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" [Husserl] was convinced, not only that phenomenology is the one true way of philosophizing, but that engaging in phenomenology requires a decision on the part of the philosopher - a decision that, as he says at one point, is analogous to a religious conversion." (p.VII)
"The Cartesian Meditations is an expanded version of two lectures that Husserl gave (in German) in Paris, appropriately enough in the Sorbonne’s Amphithéâtre Descartes. Although a French translation of Husserl’s expanded version of those lectures was published in 1931, no German version appeared during his lifetime. This is because, as Husserl continued to work over the lectures, he conceived the project of expanding them even further, in collaboration with his assistant Eugen Fink, into a large-scale work that would give a comprehensive account of his philosophy." (p.VIII)
"In 1881 Husserl moved to Vienna, where his friend Masaryk was still living. Although he at first continued his mathematical studies, submitting a dissertation in the subject, he also attended philosophy lectures given by Brentano, who first convinced him that philosophy could also be conducted in the spirit of ‘most rigorous science’ (Schuhmann 1977, 13). This led Husserl to face the decision whether to devote his life to mathematics or to philosophy. He says that the impulse that finally led him to the latter ‘lay in overwhelming religious experiences’ (ibid.). Husserl now attended many more lectures by Brentano; and the two of them finally became sufficiently close that Husserl could spend a three-month summer vacation with Brentano and his wife. While in Vienna, and under Masaryk’s influence, Husserl closely studied the New Testament. In 1886 he was baptized and received into the Evangelical (i.e., Lutheran) Church. He finally left Vienna as a result of Brentano’s recommendation that he move to Halle to study under the philosophical psychologist Karl Stumpf, who himself now began to exercise a considerable influence on Husserl. It was in Halle that Husserl gained his first university appointment. His philosophical work at this time was focused on the philosophy of mathematics and logic, and his first book, Philosophy of Arithmetic, appeared in 1891. Husserl’s philosophical horizons were broadening rapidly, however, and at the end of the decade he published the massive Logical Investigations - his first indisputable masterpiece, a work that ranges far more widely than its title would suggest, and one in which Husserl himself saw the ‘breakthrough’ to phenomenology (as he put it in the foreword to the second edition of this work). Soon after its publication Husserl moved to Göttingen to take up a chair of philosophy.
In the early years of the new century Husserl entered a deep philosophical crisis, in which he despaired - the Logical Investigations notwithstanding - of being able to give any sound justification for human claims to knowledge. The result of his working his way out of this epistemological impasse was the most decisive philosophical turning point in Husserl’s career: he became an idealist." (p.IX)
"As a result of a local decree, Husserl was given an enforced leave of absence from the university on 14 April 1933. Although this was soon rescinded, Husserl, a true German patriot, regarded it as the greatest affront of his life (Schuhmann 1977, 428). After this time he was effectively excluded from university life. In particular, Martin Heidegger, now the University Rector, cut off all contacts with him. And a few years later the German government refused Husserl permission to take up an invitation to give a keynote address at an International Descartes Conference in Paris." (p.XII)
"Transcendental phenomenology is, as Husserl himself put it, the ‘secret longing’ of all genuine earlier philosophy. It constitutes the final breakthrough to a realization of the idea that has governed philosophy from its inception among the ancient Greeks. The word ‘idea’ (Idee) is one that occurs frequently in the Cartesian Meditations (indeed in Husserl’s writings generally), and it is short for what Husserl will sometimes spell out as ‘an idea in the Kantian sense’. It is a regulative idea: one that points us forward in an enterprise that can have no final, finite completion, though we have a definite recognition of progress. It is most simply thought of as an ideal. Philosophy is in its present divided state because the directive idea of philosophy, which, according to Husserl, was born in ancient Greece and was revivified by Descartes, has lost its vital force." (p.1)
