Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology

Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) is regarded as the founder of transcendental

phenomenology, one of the major traditions to emerge in twentieth-century
philosophy. In this book Andrea Staiti unearths and examines the deep
theoretical links between Husserl’s phenomenology and the philosophical
debates of his time, showing how his thought developed in response to the
conflicting demands of Neo-Kantianism and life-philosophy. Drawing on
the work of thinkers including Heinrich Rickert, Wilhelm Dilthey, and
Georg Simmel, as well as Husserl’s writings on the natural and human
sciences that are not available in English translation, Staiti illuminates a
crucial chapter in the history of twentieth-century philosophy and enriches
our understanding of Husserl’s thought. His book will interest scholars and
students of Husserl, phenomenology, and twentieth-century philosophy
more generally.

andrea staiti is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Boston College.

He has published many articles in journals such as Husserl Studies,
Continental Philosophy Review, Philosophy and Social Criticism, and
Research in Phenomenology. He is the author and co-editor of several
books, including New Approaches to Neo-Kantianism (Cambridge, forth-
coming 2015) and Geistigkeit, Leben und geschichtliche Welt in der
Transzendentalphänomenologie Husserls (2010).
Husserl’s Transcendental
Phenomenology
Nature, Spirit, and Life

andrea staiti
University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom

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© Andrea Staiti, 2014
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Staiti, Andrea Sebastiano, 1981–
Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology : nature, spirit, and life / Andrea Staiti.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-107-06630-4
1. Husserl, Edmund, 1859–1938. 2. Phenomenology. I. Title.
B3279.H94S6955 2014
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2014004975
ISBN 978-1-107-06630-4 Hardback
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A mia moglie Sara,
con amore e gratitudine
Contents

Acknowledgments page viii

List of abbreviations x

Introduction 1
1 Southwestern Neo-Kantianism in search of ontology 19
2 Life-philosophical accounts of history and psyche:
Simmel and Dilthey 52
3 Standpoints and attitudes: scientificity between
Neo-Kantianism and Husserlian phenomenology 83
4 The reception of Husserl’s Ideen among the Neo-Kantians 109
5 Husserl’s critique of Rickert’s secretly naturalistic
transcendentalism: the Natur und Geist lectures
(1919–1927) 136
6 Historia formaliter spectata: Husserl and
the life-philosophers 170
7 The life-world as the source of nature and culture:
towards a transcendental-phenomenological worldview 222
8 Ethical and cultural implications in Husserl’s
phenomenology of the life-world 264
Conclusion 291

Bibliography 295
Index 306

vii
Acknowledgments

This book crowns a line of research that I started pursuing over ten
years ago with my MA thesis at the Università degli Studi di Milano in
Italy. It would be hard to acknowledge each and every person whose
support, care, and intellectual generosity made my research possible
and my life livable. However, it would also be hard not to acknowledge
at least those to whom I owe my passion for philosophy, and those who
graciously enabled me to cultivate it. First, I want to express my grat-
itude to my colleagues at the Boston College philosophy department for
providing an ideal intellectual home. In particular, I would like to thank
our chairman Arthur Madigan, S. J. and the Dean of the College of Arts
and Sciences David Quigley for granting me a research leave in the fall
of 2012, which allowed me to complete the typescript.
During these years I was lucky to meet extraordinary scholars of
phenomenology, whose spoken and written words shaped the way I
think about Husserl and his ambitious project. Elio Franzini, Carmine
Di Martino, and Vincenzo Costa provided invaluable insight when I
was a student, and to this day I know I can always rely on their generous
feedback. Beatrice Centi, Costantino Esposito, Faustino Fabbianelli,
and Massimo Ferrari have been wonderful interlocutors and I can
only be thankful that they were willing to follow my work from afar
and get me involved in many great initiatives. A special word of thanks
goes to my Doktorvater Hans-Helmuth Gander, to whom I owe four
unforgettable years in Freiburg and pretty much everything I know
about Husserl’s Nachlaß.
I can hardly express how much indebted I am to Nicolas De Warren
and Claudio Majolino for being wonderful friends, effective critics, care-
ful readers, and just admirable scholars. I would also like to thank all the
members and participants of the Husserl Circle, which has been the
perfect venue to present and discuss my work. In particular, I learned a
lot from Burt Hopkins, John Drummond, Steve Galt Crowell, James
Dodd, Tom Nenon, Sebastian Luft, and Thane Naberhaus.

viii
Acknowledgments ix

A heartfelt word of thanks goes to Prof. Ullrich Melle and Dr. Thomas
Vongehr at the Husserl Archive in Leuven for sharing with me Husserl’s
notes on Simmel and granting permission to quote from them.
Last but not least, let me thank my students Evan Clarke, Andrea
Cimino, Karen Kovaka, Chris Sheridan, and Ben Martin for all the
intellectual stimuli they provide and for reading ample sections of this
book. Brian Tracz, Kevin Marren, and Daniel Cattolica have been the
most accurate and dependable copy editors. Any mistakes or stylistic
problems that the reader may still find are entirely my responsibility.
This book is dedicated to my wife Sara, for her angelic patience and
her loving support. It is said that behind every great man there is a great
woman. If this is true, then the fact that I am married to Sara proves
what I always suspected: great women outnumber great men.
Abbreviations

Franz Böhm
OG Ontologie der Geschichte (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1933)

Wilhelm Dilthey
GS I–XXVI Gesammelte Schriften (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 1914–2005)
SW 1–5 Selected Works (Princeton University Press, 1985–2010)

Edmund Husserl
BW I–X Briefwechsel (Dordrecht: Springer, 1994)
Crisis The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental
Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological
Philosophy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
1970)
Hua I–XLI Husserliana – Gesammelte Werke (Dordrecht: Springer,
1950–2010)
Ideas I Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a
Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General
Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, Collected Works, vol.
2 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1982)
Ideas II Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a
Phenomenological Philosophy. Second Book: Studies in the
Phenomenology of Constitution, Collected Works, vol. 3
(Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989)
Mat I–VIII Husserliana – Materialien (Dordrecht: Springer, 2001– )
Phen. P. Phenomenological Psychology: Lectures Summer Semester
1925, trans. J. Scanlon (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977)
PRS Philosophy as a Rigorous Science, in E. Husserl, Shorter
Works (University of Notre Dame Press, 1981)

x
List of abbreviations xi

Emil Lask
LP Die Logik der Philosophie und die Kategorienlehre, in E. Lask,
Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1923)
NEW Notizen zur Einteilung der Wissenschaften, in E. Lask, Gesammelte
Schriften, vol. 3 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1924)
SW Zum System der Wissenschaften, in E. Lask, Gesammelte Schriften,
vol. 3 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1924)

Heinrich Rickert
LCF The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Science (Cambridge
University Press, 1986)
MPU “Die Methode der Philosophie und das Unmittelbare,” in
H. Rickert, Philosophische Aufsätze (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck,
1999)
SH Science and History: A Critique of Positivist Epistemology
(Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, 1962)
WPW Wissenschaftliche Philosophie und Weltanschauung, in
H. Rickert, Philosophische Aufsätze (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck,
1999)

Georg Simmel
K Kant. Sechzehn Vorlesungen gehalten an der Berliner Universität, in
G. Simmel, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 9 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1997)
PGP Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie. Eine
erkenntnistheoretische Studie, in G. Simmel, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 9
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997)
PHT The Problem of Historical Time, in G. Simmel, Essays on
Interpretation in Social Science (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield,
1980)
PPH The Problems of the Philosophy of History: An Epistemological
Essay (New York: The Free Press, 1977)
VL The View of Life: Four Metaphysical Essays with Journal Aphorisms
(University of Chicago Press, 2010)
WuK Was ist uns Kant?, in G. Simmel, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 5 (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997)
xii List of abbreviations

Wilhelm Windelband
GN “Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft,” in W. Windelband,
Präludien: Aufsätze und Reden zur Philosophie und ihrer
Geschichte, vol. 2 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1915)
 Introduction

This book has a double purpose. First, it is an essay in the history of

European philosophy. Its goal is to present to Anglophone readers a
hitherto largely ignored chapter in nineteenth- and early twentieth-
century German thought: the dispute about the foundations of the
natural and human sciences involving the Neo-Kantians and the so-
called life-philosophers, or Lebensphilosophen. Second, it is a critical
study of Husserl’s late work. As such, its goal is also to advance our
understanding of transcendental phenomenology by locating it in the
philosophical context of its time. In this second respect, it can be
considered an essay in what the German philosopher Dieter Heinrich
termed Konstellationsforschung, or constellation analysis. This histor-
ical–philosophical method prioritizes intellectual spaces [Denkräume]
over individual figures and is designed to shed light on complex ideas
that developed in the context of ongoing philosophical exchanges
among multiple thinkers.1
Not infrequently, Husserl is presented as an isolated thinker, too
engrossed in his own project to engage productively with the great
philosophers of the past, let alone his contemporaries. Moreover,
post-Husserlian phenomenologists such as Heidegger or Derrida often
projected back on their putative father their own theoretical concerns,
thus encouraging generations of scholars to explore Husserl’s work
from an extremely idiosyncratic point of view. For decades, it was

1
Martin Muslow provides the following definition of a philosophical constellation:
“A philosophical constellation can be defined as the strong connection of people,
ideas, theories, problems or documents that influenced one another in such a
way that only the analysis of this connection (and not the analysis of its isolated
components) enables the understanding of the philosophical import and
development of said people, ideas and theories.” M. Muslow, “Zum
Methodenprofil der Konstellationsforschung,” in M. Muslow and M. Stamm
(eds.), Konstellationsforschung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), 74–97.
Here 74.

1
2 Introduction

customary to read Husserl hunting for the latent seeds of subsequent

existential hermeneutics and deconstruction, attempting to expose pur-
ported aporiae that only later practitioners of phenomenology were
able to fully acknowledge. In effect, in the wake of post-Husserlian
phenomenology, scholars often compelled Husserl himself to join in a
rather artificial dialogue with the likes of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty,
Sartre, Gadamer, and Derrida. Admittedly, reading Husserl as part of
this dialogue proved fecund for the development of postwar European
thought, but as far as Husserl himself is concerned, this is a dialogue
that never actually occurred. The historical Husserl took part in very
different conversations, and, in particular, from the 1910s onward, he
actively contributed to the aforementioned dispute concerning the phil-
osophical foundations of the natural and human sciences. This dispute
had been going on virtually since the demise of Hegelian idealism in the
second half of the nineteenth century, and its roots reach deep into
Kant’s transcendental philosophy. In light of Husserl’s contribution to
the debate on the foundations of the natural and human sciences, the
twofold purpose of this book finds its theoretical justification. More
specifically, I intend to show that this debate was an incubator for the
development of Husserl’s mature thought.
As the chapters unfold, it will become increasingly clear that from
roughly the beginning of the 1910s until his death in 1938 Husserl
understood himself explicitly as a contributor to this debate. He avidly
read the works of leading philosophers such as Rickert, Simmel, and
Dilthey and responded to them, in part overtly and in part implicitly, in
both his published and unpublished writings. Stated more boldly, tran-
scendental phenomenology could only gain its distinctive contours in
the context of Husserl’s thoughtful confrontation with his contempo-
raries, who, in turn, carried forward a philosophical legacy dating back
to Kant. While it has been shown convincingly that Husserl’s Logical
Investigations developed within the context of a fruitful conversation
within the Brentano school,2 the fact that his work after the Logical
Investigations was carried out in ongoing intellectual exchange with the
Neo-Kantians and the life-philosophers has been mentioned here and
there, but it has never been the object of a thorough study. This book
intends to fill this gap in the existing Husserlian scholarship and to

2
See, for instance, R. Rollinger, Husserl’s Position in the School of Brentano
(Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999).
Introduction 3

situate Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology (back) in its authentic

philosophical lineage: Kant’s critical philosophy in its specific connota-
tion as a transcendental theory of knowledge.
The acclaimed British historian Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012)
famously called the nineteenth century a long century, because, in his
narrative, it started with the French Revolution in 1789 and ended with
the outbreak of World War I in 1914. An argument could be made that
the nineteenth century was even longer in philosophy, starting with
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in 1781 and ending symbolically with
Husserl’s death in 1938.3 This is, at least, the hypothesis I would
recommend the reader to keep in mind while reading this book:
Husserl is not so much the initiator of a twentieth-century trend generi-
cally called ‘phenomenology,’ but the last philosopher of the nineteenth
century, whose work condenses some of the most interesting aspects of
this fertile age of thought while, at the same time, developing an abso-
lutely original project. Needless to say, the groundbreaking achieve-
ments of Husserl’s project carried over into the next century, which, at
least philosophically, is probably not over yet.
The perspective I am delineating, again, is neither intended to down-
play Husserl’s impact on many of the greatest minds in twentieth-
century European philosophy, nor to suggest that Husserl’s philosoph-
ical achievements are conclusive or definitive in any sense of these
terms. Husserl’s phenomenology is a working philosophy, one that is
designed to carry out increasingly sophisticated descriptions of what is
essential to our experiences in their multifarious variety and to our
experience as a whole. The process of constant refinement and revision
in which this work unfolds makes Husserlian phenomenology imper-
vious to a definitive systematization and immune to the illusion that it
can exhaust the possibilities of philosophy once and for all. Husserl’s
own failure to produce a system of phenomenology bears witness to the
intrinsically open-ended nature of his work. Accordingly, the claim
contained in the reading hypothesis suggested above is not that
Husserl is the last nineteenth-century philosopher because he somehow
concluded or completed the historical trajectory of transcendental
thought. He is the last nineteenth-century philosopher ‘just’ because

3
In this sense, it was a felicitous decision to devote the final chapter to Husserl in the
newly published D. Moyar (ed.), Routledge Companion to Nineteenth Century
Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2010).
4 Introduction

after his death, and probably already during the last years of his life,
philosophy switched topics. The rise of Heidegger’s existentialism on
the one hand and of logical positivism on the other decreed the end of
transcendental thinking and redefined almost from scratch what the
true goals of philosophy ought to be.4 Eventually, while Husserl was
still read as a forerunner of Heidegger in some circles and as a polemical
counterpart in other circles, most great thinkers surrounding him dur-
ing his lifetime faded into oblivion. The nascent existentialist movement
had its reasons not to read the Neo-Kantians and the life-philosophers
anymore. Purportedly, their debate about the transcendental founda-
tions of the sciences did not reach the desired level of radicalism set by
the master of Messkirch, that is, it failed to ask the only question worth
asking in philosophy: what is the meaning of “Being” overall? In turn,
the nascent movement of analytic philosophy felt exempt from engaging
with the weighty tomes on the philosophical foundations of the natural
and the human sciences for a different set of reasons: these works dealt
with allegedly intractable pseudo-problems preempted by empiricism
and the logical analysis of language.
In the Anglophone world, some scant interest for Neo-Kantianism
and Lebensphilosophie, which inflamed the philosophical scene in
pre-war Germany, seemed to linger on among theorists of the social
sciences in the 1960s and the 1970s.5 As regards the theory of the
natural sciences, on the contrary, transcendental questions about the
possibility of nature as a theoretical construct had been long replaced by
questions about the so-called logic of scientific discovery. In spite of
this marginal attention among social scientists, the overwhelming bulk
of primary texts by the Neo-Kantians and the Lebensphilosophen
remained untranslated, and the few scholars who touched on them
did so with a very selective focus, given that their primary interest lay
elsewhere. Full restitution of the debate’s philosophical meaning was
simply not part of their agenda. Questions about the foundations of the
sciences remained at best methodological questions asked by practicing
social scientists in their spare time.

4
Note that merely decreeing that a certain idea is over does not amount to refuting
or disproving the idea in question. It is more an act of the will than an act of the
intellect.
5
Guy Oakes’ abridged translations of Simmel and Rickert, along with his helpful
introductory essays, are the main example of this trend. See the list of sources at the
end of this book for full references.
Introduction 5

Fortunately, this past decade witnessed encouraging signs of resur-

gent interest in Neo-Kantianism and Lebensphilosophie, as well as
growing awareness that these movements were of paramount impor-
tance for the development of mainstream currents in twentieth-century
philosophy. As for Neo-Kantianism, Michael Friedman blazed the trail
for this recent trend with his rightly acclaimed book A Parting of the
Ways: Carnap, Cassirer and Heidegger.6 Through a sharp examination
of the famous Davos conference in 1929 featuring Cassirer versus
Heidegger on the interpretation of Kant, Friedman shows convincingly
that Cassirer’s brand of Neo-Kantianism had a profound impact on
Carnap and the ensuing Anglo-Austrian philosophy of science up to
Thomas Kuhn. Moreover, Friedman suggests that the debate between
Cassirer and Heidegger foreshadows in significant ways the (in)famous
rift between analytic and continental philosophy that characterized the
discipline after World War II. More recently, Peter Gordon published a
monumental study of the Davos debate,7 which expands considerably
our understanding of the philosophical disagreement between
Heidegger and Cassirer and confirms beyond reasonable doubt that
Neo-Kantianism is worth careful consideration for those interested in
twentieth-century intellectual history. Among other things, Gordon
unearths a tension between ‘thrownness’ and ‘spontaneity’ underlying
Heidegger’s and Cassirer’s interpretation of Kant and argues that this
tension is a helpful foil for looking at further ramifications for philos-
ophy after Davos. Just one year after the appearance of Gordon’s book,
Fredrick Beiser published a thorough study of the German historicist
tradition,8 which includes illuminating chapters on Dilthey,
Windelband, Rickert, Lask, and Simmel and argues that their work is
decisive for a complete understanding of the characteristically German
preoccupation with history in philosophy. Additionally, Sebastian Luft
co-edited together with Rudolf Makkreel an excellent collection of
essays on Neo-Kantianism and contemporary philosophy,9 and he is

6
M. Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer and Heidegger (La Salle,
IL: Open Court, 2000).
7
P. Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger – Cassirer – Davos (Cambridge, MA
and London: Harvard University Press, 2010).
8
F. Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2011).
9
S. Luft and R. Makkreel (eds.), Neo-Kantianism in Contemporary Philosophy
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010).
6 Introduction

about to publish a much-needed reader on the Neo-Kantian movement

as a whole.
This very recent trend was to some extent pre-dated in Heidegger
studies. In the wake of the ongoing publication of Heidegger’s earlier
works, a few years ago, Heidegger scholars started looking at the works
of Neo-Kantians and life-philosophers mentioned in Heidegger’s lec-
tures. This led them to the conclusion that these thinkers are in fact
worth reading and that they played an important role in the genesis of
Heidegger’s project of a fundamental ontology via the existential ana-
lytic in Being and Time (1927).10
In the wake of growing intellectual ferment surrounding Neo-
Kantianism, Lebensphilosophie and their cultural milieu, the present
book is intended to contribute a further perspective on this rich chapter
of German philosophy. There are at least two respects in which this
book occupies a distinctive venue among existing and developing stud-
ies on Neo-Kantianism, Lebensphilosophie, and their connections to
phenomenology. First, to my knowledge, Husserl’s position in this
complicated tangle of philosophical ideas has never been adequately
discussed.11 In this regard, this book sets out to accomplish for Husserl
what other scholars have already accomplished successfully for
Heidegger. Second, the present book has a rather unusual focus: it
deals exclusively with the Southwestern school of Neo-Kantianism
and, to some extent, prioritizes Georg Simmel over Wilhelm Dilthey in
the discussion of Lebensphilosophie. This is because, on the one hand,
as I will discuss in Chapter 6, Husserl’s appropriation of Simmel is more
ramified and interesting than Husserl’s initial dismissal and subsequent

10
See D. Farrell Krell, Daimon Life: Heidegger and Life-Philosophy (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1992); C. Bambach, Heidegger, Dilthey and the Crisis
of Historicism (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1995); and
most recently S. Campbell, The Early Heidegger’s Philosophy of Life: Facticity,
Being, and Language (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012).
11
There are, of course, a few exceptions, which convinced me that a book-length
study would be a desideratum. See, for instance: R. D’Amico, “Husserl on the
Foundational Structures of Natural and Cultural Sciences,” Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research 42 (1981): 5–22; J. E. Jalbert, “Husserl’s Position
between Dilthey and the Windelband-Rickert School of Neo-Kantianism,”
Journal of the History of Philosophy 26 (1988): 279–296; and the set of papers
devoted to Simmel and phenomenology in Human Studies 26/2 (2003).
Bob Sandmeyer’s recent book Husserl’s Constitutive Phenomenology: Its
Problem and Promise (New York: Routledge, 2009) includes one chapter on
Husserl and Dilthey.
Introduction 7

reappraisal of Dilthey. Similarly, on the other hand, while Husserl

always maintained a polite and at times even obsequious attitude
towards the so-called Marburg school12 (the current of Neo-
Kantianism starting with Cohen and culminating with Cassirer’s phi-
losophy of symbolic forms), he engaged actively only with the
Southwestern school, and in particular with the work of his predecessor
at the University of Freiburg, Heinrich Rickert. The Southwestern Neo-
Kantian insistence on the necessity to demarcate different fields of
scientific inquiry, rather than focusing chiefly on the natural sciences
(Cohen) or on the dynamics of symbolization common to all human
activities (Cassirer), was naturally appealing to Husserl, since it seemed
to lead straight to fundamental questions that only phenomenology
could adequately address.
In fact, asking about the correct demarcation of different fields of
knowledge lies at the heart of philosophical thinking from its very
inception. In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates struggles with his interlocutors
to establish who is competent to speak meaningfully about various
topics. This often involves attempts to define the sphere of competence
of various ‘arts’ and to keep them separate from one another. In the
early dialogue Ion, for instance, Socrates ridicules the rhapsodes for
believing that they can speak meaningfully of things lying outside their
own sphere of competence, which is restricted to poetic declamation. In
the Republic, Socrates’ famous refutation of Thrasymachus similarly
revolves around the sophist’s conflation of two different ‘arts’: money-
making and politics. Knowledge of the Forms, for Plato, would grant
the philosopher the capacity to distinguish sharply between spheres of
knowledge that need to be kept distinct.

12
In a footnote to his lectures on Natur und Geist in 1919 (which will be discussed
at length in Chapter 5) Husserl remarks in passing that “only the Marburg Neo-
Kantianism was able to avoid a trivialization [Verflachung] of Kant’s powerful
intuitions.” E. Husserl, Natur und Geist. Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1919,
Husserliana Materialien, vol. 4 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2002), 193 n. Hereafter
Mat IV. In any case, Husserl does not expand on this laudatory remark, and he
rather hastens to add: “However, in Marburg Neo-Kantianism, too, it is not the
whole Kant who lives on. The whole Kant can only be drawn out of Kant’s own
writings” (ibid.). Husserl would often pay homage to the Marburg school, and he
was certainly positively impressed by their philosophical achievements. However,
with the exception of Paul Natorp’s transcendental psychology, Husserl de facto
never felt compelled to deepen his understanding of the Marburg school beyond
the basics.
8 Introduction

In a similar vein, Aristotle often defers discussion of certain topics

with the explanation that they belong in a different discipline, thus
defending the necessity to organize the universe of knowledge in a
way that keeps conflations and equivocations at bay. The very thrust
of his Metaphysics is in the definition and demarcation of a new,
fundamental philosophical discipline. Disquisitions about the distinc-
tions and hierarchic order of different fields of knowledge cut across the
whole Middle Ages and were still paramount to Descartes. The situa-
tion slowly changed after the scientific revolution, which seemingly
imposed the universal adoption of the mos geometricus for whatever
subject matter was under scrutiny. As we shall see in Chapter 7 of this
book, it was not until Kant’s Copernican turn that the sphere of validity
of naturalistic methods was relativized, thus reopening an intellectual
space for a pluralistic conception of knowledge and for a debate that
had lain dormant for most of the foregoing two centuries. As the preface
to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason evidences, Kant
bestowed great importance on the philosophical demarcation of differ-
ent fields of inquiry and considered this a necessary presupposition in
order for any discipline to stop “groping about”13 and set itself on “the
secure path of a science.”14
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the impressive flourish-
ing of historical, literary, political, and economic studies, whose high
standards of rigor could hardly be disputed, called for philosophical
elucidation. Previously, such disciplines either did not have scientific
status or had been overshadowed by the dominance of naturalistic
research. Their rapid flourishing in the spirit of rigor bore witness to
reason’s capacity to understand empirical reality well beyond the
limited scope of nature. In particular, the common trait of virtually all
the humanistic disciplines coming to fruition in the nineteenth century
was that they dealt in some way with human cultural achievements.
Unlike the subject matter of physics, the subject matter of history,
literary studies, and political economics, to mention but some, is unde-
niably shaped by subjective activity. Accordingly, thinkers in the tradi-
tion of Lebensphilosophie, such as Dilthey and Simmel, worked to
articulate a transcendental foundation of these disciplines by reference

13
I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge University Press, 1998),
106 (B vii).
14
Ibid., 107 (B x).
Introduction 9

to historically living subjects whose activity is at the origin of both

cultural objects and the methods for their cognition. In the human
sciences, as Dilthey famously puts it, “life grasps life,”15 therefore these
disciplines should be sharply distinguished from the natural sciences.
The major challenge to this view stemmed from the consideration of
the newly born discipline of experimental psychology. Grounding their
work on the hypothesis of psychophysical parallelism, researchers in
this novel field, such as Wundt and Fechner, proved that the psychic life
of human subjects can be fruitfully investigated relying on the very same
methods employed to discover laws in other provinces of nature.
Psychology, on this account, is just another natural science. Rickert
and most Neo-Kantians rejected Dilthey and Simmel’s criteria for a
demarcation of the sciences precisely in consideration of the explana-
tory power of experimental psychology. Granted that psychology is a
natural science, they opposed the idea that references to psychic life can
be sufficient to clarify what is distinctive about the human sciences.
These sciences, in Rickert’s view, do not deal with psyche but with
culture, that is, with objects bearing an ostensible relationship with
significant, culturally acknowledged values. Without anticipating too
much, it is important to underscore that late nineteenth-century psy-
chology and its philosophically ambiguous status were a battlefield of
endless controversies in almost the same sense in which Kant spoke
about metaphysics roughly one century earlier. It is revealing that over
three decades into the twentieth century, in his unfinished work The
Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology
(1935–1936) Husserl claims emphatically that psychology is still “the
truly decisive field,”16 that is, the field whose correct demarcation and

15
W. Dilthey, “Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den
Geisteswissenschaften,” in W. Dilthey, Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in
den Geisteswissenschaften, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7 (Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1927), 79–291. Here 136. Hereafter GS VII. English
trans. by R. Makkreel and J. Scanlon, The Formation of the Historical World in
the Human Sciences, in W. Dilthey, Selected Works, vol. 3 (Princeton University
Press, 2002), 100–311. Here 157, translation modified. Hereafter SW 3.
16
E. Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale
Phänomenologie. Eine Einführung in die phänomenologische Philosophie,
Husserliana, vol. 6 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1954). Hereafter Hua VI. English
translation by D. Carr, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental
Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy (Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 208. Hereafter Crisis.
10 Introduction

investigation have the most bearing on the future of philosophy and of

Western civilization as such. For nineteenth-century thinkers, including
Husserl, therefore, questions about the demarcations of different scien-
tific fields and in particular about the correct classification of psychol-
ogy were anything but otiose academic undertakings: they stood at the
vital core of philosophical inquiry. Reviving the genuine philosophical
impetus behind these questions is one of the main goals of this book.
As far as Husserl is concerned, the importance of his work on nature,
psychic life, and the different spheres of scientific inquiry are certainly
not unknown. What has been mostly overlooked is rather the central
meaning of these topics for a correct understanding of transcendental
phenomenology as a whole and for a full grasp of its intersections with
other philosophical trends in Husserl’s time. It is noteworthy that none
of the numerous introductions to Husserl’s phenomenology that
appeared in English in recent years presents Husserl’s position on the
natural and the human sciences, let alone the broader debate in which
his position took shape. Presumably, this issue has been deemed mar-
ginal to the actual core of Husserl’s work and thus dispensable for
introductory purposes. While there is some truth to the fact that
Husserl’s phenomenological analyses of nature, psyche, and culture
are rather advanced and that they presuppose at least some basic
familiarity with the phenomenological method in general, they cannot
be considered as dealing with a delimited sphere of problems that can be
safely isolated and left out of consideration. On the contrary, these
analyses are crucial to understanding both the import and the scope of
Husserl’s transcendental-phenomenological philosophy as such. To
give just one example, the rationale behind the performance of the
phenomenological epoché and reduction is bound to remain obscure
if the burning questions about the ontological status of psyche and the
scientificity of psychology are not adequately understood.17 Perhaps it
was insufficient appreciation of this point that led various post-
Husserlian thinkers to believe that they could harmlessly drop the
epoché and the reduction as mere relics of an embarrassing Cartesian
past and still continue to do phenomenology. In this regard, I believe
that the reactivation of the debate on the philosophical foundations of
the natural and the human sciences attempted in this book, among other

17
This point will be discussed at length in Chapter 6.
Introduction 11

things, will shed much needed light on the meaning and the indispens-
ability of two of phenomenology’s pillars: the epoché and the reduction.
Before I proceed to outline the structure of this book, I would like to
add three brief yet important remarks.
(1) One valuable thing I have learned from some of the thinkers I
discuss is that no theoretical work is possible without relying on
some principle for the selection and organization of the materials
under scrutiny. This is especially true of historically oriented
writing. In this sense, I am fully aware that the historical narrative
offered in this book is largely determined by my own philosophical
commitments. I understand myself as a practicing phenomenolo-
gist and consider Husserl’s work a viable source for philosophy in
the present. From this perspective, I look at the development of the
debate on the foundations of the natural and the human sciences as
somehow ‘teleologically’ oriented towards Husserl’s discovery of a
transcendental (i.e., non-naturalistic) dimension of subjectivity,
which seems to me an enduring achievement of his life’s work
and a major progress toward a correct description of said founda-
tions. This book, however, is not meant to be a defense of Husserl
or yet another introduction to phenomenology. Therefore, I expect
that on average my readers are likely to have at least some previous
understanding of transcendental phenomenology, that they are
already convinced of its value and that they will thus be able
at least to empathize (if not sympathize) with the Husserlian
standpoint I consistently maintain throughout the book without
feeling that I am omitting too many preliminary explanations
and justifications. Moreover, there is something distinctively
Husserlian to letting both the meaning and the significance of
philosophical terms or methods emerge progressively over the
course of the analysis, rather than defining or justifying them
univocally from the outset. Contrary to dominant trends in con-
temporary philosophy, definitions and justifications in phenomen-
ology are given, if needed, at the end of a philosophical analysis,
not at the beginning. Likewise, the justification of a certain line of
description is not to be provided in advance, but it should emerge
alongside the actual pursuit of phenomenological insights.
Considering that this is a work in the history of philosophy con-
ducted from a phenomenological perspective, and in order to show
12 Introduction

important features of transcendental phenomenology, it was man-

datory to respect the style of thinking that characterizes this phil-
osophical discipline. This being said, I want to emphasize that the
debate I present in this book could be addressed in equally mean-
ingful ways from different standpoints, and this would probably
bring to light aspects of it that remained at the margins of my own
presentation. I can only wish that reading this book will prompt
other scholars in the history of philosophy to study the same
materials from different standpoints and to produce new recon-
structions, even dramatically divergent from the one I offer here.
(2) In 2010, I published a revised version of my dissertation under
the title Geistigkeit, Leben und geschichtliche Welt in der
Transzendentalphänomenologie Husserls.18 While the topics of the
present book largely overlap with the topics I discuss there, I have
since changed my mind on a number of important things and
significantly broadened the focus of my research. To give just one
example, in my previous book I limited the presentation of
Southwestern Neo-Kantianism to the early phase of Rickert’s philos-
ophy and (partly misled by Husserl) interpreted it as being exclusively
focused on methodological questions. Here, on the contrary, I argue
that for Rickert and Southwestern Neo-Kantianism, questions of
method are a doorway into ontological questions, and I show this
through a discussion of the entire historical trajectory of the school.
Moreover, while the gist of the previous book is an examination of
Husserl’s theory of the historical world per se, and the overwhelming
bulk of it is devoted to a close reading of Husserlian texts, here I am
primarily focused on the debate between Husserl and his con-
temporaries, which there served merely as a foil. In short, while I
believe that Geistigkeit, Leben und geschichtliche Welt in der
Transzendentalphänomenologie Husserls is still worth reading for
those who are interested in a detailed examination of Husserl’s texts
on the historical world and related issues, the present book is much
more comprehensive and ambitious. Nothing in this book is a mere
repetition of what I had already accomplished, and, in turn, there is
nothing valuable about my previous book that has not been signifi-
cantly rethought and deepened here.

18
A. Staiti, Geistigkeit, Leben und geschichtliche Welt in der
Transzendentalphänomenologie Husserls (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2010).
Introduction 13

(3) As I mentioned above, for most primary sources I discuss in this

book there are no English translations available. Concerning
Husserl, my work draws primarily on recently published manu-
scripts, both research notes and lectures. In spite of their often
fragmented nature, these are the most fruitful and reliable texts to
reconstruct Husserl’s position. We know today that, for example,
the second book of Ideen, which was considered the mandatory
source for the themes we are about to explore, is actually spurious.
It was heavily edited and rewritten by Edith Stein, who had her own
original ideas on these issues and inevitably tended to build them
into Husserl’s typescript.19 Given the centrality of currently
untranslated texts for my interpretation, I considered part of my
task in writing this book to let these texts speak for themselves and
offer to my readers at least some of the most significant passages in
translation. This is why, especially at crucial joints of my presenta-
tion, I generally favored full quotation over paraphrase at the
expense of slightly hampering the fluency of my own text.
Translating Husserl and his colleagues into English can be an
excruciating task, and keeping the translations literal is frequently
not an option due to the verbosity and grammatical awkwardness
of the original prose. Therefore, here and there I took liberties that a
professional translator would perhaps have pondered more thor-
oughly than I did. However, the translations in this book are a
means to an end, and while I always consulted existing translations
and translators for the most difficult passages my effort was to let
the meaning of these texts come to light, even when this required a
good deal of reshuffling their letter. I also deliberately chose not to
follow strict rules of consistency for some of the key terms employed
by the philosophers I discuss. Consider, for instance, the German
word Geist as it occurs in the term Geisteswissenschaften.
Translating this word with one and the same term (‘mind,’ or
‘culture,’ or the like) in each of its occurrences would be harmful,
given that German philosophers often exploit its ambiguity in order
to emphasize different facets of the complex reality that they call
Geist. Accordingly, I translate Geisteswissenschaften in various
ways, depending on the context: human sciences, humanities,

19
An edition of the original manuscript of Ideen II is currently under preparation at
the Husserl Archive.
14 Introduction

cultural sciences, historical sciences, socio-historical sciences, scien-

ces of subjectivity, sciences of psychic life, etc. For the English-
speaking reader, it is particularly important to keep in mind that
in late nineteenth-century Germany there was no distinction
between the so-called humanities and the so-called social sciences,
and Geisteswissenschaften is a term that embraces both fields. This
is true in today’s German academia as well, where the term
Geisteswissenschaften is still current.

The opening chapter of this book, “Southwestern Neo-Kantianism in

search of ontology,” is devoted to a reconstruction of the historical
trajectory of this philosophical school. I examine the works of
Windelband, Rickert, Lask, and Böhm and argue that they are from
the very start geared towards ontology. In particular, their goal is to
clarify the ontological status of the objects investigated by the human
sciences in contrast with the ontological status of the objects investi-
gated by the natural sciences. The Southwestern Neo-Kantians attempt
to do so without any reference to consciousness or psyche, which for
them are natural objects studied by an empirical science: experimental
psychology. I show that this consistent exclusion of subjectivity from
the sphere of the human sciences ultimately leads to dire problems that
cannot be solved within their theoretical framework.
Chapter 2, “Life-philosophical accounts of history and psyche: Simmel
and Dilthey,” presents the work of Georg Simmel and Wilhelm Dilthey.
Arguably, they are the spearheads of Lebensphilosophie, at least as far as
the debate on the demarcation of the sciences is concerned. Simmel
and Dilthey both argue that a reference to psychic life is the distinc-
tive trait of the subject matter of the human sciences. In this way, they
solve the problem left open by the Neo-Kantians at the very beginning
of their inquiry. ‘Life’ is the ontological marker of the human scien-
ces, and prior to all theoretical inquiry ‘life’ is built into the fabric of
human-scientific objects. This starting point presents a number of
advantages, though it is likewise problematic upon closer scrutiny.
Neither Simmel nor Dilthey succeeds in clarifying adequately the
relationship that they think obtains between ‘life’ and nature. None
of them is willing to defend any version of Cartesianism, but the
affirmation of psychic life as a distinct ontological sphere ostensibly
requires some clarification of how this distinct ontological sphere
relates to the ontological sphere of nature. From Husserl’s point of
Introduction 15

view, which is examined in detail in subsequent chapters, the life-

philosophers’ basic conviction is correct. However, their difficulties
arise from a failure to distinguish between the empirical and the
transcendental dimensions of subjectivity.
Chapter 3, “Standpoints and attitudes: scientificity between Neo-
Kantianism and Husserlian phenomenology,” moves to consider an
issue common to both the Neo-Kantians and the life-philosopher: the
description of different standpoints as the subjective sources for
the theoretical categories characterizing different scientific fields.
Sensitivity to the plurality of standpoints as the transcendental source
for the multiple spheres of objects investigated scientifically is shown to
be a common trait of the debate as a whole. After examining the notion
of standpoint in Neo-Kantianism and Dilthey’s distinction between
inner and outer experience I introduce Husserl’s key notion of “atti-
tude,” or Einstellung. I argue that the notion of attitude provides a
strategic entry into the phenomenological perspective from within the
debate presented in the first two chapters. The chief merit of Husserl’s
notion of attitude is to avoid the possible fragmentation of our picture
of the world connected with the acknowledgment of equal value
to divergent scientific standpoints. Introducing the notion of a living
transcendental ego as the identical source of various attitudes and
describing the constitutive meaning of the possibility of switching
attitudes vis-à-vis one and the same object, Husserl maintains both a
commendable theoretical pluralism and an anti-relativistic emphasis on
the unitary life-source that underlies divergent stances on the world.
Chapter 4, “The reception of Husserl’s Ideen among the Neo-
Kantians,” focuses on the work Husserl arguably wrote in order to
engage the Neo-Kantians: Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology
and to a Phenomenological Philosophy (1913). Unfortunately for
Husserl, this work had the effect of alienating his most devoted students
in Göttingen, who read it as an inexplicable turn to idealism, and it did
not produce the desired effect of winning the Neo-Kantians over to the
cause of phenomenology. Rickert charges Husserl of being an intuition-
ist, that is, of diminishing the importance of conceptual and discursive
thought and celebrating the alleged immediacy of intuition instead.
This, for Rickert, is the hallmark of Lebensphilosophie, and, accord-
ingly, he accuses Husserl of being an ‘undercover’ life-philosopher. In
his review of Ideas, Natorp strengthens Rickert’s charges with a broadly
Platonist critique of Husserl’s concept of essence and further criticizes
16 Introduction

the ‘eidetic method’ as unfit to grasp subjectivity as such. The eidetic

method, so Natorp argues, turns subjectivity into precisely what it is
not: an object. In this chapter, I provide responses to Rickert and
Natorp from a Husserlian point of view and argue that their critiques
are helpful to clarify the meaning of two crucial concepts in Husserl’s
phenomenology, that is, ‘essence’ and ‘consciousness.’ Clarifying these
concepts is crucial for articulating Husserl’s position in the following
chapters.
Chapter 5, “Husserl’s critique of Rickert’s secretly naturalistic tran-
scendentalism: The Natur und Geist lectures (1919–1927),” is a thor-
ough examination of Husserl’s critique of Rickert’s demarcation of the
natural and the human sciences. The two major sources for this chapter
are Husserl’s seminal lectures on Natur und Geist, which he delivered in
two very different versions in 1919 and 1927. Here, Husserl argues for
the necessity of multiple criteria in the demarcation of the sciences,
distinguishing between both the formal-methodological structure of
science and the material-ontological status of various fields on inquiry.
His main charge against Rickert is that he has in no way clarified why
the world of experience is amenable to scientific conceptualization.
Rickert, in Husserl’s critical characterization, replaced the difficult
Kantian problem of a transcendental deduction of the categories with
a vaguely pragmatic reference to the necessity of using concepts in order
to master the overwhelming infinity of disconnected data streaming in
from our senses. Rickert, on Husserl’s account, did not provide a
plausible description of ‘the world of experience,’ to which he nonethe-
less constantly refers. In the context of his critique of Rickert, Husserl
crucially states that transcendental phenomenology is in fact a
“scientific life-philosophy,”20 thus providing an important clue about
his self-understanding in the philosophical context of his time.
Chapter 6, “Historia formaliter spectata: Husserl and the life-
philosophers,” is meant to substantiate Husserl’s aforementioned
claim about phenomenology being a scientifically committed kind of
life-philosophy. This includes both an appreciation of Dilthey’s and
Simmel’s work and a critique of what he takes to be their weaknesses,
the first of which is their inclination toward a kind of anti-rationalist
historicism. This chapter draws from a variety of Husserl’s manuscripts

20
E. Husserl, Natur und Geist. Vorlesungen 1927, Husserliana, vol. 32 (Dordrecht:
Springer, 2001), 240–241. Hereafter Hua XXXII.
Introduction 17

and unpublished notes on his private copies of Simmel’s books. First,

Husserl’s method of phenomenological epoché and reduction is
intended to bring to light the overarching unity that characterizes sub-
jectivity. In so doing, he intends to counteract a tendency common to
both naturalistic psychology and life-philosophy to split apart subjec-
tivity into a ‘lower’ natural stratum and an ‘upper’ spiritual stratum.
Second, from within the new perspective on subjectivity as a self-
contained sphere yielded by the reduction, Husserl proceeds to clarify
the sense in which we can consider history itself a world. This includes a
detailed description of empathy as the conscious act that enables the
communalization of our experiences and allows us to understand our-
selves as members of an indefinitely open community of transcendental
subjects. Third, Husserl discusses in a close engagement with Simmel
the meaning of historical time for the constitution of history as a
scientifically accessible ontological sphere. Finally, Husserl clarifies a
key dichotomy for the life-philosophers: psychic motivation as opposed
to natural causality.
Chapter 7, “The life-world as the source of nature and culture:
towards a transcendental-phenomenological worldview,” introduces
the theme of the life-world from the perspective of Husserl’s confronta-
tion with the Neo-Kantians and the life-philosophers. I argue that the
‘life-world’ theme should be interpreted in light of Husserl’s attempt to
articulate a humanistic worldview in continuity with what I call the
Kantian liberation narrative, that is, an understanding of Kant’s
Copernican turn as liberation from naturalism. This includes a discus-
sion of Husserl’s deconstructive genealogy of naturalism in Crisis.
Chapter 8, “Ethical and cultural implications in Husserl’s phenom-
enology of the life-world,” concludes the book with a sketch of
Husserl’s transcendental-phenomenological worldview. I argue that
Husserl sees a transformative power in the phenomenological attitude.
Practicing phenomenology is a way for the individual to achieve a
dignified sense of self, enabled by the discovery of the transcendental,
non-naturalistic dimension of her subjectivity. Husserl’s comes
extremely close to the view of life presented by Fichte in his popular
writings such as The Vocation of Man (1800), in which reality is
interpreted as the raw material for moral action. At the intersubjective
level, phenomenology is committed to clarifying intuitively the meaning
of the key notion of ‘humankind,’ which plays a central role in the
tradition of transcendental philosophy. Phenomenology’s contribution
18 Introduction

to humankind is its work towards the elucidation of the historical

teleology inherent in humankind and oriented towards the birth of a
universal culture. In Husserl’s ideal narrative universal culture is not a
kind of monochrome globalization but rather a unity within a multi-
plicity of differences, in which local home-worlds are preserved while
the awareness of partaking of the one world common to all humans
increases.
1 Southwestern Neo-Kantianism
in search of ontology

Das beständige Wetzen der Messer ist [. . .]

langweilig wenn man Nichts zu scheiden vorhat
Herrman Lotze1

For the so-called Neo-Kantian thinkers, philosophy begins with the fact
of science. Modern science represents for them freedom from ground-
less metaphysical speculation; it provides a model of rigor and objec-
tivity for all human inquiry. Although philosophy addresses the
transcendental rather than the empirical, it takes the existence of objec-
tively intelligible, empirical knowledge, i.e., the fact of science, as its
necessary point of departure.2
Despite this origin, however, it does not follow that Neo-Kantian
philosophy must remain merely ancillary to empirical science. On the
contrary, Neo-Kantianism is better understood, in general, as an effort
to re-establish a distinctive theoretical space for philosophy in a time
dominated by an unprecedented flourishing of empirical research, both
natural and humanistic. In particular, through critical reflection on

1
H. Lotzte, System der Philosophie – Zweiter Theil: Drei Bücher der Metaphysik
(Leipzig: Hirzel, 1879), 15. Quoted in H. Rickert, “Die Methode der Philosophie
und das Unmittelbare,” in H. Rickert, Philosophische Aufsätze (Tübingen: Mohr
Siebeck, 1999), 107–151. Here 107. Hereafter MPU. “The constant whetting of
knives is boring, if one has nothing to cut.”
2
It was Hermann Cohen who coined the phrase “das Faktum der Wissenschaft.”
I will not discuss Hermann Cohen’s brand of Neo-Kantianism (he founded the
so-called Marburg School) in any detail in this book. I will only examine the main
line of criticism raised by Paul Natorp against Husserl’s Ideen I in Chapter 4, but
only to the extent that Natorp’s critique reinforces and clarifies Heinrich Rickert’s
own line of criticism. The reason for this omission is twofold: (1) The
Southwestern school was involved in a much more lively exchange with
Husserlian phenomenology than the Marburg school and is thus more relevant to
the overall purpose of the book; (2) Whereas Cohen, Natorp, and his brilliant
student Cassirer have been given some attention in recent years, there is virtually
no scholarship devoted to the Southwestern school in English, which is regrettable
given its philosophical importance.

19
20 Southwestern Neo-Kantianism in search of ontology

procedures, goals, and achievements of empirical science, Neo-Kantian

philosophy elaborated previously unknown tasks for philosophical
work. To give but one example – and in so doing, to set the tone for
this first chapter – Neo-Kantian thinkers hold that the practice of
empirical science entails tacit operations of reason, operations bound
to remain implicit for the practicing scientist and only disclosed via
distinctive transcendental-philosophical analyses. Such tacit operations
of reason constitute the object cognized, at a higher level, by proper
scientific inquiry. The Kantian heritage of this conception is manifest.
However, the Neo-Kantians set out to determine an ‘a priori’ more
pluralistic than the a priori originally considered by Kant. This new
conception of the a priori does not end with a few principles governing
the experiential construction of natural phenomena, but extends to the
spheres of culture and history as well; it does not merely shape inchoate
sense data but entertains complex relations with the materials it
structures.
In this chapter, I will follow one strand in the intellectual trajectory of
Southwestern Neo-Kantianism along which the philosophical import of
this school in creating a new space and new tasks for philosophy is
particularly evident: the philosophical demarcation of natural and
human science. I will argue that, standard interpretations notwithstand-
ing, the Neo-Kantian treatment of the problems connected both to a
classification of different forms of scientific activity and to the defense of
the autonomy of the historical sciences as distinct from the natural scien-
ces points toward the formulation of a sui generis ontology. In other
words, if we follow the development of the problems tackled originally
by Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert, which were subse-
quently carried out by second-generation Southwestern thinkers
such as Emil Lask and the virtually unknown Franz Böhm, we dis-
cover a unitary effort to employ epistemological and methodological
analyses as a sort of lens in which the ontological structure of different
objects of knowledge becomes visible. Thus, contrary to the conven-
tional account, Neo-Kantianism does not provide merely the back-
ground out of which Husserlian phenomenology would develop but
rather the intellectual space in which Husserlian phenomenology dis-
plays its own philosophical potential. The phenomenological ontol-
ogy and, furthermore, the transcendental phenomenology envisioned
by Husserl are theoretical projects deeply consonant with the preoc-
cupations of the Southwestern thinkers.
Windelband’s Rektoratsrede 21

In this chapter, I intend to show how Neo-Kantianism, and, in

particular, Southwestern Neo-Kantianism, sets the theoretical stage
for the kind of ontological investigations proper to Husserlian phenom-
enology. Only within the Neo-Kantian context does one discover the
full meaning of Husserl’s characterization of subjectivity as necessarily
transcending its empirical dimension and his utilization of direct eidetic
descriptions. Thus, these central features of Husserl’s project require
examination in light of the theoretical space created by Neo-Kantian
transcendental philosophy.

Windelband’s Rektoratsrede and its ontological implications

Arguably, the debate within the Southwestern School concerning differ-
ent forms of scientificity began with Wilhelm Windelband’s
Rektoratsrede, delivered at the University of Strasbourg in 1894
under the title History and Natural Science.3 This text develops a
methodological opposition between nomothetic (viz. natural) and
idiographic (viz. historical) science.4 While nomothetic science seeks
general laws – and in so doing moves away from particular facts –
idiographic science aims precisely at a rigorous, but also lively and
empathetic, restitution of particular facts.5 Windelband distinguishes
and assesses sciences according to the “formal characteristic of their
theoretical goals”,6 rather than by the ontological realities (in
Windelband’s language, “materials”) that they investigate. For this
reason, critics have repeatedly raised charges of abstract methodolo-
gism and ontological indifference against Windelband’s position and,
with little hesitation, have extended these accusations to the whole of
Southwestern Neo-Kantianism. However, and contrary to this opinion,
Windelband’s speech contains more nuance and sophistication than
its critics concede. A closer look reveals that Windelband embeds his
methodological distinction within a broader concern with the full scope
of scientific activity, beyond the strictures of one-sided naturalism.
Accordingly, Windelband proposes his distinction as the beginning,

3
W. Windelband, “Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft,” in W. Windelband,
Präludien: Aufsätze und Reden zur Philosophie und ihrer Geschichte, vol. 2
(Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1915), 136–160. Hereafter GN.
4
GN, 145. 5 GN, 150. 6 GN, 144.
22 Southwestern Neo-Kantianism in search of ontology

rather than the conclusion, of a transcendental-philosophical line of

inquiry into what he later calls the logic of historical sciences.
First, it should be noted that Windelband’s turn to a methodological
distinction arises from his dissatisfaction with one specific form of
ontological distinction of science and not with ontological distinctions
in general. This particular distinction, the customary distinction
between nature and spirit (Geist), divides the universe of scientific
knowledge into Naturwissenschaft and Geisteswissenschaft. The rea-
son behind Windelband’s rejection of the nature/spirit distinction as a
viable standpoint from which to understand scientific activity has
multiple components. The distinction rests upon the unquestioned
metaphysical assumption from early modern philosophy that Natur
and Geist correspond to knowledge of the natural and knowledge of
the psyche, which would mistakenly construe practitioners of human
sciences (art history, sociology, political economy) as dealing either
exclusively or primarily with psychic facts. Moreover, and most impor-
tantly, the newborn science of empirical psychology simply could not be
brought under the same umbrella of existing Geisteswissenschaften.7
This last point deserves further attention. Empirical psychology
exhibits an important trait often obscured by the object-oriented
distinction of Natur and Geist: empirical psychology posits general
laws that govern the unfolding of human psychic life, and in this
respect it is aligned with traditional natural science. This intellectual
habit of positing general laws distinguishes an entire province of
science, which Windelband therefore labels “nomothetical” (law-
positing).
Having identified the distinctive intellectual habit of natural science
(not its concern with physical nature but its pursuit of general laws), we
can, in a Kantian fashion, also establish its limit, by contrasting it with
other existing forms of scientific thought. Furthermore, as Windelband
specifies, making this trait explicit allows us to recognize the pervasive-
ness of nomothetical forms of thought as well as the fateful allegiance
between these forms and traditional logic.8 The exclusive focus of tradi-
tional logic on the general forms of correct reasoning makes it partic-
ularly useful for inquiries concerning general laws, but this
predominance of law-positing forms of thought casts a distorting
shadow over the other half of the scientific universe, namely the

7 8
GN, 142–143. GN, 147.
Windelband’s Rektoratsrede 23

idiographic or historical half, obscuring the scientificity of those scien-

ces that concern singular, unrepeatable facts. Although both nomo-
thetic and idiographic thought start by collecting facts, nomothetic
thought treats facts as mere variables of fixed laws to be discovered,
whereas idiographic thought moves towards a more precise determina-
tion of the singular fact at hand, such as a painting, a political party, or
the life of a great writer.
Considering this opposition between nomothetical and idiographic
forms of scientific thought, as Windelband did, we can see “why a
struggle for the decisive influence on the general world- and life-view
of mankind is bound to flare up and in fact did flare up between them.”9
To echo the famous phrase by C. P. Snow, the division of these “two
cultures” does nothing more than manifest the intrinsic tension between
two logically opposite forms of thought.10 However – and this is the
outcome of Windelband’s analysis – these two forms of thought do not
mutually exclude one another, but rather complement each other, as
two parts of our total knowledge. Thus, the question of the primacy of
one over the other does not arise. Rather, like intellect and sensibility for
Kant, “these two components of human knowledge cannot be traced
back to one common source”11 and are therefore bound to remain
heterogeneous.
This insight leads to the first ontological implication in Windelband’s
analysis: the tension between nomothetic and idiographic science
recasts, at a more complex level, a basic tension that runs across all
objectivity as such. Every object in the world includes a formal and a
material component and can never be simultaneously cognized under
both categories. Whereas natural scientific thought reduces the facticity
of a given object to ever-recurring regularity and thus emphasizes its
being structured by a certain ‘form’ (the law), historical thought high-
lights the dependence of its objects upon a particular context of meaning
and tends to grasp the given fact in its absolute unrepeatability. In this
way, historical thought turns to the material, factual component of
objectivity; Windelband refers to this dimension of objectivity as its
being an “event” (Ereignis).

9
GN, 152.
10
See C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
11
GN, 157.
24 Southwestern Neo-Kantianism in search of ontology

An example will shed some light on these complicated and termino-

logically idiosyncratic analyses. A chemist understands a given lump of
gold as a sample of metal, with atomic number 79 and a melting point at
about 1064° C. This temperature, like a point on the Cartesian plane,
results from the intersection of a number of general laws. The historian
understands the same lump of gold, say, as a Roman coin minted under
Trajan and as celebrating the greatness of the Empire at the apex of its
geographical extension. It belongs to a unique and unrepeatable histor-
ical constellation. A general law determines the fact that gold melts at
1064° C and regulates the set of possible states of every atom of this
metal. However, that precisely this piece of gold, here and now, melts
at 1064° C cannot be deduced a priori from the natural law, for this is
an individual, about which, qua individual, the law has nothing to say.
The law does not prescribe the historical existence, the facticity, of gold
in the first place, neither in general nor in any specific place and time. It
does not prescribe the ‘event’ of this piece of gold and all that it entails in
terms of further possibilities. Natural scientific thought a priori excludes
from its purview everything that determines a given entity in its unre-
peatable uniqueness (Einmaligkeit), for such thought concerns itself
only with the invariable (das Immergleiche), i.e., laws. Conversely,
history a priori excludes from its purview that which renders a given
entity a mere instance of a certain kind of reality, for it concerns itself
exclusively with what is unrepeatable about objects and situations.
Therefore, “the law and the event [das Ereignis] remain beside one
another as the fundamental, incommensurable magnitudes of our pic-
ture of the world”12 and no philosophical speculation can ever plau-
sibly absorb one magnitude into the other.
This distinction between the unique (event) and the invariable (law),
which follows from the methodological classification of sciences, adum-
brates the necessity of a fresh ontological, content-oriented distinction
after the old Natur/Geist distinction has been dismissed. Whereas every
conceivable object may serve as an example of its particular class (and
thus be subsumed under invariable laws), not every object deserves
treatment as a unique entity belonging to history. I can contemplate
the raindrop dripping down my windowpane as long as I wish, but in no
meaningful way will this particular drop of rain appear to me as a
unique entity in world-history. On the other hand, I can look at the

12
GN, 160.
Rickert’s ontology – part 1 25

ruins of a Roman bridge and understand the stones as simply pieces of a

very solid material standing according to strict natural laws, but the
Roman bridge is also a unique historical item, embedded in a context of
meaning open to historical-scientific inquiry. This, however, begs ques-
tions that Windelband’s student, Heinrich Rickert, attempted to
answer: how can we discriminate between unique objects suitable for
historical research and mere natural objects instantiating general laws?
Is this distinction completely arbitrary?

Rickert’s concept of ontology – part 1

Whereas Windelband’s Rektoratsrede ends with only a gesture toward
a new, necessary, ontological distinction, Rickert moves much further
in this direction. He devotes two major publications to this topic of
a philosophical classification of the sciences: Die Grenzen der natur-
wissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung and Kulturwissenschaft und
Naturwissenschaft. In them, Rickert insists that a full understanding
of scientific activity requires a supplementary object-oriented distinc-
tion between nature and culture in order to complete Windelband’s
methodological distinction between history and natural science.13
Although Rickert remains faithful to his teacher’s emphasis on the
priority of a methodological distinction in the classification of scien-
ces,14 he indicates that he does so chiefly because such a distinction

13
Rudolf Makkreel misinterprets Rickert’s position when he writes: “But for Rickert
even the material distinction of nature and culture is inadequate and needs to be
replaced by a more precise methodological distinction between generalizing and
individualizing sciences.” R. Makkreel, “Wilhelm Dilthey and the Neo-Kantians:
On the Conceptual Distinction between Geisteswissenschaften and
Kulturwissenschaften,” in Luft and Makkreel, Neo-Kantianism in Contemporary
Philosophy, 253–271. Here 255. Rickert does not intend to replace a material
distinction with a formal distinction. Instead, he insists that the formal distinction
between generalization and individualization allows for the replacement of a weak
material distinction between Geisteswissenschaft and Naturwissenschaft with a
much stronger one between cultural science and natural science. Thus, the formal
distinction is the tool for articulating a superior material distinction.
14
It should be noticed that Rickert is critical of the distinction between nomothetic
and idiographic as proposed by his teacher Windelband. For a discussion of this
point see A. Zijderveld, Rickert’s Relevance: The Ontological Nature and
Epistemological Functions of Values (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2006),
246–255. For a full-scale presentation of Rickert’s philosophy see my entry
“Heinrich Rickert,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: plato.stanford.edu/
archives/win2013/entries/heinrich-rickert.
26 Southwestern Neo-Kantianism in search of ontology

renders ontological commitments controllable and scientifically ori-

ented; thus, he avoids borrowing such ontological commitments from
a pre-theoretical worldview without further reflection.15 Following
Windelband, Rickert seeks not to dismiss ontological distinctions out-
right but to articulate them more accurately than the foregoing philo-
sophical traditions. For Rickert, this requires taking a close look at
the way existing sciences actually work. Logically speaking, that is
with respect to their methods, there are only two groups of sciences:
the generalizing and the individualizing.16 This is a difference in
Begriffsbildung, somewhat inadequately translated as “concept-
formation.” Some sciences construe their concepts by moving away
from the merely individual; other sciences construe their concepts by
moving closer to individual contents of reality. As a simple fact about
the sciences, the philosopher must include this in her considerations at
her point of departure (but, again, not of arrival). Rickert praises Kant
for being the first philosopher, after the scientific revolution, who
grasped unambiguously this logical characteristic of natural scientific
inquiry. In fact, in his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics that will
be able to come forward as a Science (1783), Kant provides an
extremely fruitful definition of the domain of reality investigated by
the natural sciences: “Nature is the existence of things, insofar as
[sofern] that existence is determined according to universal laws.”17
With this brief definition Kant brings to light two important factors
about natural scientific research: (1) it aims at the determination of
universal laws; (2) it does not find its objects (‘the existence of things’)
already given, but rather it produces them through the choice of a
particular perspective from which to view experienced reality, in this

15
On this point see A. Dewalque, “A quoi sert la logique des sciences historiques de
Rickert?,” Les Études philosophiques 1 (2010): 44–66. Here 59–60. As the
author emphasizes, it is telling that Rickert entitles his book “cultural science and
natural science,” thus making his material-ontological distinction prominent over
and above his methodological one between historical science and natural science.
Regrettably, the English version of the book conceals this fact by the arbitrary
translation of the original title, Kulturwissenschaft und Naturwissenschaft as
“Science and History.”
16
H. Rickert, Science and History: A Critique of Positivist Epistemology
(Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, 1962), 45. Hereafter SH.
17
I. Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics that will be able to come
forward as a Science in I. Kant, Theoretical Philosophy after 1781 (Cambridge
University Press, 2002), 50–169. Here 89.
Rickert’s ontology – part 1 27

case, that of universal laws.18 This second point already entails the
possibility of choosing other points of view with respect to the world
of experience, other perspectives that would reveal the existence of
things in a different light than that of universal laws. Rickert thought
that Kant had not seen this possibility – a possibility that Kant himself
opened up – and so the task of its systematic development fell to the
Neo-Kantian movement:
To be sure, by thus qualifying his definition with the words “insofar as
[sofern] it is determined,” Kant brought to an end the exclusive pre-eminence
of the concept of nature, at least in philosophy if not in the individual sciences.
In other words, the “world view” of the natural sciences [. . .] was reduced by
Kant also in theory from one for which absolute validity was claimed to one
that was to be regarded as only relatively valid; and the method of the natural
sciences was concomitantly limited to a special field of investigation.19

Following Kant’s definition, one can no longer dogmatically posit

nature as a metaphysical reality-in-itself. Rather, nature is grasped as
the counterpart of a specific way of looking at reality, namely, the one
interested in working out general laws. For Rickert, precisely this de-
absolutization of nature by means of philosophical criticism made room
for a new consideration of the historical world, otherwise doomed to
concealment by the naturalistic trend of pre-Kantian metaphysics. As
Rickert writes in a later work, “nature is no longer ‘the world’, but
rather an apprehension of sensible being carried out by the scientific
subject.”20 Even if “Kant himself did not produce a systematic critical
philosophy of history,”21 a logical perspective on history in the same
spirit as his original perspective on nature appears desirable – one which
is thoroughly consistent with his critical philosophical agenda and made
possible by it. Furthermore, if our generalizing concept-formation alone
forms nature, then history arises exclusively from our view of empirical
reality in its Einmaligkeit, i.e., its unrepeatable contingency. As antici-
pated above, Rickert labels this sort of concept-formation, which grasps
reality in this capacity, “individualizing.” By contrasting generalizing

18
See Chapter 3 for a systematic treatment of the concept of standpoint in Neo-
Kantianism and its divergence from Husserl’s concept of attitude.
19
SH, 5–6, translation modified.
20
H. Rickert, Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie. Eine Einführung
(Heidelberg: Carl Winters, 1924), 139.
21
Ibid., 140.
28 Southwestern Neo-Kantianism in search of ontology

and individualizing methods, Rickert reasserts in his own terms the

dualistic opposition between law and event proposed by Windelband.
However, in slight contrast with his teacher, Rickert holds that grasping
reality in its Einmaligkeit requires a robust set of conceptual tools, so he
cannot depend upon the softer, almost pictorial form of representation
suggested by the word “idiographic.” After all, historians are scientists,
not poets or novelists. Thus, as Rickert summarizes, methodologically
speaking, “empirical reality becomes nature when we conceive it with
reference to the general. It becomes history when we conceive it with
reference to the distinctive and the individual.”22
Contrary to shallow presentations of Rickert’s thought, this meth-
odological distinction does not embody a complete philosophical
demarcation of the sciences. Rather, it represents a point of departure
for an epistemologically informed investigation of the ontological side
of both the natural-scientific and the historical method:
The circumstance that the same sensible world can be investigated scientifi-
cally according to two completely different logical standpoints must gain
significance also for ontology, in particular, for the question concerning the
being of reality as a whole.23

For this reason, one common characterization of Rickert’s position

appears inaccurate. It goes as follows: for Rickert, “in view of the
formal distinction of Natural Science and Cultural Science as two differ-
ent, yet correlated, mutually amplifying approaches or methods, the
ontological distinction is superfluous”;24 accordingly, “in the end,
ontology is epistemology.”25 Indeed, epistemology does have a meth-
odological primacy, but only in order to make possible ontological
inquiry, unburdened by unquestioned metaphysical assumptions such
as the Natur/Geist distinction. For Rickert, ontology has a theoretical
goal of its own. To contrast the two, epistemology (or in Rickert’s
language, methodology) investigates logical structures in different pat-
terns of concept-formation; ontology, on the other hand, investigates
the different kinds of objectivity grasped in scientific conceptuality.
Thus, while Rickert does hold that “nothing exists except in

22
H. Rickert, The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Science (Cambridge
University Press, 1986), 34. Hereafter LCF.
23
H. Rickert, “Die Heidelberger Tradition und Kants Kritizismus (Systematische
Selbstdarstellung),” Philosophische Aufsätze, 347–411. Here 374.
24
Zijderveld, Rickert’s Relevance, 243. 25 Ibid., 246.
Rickert’s ontology – part 1 29

judgment,”26 he also upholds the complete legitimacy and even neces-

sity of asking just what does not exist except in judgment. Because
different judgments – different connections formed between concepts
according to either the generalizing or individualizing method – corre-
spond to different objects, each sort of judgment requires a separate
investigation of the materials proper to it, and this task belongs to
ontology.
In fact, the significant asymmetry in the applicability of the general-
izing and individualizing methods demands attention to the ontological
dimension. To reiterate the two poles of the asymmetry, every conceiv-
able bit of reality (physical or psychic) admits of conception as deter-
mined by general laws and thus as an instance of a given province of
nature; not all reality allows for investigation according to individualiz-
ing concept-formation. In response to this, Rickert argues that it is
reality related to a value that deserves treatment as distinctive and
individual. The Roman coin mentioned above allows for an under-
standing and investigation of itself as more than just a lump of gold
because of its objective relation to a value (say, political grandeur). On
the contrary, the raindrop on my windowpane does not exhibit such a
relation. Although both the Roman coin and the raindrop are, follow-
ing Windelband’s suggestion, “events,” only the first possesses the
dignity of a historical event.27 This explains why a competent numis-
matist will possess a set of technical concepts to talk about the Roman
coin; with them, she will produce a thorough explication of the elements
of meaning pertaining specifically to this coin. Even if every object could
in principle receive a value-content, for Rickert not every object is a
priori endowed with value in the same way in which every object stands
a priori under natural laws.
In the investigation of any given object, value-relatedness is either
present or absent. The historian, who does not arbitrarily assign value

26
T. Willey, Back to Kant: The Revival of Kantianism in German Social and
Historical Thought (1860–1914) (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press,
1978), 143.
27
Of course, this does not in principle exclude the possibility of investing the
raindrop on my windowpane with the dignity of historical value and thus of
elevating it to the rank of historical event. A lover of pop music may argue that the
raindrops that inspired Paul Simon to write his beautiful ballad Kathy’s Song or
those that kept falling on Burt Bacharach’s head are, in fact, historical events. But
then, again, the raindrops are viewed not simply as raindrops but as the carriers of
an objective relatedness to the aesthetic values expressed in the two songs.
30 Southwestern Neo-Kantianism in search of ontology

to objects but rather investigates value-relevant objects, can only

acknowledge this “presence or absence”28 of value-relatedness in the
objects she sets out to investigate. Rickert does not take interest in the
subjective dynamics of the concrete bestowals of value upon otherwise
natural objects because he understands them as more historical and
psychological rather than as resulting from robust material-ontological
principles. Thus, he considers the intention of the Roman artisan who
designed and minted the coin, thereby conferring value-relatedness on
what otherwise would have been just a lump of gold, a fact, and not an
ontological principle. One can sharply distinguish between two kinds of
objects regardless of their empirical origin: those related to values
(cultural objects) and those that are value-free (natural objects). Only
when applied to value-related objects does the individualizing method
of historical science generate meaningful scientific knowledge. We can-
not arbitrarily attribute or remove this objective relatedness to values;
that is, in some things, we find it already there, and in others, we do not.
Therefore, we recognize it as a “material distinction” (materiale
Auszeichnung), as found on the side of the object and not on the side
of the theoretical activity of the historian.29
In neither Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung
nor Kulturwissenschaft und Naturwissenschaft does Rickert expand
further on the structure of the material side. He instead attempts to
demonstrate that the concept of value is necessary for understanding
culture and that positing values does not undermine scientificity in the
practice of historical studies.30 His insistence on the value-relatedness of
the objects of cultural science does not in the slightest oppose the general
scientific principle of making exclusively value-free judgments, for it is
absolutely possible to make value-free judgments about value-related
objects, such as simply acknowledging the given form of value-
relatedness and spelling out its implications for the given historical
context. Rickert so valued this idea, which among other things inspired

28
SH, 19.
29
However, as Dewalque points out, “even the material distinction is in a certain
respect formal” (Dewalque, “A quoi sert la logique des sciences historiques de
Rickert?,” 62), so Rickert’s direction of inquiry would be better characterized as
“a formal ontology of history” (65). This means that Rickert does not take
interest in this or that value-related object but in value-relatedness generally, as a
form that innervates a certain kind of objectivity.
30
SH, 90–91.
Rickert’s ontology – part 2 31

the great sociologist Max Weber, that he devoted long portions of his
books to repeating it and warding off possible misunderstandings,
though the details of these discussions need not occupy us further here.

Rickert’s concept of ontology – part 2

The distinction between value-related (cultural) and value-free (natural)
objects does not exhaust Rickert’s preoccupation with ontology. Even
though the bulk of Rickert’s philosophy moves from the ontological-
material fact of value-relatedness towards a theory of historical con-
ceptualization and its validity, scholars have detected in his later works
an “ontological turn.”31 I would argue, however, that while ontology
occupies an increasingly central place in Rickert’s later work, it is
excessive to speak of a turn. As the foregoing section showed, Rickert
is aware of the importance of the material side of cognition from the
very beginning and he recognizes that it deserves a separate scrutiny.
The matter of cognition cannot be reduced to its form.
‘Ontology’ becomes for Rickert the title of a Problematik encompass-
ing the entire material side of knowledge and progressively acknowl-
edging its complexity. In part, factors in the contemporary intellectual
atmosphere of the Weimar Republic motivated this concentration on
ontology. A general discontent with academic philosophy was growing
among the younger generations exposed to the horrors of World War
I. In particular, transcendental philosophy, with its distinct focus on the
forms of cognition, fell in status due to its apparent distance from reality
and concrete life. Knowledge and science generally – once counted
among the highest achievements of humankind – now suffered
accusations of veiling reality, hampering genuine access to it, and
suffocating the spontaneity of life. It seemed that only Nietzsche (or
perhaps a caricature of Nietzsche) and his epigone Oswald Spengler was
wholeheartedly cherished by young German intellectuals of the period.
This generation celebrated intuition and immediacy and set them
against what they considered the cumbersome procedures of scientific
thought. According to this trend, only the intuitionists promised to

31
J. Farges, “Philosophie de l’histoire et système des valeurs chez Heinrich Rickert,”
Les Études philosophiques 1 (2010): 25–44. Here 26. A similar position is
defended in L. Kuttig, Konstitution und Gegebenheit bei H. Rickert: Zum Prozess
der Ontologisierung in seinem Spätwerk, eine Analyse unter Berücksichtigung
nachgelassener Texte (Essen: Die Blaue Eule, 1987).
32 Southwestern Neo-Kantianism in search of ontology

grant direct access to the ‘truth’ of reality, while the latter threatened to
give rise to mental shackles and academic estrangement. Faced with this
atmosphere, Rickert realized that the future of the Kantian tradition in
German philosophy depended significantly on its ability to prove that
an emphasis on the forms of cognition does not necessitate the subordi-
nation or neglect of material or ontological considerations. In other
words, Rickert thought that the Kantian tradition did not need to
marginalize the ‘reality’ sought by the younger generation. In order to
accomplish this, proponents of Kantianism had to demonstrate that,
contrary to superficial opinions of the time, the articulation of a strong
ontology requires one to begin from the fact of cognition and its forms.
Furthermore, only such a robust ontology, conducted along the lines of
Kantian criticism, could dispel the false yet enticing hope in immediate
intuitions among contemporaries in the practice of philosophy.
This intellectual atmosphere, however, does not represent the most
interesting impetus behind Rickert’s late emphasis on ontology. Rather,
the move towards ontology appears intrinsic to Southwestern Neo-
Kantianism as such, with the ontological problematic already entailed
by Windelband’s original formulation of the nature/history distinction.
Thus, Rickert works within a connotation of transcendental philosophy
distinguished from that of Kant by precisely this trend in the direction of
the ontological. To contrast the two, Kant conceives of the material side
of cognition as fundamentally homogeneous. In other words, Kant
identifies one and only one ontological kind of material in experience
that undergoes categorial formation: spatio-temporal sense data. In a
significant paper entitled “The Method of Philosophy and the
Immediate,” which summarizes his late ventures into ontology,
Rickert calls this position “hyletic sensualism,”32 thereby purposefully
echoing the Platonic/Aristotelian concept of the prote hyle. Certainly, in
this context, the concept of hyle does not refer to dogmatically posited
metaphysical ‘prime matter’ but to the raw material out of which we
allegedly construe the objects of our experience, i.e., sense data. Hyletic
sensualists like Kant and, in Rickert’s interpretation, Husserl “believe
that all they can observe in the pure content of their experiences is
sensuous states [sinnliche Zustände], and accordingly they put all
non-sensuous components on the account of the form.”33 Thus, by
applying the traditional Kantian form/content scheme, hyletic

32 33
MPU, 128. Ibid.
Rickert’s ontology – part 2 33

sensualists only admit of sensuous content in experience: the subjective

side issues as a formal component to everything that transcends the
sensuous sphere. Objects (Gegenstände) in a full-blown sense are
considered sensuous states (sinnliche Zustände) after the infusion of
categorial forms of objectivity. Rickert, however, calls for a more
focused investigation of pure Zustände (material complexions of
content-data before they undergo categorial formation) and seeks an
elaboration of a “pure doctrine of states” (reine Zustandslehre), as a
necessary ontological supplement to the traditional “theory of objects”
(Gegenstandstheorie).34 He saw that the Zustandslehre must investigate
the materials of cognition before intellectual forms categorially structure
them as objects, and “its task would be to make abstraction from all that is
co-apprehended when the specialized sciences talk about their mate-
rial.”35 If one consistently abstracts from all categorial formations, and
so allows for an unprejudiced scrutiny of the unstructured contents of
experience, then, as Rickert argues, one finds non-sensuous elements
constantly given in experience alongside sensuous elements. He admits
that all immediately given non-sensuous material components of experi-
ence are necessarily concomitant with sensuous components, though
hyletic sensualists like Kant, he claims, wrongly interpret this concomi-
tance as a form of identity. Rickert pinpoints the error in hyletic sensual-
ism as follows: since non-sensuous components always and only appear as
given alongside sensuous components, sensuous and non-sensuous com-
ponents must be identical. However, this rests on the assumption “that
sense-organs are the only path through which something ‘from outside’,
i.e. without the mediation of thought, can reach consciousness.”36 While
the reception of material for categorial formation depends upon some sort
of activity of the sense-organs, we also have, in concomitance with sense-
data, non-sensuous elements of meaning that stream into our field of
experience, piggybacking, as it were, on the underlying sensuous elements.

34
MPU, 121.
35
Ibid. Rickert believes that a correctly executed Zustandslehre would have the
resources to replace Husserlian phenomenology because of its superior awareness of
the duality of form and matter in the constitution of every kind of objectivity.
Whereas in Rickert’s view phenomenology believes itself to have a direct, intuitive
access to the objects of cognition, his Neo-Kantian Zustandslehre would be more
aware of the careful distinctions and abstractions required in order to obtain the
“material of science untouched by thought” (MPU, 126). For a detailed discussion
of Rickert’s charges of intuitionism against Husserl’s phenomenology see Chapter 4.
36
MPU, 128.
34 Southwestern Neo-Kantianism in search of ontology

Rickert’s favorite example for illustrating his position is our experi-

ence of written words. While reading a book, we clearly have more than
just the sensuous experience of ink scribbles on the white paper.
“Rather, together with the sensuous word-pictures something funda-
mentally different from these word-pictures comes about, something
that we grasp as immediately as the sensuous component as soon as, in
concomitance with the words, we ‘think’ something.”37 The non-
sensuous component is the word’s meaning. We experience this element
of meaning as so ‘real’ and so distinct from the scribbles on paper that
we grasp one and the same meaning in concomitance with different
types of sense-data. For example, consider when we experience the
acoustic data of the spoken word instead of the visual data of the
written word. Rickert deems this example sufficient to reject hyletic
sensualism. Word-meanings are immediately given, but they differ
from, say, the visual data of black ink marks that we locate in space
and time while reading. Similar analyses reveal similar results in the
experience of artistic values grasped in concomitance with the visual
experience of patches of color on canvas or the experience of an obli-
gation in concomitance with the acoustic data produced by the voice of
our superior. In all these cases “a fundamental duality [Urdualität] in
the immediate experience-state [im unmittelbaren rein Zuständliche]
comes to light.”38 This fundamental duality, for Rickert, has nothing
to do with the shaping activity of categorial formation but is a basic
ontological fact. This fact, however, only becomes visible through
regressive inquiry that moves from a full-blown theory of objects –
like the one articulated in Rickert’s first works – to one that discloses
the ontology of the ultimate materials undergirding all differences
encountered at the level of categorially formed objects. In other
words, if categorially formed objects appear as either value-free (nature)
or value-laden (culture), this distinction exists because at a deeper level
the world consists of two fundamentally different kinds of materials,
both immediately given in experience. Contra Kant’s ontological mon-
ism of sense-data, Rickert emphatically states that “only an ontological
pluralism does justice to the richness of the world.”39

37
MPU, 129. 38 MPU, 136.
39
H. Rickert, “Thesen zum System der Philosophie,” Philosophische Aufsätze,
319–324. Here 320.
Rickert’s ontology – part 2 35

Whereas the sensuous delimits the sphere of the perceivable, the

non-sensuous delimits the sphere of the intelligible. The two spheres
intermingle in concrete experiences, but each allows for independ-
ent observation, and, most importantly, each undergoes its own
forms of categorialization and subsequent objectification. Rickert
writes:
Accordingly, the domain of pure states [das Gebiet des Zuständlichen] should
be divided into sensuous perceptions and non-sensuous partial acts of under-
standing [Verstehungen] so that these two realms, at least as regards their
immediacy, stand beside one another in full coordination.40

The intelligible nature of non-sensuous components such as word-

meanings is a critical element in order to understand correctly the full
picture of Rickert’s ontology. To restate his central distinction, sense-
data grant us perceptions, while items like word-meanings grant us
acts of understanding, or intellections. Rickert’s choice of the neo-
logism Verstehungen to designate the grasp of non-sensuous compo-
nents of experience reveals his willingness to maintain a complete
parallelism with Wahrnehmungen (perceptions) and, furthermore, to
stress the fragmentary, nearly erratic nature of the items we find at
this pre-objective, ‘rein zuständlich’ level. Regarding Verstehungen,
Rickert clarifies that grasping the meaning of a word does not amount
to a full-blown act of understanding, but rather only a partial prefigu-
ration of such – it does so only at a higher level thanks to the mediation
of conceptual thought. In other words, isolated graspings of non-
sensuous meaning-components does not reach the status of full-
blown act-experiences of meaning, or intellections. This mimics the
way in which an isolated sense-datum or even a complexion of sense-
data, prior to all categorial formation, does not equal an object. An
example will help unpack the meaning of Rickert’s notion of
Verstehung. Consider the experience of traveling in a foreign country
and having only very basic skills in the local language. While sitting on
a crowded bus in rush hour, one has a very abundant acoustic expe-
rience but can only grasp one word here or there. One only experiences
scattered fragments of meaning. Rickert understands the intelligible
sphere of reine Zuständlichkeit (which he holds one cannot experience
directly but can only reconstruct regressively) as something like a

40
MPU, 139.
36 Southwestern Neo-Kantianism in search of ontology

hyperbolic version of just this experience. It is an endless kaleidoscope

of meaning-fragments prior to their being woven together into an
intelligible unity.41 Thus, the task falls to us, as rational agents, to
turn both the chaos of sensibility and the chaos of intelligibility into a
proper sensible world of objects and a proper intelligible world of
meaning-formations (Sinngebilde).
Rickert (and Windelband) had a favorite metaphor for our stance in
experience prior to categorial structuring: a soldier assailed (bestürmt)
from all sides by all kinds of experiential data. Only through categorial
thought do we “become lords” (Herr werden) of the realm of experi-
ence, which for Rickert, prior to this appropriation, closely resembles a
very rugged battlefield. With this account, resulting from his late work,
Rickert opened up for Neo-Kantian philosophy an investigation into
the pre-objective dimension of what is immediately given in experience
and formulated a pluralistic ontology, extending beyond the strictures
of Kant’s original doctrine.

