‘Transcendental Phenomenology and Existentialism James M. Edie Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Sep., 1964), 52-63. Stable URL hitp:/flinks.jstor-org/sicisici=003 1-8205% 28 196409% 292573 1% 3C52%3ATPAB%3E2.0.CO%3B2-B Philosophy and Phenomenological Research is currently published by International Phenomenological Society Your use of the ISTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at hup:/www,jstororglabout/terms.hml. ISTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at hupulwww.jstor-org/journals/ips hum ch copy of any part of'a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the sereen or printed page of such transmission, ISTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to creating and preserving a digital archive of scholarly journals. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support @ jstor.org. hupulwww jstor.org/ ‘Sun Feb 26 05:17:24 2006TRANSCENDENTAL PHENOMENOLOGY AND EXISTENTIALISM The great drama of the phenomenological movement, particularly since the Second World War, has been the development and enlarging of the perspectives of Husser!’s original transcendental phenomenology into an existential phenomenology. André de Muralt has described this development accurately, if negatively, as the “ultimate form of the refusal to platonize”1 on the part of Husser!’s progeny - a refusal which is, no doubt, characteristic of the general spirit of contemporary philosophy as 4 whole and which justifies those who find in phenomenology a method and a spirit of search capable of renewing and deepening the realistic and pragmatic approach to philosophy characteristic of American thought. ‘Husserl, during his middle period, characterized phenomenology as a “transcendental idealism,” and a large number of his followers have con- sistently remained faithful to an idealistic interpretation of his works.2 They have resisted the “existentialist” interpretation of his thought which is associated with the carly Heidegger, with Sartre and with Merleau- Ponty and his followers in particular. We cannot hope to solve the historical question as to which of these divergent interpretations (the “dealist” or the “existential”) has the greater claim to Husserlian legiti- ‘macy in the space of this short paper. We will, therefore, limit ourselves to pointing out some of the themes, particularly in Hussert’s later writings, which lend support to the existential interpretation of his thought and, in a positive way, attempt to show how existential phe- nomenology is a genuine and authentic phenomenology.® We will center the discussion around the meaning which has been given to the term “transcendental” in recent phenomenology. In the + André de Muralt, Lidée de ta phénoménologie, Paris, 1958, p. 361. 2 This is true not only of many’ of the older generation of phenomenologists ‘who were close to Husserl himself but also of such portexistentialst waiters as “André de Muralt and Suzanne Bachelard © It is necessary to distinguish, of course, the nonphenomenological or “ontic” cxistentialism of writers such as Kierkegaard, Nietziche, Jaspers, Marce] and Camus {rom the phenomenological or “ontological” existentialism represented by the early ‘Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and their followers. What is characteristic of the latter group is its concern for transcendental analysis as defined in this paper. 52.‘TRANSCENDENTAL PHENOMENOLOGY AND EXISTENTIALISM 53 history of Western philosophy we find three major conceptions of the transcendental: that of Greek philosophy, that of Kantian idealism, and that of phenomenology. Before distinguishing them, we can note that they share in common a view of philosophy as a search for the radical, ultimate, foundational structures of experience, thought and reality. ‘A transcendental philosophy is always a “metaphysics of experience” in the senso that it means to go beyond and benetath the ordinary, common- sense, taken-for-granted evidences of daily life and “natural” thought to the foundations of these evidences. Such an enterprise involves a con- ception of philosophy as an attempt to come to grips with experience and to com-prehend it by disclosing its fundamental structures. ‘The transcendental “categories” recognized by ancient philosophy were al- ways categories of objective being, the transcendent object of experience, as it is in itself independent of human consciousness. Hence the essen- tialism and “objectivism” of Greek thought which nevertheless can be approached as a rich, yet naive, noematic analysis of experienced. being - in which being is understood not as the exercise of an activity which the philosopher is but as the object of his experience. This early conception of the transcendental as the objective structure of a transcendent reality was replaced by that of idealistic philosophy. Descartes reversed the traditional metaphysical standpoint by turning to the radical subjectivity of the thinking subject as the only