The relation between phenomenology and psychology is not only an unsettled issue in Husserl's writings, but also a controversial subject matter in the so-called the phenomenological circle.1 In the Logical Investigations, phenomenology is defined as a descriptive psychology, but this is renounced in the second edition.2 In the first volume of the Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, phenomenology and psychology are characterized respectively as a science of essence and a science of fact.3 But this distinction proves to be deficient as soon as a personalistic attitude emerges between the realm of essence and the realm of fact in the second volume.4 If the withdrawal of the publication of Ideas II by Husserl could be taken as a confirmation of his final position on this distinction between essence and fact, then his following project of a phenomenological psychology, which is intended to be a science of both the a priori and the factual,5 would be groundless. It is easy to discern all these contradictions concerning the relation between phenomenology and psychology, since the development of Husserl's idea of phenomenology is closely related to his constant refutation of psychologism. But it is not therefore an easy task to construe the nature of their relationship and its significance.
The unsuccessful collaboration between Husserl and Heidegger in preparing the "Phenomenology" article for the Encyclopaedia Britannica highlights the difficulty of working on this issue.6 It is well known that, while Heidegger takes issue with Husserl's treatment of this relation in terms of a parallelism, Husserl in his response calls Heidegger's position a "philosophical anthropology". A vast secondary literature commenting on this dispute has wound up in a dilemma between the world-phenomenon which must be justified by the constitutive function of transcendental subjectivity and the world-as-such which remains as a pregiven for the pre-reflective experience of our intentional analysis. To overcome this dilemma, it seems that one cannot help but take a stand between what is constituting and what is constituted.7 Are we then caught up in a helpless impasse, that is, whoever takes up one position would be condemned to lose sight of the other?
The objective of this chapter is to expose the nature of the relation between phenomenology and psychology as presented in Husserl's works in the light of what Merleau-Ponty suggested to be a "chiasmus",8 and to distinguish this from other interpretations.
THE DILEMMA OF THE RELATION BETWEEN PHENOMENOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY
The relation between phenomenology and psychology was already formulated in Husserl's attempt to give a psychological analysis of the origin of mathematics in the Philosophy of Arithmetic.9 But, until the Logical Investigations, this question had not appeared to him to be a thematic issue. By rejecting his earlier position in "Prolegomena to Pure Logic", Husserl lays out his position that a psychology of mental acts, "the subjectivity of knowing", cannot adequately address the necessary unity of the thought-content of these acts, "the objectivity of the content known".10 This refutation of psychologism is at first conceived by many as a subsidiary move toward an eidetic science, which excludes all kinds of psychologistic implications from the epistemological standpoint.11 An eidetic science or a "pure logic" is concerned only with ideal being. Both what is excluding and what is excluded belong to the realm of real being.
In the following Investigations, Husserl turns his attention to unveiling what is still hidden in this general acceptance. The refutation should not be held as a simple replacement of psychological analysis of natural apperception by the pure logic of ideal possibility; rather, there is need for some grounds to support this replacement, namely, evidence which is related to both purely logical and purely psychological considerations.12 To fulfill this demand, an eidetic science must not merely distinguish itself from natural, empirical science in a Platonic fashion, but must include also a suspension of our natural psychological apperception by virtue of an intentional consciousness of its objectivity.13 Phenomenology as an eidetic science thus becomes a descriptive psychology, since both intentional consciousness and natural apperception emerge from our mental processes, even though the former contains an objective content while the latter cannot. With this further exposition, the full sense of the format set out in the "Prolegomena to Pure Logic" comes into view. To be an eidetic science, phenomenology must be a descriptive psychology which studies the given phenomena in the light of their own structural inter-connectedness; in contrast explanatory or genetic psychology, as a psychologism, must pull in foreign hypotheses of a non-psychological nature in order to account causally for these phenomena.14
Obviously, the essential connection between phenomenology as an eidetic science and its presentation in the domain of the psychic does not turn into a psychological question the issue of how descriptive psychology is able to provide objective content. What distinguishes descriptive psychology from explanatory psychology is still a methodological consideration belonging to the theory of knowledge. Husserl exhibits this epistemological concern in The Idea of Phenomenology, as he takes up the distinction between the "philosophical mode" of reflection and the "natural mode" of reflection.15
It is in philosophical reflection upon our natural reflection that the suspension of our psychological apperception by virtue of our intentional consciousness receives its epistemological ground. As a positive science, psychology is based on our "natural cognition" which takes its subject as a real human being in the natural world, since natural cognition presupposes direct access to the reality of the world outside us.16 Philosophical reflection, on the other hand, is concerned with "cognition in its ideality", as it turns inward to the realm of experience itself by questioning what is taken for granted.17
Nevertheless, this inward turn of philosophical reflection should not be understood as a self-evident ground. After all, what is "immanent" to my experience can also be seen as the "transcendent" that I experience, if this philosophical reflection is given without question. This is precisely how the mistake was made by those earlier misconceptions of Husserl's phenomenology, which took the unproven existences located within our experience of them as objects existing outside these experiences.