"True philosophizing is, as Husserl repeatedly states, an unnatural activity. In all our non-philosophical life - not only in all our ‘everyday’ activities, but also in all scientific endeavours - we are concerned with objects in the world, determining their properties and their reality (or lack of it). In such a life we are, as Husserl puts it, ‘given over’ or ‘dedicated’ to the world. All our concerns and activities are ‘objectively’ directed. As we shall see in our examination of the First Meditation, transcendental phenomenology involves a switch of interest - away from the world, and towards our own conscious life in which such a world presents itself to us. Such a redirection of mental focus is not a matter of engaging in psychology, since psychology, too, is concerned with what exists in the world: it is just that it is selectively interested in one domain or stratum of it - the ‘mental’, or the ‘psychological’. The radical newness of transcendental phenomenology consists in its claim to have discovered an entirely new realm of being - one ‘never before delimited’, as he says in Ideas I - together with a new method of dealing with this new subject-matter. Much of the difficulty in introducing transcendental phenomenology consists precisely in getting someone even to discern this new field of enquiry - especially as it is so easy to misconstrue it as simply the familiar domain of the psychological. At a number of points throughout the Cartesian Meditations the reader will notice Husserl speaking of ‘beginning philosophers’. This is not a reflection of the nature of his audience. On the contrary, the work was originally delivered to a gathering of some of the leading intellectuals in France. The point is that we are all, Husserl included, beginners at coming to grips with this new field of enquiry - an enquiry into what he will call ‘transcendental consciousness’ or ‘transcendental subjectivity’." (pp.3-4)
"What Husserl calls the ‘primal establishment’ or ‘primal institution’ (Urstiftung) of philosophy is to be found among the Greeks, specifically Socrates and Plato. It begins with the ‘idea’ mentioned above - an idea that is, specifically, the ideal conception of genuine science as universal knowledge. The universality that is in question here has two senses: such knowledge concerns reality as a totality, and it can be accepted as binding by any rational person whatever. This second feature implies, furthermore, that such science should be both grounded in, and developed through, absolute insight, and hence be absolutely justified." (p.4)
"Philosophy, being a methodologically clarified attempt to progress towards the ideal of absolute knowledge, must of course be systematic. But Husserl refuses to separate the ‘systematic’ Plato from the ‘ethical’ Socrates in philosophy’s origin. For the ideal of absolute knowledge is the goal that a certain sort of life sets for itself. We can, therefore, characterize philosophy as much by the nature of its motives as by the nature of its goal. And what above all characterizes the philosophic life is self responsibility. ‘Philosophy’, as Husserl says in the very first section of the Cartesian Meditations, ‘is the philosophizer’s quite personal affair. It must arise as his wisdom, as his self-acquired knowledge tending towards universality, a knowledge for which he can answer from the beginning, and at each step, by virtue of his own absolute insights’ (44). In fact, the reader will find references to responsibility scattered throughout the Cartesian Meditations. And at one point he speaks of the need for the philosopher’s radicality to become ‘an actual deed’ (50). The responsibility in question is initially, of course, an intellectual responsibility to settle for nothing less than ‘insight’ in all matters. Socrates’ method was that of ‘tireless self-reflection and radical appraisal’, a method of ‘complete clarification’ which leads to a knowledge that is ‘originally produced through complete self-evidence’ (EP I, 9-10). The self responsibility that is philosophy is the responsibility to accept nothing as knowledge that you have not validated for yourself. It is nothing but the demand for ‘universal self reflection’, for ‘a resolve of the will to shape one’s whole personal life into the synthetic unity of a life of universal self-responsibility and, correlatively, to shape oneself into the true “I”, the free, autonomous “I” which seeks to realise his innate reason, the striving to be true to himself’ (Crisis 272 [338]). Such reason, as he goes on to say, is ‘ratio in the constant movement of self-elucidation’." (pp.5-6)
"The notion of insight has already started to emerge as being at the very heart of Husserl’s vision of philosophy, and he will spell it out in his own fashion in a way we shall investigate later. Preliminarily we can contrast it with ‘doxa’ - mere opinion, what we take on trust, what we have not interrogated and brought to clarity in our own minds: in short, prejudice. Despite the fact that such doxa is indispensable for ordinary life, it is, because of its typical unclarity and its necessary relativity to a given culture, open to question. In fact, Husserl saw epistemological naïveté as giving way to philosophy as a result of the ‘prick of scepticism’ (EP II, 27). He presents Socrates and Plato as reacting against the Sophists (whom Husserl construes as sceptics); he presents Descartes as attempting to answer various later sceptical schools of thought ; and his own move towards transcendental phenomenology in the first decade of the twentieth century was itself motivated by sceptical worries about the very possibility of knowledge - as the ‘Five Lectures’ of 1907 make plain. Scepticism rots the human spirit, corroding not only the life of the intellect but all moral and spiritual values. Nevertheless, by bringing all claims to knowledge into doubt, scepticism fulfils its destiny by making possible a truly philosophical perspective, one oriented to the possibility of knowledge as such and its implicit goal of universality." (p.6)