accessible foundation and source of truth. Descartes saw that all “objective evi- dence” is given in and to consciousness. The only possible basis for a truly radical philosophy, said Descartes, lay in the reflexive analysis of those elements and acts of consciousness in the very exercise of which ‘consciousness coincides with itself. On the basis of the apodictic cert tude of the coindence of self with self in self-consciousness it is possible to build a “scientific,” ie. a certain and valid, philosophy. This project was further developed by Kant when he attempted to transform the objectified, transcendental categories of traditional philos- ophy into structural elements of human reason and thus establish a ‘metaphysics of subjectivity. For Kant the transcendental is no longer the object of knowledge but the immanent structure of knowledge.‘ The transcendental is no longer transcendent but immanent to consciousness.’ It is the a priori condition of the possibility, not of being, but of the knowledge of being. The object of reflexion is no longer the eternal, necessary, unchanging order of transcendent being, but the transcenden- tal conditions, the foundations, of our experience of transcendent being. 4 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, tr. Norman Kemp Smith, London, 1958, p. 299. * Dbid, Pp. 118-119.54 PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH. ‘The transcendental categories of Kantian philosophy are not innate ‘ideas but structures of judgment; they are not the content but the form of knowledge, and they represent in a schematic way all the essential functions of thought. They are deduced in a rigorous and symmetrical ‘manner from the nature of judgment; for there to be a judging conscious- ess, says Kant, these categories must necessarily constitute the complete ‘nd unified logical structure which is the a priori condition of the pos- ity of such a consciousness. This structure of consciousness is not itself experienced; it is inferred or deduced; it gives us the rules of knowledge." Transcendental consciousness is ‘not given in direct, lived experience but as the apperception of the necessity of a principle of unification by means of which the multiple, diverse sensations and feel- ings of experience are identified as the experience of a unique and iden- tical subject.$ Underlying Kant’s deduction of the twelve transcendental categories of understanding is the notion, which he never made fully explicit, of a consciousness which is nothing but an act or a series of acts of judging. For Kant the J think is a fully reflexive, fully awakened judging con- sciousness; it is an intellect, so to speak, inserted in a sense-world to which it must by nature give a sense or a meaning without ever experi- ‘eneing this world in itself, in person. For this reason Kant never seriously considers any kind of experience other than fully reflexive, fully explicit intellectual judgment. Even when he goes on to treat of ethical and aesthetic experience, it is always in terms of the necessary structures of intellectual judgment that he does so. His only concern is to guarantee the validity and determine the limits of necessary and universally valid structures of thought. The subject, for Kant, is not ultimately an “expe~ riencer” but a pure “thinker.” Finally, Kant accepted, from Hume, a notion of sense-experience as an intrinsically undifferentiated, chaotic, disordered mass of impressions. In itself it has no meaning, no structure; all structure comes from a priori thought, The transcendental categories which unify experience are a priori concepts completely independent of and prior to experience. Sense~ experience, says Kant, is only a blind indication or sign (Anzeige) of reality, and the ego, conscious of its unity through the transcendental unity of the categories of understanding, can know nothing about the world as it is in itselt® Though the subject needs experience to discover © Tbid., Pp. 97.98. 136-137. ® See the important and, in my view, sound study by Ludwig Landgrebe, “La phénoménologic de Husserl estelle une philosophic transeendentale?” Les Etudes Philosophiques, 1954, Pp. 315-323.‘TRANSCENDENTAL PHENOMENOLOGY AND EXISTENTIALISM 5S itself as the source of the order and differentiation of the experienced ‘world, experience itself does not enter in any way into this differentiating Ge, judging) function of consciousness. Jn attempting to define the sense in which Husserl's phenomenology is a transtendental philosophy we cannot avoid Husser’s relation to Des- cartes and Kant, With Descartes (and against Kant) he is concerned not only with the problem of the validity of knowledge but with the actual experience of the thinking subject. Unlike Kant Husserl poses questions of fact. The “fundamental fact” (Urtatsache) is the experienced I-am, the experience of subjectivity which is not only “mine” but “me.” 19 Descartes had freed philosophy from its fascination with the external transcendent world and