Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology

ISSN: 0007-1773 (Print) 2332-0486 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rbsp20

Derrida's Intentional Skepticism: A Husserlian

Response

Pol Vandevelde

To cite this article: Pol Vandevelde (2005) Derrida's Intentional Skepticism: A Husserlian
Response, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 36:2, 160-178, DOI:
10.1080/00071773.2005.11006540

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00071773.2005.11006540

Published online: 21 Oct 2014.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 11

View related articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rbsp20

Download by: [University of Florida] Date: 10 June 2016, At: 08:52

 Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 36, No. 2, May 2005

DERRIDA’S INTENTIONAL SKEPTICISM: A

HUSSERLIAN RESPONSE
POL VANDEVELDE

Jacques Derrida’s critique of Husserl1 has been the object of an abundant

literature,2 dividing scholars into those who dismissed Derrida’s critique due
to misunderstanding, 3 those who accepted it with some caveat,
acknowledging that Derrida’s critique does not really bear upon what
Husserl intended to do4, or is not informed enough of Husserl’s texts,5 and
those who embraced his critique as the manifesto of a new philosophical
Downloaded by [University of Florida] at 08:52 10 June 2016

program. The apparent humility of Derrida’s terms of “introduction” or

“commentary” on (instead of an interpretation of) the first Logical
Investigation, should not conceal the strategy involved. While commenting
on Husserl and contributing to Husserl scholarship, Derrida also used
Husserl as a foil for outlining what was going to become his program of
doing philosophy in a radically new way. These early texts by Derrida
introduce some of the terms like “différance” or “supplement” which were to
become fashionable as the paraphernalia of a deconstruction of the
“metaphysics of presence.”
My purpose is not to assess Derrida’s philosophical program in general
nor his critique of Husserl in particular, but rather to assess the attack he
mounts on the very notion of intentionality. Derrida claims to undermine
what I take to be two notions crucial for intentionality: the possibility to
repeat a meaning in its self-identity, which guarantees the stability and
availability of intentional states, and the possibility for subjects to be present
to their intentional states, which guarantees the link between consciousness
and its object. The first notion concerns the possibility for ideality and the
second concerns the possibility for a subject to have access to an ideality.
The method Derrida uses consists in taking a genetic approach, which can
be called a deconstruction, and asking Husserl questions he did not intend to
answer. While in the First Logical Investigation Husserl reflects upon the
status of meanings, Derrida wonders how we can even express and thus re-
identify over and over again such meanings; and while Husserl describes in
“The Origin of Geometry”6 the conditions in which a particular inventor has
access to an ideality, like a theorem of geometry, Derrida sees this
description as being about the production of an ideality by a singular person.
Derrida’s deconstruction consists in showing the disseminating effect of
language. Although Husserl recognized the mediation of signs, Derrida
argues, he wrongly believed that the semiotic mediation can be reduced,7 so
that it could serve ideality without disseminating it and would not prevent

160
 consciousness to be still present to its own intentions. Against Husserl,
Derrida attempts to show that (1) meanings are at their core contaminated by
the signs used to convey them, so that the mediation of signs works against
the self-identity of what is repeated; rather than being just a means for
expressing idealities, signs are a condition of possibility for an ideality; and
(2) signs as a necessary mediation prevent subjects to be immediately present
to their intentional states; signs of necessity indefinitely defer such a
presence, so that subjects do not act as owners of what they mean, but rather
as what Derrida calls a “function of language.” At the heart of ideality and
presence, Derrida argues, there is the anonymity of a system of signs in the
form of a system of oppositions. Identity is thus the result or the work of
differences speakers cannot master and is always fragmentary and
Downloaded by [University of Florida] at 08:52 10 June 2016

provisional, as the state of a system at a particular time.

If Derrida is right, we have to accept a radical intentional scepticism: we
cannot know clearly what we mean, because the words we use in order to
express our views already carry meanings as parts and parcels of a linguistic
and conceptual system and thereby contaminate our intentions in the sense of
loading them with connotations we did not, in a part of our consciousness,
intend. The immediacy between an intention and the meanings expressing
this intention is thus an illusion. At the heart of the presence we believe we
enjoy to our own thoughts and the words we use, there is a radical absence,
in the etymological sense: the roots of our words and concepts are a system
of differences we as subjects do not master. This dissemination caused by
semiotic mediation has given rise to the views, taken as dogma in some
quarters, that everything is an interpretation, there is nothing outside of the
text, and the subject is a function of language, to use three Derridean
formulations.
The stakes of Derrida’s attack on Husserl are thus quite high. Revisiting
Derrida’s early attacks on Husserl will allow us to pause and wonder whether
the radicality of the conclusions Derrida draws is justified. In particular it will
give phenomenology a chance to respond and offer a possible alternative.
This is what I mean in the title by “Husserlian response.”
I do not attempt to defend Husserl, because Derrida points to a real
difficulty in Husserl’s philosophy – the status of meaning – which bears
upon his claim to have defeated psychologism. By linking meanings to acts
of consciousness Husserl moved beyond the formalism of Frege. The new
difficulty is to show convincingly that, although linked to acts of
consciousness, meanings are not dependent on such acts; that the order of
investigation – psychological acts giving access to meanings – is not the
order of generation – psychological acts giving rise to meanings. It does not
facilitate the demonstration that the starting point of the investigation into
meanings will always have to be psychological acts. This difficulty entails

161
 another one regarding the link between ideality and repetition. If ideality is
just what allows repetition, how do we have access to such an ideality? But if
it is repetition that guarantees ideality, is ideality then not just what is
produced, always “bound” to acts of consciousness, instead of being just
accessed to or “discovered”? I make a selective use of La voix et le
phénomène to raises the first question and of the “Introduction” to the
“Origin of Geometry” to raise the second.