"On the very first page of the Cartesian Meditations Husserl attributes to Descartes the view that all the various sciences ‘are only non-self-sufficient members of the one all inclusive science, and this is philosophy. Only within the systematic unity of philosophy can they develop into genuine sciences’ (43). This is, however, not just Descartes’s view ; it is also Husserl’s, because it is part and parcel of philosophy’s ‘primal establishment’ - this time, specifically at the hands of Plato. The ‘idea’ of a systematic enquiry into universally valid truth comes first; any ‘positive’ science is but a ‘regional’ application of this philosophical perspective to a particular domain of reality. During the course of the nineteenth century, however, the positive sciences separated themselves off from philosophy as supposedly autonomous disciplines. One thing that results from this is that such ‘sciences’ lose ‘that scientific genuineness which would consist in their complete and ultimate grounding on the basis of absolute insights, insights behind which one cannot go back any further’ (44). That is left as a philosopher’s pipe-dream. But this means that they are no longer expressions of genuine science - a failing that is actually manifest, as Husserl repeatedly points out, in the unclarities and controversies concerning the ‘foundations’ of the various sciences, even such ‘hard’ sciences as physics and mathematics (e.g. 179). An even more important result is that ‘science’ ceases to have any human meaning. ‘Merely fact-minded sciences make merely fact-minded people.’." (pp.8-9)
"According to Husserl, Descartes, in contrast to Plato, takes mathematics as a paradigm for philosophical knowledge ‘in a particular sense’ (see Crisis, §§8, 16). But that, as he says in our own text, is a ‘fateful prejudice’ (48-9), not something that redounds to his glory. In certain passages Husserl seems to suggest that one thing that is both new and valuable in Descartes is the emphasis on ‘insight’ being apodictic - i.e., so absolutely justified that the negation of what is thought is unintelligible. As a matter of fact, however, although Husserl does speak of apodicticity more frequently in relation to Descartes and post-Cartesian philosophy, his own included, this concept is not wholly absent from his discussions of Socrates and Plato." (p.11)
"As Husserl mentions elsewhere, Descartes was not the first person to have recognized the absolute indubitability of the conscious subject’s own existence for himself. As critics pointed out even in Descartes’s own day, we already find it in St Augustine. What even more precisely, therefore, is distinctive of Descartes is his ‘regression’ to the indubitable ego as the only possible way of combating scepticism. It was scepticism that ‘had the great historic mission of forcing philosophy on to the way toward a transcendental philosophy’." (p.12)
"Descartes’s last four meditations do not even get a look in. So the reader should not be surprised that there are only five Husserlian meditations, in contrast to Descartes’s six. The Cartesian Meditations are in no sense a commentary on, or companion to, Descartes’s work." (p.13)
[Première méditation - §§3-11]
"One thing makes us philosophers: the ‘idea’ of philosophy itself: a conception of knowledge that would be absolutely grounded in insight, and hence, in principle, universally acceptable. We philosophize only when, in complete self-responsibility, our intellectual life is wholly dedicated to this ideal. This idea comes alive for us originally through a certain contrast: with the relative and unclarified opinions of our everyday life. And if we are in a historical period where various ‘positive sciences’ have separated themselves from their philosophical origin, they too will appear questionable, indeed positively lacking, in relation to this guiding idea of absolute truth. This idea is our sole possession qua philosophers. As philosophers we are indigent in contrast to the ‘wisdom of the world’. But such poverty, seen from a philosophical perspective, is a freedom from prejudice - from the ‘pre-judgements’ that we find ourselves lumbered with prior to a validation through insight. As philosophers we must become intellectual beginners. Because of the need to overcome prejudice, the philosopher is one who has become ‘a nonparticipating spectator, surveyor of the world’ (Crisis, 331 [285]), one who, through radical reflection, stands above his or her own life and its ‘prejudiced’, flowing contingency, and attempts to understand it." (pp.15-16)