tured it towards an analysis of experience of the world. In this Husserl was his disciple. His philosophy is not a Philosophy of “the beyond” but of “the beneath” 1! a retum to the foundations, to the “things themselves” as they are presented to con- sciousness in immediate intuition, Husserl called his philosophy an archeology 12 of human experience, a search for the ultimate, constitu- tive foundations of experience of the world as the world of human con- sciousness. However, whereas the method of Descartes is a reflexive analysis of the very acts in which the thinking subject coincides with its ‘own being, enclosed within itself, the method of Hlusserl is a reflective analysis directed towards the transcendental field of pure experience. Whereas in Descartes and Kant the subject is enclosed within itself ‘and possesses itself in untroubled, immanent peace and clarity, the sub: ject, for Husserl, intends a world. The transcendental field of experience revealed by phenomenological reflection is neither strictly transcendent to the subject (as in Greek philosophy) nor strictly immanent to the sub- ject (@s in Cartesianism and Kantianism), itis both immanent and tran- scendent. In Husser’s terms it consists of those bipolar noetic-noematic structures which are constituted by experience of. The subject does not coincide with being as in the cogito-sum of Descartes; the subject is in- tentionally directed towards a world which it is not but of which it is the lived experience. 29 Formale und transzendentale Logik, no. 95. Cf. Herbert Spiegetberg, The Phenomenological Movement, Volume I, The Hague, 1960, p. 87 3 Husserl contrasted his method with that of Kantianism by stating that his point of departure was “from below" (the concrete phenomena) whereas the Starting point of the Kantians was “from above" (abstract forms of thought). Cf. Spiegeberg, op. cit, p. 111. ‘2 Eugen Fink, “Das Problem dor Phinomenologie E. Husserls,” Revue inter- nationale de philasophie, 1, 1938-1939, p. 246.56 PUILosoPHy AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH 1. The Phenomenological Conception of the Phenomenon. Husser’s writings reveal two deep-seated and probably incompatible ‘tims: (1) to establish the method of a phenomenology which would escape phenomenalism (and all other philosophical standpoints) and, as he puts it, bring us “to the things themselves,” as they are given in imme- diate experience, and (2) to establish a complete rationalization of expe- ence. These two themes run through his writings and have given rise to ‘the conflicting idealistic and existential interpretations of his thought. Let us take the second one first. Husserl frequently states his will to make Philosophy “a completely rational science.” 18 In his attempt to reconcile reason and experience he is led in the Kantian direction of attempting to discover the laws which are intrinsic to both. This will be possible to the extent that consciousness is conceived of as the constitutive source of its objects and all objectivity is inclosed within the immanent cycle of subjectivity. On this reading of Husserl, which seems fully justified by ‘many passages in his writings, the phenomenon appears as a wholly ideal reality, as an “essence” immanent to consciousness, detached from the real world.!4 The whole project of “phenomenological reduction” can thus be understood as a process of ideation, and intentional analysis moves from the noetic act to its noematic correlate - the ideal essence - 1s it is actualized and constituted within the wholly immanent sphere of subjectivity. It is necessary that both noesis and noema be wholly im- manent to subjectivity if we are to speak of the “necessity” and the “universal validity” of the essences intuited by the phenomenologist. Phenomenology, in this view, requires a consciousness which can achieve complete awareness of its own acts and their objects within conscious- ness. Such a consciousness would be an active power, the constitutive source of all meaning, whose necessary laws could be discovered by the analysis of its operations. But this view runs counter to other passages in which Husserl explains intentional analysis as a progressive “clarification” of the phenomena which must be, in principle, unending. Neither the ego nor the world, he says, is ever known with full rational clarity. To suppose otherwise would be to suppose either that (1) the world could be experienced as, 4 totality from all aspects at once, or (2) that consciousness is indepen- dent of and prior to experience, that it can achieve a total, rational clari- fication by a reflexive tumning-in on itself. Both of these suppositions are ‘incompatible with the new sense given to the word “phenomenon” by % Lopische Untersuchungen, Prolegomena, chapter 11. Cf. J. Q. Lauer, The Triumph of Subjectivity, New York, 1958, Pp. 120 ff 34 Cf, “Aron Gurwitich, Théorie du champ de la consclence, Pacis, 1957, Pp. 143 ff‘TRANSCENDENTAL. PHENOMENOLOGY AND EXISTENTIALISM 