Is logic intrinsically normative? Given that we often make errors in reasoning, one might hold that logic is not about how we do think but about how we ought to think. However, logical laws say nothing about thinking. How does logic gain normative traction on psychological processes such as belief formation or reasoning? To answer this question, the chapter begins by examining the debate between descriptivists, who hold that logic simply describes truth-preserving entailment relations, and normativists, who hold that logic is intrinsically normative. Husserl was a descriptivist, and Heidegger’s early work follows him. But Heidegger’s phenomenological account of the truth-predicate as grounded in the comportment of assertion, and his analysis of the “hermeneutic as” that grounds such comportment, affords a different perspective on the debate. Logic provides constitutive norms for the practice of reason-giving, a kind of rationality – being answerable to others – that is not an essential property of, but is nevertheless demanded by, Dasein’s being as “care.” The chapter concludes by showing how Heidegger’s phenomenological approach can affirm the main claims of descriptivism while insisting that “the reign of logic” in philosophy “disintegrates into the turbulence of a more original questioning.”

Conscience is “the call of care from the uncanniness of being-in-the-world – the call which summons Dasein to its ownmost ability-to-be-guilty” (SZ 289). Heidegger introduces the term as part of his account of how Dasein, lost to itself in the anonymity of the anyone (das Man), can grasp authenticity as a possibility for itself. Starting with certain aspects of our ordinary understanding of conscience as having to do with particular deeds and actions, Heidegger develops an “ontological” definition that targets essential features of selfhood.

Discussing existentialism in a volume on the history of philosophy from 1945 to 2015 poses some unique challenges. The first concerns the extension of the term. While it was customary for writers on existentialism in the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1950s to include a core set of philosophers under this rubric (Sartre, Camus, Marcel, Jaspers, and Heidegger), all but Sartre (and Beauvoir)1 denied being existentialists. Further, these same writers often expanded the list to include supposed precursors such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and even Socrates, Pascal, and Dostoevsky, who would have found the term quite alien. Mention of Dostoevsky suggests a second challenge: the fact that Sartre and Beauvoir were as well known for their literary output as for their more philosophical work meant that “existentialism” came to designate a peculiarly philosophically inflected cultural movement into which a great number of writers, visual artists, filmmakers, and others were conscripted.2

Abstract: Hie article offers a schematic historical account of the reception of Husserlian phenomenology and its offshoots in the United States, tracing the way that earlier disputes over the legacy of Husserl's work in Germany and France influenced the way that Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer, Derrida and others came to be read and taught in the United States between 1920 and the present. Focusing on the institutional dissemination of this work against the background of the polarization between “Continental” and “Analytic” philosophy, I argue that phenomenology in the United States today has achieved a certain independence from its originators and represents a distinct way of doing philosophy that can be identified neither as “Continental” nor as “Analytic.”

Keywords: phenomenology, continental philosophy, twentieth-century philosophy

Introduction

The history of phenomenology in the United States depends on how broadly one construes the term “phenomenology.” Should the reception of Hans-Georg Gadamer's work—which did not begin here until the mid-1970s, and not under the label of phenomenology—be considered part of the history of phenomenology? One might wonder whether even Heidegger belongs to the history of phenomenology in the United States. By 1962, when William Richardson published the first full-scale treatment of Heidegger in English, Heidegger was already known as an “existentialist,” and English translations of a few of Heidegger's essays on Hölderlin preceded the translation of Being and Time—arguably his most phenomenological work—by over a decade.

Existential Kantians: Heidegger and Korsgaard

In a recent criticism of Christine Korsgaard, Robert Pippin remarks that a central feature of post-Kantian German thought is the “exclusively practical, non-metaphysical status” it attributes to subjectivity (2003, p. 914). The transcendental tradition – represented here by Korsgaard’s Kant-inspired theory – rejects the metaphysical conception of the subject as a substance with certain fixed properties, arguing instead that subjectivity is an achievement, something at which I can succeed or fail. It is easy to see that Heidegger also belongs to this tradition, at least in Being and Time. There we read that “the ‘essence’ of [Dasein] lies in its ‘to be’” (GA 2, p. 56/42/67) and that Dasein is a “being for whom, in its being, that very being is an issue” (GA 2, pp. 16/12/32). For Korsgaard this non-metaphysical conception of subjectivity underlies an account of normativity, an explanation of how standards – including the standards that measure success or failure at being a subject – can bind you, can provide you with reasons for acting in some ways and with obligations that forbid you from acting in others (Korsgaard 1996b, p. 101). Her argument is complicated, but it turns on characterizing subjectivity as self-consciousness: normative concepts do not arise as answers to theoretical questions; rather they exist “because human beings have normative problems. And we have normative problems because we are self-conscious rational animals, capable of reflection about what we ought to believe and do” (1996b, p. 46). Self-consciousness thus gives rise to the normative, and the normative, “obligation … makes us human” (1996b, p. 5).