Due to this discernment of that fallacy, a "wholly new dimension" is opened for philosophical reflection, as Husserl observes:
Everything transcendent that is involved must be bracketed, or be assigned the index of indifference, of epistemological nullity, an index which indicates: the existence of all these transcendencies, whether I believe in them or not, is not here my concern: this is not the place to make judgments about them; they are entirely irrelevant.18
The suspension of our natural psychological apperception is not operated in accordance with a priori law in the Kantian sense. Rather, it is a methodological exclusion that "brackets" those transcendents which appear to our experience before we have any assurance of our access to them.19 The "epistemological nullity" indicates a reduction that turns "psychological phenomena" into "pure phenomena".20 The pure phenomenon need not to be anything different from real experience, but must be taken purely as an experience in itself. The relation between eidetic science and descriptive psychology is thus confirmed by a phenomenological reduction which allows us to come to an understanding of the possibility of cognition itself as an ideal possibility without having to take into account any psychologistic ties to the real.21
Once our suspension of natural apperception is considered as an epistemological reduction necessary for an eidetic science, phenomenology as a descriptive psychology would not be misunderstood as a psychologism. But what is this nonpsychologistic phenomenology in its substantial sense? As a method, the phenomenological reduction does not reject what is apperceived psychologically, but only takes this problematic mode of apperception out of play. In order to give a positive characterization, we cannot help but go back to what we have just put into brackets, namely, the real existence of our experience. As we return to this real account, phenomenology is no more than a transcendental psychologism; but, if we do not, it becomes the empty transcendentalism that we just refuted. Either way, we face an inescapable dilemma: do we or do we not return to the positivity? This is where the confusion between phenomenology and psychology first comes into view. But, if we take as a clue Husserl's words, "Back to things themselves" in the "Philosophy as Rigorous Science",22 this is not yet what really motivates his phenomenological move.
In reviewing the question of returning to positivity historically, Husserl points out that this confusion comes from the presupposition of naturalism:
Characteristic of all forms of extreme and consistent naturalism, from popular naturalism to the most recent forms of sensation-monism and energism, is, on one hand, the naturalizing of consciousness, including all intentionally immanent data of consciousness, and, on the other, the naturalizing of ideas and consequently of all absolute ideal norms.23
Having based their questions on natural inclination, they are asking not for
the positive content of what is experienced, but for an explanation of what is
experienced in the context of physical Nature. According to the above
reduction, however, the return to positivity has already been redirected to
the ontological basis of our epistemological reduction. In this new direction,
though "a phenomenon . . . is no `substantial' unity",24 "the psychical is not
experienced simply as something that appears; it is `vital experience' and
vital experience seen in reflection; it appears as itself through itself, in an
absolute flow".25 Thus, the positive content of phenomenology is
characterized by the performance of our phenomenological reduction, not
the naturalization of our epistemological reduction. If we stop this radical
differentiation between consciousness and nature so as to conform to an a
priori law or an innate idea, we will relapse into what we just objected to,
that is, our natural inclination. If not, we still view consciousness
psychologically, but in a de-naturalized way, so that reduction to "the pure
phenomenological sphere" becomes the "ultimate foundation of all
psychological method."26
THE TRANSCENDENTAL TURN AND ITS PROBLEMS
