-
ness should not be understood in an ontological sense as the destruction
of a world or in the eschatological sense as the end of a world7 nor as the
unhinging of a regulative idea in which, as with Ivan Karamazov’s rebel-
lion, “everything becomes possible.” “Worldliness” shapes the topogra-
phy of appearance as the space of distance, or in between, in terms of
which we can appear to each other as other, as “transcendent,” and the
world itself can become disclosed to us in truth. We are present to the
world as much as the world is present to us. How we exist in the world,
not only with regard to ourselves but also with regard to others – how we
are here in the world – conditions how the world becomes disclosed, and
thus appears, to us – how the world is there for us. As Hannah Arendt
argues, “nobody has succeeded in living in a world that does not mani-
fest itself of its own accord” (Arendt 1981, 26). That appearance implies
openness toward other appearances so that there is no appearance with-
out plural appearances, and gives space – distance – for truthful attesta-
tion in the “potential recognition and acknowledgement” of appearance.
To recognize appearances for what they are (or, conversely, to be taken
in by appearances that seem to be what they are not) is to recognize the
sense of what appears as not completely determinable in its appearance
for us. As Arendt writes:

That appearance always demands spectators and thus implies at least

potential recognition and acknowledgement has far-reaching conse-
quences for what we, appearing beings in a world of appearances,
understand by reality, our own as well as that of the world. In both
cases, our ‘perceptual faith,’ as Merleau-Ponty has called it, our cer-
tainty that what we perceive has an existence independent of the
act of perceiving, depends entirely on the object’s also appearing as
such to others and being acknowledged by them. Without this tacit
acknowledgement by others we would not even be able to put faith
in the way we appear to ourselves.
(Arendt 1981, 46)
 Critique in the Age of Paranoid Revolt 191
“Perceptual faith” designates an ontological sense for the reality of
appearances as “guaranteed by worldly context,” or “worldliness as
such.” “Worldliness” is openness to an “outside” that does not fall or
succumb to our mastery and conceit, to which we are beholden and for
which we are responsible. In Arendt’s analysis it entails the love of the
world. Worldliness is grounded in trust in the world according to which
trust in others as well as trust in social institutions becomes anchored.8
The collapse of trust in others, institutions, and inherited cultural values
are thus symptoms of an underlying loss of trust in the world, or worldli-
ness as such.
For Anders, Weltverlust becomes generated by the prodigious prolif-
eration of New Media. As Anders, writing in the 1950s, states:

[T]he events and objects of the world are “delivered to your home’ ”
by way of radio and television; they are supplied just like gas or
water; how the outside world, having overcome the greatest dis-
tances and penetrating the most solid walls, clutters up our houses,
and loses both its outside character as well as its reality; that is, how
it is no longer presented to us as “world.” Of course, it is not just an
“image” of the world, either. Rather, it is presented as a tertium, as
something sui generis, as a phantom of the world; and this phantom
acts in turn as a matrix that not only molds us, the effective consum-
ers, but also influences the organization of events; in this way it sur-
passes in terms of pragmatic reality many fragments of the so-called
“world.”
(Anders 1956, 145)9

Television collapses the distance between “near” and “far,”10 yet this
suspension of distance should not be understood merely according to
spatial and temporal coordinates. The televised world fails to confront
the spectator of modern life with any form of resistance. The world
becomes completely available and yet entirely inaccessible. The images
on the screen do not make a claim on the spectator to be believed; they
command instead attention in prescribing a contemplative stance toward
the world as captured in the camera eye. Television and radio – the phe-
nomenon under Anders’ critical scrutiny  – speak on our behalf; they
bespeak a reality for us, namely, their own. Spectatorial consciousness
thus becomes “passivized” and “subordinated” within an encompassing
“banalization” or “flattening” of the world. The spectator is not just a
consumer of images,11 since the attention demanded of the spectator by
the televised spectacle becomes itself consumed. Spirit becomes vaporized
into spectacle. Unlike a cataclysmic destruction or a revolutionary event,
this mediatic loss of worldliness is continuous, an incessant cancellation,
as well as inconspicuous, always occurring before our eyes. As Anders
argues: “In view of the fact that this supply of man with phantoms of the
192  Nicolas de Warren
world does not represent any kind of unique event, but rather a process
that has transformed the man-world relation in toto, it acquires a phil-
osophical significance” (Anders 1956, 111). This philosophical signifi-
cance resides with the spectacular cancellation of the distinction between
reality and illusion, between truth and falsity, as ways of meaningful
world disclosure. Each image welcomes us to the Machine; or, in Ander’s
terminology, the Matrix (die Matrize).

3.  The show must go on

Anders’ analysis of the mediatic transformation of the world into the
Matrix can be read as a phenomenologically orientated articulation of
what Guy Debord has called “the society of spectacle.” On this concep-
tion, the totalization of world loss is understood in the dual sense of the
globalization of spectacle and the spectacle of globalization. As Debord
writes: “The spectacle has spread itself to the point where it now perme-
ates all reality . . . the globalization of the false was also the falsification
of the globe” (Debord 1983, 9). If Lukács, following Marx, argued that
the universalization of the commodity form, as the “original form” of
objectivity in relation to subjective stances of social existence, defined
19th and early 20th century capitalism, Debord argues that after World
War II capitalism has become reconfigured around the universalization of
the commodity form of the image or “the spectacle.” For Debord, “the
spectacle is not a collection of images but a social relationship among
people, mediated by images” (Debord 1983, 18). Surplus exchange value
is no longer based on the abstraction of labor into wage labor. Surplus
value has become geared into a system of symbolic exchange (Baudril-
lard 1998 [1970]). The commodification of images and circulation of
spectacle-capital shapes the totality of modern society with the conse-
quence that “in a world that really has been turned on its head, the true
is a moment of falsehood” (Debord 1983, 14). With this inversion of
Hegel’s proposition, the meaning of critique becomes short-circuited:
even if a particular content or aspect of contemporary society is criti-
cally exposed as “false,” and thus contrasted to what is signified as true,
the whole nonetheless remains “falsified.” The totality of spectacle has
replaced the totality of Spirit. The phenomenology of spirit becomes
displaced by the anti-phenomenology of the spectacle. The spectacle of
society is the spectral emptiness of spirit that, through the totality of its
internal mediations, never arrives at either “self-knowledge” and “the
end of history” (Hegel) or revolutionary transformation and the begin-
ning of humanity through the objective self-consciousness of proletarian
praxis (Lukács).12 As Debord writes:

The spectacle grasped in its totality is both the result and the project
of the existing mode of production. It is not a supplement to the real
 Critique in the Age of Paranoid Revolt 193
world, an additional decoration. It is the heart of the unrealism of the
real society. In all its specific forms, as information or propaganda,
as advertisement or direct entertainment consumption, the spectacle
is the present model of socially dominant life. . . . The specialization
of images of the world is completed in the world of the autonomous
image, where the liar has lied to himself. The spectacle in general, as
the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the
non-living.
(Debord 1983, 6)

In the society of spectacle, the true is integrated, and hence sublated,

into the totalizing movement of fabrication and falsification. Nothing
is “real” until it has become commodified into an image, which, as the
original form of objectivity, not only structures the interaction between
objects and subjects but also subjects in relation to each other. Greil Mar-
cus comments on this process by drawing attention to its effect on lived
reality:

When everything that was directly lived moved away into a repre-
sentation, there was no real life, yet no other life seemed real. The
victory of the spectacle was that nothing seemed real until it had
appeared in the spectacle, even if in the moment of its appearance it
would lose whatever reality it held.
(Marcus 1989, 98)

In the dialectic of spectacle, the false does not pass into the true; rather,
the true passes into the false, that is, becomes “real” (true) only when
appearing as “spectacle” (fabricated and falsified). This mediatization
of social relations, in the dual sense of “mediation” and “mediazed,”
renders moot the question belief or non-belief. As Debord remarks, “no
one really believes the spectacle,” for what the spectacle demands is def-
erence, not belief. The spectacle is post-ideological in the sense character-
ized by Slavoj Žižek as the de-sublimation of ideology:

the role of capitalist ideology is not to make an explicit case for

something in the way that propaganda does, but to conceal the fact
that the operations of capital do not depend on any sort of subjec-
tively assumed belief.
(Fischer 2018, 227)

For Žižek, the

prevailing ideology is that of cynicism; people no longer believe in

ideological truth; they do not take ideological propositions seriously.
The fundamental level of ideology, however, is not of an illusion
194  Nicolas de Warren
masking the real state of things but that of an (unconscious) phan-
tasy structuring our social reality itself.
(Žižek 2009, 33)

Capitalist post-ideology operates through the “overvaluation” of basic

subjective attitudes such as “belief,” “identity,” and “choice.” It does
not deploy mechanisms of repression, but delegated styles of disavowal
and approval. The fetishism of disavowal allows for continued cynical
participation in the society of spectacle while at the same time loudly
critiquing its existence. The counter-image of critical resistance is just
as much an image that commands deference, not belief, and often under
the pressure of social sanction and public shaming when not abided. The
image metastasizes, in Baudrillard’s terms, into a simulacrum within a
circuit of symbolic exchange where belief becomes superfluous, thus cre-
ating in its wake a vacuum of belief in which everything becomes just as
much believable as unbelievable.
Following Byung-Chul Han’s argument, aesthetics has become trans-
formed into anesthetics. In our contemporary world, images sedate, but
neither enhance nor challenge consciousness. We have embraced the
anesthetics of the surface, the smooth, and the shiny.13 As Han argues:
“smooth visual communication takes place in the form of contagion,
without any aesthetic distance,” that is, without any critical distance
of judgment. In this age of mediatic sedation, the culture of the Like
and Dislike, with one swipe or click, has rendered experience, “which is
impossible without negativity,” obsolete (Han 2018, 7).

The culture of the Like and emoji icons manifests the trivialization
of experience at the expense of judgment and belief. Spread across pix-
elated displays, the spectator has the world at their fingertips within a
surface plane where everything, even the most opposite of things, sits
merely one click away from everything else. This anesthetic culture of
the click fosters a cultivation of apophenic linkages. In the integrated
hyperconnectivity of the Internet, the society of spectacle takes on the
form of an apophenic machine where the basic unit of action is the link.14
Liking and Linking are both elemental forms of acting in the digital age
of spectacle. The hyper-link/linking represents a leap in two senses: it
spans or connects one thing with another; it makes a leap from one thing
to another by establishing an arbitrary connection that per force of its
performativity becomes real and compelling. Anything becomes connec-
tively possible when everything can be connected by the immediate leaps
and bounds.
 Critique in the Age of Paranoid Revolt 195
The apophenic Internet machine is, moreover, a collective influencing
machine (Beeinflussungsapparat), or a conspiratorial matrix, in the sense
diagnosed by Victor Tausk with schizophrenics. Tausk observed that
paranoid schizophrenics often invented elaborate imaginary machines,
which they believed to be the source of their persecution and psychologi-
cal disintegration. These “machines of a mystical nature” were complex
constructions made from levers, cranks, buttons, hinges, and other mech-
anisms. They were understood to function through inexplicable forces,
such as invisible rays and telepathy, by which thoughts and emotions
become inserted into consciousness. Tausk draws attention to the picto-
rial character of the mechanisms involved:

The influencing machine makes the patients see pictures. When this is
the case, the machine is generally a magic lantern or cinematograph.
The pictures are seen on a single plane, on walls or windowpanes;
unlike typical visual hallucinations, they are not three-dimensional.
(Tausk 1992, 205)

A clinical characteristic of paranoid schizophrenics is existential

estrangement and sense of persecution emanating from something
external, as well as an obsession for identity and need for a totalizing
intelligibility that nonetheless proves opaque. Tausk argued that “the
construction of the influencing apparatus in the form of a machine repre-
sents a projection of the entire body” in compensation for the disintegra-
tion of the lived body (Tausk 1992, 202). A homologous phenomenon in
collective terms of the social body can be discerned with the apophenic
Internet machine as a conspiratorially prone social brain.15
The apophenic Internet machine generates a sense of ubiquitous rel-
evance which, as Molly Sauter observes, becomes “reinforced by the
broader acceleration of filter bubbles, which are becoming a kind of
bespoke reality.” Her comments echo Henri Lefebvre’s critical analysis
of television where “events can be presumed relevant because they were
encountered at all. This passivity of spectacle catalyzes an apophenic fre-
netic inquisitiveness.16 As Lefebvre observes:

Sitting in his armchair, surrounded by his wife and children, the tel-
evision viewer witnesses the universe. At the same time, day in and
day out, news, signs and significations roll over him like a succession
of waves, churned out and repeated and already indistinguishable by
the simple fact that they are pure spectacle: they are overpowering,
they are hypnotic.
(Lefebvre 2014, II, 75)

In this “hypnotic” condition, the spectator goes looking and “sets

out from an implicit principle: ‘Everything, in other words, anything at
196  Nicolas de Warren
all, can become interesting and even enthralling, provided that it is pre-
sented, i.e., present’ ” (Lefebvre 2014, II, 75). This ubiquity of relevance
reflects not only that everything on display is, by this very fact, interest-
ing. Everything on display becomes splayed upon a virtual insinuation
of interconnectivity with anything and everything else. The “hyper” of
interconnectivity is transmogrified into the auto-suggestive spell of inner-
connectivity, even though the integrative totality of spectacle remains
itself bereft of purpose, plot, or agency. The panic of agency becomes
amplified and withdrawal of intentionality from the world becomes
intensified.
Not surprisingly, then, conspiracy theories in the age of technical
and digital reproduction have been seen as offering strategies of “self-
protection” that safeguards the integrity of the self (and its associate
sense of collective existence) against the increasing complexity of modern
life, that is, density of mediation in tandem with an acceleration of axi-
ological transformations.17 As Richard Hofstadter argues,

the paranoid style of American politics, conspiracy theories tend to

proliferate and resurge in times of social, economic, and political
uncertainty.
(Hofstadter 2020, 527)

In the society of spectacle, the disenchantment of the world entails

above all the absence of meta-narrative. This absence functions as the
condition for the integrated totality of spectacle. But the totality of
spectacle also transcends itself on account of the absence of any meta-
narrative significance. It both sustains the incredulity of meta-narratives
and generates the need for the credulity of (any) meta-narrative. How-
ever, the meta-narrative that it generates is “out there,” given its marked
absence in here, that is, within the integrated totality of spectacle.
Thus, while an increasing density of linkages and information becomes
instantly available, the coherence of the whole becomes proportionally
non-sublating – society no longer dreams, history no longer believes, and
culture no longer progresses. Are we left with the alternative of wishful
Romantic utopia or paranoid conspiracy? Or cynical slumber? The obses-
sional drive to connect by apophenic leaps and bounds turns into a drive
to meta-narrate the totality of spectacle into unified coherence. Hence,
the conspiratorial proclivity for the production of an overabundance of
meaning-making (as with the influencing machine of the schizophrenic)
which at the same time always misses its mark; it always falls short of
exhaustiveness while always explaining more than other explanations or
refutations,18 and hence anything can become quickly integrated into the
mapping of conspiratorial intrigue.
The apophenic machine of spectacle generates an apophenic collective
subjectivity, or “we,” constituted around the solidarity “where we go
 Critique in the Age of Paranoid Revolt 197
one, we go all.” Franco Berardi characterizes this condition in a poignant
way by writing:

[T]hey are traveling alone [in the ‘info sphere’] in their lonely rela-
tionship with the universal electronic flow. Their cognitive and affec-
tive formation has made of them the perfect object of a process of
desingularization. They have been pre-emptied and transformed
into carriers of abstract fractal ability to connect, devoid of sensitive
empathy so as to become smooth, compatible parts of a system of
interoperability . . . in short, they seem unable to start any process of
conscious collective subjectivation.
(Berardi 2011, 132)

Yet, it is, arguably, precisely a conscious collective subjectivity that

becomes self-generated through an apophenic machine of conspiracy as
a constitutive harnessing and expression of a psychogenetic syndrome of
alienation. In this regard, QAnon can be seen as a manifestation of an
apophenic subjectivity or multitude; the influencing machine has become
a conspiratorial fluent subjectivity. Beginning with an initial anonymous
post, or “Q-drop,” on 4chan in October 2017 entitled Calm Before the
Storm, the collective subject of QAnon has rapidly sprawled into an
international multitude with bonds of solidarity and devotional com-
mitment.19 Each Q-drop is at once the piece of a puzzle, a cryptic mes-
sage, and prompt in a game; these Q-drops (“breadcrumbs”) become
deciphered and interpreted by “brokers,” and from these brokers, a
broader community of Q followers (“digital warriors”) undertake their
own independent “research” and “interpretation.” Within this net-
worked multitude, individuals gain a sense of personal and collective
agency through an encompassing and evolving interpretative narrative.
It allows for a participatory sense-making activity in which each fol-
lower becomes invested into conspiratorial meta-plot through their own
personal investigations. Robust belief and pliable inquisitiveness are
crystallized through this participatory sense-making in terms of which
the world becomes epistemologically and emotionally re-enchanted and
socially re-engaged. Solidarity and social prestige among “those in the
know” but also, with regard to an exposure to social derision and rejec-
tion, a social stigma and conflict that in many instances breaks the bonds
of friendship and family (much as with the social dynamics of cults).
The reaction against the disenchantment of the world is the conspirato-
rial re-enchantment of meta-narrative, but precisely because the grand
awakening of QAnon’s meta-narrative operates entirely in currency of
the spectacle of conspiracy, to the point that it generates capital and new
brand of conspiratorial capitalism,20 the faith instilled in the narrative of
QAnon testifies to the spectacle’s foreclosure of the narrative integration
of totality.
198  Nicolas de Warren
If the totality of spectacle, as the totality of the world, is narratively
ungovernable and grounded on the incredulity of meta-narrative, and
thus meta-narratively disenchanted, then it has also become ungovern-
able in terms of power and authority. The occultation of power or social
authority, that is, the prestige of elites and the authority of experts does
not merely consist in the increasing complexity of modern life and density
of mediation. In the regime of classical capitalism, social relations where
shaped by the “phantom objectivity” (gespenstige Gegenständlichkeit)
of commodification. For Debord, power itself has become a “phantom
objectivity” or “phantom substantiality” in the society of spectacle. Soci-
ety “has become occult even to its rulers” (Wark 2013, 2). As flagrantly
apparent with the Trump presidency-spectacle, government becomes for
itself ungovernable; it openly plays at and in its own spectacle of ungov-
ernability.21 The spectrality of power is the primary manifestation of the
occultation of power. Governability has become an operative issue of
surveillance. We have moved, as Deleuze argues, from a disciplinary soci-
ety to a surveillance and control society (Deleuze 1992). Along with the
metastasis of the society of spectacle into a society of surveillance, the
occultation of power – its spectrality – also functions through the mutu-
ally enhancing phenomenon of the increasing out-sourcing or privatiza-
tion of social responsibilities and services that had traditionally defined
and legitimated the state, and, on the other hand, the increasing algo-
rithmization of the world and the formation of an Algocracy (Cordelli
2020). In the society of spectacle, to reference Sauter’s insight,

it’s increasingly possible that we will have to separate reality streams:

the human politics stream, full of reactive paranoia intent on creating
graspable narratives for human consumption; and the overarching
network of networks, the financialized global capital streams, and
automated algorithmic diktats that operate and adhere without being
wholly grasped, without anyone understanding them completely.
(Sauter 2017, 9)

The Matrix of Spectacle has become algorithmically self-generating,

including its distinctive psychogenetic syndrome. It generates itself as
apophenic conspiratorial machine – the spectacle of conspiracy – in order
to obfuscate the conspiracy of its own spectacle. Because above all: The
Show Must Go On.22

4.  You need to calm down

In Alfonso Cuarón’s film Children of Men, based on the novel by P.D.
James, Mark Fischer recognizes a dystopian vision that is specific to late
capitalism. What Debord recognizes as the falsification of the globe, char-
acterized above as loss of worldliness, can be taken to anticipate Fischer’s
 Critique in the Age of Paranoid Revolt 199
diagnosis of “capitalist realism,” namely, the contemporary predicament
that we exist in a society defined by “the impossibility even to imagine
a coherent alternative to it” (Fischer 2009, 2). In Children of Men, the
function of the state has been stripped down to the obscenity of power:
internal state security (police), external projection of power (military),
and the militarization of border and aggressive immigration control. The
public space has been completely eviscerated. Social services are either
non-existent or privatized. But as Fischer writes:

[T]he catastrophe in Children of Men is not waiting to happen or

already happened; it is being lived through without any punctual
moment of disaster, and things are falling part in slow motion as
slow cancellation of the future. What caused the catastrophe to occur
remains unknown and detached from the present as to seem like the
caprice of a malign being: a negative miracle, a malediction which
no penitence can ameliorate. Such a blight can only be eased by an
intervention that can no more be anticipated than was the onset of
the curse in the first place.
(Fischer 2009, 2)

We live in age of cynical deference that capitalism, in its extreme Neo-

liberal form, accompanied by the destruction of public space, veneration
of economic individualism, de-regulation of “self-regulating markets,”
and the reduction of state to police, surveillance, and military apparatus.
This makes fertile ground for resurgent impulses of authoritarianism –
the savior – in conjunction with a conspiratorial filling of the void of the
catastrophic event, namely, cancellation, not catastrophe. It is a cancel-
lation that is never-ending, and hence, without finality, but by this very
significance, without promise of a beyond. Not with a bang, but with an
endless whimper, the 21st century spins in the void of history in the wake
of the 20th century, that century which once trusted in the future.23
Cuarón’s Children of Men nonetheless ends with a Blochian image
of hope: the miraculous birth of a child, whose immaculate conception
promises to open a future for humankind. The mother of this child born
to the world, a young African woman, an immigrant, Kee, is assisted by
Theo – “god” – to make contact with the shadowy “Human Project.”24
When Kee gives birth in a housing project occupied by disposed and
deported immigrants during an intense battle between military forces and
rebels, the sight of her newborn baby, as she descends the staircase to
escape the ravaged building (a metaphor for society itself), temporar-
ily suspends the circuit of violence. Soldiers, rebels, and refugees alike
behold the baby in wonder, kneeling before and touching sacred natality.
In this momentary hiatus of violence, there speaks hope; as soon as Kee
and Theo have found safe passage, the world closes back upon itself into
violence once more. In the final scene of Cuarón’s film, Theo and Kee
200  Nicolas de Warren
(holding her child in swaddled clothing) are helplessly adrift in a small
rowboat surrounded by fog. Theo has been mortally wounded, telling
Kee in his dying words: “Keep her close Kee, whatever happens.” A dis-
tant bell is heard as the prow of the ship Tomorrow comes into vision –
“it’s ok, we’re safe now” Kee says reassuringly to her child, herself, and,
maybe even to us.
This Blochian “pre-appearance” (Vorschein) of the future – the spirit
of mother and child hovering over the wasteland opening the way to
Tomorrow – contrasts with the image of culture in the age of the future’s
cancellation. Earlier in the film, when Theo visits his childhood friend,
Nigel, who is in charge of the Ministry of Arts department, “the Ark of
the Arts,” with the mission of rescuing art works from the carnage of the
world’s unraveling, Theo casually inquires as whether there is any point
saving them: “How all this can matter if there will be no-one to see it?”
Given that the world is afflicted with a virus that has terminated human
procreation, and hence, symbolically arrested the possibility of a future
other than the present, what meaning could there be, let alone reason,
for the preservation of cultural artifacts? Figuratively, the infected world
of Children of Men is a world (expressed in Arendtian terms) defined by
the loss of natality, and hence, absence of love for the world as well as
collapse of the future as the horizon for creative sustenance of human
plurality. Faced with this existential question (one spies hanging on the
wall in his dining room Picasso’s Guernica), Nigel answers: “I try not to
think about it.” Nigel’s response expresses the only honest attitude in a
world where “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of
capitalism.”
Culture is not immune from the contagion of spectacle and cancella-
tion of the future. For Debord, “the spectacle is the moment when the
commodity has attained the total occupation of social life” (Debord
1983, 43). Once the production of commodities reached a level of abun-
dance during the 1950s, capitalism demanded a “surplus of collabora-
tion from the worker” in transforming the worker essentially into a
consumer. Debord argues that the “proletarianization of the world,”
envisioned by Harold Rosenberg, occurred through a “humanization of
commodity” and the “terrorism of consumption” (from Ulrike Mein-
hof’s term Konsumterror): the anxiety of not being able to become inte-
grated into social life for failing to acquire consumer objects that serve
as the passage to and symbolical terms of recognition of social life.25
Debord captures the core of this process by writing: “When culture
becomes nothing more than a commodity, it must also become the star
commodity of the spectacular society” (Debord 1983, 193). For Anders
this means that

[t]he world has now become an ‘exhibition’ [zur ‘Austellung’

geworden], and certainly an advertising exhibition that is impossible
 Critique in the Age of Paranoid Revolt 201
not to visit, because we always already find ourselves in the middle
of it.
(Anders 1956, 60)

The pervading terror on consummation is not without jouissance, of

course, but the pricelessness of the joy of living in a consumer world,
intensely focused on the present and the new, comes at the price of the
future itself. The drive for consumption, entertainment, and culture
effects a perpetual cancellation of the future. Utopia is not the promise
of the future; it is the prime delivery of the present, when, at the click of
a button, everything can be delivered to you. What television delivered
in the 1950s, Amazon delivers today: commodities are supplied just like
elements, such as gas or water, having overcome the greatest distances
and penetrating the most solid walls, clutter up our houses, and loos
both their outside character and their reality – the reality, that is, of the
occulted structures of mediation (warehouses, etc.) that allows for what
consumers behold in wonder at the immediate of appearance. The terror
of consumption becomes sedated by the jouissance of the eternal sun-
shine of the New.
Robert Pfaller has characterized the “interpassivity” of contemporary
culture as “delegated enjoyment.” As exemplified with “canned laugh-
ter” and the ubiquitous “bad joke” on television programs, interpassivity
cannot be thematized through the opposition or synthesis of passivity
and activity; the canned laugh delegates the spectator to laugh “with” the
canned product when in fact the spectator is laughing alone and not actu-
ally laughing at something with others, but in response to a simulacra of
laughter that his own simulated makes the reality of semblance – of sem-
blance as the only “reality.” The pervasiveness of bad or tasteless jokes
on television and radio about women, racial minorities, etc., so what is
registered as funny by being marked with attached laughter, is that even
when there is nothing funny about such jokes there is still a “spectral
idiot” – a presupposed idiot – who laughs. As Pfaller remarks:

The idiot, of course, renders possible the same idiotic behavior on

the part of his listeners, but accompanied by a different conscious-
ness. . . . Precisely what makes them identical with the idiot (their
shared laughter) is regarded as the mark of difference that distin-
guishes them.
(Pfaller 2017, 28)

Without this misrecognition, the laughter among those who think

themselves not to be an idiot, to operate without the biases and precon-
ceptions of the idiot, the bad joke would not be possible, and yet, because
of shared laughter across the misrecognized differential consciousness of
recognition (“I’m not the kind of idiot who would find this at all funny”),
202  Nicolas de Warren
identity with the idiot becomes performed in the social-speech act of
laughing. Not surprisingly, the most trenchant public critique of politics
is embedded in comedy platforms – late-night shows after which there is
only sleep. Critique couched in comedy leads to the cynical slumber of
reason.
Mark Fischer proposes that the culture industry can be seen as the
operation of capitalism par excellence that “performs our anti-capitalism
for us, thus allowing us to continue to consume with impunity” (Fischer
2009, 13). Taylor Swift’s catchy and on the surface progressive “You
Need to Calm Down” is here a prime example of the aesthetic delega-
tion of disavowal. The refrain “You Need to Calm Down” expresses a
double meaning. On the one hand, it is directed against homophobic and
transphobic Internet trolls, but, more widely, various forms of conserva-
tive alt-right and fundamentalist rejections of cultural diversity and non-
binary expressions of self. The representation of those “who need to calm
down” is unambiguously coded: the fringe of protesters  – out-there  –
who surround the camp enclave of a utopic diversity are white, rural,
unrefined, and poor (judged from their clothes). On the other hand, the
refrain implicitly addresses us with its celebration of sexual and ethnic
diversity, retro pastels, 50s’ décor, clever punning on camp aesthetics,26
and the good life filled with tea parties and cake. Have we in fact dropped
down the rabbit hole of a post-modern Alice in Wonderland? The implied
message through is “you need to calm down” – there is no alternative to
capitalism, so why not enjoy? In the final act of this celebration, a food
fight ensues in an unended echo of Marie Antoinette’s “Qu’ils mangent
de la brioche” (rendered over time in English as “let them eat cake”);
we are presented with the joy of conspicuous consumption and commu-
nal potlach of destruction that has been identified as the driving mecha-
nism of capitalism. This utopia of consumer culture and multi-identity
of gender as culture of excess and surplus contrasts with the bucket of
despicables, ejected from paradise, and betrays the failure to recognize
the source of their discontent as material and economic – the economic
system of surplus and commodities that becomes celebrated in the utopia
of consumer camp. As a closing paean to consumption, where the ter-
ror of consumption becomes sublated into jouissance, Taylor Swift and
Katie Perry embrace each other embodied as French Fries and a Big Mac.
Even Marx would have been surprised: the commodity is a very strange
thing indeed, but only in the society of spectacle do commodities speak
to each other, and so bespeak “reality,” namely, their own. Yet, above
all, whether Taylor Swift or Donald Trump, whether cynical critique or
paranoid conspiracy, the spectacle remains unending.
Given these considerations, where does critique find itself in the age of
paranoid revolt? Critique in the age of paranoid revolt, I suggest, must
begin with confronting the impossibility of critique or, in other words, the
 Critique in the Age of Paranoid Revolt 203
degeneration of critique into an academic exercise, or gesture, without
genuine purchase on a “reality” – conspiracy worldviews – that refuses
to accept the basic sense of a reality open to and indeed amenable to cri-
tique. Offered here with neither ready-made remedy in hand or prophetic
foresight, as I have endeavored to demonstrate in a preliminary manner,
any hope for critique must begin with a clinical diagnosis (as prolegom-
ena for the possibility of critique) of the conditions and constitution of
paranoia as a social-cultural phenomenon of our times that gives witness
to a loss of the future, played out in the spectacle of the eternal present,
but by the same token, testifies to an imperative for a world that, for the
moment, only seems to be heard, unspectacularly, as a distant bell on the
prow of the ship Tomorrow.