57 Husserl. The phenomena and noemata which it is the task of phenome- nology to clarify are not creations of the ego; they are given in direct, intuition, They are the “things themselves” as experienced. The phenom enon does not cut consciousness off from the world because the phe- ‘nomenon is the world as experienced, from a certain point of view, under certain aspect. This is the phenomenological conception of the phenomenon which hhas been elaborated by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty 15 but on the basis ‘of Husserl’s own writings on intentionality and intentional analysis. For example, Husserl shows that in the perception of physical objects the aspect (Abschattung, perceptual noema) which is immediately and directly presented to consciousness is surrounded by and given with a ground of interlocking “horizons” which constitute the “sense” or structure of the perceptual experience. The internal and extemal horizons of the per- ceptual noema are perceived as implicated in and by the noema itself. It is this concentration on the structure (or “sense”) of the perceived (figure-ground; noema-horizons) that phenomenology escapes phenome- nalism from the start. The phenomenon does not block one’s contact with the “thing itself” It is that which is experienced - the very contact, with the “thing itself” - and not an intellectual or conceptual construc tion. The structure of the phenomenon (noema-horizons) can be analyzed and this is the role of reflection in phenomenology, but its structure is, ‘constituted (in a “passive synthesis” says Husserl) prior to any contri- bution of thought. 2. The Transcendental Field: the Lebenswelt. ‘The transcendental field of phenomena (experience-of-the-world-as- such) is the noematic field of phenomenological investigations. In the idealistic interpretation of Husserl the phenomenal field is interpreted as the field of pure transcendental subjectivity - the field of the “world-as- meaning” which is effortlessly constituted by an active meaning-giving operation (Sinngebung) which is the very definition of “pure conscious- ness.” 16 This transcendental field of consciousness is not “mine” or “yours” or “ours.” The problem of intersubjectivity is solved by a “tran- scendental reduction” thanks to which we reach a pure, anonymous, impersonal consciousness beneath the empirical and historical level of individual experience. This is the realm of transcendental subjectivity ‘which contains within itself the laws of intentional constitution, 38 Cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de ta perception, Pais, 1945, ‘Le Champ Phenomenal,” Pp. 64 ff 18 Ibid Pp. ¥-¥i, 61-63.58 PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH But Merleau-Ponty has rightly pointed out that this is not Husser!’s final word on the “transcendental field” since he finally recognized the “genetic” or “historical” character of all experience and, secondly, be- ‘cause he recognized intersubjectivity as a problem which was not solved by the “transcendental reduction.” In the Krisis Husserl wrote that “the transcendental” is the “object of a direct experience of myself and of ‘my conscious life with the world of which I am conscious.” 17 In his turn to experience as experience Huser! found that the two poles, myself and the world, are given correlatively at the outset and are never lost; con- sciousness is always consciousness of something. The “transcendental reduction” and the “transcendental attitude” describe a method of philo- sophical (attentive, meditative, direct) reflection to put us in the presence of experience as experience, independent of any of our “natural” expec- tations or prejudices. In his later writings Husserl calls the transcendental field of conscious- ness the Lebenswelt and he defines phenomenology as a Riickgang auf die Lebenswelt,88 a going-back to the prepredicative or prethematic region of experience which is prior to any thought about experience. The Lebenswelt is the object of an immediate experience (intuition) which is the necessary point of departure of phenomenological research. It is by a retum to the experienced Lebenswelt as such, he says, that we will ‘overcome the dogmatic positions of Standpunkisphilosophien, like empiri- cism, realism, naturalism, idealism, etc., which are “prejudiced” by an interpretation of experience antecedent to experience itselt.2° This “return to the things themselves” is possible because of the neces- sary and apodictic correlativity of consciousness and the world, For Husserl consciousness is a Welterlahrendesleben, lite-experiencing-the- world, and the sense of this definition includes not only the intentional, world-directed nature of consciousness but also the sense that, thanks to the strict correlativity of suibject and object in experience, the subject is constituted as subject only through its active involvement with the world. ‘The ego and the world are given in any experience as the constituent subject-object poles of this experience. On the other hand, phenomenology is clearly not a realism or an ‘empiricism if by that one means that meaning and value are to be found in “things” independently of any reference to human consciousness. It is true to say that phenomenology is not a description of the “real world,” »Mein Bewusstsinsleben zur Welt deren ich bewusst bin.” Kriss, nos. 26.27. 