Emil Lask: categoriality and being

A presentation of Southwestern Neo-Kantianism and its move towards
ontology cannot neglect the contribution of perhaps the most interest-
ing and complex philosopher in its ranks: Emil Lask. Regrettably, his
untimely death in World War I at the age of forty left his own philo-
sophical project largely unfinished. However, unlike with other thinkers
of the Southwestern school, scholars have explored Lask’s thought in
some depth in recent years, in part due to his influence on Martin
Heidegger and the pertinence of his work to current debates on the so-
called ‘space of reasons.’42 Given this situation, I will only present those
elements of Lask’s philosophy specifically relevant to the present

41
Interestingly, Rickert comes very close to Gottlob Frege’s famous argument that
words do not have ‘meaning’ (Bedeutung) unless they are structured into a
sentence. A further exploration of the issue, however, would exceed the scope of
this chapter.
42
Steven G. Crowell offers a thoughtful and engaging presentation of Lask’s
philosophy in Husserl, Heidegger and the Space of Meaning: Paths toward
Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
2001). On Lask and current philosophical debates see Steven G. Crowell,
“Transcendental Logic and Minimal Empiricism: Lask and McDowell on the
Unboundedness of the Conceptual,” in Luft and Makkreel, Neo-Kantianism in
Contemporary Philosophy, 150–174.
Emil Lask: categoriality and being 37

chapter. These appear scattered throughout Lask’s major publication,

Die Logik der Philosophie und die Kategorienlehre,43 and his later
notes for a System der Wissenschaften,44 a work which scholarship
has yet to give serious consideration. Although one generation younger
than his teacher Rickert, Lask’s Kategorienlehre, published in 1911,
had a significant and indisputable influence on Rickert’s late emphasis
on ontology. In a certain sense, then, Lask precedes Rickert on the path
towards ontology. However, from a purely theoretical point of view,
Rickert’s position is more cautious and less radical than Lask’s.
Understandably, the older and more accomplished philosopher accep-
ted his student’s challenges only with some reservations. In this respect,
even if Lask’s reflections on ontology came first historically, they con-
stitute a further, innovative step beyond Rickert in the theoretical treat-
ment of ontology in Southwestern Neo-Kantianism.
In his Kategorienlehre, Lask intends to revise Lotze’s Sein/Geltung
theory,45 which examined the peculiar scientificity of philosophical
thought. Lask seeks to overcome Lotze’s view that Sein and Geltung
correspond to two separate worlds by reconciling the divided spheres of
the two concepts. At the same time, he sought to retain Lotze’s ground-
breaking insight into the dual nature of all cognition and being. As
Rickert already pointed out, notions such as ‘being’ or ‘reality’ are not
themselves ‘real’; they belong in the realm of irreality (Unwirklichkeit)
and validity (Geltung) rather than in that of empiricity. In this sense,
Sein (being) itself is a kind of Geltung (validity). For this reason, Lask
dismisses the idea of a realm of existing beings, on the one hand, and a
realm of timeless validities on the other. For him, the two realms
intersect one another in the notion of “being,” which he defines as the
specific form of validity of real existents. Thus, existing beings are what
they are because they enjoy the mark of validity called “reality.”

43
Emil Lask, Die Logik der Philosophie und die Kategorienlehre, Gesammelte
Schriften, vol. 2 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1923), 1–282. Hereafter LP.
44
Emil Lask, Zum System der Wissenschaften, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3
(Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1924), 239–257. Hereafter SW.
45
For an instructive discussion of Lotze’s position and its impact on Lask’s
philosophy see Uwe B. Glatz, Emil Lask: Philosophie im Verhältnis zu
Weltanschauung, Leben und Erkenntnis (Würzburg: Königshausen &
Neumann, 2001), 54–63. Lotze introduced his distinction in order to clarify the
status of Ideas in Plato’s philosophy. He holds that Ideas should be understood as
validities and not as existents. Accordingly, a distinction results between Sein
(being) and Geltung (validity) which does not allow for further explanation.
38 Southwestern Neo-Kantianism in search of ontology

In order to clarify the complex relationship between the spheres of

Sein and Geltung, Lask suggests reforming such language and employ-
ing the Kantian distinction between matter and form, or category. Lask
rejects the Kantian (and Rickertean) idea of universally valid forms that
would ‘descend’ upon an amorphous material stratum, because it sug-
gests a predominance of the formal/categorial over the material (of
Geltung over Sein), a situation in which the material receives its differ-
entiation and structure only thanks to the formal component. For Lask,
this intellectualism tarnishes the Kantian tradition and undermines its
full philosophical potential. Thus, he sets out to remove it.
Against the predominance of the formal, Lask embarks on what
could be called an apology of the material, albeit conducted along a
transcendental-critical line of thought. He acknowledges the success of
thinkers such as Lotze and, even more so, Rickert in drawing a sharp
distinction between validity/value and being/reality. However, for Lask,
the real nature of the originary relation [Urverhältnis]46 between the
sphere of valid categories and the sphere of materials has been
overlooked:
If one looks at any determination whatsoever, e.g. a determination of logical
content, one becomes aware of the fact that the validity-content
[Geltungsgehalt] does not fulfill its meaning in itself, does not rest on itself,
does not constitute a ‘world’ apart. On the contrary, validity-content
[Geltungsgehalt] needs to nestle against something else, it craves for comple-
tion; it points beyond itself towards a foreign element lying outside of itself.47

This foreign element toward which all validity-content intrinsically

points is the material. No validity, category, form, or logical content
(a set of expressions that simply highlights different facets of the same
function) holds valid prior to its ‘commitment to’ some material con-
tent. Conversely, no amorphous material exists which, in a second
moment, receives its form from some intellectual operation. The two
elements always appear together: hence, “the two-worlds theory must
be transformed in a two-elements theory.”48
The ‘unity’ of the categorial component and the material component
constitutes objects in a full sense. Objects, considered as the unity of
category and material, bear meaning: they are unities of meaning ready
for further exploration in theoretical thought. Lask thus calls them

46 47 48
LP, 32, passim. Ibid. LP, 45.
Emil Lask: categoriality and being 39

“theoretical meaning” (theoretischer Sinn).49 The objects themselves

endow our theoretical statements with sense; they make them make
sense. In this regard, they do not simply ‘have’ sense, viz. meaning, they
are sense, viz. meaning. This, however, does not entail that objects,
when seen through the lens of philosophical investigation, prove to be
nothing but bundles of theoretical categories. In Lask’s own words:
“Obviously, existing objects are not hollow logical content, but they are
indeed alogical material encompassed by logical validity-content.”50
Crucial to Lask’s characterization of objects qua theoretical meanings is
the way in which he articulates the form/matter, viz. category/material,
relationship. The word ‘relationship’ does not fit this context, however,
because it suggests the interaction of two elements existing independently
of one another, exactly what Lask seeks to counter. Rather, objects are not
compounds of material and form; they are more like a chemical emulsion
of the two. The two elements form a mixture in which they nonetheless
remain separate. In full-blown theoretical meanings, categories do not
inform, shape, structure, or organize the material. Such a view entails the
kind of logical intellectualism Lask opposes. Instead, categories encom-
pass (umschließen), enfold (umhüllen), embrace (umgreifen), clothe
(umkleiden), or suffuse with light (umleuchten) the material, which, on
its part, is ‘coated’ and not infused with the categorial component. This
shift in language conveys the idea that the material-ontological compo-
nent of objects, namely theoretical meanings, retains an independence of
its own vis-à-vis the categorial component. The matter neither precedes
nor receives its structure from logical categories; categories are in no way
applied on the material by an active subjectivity. On the contrary, cate-
gories inhabit the same space as materials; they share with them the
domain of radical transcendence vis-à-vis subjectivity. Thus, in theoretical
activity, the subject capitalizes on the categorial clarity of theoretical
meanings because theoretical meanings manifest themselves as already
circumfused with the light of categorial intelligibility:51

49
LP, 41. For a detailed discussion of this issue and of Lask’s notions of meaning
and truth see Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger and the Space of Meaning, 44–45.
50
LP, 40.
51
With this understanding of categoriality as genuinely transcendent, Lask revives a
somewhat Aristotelian approach to the problem of categories, the pertinence of
which to the tradition of Kantian transcendental philosophy can be legitimately
questioned. For an account of this point and an interesting line of interpretation
see Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger and the Space of Meaning, 51–55.
40 Southwestern Neo-Kantianism in search of ontology

In theoretical meaning, the logically naked [material] simply renounces its

logical untouchedness; it ends up in a new situation, i.e. in the situation of
being-affected; however, it remains what it used to be, nothing changes as
regards its content and essence, it is not magically transformed into that
element which merely surrounds and ‘circumvalues’ [umgelten] it. [. . .] In
the complexion of meaning, the material simply stands there embraced by a
category.52

The light of categoriality illuminates the “fundamental material

[Urmaterial]” or “prote hyle,”53 and the two coalesce into an intrinsi-
cally dual theoretical meaning – object. Considered as such, however,
the fundamental material remains opaque and impenetrable. It main-
tains its alogical foreignness to intelligibility and only admits of negative
characterization as anything other than logical validity. However, the
Urmaterial should not be considered (as the Aristotelian term prote hyle
might wrongly suggest) as an undifferentiated mass that progressively
undergoes determination as the categorial component sheds its light.
This would amount to a slightly modified form of intellectualism, for
even if one has moved categories away from the subject all differentia-
tion would still depend upon categoriality at the expense of the material
component. On the contrary, Lask considers the Urmaterial infinitely
multifarious and differentiated, whereas the categorial sphere, if
abstractly considered prior to all contact with its own material, contains
nothing but empty and generic logical form. It is the categorial sphere
and not the material sphere that lacks differentiation and, moreover,
owes it to the multifariousness of the material it illuminates.
Categoriality without material would amount, for Lask, to an endless
ocean of intellectual light devoid of anything to illuminate. If we
encounter categories in the plural and, specifically, as manifold
meaning-components (Bedeutungen) pertaining to an endless variety
of theoretical meanings – that is, objects – we do so because the under-
lying material is multifarious and it transfers this multifariousness to
the, per se, undifferentiated sphere of categoriality. Considered in

52
LP, 73. I decided to translate Lask’s neologism “von etwas umgolten sein” with
another neologism, as ugly as the German original: “being circumvalued by
something” which in the active sounds “to circumvalue something.” It is in
keeping with Lask’s intention who, with his neologism, wants to insist on the idea
that validity is in no way “transmitted” to the material which, on its part, remains
at bottom logically impenetrable.
53
LP, 50.
Emil Lask: categoriality and being 41

respect of its definitive function of circumfusing with the light of intelli-

gibility, the alogical prote hyle categoriality displays itself as a variety of
meanings (Bedeutungen) that render intellectually accessible the sphere
of materials.
Philosophers have sometimes puzzled over the multiplicity of catego-
ries and asked questions like “Why are there precisely ten categories
considered by Aristotle?” or “Do also mundane things such as ‘dirt’ or
‘hair’ have their respective ideas in the intelligible world?” The fact of
this multiplicity represents an element of unintelligibility in the midst of
the realm of intelligibility; the multiplicity of categories renders possible
the intelligibility of per se alogical materials but remains in itself unin-
telligible. Lask writes that
The multifariousness of the logical forms does not have to be understood in
purely logical terms. On the contrary, it reveals a moment of opacity which
points towards the meaning-determining power of the alogical material [. . .]
The multiplicity in the sphere of validity, the multiplicity of the forms of
validity exists on account of the multifariousness foreign to validity.54

For Lask, materials possess an intrinsic differentiation and structure

that the categories merely reflect. The multiple categorial forms that
we detect in the realm of validity are nothing but “a reflection
stemming from”55 the infinite multiplicity of the materials. In a foot-
note, Lask characterizes these as “subterranean powers,”56 thus
portraying the upper level of categoriality as some sort of karst
topography. The materials shape their respective categories ‘from
below,’ as it were.
Considering this picture, it is quite unmistakable that, despite his
announced desire to do away with all “correlation-theories”57 and
affirm the mutual inherence of form and material, for Lask the material
component enjoys a primacy over the categorial/logical/conceptual
component. This probably arises from his resolute decision to overcome
once and for all the intellectualistic strand in the Kantian tradition.
Concerning his own philosophical work, he writes:
Everything is transferred to the material sphere in a quite anti-intellectualistic
fashion. One should not overrate what lies exclusively in the validity-
character, namely, a mere categorial label, a mere logical consecration!58

54 55 56 57 58
LP, 61. LP, 63. Ibid., n. LP, 44. LP, 86.
42 Southwestern Neo-Kantianism in search of ontology

This emphasis on the material side has an important bearing on Lask’s

classification of different scientific fields, the core issue that ignited the
movement of Southwestern Neo-Kantianism toward ontology in the
first place. Note that the issue of ontology became relevant in the eyes of
first generation Southwestern Neo-Kantians because of the methodo-
logical difference between human and natural science. Contrary to
Windelband and Rickert and in keeping with his Kategorienlehre’s
emphasis on material, in some late notes Lask argues:
Accordingly, a classification of the sciences seems to be possible only with
respect to what is investigated, i.e. with respect to the “material”, i.e. with
respect to the a-theoretical differences of the fundamental region.59

Lask goes on to explain that “the difference in terms of generalizing and

individualizing method [. . .] would only be possible if all other factors
[das Übrige] were of the same kind [gleich]. However, the essential
difference lies precisely in these other factors.”60 In other words, a
distinction in methodological terms works only if the materials to
which different methods are applied are fundamentally homogeneous
in kind. In this case, all existing differentiation would derive from the
different methodological treatments. If one rejects this position for the
reasons mentioned above, then the “logical differentiation is per se even
misleading, whereas the material differentiation per se is fully correct
and decisive.”61
For Lask, the categorial dimension simply does not have the
resources to produce differentiations but only to illuminate them.
Categories and patterns of concept-formation do not intervene to
re-shape our perceptions and Verstehungen and to bestow upon
them new order, as Rickert would have it. Lask knowingly rejects
the core insight of his teacher when he writes, “The whole idea of a
re-shaping [Umformungsgedanke] falls apart in my philosophy. What
remains is solely the selection [Auslese].”62 Rickert’s ideas concerning
the re-shaping power of categories/concepts and his notion of selection
[Auswahl] will be considered in further detail in the following chapters.
Interestingly, in his 1927 lecture on Nature and Spirit, Husserl criticizes
Rickert along a line that comes very close to Lask’s, albeit without

59
SW, 239. 60 SW, 242. 61 Ibid.
62
Emil Lask, Notizen zur Einteilung der Wissenschaften, Gesammelte Schriften,
vol. 3, 257–293. Here 260. Hereafter NEW.
Franz Böhm’s Ontology of History 43

accepting the latter’s radical emphasis on the material component.63

For Husserl, different kinds of experiential material provide the motiva-
tional ground to move conceptually in one direction or another.
However, this connection need not occupy us any further here. To
conclude our inquiry into the ontological trend of Southwestern Neo-
Kantianism, it is fitting to consider the work of a rather obscure philos-
opher in its ranks, Franz Böhm. His short book Ontologie der
Geschichte64 brilliantly recapitulates the ontological problems laid out
by the previous generations of the school and presents an innovative
perspective on the whole issue that, if considered carefully, opens up
Neo-Kantian ontology for a phenomenological treatment.

Franz Böhm’s Ontology of History

As mentioned above, one may dispute, and some have in fact disputed,
whether Lask keeps within the framework of Kantianism or more or
less intentionally throws out the transcendental-critical method along-
side his rejection of intellectualism. In either case, it remains apparent
that his emphasis on the meaning-determining (bedeutungsbestim-
mende) power of the material on the sphere of categories comes as a
reaction, and perhaps even ends up as an overreaction, to a kind of
intellectualism often associated with Kantian philosophy. Stepping
back from the legitimate motivations behind his work, two significant
problems appear in Lask’s treatment of ontology. First, he seems to

63
See Chapter 5.
64
F. Böhm, Ontologie der Geschichte (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1933). Hereafter
OG. Some biographical facts about Franz Böhm can be found in the monumental
work C. Tilitzki, Die deutsche Universitätsphilosophie in der Weimarer
Republik und im Dritten Reich – Teil I. (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2002),
326–328. Franz Böhm had a remarkable academic career. In 1937 he took over
Karl Jaspers’ chair in Heidelberg, outclassing all other candidates for the position,
among them Hans-Georg Gadamer (692–694). Of course, this did not happen
without the support of the Nazi party, a necessary condition to work in German
academia in those troubled times. However, this does not justify, I believe, the
overall dismissive tone with which Tilitzki presents the majority of the
philosophers he considers in his book, Böhm included. Whereas the historian
seeks primarily to open up the tragic vicissitudes of German academic politics
during the Third Reich, nothing prevents the philosopher from retaining what is
good in the intellectual efforts of people who eventually fell into the arms of an
all-pervasive ideology. In so doing, the philosopher affirms the right to reclaim
from history every fragment of meaning and authenticity to be found, even in ages
of extraordinary darkness.
44 Southwestern Neo-Kantianism in search of ontology

have lost sight of the specific theoretical issue that made ontology
interesting for Neo-Kantianism in the first place: the demarcation of
natural and historical science. He develops his ontological
Kategorienlehre at a very abstract level and only in a second moment
applies it to the problems concerning natural and historical science. If,
on the contrary, ontological questions keep these problems firmly in
grasp, then one need not transform Rickert’s ontological dualism
(which acknowledges the uniqueness of historical-cultural objects and
the asymmetry in the applicability of the generalizing and the individu-
alizing method) into an affirmation of the overflowing multifariousness
and differentiation of the materials relative to the merely clarifying
function of categories, as Lask does. A more prudent, transcendental-
critical approach would acknowledge only as much ontological plural-
ity on the material side as is required by our concrete experiences of
thought and scientific investigation. A second problem in Lask’s philos-
ophy he actually shares with his teacher Rickert. When Rickert considers
the relationship of the categorial component (which he calls concept-
formation) to the material component, he presents only one model, a kind
of subsumption, whereby a category is bestowed on a complexion of
experiential data (sensuous or non-sensuous) and restructures them
according to a certain conceptual pattern. The bestowal of a category,
in this scheme, comes from the cognizing subject who, in so bestowing,
carries out an intellectual synthesis. Thus, we find Rickert acknowledging
the constitutive-synthetic nature of cognition but interpreting it exclu-
sively in terms of a re-shaping power exerted by our conceptuality upon
the inert material of our experience. Lask simply rejects this model and
argues for a kind of independent life of the materials surrounded by the
light of their respective categorial forms. He does not understand knowl-
edge to be an active synthesis of heterogeneous elements performed by the
intellect. Rather, it is just an attending to the theoretical meanings that
offer themselves to investigation. Lask attributes all formative power to
the material and minimizes the ‘impact’ of cognition, which he interprets
as a mere “Verhalten zum theoretischen Sinn,”65 an attending to theo-
retical meaning. Therefore, both Rickert and Lask conceive of synthesis
as either wholly intellectual or not at all.
In light of these problems, in his Ontology of History Franz Böhm
makes two very interesting moves. First, he re-contextualizes the

65
LP, 82.
Franz Böhm’s Ontology of History 45

discussion of ontology in the nature/history framework and thus goes

back to a markedly transcendental-critical line of inquiry after Lask’s
ontological excesses. Second, he capitalizes on resources in Kant’s
philosophy that Rickert and Lask seem to ignore. In particular, he
makes a case that one does not need to conceive of the material side as
thoroughly unsynthesized and per se alien to intelligibility. Böhm points
out that, especially in his third Critique, Kant acknowledges forms of
synthesis that are not entirely ‘guided’ by the intellect: for some peculiar
objects like works of art, there remains a certain alogical residue that
renders their definitive subsumption under a conceptual category
impossible. Böhm believes that Kant’s transcendental philosophy offers
the possibility to conceive of a “gradation of the theoretical,”66 thus
striking a balance between sheer intellectualism and one-sided anti-
intellectualism. In other words, for Böhm we can acknowledge different
degrees to which the intellect (viz. theory or categorial thought) is active
in different ontological domains. Whereas for the domain of sensuous
objects (nature) we have to acknowledge with Kant an all-around
intellectual constitution, in the domain of historical objects, the intellect
works in a somewhat impoverished fashion and in some cases (Böhm
mentions aesthetic contemplation) the intellect’s activity consists in
sheer reflexivity and no genuine constitution.
Notwithstanding some obscurities in the text, two factors make
Böhm’s Ontologie der Geschichte worth reading. First, he presents the
problem of ontology from within a Neo-Kantian perspective with
remarkable clarity and precision. Second, over the course of his inves-
tigation, Böhm admits the necessity of a consideration of subjectivity in
the formation of historical objects, whereby one may overcome the
strictures of empirical psychology on the one hand and those of merely
formal transcendentalism on the other. In this way, he comes very close
to acknowledging the necessity of a phenomenological approach in
order to tackle the ontological problems left open by Neo-Kantianism
in a methodologically appropriate fashion.
Böhm points out the meaning of the ontological problem from a fully
Kantian point of view at the very outset of his work:
The possibility of nature itself is secured because it can be shown that the
rational constituents of nature in the ontological sense of the term are identical

66
OG, 47.
46 Southwestern Neo-Kantianism in search of ontology

with the constituents of natural science [. . .] Cognition of nature is possible

because the same “ratio” conditions and constitutes both knowledge and the
object [. . .] As for the issue of the possibility of “history itself,” this “exchan-
geability” of the transcendental-logical and the ontological problematic is not
to be found.67

To give but one of many examples, Kant understands the principle of

causality as both an epistemological constituent of natural scientific
thought and an ontological constituent of natural phenomena. All
epistemological categories of natural scientific thought are convertible
into ontological constituents of natural phenomena. If we can attain
natural-scientific knowledge, this happens because the intellect recog-
nizes its own categories, as it were, in the objects it sets out to investigate.
But the possibility of this recognition arises from the natural object’s pre-
theoretical constitution, in other words, in the work of what Kant calls
figurative synthesis (synthesis speciosa) and considers a condition of
possibility for intellectual synthesis (synthesis intellectualis).68 I will not
expand on Kant’s notoriously complex notion of figurative synthesis
here. It suffices to say that Kant understands figurative synthesis as a
form of organization of the spatio-temporal data stemming from the
senses, operated by the Einbildungskraft, and based on schematic
representations rather than categories. He identifies it as a form of
pre-theoretical structuring of the data of sensibility that makes such
amenable to a subsequent subsumption under a category of the intellect.
This “downward movement”69 from superior forms of synthesis to
more rudimentary, pre-theoretical forms of synthesis in Kant’s transcen-
dental deduction, Böhm argues, recurs in the context of an ontology
of history:
The fact that a material enters into a form presupposes the readiness of the
material for the given formation [Formung], and the form has to detect such
readiness already there in the material. This readiness cannot be produced by
the form in the first place.70

The Kantian, however, cannot dogmatically presuppose the material

content of history. The fact of the readiness of certain objects for

67
OG, 3.
68
For an excellent discussion of this issue see Y. Senderowicz, “Figurative Synthesis
and Synthetic a priori Knowledge,” Review of Metaphysic 57/4 (2004): 755–785.
69
OG, 5. 70 OG, 56.
Franz Böhm’s Ontology of History 47

cognition according to historical forms of conceptualization points

back to the necessity of some deeper forms of synthesis occurring at
the material level and not impinged ab ovo by conceptual thought on a
formless substrate. Therefore, a transcendental inquiry into the ontol-
ogy of historical objects has to lay bare “compositional syntheses,”71
that is, rules for the organization of the material content of historical
objects (Böhm, following Rickert and Lask, calls it “protohyletic mat-
ter”)72 prior to its treatment according to the specifically historical
pattern of individualizing concept-formation. In a line reminiscent of
Kant’s doctrine of transcendental schematism, Böhm talks about
“extra-theoretical spontaneities”73 as necessarily responsible for the
structuring of materials cognizable according to historical patterns of
conceptualization.
An example will clarify what Böhm has in mind with his distinction
between historical objects and natural objects and the non-
convertibility of epistemological categories into ontological forms in
the case of history. Let us consider two objects: the natural phenomenon
of electromagnetism and the historical period of the Renaissance. In
both cases we can distinguish between an epistemological side (the laws
of electromagnetism discovered by natural scientific thought and the
body of historical knowledge about the Renaissance) and an ontolog-
ical side (the phenomenon of electromagnetism itself and the
Renaissance itself). In both cases we encounter an object in a robust
sense: neither the physicist nor the Renaissance scholar simply plays
with her own thoughts. They both work on an object that they had first
to isolate and frame against the broader background of nature and
history. However, whereas the laws that explain electromagnetism, as
well as the basic a priori principles that undergird those laws (causality,
substantiality, reciprocal action . . .), fully exhaust the phenomenon of
electromagnetism, the historical ‘phenomenon’ of the Renaissance
resists a full exhaustion on the part of the categories employed in
historical thought. There remains no undisclosed residue in the phenom-
enon of electromagnetism after its laws have been figured out, yet some-
thing remains intrinsically opaque, unconceptualizeable, and open to
further scrutiny about the Renaissance. In Böhm’s words: “The concept-
formation of historical knowledge does not ‘constitute’ the object in the
same way in which theoretical ‘categories’ constitute ‘nature’.”74 We

71 72 73 74
OG, 24. OG, 85. OG, 37. OG, 46.
48 Southwestern Neo-Kantianism in search of ontology

apply historical categories to objects the material constitution of which

Böhm calls “metalogical,”75 i.e., their constitution follows patterns of
compositional synthesis not entirely ‘translatable’ into constitutive
categories, as is the case with the merely pre-logical constitution of
natural objects. In simpler words, we can in principle never have a
historical object all figured out in thought in the same way in which we
have natural objects figured out, since the pre-theoretical constitution
of historical objects follows patterns of synthesis that do not admit of
being fully ‘lifted up’ to constitutive categoriality.
Böhm provides us with some general headings for such spontaneous,
pre-theoretical syntheses of historical material: notions such as “organic
totality,”76 “historical temporality,”77 and ethical “progress.”78 When
we talk about the Renaissance, we consider it as an organic totality of
mutually illuminating, meaningful components (politics, literature, arts,
personalities . . .) whereby heterogeneous elements present themselves
as woven together into a coherent whole. Even if every intellectual
synthesis we will perform on the object ‘Renaissance’ intrinsically pre-
supposes this, we can never translate this meta-logical, exclusively
ontological ‘belonging together’ of the parts into the language of intel-
lectual, law-like explanation. Furthermore, we experience the objects of
history as immersed in an overarching flux of time, which, excluding the
time of empirical science, is no homogeneous medium, in which any
event could in principle occur at any time.79 World War I could not
have happened at any time in history in the same way in which a certain
chemical reaction could. We cannot ‘model’ historical time in the same
way in which we can model natural time. No theoretical category can
fully ‘recognize itself’ in history in the way it can in nature. As Böhm
summarizes:
The time of “nature” is exclusively the constitutive condition of empirical
reality. As such, it is an “originary quantum,” and it can be measured with
the help of spatial relations. The historical time is not a constitutive con-
dition of the understandable meaning-configurations [Sinngebilde] [. . .]
it is an originary quale in addition to the understandability of meaning
which announces the belonging of this meaning to the world created by
humankind.80

75 76 77 78 79
OG, 8; 21. OG, 39. OG, 63. OG, 133. OG, 65.
80
OG, 114.
Franz Böhm’s Ontology of History 49

Finally, if we can talk about history in terms of progress (something

that Böhm, in the wake of Kant and the Neo-Kantians, never feels the
need to question) this is because the material of history offers itself as
somehow pervaded by a pre-theoretical value-content, possibly fixed
with concepts such as Rickert’s value-relatedness but not entirely com-
prehended. Basically, a fully conceptual determination of progress in
history could exist only in hindsight, ‘at the end’ of the historical process,
as Hegel would have it. Since history continues to unfold, the value-
content vaguely intuited and conceptually fixed in different episodes of
history admits of a theoretical grasp only in a partial and constantly
revisable way. Until history ends, what looks like a huge step forward in
the progress of mankind today might prove to be the first step back into
the barbarism of tomorrow.
In the context of these instructive considerations Böhm makes some
important remarks that help to open up the trajectory of Southwestern
Neo-Kantianism towards Husserlian phenomenology. In a further dis-
cussion of his theory of historical time, Böhm opposes Dilthey’s influ-
ential position that identifies understandability [Verstehbarkeit] as the
fundamental category for historical objectivity,81 for understandable
constellations of meaning as per se a-temporal. The young, ambitious
prince who has his one-time right-hand man killed, in order to reassert
his own power in the eyes of the populace, for instance, is a timeless
character, an understandable configuration of meaning that could occur
in different venues of history. Cesare Borgia organizing the murder of
his captain Remiro d’Orco, as brilliantly described in Machiavelli’s
Prince, represents this timeless character ‘temporalized’ in the specific
time-venue of Italy in the early sixteenth century.
Understandable meaning-configurations lie beyond history in what
Lask would call the realm of validity. They need to be inserted in a
temporal scheme and thus rendered dynamic in order to become histor-
ical. Thus, Böhm remarks that “the dynamic ‘material’ of the historical
is the activity of the subject”82 and that “in this sense, historical objects
are accomplishments of voluntary actions oriented towards values. This
dynamic-material function of activity clarifies the meaning of the psy-
chic for the ontic structure of the historical.”83 In other words, only
through the psychic life of concrete subjects are intrinsically ‘irreal’
meaning-configurations realized into concrete historical objectivities.

81 82 83
See Chapter 2. OG, 117. Ibid.
50 Southwestern Neo-Kantianism in search of ontology

It took the subjective life of a specific person to constitute the historical

object “Cesare Borgia” out of the mere ahistorical meaning-
configuration “young, ambitious prince.” On a broader scale, it took
the lives of the several generations of men and women who lived in that
historical epoch, their thoughts and desires, their fears and hopes to
constitute “the Renaissance” out of the timeless meaning-configuration
“period of cultural rebirth.”
But what is the “psychic” evoked in Böhm’s quote? Is it just the object
of empirical psychology? If so, one could not argue for its contribution
in the structuring of value-related forms of historical objectivity.
Empirical being can in no way claim responsibility for the transcenden-
tal constitution of further empirical being. Moreover, the Neo-Kantian
tradition understands empirical subjectivity as an object of nature,
constituted and ontologically exhausted by the categories of natural
scientific thought. It belongs in a realm of objectivity that does not
pertain to history.
Or is it the transcendental subject as formal unity in multiplicities of
representation advocated by Kant? If so, it is unclear why we should
give it a special function for the constitution of historical objects as
opposed to natural. The Kantian transcendental subject, by definition a
formal principle of unity, remains indifferent to all the material differ-
ences of the objects of its representations.
Rather, it seems that the material-ontological investigations
launched by Windelband, made explicit by Rickert, radicalized by
Lask, and finally articulated by Böhm call for a reconsideration of the
psychic and its constitutive function beyond the strictures of empirical
psychology and of Kantian formalism. After all, the fact that empirical
psychology deals with psychic phenomena (a fact so crucial for the
Neo-Kantian demarcation of science) does not mean that it deals with
psychic phenomena qua psychic phenomena, i.e., according to their
ontological specificity. This is the point Husserl saw with great clarity
after Logical Investigations. Consequently, his phenomenological
project entails a full-fledged response to the problems left open in the
Neo-Kantian treatment of history. However, Husserl is not alone in
trying to propose alternative solutions to the problems left open by
the Neo-Kantians. A second mainstream current of philosophy in
early twentieth-century Germany took on the task of reconsidering
the psychic from the perspective of history, as opposed to that of
natural science; this was Lebensphilosophie. I will examine the work
Franz Böhm’s Ontology of History 51

of the two spearheads of Lebensphilosophie, Wilhelm Dilthey and

Georg Simmel, in the next chapter. This will more thoroughly establish
a foundation for understanding, in later chapters, Husserl’s own
strategy to recast the constitutive role of subjectivity for both history
and nature.
2 Life-philosophical accounts of history
and psyche: Simmel and Dilthey

“Was ist denn die Wissenschaft?”

Sie ist nur des Lebens Kraft.
Ihr erzeuget nicht das Leben,
Leben erst muss Leben geben.
J. W. von Goethe1

Now, in the philosophy of life the whole consciousness,

with all its different phases and faculties,
must inevitably be taken for the foundation [. . .]
F. von Schlegel2

Der Grundgedanken meiner Philosophie ist, daß bisher noch niemals

die ganze, volle, unverstümmelte Erfahrung dem Philosophieren zugrunde
gelegt worden ist, mithin noch niemals die ganze und volle Wirklichkeit.
W. Dilthey3

Over the long course of history, different phrases have been in vogue to
designate the complex kind of reality that we are. After the word ‘soul’
dominated the philosophical scene for many centuries, the inception of
the modern age marked a progressive departure from that language. In a
relatively short span of time compared to both antiquity and the Middle

1
J. W. von Goethe, Zahme Xenien V, in J. W. von Goethe, Gedenkausgabe der
Werke, Briefe und Gespräche 28. August 1949, vol. 1 (Zurich: Artemis Verlag,
1949), 647. “What is, then, science? / It is nothing but a force of life / You do not
generate life / Life must give life in the first place.”
2
F. von Schlegel, The Philosophy of Life, and Philosophy of Language, in a Course
of Lectures (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1847), 11.
3
W. Dilthey, Weltanschauungslehre. Abhandlungen zur Philosophie der
Philosophie, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 8 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
1960), 171. Hereafter GS VIII. “The fundamental thought of my philosophy is
that hitherto the whole, full, un-maimed experience, and with it the whole and full
reality have never been placed at the foundation of philosophizing.”

52
Simmel and Dilthey 53

Ages, a variety of new phrases were introduced: ‘thinking being,’ ‘ego,’

‘conscience,’ ‘consciousness,’ ‘subject,’ ‘Geist,’ ‘self,’ and ‘mind,’ to
name but the most prominent ones. Each phrase is meant to capture
at least one specific feature of what we are and, quite often, to pro-
nounce it the most fundamental. The term ‘life,’ which became a buzz-
word in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century German
philosophy, is a further instance of this trend.
Although no unified concept of life can be found among the over-
whelming number of self-styled life-philosophers,4 the term ‘life’ meets
some specific philosophical demands that preoccupy an entire genera-
tion of thinkers. First and foremost, all life-philosophers are in some
way or other committed to a rejection of traditional forms of metaphy-
sics. Nothing is superior to ‘life’ itself, be it a divine creator or a
universal moral law. Secondly, as briefly anticipated in Chapter 1, the
introduction of the notion of life is meant to run counter to a certain
brand of Kantianism (notably, the brand of Kantianism offered by
thinkers such as Rickert) that was widely perceived as overly intellec-
tualistic and abstract. As this chapter will show, the anti-intellectualistic
trait of life-philosophy does not amount to a rejection of Kantianism as
such but rather to a different way of being Kantian, at least for the
leading figures of life-philosophy. Thirdly, the notion of life points from
the very beginning to a supra-individual, trans-subjective dimension of
mentality. Contrary to more traditional notions such as subject, soul,
mind, and the like, life is not conceivable as a separate substance. The
widespread sense attached to the notion of life is that the living individ-
ual is what she is only to the extent that she partakes of a broader living
reality. In this respect, the notion of life bears a certain similarity to the
Hegelian notion of Geist. Contrary to Geist, however, which in Hegel’s
view develops according to a precise rhythm and moves teleologically
towards culmination in idealistic philosophy, ‘life’ is more fluid, and
none of its configurations can be deemed definitive.

4
On this point see the instructive F. Fellmann, Gelebte Philosophie in Deutschland
(Freiburg and Munich: Karl Alber, 1983), 7–28. The author suggests that ‘life’
should be considered a “lived-concept” (20), i.e. a concept that is not primarily
characterized in theoretical terms by means of a stringent definition but in terms of
the Stimmung that it evokes. One could rephrase Fellman’s point by reference to
J. L. Austin’s theory of language and say that life is a primarily performative rather
than an informative concept.
54 Simmel and Dilthey

This third connotation of the notion of life – according to which life is

primarily supra-individual – offers a criterion for an initial broad dis-
tinction within the camp of life-philosophy: between those who inter-
pret life’s supra-individuality primarily by reference to the biological
unity of the human species (Hans Driesch, Oswald Spengler) and those
who understand it primarily in historical terms. In this chapter we will
focus exclusively on the two leading figures of this second group, Georg
Simmel and Wilhelm Dilthey. While both Simmel and Dilthey do make
frequent references to biology, it is not organic life that they consider
paramount to philosophy and the foundation of the human sciences. By
‘life’ they mean the pre-reflective, pre-conceptualized dimension of lived
experience. This dimension forms a coherent whole of meaning that
conceptual thought (including natural-scientific concepts) can only
grasp in a derivative and imperfect way. Their work is a passionate
defense of the primacy of life over conceptual thought and an effort to
ground the sui generis scientificity of the human sciences in the very
dynamic of life. To anticipate a theme to be explored in subsequent
chapters, it is important to bear in mind that this is the same connota-
tion of the term ‘life’ Husserl employs when he refers to transcendental
life. ‘Life’ does not refer here to the dimension of organic existence that
we share with cats, trees, and amoebae but rather to that affectively,
culturally, and historically connoted dimension of ourselves that is
always already at play before we reflect upon it. As Max Scheler aptly
emphasizes in a programmatic essay on the philosophy of life, we
should understand the phrase ‘of life’ as a “genitivus subjectivus.”5
Life-philosophy aspires to be rather life’s philosophy than a philosophy
about life. It is “a philosophy stemming from the fullness of life, and
even – more sharply put – a philosophy stemming from the fullness of
the lived experiencing of life.”6
Even though both Dilthey and Simmel, unlike the Southwestern Neo-
Kantians, are fairly renowned, the specifically philosophical and onto-
logical dimensions of their thought have for the most part been ignored.
Simmel’s name appears towards the beginning of most historical hand-
books of sociology, and Dilthey’s name is similarly evoked here and

5
M. Scheler, “Versuche einer Philosophie des Lebens: Nietzsche – Dilthey –
Bergson,” in M. Scheler, Vom Umsturz der Werte: Abhandlungen und Aufsätze
(Berne and Munich: Francke, 1972), 310–339. Here 311.
6
Ibid.
Simmel’s lectures on Kant 55

there as one of the early figures in the movement that Gadamer even-
tually christened ‘philosophical hermeneutics.’
However, both Simmel and Dilthey have very sophisticated views on
the theoretical issues of their time, and thus it is unfair to present them
as merely anticipatory figures. They both underscore the need to pri-
oritize the material component for a correct demarcation of the differ-
ent domains of science. They advocate a renewal of Kantianism
through a close consideration of the historical world. Although they
both stress the continuity between nature and life, they refuse to leave
the study of human subjectivity to empirical-experimental psychology,
as Rickert would have it. For both Simmel and Dilthey, it is necessary to
understand what is at stake in psychology, and to formulate its authen-
tic scientific tasks in closer connection to history than to natural
science. Leaving the study of psychology exclusively to the natural
sciences in order to preserve the autonomy of the human sciences, as
Rickert would have it, is for both Simmel and Dilthey a self-defeating
move. Rickert, in their view, severely underappreciates the active,
living nature of subjectivity and believes it can be regarded as just
another causally determined natural fact. In this respect, as will be
discussed in later chapters, Husserl is of one mind with the life-
philosophers and disagrees significantly with Rickert and the
Southwestern school.

Bringing Kant back to life: Simmel’s lectures on Kant

In order to interpret correctly the meaning of historically oriented life-
philosophy and to avoid oversimplifying its contrast to transcendental
Neo-Kantianism, it is crucial to highlight life-philosophy’s indebtedness
to Kant. Compared to mainstream academic Neo-Kantianism, life-
philosophy recasts the Kantian legacy in a different light. It is known
that Wilhelm Dilthey envisioned a Critique of Historical Reason that
would extend Kant’s theoretical treatment of natural science to cover
historical science.7 Dilthey, however, never devoted himself to a fully in-

7
For an excellent reconstruction of Dilthey’s project of a critique of historical
reason see J. de Mul, The Tragedy of Finitude: Dilthey’s Hermeneutics of Life
(New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 29–33. A
discussion of Dilthey’s notion of life will be provided in the second part of this
chapter.
56 Simmel and Dilthey

depth study and interpretation of Kant.8 Georg Simmel, by contrast, did

lecture extensively on Kant’s philosophy at the University of Berlin, and
in 1904, at the apex of his popularity, published a book comprised of his
lectures on Kant, which he presented as a general introduction to
philosophy. The book is simply entitled Kant, and it carries the subtitle
Sixteen Lectures Held at the University of Berlin.9 The modesty of the
title, however, should not mislead. What Simmel offers is not a didactic
exposition of Kant’s philosophy. Even though the presentation of
Kant’s thought is remarkably rigorous, as he himself points out at the
very outset, “the purpose of this book is not historical-philosophical but
rather purely philosophical.”10 Simmel sets out to assess and appropri-
ate critically Kant’s thought from the stance of life-philosophy. This
leads to a highly interesting reformulation of it, one that sets a philo-
sophical agenda significantly different from that of Southwestern
thinkers, even though it seeks its inspiration in the same authoritative
source.
Simmel presents his program by stating, “It is necessary to measure
up Kant’s problems and solutions against what can be referred to as the
life-related questions of philosophy.”11 The book “seeks the signifi-
cance [Bedeutung] of Kant’s scientific and, in part, very specialized
theories for the meaning of life [Sinn des Lebens] and for the construc-
tion of a worldview.”12 At first glance, the most direct way to develop a
‘worldview’ out of Kant’s philosophy would be to read the project of his
criticism as paving the way for a universal voluntarism. On this read-
ing – spearheaded by Fichte – Kant carried out his critique of theoretical
reason in the interest of practical reason; by showing the inherent limits
of the former, he would be making room for the latter. The Critique of
Pure Reason would culminate in the Dialectic, where it is shown that

8
However, he was responsible for the standard critical edition of Kant’s collected
work of the Prussian Academy of the Sciences. For a detailed and informative
description of Dilthey’s work as a Kant editor and the significance of this
commitment for his philosophical activity see F. Rodi, “Dilthey und die Kant-
Ausgabe der Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Einige editions- und
lebensgeschichtliche Aspekte,” in F. Rodi, Das strukturierte Ganze: Studien zum
Werk von Wilhelm Dilthey (Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2003), 153–172.
9
G. Simmel, Kant. Sechzehn Vorlesungen gehalten an der Berliner Universität, in
Georg Simmel, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 9 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997),
8–226. Hereafter K.
10
K, 9. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid.
Simmel’s lectures on Kant 57

the most urgent questions of life cannot be answered by theoretical

reason and therefore demand a transition to practice.
Simmel, on the contrary, shows no hesitation in rejecting the volun-
taristic reading of Kant as “completely wrong.”13 On his reading:
“Kant and his system are completely intellectualistic; his interest –
which shines forth from the content of his philosophy – is to prove
that the norms that are valid for thought are valid in all domains of
life.”14 The label ‘intellectualistic,’ however, is not meant to be an
outright charge against Kant. Contrariwise, for Simmel, Kant’s inten-
tion to extend the validity of intellectual norms to the whole of life
results in a remarkable transformation of his view on rationality, which
has no precedent in the tradition of rationalism. In other words, Kant’s
intellectualism – unlike previous forms of intellectualism – ends up
bringing forth a novel understanding of the intellect rather than a one-
sided glorification of it. “[In Kant] the power of logical thought shows
itself to be all the more dominant, to the extent that it does not repeat the
untenable rationalistic attempt to repress the other psychic energies
[Seelenenergien] from the outset.”15 All the different components of
life (sensibility, will, feeling) are unreservedly acknowledged by Kant
but only in order to be subsequently placed under a rule issued by the
intellect. To give one example, the will as such is independent of the
intellect, but good will is a willing determined by the intellectual rule
expressed by the categorical imperative.
Kant’s willingness to extend the sphere of influence of the intellect
over the totality of subjective life, however, affects his conception of the
intellect itself in a way that becomes most apparent in the treatment of
sensibility and its role in objective cognition. Arguing against empiri-
cism, Kant famously defends the necessity of a priori principles that are
not taken in from the senses but rather hold valid prior to all experience.
However, unlike traditional rationalism, these a priori principles, con-
sidered per se, do not grant any kind of knowledge. It is not by combin-
ing together in thought pure a priori principles that we obtain genuine
knowledge. On the contrary, only the synthetic product that results
from the joint functioning of intellect and sensibility can be legitimately
called ‘knowledge.’ The pure a priori principles simply organize the
impressions arising from our senses, thus constituting the objective
world that we call nature. When Kant argues that we cannot have

13 14 15
K, 15. Ibid. Ibid.
58 Simmel and Dilthey

knowledge of things as they are in themselves but only of phenomena he

is not gesturing towards a hidden promised land of cognition, which
regrettably happens to be out of our reach. On the contrary, he is
establishing the ambit of validity within which our intellectual catego-
ries apply. Phenomenal nature is not an impoverished or subjectively
filtered version of nature as it is in itself. Phenomenal nature is the only
nature that there is, meaning that phenomenal objects are not pale
shadows of alleged noumenal objects; rather, they are the only objects
to which we can meaningfully refer. The mistake of both rationalism
and empiricism is to have considered the true source of objective knowl-
edge to be what proves, to Kant’s critical eye, only a component thereof.
This bears important philosophical consequences:
From this decision between sensualism and rationalism, a fundamental and
greatly significant principle arises: the authentic picture of the world
[Weltbild] only comes about through the joint work of all mental energies.
The one-sidedness of all doctrines that appoint one of these energies as the
carrier of all truth at the expense of the others is thus overcome, while the
valuation of the conscious mind in general as the source of the world to which
we can refer as knowable is preserved.16

In other words, Kant’s exaltation of the intellect does not amount to

setting it apart from the rest of our mental faculties and appointing it as
the exclusive source of true knowledge. Rather, it amounts to showing
how the intellect is actively involved in each faculty and how, in this
involvement, it displays its all-embracing power. This blending of the
intellect into the broader dynamic of life – best exemplified by the
inextricable relatedness of intellect and sensibility in theoretical cogni-
tion – is for Simmel the initial move that inaugurates the trajectory of
life-philosophy and that finds its first full-fledged formulation in
Goethe:
By way of showing that the attainment of truth requires the activity of all
theoretical powers, Kant opened up a decisive path for <the creation of> a
worldview, a path that was of course limited by his intellectualistic exclusivity
and that subsequently Goethe thought through for the first time [. . .] The
whole intellect cognizes – this was Kant’s overcoming of sensualism and
rationalism. And now <scil. with Goethe> this insight is increased and ampli-
fied: the whole human being cognizes. In this way, our mental [geistig]

16
K, 27–28.
Simmel’s lectures on Kant 59

relation to the world received for the first time its solidest basis. The differ-
ential psychic power that we have to invest in this or that cognitive task is now
viewed as a specifically structured and oriented riverbed in which the totality
of our psychic life is canalized.17

Simmel would eventually elaborate further on the connection between

Kant and Goethe in a very instructive essay, Kant und Goethe.18
However, the key point of his interpretation already stands out quite
clearly in this passage. With his idea that knowledge requires the joint
work of two faculties and that intellect alone cannot yield scientific
truth, Kant initiated a movement of integration of all the components
of subjectivity into the superior unity of what Goethe would subse-
quently call ‘life.’ Kant’s philosophy provides an initial contribution
towards a conception of life that does not construe it as a mere process
‘in the world’ but rather a process in which what we call ‘the world’ is
formed, and by which the world is carried. This operation gives rise,
according to Simmel, to a “spiritualization and liquefaction
[Vergeistigung und Verflüssigung] of our picture of the world,” one in
which “the vital power of the mind [Geist] reaches down to the ultimate
and remotest elements of being.”19 In this picture, what philosophy
traditionally called ‘reason’ is no longer the static mirror of eternal
truths. Its displacement into the ever-changing flux of sensibility reveals
its true nature: a living process forming and transforming the given.
Concomitantly, the traditional ‘carrier’ of reason, the ego, is no longer
considered a substance that exists beyond the life-process. The ego is not
“lebensjenseitig” (beyond life) but it “merges and dissolves into its own
working [geht in seiner Leistung auf].”20 It is nothing over and above its
own functioning; it ‘lives’ in it.

17
K, 28.
18
G. Simmel, Kant und Goethe, in Georg Simmel, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 8
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), 116–123. In his essay, however, Simmel
seems to be more cautious than in the above passage. Here he emphasizes the
divergence existing between the two great German thinkers. Even if both are
concerned with a restoration of the unity between subjectivity and nature, for
Kant this unity exists because it is subjectivity that brings nature about in the first
place, whereas for Goethe the two elements, while remaining distinct and
independent, share the same essence. (See here, 119.)
19
G. Simmel, Was ist uns Kant? in Georg Simmel, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 5 (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 145–177. Here, 156. Hereafter WuK.
20
K, 74.
60 Simmel and Dilthey

Thus, the world is a system of factors that mutually carry each other; the ego is
the activity that [. . .] brings the sensuous elements to their unity but does not
fall out of them – it is the vitality of the world-process [die Lebendigkeit des
Weltprozesses] which consists in the intelligible connection of those elements,
whereby objects are construed and the chaos of sensibility receives a form.21

This pathbreaking conception of knowledge, however, is counterbal-

anced in Kant by a number of strictures whose removal, according to
Simmel, goes hand in hand with the development of life-philosophy.
First and foremost, there seems to be a tension between the assertion of
subjectivity’s world-forming power and the conviction that this process
of formation can be isolated and attributed to a few unchanging a priori
principles. Kant’s worldview is guided by the idea that the world, in
terms of its fundamental principles, forms a well-rounded system and
that, accordingly, the world-forming subjectivity has a wholly “sym-
metrical,” harmonious structure.22 This conviction is at odds with what
Simmel calls “the contemporary feeling of life [Lebensgefühl],” which is
more inclined to believe in a “never-ending development in the deepest
strata of our mind [Geist].”23 The process of subjective world-
formation first discovered by Kant seems to unfold in a more erratic
fashion than Kant himself would have it.
As Simmel is eager to emphasize, however, Kant’s notion of the a
priori is not primarily psychological. Rather, it amounts to a fully “a-
subjective”24 set of principles to which our psychic life may or may not
conform: “The a priori is in fact only an a priori of cognition. Whenever
we fail to apply it, we fail to attain knowledge. Rather, we carry out
certain kinds of subjective mental processes which, however, do not
qualify as experiences.”25 In this sense, the rigidity in Kant’s notion of a
priori is connected to the restricted sphere of subjective life that it is
supposed to regulate, namely, cognition. But precisely this exclusive
interest in the restricted sphere of cognition is what feels unbearably
narrow to Simmel and to the movement of life-philosophy. The world-
forming power of life extends beyond the scope of intellectual cogni-
tion, such that taking up Kant’s legacy means moving beyond him and
toward a complete integration of all spheres of subjective activity in the
overarching unity of life. The more we move in this direction, according
to Simmel, the more we see ourselves compelled to abandon the

21 22 23 24 25
K, 76. WuK, 157. K, 38. K, 40. K, 46.
Simmel’s lectures on Kant 61

systematic notion of the world cherished by Kant and to acknowledge

the erratic, inherently opaque nature of the world-forming energy of
subjective life.
According to Simmel, another sphere in which Kant’s discoveries are
at odds with Kant’s own doctrines is that of practical philosophy. On
the one hand Kant does face the complexity and multifariousness of our
practical life. On the other he restricts his inquiry to actions that have
moral value, virtually ignoring an overwhelming number of actions that
either flow from the acknowledgment of different values or spontane-
ously emerge from the deepest, instinctive strata of our human nature.
This is why, to a modern reader, Kant’s practical philosophy shows a
“peculiar lack of vitality [Unlebendigkeit] and a foreignness towards
the deepest roots of our essence.”26 The method of generalizing into a
maxim an action that has been previously isolated from the totality of
life in which it belongs is the most glaring example of Kant’s ultimate
indifference to life as a whole.27 Acting morally seems to boil down to
acting in a vacuum, whereby the reference to the totality of life – of
which the single action is but an isolated manifestation – is suspended
and the action in question is held up against an abstract principle of
universality.
Simmel suggests that ethics should be more ambitious and “show that
the ‘ought,’ although ideal, nonetheless stands over against life. The fact
of life’s continuity only makes possible to derive parts from the whole
rather than the whole from its parts.”28 In other words, to assess the
moral worth of a life on the basis of isolated actions mistakes the holistic
nature of life for a mere aggregate of atomized episodes abstractly
related to an ‘ought’ foreign to life. Contrariwise, if practical philoso-
phy made an effort to formulate the ‘ought’ confronting life in keeping
with life’s holistic nature, then a number of other values (aesthetic,
social, religious, etc.) should be considered on par with moral value,
and the overall ‘worth’ of practical life could not be simply derived from
the summation of singular actions abstractly qualifying as moral. In a
similar vein, Kant’s wholesale dismissal of happiness as a viable crite-
rion to assess a life’s moral worth is blind to the fact that different people
seek happiness in different ways and that this, far from being an indif-
ferent psychological fact, reveals important features about what kinds
of persons they are. Different sources of happiness define different kinds

26 27 28
K, 155. K, 140. K, 142.
62 Simmel and Dilthey

of happiness,29 and not all of them are equal if we set out to assess a life’s
worth. It would be problematic at best to admit that a person who finds
happiness in torturing animals, for example, is in no way different from
a person who finds happiness in doing charitable work. The subjective
feeling of gratification may be to some extent similar in both cases, but a
philosophy concerned with the overall worth of practical life cannot be
completely silent, as Kant’s philosophy is bound to be, about the differ-
ence between these two ways of finding happiness. Simmel speculates
that Kant’s exclusive consideration of moral value in practical philoso-
phy is due to his overall commitment to the encompassing influence of
the intellect: other values, whose cultivation seem nonetheless germane
to a worthy life, are definitely more recalcitrant to logical, intellectual
treatment.
Life-philosophy thus sets for itself the task to recast the meaning of
the transcendental tradition, thereby retaining Kant’s fundamental
ideas of subjectivity’s world-forming power and its sovereignty over
nature while discarding Kant’s unilateral commitment to the intellect. In
order to fully spell out the constitutive action of life in its complexity, it
is crucial to consider the sphere of reality in which life most explicitly
faces itself and its own products: history. Like nature, history is not an
absolute reality but the result of a subjective process of formation.
However, unlike nature, history is the place where life encounters itself.

The problems of the philosophy of history

In his book Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie,30 published for
the first time in 1892 and republished in 1905 and 1907 in expanded
versions, Simmel employs the key ideas of his interpretation of Kant to
tackle the highly debated issue of history and its difference from natural
science. As we will see in a later chapter, Husserl was quite enthusiastic
about Simmel’s work and lectured on it in the context of a working
seminar in 1922. The book was expanded and revised in close

29
See K, 156.
30
G. Simmel, Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie. Eine erkenntnistheoretische
Studie, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 9, 227–419. Abridged English translation by
G. Oakes, The Problems of the Philosophy of History: An Epistemological Essay
(New York: The Free Press, 1977). Hereafter PPH when quoted from Oakes’
translation and PGP when quoted from the German for passages not included in
the English abridgement.
The problems of the philosophy of history 63

collaboration with Heinrich Rickert,31 who apparently read early drafts

of the work and gave Simmel helpful feedback. Nonetheless, the central-
ity of the notion of life marks a significant difference from the approach
of the Southwestern thinker. The distinctive trait of history and the
human sciences as opposed to the natural sciences for Simmel is the
fact that they necessarily, albeit not sufficiently, deal with psychic
phenomena:
If history is not a mere puppet show, then it must be the history of mental
processes. So the observable events that history describes are merely bridges
that link impulses and volitional acts, on the one hand, and the emotional
reactions that these external events produce, on the other.32

By way of placing mental life at the core of his understanding of history,

Simmel is starting from the opposite theoretical side vis-à-vis Rickert
and the Southwestern Neo-Kantians. His demarcation of the two fields
of scientific inquiry invokes an initial ontological dichotomy: psychic
life as opposed to inert natural matter. The decision to start with
ontology rather than logical and methodological considerations sets a
different philosophical agenda for Simmel: (1) he has to clarify the
relationship between historical science and psychology, provided that
the latter also deals with psychic phenomena; (2) on a broader scale, he
has to clarify how psychic life relates to nature.
The emphasis on the psychic fabric of historical phenomena and,
consequently, on the foundational relation between psychology and
history33 seems to make Simmel’s philosophy vulnerable to the
Southwestern Neo-Kantians’ critique that psychology sets out to dis-
cover universal laws of the mind and is therefore indifferent to historical
individuality. Psychic phenomena appear to unfold according to uni-
versal, natural-scientific causality, and they therefore seem to be irrele-
vant for scientifically grasping individuality. Simmel’s proposal to
overcome these difficulties consists in a double move. First, he proposes
a metaphysical hypothesis concerning the ontological status of psychic
phenomena as embedded in the unitary flux of individual lives. Second,
he draws a distinction between the scientific interests of psychology and
history that make the two disciplines complementary rather than

31
See the Editorial Report, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 9, 425. 32 PPH, 39.
33
See PPH, 40: “If there were a nomological science [Gesetzeswissenschaft] of
psychology, then the relationship between history and psychology would be the
same as the relationship between astronomy and mathematics.”
64 Simmel and Dilthey

divergent; on Simmel’s account, they enlighten each other mutually in

the investigation of the complex reality of life. As for the metaphysical
hypothesis, Simmel draws on the same distinction between law and
event highlighted by Windelband in his Rektoratsrede:34 laws regulate
a certain material whose existence cannot be derived from the validity of
the laws. In natural science, for instance, we must conceive of the
universe as a fundamentally homogeneous “stuff” whose particular
configurations in different spatiotemporal venues depend upon the
validity of certain laws. The existence of the stuff that undergoes law-
fully regulated differentiation, however, does not in the slightest depend
on the validity of the natural laws but is, rather, presupposed by them. If
we imagine the same set of laws regulating a different kind of funda-
mental stuff, our picture of the universe would be different from the one
we know. However, this difference would not depend on the influence
of natural laws (which would remain identical in both cases) but on the
different fabric of the fundamental stuff. Simmel speculates that some-
thing similar could hold for psychic phenomena, so that universally
valid psychological laws could nonetheless regulate a variety of funda-
mentally heterogeneous individuals:
Consider the fact that matter as such has certain definitive, primary proper-
ties. These properties – as we might put it – constitute the material world as a
total entity. There is no sense in which this fact contradicts the universality of
the laws of matter. On the contrary, it is a condition for their actual, empirical
efficacy. In the same way, each mind could possess an original, primary
quality. Like the material residue of matter, this quality could not be con-
ceived as a nomological modification of some other quality that is even more
primary: it would be a presupposition for the possibility of generally valid
laws that apply to every mind in the same way. These laws would form the
empirical domain of the mental. Clearly, these qualities could vary from one
individual to another, but this variation would not affect the universality of
the laws. Each individual mind would simply be an analog of the entire
material world.35

The unfolding flux of mental phenomena would still be regulated by the

same set of psychological laws in each individual but the inherence in
the peculiar, unrepeatable life of this individual would bestow on each
of her mental occurrences a radical individuality that no consideration
of universal laws could erase. Simmel refers to this “psychological

34 35
See Chapter 1. PPH, 41.
The problems of the philosophy of history 65

facticity” [psychologische Tatsächlichkeit] as the “substance of his-

tory”36 [Substanz der Geschichte] in the same way in which matter is
the substance of nature. Unlike matter, which can be considered homo-
geneous for the totality of nature, psychological facticity comes infin-
itely differentiated in individual subjects, whose personalities have an
individual, unrepeatable fabric prior to all consideration of causal
psychological laws. If this picture is accepted, then the reference to
psychic phenomena as the substance of history does not necessarily
efface individuality from view. Rather, individuality is built into the
ontological fabric of life prior to its differentiation into a variety of
causally regulated psychic phenomena.
Simmel, however, does not intend to collapse the distinction between
history and psychology outright, in a positivistic fashion. Even though,
overall, they deal with the same sphere of phenomena, psychology and
history have different foci. They set out to investigate different dimen-
sions or components of psychic phenomena:
The interest in a psychic occurrence is not necessarily a psychological interest.
For psychology, an occurrence is essential merely because it is psychic; psy-
chology does not devote any interest to its content, which is carried by the
psychic energy. Obviously we know about the <psychic> process only by
virtue of the contents that are or have been present in consciousness; only,
from a psychologist’s point of view, the accent falls on the dynamic of this
coming and going; the content would be indifferent to him if it were separable
from this realization or production through psychic energies. . . For history,
instead, the point is not so much the unfolding of the psychological contents
but rather the psychological unfolding of the contents. . . In this way history is
somehow a medium between the logical, purely objective consideration of the
contents of our psyche and psychology, the purely dynamic consideration of
the psychic movement of contents.37

When a historian examines Napoleon’s motivations as he moved

with his troops towards Waterloo, she is not so much concerned with
the unfolding of motivating representations in Napoleon’s individual
consciousness but rather in the ‘logical’ connections obtaining between
them that make his historical deeds understandable. Similarly, she
considers the growing discontent leading a people to rebel against
their sovereign exclusively in its objective connection to the subsequent
fact of the revolution, regardless of its undeniable status as a psychic

36 37
PGP, 236. Ibid.
66 Simmel and Dilthey

fact. Conversely, the psychologist is not interested in the objective

concatenation of psychic contents (e.g., discontent brings about frus-
tration, which brings about political unrest, which brings about a
revolution) but rather in the lawfully regulated unfolding of psychic
states (say, how the increasing intensity of a certain emotion eventually
triggers a certain action).38
Simmel shows with compelling examples that the historian con-
stantly operates within the framework of countless ‘psychological
aprioris,’ the validity of which she must assume if historical facts are
to be clarified and explained. For instance, consider the following argu-
ment: the Hebertists, who supported Robespierre during the first phases
of the French Revolution, eventually became estranged from him
because they felt they were in a subordinate position.39 When we accept
such an argument as a sound historical explanation, we assume the
validity of a psychological a priori, according to which a group of
people who sees a formerly cherished leader gaining too much power
and consensus will tend to withdraw their support because they feel
subordinate. Every book of history is shot through with ‘explanations’
of this kind that refer implicitly to some psychological laws the validity
of which is assumed a priori. This is true in our everyday interaction
with other human beings. If a colleague at work looks unusually absent-
minded and despondent and somebody tells us that he is having troubles
at home, we accept this as a reasonable explanation of his behavior,
thereby assuming as a valid psychological law that troubles affecting a
person’s private life will have a negative impact on her overall capacity
to be focused and productive. The series of observable manifestations of
that person’s behavior will be woven together and brought to an intelli-
gible unity on the basis of this a priori assumption. Incidentally, we are
much more flexible and approximate in our a priori assumptions con-
cerning mental life than in those concerning physical nature. If we

38
The contrast between the contents of life and the process of life occupy
predominantly Simmel’s late reflections and can be considered the crux of his
metaphysics of life. See, for instance, G. Simmel, The View of Life: Four
Metaphysical Essays with Journal Aphorisms (University of Chicago Press,
2010), hereafter VL. Simmel talks about a “reaching out of the life process
beyond each one of its identifiable contents” (VL, 76) and points out how “[n]o
single content that has risen to the level of being formulated in consciousness
absorbs the psychic process entirely into itself; each one leaves a residue of life
behind it that knocks on the door it has shut, as it were” (ibid.).
39
See PPH, 47–48.
The problems of the philosophy of history 67

observed a sudden increment of productivity and dedication in an

otherwise rather laid-back colleague and somebody told us that he is
having troubles at home, we would accept the explanation that his
change of behavior denotes a different way of coping with his difficult
situation. In this case, we would be ready to assume the a priori validity
of a completely opposite psychological law: a person who is having
troubles in his private life will tend to focus more on his work in order to
distract himself or compensate. This is evidence of the complex nature
of the a priori that undergirds our experience of psychic phenomena.
For Simmel, history as a science borrows this a priori from psychic
experience, as it were, and, with this foundation, addresses more intri-
cate phenomena such as groupings, parties, nations, and the like. These
entities are treated like personalities in their own right and are under-
stood with the tools of psychological insight. We talk, for instance, of a
nation’s indignation at the corruption of its leaders or of the joy of a city
over the victory of its local football team.
With his analyses, Simmel manages to circumvent successfully the
difficulties raised by the Southwestern Neo-Kantians and to offer a
convincing argument for the necessity of considering the ontological
specificity of life-related phenomena as the criterion for demarcation of
different kinds of science. Psychic phenomena are not only the sub-
stance of history: they are the paradigm to which we constantly refer in
order to make scientific sense of more complex, supra-individual histor-
ical objects.
However, it could be replied that unless one is willing to revive
traditional forms of substance dualism, psychic life also participates in
the encompassing causality of nature. Thus, Simmel owes some explan-
ation of how the ontologically peculiar province of life fits in the natural
world. Does life escape natural causality? If so, is there a peculiar set of
laws that govern history as the overarching interweaving of psychic
lives? Simmel tackles these important questions in the second section of
his book devoted to a discussion of the notion of ‘historical law.’ The
possibility of discovering laws of history analogous to those of nature
had been the dream of positivistic social thought from Comte onwards.
This idea found its most emphatic assertion in Marx and his conviction
that the development of history follows strict economical laws, the
validity of which transcends the intentions of individual historical sub-
jects. Simmel, however, is extremely skeptical of such claims. He uncon-
ditionally defends the continuity between nature and life, but precisely
68 Simmel and Dilthey

for this reason, refuses to admit a special set of laws for psychic life and
history; he explains:
All of human history is nothing more than a piece or part of the total cosmos.
Therefore, the development of each phase of history is dependent upon
innumerable conditions. The causes or motive forces of these conditions do
not lie within the historical phase itself. They are not limited or defined by the
concept of history, nor can they be deduced from this concept. The course of
human history is not like a self-contained chapter of a book in which only the
beginning and the end are implicated within the general forces of the cosmos
that influence them; on the contrary, between the course of history and these
cosmic forces there is a perpetual relationship of exosmosis and endosmosis.
As a result, history acquires properties which have causes that lie beyond
history itself. It follows that these causes cannot be deduced from the most
exact knowledge of the course of history.40

In this sense, observable historical phenomena are infinitely complex

bundles of underlying causalities, whereby elements stemming from the
most diverse provinces of reality commingle. Simmel warns the enthu-
siasts of law-based explanation that if we really were to be serious with
the notion of causal lawfulness in the sphere of psychic and historical
reality, we would have to break down all historical phenomena into all
their underlying constituents, including the overwhelming amount of
concomitant natural phenomena factoring into them. Something like a
historical battle41 would only be understood if we were able to track
down in detail the psychological condition of every single soldier;
furthermore, we would have to consider all physiological and climatic
components at play. Once this impossible ascertainment of micro-facts
had been carried out, we would have to figure out a complex formula to
calculate the outcome of the battle. This ideal would render historical
understanding utterly impossible.
In more contemporary language, one could say that since there is no
closure to the domain of psychic life and history, that is, since both of
them are rooted in the causality of nature, no specific kind of law-based
explanation can be advocated for them. This does not mean, however,
that we have to give up explanations and references to law altogether
when we deal with psychological-historical phenomena. Instead, we
only have to be aware of the merely hypothetical (meaning, revisable

40 41
PPH, 125. See PPH, 135.
The problems of the philosophy of history 69

in principle) and approximate nature of all our explanations: “Laws of

nature are only valid for simple or constitutive elements. For this reason,
therefore, laws of history have an approximate or relative signifi-
cance.”42 Simmel anticipates positions in contemporary philosophy of
mind that deny the existence of specifically mental causation, granting
that all causal powers reside in the sphere of physical nature.43 Thus,
what appears to us as genuinely psychic or historical causality is nothing
but the outward manifestation of an infinitely complex summation of
micro-causalities ultimately rooted in nature.
Every individual life (a person) as well as every supra-individual life
(e.g., a community), on Simmel’s account, can be considered an aggre-
gate of endlessly unfolding mental events centered on an unfathomable
point of radical individuality. This fountain (Quellpunkt) of life, how-
ever, is fully integrated in the natural world and co-determined by its
laws and occurrences. It bestows its own peculiar, unrepeatable color-
ing to what would otherwise be just a series of very complex natural
events of the genus ‘psyche.’ Every living individual represents a point of
material dis-homogeneity in the fundamental homogeneity of natural
matter.44 This does not mean a difference in substance but a perturba-
tion in the evenness of nature, as it were, one from which a series of
individually colored psychic phenomena wells up and coalesces into the
totality of a life. Simmel frequently uses the metaphor of “pulse-
beats”45 (Pulsschläge) to characterize the dynamic in which life creates
its own contents and unfolds in them. The pulsating center of each
individual personality, however, is nothing over and above the natural
world. It is a fold of individuality in the midst of nature. Psychic
phenomena (and at a higher level, historical phenomena) are natural
phenomena bearing a distinctive mark of individuality that refers back
to an unfathomable center.
As we will see in the next section, there are important similarities
between Simmel’s characterization of life and that of the other cham-
pion of Lebensphilosophie: Wilhelm Dilthey. Although his most crucial
writings precede Simmel’s chronologically, there is an important sense

42
PPH, 133.
43
See, for instance, J. Kim, Physicalism or Something Near Enough (Princeton
University Press, 2005).
44
Whether or not this is true of both human and non-human individuals would be a
very interesting question on this point that, however, I cannot tackle in this book.
45
PGP, 284.
70 Simmel and Dilthey

in which Dilthey’s philosophy is a further advancement systematically

for the understanding of the relationship between nature, psyche, and
history. Seeking a strong foothold in the reality of historical life, Dilthey
criticizes the application of theoretical models borrowed from natural
science, such as causality, to life-related phenomena. Following from
this realization of the inadequacy of causal explanations for a satisfying
understanding of life, which he shares with Simmel, Dilthey offers a
number of important insights into the way forward. The set of psycho-
logical aprioris operative in our understanding of history, advocated
but not fully articulated by Simmel, becomes for Dilthey the object of a
science yet to be developed – descriptive psychology.

A psychology tailored to the human sciences: Dilthey’s Ideen

über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie
When Dilthey’s Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde
Psychologie46 came out in 1894, the research program it presented
shared little to nothing with what had meanwhile become mainstream
psychological investigation. At times, the book reads like a somewhat
odd and belated attempt to invert the already advanced process of
estrangement from the human sciences that characterized the psychol-
ogy of his time. It is telling that Hermann Ebbinghaus (a former student
of Dilthey and a practicing experimental psychologist), in a vitriolic
review of the book,47 does not even feel the need to argue against
Dilthey’s views and proposals in any detail: he points out that the
elderly philosophy professor simply lacks the technical competence
required to talk about psychology at all. As a matter of fact, Dilthey
and his critic mean two completely different things by ‘psychology.’ For
Dilthey, the use of quantitative models by practitioners of experimental
psychology like Ebbinghaus is not wrong; rather, such models are

46
W. Dilthey, Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie, in
W. Dilthey, Die geistige Welt. Einleitung in die Philosophie des Lebens. Erste
Hälfte: Abhandlungen zur Grundlegung der Geisteswissenschaften, Gesammelte
Schriften, vol. 5 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1924), 139–240.
Hereafter GS V. English translation by R. Makkreel and D. Moore, “Ideas for a
Descriptive and Analytic Psychology,” in W. Dilthey, Selected Works, vol. 2,
Understanding the Human World (Princeton University Press, 2010), 115–210.
Hereafter SW 2.
47
H. Ebbinghaus, “Erklärende und beschreibende Psychologie,” Zeitschrift für
Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 9 (1896): 161–205.
Dilthey’s Ideen 71

simply uninteresting and barren. Dilthey arrives at this opinion because

he looks at psychology through the eyes of a historian, seeking instru-
ments to understand more deeply the multifarious world of human
culture. Ebbinghaus and his peers, on the contrary, look at the discipline
through the eyes of naturalists seeking for the missing link toward a
total, unified understanding of nature that may include the psychic.
As the title suggests, Dilthey’s Ideen is not the communication of
already achieved scientific results but rather a cornucopia of proposals,
critiques, historical surveys, rudimentary analyses, and anthropological
remarks, all nested in a distinctively Kantian approach to the founda-
tion of science. This point has, in fact, been downplayed in the existing
Dilthey scholarship, for the most part influenced by later hermeneutics
and narrative theory: Dilthey’s Ideen is a Kantian work in which laying
the foundation of a certain science means pinning down its constitutive
categories while establishing its limits.48 As I will argue shortly, the
notion of life as introduced by Dilthey fulfills a double function, both
furnishing for humanistic science its objects and marking its limits.
Moreover, Dilthey’s Ideen presents us with a decidedly foundational
view of scientific inquiry, one in which the descriptive-analytical psy-
chology he envisions “will become the foundation of the human scien-
ces, just as mathematics grounds the natural sciences.”49
Before we examine his work in some detail, it is appropriate to situate
it in the trajectory of the present chapter. Dilthey, like Simmel, is a life-
philosopher. With respect to the issue of the foundation of science this
means that he gives priority to the ontological fabric of the objects of
scientific inquiry over methodology. If humanistic-historical science
differs from natural science, this is first and foremost because it inves-
tigates life-related phenomena as opposed to merely natural phenom-
ena. Unlike Simmel, however, Dilthey does not ground this difference
on metaphysical speculation concerning the fundamental individuality
of ‘psychic facticity.’ For him, it is not enough to defend the individual-
psychic character of history while conceding that “all of human history
is nothing more than a piece or part of the total cosmos”50 and is
therefore governed by the same laws that govern nature. The psychic
phenomena that constitute the historical world of culture, he holds,

48
To my knowledge, the only commentator who stresses this point adequately is the
above quoted J. de Mul, The Tragedy of Finitude.
49
GS V, 193/ SW 2, 165. 50 PPH, 125.
72 Simmel and Dilthey

present themselves in experience in a way different from that of natural

phenomena. Accordingly, the world of psyche is simply misconstrued
when viewed in terms of natural causality. Dilthey is thus one step
ahead of Simmel in the affirmation of the autonomy of the psychic
sphere. Not only does he assert this autonomy but he also lays the
groundwork for a novel way of investigating the psyche. As we will
see, however, he oscillates between this insight and an anthropological-
relativistic bias that stems from his preponderant interest in historical
inquiry.
Natural-scientific thought, for Dilthey, works in a distinctive way: in
order to explain natural phenomena, it posits a limited number of non-
observable elements or constituents of these phenomena and then pro-
duces hypotheses concerning the laws that regulate the connection of
such elements giving rise to what is phenomenally observable.51 This is
because natural phenomena present themselves as fundamentally dis-
connected at first. For instance, there is no immediately intelligible
connection between the bubbling of the water on the stove and the
heat it emanates. No directly observable connection exists between
movement and temperature in the water. The fact that increment in
temperature is concurrent with increment in bubbling suggests that the
two phenomena may be related, but we do not immediately experience
how or why. It is only when we posit the existence of molecules and
thereupon advance thermodynamic hypotheses that initially discon-
nected phenomena enter into a meaningful connection we can under-
stand. The connection in what is observed must be created in the first
place by constructing hypotheses and positing non-observable ele-
ments. With this in mind, Dilthey remarks:

51
This understanding of natural scientific thought is heavily influenced by
Helmoltz’s so-called theory of signs, which is designed to negotiate the gap
between the merely subjective phenomenal world of experience and the purely
quantitative world ‘as it is in itself.’ In a nutshell, Helmoltz operates according to
a strong dualism between the world as it appears to the senses and the real world
as it is portrayed by physics. Living in the first, we have no direct sensory access to
the second. All that we know is that whenever we observe a modification in the
phenomenal world of the senses a real modification is occurring in the real world
of physics. The phenomenal modification thus stands as a sign of the real
modification. On the basis of this sign relationship between the two worlds we
can then set out to conjecture the nature of the real physical occurrences and the
laws that regulate them. The verification of our hypotheses about the physical
world, however, is bound to remain indirect.
Dilthey’s Ideen 73

Now, however, the question arises whether it is legitimate for explanative

psychology to transfer the way the natural sciences form hypotheses to the
domain of psychic life and supplement what is given with a causal nexus.52

The answer, for Dilthey, has to be in the negative. In fact, the reduction
to a limited number of non-observable elements and the construction of
an underlying causal law, posited hypothetically, are motivated in
natural-scientific thought by the characteristics of our experience of
natural phenomena. The facts of natural science present themselves to
consciousness “as phenomena and as given in isolation,”53 that is, they
are experienced as initially disconnected manifestations of a reality that
lies behind them. On the contrary, psychic facts “are given originaliter,
from within, as real, and as a living continuum or nexus”;54 they are not
experienced as manifestations of a hidden reality but are themselves
reality. Moreover, they are not disconnected but are always part of a
broader psychic life in which they are meaningfully integrated with
other psychic facts. “Life presents itself everywhere only as a continuum
or nexus.”55
The psychic life-process is originally and everywhere – from its most elemen-
tary forms to its highest – a unity. Psychic life does not grow together from
parts; it is not composed of elements; it is neither a composite nor a product of
cooperative sensory or affective atoms; it is originally and always a compre-
hensive unity.56

This means that we do not need to integrate our experience of the

psychic with hypotheses and non-observable elements in order to render
it intelligible. The connections and transitions from state to state
through which our psychic life unfolds are always directly experienced
[erlebt] and do not require the intervention of theoretical constructions.
This is why Dilthey insists on his famous dictum: “Nature we explain,
but psychic life we understand.”57 Rather than expressing two distinct
scientific tasks pertaining respectively to the fields of naturalistic and
humanistic research, erklären and verstehen designate for Dilthey two
fundamentally different ways of responding to natural and psychic facts
occurring in our concrete experience. We respond to the facts of nature
by trying to figure out their causes and connections with all sorts

52
GS V, 142/SW 2, 117. 53 GS V, 143/SW 2, 119.
54
GS V, 143/SW 2, 119. 55 GS V, 144/SW 2, 120.
56
GS V, 211/SW 2, 182, translation modified. 57 GS V, 143/SW 2, 119.
74 Simmel and Dilthey

of hypotheses,58 whereas we respond to psychic facts occurring in

ourselves and other individuals with a mostly successful dynamic of
understanding that does not require us to be especially inventive. The
upwelling of a feeling of disgust after the perception of the funny smell
coming from my fridge does not elicit from me special hypotheses and
conjectures in order to be understood: the connection existing between
the two psychic facts is immediately given in inner perception. To be
precise, the two facts do not simply ‘follow’ one another: they are non-
independent parts of a whole psychic nexus that we might label ‘per-
ceiving a disgusting smell.’ Moreover, this episode is embedded in a
broader nexus of life. This nexus would include, say, my bad habit of
procrastinating before performing unpleasant yet necessary activities
and my resolution to finally go ahead and clean the fridge. Nothing
occurring in my psychic life or in the psychic lives of other human beings
escapes this constant integration in an all-encompassing nexus. The
decisive fact about psychic life, Dilthey writes, is that “the transitions
from one state to another and the productive influence that links them
fall within inner experience. [. . .] The structural nexus is available in
lived experience.”59
If both psychic facts and the principles of their integration into a
nexus are experienced directly, then the scientific task of psychology is
that of a description and analysis of psychic life. Psychology should be
conducted along descriptive lines in order to shed light on the real
psychic life that we experience instead of construing an underlying
psychic reality of which our experienced psychic life would be a mere
phenomenon.
By descriptive psychology, I understand a science that explicates constituents
and their connection in terms of a single nexus that appears uniformly in all
mature human psychic life – a nexus that is not inferred or postulated, but
experienced. This psychology is thus the description and analysis of a nexus
that is originally and always given as life itself.60

The classification and analysis of different classes of psychic occur-

rences envisioned by Dilthey, however, does not conclude the work
of psychology. Considering Dilthey’s proposal so far, we are once

58
Incidentally, this kind of response is identical in both scientific and pre-scientific
forms of thought.
59
GS V, 206/SW 2, 177. 60 GS V, 152/SW 2, 127.
Dilthey’s Ideen 75

more confronted with the problem of individuality, which is so

fundamental in spelling out the difference between the world of
nature and the world of Geist. The psychological method proposed
by Dilthey is, in his words, “description and analysis of a fully
developed and mature human type.”61 Accordingly, it grants an
understanding of those structures and laws that govern the psychic
life of all human beings at all times. However, the historical world is
made of individuals, and the humanist is primarily concerned with
the differences rather than the similarities of his objects of inquiry.
As Simmel puts it:
There would be no reason to doubt that the same laws governing the associ-
ation and reproduction of ideas, differences in sensibility, the development of
volition, apperception, and suggestibility would apply with equal validity to
Nero and Luther and to Jesus and Bismarck.62

However, what is at stake in historical inquiry is not what makes Nero,

Luther, Jesus, and Bismarck similar but rather what makes them differ-
ent, or, better, unique. In light of this point, the descriptive psychology
envisioned by Dilthey seems no better in providing a foundation for the
human sciences than the much-scorned experimental psychology. Both
seem indifferent to individuality and incapable of accounting for its
origin. As we saw above, Simmel circumvented this problem by attrib-
uting a priori status to individuality. According to his metaphysical
hypothesis, the mark of individuality belongs to each individual life
prior to all consideration of the laws that regulate its unfolding. Dilthey,
on the contrary, cannot adopt a hypothesis at this point; otherwise, he
would be working in exactly the same way that he criticized in his
experimentalist opponents.
His move is rather to present his descriptive psychology as just the
first stage of inquiry into the human psyche. The second stage would be
what he labels a “comparative psychology”63 which would describe
and render scientifically intelligible the differences existing between
historical individuals. The wish to illuminate and classify individual
differences is actually the rationale behind Dilthey’s approach to

61
GS V, 213/SW 2, 184. 62 PPH, 41.
63
See W. Dilthey, [Über vergleichende Psychologie.] Beiträge zum Studium der
Individualität, in GS V, 241–316. English translation by E. Waniek, “[On
Comparative Psychology.] Contributions to the Study of Individuality,” in SW 2,
211–284.
76 Simmel and Dilthey

psychology. Since it is guided primarily by an anthropological inter-

est,64 Dilthey’s psychology views the study of uniformities in the human
psyche as a means to an end – a scientific grasp of individuality. This
follows from his understanding of individual differences as purely
quantitative, as different combinations of the fundamentally homoge-
nous ingredients of a normally developed human psyche. As he argues
towards the end of the Ideen:
The uniformity of human nature manifests itself in the fact that the same
qualitative determinations and forms of connection appear in all human
beings (where no abnormal defects exist). But the quantitative relationships
in which they manifest themselves differ widely from one another; these
differences are linked into ever-new combinations, and here we find the initial
basis for distinguishing individuality. What appears to us in terms of [distinct]
qualitative characteristics can be derived from these quantitative differences
and their relationships.65

The task of comparative psychology would be then to identify the “rules

that limit the possible ways in which various quantitative proportions
can co-exist.”66 On this basis, Dilthey views the whole psychic world of
history as endless variation of the same fundamental theme: humanity.
Not only individual human beings but also the more complex supra-
individual entities studied by historians are considered to be combina-
tions of the same set of psychic ingredients: “Human races, nations,
social classes, professions, historical stages, individualities: all these
further delineate individual differences within what is uniform in
human nature.”67
Notions like ‘nexus,’ ‘lived-experience,’ ‘connection,’ ‘understanding
vs. explaining,’ ‘unity,’ and the like, which we have so far explored,
constitute the categorial apparatus for the foundation of psychology,

64
In a manuscript stemming from the same years of the Ideen Dilthey is adamant
that “following the old manner of speaking, [descriptive psychology] can be also
designated empirical, as anthropology.” W. Dilthey, Gesamtplan des zweiten
Bandes der Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften. Drittes bis sechstes Buch
(“Berliner Entwurf”) (ca. 1893) in W. Dilthey, Grundlegung der Wissenschaften
von Menschen, der Gesellschaft und der Geschichte. Ausarbeitungen und
Entwürfe zum zweiten Band der Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (ca.
1870–1895), Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 19 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 1982), 308. Hereafter GS XIX.
65
GS V, 229–230/SW 2, 199–200. 66 GS V, 230/SW 2, 200.
67
GS V, 236/ SW 2, 205.
The unfathomableness of life 77

which itself provides a foundation for the whole universe of human

science. As stated above, however, there is a further Kantian element in
Dilthey’s conception of psychic life and history: the fact of life itself
marks the inner limit of all historical investigation and, in fact, of all
intelligibility.

