The Subject S of Phenomenology Rereading Husserl 4Th Edition Iulian Apostolescu Online Ebook Texxtbook Full Chapter PDF

The Subject s of Phenomenology
Rereading Husserl 4th Edition Iulian

Apostolescu
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-subject-s-of-phenomenology-rereading-husserl-4t
h-edition-iulian-apostolescu/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...
Husserl s Phenomenology From Pure Logic to Embodiment

James Richard Mensch
https://ebookmeta.com/product/husserl-s-phenomenology-from-pure-
logic-to-embodiment-james-richard-mensch/
Husserl on Ethics and Intersubjectivity From Static and

Genetic Phenomenology Janet Donohoe
https://ebookmeta.com/product/husserl-on-ethics-and-
intersubjectivity-from-static-and-genetic-phenomenology-janet-
donohoe/
Phenomenology to the Letter Husserl and Literature 1st

Edition Philippe P Haensler Kristina Mendicino Rochelle
Tobias Editor
https://ebookmeta.com/product/phenomenology-to-the-letter-
husserl-and-literature-1st-edition-philippe-p-haensler-kristina-
mendicino-rochelle-tobias-editor/
McGraw Hill Education SAT Subject Test Chemistry 4th Ed

4th Edition Thomas A. Evangelist
https://ebookmeta.com/product/mcgraw-hill-education-sat-subject-
test-chemistry-4th-ed-4th-edition-thomas-a-evangelist/
McGraw Hill Education SAT Subject Test Biology E M 4th
Ed 4th Edition Stephanie Zinn
test-biology-e-m-4th-ed-4th-edition-stephanie-zinn/
Defending Husserl Uwe Meixner
https://ebookmeta.com/product/defending-husserl-uwe-meixner/
Yorick s World Science and the Knowing Subject Peter

Caws
https://ebookmeta.com/product/yorick-s-world-science-and-the-
knowing-subject-peter-caws/
McGraw Hill Education SAT Subject Test Math Level 1 4th

Ed 4th Edition John J. Diehl
test-math-level-1-4th-ed-4th-edition-john-j-diehl/
Philosophical Skepticism as the Subject of Art Maria

Bussmann s Drawings 1st Edition David Carrier
https://ebookmeta.com/product/philosophical-skepticism-as-the-
subject-of-art-maria-bussmann-s-drawings-1st-edition-david-
carrier/
Contributions to Phenomenology 108
Iulian Apostolescu Editor
The Subject(s) of
Phenomenology
Rereading Husserl
Contributions to Phenomenology
In Cooperation with The Center

for Advanced Research in Phenomenology
Volume 108
Series Editors
Nicolas de Warren, Department of Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University,
State College, PA, USA
Ted Toadvine, Department of Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University,
State College, PA, USA
Editorial Board
Lilian Alweiss, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
Elizabeth Behnke, Ferndale, WA, USA
Rudolf Bernet, Husserl Archive, KU Leuven, Belgium
David Carr, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA
Chan-Fai Cheung, Chinese University Hong Kong, Sha Tin, Hong Kong
James Dodd, New School University, New York, USA
Lester Embree, Florida Atlantic University, Florida, USA
Alfredo Ferrarin, Università di Pisa, Pisa, Italy
Burt Hopkins, University of Lille, Lille, France
José Huertas-Jourda, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada
Kwok-Ying Lau, Chinese University Hong Kong, Sha Tin, Hong Kong
Nam-In Lee, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea (Republic of)
Dieter Lohmar, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany
William R. McKenna, Miami University, Ohio, USA
Algis Mickunas, Ohio University, Ohio, USA
J.N. Mohanty, Temple University, Philadelphia, USA
Dermot Moran, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
Junichi Murata, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan
Thomas Nenon, The University of Memphis, Memphis, USA
Thomas M. Seebohm, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz, Germany
Gail Soffer, Roma Tre University, Rome, Italy
Anthony Steinbock, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, USA
Shigeru Taguchi, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan
Dan Zahavi, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
Richard M. Zaner, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, USA
Scope
The purpose of the series is to serve as a vehicle for the pursuit of phenomenological
research across a broad spectrum, including cross-over developments with other
fields of inquiry such as the social sciences and cognitive science. Since its
establishment in 1987, Contributions to Phenomenology has published over 100
titles on diverse themes of phenomenological philosophy. In addition to welcoming
monographs and collections of papers in established areas of scholarship, the series
encourages original work in phenomenology. The breadth and depth of the Series
reflects the rich and varied significance of phenomenological thinking for seminal
questions of human inquiry as well as the increasingly international reach of
phenomenological research.
All books to be published in this Series will be fully peer-reviewed before final
acceptance.
The series is published in cooperation with The Center for Advanced Research in
Phenomenology.
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/5811

Iulian Apostolescu
Editor
The Subject(s)
of Phenomenology
Rereading Husserl
Editor
Iulian Apostolescu
Faculty of Philosophy
University of Bucharest
Bucharest, Romania
Portions of Adam Konopka’s chapter entitled “Parts, Wholes, and Phenomenological

Necessity” were published in Ecological Investigations: A Phenomenology of Habitats
(New York: Routledge, 2020), 126–138.
ISSN 0923-9545 ISSN 2215-1915 (electronic)

Contributions to Phenomenology
ISBN 978-3-030-29356-7 ISBN 978-3-030-29357-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29357-4
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of
the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation,
broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information
storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the
editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any
errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional
claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, my thanks go to Philippe P. Haensler and Vedran Grahovac for
their support and inspiring discussions at earlier stages of this project. I especially
appreciate the unusual patience of all the contributors to this volume, which has
been 3 years in the making. I am also grateful to Nicolas de Warren and the two
anonymous referees for their suggestions for revisions and constructive feedback.
This collection would not have the form it does if it were not for their input. I would
like here to extend my due thanks to Rodney K.B. Parker for generously lending his
time in helping with editing the introduction. Finally, I would like to thank Anita
van der Linden-Rachmat and Cristina dos Santos at Springer for their invaluable
editorial assistance.
Bucharest, Romania 2019 Iulian Apostolescu
v
Introduction
2018 marked the 80th anniversary of the death of Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl.
While phenomenology “is now safely ensconced in the cultural firmament,”1 its
basic philosophical assumptions and invariant methodological commitments remain
thought-provoking, if not deeply enigmatic.2 For, as elegant as Husserl’s often cited
claim that we must return to the “things themselves” (Wir wollen auf die “Sachen
selbst” zurückgehen),3 may be, it is anything but simple. Both “orthodox” Husserlians
and phenomenology’s harshest critics will readily agree that the main subject matter
of Husserl’s philosophy is the subject or the pure field of transcendental subjectivity.
However, it is far from clear what precisely this implies. Considering the vast range
of themes covered in Husserl’s writings, as well as the immense complexity
underlying the development of his thought—from its Brentanian beginnings4 to its
1
Sokolowski, R. 2010. “Husserl on First Philosophy”. In: Mattens F., Jacobs H., Ierna C. (Eds.),
Philosophy, Phenomenology, Sciences. Phaenomenologica (Published Under the Auspices of the
Husserl-Archives), vol 200. Springer, Dordrecht, 3–23.
2
For a discussion of “the inner ambiguities of the phenomenological method” see Mertens, Karl.
2018. “Phenomenological Methodology”. In: Zahavi, D. (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the
History of Phenomenology, Oxford University Press, 469–491. See also, Luft S., Overgaard, S.
(Eds). 2012. The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology, Routledge, 1–14. For a thorough treat-
ment of the phenomenological methodology, see especially the essays by Ludwig Landgrebe, Jan
Patočka, and Dieter Lohmar included in Drummond, John J., Höffe, O. (Eds). 2019. Husserl:
German Perspectives, Fordham University Press.
3
Husserl, E. 2001. Logical Investigations, Part I of Volume II, “Investigations into Phenomenology
and the Theory of Knowledge”, Trans. J. Findlay. London and New York: Routledge, § 2, 168. See
also Husserl, E. 1987. “Philosophie als strenge Wissenchaft”. In: Sepp, H.R., Nenon, Thomas
(Eds.), Aufsätze und Vorträge (1911–1921), Husserliana: Edmund Husserl – Gesammelte Werke,
Volume XXV, Springer, 21: “Weg mit den hohlen Wortanalysen. Die Sachen selbst müssen wir
befragen. Zurück zur Erfahrung, zur Anschauung, die unseren Worten allein Sinn und vernünftiges
Recht geben kann. Ganz trefflich!”
4
See Husserl, E. 2018. “Reminiscences of Franz Brentano”. In: Antonelli, M., Boccaccini, F.
(Eds.), Franz Brentano: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers. Volume I: Sources and
Legacy, Routledge, 356–364. Originally published in Kraus, O. (Ed.). 1919. Franz Brentano. Zur
Kenntnis seines Lebens und seiner Lehre, Munich: Beck, 151–167; Rollinger, R. D. 1999. Husserl’s
Position in the School of Brentano. Dordrecht: Springer; Moran, D. 2000. “Husserl’s Critique of
vii
viii Introduction
transcendental reinterpretation5 and, last but not least, to its own “crypto-
deconstruction” in the revisions of his early manuscripts and in his later work—one
cannot but acknowledge the fact that “the” subject of phenomenology marks an
irreducible plurality of possible subjects. Thus, phenomenology’s imperative to turn
to the “things themselves,” today, indicates a task of re-approaching phenomenolo-
gy’s own linguistic framework and methodological strategy before anything else: to
return to the “texts themselves,” to re-engage with Husserl as a writer, with his
disciples and successors as readers.
Bringing together established researchers and emerging scholars alike to discuss
new readings of (readings of) Husserl and to reignite the much needed discussion of
what phenomenology actually is and can possibly be about, The Subject(s) of
Phenomenology: Rereading Husserl sets out to critically re-evaluate (and chal-
lenge) the predominant interpretations of Husserl’s philosophy, and to adapt phe-
nomenology to the specific philosophical challenges and context of the twenty-first
century.
The chapters in this volume are arranged into three parts:
Part I: The Phenomenological Project: Definition and Scope
In the first chapter of Part I, Jean-Daniel Thumser explores Husserl’s understanding

of “transcendental language” by tracing the different phases in Husserl’s conception
of language from the Logical Investigations to his later manuscripts. In his contribu-
tion, Adam Konopka reconstructs the account of the organization of unified definite
manifolds that Husserl develops in his early writings. He argues that Husserl’s con-
cept of necessity gets fixed through the logic of “fitness” that is operative in Husserl’s
account of unified definite manifolds organized by symmetrical part/whole rela-
tions. Simone Aurora shows how the philosophy of the early Husserl—as put forth
Brentano in the Logical Investigations”, In: Manuscrito, XXIII (2), 163–206; Moran, D. 2017.
“Husserl and Brentano”, In: Kriegel, U. (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Franz Brentano and the
Brentano School, Routledge, 293–304; Fisette, D. 2018. “Phenomenology and Descriptive
Psychology: Brentano, Stumpf, Husserl”, In: Zahavi, D. (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the
History of Phenomenology, Oxford University Press, 88–104; Fréchette, G. 2019. “The Origins of
Phenomenology in Austro-German Philosophy”, In: Shand, J. A. (Ed.), Blackwell Companion to
19th-Century Philosophy, London, Wiley-Blackwell, 418–453.
5
Mohanty, Jitendra Nath. 1997. Phenomenology: Between Essentialism and Transcendental
Philosophy, Evanston: Northwestern University Press; Luft, Sebastian. 2011. Subjectivity and
Lifeworld in Transcendental Phenomenology, Evanston: Northwestern University Press; Staiti,
Andrea. 2014. Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology: Nature, Spirit, and Life, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press; Zahavi, Dan. 2017. Husserl’s Legacy: Phenomenology, Metaphysics,
and Transcendental Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Livingstone, Paul M. 2018.
“Edmund Husserl: From Intentionality to Transcendental Phenomenology”. In: Lapointe S. (Ed.),
Philosophy of Mind in the Nineteenth Century: The History of the Philosophy of Mind, Volume 5,
Routledge, 232–248; Apostolescu, I., Serban, C. (Eds.). 2020. Husserl, Kant and Transcendental
Phenomenology, De Gruyter.
Introduction ix
in the Logical Investigations—ought to be considered part of both the wider tradi-

tion of transcendental philosophy and structuralism. Aurora addresses Husserl’s
notion of Wissenschaftslehre and the mereology developed in the third Logical
Investigation to show how Husserl’s position can be defined in terms of “phenom-
enological structuralism,” “structural phenomenology,” or, as Aurora proposes,
“transcendental structuralism.” Corijn van Mazijk analyzes three different interpre-
tations of transcendental consciousness and identifies the respective reasons for
supporting them. What is particularly novel about van Mazijk’s account is that, on
the one hand, it exposes Husserl’s notion of transcendental consciousness as involv-
ing a kind of “metaphysical commitment,” and, on the other, it no longer takes
consciousness as a kind of “object” or matter of a “regional ontology.” It is argued
that the streaming life of transcendental consciousness should be characterized as
encompassing the totality of being. Vedran Grahovac suggests that Husserl develops
a peculiar strategy in order to disclose the vicious circle that is at work in the psy-
chologist’s notion of inner evidence. Instead of merely dismissing psychologistic
logic in the Logical Investigations, Husserl enacts its inherent circularity, thereby
opening the space for an ideal science of logic. By closely following the argumenta-
tive structure of his contemporaries and immediate predecessors whom he criticized
and by fully acknowledging their concerns, Husserl was able to move beyond their
philosophical projects.
Part II: The Unfolding of Phenomenological Philosophy
The primary aim of Victor Gelan’s contribution is to show that Husserl’s idea of
rigorous science offers a fundamental contribution to the understanding, clarifica-
tion, and development of the idea of science in general, especially to the structuring
of the scientific character of the social and human sciences. Marco Cavallaro argues
that there are at least two essential traits that commonly define being an “I”: per-
sonal or self-identity and self-consciousness. He argues that they bear quite an odd
relation to each other, insofar as self-consciousness seemingly jeopardizes self-
identity. Cavallaro’s chapter elucidates this issue by situating it in the history of
transcendental philosophy beginning with Immanuel Kant. Re-evaluating and
applying the resources of Husserlian phenomenology, Saulius Geniusas aims at
shedding new light on the essential structures of productive imagination (produktive
Einbildungskraft). According to Geniusas’ working hypothesis, productive imagi-
nation is a relative term whose meaning derives from its opposition to reproductive
imagination. Rodney K.B. Parker focuses on the relationship between Husserl and
Theodor Celms, especially Celms’ criticisms of Husserl’s transcendental-
phenomenological idealism. Celms argues that, despite his account of intersubjec-
tivity, Husserl cannot escape the threat of solipsism. The relation of genetic
phenomenology and the project of phenomenological reduction is the primary con-
cern of Matt Bower’s chapter. Despite Husserl’s occasional loose references to
“the” reduction, performing the reduction implies numerous interrelated techniques.
x Introduction
Bower delves into these intricacies with the aim of determining the place of genetic
phenomenology within the whole of the phenomenological method. Putting Husserl
into dialogue with Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Randall Johnson’s chapter turns to phe-
nomenology’s notion of “passivity.” According to Johnson, the inherent (self-)frag-
mentation of passivity forces philosophy to pay tribute to the problematic “space
between” noema and noesis and to reflect on the highly ambiguous status of a
“genetic” phenomenology trying to think its own origins.
art III: At the Limits of Phenomenology:

P
Towards Phenomenology as Philosophy of Limits
Benjamin Draxlbauer begins Part III by offering a phenomenological analysis of the

phenomenon of oblivion [Vergessen]. For Husserl, Draxlbauer argues, oblivion is a
true limit-case emerging on the edge of time consciousness. The chapter elaborates
two distinct aspects of oblivion discussed by Husserl in conjunction with broader
considerations on the topic and its relationship to intentional consciousness.
Christian Sternad’s chapter analyzes various phenomenological approaches to death
and elucidates how these approaches subsequently influence conceptions of subjec-
tivity. Since death interrupts the correlation between the subject and the object, it
calls into question the fundamental premises of the phenomenological method. In
light of this, Sternad suggests that one can only gain a full picture of human mortal-
ity by a thorough account of intersubjectivity: death is not an isolated experience at
the end of our lives, Sternad argues; rather it is what structures the ways in which
we engage with others and our lifeworld. In his chapter, Neal DeRoo turns to the
problem of expression and its role in the phenomenological project. DeRoo shows
that the concept of expression grows out of Husserl’s debate with Gottlob Frege,
more specifically: that expression is Husserl’s first attempt to more rigorously define
“sense” as the essential connection between subjective acts of meaning and “objec-
tive” meanings. As a consequence, DeRoo argues, it is expression that is the true—
and unexpected—core of Husserlian phenomenology as a whole. Elodie Boublil’s
chapter shows how Merleau-Ponty’s reference to the idea of “coherent deforma-
tion” is his attempt to rethink subjectivity’s individuation with regard to the dynam-
ics of operative intentionality and their expressions. Boublil demonstrates that, in
response to André Malraux, Merleau-Ponty works out a diacritical sense of indi-
viduation as style that conveys existential possibilities. Boublil concludes by pro-
posing a “phenomenology from within” that relies on literary, psychoanalytic, and
artistic works to exhibit the “metamorphosis of the subject in and through its world.”
Rereading Husserl’s Vienna Lecture, Ian Angus’ chapter interrogates Husserl’s
attempt to define Europe as the spiritual home of reason. Against the backdrop of
Husserl’s notion of “primal institution” (Urstiftung), Angus re-evaluates Husserl’s
interpretation of the exploration of North America as an important exogenous
renewal for the European entelechy of reason. In his chapter, Keith Whitmoyer turns
Introduction xi
to Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Husserl in Le philosophe et son ombre and the 1958–

