A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness, and Action: Husserl the “Philosopher of Infinite Tasks” and the Crisis of Reason.

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Maurice Natanson in his work “Edmund Husserl, Philosopher of Infinite tasks” provides us with 10 landmarks of the conceptual terrain of Phenomenology:

“Phenomenology is a presuppositionless Philosophy which holds consciousness to be the matrix of all phenomena, considers phenomena to be the objects of intentional acts and treats them as essences, demands its own method, concerns itself with pre-predicative experience, offers itself as the foundation of Science and comprises a philosophy of the life-world, a defense of reason, and ultimately a critique of Philosophy.”(P.19)

Not everyone would agree with this list, however. It is questionable, in the light of the omnipresence of the influence of Descartes whether Phenomenology is as innocent of presuppositions as is claimed. The shifts toward Leibniz’s monadology and the attempt to provide unprejudicial descriptions of the life-world in later work also raise questions about the “neutrality” of Phenomenology. Paul Ricoeur in his work “Husserl: an analysis of his Phenomenology” does his best to locate Husserl’s thought in a historical context:

“Husserl is connected to Kant not only through the idealistic interpretation of his method but likewise in descriptions which continue the Kantian analysis of mind__(Gemuth); although in the Critique this analysis tends to remain in the shadow of epistemological preoccupations. Likewise, phenomenology matches the spirit of Hume in-depth—it continues the great English tradition of criticising language and extends its discipline of thought into all sectors of experience, experience of signification, of things, of values, and of persons. Finally, phenomenology is still most radically related to Descartes, to the Cartesian doubt and cogito”(trans by Ballard E G and Ember L E(Evanston, North Western University Press, 1967, P.3-4)

It would indeed be difficult to maintain in the light of the above that transcendental assumptions about the ego and the world were not significantly operating in Husserlian Phenomenology. Ricoeur, in our opinion, is over-critical of Kantian Critical Philosophy and its analysis of the notion of “representation”, thus failing to appreciate the extent to which Kantian Philosophy owes an intellectual debt to Aristotelian hylomorphic theory that focuses on all kinds of change in the world and the relation of this change to both representation and intention in its relation to the will. Husserl does not share this perspective of attempting to philosophically describe and explain change in the world, perhaps, because, as Ricoeur points out, he shares the anti-Aristotelian animus of Descartes whose metaphysics ends up relying on the assumptions of dualism and materialism: two positions that hylomorphic theory deliberately targeted as unsustainable.

Indeed it becomes apparent that Husserl himself embodied the “spirit of change” that swept through modern Europe: a spirit of change that included “reversals” of judgment in relation to the “crisis” of his times:

“Our age is called an age of decadence. I cannot consider this complaint justified. You will scarcely find in history an age in which such a sum of working forces was set in motion and performed with such success.”(Edmund Husserl, Philosophy as Rigorous Science” in “Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy”, P.145)

We accused Descartes in volume one of this work of being one of the “New Men”, embracing a skepticism and solipsism that influenced much of the Science of the modern age. The above quote was written on the eve of the First World War, that in its turn would unleash firstly, another World War in which two atomic bombs were dropped on civilian populations, and secondly, a cold war that took the world to the brink of self-annihilation. During 1935 Husserl “reversed” his judgment when he began to fear the worst. He feared the collapse of the modern lifeworld and in particular:

“The downfall of Europe in its estrangement from its own rational sense of life, its fall into hostility toward the spirit and into barbarity.”(Husserl’s “Crisis” P. 299)

It does not, however, seem to have occurred to this trained mathematician and scientist to trace the modern malaise all the way back to the dualistic and materialistic reflections of the “new men”(Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, Adam Smith, ). Husserl might have, according to Ricoeur, shared some of the transcendental concerns of Kant but he did not share Kant’s metaphysical grounding of transcendental Philosophy. Indeed, it is clear that Husserl dismissed both Aristotelian and Kantian metaphysics.