The unfathomableness of life

Dilthey’s thought oscillates between two opposites, rendering any defin-
itive statement about his innermost philosophical intention extremely
difficult. On the one hand, he is optimistic about the capacity of
descriptive psychology to elucidate the basic constituents and dynamics
of the human mind. This goes so far as to provide a solid foundation for
the vast scientific class of the human sciences. On the other hand, he
constantly stresses a sort of duality within the psyche, a duality that
renders merely speculative any conjecture about the source of its unity.
In other words, if on the one hand ‘life’ is for Dilthey the encompassing
title for all psychic facts observable in the nexus of inner experience, on
the other he insistently counterposes this manifest dimension of life (also
labeled ‘consciousness’) with a hidden, obscure life-source that under-
girds every psychic process and eludes every attempted grasp in discur-
sive thought.68 Therefore, psychology is certainly the science of life, but
at the same time it is ‘only’ a science of the surfaces of life. What we can
scientifically say about psychic experience only brushes the tip of the
iceberg; though we experience the very core of our psychic life, this core
escapes our discursive elucidation. As a famous passage of the Ideen
points out:
We cannot create a nexus that exceeds the one given to us. It is impossible for
the science of psychic life to go behind the nexus that inner experience
provides us. Consciousness cannot go behind itself. The nexus of inner
experience within which thinking functions, and from which it begins, and
on which it depends, is for us an ineradicable presupposition. Thinking

68
This claim should not be conflated with later psychoanalytic claims about the
existence of a so-called unconscious. Whereas for Freud the unconscious (1) has
its own lawfulness, (2) cannot be experienced, and (3) can be studied indirectly,
for Dilthey the ‘life-source’ that underlies our conscious activity can only be
experienced [erlebt], but we cannot advance any meaningful hypothesis about the
laws governing it.
78 Simmel and Dilthey

cannot go behind its own actuality, behind the actuality from which it
emerges.69

Discursive thought sprouts up, as it were, on the basis of a continuity of

life that it cannot itself represent exhaustively with its own conceptual
means. This characterization of the unfathomable ‘center’ of life keeps
with the anti-intellectualistic concern of Lebensphilosophie:
A bundle of drives and feelings – that is the core of our psychic structure. The
interest of feeling that this core imparts to the play of impressions brings them
to our attention as perceptions, relates them to memories, and allows chains
of thought to be formed resulting in either the enhancement of existence or
suffering, fear, and anger. In this way, all the depths of our being are moved;
and from here, as pain goes over into longing, and this then into desire, or into
another series of emotional states of mind, there emerge the voluntary acts.70

This way of construing the deep-lying source of unity of our manifest

psychic life is markedly Kantian. Life as such is presented as a sort of
psychic ‘thing in itself,’ something unknowable beyond its own phe-
nomenal appearance, i.e., its own objectifications in cultural products,
expressions, and so forth. However, unlike the Kantian thing in itself for
natural scientific thought – that is, the unknowable source of impres-
sions – we do have an experience of life. In fact, an intuitive, non-
discursive experience of the unfathomable depths of life is all we have.
Life does not properly manifest itself: it can be felt, experienced affec-
tively, but not observed and conceptualized after the manner of its own
psychic products. So to speak, life does not come to genuine manifes-
tation in its own products; it only shines through them per spaeculum.
This experience of life [Lebenserfahrung] can never be fully translated
into concepts but only expressed through metaphors, rites, images, i.e.,
through the language of art, religion, and metaphysics:
From this unfathomableness of life it follows that life can only be expressed in
a metaphorical language [Bildersprache]. Acknowledging this fact, clarifying
its reasons, and developing its consequences would be the beginning of a
philosophy that would really do justice to the great phenomena of poetry,
religion, and metaphysics, since it would grasp the ultimate unity at their core.
They all speak out the same life, one in images, the other in dogmas, the other
in concepts.71

69 70 71
GS V, 194/SW 2, 166. GS V, 206/SW 2, 177. GS XIX, 307.
The unfathomableness of life 79

Furthermore, the idea of a principle that grants unity to our psychic life
is clearly an offshoot of the Kantian doctrine of the transcendental ego.
Similarly to Kant, Dilthey considers the contrasts between an empirical
consciousness (the psychic facts whose connection we experience) and the
‘transcendental’ source of its unity (the life-source). For Dilthey, too, the
ultimate principle is a principle of unification, but it is infinitely more
complex than Kant’s transcendental ego. It does not stand over and
above the process of consciousness but rather underneath. It does not
simply grant the belonging of all representations to one and the same
stream, but it also governs the succession of these representations with
respect to their content and is responsible for their ‘affective’ coloring. In
conclusion, for Dilthey, in a Neo-Kantian fashion, human science has an
‘external’ border in what is other than itself, i.e., naturalistic research
based on disconnected outer experiences. On the other hand, however,
and in a more traditionally Kantian sense, humanistic research also has a
limit in what is other in itself, i.e., life as the unknowable source of unity
of the psyche.
One final point is left to address: the relationship between the unfa-
thomable depth of life and nature. Incidentally, this is the point where a
certain distance from the Kantian tradition and a certain proximity to
positivism and evolution theory becomes perceptible in Dilthey’s
thought.72 The discursively ungraspable life-source is, so to speak, the
point of tangency between psyche and nature. His characterization of
the ‘center’ of life as consisting of drives and instincts reveals that the
more we approach the propulsive center of life, the more (paradoxi-
cally) we distance ourselves from what is properly psychic and get closer
and closer to nature. As Dilthey writes in his later work, The Formation
of the Historical World in the Human Sciences: “We ourselves are
nature, and nature is at work in us, unconsciously, in dark drives.”73
The presence of dark drives, instincts, feelings, and other irrational
forces at the core of our life (a presence we can only experience and not
conceptualize) is, for Dilthey, a symptom of the workings of nature
‘within’ us. The picture of the relationship between psychic life and
nature thus becomes more complex than it is for Simmel, who simply

72
For a convincing discussion of this point see H.-H. Gander, Positivismus als
Metaphysik. Voraussetzungen und Grundstrukturen von Diltheys Grundlegung
der Geisteswissenschaften (Freiburg and Munich: Alber, 1988). Here, 253–254.
73
GS VII, 80/SW 3, 101.
80 Simmel and Dilthey

considered psychic life as an individually colored natural phenomenon.

For Dilthey, nature ‘gives the input’ at the lower strata (instincts,
sensations), but, as soon as the input is taken in, it becomes integrated
into a system organized according to patterns of meaning and signifi-
cance, categorically different from natural causality. All that we have is,
so to speak, a hunch that the propulsive force steering our conscious life
lies in nature. However, we cannot see the transition occurring between
merely natural (i.e., physiological) dynamics and basic psychic facts
because even the most rudimentary, detectable psychic fact already
presupposes this transition. In other words, the point of tangency
between mere physiology and genuine psyche recedes the more we try
to approach it via psychological observation. The more we analyze the
fabric of our psychic life in its most elementary manifestations, the more
we leave the province of psychology behind and approach those of
physiology and biology. This sheds light upon the revealing and unex-
pected appreciation of the authoritative experimentalist Wilhelm
Wundt in Ideen. Even though Wundt espouses the kind of natural-
scientific method in psychology that Dilthey rejects, Dilthey praises
him for revising the hard-line psychophysical parallelism defended by
most experimental psychologists of his time:
He then went on to indicate “that psychophysical parallelism is a principle
whose application extends only to the elementary mental processes, to which
definite movement-processes run parallel, not to the more complicated prod-
ucts of our mental life, the sensible material of which has been formed and
shaped in consciousness, nor to the general intellectual powers which are the
necessary presuppositions of these products.”74

With his characterization of drives, instincts, and impressions as the

workings of nature at the core of our psychic life, Dilthey comes very
close to Wundt’s position that not all of psychic life runs parallel to
physiological events. However, at its most basic, psychic life is anchored
to nature, even though this anchorage is not discursively thinkable and
cannot be considered a sufficient explanation of the complexity of
psychic life.
All things considered, there is an equivocal, Janus-faced meaning of
‘nature’ in Dilthey’s thought. On the one hand nature is, in a Kantian

74
GS V, 167/SW 2, 141–142. See W. Wundt, Human and Animal Psychology,
trans. J. E. Creighton and E. B. Tichener (London: George Allen, 1912), 447.
Recapitulation and transition 81

sense, the phenomenal world that appears in outer perception and

stands over against the inner world of our own psychic life. On the
other nature is – like Goethe’s Mothers – the primordial matrix of this
psychic life itself, what gives it impetus and continuity while eluding
every attempted conceptual grasp. How these two senses of nature can
be reconciled in Dilthey’s thought is admittedly hard to see.

Recapitulation and transition

In these first two chapters, I presented and assessed the theoretical
problems connected to a demarcation of different groups of sciences
as developed in Neo-Kantianism and Lebensphilosophie. As I hope
became clear over the course of the presentation, both approaches to
the problem lead straight to the question of ontology. For the
Southwestern Neo-Kantians, ontology is broken down into at least
two provinces: empirical being and, in a broad sense, meaning, as
adumbrated by Rickert’s distinction between Wahrnehmungen and
Verstehungen. However, further developments within the school led
to an acknowledgment of the constitutive function of psyche for the
institution of meaning and, in particular, for the structuring of abstract
meaning-configurations into concrete historical objects. In the concep-
tual apparatus of the school, however, there are no viable resources to
articulate a constitutive notion of psyche. With its picture of the world
rigidly split up into Sein (being) and Geltung (meaning, validity),
Southwestern Neo-Kantianism simply has no room for anything psy-
chical outside empirical being.
With life-philosophy, we encountered a different approach to the
same issue. Simmel and Dilthey anchor their demarcation of the sciences
primarily to their material content: the human sciences investigate
psychic and life-related facts, whereas the natural sciences only inves-
tigate mechanistic and lifeless phenomena. By placing the notion of life
in the center of their inquiry and contrasting it to the notion of nature,
Simmel and Dilthey seem to offer a more convincing account of the
differences existing between the human and the natural sciences.
However, they run into dire difficulties as they try to relate back to
nature the life that they carefully distinguished from it at the outset. For
both of them, the ontological distinction drawn at first seems to be
negated in the end by the assertion of the fundamental continuity of
life and nature. For Dilthey, in particular, we saw how this ambiguity
82 Simmel and Dilthey

results in a problematic duality in the very concept of nature. On the one

hand, nature is the phenomenal, ‘external’ world alien to our inner life.
On the other, it is the matrix of life itself. Life, whose autonomy he
asserted so emphatically against naturalistic psychology, thus ends up
tightly compressed between two dimensions of nature.
The question remains open whether the pluralistic ontology advo-
cated by Rickert and required by the existing plurality of the sciences
can be given a foundation that preserves the autonomy of the psychic
without thereby reverting to a sort of Cartesian substance dualism. In
other words, an understanding of the psychic is required that does not
leave it undertheorized between two extremes – of empirical, causally
regulated being and unreal, intellectual meaning. In the next chapter, I
will move to a more systematic approach and introduce Husserlian
phenomenology into the debate. I will attempt a comparison between
the notion of standpoint, as articulated by both the Neo-Kantians and
Dilthey, and the notion of attitude [Einstellung], as introduced by
Husserl. While it is generally accepted that this notion is crucial to
Husserl’s understanding of science, its systematic place in the debate
presented thus far has never been explored satisfactorily. As I endeavor
to show in the next chapters, the central notion of transcendental
subjectivity made available by the phenomenological epoché offers a
radical way to move beyond the problems left unsolved or unaddressed
by the Neo-Kantians and the life-philosophers – a movement towards a
truly autonomous ontology of the ‘psyche.’
3 Standpoints and attitudes: scientificity
between Neo-Kantianism and
Husserlian phenomenology

Natural science does not simply describe and explain nature;

it is a part of the interplay between nature and ourselves;
it describes nature as exposed to our method of questioning.
W. Heisenberg1

Without being aware of it and without being rigorously systematic about it,
we exclude the Subject of Cognizance from the domain of nature that we
endeavor to understand.
We step with our own person back into the part of an onlooker who does
not belong to the world, which by this very procedure becomes an objective
world.
E. Schrödinger2

In this chapter, we shall discuss the Neo-Kantian notion of standpoint

(Standpunkt) and the Husserlian notion of attitude (Einstellung).3
Within their respective philosophical systems, these two notions under-
pin a non-dogmatic foundation for science. Both for the Neo-Kantians
and for Husserl, a non-dogmatic foundation of science – that is, an
account of scientificity according to which scientific knowledge does not
consist in mirroring objects of study (i.e., a copy-theory of cognition) –
amounts to a philosophical theory according to which objects of knowl-
edge and forms of cognition are thoroughly correlated. Cognition does
not grasp readily available objects that exist independently of it. Rather,
it contributes by carving out different objective domains and the objects
encountered therein.

1
W. Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy (New York: Prometheus Books, 1999), 81.
2
E. Schrödinger, What is Life? (Cambridge University Press, 1992), 118.
3
I presented an earlier version of this chapter on April 28, 2011 at the Husserl Circle
Meeting at Gonzaga University in Florence, Italy. I would like to thank all the
participants, in particular Sebastian Luft, for their helpful comments and critiques.

83
84 Neo-Kantianism and Husserlian phenomenology

In the first two chapters, we sketched the battle lines of the debate
concerning a genuinely philosophical classification of science. Now let
us focus more specifically on the theoretical devices employed by the
participants in the debate. We shall see that the differences between the
different schools are not as clear as they appeared initially. The battle
lines begin to blur as these otherwise disparate thinkers strive towards a
common goal of removing the naivety of empirical research via a
philosophical consideration of the tight link existing between the
objects and the subjects of scientific activity.
This context proves a propitious moment to introduce a first, crucial
notion in Husserl’s phenomenology: the notion of attitude. Attitude is a
key to properly understanding both the fundamental differences exist-
ing among empirical sciences and the place of phenomenology itself in
the universe of scientific activity. As we shall see, Husserl defines his
phenomenology first and foremost in terms of a singular attitude. In
doing so, he assumes – for good reasons – that the concept of attitude is
fundamental, cutting across both phenomenological and non-
phenomenological forms of scientific thought. Therefore, one must
understand attitude in order to approach phenomenology in a theoret-
ically adequate manner.
The Neo-Kantian ‘standpoint’ and the Husserlian ‘attitude’ cannot
be reduced to the same doctrine. On the contrary, while homologous,
the two concepts adumbrate differing accounts of what it means for the
objects of cognition to correlate intrinsically with cognitive activity. The
Neo-Kantians and Husserl both argue that the object of knowledge is
not a dogmatically presupposed reality but a constituted entity, shot
through with subjectivity, as it were. Neo-Kantian philosophy, how-
ever, has no account of what Husserlian phenomenology calls ‘change
of attitude’ (Einstellungswechsel), a deficiency which results in insur-
mountable difficulties for the Neo-Kantian accounts of how the same
object appears in different guises when we vary our cognitive stand-
point towards it.
This gap in the Neo-Kantian concept of standpoint is a product of an
exclusively formal understanding of transcendental subjectivity. As we
saw in Chapter 1, this exclusivity precludes a fully convincing account
of historical objectivity. Extending that discussion, the Neo-Kantians
interpret a change in standpoint as a mere psychological fact pertaining
to an empirical subject and thus irrelevant to epistemological inquiries.
This neglect of changes in standpoint is a mistake. Husserl’s discovery
Southwestern Neo-Kantianism 85

of transcendental subjectivity via the phenomenological reduction – a

discovery that we shall retrace in greater detail in later chapters, but that
must be anticipated here – makes clear that the phenomenon of
Einstellungswechsel cannot be cast aside. For Husserl, a change of
attitude assumes a transcendental-constitutive role that helps to disclose
the intrinsically stratified nature of objects of knowledge. Beginning
with the Neo-Kantian notion of standpoint, we shall move to
Dilthey’s proposed distinction between inner and outer experience
(innere und äußere Erfahrung) and finish with a consideration of
Husserl’s view.

Kantian synthesis and the plurality of standpoints

in Southwestern Neo-Kantianism
The distinctive trait of the Neo-Kantian movement as a whole is argu-
ably its singular attention to the principle of synthetic cognition in
Kant’s philosophy. Their key philosophical principle is that cognition
is never a copy of reality but always a synthesis.4 Wilhelm Windelband
summarizes this view and its consequences with great clarity, stating:
Kant’s immortal accomplishment was the discovery of synthetic conscious-
ness. Since the Critique of Pure Reason it is forever impossible for a mature
philosophical consciousness to conceive of the world as ‘given’ and mirrored
in consciousness as it appears to a naive [spectator]. Everything we hold for
given already entails the work of our reason, and our cognitive right on things
rests solely on the fact that we create them for ourselves in the first place. The
necessity to appropriate in the first place the world that we shall experience
depends on the fact that we can only experience a selection [Auswahl], and a
selection in an ordered connection. The principle for such selection as well as
for the order can only be sought within the structure of our consciousness.5

Rickert reaffirms his mentor’s position in Kulturwissenschaft und

Naturwissenschaft as follows:
[T]he part of reality that man can include in his concepts, and thus in his
knowledge, is almost infinitesimally small when compared to what he must

4
See W. Windelband, Immanuel Kant. Zur Säkularfeier seiner Philosophie, in
Präludien, vol. 1 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1914), 112–146. Here 125.
5
W. Windelband, “Kulturphilosophie und transzendentaler Idealismus,” in
Präludien: Aufsätze und Reden zur Philosophie und ihrer Geschichte, vol. 2,
279–294. Here 282–283.
86 Neo-Kantianism and Husserlian phenomenology

disregard. Accordingly, if in order to know reality we had to form a con-

ceptual copy of it, we should be confronted with a problem that is essentially
insoluble. Hence, if anything that has thus far been achieved may in any way
claim to be considered knowledge, cognition will still have to be regarded [. . .]
not as a reflective process by which “phenomena” are faithfully transcribed
but as a process of restructuring the data of immediate experience; and, we
may add, it is always a process involving the simplification of the actual
multiplicity of reality itself.6

In other words, not only would a mirroring duplication of reality be

epistemically redundant, it would be intrinsically impossible because
consciousness could never conceptualize at once the overwhelming flow
of data streaming in from the senses. We are bound to be selective, and
selection necessarily implies criteria that cannot simply be extracted
from the material undergoing selection. Brute reality has very little to
tell a philosopher about the activity of consciousness organizing it into a
theoretically understandable whole. Neo-Kantians learned this lesson
especially from Kant’s transition from the first to the second critique.
Unlike the German Idealists, the Neo-Kantians did not feel obliged to
overcome the putative fragmentation in Kant’s philosophy and inte-
grate its different parts into a continuous system. In fact, they consid-
ered the dualism between nature and freedom the most compelling
insight in Kant’s thought.
Emil Lask expresses adamantly the Neo-Kantian interest in this dual-
ism. Borrowing from the introduction of his early book on Fichte:
The fact that Kant postulated explicitly the dualism of method, i.e., the double
type of treatment [Behandlungsart] of one and the same object also in the
investigation of the life of the human race has been heeded too little [. . .] The
same domain of reality is always at the same time nature and “reason”,
according to the method it is subjected to. However, in order to haul out the
reason from the immediate given, one has to approach things already equip-
ped with a measuring rod. In the midst of reality, indifferent towards values,
one generates the object of investigation through the standpoint of
investigation.7

As Lask clarifies in the rest of his introduction, it is only if we consider

the human race from the point of view of freedom that we will be able to

6
SH, 32–33, translation modified.
7
E. Lask, Fichtes Idealismus und die Geschichte, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1.
(Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck), 5–6.
Southwestern Neo-Kantianism 87

pick out those elements that are relevant to a philosophical narrative

about human history from the overwhelming and chaotic mass of
events pertaining to human subjectivity.8 It is worth noting that
Lask – along with Husserl, but in opposition to Windelband and
Rickert – espoused the idea that natural science does not simply run
parallel to human science, but rather grows out of an ‘artificial’ (albeit
fully motivated) abstraction from the world described and investigated
by the humanist. In this sense, the world of nature is distilled out of the
world of culture, neither prior to it nor simply constructed on its side.
We shall expand on this point below.
Kant, however, only identified one deterministic standpoint for the
cognition of the phenomenal world and the standpoint of freedom for
the cognition of what he calls the noumenal world or the kingdom of
ends. Neo-Kantian thinkers accept that there are several different stand-
points within each domain. For instance, as Heinrich Rickert pointed
out in countless works, we can distinguish between the value-free stand-
point of natural science and the value-related standpoint of cultural
science as two logically opposed, but equally legitimate, perspectives for
a scientific investigation of the phenomenal world.9 Furthermore, on the
basis of this fundamental opposition, we can develop more sophisti-
cated distinctions between subordinate standpoints falling under the
two overarching categories of the natural and the historical. As Rickert
points out, “the critical principle necessarily leads to pluralism.”10 In
other words, once the myth of cognition as mirroring is dispelled, the
path is open for a genuinely pluralistic conception of reason. It is only if
we believe in an ultimate, residue-less correspondence between cogni-
tion and the world that we will pit different scientific methods against
one another. Otherwise, we shall welcome any rationally patterned
contribution to the investigation of reality.
Moving from this general epistemological framework to a more
specific focus, we must ask: how can we define a standpoint? what
holds it together? Contrary to what the ordinary meaning of the word
‘standpoint’ suggests, there is nothing capriciously subjective to stand-
points. A standpoint is not a subjective opinion; rather a standpoint is
exclusively identified by a definite theoretical goal and the coherent set

8 9
Ibid. See Chapter 1.
10
Rickert, “Systematische Selbstdarstellung,” Philosophische Aufsätze, 347–411.
Here 356.
88 Neo-Kantianism and Husserlian phenomenology

of concepts necessary to make that goal attainable. For the Neo-

Kantians a standpoint is an impersonal teleological construction.
Take, for instance, the standpoint of natural science. It can be defined
first in terms of a goal, namely, universally valid cognition of natural
phenomena. Once the goal is set, it can be proved (at least in a Kantian
framework) that from the very notion of this goal a number of corre-
lated principles necessarily follows. For instance, if we are to achieve
universally valid cognition of nature, we need notions like causality and
law. To adopt the standpoint of natural science means to think and
experiment in the theoretical space established by such concepts. But
this standpoint’s ‘logical’ validity and coherence holds sway independ-
ently of the actual practice of natural science.
A further instance would be the ethical standpoint (today, usually
called the standpoint of normativity). The ethical standpoint relies on
notions such as ‘ultimate ethical standard,’ ‘freedom,’ and ‘punishment
and reward.’ Regardless of whether an empirical subject adopts it or
not, the ethical standpoint is teleologically oriented toward the assess-
ment of actions in terms of good and evil, and this orientation entails a
number of concepts like the above mentioned.
To cite one last example, the historical standpoint is oriented toward
cognition of the individual (be it a historical personality, an institution,
or a historical period), therefore necessitating notions such as value,
relevance, and context. Again, this standpoint is an ideal construction,
the validity of which rests solely on its internal articulation.
Most importantly, every standpoint necessarily includes an object
amenable to investigation according to the standpoint in question.
This insight is distinctive of transcendental philosophy. The object of
knowledge is not dogmatically presupposed, but intrinsic to the process
of knowledge itself.
Expanding on an example from Chapter 1, ‘Renaissance studies’ are
the scientific investigations of the object ‘Renaissance,’ which is itself a
construction based on the same kind of conceptuality employed in its
scientific investigation. To say that the object ‘Renaissance’ is a con-
struction does not mean that it is a figment of imagination or that it can
be whatever one desires. Historians can make genuine discoveries about
the Renaissance as much as biologists can make genuine discoveries
about stem cells. ‘Stem cells’ and other such objects are components of
the standpoint of natural science, or, more precisely, of the complex
subordinate standpoint of natural science known as the biological
Dilthey’s response to Windelband 89

standpoint. In order to see a cell and, furthermore, a stem cell (a cell that
is capable of differentiating into a cell of various tissue types) in the
lump of organic matter under our microscope, we need to approach it
with very sophisticated conceptual tools. If we are tempted to believe
that a stem cell is a more legitimate object than the Renaissance, this is
because – a Neo-Kantian would argue – we have cultural and historical
reasons for privileging natural scientific thought. After all, the knowl-
edge we actually acquire about a stem cell is not knowledge of this or
that particular stem cell, but of the abstract pattern governing the
functions of stem cells. Ontologically speaking, such patterns are as
‘unreal’ as the Renaissance.
In summary, the Neo-Kantians conceive of standpoints as teleolog-
ical constructions that define different domains of scientific activity. In a
transcendental way they include the objects they are ‘designed’ to
investigate. These objects are construed with the same categories that
characterize the scientific descriptions and explanations falling under
the standpoint in question.

Dilthey’s response to Windelband: the distinction between

inner and outer experience
In Chapter 2, we highlighted how life-philosophers such as Simmel and
Dilthey prioritize a material distinction for a philosophical classification
of the sciences. They consider the key distinction to be between physical
phenomena and life-related phenomena. In the present context, it is
appropriate to examine how they understand the mode of access to
phenomena of these two groups. Dilthey gives a remarkably sophisti-
cated account of how the natural world and the human world (die
geistige Welt) come into view and, in so doing, provide working mate-
rial to the natural and the human sciences, respectively. He articulates
his position in the first part of the essay “Contributions to the Study of
Individuality,” which appeared in 1896 as a supplement to “Ideas for a
Descriptive and Analytic Psychology” (1894).11 Dilthey outlines here a
critical response to Windelband’s Rektoratsrede,12 taking particular
issue with its central theses that (1) methodology should be the primary

11
For a discussion of Dilthey’s “Ideas” see Chapter 2.
12
For a discussion of Windelband’s Rektoratsrede see Chapter 1.
90 Neo-Kantianism and Husserlian phenomenology

criterion to classify the sciences and, therefore, that (2) psychology

should be divorced from the humanities.
Dilthey begins by constructing an argument for classification criteria
based on the distinction between outer and inner experience – a possi-
bility that Windelband considered but summarily dismissed. Dilthey’s
reasoning is that if the widespread skepticism surrounding the notion of
inner experience could be dispelled by way of a clear definition, then a
reliable demarcation of sciences could be elaborated from the contrast
between inner and outer experience. In his estimation, inner experience
discloses the human world and outer experience discloses the world of
nature. These two kinds of experience, however, are not unrelated –
they both refer to broadly the same facts, although they carve out of
these facts different material contents of knowledge. Moreover, inner
experience is not an independent source of cognition but, instead,
presupposes outer experience as its basis.
Dilthey proposes the following definition: “By outer or sensory per-
ception I mean the process by which the impressions registered by the
senses are combined into a whole that is distinct from the self.”13 In
turn, outer perceptions are the building blocks of full-blown outer
experience: “By outer experience I mean that complex of processes by
which discursive thought brings one or several outer perceptions into a
nexus of intelligibility that expands our cognition of the external
world.”14 According to these definitions, outer perception can be char-
acterized as a process of externalization. A certain array of sensory
impressions is apprehended as a whole and projected outside of the
self as manifesting an external object.15 The externalizing process of
outer perception is thus the doorway into the external world. The
combination of multiple outer perceptions in discursive thought gives
us outer experience properly speaking, that is, increments of knowledge
concerning what lies outside ourselves.
Turning our attention from the externalized sensations of outer
perception to our inner awareness of them gives rise to inner percep-
tions, which – if combined together by discursive thought – “are
brought into a nexus that makes these facts of the human world more

13
GS V, 243/SW 2, 213. 14 Ibid.
15
It should be noticed that from Dilthey’s wording it remains unclear whether the
externalized array of sensations should be considered coincident with the external
object or a mere appearance of the external object.
Dilthey’s response to Windelband 91

intelligible and that expands the conceptual cognition of the inner

world.”16 In this mode, inner perception and inner experience are
defined by a suspension of the externalizing tendency associated with
outer perceptions:
From all these outer perceptions and the resulting outer experiences, I distin-
guish the reflexive awareness that we possess of psychic processes or states
mainly by the negative feature that we do not externalize them. Thus the
concept of inner processes or states emerges as distinct from what is
external.17

Dilthey’s point is that for everything that we experience as happening

(or having happened or about to happen) in the world around us, we
can turn our attention inwards and focus on the given thought, emo-
tion, desire, or feeling that the situation arouses in us. In so doing, we
are not turning away from the external situation but are relating it to
ourselves. This is the meaning of Dilthey’s famous notion of Erlebnis.
One could say that we are rather broadening the scope of what we
experience, but it is critical to notice that this internal turn requires a
fundamental reflexive modification of our standpoint. Dilthey insists
that this shift of standpoint is not to be considered an entry into a
mysterious intra-mental world: “After all, outer perceptions form the
ever-present basis for inner perceptions as well, and even when our
attention turns to an inner state or process, we remain conscious of its
relation to images of objects.”18
Moreover, inner experience has to constantly “cooperate with”19
outer experience in order for us to transpose our sense of interiority to
foreign subjects and to reconstruct the inner life from which all manner
of artifacts in the human world originate.20 Side remarks in Dilthey’s
analyses point out that the borders between inner and outer experience

16
GS V, 245/ SW 2, 215. It is interesting to notice how this theory of reflexive
awareness and the grasp of inner processes by a shift of attention come close to
Brentano’s account of self-awareness and the possibility to study psychic
occurrences by a shift from the primary to the secondary object of consciousness
(the conscious act itself). Brentano and Dilthey both studied under F. A.
Trendelenburg (1802–1872), although to my knowledge the influences linking
together the three eminent philosophers have never been the objects of scholarly
studies.
17
GS V, 243/ SW 2, 213. 18 GS V, 244/SW 2, 214.
19
GS V, 246/ SW 2, 215.
20
A more thorough discussion of this point is offered in Chapter 6.
92 Neo-Kantianism and Husserlian phenomenology

are somewhat fluid and, more importantly, that they can overlap in
various ways. In philosophy, for example, forms of metaphysical ideal-
ism à la Berkeley can be seen as willful extensions of the standpoint of
inner experience to the external world. Transcendental thinking, in
Dilthey’s psychological interpretation, is an attempt to “integrate the
images of objects given in outer perception into the nexus of our facts of
consciousness”21 – that is, to start from outer perception and inter-
rogate the regularities of inner experience that render outer perception
possible in the first place.
Considering the general relations existing between inner and outer
perception and their function of disclosing, respectively, the (inner)
human and the (outer) natural world, Dilthey draws the following
conclusion: “On the basis of the natural sciences, the human sciences
study spiritual-cultural facts as manifest in objects of sense, the rela-
tions of these facts to each other and to physical facts” (emphasis
added).22 The key point of this passage is contained in the as.
Dilthey maintains that if the inner life of consciousness remained
entirely subjective – that is, if we had no notion of other subjects
outside of ourselves and of their ability to shape the physical world –
we would remain confined forever to the sphere of nature. The human
sciences are necessitated by the fact that inner conscious life manifests
itself outside of our own mind, projecting its plans and demands on the
physical world. The notion of Geist in Dilthey’s Geisteswissenschaft
does not refer to the internal mental processes of individual subjects. It
refers to conscious mental life “as manifest in objects of sense.”23
These objects are not ontologically distinguishable from mere material
objects, but they compel us to invest them with an inner perspective.
Dilthey writes eloquently:
By contrast to the natural sciences, the human sciences come into being
because we are compelled to attribute psychic life to animal and human
organisms. On the basis of their life-manifestations, we transfer to them an
analogue of what is given to us in our inner perception.24

Thus, for Dilthey the difference between inner and outer experience is
not absolute and does not entail a strict separation between an outer
world of nature and an inner world of sense. Inner experience is an

21
GS V, 246/ SW 2, 216. 22 GS V, 248/ SW 2, 217. 23
Ibid.
24
GS V, 249/ SW 2, 218–219.
Dilthey’s response to Windelband 93

intensification of the reflexive awareness already present (but generally

not attended to) in outer experience. Instead of focusing on situations in
the outer world and attempting to gauge their objective content, inner
experience focuses on the significance or relevance to life that these
situations entail. This ‘inward turn’ is not a turn away from the external
world, but an amplification of the subjective side of every experience of
the world. This amplification is the basis for a disclosure of the human
world – that is, the interconnected whole of experience and significance
in which our human lives unfold.
Drawing on these considerations of the overall connectedness of the
human world, the importance of the psychic experience constituting
that world, and the extensions of psychic purposiveness into that world,
Dilthey forcefully rejects the Windelband-Rickert position that meth-
odological distinctions are the basis for a proper understanding of the
human sciences. If this methodological criterion – termed ‘idiographic’
by Windelband and translated into the jargon of ‘individualization’ by
Rickert – is taken to be the distinctive feature of human science, then it is
unclear what to do with those sciences that aim at the discovery of
universal regularities but do not treat mere natural facts.
Dilthey calls such sciences “systematic human sciences,”25 citing
linguistics, economics, and certain branches of sociology as exemplars.
It seems that, following Windelband and Rickert, such sciences should
be assigned to the natural-scientific camp. Ultimately, for them, only
history fits the criterion of individualization, thus remaining the only
‘human science’ proper. But even in history Dilthey notes that the
exclusive interest in the individual is far from obvious:
Those histories provided us by Polybius, Machiavelli, Montesquieu,
Tocqueville, Taine and among us by Nitzsch, histories that search for uni-
formities in the way external conditions and historical forces effect individual
historical phenomena, serve as disciplinary counter-instances against this
abstract separation of the cognition of what is uniform and the description
of what is singular.26

Rickert, seeing the merit in this criticism, formulates a response in his

later book Kulturwissenschaft und Naturwissenschaft (1899). First, he
points out that descriptions of uniformities and even laws in the human
sciences are always a means to an end: they are carried out in order to

25 26
GS V, 257/ SW 2, 226. GS V, 257/ SW 2, 226–227.
94 Neo-Kantianism and Husserlian phenomenology

better understand individuals. This is true of Dilthey’s descriptive-

analytic psychology, which is designed to provide the resources for a
better understanding of individual differences in the human world.
Second, Rickert points out that a combination of methodological cri-
teria (nature/history) and material criteria (nature/culture) in the classi-
fication of the sciences admits of intermediate disciplines whose
methodological outlook is natural scientific, but whose subject matter
is value-laden. On this account, disciplines like linguistics should be
termed (somewhat awkwardly) ‘natural sciences of culture,’ as opposed
to ‘natural sciences of nature’ (such as physics) or ‘historical sciences of
culture’ (such as art history).
Further details of Rickert’s response to Dilthey need not occupy us
here. The critical point is that, for Dilthey, an interest in regularities,
uniformities, and laws can be maintained in the sphere of inner experi-
ence. The work of the humanist implies the assumption of a different
standpoint, but this does not necessarily correspond to a change in one’s
cognitive tasks and goals. Natural objects and supra-individual uni-
formities continue to appear in the field of inner experience. However,
they are transfigured by their connection with human agents and their
significance for life. The shift from the outer to the inner world discloses
two materially distinct provinces of reality without fracturing the con-
tinuity of our experience.

Lask’s defense of a thoroughly material distinction

Emil Lask also makes definite contributions to the question of how we
access different fields of scientific inquiry and how different modes of
access constitute the objects thereby disclosed. While he endorses the
notion of standpoint articulated by Windelband and Rickert in his early
works, in later reflections he departs significantly from their position.
The broad strokes of Lask’s later position can be reconstructed from
posthumously published drafts of Zum System der Wissenschaften27
and Notizen zur Einteilung der Wissenschaften28 (mentioned in
Chapter 1). As will become clear in the final part of this chapter and
in later chapters of this book, Lask largely anticipates Husserl’s posi-
tion. There is no evidence, however, that Husserl ever read these notes,

27 28
SW. NEW.
Lask’s defense of a thoroughly material distinction 95

which means that the two thinkers reached virtually the same conclu-
sions by separate paths.
The gist of Lask’s position is that, contra Windelband and Rickert, “a
purely logical meaning of nature must be absolutely denied.”29 As
explained in Chapter 1, for Rickert a purely logical meaning of nature
can be found in Kant’s dictum that “nature is the existence of things,
insofar as [sofern] that existence is determined according to universal
laws.”30 According to this principle, the natural-scientific standpoint is
applicable to any kind of material to the extent that every part of reality
is in some aspects determined by universal laws. For Rickert, this is the
distinctive feature of natural science qua generalizing method. Lask is
extremely critical of this argument.31 He insists: “The character of
nature is not a product of the generalizing method but rather of a
definite manner of consideration [Betrachtungsweise].”32 Not only
does Lask acknowledge, along with Dilthey, that a significant number
of human sciences have a generalizing tendency, he also points out that
the ‘nature’ studied by the natural sciences – far from being a merely
formal concept – results from a deep alteration of the immediately given
material of experience.33 In this sense, he is not satisfied with an artic-
ulation of the relationship between natural and human sciences in
which the two scientific disciplines merely run parallel to each other
and are cut from the same primary experiential material. Accordingly,
for Lask Dilthey’s presentation of outer experience as the basis for the
natural sciences reveals only half of the truth. The natural sciences are
based on an alteration of the material delivered by outer experience and
not on outer experience tout court.
Lask seeks to explain this alteration using the terms “devitalizing”
(ertöten) and “quantifying tendency” (quantifizierende Tendenz). As
we know from Chapter 1, he is committed to what he calls a two-
elements theory based on the Urverhältnis of empirical being and
validity. A halo of validity (or value) surrounds the multifarious infinity
of ‘materials’ such that different ways of knowing are merely different

29
NEW, 272.
30
Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics that will be able to come forward
as a Science, 89.
31
He writes polemically in a comment on Rickert: “Always [the] argument [that]
since all empirical reality can be treated according to the natural-scientific method
there can be no difference in the material!” NEW, 269.
32
SW, 243. 33 See SW, 242.
96 Neo-Kantianism and Husserlian phenomenology

ways of attending to the categorially illuminated material. What

appears first and foremost in our transactions with the world is
not pure sensuous material ready for natural scientific treatment,
but, rather, “sensibility pervaded by value” (wertdurchdrungene
Sinnlichkeit).34 Appropriating language from the tradition of life-
philosophy, Lask goes on to argue that sensuous material is originally
‘enlivened’ by its value-pervadedness and thereby correlates with life
rather than with the intellect alone. Sensuous materials in their original
appearance present themselves as substrates for values – for life-related
configurations of categorial meaning.35
The ‘manner of consideration,’ or attitude, characteristic of natural
science, is not a mere focus on sensuous material but a “ripping out of
the sensuous, a rescission of the connections, a revocation of their
substrate-character.”36 Sensuous material is not just attended to by
natural science. It is first and foremost isolated from the living context
of validity in which it originally inheres. This is why “the methodolog-
ical presupposition for purely empirical natural science is then the
artificial ripping out and devitalizing [Ertötung] of the sensuous.”37
Although generalization is admittedly a distinctive feature of natural
science, “one should not simply take one’s point of departure in general-
ization, rather, only the generalizing in the devitalized sphere is natural-
scientific.”38 Nature and outer experience figure prominently also in the
human sciences, but nature here is “the non-devitalized nature for
life.”39
The process of ‘devitalizing’ the sensuous sets the basis for another
distinctive feature of natural scientific work: the quantifying tendency
which guarantees maximal intellectual mastery of the material under
scrutiny. Lask makes an important remark regarding mechanics, which
Rickert indicates as the fundamental natural science due to its
generality:
If mechanics really resulted exclusively from the generalizing tendency and if
the qualitative invariability and homogeneousness depended merely on this
tendency, then, for instance, in physics and chemistry – whose subject matter
is not mechanical corporeity in general but has a greater qualitative partic-
ularity and concreteness – the qualitative surplus should be investigated (e.g.,
chemical affinity). On the contrary, also [in these sciences] the qualitative is

34 35
SW, 241. For a clarification of this technical language see Chapter 1.
36 37
SW, 241. SW, 244. 38 SW, 242. 39 NEW, 268.
Husserl’s notion of attitude 97

ignored and exclusively the quantitative components are taken into

consideration.40

For Lask these features of natural science are evidence of its inferiority
vis-à-vis philosophical knowledge. In his notes, one finds several instan-
ces of Lask’s animosity towards natural science, which, unfortunately,
was widespread among young German intellectuals in the early twen-
tieth century and subsequently degenerated into Nazi irrationalism.41
Thankfully, these aspects of his thought are not essential to his most
philosophically interesting points. The natural scientific method pre-
supposes a specific treatment of the material delivered by the senses in
which these materials are divested of their original inhering values and
considered exclusively in their quantitative determinations. Husserl
eventually refines these ideas (but, again, he never encountered Lask’s
notes) and points out how the ‘idealizing’ process of natural science –
far from being a falsification of our original relationship with the
world – is necessary in order for thought to overcome the subject-
relatedness through which perceptual objects are originally constituted
in experience. Husserl’s critique is directed at the ‘forgetfulness’ of this
process, namely, taking for real the artificial world legitimately
abstracted out of the life-world in which we exist.

Husserl’s notion of attitude

We now have a sophisticated enough sense of the debate surrounding
‘standpoints’ and modes of access to fields of scientific inquiry at the
beginning of the twentieth century to appreciate the strength of
Husserl’s analyses of these issues. The phenomenological notion of
Einstellung42 (attitude) is one of the most crucial yet least clarified in
Husserl’s philosophy. In the context of the present chapter, and for the
overall purpose of this book, the concept of attitude is particularly apt
for introducing Husserl’s perspective on the liveliest philosophical
debate of his time. ‘Attitude’ is also a concept that stands in a genus/
species relationship with the very concept of phenomenology. In fact,

40
SW, 249.
41
In SW, 240, for instance, he deems empirical cognition “castrated” and
“blasé.”
42
A first attempt of clarification can be found in my “Systematische Überlegungen
zu Husserls Einstellungslehre,” Husserl Studies 25/3 (2009): 219–233.
98 Neo-Kantianism and Husserlian phenomenology

phenomenology is first and foremost characterized by its founder as an

attitude. Therefore, properly understanding the concept of attitude is
requisite to properly understanding phenomenology. The fact that the
key definiens of transcendental phenomenology – that is, the concept of
attitude – fits naturally into the debate about the demarcation of the
sciences is one further clue that Husserl’s philosophical project is tightly
connected to this debate.
The concept of attitude recurs in different venues of Husserl’s
thought, and it is used in a somewhat non-technical way that makes it
hard to pin down. However, one remarkable feature cuts across differ-
ent usages of the term Einstellung: attitudes are paired up in an antag-
onistic, yet mutually clarifying, fashion.43 It is possible to identify at
least three such pairs: the natural/phenomenological attitude, the natu-
ralistic/personalistic attitude, and the theoretical/evaluative-volitional
attitude. Whereas the first pair has been largely explored in Husserl
scholarship,44 the second two pairs remain uncharted. In the context of
this chapter, it is apropos to discuss the second two pairs first. A later
chapter will address in detail both the ramifications of phenomenolog-
ical attitude and the role that this attitude plays in the debate between
Neo-Kantians and life-philosophers.45 A general characterization is
sufficient for this chapter and will be provided in the concluding
remarks.
The pair naturalistic/personalistic attitude is presented extensively for
the first time in Ideas II in order to highlight the difference between
natural sciences and human sciences.46 The naturalistic and the person-
alistic attitude are presented as two different ways of looking at the

43
Interestingly, this way of thinking in terms of mutually illuminating oppositions
comes extremely close to the so-called ‘heterological’ pattern of thought typical of
Neo-Kantianism and, in particular, of Heinrich Rickert’s philosophy. On the
meaning of heterology see Zijderveld, Rickert’s Relevance, 20–21.
44
See in particular S. Luft, “Husserl’s Phenomenological Discovery of the Natural
Attitude,” Continental Philosophy Review 31/2 (1998): 153–170.
45
See Chapter 6.
46
See E. Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen
Philosophie. Zweites Buch: Untersuchungen zur Konstitution, Husserliana, vol.
4 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1954). Hereafter Hua IV. English translation by
R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to
a Phenomenological Philosophy. Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of
Constitution, Collected Works, vol. 3 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), § 49. Hereafter
Ideas II.
Husserl’s notion of attitude 99

world, highlighting certain features to the detriment of others. As

Husserl puts it:
While the natural sciences, according to their sense, are characterized by an
abstractive filter [Blende] through which everything subjective, all mentality is
filtered out [abgeblendet], the totality of subjectivity would be the theme of
human science [Geisteswissenschaft] overall.47

The naturalistic and the personalistic attitude are thus two basic options
for interpreting the world: one that filters out subjectivity and another
that privileges it. Different forms of scientificity are thus parsed by the
role they assign to subjectivity in their overall interpretations of the
world.
It should be noted that while Husserl holds fast to the customary
distinction between natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) and human
sciences (Geisteswissenschaften), his distinction between naturalistic
and personalistic attitude as the source of the two different classes of
science differs from Dilthey’s. For Dilthey, the distinction between
natural sciences and human sciences depends primarily on their subject
matter: natural science deals with physical nature revealed by outer
experience whereas human science deals with the world of psychic
nexus revealed by inner experience. Husserl’s distinction based on
different attitudes is perfectly compatible with the idea of a natural
science of mentality (e.g., neurophysiology) and of a humanistic science
of physical nature (e.g., geography). For Husserl, what matters is not
whether a mode of inquiry interrogates subjectivity as its subject matter,
but whether that mode considers subjectivity a valid factor in its own
right (as opposed to filtering it out as an appendage of physical reality).
The paradigmatic example that clarifies the opposition between the
two attitudes is the human body. The body can be seen merely as a
complex instance of physical nature, to which subjectivity is causally
annexed as a “second nature.”48 Alternatively, it can be viewed as the
organ of the will – as a sort of ‘extension’ of personal subjectivity in the
world. The two attitudes are not compatible, and there is no overarch-
ing attitude that could simply mirror what the human body is. The

47
E. Husserl, Erste Philosophie (1923/24). Zweiter Teil: Theorie der
phänomenologischen Reduktion, Husserliana, vol. 8 (The Hague: Nijhoff,
1959), 286. Hereafter Hua VIII.
48
E. Husserl, Einleitung in die Philosophie. Vorlesungen 1922/23, Husserliana,
vol. 35 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2002), 19. Heareafter Hua XXXV.
100 Neo-Kantianism and Husserlian phenomenology

natural and the personalistic dimensions of the body as disclosed by the

two attitudes are layered in a definite way that only a phenomenological
description can reveal. That said, a phenomenological description of
the two attitudes only discloses the tension between them and is by
no means designed to resolve it. We shall revisit this point in the
conclusion.
A further important feature of Husserl’s phenomenological notion of
attitude is that attitudes do not characterize exclusively, or even pri-
marily, scientific activity. We can literally ‘look at the world’ from a
naturalistic or from a personalistic point of view and be more or less
aware of it, regardless of whether we thereupon choose to theorize in the
spirit of the elected attitude. We owe Husserl’s fellow phenomenologist
Moritz Geiger for a set of illuminating remarks on this issue. In his book
Die Wirklichkeit der Wissenschaften und die Metaphysik, he points out:
a limitation to science does not belong to the essence of attitude[s]. Rather,
attitudes are pre-apprehensions [Vorgriffe] vis-à-vis the structure of reality
overall – [they are] pre-formations [Vorformungen] that are certainly
exploited by science but that, however, are at play overall when issues con-
cerning reality are tackled: in ordinary life as well as in dealing with specific
metaphysical-philosophical problems or in the construction of entire meta-
physical systems.49

This is an important difference between the Neo-Kantian notion of

standpoint and the phenomenological notion of attitude. Whereas the
Neo-Kantians consider pre-scientific experience a fundamentally homo-
geneous whole, Husserl sees that we are presented with fundamentally
different attitudes already at the pre-scientific level. For the Neo-
Kantians, divergences in standpoints only arise when we enter the
sphere of scientific thought. For Husserl and the phenomenologists,
such divergences in science are higher-level manifestations of divergen-
ces that originate in pre-scientific experience.
This remark leads us to the third pair in Husserl’s doctrine of attitude:
the theoretical/evaluative-volitional attitude. This distinction underpins
the naturalistic/personalistic distinction and can be viewed as the most
basic dichotomy in the sphere of attitude. If it is possible to assume
encompassing attitudes toward reality – such as the naturalistic or the

49
M. Geiger, Die Wirklichkeit der Wissenschaften und die Metaphysik (Bonn: F.
Cohen, 1930), 122.
Husserl’s notion of attitude 101

personalistic attitude – this is because at a more fundamental level it is

always possible to assume a theoretical or an evaluative-practical atti-
tude towards single objects or states-of-affairs.50 Husserl focuses on
these basic forms of attitude from Ideas II onwards and offers some
illuminating analyses, particularly in the lecture on Erste Philosophie.
Whereas in early stages of phenomenology his chief concern was to
establish the general structure of intentional acts considered in their
singularity, the expansion to genetic phenomenology in later phases of
his thought implies a broader preoccupation with the dynamics of
intentional life as a whole:
As even a cursory glance reveals, the acts that the ego performing reflection
finds as its own (or, better, as those belonging to its own unreflected ego that
previously lived in naiveté) are usually, or actually always more or less inter-
woven, connected, founded upon one another.51

Husserl calls a complexion of acts woven together in overarching unity

“action” (Aktion) and distinguishes between different ways in which an
action can be structured. Some actions are “total acts” (Gesamtakte)
consisting of a number of underlying acts, some of which perform an
ancillary function and others of which carry the actual will that holds
the complexion together. While I am carrying out a geometrical proof,
there is an overarching theoretical action that, if analyzed more closely,
turns out to be sustained by a number of ‘ancillary’ theoretical actions.
For instance, I must read the signs on the paper, keep track of the steps I
make, and draw lines and figures. In Husserl’s terms, I have a dominant
action (Hauptaktion) (the proof) and a number of acts serving ancillary
functions (dienende Funktionen), enabling the dominant action. On the
other hand, there can be parallel actions that do not ‘merge’ together
into the unity of a total act organized according to the dominant/

50
This is not intended to suggest a direct parallelism according to which the
naturalistic attitude would be necessarily theoretical and the personalistic attitude
would be evaluative-volitional. We can have forms of theorizing also while
standing in the personalistic attitude (the most eloquent case is, as we said, human
science), on the contrary, we cannot have evaluative-volitional experiences while
standing in the naturalistic attitude, which is by definition exclusively theoretical.
Although I will not explore this asymmetry in full, it suffices to point out that this
is because the naturalistic attitude is a thoroughly ‘unnatural’ amplification of the
theoretical attitude, whereas the personalistic attitude is a ‘natural’ disposition.
51
Hua VIII, 100.
102 Neo-Kantianism and Husserlian phenomenology

ancillary structure. In this case, the meaning of attitudes in the sense of

the third pairing becomes manifest. As an example, Husserl writes:
As a botanist, I may be delighted by the beauty of a flower, but this delight is
not the dominant action if I am in the attitude of gaining knowledge about the
flower by observation and classification. Once I am done with it, instead of
this theoretical action, the foregoing aesthetical joy that ran alongside it may
become the dominant action. Another example of such a change is the one
between the aesthetical observation of a work of art and the observation of
the art historian. In this case, we do not say that the two acts function as parts
of a total act.52

When we are observing an object for theoretical purposes, we are, as

Husserl puts it in Ideas II, performing a “seeing in an eminent sense.”53
The act of seeing becomes the dominant action and lets other actions
become marginal or un-accomplished (unvollzogen). The delight for the
beauty of the flower may very well be ‘still present’ when the botanist
starts engaging in his classificatory work, but he does not ‘live’ in that
delight. Nonetheless, the delight runs its course parallel to the new,
theoretical dominant action.
From this point of view, attitudes amount to concrete accomplish-
ments of consciousness meant to orchestrate the multifarious fabric of
acts characterizing each cross-section of our conscious life. If acts of
different classes simply co-existed in consciousness – that is, if they were
all ‘accomplished’ to the same degree and simultaneously – life would be
an unmanageable cacophony. The harmony of order and meaning is
only achievable because orchestration according to different attitudes is
at play. Objects manifesting themselves in experience do not do so ‘in
one blow’; they reveal different features according to our choice of
attitude.
This basic fact about the life of consciousness becomes amplified and
generalized when we consider the shift from this level of consideration
to that of the naturalistic and personalistic attitudes. Here, not only is
the experience of a flower modified, but the overall outlook on reality
changes depending on whether or not we admit subjectivity into our
broad picture. On the basis of Husserl’s analysis of attitudes in the life of
consciousness, the naturalistic and the personalistic attitude can be seen
as abiding ‘habituations’ in our way of looking at the world. In this

52 53
Hua VIII, 101. Ideas II, 10.
Husserl’s notion of attitude 103

respect, the personalistic attitude should be considered preeminent

because it necessarily becomes habituated for every human being:
“We thus have to do here with an entirely natural and not an artificial
attitude that would have to be achieved and preserved only by special
means.”54 In the personalistic attitude we carry out ‘actions’ that are
generally guided by evaluative and practical concerns. Occasionally, we
carry out actions in which the theoretical component is dominant,
but the overall preoccupation is still geared towards our welfare as
persons.
On the contrary, the naturalistic attitude is a thoroughly unnatural
focus on the objective ‘positings’ of our experiences. It has to be learned
and practiced, and it can be seen as an abstractive impoverishment of
our personalistic experience. While the naturalistic attitude is thor-
oughly theoretical – that is, it privileges the simple thetic or positional
intentional content and its objective determinations as opposed to the
intentional content’s significance or practical function – it should be
emphasized once again that it is the exclusion of subjectivity, not the
privilege of theory, which defines the naturalistic attitude as such. There
is room for theory in the personalistic attitude, as the existence of the
human sciences reveals. Husserl is in line with Dilthey and Simmel in
emphasizing that the human sciences are carried out in the same ‘intel-
lectual’ mode as our pre-scientific life. They emerge from the same kinds
of concerns that characterize our everyday transactions in the world,
such as understanding other human beings and finding our place in
society.
Rather than just living his human life in the best possible way, the
human scientist wants to produce theories about human life. In
order to do so, subjectivity cannot be excluded. Contrariwise, in the
naturalistic attitude subjectivity has to be excluded in order to let
objective properties come into relief. Even those natural sciences that
have mental occurrences as their subject matter do not treat these
mental occurrences as ‘active’ expressions of living agents who intend,
assess, and act on their surrounding world. Mental occurrences are
merely natural occurrences whose regularities can be formulated in
mathematical terms. Accordingly, we can refine our initial definition
by adding that the naturalistic attitude is a wholly theoretical attitude
that revolves around the exclusion of subjectivity qua subjectivity. The

54
Ideas II, 192.
104 Neo-Kantianism and Husserlian phenomenology

personalistic attitude, on the contrary, is a mostly practical-evaluative

and occasionally theoretical attitude in which the world is seen as it
appears to a human subject: as an open horizon of practical possibilities
populated by significant objects and fellow acting subjects.

Phenomenology and the constitutive function of

changes of attitudes
The common systematic function of attitudes in phenomenology and
standpoints in Neo-Kantianism is now coming into view. In both cases,
the objects of our consideration are related in a non-trivial sense to the
stance we assume toward them. In the way a human action can be
viewed either as a natural fact standing under rigid causal laws or as a
moral fact standing under the obligations of practical reason, so too can
a flower be experienced according to the evaluative-practical attitude as
having certain, scientifically relevant, botanic features or as something
beautiful and desirable. On a broader scale, reality can be viewed as a
set of complex causal interactions between physical bodies (naturalistic
attitude) or as a world of meaning, full of significance for living personal
subjects (personalistic attitude).
In spite of this clear similarity, there are important differences that
must be spelled out. In order to do so, we must reconsider the way in
which the relationship between objects and subjective outlook is articu-
lated in the two philosophical schools. For the Neo-Kantians, as argued
above, the object is produced by a given standpoint. I can look at a
flower as an instance of its class and as the point of intersection of a set
of biological laws. On the other hand, the same flower can be viewed
historically, say, if it played a role as the emblem of a political party. But
are we really dealing with the same flower? A lump of gold can be
viewed as a sample of metal or as a precious gift. Is it the same lump of
gold in both cases? Even if our common sense urges us to answer
positively, from a strictly Neo-Kantian point of view we would have
to reject our common sense inclination. The lump of gold as part of the
natural-scientific standpoint is different from the lump of gold given to
us in pre-scientific experience and also from the lump of gold that has a
certain historical value. Each object is what it is only within the frame-
work in which it is investigated. There is no metaphysically pre-existing
object in itself that we subsequently approach according to different
standpoints. On the contrary, each standpoint includes the object it is
Phenomenology and changes of attitudes 105

designed to investigate. The standpoints are intrinsically disjointed

because each of them follows a different logic. Consequently, the
objects of different standpoints are necessarily disjointed as well.
Husserlian phenomenology provides the resources to maintain a
radical difference between attitudes and, correlatively, differences
between the objects manifested therein, while at the same time defend
a continuity running through all these differences. As the example of the
flower given by Husserl makes clear, attitudes can be changed. As he
points out in Ideas II, a “characteristic change of attitude belongs, as an
ideal possibility, to all acts, and accompanying it is always the corre-
sponding phenomenological modification.”55 We can always switch
from a theoretical attitude to an evaluative-practical and then back to
a theoretical. In the same way, we can go back and forth between the
naturalistic and the personalistic attitude as we walk in and out of
the lab. This is more than a psychic fact about humans: it is essential
to the very notion of attitude. One and the same subjectivity cuts across
all attitudes and is responsible for their orchestration.
We can now broach a provisional characterization of the first dichot-
omy in Husserl’s remarks on attitude: the opposition between the
natural attitude and the phenomenological attitude. The natural atti-
tude is the fundamentally unreflective mode in which normally devel-
oped human beings conduct their life for the most part. In this attitude,
we take for granted the existence of an ontologically self-subsistent
world around us, and we apprehend ourselves as human beings existing
as entities of that world. Of course, while living immersed in the natural
attitude we know nothing about this; the essential features of the
natural attitude become visible from the phenomenological standpoint.
Part of what it means to assume the standpoint of phenomenology is to
be aware of the power of the natural attitude.
To the extent that it admits of human subjectivity, the natural attitude
is coextensive with the personalistic attitude. When Husserl uses the
phrase ‘natural attitude,’ however, he wants to emphasize something
other than the opposition with the ‘unnatural’ (i.e., artificial) attitude
of the natural scientist. The natural attitude designates the all-
encompassing, mostly uncritical, mode of existence of human beings
in the world, both when they act as persons (personalistic attitude) and
when they theorize in the spirit of natural science (naturalistic attitude).

55
Ideas II, 10.
106 Neo-Kantianism and Husserlian phenomenology

Even when we assume the naturalistic attitude we do not cease to posit

an existing world – which in the naturalistic attitude becomes the
subject matter of quantitatively oriented research – and ourselves as
the (allegedly) self-effacing human subjects who investigate this world.
This is why, in Ideas II, Husserl, after carefully distinguishing between
the personalistic and naturalistic attitudes, makes the following remark:
Upon closer scrutiny, it will even appear that there are not here two attitudes
with equal rights and of the same order, or two perfectly equal apperceptions
which at once penetrate one another, but that the naturalistic attitude is in fact
subordinated to the personalistic, and that the former only acquires by means
of an abstraction or, rather, by means of a kind of self-forgetfulness of the
personal Ego, a certain autonomy.56

From this point of view both the personalistic and the naturalistic
attitudes can be viewed as subordinated modes of the encompassing
natural attitude, one in which the natural attitude plays itself out with-
out any restrictions (personalistic attitude) and the other in which it
plays itself out in the mode of the methodologically imposed exclusion
of human subjectivity (naturalistic attitude).
In the context of the natural attitude ‘the world’ is the theme of all
themes, one “that has no other theme above itself.”57 Subjectivity is
‘read into’ this existing world and is considered a segment of nature, be
it in the methodologically restricted sense of this term (naturalistic
attitude) or in the broader, less determinate sense in which we com-
monly talk about ‘nature’ (personalistic attitude). The world is viewed
as the totality of what is – both physical and psycho-physical. Our
selves – or, in Husserl’s terminology, our egos – are apprehended as
empirical entities whose defining features and properties stand in a
causally regulated continuity with the defining features and properties
of other classes of objects in the world. In this framework, the constit-
utive function that shifts of attitude play with respect to the objects of
experience is bound to remain unseen. The world is interpreted as being
‘already-there,’ endowed with subject-independent properties, and our
subjectivity can only be understood as a psychic mirror on which such
properties are occasionally reflected.

56
Ideas II, 193.
57
E. Husserl, Zur phänomenologischen Reduktion. Texte aus dem Nachlass
(1926–35), Husserliana, vol. 34 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2002), 52. Hereafter Hua
XXXIV.
Phenomenology and changes of attitudes 107

This, however, is not the only attitude we can assume toward the
world and ourselves. Husserl advocates the necessity of a shift to the
phenomenological attitude, which alone can do justice to the actual
status of subjectivity. In the phenomenological attitude, the naive posit-
ing of the world typical of the natural attitude is suspended. In so doing,
the self-insertion in the world constantly operating within ourselves is
discontinued (Husserl talks about an enworlding self-apprehension that
characterizes human subjectivity and that needs to be counteracted
methodologically). Through the methodological device which Husserl
famously termed ‘epoché’ we can cease to take the existence of a world
around us for granted and open up the possibility to apprehend our
subjectivity in a non-worldly manner; we can learn to see ourselves as
transcendental egos rather than empirical subjects woven into the
causal fabric of the existing world.
The epoché sets the basis for the so-called phenomenological reduc-
tion – a leading back of everything that presents itself in experience to
the constitutive dynamics of transcendental, non-worldly subjectivity.
The shift to the phenomenological attitude does not imply depreciation
or even rejection of the natural attitude. On the contrary, by interpret-
ing itself as a transcendental ego responsible for the constitution of the
world and of itself qua human subject in the world, the phenomenolo-
gist learns to appreciate the ‘depth’ of the natural attitude and the
hidden subjective workings that make it possible. As Husserl puts it in
one of his manuscripts:
Through the phenomenological reduction as ‘transcendental reflection,’ the
ego frees itself from the limits of the naturalness of its existence, the limits of
‘naive’ humanity; in a sense, the ego frees itself from blinders that prevent it
from seeing its absolute, fully concrete existence or, which amounts to the
same, prevents it from seeing an infinite wealth of life-possibilities, in which
those of natural existence are certainly included but are, so to speak, abstract
and imperfect.58

As long as the ego interprets itself exclusively as a natural-empirical

human subject, the correlations that exist between its attitudes and the
‘looks’ of the objects disclosed through them are bound to remain
partially unintelligible. If the naively posited existence of the empirical
world is suspended and seen purely as manifested in subjective

58
Hua XXXIV, 225.
108 Neo-Kantianism and Husserlian phenomenology

experiences, then a new perspective arises, one in which the multifarious

characteristics of experienced objects are seen as ‘achievements’ – the
results of constitutive processes of transcendental subjectivity.59
If a flower can be contemplated first in aesthetic rapture and sub-
sequently with scientific rigor, this is because there is a transcendental
ego at work, arranging and rearranging the patterns of its own con-
scious life. The transcendental ego does not merely grant logical unity to
representations but is, phenomenologically speaking, a living agent free
to follow its own paths in the unfolding of experience.60
Correlatively, the object has multiple horizons. It is intrinsically
stratified, and this makes the assumption of different attitudes toward
it necessary in order to reveal progressively all layers of meaning per-
taining to it. Going back to the example of the human body, it is at the
same time a natural body, a biological organism, the bearer of sensa-
tions, the organ of the will, and a concrete human person. These are
not simply five disconnected objects but five layers of meaning of
one and the same object. Some of them come to light only from a
naturalistic standpoint; others only if we adopt the personalistic atti-
tude. Nonetheless, we cannot vary these layers as we wish. We can only
orchestrate their manifestation depending on the standpoint or attitude
we decide to adopt. The unity of the object throughout its layers of
meaning is a correlate of the unity of transcendental subjectivity
throughout its changes of attitudes.
In this sense, a phenomenological analysis of different attitudes has
the capacity to retain the most fundamental insight of Neo-Kantianism
about the plurality of standpoints, while giving a more convincing
account of why this plurality does not jeopardize the unity of the object
and the corresponding unity of our intellectual life.
In Chapter 4 we shall delve deeper into the philosophical exchange
between Husserl and the Neo-Kantians. In particular, we will examine
the Neo-Kantians’ reception of Husserl’s first major work after Logical
Investigations, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a
Phenomenological Philosophy, published in 1913.

59
A more thorough description of the shift to the phenomenological attitude will be
offered in Chapter 6.
60
Marcus Brainard coined the felicitous phrase “egoic motility” to talk about the
ego’s capacity to orchestrate different modalities in the transcendental field of its
own experience. See M. Brainard, Belief and Its Neutralization: Husserl’s System
of Phenomenology in Ideas I (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002), 166, passim.
4 The reception of Husserl’s Ideen
among the Neo-Kantians

In making its first appearance, phenomenology must

[. . .] reckon with a fundamental mood of skepticism.
Edmund Husserl1

The publication of the first volume of Husserl’s Ideen zu einer reinen

Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch
(1913) (Ideen I), provoked a wave of criticism among Husserl’s
Göttingen students owing to the book’s unambiguous commitment to
transcendental idealism.2 Less well known is that the book was also
vehemently criticized by those thinkers who represented the mainstream
version of transcendental idealism in early twentieth-century Germany,
namely, the Neo-Kantians. Interestingly, the sharp criticism of Husserl’s
transcendental phenomenology as presented in Ideen is a point of
agreement for the two most prominent schools of Neo-Kantianism,
Marburg and Southwestern, which otherwise embodied two signifi-
cantly different ways of understanding and recasting Kant’s tran-
scendental philosophy. This double attack from opposite sides of
Neo-Kantianism against Ideen I can be considered a clue about the
originality of Husserl’s work, which could not be easily aligned with
existing currents of transcendental philosophy. On the other hand,

1
E. Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und einer phänomenologischen
Philosophie. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie.
Erster Halbband: Text der 1.–3. Auflage – Nachrdruck, Husserliana, vol. 3/1 (The
Hague: Nijhoff, 1977), Hereafter Hua III/1. English translation by F. Kersten,
Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological
Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology,
Collected Works, vol. 2 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1982), 148. Hereafter Ideas I.
2
An earlier version of this chapter is published as “The Ideen and Neo-
Kantianism,” in L. Embree and T. Nenon (eds.), Husserl’s Ideen (Dordrecht:
Springer, 2013), 71–90. The present version, however, offers a much refined
presentation of Husserl’s eidetics, and it has been largely reworked in order to fit in
the overall line of inquiry of the book.

109
110 Husserl’s Ideen among the Neo-Kantians

Ideen I was written in a rush3 and is shot through with obscurities,

giving rise to all sorts of misinterpretations, especially from uncharit-
able readers. Husserl is thus partly responsible for not having achieved
the desired effect of engaging the Neo-Kantians and convincing them of
the necessity to reformulate the task of transcendental philosophy in
phenomenological terms.
In this chapter, I intend to present Heinrich Rickert’s and Paul
Natorp’s (Marburg) critiques of Ideen I and to offer a response from
a Husserlian point of view. I will do so by addressing two fundamental
issues in phenomenology: the eidetic and the phenomenological dimen-
sion of subjectivity. In a certain sense, Husserl’s formulations in Ideen I
are vulnerable to the critiques raised by these two leading philosophers
of the Neo-Kantian movement. However, if we try to spell out more
accurately Husserl’s position beyond the letter of the Ideen, this vulner-
ability tends to disappear. In particular, Husserl’s concept of eidetic
knowledge turns out to be less in contrast with Rickert’s epistemology
than the two thinkers would have it. The much more fundamental
disagreement revolves around the notion of subjectivity and Husserl’s
related claim that phenomenology is the fundamental science for phi-
losophy. Neo-Kantians in general, and Natorp in particular, are skep-
tical about the possibility of direct descriptions of subjectivity, while
Husserl defines phenomenology as an eidetic science of transcendental
subjectivity.
The two positions, however, do not amount to just two incomparable
visions. Neo-Kantian skepticism towards phenomenology forces the
Husserlian phenomenologist to clarify the meaning of fundamental
concepts such as essence and intuition. Conversely, Husserlian phenom-
enology can help rectify some misunderstandings and strictures that
characterize Neo-Kantian philosophy while nonetheless preserving the
latter’s most valuable epistemological insights.

Eidetics, intuition, and conceptual knowledge

In 1911, after reading Husserl’s article, “Philosophie als strenge
Wissenschaft,” in the first issue of Logos – the newborn official organ

3
See K. Schuhmann, Die Dialektik der Phänomenologie II: Reine Phänomenologie
und phänomenologische Philosophie. Historisch-analytische Monographie über
Husserls “Ideen I” (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973), 3.
Eidetics, intuition, and conceptual knowledge 111

of Southwestern Neo-Kantianism – Rickert wrote an enthusiastic letter

to the founder of phenomenology saying, “I believe that overall our
paths will get closer and closer to one another.”4 It was Rickert himself
who urged Husserl to participate in the Logos project, both as a
member of the scientific board and as a contributor. In Rickert’s eyes,
“Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft” represented a significant step
forward after the Logical Investigations: Husserl was now able to locate
his project explicitly within the philosophical debate of his time in terms
of a scientific philosophy standing in sharp contrast to both naturalism
and historicism. In so doing, phenomenology placed itself within the
same theoretical space as Neo-Kantianism and articulated its stand-
point in opposition to the same rivals.
Considering this thoroughly concordant point of departure, it is
initially puzzling to read Rickert’s strong attack against phenomenol-
ogy in his polemical essay, Die Philosophie des Lebens: Darstellung und
Kritik der philosophischen Modeströmungen unserer Zeit (1920).5 This
short book denounces a trend in early twentieth-century philosophy
that Rickert considers frivolous but dangerously widespread: the
emphasis on life over rationality and on immediate intuition over con-
ceptual knowledge. Surprisingly, Husserl’s phenomenology is listed
together with Dilthey’s, Bergson’s, and Simmel’s Lebensphilosophie
and various forms of biological vitalism as a philosophy “devoid of
principles [prinzipienlos]” that even “elevate[s] the lack of principles to
a philosophical principle”(!)6 What led Rickert to change his opinion of
phenomenology so radically? He explains as follows:
What matters here is obviously not the articulation of the logical in contrast to
the psychological: this, in fact, can only lead to a refusal of a philosophy of
mere life. Rather, what matters is the doctrine of the “vision of essence
[Wesensschau]” which Husserl intends to appoint as fundamental science
for all philosophy and which granted him followers. Albeit with a conscious
one-sidedness and to this extent unfairly, we try to interpret this doctrine, too,
as a contemporary trend connected to the tendencies towards lived-experience
(Erlebnis), considering that phenomenology means the doctrine of a newly
discovered kind of intuitive and immediate phenomena [Erscheinungen].”7

4
E. Husserl, Briefwechsel, vol. 5, Die Neukantianer (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994),
171. Hereafter BW V.
5
H. Rickert, Die Philosophie des Lebens: Darstellung und Kritik der
philosophischen Modeströmungen unserer Zeit (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1920).
6
Ibid., 50. 7 Ibid., 28–29.
112 Husserl’s Ideen among the Neo-Kantians

In the footnote at the end of this passage, Rickert explicitly cites

Husserl’s Ideen I as the source for his critical understanding of
Wesensschau.
It is important to underscore that Rickert’s critique is not directed
against the concept of essence as such. The idea that a scientific philos-
ophy must yield essential, non-empirical knowledge was already prom-
inent in Husserl’s “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft,” the essay
about which Rickert was quite enthusiastic.8 The controversial element,
which was not as prominent in Husserl’s previous work, but is strongly
emphasized in the Ideen, is the claim that essential knowledge is a form
of intuitive knowledge, legitimately comparable to sensory vision.
Husserl’s statements on this point are famous:
The essence (Eidos) is a new sort of object. Just as the datum of individual or
experiencing intuition is an individual object, so the datum of eidetic intuition
is pure essence. Not a merely external analogy, but a radical community is
present here. Seeing an essence is also precisely an intuition, just as an eidetic
object is precisely an object.9

Later in the book Husserl even reinforces his view by suggesting not
only that essences are objects given intuitively just like perceptual
objects, but also that everyone is good at intuiting essences: “The
truth is that all human beings see ‘Ideen,’ ‘essences,’ and see them, so
to speak, continuously.”10 Indeed, there is something utterly plain and
non-emphatic to Husserl’s presentation of Wesensschau:
Thus, for example, any tone in and of itself has an essence and, highest of all,
the universal essence tone as such, or rather sound as such – taken purely as
the moment that can be singled out intuitively in the individual tone (alone, or
else by comparing one tone with others as ‘something common’).11

On Husserl’s account, to encounter a tone is to encounter a datum of

experience already structured according to some essence before we
reflect phenomenologically upon it. This is why I can wonder, for
instance, whether the whistle I just heard was the whistle of the train
or the whistle of someone calling her dog but not whether what I just
sensed was a tone or a smell. I may be in doubt as to what kind of object
my birthday present is supposed to be, but not as to whether I am

8
See E. Husserl, Philosophy as a Rigorous Science, in E. Husserl, Shorter Works
(University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 173. Hereafter PRS.
9
Ideas I, 9. 10 Ideas I, 41. 11 Ideas I, 8.
Eidetics, intuition, and conceptual knowledge 113

contemplating a physical thing or a mental act. The fundamental differ-

ences in genera that are here at play do not seem to stem from our
intellectual activity; rather, they simply present themselves in experience
in concomitance with the experience of individual data. Accordingly,
there is a sense in which to experience something as a tone means to
experience more than a mere individual datum. For Husserl, this basic
fact has little to do with intellectual concept-formation, and it would be
wrong to understand a situation like the one just mentioned in terms of
the intellect or some hidden faculty being at work, enhancing raw
sensations with non-sensible categories.
Rickert, however, contends that such a fact cannot be produced as an
example of genuine knowledge. Genuine knowledge, for him, is always
the result of conceptual mediation and thus implies a departure from a
merely receptive-intuitive dimension. Knowledge is necessarily discur-
sive, so the claim of some sort of non- or pre-discursive knowledge is for
Rickert a contradictio in adjecto. We attain scientific knowledge only to
the extent that we “re-structure [Umformen]” our immediate intuitions
by means of concepts and, in so doing, bestow upon them order and
articulation. For Rickert, Husserl’s emphasis on essential knowledge
being a form of intuition can be viewed as a particularly clear instance of
what he calls intuitionism, a widespread theoretical “short cut” that
demeans the toil of conceptualization in philosophy by overemphasiz-
ing and misinterpreting the merely receptive role of intuition.12
Vehement critiques against every form of intuitionism are present in
several essays and book chapters and represent the backbone of
Rickert’s philosophical work from the 1920s onwards. In his last jour-
nal article, “Kennen und Erkennen” (published in 1934, more than
twenty years after the publication of Husserl’s Ideen),13 he launches a
further attack against phenomenology by analyzing the very same
example given by Husserl at the outset of the Ideen and offering a

12
In a recent paper Helmut Holzey offers a convincing sketch of the Neo-Kantian
critique of the concept of intuition: H. Holzey, “Neo-Kantianism and
Phenomenology: The Problem of Intuition,” in Luft and Makkreel, Neo-
Kantianism in Contemporary Philosophy, 25–40. However, in spite of the rather
broad formulation in the title, he considers exclusively Natorp’s thought and
ignores Rickert’s contribution on this issue. It seems to me, however, that
Rickert’s critique of phenomenological intuition is actually much more reflective
and sophisticated than Natorp’s.
13
H. Rickert, “Kennen und Erkennen. Kritische Bemerkungen zum theoretischen
Intuitionismus,” Kant Studien 39 (1934): 139–155. Hereafter KE.
114 Husserl’s Ideen among the Neo-Kantians

different account of the way we grasp the “essence” of a tone. That the
addressee of Rickert’s polemic is still Husserl, and in particular
the Husserl of the Ideen, is unmistakable considering the example and
the language Rickert uses. As the title of his paper suggests, there is
a sharp difference between sheer acquaintance [Kenntnis] with the
intuitively given individual tone and scientific knowledge [Erkenntnis]
of the essence of a tone as such. A process of knowledge begins when we
start to analyze the intuited tone and differentiate between several
elements pertaining to it:
The sheer intuition of the tone gives “everything at one fell swoop.”
Knowledge does not and cannot do so. Rather, knowledge dissects through
a number of assertions the single tone – which we perceive intuitively “as a
whole” – into a series of “moments.” Such moments are fused together
immediately and intuitively only in perception. Within knowledge, these
moments must be separated from each other and become the objects of
predications each one for itself.14

It is only after the intuitively given tone undergoes such a dissection

into a variety of moments (intensity, duration, pitch, etc.) that we can
discern the essential moments for any tone whatsoever. Rickert insists,
in open polemic against Husserl’s Wesensschau:
Therein and only therein [in the process of cognitive dissection] do we find
the general “essence” of the tone that we previously intuited in perception.
In other words, only in this way do we attain knowledge of the tone as tone;
of that tone which beforehand we only made acquaintance of intuitively. But
then we moved with our knowledge way beyond intuitive acquaintance.
Such process, which discloses for us the essence of something, can by no
means be understood as a form of . . . intuition. Rather, through our act of
knowledge, we necessarily restructure [umbilden] the cognitional material
given to us in intuition . . . Such restructuring is unavoidable for every
knowledge which endeavors to delve into the general “essence” of
something.15

From a phenomenological point of view it would be all too simple, to

dismiss these critiques by rejecting the notion of intuition Rickert oper-
ates with as too narrow. Indeed, Husserl works with a broad concept of
Anschauung which shares little with Kant’s. Whereas, for Kant, intu-
ition amounts to the blind intake of sense data (at least as far as a finite

14 15
KE, 149. KE, 150.
Eidetics, intuition, and conceptual knowledge 115

intellect is concerned),16 for the Husserl of the Logical Investigations,

intuitions come to fulfill previously empty intentions. This fulfilling
function is exerted by sensuous intuitions when the previously empty
intention is a simple perceptual intention and by a combination of
sensuous and non-sensuous intuitions when the previously empty inten-
tion is a higher-order intention presenting a whole state of affairs, e.g., a
judgment or an aesthetic evaluation.
However, it should be emphasized that Rickert’s point in his critique
of intuitionism is not orthodox Kantian. From Kant’s perspective,
intuition would provide exclusively sensuous material, and therefore,
all non-sensuous components of experience must derive somehow from
the intellect. In another essay, written a few years before “Kennen und
Erkennen”, Rickert was adamant that not only sensuous material but
also “non-sensuous [material] is immediately given in intuition”17 and
that “the non-sensuous [material] lies in our immediate lived-
experiences or intuitions beside the sensuous [material] as a wholly
autonomous ‘Quality’.”18 To speak the language of phenomenology,
not only things but also meanings are in a robust sense given and not
imposed on or applied to sensuous content. In the example of a tone, not
only sensuous acoustic data are given in intuition but also elements of
generality that we subsequently express with concepts such as pitch and
intensity. Rickert would be of one mind with Husserl in emphasizing the
necessity to broaden the concept of intuition and extend it to elements of
generality and meaning within experience.
However, Rickert wants to underscore that the intuitive givenness of
elements of generality cannot yet be considered knowledge, let alone
essential, scientific knowledge. Essential knowledge is, for Rickert, a
process of transformation of the given according to demands and
criteria that are not extracted from the given but rather flow from the
cognizing agent. Of course, we do not have intuition only of the sensible
but also, in Rickert’s language, of the “intelligible.”19 But intuition only
provides the material, be it sensible or intelligible. It is our task as
rational agents thereupon to carve our concepts so that we can create
a systematic theoretical kosmos out of the scattered fragments of

16
I am obviously referring to empirical intuition and not to the pure intuition of
space and time in Kant’s transcendental aesthetics, a doctrine that both Husserl
and the Neo-Kantians rejected as untenable for reasons that need not occupy us
here.
17
MPU, 128. 18 MPU, 136. 19 MPU, 140.
116 Husserl’s Ideen among the Neo-Kantians

intelligibility given to us in sheer intuition and thereby bring about

essential knowledge. We need to reorganize conceptually also the
non-sensuous elements of intelligibility given in intuition in order
to transform a fragmented “chaos of manifestations [Gewühl von
Erscheinungen]” into a proper mundus intelligibilis.20 Husserl’s
emphasis on intuition is, for Rickert, only a rhetorical expedient to
downplay the role of conceptual constructions in his own thought and
in so doing create a result which is appealing to younger generations.
This is why he charges Husserl of practicing an “ostrich philosophy.
Due to fear of constructions he sticks his head in the sand of intuitions,
in order not to have to see the constructions he cannot do without.”21
The same line of criticism is expressed in Paul Natorp’s review of
Husserl’s Ideen, published in the 1917/18 issue of Logos. After declar-
ing his interest in Husserl’s project of a pure phenomenology, one that
he perceives as close to his own project of a critical psychology, Natorp
focuses on Husserl’s concept of intuition and essence. He expresses his
concerns by questioning Husserl’s talk of an “originarily giving act or
consciousness” that presents us intuitively with essences.22 The word
Anschauung suggests a “passive receiving”23 of the corresponding
object. However, Husserl’s insistence on Wesensschau being a giving
act (ein gebender Akt) seems to suggest that, in this connection, we
cannot understand intuition in terms of mere receptivity. Natorp sug-
gests, paraphrasing Kant, that with a priori knowledge “there is an
originary appropriation of something that was by no means already
there beforehand.”24 In other words, we still can use metaphors such as
grasping, seeing, and intuiting to underscore how we do not arbitrarily
create a priori knowledge but rather follow a necessity that belongs to
the ‘things themselves.’ On the other hand, we have to be aware of the
fact that a priori knowledge pertains to a more fundamental “continuity
of thought”25 that connects, disconnects, distinguishes, and articulates.
Every isolated positing of an essence conceals the underlying “process
of thought, which is the authentic ‘giver’ of essences.”26 The emphasis
on the processual trait of eidetic knowledge is thus manifestly a point on
which Rickert and Natorp are in agreement against Husserl.

