Abstract
This article critiques Husserl’s idea of grounding through an exploration of his notion of the lifeworld. First, it sketches different senses of the lifeworld in the Crisis and explains in what sense it is taken to be a universal foundation of all sense-formation. Second, it criticizes Husserl’s idea of grounding and shows that it fails because the alleged foundation—namely, the lifeworld as a perceptual world, or rather lifeworldly experience as perception—is inadequately determined. Perception cannot function as a universal foundation because it is always already interpretation. “The groundlessness of sense” means that the process of sense-formation can in no way rest upon an ultimate ground because contingent presuppositions and historical circumstances influence it from the very beginning. The paper concludes by discussing the consequence of this view for the relation between philosophy and sciences.
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Notes
This text was published as “Die Abgründigkeit des Sinnes: Kritik an Husserls Idee der Grundlegung” in In den Netzen der Lebenswelt; Suhrkamp Verlag: Frankfurt am Main, 1985. It originally appeared in Lebenswelt und Wissenschaft in der Philosophie Edmund Husserls. Edited by Elisabeth Ströker. Klosterman: Frankfurt am Main, 1979. References to Husserl’s Crisis, the Logical Investigations, and the Cartesian Meditations are given parenthetically. Where an English translation is available, we cite it after the German pagination.
On the state of this debate, in which H. Blumbenberg, G. Brand, U. Claesges, H.-G. Gadamer, J. Habermas, P. Janssen, W. Marx, and P. Ricoeur among others have participated, see Landgrebe (1977, pp. 14-22).
See the title of Crisis, Part 3A: “The way into Phenomenological Transcendental Philosophy from the Lifeworld” [Emphasis added by Waldenfels]. On the various approaches to questioning back, see Ricoeur (1978).
This alternative is downplayed when Gadamer mentions the lifeworld, with its questioning after the “essential structure of the world,” and then later: “But the life-world means something else, namely the whole in which we live as historical creatures” (Gadamer 1965, 233/251).
Merleau-Ponty (1945, p. 374/338).
Langrebe brings this under the Husserlian opposition between the “universe of intuitability” and a “concrete universality;” the former meaning a fundamental structure that the individual lifeworlds do not contain as particularities in themselves and which, to that extent, remains abstract (1978, p. 42).
See Merleau-Ponty (1945, p. 451/414).
Cf. for example K 107/C 105, K 163/C 160.
Cf. Gurwitsch (1977, §§ 12–16).
Cf. Derrida (1967).
Cf. the investigations of K. Goldstein; also Merleau-Ponty, (1945, p. 119 ff./100 ff.).
Cf. Snell (1955, pp. 17–42).
Nietzsche (1973, p. 317).
Cf. Blumenberg (1963, p. 26): “In the sytheses of empirical intuition there emerge always selections and leaps,” and this means: “at the lowest most elementary layer of its accomplishments, human intellect is always already grasped as formalizing.” It is well known that Foucault made the middle realm of a factical-a priori “Episteme” the jumping off point of his investigations: “Thus, between the already ‘encoded’ eye and reflexive knowledge there is a middle region which liberates order itself” (1966, p. 12/xxii). Here it is a matter of “wild being [être brut] (an expression borrowed from Merleau-Ponty), which cannot be derived from anything else and that—paradoxically put—yields a “positive ground” (1966, p. 12 / xiii).
See Merleau-Ponty (1949, p. 115 ff./134 ff., 105 ff./123 ff.).
Gadamer (1965, p. 233/252).
Translator’s Note: “Paradigm” and “Exemplar” are technical terms in Kuhn’s philosophy of science.
On this point, see Waldenfels (1978).
For a phenomenologically oriented psychology, see for example Graumann and Métraux (1977)..
For more detail see Waldenfels (1979).
Merleau-Ponty speaks, in view of an overcoming of ethnological alienness, of a “universal lateral” (1960, p. 150/120).
Regarding the outer and inner limitations and exclusions of any discourse, see Foucault (1971).
Wittgenstein (1953, § 325).
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Translator’s Note. We wish to thank Bernhard Waldenfels for his encouragement to carry out this project. We would also like to thank Suhrkamp Verlag for their permission to publish the translation.
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Waldenfels, B., Driker-Ohren, C. & Saber, M. The groundlessness of sense: a critique of Husserl’s idea of grounding. Cont Philos Rev (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-023-09626-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-023-09626-y