§ 28. Transformation of methodological attitude
To provide some more context to the Moments of Disruption by Kris Sealey and consequently to the plausibility of comparing Sartre to Levinas, I will for the duration of this chapter change my approach and adopt more historical one. The reason for this decision stems from my opinion that while predominantly systematic work can produce some very inspiring and applicable insights (even in a field of continental philosophy of 20th century181), it can also lead to some unfortunate misunderstandings. Sealey’s book belongs by bigger margin into the systematic category, as the historical implications and more specifically order of published texts of both Levinas and Sartre do not seem to play a role in her analysis, perhaps with the exception between their mature and late stages. This would pertain to the differences between Sartre’s L'être et le néant and Critique de la raison dialectique on one hand, and Levinas’s Totalité et Infini and Autrement qu'être ou au- delà de l'essence on the other. This characteristic provides her work some very valuable space for original conclusions, but at the same time for statements that combine – on the course of one page of text – Levinas’s notion of il y a and Autrement qu'être at the same time without much concern for the compatibility of both stages of his thought (to name of example among many).182
However, my focus is to also address the methodological framework in which Levinas and Sartre operate. Because of that, my analyses will be oriented more towards their early careers, or more precisely on the tension between the contents of their first mature works and that of the shorter and lesser-known texts which they wrote in approximately similar time.183 We have already established the connection which they share with Husserl, and even without addressing the
181 E.g. ZAHAVI, Dan: Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame. Oxford University Press (Oxford, 2015).
182 SEALEY, Kris: Moments of Disruption, p. 79.
183 We will therefore attempt to scrutinize statements such as this: “While Sartre’s work is, overtly, a phenomenological ontology, Levinas’s project rests on an explicit rejection of ontology (and, to a degree, phenomenology) altogether. No comparison of their work would be fair without acknowledging the implications of this significant difference.” SEALEY, Kris: Moments of Disruption, p. 124.
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historical connotations, we were led to the point when intentionality implies, next to several other features, alterity, possibly even in the form of another person. To elucidate this connection further, I will now explore the historical context of how Husserl’s phenomenology reached its French audience. For this end, I will utilize as the source of the most of the fractographical and historical connotations an exceptionally informative book by Christian Dupont entitled Phenomenology in French Philosophy: Early Encounters.184
Even though it requires a certain degree of a simplification, we can clearly distinguish several stages of how the Husserlian thought was “assimilated” within the French environment. In this chapter, I will be pursuing two main goals associated with this process. First, my goal will be to briefly introduce main stages of this assimilation, while concentrating notably on the historical- biographical context. Second, I will return back to the Cartesian Meditations – our core resources of Husserl’s thought – only this time addressing the issue that had risen at the end of previous chapter, the question of the other. By doing so we will set the stage for concentrating more specifically on the stage (of Husserlian reception in France) that I will later introduce as the last, and by pursuing this philosophical notion I will demonstrate how the Husserlian thought has been adopted into the systematical conception of both selected French philosophers – Levinas and Sartre. This approach should enable us to have both the systematic and historic circumstances in mind when we deal with the cardinal issue of intersubjectivity.
§ 29. Several stages of early reception
The text thanks to which Husserl become known to wider academic public in Germany were his Logical Investigations from 1900 (first volume) and 1901 (second volume). After their publication, the renown of his philosophy started to grow exponentially, which by the grace of the recommendation from David Hilbert led to him acquiring the position of associate professor in Göttingen University. 185 However, it took another decade before Husserl attracted any sort of public critical attention in France. The first person to refer about Husserl therein was Belgian
184 DUPONT, Christian: Phenomenology in French Philosophy: Early Encounters. Phaenomenologica vol. 208, Springer (Dordrecht, 2014). Especially the passage from 104-163.