20
See MPU, 139. For a more thorough discussion of this point see Chapter 1.
21
MPU, 117.
22
P. Natorp, “Husserls ‘Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie’,” in H. Noack (ed.),
Husserl (Darmstadt: WBG, 1973), 40. Hereafter HIP.
23
HIP, 40. 24 HIP, 41. 25 HIP, 42. 26 HIP, 43.
Eidetics, intuition, and conceptual knowledge 117

Natorp reinforces this idea by referring explicitly to Plato’s thought,

considering that Husserl always hinted at Plato as a major source of
inspiration concerning eidetics.27 Natorp, an esteemed interpreter of
Plato, decrees that Husserl “did reach Plato’s eidos, however, he stood
still at the first level of Platonism, i.e., the level of rigid eidē ‘standing
there in being’ motionlessly. He did not follow Plato’s last step, which
was actually Plato’s greatest and most characteristic step: bringing the
eidē into motion and fluidifying them into the ultimate continuity of the
process of thought.”28 Natorp refers here to Plato’s dialectical method
as the way to grasp the essence of things.29
To summarize, we can identify two closely related critiques of
Husserl’s account of eidetic knowledge in Ideen I from the Neo-
Kantian camp. (1) Eidetic knowledge cannot be intuitive because
intuition only provides the material of knowledge, be it sensible or
intelligible. Knowledge is necessarily conceptual-discursive, and con-
ceptuality involves a departure from the immediacy of intuition.
(2) Eidetic knowledge is processual. It is the result of a thought-process
that needs to be taken into account if we want to be able to justify the
validity of our eidetic insights.
Husserl’s reaction to this criticism is documented in some of his
lecture courses and manuscripts. Overall, he is rather dismissive of it
and does not seem willing to take it too seriously. In his 1922 lecture
“Introduction to Philosophy,” for example, he offers a brief retort to
those who criticize intuition as a valid method, in which he simply
insists that philosophers should only talk about things whose evidence
they are able to see in the first place. Knowing from one of his letters that
Husserl received and read Die Philosophie des Lebens,30 it is reasonable
to assume that the addressee of his retort is precisely Rickert, although
Rickert’s name is not mentioned explicitly. This is Husserl’s defense of
phenomenological intuitionism in “Introduction to Philosophy”:

27
Karl-Heinz Lembeck points out correctly that Natorp’s intention in his review
can be viewed as the attempt to give a new interpretation to Husserl’s
concept of intuition based on a ‘dynamic’ understanding of Plato’s theory of
Ideen. K.-H. Lembeck, “Begründungsphilosophische Perspektiven: Husserl und
Natorp über Anschauung,” Phänomenologische Forschungen (2003): 97–108.
28
HIP, 44.
29
This is not the place to expand further on Natorp’s idiosyncratic reading of Plato.
See P. Natorp, Plato’s Theory of Ideas: An Introduction to Idealism (Sankt
Augustin: Academia, 2004).
30
See Husserl’s letter to Rickert of August 9, 1920, BW V, 182–183.
118 Husserl’s Ideen among the Neo-Kantians

Being radical means delving down to the ultimate roots, seeing these very
roots, and, as a matter of principle, drawing all thought (both its details
and its principles) exclusively from such self-givenness. Unfortunately, the
much-abused word “intuition” permits one to categorize phenomenology
under the heading of “intuitionist philosophy,” and thus place it under the
same umbrella with all sorts of mythical enthusiasm and unscientific
extravagancies.
Phenomenology, as the expression of a will to absolutely honest and
justified science, neither appeals to nor builds upon supernatural illumina-
tions. Phenomenology ignores all kinds of mysterious “intellectual intuitions”
and it offers no technique through which devotees would be enhanced with
unheard-of spiritual powers. Phenomenology is a field for the conceivably
most prosaic kind of work conducted in a spirit of highest and most radical
conscientiousness. In phenomenology, the “method of intuition” has a simple
and prosaic meaning. It means that I only judge reliably when besides mean-
ing something, I am also in a position to present [ausweisen] and exhibit
[aufweisen] what I mean. The most radical kind of exhibiting is seeing or
something analogous to ordinary seeing, and even this principle must be
exhibited through an act of exhibition via pure seeing.31

It is perfectly understandable that Husserl was frustrated about

Rickert’s mischaracterization of phenomenology as irrationalistic intui-
tionism. However, precisely the fact that ‘intuition’ is a much-abused
term in philosophy seems to call for a more thorough explanation of
what intuition means in phenomenology.
Both remarks by Rickert and Natorp are strong. To reiterate, they
claim that (1) eidetic knowledge is conceptual-discursive rather than
intuitive and (2) eidetic knowledge is processual rather than a momen-
tary insight. The benevolent interpreter of Husserl is compelled to go
beyond the letter of Ideen I in order to provide a satisfying answer to
them. In answering the first critique, it is safe to concede to Rickert that
intuition cannot per se already qualify as knowledge. Husserl, however,
does not seem to claim otherwise in Ideen I. Instead he wants to
emphasize the fact that the scope of intuition is not restricted to sensi-
bility but includes ideal objects and, among them, essences to which all a
priori valid predications pertaining to a certain sector of reality (in
Husserl’s terms: ontological region) can be referred. He does not
dwell extensively on how the intuitive givenness of essences can func-
tion as the basis for a science of essences, although he makes clear that

31
Hua XXXV, 288.
Eidetics, intuition, and conceptual knowledge 119

precisely this is the project he envisions under the heading “phenomen-

ology.” Accordingly, and in order to do justice to Husserl’s project, we
have to draw a distinction between intuitive vision of essence and
conceptual knowledge of essence, i.e., between Wesensschau and
Wesenserkenntnis.32 Having an intuitive vision of essence does not yet
amount to having a fully articulated knowledge of that essence.
Husserl’s awareness of this distinction can be exemplified with a brief
anticipation of his studies on nature and spirit, which shall be detailed in
later chapters. In the second book of Ideas, which was only published
posthumously, Husserl endeavors to articulate both an ontology of
nature and an ontology of spirit, and in so doing to clarify the distinc-
tion between the natural and human sciences. On the one hand he
points out that we have to interrogate our pre-predicative experience
and gain an insight into the intuitively given essence of each domain. On
the other hand he underscores the necessity thereupon to select the
correct conceptuality to build up an eidetic science of nature and an

32
The distinction between Wesensschau and Wesenserkenntnis has been recently
addressed and framed in terms of an intuition of essence “upriver” and
“downriver” of an eidetic judgment in C. Majolino, “La Partition du réel:
remarques sur l’eidos, la phantasia, l’effondrement du monde et l’être absolu de la
conscience,” in C. Ierna, H. Jacobs, and F. Mattens (eds.), Philosophy,
Phenomenology, Sciences – Essays in Commemoration of Edmund Husserl
(Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), 573–660. Here, 593. Whereas the intuition of
essence ‘upriver’ of an eidetic judgment simply consists in the possibility of
viewing an individual as an example of its class (this tone is also a tone), through a
corresponding shift of attitude, the transition to a pure eidos and thereby the
intuitive vision of an essence as fulfilling intuitively an eidetic judgment requires a
specific method of disengagement of reality and fantasy-variation. I cannot
expand further on this point here but I wish to refer to Majolino’s excellent work
for an extended and convincing treatment. It should be noticed, however, that in
Husserl there are at least two different problems regarding the status of eidetics,
which he does not always keep distinct as they should be. One problem is how we
bring already formulated judgments entailing eidetic claims to phenomenological
fulfillment. This requires going through a number of methodologically
regimented steps, which should help us discern whether what we judge to be
essential actually is essential. A different problem is how we form eidetic
judgments in the first place. This requires that we are somehow already aware,
prior to all judging, that the things we encounter and the experiences we have are
structured according to stable regularities, of which we can meaningfully ask
whether they are merely empirical or essential. It is in the process of testing the
eidetic necessity of recurring properties of experienced individuals and individual
experiences that we set the basis for the constitution of objects of a new kind
(essences), which subsequently can become the subject matter of discursive
predication.
120 Husserl’s Ideen among the Neo-Kantians

eidetic science of spirit. There is a kind of conceptuality that faithfully

brings to expression what has been seen through Wesensschau and a
kind of conceptuality that is at odds with the corresponding
Wesensschau.
The conceptuality of mechanistic causality, for instance, is at odds
with the kind of eidetic insight that characterizes our experience of
mentality, revealing it as a domain of experiences linked in terms of
interrelated motivation. In order to express this eidetic insight and to
grant truly phenomenological scientificity to our ontology of mentality,
we need to replace mechanistic conceptuality with the conceptuality of
motivation. This is why Husserl, for example, characterizes natural
causality as “extra-essential [außerwesentlich]”33 when we consider
the unfolding of psychic life. We can, of course, employ the conceptual-
ity of mechanistic causality in order to explain the connection between
two mental events, say: (A) “reading in the newspaper about the eco-
nomic crisis” and (B) “deciding to run to the bank to withdraw all my
money.” We could, for instance, observe the configurations of neuronal
activity in the brain in A and B and, by way of repeatedly observing and
hypothesizing, finally discover the causal law regulating the transition
from A-like states to B-like states.34 The kind of knowledge attained in
this case is by no means false or trivial for a phenomenologist.
Rather, as far as the mental is concerned, this kind of knowledge
would be deemed extra-essential, because the conceptuality at work
does not match with the eidetic intuition of the purely motivational
connection linking A and B, the essential features of which should be
brought to conceptual expression in a significantly different way.
Essential knowledge is concept-formation in accord with an underlying
vision of essence. Extra-essential knowledge is concept-formation
following theoretical demands other than those suggested by an under-
lying vision of essence.35 In this sense, and in keeping with the spirit of

33
E. Husserl, MS A VI 16/25a, edited by U. Melle, published in T. Nenon and
L. Embree (eds.), Issues in Husserl’s Ideen II (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996), 1–8.
Here 2.
34
Whether there really are such things – i.e., causal laws formulable in
mathematical terms that regulate the transition from a state belonging to a certain
psychic class and states of a different class – is a complex question with no
obvious answer, in spite of all recent enthusiasm for so-called reductive theories
of the mental.
35
Interestingly, this position comes close to that of Rickert’s student Emil Lask. In
his insightful reflections on Lask’s philosophy, Steven G. Crowell writes: “Thus
Eidetics, intuition, and conceptual knowledge 121

Rickert’s critique, essential knowledge is not some sort of mystical

intensification of the vision of essence but an essentially different kind
of accomplishment. The first is concept-formation on the basis of the
latter. Troubles and crises arise when extra-essential knowledge sup-
plants essential knowledge and thereby blurs the underlying vision of
essence.
After establishing the distinction between Wesensschau and
Wesenserkenntnis, we can also argue for a certain superiority of
Husserl’s position over Rickert’s: Rickert has no robust account of the
boundaries imposed upon concept-formation by experience.36 We can-
not form concepts of any sort if we intend to produce essential knowl-
edge about a given sector of reality. We have to hold fast to an
underlying eidetic intuition and orient our conceptualization to a faith-
ful articulation of the essence as it is given intuitively. In a certain sense,
it holds true that intuitions are reorganized in cognition, as Rickert
would have it. This is true for both empirical and eidetic intuitions.
But not every form of conceptual reorganization is equally legitimate for
every kind of intuition. If we want to attain essential knowledge, we
rather have to mold our concepts according to an underlying essential
intuition; in Husserlian language, we have to make sure that the con-
nections of concepts that we use to describe an essence can really receive
intuitive fulfillment.

the problem of knowledge appears as the problem of choosing (or discovering)

the proper category for given material . . . Error, on this view, consists in
predicating of some material a category in which it does not stand.” Crowell,
Husserl, Heidegger and the Space of Meaning, 63–64. However, Husserl is less
exclusive than Lask. Extra-essential knowledge, although not in accord with an
underlying vision of essence (in Lask’s language: category), is not to be deemed
erroneous outright. It is regrettable that Lask passed away before having the
opportunity to read Husserl’s Ideen which would have offered precious insights
to carry forward his own philosophical project had he been able to develop it
further. Crowell, however, wrongly attributes to Rickert, too, the position that
“the sciences are rooted in pretheoretical experience, and their governing
categories will differ according to the way their objects present themselves in such
experience” (Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger and the Space of Meaning, 275). While
Rickert does acknowledge a kind of proto-conceptualization happening through
natural language in pre-scientific experience, he couldn’t be further from the view
shared by both Husserl and Lask that pre-scientific experience somehow dictates
the categorial boundaries in which the sciences can legitimately operate.
36
On the contrary, the idea of experiential boundaries imposed on concept-
formation, if this latter is to attain essential knowledge, represents the crucial
novelty that stems from Husserl’s eidetics.
122 Husserl’s Ideen among the Neo-Kantians

The above considerations give us resources to answer the second

critical remark, according to which eidetic knowledge is necessarily a
processual and not a momentary insight. Natorp is right to quote Plato
and highlight the difference between Husserl’s and Plato’s conceptions
of essence. Famously, Plato maintains that we can never “see” essences
directly in our earthly life. For Plato, the act of ‘seeing an essence’ (on
earth) is a metaphor for a dialectical and thus mediated act of discov-
ering true relations in the intelligible realm. We only “see” an essence,
albeit imperfectly, to the extent that we are able to produce a definition
and justify it within a system of logically connected definitions by means
of dialectical reasoning. This is why “seeing an essence” and “produc-
ing a definition” are fundamentally synonymous in Plato’s thought. By
recasting Plato’s conception, Natorp thus fails to distinguish between
Wesensschau and Wesenserkenntnis and seems to suggest that on closer
inspection Wesensschau is actually nothing but Wesenserkenntnis and,
to be precise, Wesenserkenntnis before logical and conceptual justifica-
tion is undertaken.37 Natorp represents here a longstanding tradition in
philosophy according to which essences manifest themselves only in
cognition. On this account, ‘seeing an essence’ amounts, by necessity, to
‘having a successful intellective grasp of a general truth.’ The kind of
subjective act in which essences manifest themselves in the first place
would be, accordingly, a judgment articulating a true definition.
Definitions are necessarily relational and involve a thought-process of
comparison and distinction in order to be articulated. Therefore, no
essence can be posited in isolation from the continuity of thought that
makes definition possible.
Husserl, however, does not follow Plato and the tradition stemming
from his philosophy on this point. By simply seeing an essence we do not
necessarily acquire knowledge of some sort. For Husserl, a vision of
essence is not the culmination of a cognitive process of abstraction from
the objects in the visible world. Essences are not entities, the viewing of
which coincides with or is a metaphor for successful cognitive achieve-
ment. Rather, essences are for Husserl objects in a robust formal-logical
sense, i.e., substrates for true or false predications. We thus have to

37
For a brief but illuminating characterization of the Neo-Kantian idea of
justification in transcendental philosophy and its difference from Husserl’s
phenomenology see Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger and the Space of Meaning,
173–174.
Eidetics, intuition, and conceptual knowledge 123

distinguish between experiential access to essences and discursive-

conceptual articulation of essences. These two moments are distinct
although we generally consider essences for theoretical purposes and
are, therefore, interested from the very beginning in carrying out con-
ceptual articulations of them. This, on Husserl’s account, might be the
reason why the Platonic tradition conflated predicative articulation of
essences via dialectics with the simple seeing of an essence on the basis of
the individual data of experience.
Husserl’s following remarks are eloquent enough:
[An essence is] something that can be thought of vaguely or distinctly, which
can be made the subject of true and false predications;38 essences can be an
intuitive consciousness of essences, in a certain manner they can also be seized
upon, without becoming ‘objects about which’;39 like other objects [essences]
can at times be intended correctly, at times falsely, as, e.g., in false geometrical
thinking.40 The consciousness of an essence’s givenness is often not adequate
ideation, i.e., it is not ideation, in which the essence comes to a full and
authentic givenness.41

Considering these quotations, the last one in particular, we can see why
Husserl does not see a contradiction in the intuitive and at the same time
actively “giving” aspect of Wesensschau. The process of eidetic cogni-
tion starts with the mostly vague and unthematic awareness that a given
datum of experience belongs to a certain class. This is because its
manifest properties display associative similarities and overlap with
those of previously experienced objects of the same class. In this kind
of consciousness, our apprehending regard is guided by what Husserl
calls empirical types. Empirical types could be characterized as bundles
of anticipations formed over the course of past experiences. Thereby,
the merely contingent features of the apprehended object are fused
together with its specific, essential features. What is essential to that
particular kind of object does not stand out in a way that allows for
further theoretical determination. Nonetheless, already at the level of

38
Ideas I, 10. 39 Ideas I, 33.
40
Ideas I, 44. Neither Plato nor Natorp would be willing to accept false geometrical
thinking as a case in which a vision of essence is nonetheless operative. For
Husserl, on the contrary, this would be a case of vision of essence followed by an
unsuccessful attempt to gain knowledge of the corresponding geometrical
essence.
41
E. Husserl, Vorlesungen über Bedeutungslehre. Sommersemester 1908,
Husserliana, vol. 26 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1987), 108.
124 Husserl’s Ideen among the Neo-Kantians

simple perception and type-based apprehension, the objects encoun-

tered in experience implicitly harbor essences ‘in’ them. That this is
Husserl’s view is confirmed by the following passage stemming from a
1918 manuscript commenting on the Ideen:
If one moves behind logical consciousness, back into sensuous consciousness,
it is possible that a red sensuous object appears without being apprehended as
red, thereby maintaining its sensuous unity, within which, then, the implied
red maintains its unity. The essence individuates itself in this object and in a
certain sense it is entailed in it: however the essence is entailed in the object
implicitly. For the essence itself it is indifferent whether it is grasped here or
there on the basis of examples, whether this or that object is given as one of its
individuations, whether it is categorially grasped in this or that way.42

The first step toward the full vision of an essence consists in thematizing
the vague awareness of an object’s belonging to a given class and
subsequently testing the ‘essentiality’ of its salient properties with the
aid of a methodological procedure that Husserl later dubbed ‘eidetic
variation’.43 When we perform an eidetic variation, we actively move
from the awareness of a certain property as belonging to a given
instance, through a generalization of that property for all instances of
its class, and finally to the redirection of our focus from the infinite
variety of possible instances to an object of a new kind: the essence of
the class at issue, to which the property is attributed.
With the example of a tone, we start by hearing a tone and being
aware of it as a tone. Subsequently, after focusing on its salient proper-
ties while holding the whole given tone firmly in grasp, we can see with
evidence that some of these properties must be present a priori in “any
tone whatever.” Varying the given tone and producing in our imagina-
tion further examples of tones will let the essential properties of a tone in

42
E. Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen
Philosophie. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie.
Zweiter Halbband: Ergänzende Texte (1912–1929), Husserliana, vol. 3/2
(The Hague: Nijhoff, 1976), 581. Hereafter Hua III/2. My italics.
43
It should be remarked that the procedure of eidetic variation is not explicitly
present in the Ideen and is introduced by Husserl only later, especially in his
lectures of transcendental logic in the 1920s. However, it has been convincingly
shown that the method of eidetic variation is nothing but a refinement of the
procedure employed by Husserl from the start in his phenomenological analyses.
See D. Lohmar, “Die phänomenologische Methode der Wesensschau und ihre
Präzisierung als eidetische Variation,” Phänomenologische Forschungen (2005),
65–91.
Eidetics, intuition, and conceptual knowledge 125

general separate from the purely contingent properties. At this point, we

can shift our attention from the infinite variety of possible examples to
a new object that is intuited as the ideal carrier of all the features
pertaining to any tone whatsoever. The “originarily giving act” of
Wesensschau is thus not, as Natorp would have it, a hidden construc-
tion or, as Plato would have it, the result of dialectical reasoning but a
move from the unthematic to the thematic, from the implicit to the
explicit in order to pick out what is essential to given kinds of objects.
At this point, and only at this point, are we ready to articulate con-
ceptual knowledge of essence and, for instance, write down the sentence
‘to the essence tone belong pitch and intensity.’ Note that at the begin-
ning of this process, when we just heard a tone, we already heard
something having pitch and intensity. However, we most likely did
not seize on pitch and intensity as discrete properties, and we certainly
did not spend time sieving through the tone to isolate pitch and intensity
as essential properties from other merely contingent properties. The
initial experience of a tone is characterized by a set of properties
‘fused together,’ as it were, and it is guided by the empirical type
‘tone,’ which we formed over the course of our foregoing experience.
Moving in a further step to consider the tone’s salient properties should
be considered a shift of focus in the overarching experience of the tone,
rather than an achievement of our discursive-conceptual capacities.
Moreover, it is not enough to discriminate between properties that are
in some way always recurring, such as pitch and intensity, and proper-
ties that are merely accidental, such as, say, the length of the tone’s
duration. It is only when we engage in a process of variation, in which
we disengage all the empirical, contingent experiences of tones we had,
and range over an indefinite manifold of possible tones, that the essen-
tiality of certain properties will stand out. Pitch and intensity, to stay
with our example, are then recognized as being essential properties of
any tone whatsoever, rather than empirically recurring features of all
tones that we hitherto happened to hear and of those we will happen to
hear in the future. Redirecting the ascription of properties identified as
essential from the indefinite manifold of possible tones to an object of a
new kind (the essence ‘tone’) is a theoretically relevant move to the
extent that it inaugurates a new sphere of inquiry, in which we do not
operate with variants and instances of empirical items but with a stable
and indefinitely accessible class of ideal objects. There is no need to have
further experiences of tones in order to hold fast to the truth of the
126 Husserl’s Ideen among the Neo-Kantians

judgment “to the essence ‘tone’ belong pitch and intensity” because this
judgment now intends an ideal object of a new kind that is distinct from
the variety of instances on the basis of which it was initially constituted.
To recapitulate, the essence is ‘given’ to us in three guises: (1) per
speculum, as it were, i.e., through the lens of the individual that we
choose to view as an example of its class; (2) through the process of
imaginative variation, as a new ideal object that carries its own deter-
minations and can at any time be referred back to an infinite variety of
possible individuals; (3) as the fulfilling factor of a potentially infinite
number of eidetic judgments, that is, as the correlate of indefinitely
articulable Wesenserkenntnis. However, a synthesis of coincidence
runs through all these forms of consciousness of an essence. One and
the same essence is implicitly, unthematically, present at first, then it is
made the object of explicit consideration and finally it is cognized via
connections of concepts, of which it provides the intuitive fulfillment.
To sum up and conclude this section: I argue that the problems raised
by Rickert and Natorp about Husserl’s theory of essence can be over-
come if we hold fast to (1) a robust distinction between Wesensschau
and Wesenserkenntnis and (2) an understanding of the giving act of
Wesensschau as a movement from the unthematic to the thematic and
not as a hidden, unexplicated process of conceptual thought.44

Difficulties with an eidetic science of consciousness

After the distinction between unthematic, vague awareness of an
essence, vision of essence, and knowledge of essence has been estab-
lished we are equipped with the appropriate theoretical tools to face the
next challenge posed to Ideen I by the Neo-Kantians. This second
challenge hits upon another crucial point of Husserlian phenomenol-
ogy: its self-understanding as “a descriptive eidetic doctrine of tran-
scendentally pure lived experiences [Erlebnisse]”45 and the connected
claim to be, as such, the most fundamental of all sciences. The under-
lying issue is manifestly one and the same, since the fundamentality
Husserl claims for phenomenology rests on its investigating the domain

44
In this sense, as Nicolas De Warren aptly emphasizes, “an ‘intuition of essence’
requires a complex form of activity and passivity.” N. De Warren, “On Husserl’s
Essentialism,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 14/2 (2006):
255–270. Here 262.
45
Ideas I, 167, translation modified.
An eidetic science of consciousness 127

of being presupposed by all further domains of being, namely, lived-

experience. However, for the sake of clarity, it can be fruitfully articu-
lated in two sub-points, addressed respectively by Natorp and by
Rickert. The first sub-point is whether the eidetic method presented
above is really adequate for a philosophical study of subjectivity and
experience. The second sub-point is whether the concept of phenom-
enon, on which phenomenology rests, is really as fundamental as
Husserl would have it, and therefore whether a phenomenology per se
is fit to carry the burden of being the most fundamental of all sciences.
Let us start with the first sub-point and turn once more to Natorp’s
review, in order to then conclude with a consideration of the second
sub-point.
After a paraphrase of the chapters of Ideen I devoted to the phenom-
enological reduction and the disclosure of pure consciousness, Natorp
focuses on Husserl’s claim that every positing of being and value must
refer back to a positing consciousness that is not in turn posited on the
basis of something else, but rather is immediately given. This positing
consciousness is pure consciousness conceived of as “phenomenological
residuum”46 after all further positings of being have been suspended via
epoché. Its purity consists in its independency from empirical being and,
in particular, from an empirical body. Its ‘conscious’ aspect depends on
the fact that after the performance of the phenomenological epoché we
are still dwelling in the realm of accessible experiences, which we can
thematize and study in a direct, intuition-based fashion.
According to Husserl, the kind of task connected to this discovery of
pure consciousness is a description of its general structure (intention-
ality) and of the different classes of experience (perception, recollection,
fantasy) from an eidetic point of view. But, Natorp asks, is the kind of
knowledge that we thus acquire really essential knowledge of pure
consciousness?47 In other passages of his work Husserl characterizes
the nexus of Erlebnisse as a whole, not as a patchwork of juxtaposed
experiences but as an endless and continuous stream. But then Natorp
argues that, on closer inspection, “the stream in its streaming is some-
thing other than what can be grasped and fixed in reflection.”48
Certainly, to a reflective gaze, pure consciousness appears as a
self-contained nexus of lived experiences of different kinds.
However – Natorp stands here very close to Rickert’s remarks discussed

46 47 48
Ideas I, 65. HIP, 49. HIP, 50.
128 Husserl’s Ideen among the Neo-Kantians

above – “the ‘immediateness’ of pure consciousness [i.e., pure con-

sciousness as it appears to a reflective gaze] is not already as such also
immediately known [erkannt] or knowable.”49
One could rephrase Natorp’s concern employing the Husserlian
conceptuality worked out at the end of the previous section.
According to that framework, pure consciousness manifests itself in a
certain way under our reflective regard. However, the sheer thematiza-
tion of pure consciousness in reflection is not yet knowledge of pure
consciousness. We should ask ourselves, according to the above dis-
tinctions, whether the eidetic knowledge of consciousness envisioned by
Husserl really catches what is essential to consciousness! If our eidetic
insight tells us that consciousness is essentially a stream, then we will
have to work out concepts and methods of investigation that do justice
to its streaming nature, provided we want to achieve essential and not
extra-essential knowledge. But if we then set out to analyze Erlebnisse
(lived experiences), treating them as isolated objective units, and, fur-
thermore, if we try to ‘extract’ from them static essential structures, such
as “the eidos of perception,” “the eidos of recollection,” and “the eidos
of imagination,” are we not missing precisely what Husserl himself
acknowledged as the essential trait of consciousness, namely, its being
a stream? In fact, Natorp reads Husserl as making precisely this
mistake:
But in this way [i.e., via an eidetic analysis], is the overflowing stream of
consciousness not brought to a halt against its own nature and is its concrete-
ness not resolved into a sum of abstractions, in particular if thereby (following
Husserl) the singular experience is immediately grasped in ‘eidetic
generality’?50

Natorp’s counterproposal, presented in his Allgemeine Psychologie, for

dealing philosophically with the stream-like nature of consciousness
can be left aside here.51 Rather, we should try to answer Natorp’s
challenge using Husserlian resources. A first, somewhat obvious but
in no way trivial remark is that Natorp’s statement that “consciousness
is essentially a stream” is not itself a stream but rather a piece of eidetic

49
Ibid. 50 HIP, 53.
51
This is what he called “reconstructive method.” For a full-fledged account of
Natorp’s reconstructive method see Sebastian Luft, “Reconstruction and
Reduction: Natorp and Husserl on Method and the Question of Subjectivity,” in
Luft and Makkreel, Neo-Kantianism in Contemporary Philosophy, 59–91.
An eidetic science of consciousness 129

knowledge, based on eidetic intuition and conceptually expressed.

Accordingly, we cannot escape eidetic knowledge or, at least, eidetic
claims about consciousness if what we want is a descriptive science of
consciousness. Furthermore, correctly executed Wesensschau reveals
that consciousness is not just a stream but rather a stream that assumes
very specific forms. I do not know what perceptions, recollections,
expectations, and fantasies I will have in the future, but I know a priori
that I will have all of them or, in other words, that the forms which my
conscious life assumes will be necessarily and exclusively perceptions,
recollections, expectations, fantasies, and the like. Again, this insight is
just as essential as the one revealing that consciousness is essentially a
stream. Metaphorically, there is a difference between a formless torren-
tial stream and a stream that flows obediently between well-formed
banks. Consciousness resembles much more the second kind of stream
than the first. In this sense, the different classes of lived-experience and
their eidetic investigation are not abstract falsifications of conscious-
ness’s streaming nature. Rather, within the Husserlian project of a
science of essences, such a classification goes hand in hand with it.
Phenomenologically speaking, we need both an eidetic study of
Erlebnisse and their basic intentional structure as well as an eidetic
study of the stream in which all these Erlebnisse are constituted.
Corresponding respectively to these two tasks are what Husserl calls
static phenomenology and genetic phenomenology. Static phenomen-
ology distinguishes and describes different classes of experiences,
whereas genetic phenomenology studies how experiences come about
on the basis of more rudimentary elements, such as sensations or
instincts, and how they are connected together through temporality
and association. The influence of Natorp’s thought on Husserl’s devel-
opment of a “genetic method” has been rightly emphasized by several
scholars.52 However, in a way that some scholarly work does not seem

52
The first to underscore this influence was Iso Kern in his monumental work
Husserl und Kant: Eine Untersuchung über Husserls Verhältnis zu Kant und zum
Neukantianismus (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1964), 366–367. Recently, Natorp’s
influence on Husserl has been the object of renewed attention: D. Welton, “The
Systematicity of Husserl’s Transcendental Philosophy,” in D. Welton (ed.), The
New Husserl: A Critical Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003),
255–288; S. Luft, “Natorp, Husserl und das Problem der Kontinuität von
Leben, Wissenschaft und Philosophie,” Phänomenologische Forschungen
(2006): 99–134.
130 Husserl’s Ideen among the Neo-Kantians

to adequately appreciate, Husserl’s move towards genetic phenomen-

ology does not mean a move away from static phenomenology or a
change of mind about fundamental phenomenological concepts such as
essence and intuition.
Husserl was well aware of the dynamic nature of consciousness
much earlier than his publication of Ideen I53 as indicated in his famous
1904/05 lectures on time-consciousness.54 While it is true that the
investigations carried out in these lectures are not yet termed genetic
phenomenology they foreshadow the subsequent articulation of genetic
phenomenology: even in the investigation of the dynamic structures of
consciousness, the phenomenologist is not concerned with facts but
with essences. In this connection, such essences are the underpinning
structures of a dynamic process. However, they are not themselves
dynamic but, rather, as Husserl puts it in a later manuscript, “rigid
lawfulnesses”55 [starre Gesetzlichkeiten], where “rigid” means invar-
iable, selfsame validities.56 For these, too, the ultimate source of legiti-
macy must be intuition and not mere logical consistency or speculative

53
This is the substance of Husserl’s response to Natorp’s critical review of Ideen
when in a letter to the Neo-Kantian philosopher he writes: “I overcame the stage
of static Platonism already more than one decade ago” (letter to Natorp, June 29,
1918, BW V, 135–136. Quoted in Luft, “Natorp, Husserl und das Problem der
Kontinuität von Leben, Wissenschaft und Philosophie,” 106 n. 18).
54
Interestingly, in spite of all his emphasis on the dynamic nature of consciousness,
Natorp does not have a theory of time-consciousness. I cannot expand here on
Husserl’s investigations into time-consciousness and its import in genetic
phenomenology. An illuminating study of these issues is offered in N. De Warren,
Husserl and the Promise of Time: Subjectivity in Transcendental Phenomenology
(Cambridge University Press, 2009).
55
E. Husserl, Die Lebenswelt. Auslegungen der vorgegebenen Welt und ihrer
Konstitution. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1916–1937), Husserliana, vol. 39
(Dordrecht: Springer, 2008), 11. My italics. Hereafter Hua XXXIX.
56
Sebastian Luft seems to downplay this important point when he writes:
“Obviously, with a modification of phenomenology’s theme the characterizing
trait of eidetic science undergoes a transformation too. Accordingly, an eidetic
science of transcendental subjectivity deals with ‘laws of genesis’, such as the laws
of motivation and association” (Luft, “Natorp, Husserl und das Problem der
Kontinuität von Leben, Wissenschaft und Philosophie,” 124–125). This
statement can be read as suggesting that static phenomenology deals with
essences, whereas genetic phenomenology deals with eidetic laws. This is
misleading for two interconnected reasons. (1) The concept of eidetic law is not
peculiar to genetic phenomenology. Rather, every essence – also ‘static’ essences
such as the essence of a tone or the essence of perception – can be converted into
eidetic laws of the form “for every conceivable x: if x is an F then x is a G”
(R. Sowa, “Husserls Idee einer nicht-empirischen Wissenschaft von der
Phenomenology’s foundational claim 131

construction. Husserl’s preoccupation with intuition and intuitive legit-

imatizing even in the difficult field of genetic phenomena is witnessed,
for instance, by his untiring work on the so-called time-diagrams, which
are meant to contribute precisely an intuitive legitimatizing for the
complicated genetic structure that characterizes time-consciousness.57
Natorp’s critical remarks on Husserl’s alleged static Platonism are
thus only acceptable insofar as they gesture towards the necessity of a
genetic phenomenology of pure consciousness, a chapter missing in
Ideen I. However, Natorp notwithstanding, both static and genetic
phenomenology are and must be eidetic sciences of consciousness
whose aim is to achieve universal, rigid, and unchangeable validities
and not just to defend the allegedly unobjectifiable fluency of the stream
of consciousness. If the talk of genesis is to be justified, one has to
include in this very notion that ‘something’ which the genesis at issue
is supposed to generate. Husserl’s most important discovery is not
simply that there is a genetic and dynamic trait to consciousness.
Rather, for him, the stream of consciousness moves teleologically
towards its self-realization in lived-experiences, the structure of which
can be grasped in eidetic universality and does not depend on mere
physiological underpinnings. Thus, out of raw (unapprehended) hyle,
full-blown Erlebnisse are generated on the basis of which objects of all
kinds and, ultimately, an existing world are posited. This dynamic,
which Husserl calls ‘constitution’, is describable through and through
in eidetic terms.

Phenomenology’s foundational claim

In light of these last remarks, which are meant both to reinforce phe-
nomenology’s eidetic project and to highlight the necessity to extend it

Lebenswelt,” Husserl Studies 26/1 (2010): 59), for example, “if x is a tone then x
is an object with an intensity and a pitch.” (2) The “laws of genesis” too qua
eidetic laws can be in turn converted into “static essences,” or, better, re-
articulated in terms of a vision of essence, such as “to the essence of time-
consciousness belongs the threefold structure retention/primary impression/
protention.” (The law-like formulation would be: “if x is a time-consciousness
then x is an entity the structure of which is retention/primary impression/
protention.”)
57
To learn about Husserl’s work on the diagrams see the instructive paper: J. Dodd,
“Reading Husserl’s Time-Diagrams from 1917/18,” Husserl Studies 21/2 (2005):
111–137.
132 Husserl’s Ideen among the Neo-Kantians

beyond the scope of static analyses, we can turn to the aforementioned

second aspect of this wave of criticism concerning phenomenology’s
claim “to be the science fundamental to philosophy.”58 Although
Natorp also expresses some serious doubts about this claim in his
review,59 it is Rickert who voices the Neo-Kantian concerns vis-à-vis
phenomenology’s self-understanding in the sharpest fashion. In Ideen
I Husserl famously insists on the fact that while all empirical being
depends on phenomena of consciousness for its manifestation (and its
cognition is thus mediated) phenomena of consciousness do not
depend on further phenomena and are thus immediately and abso-
lutely given.60 However, Rickert points out that, on closer inspection,
the very notion of ‘phenomenon’ in construed in a threefold way. A
phenomenon is necessarily a phenomenon of something for a subject.
Even if we carry out a phenomenological reduction, as Husserl intends
to do, and consider the object of the phenomenon purely as intended,
Rickert argues:
If the word phenomenon – on this condition – is not to become entirely
meaningless, isn’t a subject to whom the phenomenal [das Erscheinende]
appears or who intends via the phenomena the unknown object that appears
therein, even more necessary? How can one claim, however, to bring such an
ego into the “phenomenological” sphere just like the phenomena that appear
to it? Does one not thereby have to leave the realm of the immediate in the first
place?61

In other words, Rickert’s line of argument could run thus: phenomen-

ology is a science of phenomena that claims to be the fundamental
science for philosophy. Fundamentality must go hand in hand with
immediacy of the investigated object. Should phenomena turn out to
refer necessarily to something other than phenomena, and thus not
immediately cognized, then it will be knowledge of this further element
that deserves to be deemed fundamental. However, on closer inspec-
tion, the concept of phenomenon refers per definitionem to something
other than itself. Therefore, phenomenology cannot be the fundamental
science.

58
Ideas I, XVII. 59 HIP, 50.
60
See Ideas I, 95–96. It is appropriate to recall that ‘phenomenon’ for Husserl
amounts to ‘lived-experience’, i.e., perception, recollection, expectation, and so
forth.
61
MPU, 115.
Phenomenology’s foundational claim 133

Rickert indicates with remarkable clarity the following problem:

In a “phenomenology” deserving this name, one has to call immediate either
the phenomena or the subject and, accordingly, denominate mediate [vermit-
telt] either the phenomena or that subject for which they are phenomena. In
this respect, already the concept of phenomenon – should this word maintain
its significant meaning – introduces an element in the observation, through
which the permanence within the immediate of unbroken lived-experience
[Erlebnis] and its intuition is rendered a priori impossible.62

Leaving aside the vaguely Hegelian reminiscence of these remarks,

whose line of thought is prima facie very distant from Husserlian
preoccupations, Rickert’s position could be pinned down to one rather
direct question: does phenomenology, qua science of phenomena, have
the resources to defend the claim of being the fundamental science for
philosophy? And, furthermore: is the concept of phenomenon self-
sufficient when it comes to a genuinely philosophical assessment of
the import of phenomenology?
Here a very important point has to be emphasized. Husserl’s ‘phe-
nomenology,’ pace Rickert, is not strictly speaking a science of con-
scious phenomena but a science of the essences of conscious
phenomena. Husserl is certainly committed to a view that considers
the essential structures of consciousness to be fundamental vis-à-vis the
essential structures of other spheres of reality. This is because the dis-
coverability of other essences (recall the example of the tone given
above) presupposes the workings of consciousness according to its
essential structures. However, Husserl does not believe that the phe-
nomena themselves, that is, the actual Erlebnisse of an actual conscious
subject, have a foundational function vis-à-vis other objects, such as the
objects of external perception. Unlike Descartes and Brentano, Husserl
does not argue for the primacy of immediate knowledge of inner objects
over mediate knowledge of external objects. Phenomena are immedi-
ately experienced manifestations; they do not enjoy a kind of epistemic
priority. Moreover, strictly speaking they are not the subject matter of
phenomenology but rather what delivers to phenomenology, as to all
other sciences, its specific subject matter, namely, essences. To the
extent that phenomenology studies the essence of this process of ‘deliv-
ery,’ viz. manifestation of all kinds of subject matters through conscious

62
MPU, 116.
134 Husserl’s Ideen among the Neo-Kantians

experiences, it claims to be fundamental vis-à-vis all other empirical and

a priori sciences. However, ‘fundamental’ here does not mean first in an
ideal chain of epistemic justification beginning with immediate cogni-
tion of mental events. Phenomenology is foundational because it pro-
vides descriptions of what is essential in order for whatever chain of
epistemic justifications to begin in the first place, namely, the manifes-
tation of something in experience prior to all cognitive-judicative activ-
ity. If we were to express phenomenology’s most basic principle in the
shortest formulation possible, the following statement would be a good
candidate: no cognition without previous manifestation. Applying this
principle, we should simply make sure that we do not operate with too
narrow a notion of manifestation. It is phenomenologically unwar-
ranted to restrict the sphere of acceptable intuitions yielded by direct
manifestations to sensory experience.
For instance, when we talk about a pure ego, do we abandon entirely
the sphere of manifestation and intuition, as Rickert would have it? The
answer to this question has to be negative. We would have to abandon
intuition, if by intuition we meant exclusively ‘direct vision in reflection’
or something along these lines. But this has never been Husserl’s only
concept of intuition. Although the transcendental ego cannot be located
directly among its own phenomena, there are plenty of ways to make
the transcendental ego intuitive and its corresponding concept clear. For
instance, we can describe the phenomena of attention, a kind of expe-
rience that remains mysterious if we refuse to see an ego at work who
chooses to focus on what would otherwise remain merely in the percep-
tual “background.”63 Furthermore, we can describe voluntary acts,
characterize them as acts springing from an inner ego-center, and finally
contrast them to acts sourced from the external world.64 The list could
go on. In all these cases we have possible lines of analysis for the
clarification of the concept of ego. Pursuing these lines of analysis, we
render the ego intuitive by reference to directly describable experiences
without thereby pretending to “see” the ego in the same way in which
we see a desk or the perception of a desk in reflection. Similar

63
See Ideas I, §37.
64
On this point and on Husserl’s indebtedness to Pfänder see M. Ubiali, “Die
Willensakte und der Umfang der Motivation: Eine Gegenüberstellung von
Pfänder und Husserl,” in P. Merz, A. Staiti, and F. Steffen (eds.), Geist–Person–
Gemeinschaft: Freiburger Beiträge zur Aktualität Husserls (Würzburg: Ergon,
2010), 241–267.
Phenomenology’s foundational claim 135

clarifications could be given about all fundamental insights of phenom-

enology, a task that would require much work and more space than this
chapter can reasonably accommodate.
To summarize and conclude, the Neo-Kantian critiques are precious
because they compel the phenomenologist to shed clarifying light on
crucial elements of her endeavor. When Rickert and Natorp cast doubt
on the notion of Wesensschau, they offer the opportunity to distinguish
between vision of essence and knowledge of essence and, thus, the
opportunity to clarify the kind of cognition phenomenology yields.
When Natorp suggests that consciousness is dynamic and that, there-
fore, the eidetic method might be intrinsically inadequate to capture
what is essential to it, he necessitates a more accurate understanding of
the relationship between static and genetic phenomenology like the one
sketched above. Finally, Rickert’s remarks on the concept of phenom-
enon help clarify the status of phenomenology as a foundational phil-
osophical discipline.
In Chapter 5, we will turn to Husserl’s direct criticism of Rickert,
which occurred over ten years after the publication of Ideas I and dealt
specifically with the problem of the natural and the human sciences.
5 Husserl’s critique of Rickert’s secretly
naturalistic transcendentalism: the
Natur und Geist lectures (1919–1927)

Authentic science tolerates no naivety.

Edmund Husserl1

Autonomous thinkers are not exactly the best readers. . .

Edmund Husserl2

As a glance at the rubric of his lectures and seminars reveals, Husserl

worked intensively on the topic of nature and Geist from the 1910s until
the end of his life. Various reasons can be identified as to why Husserl
increasingly channeled his intellectual energies into this avenue of
research. Briefly put, it can be argued that the bundle of problems
pertaining to a philosophical demarcation of nature and Geist and,
correlatively, of natural and human science provides the ideal context
for phenomenology to clarify its status and display its fullest philosoph-
ical potential. Drawing a line of demarcation of this kind entails
(1) some general notion of what “science” means, a topic on which
Husserl worked intensively for decades starting with his Prolegomena
to a Pure Logic back in 1899. Moreover, it presupposes (2) a theory
about the relationship between epistemology and ontology that
addresses the mutual dependencies and the blurring asymmetries link-
ing nature/Geist on one hand and natural/human science on the other.
Husserl’s understanding of phenomenology as ‘correlative research’
focusing on the relation between meaning-bestowing acts and their
objective correlates (the constituted noemata) offers precisely such a
theory. Demarcating different scientific fields also requires (3) a capacity
to see beyond the contingency of already existing disciplines and artic-
ulate distinctions that hold valid despite the vagaries of the history of

1
Hua XXXII, 16.
2
Husserl in a letter to Rickert, August 9, 1920 after reading Die Philosophie des
Lebens. BW V, 183.

136
The Natur und Geist lectures 137

science. Phenomenology alone, as opposed to all sciences of facts

(Tatsachenwissenschaften), is capable of articulating these universally
valid distinctions through its eidetic orientation. Talking philosophi-
cally about different fields of scientific inquiry entails (4) being sensitive
about the far-reaching implications connected with these topics, which
have a direct impact on worldview. Husserl explicitly acknowledges
that the “dire problems of a worldview are connected”3 with the
philosophical understanding of nature and Geist and, in particular,
that the absolutization of nature characteristic of the naturalism of his
time “propagated a worldview that rendered impossible a truly great
and free spiritual life [Geistesleben], directed towards the eternal ends of
mankind.”4
In this chapter I will examine Husserl’s critique of Rickert as a
particularly significant context for correctly understanding the specific-
ity of Husserl’s phenomenological approach to this issue. Husserl must
have been well aware of the importance of this critique, considering that
he devoted to it a vast portion of his last lecture course held at the
University of Freiburg in 1927, entitled Natur und Geist. To be precise,
there is no other of his contemporaries whom Husserl criticized in such
detail and to such an extent in any of his published or unpublished
writings. Whereas references to other contemporary philosophers in
Husserl’s work are generally cursory or limited to a few short quotes,
the critique of Rickert covers about fifty pages in the main text of the
lecture and is supplemented by another twenty pages of appendixes. In
fact, the disagreement between the two brings to light important ele-
ments that remained underdeveloped in Husserl’s earlier treatments of
the difference between nature and spirit (e.g., the second book of Ideen),
such as the difference between pre-scientific experience and its concep-
tual articulation.
It is important to underscore from the beginning that for Husserl the
demarcation at issue cannot be carried out by means of simple concep-
tual oppositions such as the one between the individualizing and the
generalizing method laid forth by Rickert, the one between inner and
outer experience proposed by Dilthey or the more customary one
between psychic and physical phenomena defended, for instance, by
Brentano. In a sense, all these distinctions are taken into consideration
and their value is preserved in Husserl’s thought, although they are

3 4
Mat IV, 8. Mat IV, 9.
138 The Natur und Geist lectures

recast in a different framework. Let us begin by examining the first of

Husserl’s lecture courses on Natur und Geist (1919) and then move to
the second, where the extensive critique of Rickert is to be found. As we
will see, the polemic against the Neo-Kantians in general and Rickert in
particular is already present in the earlier course, even though no name
is mentioned explicitly. It is only in the later course that Husserl iden-
tifies the exact target of his critique.

Natur und Geist (1919): the movement back to experiencing

consciousness
Husserl’s first lecture course on Natur und Geist was delivered in
Freiburg in 1919, two years after he officially occupied the prestigious
First Chair of Philosophy left vacant by Rickert, who accepted an offer
from the University of Heidelberg as the designated successor of his
teacher Windelband. Considering the hardships of wartime, and the
reduced academic activity in the years 1916 to 1918,5 it can be argued
that Natur und Geist is the first lecture course that Husserl taught in
fully normal working conditions at the University of Freiburg. The
decision to focus on nature and Geist is perhaps motivated by a will-
ingness to link his own work, albeit critically, to that of his predecessor,
whose monumental study, Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen
Begriffsbildung, counted as a cornerstone in this area of philosophical
inquiry. However, the lecture follows very closely the systematic line of
inquiry outlined by Husserl in his three-book project, Ideas Pertaining
to a Pure Phenomenology and a Phenomenological Philosophy, of
which the first volume appeared in 1913, arguably winning him the
full professorship at Freiburg. Further, the lecture adumbrates for the
first time topics that will occupy Husserl in Crisis fifteen years later.
Husserl introduces his lecture emphasizing how the existence of a
scientific culture is “the distinctive fundamental trait of Greek-
European culture”6 and how the progressive realization of the ideal of
scientific knowledge permeated the history of the West from its incep-
tion. However, the historical development of science did not follow a

5
It should be noted that the majority of the students were involved in the military.
Moreover, the catastrophe of World War I affected the Husserl family
dramatically with the death of their second son Wolfgang in 1916.
6
Mat IV, 3.
Natur und Geist (1919) 139

logical pattern, and it failed to do so due to the very essence of science

itself. The major breakthrough in the study of nature was rendered
possible by the creative genius of Renaissance men such as Descartes
and Galileo, whose application of mathematical models to natural
phenomena inaugurated a new era of discoveries and practical possi-
bilities, leading to the birth of a vast array of disciplines. Similarly,
although a few centuries later, the humanistic-historical sciences came
to fruition, thereby achieving an admirable degree of precision and
differentiation. Considering this situation, Husserl writes:
one would expect that fundamental clarity concerning the radical distinctions
which separate in principle the main regions of scientific disciplines, concern-
ing the essential characteristic of the domains and the characteristic of meth-
odology – which depends on the domains – [already] held sway. Oddly
enough, however, this is not the case at all. Naivety and Reflection character-
ize the development towards all superior accomplishments of reason.7

What should have been first from a logical point of view, i.e., a precise
delimitation of the areas of competence of different disciplines as well as
the methodologies apt to fulfill their different theoretical tasks, only
comes to light as a desideratum in hindsight, when scientific inquiry
already reached a certain degree of maturity. As Husserl points out
parenthetically, this fact exemplifies a universal law of all rational
activity, a law that unveils rationality’s ‘unextinguished debt,’ so to
speak, to its opaque native soil of sensibility. He says:
Apperceptions that grew at the level of passive sensibility and passively grown
drives lead up to a manner of acting characteristic of a naive stage. Success and
failure and their modification ignite a reflection on the whys and wherefores of
this success or failure. This happens in various stages and with an increasing
degree of clarity and insight.8

All beginnings are naive or “crude,”9 as Vico would have it, and this is
true also of scientific research. “But the level of authentic science only
breaks through via a radical philosophical reflection about meaning,
cognitive value and achieved goals of such intellectual work.”10 The

7 8
Mat IV, 5. Ibid.
9
G. B. Vico, The New Science: Revised Translation of the Third Edition 1744
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968), 109: “the nature of everything born
or made betrays the crudeness of its origin.”
10
Mat IV, 6.
140 The Natur und Geist lectures

rather paradoxical task of philosophical inquiry vis-à-vis specialized

research is thus established: it has to take care of the foundations after
the building has been already raised, injecting intelligibility into the
practice of science and, in so doing, counteracting its foremost risk,
“the mechanization of method.”11 The iterated success of scientific
practices and their crystallization into a well-defined set of teachable
operations, in fact, leads to an increasingly mindless appropriation and
application of the scientific method, whose inner rationality is thus in
constant jeopardy:
The sciences flourish on the basis of a technicized methodology that can be
successfully appropriated without being innerly and truly understood. In this
way several specialized disciplines shoot in the air beside one another, without
being accompanied by a clear awareness of their research goals – determined
by the specificity of their radically different regions – and of their contrasts
with the research goals of other scientific regions. This, however, ends up
hindering the progress of scientific culture, it relegates the sciences to a lower
stage, which, for sure, renders possible an infinite wealth of results but also
blinds the sense for the ultimate goals of knowledge and for a work in depth
rather than in breadth.12

Considering this danger, it is clear that the philosophical classifica-

tion of sciences is not merely geared towards bringing some conceptual
order in the multifarious and unpredictable world of specialized
research. Rather, it aims at a theoretical enhancement of the work of
specialized research, in order to bring to genuine fulfillment the ideal of
knowledge naively embraced but never fully attended to by specialized
researchers. Thus, for Husserl, philosophical work is not meant to
preach reforms but to illuminate and lift up to a higher level of intelli-
gibility the already existing scientific work. At the same time, a funda-
mental clarification of the regions and tasks pertaining to different areas
of scientific inquiry is meant to have a bearing on the future develop-
ment of science itself, prevent intellectual energies from being wasted
along inevitably barren paths of research, and overcome the one-sided
picture of the world that emanates from the yet underdeveloped natural
sciences.
These initial remarks outlining the work to be accomplished by a
philosophical classification of the sciences already entail an important

11 12
Ibid. Mat IV, 6–7.
Natur und Geist (1919) 141

idea: the genuine theoretical tasks of a certain branch of science are

dictated by the ontological specificity of its region of inquiry. What
makes for the ontological specificity of a certain region is not imposed
by theory but rather presupposed in every theoretical operation.
Whereas for regions of being standing far apart from one another,
such as, say, the region of numbers and the region of physical objects,
it is relatively easy to draw distinctions and avoid misleading overlaps,
things are significantly different when it comes to a philosophical dis-
tinction of the regions of nature and psyche, “which seem to encompass
one another and yet to be radically distinct.”13 In order to counteract
this problem, in his lectures Husserl puts into play an operation that will
characterize the bulk of his philosophy from the early 1920s onwards,
namely, the regression to pre-theoretical consciousness as the sphere in
which regional distinctions are originally constituted. The question
connected to this regressive move could be formulated as follows:
what is available to a subject in general prior to all scientific theorizing?
First and foremost, Husserl points out that we are constantly aware
of our life as an ongoing process of perception: “The life of the I is a
constant perceiving.”14 This basic fact entails a number of further
elements that must be considered equally fundamental: perceptual
awareness necessarily entails temporal awareness, and thus the distinc-
tion between first-hand experiences (impressional perceptions of
present objects) and memories (reproductive perceptions of past
objects), as well as the distinction between a subjective (‘immanent’)
and an objective (‘transcendent’) side of all conceivable perceptions. In
other words, we can always distinguish between two attitudes – a
reflective attitude in which we seize on the momentarily given profile
of a certain object and a straightforward attitude in which we simply
attend to the object as such. Whereas profiles are experienced as con-
stantly changing appearances in the ‘immanent’ stream of our con-
sciousness, the object as such is a ‘transcendent’ unity that stays the
same through all variation of immanent profiles. If we then move to
examine the realm of such pre-theoretically given transcendent objects,
a basic distinction is immediately available: “Objects and subjects,
i.e., alien subjects.”15 Some objects are experienced as lifeless physical
things, some other objects are experienced as animated bodies, i.e.,
physical things in which a superadded psychic stratum inheres.

13 14 15
Mat IV, 8. Mat IV, 22. Mat IV, 25. Reprised in Mat IV, 118.
142 The Natur und Geist lectures

Physical things, whose unitary transcendent reality is intuited as non-

coincident with the multiplicity of their immanent appearances, are thus
the fundamental type of pre-theoretically available objects. Using
Husserl’s famous terminology in Ideas II, which he recasts in this
lecture, these objects are experienced as res temporalis (they endure in
time), res extensa (they are extended in space), and res materialis (they
are the abiding substrates of real properties, which are causally depend-
ent from the surrounding circumstances).16 Even animated bodies are
experienced, at a fundamental level, according to these three lines of
apprehension. Accordingly, if we focus purely on these fundamental
characteristics, we can begin to circumscribe the domain of nature:
“Nature in its specific sense, the subject matter of natural science, are
the mere things, the things as mere nature.”17 However, the suspension
of the psychic component in the apprehension of animated bodies does
not yet suffice to isolate the fundamental layer of nature. In fact, not all
properties that inhere in natural things are natural properties:
The objects that are consciously pre-given to an I assume new predicates to the
extent that this I turns towards them and makes them into the themes of
ever-new acts, e.g., evaluative and practical acts. [They assume,] for instance,
predicates of value, abiding determinations that accrue to the objects and with
which objects are then pre-given to consciousness in the future.18

Husserl proposes to call these predicates, for lack of a better name,

“predicates of significance.”19 Such predicates have a hybrid nature.
Like purely physical predicates, they are experienced as belonging to the
object as abiding properties. However, unlike physical predicates, they
cannot be conceived in abstraction from the subjective activities that
brought them about in the first place. That a piece of timber is experi-
enced as “sturdy” and not simply as, say, brown or heavy, depends on
its having been prepared according to certain techniques that render it
particularly apt to support, say, the weight of a human body. The
overwhelming bulk of the objects that we encounter in our human
world are endowed with predicates of significance, and it is only by
way of a willful abstractive impoverishment of the total content of our
experience that we can isolate a sphere of pure nature, which comprises
exclusively ultimate substrates and their “real predicates,”20 such as

16
See Ideas II, §§12–17; Mat IV, 121–124. 17 Mat IV, 121.
18
Mat IV, 122. 19 Ibid. 20 Mat IV, 150.
Natur und Geist (1919) 143

extension, size, etc. However, such purely natural objects are entailed as
an underpinning core in every conceivable culturally formed object. At
any time, we can abstractively divest full-blown physical objects of their
predicates of significance and isolate in them the ‘purely natural’ core.
To call this methodological procedure21 ‘abstraction,’ however, does
not imply that it is somehow illegitimate. On the contrary, if we abstract
from all predicates of significance, “there remains for us as an intuitive
core the pure real, i.e., what is ultimately presupposed in all meaning-
bestowals through subjective acts as the object prior to all acts, prior to
all subjective operations.”22 The core of pure nature is thus a funda-
mental layer that can be isolated in the broader concept of “reality,”23
which, as Husserl points out, also includes other subjects and predicates
of significance.
These fundamental distinctions allow Husserl to articulate a distinctive
concept of culture, which he then proceeds to set up against Rickert and
the Southwest Neo-Kantians. “Culture” Husserl says, “would then be
in general the correlate of active [leistende] subjectivity.”24 It includes
all objects and activities endowed with significance by the meaning-
bestowing operations of a subject or a community of subjects.25 In this
respect, as Husserl points out, the term Geisteswissenschaft and the
expression Kulturwissenschaft are equivalent and simply emphasize
two different sides of the same coin. Like ‘morning star’ and ‘evening
star,’ they are just two ways to refer to the same phenomenon. As the
following passage emphasizes:
In the contrast [articulated] up to this point, we have on the one hand nature
as the world of mere realities, as the world considered without significance, as
the world considered unconcerned with all significance. On the other hand,

21
Husserl often refers to this impoverishing procedure that allows us to isolate the
stratum of pure nature as Abbau (dismantlement). For an extended discussion of
Abbau see my entry in H.-H. Gander (ed.), Husserl-Lexikon (Darmstadt: WBG,
2010), 17–18 as well as my article “Different Worlds and Tendency to
Concordance: Towards a New Perspective on Husserl’s Phenomenology of
Culture,” The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological
Philosophy 10 (2010): 127–143.
22
Mat IV, 125. 23 Ibid. 24 Mat IV, 139.
25
Husserl’s further distinction of “social cultural objects” (those endowed with
intersubjective significance for a plurality of communalized subjects) and “a-
social cultural objects” (those whose significance is available exclusively for an
isolated subject) (Mat IV, 139) does not need occupy us further here and is
however internal to the broader notion of culture.
144 The Natur und Geist lectures

[we have] the world full of significance, the world in its significance, bestowed
by individual or communal subjectivity [. . .] The juxtaposition of nature and
spirit means nothing but this, in particular when we think about the
“Geisteswissenschaften” in their ultimate sense and about the meaning that
the word “Geist” may have (and in fact has) in this expression. If we talk
about culture, we have in mind the products of meaning-bestowing subjec-
tivity, which endows things with spiritual meaning [vergeistigen] through
operations of significance [Bedeutungsleistungen] and also brings about
‘spiritual’ connections.26

In this sense, the Geist explored by the Geisteswissenschaften is the

author of culture, and, therefore, it cannot be expunged when it comes
to a material definition of cultural science, as Rickert would have it.
Wertbeziehung (relatedness to value) can be definitely distinguished
from Wertung (active valuation), but it cannot be correctly understood
without reference to Wertstiftung (value-institution), which is an emi-
nently subjective activity. Husserl’s reference to Rickert is evident in the
continuation of this thought:
From this point of view, it is a merely verbal dispute [Wortstreit] whether the
true distinction should be the one between nature and culture or the one
between nature and spirit. The real issue, i.e., the working out of the radical
ontological and phenomenological distinctions, to which the terminology
must refer back and to which we have to constantly appeal in science, was
missing completely.27

Given Husserl’s statement in the last sentence, this matter regarding the
dispute with Rickert and the Neo-Kantians might seem settled. We
cannot conceive of culture without taking into account an active sub-
jectivity responsible for its formation, so Geist and Kultur are correla-
tive terms that have to be contrasted as a pair to nature. Nature
designates the most fundamental sphere of reality upon which the
sphere of significance (reality in the broader sense) is founded. In this
way, objects endowed with significance encompass the sphere of natural
objects, which are not ontologically different from but rather inhabit
the core of cultural objects. This picture of the relationship between
nature and Geist/Kultur remains a constant in Husserl’s thought.
However, a defense of active subjectivity as involved in cultural creation
and, therefore, as integral to a definition of cultural science does not

26 27
Mat IV, 139–140. Mat IV, 140.
Natur und Geist (1927) 145

suffice, in Husserl’s view, to offer a valid alternative to Rickert. In later

years, Husserl realizes the necessity to address and criticize directly the
epistemological framework behind Rickert’s expulsion of subjective
processes from the realm of Geist. Furthermore, and starting from this
critique, Husserl sets out to clarify why it is illegitimate to consider
culture-forming subjective activity simply as an illusion to be explained
away from a naturalistic point of view. These two aspects are most
likely at the origin of Husserl’s reconsideration of Rickert’s philosophy
almost ten years after his first foray into the intricate problems of nature
and spirit in 1919.

Natur und Geist (1927): the plan of the lecture

and the formal distinctions
In his last lecture course before retirement, Husserl tackles once more
the problem of a philosophical demarcation of natural and human
sciences. His decision to give renewed attention to this problem deserves
some questioning: why retrieve the issue of Natur und Geist? Unlike
other areas of phenomenological research, where the fundamental lines
of clarification seem to be more or less settled, the problematic of nature
and spirit remains thoroughly open until the latest stages of Husserl’s
philosophical itinerary. Neither the static studies in the phenomenology
of constitution in the second book of Ideen nor the distinction between
real predicates and predicates of significance in the first lecture course
on Natur und Geist in 1919 seems to have fully satisfied Husserl’s
avidity for philosophical clarification in this field. So we find him
grappling with this issue anew in 1927 and launching his analysis in
an entirely new fashion. Most importantly, this late foray into ontology
and theory of science is conducted with a largely Kantian and Neo-
Kantian vocabulary. The recourse to specifically phenomenological
jargon is minimized, and priority is given to a direct engagement with
contemporary discussions in the philosophy of science. As a careful
look at the table of contents reveals, the structure and concept of these
lectures repeat – in outline, but unmistakably – the order of exposition
and even the systematic approach of Rickert’s seminal works
Kulturwissenschaft und Naturwissenschaft (1910) and Die Grenzen
der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung (1896–1902). For once,
Husserl seems to resist his tendency to suspend customary ways of
posing philosophical problems in order to bestow new meaning upon
146 The Natur und Geist lectures

them and sticks instead to the terms in which the issue of nature and
spirit was discussed among his contemporaries. He accepts, so to speak,
to play the game according to the Neo-Kantian rules and sets out to
show that his many years of phenomenological training allow him to be
a better Kantian than his contemporaries who follow the letter but not
the spirit of the old master from Königsberg.
The opening lecture presents ideas that can be found almost verbatim in
Rickert’s works and to a certain extent constitute a common ground of
agreement for all the early twentieth-century philosophers reacting against
positivism and irrationalism. After setting aside the idea that philosophy
should be understood as a mere individual Weltanschauung, i.e., “a
supreme goal for the personal striving towards cultural education
[Bildungsstreben],”28 rather than a science, Husserl proceeds to contrast
the distinctive scientificity of philosophy to that of specialized empirical
research: “Philosophy has its characteristic sphere of interest and knowl-
edge in what is universal, as opposed to the singular sciences, whose
sphere lies in what is specific.”29 The ‘universal’ at stake, however, is
not understood here in the Aristotelian sense of the conceptual as opposed
to the perceptual but as the concrete totality of what is, i.e., the world as a
whole. Husserl goes on to underscore that
although every particular science has its particular thematic sphere, it is
manifest that all thematic spheres of all the sciences are at the same time
inextricably united. They constitute a total sphere, a universe in the specific
sense of the uniqueness of a totality, and this is what philosophy deals with.30

Philosophy is characterized by an “interest for the totality,”31 a totality

that is not a mere concept but the world itself, in which all sectors of
reality isolated and explored by the specialized sciences are embedded.
The very same idea that ‘the totality of the world’ (das Weltganze)
is the specific object of philosophy can be found ubiquitously in
Rickert’s work. In the polemical essay titled “Scientific Philosophy and
Weltanschauung,” for instance, he writes: “The particular sciences limit
themselves essentially to [investigate] this or that part of what we call the
totality of the world [das Weltganze]. Philosophy, on the contrary,
endeavors to grasp the world as the totality of all its parts.”32 For

28
Hua XXXII, 3–4. 29 Hua XXXII, 5. 30 Ibid. 31 Hua XXXII, 7.
32
H. Rickert, Wissenschaftliche Philosophie und Weltanschauung, Philosophische
Aufsätze, 325–346. Here 326. Hereafter WPW. Rickert also goes on to
Natur und Geist (1927) 147

both Rickert and Husserl, however, interest in the totality of the world is
not a merely cumulative interest, since the world as a whole is not simply
the sum total of its parts. These parts, in fact, are not juxtaposed like the
detachable pieces of an assemblage, they are interwoven into complex
relations with one another. In Husserl’s words:
In truth, the various sciences do not stand beside one another as juxtaposed
parts. On the contrary, and in spite of all relative differentiation, they are
innerly related to one another and they penetrate one another in a variety of
ways: partly after the manner of generality and particularity, and partly after
the manner of indivisible correlation.33

The incapacity to shed light on the world as a whole and, conse-

quently, the incapacity to rationally justify the partitions of the world-
whole underlying the division of labor in the sciences constitutes a
defect of scientificity intrinsic to specialized research. Thus, philosophy,
as the science of the world-whole, does not articulate its work merely
parallel to that of the positive sciences. Its goal is to restore the unity of
all science originally envisioned at the dawn of Greek philosophy by
way of infusing into the existing sciences ultimate clarity concerning
their legitimate areas of research in light of the world as a whole. The
kind of research apt to achieve this goal is termed by Husserl
Grundlagenforschung, i.e., an inquiry into the foundations. The basic
point of departure of this investigation is the insight that prior to all
scientific activity we have an experience of the world.34 Although the
idea of a regression to pre-theoretical experience was already present in
his earlier lectures, the specification that pre-theoretical experience is an
experience of the world marks an important advance in Husserl’s treat-
ment of the Natur und Geist problematic. As he states:
This world is pre-given through the universal experience that runs through the
lives of us all. For the individual living in the modern scientific culture and
even more so for people who are oblivious to such culture, “the” world is
there prior to all science and even prior to all discussing, naming and judging
of everyday life.35

emphasize that the very idea of partitioning reality into different fields of inquiry
logically implies a concept of the whole, which, however, remains undertheorized
in the context of empirical and specialized research. For an extensive treatment of
this issue see Chapter 7.
33
Hua XXXII, 6.
34
A more focused investigation of these points will be offered in Chapter 7.
35
Hua XXXII, 14.
148 The Natur und Geist lectures

However, this pre-given world is constantly targeted by our practical,

aesthetic and theoretical intentions. It thereby receives new meaning and
differentiation, while undergoing different forms of conceptualization as
it is reorganized in terms of more specific spheres of reality. This dynamic
of targeting, apprehending, reorganizing, and conceptualizing our expe-
riences against the background of the world as a whole is not entirely
erratic. It has a logic that can and must be laid bare. Accordingly, Husserl
assigns to his phenomenological Grundlagenforschung the task of
“measuring out [durchmessen] the path which leads from mute, uncon-
ceptualized [begriffslos] experience and its universal interweavings first of
all to the typical, vague and primitive generalities which suffice in every-
day life and then from there to the authentic and true concepts that must
be presupposed by authentic science.”36 As will become clear in what
follows, the first important point of contention between Rickert and
Husserl revolves around the very concept of ‘world-whole.’ Whereas
for Rickert the notion of world-whole functions merely as a regulative
ideal for scientific philosophy, Husserl points out that we have an
experience of the world as a whole and that this experience has an
identifiable structure. Of course, the experience of the world is not a
straightforward consciousness comparable to that of a perceptual object.
Nonetheless, we have an anticipatory experience of the horizons surround-
ing everything that there is, and the concrete explorations of these hori-
zons – both in science and in everyday life – are guided by some a priori
principles that are not merely formal-logical but material-ontological.
Before these differences are addressed, however, the details of
Husserl’s analysis must be taken into view. Following one further step
of Rickert’s strategy in Kulturwissenschaft und Naturwissenschaft,37
Husserl begins by pointing out the existence of two evidently distinct
groups of sciences. To begin with, natural and human sciences consti-
tute at least two distinct types in our cultural world. In more contem-
porary talk, it could be argued that natural and human sciences present
themselves at first as two groups bearing internal family resemblances.
The existence of a real distinction between the two groups, however, has
been variously disputed; as Husserl argues: “The differentiation in
terms of types may be apparent and therefore [remain] unanimously
undisputed. However, it can be seriously attempted to interpret it away
and dismiss the essential distinction through considerations which can

36 37
Ibid., 16. SH.
Natur und Geist (1927) 149

perhaps be extremely dubitable but which are, subjectively speaking,

very convincing.”38 The human sciences have been viewed as yet under-
developed natural sciences; they are still stuck at the stage of morpho-
logical descriptions and classifications of their objects, but they are
nonetheless aimed at producing explanations based on quantitative
data and causal laws. This view evidently rests on two interconnected
assumptions: (1) that there is one overall meaning to the word
“science,” i.e., law-based explanation, and (2) that the relationship
between morphological descriptions and law-based explanations is an
a priori relationship – that of a means (description) to an end (explan-
ation). Our will to know would remain, in all cases, unsatisfied until a
law is achieved.
The question of the epistemological relationship existing between
description and explanation and the function of both procedures is,
for the more mature Husserl of 1927, “the core issue in the controversy
between natural and human sciences.”39 For the naturalistically minded
scientist, all morphological description is a “mere transitional stage
[bloße Durchgangsstufe] towards an objective, broadly speaking natu-
ralistic consideration of the world.”40 Classificatory descriptions are
necessary but only as provisional stepping-stones towards the achieve-
ment of a law. For the humanist, on the contrary, a morphological
description is “an end in itself”41 (Selbstzweck): it does not require
transition to an ‘objective truth’ based on quantitative parameters and
standing under a causal law. Moreover, for humanists like Husserl, the
question arises as to
whether this idea of objective sciences directed towards what exists as it is in
itself can exhaust all scientific tasks, and whether these sciences and all their
positions of tasks do not perhaps themselves harbor some kind of subjectivity
or relativity, which leads to necessarily correlated sciences, sciences of a
subjectivity and its subjective surrounding world with subjective formations,
i.e., all those merely subjective components put out of play by objective

38
Hua XXXII, 23. 39 Ibid., 194.
40
Ibid. See also E. Husserl, Phänomenologische Psychologie. Vorlesungen
Sommersemester 1925, Husserliana, vol. 9 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1962), 350.
Hereafter Hua IX. “In natural science, description is a mere transitional
component [Durchgangsstück] of the objective method. What description
actually grasps is not what is objective itself, which only announces itself
indirectly therein.”
41
Hua XXXII, 194.
150 The Natur und Geist lectures

science. These sciences would study subjectivity qua subjectivity, [and thereby
constitute] a science functional to the living human being and as such directed
towards the human being itself in its fullness of life, as experiencing and
variously acting, as constantly related to its own intuitive surrounding
world and shaping this world from within its own life.42

In light of these important remarks, it is not hard to see why Husserl

disagrees with both Dilthey’s and Rickert’s respective characterizations
of the difference between the two groups of sciences. As for Dilthey, his
distinction between descriptive Verstehen as the exclusive prerogative
of human science and explanation as pertaining exclusively to natural
science fails to acknowledge the existence of a descriptive stage also in
the natural sciences (the gathering and classification of observational
data) as well as its merely transitional status. A naturalist would not
dispute the necessity of beginning with understanding and morpholog-
ical description both in the investigation of nature and in the human
sciences. He would reject the necessity of ending with such descriptions,
so that Dilthey’s distinction would still hold valid but apply solely to the
contingent stage of development of the human sciences.
As regards Rickert, his insistence on Kant’s definition of nature43 being
purely formal, and therefore applicable to any kind of object, disregards
the fact that the very project of seeking universal laws already entails a
tacit decision about the highest epistemic aim (law as opposed to mere
morphological description) and therein an assumption about the ontol-
ogy of the object under scrutiny. When he advocates the right of a
natural-scientific psychology to seek universal laws of the mind Rickert
assumes that mental phenomena and physical phenomena are ontologi-
cally homogeneous, so that the task of seeking universal laws is equally
legitimate in both fields of inquiry (i.e., it constitutes in both cases the
highest epistemic aim). Moreover, Rickert fails to acknowledge the true
ambition behind the project of the Geisteswissenschaften. The human
sciences do not simply aspire to achieve autonomy from the natural
sciences. If their claim is taken seriously, then it must be acknowledged
that they set out to encompass the natural sciences and subsume them and
their truths under the rubric of “cultural formations.” Thus, Rickert’s

42
Ibid., 193.
43
“[T]he existence of things, insofar as [sofern] that existence is determined
according to universal laws.” Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics that
will be able to come forward as a Science, 50–169. Here 89.
Natur und Geist (1927) 151

attempt to justify the relative right of the individualizing method of the

human sciences beside the generalizing method of the natural sciences
fails to capture the full scope and task of humanistic inquiry.
In consideration of these elements, the problem that Husserl sets out
to resolve is how to make a rationally informed decision about the point
of contention between the naturalist and the humanist presented above.
Unless one is willing to reduce the crucial issue of the relationship
between morphological description and law-based explanation to a
matter of personal taste and worldview, some criteria must be found
to assess the legitimacy of the epistemic claims put forth by the humanist
and the naturalist. These criteria, for Husserl, can only be achieved by a
rigorous consideration of our pre-theoretical experience of the world. It
is impossible to come to a decision based on the exclusive consideration
of the existing sciences. The analytical gaze must go back to the expe-
rience which gives us the objects subsequently investigated by the
sciences and carry out “a demarcation of the possible domains as the
self-enclosed and infinite structures of the experiential world as such.”44
Every possible domain of experience has to be characterized in terms of
its “fundamental concept,”45 which expresses the essence of the domain
at issue. For instance, we can see intuitively that the fundamental con-
cept ‘space’ expresses the essence of the self-enclosed domain of inquiry
of geometry. This essence must be rendered the object of explicit con-
sideration in order to spell out all its further determinations. This
operation, in Husserl’s terminology, advances the science at issue
from the stage of a factually existing discipline to the stage of a “science
in the pregnant sense” (im prägnanten Sinne),46 i.e., a science that is
fully aware of its legitimate sphere of competence, of the authentic tasks
connected to it and of its position in the overarching whole of scientific
research. As Husserl points out: “Therefore, the domain of a science in
the pregnant sense is not something pre-given without further ado; on the
contrary, it indicates an important task and a fundamental component of
the task of an authentic philosophical classification and, at the same time,
of an investigation of the foundations [Grundlagenforschung].”47 In this
context, Husserl chooses the term region to designate a domain that is
essentially unitary and self-enclosed. A domain of this kind will have a
number of “axiomatic concepts”48 (a more technical phrase for ‘funda-
mental concepts’), which express what belongs essentially to it. “The idea