38 Cf. note 26 below. 39 Ldeen 1, n0, 26, Gibson tr. Pp. 95-96,"TRANSCENDENTAL PHENOMENOLOGY AND EXISTENTIALISM 59 but it is a description of the experience of the perceived world as the primary reality. If by “real world” one understands the world minus subjectivity or the world as a totality independent of and prior to any relationship to consciousness, it would be nonsensical to speak of @ phenomenological elucidation of the “real world.” On the other hand ‘consciousness does not create the world since it is experience of the world, What consciousness adds to the “real world” is a relationship to itself, and it is in terms of the directional, intentional structure of con- sciousness that we can speak of the a priority of consciousness: itis the subject which experiences the world and not vice versa. The world has no meaning in itself because meaning always involves consciousness. But the constitutive intentionality of consciousness should not be understood as the creation of meaning and value ex nihilo, or out of itself alone, or, ‘uch less, the creation of the world as such. Consciousness is constitutive of the world in the sense that it objectfies the world, differentiates and “constitutes” objects within the world, and that it is in and through this essential objectifying activity of consciousness that it experiences itself as subject. Thus, for Husserl, the world as the noematic correlate of experience is as apodietically certain as the ego; those who place all apodicticity on the side of the cogito have a non-Husserlian, i.e. a nonintentional, notion ‘of consciousness.2° But to say that the ego and the world are apodicti- cally certain and always given together, with the same evidence, in expe- rience, is not to say that either is ever known adequately or completely. Jn the words of Merleau-Ponty: we can have absolute certitude of the world in general but only relative certitude about any particular thing in 2 Cf, Ludwig Landgrebe, joc. city p. 322. Aron Gurwitsch, op. cit, Pp, 182-185, and Pp. 252 ff, argues on the basis of “principles established by Husser!" that we have only “presumptive evidence” of the existence of “real things” and of the “ ceptual world” in general. Gurwitsch adopts this position because of generalization ‘of Husser’ theory of signification in which the “perceptual noema” holds the same relationship to the signifying acts of consciousness a5, for instance, the spoken word. fo its meaning. It i not in any sense, says Gurwitsch, a constituent of its own meaning. This notion of the “perceptual nocma” appears to me unfaithful to Husser's most profound intentions and it erases the essential distinction between “evident” (Selbstgebung) consciousness and nonevident consciousness, between pre sentive (intuitive) acts of consciousness and nonevident (symbolic) acts. If followed. consistently, this interpretation of Husserl would nullify the specifically phenome- ‘nological notion of intentionality as well as the new phenomenological notion of the “phenomenon” as the perceived thing itself under one of its aspects. Gurwitsch’s notion of the perceptual noema as a completely idealized phenomenon is more Kantian than Husserlin,0 PHILosopny AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH ‘the world.#1 The world, in short, is given in any experience as the mate horizon or ground of experience, as the ultimate meaning-structure in which any given phenomenon is inserted and in which it is understood. 3. The Primacy of Perception. ‘One of Husser!’s major contributions to philosophy is his “pure logic of significations,” and the study of the purely formal structures of con- sciousness, what he called “formal ontology.” It was in this search for the structures of pure thought that Hlusser!’s philosophy most closely resembled Kantianism, However, this must not blind us to the absolutely fundamental differences between Husserl and Kant. There is no “tran- scendental deduction” of categories or forms of judgment in Husserl. He is mote concerned with “material” logic than with “formal” logic. ‘The eidetic structures of even purely formal thought are not acquired by deduction but by a method of “free variation” based on what is given.2? Secondly, even those purely formal structures of thought are the objects of experience; the experienced world (Lebenswelt) contains “ideal enti- ties” which can be the objects of categorial intution.28 Let us try to be clear. Men do not live only in the “real” world of perception but also in the worlds of imagination, of artistic creation, of social institutions, and in the ideal worlds of mathematics and