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The Archaelogy of Spirit and the Unique Self: A Husserlian Reading of Conrad-Martius

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Abstract

Although the connections of Hedwig Conrad-Martius’ ontological phenomenology, what she called, “realontology,” to Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology were constant concerns that usually remained in the background of her work, on occasion they became foreground. Similarly the problems surrounding the individuation of the person and spirit were persistent but rather marginal in her writings. In this paper I want first to review some of the issues as they are connected to ontological and transcendental phenomenology. Then I want to relate them to the cosmological and theological issues that were no less important for Conrad-Martius.

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Notes

  1. Conrad-Martius (1965, 393 ff).

  2. Conrad-Martius (1965, p. 396).

  3. Conrad-Martius (1965, p. 397). see also Conrad-Martius (1923).

  4. Idem.

  5. Conrad-Martius (1965, p. 398). see also Conrad-Martius (1923).

  6. Conrad-Martius (1965, pp. 399–400).

  7. Conrad-Martius (1912/1920).

  8. Cf. the translation, Husserl (2006) and the translators’ introduction, XXII–XXIV, upon which this discussion is dependent.

  9. Conrad-Martius (1916), in Husserl’s Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, III, 345–542. In both the Preischrift as well as the “Erscheinungslehre” the writings of the positivist school, especially Avenarius and Mach, serve as a point of departure. See Husserl’s discussion of these thinkers in Husserliana XIII, §10 in the text of Grundprobleme as well as its Appendix XXII.

  10. For this paragraph, see Conrad-Martius (1965, pp. 400–401).

  11. Conrad-Martius (1965, pp. 298–299). This paragraph is an interpretive paraphrase of these extremely difficult passages.

  12. Conrad-Martius (1965, pp. 299 and 305).

  13. Conrad-Martius (1957, p. 123).

  14. Conrad-Martius (1957, p. 134).

  15. Conrad-Martius (1963, pp. 234–235).

  16. Ibid., p. 234.

  17. See especially the Nachlass MS, B I 14, XI, pp. 24–24 of the Leuven Archives transcript. I am grateful to the Director of the Archives, Professor Ullrich Melle, for permission to cite this MS.

  18. See Husserl (1973, p. 385).

  19. Conrad-Martius (1960).

  20. Conrad-Martius (1963, p. 266). This theme pervades much of her writing.

  21. The most elaborate discussion of entelechy is in Conrad-Martius (1961). Although doubtless Conrad-Martius was indebted to Hans Driesch, the view that her view is identical with his reveals an ignorance of the pains she took to differentiate her position from that of Driesch. Today the basic framework of entelechy as envisaged by both Driesch and Conrad-Martius has received a partial resurrection in the various writings of the maverick philosophical biologist, Rupert Sheldrake, with his category of “morphogenetic fields.” See, e.g., Sheldrake (1988). Although Sheldrake is by no measure a philosopher of the same stature as Conrad-Martius or Driesch, his knowledgeable and iconoclastic challenge to the reductionist biological establishment is welcome. Sheldrake has spent much of his philosophical and scientific energy arguing not only for an analogous theory of essence-entelechy, but also that the theory of morphogenetic fields makes possible an innerpsychic connectedness which he also calls “morphic resonance.” This interconnectedness, like the Jungian collective unconscious, makes intelligible many of the undeniably weird phenomena which orthodox science disregards but for which, Sheldrake believes, there is impressive evidence. Cf, the final paragraph of Conrad-Martius (1960) as well as the final fifty pages of Conrad-Martius (1954), especially the final excursus on clairvoyance.

  22. Conrad-Martius (1960, p. 13).

  23. Conrad-Martius (1965, pp. 75–76).

  24. For the best discussion of this matter, see Klawonn (1987, pp. 43–70).

  25. Although what we refer to with “persons” properly involves a non-sortal reference, in everyday usage we use “person” interchangeably with “human,” i.e. as a sortal term. Persons are non-sortal because what we refer to are beings who refer to themselves with “I,” i.e., who refer to themselves non-ascriptively and who therefore are not self-identifying by way of properties or criteria of features.

