AMERIKS, 1977. Husserls Realism

Philosophical Review

Husserl's RealismAuthor(s): Karl AmeriksReviewed work(s):Source: The Philosophical Review, Vol. 86, No. 4 (Oct., 1977), pp. 498-519Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of Philosophical ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2184565 .Accessed: 16/04/2012 20:49

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The Philosophical Review, LXXXVI, No. 4 (October 1977).

HUSSERL'S REALISM* Karl Ameriks

I N Husserl's works there occur many remarks which have been taken to demonstrate an allegiance to idealism. Even most

interpreters sympathetic to phenomenology see these remarks as involving such poor arguments for idealism that they constitute grounds for rejecting much of Husserl's philosophy. After exhib- iting the main sources of the common interpretation and rejection of Husserl as an idealist, I shall argue that his remarks should rather be understood as being made in the context of a good argument for realism, that is, the doctrine that there are physical objects which exist outside consciousness and are not wholly dependent on it ("idealism" will be understood as the denial of this thesis).' After reconstructing Husserl's realism, I will also suggest reasons why it could be misunderstood and will criti- cize contrary interpretations of Husserl.

I

The common interpretation of Husserl as an idealist is rooted in Husserl's own characterization of his philosophy as a kind of "transcendental idealism." In the first edition of Ideas (1913), Husserl argued for this "idealism" and concluded:

(A) [TJhe whole spatio-temporal world in which man and the human ego claim to belong as subordinate singular realities, is according to its own meaning mere intentional being, a being, therefore which has the merely secondary, relative sense of a being for consciousness. It is a being which consciousness in its own experiences posits, and is, in principle, intuitable and determinable only as the element common to the (harmoniously) motivated appearance mani- folds, but over and beyond this is just nothing at all.2

Later, in a section of his Cartesian Meditations (1929) entitled,

*For help with the final formulation of this paper, I am indebted to a referee and the editors of THIE PHILOSOHICAL REVIEW, and to my col- leagues at Notre Dame, especially Professor Gary Gutting.

'For a more precise version of this definition see A. C. Ewing. Idealist. A Critical Survey (London, 1933), p. 3.

2Edmund Husserl. Ideas, tr. by W. R. Boyce-Gibson (New York: Collier Books, 1963), p. 139. All my abbreviated references will be to this volume.

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"Genuine Phenomenological Explanation of One's Ego Cogito as Transcendental Idealism," Husserl asserted,

(B) [E]very imaginable sense, every imaginable being, whether the latter is called immanent or transcendent, falls within the domain of transcendental subjectivity, as the subjectivity that constitutes sense and being . . . if transcendental subjectivity is the universe of possible sense, then an outside is precisely-nonsense.'

And in a preface to the English edition of the Ideas (1931) Husserl wrote,

(C) I must not hesitate, however, to state quite explicitly that in regard to transcendental-phenomenological idealism, I have nothing whatsoever to take back, that now as ever I hold every current form of philosophical realism to be in principle absurd. .. [p. 12].

These passages are only the most familiar of many which would appear to justify the common treatment of Husserl as an idealist. Moreover, they are surrounded by discussions in which his grounds for holding an (apparently) idealist position seem all too evident. They are the familiar grounds of the Cartesian: the insistence on intuitive certainty, the claim that the external world is not known with such certainty, and the observation that even if that world did not exist, the contents of consciousness could be such as to provide us with all that constitutes the experience which, naively, we have been taking to be the experience of an independent world. Yet even for one attached to such grounds it would seem the proper conclusion would be only to be neutral with respect to the metaphysical issue of realism. Most interpreters have felt this is the position Husserl should have held, but that regrettably he drew the more radical and invalid conclusion that realism is false. Here I believe Husserl has been the victim of fun- damental misunderstanding, for I will argue that in view of their context his remarks must be understood as properly reflecting a phenomenological argument for realism, rather than idealism or metaphysical neutrality.

3Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, tr. by Dorian Cairns (The Hague, 1969), p. 84. These passages are emphasized in Wesley Morriston, "Inten- tionality and the Phenomenological Method: A Critique of Husserl's Tran- scendental Idealism,"Journal of the British Societyfor Phenomenology, 7 (1976), pp. 37, 39. See also R. Chisholm, Realism and the Background of Phenomenology (New York, 1960), pp. 20-21.

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II

The context for Husserl's remarks in the Ideas is set by the introduction in section 39 of the topic of the essential differences between the concepts of "consciousness and natural reality," that is, the concepts of an experience (in the sense of a strictly momentary occurrence; Husserl realizes that we can speak of "experiences" as items which are temporally extended, complex, opaque, and not sheerly identical with a moment of consciousness, but that is not the way he means to use the term) and a physical appearance. Husserl notes that even if one regards the latter concept as the concept of something relatively subjective, as opposed to the theoretical concepts of reality offered by science, nonetheless the concept of a physical phenomenon is not the concept of something subjective in the sense in which an experience is subjective (section 40). For Husserl, experiences are wholly "immanent"; at each moment there is nothing more to them than what is present to mind. Physical phenomena, on the other hand, are given perspectivally and are thus necessarily "transcendent" in that they cannot be simply identified with what is present to a mind at a particular moment (sections 41, 42).

