Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre: Presence and the Performative Contradiction

Abstract

In this essay I explore the divide that separates Heidegger and Sartre from Husserl. At issue is what Derrida calls the “metaphysics of presence.” From Heidegger onward this has been characterized as an interpretation of both being and knowing in terms of presence. To exist is to be now, and to know is to make present the evidence for something’s existence. Husserl’s account of constitution assumes this interpretation. By contrast, Heidegger and Sartre see constitution in terms of our pragmatic engagements with the world, engagements that they trace to the essential nothingness at our core. Who is correct: Husserl or those who give his phenomenology a negative basis? At issue is the nature of transcendence. Do we transcend ourselves toward the world by constituting both our own and the world’s presence or do we do so by virtue of an inner nothingness that allows us to assume various identities as a consequence of our pragmatic engagements? Husserl claims that to argue against presence is to argue against evidence. It is to enter into a performative contradiction, one where you undercut the evidence you present for your position. His theory of constitution can, in fact, be seen as an attempt to avoid this contradiction. Implicit here is a claim that Heidegger and Sartre, in their appeal to nothingness, must fall into this contradiction. The contradiction thus becomes a way of deciding between their positions. I do so by exploring their accounts of constitution and the rationality they see implicit in it.

Acknowledgements

This article was supported by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of Czech Republic, Institutional Support for Long-term Development of Research Organizations, Charles University, Faculty of Humanities. It is an output of the program PRVOUK P18 Phenomenology and Semiotics.

Notes

1. Jacques Derrida, “Ousia and Grammé: Note on a Note from Being and Time,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982), 34.

2. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1967), 25. I generally follow the translation of Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962). Since this work gives the page numbers of Sein und Zeit, I cite the original pagination, which is hereafter cited in the text.

3. Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Margins of Philosophy, 16.

4. Jacques Derrida, “Speech and Phenomena,” in Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 63.

5. Derrida, “Speech and Phenomena,” 63. Derrida identifies presence and evidence in the following words: “this privilege of the present-now defines the very element of philosophical thought, it is evidence itself, conscious thought itself” (62). Thus to contest presence is to move beyond philosophical thought.

6. Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, ed. Ursula Panzer, in Edmund Husserl, Gesammelte Schriften (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1992), 2.120. All translations from the German edition of Logische Untersuchungen (Logical Investigations) are my own.

7. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2.151–52, fn.

8. The difficulty here is the same as that presented by Frederic Fitch with regard to the claim of universal scepticism. As he notes, the sceptical view according to which “nothing is absolutely true” is actually a “theory about all theories.” It thus casts doubt upon itself. Its theoretical thesis is that no proposition can be asserted as true for certain. Allowing for self-reference with respect to this assertion, it becomes inconsistent. On the one hand, it casts doubt on its own validity. On the other hand, if it is really valid, then it wrongly casts doubt on its own validity in casting doubt on the validity of all statements. In Fitch’s words, “if it is valid, it is self-referentially inconsistent and hence not valid at all.” We can also say that, as a universal statement, it is invalid since it must except itself from its own claims to universality. See Frederic B. Fitch, “Self-Reference in Philosophy,” in Contemporary Readings in Logical Theory, ed. Irving M. Copi and James A. Gould (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 156–57.

9. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2.226.

10. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 4.762.

11. See Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 4.605–6, 717.

12. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 4.623.

13. Husserl’s preferred term is “constitution,” though he does use “synthesis.” Both terms are taken as equivalent to Kant’s concept. In Husserl’s words: “What is called constitution, this is what Kant obviously had in mind under the rubric, ‘connection as an operation of the understanding,’ synthesis” (Ms. B IV 12, 2–3, 1920). I wish to thank Professor Rudolf Bernet for permission to cite from Husserl’s unpublished manuscripts.

14. Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch, ed. R. Schuhmann (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), 88. All translations from the German edition are my own.

15. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966), 23; hereafter cited in the text.

16. Husserl, Logical Investigations, 2.120.

17. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), §493, 272; §473, 263; §480, 266–67.

18. Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie, 349.

19. Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie, 380.

20. Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie, 118.

21. Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie, 356.

22. This letter appears in the textual critical notes to Husserl’s Phänomenologische Psychologie, ed. W. Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 601.