purely formal thought.2 But it is the constant doctrine of Husserl that all imaginative and categorial intuitions (and all “higher-order” intuitions) are founded on perceptual intuitions. This is what Merleau-Ponty calls, the primacy of perception in phenomenology.2 Here we touch on the sense in which phenomenology is an “empiricism” of a new kind even when it is still called a “logic of experience” or a “rational science.” Per- cceptual intuition does not give us the “confused ideas” of Descrates; it is not the blind Anzeige of Kant. Perception is, rather, the area of “‘tran- scendental” experience and ultimately all structures of consciousness are 3 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, op. cit, p. 344. % Ct. Ludwig Landgrebe, loc. cit, p. 322. Formale und transzendentale Logik, 90. 11. 34 For Husser! the “real” world of perceptual experience is the domsin of “pas- ive" or prereflexive syntheses; the other domains of experience are founded on this one and they involve "active" ax well as “passive” syntheses. Aron Gurwitsch in his article on "La conception de la conscience chez Kant et chez Huser,” Bul- letin de la Socié francaise de philosophie, 1960, Pp. 65-96, has shown how radi cally Husserl's theory of consciousness differs from Kant's and the importance of his notion of passive syntheses. 3 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Le primat de la perception et ses conséquences philosophiques,” Bulletin de fa société francaise de philosophie, 1947, Pp. 119-183. In the Phénoménologie de la perception he even speaks of 2 “phenomenological positivism” p. xi‘TRANSCENDENTAL PHENOMENOLOGY AND EXISTENTIALISM 61 founded on the primary perceptual contact of consciousness with the world.26 ‘As we descend from the categorial or “predicative” structures of fully conscious thought to their experiential foundations, we discover, says Husserl, the underlying substructures of “prepredicative” experience. This is the area of what he calls “passive syntheses” or the “hidden achievements” of intentional consciousness. This is the foundational, ppreteflexive field of pure experience in which the world is constituted as a world for consciousness. The primary task of phenomenology is to return to this world as the matrix of all the derived constructions of thought. Experience precedes any thought about experience. When we begin to reflect on experience and “attend to” it, we discover that consciousness has already been at work ahead of us. We discover an intersubjectively constituted world of meaning and value to whose con- stitution we have already contributed without knowing it. We discover ‘ourselves as fatally immersed in a world which is already ours. At this point the work of phenomenology truly becomes an archavology of con- sciousness: a digging-down-to and an uncovering of the prepredicative and preconscious structures of experience which are the “essences” of experience. Such structures are the transcendentals of phenomenology in the most radical sense. They are the primary structures of experience as experience. They possess an “eidetic” necessity and a transcendental validity of a special kind: not as closed, fixed, innate ideas (since an intentional consciousness cannot be a “container of forms”), but as open, historical, asymtotic meaning-structures of lived human existence. They are neither categories of objects (as in Greek philosophy) nor categories of the subject (as in Kantianism) but categories of bipolar, noctic- noematic experience itself. Through the disclosure of the perceived world as the transcendental field of phenomenology in the primary sense of the term, we discover the new meaning given to the transcendental in phenomenology. The transcendental structures of phenomenology are rooted in perceptual experience, and because this experience is essentially temporal or historical they can have only a provisional validity. They 3° Logische Untersuchungen, 6th Investigation, chapters 5 and 6. Cf. Erfahrung und Urel, no. 10: Aur die Evidenzen der Erfahrung sollen sich letlich alle pridikativen Evidenzen grinden. Die Aufgabe der Ursprungsklirung des priikativen, Untels, dieses Fundierungsverhilinis nachzuweisen und das Entspringen der vor- pridikativen Evidenzen aus denen der Erfahrung 2 verfolgen, erweist sich nach ‘der nunmehrigen Aufklirung des Wesens der Erfabrung als Aufgabe des Rickgangs ‘auf die Welt, wie sie als universaler Boden aller einzelnen Erfabrungen, als Welt ‘der Erfahrung vorgegeben ist, unmittelbar und vor allen logischen Leistungen. Det Riickgang auf die Welt der Erfahrung is Riickgang auf dio ‘Lebenswelt’ d. i. die Wolt, in der wir immer schon leben, und die den Boden fir alle Erkenntniseistung abgibt und fr alle wissenschaftliche Bestimmung.” Italics mine.2 PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH are not the structures of a “pure” consciousness but of an intentional existence. They can be defined as the “meanings” of experience in the ‘most fundamental