Abstract

Already in his 1913 Ideen I, Husserl claimed that there are two types of intuition: experiencing, that is, sense, intuition and ideal intuition. The former provides us with contingent facts, whereas the latter provides essences. Commenting on this dichotomy in his own book-length work, Appearance and Sense, published in 1914, Shpet believed Husserl had overlooked an important and distinct type of phenomenon that we call “social” and thereby omitted a corresponding third type of intuition that reveals the social function or purpose of a thing. This oversight on Husserl’s part led him to claim that an “I,” or ego, stood behind or possessed the human individual’s consciousness. Husserl failed to notice that we can and do meaningfully speak of a social consciousness that, as such, belongs to no single individual. Apart from the “evidence” of ordinary language, Husserl’s strict dichotomy leaves unaddressed how we can proceed from external appearances to their understanding, which cognitively is always in terms of concepts, traditionally called “universals.” That is, we frame our experiences and express them verbally, the words employed being meaningful to us and hopefully to “the other.” Realizing the problem of transiting from the intuition of the contingent to that of the ideal, Shpet in early 1917 downplayed the difference, preferring to call them different degrees of seeing with different conscious attitudes. He called the conscious “seeing” associated with an understanding of words “intelligible intuition.” With an interest in historical methodology predating his acquaintance with phenomenology, Shpet recognized that the only tool available to the historian is the words appearing on documents, which serve as signs. How we understand these signs forms the study of hermeneutics, which functions as the epistemology of history. However, the fear remains that if we conceive the understanding of signs and “intelligible intuition” subjectively, we lapse into a psychologism. We must not forget the social origin of language, that language is no more the possession of an individual than is consciousness. The sense of words is established in an intersubjective context. Thus, Shpet turned to a study of language much as he had previously turned to consciousness and saw neither as subjective.