Synthesis and Backward Reference in Husserl’s Logical Investigations

230 Pages·1995·4.515 MB·English

by  Jay Lampert (auth.)

SYNTHESIS AND BACKWARD REFERENCE IN
HUSSERL'S LOGICAL INVESTIGATIONS
PHAENOMENOLOGICA
COLLECTION FONDEE PAR H.L. VA N BREDA ET PUBLIEE
SOUS LE PA TRONAGE DES CENTRES D' ARCHIVES-HUSSERL
131
JAYLAMPERT
SYNTHESIS AND BACKWARD
REFERENCE IN HUSSERL'S
LOGICAL INVESTIGATIONS
The titZes in this se ries are listed at the end 0/ this voZume.
Comite de redaction de la collection:
President: S. Usseling (Leuven)
Membres: J.N. Mohanty (Philadelphia), P. Ricreur (Paris),
E. Ströker (Köln), J. Taminiaux (Louvain-Ia-Neuve)
SYNTHESIS AND BACKWARD
REFERENCE IN HUSSERL'S
LOGICAL INVESTIGATIONS
by
JAYLAMPERT
Springer-Science+Business Media, B.V.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lampert, Jay, 1957-
Synthesis and backward reference in Husserl's Logical
investigations / Jay Lampert.
p. cm. -- (Phaenomenologica ; 131)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Husserl, Edmund, 1859-1938. Logische Untersuchungen.
2. Logic. 3. Knowledge, Theory of. 4. Phenomenology. 5. Reference
(Philosophy) 6. Meaning (Philosophy) I. Title. 11. Series.
B3279.H93L7433 1995
160--dc20 94-23102
ISBN 978-90-481-4463-1 ISBN 978-94-015-8443-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-015-8443-2
printed on acid-free paper
All Rights Reserved
© 1995 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1995.
Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover 1st edition 1995
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
incIuding photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE vii
INTRODucnON (a) General and Historical Introduction
(b) The Secondary Literature on Husserl's Concept of
Synthesis 13
CHAPTER 1 LU i: Unity in Multiplicity: Meaning, Science, and
the Fluctuation of Occasional Expressions 38
CHAPTER 2 LU ii: The Unity of Species and the Multiplicity
of Individuals. The Problem of Synthesis: The
Grounding of Universality 51
CHAPTER 3 LU iii: The Theory of Parts and Wholes: The
Dynamic of Individuating and Contextualizing
Interpretation 73
CHAPTER 4 LU iv: Syncategorematic Terms. The Problem of
Representing the Synthetic Connections that Underlie
Meanings 88
CHAPTER5 LU v: Names Refer Back to Judgments and
Judgments Refer Back to Names. The Problem of
Synthesis: Referring Back to Simples 109
CHAPTER 6 LU vi: Five Elements in Husserl 's Account of the
Synthesis of Epistemic Fulfilment 125
Section 1. The Categories of Universal Names 126
Section 2. The Role of Contexts 133
Section 3. The Categories of Perspective and
Cognitive Ordering 152
Section 4. The Categories of Limit 167
CONCLUSION Section 5. The Categories of Referring Backward 182
APPENDIX Ideen I (sections 118-124): Drawing Back to the
Ego. Synthesis and Phenomenological Science 196
BIBLIOORAPHY 205
INDEX 211
v
PREFACE
In the sixth Logical Investigation, Husserl defines meaning, objectivity, and
knowledge by appealing to "syntheses of fulfilment": each act of conscious
ness has a meaning-intention whereby it anticipates a range of fulfilling
intuitions, whose ongoing synthesis would identify intended objects in the face
of their changing appearances. Synthesis is essential to phenomenological
description. But what does it mean to say that one experience is combined with
others?
This monograph is a speculative-exegetical Husserlian analysis of the
ground, the mechanisms, and the results of synthesis. Focusing on Husserl's
Logical Investigations, I argue that synthesizing consciousness must be a
self-propelling, self-explicating system of interpretative acts driven by ongoing
forward and backward references, grounding its structures as it proceeds,
and positing its origins as that which must have been given "in advance".
To this end, I develop a dialectical reading of Husserl's largely untreated
category of "referring backward" (zurückweisen).
Treatments of Husserl's concept of synthesis have tended to focus on
Husserl's later work on passive synthesis. By drawing out the centrality of
the concept of synthesis in the Logical Investigations, I show how synthesis
is at the foundation of intentionality as such, and also indicate the continuity
of descriptive categories that run through both the early and the late Husserl.