"Even in my purest philosophical moments I do not cease to be of the opinion - i.e., to believe - that cats chase mice, that the first-order predicate calculus is complete, and so forth. It is simply that in my philosophical endeavours I make no use of these beliefs of mine. I take none of them, as Husserl sometimes puts it, as premises for my philosophical thinking ; and such thinking does not concern itself with the reality or truth of the objects of such beliefs." (p.16)
"Philosophy, according to Husserl, precedes the positive sciences both historically and by virtue of essence - indeed precisely because these sciences are thus informed by the ideal of absolute, universal knowledge." (p.17)
"We should not, as self-responsible philosophers, accept as absolutely binding mere second-hand opinions or things of which we have some vague intelligence, but only those things which we have directly experienced for ourselves." (p.17)
"Something is apodictic if its non-being, its non-existence, is inconceivable (56). Now, it doesn’t take long, with Descartes before us, to realize that even the existence of an ‘external’ world, of anything other than one’s own conscious life, is not apodictic in this sense. Therefore we should not rely, in our philosophizing, even on the ‘prejudice’ that there is such a real world. This is (one aspect of) the second, and more radical, bracketing which Husserl introduces in §7, and which he eventually refers to as the ‘phenomenological epoché’ (60). By contrast, your own existence as a conscious being is absolutely indubitable (for you). Moreover, what emerges as thus indubitable is not a bare, featureless entity, but a being with a field of consciousness. Not only can you not doubt that you exist, you cannot doubt that you have various kinds of ‘thoughts’, ‘cogitationes’ - a term that Husserl, like Descartes, understands in a broader sense than the everyday one, so as to include perceptual experiences, and, indeed, everything that involves us being attentively directed towards some object or other. Since you, as a beginning scientific philosopher, are restricting what you accept as a philosopher to what is apodictic, you are, at least initially, now restricted to your conscious self and its ‘thoughts’: to your ‘pure’ self and your ‘pure’ thoughts, as Husserl puts it, since they are untainted by any ‘prejudice’ concerning the reality of a non-apodictic world. He then for some reason calls this field of consciousness ‘transcendental consciousness’, and the restriction of your concerns as a philosopher to this field of research he terms the ‘transcendental reduction’." (pp.18-19)
"Given that our motivation is a quest for absolutely certain knowledge in the face of scepticism, we should expect Husserl to attempt to confute the sceptic by going on to prove the reality of the world, and to demonstrate how we can have genuinely ‘scientific’ knowledge of it - as did Descartes. But this is precisely what we do not find in the remaining meditations. Recall that Husserl was consistently interested only in the first two of Descartes’s meditations. This is not simply because he thought that most of the arguments in Descartes’s other meditations were invalid and based on unquestioned, mostly Scholastic, prejudices (though he did think this), but because he thought that the whole attempt to go beyond what Descartes had attained in the first two meditations was misguided in principle. In particular, Husserl thought that the very idea of trying to prove the existence of an ‘external’ world on the basis of the contents of ‘inner’ experience was, as he liked to put it, using the French term, a nonsens. According to Husserl, Descartes discovered a transcendental perspective in his first two meditations, but then abandoned it in busying himself with such a nonsensical proof. In Husserl’s view, Descartes should have stayed with his initial discovery and explored it further." (p.19)
"Husserl calls Descartes’s indubitable self ‘a little tag-end of the world’ (63), a ‘piece of the world’ (64). It is not a transcendental self. In order to understand what Husserl means by this, we need to examine the two respective paths to the Cartesian and the Husserlian ‘reductions’, since the radically different destinations are determined by the radically different procedures for arriving there. The phenomenological epoché is not, and does not involve, any process of doubt." (p.21)