185 Where he remained from 1901 to 1916.
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Thomist monsignor Léon Noël186. He wrote an article for a journal Revue néo-scolastique de philosophie in which he employed Husserl’s arguments in the context of the debate between defenders of psychologism and then contemporary supporters of the efforts to base logic on objective means.187 Noël, as an opponent of psychologism, saw a theoretical ally in Husserl by virtue of the fact that Christian dogmas were in the perspective of then current neo-scholastics rooted in similar kind of realism as objectivist logic. According to Noël, Carl Stumpf was its main propagator and Husserl as his student and later also a colleague at the University of Halle seemingly represented similar approach.188 That is supposedly attested in Logical Investigations by an effort to free the notion of truth from the domain of psychologically defined subjectivity and by the general inclination to realistic epistemology. At the very end of his article, Noël notes that Husserl (as a convertite from psychologism) openly admits a medieval inspiration for his notion of intentionality, which obviously was a very pleasing circumstance for the neo-scholastic circles.189 Stumpf’s phenomenology was nevertheless much narrower in its scope, mainly because of three following issues: The exclusion of functions or acts – which was the main occupation of Husserl at that time in Logical Investigations; by restricting himself to material matter – Husserl’
hyle – of intentional acts; and finally by not employing phenomenological reduction. It in other words remained “at the mere level of phenomenological psychology,” which was all but a preparatory phase to pure phenomenology for Husserl.190
It is also interesting to note that the debate about the nature of Husserl’s work from the point of view of Thomism has attracted the (critical) attention of Czech phenomenologist Jan Patočka. In 1934, he published a review in the journal Česká mysl (Czech mind) entitled La phénomenologie. Journées d’études de la société thomiste.191 Ludger Hagedorn later translated
186 1878 – 1955. A director of “Institut supérieur de philosophie” at the Katholic University in Leuven.
187 Especially in Austria and Germany.
188 DUPONT, Christian: Phenomenology in French Philosophy: Early Encounters, p. 104.
189 DUPONT, Christian: Phenomenology in French Philosophy: Early Encounters, p. 105.
190 SPIEGELBERG, Herbert: The Phenomenological Movement, p. 65.
191 PATOČKA, Jan: “Rec.: ‘La phénoménologie’, Journées d'études de la société thomiste, Juvisy, Seine- et-Oise, 12. 9. 1932”. In: Česká mysl 30 (1934), n. 4, pp. 237-238.
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this review into German.192 It was however never published in English. In light of that, I provide the English translation of the full review in the footnote.193
But coming back to article of Leon Noel, it was actually still in the same year (1910) that Victor Delbos194 gave a speech entitled “Husserl’s critique of psychologism and his conception of
192 PATOČKA, Jan: “La phénoménologie. Journées d'études de la société thomiste”. Trans. L. Hagedorn.
In: Jan Patočka. Texte — Dokumente — Bibliographie. Alber (Freiburg, 1999) pp. 432-433.
193 “The oldest French article about Husserl stems from the pen of Thomist L. Noël (Les frontières de la logique, Revue néoscolastique de philosophie, XVII, 1910). Since then, the interest in Husserl spread even in other French philosophical milieus, while not ceasing for Thomists; the present book is a testament to this as it contains the discussions of Thomist society (established by Mandonnet). It
reproduces two lectures and two discussions. First lecture, by Salzburgian Benedictine Daniel Feuling, is about the notion of phenomenology, while the author of the second is renowned professor from Leuven R.
Kramer, and it is dedicated to the relation between phenomenology and Thomism.
Feuling’s contribution is well informed albeit brief exposé about Husserl and Heidegger. The author consulted personally with Husserl, dr. Fink and Heidegger. The problems he adressed exceeded the horizon of the other participants so far that a discussion about the important points of the lecture did not even occur. I would highlight especially his explanation of the reduction, differentiation of “thematic”
reduction from the “transcendental”, the mention of graduality of constitution, precise differentiation of phenomenological reduction from the eidetic one, explanation of the three egos of phenomenological reduction. What stands out among his comments about Heidegger is his [Heidegger’s] take on his relation to Husserl’s reduction, which is not altogether negative, as is commonly claimed, and Heidegger’s (originally Aristotle’s) claim “Gott philosophiert nicht”.
During the course of the discussion, it was notably Edith Stein who succeeded with her explanation of the continuity of the early and late philosophy of Husserl (it was apparent that she is less acquainted with the newer phase); besides that, the remarks of other disputers were littered with misapprehensions and misunderstandings, hence they cannot be successfully used to explain Husserl. The lecture of Kremer is unconvincing because it does not offer anything new, it criticizes phenomenology still through sub specie inadequately apprehended intuition of essences and it fails to deal with the problem of reduction. The words of Alexander Koyre, also formerly a student of Husserl, stand out in the debate similarly to those of Stein, but his comments suffer from philosophical ambivalence in relation to the problem of Husserl’s idealism.”
194 1862 – 1916. A historian of philosophy at the Sorbonne University in Paris.