The Introduction to this study schematizes the modem history of the concept
of synthesis, and reviews the secondary literature on Husserl's concept of
synthesis. The next five chapters consider the role of synthesis in each of
Husserl's first five Logical Investigations. The first chapter argues that all
meanings are synthetic. The second develops Husserl's argument that universals
are independent of, yet grounded in, individuals, into a general theory of
synthetic "grounding". The third argues that individuals too are grounded in
syntheses, namely in the way that whole-part relations exhibit a "demand
for supplementation" (Ergänzungsbedürjtigkeit). The fourth shows how syn
categorematic terms exhibit the synthetic connections that underlie meanings
"in advance". The fifth reconciles Husserl's claims that names and judgments
refer back to one another, by developing a theory of "referring backward" in
general.
The sixth chapter pursues a systematic and speculative theory of synthesis
based on the Sixth Investigation. I develop five increasingly complex
Husserlian analyses of synthesis, based respectively on the categories of
universal names, contexts, perspectives, ideal limits, and finally, the dynamic
whereby meanings retroactively refer back to, and thereby constitute the very
priority of, their own grounds. My argument is that references forward to
epistemic completion succeed only by setting in motion re-interpretations of
vii
viii PREFACE
past contents. Every act of consciousness carries in medias res the problem
atic of grounding as it aims to recover its own content. Synthetic consciousness
always occurs too late to get started, yet all it ever does is work at consti
tuting the ground for moving to something that can come next, which is to say,
at constituting its own starting-point. As lived carriers of the systematic
development of interpretations of the world, all contents carry out the
self-hood of consciousness, and at the same time, constitute cognition's self
critique.
I argue, finally, that the Logical Investigations lacks an account of how
implicit backward referents can be stored in consciousness. Husserl does
offer such an account in Ideas 1 with his theory of pure consciousness - not
as an ego prior to synthesis, as most commentators take it, but as the under
lying unity carried out as synthetic interpretations "draw back" or "withdraw"
to the ground of their own self-articulation.
While this study takes the form of a reading of Husserl's texts, it is at the
same time a contribution to current dialogues among phenomenologists, dialec
ticians, and deconstructionists. Some phenomenologists have thought of
synthesis as a set of structures for combining acts of consciousness with one
another. Some dialecticians (certainly Hegelians, and some critical theorists
as weIl) think of Husserlian synthesis as unnecessarily limited to subjective
consciousness, and argue for a metaphysical construal of synthesis, where syn
thetic consciousness would be grounded by some kind of real origin (whether
a Fichtean ego, a Hegelian Spirit, or a Marxist dialectic of Nature). And
some deconstructionists have argued that the very logic of synthesis depends
upon ideal end-points that are endlessly deferred, so that synthesis, while essen
tial for a science of consciousness, is more a kind of metaphor than an actuality.
My approach incorporates many of the analyses of dialectical and decon
structive philosophies into a phenomenological context. I interpret the
extensions of the concept of synthesis into a metaphysics of subjectivity on
the one hand, and the dispersions of the phenomena of synthesis into
open-ended deferrals on the other hand, not as critiques that undermine phe
nomenology (though dialecticians and deconstructionists generally do interpret
their own arguments in this way, as indeed do most phenomenologists), but
as fields to be developed within a phenomenological framework. On my
reading, it is precisely the self-explicating structure of synthesis that incor
porates the categories of dialectics and deconstruction into phenomenological
description.
If phenomenology, dialectics, and deconstruction are, in the final analysis,
complementary, then there are a great number of philosophers who need to
be read anew, and there are a lot of philosophical problems, from subjec
tivity to truth to language to time to justice, that will benefit from expanded
resources.
I would like to thank Professor John Russon for years of insightful philo
sophical conversation and friendship. I would also like to thank Professor
Henry Pietersma, who taught me Husserl in the first place. Professor Kenneth
PREFACE ix
Schmitz, the best teacher lever had, is responsible whenever I think in a
Hegelian way. Many colleagues and friends read and made helpful comments
on parts or wholes of earlier versions of the manuscript, including Professor
James Morrison, Professor J. N. Mohanty, Professor Graeme Nicholson, and
Professor Marguerite Deslauriers. Professor James Mensch generously offered
publication advice. I would also like to thank Mindy McAdams for spirited
editing and other help. Many others who contributed to the writing of this work
deserve to be individuated, but for the present will have to remain hidden in
its synthetic unity.