After drawing attention to these points, Husserl devotes a section (43) to attacking the tempting "fundamental error" of inferring that because physical phenomena are in this sense transcendent the experience of them does not disclose to us things them- selves. The inference is unjustified but notorious. Husserl notes that it is implicit in the empiricist view that what is present to a perceiver are images, signs, or ideas, and not things themselves. But the primary object of attack here is Kant, for Husserl regards what he has called the "fundamental error" as tied up with the notion that only a being like God, who could see things wholly at once (in an "intellectual intuition"), can know things themselves. For Husserl, this notion conflicts with the very meaning of physical phenomena. If someone were to be aware of something nonperspectivally, so that it would be wholly present to mind, that item would be in effect immanent in Husserl's sense; it would not be what we understand as a physical thing but rather should be regarded as an item of the mind (though this is still not to say it would be identical with the act that knows it).

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At this point Husserl summarizes his position in a terminology that has misled his interpreters. He speaks of the "merely phenomenal being of the transcendent" and the "absolute being of the immanent" (section 44). This may give the impression that what is transcendent, namely physical items, are not fully real, whereas what is immanent, namely experiences, are alone real. Yet this is not at all what Husserl means. What he means is that experience is "absolute" simply in that the appearance of an experience gives us the whole experience, adequately and ab- solutely, whereas the appearance of a thing is always inadequate, incomplete. It is precisely by bringing out that things do not (and cannot) have "absolute being" in the sense of being immanent, that Husserl is trying to point out that they are transcendent, that they are understood to exist apart from the mind. Husserl recognizes that the epistemic transcendence things have in the sense of not being completely given is not in itself a proof of a real transcendence in the sense of a separate existence. At this point he is not demonstrating that there really exist such transcendent items; he is simply trying to distinguish the concepts of the transcendent and the immanent and thus to ward off an ideal of knowledge which would require the perception of transcendent things to have precisely what is impos- sible, namely the character of immanent perception.4

It is important that the initial realistic context of Husserl's discussion be properly understood, because from this point on his language becomes even more idealistic in tone although its underlying meaning remains realistic. Thus in section 45 Husserl concludes:

A transcendence which dispensed with the aforesaid systematically motived connexion with my existing sphere of actual perception would be a completely groundless assumption; a transcendence which dispensed with the same, on principle, would be nonsense [p. 129].

Here it may seem that although Husserl has rejected any reduction of things to what is actually perceived, he is still insisting that we cannot meaningfully say anything exists which cannot be per-

4Cf. Section 138ff, and Rudolf Boehm, "Husserl's Concept of the 'Absolute'," in The Phenomenology of iusseri, ed. by R. 0. Elveton (Chicago, 1970), p. 189: "Husserl denies the absolute being of the real on the basis of affirming the independent mode of existence of the real as the 'being-in-itself' of the transcendent which in principle excludes the possibility of absolute giveness."

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ceived. In a sense, Husserl is saying this, but in doing so he is by no means challenging realism. The whole point of section 45 is to distinguish the notions of "unperceived experience" and "unperceived reality." The distinction for Husserl lies in the fact that while there may be unperceived, that is, nonreflected upon experiences, these are all immediately perceivable upon a proper reorientation of mind. Natural reality, on the other hand, contains items which are not only not actually perceived but cannot be immediately perceived by the subject. Hence, in saying it is non- sense to assume transcendent things which cannot be actually perceived, Husserl does not mean that what is must be such that its perception is a ready physical possibility. At a first approximation, his view is rather just that any meaningful claim that a thing exists presumes that it is logically possible for that thing to be in some way perceived, that is, for some experiencer to have a direct experience of some aspect of the thing. So interpreted, Husserl's position could be expressed in the trivial sounding statement that it is "nonsense" to assume something exists which is transcendent yet in principle unperceivable. It will be seen that in later passages Husserl phrases his view in such a way that it involves something more than a trivial statement, though still definitely nothing so strong as the claim that things are relative to the physical possibility of being perceived.

In section 46 Husserl concludes the first part of his discussion by reiterating the "indubitability of immanent" and the "dubita- bility of transcendent perception." He emphasizes that the "dubitability" of the transcendent does not mean that there are "rational grounds which might be pitted against the tremendous force of unanimous experience" (p. 132). What is transcendent can be doubted simply in that "doubt is thinkable," for the nonexistence of whatever is incompletely given and not identical with consciousness always remains logically possible. Nonetheless, Husserl says the existence of the world "is even empirically indubitable, in that it is apodictic that as long as there is harmonious experience it is impossible to believe the world and the things of experience do not exist."'

-Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phfinomenologie und phainomenologischer Phi/osophie, vol. III of Jiusserliana, ed. by W. Biemel (The Hague, 1950), p. 109 (my translation). This passage is omitted from the English version of the Ideas and is one of the many instances in which that text has a misleadingly

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This brings us to the threshold of Husserl's argument for what he calls transcendental idealism. Husserl begins by noting a series of counterfactual situations, arranged roughly in order of their philosophical significance (section 47). Matters could have been such that people would be psychologically incapable of learning the laws of physics; or such that very different physical laws would obtain; or such that even though there would be enough regularity in experience to allow ordinary objective judgments, there would not be enough to allow the determination of precise laws in the form of modern science; or, finally, matters might have been such that the contents of consciousness would leave us "wholly incapable of constituting self-preserving "realities," unities that endure and exist "in themselves" whether perceived or not per- ceived" (p. 137; compare p. 151). Especially through this last possibility Husserl is trying to draw our attention to a sense in which the natural world is a "correlate of consciousness" and is "constituted" in it, in that the "the general concept of thing- transcendence, which is the standard whereby all natural state- ments about transcendence are measured, cannot be extracted from any source other than perception's own essential content" (p. 134). There are at least three points in these remarks which will require elucidation: the notion of reality (i) as a "correlate" of consciousness, (ii) as being "constituted" in it, (iii) and as having its "standard" in "perception's own essential content." Here again Husserl's prima facie idealistic remarks will prove to be consistent with realism.