44 45 46 47 48
Hua XXXII, 26. Ibid., 27. Ibid., 28. Ibid. Ibid., 29.
152 The Natur und Geist lectures

of region as an essentially enclosed sphere of being is in itself prior to the

idea of the corresponding science.”49
However, as Aristotle realized early on, what is first in itself is not
always first for us, and so the phenomenologist finds herself in the
problematic situation of having to unearth the axiomatic concepts of
all possible regions of being and, thereby, departs from the already
existing sciences, moving retrogressively to their hidden, intuitive sour-
ces. This is why Husserl, instead of addressing directly the essences of
different regions of being, devotes a long portion of his lecture to a
clarification of the different sciences, following Rickert’s strategy of
analyzing the sciences primarily in view of their formal structure and
subsequently in terms of their material content.
First and foremost, Husserl characterizes science in general as a
specific “kind of intellectual operation”50 that results in true assertions
and theories. These latter do not simply stand disconnected beside each
other but, rather, belong together in a web of theoretical truths. Husserl
asserts that a science in general must be a coherent unity of theoretical
truths held together by reference to the same nexus of thematic
objects,51 and he goes on to draw three distinctions for a purely formal
classification of the sciences. The first distinction is the one between a
priori and a posteriori sciences. While a posteriori sciences consist of
empirical judgments about really existing beings, a priori sciences are
exclusively concerned with essential possibilities.52 They do not posit

49
Ibid. 50 Ibid., 31.
51
It is interesting to remark, in passing, that Husserl’s characterization of a science
in general in his 1927 lecture course does not fundamentally differ from the one
he gave more than two decades earlier in his Prolegomena to a Pure Logic. In his
earlier book Husserl characterized the unity of a single science in these terms:
“The truths of a science are essentially one if their connection rests on what above
all makes a science a science. A science is, as we know, grounded knowledge, i.e.,
explanation or proof [. . .] Essential unity among the truths of a single science is
unity of explanation [. . .] Unity of explanation means [. . .] homogeneous unity of
explanatory principles.” E. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen. Erster Band:
Prolegomena zur reinen Logik, Husserliana, vol. 18 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1957).
English translation by J. N. Findlay, in Logical Investigations, vol. 1 (London:
Routledge, 1970), 229. Similarly, in this text Husserl characterizes the
“theoretical unity” of a science in terms of the “systematic unity of a nexus of
proofs” [Begründungszusammenhang] (Hua XXXII, 32), in which an infinite
multiplicity of objects to be investigated are posited as belonging together in the
same thematic sphere. For a helpful discussion of Husserl’s notion of science see
Majolino, “La Partition du réel,” 588.
52
Hua XXXII, 33–34.
Natur und Geist (1927) 153

any particular fact but only general, essential rules to which facts must
necessarily conform. One has to think here about geometry and its
theorems, which do not entail judgments about really existing figures
in the empirical space, but rather about pure spatial configurations and
relations whose properties logically precede those of objects in the
empirical space. Second, it is possible to distinguish between purely
formal and content-related (sachhaltig) sciences.53 The purely formal
sciences comprise formal logic and pure mathematics. Their judgments
and laws are valid for ‘anything whatsoever’ (Etwas überhaupt), that is,
they do not necessitate any specification concerning the content about
which they judge. On the contrary, content-related sciences relate spe-
cifically to a determinate class of objects. For instance, geometry deals
with objects that are extended in space, physics deals with material
objects, psychology deals with psychic objects, and so forth.
It might be tempting to assume that this second distinction is a mere
restatement of the first. However, Husserl points out that we can
assume an a priori attitude also when we are investigating a region
determined by content. Geometry would be, also in this case, a good
example; something similar is what Kant envisioned with his ‘tran-
scendental logic’ and the groundbreaking idea of a natura formaliter
spectata. In this sense, for Husserl, the second distinction is at the same
time a general distinction in its own right and a subdivision internal to
the first distinction: a priori sciences can be further broken down into
formal and content-related. On the other hand, a posteriori sciences can
only be content-related, since there is no such thing as a purely empirical
set of formal conditions of objectivity.
The third distinction is the one between concrete and abstract scien-
ces, and it brings into view an important relational element that was
missing in the previous distinctions. The concepts ‘concreteness’ and
‘abstractness’ can be clarified by reference to the fundamental distinc-
tion of substrate and determination in a given object. Every conceivable
object has some determinations (‘this apple is red,’ ‘the number 7 is
uneven,’ etc.) that all refer back to a substrate of which they are determi-
nations. Some of these determinations are ‘absolute determinations’, i.e.,
they can be originally experienced only as determinations, although they
can be eventually treated as relative substrates in more sophisticated
intellectual operations. Coloration and extension are good examples of

53
Ibid., 34–35.
154 The Natur und Geist lectures

absolute determinations. We can only experience color or extension

attached to a colored or extended object, although we can eventually
discover determinations pertaining to color as such (e.g., ‘red is a primary
color’). Moreover, most determinations only manifest themselves in a
necessary connection with other determinations, as the example of color
and extension proves: we can only experience color spread over a certain
spatial extension and, conversely, we can only experience spatial exten-
sion as filled with some color. Husserl points out:
Every individual being, then, exists only as a totality of moments belonging
together, to which corresponds the idea of a total concept related to all the
moments of the object as the concept’s individuation [Vereinzelung], i.e., the
concept encompasses [begreift] the object according to all its moments. In this
way we obtain the first ideas of concretum and concrete concepts. Every
individual being must be called concretum to the extent that it entails a
manifold of inextricably ‘intergrown’ moments and exists in their overall
intergrownness (concrescere).54

In a broader sense, however, we can also understand a ‘total concept’ as

a concept expressing the entire “concrete essence”55 of a given object, that
is, a general notion (Allgemeinheit) that expresses the species to which the
object in question belongs. For instance, when we say of something that it
is a ‘thing,’ we definitely do not rehearse conceptually the entire wealth of
its specific, individual determinations, but nonetheless ‘thing’ is a total
concept that embraces in a very broad way what that individual being
essentially is. In this sense, ‘thing’ is a concrete concept since it entails in a
single brushstroke all essentials pertaining to a potentially infinite number
of individuals. For example, the concept ‘thing’ entails a priori also
extendedness, temporal duration, sensuous qualities, and so forth.
In a more ordinary use of the terms ‘concrete’ and ‘abstract’ we might
be inclined to deem the concept ‘thing’ abstract compared to more
‘concrete’ concepts such as ‘tree’ or ‘rock.’ ‘Concrete’ would thus des-
ignate concepts that express more specific kinds as opposed to the
increasing ‘abstraction’ we encounter as we ascend the scale of genera.
Husserl recognizes this way of understanding ‘concrete’ and ‘abstract,’
but he insists that a distinction centered around the notions of individ-
ual (concrete) and determination (abstract) is “inevitable”56 and more

54
Ibid., 38. The allusion to the etymology of the word “concrete” by adding in
parenthesis the Latin word concrescere (literally “to grow together”) is Husserl’s.
55
Ibid., 38. 56 Ibid., 40.
Natur und Geist (1927) 155

fruitful for the sake of classifying the sciences. According to Husserl’s

proposal, we can have “concrete concepts with very different degrees of
generality”;57 for instance, both the concepts ‘thing’ and ‘artifact’ are
concrete to the extent that they express the concrete essence of a wide
range of individuals, even though the former is more general than the
latter. Consequently, ‘abstract’ are first and foremost those concepts
that refer to non-independent moments of a given kind of object, i.e., to
absolute determinations that cannot be experienced apart from the
objects in which they inhere and whose theoretical treatment requires
previous abstraction from these objects. In the wake of this distinction,
we can proceed to discriminate between abstract and concrete sciences.
Concrete sciences are those studying concrete individuals or classes of
individuals, whereas abstract sciences are those focusing exclusively on
abstract moments of these individuals. For instance, natural science as a
whole is a concrete science that studies material bodies as wholes in a
manner dissimilar to mechanics, which, compared to natural science, is
an abstract science that considers “bodies purely as the substrates of
movements and moving forces.”58 The concepts of abstractness and
concreteness, however, can be easily functionalized and proven relative:
for instance, geometry is an abstract science to the extent that it isolates
extension from the full concreteness of material bodies given in experi-
ence. However, plane geometry is abstract if considered in comparison
with geometry as a whole, to the extent that it further isolates two-
dimensional figures from the totality of extended figures in general.
In light of this distinction, it turns out that all formal sciences are
abstract, since they isolate from the full concreteness of objects deter-
mined by their content the formal-ontological determinations common
to anything whatsoever and deal exclusively with them. The operation
of progressive abstraction from material determinations that leads to
the field of formal ontology Husserl calls formalization.59 However,
and this is the important result of Husserl’s analysis, not all a priori

57
Ibid.
58
Ibid. Interestingly, Husserl points out in passing that “perhaps even universal
physics is abstract, if it were possible to prove that mere material nature is nothing
but a non-independent structure of the fully concrete world” (ibid., 40).
59
For an illuminating discussion on these issues see D. Lohmar, “How are Formal
Sciences Possible? On the Sources of Intuitivity of Mathematical Knowledge
according to Husserl and Kant,” The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and
Phenomenological Philosophy 6 (2006): 109–126.
156 The Natur und Geist lectures

sciences are abstract, in the same way in which not all of them are
devoid of content: “orientation towards concreteness is possible also
in a priori research.”60 If we characterize a priori research as the inquiry
into mere possibilities, then we have to distinguish between mere formal
possibilities and real, i.e., content-related, possibilities. Accordingly:
Every possible world has [. . .] a double a priori. A formal-mathematical a
priori, to the extent that the world with its infinities can be contemplated in
emptily formal generality (in our sense: analytically) as a mathematical mani-
fold under abstraction from all its material determinations [von allem sach-
haltig Bestimmenden]. However, <every possible world> also possesses its
universal and concrete material a priori, which, together with the analytical a
priori, can precede all experiential research and, if it is grasped scientifically,
can serve experiential science as a methodological instrument.61

In contrast to the operation of formalization, which results in a purely

formal a priori, Husserl calls rationalization62 the intellectual operation
that moves from the contemplation of facts in the world to the con-
templation of their material a priori, which constitutes specifically their
concrete essence.
As stated above, unlike the first two distinctions, the distinction
between concrete and abstract sciences is relational. Abstract sciences
deal with non-independent parts of concrete objects, which, in turn, are
the subject matter of concrete sciences. Accordingly, every abstract
science is a priori embedded in or encompassed by one or more concrete
sciences. In this respect, it is possible to introduce a further distinction
(capitalizing on the concrete/abstract distinction) that will prove impor-
tant to clarify the relationship between natural and human sciences and,
indeed, phenomenology. The fourth distinction introduced by Husserl
is that between independent and non-independent sciences. The inde-
pendence or non-independence of a science depends on the complex
configurations of concreta and abstracta in its field of inquiry and in
those encompassing it. Husserl gives a clear definition, stating:
The field of a science will have to be called independent when its theoretical
exploration [Verfolgung] never has to lead beyond this field; no matter how
far we penetrate its infinite horizons, it is a self-enclosed horizon that never
has to be overstepped. In the opposite case the field is non-independent and
then the theoretical interest will necessarily have to stretch out until it reaches

60 61 62
Hua XXXII, 42. Ibid., 44. Ibid., 48.
Natur und Geist (1927) 157

the thematic totality; this means, however, that for complete satisfaction of
the theoretical interest we need a science directed to this totality, to this fully
independent field of being. Such science would be the basis on which the
foregoing initial science [Ausgangswissenschaft] depends and in which it is, at
the same time, incorporated.63

Husserl suggests the example of geography as a non-independent

science, whose consistent exploration necessarily leads to overstep the
thematic field ‘earth’ and take into consideration the solar system, the
universe, and ultimately the totality of nature, in which the earth is
embedded as a concrete but non-independent object. Although the earth
is definitely not an abstract object such as a surface or a color its reality
and its physical structure are manifestly unthinkable outside the solar
system and, on a broader scale, outside the overarching totality ‘nature.’
In this broader respect, the earth is only a relative concretum and it is
abstract vis-à-vis the totality of nature, which constitutes the field of
inquiry of an independent science, i.e., natural science. In a way similar
to natural science, the theoretical exploration of purely formal objects
in the mathematical sciences (mathesis universalis) does not require us
to overstep the borders of mere contentless ideality. The formal sciences
are thus independent. Therefore, it becomes manifest that there can be
independent or dependent sciences of both concrete and abstract
objects.
Introducing the notion of independence and non-independence of a
science with respect to the closure of its field of inquiry, Husserl enhan-
ces his analysis with a fruitful perspective that sets the stage for his
critique of Rickert. All sciences deal with infinities. These can be the
intensive infinities of a concrete object (such as the earth in geography)
or the extensive infinities of an indefinite number of objects, concrete or
abstract (such as the totality of physical objects in natural science,
mental objects in psychology, or formal-logical objects, such as sets in
the formal sciences). However, and this is the crucial point, not all
infinities are worlds, i.e., systematically structured fields of concrete
singularities.64 If we consider the fields of inquiry of formal sciences
such as, for instance, set theory, we quickly realize that the a priori laws
governing those fields (e.g., the basic properties of all the binary oper-
ations to be possibly carried out on sets) allow for instantiation in an

63 64
Ibid., 52–53. See ibid., 57.
158 The Natur und Geist lectures

infinite number of ‘objects’ that are disconnected from one another.

There is no such thing as a ‘world’ of sets that is progressively explored
by set theory. Based on the laws of set theory, we can assemble in our
perceptual field or generate in our thought an infinite number of
completely disconnected sets, without in so doing violating any a priori
principle pertaining to this formal field. No set generated in thought
according to the laws of set theory entails conditions for the generation
of the next set. The situation is completely different if we take
into consideration content-related sciences, such as natural science.
In this case
[t]he totality that characterizes the field’s concept [Gebietsbegriff] means
much more. It must be thought, and therefore also be thinkable, as a con-
nected unity of co-existence: the manifold objects falling under the field’s
concept as all being at one [in eins] and then furthermore as being connected
with one another in this co-existence so that an orderly progress of knowledge
is prefigured, through which ideally all truths relative to these objects can be
considered a priori attainable in a systematic progression.65

Whereas the extension of the concept ‘set’ as the thematic field of set
theory embraces a disconnected infinity of individual sets without
entailing any condition about their possible co-existence, the concept
‘nature’ as the thematic field of natural science embraces a totality of
necessarily co-existing physical objects. Although the conditions for this
co-existence can be variable (we can generate in thought an indefinite
number of possible natures), the notion of some lawfully regulated
co-existence of the singularities entailed in the extension of the concept
‘nature’ belongs to it a priori. The notion of a priori conditions of
co-existence thus marks the distinction between a mere conceptual
extension and a world. The objects of a possible world (as opposed to
an empty mathematical manifold) must stand in some a priori relation
to one another, that is, they must have a definite ‘position’ in that world,
and this position must be in principle accessible from any point of
departure internal to that world following the appropriate path. This
is the only scenario in which the ideal of factual knowledge is not
completely overwhelmed and rendered impracticable by the infinity of
the object to be known. Even if the infinity, say, of the natural world is
not accessible in one flash, we know that everything that exists in nature

65
Ibid.
Rickert’s theory and phenomenology 159

is in principle accessible, that causally regulated paths exist which lead

from any given object or state to any other. To stay with the example of
nature, this is precisely the meaning of spatiality and temporality for
natural objects. There is a spatio-temporal order that governs in
advance the accessibility of natural objects in experience, so that, for
instance, past objects can be only accessed in memory, future objects
can be expected, present objects that are removed from the most prox-
imate perceptual field can be rendered accessible through appropriate
changes in spatial position. Moreover, the contingent state of any given
object in any given spatio-temporal position delineates a whole set of
empirical laws that determine causally both the object at issue and the
infinite manifold of objects surrounding it. Husserl summarizes his
understanding of a world amenable to empirical knowledge, as opposed
to a mere indeterminate manifold of instances of a certain concept:
Cognitive mastery of an individual totality presupposes (in order to be able to
become a practical goal in the first place and then a theme for a science) that
each of its concrete objects in its individuality be knowable, and this in turn
presupposes that the totality has the universal form of a system, as an orderly
and construable system of positions, in which the quale of the single objects
individuates itself. The construability, however, means that [the totality in
question], as a system of forms of accessibility, must be navigated stepwise
and that these steps must be repeated and summed after the manner of the
‘again-and-again’ [Immer-wieder] in constantly the same way. In other
words, it must be possible to generate the system in a constructive way starting
from any position; it has to be homogeneous; each constructive element, each
generative step must allow for iteration and the sameness of each step must be
always recognizable.66

Content-related distinctions: the weakness in Rickert’s theory

and phenomenology as Lebensphilosophie
At this point, it is appropriate to recall that all the distinctions examined
so far were purely formal. They did not advance any claim based on the
specific content of different sciences. Even when content-related sciences
were considered in contrast to empty formal sciences, this distinction
was not itself based on contents but purely on the formal ‘style’ of
investigation. Content-related sciences are those sciences that have a

66
Ibid., 64.
160 The Natur und Geist lectures

materially determined content as their subject matter, as opposed to

formal sciences that deal with the pure forms of ‘something in general’
(Etwas überhaupt). The criterion for this distinction is, again, formal.
However, a completely new standpoint has to be introduced in order to
engage more directly the customary distinction between Natur and
Geist. This distinction is drawn according to a material criterion. The
discussion of material criteria for the demarcation of science at this
point in his analysis is critical to Husserl’s subsequent critique of
Rickert and his teacher Windelband. In fact, Husserl will be able to
prove that the fundamental methodological distinction between indi-
vidualizing and generalizing sciences invoked by the two Southwestern
thinkers only appears to be purely logical, while being in fact a spurious
mixture of material and formal principles.
Sciences can be distinguished on the basis of the object that they
investigate – physical objects in the case of natural science and the
human psyche in the case of Geisteswissenschaft. If we attempt to
delineate a genealogy of this distinction, it is not difficult to identify its
original source in Descartes’s metaphysical separation of res extensa
and res cogitans. The assumption that guides scientists who adopt
this distinction (or the less metaphysically committed one between
physical and psychic phenomena) is described by Husserl in the follow-
ing terms: in the same way in which physical phenomena delivered by
our senses can be viewed as changing, subjective manifestations of
natural objects in themselves, psychic phenomena can be viewed as
changing, subjective manifestations of ‘souls,’ ‘minds,’ or ‘psychic sub-
jects’ in themselves. In both cases, thus, scientific theorizing should aim
at determining what is true in itself with the aid of mathematical
concepts and laws since, by definition, truth lies behind the sphere of
what is immediately experienced and requires a peculiar process of
‘idealization’ in order to be achieved.67 In the same way in which
natural science sets out to determine the inner workings and structures
of nature by peeling off the subjectivity from its manifested phenomena,
so psychological science should determine the mind as it is ‘in itself.’
To the extent that it combines an ontological dualism and a methodo-
logical monism, the customary distinction of Natur and Geist stemming
from both Descartes’s philosophy and a number of naturalistic thinkers
is deficient in Husserl’s eyes. Whereas the method of excluding

67
See ibid., 70–71.
Rickert’s theory and phenomenology 161

subjectivity and determining (with the aid of mathematical concepts)

the ‘thing in itself’ of nature is fully motivated by the stratified
experience of the physical thing given in perception, mental phenom-
ena seem to call for a completely different treatment. If we follow
purely the way in which they offer themselves to our theoretical
regard in experience, we quickly realize that with psychic phenomena
there is no such thing as a series of changing manifestations offering
mere profiles of an alleged thing in itself. Rather, it is clear that, while
they are critical for the manifestation of an existing nature, psychic
phenomena do not themselves manifest something like an existing
mind. They completely coincide with their function of manifesting
non-mental, transcendent being. There is no mental ‘residue’ to be
determined that would become available once the merely subjective
appearance of psychic phenomena was peeled off with the aid of
mathematics.
These remarks are crucial to understanding why Husserl considered
Windelband’s and Rickert’s attempts to move away from the Cartesian
distinction via a purely methodological distinction ill-suited. In a sense,
their proposal ends up tacitly accepting precisely the key idea of the
Cartesian distinction. The fact that empirical psychology seems to have
no bearing on the concrete development of the humanities is sufficient
for Rickert to expel psychology as such from the human scientific field.
This fact motivates him to revert to a purely methodological criterion
as the proper point of departure and underscores that psychology
employs a generalizing method aimed at the discovery of general
laws like all other natural sciences. Husserl instead, similarly to
Dilthey, would draw a different conclusion from psychology’s useless-
ness for humanistic research and ask whether we have sufficient reason
to hold fast to the natural-scientific ideal in psychology. His answer is
that we do not, since our experience of psychic phenomena does not
offer any motivation to move in the direction of a mathematically
formulated determination of a psychological an sich. This is not
because we immediately ‘understand them’, as Dilthey would have it,
but because their objective structure does not present the same strat-
ification that characterizes natural phenomena and renders their
natural-scientific treatment legitimate and, at points, necessary. If we
follow our experience, rather than our historically conditioned theo-
retical habits, we should lay forth a completely different set of tasks for
the sciences of psyche.
162 The Natur und Geist lectures

Without anticipating too much about Husserl’s indebtedness to and

critique of Wilhelm Dilthey, a topic for Chapter 6, it is now important to
highlight the reason why, according to Husserl, Rickert simply did not
have the theoretical resources to reformulate the meaning of psychol-
ogy. Briefly put, Rickert failed to address the above distinction between
a merely empty mathematical manifold and a world. His fundamental
idea, which “goes through his entire work and gives it systematic
coherence,” is, as explained in Chapter 1, “the ‘overcoming’ of the
infinite multiplicity of the world that has to be known via the two
correlative paths of generalization and historical individualization.”68
The fundamental line of his inquiry is the following: an infinite world
is there and has to be mastered. How is this possible? By simplifying
the overwhelming abundance of data streaming in from the senses
via theoretical “incisions”69 (or ‘cuts’) in the unbroken flow of our
experience. Such incisions are guided by two different patterns of
conceptualization. One is the generalizing method geared towards
the universality of laws, which effaces what is individual from view
but allows for useful predictions and calculations. The other is the
individualizing method, which focuses on individual occurrences in
their singularity, thus allowing a great degree of sophistication
but no law-based explanation. In both cases, the “heterogeneous
continuum”70 of our unconceptualized experience is turned into
something discrete and thus rendered amenable to our theoretical
understanding.
Husserl highlights that Rickert’s line of argument is a somewhat
trivialized version of Kant’s transcendental deduction, in which the
applicability of the categories to the manifold of sensibility has to be
justified. Rickert simplifies this difficult Kantian task through a vaguely
“pragmatic”71 demand, namely, that we need conceptual simplification
and reorganization of the given in order to navigate our way through
the world’s infinity. Husserl’s remark on this pragmatic element is
almost mocking:
The activity of generalizing, the creation of concepts and laws and finally
of completely non-intuitive exact concepts as well as natural laws should
be the means to make the infinity knowable. However, at this point
one could say: does the infinity have to do us the favor of yielding to our

68 69 70 71
Ibid., 87. See SH, 34. Ibid. Hua XXXII, 91.
Rickert’s theory and phenomenology 163

thought-productions [Denkerzeugnisse], of being knowable via concepts and

laws? Why should the endless world have to care about our cognitive interests
and demands?72

Rickert construes the world prior to our conceptualization as

“entirely uniform” or “monistic.”73 But, Husserl asks, in front of a
completely chaotic and unstructured world, how could we ever come up
with the idea of a law-based conceptual mastery of it? How could the
vision of a theoretical understanding via concepts and laws appear as a
practically attainable goal? How could total chaos motivate a rational
agent to bring about order? Interestingly, Hermann Lotze – one of the
first exponents of Neo-Kantianism and a major source of inspiration for
the Southwest German school – brought to light one of the weakest
spots in a critical theory of knowledge when he stated that the suit-
ability of sense-data for subsumption under our intellectual categories
should be considered a “fortunate fact” (eine glückliche Tatsache)74
and thus remains inexplicable within a critical framework. If the
sphere of sensory intuition (or, more generally, experience) is consid-
ered per se entirely inchoate and unstructured and thus thoroughly
alien to conceptuality, then the fact that it is nonetheless amenable to
conceptual organization is indeed a piece of good luck. But, from
Husserl’s perspective, this simply shows the intrinsic weakness of
theories of knowledge that begin with an impoverished and generic
notion of unconceptualized experience, such as Rickert’s. Husserl
points out:
If knowledge grasps, conceptually and authentically, what exists and how it
exists [Seiendes und Soseiendes], then precisely what exists is itself conceptual.
Concepts are not our private thing, which only pertains to us cognitive agents.
What exists is, in turn, not in itself alien to concepts.75

72
Ibid.
73
SH, 13. It should be remembered that this kind of ‘monism’ does mean that for
Rickert the entire world is made of one single kind of ontological ‘stuff.’ His
ontology is, as discussed in Chapter 1, pluralistic. The ‘world’ comprises
empirical objects (physical or psychical) as well as meanings. This dual ontology,
however, goes hand in hand with a ‘structural’ monism and affirmation of the
world’s uniform lack of order and organization prior to the conceptual
operations of generalization and individualization.
74
Quoted in W. Windelband, “Kritische oder genetische Methode?,” Präludien,
vol. 2, 99–135. Here 104.
75
Hua XXXII, 92.
164 The Natur und Geist lectures

According to Husserl, Rickert’s account treats the unconceptualized

experience of the world as a merely formal mathematical manifold76
in which no laws governing the conditions of real co-existence for the
manifold’s members are to be discerned. Rickert skips a serious inquiry
into the material a priori of world-experience. He moves from a merely
formal contemplation of unconceptualized experience as “immeasur-
able manifold”77 to its simplifying reorganization under universally
valid empirical laws, whereby the immeasurability is overcome and
the manifold is theoretically mastered. But, in this way, precisely the
possibility of this transition, the very idea of reorganizing the manifold
according to empirical laws, remains unaccounted for. In contrast to
Rickert’s characterization of unconceptualized experience as a hetero-
geneous continuum, Husserl emphasizes forcefully that
the world must have a structure of homogeneity. If I ask about the conditions
for possibility of knowledge of the world as infinite manifold, this question is
guided by the empty representation of a manifold, i.e., [I am moving from] the
analytical a priori towards the synthetic. But the observation of experience
itself (which bestows sense upon the world) shows through free variation of
this experience and the experienced world that what is far must be similar
to what is near. This presumption is induction, and each induction is a
pre-figuring of sense and being based on analogy. Therefore it is evident that
if this world and a world in general are to exist, they must exist as homoge-
neous worlds.78

Put simply, it is because we recognize patterns of order and stability

already at the level of unconceptualized experience that we are moti-
vated to cognize nature in scientific terms. In order to spell out the
essential, a priori laws underlying these patterns of order and stability
we have to delve into the multifarious manifestations of the world in its
material richness and orient ourselves in the mode of a priori research,
as outlined above. This does not mean that we cannot ask formal

76
On Rickert’s account, however, a mathematical manifold would be already a
reorganization of our inchoate intuitive experience, only, one where the
heterogeneous continuum is not turned into a heterogeneous discretum via
conceptual incisions but rather into a homogenous continuum. In mathematics,
all heterogeneity and differentiation in the experiential world is renounced in
favor of a pure contemplation of homogenous continuity (see SH, 34–35). For
our present concerns, however, the details of Rickert’s philosophy of
mathematics can be left aside.
77
SH, 32. 78 Hua XXXII, 249.
Rickert’s theory and phenomenology 165

questions. The problem with Rickert’s take on the transcendental

deduction is that his analyses are “of a formal style but, as we can see,
they are not pure.”79 A really pure transcendental deduction starting
from the analytical a priori and then moving ‘downwards’, as it were, to
a consideration of the material a priori should begin with the merely
empty representation of a manifold of ‘somethings in general’ and spell
out those minimal formal-ontological requirements that allow for non-
contradictory judgments. Once this important part of the deduction
were accomplished, it should be asked what further conditions must be
added in order for the merely empty manifold to be a manifold of really
existing beings, that is, co-existing entities in a real world. This would
open up an overwhelmingly wide field for a priori research that could
not, however, be derived from further elaboration on the formal onto-
logical conditions but would instead require materially oriented inves-
tigations of a completely different kind. “World-experience remains
[for Rickert] an empty word.”80
Rickert’s failure to address the material a priori structures of the
world that undergird different regions of being leads him to a tacit
acceptance of naturalism, which is clearly proved by his unqualified
embrace of empirical psychology:
The traditional biases become visible in Rickert not only in that he deduces the
antediluvian ideal of mechanism as ideal for the physical sciences, but he even
advocates the same ideal also for psychology and thereby also for the whole
world as valid, as something obviously entailed deductively [mitdeduziert] by
the formal generality of his deduction.81

Husserl, as a trained natural scientist and mathematician, is well

aware of the progressive move away from mechanism and classical
physics occurring in his time82 and cannot help but mock Rickert’s
old-fashioned appeal to mechanistic causality in physics while at the
same time denouncing its even more pernicious effects in psychology.
The naturalistic bias in Rickert’s thought, which makes him accept the
same (outdated) method in both natural science and psychology, leads
to another absurdity in Husserl’s eyes, which is the divorce of subjec-
tivity and value carried out in Rickert’s classification of the human
sciences. Commenting on the excerpts from Rickert’s writings collected
in preparation for his lectures, Husserl writes:

79 80 81 82
Ibid., 237. Ibid., 100. Ibid., 243 See ibid., 241–242.
166 The Natur und Geist lectures

I realize in hindsight that I presented Rickert’s theory of reference-to-value

[Wertbeziehung] too limpidly. His own presentation is actually pretty unclear
and convoluted. The simple idea that the historian can empathize with the
people who carry out valuations and study the way in which they are deter-
mined by their subjectively intended values without installing himself on the
ground of their evaluations does not become clear.83

Husserl seems not to realize that Rickert’s failure to take into consid-
eration psychic subjects carrying out evaluations and the possibility to
empathize with them is deliberate! It is part of his strategy of divorcing
the human sciences from psychology in order to preserve their autono-
mous method. However, as a matter of fact, while it is true that little or
nothing can be contributed to the human sciences by a strictly natural-
istic psychology, it is hard to see how their progress could depend on
complete disregard for the psychic processes of acting subjects who
create culture on the basis of acknowledged values.84
To sum up, for Husserl, Rickert’s formalistic theory of knowledge (1)
fails to provide genuine justification for the ideal of scientific knowledge
and (2) falls prey to the naturalism inherited from the Cartesian tradi-
tion. His abstract understanding of experience not only fails to grant
true autonomy to the human sciences but also offers an outdated and
deficient account of the possibility of natural science. In the wake of
Rickert’s failure, Husserl points out:

83
Ibid., 232.
84
Incidentally, Husserl’s charge that Rickert completely disregards valuing
subjectivity is not entirely fair. Rickert’s point is that valuing subjectivity is not the
fundamental concept of the domain of culture, and therefore it should not be
considered as the starting point in a philosophical investigation of the human
sciences. Once the genuinely fundamental concept of value has been established, a
consideration of historically living subjectivity is certainly helpful and even
necessary. This line of thought, however, becomes more explicit in later editions
of Rickert’s magnum opus, The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Science,
and it is not fully articulated until the fifth edition, which came out in 1929 two
years after Husserl’s lectures on Natur und Geist. Here he states clearly that
“[T]here must be human beings in every reality that is a possible object of a
historical representation. By virtue of the individuality of their volition and action,
they constitute individuals with respect to social values. It also follows that the
mental life of a human community, which is significant because of its singularity,
stands at the center of every historical representation” (LCF, 132). For Rickert,
however, the recognition of living subjectivity as the center of historical
representation entirely presupposes the validity of the values that this subjectivity
intends and cultivates. For a discussion of Rickert’s notion of value see Chapter 1.
Rickert’s theory and phenomenology 167

All thought in aprioristic abstraction (including content-related thought such

as geometry) offers a guarantee, offers real evidence for ultimate foundation
only if it is drawn from the whole fullness of concreteness. Thought becomes
groundless if it does not take its departure precisely in that ‘ground,’ which is
the whole actuality of life with every single element that constitutes its full-
ness, and if it fails to constantly look back towards this ground, being aware in
full clarity how all abstractions spring from this life-source.85

In this context, Husserl drops the crucial remark that his transcendental
phenomenology actually sides with life-philosophy against the abstrac-
tions of Southwestern Neo-Kantianism. He emphasizes that “the reac-
tion of the various good, but, in part, also mistaken life-philosophies
against rationalistic science”86 depends on the incapacity of abstractly
rationalistic accounts of scientific cognition to provide genuine clarity
about the material conditions for the possibility of knowledge, thus
opening an unbridgeable chasm between science and experiential life.
Even if the general tendency of life-philosophy to relativize and histori-
cize all knowledge is absolutely alien to Husserl, he acknowledges
without reservation that cognition in general and science in particular
must be integrated into a larger dynamic of experiential life, which
provides the motivational basis for scientific activity and whose aprior-
istically oriented scrutiny yields essential truths that undergird all
higher-level cognitive activities. The task thus outlined coincides with
philosophy’s innermost vocation and clarifies its function in the broader
edifice of science. A longer passage from an appendix to the lecture
offers an illuminating recapitulation of Husserl’s point as well as an
extremely significant clue to understanding Husserl’s position in the
context of the Naturwissenschaft/Geisteswissenschaft dispute. It
sounds almost like a short manifesto:
It is the fundamental characteristic of the new phenomenology, which does
not call itself life-philosophy but, preserving the authentic ancient meaning of
philosophy as the universal science, is a life-philosophy, that it is everything
but inclined to renounce science, the great heritage of millennia, and rather
advocates science anew, but then universal science springing from the con-
ceivably most radical foundation or rather self-responsibility of the cognizing
agent. Phenomenology wants to make such science possible through its
method. Obviously, in this way, phenomenology also wants to enable a
conservative preservation, but also a reconfiguration of the sciences handed

85 86
Hua XXXII, 239. Ibid.
168 The Natur und Geist lectures

down historically and currently at work. [Phenomenology wants] to enable a

radical, critical appraisal and a new foundation [Neufundamentierung] of
these sciences, that relieves them of all paradoxes and controversies about
their fundamental principles [Grundlagenstreitigkeiten] and overcomes all
absurd tension between science and life. Therefore, the fundamental character
of phenomenology is scientific life-philosophy, i.e., a science that does not
presuppose and is not based on the already existing sciences, but is rather
radical science, having as its fundamental scientific theme the concrete uni-
versal life and its life-world, the real concrete surrounding world. Taking its
departure from here and drawing purely on the most concrete intuition it has
to bring the type-pattern [Typik] of this surrounding world into rigorous
concepts that can be verified at any time. From there, phenomenology has
to work out systematically the fundamental conceptuality that has to serve all
possible sciences, thereby showing that, on the other hand, all possible scien-
ces can only have meaning in relationship to the fundamental structures of the
reality of life [Lebenswirklichkeit].87

Aside from the somewhat rhetorical tone, Husserl’s point in this

illuminating passage is clear enough. He intends to distance himself
from all forms of transcendentalism, such as Rickert’s own brand, that
begin with a misrepresentation of experiential life, whereby this latter is
construed as an inchoate and structureless continuum, in order to then
force on this caricature of experiential life the allegedly world-forming
power of conceptuality. However, concepts that are alienated from
experience from the outset cannot be reconciled with it deductively in
a second moment. In this respect, Husserl feels entirely consonant with
the tradition of life-philosophy, which emphasizes the continuity
between life and cognition as well as the origin of all concepts in
life-dynamics. However, unlike most life-philosophies, Husserl’s phe-
nomenology wants to remain scientific and even ‘hyper-scientific,’ so to
speak. The immersion in the multifarious plenitude of the life-world and
its forms does not displace thought into a realm of absolute relativity
and contingency. Contrariwise, it is precisely the orientation towards
material a priori structures in the midst of the intricacies of experiential
life that grants phenomenology its own peculiar and radical kind of
scientificity. In a sense, mainstream life-philosophy implicitly accepts
the misrepresentation of experiential life offered by transcendental
thinkers à la Rickert and simply refuses the universal validity of the

87
Ibid., 240–241.
Rickert’s theory and phenomenology 169

concepts forced on it. It celebrates the allegedly erratic and unfathom-

able dynamics of life and its surrounding world instead of working to
overcome them in conceptual thought. But this unconvincing picture of
experiential life as a fundamentally malleable, erratic, and heterogene-
ous whole is common to both currents.
Husserl is more radical and rigorous than most life-philosophers in
that he devotes his efforts to offer a different, more reliable picture of
how experience is structured and how, in the case of physical nature, it
motivates empirical investigation geared towards the discovery of
causal laws. However, his defense of the demands of life-philosophy is
a precious clue to make sense of his project. In this respect, a closer
consideration of Husserl’s intellectual exchange with philosophers like
Simmel and Dilthey is of paramount importance for an adequate assess-
ment of his phenomenology. This will be the theme of Chapter 6.
6 Historia formaliter spectata: Husserl
and the life-philosophers

Life as operative comes first.

Edmund Husserl1

The final remarks of Chapter 5 indicated that Husserl understood his

phenomenology to be deeply consonant with life-philosophy. This con-
sonance, however, has nothing to do with an alleged prioritization of
intuition over conceptual thought, as Rickert maintained in his essay
Die Philosophie des Lebens.2 What mattered to Husserl was rather the
acknowledgement of living subjectivity as opposed to inert nature and
the defense of the human sciences as rooted in an autonomous science of
psyche. This chapter will examine some systematic points connecting
Husserlian phenomenology and life-philosophy. Husserl did not pro-
duce a critique of life-philosophy as extensive and articulate as his
critique of Rickert. However, from the beginning of the 1920s onwards,
he read carefully both Dilthey and Simmel and realized that they stood
much closer to his own project than he had initially thought.
Instead of focusing on a single lecture course or set of manuscripts, we
shall follow some helpful cues provided by Husserl in various notes on
the life-philosophers scattered throughout his work and try to develop
systematically the indications entailed therein. In most cases, Husserl
valorizes the intuitions and the demands expressed by the life-
philosophers while criticizing their actual doctrines and the unques-
tioned presuppositions upon which they are built.
Husserl’s personal contact with the main exponents of life-
philosophy was sparse during his life. His academic relationship with
Dilthey, nonetheless, went through highs and lows, though the two
always remained on friendly terms. In Philosophy as a Rigorous
Science (1911) Husserl harshly criticized Dilthey’s writings on philoso-
phy and worldview. The critique argues that Dilthey’s insistence on the

1 2
Hua VIII, 475. See Chapter 4.

170
Husserl and the life-philosophers 171

historicity of philosophy, i.e., its relativity to ever-changing historical

conditions, amounts to an unacceptable concession to relativism and
skepticism. In his essay, Husserl equates Dilthey’s conception of philos-
ophy as Weltanschauung to unscientific “wisdom”3 and advocates for
the necessity of preventing philosophy as a scientific endeavor from
being conflated with or even replaced by such wisdom.4 Dilthey, who
had been an enthusiastic reader of the Logical Investigations, was
rather shocked to receive such a harsh rebuke by Husserl. In the ensuing
correspondence between the two, Dilthey lamented what he considered
Husserl’s complete misunderstanding of his true intention, and Husserl
replied insisting on the necessity of rigorous eidetic analyses geared
towards the establishment of absolutely valid a priori norms in the
sphere of culture, which – one is tempted to add – is obviously easier
said than done.5 What could have been the beginning of a fruitful
exchange was soon truncated by Dilthey’s death in the fall of 1911.
As a matter of fact, in Philosophy as a Rigorous Science, Husserl
presents Dilthey’s position in an exceedingly simplified fashion, and
the profoundest elements of his thought are not even addressed. One
gets the impression that Husserl is using Dilthey just as a straw man to
attack historicism more generally and, in so doing, keep with the
theoretical standards of the journal Logos, which the Southwestern
Neo-Kantians used to express their aversion towards both naturalism
and historicism.
It is worth noticing, however, that in Philosophy as a Rigorous
Science Husserl does not even mention the concept of life. As outlined
in Chapter 4, the standard Neo-Kantian attack on historicism generally
revolved around the inadequacy of mere life as a fundamental principle
for philosophy. It set up the erratic and ultimately opaque dynamics of
historical life against the atemporal validity of concepts, counterposing
valid conceptualization against mere intuitive contemplation of the
vagaries of history. Husserl criticizes the reduction of philosophy to a

3
PRS, 52.
4
We shall dwell more extensively on Husserl’s complex understanding and
progressive appropriation of the notion of Weltanschauung in Chapter 7.
5
The exchange between Husserl and Dilthey was originally edited and published
alongside an instructive introduction by Walter Biemel in Man and World 1/3
(1968), 428–446. It was subsequently included in the critical edition of Husserl’s
Briefwechsel. See E. Husserl, Briefwechsel, vol. 6, Philosophenbriefe (Dordrecht:
Kluwer, 1994), 41–51. Hereafter BW VI.
172 Husserl and the life-philosophers

multiplicity of contingent historical opinions, but he does not seem to

share with Rickert and the other editors of Logos the idea that this
unpalatable reduction is a direct consequence of a philosophical priori-
tization of life. It would be illegitimate to make too much of this
omission, but it can be taken as an interesting hint that, at this early
stage of his Auseinandersetzung with the life-philosophers, Husserl was
already less dismissive of them than were the Neo-Kantians.
Fifteen years later, after actually reading Ideen über eine beschrei-
bende und zergliedernde Psychologie (1893) and Der Aufbau der
geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften (1910), Husserl
changed his mind about Dilthey’s philosophical value. In his lecture
course Phänomenologische Psychologie (1925)6 he praises Dilthey’s
Ideen as a work “characterized by genius”7 and goes on to remember
its author with the following laudatory remarks:
[H]e had an incomparable capacity for surveying everywhere the concrete life
of the mind, individual and socio-historical, in its living concretions, for
grasping intuitively its typical shapes, its forms of change, its motivational
connections, and for carrying out with respect to them great surveying expli-
cations which make intelligible to us the characteristic being and genesis of
historical mentality in its concrete necessity.8

Of course, this does not mean that Husserl suddenly became a

Diltheyan. In spite of his late reappraisal, he still maintains some
serious reservations about Dilthey’s method – which he considers
extremely unsystematic9 – and most importantly about Dilthey’s under-
standing of the philosophic status of his own analyses. His lack of a
rigorous concept of eidos gave the impression that his descriptions of
the basic types of psychic and cultural facts did not have any general
validity and simply applied to average, normally developed human
beings.10 However, as we shall see shortly, in spite of his unsystematic
style and his misleading self-understanding, Dilthey was a trail-blazer
for a genuine phenomenological foundation of the historical world.

6
Hua IX, 3–236. English translation by J. Scanlon, Phenomenological Psychology:
Lectures Summer Semester 1925 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977). Hereafter Phen. P.
7 8
Phen. P., 3. Ibid., 4.
9
With a slightly condescending tone, Husserl states that Dilthey “was much more a
man of brilliant intuitions of the whole than of analyses and abstract theorizings”
(ibid., 3).
10
Ibid., 11.
Husserl and the life-philosophers 173

Things are different as far as Simmel is concerned. We have little

information about the actual historical contact between him and
Husserl. The few letters that the two thinkers exchanged are of no
philosophical value, but they testify to the friendly relationship between
them.11 A more interesting fact is that Husserl read some of Simmel’s
theoretical works on history very carefully and in 1924 even adopted
Simmel’s Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie for his philosophical
exercises or Übungen.12 Husserl would generally select classics in the
history of philosophy such as Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason or Locke’s
Essay for his Übungen, and Simmel is one of the few among his contem-
poraries who had the privilege of being read and discussed in Husserl’s
seminar. It is hard to overestimate this fact. Husserl’s marginal notes on
his personal copies of Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie and of
two other essays by Simmel, Das Problem der historischen Zeit (1916)
and Vom Wesen des historischen Verstehens (1918), show that despite all
specific differences he considered Simmel a major source of inspiration,
directing Husserl’s own efforts towards a phenomenological elucidation
of the essence of the historical world.
Moreover, from the 1920s onwards Husserl integrates more and more
into the language of phenomenology terms and phrases that he borrowed
from the tradition of Lebensphilosophie. For instance, Husserl uses
Simmel’s metaphor of Pulsschläge (pulse-beats), to designate the gener-
ation of single acts of consciousness issuing from the transcendental ego,13

11
See BW VI, 401– 411.
12
See K. Schuhmann, Husserl-Chronik: Denk- und Lebensweg Edmund Husserls,
Husserliana Dokumente, vol. 1 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977), 281. The Übungen
were small seminars in which the professor would read and comment on a
philosophical book of his choice. Attendants in Husserl’s Übungen reported that
he would very often go off on tangents and actually present his own ideas rather
than commenting on the selected book. On a side note, it is an interesting
coincidence that Husserl’s very last doctoral student, a certain Hellmuth Bohner,
devoted his dissertation to “A Study of the Development of Georg Simmel’s
Philosophy.” Bohner defended his dissertation in the spring of 1928. See
Schuhmann, Husserl-Chronik, 327.
13
See, for instance, Hua VIII, 81, where Husserl explains to his students the
meaning of the phenomenological reduction as a consideration of one’s
experience under suspension of its naively accepted validity, so that this
experience is taken purely “as a pulse of my own egological life.” The expression
Puls is repeatedly used in the continuation of the text (see Hua VIII, 83; Hua VIII,
99), in later lectures (Hua IX, 8) and in manuscripts stemming from the same
period (e.g., Hua VIII, 472). The Erste Philosophie lecture from which the above
passage is taken was given during the same semester in which Husserl held his
174 Husserl and the life-philosophers

as well as Lebensganze and Lebenszusammenhang – two terms clearly

stemming from Dilthey – to talk about the overarching unity in the
temporally unfolding stream of subjective experiences. Considering all
these elements, it is fair to say that the tradition of Lebensphilosophie and
in particular Simmel, whose works Husserl read intensively and even
adopted for his own teaching, had a very significant yet subterranean
impact on the development of Husserl’s thought.

The historical world

Briefly put, the theoretical problem framing Husserl’s confrontation
with the life-philosophers is: what does it mean that history can be
construed as a world, as the phrase ‘historical world’ as opposed to
the ‘natural world’ seems to suggest? Are we using the word ‘world’
metaphorically when we talk about history as a world, or is there any
substantial analogy between the subject matter of the natural sciences
and the subject matter of the human sciences? And if there is any robust
sense in which we can talk about the historical (or ‘human’) world,
upon what phenomenologically detectable conditions does our experi-
ence of this world rest?
Let us recall the analysis of the last chapter: a world, in Husserl’s view,
must be distinguished from a mere mathematical manifold as construable
in terms of a system of positions governed by a set of material a priori
principles of co-existence. The two fundamental principles governing the
world of nature are spatio-temporality – which provides the two basic
forms of co-existence of simultaneity and succession – and causality –
which provides the framework for all possible interactions between
spatio-temporally co-existing realities. Husserl considers these two prin-
ciples first and foremost in their intuitive dimension, that is, as they are
experienced prior to their formulation in mathematical terms by natural
science.

seminar on Simmel’s Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie. In other manuscripts

he uses expressions such as “Lebenspulse,” literally “life-pulses.” E. Husserl,
Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlaß. Dritter Teil:
1929–1935, Husserliana, vol. 15 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973), 28, hereafter Hua
XV; Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlaß,
Zweiter Teil: 1921–1928, Husserliana, vol. 14 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973), 160,
hereafter Hua XIV; Hua XIV, 202; Hua XIV, 409. Elsewhere he uses the
expression “lebende Pulsschläge,” “living pulse-beats” (Hua XIV, 359).
The historical world 175

Obviously, we cannot construe the historical world as a causally

regulated system of realities appearing in space and time. Nonetheless,
according to Husserl, there are similar a priori principles of regulation
in the world of history. Dilthey and Simmel pointed in the right direc-
tion when they indicated the notion of ‘psychic facticity’ or ‘psychic
nexus’ as the fundamental concept for making scientific sense of the
historical world. However, they both found themselves entangled in
insurmountable difficulties when they had to clarify the structure and
status of such nexus.
First, Simmel’s insistence that “psychological facticity” should be
considered the “substance of history”14 as well as Dilthey’s character-
ization of inner experience as the doorway into the human world15 can
be potentially misleading. They might be interpreted as meaning that
the historical world exists only in the interiority of historical individu-
als. Simmel’s important discovery that the a priori principles presup-
posed by historians fundamentally coincide with those operative in
psychology and in everyday human interaction could degenerate into
a reduction of history to mere interiority. In this connection, Simmel’s
and Dilthey’s lack of a rigorous notion of intentionality becomes partic-
ularly troublesome. Their rightful emphasis on the preeminent meaning
of psyche for history tends to blur the distinction between subjects and
objects in history and to undermine the transcendent nature of the
historical world. While Husserl agrees with the spearheads of life-
philosophy that cultural manifestations and ultimately history itself
can only be understood by reference to living subjects, he underscores
the necessity of retaining a distinction between the historical world as a
subjective achievement and the (transcendental) subjectivity whose
workings give rise to the constitution of such a world. The following
passage from one of Husserl’s research manuscripts seems to rectify
Simmel’s and Dilthey’s confusion and provide a basis for a correct
formulation of the problem of the historical world:
Man is a historical creature, he lives in a ‘humanity’ [Menschheit] that exists in
historical becoming, which creates history. Humanity is subjectivity as carrier
of the historical world, a phrase that does not mean “the life that lives
historically and constitutes history” but rather indicates its worldly [umwelt-
lich] correlate as human surrounding world [Umwelt], which carries in itself

14 15
PGP, 236. See Chapter 2. See Chapter 3.
176 Husserl and the life-philosophers

spiritual-cultural [geistig] meaning received from man, from humanity as a

whole; as a title for ontic qualities of realities and of their ontic historicity; as
having this meaning from human activity, from human interests, goals and
systems of goals.16

The full recognition of the transcendence of the historical world as

product of historically active subjectivity has the advantage of indicat-
ing a rigorous method for phenomenological analyses: from the identi-
fication and description of essential features of the historical world they
will have to inquire back into the essential features of the subjectivity
responsible for its constitution.
Second, if psychology deals exclusively with isolated individuals, how
can it be fundamental for the human sciences? Husserl recognizes that
Dilthey’s brand of descriptive psychology has a certain superiority
compared to his teacher Brentano’s: from the very start Dilthey is
interested in psychology as a possible foundation for the human scien-
ces. He states:
From this goal, the following requirement resulted immediately and obvi-
ously: to go back to inner experience in which mentality [Geistigkeit] offers
itself in its own essential content. However, through the theme of the human-
ities as sciences of the socio-historical world from the very beginning, the gaze
was stretched beyond the individual subjects of historical life and it was
directed towards historical life itself, which is interiorly unitary in each
human being and still supraindividual.17

Dilthey, however, does not have sufficient conceptual resources

to clarify this apparently mysterious link between the psychic life of
individuals and the supra-individual being of historical life as a
whole. He remains firmly anchored in the mainstream tradition of
Individualpsychologie, which considers exclusively the psychic life of
isolated subjects. Dilthey feels the need for an extension of psychic life
into a unitary field exceeding single individuals but does not have any-
thing philosophically significant to offer to this purpose. In Husserl’s
words:
Dilthey talks about nexuses of spiritual life [Zusammenhänge des
Geisteslebens]. – He has in view the intersubjective unity of historical life.
But how does a human being reach out of his own psychic nexus and the
motivations entailed therein – how can my life be motivated by alien life? To

16 17
Hua XV, 180. Hua IX, 355.
The historical world 177

begin with, Dilthey did not see clearly the problems of personality in com-
munity, towards which he is nonetheless directed, and remained stuck in the
stream of experiences [Erlebnissstrom.]18

Individually oriented psychology from Locke onwards operates

under a strong naturalistic assumption that prevents it from seeing the
purely ‘spiritual’ unity of the human world. The assumption is that since
human bodies are spatially separated and interact with one another
only occasionally and exteriorly, then the ‘souls’ attached to these
bodies, too, must be originally separated and interact with one another
only occasionally and exteriorly. Husserl labels the result of this
assumption a “naturalistic fragmenting [Zersplitterung] of spirit
[Geist],”19 which, of course, bears fateful consequences for the desired
psychological foundation of the human sciences.
This last remark leads us straight into the third and final major
shortcoming in the life-philosophical accounts of psyche and history:
the relationship between nature, psyche, and history remains funda-
mentally ambiguous and ultimately obscure.20 When Simmel states that
“all of human history is nothing more than a piece or part of the total
cosmos,”21 and when Dilthey remarks that “we ourselves are nature,
and nature is at work in us, unconsciously, in dark drives,”22 they both
make implicit concessions to a naturalistic view of subjectivity. If his-
tory is a psychic nexus, but human psyche is fundamentally continuous
with inert nature, which is taken to be ‘at work’ in it at the most
fundamental level, then both psyche and history are ultimately mere
appearances, that is, they are the way in which inextricably complex
tangles of natural events appear at the macro level. The insistence on the
different nature of historical and psychic events, on their understand-
ability and on their occurrence in motivated connections is ultimately
arbitrary. Husserl seems to point out rightfully that the life-
philosophers cannot have both a secure and autonomous domain for
the human sciences grounded in descriptive psychology and an implic-
itly naturalistic understanding of psyche. Either there is only one field of
inquiry, namely, universal nature – but then all methodological distinc-
tions and claims of autonomy for the human sciences are ultimately
unwarranted – or there has to be a sense in which the field of psyche is a
closed field of inquiry in its own right. Only as a closed field of inquiry

18
Ibid., 356. 19 Ibid., 357. 20 See Chapter 2. 21
PPH, 125.
22
GS VII, 80/SW 3, 101, translation modified.
178 Husserl and the life-philosophers

strictly distinct from nature can psyche offer a robust foundation for the
correlative field of history. Otherwise, both psychology and history will
have to be considered, to use contemporary language, merely epiphe-
nomenal disciplines, or, in Husserl’s terms, merely transitional disci-
plines, whose legitimacy only lasts until the actual scientific work of
causal explanation is carried out.
Based on the distinctions presented in Chapter 5, it should be clear
that the closure of a scientific field does not mean that this field is really
(metaphysically) separate or separable from other fields. Accordingly,
to ‘close’ the field of psychology does not necessarily amount to defend-
ing Cartesian substance dualism. For Husserl, the phenomenological
epoché and reduction are the methodological tools necessary to close
the field of psychology and in so doing raise it and the human sciences
founded upon it to the rank of truly autonomous sciences. However, as
we shall see in the next section, to close the field of psychology neces-
sarily results in a significant modification of the meaning of subjectivity.

Closing the field of psyche – opening up the field of history: on

the meaning of the phenomenological epoché and reduction for
the project of a purely descriptive psychology
To begin articulating the problem of the closure of the psychic field, it is
helpful to recall the following passage from the Natur und Geist lecture
(1927):
The field of a science will have to be called independent when its theoretical
exploration [Verfolgung] never has to lead beyond this field; no matter how
far we penetrate its infinite horizons, it is a self-enclosed horizon that never
has to be overstepped. In the opposite case, the field is non-independent, and
then the theoretical interest will necessarily have to stretch out until it reaches
the thematic totality. This means, however, that for a complete satisfaction of
the theoretical interest, a science directed to this totality, to this fully inde-
pendent field of being is necessary, i.e., a science on which the above initial
science [Ausgangswissenschaft] is dependent and in which it is at the same
time incorporated.23

How does psychology fit this description? Do the infinite horizons of

its field of inquiry never overstep the domain of the purely psychic?

23
Hua XXXII, 52–53.
Closing the field of psyche 179

Psychology seems not to be an independent science. This is because a

satisfactory exploration of its field of inquiry manifestly requires a
consideration of sensations and basic sensuous feelings (such as pleas-
ure and pain) whose occurrence depends causally on stimuli at the
neural and hence physiological level. If this is the case, then the field
of what is purely psychic verges on nature; therefore, the ‘thematic
totality’ pertaining to psychology must be considered nature qua
encompassing the causes of psychic events. Strictly speaking, psychol-
ogy should be considered a non-independent branch of the natural
sciences.
The status of sensations has always been a vexing question for
theorists of psychology. A good document to illustrate the controversies
surrounding this question is the first chapter of Brentano’s Psychology
from an Empirical Standpoint (1874). Brentano reports the opinions of
various eminent psychologists of his time, all dealing in some way with
the problem of sensations. John Stuart Mill – in many respects the father
of modern psychological theories – recommended simply excluding
them from consideration in psychology, leaving them entirely to phys-
iology. Fechner advocated for a sharp distinction between a descriptive
psychology dealing with classes of mental states, and a separate disci-
pline, which he labeled psychophysics, investigating those mental
phenomena that necessarily require consideration of underlying phys-
iological occurrences.24 Brentano himself draws a distinction between
genetic and descriptive questions in psychology, and, while he agrees on
the necessity of keeping the two apart, he recognizes an “inevitable
encroachment of physiology upon psychology and vice versa.”25 In
this context, however, “it will be the task of the physiologist to inves-
tigate the ultimate and immediate physical causes of sensation, even
though in so doing he must obviously also look at the mental
phenomenon.”26
In spite of this distinction, however, neither Mill nor Fechner nor
Brentano manages to entirely disregard sensations and their physiolog-
ical causes in their ‘purely psychological’ inquiries.27 Moreover, mere

24
See F. Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (New York:
Routledge, 1995), 6.
25
Ibid., 7. 26 Ibid.
27
Brentano concedes: “It will definitely be the task of the psychologist to ascertain
the first mental phenomena which are aroused by a physical stimulus, even if he
cannot dispense with looking at physiological facts in so doing” (ibid.).
180 Husserl and the life-philosophers

exclusion or relegation of sensations to a separate discipline does not

amount to closing the field of psychology. Such proposals concede that,
strictly speaking, the field of psychology is not closed. The most funda-
mental building blocks of psychic life are brought about by causes that
lie outside the purely psychic domain. On this basis, theorists of psy-
chology propose partitions within the sphere of psychic events accord-
ing to which ‘higher-level’ events such as perceptions or volitions can be
‘abstractly’ isolated from their sensory basis, which is considered a
‘lower-level’ stratum whose scientific treatment necessarily leads to a
quest for non-psychic, physiological causes.
This is, in very brief compass, the same picture of mental life accepted
and assumed methodologically by the pioneer of experimental psychol-
ogy, Wilhelm Wundt, and endorsed by Dilthey.28 One advantage of this
two-layered model of mental life is that it squares nicely with a broadly
Kantian conception of experience. It allows for a distinction between a
purely passive-receptive source – the natural phenomenon of sensibility,
which only provides the ‘material’ content of experience – and an active-
forming power of psyche, which processes the materials received from
the senses and molds them into experiences and any other kind of
higher-level conscious act built upon experiences.
Husserl was familiar with this position, and it is evident from his
analyses of corporeity and psyche that he was influenced by Wundt’s
model of psychic life. On the one hand Husserl recognizes a certain
plausibility to this model, and for his entire life he never ceases to
describe subjectivity in terms of two layers, first ‘Seele’, which roughly
corresponds to the lower level in the Wundtean scheme, and second
‘Geist’, which indicates the active-forming power characterizing the
higher level. On the other hand his progressive deepening of the mean-
ing of the phenomenological reduction makes him aware of a danger
inherent in this model. By ‘naturalizing’ the lower part of subjectivity –
the Seele directly caused by physiological processes – the higher part is
itself made entirely continuous with the world of nature. Husserl
becomes increasingly aware that a complete shift of attitude is possible,
one in which the dual model is retained but is no longer interpreted as
consisting of two separate parts – one natural, the other genuinely
psychic. Let us consider a few exemplary passages where the evolution
in Husserl’s approach becomes tangible.

28
See Chapter 2.
Closing the field of psyche 181

In the long and illuminating supplement to the third part of Ideas II

(which can be considered a small treatise in its own right),29 Husserl
fleshes out the idea that “the spirit [Geist] has a psychic [seelisch]
basis.”30 He then goes on to define sensibility as this “psychic [seelisch]
basis of the spirit, and of the spirit on all conceivable levels.”31 Within
the sphere of sensibility Husserl further distinguishes between “sensu-
ous data,”32 such as color data presenting themselves in the visual field,
“sensuous feelings”33 founded upon these data, such as instincts, drives,
and the like, and finally “secondary sensibility,” corresponding to all
the sedimented products of past experiences that resurface passively in
present experience and influence the way in which we apprehend new
objects and situations.
Husserl contrasts this fundamentally passive sphere of subjectivity
with the active life of the Ego, which consists of conscious acts that
radiate freely from the Ego-center and apprehend the rudimentary
unities in the passive sphere as manifestations of full-blown objects. In
this context, Husserl sketches some of his first genetic analyses and
attempts to describe the main characteristic of the psychic (seelisch)
field of passivity underlying the egological life of the spirit (Geist). He
points out that the apprehending regard of the active Ego never turns
towards an entirely inchoate mass of sense data. Prior to all active
‘turning-towards’ (Zuwendung) of the Ego, sense data organize them-
selves associatively according to laws of similarity and contrast. Such
passive, pre-egological organization constitutes what Husserl in later
texts calls “sensuous saliences” (sinnliche Abgehobenheiten), which
stand out as structured wholes from the environing perceptual back-
ground and knock at the door of the active Ego, as it were, demanding
its attention. Husserl terms this phenomenon affection and repeatedly
underscores that affective unities within the sphere of passivity should

29
Ideas II, 344–381. A valuable examination of this supplement is offered in
T. Sakakibara, “The Relationship between Nature and Spirit in Husserl’s
Phenomenology Revisited”, Continental Philosophy Review 31 (1998):
255–272. Here 258–262. The author, however, fails to acknowledge the
development of Husserl’s position on this matter and reads back into this early
document Husserl’s later position. To be sure, pre-egological passivity “is never
to be understood in the natural-scientific sense” (Sakakibara, “The
Relationship,” 259). However, in his first attempts to shed some light on these
difficult issues, Husserl did try to understand the underlying psychic basis of spirit
as continuous with the inductive causality of the natural world.
30
Ideas II, 345. 31 Ibid., 346. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid.
182 Husserl and the life-philosophers

not be understood as products of some unconscious apprehending

activity but purely as self-organized sensuous coalescences that the
Ego finds available as being ‘already there’ in all its active accomplish-
ments. Commenting on the phenomenon of affection, Husserl makes
the following crucial statements:
No active Ego-motivations arise through “association” or through “psycho-
physical lawfulness”; thus, they do not arise the way all formations of sensi-
bility do. To be sure, the whole natural machinery is presupposed, the
“natural mechanism.” Can it now be said that what proceeds from the Ego
and occurs in the Ego as “affecting,” in penetrating into the Ego as motivat-
ing, drawing it to itself ever tighter – still prior to any yielding – is no longer
nature? No, the affection belongs quite certainly in the sphere of nature and is
the means of the bond between Ego and nature. Moreover, the Ego also has its
natural side. All Ego-actions, just like the Ego-affections, come under the law
of association, are arranged in time, work afterwards as affecting, etc. But at
best it is the Ego thought of as purely passive that is mere nature and belongs
within the nexus of nature. But not the Ego of freedom.34

Husserl is thus attempting to draw the distinction between nature and

Geist within the sphere of consciousness in terms of a distinction
between a passive-natural side of the ego and an active-spiritual side.
Although in the above passage he distinguishes between ‘association,’ as
a set of specifically psychic laws regulating sensuous data, and ‘psycho-
physical lawfulness,’ as a separate set of concomitant regularities in the
organization of sensuous data deriving from underlying physiological
causes, both sets of laws are considered ‘natural.’ According to this
description: “Ego and nature stand in contrast, and every act also has its
natural side, namely its underlying basis in nature: what is pre-given as
affecting is a formation of nature.”35 This picture of psychic life does
not fundamentally depart from Wundt’s, except perhaps for Husserl’s

34
Ibid., 349, translation modified. In the English edition, the German term
Naturgetriebe is wrongly translated as “natural drives,” thus mistaking the
singular word Getriebe, which means “machinery,” for the plural word Triebe,
which means “drives.” This mistake is particularly pernicious in this context,
where Husserl is drawing subtle distinctions between feelings, drives, and
instincts as belonging to nature and free actions as belonging to Geist.
Unfortunately, the entire English edition of Ideas II is shot through with such
basic translation mistakes, which a serious copy editor could have easily detected,
thus sparing the reader the necessity of constantly double-checking the original
German text in order to make sense of Husserl’s descriptions.
35
Ibid., 350.
Closing the field of psyche 183

distinction of associative laws and specifically psychophysical laws.

This adumbrates the idea that association may not be itself a psycho-
physical phenomenon. Husserl, however, does not develop it in this
context.
Indeed, just a few years after penning the above statements, in his first
lecture course on Natur und Geist in 1919, Husserl starts raising some
doubts about the tenability of the Wundtean model, which, however, he
still considers a valuable stepping stone for a correctly executed phe-
nomenology of consciousness. He concludes his analysis of psyche and
the body with the following remarks:
A certain parallel ordering of the psychological [. . .] is certainly legitimate. It is
possible, then, to follow the idea that in animal psychic life we must distin-
guish between an underlying stratum [Unterstufe], which runs immediately
parallel to the physical-corporeal dimension, and a higher layer, which has no
such immediate relationship to the physical but is physically conditioned in a
mediated fashion via its connection with the underlying layer. Accordingly,
we would have (1) the direct parallelistic regulation of the underlying layer;
(2) the rules of dependency of the upper layer from the lower layer; (3)
possibly, specific rules pertaining to the upper layer. After this surely valuable
distinction [is drawn], a question arises: what kind of rules are to be consid-
ered particularly for the psychic [das Psychische] of the higher layer? As for
the underlying layer, we obviously have to think about sensations [sinnliche
Empfindungen] and phantoms, sensuous feelings and drives. The higher layer
consists of the manifold shapes of consciousness qua intentionality, although
obviously whether this distinction should be understood as a real separation
has to be seriously pondered.36

In this lecture Husserl leaves the question open, but it is clear that the
picture of subjective life as split so that the natural ‘psyche’ stands in
contrast to the free activity of the ‘spiritual’ ego is no longer fully
convincing. In the very last lines of this lecture, he reiterates his standard
critique of naturalism in psychology and points out the different per-
spective on subjectivity opened up by phenomenology using language
that clearly echoes Dilthey:
Phenomenology opened up for us endless fields for knowledge of the I and
consciousness in which completely different regulations, regulations of inner
motivation come to light. [We discover] nexuses that, already in singular

36
Mat IV, 218.
184 Husserl and the life-philosophers

cases, have a completely different characteristic: that of understandability, the

only authentic understandability.37

Most importantly, however, one should add that the ‘different’

perspective on the ego and consciousness opened up by phenomenology
regards all dimensions of subjectivity and not just the upper stratum. A
few years later, in his 1920s lectures on ethics, Husserl summarizes in
the following terms what he considers to be the fundamental mistake of
naturalistic psychology and, in a certain sense, also of his earlier artic-
ulation of the Seele/Geist distinction:
[The main mistake of naturalistic psychology is] that it posited the passivity
of association and of the whole psychic life unfolding without the activity of
the I at the same level with the passivity of the physical natural process [. . .]
However, passive motivation is, like all spiritual causality [. . .] a sphere
of understandability standing under pure essential laws and, therefore,
having a completely different meaning than natural causality and natural
lawfulness.38

Husserl continues pointing out that this wrong-headed equation of

physical passivity and passivity in the sphere of psyche led to “the
naturalistic tendency to reinterpret all ego-activity, including the free-
dom of spiritual [geistig] agency in the sphere of purely rational moti-
vation as an illusory formation [Scheingebilde] springing from merely
passive sources.”39 He now reasserts the distinction between the higher
and lower levels of subjectivity but interprets them in significantly
different terms:
Within subjectivity [Geistigkeit] we have two levels. They are indivisible because
they are essentially related to one another: the lower level – that of the mere
psychic [seelisch] – and the higher level, that of subjectivity [Geistigkeit] in
an eminent sense. The lower level is that of pure passivity [. . .]40 [and] the
higher level is the whole personal life and, from there, all socio-historical living
and acting [Leben und Leisten] reaching beyond individual persons.41

How did Husserl recalibrate his description of subjective life? And

why did he come to consider it a thoroughly coherent nexus of

37
Ibid., 220.
38
E. Husserl, Einleitung in die Ethik. Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1920 und
1924, Husserliana, vol. 37 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2004), 333. Hereafter Hua
XXXVII.
39
Ibid. 40 Ibid., 110. 41 Phen. P., 99.
Closing the field of psyche 185

understandability? The answer to these questions has to be sought in

Husserl’s other works on the meaning of the phenomenological epoché
and reduction. While there is no single, univocal rationale behind the
performance of the phenomenological epoché and reduction, and while
strictly speaking one should talk about phenomenological epochés and
reductions in the plural form, in the context of our discussion one
fundamental meaning of these theoretical devices stands out as central:
they are geared towards the closure of the field of psychology.
Let us try to describe in just a few brushstrokes the trajectory leading
to the problem of how to close the field of psychology from within a
phenomenological perspective. As we saw in Chapter 5, for Husserl, a
first and fundamental distinction in the world of pre-theoretical experi-
ence is that between things and living bodies, whereby living bodies are
things endowed with a subjective dimension. Accordingly, “[e]very-
thing subjective, including concrete subjectivity itself, figures in the
world of experience as naturalized, that is, as enhancing something
natural with subjective meaning or content.”42 In the development of
a scientific culture, it is possible, and even inevitable, that a motivation
to study this subjective component in its specificity will arise. This is, in
very brief compass, the scientific motivation behind psychology.
Psychology, properly understood, aspires to be a discipline capable of
isolating and studying the psychic side of psychophysical entities called
animals and, more specifically, of human animals. In order to focus on
its desired subject matter, psychology necessitates an abstractive
epoché, which Husserl characterizes in the following terms:
As a psychologist I must behave with respect to myself and my own psychic
dimension, too, in the way I behave with respect to others: as if I observed,
as if I were an ‘unparticipating’ observer of my self and my worldly life,
and as such an observer I have to put out of play the validity I constantly
effectuate as I live forth naturally. In so doing, I modify my naive experi-
encing so that it becomes my real psychological theme, and a truly pure
theme.43

A correctly executed psychological epoché necessarily modifies

subjective experience in comparison to natural, non-scientific self-
reflection. While the occasional consideration of our subjective experi-
ence in everyday life does not affect the positings of existence entailed in

42 43
Hua XXXIX, 278. Hua XXXIV, 129.
186 Husserl and the life-philosophers

the experience under scrutiny, a purely psychological consideration has

to target and suspend all extra-mental being and focus exclusively on
experiences qua experiences. For instance, if I find myself contemplating
my own perception of a stick in the water, marveling at the optical
illusion that makes the stick appear bent, I am in so doing implicitly
‘endorsing’ the position of an existing stick appearing bent in the water.
This ‘positing’ (Setzen) is essentially entailed in the first-order percep-
tion I am now focusing on. However, if my contemplation of this
perception is motivated by a purely psychological interest, then,
according to Husserl, I will have to bracket the existence of the stick
as belonging in the mind-independent nexus of physical nature and
concentrate purely on the subjective content of my experience. In so
doing, I will be entitled to consider the stick and its pretension to
existence only insofar as they are manifested in the purely subjective
nexus of my own experiencing. I will not judge and make scientific
claims regarding my experience based on the assumption of the stick’s
extra-mental existence.
As long as this psychological epoché is carried out on single experi-
ences it does not seem to pose any problem. I can, in fact, at any time
sort out one of my experiences, bracket the extramental existence
posited in it and carry out psychological observations. On the contrary,
serious problems arise if the psychologist starts wondering about the
broader scope of her work. Experiences and their objects do not exist in
isolation. A stick I am perceiving at a given moment is what it is and
possesses its validity as a real ‘existent’ only insofar as it belongs in an
overarching nexus of further real existents. Similarly, my perception of
the stick only occurs as a momentary eddy in the endless flow of my
subjective life. It is inextricably connected with other experiences I had
(or may have), which in turn posit (or would posit) other existents, and
so on ad infinitum. To continue with our example, while I may success-
fully suspend the validity of the stick the moment I decide to contem-
plate psychologically my experience of it, I would nonetheless continue
to posit, albeit implicitly, the existence of the whole world in which the
stick is taken to exist. Among other things, this world contains the
psychologist’s own body, which, according to psychology’s self-
understanding, is the other ‘half’ of that psychophysical entity whose
subjective life psychology is determined to study scientifically. The
existence of this body is the necessary condition in order for subjective
life to exist in the first place. In fact, the body is the source of all
Closing the field of psyche 187

causalities inaccessible to a purely psychological gaze whose workings

give rise to basic psychic facts, such as sensations.
The unaffected validity of the world, and of all experiences of worldly
existents surrounding every single experience under psychological scru-
tiny, thus jeopardizes the consistency of the psychologist’s scientific
endeavor. If she intends to achieve real purity in her subject matter, and
if her scientific aims exceed the occasional investigation of isolated expe-
riences, then there has to be a way to extend the psychological epoché from
single experiences to the entire nexus of subjective life and, correlatively, to
the entire world therein intended and posited as existing. In other words, a
genuinely phenomenological, universal epoché is needed, one which from
the very beginning brackets and modifies the world into a world-
phenomenon and considers it only to the extent that it manifests itself in
the subjective nexus of a world-experiencing subject. This approach puri-
fies focused investigations of single experiences or series of experiences of
their extra-mental positings from the start and allows these investigations
to cohere in a nexus that is no longer entangled with nature.
Following these considerations and finally carrying out the phenom-
enological, universal epoché brings to light something extremely relevant
to our theme: I can posit and study subjective life in a scientific manner
“without having to posit my own corporeity beforehand.”44 In other
words, if I execute the phenomenological epoché, and thus decide to
bracket the validity of the world in its entirety from the start, my own
body itself as a component of the world undergoes the bracketing. It, as
much as any other existent in the world, is ‘phenomenalized,’ considered
only to the extent that it lays claim to existence within nexuses of sub-
jective experiences. Along with my body, my entire existence as a human
being, as a psychophysical entity, is bracketed and taken purely as a
datum of experience. Once inside the phenomenological brackets, I can
no longer take my body as the source of physiological causalities that are
inaccessible to the psychological gaze and that bring about psychic life in
the first place. Metaphorically speaking, the body no longer stands
‘behind’ consciousness, engineering its existence in the natural world. It
is an appearing worldly item with its characteristic index of validity that
the phenomenologist is ready to consider precisely qua index of validity.45

44
Hua XXXIX, 42.
45
This, however, does not mean that the body is just another worldly item like any
other physical thing one may or may not happen to perceive. Husserl devotes long
188 Husserl and the life-philosophers

Recalling the problem we started with – the status of sensations as

immediately caused by extra-psychic factors – we can now see what the
phenomenological epoché accomplishes. It blocks, as it were, the natu-
ral tendency of psychological inquiry to overstep its disciplinary borders
when it comes to consider the most elementary components of psychic
life.46 By phenomenalizing the body, it impedes the leading back of
sensibility (in the broad sense described above) to proximate physical
causes and in so doing it closes the field of psychology.47 Briefly put, the
phenomenological epoché and reduction result in a de-naturalization of
sensibility (meaning by ‘sensibility’ the entire sphere of Seele defined
above). The picture of subjective life after this de-naturalization is that
of an entirely closed or “self-contained”48 sphere, which Husserl
increasingly characterizes with his borrowing the Leibnizean concept
of “monad.”49 Each monad is a “unity of thoroughly connected under-
standability, in which only the fact of sensations remains as a non-
understandable residue.”50 Obviously, in the phenomenological register,
sensations, or, better, the sphere of primary sensibility, cannot be
further explained because they are the ultimate, most basic manifestation
of subjective life. They have to be taken as an element of irreducible
facticity within consciousness. The essential laws governing the inner
development of a monad’s life and the purely spiritual connections

and detailed analyses to the body’s way of appearing and its constitutive function
with respect to other worldly things due, for instance, to the role of kinaesthesia.
Moreover, in every conceivable phase of my waking life, my own body necessarily
appears in my perceptual field, unlike all other things that come and go.
46
In a manuscript dated 1932, Husserl definitively confirms that he now
considers the totality of subjective life, including both the higher and the lower
levels, as an enclosed system of understandability distinct from nature in the
following terms: “[But] all these ‘sensations,’ the kinaestheses and the sensuous
intuitions [sinnliche Anschauungen] are nothing natural; natural science
knows no kinaestheses, no perspectival modes of appearing, etc., let alone
subjective perspectival appearances, subjective orientations, etc.” (Hua
XXXIX, 616–617). The phrase ‘sinnliche Anschauungen’ is presumably
intended in the Kantian sense.
47
The de-naturalization of sensations does not imply a denial that sensations relate
to the body tout court. Sensations are experienced as localized in the body, be it in
the immediate sense in which tactual sensations occur in identifiable spots of the
body or in the indirect sense in which, for instance, acoustic sensations are
localized in the ear. This, however, is a line of analysis that differs significantly
from the psycho-physiological quest for unexperienced physical causes of
sensation.
48
Phen. P., 165. 49 Ibid. 50 Mat IV, 218.
Closing the field of psyche 189

linking together an open community of monads thus become the psychic

foundation of the historical world.51
We have two implications of the epoché to highlight before we
conclude this discussion. First, the shift from the psychological to the
phenomenological attitude is not without “the corresponding phenom-
enological modification”52 on the objective side. The bracketing of
the body and the corresponding bracketing of the ‘human being’ as
psychophysical subject necessarily brings about a modification in the
meaning of subjectivity studied by phenomenology. Psychologists are
determined to study the psychic side of human beings, but, in Husserl’s
ideal narrative, they realize that in order to capture their field of inquiry
in its purity the naively embraced validity of the world has to be
bracketed tout court. Accordingly, the purity of the subjective field
necessarily implies giving up the human being as the horizon of
interest of the discipline initially understanding itself as pure psychol-
ogy, but whose consistent pursuit leads to its reformulation as purely
transcendental phenomenology. The closed subjectivity sought after by
psychology cannot be human, and its actual attainment implies a rede-
finition of the status of psychology, which has to reinterpret itself as
transcendental phenomenology. In a certain sense, then, if psychology
decides to remain true to the initial formulation of its task, then its field
of inquiry is bound to remain open because the psychic side of a human
being can only be separated from its physiological basis abstractly. If,
on the contrary, psychology follows the demand for a closed and
autonomous field of inquiry consistently, this leads to a phenomeno-
logical ‘revolution,’ which discloses a new dimension of subjectivity,
one which can be studied with an entirely autonomous method but
‘loses’ its specifically human connotation. This does not mean, as one
might be tempted to think, that the subject matter of phenomenology is
some kind of over-human incorporeal entity, as is sometimes alleged by
caricatured presentations of Husserl’s thought. Husserl believes that he
has discovered a previously unseen dimension of subjectivity, which for
each subject carrying out the reduction numerically coincides with his
or her human psyche. There is absolutely no sense in which we would

51
Ludwig Landgrebe correctly points out that “The inner historicity of each
individual is the a priori presupposition of the historical world.” Faktizität und
Individuation. Studien zu den Grundfragen der Phänomenologie (Hamburg:
Meiner, 1982), 47.
52
Ideas II, 10. See Chapter 3.
190 Husserl and the life-philosophers

somehow possess two ‘subjectivities.’ Our psychic life is one and one
only. Transcendental subjectivity is not ontologically separated from
the human psyche. It is human psyche seen in a new light, one in which
its specifically human connotation is suspended and in which what had
been previously understood simply as the psychic side of a psychophys-
ical entity is now seen purely as subjectivity, prior to all ascriptions to
psychophysically existing entities in the real world.
Second, the closure of psychology’s field does not amount to a retreat
into the ethereal spaces of a purely mental world purged of any refer-
ence to the ‘real’ world in which we live our natural life. The phenom-
enological bracketing does not remove the index of ‘reality’ or ‘genuine
transcendence’ attaching to the objects around us. Upon closer scrutiny,
it turns out that the closure of psychology’s field and its consequent
redefinition as transcendental phenomenology implies a dramatic
opening of the sphere of interest of this newborn science of subjective
life. As Husserl realizes early on:
Thanks to the intentionality of the cogitatio or of ‘consciousness,’ as we also
said, phenomenology, which we could also designate the ‘science of pure
consciousness,’ encompasses in a certain way all that it has excluded so
carefully; it encompasses all cognitions, all sciences and, on the objective
side, all objects, including the entirety of nature.53

In other words, it is only when subjectivity is considered a segment of

the world, namely, as the psychic side of a psychophysical entity called
‘human being,’ that its exclusive consideration seems to imply a with-
drawal from the rest of the world. Subjectivity grasped in its transcen-
dental dimension, on the contrary, encompasses the world itself. The
world’s validity is retained in its suspended form within the phenom-
enological brackets. ‘World’ now becomes the title of an endless system
of interconnected realities manifesting themselves as such within the
self-contained nexus of transcendental-subjective experiences. Husserl
mints the efficacious term Ichall to indicate the shift of theme enacted by
the phenomenological attitude: it redirects the phenomenologist’s gaze
from the Weltall (literally world-all), which is the ordinary German
word for ‘universe,’ to the transcendental Ichall, literally ego-all. The

53
E. Husserl, Einführung in die Phänomenologie der Erkenntnis. Vorlesung 1909,
Husserliana, Husserliana Materialien, vol. 7 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), 64.
Hereafter Mat VII.
Monads with windows 191

gaze is still firmly directed to all things of experience but in a new key.
Whereas the key to the whole in the natural attitude is ‘world,’ in which
everything is experienced as worldly, the key to the whole in the phe-
nomenological attitude is ‘I,’ and everything is experienced as mani-
fested to my experiencing ego. As early as 1917, in his essay on
phenomenology and theory of knowledge, Husserl gives a clarifying
account of the ‘shift of key’ produced by phenomenology:
Instead of the world encompassing me, I encompass the world. The world
encompassed me, the human being. I, however, the I who carries out this
radical reflection, do not have a space, a world ‘outside’ of myself, encom-
passing me. I do not have a world of things that could hold valid beside this I
as having equally legitimate and equally absolute being, things interwoven
causally with this I and mirrored by it, as if the I were a mirror.54

In the next section, we shall consider a further shift of attitude, this time
occurring within the scope of phenomenology, namely, the shift from the
Ichall as phenomenological theme to what Husserl calls Monadenall, i.e.,
the intersubjective ‘whole of monads,’ which becomes accessible via a
consideration of the constitutive function of empathy. It is important
however, to retain the meaning of Welt, Ich, and Monaden as modifiers
of All, the totality of what is. Like three different musical keys, they
determine three different ‘tones’ of the world that we experience. They
are not three competing theories but three perspectives on being, disclos-
ing three different and yet interrelated ‘universes.’ If it is possible to
experience and cognize the worldly universe (Weltall) at the natural
level, however, this is because the egological universe (Ichall) and even
deeper the intermonadic universe (Monadenall) are latently operative.