  26. This summarizes more lengthy discussions of Husserl and Hönigswald in Hart (2009).

  27. These last three paragraphs reflect larger discussions in Hart (2009).

  28. Jankélévitch (1953, p. 135). For Conrad-Martius’ theory of angels, which has to do with a unique temporality and spatiality, see Conrad-Martius (1954, 285 ff).

  29. In a footnote of Conrad-Martius (1960, pp. 41–42) notes that this is an amalgam of Isaiah 43:1; Ephesians 1:4; Revelations 2:17.

  30. Conrad-Martius (1960, pp. 49–50).

  31. Conrad-Martius (1957, p. 124).

  32. This, as Alexandra Elizabeth Pfeiffer has pointed out, has affinity with the Thomist doctrine of materia prima signata. Dr. Pfeiffer’s book is an excellent introduction to Conrad-Martius. See her Hedwig Conrad-Martius (in Orbis Phaenomenologicus, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann Verlag, 2005). For the problem of individuation, see 166 ff. Yet for St. Thomas, the person as the dignitas of the individual substance in a rational nature has its foundation in its being an individual suppositum Further, Conrad-Martius’ position echoes St. Thomas’ in another important matter. As Robert Sokolowski has put it: “In man the one soul is the source of a spiritual life as well as a bodily organic one.” Sokolowski, op. cit., 155. The philosophical problem is how soul as a formal principle accounts for the uniquely unique ipseity. Of interest here is the consideration that further muddies the waters: There is a venerable Christian (Catholic) teaching that the human soul is individually created by God—and this is the foundation for the uniqueness of the person, which we in this essay tie to the unique ipseity. Like Conrad-Martius, this doctrine holds the uniqueness of ipseity is subordinated to the soul-principle; but unlike Conrad-Martius, this doctrine has the “individual soul” being created immediately by God. (One might ask: Was the tradition using “soul” here technically, e.g., in contrast to person?) I am not clear whether Husserl himself ever reached resolution on these matters. We wrestle with some of them Who One Is.

  33. In what follows we are helped and occasionally differ from Conrad-Martius (1965, pp. 225–260).

  34. See Gallagher (2000, pp. 230–231).

  35. I think Conrad-Martius is insufficiently concerned about this distinction on 240–241.

  36. See Sokolowski (1990, pp. 197–207).

  37. For some historical references to this teaching, see Catechism of the Catholic Church (Liguori, Missouri: Liguouri Press, 1994), #366. The “Dutch Catechism,” A New Catechism (New York: Seabury Press, 1969), 382 and 518–519 has in this regard important passages. It strives to do justice to creation of the person as the unity of the creation of the soul, body, and all of natural being. Creation is what causes reality to be and to grow at each moment. In the beginning of a new human life there is a sacred moment in which creative power is especially evident. “After all, my parents could not have wanted ‘me.’ At best, they wanted ‘a boy’ or ‘a girl.’ Only God wanted ‘me.’” The text goes on at 382 to say, “An ‘I’ which could say ‘You’ to God, have a direct personal relationship with him, is called into being through human heredity, and hence by the hand of God. These two things form together one action.” This text as it stands leans in the direction of Conrad-Martius’ position in so far as it makes the individuality of each to be sufficiently determined through the contingencies human heredity, even though, of course, this is itself “by the hand of God.” In the Roman Curial Supplement we find what appears to be corrections with which the basic theses of this paper are in agreement. Here the excellent philosophical point of The Dutch Catechism that only God could have wanted ‘me’ is not permitted to be subsumed by the contingencies of heredity. It states “the existence of each human person follows from the transmission by the parents of a body which is ready for the soul and demands the existence of a soul. For the rest, the existence of the soul goes back only to God. The complete and direct transmission of the body by the parents extends indirectly in a certain sense to the soul itself, insofar namely as the body is for the soul and calls for it.” (519) Although the Supplement concedes that the parents are “the parents of the whole person,” it insists that the mode of cooperation with God differs as regards body and soul. The claim that “the parents transmit human nature to their children” must be balanced with the claim that “the existence of the soul goes back only to God.”

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  1. Department of Religious Studies, Indiana University, 2641 N. Dunn, Bloomington, IN, 47408, USA

    James G. Hart

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Hart, J.G. The Archaelogy of Spirit and the Unique Self: A Husserlian Reading of Conrad-Martius. Axiomathes 18, 407–424 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-008-9035-2

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