1959 course at the Collège de France, La philosophie aujourd’hui, putting them into
dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas’ 1948 essay, La réalité et son ombre. On this
basis, Whitmoyer argues that Husserl’s work must not be treated as a luminous
canon, as a set of sacred scriptures bereft of all darkness, but that the brilliance of
the founder of phenomenology lies in his multiplicity; that Husserl was always oth-
erwise than himself, haunted by his shadows. Emre Şan elaborates how contempo-
rary phenomenology sets out to explore territories perhaps indicated, but mostly
ignored or abandoned, by Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Şan examines three pro-
tagonists of the so-called “new” phenomenology, Michel Henry, Merleau-Ponty,
and Jean-Luc Marion, in order to understand the reinterpretation of the concept of
phenomenon in terms of givenness and event after the theological turn. In his chap-
ter, Ben Turner explains how the phenomenological epoché understood as a meth-
odological principle is rethought as political in the work of Bernard Stiegler. For
Stiegler the epoché is both the suspension of existing social systems and a moment
of critical redoubling where the source of disruption is integrated into a new “epoch.”
Of particular interest to Turner is how Stiegler develops this double understanding
of the epoché through his reading of retentionality as found in Husserl’s lectures On
the Consciousness of Internal Time. Putting Husserl into dialogue with the writings
of Jean Cavaillès and Gaston Bachelard, David M. Peña-Guzmán shows how his-
torical epistemology can be read as simultaneously critiquing and expanding
Husserlian phenomenology. In doing so, Peña-Guzmán rebuffs the widespread con-
ception that historical epistemology is phenomenology’s “Other” and calls for fur-
ther research on their historical and philosophical relationships.
Contents
Part I The Phenomenological Project: Definition and Scope

An Analytic Phenomenology: Husserl’s Path
to the Things Themselves�� 3
Jean-Daniel Thumser
Parts, Wholes, and Phenomenological Necessity�� 17
Adam Konopka
The Early Husserl Between Structuralism
and Transcendental Philosophy�� 31
Simone Aurora
Transcendental Consciousness: Subject, Object, or Neither? �� 45
Corijn van Mazijk
Philosophy as an Exercise in Exaggeration: The Role of Circularity
in Husserl’s Criticism of Logical Psychologism�� 57
Vedran Grahovac
Part II The Unfolding of Phenomenological Philosophy

Husserl’s Idea of Rigorous Science and Its Relevance
for the Human and Social Sciences�� 97
Victor Eugen Gelan
Ego-Splitting and the Transcendental Subject.
Kant’s Original Insight and Husserl’s Reappraisal�� 107
Marco Cavallaro
What Is Productive Imagination? The Hidden Resources
of Husserl’s Phenomenology of Phantasy�� 135
Saulius Geniusas
xiii
xiv Contents
Does Husserl’s Phenomenological Idealism Lead to Pluralistic

Solipsism? Assessing the Criticism by Theodor Celms�� 155
Rodney K. B. Parker
Finding a Way Into Genetic Phenomenology�� 185
Matt E. M. Bower
The Allure of Passivity�� 201
Randall Johnson
Part III At the Limits of Phenomenology:

Towards Phenomenology as Philosophy of Limits
Time and Oblivion: A Phenomenological Study on Oblivion�� 215
Benjamin Draxlbauer
On the Verge of Subjectivity: Phenomenologies of Death�� 231
Christian Sternad
Spiritual Expression and the Promise of Phenomenology �� 245
Neal DeRoo
Individuation, Affectivity and the World: Reframing Operative
Intentionality (Merleau-Ponty)�� 271
Elodie Boublil
Husserl and America: Reflections on the Limits of Europe
as the Ground of Meaning and Value for Phenomenology�� 291
Ian Angus
Husserl and His Shadows: Phenomenology After Merleau-Ponty�� 311
Keith Whitmoyer
Phenomenological Crossings: Givenness and Event�� 327
Emre Şan
Politicising the Epokhé: Bernard Stiegler and the Politics
of Epochal Suspension �� 341
Ben Turner
Not Phenomenology’s ‘Other’: Historical Epistemology’s
Critique and Expansion of Phenomenology�� 355
David M. Peña-Guzmán
Part I
The Phenomenological Project: Definition
and Scope
An Analytic Phenomenology: Husserl’s
Path to the Things Themselves
Jean-Daniel Thumser
Abstract In contrast to the scientific and mundane understanding of things, Husserl

introduced the phenomenological reduction in order to comprehend things them-
selves. As the transcendental subject redirects his sight to apprehend things in a
non-thetic way, things which were first perceived simpliciter are now perceived
idealiter because they are reachable for the conscious subject. However, the practice
of the reduction rejects any use of a thetic mundane aspect. Then how is it possible
to talk about inner or reduced experiences when the language itself is mundane? It
is our task to understand how a transcendental language may be possible by deter-
mining the different steps of Husserl’s conception of language from the Logical
Investigations to his later manuscripts. We will see that the path to the things them-
selves is more perilous than we think.
Keywords Phenomenology · Analytic phenomenology · Pure logic ·

Transcendental language · Indexicals · Passive synthesis · Egological discourse
1 Introduction
Contrariwise to the common and scientific language, which are both based on a
certain positive understanding of things, phenomenology’s aim is to describe the
essence of the experiencing life by practicing the phenomenological reduction
(ἐποχή or bracketing). This reduction tends to put into parenthesis the thetic under-
standing of life by focusing on how phenonality appears consciously. The phenom-
enological reduction permits to redirect our view on the subject’s constituent and
transcendental life – the antechamber of the subjective life from which the entire
world acquires a meaning. Therefore, the domain of phenomenology concerns
essences and idealities. Things are considered as phenomena, namely noematic
I would like to thank two persons who helped me improve this paper in English: Chih-I Chang and
Appoline Hontaas-Romanens.
J.-D. Thumser (*)

Ecole Normale Supérieure, Archives Husserl, Paris, France
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 3

I. Apostolescu (ed.), The Subject(s) of Phenomenology, Contributions to
Phenomenology 108, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29357-4_1
4 J.-D. Thumser
correlates. Phenomenology’s use of langage is then specific insofar as it deals with

idealities. Thus, phenomenology can’t be satisfied with common thetic language.
On the contrary, the scientific approach tries to determine and classify nature in its
own terms as it is for instance the case with the periodic table of elements for the
chemist. But nature might not be reduced to that kind of reasoning, for the naturalist
scientist does not take his very own subjectivity into account during his research.
Therefore, the naturalistic determination of the world – the scientific ideation of
nature – tends to deny the subjective part of any research insofar as science’s ambi-
tion is to unveil a “pure object”. As Heisenberg worded it: “Ideally the aim of a
scientific representation is the “objective” representation of a specific state of affairs.
It is assumed that the relevant condition can be sufficiently detached from us and
from its representation that it in fact may be turned into a pure ‘object’” (Heisenberg
1942, I 3 Order). Hence, resorting to an naturalistic posture when it comes to the
environment of life (Lebensumwelt) or nature in general may not allow the researcher
to acquire the right position concerning subjectivity itself for it is always “hidden”.
The scientist’s ego is precisely anonymous, because none of his researches concern
the primordial status of the ego: “The transcendental life accomplishes itself in a
profound anonymity and remains blind to itself as long as it does not reflect on its
self-constitution” (Montavont 1999, 48). It is precisely phenomenology’s task to
discover the constituent role of the ego and to explain how the constitution of any
kind of reality belongs to it. Consequently, what are the specific resources of phe-
nomenology that could help us override the inherent explanatory gap which belongs
to the scientific taxonomy of beingness? How did Husserl intend “to go back to the
things themselves” (Husserl 2001a, 168), and what does it accurately mean when it
comes to the expression of reduced experiences (Erlebnisse)? By describing how a
transcendental language is possible, we aim to highlight the fact that none of the
substantives or deictic expressions that one may use to designate an element of the
field of phenomenology are legitimate insofar as phenomenology deals with univer-
sal and eidetic invariants. An analytic phenomenology may then be conceived as an
attempt to understand how the transcendental language is possible as an expression
of lived experiences. This method was initially mentioned in the first Logical
Investigations in order to determine a path to the things themselves. It is our task to
examine this method within an analysis of a major part of Husserl's work which has
never been thematically considered from both Husserl and his commentators: an
“analytic phenomenology” (Husserl 2001a, 172). We will consequently highlight
the importance of this uninterrupted question in Husserl’s corpus in order to com-
prehend its unity and its later developments. As Adolf Reinach formerly assured:
When we strive to make analysis about the essence, it is natural to begin with words and
their meanings. It is not a coincidence that Husserl’s Logical Investigations begins with an
analysis about the concepts of word, expression and signification, etc. At first, it is to master
the hardly believable ambiguities which are in particular in the philosophical terminology
(Reinach 2012, 49).
An Analytic Phenomenology: Husserl’s Path to the Things Themselves 5
2 I n the Depth of Subjectivity: A Return to the I and the

Others
2.1 Formal Logic Versus Pure Logic
The first Logical Investigation brings us to clarify the suitable terms used to express
any kind of thoughts, and permits us to apprehend “true objects of logical research”
within a “clarity that excludes all misundertanding” (Husserl 2001a, 165). It is there-
fore necessary to begin with a formal review in order to reach what pure logic is, or
what specifically belongs to a phenomenology which concerns the expressions cov-
ering the intimate experiences (innere Erlebnisse). We may then underline that
Husserl began an analysis of expressions and significations in the context of a gno-
siological research that would not be reduced to a simple formal logic but that which
already is a phenomenological pure logic. Consequently this analysis can’t be
reduced to “grammatical discussions, empirically conceived and related to some
historically given language” (Husserl 2001a, 166). Husserl indeed positioned him-
self as a phenomenologist who aimed to describe the essence of experiences by
employing a method that does not include the empirical experiences. He thus tried to
distinguish the terms that are used in order to depict a thought, but also thoughts
themselves by considering them only as phenomena while the mundane experiences
are reduced. It is then the intentional act that matters, not the object itself, but the
content of experience: “it is absolutely crucial to our interpretation of Husserl that
the claim that noemata and Sinne are meanings be understood only in conjunction
with the claim that they are contents, not objects, of acts” (Woodruff Smith and
McIntyre 1982, 155). This method offers the possibility to distinguish what concerns
the signification and the manifestation of things whenever it comes to lived experi-
ences. The same can be said when it comes to distinguishing what is meant, in other
words what falls sometimes in a direct relation with the object (Gegenstand) – the
filling acts –, and sometimes the signitive acts which may however lack an object,
even if this act confers a signification. It is in that sense that the imperative return to
the things themselves can be understood: it means a return to the pure subjective
sphere that always provides a sense to what is encountered. Then the question about
the relations linking terms in a linguistic structure has no importance for phenome-
nology, it leads us to a descriptive analysis of essential relationships which gives rise
to a “meaning-fulfilment” (Husserl 2001b, 184). Moreover, we can emphasize with
Alexander Schnell that what matters in any kind of expression concerns
the expression in specie that does not depend neither on the situation in which it is expressed
nor on the person who pronounces it. We must therefore clearly distinguish between the
ideal signification on the one hand, and the real acts, that are constitutive for the significa-
tion, on the other hand – the correlation that Husserl will name in the Ideen I the ‘noetico-
noematic correlation’ (Schnell 2007, 87).
Thus there is no possible analysis that isn’t strictly phenomenological. An analysis

is inevitably based on experiences which could be universalized for all rational
6 J.-D. Thumser
beings. Nevertheless, such a descriptive approach accomplishes much more than

poiting to an explanation of expressions. It highlights a whole section on the com-
munication of ideas within the human community.
2.2 Communication Between Reasonable Beings
Husserl discerns about the intersubjective link a crucial issue about the expression:
communication. Indeed, an expression is always based on an intention to signify
something to someone through words: “the articulate sound-complex, the written
sign etc., first becomes a spoken word of communicative bit of speech, when a
speaker produces it with the intention of ‘expressing himself about something’”
(Husserl 2001a, 189). We may also underline the fact that “expressing oneself” (sich
äussern) means “to externalize oneself” and refers likewise to the verb “äussern”
which means “articulate”. In that perspective the meaning of an expression of one-
self leads to an articulation of a thought, an articulation of the subjectivity which
intends to externalize itself. This dimension of the expression reflects the immeasur-
able need to express oneself on her/his experiences (Erlebnisse) and at the same
time the need to share knowledge in order to confront it to the authority of others
and make it valid – it is also the same need while the subject soliloquizes (Husserl
2001a, §8). Sich äussern here has the same value than existing (exsistere), that
means appearing, showing ourselves, as originally understood in Latin. In this case,
it means to share one subjective experience with another, as well as manifesting this
subjective experience within words. That is the way a communicating community
recognizes itself, because subjects share their ideas and their experiences, thanks to
sounds, gestures, and writings. The “tools” that are used are neither unarticulated
sounds, nor random behaviors and haptic movements, but expressions of a subjec-
tivity which externalizes itself. Furthermore, this communication between thinking
subjects is not limited to the recognition of others as reasonable beings, but includes
a communication of experiences that cannot be expressed with words. Thus, if
words may limit our understanding of other people’s experiences, they contribute in
their descriptive use to discover other people’s experiences. This new comprehen-
sive dimension illustrates how we share our emotions, our pain, etc. As Husserl
wrote, this linguistic dimension is referred to another kind of perception that is not
a perception like a taking-for-real (Warhnehmung). It participates to the presentifi-
cation (Vergegenwärtigung) that presents us other people’s experiences obliquely
and permits us to transpose those experiences to our own, but not identically:
Common speech credits us with percepts event of other’s people’s inner experiences; we
‘see’ their anger, their pain etc. Such talk is quite correct, as long as, e.g., we allow outward
bodily things likewise to count as perceived, and as long as, in general, the notion of percep-
tion is not restricted to the adequate, the strictly intuitive percept. […] The hearer perceives
the speaker as manifesting certain inner experiences, and to that extent he also perceives
these experiences themselves: he does not, however, himself experience them, he has not an
‘inner’ but an ‘outer’ percept of them. Here we have the big difference between the real
grasp of what is in adequate intuition, and the putative grasp of what is on a basis of inad-
equate, though intuitive, presentation” (Husserl 2001a, 190).
If it is possible to partially understand other people’s inner experiences through their

behavior and expression, this comprehension is nevertheless limited. Indeed, we may
for instance consider the case of a young person who has never tasted wine and who is
now talking to an oenologist: the neophyte is able to understand the notion of a certain
taste but won’t be able to link those concepts to any previous experience (Erlebnis).
Moreover, if we consider the current neurocognitive research, we may also point out
that despite the major discovery of the mirror neurons – that we could call social neu-
rons as they are activated during empathy and social interactions –, the “pain matrix”
that is engaged while the subject sees another subject who is being hurt is limited. In
fact, as the title of a recent paper summarizes it, the limits of our understanding of an
other’s pain is limited: “empathy for man involves the affective but not the sensory
components of pain” (Singer et al. 2004). Whereupon Husserl could be designed as
precursor on the necessary modalities to recognize and share our experiences. Indeed,
Husserl radically distinguishes himself from Max Scheler and what he called an “affec-
tive fusion” (Einsfühlung). For Husserl, communication is essential but limited. To
express oneself is a manifestation of oneself’s experience and subjectivity. We recog-
nize ourselves as individual beings in flesh and bones (leibhaftig) endowed with rea-
son. However, to what extent are we precisely able to manifest subjectivity? Is saying
“I” sufficient to express our inner experiences? That might not be the case, especially
if we consider it only as an indexical, even more as an “essential indexical” (Perry
1993). The limits of communication and of the transcendental language may lie here.
2.3 Does “I” Mean Something? I as Indexical
In fact, the indexicals “I”, “here” and “now” are commonly used to describe a per-
ceived situation, but the “I” may suggest more than that. For instance, “The indexical
“I”, not the philosophical anomaly, “the I” or “the eidos I” […], refers to the unique
individual who is self-present immediately in her unique essence and who may be
present for the listener “in the flesh”, (“registered”, as Sokolowski puts it), and not in
an empty intention” (Hart 2009, 67). In that sense, saying “I” suggests more than a
simple indexical, it is essential as it refers itself to a reasonable being. But Husserl
introduces another point in the Logical Investigations: the “I” is nothing that is uni-
versal or objective. The “I”, “here” or “now” are “essentially occasional” (Husserl
2001a, 218) terms, which are used to describe a punctual and unique situation:
Every expression, in fact, that includes a personal pronoun lacks an objective sense. The
word ‘I’ names a different person from case to case, and does so by way an ever altering
meaning. What its meaning is at the moment, can be gleaned only from the living utterance
and from the intuitive circumstances which surround it. […] It is the universal semantic
function of the word ‘I’ to designate whoever is speaking, but the notion through which we
express this function is not the notion immediately constitutive of its meaning (Husserl
2001a, 218–219).
8 J.-D. Thumser
Thus the signification of the expressed “I” finds its meaning only in the subjective
part of the subject. “I” means “I am here, present, thinking, speaking to someone on
something” and can only be distinguished from the things it speaks about by the use
of the “I”. Furthermore, if every human being is able to express his or her very own
subjectivity by the use of the “I”, even if it is under an implicit form, this “I” always
means another subjectivity and another concept of the “I”: “Each man has his own
I-presentation (and his individual notion of I) and this is why the word’s meaning
differs from person to person. But since each person, in the quest of himself, says ‘I’,
the word has the character of a universally operative indication of this fact” (Husserl
2001a, 219). But if Husserl brings here attention to the communication between dif-
ferent empirical egos, it is not necessary for him that each ego clearly understands
the notion of the “I”. That could indeed be the case for many individuals. The “I”
does not express the person entirely. We may also call it with Stéphane Chauvier a
certain “descriptive ingenuity of the I-thinking”, because “behind the ‘I’, likewise
behind the ‘here’ or the ‘now’, there is no description of anything and that is the
reason why the ‘I think’ […] does not include any knowledge of the thing which
thinks” (Chauvier 2009, 118). For instance, a brain damaged person is also capable
to say “I” without any need to know what it is to be an I: it is the same case for people
who suffer from Alzheimer or anosognosia. And Husserl does not say the contrary,
at least in the Logical Investigations, when he affirms briefly that “the word ‘I’ has
not itself directly the power to arouse the specific I-presentation ; this becomes fixed
in the actual piece of talk.[…] In its case, rather, an indicative function mediates,
crying as it were, to the hearer ‘Your vis-à-vis intends himself’” (Husserl 2001a,
219). As we see here, Husserl describes the “I” as a particular indexical, that has an
indicative function not similar to the other indexicals like “here” or “now” for the “I”
indicates a living reasonable being. Nevertheless Husserl does not give any further
explanation about the specific role of the “I”. He remains evasive on this issue, by not
mentioning anything that could be possibly linked to his later transcendental phe-
nomenology. We will consequently take into account the new horizons opened by
Husserl when he introduced the ego as the foundation of all apodictic knowledge.
3 The Antepredicative Articulation of Linguistic Thoughts
3.1 The Antepredicative Part of the Language
Thanks to the introduction of the transcendental ego, Husserl is able to determine