sense of the word: the structures which constitute the world as the world of human consciousness. These structures clearly do not have the “formal” necessity of formal logic or geometry but rather the “objective” or “material” necessity inherent in the objects of tran- scendental logic (in Husserl’s sense). They have the “essential” or “eidetic” necessity of experienced meaning-structures which cannot be experienced otherwise than according to their “essence.” ‘The want of time prohibits us from giving detailed examples of tran- scendental structures in the sense in which we have attempted to define them.2* Suffice it to say that phenomenology recognizes no such thing as an absolutely chaotic mass of primary sentations or “impressions” which, as in Kant for instance, have to be organized and structured according to the a priori categories of reason. Experience of the world is always structured, i.e. meaningful, experience. Its structures are autochthonous to experience itself and as such are neither wholly objec- tive nor wholly subjective. Nor are they ever wholly fixed. Moreover, theso structures aro all interrelated and the analysis of any one neces- sarily leads to others with which it is related by a mutual implication. ‘The ultimate horizon of this interlocking system of structures is the his- cal Lebenswelt - the transcendental field of all experience. Conclusion. If we were now to assess the contribution of existential phenomenology to the original perspectives of Husserl in this view of the nature and goal of phenomenology, we would find two developments of exceptional importance - both of which nevertheless appear to be entirely faithful to ‘Husserl's most profound intentions. First of all, Heidegger showed that phenomenology could not limit itself to an investigation of “pure” con- sciousness but must necessarily involve an analysis of human existence as a unitary whole, With Heidegger any tendency to consider transcen- dental subjectivity as a disembodied “thinker” is definitively overcome; ‘man as presence-to-the-world is the only possible point of departure for phenomenological analysis. This discovery marks the continuity between 2° By way of example and to indicate what we have in mind: Heidegger's Dasein- analytics, Sartre's discussions of being-and-doing, being-and-having, doing-and- having, Merleau-Ponty's analyses of spatialty, sexuality, temporality in their per- coptual grounding, Gurwitsc’s analysis of the structure of the phenomenal field, ‘Schutz’s analyses of the “typfications” of life-world experience, all furnish sound ‘and well-developed analyses of what we are here calling transcendental structures ‘of experience.‘TRANSCENDENTAL PHENOMENOLOGY AND EXISTENTIALISM 63 the transcendental analysis of Husserl and the existential-analytics of later existential phenomenology. The second point concems the extremely important phenomenological distinction between (1) operating intention- ality or “perceptual consciousness” and (2) the intentionality of “%ntet- lectual” or fully reflexive consciousness, which has been emphasized by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty.2 This distinction was explicitly made by Husserl himself, as we have seen, but it was left to the French phenom- ‘enologists to draw out the fuller phenomenological consequences of this distinction. This is not a distinction between two distinct intentionalities ‘or consciousnesses, but the distinction between two moments of the same intentional consciousness. Fully reflexive consciousness, the realm of the idea” and of the constructions of thought, flows from a reflection on the prereflexive understanding (verstehen) of the meaning-structures. of lived experience. It is the realm of prepredicative experience which is the primary field of phenomenology, and phenomenology itself is pos- sible because this original field of experience (Lebenswelt) is already “pregnant with meaning.” Its meaning-structures can be brought to the level of thematic awareness by a “radical” phenomenological reflection 2° of which they are the source and the guarantee. It is by further developing these briefly sketched directions of phe- rnomenology that it will become clear to what extent an existential and “ontological” interpretation of phenomenology is justified. JAMES M. EDIE. NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY. 25 Cf, Metleau-Ponty, “Le primat de la perception..." oe. city Pp. 123, 127, ff. 2 The term “radical reflection” is usual in Merleau-Ponty; Sartre prefers to speak of “existential psychoanalysis” in his own specific sense; Heidegger speaks in his early (phenomenological) works of Dascin-analyties or ontological analysis. ‘What is important is that the projects designated by these terms share in common ‘4 fundamental phenomenological intention of disclosing and thematizing those foundational noctienoematic structures which are given in experience as the con- stitative conditions of the possibilty of experience as such.