Ideality and Repetition

In La voix et le phénomène Derrida’s attack on Husserl’s semiology
resides squarely in Derrida’s somewhat controversial belief that, for Husserl,
a meaning always originates in an act, so that the ideality of meaning has its
Downloaded by [University of Florida] at 08:52 10 June 2016

origin in “the possible repetition of a productive act” (SP 6), the ideality
itself consisting in its capacity “to be repeated ideally to infinity” (SP 6). If it
can be shown, as Derrida attempts to do, that acts are not pure, but always
associated with particular and contingent elements linked, for example, to
the situation of the speakers, then pure repetition is in jeopardy.
As is well known, Derrida questions the distinction Husserl makes
between two types of signs: expression (Ausdruck) and indication (Anzeige).
Husserl himself does not devote much attention to this distinction; he is more
interested in the notion of expression, those signs which are endowed with a
meaning intention (Meinung). He believes he can put aside those other
elements which can function as signs through association, like marks and
flags, which he calls “indications.” He uses “indication” in a rather broad
and vague sense that includes associations (like a flag associated with a
nation), natural signs (like smoke indicating fire), but also the intimation of
the mental acts a subject performs when speaking. Regarding these
intimations Husserl also collapses those acts that are manifested by what is
said – “it is raining” indicates my belief, or assertion, or judgment that it is
raining – with those that are inferred by listeners on the basis of the
perception of the speaker – my expression “It is raining” can also indicate
any mental state I happen to have at the time I utter that expression, like my
disappointment that my son’s football game will be cancelled.
This rather loose concept of indication lends itself to be an easy target.
Although Derrida acknowledges that this difference between expression and
indication in Husserl is “more functional than substantial” (SP 20), he sees
this intricacy – Husserl says Verflechtung – of meaning and indication as a
“contamination” (SP 20). Derrida understands that indication includes all
those aspects that are contingent, secondary, particular, whereas the
expression can reach a purity that allows it to be repeated without loss and
re-identified over and over again. He thus sees what Husserl only considers a
functional difference as being central to Husserl’s phenomenology:

162
 “Husserl’s whole enterprise – and far beyond the Investigations – would be
threatened if the Verflechtung which couples indication and expression were
absolutely irreducible, if it were in principle inextricable and if indication …
resided in the essential intimacy of the movement of expression” (SP 27.
Trans. modified).
What Derrida wants to show is that any expression is not something that
can subsidiarily be an indication, as Husserl believes, but is at the same time
indication, so that an expression is never just expression or pure expression.
Here lies the contamination Derrida speaks of. “‘Everyday language’ is not
innocent or neutral. It is the language of Western Metaphysics, and it carries
with it not only a considerable number of presuppositions of all types, but
also presuppositions inseparable from metaphysics, which, although little
Downloaded by [University of Florida] at 08:52 10 June 2016

attended to, are knotted into a system.”8 What is expressed is both what is
meant and what is indicated. Since speakers cannot master what their
expressions indicate, because they themselves do not know what
connotations might be involved in what they say or what readers will infer
from what they say, they lose their capacity as owners of what they mean
and fall into the position of readers of their own intention, having to decipher
what they mean. In Burt Hopkins’ terms, “contra Husserl’s decision to
privilege the sign-signifier and hence univocity, language is intrinsically
indicative and hence equivocal.”9
These criticisms of Husserl manifest what I call Derrida’s intentional
scepticism. However, although Husserl’s notion of indication, as mentioned
above, is rather vague and deserves criticism, Derrida overstates his case. I
only point to one element of this overstatement: his tactical move of
translating Bedeutung by vouloir-dire, to want to say something. The
translation is not inaccurate: of a word it can be said in French that il veut
dire in the sense that it means something. But native speakers do not
perceive any “will” to say anything. The situation is different when applied
to a person: Que veux-tu dire? means “What do you want to say?” in the
sense of “What do you mean?” By generalizing the “will to say” to
Bedeutung, Derrida (1) not only establishes a correlation between meaning
and act of consciousness, which Husserl accepts, but also reduces meaning to
such an act, in this case a will, which Husserl does not do, and (2) forces the
Bedeutungsintention – meaning intention – into not only an act of
consciousness, but an act of the will, which reinforces the character of
consciousness as activity and turns the subject into an activist; this allows
him to put Husserl in the camp of what he calls a “transcendental
voluntarism”: “The explicit teleology that commands the whole of
transcendental phenomenology would be in fact nothing but a transcendental
voluntarism. Sense wants to signify itself, expresses itself only in a wanting-
to-say which is none other than a wanting-to-say-itself of the presence of

163
 sense” (SP 35. Trans. modified). This will at the origin of meaning pre-exists
the signs used to express it in the form of a sense, a mute or pre-expressive
sense,10 so that Husserl, according to Derrida, is entangled in a metaphysics
of presence: there is first an act of consciousness of intending and then this
act seeks its expression.
The crux of Derrida’s argument consists in the fact that Husserl regards
the level of expression as “unproductive,” as he puts it in §124 of Ideas I,
like an external garment which does not introduce any opacity in the
meaning or the act of meaning. Derrida sees a confirmation of the purity of
that act of the will in Husserl’s understanding of soliloquy. In isolated
thinking, when one speaks to oneself, the signs do not fulfil the function of
indication. In contradistinction to a dialogue, where I express myself and
Downloaded by [University of Florida] at 08:52 10 June 2016

also manifest which mental states I have, in isolated thinking I have pure
expressions. Even if I tell myself, “You behaved badly. You can’t go on like
that,” Husserl claims, I do not indicate to myself that I give myself an order
or that I am angry at myself.
Against such a view of a neutralized language Derrida sees indication as
permeating meaning.
Just as expression is not added as a “stratum” to the presence of a pre-expressive sense, so,
in the same way, the outside of indication does not happen to affect the inside of expression
by accident. Their intertwining (Verflechtung) is primordial; it is not a contingent association
that could be undone by methodic attention and patient reduction” (SP 87. Trans. modified).
Derrida’s critique hits the heart of intuition, the principle of all principles of
phenomenology that something can be given immediately to consciousness.
Because signs are related to the system of conceptual differences, to the net
of connotations that speakers cannot master, of which they are not even
conscious, “is it not excluded for essential and structural reasons – those
precisely which Husserl recalls – that the unity of intuition and intention can
ever be homogeneous and that the wanting-to-say be founded in intuition
without disappearing?” (SP 92. Trans. modified). At the heart of intuition
there is an absence:
My non-perception, my non-intuition, my absence hic et nunc are said through the very fact
that I say it, through what I say, and because I say it. Never will this structure form with
intuition a ‘unity of intimate fusion.’ The absence of intuition – and thus of the subject of
intuition – is not only tolerated by discourse, but required by the structure of meaning in
general, as far as it is considered in itself. Such an absence is radically required: the total
absence of the subject and object of a statement – the death of the writer and/or the
disappearance of the objects he may have described – does not prevent a text from ‘wanting
to say’ something. On the contrary, this possibility makes the wanting-to-say something
arise, gives it out to be heard and read” (SP 93. Trans. modified).11
Derrida calls “différance” “the movement according to which language, or
any code, any system of referral in general, is constituted ‘historically’ as a
weave of differences.”12 This leads him to say:

164
 The subject in its identity with itself, or eventually in its consciousness of its identity with
itself, its self-consciousness, is inscribed in language, is a ‘function’ of language, becomes a
speaking subject only by making its speech conform – even in so-called ‘creation,’ or in so-
called ‘transgression’ – to the system of the rules of language as a system of differences, or
at the very least by conforming to the general law of differance.13
Consciousness thus becomes “a determination or an effect within a system
which is no longer that of presence but of différance.”14 The mediating role
of signs through a system of differences prevents consciousness from being
fully present to itself.
However powerful and fascinating Derrida’s critique of Husserl may
appear, his understanding of meaning (Bedeutung) as a will-to-say (vouloir-
dire) causes him to overlook one crucial point: meaning is linked to acts not
Downloaded by [University of Florida] at 08:52 10 June 2016

simply as generated by acts, but as species of acts. For example, when

someone states “2x2=4,” the state of affairs is named by the proposition,
which is different from the judgment made. The expression conveys a
meaning, but this meaning is not entangled in any particular situation of
occurrence, although it remains correlated to acts of consciousness in the
sense that meaning can be instantiated in an act of judgment or doubt.
Meaning is animated by acts of consciousness, but can be uncoupled from
those acts, so that the expression “2x2=4” is a proposition that does not
include in its content the fact that is can be asserted, wished, or questioned.
Derrida mentions it in La voix et le phénomène and acknowledges in
“Genèse et structure’ dans la phénoménologie” that “Husserl … wants to
maintain at the same time the normative autonomy of the logical or
mathematical ideality in relation to any factual consciousness and its original
dependence in relation to a subjectivity in general; in general but
concrete.”15 However, if the Bedeutung is a will to say, as Derrida claims it
is, the first alternative becomes unintelligible – the autonomy of meaning in
relation to any factual consciousness – and we are left with the second:
meaning is dependent on subjectivity or always generated by an act. Derrida
has thus an easy task to draw the conclusion that indication will always
contaminate expression, in the sense that the particular and contingent
circumstances of utterance, for example, permeate what is expressed and
there will always be some arbitrariness in ascribing to a speaker what is
meant and what is just indicated. The whole process of communication is
seriously impeded, if not paralyzed.
However, if it makes sense to say that meaning is a species of acts, as
Husserl clearly states in the First Logical Investigation, meaning is indeed
linked to acts of consciousness, but is not reducible to these acts and thus not
“dependent” on them. Meaning is the abstracted moment of the act that can
be instantiated by many different subjects.
I realize … that what I mean with [π is a transcendental number] or, when I hear it, grasp as
its meaning [Bedeutung] is identically what it is, whether I think or exist or whether there are

165
 any thinking people and acts or not … This true identity we here affirm is nothing else than
the identity of the species. Thus and only thus can such an identity as an ideal unity
encompass the disseminated multiplicity of individual singularities … The multiple
singularities toward the ideal one meaning are naturally the corresponding moments of the
meaning act (Bedeuten), the meaning intentions.16
These meanings form what Husserl calls “a class of concepts in the sense of
‘general objects.’17
Because meaning is a species, “the relation between meaning and the
mental is thus not the external one of grasping, but the internal one of an
instance’s exemplifying its kind.”18 However, this notion of species or
general objects has an opaque link to actual acts of consciousness which
cannot keep the spectre of psychologism at bay. As Maurita Harney sees it,
Downloaded by [University of Florida] at 08:52 10 June 2016

The approach to meaning which Husserl develops in the Logical Investigations is one in
which meaning, although not a real component of acts, is nonetheless a property of acts in
the sense that it is ultimately determined (inwardly) by the act’s intentional essence. It
follows from this that investigations into meaning are ultimately investigations into
psychological acts.19
Husserl revisited his theory of meaning through his idealist turn and
considers that meaning – what he calls “noema” in Ideas I – is always the
correlate of an act of consciousness, so that a meaning cannot exist without
the possibility of being thought, but that “this correlation of noesis and
noema is not a real component of acts.”20 Husserl averts the danger of
relativism by turning consciousness into an absolute ego. As he says in a text
of 1908:
All empirical being is relative. It appears to an ego, appears to him always differently,
appears to a different ego and always different. And if it appears to no ego in the strong
sense, then it has still to be determined only through a relation to appearances to an ego. But
this factual relativity has behind itself an essential relativity. To the essence of the
transcendent it belongs to appear, to present itself (darstellen) and to be given and to be
susceptible to be given only through appearances. A priori, thus to the essence of the
transcendent real being belongs a relation to an absolute ego, to an absolute consciousness in
its different ego-concretions.”21
Husserl’s view that meaning is a species of acts or a correlate of acts
weakens Derrida’s claim that (1) meaning is a will-to-say and (2) a will-to-
say that is always already contaminated by indications. My intention is mine
only secondarily, once a meaning is instantiated, so that the use of signs is
for me the condition for having access to meanings, rather than the
dissemination of my intention. However, the question remains: what is the
relationship between those meanings as species or correlates and signs
through which they become available to me? To some extent Husserl
addressed this question in “The Origin of Geometry”, where he offers us an
illustration of how an ideality is accessed for the first time and what Derrida
in his reading of Husserl understands as the “creation” of an ideality.

166
 Ideality and Language
Science, Husserl says, is a spiritual (geistiges) product, but it has a
“historical beginning” and “an origin in a capacity (Leisten),” which he
characterizes as “project and then in successful execution” (OG 356). In his
translation of “The Origin” Derrida translates Leisten by acte producteur
(productive act).22 As for the translation of Bedeutung as a will to say, this is
not incorrect, much as it is an interpretation, which again leads Derrida to
understand meaning, in this case ideality, as always generated by a particular
act of consciousness. “Every ideal objectivity is produced by the act of a
concrete consciousness (the only starting point for a transcendental
phenomenology)” (IOG 42). Ideal objects are thus “constituted” (IOG 78).
Let me summarize rather wildly what Husserl calls the production
Downloaded by [University of Florida] at 08:52 10 June 2016

