Wittgenstein, Kant and Husserl

Continental Philosophy Review (2004) 37: 277307 c Springer 2005
Wittgenstein, Kant and Husserl on the dialectical temptations

of reason
DANIEL J. DWYER
Philosophy Department, Xavier University, Cincinnati, OH, USA
(e-mail: dwyerd@xavier.edu)
Abstract.
There is an interesting sense in which philosophical reection in the tran-
scendental tradition is thought to be unnatural. Kant claims that metaphysical
speculation is as natural as breathing and that transcendental critique is neces-
sary to prevent reason from lapsing into a natural dialectic of dogmatism and
skepticism. Husserl argues that the critique of theoretical reason is grounded
upon a transcending of the natural attitude in which we are at rst unjusti-
ably and navely directed toward objects as separate from consciousness.
A perfectly sensible question arises: Why do we need to effect a change in
our natural cognitive orientation to both ourselves and the world in order to
know each respectively? Why does a sort of dialectical self-deception come
so naturally to us, and why is an effort so great as to seemunnatural necessary
for philosophical self-knowledge? The aim of this paper is threefold: rst,
to argue that seemingly compulsory philosophical assumptions are inevitably
generated from within reason itself and thus remain resistant to a complete
therapy; second, to show how Kant diagnoses reasons dialectical tendencies
as inevitable and ever-recurring without transcendental vigilance; nally, to
argue that the early Husserls appropriation of a transcendental epistemology
is inuenced decisively by Kants transcendental reection in order to combat
the reigning naturalism of his day. My overall claim is that by thematizing the
natural dialectic of reason best articulated in the rst Critique, we can disclose
the Kantian way in which Husserl conceives of the natural temptation to nat-
uralize consciousness. We rst turn, however, to an inuential contemporary
account of a decidedly non-transcendental philosophy, what has come to be
known as therapeutic Wittgensteinianism.
1
1. Wittgenstein on seemingly compulsory temptations
Some contemporary thinkers believe that, following Wittgenstein, purely di-
agnostic and therapeutic philosophy can root out and suppress the dialectical
278 DANIEL J. DWYER
tendencies of reason. Part of the attraction of the later Wittgensteins thought
is its apparent promise that linguistic analysis can and must completely di-
agnose and then dissolve reasons own natural temptations to theorize and
speculate. But this promise, if feasible, does not do justice to the inevitability
of reasons natural instincts, which, like the roots of weeds in an otherwise
well-tended garden, will resurface and pose problems ever again. Even though
a full cure of the obsessions of reasons speculative instincts,
2
the philo-
sophical disease,
3
or the peculiarly philosophical mental cramp
4
may not
be possible, a kind of transcendental diagnosis must be made and then sus-
tained with vigilance, lest our bewitched understanding fall back into its nave
oblivion of the primordiality of ordinary language and our formof life. I argue
that Wittgensteins non-empirical ideal of perspicuity about language and our
form of life cannot be achieved and indeed seems to be impossible by means
of mere diagnostic therapy.
What is striking about Wittgensteins thought experiments in the Philo-
sophical Investigations is how often he gives a provisional answer to the
questions raised in the formof We are tempted to say that . . .,
5
We are held
captive by a picture . . .,
6
we are dazzled by the possibility, for example,
of an ideal language.
7
He claims that he is merely assembling a series of
reminders not to give in to such illusions,
8
and that we can achieve com-
plete clarity so that the problems will completely disappear.
9
Wittgenstein
argues that philosophers from Socrates and Plato onwards are held captive
by seemingly compulsory pictures of how language and thought work in re-
lation to extra-linguistic reality. In particular, a transcendental method, or a
transcendent perspective on our form of life, one that calls into question the
conditions of possibility of knowledge of the possibility that thought can cor-
respond to the object itself is motivated by a seemingly natural feeling that
by means of such thoughts we have caught reality in our net.
10
What we call
a priori knowledge or transcendental insight is, for Wittgenstein, simply the
form of account which we happen to nd very convincing.
11
Philosophys
purpose, then, is not to be a constructive, nal explanation of such appar-
ently compulsory illusions but rather a descriptive, therapeutic diagnosis of
how our intelligence is alternately fascinated,
12
puzzled,
13
deluded,
14
seduced,
15
bewitched, or dazzled by means of idle and often deceptive
uses of language.
16
Philosophical therapy is to remind us of something of
which for some reason it is difcult to remind ourselves,
17
namely, that it is
only when language takes a vacation that philosophical problems appear to be
intractable.
18
Therapy is to untie the knots in our thinking. But Wittgenstein
immediately adds to this thought: philosophizing has to be as complicated
as the knots it unties.
19
To untie the knots and provide the antidote, we must
be able to compare apparently nonsensical uses of language with clear and
THE DIALECTICAL TEMPTATIONS OF REASON 279
meaningful uses, and this will, as Bouwsma puts it, therapeutically quicken
our sense of the queer.
20
Wittgenstein thus proposes diagnoses, multiple therapies, and nally a
cure: The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing
philosophy when I want to. The one that gives philosophy peace, so that
it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question.
21
The promise is to be released from the problems that inexorably keep
reappearing for a certain cast of philosophical reection.
22
But not enough
attention has been paid to the fact that it is a slow cure of reasons ills: In
philosophy we may not terminate a disease of thought. It must run its natural
course and slow cure is all important.
23
If it is neurosis and not complete
delusion that must be cured, then we might speak, as Jonathan Lear does,
24
of a therapy that must let the dialectic of surface and depth play itself out
before we can too quickly speak of a complete healing, where our neurotic
thoughts. . . are at peace.
25
There is a passage in which we can see the
slowness of a cure applied to a curious kind of dialectic of itching and
scratching:
Philosophy hasnt made any progress? If somebody scratches the spot
where he has an itch, do we have to see some progress? Isnt it genuine
scratching otherwise, or genuine itching? And cant this reaction to an
irritation continue in the same way for a long time before a cure for the
itching is discovered?
26
But to focus on the slowness of the cure is not merely to draw attention to
the stubbornness of philosophers. The linguistic therapist must be sensitive
to some basis in truth from which the platonic neurosis may spring, for one
cant take too much care in treating philosophical mistakes. They contain so
much truth.
27
Wittgenstein practices here a certain reection on unreective
philosophical practices, a reection that points to the ineradicability of appar-
ently compulsory temptations whose cure, no matter how slow, can never be
denitive.
There are good reasons to believe that Wittgenstein does not comprehen-
sively dissolve a kind of philosophical dialectic that both provokes and makes
ultimately unsatisable his well-known desire for a perspicuous represen-
tation ( ubersichtliche Darstellung) of linguistic phenomena.
28
Wittgenstein
sees a perspicuous representation of the grammar of our language as an ar-
rangement of the reminders of familiar rules, a complete survey of every-
thing that may produce unclarity.
29
Perspicuity is lacking if we do not have
a birds eye view or synoptic account of how grammar works, in other
words, if we do not know how to articulate the way we look at things and
280 DANIEL J. DWYER
linguistic connections as we would like to.
30
The complete clarity which per-
spicuity would give us implies that philosophical problems should completely
disappear.
31
As Glock as shown, Wittgenstein borrows the originally scientic
concept of perspicuity from Frege, Hertz, and Boltzmann, but he gives to it
the slightly different sense of being able to shed light on a diverse multitude
of phenomena without discovering anything new . . . by analyzing what is
already known which claries certain links or interconnections between the
phenomena.
32
Althoughit is true that, for example, psychologyandmathematics searchfor
perspicuityandthat platonic philosophers searchfor anintellectual perspicuity
of a certain kind,
33
Wittgenstein clearly distinguishes his goal from both that
of a scientistic reductionism and that of a sideways-on transcendent picture
of language use. One of the rst uses of the notion is given in the Remarks on
the Foundation of Mathematics, where surveyability (

Ubersehbarkeit) con-
cerning the validity of a logical proof is shown to exclude all grounds for
doubt.
34
But these examples are misleading if one understands by them that
perspicuity needs to be discovered or unearthed by a logical, scientic, or em-
pirical investigation, rather than retrieved or recollected through philosophical
therapy.
35
Maintaining that perspicuity is to give the form of account we
want to give
36
means something above and beyond simply the constant re-
hearsing of imaginary thought experiments and showing the limit of empirical
explanations of meaning. It is closer to a world-viewthan a scientic theory.
37
Perspicuity has apparently only a negative aim: to remove the inuence of
disquieting aspects of grammar to allay philosophical puzzlement.
38
To re-
move disquieting problems is to adopt a kind of quietism that can only be
sustained by perspicuity:
Once a perfectly clear formulation ultimate clarity has been reached,
there can be no second thoughts or reluctance any more, for these always
arise from the feeling that something has now been asserted, and I do not
yet know whether I should admit it or not. . .. Controversy always arises
through leaving out or failing to state clearly certain steps, so that the
impression is given that a claim has been made that could be disputed. I
once wrote, The only correct method of doing philosophy consists in not
saying anything and leaving it to another person to make a claim. That is
the method I now adhere to.
39
But to allay puzzlement in this way does not mean to get rid of it altogether.
For one reason, there does not seem to be a limited number of ways of getting
confused.
40
For another, fascination with philosophical problems is part of
the human condition.
41
So perspicuity should at the very least help us see that
to relieve the mental cramp it is not enough to get rid of it; you must also
see why you had it;
42
in other words, one needs to understand positively the
kind of attitude that provoked the cramp. Moreover, disclosure of perspicuity
plays the positive role of identifying the scaffolding of facts that uphold
our everyday concepts, facts which, if changed, would make our everyday
linguistic practices meaningless.