the origins of all knowledge. “The expressions, “I perceive,” “I judge, “I want, “des-
ignate at the same time an essential shape of these lived-experiences themselves that
are essentially given through the ego-centration. Here, the ego is everywhere living
in these acts as carrying them out […]. The ego is not a box containing egoless
lived-experiences” (Husserl 2001c, 17). But how are those experiences expressed
through language? Are the conscious lived experiences expressible through lan-
guage, or does the language come after experiences? Husserl introduces here a
certain novelty by saying that “Thinking is carried out from the very outset as lin-
guistic. What resides in our practical horizon as something to be shaped is the still
indeterminate idea of a formation that is already a linguistic one” (Husserl 2001c,
12). Indeed Husserl indicates that the expression of lived experiences is already
linguistic inasmuch as thoughts are always linguistic. This means that the antepred-
icative part of our life determines in a certain pre-linguistic way the expression and
the predication of our experiences within the use of words. As specified by Natalie
Depraz, “The primordial language of phenomenology is the language of the percep-
tion, of the perceived sense, in other words, Husserlian, it is a language which is
originated from the antepredicative” (Depraz 1999, 91). Then, contrariwise to what
we may think about the originarity of our experiences, the ego is always confronted
to a linguistic world which arises from the antepredicative experiences. Nevertheless,
Merleau-Ponty demonstrated this a bit further with the assimilation and the use of
words that may not be without interest. In fact, he highlights that the ego may be
surprised about the inner process of the language:
The speaking power that the child assimilates by learning the language is not the sum of the
morphological, syntactic and lexical significations: this knowledge is neither necessary nor
sufficient to acquire a language […]. Words and phrases that are necessary to lead to the
expression of my significant intention does only recommend to me, when I talk, by what
Humboldt called the innere Sprachform (and which is called by the moderns Wortbegriff)
[…]. There is a “linguistic” meaning of the language which accomplishes the mediation
between my intention still silent and the words, so that my words surprise me and teach me
my thought. Organized signs have their immanent sense which falls outside the ‘I think’,
and belongs to the ‘I can’ (Merleau-Ponty 1960, 110–111).
Thus, the idea that there is a certain “descriptive ingenuity” about the use of indexi-
cals may totally be true, for the ego is not completely involved in the inner linguistic
process, but is occasionally surprised by the words it uses. On that point, we may
emphasize the fact that more recent researches have come to the same conclusion:
the inner linguistic process takes place in the act of perceiving, and thinking cannot
be distinguished from the language for there is no thinking without words. But the
role of the ego in the determination of words is not primordial insofar as thinking is
already linguistic. In this case, Merleau-Ponty is right when he affirms that “orga-
nized signs have their immanent sense which […] belongs to the ‘I can’”, because
the inner linguistic process does not include, at least for the antepredicative part of
our understanding, any participation of an ego. As Jean Petitot also stated: “the non-
conceptual pre-structuration of the semiotic of the natural world is in a large part
perceptual” (Petitot 2004, 138).
3.2 The Passive Synthesis and the Animation of Words
This problem of an antepredicative formation of our linguistic understanding may

only be comprehended by analyzing what Husserl calls the “passive synthesis”.
Indeed, in the stratification of the constitutive conscience, the passive synthesis is an
10 J.-D. Thumser
underlying activity that is necessary to unify the diversity of the lived experiences.
“This synthesis, that the activity of conscience always finds as already done, can
also only be passive in relation to the activity [conscience as an activity of judging
logically], and in so far as it is strictly pre-logic, […] it is antepredicative” (Escoubas
and Richir 1989, 11). The passive synthesis is thus distinguished from the active one
for this latter deals with logical and empirical judgments, and more generally deals
with the field of the perception (Wahrnehmung). The active synthesis is a judicative
act, contrariwise to the passive synthesis which is the basis for the active one for it
is a principle of association from which “the Ego always has an environment of
‘objects’” (Husserl 1960, 79). In other words the passive synthesis is the activity
which permits the transcendental subject to constantly be in a world of objectivities
(Gegenständlichkeiten). Its process is to be a relation between different kinds of liv-
ing experiences and objects, between what is pre-given and what will later permit
the subject/object relation. Moreover, if the antepredicative life finds its ground on
the experience of the world in which we take part and in which the mundane ego is
not yet able to access its very own self-consciousness, the world must be understood
as a horizon that needs to be constantly constituted, and carries in itself an overture
of sense. It is the gap between the world and the subject that gives rise to any attribu-
tion of sense. This is how the passive dimension of experience matters that much,
because it takes place in the “environment” (Umgebung) necessary for knowledge
to that extent that it precedes any thetic act:
The environment (Umgebung) is copresent as a domain of what is pregiven, of a passive
pregiveness, i.e., of what is always already there without any attention of a grasping regard,
without any awakening of interest. All cognitive activity, all turning-toward a particular
object in order to grasp it, presupposes this domain of passive pregiveness. The object
affects from within its field; it is an object, an existent among others, already pregiven in a
passive doxa, in a field which itself represents a unity of passive doxa (Husserl 1973, 30).
This implies that the passive synthesis is the origin of all knowledge. It is the activ-
ity of the phenomenal conscience which permits the ego to actualize its field of view
concerning the objects (Objekte) so that these objects become, thanks to the reduc-
tion, categorial objectities resulting from the aware activity of the ego. This activity
of conscience is essential in many forms, but particulary permits us here to under-
stand the propitious modalities of the expression of living experience. Indeed,
Husserl underlines another aspect of the passive synthesis regarding its linguistic
role, the fact that the comprehension of words as “sounds of the language” comes
from the passive synthesis, not the conscious and active one:
in ordinary reading, we by no means have, combined with that, an accompanying articula-
tion of actual thinking, of thinking produced from the Ego, member by member, in syn-
thetic activity. Rather, this course of thinking properly is only indicated (by the passively
flowing synthesis of the sensuous verbal sounds) as a course of thinking to be performed
(Husserl 1969, 56).
We can see here that the production of sense, whether it is about the expression or
the entire thinking, is essentially linked to the passive synthesis as something to be
done. Husserl indicates in this passage that language and the whole activity of
thinking is based on the passive synthesis – this latter is the unique necessary activ-
ity to acquire a conscious association. The antepredicative may also be compre-
hended as a primary form of linguistic, a proto-language based on the prejudicative
living, the perceiving living. Afterwards, when this process of passive association is
done, words acquire another level of meaning. Indeed, Husserl underlines the fact
that once the formatting of the linguistic and predicative thought is consciously
done, words, which originally have only a social and positive meaning, now bear a
soul as they are expressed by a thinking subject: “in speaking we are continuously
performing an internal act of meaning, which fuses with the words and, as it were,
animates them. The effect of this animation is that the words and the entire locution,
as it were, embody in themselves a meaning, and bear it embodied in them as their
sense” (Husserl 1973, 22).
We could eventually say that the passive synthesis is necessary to comprehend a
unity within the variety of different living experiences. It is also necessary to express
experiences through words inasmuch as thinking is a result of an experience that is
antepredicative. The passive synthesis is then the junction between the transcenden-
tal life and the world because the world “in its primitive ontological structure, it is
the preconstituted substrate of all meaning” (Derrida 2003, 110). But it constantly
needs to be consciously actualized within the process of the passive synthesis and,
furthermore, the reduction. Nevertheless, the expression of reduced living experi-
ences is still unexplained and needs to be clearly analyzed for it certainly is the most
difficult task of the phenomenologist. Indeed, how can a reduced experience be
expressible in a mundane language that is at the same time rejected during the
reduction?
4 he Expression of Reduced Experience:

T
The Transcendental Sprache
4.1 he Reduction and the Problem of the Mundane

T
Language
Within this last part of our article, we will try to answer this question: Under which
circumstances is it possible to express reduced experiences? If it is accepted that
every thought is developed through language, the phenomenological reduction
might hamper the expression of immanent experiences because it sets aside every-
thing that is related to the doxic terms of the mundane life to which the language
belongs. Moreover, as Husserl wrote first it in the fifth Logical Investigation, judg-
ments “elude complete conceptualization and expression, they are evident only in
their living intention, which cannot be adequately imparted in words” (Husserl
2001b, 88). It is then obvious that Husserl could not consider at this moment that the
inner experiences may be completely expressed within words, but the introduction
of the reduction has brought with it a major turnaround: the living experience can
12 J.-D. Thumser
now be fully examined as we practice the transcendental reduction. Nevertheless,

could this examination be done in a non-linguistic way? Certainly not. And the
descriptive task that Husserl aimed for depends on a linguistic approach that needs
to be revisited. Since 1913 Husserl asked himself about this linguistic reform: “For
how far logical and, in a like way, pure ontological, pure ethical, and whatever other
apriori propositions one may cite, actually express something phenomenological,
and to which phenomenological stata the respective propositions may belong, is not
obvious” (Husserl 1983, 211–212). This difficulty is even greater because the lan-
guage does not seem to be adequate to signify the immanent dimension of pure
experiences. Its current use is only to describe physical phenomena, landscapes,
faces, in other words the being as it is given. But phenomenology cannot be limited
to this point for its aim is to explain a vision of essence (Wesenschau). However, can
the phenomenologist content her/himself with the common language? Husserl does
not give a definitive answer to that, but claims in the first volume of the Ideen: “as
phenomenologists we are not supposed to stop being natural human beings or posit-
ing ourselves as such when we speak” (Husserl 1983, 149). This assertion leaves us
in uncertainty as we doubt about the reach of the ordinary language to express expe-
riences of an eidetic order. Therefore the eidetic reflections encounter a certain risk
to that extent that they might not be expressible, at least in their own essence. This
alternative may also be related to the later thesis of a private language, as Wittgenstein
stated. But is it really the case with Husserl?
4.2 The Egological Content of the Expression
Husserl could not assuredly accept a dualistic way to understand the expression of
the inner experience. For instance, there cannot be an inner and private language
that could be distinguished from a mundane language because the experience can-
not be divided into two: the first unspeakable and the other expressible. The reduc-
tion itself shows that there is a way to access the inner sphere of the subject and, as
we reach this sphere, the subject acquires the ability to make salient “the unnoticed
intrusions of empty verbal meanings” (Husserl 1983, 212). Therefore the phenom-
enological reduction permits to comprehend words in a non-mundane and scientific
way, because it gives prominence to the immanent originary life in which every-
thing is “seen” in a sheer way without any specific thetic acts. The intelligibility of
the inner experiences is thus egologically oriented. How could it be otherwise? As
Berthoz and Petit also stated: “the very notion of a ‘point of view’ refers to an ego:
‘an objective point of view’ is typically a contradictio in adjecto” (Berthoz and Petit
2006, 280). Moreover, as Husserl affirmed in an unpublished manuscript, the reduc-
tion allows the phenomenologist to give another content to his discourse, a transcen-
dental content for it is oriented by the ego:
In the return to the absolute subjective sphere, this one reveals itself as a field of experience
and of descriptive research. But jointly, it is given to us as a predicative truth which will be
studied and expressed, a truth that might beside be, from a descriptive point of view, a truth
of fact or a truth of essence. Therefore we use here the language and its significations – but
the language will be egologically reduced and the words and the propositions will be
reduced to simple egological symbols which freely receive their meaningful content from
the ego, a content that, by means of the bracketting, will become a purely egological mean-
ing […]. As a transcendental ego, I shape symbols – transcendental symbols which exist in
my transcendental sphere and which are then intersubjectively ‘feelable’ in their intersub-
jective transcendental being, and which, as significations, symbolize transcendental states
of affairs. We need then, thanks to their signification, to set in general transcendental truths,
first by a descriptive way for my primordial sphere, secondly for my intersubjectivity that
is egologically oriented, for the world of experience in a transcendental apprehension in all
its strata. – It is on this that we potentially must ground in an indirect way a transcendental
knowledge: ‘a transcendental logic’. The logic of predicative truths, as transcendental
truths, the Logos of the transcendental. […] Of course, all of this is not contradicted by the
fact that the accomplished enunciation in words, in the German grammar already has a
meaning which refers itself to the German nation, and, consequently, that I immediately
contradict the transcendental epoch with my discourse, even in the discourse-that-I-have-
with-myself. Furthermore, it is sufficient here to return to the possibility to reduce by this
way my language, in order to repel any mundane meaning so that it could become a pure
expression of what I aim for, it means consequently that I do not put anything else in value
but the discourse originally conceived by myself (Husserl 1931, 19–20).
We see here that the use of language is totally different when we practice the phe-
nomenological reduction because the content of the expressions is transcendentally
oriented. Everything that we could say then expresses an intimate experience, an
egological experience. As Husserl’s disciple Eugen Fink also stated, the natural lan-
guage is not modified during or after the reduction, but receives another content that
is, this time, transcendentally modified. We do not speak about mundane, ephemeral
things, nor about Abschattungen, but about things themselves as they are perceived
within the inner transcendental sphere. “I always speak the natural language, but in
a transcendentally altered sense” (Fink 1995, 86). While the common language is
used to express things in a thetic way, to express them in their current actuality and
qualities, their hic et nunc, phenomenology has contrariwise in sight the originary
experience of the transcendental subject. And, even if there is nothing like a proper
phenomenological language, there is however a verification of the content of sen-
tences: “Phenomenological sentences can therefore only be understood if the situa-
tion of the giving of sense to the transcendental sentence is always repeated, that is,
if the predicatively explicating terms are always verified again by phenomenologiz-
ing intuition” (Fink 1995, 92). We are now able to understand that the transcenden-
tal Sprache is not a specific language with another structure, but a modification of
the sense of each sentence by the practice of the reduction. Thus the “language will
be egologically reduced”. And, at least but not at last, the use of inverted commas is
remarkable as well in Husserl’s corpus, because it underlines another understanding
of words and things. Indeed, in contrast to the scientific use of language, Husserl
uses the inverted commas to speak about things not as real components of nature,
but as correlates of conscious acts; it points out the redirection of the sight from the
thing simpliciter that is perceived and scientifically explainable to the thing idealiter
which is only reachable for the conscious subject:
14 J.-D. Thumser
‘In’ the reduced perception (in the phenomenologically pure mental process), we find, as
indefeasibly belonging to its essence, the perceived as perceived, to be expressed as ‘mate-
rial thing’, ‘plant’, ‘tree’, ‘blossoming’ ; and so forth. Obviously, the inverted commas are
significant in that they express that change in sign, the correspondingly radical significa-
tional modification of the words (Husserl 1983, 216).
5 Conclusion: An Overture to the Ichrede
Finally, we are now able to say that the phenomenological langage is grounded on
the passive synthesis because every thought is originally linguistic even if a lived
experience is not conscious at first. The passive synthesis is indeed an activity which
allows to organize thoughts and to actualize them within a underlying process which
can constantly become conscious. Furthermore, the phenomenologist discovers an
always new world as he practices the reduction – the transcendental life –, and real-
izes that she/he is the only constitutive part in the intersubjective constitution of
sense with other egos. “The transcendental life is given to me, that is also that I give
it to me. […] Living as a phenomenologist is also conquering in ourselves a self that
is more lively than the simple natural I” (Depraz 1991, 461). Nevertheless, as the
phenomenologist conquers another level of life, the expression of the inner living
experiences is still problematic for there is no proper transcendental language. The
only thing that changes is the content of sense that is given while the reduction is
practiced. Therefore, the linguistic way to express things themselves is modified
with the use of inverted commas, for example. But the important aspect of this lin-
guistic modification is not the use of this kind of tools, it is instead the egological
centration. Indeed, and as a conclusion to this paper, Husserl invites us to constantly
meditate about the transcendental and egological part of our lives where everything
makes sense. It is his goal to emphasize the fact that every discourse can be an ego-
logical discourse (Ichrede) insofar as the reduction is practiced. Suddenly as the
transcendental ego reflects on itself a “new understanding of life” can be revealed in
order to establish a “universal science” grounded on the transcendental
subjectivity:
We must now focus on the discourse of the I and each participant is the I, the I that is in
question. I, I say so as a beginner in philosophy, I want to start a new understanding of life,
a constant knowledge from an absolute legitimacy and that could in some way, I hope so,
neatly, become a universal science (Husserl 2002, 315).
References
Berthoz, A., and J.-L. Petit. 2006. Phénoménologie et physiologie de l’action. Paris: Odile Jacob.
Chauvier, S. 2009. Ce que Je dit du sujet. Les Études Philosophiques 88: 117–135.
Depraz, N. 1991. La vie m’est-elle donnée ? Réflexions sur le statut de la vie dans la phénoménolo-
gie. Les Études Philosophiques 4: 459–473.
———. 1999. Écrire en phénoménologie. Paris: Encre Marine.
Derrida, J. 2003. The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy. Trans. Marian Hobson.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Escoubas, E., and M. Richir. 1989. Husserl. Grenoble: Jérôme Millon.
Fink, E. 1995. Sixth Cartesian Meditation: The Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method. Trans.
Ronald Bruzina. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Hart, J.G. 2009. Who One Is, Book 1: Meontology of the “I”. A Transcendental Phenomenology.
Dordrecht: Springer.
Heisenberg, W. 1942. Reality and Its Order. http://werner-heisenberg.unh.edu/t-OdW-english.
htm#seg13.
Husserl, E. 1931. Ms B I 5 V [Epoché, Reduktion, korrelative Weltbetrachtung und Phänomenologie],
Erster Gang der Besinnung, Reduktion korrelativer Welbetrachtung und nach der ontologischen
Seite Anfang ontologischer Eidetik. Reduktion. Voran ein Blatt über transzendentale Sprache
<?> als zunächst ständige Voraussetzung.
———. 1960. Cartesian Meditations. Trans. Dorion Cairns. Dordrecht: Springer.
———. 1969. Formal and Transcendental Logic. Trans. Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff.
———. 1973. Experience and Judgment. Trans. Churchill J.S., and Ameriks K. London:
Routledge.
———. 1983. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy,
First Book. Trans. Kersten, F. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
———. 2001a. Logical Investigations, Volume I. Trans. John Findlay. London: Routledge.
———. 2001b. Logical Investigations, Volume II. Trans. John Findlay. London: Routledge.
———. 2001c. Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis. Trans. Anthony J. Steinbock.
Dordrecht: Kluwer.
———. 2002. Einleitung in die Philosophie. Vorlesungen 1922/23. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Merleau-Ponty, M. 1960. Signes. Paris: Gallimard.
Montavont, A. 1999. De la passivité dans la phénoménologie de Husserl. Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France.
Perry, J. 1993. The Problem of the Essential Indexical and Other Essays. New York/Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Petitot, J. 2004. Morphologie et esthétique. Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose.
Reinach, A. 2012. Phénoménologie réaliste. (Ed. Dominique Pradelle). Paris: Vrin.
Schnell, A. 2007. Husserl et les fondements de la phénoménologie constructive. Grenoble: Jérôme
Millon.
Singer, T., B. Seymour, J. O’Doherty, H. Kaube, R.J. Dolan, and C.D. Frith. 2004. Empathy for
Pain Involves the Affective But Not Sensory Components of Pain. Science 303 (5661): 1157–
1162. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1093535.
Woodruff Smith, D., and R. McIntyre. 1982. Husserl and Intentionality: A Study of Mind, Meaning
and Language. Dordrecht/Boston/Lancaster: Kluwer.
Parts, Wholes, and Phenomenological
Necessity
Adam Konopka
Abstract This chapter reconstructs the account of the organization of unified defi-
nite manifolds that Husserl developed in his early logic of parts and wholes. I argue
that Husserl’s conception of necessity gets fixed through the logic of fitness that is
operative in his account of unified definite manifolds that are organized by sym-
metrical part/whole relations. Husserl’s logical account of necessity finds its ulti-
mate justification in his theory of intentionality and is operative in his
phenomenological methodology generally. Through this conception of necessity of
the way in which manifolds are unified and organized, Husserl radicalized and
exploded the Kantian conception of the material a priori and distinguished among
several kinds of a priori, e.g., the correlational a priori, a priori bound to the empir-
ical, and pure material a priori. Husserl’s phenomenological account of the material
a priori further clarifies the important differences with Kant’s approach to the prob-
lem of necessity.
Keywords Necessity · Manifolds · Unity · Synthesis · A Priori · Kant · Husserl
1 Introduction
The problem of necessity concerns the identification and clarification of the kinds
of invariant unities that can be known amidst the variant manifolds of a contingent
world. This problem can be initially highlighted through a reference to the
Copernican revolution and the historical shift from a geocentric understanding of
solar system variation to a heliocentric view. From a geocentric approach, the appar-
ent motion of heavenly bodies, e.g., sun, moon, and stars, are accounted for in terms
Portions of Adam Konopka’s chapter entitled “Parts, Wholes, and Phenomenological Necessity”
were published in Ecological Investigations: A Phenomenology of Habitats (New York: Routledge,
2020), 126–138.
A. Konopka (*)
Xavier University, Cincinnati, OH, USA
e-mail: konopkaa@xavier.edu