Notes
1. In the words of anthropologist Wade Davis, see www.rollingstone.com/
culture/culture-features/wade-davis-interview-unraveling-of-america-mag
dalena-1088622
2. Quoted in “The Prophecies of Q.”
3. As Sarah Marshall remarks: “The problem is that these hundreds of thou-
sands of supposedly missing children are a product of unreliable statistics and
misleading anecdotes on social media. These memes and posts are popping up
all over Facebook, pointing to what QAnon supporters believe is an elite child
sex trafficking ring comprised of Democratic politicians and celebrities. That
there is no elegant way to fact-check the concerns of Save the Children without
sounding dismissive of human suffering is part of why it is so difficult to talk
about, and why people who attempt to do so are often targeted as enablers
or complicit in pedophilia.” www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/9/25/21453036/
save-thechildren-qanon-human-trafficking-satantic-panic
4. In his review essay of Oliver Stone’s film JFK, “Footfalls in the Crypt,”
Vanity Fair (February  1992, https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/1992/2/
footfalls-in-the-crypt)
5. ‘Political economics’ is meant here in Marx’s 19th century sense.
6. ‘Historical consciousness’ is meant in Lukács’ sense.
7. “End of the world” as reflected upon in Jonathan’s Lear’s Radical Hope:
Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (2006).
8. For this ontological conception of trust in the world, see de Warren 2020,
Chapter 1. For its significance in Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958), see
Chapter 2.
9. https://libcom.org/files/ObsolescenceofManVol%20IIGunther%20Anders.
pdf
10. In echo of Walter Benjamin’s influential thesis in his work of art essay.
11. Anders speaks of “image gluttony” (Bildfresserei).
12. “The truth is the whole. The whole, however, is merely the essential nature
reaching its completeness through the process of its own development. Of
the Absolute it must be said that it is essentially a result, that only at the end
is it what it is in very truth; and just in that consists its nature, which is to be
actual, subject, or self-becoming, self-development.” (Hegel 2019, 81–82)
13. This is as exemplified with the iPhone in function and form.
204  Nicolas de Warren
14. As Molly Sauter insightfully argues in “The apophenic machine” (Sauter
2017).
15. A useful reference in this respect is Joseph Gabel’s analogy between reifi-
cation and false consciousness (as developed in the framework of Lukács’
History and Class Consciousness) and schizophrenia as a collective social
phenomenon. According to Gabel, it is “not at all fortuitous that the two
essential elements of Lukácsian description of the reified world” corre-
sponds with the “state of being crushed by the world” and “the obsession
for identity” with its “logic of pure identity,” which are characteristic of the
world of schizophrenia (Gabel 1975, 21). Gabel follows Binswanger in con-
ceptualizing schizophrenia as a mode of being-in-the-world, namely, as loss
of the world. As Debord himself notes in Society of Spectacle, Gabel’s paral-
lel between false consciousness and schizophrenia must be placed within the
general movement of spectacle. The failure of encounter with others leads
to its replacement by “a hallucinatory social fact: the false consciousness of
encounter, the “illusion of encounter.” In a society where no one can any
longer be recognized by others, every individual becomes unable to recog-
nize his own reality.” (Debord 1983, 217)
16. Lefebvre notes that “vulgar encyclopedism as all the rage.”
17. As Melley writes: “the conspirational views function less as a defense of
some clear political position than as a defense of individualism, abstractly
conceived.” (Melley 1999, 11)
18. In “Of Conspiracy Theories,” Brian Keeley explains: “Conspiracy theories
always explain more than competing theories, because by invoking a con-
spiracy, they can explain both the data of the received account and the
errant data that the received theory fails to explain.” (1999)
19. An estimated 10–15% of the American population – roughly 30 million –
are supporters or followers of QAnon. The global COVID-19 pandemic has
created a claustrophic – “socially remote” – environment that has spurred
the internationalization of QAnon and a world-wide conspiracy movement
and attitude against government, news media, and COVID-19. Both in the
United States and abroad, QAnon has metastasized since 2019–2020 into
an encompassing eco-system for varied conspiracy theorists (“false flag”
operations of Sandy Hook, Boston bombing; anti-vaxxers, etc), religious
orientations, political persuasions (“Bernie Bros,” etc.), and race and gender.
It is also a movement than be localized to local conditions. Melanie Smith,
“Interpreting Social Qs: Implications of the Evolution of Qanon” Graphika.
https://graphika.com/reports/interpreting-social-qs-implications-of-the-evo
lution-of-qanon. See also: www.mediamatters.org/qanon-conspiracy-theory
20. One thinks of Alex Jones or the evangelist Jim Bakker.
21. As with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who first became an
imaginary president in his 2015 television show Servant of the People, before
being elected to become “the real” President in 2019, who was launched to
the Presidency through a newly founded political party called Servant of the
People and organized by his own television production company, Kvartal 95
(www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/10/07/in-ukraine-a-tv-president-to-
rival-trump).
22. As Wark writes: “[T]he disintegrating spectacle can countenance the end of
everything except the end of itself. It can contemplate with equanimity melt-
ing ice sheets, seas of junk, peak oil, but the spectacle itself lives on.” (Wark
2013, 3)
23. This foreclosure of the future is aptly described by Franco “Bifo” Berardi as
the slow cancellation of the future.
 Critique in the Age of Paranoid Revolt 205
24. As Cuarón remarked: “The fact that this child will be the child of an African
woman has to do with the fact that humanity started in Africa. We’re putting
the future of humanity in the hands of the dispossessed and creating a new
humanity to spring out of that.” (www.moviehole.net/interviews/20061021_
interview_alfonso_cuaron.html).
25. See Alexander Sedlmaier, Consumption and Violence: Radical Protest in
Cold-War West Germany (2014), Ch. 3, Consumption and Violence.
26. On the one hand the trailer camp is pictured as a protected resort but on the
other hand it is framed as a segregated camp, and as such parallels with the
destruction barracks of the 20th and 21st centuries.

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13 Critique as Disclosure
Building Blocks for
a Phenomenological
Appropriation of Marx
Christian Lotz

1. Introduction
The history of the relationship between Marxism and Phenomenology is
complex. At least four immediate points of encounter can be identified: 1)
almost all major French phenomenologists, not only Sartre and Merleau-
Ponty but also figures such as Lefebvre, were close allies of Marxism at
some point in their intellectual developments; 2) in the Frankfurt School
tradition we find not only close encounters such as Marcuse’s early essays
and their attempt to bridge Heidegger with Marx but also appropria-
tions of phenomenology in thinkers such as Lukacs and Adorno; 3) in the
1960s we are confronted with the revival of a Marxist phenomenology
in Italy, particularly in the work pushed forward by Enzo Paci (e.g., Paci
1970); and finally, 4) we saw a general appropriation by phenomeno-
logical scholars of Marx and Marxism in Europe, represented by four
volumes on these issues edited by Bernhard Waldenfels in the late 1970s
(Waldenfels 1977–79). However, after these 20th century waves of schol-
arship had subsided, interest in forging a connection between Marxism
and Phenomenology had largely disappeared, especially in Husserl schol-
arship. Two observations seem to be important here: first, whereas in the
French tradition encounters between Marxism and Phenomenology seem
to be more politically than philosophically motivated, in parts due to the
intellectual engagement of French philosophers with the French Com-
munist Party and their struggles of finding a proper response to the role
of Soviet Union and Stalinism after WWII, in the German tradition phe-
nomenological impulses were employed to develop new theories of soci-
ety distinct from the most important movements of the beginning of the
20th century, such as Neo-Kantianism and Positivism. Second, in times
during which Marxism was still a political worldview, it was difficult to
free Marx’s genuine philosophy and social theory from its entanglement
in the larger Marxist movements, which, in turn, lead to a reductive read-
ing of Marx. However, with the withering away of “real existing social-
ist” countries and Marxist worldviews, Marx was subjected again to a
proper philosophical reading, which includes not only a theory of society

DOI: 10.4324/9781003191483-13
208  Christian Lotz
but also theories of ontology and epistemology. Unfortunately, in these
encounters, the role of Marx’s philosophy remains obfuscated because
post-phenomenological philosophers, such as Deleuze and Althusser,
turned to Marx as a figure that can be used for anti-phenomenological
thinking.
Thankfully, this situation has changed significantly in recent years.
Indeed, several scholars have demonstrated that it is time to bring phe-
nomenology back into Marxism and scholarship on Marx: Richard West-
ermann has shown that Lukacs’ early philosophy was developed in close
encounter with Husserl and can be read as a “phenomenology of capital-
ism” (Westerman 2019). Ian Angus has argued for a close methodological
re-reading of Husserl, Marcuse, and Marx (Angus 2016, 2017), and has
recently published a monumental study on Phenomenology and Marx-
ism, which includes a consideration of Husserl (Angus 2021). Andrew
Feenberg has shown new ways to deal with Marcuse and his encounter
with Husserl and Heidegger (Feenberg 2005, 2013). In what follows,
I would like to contribute to these new trajectories by focusing on a few
selected building blocks that will pave the way for a renewed, thorough,
and sober phenomenological reading of Marx’s philosophy (see also Lotz
2013, 2021). As this project is far too extensive for one chapter, I intend
to show here that this can be done best through 1) moving Marx away
from a Hegelian framework, 2) understanding the concept of critique as
an attempt to de-naturalize social phenomena (see also Paci 1969) and
as disclosure, and 3) showing that Marx’s concept of philosophy, his
method, as well as his understanding of technology, are forms of “disclo-
sure.” This, in turn, should point us away from a dialectical understand-
ing of Marx and open up new venues for a phenomenologically inspired
critique of political economy (see also Araujo 2017).

2. Moving Marx away from Hegelianism

Despite the obvious points, the most visible in 20th-century appropria-
tions of Marx in Frankfurt School critical theory and Italian phenom-
enological Marxism include the attempt 1) to understand Marx’s theory
not as a narrow economic theory, but as a critical theory of society that
includes epistemological and ontological questions, and 2) to understand
his theory by focusing on the categorical framework of his theory, which
requires us to reject approaching Marx from a Hegelian standpoint,
despite that in many dogmatic readings of Marx Hegel is still the main
reference point for coming to grips with Marx. I  submit that an anti-
Hegelian understanding of Marx is necessary for moving his thought
back to a subjective-transcendental and less metaphysical framework,
and ultimately, for pushing him into the phenomenological matrix of
thought. As I will briefly outline here, there are central systematic aspects
that speak against a Hegelian reading of Marx; most importantly, it is
 Critique as Disclosure 209
Marx’s methodological standpoint that itself speaks for a perspective
of thought that can be characterized as “transcendental philosophy,”
broadly construed. I will point to two crucial aspects that do not allow
us to read Marx from a Hegelian perspective, namely, first, the concept
of finitude, and second, the role of concepts, before I outline the concept
of critique in the next section of this chapter.

2.1. Infinity/finitude
Let me first remind us of a few obvious points that nevertheless tend
to be overlooked in the Hegelian understanding of Marx, especially the
Hegelian readings of Capital. According to Hegel, Kant’s philosophy
remains insufficient because its “standpoint” remains, in the end, only
a standpoint of the human being, which Hegel interprets as being based
on a limited concept of reason. According to Hegel, the consequence of
this limited concept is that we cannot transcend finitude and close the
gap between reason and reality, reason and society, reason and God, and
reason and the moral good. As we know, the function of Hegel’s Science
of Logic is to overcome the gap between the finite and the infinite, and
to demonstrate that reason is infinite via thinking itself through and in
what it is not. For Hegel, pure thinking can be the other of itself. For
Kantian thinking and its 19th- and 20th-century successors such a posi-
tion is impossible to maintain, insofar as there is always something that
remains not thinking, such as intuitions, sensations, the thing-in-itself,
matter, and the other. In contrast, Hegel’s project is supposed to show in
actu that the gap that underlies all of the modern dualisms, namely the
gap between reason and being, can be closed via reason and philosophi-
cal thought itself.
It is not a secret that even in his later writings Marx remains tied
to what Hegel calls the “human standpoint” and the “standpoint of
humanity,” even if Marx’s standpoint is mediated by the Young Hege-
lians, rather than by Kant himself. He explicitly criticizes Hegel for not
accepting the difference between concept and content, which also means
that Marx’s thinking is accepted only as a human activity and therefore
limited through its own emergence in human life. It cannot transcend its
own material background via an absolute self-relatedness that includes
the other of itself. The ontological principle of life, which replaces Kant’s
synthetic consciousness, is taken to be the principle of all human and
social reality. This is visible not only in his earlier writings, such as the
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844) and The German Ideol-
ogy (1845), but also in Capital. For example, in Chapter 6 of Capital the
principle of life is nicely visible in Marx’s understanding of labor power:

The second essential condition to the owner of money finding labor-

power in the market as a commodity is this—that the laborer instead
210  Christian Lotz
of being in the position to sell commodities in which his labor is
incorporated, must be obliged to offer for sale as a commodity that
very labor-power, which exists only in his living self.
(Marx 1993, 272)

Accordingly, in terms of the “living self,” what gets subsumed under

capital in modernity is consciousness insofar as it is related to itself
but only inasmuch as it encounters itself through its sensuousness and
embodiment (which is visible in Marx’s treatment of space, body, and
death in Capital). Leaving aside the wider context of Marx’s theory for
the purpose of this chapter, it is important to note that it is human life to
which thinking and thought as finite activities can be applied. Systemati-
cally, this position is closer to Kant and phenomenology than to Hegel.
Accordingly, embodied activities are part of social and natural reality,
and importantly, this also includes thinking and reason itself. Put differ-
ently, Marx reason remains explicitly human, which in turn means that
it is limited and finite. In Hegel’s terms, we could also add that Marx’s
thought remains as negative as Kant’s is. Hegel charges Kant with the
following:

the general idea to which he gave justification and credence is the

objectivity of reflective shine and the necessity of the contradiction
which belongs to the nature of thought determinations: of course,
this he did above all with reference to the way in which these deter-
minations are applied by reason to the things in themselves; never-
theless, what such determinations are in reason, and with reference
to what is in itself, this is precisely their nature. This result, grasped
in its positive aspect, is nothing else but the inner negativity of the
determinations which is their self-moving soul, the principle of all
natural and spiritual life. But if one stays fixed at the abstract nega-
tive aspect of dialectics, the result is only the commonplace that rea-
son is incapable of knowing the infinite—a peculiar result indeed, for
it says that, since the infinite is what is rational, reason is not capable
of cognizing the rational.
(Hegel 2010, 35)

Leaving the finer details aside, Hegel argues here that a finite concept of
reason that cannot grasp the thing-in-itself remains ultimately irrational
since true reason (as Hegel believes) contains its own self-negation and
the other of itself in itself: only this is for Hegel “rational” (vernünftig).
However we position ourselves in this battle between Kant and Hegel;
it is safe to argue that Marx rejects the speculative nature of reason.
There are no indications that either the early philosophy, which is based
on human life, or the later philosophy, which is based on capital, spells
these principles out as principles of a (mysteriously) conceived identity
 Critique as Disclosure 211
between thought and being. Moreover, Marx does not propose a uni-
versal logic that would be valid for all spheres of being such as nature,
mind, and God, which is consistent, since his thinking is restricted to the
sphere of (human) society. To be sure, his restriction is thoroughly post-
Hegelian since it requires us to focus on one region or realm of being
through which the others become accessible, namely, society.
I would also like to remind us here of Heidegger’s reading of Kant,
which argues that Kant’s metaphysics is, in fact, determined by the con-
cept of finitude, that is, that it is centered on the question of how intuition
and understanding (Verstand) are interrelated. Marx’s theory is ruled by
the same systematic problem, namely, how theory and historical content
and experience are interrelated to such an extent that one cannot exist
without the other. For Hegel, reason can be self-related without being
mediated by intuition; that is, something can be “known” by thinking
about thinking alone. The latter position is impossible to defend within
Kantian and phenomenological transcendental philosophy. This counts
equally for Marx, insofar as his methodological position of how some-
thing can be “known” via his theory and thinking must be related to
intuition and experience, even if we enlarge the latter concept to include
the concept of history. Accordingly, to argue that Marx is a Hegelian,
is leading into the wrong direction and fixes all debates about the status
of Marx’s theory for modern and contemporary philosophy to a histori-
cal confrontation that hides rather than reveals the true importance of
Marx’s thinking for phenomenological thought.

2.2. Concepts/intuitions
The problem of finitude and Hegel’s critique of Kant as employing only
a finite concept of reason that is not able to truly relate itself to itself
is also visible in the treatment of concepts and intuitions, the issue of
which sheds more light on Marx as a thinker who remains closer to tran-
scendental philosophy than to Hegel. It is certainly true that the concept
versus (sensual) intuition dualism is no longer a strictly epistemological
relation in Marx; however, the problem is situated in the methodological
problem of how to research and present the system of political economy
coherently in regard to social-economic categories in relation to the real
historical process. As Marx underlines in his late remarks on Wagner; he
“does not begin with concepts” (Marx 1881), which seems to be surpris-
ing at first, since we might ask: is it not the case that Marx deals with
the concepts of value, money, and capital in the first chapters of Capital?
Importantly, what Marx rejects is not the role of concepts in his theory,
but the conception of concepts as 1) being self-related, 2) independent
from (sensual) intuitions, and 3) internally deducible. Instead, he argues,
basic concepts can only be genetically traced back to intuitions via a
systematic presentation of their order. This also explains why he calls his
212  Christian Lotz
basic concepts not “concepts,” but categories (for more on categories,
see Lotz (2020)). It would be “scholasticism,” as Marx argues in his
defense against Wagner, to derive use value and exchange value from
the value concept instead of developing them analytically; what Marx
means here is that the value form cannot be grasped via a logical process:
“my analytical method . . . has nothing to do with the German profes-
sorial method of deriving concepts from concepts” (Marx 1881). As a
consequence, Marx argues that basic concepts (again, now conceived of
as categories) that are employed in his theory of political economy need
to be traced back and genetically developed via the real historical devel-
opments and experiences. Consequently, Marx transforms the concept/
intuition dualism into the category/history dualism, which in turn makes
clear why we cannot artificially disconnect the “systematic” development
of the concepts presented in the first chapters of Capital from the later
chapters on history. Both belong systematically together. This has two
interesting consequences for further thinking about the role of concepts
in Marx: 1) First, put in Kantian terms, we might say that economic
categories remain empty without historical content, and historical con-
tent remains blind without economic categories. Again, one cannot be
grasped without the other. Just as in Kant transcendental concepts cannot
be thought of as being independent from experience, so also in Marx:
the categories developed in Capital cannot be thought of as being inde-
pendent from historical experience, even if the systematic presentation
of the categories and their interrelatedness requires a separate discussion
and presentation. 2) Second, Marx is here in striking proximity to Hus-
serl’s later philosophy, insofar as both the static and essential phenomena
for Husserl need to be genetically analyzed, and their meaning horizon
needs to be revealed and traced back to that from which they emerge. Of
course, in Husserl, despite the Crisis problematic, this primarily refers
to the relation between the pre-reflective affective world and judgments
(such as in Analyses concerning Passive Synthesis and Experience and
Judgement), but the point is the same insofar as in Marx the content of
categories no longer refers to a conceptual content; rather, it refers back
to a system of relations in real history.
Furthermore, we would do well to remind ourselves that Hegel criti-
cizes Kant for arguing that the categories can only be developed in con-
nection with the sensually given; that is, he argues that Kant remains
within an empiricist psychology. In contrast, according to Hegel, we
should ask for the truth contained in the categories (Hegel 2010, 525).
It is clear that Marx (and later critical theory) cannot fall under such a
Hegelian paradigm of “truth as actuality” for two main reasons. First,
Marx’s theory of political economy is not based on a historical universal-
ity, insofar as its object is historically limited to capitalist society. The
categories must be won in and wrested from the historically given. Sec-
ond, the absolute (self-related and logical) necessity that Hegel calls for in
 Critique as Disclosure 213
the quote above does not exist for Marx given that his concepts are tied
to historical developments and would lose their reference if capitalism
would in fact be overcome. The theoretical genesis of the categories and
their exposition demonstrates that the categories cannot be understood
without their real historical relations.
Consequently, generating the necessity of the systematic relations in
political economy cannot be absolute in the Hegelian sense since the
object is itself historically limited. In opposition to this, Hegel argues that
philosophy as pure thinking must demonstrate that it is in principle not
finite, not limited, and therefore truly self-referential. Social categories
can therefore not be concepts in the Hegelian sense. Furthermore, what
is contained in categories can be spelled out and revealed in the histori-
cally given preconditions of capital, which, in Marx’s theory, can neither
posit itself nor develop autonomously but is brought about through real
violence, expulsions, and turning formerly concrete labor processes into
abstract labor. Accordingly, for Marx, proper method takes place on the
level of the presentation of the categories, not on the level of the relations
to which these categories refer. In Hegel, dialectics is purely expository,
insofar as the presentation of the categories in his Science of Logics is
at the same time the real unfolding of thought through itself. Put differ-
ently, there is no difference between presentation and research in Hegel.
Against this, Marx holds the following:

Of course the method of presentation must differ in form from that

of inquiry. The latter has to appropriate the material in detail, to
analyze its different forms of development, to trace out their inner
connection. Only after this work is done can the actual movement
be adequately described. If this is done successfully, if the life of the
subject-matter is ideally reflected as in a mirror, then it may appear
as if we had before us a mere a priori construction.
(Marx 1993, 102)

Finally, we find this Marxian rejection of blurring the line between con-
cepts and intuitions also in the introduction to the Grundrisse, which,
in the English-speaking world, is usually taken as a document that dem-
onstrates Marx’s close connection with Hegelian dialectics. One of the
central passages in the Grundrisse reads as follows:

The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many

determinations, hence unity of the diverse. It appears in the process
of thinking, therefore, as a process of concentration, as a result, not
as a point of departure, even though it is the point of departure in
reality and hence also the point of departure for observation and
conception. Along the first path the full conception was evaporated
to yield an abstract determination; along the second, the abstract
214  Christian Lotz
determinations lead towards a reproduction of the concrete by way
of thought.
(Marx 1995, 101)

Unfortunately, what gets lost in the English translation of this oft-cited

passage is that Marx uses two eminent Kantian terms for explaining the
core of his methodological reflections: the term used for “observation”
in German is “Anschauung” (intuition), and the term used for “concep-
tion” in German is “Vorstellung” (representation). As becomes clear
after reading the entire passage, Marx warns us to understand concepts
in a speculative fashion as self-related and as being based on some inter-
nal developmental logic. As he further argues, categories in his theory
depend upon the ordering of the historically won material; again, as
given. Darstellung is so central for Marx since the way in which the
material is presented to us is not, as in Hegel’s Science of Logics, pregiven
in the logic of the thought itself; there is no problem of how to pre-
sent the categories in Hegel, since in Hegel’s Science of Logics we think
about thought through itself. Put differently, the ordering done in subjec-
tive thought is identical with the logical ordering contained in objective
thought itself.
Finally, as was shown just earlier, determining a social formation in
its inner logic and inner limits is identical with revealing it as a histori-
cally finite social formation. From this it follows immediately that the
specific categories that belong to the object of critical analysis a) must
be related to each other through their inner genesis and coherence and
b) must be analyzed in their historical genesis by revealing or “unmask-
ing” (Couzens-Hoy 2008, 282) their fields of emergence. This is nicely
visible in a distinction that Marx makes at the beginning of the chapter
on “primitive accumulation.” There he draws a distinction between two
concepts of origin and argues against political economists of his time
that they identify origin (Ursprung) with past (Vergangenheit). Whereas
bourgeois political economists determine the “origin” of economic devel-
opment as something that remains external to the economic development
itself, that is, as a thing of the past that is over and no longer is part
of the development itself, Marx’s own analysis reveals the origin of the
economic development as a moment of this development. Strikingly, this
reminds us of the phenomenological idea of demonstrating that a genesis
of a phenomenon is implied in the phenomenon, as long as we operate
with the concept of meaning.
In conclusion, we can see that Marx is closer to a subjective and phe-
nomenological method than to any kind of speculative or dialectical
method. Thus, it should be clear why it is not appropriate to (simply)
approach Marx from a Hegelian perspective, since Hegel despised the
critical standpoint, characterizing it as a limited standpoint and as a lim-
ited conception of reason and philosophy.
 Critique as Disclosure 215
3. Critique
After having demonstrated in the foregoing section that we should read
Marx more properly as a non-Hegelian thinker and as a philosopher who
rejects the concepts of infinite reason, metaphysics, and even dialectics,
it should now be easier to understand not only why Marx could be read
as a phenomenologist, but also why his thinking can be read as a phi-
losophy that is critical through disclosing what is contained in the given.
German and Anglo-American Frankfurt School theorists since Habermas
have repeatedly argued against older authors within the same tradition,
maintaining that the concept of critique needs to be grounded by norma-
tive concepts, if it does not want to end up in self-defeating positions. In
this vein, one cannot criticize reason without employing at least a mini-
mally defined normative origin of rational judgments about reason. More
recently, Rahel Jaeggi has spelled out the concept of critique in critical
theory in regard to three aspects: a functional, an ethical, and a moral
aspect of critique (Jaeggi 2016). The functionalist critique of capitalism
argues that capitalism is dysfunctional, the moral critique argues that
capitalism is based on exploitation, whereas the ethical critique of capi-
talism argues that capitalism leads to a meaningless life (ibid.). Though
I find this differentiation very helpful, it shows how the critique of politi-
cal economy and the Kantian sense of “critique” in critical theory remain
systematically under-evaluated in contemporary critical theory (see also
Nemeth 1976, 245). In any case, it falls short of a proper Marxian con-
cept of critique, which I will briefly outline in the following.
The argument that critical theory is necessarily in need of normative
foundations is shortsighted, as the proper concept of critique should be
conceived of as the attempt to reveal the inner limits of its object through
an analysis of what is essential to its object. As the object of social cri-
tique is society, a critical theory of society is or becomes critical whenever
it reveals its object as finite. In a central passage on Hegel, Marx writes:

True criticism shows the inner genesis of the Holy Trinity in the brain
of man. It describes its birth. Similarly, a truly philosophical criti-
cism of the present constitution does not content itself with showing
that it contains contradictions: it explains them, comprehends their
genesis, their necessity. It grasps their particular significance. This act
of comprehension does not however consist, as Hegel thinks, in dis-
covering the determinations of the concepts of logic at every point;
it consists in the discovery of the particular logic of the particular
object.
(Marx 1992, 158)

Decisive in this quote are three aspects of Marx’s concept of critique,

namely: 1) critique is a procedure that leads to a comprehension of its
216  Christian Lotz
object, 2) critique is essentially grasping a phenomenon in its genesis,
and 3) critique comprehends the inner logic of its object, and only in this
way, does it grasp its essence. We can easily see that critique is here intro-
duced by Marx as an analytic activity that attempts to define its object
through grasping the inner limits of its object by tracing its elements
back to their origins. Genesis is here identical with finitude, insofar as
an object with its genesis can no longer be located in an abstract logical
space that is characterized by an atemporal structure. Instead, a geneti-
cally determined object has a temporally limited horizon and therefore a
finite (and historical) origin. Only an object that can be determined by its
own inner logic can be separated from another object, as the difference
between objects comes about through that, which “makes them up” as
precisely this and not another object. A determination of an object in its
being, accordingly, introduces a limit through which the particularity of
the object is revealed. Marx’s connection of critique and analysis has a
phenomenological character, insofar as he traces that which makes an
object a particular object back to its inner categorical determinations. As
we know, this idea is central for Kant’s First Critique within which Kant
criticizes existing metaphysics not only by limiting the scope of what
could legitimately fall under metaphysics but also by limiting the scope
and essence of reason and rationality itself. Critique deals with finitude
in the Heideggerian sense.
Accordingly, it should become more transparent how Marx uses the
concept of critique for the analysis of capitalism. The Critique of Political
Economy is critical because the Marxian critique does not deal with just
any social formation; instead, it has a specific object, namely, capitalist
society (i.e., a social formation determined by valorized labor). A critique
of capitalist society, consequently, tries to analyze this specific sociality
as a specific form, and in so doing it tries to analyze capitalism in such a
way that its inner limits become visible by revealing its essential categori-
cal determinations. As we said earlier, determining a social formation in
its inner logic and inner limits is identical with revealing it as a histori-
cally finite social formation. So, more specifically, Critique of Political
Economy is critical because it reveals its object, capitalist society, as a
finite form of sociality that, because it is finite, can also be overcome, can
fall apart, or can be replaced by a different form of sociality. As Marx
says in the quote above (and as a social phenomenologist), the essence of
an object is this essence because it contains its own peculiar logic. All of
this is nicely visible in a famous quote from a letter to Lassalle written in
February 1858:

The work I am presently concerned with is a Critique of Economic

Categories or, if you like, the system of the bourgeois economy criti-
cally presented. It is at once a presentation of the system and because
of the presentation a critique of the system.
(Marx 1858)
 Critique as Disclosure 217
4. Disclosure
Above, I  have (hopefully) successfully indicated that Marx’s thinking,
if grasped philosophically, is closer to a subjective and transcendental
way of thinking about (social) phenomena than to a Hegelian concep-
tual and epistemological framework of thinking. In what follows I will
demonstrate that the genetic phenomenology that is implied in Marx’s
thought can also be detected in the way in which both philosophy and
phenomena are taken to be based on disclosure rather than logical or
causal interpretations.

4.1. What philosophy reveals

Let me remind us of the following: the function of the phenomenological
epoché is to make visible a realm that is lost behind the veil of the natural
attitude within which we are not aware of the proper intentional connec-
tions and associations of experience. This, once subjected to phenom-
enological reflection, emerges as a phenomenon for the analytical gaze
of the phenomenologist. Perhaps surprisingly, we find the same problem
in Marx’s method in Capital, which is built around the problem that the
fetishistic relations that the commodity form introduces in social reality
makes social relations and associations contained in experience and eve-
ryday activities invisible. The intent of Marx’s method is to make these
relations visible again in the natural attitude via turning what appears
in everyday experience as natural into phenomena, which can be traced
back to their true field of origin. Accordingly, Marx’s method can prop-
erly be understood as a genetic phenomenology of society.
This genetic reconstruction takes place on two levels: on the one hand,
Marx argues in his early writings, especially in the famous letter exchange
with Ruge in 1843, that the task of philosophy is to analyze “mystical
consciousness obscure to itself.” On the other hand, he argues in his
mature writings, especially in Capital in 1867, that the task of a critique
of political economy is to de-naturalize fetishistic social relations that
appear to agents in capitalist society as natural relations. In both cases, it
is the task of critical reflection to operate without logical or causal con-
nections; instead, the entire endeavor is about revealing what remains
hidden in the natural attitude, which, once subjected to the analytical
gaze, are then analyzed as phenomena proper. Accordingly, critique is
here understood as disclosure.
Let me briefly point to the Ruge letters before dealing with Marx’s
method in Capital in more detail. In a famous passage, Marx writes the
following:

The reform of consciousness consists entirely in making the world

aware of its own consciousness, in arousing it from its dream of
itself, in explaining its own actions to it. Like Feuerbach’s critique of
218  Christian Lotz
religion, our whole aim can only be to translate religious and politi-
cal problems into their self-conscious human form. Our programme
must be: the reform of consciousness not through dogmas but by
analysing mystical consciousness obscure to itself, whether it appears
in religious or political form. It will then become plain that the world
has long since dreamed of some­thing of which it needs only to
become conscious for it to possess it in reality. It will then become
plain that our task is not to draw a sharp mental line between past
and future but to complete the thought of the past. Lastly, it will
become plain that mankind will not begin any new work but will
consciously bring about the completion of its old work.
(Marx 1992, 209)

The following aspects are important for the purpose of this chapter: 1)
Marx does not argue that his method operates from the outside of society
via an external observer who normatively criticizes society or the agents
who operate in it. Rather, he argues that the task of critical philosophy is
merely to analyze properly how things are; 2) consequently, he assumes
that in social everyday life, society appears to its agents “upside down”;
that is, as not how things truly are. One does not need to artificially
construct associations to immediately notice how close Marx’s thought
appears to the thought of Husserl, given that in Husserl we see the
attempt in his Crisis to criticize the formalized concept of reality that the
modern natural sciences introduce by showing how it is alienated from
the practical rationality that we find in the life-world (see also Paci 1968,
14–18), which includes ethics (Husserl 1970, 131). As Husserl attempts
to phenomenologically “heal” the disconnect from the life-world that the
modern mathematization of nature introduced, thereby reconciling the
modern world with itself, so does Marx attempt to reconcile the social
world by bridging the disconnect of society and its agents through the
imaginations and distortions introduced by metaphysics and religion (see
also Shmueli 1973). As Marcuse has it,

Husserl proposes to break the mystification inherent in modern sci-

ence by a phenomenological analysis which is in a literal sense a
therapeutic method. Therapeutic in the sense that it is to get behind
the mystifying concepts and methods of science and to uncover the
constitutive lebensweltliche a priori under which all scientific a priori
stands.
(Marcuse 1965, 287)

In both cases, the critical task is achieved by way of a thorough analysis

of how things are rather than how things – seen from an external posi-
tion  – ought to be. Again, critique is here understood differently than
critical theorists, such as Jaeggi, assume.
 Critique as Disclosure 219
The problem of visibility, invisibility, and the disconnect within
modernity is not only hinted at in Marx’s early writings; for one could
argue that it is the problem of Capital, insofar as it not only explicitly
determines the entire fetishism problem, but also re-appears on every
methodological level of Marx’s mature theory. For example, think of the
problem of commodity circulation and market relations. Marx’s entire
theory deals with the problem that all social relations, that is, relations
contained in production, consumption, and distribution, disappear at the
surface of commodity circulation. Put in modern terms, at the surface
of the market exchanges and the processes of selling and buying, the
entire content of political economy and the central functioning of capital
and surplus value disappear and are no longer visible. It is as if the true
content of the act of buying and surplus value disappears in the natural
attitude that buyers and sellers move in during their everyday transac-
tions. It should come as no surprise, then, that the problem of how to
reveal these true relations that remain veiled behind the natural attitude
can be traced throughout all levels of Marx’s Capital. For example, in the
fetishism chapter Marx states the following:

We have already seen, from the most elementary expression of value,

x commodity A = y commodity B, that the object in which the magni-
tude of the value of another object is represented, appears to have the
equivalent form independently of this relation, as a social property
given to it by nature. We followed up this false appearance to its final
establishment, which is complete as soon as the universal equivalent
form becomes identified with the bodily form of a particular com-
modity, and thus crystallized into the money-form. What appears
to happen is not that gold becomes money, in consequence of all
other commodities expressing their values in it, but, on the contrary,
that all other commodities universally express their values in gold,
because it is money. The intermediate steps of the process vanish in
the result and leave no trace behind. . . . Hence the magic of money.
(Marx 1993, 187)

What Marx points out here is the process through which the value-form,
as he discusses it in the first chapter of Capital, becomes invisible in the
result of its constitution, that is, in the real existing form of value, which
is money. However, the steps that lead to money as the universal media-
tor of social reality vanish in their result. As Marx puts it in the above
quote, the intermediate steps of the process vanish in the result and leave
no trace behind. When we find commodities on the market, they already
come with a price tag, and the fact that commodities are constituted by
their specific social form disappears behind their appearance. Put differ-
ently, money is “magic,” insofar as in its thing-like form its true relations
disappear. Turning money into a phenomenon is therefore the goal of
220  Christian Lotz
Marx’s reflections. Similarly, Marx argues that this natural-fetishistic veil
occurs at every level of money and capital. For example, at the surface
of commodity circulation and everyday market relations, such as buy-
ing and selling as well as supply and demand, equal individuals seem to
encounter each other as formally free individuals. In fact, market rela-
tions are only apparently made of individual transactions between indi-
viduals that are socially constituted through their exchange relations. In
truth, however, these individuals are constituted by the relations that are
hidden in the market relations. As a consequence, Marx’s methodologi-
cal reflections need to cut through the fetishism of the natural attitude
and reveal the latter as the surface of lost “traces.” The core of Marx-
ian method, hence, is truly phenomenological, insofar as it reveals via
a genetic reconstruction the social relations that turn up as natural in
everyday life. It is important to note that this genetic reconstruction does
not proceed through the concept of causality, since Marx does not argue
that the underlying relations cause surface effects; rather, he argues that
the naturalized market contains social relations that can be disclosed
through properly turning everything that seems to be natural into some-
thing social. As he underlines right at the beginning of Capital, the value
form contains no natural elements, even if to agents in capitalism as well
as to bourgeoisie economists and philosophers it appears as natural.
Marx’s critique of political economy, accordingly, de-naturalizes society
and properly traces it back to social elements. Again, critique appears
here as disclosure.

4.2. What technology reveals

A last point that I would like to point our attention to is Marx’s treat-
ment of technology in Capital, since in his treatment he demonstrates
very well how his genetic social philosophy works in its entirety as a
critique via disclosure. For a long time, the literature on Marx and tech-
nology, especially in the Anglo-American world, was haunted by ques-
tions of instrumentalism, determinism, and historicism. These readings
are based in their entirety on a misunderstanding of Marx’s method and
his philosophical underpinnings. A thorough reading of the long chapters
in Capital in which Marx deals with technology show a completely dif-
ferent problem, which is nicely hinted at in the following passage, hidden
in a footnote (see also Harvey 2010, 189):

Technology reveals man’s mode of dealing with Nature, the process

of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays
bare the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the men-
tal conceptions that flow from them. Every history of religion, even,
that fails to take account of this material basis, is uncritical. It is, in
reality, much easier to discover by analysis the earthly core of the
 Critique as Disclosure 221
misty creations of religion, than, conversely, it is, to develop from the
actual relations of life the corresponding celestialised forms of those
relations. The latter method is the only materialistic, and therefore
the only scientific one. The weak points in the abstract materialism of
natural science, a materialism that excludes history and its process,
are at once evident from the abstract and ideological conceptions of
its spokesmen, whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their
own speciality.
(Marx 1993, 493)

It is quite remarkable that at this point, in uncanny proximity to Hei-

degger, Marx does not use the word “verursachen” (causes), but instead
speaks of “enthüllen” (revealing/disclosing). As we know from Hei-
degger, “causality as effecting” differs from to-bring-something-into-the-
open (Heidegger 1993, 313, 316, 331). Similarly, for Marx technology
does not cause anything; rather, it discloses central relations within the
social totality in a certain mode, namely, in the mode of being available
for capital accumulation and the process of valorization. Marx has often
been read through some of his key formulations, such as that all history
is the history of class struggle, or that being is prior to consciousness.
These empty and abstract reductions are all misleading, though, as they
do not appreciate that each phenomenon that Marx analyses, including
technology, can only be understood within the totality of social rela-
tions. Indeed, abstractions are just the beginning: the point is to reach
the concrete. The phenomenon of technology discloses the entire range
of social and ecological relations, which includes technologies, the rela-
tion to nature, social relations, modes of material production, daily life,
mental conceptions, and institutional frameworks. Consequently, we can
see here how formerly naturalized experiences and things are saved from
logical (dialectical) as well as causal explanations and, instead, are genet-
ically analyzed as phenomena in which their meaning “apprehensions”
are revealed and de-naturalized. It is in this sense that critique functions
as a form of disclosure by demonstrating the mystifications and veils that
we encounter in our “natural” daily lives within which we just “do”
things without understanding how their meaning is constituted.

5. Conclusion
Marx’s philosophy is phenomenological by disclosing reality on three
levels: 1) on the level of the method, via a genetic reflection on what is
contained in naturalized experiences, 2) on the level of philosophy, via a
disclosure of what social reality in truth is, and 3) on the level of social
phenomena (such as technology), via a disclosure of what is contained
in these phenomena. These three (selected) aspects of Marx’s philosophy
should lead us to the conclusion that a phenomenological reading of his
222  Christian Lotz
theory is not an arbitrarily constructed perspective; rather, it is in its core
a philosophy that traces back phenomena to their true content and ori-
gin. His philosophy should be grasped as a genetic phenomenology of
(capitalist) social reality and social relations that reveals their true con-
tent once properly disclosed. As such, without being directly normative,
Marx’s philosophy pushes away the blind spots of what with Husserl we
might call the social-natural attitude and, at the same time, it is critical
because it reveals capitalist social phenomena in how and what they are.

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14 Crisis and Modernity
On the Idea of
Historical Critique
Timo Miettinen

1. Introduction
According to the well-known thesis by Reinhart Koselleck in his Critique
and Crisis (1988), European modernity evolved from the recognition of
a twofold crisis. As a result of the gradual dissolution of Medieval feu-
dal order and the emergence of Protestant movements, there emerged
a new sense of societal crisis that announced itself in the dissolution of
traditional loyalties and authorities. In Europe, this crisis was particu-
larly devastating for two institutions, the Holy Roman Empire and the
Catholic Church, both of which lost their authority to the newly emerg-
ing political institution: the state. The state, however, was not just an
institution among others. It carried within itself a fundamental intellec-
tual transformation in the way political power justifies itself. Particularly
through the work of Machiavelli – who was one of the first to use the
word state (it., lo stato) in a somewhat modern sense, denoting a sense
of an abstract entity that the prince must take care of – there emerged a
critical distinction between the domains of politics and morality. Politics
could no longer be understood with regard to a pre-existing idea of social
order or good governance; it was about power and how to manage it.
According to Koselleck, it was exactly this sense of crisis, the loss of
moral foundation, that gave birth to a particularly modern way of think-
ing about politics. Its primary representative was Thomas Hobbes who
built his theory of sovereignty on the basis of a naturalistic psychology
of the egoistic individual. The critics of Hobbes such as Pufendorf and
Locke challenged this claim and emphasized the role of pre-political
human sociality in the constitution of political institutions. Although the
17th and 18th centuries did not formulate a coherent theory of “society,”
they paved the way for a new way of thinking about societal critique as
an essential counterforce to political power.
From the 18th century onward, modern political thinking aimed at
overcoming this crisis with the help of history. Particularly the so-called
Theodicean interpretations of history aimed at revealing the evolution
of historical societies by means of teleological argumentation (Nisbet

DOI: 10.4324/9781003191483-14
 Crisis and Modernity 225
1980). Kant, for one, argued that the development of human history
contained within itself a secret plan of nature – one that was inevitably
leading to the universal applicability of a republican form of governance.
Hegel, likewise, treated the ideals of the French Revolution in terms of a
necessary development of spirit, what he called “the march of God in the
world.” It was to be shown that the development of human history, even
with all of its violent characteristics, had been rational and inevitable.
Husserl was a philosopher for whom the idea of crisis carried a particu-
lar significance. Particularly in his late works, Husserl began to address
what he understood as the fundamental crisis of his own time: the ina-
bility of science in formulating a positive, normative vision for rational
humanity. Although the question concerning the unity of science was
acute already in Husserl’s earlier works, it was not until the 1920s that
Husserl began to see this problem in connection to broader topics such
as sociality, history, and culture. “The crisis of the European sciences”
that Husserl analyzed in his works of the 1930s was not a crisis that
was constitutive only for the sciences themselves. It was a broader crisis
of humanity and cultural renewal, a loss of practical ideals for rational
action.
In the context of these works, Husserl began to sketch what he called a
“teleological-historical” approach to phenomenology. Unlike the philos-
ophers of the 18th and 19th centuries, however, Husserl did not under-
stand teleology primarily as a tool of legitimation of past developments.
On the contrary, the concept of teleology was essentially tied to the idea
of crisis understood as the collapse of existing beliefs and values. In the
Crisis, Husserl employed the concept of teleology as a way of unrave-
ling what he understood as the fundamental conundrum of modernity,
namely, the split between the natural and the human sciences, of nature
and spirit. In this regard, the “crisis” was not only a diagnostic concept
but rather a call for action. It was founded on a new insistence of critique
of the present moment as a necessary point of departure for all serious
philosophizing.
This critique of the present, however, was not to be understood as a
shift from transcendental phenomenology to cultural critique. Instead, it
was tied to Husserl’s broadened understanding of philosophy in terms
of a generative phenomenon, as a fundamentally cultural and communal
endeavor. Instead of an attitude of the individual, philosophy was now
much more to be understood in terms of a pre-existing accomplishment
that is transmitted from generation to generation  – something that we
inherit rather than invent ourselves. It was only through a critique of the
present and its “presuppositions,” Husserl argued, that phenomenology
was to redeem its promise as a rigorous science.
In this article, I discuss this transition from the critique of the present
moment to a teleological understanding of philosophy. As I will show,
teleology became for Husserl an essential tool of philosophical critique:
226  Timo Miettinen
something that is aimed at a fundamental transformation of the present
moment. Instead of a philosophical attitude founded on a liberation from
historical presuppositions, these presuppositions served as a necessary
point of departure for a serious philosophical stance. This step, however,
necessitated a broader understanding of philosophy itself in terms of a
communal and cultural accomplishment, as something that belongs to
the structure of the historical lifeworld.

2. Philosophy of the present

Husserl famously characterized his phenomenology as a philosophical
attitude oriented in the present moment. In his view, all meaning and
sense  – as well as the sense-constituting structures of consciousness  –
were to be examined with regard to their givenness in “bodily” or “liv-
ing” presence. Although this presence turned out to be more like a stream
than a slice of time, it nevertheless remained the ultimate point of refer-
ence for all meaning and validity.
In Husserl’s later works, however, this presence seemed to acquire for
itself a completely new meaning and importance. Particularly in the con-
text of The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenome-
nology, the horizon of philosophical reflection was now defined in terms
of “the actual state of the present” (die faktische Gegenwartslage) and
“our present situation” (unsere Gegenwartssituation) (Hua VI, 8, 16).
This presence was not to be conceived solely in terms of personal expe-
rience or “givenness,” but rather in terms of a broad understanding of
cultural, social, and to some extent political conditions. Its correspond-
ing subject was not only the philosophizing individual but what Hus-
serl called “we, humans of the present” (Wir Menschen der Gegenwart),
“we, philosophers of the present” (wir Philosophen dieser Gegenwart),
or simply “contemporary philosophers” (heutige Philosophen) (Hua VI,
12, 15, 72).
This distention of the meaning of “presence” seemed to go hand in
hand with the expansion of philosophizing subjectivity. “We,” and not
the “I,” was to be understood as the true subject of this type of approach
(Hua VI, 12–15). The idea that philosophical questioning must somehow
be tied to a philosophizing community was perhaps partly a rhetorical
move, a wake-up call for others. Even more importantly, it seemed to go
hand in hand with Husserl’s understanding of philosophy as a fundamen-
tally social activity – something that Husserl began to analyze already in
his post-WWI works (Miettinen 2020). Particularly through his reading
of the birth of Greek philosophy in Plato and Aristotle, Husserl began
to emphasize the communal aspects of philosophizing and linked it into
a wider understanding of science as a cultural and communal endeavor.
For instance, in his so-called Kaizo essays of the early 1920s, Husserl
defined philosophy in terms of a “spiritual organ, in which the community
 Crisis and Modernity 227
establishes the consciousness of its true definition” (Hua XXVII, 54).
Philosophy was not to be conceived primarily in terms of an attitude of
the individual but rather as an “overarching and all-embracing idea of
culture” living under the guidance of rigorous science (Hua XXVII, 89).
Above all, the communal activity of philosophy was defined by what
Husserl called “free critique” (Hua VI, 336). Its basic character relied on
two ideas. First, philosophical critique was “free” because it is based on
the fundamental equality of all persons involved. In the field of philosoph-
ical cooperation, there are no particular authorities, no masters control-
ling the process of truth-seeking. Domination is a natural enemy of free
critique. Second, this type of critique was to be conceived as free because
it concerns “all life and all life-goals, all cultural products and systems
that have already arisen out of the life of man” (Hua VI, 329). This means
that in philosophy, there are no taboos or topics protected by their tra-
ditionality. More importantly, philosophy is not simply a domain of cul-
ture among others – it is a critical activity that covers all fields of human
existence from art to politics, from education to science. All domains of
culture can thus undergo a “philosophical” transformation whereby they
are subjugated to critical inspection in the light of infinite ideas.
In this regard, philosophy meant a complete “revolutionization in the
very manner in which humanity creates culture” (Hua VI, 325). Culture
was no longer understood in terms of a repetition or assimilation of the
past, but rather as a form of critical activity aimed at a constant improve-
ment of things in the light of theoretical and practical ideals. It created
a completely new horizon of production, which understood itself with
regard to completely new kinds of goals, infinite ideas.
As Husserl emphasized, because these goals are fundamentally unreach-
able in concrete action, the idea of philosophical culture living under the
spirit of free critique was something that cannot be really fulfilled within
the lifespan of an individual, not even a particular community. Instead, it
can only be realized in a continuity of generations:

But only in the Greeks do we have a universal (“cosmological”) life-

interest in the essentially new form of a purely “theoretical” attitude,
and this as a communal form in which this interest works itself out
for internal reasons, being the corresponding, essentially new [com-
munity] of philosophers, of scientists (mathematicians, astronomers,
etc.). These are the men who, not in isolation but with one another
and for one another, i.e., in interpersonally bound communal work,
strive for and bring about theoria and nothing but theoria whose
growth and constant perfection, with the broadening of the circle
of coworkers and the succession of the generations of inquirers, is
finally taken up into the will with the sense of an infinite and a com-
mon task.
(Hua VI, 326)
228  Timo Miettinen
However, although Husserl credited Plato and Aristotle for being the true
originators of universal philosophy and the idea of “common task,” the
Greeks did not yet operate with an idea of philosophy tied to an infinite
horizon of development. “Antiquity,” Husserl wrote in the Crisis, “went
never far enough to grasp the possibility of an infinite task” (Hua VI, 19).
While the Greeks operated with a rather developed concept of ideality,
they were never really able to tie it into “a rational infinite totality of
being with a rational science systematically mastering it” (Hua VI, 22).
In Husserl’s view, it was only Descartes who articulated a conception of
philosophy that was essentially tied to a horizon of perpetual develop-
ment. It was only in modern times that philosophy became a rigorous
science in the sense that it required a full clarity and certainty of its basic
presuppositions, thus laying the foundation for science as an axiomatic
system. Moreover, it was only this demand of absolute certainty for ori-
gins that made possible the idea of philosophy as a uniform, continually
developing system.
This new idea of infinity, however, turned out to be a double-edged
sword. While theoretically, the new mathematical formalism of Descartes
made possible an idea of philosophy as a continuously developing system,
it also produced a new threat against it. The modern natural sciences in
particular conceived of themselves on the basis of an axiomatic system
constantly expanding itself on the basis of few unquestioned presupposi-
tions. By abstracting from the intuitively given surrounding world on the
basis of “geometrical-ideal bodies” (Hua VI, 18), the modern natural sci-
ences laid the foundation for an increasing deduction of new theoretical
hypotheses. These sciences, however, rested on a peculiar forgetfulness
of their original act of institution. By looking away from the manifold
of idealities constitutive for the lifeworld, these sciences took “for true
being what is actually a method” (Hua VI, 52). Accumulation of knowl-
edge was not matched with a critique of foundations.
For Husserl, it was exactly this double character of infinity that con-
stituted the paradox of modernity. While modernity was able to open
up a horizon of infinite development for the sciences, it simultaneously
betrayed this promise by limiting itself to only one type of ideality, the
mathematical-geometrical. The promise of perpetual critique was missed
because of a lack of critique in the fundamental presuppositions (Voraus-
setzungen) of the system itself.
The role of history in Husserl’s late works such as the Crisis was essen-
tially tied to the idea of presuppositions (see Hua VI, 362). For philoso-
phy to be truly universal, it needs to take into account the historical
process of meaning-creation that has led to the present moment. This
was already the principle articulated by Aristotle when he insisted that
philosophy starts from the recognition and acknowledgment of past
ideas. Philosophy is more than thinking; it is a comprehensive aim to
take possession of the whole of tradition, at least to the extent that this
 Crisis and Modernity 229
tradition is relevant for our ideas. The critique of the present is thus
fundamentally tied to a critical appropriation of the past. This is what
Husserl later called “teleological-historical reflection” proceeding to a
critical “questioning-back” (rückfragen) of the present moment (Hua VI,
passim). In order for an axiomatic science to be successful, it must be
corresponded with a perpetual critique of foundations – and even more
importantly, with a continual appropriation of the past.
One of Husserl’s key insights in this regard was that the historical devel-
opment of ideas is neither cumulative nor dialectical, but it is defined by
the unique possibility of forgetting. This forgetting is not always harmful.
In some cases, as in the natural sciences, it may be a key condition for the
creation of new theories and ideas. In philosophy, however, forgetting is
a natural enemy of the kind of radical responsibility and critique aimed at
the totality of conceptions and ideas. What made Husserl’s “teleological-
historical” approach unique in this regard was that it was accommodative
of this forgetting and provided a new vocabulary for its understanding.
At the heart of this vocabulary was the concept of teleology.