43
One suspects, however, that this desirable goal is not ultimately realizable
because Wittgenstein does not thematize the kind of non-empirical reection
necessary to disclose a perspicuous representation. The ideal of a compre-
hensive overview implies a kind of reection that transcends in a way the
language of any particular language game, for it would arguably apply to any
language game whatsoever, including the often cited imaginative examples of
African tribes who ostensibly do not share our form of life, i.e., our form of
mindedness.
44
To understand mindedness in general seems to be a goal for
which the later Wittgenstein yearned, yet he did not fully appreciate the kind
of transcendental goal implied therein. Furthermore, there is the question of
howwe are to understand the whole of the therapeutic techniques themselves,
for this understanding is not the kind of understanding we seek when we dis-
solve our individual mental cramps. To say that perspicuity is simply a matter
of retrieving or reminding does not answer the thrust of the question. For it
is clear that after going through a certain kind of philosophical reection in
the Investigations, we should be led to adopt a different attitude toward the
futile explanations of meaning, understanding, etc.
45
Later in the paper, I will
argue that transcendental dialectic has as one of its therapeutic goals the
reective understanding of the transition between attitudes that continue to
bewitch the intelligence. But Wittgenstein, unlike Kant and Husserl, seems
constrained to articulate such insights because there is no transcendent lan-
guage in which to communicate them the most we can say is that he shows
them, but cannot articulate them without apparently violating his deationary
and non-revisionary style of investigation.
46
2. Therapeutic Wittgensteinians: Platonism as dialectical temptation
There is increasing recognition that the best way to interpret a continuity
between the early and late Wittgenstein is to see him in both periods as at-
tempting to overcome a natural and inevitable desire to have questions about
absolute meaning and understanding answered. Among the so-called ther-
apeutic Wittgensteinians, there is rst a trend to understand this desire as
conceptual platonism. A platonist seeks an absolute, immutable ground or
third-person, independent perspective or external standpoint by which one can
denitively explain what is meaning, what is meant, what is understanding,
282 DANIEL J. DWYER
and what is understood. Wittgenstein describes such a point of view as the
search for a super-order or super-concepts,
47
or the superlative fact.
48
In line with his well-known penchant for ascribing error not to the intellect
but to the will, he also describes this point of view as the longing for the
supernatural
49
or longing for the transcendent.
50
Conceptual platonism is beholden to the picture of an ever-recurring quest
for an impossible sideways-on view of the world and our own thinking
51
as McDowell puts it, a craving for external friction in our picture of [lin-
guistic] spontaneity.
52
The platonist demand for an unconditioned behind
the conditioned ways of speech and language games ends up, however, in the
illusion that we understand the meanings of words by following xed rails
laid down in the world.
53
Being disabused of this form of questioning usually
involves a recoil into an illusory security that diverts the attention away from
what Cavell describes as the terrifying non-platonistic vision of a form of life
as the place where our spade hits bedrock.
54
A second characteristic of therapeutic thinkers is their growing awareness
of the dialectical role that conceptual platonism or nave realism plays in
generating the philosophical bewitchment of our intellect.
55
McDowell calls
conceptual platonismas described above rampant platonism and shows it to
be yet another formof the foundationalist myth of the given which is responsi-
ble for the dialectical oscillation toward a frictionless linguistic coherentism.
56
Not to fall prey to foundationalism is not to indulge the sense of spookiness
or uncanniness but rather to exorcize it.
57
One way McDowell thinks he
can carry out the exorcismis to think of certain analytic truths as the so-called
hinge propositions Wittgenstein refers to in On Certainty.
58
Another is to
take seriously the vestigial transcendental idealism Lear nds in the later
Wittgenstein.
59
But in his own version of Wittgensteinian quietism as a res-
olution of this otherwise ceaseless dialectic, he admits that the impulse [to
philosophy] nds peace only occasionally and temporarily.
60
It seems as if
McDowell, after diagnosing rampant platonism and holding fast to the ideal
of Wittgensteinian therapy to dissolve a dialectic between foundationalism
and coherentism, nonetheless shows that quietism leaves questions open and
desires unsatised, and it is precisely because of this that he later engages
the transcendental tradition of Kant and Hegel inherited and appropriated by
Sellars.
61
In conclusion, it is difcult to reconcile the following two claims: on the
one hand, the assertion of apparently compulsory platonistic temptations that
make it hard for us to remind ourselves of the limited nature of philosophical
insight and, on the other, the claim of the genuine prospect of full diagnosis,
therapy and cure which would completely deprive these philosophical pictures
of their compulsory force. The nagging methodological question that haunts
the Investigations is then: What makes apparently compulsory assumptions
about the relation of mind and world appear to be compulsory? In other words,
can apparently natural philosophical conicts be brought to a state of perpetual
peace, not through a treaty that recognizes the valid competing claims of the
antagonistic parties but through a dissolution of the rights of all parties to
any natural part of the territory? These questions do not nd a satisfactory
answer in the writings of the so-called therapeutic Wittgensteinians. They
remain unanswered because the platonistic malady is seen to be dialectically
necessary (and easily overcome) to make sense of the therapy as proposing a
full cure.
62
But if it is true that the philosopher handles a question as he would
an illness,
63
then it is not clear how Wittgenstein accounts for the original
and ever-recurring form of our philosophical questions, which are saturated
with nonsense. Surely it cannot be a nonsensical enterprise to ask what it is
about the questions that makes them nonsensical, in other words, what are the
conditions of possibility of emerging from natural nonsense to philosophical
sense?
At least two thinkers have pointed to the possible interpretation of the late
Wittgensteins thought as containing an unthematic commitment to a kind
of reective philosophy that is, paradoxically, supposed to do away with
philosophy. Jonathan Lear and Kenneth Westphal both point to passages
in the Philosophical Investigations as evidence of a quasi-transcendental
method on the part of Wittgenstein.
64
Lears gloss on transcendental method
is non-empirical inquiry into rule-following, even though, as he admits,
Wittgenstein displays no interest in necessary structures.
65
Nonetheless,
Wittgenstein pursues a via negativa: We discover that the obvious forms
of empirical explanation could not possibly answer the kind of platonist
questions that are asked in philosophy, and it is precisely this discovery which
amounts to non-empirical insight into our form of life.
66
The idea is that the
logical contingency of our allegedly necessary truths makes it difcult to
imagine an alternative because these most basic facts reect general facts
about our mindedness. Westphal argues that Wittgenstein claims that if
very general facts of nature were different we would not and could not have
the practices we do.
67
One also has to make sense of the kind of afnity
between German, English, and other languages that have more or less afnity
with these languages, for surely this afnity is a necessary constituent in our
form of life, our mindedness.
68
How could we make sense of such afnity if
it is not the kind of empirical investigation Wittgenstein avoids? The notion is
not nonsensical, not only because Wittgenstein uses it to describe our mind-
edness, but because we can only reectively inquire into what non-empirical
concepts might mean through a kind of transcendental inquiry. This inquiry
needs both to avoid conceptual platonism and describe why we are at the
284 DANIEL J. DWYER
same time attracted to and repelled by the need for a sideways-on view of
the world. The nal point is the promising suggestion of a way to capture
a kind of transcendental aspect to Wittgensteins drawing the line always at
our formof life.
69
Lear proposes we interpret Wittgensteins quietismabout
a full articulation of form of life by comparing it to Kants transcendental I.
Kants assertion of the necessary accompaniment of the I think with all our
representations has a Wittgensteinian parallel, namely, that we are so minded
[in our form of life] must accompany all our representations.
70
Forgetfulness
of our mindedness is precisely what is non-empirically disclosed in
just about every imaginative scenario proposed by the later Wittgenstein,
and thus these scenarios must be carried out in a sort of non-empirical
reection.
3. Kant and the natural dialectic of reason
It is evident that Kant addresses many of the same philosophical problems as
Wittgenstein, but we will focus on how he treats the problematic nature of our
temptations towards skepticismand dogmatism. The rst Critique attempts to
refute both those who are inclined to understate reasons theoretical compe-
tence andthose whotendtooverstate reasons theoretical competence. Among
the former are Locke and Hume. Among the latter are Plato, Wolff, and Leib-
niz, the transcendental realists who intellectualized the appearances
71
in postulating knowledge of things in themselves (A 369). The end result
of the dialectic [that] is natural to reason (B xxxi), this wholly natural
antithetic between skepticism and dogmatism, is ultimately to euthanize
reason.
72
Kant explains why we can have an apparently denitive non-empirical
insight into reasons inherent dialectic that oscillates between such overstate-
ments and understatements. Instead of just showing how reasons natural
questioning is frustrated at every turn by its unfounded groping and frivolous
wandering about without critique (Bxxx), transcendental reection discloses
with perspicuity or comprehensiveness (A xiii) why such questioning will al-
ways occur without critical vigilance and reasons self-understanding of its
own capacities. Transcendental epistemology recognizes the threats of con-
ceptual platonism on the one hand and the dialectical temptations unearthed
by therapeutic Wittgensteinians on the other. It does this, however, with-
out drawing the merely diagnostic conclusion that multiple deconstructive
therapies are our only recourse to the natural temptations to overstate rea-
sons power. Transcendental reection discloses with insight why dialectic is
so natural and, on the basis of this disclosure, sees diagnostic quietism and
conceptual platonism as equal threats to the justied use of reason. For ex-
ample, it may appear that the distinction between Hume and Wittgensteins
methods, according to Kant, is the difference between skepticism and
the skeptical method. The skeptical method is described as watching or
even occasioning a contest between assertions, not in order to decide it to
the advantage of one party or the other, but to investigate whether the ob-
ject of dispute is not perhaps a mere mirage at which each would snatch
in vain without being able to gain anything even if he met with no resis-
tance (A 424/B 451). If our conclusion in the previous section is right, we
must show that Wittgensteins goal of perspicuity is unattainable until there
is recognition of a non-skeptical, non-empirical insight into the ceaseless nat-
ural temptations into which our understanding falls in its bewitchment by
language.