INTRODUCTION
(A) GENERAL AND HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION
What does it mean to say that one experience is combined with others? What
is the cause of the synthesis of one content of consciousness with another, what
are experiences before they are combined, how does the combination take
place, and what sort of experience results from this combination? When we
see an object from one side, what is it about that seeing that makes us connect
it with the last side and anticipate the next? When we interpret an object in
a particular way, what is it that leads us towards a more complete interpreta
tion or leads us to uncover the parts and presuppositions implicit in that
interpretation? Or in general, what structures or processes allow acts of inter
pretative consciousness to anticipate and fulfil one another, to demand their
own explications and supplementations, to refer forward and backward
to successors and predecessors, and to ideal completion-points and ideal
points of origin? In short, how does each content of experience carry the
demands for its combination with others in an ongoing synthetic unity of
consciousness?
Such general questions could be asked of any philosophy, but they are espe
cially urgent for Husserlian phenomenology, which is guided by doctrines of
meaning and consciousness, interpretation and knowledge, experience and
judgment, subjectivity and objectivity, intersubjectivity and history, all of which
depend on processes wherein contents of consciousness are synthesized under
unifying interpretations. Yet no study of Husserl has focused on his concept
of synthesis. In this work, I will develop a certain problematic of synthesis,
and I will show how this problematic dominates Husserlian phenomenology,
using his Logical Investigations (1900) as an exemplary early text. I will
articulate problems of the original ground, the ongoing mechanisms, and the
end results of synthesis, and I will work out a solution to these problems based
on a study of the special problems of synthesis that arise in each of Husserl's
six Logical Investigations. My argument will be that consciousness is a self
explicating system of interpretative activity, a dynamic whose parts demand
and pass over into one another, a process that grounds its synthesizing struc
tures as it procedes, by continuously referring forward to ideal end-points
and referring backward to ideal origin-points.
In the first part of this Introduction, I will first articulate a problematic of
synthesis in general, and outline the development of special problems to be
treated in the following chapters. I will then give abrief schematic presenta
tion of the modern history of the concept of synthesis, to situate Husserl
in relation to Humean, Leibnizian, Kantian, and Hegelian concepts of syn
thesis. In the second part of this Introduction, a treatment of the secondary
literature on Husserl's concept of synthesis, I will introduce controversies
2 INTRODUCTION
surrounding my interpretation and approach, and will set up the sorts of argu
ments which will justify my construal of synthesis.
The problem of synthesis arises in the context of Husserl's most general
account of intentional consciousness. A conscious experience is said to contain
a meaning-content which presents or signifies or refers to an object from a
certain perspective and under a certain interpretation. This meaning-content
anticipates a range of possible further experiences of that and other objects.
As the flux of experience unfolds, its unity of objective references is consti
tuted in an ongoing way by the fact that each content is apprehended as the
fulfilment (or else as the frustration) of the anticipatory force of previous expe
riences. In this way, the flux of experience is apprehended not in discontinuous
units, but as progress in the revelation of a self-identical world to direct
intuition. There is in fact a double synthesis at work here: the synthesis of
contents of consciousness with other contents is carried out as the synthesis
of contents of consciousness with their objects.
It is under this model that I will develop the three-fold problematic of the
grounds, the mechanisms, and the end-results of synthesis. The problematic
of the original motivating ground of synthesis, the ultimate explanation of why
each content of consciousness should have to be combined with others at
an, is a problem both for the nature of that which combines contents as wen
as for the nature of the contents to be synthesized. It seems that synthetic inter
pretation appeals to some sort of rule, law, or structure of consciousness.
But do these laws originate in principles of logic, in empirical habits, in a
priori categories of the understanding, in the spontaneous activity of the ego,
in the momentum of the stream of consciousness, or in something else? And
how are the contents of consciousness themselves available and prepared to
be synthesized? Individual contents will themselves at some point have to
ground their own syntheses with one another, whether in the sense that indi
vidual contents express overlapping meanings, or because they are always
already contextualized in streams of processes. Indeed the very differentia
tion of individual contents of consciousness from the flux of background
experience depends on syntheses wherein perceptual and/or interpretative
contents set limits to, and are determined in relation to, one another.
The problematics of the original ground of synthesizing interpretation is
thus a problem of the mechanisms wherein each given content passes over into
(e.g. borders, anticipates, fulfils, determines, entails, motivates, verifies, illu
minates, conjoins with, interpenetrates with, or sublates) the next. One problem
concerns how each content has a determinate next-content, and so anticipates
a non-arbitrary range of successors. Another problem concerns what it is about
each content that makes it in principle more than it is, namely a demand for
supplements and completions in general. What does it mean to say that part
of an experience is "implicit", that experiences "anticipate" completions "in
advance"?
The problematic of the mechanisms of synthesis is thus finally one of the
results that can be produced by, or demanded by, the combination of contents.