(Erzeugung) of an ideality and what Derrida takes as the birth of an ideality. I

distinguish four stages. In the first stage the “founding geometer,” in Husserl’s
example, has a “first production (erste Erzeugung) in an “original ‘evidence’”
(urprüngliche ‘Evidenz’). This evidence, which “is itself originally present in
the actuality of the first production” (OG 359), passes by, is unstable, can
easily disappear and be forgotten. But it can “be re-awakened” (OG 359). To
the passivity of what is past and has fallen in retention belongs “the possible
activity of a recollection” (OG 359-60). At this second stage the first
production, which is also a lived experience, is “lived through in a quasi-new
and quasi-active way” (OG 360). A second production takes place which
covers the first one (kommt in Deckung): “What has now been realized in
original fashion is the same as what was previously self-evident” (OG 360).
The model of this repetition is remembering. Husserl uses the schema “empty-
fulfilled intention” when he says that in the repetition the production which
was originally evident is like a “pure fulfilment of its intention” (OG 360) and
thereby becomes the “renewed (recollected) production” (OG 360). Now that a
repetition has taken place, repetition can be done at will. There is a “chain of
repetitions” (OG 360). At the third stage we have the pre-stage of objectivity
when other people encounter the first discoverer. Through empathy and
linguistic exchange other people can not only repeat the evident production,
but also actively understand it (OG 360). They partake in the activity of
production, co-accomplish the activity that produced the spiritual product in
the first place. A “transfer of the production” (Fortpflanzung der Erzeugung)
of the first discoverer to other people has become possible, which Husserl calls
a “re-production” (Nacherzeugung). The series of repetitions transforms itself
in a “series of understanding” (Verständniskette, OG 360). What was evident
for the first discoverer remains the same in the consciousness of others. “In the
unity of the community of communication among several persons the
repeatedly produced structure becomes an object of consciousness not as a
likeness, but as the one structure common to all” (OG 360).

167
 At the fourth stage idealities receive their “permanent existence”
(verharrendes Dasein). The production is no longer dependent on the
connection between the discoverer and his contemporaries. These could have
died and the production still lives on. Through writing the communication
has become virtual in the sense that it “makes communication possible
without immediate or mediate linguistic contact” (OG 360-1). Husserl uses
the word “communication” in order to indicate that the function of language
does not reside in replacing communication, but in making communication
possible. What the written signs allow, Husserl says, is a transformation back
into the corresponding activity, like a reverse-engineering. Although the first
discoverer might no longer be there, we can understand him in the sense of a
virtual communication with him. This means for Husserl that the goal is not
Downloaded by [University of Florida] at 08:52 10 June 2016

so much to understand his words, but what he conveyed through these

words. We use his words in order to figure out what he meant by these
words. “The formation becomes sedimented, so to speak. But the reader can
make it self-evident again, can reactivate the self-evidence” (OG 371-2.
Trans. modified).
Language has made a production available, even when the discoverer is
no longer there. The production has thus gained a new existence. It exists
even when nobody reactivates it. While the danger at the first stage was that
the production could vanish, escaping memory, the new danger at the fourth
level consists in the writing itself: a reader can understand a text without re-
transforming this text into its first production, without reactivating this first
production, thus without understanding and reproduction (nachverstehen,
nacherzeugen), to use Husserl’s formulations. Husserl speaks in this context
of a “seduction of language” (Verführung der Sprache, OG 362).
The question for us is about the status of the production by the first
discoverer: there are three options: (1) it is the true discovery of a “meaning”
that already existed before being discovered, so that the first geometer, in
Husserl’s example, was first only in having access to it; (2) the production is
a true creation, causing a new meaning, which did not exist before, to
populate the world; or (3) the production is neither a mere discovery nor a
mere creation. I leave the third possibility for the last part of this essay.
Husserl seems to hesitate between (1) and (2) and Derrida, while noting
the hesitation, tends to understand him as defending (2). His reading is
somewhat encouraged by Husserl. Although he states that geometry only
exists in its propositions and that geometry is valid for all people including
conceivable people, Husserl qualifies what the first discoverer carries out as
a “production” (Erzeugung). In addition he mentions ideal objects of
geometry along with cultural objects, which also suggests that geometry as a
“spiritual product” is “created” like a work of literature. “‘Ideal’
objectivity … is proper to a whole class of spiritual products of the cultural

168
 world to which not only scientific constructions and the sciences themselves
belong, but also, for example, the constructions of fine literature” (OG 356-7).
In a footnote – which Derrida qualifies as “important” (IOG 66) – he
explains that the concept of literature encompasses those productions that
“have their objectivity, their existence-for-everyone, only as signification, as
the meaning of speech” (OG 357). Furthermore, Husserl describes the four
stages mentioned above not as a description of what happened to a real first
geometer, but as part of a questioning-back (Rückfrage) from within a
tradition. The first stage of the process is actually the last stage of the
reconstruction. “Starting from what we know, from our geometry … there is
an inquiry back into the submerged original beginnings of geometry as they
necessarily must have been in their ‘primally establishing’ function” (OG
Downloaded by [University of Florida] at 08:52 10 June 2016

158). While it is clear that the first “production” Husserl mentions does not
belong to a real person, it is less easy to determine whether this first
production is a first mental activity that must have taken place as a
methodological step – what we, the investigators, must posit regardless of
what took place in actuality – or whether it is a mental activity that really
took place and that we have to reactivate, although not bound to the actual
inventor who did it. In the first case we could claim to belong to the open-
ended intersubjective community and see the ideality as correlated with
transcendental consciousness: the “production” is the mental act that anyone
accessing that ideal meaning must have thought. In the second case, the
ideality would not be bound to an actual person, but would be bound to some
extent to the actual circumstances of production that we would have to
reconstruct in order to have access to the ideality.23
Depending on which option interpreters of Husserl choose, language will be
seen as playing a different role. In the first case, language is necessary for us to
have access to the self-evidence the first discoverer had, but this necessity is
due to the accidents of history that may have cut us off from any contact with
the first discoverer. In the second option, language would be constitutive of the
ideality, so that without language no ideality would be such.
Many commentators have chosen this second option in their
understanding of Husserl. While Merleau-Ponty acknowledges that “Husserl
is not looking to explain ideality through language”, he understands that, for
Husserl, “ideality is neither first nor second in relation to the linguistic
Verstehen, that ideality emerges in linguistic understanding, that it cannot be
reduced to language as to a positive content, but also that ideality does not
dominate linguistic understanding as a superior possibility.”24 For Merleau-
Ponty the detour through language touches the self-identity of the first
production. Once the production is expressed in language this production is
“preserved insofar as it is lost as production, left behind as Erzeugung
insofar as it has become available, for example, for other productions.”25 He

