Philosophical theories are formulated to respond to perceived difficulties. The widespread tendency to understand phenomenology on a Husserlian model makes it incomparable with other views. This article will contest the view that ‘phenomenology’ should only be understood in a Husserlian manner, proposing a broadened definition intended to make it easier to compare and contrast, hence to estimate the degree of progress with respect to outstanding concerns, of Husserlian and non-Husserlian forms of phenomenology.
‘Phenomenology’ obviously means different things to different observers. Observers disagree—often basically disagree—about the meaning of the term, as well as about how to understand Husserl. It goes beyond the scope of this discussion to propose a correct reading of Husserlian phenomenology. Although Husserl thinks that he invented ‘phenomenology,’ I will use the term in a wider sense, to refer to approaches to cognition based on phenomena. From the latter angle of vision, ‘phenomenology’ includes not only Husserl and the Husserlians but also a wider selection of thinkers stretching back to early Greece. Although this will enlarge the scope of what counts as phenomenology, I will not be claiming that everyone is a phenomenologist. I will, however, be arguing that Kant, Hegel and Husserl are phenomenologists, or again phenomenological thinkers, and that Hegel and Husserl can be understood through their different reactions to Kantian phenomenology.
I. What is phenomenology?
Husserl’s claim to discover phenomenology suggests that it originates in the Logical Investigations. According to this view, the phenomenologists are the series of thinkers influenced by Husserl, who form what Spiegelberg influentially identifies as the phenomenological movement (Spiegelberg Reference Spiegelberg1960). Yet this account is too simplistic. Though he continued to refer to ‘phenomenology’, Husserl’s understanding of this term evolved in ways that many ‘Husserlians’ later rejected. Heidegger’s view of ‘phenomenology’ is, for instance, not only different from but also starkly opposed to Husserl’s.Footnote 1
‘Phenomenology’ comes from the Greek term phainomenon, meaning thing appearing to view, from phainein, to show, or what appears, as opposed to reality. It was later used in a natural scientific context, for instance by Newton. In the Scholium to the Principia, he claimed to deduce his experimental philosophy from phenomena in eliciting the laws of nature directly from experience.
Phenomenon was apparently in use in the late sixteenth century. The term ‘phenomenology’, which only emerged in a philosophical context in the middle of the eighteenth century, was used slightly earlier than 1762 by both F. C. Oetinger and J. H. Lambert. The latter, with whom Kant corresponded, was apparently the first to use ‘phenomenology’ in a specifically philosophical manner. Francis Bacon discusses four kinds of idols, or illusions, that impede us from correctly knowing the world. Under Bacon’s influence, Lambert developed a theory of phenomenology as false appearance (Schein) in Das neue Organon (1764).
Phenomenology, understood as the study of phenomena in a cognitive context, was important long before the term emerged in the eighteenth century. Plato, for instance, studies the relation between appearances and forms or ideas, in short reality. According to Plato, since we cannot go from phenomena to reality, knowledge is possible if, on grounds of nature and nurture, some amongst us can directly intuit mind-independent reality. In different ways, the general view that cognition depends on metaphysical realism runs throughout the philosophical tradition. As used here, ‘phenomenology’ will be understood in a wide, but specifically epistemic sense, as based on phenomena.
II. Husserlian impedimenta
The Husserlian conviction that he invented phenomenology creates a series of impedimenta to earlier epistemic approaches to phenomena. These include the Husserlian conviction that Hegel lacks a critique of reason (however, see Forster Reference Forster1998), and the ‘French’ view that Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger share a single phenomenological method (for this view, see Grondin Reference Grondin1985: 274).
If Husserl has no significant phenomenological predecessors, then Hegel is not and in fact could not be a phenomenologist. According to Kant, philosophy worthy of the name begins and ends in the critical philosophy. Husserl makes a similar claim about phenomenology.Footnote 2 In linking phenomenology to the history of philosophy, which he did not know well, Husserl describes phenomenology as ‘the secret longing of the whole philosophy of modern times’ (I: §62, 166).Footnote 3 No one denies that Husserl began a kind of phenomenology, but it is unclear what that is, whether he was the first phenomenologist, or again whether some version of Husserlian phenomenology is the only acceptable philosophical approach.
Husserl’s Kantian conviction about phenomenology explains in part his relative disinterest, which he shares with Kant, in the history of philosophy. His grasp of the tradition is weak in comparison to such contemporaries as Cassirer, Gadamer and Heidegger. For most Husserlians, the history of ‘phenomenology’ does not play more than a tangential role in their discussion. If Husserl had been better acquainted with the history of philosophy, he might have been more cautious in his claims for originality, more generous in acknowledging significant phenomenological predecessors.