18 A. Konopka
of the actual motion of heavenly bodies. By contrast, a heliocentric approach

accounts for the apparent motion of heavenly bodies in terms of the motion of the
observer. The observer undergoes variations that condition the knowledge of the
variations in the world. In this historical sense, the problem of necessity is the prob-
lem of how to account for invariance amidst complex variation. The difficulty lies
in the authentic clarification of how the variation in a contingent manifold is given
as a unified determinate object with a necessary invariance-amdist-variability. As
Julia Jansen formulated it, the problem of necessity concerns the way in which a
contingent sensible manifold is unified, “While the world is given as a sensible
manifold, and, insofar as it is given, it is always contingent, its unity may carry and
be known to carry necessity, in which case the unified manifold attains objectivity.”1
Jansen identifies an important difference in the way in which Kant and Husserl
account for the kinds of necessity in which sensible manifolds are unified as objects.
While Kant’s account maintains that a unified manifold receives the necessity of its
unity in an asymmetrical relation to the transcendental unity of apperception,
Husserl’s symmetrical account recognizes that objects are passively synthesized
with a necessary unity proper to themselves.
2 The Problem of Necessity and Pure Logic
Husserl’s treatment of the problem of necessity in the Logical Investigation arises in

the context of his discussion of the propositional truths of this scientific knowledge.
Scientific knowledge is grounded in explanatory laws that provides justification for
knowledge, “To know the ground of anything means to see the necessity of its being
so and so. Necessity as an objective predicate of truth (which is then called a neces-
sary truth) is tantamount to the law-governed validity of the state of affairs in
question.”2 Husserl thus identifies the necessity of a truth with justified proposi-
tional knowledge and makes the distinction between the necessity involved in indi-
vidual and general truths. Individual truths contain propositions that indicate the
actual existence of factual singulars and, as such, are contingent. By contrast, gen-
eral truths involve assertions that infer the possible existence of individual facts
from general laws. General truths yield justified propositions through deduction and
have a necessity that results from the interconnectedness of basic laws that comprise
a systematic theory.
The necessity involved in general truths is not vague and indeterminate, but has
determination in correlation with a given field of knowledge that comprises a deter-
minate manifold, “The objective correlate of the concept of a possible theory … is
known in mathematical circles as a manifold.”3 A manifold is a multiplicity in the
1
Jansen, Julia. 2015. Transcendental Philosophy and the Problem of Necessity in a Contingent
World. Metodo: International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy, 1, 48.
2
Husserl, Edmund. 1975. Husserliana XVIII Logische Untersuchungen. Erster Teil. Prolegomena
zur reinen Logik, ed. Elmar Holenstein. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, §63. Hereafter, Hua. XVII.
3
Ibid., §36.
Parts, Wholes, and Phenomenological Necessity 19
formal and mathematical sense and Husserl’s conception of the objective correlate
of theoretical investigation finds its analytic expression as a theory of manifolds. It
was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz who first envisioned the ideal of logic as a “discipline
of mathematical form and strictness” and the breadth of logic to include a mathemat-
ical theory of probabilities.”4 Leibniz’s notion of mathesis univeralis was the first
systematic attempt to unify the formal apophantics of Aristotle with the mathemati-
cal logic that historically developed after Franciscus Vieta. As Husserl states, “Our
relation to him [Leibniz] is relatively of the closest” regarding the understanding of
the relationship between logic and mathematics, a relation that finds its mature
expression in Formal and Transcendental Logic.5 In the Logical Investigations,
Husserl identifies Leibniz’s notion of a pure theory of manifolds with pure logic – a
discipline that investigates the necessary unities of synthesized manifolds.
Pure logic is a discipline that underlies the methodological and normative fea-
tures of logic in general and can serve as a formal theory of scientific reasoning. The
discipline of pure logic identifies and clarifies meaning-categories
(Bedeutungskategorien) and object-categories (Gegenstandskategorien) and the
lawful combination of the two. For example, pure logic identifies and clarifies the
laws governing combinations of meanings into propositions, arguments, and theo-
ries. The investigation into the meaning categories yield formal concepts that cor-
respond to the categories of formal ontology, e.g., concepts such as one, object,
quality, relation, number, plurality, whole, and part. These formal categories are
organized around the empty notion of “something” or “object as such” and are dis-
tinguished from the material concepts of object-categories. While the formal con-
cepts apply to any object whatsoever, material concepts such as color, brightness,
tone, intensity, plant, animal, and so on are organized around the highest regions
among various given objects. The investigation into these object categories yields a
study of unified definite manifolds.
3 Parts, Wholes, and Necessary Fitness
Husserl’s Third Investigation is a study of the lawful relations among two formal
concepts of meaning categories – the essential necessity among parts and wholes.
He begins this investigation with the general distinction between simple and com-
plex objects. Simple objects have no parts, while complex objects do. Complex
objects, in other words, are wholes with parts. This distinction between wholes and
parts that arises in complex objects is primitive, which is to say, no other terminol-
ogy can provide a concept that is more basic nor can the relation between wholes
and part be clarified by a more primitive terminology as long as parts and wholes are
4
Hua. XVIII, §60.
5
Husserl, Edmund. 1974. Husserliana XVII Formale and transzendentale Logik. Versuch einer
Kritik der logischen Vernunft, ed. Paul Janssen. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, §23. Husserl did not
think that Leibniz’s notion of mathesis universalis provided an adequate account of how the unity
that brings together apophantic logic and mathematical logic in a single science is achieved.
20 A. Konopka
taken in general indeterminateness of formal concepts of meaning categories.6 Parts

and wholes are fundamentally correlative, which is to say, they are defined in a
mutual relation. Parts part wholes and wholes whole parts, that is, each is unintel-
ligible without relation to the other.
The first distinction Husserl then makes concerns two types of parts – indepen-
dent (Selbstständigkeit) parts (pieces) and non-independent parts (moments).
Moments are parts that are non-independent from their wholes. Consider, for exam-
ple, a material object taken as a whole – it cannot be presented without reference to
its extension, surface, color, and brightness. Consider, in particular, a leaf from a
fallen tree. These constituent parts of the leaf are organized through relations of
dependence. The brightness of the leaf cannot be presented without presupposing its
color, the color of the leaf cannot be presented without its surface, and its surface
cannot be presented without its extension. These presentational moments of the leaf
supplement each other and their whole necessarily, which is to say, the necessary
supplementation involved in complex wholes defines Husserl’s notion of moment
(non-independent part).7
6
In Peter Simons’ pioneering attempt to formalize Husserl’s mereology, he criticizes Husserl’s
seemingly arbitrary privilege of complex objects over simple objects. This criticism also arises in
Simons’ comment on Husserl’s concept of a pregnant whole, “The pregnant whole for the founda-
tion relation in question offers [Husserl] the promise of being neither too large nor too small. But
this concept is itself defined in terms of the relation of individual foundation, as we shall see below,
so it cannot be invoked without circularity. I do not believe that Husserl saw the threat of circularity
here…” Simons, Peter. 1992. Philosophy and Logic in Central Europe from Bolzano to Tarski:
Selected Essays. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 90. This criticism is correctly applied to
the Third Investigation where Husserl does not provide this justification. However, it is ultimately
Husserl’s analysis of intentionality in the Sixth Investigation and eventual development of the
phenomenological reduction that provide the justification for the individual foundation of complex
objects and Husserl’s concept of pregnant whole. Husserl methodologically establishes his theory
of intentionality between the first and second editions of the Logical Investigations through his
non-psychologistic investigation of the relationship between consciousness and presentational
contents (sense – Sinn). Husserl understands presentational contents to be necessarily intentional
and intentionality to be necessarily content directed. See Husserl, Edmund. 1984. Husserliana XIX
Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Teil. Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der
Erkenntnis. ed. Ursula Panzer, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, Sixth Investigation, §48; Husserl,
Edmund. 1950. Husserliana III Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenlogie und phänomenlogischen
Philosophie. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie. ed. Walter Biemel.
The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, §2 and 88.
7
Hua. XIX, Third Investigation, §24. For a pioneering study of Husserl’s part/whole logic, see
Sokolowski, Robert. 1968. The Logic of Parts and Wholes in Husserl’s Investigations. Philosophy
and Phenomenological Research, 28(4): 537–553. For an approach to the relationship between
Husserl’s part/whole logic and broader methodology, see John Drummond, John. 2008. Wholes,
Parts, and Phenomenological Methodology. In Edmund Husserl: Logische Untersuchungen, ed.
Verena Mayer, 105–122. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Hereafter, Drummond 2008a. For a critique of
Sokolowski, see Lampert, Jay. 1989. Husserl’s Theory of Parts and Wholes: The Dynamic of
Individuating and Contextualizing Interpretation – Übergehen, Abheben, Ergänzungsbedurftigkeit.
Research in Phenomenology 19(1): 195–212. For an account that explores the relationship between
Husserl and Heidegger in light of part/whole logic, see Øverenget, Einar. 1996. The Presence of
Husserl’s Theory of Wholes and Parts in Heidegger’s Phenomenology. Research in Phenomenology,
26(1): 171–197. For a criticism of Husserl’s part/whole logic through a notion of biological func-
Pieces, by contrast, are independent parts that can by their nature be presented
apart from the other parts forming a complex whole. Consider, for example, a tree
as a whole comprised of branches, trunk, bark, roots, and so on. These parts can be
presented separately – aspects of the tree branch can be presented in separation from
the other independent parts of the tree, e.g., extension, weight, and shape. Not only
can these parts be presented independently from the whole of the tree, e.g., the tree
weight and branch weight have separable sums, but the parts can be independently
presented from each other, e.g., the shape of the branches and trunk are not depen-
dent on each other. Husserl recognized that certain aspects of a part are altered when
removed from its whole while other aspects retain their identity. The fallen branch
is separated from its functional unity with the whole tree and its corresponding
functional sense is altered – the branch no longer functions in the nutritive dynamic
of its whole – and therefore the functional sense of the branch has a non-independent
relation (moment) to its whole. The fallen branch is a branch of the tree in name
only (homonymously), which is to say, abstractly. However, Husserl’s point is that
the phenomenally presentational aspects of the branch – e.g., extension, weight, and
shape – have senses that are independent in that they are not altered by their separa-
tion and are therefore not in need of supplementation. The independent branch can
be presented apart from its functional incorporation into the whole tree and can be
presented in its own unified right – as wood. Husserl thus defines a “piece” as any
part that is independent relative to the whole W of which it is a part.8
Husserl’s mereology develops out of this basic distinction between independent
and non-independent parts, a distinction that relies on a notion of necessity at work
in the supplementation involved in alteration. As we will see below, this notion of
necessity among part/part relations and part/whole relations is basic to his presenta-
tional account of dependence and has implications for the way Husserl’s conception
of necessity relates to Kant’s. The important point here is that the principle of rela-
tive dependency not only goes all the way down in Husserl’s conception of part/part
relations, but even extends to the basic part/whole relation itself. In other words,
parts exist only in a relative dependency to wholes and while some parts can become
tion, see De Preester, Helena. 2004. Part-Whole Metaphysics Underlying Issues of Internality/
Externality. Philosophica 73: 27–50. For additional approaches, see Lohmar, Dieter. 2000. Edmund
Husserls ‘Formale und transzendentale Logik’. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft;
Gurwitsch, Aron. 1966. Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology. Evanston: Northwestern
University Press; Gurwitsch, Aron. 1964. The Field of Consciousness. Evanston: Northwestern
University Press; Seebohm, Thomas M. 1973. Reflexion and Totality in the Philosophy of
E. Husserl. Journal of the British Society of Phenomenology, 4:20–30; Fine, Kit. 1995. Part-whole.
In The Cambridge Companion to Husserl, ed. Barry Smith and David Woodruff Smith, 463–485.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Willard, Dallas. 2003. The Theory of Wholes and Parts
and Husserl’s Explication of the Possibility of Knowledge in the Logical Investigations. In
Husserl’s Logical Investigations Reconsidered, ed. Denis Fisette, 163–182. Dordrecht: Kluwer
Academic Publishers; Drummond, John. 2008. Historical Dictionary of Husserl’s Philosophy.
Lanham: Scarecrow Press. Hereafter, Drummond 2008b; and Moran, Dermot and Joseph Cohen,
Joseph. 2012. The Husserl Dictionary. New York: Bloomsbury.
8
Hua. XIX, Third Investigation, §17.
22 A. Konopka
presented as objects in their own right as wholes and thereby become a self-founding
concretum, this nevertheless presupposes a more original complex whole.
Husserl’s mereology proceeds from the distinction between (non)independent
parts (pieces and moments) to founding/founded relations, relations that Husserl
uses extensively not only in the Third Investigation, but in his later understanding of
constitution.9 Generally speaking, Husserl employs founding/founded relations
extensively in his subsequent articulation of the network of definitions and laws
governing the manifold of relationships that follow upon the piece/moment distinc-
tion. Husserl defines foundational moments as:
(A) founded moment – a moment for which another moment provides a foundation
in the formation of a whole;” such that founded moment A supposes and forms
a unity with moment B or whole W according to necessary association.
(B) founding moment – provides a supposition and forms a unity with another
moment and for the whole that it forms with its associated moments; such that
moment B founds moment A such that B is the supposition of and unified with
A or whole W according to necessary association.10
Consider a forest as an extended illustration of these founding/founded relations.
The forest has a manifold of moments that can be considered in various founding/
founded relationships. The populations of trees provide habitat for a manifold of
insects, birds, and other animals. The set of interactions involved in this habitat rela-
tion could be considered a specific type of collective according to relations of foun-
dation. If the habitat collective is merely a sum or aggregate with no founding/
founded relations, then it is merely a whole in a rather wide sense, that is, deter-
mined merely in terms of abstracted unifying moment such as number or content.
The habitat-as-whole would be merely a collective that lacks inherent organization.
If the tree populations interact in a meaningful relation with the insects, birds, and
other animals, this meaningful interaction can be expressed in various kinds of
founding/founded relations. Consider, for example, interactions involving nutrition
distribution. The tree provides nutrition for the insect, the insect is nutrient provi-
sion for the woodpecker, and so on. In this nutrient chain, one that has causal attri-
butes as well, the nutrient provision of the woodpecker is founded on the insect,
which in turn is founded on the beech tree. These founded/founding moments in the
constitution of the nutrient chain could further be organized according to several
additional distinctions that Husserl makes in his theory of foundation, e.g., immedi-
ate or mediate, remote or proximate, and so on. We could say, for example, that the
beech tree is a mediate founding moment to the nutrient provision of the wood-
pecker, while the insect is the immediate founding moment. It is according to found-
ing relations such as this that the nutrient fitness involved in a habitat is not merely
9
Edmund Husserl 1973. Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic, ed.
Ludwig Landgrebe, trans. James S. Churchill and Kart Ameriks. Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, §81. See also Sokolowski, Robert. 1970. The Formation of Husserl’s Concept of
Constitution. The Hague: Springer.
10
See Hua. XIX, Third Investigation, §14; Drummond 2008b, 82.
a sum or aggregate, but an organized and organizing collective of meaningful rela-