Ricoeur in an essay entitled “Kant and Husserl” claimed in support of the above line of reasoning that Husserl’s problematic “transcendental solipsism”(fully in accordance with the spirit of the times) was directly due to what he calls “disontologizing the object”: a process that Ricoeur claims leads to a crisis in Husserl’s Philosophy. He also claims that it is possible to see in Husserl’s Phenomenology a fruitful elaboration upon Kantian epistemology: an elaboration that compliments the Kantian notion of “the phenomenon”. To the extent that phenomena and noumena are for Kant metaphysically and logically connected such an elaboration must, of course, be limited in its scope. The metaphysical “method” of Kant’s mature philosophy refers to two elements of Kantian metaphysics: firstly, the method limits the phenomenon and situates it in relation to noumenal reality. Secondly, there is a reference to the internal structure of the phenomenon although the account is carried out in the context of explanation/justification rather than in a context of exploration and description. The context referred to here is the context of judgment in accordance with the categories of the understanding–the lynchpin that is used to connect the sensible and rational aspects of the mind. The empirical question of how the mind knows is subordinated to the Kantian a priori principle of thinking, rather than in terms of its concrete characteristics or its conscious intentions. Kant’s account focuses that is upon objectivity in general rather than that constituted by specific acts, operations or functions of what Natanson calls the matrix of consciousness or the Cartesian ego cogito cogitata. Kant does not seek to explore and describe this ego but instead seeks to explain and justify all intentions conceptually at an abstract level of reflection, i.e. in terms of the possibility of phenomena. The “I think” that is involved at this reflective level is characterised by Kant in both theoretical terms(the categories of judgment aiming at the truth) and in practical terms in which a maxim of action wills or “thinks of people as ends in themselves in accordance with an idea reason (of the good) and an idea of freedom.

The interesting question which Ricoeur poses is whether in essence the Kantian “I think” is both a being and an act: whether that is cogito ergo sum ( I think therefore I am) is an essential part of the Kantian cognitive apparatus. For Husserl, consciousness means or intends the world. The matrix of consciousness for Husserl has its own transcendental aesthetic of temporal structure in which the retentions of the past and the protensions of the future are integrated into a concrete presence of intentionality. Ricoeur describes this as follows:

“The first act of consciousness is designating or meaning. To distinguish signification from signs, to separate it from the word, from the image, and to elucidate the diverse ways in which an empty signification comes to be fulfilled by an intuitive presence, whatever it might be, is to describe signification phenomenologically…..intentionality is that remarkable property of consciousness to be a consciousness of…., of moving out from itself toward something else, then the act of signifying contains the essence of intentionality.”(Husserl, P. 6)

Husserl points out that there are many different forms of intentionality in which a distinctive cogitatio is directed at a distinct cogitatum. A thought, that is, might take the form of a willing or the forms of loving, desiring, judging something present, past, or future. A perceiving of an object appears, however, to be the primary form of intentionality for Husserl probably because it is the primary form of intentionality that constitutes consciousness. The problem that this form of concretisation has for Aristotelianism and Kantianism is that the “I” for them is not a form of consciousness but rather something that performs the role of an explanatory or justificatory “principle”. Another problem with Husserlian Phenomenology is that from the point of view of common sense it strains the imagination to believe that consciousness is capable of physical action. For common sense, only people can act, and it is also a belief of common sense that one can act without being “conscious” of what one is doing(e.g. driving a car whilst consciously carrying on a conversation). Ricoeur argues that Husserl emphasizes for everyone how perception never ceases to reveal how living goes far beyond judging(P8), how being-in-the-world is not exhausted by Kant’s four questions of “What can I know?”, “What ought I to do?” “What can I hope for?” , and “What is man?”. Indeed in Husserl’s final reflections upon the lifeworld, an ante-predicative irreducible lifeworld becomes the basis for all understanding, reflection, and logic. Initially this seems to be a move away from what Ricoeur refers to as the Husserlian prejudice in favour of the founding role of “representation” that is present in all forms of intentionality, including the affective and volitional forms, but it is not clear that Husserl ever abandoned this “founding” role of representation in phenomenology whose central meaning is essentially related to the science of “what appears”. When Husserl, however, claims that different forms of consciousness have different meanings in accordance with the different objects that are intended. This obviously raises the question of truth and its relation to consciousness. O Shaughnessy in his work “Consciousness and the World” claims that there are both logical and essential links between consciousness and perception as well as between consciousness and truth/rationality. The former is obviously a bridge from the inner realm of the mind to the outer and the latter being an internal bridge between aspects of mentality that are not shared by the unselfconscious consciousness of animals. Kant confirms both of these links in a chapter entitled “Phenomena and Noumena” in his First Critique:

“We demand in every concept, first, the logical form of a concept(of thought) in general, and, secondly, the possibility of giving it an object to which it may be applied. In the absence of such an object, it has no meaning and is completely lacking in content, though it may still contain the logical function which is required for making a concept out of any data that may be presented. Now the object cannot be given to a concept otherwise than in intuition: for though a pure intuition can indeed precede the object a priori even this intuition can acquire its object and therefore objective validity only through the empirical intuition of which it is the mere form–therefore all concepts, and with them all principles, even such as are possible a priori relate to empirical intuitions, that is to the data for a possible experience. Apart from this relation, they have no objective validity and in respect of their representations are a mere play of imagination and the understanding.”(Critique P.259)

The above could be viewed as an exercise in phenomenology and Kant’s remarks here bear clearly the imprint of his synthetic project of integrating the rationalism of Aristotle with the empiricism of Locke, Hume, and Reid. Even the concept of cause has intuitive relations with intuitive Time on pain of becoming meaningless, becoming an empty abstract logical exercise. The rules of the employment of the understanding, then, are therefore not transcendent rules, but rather rules that anticipate the forms of possible experience. Here we are obviously also touching upon the truth function of consciousness insofar as we are dealing with self-conscious beings. Objects are subsumed under concepts in Judgments that are directed at the truth.. This, however, does not mean that the concepts arise out of the objects: concepts are nothing but forms of thought for Kant. There is, however, another aspect of Kantian thought which runs counter to the Husserlian Phenomenological project:

“At the same time, if we entitle certain objects, as appearances, sensible entities(phenomena) then since we thus distinguish the mode in which we intuit them from the nature that belongs to them in themselves, it is implied in this distinction that we place the latter, considered in their own nature, although we do not so intuit them, or that we place other possible things, which are not objects of our senses but are thought as objects merely through the understanding, in opposition to the former, and that in so doing we entitle them intelligible entities(noumena). The question then arises whether our pure concepts of the understanding have meaning, in respect of these latter objects, and so can be a way of knowing them.”(Critique P.266-7)

A noumenon, for Kant, in a positive sense, then, is “an object of a non-sensible intuition”(P.268), an intellectual intuition. This entails that we cannot think of any “way” in which the objects of such intellectual intuition may be given to us. They are an X, an unknown, situated at the boundary of our understanding and reasoning about the world. The above quote, then, points to Kantian links between consciousness and perception(both inner and outer) and between consciousness and its truth-functional relation to the world.

Phenomenological description would reject the above justification of the relation between concepts/principles and the logos of ” what appears”. Husserl, in particular, the mathematician and scientist would also reject the metaphysical and ontological commitments referred to above, even if they were made to determine the limits of our thought about the world. The preferred path Husserl chose was one that led to “transcendental solipsism” that subsequently (when Husserl coined the idea of the life-world) had difficulty with the intersubjective dimensions of objectivity The reduction of all of life to consciousness, without any accompanying relation to truth and rationality, would have been for Kant a resurrection of a kind of dualism that reminded one of Cartesian Philosophy and its need to eventually retreat into a materialistic position that located consciousness in the brain: with an appeal to God thrown into the equation to maintain dualistic assumptions. No such materialistic component or reference to God is to be found in Husserl, of course, but a spiritualism of consciousness which we do find would have been a cause for concern for Kant. Kant’s position is contrasted with Husserl’s in that Kant inherited the Aristotelian propensity to give an account of Being in his explanations and justifications of all forms of change to be found in this complex world. Rationality and logic are replaced in the mature Husserl by a method that implies the use of the imagination to varying the presentation of phenomena in pursuit of their essences. There is also a shift from the question of why things are as they are, to how they can be so: a shift away from the need for justification. Indeed had Kant been confronted with Husserl’s theories he would have pointed out that an unanalysed idea of “experience” was motivating the whole project: an experience of a cogito fixated upon perceiving rather than thinking, judging, or willing. Indeed Kant might have used one of Husserl’s own terms of criticism against him and accused the project of “Psychologism”. On this theme, Kant had the following to say in his work “Anthropology from a Pragmatic point of view.”:

“Representations in regard to which the mind behaves passively and by means of which the subject is therefore affected(whether it affects itself, or is affected by an 0bject) belong to the sensuous cognitive faculty. But ideas that comprise a sheer activity(thinking) belong to the intellectual cognitive faculty. The former is called the lower, the latter the higher cognitive faculty. The lower cognitive faculty has the character of passivity of the inner sense of sensations: the higher a spontaneity of apperception, that is of pure consciousness of the activity that constitutes thinking. It belongs to logic(a system of rules of the understanding), as the former belongs to Psychology(a sum of all inner perceptions under laws of nature) and establishes inner experience.”(P.29-30)

The criticism of Psychology described by Kant above would follow for all forms of transcendental solipsism. The justification of this criticism would also point to the lack of attention to the truth-function of consciousness and its links to the activity of thinking entailed by the Categories of Judgment. The consciousness of such activity at the very least requires a form of reflection that Ricoeur claims are lacking in Husserl’s account. Ricoeur, in giving his own account of the matter, fixates upon the reflection involved in self-consciousness, a form that is detached from the truth of representation:

“The positing of the self is a truth which posits itself, it can be neither verified nor deduced; it is at once the positing of a being and of an act: the positing of an existence and of an operation of thought: I am, I think; to exist for me is to think; I exist inasmuch as I think. Since this truth cannot be verified like a fact, nor deduced like a conclusion, it has to posit itself in reflection. Such is our philosophical starting point.”( Freud, P.43)

The above, according to Ricoeur, does not, however fully characterise the power of reflection which also requires an act of interpretation that in its turn requires philosophical positions as complex as Phenomenology or Psychoanalysis to complete this act. This is because consciousness cannot be captured in an intuition but rather requires:

“an effort to recapture the Ego of the Ego Cogito in the mirror of its objects, its works, its acts”(Freud, P.43)

The so-called first truth or “axiom” of the Cartesian system held in such high standing by Husserl has, according to this amendment by Ricoeur, to be revealed by the ideas, works, institutions, and monuments that concretely present it. Consciousness, in other words, is, as Freud maintained, a vicissitude of the Instincts, it is a task requiring a complicated hylomorphic actualisation process. This account clearly suggests that the Cartesian apperception of oneself in which one “feels certain” is not enough.

This suggests a return to Kant’s reflection on noumena, or alternatively a form of existence that is not a category but rather a mind that is subject to transcendental investigations. Ricoeur’s account, however, posits a being that does not understand via the Kantian Categories of the Understanding but rather engages in some kind of transcendental act. Ricoeur acknowledges the possible role of Kantian practical reasoning as part of this transcendental act: something like the universal and necessary account of Kant is probably needed in order to allow the full scope of the role of intersubjectivity in objective judgments(given the “foundation” of transcendental solipsism). Kant clearly demonstrated in his second critique, the Critique of Practical Reason, that it is possible not only to posit oneself as such as an existence in itself but also that of other people as “ends-in-themselves”( as centres of Being). Such existential entities are, in Kantian language, intentions without intuitions. Husserl’s phenomenology does not invite such a move. Ricoeur in his essay “Kant and Husserl” in his work on Husserl claims the following as part of his criticism:

“he confused the problem of being(ëtre) with the naive positing of particular beings(étants) in the natural attitude. Now, this naive positing is precisely the omission of the connection of particular beings to ourselves and it arises from that Anmassung(presumption) of sensuousness discussed by Kant. Furthermore the interlacings of the significations of objectivity which we found in Kant, an objectivity constituted “In” us and a founding objectivity “of” the phenomenon is not to be detected in Husserl.”(P190-191)

One can also detect in the above quote a Kantian critique of a position that attempts to situate itself at the level of the lower cognitive functions operating at the level of the imagination rather than on the higher cognitive levels of the understanding and reason.

Husserl’s use of reason does not resemble Kant’s use. For Husserl, Reason is fundamentally associated with actuality rather than potentiality or possibility and intentions with intuitions that mystically point beyond themselves to the realm that Ricoeur attempts to delineate with his definition of Reflection as “the appropriation of our effort to exist and our desire to be”. For Husserl, the mathematician and scientist Reason is connected to originary evidence, a position that claims that there is no intention without an intuition to provide evidence for it.