Alhough there is no space here to argue the point in detail, all the main German idealists, including Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, are concerned with cognition based on phenomena. Depending on how phenomena are understood, all the main German idealists can be considered as phenomenologists.
Husserl’s unsubstantiated claim that Hegel lacks a critique of reason points to the former’s superficial grasp of the philosophical tradition.Footnote 4 This assertion must be substantiated by an account of what Husserl means by ‘reason’ and ‘rigorous science’, but also by a similar account of Hegel’s position. There is no evidence in Husserl’s voluminous writings that he ever seriously attempted to read Hegel. Heidegger, who often discusses Hegel, claims that if philosophy is to survive, it must come to grips with Hegel. He often wrote and lectured about Hegel, whom, during his Nazi period, he assimilated to his own vision of the Nazi view of the total state.Footnote 5 He clearly thinks that dialogue with Hegel is essential to what he melodramatically casts as the survival of philosophy.
Husserl’s belief that the critique of reason which he detects in Kant and Fichte is missing in Hegel and the romantic school is, as concerns Hegel, if ‘romanticism’ means ‘early German romanticism’, simply uninformed. Hegel opposed romanticism in all its forms. A post-Kantian version of the Kantian critique of reason is present on virtually every page in Hegel’s writings. Post-Kantian German idealism consists of a lengthy post-Kantian critique of reason, including most prominently Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. Though post-Kantian German idealism widens and in that sense rehabilitates the Kantian view of reason, it does not follow that any of the major post-Kantian thinkers ‘lacks’, to use Husserl’s term, a critique of reason.
Post-Kantian German idealism features a concerted effort, by different hands, to interpret, criticize, reformulate and realize the intrinsic aims of the critical philosophy. Kant launches a blanket claim of dogmatism against pre-Kantian philosophy in general. Hegel, who rejects the Kantian claim to overcome dogmatism, consistently takes Kant to task for the supposedly dogmatic character of the critical philosophy. Yet he does not turn away from, but rather seeks to deepen, Kant’s position which, he says, ‘constitutes the foundation and the starting point of the new German philosophy, and this is a merit of which it can boast undiminished whatever fault may be found in it’ (Hegel Reference Hegel2010: 40).
Hegel is best understood, as he suggests in the preface to the Differenzschrift, his initial philosophical text, as rejecting the letter but accepting the spirit of the critical philosophy. He attempts, as he suggests Fichte and Schelling also attempt, to complete the Kantian critique of reason according to its spirit but not according to its letter. Kant, who thought he was misinterpreted by his initial readers, appeals to this ancient Pauline distinction, which is in turn restated by Fichte, and then referenced by Hegel in the preface to the Differenzschrift.
A different kind of difficulty, also based on ignorance, is presented by attention to method as the criterion of phenomenology. Husserl and Heidegger both insist on method as central to phenomenology. This Husserlian conviction leads to the familiar French belief, inspired by the familiar Cartesian emphasis on method, that the so-called three Hs—namely Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger—share a commitment to the same phenomenological method (see Kojève Reference Kojève1947: 470).Footnote 6
Descartes believes that method is central to philosophy. Yet it is in fact false that there is a phenomenological method common to Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger, or to Husserl and Hegel, or even to Hegel and Husserl. Hegel rejects the view that philosophy depends on method. Kant seeks to identify the general conditions of cognition as distinguished from the process of knowledge. Hegel, who thinks that the conditions of knowledge cannot be isolated from the process of knowledge, rejects this Kantian distinction. He cannot consistently criticize Kant’s effort to formulate a method and also characterize his own position as based on a method. Efforts to describe Hegel’s position as a method approach it from a perspective that he rejects (see Kosok Reference Kosok1978: 237–88).Footnote 7
III. Kant and phenomenology
Important thinkers often, perhaps always, react against different views. Hegel initially responds to Kant, Fichte and Schelling. He later takes into account the entire Western tradition. Husserl is influenced by Hume, Brentano, Bolzano, Kant and others. The relation between Hegel and Husserl is mediated through Kant, hence indirect. Kant influences Hegel and Husserl, who each independently, in Kant’s wake, turn to phenomenology. Hegel and Husserl react to, build on and in different ways go further down the path opened by the critical philosophy.