"Since doubt is precisely a matter of holding a position on the reality of something, it is a particular way in which bracketing, disconnection, has not been effected. Hence, Husserl insists over and over again that if we initially believe something, such belief remains when we effect the bracketing. The epoché is, he says, a certain ‘refraining’ from belief ‘which is compatible with the unshaken conviction of truth, even with the unshakeable conviction of evident truth’ (Ideas I, 55, incorporating a marginal correction of Husserl’s). As he says in the Cartesian Meditations itself, although we no longer ‘ratify’ or ‘accomplish’ the natural belief in the world, ‘that believing too is still there and grasped by my noticing regard’ (59). He is even more emphatic in the Crisis, where he says that ‘there can be no stronger realism’ than the position we find ourselves in after the epoché, if by realism ‘nothing more is meant than: “I am certain of being a human being who lives in this world, etc., and I doubt it not in the least”’ (Crisis, 190-1 [187]). Indeed, if the epoché were a form of doubt, it would be both impossible to execute and also nonsensical as a gateway to transcendental phenomenology. It would be impossible, because effecting the epoché, like the attempt to doubt, ‘belongs to the realm of our perfect freedom’, whereas doubt, like any other ‘position’, does not (Ideas I, 54). Doubt, like belief, is not under our control, but is necessarily ‘motivated’ by the course of our experience." (p.21)
"In the present circumstances, for example, it is, according to Husserl, impossible for you to doubt that you really are reading this book. Abstract sceptical worries about ‘the external world’ simply have no force here, as Hume’s quip - about seeing whether the sceptic, who has just been pontificating on the uncertainty of the ‘external world’, leaves the room by the door or leaps out of the window - nicely illustrates. We begin, in our experience of the world, with full conviction concerning the reality of what we experience. Husserl calls it the Urdoxa: that certainty which is the primary and primal ‘position’ of our cognitive lives, which can only be modified, or ‘modalized’, and that only in one way - by some disharmony or conflict entering our experience. If you were to reach out to touch this book you seem to see, and your hand went straight through it; or if the book started to move around as you shifted your gaze, fixed in the centre of your visual field ; then your certainty in its reality would indeed be shaken - but only as a result of some such discrepancy. Failing that, the reality of the objects of your experience is indubitable. Even when the reality of a particular object is questioned - perhaps even rejected: it was mere illusion, or downright hallucination - it is so only against the background of a continuing certainty concerning the reality of the world in general. In practice, all such ‘cancellings’ are local. The book may be put down to a mere delusive ‘appearance’ when your hand goes through it or when it tracks your gaze, but only in contrast to the reality of your hand, of the rest of your visual surroundings, indeed of the rest of the world. Short of a radical discontinuity in your experience as a whole, the reality of the world as such, as opposed to particular, local elements in it, is indubitable. Indeed, Husserl can even say that if your experience continues to unfold in its typically harmonious way, the reality of the world has a relative apodictic certainty for you." (pp.22-23)
"If the epoché involved doubt, it would make nonsense of the science of transcendental phenomenology, since this, as we shall see later, involves faithful description of the accomplishments of consciousness - a faithfulness that is achieved by pure reflection on the processes of conscious life. Now, one thing of which we shall expect a faithful phenomenological description is belief in a real world. But this would be impossible if all such beliefs had been eradicated, or in any way altered, by the epoché. It is, therefore, absolutely vital that, as far as the content of our natural experience is concerned, the epoché leaves everything exactly as it is." (p.23)
"How does attempting to doubt differ from simply doubting something ? One difference is this: that although the latter must be motivated, it need not be explicitly reflective, whereas the former must be. In attempting to doubt something, indeed in attempting to determine the ‘validity’, the epistemological worth, of anything in any degree, you must in a certain way hold the presumed state of affairs ‘in abeyance’, regard it as being ‘in question’. For if belief in its existence wholly ruled your reflections, these would make no sense. This reference to the level of reflection is what is critical for understanding the First Meditation. For although our natural experiencing of the world is not under our control, our possible reflections upon it are. Here we are free. In particular, we are free both as to the subject-matter we shall reflect upon, and what we choose to motivate or guide us in our reflections. For example, one thing I could decide to reflect on is how my life would be emotionally for me if I were twice as tall as I am and everyone else were his or her normal size. In such a reflection I never cease to believe that I am of normal size, but I simply do not let that fact influence me in my reflections. I ‘bracket’ it. Transcendental phenomenology involves but a radicalization of this freedom from position that attaches to reflection as such. The epoché is nothing but reflection, or reflexivity, carried through with true philosophical radicality.
