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What is the Question to Which Husserl’s Fifth Cartesian Meditation is the Answer?

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Abstract

Interpreters generally agree that the Fifth Cartesian Meditation fails to achieve its task, but they do not agree on what that task is. In my essay, I attempt to formulate the question to which the Fifth Cartesian Meditation gives the answer. While it is usually assumed that the text poses a rather ambitious question, I suggest that the text asks, “How is the Other given to me on the most basic level?” The answer would be that the Other is given as accessible in the mode of inaccessibility. Husserl’s failure to convey this question clearly seems rooted in ambiguities concerning the concepts of solipsism and the sphere of ownness.

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Notes

  1. Hans-Georg Gadamer suggests that understanding a text means understanding the question to which the text gives an answer (Gadamer 1986, p. 368 ff.). Robert Bernasconi employs this hermeneutical principle in his illuminating essay on Levinas, “What is the Question to which ‘Substitution’ is the Answer?” (Bernasconi 2002).

  2. Let me be clear from the beginning as to what shall not (and cannot) be accomplished in this essay. The task will not be to evaluate the significance of CM V for Husserl’s work. Neither will I ask whether Husserl’s other texts harbour resources for developing alternative and possibly better accounts of intersubjectivity, as has been the project of several insightful studies. Cf. Mensch (1988), Steinbock (1995), Zahavi (1996).

  3. Derrida (1991, p. 71).

  4. Sartre (1993, p. 252 f.).

  5. Smith (2003, p. 215).

  6. Mensch (1988, p. 24).

  7. Mensch (1988, p. 24). Mensch makes the following statement which, in its argumentative structure, is somewhat puzzling: “The context is that of the transcendental attitude with its epoché. Within this attitude, being is reduced to being given. This means that the question of the givenness of the Other becomes the question of the being of the Other.”—If the last sentence is to hold true, then “being” in this context means being as appearance, not being in itself or as such, and the epoché would not be violated.

  8. Mensch (1988, p. 36).

  9. Theunissen (1977, p. 102). It is striking that Theunissen formulates the goal of CM V in this way, yet considers “constitution” such a controversial topic that he will not take position regarding its meaning.

  10. Ibid. Theunissen writes “der Weg zu diesem Ziel,” which could be translated as “way to this goal.” Yet since “way” in English carries a less instrumental connotation than the German “Weg,” a less literal translation of this German idiom seems called for. I have thus resorted to translating it as “means,” even though the English idiom to which it corresponds is not “means to a goal” but “means to an end.”

  11. Theunissen (1977, p. 103).

  12. Theunissen (1977, p. 103).

  13. Theunissen (1977, p. 103 ff.).

  14. Levinas and Theunissen seem to be in agreement on this issue, although they describe it in rather different ways.

  15. Concerning the question as to whether Husserl considered intersubjectivity a central topic for phenomenology, the number of manuscripts on intersubjectivity (Hua XIII–XV) can be taken as an indication that he indeed deemed it essential. The number of pages Husserl wrote on intersubjectivity does not simply mean that he was dissatisfied with CM V. That intersubjectivity figures in his dissatisfaction with certain published texts on phenomenological method and reduction confirms the centrality of this issue.

  16. Interestingly, those philosophers who investigate the singularity of the Other are generally either directly influenced by Husserl (like Levinas and Derrida) or indirectly (i.e., by way of Levinas and Derrida).

  17. Theunissen himself points out how the Husserlian tension between the Other as subject and as object has significantly influenced Sartre’s account of the Other in Being and Nothingness. Sartre reverses Husserl’s emphasis and claims that the “earliest” experience is that of me being the object for the Other, not me being the subject. Yet it is questionable whether Sartre can really show this priority, especially since he mainly proceeds by way of examples.

  18. Steinbock (1995, p. 66).

  19. Let me point out that my disagreement with Steinbock concerning the role of CM V does not diminish my appreciation of his project, in Home and Beyond, of pursuing a generative phenomenology after Husserl.

  20. Steinbock (1995, p. 66).

  21. A question that cannot be discussed here concerns the relation between the Cartesian way into phenomenology and other pathways, such as the way through psychology and the way through the lifeworld. It seems to me that Husserl deems certain elements of the Cartesian way still helpful and imports them into other pathways, despite his criticism of the Cartesian way (which concerns mainly the danger of lapsing back into the natural attitude because one does not yet know what has been gained by the change of attitude (Hua VI, p. 158/155)). Husserl also implies that each path, “as a path already taken, (...) offers itself as one that can at any time be taken again” (Hua VI, p. 123/120). For a more detailed analysis of the relation between the different pathways, see Bernet et al. (1995, pp. 65–75), Drummond (1975), and Chaps. 5 and 6 in Stähler (2003).

  22. Steinbock (1995, p. 65).

  23. David Carr expresses this very well: “The task which arises is to explain how the Other exists for him, not whether the Other exists as such” (1973, p. 19).

  24. The Crisis, in contrast, also examines both intersubjectivity and the lifeworld, yet focuses much more on the world than on the Other.

