Abstract
Hynek Janoušek turns to the phenomenological tradition and Husserl’s Logical Investigations. Husserl’s phenomenology does not include either a unitary experienced self or a Kantian transcendental self, and he describes the self as a bundle. Husserl’s discussions of Hume form part of a wider appreciation of Hume in the German speaking world at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. There are, however, important differences between the constituents of our bundles for Hume and Husserl. For Husserl, the conscious contents of experience have intentionality, that is, they are experienced as directed at pumpkins and pencils, trees and patches of red, whereas for Hume, such impressions and ideas are described according to their intrinsic character. In the second edition of Logical Investigations, Husserl abandons Hume entirely, as he there comes to accept the existence of a pure unitary ego.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
I will also use the abbreviation LI for his Logical Investigations.
- 3.
‘A’ in front of the page number refers to the page number of the first German edition of the Logical Investigations as given in the critical edition of the work (Husserl 1984). If there is no page number of the English translation (Husserl 2001) given, the translation is mine since the text quoted or referred to is omitted from the English translation.
- 4.
Husserl changed his mind concerning the topic of the self in the second edition of the book. Since the English translation of the Logical Investigations follows the second edition, the whole change of view is lost to the English reader.
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
I will also use ‘PES’ as an abbreviation of the full title.
- 8.
According to Brentano, all psychical phenomena are intentionally related to an object. Besides being intentionally related to an object, all psychical phenomena also perceive themselves. Brentano calls this self-perception ‘inner perception’ (1973, 70, 98).
- 9.
I am following the translation of ‘psychische Phänomene’ as ‘psychical phenomena’, instead of ‘mental phenomena’ used in the original translation.
- 10.
I would like to thank Robin Rollinger for making the passage from manuscript Ps 53 and its English translation available to me. ‘Divisiva’ are parts at which we can arrive only by dividing a concrete whole into its constituents. Such parts are not things ‘in and of themselves’ (Brentano 1973, 120; editor’s footnote). For a somewhat different evaluation of Brentano’s view of Hume’s idea of the self as a bundle, see Textor (2013). For further discussion of Brentano’s theory of the unity of consciousness, see Fréchette (2015) and Dewalque (2017).
- 11.
It is important to note that when Brentano writes that ‘there is no such thing as the soul’ (1973, 8) he is not referring to his own views but to views commonly associated with the nineteenth century ‘psychology without the soul’. This wasn’t his view. In his lectures on immortality in 1869–70 Brentano claimed that ‘experience offers the concept of the soul everywhere. In every one of our perceptions it is co-grasped’ (1869, 29679; see Rollinger forthcoming). This seems to be a view to which Brentano firmly held. However, this view implies that we can explicate what is a soul (the one unitary thing), and, if it is indeed a substance, what we actually mean by substance. For Brentano, this involves metaphysical investigations.
- 12.
Cf. ‘As to immortality, it is precisely as easy to conceive that a succession of feelings, a thread of consciousness, may be prolonged to eternity, as that a spiritual substance for ever continues to exist: and any evidence which would prove the one, will prove the other’ (Mill 1872, 246).
- 13.
Later in his career, Brentano changed his view, accepting that a group of real things is itself a real thing. However, for Brentano a group as a thing cannot be a unitary thing in and of itself; therefore, consciousness cannot be a group.
- 14.
He nevertheless uses the phrase ‘substantive unity’ in one place to characterize what is revealed in inner perception (see Brentano 1973, 130).
- 15.
Since an intentional relation is always a relation to something, this something must be presented. Since, for Brentano, all psychical phenomena are intentional, they must be either presentations or based on presentations.
- 16.
Brentano means to say that the cause could be replaced by another one which is not a presentation.
- 17.
Textor (2013, 79–80) finds another option insofar as two independent perceptual phenomena (of e.g. hearing and seeing) could contribute to a non-inferential comparative judgement affirming hearing and seeing. It is not clear to me how this judgement could be evident, as Brentano wants it to be, and how the consciousness of ‘and’ (or consciousness of the togetherness of phenomena) could arise. If it is constituted by the non-inferential judgement then it seems to me that what we have here is a peculiar version of a higher-order theory of consciousness.
- 18.
However, for Husserl, the present phase of experience is not complemented by past and anticipated experiences describable as objects of our present memory and present anticipatory imagination, as Brentano would have it. Rather ‘retention’ and ‘protention’ are modes of experiences unified with ‘urimpressions’, that is, with experiences given in the ‘present now’. Living presence of retention, urimpression, and protention is thus not to be confused with the coexistence of experiences in the present now.
- 19.
Husserl calls this unified complex of experiences a ‘phenomenological ego’ or ‘phenomenologically reduced ego’. This is a bit confusing, because, as we will see, Husserl claims that the stream of consciousness is anonymous.
- 20.
This question makes no sense from the standpoint of Husserl’s later transcendental idealism. It is therefore omitted from the second edition of LI.
- 21.
See also Janoušek and Zahavi (2020, 622–626).
- 22.
- 23.
For a detailed explication of this passage from the standpoint of Husserl’s transcendental philosophy, see Marbach (1974, 74–121).
- 24.
Lipps, Pfänder and Husserl engaged themselves with each other’s work and exchanged arguments on various topics—the nature of the self and of empathy being among the most important ones.
- 25.
Lipps (1901, 12) stresses that this subjective awareness of the self as having an active, but limited influence on how objects appear is not of a reflective kind. The self as a conscious object is given only in a reflection on its past.
- 26.
For a discussion of this type of objection, see Penelhum (1976, 12–15).
- 27.
- 28.
For a somewhat different, but related worry, formulated from the standpoint of Hume scholarship, see Penelhum (1992).
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Janoušek, H. (2022). Husserl (and Brentano) on Hume’s Notion of the Self. In: O'Brien, D. (eds) Hume on the Self and Personal Identity. Philosophers in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04275-1_11
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