169
 concludes that language receives in Husserl an ontological dimension. In
Heideggerian formulations he writes that discourse is the opening “of an
enormous layer of being” (un immense feuillet d’Etre).26 Even stronger, he
claims that “taken positively, ideality is a myth: there is no Erzeugung which
would be total reactivation.”27
Derrida continues in this line and radicalizes it.28 Although Husserl calls
the first stage a “self-evidence” (with quotation marks) and speaks of an
“original self-presence in the actuality of the first production … in the
original ‘self-evidence’” (OG 359. Trans. modified), Derrida claims that
“truly, there is not first a geometrical evidence which would then become
objective. Geometrical evidence only starts ‘the moment’ there is evidence
of an ideal objectivity. The latter is such only ‘after’ having been put into
Downloaded by [University of Florida] at 08:52 10 June 2016

intersubjective circulation” (IOG 64). The first level has thus no real
existence. More strongly than Merleau-Ponty, Derrida asserts that language
and writing constitute objectivity: “Husserl insists that truth is not fully
objective, i.e., ideal, intelligible to everyone and indefinitely perdurable, as
long as it cannot be said and written” (IOG 90).
Just like Merleau-Ponty, Derrida associates ideality with objectivity and
sees language as being necessary for full objectivity. By objectivity they
understand availability to everyone. When we apply this understanding of
objectivity to the different stages of ideality mentioned above, we can grant
that there is no objectivity at the first level, where the discoverer himself
does not know exactly what he has found. At the second stage, where the
discoverer can reawaken and repeat his first production, we have no
objectivity in the sense of availability to everyone, but we have an
objectivity in the limited sense of a product that can be re-identified by the
producer: he can repeat accurately his first production as he produced it the
first time. All scientists and artists do that. And like discoverers who do not
find their audience right away, they can wait for better times without
forgetting or losing their discoveries. How do they manage to do this? With
what means can someone preserve a discovery for better times? Most likely
though a form of articulation and the best articulation is certainly language,
but it is not the only one. Other forms of articulation are possible like images
(Einstein claimed that he thought through images) or a code like music or
painting. It is also possible for many people to identify and recognize
feelings, scents, or tastes with different degrees of proficiency, if we can
extend ideality to cover those domains.
At the third stage of communication and empathy, it is fairly obvious that
language is needed in order to disseminate any product. However, there is
also the possibility for people who know each other very well, to understand
each other only through empathy without uttering any word, although only
for a limited field of activities or topics.

170
 In short, it seems to me that language is only necessary for an objectivity
as availability to everyone. For a limited objectivity in the sense of a stable
and reproducible presence or in the sense of a meaning that is valid for one
person alone, there are no reasons to see language as a necessary tool. This
limitation already points to exaggerations in Merleau-Ponty and Derrida
about the role of language. In addition, the mention of language by Husserl is
part of a reconstruction, as mentioned above. And Merleau-Ponty and
Derrida understood this to be the reconstruction of a first “production.” The
ideality is thus not only objective through language, but, in their
understanding, bound to language, so that there is no ideality independent of
language.
This is what I would like to test. I take advantage of Husserl’s mention of
Downloaded by [University of Florida] at 08:52 10 June 2016

different types of ideal entities, like logical meanings, scientific propositions,

or words, and focus on one type of ideality, a thought. I would like to
illustrate the third option mentioned above about the status of ideal entities:
that they are neither totally cut off from mental acts – merely discovered –
nor totally dependent on mental acts – merely created – or, to use Husserl’s
terms, neither totally free nor totally bound. Although this goes beyond what
Husserl explicitly says and leaves out of consideration the question of logical
meanings, it might reconcile the tensions Derrida rightly pointed to. It might
also force us to accept that psychologism cannot be overcome, only tamed
and neutralized in some transcendental form.

Thinking as Navigation through Words

As “ergänzender Text IV” of Formale und transzendentale Logik, Husserl
wrote an essay in the Wintersemester of 1920-21, which was supposed to
serve as the introduction to the lectures on transcendental logic and which
investigates the link between discourse, thinking, and thought. From the
onset Husserl takes his distance from a view Derrida accuses him of holding,
namely that the meaning intention (Meinung) is a clear mental moment
before the use of meaning (Bedeutung). Husserl writes:
The one who expresses himself lives in the efficacious practical intention to articulate this or
that view. That must not be understood as if he formed the intention explicitly, and would
only then seek suitable words to express it … In solitary thought in which one expresses to
oneself, it is surely not the case that we would first have the formation of thought and then
seek the suitable words. Thinking is carried out from the very outset as linguistic. What
resides in our practical horizon as something to be shaped is the still indeterminate idea of a
formation that is already a linguistic one. The thought that we have in mind and that we
bring to expression interiorly is already equivocal, though still determined in an incomplete
manner.”29
When we apply this to the first stage mentioned in the “Origin of Geometry”,
we understand better why Husserl named this level or this moment
“evidence” and why he used the word with quotation marks, something

171
 Derrida entirely overlooks. Now Husserl characterizes this moment as an
“indeterminate representation of a formation” (unbestimmte Vorstellung
eines Gebildes).30 We can say about this stage what Wittgenstein says about
a private sensation: “It is not a something; but it is not a nothing either!”31
Indeterminacy does not necessarily amount to an absence. When we think,
our thought cannot be identified without language. Our thinking, however, is
not sheer words. The Deckung Husserl mentions reminds us of the ambiguity
of a thought: meaning intention and meaning content with the precedence of
the meaning intention. However, this privilege does not amount to saying
that the speaker first thinks and then speaks. Only that words need a light,
need to be lead. “… in speaking we continuously carry out an internal act of
meaning that melds with the words, as it were, animating them. The result of
Downloaded by [University of Florida] at 08:52 10 June 2016

this animation is that the words and the entire discourse incarnate within
themselves a meaning, and incarnated in them, bear it within themselves as
sense.”32
Thus Husserl ascribes language a constitutive role, but language does not
replace the process of thinking. The meaning intention is this moment of
leading words: words cannot decide to align themselves, form sentences,
make up a text, and become a book. Someone creates this, although he uses
words to create it. Husserl always firmly believes that an ego takes part in
the process. “… the ego is everywhere living in these acts as carrying them
out, as being related to the perceptual object, the judged object, the willed
object through these acts.”33 This presence of an ego, against what Derrida
claimed, is not the immediate presence of an ego to his thoughts. “The ego
seizes the word in regarding it; it grasps its indicative tendency; it willingly
allows itself to be guided by it, to be initiated into the execution of thinking;
it allows itself to be oriented by what is thought as what is meant by the
words. But we do not intend the words themselves here!”34
Within his theory Husserl is able to preserve the privilege of the meaning
intention against the possible dissemination through words, because there is
an ideality in the words themselves. The question of the link between thinking
and language is not the link between two processes. If that were the case, one
would have to have precedence, either an absolute framework of thinking or
of language. Derrida has showed that the first alternative is untenable and has
thus advocated the second. If words also carry an ideality, there is a third
possibility. The meaning intention is not an autonomous moment which could
be exercised by itself. Language is also not just a material means which
would be estranged from the spiritual nature of the meaning intention. In the
word the acoustic aspect is to be distinguished from the ideal aspect. “In a
treatise, in a novel, every word, every sentence is singularly unique, and it
cannot be duplicated by a repeated reading, be it aloud or to oneself.”35 There
is an “ideality of language” (Idealität der Sprache).36