Transcendental philosophy and intentionality

According to Kant, transcendental philosophy embodies that kind of knowledge “by which we know that – and how – certain representations … can be employed or are possible purely apriori”; that is, “such knowledge as concerns the apriori possibility of knowledge, or its a priori employment” (1968, p. 96 [A56/B80]). In Kant’s language, to say that a representation is “possible” is equivalent to saying that it can be “employed,” and that, in turn, is equivalent to saying that it has “content,” that is, “relation to [an] object” (1968, p. 100 [A63/B87]). All representations, as such, purport to have content, but not all of them do. In showing “that and how” representations can have content, transcendental philosophy is concerned with the issue of intentionality, with showing that entities in the world are there for us, how our mental life discloses what there is. At first, however, its approach to this issue seems restricted to showing “that and how” certain representations can have a relation to objects “purely a priori” – that is, without reference to any experience in which objects can be given. In this sense, transcendental philosophy specifically concerns the intentionality of reason, where reason is the power of producing representations whose purported content does not derive from experience. How can representations that have their seat purely in thinking be shown to have a relation to an object? Kant answers that this is possible only if the content of such representations can be shown to be the condition for the possibility of intentionality as such, that is, only if it makes “objects” – entities as they are there for us – possible. In fact, then, the Critique of Pure Reason’s approach to the question of intentionality is not at all restricted. By showing that and how certain representations are employable a priori it shows how any representation could have relation to an object at all.

In 1975 Hilary Putnam published “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’,” in which he argued that “‘meanings’ just ain’t in the head” (1975b, p. 227). In the debate that arose around this thesis in the 1980s and 1990s, the term “internalism” came to be used for the thesis that Putnam criticized, while “externalism” named a cluster of alternative positions. With few exceptions, phenomenologists did not participate in this debate. There were many reasons for this, but one of them, surely, is well expressed by Felix O. Murchada. “Far from being enlightening,” Murchada writes, the distinction between internalism and externalism “actually obscures the understanding of both Husserl and Heidegger” (2003, p. 98). The reason, he thinks, is clear: already in Husserl “the reduction … set[s] the very distinction of internalism and externalism aside.” Dan Zahavi reaches a similar conclusion: “In my view, the phenomenological analyses of intentionality (be it Husserl’s, Heidegger’s or Merleau-Ponty’s) all entail such a fundamental rethinking of the very relation between subjectivity and world that it no longer makes much sense to designate them as either internalist or externalist” (2004, p. 53).

While I share these views, the concept of phenomenological immanence, which results from the reduction and is crucial to the kind of “fundamental rethinking” Zahavi invokes, remains a difficult one, and it seems to me that the debate over internalism and externalism can provide a useful framework for clarifying it. As I shall argue, what is distinctive about phenomenological immanence is that it is normatively structured and so contrasts sharply with the Cartesian-psychological forum internum of standard internalism, a conception of “the head” that is shared by standard externalism. In this, phenomenological immanence bears an interesting relation to the “space of reasons” articulated in Robert Brandom’s pragmatic inferentialism, which likewise tries to get beyond the assumptions of the internalism/externalism debate.

Agency and practical reasoning

In his “Letter on Humanism” Heidegger writes: “We are still far from pondering the essence of action decisively enough. We view action only as causing an effect” (GA 9, p. 313/239). Of action, praxis, Aristotle noted that it is something “which is itself its end” and thus cannot be understood as a cause that brings something about. Of course, action does bring things about, but that does not exhaust its meaning. It can be hard to find a way to talk about that meaning without falling into the language of causing and producing, but unless we do we shall miss Heidegger’s contribution to the philosophical elucidation of practical reason. For that contribution does not lie in explaining what makes an action rational, what it is to act according to reason; rather it lies in clarifying, phenomenologically, what it is to be an agent. For this reason, if we wish to determine where morality fits in to Heidegger’s ontology we should look not to the quality of character (virtue) or to the maxim of acts (duty) but to the nature of agency.