3. The incompleteness of the past

Already in the Prolegomena to the Logical Investigations, Husserl had
approached the concept of teleology with regard to the overall develop-
ment of science. Instead of an accumulation of knowledge, science was
to be understood in terms of a “unity of foundational connections” (Hua
XIX/1, 30) pointing toward the idea of knowledge in its over-arching
fullness. In this regard, science is internally defined by a “teleological
sense” in the attainment of knowledge (Hua XIX/1, 39), a goal that is
fundamentally ideal.
Unlike for naturalist philosophy, teleology did not denote primarily a
material principle of organization and development as in the case of bio-
logical ontogenesis (e.g., from fertilization to full organism). For Husserl,
teleology played a central role as an ideal category of organization that
characterizes both ideal meanings and the formation of consciousness.
However, it was not until the late 1920s that Husserl really began
to discuss the proper structures of this process. What Husserl analyzed
under the heading of “genetic phenomenology” (Steinbock 1998) con-
cerned not only different forms of cognition (e.g., thinking, acting, will-
ing) or meaning, but the process of their becoming in accordance with a
teleological structure. Both cognition and knowledge itself can be under-
stood according to a teleological structure whereby they point toward an
idea of full realization, containing within themselves a history of devel-
opment. For instance, individual perceptions have their teleological goal
in the constitution of a full object (Hua III, 213). “The continuity of the
mind is a continuity of influences, a connection of development,” Husserl
wrote, “and it is dominated by an analytically demonstrable immanent
230  Timo Miettinen
teleology” (Hua IX, 9). Thus, teleology was not to be understood as an
“objective” state of affairs conceived from a third-person perspective. We
ourselves, as Husserl puts it, are “the bearers” of teleology “who take
part in carrying it out through our personal intentions” (Hua VI, 71).
Husserl understood teleology as being structured by acts of institu-
tion (Stiftung) (cf. Hua IV, 113). Although this notion was very close to
what Husserl, in the first volume of Ideas, called “positing” (Setzung)
or “thesis” (Thesis), it differed from this early sense by paying attention
to the temporal aspect of meaning constitution. The notion of Stiftung
denoted an abiding character of a particular affect, act or meaning con-
tent, and as such, it opened up the problematic of the temporal genesis of
sense. The notion of Stiftung was thus related to a set of other concepts
(Urstiftung, Nachstiftung, Neustiftung, and Umstiftung) referring to the
dynamic transformation of sense and meaning.
Husserl called this accumulation and transformation of sense by the
term “sedimentation” (Sedimentierung) (Hua VI, 380). The concept
referred to the layered character of the temporal development of sense
through which individual “institutions” ’ follow and are founded by each
other. Already in his analyses of individual consciousness, Husserl empha-
sized the peculiar abruptness of this process: Although our convictions
are often founded on original institutions of meaning in full evidence,
these founding acts may be forgotten or remain completely unreflected.
Why we have chosen to believe or act in a particular way is not often
founded on full evidence but is rather a product of habituation of cus-
tom. In the context of ethics, for instance, Husserl’s genetic approach
entailed a shift from a theory of value to a theory of human renewal.
A similar process of sedimentation can be discovered in the domain
of culture. Husserl analyzed this with the concept of generativity (Gen-
erativität). It referred to the field of historical, cultural, and intergen-
erational processes of meaning-creation, which constitute the “unity of
historical development in its widest sense” (Hua XXIX, 63). Generativity
encompassed all those forms of meaning-constitution that take place in
the intersubjective and intergenerational processes of cooperation, and
that express themselves in the form of lasting cultural accomplishments.
These processes – as they take place in the domains of science, art, and
culture – naturally differ from each other in several respects. However,
they all share the common feature of traditionality – they are all some-
thing “passed forward” (lat., tradere) in the course of generations – and
thus reach beyond the finite life of individuals.
This process, even more than in the case of individual consciousness,
is defined by a unique incompleteness (Hua VI, 336). This incomplete-
ness becomes manifest, first of all, at the level of givenness: tradition
provides us with meanings that are by their essence “empty” and call for
their reactivation in lively intuition. This happens, for instance, when we
read about a past event or try to comprehend what a particular author
has meant with his or her work. But this partiality concerns also other
 Crisis and Modernity 231
practices such as building, baking, or handicrafts. They are often based
on repetition or imitation of past techniques without particular reflection
on their original act of institution. Things are done like they always have
been.
In this regard, Husserl’s analyses on generativity significantly broad-
ened the scope of phenomenology to include those forms of meaning
and validity that are appropriated not through simple acts of institu-
tion performed by an individual but on the basis of an inherited tradi-
tion, its assimilation or critical refutation. The sedimentation of meaning
that takes place in intergenerational processes of constitution shares the
same teleological structure as in the case of individual consciousness  –
however, it is even more fundamentally defined by a peculiar one-
sidedness whereby the acts of “original institution” (Urstiftung) can only
be accessed indirectly through historical evidence.
There is nothing wrong with this indirect access as such. It merely
shows that the temporal development of meaning and sense is not one
of simple accumulation, but rather a complex process forgetting and
remembering. As Husserl himself put it:

Inherited tradition (Erbschaft) is not repetition, but intentional agree-

ment, conversion, concealment, and even transformation through
this concealment.
(Hua VIII, 436)

It is a part of the generative history of communities that it is not one of

straightforward development but rather a complex process of activation
and de-activation of the past. There are things that we actively remember
and then there are things that we seek to forget.
For Husserl’s phenomenology, accordingly, teleology did entail not
only a merely descriptive sense but also a normative potency. To say
that our historical present is teleological means, first of all, that it is not
absolute; it is a product of a certain generative development that endows
the present moment with its unique character, its specific normativity
(Aldea 2016). That we are beings to whom a scientific worldview or a
particular system of political institutions has been handed down is not an
ahistorical fact but a result of a certain historical process. In this regard,
teleological inspection does not take the present state of affairs merely as
something given, but as a result of a particular historical development.
But it also means that the past is not given to us as a simple accom-
plishment but rather as a task pointing toward its future development.
The history of the cultural accomplishments is thus inseparable from the
thinking and acting of historical communities.

We ourselves have developed historically; as historians we ourselves

create world history and world science in every sense, a historical
cultural structure within the motivation of the European history in
232  Timo Miettinen
which we are situated. The world . . . is itself a historical structure
belonging to us, who are ourselves in our being a historical structure.
(Hua VI, 313)

This double sense of history  – history as a structure of the world and

of ourselves  – turned out to be particularly important for philosophy.
If philosophy, too, is a part of the historically developing lifeworld and
an activity performed by historical subjects, it cannot simply do away
with this embeddedness in a tradition. In order for philosophy to be uni-
versal, it must necessarily understand itself with regard to a critique of
historical presuppositions. This shift had a major impact on Husserl’s
self-understanding of his phenomenological project.

4. Philosophy and historical critique

The relationship of philosophy to its generative dimensions was slightly
more complex than in the case of other cultural accomplishments. Espe-
cially in Husserl’s early analyses, philosophy seemed to remain outside
of teleological considerations because of its ahistorical character. As phi-
losophy deals with universals that are fundamentally unchangeable, it
does not seem to have a special relation with history. As Husserl put it in
one of his early texts, while the history of philosophy might work as an
“inspiration” for philosophers of the present, it does not really provide
any concrete assistance in the strenuous work of systematic philosophi-
cal reflections. “It is not through philosophies that we become philoso-
phers,” Husserl wrote – and the efforts of arriving at the genuine sense
of philosophy via historical reflections lead to nothing but “hopeless
efforts” (Hua XXV, 61).
The introduction of the problem of generativity, however, seemed to
have a profound effect on this idea. If philosophy, too, is a way of think-
ing essentially tied to the historically developing lifeworld and its presup-
positions, it cannot dismiss the problem of history altogether. Rather,
the universal task of phenomenology only makes sense with regard to a
critical absorption of historical prejudices  – an approach that was still
missing in the context of Husserl’s early work Ideas (1913):

We shall see that the lifeworld . . . is nothing but the historical world.
From here, it becomes conceivable that a completely systematic intro-
duction (that leads) into phenomenology begins and is to be carried
through as a universal historical problem. If we introduce the epoché
without the historical framework, then the problem of the lifeworld,
that is, of universal history, is left behind. The introduction in Ideas
does in fact retain its right, but I now consider the historical way to
be more fundamental and systematic.
(Hua XXIX, 426)
 Crisis and Modernity 233
The “historical way” to the problems of phenomenology is thus more
fundamental and systematic simply because it corresponds to the idea of
philosophy as a teleological notion. Philosophy denotes an open horizon
of development that can never be exhausted by a single description; it is
a critique of reason whose true sense lies in infinity. “Philosophy is noth-
ing other than [rationalism] through and through,” Husserl argued, but
it is “differentiated within itself according to the different stages of the
movement of intention and fulfillment; it is ratio in the constant move-
ment of self-elucidation (Selbsterhellung)” (Hua VI, 273). The purpose of
teleological reflection is exactly to uncover this historical logic of primal
establishments (Urstiftungen) and secondary establishments (Neustiftun-
gen), which constitute together the “inner historicity” (Innengeschichtli-
chkeit) of philosophy (Hua XXIX, 417). True progress in philosophy
can only be realized on the basis of an all-encompassing attempt to take
possession of the whole of preceding philosophy.
In Husserl’s late manuscripts, we find this transition expressed also
in terms of novel relation to the idea of “presuppositions” (Vorausset-
zungen). Since the Logical Investigations, Husserl had considered the
principle of presuppositionlessness (Voraussetzungslosigkeit) as the fun-
damental and necessary point of departure of pure phenomenology (Hua
XIX/1, 24). What Husserl meant with this idea was that all of our con-
cepts must derive their legitimacy straight from the experience in which
they are given and that we should avoid all metaphysical speculations
concerning being and experience. Following the demand for straight evi-
dence, phenomenology was to be undogmatic: it was to turn its back
to the preconceptions of the natural attitude and the traditionally given
problems of philosophy.
In this regard, Husserl’s later works signified an important transition.
While he still held on to the idea of phenomenological reduction as a
“bracketing” of the natural attitude, he began to see “historical presup-
positions” as something that essentially belong to critical philosophical
reflection. “Without reflecting the totality of our presuppositions,” Hus-
serl wrote, “there is no philosophy, no science of the final and genuine
responsibility” (Hua XXIX, 415, cf. 399). Philosophical reflection – like
all intellectual activities – is necessarily bound to a particular tradition,
a pre-given set of ideas. It can be realized only through a critical appro-
priation of this past, as the realization of the limits of traditional ideas,
concepts, and rationalities. To become a philosopher is not to abstain
from the tradition but to join it.
Accordingly, it seems that in Husserl’s later works, his earlier distinctions
between historical and systematic approaches began to crumble. As Hus-
serl put in a manuscript, transcendental phenomenology was defined by

the intertwining (Ineinander) of historical investigations and the sys-

tematic investigations they [the historical] motivate, arranged from
234  Timo Miettinen
the start according to that peculiar sort of reflexivity through which
alone the self-reflection of the philosopher can function.
(Hua VI, 364)

It was only the teleological-historical way that was able to acknowl-

edge the generative character of philosophy as something that we inherit
rather than simply execute. There is no philosophy without reflecting the
totality of preconceptions.
This idea makes understandable the claim Husserl makes in the Crisis,
namely, that the teleological critique aims at liberation (Befreiung) (Hua
VI, 60). Instead of a “negative” idea of liberation characteristic of Hus-
serl’s early works – freedom from historical presuppositions – Husserl’s
later works pointed toward a “positive” concept of liberation through
historical reflection. We become free in our thinking only by acquiring
the best possible grasp of our situation, the historical steps that constitute
our historical presence (Hua XXIX, 397). It is only through a compre-
hensive understanding of the past that one is able to overcome the his-
toricist idea that all philosophical reflection remains fundamentally tied
to the present moment.
It is thus possible to see why Husserl’s method of “teleological-historical
reflection” distinguished itself quite clearly from any Hegelian concept of
teleology (Carr 2016). For Hegel, the teleological method of philosophy
was primarily meant as a way of justifying the all-encompassing rational-
ity of historical development. Through the idea of “cunning of reason”
(List der Vernunft), Hegel was able to argue that even the seemingly irra-
tional or unjust events contribute to the necessary development of spirit
and consequently to the progress of human freedom. “This is the true
Theodicy,” writes Hegel, “[. . .] that what has happened, and is happen-
ing every day, is not only not ‘without God’, but is essentially his work”
(Hegel 1899, 457). For Hegel, it was exactly the universal teleology of
the world that justifies the present moment as the indispensable result of
spirit’s progression.
For Husserl, on the contrary, the teleological horizon of the past was
not called upon in order to justify the present as a result of a necessary
development, but instead, in order to demand a creative transformation
on the present state of affairs. For him, teleology became ultimately a
critical requisite of philosophical thinking that does not merely confine
itself to the present moment and its factical accomplishments but aims
at showing their necessary finitude and incompleteness in regard to the
infinite horizon of philosophy.

5. Conclusion
In this article, I have described the argument made by Husserl in his late
works according to which philosophy ought to be understood in terms of
 Crisis and Modernity 235
a communal and cultural activity that is fundamentally tied to a histori-
cal continuity of generations. While the Greeks were the first to conceive
philosophy in terms of a social activity tied to a plurality of subjects,
they did not articulate philosophy in terms of an infinite task. It was
only modernity, in Husserl’s view, that was able to articulate an axio-
matic view of philosophy tied to an open-ended horizon of development.
This promise, however, was quickly broken by the Galilean insistence
of mathematical-geometrical ideality as the primary and superior form
of ideality. It left a permanent separation of the domains of nature and
spirit, and a fundamental unclarity regarding the unity of science. Par-
ticularly through the work of Thomas Hobbes and his naturalistic way of
thinking about fundamental motives in human society, this promise left a
permanent crisis at the heart of modern political thought.
For the philosophers of the 18th and 19th centuries, history became
the most important tool for the overcoming of this crisis. It was exactly
the teleological conception of history that was to overcome the fun-
damental split between morality and politics, to demonstrate that the
development of political institutions complied with a higher meaning
and purpose. Husserl, on the contrary, emphasized the role of teleology
as a fundamentally critical instrument of philosophical reflection, some-
thing that ought to serve the critique of the present moment (instead of
its legitimation). If philosophy was to be understood in terms of a gen-
erational project, something that transcends the life of the individual, it
needed to be analyzed with regard to a teleological structure of becoming
through various “primary” and “secondary” institutions. Only an all-
encompassing historical viewpoint to the development of whole history
makes possible a true critique of the present moment.
In this regard, it is possible to claim that for late Husserl, the concept
of critique was broadened from a purely descriptive concept to a his-
torical, communal, and normative notion. It was historical insofar as it
aimed at analyzing the historical dependence of the present from the past,
communal insofar as it necessitated the principle of free critique, and
normative insofar as it aimed at a transformation of the present state of
affairs. More importantly, philosophy itself could only be understood in
terms of a perpetual critique that can only be realized in the continuity of
generations. As Husserl put it in a late manuscript:

In the community with others, I  have the endless horizon of pro-

ductive activity, at least an empirically endless one. I do not know
how the world will stand ultimately, I do not know whether it will
or must always be the same. I do not know, and we do not know
whether a sudden world-catastrophe will make end of all striving.
I know empirically that I will die, that my personal work and accom-
plishing will come to an end, [and] that my personal happiness which
is given to me in success, is a passing fact. As being in human love,
236  Timo Miettinen
I find consolidation in the thought that my action is a part of a chain
of action, which continues through the chain of generations in the
context of an endless worldly reality, and that its value (sein Gutes)
benefits others and is improved, increased, and extended by them,
benefitting also the forthcoming generations. The horizon is so wide
and open, that I have a certain relative satisfaction according to the
possibility, that this horizon may also be finite. But I know nothing
about it. This is something that my satisfaction does allow itself to
grow complete. Would I  believe beforehand in the finitude of the
continuity of generations, it would not abolish my ethical striving,
but I would have to value the world as being imperfect, though not
as worthless, because it contains values that are also developed; how-
ever, against the necessary ideal of improvement in infinitum, it has
an infinite insufficiency.
(Husserl 1996, 229–230)

References
Aldea, Smaranda. 2016. “Phenomenology as Critique: Teleological—Historical
Reflection and Husserl’s Transcendental Eidetics.” Husserl Studies 32(1):
21–46.
Carr, David. 2016. “Husserl and Foucault on the Historical A Priori: Teleologi-
cal and Anti-Teleological Views of History.” Continental Philosophy Review
49(1): 127–137.
Hegel, G. W. F. 1899. The Philosophy of History, translated by J. Sibree. Revised
edition. New York: The Colonial Press.
Husserl, Edmund. 1996. “Wert des Lebens. Wert der Welt. Sittlichkeit (Tugend)
und Glückseligkeit < February 1923>.” Edited by Ullrich Melle, Husserl Stud-
ies 13: 206–235.
Koselleck, Reinhart. 1988. Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogen-
esis of Modern Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Miettinen, Timo. 2020. Husserl and the Idea of Europe. Evanston, IL: North-
western University Press.
Nisbet, Robert. 1980. History of the Idea of Progress. New York: Basic Books.
Steinbock, Anthony. 1998. “Husserl’s Static and Genetic Phenomenology: Trans-
lator’s Introduction.” Continental Philosophy Review 31(2): 127–134.
15 What Is Critique –
For Phenomenology?
A Foucauldian Perspective
Sophie Loidolt

1.  Types and models of critique

Critique can have many different forms and targets. It is, however, intrin-
sically bound up with truth and power.1 And with a certain kind of
dissent: something is “not right” about the current situation, be it theo-
retical or societal, be it in the way we think or live – which, obviously,
often hangs together. This is when the subject speaks up. Either, subtly,
in a theoretical, rather “academic” argumentative setting; or in the politi-
cal public, in a more conflictual and agonistic setting. Philosophy in the
Socratic-Platonic form emerged precisely as critique in this sense, and in
both versions. This is at least the narrative that Edmund Husserl, founder
of phenomenology, defended and regarded as the “primal institution”
(Urstiftung) of logos in the history of humanity. In criticizing the soph-
ism and skepticism of their times and in recognizing their challenges as
“problems of the fate of humanity on its way to true humanity” (Hua
VII, 9), Plato’s Socrates and Plato himself emerge as the paradigmatic
figures of critical reason and responsibility for Husserl. They pave the
way to an “ethical-practical life” (Hua VII, 11) under the guidance of
constant scrutiny and accountability (Socrates), as well as to its theoreti-
cal form as radical grounding and absolute justification (Plato).
This directly takes us to two different, sometimes consecutively
employed forms of critique: negative critique, which only points to what
is or might be wrong about the current state of affairs; and constructive
critique, which aims at a positive counter-offer. While every critique has
a negative aspect, this can be viewed either as only a prelude to one’s
positive account or as the end in itself of critical practice. In a condensed
overview on the intellectual history of critique and especially “negative
critique,”2 Oliver Flügel-Martinsen (2016) distinguishes between differ-
ent ways of critique in relation to this question. I would like to take up
and further develop his (partly generative) typology in order to investi-
gate which kinds of critique the phenomenological tradition might have
to offer.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003191483-15
238  Sophie Loidolt
One dominant line of the Western tradition, according to Flügel-
Martinsen (2016, 4), runs from Plato to Descartes and Kant, and that is
“negative critique as a preparation for a new beginning.” This kind of
critique questions certain epistemological or societal/ethical/political pre-
suppositions, from which it critically distances itself in order to ground a
firmer fundament that resists those radical criticisms and skeptical doubts.
As Flügel-Martinsen points out, these forms of critique can themselves be
quite radical, but often lose their radicality and cogency when proceeding
to their own positive accounts.3 Another example for this is Hegel, who
develops the important negative form of “immanent critique” of social
structures through the dialectic demonstrations of their “immanent con-
tradictions” (Flügel-Martinsen 2016, 9). This is prominently taken up
by Marx, who, together with Nietzsche, is regarded as a transitional fig-
ure by Flügel-Martinsen with regard to negativity. Nietzsche and Marx
therefore form a second type of critique, where the radical and subversive
aspect already shows its virtue in terms of a purely negative form, but
is still complemented by a certain narrative of progress (or, at least, a
will to power). The explicitly and exclusively negative forms of critique
as a third type, which either take up a Marxist or Nietzschean flavor,
are finally to be found in the works of Adorno, Foucault, Derrida, and
Geuss. While these critiques have the merits of not being dependent on
a positive counter-image and of operating with rather modest norma-
tive and epistemological commitments, they have often been accused of
being destructive without any “normative foundations” and therefore
skeptical or even cynical (Flügel-Martinsen 2016, 10). This kind of criti-
cism was, for example, prominently voiced by Habermas (1988, 297f.).
However, the fact that Habermas directed this critique not only against
Foucault but also against his own “ancestor” Adorno4 shows that dif-
ferent types of critique appear in and across different “schools” or tradi-
tions of thought – which again motivates further internal criticisms and
developments.
This complicates matters, but helps my aim of trying to get a grip on
phenomenological forms of critique, which demonstrate a similar hetero-
geneity and crossing over of types of critique. From Flügel-Martinsen’s
typology of negative critique, one can further elaborate on three models
of how critique is done, which also resonate with the critical options
pointed out by Foucault in his famous lecture What is Critique? Let me
quickly characterize these different modes and models of critique, before
I take a look at the notion of critique and its different aspects in phenom-
enology itself. My thesis will be that all three models are present in the
phenomenological tradition.

1) The “presupposition/justification” model (type Plato/Kant): As

mentioned earlier, critique in this case is done by putting seemingly
self-understood  – “naïve,” in Husserl’s words  – presuppositions in
 What Is Critique – for Phenomenology? 239
question, which makes it “radical” (i.e., going to the radix, the root
of things and thoughts).5 At the same time, it aims at analytic clarity
and rigorous justification of all its positive claims. How this is done,
through conceptual analysis, originary intuition, eidetic insight or an
intersubjective procedure of justification, or all four, can vary. But in
the end, it will be the power of the argument or insight (clara et dis-
tincta perceptio) which, in principle, decides all matters and norms
in question, and which is acquired through a certain autonomy of the
thinker.6 This makes this form of critique the straightforward form of
Enlightenment critique – even though all modes of critique somehow
connect to the project of Enlightenment and its Socratic/Platonic pre-
cursor of logon didonai (giving reasons).
2) The “immanent tensions” model (type Hegel): This mode of critique
is dialectical and has come to be the paradigmatic model for “social
critique.” It points to inner tensions of a society, especially modern
capitalist society. These tensions and conflicts can occur on the level
of my individual existence, in intersubjective relations, even in epis-
temology, but they always relate to society as a whole. A  further
idea is that there is a material and power-related basis of thinking,
or, to echo Marx’s famous words, that social “being”7 determines or
at least forms “consciousness.” This opens the way for “ideology-
critique.” This form of critique intends to be praxis. It is engaged for
matters of equality and social justice, a feature it shares with Ameri-
can pragmatism.
3) The “genealogical” model (type Nietzsche): Critique in this sense is
based on destructing or deconstructing the framework of a given con-
cept or understanding, for example, of morality, subjectivity, truth,
and being by demonstrating the genealogical workings of power and
(self-)deception that have produced the status quo. It can also be
described as a hermeneutic strategy of removing veils, however, not
in order to arrive at the “real thing,” but rather to see how all things
are situated and intelligible only in a framework of historicity, mean-
ing/discourse, and power. One of its features is a constant scrutiny
vis-à-vis one’s own intellectual frameworks and self-understandings
or, as Ricœur (1970, 30) would say, a “hermeneutics of suspicion,”
alluding to the “three masters of suspicion,” Nietzsche, Marx, and
Freud. It is not necessarily directed at a positive “solution,” since
it often portrays the productive workings of power as inescapable
and immanent. Nevertheless, it aims at a radical clarification of one’s
contingent situation and status.