172
 When I think, I use words. But it is not so as if these words were extrinsic
to my meaning intention. Strictly speaking I do not use words as acoustic
elements, but words as bearers of a meaning that is intelligible to others. I
use words as they would be used by the average speaker in my community. It
also means that specific concatenations of words hold as expressions of
meanings, themselves correlates of acts of consciousness, what we can call
intentional states and which can acquire a transcendence. To use a particular
concatenation of words means nothing else than borrowing a meaning
intention from my linguistic community, an intention which is common or
possible or made available by certain conventions in this community.
Let us remember that Derrida accused Husserl of having reduced an
expression to a meaning intention. Derrida translated Bedeutung (meaning)
Downloaded by [University of Florida] at 08:52 10 June 2016

by vouloir dire: to want to say something. Against such a reduction Derrida

objected that an expression is always already an indication so that the
expressed meaning intention is never a pure meaning intention, but from the
start contaminated. When we use three parameters instead of two, the
problem disappears. My meaning intention is not an autonomous moment,
but a navigation among possible meaning intentions which are already
encapsulated in the words and possible word sequences. When I say “It is
raining,” although it might indicate that I am disappointed because my son’s
football game will be cancelled, this indication is dependent on the
intelligibility of what I said and this intelligibility, strictly speaking, does not
belong to me: I borrow not just words, but a meaning which is correlated to a
conventional intentional state, in this case believing that it is raining and, by
uttering it, ascribing this belief to myself as mine in an assertion. It is my
meaning intention not because I own it, but because I chose this word and
not that word, this sentence and not that one.
The contamination Derrida speaks of can be reduced and is thus not native
to intention. For the contamination only occurs for particular acts of
consciousness, but not for the “species” (Logical Investigations) or the
correlation. We can thus meaningfully tell someone: “I understand what you
say, but not what you mean,” in the sense of grasping a meaning correlated
to a possible intentional state – “Jim ran with the sun” – but being unable to
ascribe what you try to convey as your particular act of consciousness.
Similarly, we can tell someone: “Do you mean what you just said?” in the
sense of “Do you take as your own particular intentional act what anybody
speaking English would take the meaning of your sentence and the
intentional act correlated to it to be?”
The dissemination of language Derrida claims is unavoidable can be
reduced as well, although only to a certain extent. In synchrony, for people
living in the same community, the language speakers speak conveys a set of
possible intentional states – Husserl’s “species” of acts – so that, if asked

173
 why I made an assertion when saying “It is raining,” ultimately I will have to
just say that I speak English, because it is what the sentence in English
conveys. As Husserl puts it in Formale und transzendentale Logik,
We hold fast at once to the universality of the coinciding of language and thinking. That
designates for us now two parallel domains; they correspond to one another as the domain of
possible expressions and as the domain of possible senses, of possible expressive intended
meanings. They yield in their intertwined unity the two-sided domain of current and concrete
discourse, of sense-fulfilled discourse. Thus, every assertion is at once speech and currently
intended meaning, more precisely, judicative intended meaning; every pronounced wish at
once optative speech and the current wish itself, the current wish-meaning, etc.37
Although many cultural connotations may affect the words we use, like
racial or gender bias undertones, these connotations only “contaminate” what
we convey if they reach the status of intentional states. If someone points out
Downloaded by [University of Florida] at 08:52 10 June 2016

to me some connotations of the words I used, I can still claim that the
connotations, although “indicated” by my sentence, do not belong to what I
mean; I was not aware of them. Only if it can be proven that I actually
entertained another intentional state, for example the intent to debase or
insult someone, in addition to the content of what I said, can I be faulted for
manifesting those connotations. In other words, only when an intentional
state can be ascribed to me can I be faulted for entertaining it. What is
indicated pertains to what I mean, but not as the meaning I convey. These
connotations belong to a cultural use of a language and are analogous to the
connotations conveyed by my accent, the type of vocabulary I use (urban or
agrarian, scientific or literary, simple or elaborate). They may reveal much
about who I am, but they do not threaten the self-identity of the meaning I
convey in the sense of the socially accepted intentional state that I, of
necessity, ascribe to myself by choosing the words I used. It is only when
these connotations conveyed in the cultural use of a language reach the
threshold of a “social consciousness” that speakers would become “authors”
of those connotations if they were to use the words or expressions including
those connotations.38
When I think, I am in part led by words, Husserl tells us. A word invites
another word and a sequence of words can offer the opportunity to configure
an interesting idea which then becomes my idea. And when someone tries to
understand me or to interpret what I said, they have to use my words as tool
for identifying the meaning intention I claimed to convey in the words as I
expressed them. I am the one who is understood or misunderstood not when
my words are understood, but when someone has transformed them back
into what I meant with these words and sentences. My meaning intention
was the usage of these means. The goal of understanding or interpretation
does not reside in finding a meaning-intention that is separate from words
and sentences. To understand or to interpret means to ascribe a meaning
intention to someone and that means: to reproduce the act of the speaker

174
 through which he chose these words and sentences, such that he must have
the intentional state anyone speaking his language would have when using
these words and sentences. This is what I take Husserl to mean when he
speaks of the claim to reactivate an original production and which belongs to
the domain of responsibility (Verantwortung OG 362).39
Language offers constraints regarding what Benjamin calls “the manner of
speaking” (die Weise des Sagens, die Art des Meinens),40 but language is not
a limitation in itself. If one wants to speak about the constraints that are
exerted against a meaning intention, one has to note that, first, these so-
called constraints are actually the conditions of possibility for meaning
intention, so that a meaning intention is configured. Without constraints
there would be no meaning intention; and, second, the constraints exerted on
Downloaded by [University of Florida] at 08:52 10 June 2016

meaning intention are not intentional. They are a mode of speaking and the
speaker must choose one among several possible candidates. What is
intentional is this act of choosing or navigating among the constraints of a
language. Navigation indeed involves a limited uncertainty of the thought at
arrival and the possibility of getting lost, but navigation does not amount to
doom oneself to dissemination.
Marquette University
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Sebastian Luft for his critical comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