The term ‘phenomenology’ has at least four distinguishable meanings in Kant’s writings. In the immediate aftermath of the Inaugural Dissertation (1770), Kant defined the positive part of this work as a phaenomenologia generalis. In a letter to Lambert, he calls attention to the difference between general laws of sensation as opposed to concepts and basic principles of pure reason with respect to metaphysics. He describes phaenomenologia generalis as a special but negative science that precedes metaphysics, in order to avoid confusion over judgments about objects of pure reason. At this point, he understands phenomenology as a propaedeutic discipline, which preserves true metaphysics from any sensory contamination.Footnote 8 This view of phenomenology is at least roughly similar to Lambert’s view, differing mainly in that it is prolegomenal. In sum, in this pre-critical period, Kant intended phenomenology to precede science as a separate, propadeutic discipline whose role lies in testing the validity and limits of sensory knowledge.
Kant’s view rapidly changes. In the famous Herz letter, written early in the critical period, ‘phenomenology’ refers to general phenomenology understood as equivalent to epistemology. At this point, ‘phenomenology’ is synonymous with what will later become the critical philosophy as such. What was earlier understood as a preliminary, negative discipline in the pre-critical period has apparently become equivalent to the entire philosophical discipline. Kant now understands critical philosophy as phenomenology and phenomenology as critical philosophy. This meaning is retained by Kant, for instance in his letter to Lambert, cited above, where he toys with the idea of calling the critical philosophy expounded in the Critique of Pure Reason by the name ‘phenomenology’. Kant later abandoned the term ‘phenomenology’ in favour of ‘critical philosophy’, a term he uses often in the first Critique, but less frequently later on, to refer to his position.
Phenomenology plays another, further role in Kant’s view of philosophical physics. The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science studies the a priori conditions of physics. In its last chapter, which is entitled ‘Phenomenology’, this term refers to a modal account (possibility, actuality and necessity) of the experience of matter in motion. Kant here describes phenomenology as a theory of true appearances (Erscheinungen), as a theory that explains how, within the realm of material natural science, empirical phenomena become experience. In this respect, Kant writes:
At issue here is not the transformation of semblance [Schein] into truth, but rather of [true] appearance [Erscheinung] into experience; for, in the case of semblance, the understanding with its object-determining judgments is always in play, although it is in danger of taking the subjective for objective; in the [true] appearance, however, no judgment of the understanding is to be met with at all—which needs to be noted, not merely here, but in the whole of philosophy, because otherwise, when appearances are in question, and this term is taken to have the same meaning as semblance, one is always poorly understood. (Kant Reference Kant1910ff: IV, 555)
The term ‘phenomenology’ does not occur in the first Critique, in which there is extensive discussion of phenomena. Yet the position that Kant expounds in this treatise arguably concerns a fourth form of phenomenology, which Kant links to a distinction between two different, incompatible epistemic strategies. Kant’s crucial but enigmatic claim to know Plato better than the latter knows himself directs attention to his relation to Plato and, if there is a difference, to Platonism (CPR: B370, 395). Like Plato, Kant is a dualist. The critical philosophy states the epistemic problem in a recognizably Platonic manner. Plato’s distinction between appearances and forms or ideas is apparently reformulated in Kant’s distinction between appearance (or representation) and noumenon (or thing in itself). Kant’s post-Platonic approach to cognition, on the basis of a revised form of the ancient Platonic ontological distinction between appearance and reality, is arguably intended to solve the Platonic problem: that of the relation between appearance or phenomena and forms, ideas or reality. Plato rejects the backward epistemic inference from appearance to the mind-independently real, or from thought to being, or again in causal terms from an effect to its cause. He relies instead on intellectual intuition, or the direct epistemic grasp of what is.
Kant, who rejects intellectual intuition, invokes epistemic constructivism to grasp the relation between appearance and reality. Kant multiplies technical vocabulary as he unclearly restates two main readings of the Platonic relation between appearance and reality: either as a phenomenon, that is as an appearance (Erscheinung), or again as a representation (Vorstellung), two terms that Kant appears to use as synonyms, on the one hand; and as a thing in itself or as a noumenon, on the other. Since each of these terms can be read in different ways, the interpretation of the critical philosophy is difficult. There seem to be two main interpretations of Kant’s epistemic position: as an Erscheinungslehre, or roughly the appearance or the representation (Vorstellung) of what is as it is. The latter, or thing in itself, can without contradiction be thought but neither experienced nor known, since it refers to an unknown and unknowable reality (CPR: B566, 535). This view, which is sometimes called the two aspects thesis, or again the double aspect thesis, is a sophisticated form of empiricism. It suggests that mind-independent reality can not only be thought without contradiction but also in fact appears. This reading of Kant, which has support in texts, is currently best illustrated by Allison (Reference Allison2004). Yet it is incompatible with the so-called Copernican revolution in philosophy (a term Kant never uses to refer to his position, but that was in use by Reinhold, Schelling and perhaps others while Kant was active), or the view that we know only what we in some sense can be said to ‘construct’.