When philosophy as rigorous science signifies that the nature of phenomenology is determined by the phenomenological method, the tension between phenomenology and psychology becomes salient. As we have just seen, to justify the way of distinguishing phenomenology from naturalism, we have to return to its experiential basis, even if in a de-naturalized way, in order to perform this distinction. Is this not to say that apperception is necessary in the first place, and if so how can phenomenology be an eidetic science? Conversely, if natural psychological apperception is totally excluded, does not the phenomenological reduction become a mere temporary disregard of what is essentially connected in reality, and if so why do we then have to suspend our natural psychological apperception? These questions led Husserl to a transcendental turn giving a necessary ground to the reduction itself, as he remarks in the Introduction of Ideas, I:
It will strike the reader that . . . instead of the generally customary single separation of sciences into sciences of realities and sciences of idealities (or into empirical sciences and a priori sciences), two separations of sciences appear to be used which correspond to the two contrasting pairs: matter of fact and essence, real and non-real.27
There is a fundamental difference in the characterization of phenomenology here and previously. In the Logos article, Husserl remained at the psychologistic position, as he claimed that:
Phenomenology and psychology must stand in close relationship to each other, since both are concerned with consciousness, even though in a different way, according to a different "orientation".28
Psychology treats experiences as "real events in the natural context of zoological reality", while phenomenology suspends this particular treatment in order to describe and analyze it in its "essential generality". Their different way of viewing experiences is not "rooted in grounds of essence", but on the interest or "orientation" of each. Thus, it may not result from "chance-inclination"; but it is certainly without conceptual clarity29 and consequently falls back into psychologism once again.
By contrast, when for the sake of clarity they are reexamined here as "real" versus "non-real", in addition to the division of "fact and essence", the very transitional character of the methodological parallelism disappears. Their difference now is due, not to a different orientation in the forms of intuition which are possible with respect to any given object, rather, it is due to an essential intuition which views the object in terms of what makes it what it is and not any other.30 Therefore, unlike mathematics or logic in dealing with essence from a naturalistic point of view, this science of essence, or what Husserl here calls "transcendental phenomenology", is intended to clarify how one knows what one presumed to know previously.31 At the outset of Ideas I, Husserl specifies the phenomenological attitude and the natural attitude in order to characterize this new way of experiencing the world in distinction from our habitual way of experiencing the world.32
Being free of the naturalistic prejudice, the natural attitude experiences the world "not only as a world of mere things, but also with the same immediacy as a world of objects with values, a world of goods, a practical world".33 To be sure, what we face in this natural attitude is the same reality that we face in the naturalistic position, but "the general positing which characterized the natural attitude" is restricted no longer to the natural world, but to the world of everyday life. The world exists as it gives itself to us in our experiences of it in accordance with the naturalistic position. But, having performed the phenomenological reduction, this world simply exists "out there" without any presupposition of its manner of existing, for we realize that we had held such a presupposition with respect to our experience of the world.
In this new way of experiencing the world, "general positing . . . does not consist of a particular act, perchance an articulated judgment about existence".34 On the contrary, with a conceptual clarity received from the reduction, "we can now proceed with the potential and inexplicit positing precisely as we can with the explicit judgment-positing".35 The "epistemological nullity" which appeared in the 1907 lectures is thus confirmed, as Husserl makes it plain that "the positing is a mental process, but we make 'no use' of it".36
Although it is through my consciousness that the world is given to me as existing "out there", this inward turn, if we recall, may very well be confused with the psychological ego. How do we prevent ourselves from this error once and for all? Husserl's answer here is that the "residue" of phenomenological reduction is no longer its experiential basis, but the way of our experiencing the world, or the relation itself.
