Abstract
I present the first systematic account in the literature of a Husserlian response to Natorp’s critique of Husserl’s account (in Ideas I) of the pre-givenness of both the absolute stream of lived-experience and its essences to reflection . My response is presented within the broader context of what I argue is Heidegger’s misappropriation of Natorp’s critique of the phenomenological limits of reflection in Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology and the misguided French attempt to address Heidegger’s critique by introducing the dialectical notion of “pre-reflective” consciousness to phenomenology. My Husserlian response (1) shows that Husserl’s account of reflection in Ideas I is able to rebut Natorp’s critical claims that transcendental phenomenology cannot access the streaming of the stream of lived-experience without “stilling” its flow and (2) that a gap in Husserl’s account of the transformation of the natural phenomenon of reflection into transcendental reflection provides justification for Natorp’s criticism of the ambiguity of Husserl’s account in Ideas I of the givenness of the essence of lived-experience investigated by transcendental phenomenology.
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Notes
- 1.
“Paul Gerhard Natorp was one of the most prominent philosophers in Germany at the turn of the last century… [He was a student of] Hermann Cohen and F.A. Lange, and of their interpretation of Kant … Boris Pasternak, Karl Barth, and Ernst Cassirer were among his students … In addition to Cohen, academic colleagues included the philosopher Nicolai Hartmann, the theologians Rudolf Bultmann and Rudolf Otto, and the literary scholar Ernst Robert Curtius. Late in life, Natorp directed Hans-Georg Gadamer’s doctoral dissertation … and, together with his long-time philosophical interlocutor, Edmund Husserl of Freiburg, engineered Martin Heidegger’s appointment as an Extraordinarius at Marburg in 1923. Upon Natorp’s death the following summer Heidegger assumed his chair, thus bringing the department’s Kantian orientation to a decisive close” (Kim, Alan, “Paul Natorp”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Summer 2016).
- 2.
Paul Natorp, “Husserls Ideen zu enier reinen Phänomenologie,” Die Geisteswissenschften I (1914): 426–448. Republished in Logos: International Zeitschrift für Philosophie der Kultur 7 (1917–18): 224–246. References here, cited as “Natorp 1973” are to the reprint in Hermann Noack’s volume Husserl (Noack 1973, 36–60). English: “Paul Natorp. Husserl’s Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology,” trans. J. Veith, in The Sources of Husserl’s ‘Ideas I, eds. A. Staiti and E. Clarke (Berlin, Boston: de Gruyter, 2017), 305–324.
- 3.
See especially “War Emergency Semester 1919,” in Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie (Heidegger 1987). Hereafter cited as ZBP.
- 4.
Sartre 1956, liii.
- 5.
An exhaustive digital search of Husserliana reveals two instances where Husserl does in fact use the term “pre-reflective,” once as an adjective, “vorreflektiven Sphäre” (Husserl 1952, 252) and once as a noun: “Offenbar kann sich mein Ich erst konstituieren, nachdem sich schon das Vor-Reflektive, das Geradehin-Seiende, konstituiert hat” (Husserl 2014, 459). In both cases, however, the context is not a transcendental judgment about the eidetic relationship between reflectively and non-reflectively modified lived-experiences but a general description whose province is not rigorously transcendental. These isolated instances, therefore, on my view, do not provide evidence of Husserl’s employment of the term in a rigorous terminological sense.
- 6.
See, for instance, Zahavi 1999, p. 54ff. Zahavi, of course, is not alone in operating uncritically on the basis of this assumption. But given his high visibility, his work is perhaps emblematic of it. In the passage referred to, Zahavi appeals to Husserl’s own words to explain, “how reflection also relies on a prior prereflective self-awareness” (Zahavi 1999, 54), even though those words in the passages he cites (and everywhere else) do not include the word ‘prereflective’.
- 7.
Paul Natorp, Platos Ideen Lehre. Eine Einführun in den Idealismus (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2004a). Originally published 1902 and again in 1921 as a Second Edition. English trans. Plato’s Theory of Ideas. An Introduction to Idealism, trans. Vasilis Politis and John Connolly (Academia Verlag, 2004b). Cited as “PTI.”
- 8.
Andrea Staiti’s generally informative discussion of Natorp’s review in “The Ideen and Neo-Kantianism” (Staiti 2013), seems to identify Natorp’s reference “to bringing the eidê into motion and fluidifying them” (78) with “Plato’s dialectical method as the way to grasp the essence of things,” and to claim, on this basis, “Natorp here represents a longstanding tradition in philosophy according to which essences ‘manifest themselves’ only in cognition” (80). While Natorp does indeed refer to Plato’s dialectical method, he argues in Plato’s Theory Ideas that that method is used (in Plato’s Sophist) to investigate not the “essence of things” but the relation to one another of the five greatest gene (eidê). The “community” of these eidê, however, is not established for Natorp through dialectically produced “definitions” (80) that discover “true relations in the intelligible realm.” Rather, on Natorp’s view, the dialectical investigation of the community or participation of the eidê in one another establishes that the condition of every cognitive relation itself involves a deeper relation, namely, the “positing [Setzung]” (PTI, 305) of the “pre-relational [vorbezüglichen]” self-reference of each of the greatest eidê as well as the positing of each eidos’s proper relation to the other greatest eidê. It is thus because kinêsis is involved in both what he calls “the fundamental situation of relation [Beziehungsgrundlage]” (303) of the pre-relational self-reference and the relation to an other, that Natorp draws the conclusion behind his critique of Husserl’s Aristotelian account of the eidê, namely, that relations are more fundamental than things. Although I cannot go further into it here, the acceptance of this critique would not lead to Husserl’s genetic phenomenology, as some have argued, but rather to a casting aside of the Aristotelian priority of the tode ti as an implicit “guiding clue” for phenomenology’s eidetics.