But what is gained by calling the inherently dialectical tendencies of reason
natural? Like Aristotle, Kant distinguishes between natural in the sense of
that which properly and reasonably ought to happen and that which usually
happens (A 4/B 8). It is this distinction that is key to the unity of this paper,
insofar as a transcendental diagnosis of dialectical tendencies of the mind
must identify both senses of the natural and show in what way transcendental
reection discloses the slide between normative and descriptive tendencies
of the mind. That there is a convincing explanation of the descriptive use of
natural is the rst step in disclosing why the normatively natural change of
attitude is to be adopted.
73
For Kant, dialectic is an intrinsic component of reasons progression toward
self-critique that safeguards against its own natural tendencies to dogmatism
and skepticism. Insofar as the metaphysical tendencies are generated, not by
the world or nature, but within reason, it is within its power to prevent these
inevitable tendencies from reappearing and seeming compulsory again. Rea-
son can render itself content with its incapacity to go beyond the boundaries
of possible experience and capable of resisting the ever recurring temptations
to project its subjective conditions of knowledge as objective features of the
world (A 613/B 641). But the calming insight into speculative reasons own
limits is fragile insofar as this satisfaction seems ever threatened by a return
of the dialectic if critical vigilance is not maintained:
There is a natural and unavoidable dialectic of pure reason, not one in which
a bungler might be entangled through lack of acquaintance, or one that
some sophist has artfully invented in order to confuse rational people, but
one that irremediably (unhintertreiblich) attaches to human reason, so that
even after we have exposed the mirage (Blendwerk) it will not cease to lead
our reason on with false hopes, continually propelling it onto momentary
aberrations that always need to be removed.(A 298/B 35455)
286 DANIEL J. DWYER
[Unavoidable illusions] are sophistries not of human beings but of pure
reason itself, and even the wisest of all human beings cannot get free of
them; perhaps after much effort he may guard himself (sich verh uten) from
error, but he can never be wholly rid of the illusion, which ceaselessly
teases and mocks him.(A 339/B 397)
Kant views reason as inevitably drawn to metaphysical speculation, a
propensity as natural as breathing to overstep the boundaries of experience in
its employment of concepts (A 642/B 670). Reason, in its unquenchable de-
sire for a rmfooting (A796/B824), seeks satisfaction and takes refuge
in transcendental hypotheses that cannot yield insight or explanation into that
which transcends the boundaries of possible experience (A 772/B 800). The
ideas postulated by reason are generated by the dialectical nature of the inner
workings of reason within the real medium of dialectical illusion, i.e., the
subjective which offers itself to or even forces itself upon reason as objec-
tive in its premises (A 792/B 820). The discovery that would yield peace to
philosophical reason is, as it was for Wittgenstein, a complete and systematic
clarity, but it is reasons fate and determination never to nd that peace in the
speculative sphere (A 797/B 825)
74.
This is not to say that reason, through a
complete self-critique by which it determines the range of its own powers and
abides within those limits, cannot reach a kind of unity and self-knowledge.
But it is not clear that reason can entirely free itself of the unavoidable ten-
dencies to fulll its metaphysical eros by hypostatizing its ideas of a soul, a
complete cosmos, and a supreme being. Reason is compelled as it were, not
by God or a priori in the world, but by itself to raise questions which it cannot
answer. To know that such questions are in principle unanswerable is as deep
an insight that speculative reason can arrive at; but it remains an insight into
itself, not into the divine or the world. The critique of reason has thus to deal
only with itself and the problems which arise entirely from itself, and which
are imposed on it by its own nature, not by the nature of things which are
distinct from it (B 2223).
In the Treatise on Human Nature, Hume emphasizes the minds tendency
to spread itself on external objects and attributes the origin of false philos-
ophy to the tendency of the human mind to transfer the determination of the
thought to the external objects, and suppose any real intelligible connexion
betwixt them; that being a quality, which can only belong to the mind that con-
siders them.
75
Perhaps no other philosopher emphasized and critiqued this
metaphysical urge, this reifying tendency of the mind, more systematically
than Kant. Kant appropriates for his critical purposes a logical fallacy familiar
to 18th century logicians, namely, subreption (Erschleichung). According to
the standard usage of the day, subreption is a logical fallacy whereby one
slips a phenomenon under the wrong category; in Kants general use of the
term, something subjective is mistaken for something objective. As early as
the Inaugural Dissertation, Kant extends the meaning of the term to signify
an error in metaphysics:
Since the tricks of the intellect in decking out sensitive concepts as intel-
lectual marks may be called a fallacy of subreption, . . . the interchange
of the intellectual and the sensitive will be the metaphysical fallacy of
subreption (the fallacy of intellectualizing the phenomena, if a barbarism
be permitted).
76
In the Critique of Pure Reason, subreption is a fallacy whereby one substi-
tutes the subjective [element] of our presentation for the objective, viz., for
the cognition of what is in the object (A 791/B 819). To avoid subreption we
must focus on the subjective sources underlying the possibility of an object
as such (A 149/B 188), and regard the object as merely appearance (A
36/B 53). Whereas the ideas of reason are transcendent to the understanding,
the immanent concepts of the understanding can always be supplied with
an experience that adequately corresponds to them.
77
In the paralogisms of
reason, Kant remarks, One can place all illusion in the taking of a subjective
condition of thinking for the cognition of an object (A 396).
The faculty responsible for subreption is neither the understanding nor rea-
son but judgment. Judgment can be understood in two different but related
ways. First, it is the capacity to judge (Verm ogen zu urteilen; see A 69/B
94 and A 81/B 106), or what Longuenesse calls generally the capacity for
discursive thought. Secondly, it is the capacity to judge specically in re-
lation to sensory perception (Urteilskraft, see A 643/B 671).
78
The power
of judgment in the rst sense is the ability to subsume under rules, i.e.
to distinguish whether something does or does not fall under a given rule
(A 132/B 171). Transcendental philosophy is critique of judgment, in this
sense; it keeps the power of judgment from making slips, . . . as it uses
what few pure concepts of understanding we have (A 135/B 174). Although
Kant famously equates deciency in judgment with a stupidity for which
there is no remedy (A 34n.), one might nonetheless see the rst Critique
as Kants attempt to provide such a remedy, at least for that peculiar form
of philosophical stupidity whereby one misuses ones cognitive powers (A
296/B 353). For example, the Schematism chapter insists that any genuine
employment of the categories of the understanding is restricted to the sen-
sible conditions that render possible the application of objects to objects in
general (A 140/B 179). If one abstracts from these sensible conditions, then
the use of the understanding mistakenly uses the unschematized categories
288 DANIEL J. DWYER
as the principle of knowledge of material things. This attempt is based on
a deception (T auschung; B 306) insofar as the problem concerns mistak-
ing the conditions of thought for the conditions of things.
79
What is at fault
here, in summary, is the way in which reason, without itself noticing it, . . .
surreptiously makes assertions (erschleicht) . . . in which it adds something
entirely alien to given concepts a priori, without one knowing how it was
able to do this and without this question even being allowed to come to mind
(A 6/B 10).
Transcendental dialectic discloses the illegitimate, transcendent use of rea-
son beyond the limits of objective validity. Reason nds itself trapped in
transcendental illusions that cannot be avoided at all, whereby it is tempted
to make unjustied and illusory ontological claims (A 297/B 354), for ex-
ample in hypostatizing the union of soul and body (A 389), taking space as
an absolutely necessary and self-subsistent object, and taking the concept of
a rst necessary being as a real objective being (A 619/B 647). Kant dis-
tinguishes between conceptus ratiocinati, or correctly inferred concepts that
have objective validity, and conceptus ratiocinantes, or reasoning concepts
that have no objective validity (A 311/B 368). With the latter, there is no ob-
jective thing independent of the reasoning mind, but only an ens rationis, an
empty concept without object (A 669/B 697). This empty concept is a mere
invention (A 292), a mere idea (A 681/B 709), or an empty thought-entity
(Gedankending; A 669/B 697).
In the absence of the givenness of the unconditioned whole behind the
series of appearances (A 792/B 820), reason takes it itself as capable to make
true assertions of it. But this self-misunderstanding resembles subreption in
that the illusion engendered by reason itself rests on subjective principles
and passes them off as objective (A 298/B 354). Critique provides a negative
check on this misunderstanding to prevent sensible intuition from being
extended to things in themselves, and this serves to limit the objective validity
of objective knowledge (A 255/B 311). Transcendental dialectic can thus
be broadly conceived as a critique of understanding and reason that aims at
disclosing and thus avoiding the subreptions and illusions that are denitive of
traditional metaphysics (A 63/B 88)
80.
And precisely because the dialectical
illusion has its origin in reason, reason can become aware of and correct for its
own self-deception, even though it irremediably attaches to human reason,
so that even after we have exposed the mirage it will still not cease to lead our
reason on with false hopes (A 298/B 354)
81
.
It is ultimately transcendental reection that discloses judgments sub-
reptive tendencies and reasons dialectical tendencies. It is distinguished
from logical reection, which is a mere comparison of the basic concepts
of identity, difference, agreement, and opposition that abstracts from the
cognitive power(s) from which these concepts are generated. It is also sharply
distinguished from empirical reection, which is a kind of Humean mental
introspection of the contents of ones mind.