In speaking of things as "correlates" of consciousness, for example, Husserl is saying that no matter how closely related propositions about things and about consciousness are, the former

idealistic appearance. Another example is the mistranslation of presentable as "presented" on the top of Ideas, p. 140. In other places Husserl is more precise about the dubitability of the world, by distinguishing between (i) "the possibility of the disruption of the harmonious structure of the world," and (ii) the (possibly incoherent) "sheer possibility that this world or the world in general is not;" (Erste Philosophie II, vol. VIII of Jiusserliana, ed. by R. Boehm (The Hague, 1959), p. 391) as well as between (i) the idea that future experience might undercut certainty that a specific item in the world existed and (ii) the (possibly incoherent) idea that it might become uncertain whether the world as such ever existed (Ideen, p. 399f.). See also Edmund Husserl, Erste Philosophie I vol. VII of Jiusserliana, ed. by R. Boehm (The Hague: 1956), p. 392.

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are still not identical or reducible to the latter. Things are "correlated" with consciousness in that were one's mind suitably impoverished the assertion of transcendent items would be un- justified and without motivation. But as "correlates" (rather than parts), such items remain distinct from consciousness and never become immanent.6 Any supposition that things are immanent in the sense of being dependent upon conscious- ness in their existence goes directly against the obvious implica- tions of Husserl's discussion of counterfactual situations. The point of that discussion is just that for each level in the complexity of reality there is a corresponding level of experience without which that reality would not be properly assertible. This hardly means that reality of a certain complexity cannot exist without consciousness of correlative complexity. When we imagine the people whom Husserl describes as incapable of learning the laws of physics, there is no reason to think we are to imagine that physical things obeying those laws could not exist in their world; on the contrary, we expect such laws would be the explanation of the people's incapacity.

More idealistic in tone is Husserl's talk of things as "con- stituted" in consciousness. Many interpreters have understood this to mean things are either created by or wholly dependent on consciousness. However, in a letter to William Hocking, Husserl explained that the term "konstituieren" is to be taken as meaning "to manifest oneself."' Thus, Husserl can typically ask how an object "constitutes itself" as being real.8 Things constitute themselves in consciousness in the sense that that is where they display their form and meaning. For each thing we know, there are, according to Husserl, certain constitutive forms. These are accessible only through experience, and as experience becomes appropriately articulated we can say that things are constituted or take on meaning within it. It would be obviously contrary to all that has been shown so far to think that Husserl believes the

6Cf. Edmund Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, tr. by Dorian Cairns (The Hague, 1969), p. 165: "The object is evidently not itself the actual and openly possible experiential processes constituting it; nor is it the evident possibility, connected with this process, the possibility, namely, of repetitive syntheses."

7Quoted in Walter Biemel, "The Development of Husserl's Philosophy," in The Phenomenology of Husserl, ed. by R.O. Elveton (Chicago, 1970), p. 158.

8Erste Philosophie I, p. 388.

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mind makes things. What Husserl did believe is that things can only manifest or constitute themselves as such for a mind which is not a mere receptacle of data but has a capacity to organize and understand what is before it in terms of concepts, laws, and projective inferences. In this way, Husserl's epistemology is idealistic rather than crudely empiricistic.9 It is this sheerly epistemological idealism which is expressed in his statement that perception itself provides the "standard" for transcendent things. His position here is that a complex form of coherence must be the test for objective meaning and truth. This is not incompatible with believing that what is objectively true corre- sponds to and is correlated with experience but is not a part of it. Moreover, Husserl's statement reveals that he in no way sub- scribes to the relativism some see as the consequence of an adherence to considerations of coherence. The criterion Husserl proposes is consciousness's "essential content," that is, something is to be said to really exist not when it merely coheres with some particular limited evidence but when there are "theoretical determinations of increasing transparency and unceasing pro- gressiveness," such that "consciousness, with its experimental content and its flux is really so articulated in itself that the subject of consciousness in the free theoretical play of empirical activity and thought could carry all such [verifying] connections to completion" (p. 138).

Here Husserl is still on the level of an analysis of meanings and is not determining matters of fact. His point is that to meaningfully assert something exists is to say that there are determinate and connected ways in which it could be progressively verified. In actual fact, things are never completely verified, they do not become immanent, and so their nonexistence remains logically possible. But what should we say if in fact the standard of truth appears to be met as best it can in finite experience? What Husserl says is that

[If there is nothing lacking which might in any way be required for the appearance of a unitary world and the rational theoretical knowledge of the same. is it still conceivable, is it not on the contrary absurd that the corresponding transcendent world should not be? [p. 138]

9"Epistemological idealism" is well characterized along these lines and distinguished from "metaphysical idealism" in Harold I. Brown, "Idealism, Empiricism, and Materialism," New Scholasticism 47 (1973), pp. 311-323.

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The answer Husserl expects for this rhetorical question demon- strates an allegiance to realism which we now only need to defne more precisely.