In distinction from the Logos article, as we reflect on this consciousness which was presumed to be psychological in nature, there comes about a transcendental consciousness which conceptualizes the de-naturalization of our epistemological reduction. In this transcendental reduction, "all our others must be understood exclusively in the senses that our expositions prescribe for them and not in any others which history or the terminological habits of the reader may suggest."37 There is indeed a difference between an appearance of an object and the object itself which appears, as we have already drawn the distinction between "transcendent" and "immanent". But, until now, we have not clarified this "intentional" nature of consciousness, that is, all consciousness has such objects of which it is the consciousness that they are. Thanks to the transcendental reduction, Husserl is able to see that "we are speaking of mental processes purely with respect to their essence, or of pure essences and of that which is `a priori' included in the essences with unconditional necessity."38
As the domain of immanence is restricted to that which is immanent to it, our objects are not real existents but intentional objects within the domain of immanence itself. In fact, it is the latter that makes the former possible, not the other way around as we usually accept in our prevailing habits of thought.39 This inversion marks the important distinction between "transcendent" and "transcendental". Transcendent objects, in spite of the distinction between immanent and transcendent, are given transcendently insofar as they are given through adumbrations; and these adumbrations are themselves given as the only way through which those objects can be given.40 Transcendental, however, is the "transcendence in immanence", insofar as "a mental process is not adumbrated".41 Therefore, contrary to our habitual way of experiencing the world, where the transcendent object is experienced as the thing-in-itself, the transcendental object, which is experienced as transcendent, is really experienced as transcendent to one's experience of it: in other words, the thing-in-itself is really nothing but the intentional unity of its adumbrations.
Once we reach this distinction between "being as mental process and being as a physical thing",42 the ontological ground of our epistemological reduction, which was not further pursued in the Logos article, is finally justified. What was experienced as absolutely, immediately and necessarily in the natural attitude turns out to be incomplete, dubitable and contingent in the phenomenological attitude, since:
Over against the positing of the world, which is a "contingent" positing, there stands then the positing of my pure Ego and Ego-life which is a "necessary", absolutely indubitable positing. Anything physical which is given "in person" can be non-existent; no mental process which is given "in person" can be non-existent. This is the eidetic law defining this necessity and that contingency.43
Consequently, the world is realized as "the correlate of certain multiplicities of experience distinguished by certain essential formations." But can consciousness experience itself as being part of the world, so that the natural world it constituted is necessary in and of itself? This is where the confusion between phenomenology and psychology reappears as a hopeless muddle. According to Husserl's answer:
In our experiencing it is conceivable that there might be a host of irreconcilable conflicts not just for us but in themselves, that experience might suddenly show itself to be refractory to the demand that it carry on its positings of physical things harmoniously, that its context might lose its fixed regular organizations of adumbrations, apprehensions, and appearances-- in short, that there might no longer be any world.44
Thus, the natural world could be nullified as being just as incomplete and contingent as all transcendencies that might no longer be, but transcendental consciousness would continue to exist without this natural world as its correlate. In order to serve its purpose of justifying phenomenological reduction not as a temporary and provisional abstraction from Nature, Husserl seems to push this inversion to an extreme. He contends that "the being which is first for us is second in itself; i. e., it is what it is, only in `relation' to the first".45 Consciousness which exists within the world thus could in no way at the same time be considered as the foundation for that world. Apparently, our gaining this absolute region leaves us in great danger of falling into a transcendentalism which leaves unaccounted the fact of the natural world.
ONTOLOGIZING THE PERSONAL
It is generally believed that Husserl cannot avoid this problem in continuing his transcendental turn.46 However, it is also interesting to know that those criticisms all agree that Husserl did not fall straightforwardly into a transcendentalism. The discrepancy herein is significant because the two questions following this problem foreshadow the nature of the relation between phenomenology and psychology. They are: Why is experience in everyday life such that the world appears to us as "out there", existing independently of our experience of it? and Why is not consciousness in its transcendental form immediately accessible to us, but rather "hidden" within the naturalistic bent of the natural attitude? These two questions are mutually exclusive. The former would eliminate previous laborious studies, while the latter reinforces these exacting efforts. But they are all included in Husserl's response to this seemingly insurmountable problem.