This radicality consists in the fact that through the epoché we disregard all our ‘positions’, all of our beliefs about any matters of fact - except for the unavoidable and absolute certainty that we have of our conscious life itself while we reflect. The epoché does not nullify, or weaken, our natural beliefs about the world. Rather, as Husserl says at one point, it adds something to the original belief. What is added is a ‘specifically peculiar mode of consciousness’ (Ideas I, 55): a higher-level, reflective consciousness which proceeds in its enquiries uninfluenced by the beliefs that it clearly sees persisting. In attaining this ‘disconnected’, spectator view of ourselves and our experiences, we abandon what Husserl calls the ‘natural attitude’ that pre-reflective certainty in the reality of the world that thoroughly informs not only our everyday lives, but also all ‘positive’ sciences." (pp.24-25)
"Husserl can speak of the need of a ‘critique’ of phenomenological knowledge. Such a critique would address such questions as ‘How far can the transcendental ego be deceived about himself ?’ and ‘How far do those components extend that are absolutely indubitable, in spite of such possible deception ?’ (62). However, although this issue is
raised in the First Meditation, it is not squarely addressed. It is taken up at the start of the following meditation; but, as we shall see in the next chapter, its working out is then again deferred. Indeed, it is never fully addressed in the present work." (p.26)
"This is what is entirely missing from Descartes’s own Meditations, and what, according to Husserl himself, is - aside from a few halting premonitions in Berkeley, Hume and Kant - new in Husserl. The point of the epoché is the ‘transcendental reduction’. These two terms do not mean the same thing. ‘Epoché’, as we have seen, means the bracketing or putting out of play of our entire belief in the reality of the world, whereas ‘transcendental reduction’ means the restriction of our philosophical enquiries to the field of ‘subjectivity’. Yet the two are intimately related (though not, as we shall see in Chapter 3, mutually entailing). The epoché, as a refusal to use any of our natural beliefs as ‘premises’, only makes sense in relation to a novel, unnatural concern. Rather than being interested in the world and the things it contains, we must be interested in something else, something that is such that the question about the truth or falsity of our natural beliefs is simply out of place. That something else is our experiencing self - the one thing of which we are guaranteed even if all our natural beliefs are false. Only if we are concerned solely with this domain does the epoché, as introduced in the context of the present meditation, make any sense. Conversely, if we are concerned purely with our own subjective lives, the epoché must be effected, since to use the content of any natural belief as a ‘premise’ would be to concern ourselves about the reality of some worldly object, and so to transgress the limit imposed on our future enquiry as one related solely to our subjectivity. This is why Husserl can sometimes say that bringing in any natural belief would simply be absurd, for it would be inconsistent with our newly established intellectual concern." (pp.27-28)
"What it is for consciousness to be ‘transcendental’ is, as Husserl standardly puts it, for it to constitute all of its objects. It is the gaining of this insight that is the climax of the First Meditation. It is precisely because Descartes did not clearly attain to this insight." (p.28)
"Husserl frequently contrasts Descartes’s interest with his own by saying that whereas Descartes was concerned with the dubitability of the world, he is interested in its possible non-existence (e.g., EP II, 80 and 264). Although this may seem a ‘nice’ distinction, it is crucial, since it is in play at the very place in the First Meditation where Husserl speaks of ‘the great reversal’, the one that ‘if made in the right manner, leads to transcendental subjectivity’ (58). The point from which the reversal is made is, of course, the Cartesian recognition that, whereas the existence of the world is not apodictic, you can have apodictic certainty of your own conscious existence. What Husserl focuses on in particular at this juncture is that the non existence of the world is thinkable. Everything hinges on the significance of this fact. You are to think concretely for yourself the following thought, which I shall term the ‘Cartesian thought’: Although I exist and am experiencing in this present manner, this world I seem to be experiencing does not exist. It has no reality. This is not something you can believe; it is not even something to which you can attach the slightest probability; but you can coherently think it. In case you are having difficulty, Husserl frequently offers a train of thought to bring alive the possibility in question. You are to entertain the thought that your future course of experience ceases to have that coherence (or ‘harmoniousness’, as Husserl liked to put it) which it has embodied up to now. For it is precisely because of such coherence that you have a belief in a world in the first place. If we entertain the possibility of a subject whose conscious life is either