On the Complexity and Wholeness of Human Beings: Husserlian Perspectives

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International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 25(3), 393-406. https://doi.org/10.1080/09672559.2017.1323404 2017 Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=riph20 Download by: [Jyvaskylan Yliopisto] Date: 28 September 2017, At: 02:52 International Journal of Philosophical Studies ISSN: 0967-2559 (Print) 1466-4542 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/riph20 On the Complexity and Wholeness of Human Beings: Husserlian Perspectives Sara Heinämaa To cite this article: Sara Heinämaa (2017) On the Complexity and Wholeness of Human Beings: Husserlian Perspectives, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 25:3, 393-406, DOI: 10.1080/09672559.2017.1323404 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09672559.2017.1323404 © 2017 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published online: 22 May 2017. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 59 View related articles View Crossmark data InternatIonal Journal of PhIlosoPhIcal studIes, 2017 Vol. 25, no. 3, 393–406 https://doi.org/10.1080/09672559.2017.1323404 © 2017 the author(s). Published by Informa uK limited, trading as taylor & francis Group. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. On the Complexity and Wholeness of Human Beings: Husserlian Perspectives Sara Heinämaa department of social sciences and Philosophy, academy of finland, university of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, finland ABSTRACT At the beginning of Being and Time, Heidegger rejects Husserl’s classical phenomenology on three grounds: he claims that Husserlian phenomenology is impaired by indeterminate concepts, by naïve personalism, and by obscurities in its account of individuation. The paper studies the validity of this early critique by explicating Husserl’s discourse on human persons as bodily-spiritual beings and by clarifying his account of the principles by which such beings can be individuated. The paper offers three types of considerations. After a summary of Heidegger’s early critique of Husserl, the second section of the paper distinguishes between two dimensions of Husserl’s discourse on human persons. It argues that Husserl does not put forward one analysis of the being of humans, but explicates two different accounts and then studies critically their mutual relations of dependency: on the one hand, the naturalistic account of human beings as layered beings and on the other hand the personalistic account of human beings as peculiar kinds of unified wholes in which the mental and the bodily are inextricably intertwined. The third section of the paper clarifies Husserl’s theory of individuation and its consequences for our discourse on human persons. Finally, the fourth section explicates the conceptual means by which Husserl develops his account of human beings as persons. The paper ends in drawing some conclusions for contemporary philosophical anthropology. KEYWORDS husserl; heidegger; person; embodiment; individuation; expressive whole 1. Introduction At the very beginning of the first part of Being and Time, Heidegger distinguishes his own Dasein-analytic and the new phenomenological hermeneutics that it motivates from Husserl’s classical phenomenology which, in Heidegger’s reading, is dominated by epistemological interests and misguided by takenfor-granted concepts. Heidegger attacks classical phenomenology as a strayed form of philosophical anthropology, hopelessly entangled with ontic inquiries CONTACT sara heinämaa [email protected] OPEN ACCESS Downloaded by [Jyvaskylan Yliopisto] at 02:52 28 September 2017 394 S. HEINÄMAA and with empirical notions of human life. Thus, he argues that his former teacher falls victim to fundamental mistakes that are analogous to those that strain nineteenthand twentieth-century life philosophies and all philosophical ‘personalism’ (Heidegger [1927] 1993, 47/72). The fundamental problem that Heidegger identifies in his contemporary philosophy is the neglect of the question that concerns the meaning of beingand the crucial and distinctive role that this question plays in our own existence. We are not just one type of being among other types, but more essentially are beings who question the sense of being (der Sinn von Sein) from within unique places and situations in the world and who ask in particular about their own way of being, that is,Da-sein. For Heidegger, the realization of our distinctive relation to being must serve as the transcendental basis for philosophical anthropology, as distinct from all empirical inquiries into human beings and their possessions, material and mental. Heidegger acknowledges that his contemporary philosophies of life and personhood involve implicit tendencies toward posing the question about our human way of being, but he argues that these philosophies never undertake this task properly, since they do not critically investigate the inherited philosophical terminology of persons, egos, souls and spirits, but take these terms as given: ‘Thus we are not being terminologically idiosyncratic when we avoid these terms as well as the expressions “life” and “human being” in designating the beings that we ourselves are’ (Heidegger [1927] 1993, 46/71–72; cf. GA20 124). In this context, Heidegger claims that his contemporary philosophy, in all its variations, is still seriously strained and delimited by the influences of Hellenistic philosophy and Christian theology, and most recently by Cartesian subjectivism, pieced together from ancient and medieval concepts: ‘[w]hat obstructs and misleads the basic question of the being of Da-sein is the orientation thoroughly colored by the anthropology of Christianity and ancient world, whose inadequate ontological foundations also personalism and the philosophy