The concept of practical reason has roots in Aristotle’s concept of phronesis. In contrast to that sort of reason – episteme, theoria – that has to do with what “is not even capable of being otherwise” (as in mathematics or metaphysics), phronesis concerns what is “capable of being otherwise” – above all, human affairs, ethics and politics (NE 1139b, 1140b). While this way of distinguishing practical from theoretical reason has its uses, it is too bound up with the details of Aristotle’s metaphysics to be of much help in reading Heidegger. But Aristotle offers another, more salient, way of distinguishing the two. Practical reasoning, deliberation, aims to reach a decision about what to do; it pursues a chain of inference that ceases when the reasoner “has brought the moving principle back to himself and to the ruling part of himself” (NE 1113a), whereby the reasoner becomes a cause, that is, an agent.

Perception as epistemic warrant

Suppose I tell a friend that the rose bush on my front porch is in bloom. If he wonders how I know such a thing, I might respond that I saw it as I left for work this morning. If pressed, I might invite my friend home so he can see the bush for himself. What is supposed to be served by my report of what I saw? It is supposed to provide justification for what I say by grounding it in what I see. But what does “grounding” mean here? My claim about the rose bush is a claim about an entity in the world, and I assume that looking at such an entity warrants the claim, that perceiving it underwrites the truth of what I say. Skeptics have often questioned this assumption, pointing out that perception can be deceptive in many ways; indeed we may have no good reason for holding that any perception delivers the world as it is. When I make a judgment, the object about which I judge becomes a standard against which the judgment may be measured: if the object is as I say it is, then my judgment is true (i.e., does what it is supposed to do as this judgment); if not, not. But the skeptic reminds us that the fact that the object is a norm for judgment does not entail that perception can serve as warrant for judgments. Only if perception provides reliable access to objects can it serve this role. To show that it does, one might try to establish a connection between the content of perception and a causal process running from the object to the brain. But this has the disadvantage of severing ties between justification and the first-person experience of getting it right. Whether this is a price we are willing to pay for an answer to the skeptic is something that others will have to decide. The sort of approach that interests me here, a phenomenological one, looks for the connection between perception and epistemic warrant in first-person experience.

What is philosophy of mind philosophy of?

In a recent paper which critically examines and rejects several suggestions that have been made for “bridging the gap” between Husserl’s phenomenology and neuroscience, Rick Grush concludes on a positive note:

As Grush continues, it turns out that phenomenology has a rather central role to play in what is now customarily referred to as the “philosophy of mind.”

Phenomenology and twentieth-century thought

Though the term “phenomenology” was in use prior to Edmund Husserl – it is found, for instance, in Kant and Lambert, and, with a very different signification, in Hegel – it is in its Husserlian form that phenomenology came to exert a decisive influence on twentieth-century thought. To understand Husserlian phenomenology it is pointless to go back to the term’s previous uses, since Husserl paid no attention to these; instead, his thinking developed in debates over the foundations of arithmetic and logic carried out in the school of the Austrian philosopher Franz Brentano. Nor is Husserlian phenomenology a static entity. Initially a method for tackling certain epistemological problems, phenomenology became, over the four decades of Husserl’s mature philosophical life, the basis for a complete “system” that “has within its purview all questions that can be put to man in the concrete, including all so-called metaphysical questions, to the extent that they have any possible meaning at all” (Hua 5, p. 141/Husserl 1989, p. 408). So understood, phenomenology was to be a platform for generations of researchers who would contribute, as in the natural sciences, to a growing stock of philosophical knowledge. In so doing they would shore up the threatened legacy of European civilization – a culture based not on tradition and opinion, but on rational insight into universally valid truths and values.

The fate of Husserlian phenomenology in the twentieth century turned out quite differently, however. Husserl’s project did provide the starting point for several generations of philosophers, beginning with contemporaries such as Alexander Pfänder, Adolf Reinach, and Moritz Geiger, and continuing through Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Jacques Derrida, among many others. Yet in each case adoption of the phenomenological approach was accompanied by rejection of much of Husserl’s actual doctrine. As a result, though phenomenology remains a vital contemporary movement, Husserlian phenomenology is often treated as a mere historical antecedent.