IV. Hegelian phenomenology and epistemic constructivism
Hegel and Husserl both develop phenomenological theories in Kant’s wake. Both theories can be understood to be independent efforts to deepen and complete Kant’s approach to cognition. Husserlian and post-Husserlian phenomenology has been carefully studied, but there has been little attention to Hegelian phenomenology.Footnote 9 Hegel, who entitled his study Phenomenology of Spirit, never claims to be doing phenomenology. Yet examination of his position suggests that he proposes a sophisticated a posteriori reformulation of Kant’s a priori epistemic constructivism in his phenomenological account of cognition.
Hegel sharply criticizes causal theories of perceptual cognition in proposing a phenomenological alternative. The causal theory of perception, sometimes known as the new way of ideas, includes what is usually designated as rationalism, or theories running from ideas to the mind-independent world, and empiricism, or theories based on empirical experience of the world. Rationalism and empiricism share a causal relation between ideas and the world—between the world, which causes ideas, and the ideas through which we know the world. Both further rely on the anti-Platonic reverse causal inference from ideas, taken as an effect, to the world, taken as their cause.
In reacting to Kant, Hegel overlooks the phenomenological dimension of the critical philosophy, which he misreads as if it were a representational approach to knowledge. This is an obvious misreading, since Kant, who claims that ‘representation’ cannot even be defined, rejects a representational approach to cognition, as the basis of his Copernican turn. According to Kant, we have never made progress on the assumption that cognition must conform to objects, and we cannot cognize mind-independent reality. Hegel, who overlooks this possibility, analyzes the Kantian view, which he describes as dogmatic, under the headings of empiricism and consciousness, to which he proposes an alternative epistemic approach—influenced by Fichte—which is based on self-consciousness.
Kant’s Copernican alternative is phenomenological. It presents an approach to cognition based on an account of the construction of the phenomena of consciousness. This is the meaning of the Kantian suggestion that cognition is possible if and only if the cognitive object is not independent of, but rather depends on, the cognitive subject. Hegelian phenomenology is not intended simply to reject but rather to improve on Kant’s phenomenological approach to cognition in the Copernican revolution. Kant’s Copernican revolution is constructivist, or based on a non-standard form of identity between subject and object, knower and known. According to Kant, cognition is possible if and only if the subject that cognizes and the object that is cognized are identical. This identity, which is phenomenological, concerns the phenomenal contents of experience. Hegel formulates a version of the philosophy of identity (Identitätsphilosophie), more precisely of the identity of subject and object, which are both given in the form of phenomena within consciousness.
In this regard, Hegel makes two basic points. First, within consciousness the self-conscious subject distinguishes between two phenomenological objects: itself as the self-conscious subject and the object of which it is conscious. Second, the cognitive subject makes the assumption, or posits, that the mind-independent real world is given phenomenally. ‘Consciousness’, Hegel writes,
simultaneously distinguishes itself from something, and at the same time relates itself to it, or, as it is said, this something exists for consciousness; and the determinate aspect of this relating, or of the being of something for a consciousness, is knowing. But we distinguish this being-for-another from being in-itself; whatever is related to knowledge or knowing is also distinguished from it, and posited as existing outside-of this relationship … (PhG: §82, 51–52)
Hegel criticizes the critical philosophy, which he controversially understands as a form of empiricism, in the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in the passage on the second ‘Position of Thought with Respect to Objectivity’ and again in the very detailed account of ‘Consciousness’ in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel agrees with Kant that the metaphysical realist claim to grasp a mind-independent external world is indemonstrable. This suggestion undermines all forms of metaphysical realism, and supports Kant’s Copernican turn to cognitive constructivism.