but a tumult of chaotic experiences, or one with but temporary stabilities in which nothing confirms anything else and in which almost all the subject’s anticipations and expectations are frustrated, we must surely grant that such a subject would have no sense of dealing with a real world. You are to entertain the thought that this should happen to you. There are certain such courses of experience in the face of which the thought ‘None of this is real, and never has been’ would become tenable. This, in fact, is the only way in which Husserl ever attempts to make the vital thought in question concrete. It is not, however, one that he himself held to be beyond question (EP II, 391-3). Would not an equally rational response to such a future course of experience be that you had gone mad ? Or that the world had gone out of existence, but that it (or a world) might come into existence again ?" (pp.29-30)
"The importance of the ‘Cartesian thought’ is that Husserl regards it as motivating the ‘transcendental insight’. To determine whether this is indeed the case we need to see what precisely the repeated statements of the ‘insight’ are saying. For there are two things they might be taken as saying, which I shall contrast as the ‘strong’ and the ‘weak’ readings. According to the strong reading, such statements are statements of idealism: everything other than consciousness itself is but a construction thrown up by consciousness, and its existence is dependent upon consciousness. This would be a great insight indeed; it would go far beyond Descartes; and it would warrant the restriction of any ultimately grounded and grounding science to the domain of consciousness itself. And, in fact, Husserl was such an idealist. But does he really think that he can establish such a position already at this early stage of his enquiries ? This is an important question to ask, because the claim that the Cartesian thought entails any form of idealism at all is widely held to be a gross fallacy. For the argument would have to run along something like the following lines: It is apodictically certain that I exist and that I at least seem to be experiencing various real objects in a real world ; it is not apodictically certain that any worldly object, anything other than my own conscious self, exists at all; therefore my present experiences, and all that I am indubitably aware of, can exist whether or not there is a world at all over and above my consciousness ; therefore the objects of my experiences are independent of the existence of anything other than myself and depend entirely on me for their existence. Such an argument would seem to involve an invalid move from what is merely ‘epistemically’ possible - i.e., what is imaginable, or conceivable - to what is ‘metaphysically’ or genuinely possible - i.e., how things might have been. 4 The question is whether Husserl endorsed such an invalid form of argument. In fact, it is far from clear that he didn’t. He can, for example, state, as an immediate consequence of the Cartesian thought, that his consciousness is a sphere of being ‘neatly separable’ from the world (EP II, 76). Moreover, the grammatical moods he employs in expressing the Cartesian thought are significant. He says, for example, that ‘This experiencing life exists and is my life even if nothing real were to exist or does exist’ (EP II, 81, my emphasis). The use of the subjunctive here seems to indicate that Husserl is going beyond the merely ‘epistemic’ claim that his own consciousness certainly exists even if (perchance) the real world doesn’t, and embracing the ‘metaphysical’ claim that his consciousness would exist even if the real world didn’t. Moreover, he can gloss ‘transcendental subjectivity’ as ‘that which would remain even if there were no world’ (EP II, 128). So it may well be solely on the basis of the Cartesian thought that he can say of consciousness that ‘Nulla “re” indiget ad existendum’ - it requires no ‘reality’ (in the sense of spatio-temporal reality) in order to exist - and that ‘the existence of nature cannot be the condition for the existence of consciousness’ (Ideas I, 92, 96). In fact, Husserl frequently makes use of inferences from epistemic to metaphysical issues in a way that can seem outrageous. He seems to infer, for example, from the impossibility of doubting my own existence, that I am therefore a necessary existent. [...]
Indeed, Husserl not infrequently employs turns of phrase in relation to his own conscious self that traditionally have been reserved for God. Here essence is inseparable from existence; the self ‘in se et per se concipitur’ (‘is conceived in and through itself’ - an echo of Spinoza); and it is ‘causa sui’ (‘self-caused’) (Int II 159; 257; 292). I shall be leaving this deeply problematic aspect of Husserl’s thought largely out of account in these pages; and in the present context, I shall set aside the distinct possibility that Husserl moved directly from the Cartesian thought to idealism. For Husserl in fact has a much better argument for idealism than the above fallacious train of thought (if that is what it is), and we shall be considering it in Chapter 4." (pp.30-32)
-A. D. Smith, Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations, Routledge, London / New York, 2003, 271 pages.