82
For Kant, reason goes its way
in its empirical use, and a special way in a transcendental use (A 563/B
591). Logical reection must be supplemented by transcendental reection
because we need to see the relation between our representations in general
and their sources in the faculties of our mind. Transcendental reection is
that through which I make the comparison of representations in general with
the cognitive power in which they are situated, and through which I distin-
guish whether they are to be compared to one another as belonging to the
pure understanding or to pure intuition (A 261/B 317; see also A 27677/B
33233). What makes transcendental reection difcult but at the same time
indispensable for uncovering the illusions of the mind is the fact that it re-
quires an altered way of our way of thinking.
83
Here we encounter again
the shift between the natural (in the sense of descriptive) and natural (in the
sense of normative) attitudes. To disclose the altered way of transcendental
thinking is to prepare ourselves to nd out the subjective conditions under
which we can arrive at concepts . . . [for] all judgements require a reec-
tion, i.e., a distinction of the cognitive power to which the given concepts
belong (A 26061/B 31617)
84
. It is through a sustained transcendental re-
ection that we can ward off platonic tendencies (see A 854/B 882) and
arrive at an a priori insight into the relation between our cognitions and the
faculties responsible for those cognitions that is more than just an expla-
nation of things which, according to Wittgenstein, we happen to nd very
convincing.
But does the dialectical conict end once its primordial subreptive and
dialectical tendencies are disclosed? Kant seems to be open to several in-
terpretations here, and his thought does not seem to escape a fundamental
ambiguity: Kant wants to hold both that the erroneous metaphysical conclu-
sions are somehow inescapable and that it is possible to avoid succumbing
to the actual errors that are involved in accepting such conclusions.
85
On
the one hand, he claims that transcendental illusion does not cease even
though it is uncovered and its nullity is clearly seen into by transcendental
criticism (A 297/B 353, emphasis added). The subjective investigation of
itself reveals that reason is its own source of unavoidable illusion and thus
constitutes a house divided against itself.
86
Even the wisest of philosophers
may guard himself from error, but he can never be wholly rid of the illusion,
which ceaselessly teases and mocks him (A 339/B 397). Kant even speaks
of a transcendental ground which is the basis of false inferences and has its
ground in the nature of human reason, and will bring with it an unavoidable,
although not insoluble, illusion (A 341/B 399).
290 DANIEL J. DWYER
Transcendental Illusion (Schein) . . . does not cease even after it has been
detected and its invalidity clearly revealed by transcendental ciriticism. . . .
This is an illusion (Illusion) which can no more be prevented than we can
prevent the sea from appearing higher at the horizon than at the shore; . . .
or to cite a better example, than the astronomer can prevent the moon from
appearing larger at its rising, although he is not deceived (betrogen) by this
illusion. (A 297/B 354).
On the other hand, he argues that if we can keep the merely regulative use
of reason in view and beyond doubt, the conict of reason with itself will
also be entirely at an end (A 516/B 544). In the preface to the rst edition
of the Critique, an optimistic Kant declares I atter myself that in following
[this path] I have succeeded in removing all those errors that have so far put
reason into dissension with itself. . .. After discovering the point where reason
has misunderstood itself, I have resolved themto reasons full satisfaction (A
xii). In this business I have made comprehensiveness my chief aim in view,
and I make bold to say that there cannot be a single metaphysical problem
that has not been solved here (A xiii)
87
.
It seems that the problem is the following: If the mind naturally makes
illicit ontological claims that transcend the legitimate use of cognitive judg-
ment, it will remain in dialectical conict with itself, insofar as internally
generated antinomies are sustained by such a conict.
88
But reason is fated
by its fallen nature always to go beyond the limits of sensibility, naturally
avoiding transcendental reection (A 564/B 592), and this insofar as a kind
of metaphysically erotic drive is constitutive of it.
89
The critical philosopher,
moreover, realizes that the ideas of reason cannot be rejected out of hand and
dispensed with as mere projections of reasons unrequited love. Reason can
achieve insight, not into the beings projected by its ideas, but rather into what
it lacks, namely, a comprehensive perspicuity of the ground of the empirical
world. It comes to feel its need for systematic completeness of experience
through what its drive for knowledge leaves unexplained.
90
Critique requires,
then, transcendental reection to maintain an eternal vigilance to safeguard
reasons vocation to know itself, both in its a priori insight into the conditions
of possibility of thought and, by an altered way of thinking, its seeing into
the nullity of its own illusions.
91
Transcendental reection shows, nally, that
Wittgenstein lacks an articulation of why his desire for perspicuity cannot
be satised, for perspicuity transcendentally considered would imply non-
empirical insight not only into our mindedness in our form of life, but the
conditions of possibility of any mindedness whatsoever. Even if Wittgenstein
insists that this insight cannot be said but can be shown, we need a fuller ac-
count of the altered way of thinking and transcendentally changed attitude
one needs to arrive at comprehensiveness. It is precisely the need for a changed
philosophical attitude that Husserl appropriates from Kant in his attempt to
overcome the natural dialectical tendency of consciousness to misunderstand
itself and the scope of its own thought.
4. Husserl on the inevitable temptation to naturalism
Both Kant and Husserl can be said to lay claim to an inevitability thesis:
There is something natural and inevitable to the way in which reason or con-
sciousness gets the world wrong in thought, precisely by getting itself wrong
as the condition of possibility of knowledge.
92
Whereas Kant and Wittgenstein
were combating a nave realism about objects in their concern to critique a
broadly conceived platonistic metaphysics, Husserl discloses a nave realism
about the nature of subjectivity in his concern to critique both metaphysics
and empiricism. Kants diagnosis of the mixing or blending (Vermengung) of
certain wandering and shifting faculties nds its phenomenological counter-
part in the critique of the blending of two existential standpoints or attitudes
(Einstellungen) one can take toward reasons own capacities and its own
boundaries.
93
To put it in Kants terms, what is necessary is the distinction of
reasons empirical and transcendental uses and the disclosure of the altered
way of thinking that distinguishes empirical introspection fromtranscenden-
tal reection. For Kant, the aim of the transcendental dialectic can seem to
be primarily negative, namely, to show that the hyperphysical employment of
concepts does not constitute knowledge or experience strictly speaking, even
though transcendental hypotheses must be adopted in order to make sense
of what does constitute knowledge in its systematic form (A 6364/B 88).
But we have also emphasized both reasons positive insight into its own di-
alectical nature as the necessary step to its long-deferred self-knowledge and
Kants condence that reasons lust for knowledge can be satised within cer-
tain bounds. In the Prolegomena, the transcendental viewpoint yields insight
into the boundary of pure experience, and the reference to what transcends
experience:
The setting of a boundary to the eld of experience by something which is
otherwise unknown to reason, is still a cognition which belongs to it even at
this point, and by which it is neither conned within the sensible nor strays
beyond the sensible, but only limits itself, as bets the knowledge of a
boundary, to the relation between what lies beyond it and what is contained
within it. . .. Reason leads us to the objective boundary of experience, to
the reference to something which is not itself an object of experience but
must be the highest ground of all experience.
94
292 DANIEL J. DWYER
If it is true that the absolute totality of experience is not itself experience,
then we can say it is not given as experience is. But this does not imply
that such a totality or its Wittgensteinian analogue of perspicuity is not
given in any way at all. Indeed if there is to be insight into the boundaries of
reason there would be a givenness appropriate to this insight not on the part
of the world, or the divine, but of reason itself. For both Kant and Husserl,
reason in the sense of the highest capacity of human intelligence to strive for
knowledge can always be tempted to view either its own limits or its own
powers as something greater or less than they really are. Critical vigilance
and a sustaining of our keeping in view of our changed way of thinking are
necessary safeguards against such temptations.
The early anti-psychologistic Husserl understands the transcendental as
characteristic of the mode of argument according to which the primary ques-
tion is not whether but how knowledge in general is possible. One asks
about what renders intelligible the possibility of knowledge of an objec-
tivity (Gegenst andlichkeit) and the sense of an objectivity of knowledge.
95
But what motivates this question as the question that gives sense to the phe-
nomenological enterprise in its earliest stages? The transcendental mode of
argument is found by Kant, at least, to be necessary as a result of the insight
into the natural, dialectical, and self-subverting tendencies of reason.
96
In
pre-critical philosophy, the subjective conditions of possibility of knowledge
are either dogmatically reied or skeptically problematized, and are never
laid out as what they really are. Kant goes so far as to speak of an intrin-
sic decay of the human understanding which, together with the dialectic
of dogmatism and skepticism, constitute the necessary conditions for rea-
sons self-rectication.
97
Our argument is that Husserls appropriation of the
Kantian problematic as rooted within reason itself is evident in the period in
which he works out a sustained critique of naturalistic epistemology based on
the inuential experimental psychology of his day.
The early phenomenological movement is known to have had a general
disdain for dialectical forms of reasoning. It treated dialectic as by and large a
foil for the phenomenological method of intuitive givenness.
98
Nonetheless,
if we focus on what is essentially transcendental about the justication of the
intuitive method, we can seize upon a kind of dialectic at the entry gate to
phenomenology in its nascent transcendental phase. It is not presented ex-
plicitly as a dialectic of a rational faculty, but implicitly in the necessary and
inevitable confrontation of epistemology with naturalism. It was naturalism
in the form of psychologism that constituted for Husserl the decay of the
human understanding from which a genuine descriptive psychology had to
start out, a project laid out in the Prolegomena to Pure Logic of 1900. What
was necessary there was to thematize and attempt to overcome the tendency of
consciousness to understand itself according to the categories and principles
of the natural sciences and take itself as just another empirically veriable
object in the world. Naturalism inevitably misses the genuine sense of the
epistemological problematic because the answer it gives about the nature of
consciousness does not even rise to the level of the question raised about
the possibility of knowledge. Now we set up the context of a transcenden-
tal overcoming of naturalism in the rst text in which Husserl articulates a
specically transcendental approach to epistemology, his epistemology lec-
tures from 19061907 and its rst systematic formulation in what is now
published as The Idea of Phenomenology from 1907.