Monads with windows: the constitutive function of empathy

for the historical world
Let us now move to consider the second point of contention between
Husserl and the life-philosophers mentioned at the beginning. How is a
purely spiritual connection among experiencing subjects to be under-
stood? Is it possible to overcome the dogmas of individual psychology?
How does this contribute to a foundation of the historical world?

54
E. Husserl, Aufsätze und Vorträge (1911–1921), Husserliana, vol.25 (Dordrecht:
Kluwer, 1986), 176. Hereafter Hua XXV.
192 Husserl and the life-philosophers

Husserl is well aware that talk of a ‘purely spiritual’ unity among

experiencing subjects sounds extremely odd and even irrational.
Moreover, the meaning of this expression cannot be gauged simply by
turning one’s regard to what is left out of the sphere of pure nature.55
Husserl addresses these problems explicitly in one of his research
manuscripts:
In contrast to the whole of nature [Allnatur] stands now the whole of spirit
[Allgeist]. Why do we balk at using this word? Why does it not figure in
ordinary language or life, or does it do so only in a sense that cannot be
possibly in question here? Actually, for a good reason. The thematic abstrac-
tion of the whole of nature [Allnatur] gives as a result the self-contained
structure of the fully concrete world of experience, a structure that has to be
investigated as a separate theme [. . .] But what is left out, what is extra-
thematic in this context, is not a unity of the subjective which would be a
similarly self-contained unity of experience as a ‘world’ of experience, as a
whole of spirit [Allgeist], as a spiritual universe to be treated thematically in
the same way in which natural science treats nature.56

By closing off the subjective sphere, the phenomenological epoché and

reduction set the necessary conditions for understanding the universal
nexus of subjectivity in a scientifically rigorous fashion. However, the
specific kind of unity holding together this nexus still requires clarifica-
tion. The key class of experience to consider here is empathy.
As is well known, Einfühlung was a buzzword in early twentieth-
century German philosophy and psychology. Its specific meaning varied
for different thinkers, but at bottom it was used to designate a subject’s
experience of subjectivity other than his own. However, the spectrum
of meanings attached to this phrase was overwhelmingly wide.
Philosophers and psychologists often used Einfühlung indiscriminately
to indicate both (1) our experience of other human beings as subjects
and (2) our experience of cultural artifacts serving specific social or
artistic purposes. Even in those rare cases in which the usage of
Einfühlung was limited to the first type of experience, its meaning
oscillated between at least three connotations, which a genuinely phe-
nomenological analysis must keep strictly distinct: (1a) Einfühlung as
the conscious act in which a living, experiencing subjectivity is ascribed

55
For the obtainment of nature through an impoverishing abstraction from the
world of experience see Chapter 5.
56
Hua XXXIX, 272–273.
Monads with windows 193

to certain bodies; (1b) Einfühlung as the capacity to ‘empathize’

with other subjects and understand their motivations, feelings, etc.;
(1c) Einfühlung as the active ‘turning towards’ other subjects recog-
nized as such in order to establish social bonds.
The merit of Husserl’s work is to discriminate both conceptually and
terminologically between these three meanings. He generally employs
the term Einfühlung (which, for lack of a better translation, we will
render, as is customary, with ‘empathy’)57 only to indicate the meaning
(1a), which he considers foundational in respect to the other two. For
(1b) he often employs the Diltheyan term Nachverstehen58 or variants
of it such as Hineinverstehen59 (literally “understanding-into”) or Sich
Hineinversetzen60 (somewhat freely: “putting oneself in someone else’s
shoes”). Obviously, in order to be able to understand someone else’s
intentions, motivations, and feelings, it is necessary first to acknowledge
the other as an embodied self. Therefore (1b) thoroughly presupposes
(1a). For (1c) Husserl uses the phrase ‘social acts’ or ‘I-Thou acts,’ and
he repeatedly stresses the necessity of distinguishing them from simple
acts of Einfühlung (1a). In specifically social acts, other subjects are
recognized as subjects of will: they are given orders, they are listened to,
and so forth. Such acts require a subject’s taking the initiative with
another subject and not merely the recognition that the other is a subject
and not a mere thing. This brings to light a further, important difference
obtaining between acts of the class (1a) vis-à-vis (1b) and (1c). While
Nachverstehen and social acts require a certain amount of effort and
interpretation and are open to failure (I can fail to understand the

57
Unfortunately, the meaning of the word “empathy” in English is much closer to
(1b) than to (1a). Sometimes translators tried to obviate this problem rendering
Husserlian Einfühlung with the neologism “intropathy”; see, for instance,
A. Steinbock, Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology after Husserl
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995). “Intropathy,” however,
sounds too esoteric a translation for a term that in German was actually rather
ordinary. After all, considering that Husserl deemed the German word
Einfühlung problematic to render the phenomenon (1a), it does not seem too
inappropriate to render it with the likewise problematic word “empathy” in
English.
58
See Hua XXXIX, 57; 162; 167; 171; 340; 393; passim. Hua XV, 133; 166; 224;
233; 472; passim.
59
Hua IV, 194/Ideen II, 204.
60
See, for instance, Hua XIV, 149, where Husserl indicates the equivalence of
Nachverstehen and Sich-Hineinversetzen. Other occurrences are Hua XV, 427;
Hua XXXIX, 303; 340; 393; Hua IV, 275.
194 Husserl and the life-philosophers

other’s true intentions or fail to establish a social bond), Einfühlung in

the Husserlian sense only requires our perceptual attending to a certain
class of objects in our experience – those presenting themselves as
human bodies – and, upon fulfillment of this simple requirement, it
cannot fail.61
For the purpose of the present chapter we shall first focus on empathy
in the Husserlian sense (1a) and then examine its constitutive function
for the historical world. In so doing, we will deliberately skip a thor-
ough description of other functions of empathy revealed by phenomen-
ology, such as the constitution of a fully objective sense of nature as the
infinite sphere of realities accessible by anyone. Incidentally, the possi-
bility of describing conscious acts in different ways depending on the
dimension of experience to be clarified is a fundamental characteristic of
the phenomenological method. There is no ‘standard’ line of description
of conscious acts that would be simply dictated by the acts themselves

61
Two remarks are important to strengthen this point. (1) To say that Einfühlung in
the sense of (1a) cannot fail does not mean that we cannot be wrong about what we
take to be a subject. I can experience a mannequin as a human subject from afar and
then discover that it was just a mannequin. However, as long as the illusion lasts I
have a genuine, and in this sense successful, Einfühlung. The same goes for the
possibility of experiencing a perfectly designed robot as a human being. If the robot
is perfectly designed, this means precisely that it succeeds in giving rise to genuine
Einfühlungen in subjects experiencing it. For a helpful discussion of this issue see
V. Costa, L’esperienza dell’altro: per una fenomenologia della separazione, in
A. Ferrarin (ed.), Passive Synthesis and Life-world – Sintesi passiva e mondo della
vita (Pisa: ETS, 2006), 109–125. (2) Sometimes it has been alleged that the very
recognition of a subject as different from a mere thing depends on social conditions
and is not as “automatic” as Husserl takes it to be. The notorious example of slaves
in the ancient world being considered as mere tools is invoked as evidence. This
position seems to be geared towards the assertion of a certain primacy of (1c) over
(1a). However, it is extremely unconvincing. The master considering his slave as a
tool presumably did not fail to tell him or her apart from his hammer or chair. He
would not attempt to pick up his slaves and do things with them as he would do with
artifacts. The master would in fact issue orders and expect his slaves to obey. This
means that the word “tool,” when it designates a human slave, is used
metaphorically in order to express his or her being entirely subdued to the master’s
will. The master, therefore, was not lacking Einfühlungen in the presence of his
slaves. On the basis of a fully successful Einfühlung (1a) he would have been
establishing or perpetuating a social bond (1c), in which no mutual exchange of
orders and services was contemplated. The moral meaning of such a situation
cannot be assessed here; however, this brief description should suffice to show that
Einfühlung (1a) is, in a sense, morally neutral. It takes more than mere recognition
of the other as a living human subject to treat him or her in a morally respectful way.
Monads with windows 195

regardless of the context of phenomenological clarification in which the

description at issue is carried out.
A glance at the life-philosophers’ treatment of empathy reveals a weak-
ness that, in Husserl’s eyes, prevented them from grasping its constitutive
function for history. For both Simmel and Dilthey our experience of others
is not strictly speaking experience but rather an inference based on the
observation of the other’s behavior. As we saw in previous chapters,
Dilthey emphasizes the importance of expression (Ausdruck) as the orig-
inal manifestation of subjective meaning. On the basis of observed expres-
sions, we are able to relive (Nacherleben) the original life-sources from
which such expressions sprung and then move to understand (Verstehen)
their constituent motivational factors. In other words, observed expres-
sions ignite a dynamic of re-experiencing within the observing subject. In
this sense, the process of understanding relates not so much to foreign life
actually expressing itself (which for Dilthey remains ultimately unfathom-
able) but rather to the inner re-production (innere Nachbildung) of this life
operated by the observing subject. In short, what I try to understand is the
inner picture that I created for myself based on the empathetic re-living or
re-experiencing of foreign life ignited by the observation of some external
expression. Given this framework, it is no surprise that Dilthey does not
feel obliged to distinguish between our experience of other people and our
experience of cultural products, as mentioned above. In both cases, we are
faced with expressions (be they bodily gestures and utterances or patches
of color on canvas and the like), and we attempt to reconstruct and
understand within ourselves the life at their origin. Moreover, Dilthey
does not at all distinguish between our capacity to attribute subjectivity to
bodies other than our own (empathy in the Husserlian sense: (1a)) and our
attempts to interpret expressions of foreign subjectivity (Nachverstehen:
(1b)). On Dilthey’s account, what we labeled (1a) is nothing but an
extremely thin kind of (1b). Attribution of subjectivity to another body
always goes along with attempts to understand concrete expressions and
it is itself, in a sense, a very basic attempt to understand.
Simmel is even more explicit than Dilthey. In one of his very last essays,
“On the Nature of Historical Understanding” (1918), he describes our
awareness of foreign subjects in the following terms:
On the basis of initial appearances, another person is a collection of observ-
able impressions. We see, hear and touch him. But consider the following
propositions. An animate mind lies “behind” all these appearances. They all
196 Husserl and the life-philosophers

have a mental status, an inner aspect that is not exhausted by their observable
properties. In short, the other individual is not a marionette, bur rather a
person who can be understood from within. These propositions presumably
do not have the status of given facts, at least not in the same sense that the
observable impressions of the individual constitute given data. On the con-
trary, they inevitably retain the character of presumptions [Vermutungen]
which can never be conclusively verified [. . .] We do not experience [that the
other person is animated or has a mind] as a fact which has the compelling
vivacity of a sense impression.62

His personal copy of Simmel’s essay shows that Husserl studied this text
intensively. Beside the passage just quoted Husserl annotates:
“Completely wrong interpretation of empathy.”63
What is wrong about Simmel’s interpretation of empathy is that it
degrades our experience of other subjects to a Vermutung, which would
perhaps be better translated as ‘conjecture’ based on a hypothetical
inference.64 On this account, there would be no fundamental difference
between forming the conjecture that my wife went to the gym based on
the observation that she is not at home and her sneakers are missing and
forming the conjecture that my wife is a minded being like me based on
the observation that she moves around, talks, laughs, cries, and so forth.
In both cases, we would form our conjecture based on incomplete
information. Moreover, following Simmel, there is a sense in which,
while the conjecture that my wife went to the gym is verifiable (I can go
to the gym and see if she is there), the conjecture that she is a minded
being is not. This is because I will never have direct access to her ‘mind,’
and all conceivable reassurances I could possibly receive from her on
this matter can only be understood and given credit assuming that they
are manifestations of a minded being.

62
G. Simmel, Vom Wesen des historischen Verstehens, in Georg Simmel,
Gesamtausgabe, vol. 16 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999), 151–179.
Translated by G. Oakes, “On the Nature of Historical Understanding,” in
G. Simmel, Essays on Interpretation in Social Science (Totowa, NJ: Rowman &
Littlefield, 1980), 97–126. Here 99.
63
E. Husserl, BQ 445; Georg Simmel, Vom Wesen des historischen Verstehens
(Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler und Sohn, 1915), 4, from Husserl’s private library
preserved at the Husserl Archives Leuven.
64
In his earlier work, Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie, Simmel suggests
that our mostly unaware attribution of a mind to other human beings is based on
a “hypothesis” (PGP, 240). For an excellent discussion of these issues see
T. Karlsruhen, “Simmels Evolution der Kantischen Voraussetzungen des
Denkens,” Simmel Studies 11 (2001): 21–52. Here, 28–40.
Monads with windows 197

It is not hard to see that Simmel’s theory leads to absurd conclusions.

It seems to undermine one of our most elementary experiences, namely,
that the world is populated by other minded beings like us. This expe-
rience is rendered entirely hypothetical and thus unfit to do any further
philosophical work towards a clarification of the status of the historical
world. The rationale behind Simmel’s conception of empathy is clear:
He wants to point out that the historical world is not a ready-made
reality outside of ourselves that determines us from without but, rather,
in a Kantian fashion, is the product of constructive intellectual processes
that begin already in everyday interaction. However, this seems to be
too strong a reaction against ‘realistic’ tendencies in historical theory,
one that completely obliterates elementary data of our experience. In a
later manuscript, Husserl aptly remarks that when it comes to describ-
ing our awareness of other subjects: “Regardless of how one may prefer
to call it: ‘empathy’ or ‘experience through understanding’ [verste-
hendes Erfahren] or what have you, it is in any case experience.”65
Husserl’s insistence on empathy being a robust kind of perceptual
experience and not an unverifiable conjecture is consistent throughout
his career. This is part of the reason why he is not particularly fond of
the term Einfühlung,66 which vaguely suggests an emotional rather
than perceptual awareness of other subjects. Before we move to present
in outline Husserl’s positive account of empathy, we should pause to
reflect on the problem that prevented Simmel from attributing empathy
the status of a genuine experience. In a nutshell, Simmel points out that
unlike the perception of other subjects’ bodies, our “experience” of
their mind lacks entirely the vivacity supplied by a specific sensory
basis. In other words, what we can see, touch, smell, etc. is just another
body. On the contrary, there are no sense data manifesting to us directly
the other’s subjective life. At first blush, this seems to be a strong reason
to deny empathy the status of a genuine perceptual experience.
However, there is a phenomenological problem with Simmel’s anal-
ysis already present in his understanding of perceptual experience of a
simple thing. Every perceptual experience, properly described, is a
mixture of authentic presentation and a surrounding horizon of further
possible presentations that are not impressionally present but are

65
Hua XXXIX, 617.
66
See, for instance, Hua VIII, 63 n. 1, where Husserl remarks in passing that he
considers the term Einfühlung unfit to designate our experience of other.
198 Husserl and the life-philosophers

nonetheless experienced. For instance, while I am perceiving my laptop,

what I have authentically present in my impressional consciousness is
only one profile at a time. In this moment I am seeing – in the eminent
sense of ‘having sensuously present in consciousness’ – only one profile,
presenting me with the screen and the keyboard. However, the concrete
content of my experience of the laptop includes the awareness that I
could change my position and that currently unseen sides would appear
and replace the profile I am momentarily experiencing. These unseen
sides, although they are not sensuously present in consciousness, are
part of my current experience of the laptop. Without being somehow
aware of the unseen sides of my laptop while they do not appear, my
experience would not qualify as perception. In Husserl’s terminology,
the currently unseen sides of my laptop are nonetheless co-present and
are necessarily apperceived or appresented on the basis of what is
momentarily presented.67 At the same time, what is momentarily
present in consciousness would be absolutely nothing if it were not
embedded in an apperceptive horizon. It would be just a fleeting sensory
impression and not the manifestation of an existing thing.
In our exploration of perceptual things, we are constantly aware of
turning merely apperceived sides into properly perceived sides, while
what was just perceived falls back into the apperceptive horizon of
co-presence. In light of this analysis of perception, which is far more
accurate than Simmel’s, there is nothing anomalous or deficient about
empathy being a genuine experience of something unseen. Seeing
beyond the momentary content of our consciousness is not an anomaly
of empathetic experience but rather an essential trait of any genuine
perceptual experience whatsoever. In this sense, what renders empathy
possible is just the same apperceptive transcending of what is momen-
tarily given that is already operative in the perception of simple things.
Let us follow briefly Husserl’s felicitous description of empathy
offered in the Erste Philosophie lecture (1923/24), delivered the same
years he was deepening his study of Simmel.
Husserl points out that we have an original experience of subjectivity’s
inherence in a physical body: the experience of ourselves. We constantly
see our body, we ‘hold sway’ in it, we use it to move in space and we are
tactually aware of its material existence in the world of natural things.
He asserts:

67
“All appresentation is founded in presentation.” (Hua XXXIX, 410.)
Monads with windows 199

Only to the extent that things in my bodily surroundings equal my own living
body and that element in it which bestows on its physical behavior the rank of
animating expression, can and even must such things be apprehended and
experienced as living bodies. I do not say this on the basis of some objective-
psychological theories [. . .] but rather by observing my perception and its
characteristic structure as perception of my own living body and of alien living
bodies.68

In the more famous Cartesian Meditations a few years later (1929)

Husserl will refer to “analogizing apprehension”69 of the other’s body
based on the “associative pairing”70 linking it with my own body,
whereby the experienced similitude between our two bodies allows for
the transference (Übertragung) of the sense ‘embodied subjectivity’ –
originally experienced in my own body – into the other body. In the
Erste Philosophie lecture, the terminology is less technical, and
Husserl’s main concern is to stress that in empathetic experiences
other subjects are genuinely experienced. This experience has a kind
of immediacy to it that comes to expression when in ordinary language
we say ‘I see the other person’ and not just ‘I see his or her body.’
Perhaps having in mind Simmel’s “completely wrong” characterization
of empathy Husserl insists that this experience is “no inference” and
“not a kind of mediated thinking” because the other is “really experi-
enced.”71 In order to explain how this real experience can occur despite
the impossibility of the other’s mind presenting itself through sense
impressions, Husserl articulates the explanation outlined above. He
holds that the experience of others in empathy is an immediate percep-
tion, restating:
[A]nd still this perception entails a certain mediatedness, which distinguishes
it essentially from the perception of my own body. In my own body, as we
saw, both the thingly [dinglich] living body and the psychic component that
embodies itself in it, as well as the way in which this embodiment occurs, are
originally perceived. The psychic component is namely my own. On the
contrary, while the other’s living body is originally perceived in my spatial
surrounding world as much as my own body, the psychic component embod-
ied in it is not likewise originally perceived. It is not really and authentically

68
Hua VIII, 62.
69
E. Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge (1931),
Husserliana, vol. 1 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1963), 140. Hereafter Hua I.
70
Hua I, 147. 71 Hua VIII, 62.
200 Husserl and the life-philosophers

self-given, it is only co-intended after the manner of appresentation. In this

regard, there is a similarity with that anticipation through which in every
outer perception something co-perceived, something intended as being there
concomitantly, is included, such as, for instance, the unseen rear side of a seen
thing. But the analogy is not perfect [. . .] This indicating intention does not
demand and does not contemplate a resolving perception, as is the case with
all pre-figuring moments in the perception of a thing in space. The perception
of an alien living body is rather [. . .] essentially perception through originary
interpretation [Wahrnehmung durch ursprüngliche Interpretation].72

Like the rear side of a perceptual thing, the psychic life of an alien
subject is not seen but is nonetheless experienced alongside what is
authentically perceived, the alien human body. However, unlike the
rear side of a perceptual thing, the psychic life of an alien subject cannot
be brought to direct manifestation by further perceptual exploration of
his body. It is an appresented component that is bound to remain
appresented. This appresentation is its way of being originally given.
It would be wrong-headed at this point to interpret the impossibility
of self-givenness in direct presentation as a lamentable deficit in our
experience of alien subjectivity. This is because it would be illegitimate
to impose the requirement of impressional self-givenness characterizing
simple perceptual experience on our experience of alien subjectivity.
Empathy, as Husserl points out, is just a “specific, fundamental form of
experience,” which still “has to be designated as perception” in virtue of
its originally giving trait but which has its own “ways of confirma-
tion”73 and legitimatization vis-à-vis simple perception. Following
Nicolas De Warren’s apt characterization, in empathetic experience
the demand of intuitive fulfillment that belongs to every form of inten-
tionality, and in particular to simple perception, is in a certain sense
withheld, and thereby consciousness becomes open to the experience of
something other-than-itself.74 To put it in simpler words, seeing the
other’s mind just like we see our own mind is a wrong ideal if applied to
our experience of alien subjectivity. A first-personal seeing of the other’s
mind would not be the optimal version of what in our empirical world,
unfortunately, only happens in the mode of appresenting indication.

72
Ibid., 63. 73 Ibid.
74
N. De Warren, Husserl and the Promise of Time: Subjectivity in Transcendental
Phenomenology (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 239. De Warren does not
mention directly the Erste Philosophie lecture, but the longer passage quoted
above (see n. 68) directly confirms his reading.
Monads with windows 201

Appresenting indication is precisely the way in which subjects are

genuinely present for each other through empathy, and the demand of
intuitive fulfillment after the manner of simple perception is just out of
place for this type of experience.
After the acknowledgment of the genuine experiential status of empa-
thy, the stage is set for an analysis of its constitutive function with regard
to the historical world. In short, Husserl shows that empathy does not
yield merely occasional experiences of isolated subjects. On the contrary,
a complete analysis of empathy and its essential characteristics reveals
that empathetic experience discloses for every subject an open horizon of
other subjects extending indefinitely into the past and into the future. Let
us recall the talk of ‘monads,’ which was adopted to stress the self-
contained nature of transcendental subjectivity. Commenting on this
self-containedness of empathy, Husserl makes the following remark,
which is of crucial importance for the continuation of our analysis:
Every ego is a “monad.” But monads have windows. They have no windows
or doors to the extent that no other subject can really enter. However, through
such windows (the windows are empathetic experiences) the other subject can
be experienced in the same way in which one’s own past experiences are
experienced through recollection.75

The suggested analogy between empathy and recollection brings to light

a feature of empathy that deserves close scrutiny. Empathy can be described
as a kind of presentification (Vergegenwärtigung). Presentifications are
those experiences through which something absent is experienced. This
occurs, for instance, when we remember our childhood bedroom, when
we imagine a crocodile, or when we expect the train to arrive soon at the
platform. All these objects cannot present themselves to us perceptually the
moment we want to experience them. While I am standing on the platform
waiting for the train, there are a limited number of things that present
themselves to me ‘by themselves’ in perception: the tracks, the wires, the
timetable, the benches, and so forth. My childhood bedroom does not. If I
decide to remember it, I am the ‘operator’ of its presence. In Husserl’s
language, I presentify it for myself. Similarly, if I decide to picture for
myself the imminent arrival of the train, the expected train is made present
by me. In a different sense, if I decide to kill time playing with my thoughts
and start to imagine a crocodile, a crocodile now appears before ‘my

75
Hua XIV, 260.
202 Husserl and the life-philosophers

mind’s eye’ as if it were present. However, when I imagine, I do not posit

the imagined objects as being present somewhere else, having been present
or being about to be present. I am just not concerned with their reality or
irreality. Husserl, therefore, distinguishes two fundamental classes of pre-
sentifications: positional (those in which the presentified object is posited
as being, having been, or being about to be) and non-positional (those
in which a mere semblance of presence is evoked and no position of
being takes place, including picture-consciousness76 and free-floating
imagination).
In light of the above remarks, it may seem odd that Husserl would
describe empathy, too, as a kind of presentification. Is not empathy a
genuine experience of self-givenness? Actually, all presentifications are
genuine experiences; they are genuine experiences happening in a differ-
ent experiential ‘mode.’77 Remembering my childhood bedroom means
having a genuine experience of my childhood bedroom in the mode
‘recollection.’ Imagining a crocodile means having a genuine experience
of a crocodile as if I were perceiving it, or in the mode ‘fantasy.’
Similarly, experiencing another subject means experiencing his or her
presence through a specific kind of presentification, empathy, thanks
to which the perceptual presence of the other’s body receives the
enhancement ‘living subjectivity’ simply by following the compelling

76
Here, of course, more specific distinctions would be needed. There is clearly a
difference between a photograph and a painting, in that the object depicted in the
photograph ‘must’ have existed at some point, while the subject of a painting can
be entirely imaginary. Similarly, there is a difference between a portrait and an
abstract painting. However, Husserl distinguishes between the actually appearing
object of an image and the ‘sujet’ that was originally depicted or photographed.
Even in the case of photographs or portraits, the actually appearing image seen in
the canvas or the photographic paper is not posited as being (Napoleon is not
actually hanging on the wall or failing to do so; he is merely appearing in the
painting), and the reference to the sujet once depicted is extrinsic to the actual
experience of the image. For an illuminating discussion of these important issues
see N. De Warren, “Pamina’s Eyes, Tamino’s Gaze: Husserl’s Phenomenology of
Image-Consciousness Refashioned,” in Ierna, Jacobs, and Mattens, Philosophy,
Phenomenology, Sciences, 303–332.
77
It should be mentioned that Husserl changed his mind on this point. In the Logical
Investigations he still described non-perceptual experiences as inauthentic
presentations, following his teacher Brentano. Later, he realized that
presentifications lack nothing in terms of the content that they present and are
therefore authentic. The phenomenological difference between presentifications
and simple presentations (perceptions) has to be entirely ascribed to the mode in
which such content presents itself.
Monads with windows 203

experiential motivation entailed in the experience of that body’s

similarity with my own.
At this stage of our analysis we must turn to consider two essential
features of all presentifications: intentional implication and iterability.
Intentional implication is the key phenomenon that ‘holds’ together
monadic life, first at the individual level and then, via empathy, at the
communal level. It is the hinge of the historical world. To characterize it
briefly, intentional implication is the inherence of a latent ego in every
act of presentification. In fact, whenever I remember something, the full
content of my recollection includes my past ego perceiving the object I
am remembering. Whenever I expect something to happen, such as the
thunder after a flash of lightning, the full content of my expectation
includes the future ego perceiving the object I am expecting. Most
importantly, as soon as we unearth the latent ego intentionally impli-
cated in our own reproductive presentifications, such as recollections
and expectations, we experience this ego as fundamentally coinciding
with our present ego. My own recollections qualify as my own precisely
because at any time I can unearth the latent egos implicated in them and
experience these egos as coincident with my present ego. The same goes
for expectations and future egos. A good way to catch hold of the
distinction between the latent ego of presentifications and the ego
carrying out a presentifying act in the present is to consider all those
experiences in which I can no longer ‘endorse’ the validity of my past
perceptions. For instance, I can remember seeing a round tower before I
approached it and realized that it was, in fact, square. It is not my
present ego who sees the round tower, because to see a round tower is
to endorse the validity of a round tower as an actual existent. Rather,
my present ego sees itself seeing a round tower in the past, although the
focus of its attention while remembering is generally on the tower and
not on the recollection. In this experience, the present ego can still
‘identify with’ the past ego, but it is the identification, or coincidence,
of two elements originally experienced as distinct.
The experienced coincidence between the latent, presentified egos and
the ego carrying out a presentifying act in the present grants the unity of
one’s own life-nexus, which Dilthey recognized but never accounted
for. Moreover, the experience of intentional implication within one’s
own subjective life supplies the model for a further clarification of
empathy. In the lecture on Erste Philosophie – which is the most
important source available for a description of intentional implication
204 Husserl and the life-philosophers

and iteration – Husserl describes empathy as feeding on the experienced

similarity of my body and the other’s body:
In this connection, this similarity motivates originally a presentifying func-
tion, an indication of a similar psychic life. This life, however, is not indicated
in a kind of recollection or expectation, which would allow for an identifica-
tion of the co-presentified ego-subject with myself; it is an ego, but an other.
The characteristic intentional structure of this kind of perception, which owes
a main portion of its accomplishment to a presentification, reveals an ego and
yet not myself as implicated subject; it makes me aware that another ego is in
front of me, and without this the words ‘other ego’ or ‘neighbor’ would be
meaningless for me.78

Obviously, no synthesis of coincidence occurs between the implicated

ego and my own present ego having an empathetic experience.
However, the other ego’s life is connected intentionally to my own
life, and we now live as subjects whose lives never really intersect but
are nonetheless inextricably linked to one another. Empathizing with
other subjects opens up for me an entirely new horizon, one that extends
my own life-possibilities beyond my self. Husserl describes this phenom-
enon in a manuscript written some ten years after the Erste Philosophie
lecture:
Let us consider that the perceptual present in its concreteness implicates actual
and potential empathy, too. By virtue of the characteristic structure of such
presentifications – which are of a new kind vis-à-vis the presentifications that
make me aware of my own past and future life – alien life (present, past, and
future) manifests itself as implicate. Now I possess not only the synthesis of
my ‘own’ immanent time, in which the unity of my own stream of life in its
own life-temporality [Lebenszeitlichkeit] is constantly aware for me as the
horizon of my present life, which can be disclosed through recollections. Now
the horizon of empathy [Einfühlungshorizont], through which being and
conscious life of alien subjects is there for me, is co-aware, too, in my present
life and as belonging to each previous life-present, as a horizon that, like my
own, can be disclosed.79

As we can easily ascertain, the disclosure (or exploration) of another

subject’s life does not occur via direct presentifications of his or her
conscious acts. However, it can occur through communication and
interpretation in which I adopt the other’s validities as my own and

78 79
Hua VIII, 135. Hua XXXIX, 89.
Monads with windows 205

progressively come to share the infinite horizon of his or her world. To

conclude this description of intentional implication, it is important to
notice that empathy does not grant just a fleeting experience of some
other mind. The recognition of the other as a subject, i.e., as an ego not
coinciding with but implicated by my own ego, establishes a permanent
horizon of life that I experience as connected with my own in the specific
sense of intentional implication.
The second decisive feature of presentifications relevant here is iter-
ability. Let us consider the following experiences: I can expect to
remember something; I can remember that I often used to recall a certain
episode of my life; I can expect another subject to remember a certain
episode of their life, in which they expected something to happen.
Presentifications can nest inside one another like Russian dolls. The
intentional implication characterizing presentifications considered sin-
gly can be iterated indefinitely, thus giving rise to increasingly compli-
cated layerings of latent egos.
Considering this phenomenological fact, we can formulate the fol-
lowing essential insight: every field of present experience of any con-
ceivable ego whatsoever harbors an infinity of actual and possible
implicated egos, which in turn have fields of experiences harboring an
infinity of actual and possible egos, including the ego initially consid-
ered, and so on.
Thereby an intersubjective present as synthetic intersubjective simultaneity of
streams of life qua streams of presence is constantly constituted. Each stream
is implicated horizonally in every other, and each stream implicates its own
past in a way that this past is a past of the simultaneously implicated past of
that stream’s co-subjects, in an open infinity, through empathy. The same
holds for the future. The community as community of reciprocity
[Wechselgemeinschaft] entails that in my present my simultaneous “us-all”
[Wir-All] is implicated and that this totality is one and the same for each
subject of my us, in a way that can be disclosed.80

This universal, intersubjective implication building the unity of a total

horizon begins with a very elementary kind of iteration: I can empathize
with someone empathizing with me. In empathy, I can experience
myself simultaneously as subject and object of empathetic experience.
I experience myself as the other’s other. The reciprocity of empathy

80
Ibid., 90.
206 Husserl and the life-philosophers

establishes the most fundamental kind of mutual recognition, which can

then be indefinitely iterated to include an infinite community of
(actually or potentially) empathizing subjects being one another’s
others.
On the basis of this most fundamental form of being-there-for-one-another-
reciprocally the most disparate I-Thou-acts and Us-acts become possible [. . .]
In this way, highly multiform communal life becomes possible. Its remarkable
characteristic consists in this: not only many subjects live in general, but they
live in a way that through the intentionality of empathetic experience each of
them has all others given as their others; as being co-existents, partly in the
form of an original experience and partly in the form of a definite or open and
indefinite knowledge, they are present in the subjects’ existential field.81

These last lines provide an important clue regarding the foundation of

the historical world that we are pursuing in this chapter. The universal
reciprocity rendered possible by empathetic experience establishes the
first, fundamental a priori governing the historical world. In the same
way in which space is the a priori form of co-existence in the sphere of
nature, the reciprocal being-there-for-one-another established by empa-
thy provides the a priori form of co-existence in the sphere of history.
From every conceivable ego, it is a priori possible to construct a system
of definite ‘spiritual’ positions encompassing all actual and possible
egos (past, present, and future) following the lines of intentional impli-
cations and iteration entailed in every actual or possible empathetic
experience.
In the next section, we shall examine another fundamental constitu-
ent of the historical world, namely, historical time. We have established
the principle of simultaneity (co-existence) of all conceivable transcen-
dental monads, so we now move to considering the principle of their
succession which is also responsible for the intelligibility of all cultural
products and historical situations.

Simmel and Husserl on the rigidity and plasticity

of historical time
Another important source for assessing Husserl’s critical appropriation
of life-philosophical themes is Simmel’s essay Das Problem der

81
Hua VIII, 137.
Simmel and Husserl on historical time 207

historischen Zeit (1916).82 Together with the above-mentioned Vom

Wesen des historischen Verstehens, it was part of a series of studies
Simmel undertook in order to start a thorough revision of his major
work Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie.83 Husserl’s abundant
marks on his personal copy of Simmel’s essay and his positive marginal
comments prove that he considered this work extremely valuable.
Simmel endeavors here to characterize in just a few brushstrokes the
specific meaning of time for the historical world. In particular, he is
interested in the ontological difference between time in the sphere of
history and time in the sphere of nature. While natural time is nothing
but a quantitative variable in processes that can occur and recur in any
venue of the universe, time in the sphere of history binds facts to
absolutely unique positions. Moreover, it configures itself in ways that
differ significantly from the linear, mono-directional pattern of natural
time. As we shall see in what follows, Husserl will eventually recast
some of Simmel’s analyses in his own language.
One preliminary remark before we move to analyze Simmel’s text:
Husserl’s phenomenological investigations of time cover many different
phenomena and span his entire life. The bulk of his work on time
revolves around a phenomenological clarification of the constitution
of primal time in immanent consciousness. In other words, Husserl’s
time-analyses set out to reconstruct how the immanent flow of primor-
dial data (Urhyle) organizes itself synthetically and, in so doing, con-
stitutes the most fundamental meanings of ‘past,’ ‘present’, and ‘future’
as dimensions of experiences. The doctrine of original impression,
retention, and protention, designed to describe this fundamental self-
organization of inner consciousness, is one of Husserl’s profoundest
achievements, and it has been the object of detailed analyses and inter-
pretations in the past decades. Reconstructing or even summarizing this
remarkably complex area of Husserl’s thought would require a signifi-
cant amount of space and a digression from the line of inquiry we are
pursuing in this book. However, like everything else in the life of
subjectivity, the constitution of historical time presupposes the synthetic

82
G. Simmel, Das Problem der historischen Zeit, in Georg Simmel, Gesamtausgabe,
vol. 15 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), 287–304. Translated by
G. Oakes, “The Problem of Historical Time,” in Simmel, Essays on
Interpretation in Social Science, 127–144. Hereafter PHT.
83
See G. Oakes, Introduction, in Simmel, Essays on Interpretation in Social Science,
7–8.
208 Husserl and the life-philosophers

work of primordial time-consciousness. Therefore, I have elected to

assume some basic familiarity with Husserl’s analyses of inner time-
consciousness. What we are about to analyze with the aid of Simmel is
not so much the constituting consciousness of time but rather a con-
stituted dimension of time, which in turn functions as a constitutive a
priori condition for the possibility of a historical world.
Simmel begins his essay asking the following questions: “What is the
relationship between time and the other components of history? And
what is the special import of the concept of time that is germane to
history?”84 First of all, Simmel points out that time is the fundamental
principle of individuation for historical realities: “A given aspect of
reality qualifies as historical when we know how to fix it at a certain
position within our temporal system.”85 This means that the simple fact
that an event happened does not suffice to qualify it as historical. We
must be able to locate this event in a more or less precisely determined
moment in the whole of history. This is because mere understanding,
which Dilthey deemed the organ of historical knowledge, does not
supply any meaningful information about the historical reality of the
fact at issue:
Understanding – that is, the ability to empathize or to project oneself into a
structure of elements – is exclusively concerned with ideal contents.
Understanding is a consequence of the coherence and the association of
these ideal contents. From the perspective of understanding, therefore, the
question of whether these contents fall under the categories of reality or
fantasy, the present or the past, is of no consequence.86

In other words, there is no real difference between understanding the

fictional character of a novel and understanding a historical figure of the
past. What we understand is a series of ideal ‘contents’ whose connec-
tion is indifferent to reality or fantasy. The mere fact that we can
understand some meaningful connections does not prove anything
about the actual historical occurrence of the objects to which these
connections pertain.87 Understandability and temporal situatedness
are thus two completely independent ‘sources’ for the constitution of
an object as ‘historical.’

84
PHT, 127. 85 Ibid. 86 Ibid., 128–129.
87
This issue was touched upon already towards the end of Chapter 1, where we
examined Franz Böhm’s OG. Böhm, in fact, makes reference to Simmel’s essay on
historical time.
Simmel and Husserl on historical time 209

Let us imagine, following Simmel’s suggestion, isolating a certain

historical phenomenon and understanding thoroughly its immanent
constituent factors. This phenomenon could be “ideally located at any
position within a temporal sequence without producing any change in
its character.”88 For instance, let us imagine understanding thoroughly
the immanent reasons behind the transition from the republican age to
the imperial age in ancient Rome. There is a sense in which, abstractly
speaking, this “interpretive complex” (Verstehenskomplex)89 is indif-
ferent to the specific time-venue in which it occurred. We could imagine
it moving an entire century backward or forward and still retaining all
its immanent meaning-constituents. This would not alter our under-
standing. However, if we consider the totality of history, in which this
phenomenon occurred, things change significantly:
Suppose, on the other hand, that the interpretive complex embraces the
totality of all known contents. Then this relationship between temporal
location and interpretation is no longer possible. From our perspective,
what exists both before and after this totality is only empty time, a vacuum
in which no change of position is possible. This is because, within such a
temporal vacuum, no position can be differentiated from any other position,
just as no body can have a “location” in the vacuum of absolute space. The
spatial location of bodies is only reciprocally determined as a consequence of
their spatial interrelationships. The totality of the corporeal world, therefore,
is non-spatial, for there is nothing which exists outside of this totality that
could serve as a point of reference to “define” its location. For the same
reason, time is only a reciprocal relationship between the contents of history.
History as a whole, on the contrary, is atemporal.90

Simmel is suggesting that the apparent isolability and movability of

historical facts (or groups of facts) is only due to our necessary disregard
for the broader totality of history in which they occurred. We can isolate
and treat the transition from the republican to the imperial age in
ancient Rome as an abstract historical fact per se. However, true under-
standing of its meaning would require the extension of our sphere of
interest to what happened immediately before and immediately after
this transition. In turn, true understanding of this now expanded time-
period would require further extension to an earlier past and a later
future, and so forth. If we followed this procedure indefinitely we would
come to embrace the totality of human history up to the present moment

88 89 90
PHT, 131. Ibid. Ibid.
210 Husserl and the life-philosophers

and realize that every single event in it has an irreplaceable time-venue

that cannot be exchanged with any other event. Simmel continues:
It is only at this point that we can understand both the significance as well as
the paradoxical character of this heuristic construct. As the foregoing account
demonstrated, the reciprocal process of interpretation which forms this com-
plex into a coherent whole is only preliminary and fragmentary. Such a
process of interpretation qualifies as complete only if the complex is extended
in both temporal directions – for our understanding of an event is complete
only if we can identify its consequences – until the limits of the complex
approximate the limits of our knowledge. Within this total sequence, the
location of each content is definitively and, in principle, unambiguously
determined.91

Husserl finds these analyses extremely helpful but he complains that

they are “too formal.”92 He means that Simmel does not explicitly
address the fact that, ultimately, the reason why history only admits
of absolutely determined and non-interchangeable temporal positions is
that history is the development of spiritual (geistig) realities as opposed
to mere natural things. In the lower part of the page from which the
above quotes are taken Husserl comments:
The historical is individual: by that we mean that this content can only occur
once. In this sense, the natural is in principle not individual. This depends on
the following fact: spirit [Geist] and spiritual facts [geistige Tatsachen] and
thus the whole spiritual world [Geisteswelt] (which has a unity as spiritual)
<can> develop (life); things on the contrary are dead and have no
development.93

In other words, we cannot move historical facts around the axis of

historical time because in the very conception of a totality of history,
“we are guided by the idea of a total development [Entwicklung] in the
Aristotelian sense. Within this total development individual develop-
ments have their function, which demands to be understood.”94 Husserl
is suggesting that it is only in a purposive (teleological) system that the
constituent parts have absolutely determined and non-interchangeable
positions. Therefore, Simmel’s correct insight into the characteristic

91
Ibid., 131–132.
92
E. Husserl, BQ 442; Georg Simmel, Das Problem der historischen Zeit (Berlin:
Verlag von Reuther u. Reichard, 1916), 12–13, from Husserl’s private library
preserved at the Husserl Archives Leuven.
93
E. Husserl, BQ 442, 9. 94 Ibid., 10.
Simmel and Husserl on historical time 211

rigidity of historical time should be supplemented by a consideration of

the specific purposiveness of historically developing spiritual facts. If we
consider this spiritual purposiveness, then the absolute temporal posi-
tion of historical events and the characteristic ‘uniqueness’ of their
contents reveal two sides of the same coin: historical events are stages
in the development of a teleological system. The failure to recognize this
teleological character of the historical whole leads Simmel to separate
‘form’ (historical time) and ‘content’ (complexions of events) of history
and to prioritize form over content:
A historical status can be ascribed to events even though they may be repeated
thousands of times with exactly the same qualitative properties. The thesis
that the historicity of an event is defined by reference to the uniqueness of its
content seems to be based on an illegitimate inference or extrapolation from
the uniqueness of the cosmic process as a whole. This total process, of course,
cannot be repeated. This is because every repetition – including the repetition
of eternal recurrence – is already included in the cosmic process itself. Any
such repetition would be identifiable as some aspect of the cosmic process. In
principle, the occurrence of an unlimited number of events with exactly the
same content is possible. Therefore, I fail to understand the import of the
uniqueness of the individuality of these events if the expressions ‘uniqueness’
and ‘individuality’ are meant to refer to the content of the events in question.
The concept of the uniqueness or individuality of an event makes sense only if
it refers to the time-frame in which a given content is located. The concept of
time entails that such a time-frame is non-repeatable.95

Husserl remarks on the side that this idea of indefinite repeatability for
historical events is “definitely wrong,”96 and he utterly debunks the
Nietzschean thought of eternal recurrence evoked by Simmel in this
passage: “I consider <eternal recurrence> nonsense. It contradicts every-
thing historical.”97 This abstract consideration of the ‘content’ as strictly
distinct from the form of historical events is “wrong specifically for
spiritual facts,”98 and it is precisely Simmel’s disregard for the ontological
specificity of the type of facts he is considering that prevents him from
seeing the material impossibility in the thought of history as an endless
repetition of identical yet univocally temporalized facts.
Let us leave aside, for the moment, the question concerning the kind
of teleology Husserl has is mind. The idea that history is a purposive
system, in any case, is common to a number of thinkers of his time,

95 96 97 98
PHT, 134. E. Husserl, BQ 442, 14. Ibid. Ibid.
212 Husserl and the life-philosophers

including Dilthey. It can be understood in the minimal sense that

historical individuals act upon goals, so history as a whole is oriented
towards a system of goals that may or may not coalesce into one single
overarching goal for mankind. We shall consider this issue more specif-
ically in Chapter 7.
For now, and to conclude this section, it is important to dwell on
another feature of historical time: its plasticity. In the framework of
a rigidly established sequence of temporal positions ‘filled’ with
non-repeatable historical contents, we can detect a certain rhythm
characterized by typical patterns. Historical events are absolutely non-
repeatable with respect to their content, but a distinctive typicality
characterizes historical time. Husserl introduces the notion, otherwise
uncommon for him, of Tempo (rhythm) when commenting on a pas-
sage in which Simmel examines the concept of duration in history.99
Historical duration (Dauer) differs significantly from the mere persis-
tence in time (Beharrung) of natural things. If we imagine the para-
doxical situation of an absolute historical stasis, say, ten years of
government in which absolutely nothing happened that would allow
us to distinguish those ten years from what happened before and after
them, these ten years would count as a “historical atom”100 and in a
sense they would have no genuine ‘duration’ at all.
Hussel comments:
Rhythm [Tempo]! In the sphere of life, and then also in the sphere of history,
duration is a concept that measures through a quantitative determination
[Größenbestimmung] the rhythm of what happens, and this is an essential
component of the intuitive spheres of life.101

The idea that a definite rhythmic movement characterizes historical

time illuminates a feature that Simmel only mentions in passing but that
Husserl develops in a more detailed way in some of his manuscripts.
There is an essential periodicity (Periodizität) to historical time, which,
in turn, has its roots in essential features of historically living human
persons.102 Husserl identifies various types of periodicity. The most
fundamental is the alternation of sleep and wakefulness, which origi-
nally correlates with the alternation of day and night. Furthermore, we
can think of the periodical recurrence of certain instincts such as hunger.

99
PHT, 137. 100 Ibid. 101
E. Husserl, BQ 442, 19.
102
See Hua XXXIX, 591.
Simmel and Husserl on historical time 213

This gives rise to typical, recurring qualia of time, such as the distinctive
feelings of preprandial and postprandial time. At a higher level, the day,
the week, and the year consist of the rhythmic alternation of work and
leisure,103 and these two encompassing forms of life set the tone for
various arrays of interests and goals. Moreover, the passing of time
occurs in the form of ‘ages’ and ‘aging,’ both at the individual and the
supra-individual level:
Historical time has “ages” [Zeitalter]. In a broad sense, this statement indi-
cates a thoroughly oriented articulation, so that all differences of historical
hour, historical year, historical decade, etc., would be “age”-forms [Zeitalter-
Formen]. In a precisely analogous sense, personal time – the time of personal
life – too, has the form, the apriori of its form of “change” [Wechsel], as type-
pattern [Typik] describable in terms of ages. All periods [Abschnitte], also in
the subjective measurement, are measures of ages [Altersgrössen]. How old
[alt]? One year, five months, etc.; day, hour, etc. Measures of ages, measures
of an oriented subjective time. What grows old in it is the subject of life. Life,
on its part, is not called old or young, so that the age, too, would not be age
with respect to life but with respect to the living subject.104

Besides displaying the overall feature of periodicity at various levels, the

plasticity of historical time allows for contractions and expansions in
the sphere of what we consider present in the specific sense of historical
contemporaneousness. In Husserl’s description:
An individual subject lives his intentional life in correlation with his inten-
tional surrounding world. Experiencing, representing, thinking, suffering,
and acting, a subject is constantly related to this conscious surrounding
world. What does “present” mean for such a subject? The form of the tense
praesens? Every occurrence in the surrounding world, which is still becoming;
every enduring that is still enduring now is present happening and being, and
this present stretches as far as the past (the past accessible to recollection) that,
as past-horizon, is intentionally connected to the now. The present war and
peace, the present emperor, the present crisis, my present trip, etc. The same
goes for my life as present.105

103
Ibid., 308. 104 Hua XIV, 217.
105
Ibid., 221. These descriptions allude to the notion of ‘living present,’ which is
paramount in Husserl’s later work on time, especially in the so-called C-
manuscripts. It should be mentioned that the first occurrence of the phrase ‘living
present’ to describe the temporal fabric characterizing living subjectivity can be
found in Simmel’s essay Life as Transcendence, the overture to his metaphysical
work Lebensanchauung (1918). After describing the time of life as consisting of
214 Husserl and the life-philosophers

These descriptions are, of course, quite rough, and they merely indi-
cate directions for further phenomenological research. Husserl himself
never developed them beyond the preliminaries. However, they suffice
to establish a further a priori condition for the possibility of history as a
world. Historical time is the form of succession and contemporaneous-
ness of historical events. It is characterized by rigidity with respect to the
temporal positions pertaining to each historical event and plasticity
regarding the typical patterns according to which such rigidly deter-
mined events assume their place in specific nexuses of significance.
Every conceivable historical event occurs in a definite context of perio-
dicity (at night, during the day, in the past decade, etc.) and is thus
caught up in the specific rhythm of personal life.

Natural causality and motivational causality

After considering empathetic being-there-for-one-another and histori-
cal time as two ontological a prioris of the historical world, we have to
consider briefly the third a priori, i.e., motivation. Husserl describes
motivation as “psychic causality” and “specifically personal causal-
ity.”106 This means that motivation in the sphere of history plays the
same role played by inductive causality in the sphere of nature: it is the
explanatory principle for all observable manifestations and changes.
Prior to all natural-scientific experimenting and theorizing, in the obser-
vation of nature we are aware that the physical circumstances in which a
given thing is immersed determine the way in which it appears to us –
the circumstances cause (in the natural sense) the thing’s observable
behavior. A red apple in a poorly illuminated room will appear grey; an
ice cube taken out of the freezer will start to melt. If we ask why such
phenomena occur, we are asking for a plausible account of the circum-
stances surrounding the apple or the ice-cube and the way in which these
two objects ‘respond’ to these circumstances, according to their intrinsic
properties. A red apple ‘responds’ to the circumstance of poor illumina-
tion by appearing grey. An ice cube ‘responds’ to the circumstance of
‘thick’ phases comprising a quantum of past and future within every span of
present, Simmel states: “The living present consists in the fact that it transcends
the present” (VL, 7). Given the tenor of Simmel’s description, it would not be
unwarranted to speculate that this essay may have been a major source of
inspiration for Husserl’s later formulation of his notion of living present, which
is largely coincident with Simmel’s.
106
Phen. P., 108.
Natural causality and motivational causality 215

higher temperature by starting to melt. In these cases, we are able to

distinguish, albeit implicitly, between the intrinsic properties of a
thing (redness, coldness), the momentary appearance of that thing
(grayness, melting-ness), and the circumstances causing this momen-
tary appearance. Repeated and refined observation can lead to very
precise predictions of a thing’s possible ways of appearing in varying
circumstances. Such predictions can be eventually formulated in
mathematical terms, increasing significantly their precision and
comprehensiveness.
In a similar way, we are aware that spiritual facts (including both
mental events in single individuals and cultural events in communities)
always happen in a given context of significance. The circumstance of
hunger gives rise to the desire to eat, which in turn triggers certain
actions geared towards the acquisition of food. Seeking food is the
way in which a psychic subject ‘responds’ to the circumstance of being
hungry. In this case, too, we are implicitly distinguishing between a
subject with its intrinsic properties (e.g., the ability to move around,
identify certain things as edible, etc.), its momentary way of appearing
(the actual activity of seeking food in the given moment considered),
and the circumstances causing this way of appearing (hunger).
Here the meaning of cause is different from that of natural causality.
If we ask why in this context, we want to hear about the motivation that
drives a certain subject to act in a certain way.107 As Simmel recog-
nized,108 in this context we can have very different outcomes and accept
as valid opposite sets of motivations under similar circumstances.
However, this does not mean that motivational causality is a ‘softer’
kind of lawfulness compared to natural causality. In the sphere of
history it is possible to contemplate concatenations of motivations
having a strict necessity to them. However, this motivational necessity
does not amount to natural inevitability, but rather to compelling force
or psychic irresistibility. To stay with our previous example, we can
explain the behavior of someone stealing food by reference to the
irresistible urge to eat and a circumstance of indigence. This course of
action can be contemplated in its typicality; it is characterized by a

107
The same goes for cultural artifacts. To understand a cultural artifact means to
understand the circumstances in which it was produced and the motivations
behind its production.
108
See Chapter 2.
216 Husserl and the life-philosophers

certain intuitable necessity. However, other constellations of motiva-

tional irresistibility could obtain in similar circumstances. We can
explain the behavior of someone who chooses to starve to death rather
than stealing food, for instance, by reference to the irresistible force of
moral ideals. The ‘irresistibility’ of morality, in this case, supersedes the
irresistibility of hunger. This is also a course of action that can be
contemplated in its ideal typicality, which is more or less perfectly
reflected in concretely occurring courses of action.
Dilthey and Simmel first introduced a robust notion of motivation as
the key concept in understanding the historical world. Dilthey, in par-
ticular, contrasted natural causality and psychic motivation and, as we
saw, insisted on the illegitimacy of natural-scientific methods in the
sphere of psyche and history. Husserl’s own contribution to their
achievement is twofold. First, he extends the notion of motivation to
the entirety of psychic life. Second, thanks to his different understanding
of empathy, he acknowledges a distinctive kind of intersubjective moti-
vation reaching beyond the inner subjective life of an isolated
individual.
In keeping with his above-mentioned critique of naturalistic psychol-
ogy and its reduction of the passive sphere of subjectivity to mere
nature, Husserl considers thoroughly motivational all those associative
and instinctive phenomena that occur without the active participation
of the ego. Deliberate actions based on the active recognition of reasons
or on the conscious pursuit of a goal are not the only things that qualify
as motivational. In Husserl’s words:
Everywhere in the spiritual [geistig] sphere two kinds of motivations inter-
weave: the rational and the irrational, i.e., the motivation of higher, active
subjectivity [Geistigkeit] and the motivation of lower, passive or affective
subjectivity [Geistigkeit].109

We can view rational motivation in two ways: (1) as the law objec-
tively linking together conscious acts and (2) as the ‘force’ compelling
the ego to act and judge in a rationally justifiable way. Husserl explains
this twofold meaning of rational motivation in the following terms:
Motivation can exist here in the most authentic sense whereby it is the Ego
that is motivated: I confer my thesis onto the conclusion because I judged such

109
Hua XXXVII, 108.
Natural causality and motivational causality 217

and such in the premises, because I have given my thesis to the premises [. . .] In
each case here I am accomplishing a cogito and am determined in doing so by
the fact that I have accomplished another cogito. Obviously, the thesis of
the conclusion is related thereby to the thesis of the premises. These are
Ego-theses, yet on the other hand they are not themselves the Ego, and so
we also have as motivation a particular relationship among the theses. But the
theses as theses have their “material,” and that produces lines of dependencies
as well: the full assertions and, correlatively, the full lived-experiences have a
“connection of motivation.”110

In all such cases the Ego can take responsibility for its acts and, if
necessary, justify its positions. Even mistaken judgment or incorrect
reasoning belongs in the sphere of rational motivation. I could explain
the mistaken reasons that led me to judge in a certain way and even-
tually come to recognize the correct reasons I previously overlooked.
In contrast to this level of rational motivation, which plays itself out
entirely in the sphere of position-takings (Stellungnahmen), stands irra-
tional, or, better, “a-rational”111 motivation. This kind of motivation is
rooted in sensibility and in the constant interaction between present and
past experiential life. This second dimension is the most familiar:
A thought “reminds” me of other thoughts and calls back into memory a past
lived experience, etc. In some cases it can be perceived. In most cases, how-
ever, the motivation is indeed actually present in consciousness, but it does not
stand out; it is unnoticed or unnoticeable (“unconscious”).112

I can suddenly remember that I am late for my dental appointment after

running into an acquaintance on the street. At first, I see no connection
between these two events, but upon further inspection I realize that the
last time I saw this person was in my dentist’s waiting room. Seeing that
acquaintance motivated remembering my dental appointment. In this
case, I am not taking any rationally justifiable position, and I cannot be
held responsible for the welling up of this recollection in connection
with the foregoing perceptual act. The thought of my dental appoint-
ment ‘popped up’ into my mind without my active participation.
However, the two events are linked in a way that we can clarify and
has little to do with inductive, natural causality.
Experiences like this one reveal in a particularly evident fashion a
motivational connectedness that encompasses the entirety of our

110 111 112

Ideas II, 232. Ibid., 234. Ibid.
218 Husserl and the life-philosophers

experiential life, including the sphere of simple perceptions. To a phe-

nomenological analysis, the simple perceptual experience of my
acquaintance walking on the street possesses already in itself a motiva-
tional structure. While I followed my acquaintance walking on the
street, I ‘unconsciously’ carried out an ongoing synthesis of all the
perceptual phases in which his walking body appeared to me. Every
new profile of my acquaintance’s body was integrated into an overall
perception and apprehended as manifesting one and the same ‘thing,’
thereby motivating my expectation of being presented with ever-new
profiles as long as my acquaintance abided in my perceptual field.
Husserl describes this state of affairs:
Apprehensions of things and of thingly nexuses are “webs of motivation”:
they are built through and through from intentional rays, which [. . .] refer
back and forth, and they let themselves be explicated in that the accomplish-
ing subject can enter into these nexuses. I have the unitary intentionality in
which a thing is given to me in one stroke. Then from every way of running
through it, there results a series of continuous acts unfolding in the first-
posited sense and in a harmonious sense conforming to every further given-
ness. That is to say, everything here is “motivated,” including every new
positing and every phase of the unitary total positing as well as every new
partial positing.113

In this case, too, we are not motivated in the sense of being rationally
compelled to think or act in a justifiable way. The ‘webs of motivation’
characterizing the unfolding of single perceptual experiences as well as
the totality of our subjective life run their course without the active
engagement of our egos. However, it is crucial to notice that whatever
our ego actively engages with must have been previously ‘arranged’
(technically: constituted) in the sphere of passive, irrational motivation.
If I am able to link the perceptual experience of my acquaintance with
my impending dental appointment, and if I am able to make the rational
judgment that I should better change my plans and run to the dentist,
this is because, prior to my active engagement, unnoticed ‘webs of
motivation’ constituted meaningful nexuses that I am now in a position
to consider and act upon. This means that irrational motivation does
not stand over and against rational motivation but rather prepares the
terrain for it. Husserl summarizes this point with a quite effective

113
Ibid., 236.
Philosophical meaning of the Geisteswissenschaften 219

metaphor: “Passive motivation is the native soil of reason [der

Mutterboden der Vernunft].”114
Given this distinction between passive and active motivation, we have
now to address a last decisive feature of motivation: motivation is, so to
speak, contagious. Through the channels of empathy, not only can I
understand alien motivations, but they can be appropriated and become
my own. Motivation is the way in which monads bring about effects
(wirken) in one another and through one another. In this context, too,
we can distinguish between motivations that occur passively in our
intersubjective life, such as the involuntary attraction or repulsion we
might feel towards another subject, and active, deliberate attempts to
motivate others by communicating our will to them. This second type of
intersubjective motivation characterizes social acts and can be realized
in various ways, such as by asking favors or by imparting orders.
Through active communication, both linguistic and non-linguistic,
one subject can realize, or bring about, another’s will. In Husserl’s
characterization, it is the master’s will that realizes itself in the slave’s
action, it is the general’s intentions that find their fulfillment in the
soldiers’ battling and so forth. This, of course, does not mean real
‘possession’ of someone’s mind but communication of one’s will, the
corresponding adoption of the other’s motives and subsequent action.
The above considerations establish the third a priori of the historical
world besides empathetic being-there-for-one-another and historical
time: motivation as the specifically historical-personal type of causality.
A correct interpretation of motivation based on its extension to the
totality of subjective life (thanks to the phenomenological reduction)
and to the sphere of intersubjective interaction (thanks to the theory of
empathy) thus completes Husserl’s phenomenological-ontological anal-
ysis of the historical world and sheds further light on his indebtedness to
and critique of the tradition of Lebensphilosophie.

Conclusion: the philosophical meaning of the

Geisteswissenschaften
To conclude this chapter and to introduce the themes of the final two
chapters of this book, let us consider what Husserl takes to be the
philosophical meaning of the nineteenth-century turn towards the

114
Hua XXXVII, 331.
220 Husserl and the life-philosophers

Geisteswissenschaften. For Husserl, this new group of sciences is not

simply another area of human knowledge besides natural science. There
is a systematic, philosophically relevant meaning to the ‘discovery’
of the world of Geist after the long centuries of Renaissance and
French Enlightenment naturalism.115 Thus, as we briefly suggested in
Chapter 5, a philosophically informed consideration of the human
sciences must recognize that the ‘subjectivity’ that they set out to under-
stand and investigate scientifically encompasses both the natural scien-
ces and nature itself as their subject matter. The natural sciences are
themselves cultural achievements, and ‘nature’ in the specific sense of a
theme for quantitatively oriented research only became accessible
through intellectual operations that occurred at a certain point in his-
tory, notably, in the work of Renaissance men such as Galileo and
Descartes. Serious consideration of this fact thus leads the philosoph-
ically reflecting theorist of science to two options. The first option is a
thoroughgoing historical relativism that would dissolve the very
notions of science and reality into merely contingent cultural products.
This is the position Husserl (and Rickert) attributed to Dilthey. The
other option would be to engage in deeper analyses of the subjectivity
investigated by the human sciences and to face the paradox of subjec-
tivity being both a fact in the world and the field of manifestation in
which every fact in the world (including the fact of subjectivity) receives
its meaning. This line of consideration would inevitably lead to the
discovery of transcendental, as distinct from empirical, subjectivity
and thus to a rationale for the performance of the phenomenological
reduction.
In other words, for Husserl there is a systematic path leading from the
natural sciences to the human sciences (including pure psychology) to
transcendental phenomenology. In an important sense, the human sci-
ences stand ‘closer’ to phenomenology than the natural sciences: while
the transition from the natural sciences to the human sciences implies a
complete switch of theme, the transition from the human sciences to
transcendental phenomenology occurs by means of a switch of attitude
within the same thematic sphere: subjectivity. This switch of attitude, as
we described above, determines a redefinition of the theme (from
human to transcendental subjectivity) and an expansion of the field of

115
Incidentally, Husserl considers this discovery to be the specific contribution of
German idealism to Western culture. See Mat IV, 140.
Philosophical meaning of the Geisteswissenschaften 221

inquiry (from the psychic ‘segment’ of the existing world to the endless
egological universe in which the existing world as such is constituted).
Husserl offers a synthetic sketch of the systematic progression he has
in mind in a footnote to a manuscript stemming from the same period as
the Erste Philosophie lecture:
The consistent progression from natural science to human science leads to the
intentional encompassing of nature in spirit [Geist] to the encompassing of
spirit through spirit itself. Natural science and nature itself, worldly science
and the scientifically cognized world itself as such, turn into a formation
[Gebilde] within universal spirit. This motivates the thought of an absolute
science of spirit [Geisteswissenschaft] as the way into an absolute, universal
science.116

In other words, transcendental phenomenology as the universal science

encompassing both physical nature and human, historical subjectivity
overcomes the apparent opposition between the image of the world deliv-
ered by the human sciences and the natural sciences. Phenomenology has
the resources to elucidate their status as constituted formations brought
about by the intentional workings of transcendental subjectivity. Another
passage from a manuscript summarizes Husserl’s understanding of phe-
nomenology in the framework of the Natur-Geist opposition as well as the
philosophical contribution this discipline is supposed to make towards
overcoming such opposition:
Phenomenology is the science of transcendentally pure, universal spirit and,
moving to a consideration of the world, it is the universal spiritual science that
recognizes in everything worldly formations [Gebilde] of universal subjectiv-
ity [universale Geistigkeit]. Phenomenology overcomes [aufheben] the sepa-
ration of natural and human sciences to the extent that, as universal science, it
turns all sciences in general into branches of the one spiritual science: the
science of transcendental universal spirit.117

Based on these considerations, we are now in a position to assess the

meaning of Husserl’s late analyses of the life-world and the specifically
philosophical project Husserl envisioned for his phenomenology within
the intellectual debates of his time. This will be the theme of Chapter 7.

116 117
Hua VIII, 276 n. Ibid., 361.
7 The life-world as the source of nature
and culture: towards a transcendental-
phenomenological worldview

Die Welt, die wir erleben ist unsere Tat.

Wilhelm Windelband1

Die Frage, was bin ich, was ist der Mensch, die
Menschheit, beantwortet die Transzendentalphilosophie
durch ihre tiefste Auslegung der Subjektivität als sich selbst
und Welt konstituierender.
Edmund Husserl2

In this chapter, I will attempt to position Husserl’s late work on the

life-world within the debate between the Neo-Kantians and the life-
philosophers that I have endeavored to reconstruct thus far. I will
suggest that we look at Husserl’s transcendental-phenomenological
ontology of the life-world through the prism of what I will call the
Kantian liberation narrative. In this light, it should become clear that
Husserl increasingly joined forces with the best philosophical minds of
his time in order to combat naturalism and articulate a humanistic
worldview: one characterized, in Simmel’s words, by a “spiritualization
and fluidification [Vergeistigung und Verflüssigung] of our picture of
the world.”3 This, however, should not be taken to mean that Husserl’s
transcendental phenomenology is ultimately all about articulating a
humanistic worldview. Transcendental phenomenology remains for
Husserl a discipline in its own right, one that has a foundational
function for all philosophical problems and all empirical sciences. The

1
“The world that we experience is our deed.” W. Windelband, “Kulturphilosophie
und transzendentaler Idealismus,” in W. Windelband, Präludien: Aufsätze und
Reden zur Philosophie und ihrer Geschichte, vol. 2, 279–294. Here 283.
2
“Transcendental philosophy answers the questions ‘who am I?’ ‘what is man,
what is mankind?’ through its deepest interpretation of subjectivity as constituting
itself and the world.” Hua XV, 153.
3
WuK, 156.

222
The Kantian liberation narrative 223

articulation of a humanistic worldview should be understood as the

way in which transcendental phenomenology plays itself out in the
philosophical debate of Husserl’s time and as a consequence of its
commitment to a non-naturalistic view of subjectivity. With the aid
of a notion stemming from the Aristotelian tradition, we could argue
that phenomenology’s commitment to a humanistic worldview is not
essential to it but counts among its per se accidents, that is, those
accidents that flow from a thing’s essence but are not themselves part
of that thing’s essential content. To the extent that phenomenology sets
out to articulate essential features of consciousness in general, it is in a
sense indifferent to specifically human concerns regarding the factual
existence of conscious beings in a cultural world. However, to the extent
that phenomenology is committed to a non-naturalistic view of sub-
jectivity, that is to say, to the extent that phenomenology unearths the
transcendental dimension inherent in any conceivable consciousness,
when phenomenology plays itself out in the culturally formed world of
humans, it assumes the shape of a humanistically oriented philosophy.
Admittedly, there is a certain degree of contingency to this connotation
of transcendental phenomenology. However, this is the inevitable
degree of contingency that every theoretical enterprise primarily con-
cerned with pure possibilities must take in when it sets out to articulate
its standpoint in the sphere of factually existing culture.4 I will expand
on this important issue in Chapter 8. First, a detailed discussion of
Husserl’s notion of life-world in the context of his late phenomenology
and of the Kantian liberation narrative is necessary.

The Kantian liberation narrative

In the predominantly Neo-Kantian atmosphere of early twentieth-
century Germany, the philosophical giant from Königsberg was inter-
preted primarily as an epistemologist; however, the most ambitious
thinkers were well aware that Kant’s lifework had much deeper impli-
cations that reached far beyond the establishment of norms for empiri-
cal knowledge. In particular, as we mentioned in Chapter 2, Kant was
considered a mandatory point of reference towards the establishment of
a worldview or Weltanschauung – a comprehensive stance on the world
as a whole beyond the restricted perspectives of the specialized sciences.

4
For a discussion of Husserl’s notion of eidos see Chapter 4.
224 A transcendental-phenomenological worldview

In this sense, Kant was celebrated as the thinker who liberated Western
thought from the mental shackles of naturalism and cleared the way for
a novel understanding of our position in the world. This is the substance
of what I will refer to as the ‘Kantian liberation narrative.’ In this
narrative, Kant set the basis for a philosophical overcoming of natural-
ism qua worldview and opened up a new perspective for a philosophical
consideration of the historical world. Needless to say, the Kantian
liberation narrative is truly a Neo-Kantian narrative, that is, it is an
idiosyncratic interpretation of Kant from the point of view of the
nineteenth-century problem of naturalism. Kant’s own main preoccu-
pation is clearly not the rejection of naturalism (a category that he did
not possess) but rather the rejection of metaphysics as a science. The
Neo-Kantians, however, articulate their own narrative about the
importance of Kant by drawing on resources that are indeed present
in Kant’s work. Therefore, the Kantian liberation narrative is not so
much a misreading as it is a highly selective reading of Kant, developing
some elements in transcendental philosophy that deliberately depart
from its letter but self-avowedly further its spirit.
In his 1924 book Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie. Eine
Einführung Rickert offers an illuminating presentation of the Kantian
liberation narrative, stating:
Kant famously compared his theory of knowledge with Copernicus’ deed
[Tat], and we can follow his comparison in yet one further direction.
Precisely because of the “Copernican standpoint,” transcendental idealism
means a reversal [Umkehr] in the direction that philosophy saw itself neces-
sitated to follow on the basis of the new picture of the world delivered by
astronomy. However – and this is decisive – such reversal leaves wholly intact
the natural-scientific picture of the world and nonetheless enables philosophy
to revive the problems of a philosophy of history. Thus, the dependency of the
philosophy of history from cosmology is overcome.5

The heliocentric revolution in Renaissance astronomy crushed the

medieval belief that man stood at the center of the universe. The spatial
displacement of the earth as the seat of mankind was almost immedi-
ately interpreted as a dethronement of man. The door was open to the
appointment of nature as the true ‘center’ of all things and to a demean-
ing self-understanding of man as just one among many manifestations

5
Rickert, Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie, 138.
The Kantian liberation narrative 225

of nature. In this situation, Kant’s philosophy almost worked like a

counterrevolution. Rickert continues:
Through Kant the subject is repositioned back in the “center” [Mittelpunkt]
of the world under full recognition of modern teachings about nature.
Obviously, this is no longer a spatial center. However, the way in which this
repositioning happens is much more significant for the problems of the
philosophy of history. Now, once again, everything “revolves around” the
subject. “Nature” is not the absolute reality. Rather, according to its general
essence, nature is determined by “subjective” forms of apprehension.
Precisely the “infinite” universe is nothing but an idea of the subject, the
thought of a task [Aufgabe] that is necessarily assigned to the subject while
being insolvable. Through this Kantian “subjectivism” – which has nothing to
do with psychologism and anthropologism, and therefore can only be under-
stood as subjectivism with a grain of salt – the foundations of the empirical
natural sciences are in no way altered. On the contrary, they are even rein-
forced. However, the foundations of naturalism as worldview, which denies
every “objective” sense to historical life and therefore renders a philosophy of
history impossible, are completely undermined.6

The profusion of inverted commas in Rickert’s text indicates that

through the Kantian revolution terms such as “nature,” “center,” “sub-
ject” undergo a significant redefinition. The picture of the world in the
pre-modern age featured man as standing in the spatial center of an
ontologically self-subsistent universe created by God. The Kantian
picture of the world features subjectivity understood exclusively qua
rationality standing in the transcendental center of nature qua product
of the shaping activity of the categories applied on sensory data. In a
sense, this novel picture of the world dispels the potential sense of self-
entitlement flowing from the foregoing view, according to which man’s
dignity over the rest of creation is automatically granted by his God-
given position in the physical universe. After Kant, rationality is deemed
the only authentic source of a subject’s dignity, and it is through the
exertion of rationality that subjects get to actively occupy their legit-
imate place at the center of that universe which is now understood as
their own achievement. Once the productive meaning of rationality is
recognized and the apparent absoluteness of nature is overcome, the
stage is set to acknowledge other spheres in which subjects may exert

6
Ibid., 138–139.
226 A transcendental-phenomenological worldview

their innermost shaping powers or fail to do so: in particular, the sphere

of human history. In Rickert’s words:
Now, not only man stands, as a subject with his theoretical reason, at the
center of that “nature” which he understands scientifically. He also under-
stands himself immediately with his practical reason as the agent who can
bestow upon cultural life a positive meaning. [He understands himself],
namely, as autonomous, “free” personality aware of his duty, and practical
reason has primacy. With respect to this primacy, what meaning can the fact
that the stage of history is a spatially and temporally fleeting speck in a
random point of the natural whole still claim for itself? Nature is no longer
“the world,” but rather an apprehension of sensory being carried out by the
scientific man. In both the theoretical and the practical sphere, for the auton-
omous, law-giving subject, the spatial and temporal conditions of nature have
become indifferent with respect to matters of value. The autonomous man
leaves to science, which has destroyed the old and dogmatic picture of the
world, all conceivable freedom regarding the investigation of nature, includ-
ing psychic life. However, the autonomous man will never concede that the
science dealing with the sensory-real being of things would have to decide
anything about value or disvalue, about meaning or meaninglessness of the
world in its entirety.7

Interestingly, a version of the Kantian liberation narrative can be

found in philosophers as distant from Rickert as Simmel and Dilthey.
In the preface to the second edition of his Die Probleme der
Geschichtsphilosophie (1905), Simmel states programmatically that
“it is necessary to emancipate the self from historicism in the same
way that Kant freed it from naturalism.”8 His description of Kant’s
achievement regarding the liberation from naturalism is remarkably
similar to the one Rickert offers some fifteen years later. Simmel states:
Consider Kant’s question: how is nature possible? As a contribution to our
Weltanschauung, the value of Kant’s answer to this question lies in the free-
dom which the self or ego achieves in its relationship to everything that falls
within the domain of mere nature. The self produces nature as its own idea.
The general, constitutive laws of nature are simply the forms of our mind.
Nature is thereby subjected to the sovereign self.9

However, Simmel continues, Kant did not complete his empowering

project of liberation. The discovery of history in the nineteenth century

7 8 9
Ibid. PPH, VIII–IX. PPH, VIII.
The Kantian liberation narrative 227

poses a new threat to the sovereignty of the mind and seems to degrade
the self to what Gadamer would eventually characterize as “a flickering
in the closed circuits of historical life.”10 Simmel describes the problem
in the following terms:
Consider the two forces which threaten modern man: nature and history. In
Kant’s work, the first of these forces is destroyed. Both seem to suffocate the
free, autonomous personality. Nature has this property because mechanism
subjects the psyche – like the falling stone and the budding plant – to blind
necessity. History has this property because it reduces the psyche to a mere
point where the social threads woven throughout history interlace. The entire
productivity of the psyche is analyzed as a product of evolution. In the work of
Kant, the autonomous mind escapes the imprisonment of our empirical
existence by nature [. . .] The mind frees itself from enslavement by nature.
But this enslavement is now transformed into another: the mind enslaves itself
[. . .] [H]istory as a brute fact, a reality, and a superpersonal force threatens the
integrity of the self quite as much as nature.11

It is particularly remarkable to find traces of the Kantian liberation

narrative even in the work of Dilthey, who is generally charged with
historicism and cultural relativism. At the very end of his essay The
Essence of Philosophy (1907), which provoked the ire of Rickert and
Husserl alike for its apparent debasement of philosophy to historically
contingent wisdom, Dilthey reveals his true philosophical intentions
and in so doing he disproves, to a certain degree, the uncharitable
interpretations of his theory of Weltanschauung:
The last word of the mind which has surveyed all these Weltanschauungen is
not the relativity of each but the sovereignty of the mind over against every
single one of them, and also the positive consciousness of how in the various
attitudes of the mind the one reality of the world exists for us.12

Dilthey sees a potential threat to the ‘sovereignty’ of the self in philoso-

phy’s illusion to be able to restitute the fullness and complexity of
historical life in a system of concepts claiming to understand and thus
‘exhaust’ the actually inexhaustible meaning of this life. His project of a
comparative study of historical worldviews seeking regularities and

10
H.-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 276.
11
PPH, VIII.
12
W. Dilthey, Das Wesen der Philosophie, GS V, 339– 416. English translation by
S. A. Emery and W. T. Emery, The Essence of Philosophy (Chapel Hill: North
Carolina University Press, 1969), 66.
228 A transcendental-phenomenological worldview

recurring patterns is undertaken in order to affirm the superiority of the

living subject over all cultural formations.