Husserl regards this challenge as a paradox in terms of the dual
nature of conscious life:
On the one hand consciousness is said to be the absolute in which everything transcendent and, therefore, ultimately the whole psychophysical world, becomes constituted; and, on the other hand, consciousness is said to be a subordinate real event within that world. How can these statements be reconciled?47
To answer this question, after arriving at the "self-contained complex of being", he is first concerned with the way in which consciousness can justifiably be viewed psychologically. But unlike the naturalization subsequent to the de-naturalization of consciousness, as the Logos article suggests, Husserl has to develop an answer within the transcendental context. In other words, psychological apperception has been by-passed in our ascent to the transcendental, but it has not been unconditionally rejected. The "reality" of objects thus reappears to us in a constituted nature, in a brand new perspective upon this transcendental function:
Only by virtue of the connection joining a consciousness and an organism to make up an empirically intuited unity within Nature is any such thing as mutual understanding between animate beings pertaining to a world possible; and only thereby can any cognizing subject find the complete world and at the same time know it as one and the same surrounding world belonging in common to him and to all other subjects.48
Rather than reflecting upon itself in its immanence, consciousness now also apprehends itself transcendentally. It takes itself as an object for its perception along with all other objects which it perceives to be transcendent to itself. This "reification" could very well be justified by our intersubjective experience, for each person takes him or herself to be a real state of an animal being, and thereby as existing "inside" this animal in a real relation with the objects that exist "outside".49
But if consciousness is conceived as a parallelism of psychological and transcendental viewpoints, has it not relapsed into psychologism again? Husserl thinks not, since consciousness may appear as transcendent, even though it is never anything but transcendental in nature.50 In fact, this is exactly how our natural cognition becomes possible. But, why would consciousness appear as transcendent, while it is transcendental in reality? What is the nature of its constitution? It is said that, as a transcendent, consciousness is in no sense necessary; but, as a transcendental, it could appear to itself in other than psychological forms. All of those transcendencies to which consciousness now relates psychologically, have the merely intentional being of things; they are constituted and stand in a necessary and dependent relation to consciousness as Absolute.51 The reification does not suggest that psychological reality exists in itself; on the contrary, the existence of psychic reality is relative to, and contingent upon, the "absolute systems of experience" which constitute it. Furthermore, it is only by acknowledging the relative and contingent nature of the psychic that the necessary and absolute nature of the transcendental could be confirmed, since the constitution points to that which constitutes psychic unities as the unities they are.52
By viewing consciousness as transcendental in its own essence, and as being psychological in an empirical and relative sense, obviously, Husserl has not by-passed the fundamental tension between phenomenology and psychology. In order to overcome what he later calls "transcendentally naive"53 he must lay the ground of this constitution. He turns then to the aforementioned second question:
If the province of phenomenology were presented with such immediate obviousness as the province pertaining to the natural attitude in experiencing. . . . then there would be no need of circumstantial reductions with the difficult deliberations which they involve.54
Again, he returns to transcendental reduction. But, it is different from what was intended to justify the necessary ground of the epistemological reduction. Now it is to give an ontological ground for what is constituted without being condemned as psychologism. In Ideas II, this is the difference between the naturalization of consciousness and mundanization of consciousness.55 Naturalization is an over-generalization of the methods of the physical sciences to all of reality, as the natural attitude of Ideas I has established. Thanks to phenomenological reduction, we recognize that naturalistic apperception sees things solely in terms of their materiality by losing sight of their cultural and human significance. Thus, when constitution becomes a thematic issue in Ideas II, Nature is the intentional correlate of experiences carried out in the natural attitude. Nature is no longer given to naive perception, but is the product of a theoretical transformation of everyday experience.56
But, what is this theoretical transformation which is not confined within the epistemological function of the natural scientific transformation? Having turned his attention to cultural and human meaning, Husserl discovered that human beings may appropriately be situated within Nature as "mere things" with respect to the human body as a psycho-physical reality, but this is not appropriate with respect to the psychic reality in its "concrete totalities".57 Having been given "in flux", the psychic appears to be a temporal unfolding on the basis of an idio-psychic dependence, rather than a causal relation.58 By means of a further reflection upon this motivational character of the psychic, he brings out a personal dimension, viewing this world as being simply there in a personally engaging way.59 In this personal attitude, the body as physical with respect to the psycho-physical unity of the person turns out to be but one possible meaning of the body. In addition it is a reality in the spiritual life of the personal-cultural world which by this additional reduction is a purely personal world made up solely of cultural significations. As the human sciences result from this ontologization of the personal attitude, there is an apparent inversion of the priority of the psychic over the physical in correspondence with the inversion in Ideas I.60 However, this parallelism in ontologization is not a mere methodological parallelism, in which case it would be understandable that consciousness would be absolute in the transcendental field. But how can we have an absolute reality at all, given that we know that all reality is constituted and thus relative to transcendental constitution?