Constructivist thinkers such as Hobbes, Vico, Kant, Hegel and Dewey need to explain what it means to ‘construct’ the cognitive object. Hegel substitutes empirical realism, or the idea that we can only know what is given in conscious experience, for metaphysical realism, or the unsupported claim to know the mind-independent world as it is. Hegel’s critique of Kant shifts the cognitive process from cognition based on representations, or representationalism, which he mistakenly takes to be the Kantian view, to cognition based on phenomena. All appearances are phenomena, but only some phenomena are representations. Representations form a sub-class of phenomena that refer beyond themselves to objects that appear. In giving up reference to what conceivably lies beyond the limits of conscious experience, Hegel abandons any and all cognitive claims about things in themselves, noumena, or again the way the mind-independent world is. Hegel’s phenomenological aim is not, as in empiricism, to correctly represent the world. It is rather to cognize the phenomena, which make up the contents of conscious experience.
Identity is a minimal condition of cognition. According to Hegel, difference points toward the need to seek an underlying unity, or identity, which is the condition of overcoming difference. This is the meaning of Hegel’s conception of idealism, which he describes in different ways pointing to the same insight: ‘In general … [since] substance is in itself or implicitly Subject, all content is its own reflection into itself’ (PhG: §54, 33). The subject does not know something other than or different from itself, since knowing is self-knowing. Hegel repeats the same basic claim in different words when he writes that: ‘Reason is the certainty of being all reality’ (§235, 142). In other words, to know is to know oneself phenomenally in the form of otherness.
Hegel works out his view of phenomenology in the Phenomenology of Spirit, and in the ‘Phenomenology’ section of the Encyclopedia. Kant contends that the subject must construct what it knows, but he fails to describe ‘epistemic construction’, which he ascribes to a pre-conscious, uncognizable activity (CPR: B181, 274).
Like Kant, Hegel thinks that we can only grasp the contents of experience indirectly through a series of categories. Unlike the Kantian ones, Hegelian categories are not fixed, innate, or a priori. They are rather theories that derive from experience, and are further tested and if necessary corrected through experience. According to Hegel, the cognitive object is not independent of, but rather dependent on, the theory or conceptual framework one employs to cognize that object. As the theory changes, the object also changes. The cognitive object is literally constructed through theories intended to grasp it. Hegel thinks cognitive objects arise within a historical cognitive process aimed toward formulating a theory adequate to the test of experience.
V. Husserlian phenomenology and epistemic representationalism
Hegel ‘naturalizes’ Kantian a priorism. He describes the a posteriori construction of the contents of consciousness through a dialectical interaction between what we necessarily posit as the mind-independent world and the cognitive subject. His reaction to Kant runs from the transcendental or a priori to the a posteriori plane. He begins on the a posteriori plane, in reformulating Kantian phenomenological constructivism as a posteriori. Husserl’s reaction to Kant runs, on the contrary, from the a posteriori to the a priori plane. He starts on the a posteriori level, or with what is given to consciousness, in rising through reduction either to or at least toward the a priori level examining the constitution of the phenomenological contents of consciousness.
After his initial breakthrough to phenomenology, Husserl never tires of utilizing the term, which he understands in an ever-expanding series of different ways in his published and unpublished corpus. Unlike Hegel, who rarely changes his mind, Husserl largely carries out his philosophical education in public. Commentators favourable to Husserl concede the difficulty of specifying his understanding of ‘phenomenology’. According to Orth, Husserl never arrived at a definitive view of ‘phenomenology’ and simply identified everything he did or wrote as ‘phenomenological’ (see Orth Reference Orth1982: 231–49).
Husserlian phenomenology includes at least three main elements: the structures of consciousness from the first-person point of view; a theory of knowledge based on the ancient dream of philosophy as a rigorous science; and intentionality, or some version of the general view that thought is about or directed toward some real or imaginary object in order to grasp its essence, or in another definition as the power of minds to be about, to represent, or to stand for, things, properties and states of affairs.
Husserl’s position develops in an enormous series of published and unpublished writings. Since we cannot study the evolution of his position in detail, it will suffice to identify two main phases of the development of his theories through brief reference to two main works, the Logical Investigations (1900–1) and Ideas 1 (1913). The former features a descriptive, non-transcendental phenomenology, and the latter expounds transcendental phenomenology which took shape after the discovery of the transcendental reduction.
Husserlian phenomenology is developed in complex ways in an enormous bibliography. Since Husserl’s relation to Kant has been studied in detail (see Kern Reference Kern1964), it will suffice to reconstruct his position in terms of three concepts only, each of which has a Kantian predecessor, including: psychologism, the phenomenological reduction and the concept of constitution.
Psychologism, which Husserl discusses in the Logical Investigations, runs like a red thread throughout all his later writings, linking together Husserl’s many concerns. Kant rejects what Husserl later calls psychologism in distinguishing the psychological and the logical components of cognition. Frege famously accused Husserl of falling prey to psychologism in a review of the latter’s pre-phenomenological Philosophy of Arithmetic. Husserl’s breakthrough to phenomenology arises, following Frege’s lead, in the process of formulating a complex account of psychologism in the first volume of Logical Investigations.