In saying that fully harmonious experience of something tran- scendent makes its nonexistence "absurd," Husserl is not saying that such experience entails an objective existence claim. ' To properly understand Husserl's position we must get a grasp of his use of the term "absurd." The term happens to be employed in a passage that was skipped over in which Husserl discusses what he calls the "logical possibility and real absurdity of a world outside our own" (section 48). Husserl here clearly distin- guishes the formal logical possibility of items beyond the world of possible experience and the material "nonsense" or "absurdity" of this possibility. Earlier Husserl's position was expressed in terms of the mere requirement that it not be logically impos- sible that things can be experienced. It now becomes apparent that this requirement needs to be formulated more precisely. His remarks here invite us to consider the logical consistency yet "real absurdity" of the bare idea of something existent but not experienceable by any imaginable form of consciousness. The key point here is that for Husserl "experienceability never betokens an empty logical possibility, but one that has its motive in the system of experience" (p. 134). The idea of a "world outside our own" is the objectionable idea of something not experience- able in this sense. The idea is not self-contradictory but it is "absurd" in that it involves a positing which has no justification in experience, no ties to a system of concepts we can employ. Thus when Husserl says, "the transcendent must needs be expe- rienceable, and not merely by an ego conjured into being as an empty logical possibility but by an actual ego, as the demonstrable unity of its systematic experience" (p. 136), what he means to emphasize is the term "systematic." He expressly notes, "things no doubt exist and worlds of things which cannot be definitely

'"Husserl's position is thus consistent with Joel Kupperman's recent argument that realism involves (and "any idealism or phenomenalism" would deny) the thesis that "statements about the (distinct) existence of physical objects are not entailed by conjunctions of statements describing actual experiences or the experiences that would occur in various descriptively specifiable circum- stances," ("Realism vs. Idealism," American Philosophical Quarterly, 12 (1975), p. 203.) For Husserl's resistance to the thesis that statements describing experience must entail statements that objects exist, see Ideas, pp. 141, 153.

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set out in any human experience."" Thus the consciousness to which things are relative according to Husserl is neither actual nor even possible human consciousness (thought of as either an "empty logical possibility," or a distinct set of limited physical possibilities) but rather consciousness in the generic sense of some determinate, systematic cognitive structure. 12

We can now tie together Husserl's two discussions of "absurd" possibilities. Just as existence does not entail experienceability by consciousness, although the assumption of things which are-not at all experienceable is absurd, so also for Husserl full harmonious experience does not entail the existence of things, although it does make absurd the denial of their being.

Husserl's doctrine of the absurdity of a "world outside our own" deserves further examination, because it bears a relation to the Kantian notion of a thing-in-itself which sheds considerable light not only on the nature of Husserl's realism but also on the reasons his realism took on an appearance that misled many interpreters. In attempting to distance himself radically from a peculiar kind of Kantian realism, Husserl led many to think he was not a realist at all. There are two related themes arising from Kant which Husserl regarded as leading to a "groundless metaphysics."' The first is the notion of experience as having a structure whose necessity is dependent essentially on the minds of a species having a certain form. Because of this notion Husserl said Kant provided but an "anthropological" or psychological theory, whereas phenomenology seeks objective principles which "belong not specifically to man but to the essence of thinking and knowing."'4 Closely related to the first notion is the concept of reality as something "in itself" with a true nature wholly independent of the forms of finite supposedly distorting minds (or "conceptual frameworks"). A Kantian allegiance to this

"Ideas, p. 136. Elsewhere Husserl allows there may be "bodies with psycho- physical rules and feelings in principle inaccessible to me," Erste Phi/losophie I, p. 219.

'2Husserl does speak of an individual "transcendental ego," but this can be understood as something which simply instantiates and retraces the generic structure. In Erste Philosophie I, p. 220, Husserl speaks of relativity to a "reasonable and normal subjectivity," whose sensibility "stands under univer- sal rules."

'lSee Erste Philosophie I, pp. 357f., 361-362. "Ibid., p. 355; cf. pp. 381, 399.

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concept of a thing-in-itself can arise either in the form of a belief in a brute substrate of our experience or in the consideration of the possibility of another world in principle beyond our experience. 5

From the perspective of Kantians of Husserl's time, especially from the so-called realist perspective of such Neo-Kantians as Alois Riehl, 16 the denial of a thing-in-itself was seen as equivalent to the denial of the real substrate of our experience. But for Husserl it is absurd to posit such an in-principle unknowable, something by definition without anything like the structure of the items of our cognition, as the underlying reality of those items. To deny there are such things is not to deny the real world; it is to deny any point in assuming extra entities beyond those which have cognizable structure. So while Husserl's transcen- dental idealism might at first glance appear to be more idealistic than Kant's in its rejection of things-in-themselves, this rejection is nothing but the denial of an absurd hypothesis. It in no way counts against and is in fact in perfect harmony with Husserl's argument that it would be absurd to deny there really is a tran-

' For a discussion of recent invocations of this latter possibility, see R. Rorty, "The World Well Lost," Journal of Philosophy, 69 (1972), p. 663. Like Husserl, Rorty attacks those who advance this supposedly realistic consideration as committed to an absurd, though not demonstrably logically contradictory, concept of a thing-in-itself.

'6Riehl is the "realist" Husserl would have been most familiar with, for he was a colleague of Husserl's at Halle for a few years and held the leading Chair in Philosophy in Germany when Husserl was writing the Ideas. I believe Husserl's picture of the realism he means to reject is largely patterned after Riehl, who held the passivity of experience requires us to posit a meta- physical being which is ultimately real but not knowable through our subjective categories for appearances. Cf. Ideas, p. 143f., where Husserl charac- terizes "the realism so fashionable in our day" as holding that the objects of perception are not (even referentially identical with) the things that really are, for these are supposedly "wholly unknown," "characterized only indirectly and analogically through mathematical concepts." This was precisely Riehl's view. The reader should study the whole section, culminating in the attack in "an unknown world of thing realities in themselves," in its German version, because the English text on p. 144 is corrupt. In Erste Philosophie I, p. 402, Husserl argues that in effect the Neo-Kantians had only the choice of being psychologistic (like Herbart), or of holding on to the absurd notion of a thing- in-itself (like Riehl), or of nonpsychologistically rejecting that doctrine, in which case he believed they would no longer really be Kantian. Cf. I. Kern, Husserl und Kant (The Hague, 1969), pp. 14, 119f.