THE TENSION BETWEEN PHENOMENOLOGY
AND PSYCHOLOGY
Here appears one of the major embarrassments, as well as mysteries, of phenomenology. On the one hand, Husserl holds on to his transcendental project as he insists in Ideas III that phenomenology is to lay the ground for all the sciences.61 On the other hand, an eidetic psychology which is concerned with the ontological status of its subject matter continues to crop up after Ideas II. What does Husserl mean in regard to this tension between phenomenology and psychology? In what follows, we would account for Husserl's answer in an interpretive manner; this will be in contrast to the expositional manner above, as indicated by the two questions concerning his transcendental turn.
As a result of the parallelism in ontologization, human scientific psychology becomes "a socio-cultural science" in Ideas III where the boundary between what is constituting and what is constituted is blurred.62 To be sure, an eidetic analysis of the psychic is neither a study of consciousness eidetically in its purity, nor a study of empirical-psychological appearance only, but a de-naturalization of the latter in accordance with the former. Psychological subjectivity shares the absoluteness which we discovered in the sphere of transcendental subjectivity, only it situates this absolute within "the world of mind". This is how the personal attitude of Ideas II is proved. The lived process of the psychic is not altered by the realizing apperception of the natural attitude: on the contrary, insofar as we recognize the psychic as the lived-process or as a worldly absolute, "phenomenological eidetic doctrine and rational psychology coincided" without any psychologistic implications.63 On the other hand, Husserl reminds us here:
Whoever cannot free himself from this particular apperception, whoever cannot perform the phenomenological reductions and grasp the pure, absolutely posited lived-process, the pure consciousness as idea, to him is denied not only the penetration into transcendental phenomenology but also that into philosophy in general.64
The psychological view of consciousness is merely a way of viewing transcendental consciousness in its "worldliness", or its mundaneness. But, the task for philosophers having interest in a universal science is to provide an epistemological clarification of the foundation for all sciences. In other words, it is we who distinguish phenomenology from psychology who are able to recognize that the psychic is situated as a relative and constituted region of reality.
Thus, the complicated relation between phenomenology and psychology can be unravelled only by the performance of the phenomenological reduction. Before its performance, psychology as a natural science is interested in the empirical appearance of the pure lived-process as a psychic state, so as to allow for a de-naturalization of consciousness and the assumption of the personal attitude. After its performance, it pertains to transcendental phenomenology as philosophy to take up the epistemological problem and to study consciousness in its transcendental purity. It is true that there is only a "nuance" of difference between what is before and what is after the phenomenological reduction, as Husserl realizes in the Nachworts.65 But, "only the being of transcendental subjectivity has the sense of absolute being",66 as it discerns this nuance. By contrast:
As long as one knows only of psychological subjectivity, posits it as absolute, and yet would explain the world as the mere correlate of this subjectivity, then idealism will be countersensical, will be psychological idealism.66
If, from the above conclusion, consciousness can either be viewed as transcendental or as psychological, but not both at the same time, Husserl's project that "in place of empirical psychology there had to appear a novel, purely a priori and yet at the same time descriptive science of the psychic",68 will be countersensical. How can a science of phenomenological psychology keep both of these subject matters alive simultaneously and necessarily? In the introduction of this work, Husserl seems to direct himself to avoid this dilemma by giving a "pedagogical function" to the proper task of phenomenological psychology:
Perhaps our psychology provides an a priori possible and natural point of departure for the ascent to a transcendental phenomenology and philosophy. To that extent, such an inner psychology would be of special philosophical interest as a pedagogical, motivating stage preliminary to philosophy.69
That is to say, just because transcendental phenomenology has to abandon what is descriptive psychologically in order to achieve its full philosophical integrity, there must be a phenomenological psychology which conducts a reflective analysis of consciousness in order to provide an epistemological ground for a descriptive psychology. However, such an answer proves to be misleading, since the simultaneity of the a priori and factual in phenomenological psychology comes from a methodological parallelism, not a parallelism in ontologization, as was intended. There is no need for phenomenological psychology if it is only to repeat what transcendental phenomenology is supposed to do and eventually becomes "a preliminary step that will lead up to an understanding of philosophical phenomenology".70