As in any typology, there will be overlappings. Types 2 and 3 can share

several features; but type 2 can as well lean toward type 1 (as is the case
for the aforementioned Habermas); whereas types 1 and 3 rather seem to
be in tension with one another.
240  Sophie Loidolt
2.  Critique in phenomenology

2.1. A possible standard reading and Foucault’s perspective in

“what is critique?”
Now, where does phenomenology figure in that classification? One way
to tell the story – an often repeated one, indeed – would be to identify
Husserl as the classic example for “type 1”: a foundationalist, rooted
in the bourgeois-liberal Enlightenment convictions of the 19th century,
envisaging autonomous and true selves within an autonomous and true
community of humanity, which obliges to constant renewal and critique
in an “endless working community” (Arbeitsgemeinschaft) (cf. Husserl
1970, 286–287; Hua VI, 439). Heidegger would figure as “type 3”: the
Nietzschean master of destruction, unveiling the historistic layers and
our existential “fallenness” into Verdeckung, Verdunkelung, and Verstel-
lung8 of Being, world, and our own Dasein into a technological age of
mass society (cf. Heidegger 1967, 1977); yet leaving us with a slightly
fuzzy image of resistance through “resoluteness” and “thinking” and no
moral categories at all (including a politically disastrous stance). Finally,
Sartre or the “French Existentialists” more generally, could be associ-
ated with “type 2” through the influence of Hegel/Kojève and Marxism:
here morality and revolutionary politics are definitely an issue, especially
through a focus on immanent conflicts, relations of recognition, power,
ideology, alienation, and inauthenticity; and with an emphasis on the
individual and its freedom and emancipation in society.
These broad-brush characterizations each relate to a certain core of
each proponent and I do not intend to dismiss them as wrong. However,
one of their disadvantages is that they make it hard to understand how
these forms of critique could connect to something like a “phenomeno-
logical tradition.” Are these different forms of critique completely exter-
nal to phenomenological goals and methods or do they connect to them?
And could there be an internal development of critique that relates to
these goals and methods? These would be important questions to answer,
if one wanted to lay out a more coherent account of the conjunction of
“phenomenology and critique,” one that not only focuses on only one
author or only one form of critique.
Another interesting objection against the simple standard classifica-
tion above is that Michel Foucault actually tells a slightly different story
in his famous lecture from 1978 What is Critique?. In partly reflecting
his own development and his approach to the question of critique and
Enlightenment, he presents the context of the intellectual situation in
France. This leads him to linking up phenomenology, critical theory, and
his own project in a unique and interesting way that offers a different and
indeed more coherent perspective on how critique can be reconstructed
as a dynamic feature of the phenomenological method. In the following,
 What Is Critique – for Phenomenology? 241
I will therefore analyze a few longer quotes from this little text and try to
draw out the important points for phenomenological critique – an issue
that is certainly not Foucault’s main concern and therefore needs a care-
ful discussion.
When portraying his own approach to the question of critique and
Enlightenment, Foucault (2007, 55) links his project explicitly to the
Frankfurt School and speaks of a “fellowship” to his own intentions.
This fellowship concerns the dismissal of a straightforward form of
Enlightenment critique: “there is this suspicion that something in ration-
alization and maybe even in reason itself is responsible for excesses of
power” (Foucault 2007, 51), a suspicion which Foucault sees much more
intensively developed in Germany than in France.9

From the Hegelian Left to the Frankfurt School, there has been a
complete critique of positivism, objectivism, rationalization, of
techné and technicalization, a whole critique of the relationships
between the fundamental project of science and techniques whose
objective was to show the connections between science’s naïve pre-
sumptions, on one hand, and the forms of domination characteristic
of contemporary society, on the other.
(Foucault 2007, 51)

And now comes an example creating a link that might be rather surpris-
ing for German as well as Anglophone readers:

To cite the example presumably the most distant from what could
be called a Leftist critique, we should recall that Husserl, in 1936,
referred the contemporary crisis of European humanity to something
that involved the relationships between knowledge and technique,
from episteme to technè.
(Foucault 2007, 51f.)

Foucault clearly sees a “German” tradition here that spans the politi-
cal and intellectual differences and that was certainly less obvious for
the respective protagonists themselves. Furthermore, the case seems to
be so obvious in the French reception that Foucault explicitly speaks of
“no surprise” that the critical question concerning Enlightenment and its
dark sides of rationalization, objectification, technicalization, and domi-
nation has arrived “through phenomenology.” Here is another longer
passage which merits careful reading:

I do believe that the situation in France has changed in recent years.

It seems to me that in France, in fact, (just as the problem of the
Aufklärung had been so important in German thought since Men-
delssohn, Kant, through Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, the Frankfurt
242  Sophie Loidolt
School, etc. . . .) an era has arrived where precisely this problem of
the Aufklärung can be re-approached in significant proximity to the
work of the Frankfurt School. Let us say, once again to be brief—and
it comes as no surprise—that the question of what the Aufklärung
is has returned to us through phenomenology and the problems it
raised. Actually, it has come back to us through the question of
meaning and what can constitute meaning. How it is that meaning
could be had out of nonsense? How does meaning occur? This is a
question which clearly is the complement to another: how is it that
the great movement of rationalization has led us to so much noise, so
much furor, so much silence and so many sad mechanisms? After all,
we shouldn’t forget that La Nausée is more or less contemporaneous
with the Krisis.
(Foucault 2007, 53)

There are two striking issues in this passage I would like to comment on,
and which should give us an inside/outside look at the question of critique
in phenomenology: the question of meaning and meaning-constitution as
the methodical hinge of critique; and the link of theoretical with existen-
tial issues.

2.2.  The question of meaning and meaning constitution

What Foucault points to as the decisive question phenomenology has
raised, “the question of meaning and what can constitute meaning,” offers
a more continuous and coherent reading of the development of phenom-
enology and its concomitant modes of critique than just an unconnected
historical typology of critiques. Indeed, this question of meaning and
meaning-constitution is at the heart of Husserl’s, Heidegger’s, Sartre’s,
Merleau-Ponty’s, Patočka’s, Arendt’s, etc. – and Foucault’s – projects
respectively. And there is a certain logic with which this question of mean-
ing evolves: It all starts out with Husserl proclamation to go “back to the
things themselves!” which has a clear, anti-psychologist, but also an anti-
neo-Kantian implication, claiming that the meaning of things is neither
derived from the brain, nor from a pre-formed conceptual framework.
Instead, it occurs in the intentional encounter, it manifests itself as the
givenness of ideal or real objects (from trees to mathematical entities) for
a subject that correlatively grasps them in their modes of givenness – and
thus as they are. This is the process of meaning-constitution: the appear-
ance of the thing as it is in correlative acts. This sort of critique, that the
“things themselves” are “given” and not constructed or created as mere
images of a brain/psyche, had a massively liberating aspect for many phi-
losophers. Among them were such different proponents as the Munich
and Göttingen school of essential “realists,” as well as Heidegger and
Sartre, who thereby found the method to leave behind neo-Kantianism
 What Is Critique – for Phenomenology? 243
and neo-Hegelianism. For Husserl, at least, this structure of givenness
(of something for someone in different modes) also implies a critical and
constant drive toward originary intuition, if possible, and the different
forms of Evidenz the object allows for.
But there is also a second moment in Husserl’s development of phenom-
enology as an analysis of meaning-constitution which gained strong criti-
cal potential. Despite the disputes over who constitutes meaning and how
(which took place already early on), the whole concept of constitution
had rendered “the things themselves” layered and dynamic in the phe-
nomenological analyses themselves. Their meanings had layers, and those
layers had a certain logic of Aufbau and history. This brought Husserl, as
it were, naturally to the concepts of genetic phenomenology, of passivity,
and of historicity. The deep meaning of the term itself, Geschichtlichkeit,
is certainly Heidegger’s accomplishment, but Husserl already studies the
historically situated discovery of ideas, such as the invention of geom-
etry and modern symbolic mathematics, and he develops a fine-grained
sense for what it means to understand oneself (and one’s society) along
different paradigms and “attitudes” that can change through cultures
and time. This leads him to a critique of scientific objectivism and tech-
nological rationalism as deep misunderstandings of ourselves and the
world, which emerged with certain developments at a certain period of
time (“Galilei’s mathematization of nature,” as explained in the Crisis:
Hua VI, §9), and became dominant through modernity. One might say
that this misunderstanding specifically concerns the cultural and human
world, which is, at the same time, the scientific world with its “scientific
image,” as well as its political and social institutions.
Now, if one wanted to pursue a golden thread of development of differ-
ent forms and models of critique in phenomenology, one could examine
precisely this question of meaning-constitution (in its various aspects)
as a contested question. While for Husserl, the neglected (and therefore
criticizable) feature of objectivism was subjectivity and, indeed, transcen-
dental intersubjectivity, it was quickly disputed if and to what extent
transcendental inter/subjectivity was the ultimate source of meaning
constitution. “What can constitute meaning?” as Foucault formulates
it, “How does meaning occur?” These questions have been answered
differently in the phenomenological tradition, and they correlate to spe-
cific forms of critique. For Heidegger, for example, it is the dynamic,
holistic, and practice-embedded relation between Being and Dasein, that
is, its temporal care-structure, rather than transcendental intersubjectiv-
ity or transcendental consciousness that can explicate, “how meaning
could be had out of nonsense.” Critique must therefore be directed at the
reification of all structures of Dasein, which are structures of actualiza-
tion (Vollzug). “Destruction” must be the intellectual work of critique
in order to unveil the historistic forms of (mis-)understanding of Being.
Merleau-Ponty, for his part, situates the source of meaning-constitution
244  Sophie Loidolt
in the operative intentionality of the lived body, its embeddedness in the
world and its intercorporeal connection with other bodies, and he derives
his critique of intellectualism and empiricism from this perspective. Levi-
nas again shifts the question of meaning-constitution and claims that the
other appears “by and through himself” as “meaning without context.”
This leads to an ethical critique of the classic concept of the subject whose
isolated meaning-constitution is partly revealed as a violent “return to
the self.” We can see a certain development of critique (and types of cri-
tique) here, that nevertheless runs along a certain analogy: Just as Husserl
criticized objectivism and constructivism through intentional givenness,
and Heidegger criticized theoretical and cognitivist paradigms through
the primacy of practices, Levinas pushes the critique of the theoretical
and practical logos to a primacy of ethics. Arendt, to name a final exam-
ple, locates the source of meaning in plural interaction. This brings her
to a political critique of the theoretical stance of philosophy and all other
depoliticizing attitudes and developments.
Given this general layout, one could claim that following the phenom-
ena and the unfolding of their meaning, by itself creates different forms,
types, and models of critique. This concerns two aspects. First, as I have
pointed out, the source of meaning (or meaning-constitution). The worry
about the position of the subject has been central here, and has led to
many different philosophical critiques (including phenomenological10 cri-
tiques) throughout the course of the 20th century. Foucault represents
one of the strands that have creatively worked with phenomenological
methodical means to get a grip on issues of “meaning constitution,” even
if he then turns to (post-)structuralism and the history of sciences in rela-
tion to power. This gives his notion of critique a decisively different flavor,
one that focuses on “systems of constraints characteristic of the signifying
machinery” (Foucault 2007, 53). The other aspect, however, that I would
like to emphasize in addition to the overly dominant discourse on the
subject (from strong subject to non-subject and subjectification), is that
of the modes of givenness. In the reflections on how phenomena appear,
there are three factors that shape the way how the respective mode of
critique unfolds in phenomenological approaches: evidence, historicity,
and withdrawal.
Evidence is a tendency in givenness to full or originary givenness.
Clearly, for Husserl, this is the orientation critique must have – which
would lead, eventually, to a constructive notion of critique or at least
to a tendency toward it through the idea of teleology (in the sense
of Flügel-Martinsen’s characterization of constructive critique as a
full positive counter-image, while teleology can only “point” into a
direction).
Historicity is a temporal structure of layers in meaning-constitution
that surpasses the subject while still being actualized by subjects. On the
 What Is Critique – for Phenomenology? 245
one hand, this relativizes one’s position, since a fundamental historical
situatedness must be recognized. On the other hand, it makes, as has
been argued already, the sedimented meanings of things comprehensible
and criticizable as having originated in specific historical and cultural
practices.
Withdrawal is an aspect in the givenness of certain phenomena which
resists the theoretical and evidential gaze. This is characteristic not only
of the alterity of others but also of aesthetic, erotic, liminal, disruptive
phenomena. Again, this challenges the possibilities of theoretical and
conceptual “power” to grasp, explain, and make transparent any given
phenomenon. On the other hand, it allows for a critique of the violation
and distortion that can happen in rationalization, objectification, concep-
tualization, even reason-guided desire for absolute transparency.
Are not these three topics contradicting each other? It might come as
a surprise, but I do not think so. Most importantly, one has to empha-
size that evidence is not a given, but a tendency in the givenness of the
phenomenon. Hence, this aspect can subsist concomitantly with a phe-
nomenon’s historistic layers and a certain withdrawal. Since these aspects
of givenness are interrelated, their constellation might change the mean-
ing of the evidence that will be possible in the given case. Consider, for
example, how issues of discrimination and suppression of certain groups
through racism, sexism, colonialism are “given” to us. They are clearly
asking us for evidential standards of equality, for evidential measures
to reach that goal, in politics, economy, and society. At the same time,
there are historistic layers of dominant understandings that might cause
framings of the given problems and possible solutions that go against that
desire in the sense that they imply another violation. And there might be
issues of alterity that more generally withdraw from what can be said
in such a general discourse. I think that we constantly have to navigate
between these different aspects, and I consider this to be one of the most
central works of ongoing critique.
These dynamics of interrelated tendencies and appeals of criticisms
within the givenness of phenomena also touch the relation between rea-
son and critique, in the way that Foucault addressed it earlier. It is an
interplay of a critique with reason and of reason (genetivus objectivus)
in its historical situatedness as well as its in its own possible violence and
intrinsic interrelatedness with power. The latter aspect is certainly some-
thing that has been elaborated explicitly by Foucault and that needs to be
strengthened in phenomenology, although resources for such strengthen-
ing can be found in Heidegger and Arendt, and ethical aspects of this
problem in Levinas. Along these lines, the existential discomfort with
a “reason” running into absurd and violent consequences is something
that is grasped and articulated. This brings me to my second comment on
Foucault’s observations.
246  Sophie Loidolt
2.3.  Crisis, nausea, critique
In the last sentence of the longer quote earlier, Foucault interestingly
draws a direct line from Husserl’s Crisis to Sartre’s Nausea.

How is it that the great movement of rationalization has led us to so

much noise, so much furor, so much silence and so many sad mecha-
nisms? After all, we shouldn’t forget that La Nausée is more or less
contemporaneous with the Krisis.
(Foucault 2007, 53)

Indeed, the crisis is not only one of the sciences but also one of “Euro-
pean humanity,” as Husserl entitles another essay of this period. In this
work, even Husserl himself uses dramatic words to describe the “loss of
meaning” of science for our “most burning” questions: “questions of
the meaning or meaninglessness of the whole of this human existence”
(Husserl 1970, 6). In Nausea, it is quite clear that the impending mean-
inglessness has already become unbearable for the subject. Something is
deeply wrong: not with me, the novel seems to say, but with the world,
even with the objectivity of its objects.
This, one could claim, is the concrete beginning of phenomenology-
inspired resistance and critique – critique not in a theoretical sense, but in
the sense that there is an urge that the world must change. In suggesting
that this “atmosphere” is there in phenomenology, existentialism, and
the Frankfurt School, given that all three are concerned with develop-
ments of modernity, Foucault loosely but plausibly binds together these
projects as critical projects and as arising with the same concerns. Yet,
elegantly, Foucault also draws his lines. The existentialists’ answer to
nausea and absurdity, their “leap into action” (Arendt 1994, 438) from
a “springboard” of Cartesian freedom (Sartre) or their analysis of limited
freedom in a situation (Merleau-Ponty, de Beauvoir) is not the path of
critique Foucault will take. Instead, Foucault reinforces the question of
meaning-constitution on another level to push his own critical project
forward. In the paragraph that follows directly after the one above, he
makes clear that “after the war,” “the problem of ratio and power” was
discovered through analyses of the “coercive system of the machine of
signifiers” and of the “history of the sciences.” Again, he gives a distinct
nod to phenomenology here. But he also indicates his own diverging path
with Cavaillès, Bachelard, and, most of all, Canguilhem:

And it is through the analysis, after the war, of the following, that
meaning is being solely constituted by systems of constraints charac-
teristic of the signifying machinery. It seems to me that it is through
the effects of coercion which are specific to these structures that, by
a strange shortcut, the problem between ratio and power was dis-
covered. I  also think (and this would definitely be a study to do)
 What Is Critique – for Phenomenology? 247
that—analyzing the history of science, this whole problematization
of the history of the sciences (no doubt also rooted in phenomenol-
ogy, which, in France, by way of Cavaillès, via Bachelard and through
Georges Canguilhem, belongs to another history altogether)—the
historical problem of the historicity of the sciences has some relation-
ships to and analogies with and echoes, to some degree, this problem
of the constitution of meaning. How is this rationality born? How is
it formed from something which is totally different from it? There we
have the reciprocal and inverse problem of that of the Aufklärung:
how is it that rationalization leads to the furor of power?
(Foucault 2007, 54)

Now, my reading does not intend to make Foucault into a phenomenolo-

gist. It is tempting to trace the omitted in this quote and speculate about
the one phenomenological figure that is not mentioned in Foucault’s
miniature history of ideas: Heidegger  – whose thoughts concerning
“destruction” and a “history of Being” were certainly most important
for Foucault, as well as the Nietzschean impulse of critique that could
be refined with Heidegger. However, what I wanted to point to here was
the implicit story that Foucault tells about phenomenology, its critical
methodical potential, and its embeddedness with other “critical” strands
of thought. This potential lies in the methodically grounded analysis of
meaning; in the worry about modern rationalization and objectification;
and in the existential suffering tied to it: a suffering from meaningless-
ness, absurdity, and worldlessness that threatens to entail a disintegra-
tion of “science” and “world” and, more dramatically, a disintegration
of individuals and worldly and social structures.

3.  Critique as an attitude and a political virtue

But what makes a certain critique “social” and “political?” At the begin-
ning of his essay, Foucault characterizes critique as “the art of not being
governed quite so much” (Foucault 2007, 45), an attitude that arises
complementarily with the movement of governmentalization, the art of
governing individuals and society, in the 15th or 16th century.

I do not mean by that that governmentalization would be opposed in

a kind of face-off by the opposite affirmation, “we do not want to be
governed and we do not want to be governed at all.” I mean that, in
this great preoccupation about the way to govern and the search for
the ways to govern, we identify a perpetual question which would
be: “how not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of those
principles, with such and such an objective in mind and by means of
such procedures, not like that, nor for that, not by them.”
(Foucault 2007, 44)
248  Sophie Loidolt
Foucault exemplifies this emerging “critical attitude” by 1) a hermeneutic
and truth-orientated re-interpretation of the Bible directed against the
Catholic church, 2) an emerging discourse of “natural rights” versus the
contingent and suppressive laws of the powerful, and 3) science and truth
as a justifying measure against dogmatic authority. Critique, in its histor-
ical origins as a specific practice of Western modernity, is thus portrayed
as emerging with an intrinsically political connotation, its motive being
not wanting to be governed like that, not for that, not by them.
In a certain sense, this converges with Habermas’ analysis of the emer-
gence of the public sphere by private bourgeois men coming together and
analyzing all issues of “public interest” – first and foremost economic
and political issues regulated by the respective governments – according
to reason, transparency, and justification (Habermas 1991). This was not
so much an end in itself as rather a strategy to also subject the powerful
to the laws of reason and make their power responsive to questions of
justification. Yet, as Foucault sees it, this initially political motive was
tamed into an epistemological one. As a decisive figure of this develop-
ment, he highlights Kant, who separated the notions of “critique” and
“Aufklärung” and engineered the former, “critique,” as a question of
knowledge.

It seems to me that this question of the Aufklärung, since Kant,

because of Kant and presumably because of this separation he intro-
duced between Aufklärung and critique, was essentially raised in
terms of knowledge (conaissance), that is, by starting with what was
the historical destiny of knowledge at the time of the constitution of
modern science.
(Foucault 2007, 58)

This whole project of examining reason in order to correct itself meant

to ask the following questions: “What false idea knowledge has gotten of
itself, what excessive use has it exposed itself to, to what domination is it
therefore linked?” (Foucault 2007, 59) While Foucault sees this project
of an “examination of legitimacy” still alive in Habermas’ philosophy,
he rejects the idea that reason could be overcome by “better reason”
and instead, as is well known, advocates an intrinsic entanglement of
subjects, truth, and power that is not to be “overcome” but rather to be
adequately analyzed and understood. If the relation of knowledge and
domination is indeed to be criticized, Foucault rather puts it in the very
concrete context of critique as an attitude that is linked to the decisive
will “not to be governed like this.” Critique, hence, as Aufklärung – and
as a will to “get out of one’s minority” (Foucault 2007, 67) is what he
wants to hold onto.
How does this re-politicization of critique relate to phenomeno-
logical forms of critique? And what does this leave us with in terms of
 What Is Critique – for Phenomenology? 249
phenomenological forms and possibilities of critique? First of all, it leaves
us with the appeal not to get stuck in self-referential questions of justifica-
tion and legitimacy alone, questions of “knowledge” only. But the issue
of justification and “better reason” rightfully remains a disputed one for
phenomenology. For Husserl, it is quite obviously a battleground where
the crisis of humanity will decide itself for better or worse. Yet again,
and precisely because of this grave existential tone Husserl employs,
I would like to emphasize that it is meaning and not only “examination
of legitimacy,” which is in the center for him: that “science has nothing
to say to us,” not on those “most burning . . . questions of the meaning
or meaninglessness of the whole of this human existence” (cf. Husserl
1970, 6) is the actual problem for Husserl. Not only does he not want
to be governed like this; but he also anticipates the sinister combination
of irrationalism (as a reaction to meaninglessness) and technocracy (as a
progression of objectivism) producing meaninglessness on the large scale.
Heideggerian and existentialist critiques have rather refrained from the
idea of “better reason” like Foucault suggests it, and often in favor of
“authenticity.” “Not wanting to be governed like that,” however, then
can run the risk of ending up in a rather Platonic retreat of the “think-
ers” from the “masses” (cf. Villa 1996). Existentialist thinkers after Hei-
degger, from Arendt to Sartre, have criticized and avoided this, among
other things, by taking decisive steps into the political realm. Clearly,
in and after the war, totalitarianism became the central issue of criti-
cal efforts, concerning the analyses of its different sources and possible
remedies. Similarly, colonialism, sexism, and racism have been targets of
phenomenological critique through Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Fanon, and
de Beauvoir. It is fair to claim that these forms were also sources for con-
crete political practices of resistance.
Yet, one could also regard critique as a general “attitude,” as Foucault
(2007, 42) does. As he remarks, critique in this sense is “akin to virtue”
(Foucault 2007, 43). This idea of critique as a virtuous activity is not alien
to phenomenology but, on the contrary, at its very core in different varia-
tions. For Husserl, it is the never-ending critical and self-critical work for
renewal that represents this virtue; for Heidegger, thinking is the virtuous
practice of resistance; for Sartre, freedom is a transcendence that will
always have its resistant element; and for Levinas, alterity is the constant
and never-ceasing thorn in the side of reason that demands for critique
and more critique and still will never be pacified by any justification.
I see the different tensions between the portrayed types and models of
phenomenological critique rather as a strength than as a weakness, and
their agonistic interrelatedness as a fruitful framework to deal with the
various forms of givenness and meaning-constitution. Negative critique
does not have to end in a positive rational counter-proposition; but if it
results in being a “critical attitude,” a resistance against and with con-
crete practices, it must also be able to say why. This “why” is articulated
250  Sophie Loidolt
in the phenomenological descriptions of how meaning comes about, how
there can be oblivion as well as violence in meaning-constitution, and
how the loss and deprivation of meaning causes suffering.

Notes
1. By this statement, I mean to capture multiple relations and positions with-
out yet arguing for a specific one. This leaves the spectrum open for plural
interpretations: Even if one would reject Foucault’s thesis that discourses
of truth are intrinsically bound up with power, one could still claim that
critique is itself powerful, by helping truth to appear. Furthermore, critique
confronts the powerful: dominant positions, dominant truths, dominant
misunderstandings, dominion as such. I  therefore characterize it as “dis-
sent.” As for the word “power,” I use it mostly to characterize direct and
indirect relations between people and ways in which society structures itself.
When speaking about the power of drives, affects, conatus or (other) natural
forces, I would rather use the word “force.”
2. The concept of “negative critique” is an established concept in the discourse
of the Frankfurt School (Flügel-Martinsen’s paper is in fact, and this not by
accident, a contribution to the Handbook of Kritische Theorie). As Flügel-
Martinsen shows, it is not as if this notion implies that there are no positive
standards of correctness at all implied in those kinds of critiques. The notion
rather indicates that there is no positive vision laid out that could serve as
an alternative or counter-image to the criticized status quo. The debate then
revolves around the question: Do we always need a positive counter-offer
to make a certain critique valid? Do we need a concrete idea of utopia or of
“how to do it better” in order to criticize the here and now?
3. Flügel-Martinsen’s exposition is one of a history of ideas, but one may ask
if this empirical-historical observation might not also point to the more gen-
eral difficulty of laying out a full-fledged positive counter-conception of the
criticized position, which would then be immune to critique. This concerns
theoretical as well as political and moral matters.
4. Cf. Habermas 1988, 130–157. Adorno would have answered that demand-
ing of critique to be “constructive” is deradicalizing it: “By imposing the
positive, critique is tamed from the outset and deprived of its vehemence.”
(Adorno 1997, 792, my translation)
5. For Husserl, philosophy must be “true/authentic (echt) and radical” (Hua
VII, 8).
6. This also resonates with Kant’s three maxims of enlightened thinking from
the Critique of Judgment: “(1) to think for oneself; (2) to think from the
standpoint of everyone else; and (3) to think always consistently” (Kant
1987, 160).
7. Clearly, Marx has not Heidegger’s “Being” in mind here, but also not a sim-
ple materialist conception, since he speaks of gesellschaftliches Sein (Marx
1961, 9).
8. Cf. Heidegger 1962, §6, §7C. “Wenn das Dasein die Welt eigens entdeckt
und sich nahebringt, wenn es ihm selbst sein eigentliches Sein erschließt,
dann vollzieht sich dieses Entdecken von ‚Welt‘und Erschließen von Dasein
immer als Wegräumen der Verdeckungen und Verdunkelungen, als Zerbre-
chen der Verstellungen, mit denen sich das Dasein gegen es selbst abriegelt.”
(Heidegger 1967/1962, 129/167)
 What Is Critique – for Phenomenology? 251
9. Foucault gives the following explanation for this: “Roughly, one can say
this: it is less perhaps because of the recent development of the beautiful, all-
new and rational State in Germany than due to a very old attachment of the
Universities to the Wissenschaft and to administrative and state structures,
that there is this suspicion that something in rationalization and maybe even
in reason itself is responsible for excesses of power.” (Foucault 2007, 51)
10. One should not forget that also Husserl criticizes a strong position given to
the subject in the sense of a naturalist psychologism or a mental constructiv-
ism through concepts.