In his earlier work Ideas 1, Husserl was aware of the “passive” nature of the lower level of consciousness he sought to describe. This level was built up on the basis of ante-predicative existence and present consciousness: a thinking that is actually present here and now and certain of itself in its act and intention. This cannot but end in the tears and tragedy of transcendental solipsism which, immediately it is posed, suggests the problem of the status of other consciousnesses. Kant’s Philosophy is influenced by hylomorphism and concerns itself with the form or possibility of experience rather than its present-ness for consciousness here and now. This possibility of experience is not a possibility for one consciousness but rather a principled universal possibility where I can both intend myself and others as beings, not on the basis of intuitions but on the basis of the possession of powers of understanding and reason. There is no necessity for such a position to investigate into the mute existence of feeling using the tool of “imaginative variation” in order to generate a lifeworld that resembles the complexity of the lifeworld we all share. One will not find in Kantian reflection an endless dialectic of a transaction between myself and others who “invade” my life-world: a dialectic that resolves itself on the basis of an argument from analogy. Ricoeur claims that Kant’s Philosophy goes “straight to the sense of existence”(P.198) in the second formulation of the categorical imperative which reads:

“Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person, or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only”(Lewis W Beck, Practical Reason and Other Writings in Moral Philosophy(Chicago, 1948, P. 429)

Kant continues his reasoning by claiming:

“rational beings, on the other hand, are called persons because their nature already marks them out as ends in themselves(“P 428-9)

In this reasoning-process, we encounter no intuition or feeling of empathy requiring an act of imagination, but rather an appeal to an attitude of Respect that is required by all beings that are persons because they are what they are. This formulation in its turn founds a third formulation of the categorical imperative which relates to persons living under the reign of justice and law: a realm in which their human rights are determined both by the moral law and a doctrine of rights that are a part of that moral-legal system. Ricoeur rejects what he refers to as a “narrowing” of the content of practical reasoning and in so doing fails to see the logical connection between the moral law and the ethics and politics of Aristotle. He is worried that when we are transported into this world of “how-things-ought-to-be” one can neither “see nor feel oneself in it”. It is clear that for Ricoeur, intention without intuition is blind and therefore alien to my subjective life. At issue in this misunderstanding is the difference between a quaestio juris which relates to the normative right that exists to justify the application of an idea or a concept and a quaestio facti that relates to the evidence for a claim in the tribunal of experience, A transcendental deduction is needed to provide the justification or the right to use an idea or a concept. Insofar as the theoretical ideas of pure reason are concerned they are not constitutive whether they be psychological, cosmological, or theological. Kant has this to say concerning theoretical pure reason:

“The greatest and perhaps the sole use of all philosophy of pure reason is therefore only negative: since it serves not as an organon for the extension but as a discipline for the limitation of pure reason, and instead of discovering the truth, has only the modest merit of guarding against error. There must, however, be some source of positive modes of knowledge which belong to the domain of pure reason, and which, it may be, give occasion to error solely owing to a misunderstanding, while yet in actual fact they form the goal towards which reason is directing its efforts. How else can we account for our extinguishable desire to find firm footing somewhere beyond the limits of experience? Reason has a presentiment of objects which posses a great interest for it. But when it follows the path of pure speculation, in order to approach them, they fly before it. Presumably, it may look for better fortune in the only other path which still remains open to it, that of its practical employment.”(P.629)

This quote should suffice to dismiss Ricoeur’s concerns over the domination of the Kantian Categories over the practical lifeworld of persons. It is clear from the above that all attempts to gain knowledge about the object or phenomenon of man only ends in the Heideggerian position of Man as a being for whom his being is in question. For Kant, however, it is primarily practical reasoning that will provide an answer to the question of “What is man?”. Kant confirms this in the following comment:

“All transcendental logic is, in this respect simply a discipline. Consequently, if there be any correct employment of pure reason, in which case there must be a canon of its employment, the canon will deal not with the speculative but with the practical employment of reason.”(P.630)

Reason will not be satisfied until it reaches out beyond the realm of its empirical employment to the limits of all knowledge and toward a self-subsistence systematic whole. Three ideas will contribute to this whole: the major idea of the freedom of the will, the idea of the immortality of the soul, and the idea of God’s existence. In terms of the idea of the freedom of the will Kant claims that the phenomenon of the exercise of the will we are engaging in is –” a labour with insuperable difficulties”(P 631)—unless of course, we regard the will as the intelligible cause of our volitions:

“For as regards the phenomenon of its outward expressions, that is, of our actions, we must acquire for them–in accordance with a maxim which is inviolable, and which is so fundamental that without it we should not be able to employ reason in any empirical manner whatsoever–in the same manner as all other appearances of nature, namely, in conforming with unchangeable laws.”(P.361)

The practical employment of reason is twofold, instrumental and categorical. In the case of instrumental reasoning, the use of reason is for the empirical purposes of our happiness and is governed by the regulative principle of prudence. In this realm, we do see and feel the influence of the principle or especially the absence of the principle. A priori categorical laws, on the other hand, are concerned with what we categorically ought to do as compared with what we prudentially and hypothetically ought to do in order to achieve individual happiness. In this latter form of reasoning, self-love is the regulating desire, whereas in the categorical form of reasoning, a love for humanity is rather “constituted” by the moral law where the being of humanity is no longer in question but constituted by attitudes that are categorical, e.g. respect for the “sacred” whether that be life or a supreme ideally intelligent being. The former use of reason is psychological and contrasts with a use of reason that is transcendentally practical. The freedom of the will is transcendentally practical when it is determined categorically by reason in its practical employment. If the will, on the other hand, is determined or caused to act or judge by sensuous desire such a will is “caused” in its activity The will in such circumstances becomes a “cause in nature” that aims at bringing about a natural object or state of affairs that is phenomenal and not noumenal. The kind of happiness that supervenes “causally” irrespective of whether I am “morally worthy of it” is a transient form of happiness that can easily disappear. The form of happiness on the other hand, that follows from a form of life that is lived by following the moral law is a more permanent form of happiness and it is this form that, according to Kant we all hope for. Those that have achieved such a state, live in an intelligible moral world and this is the systematic telos of both theoretical and practical Reason: a reasoning that is involved in the answers to the three aporetic philosophical questions of “What can I know?”, “What ought I to do?” and “What can I hope for?”

Morality is of course principally concerned with the second question and in virtue of this fact is an autonomous system. Man, however, also wishes for an answer to the third question and for this a transcendental theology is required:

“A theology which takes the ideal of supreme ontological perfection as a principle of systematic unity.”(P.642)

It is this aspect of aporetic questioning that determines the moral attitude as something sacred. Husserl would reject most of the above on the grounds of its being insufficiently descriptive of the intentive processes of consciousness. For Husserl, we discriminate between, for example, willing and moving because of the different meanings of their objective correlates. This is what Husserl would have called “noematic” reflection. An action that is willed, for Husserl is to be described as a project that I decide upon: something that is in my power and can be described in terms of the words “I make up my mind”. Somehow, in a way that is not evident, this description is valid for my fellow man universally. Perhaps this validity occurs via an argument from analogy or alternatively via the use of imagination to vary cases more or less systematically. The source of Reason behind this “reflective” process has all but disappeared leaving us with an object that does not suffice for the differentiation between a case of willing and a case of being moved to act by instinct. Neither will we find in Husserl the kind of distinction between emotion and moral willing which we can find expressed in Kant’s “Groundwork”:

“Practical good, however, is that which determines the will by means of its representations of reason, not by subjective causes but objectively, that is, from grounds that are valid for every rational being as such. It is distinguished from the agreeable as that which influences the will only by means of feeling from merely subjective causes which hold only for the senses of this or that one, and not as a principle of reason which holds for everyone.”(The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant’s Practical Philosophy(Cambridge,CUP, Trans. by Mary J Gregor, 1996, P.67))

This view is consistent with that of Aristotle for whom it was important to give a correct description and explanation of the emotions. This was important for many reasons amongst which was the reason given in his work “Rhetoric” in which knowledge of the emotions was important for the technological task of persuading an audience by means of public discourse. For Aristotle, Rhetoric was a device the orator would use in order to create an appropriate “response” in an audience: a response which would include feeling certain emotions and creating an appreciative state of mind. Aristotle gives the motivation for this kind of “technological” persuasion in Book 2 of his Rhetoric:

“The emotions are all those feelings that so change men as to affect their judgments and that are also grounded by pain or pleasure. Such are anger, pity, fear, and the like, with their opposites. We must arrange what we have to say about each of them under three heads. Take, for instance, the emotion of anger: here we must discover what the state of mind of angry people is, who the people are with whom they usually get angry, and on what grounds they get angry. It is not enough to know one or two of these points; unless we know all, we shall be unable to arouse anger in anyone. The same is true of the other emotions.”(II,I, 21-28)

