AT PLAY IN THE FIELD OF POSSIBLES PATHWAYS IN PHENOMENOLOGY VOL. I Editor Elizabeth A. Behnke Editorial board Edward S. Casey Ion Copoeru Natalie Depraz Mădălina Diaconu Lester Embree Eugene T. Gendlin Klaus Held Nam-In Lee Filip Mattens Jitendra Nath Mohanty Dermot Moran Rosemary Rizo-Patrón Rochus Sowa Bernhard Waldenfels Antonio Zirión Pathways in Phenomenology series is published in collaboration with Initiative in Phenomenological Practice www.ipp-net.org AT PLAY IN THE FIELD OF POSSIBLES An Essay on the Foundation of Self and Free-fantasy Variational Method ¤ Richard M. Zaner Ann Geddes Stahlman Professor Emeritus of Medical Ethics and Philosophy of Medicine Vanderbilt University © ZETA BOOKS, 2012 Zeta Books, Bucharest www.zetabooks.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. www.zetabooks.com ISBN: 978-606-8266-43-5 (paperback) ISBN: 978-606-8266-44-2 (ebook) Th is book is for my enchanting wife, Junanne, a poet whose work and presence is a celebration of life; we have grown older together, loving every moment. "It is out of the dailiness of life that one is driven into the deepest recesses of the self." --Stanley Kunitz

PREFACE A long time ago, I sat down in a rickety chair in a tiny room off a garage at an old desk and with a large stack of blank paper placed just so on it. It was the dead of winter in a place where all this made a great deal of diff erence-it was on the north shore of Long Island-Port Jeff erson, more exactly- in the winter of 1972. I had the idea of sitting down to write about some things that had been nagging me for some time. Not too long, to be sure, for I was still quite a young man, only a whisker past a decade from receiving my doctorate at the Graduate Faculty of Th e New School in 1961. I must have been charmed, for I had been able to study with some fabulous mentors: Maurice Natanson fi rst, while I was still an undergraduate (although, it is true, a bit older than most, having already served in the Air Force as a B-26 gunner in Korea, with 50 combat missions behind me); then Alfred Schutz, Dorion Cairns, Hans Jonas, Werner Marx and, after Schutz's death in 1958, Aron Gurwitsch. All of which was not only instructive in the fi nest sense, but persistently raised a clutch of questions that, I sensed, needed pursuit. Th ey also needed maturity, and I realized that I had to let them settle into my mind, my self. I insistently let them remain unaddressed for as long as I could before I began, ever so slowly and cautiously, to allow them to bubble up and stay a while in the sun, in the soil of my awake mind where I hoped to be able to dig into their grounds, eventually even nurture them to life. So, that winter in the garage's tiny, cold side-room, I began the long process of airing out and thinking about these questions so AT PLAY IN THE FIELD OF POSSIBLES10 that I might begin to learn whether they really were worth pursuit, worth pondering fi rst this way then that until, eventually, things could be a little settled between us, these questions and myself. And, like a lot of seekings that probe really good questions, things turned out quite a bit diff erently from what I had fi rst imagined. What eventually emerged was a somewhat lengthy manuscript. Even so, I knew that what I was searching for had yet to be found much less clarifi ed. So I put the thing to rest, back on the shelf where nobody would be likely to look. And forgot it. I was, I now realized, acting in the best spirit of what I had been absorbing during my studies with those wonderfully keen and always critical mentors. I wanted, in a word, to explore these phenomena myself, on my own, as best as I could, without worrying about what others might have said or not said-even while I surely do recognize the value of that kind of scholarship. I needed, and still need, to explore so that I can see for myself, so to speak. Which is not to deny that others may well have visited this terrain-Husserl surely had done so, and some others, I have no doubt-but, in the spirit of phenomenological inquiry as I came to understand this discipline, I knew that I had to visit there for myself. What follows is the substance of that voyage-one that took a good deal longer than I had ever imagined. Th is little book is not the fi rst time I've published my thoughts about some of the matters those questions make prominent. I've done two articles-the fi rst nicely buried in the honorable if neglected cemetery of a Festschrift in memory of Dorion Cairns,1 the second an article several years later, where some of the ideas seemed to me more clearly pursued.2 Still others touched lightly on this or that feature of the phenomenon, but 1 Richard M. Zaner, "Th e Art of Free-Fantasy Variation in Rigorous Phenomenological Science," in F. Kersten and R. Zaner (eds.), Phenomenology: Continuation and Criticism, Essays in Memory of Dorion Cairns, Th e Hague: Martinus Nijhoff , 1973) 192-219. 