The Future of Husserlian Phenomenology

David Carr


Here are a few loosely related topics that come to my mind when I think of the future of Husserlian phenomenology:

Future and Past

    In his early years Husserl was one of those thinkers who believed in a sharp distinction between “doing” philosophy and doing its history. In this he was like his admired predecessor, Descartes; and many philosophers who came later, notably in the analytic tradition, have shared this view. Such philosophers often share another belief, that the key to “doing” philosophy is to be found in a method: the Cartesian method, the phenomenological method, the method of “linguistic analysis,” and the like. To solve or dissolve philosophy’s problems, we need only to find and apply the right method. The history of philosophy can be left to historians of ideas. Critics of the phenomenological tradition, from within and from without, often express their irritation that so many books are written about Husserl, about Heidegger, about Merleau-Ponty, and so few are devoted to “doing” phenomenology. Isn’t this a betrayal of Husserl’s spirit? And given the many volumes of pedantic scholarship and trivial philological interpretation, these sentiments are understandable. 
    When we indulge these sentiments, however, it is useful to remember that in his later years Husserl somewhat changed his view on this matter. What he realized was that the problems of philosophy, our idea of “doing” philosophy, our ideas of method, do not simply hang there in the air, waiting for us to take them up; they come to us from the tradition, whether we are aware of it or not. To be fully conscious of what we are “doing,” we need to be aware of where it comes from. The history of philosophy and of phenomenology can be done badly, to be sure; but then “doing” phenomenology can be done very badly too. And both can be done very well. Like the future in general, the future of phenomenology cannot be cut off from its past.
 
Where is the future?

    Phenomenology has its roots in central Europe, and in European philosophy. For many years it has been a vital part of philosophical life in North and South America. In the fall of 2001 a large conference was held at Peking University to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the publication of Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen. This conference, which was also attended by philosophers from Japan, Taiwan and Korea, also marked the founding of the Research Center for Phenomenology at Peking University. A similar Research Center also exists at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The Chinese Society for Phenomenology has existed since the early 1990s. The practice of phenomenology by Asian scholars, apart from its intrinsic interest, raises questions about the connection between culture and philosophy. Speaking in geopolitical terms, people often say that the future lies in Asia, and in China in particular. Perhaps the future of phenomenology lies there too.

Mind and Brain

    Meanwhile, back in Euro-North America, the topic of the day is the mind-brain relation. For long time, philosophers in the positivistic-analytic tradition thought that if we just learned more about the brain, the problem of consciousness, and maybe consciousness itself, would just go away, an appearance whose underlying reality would fully account for it. Curiously, as many of these philosophers now recognize, while our knowledge of the brain and its functions has grown enormously, understanding its relation to consciousness has become more and more elusive. More knowledge about the complex physical events of the brain has not provided us with a clear-cut account of how these relate to such phenomena as awareness, thinking, feeling, imagination, and the like. One problem here is the reigning assumption that we all already understand all there is to know about consciousness, and what’s needed is yet more knowledge of the brain. But in fact the understanding of consciousness, even by philosophers who sometimes use the term “phenomenology” to refer to subjective experience (Dennett is one), is very naïve. It is not uncommon to find psychologically very dubious notions like stimulus-response, the reflex arc, and the constancy hypothesis being employed by contemporary philosophers to describe conscious experience. Causality is routinely conflated with intentionality to produce the kind of confusion that could be easily cleared up by reading some passages from Husserl or Merleau-Ponty. The future of phenomenology might lie in part in the discovery by these philosophers that phenomenologists in the Husserlian tradition have developed some very sophisticated concepts and descriptions for dealing with consciousness from the first-person point of view. If we want to understand the relation between consciousness and the brain, our first-person approach to consciousness has to be at least as conceptually sophisticated and refined as our approach to the brain.

I and We

    Speaking of the first person, it is often forgotten that this grammatical position has a plural as well as a singular form. The first-person singular has been explored richly in Western philosophy since Descartes, and Husserlian phenomenology is often thought of mainly as a continuation and improvement of this tradition. And so it is. But the emergence of an interest in the we-subject occurs already in Hegel’s notion of Geist, and Husserl, of course unaffected by Hegel, begins to develop ideas of a plural subject in many of his manuscripts on intersubjectivity. The concept of the communal or plural subject is related to but different from the problem of intersubjectivity. The latter explores how I experience the other, and is focused on what Alfred Schutz calls the face-to-face relation and Buber the I-thou relation. Levinas’ critical response to both Buber and phenomenology is still concerned with this one-on-one encounter. The sense of membership in a community, and the manner in which the “we” functions as the proper subject of experiences, actions, memory, expectation, and of a form of existence which outlives that of its individual members, are topics deserving of future phenomenological attention. These topics are important for developing the phenomenological contribution to the philosophy of history, but also for connecting phenomenology to ethics and political and social existence.

The phenomenology of the future

    Part of the future of phenomenology should be devoted to the phenomenology of the future. By this I mean the phenomenological description of protention and expectation. Husserl somewhat neglects these topics in his treatment of time-consciousness, even though he gives us some useful hints; but it is obviously as important as the phenomenology of retention and recollection. Heidegger, of course, argues for the priority of the future, but the phenomenology of the future needs a much more detailed description than the one he gives us. Investigations in the Husserlian style would complement and correct the undue influence held by Heideggerian thought in this domain.