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pure logic” during a lecture course at the École des hautes études sociales. In this exposé, he opposes psychologism and logicism.195 He sees the root of psychologism (in a manner not unlike Noël) in British Empiricism (notably in Hume). It is typical for what he labels „logicism” to attempt to constitute objectivity on a rational background. In this group, he therefore includes the neo-Kantians most notably represented by Hermann Cohen, and Husserl, because of his formalizing tendencies. According to Delbos, Husserl always responds to the basic premises of psychologism196 by differentiating between pure logic and partial science, while putting pressure on ideal conditions, upon which the latter is based. In Delboses’s view, Husserl is not that different from neo-Kantians, but it is nevertheless noted that his phenomenological project from the second volume of Logical Investigations might offer common ground for both pure logic as well as psychology. He warns, however, of Husserl’s mathematizing tendencies, rigid formalism and overuse of schematic approach.197
According to Dupont, both see the main merit of Husserl’s philosophy above all else in his arguments against psychologism.198 None of them mention the method of phenomenological reduction, which Husserl introduced in his lectures in Göttingen in 1907, and therefore we can doubt whether they had any notion about the direction of Husserl’s thought after the publication of Logical Investigations. Nevertheless, both appreciate certain originality regarding Husserl’s approach to seeking the transcendental level of consciousness as a basis for intentional acts, but they do not prescribe any special significance to the notion of intentionality. They also do not elaborate on its different use and connotations either among Husserl and Brentano or in medieval scholastics. In this first phase, Husserl was being perceived as a rigorous critic of psychologism who is focused above all on logic. While searching for its deepest foundations, he offered some relatively very original points of view, but his phenomenological project remained yet unknown
195 DUPONT, Christian: Phenomenology in French Philosophy: Early Encounters, p. 105.
196 Simply put: A) Rules which govern psychic life must be deduced from it itself. B) Logic draws its matter from psychological processes of judgment, representation etc. C) The evidence of truth of a judgement only reflects the experience of harmonical psychical state.
197 DUPONT, Christian: Phenomenology in French Philosophy: Early Encounters, p. 106-107.
198 DUPONT, Christian: Phenomenology in French Philosophy: Early Encounters, p. 107.
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due to the outbreak of First World War and it took another decade before his article Philosophy as rigorous science199 and first edition of Ideas200 attracted any attention.201
§ 30. The impact of the World War I
The contact between French and German academic circles deteriorated significantly as a consequence of the breakout of the war. However, the geopolitical situation also initiated another phase of the reception – by causing a wave of migration from the central and eastern parts of Europe to the west. One of the migrants escaping from the war was Lev Šestov202. This ethnical Russian, who studied in Italy and Germany, escaped his homeland after the Bolshevik revolution and settled down in France in 1921.203 According to Dupont, the main mark that he left on the French reception of Husserl was an article entitled Memento mori, published in translation from Russian in 1926’s edition of journal Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger. It was concerned mostly with Husserl’s article Philosophy as rigorous science. The main point of Šestov’s critique is Husserl’s distinction between wisdom (sagesse) and science (science), whereas according to Husserl philosophy should be understood as belonging to the sphere of the latter. This tendency should, says Šestov, connect Husserl all the way with Plato, from whom this tendency was passed down by Descartes, Kant and Fichte to Husserl himself, who unlike his predecessors categorically refuses not only psychologism, but any kind of metaphysics.204,205 At this point,
199 Text „Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft” was published in the first volume of journal Logos, which Husserl prepared along with the help of Heinrich Rickert, in 1910.
200 Published for the first time in 1913.
201 DUPONT, Christian: Phenomenology in French Philosophy: Early Encounters, p. 108-109.
202 1866 – 1938. He wrote exclusively in Russian and his works were then translated into French by another “immigrant” – p Boris de Schloezer.
203 DUPONT, Christian: Phenomenology in French Philosophy: Early Encounters, p. 110.
204 DUPONT, Christian: Phenomenology in French Philosophy: Early Encounters, p. 111.
205 The language of metaphysicist as well as the language of religion is indirect and non-scientific and as such it can provide a certain extent of comfort, but his value apart from this end is (especially for Husserl’s goals) rather minimal. DUPONT, Christian: Phenomenology in French Philosophy: Early Encounters, p. 111.
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Husserl supposedly betrays his own principles by turning his description of categorical essences into a basis for idealism and thus into a type of metaphysics, which he tries to avoid. This metaphysics is described as being based on univocal transcendental meaning of logical judgments.