  25. The concepts of pairing and appresentation are very complex and have been submitted to criticism by Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. For a discussion of these critiques which owns up to the complexity of the issue, see Mooney (2007). Mooney argues that the criticism is partly persuasive but fails to do justice to Husserl’s conception of appresentation.

  26. Scheler (1973, p. 232 f.).

  27. Especially the volumes on intersubjectivity, such as Hua XIII, p. 6: “Without a ‘you,’ there is no ‘I’ opposed to it.”

  28. Eugen Fink, “Response to Alfred Schutz.” In Schutz (2004, p. 170).

  29. Schutz (2004, p. 172).

  30. Cf. Yamaguchi (1982).

  31. Schutz writes: “Only in as much as the very subjectivity of an Other is in question are the ‘products’ of that subjectivity ‘screened off’ in the sphere that is ‘properly’ of the ego (Par. 45)” (2004, p. 148). It is in order to investigate the subjectivity of the Other that it becomes necessary to “screen off” the contributions of the Other.

  32. It may seem that Husserl’s comparison between the inaccessibility of the Other and the way in which my own past eludes me on the level of time-consciousness lessens the Other’s inaccessibility (cf. Hua I, p. 144 f.). However, a closer study of time-consciousness shows that there is already a most primordial disappointment occurring on the level of the past that slips away: a first occurrence of otherness in the self. See Held (1966, p. 131 ff.).

  33. Bernet et al. (1995, p. 156 ff). Smith (2003, p. 216 ff.) calls them the “solipsistic sphere” and the “sphere of ownness.”

  34. To be sure, Bernet, Marbach, Kern mention that according to a later manuscript (namely, text nr. 36 from 1934 (Hua XV, p. 634 ff.), which we shall discuss below), “the primordial sense of primordinality would be the solipsistic sense” (Bernet et al. 1995, p. 159).

  35. Husserl distinguishes this form of “Nature” carefully and convincingly from Nature in the objective sense, which the natural scientist focuses on (Hua I, p. 127).

  36. This access turns out to be more complicated than it first seems, as discussed in the final part of this essay.

  37. I agree with Smith that “Husserl does have a use for both of these notions” (2003, p. 219), but I am arguing that one of them bears a merely preliminary, methodological function.

  38. Translation taken from Bernet et al. (1995, p. 159).

  39. Bernet et al. (1995, p. 159) and Smith (2003, p. 218) quote this passage as evidence that there are two concepts of the sphere of ownness in play in CM V. On my reading, the most important contribution of this passage consists in alerting us to the significance of the solipsistic reduction as preliminary and as a methodological step. The passage thus shows that the two concepts are not co-existent. It is not entirely certain that the “primordinal sphere of ownness” from CM V can be equated with the “proto-modal monad” mentioned here. Yet, because the topic of (Husserlian) monads has such complex implications and connections, a closer examination of this issue cannot be undertaken here.

  40. E.g, Embree (2006).

  41. In that sense, the solipsistic reduction could be compared to the stepwise reduction Husserl uses in the Crisis when he asks us to abstract from the sciences. Cf. Hua VI, Section 35.

  42. With respect to a slightly different issue—namely, the possibility of describing a purely pretheoretic experience—Husserl states very nicely in his lecture course on Phenomenological Psychology: “Was sich uns im schlichten Hinblick als Gesehenes, Gehörtes, als irgendwie Erfahrenes gibt, das trägt bei näherer Überlegung an sich derartige Niederschläge früherer Geistestätigkeiten, und so ist es fraglich, wo dann je eine wirklich vortheoretische Welt in reiner Erfahrung zu finden ist, frei von den Sinnesniederschlägen vorangegangenen Denkens” (Hua IX, p. 56).

  43. Carr (1973, p. 15).

  44. Carr (1973, p. 19).

  45. Merleau-Ponty (1964, p. 173, italics in original).

  46. Merleau-Ponty (1964, p. 174).

  47. Steinbock (1995, p. 51ff.), Carr (1973, p. 24 f.).

  48. Ms. E III 9, S. 84 (1931), quoted from Held (1966), p. 166, my translation.

  49. The following rather condensed comments are based on Klaus Held’s important study Lebendige Gegenwart (1966).

  50. This peculiar dual character of standing and streaming is familiar to us from the dual meaning of the “now.” “Now” designates the enduring form of presence, on the one hand, and the manifold of temporal positions in the flow, on the other. This original unity-in-manifold is necessary in order to encounter a thing as identical. Klaus Held presents the complex relation between enduring, unified form and streaming manifold in a helpful image: “The Now as standing and enduring form of current presence marks everything that flows through it, puts the stamp of the unified present on it, as it were, and effects in this way that the marked Now immediately turns into a temporal position.” (Held 1966, p. 32; my translation).

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Correspondence to Tanja Staehler.

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An earlier version of this essay was delivered at the Husserl Circle Meeting in Prague, April 22–28, 2007. I would like to thank the participants for their helpful questions and comments.

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Staehler, T. What is the Question to Which Husserl’s Fifth Cartesian Meditation is the Answer?. Husserl Stud 24, 99–117 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-008-9036-4

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