Explanatory psychology in late 19th century Germany relied upon an em-
piricist reduction of all mental experiences as atomistic, self-standing, phys-
iological bits of data whose succession of one after the other can only be
inductively tabulated. These bits of data are analytically conceived as ele-
mentary phenomena or physiological facts: sensations, affects, and simple
representations.
99
This inuential naturalistic psychology conceived of the re-
lations between conscious experiences similarly to the way in which natural
science conceived of the relations between material elements. And to conceive
consciousness as the same in kind as matter is, for Husserl, an example of
the fundamental metabasis or illicit conation of categories of being made in
modern epistemology. The error of psychologism is therefore
the confusion of elds, the mixture of heterogeneous things in a putative
eld-entity, especially when this rests on a complete misreading of the ob-
jects whose investigation is to be the essential aim of the proposed science.
Such an unnoticed metabasis eis allo genos can have the most damaging
consequences: the setting up of invalid aims, the employment of methods
wrong in principle, not commensurate with the disciplines true objects.
100
The early Husserl critiques the different varieties of this primordial episte-
mological unclarity as psychologism, anthropologism, and biologism. What
he discloses is the extraordinarily strong inclination in modern philosophy
and psychology to mis-take the totality of consciousness for either some-
thing it is not or something it is only in part. Husserls critique of naturalistic
psychology and empiricist philosophy of mind emphasizes a kind of illicit
indeed a kind of reverse subreption of reason in which the transcendental
capacities of consciousness are confused with the natural, causal properties
of transcendent objects:
Absurdity: when one engages in natural reection upon knowledge and
subordinates it and its achievements to the natural system of thought found
in the sciences, one at rst gets involved in theories that, although initially
294 DANIEL J. DWYER
attractive, invariably end up in contradiction or absurdity. Tendency to-
ward blatant skepticism.
101
Within the naturalistic view of self-contained physical laws, both norma-
tivity and consciousness become at worst reduced to the physical and at best
conceived as a secondary parallel accomplishment of the physical or, as we
might put it today, a mere epiphenomenon.
102
Naturalismis thus the theory ac-
cording to which purely natural-causal explanations of conscious phenomena
are necessary and sufcient explanations. Put this way, it involves the ab-
surdity of naturalizing something [consciousness] whose essence excludes
the kind of being that nature has.
103
Just as for Kant, so too for Husserl the
distinction between the the normatively natural (what ought to be the case
independent of fact) is reduced to the descriptively natural (what happens to
be the case as a matter of fact). Furthermore, naturalistic science assumes the
possibility of objective knowledge insofar as it never self-consciously raises
the transcendental question of the justication of an objective fact as such:
104
[Metabasis] comes about only through a mistaken, but entirely natural,
shifting of the problem: between the explanation (Erkl arung) of knowl-
edge as a natural fact as offered by the natural science of psychology,
and the clarication (Aufkl arung) of knowledge in terms of the essential
possibilities of its achievement.
105
Thinking naturalistically is an inborn habit by which we live and ac-
cording to which we inevitably adulterate the conscious naturalistically.
106
For Husserl, to be able to grasp the dialectical oscillation of reason between
natural and transcendental viewpoints or between psychologism and an-
tipsychologism, as he characterizes the dialectic at one point
107
leads to the
achievement of insight into the validity of the altered attitude of transcenden-
tal consciousness as world-disclosive. What provokes the dialectic and makes
its naturalness problematic is precisely that instead of transcendental descrip-
tion one gets fromnaturalismmerely causal explanation and therefore ones
sense of the necessary normativity of logic and knowledge are reduced to
contingent factors of the constitution of our human species.
108
Ones sense
that naturalism cannot answer transcendental questions about knowledge is
not, however, a merely historically contingent sense of nostalgia or Heimweh
in a world disenchanted by the all-encompassing reach of natural science to
every worldly being. The philosopher of mind confronts within herself at all
times the extraordinarily strong tendency to judge in a transcendent sense
whenever a transcendently directed act of thought occurs and a judgment is
to be based upon such an act.
109
This tendency can be compared to Kants
lazy reason in the case where we hastily regard our investigation into nature
as absolutely complete so that reason can take a rest (A 689/B 717). Just as
Wittgensteins imaginary interlocutors express the kinds of platonistic and
skeptical views to which they are tempted quite spontaneously in a kind of
context-free dialogue, so too Husserls sense of the naturalness with which
we at rst study our minds and its achievements has more to it than merely
the fact that our historical era is unduly impressed by the ever increasing suc-
cess of empirical science. In sum, naturalism, insofar as it presupposes that
empirical answers sufce to answer transcendental questions about the condi-
tions of possibility of knowledge, provides a seemingly compulsory starting
and endpoint of thought to which our minds are always tempted to return.
Naturalism is thus the original sin of epistemology, insofar as transcendental
questions admit only of transcendental answers, i.e. answers . . . without the
least empirical admixture (A 640/B 668).
110
For Kant, a full exploration of
the cosmological ideas should deter us fromnaturalism, which asserts nature
to be sufcient for itself, because we will be led to see the obvious insuf-
ciency of all possible cognition of nature to satisfy reason in its legitimate
enquiry.
111
For Kant, the concepts of the understanding are not derived from
natural experience in Humean fashion precisely because our natural experi-
ence is derived from them.
112
So too, for Husserl, consciousness must not be
seen as just another part of the world like any other, because it is precisely the
reason why there is a world there for us in the rst place.
113
The very strength of the natural inclination to metabasis concerning con-
sciousness motivates the recourse to the phenomenological reduction or the
putting out of play of our belief in the transcendent aspects of the natural
world in which we unreectively live. First we problematize and withhold
our assent from straightforward object-directed beliefs stemming from what
Husserl innocently calls the natural attitude (in the descriptive sense of natu-
ral). The attitude is natural insofar as it is the point of view from which we are
at rst directed toward transcendent objects in the world in a way that is obliv-
ious to the ways in which these objects are given to and for consciousness. It
encapsulates how we normally accept the world as it presents itself to us,
114
and this normality does not manifest countersense, which arises only when
one tries to explain away or reduce everything to the natural attitude.
115
The
natural attitude is characterized by a mental directedness towards the pregiven
world within a universal unthematic horizon where notions of pregivenness
and horizonality do not yet have any sense.
116
We are unreectively aware of
the transcendence of the objects in the world without a having a correlative
understanding of the immanent ways in which the sense of transcendence in
general is grounded and synthesized in consciousness itself. The natural atti-
tude needs to be put out of play because it is saturated with nave, pre-critical
tendencies to believe that there are indeed objects of perception, memory,
296 DANIEL J. DWYER
and knowledge that exist entirely independently of our experiencing them.
117
Transcendental reection in the Kantian sense has yet to be carried out since
the manifold of experience (our representations) has not yet been related back
to the sense-constituting origins in the understanding and sensibility.
Husserls argument about the origin of naturalistic thinking and its seduc-
tions is unique because of where he locates its genesis, namely, in the navet e
of our pre-philosophical attitude. The problem with the natural attitude is
that it already contains within itself the seeds of dogmatism, in the form of
a metaphysical naturalism.
118
Naturalism arises from the absolutizing of the
object-directedness of the natural attitude into an all-encompassing scientic
theory. Now this absolutizing of object-directedness is not an illegitimate en-
terprise in itself indeed all natural science depends upon the bracketing of
the knowing subject and thematizing of the objects themselves, for otherwise
there would be no straightforwardly objective science but we cannot claim
that naturalism is poised to explain the transcendental question of how the
object-directedness of consciousness can be justied. The reduction leads the
givenness of objects back to consciousness but it also reveals the reective
consciousness as capable of doing so, a revelation that cannot be captured
within the scope of object-directed natural science. For the altered way of
thinking is already in process in this rst part of the reduction, but the change
of attitude is not thematized as an object in natural science. Second, we lead
back the sense and the givenness of all phenomena both physical and mental
to the consciousness to whom and for whom those phenomena are given. In
other words, in the reduction the being of the transcendent world reveals itself
as having the irreducible sense of appearing-for-consciousness.
119
The prob-
lem is now that the transcendental or phenomenological attitude strikes us as
a completely unnatural direction of thought.
120
By unnatural is meant what
we referred to above as normatively natural, a non-nave critical attitude
that presupposes nothing in its inquiry into the transcendental conditions of
knowledge of the natural world. But it is for essential reasons and not merely
by chance or historical contingency that we nd ourselves slipping back into
a naturalistic or psychologistic frame of mind.
121
No sooner has transcendental reection glimpsed the non-naturalistic con-
ditions of possibility of its own knowledge that consciousness falls back into
the natural attitude:
Even those who have gotten clear on the problem nd it very difcult to
hang onto this clarity and, in subsequent thought, easily slip back into the
temptations of the natural modes of thinking and judging as well as those
false and misleading formulations of the problem which grow on their
basis.