23. Martin Heidegger, “Vom Wesen des Grundes,” in Wegmarken (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1967), 69.

24. Does this mean that historical knowledge is less rigorous than that of the exact sciences of nature? According to Heidegger, for a science to make this claim is a sign that it misunderstands its own understanding, i.e., the historical presuppositions that the understanding involves. As I cited him, “interpretation is never a presuppositionless apprehending of something presented to us.” The difference is that “the ontological presuppositions of historical knowledge transcend in principle the idea of rigor held in the most exact sciences.” They do so insofar as the “existential foundations relevant for it” are broader (Sein und Zeit, 153). Those of mathematics, for example, “lie within a narrower range” than history. Now, for Heidegger, historical research can never be completed. The interpretations that it advances are not independent of the standpoint of the researcher, and this standpoint changes with the advance of history. By implication, the same holds for science.

25. See Martin Heidegger, “Vom Wesen der Wahrheit,” in Wegmarken (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1967), 91–94.

26. Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins, ed. Rudolf Boehm (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), 29; English translation, The Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), trans. John Barnett Brough, vol. 4 of Edmund Husserl, Collected Works, ed. Rudolf Bernet (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), 30. Unless otherwise indicated, I follow Brough’s translation; hereafter page numbers refer to the original and to the English translation, respectively, and are cited in the text.

27. As Husserl puts this: “But if we call perception the act in which all ‘origin’ lies, the act that constitutes originally, then primary memory is perception. For only in primary memory do we see what is past, only in it does the past become constituted—and constituted presentatively, not re-presentatively. The just past, the before in opposition to the now, can be directly seen only in primary memory; it is its essence to bring this new and original past to primary, direct intuition, just as it is the essence of the perception of the now to bring the now directly to intuition” (Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins, 41–43).

28. As Husserl writes, the sense of such departure “springs from the interpretation of the temporal representatives of the temporal positions” [Zeitstellenrepräsentanten], such representatives being the fadings. “This interpretation too is continuously maintained in the flow of modification” in that we continuously interpret the process of fading as departure into pastness (Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins, 66–69, translation modified). Thus, in taking the tone “as identical in the flow of the modification of the past,” “the interpretation that belongs essentially to this modification... lets the continuous process of being pushed back into the past appear.” We experience the tone that has sounded as both “held fast in its matter” and as receding into the past (66–67, 69, translation modified). Calling such modifications “adumbrations,” he writes in an appendix, “The elapsed now... presents itself in the new actually present now in a certain adumbration; and each such adumbration represents [vertritt], so to speak, what has been in the actual now” (275–76, 285–86, translation modified). Thus the “elapsed duration” of the tone is “represented [repräsentiert] by means of a continuity of fading modifications.” Such modifications are “the flow of adumbrations in which the identical tone ‘presents’ itself [sich ‘darstellt’]” (277–87).

29. “Ich bin im strömenden Schaffen von Transzendenz, von Selbsttranszendenz, von Sein als Selbstvergangenheit und Selbstzukunft.” Ms. C7, 21a, 9 July 1932, in Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution (1929–1934), Die C-Manuskripte, ed. Dieter Lohmar (Dordrecht: Springer Verlag, 2006), 130.

30. Husserl, “Ich bin—ich bin im Währen, der ich bin, und bin als das immer schon in dieser Seinsart einer vielfältigen kontinuierlichen Transzendenz meines urmodalen Seins als Jetzt.” Ms. C7, 21a, 9 July 1932, in Späte Texte, 130.

31. Husserl, Ms. C7, 21a-b, 9 July 1932, in Späte Texte, 130.

32. Husserl, Ms. BIII 9, 15a, Oct.-Dec. 1931. As he also describes my being as functioning nowness, my act flows away, “but I, the identity of my act, am ‘now’ and only ‘now’ and, in my being as an accomplisher [Vollzieher], am still now the accomplisher.” Here, “I, the presently actual ego, am the now-ego” [jetziges Ich].” Ms. C10, 16b, Sept. 1931, in Späte Texte, 200.

33. Husserl, Ms. C2, 2b-3a, Aug. 1931, in Späte Texte, 2.

34. Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie, 129.