References
1. Jacques Derrida, Le problème de la genèse dans la philosophie de Husserl. Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1990 (written in 1953-4); Eng. trans. The Problem of Genesis in
Husserl’s Philosophy, by M. Hobson. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003;
Jacques Derrida, “Introduction.” In Edmund Husserl, L’origine de la géométrie, traduction
et introduction par Jacques Derrida. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, [1962] 1974;
Eng. trans. Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, by J. Leavey. Stony Brook: Nicolas
Hayes. Henceforth as IOG, followed by the page number in the text; Jacques Derrida, La
voix et le phénomène. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967; Eng. trans. Speech and
Phenomena. And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, by D. Allison and N. Garver.
Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Henceforth as SP, followed by the page
number in the text.
2. See, for example, the collection of essays “Derrida’s Interpretation of Husserl” in The
Southern Journal of Philosophy, vol. XXXII, Supplement, ed. L. Lawlor (1993). For a
general, exhaustive, and sympathetic presentation of Derrida’s critique of Husserl, see
Leonard Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl. The Basic Problem of Phenomenology.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.
3. Among many others, see Curtis Bowman, “Speech and Phenomena on Expression and
Indication: Derrida’s Dual Critique of Husserl’s Demand for Apodictic Evidence and the
Phenomenological Reduction.” International Studies on Philosophy 31 n.4 (1999), 1-21;
Alan White, “Reconstructing Husserl: A Critical Response to Derrida’s Speech and
Phenomenon.” Husserl Studies 4, n.1 (1987) 45-62.
4. Among many others, see Rudolf Bernet, “Derrida and His Master’s Voice”, in W.R.
McKenna and J.C. Evans (eds.), Derrida and Phenomenology. Dordrecht: Kluwer
Academic Publishers, 1995, 1-21; Rudolf Bernet, “On Derrida’s Introduction to Husserl’s

175
 ‘Origin of Geometry’”, in Hugh Silverman (Ed.), Derrida and Deconstruction. New York:
Routledge, 1989, 139-153; Burt Hopkins, “Husserl and Derrida on the ‘Origin of
Geometry’”, in McKenna and J.C. Evans, Derrida and Phenomenology 61-93; Leonard
Lawlor, “The Legacy of Husserl’s ‘Ursprung der Geometrie’: The Limits of
Phenomenology in Merleau-Ponty and Derrida.” In Ted Toadvine and Lester Embree,
Merleau-Ponty’s Reading of Husserl. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002, 201-
223; Dallas Willard, “Is Derrida’s View of Ideal Being Rationally Defensible?” McKenna
and J.C. Evans, Derrida and Phenomenology, 23-41.
5. See, among others, Donn Welton, The Other Husserl. The Horizons of Transcendental
Phenomenology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.
6. Edmund Husserl, “The Origin of Geometry.” In Husserl. The Crisis of European Sciences
and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. D. Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1970. Henceforth as OG, followed by the page number in the text.
7. As Derrida formulates it, “if, physically or not, [the expressive stratum] proffers a
constituted sense, it is essentially re-productive, that is unproductive” (Jacques Derrida,
Downloaded by [University of Florida] at 08:52 10 June 2016

“Form and Meaning: A Note on the Phenomenology of Language.” In Derrida, Speech and
Phenomena. And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, 115. Derrida’s emphasis).
8. Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. A. Bass. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 19.
9. Burt Hopkins, “Husserl and Derrida on the ‘Origin of Geometry,’” 84.
10. Traditionally, and Derrida sees Husserl as part of that tradition, soliloquy is the voice of
consciousness where there is no mediation and where I communicate directly with myself.
As Derrida explains in Of Grammatology, “Voice produces a signifier that does not seem
to fall in the world, outside the ideality of the signified, but remains sheltered, at the very
moment it reaches the audio-phonic system of the other, in the pure interiority of self-
affection … Voice and voice consciousness, i.e., consciousness as such as presence to
oneself – are the phenomenon of a lived self-affection as a suppression of différance. This
phenomenon, this presumed suppression of différance, this lived reduction of the opacity of
the signifier are the origin of what we call presence. Is present what is not submitted to the
process of difference?” (Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie. Paris: Les Editions de
Minuit, 1967, 236. My translation).
11. Rudolf Bernet summarizes Derrida’s critique as follows: “by submitting itself to a
transindividual code the voice loses its self-mastery and can only be recognized through
the detour through anonymity” (Rudolf Bernet, “Derrida and His master’s Voice” p. 18).
Bernet concludes that “there is neither immediate consciousness of itself which is fully
intuitive and purely internal, nor an unchanging presence of an ideal object which would
remain identically the same throughout its multiple repetitions and representations” (18-9).
12. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy. trans. A. Bass. Chicago: The University Press of
Chicago, 12.
13. Derrida, Margins 15.
14. Derrida, Margins 16.
15. Derrida, “‘Genèse et structure’ et la phénoménologie.” In Derrida, L’écriture et la
différence. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1967, 235.
16. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 105-6.
17. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 106. For a detailed treatment of the notion of species of
acts, see Donn Welton, The Other Husserl, 64ff. This leads Husserl to draw two further
conclusions. Because they are species and thus not limited by the contingent circumstances
of the performance of the act, they are also not bound to signs. “In itself there is no
necessary connection between the ideal unities, which factually function as meanings, and
the signs to which they are bound, that is to say, through which these meanings are realized
in the human mind. We can thus not affirm that all ideal unities of this sort are expressive
meanings. Each case of new conceptual formation shows us how a meaning comes to be
realized which before had never been realized” (Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen109-10).
In addition, there is the possibility for some meanings to be such without being instantiated.

