James’s contemporaries Charles Sanders Peirce and Josiah Royce stood in close dialectical exchange with him on these themes. Differences between them concerned the scope and conditions to be assigned experience. In general, Peirce argued that experience is to be construed more narrowly, in terms of mathematical logic and physics, whereas Royce argued that the understanding of truth, error, and meaning requires the assumption of an absolute knower or experiencer. Peirce was a seminal thinker whose thoughts were often beginnings in the more systematically developed philosophies of the other Americans. Tendencies in continental Europe Edmund Husserl and Phenomenology
Edmund Husserl, the German philosopher, used the term Phenomenology to name a whole philosophy. In order to rid his transcendental investigation of empirical prejudgments and to discover connections of meaning that are necessary truths underlying both physical and psychological sciences, Husserl bracketed and suspended all judgments of existence and empirical causation. He did not deny them; rather, he no longer simply asserted them. He reflected upon their intended meaning. In reflection he claimed to see that things have meaning in terms of how they appear to men in their pre-reflective life and that awareness is in terms of this “how.” In pre-reflective life, however, men are not aware of the “how” as such. By exposing this basic meaning through which men refer to things, he can free their eyes of the “cataracts” of the stereotyped and the obvious and can summon them “back to the things themselves.”
Edmund Husserl, c. 1930.Archiv für Kunst und Geschichte, Berlin
Husserl took traditional metaphysics to be infested with precritical commitments to existence, either physicalistic, psychologistic, or logistic. He used the term ontology, however, to apply to his study of objects of consciousness and even appropriated the Aristotelian term first philosophy. The world appears within the reflective bracket as existentially neutral (that is, as regards whether things have existence in themselves or exist for men) but ontologically ordered because, if various orders of beings exist, then what they are can be nothing but what they are intended to be. And what they are cannot be known until all they are intended to be is known.
Husserl distinguished two types of ontologies: formal ontologies, which are the domain of meanings, or essences, such as “one,” “many,” “whole,” or “part,” that are articulated by formal logic and which Husserl referred to as empty; and material ontologies, which discover and map the meaning and structure of sensory experience through transcendental investigation. In material ontology, for example, the essence of any physical thing is discovered by varying in the imagination the object that is given within its strictly correlative mode of perceptual consciousness; the essence is that identical something that continuously maintains itself during the process of variation. It is intuited that the perceived thing cannot vary in the imagination beyond the point of something given perspectively and incompletely to any given perceiving glance; hence, this is the essence of any physical thing. This is a truth of eidetic necessity and comprises a first principle in Husserl’s projected philosophical science; e.g., numbers are what they are because of the ways in which they are not like things. The Existentialists
Husserl had early distinguished the primary task of description of “morphological essences” (those with “floating” spheres of application in the sensory life) from description of essences like those in geometry, which described closed, or definite, manifolds; but the question of the theoretical status of the ordinary perceptual world, or lived world (Lebenswelt), became increasingly disputed among Existentialists. They asked whether there can be a philosophical science that has made all its presuppositions transparent to itself. If transcendental elucidation of the Lebenswelt, with its historically established sediments of meaning, is really essential to show how theoretical sciences are grounded, then one may reasonably ask how Phenomenology can be sure it has accomplished the elucidation completely because it is itself a theory. The question gained urgency by Husserl’s nearly imperceptible slide into what appeared to be an Idealist position regarding the source of all meaning, a commitment to an absolute ego. If this ego is regarded as individual in any way, the problem arises of how any other individual can be as other because it is constituted in this primal ego.
Husserl’s theory of the ego was rejected by French Existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. For the latter, the bracketing of meanings can never be completed, for consciousness is not an enclosed individual that could grasp through reflection all its possible motivations to experience and give meaning to a world. Knowers are subjects with bodies, whose perceptual life is articulated only incompletely and discloses the world in progressively surprising ways. More meaning is found in existence than can at any moment be expressed, and even the meaning of existence is not reducible to any definable set of meanings.
Husserl’s approach was not nearly radical enough for Martin Heidegger, a German thinker sometimes called an Existentialist. In thinking that he could prescind so neatly from facts and retain the essence of facts, Husserl was still involved to some extent in the prejudgments—the psychologistic, physicalistic, and logistic dualisms—that he inveighed against. For Heidegger there is no realm of consciousness that constitutes meaning, and he does not think that some sharp but harmless line could be drawn between essence and fact. The ambiguity in Husserl’s thought between “object” as sense of the particular and as the encountered particular in its bodily presence is not harmless. It is unjustifiable to think that consciousness can finally demarcate the essential sense of a thing. Thus, Heidegger discarded the very concept of consciousness and proposed a “fundamental ontology” of human being (Dasein). Man as a subject in the world cannot be made the object of sophisticated theoretical conceptions such as “substance” or “cause”; man, furthermore, finds himself already involved in an ongoing world that cannot as a whole be made the object of such conceptions; yet the structure of this involvement is the transcendental condition of any science of objects. For example, a man can band with other men in philosophical groups and can think about the metaphysical status of other men only because he is already essentially with others. He cannot hope to so purify his own thinking that it becomes that of an impersonal thinker, an absolute ego.