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scendent world when our evidence for it is unanimous though fallible.

Given Husserl's sympathy for many themes of an idealistic epistemology (such as an emphasis on coherent experienceability as a requirement for meaningful assertions) and his belief that the realism of his day was infected with absurd doctrines (such as the "thing-in-itself"), it should be clear now why he felt "tran- scendental idealism" was an appropriate title for his philosophy. But regardless of what he called his philosophy, his metaphysical position is definitely not idealistic and not even neutral. He says the world's existence, though not "immediately apodictic," "17 nonetheless is "empirically indubitable," and it is apodictic for him that given harmonious experiences it becomes absurd to deny an external world.

We can now attempt a summary reconstruction of Husserl's realism. By pointing out that natural reality does not have "absolute" being, that "every experience [of things] . . . leaves open the possibility that what is given, despite the persistent consciousness of its bodily self-presence, does not exist" (p. 131), Husserl reminds us that all experience remains logically com- patible with the hypothesis that things do not exist. He then asks us whether we should hold off from making claims of actuality until that hypothesis is logically eliminated, but notes that this would only occur when the relevant data had in effect become immanent in character, in which case we would still be left with- out a route to the desired conclusion of the existence of an external world. In Peircian terms, the argument could be expressed this way: we can "retroduce" or postulate the existence of things as an appropriate explanation of our inadequate thing-experiences, and we can regard that postulate as the only live one, for it is unclear how any other hypothesis would give us any explanation at all. In more Husserlian terms, the argument is this: given the fact that the evidence we have for a realistic conclusion is in essence precisely the kind we should expect to have for it, would it not be absurd to deny that conclusion, even though we are not in possession of premises entailing it?

'7Cartesian Meditations, p. 17. This remark suggests that the world may be in some sense apodictic for Husserl. See above, n. 5.

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III

In view of this interpretation of Husserl as a realist, some account must be given of the initial quoted passages which seemed to imply idealism, as well as of the many interpretations which have treated Husserl as an idealist.

Most of Husserl's "idealistic" comments can be handled by keeping in mind the previous point that the "pure" or "transcendental" consciousness he regards transcendent things to be relative to is to be understood not as some particular human consciousness but as consciousness in the generic sense of cog- nitive capacity. Thus in passage (A) the key point is that Husserl is requiring transcendent things to be "intuitable and deter- minable" by consciousness in this sense. This is not even a requirement that they must be perceivable in an ordinary way, for in a later section directed precisely against those who would deny the existence of what cannot be intuited directly or sensibly, Husserl remarks,

Even a divine physics cannot make categorical thought determinations [e.g.. theoretical predications] intuitable in the plain, ordinary way, as little as divine omnipotence can bring it about that elliptic functions should be painted or played on a fiddle [p. 1481.

Another point that reinforces reading passage (A) as in no way affirming ordinary idealism is the fact that appended to the pas- sage in the German edition is Husserl's remark, "or, more precisely, for the being of the world, a being over and beyond (this consciousness) is absurd." 8 It is obvious that "consciousness" here does not mean human consciousness, since Husserl has already allowed it is not absurd to speak of realities humans can't perceive. Thus Husserl is not categorically saying that as a matter of fact there are no things outside of the minds that actually exist; he is saying, in complete harmony with his general argument, that it is "absurd" though not necessarily logically con- tradictory to posit beings which are in principle uncognizable by any mind.

Precisely the same point is expressed in the claim of passage (B) that it is "nonsense" to speak of something outside "tran- scendental subjectivity." This means it is absurd to affirm any-

'"Ideen, p. 117.

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thing as existent outside the "universe of possible sense" that can be "constituted" or manifested in some form of consciousness. A similar account can be given for passage (C), in which "realism" is characterized not as false or unlikely but "absurd." Here one need only remember that Husserl's understanding of "philosoph- ical realism" links it to the absurd concept of a thing-in-itself, which in turn is just another version of the "nonsensical" idea of something outside transcendental subjectivity. It is also significant that in the remainder of the sentence quoted in (C) Husserl goes on to reject all ordinary idealism as well. In general, Husserl combines his affirmations of what he calls "transcendental- phenomenological idealism" with explicit rejections of "psycho- logical idealism," which makes things relative to actual individual human consciousness, and of Kantian transcendental idealism, which makes physical objects relative to what are regarded as mere human forms of intuition. For Husserl, on the contrary, spatio- temporal objects are fully real, and he cannot imagine a mind which could really know these objects without knowing them through the manifestation of their spatiotemporal properties.'9

Not only can passages (A), (B), and (C) be read as fully compatible with attributing a metaphysically realistic position to Husserl, but it can also be shown that the many interpretations which treat Husserl as an idealist do not present evidence which would undermine that attribution. A complete survey of the idealistic interpretation cannot be offered here, but a brief indica- tion of its general character can be given and a few of its more prevalent versions examined more closely.