The problem of worldview

While both Neo-Kantian thinkers such as Rickert and life-philosophers
such as Simmel and Dilthey subscribe to some version of the Kantian
liberation narrative, they disagree on the meaning of ‘worldview’ and on
the significance of this term for philosophical inquiry. Adequate under-
standing of the dispute surrounding the notion of Weltanschauung is
therefore necessary in order to understand Husserl’s critical appropria-
tion of this term and his distinctive take on the Kantian liberation
narrative.
The term Weltanschauung can be traced back to Kant’s Critique of
Judgment (1790),13 but it only gained prominence in the German
philosophical debate during the second half of the nineteenth century.
It was probably Dilthey who began to employ it consistently in order to
designate philosophy’s distinctive function in the broader system of
human culture. In short, unlike specialized research, which only pro-
vides knowledge about parts of reality, philosophy’s vocation is to
provide knowledge about the world as a whole prior to its partition
into separate fields of inquiry.
The necessity of a comprehensive worldview over and above the
fragmented pieces of knowledge accumulated by empirical research
was heartfelt both inside and outside late nineteenth-century academia.
In a time of rapid evolutions and sudden revolutions in virtually all
fields of science, the younger generations of educated Europeans longed
for existential grounding in a more stable kind of knowledge. They
expected philosophy to accomplish what specialized research had to
set aside programmatically for the sake of actual progress. Philosophy
had to offer knowledge about the meaning of human life and the world.
Dilthey expressed this understanding of philosophy in various writ-
ings throughout his career. As he states in some early notes on the
notion of worldview:

13
For an informative discussion of the historical roots of this term see D. Naugle,
Worldview: The History of a Concept (Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge:
Eerdmans, 2002) and B. Kreiter, “Philosophy as Weltanschauung in
Trendelenburg, Dilthey, and Windelband,” unpub. Ph.D. thesis, Vrije
Universiteit Amsterdam.
The problem of worldview 229

I want to prove that philosophical systems, too, as much as religions and

artworks, entail a view of life and the world, which is not grounded in
conceptual thought, but rather in the vitality of the people who create these
systems.14

On this account, a worldview has to be understood as the terminus a

quo of all philosophical thinking. Unlike the specialized sciences, phi-
losophies are not just impersonal connections of concepts. They are
cultural productions in which the unique life of an individual seeks to
express itself conceptually, and in so doing articulates its stance towards
the world as a whole. Given the fundamental connectedness of individ-
uals to the overarching whole of historical life, a great philosopher is an
individual in whom resonates the feeling of life (Lebensgefühl) of an
entire historical epoch and who is able to bring this feeling to conceptual
expression. This, in turn, enables other individuals to better understand
themselves.
As we anticipated above, for Dilthey, worldviews display a recurring
set of features that can be spelled out:
To the extent that they attempt to provide a complete solution to the riddle of
life, all worldviews entail regularly the same structure. This structure is in each
case a nexus in which the questions concerning meaning and significance of
the world are decided on the basis of a picture of the world [Weltbild]. Ideal,
highest good and supreme principles for the regulation of life are derived from
this decision.15

Dilthey believes that the available worldviews fundamentally amount to

three recurring types: naturalism, idealism of freedom, and objective
idealism.16 What matters to our characterization of Dilthey’s position
in this chapter, however, is that the sources of such worldviews are not
considered to be conceptual. This is because concepts necessarily ana-
lyze reality and in so doing fail to grasp the whole. The human position
before life and the world in their totality precedes and grounds all
subsequent philosophical and cultural achievements. Only a human
being as a whole is receptive to the world as a whole and feels the
pressing need to fathom its meaning. The theoretically oriented human
being engaging in philosophical inquiry can only achieve partial glimp-
ses of the world, and in order to do so he has to leave out of consid-
eration all those components of the world that do not correlate with the

14 15 16
GS VIII, 30. Ibid., 82. See ibid., 100–120.
230 A transcendental-phenomenological worldview

intellect. True philosophy, on the contrary, should shake off its exclu-
sively theoretical perspective, recognize its origin in the same mysterious
awareness of the world as a whole that gives rise to religion and art, and
strive to delve deeper and deeper into the riddle of life. In so doing,
philosophy would dispense with the illusion of being able to solve the
riddle of life through a definitive connection of concepts.
A similar version of worldview as the terminus a quo of all philo-
sophical thinking is present in Simmel’s work. His emphasis on the
metaphysical meaning of individuality as the ontological fabric of psy-
chic being17 provides an extremely pertinent framework for his under-
standing of philosophy as the product of a Weltanschauung. In a short
essay, On the History of Philosophy, he suggests that each philosophy
should be regarded as a worldview, as “an expression of the existential
relationship between a mind and the cosmos as a whole.”18 In his
previous work Hauptprobleme der Philosophie (1910) he explains:
Precisely what people call Weltanschauung depends mostly on the different
being of personalities. Precisely the picture of the whole – which appears to
entail the maximum and most pure degree of objectivity – reflects the specific-
ity of its carrier [Träger] much more than the objective picture of some detail
generally does.19

In this light, unlike the history of specialized disciplines, the history of

philosophy is not a history of progressive discoveries that become part
of an impersonal corpus of objective truths while previous theories are
discarded as outdated. “The history of philosophy gradually realizes the
timeless domain of possible philosophical positions,”20 and such posi-
tions correspond to different types of human personality seeking to
express their characteristic response to the mystery of the world as a
whole.
Unsurprisingly, Windelband and Rickert were extremely critical of
this understanding of Weltanschauung. If philosophies emanate from
an unfathomable existential relationship between individuals and the
world as a whole, then they turn out to be ultimately contingent

17
See Chapter 2.
18
G. Simmel, “On the History of Philosophy,” in Simmel, Essays on Interpretation
in Social Science, 198–204. Here, 199.
19
G. Simmel, Hauptprobleme der Philosophie, in Georg Simmel, Gesamtausgabe,
vol. 14 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996), 7–157. Here 26.
20
Simmel, “On the History of Philosophy,” 199.
The problem of worldview 231

constructions whose truth-claims cannot be objectively adjudicated.

They can only be assessed in terms of their success or failure in express-
ing a certain personality or human type. In this sense, philosophies
would not be much different from works of art.21 This, however,
seems to contradict the scientific spirit of most great philosophers and
to completely disregard the fact that, generally speaking, serious philo-
sophical theories lay claim to truths that any human type can ideally
assess and appropriate.
Rickert, in particular, agrees emphatically with most philosophers of
his time that philosophy should be concerned with the world as a whole.
As he states in his programmatic essay Vom Begriff der Philosophie: “It
shouldn’t be disputed that philosophy has to investigate the whole and
finally achieve what we call a Weltanschauung, which is not a very apt
term but it can hardly be given up.”22 However, a worldview for
Rickert is not so much the terminus a quo, but rather the terminus ad
quem of philosophical thinking. Philosophy should yield a worldview
after completing as satisfactorily as possible a systematic survey of the
fundamental constituents of reality and their mutual relationships.
Rickert does not deny that we generally turn to philosophy motivated
by questions about the meaning of life and the world. However, he
believes that philosophers should make an effort to provide plausible
answers to these questions in a scientific spirit by committing themselves
primarily to rational scrutiny rather than existential pathos. A
Weltanschauung should thus be a task for the philosopher who has
first learned to contemplate the world as a whole and to relate it back to
its constituent parts. In particular, adequate comprehension of the
world as a whole must include an inquiry into the problem of value,
which is the most relevant for the formation of a worldview. Only if we
learn to look at reality as relating to objectively valid values and
appreciate the meaning of subjectivity as the medium in which reality
receives its relation to value can we hope to overcome the strictures of
naturalism and subjectivism and find our legitimate place in the
world.23

21
The suggestion to consider philosophical systems almost like works of art is
Simmel’s.
22
H. Rickert, “Vom Begriff der Philosophie,” Philosophische Aufsätze, 3–36.
Here 3.
23
On these issues see Rickert’s seminal paper “Vom System der Werte,” ibid.,
73–105.
232 A transcendental-phenomenological worldview

While Rickert continues to use the term Weltanschauung to designate

philosophy’s ultimate goal in his writings until roughly 1920, his later
work marks a terminological shift. Especially in his essay
Wissenschaftliche Philosophie und Weltanschauung (1933)24 and in
his last book Grundprobleme der Philosophie (1934)25 Rickert renoun-
ces the language of worldview and prefers to talk about philosophy
as “scientific knowledge of the world as a whole.”26 With this
terminological shift, Rickert seems to implicitly acknowledge that
Weltanschauung is now a trite buzzword irreversibly associated with
the anti-rationalistic tendencies of the life-philosophers and is thus lost
for scientific philosophy. Rickert contends that what he now calls
pejoratively “Weltanschauung-philosophy” is unfit to investigate the
world as a whole. As a matter of fact, in Rickert’s eyes, the unduly
scorned ‘theoretically oriented man’ proves to be the only type of
subject fit for philosophy. If we philosophize ‘as whole human beings,’
as Dilthey would have it, and not as ‘purely theoretically oriented
human beings,’ our stance will be co-determined by the particularity
of our emotions and desires, and we will not be able to elevate ourselves
to a contemplation of the world as a whole. Rickert contends:
Only when man detaches himself from all a-theoretical interests of life and
existence and tries to think exclusively in theoretical or scientific terms does he
reach the freedom and autonomy required to take into view all that there is in
the world, i.e., the world as a whole. Beforehand there is no occasion for man
to raise questions that go beyond the ‘small’ world that he has built for himself
and to which alone his pre-scientific Weltanschauung refers.27

For Dilthey, by contrast, only if the totality of our human energies is at

play does the world as a whole disclose itself to us. Rickert views the
practical and emotional sides of our life as restrictive rather than dis-
closive. The will and the heart bind us to particulars of the world that
are significant for us. The intellect alone, precisely because of its one-
sidedness, allows us to leave these particulars behind as particulars and
view them as part of a bigger world that transcends our plans and
expectations. On Rickert’s account, Dilthey conflates the necessity of

24
H. Rickert, “Wissenschaftliche Philosophie und Weltanschauung,” ibid., 325–346.
Hereafter WPW.
25
H. Rickert, Grundprobleme der Philosophie. Methodologie, Ontologie,
Anthropologie (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1934).
26
WPW, 333. 27 WPW, 338.
Husserl and Weltanschauung 233

a reflection on the totality of the human being with a reflection of

the totality of the human being, that is, a reflection carried out by
man as a whole. Of course, a philosophy that aims at comprehen-
siveness as opposed to specialized empirical research must by def-
inition consider everything in its systematic account of the world,
including the emotional and practical dimensions of existence.
However, this does not necessarily mean that when we do philos-
ophy we should let our prejudices, personal emotions, and practical
goals co-determine and even provide justification for our philo-
sophical claims. This is a conflation that undermines not simply
one way of doing philosophy as opposed to another but philosophy
as a discipline overall. Rickert is willing to recognize some value to
inspirational teachings based on existentially grounded intuitions of
the whole, but he maintains that philosophy conducted in a scien-
tific spirit is superior to such teachings and should be kept strictly
separate from them.

Husserl and Weltanschauung

Rickert’s emphatic statement of the necessity to distinguish
Weltanschauung philosophy and scientific philosophy reiterates almost
literally the proposal Husserl put forward over twenty years earlier in
Philosophy as a Rigorous Science. Here Husserl writes: “Weltanschauung
philosophy and scientific philosophy are sharply distinguished as two
ideas, related in a certain manner to each other but not to be confused.”28
At that time, Rickert still cherished the term worldview and believed that it
could be used in a scientifically and theoretically oriented sense to desig-
nate the ultimate goal of philosophical thinking. Husserl, on the contrary,
had already expressed his reservations about the dominant trend of
Weltanschauung philosophy from the lectern two years before penning
his contribution to the first issue of Rickert’s journal Logos. In an intro-
ductory course on the phenomenology of knowledge in 1909 he began his
lectures with the following statements:
Why do people turn to philosophy? First and foremost not, as is the case in all
other disciplines, in order to be ‘productive’ and to finally become a professor.
The urgency of life and the riddle of existence, which cause so much suffering

28
PRS, 191.
234 A transcendental-phenomenological worldview

to the dóskolos, lead to philosophy, and life demands an answer. For the
intellectually educated person, however, this answer must have something like
a scientific form, which is called ‘system.’ The Greeks felt the need for
salvation and thus craved salvation-granting metaphysics, or, better, religion;
they wanted religion. However, the person educated in the spirit of Greek
science could only accept such religion in the shapes of philosophy, also called
‘dogmatics.’ Most philosophies are of precisely this kind. Each of them is
actually the ‘dogmatics’ of a faith, of a thoroughly personal faith, of the
philosopher’s so-called worldview. All this should be recognized in its beauty
and right, in its life-inspiring and life-ennobling power. But couldn’t we and
shouldn’t we recognize validity to philosophy as science, too? Couldn’t we
legitimately hope great things from its development and growth? If not for the
fulfillment of our personal life, for our personal salvation, for us living here
and now in our time, so at least for mankind in the future? People call for
philosophy as deed, as life-power [Lebensmacht]. Couldn’t philosophy as
science open up for future mankind higher and nobler life-possibilities,
which may reward our sacrifices, efforts and renouncements in the present?29

Husserl’s tone is remarkable, considering his otherwise rather dry style.

In spite of Husserl’s dismissal of philosophy as some kind of life-
empowering wisdom, this quote already adumbrates an important
idea critical to his subsequent appropriation of the notion of worldview:
a human being educated in a scientifically minded culture will be ready
to genuinely embrace a worldview only if this presents itself in a scien-
tific form. In this lecture, however, he is much more interested in mark-
ing his own position against all forms of Weltanschauung-philosophy.
He continues his preliminary remarks as follows:
You are perhaps surprised. I defend philosophy as science. Those among you
who have been able to examine the cultural life of our time shall definitely know
that reasons to embark on such defense are not missing. Consider the major
transformation that occurred this past decade: the new and ever-growing yearn-
ing for worldview, religion, for a life in spirit, for a thoroughly autonomous
personal life in freedom, beauty, and moral deed. This great transformation
makes itself known also in the resurgence of interest in philosophy. And philos-
ophy should be our guide. However, people argue: how could and how would
this miserable academic philosophy, this philosophy as science, help us? We need
a philosophy that gives concrete expression to the deepest will to life of our time,
to its ideals, its hopes, and its endeavors. We need a philosophy that has grown
out of the richest personal life, so that it manages to awaken, strengthen, and

29
Mat. VII, 8.
Husserl and Weltanschauung 235

nurture further life of the same breed. Such philosophy is the creative achieve-
ment of a genius who concentrates in himself all the dominant tendencies of our
time, finds in them his own most personal will to life, and objectifies them in a
perfect literary creation: the philosophical artwork. Very good, I say. Let us
welcome such philosophers and their philosophy. Once it is there, it should
quicken us, too. We are, too, children of our time. However, should we, who
are not original geniuses but rather simple working people, just twiddle our
thumbs? Shouldn’t we continue to serve the goals of mankind in our unpreten-
tious way, through the forms of science, which is not directed towards what is
temporal, but rather towards what is eternal? Science obviously does not procure
to the yearnings of our life fulsome satisfaction. On the contrary, it lifts us above
our own ego, above our time and all its miseries to a region of eternal values.30

The affirmation of science as a domain of timeless values as opposed

to the vagaries of historically conditioned worldviews is characteristic
of Husserl’s position in this period. While most Neo-Kantians would
support wholeheartedly Husserl’s affirmation of the timeless validity
of the ideal of science, they would highlight a potential danger in his
sharp distinction between Weltanschauung and scientific philosophy.
Emil Lask raises his concerns in his notes after reading Husserl’s
Philosophy as a Rigorous Science:
The more powerful and fundamental the material under scrutiny, the greater
the mission of knowing. This, however, is only possible in philosophy,
where precisely the whole is the material. Therefore, it is wrong-headed to
counterpose philosophy as worldview and philosophy as rigorous science.
Obviously, the term Weltanschauung is ambiguous: a worldview can be wholly
a-contemplative; it can be contemplatively oriented and stand in the service of
life; finally, it can be theory building upon the dynamics of life [Lebensverhalten],
and in this sense philosophy is a theoretical doctrine of Weltanschauung. Husserl
contends in Logos (“Philosophy as a Rigorous Science”) that science is entirely
“impersonal.” Now, obviously, philosophy is all about contemplative objectivity
[Sachlichkeit]; however, everything is included in it! Husserl contends that
philosophy does not need wisdom but theoretical ability. This is a false opposi-
tion! It needs both [. . .] Likewise, profundity [Tiefsinn] and “scientific clarity” do
not stand in opposition. On the contrary, profundity is assumed as material by
theoretical clarity, and thereby it is systematized, ordered, and illuminated. All
this is precisely the specific achievement of theory: the intellect approaches the
‘depths,’ delves into them, and raises them to clarity. What is chaotic is thereby
destroyed, but the content is indestructible.31

30 31
Mat. VII, 8–9. SW, 252.
236 A transcendental-phenomenological worldview

In other words, for Lask, the point is not so much to purge philosophy
of unscientific wisdom but also to illuminate and reorganize theoret-
ically those intuitions about the meaning of life and the world that play
such an important role in people’s ‘will to philosophy.’ After all, if
philosophy has to be a theoretical exploration of the world as a whole
it cannot programmatically exclude from its purview any of the world’s
parts, including those existential and emotional responses to life’s
mystery that often drive people to philosophy.
It can be shown, however, that Husserl progressively changed his
mind regarding the problem of worldview and that he eventually came
to appreciate the meaning of this notion for philosophy. His later work
can be read as a deliberate effort to set the basis for a phenomenolog-
ically inspired worldview, which is designed to provide a viable
alternative to the dominance of naturalism. In this way, Husserl
appropriates Rickert’s initial position, according to which philosophy
should yield a worldview, while Rickert, as we showed above, moves to
embrace Husserl’s earlier position in Philosophy as a Rigorous Science
and advocate for a sharp distinction of philosophy as a science and
philosophy as worldview.
What factors let Husserl revisit his position on Weltanschauung? As is
often the case with the development of philosophical ideas, we can indi-
cate both external and internal factors. The most important external
factor was the outbreak of World War I in 1914. There is no doubt that
this event had a profound impact on Husserl.32 At the personal level,
tragedy struck when Husserl’s youngest son Wolfgang, then twenty-two
years old, died in 1916 in the battle of Verdun. Besides, as an intellectual,
Husserl had to face the spiritual bankruptcy of his time, and he slowly
came to realize that the sources of such misery were rooted deeply in the
lack of authentic self-understanding characterizing Western civilization.
The best minds of the West were increasingly put to work on specialized
problems using the quantitative and statistical methods of empirical
research without being enlightened about the dignity of their own ‘sub-
jectivity,’ as the source of both scientific methods and (in a transcendental

32
For example, scholars have convincingly shown that World War I marks a radical
turning point in Husserl’s conception of ethics, so that it is now customary,
following Ullrich Melle, to distinguish between Husserl’s ‘pre-war’ ethics,
revolving around the project of a formal axiology, and his ‘postwar’ personalistic
ethics. See U. Melle, “The Development of Husserl’s Ethics,” Études
phénoménologiques 7/13–14 (1991): 115–135.
Husserl and Weltanschauung 237

sense) of the natural world that such methods are designed to investigate.
In a word, Western civilization had been overtaken by naturalism. This
was not just a set of doctrines explicitly endorsed by some philosophers,
such as those Husserl masterfully refuted in the Prolegomena to a Pure
Logic (1899) and in the first part of the aforementioned Logos essay.33
Naturalism was rather a worldview widely spread at all levels in European
societies. It certainly flew from the specialized sciences of nature, but its
influence reached far beyond the community of specialists. It became
almost a ‘fundamental mood,’ to borrow an expression from Heidegger,
which was common to practicing scientists and ordinary people alike.
In order to combat naturalism, targeted refutation of specific philosoph-
ical theories – such as psychologism in epistemology and Cartesian
substantialism in the philosophy of mind – proved insufficient. A
Weltanschauung presenting itself in a scientific guise, such as naturalism,
could only be overcome by way of setting the basis for a novel
Weltanschauung, which, in Husserl’s hopes, would have eventually
extended its influence on Western civilization as a whole and dispelled
naturalism. Phenomenology, from the years of World War I onwards, can
be read as an attempt to work towards this Weltanschauung, which
Husserl recognized that he shared with his Neo-Kantian colleagues and
with classical German philosophers, such as Fichte. In this way, he appro-
priates what I referred to as the ‘Kantian liberation narrative’ and employs
the powerful conceptual and methodological arsenal of his phenomenol-
ogy to articulate a humanistic worldview with the highest possible scien-
tific rigor.
The first traces of this development can be found in Husserl’s
correspondence with Rickert during the first years of World War I.
In 1915, after congratulating Rickert for his recent appointment as
the successor of his teacher Windelband in Heidelberg, Husserl con-
fesses that he owes to Windelband’s great works in the history of
philosophy his fascination with Kant and classical German philosophy,
which, however, under Brentano’s influence, lay dormant for quite a
while.34 He writes:

33
For a full account of Husserl’s refutation of epistemological and psychological
naturalism see my “Unforgivable Sinners? Epistemological and Psychological
Naturalism in Husserl’s Philosophy as a Rigorous Science,” Rivista
Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia 3/2 (2012): 147–160.
34
Actually it is fair to say that Husserl initially shared with the Brentano school
utter contempt for Kant and, especially, for the German idealist. Helmuth
238 A transcendental-phenomenological worldview

Thanks to [Windelband’s works,] my soul, already in my naturalistic begin-

nings, was filled with a secret yearning for the old romantic territory of
German Idealism. However, German Idealism did not gain its full contours
for me through Windelband. Going my own hardscrabble path, building up
from below, I was in a position to recognize the greatness and the eternal
meaning of German Idealism (setting aside all romantic conceptuality) only
when, without noticing at first, I found myself in the idealistic camp. (As you
can imagine, Fichte now attracts me more and more.) Thus, in this last decade
I feel tightly connected with the leaders of the German idealistic schools. We
fight as comrades against the naturalism of our time as our common enemy.
We serve, each of us in their own way, the same gods, and since this is
something serious and holy to us, something to which we committed our
entire life, each of these ways harbors in itself its own necessities and is bound
to be indispensable for the advancement of philosophy.35

Just two years later, in 1917, an editorial event added further momen-
tum to Husserl’s revision of his position on Weltanschauung. Dietrich
Mahnke, who had been Husserl’s student in Göttingen, published a
short book entitled The Will to Eternity: Thoughts of a German
Warrior on the Meaning of Spiritual Life.36 The book is the perfect
example of a very popular genre at the time, the so-called Kriegsbuch.
War-books were mostly rhetorically inflated pamphlets exalting the
putative spiritual significance of the war and self-righteously defending
the German cause. Needless to say, they were generally of little philo-
sophical value. War-books proliferated in Germany in the 1910s and
even first-rate intellectuals such as Thomas Mann and Max Scheler fell
prey to the fascination of such an immensely popular genre and gave
their own contributions to it.
The only philosophically interesting aspect of Mahnke’s book is his
deliberate attempt to develop a Weltanschauung based on phenomen-
ology, which Husserl, by his own admission, found both intriguing and

Plessner recounts a rather amusing anecdote on this matter. Once, in Göttingen,

as Plessner was accompanying Professor Husserl home while attempting to
explain to him the outlines of his dissertation project on Fichte’s
Wissenschaftslehre, Husserl suddenly blurted out the following statement: “In
my opinion the whole of German Idealism has always been shit. All my life I have
always sought [and at this moment he lifted up his walking stick and pushed its
top, bending the stick, against the doorpost] reality.” Reported in R. Boehm,
Vom Gesichtspunkt der Phänomenologie (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1968), 28–29.
35
Husserl in a letter to Rickert, December 20, 1905, BW V, 178.
36
D. Mahnke, Der Wille zur Ewigkeit: Gedanken eines Deutschen Kriegers über
den Sinn des Geisteslebens (Halle: Niemeyer, 1917).
Husserl and Weltanschauung 239

eye opening. Mahnke was well aware of Husserl’s outspoken aversion

to Weltanschauung philosophy. Therefore, he begins his dedication to
Husserl asking rhetorically whether he should dare associate his name
with a series of thoughts “which correspond so little to his ideal of
‘philosophy as a rigorous science’.”37 However, he continues address-
ing Husserl directly:
You too, the master of eidetic intuition [Wesensschau], do not fail to realize
that the needs of life require a “Weltanschauung philosophy” besides “rig-
orous science.” The highest goal of such Weltanschauung philosophy is not
the purity and depth of truth, but rather the purity and depth of human
existence. For the spiritualization of everyday life we do not need a definitively
secured metaphysics, but rather a practical life-wisdom, albeit only provision-
ally concluded.38

The bulk of Mahnke’s work is geared towards the illustration of his

own Weltanschauung, which can be summarized in the rather blunt
idea that “the meaning of all spiritual-cultural life [Geistesleben] is the
will to eternity.”39 Mahnke sees in Husserl’s method of Wesensschau a
source of glimpses into eternity – the eternity of objectively valid eidetic
laws – and considers the contemplation of essences to be especially
beneficial to the soldier meditating on the meaning of his life in the
trenches. Wesensschau is thus not just a method to obtain scientific
truths: it has an existential meaning which can be brought to light in
order to quench people’s thirst for life-sustaining wisdom.
Husserl was enthralled by Mahnke’s work, writing an enthusiastic
review recommending the book wholeheartedly to “all friends of phi-
losophy.”40 In 1931, over ten years later, he refers to the book in a letter
to Mahnke and recounts that he randomly picked it up from the shelf
and could not stop rereading it.41 However, as one would expect,
Husserl’s appropriation of Weltanschauung resulted in a project of a
completely different tenor than the bellicose nationalism of his student
Mahnke’s. This is the project commonly known as phenomenological
life-world ontology. Life-world ontology, which will be the theme of the
next sections, goes hand in hand with what we could provisionally call a
deconstructive genealogy of naturalism as worldview. This remark is
particularly important in order to characterize Husserl’s take on the

37
Ibid., VII. 38 Ibid., VIII–IX. 39 Ibid., 4. 40 Hua XXV, 295.
41
E. Husserl, Briefwechsel, vol. 3, Die Göttinger Schule (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994),
477. Hereafter BW III.
240 A transcendental-phenomenological worldview

idea of “worldview” as the obscure terminus a quo of philosophy

proposed by Simmel and Dilthey. As we mentioned above, Husserl
progressively appropriates Rickert’s earlier notion that philosophy
should yield a scientific Weltanschauung alternative to naturalism,
and in this respect he opposes views that construe Weltanschauungen
as the unfathomable existential sources of philosophical thinking.
However, a new phenomenological Weltanschauung cannot be devel-
oped without first acknowledging the power of naturalism and inquir-
ing into its sources. There is a sense in which, pace Rickert, these sources
are indeed hidden and obscure. Husserl’s bold claim, however, is that
the method of phenomenology can illuminate the obscure, thereby
exposing the true nature of these sources, which do not lie deep in the
subconscious of human character-types, but rather in the forgotten
vicissitudes of Western history and the intricate intentional shifts that
inaugurated the long course of modern science. Such shifts, as we will
see, are not merely accidental. They are motivated by the way in which
we experience nature. However, they tend to be forgotten the more
modern science becomes a habituated mind-set. This leads to a funda-
mental distortion of the relationship between the concrete world of
experience and the idealized world of natural-scientific inquiry,
whereby the latter supplants the former. Naturalism is nothing but the
‘cultural’ climate ensuing from this distortion. To the extent that the
original distortion has been forgotten, naturalism is indeed experienced
as if it flew from unfathomable depths. However, these are nothing but
the depths of history, and they can be probed with the aid of intentional
analysis and the recognition of the inherent tradition linking together
the present and the past transcendental subjects. To proceed systemati-
cally, however, the first step is to become familiar with Husserl’s
descriptions of the life-world as such.

Life-world ontology as intuitively and contemplatively oriented

inquiry into the structure of the world-whole
As we saw in Chapter 5, Husserl argues that philosophy is characterized
by an “interest for the totality”42 of what is, namely, the world as a
whole. There we noted in passing that he shares this view with Rickert,
and at this point we are in a position to fully grasp its philosophical

42
Hua XXXII, 7.
Life-world ontology 241

centrality in context. We deferred a full assessment of Husserl’s take on

the world as a whole and his differences from Rickert, and it is now time
to address this important issue.
Let us start this section with what might strike the reader as a minor
philological remark, but which should assume philosophical signifi-
cance in light of the foregoing analyses. The editor of the voluminous
collection of Husserl’s manuscripts on the life-world, Husserliana
XXXIX, reports that Husserl gathered the overwhelming bulk of
these manuscripts (several hundreds of pages spanning over three dec-
ades) in a bundle marked with the title Zur Weltanschauung, i.e.,
“towards worldview.”43 There can be no doubt, then, that Husserl
saw his laborious work on the life-world as responding to the heated
debate surrounding the notion of Weltanschauung, and we can cer-
tainly assume that he was well aware of the philosophical ladenness of
this term. The world as a whole that needs philosophical elucidation,
however, is not a limit-idea that merely serves to orient our inquiries.
Husserl upholds his unwavering commitment to intuitiveness and takes
the expression Weltanschauung quite literally. If what philosophy is
supposed to achieve is insight about the world as a whole, phenomen-
ology sets out to actually get down to eidetic descriptions of the world as
it is intuitively (anschaulich) given in our experience. Thus, phenomen-
ology in its mature form pursues a Weltanschauung in two senses. (1) In
the ordinary sense of the word Weltanschauung, phenomenology
aspires to contribute to the Kantian liberation narrative and breathe
new life into its anti-naturalistic understanding of the world. (2) In the
literal sense of the word Weltanschauung, phenomenology yields
Anschauung (intuition) of the Welt (world); it aims at a descriptive
elucidation of our concrete awareness of the world as a whole prior to
the thematization of its parts in the specialized sciences.44
These two pursuits are interrelated. For Husserl, it is only by carrying
out the program in (2) that the aspiration expressed in (1) can find its
actual fulfillment. This is because the correct execution of the program
in (2) goes to show that there is no meaningful sense of the phrase ‘world
as a whole’ independently of the nexuses of experience of living subjects
and their intentionality. Transcendental subjectivity thus proves to be

43
Hua XXXIX, 737.
44
The use of Weltanschauung in this second, literal, sense is documented for
instance in Hua XXXIX, 127.
242 A transcendental-phenomenological worldview

not at all a subordinated thematic sphere in the overarching thematic

whole called “world,” as Rickert would have it, but the very source of
meaning and validity of the world-whole itself. In a nutshell, Husserl’s
phenomenological execution of an eidetically oriented Weltanschauung
is geared towards the establishment of the following version of
the Kantian liberation narrative qua worldview: “In our ‘relating-
ourselves-to’, in our multifarious intentionality, we are [. . .] the carriers
of the world’s ‘being’.”45
Husserl’s notion of the life-world does not amount to just the idea
that the world as a whole is broader than the world investigated by any
of the positive empirical sciences. For Husserl, there is a concrete sense
that in every experience of something in the world we are implicitly
experiencing the world as a whole, which is available for us as a
constant horizon. The aforementioned manuscripts entail a wealth of
detailed descriptions of this eidetic state of affairs. Husserl admits that
“the world as world of experience” is “definitely a ticklish theme.”46
This is because, strictly speaking, our experience is always directed
towards some worldly object and not towards the world itself. In this
sense, “the experience of singularity precedes the experience of the
world and ‘knowledge’ of the singular precedes ‘knowledge’ of a uni-
verse, or, better, of ‘the’ universe of singularities.”47 Nonetheless, no
experience of a singular perceptual object is conceivable as standing in
complete isolation. Every concretely experienced perceptual object has
both an internal horizon of further manifestation (new profiles present-
ing us with previously unseen sides and properties of the given object)
and an external horizon of further surrounding objects that at any time
can be turned into objects of our primary attention. Another way of
describing this is to say that every single object of experience emerges
from a surrounding horizon of objects of possible experience, which is
constantly co-given alongside the actual focus of our present experi-
ence. The external horizon does not suddenly come into view only when
we turn our attention away from the object we are experiencing. It is an
implicitly co-aware background constantly accompanying our experi-
ence of individual beings and all of our practical transactions. Most
importantly, this external horizon is not merely the empty awareness
that we could put an end to this particular perceptual experience and
switch to consider another object. Moving from a given perceptual

45 46 47
Ibid., 603. Ibid., 130. Ibid., 126.
Life-world ontology 243

object to the exploration of its external horizon is not a leap into the
unknown. The external horizon of any conceivable object is entirely
structured and can be described as a horizon of previously acquired
validity. It is always already present, albeit implicitly, as a horizon of
further existents that will appear according to my kinaesthetic orienta-
tion and motion, that will exhibit certain typical patterns encountered
in previous experiences, that will in some way enrich or reconfigure the
web of my anticipations, and so forth.
Based on these descriptions, it is possible to clarify the sense in which
we can talk about the world as experienced from a phenomenological
perspective: the world is the total synthesis of the external horizons of
all real and possible things, and to the extent that these horizons are
structured according to common essential regularities they merge into
one all-encompassing horizon. The world-horizon is constantly pre-
supposed (literally: pre-posited, or voraus-gesetzt) in every particular
positing of existing being, and it is pre-given as a ground of already
established validity into which the establishment of new validities nec-
essarily flows. Husserl deems this pre-givenness of the world “the
fundamental a priori,”48 meaning the a priori structure on the basis of
which all further a priori structures are detectable and articulable.
Correlatively, our awareness of the world qua horizon can be described
as follows:
World-consciousness is consciousness in the mode ‘certainty of being’
[Seinsgewissheit]. This certainty did not arise through a single being-positing
act occurring in the life-nexus, through an act of grasping something as
existent or even through a predicative judgment of existence. All that already
presupposes world-consciousness in the mode ‘certainty of being.’49

How can we account for this certainty of being? Did we reach the
“bedrock where our spade is turned,”50 to borrow an effective meta-
phor from Wittgenstein, and all further analysis is utterly impossible?
Husserl’s strategy to solve this dilemma is to move from a merely static
description, in which the world figures as the horizon surrounding every
singular existent, to a genetic-dynamic description in which both the
total horizon ‘world’ and existents considered singly are ‘set in motion,’

48
Ibid., 125. 49 Ibid., 61.
50
See L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell,
2009), 217.
244 A transcendental-phenomenological worldview

as it were, and exposed as being essentially caught up in an unending

process of constitution. Assuming this perspective, the world itself qua
all-encompassing horizon proves to be the result of the foregoing con-
stitution, which, however, cannot be simply equated with the constitu-
tion of single objects of experience in perception. Husserl underscores
this point in the following way:
The world of which I possibly speak, the world which I possibly consider, is
something valid of my own sphere of validity (of actual or hidden holding-as-
valid), and its sense is sense within myself, stemming from my own active or
passive accomplishments.51

In order to understand correctly the meaning of this statement, it is

crucial to appreciate the concept of validity Husserl is employing here.
We should recall the Neo-Kantian insight, dating back to Lotze and
reprised by Rickert and Lask, that being itself is a kind of validity.52
Husserl appropriates the same notion of validity in his analyses of the
‘positing’ function of perceptual experience. Whenever we undergo a
perceptual experience that culminates with the explicit positing of
something as existing, we thereby establish a validity: the validity of,
say, this desk as existent. The first establishment of such validity, which
Husserl terms Urstiftung, however, entails “a horizon of continuing
validity”53 (Fortgeltung) which can be at any time reactivated, thus
carrying out a Nachstiftung (post-establishment) which confirms and
reinvigorates the certainty associated with the original Stiftung. My
desk, whose validity as existent was established the fist time it man-
ifested itself to me, continues to hold valid after I stop perceiving it, and
whenever I return to my office its reappearance fills with intuitive
content an anticipatory intention that was already in play. We should
think of experience as an endless process of establishing and retrieving
validities in constant negotiation with the prompts issuing from our
perceptual field. In so doing, we disclose ever-new horizons and enrich
those we already possess. Each newly established validity eventually
merges into an already valid background and is integrated in the coher-
ent whole of what we take as being the world. Occasionally, interfer-
ences and breaches occur in this process. What we took as valid proves
to be mere illusion or to be different than we initially established. This
leads to correction and partial reconfiguration of what counts as ‘the

51 52 53
Hua XXXIX, 118. See Chapter 1. Hua XXXIX, 1.
Life-world ontology 245

world,’ but in no case does it affect our unwavering belief in the world’s
existence as the all-encompassing ground of what we take to be valid.
Having a world, thus, does not simply mean having a collection of
disconnected things that we partly experience and partly anticipate. It
means mastering an encompassing horizon of spatio-temporal being
that we know how to explore. In Husserl’s words:
For us as subjects of a natural life there are not only things that we see (each of
them with a horizon of familiarity regarding the unseen rear sides <whose
manifestation> is eventually to be expected, however, as a mixture of deter-
minate sense and horizon-sense), and on top of them those that we don’t see,
which are valid for us because we have seen them before and we still possess
them as valid. Rather, in every waking moment of life a whole world is there
for us, a world that reaches into the infinities of space and time (and which is
structured in each of its details according to a real-categorial typical
pattern).54

This world is, as Husserl mentions, the world of our natural, pre-
scientific life. The infinite task of a phenomenological life-world ontol-
ogy is the elucidation of all its underpinning a priori structures. The
unfolding of this project, in line with the tenets of the Kantian liberation
narrative, should fully clarify the sense in which we can possibly talk
about a world and in so doing progressively justify the ‘subjective’ path
that necessarily has to be taken for this purpose:
At this point, however, the constitutive analysis may proceed in its description
and clarification of the genesis (questioning back into the essential primal
establishings and their fundamental forms); it is certain that the title
“world” – and specifically the world that is valid for us – is a title for real
and possible ego-acts. ‘Possibility’ here refers on one hand to previous estab-
lishing through ego-acts in this specific sense, on the other hand to a free
activity of disclosure of horizons based on the subjects’ capacities, on their
evidence: “I can carry forward my experiencing.”55

This should not be taken to mean, however, that we can meaningfully

construe the subjective process of world-constitution as the mere indef-
inite iteration of single processes of constitution of worldly existents, as
one might erroneously think. The stretch of experiential life constituting
a definite perceptual object has a beginning and an end in the stream of
phenomenological time. True, its horizon refers to further stretches of

54 55
Ibid., 3. Ibid., 4.
246 A transcendental-phenomenological worldview

experiential life constituting perceptual validity in the same way.

However, there is a certain, provisional completeness to the constitution
of one single perceptual object. We can describe the process from its
inception within the sphere of passivity up to our actual turning
towards the affective salience in our perceptual field, which culminates
in the full objectification and the concomitant establishment of a val-
idity of being (Seinsgeltung). Contrariwise, we cannot conceive of
world-constitution as a finite process with an identifiable point of
inception and with a (provisionally) conclusive point of culmination
in some type of objectifying apprehension. World-constitution is some-
thing we can only describe as always already underway. It is an intrinsi-
cally inception-less process, which admits of constant readjustment and
modification as far as details are concerned, but never deviates from its
necessary termination in the unbreakable certainty of an infinity of
existing being. Accordingly, it does not culminate in some form of
objectification in which the world-whole would be present to us after
the manner of an existing worldly object. The world’s pre-givenness as
the backdrop of all actual establishment of validities in the sphere of
givenness can be studied only precisely qua pre-givenness. The world’s
givenness is nothing over and above its thematized pre-givenness,
which, in turn, is not just the preliminary stage of a process that
would culminate with actual, full-blown perceptual manifestation.
The world’s thematized pre-givenness is the world’s givenness, to the
extent that the world is nothing but the infinite horizon of structured
anticipations that entail the promise of unceasing manifestation.
Husserl describes in a few brushstrokes the unique character of world
constitution in the following passage:
The world is constituted as being – as the existing total unity [All-Einheit] of
realities that exist in themselves. It is a constituted ‘product’ [Gebilde] in the
streaming, world-constituting subjectivity. However, it is not a finished prod-
uct to be equated with the products that we achieve in the naivety of our
natural world-life. [Unlike the world,] these products became ‘finished’
through our production, and from then on they are readily available as
being.56

The world is never ‘ready’ the way that an artifact actively produced
according to a plan can be ready for use or the way that a perceptual

56
Ibid., 83.
Life-world ontology 247

object seized in active attention can be ready for further categorial or

practical operations. Accordingly, the ‘world-constituting’ transcen-
dental subjectivity cannot be possibly understood as some kind of tran-
scendental demiurge molding a lump of clay into a statuette. That kind
of subjectively planned production entirely presupposes the constitu-
tion of the world within transcendental subjectivity, and therefore it
cannot be employed as a metaphor to shed light on it. Like Kant’s
transcendental ego in Simmel’s rendition,57 Husserl’s transcendental
subjectivity entirely coincides with its world-constituting function and
should not be artificially separated from it. While as empirical human
subjects we form and carry out plans, thereby modifying the world
around us and producing new things, as transcendental subjects we
constantly carry out world-constitution in a way that we are not in a
position to steer according to plans and purposes. Husserl touches on
this issue explicitly in a manuscript from the early 1920s. Here he
compares the external world, which we originally acquire in outer
experience, and the ‘inner’ world of consciousness, which discloses itself
in the phenomenological reflection. The subjective sphere of imma-
nence, unlike the objective sphere of transcendent things, is not a
world in its own right existing merely alongside the world of experience
and up for separate scrutiny: “Over the course of genesis, all immanent
acquisition flows into worldly constitution; immanence merges and
dissolves into [geht auf] its function of worldly constitution.”58
At this point the attentive reader may have noticed that in most
passages quoted above Husserl speaks of ‘world’ and of ‘life-world’
interchangeably. He actually refers mostly to just ‘the world,’ although,
as we know, most of the manuscripts we quoted from belong in the
bundle Zur Weltanschauung and have been published in the
Husserliana volume devoted to the life-world. What does the addition
of the prefix ‘life’ add to the term ‘world’? Why coin a new term to talk
about the world as a whole? Reconstructing the complex genesis of the
concept of life-world in Husserl’s thought and measuring out the broad
spectrum of its meanings would exceed the scope of this chapter.59 For
our present purpose it is sufficient to say that the phrase ‘life-world’ is
first and foremost a contrastive term. Husserl employs it mostly in

57
See Chapter 2. 58 Hua XXXIX, 22.
59
For an excellent reconstruction see the entry Lebenswelt in Gander, Husserl-
Lexikon.
248 A transcendental-phenomenological worldview

contrast to the idealized world of mathematical physics in order to

emphasize how the latter is not the real world but rather a construction
(albeit a fully legitimate and motivated one) fashioned by a definite set
of intellectual operations. We shall explore this fundamental meaning in
the next section.
Another context in which ‘life-world’ is employed as a contrastive
term is that of culture. Husserl speaks of the one all-encompassing life-
world in contrast to the multiple worlds of historical cultures or the
special worlds created by selective interests (for instance, when I am
doing mathematics, I am immersed in a self-contained world of num-
bers, operations, etc.).60 The philosophical payoff of this contrast is, as
we will see in greater detail in the next chapter, a distinctive openness to
the plurality of cultures paired with a forceful rejection of cultural
relativism and the prospect of a universal humanistic culture.

60
On special worlds and attitudes see S. Luft, Subjectivity and Lifeworld in
Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
2011), 42. In his discussion Luft discusses the German term Sonderwelt, which,
however, Husserl almost never uses. The only occurrence I was able to find is in
Hua IX, 503 where he speaks of ideale Sonderwelten (ideal special worlds),
presumably referring to ideal dimensions such as those of numbers, geometrical
shapes, or music (notes, intervals, etc.) and insisting that they are, too, part of ‘the
world’ (read: the life-world). In a recent paper Nicolas De Warren underscores the
contrast between the life-world and special worlds in order to reject the notion
that one can unqualifiedly identify the life-world with the world of culture. While
the world of culture consists in a plurality of special worlds defined by horizons of
interest (e.g., the world of sports, the world of politics, etc.), “the Lebenswelt, on
the contrary, is neither a world defined by a special interest, nor a world defined
by a general or universal interest.” For this reason: “It would be wrong to
conceive of the life-world as a universal cultural or social structure that all
possible societies have in common.” N. De Warren, “La Crise de la raison et
l’énigme du monde,” in F. De Gandt and C. Majolino (eds.), Lectures de la Krisis
de Husserl (Paris: Vrin, 2008), 23–44. Here 35. Put this way, however, the
contrast is overstated. Husserl speaks repeatedly of a universal Seinsinteresse, or
naive interest in being, that underlies all of our transactions in the world within
the natural attitude (see, for instance, Hua VIII, 98; 110; 159–160; 306). The life-
world as the world in which we live our natural lives, is thus indeed the correlate
of an overriding, universal interest. De Warren is right that the universal interest
in being is nothing like the special interests underlying special worlds, in that it is
mostly unthematic and pervasive. But the life-world can nonetheless be defined in
terms of a kind of universal interest, which, among other things, also clarifies why
all subordinated cultural worlds have an interest-structure. Since the life-world is
organized around an interest, the interests underlying special worlds can be
interpreted as branching off from the one, unchanging interest in being that
defines the life-world.
Life-world ontology 249

However, even in this case Husserl’s terminology retains its character-

istic fluidity. While the life-world is mostly employed as a singulare
tantum, Husserl uses the term in the plural here and there61 to designate
the subjectively shaped environments in which human and animal
groupings live their communal lives. In these contexts Husserl is much
more interested in the emphasis on the life component in the phrase
life-world. Thinking this point through is paramount to understanding
the import of the notion of life-world as indicating the world’s being
aus dem Leben, that is, growing out of life and harboring the growth of
further life within itself.
While the special world of a certain culture or even the world of
human culture overall do not coincide with the life-world as the ground

61
See, for instance, Hua XXXIX, 198; 530; 540. The fluidity of Husserl’s usage of
the term life-world often puzzled and sometimes even irritated scholars. David
Carr, for instance, deems Husserl’s concept of life-world problematic and even
inconsistent. This is because, he argues, “Husserl has assembled under one title a
number of disparate and in some senses even incompatible concepts.” D. Carr,
“Husserl’s Problematic Concept of Lifeworld,” in L. Embree and D. Moran,
Phenomenology: Critical Concepts in Philosophy, vol. 1 (London: Routledge,
2004), 359–374. Here 360. In particular, Carr sees a “[d]iscrepancy between
lifeworld as cultural world and lifeworld as world of immediate experience,” in
that “the cultural community is not something perceived, like a thing or a body”
(368). In Carr’s view, “[s]uch terms as ‘pre-predicative,’ ‘immediate,’ ‘intuitively
given’ are clearly out of place” if applied to the world of culture (367). The
problem with Carr’s argument is that if it is meant to highlight an internal
difficulty within the horizon of Husserl’s thought then it rests on a pars pro toto
fallacy. Carr wrongly equates sensory perception (pars) and perception in general
(toto). From Husserl’s phenomenological perspective, however, there would be
nothing wrong with saying that cultural objects and communities (alongside
values, norms, etc.) are or can be intuitively perceived. If perception is defined as
original givenness, then when I am contemplating a cultural object or observing
the customs of a foreign cultural community, and provided I have a full grasp of
the meaning of the cultural object or custom at issue, I am having a genuine
perceptual experience. Consider the following anecdote: “On his deathbed in
1918, the art-collector Alexander Schnütgen was presented with a crucifix. After
he inspected the object held before him, he expertly declared ‘fourteenth century’
and immediately died.” Valentin Groebner, Defaced: The Visual Culture of
Violence in the Late Middle Ages (New York: Zone Books, 2004), 88. Quoted in
De Warren, “Pamina’s Eyes, Tamino’s Gaze.” For Schnütgen the cultural value
or set of values unambiguously identifying the crucifix as an artifact from the
fourteenth century were perceptually present and not merely interpreted or
hypothesized. If the Husserlian concept of perception as original, intuitive
givenness is correctly understood, then there is absolutely no tension or difficulty
in assembling under the concept of lifeworld both the world of sensory perception
and the world of culture.
250 A transcendental-phenomenological worldview

of all culture (including scientific culture), such a consideration of the

world of culture is helpful to develop a guiding thread for understand-
ing Husserl’s life-world. In the culturally formed world of humans, we
encounter a wide variety of objects (both empirical and ideal) that we
recognize as growing out of the life of individuals and communities.
Artifacts, legal systems, institutions, and religious ceremonies are
among the objects whose existence is fundamentally entwined with
that of humans who brought them about. In the natural attitude, how-
ever, such objects only constitute ‘half’ of the world, so to speak. The
other half is that of nature, that is, the totality of what is prior to all
cultural formation, including the ‘stuff’ that we use to create cultural
objects (wood for artifacts, stones and sand for buildings, etc.). Clusters
of cultural objects linked together by a coherent set of goal-oriented
intentions, in turn, constitute special worlds, such as the world of a
religious movement or the world of a certain musical niche. People
partaking of such worlds know themselves as partaking of a flow of
‘life’ that precedes and surpasses them. What about the world as a
whole? To what extent can it be designated a life-world?
As we explained in detail in the foregoing chapter of this book, the
phenomenological reduction and the ensuing discovery of transcenden-
tal subjectivity open up the field of phenomenology to the totality of
what is. It sets the basis for recognizing that it is not artifacts and
specifically cultural objects alone that are fundamentally entwined
with subjectivity. Rather, in keeping with the analysis of the world as
a structure of experientially established validity, the world as a whole
is a world entwined with life, a world grown out of it. This, of course, is
not merely human life but the overarching transcendental life encom-
passing humans, conscious animals, and their respective worlds. It is
transcendental life that carries out transcendental constitution in the
sense defined above. Transcendental life, as we saw, “merges and dis-
solves into [geht auf] its function of worldly constitution”62 as the
ongoing establishment, retrieval, and dismissal of validities. In this
respect, ‘life-world’ coincides with transcendental constitution. There
is no such thing as a pre-existing world and a life that happens to live in
it or a pure life that creatively spins the world out of itself, as it were.
Rather, transcendental life is at bottom nothing but this world-in-the-
making (it geht auf in it), and the world is nothing but this life-world,

62
Hua XXXIX, 22.
Life-world ontology 251

that is, this totality of established being that is constantly in a process of

disassembling, reassembling, and reconfiguring as the movement of
transcendental life unfolds from one generation of empirical subjects
to the next. This process makes for an increasing ‘thickness’ of the life-
world as newly established products of ongoing transcendental consti-
tution flow into the totality of what henceforth shall count as ‘world’
and are handed down to future transcendental subjects.
Within the nexus of progressing experience belonging to each individual and
each communalized humanity, the handing down [Tradieren] – one-sided at
first, then reciprocal – produces a progressively unitary, an ever richer and
extended pre-givenness. In this way, the world, which is always already world
for all, constantly hands down the enrichments of individuals and groups to
further individuals and groups.63

Following the suggestion entailed in these lines, we can state that the
life-world in which we live is a much more complex and richer ground
of established validities than the life-world in which, say, ancient
Romans lived. However, some of the established validities that were
part of their own life-world are now lost, and we can only retrieve them
as having once been valid. In this respect, we can very well say that we
live in the same life-world in which the ancient Romans lived, if we
consider the life-world’s abiding structure of pre-givenness with its a
priori constituents. In another respect, however, our life-world is differ-
ent from the ancient Roman life-world. This is because the actual
horizon of validities in our life-world is inevitably other than theirs.
This sheds light on the life-world’s fundamental historicity, which does
not amount to completely unpredictable variability, but to the constant
coming and going of validities within a framework of abiding certainty
in the world’s being. In sum, while it is indeed mandatory to distinguish
between the life-world and culture, the observation of culture provides
the clue to understanding in what sense we can speak of the life-world as
a world flowing out of life. Once we switch from the natural to the
phenomenological attitude, the entwinement of what counts as world
and life (which is patent in the sphere of human culture) is revealed to be
universal. Here, life is transcendental life, and world constitution is not
active creation as is the case with cultural products but is, rather, a

63
Ibid., 54.
252 A transcendental-phenomenological worldview

complex play of activity and passivity in which transcendental life

completely exhausts (geht auf) its potential and its meaning.

The life-world as the source of nature and its relationship with

the life-world as the source of culture in The Crisis of the
European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology
After painting a broad picture of Husserl’s life-world as phenomenology’s
articulation of the ‘world as a whole’ sought by Neo-Kantian philosophers
and Lebensphilosophen alike, it is now appropriate to spend some time
clarifying how the life-world relates to the specific domains of the natural
and the human sciences. I presented part of the analysis pertaining to
nature in Chapter 5 in the context of Husserl’s critique of Rickert. It is
sufficient to recall that Husserl, in his confrontation with the Neo-Kantian
understanding of nature as a purely logical notion, points out that we
actually never encounter mere nature in our everyday life. Nature is
obtained by way of an abstractive impoverishment of experienced reality,
whereby all predicates of significance are excluded. Moreover, the sub-
jective appearance of these objects is set aside and they are considered
exclusively as the substrates of their objective properties.
Husserl’s treatment of nature and its relationship with the life-world is
famously embedded in his late reflection on the collapse of European
culture in his incomplete masterpiece The Crisis of the European
Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1935–1936). His argu-
ment in this work is that the West lost its way because it grew increasingly
oblivious to the genuine task of philosophy and of the empirical sciences
that once branched off from it. In particular, natural science forgot its
status of being an activity carried out by living human subjects, and
instead of ennobling and serving humanity it turned into a threat for
humanity’s self-understanding. As a matter of fact, Husserl had been
reflecting on these issues since the late 1910s. In Chapter 5, I mentioned
in passing his emphasis on the perpetual risk of specialized research, the
“mechanization of method,”64 in his Natur und Geist lecture in 1919. In
these lectures this issue is merely touched upon for introductory purposes.
Subsequently, however, it gains increasing centrality, becoming Husserl’s
chief concern in the last years of his life. The core of Husserl’s charge
against the historical development of natural science, however, is clearly

64
Ibid.
The life-world 253

formulated as early as 1921 in a research manuscript preparatory to the

Erste Philosophie lecture. Husserl’s language here is particularly revealing
of his full appropriation of Weltanschauung motifs, and the reference to
Fichte’s popular work Anweisungen zum seligen Leben (1806) confirms
his newfound appreciation for the Neo-Kantian tradition:
The universal theoretical interest was <originally> only a branch and an organ
of the universal practical interest. Science is power, and science makes you
free, and freedom through scientific reason is the way towards “bliss,” i.e., the
way towards an authentically fulfilling human life, towards a new humanity,
which dominates its world with the power of authentic science and through
this power transforms itself into a world of reason. This is the fundamental
thought of the “Enlightenment”; this thought sustains modern science in its
entirety and functions as its driving force. However, the great science, which
subsequently came to fruition, created for the intellect a world, which appa-
rently dissolves the driving thoughts stemming from practical reason. Instead
of opening wide for man the gates of genuine freedom and offering its
empowering tools, science seemingly transforms man itself in a complex of
facts bereft of freedom. Science seemingly subordinates man to a meaningless
world-machinery. It explains man in terms of a merely subordinated machine
in the world-machinery. Instead of providing man with scientific “directions
towards a blessed life” [Anweisungen zum seligen Leben] [. . .] science turns
nature and freedom into an incomprehensible antinomy.65

This passage is an ideal prelude to the main preoccupations and lines of

inquiry in Crisis. Husserl alludes to what he considers a distinctive
feature of Western thought and an innate tendency of cognitive activity
as such. Knowing is originally a practical activity whose goals and limits
are established by the given practical situation of the cognitive agents.
However, the practice of knowledge can progressively branch off from
the practical interests that initiated it and become an end in itself.
Knowledge can be pursued as a contemplative activity and set goals of
its own standing in some tension with those of practical life. We could
talk here about an intrinsic centrifugal movement characterizing cogni-
tive activity, which over the course of time pushes knowledge away
from its gravitational center in everyday praxis.66 This movement is at
the same time liberating and dangerous. It is liberating to the extent that

65
Hua VIII, 230–231. Husserl is obviously alluding to Fichte’s popular work
Anweisungen zum seligen Leben (1806).
66
A phenomenological account of why it is the case that knowledge tends to become
emancipated from the practical interests wherein it originally emerges would be
254 A transcendental-phenomenological worldview

it opens up the field of rationality to indefinitely expanding inquiry. It is

dangerous to the extent that autonomous knowledge necessarily has a
feedback on praxis. In the best-case scenario, this feedback results in
enhancement and elevation of the foregoing praxis to a higher stage of
rationality and responsibility. This is the kind of feedback on praxis
Husserl envisions for his phenomenology. In the worst-case scenario,
however, the feedback results in a conflict and even a denial of the ideals
and demands characterizing pre-theoretical praxis. This is, in short,
what Husserl imputes to modern science. Therefore, it is only by way
of going back to the original movement of emancipation of knowledge
in Western history and tracing its crucial shifts that autonomous knowl-
edge, viz. science, can be reset on a track of positive feedback on human
praxis that characterized, at least in theory, its pre-modern formulation.
Husserl’s guiding example to illustrate this process of emancipation is
the evolution of the practice or ‘art’ of measuring land into Euclidean
geometry. This is because geometry clearly has a direct bearing on
modern natural science. Measuring land is a kind of cognitive activity
that necessarily requires acquaintance with basic spatial shapes and
with the possibility to assign numerical values to the space of experi-
ence. However, the degree of exactitude required by the practice of
measuring land, say, for the sake of adjudicating a dispute between
landowners is relatively low. The legal land-measurer in ancient times
does not need to operate with exact rectangles and with sophisticated
measuring tools. The practice of appraising polygonal shapes and
measuring lengths remains bound to imperfect empirical appearances
and to the relatively low standards of truth sufficient in everyday life.
Geometry is born when the contemplation and measuring of shapes is
undertaken for its own sake.67 The focus of the newborn geometer is no

quite complex and exceed the scope of this chapter. I have attempted to outline how
such an account would have to proceed in “The Mark of Beginnings: Husserl and
Hegel on the Meaning of Naiveté,” in F. Fabbianelli and S. Luft (eds.), Husserl und
die klassische deutsche Philosophie (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014), 255–264.
67
One of the most powerful documentations of this unheard-of change of focus and
the mystifying effect it had on the populace in ancient Greece can be found in
Aristophanes’ Clouds (vv. 200–205). Here is the exchange between the
protagonist Strepsiades and a student at the Academy:
(Strepsiades notices a strange array of ludicrous scientific instruments) . . .
Strepsiades: What’s this for?
Student: Geometry.
Strepsiades: Geometry? What’s that?
The life-world 255

longer on the approximate space of perceptual experience but on an

idealized space made of exact figures and completely deprived of the
superabundant wealth of perceptual qualities. This change of focus
requires a previous abstraction of the spatial dimension from the con-
crete bodies of experience, whose inexact geometrical properties are
always infused with sensory and practical-aesthetic properties. The first
two steps leading to the birth of geometry are thus (1) abstraction of the
spatial dimension from the fullness of the experienced world and (2)
idealization of the geometrical shapes thus obtained. With these two
steps, in Husserl’s words, “we attain what is denied us in empirical
praxis – ‘exactness’ – for there is the possibility of determining the ideal
shapes in absolute identity, of recognizing them as substrates of abso-
lutely identical and methodically, univocally determined qualities.”68
These two moves allowed geometry in particular and quantifying
mathematical thinking in general69 to yield impressive discoveries and
reach a significant degree of sophistication. Moreover, like all knowl-
edge that has become autonomous, geometry had a feedback on the
praxis from which it emerged. Centuries later, at the dawn of modern
science, geometry was not only a well-established discipline with its
specialists, its textbooks, and so on. It was also an applied science
assisting various kinds of technology and lending its conceptual arsenal
to the work of craftspeople in the most disparate areas. When Galileo
Galilei (1564–1642), the spearhead figure of modern science for
Husserl, started delineating the basis of the scientific revolution, the
‘applicability’ of geometry to the empirical world was already taken for
granted. The original operations of abstraction and idealization that
gave rise to the objects of geometry in the first place were no longer vivid
in the historical memory of Western philosophers. For Galileo, the fact

Student: It is the science of measuring the land.

Strepsiades: I see, to measure our plots for the landlords?
Student: No, to measure the land generally.
Strepsiades: Lovely! What a very democratic mechanism.
Aristophanes, Clouds, trans. Peter Meineck (Indianapolis, IN:
Hackett, 2000), 16–17.
68
Crisis, 27.
69
As Husserl points out parenthetically: “Geometry represents for us here the whole
mathematics of space-time” (ibid.). Another example could be the art of
weighing, which obviously has different standards when it is employed for the
sake of trade on the marketplace and when it is practiced purely for the sake of
theory.
256 A transcendental-phenomenological worldview

that idealized geometry can be ‘applied’ to the empirical world and that
it allows us to overcome all relativity when it is applied, determining
empirical objects in a reliable and predictive fashion, becomes of para-
mount importance. A groundbreaking guiding thought dawns on
Galileo: “Must not something similar be possible for the concrete
world as such?”70 In other words, if the method of abstraction and
idealization works for the univocal determination of spatial properties
in empirical bodies, would it not be possible to extend this method to the
totality of what is?
The observation of nature in experience yields the certainty of an
“overall style”71 of the world. This is a causal style, which allows for
approximate predictions regarding the ‘behavior’ of different objects in
different circumstances. Every natural occurrence stands in some causal
relation with other natural occurrences in its surroundings. Galileo’s
plan is to expand the strategy of idealization that proved effective with
geometrical shapes and apply it to the totality of empirical being. In order
for this to happen, however, a dire problem has to be overcome. Unlike
spatial shapes, the sensible qualities characterizing empirical objects do
not allow for direct idealizing mathematization. Therefore, the third step
in the genealogy of modern science and the ensuing naturalism is that of
an “indirect mathematization”72 of the sensible qualities characterizing
physical bodies in their concreteness (3). This move to indirect mathema-
tization of sensible qualities is the third step if considered with respect to
the emancipation of knowledge from praxis to the investigation of the
empirical world. However, it is the first or the inaugural step with respect
to the historical development of modern natural science.
The reason why the mathematization of sensible qualities must be
indirect is that they do not admit of a straightforward numerical deter-
mination in the way that shapes do. The experience that a certain rod is
longer than another rod can be directly translated into the exact lan-
guage of numerical relations, say, by way of measuring both rods with a
third rod that we take as our standard and determining how many times
the length of the standard rod is contained in the shorter and in the
longer rod. Contrariwise, the experience that a certain rod is of a
brighter shade of red compared to another rod cannot be translated
into numerical language directly by way of adopting a third red rod
and determining that, say, one rod is only twice as red as the standard

70 71 72
Ibid., 33. Ibid., 31. Ibid., 34.
The life-world 257

rod while the other is a good three times redder. This is evidently
impossible. The vagueness and approximation of sensible qualities is
intrinsic. Another way of looking at this intrinsic vagueness is to say
that while sensibly intuited geometric properties can be experienced as
approximations of an ideal shape (the vaguely round shape of a pond
‘points towards’ a perfect circle), sensible qualities do not approximate
any ostensible ideal quality. Given a certain shade of red there is no
‘ideal red’ that the shade points towards in and of itself.73
Therefore, the mathematization of such qualities envisioned by
Galileo for the sake of a total geometrical idealization of the world “is
thinkable only in the sense that the specifically sensible qualities
(‘plena’) that can be experienced in the intuited bodies are closely
related in a quite peculiar and regulated way with the shapes that belong
essentially to them.”74 Introducing this thought, Husserl wants the
readers to become aware of its “strangeness,”75 which for those coming
centuries after Galileo is hardly perceivable. True, there are, as Husserl
reports, some sensible qualities that appear to be directly related to the
shapes of the bodies to which they attach, such as the length of a string
and the pitch and tone of the sound it produces. And it is also true that
by way of introducing the notion of an infinite determinability of the
approximately determined geometric qualities of empirical bodies
applied geometry injects a previously unknown dimension of infinity
into the sensible world as a whole. Neither of these two observations,
however, directly proves the “mathematizeability” of all sensible prop-
erties. What Galileo has at this point is only the awareness of an all-
encompassing causality that allows for approximate induction and the
hypothesis that the method of mathematization originally designed for
spatial shapes can be meaningfully extended to the total causal nexus of
nature. Note that, unlike the original mathematization of shapes carried
out in geometry, the mathematization of sensible ‘plena’ does not rest
on a previous abstraction. It is not by way of abstracting the dimension
of sensible qualities from the concreteness of experienced bodies that we
set the conditions for their mathematization. The inaugural movement

73
See François de Gandt, Husserl et Galilée: Sur la crise des sciences européennes
(Paris: Vrin, 2004), 59. “One cannot depart from the empirical and sensible
gradualness of colors and smells. On the contrary, the optimum of the contours
possesses a sense independently of the given perception, it can be treated in and of
itself.”
74
Crisis, 35. 75 Ibid., 37.
258 A transcendental-phenomenological worldview

of modern science goes from the successful mathematization of shapes

to the hypothesis of a possible mathematization of the total causal
nexus of nature. It is only to the extent that sensible qualities belong
in this total causal nexus that they are indirectly involved in the
mathematization.
As a matter of fact, Galileo did not recognize the status of his project
of mathematizing the ‘plena’ of experience as resting on a hypothesis,
and, with the aid of theological-metaphysical beliefs, he took this
hypothesis immediately for an absolute truth (he famously considers
mathematics the language in which God wrote the great book of the
universe). Husserl, on the contrary, wants his readers to appreciate and
take seriously the hypothetical status of the assumption undergirding
the project of modern science:
[T]he Galilean idea is a hypothesis, and a very remarkable one at that; and the
actual natural science throughout the centuries of its verification is a corre-
spondingly remarkable sort of verification. It is remarkable because the
hypothesis, in spite of its verification, continues to be and is always a hypoth-
esis; its verification (the only kind conceivable for it) is an endless course of
verifications. It is the peculiar essence of natural science, it is a priori its way of
being, to be unendingly hypothetical and unendingly verified.76

For Galileo and the first modern scientists, this hypothesis is immedi-
ately translated into a new method; “it was the matter for the passionate
praxis of inquiry”77 geared towards the establishment of new and
increasingly precise measurements. These, in turn, are cast in mathe-
matical formulae, and these formulae rapidly become the focal point of
the newborn modern science. “In other words, if one has the formulae,
one already possesses, in advance, the practically desired prediction of
what is to be expected with empirical certainty in the intuitively given
world of concretely actual life.”78 Reflecting on the meaning of these
formulae and their relation to the intuitive world whose causal com-
portment they are designed to predict, Husserl points out that the
increasing sophistication of algebra and of algebraic methods progres-
sively create a “superficialization,”79 or emptying of meaning. To the
extent that, for instance geometrical shapes and relations are univocally
associated with numbers, and, eventually, after the invention of analy-
sis, with free variables symbolized by letters, the original intuitive

76 77 78 79
Ibid., 41–42. Ibid., 40. Ibid., 43. Ibid., 44.
The life-world 259

relation of these ideal entities to the dimension of space is progressively

lost. We thus get to the fourth and definitive step on the way to the
establishment of modern science: (4) formalization. With formalization
the idealized entities of geometrical-mathematical thinking are replaced
by the symbols figuring in the formulae. Such symbols facilitate calcu-
lations and the creation of new formulae. However, they obliterate the
dimension of intuitive experience, to which they nonetheless must retain
some obscure connection in order for the formulae to ‘rub against’
the empirical world that they are designed to make predictable. Over
the course of time, natural scientists no longer need to take into view the
bold hypothesis put forward by Galileo. The impressive power of for-
malized methods for the treatment of nature gives rise to increasingly
technicized and non-reflective research praxis. To reiterate Lask’s
unfriendly but well-taken remark, modern natural science becomes
more and more blasé about its methods.80
Up to this point, we traced, following Husserl’s analysis in the second
part of Crisis, the intentional shifts characterizing the birth of modern
science. However, we have not encountered naturalism yet. It is with the
next step that naturalism comes onto the scene. While Husserl hastens
to point out that this next step is already undertaken in Galileo’s work,
it is important to keep it conceptually distinct from the three foregoing
steps. If this distinction were not possible, then it would be impossible to
criticize and reject naturalism while at the same time acknowledging
and respecting the work of the natural sciences as Husserl ubiquitously
does. The fifth step (or the first and last step with respect to the genesis of
naturalism qua worldview) is “the surreptitious substitution of the
mathematically substructed world of idealities for the only real world,
the one that is actually given through perception, that is ever experi-
enced and experienceable – our everyday life-world.”81
This step can be further broken down into two steps: (5.1) the
hypostatization of the formalized idealities of geometrical thinking
and (5.2) the substitution of such hypostatized idealities for the objects
of intuitive experience. As for (5.1), the tradition of hypostatizing ideal-
ities is as old as Plato’s philosophy and long pre-dates the development
of geometrical thinking as a formalized method for natural scientific
inquiry. However, from a Platonic perspective, hypostatized idealities
inhabit a world of their own, one of which the intuitive world of

80 81
See Chapter 3. Crisis, 48–49.
260 A transcendental-phenomenological worldview

experience is a mere copy. The innovative and previously hardly con-

ceivable step is (5.2), in which the world of experience is not simply
demoted to a copy but is entirely supplanted. In Galileo’s philosophy,
the world of experience is declared an entirely subjective slideshow of
secondary qualities, as opposed to the great book of the real universe,
which God wrote in the language of mathematics. Following this fifth
step, in Husserl’s famous words, “we take for true being what is actually
a method.”82
The supplanting of the life-world operated by modern natural science
in its naturalistic development immediately translates into a problem of
value:
If the intuited world of our life is merely subjective, then all the truths of
pre- and extrascientific life that have to do with its factual being are
deprived of value. They have meaning only insofar as they, while them-
selves false, vaguely indicate an in-itself which lies behind this world of
possible experience and is transcendent in respect to it.83

The fact that Husserl mentions the problem of value at this point is
decisive in order to underscore a point that remains unaddressed in the
analysis leading up to this conclusion. The intuited world of experience
is not only a perceptual world made of inexact shapes, sensible ‘plena,’
and an overall causal style. It is first and foremost a world of value and
significance, a world cultivated over the course of generations and
viewed by subjects in light of human purposiveness. All of this is
automatically undermined the moment that the world of experience,
in which alone human praxis plays itself out, is declared merely sub-
jective and therefore ultimately illusory. At this point, it is apt to recall
the characterization of pure nature developed by Husserl (and Lask) in
earlier chapters. Nature was characterized as what remains of the world

82
Ibid., 51. This distinction reiterates almost literally Ernst Mach’s distinction
between Untersuchungsgegenstände and Bestimmungsweisen, that is, objects of
investigation and modes of determining these objects. For Mach, the abstract
entities of mathematical physics fall in the second category; they are modes of
determining the objects of investigation of natural science. These objects, in
Mach’s philosophy, are nothing but the appearances manifesting themselves in
our consciousness. Husserl, of course, does not subscribe to Mach’s
phenomenalism and, in keeping with his concept of intentionality, maintains a
distinction between the appearances of a natural object and the natural object
itself.
83
Ibid., 54.
The life-world 261

once we abstract from all predicates of significance and from all sub-
jective appearances. We can then say that there is something like a zero
step (0) in the history of natural science, a preliminary abstraction that
precedes in principle the abstraction of geometry (1) focusing on pure
shapes. This is the abstraction of pure nature as such from the totality of
the culturally formed world in which we live. Such abstract nature is not
yet the mathematized nature of modern natural science, but it is the
domain of being in which modern natural science carries out its inten-
tional shifts of meaning. It is indeed with Galileo and his successors that
the abstraction of pure nature as the thematic totality for natural-
scientific inquiry is explicitly thematized and achieved. However, we
must make an effort to see the conceptual separability of this step (0)
from all subsequent theoretical operations (1–5.2). While mathema-
tized nature is a cultural production through and through, intuitive
nature is transcendentally presupposed in all conceivable cultural pro-
ductions, including modern natural science. Mathematized nature,
however, is legitimately ‘drawn out’ of intuitive nature and it is, so to
speak, a cultural product cum fundamentum in re. For Husserl, to
mathematize nature is not an arbitrary activity, which Westerners just
happened to engage in. To mathematize nature is to follow a path of
inquiry suggested by the things themselves, to the extent that they dis-
play isolable quantitative features and recurring causal patterns in their
interaction. What is problematic in Husserl’s eyes is that the original
mathematizing operations were forgotten as the methods of natural
science grew increasingly familiar to new generations of apprentices.
Thus, as we saw, mathematical constructions supplanted the actual
beings encountered in our everyday life, not only in their dimensions
of significance and subjective outlook but also in their purely natural-
intuitive core. To put it differently, Husserl does not merely counterpose
the mathematized world of natural science and the world of significant
objects in our everyday life. He counterposes the meaningful objects
encountered in the culturally formed human world and the meaning-
free stratum of nature that inheres in these objects, as we saw in
Chapter 5. In a further step, he contrasts intuitive nature qua abstract,
albeit fully intuitive, layer in the human world and mathematized nature
as a cultural product drawn out of intuitive nature via a number of
intentional shifts that we attempted to trace in his masterpiece Crisis.
This point is so important that it occupies almost exclusively
Husserl’s work in his manuscripts surrounding Crisis. In an
262 A transcendental-phenomenological worldview

illuminating text from the early 1930s Husserl makes the following
remarks concerning the status of nature as an abstract dimension in
the totality of the experienced life-world:
The totality of what is [Allheit des Seienden] qua world has as its underlying
ground [Untergrund] the existing nature [seiende Natur]. But this must not be
misunderstood. As if nature were constituted as a valid universe for itself; as if,
so to speak, we humans only occasionally had the idea of doing something
with natural objects, to give natural matter a form according to our goals. We
humans, as humans, are subjects who act according to goals, we always
already have goals and in all our acts we pursue, achieve, expand, etc., certain
goals. Nature is an abstraction, and all experiencing activity restricted to
nature (explication, etc.) is precisely a restriction in the service and for the
sake of human striving, of goal-directed striving. The world with all its
already completed purposive products [Zweckgestalten] is always already a
field for goal-directed activities, for goals to be conceived and attained in view
of the future horizon.84

In another manuscript from the same group, he specifies how we should

think about nature as the abstract core (Kern) underpinning concrete
life-worldly being. His remarks fit nicely with the discussions in
Chapter 5 of this book concerning the criteria for demarcation of differ-
ent scientific fields:
The abstraction of a ‘nature’ is possible in the same way in which the
abstraction of geometrical space is possible (although obviously the latter
kind of abstraction is subordinate to the first kind of abstraction). This
abstraction delimits a self-contained structural a priori by way of creating in
what is possibly factual [im möglichen Faktum] the ground for a self-
contained science in complete independence from the a priori belonging to
the concrete world with its dimensions of significance and to the rest of the
world in general, including the abstractly excluded sphere of personal sub-
jectivity. Obviously, independence is meant here in the sense of abstraction.
On the contrary, when we pursue the a priori of the concrete world of
experience, we are not dealing with a structure of this kind to be considered
independently.85

Husserl’s suggestion of an analogy with geometry is extremely helpful.

In the same way in which, say, plane geometry deals with a delimited
sphere of spatial phenomena by way of excluding from its theoretical

84 85
Hua XXXIX, 326–327. Ibid., 264.
The life-world 263

purview other aspects of space, such as the third dimension, nature

becomes a delimited sphere for inquiry to the extent that it is abstractly
isolated from the fully concrete a priori of the world of experience.86
This perspective allows Husserl to call into question the rationale
behind carrying out the abstractive operations that establish nature as
a self-enclosed domain of being and to ask about the authentic aims,
both epistemic and practical, underpinning the project of modern nat-
ural science.
To conclude this section, it is worth noticing that the distinction
between the intuitive nature underpinning the life-world and the math-
ematized nature created by modern natural science sets Husserl apart
from his Neo-Kantian associates. Although, as we saw above, they all
agreed that ‘nature’ is not an absolute being but a product of the
synthetic-categorial activity of the subject, none of them recognized a
different, autonomous meaning to intuitive nature. For the Neo-
Kantians (with the exception of Lask), ‘nature’ and ‘the subject matter
of modern natural science’ are synonymous. Dualism between nature
and culture, in Rickert’s sense, was therefore inevitable. Considering
just Rickert’s account of it, the Kantian Copernican deed may have
freed the West from naturalism, but it left Westerners wondering how
the idealized world described by natural science could possibly be the
same world in which they live their historical and purposeful lives. Being
assured that both nature and culture somehow have their origin in our
categorial capacities is certainly not enough explanation. One chief
merit in Husserl’s distinction is to clarify the ambiguity inherent in the
concept of nature after the advent of modern natural science and, thus,
prepare the terrain for a renewed understanding of human subjectivity
as the agent responsible for the natural-scientific endeavor.
In the next and final chapter I will address the salient features of a
worldview inspired by Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology of the
life-world as he envisions it in his manuscripts. This worldview’s prox-
imity to the Kantian liberation narrative will become increasingly man-
ifest, though some further points of divergence will surface, too.

86
For a discussion of plane geometry as an abstract discipline see Chapter 5.
8 Ethical and cultural implications
in Husserl’s phenomenology
of the life-world

Perhaps it will even become manifest that the total

phenomenological attitude and the epoché belonging to it
are destined in essence to effect, at first, a complete personal
transformation, comparable in the beginning to a religious
conversion, which then, however, over and above this, bears
within itself the significance of the greatest existential
transformation which is assigned as a task to mankind as such.
Edmund Husserl1

After reconstructing the Natur versus Geist debate and exploring

Husserl’s contribution to it, we saw that his late notion of life-world
engages some of the deepest philosophical preoccupations of his time. In
particular, we highlighted that the life-world is the ground of both
nature and culture, and that this insight bears important consequences
pertaining to the problem of worldview as defined in Chapter 7. By way
of conclusion, it is now time to articulate the general outlook of the
phenomenological worldview yielded by the scientific investigation of
the life-world within the phenomenological attitude. The perspective
hereby assumed is worth reiterating: my argument is neither that the
life-world somehow is a worldview, nor that Husserl’s late phenomen-
ology is all about worldview, but, rather, that a phenomenological
investigation of the life-world yields a worldview, namely, a phenom-
enological worldview, which Husserl hoped would replace naturalism
and positivism.
The opening quote above is a very appropriate place to begin. It is
arguably one of the most famous passages in Crisis, and it is often
produced as evidence of Husserl’s allegedly newfound existential
pathos in the last years of his life. However, the language of personal
transformation and religious conversion (Umkehr) has never been

1
Crisis, 137.

264
Husserl’s phenomenology of the life-world 265

taken as seriously as it should. What exactly is a religious conversion?

And what kind of personal transformation does it bring about? And,
finally, what does this have to do with philosophical technicalities such
as the epoché and the phenomenological attitude?
Let us remember that Husserl had the experience of a religious con-
version earlier in his life. He converted to Christianity from Judaism
under the influence of Masaryk in Vienna.2 Although Husserl does not
seem to have ever been a particularly fervent religious spirit, the con-
version to Christianity had a profound impact on his personal life,3 such
that it would be unfair to characterize his later decision to be baptized as
a matter of mere social convenience.4 It is therefore likely that the
paradigm for his understanding of ‘religious conversion’ is precisely
his own conversion experience, that is, a specifically Christian conver-
sion experience.
An excursus into the psychological and existential intricacies of
Christian conversion would be out of place in the present context.
However, one central aspect deserves to be mentioned as a guiding
thread for looking at Husserl’s understanding of the phenomenolog-
ical attitude as a religious conversion. Famously, the Greek word for
conversion in early Christianity is metanoia (from the verb μετανοεῖν).
We can find it, for example, in St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans (12:2)
where he exhorts the community, saying: “Do not be conformed to
this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind (meta-
noeite).” Christian conversion in St. Paul’s account is thus primarily a
renewal of mind or a change of conception that transforms the convert
by way of introducing an anti-conformist perspective on the world.
The convert does not merely add one more belief (notably, the belief in
the divinity of Christ) to the list of the beliefs she already held. Rather,
the convert looks at the exact same things of previous acquaintance in
a new way, one that is thoroughly informed by the novel religious

2
K. Schuhmann, Husserl-Chronik: Denk- und Lebensweg Edmund Husserls,
Husserliana Dokumente, vol. 1 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977), 10.
3
See ibid., Husserl’s description to Metzger: “The powerful impact of the New
Testament on the twenty-three-year-old developed into an impulse to find the way
to God and to an authentic life through a rigorous philosophical science.”
4
At that time Husserl was still connected with the University of Berlin, where he had
worked with the famous mathematician Weierstraß. However, he received his
baptism in a Lutheran church in Catholic Vienna, where he was hearing
Brentano’s lectures on psychology. Ibid., 15.
266 Husserl’s phenomenology of the life-world

perspective.5 I would like to suggest that this is largely the same

structure of personal transformation Husserl has in mind with respect
to the phenomenological attitude. By way of unearthing the transcen-
dental dimension inherent in human subjectivity and revealing the
ongoing dynamic of transcendental world-constitution, the phenom-
enological attitude transforms our way of thinking about ourselves as
subjects in the world. In the phenomenological attitude, we are still
seeing the same things and living through the same experiences, but we
do so with a new sense of self dignified by the discovery of the non-
reducible transcendental dimension of subjectivity.
The analogy between the switch to the phenomenological attitude
and the logic of Christian conversion can be spelled out in one further
direction. The change of mind that defines Christian metanoia is not a
sudden insight or the merely intellectual adherence to a set of beliefs.
Rather, metanoia matures within a new kind of praxis, including the
exposure to the life of the Christian community, the attendance to
religious services, and the involvement in charitable activities.
Religious praxis thus precedes and founds religious conversion. It is
religious praxis that throws a new set of values into relief, thus prepar-
ing the terrain for the actual conversion to such newly visualized values.
Moreover, after the conversion it is the perseverance in this kind of
praxis that aliments and preserves faith. Similarly, I contend, the kind of
theoretical praxis that Husserl carries out in his manuscripts and lec-
tures precedes and grounds the full embrace of the phenomenological
perspective. It is only by way of constantly revisiting certain lines of
thought leading up to phenomenology, and by way of continuing to do
phenomenology, that the self-transformation Husserl envisioned for
individuals and for humankind at large becomes a practical possibility.
In the two sections of this final chapter I want to explore the trans-
formative power of phenomenology and, in particular, of the phenom-
enological analysis of the life-world both at the individual and at the
intersubjective levels. This will involve commenting on a number of
crucial notions of Husserl’s late phenomenology, including the contro-
versial concepts of teleology and cultural universalism.