‘Psychologism’ is understood in different ways,Footnote 10 but mainly as the conflation of psychological and non-psychological entities—what Kant, in reference to Locke, calls ‘physiology’. Husserl is centrally concerned with this theme throughout his phenomenological writings. This includes his early turn toward Kant, and his later turn away from Kant and toward Descartes. Husserl, who denies that either Kant or Descartes is already a phenomenologist, thinks that, on the basis of the Cartesian ego cogito, it is possible to arrive at transcendental subjectivity.Footnote 11 In the Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, his last, unfinished work, he calls attention to Kant’s uncritical assumption of the life-world (see Husserl Reference Husserl1970: §§28–34, 103–35).
The phenomenological reduction was initially formulated in 1911. Speaking generally, ‘reduction’ is the starting point of phenomenology, through which one rises from the natural attitude within the world to the presuppositionless level of philosophy as a rigorous science, in short to the a priori plane. The reduction was rejected by many of Husserl’s followers, perhaps most famously by Merleau-Ponty, but Husserl later thought that it was the cornerstone of transcendental phenomenology. This suggests that his earlier writings were not phenomenological in this later transcendental sense, and, if phenomenology is a transcendental science, were perhaps not phenomenological at all.
Kant, who begins a priori, does not have to account for it. Husserl’s difficulty lies in understanding the transition from the a posteriori to the a priori as something other than a regulative idea. This difficulty is identified by Merleau-Ponty in his reference to the reduction as an infinite task, which, since it can only be a regulative idea, cannot be completed, hence cannot be constitutive (see, for discussion, Natanson Reference Natanson1974). If the completed reduction is a precondition for transcendental phenomenology, then it is difficult to see how presuppositionless science as Husserl understands it is possible.
Constitution is another difficult but crucial Husserlian concept. According to Kant, the subject constructs the objects of experience and knowledge. Hegel thinks cognition depends on the a posteriori construction of cognitive objects within consciousness. Husserl’s view of ‘constitution’, his term for idealist epistemic constructivism, is unclear. The Husserlian concept of constitution is linked to a representational approach to Kant. Hegel rejects the Kantian representationalism which Husserl apparently espouses. In Ideas I and thereafter, that is after the discovery of the transcendental reduction, Husserl invokes ‘transcendental idealism’ in pointing toward a limited affinity with Kant. At this point Husserl follows the Kantian distinction between what is constituted in consciousness, objects of experience and knowledge, and the mind-independent real world.
Husserl accepts the traditional goal of philosophy to be a rigorous science while rejecting historicism and relativism. He seeks to make out the alleged parallel between the transcendental plane and what he later came to call the life-world, or between transcendental psychology and psychology. He describes ‘constitution’ in a long series of writings, including the Philosophy of Arithmetic, Ideas I, Cartesian Meditations, and two posthumously published books, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology and Experience and Judgment. In Ideas I, he contends, in refuting subjective idealism—a view he ascribes to Berkeley—that all reality exists through the dispensing of meaning (I: §55, 152–54). Husserl considers the subject, or consciousness, to be self-contained and absolute, dependent on nothing. He seems to hold that the spatio-temporal world only is for a subject as what is intended (§49, 136–39). He apparently believes that there is a mind-independent external world with which we come into contact and which we know insofar as it is ‘constituted’ in our consciousness through the intention, or way in which consciousness is directed toward its object. Husserl’s central point is that the object is not constructed by the subject, but rather is constituted as an object for the subject.