It is important also to note here that for Aristotle, a speech has two parts, one in which you state your case, and the other in which you prove your case. Proof can occur via examples of actions or outcomes in the past, or via enthymemes which include maxims of action or judgments. In spite of this emphasis on the role of reason and understanding the nature of the emotions, Rhetoric is not a definite science but is rather a part of the technological or productive sciences which are regulated by the involvement of the rational faculties in areté (doing the right thing in the right way at the right time). Rhetoric is a dialectical method that everyman uses in order to “discuss statements and to maintain them and as is the case with all artistic activity, the practice can be systematic. Rhetoric should not be employed by those who propose and administer laws and justice simply because, as Aristotle claimed:

“to find one man, or a few men, who are sensible persons and capable of legislating and administering justice is easier than to find a large number. Next, laws are made after consideration whereas decisions in the courts are given at short notice, which makes it hard for those who try the case to satisfy the claims of justice and expediency. The weightiest reason of all is that the decision of the lawgiver is not particular but prospective and general, whereas members of the assembly and the jury find it their duty to decide on definite cases brought before them. They will often have allowed themselves to be influenced by feelings of friendship, hatred or self-interest that they lose any clear vision of the truth and have their judgment obscured by considerations of personal pleasure and pain.” (I,I,1-12)

It is clear from the above that the issue of justice is a universal good-in-itself and not merely an instrumental and particular good. Dialectical reasoning, when it aims at instilling or removing emotional states, appears to have an effect similar to music, according to Aristotle, a cathartic effect aiming at what Aristotle termed innocent pleasure: a particular pleasure felt at a particular time aiming at what Kant would have called self-love. Particular judgments of the above kind aim at feeling good, aim, that is, at instilling a pleasurable state of mind or avoiding a painful state of mind. The absence of universality indicates here the irrelevance of truth and the absence of law-governed action.

The above distinction between a dialectically-based Rhetoric of the kind used by individual lawyers to argue for positions in individual cases, and a law-based system of universal judgments in which the evaluation of any action under consideration is deemed either to be following the law or not by a judge is contained in the Philosophy of Kant(in the distinction between the logic of particular and universal judgments respectively). Particular judgments will be related to intuition and its particular immediate effect on the cognitive system of the judger. Universal judgments will involve more general conceptual relations, i.e. the relation of conceptual representations to each other.

Now Husserl would not have been able to give us anything like the above-nuanced accounts of the role of Rhetoric in the formation of judgments. This in spite of the fact that it might have been the domination of rhetoric in the political discourse of the late 19th century that contributed to what he eventually acknowledged(after an initial refusal) as the “sickness of Europe”.

Phenomenology, according to Ricoeur, owes a debt to Hegel. How to characterise that debt is problematic given the role of dialectical logic in the relativisation of both Aristotelian and Kantian categorical(deductive) logic. Husserlian Phenomenology comes late to this political party with its realisation in the 1930s that History has a Spirit that can become ill and that the causes of this illness need to be identified if philosophy is to remain a relevant historical force to be reckoned with. This position obviously required a Philosophy of History which Hegelianism succeeded in replacing with a dialectical “sense” of History. Kant, that is, might have been the last Philosopher to have a theory of the conditions of the possibility of History that could, for example, serve as a foundation to criticise the National Socialism of the Nazis and the fascism of Communist regimes. Both of these tyrannical regimes owed their existence partly to the dialectical form of rhetoric that had been growing in influence since the time of Machiavelli.

Ricoeur, in his essay “The Sense of History” asks the following penetrating question:

“But it remains to be understood how historical perspectives could be incorporated into phenomenology. Here, the transformation of a set of philosophical problems goes beyond any explication of psychological motivation, for the coherence of transcendental phenomenology is in question. How can a Philosophy of the Cogito, of the radical return to the ego, as founder of all being, become capable of a philosophy of History.”(P 144-5)

Ricoeur refers to the possibility that the idea of infinite tasks ordered by an idea of the infinite can provide some kind of answer to his question. History in the eyes of Aristotle and Kant was to be construed as a form of genetic explanation in which the process of actualisation of institutions and states occurs, involving an evolution from the less complex forms to the more complex forms until a telos is reached which is rational. The Phenomenology of Husserl would reject this kind of view of both Politics and History. For Husserl, in other words, a History of Spirit would seem to be impossible. If this is so a question arises over his diagnosis of the “sickness of Europe”. This impossibility would have been, for Husserl, extremely problematic during the dark years leading up to the second World war.