122
Consciousness is such that it wanders and strays (schweifen) from the
transcendental viewpoint of seeingthe scope of awareness the mindcanhave in
the presence of worldly objects. It shifts away fromits twofold insight into the
very sense of the question of the conditions of possibility of knowledge and its
own disclosive capacity to uncover the eld of givenness of the world. Husserl
claims that this wandering is almost unavoidable for natural reection:
The task of epistemology, or the critique of theoretical reason, is rst
of all a critical one. It must expose and reject the mistakes that natural
reection upon the relation between knowledge, its sense, and its object
almost inevitably makes; and it must thereby refute the explicit or implicit
skeptical theories concerning the essence of knowledge by demonstrating
their absurdity.
123
Reason that wanders succumbs to the enticing temptation to collapse the
attitudinal bipolarity into a seemingly more consistent and apparently more
fruitful methodological or theoretical naturalism.
124
Reason that wanders is
reason that oscillates in an uncertain fashion between two attitudinal poles,
between the appreciation of the natural-causal properties of the subject and its
world and the appreciation of the subjects disclosive and sense-constituting
capacities. The reduction at work in Husserls early writings is the attempt, on
the one hand, to recognize this quasi-dialectical nature of the selfs thematic
attention, and on the other hand, to make the thematic attention to the selfs
transcendental capacities intoa kindof acquiredintellectual virtue of sustained
reection.
125
What motivates and sustains the necessary move to the reduction
in the early Husserl is nothing in the natural world but something internal to
reason itself. For reason confronts itself and its naturalistic tendencies in its
own attempt to become fully self-conscious and fully justied in its claims to
knowledge. Just as it was for Kant, reason cannot know itself fully unless and
until it becomes aware of its own propensity to metaphysics and naturalism,
propensities as natural as breathing itself. Furthermore, the motivation for the
reduction takes on a fundamentally ethical signicance for the early Husserl
as he articulates a Socratic life led in devotion to the fullest evidence possible
in its scientic knowledge of the world. The consistency of phenomenological
investigations depends entirely upon the single-mindedness and purity of
the phenomenological attitude.
126
The ability to sustain transcendental reec-
tion is something that belongs to the realm of our perfect freedom.
127
The
relevant ideal is the striving for a life in absolute self-responsibility.
128
The
stress on freedom and will imply an erotic motor of desire that can generate
and apparently sustain the project of suspending the world-belief of the natural
attitude in order to thematize it in the altered transcendental attitude.
129
298 DANIEL J. DWYER
5. Conclusion
Wittgenstein, Kant, and Husserl all uncover reasons natural and inevitable
temptations to think and make claims in unjustiable ways. The revelations of
these temptations disclose them to be operative dialectically in tandem with
opposed views of apparently equal and opposite force. The ultimate antidote
to the ceaseless play of natural misunderstandings, to reasons natural wander-
ings, shiftings, and vacillations (A 615/B 643) may seem to be the dissolution
of reasons natural neuroses and to provide it the peace or the calminsight
(A 797/B 825; A 615/B 643) it yearns for. But I have argued that philosophy
must not simply learn to know when to stop: it must rst thematize its own
non-empirical ability to work through the dialectical temptations in order to
achieve a reective overviewof reasons tendencies. It is only by transcenden-
tal reection on the conditions of possibility of knowledge that one can achieve
Wittgensteins goal of complete surveyability or perspicuity of our minded-
ness in a form of life.
130
Kant and Husserl in equally Socratic fashion show
that dialectic is not to be avoided at all costs; reason very much needs such a
conict (A747/B775). Recourse to transcendental reection is motivated by
the awareness of the inevitable frustrationof all empirical or naturalistic claims
to yield a comprehensive overview of philosophical problems. It is also mo-
tivated by the understanding that the problem of reason in its naturally fallen
state is that it tends to overstate or understate its own cognitive competence.
Only by striving to know what is untenable, even though somehow natural, in
reasons own inclinations can Kant and Husserl show the way to a consistent
adoption of a transcendentally altered way of thinking or changed atti-
tude, that will not only hold the dialectic of reason in check put also yield the
non-empirical insight necessary to reveal the perspicuity Wittgenstein denied
himself. Transcendental epistemology reveals such a goal of perspicuity
to be, contrary to Wittgensteins therapeutic intentions, yet another way in
which reasons natural instinct for systematic completeness discloses itself
as both inevitable and not fully dissolvable by recourse to merely empirical
investigations.
131
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank John McCarthy, Andrew Peach, Nicolas de Warren,
Henning Peucker, and Tom Nenon for helpful comments and criticisms. My
greatest debts are to the incisive critiques and suggestions from two anony-
mous referees.
Notes
1. Many of the representative proponents of this view are the contributors in The New
Wittgenstein, ed. Alice Crary and Rupert Read (NY: Routledge, 2000). Crarys intro-
duction (118) shows what is common to the method employed by these contribu-
tors, namely, explaining linguistic therapy as a diagnosis and cure of conceptual pla-
tonism about meaning and the world, both in the late and the early Wittgenstein. An
excellent reading of this sort is James Conant, A Prolegomenon to the Reading of
Later Wittgenstein, in The Legacy of Wittgenstein: Pragmatism or Deconstruction,
ed. Ludwig Nagel and Chantal Mouffe (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2001), 93
130.
2. Wittgensteins Lectures, Cambridge, 193235, ed. Alice Ambrose (Totowa, NJ: Rowman
and Littleeld, 1979), 9899 and 108.
3. Philosophical Investigations (henceforth PI), rev. trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, third ed.
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 593; cf. Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch, ed. G.H. von
Wright (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 44.
4. Blue and Brown Books, second ed. (NY: Harper and Row, 1960), 59.
5. Philosophical Grammar, ed. Rush Rhees, trans. Anthony Kenny (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1974), 130.
6. PI 115.
7. PI 110.
8. PI 89 and 127.
9. PI 133.
10. PI 428. See also Philosophical Grammar, 462: Human beings are entangled all
unknowing in the net of language. One wonders whether a merely therapeutic view
of language games could yield the knowledge of the existence, not of the world as such,
but of an all-encompassing linguistic net.
11. PI 158.
12. Blue and Brown Books, 27.
13. Ibid., 5.
14. Ibid., 70.
15. Culture and Value, 15.
16. PI 100, 109, 110, 132 and On Certainty, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright,
trans. Denis Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe (NY: Harper and Row, 1969), 31 and 435.
17. PI 89, emphasis added.
18. PI 38.
19. Zettel, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 452; see also Philosophical Occa-
sions 19121951, ed. James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993),
183.
20. O.K. Bouwsma, The Blue Book, in Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Man and His Philosophy,
ed. K.T. Fann (NY: Dell, 1967), 158ff.
21. PI 133. Compare Philosophical Occasions, 195.
22. Zettel, 299.
23. Ibid., 382.
24. Jonathan Lear, The Disappearing We, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, sup-
plementary volume 58 (1984): 240241. Interestingly, Wittgenstein compares logical
analysis to psychoanalysis in the section Philosophy from the Big Typescript.
300 DANIEL J. DWYER
25. Culture and Value, 43. That talk of a seemingly compulsory philosophical delusion
seems to end after a certain stage in Wittgensteins thinking makes Lears neurosis
interpretation more convincing.
26. Ibid., 8687.
27. Zettel, 460.
28. PI 122.
29. P.M.S. Hacker, Wittgensteins Place in Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1996), 108. See also Hacker and G.P. Baker, Wittgenstein: Understanding
and Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 531545 for an analysis of
the continuity and discontinuity of the Tractatus view of a correct logical view in the
Tractatus (4.1213) and the later notion of

Ubersichtlichkeit.
30. See Philosophical Occasions, 133, 175, and 177. Birds-eye view is the perhaps not-so-
infelicitous translation of

Ubersichtlichkeit in Philosophical Remarks, ed. Rush Rhees,
trans. Raymond Hargreaves and Roger White (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975) in the sense that
it captures a kind of non-empirical reection on the limits of empirical explanations.
31. PI 133.
32. Hans-Johann Glock, A Wittgenstein Dictionary, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 278289.
For an even more detailed account of what perspicuity entails, see James Conant, A
Prolegomenon to the Reading of Later Wittgenstein, 127. It is interesting to note a
certain similarity between the ideal of perspicuity and the debunked notion of the a
priori order of the world, which is an order that must run through all experience. (PI
97).
33. Zettel, 464.
34. Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, ed. G.H. von Wright, R. Rhees, and G.E.M.
Anscombe, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1967), 8384.
35. I am indebted to Andrew Peach on this point.
36. PI 122 and 158.
37. See PI 122: The concept of a perspicuous representation is of fundamental signicance
for us. It earmarks for us the form of account (Darstellungsform) we give, the way we
look at things. (Is this a Weltanschauung?).
38. Glock, A Wittgenstein Dictionary, 281.
39. Friedrich Waismann, Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, ed. Brian McGuinness,
trans. Joachim Schulte and Brian McGuinness (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), 183.
40. PI 133.
41. Big Typescript, 422424, as cited in Glock, A Wittgenstein Dictionary, 282.
42. Wittgensteins Lectures, Cambridge, 193235, 90, emphasis added. On the liberating
effect of relieving a mental cramp, see Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: AMemoir
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 43.
43. Zettel 350. See also PI II, xii, 195.
44. Lear describes this as the goal of capturing what constitutes our mindedness or our
agreement in judgments within our formof life. See Lear, The Disappearing We, and PI
241242. He goes sofar as tocompare Kants assertionof the necessaryaccompaniment
of the I think with all our representations with a Wittgensteinian parallel, namely, the
we are so minded must accompany all our representations. (229)
45. See Lear, Transcendental Anthropology, in Subject, Thought, and Context, ed. Philip
Pettit and John McDowell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 282.