This relatively simple point seems to have been swallowed up in the secondary literature on Husserl. All observers agree that Husserl’s concept of constitution is close to the heart of his position, but the proper interpretation of this Husserlian concept remains unclear. According to Fink, the meaning of ‘transcendental constitution’ fluctuates between the formation of sense of something already constituted and creation (Fink Reference Fink1952: 78). Sokolowski believes that ‘reality requires consciousness in order to be “real”’ (Sokolowski Reference Sokolowski1970: 196). Spiegelberg holds that Husserl never settles on a single meaning of ‘constitution’ (Spiegelberg 1982: 130–31, 706–8). For Heidegger, ‘constitution’ does not mean producing or making, but rather letting something be seen (Heidegger Reference Heidegger1992: 71). Moran points to different claims in different Husserlian texts, including the Kantian idea that objects for consciousness are ‘built up’ through a combination of the contents of sensory intuition and the application of categories which is stressed in Cartesian Meditations (Moran Reference Moran2000: 164–66). Welton claims that constitutive phenomenology ‘schematizes the structural formations making phenomenal fields possible according to transcendental space’ (Welton Reference Welton2000: 254). Mohanty suggests that constitution is the two-fold process of the intentional act consisting in the constitution of a noematic sense and then, on that basis, the overlapping noemata of objects (Mohanty Reference Mohanty1997: 91–92). His useful suggestion can be paraphrased as the idea that mind-independent objects only become objects for us through the progressive elaboration of an intention, or directedness towards (something), which, in this way, comes to be for us. In a word, for Husserl constitution and intentionality are correlative concepts, since what is intended is in fact constituted by us (see Kohák Reference Kohák1978: 120–25). In short, Husserl’s theory of constitution is an account not of the construction but the constitution of the intentional object.
VI. Forms of Husserlian phenomenology
Husserl’s breakthrough to phenomenology occurred in the midst of the ongoing dispute about psychologism to which he strongly contributed. His defense of anti-psychologism through a multi-dimensional attack on psychologism was directed against psychologistic thinkers, including certain Kantians, and even against Kant himself. Yet Husserl clearly belongs in the Kantian camp with respect to many themes, including, as noted, his anti-psychologism and his anti-historicism.
Husserl’s initial and later forms of phenomenology are divided by the phenomenological reduction. Husserl’s initial form of phenomenology is paradoxically both closer to as well as further from Kant’s critical philosophy than its later development. In the Logical Investigations, Husserl links phenomenology to intuition in separating his theory from Kant’s. The title of volume 2 of the Logical Investigations—Investigations into Phenomenology and the Theory of Knowledge—points toward phenomenology as the way into epistemology. In the introduction, Husserl forges a link between phenomenology and epistemology. He focuses here on the connection between ‘objective theory of knowledge’ and ‘the pure phenomenology of the experiences of thinking and knowing’. He grounds his phenomenological approach to theory of knowledge in essentialism. By ‘phenomenology’ he means at this early point ‘experiences [Erlebnisse] intuitively seizable and analyzable in the generality of their essence, not experiences empirically perceived and treated as real facts …’ (Husserl Reference Husserl1970: vol. 2, 166).
Husserl later came to regard his initial position as problematic. He took steps to correct it in ways many of his followers found increasingly problematic, while clearly insisting on a phenomenological solution to the problem of knowledge. After The Idea of Phenomenology (1907), he remained committed to the phenomenological reduction, which he continued to work out in the important programmatic article, Philosophy as Rigorous Science (1911) and in Ideas I (1913), while further developing a phenomenological theory of knowledge based on a solution to psychologism. At this point he focused on supposed correspondence between immanent consciousness and transcendent objects (see, for discussion, Husserl Reference Husserl1990).
The transition from descriptive to transcendental forms of phenomenology is the crucial step to Husserl’s mature position. In Ideas I, that is after the discovery of the reduction, Husserl understands phenomenology as ‘the science of the essence of consciousness’, which he studies from the first-person perspective in terms of intentionality (I: 33ff.). Here Husserl studies objects in the life world, whose existence is naively assumed, but which is supposedly bracketed through the phenomenological reduction. In later writings, Husserl builds on his shift to transcendental idealism in continuing to work out his phenomenological theory. Husserl’s position later develops in many ways but arguably does not basically change. Since this is not a full study of Husserl, suffice it to say that his later writings expand the version of the position based on the transcendental reduction that he initially expounds in Ideas I while addressing a series of related difficulties, some of which have been noted above, including the crucial problem of completing the reduction.
VII. Hegelian and Husserlian phenomenology
Kant’s position has been interpreted in two main ways—as either representational in that the subject depends on the object, or as constructivist in that the object depends on the subject. In a representational reading, the critical philosophy proposes an account of cognition based on the representation of a mind-independent, real object. A representational interpretation of the critical philosophy depicts it as in effect solving the ancient problem of metaphysical realism. This problem has been on the epistemic agenda at least since Parmenides, who at the dawn of the Western tradition suggested the identity of thought and being. On a constructivist reading, on the other hand, the critical philosophy describes the subject’s construction of the mind-dependent cognitive object, which it experiences and knows.
