Paul Ricoeur: Husserl

This collection of Ricoeur’s essays from the 1950s functions as a solid and safe introduction to Husserl’s phenomenology. Ricoeur was an important translator and regular scholar of Husserl, and these pieces likely were key references on phenomenology for the French intellectual scene of the 1960s (Derrida’s early works on Husserl cite Ricoeur’s book). Most of the articles contained here consist of commentaries on or general examinations of individual works by Husserl, including Ideas I, Ideas II, Cartesian Meditations, and The Crisis of European Sciences. One of Ricoeur’s most persistent interests is investigating the nature of Husserl’s infamous idealism. Ricoeur claims Husserl’s work after Logical Investigations follows two paths: an enrichment of descriptive themes that threatens to “overflow the initial logical framework” and a refinement of his method and presentation of phenomenology. The former sometimes took a psychological/subjective form that might contradict idealism, whereas the latter at times reworked phenomenology into a more pure idealism. Ricoeur concludes, “The fact is that the idealistic interpretation of the method does not necessarily coincide with its actual practice, as many of his disciples have pointed out.” For example, in Ideas I, “consciousness is called a ‘remainder,’ a phenomenological ‘residue,’” and Husserl refrains from “pronouncing on the ultimate ontological status of the appearing.” In doing intentional psychology that is meant to prepare the way for transcendental philosophy, Husserl in Ideas I also does not clearly mark the point in the text at which he is actually practicing the phenomenological reduction. Consequently, there is a vacillation in how intentionality - consciousness’ going outside of itself – is described. Before the phenomenological reduction, intentionality can be described as an “encounter,” as psychological “receptivity.” But after the reduction, intentionality can be described as a potentially creative act, as the “constitution” of what consciousness gives to itself. Viewing this conceptual fluctuation, Ricoeur concludes that in Ideas I phenomenological idealism remains a project or promise that is not fully carried out by the text. But in the later Cartesian Meditations (on which Ricoeur has two clear and helpful essays here) a new idealism becomes dominant, and “Constitution becomes a gigantic project of progressively composing the signification ‘world’ without an ontological remainder.” In that work, solipsism is transformed from an objection into an argument. Ricoeur considers the stronger idealism to be based upon a “non-thematizied decision which may well be called a ‘metaphysical’ decision.” “This decision consists in saying that there is no other dimension of the being of the world than the dimension of its being for me, and there is no other set of problems than the transcendental one.” Yet even this transcendental idealism was contested in some of the works written after 1929. In The Crisis of European Sciences, Husserl’s investigation of the “life-world” focuses on “the primordial evidence of the world. The accent is placed no longer on the monadic ego; instead the accent is placed on the totality formed by the ego and surrounding world in which it is vitally engaged.” Ricoeur makes some interesting comparisons of Husserl and Kant throughout the book. Rather than seeing Husserl simply as Kant without the in-itself, Ricoeur, summarizing Eugen Fink, emphasizes that “Husserl’s ‘question’ . . . is not Kant’s.” He explains, “Husserl’s question . . . is the origin of the world” rather than “the question of validity for a possible objective consciousness.” For Husserl, “the transcendental subject is not at all external to the world; on the contrary, it is the foundation of the world.” Kant is concerned with justifying the universality of knowledge instead of describing how the mind knows. But Ricoeur notes there are passages within the Critique of Pure Reason, such as the investigation of time and space, where phenomenology triumphs over epistemology. Ricoeur claims that Husserl lost sight of ontology and the goals of Kant’s critique: “Husserl did phenomenology, but Kant limited and founded it.” Comparing Husserl’s phenomenology to existentialism, Ricoeur claims Husserl subordinates the “potentiality of intentional life” to the “analysis of ‘sense.’” Rather than pursue how the transcendental ego’s constitution of sense makes possible the creative “project” of existentialism, Husserl more conservatively attempts to establish sense’s systematicity. Ricoeur claims Husserl remains bound to a “latent rationalism” that “never undertakes to consider the creativity of consciousness unless led by a ‘transcendental guide,’ the object.” The flux of consciousness never degenerates into chaos or a “descriptive game” because it is constrained by the “transcendental guide of the intentional object.” “Ultimately one can say that the Idea of the world is the transcendental guide of egology. This Idea structures the ego and assures us that transcendental subjectivity is not a chaos of intentive subjective processes.”