46. See Lears Leaving the World Alone, Journal of Philosophy 79 (1982): 383. Straw-
son shows what perspicuity looks like without falling into the traps of Wittgensteins
interlocutors. His descriptive (as opposed to revisionary, or, as Wittgenstein would put
it, explanatory) metaphysics is content to describe the actual structure of our thought;
Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1963), xiii.
Lears notion of an account of our mindedness is echoed in the following line: Descriptive
metaphysics describes some general and structural features of the conceptual scheme in
terms of which we think about particular things. (2) It is no coincidence that Strawson
carries out the project in a Kantian spirit (xiii, 53).
47. PI 97.
48. PI 192.
49. Philosophical Occasions, 187.
50. Culture and Value, 15. See also Zettel 260.
51. Lear, Transcendental Anthropology, 288 and John McDowells Mind and World
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 35.
52. Mind and World, 11. Finkelstein denes a platonist about meaning as someone who, in
an effort to explain how mere noises and marks can have semantic signicance, is driven
to posit self-standing sources of signicance items which stand to the signicance of our
dead marks and noises as the sun stands to the light of the moon. See his Wittgenstein
on Rules and Platonism, in The New Wittgenstein, 5354. Crispin Wright puts it in the
following way: Platonism is, precisely, the view that the correctness of a rule-informed
judgment is a matter quite independent of any opinion of ours, whether the states of affairs
which confer correctness are thought of as man-made constituted by over-and-done-
with episodes of explanation and linguistic behaviour or truly platonic and constituted
in heaven. Wittgensteins rule-following Considerations and the Central Project of
Theoretical Linguistics, in Reections on Chomsky, ed. A. George (Oxford: Blackwell,
1989), 257.
53. On rules as rails, see Zettel 375, Philosophical Occasions, 429, McDowells Mind and
World, 92n., and David Pears, The False Prison: A Study in the Development of Wittgen-
steins Philosophy, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 10. McDowell claims
the platonist chafes and recoils from the vertigo of not having such rails in his Non-
cognitivism and Rule-following, in The New Wittgenstein, 43: The idea that consider-
ation of the relation of thought and reality requires the notion of an external standpoint
is characteristic of a philosophical realism. . .. This realism chafes at the fallibility and
inconclusiveness of all our ways of nding out how things are, and purports to confer a
sense on But is it really so? in which the question does not call for a maximally careful
assessment by our lights, but is asked from a perspective transcending the limitations of
our cognitive powers. (46)
54. We learnandteachwords incertaincontexts, andthenwe are expected, andexpect others,
to be able to project them into further contexts. Nothing insures that this projection will
take place (in particular, not the grasping of universals nor the grasping of books of rules),
just as nothing insures that we will make, understand, the same projections. . .. Human
speech and activity, sanity and community, rest upon nothing more, but nothing less,
than this. It is a vision as simple as it is difcult, and as difcult as it is (because it is)
terrifying. Stanly Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (NY: Scribners, 1969), 52.
55. Ondialectic, see Alice Crarys IntroductioninThe NewWittgenstein, 79, andFinkelstein,
Wittgenstein on Rules and Platonism.
56. Mind and World, 19, 77, 91, and 110. Rampant platonism is opposed to his innocent
formof naturalized platonism, which is based on the recognition that we need to allowfor
the satisfaction of our desire for clarity about meaning that is not wholly subjective (91).
302 DANIEL J. DWYER
Given our argument above that Wittgenstein strives in a similar way to satisfy our desire
for perspicuity, it is no surprise, then, that McDowell conceives of the naturalized platonist
as simply concerned with Wittgensteinian reminders (PI 127).
57. Mind and World, 17677.
58. On the importance of hinge propositions, see John Cook, The Metaphysics of
Wittgensteins On Certainty, Philosophical Investigations 8 (1985): 81119 and his
Wittgensteins Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
59. Mind and World, 159. McDowell even admits that the idea of a transcendental consti-
tution of consciousness sounds harder to rehabilitate, but perhaps even that would not be
impossible. (155n.)
60. Ibid., 177.
61. See his Having the World in View: Sellars, Kant, and Intentionality, in Journal of
Philosophy 95 (1998): 431491 and Experiencing the World in Reason and Nature,
ed. Marcus Willaschek (M unster: LIT Verlag, 2000), 318.
62. P.M.S. Hacker is perhaps the most insistent commentator on the fullness and complete-
ness of therapeutic cure and the resulting satisfaction of our reective desires; see his
Wittgensteins Place in Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy, 107117.
63. PI 255.
64. If the formation of concepts can be explained by facts of nature, should we not be
interested, not in grammar, but rather in that in nature which is the basis of grammar?
Our interest certainly includes the correspondence between concepts and very general
facts of nature. . .. If anyone believes that certain concepts are absolutely the correct ones,
and that having different ones would mean not realizing something that we realize then
let him imagine certain very general facts of nature to be different from what we are used
to, and the formation of concepts different from the usual ones will become intelligible.
(PI, 195) Also relevant here are Strawsons Kantian-inspired descriptive metaphysics and
the notion of scaffolding of facts at Zettel 350.
65. Lear, Transcendental Anthropology, 277.
66. Ibid., 273 and 280.
67. Kenneth Westphal, Epistemic Reection and Cognitive Reference in Kants Transcen-
dental Response to Scepticism, Kant-Studien 94 (2003): 151. Recall the Tractatus,
5.5563: All propositions of our colloquial language are actually, just as they are, logically
completely in order. Were this not so, then language could not be capable of representing
reality at all.
68. Philosophical Grammar, 190.
69. PI 241242.
70. Lear, The Disappearing We, 229.
71. Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), A 271/B 327. All parenthetical references in the text
will be to this translation and the page numbers will refer to the Akademie edition.
72. A wholly natural antithetic . . . into which reason falls of itself and even unavoidably;
and thus it guards reason against the slumber of an imagined conviction, such as a merely
one-sided illusion produces, but at the same time leads reason into the temptation either
to surrender itself to a skeptical hopelessness or else to assume an attitude of dogmatic
stubbornness. . .. Either alternative is the death of a healthy philosophy, though the form
might also be called the euthanasia of pure reason. (A407/ B434) The dialectical role of
Hume, the naturalist of pure reason, is to play the taskmaster of the dogmatic sophist
for a healthy critique of the understanding and of reason itself. (A 855/B 883).
73. Good examples of Kants use of the descriptive sense of natural are to be found in the
following preliminary passages of the Critique: Human reason . . . inexorably pushes
on, driven by its own need to such questions that cannot be answered by any experiential
use of reason. (B21) Howis metaphysics as a natural predisposition possible? i.e., how
do the questions that pure reason raises, and which it is driven by its own need to answer
as well as it can, arise from the nature of universal human reason? (B 22) [Critique
deals] merely with itself, with problems that spring entirely from its own womb, and that
are not set before it by the nature of things that are distinct from it but through its own
nature. (B 23)
74. See also Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, second edition, trans. James W.
Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2001), Ak 328.
75. A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge, second rev. edition by P.H. Nidditch
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 167168.
76. Inaugural Dissertation, in Kants Latin Writings, trans. Lewis White Beck (New York:
Peter Lang, 1992), 14849.
77. Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 215, Ak. V:
342.
78. B eatrice Longuenesse, Kant and the Capacity to Judge, trans. Charles T. Wolfe
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 78.
79. See Michelle Grier, Kants Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001), 91: Kants point seems to be that because of the failure to
recognize the kind-distinction between sensible and intellectual distinctions, the tran-
scendental use of the understanding inadvertently (and perhaps unavoidably) falls victim
to applying sensible (spatiotemporal) predicates as if they were universal conditions of
objects in general. This account of the transcendental employment of concepts is thus
the critical analogue to the theory of subreption in the Dissertation.
80. See Grier, Kants Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion, ch. 4, Karl Ameriks, The Critique
of Metaphysics: Kant and Traditional Ontology, in The Cambridge Companion to Kant,
ed. Paul Guyer, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 249279, and Susan
Nieman, The Unity of Reason (NY Oxford University Press, 1992).
81. In all judgments illusion rests on the confusion of the subjective and the objective,
especially in the case of the principles of reason, where subjective grounds can also be
[mistaken for] objective grounds; Reexion 5058, cited in Grier, Kants Doctrine of
Transcendental Illusion, 278.
82. Westphal, Epistemic Reection and Cognitive Reference, 141.
83. The attempt to think [objects as they are thought merely through reason] will provide a
splendid touchstone of what we assume as the altered way of our way of thinking, namely
that we can cognize of things a priori only what we ourselves have put into them. (B
xviii). On transcendental reection, see also A xvixvii, A 51/B 7576, A 261/B 317,
and A 260/B 316.
84. The secondary literature on transcendental reection is rather sparse. See Longuenesse,
Kants Capacity to Judge, 113 and 126127 and Westphals Epistemic Reection and
Cognitive Reference, 138 and 141.
85. Either, it would seem, the metaphysical conclusions are inevitable, in which case the
accompanying errors are unavoidable, or it is possible to correct, or avoid altogether, such
errors; Grier, Kants Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion, 5. Grier works out a helpful
distinction between the illusions that give rise to the fallacies of the Transcendental Di-
alectic and the actual fallacies themselves, and takes the former to be unavoidable and the
304 DANIEL J. DWYER
latter to be avoidable (910). She argues furthermore that one must take seriously Kants
claim that illusion is necessary in a way that both leads us to metaphysical wandering
and in some way makes knowledge possible (5).