References
Adorno, Theodor W. 1997. “Kritik.” In Gesammelte Schriften 10.2, 785–793.
Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp.
Arendt, Hannah. 1994. “Concern with Politics in Recent European Philosophi-
cal Thought.” In Essays in Understanding 1930–1954, edited by and with an
introduction by Jerome Kohn, 428–447. New York: Schocken.
Flügel-Martinsen, Oliver. 2016. “Negative Kritik.” In Handbuch Kritische Theo-
rie, edited by U. Bittlingmayer et al., Springer Reference Sozialwissenschaften.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-12707-7_31-1.
Foucault, Michel. 2007. “What Is Critique?” In: The Politics of Truth, edited
by Sylvère Lotringer, introduction by John Rajchman, translated by Lisa
Hochroth, 42–81. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
Habermas, Jürgen. 1988. Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: Zwölf Vor-
lesungen. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1991. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere:
An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, translated by T. Burger. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1967. Sein und Zeit. 11th unchanged edition, Tübingen:
­Niemeyer. In English: Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and
Edward Robinson. Basil Blackwell, 1962.
Heidegger, Martin. 1977. The Question of Technology and Other Essays, trans-
lated by William Lovitt. New York/London: Garland.
Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental
Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, translated
by David Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Kant, Immanuel. 1987. Critique of Judgment, translated by Werner S. Pluhar.
Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing.
Marx, Karl. 1961. Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Vorwort. In Karl Marx/
Friedrich Engels: Werke. Bd. 13. Berlin: Dietz.
Ricœur, Paul. 1970. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans.
Denis Savage. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Villa, Dana R. 1996. Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
16 The Power of the Reduction
and the Reduction of Power
Husserl’s and Foucault’s
Critical Project
Maren Wehrle

1. Introduction
In this chapter, I will focus on the aims, methods, and problems of both
Husserl’s and Foucault’s projects in order to mark their differences and
their similarities. In so doing, I  will underscore their shared (Kantian)
goal: to strengthen the human capacity for reason as a critical means of
theoretical and practical reflection. While this point might be more clearly
demonstrated with regard to their similarities, I contend that the differ-
ences between these two thinkers’ aims only reinforce their respective
routes toward their shared objective. In my view, both thinkers engage in
a project aiming to objectify subjective reason. To show this, I argue that
both Husserl and Foucault apply a methodological reduction in order
to understand and thereby reduce the discursive and social powers that
determine reasoning. As a result, Husserl sought to make the sciences
aware of their foundations in the lifeworld, while Foucault sought to
expose their basis in and through the workings of power.
The first part of this chapter will consist of retracing the respective
motives for critique in both Husserl’s and Foucault’s writings. Husserl
understands his project in line with a classical Kantian critique of rea-
son; that is, as a transcendental and descriptive endeavor to define the
general structures of all possible reasons. At the same time, he points
to the particular historical and scientific frameworks, beliefs, and habits
that determine every actual reasoning. Alternatively, Foucault claims that
reason itself is historical and thereby enabled by respective frameworks
of discursive or non-discursive power. However, the very motivation and
presupposition for the possibility of a genealogy and critique of historical
reason as a knowledge/power complex lies in the belief of a (somewhat)
“universal” human capacity for reasoning.
In the second part of the chapter, I will engage examples of how both
thinkers relate and use philosophical methods through their lines of
critique. I will argue that both Husserl and Foucault apply methods of
reduction in order to realize their descriptive/archeological and genetic/
genealogical projects, respectively. Both approaches result in – however

DOI: 10.4324/9781003191483-16
 The Power of the Reduction and the Reduction of Power 253
provisional or historical this may be – a definition of general structures
of reasoning and in transcendental assumptions about the broad sense of
the term. For both Husserl and Foucault, the possibility of reasoning –
as a verb, not as a noun – is a precondition for philosophical critique,
which is itself an infinite task. Such “work of freedom” (Foucault 1997,
315; Nethery 2013, 158ff.) in turn needs a particular philosophical ethos
(cf. Depraz 2013).

2. Starting points: Husserl, Foucault, and their respective

motives for critique
We recall the radicalness of the Cartesian idea of philosophy, as the idea
of the all-embracing science, grounded to the utmost and apodictically.
This idea demands an absolute universal criticism, which, for its part, by
abstention from all positions that already give anything existent, must
first create for itself a universe of absolute freedom from prejudice.
(Hua I, 74/35)

2.1. Husserl and his search for objectivity and generality

Husserl’s project of a universal critique was one of the last attempts to
develop a systematic and foundational approach of philosophy as tran-
scendental critique and, based on this, as regional ontology. But, far
from proposing a pre-fixed system of philosophy, he wanted to develop a
method that in principle could account for all actual and possible prob-
lems of truth. In his times, he witnessed that philosophy turned from
being the primary science into a plurality of fragmentary schools and
debates, thus lowering its status to that of mere worldview or useful serv-
ant for inspiration or clarification of the “real” (i.e., natural and empiri-
cal) sciences (cf. Hua I, 45–48/4–7; Hua IV, 1–12/3–14; Carr 1970,
xv–xliii; Hua XXV, 3–43/71–147).
In order to render philosophy primary or critical again, one has once
more to return to the radical origins of critique, which lay, for Husserl,
not primarily in Kant but in Descartes’ skepticism (and was inspired by
the Delphic motto “know thy self”; cf. Hua I, 183/157). Critique, in this
context, is motivated by the aim or idea of philosophy as a rigorous and
first science, where all assumptions are justified up to the last apodictic
principles, and in which assumptions and results need to be made valid
universally. Critique, at least for Husserl, thus stands always in the ser-
vice of either the objective or the universal.
In order to reach objectivity, one needs a radical critique that frees our
experience and reason from mere subjective or (not yet) justified assump-
tions and pre-judgments about being. In order to make justified claims
about being, one must fulfill or verify one’s intentions, that is, bring them
to evidence. To justify evidence as an indicator for truth, one thereby
254  Maren Wehrle
needs to start from an undoubtable first point of evidence, that is, the
apodictic evidence of the ego cogito. In order to reach and justify objec-
tivity, one thus begins with a critique of subjective experience, because
only with regard to our own experiences do we have original access (in
contrast to the conscious life or experiences of others; cf. Hua I).
Critical investigation must thus start from subjectivity because we, the
world and others, are only given and accessible via this experiential field.
Critique, in this sense, is always immanent to experience, and every test-
ing or falsification is happening or done in actual and future perceptions
or in other forms of experiences (Aldea 2020).1 From here we reflect,
test, doubt, or compare phenomena with other subjects’ experience. It
is here that we experience the influence, necessity, and transcendence of
the world and others. It is within subjective experience that we come to
encounter intersubjective meanings that were already pregiven and find
out how they shaped our experience and behavior. “The [life]world is
prior to all analysis,” as Merleau-Ponty puts it (Merleau-Ponty 2012,
lxxiiii); it is already a part of our subjectivity before we make its mean-
ings explicit and try to justify them.
In order to reach universal validity, however, one has to free reasoning
from all bounds with the empirical or contingent. The aim for objectiv-
ity, that is, constitutive (or concrete genetic) necessity, thereby relies on
the transcendental reduction, while the need for universality and logical
necessity relies on the eidetic variation or reduction. In the latter, one
tries to find the invariant structures (i.e., the essence) of a thing x or act
x through potentially endless phantasy variation of a random example.
The universal is thereby a definition of generality and universal valid-
ity. The invariant is formally the most general aspect that all things or
acts of x must have in common – a feature that is not contingent but
necessary and thus universally valid for all actual and possible things
or acts x. With regard to subjectivity, this means that the defined fea-
tures are general structures of consciousness that must be valid for any
possible subjectivity, independent of their actual modes, varieties, and
historical existence or realization (cf. Hua III/1, 10–39/5–33; Husserl
1975 [1939], §86–89). In this sense, the eidetic variation of one’s own
empirical ego or subjectivity leads to the basic structures of every pos-
sible and thinkable conscious subject. As such, the eidetic applied to
subjectivity must in principle be transcendental, as these structures also
define the conditions of the possibility for experience. This application
also sheds light on the passive and active forms of the constitution of
sense within subjectivity.
Transcendental phenomenology is, in this sense, both a genealogy and
a critique. It is a genealogy insofar as it shows that, as a condition of its
transcendental nature, every subjectivity has to have an individual and
intersubjective history. Inquiry into the concrete-how of this individ-
ual or intersubjective history (i.e., concrete genetic inquiry) involves an
 The Power of the Reduction and the Reduction of Power 255
investigation of the constitution of a specific meaning or lifeworld, as Hus-
serl tried to show in the historical analysis of the Crisis (Hua VI). For Hus-
serl, such a genealogy is critical because it takes seriously the constitutive
participation of the subjective (i.e., passive and active syntheses) and inter-
subjective dimensions. This means, first, distancing oneself from what is
self-evident and trying to bracket the validity of prior habits, knowledge,
and assumptions so as to then thematize and justify them. Secondly, this
also entails critically reflecting on the scope and limits of the evidence –
i.e., the necessity and contingencies – of one’s experience and insights.
Therefore, one could say that Husserl tries to reduce actual thinking to
its basic, minimal structures that are necessary in order to experience. In
doing so, he is directed at the necessary acts or passive processes of expe-
rience (noesis) and not their specific content. Nowhere does Husserl aim
to define the essence of what is either human or knowledge. In contrast to
Kant, these transcendental structures are not mere static schemas of intu-
ition; instead, the transcendental is thought of as the constituting possi-
bilities of every empirical individual subject. In order for a coherent and
meaningful experience to happen – that is, for “sense” to happen –, formal
schemas of time and space are insufficient. The conditions for the possi-
bility of experience have to be extended, dynamized, and individualized:
one needs to be embodied; to feel what one experiences and therefore
have the ability, however minimal, to move; mostly, one needs to have an
experiential past and possible future in order to coherently experience the
world (cf. Wehrle 2021). This does not mean, however, that we are able
to experience the world in and of itself, or ever have adequate evidence
for its existence. Rather, the “world” has to be understood as a horizon
of concordant past, present, future experiences that are possible for me
and potentially for other subjects. In this sense, Husserl’s transcendental
philosophy is not as reductive as it might seem.
What is essential is the differentiation between the transcendental or
constitutive necessity and its concrete situated realization; that is to say,
between that something must be in place (i.e., embodiment, intentional-
ity, passive syntheses) in order to speak of a coherent experience and how
this experience is concretely realized in its various and diverse forms,
that is, in its singularity by an individual. Singularity itself thereby plays
a central role as the transcendental ego is in fact not separate from the
singular empirical ego; rather, they refer to two different aspects of sub-
jectivity (cf. Heinämaa, Hartimo and Miettinen 2014, 8). Every singular
empirical ego – at least a human one – is potentially able to constitute
a transcendental fact and the insight into it is transcendental. The act of
self-constitution, however, can only be realized by concrete individuals in
interaction with other subjects. That is why, in analyzing Husserl’s writ-
ings, we no longer speak of a transcendental ego but of a transcendental
person, field and life, or of transcendental intersubjectivity (cf. Luft 2005;
Crowell 2014; Jacobs 2014).
256  Maren Wehrle
The praxis and the results of transcendental philosophy, if seriously
applied, should make phenomenologists modest. Modest, because it
makes them aware of their dependence on other subjects and of their
limits in reaching a level of basic and shared necessities and generalities.
These methods should secure a level of distance and attention to one’s
experience.
The transcendental reduction indeed leads to an awkward split of the
Ego, where we look at ourselves from a distance. When we focus on
ourselves as transcendental, we become aware of the constitutive func-
tions and achievements of subjectivity that are the necessary conditions
for the possibility of experience. We can thereby focus on a concrete
genetic investigation: to focus on what is necessary for the constitution
of intersubjective meaning (e.g., the cultural-technological phenomenon
of the “smartphone”); or, we can more generally investigate what is nec-
essary for the evidence and the validity of the concept of “objectivity”
(as something that is valid and accessible for all); or, in the most general
eidetic way, we can determine the subjective structures (i.e., temporal,
associative synthesis, intentionality, embodiment, intersubjectivity) that
are necessary for all possible and thinkable experience.

2.2. Foucault and his search for contingency and

discontinuity
[T]he thread which may connect us with the Enlightenment is not faith-
fulness to doctrinal elements but rather the permanent reactivation of
an attitude—i.e. a philosophical ethos that could be characterised as a
permanent critique of our historical being.
(Foucault 1997, 312)

According to Foucault, the fundamental task of philosophy as “enlight-

enment” consists of a genealogy and critique (Foucault 1994 [1984],
303–319). By “genealogy,” he does not mean the genealogy of sense
made in or between subjects, but rather how an epoch or society makes
sense of the subject; that is, how knowledge and power constitute specific
historical subjects. Critique is, in this sense, not directed at the formal
limits of thinking (in every possible thinking subject), but at the concrete
historical conditions that limit our ways of thinking of the world and of
ourselves.2 While Husserl’s critique tries to focus on the most basic and
general structures all conscious beings might have in common, Foucault
places emphasis on the concrete and historical differences of knowledge
and power that define what a subject is supposed to be.
In Foucault’s time, one could no longer believe in a common reason or
in having the ideal of a philosophical community that together works on
an even deeper and better understanding of the world (the philosopher
 The Power of the Reduction and the Reduction of Power 257
as a functionary of human kind, as Husserl would put it). Following
the unbearable crimes of the German National Socialist regime and the
increasing visibility of debates on oppression, discrimination, and eman-
cipation, one knew all too well that these “false” universalities wrapped
up as “natural” or “normal” were and could be used to justify mar-
ginalization, discrimination, oppression, and even genocide. In this
sense, notions of essence and universality as well as normativity became
problematic.
To this end, Foucault’s intention was not to achieve universal insights
that go beyond what is mere empirically or historically contingent. On
the contrary, he sought to debunk any attempt of a concept to (falsely)
claim universality and objectivity, and instead show the historical gene-
alogy and thus contingency of concepts. His aim was not to establish a
rigorous or universal science in turn; rather, it was at the same time much
more modest and much more radical compared to Husserl’s. Foucault
merely interrogates how we might perceive and think things differently
than we currently do within the limits of our historical episteme or the
ruling dispositive3 of power and, as a result, he goes beyond these limits
in order to realize new forms of being.
In order to free oneself of the assumption of the current knowledge-
power framework, Foucault takes a methodological detour through
history: “turning to” historical documents that express how people expe-
rienced and thought differently from the way we do now, thereby provid-
ing one with the needed distance that makes possible a problematization
of the present. Historical variations make us realize that all truths and
orders, which have become natural and “flesh and blood” for us here and
now, could also have been completely different.
The main function of such a critique is not to provide justification, as
Han-Pile points out, but to foster “a better understanding of the problem-
atizations that govern our understanding of ourselves and of the world”
(Han-Pile 2016, 96). His genealogies thus aim to draw attention to the
fact that we can and do address the world and ourselves differently, in
different times and circumstances, due to changing historical, political,
economic, or social interests and problems. Foucault has therefore two
aims: first, a positivistic one in which he wants to show and describe
the genealogy of a certain phenomenon or way of thinking; and second,
an epistemological critique, as it shows (and thereby goes beyond) the
historical limits of our reasoning. In a positivistic way, Foucault investi-
gates the enabling conditions for the specific episteme (cf. Foucault 1994
[1966]), political organization, or form of power in question (cf. Fou-
cault 1995 [1975], 1990 [1976]). But, for Foucault, such a genealogical
aim is always already motivated by a normative critique and expresses
an ethical telos. He hopes that such an enlightenment will also result in
“higher forms of self-awareness and open up a space for personal and
social change” (Han-Pile 2016, 98).
258  Maren Wehrle
Genealogy and critique are thereby not merely epistemological tools.
Doing genealogy and critique is not only about showing the contingent
development of the frameworks that define how and what we can think
of ourselves and others; but it is also about how we come to be what we
are. Genealogy and critique therefore stand in the service of an ontology
of the present – an ontology of ourselves (Foucault 2011 [2008]) – that
shows our contingent origins and thereby opens up a critique of our his-
torical being. Thus, critique, as Foucault uses it, should not show us the
formal conditions and limits of human rationality, as in Kant, but rather
point us to the concrete historical conditions limits of knowledge and
truth. By showing that these limits are contingent, he wants to free us
from limits and to think and to practice subjectivity differently. Geneal-
ogy and critique in Foucault’s writings thus aim for a transformation of
subjectivity in pointing to new possibilities of thinking and of being a
subject.
In this Enlightenment style and in their method of bracketing of
assumptions and prejudices, where they try to distance themselves from
the current historical a priori (which is just another word for “natural
attitude”),4 Foucault and Husserl are similar in a rather peculiar way.5
They both plea for description instead of explanation: a return to the
things (or discourses) themselves. Instead of placing a scientific, cultur-
ally heuristic or conceptual framework over the “things” we analyze,
they abstain from any pre-established classification or evaluation. Rather
than deducing or explaining, one has to describe what there is and within
the limits that it is given to us. Both thinkers bracket the natural atti-
tude, either in its general or historically specific form, that is, as general
belief in the existence of the world, or in its concrete historical realization
as common sense, scientific views and truths. They both do this not to
doubt, deny, or to exclude these beliefs, but in order to make them visible
and explicit. By doing this they are able to show, test, and criticize false
universalities and objectivities, for example, by methods of eidetic or his-
torical variation. For both, the world is not simply there, but only given
to us through constitution and order, whether this is achieved through a
consciousness or through abstract systems of knowledge and power. One
must admit that they take rather different stance with regard to our abili-
ties to “distance” ourselves from our current episteme or natural atti-
tude.6 However, they both insist on the transcendence and resistance of
the world, alter egos, bodies, and desires. Indeed, even consciousness, a
term Foucault himself would never rely on, is shown in Husserl as always
dependent on the “something” of which one can be conscious, that is, the
non-ego or the world. In this sense, perception and reflection are never to
be complete but always perspectival and horizonal; no consciousness is
absolute or transparent in itself.
Every active act of consciousness relies on passive processes, every con-
stitution relies on past constitutions by other subjects. The same holds
 The Power of the Reduction and the Reduction of Power 259
for discourse and power, which can never completely determine subjec-
tivity. The fact that there are relations and forces of power implies that
there is always the possibility of resistance, and the fact that there is an
order of discourse relies on the fact that people speak (cf. Foucault 1981
[1971]). It is people’s activity that brings power and discourse to life: by
appropriating and applying discourses, therein lies the chance or risk of
transgressing and transforming this order in the very acts of speaking.
Therefore, on the one hand, Husserl and Foucault are knowledge-critical
constructivists and enlighteners as well as convinced positivists, on the
other.
Husserl and Foucault, one could argue, thus work on the same prob-
lem, although from different or even complementary angles: the problem
of subjectivity, which is both constituting and constituted (cf. Nethery
2013). While Husserl starts with subjectivity and arrives, in the end, at
the problem of history (cf. Hua VI), Foucault starts with history and
arrives at subjectivity and the ways it cares for and constitutes itself (cf.
Foucault 1990 [1976], 2005 [2001]). In this sense, Foucault could not
escape the problem of the empirical-transcendental doublet, which he
criticized in the modern notion of subjectivity (Foucault 1994 [1966],
332; cf. Han 2002). Although he focuses on the contingence of the mod-
ern notion of the subject, he never escapes the fact and the transcendental
status of subjectivity; that is, that there are subjects which are able to
experience, make sense, and reflect on this very contingency.

3. Husserl and Foucault: companions in method

Despite various critiques in philosophy and beyond, Husserl’s transcen-
dental or eidetic phenomenology is not about identification, or finding
one’s true or authentic self, or returning to a pure or natural experi-
ence. It is instead a method to provide us with the needed distance from
how and what we experience; it starts with bracketing beliefs, discur-
sive frameworks, and the neutralization of our overall belief in the exist-
ence of being. Such a distance from the natural attitude is necessary in
order to break with its notion of self-evidence in which the things and
world appear to us. This is a self-evidence that is concretely shaped by
prior experience, acquired habits, and prior knowledge, all of which are
expressions of one’s respective lifeworld, that is, common scientific, cul-
tural, political discourses, social organization, and norms.
Husserl therefore neither denies nor devalues the natural attitude or life-
world for its common sense, habits, scientific and discursive frameworks,
and overall practical and existential beliefs in being. Instead of starting
from such an embedded, embodied, enactive perspective, he seeks at first
to bracket its validity – not to erase or deny, but to properly investigate
it, thematizing that which is already practically self-evident. Husserl’s
interest is hence, at least in his early works, not so much an existential
260  Maren Wehrle
one but an essential one. One can seldom find descriptions of varieties
of different forms of concrete situated experience and their respective
lifeworlds. Husserl endeavors to reduce the concrete to the formal or
minimal (transcendentally necessary) conditions, or general structures of
every possible experience. Meanwhile, Foucault is interested in the reduc-
tion (of factual discursive sources) to historically (enabling) conditions of
respective modes of perceiving and thinking (episteme). While Husserl
seeks to define the eidos of consciousness, the transcendental subject (i.e.,
what all possible subjects must have in common in order to be able to
experience a coherent world), Foucault seeks to find the discontinuities
and differences within specific historical modes of experience (cf. Aldea
and Allen 2016; Moran 2016; Carr 2016).

3.1.  Description and archeology: back to the things themselves

Both Husserl and Foucault, one could argue, start their endeavor in
employing peculiar methods in order to enable an open-minded descrip-
tion of experience. In this respect, they attempt to bracket or to neutralize
one’s personal interests and beliefs in order to make room for “the things
themselves” (Hua XIX/1, 10; XXV, 21). This requires a certain distance
from common sense knowledge and practical engagement with the things
one wants to analyze, that is, a reversal of the gaze or switch of attention
(Depraz 2013, 11), which leads to a specific methodological attitude. So
much for the similarities; the difference between them lies in what they
deem “the things themselves.”
For Husserl, these are intuitive phenomena, the things as they are given
to us via our conscious experiences. For phenomenologists, this is the
only epistemological and practical access we can have of the world, as
there is just one world – the world we experience. Experience thus stands
at the beginning of every critical analysis. This guides inquiries into not
only what appears (noematic line of investigation) but also how and why
it (can) appear for subjects (noetic line of investigation). Foucault, for
his part, does not believe that we can come to the things themselves by
describing what appears to us in direct experience. Our perception is
too much interwoven with discursive orders and conceptual frameworks.
In his archeology, he seeks a description of discursive events (Foucault
1972 [1969], 27) and thereby treats experience  – what we think, say
or do – as historical expressions of a specific discourse (Foucault 1997,
315). For this, he needs to delimit a field of discourse along with its ele-
ments, the so-called statements (Foucault 1972, 27). This in turn requires
a “change of viewpoint” and attitude (ibid., 111), which is achieved via a
suspension of heuristic lines of assumptions (e.g., the idea of continuity,
linear progression of a work, or the subject as author or origin of ideas),
that then opens up a field of new research (ibid., 26). With this, Fou-
cault eschews the preselection of discursive material into “divisions or
 The Power of the Reduction and the Reduction of Power 261
groupings with which we have become familiar” (ibid., 22). This method
should help one to remain “within discourse itself” (ibid., 76), and so to
see what there is rather than explain it away with pre-established mean-
ings. This indeed sounds much like the descriptive epoché phenomenolo-
gists apply to prepare for a disinterested observation and to focus on how
something actually appears to us. Archeology as well as phenomenologi-
cal description thus needs a method to prepare our intuition for “opening
up” to the thing in question, while distancing ourselves from familiar
definitions: what is given should be, in Husserl’s words, “accepted simply
as what it is presented as being, but also only within the limits in which
it is presented there” (Hua III, 52/44). However, as we will see later,
Foucault does not believe in bracketing alone, but argues for a methodo-
logical detour through historically different ways of thinking in order to
achieve this distance.

3.2. Eidetic or historical variation: determining the general

and the contingent
According to Husserl, on the basis of the description of the “what” of
experience, one can follow two methodological paths: the eidetic and the
transcendental one. The eidetic or static analysis thereby takes what has
been experienced (e.g., a house or a melody) as mere examples and tries
to define either the invariant and necessary characteristics of the per-
ceived object or the general structures of the acts of experience (e.g., per-
ception, memory). The transcendental or genetic analysis looks back to
the general and concrete conditions of experience, and is hence directed
to the constitutive processes: the becoming of either the subject or the
object of experience. Thus, Husserl’s static and eidetic analysis finds its
parallel in Foucault’s archeology.
The imaginative praxis of eidetic variation in Husserl’s writings is sup-
posed to free reflection on the essence of things from their empirical
existence, conditions, and scope. In actively producing lines of variants
of an experienced or imagined object (e.g., a red rose) of x (the color
red), one then can passively watch the occurring overlap within the line
of variation. The object in question is therefore treated as a mere exam-
ple and not in its singularity. Following this, one can actively identify
the aspect in which all (possible) variations must coincide. This formal
or minimal aspect, which all possible variations of one thing share, is the
essence of that thing; that which is necessary to call the thing x, x. How-
ever, one can also use eidetic variation to find differences within possible
variations. In changing the focus on aspects which differ in possible vari-
ations, one can find out about possible variations and diversity. A pure
and rightly defined eidos must in this sense cover all possible diversities;
otherwise its definition is not yet general (or pure) enough (cf. Husserl
1975, §89ff.).
262  Maren Wehrle
Does Foucault engage in an eidetic variation when it comes to dif-
ferent historical epistemes or forms of power? This seems a rather far-
fetched and even non-sensical claim. Foucault, after all, in contrast to
Husserl, explicitly opposes any universal assumption of absolute or time-
less essences, and he does not base his investigations on thought experi-
ments or variations done in phantasy, but rather on concrete historical
documents, such as scientific, poetic, economic, and social sources of
a respective time period. That said, what he does is intended as a rep-
resentative historical analysis; in fact, the selection of these sources is
rather arbitrary and not representative of a particular time period. In this
case, what if these sources were explicitly meant as mere random starting
points in order to show the possible variation or the invariant within and
between historical periods? As Husserl in the Crisis argues, the respective
historical sources are not treated as facts but have merely an exemplary
function (Carr 1970, xxxvi).
These randomly picked examples are but one set of archeological/
historical examples that serve to show the common essence of thinking
within a specific time period or the differences with regard to other sets
of historical examples. The examples are used to show the commonal-
ity (i.e., invariance) within one period and the differences with another
period in the way subjects approached, experienced or thematized the
world; or to use Heidegger’s turn of expression for a change, they show
how the world was revealed or revealed itself to the people in differ-
ent times. Foucault’s interpretation of Velázquez’s “Las Meninas” in The
Order of Things, for instance, centers neither on the singularity of the
painting nor on the genius of the painter, but rather it highlights by exam-
ple the invariant structure of representation itself (cf. Lawlor 2006, 95;
Nethery 2013, 32). In the painting, the place of the sovereign subject or
king is literally (still) empty and thus opens up a space to make the func-
tion of representation itself thematic, which Foucault deems typical of
the classical age.
However, even if Foucault is engaged in a search for discontinuities
or differences, nonetheless he must rely on structures or aspects that are
common or shared. In the Order of Things, these are the categories of
life, labor, and language, which are thematized differently in their respec-
tive ages. Any difference must thus stand out against something that is
in common in order for it to be grasped as difference, that is, difference
with regard to x. The same holds for discontinuity which, without a prior
continuity, the interrupting “dis” could not be experienced or identi-
fied. So, one could argue, that Foucault too reduces the positive/empiri-
cal to the possible (i.e., what can be potentially thought within such an
essence) and to the formal essence (i.e., what these random examples
have in common regarding their form). What admittedly differs is that
Foucault would not claim these essences to be universal and a priori;
that is, ahistorical or completely independent of empirical and concrete
 The Power of the Reduction and the Reduction of Power 263
developments. Like Merleau-Ponty, he would argue instead that there are
generalities we can intuit or identify, but that they endure in time because
we continue to realize, perform, and apply them (cf. Merleau-Ponty 2010,
7; also 2012, lxxviii). But this insight of timeliness renders neither the
investigation general, nor the specific method of variation useless. On the
contrary, it underscores its relevance. There might be, for example, some
generalities that endure longer than others and so can be said to be (at
least until further notice) valid for all thinkable variations of subjectivity.