tions that, as we have seen, have suppositions and forms of unified contents that are
proper to the kind of object that it is.
While Husserl’s understanding of wholes is not as developed as his mereology,
his analysis of wholes is nevertheless instructive for drawing out the extent to which
a priori necessity pervades his part/whole logic. Husserl defines a pregnant or
proper whole as a set of contents (parts) united by a single, although possibly com-
plex, foundation without the help of additional, non-essential contents (parts).11
Notice that this definition of whole makes use of the non-independency of founding/
founded relations. Every content (part) comprised in a proper whole is foundation-
ally related with every other part or content comprised by that same whole. Husserl
is clear that the unity of foundational relationships in proper wholes is not an addi-
tional moment over and above this interconnected unity of moments. Rather the
“unifying moment” (Einheitsmoment) of the whole is immanent to the founding
relations. This means that the unity of proper wholes arises from and finds its justi-
fication in the need for supplementation according to the lawful regularity of its
non-independent parts. Even in the most minimal sense – the necessity of coexis-
tence – is sufficient to produce the unity of a whole. Indeed, the whole is nothing
other than the interconnected unity of founding/founding moments and this unity is
nothing other that the necessary lawful interconnections of moments.
This brief introduction to Husserl’s account of necessity allows for a more gen-
eral characterization of his position. Complex objects are presented as identities in
a manifold that are organized in the part/whole relations. The principle of lawful
necessity not only pervades Husserl’s conception of parts, but his conception of
wholes. As we have seen, Husserl provides a symmetrical notion of presentational
dependence that operates with a notion of necessity that can be defined as necessary
supplementation involved in alteration. The symmetry between parts and wholes in
complex objects is absolute according to a priori necessity. This has not only been
seen in Husserl’s first distinction between parts as independent or non-independent
according to necessary supplementation, but in his characterization of the unity of
wholes in terms of the necessity at work in founding/founded relations. To put it
differently, Husserl provides a symmetrical model of presentational dependency
that finds its evidential justification, as I explore below, in his conception of noesis-
noema correlate.
4 Multi-level Generalizations
The problem of necessity is also tied, more broadly, to the process of generalization
from the unified definite manifolds of perceptual sense to gradient kinds of general-
izations involved in conceptualization. The unified definite manifolds involved in
complex wholes can be distinguished according to the kinds of synthesis involved
11
Hua. XIX, §21.
24 A. Konopka
in perception and conceptualization. First, the unities involved in the perception of

synthesized manifolds yield an identity. This identity-synthesis involved in percep-
tion implies that objectivity is not reducible to the presentational phases of the
intended perceptual object, but rather has the unification of an identical individual.
In short, perceptual synthesis in a manifold yields an identity – a unified and indi-
vidual object.12 Perceptual objects obtain their identity through the synthesis of
appearances that manifest a unified individual.
Second, the unity involved in conceptualization is the result of a synthesis of a
like with like (similarity). The synthesis involved in conceptualization is involved in
the predications in which properties or attributes are related to objects, e.g., percep-
tual identities. For example, the judgment “The tree is tall” does not merely indicate
that the tree has a certain vertical magnitude – that the tree is this tall. This would
merely indicate that this tree is this tall and, as such, it is different than other tall
trees. Instead, the judgment involves a predication of a property or attribute that
involves a synthesis of like with like – that the tree is tall and as such is similar to
other objects that have the attribute of being tall even amidst noticeably different
heights. Such a predication involves the synthesis of similarity (like with like) at
work in conceptualization.
The unities involved in the synthesis of like with like among collectives of
objects can arise through a consideration of similarities or differences among the
individuals of the collective. The collective is not merely an empty totality, but can
be considered in terms of the similarity of objects with common attributes. The
agreement of sense involved in this synthesis does not cancel the difference among
spatially individuated objects. Rather the similarity of multiple objects is spread out
in an array in which the differentiation of individuals persists. The unity here is the
“unity of a plurality of kinship.”13 The persistence of the recognition of individuals
in a collective distinguishes the identity of perceptual synthesis from the similarity
of like with like involved in conceptualization.
The patterns of similarity involved in collectives can be analyzed at various lev-
els of generality or universality. At one end of the spectrum is the lowest level of
generalization that have only particular instances under them. Husserl calls the ideal
objects of this level “eidetic singularities” that “manifest the lowest specific
differences.”14 Second, the next level of generality focuses on the shared attributes
of individuals of a collective and abstract a universal object-species. A species is a
low level generalization that abstracts the shared attributes of objects as identities
and has a morphological essence that is determined in relation to eidetic singulari-
ties. At the third level of generalization are genera that abstract the common attri-
butes among groups of species and individuals. We can grasp with lawful necessity
the commonalities among species, e.g., beech, maple, and hemlock trees, and arrive
at a genus – tree and plant in general. Finally, the highest level of generality involved
12
Husserl 1973, §81.
13
Ibid., 323.
14
Hua. III, §30. See also Drummond, John. 1995. Synthesis, Identity, and the A Priori. Recherches
husserliennes 4: 27–51.
in collectives of individual objects is a region. Husserl defines region as “the total

highest generic unity” in which the genera and species of independently existing
objects are organized, e.g., the regions of spatio-temporal materiality, animate
organisms, and cultural achievements.
5 The Distinction Between Analytic and Synthetic Necessity
The notion of necessity that is proper to the identity in a manifold of object catego-
ries and the synthesis of like with like involved in meaning-categories phenomeno-
logically clarifies the authentic distinction between analytic and synthetic necessity.
The degrees of increasing levels of generality progress according to an interest in
the unity proper to the synthesis of “like with like” (similarity) and are determined
according to the essential necessity of the eidetic sense of object-categories. The
necessary supplementation involved in the alteration of presentational sense is also
involved in both the determination of the various levels of generalization. We have
seen that the lawful relations of formal concepts such as object, quality, relation,
number, plurality, whole and part have an essential difference from material con-
cepts of object categories, e.g., color, brightness, plant, tree and so on. Analytically
necessary laws are operative in the formal concepts of meaning categories that are
independently founded on the indeterminate notion of “something” or “object as
such.” These analytically necessary laws are free from the determination of material
concepts and the explicit or implicit assertion of individual existence. By contrast,
synthetic necessity is determined by the material laws of object categories and the
specific nature of unified moments.
The essential distinction between formal categories and material spheres of
essence provide the authentic basis for the distinction between analytic and syn-
thetic propositions. An analytic necessity characterizes any proposition that is
unconditionally universal in that it is free from the specifications of particular mate-
rial content. The proposition “A whole has parts and parts have wholes,” for exam-
ple, has an analytic necessity that is merely determined by the formal concepts of
whole and part. Analytic necessity can be distinguished from the specifications
involved in material concepts when positing the relation among object-categories.
Consider, again, the relationship between color and extension. Propositions regard-
ing these material concepts do not involve an inherent relation to each other – color
and extension have meanings that are independent from each other. Nevertheless,
there is an essential necessity in the relation between color and extension. This
necessity among material concepts of object categories is synthetic in that the prop-
osition “Color is not presented without extension” relates different object-categories
that operate at different degrees of generalization. The relation between the sense of
the concept of color and extension not only relate different propositional meanings
but also relate varying levels of generalization – color is a lower level generality
than extension. Color does not analytically entail extension – analytic necessity is
free of material determination of object categories at whatever level of generalization.
26 A. Konopka
Synthetic necessity is defined, in contrast, as any law that identifies a founding rela-
tionship of material concepts through the clarification of the specific sense of uni-
fied moments. The synthetic or material a priori is the necessary lawfulness of the
determinate sense in which various objects are disclosed.
6 Correlational A priori and Intentionality
Husserl solidifies the conception of necessity that is operative in his notions of the
a priori lawfulness through the logic of fitness in his theory of parts and wholes. We
have seen that the necessary supplementation involved in alteration defines, in par-
ticular, Husserl’s conception of a material a priori law as the essential relations of
presentational dependence that organize unified definite manifolds. While Husserl’s
solution to the problem of necessity gets worked out in an eidetic analysis of the
formal concepts of meaning categories, he applies this solution extensively in his
broader philosophical project, e.g., in the investigation into the logic of grammar
and later theory of constitution. Husserl’s mature theory of intentionality provides
the ultimate justification for this conception of necessity. All consciousness is con-
sciousness of such and such – or more formally – the experience of an object and the
object of experience are internally related moments, not externally related pieces.
All objects are complex objects insofar as they are given, minimally, to a subject.
Husserl characterized this internal unity between subject and object as mutually
or reciprocally dependent moments of experience. This involves a departure from
the distinction between “being for us” and “being in itself” in that an “object that is,
but is not and in principle could not be an object of consciousness, is pure non-
sense.”15 Husserl thus rejects Kant’s distinction between the world as it appears and
the world as it is in itself and shifts explanatory emphasis to the correlational varia-
tion involved in the determinate sense through which objects disclose themselves.
It is thus possible to speak of a “correlational a priori” proper to the noesis-
noema correlate that characterizes the structures of intentionality.16 For example, the
variations involved in perception provide correlative unified definite manifolds – a
manifold of appearances proper to the perceptual object and a manifold of perspec-
tival orientation proper to an embodied noesis. The perceptual object, e.g., a tree,
obtains its identity in a synthesis of a visual manifold that is generated by bodily
variations, e.g., eye movements, neck movements, walking around the tree, and so
on. The identity of the tree is manifested in and through the visual manifold. This is
a significant point that can highlight another important difference between Husserl
and Kant. For Husserl, the unity that is achieved in the synthesis identity of
15
Husserl, Edmund. 1973. Husserliana II Die Idee der Phänomenologie. Fünf Vorlesungen, ed.
Walter Biemel. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 19ff.
16
Hua. XVII, §72; Hua. III, §90. Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and
Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David
Carr, §46. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
p erception is inherent in the determinate sense of the object itself and not reducible
to the perceptual achievements of the cognizing and embodied subject. The unity of
identity is present in and through the manifold of contents such that the tree is one
individual that is persistent throughout the manifold – the perceptual contents of the
phases of the perceptual manifold necessarily supplement each other in an identity.
The unity here is discovered (not achieved by the knower) and it is disclosed by and
in the object in a “synthesis of coincidence” (Deckungssynthese).17 The necessity
here finds its justification in the lack of variation or alteration among the proposi-
tional attributes of the tree, e.g., extension, location, color, and so on. The object is
a definite manifold that is unified as an identity – an individual whole – according
to the essential necessity of its interrelated parts.
Kant, by contrast, maintained that the unity involved in objects of appearance is
produced by the achievements of the cognizing knower. Kant’s account of the unity
of a sensible manifold reflects his separation between the faculties of understanding
and sensibility. Unity presupposes synthesis that, in turn, is “an act of the [subject’s]
self-activity.”18 The unity that obtains through synthesis is an “act of the understand-
ing” because unity, unlike form, demands the understanding. On the one hand, the
unity of intuition is produced in the sensible synthesis and gives intuitions to objects.
On the other hand, the unity of concepts, produced by intellectual synthesis, gives
unified concepts to objects. In both cases, the unity is presupposed and conditioned
by a “higher” unity, that is, the “original synthetic unity of apperception.” The unity
of apperception is necessarily valid and guarantees the possibility of self-
consciousness, “The I think must be capable of accompanying all my presentations.”19
This necessity is objective in that it unifies the intuitions of sensible manifolds.
Indeed, Kant characterizes objectivity as “that in whose concept the manifold of a
given intuition is united” and this unity is the achievement of the understanding,
“that which itself is nothing more than the power to combine a priori and the bring
the manifold of given intuitions under the unity of apperception.”20 This unity of
apperception supervenes on objects in a sensible manifold as a one-sided relation
between the subjective condition to the conditioned object.
The principle of necessity in Kant’s conception of the a priori is asymmetrical
(one-sided) from the point of view of Husserl’s notion of the correlational a priori
proper to intentionality. The correlational a priori operates with a symmetrical
notion of necessity wherein the determinate senses of objects themselves obtain
unity and fit together in states of affairs. As we have seen, this difference between
Husserl and Kant’s conception of a priori knowledge is particularly evident in their
respective accounts of the synthesis of sensible manifolds.
17
Ibid., The Origin of Geometry, 360.
18
Kant, Immanuel. 1965. Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, B130. New York:
Macmillan and Company.
19
Ibid., B131.
20
Ibid., B136.
28 A. Konopka
7 The A priori Bound to the Empirical and the Problem

of Necessity
Husserl radicalizes and explodes Kant’s notion of the a priori according to the vari-
ous levels of generalization or universality. As we have seen, the formal objective a
priori involves investigations into formal and mathematical logic and formal ontol-
ogy. The material objective a priori is more complicated in that Husserl distin-
guishes between the a priori that is pure, exact, and “bound to the empirical.”21
Consider, in particular, the conception of necessity that is involved in the “a pri-
ori bound to the empirical.” As we have seen, objects take shape as synthetic unities
in the mode “they themselves” and not merely as appearances of objects. They have
the determinate sense of their material content that is not merely unified according
to the formal concepts of the meaning formations of objects in general. The material
attributes of objects include, as we have seen, characteristics that operate at various
degrees of generalization, e.g., species, genera, and region. In addition, these mate-
rial attributes have particular determination as contingent matters of fact. It is in this
sense that the material objective a priori is also a contingent a priori. The specific
core of material content finds its determination in contrast to the specificity of dif-
ferent subsets of contents and are thus relationally limited in contingent matters of
fact. Objects have relations with different objects and the extent of these differences
limit the possible variations in which the object’s specific attributes can be deter-
mined as an object of that type. The “a priori bound to the empirical” departs from
the contents realized in empirical generalizations and intuits these contents as pre-
sumptively necessary for objects of given type. It is a presumptive generalization
with an empty necessity that is waiting to be filled out in that it has not tested the
necessity of its relations and the universality of its generalizations. The “a priori
bound to the empirical” is distinguished from the “pure material a priori” that has
achieved its fulfillment in the essential necessity manifest through a process of
eidetic variation.
Even though the necessity-amidst-contingency involved in the “a priori bound to
the empirical” has not yet been fully clarified in reflection, this does not imply that
the necessity of unified manifolds is not proper to the objects themselves. Reflection
on the way in which determinate objects in the world present themselves as sensible
manifolds with necessary associations confirms that the world is pre-given with its
own unity of coincidence (Deckung). As Husserl stated,
“…there are breaks here and there, discordances; many a partial belief us crossed
out and becomes a disbelief, many a doubt arises and remains unsolved for a time,
and so forth. But ultimately, … if the world gets an altered sense through many
particular changes, there is a unity of synthesis in spite of such alterations running
through the successive sequence of universal intending of the world – it is one in its
21
Husserl 1973, 374.
particular details … it is in itself the same world. All of this seems very simple, and
yet it is full of marvelous enigmas and gives rise to profound considerations.”22
The necessary unities of sensible manifolds are not merely the result of subjec-
tive accomplishments, but have pre-given associations that are passively synthe-
sized with a necessary unity proper to themselves.
Both Kant and Husserl share the conviction that transcendental philosophy
attempts to identify and clarify the necessity of the lawful regularities in a contin-
gent world through a reference to the necessary conditions of their knowability.
They differ, however, in important ways with regard to their accounts of these nec-
essary conditions. While Kant reasons from the necessary condition of the possibil-
ity of knowledge (unity of apperception – the “I think” that accompanies all my
representations) to that which is conditioned (unified manifolds), Husserl reasons
from the conditioned (organized unity of definite manifolds) to the condition (the
structures of intentionality). In other words, Kant accounts for the necessity proper
to the unity and organization of manifolds in a one-sided relation to the subjective
accomplishments of the knower. In contrast, Husserl account for necessary unities
of sense in terms of a two-sided relation of intentionality that is inclusive of lateral
unities of coincidence.
References
De Preester, Helena. 2004. Part-Whole Metaphysics Underlying Issues of Internality/Externality.