Therefore, in the closing pages of Phenomenological Psychology, Husserl redirects himself to the necessity of phenomenological psychology, as he gives a "retrospective" synopsis:
There can be here a consistent progress and an approximative mastering of the experienceable by an a priori which, even in this approximative relativity, can gradually and relatively satisfy theoretical and practical interests and, on the other hand, include the satisfaction of being on the way to the idea of a conclusive truth. All-inclusive experience in its unexplicated infinity includes an `a priori' and an infinite gradation of approximative a priori regularities.71
It is true that, in its eidetic necessity, phenomenological psychology is concerned with `the' world which is the intentional correlate of experience, not just `my' world, whereas, as a psychology, it is only appropriate to the constitution of a "personal world" as that which appears within the confines of my own experience. But, to sever the tie with the psychological ego, to put aside the prejudice that experience belongs to a psychological subject, would not result in the loss of our subject matter, even though it may very well be construed as a transcendental undertaking. Phenomenological psychology thus resumes its ontological status, when it must retain its character of being given as it situates itself in this relation to consciousness. The human being comes to be in the world at the same time that it is constituting that same world in its meaning without being remaindered as mysterious as Heidegger has suggested.72 That is to say, by calling into question the real world which serves as its ground, we do not appeal to that which is itself questionable in order to resolve its questionable status. Phenomenological psychology is no longer the psychology which presumes `the' world as the context in which its subject exists and thereby remains "transcendentally naive"; rather, it is where we ask how consciousness can constitute that wherein it is presumed to belong.
Nevertheless, in order to clarify the constituting function of the constituted nature of phenomenological psychology, this direction reverts to Husserl's transcendental turn, as he indicates in the "Phenomenology" article:
It is just the field of transcendental self-experience (conceived in full concreteness) which in every case can, through mere alteration of attitude, be changed into psychological self-experience.73
Some phenomenological psychologists and philosophers concede this final move and interpret it as implying that while one may wish to overcome psychologism to do philosophy, one must tolerate psychologism in order to do psychology, in accordance with the format of transcendental phenomenology.74 To be sure, transcendental subjectivity becomes consciousness apperceived in its world-constituting function, while psychological subjectivity becomes consciousness apperceived in its mundane appearance as belonging to an animal reality. But, Heidegger questions Husserl's draft of the "Phenomenology" article, "What is the mode of Being of this absolute ego--in what sense is it the same as the factual I and in what sense is it not the same?"75 To answer this question, many believe that there is a dialectical movement underlying this reciprocal relation between phenomenology and psychology, since, on the one hand, the constituting is logically prior to the constituted and, on the other hand, historically, the former comes into being through the latter.76
CONCLUSION
In reviewing what we have described from Husserl's works, there is indeed an ontological difference to be found between the subject matters of these parallel, yet supposedly separate, sciences. This parallelism between phenomenological psychology and transcendental phenomenology is not only in justifying transcendental subjectivity, but also in confirming that only phenomenological-psychological reduction places the responsibility for the appearance of things in consciousness on the consciousness in which they appear. Therefore, to interpret this parallelism dialectically appears to be the most proper answer to satisfy both what Husserl insists throughout his career and what he emphasizes more and more in the later years. On the one hand, there must be an act of constitution which is not its own making, if we attempt to return to the human being who performed this reduction; after having done so we are merely demonstrating that we have yet to complete the performance of the reduction. On the other hand, the field of transcendental subjectivity provides the horizon for the historical and cultural changes which the meaning of the human undergoes; it is only in what is constituted that we find the constituting I for which the worldly I is "at hand".