2 Richard M. Zaner, "Examples and Possibles: A Criticism of Husserl's Th eory of Free-Fantasy Variation," Research in Phenomenology III, 1973, pp. 29-43 Preface 11 it was especially Cairns, I must say, whose meticulous study of Husserl-with whom he had spent some years on two diff erent occasions-persuaded me that the phenomenon of free-fantasy deserved far more attention than it had received from him or Husserl, for that matter. To my knowledge, this somewhat fabulous but always extraordinary method has never received very much attention, a circumstance which persuades me, to be blunt, that either of several hypotheses must be correct. Husserl's many strong claims (see below, Chapter II) about the method he conceived based on the phenomena is either (a) totally exaggerated, and thereby, it may be, my own interest as well; (b) the "naturalistic" bend of mind which, he noted more than once, would surely-and deservedly, which is the point here-fi nd much to lampoon in Husserl's claim that "fi ction" is the source of all "eternal knowledge;" or (c) Husserl's claim is basically right, but he left too much unexplored for his own claim to deserve more than passing mention; or, fi nally, (d) Husserl himself, far more focused on establishing the grounds and method for "eternal truths," for reasons that are clear enough in his many works, failed to focus on the phenomenon that underlies the very possibility of those grounds and method–and took most of his students and followers with him in this other route. I think that (c) and (d) are closest to the truth. In fact, I have found no treatment of the specifi c phenomenon itself. As I note in Chapter II below, Edward Casey has surely come closest to appreciating what Husserl seemed to have been driving at. He has not only acknowledged Husserl's emphasis, but also appreciates that bringing free-fantasy variation within phenomenological method itself allows Husserl "to view imagining unambivalently and in its full signifi cance."3 Casey's interest, however, is 3 Edward S. Casey, Imagining: A Phenomenological Study, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976, 225. AT PLAY IN THE FIELD OF POSSIBLES12 less to probe the specifi c method, its roots and grounds, and its "full signifi cance" than it is to inquire into imagination more generally-with which I have no quarrel. I want to be clear about my interests, however. While I surely do probe the roots of free-fantasy variational method, I must also be very clear about the terrain my study actually explores. It was, in fact, while addressing issues posed by Husserl's method that I found myself being tugged into what at fi rst seemed a quite diff erent theme: that of so-called "self." Th oughts of learning what others had to say about free-fantasy quickly faded into the background as I was increasingly fascinated by what had, quite without advance notice, become the principal topic of my refl ections. Th is was, in a certain sense, not surprising, for I had long been attracted to this phenomenon. (CS) Still, from the beginning of this present study, my aim had been to probe the roots of free-fantasy method; yet, as it progressed, the phenomenon of self was persistently being focused. I make no apologies for this, as one might be tempted to term it, diversion, for as quickly becomes clear the two themes are closely connected, as I hope will become clear as I probe and explore the phenomenon of free-fantasy variation. LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS CM = Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations DCa = Dorion Cairns, "Perceiving, Remembering, Image-Awareness & Feigning" DCb = Dorion Cairns, "An Approach to Husserlian Phenomenology" EU = Edmund Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil FTL = Edmund Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic Ideas I = Edmund Husserl, General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology PCP = Edmund Husserl, "Philosophy as a Rigorous Science," in Quentin Lauer (Editor), Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy. SB = Suzanne Bachelard, A Study of Husserl's Formal and Transcendental Logic. Zaner, CS = Th e Context of Self