3.3. Transcendental and historical reduction: asking

back to the conditions
I try to historicize to the utmost in order to leave as little space as pos-
sible to the transcendental. I cannot exclude the possibility that one day
I will have to confront an irreducible residuum which will be, in fact, the
transcendental.
(Foucault 1996, 98–99)

The noematic eidetic analysis in Husserl’s writings endeavors to define

a regional ontology and thus to differentiate among different kinds of
beings and generalities, such as material and categorial, essences, and
types; the noetic eidetic analysis consequently leads to a transcendental
inquiry. This is because some of the necessary structures of consciousness
are not merely necessary with regard to the essence of this specific way
of experiencing – that is, what characterizes this experience, for example,
perception, as what it is  – but are constitutively necessary for having
meaningful experience. The second line of investigation, the transcenden-
tal, looks back to the constitutive (mostly, passive) processes within sub-
jectivity that are constitutively necessary for a stable and coherent object
perception in general (transcendental genealogy), or for a specific way of
experiencing (concrete genealogy). While the former aims to define the
ne­cessary and minimal transcendental structures of all human subjects
(that is, that there must be processes like passive and active synthesis,
intentionality, embodiment in play), the latter inquires into the factual
prior experiences, habits, and cultural lifeworlds that explain the how
and content of a specific situated experience. The same arguably applies
for Foucault, when he argues for a historical a priori that is transcenden-
tal in both a weak and strong sense: “weak” in the sense of a mere rela-
tive, a contingent which is a historical condition or essence of experience
and knowledge; and “strong” in the sense that temporality, that is his-
tory as such, is the condition for every concrete meaningful experience.
As there (always is) order, there always already is history.
In preparing for this transcendental-historical switch of attitude, both
Husserl and Foucault practice a methodological reduction. Instead of
264  Maren Wehrle
simply bracketing specific beliefs with respect to the objects of descrip-
tion, the transcendental reduction of Husserl brackets the most basic and
general “belief” that automatically underlies all human experience: the
belief that what we experience, the world, actually exists. At first glance,
Foucault seems to reverse this reduction. Instead of “reducing” the world
in order to focus on (the conditions within) the subject that make the
appearance of this world possible, Foucault appears to “reduce” the sub-
ject in order to focus on the conditions in the (historical) world that
make specific forms of subjects possible. In this regard, Husserl and Fou-
cault follow opposing (or, one might say in a dialectical fashion, comple-
mentary) projects. While one suspends the world to findthe constituting
subject, the other suspends the subject to find how this subject was his-
torically constituted.7
However, look again and things become more complicated. The term
“reduction” for Husserl is not the same as suspension or bracketing,
but rather it represents a second methodological step. Suspension or
bracketing thereby does not mean to negate or to exclude the world but
rather has two methodological functions: 1) it puts the question of valid-
ity of the respective beliefs, and not the world (Husserl) nor the subject
(Foucault), into brackets; 2) by way of bracketing, these beliefs become
explicit and visible, and thus can now be investigated, namely tested and
justified (Husserl) or problematized (Foucault). After the switch of focus
from “what” appears to “how” it appears (i.e., the conditions within the
experiencing subject as per Husserl, or within the historical world as per
Foucault), one is compelled to “reduce” those processes so that we can
understand what is necessary for an object (or objective world) to appear
or for this specific notion of subjectivity to be valid or “normal.”
Seen in this way, Foucault does not exclude or suspend the subject
as such in his archeology, but merely the notion of the modern subject
as “sovereign or origin of meaning.” The same is true of his genealogi-
cal investigations. Here, he does not suspend subjectivity (as constitut-
ing) but looks into how specific forms of being a subject are constituted
through different forms of power (knowledge); for example, the docile
bodies of soldiers through the normalizing techniques of disciplinary
power (cf. Foucault 1995 [1975], 135ff.). Especially, the ethical investi-
gations of the late Foucault point to the fact that every subjectivity must
be said to have constituting powers themselves in being able to give one-
self a form and aesthetic of existence. Although these constituting pow-
ers are neither autonomous nor outside of current knowledge orders and
constellations of power, they have to be presupposed in Foucault’s theory
of power as well as in his project of critique. In this sense, Husserl’s and
Foucault’s projects are indeed complementary in that they coalesce on
this transcendental insight: the subject and history are equally primor-
dial; there is no history without constituting subjects and no subjects
without history.
 The Power of the Reduction and the Reduction of Power 265
That said, while Foucault tries to see given orders of things differently,
Husserl seeks to uncover the underlying structures of experience and con-
sciousness that renders “givenness” possible. That is to say, while the one
seeks to make the randomness and ruptures of orders of experience vis-
ible, the other strives to show the underlying continuity, universality, and
teleology of these orders (Carr 2016). However, for both, critique neces-
sarily is a practice or method of estrangement and alienation toward the
everyday experience of the world and ourselves. Foucault achieves this
distance with the help of the detour through historically different ways
of thinking, whereas Husserl does so in bracketing the belief in the exist-
ence of the world. Both therefore apply Husserl’s intuition elucidated at
the end of his Cartesian Meditations: we first have to lose the world by
a methodological epoché in order to (re)gain it in its full (intersubjec-
tive) sense (Husserl 1960 [1931], 157). While this is, according to Hus-
serl, only possible by way of critical self-examination, the result of this
examination is neither internal nor subjective, but necessarily intersub-
jective. A problematization or critical ontology of ourselves, as Foucault
intended, could thus be seen as a necessary dialectical companion to this
critical self-examination.
Moreover, these methods of reduction are not merely tools that I can
simply choose to use. Rather, they form two complementary parts of
what both characterize as a philosophical ethos. When it comes to the
transcendental reduction, which leads to an alienation toward ourselves
(and is a somewhat weird and counterintuitive stance), we are in need of
developing a habit or ethos (Hua XXXIV, 75). To do otherwise, we risk
falling out of this attitude, thereby negating or forgetting about this tran-
scendental dimension of subjectivity altogether. In order to stay vigilant
and to be able to grasp these concrete or general constitutive necessities,
the reduction must turn into a lasting ability (Vermögen), that is an atti-
tude that we can switch-on when needed and which characterizes the
ethos of phenomenology and phenomenologists.
Critique in Foucault’s writings is also not merely a theoretical endeavor,
but one that is supposed to transform the person and be transformed itself
into an ethos. Although he sought to suspend all normative standpoints
from his investigation, Foucault’s supposedly positivist or descriptive
genealogical take has by itself an “ethical import:” as “questions about
epistemically enabling conditions help us get a grip on how best to under-
stand and answer ‘whether possible’ questions about ethical legitimacy”
(Han-Pile 2016, 98). Critique in Foucault’s writings therefore allows indi-
viduals to reflect on and strive to go beyond the conditions of possibility
of their own self-understanding. Foucault’s emphasis on the Greek stoa
establishes a specific practical ethos: a care for the self. Through repeated
practices (e.g., meditations, askêsis), this should not only facilitate the
acquisition of an epistemological attitude but also change one’s way of
being a subject; it enables one to transform into a more autonomous and
266  Maren Wehrle
self-mastered person who is less dependent on external conditions and
evaluations by others (cf. Foucault 2005 [2001]). By way of contrast, the
ethical transformation in Husserl’s writings continues to be formulated
as an epistemological albeit collective aim, where one strives for an ever
better, more evident, and differentiated description of the world in which
phenomenologists take up the role as functionaries of humankind. For
Foucault, the ethical impact then turns into a practical epoché.

4. Conclusion: critique as an endless collective task

The theoretical and practical experience we have of our limits, and of the
possibility of moving beyond them, is always limited, determined, and
thus we are always in the position of beginning again.
(Foucault 1997, 316–317)

In this chapter, I have argued that Husserl and Foucault pursue similar
critical projects that can be traced back to those of Kant. Both thinkers, in
their attempts to transform and expand on Kant’s critique of pure reason
and notion of transcendentalism, present their projects as ethical under-
takings – a matter, not just of reflection, but of personal transformation.
Thus, we see development from a merely formal transcendental ego to
an embedded and embodied transcendental person with an emphasis on
the transcendental role of historicity for every experience and thinking.
Certainly, there are differences between the two: Husserl places his
faith in the power of the transcendental reduction as a critical reflective
process (insofar as it neutralizes prior beliefs, habits, and assumptions)
that enables access to the essences and necessities of experience, whereas
Foucault is an ardent critic of perception’s or thinking’s capacity to rid
itself of its own determinations and thereby accuses phenomenology of
an ahistorical essentialism.
In this regard, Foucault was not wrong to dismiss the phenomenologi-
cal optimism for the purity of the power of reduction; yet, Husserl was
also right to insist on its critical potential: although a complete reduction
might never be possible, as Merleau-Ponty also rightly points out, this
does not discredit the reduction per se either as a reflective tool or as an
ideal. The reduction helps tackle prior assumptions and disclose neces-
sary foundations and historical constitutions in order to make us more
responsive to the “things” or “other subjects” as they (historically) give
themselves.
In fact, this uncompletedness of every transcendental or eidetic reduc-
tion reminds us that critique as praxis is never complete, fulfilled, or
satisfied; it is in principle an endless and infinite task. Both Husserl and
Foucault share this task albeit with different starting points: Husserl as
the optimistic universalist who sought to unite philosophers with the
 The Power of the Reduction and the Reduction of Power 267
collective work of building a rigorous science and to secure a shared
objectivity; Foucault as the hyperactive pessimist who sought to under-
score the most urgent dangers of our times. Their underlying problems
are uncannily alike, summarized by the question of how one might
properly bracket or go beyond the natural attitude. The question con-
fronting every critique is inherent to critique itself, namely, the limits of
one’s thinking. This brings to mind still a number of questions: to what
extent then can we have insight into these limits, and what motivates
this questioning or critique? To what extent can we become aware of the
discourses, habits or practices, the “order” which, in Foucault’s words,
constitutes our lifeworld or normality?
This is not merely an epistemological problem, but an ethical one. If
we are not able to see, bracket, reflect, or problematize our biases or
what is self-evident to us, we tend to believe that this is the only possi-
ble way to experience; that is, we tend to generalize our mere subjective
perspective of the world. Such a false generalization is the opposite of
a shared objectivity or common generality. It is mere bias, interest, and
thus power in disguise – the naturalization of subjective (group) interests
to establish a false objectivity. Such a lack of insight into the “how” of
experience and thinking, a missing distance toward ourselves and our
normality, leads in turn to the legitimization of selectivity and exclusion,
not only in theory but also in praxis.
Husserl’s aim to endlessly work (together) for an always more differen-
tiated and adequate view of the world or things in themselves, however
naïve or idealistic it might seem, is complementary to Foucault’s aim to
perceive, think, and to be different from what we think, perceive, and
already claim to be. This is because “difference,” in this sense, implies
above all else seeing more and other aspects of things and the world com-
pared to what we are used to seeing. This was also what Husserl strived
for: more differentiation, more evidence, and thus more “objectivity” in
the sense of what is valid and accessible for all. This search for objectiv-
ity can therefore only be achieved through pluralism and variation: either
through phantasy, empirical examples, historical sources, or through the
experiences, thoughts, and research of other subjects. In other words,
we can relativize our own perspectives and insights and come closer to
objectivity, but only via a detour through history, fiction, or other inter-
subjective voices.
Saying that we can achieve objectivity only through pluralistic ave-
nues of experience and thought is to define objectivity as a multifaceted
attainment rather than as something static. This is objectivity not merely
in the sense of epistemological validity, but also in the sense of acces-
sibility and participation for all. The power of reduction would there-
fore also be constituted as a reduction of power. Practically, this would
mean reducing the power monopoly of a few subjects, while theoretically
we reduce power to its necessary and constitutive features, namely, the
268  Maren Wehrle
ability and freedom to act; that is, to actively participate in shaping and
making sense of this world. It is this patient collective labor that is needed
to give form to our impatience for freedom (Foucault 1997, 319; Oksala
2005, 210).

Notes
1. Cf. Aldea 2020 for an elaboration of this thought. Aldea sees transcenden-
tal phenomenology as an immanent critique that offers tools to analyze the
modally productive tensions between eidetic and historical aspects.
2. It is a matter of debate to what extent these limits or discourses that determine
our thinking can be accessed or reflected upon. Foucault himself is rather
ambivalent on this matter. On the one hand, he emphasizes rightly that one
cannot exist or step outside of the discourse that shapes one’s present, on
the other hand, he argues and pleas for a praxis of problematization of one’s
present. The distance that is needed to break with the self-evidence of this
present can be achieved through a confrontation with the norms, practices,
and discourses of other times, which make one see that the present could have
been otherwise. Foucault’s philosophy can thus be understood as providing
the evidence that such a distance, reflection, and critique are possible through
the practice of a genealogy, that is, through confirming the transcendental
potential of human thinking, which can go beyond the factual or present state
in inquiring back to its conditions.
3. “Dispositive” refers to a strategical and organizational “theme” or system of
power relations beyond mere discourses. The dispositive is an ensemble of het-
erogeneous and dynamically interacting elements such as discourses, institu-
tions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures,
scientific statements, philosophical, moral, or philanthropic propositions.
4. The historical a priori refers to the respective discursive framework that oper-
ates as one’s background assumption about what counts as normal, scientific,
or true within a specific time. In this sense, it is part of one’s self-evident and
thus natural attitude toward the world, including common scientific theories
and popular worldviews that automatically lead to specific pre-assumptions
and prejudices.
5. This paper focuses on the methodological commonalities between these two
thinkers in order to stress the shared critical spirit of their projects. This does
neither mean, however, that the intention is to downplay the often emphasized
differences between the two, nor is it to argue that they would agree with each
other’s theories or with my interpretation of their commonalities. It is my con-
tention, however, that it is about time to view their projects through a different
lens. I hope this helps to bring common aspects and relations to light that have
been hitherto overlooked – aspects that could prove fruitful for the discourse
on critique and critical philosophy as a whole.
6. For Husserl, as in Kant, transcendental reflection is an intrinsic possibility of
every (at least human) consciousness, while for Foucault, reflection seems to
rely on the experienced contrast of different discursive orders. Both Husserl
and Foucault propose methods to support this transcendental sense of cri-
tique, and, moreover, in both of these thinkers’ respective projects, the ques-
tion arises as to how critique and philosophical reflection are motivated in the
first place.
7. The idea of the reverse reduction is originally spelled out in the dissertation
by Nethery 2013, 20. I also share Nethery’s observation (fn., 16) that Husserl
 The Power of the Reduction and the Reduction of Power 269
and Foucault’s methodological developments mirror each other (from static to
genetic phenomenology in Husserl, and in Foucault from archeology toward
genealogy).

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1921). Robin D. Rollinger and Rochus Sowa (eds.). Dordrecht: Springer.
Hua XXXIX. 2008. Die Lebenswelt. Auslegungen der Vorgegebenen Welt und
Ihrer Kostitution. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1916–1937). Rochus Sowa (ed.).
Dordrecht: Springer.
Hua XLI. 2012. Zur Lehre vom Wesen und zur Methode der eidetischen Variation.
Texte aus dem Nachlass (1891–1935). Dirk Fonfara (ed.). Dordrecht: Springer.
Hua XLII. 2014. Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie. Analysen des Unbewusst-
seins und der Instinkte. Metaphysik. Späte Ethik. Texte aus dem Nachlass
(1908–1937). Rochus Sowa and Thomas Vongehr (eds.). Dordrecht: Springer.
Hua XLIII. 2020. Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins. Teilband II Gefühl
und Wert Texte aus dem Nachlass (1896–1925). Ullrich Melle and Thomas
Vongehr (eds.). Dordrecht: Springer.
Hua XLIII. 2020. Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins. Teilband III: Wille und
Handlung Texte aus dem Nachlass (1902–1934). Ullrich Melle and Thomas
Vongehr (eds.). Dordrecht: Springer.

Husserliana Dokumente (HuaDok)

HuaDok III. 1994. Briefwechsel. K. Schuhmann and E. Schuhmann (eds.).
Dordrecht: Springer.

Husserliana Materialien (HuaMat)

HuaMat 4. 2002. Natur und Geist. Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1919. Michael
Weiler (ed.). Dordrecht: Springer.
HuaMat 8. 2006. Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution (1929–1934): Die
C-Manuskripte. Dieter Lohmar (ed.). Dordrecht: Springer.
Author Short Bios

Andreea Smaranda Aldea is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Kent

State University. During the 2019–2020 academic year, she held
appointments as Fulbright Finland and Kone Foundation Finland Sen-
ior Research Scholar for her research on phenomenology as critique.
She has published widely on the imagination, phenomenological meth-
ods, possibility constitution, experiences of difference, and critical
philosophy. She is the co-editor of a special issue of Continental Phi-
losophy Review (“The Historical A Priori in Husserl and Foucault”)
and the co-editor of a special issue of Husserl Studies (“Imagination in
Husserlian Phenomenology: Variations and Modalities”). She is cur-
rently working on a book on the imagination.
David Carr is Charles Howard Candler Professor Emeritus at Emory Uni-
versity and Visiting Lecturer at the New School for Social Research.
His areas of research are 20th-century phenomenology, especially
Husserl, theory of historical narrative, and philosophy of history. He
is the author of Phenomenology and the Problem of History (North-
western University Press, 1974, reissued in 2009); Time, Narrative
and History (Indiana University Press, 1986); Interpreting Husserl
(1987); The Paradox of Subjectivity (Oxford University Press, 1999);
and Experience and History (Oxford University Press, 2014), and His-
torical Experience (Routledge, 2021).
Natalie Depraz is Professor of Philosophy at the Rouen Normandy
University and University Member at the Husserl Archives in Paris.
Among her recent publications are Attention et vigilance: A la croi-
sée de la phénoménologie et des sciences cognitives (PUF, 2014, 2019
in English) and Avatar, “Je te voix”: Une expérience philosophique
(Ellipses, 2012) and Lucidité du corps: De l’empirisme transcendan-
tal en phenomenologie (Kluwer, 2001). She is known for her inno-
vative work in Husserlian phenomenology and in interdisciplinary
studies between philosophy, bio-sciences, and cognitive sciences
and is the developer of the new methodological framework called
“micro-phenomenology.”
274  Author Short Bios
Mirja Hartimo is Docent and Senior Researcher at the University of
Jyväskylä. She is the author of Husserl and Mathematics (Cambridge
University Press, 2021) and has edited or co-edited many volumes and
journal special issues, for example, Phenomenology and the Tran-
scendental (Routledge, 2014), Critical Views of Logic (SI of Inquiry,
2021), and Contemporary Phenomenologies of Normativity: Norms,
Goals, and Values (Routledge, 2021).
Sara Heinämaa is Academy Professor (2017–2021 AF) and Professor of
Philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä. She specializes in classi-
cal and contemporary phenomenology, existentialism, and history of
philosophy, and has published extensively in these fields, especially
on normativity, emotion, embodiment, and intersubjectivity. She is
co-author of Birth, Death, and Femininity (Indiana UP, 2010), and
author of Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference (Rowman &
Littlefield, 2003), and has co-edited several volumes, including and
Contemporary Phenomenologies of Normativity (Routledge, 2021)
and Phenomenology and the Transcendental (Routledge, 2014) and
Consciousness (Springer, 2007).
Julia Jansen is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Husserl
Archives at the University of Leuven. She is specialized in phenome-
nology and transcendental philosophy. Her work combines systematic
research and historical scholarship in an original manner. She draws
on phenomenology and Kantian philosophy to illuminate problems
of imagination, perception, and a priori cognition. She has published
widely on all these topics, and contributed strongly in the phenomeno-
logical analysis of imagination, cognition, and practical reason.
Sophie Loidolt is Professor of Philosophy at the Technical University of
Darmstadt. Her work centers on issues in the fields of phenomenology,
political and legal philosophy, and ethics, as well as transcendental
philosophy and philosophy of mind. Her books include Anspruch und
Rechtfertigung: Eine Theorie des rechtlichen Denkens im Anschluss
an die Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls (Springer 2009), Einfüh-
rung in die Rechtsphänomenologie (Mohr Siebeck, 2010), and Phe-
nomenology of Plurality: Hannah Arendt on Political Intersubjectivity
(Routledge, 2017).
Christian Lotz is Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State University.
Among his book publications are The Art of Gerhard Richter. Her-
meneutics, Images, Meaning (Bloomsbury Press, 2015), The Capital-
ist Schema: Time, Money, and the Culture of Abstraction (Lexington
Books, 2014), From Affectivity to Subjectivity: Revisiting Edmund
Husserl’s Phenomenology (Palgrave, 2008), and Vom Leib zum Selbst:
Kritische Analysen zu Husserl und Heidegger (Alber, 2005).
 Author Short Bios 275
Timo Miettinen is an Academy Research Fellow at the University of Hel-
sinki, Center for European Studies. He specializes in phenomenology
and European political thought and is the author of Husserl and the
Idea of Europe (Northwestern University Press, 2020) and the co-
editor of Phenomenology and the Transcendental (Routledge, 2014).
Alice Pugliese is Associate Professor of Moral Philosophy at the Univer-
sity of Palermo. Since 2003, she has also been affiliated with the Hus-
serl Archive at the University of Cologne and with the international
network gPhen Genetic Phenomenology and the Human Sciences.
Her research topics are Husserlian phenomenology, phenomenologi-
cal theories of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, public ethics and
bioethics. Her most recent publications include: “5th Cartesian Medi-
tation, §§ 55–64,” in Husserl, The Cartesian Meditations: Commen-
tary and Interpretation (ed. D. de Santis, De Gruyter, forthcoming);
An Unsolved Question: Husserl’s Path toward Genetic Intersubjectiv-
ity (Babelonline, 2019).
Lanei M. Rodemeyer is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Duquesne
University. She works in the areas of phenomenology, continental
philosophy, the philosophy of time, and feminist/gender philosophy
of the body. She has published two books, Intersubjective Temporal-
ity: It’s About Time (Springer, 2006), on Husserl’s phenomenology of
inner time-consciousness, and Lou Sullivan Diaries (1970–1980) and
Theories of Sexual Embodiment: Making Sense of Sensing, on theo-
ries of embodiment and the diaries of Lou Sullivan. In her articles she
focuses on embodied consciousness, temporality, and gender.
Anthony J. Steinbock is Professor of Philosophy, Stony Brook University
and Director, Phenomenology Research Center. He works in the areas
of phenomenology, social ontology, aesthetics, and religious philoso-
phy. His publications include works on generative phenomenology,
religious experience, and the emotions. His most recent book is Know-
ing by Heart: Loving as Participation and Critique (Northwestern
University Press, 2021). He is Editor-in-Chief, Continental Philosophy
Review, and General Editor, Northwestern University Press “SPEP”
Series.
Michela Summa is Junior-Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at Wür-
zburg University. She earned her PhD at the University of Pavia and
KU-Leuven (published dissertation as Spatio-temporal Intertwining:
Husserl’s Transcendental Aesthetic, Springer, 2014). She held post-
doctoral positions at the Clinic for General Psychiatry in Heidelberg
(2009–2015) and at the Institute for Philosophy in Würzburg (2015–
2018), as well as guest professor for phenomenology and hermeneutics
at the Institute for Philosophy in Kassel (2018). Her research focuses
on the philosophy and phenomenology of perception, imagination,
276  Author Short Bios
emotions, fiction, and sociality, on theories of intentionality and on
phenomenological psychopathology.
Nicolas de Warren is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Stud-
ies at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Husserl and
the Promise of Time (Cambridge University Press, 2010), A Momen-
tary Breathlessness in the Sadness of Time: On Krzysztof Michalski’s
Nietzsche (Jonas ir Jakubas, 2018), and Original Forgiveness (North-
western University Press, 2020). He is currently writing a book on
stupidity.
Maren Wehrle is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Erasmus Uni-
versity Rotterdam. Her areas of specializations are phenomenology,
philosophical and historical anthropology, feminist philosophy, and
cognitive psychology. She is the author of Attention in Phenom-
enology and Cognitive Psychology: Horizonte der Aufmerksamkeit
(Wilhelm Fink, 2013) and co-edited (together with S. Luft), Husserl
Handbuch: Leben-Werk-Wirkung (Metzler, 2018). She has published
widely on the topics of embodiment, habit, normality, and normativ-
ity (e.g., “The Normative Body and the Embodiment of Norms. Bridg-
ing the gap between phenomenological and Foucauldian Approaches”
(Yearbook for Eastern and Western Philosophy, 2017)).
Name Index
Adorno, Theodor 53, 129, 207,
238, 250
Aldea, Andreea Smaranda 81,
156, 268
Althusser, Louis 208
Al-Saji, Alia 119, 130
Anders, Günther 190 – 192, 200 – 201
Arendt, Hannah 105, 190 – 191, 200,
242 – 246, 249
Aristotle 3, 87, 153, 226, 228
Avenarius, Richard 11 – 13, 23
Bachelard, Gaston 246 – 247
Bachelard, Suzanne 40 – 41
de Beauvoir, Simone 6, 47, 99 – 103,
106, 138, 143 – 146, 149, 246, 249
Bedorf, Thomas 44
Benhabib, Seyla 154
Berardi, Franco 197
Berkeley, George 13
Binswanger, Ludwig 142, 204
Bloch, Ernst 186 – 187, 200
Boethius 153
Boss, Médard 142
Bühler, Karl 86 – 87
Burch, Matthew 49 – 50
Cairns, Dorion 87 – 88, 131
Canguilhem, Georges 246 – 247
Cantor, Georg 85
Carr, David 74
Cavaillès, Jean 246
Cicero, Marcus Tullius 153
Crowell, Steven 120 – 121
Davis, Duane 96 – 102
Debord, Guy 192 – 193, 198, 200
Deleuze, Gilles 189, 198, 208
Derrida, Jacques 120 – 121, 238
Descartes, René 3, 10 – 13, 17, 57,
107, 114, 130, 228, 246, 253
Dilthey, Wilhelm 11, 13, 81, 86
Drummond, John 170 – 171
Fanon, Frantz 3, 249
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 12
Fink, Eugen 59, 73
Fischer, Mark 198 – 199, 202
Flügel-Martinsen, Oliver 237 – 238,
244, 250
Foucault, Michel 51, 99, 104 – 105,
113, 238, 240 – 249, 252 – 269
Gabel, Joseph 204
Galileo, Galilei 16, 22 – 23, 57, 85,
235, 243
Garfinkel, Harold 142
Geuss, Raymond 238
Glissant, Édouard 144, 147 – 148
Goffman, Erwin 142
Grassmann, Hermann 85
Guenther, Lisa 96 – 104, 109, 144, 156
Habermas, Jürgen 215, 238 – 239, 248
Hamilton, William-Rowan 85
Han, Byung-Chul 194
Han-Pile, Beatrice 257
Hartmann, Nicolai 171
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 6, 12,
113, 158, 192, 203, 208 – 214, 225,
234, 241
Heidegger, Martin 12, 49, 99 – 103,
106 – 107, 142 – 143, 207 – 217, 225,
234, 238 – 243
Heinämaa, Sara 77
Held, Klaus 107
Henry, Michel 119 – 120, 130
Hermann, Steffen 44
278  Name Index
von Hildebrand, Dietrich 171
Hobbes, Thomas 172, 224, 235
Hofstadter, Richard 196
Hume, David 12 – 13, 40
Husserl, Edmund passim
Jaeggi, Rachel 190, 215, 218
Kant, Immanuel 3, 6, 9, 13 – 22,
25 – 40, 45, 56, 59 – 61, 81, 85,
114 – 115, 130, 140, 153, 171,
207 – 225, 238 – 242, 248, 252 – 255,
258, 266, 268
Kojève, Alexandre 240
Koselleck, Reinhart 224
Lambert, Johann Heinrich 153
Lefebvre, Henri 195 – 196, 207
Lefort, Claude 154
Levinas, Emmanuel 6, 107, 119, 130,
244 – 245, 249
Lie, Sophus 85
Locke, John 153, 224
Loidolt, Sophie 156, 182
Luhmann, Niklas 174 – 175
Lukács, Georg (György) 189, 190,
192, 204, 207 – 208
Machiavelli, Niccolò 224
Mahnke, Dietrich 86
Mailer, Norman 188
Marcus, Greil 193
Marcuse, Herbert 4, 207 – 208, 218
Marx, Karl 6, 62, 105 – 106, 154, 192,
202, 207 – 222, 238 – 240
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 6, 45,
47, 51, 95, 99 – 109, 118 – 119,
126 – 127, 130 – 131, 143, 157,
159 – 160, 190, 207, 242 – 243, 246,
259, 254, 263, 266
Meyer, Adolf 87
Murphy, Ann 44, 95 – 104
Natorp, Paul 130
Nethery, Harry 268 – 269
Newton, Isaac 14, 22
Nietzsche, Friedrich 189 – 190,
238 – 241, 247
Oksala, Johanna 114 – 115
Paci, Enzo 207 – 208
Patočka, Jan 242
Pfaller, Robert 201
Piaget, Jean 139 – 140
Plato 114, 127, 130, 153, 226, 228,
237 – 239, 249
Plessner, Helmuth 118 – 119
Putnam, Hilary 127
Rawls, John 170 – 173, 183
Ricœur/Ricoeur, Paul 143, 239
Riemann, Bernhard 85
Rodemeyer, Lanei M. 156, 182
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 172
Ryle, Gilbert 130
Salamon, Gayle 44, 95 – 104,
144, 156
Sartre, Jean-Paul 6, 47, 99 – 107,
119, 125, 143, 147, 207, 240 – 243,
246, 249
Sauter, Molly 195, 198
Scheler, Max 171
Schütz/Schutz, Alfred 105, 142
Sextus Empiricus 153, 166
Simmel, Georg 81, 86
Socrates 237, 239
Spranger, Eduard 81, 86 – 87
Staiti, Andrea 80 – 81, 84, 92
Stein, Edith 3, 148, 171
Swift, David 189
Swift, Taylor 202
Tausk, Victor 195
Varela, Francisco 140 – 142
Vermersch, Pierre 139 – 142
Vico, Giambattista 153
Waldenfels, Bernhard 147, 207
Weber, Max 91, 105, 190
Weiss, Gail 95 – 104, 144, 166
Woolf, Virginia 68
Zahavi, Dan 53
Žižek, Slavoj 193
Subject Index
abnormality 36, 106, 155 – 156, 161;
see also anomality
abstraction 26 – 28, 30 – 33, 37, 48,
121 – 125, 128, 156, 173, 178, 192,
210 – 221, 228
action 3 – 6, 18 – 19, 23, 39, 63, 81, 83,
102, 128, 158, 165, 171, 178 – 180,
186, 188, 194, 217 – 218, 225, 227,
236, 246; see also interaction
actuality 4, 14, 31, 51 – 53, 59, 124,
128, 147, 212, 221, 226, 253 – 255;
see also modality
affectivity see emotion
alienation 147, 190, 197, 240, 265
alterity 124, 144, 245, 249; see also
otherness
analysis/analytical: archeological (see
analysis, of power); conceptual 129,
239, 257; critical-philosophical
4, 195, 214 – 216, 220 – 221,
239 – 240, 254, 248; genealogical
76, 156 – 157, 252 – 258, 239 – 240,
246 – 247, 252 – 258, 268 – 269;
historical 147 – 148, 252, 254 – 255,
261 – 266; micro- 73, 149; of
phenomena, phenomenological 3,
47, 52, 73, 83, 90 – 91, 96, 111,
114 – 117, 120 – 127, 144 – 145,
171 – 181, 191 – 192, 218, 243, 247,
261, 263; of power 1, 4, 98 – 99,
102 – 105, 144 – 145, 157, 188 – 189,
198 – 199, 209 – 210, 224, 237 – 252,
256 – 257, 252, 256 – 264, 267 – 268;
psycho- 198, 239
analytics of power see analysis, of
power
anomality 143, 156; see also
abnormality
apodicticity 38, 59 – 61, 72, 75,
253 – 254
application: of laws and rules 26 – 27,
32 – 36; of phenomenology 49 – 50,
54, 81, 99, 102, 116 – 117, 129,
138, 147, 156 – 157, 171, 179,
252 – 254, 261, 254 – 265
a priori (vs. a posteriori) 3, 5, 13 – 15,
30 – 33, 37 – 39, 63 – 64, 71, 82,
178, 213 – 214, 218 – 219, 258,
262 – 264, 268
arbitrary (beliebig) 33 – 35, 67
attitude (Einstellung) 51, 56, 78,
83, 118, 138, 147, 158, 226,
243, 247, 248, 249; natural
9 – 23, 53, 71 – 72, 80 – 91,
148, 152 – 167, 217 – 222, 233,
258 – 259, 268; naturalistic 7, 15,
45, 50, 224, 235; personalistic
15, 83; phenomenological-
transcendental 50, 67 – 72, 80 – 83,
90, 140, 143 – 145, 155 – 167, 226;
theoretical 69 – 71, 80 – 87, 228,
244, 260
axiology 3 – 5, 18 – 19, 62, 160, 230,
235 – 236; see also evaluation
belief 15 – 17, 21, 45 – 46, 53, 90, 92,
109, 122, 138, 144, 193, 197, 252,
258 – 260, 264 – 266; world- 15 – 17,
80, 109, 122, 138, 161, 265; see
also faith
Besinnung 5, 57, 61 – 63, 67 – 72,
80 – 82, 84 – 88, 90 – 92; existential
dimensions of 63, 84; see also
reflection
body (Leib) 116 – 120, 124 – 129, 128,
131, 244; see also embodiment
280  Subject Index
categories 15, 20, 39, 145, 211 – 214,
240, 262
change 4, 102, 104, 164, 224 – 226,
257 – 258, 260, 262, 265 – 266; see
also transformation
clarification: critical 57, 88, 159, 239;
of experience 53, 58, 88 – 90, 122,
253; phenomenological 4, 57 – 58,
62 – 63, 81, 89, 91, 122 – 123, 154
common sense (also sensus communis)
12 – 15, 17, 22, 85, 39, 45 – 46, 50,
82 – 83, 87, 248 – 260; -philosophy
22, 258, 260
concordance 37 – 38, 69, 155 – 156,
161, 255; see also optimality
concrete 27 – 28, 31, 38, 64, 67 – 71,
123, 125, 140, 142 – 146, 159 – 160,
171 – 173, 178, 180, 213 – 214,
221, 246 – 249, 254 – 265; see also
abstraction
conspiracy-phantasy 186 – 202
constitution 49, 58 – 64, 71 – 72,
80 – 84, 89 – 90, 98 – 110, 115 – 129,
142 – 147, 152, 156 – 164, 172 – 176,
188, 218 – 221, 224 – 234, 242 – 249,
254 – 266
contingency 5, 30, 38, 40, 47 – 48, 57,
254 – 255
correlation 16 – 17, 46, 49, 60, 71 – 72,
81 – 83, 85, 92
Critical Theory 1, 4, 44, 114, 154,
156 – 157, 173, 189, 208, 212 – 216,
240 – 242
critique, critical 1 – 8, 11 – 23, 38 – 39,
44 – 45, 48 – 54, 56 – 65, 69 – 74,
81 – 82, 85, 88 – 91, 95 – 110,
113 – 116, 121, 138, 142 – 148,
153 – 166, 171 – 173, 177, 186,
188 – 195, 202 – 203, 215–216 ,
224 – 235, 237 – 250, 252 – 267;
diagnostic 5, 70 – 73, 145 – 147,
198 – 199, 203; historical 4 – 6,
57 – 67, 69, 100 – 110, 115, 129,
147 – 148, 157, 163 – 164, 212 – 214,
224 – 234, 243 – 258, 252 – 267;
immanent 4 – 5, 50 – 51, 56, 64 – 65,
71, 154, 238 – 239, 254; Kantian
13 – 17, 22, 25 – 39, 45, 56, 59 – 60,
85, 140, 209 – 215, 241 – 242, 248,
258, 266; phenomenological 4, 9,
12 – 23, 44 – 45, 48 – 54, 56 – 65, 69,
73, 81 – 82, 85, 87 – 90, 95 – 106,
110, 121 – 124, 129, 138 – 139,
154 – 157, 159 – 166, 173, 225 – 229,
232 – 233, 243 – 246, 249, 253 – 255,
259 (see also epoché; reduction);
political, political-social 3 – 4, 6 – 7,
44 – 45, 71 – 72, 99 – 102, 113,
144 – 145, 148, 154, 170 – 173,
208 – 220, 225, 239, 244, 247 – 249;
self- 51, 62 – 64, 115, 157, 164,
249, 265
Dasein 103 – 105, 142, 240, 243, 250
description 6, 44 – 54, 60, 80 – 86,
95 – 104, 120 – 124, 139 – 148,
156 – 157, 172 – 174, 177, 182,
231 – 235, 249 – 250, 258, 260 – 261,
265 – 266
destruction (Destruktion) 239 – 247
dialectics 145, 208, 210, 213 – 215,
221, 238 – 239, 264 – 265
disability 7, 104 – 105, 114, 144
doxa 46, 67, 159 – 160; see also belief;
faith
ego 3, 21, 58 – 61, 65 – 68, 72, 96 – 97,
103 – 104, 116 – 123, 143, 156,
179, 253 – 258, 266; see also self;
selfhood
egology 6 – 7, 123 – 124, 143 – 145, 156
eidetics 1, 5 – 7, 33, 46 – 47, 49, 57 – 59,
62, 64 – 65, 71 – 74, 113 – 116,
129 – 130, 156, 256, 259
eidos, eide 38, 47 – 48, 52, 62, 123,
260 – 261; see also eidetics; essence
embodiment (Leiblichkeit) 68, 103,
108, 110, 112 – 116, 123, 125, 129,
210, 255 – 256, 263; see also body
emotion 31, 38 – 39, 141 – 142, 147,
152, 157, 164 – 166, 172, 195,
197, 212
empathy (Einfühlung) 21, 47, 83 – 84,
108, 127 – 128, 144
empiricism 140, 143, 171 – 172,
212, 244
epoché 9, 11 – 12, 16 – 17, 21, 45 – 46,
50, 52 – 53, 56, 80, 96, 113 – 116,
138, 140, 143 – 144, 147, 156, 162,
166, 217, 232, 261, 265 – 266
essence 12, 31 – 34, 36 – 38, 47 – 48, 52,
81, 216, 254, 257, 261 – 263;
see also eidos
ethics 3 – 5, 18 – 22, 99 – 105, 114 – 115,
153, 170 – 173, 177 – 183, 218,
230, 236, 244; as/of renewal
(Erneuerung) 18 – 19, 51, 230, 244
evaluation 57 – 73, 81 – 82, 86, 90 – 91,
128, 165, 171, 175, 177, 265 – 266;
see also axiology