- 9.
The distinction Natorp really wants here is that between “exact” and “inexact” (morphological) essences, because either kind of essence, on Husserl’s view, can exhibit “abstracta” that, in turn, lend themselves to essential explication. See Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and a Phenomenological Philosophy, §74.
- 10.
Natorp therefore does not extend his critique (in Allgemeine Psychologie nach kritishcher Methode [Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1912) of the “objectivation” of the subjective that drives traditional psychology and Husserl’s presentation of phenomenology as “descriptive psychology” in Logical Investigations to Husserl’s presentation of phenomenology in Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology. (Regarding the earlier critique, see Sebastian Luft, in “Reconstruction and Reduction: Natorp and Husserl on Method and the Question of Subjectivity,” Neo-Kantianism in Contemporary Philosophy [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010], 64–66. Hereafter cited as “Luft.”)
- 11.
“September 10, 1918: Edmund Husserl to Martin Heidegger,” in Becoming Heidegger, ed. Theodore Kisiel and Thomas Sheehan, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 361.
- 12.
To argue that Natorp’s claims about the limits of reflection vis-à-vis knowledge of the streaming of the stream presuppose eidetic knowledge of unreflective lived-experience, that is, the knowledge that “‘consciousness is essentially a stream’,” (Staiti, 84) does not really get at the heart of his critique of Husserl. Natorp’s claim, as we’ve seen, is not that consciousness is essentially a stream, but that a dimension of it is, and it is precisely that dimension, in its streaming, that reflection on it stops and therefore changes from its non-reflective flowing nature. I show below that Husserl’s account of reflection addresses what Natorp’s critique of it does not, namely, how the access to the streaming dimension of lived-experience presupposed by his method comes about. Moreover, I show that according to Husserl’s account, the change in the nature of unreflectively lived-experience induced by its reflective objectivation is itself presented by Husserl as a phenomenon, the recognition of which takes place in “higher” acts of reflection.
- 13.
The attempt to fashion a Husserlian response to Natorp’s critique of the status of the givenness of the essence in Husserl by invoking the distinction between Wesensschau and Wesenserkenntnis begs the question, on my view, that Natorp justifiably raises concerning Husserl’s talk in Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology about the essence’s absolute mode of givenness. As we’ve seen, Natorp is questioning how it’s possible for the essence to be said to be absolute, in the sense of being given “ready-made” in advance of the seeing that sees it. To say that it’s first seen, in a seeing that provides the basis for its cognition but is sufficiently different from it to be non-conceptual, does not address the question of the mode of the putative non-conceptual givenness. To characterize the givenness of the essence in terms of “a move from unthematic to the thematic” (Staiti, 82), a move that functions “to increase the clarity of the given essence,” presupposes rather than addresses the question of the givenness proper to the essence’s unthematic status. It presupposes that the essence is somehow there and “ready-made,” waiting to be thematized and conceptually clarified. But this seems to be precisely what Husserl’s post Ideas account of Wesensschau rules out, namely, that, in advance of methodological intervention, the eidos is somehow already pre-constituted. Indeed, Husserl’s most developed account of Wesensschau (in Experience and Judgment) makes no mention at all of degrees of thematic clarity being a factor in the seeing of an eidos.
Interestingly in this connection, Husserl writes the following in the margin of his copy of Natorp’s Allgemeine Psychologie:
The opposition of object-subject that is at play here finds its comprehensive resolution only through the phenomenological reduction, viz., in contrasting the natural attitude—which has givennesses, entities, objects as pregiven—the transcendental attitude, which goes back to the ego cogito, i.e., which passes over to absolute reflection , which posits primal facts and primal cognition , i.e., absolute cognition of possible cognition that has nothing pregiven but that is purely self-having cognition (sich selbst habendes Erkennen). (Luft 2010, 74.)
Husserl most likely wrote this note in 1918, when, as he relates in his letter to Heidegger referred to above, he “took up” (361) Natorp’s book and studied it. Thus, some five years after the publication of his Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology, Husserl—at least in the thinking behind the writing of this note—seems to have given up on the idea of the “pregiven” in connection with “absolute cognition.” Since this would presumably include the absolute cognition of essences, it appears that Husserl had moved significantly beyond the position presented in his Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology that was the target of Natorp’s critique.
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Hopkins, B.C. (2021). The “Offence of any and all Ready-Made Givenness”. Natorp’s Critique of Husserl’s Ideas I. In: Parker, R.K.B. (eds) The Idealism-Realism Debate Among Edmund Husserl’s Early Followers and Critics. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 112. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62159-9_4
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