During the time of Ideas I all the sciences of the time were regarded as “mundane” and were therefore seen to be unable to capture the transcendence of “Spirit”, unable that is, to capture the dialectical relation between a transcendental ego and the “sense of History”. History would appear, then, to be twice excluded in Husserl’s account, firstly in terms of the absence of a concept of genesis, and secondly, in terms of the mundane subject matter of History, Sociology, and Politics. Even attempts to temporalise consciousness with memory and expectation fails to square the circle of the infinite task of a dialectic that has a problematic relation to truth. This latter attempt fails because the idea of a plurality of consciousnesses Husserl claims is to be located “in” some consciousness. Ricoeur points out that:

“thus the central question of the philosophy of History goes from the crisis to the Idea, from the doubting to the sense. The consciousness of crisis calls for a reaffirmation of a task, but a task which by its structure is a task for everyone, a task which develops a history. In return, history lends itself to a philosophical reflection only through the intermediary of its teleology, for it appears to be implied by an original type of rational structure which specifically requires a history.”(P.151)

This takes us back to the thought of Aristotle and his hylomorphic characterisation of humanity taking the form of a rational animal capable of not just discourse but of the creation of institutions and States. Rationality is, on this theory, neither an actuality nor a nonentity but rather a possibility or potentiality that builds upon the powers of discourse and reasoning. For Aristotle, dialectical discourse in Politics(and History) must be judged in terms of its universal end or telos, a telos supported by material, efficient and formal “causes”(explanations). Hylomorphic theory is too complex to be subsumed under or “in” a transcendental ego. Husserl appears to regard teleology as a “sense”, something “immanent” with the intention of a life, an action, or a creative activity. He then regards this “immanent idea” as a universal Philosophy which is:

“not a system, a school, or a work with a date, but an Idea in the Kantian sense of the term”(P.152-3)

The idea referred to, however, is paradoxically a theoretical idea related to the infinity of tasks rather than to the Kantian practical ideas of freedom or a Kingdom of Ends. The “crisis” of this dark period of History appears to be a very theoretical and academic crisis situated in the “objectivist” prejudices of the “mundane sciences”. According to Husserl Phenomenology is capable of removing this crisis and:

“then phenomenology will be envisaged as the catharsis of the sick man”(P.154)

Phenomenology appears then to possess the capacity to create a “new man”, a “man of infinite tasks”, a superior man to the man of facts engendered by the mundane sciences. There is something of importance in the observation that the sciences were promoting a vision of the world as a totality of facts but there is also something suspicious about this man of “infinite tasks”. Arendt in her work “The Origins of Totalitarianism” points to the absence of Aristotelian moderation in the spirit of the “new men” of the modern age who believed like Cecil Rhodes that they could colonise the planets if they could, in a spirit of “anything is possible”. These new men were indeed men of infinite tasks for whom there were no rational limits, only an ever-circling dialectic that never arrived at its end or telos.

It is a familiar fact, of course, that these new men were well acquainted with the instrumental art of Rhetoric that consistently spoke of the universal in the mode of the particular or alternatively denied its existence altogether. Connected to this denial was a process of replacing rationality and understanding with sensibility operating in accordance with a free-ranging imagination capable of infinitely varying the particular, of reducing the universal to the particular. We should recall in this context that Hitler first particularised the Jews in terms of race, sometimes in terms of animals. Stalin particularised everyone who was not a communist as a capitalist, in accordance with thesis-antithesis dialectical reasoning, without any reference to “ends” relating to the true or the good.

Let us remind readers of Husserl’s 1910 judgment that all was well in Europe and also recall the radical shift of perspective during the 1930s– a shift from thesis to antithesis–all in the name of an academic crisis of the European sciences and a crisis of reason. This final acknowledgment of the logic of the obvious, however, was in its turn a denial of the underlying “explanations” of what was occurring, namely firstly, an abandonment of Aristotle by the “new men” of the modern age and, secondly, a refusal to view Kant in an Aristotelian perspective, a refusal to see Kantian Philosophy for what it was, namely, a Philosophy of Enlightenment.