of life ignore’ (Heidegger [1927] 1993, 48/73). In Heidegger’s account, the tradition of anthropology seriously burdens and delimits also Husserl’s classical phenomenology: in a similar manner as its philosophical contemporaries and predecessors, Husserl analyses the existence of human beings by concepts that have deep roots in Christian dogma and ancient philosophy, roots that already centuries ago had lost contact with their original sources in concrete phenomena and living experiences of human beings. But how exactly is this problem manifested in Husserl’s phenomenology? What is the seeming self-evidence that classical phenomenology presupposes, despite all its radicalness and rigour? The aim of this paper is to answer this question by studying the validity of the critique that Heidegger directs against classical phenomenology and to ask to what extent his presentation of Husserl’s alternative approach holds. Such a comparative inquiry advances the development of contemporary philosophical Downloaded by [Jyvaskylan Yliopisto] at 02:52 28 September 2017 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES 395 anthropology by separating between two influential discourses on human being that both are ‘phenomenological’ in the general sense that both describe and analyse conditions of our experiencing. However, instead of the simple opposition that Heidegger’s early critique suggests, we find two alternative approaches that share the phenomenological-transcendental interest in clarifying the conditions of experiencing but divert on crucial matters that concern our experiences of human beings, ourselves and others. The paper offers three types of considerations. After a short summary of Heidegger’s early critique of Husserl, the second section of the paper distinguishes between two different dimensions of Husserl’s discourse on persons. It argues that Husserl does not put forward one analysis of the being of humans but explicates two different accounts and then studies critically their mutual relations of dependency. So rather than arguing for any one conception of human being, Husserl provides an explication of two different conceptions: on the one hand the naturalistic account of human beings as layered beings, and on the other hand, the personalistic account of human beings as peculiar kinds of unified wholes in which the mental and the sensuous-bodily are inextricably intertwined. The third section of the paper clarifies Husserl’s theory of individuation and its consequences for our discourse on human persons. Finally, the fourth section explicates the conceptual means by which Husserl develops his account of human beings as persons. The paper ends in drawing some conclusions for contemporary philosophical anthropology. 2. Heidegger’s Critical Remarks For Heidegger, the main problem of classical phenomenology is that it leaves unclarified what the performance (Vollziehung) of acts mean, how acts are given and what their being is (Heidegger [1927] 1993, 48–49/73–75; cf. GA20 170–175/123–125). More precisely, what remains merely presumed is the way in which performed acts relate to performing subjects, and how the subjects are given to themselves. In the 1925 lectures on the history of the concept of time, Heidegger acknowledges that, while studying the constitution of time-consciousness, Husserl does provide explications of the structures of the stream of lived experiencing and of the unity of life that are supposed to constitute the continuum of intentional activity and intentional acts, but despite this, his crucial objection remains: ‘But even if the being of acts and the unity of the experiential stream were determined in their being, the question of the being of the full concrete man would still remain’ (Heidegger GA20 173–174/125).1 In Heidegger’ account, this fundamental indeterminacy of classical phenomenology manifests most clearly in its ambiguous discourse on persons. For Husserl, he contends, the human person is essentially a performer of acts, but since the concepts of acts remain indeterminate, Husserl and his followers cannot but proceed negatively and argue that the person is not a material thing Downloaded by [Jyvaskylan Yliopisto] at 02:52 28 September 2017 396 S. HEINÄMAA or a natural organism. In Being and Time, Heidegger formulates his objection as follows: The person is not a Thing [Ding], not a substance, not an object [Gegenstand]. […] Essentially the person exists only in the performance of intentional acts, and is therefore essentially not an object. […] Acts are performed; the person is a performer of acts. What, however is the ontological meaning of ‘performance’? How is the kind of Being which belongs to a person to ascertained ontologically in a positive way [positiv]? (Heidegger [1927] 1993, 47–48/73) Thus, Heidegger’s critique emphasizes the fact that classical phenomenological accounts proceed by first stating negatively that the being of a person is not like the being of things and natural entities. As a preparatory step such a characterization would not be a problem, but Heidegger then argues that this intitial negative move is never fully compensated in Husserlian phenomenology by a proper account of the being of persons in positive terms.2 In the 1925 lectures, Heidegger is more explicit in his critique of Husserl. He claims that if we were to ask Husserl what the being of the person is, Husserl would be able to answer by merely pointing out that the being of persons differs from the being of thinglike natural realities. And if we would insist on receiving a more precise and positive determination of personal being, Husserl would just lead us to reflect on the inner structures and processes of pure consciousness: ‘At the bottom, we are being led back to the same basis, to the immanent reflection of acts and lived experiences, without these acts on their part being actually defined’ (Heidegger GA20, 167/120; cf. GA20 170–171/122–123). There is another crucial problem in Husserl’s ‘personalism’, according to Heidegger, connected to its neglect of the ontologial preconditions of the ideas of personhood and act-performance. 