evidence 2, 7, 38, 46, 48, 50 – 51, 60,
62, 64, 84, 88 – 91, 93, 233, 244,
253 – 256
example (methodic) 25 – 26, 29 – 40,
89, 254, 261 – 262
facticity, factic 3, 5, 160, 234
faith 12, 45, 87, 190 – 191; see also
belief
formalization 48, 128, 218
founding, foundation (Fundierung)
122, 170 – 172, 174 – 175, 228, 230
Frankfurt School 4, 105, 113,
207 – 208, 215, 241 – 242, 246, 250
gender (Geschlecht) 50, 68 – 72,
104 – 105, 117 – 118, 120, 123,
143 – 148, 182, 202
generativity (birth, death) 3, 5, 56,
64, 68, 144, 157, 159 – 161, 164,
230 – 232
habituation, habitual 39, 90, 123,
162 – 164
historicism 6 – 7, 220
historicity 3 – 5, 11, 23, 57 – 60,
68 – 70, 80 – 81, 90, 160, 233, 239,
243 – 247, 263, 266
history (intentional) 21 – 23,
82 – 92, 103, 159, 224 – 235, 237,
243 – 247, 254 – 267; of being 247;
conceptualization of 211 – 212,
220 – 221; as development 224 – 229,
232; end of 192 – 193, 196; and
institution 237; of sciences 244 – 247
idea 19, 25, 34, 227 – 229, 247
ideality 4, 31 – 37, 48, 85, 111,
228 – 229, 235 – 236, 242
identity 100, 194 – 195, 201 – 202;
gender- 68 – 69, 147, 182; in the
logical sense of sameness 66, 69,
210; personal 100, 176, 182;
social 177, 182
ideology 52, 154, 193 – 194,
239 – 240
imagination 4 – 6, 29 – 39, 48, 62 – 72,
123, 141, 163, 188, 195, 198 – 199,
261; see also phantasy
immanence 5, 50, 56, 64 – 65, 71 – 75,
103, 105, 119, 125, 129, 154,
229, 238 – 239, 254; see also
transcendence
infinity 36 – 37, 209 – 210,
215, 227 – 228, 233; of
Subject Index  281
phenomenological work 53, 56 – 57,
62 – 64, 71, 233 – 236
institution (Stiftung) 57 – 63, 68 – 71,
104 – 105, 172 – 173, 228 – 237
intentionality 3 – 6, 10, 21, 33, 50,
66 – 68, 82 – 87, 92 – 93, 96 – 97,
100, 113, 120 – 128, 139, 144, 147,
154, 171 – 172, 175, 196, 217, 231,
242 – 244
interaction 5 – 6, 15, 20, 68, 106, 108,
144, 155 – 157, 175 – 176, 193, 244,
255 – 256
intersubjectivity 21, 37 – 38, 85, 95,
108, 120 – 123, 144 – 146, 243,
255 – 256
intuition 31 – 33, 36, 141, 211 – 214,
230, 239, 243, 261; a priori
211 – 213; eidetic 31 – 33, 37, 265
I-you 30, 188, 202
judgment 25 – 31, 33, 36, 38, 30,
63 – 64, 122, 143, 171, 212
latency 53, 68, 76; see also patency
law 18 – 19, 25 – 27, 31 – 36, 35, 40, 48,
172; see also norm
LGBTQIA+ 117, 120, 143
lifeworld (Lebenswelt) 15 – 23, 56 – 58,
63, 68 – 69, 98, 160 – 161, 226 – 232,
252, 255, 259 – 260, 266 – 267
limit 7, 18, 25 – 27, 30, 32, 52, 60 – 61,
64, 68, 72, 119, 127, 173, 179,
213 – 216, 255 – 258, 266 – 268
logic 12, 18 – 19, 39, 47, 83 – 84,
88 – 91, 211 – 217
materialism 4, 157, 207 – 208,
221, 240
meaning see sense
memory 32, 57, 65 – 67, 261
metaphysics 9, 13 – 15, 17, 20,
80, 97 – 98, 174 – 175, 208, 211,
215 – 216, 217, 233
method, methodology: analytical
(see analysis); of clarification (see
clarification); critical (see critique);
descriptive 6, 44 – 51, 81 – 86, 92,
96, 99, 120, 122, 139 – 148, 172,
174, 183, 251 – 252, 258 – 261, 266;
of distancing 17, 64, 70, 119, 155,
255 – 261, 267 – 268; eidetic (see
eidetics); of the epoché (see epoché);
generative 56, 64, 68, 75, 157 – 161,
167, 231 – 234, 237, 315; genetic 3,
5, 56 – 57, 64 – 67, 75 – 76, 139, 157,
282  Subject Index
173 – 176, 211 – 212, 217, 221 – 222,
229 – 230, 243, 252 – 256, 261, 269;
hermeneutical 1, 81, 85, 90, 239;
historical/teleological-historical
5 – 6, 57 – 58, 71, 74, 80, 84, 86,
234; materialistic (see materialism);
micro-phenomenological (see
phenomenology, -micro);
phenomenological 9 – 13, 16, 39,
45, 52, 56 – 57, 63 – 64, 72, 77,
81, 96 – 98, 102 – 106, 111, 114,
121, 138, 214, 240; reductive (see
reduction); reflective (see reflection);
therapeutic 218
micro-phenomenology 72,
138 – 141, 146 – 147, 149; see also
phenomenology, micro-
modality 4, 30, 66, 69, 70, 75, 119,
149; see also actuality; necessity;
possibility
modernity 13, 16, 91, 171 – 172,
188 – 198, 202, 209 – 211, 218 – 219,
224 – 235, 239, 243, 246 – 248
morality 18 – 24, 160, 171 – 172,
187 – 188, 209, 215, 224, 235, 240;
see also ethics
motivation 15 – 16, 20, 52, 83, 126,
153 – 164, 170 – 179, 231 – 232
natural attitude see attitude
naturalization, naturalism 7, 15,
45 – 46, 50, 70, 82 – 83, 220 – 221,
224, 235, 267
necessity 30, 38, 40, 60 – 61, 68,
157, 255; ideal 4, 26, 38, 47,
57, 71 – 72, 254, 256, 261; of the
phenomenological methods 6, 113,
130, 254; transcendental 1, 3, 5,
62, 72, 260, 263; see also modality
norm 85, 98 – 90, 165, 239, 259, 268;
see also law
normality, normalization 72, 106,
117 – 118, 143, 147, 257, 264 – 268
normativity 5 – 6, 21, 28 – 39, 40, 44,
51 – 52, 57 – 58, 63 – 64, 67, 75, 81,
88 – 92, 143, 152 – 164, 171 – 172,
177, 182 – 183, 186, 215, 218, 222,
225, 231, 235, 238 – 239
objectivism 241 – 244, 247
objectivity 91, 104, 117 – 120, 127,
147, 160, 175, 192 – 193, 198, 210,
246, 252 – 257, 267
oppression 4, 106, 143 – 145, 257
optimality 155 – 156, 160 – 161
orientation 4, 62 – 64, 68 – 72, 100,
141, 154, 164 – 165, 171
otherness 117 – 118, 124, 143, 147,
166, 186 – 187; see also selfhood
patency/patent vs. latency/latent
68 – 69, 71 – 72, 76
patient 179 – 180, 195
person, personhood 15, 20, 34, 45,
57, 73, 83, 102, 122 – 123, 144,
161, 175 – 176; of a higher order
172 – 174
phantasy (Phantasie) 32 – 37, 47, 52,
67, 76, 254, 262, 267
phenomenology: critical 7, 24, 44,
54, 73, 95 – 110, 113 – 115, 138,
142 – 147, 156, 171 – 172; eidetic
5 – 7, 31 – 38, 46 – 53, 57 – 65, 71 – 72,
91 – 92, 96 – 97, 113 – 116, 121 – 123,
129, 141 – 142, 163, 254 – 267;
existential 1 – 8, 47, 99 – 107,
114 – 115, 119 – 121, 142 – 147, 207,
240 – 249; micro- 72, 138 – 141,
146 – 147, 149; transcendental 21,
54 ,  56, 61, 77, 80 – 85, 89 – 91,
138 – 141, 146 – 147, 225, 233, 254
plurality, pluralism (of subjects/
experiences) 30, 35 – 39, 65,
160 – 161, 172, 200, 235, 244,
267 – 268
political 3 – 4, 6 – 7, 21, 44 – 45, 52 – 53,
56, 71 – 72, 99 – 102, 113 – 117,
143 – 148, 154 – 157, 170 – 173, 189,
196, 207 – 220, 224, 235, 237 – 238,
241 – 249, 257
possibility 28 – 34, 40, 51 – 53, 68,
114 – 115, 124, 141, 147, 155 – 158,
189, 199 – 203; conditions
of 11 – 19, 56, 64 – 65, 85; of
experience 3 – 5, 19 – 21, 29 – 30, 56,
96, 102 – 103, 142, 161, 254 – 256;
of knowledge 12 – 15, 59 – 60, 64;
open vs. enticing 155 – 156, 158;
pure vs. real 47 – 51, 68 – 73; of
reason 14 – 15, 34; see also modality
power 4, 98 – 99, 102, 105, 144, 154,
157, 188, 198 – 199, 224, 237 – 250,
252, 255 – 268
praxis 63, 157, 172, 239, 256, 261,
266 – 267
prejudice see presupposition

presupposition 14, 45 – 46, 53,
58 – 59, 61, 64, 81, 88, 90 – 91, 140,
143 – 144, 163, 225 – 234, 238
public: ethics 170 – 173, 178, 182;
sphere 173 – 177, 186, 199,
237, 248
purity 14 – 15, 51 – 54, 88, 90,
119 – 120, 122 – 127, 209, 217, 233,
259, 261, 266
queer theory 7, 104 – 105, 111
race 144, 182, 201
race theory 7, 44, 104 – 105, 114
reality 16, 45, 90, 122, 128, 186 – 191,
218, 221, 236
reason (Vernunft) 4, 14 – 15, 18 – 20,
85, 91, 178, 209 – 211, 214 – 216,
233 – 234, 237, 245, 248 – 249,
252 – 253, 266
recollection see memory
reduction 11, 121, 252, 260,
263 – 267; eidetic 36, 92, 113 – 114,
116, 121 – 123, 254, 266; to the
sphere of ownness 122 – 124,
125, 130; transcendental-
phenomenological 3, 9, 11 – 13,
16, 21, 46 – 50, 56, 59, 66, 80,
82, 92, 113 – 116, 121 – 123,
155, 162 – 163, 233, 254 – 256,
264 – 266
re-experiencing (wiedererfahren)
65 – 67, 70, 76
reflection 16, 51, 60, 62, 66 – 67,
70 – 71, 75, 96, 165, 172,
246 – 247, 249; back (Rückfragen/
Rückbesinnung/ Rückblicken) 2,
16 – 17, 57 – 58, 61 – 62, 66, 73,
91, 222, 229; critical 3, 5 – 6, 39,
57 – 58, 66, 72, 84, 88, 89, 90 – 92,
152, 159, 255, 266, 268; eidetic
96, 261; historical (teleological)
3, 5, 57 – 58, 62 – 63, 67, 80,
84, 160, 225, 229, 233 – 234;
phenomenological 21, 51, 67,
72, 268; philosophical 2, 226,
232 – 235; pre- 139, 158, 172, 212;
radical 59, 61, 63 – 64, 71, 113,
152, 154 – 156, 158, 160, 162, 164,
217, 268; self- (Selbsbesinnung)
5 – 6, 16, 57 – 66, 72 – 75, 115, 130,
155, 161 – 166; transcendental 5,
61, 88, 268
Subject Index  283
reflexivity: of experience 65 – 66, 130,
165; of thinking 58 – 59, 61 – 62, 70,
73, 165, 234
religion 45, 86, 124, 161 – 162, 218,
220 – 221
renewal (Erneuerung) 1, 51, 58,
62 – 64, 70, 73 – 74, 91, 138, 176,
225, 230, 240, 249
resistance 189 – 194, 240, 246,
249, 259
revolution 191 – 193, 225 – 227, 240
science 2, 12 – 23, 32 – 33, 45 – 47,
50 – 54, 57 – 63, 80 – 90, 92,
113, 117 – 118, 122, 128, 159,
173 – 174, 218, 221, 225 – 231,
241 – 249, 252 – 253; human
(Geisteswissenschaften) 54, 86,
114, 130, 153, 174, 225; natural
13 – 16, 19, 22 – 23, 45 – 46, 80, 87,
115, 130, 173, 218, 221, 228 – 229;
rigorous 50, 60, 113, 225,
227 – 228, 253, 267
second-person 117 – 118, 146 – 147
sedimentation 62 – 64, 68 – 70, 90 – 91,
109, 140, 230 – 231, 245
self 39, 50 – 53, 59, 62 – 73, 84, 99,
119 – 120, 123 – 126, 144, 147, 155,
165 – 166, 171, 176 – 181, 196, 210,
233 – 234, 239, 244, 255, 265 – 266;
see also ego
selfhood 120, 122 – 123; see also
otherness
sensation, the senses 13, 126 – 127;
double- 126 – 127
sense (and meaning) 16, 49, 62 – 64,
96 – 97, 101 – 104, 108 – 110, 114,
122, 152 – 157, 171, 192, 212, 215,
226 – 230, 242 – 250, 254, 263 – 264;
of being 161 – 166; concept of
214; -constitution 1 – 6, 57 – 58,
62, 71 – 72, 82 – 88, 90 – 91, 152,
157, 221, 226 – 233, 242 – 247,
254 – 256; -giving 147 – 148, 154,
174 – 176, 196 – 197, 228, 255 – 256,
268; goal- 84 – 85, 90 – 91, 93;
objective 91, 108 – 109, 119 – 120,
124, 266 – 267, 246; reflection of
(see also Besinnung; reflection);
teleological 229; temporal genesis
of 230 – 233, 256
situatedness 5, 63, 68, 146, 159, 245
sociality 174 – 175, 216, 224 – 225
284  Subject Index
stance 52, 64, 68 – 71, 99, 143,
149, 191, 226, 240, 244; see also
attitude; position
structure: eidetic and invariant 5,
32 – 37, 48 – 49, 96 – 97, 102 – 103,
111, 142, 152, 163, 254,
261 – 262; of method 56, 73; socio-
historical 100 – 102, 104, 152, 156,
238, 243, 247 – 248; transcendental
1, 3, 26, 38, 59, 62, 64, 71, 86,
95 – 98, 109, 120, 128, 142, 157,
173, 226
subject, subjectivity 11, 18 – 23, 29,
36 – 39, 49, 54, 83 – 85, 92, 96 – 97,
100 – 110, 117, 123, 127, 138 – 144,
155 – 156, 163, 171 – 179, 197, 226,
237, 239, 242 – 246, 254 – 265
suspension see epoché
stupidity 27, 187 – 188
technology 22 – 23, 177, 189, 196,
208, 220 – 222, 240 – 241, 256
teleology 74, 155, 225, 229 – 235,
244, 265
temporality 33, 65, 70, 96, 122, 160,
163, 230 – 231, 244, 263
transcendence 105, 154, 161 – 162,
249, 254, 258; see also immanence
transformation (Wandlung,
Umwandlung) 4, 70, 166, 177, 192,
265, 227, 230, 234 – 235, 258, 266
trust, trustee 157, 173 – 183, 191; see
also belief
unconscious 76 – 77, 178 – 179, 194
value (Marxist concept of) 192,
211 – 212, 219 – 220
variation: eidetic 33 – 40, 48,
71, 75 – 77, 141, 163, 254, 258,
261; free 3, 163; historical 23,
257 – 258, 261 – 263; imaginative,
arbitrary 30 – 31, 33 – 37, 75, 163,
261 – 262, 267
Vermöglichkeit 70
violence 145, 199 – 200, 213, 245, 250
we-intentionality 21
world 3, 6, 10 – 12, 16, 18 – 23, 38,
61, 67 – 69, 80, 82 – 86, 92, 95,
101 – 102, 105, 108, 118 – 120,
122, 124, 159 – 163, 166, 174 – 176,
186 – 203, 212, 217 – 218, 228,
232 – 236, 240 – 247, 254 – 268;
alien- 160 – 161; alternative 37,
70, 76; facticity of 109, 111, 234;
home- 52, 160; life-: natural 9 – 13,
15, 39, 46 – 48, 52 – 53, 82 – 84, 243;
objective 21, 82 – 83, 110, 124 – 125,
176, 229 – 230, 264; -view 11, 158,
187 – 188, 207 – 208, 231, 253; see
also lifeworld
world-belief see belief, world-
wordliness and worldlessness 170,
189 – 191, 198, 247
zig-zag 2 – 3, 57 – 58, 62, 68, 71 – 72, 77