5
A locus classicus for a phenomenological description of Christian conversion is
Martin Heidegger’s early lectures on the phenomenology of religion in 1919.
M. Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2004).
Husserl’s life-world analyses 267

The ethical impact and the transformative power of Husserl’s

life-world analyses
Husserl’s manuscripts on the life-world offer a remarkable reading
experience. They have an almost mesmerizing effect on the reader,
who is exposed to phenomenology’s being first and foremost a kind of
practice that involves a demanding training of the apprentice’s eye. In
them, we see Husserl often reiterating the same lines of analysis time and
again, starting off with what might seem a delimited issue and then
progressively expanding his focus to encompass the total horizon in
which the initial issue is embedded. These manuscripts are an exercise
in what is perhaps the most difficult of all philosophical tasks: learning
to visualize the world as a whole, before jumping to theorize about it.
Visualizing the world as a whole is for Husserl a transformative intel-
lectual experience. (1) To the extent that the world as a whole is more than
mere nature, it is an experience that enables one to relativize the meaning
of nature and to integrate the investigation of nature into broader human-
istic concerns. (2) To the extent that the world as a whole is what it is only
as the total horizon of experiencing transcendental subjectivity,6 learning
to visualize the world as a whole implies learning to visualize subjectivity
as a whole standing in its transcendental function. (3) Lastly, and this will
be the theme of next section, to the extent that it makes us sensitive to
dimensions of the world that lie beyond the limited horizons of what we
are familiar with, learning to visualize the world as a whole bears impor-
tant consequences for a universalistic view of humankind.
To begin with the first issue, the result of Husserl’s analysis of nature
squares with the understanding of nature characterizing one of the
heroes in the Kantian liberation narrative: Fichte. In his popular
writings from 1800 onwards, particularly in the last section of his
acclaimed book Die Bestimmung des Menschen (1800), Fichte worked
to replace the mechanistic conception of nature articulated by French
Enlightenment thinkers, with a novel view in which nature is nothing
but the raw material for human action, which awaits to be molded
according to our innermost goals and aspirations.7 Leaving aside the

6
As we mentioned above, in the phenomenological perspective, the world is a “title
for actual and possible ego-acts” (Hua XXXIX, 4).
7
It should be added that for Fichte (and for Husserl, too) such goals and aspirations
are not entirely haphazard as one might be tempted to assume. Rather, they are
dictated from a universal moral imperative, which issues its commands to all
268 Husserl’s phenomenology of the life-world

specifics of Fichte’s philosophy, which is notoriously quite complex, let

us limit ourselves to mention that a large number of passages from
Husserl’s manuscripts promote a remarkably similar conception of
nature as one of the key achievements of the phenomenological
perspective. This passage follows in Husserl’s text the considerations
about the abstractness of pure nature expounded in the foregoing
chapter, and it illustrates his conception adamantly:
What connects humans is the world of validity [Geltungswelt] common to
them all. In this world of validity the nature common to all humans [allmens-
chlich] – if we think of the world as already constituted in a unitary fashion – is
the essential core that essentially undergirds all layers of the common world.
The existing world is the general ground of human existence [Dasein], or,
better, it is the perpetual horizonal universe of materials, on which we humans
purposefully act and shall act in the future. The world that already is [die
schon seiende Welt] is the universal matter for the world that ought to be and
shall be according to this ought [die seinsollende und sollensmäßig sein
werdende Welt]. It is the universe of that with which we shape the new [. . .]
The existing world <is> material for the world that shall be in the future; a
world that ought to be and that is up to us to bring about.8

Husserl seems to believe that assuming a panoramic perspective on the

human world with the aid of the phenomenological method almost
automatically ‘activates’ certain ethical imperatives, whose compelling
force the phenomenologist is bound to perceive. For Husserl, awaken-
ing to the infinity of the life-world in which all our human activity,
including natural-scientific theorizing, unfolds means awakening to the
infinity of the values that animate our actions. In his The Vocation of
Man, Fichte expressed metaphorically the same conviction:

humans and is ultimately rooted in the divine will. It is worth mentioning that
Husserl gave Übungen on Die Bestimmung des Menschen and other Fichtean
popular works, and in 1917 he offered a series of lectures on Fichte’s ideal of
mankind to the soldiers returning from the front. These lectures are available in
Hua XXV, 267–293 and have been translated into English as Husserl, “Fichte’s
Ideal of Humanity [Three Lectures],’ trans. J. Hart, Husserl Studies 12 (1995):
111–133. For an extensive discussion of their philosophical significance see
J. Hart, “Husserl and Fichte: With Special Regard to Husserl’s Lectures on
‘Fichte’s Ideal of Humanity’,” Husserl Studies 12 (1995): 135–163 and my
“Fenomenologia dell’ideale. Husserl lettore di Fichte nelle Lezioni del 1917,”
Annuario Filosofico 22 (2006): 401– 421. For references to Husserl’s Übungen on
Fichte see K. Schuhmann, Husserl-Chronik: Denk- und Lebensweg Edmund
Husserls, Husserliana Dokumente, vol. 1 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977), 75.
8
Hua XXXIX, 327–8.
Husserl’s life-world analyses 269

I cast a glance on the present relations of men towards each other and towards
Nature, on the feebleness of their powers, the strength of their desires and
passions. A voice within me proclaims with irresistible conviction – “It is
impossible that it can remain thus; it must become different and better.”9

In a kindred spirit, Husserl writes that “our acting life [Aktleben]”

should be understood “as directed towards the pre-given world, in
order to shape it purposefully and turn it into a world infused with
value [wertvoll].”10 He continues this line of thought explaining that
“living in the world amounts to living towards a world infused with
value, while the already existing world is always partly valuable, partly
bereft of value, and partly valueless (indifferent).”11
These thoughts might strike a contemporary reader as naive at best
and as seriously deficient at worst. How could Husserl really believe
that an armchair survey of the world as a whole would suffice to
awaken ethical responsibility and even provide grounding for the values
that should guide humanity towards its constitutive telos? In precisely
the same span of years, would not a survey of the world as a whole
rather evoke ominous visions of revenge and total domination in the
nationalistic majority of Husserl’s fellow countrymen? Moreover, what
are these values Husserl constantly refers to? Is he thinking of a more or
less complete list of definite values? Does he have a convincing argu-
ment about their universality?
Admittedly, Husserl’s project of ethical regeneration for Europe
based purely on the phenomenological contemplation of the life-world
and its a priori constituents raises a number of questions. However,
similar questions could be raised with regard to any purely philosoph-
ical attempt to promote actual ethical renewal, and they would possibly
touch on the intrinsic limits of philosophy when it comes to a substantial
motivation (as opposed to mere descriptive elucidation) of human
ethical behavior. In this regard, Husserl’s aspirations are perhaps no
more and no less naive than those of any other great philosopher in
history who struggled with the same issues. In addition, the fact that
Husserl’s talk of universally human values remains vague is regrettable.
One reason for this vagueness might be that in the Neo-Kantian context
of his time reference to values was common currency in philosophy.

9
J. G. Fichte, The Vocation of Man, translated by W. Smith (Chicago, IL: Open
Court, 1906), 113.
10
Hua XXXIX, 314. 11 Ibid., 315.
270 Husserl’s phenomenology of the life-world

Husserl may not have felt obliged to spell out in detail the values
putatively common to all humans, given the overall agreement among
professional philosophers that such values were in fact given.
Furthermore, we should remember that Husserl’s approach to these
issues is descriptive, that is, he is not engaging in an imaginary argument
with the moral nihilist who denies that there are universal values or with
the post-structuralist genealogist who believes that what we call ‘values’
only express relations of power, and the like. Those who seek argu-
ments for these positions, pro or against, will most likely be disap-
pointed by what Husserl has to offer. A different, more productive
attitude regarding Husserl’s work on these issues is recommended. I
suggest that we should approach Husserl’s descriptions in the following
spirit: it is hardly deniable that we do have experiences of value in our
everyday life, that regardless of the concrete responses to values for
different human groups and individuals we do consider certain values to
be experienced in fundamentally the same way by all humans (for
instance, we seem to be able to recognize broadly virtuous behavior
across cultural differences),12 and that sufficiently reflective people do
experience a disproportion between the world as it is and the world as it
ought to be. Husserl’s work is oriented to provide good descriptions of
these experiences and not to provide answers to moral skeptics. Good
descriptions should, in turn, increase our awareness and put us in a
position to pursue willingly what, in Husserl’s eyes, we had already
been pursuing all along, albeit confusedly.
This being said, Husserl was certainly not naive enough to believe
that turning one’s phenomenological regard towards the life-world’s
infinity would automatically bring to light a definite and discrete set of
values fit for the ethical orientation of humankind. Instead, what he
firmly believes phenomenology does automatically bring about for its
human practitioners is a novel self-understanding based on the tran-
scendental interpretation of their subjectivity. Recall that this, for

12
In a manuscript Husserl comments: “Some human virtues of friendship, loyalty,
justice, and so forth, stand out from the particular form that they received
through particular habits and prove to be a human kernel that may be found in
very different nations as a universally human (allgemeinmenschlich) character of
all ‘civilized’ populations.” E. Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen
Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Ergänzungsband:
Text aus dem Nachlaß 1934–1937, Husserliana, vol. 29 (Dordrecht: Kluwer,
1993), 42–43. Hereafter Hua XXIX.
Husserl’s life-world analyses 271

Husserl, is not phenomenology’s primary task (which is a purely theo-

retical elucidation of the a priori structures of any consciousness what-
soever), but, we could say, it is its most important side effect for the
world of human culture. Husserl insists repeatedly on the trans-
formative power characterizing phenomenology, whose foremost
achievement is making one aware of one’s transcendental status as a
world-constituting agent. If humans ‘understand themselves transcen-
dentally’ (a phrase that recurs ubiquitously in Husserl’s late work), they
are drawn out of the ‘world-machinery’ of mathematically interpreted
nature and become open to a novel understanding of their place in the
world:
Through phenomenology, I reveal the transcendental sense of I, Us, and
World. In so doing, I am not only open to my ultimate truth, but also, through
this knowledge, I am at the same time individually other than the one I was
before.13

This is another point where Husserl departs from the Neo-Kantian

version of the Kantian liberation narrative. In Rickert’s interpretation,
Kant’s critical philosophy affirms the centrality of a ‘subject in general’
as the ideal carrier of the categories and the point of convergence of all
synthetic functions of the intellect, but at the same time it construes
human subjectivity as on a par with all further empirical being.
Husserl’s phenomenological reduction does something more radical.
It transfers ‘the transcendental’ right to the heart of a human’s experi-
encing life as a hidden (verhüllt), but at any time revealable (enthüllbar),
dimension that each of us can discover as our innermost self.14
Adequate understanding of the doctrine of transcendental world-
constitution, in turn, should find an echo in our practical self-
understanding. In light of this doctrine, the ‘truth’ about subjectivity is
not its appearance under the ruling apprehension of the naturalistic
attitude, according to which the psyche is just the accompanying phe-
nomenon of certain physiological bodies.15 Rather, revealing the

13
Hua XXXIX, 215.
14
See Hua XV, 389. Incidentally, Rickert understood this difference very well and
attacked Husserl’s conception of transcendental subjectivity on various
occasions. See, for instance, MPU, 117 n. 3.
15
Contemporary talk of the “psychic properties” of physical systems (first and
foremost animal bodies) seems to be very much in line with the position Husserl
intends to overcome.
272 Husserl’s phenomenology of the life-world

transcendental-constitutive function of subjectivity through the epoché

means revealing that subjectivity is through and through operative; it is
an unceasing stream of operativeness in the two shapes of passive self-
constitution and active object-constitution. This realization, in keeping
with the Platonic-Aristotelian conviction that what acts is superior to or
more noble than what is acted upon, opens up for the human being a
scientifically grounded possibility to acknowledge one’s and one’s
fellow humans’ dignity over all empirical being, including every other
human being’s own body. Husserl adumbrates this view in a dense
paragraph from a manuscript:
To the extent that the “transcendentally awakened” I, following the “guiding
thread” of worldliness converted into a “transcendental phenomenon,”
reveals systematically his innermost transcendental being and that of tran-
scendental subjectivity as a whole [. . .] [it] creates “productively” a new and
endless horizon and a new kind of knowledge as self-knowledge of the tran-
scendentally phenomenologizing I. This, however, entails also knowledge of
the being of transcendental individuality in general in its infinite horizonality
for itself, [horizonality] “produced” anew through a new “production.” This
horizonality is the infinity of evident transcendental interpretation, which the
phenomenologizing I sets to work, thereby having the endless horizon of what
is yet to be accomplished before its eyes. Generally, this horizon remains
hidden for further transcendental subjects (except the phenomenologically
awakened [ones]), that is, hidden through its worldliness.16

The prima facie obscure language used in this passage only partially
overshadows the philosophical significance of the perspective Husserl is
attempting to articulate. The ‘transcendentally awakened’ human sub-
ject is sensitive to other human subjects’ transcendental dimension and
to their impoverished self-understanding while they abide by the sphere
of ‘worldliness.’ However, the world seen in its transcendental light
reveals itself to be nothing but the arena in which humanity is called to
wake up to its authentic status, and in so doing self-consciously pursue
its path of enlightenment and “humanization.”17
In spite of Husserl’s paternalistic tone at times, it should be remarked
that the worldview he articulates in these passages does not covertly
entertain the wish for an impossible world in which all human beings
would somehow become phenomenologists. Husserl would probably
be happy to settle for less, that is, for a world in which the findings made

16 17
Hua XV, 390. See ibid., 391, 589; Hua XXXIX, 312.
Husserl’s life-world analyses 273

possible by the phenomenological reduction were familiar to the general

public and respected at least to the same degree that the findings of the
natural sciences are respected in our contemporary world. Needless to
say, one does not need to familiarize oneself with the intricacies of
phenomenological inquiry in order to flourish as a human being.
However, in Husserl’s view, one does need to have some scientifically
grounded sense of the transcendental meaning of her subjectivity in
order not to succumb to the self-debasing influences of naively
embraced naturalism. Flights into mysticism or religious enthusiasm
will not do because Western civilization was born under the guiding star
of Greek science. Therefore, educated Westerners will only be able to
embrace wholeheartedly (that is, without being constantly tormented
by the specter of doubt) doctrines and ideas that present themselves in a
scientific guise.
That the dignity of subjectivity over all further being is the most
important insight yielded by the phenomenological attitude and the
reflection of the life-world is documented in numerous passages of
Husserl’s corpus where he talks about the Seinsdignität, or ontological
dignity of subjectivity. Let me quote just two for the sake of
exemplification:
The leading thought of idealism [. . .] <is> that subjectivity precedes objectivity
in ontological dignity (Seinsdignität) and that all objectivity (all worldly
being) is only being that flows from subjectivity’s innermost passive and active
sources. No ontology, if it is thought through consistently according to its
eidetic correlations (Wesenskorrelationen), fails to lead to this insight as an
apodictically evident one (not a metaphysical construction).18
Reality, as much as ideality, has a subordinated ontological dignity (unter-
geordnete Seinsdignität). The preeminent ontological dignity (übergeordnete
Seinsdignität) is that of subjectivity with ego-cogito-cogitatum.19

Interestingly, Husserl’s conception of dignity is entirely coincident with

Kant’s, who, as Oliver Sensen recently proved, draws from the Ancient
Roman tradition dating back to Cicero’s De Officiis and conceives of
dignity as a relational ontological property and not as an absolute,
non-relational value inherent in human beings. As Sensen puts it:
“Kant conceives of dignity as sublimity (Erhabenheit) or the elevation
of something over something else. Ontologically ‘dignity’ refers to a

18 19
Hua VIII, 215. Hua XIV, 257.
274 Husserl’s phenomenology of the life-world

relational property of being elevated, not to a non-relational value

property. ‘X has dignity’ is another expression for ‘X is elevated over
Y’ or ‘X is higher than Y’.”20 In particular, for Kant, “human beings are
distinguished from the rest of nature by having capacities (e.g. reason,
freedom) that put human beings at a distance from immediate natural
determination.”21 However, note that, unlike Kant, for Husserl the
dignity of human beings does not rest merely on their rationality and
freedom as two characteristics to be isolated from a natural psychic
basis common to both humans and animals, but rather on human
subjectivity taken as a whole, i.e., including the ‘passive sources’ men-
tioned above. It is subjectivity as a whole (including de-naturalized
sensibility, instincts, drives, habits, inclinations, and passive comport-
ment) that carries out transcendental world-constitution. Rationality
and freedom (or, better, rationality, viz. freedom) are indeed the two
highest dimensions of subjectivity but their native soil is in sensibility
and instinct and these ‘lower’ dimensions partake of subjectivity’s
ontological dignity over nature, too.22

20
O. Sensen, “Kant on Human Dignity,” Kant-Studien 100 (2009): 309–331.
Here 310.
21
Ibid., 313.
22
My gratitude to an anonymous referee for insisting on the necessity to address
this issue, which (contrary to what the referee suggested) marks a significant
difference between Husserl and Kant. Incidentally, Husserl’s insistence on the
dignity of subjectivity as a whole, and not just rationality, does include non
human animals, who are, as much as humans, transcendental subjects. Husserl
speaks explicitly of animals as “transcendental animal subjects (transzendentale
Tiersubjekte)” (Hua XXIX, 87) and insists that animals are “no machines, but,
rather, personal beings (personal seiende Wesen)” (Hua XV, 61). Moreover, we
“do not experience animals as completely foreign living beings [. . .] The animals
of one species have their characteristic being-there-for-one-another and with-
one-another, they have their characteristic generative nexus, which (from an
internal point of view) for them means an inner unity among themselves. They
stand in relationships of empathy, they understand one another according to
their species, they are familiar and unfamiliar to one another on the basis of
instinct and experience – this is how we understand them, we experience them,
at least in case they are animals belonging to ‘higher’ species” (Hua XV,
622–623). Whether this legitimately sets the basis for a phenomenological
foundation of animal rights, as, for instance, Ullrich Melle has argued in recent
talks, is an issue I cannot and do not intend to adjudicate in this book. However,
as far as we know, it seems that (for entirely empirical reasons) only humans are
capable of realizing their dignity, and that of animal subjects, with the aid of
philosophy and phenomenology.
Husserl’s cultural universalism 275

The next and concluding section is devoted to shedding further light

on Husserl’s concept of humankind and his endeavors to render this
concept intuitive. In this context we shall also attempt to clarify the
sense in which he talks about a teleology in history.

Husserl’s cultural universalism

The concept of humanity plays a pivotal role in the tradition of tran-
scendental philosophy. Famously, in Kant’s ethical and historical
works, references to humankind have a key normative function. In his
practical philosophy, humankind is the ultimate standard by which we
are supposed to evaluate the moral worth of our actions. It is also the
object deserving our utmost respect, to the point that the respect we owe
to individual rational beings rests entirely on the respect we owe to
humankind at large. This is especially clear in the most quoted formu-
lation of the categorical imperative in Grounding for the Metaphysics of
Morals: “So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or
in the person of any another, always at the same time as an end, never
merely as a means.”23 In Kant’s philosophy of history, humankind as a
whole is presented as the true subject of reason, that is, as the entity
which alone can bring to full realization the demands of rationality,
granted that these demands only find imperfect fulfillment in the lives of
individuals.
The advent of Romanticism in post-Kantian Europe and its emphasis
on national communities marked an important shift from Kant’s orig-
inal conception; however, rather than a wholesale rejection of ‘human-
ity,’ this shift can be interpreted as an attempt to recast this notion in a
historically and geographically qualified sense. It could be further
argued that a materialistically modified version of Kant’s notion of
humanity eventually resurged in the philosophy of Marx. A few decades
after Marx, the German Neo-Kantians did not have a unified model of
humanity, but they variously subscribed to available versions of this
idea. Some thinkers such as Cohen and Natorp cherished a social-
democratic understanding of humanity, whereas the seeds of national-
ism could be seen in the work of other figures, such as the representative
of the Southwestern school Bruno Bauch.

23
I. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Cambridge University Press:
Cambridge, 1997), 38 (Ak. 429). My italics.
276 Husserl’s phenomenology of the life-world

Husserl, who was by his own admission an apolitical thinker,24 did

nonetheless produce a number of manuscripts devoted to politically
sensitive issues such as cultural differences and intercultural under-
standing. Husserl’s unstated goal in these manuscripts can be formu-
lated in a way that befits his broader philosophical commitments:
rendering the idea of humankind intuitive. While in Kant and his
Neo-Kantian followers the notion of ‘humankind’ is a theoretical con-
struction that underlies certain argumentative strategies in practical
philosophy,25 Husserl works strenuously to clarify how this notion
can be formed concretely starting from the finite and restricted perspec-
tive of culturally embedded historical individuals. Visualizing human-
kind as a whole, in Husserl’s view, should prepare the terrain to see its
teleology, that is, the inner tendency inherent in humankind’s historical
path. It is worth mentioning in advance that when Husserl talks about
teleology in history he means goal-orientedness. His belief about
humankind being oriented towards a goal does not entail any claim
about the actual attainment of this goal. Husserl does not believe that
humanity has a set ‘destiny’ of some sort and that it is inevitably march-
ing towards that destiny, regardless of the actual decisions and inclina-
tions of individual human beings. The teleology of humankind Husserl
envisages is consistent with potential deviation from humankind’s pre-
sumptive goal, and in this sense it is very distant form Hegelian and
Marxist claims about a set direction in human history, be it towards
freedom in an ethical state or towards a classless society, respectively.
Husserlian teleology should be understood along the lines of
Aristotle’s claim that all human beings seek happiness as their ultimate
goal. This does not rule out the possibility that they make themselves
and others very unhappy in the attempt. It is thus entirely possible that
they end up even moving away from what nonetheless remains their
teleological end. For Husserl, history at large displays the same ten-
dency that characterizes individuals. This is a tendency towards the
creation of enduring conditions for a harmonious and meaningful
existence, conditions that can only be achieved with the aid of rational,
self-critical deliberation. Societies should then be seen as moving

24
See letter to Metzger, in E. Husserl, Briefwechsel, vol. 4, Die Freiburger Schüler
(Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), 407– 414. English translation by E. Kohák in
E. Husserl, Shorter Works, 360–364.
25
To reiterate the language of Chapter 3: it is a constitutive concept of the ethical
standpoint.
Husserl’s cultural universalism 277

teleologically (in the above sense) towards the establishment of

life-conditions that befit and promote rational deliberation and self-
critique.
In this sense, what makes Western civilization particularly significant
is that in Husserl’s view it is the only civilization whose very birth
occurred under the auspices of philosophy, that is to say, of the disci-
pline specifically devoted to rational deliberation and self-critique.26
However, the fact that an individual explicitly sets for himself the goal
of being rational and self-reflective does not assure anything about
whether he will live up to his good intentions. Likewise, the fact that a
civilization was born out of the ideals of philosophy does not at all
imply that such civilization is morally or intellectually superior to other
civilizations, and Husserl never seems to suggest that. However, if we
accept that rational deliberation and self-critique for the enactment of a
harmonious, meaningful life are essential traits of all humans, then the
fact that one specific civilization made these traits explicit and even
shaped itself around them in the first place is definitely a historically
relevant fact, one that is bound to have an impact on every civilization
that encounters the West.
Husserl’s manuscripts dealing with the notion of humanity almost
always begin with a description of one’s so-called home-world
(Heimwelt). This is because all human beings necessarily begin their
life in some type of home-like environment: “The lowest stage is man in
his home in the narrowest sense, no matter how primitive or ‘cultivated’

26
Of course, whether philosophy was the only or even the predominant factor for
the birth of Western culture is up for debate and should be adjudicated
historically. Husserl does not have the slightest hesitation that this is the case. This
whole point ultimately depends on how broad a notion of philosophy one is
willing to adopt. If we consider, say, Buddhism or Confucianism to be
philosophies, then Husserl’s particular interest for the West becomes
unwarranted. If we want Husserl’s perspective to remain more coherent, it would
be advisable to adopt a narrower concept of philosophy, one that considers the
use of logical and conceptual methods and the orientation towards universal
truth, the sine qua non in order for a discipline to be legitimately called
‘philosophy.’ After all, it is not at all obvious that ‘philosophy’ must be considered
a sort of honorific title, and that resisting to call sophisticated and deep forms of
human wisdom such as Confucianism or Buddhism ‘philosophy’ necessarily
amounts to demoting them in some way. Perhaps it is more lamentably
Eurocentric to believe that we are somehow ennobling Eastern thought by calling
it ‘philosophy,’ than to concede that the designation ‘philosophy’ indicates a
specifically Western tradition of thought. This, however, would be the theme for
another book.
278 Husserl’s phenomenology of the life-world

a man is.”27 The decisive elements in order for an environment to be

characterized as home are essentially two: proximity and normality. If
we look at normality from the point of view of its habituation over time,
we can then talk about ‘familiarity’ as the habituated normality in a
context of proximity.
Talk of proximity in the home-world does not exclusively refer to
perceptual proximity but, more broadly, to practical proximity, that is,
to all things and people that are within one’s practical reach – things to
be acted upon and people to interact with. Practically proximate things
and people, in turn, have a definite style; they behave in ways that the
subject of a home-world has learned to anticipate from early childhood.
This defines a sphere of normality. In this sphere life unfolds in an
overall undisturbed fashion, which, as Husserl puts it, is
[t]he type of a coherent and entirely normal life, of a life that possesses
constantly its normal practical horizon, a practical field, a field of ‘predict-
ability,’ of practical possibility with foreseeable consequences, characterized
by the awareness of ‘being able to.’28

The horizon of practical proximity, or near-world (Nahwelt), is essen-

tially surrounded by a far-world (Fernwelt).29 For the person living in
the home-worldly attitude, the inaccessible far-world surrounding the
near-world is apprehended as a mere continuation of the near-world, as
a world characterized by the same style as the near-world. In this sense,
the home-world does not coincide with the near-world, as one might be
tempted to think. The home-world includes distance (both perceptual
and practical), but this distance is anticipated as being simply a contin-
uation of proximity.
Proximity in the home-world is organized in a way that could be
construed metaphorically in terms of concentric spheres: household,
family, friends, village, county, region, homeland. Each of these spheres
has its typicalities, that is, its normal style, which includes occasional
anomalies. These anomalies, however, are normal anomalies, that
is, anomalies that have themselves a familiar style and familiar ways
of being overcome. The sudden death of a family member is an anom-
alous event in the normal unfolding of a family’s life, at least in most
developed countries. However, there are typical ways in which other
family members will face this event and cope with it according to

27 28 29
Hua XXXIX, 153. Hua XV, 210. See Hua XXXIX, 329; 175–176.
Husserl’s cultural universalism 279

established practices of grief. Over time, the normal unfolding of family

life will be restored; alternatively, new scenarios may open up (the
family might break apart, etc.) and become, in turn, familiar over time.
In the alternation of undisturbed normality with the occasional pre-
sentation of familiar anomalies, home-worlds offer to individual human
beings the first environment for cultural maturation. This is where the
individual learns what it means to be part of various groupings consist-
ing of other individuals. Husserl stresses repeatedly that to be human is
essentially to be part of some human grouping, and living in a home-
world allows individuals to progressively understand themselves as
members of a number of interconnected groups, from the original
nucleus of their household all the way up to their nation. Forming the
idea of nation means reaching the widest horizon of social awareness
achievable in the context of one’s home-world prior to all contact with
foreign home-worlds.
The description of home-worlds up to this point was conducted
according to a kind of methodological restriction similar to the one
employed for the description of pure nature in Chapter 5. As a matter of
fact, home-worlds do not exist in complete isolation. Living in a home-
world always already entails being in some way aware that there are
foreign-worlds (Fremdwelten) and that these worlds count as home-
worlds for other groups of people. In an abstractly impoverished
description of home-worlds, however, foreign home-worlds are indis-
tinguishable from what we previously called the ‘far-world,’ that is, the
empty horizon of practical inaccessibility implicitly anticipated to be a
mere continuation of the near-world of practical proximity. This
abstractive impoverishment is helpful in realizing what happens when
a concrete encounter with a foreign home-world occurs. The foreign
world comes into relief from the empty space of the far-world and gains
its distinctive contours. Thereby, a fundamental modification for the
members of both worlds begins:
I and we learn to recognize foreigners as subjects of a foreign world, which
they experience coherently from within the life of their community. In corre-
lation with this world, as the practical life-world and as world in general
that is valid for them, they are people of different experiences, with a
different natural environment, different life-goals, and all kinds of different
convictions, different habits, different practical behavior, different
traditions. Recognizing that there are other home-worldly communities
[Heimgenossenschaft], who live and behave differently, who understand
280 Husserl’s phenomenology of the life-world

“the” world differently, who have de facto a different cultural world valid for
them and not for us, my own world expands for me (and for my own home-
worldly community).30

The concrete encounter with a foreign community transforms the

individual’s notion of home-world from a singulare tantum into a
plurale tantum. There is no such thing as the home-world surrounded
by a horizon of foreignness; there are only home-worlds, in the plural,
which amount to ways in which the one world, common to us all, is
apprehended according to historically contingent traditions. Herein lies
the first specific element of transformation brought about by the
encounter with a foreign cultural world: the one world comes into relief
as different from just our world, that is, what counts as world within the
restricted sphere of validity of a singular human community. This gives
to the home-worldly community both a new horizon of meaning to be
explored (the common world, which remained previously unseen) and
full awareness of what they now recognize to be their world as opposed
to another people’s world. Husserl continues his description:
A foreign human group [Menschentum] constitutes itself, a foreign humanity
[Menschheit], as a foreign people, for example. Precisely this constitutes for
me and for us “our own” home-worldly community, the community of our
people in relation to our cultural surrounding world as the world of our
human validities, those specific to us. Therefore I have [. . .] a modification
of my and our experience of the world and of the world itself. We, my people
and the other people, are in “the” world, and each of us has a surrounding
world characteristic of their people (with its unpractical horizon).
‘Surrounding world’ separates from ‘world.’31

The split of surrounding world and ‘the’ world in Husserl’s description

clarifies the origin of both nationalism and the possibility of a universal
human culture. Once ‘we’ realize that our home world is just one among
many, a set of new questions regarding our national validities and
practices arises. Which ones capture aspects of ‘the’ world as such,
and are thus shareable with other people? Which ones are just idiosyn-
cratic ways of looking at the world that do not come to friction with
what is ‘actually’ the case for everyone? These questions can be per-
ceived as threatening and instigate zealous resistance. This is where
nationalism begins. On the other hand, even the extreme case of

30 31
Hua XV, 214. Ibid.
Husserl’s cultural universalism 281

nationalism testifies to a transformation that is already underway, that

is, a home-world encountering a different home-world must necessarily
revise its self-understanding in some relation to the foreign home-world,
no matter how hostile this relation may be. No room is left for the
singulare tantum of an isolated home-world. In this context, Husserl
talks about a transformation in the home-worlds’ respective histories.
Both home-worlds transition from a merely national history to a genu-
inely political history:
The life of a nation in a unitary internationality results in a development to a
historicity of a new kind: the political. Political historicity now pertains to this
nation and to all nations living in international co-existence. Each nation has
its own historicity, originally grown in the context of its generational lineage.
By entering in a life-connection with a second nation and its national histor-
icity, it initiates a process of transformation of national historicity into polit-
ical historicity. This causes a certain unification of the different political
historicities in a higher-level historicity.32

Although the encounter with a foreign world is a radically new event

and a turning point in the history of a hitherto isolated home-world,
Husserl indicates that if the members of an isolated home-world can
understand a foreign world as foreign and eventually move to appro-
priate some of that world’s validity, this is essentially because the
foreignness of the foreign worlds is ultimately not so radical as one
might be inclined to think. First, people of a foreign world are from the
very start understood as human beings, that is, as subjects having the
same basic human “needs”33 and living in a world that, like one’s home-
world, was shaped over the course of generations in order to meet those
needs. Second, experiences of foreignness and the necessity of interpre-
tive efforts to cope with foreignness already occur within the sphere of
one’s home-world. Husserl mentions differences in social classes, for
instance, the difference between growing up in a middle-class family as
opposed to growing up in an aristocratic family.34 The middle-class
type perceives the world of the aristocrat as foreign and incomprehen-
sible. A good deal of interpretive effort and, ideally, of actual living in
the world of aristocracy would be required in order for the middle-class
person to become familiar with the world of aristocracy and, so to
speak, to incorporate it in what counts as her own home-world.

32 33 34
Hua XXIX, 10. Hua XXXIX, 312. Ibid., 161.
282 Husserl’s phenomenology of the life-world

Similarly, we can progressively appropriate a completely foreign cul-

tural world and, in so doing, form an actual cultural unity with our own
home-world. Husserl uses the example of China to illustrate this point:
Understanding a Chinese person presupposes understanding one’s home-
world in the present, and it presupposes life in a circle of familiar people in
one’s home-world. In the same way in which as a child I was educated into my
generative human world, if I want to understand the Chinese person and the
Chinese world, I have to be educated <into it>. By way of actively living into
[hineinleben] the foreign world, I have to acquire its characteristic appercep-
tion, in whichever way and as much as this is possible. This would amount to
becoming more and more a Chinese person among Chinese – while remaining
German and not losing my German surrounding world. The same goes for the
Chinese in my own world. I should get to the point of appropriating the
concrete Chinese life-world [Lebensumwelt], including the living past entailed
in it. Subsequently, I would have to appropriate also the living horizon of
the future, which, in its streaming, also belongs in the Chinese world. This
would then become the foundation to enable the reconstruction of “histor-
ical” traditions and the construction of an understandable Chinese history –
fully understandable from the Chinese point of view. Obviously, this is not
entirely possible; however, it is not possible in the same way in which it is not
entirely possible for me to appropriate in its full concreteness the type of the
Junker, etc.35

The fact of possible mutual understanding can only be explained

because “through all incomprehensibilities runs the unity of a tradition-
ality – a unity of the surrounding world with its typical structure, which
is partly familiar and partly still in the making via appropriation.”36
The line of traditionality running through, say, the home-world of the
German middle-class and the German aristocracy in Husserl’s time was
definitely richer and more conspicuous than the very thin line of tradi-
tionality running through the German and the Chinese home-worlds
considered in their entirety. At a minimum, the level of traditionality
shared by two separate home-worlds can be limited to the mutual
recognition of belonging to the human race and being involved, percep-
tually and practically, with the same environing things. This, however,

35
Ibid., 162–163. It would be interesting to know whether Husserl was thinking
here of Matteo Ricci, S. J. (1552–1610) and his famous journey to China. The
idea of becoming Chinese among the Chinese can be found in his correspondence
and journals.
36
Ibid., 161.
Husserl’s cultural universalism 283

would be the starting point for further interaction and for progressive
increment of what henceforth will be a common traditionality.
For the sake of rendering the idea of humankind intuitive, we should
imagine the encounter between two mutually foreign home-worlds
iterated indefinitely. The contrast between ‘the one world’ and the
plurale tantum of national home-worlds would grow increasingly
sharper, while the wealth of validities appropriable for everyone
would grow significantly. New lines of shared traditionalities would
come into relief as variants of one and the same overarching tradition-
ality common to all humans. Moreover, and most importantly, the
conditions would be set for the appearance of an entirely new line of
traditionality, that is, the traditionality of ‘science’ or ‘philosophy’ as
the theoretical enterprise designed to investigate the newfound dimen-
sion of all things, ‘the one world’ common to all historical nations.37
From this point of view, it is possible to conclude this chapter by
shedding some light on the basic idea inherent in Husserl’s notion of a
teleology intrinsic to humankind. In short, according to Husserl,
humankind is moving teleologically to full awareness of inhabiting
one and the same world (“the Earth”), and waking up to its practical
and theoretical responsibility for this world and for its own position in
it. It is moving towards a universally human world-culture. Husserl
underscores that this movement only became conspicuous in recent
times, thanks to groundbreaking developments in politics, science,
and communication. The following passage, which is one of the few
in Husserl’s entire corpus where he refers to a specific time-venue in
history, offers a particularly clear picture of the teleological movement
he takes to be unfolding in human history:
Since roughly the second half of the nineteenth century, thanks to the organ-
ization of power in national states, humankind constitutes a maximally
extended practical community, that is, a totality of ego-subjects for whom a
real possibility of immediate or mediate reciprocal understanding and of
practical social action is given. This is the case in a way that does not admit
of the possibility of further expansion to include new subjects. In other words,
human beings are now united through a communal practical surrounding
world, that is, the earthly world (world in the sense of world-history). Such a

37
Husserl underscores that philosophy is the only human cultural activity that
“comes onto the scene bereft of all tradition, in order to create a tradition in the
first place” (Hua VIII, 320).
284 Husserl’s phenomenology of the life-world

maximal practical community constitutes a practical total community, a

personal universe, a human world. Before the nineteenth century, multiple
human worlds, multiple human total communities lived on Earth [. . .] and not
just one.38

Different cultures began their historical trajectory in the restricted

sphere of their isolated home-worlds. They eventually moved to
encounter one another and to form international bonds. Following
Husserl’s suggestion, by the end of the nineteenth century, virtually no
cultural home-world on the planet had remained stationary at the level
of national historicity. All human nations encountered one another at
some point and are now part of an all-encompassing total history. As we
pointed out above, intercultural encounters necessarily ignite a revision
of self-understanding for the members of a previously isolated home-
world. Upon encountering a foreign world, its members come to realize
that ‘their’ home-world is not “simply a piece of a ‘true’ world,”39 of
which every human groups just happens to possess a separate fragment.
After the encounter, the inhabitants of each home-world experience it as
a vantage point on the world, that same world that is accessible from
other vantage points and that can be explicitly addressed as a theme for
theoretical and practical consideration. Repeated intercultural encoun-
ters strengthen the awareness of the existence of one and the same world
common to all humans and spawn attempts to articulate what should
count as our common world in ways that can be shared by all humans
regardless of their initial cultural provenance. From this point of view,
the birth of Greek philosophy is an important step on the way towards
the full unification of humankind. Philosophy, in Husserl’s narrative, is
nothing but the professionalization of hitherto extemporaneous
attempts to articulate the one world common to all and is thus the
discipline spearheading, at least ideally, humanity’s journey towards
its earthly telos.40

38
Hua XIV, 215–216. 39 Hua XXXIX, 203.
40
Commenting on these issues in a recent paper, Dermot Moran has argued that
“[p]hilosophy [. . .] allowed the Greeks to recognize their world-view as a local or
national world-view (Weltanschauung)” and that this “leads the Greeks to make
the crucial distinction between a ‘world-representation’ (Weltvorstellung) and the
‘world in itself’.” D. Moran, “Even the Papuan is a Man and Not a Beast: Husserl
on Universalism and the Relativity of Cultures,” Journal of the History of
Philosophy 49/4 (2011): 463–494. Here 481. This characterization mistakes the
effect (philosophy) for the cause (the separation of national home-world and the
Husserl’s cultural universalism 285

These considerations on the teleological direction of history towards

a planetary community square in substance with the picture of human
history Kant offered in his rightly famous essay Idea for a Universal
History with Cosmopolitan Intent (1784). However, there are a few
aspects that distinguish Husserl’s position from Kant’s.
First, Kant’s teleological view of history is based on the conviction
that rationality cannot come to full fruition in the lives of individuals.
The real locus where the innermost demands of reason can be possibly
met must therefore be humankind at large in its historical progression.
Contrariwise, for Husserl, the teleology inherent in human history is
nothing but the large-scale continuation of a tendency towards a life in
reason that manifests itself first and foremost in subjects considered
singly. In the same way in which individual subjects seek to overcome
the one-sidedness of their contingent perceptual position and continue
to inspect the things in their surroundings until they reach an optimal
grasp that harmonizes with the rest of their experience, subjects strive to
achieve a harmonious and meaningful life as persons, at both the
individual and the intersubjective levels. This requires the establishment
of enduring convictions and dispositions that are not based merely on
one’s contingent cultural situation, but on rigorous self-examination
and actively acquired self-understanding. Thus, it is not by transferring
the possible realization of reason’s demands from the individual to
humanity at large that a teleological consideration of history becomes
one world). Husserl’s point is rather the opposite. The intercultural encounters
that happened at the time of the Greek colonization of the near East brought to
light the relativity of cultures and their contrast with the one world common to all
humans. Only on the basis of this experience could philosophy come about as the
intellectual activity geared towards conceptual determination of the one true
world. If philosophy qua specifically Greek cultural product were the source of
the distinction between the one world and the contingent cultural worlds, then
this distinction would rely entirely on a contingent cultural product whose
existence cannot be further accounted for. Claims to universality for philosophy
would be completely unwarranted. It is only because for Husserl the specific
subject matter of philosophy (the one true world as opposed to contingent
cultural worlds) comes to light in every intercultural encounter, no matter how
fleeting and unthematic its appearance may be, that philosophy can lay claim to
universality. Philosophy takes upon itself the task of investigating thematically
and rigorously that object (the one world) that is bound to peep out, albeit
marginally and mostly unnoticed, in every encounter between different cultures.
Thus, every conceivable culture can in principle become philosophical to the
extent that it can decide to partake in this task, whose meaning is in principle
accessible to every conceivable culture that had an encounter with any other
conceivable culture.
286 Husserl’s phenomenology of the life-world

possible but, rather, by bringing to light the inner dynamics of self-

realization governing the experience of each single subject.
Second, Kant insists that teleology is not a constitutive concept of
history. Human history merely admits of a teleological consideration
without, however, necessarily requiring it.41 If we look at human history
from a teleological viewpoint, Kant argues, we will be able to develop a
meaningful narrative about it, though in so doing we should be aware that
this is a deliberately chosen perspective and not a mere ‘description’ of
what human history is in itself. This aspect in Kant’s essay is obviously
consistent with the tenets of his critical philosophy. Husserl’s understand-
ing of teleology is, in this regard, much stronger than Kant’s. Teleology for
Husserl is not merely a perspective that we may or may not choose to
assume to describe human history. As he points out in his critical remarks
to Simmel’s Das Problem der historischen Zeit,42 Husserl understands the
teleological movement of human history to be one of its essential constit-
uents, flowing from the subjective movement towards a harmonious and
meaningful life under the guidance of reason. Failing to see the teleology
operative in human history is thus for Husserl failing to catch hold of one
of the key ontological specifics of human persons. A teleological consid-
eration of history is therefore not only possible but also required.
Third and last, Husserl does not spell out in detail the characteristics of
the international culture of reason that he takes humanity to be moving
towards. He does not describe how such culture might look from a social
and political point of view. However, in his descriptions, he seems to
insist that the realization of the human world-culture would not imply a
leveling down of all cultural differences and national traditions. In his
ideal narrative, home-worlds realizing a part of the broader tradition of
humankind understand themselves as functional members of mankind,
but they can only do so if they maintain their national identity and thus
preserve the specificity of their contribution to the whole. In keeping with
the key insights of his mereology, Husserl does not believe in a total
fusion of horizons in which the constituent national horizons would
dissolve. On the contrary, upon encountering each other, national

41
Bernward Grünewald argues correctly that, for Kant, “philosophical history is
not a foundation, but just a reflective consideration of empirical history.”
B. Grünewald, Geist – Kultur – Gesellschaft: Versuch einer Prinzipientheorie der
Geisteswissenschaften auf transzendentalphilosophischer Grundlage (Berlin:
Duncker & Humblot, 2009), 171.
42
See Chapter 6.
Husserl’s cultural universalism 287

home-worlds should understand themselves as functional parts in the

organic whole of humanity, to which they can now deliberately contrib-
ute. Full integration of previously isolated home-worlds into the over-
arching whole of humanity requires viewing each of them as one unique
way of apprehending the one world, which, in turn, does not manifest
itself elsewhere than in the indefinitely open manifold of culturally
embedded world-apprehensions. In other words, in the same way in
which the manifold profiles of perceptual objects do not blend into one
single profile in order to let the object itself appear, home-worlds should
not blend into one monochrome international culture in order to let the
one universally shared world come into view. In Husserl’s ideal narrative,
a genuine international universal culture should be precisely as the phrase
“inter-national” suggests. It would preserve national specificities, but
these would be productively coordinated on the basis of the one world
constituted jointly by all cultures.
To conclude this section, it is appropriate to recall that Husserl was
well aware of the tense relationships between European nations in his
time, and, as we saw, he was very vocal in denouncing a crisis in
Western culture. This must be taken into account in order to assess
correctly the status of the analyses just presented and not to mistake
them for ahistorical wishful thinking. The register of Husserl’s descrip-
tion is and remains, even in the sphere of history and culture, eidetic.
This means that ‘teleology’ is intended to describe what should count as
one of the essential traits of humanity as such, and not just the factual
progression or regression of human history. Certainly, he takes his cue
from historical facts such as the birth of philosophy in ancient Greece
and the international connectedness of cultural worlds in the late nine-
teenth century. However, these facts are considered as examples and
indicators of ideal validities whose actual realization in the contingent
development of history can be significantly imperfect. Nonetheless, for
Husserl, unveiling the teleology ideally inherent in human history with
the aid of eidetic ‘rationalization’43 is a philosophically and culturally
significant activity, one that, in Kant’s spirit, may even “contribute”
directly to the attainment of humanity’s telos.44

43
See Chapter 5.
44
See Kant’s Ninth Proposition in I. Kant, “Ideas for a Universal History with a
Cosmopolitan Aim,” Anthropology, History and Education (Cambridge
University Press, 2007), 107–120. Here 118.
288 Husserl’s phenomenology of the life-world

Recapitulation and conclusion

As we approach the conclusion of the book, let me briefly recapitulate
the outcomes of the last two chapters. We began in Chapter 7 by
suggesting that Husserl’s late phenomenology of the life-world reveals
its true meaning if interpreted in the context of the Kantian liberation
narrative. We then articulated the Kantian liberation narrative: Kant
sets the basis to overcome naturalism as the worldview dominating the
West after the scientific revolution. Interestingly, this narrative proved
to be largely shared by both the Neo-Kantians and the life-philosophers,
who otherwise disagree significantly on philosophical issues. We then
turned to consider the important notion of Weltanschauung and pre-
sented the controversy between those who consider worldviews to be
the terminus ad quem, or final goal, of philosophic thinking and those
who interpret them as the terminus a quo, that is the hidden existential
source of philosophy. Husserl’s take on Weltanschauung was one of
initial skepticism, and subsequently of progressive appropriation. He
began rejecting the notion of worldview as threatening the scientificity
of philosophy; however, he eventually recognized the force of world-
views, and, in particular, of naturalism. He then set out to articulate a
phenomenological worldview characterized by a deconstructive geneal-
ogy of naturalism (pars destruens) and a positive affirmation of the
operative, world-constituting nature of transcendental subjectivity
(pars construens). This included a thorough description of our con-
sciousness of the world as the totality in which all our theory and praxis
are embedded and the historical reconstruction of the intentional shifts
operated by modern science as presented in Husserl’s Crisis. We iden-
tified five steps: (1) abstraction of spatial qualities; (2) idealization of
pure shapes; (3) indirect mathematization of the sensible qualities; (4)
formalization; (5.1) hypostatization of the formalized idealities; (5.2)
substitution of these hypostases for the concrete life-world. We then
pointed out that the entire trajectory of modern natural science rests on
a preliminary move, or step (0), that is the abstraction of pure nature
from the concrete, culturally formed world of significance in which our
lives unfold.
Once the misunderstandings of naturalism are dispelled, the way is
clear for a reconsideration of culture-formation as the innermost voca-
tion of subjectivity. Husserl believes that the transcendental analysis of
the life-world as the total horizon of human life has a transformative
Recapitulation and conclusion 289

power in that it restores the dignity of subjectivity over mere nature, that
naturalism undermined. Finally, the panoramic surveys of the life-
world’s infinity enacted in Husserl’s manuscripts offer resources to
render the Enlightenment notion of ‘humankind’ intuitive. Rather
than operating with an abstract normative concept of humankind,
Husserl analyzes concretely how this concept is formed in and through
the encounters between previously isolated national ‘home-worlds.’ For
Husserl, the encounter between home-worlds and the ensuing experi-
ence of one and the same world apprehended in different ways delineate
a teleology in the historical development of humankind. In Husserl’s
deliberately ideal or eidetic narrative, human history moves towards a
world-culture in which a harmonious life of self-responsibility and
reason may be possible. Phenomenology thus joins forces with other
philosophical trends to defend a humanistic worldview in opposition to
naturalism.
In conclusion, it is legitimate to reflect on the specificity of Husserl’s
humanism. Is it any different from Neo-Kantian humanism and the life-
philosophical exaltation of history? In order to answer this question we
have to return briefly to the important remark that humanism is a sort of
per se accident of transcendental phenomenology and not its essential
core. Phenomenology, as we saw, understands itself as an eidetic dis-
cipline, that is, a discipline oriented towards rationalization via con-
templation of pure possibilities. To the extent that phenomenology
studies the essential configurations of pure consciousness in its correla-
tion with essential configurations of the world, it is indifferent to the
empirical fact of human consciousness in the historical world. In
Husserl’s self-understanding, the essential configurations unearthed by
phenomenology would hold valid for any possible consciousness expe-
riencing any possible world. Husserl’s humanism is thus essentially
what we could phrase a de-centered humanism.45 Its centerpiece is not
the ideal of ‘man’ as the highest end but the contemplation of essential
possibilities of consciousness and its preeminence over the natural
world. This allows Husserl to maintain a healthy critical distance
from the human world and to avoid the enticements of a naively
celebratory attitude towards the fact of culture, whose C he is never
inclined to capitalize. Husserl does not in the slightest resemble

45
My gratitude to Claudio Majolino for suggesting the effective phrase
“umanesimo decentrato” in a long and illuminating conversation on these issues.
290 Husserl’s phenomenology of the life-world

Cocteau’s character, whom Sartre rightly chastises, who contemplates

the world from an airplane and proclaims: “Man is amazing!”46 On the
contrary, he would agree with Sartre that “man is constantly in the
making.”47 This involves an unreserved acknowledgment of the con-
tingency of history and the finitude of the cultural manifestations
appearing in it. However, unlike Sartre, Husserl’s eidetic analysis of
consciousness in the life-world unearths essential possibilities that
undergird this ‘being-in-the-making’ and that can even be actively
assumed as rational guidelines for the unending self-shaping of human
history. For instance, the essential possibility of humankind developing
into a world-culture is, indeed, inscribed in the very fabric of a rational
consciousness intentionally directed towards a world and empatheti-
cally connected to other rational consciousnesses. The actual develop-
ment of history, however, can turn against this essential possibility and
make it impossible as a real possibility for the actually existing subjects.
However, the eidetic de-centering of humanism carried out in Husserl’s
transcendental phenomenology has a beneficial effect: it prevents
humanistically oriented thinking from letting its validity depend on
the contingent vicissitudes of history. The traditional humanist
defending the ideal of man as the ultimate end is likely to see this ideal
irrevocably crushed, say, in front of Auschwitz. The de-centered
humanist schooled in Husserlian phenomenology knows that essential
possibilities having been contemplated as such are indefinitely available
to orient and reorient human history even in its darkest and most
hopeless moments, when all belief in humanity is likely to crumble.
Husserl expresses this view in a touching passage from a letter to the
Canadian philosopher Winthrop Pickard Bell:
It is very gratifying that there are still lively people on this gloomy planet:
Were there none, I nevertheless would not despair, but would build them up
eidetically for myself, firmly convinced that purely formed ideas must give rise
to lively people who accord with them.48

46
J.-P. Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism (New Haven, CT and London: Yale
University Press, 2007), 51–52.
47
Ibid.
48
BW III, 16–17. Quoted in M. Brainard, “‘For a New World’: On the Practical
Impulse of Husserlian Theory,” Husserl Studies 23/1 (2007): 17–31. Here 18.
 Conclusion

I would like to return to Husserl’s statement that phenomenology is a

“scientific life-philosophy [. . .] having as a fundamental scientific theme
the concrete universal life and its life-world.”1 This is the passage that
best summarizes the interpretation of Husserl’s transcendental phenom-
enology I tried to articulate and whose philosophical dimensions
I endeavored to spell out.
Husserl had a tendency to attribute to his phenomenology a variety of
conflicting philosophical tags. In Ideas I, for instance, he boasts: “we
are the genuine positivist”2 just a few pages after bashing positivism for
being blind to the autonomous validity of ideas. In Einleitung in die
Philosophie (1922), he argues that phenomenology is simultaneously
“the perfection [Vollendung] of rationalism and [. . .] the perfection of
empiricism.”3 Ubiquitously in his work he professes that phenomen-
ology is a form of transcendental idealism, while at the same time
insisting that his own brand of idealism is actually the most radical
form of realism, to the extent that it dispels all conflations of the
transcendence of nature with the immanence of consciousness. By
calling transcendental phenomenology a scientific life-philosophy,
however, Husserl was doing more than just adding another item to
his list of paradoxical self-brandings. As a matter of fact, while all
aforementioned tags refer to very broad currents in Western philoso-
phy in general, ‘scientific life-philosophy’ refers specifically to the
philosophical controversy about the natural and the human sciences
in Husserl’s time. Husserl is offering a definitive determination of the
position of his phenomenology in relation to Rickert and the
Southwestern school on the one hand and to Dilthey and Simmel on
the other. He is claiming that phenomenology is able to harmonize two
traditionally divergent desiderata in post-Kantian German philoso-
phy: scientificity and proximity to life. To be scientific in philosophy

1 2 3
Hua XXXII, 140. Ideen I, § 20. Hua XXXV, 288.

291
292 Conclusion

does not mean, as Rickert would have it, to restructure the inchoate
manifestations of life according to conceptual perspectives intrinsically
alien to it. Rather, to be scientific in philosophy means to bring to
faithful conceptual expression the transcendental structures and
dynamics of life, which are responsible for the constitution of a
world. It is helpful to recall here that by ‘life’ Husserl and the life-
philosophers do not mean the biological processes governing the exis-
tence of an organism, but rather experiencing subjectivity itself, to the
extent that experiencing subjectivity is not a mere mirror or a tabula
rasa, but a vital and dynamic principle. Life itself is the transcendental,
and all the categories and principles that philosophy endeavors to spell
out conceptually must be drawn directly from it.
Furthermore, it is noteworthy that in his declaration of allegiance to
life-philosophy Husserl immediately mentions the main issue of his late
work: the life-world in its correlation with universal constituting life.
The notion of life-world is thus part and parcel of Husserl’s critical
appropriation of life-philosophical themes in his confrontation with
Dilthey and Simmel. One could argue that the identification of the
life-world as a theme for phenomenology allows Husserl to stabilize
the meaning of life-philosophy and correct certain lamentable irration-
alistic tendencies in it. As I tried to show in the foregoing chapters,
Husserl’s discovery of the life-world leads to a reformulation of the
relationship between nature and Geist in way that does not rely on
overly simplistic oppositions, as is the case, for instance, with Dilthey. In
a sense, if the main drawback of modern natural science is that it “turns
nature and freedom into an incomprehensible antinomy,”4 then the
type of life-philosophy envisaged by Dilthey does not seem to offer
viable resources to overcome the antinomy. It just restates the antinomy
from the point of view of free and creative Geist, rather than from the
point of view of nature. The discovery of the life-world opens up a new
perspective, according to which both nature and Geist are constituted
and thus refer back to an original experience of the world, which is
accessible to phenomenological inquiry. The distinction between nature
and Geist remains legitimate,5 but it is embedded in a broader

4
Hua VIII, 230–231.
5
I am thankful to Nicolas De Warren for insisting on the necessity to include a
discussion of the life-world, in order to assess the validity of my claim that
Husserl’s characterization of phenomenology as a scientific life-philosophy is
Conclusion 293

dimension of being, the life-world, in the framework of which the two

ontological spheres prove to be mutually clarifying, rather than
opposed. Actual phenomenological descriptions of the life-world and
its relation to culture and nature can be significantly expanded and
improved, and it is a fact that Husserl did not manage to develop
them beyond the preliminaries. Husserl, however, indicated a promis-
ing avenue of research that does not infringe upon the prerogatives of

central to his late work. Unfortunately, I cannot agree with his remark that
Husserl’s view of history in the Crisis text is characterized by “the absence of this
life-philosophy perspective, as we might call it, according to which history is an
expression of life” and that “the view of history in the Crisis [. . .] consists in
deconstructing, as it were, the very distinction between nature and spirit.” De
Warren, review of Andrea Staiti, Geistigkeit, Leben und geschichtliche Welt in der
Transzendentalphänomenologie Husserls, Husserl Studies 28 (2010): 161–166.
Here 166. The immediate connection of the life-philosophical character of
phenomenology and the life-world theme in Husserl’s quote seems to reveal that
there is no ostensible difference between phenomenology qua scientific life-
philosophy and phenomenology qua ontology of the life-world as presented in
Crisis, unless one were able to prove that Husserl’s notion of life-world in 1927 is
significantly different from Husserl’s notion of life-world in 1936. In light of the
newly published materials in Hua XXXIX, spanning over three decades, such
difference seems extremely implausible. True, in Crisis Husserl does not rehearse
his descriptions of transcendental life as found in his 1920s lectures and
manuscripts, and he moves directly to examine historical sedimentation and its
impact on the self-understanding of Western science. However, this seems to
provide evidence that he is presupposing the validity of his groundwork towards a
phenomenology of constitutive life, rather than disavowing it. How else,
otherwise, could we understand his claim that past intellectual achievements such
as Galilean science are still accessible in their foundational dimension from the
present, that they can be reactivated, subjected to rational scrutiny and taken up
responsibly by subjects living centuries later? It seems that a life-philosophical
framework like the one offered in Chapter 6, according to which transcendental
life is an intersubjective unity that constitutes history, is unavoidable if we are to
make sense of Husserl’s claims in Crisis. Furthermore, some disambiguation of the
term ‘deconstruction’ in the phrase ‘deconstructing the distinction between nature
and spirit’ would be required in order to take a stance on De Warren’s second
claim. If by ‘deconstructing the distinction’ we mean ‘undermining the distinction,’
then this cannot possibly be Husserl’s intention. Undermining the distinction
between nature and spirit is precisely the main danger associated with the
naturalism Husserl sets out to combat. Why would undermining the distinction of
nature and spirit in the name of the life-world be preferable to undermining this
distinction in the name of mathematically constructed nature? If by
‘deconstructing the distinction’ we mean, as I take De Warren to mean,
‘deconstructing the Cartesian construal of the distinction’ in order to show that
nature and spirit are not opposed but rather interconnected layers in the one
encompassing life-world, then I hope that Chapter 8 shed further light on De
Warren’s remark.
294 Conclusion

empirical inquiry but that, at the same time, bears far-reaching

implications for the sciences’ self-understanding and for the picture of
the world that they contribute to propagating.

Husserl’s phenomenology famously evolved through a series of begin-

nings. Some of them were major breakthroughs, like the one he attained
in Logical Investigations, and some of them were just small beginnings,
as Husserl designated the one offered in Crisis. Be they major or small,
beginnings are always characterized by the introduction of a new per-
spective that elicits further work. Husserlian scholarship seems to have
evolved in a similar way, following partly the publication of Husserl’s
unpublished materials and partly the concerns stemming from other
philosophical traditions.
With this book, I hope to have offered some kind of new beginning (of
whatever size) for our understanding of Husserl and the German phi-
losophy of his time. However, if I was able to prove at least that reading
Husserl in the context of his confrontation with the Neo-Kantians and
the Lebensphilosophen is a rewarding philosophical experience and a
sine qua non to understand his late work, I can consider my primary
goal achieved.
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Index

a posteriori science, 152, 153 being

a priori science, 133, 152, 153, 155 absolute, 191, 263
absence, 30 and meaning/value, 81, 127
abstraction, 33, 106, 122, 128, 154, subjectivity, 272
155, 167, 192, 255, 256, 257, subjectivity and, 149–150
262, 288 Beiser, Fredrick, 5
as impoverishment (Abbau), 103, Bergson, Henri, 111
142, 143, 192, 252, 279 Berkeley, George, 92
from values, 87, 142, 143, 260–261 biology, 54
of spatial qualities, 156, 255, 288 and life, 54, 80
action (Aktion), 101 Dilthey and Simmel on biology, 54,
dominant action (Hauptaktion), 101 80
“total acts” (Gesamtakte), 101 Böhm, Franz, 43
un-accomplished action on history, 43, 46, 47–48, 49
(unvollzogen), 102 on ontology, 14, 20, 43, 44–46
analytic philosophy, 4, 5, 71 on subjectivity, 49–51
animals, 92, 183, 185, 249 Brentano, Franz, 2, 91, 133, 137,
as transcendental subjects, 250, 274 176, 179, 202, 237, 265,
anthropology, 71, 72, 76, 225 295, 303
appearances, 141, 177, 188, 195, 254,
260, 261 Campbell, Scott, 6
appearance-reality distinction, 141 Carr, David, 249
unity of appearance, 141–142 Cassirer, Ernst, 5–6, 7, 19
Aristotle, 8, 41, 152, 276 categorial thought, 36, 45
attitude (Einstellung), 15, 82, 83, 97, 98 and unity, 38
change of attitude Böhm on categories, 44–45
(Einstellungswechsel), 84, 105 Lask on categories, 38–41
natural/phenomenological, 98, 108, ontology and, 43–44, 45
190–191 Rickert on categories, 42
naturalistic/personalistic, 98, 100 Windelband on categories, 23
phenomenology and the constitutive Christianity, 265, 266
function of changes of attitude, 108 Christian conversion as grounded in a
reflective versus straightforward new praxis, 265, 266
(unreflective), 141 Christian conversion as metanoia,
theoretical/evaluative-volitional, 98, 265, 266
100 classification of the sciences, 25, 42, 89,
authenticity, 3, 55, 58, 116, 123, 139, 94, 140, 152, 165
148, 151, 167, 184, 197, 202, 216, methodological (nature/history)
225, 236, 253, 263, 265, 272 versus material (nature/culture), 94

306
Index 307

cognition, 9, 31, 32, 37, 44, 47, 57, 58, De Warren, Nicolas, viii, 126, 130, 200,
83, 123, 134, 135, 190 202, 248, 249, 292, 293
copy-theory of cognition, 83, 85 Derrida, Jacques, 1, 2
Cohen, Hermann, 7, 19, 275 Descartes, René, 8, 133, 139,
community, 17, 69, 112, 143, 166, 177, 160, 220
189, 205, 206, 237, 249, 265, 266, descriptive psychology, 70, 74, 75, 76,
279, 280, 283, 285 77, 176, 177, 179
comparative psychology, 75, 76 and psychic life, 9–10, 14, 74–75
and history, 75, 76–77 dignity, 236
Dilthey on comparative psychology, Husserl on dignity, 272, 273,
227–228 274, 289
Comte, Auguste Kant on dignity, 226, 273
and positivistic social thought, 67 ontological dignity, 29, 273, 274
concepts Dilthey, Wilhelm
conceptual knowledge, 111, approach to psychology, 75–76
119, 125 distinction between inner and outer
conceptuality of mechanistic experience, 15, 85, 90–92, 137
causality versus conceptuality of on nature, 69–70
motivation, 120 on psychic life, 76–77
total concept, 154 dogmatics, 233–234
consciousness Driesch, Hans, 54
and immediateness, 128
and its preeminence over the natural Ebbinghaus, Hermann, 70, 71
world, 289 ego
and reflection, 127, 128, 247 and affection, 181, 182
logical versus sensuous, 124 and nature, 182
pure consciousness as nexus of lived as living agent, 103, 108
experiences, 127 as monad, 188, 201
self-conscious, 272 ego-motivation, 182
stream of consciousness, 128, 131, 141 eidetic analysis, 128, 290
Crowell, Steven, 36, 39 and eidetic generality, 128
culture and eidetic variation, 124
and its relation to science, 221 eidetic intuition, 112, 120, 121,
and traditionality, 282, 283 129, 239
as community of subjects, 280–281 and essential knowledge, 120, 121
as the correlate of active (leistende) and essential structures, 128, 130, 133
subjectivity, 143 eidetic knowledge, 110, 116, 117, 118,
cultural differences, 270, 276, 286 122, 128, 129
cultural universalism, 266, 276–277 as conceptual-discursive rather than
definition of, 143–144 intuitive-immediate, 117
intercultural encounter, 276, 284, 285 as processual, 116, 117, 118, 122
possibility of universal human eidetic science, 110, 119, 130
culture, 280 of consciousness, 126, 127–128, 129,
130–131
D’Amico, Robert, 6 empathy
Davos debate, the, 5–6 and monadic life, 191, 203
and the rift between analytic and and recollection, 201, 202, 203, 204,
continental philosophy, 5 213, 217
de Mul, Jos, 55, 71 as communalization of experience,
de Tocqueville, Alexis, 93 16–17, 191, 192
308 Index

empathy (cont.) Heidegger, Martin, 1, 2, 4, 5, 6,

as presentification 36, 237
(Vergegenwärtigung), 201–205 Heinrich, Dieter, 1
empiricism, 4, 57, 58, 291 Heisenberg, Werner, 83
natural science and, 4 Helmoltz, Hermann, 72
phenomenology and, 291–292 history
epistemology, 28–29, 110, 136, 237 and human science, 63
phenomenology and, 110 and natural science, 25, 62
epoché and psyche/psychology, 65,
and transcendental subjectivity, 107 177–178, 216
as basis for phenomenological as variation of a single theme, 76
reduction, 11, 107 in terms of progress, 49
phenomenological, 10, 17, 82, 127, laws of history as relatively
178, 185, 187, 188, 192 significant, 69
universal, 187 national, 281, 284, 286–287
essence political, 281
and eidetic method, 16, 118–119 Hobsbawn, Eric, 3
and intuition, 110, 119, 130 Holzey, Helmut, 113
ethics, 48, 61, 184, 236, 270 human science, 92
and renewal, 268, 269–270 Dilthey on human science, 9, 16, 70,
92, 99
facticity, 23, 24, 188 Husserl on human science, 103, 145,
and worldview, 23, 24 148–151
psychological facticity, 64–65, life as the ontological marker of the
71, 175 human sciences, 14
Farrell Krell, David, 6 Rickert on human science, 9
Fechner, Gustav, 9, 179 study of spiritual-cultural facts as
Fellmann, Ferdinand, 53 manifest in objects of sense, 92
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 17, 56, 86, 237, human sciences, 1
253 humankind
Fichtean idealism, 238, 267–268 and humanization, 272
formalization, 155, 156, 259, 288 and the possibility of universal
of idealized shapes, 259, 288 culture, 18
versus rationalization, 156 Kantian and Neo-Kantian thought,
Friedman, Michael, 5 275–276
universalistic view of, 267
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 2, 43, 55, 227 Husserl, Edmund
Geiger, Moritz, 100 affirmation of science, 235
Geist as intuitionist, 15
and the ambiguity of definition, as life-philosopher, 15
13–14, 263 critique of Rickert, 16, 138, 170, 252
geometry, 151, 153, 167, 254–256, 257, on ontology and epistemology,
261, 262–263 136–137
and formal science, 152–153, 155 on transcendental life, 54, 250, 251,
Glatz, Uwe, 37 252, 293
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 52, 58–59, 81 passive and active motivation, 184,
Gordon, Peter, 5 219
Great War, the, 3, 236, 237 problem of worldview, 137
Greek-European culture, 138 hypostatization, 259–260, 288
Index 309

idealism, 2, 15, 92, 220, 229, 238, 273 on form and matter, 39, 41
phenomenological, 291–292 on freedom, 86–87
transcendental, 109–110, 224 two-elements theory, 38, 95–96
idealization, 160, 255, 256, 257, 288 Leibnizian concept of monad, 188
of pure spatial shapes, 288 life (Lebenserfahrung)
imagination, 88, 124, 128, 201–202 and the demarcation of the sciences, 63
immanence, 247, 291 as an ongoing process of
subjective (immanent) perception, perception, 141
141, 142 as individual (person), 69, 75
intentionality, 127, 175, 183, 190, 200, as nexus of inner experience, 77
206, 218, 241, 260 as pre-reflective/pre-conceptualized, 54
and the constitution of time in as supra-individual (community), 53,
immanent consciousness, 207 54, 69, 176
inter-subjectivity, 17, 143, 176, 191, psychic life, 80
205, 216, 219, 266, 285, 293 psychic life as a distinct ontological
and the origin of the life-world, 168, sphere, 14
280–281 life-philosophy (Lebensphilosophie)
intuition as a different way of being Kantian, 53
and immediacy, 31 as rejection of traditional
as seeing an essence, 112, 122 metaphysics, 53
intuitionism, 33, 113, 115, 117, 118 Husserlian phenomenology as, 169
irrationalism, 97, 146 phenomenology as a scientific life-
philosophy, 291
Jalbert, John, 6 life-source, 15, 79, 167, 195
Jaspers, Karl, 43 as unity of psychic facts, 77, 79
judgment, 29, 115, 122, 126, 152, 165, life-world, 168, 221, 248, 251, 263,
217, 243 269, 279, 293
eidetic, 119, 126 problem of, 247, 249, 250, 252
value-free, 30 linguistics, 93, 94
as a ‘natural science of culture’, 94
Kant, Immanuel logic
and practical philosophy, 61 and mathematics, 153
and sensibility, 23, 46, 57, 58, 59–60 problem of, 40–42, 63, 122, 277
and the necessity of a priori the logical as opposed to the
principles, 57 psychological, 60–61, 122
and transcendental deduction, 16, 46, Lohmar, Dieter, 124, 155
162, 165 Lotze, Herman, 19, 37, 38, 163, 244
Kantian liberation narrative, 17, 222, on being and validity, 37
223, 224, 226, 227, 228, 237, 241, Luft, Sebastian, 5, 128, 130, 248
242, 245, 263, 267, 271, 288
Kantian synthesis, 46 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 49, 93
principle of causality, 46 Mahnke, Dietrich, 238–240
Kuhn, Thomas, 5 Majolino, Claudio, viii, 119, 152,
248, 289
Lask, Emil Makkreel, Rudolf, 5, 25
and the multiplicity of forms of Mann, Thomas, 238
validity, 41 Marburg School, the, 7, 19, 109, 110
definition of theoretical meaning, 39, Marx, Karl, 67, 275, 276
40, 44 mathematization, 256–258, 288
on categoriality and being, 36–43 of sensible qualities, 256, 257, 288
310 Index

mechanism, 165, 182, 227 objectivity, 19, 23, 28, 30, 33, 49, 50,
mechanistic 153, 230, 235, 273
mechanistic view of nature, 81, 120, objects
165, 267 as unities of meaning, 38
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 2 cultural, 9, 30, 31, 44, 143, 144, 249,
metaphysics, 9, 27, 53, 78, 234, 239 250–251
mind-body problem, 195, 196, empirical, 163, 256
197, 227 natural, 14, 25, 30, 31, 47, 48, 143,
Cartesian dualism, 178, 237 144, 159, 160, 262
Cartesian-dualism, 161 ontology
Montesquieu, 93 and regions, 139, 140, 141, 152, 165
Moran, Dermot, 284 Böhm on ontology, 43–51
Moyar, Dean, 3 Husserl on ontology, 119–124
Muslow, Martin, 1 Kant on ontology, 34
life-world ontology, 239, 245
Natorp, Paul pluralistic ontology, 82
critique of Husserlian Rickert on ontology, 25–28
phenomenology, 15, 110, 117, transcendental-phenomenological
122, 126, 127, 128–129, 131 ontology, 222
natural causality, 17, 67, 72, 80, 120,
184, 214, 215, 216, 217 perception
as “extra-essential” impressional versus reproductive,
(außerwesentlich), 120–121, 128 141, 197–198, 200, 203
natural science inner versus outer, 74, 81, 90–92, 200
and causality and law, 88 perceptual and temporal awareness,
and formal/material science, 153 141
as a generalizing method, 25, 26, 27, subjective (immanent) versus
29, 42, 44, 61, 95, 96, 137, 151, objective (transcendent), 141–142
160, 161, 162 phenomena
as exclusion of subjectivity, 14, physical versus life-related, 67, 70,
103, 106 71, 81, 89, 137, 150, 160
experimental psychology and, 9, 14, phenomenological reduction, 85, 107,
55, 70, 75, 180 127, 132, 173, 180, 219, 220, 250,
nature 271, 273
as mathematized, 257, 261–262, 263 as transcendental reflection, 107
as opposed to culture, 25, 144, 263 phenomenology
as opposed to freedom, 86, as “correlative research”, 136
182, 253 as de-centered humanism, 289, 290
as opposed to Geist, 22, 74–75, as eidetic science of transcendental
119–120, 136–137, 138, 182 subjectivity, 110
as the raw material for action, 17, as intuition (Anschauung) of the
32–33, 267, 292–294 world (Welt), 241
as value-free, 143–144, 252 as science of essences, 118, 129
history and, 47–49, 51, 227 as transformative, 17, 266, 267, 271,
subjectivity and, 55, 59, 67–68, 289
92–93, 186, 221 is not “intuitionist philosophy”, 118
Neo-Kantianism, i, 5, 6, 15, 19, 20, 21, static versus generative, 129–131
32, 44, 45, 55, 81, 104, 109, philosophy
111, 163 as cultural education
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 31, 93, 211 (Bildungsstreben), 146
Index 311

interest for the totality, 146–147 scientific inquiry, 7, 10, 20, 25, 26, 63,
the birth of philosophy in Ancient 71, 94, 97, 137, 139, 140, 240,
Greece, 254, 287 259, 261
philosophy of science, 5, 145 and ontology, 63, 71
Plato, 7, 117, 122, 123, scientific revolution, 8, 26,
125, 259 255, 288
Polybius, 93 and Renaissance studies, 47–48, 50,
psychologism, 225, 237 88–89, 220, 224
psychology sensation, 80, 90, 108, 113, 129, 179,
and historical science, 63, 65, 178 180, 183, 187, 188
and natural science, 157, 161, 183 Simmel, Georg
closure of psychology, 68, 157, 178, concept of historical individuality, 63,
185, 190 65, 69
Dilthey on psychology, 55, 80, 176 concept of historical time, 210–211
empirical, 22, 45, 50, 161, 165 skepticism, 90, 109, 110,
naturalistic, 17, 82, 166, 184, 216 171, 288
Rickert on psychology, 55, 165 Neo-Kantian skepticism towards
Simmel on psychology, 55, phenomenology, 110
65–67, 175 Snow, Charles Percy, 23
sociology, 22, 54, 93
rationalization, 156, 287 Southwest German School, the, 14,
of the sciences via eidetic analysis, 20–21, 36, 42, 49, 55, 81, 109,
287, 289 163, 275
reduction, 10–11, 17, 73, 178, 185, 188, Southwestern German School, the, 7
189, 192 Spengler, Oswald, 31, 54
religion, 78, 229, 230, 234, 266 standpoint (Standpunkt), 83
phenomenology as religious and normativity (ethics), 88
conversion, 264–266 and plurality, 15, 108
representation, 28, 46, 50, 79, 108, 164, as impersonal teleological
165, 166, 284 construction, 88
Rickert, Heinrich Neo-Kantian ‘standpoint’ versus
critique of essential knowledge, 113, Husserlian ‘attitude’, 82, 83,
115, 116, 121 84–85
naturalistic transcendentalism, 16 object of knowledge and, 88
on concept-formation, 26, 27, 28, 29, value-free standpoint of natural
42, 44, 47, 113, 120, 121 science, 87
on irreality (Unwirklichkeit), 37, 202 value-related standpoint of cultural
ontological pluralism, 34, 44 science, 87
“vision of essence” (Wesensschau), subjectivity
111, 121, 135 alien subjectivity, 141, 200, 204
Rodi, Frithjof, 56 and unity, 59
Rollinger, Robin, 2 and world, 149
as carrier of the historical world, 175,
Sandmeyer, Bob, 6 242
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 2, 290 as constituting, 107, 266
Scheler, Max, 54, 238 empirical, 50
on life-philosophy, 54 existence as a subject, 187, 245
Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich, 52 Husserl’s non-naturalistic view of
Schrödinger, Erwin, 83 subjectivity, 165–166
Schuhmann, Karl, 110, 173, 265 Neo-Kantians on subjectivity, 110
312 Index

Taine, Hippolyte, 93 values

teleology active valuation (Wertung), 144
and cultural universalism, 266 and ethics, 61–62, 268, 270
and happiness, 62, 276 and validity, 244–245
and humankind, 18, 275, 276–277, as experienced, 127, 243
283 Husserl on values, 166, 235, 266,
and the transcendental dimension of 269–270
subjectivity, 11 relatedness to value (Wertbeziehung),
as ontological constituent of human 29–30, 144
persons, 131 Rickert on values, 9, 30, 231
Kant’s notion of, 286 Vico, Giovambattista, 139
time
and empirical reality, 8, 27, 28, 48, 95 Windelband, Wilhelm
and flux, 48, 63, 64 and idiographic (historical) science
and history, 48, 208 vs. nomothetic science, 21–23, 93
transcendence law and event, 28, 64
and intentionality, 190 world
and subjectivity, 39, 176 and surrounding world (Umwelt),
of nature, 291 103, 149, 150, 168, 169, 175, 199,
transcendental ego, 15, 79, 107, 108, 213, 280, 282, 283
134, 173, 247 as foreign world, 279, 281,
transcendental idealism 282, 284
and subjective realism, 291 as home-world, 280–283, 284, 287
transcendental logic, 124, 153 as pre-given through universal
transcendental phenomenology, 3, 98, experience, 142, 147–148, 182,
189, 220, 221 243, 246–247, 269
as a scientific life-philosophy, 16, 291 as theme of phenomenology, 17, 106
as project of renewal, 190, 265–266 awareness of world qua horizon
epistemology and, 222–223, 289 (world-consciousness), 243–244
transcendental philosophy historical world as opposed to natural
and intersubjectivity, 17, 222, 275 world, 27, 55, 71, 174–177
and Kant, 2, 21, 32, 39, 45, natural world as governed by
109, 275 spatio-temporality and
as a transcendental theory of causality, 32, 46, 159, 245
knowledge, 3 possibility of knowledge of the world,
transcendental subjectivity, 82, 84, 108, 164, 167
110, 130, 201, 220, 221, 247, 250, Rickert on world-experience,
267, 271, 272, 288 164–165
and historical objectivity, 84 structure of homogeneity, 69, 164
as world-constituting, 245, 246, 247, totality of the world (das Weltganze),
266, 271, 274, 288 146, 147
Trendelenburg, Friedrich Adolf, 91 world-as-a-whole vs. world-parts, 61,
two-worlds theory, 38 73, 146–147, 148, 223, 228,
Lask and, 38 229, 231, 236, 241, 242,
267, 269
validity, 37, 41, 49, 64, 66, 81, 95 world-whole, 147, 148, 242, 246
validity/value and being/reality, world-view (weltanschauung), 17, 26,
38–39, 95–96 272, 284
value as opposed to science, 236
as the ground of culture, 260 as task of philosophy, 229, 252
Index 313

Dilthey on worldview, 170, 227, 228, problem of, 233

229–230 Rickert on worldview, 230–232,
humanistic, 222–223, 237, 289 233
Husserl on worldview, 137, 151, scientific, 235
233–234, 239–240, 241 Simmel on worldview, 228, 230
Kant on worldview, 56–58, 60, transcendental-phenomenological,
223, 288 17, 263, 264, 288
Lask on worldview, 235–236 Wundt, Wilhelm, 9, 80, 180
naturalistic, 224, 225, 237, 239, model of psychic life, 180, 182–183
259, 288
Neo-Kantians and, 235 Zijderveld, Anton, 25, 98