Let us deal first with some of the more typical and less detailed treatments of Husserl as an idealist. After referring to the passages of the Ideas that have been analyzed above, John Findlay, for example, concludes that here, "Husserl has provided no good or even meaningful reason for doubting that the natural world exists."" Findlay is right, of course, in noting Husserl has not proven we should doubt the world exists, but this typical point

'9See e.g., Cartesian Meditations, p. 86; Ideas, p. 153; Erste Philosophie I, pp. 355, 364. Husserl's views here are comparable to those of the American "per- spective realists" of the same era.

'John Findlay, "Phenomenology and the Meaning of Realism" in Phenomenology and Philosophical Understanding, ed. by Edo Pivcevic (Cambridge, 1975), p. 156.

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can be offered as a reproach to Husserl only after it has been established that he was trying to prove any such thing. Our examination of the context of Husserl's discussion disclosed he was involved in showing that on the contrary we have no reason for doubting the world exists, and it would be "nonsense" for us to do so. Another typical reproach of Husserl is that voiced in Robert Solomon's question, "If the ego constitutes its objects, what phenomenological grounds could there be for supposing that the world has any existence apart from its creation by the ego?"21 Here again the idealist interpretation rests on an unsubstantiated presupposition. It would have to be shown that "constitutes" has for Husserl the meaning of "creates," something which his own elucidation denies. Richard Schmitt, in his attack on transcen- dental phenomenology as a "muddle" if not a "mystery," has at least recognized that Husserl's talk of a transcendental ego "constituting" the world is not to be understood in terms of a mind metaphysically causing anything but is rather to be taken as indicating there is a set of "formal rules [which] determine the actual construction of knowledge and experience."22 Schmitt's objection is that this is a "misleading way to use" the word "constitution." Here again the criticism of Husserl has failed to give fair attention to the context of his work. As Robert Sokolowski has shown, Husserl's use of the term "konstituieren". in this manner is in accord with the practice of Husserl's philo- sophical environment, and especially with the well-known work of Natorp.23 Nonetheless, the idealistic interpretation has also been advanced by figures within Husserl's tradition. In fact, the philos- opher who has made perhaps the greatest effort in pressing the charge of idealism is Roman Ingarden, a man who could well lay claim to being as close to and respected by Husserl as anyone. Ingarden has put together "a series of assertions which may be regarded as arguments for idealism and which were used by Husserl for this purpose."24 Ingarden considers six such assertions,

2Robert Solomon, From Rationalism to Existentialism (New York, 1972), p. 177. Cf. Sidney Hook, "Husserl's Phenomenological Idealism," Journal of Philosophy, 27 (1930), p. 370.

'Richard Schmitt, "Transcendental Phenomenology: Muddle or Mystery," in Phenomenology and Existentialism, ed. by R. Solomon (New York, 1972), p. 138.

' Robert Sokolowski, The Formation of Husserl's Concept of Constitution (The Hague, 1974), p. 214f.

2Roman Ingarden, "About the Motives Which Led Husserl to Transcen-

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and I shall argue that none of them shows Husserl was an idealist.

The first three arguments Ingarden constructs are typical of many offered by idealistic interpreters,25 but can be immediately seen to have no implications for idealism as we have defined it. These arguments conclude: (i) "objects could cease to be there or not be there at all, while the perceptual experience would con- tinue in its existence," (ii) because things change between per- ceptions, "the cognition of things by means of outer per- ception is essentially infected with an element of uncertainty," and (iiz) because earlier perceptions can have brought a "thing to appearance under a false aspect of a what which does not belong to it at all . . . it always remains questionable in principle whether the 'until now' given really exists at all."26 Obviously none of these points establish a metaphysical dependence in the being of the nonmental on that of the mental. They simply call attention to some familiar ways in which the mental appears epistemically privileged in contrast to the nonmental. Of course, Ingarden also does not believe these arguments establish idealism, but he does think Husserl takes them to express not only epistemo- logical but also ontological qualifications about the nonmental. It is true that Husserl moves from these points to a characterization of the nonmental as "relative" in its being, but it is not clear he is wrong in doing so. In the first place, it has been shown that Husserl's characterization of the transcendent as not "absolute" but relative is actually part of an argumentfor realism. Secondly, with respect to the epistemic properties which he has just analyzed, Husserl has shown that there are ways, albeit strictly epistemic ones, in which the being of the nonmental is qualified and that of the mental is not. Insofar as he does not speak of any other kind of relativity, such as causal dependence (in fact, Husserl expressly rules out any causal relation between

dental Idealism," in Phenomenology and Natural Existence, ed. by Dale Riepe (Albany, 1973), p. 102. See also his "Uber den transzendentalen Idealismus bei Husserl," in Husserl et la Pensee moderne, ed. by H. L. van Breda and J. Taminaux (The Hague, 1959), pp. 95-117; and "What is New in Husserl's Crisis," in Analecta Husserliana, vol. II, ed. by Anna Tymienecka (Dordrecht, 1972), pp. 23-47.

25 See e.g., Edo Pivcevic, Husserl and Phenomenology (London, 1970), p. 77.

26Ingarden, op. cit., pp. 102-103.

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"pure consciousness" and the world), there is no need to take Husserl as having the kind of ontological intentions Ingarden assumes. Moreover, Husserl's focus on the apparent epistemo- logical privileges of the mental can be understood apart from any judgment about his eventual ontological position. The focus is appropriate simply because Husserl, like many other philos- ophers, believed it methodologically important to begin with data about which apodictic claims can be made.

