Journal of the History of Philosophy

With Crowell’s new book, one of contemporary Anglo-American philosophy’s buzzwords, ‘normativity,’ makes its official debut in phenomenological studies. Drawing on an impressive range of primary sources and engaging a remarkable array of literature, Crowell argues that meaning (the central theme of phenomenology) is a “norm-governed phenomenon” (1), and that the subject, who is responsive to meaning qua normative, is best described as an embodied, practically engaged Dasein.

Section 1 outlines phenomenology’s approach to meaning. “[P]henomenology does not locate meaning in the subject but identifies it transcendentally with the object” (17). In so doing, phenomenology describes experience as governed by standards of success or failure, that is, as entailing criteria to establish whether things really are the way that we take them to be. To be able to commit ourselves to things being a certain way, however, we must be more fundamentally committed to “being something,” we must be trying to be something (28–29). This perspective informs Crowell’s survey of Husserlian phenomenology and his characterization of the disagreement between Husserl and Heidegger on the subject of commitment.

Section 2 explores the work of Edmund Husserl. Crowell argues for the necessity of the first-personal standpoint, the contribution of phenomenology to the internalism/externalism debate, and the normative character of perceptual experience. Crowell claims that the normative in perception is grounded in our abilities to skillfully navigate the world as [End Page 387] embodied, factual subjects. This is meant to reinterpret the status of Husserlian transcendental subjectivity, which, for Crowell, cannot be construed as absolute consciousness but “as embodied, practical, and social” personal egos “responsible for the order of meaning” (154).

Section 3 turns to consider Martin Heidegger. For Crowell, Heidegger is far from shedding the first-person perspective and the centrality of reason, grounding both in breakdown experiences such as death and the call of conscience, in which our fitting-in the anonymous order established by the one-self (das Man) collapses.

Section 4 is devoted to practical philosophy. It includes an Auseinandersetzung with Christine Korsgaard, which disputes that the source of normativity can be found in reflection, a look at Husserl and Heidegger on the intentionality of action, and a closing chapter that reiterates some of Crowell’s key insights about Heidegger’s philosophy.

Crowell’s philosophizing is at its best when it engages Heidegger’s work. By comparison, his reading of Husserl and his overall characterizations of phenomenology raise some questions. First, it remains unclear why the experience of trying to be something as the ground of normativity “cannot be considered an act of consciousness” (29, 163). Presumably this is because Crowell considers Husserl’s notion of act as “something like a mental process or a propositional attitude” (26). Crowell grounds normativity in an embodied personal subject. Since Husserl appeals to an absolute consciousness that constitutes the body without being constituted by it, his phenomenology is unfit to capture the existential phenomenon of trying to be something. This argument, however, is problematic. It is not the case that, for Husserl, something is either constituted or constituting. Most things Husserl describes are both constituted and constituting, including the body. It is constituted in the sense that the ownership of my body can be accounted for via a description of certain basic experiences (tactual, kinesthetic, etc.). It is constituting when it comes to the constitution of perceptual objects, other bodily existing subjects, etc. If Crowell had taken into account Husserl’s analyses of the life-world (which, quite surprisingly, he does not address) he would have seen several of his critical additions to phenomenology already confirmed by Husserlian analyses.

Second, is it plausible that “the connection between normativity and meaning” (1) holds for the entire scope of experience? There are vast areas of experience in which we do not commit to things being a certain way, such that we can incur success or failure; thus there are vast areas of experience in which meaning is not a...