Philosophica 73: 27–50.
Drummond, John. 1995. Synthesis, Identity, and the A Priori. Rescherches husserliennes 4: 27–51.
———. 2008a. Wholes, Parts, and Phenomenological Methodology. In Edmund Husserl: Logische
Untersuchungen, ed. Verena Mayer, 105–122. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
———. 2008b. Historical Dictionary of Husserl’s Philosophy. Lanham: Scarecrow Press.
Fine, Kit. 1995. Part-whole. In The Cambridge Companion to Husserl, ed. Barry Smith and David
Woodruff Smith, 463–485. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gurwitsch, Aron. 1964. The Field of Consciousness. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
———. 1966. Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology. Evanston: Northwestern University
Press.
Husserl, Edmund. 1950. In Husserliana III Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenlogie und phänomen-
logischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie, ed.
Walter Biemel. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
———. 1966. Husserliana XI Analysen zur passiven Synthesis. Aus Vorlesungs- und
Forschungsmanuskripten, 1918–1926, ed. Margot Fleischer. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
———. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Trans.
D. Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
-------. 1973. Husserliana II, Die Idee der Phänomenologie. Fünf Vorlesungen, ed. Walter Biemel.
The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
———. 1974. Husserliana XVII, Formale and transzendentale Logik. Versuch einer Kritik der
logischen Vernunft, ed. Paul Janssen. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Husserl, Edmund. 1966. Husserliana XI Analysen zur passiven Synthesis. Aus Vorlesungs- und
22
Forschungsmanuskripten, 1918–1926. ed. Margot Fleischer, 101. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
30 A. Konopka
———. 1975. Husserliana XVIII Logische Untersuchungen. Erster Teil. Prolegomena zur reinen
Logik, ed. Elmar Holenstein. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
———. 1984. Husserliana XIX Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Teil. Untersuchungen zur
Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis, ed. Ursula Panzer, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Jansen, Julia. 2015. Transcendental Philosophy and the Problem of Necessity in a Contingent
World. Metodo: International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy 1: 47–80.
Lampert, Jay. 1989. Husserl’s Theory of Parts and Wholes: The Dynamic of Individuating and
Contextualizing Interpretation – Übergehen, Abheben, Ergänzungsbedurftigkeit. Research in
Phenomenology, 19(1): 195–212.
Lohmar, Dieter. 2000. Edmund Husserls ‘Formale und transzendentale Logik. Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.
Moran, Dermot, and Joseph Cohen. 2012. The Husserl Dictionary. New York: Bloomsbury.
Øverenget, Einar. 1996. The Presence of Husserl’s Theory of Wholes and Parts in Heidegger’s
Phenomenology. Research in Phenomenology 26 (1): 171–197.
Seebohm, Thomas M. 1973. Reflexion and Totality in the Philosophy of E. Husserl. Journal of the
British Society of Phenomenology 4: 20–30.
Simons, Peter. 1992. Philosophy and Logic in Central Europe from Bolzano to Tarski: Selected
Essays. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Sokolowski, Robert. 1968. The Logic of Parts and Wholes in Husserl’s Investigations. Philosophy
and Phenomenological Research 28 (4): 537–553.
———. 1970. The Formation of Husserl’s Concept of Constitution. The Hague: Springer.
Willard, Dallas. 2003. The Theory of Wholes and Parts and Husserl’s Explication of the Possibility
of Knowledge in the Logical Investigations. In Husserl’s Logical Investigations Reconsidered,
ed. Denis Fisette, 163–182. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
The Early Husserl Between Structuralism
and Transcendental Philosophy
Simone Aurora
Abstract Phenomenology and structuralism are commonly understood as two

opposing and largely incompatible schools of thought. Indeed, if the former is
thought of as the philosophy of subjectivity par excellence, and the latter as the
tradition in which the “death of man” is declared, it seems difficult to challenge the
antagony between them. On closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that this
picture represents an oversimplification and turns out to be, to a great extent, falla-
cious. The aim of this paper is to show that the philosophy of the early Husserl –
notably as exposed in the Logical Investigations – ought to be fully considered as
both part of the wide tradition of Transcendental philosophy as well as Structuralism.
To this end, the paper mainly addresses Husserl’s notion of Wissenschaftslehre and
the mereology developed in the Third logical investigation and, as a result, tries to
show how Husserl’s position can be defined in terms of a “phenomenological struc-
turalism” or a “structural phenomenology” or, as I propose, a “transcendental
structuralism”.
Keywords Edmund Husserl · Logical investigations · Phenomenology ·

Transcendental philosophy · Structuralism
1 Introduction
This paper is consistent with a line of research that had its heyday in the 1970s and
that can be basically traced back to two pioneering works published by Elmar
Holenstein (Holenstein 1975, 1976. See also Kultgen 1975). The main thesis under-
pinning these investigations is that phenomenology and structuralism emerged as
pan-European and interdisciplinary approaches and, far from representing conflict-
ing or alternative schools, developed within a wide and complex network of mutual
influences at the beginning of the twentieth century. Even though these
S. Aurora (*)
Dipartimento di Filosofia, Sociologia, Pedagogia e Psicologia Applicata (FISPPA), Università
degli studi di Padova, Padova, Piazza Capitaniato, Italy
e-mail: simone.aurora@unipd.it

32 S. Aurora
investigations remained quite marginal – when compared with the main directions
of phenomenological and structural inquiries – and were gradually abandoned, they
have recently regained their vigour. Just to mention the most recent and detailed
outcomes of this renewed interest in the relationship between phenomenological
and structural approach, one can make reference to the two last special issues of
Acta Structuralica. International Journal for Structuralist Research (whose topics
are, respectively, Phenomenology and Structuralism and Merleau-Ponty and
Structuralism) as well as to fresh publications like Stawarska (2015), De Palo
(2016), Aurora (2017), Flack (2018).
Against this background, the present paper intends to show in which sense the
work of the early Husserl represents a privileged place for a discussion of the pos-
sible intertwining between phenomenological and structuralist research and, in
this way, to support to the above-mentioned new – or rather – renewed approach
to Husserl.
In a wider sense, the combination of the fundamental features of phenomenology
and structuralism, as found in many aspects of Husserl’s philosophical reflection,
outlines the twin idea that, on the one hand, phenomenology is essential to solving
the typical impasse of a certain kind of structuralism, namely its tendency to employ
too rigid a notion of structure and to rest on a naïve objectivism on the other hand,
structuralism is also revealed as essential to the typical impasse of many versions of
phenomenology with their tendency towards radical forms of subjectivism.
2 Transcendental Philosophy and Structuralism
Let us begin by way of some definitions. We can define “transcendental philosophy”

as any philosophical perspective that displays all of the three following features (for
the following definition of the hallmarks of transcendental philosophy cf. Rametta
2008, 2015).:
1. A philosophy that raises the question concerning the conditions of possibility of
knowledge. This question requires an immanent and critical investigation of the
legitimacy of every cognitive performance and, especially, of scientific knowl-
edge. That is why philosophy becomes, in its transcendental disguise, a “critique
of reason” with Kant and, first with Fichte and then with Husserl, a “theory of
science” or a “science of science”;
2. A philosophy that stresses the productive character of reason and its capacity to
condition and determine reality a priori;
3. A philosophy that demands reflection on the nature of subjectivity and on its
theoretical relationship with experience, on the one hand, and consciousness, on
the other hand.
As regards the term “structuralism”, this usually refers to a research trend in the
humanities, especially popular in France during the 1950s and 1960s, whose “pilot
science” – to borrow an expression from Dosse 1991 – was represented by Saussurian
The Early Husserl Between Structuralism and Transcendental Philosophy 33
linguistics and, above all, by the structural linguistics developed by the schools of
Prague, Moscow and Copenhagen. In fact, however, the history of structuralism
begins much earlier and is not at all limited to the field of linguistics and social sci-
ences and still less to a particular period of French culture (cf. Flack 2016). On the
contrary, structuralism constitutes – using Thomas Kuhn’s classic formulation – a
scientific paradigm, that is a set of principles that “define the legitimate problems
and methods of a research field” or, as in the case of structuralism, of a wide range
of research fields, and that is moreover “sufficiently unprecedented to attract an
enduring group of adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity […]
and sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of
practitioners to resolve” (Kuhn 1996, 10). “Structuralism”, as Ernst Cassirer
observes in Structuralism in Modern Linguistics (1945), is “no isolated phenome-
non; it is, rather, the expression of a general tendency of thought that […] has
become more and more prominent in almost all fields of scientific research”
(Cassirer 1945, 120). In short, structuralism can then be seen as a coherent, unitary
and integrated scientific endeavour, which emerges in opposition to the scientific
framework typical of the nineteenth century, according to which only those explana-
tions are truly scientific, which are causal and historical-genetic.
Mature structuralism, which will not be taken into consideration in what follows,
can then be seen as a modulation of this general “tendency of thought” via an often
original development and a productive complication of those distinguished features
that are the outcome of a well-defined epistemological rupture that took place in
Europe at the turn of the twentieth century and that lies in the emergence, in many
disciplinary areas – such as mathematics, psychology and linguistics – of a scien-
tific paradigm of a structural kind (cf. Bastide 1962; Piaget 1970)
“A structuralist perspective”, Roman Frigg and Ioannis Votsis write, “is one that
sees the investigation of the structural features of a domain of interest as the primary
goal of enquiry.” “This vision”, they continue, “has shaped research programmes in
fields as diverse as linguistics, literary criticism, aesthetics, sociology, anthropol-
ogy, psychology, and various branches of philosophy” (Frigg and Votsis 2011, 227).
In other words, a structuralist approach seeks to identify and describe the specific
structures embedded in a specific class of elements, which evidently varies from
discipline to discipline. To provide a univocal and rigorous definition of the concept
of structure is not an easy task, though (see Boudon: 1971; Broekman 1974 and
Lepschy 1981). Nonetheless, I think that is possible to offer a definition of “struc-
ture” via a combination of two “standard definitions” of this notion, advanced by
Roger Bastide and Jean Piaget in the 60’s.
Bastide defines the concept of structure in the following way:
1) a bound system, such that the change made to an element implies a change in the other
elements; 2) this system (and this is precisely what distinguishes it from a mere organisa-
tion) is latent in the objects – hence the expression of ‘model’ used by the structuralists –
and it is precisely because it is a model that it allows predictability and makes the observed
facts intelligible; 3) models are ‘local’ – not only in the sense that they vary depending on
the disciplines – but also that every discipline may have to use variable models; 4) the con-
cept of structure is a ‘synchronic’ concept (Bastide 1962, 13, my translation).
34 S. Aurora
Some years later, Piaget writes that

A structure is a system of transformations. Inasmuch as it is a system and not a mere collec-
tion of elements and their properties, these transformations involve laws: the structure is
preserved or enriched by the interplay of its transformation laws, which never yields results
external to the system nor employ elements that are external to it. In short, the notion of
structure is comprised of three key ideas: the idea of wholeness, the idea of transformation,
and the idea of self-regulation (Piaget 1970, 5).
According to these definitions, a structure can be described as a totality, that is as a

closed system of elements governed by a set of transformation rules that determine
the range of all possible combinations between its elements, such that every change
made to one of the elements modifies all the others. Moreover, a structure is auto-
regulative. This means that the transformation rules of a structure cannot yield ele-
ments which do not belong to the domain of the structure itself. Furthermore,
elements produced through the transformation rules preserve these same rules and
are subject to them. Finally, a structure must always be able to be interpreted in
terms of a model, namely of a formal description that allows one to outline and
predict the relations that subsist among the elements composing the structure itself.
While Husserl’s work is widely (though not universally) accepted as belonging
to the tradition of transcendental philosophy, its connection to the structuralist cause
has been, mostly, neglected, when not explicitly or implicitly refused, especially by
those scholars who understand Husserl’s philosophy as a radical form of subjectiv-
ism (see for instance Lavigne 2005). An important exception is represented by two
books published by Elmar Holenstein in 1975 and 1976 respectively. Essential as
they are, they limit themselves to a detailed reconstruction of the historical and
theoretical relationship between Husserl’s phenomenology and Roman Jakobson’s
structural linguistics (cf. Holenstein 1975, 1976). With the exception of these works
and of a few brief essays by Giovanni Piana (Piana 2013a, b), as well as of some
crucial texts by Jacques Derrida (cf. Derrida 2005), scholars have limited them-
selves to merely acknowledging the role played by Husserl as a generic precursor of
structuralism (see for instance Dosse 1991; Verhaar 1973; Fontaine 1974; Caws
1988; Albrecht 2010). However, even in these cases the focus has mainly been on
linguistic structuralism, especially on Prague’s linguistic structuralism. What is still
missing is thus a systematic study of the historical and theoretical relationship
between Husserl’s phenomenology and structuralism in general.1
3 Phenomenology as Wissenschaftslehre
In the preface of the first edition of the Logical Investigations, Husserl claims that
he will focus on “discussions of a very general sort” that stretch far beyond “the
narrow sphere of mathematics” –which he had dealt with in his first philosophical
work published in 1891, namely Philosophy of Arithmetic – and that aspire to “a
1
I have tried to fill this gap in Aurora (2017, 2018).
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Lisen, eikä se tee mitään, että hän kutsui teidät salassa äidiltään.
Mutta Ivan Fjodorovitšille, teidän veljellenne, minä en voi yhtä
helposti uskoa tytärtäni, suokaa se minulle anteeksi, vaikka minä
edelleenkin pidän häntä mitä ritarillisimpana nuorena miehenä. Ja
ajatelkaahan, hän oli Lisen luona enkä minä tietänyt siitä mitään.
— Kuinka? Mitä? Milloin? — kysyi Aljoša hyvin ihmeissään. Hän ei

enää istuutunut, vaan kuunteli seisoaltaan.
— Minä kerron teille, tätä varten juuri minä kenties kutsuinkin

teidät, sillä en todellakaan tiedä, miksi teitä kutsuin. Asia on näin:
Ivan Fjodorovitš on ollut luonani kaikkiaan kaksi kertaa Moskovasta
palattuaan, ensimmäisellä kerralla tuli tuttuna vieraskäynnille ja
toisen kerran aivan äskettäin, Katja istui luonani, Ivan Fjodorovitš tuli
tänne kuultuaan hänen olevan luonani. Minä en tietysti ole vaatinut
häntä useasti käymään, kun tiedän, miten paljon hänellä nyt
muutenkin on puuhaa, vous comprenez, cette affaire et la mort
terrible de votre papa, mutta yhtäkkiä säänkin tietää, että hän on
käynyt taas, ei kuitenkaan minun, vaan Lisen luona, tämä on jo
kuudes päivä siitä, tuli, istui viisi minuuttia ja meni pois. Minä sain
tästä tietää vasta kolme päivää myöhemmin Glafiralta, niin että se oli
minulle yllättävän hämmästyttävää. Kutsun heti luokseni Lisen, mutta
tämä nauraa: hän, mukamas, ajatteli, että te nukutte, ja pistäytyi
minun luokseni kysymään, kuinka voitte. Tietysti se olikin niin. Mutta
Lise, Lise, oi hyvä Jumala, kuinka hän tuottaa minulle harmia!
Ajatelkaahan, eräänä yönä äkkiä — siitä on neljä päivää, se oli heti
sen jälkeen kuin te viimeisen kerran olitte täällä ja menitte pois —
äkkiä hän yöllä saa kohtauksen, huutoa, kirkumista, hysteriaa! Miksi
minulla ei koskaan ole hysteriaa? Sitten seuraavana päivänä taas
kohtaus, ja samoin sitäkin seuraavana, ja eilen sitten tuo affekti. Hän
huutaa minulle yhtäkkiä: »Minä vihaan Ivan Fjodorovitšia minä
vaadin, ettette ota häntä vastaan ja että kiellätte häntä käymästä
meillä!» Minä tyrmistyin noin odottamattomasta puheesta ja vastaan
hänelle: »Mistä syystä minä kieltäisin niin kunnollista nuorta miestä
tulemasta, lisäksi miestä, jolla on sellaiset tiedot ja sellainen
onnettomuus osanaan», sillä kuitenkinhan kaikki nämä jutut —
nehän ovat onnettomuus eikä onni, eikö totta? Hän alkoi äkkiä
nauraa sanoilleni ja, tiedättekö, niin loukkaavasti. No, minä olen
iloissani, ajattelen, että olen saanut hänet nauramaan ja että
kohtaukset nyt ovat ohi, varsinkin kun minä itsekin olin aikonut
kieltää Ivan Fjodorovitšia tekemästä omituisia vieraskäyntejä ilman
minun suostumustani sekä vaatia häneltä selitystä. Mutta äkkiä tänä
aamuna Lise heräsi ja suuttui Juliaan ja, ajatelkaahan, löi tätä
kädellään kasvoihin. Mutta tämähän on pöyristyttävää, minä
teitittelen palvelustyttöjäni. Ja yhtäkkiä tunnin kuluttua hän syleilee ja
suutelee Julian jalkoja. Minulle taas hän lähetti sanan, ettei tule
ollenkaan luokseni eikä tahdo käydä vastedeskään, ja kun minä itse
kompuroin hänen luokseen, niin hän alkoi minua kiireesti suudella ja
itki sekä työnsi suudellessaan minut pois huoneesta puhumatta
sanaakaan, niin että minä en saanut tietää mitään. Nyt, rakas
Aleksei Fjodorovitš, panen kaiken toivoni teihin, ja tietysti teidän
käsissänne on koko elämäni kohtalo. Minä yksinkertaisesti pyydän
teitä menemään Lisen luo, ottamaan häneltä selville kaikki, niinkuin
vain te yksin osaatte tehdä, ja tulemaan sitten kertomaan minulle,
minulle, äidille, sillä te ymmärrätte, että minä kuolen, suorastaan
kuolen, jos tätä kaikkea jatkuu, tai karkaan kotoani. Minä en voi
enempää, minulla on kärsivällisyyttä, mutta minä voin sen menettää
ja silloin… silloin tapahtuu kauheita. Ah, hyvä Jumala, vihdoinkin,
Pjotr Iljitš! — huudahti rouva Hohlakov alkaen yhtäkkiä loistaa, kun
näki Pjotr Iljitš Perhotinin astuvan sisälle. — Olette myöhästynyt! No,
mitä, istuutukaa, puhukaa, ratkaiskaa kohtaloni, no, mitäs tuo
asianajaja? Mutta minne te menette, Aleksei Fjodorovitš?
— Menen Lisen luo.
— Ah, niin! Ettehän vain unohda, ettehän unohda mitä teiltä

pyysin?
Siitä riippuu kohtalo, kohtalo!
— En tietenkään unohda, jos se vain käy päinsä… mutta olen

kovin myöhästynyt, — mutisi Aljoša peräytyen kiireesti.
— Ei, aivan varmasti, varmasti käykää puheillani, eikä vain »jos se

käy päinsä», muuten minä kuolen! — huusi rouva Hohlakov hänen
jälkeensä, mutta Aljoša oli jo mennyt ulos huoneesta.
3.
Reuhtova lapsi
Astuessaan Lisen huoneeseen Aljoša tapasi hänet puolittain

loikomassa entisessä lepotuolissaan, jossa häntä kuljetettiin silloin,
kun hän ei vielä voinut kävellä. Hän ei liikahtanutkaan Aljošaa
vastaan, mutta hänen tarkka, terävä katseensa suorastaan tunkeutui
tulijaan. Silmät olivat hieman tulehtuneet, kasvot kalpean keltaiset.
Aljoša hämmästyi, miten Lise oli kolmessa päivässä muuttunut, jopa
laihtunutkin. Hän ei ojentanut Aljošalle kättään. Aljoša itse kosketti
hänen hienoja, pitkiä sormiaan, jotka liikkumattomina lepäsivät
hänen hameellaan, sitten hän istuutui ääneti vastapäätä tyttöä.
— Minä tiedän, että teillä on kiire vankilaan, — lausui Lise tylysti,