Kant’s view influences Hegel and Husserl differently. A simple way to put the point is that Hegel adopts a version of Kantian constructivism, an approach mediated through such intervening thinkers as Fichte and, to a lesser extent, Schelling. But in reacting to Kant and others, Husserl forges a conception of constitution, or the epistemic representation of what is in independence of us.
According to the critical philosophy, because the subject constructs the object a priori, at the point of cognition subject and object coincide. Hegelian constructivism is based on the interrelation between theories about the contents of consciousness. Hegel thinks that cognitive subjects carry out a posteriori construction of cognitive objects dependent on theories about them. Epistemic theory requires that the subject of the view and the view of its object be cognitively identical. If a difference arises between cognitive theory and cognitive object, then the theory as well as its epistemic object both change.
In the Herz letter (of 21 February 1772), Kant suggests an approach to the problem of knowledge based on an analysis of the relation of representations to mind-independent external objects. In this approach, representations in the mind relate to mind-external objects outside it. Hegelian phenomenology depends on overcoming the difference between phenomena and theories about them in reaching cognitive identity.
Hegel’s constructivist approach to cognition is perhaps less difficult to grasp than Husserlian phenomenology. In reacting to Kant then, later, to Descartes and others, Husserl seems to accept a representational approach to cognition. In restating a version of Kantian representationalism, Husserl follows Bolzano’s distinction between subjective and objective representations (Bolzano Reference Bolzano1972). His insistence on objective representation points as early as the Logical Investigations to a triple distinction between logic, which concerns objective ideas; psychology, which concerns subjective ideas; and phenomenology, which concerns the objective mental contents, as specified by the appropriate phenomenological method, in subjective acts of consciousness. Beginning in Ideas I, Husserl distinguishes between noesis and noema, the intentional content or internal structure of mental acts, to express the distinction and correlation between the intentional structure of consciousness, its directedness as it were, on the one hand, and its ideal content, or the object as intended, on the other.
Husserl often insists on the scientific character of transcendental phenomenology. His epistemic ambition is evident in his insistence on presuppositionlessness, originary beginnings, rigour and the rejection of historicism, naturalism and skepticism in favor of transcendental idealism. But once Descartes regresses to the ego cogito, it is unclear how to return to the world. This difficulty recurs in Husserl. It must be explained how to reach the intended cognitive object, or that to which the contents of consciousness refer. Through the reduction, Husserl brackets the existence of the intentional object, hence the existence of the natural world. His strategy lies in claiming a parallel between transcendental psychology and ordinary psychology, between the contents of consciousness examined on the transcendental plane and the mind-independent external world as supposedly given in the natural attitude. If this is correct then, for Husserl to cash out the epistemological claim of transcendental phenomenology, he must solve the enigma of Kant’s representational approach to knowledge.
Conclusion: Hegel, Husserl and epistemic phenomenology
In this article I have sought, through a non-Husserlian, widened approach to phenomenology, to clarify the relation between Hegel’s and Husserl’s phenomenological approaches to cognition. The widely known Husserlian claim to begin phenomenology is doubly unsatisfactory: first, it fails to account for the different pre-reductive and later reductive phases of Husserl’s position, which, according to his own criteria, are either already or no longer phenomenology. And, second, that claim fails to acknowledge that in different ways phenomenology, or the approach to cognition through phenomena, goes all the way back to the Greek tradition.
Kant is both a transcendental idealist and a cognitive constructivist. Hegel and Husserl defend opposing interpretations of the critical philosophy. Husserl builds on the critical philosophy understood as a representational analysis of cognition, in short the epistemic approach to an already constituted cognitive object, which in this way becomes an intentional, properly phenomenological object for us. Hegel, who like Kant rejects epistemic representationalism, reformulates the latter’s a priori constructivist approach in terms of the construction and cognition of an a posteriori cognitive object. It remains to be seen whether Kantian representationalism, which the author of the critical philosophy rejects in favour of constructivism, can be defended against Kant.
It might be objected that, if one assumes that Husserl was aware of, but not convinced by, the early Greek discussion of phainomena, then what is at stake is a mere preference for a non-Husserlian rather than a Husserlian definition of ‘phenomenology’. Yet philosophy is not independent of but rather dependent on, and hence can be usefully understood through, the philosophical tradition. If later theories build on their predecessors, then a wider view of phenomenology helps to understand that and how different thinkers contribute to a general approach, which, despite contrary claims, has its roots in the ancient Greek tradition. In this respect a wider, more inclusive understanding of phenomenology, which in no way impugns or otherwise diminishes the interest of Husserlian contributions to phenomenology, is—despite Husserlian claims to the contrary—clearly preferable.