3 The mischief is that classical phenomenological discussions of human beings – their souls, minds, spirits, and bodies – implicitly refer back to and draw resources from the natural attitude that the phenomenological-transcendental reduction is supposed to leave behind through the suspensions of the general thesis of being. The classical phenomenologists, so to say, borrow concepts that belong to the natural attitude and use these concepts to flesh out their transcendental accounts of personhood and subjectivity. However, they never pay back this conceptual debt and thus remain bound to supposedly suspended natural notions. In other words, the heroic attempts that Husserl and his followers made for the reinterpretation of the relations between soul, spirit, mind and body irretrievably repeat ancient and early modern conceptualizations, as well as natural empirical notions about our life and existence, and never really break new ground for a philosophical anthropology, and even less for a true ontology of ourselves: In their turn ‘body’, ‘soul’, and ‘spirit’ may designate phenomenal domains which can be detached as themes for definite investigations; within certain limist their ontological idefiniteness way not be important. When, however, we come to the questions of man’s Being, this is not something we can simply compute by adding Downloaded by [Jyvaskylan Yliopisto] at 02:52 28 September 2017 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES 397 together those kinds of Being which body, soul, and spirit respectively possess – kinds of Being whose nature has not as yet been deteremined. And even if we shopuld attempt such an ontological procedure, some idea of the Being of the whole must be presupposed. (Heidegger [1927] 1993, 48/74) Heidegger thus contends that if we decide to proceed by the methods and concepts of classical Husserlian phenomenology, then we are bound to formulate all philosophical questions that concern our own being by the concepts of person, and since these concepts are inextricaby bound up with ancient and early modern concepts of act, soul, spirit, mind and body as well as with naïve everyday notions about human beings and their lives, we do not really proceed in any philosophical way. The problematic character of these concepts can be properly illuminated only by fundamental-ontological investigations that lead us to pose the questions of our own way of being in a completely new way. For systematic reasons, it is important to notice that in the 1925 lectures, Heidegger also provides a third formulation for his critique of classical Husserlian phenomenology. This criticism is more specific than his general complaint about the inadequacy of the concepts of persons (as act-performers), and also more specific than his consequent remarks about the indeterminacy of the concepts of act, soul, spirit, mind and body. In the lectures, Heidegger claims that Husserl’s phenomenology is bound to resort to the concepts of body and embodiment in the task of individuating human beings. The point is formulated as follows: The fundamental stratum is still the naturally real, upon which the psychic is built, and upon the psychic the spiritual. Now comes the question of the constitution of the spiritual world. It is true that the genuine naturality of the personalistic attitude is thematically emphasized, but the actual account still gives precedence to the investigation of nature. The being of the person is not as such experienced in a primary way. The matter instead remains in the reflection on acts, in the inspection sui. Only now the theme is not the pure consciousness and pure ego but instead the isolated individual consciousness and ego. But the isolation is always conditioned by the body. (Heidegger GA20 172/124; cf. Patocka [1995] 1998, 149–178; Dodd [1995] 1998, xxix) Heidegger does not dismiss the fact that Husserl explicitly argues that consciousness has its own internal or immanent manner of individuation, but he contends that this argument cannot help us with the interpretation of the being of human persons, since persons are not pure consciousnesses but are practically engaged and affectively involved with the worldly objects that they intend and with the world as an integrated context of such objects. Essentially Heidegger’s critical remarks here suggest that the immanent principle of individuation that Husserl presents can merely distinguish the reflecting ego from everything else but cannot differentiate between separate individuals in the experienced plurality of human life. On purely immanent grounds, we can only keep ourselves distinct from everything alien or from a general anonymous other without ever coming to You, He, She, etc. 4 So, in order to individuate other Downloaded by [Jyvaskylan Yliopisto] at 02:52 28 September 2017 398 S. HEINÄMAA human beings, and not just themselves, a Husserlian phenomenologist would have to resort to the natural distinctness of human bodies, which goes against the method being employed. In order to be able to evaluate Heidegger’s dismissal of classical phenomenology, or to see to what extent it may be justified, we need to clarify three central factors in Husserl’s discourse on persons: a distinction between two attitudes, the principles of individuation and the analysis of the structure of expression. This is the task of the three sections below. 