— mutta teitä on kaksi tuntia viivyttänyt äitini ja kertonut teille
minusta ja Juliasta.
— Kuinka te sen tiesitte? — kysyi Aljoša.
— Minä kuuntelin salaa. Mitä te minuun tuijotatte? Kun tahdon

salaa kuunnella, niin kuuntelen, siinä ei ole mitään pahaa. En pyydä
anteeksi.
— Te olette jostakin syystä kiihdyksissä?
— Päinvastoin, minä olen hyvin iloinen. Äsken juuri ajattelin taas,

kolmannenkymmenennen kerran: miten hyvä olikaan, että peruutin
teille antamani lupauksen enkä rupea vaimoksenne. Te ette kelpaa
aviomieheksi: minä menen kanssanne naimisiin ja annan yhtäkkiä
teille kirjelipun vietäväksi sille, jota rupean teidän jälkeenne
rakastamaan, ja te otatte ja viette sen ehdottomasti perille, vieläpä
tuotte vastauksenkin. Te täytätte neljäkymmentä vuotta, ja yhä te
samalla tavoin kuljettelette tuollaisia kirjelippujani.
Hän alkoi äkkiä nauraa.
— Teissä on jotakin ilkeätä ja samalla jotakin vilpitöntä, — hymyili

hänelle Aljoša.
— Se vilpitön on sitä, että minä en häpeä teitä. Enkä ainoastaan

ole häpeämättä, vaan en tahdokaan hävetä, juuri teidän edessänne,
juuri teitä. Aljoša, minkä tähden minä en kunnioita teitä? Minä
rakastan teitä suuresti, mutta minä en kunnioita teitä. Jos
kunnioittaisin, niin en puhuisi, häpeäisin, eikö niin?
— Niin.
— Mutta uskotteko, että minä en häpeä teitä?

— En, en usko.
Lise alkoi taas nauraa hermostuneesti; hän puhui nopeasti,

kiireesti.
— Minä olen lähettänyt veljellenne Dmitri Fjodorovitšille vankilaan

konvehteja. Aljoša, tiedättekö, kuinka miellyttävä te olette! Minä tulen
teitä hirveästi rakastamaan sen vuoksi, että te niin nopeasti sallitte
minun olla teitä rakastamatta.
— Miksi te kutsuitte minua tänään, Lise?
— Mieleni teki ilmaista teille eräs toivomukseni. Minä tahdon, että

minua joku kiduttaisi, menisi naimisiin kanssani ja sitten kiduttaisi,
pettäisi, lähtisi ja matkustaisi pois. Minä en tahdo olla onnellinen!
— Olette alkanut pitää epäjärjestyksestä?
— Ah, minä en tahdo epäjärjestystä. Mieleni yhä tekee sytyttää

talo tuleen. Minä kuvittelen, kuinka minä menen ja sytytän salaa, sen
pitää välttämättömästi tapahtua salaa. Koettavat sammuttaa, mutta
se palaa. Minä tiedän enkä puhu kenellekään. Ah, tyhmyyksiä! Ja
miten ikävää!
Hän viittasi inhoten kädellään.
— Elätte rikkaudessa, — lausui Aljoša hiljaa.
— Olisiko sitten parempi olla köyhä?
— Olisi.
— Sen on teille pannut päähän munkki-vainajanne. Se ei ole totta.

Olkoon, että minä olen rikas, ja kaikki köyhiä, minä syön konvehteja
ja juon kermaa enkä anna niille kenellekään. Ah, älkää puhuko,
älkää puhuko mitään (alkoi hän huitoa kädellään, vaikka Aljoša ei
ollut avannut suutaankaan), te olette tämän kaiken puhunut minulle
jo aikaisemmin, minä osaan kaikki ulkoa. On ikävä. Jos minusta
tulee köyhä, niin minä tapan jonkun, — ja jos minusta tulee rikas,
niin kenties silloinkin tapan, — miksi istuisin! Mutta tiedättekö, minä
tahdon korjata eloa, tahdon leikata ruista. Minä menen kanssanne
naimisiin, ja teistä tulee talonpoika, oikea talonpoika; meillä on pieni
varsa, tahdotteko niin? Tunnettehan Kalganovin!
— Tunnen.
— Hän aina vain kulkee ja haaveilee. Hän sanoo: miksi todellakin

eläisin, parempi on haaveilla. Haaveilla voi mitä iloisinta, mutta
eläminen ikävystyttää. Ja kuitenkin hän kohta menee naimisiin, hän
on minullekin tunnustanut rakkautensa. Osaatteko te panna hyrrän
pyörimään?
— Osaan.
— Hän on niinkuin hyrrä: panna hänet pyörimään ja päästää

kulkemaan ja lyödä, lyödä, lyödä piiskalla: menen hänen kanssaan
naimisiin, pyöritän koko elämäni. Eikö teitä hävetä istua kanssani?
— Ei.
— Te olette hyvin vihainen siitä, että minä en puhu pyhistä

asioista. Minä en tahdo olla pyhä. Mitä toisessa maailmassa tehdään
kaikkein suurimmasta synnistä? Teidän täytyy tietää tämä aivan
tarkalleen.
— Jumala tuomitsee, — sanoi Aljoša katsoen häneen pitkään.

— Niin minä tahdonkin sen olevan. Minä tulisin ja minut
tuomittaisiin, mutta minä alkaisin yhtäkkiä nauraa heille kaikille päin
silmiä. Minun tekee hirveästi mieleni sytyttää palamaan talo, Aljoša,
meidän talomme, ettekö te vieläkään usko minua?
— Miksi? On lapsiakin, kahdentoista vuoden ikäisiä, joiden mieli

kovin tekee sytyttää jotakin palamaan, ja he sytyttävät. Se on
tavallaan tautia.
— Se ei ole totta, ei ole totta, olkoon olemassa lapsia, mutta minä

en puhu siitä.
— Te pidätte pahaa hyvänä: se on hetkellinen kriisi, se johtuu

kenties entisestä taudistanne.
— Mutta te halveksitte minua! Minä suorastaan en tahdo tehdä

hyvää, minä tahdon tehdä pahaa, eikä siinä ole mitään tautia.
— Miksi tehdä pahaa?
— Jotta ei mihinkään jäisi mitään! Ah, kuinka hyvä olisi, kun ei jäisi
mitään! Tiedättekö, Aljoša, minä aion toisinaan tehdä hirveän paljon
pahaa ja kaikkea huonoa, ja teen sitä kauan salaa, ja yhtäkkiä kaikki
saavat sen tietää. Kaikki ympäröivät minut ja osoittavat minua
sormellaan, ja minä katson kaikkia. Se on hyvin miellyttävää. Miksi
se on niin miellyttävää, Aljoša?
— Muuten vain. Tarve murskata jotakin hyvää tai, niinkuin te

sanoitte, sytyttää palamaan. Semmoista sattuu.
— Mutta eihän se ole vain sitä, että minä sanoin, minähän myös
teen sen.
— Minä uskon.
— Ah, kuinka minä rakastan teitä sen tähden, että te sanotte: minä
uskon. Ja tehän ette ollenkaan, ette ollenkaan valehtele. Mutta
kenties te luulette, että olen puhunut teille tätä kaikkea tahallani,
ärsyttääkseni teitä?
— En, en luule… vaikka kukaties on hieman sitäkin tarvetta.
— On hieman. En valehtele koskaan teille, — lausui hän, ja jokin

tuli leimahti hänen silmissään.
Aljošaa hämmästytti kaikkein enimmän hänen vakavuutensa:

hänen kasvoissaan ei nyt ollut naurun eikä kujeilun varjoakaan,
vaikka aikaisemmin ilomielisyys ja kujeilun halu ei ollut jättänyt häntä
kaikkein »vakavimpinakaan» hetkinä.
— On hetkiä, jolloin ihmiset rakastavat rikosta, — lausui Aljoša

miettivästi.
— Niin, niin! Te sanoitte minun ajatukseni, rakastavat, kaikki

rakastavat ja aina rakastavat, eikä vain »hetkiä». Tiedättekö, tässä
ovat kaikki ikäänkuin sopineet joskus maailmassa, että he
valehtelevat, ja siitä asti ovat kaikki valehdelleet. Kaikki sanovat
vihaavansa pahaa, mutta sydämessään kaikki sitä rakastavat.
— Luetteko te yhä kuten ennenkin huonoja kirjoja?
— Luen. Äiti lukee ja piilottaa tyynynsä alle, ja minä varastan

sieltä.
— Kuinka teitä ei hävetä itsenne tuhoaminen?

— En minä tahdo tuhota itseäni. Täällä on eräs poika, hän makasi
rautatiekiskojen välissä, kun vaunut kulkivat ylitse. Onnellinen hän!
Kuulkaa, nyt teidän veljenne tuomitaan siitä, että hän on tappanut
isänsä, ja kaikki pitävät siitä, että hän tappoi isänsä.
— Pitävät siitä, että tappoi isänsä?
— Pitävät, kaikki pitävät! Kaikki sanovat, että se on hirveätä, mutta

sydämessään pitävät siitä suuresti. Minä ensimmäisenä.
— Kaikissa teidän sanoissanne on jonkin verran totta, — lausui

Aljoša hiljaa.
— Ah, millaiset ajatukset teillä on! — vingahti Lise innoissaan. —

Semmoiset ajatukset munkilla! Te ette usko, kuinka minä teitä
kunnioitan, Aljoša, siitä, että te ette milloinkaan valehtele. Ah, vain
teille minä kerron hullunkurisen uneni: minä näen toisinaan unessa
piruja, on olevinaan yö, minä olen huoneessani, ja siinä on kynttilä,
ja yhtäkkiä on kaikkialla piruja, kaikissa nurkissa ja pöydän alla, ja ne
avaavat oven ja niitä on siellä oven takana iso joukko, ja niiden mieli
tekee tulla sisälle ja ottaa minut. Ne tulevatkin jo luokseni, tarttuvat jo
minuun. Mutta minä teen yhtäkkiä ristinmerkin ja ne peräytyvät
kaikki, pelkäävät, mutta eivät kuitenkaan poistu kokonaan, seisovat
ovella ja odottelevat nurkissa. Ja yhtäkkiä alkaa hirveästi tehdä
mieleni ruveta ääneeni soimaamaan Jumalaa, ja minä alankin
herjata, ja silloin ne taas yhtäkkiä tulevat suurin joukoin luokseni,
tulevat hyvin iloisiksi, tarttuvat taas minuun, minä teen taas
ristinmerkin — ja ne peräytyvät kaikki. Se on ihmeen hauskaa, ihan
on läkähtyä.
— Minäkin olen nähnyt joskus saman unen, — sanoi Aljoša

yhtäkkiä.
— Ihanko todella? — huudahti Lise ihmetellen. — Kuulkaa, Aljoša,
älkää naurako, tämä on hirveän tärkeätä: onko mahdollista, että
kaksi eri ihmistä näkee saman unen?
— Kaiketi se on.
— Aljoša, minä sanon teille, että se on hirveän tärkeätä, — jatkoi

Lise ihmetellen aivan ylenpalttisesti. — Ei uni ole tärkeä, vaan se,
että te olette voinut nähdä aivan saman unen kuin minä. Te ette
koskaan valehtele minulle, älkää valehdelko nytkään: onko se totta?
Ettekö tee pilaa?
— Se on totta.
Lise oli jostakin hyvin hämmästynyt ja oli puoli minuuttia vaiti.
— Aljoša, käykää luonani, käykää luonani useammin, — lausui

hän yhtäkkiä rukoilevalla äänellä.
— Minä käyn luonanne aina, koko elämäni ajan, — vastasi Aljoša

lujasti.
— Minähän puhun ainoastaan teille, — alkoi Lise taas. — Minä

puhun vain itselleni ja teille. Yksistään teille koko maailmassa. Ja
mieluummin puhun teille kuin itselleni. Enkä ollenkaan häpeä teitä.
Aljoša, miksi minä en ollenkaan häpeä teitä, en ollenkaan? Aljoša,
onko totta, että juutalaiset varastavat ja teurastavat pääsiäisenä
lapsia?
— En tiedä.
— Minulla on eräs kirja, minä olen lukenut jostakin jossakin

langetetusta tuomiosta ja että juutalainen oli ensin leikannut
nelivuotiaalta pojalta kaikki sormet molemmista käsistä ja sitten
ristiinnaulinnut hänet seinään, iskenyt nauloilla hänet siihen, ja sanoi
sitten oikeudessa, että poika oli kuollut pian, neljän tunnin kuluttua.
Olipa se pian! Sanoo: hän voihki, voihki kaiken aikaa, mutta toinen
katseli ja nautti siitä. Se on hyvä!
— Hyväkö?
— Hyvä. Minä ajattelen toisinaan, että tuo ristiinnaulitsi ja olenkin

minä itse. Poika riippuu ja vaikeroi, mutta minä istuudun vastapäätä
häntä ja syön ananashilloketta. Minä pidän hyvin paljon
ananashillokkeesta. Pidättekö te siitä?
Aljoša oli vaiti ja katseli häntä. Tytön kalpeankeltaiset kasvot

vääristyivät äkkiä, silmät alkoivat palaa.
— Tiedättekö, kun minä luin tuosta juutalaisesta, niin tärisin sitten

koko yön itkun vallassa. Kuvittelen, kuinka lapsi huutaa ja voihkii
(nelivuotiaat pojathan ymmärtävät), mutta minun päästäni ei vain
lähde tuo ajatus hillokkeesta. Aamulla minä lähetin kirjeen eräälle
ihmiselle, että hän välttämättömästi tulisi luokseni. Hän tuli, ja minä
kerroin hänelle pojasta ja hillokkeesta, kaiken kerroin, kaiken, ja
sanoin, että »se on hyvä». Hän alkoi yhtäkkiä nauraa ja sanoi, että
se on todellakin hyvä. Sitten hän nousi ja lähti pois. Istui kaikkiaan
vain viisi minuuttia. Halveksiko hän minua, halveksiko? Sanokaa,
sanokaa, Aljoša, halveksiko hän minua vai eikö? — sanoi hän ja
oikaisihe suoraksi leposohvalla. Hänen silmänsä säkenöivät.
— Sanokaa, — lausui Aljoša kiihtyneenä, — tekö itse hänet

kutsuitte, tuon miehen?
— Minä itse.
— Lähetitte hänelle kirjeen?
— Kirjeen.
— Kysyäksenne nimenomaan tästä, lapsesta?
— En, en ollenkaan siksi, en ollenkaan. Mutta kun hän astui

sisälle, niin minä heti kysyin tätä. Hän vastasi, alkoi nauraa, nousi ja
lähti.
— Tuo mies käyttäytyi rehellisesti teitä kohtaan, — lausui Aljoša

hiljaa.
— Mutta halveksiko hän minua? Pilkkasiko?
— Ei, sillä hän uskoo kenties itse ananashillokkeeseen. Hän on

nyt myös hyvin sairas, Lise.
— Niin, hän uskoo! — sanoi Lise säihkyvin silmin.
— Hän ei halveksi ketään, — jatkoi Aljoša. — Hän vain ei usko,

niin silloin tietysti halveksii.
— Siis minuakin? Minua?
— Teitäkin.
— Se on hyvä, — sanoi Lise omituisesti kiristellen hampaitaan. —