Ingarden's fourth argument may be genuinely idealistic but it involves no textual references and is not recognizably Husserlian. Its conclusion is that "every unconditional attribution of a certain whatness and qualitative determination to the perceptually given is basically unjustified, is in reality a transgression of the validity of finite experience."27 Husserl could accept the last phrase of the conclusion but not the penultimate one. Strictly speaking, uncon- ditional assertions by creatures who do not have complete access to what they are judging do transgress the bounds of formal validity, but this is not to say they are "unjustified." Husserl obviously understood this, for his whole theory of perception is a theory about how we can make warranted judgments on the basis of evidence that we have as but finite subjects.

Ingarden's fifth argument is that since "the meaning of the objective what the qualitative determination . . . is a synthetic result of the multiplicity of perceptions belonging to each other through which one has already passed," therefore, "realities are nothing but 'constituted' noematic meaning-entities of a special kind . . . [and] exist only for the pure transcendental ego."28 This reconstruction is typical in its failure to distinguish what Husserl means by relativity to a "pure ego" from the very different concept of dependence on an actual human ego. But its major fault is its casual attribution to Husserl of the view that realities are nothing but "meaning entities." Though Ingarden's view is shared by many, the evidence is against this attribution.29

'Ibid., p. 104. 'Ibid., pp. 104-105. "See e.g., Findlay, op. cit., p. 154; John Findlay, "Phenomenology,

Realism and Logic," Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 3 (1972), p. 143; F. Olafson, "Husserl's Theory of Intentionality in Contemporary Per- spective," Nous, 9 (1975), p. 80; G. Kung, "The World as Noema and as Referent," Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 3 (1972), p. 21;

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Throughout his philosophy Husserl distinguishes the realm of meanings from that of what is actual or natural. In the Ideas he points out, "the tree plain and simple can burn away .. . but the meaning, the meaning of this perception . .. cannot burn away," and he reiterated this point with a reference back to this passage in his last work, the Crisis.30 It would be wholly contrary to the general argument we have unearthed in the Ideas to hold that while there are evident meanings of tree perceptions, there are actually no distinct physical trees.

Ingarden's final argument involves Husserl's talk of the mind as "constituting" entities. Ingarden contends, "Husserl more and more interprets 'constitution' of the higher noematic meaning during the experiencing of the deeper constitutive multiplicity in the sense of a 'creating,' a 'founding' of this higher meaning.""3 In addition to the previous points made against this interpretation of "constitution," the following may be brought to bear against Ingarden. First, it is clear that Husserl always rejected psychologism and distinguished between the being of what is constituted, even in an "active" fashion, and the being of the mind tracing that constitution. It is true that Husserl came to give more attention to what he called the "active" constitution involved in higher level mental processes, in which one is not simply passively given objectivities but must in some way actively uncover them, as for example in a process of abstraction.32 But even here, Husserl remarks that the "productivity of consciousness will hardly signify that I invent and make this highest transcendency."33 And even if Husserl had believed abstract objects are reducible to acts or powers of mind, this would not have made him a metaphysical idealist about the external world. In fact, Husserl regarded abstract objects as transcendent: "they are what they are only as 'coming from' an original production [what Husserl later calls an

G. Kiing, "Husserl on Pictures and Intentional Objects," Review of Metaphysics, 26 (1973), p. 679. The view is well challenged in D. W. Smith and R. McIntyre, "Intentionality via Intensions,"Journal of Philosophy, 68 (1971), p. 560.

30Ideas, p. 240; Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, tr. by David Carr (Evanston, 1970), p. 242.

3Ingarden, op. cit., p. 107. Cf. Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, vol. I (The Hague, 1960), p. 144f.

32See e.g., Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgment, ed. by L. Landgrebe, and tr. by J. S. Churchill and K. Ameriks (Evanston, 1973), p. 323f.

'Formal and Transcendental Logic, p. 251.

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"evident-making activity of consciousness," not a causing]. But that is not at all to say that they are what they are only in and during the original production.""4 Secondly, Husserl's episte- mology always recognized a material given for whose origin the ego is in no way responsible."5 Indeed, given that Husserl's concept of the transcendental subject is expressly not the concept of a spatiotemporal being (see passage A) but rather of the set of structures of intelligibility for all spatiotemporal being, it would be a category mistake for him to speak of that subjectivity itself as bringing anything into being. Hence, since Husserl obviously does not regard the empirical subject as responsible for the matter of sensations, these must have their source outside the subject and cannot be wholly caused or created by him.

Many of the points just made against Ingarden and other idealistic interpretations are seconded in a recent study by Richard Holmes which, like this one, disputes the characterization of Husserl as a metaphysical idealist while acknowledging a sense in which he may be termed an "epistemological idealist." However, Holmes insists that as a transcendental phenomenologist, studying claims about essences and not existence, Husserl is and must be ''metaphysically neutral." This is a perplexing claim because even if a philosopher did confine himself to the study of essences, it is unclear why this could not have metaphysical implications. Holmes bases his view first on an exegesis of the following passage:

(1) Phenomenological idealism does not deny the actual existence of the real world (and primarily of Nature), as if it meant, that the world which underlies. although unnoticed, the natural thinking and that of the positive sciences was an illusion.

(2) Its only task and accomplishment is to clarify the sense of this world, precisely the sense, in which everyone accepts it, and with genuine right accepts it, as actually existing.