3. Psycho-physical Complexes and Unified Persons In the second volume of Husserl’s Ideas (Ideas II), we find several related accounts and explications of our apprehension of human beings. The main distinction is between two different attitudes with two different kinds of thematic positing: the naturalistic (natural-scientific) attitude that posits nature as a basis of all being, and the personalistic attitude that posits spiritual units and wholes. In other words, Husserl describes two different ways of understanding and studying human beings, which is possible within two different attitudes. The main methodological aim of Ideas II is to carefully distinguish between these two thematizations, and between the two attitudes and interests in which they are formed, and then to study their inner structures respectively as well as their mutual relations of dependency. The reflective phenomenological attitude is supposed to make this critical inquiry possible by suspending all positings operative within the two attitudes under investigation. More precisely, Husserl argues, that on the one hand human beings can be apprehended as stratified two-layered complexes or psycho-physical systems. On the other hand, human beings can be grasped as persons, that is, as spiritual-bodily wholes with spiritual-bodily constituents and spiritual-bodily relations to the environing world. Ideas II characterizes the difference between these two apprehensions as follows: In the [naturalistic attitude], the totality of ‘objective’ physical nature was, or is, there for us, founding, scattered therein, living bodies, sensitiveness, and psychic lives. All men and animals we consider in this attitude are, if we pursue theoretical interests, anthropological or, more generally, zoological objects. […] What has been said concerns our fellow men as well as ourselves, to the extent that we consider ourselves theoretically precisely in this attitude: we then are animated living bodies [Leiber], objects of nature, themes of the relevant natural sciences. But it is quite otherwise, as regards the personalistic attitude, the attitude we are always in when we live with one another, talk to one another, shake hands with one another in greeting, or are related to one another in love and aversion, in disposition and action, in discourse and discussion. […] To live as a person is to posit oneself as a person, to find oneself in, and to bring oneself into, conscious relations with a ‘surrounding world’. (Hua4 182–183/192–193) Downloaded by [Jyvaskylan Yliopisto] at 02:52 28 September 2017 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES 399 This means that, in the naturalistic attitude, we have two layers of beings, causally and functionally connected one to the other: the psychic that emerges from and operates on a physical substrate and the physic that supports the psychic and produces it. In the personalistic attitude, we only have one unified being. The spiritual is not a second something emergent on or juxtaposed with its bodily-material ‘basis’ but thoroughly penetrates the body and organizes it according to its own principles. Both attitudes conceive human beings as mental beings with bodily capacities, but whereas the former attitude conceptualizes the mental as an emergent psychic layer of being ontologically dependent on the fundamental ontological layer of the physical, the latter conceives the mental as a formative spiritual power that operates on bodily-sensible materials. Unlike Heidegger, Husserl does not aim at undermining the naturalistic or natural-scientific attitude or its theories of human beings. In his account, this attitude is integral to many of our practices, from traditional medical therapies to modern neuro-sciences, and thus has its own justification, but also its own limits (Hua4 190–191/200–201). Rather than rejecting the naturalistic attitude, Husserl aims at demonstrating under which conditions this attitude becomes possible and what interests it serves. However, his critical inquiry into the relations between the two attitudes reveals that the naturalistic attitude – with its objects, the merely material thing and the human being as a psycho-physical complex – is not a self-supportive or independent sense-formation. The analyses of Ideas II and The Crisis of European Sciences (Hua6) disclose this attitude as a highly complex sense-accomplishment that necessarily refers to and presupposes a more fundamental attitude in which we grasp human beings as unified wholes with meaningful, expressive bodies. This argument is summarized as follows by Husserl: Upon closer scrutiny, it will even appear that there are not here two attitudes with equal rights and of the same order, or two perfectly equal apperceptions which at once penetrate one another, but that the naturalistic attitude is in fact subordinated to the personalistic, and that the former only acquires by means of an abstraction or, rather, by means of a kind of self-forgetfulness of the personal ego, a certain autonomy – whereby it proceeds illegitimately to absolutize its world, i.e., nature. (Hua4 183–184/193, emphasis added; cf. Hua6 244–245/297) Thus, Husserl questions the primacy of the naturalistic attitude and argues that it depends, in its sense, on a more profound attitude, in which we do not apprehend or study human beings – ourselves or others– as psycho-physical compounds but experience them as spiritual-bodily persons with comprehensive motivational, significative and communicative relationships with their surroundings. The problem of the naturalistic apprehension of human beings is not that it would lack sense or legitimation; rather the problem is that it harbours in itself universalizing tendencies that buttress the false notion that everything that appears is ultimately physical. Downloaded by [Jyvaskylan Yliopisto] at 02:52 28 September 2017 406 S. HEINÄMAA Heinämaa, Sara. 2007. “Selfhood, Consciousness, and Embodiment: A Husserlian Approach.” In Consciousness: From Perception to Reflection in the History of Philosophy, edited by Sara Heinämaa, Vili Lähteenmäki, and Pauliina Remes, 311– 328. 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