Kun hän lähti ulos ja rupesi nauramaan, niin minä tunsin, että on
hyvä olla halveksittuna. Poika, jolta leikattiin sormet, on hyvä asia, ja
halveksittuna oleminen on hyvä…
Ja hän alkoi nauraa omituisen ilkeästi ja kiihtyneesti Aljošalle

vasten silmiä.
— Tiedättekö, Aljoša, tiedättekö, minä tahtoisin… Aljoša,
pelastakaa minut! — huudahti hän hypähtäen äkkiä sohvalta,
syöksyi hänen luokseen ja kiersi voimakkaasti kätensä hänen
ympärilleen. — Pelastakaa minut, — hän melkein voihkaisi. —
Sanonko minä kenellekään maailmassa sitä, minkä olen teille
puhunut? Mutta minähän puhuin totta, totta, totta! Minä tapan itseni,
sillä minua inhoittaa kaikki! Minä en tahdo elää, sillä kaikki on
minusta inhoittavaa! Minua inhoittaa kaikki, inhoittaa kaikki! Aljoša,
miksi te ette rakasta minua ensinkään, ette ensinkään! — lopetti hän
raivostuneena.
— Minähän rakastan! — vastasi Aljoša lämpimästi.
— Ja itkettekö minua, itkettekö?
— Itken.
— Ei sen tähden, että minä en tahtonut tulla vaimoksenne, vaan

itkettekö yksinkertaisesti minua, aivan yksinkertaisesti?
— Itken.
— Kiitos! Minä tarvitsen vain teidän kyyneliänne. Mutta kaikki muut

rangaiskoot minua ja polkekoot jalkoihinsa, kaikki, kaikki,
poikkeuksetta kaikki! Sillä minä en rakasta ketään. Kuuletteko, en
ke-tään! Päinvastoin vihaan! Menkää, Aljoša, teidän on aika mennä
veljenne luo! — sanoi hän irtautuen hänestä äkkiä.
— Kuinka te sitten jäätte? — lausui Aljoša miltei pelästyneenä.
— Menkää veljenne luo, vankila suljetaan, menkää, tässä on

hattunne!
Suudelkaa Mitjaa, menkää, menkää!
Ja hän työnsi melkein väkisin Aljošan ulos ovesta. Tämä katseli
murheellisena ja ällistyneenä, mutta tunsi yhtäkkiä oikeassa
kädessään kirjeen, pikkuisen kirjeen, joka oli tiiviisti taitettu kokoon ja
hyvin suljettu. Hän vilkaisi siihen ja luki silmänräpäyksessä osoitteen:
»Ivan Fjodorovitš Karamazoville». Hän loi nopean silmäyksen
Liseen. Tämän kasvot muuttuivat miltei uhkaaviksi.
— Antakaa se perille, antakaa ehdottomasti hänelle! — käski tyttö

raivoisasti, ja koko hänen ruumiinsa vapisi. — Tänään, heti! Muuten
minä otan myrkkyä! Tätä varten minä teidät kutsuinkin!
Ja hän paiskasi nopeasti oven kiinni. Säppi kalahti. Aljoša pisti

kirjeen taskuunsa ja meni suoraan portaille poikkeamatta rouva
Hohlakovin luo, jonka hän sitäpaitsi oli unohtanutkin. Heti kun Aljoša
oli mennyt, käänsi Lise säppiä, avasi oven hiukan raolleen, pisti
rakoon sormensa ja painoi oven kiinni litistäen kaikin voimin
sormeaan. Noin kymmenen sekunnin kuluttua hän irroitti kätensä
ovesta, meni hiljaa ja hitaasti nojatuolinsa luo, istuutui, ojentautui
suoraksi ja alkoi tarkasti katsella mustunutta sormeaan ja kynnen
alta pullistuvaa veripahkaa. Hänen huulensa vapisivat, ja hän
kuiskasi itsekseen hyvin nopeasti: — Minä olen katala, katala,
katala, katala!
4.
Hymni ja salaisuus
Oli jo aivan myöhä (ja pitkäkö on marraskuun päivä), kun Aljoša

soitti vankilan portin kelloa. Oli jo alkanut hämärtää. Mutta Aljoša
tiesi, että hänet päästetään estelemättä Mitjan luo. Kaikki tämä on
meillä, meidän kaupungissamme, aivan samanlaista kuin kaikkialla
muuallakin. Aluksi tietysti, valmistavan tutkimuksen loputtua, oli
sukulaisten ja eräitten muitten henkilöitten noudatettava muutamia
välttämättömiä muodollisuuksia päästäkseen Mitjan puheille, mutta
myöhemmin muodollisuuksista ei enää paljoa välitetty, vieläpä
joihinkuihin Mitjan luona käyviin henkilöihin nähden aivan kuin
itsestään muodostui poikkeuksia. Mentiinpä niinkin pitkälle, että
vankia toisinaan sai tavata sitä varten määrätyssä huoneessa
melkeinpä kahden kesken. Tämmöisessä asemassa olevia
henkilöitä oli kuitenkin vain muutamia: ainoastaan Grušenjka, Aljoša
ja Rakitin. Grušenjkaa suosi suuresti itse poliisipäällikkö Mihail
Makarovitš. Ukon sydäntä painoi sen, että hän oli nuhdellut
Grušenjkaa Mokrojessa. Myöhemmin, kuultuaan asian oikean laidan,
hän oli kokonaan muuttanut mieltään Grušenjkaan nähden. Ja
omituista: vaikka hän oli vahvasti vakuutettu Mitjan syyllisyydestä,
niin hän kuitenkin vangitsemisesta asti suhtautui tähän yhä
lempeämmin: »Kenties siinä oli pohjaltaan hyvä mies, mutta joutui
hunningolle juopottelun ja epäsäännöllisen elämän takia!» Entinen
kauhistus muuttui hänen sydämessään jonkinmoiseksi sääliksi.
Aljošasta poliisipäällikkö taas piti hyvin paljon ja oli jo kauan tuntenut
hänet, ja Rakitin, joka myöhemmin oli ruvennut hyvin usein käymään
vangin luona, oli »poliisipäällikön neitien», niinkuin hän heitä nimitti,
kaikkein lähimpiä tuttuja ja oleili joka päivä heidän kodissaan.
Vankilan päällikkö oli rehti mies, mutta sangen säntillinen virkamies,
ja hänen talossaan Rakitin oli kotiopettajana. Aljoša taas oli vankilan
päällikönkin hyvä ja vanha tuttu, sillä tämä puheli yleensä mielellään
hänen kanssaan »viisaita asioita». Ivan Fjodorovitšia esimerkiksi
vankilan päällikkö kunnioitti, vieläpä pelkäsikin tämän arvosteluja,
vaikka oli itsekin suuri filosofi, tietenkin »oman järkensä mukaisesti».
Mutta Aljošaa kohtaan hän tunsi jonkinmoista voittamatonta
myötätuntoa. Viimeisenä vuonna oli ukko syventynyt tutkimaan
raamatun apokryfisia kirjoja ja kertoili myötäänsä vaikutelmistaan
nuorelle ystävälleen. Aikaisemmin hän oli käynyt Aljošan luona
luostarissakin ja keskustellut hänen sekä pappismunkkien kanssa
tuntikausia. Sanalla sanoen, jos Aljoša olisikin myöhästynyt
vankilasta, niin hänen tarvitsi vain pistäytyä päällikön luo
saadakseen asian järjestetyksi. Sitäpaitsi olivat kaikki vartijatkin
vankilassa jo tottuneet näkemään Aljošan. Vahti ei tietenkään tehnyt
esteitä, kun vain oli lupa esimiehiltä. Kun Mitjaa kutsuttiin, niin hän
aina tuli kopistaan siihen paikkaan, mikä oli määrätty tapaamista
varten. Huoneeseen astuessaan Aljoša kohtasi Rakitinin, joka jo oli
lähdössä pois Mitjan luota. Molemmat viimeksimainitut keskustelivat.
Rakitinia saattaessaan Mitja nauroi kovin jollekin asialle, mutta
Rakitin tuntui murisevan. Varsinkaan viime aikoina Rakitin ei
mielellään ollut tekemisissä Aljošan kanssa eikä juuri koskaan
puhunut hänen kanssaan, vieläpä tervehtikin väkinäisesti.
Nähdessään nyt Aljošan astuvan sisälle hän erikoisesti rypisti
kulmakarvojaan ja käänsi katseensa pois, aivan kuin koko hänen
huomionsa olisi kiintynyt lämpimän, karvakauluksisen päällystakin
napittamiseen. Sitten hän alkoi heti etsiä sateenvarjoaan.
— Kunhan ei vain unohtuisi mitään omaa, — mutisi hän

ainoastaan sanoakseen jotakin.
— Älä vain unohda mitään vierasta! — laski leikkiä Mitja ja alkoi

heti itse nauraa hohottaa sukkeluudelleen. Rakitin tulistui
silmänräpäyksessä.
— Neuvo sinä sitä omille Karamazoveillesi, joka on maaorjuudella

elänyttä koplaa, äläkä Rakitinille! — huudahti hän äkkiä ihan täristen
vihasta.
— Mitä sinä? Minä sanoin leikilläni! — huudahti Mitja. — Hyi,

perhana! Tuommoisia ne ovat kaikki, — kääntyi hän Aljošan puoleen
viitaten päännyökkäyksellä Rakitiniin, joka kiireesti poistui, — istui
täällä, nauroi ja oli iloinen, mutta nyt yhtäkkiä tulistui! Sinulle ei edes
nyökäyttänyt päätään, oletteko te ihan riidoissa, vai mitä? Miksi sinä
tulet niin myöhään? Minä en ole sinua vain odottanut, minä olen
himoinnut koko aamun tavata sinua. No, mitäpä siitä! Saamme
vahingon korjatuksi.
— Miksi hän on ruvennut käymään niin usein luonasi? Onko teistä

tullut ystävät, vai mitä? — kysyi Aljoša nimikään osoittaen
päännyökkäyksellä ovea, josta Rakitin oli mennyt.
— Tullutko Mihailin ystäväksi? En, enpä juuri. Ja mitäpä hänestä,

senkin siasta! Hän on sitä mieltä, että minä olen… konna. Eivät edes
ymmärrä pilaa, se niissä on pääpiirteenä. Eivät milloinkaan ymmärrä
pilaa. Kuiva on heidän sielunsa, lattea ja kuiva, aivan semmoista
siellä on kuin minä tunsin silloin, kun lähestyin vankilaa ja katselin
vankilan seiniä. Mutta älykäs mies hän on, älykäs. No, Aljoša, minä
olen nyt mennyttä miestä!
Hän istuutui penkille ja pani Aljošan viereensä istumaan.
— Niin, huomenna lankeaa tuomio. Mitä, eikö sinulla todellakaan

ole mitään toivoa, veli? — lausui Aljoša arkatunteisesti.
— Mitä sinä tarkoitat? — katsahti Mitja häneen omituisen

epämääräisesti. — Ah, sinä puhut tuomiosta! No, perhana! Me
olemme tähän saakka koko ajan puhuneet sinun kanssasi
jonninjoutavista asioista, aina vain tuosta tuomiosta, mutta kaikkein
tärkeimmästä en ole puhunut sinulle mitään. Niin, huomenna
lankeaa tuomio, mutta en minä tuomion johdosta sanonut olevani
mennyttä miestä. Ei ole minulta pää mennyt, vaan se, mikä oli
päässä, se on mennyt. Miksi sinä katsot minua niin arvostelevan
näköisenä?
— Mistä sinä oikein puhut, Mitja?
— Aatteesta, aatteesta, siinä se! Etiikka. Mitä on etiikka?
— Etiikka? — ihmetteli Aljoša.
— Niin, eikö se ole jokin tiede?
— On, sellainen tiede on olemassa… mutta… minä tunnustan,

että minä en osaa selittää sinulle, millainen tiede se on.
— Rakitin tietää. Paljon tietää Rakitin, piru hänet periköön!

Munkiksi hän ei rupea. Tekee lähtöä Pietariin. Sanoo siellä
toimivansa arvostelujen osastossa, mutta jaloon suuntaan. Mitäs,
hän voi olla hyödyksi ja menestyä hyvin. Uh, ulkonaista menestystä
saavuttamaan ne ovat mestareita! Hitto vieköön etiikan. Minä olen
mennyttä miestä, Aljoša, Jumalan mies! Minä rakastan sinua
enemmän kuin ketään muuta. Sydämeni vapisee sinun tähtesi, niin
se on. Mikä olikaan Karl Bernard?
— Karl Bernard? — ihmetteli taas Aljoša.
— Ei, ei Karl, maltahan, minä sanoin väärin: Claude Bernard.
Mikä se on? Kemiaako, vai?

— Se lienee eräs tiedemies, — vastasi Aljoša, — mutta tunnustan
sinulle, etten osaa hänestäkään paljoa sanoa. Olen vain kuullut, että
sellainen tiedemies on olemassa, mutta en tiedä, mikä hän on
miehiään.
— No, hiisi hänet vieköön, en minäkään tiedä, — alkoi Mitja

sadatella. — Luultavammin joku konna, ja kaikki ovat konnia. Mutta
Rakitin pujottautuu läpi. Rakitin pujottautuu pienestäkin raosta läpi,
hän on myös Bernard. Uh, noita Bernardeja! Paljon niitä on siinnyt!
— Mikä sinua vaivaa? — kysyi Aljoša lujasti.
— Hän tahtoo laatia kirjoitelman minusta, minun jutustani, ja

aloittaa sillä kirjallisen uransa, sitä varten hän käy täällä, hän selitti
itse niin. Siinä tulee muka olemaan jotain suuntaa: »hänen on pakko
tappaa, ympäröivien olosuhteitten vaikutusta» ja niin edespäin, selitti
hän minulle. Siihen tulee sosialistinen vivahdus, sanoo. No, piru
hänet vieköön, tuleeko siihen vivahdus vai ei, se on minusta
samantekevää. Veli Ivanista hän ei pidä, vihaa häntä, eikä ole
suopea sinullekaan. No, minä en ole kuitenkaan karkoittanut häntä
pois, sillä hän on älykäs mies. Kovin hän kuitenkin kopeilee. Äsken
juuri sanoin hänelle: »Karamazovit eivät ole konnia, vaan filosofeja,
sillä kaikki tosivenäläiset ihmiset ovat filosofeja, mutta sinä, vaikka
oletkin saanut oppia, et ole filosofi, sinä olet maalaismoukka.» Hän
nauroi ilkeästi. Mutta minä sanoin hänelle: de ajatuksibus non est
disputandum, eikö se ollut hyvä vitsi? Pääsin ainakin klassillisuuden
makuun minäkin, — alkoi Mitja äkkiä nauraa hohottaa.
— Minkä tähden sinä olet mennyttä miestä? Sinä sanoit äsken

niin, — keskeytti Aljoša.

The Subject S of Phenomenology Rereading Husserl 4Th Edition Iulian Apostolescu Online Ebook Texxtbook Full Chapter PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Subject S of Phenomenology Rereading Husserl 4Th Edition Iulian Apostolescu Online Ebook Texxtbook Full Chapter PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Subject s of Phenomenology

Rereading Husserl 4th Edition Iulian

Husserl s Phenomenology From Pure Logic to Embodiment

Husserl on Ethics and Intersubjectivity From Static and

Phenomenology to the Letter Husserl and Literature 1st

McGraw Hill Education SAT Subject Test Chemistry 4th Ed

Defending Husserl Uwe Meixner

Yorick s World Science and the Knowing Subject Peter

McGraw Hill Education SAT Subject Test Math Level 1 4th

Philosophical Skepticism as the Subject of Art Maria

Iulian Apostolescu Editor

In Cooperation with The Center

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/5811

Portions of Adam Konopka’s chapter entitled “Parts, Wholes, and Phenomenological

ISSN 0923-9545 ISSN 2215-1915 (electronic)

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

Part I: The Phenomenological Project: Definition and Scope

In the first chapter of Part I, Jean-Daniel Thumser explores Husserl’s understanding

in the Logical Investigations—ought to be considered part of both the wider tradi-

Part II: The Unfolding of Phenomenological Philosophy

 art III: At the Limits of Phenomenology:

Benjamin Draxlbauer begins Part III by offering a phenomenological analysis of the

to Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Husserl in Le philosophe et son ombre and the 1958–

Part I The Phenomenological Project: Definition and Scope

Part II The Unfolding of Phenomenological Philosophy

Does Husserl’s Phenomenological Idealism Lead to Pluralistic

Part III At the Limits of Phenomenology:

Abstract In contrast to the scientific and mundane understanding of things, Husserl

Keywords Phenomenology · Analytic phenomenology · Pure logic ·

J.-D. Thumser (*)

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 3

correlates. Phenomenology’s use of langage is then specific insofar as it deals with

2 I n the Depth of Subjectivity: A Return to the I and the

2.1 Formal Logic Versus Pure Logic

Thus there is no possible analysis that isn’t strictly phenomenological. An analysis

beings. Nevertheless, such a descriptive approach accomplishes much more than

2.2 Communication Between Reasonable Beings

If it is possible to partially understand other people’s inner experiences through their

2.3 Does “I” Mean Something? I as Indexical

3 The Antepredicative Articulation of Linguistic Thoughts

3.1 The Antepredicative Part of the Language

Thanks to the introduction of the transcendental ego, Husserl is able to determine

3.2 The Passive Synthesis and the Animation of Words

This problem of an antepredicative formation of our linguistic understanding may

4  he Expression of Reduced Experience:

4.1  he Reduction and the Problem of the Mundane

now be fully examined as we practice the transcendental reduction. Nevertheless,

4.2 The Egological Content of the Expression

5 Conclusion: An Overture to the Ichrede

Keywords Necessity · Manifolds · Unity · Synthesis · A Priori · Kant · Husserl

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 17

of the actual motion of heavenly bodies. By contrast, a heliocentric approach

2 The Problem of Necessity and Pure Logic

Husserl’s treatment of the problem of necessity in the Logical Investigation arises in

3 Parts, Wholes, and Necessary Fitness

taken in general indeterminateness of formal concepts of meaning categories.6 Parts

a sum or aggregate, but an organized and organizing collective of meaningful rela-

in perception and conceptualization. First, the unities involved in the perception of

in collectives of individual objects is a region. Husserl defines region as “the total

5 The Distinction Between Analytic and Synthetic Necessity

6 Correlational A priori and Intentionality

7 The A priori Bound to the Empirical and the Problem

De Preester, Helena. 2004. Part-Whole Metaphysics Underlying Issues of Internality/Externality.

Part I: The Phenomenological Project: Definition and Scope

Part II: The Unfolding of Phenomenological Philosophy

art III: At the Limits of Phenomenology:

Part I The Phenomenological Project: Definition and Scope

Part II The Unfolding of Phenomenological Philosophy

Part III At the Limits of Phenomenology:

2 I n the Depth of Subjectivity: A Return to the I and the

2.1 Formal Logic Versus Pure Logic

2.2 Communication Between Reasonable Beings

2.3 Does “I” Mean Something? I as Indexical

3 The Antepredicative Articulation of Linguistic Thoughts

3.1 The Antepredicative Part of the Language

3.2 The Passive Synthesis and the Animation of Words

4 he Expression of Reduced Experience:

4.1 he Reduction and the Problem of the Mundane

4.2 The Egological Content of the Expression

5 Conclusion: An Overture to the Ichrede

2 The Problem of Necessity and Pure Logic

3 Parts, Wholes, and Necessary Fitness

5 The Distinction Between Analytic and Synthetic Necessity

6 Correlational A priori and Intentionality

7 The A priori Bound to the Empirical and the Problem

2 Transcendental Philosophy and Structuralism