Practical philosophy and the crisis

If practical philosophy is that branch of philosophy which analyzes the nature of action, then both Husserl and Heidegger provide elements for a practical philosophy, since both of them offer a phenomenology of action. But practical philosophy also has a normative dimension, concerned with the question of what I ought to do, and the two phenomenologists deal with this as well. The present chapter examines how Husserl and Heidegger conceive the fit between these two aspects of practical philosophy, and the conflicting estimations of the role of reason to which this leads.

For both Husserl and Heidegger, practical philosophy is inseparable from a philosophy of history. Because philosophy has a practical cultural role it must understand its own historical situation, and both Husserl and Heidegger see that situation as one of “crisis.” But while Husserl believes that the crisis calls for restoring “the genuine sense of rationalism,” in which reason governs not merely our technical-practical cognition of nature but our evaluative and practical lives as well (Hua 6, p. 14/16), Heidegger holds that the technization of reason is itself the outcome of that “genuine rationalism.” Thus, while Husserl’s phenomenology tends increasingly toward something like the “primacy of practical reason,” Heidegger’s itinerary is more complicated.

This book outlines and defends a new understanding of the philosophical importance of phenomenology, taking the work of Husserl and Heidegger as exemplary. The crux of this understanding lies in the connection between normativity and meaning, a connection that has been extensively explored in certain strands of analytic philosophy but has not been sufficiently appreciated in the phenomenological tradition. In one sense this is odd, since meaning (in the form of an analysis of intentionality) has been central to that tradition from the beginning. In another sense, however, it is perfectly understandable, since neither Husserl nor Heidegger (nor most of their followers) identified the theme of phenomenology specifically with meaning (Sinn). Rather, Husserl understood phenomenology to be a science of consciousness, while Heidegger understood it to be an approach to being. At the same time, both Husserl and Heidegger argued that phenomenology transformed the sense of previous philosophical concepts, so it is not altogether clear how we are to understand terms like “consciousness” and “being” in their writings. As I have argued in Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning (2001), and continue to argue in this volume, a careful look at the particular descriptions, analyses, and interpretations offered by each shows that it is phenomenology’s focus on the transcendental conditions of the constitution or disclosure of meaning that upsets our understanding of traditional philosophical topics in the ways that exercised Husserl and Heidegger. It thereby also allows us to appreciate why the analytic treatments alone are not enough.

The closer examination of the space of meaning in its character as a norm-governed phenomenon, and of the self or subject capable of experiencing such meaning, is the primary aim of this book. That examination yields a conception of phenomenology that sees in it neither a one-off product of a largely defunct continental metaphysical tradition, nor an appendage that deals with marginal cases of “what it is like” to experience something. The phenomenology I have in view offers a deep and compelling approach to problems of philosophy. In this volume, issues in philosophy of mind, moral psychology, and philosophy of action provide the primary focus for illustrating this claim.

“Phenomenology, that’s Heidegger and I – and no one else.” According to legend Husserl spoke these words in the early 1920s, when he was at the height of his fame in Freiburg and Heidegger, his young assistant, was grappling with the ideas that would become Being and Time. In 1927 Heidegger dedicated that work to Husserl “in respect and friendship,” writing in a footnote that “[i]f the following investigation has taken a few steps forward in disclosing the ‘things themselves,’ the author must first of all thank E. Husserl, who, by providing his own incisive personal guidance and by freely turning over his unpublished investigations, familiarized the author with the most diverse areas of phenomenological research during his student years in Freiburg” (GA 2, p. 52/38/489). But in 1923 he was writing privately to Karl Löwith that “I am now convinced that Husserl was never a philosopher, not even for one second in his life” (Husserl 1997, p. 17). And while dedicating Being and Time to his mentor, Heidegger was writing to Karl Jaspers that “if the treatise has been written ‘against’ anyone, then it has been written against Husserl” (Husserl 1997, p. 22). For his part, Husserl struggled to understand how Heidegger’s work fit into his own project of transcendental phenomenology and ultimately came to the conclusion that it did not: “my antipodes, Scheler and Heidegger,” he wrote to Roman Ingarden in 1931 (Husserl 1968, p. 67).