The core of the dispute, in Dupont’s view, is thus Husserl’s effort to anchor epistemology as first philosophy, which leads according to Šestov into a dismissal of the meaning of reality. Husserl is therefore once again depicted as an overzealous logician, who deviated from Plato and missed the necessity of metaphysics and the sphere of the irrational as that which stands above the domain of the reason.206
The response to Šestov’s article came from the pen of Jean Hering207. This Alsatian by birth studied in Strasbourg, from where he left in 1909 to spend a semester in Göttingen. There he got to know Husserl and eventually become a member of a group of his closest associates. His article Sub specie aeterni. Réponse à une critique de la philosophie de Husserl208 is structured explicitly as an apology and reacts to Šestov’s criticisms one by one and thus instigates first public debate about Husserl’s philosophy in France.209 Focal point of the argument is once again the polemic about the above-mentioned distinction between wisdom and science, and Hering claims that Šestov did not really understood Husserl’s principal goal.210 He (Husserl) is not opposed to all kinds of metaphysical and practical philosophy as such, but rather criticizes them for their inconsistent approach. Šestov overlooks these and other rather important nuances because he lacks the proper knowledge of the second volume of Logical Investigations and the first edition of Ideas.
As a result of this incompetence, Šestov blames Husserl’s alleged idealism of inability to comprehend the real world, in other words he misunderstands Husserl’s claims about bracketing questions pertaining to existence. Next, Hering criticizes what he finds to be a misunderstanding of how Husserl uses the notion “cogito”, although Hering himself restrains from offering his own interpretation and avoids any deeper interpretation of intentional schematics. He claims that Husserl is not trying to dismiss empirical sciences as such, but rather attempts to reform them by
206 DUPONT, Christian: Phenomenology in French Philosophy: Early Encounters, p. 111-112.
207 1890–1966.
208 Published in Strassbourgh in Revue d’histoire et de philosophie réligieuse (7: 351–364).
209 After First World War Alsassia become a part of France again.
210 DUPONT, Christian: Phenomenology in French Philosophy: Early Encounters, p. 113.
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providing necessary methodological basis.211 If Husserl is trying to provide this basis by returning to the “things themselves” and by researching how these things reach evidence in intuition, the distinction between rationalism and irrationalism as propagated by Šestov loses appropriate justification. In 1926, Hering published a book entitled Phénoménologie et philosophie religieuse, which marked the first monograph in French dedicated to phenomenology and Husserl’s thought stood for one of its cornerstones.212 This debate continued by another article from Šestov and personal letter from Hering, but remained essentially the same – Šestov blamed Husserl’s phenomenology for overzealous rationalism and Hering refuted by correcting the explanations of Husserlian analyses while drawing from texts (notably first Ideas) with which Šestov was acquainted very well (if at all). Characteristic trait of this second phase was thus the first public debate about Husserl’s philosophy, which was not concentrated around the criticism of psychologism, but thanks to direct participation of one of Husserl’s students, it evolved into a direct discussion about phenomenology as an original philosophical approach. Second product of this debate was the first monograph dedicated to phenomenology in French.213
Still, there was no publication that could serve as a general introduction into Husserl’s dense thought. Such a book was published only in 1926 by Bernard Groethuysen214. According to Dupont, his work Introduction à la pensée philosophique allemande depuis Nietzsche depicts Husserl along with Nietzsche, Dilthey and Simmel as one of the philosophers who tried to offer a way out of the crisis in which the German philosophy has found itself “after the collapse of metaphysical idealism.”215 Report about his thought begins with a description of Husserl’s
211 DUPONT, Christian: Phenomenology in French Philosophy: Early Encounters, p. 113-114.
212 Husserl’s expressed his admiration for Hering (and his faithfulness) in one of the letters to R. Ingarden.
LAVIGNE, Jean-Francois : « Lévinas avant Lévinas : L’introducteur et le traducteur de Husserl ». In : Emmauel Levinas, Positivité et transcendance suivi de Lévinas et la phénoménologie. Sous la direction de J.-L. Marion. Presses Universitaires de France (Paris, 2000). Pp. 49-87. P. 52.
213 DUPONT, Christian: Phenomenology in French Philosophy: Early Encounters, p. 114-118.
214 1880–1946. In French writing student of Wilhelma Diltheye. In 1933, as a reaction to the Nazis seizing power, he escaped Berlin and relocated to Paris, where he started to lecture.
215 DUPONT, Christian: Phenomenology in French Philosophy: Early Encounters, p. 118.