86. Prolegomena, Ak 329, 339.
87. Kants boldness on this count does not end in the prefaces. On the last page of the Critique
he claims that his goal before the end of the 18th century is to bring human reason to
full satisfaction in that which has always, but until now vainly, occupied its lust for
knowledge. (A 855/B 883)
88. On the juridical metaphor that governs this idea of conicting parties within reason itself,
see Dieter Henrich, Kants Notion of a Deduction and the Methodological Background
of the First Critique, in Kants Transcendental Deductions, ed. Eckart F orster (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1989), 3839, and Ian Proops, Kants Legal Metaphor and
the Nature of a Deduction, Journal of the History of Philosophy 41 (2003): 209229.
89. On the metaphysical eros of Kantian reason, see Richard Velkley, Freedom and the End
of Reason (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989).
90. What Does it Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?, in Religion within the Boundaries of
Mere Reason, ed. and trans. Allen Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 1998), Ak 140n.
91. Prolegomena, Ak 328.
92. Kant even claims that dialectical inferences in the paralogisms have a transcendental
ground in the nature of human reason [that will] bring with it an unavoidable, although
not insoluble, illusion. (A 341/B 399)
93. It should be noted that sensibility, understanding, and reason are not understood by the
pre-transcendental Husserl as separate human faculties but rather as different aspects of
the subjects constitutive achievement of knowledge. For Husserl, reason is not a faculty
above and beyond understanding and sensibility but rather a title for the rational way in
which understanding arises out of sensibility in a way that is normally and normatively
continuous. The genesis of rational activity arises in such a way as to preserve the proto-
rational structures of sensibility but in a higher form, that of conceptually articulated
experience. See Prolegomena to Pure Logic, in Logical Investigations, ed. Dermot Moran,
trans. John Findlay (NY: Routledge), vol. 1, 216217.
94. Prolegomena, Ak 361362. From a phenomenological point of view, the awareness of
the boundary of consciousness is evidence for the givenness within consciousness it-
self of that boundary, understood as the givenness of the intentional reference to that
which transcends the eld of consciousness. Idea, 35. Indeed the phenomenon qua phe-
nomenon has the intrinsic quality of a relating-itself-to-something-transcendent. So a
kind of erotic directedness to the world as the horizon of all objectivity is characteristic
of all kinds of intentionality, not just the intentions of the absolute ideals of Kantian
reason. What is disclosed in the phenomenological attitude is the very meaning of tran-
scendence as given within the realm of the immanence of pure consciousness. Any other
notion of the meaning of transcendence, as if it were conceivable entirely apart from
the conscious intending of natural, objective, extramental reality, runs into the problem
of the metabasis which then occasions the dialectic of naturalism, and ultimately the
dialectic of realism and idealism. For the latter are theories which share the assump-
tion that immanence is something internal to the mind and transcendence is something
external to the mind. Husserl gets beyond this inside-outside dichotomy by uncovering
from within the different ways in which the internal and the external are given to the
subject.
95. Einleitung in die Logik und Erkenntnistheorie, Husserliana XXIV, ed. Ullrich Melle
(Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1984), 197, hereafter Einleitung.
96. Velkley, Freedom and the End of Reason, 15.
97. Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Prussian Akademie (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1902), Ak
18, R4936.
98. In this regard Heideggers anecdote is revealing: G ottingen 1913: For a whole semester
Husserls students argued about how a mailbox looks. Using this kind of treatment,
one then moves on to talk about religious experiences as well. If that is philosophy,
then I, too, am all for dialectic; Ontology, trans. John van Buren (Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press, 1999), 86. Also telling is Husserls all too brief and supercial
discussion of romantic Hegelianism as generating both the naturalism and historicism
of the nineteenth century; see Philosophy as a Rigorous Science, in Phenomenology
and the Crisis of Philosophy, trans. Quentin Lauer (NY: Harper, 1965), 7677.
99. See Diltheys Ideen uber eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie, in
Gesammelte Schriften, Band 5 (Stuttgart: B.G. Teubner, 1964), 156 and 159.
100. Logical Investigations, vol. 1, 55. The spirit of the methodological point here is captured
nicely by Aristotle: It belongs to an educated person to seek such certitude as the nature
of that thing allows. (Nicomachean Ethics, 1094b24)
101. The Idea of Phenomenology, trans. Lee Hardy (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999), 62, hereafter
Idea.
102. Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, 79.
103. Ibid., 107
104. What is taken for granted in natural thinking is the possibility of cognition. Constantly
busy producing results, advancing from discovery to discovery in newer and newer
branches of science, natural thinking nds no occasion to raise the question of the
possibility of cognition as such. . .. Cognition is a fact in nature. It is the experience of
a cognizing organic being. It is a psychological fact; Idea, 15.
105. Idea, 63.
107. Ibid., 120.
108. On the species relativism of psychologism, see Prolegomena to Pure Logic, section
36, in Logical Investigations, vol. I.
109. If we combine with this the extraordinarily strong tendency to judge in a transcendent
sense whenever a transcendently directed act of thought occurs and a judgment is to be
based upon such an act, thus falling into a metabasis eis allo genos, then we can give
a sufcient and complete deduction of the following epistemological principle: in every
epistemological investigation, into whatever type of knowledge, the epistemological
reduction must be performed, that is, all transcendence that comes into play here must
be excluded, must be supplied with the index of indifference, of epistemological nullity,
with an index that says: the existence of all transcendent entities, whether I believe in
them or not, does not concern me here; this is not the place to pass judgment on the
issue, to do so is entirely beside the point; Idea, 30.
110. Husserl dramatizes what is at stake in missing the genuine sense of epistemology
by using religious imagery of the temptation and subsequent fall of modern reason:
The specically epistemological sin, the sin against the holy spirit of philosophy,
and unfortunately also the original sin, in which the human being who has awoken
from the condition of epistemological innocence necessarily falls, is the confusion of
consciousness and soul, of epistemology and psychology; Einleitung, 176.
306 DANIEL J. DWYER
111. Prolegomena, Ak 363.
112. Ibid., Ak 313.
113. Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology (London: Routledge, 2000), 143.
114. Ideas I, trans. Fred Kersten (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1983), section 30.
115. Ibid., Section 55.
116. The Crisis of European Sciences, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press), 145.
117. But it is important to note that phenomenology does not ultimately renounce all of
natural reasons realistic instincts as it were it attempts to justify, account for, and
ultimately redeem its openness to and pretheoretical engagement with the world. Indeed,
the philosophical should not replace the prephilosophical and teleological directedness
toward truth, but rather situate and contemplate it. Robert Sokolowski, Introduction
to Phenomenology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 198. We may
compare this point to Kants claim in the rst Critique that transcendental idealism is
ultimately compatible with empirical realism. (A 370)
118. See Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology, 136.
119. Klaus Held, Husserls Phenomenological Method, trans. Lanei Rodemeyer, in The
New Husserl (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003), 23.
120. Eine durchaus unnat urliche Denkrichtung; Einleitung, 165. Such a direction of
thought is characterized as remote from natural thinking in Ideas I, xvii.
121. Husserls Introduction to the six Logical Investigations, 169171.
122. Idea, 31.
123. Ibid., 18, emphasis added.
124. Husserl has in mind here Locke and his 19th century experimental psychologist heirs.
As long as we are in the condition of epistemological innocence and have not taken
from the tree of the philosophical apple, namely, the critical formulation of the problem,
every science is legitimate for us, we can rejoice at each one, every science satises us
by the immanent evidence; Einleitung, 177.
125. That being is necessarily what it is to and for consciousness is a non-empirical insight of
the rst order, an insight that qualies phenomenology as rst philosophy for Husserl.
Yet it is an insight whose subtlety and apparent implication of a subjective idealism
accounts for the relative ease with which, once attained, the insight slips out of the
thematic point of regard (Blickpunkt) and back into the horizontal eld of regard
(Blickfeld). In other words, what is difcult in carrying out the reduction is maintaining
a consistent focus upon ones capacities to disclose and reect on the sense of the
givenness of the world. Wilhelm Wundt and other anti-naturalistic psychologists of the
late 19th century argued that perceptual attention is a kind of spontaneous searchlight
that unies and objecties for the perceiving subject the incoming sense data, which
would otherwise remain dispersed, scattered, and so merely subjective. Analogously,
and under the inuence of this kind of descriptive psychology, the early Husserls
reduction is a uniquely philosophical self-reection (Besinnung) that attempts to harness
or channel the selfs already existing yet only temporarily lasting attention to its own
higher and non-natural capacities qua transcendental self.
127. Ideas I, sect. 31.
128. Erste Philosophie 1923/4, Husserliana VIII, ed. Rudolf Boehm (The Hague: Nijhoff,
1950), 167.
129. Iso Kern argues that the main difference between the reduction as presented in the
1907 Idea of Phenomenology and the reduction as presented in the 1920s is that only
in the latter is there a self-reection (Besinnung) on the possibility and essence of this
operation. Thus, the possibility and indeed the necessity of a phenomenology of the
phenomenological reduction arises only later for Husserl; see his Husserl und Kant:
Untersuchung uber Husserls Verh altnis zu Kant und zum Neukantianismus (The Hague:
Nijhoff, 1964), 93. See also the recently published Zur ph anomenologischen Reduktion:
Texte aus dem Nachlass, Husserliana XXXIV, ed. Sebastian Luft (Dordrecht: Kluwer,
2002), especially Part One.
130. Wittgenstein says in the Preface to the PI that the investigations contained therein are
only an album and that, after several unsuccessful attempts to weld my results together
into such a whole, I realized that I should never succeed. (ix)
131. An earlier draft of this paper was presented at Xavier University in spring 2004 and the
Husserl Circle in June 2004.

Wittgenstein, Kant and Husserl

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Wittgenstein, Kant and Husserl

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Continental Philosophy Review (2004) 37: 277307 c Springer 2005

Wittgenstein, Kant and Husserl on the dialectical temptations

You might also like