"Ibid., p. 168. 35 Many interpretations have denied this, largely because of some

remarks about Husserl's plans in Eugen Fink, "The Phenomenological Philos- ophy of Edmund Husserl and Contemporary Criticism," in The Phenomenology of lusserl, ed. by R.O. Elveton, (Chicago, 1970), pp. 73-147. Spiegelberg thus says that in unpublished work Husserl was trying to demonstrate "the primal constitution of the stream of time by the active hidden achievements of the transcendental ego" (op. cit., p. 148). Against Fink, convincing arguments have been offered by Sokolowski that Husserl's analysis of time constitution led precisely away from regarding an active ego as the ultimate creative source of constitution (op. cit., pp. 159, 197).

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(3) That the world exists, that it is given as an existing universe in an experience which is continuous and always fits together in universal consonance, that is completely indubitable.

(4) It is entirely something else to understand this indubitability which is carried by this life and positive science, and to clarify its justification.

(5) In this respect it is a philosophical fundamental, from the discussions in the text of the Ideas, that the continuous progression of experience in this form of universal agreement is a mere presumption, even if legitimately valid, and that accordingly the nonexistence of the world, always remains thinkable, while up to now the world is actually and harmoniously experienced.36

Holmes properly concludes that here, "Husserl maintains that his philosophy does not deny 'the actual existence of the real world.' " But he adds, "There is no metaphysical commitment made and none is expected to be made on the basis of phenomenological investigation."37 Let us allow that the first few sentences in the above passage do not defeat Holmes' nonrealist interpretation. In saying the world's existence is "indubitable" Husserl might just mean people take the existence of the world to be indubitable and the task of phenomenology is to clarify the sense of this phenomenon. However, Holmes then states,

In the fourth sentence Husserl points out that his task, of sense clarification, is something different from providing justification for the beliefs and accep- tances, that is, different from proving that an acceptance of the world as actually existing is metaphysically justified. Transcendental phenomenology cannot enter into such discussions of justification . .38

But in the fourth sentence surely Husserl is not contrasting sense clarification with the justification of existence claims and limiting himself to the former; rather he is contrasting the mere observation that a particular existence claim ("the world exists") is indubitable with a clarification of what does justify that indubitability, and in so doing he is implying there is justification for the claim.

The fifth sentence might seem to undercut this interpretation. Holmes reads it as meaning that "the belief that the world exists

36Richard Holmes, "Is Transcendental Phenomenology Committed to Idealism?" The Monist, 59 (1975), p. 102. This is Holmes' translation of what appears on Ideas, p. 14. and Ideen zu einer reinen Phdnomenologie und phdnomeno- logischen Philosophie III, vol. V of Husserliana, ed. by M. Biemel (The Hague, 1952), pp. 102-103.

37Ibid., p. 103. 38Ibid., p. 104.

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is legitimate insofar as it is based on a continuous and coherent set of experiences, but that does not tell us whether this belief is true in the sense that the world actually exists."39 It is no doubt Husserl's use of the words "mere presumption" that sparks this reading. But what Husserl is calling a "mere presumption" is not the thesis "that the world actually exists," but rather the belief in "the continuous progression of experience." Husserl is not to be read as saying the nonexistence of the world "remains thinkable" in the sense that even now there are legitimate doubts about it. Here Holmes' translation does injustice to Husserl's use of the word "immerfort"; Husserl's point is that one can always raise the question of whether "from now on" the world will continue to be as it has been. In itself, this Humean observation hardly undercuts the rationality of asserting the reality of the world.40

Holmes draws in Husserl's Cartesian Meditations in a final attempt to buttress his claim that transcendental phenomenology is engaged in the mere task of sense explication and therefore must remain metaphysically neutral about the existence of the world. But a Husserlian argument for realism can be constructed from the Cartesian Meditations just as from the Ideas. Husserl dedicates the third Meditation to the problem of "truth and actuality." He argues there that given "evidently verifying syntheses" a meant object can be assigned the "evident character existing.""4 In line with this argument he goes on to entitle a section "actuality as the correlate of evident verification."42 Husserl holds that "it is evidence alone by virtue of which an 'actually' existing, true, rightly accepted object of whatever form or kind has sense for US."43 Here he is not reducing the existence of objects to their meanings or the evidence for them but he is saying we are justified in asserting things actually exist when certain criteria of evidence are satisfied. There may be difficulties in Husserl's theory of evidence here but if anything these show only that he was too naive a realist, not that he failed to be one or that he regarded phenomenology as irrelevant to the issue of realism.

39Ibid., p. 105. 40Cf. above, n. 5. Holmes' next argument, based on passage (A), also

fails because of inattention to the German. He ignores the addition made to the passage by Husserl and discussed above, n. 13.

41 Cartesian Meditations, p. 57. 42Ibid., p. 59.

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There is only a modest sense in which Husserl's phenom- enology is not explicitly realistic. What he has presented is the outline of an argument that if we are in possession of appropriate harmonious evidence we are justified in making existential asser- tions. He has not gone on to explicitly fill in the contingent details of the argument. He has not asserted here the needed contingent premise that we are in fact in possession of harmonious evidence nor has he given a theory as to precisely how much harmony is needed tojustify the induction that the world could be given in thoroughgoing harmony. In this way his phenomenology remains "neutral" and apodictic, but this does not mean that it has not provided a case for realism or that it precludes a stance on such an issue. As Husserl himself remarked, his tran- scendental philosophy is not to be misunderstood as keeping the "essence and being" of the world forever beyond investigation."

University of Notre Dame

43Ibid., p. 60. ""Nicht ist also die transzendentale Epoche dahin misszuverstehen,

dass das Sein und Sosein der Welt uberhaupt ausser Frage bleiben soll," Erste Philosophie II, p. 465.

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