176
 “There are thus innumerous meanings which in the habitual relative sense of the word are
purely possible meanings, whereas they have never come to expression and, by virtue of the
limits of the human cognitive capacities can never come to expression” (Husserl, Logische
Untersuchungen109-10). This latter claim seems to go against what is stated in the Fifth
Logical Investigation, where Husserl qualifies the species as the matter of acts and thus as a
component of acts. We cannot strictly speaking consider a meaning that could not be
instantiated, unless we imagine a possible future consciousness capable of such; for
example, if we were to move to another planet where different laws of physics apply. And
the talk of a meaning that in principle cannot be instantiated can only be “meaningful” if we
imagine superhumans endowed with an intelligence far superior to ours, while at the same
time imagining our relation to these superhumans in one single community.
18. Peter Simons, “Meaning and Language.” In Barry Smith and David Woodruff Smith, The
Cambridge Companion to Husserl. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, 113.
He continues: “Husserl thus effects a remarkable economy in the ontology of abstract
meaning by employing the relation of instantiation or exemplification, which the realist
Downloaded by [University of Florida] at 08:52 10 June 2016

about universals needs anyway, and at the same time tying meaning internally to the
mental, a feat which had eluded his Platonist forebears Bolzano and Frege. At the same
time Husserl manages to avoid a psychologistic and subjectivistic account of meaning, a
feat which had eluded his empiricist forebears” (113).
Jocelyn Benoist takes another angle: he claims that “in fact and properly speaking there
is nothing other than acts; meaning so to speak ‘does not exist.’ At best can we conceive a
manner of distributing acts in classes of acts, and there lies the possibility of thinking
something as the identity of ‘the’ meaning, as we say” (Jocelyn Benoist, “L’identité d’un
sens: Husserl, des espèces à la grammaire.” In Jocelyn Benoist, Robert Brisart, and Jacques
English (eds.), Liminaires phénoménologiques. Recherches sur le développement de la
théorie de la signification de Husserl. Bruxelles: Publications des Facultés Universitaires
Saint-Louis, 1998, 231. My translation).
19. Maurita Harney, Intentionality, Sense and the Mind. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984,
162.
20. Donn Welton, The Other Husserl, 265.
21. Husserl, Transzendentaler Idealismus. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1908-1921). Husserliana
36. Hrsg. R. Rollinger and R. Sowa. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003, 33. Consciousness does not
have to be an actual one, but only a possible one: “Even when they do not refer back to a
real consciousness, general objects and ideas refer to a possible consciousness and this
possibility is finally itself only thinkable in relation to an actual consciousness” (Husserl,
Transzendentaler Idealismus, 72).
22. Derrida, “Introduction” 178.
23. Derrida formulates Husserl’s problem as follows: “Either [this genesis] is an empirical
operation that founds ideal significations, and these are then bereft of objectivity and rigor,
or else the ideal objectivities are a priori possible and the sense or the necessity of their
historical becoming is no longer understood. Because he did not start from an a priori that
was ontological rather than phenomenological (a [phenomenological one] which at the end
becomes formal), because he did no unite synthetically and dialectically being and time …
Husserl is obliged to bring together in confusion an empiricism and a metaphysics, the two
ghosts of phenomenology” (The Problem of Genesis 169).
24. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Notes de cours sur L’origine de la géometrie de Husserl. Renaud
Barbaras (ed.). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998, 27; Eng. trans. Husserl at the
Limits of Phenomenology, ed. L. Lawlor and B. Bergo. Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 24 (trans. modified).
25. Merleau-Ponty, Notes de cours sur L’origine de la géométrie de Husserl, 29; Eng. trans.
25 (transd. modified).
26. ibid, 53; Eng. trans. 44 (trans. modified).
27. ibid, 57; Eng. trans. 47 (trans. modified).

177
 28. Interestingly, Derrida mentions an analogous dangerous alternative: “to distinguish into an
absolute opposition the phenomenological advent of objectivity and the historical event of its
appearance; starting from this separation, there is an oscillation again between two types of
reduction of genesis to a pure accident stripped of all phenomenological meaning: at some
points, under the pretext that objectivity presupposes freedom in relation to historical
determination, and thinking thus to be respectful of its phenomenological signification, its
advent is held to be the only essential thing; at other points, considering that this liberty is
nothing without the historical act of liberation that produced it and produces it at each instant,
and that objectivity and freedom are ‘constituted’ in and through the history of nature, the
event is made into the only effective reality. In both cases, is there not infidelity to the most
authentic intention of Husserl’s phenomenology?” (The Problem of Genesis, xxvii).
29. Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik. Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft.
Hrsg. P. Janssen. Husserliana 17. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974, 359. This text was
translated as the first part of Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis. Lectures
on Transcendental Logic. Trans. A. Steinbock. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001, 12 (translation
Downloaded by [University of Florida] at 08:52 10 June 2016

modified).
30. Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik 359; Analyses Concerning Passive and Active
Synthesis 12.
31. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen. Hrsg. E. Anscombe. New York:
Macmillan, 1953, 102.
32. Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik 360; Analyses Concerning Passive and Active
Synthesis 14.
33. Husserl, ibid., 363; Eng. 17.
34. Husserl, ibid., 366-7; Eng. 23.
35. Husserl, ibid., 358; Eng. 10.
36. “Language possesses the objectivity of objectlike formations, of the so-called spiritual or
cultural world and not that of mere physical nature. As an objective, spiritual formation,
language has the same features as other spiritual formations. In this way we distinguish
from the thousand reproductions of an engraving, the engraving itself, and this engraving,
that is, the engraved image itself, is intuitively read-off of every reproduction, and is given
in every one of them in the same way as identically ideal. Likewise, when we speak of the
Kreutzer sonata in distinction to any of its arbitrary reproductions. Even if the sonata itself
consists of sounds, it is an ideal unity, and its sounds are no less an ideal unity; they are not
for instance physicalistic sounds or even the sounds of external, acoustic perception”
(Husserl, ibid., 359; Eng. 11).
37. Edmund Husserl, ibid.,. 361; Eng.15 .
38. In a diachronic perspective or in intercultural encounters Derrida’s perspective is more
valid. As Foucault showed in The Order of Things, there may be a certain manner of
ordering things that people as a community take for granted and do not even perceive, but
that outside observers – like anthropologists – or historians – in the case of Foucault – can
point to. The talk of “indication” – this particular scientific method of the 17th century
“indicates” the manner in which this epoch ordered things – would then be legitimate. But,
to repeat, what is indicated could not be qualified as an intentional state because people of
that epoch could not entertain those intentional states consciously.
39. In a footnote Husserl writes: “At first, of course, it is a matter of a firm direction of the
will, which the scientist establishes in himself, aimed at the certain capacity for
reactivation. If the goal of reactivatability can be only relatively fulfilled, then the claim
which stems from the consciousness of being able to acquire something also has its
relativity; and this relativity also makes itself noticeable and driven out. Ultimately,
objective, absolutely firm knowledge of truth is an infinite idea” (OG 362-3).
40. Walter Benjamin, Illuminationen. Ausgewählte Schriften I. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1955, 55.

178