However, one has to be careful to understand this dialectical nature of the relation between phenomenology and psychology. If the untangling of what is intertwined between them is to render it intelligible, as Merleau-Ponty points out, "not only will psychology never take the place of philosophy, but as psychology it necessarily involves a deformation of consciousness."77 Phenomenology consequently would lose its original meaning as the foundation for the human sciences. On the other hand, as Merleau-Ponty admits, "there is dialectic", but:
Only in that type of being in which a junction of subjects occurs, being which is not only a spectacle that each subject presents to itself for its own benefit but which is rather their common residence, the place of their exchange and of their reciprocal interpenetration.78
If we think over what Husserl thought about, rather than reducing his thinking strictly to what he said,79 what comes about in the reciprocal envelopment of phenomenology and psychology is nothing but a "reversal". That is, every attempt at grasping things as they are `in themselves' culminates in a `retiring into oneself', just as every attempt at grasping things as they are `for us' throws us back into the world of things `in themselves'. This overlapping parallelism does not have to erase their ontological difference, as the followers of Heidegger contend, nor need their divergence turn them into a psychologistic muddle, as the followers of Husserl insist. Rather, there is a "chasm" between phenomenology and psychology, where the phenomenological reduction, as Merleau-Ponty understands, "is not the unreflected which challenges reflection; it is reflection which challenges itself."80
National Chengchi University
Taipei, Taiwan
1. Mohanty said: "The wonderful, paradoxical parallelism between the mundane psychic life and transcendental consciousness remains one of the major embarrassments as well as mysteries of phenomenology." J. Mohanty, The Possibility of Transcendental Philosophy (Boston: Nijhoff, 1985), p. 153.
2. E. Husserl, Logical Investigations, 2 vols., trans. by J. N. Findlay (New York: Humanities Press, 1970), cf. pp. 261-63.
3. E. Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. by F. Kersten (Hague: Nijhoff, 1983), p. xx. Hereafter cited as Ideas I.
4. E. Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book, Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, trans. by R. Rojcewicz & A. Schuwer (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), p. 147. Hereafter is cited as Ideas II.
5. E. Husserl, Phenomenological Psychology, trans. by J. Scanlon (Hague: Nijhoff, 1977), p. 29.
6. "`Phenomenology', Edmund Husserl's article for the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1927)", trans. by R. E. Palmer, in Husserl: Shorter Works, ed. by P. McCormick & F. Elliston (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1981), p. 21-35. W. Biemel, "Husserl's Encyclopedia Britannica Article and Heidegger's Remarks Thereon", trans. by P. McCormick & F. Elliston, in Husserl: Expositions & Appraisals, ed. by P. McCormick & F. Elliston (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1977), p. 286-303.
7. For those who on Husserl's side hold that the constituting is prior to the constituted, see J. Scanlon, "The Epoché and Phenomenological Anthropology", in Research in Phenomenology, 2 (1972), 95-109; and J. Mohanty, "Consciousness and Existence: Remarks on the Relation between Husserl and Heidegger", in Man and World, 11 (1978), 324-335. For those who on Heidegger's side consider that the constituted underlies the constituting, see J. Caputo, "The Question of Being and Transcendental Phenomenology: Reflections on Heidegger's Relationship to Husserl", in Research in Phenomenonlogy, 7 (1977), 84-105; and F. Seeburgh, "Heidegger and the Phenomenological Reduction", in Philosophy and Phenomenoloyical Research, 36 (1975), 212-221.
8. Merleau-Ponty said: "It is in becoming conscious of myself as I am that I am able to see essences", in "Phenomenology and the Science of Man", The Primacy of Perception, ed. by J. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1964), p. 73. But this statement should not be simply understood as meaning that the constituted underlies the constituting, since Merleau-Ponty later notes: "there is a thought (the reflective thought) that, precisely because it would like to grasp the thing in itself immediately, falls back on the subjectivity--and which, conversely, because it is haunted by the being for us, does not grasp it and grasps only the thing `in itself', in signification. The true philosophy is to apprehend what makes the leaving of oneself be a retiring into oneself, and vice versa. Grasp this chasm, this reversal. That is the mind." M. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. by C. Lefort, trans. by A. Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1968), p. 199.
9. E. Husserl, Philosophie der Aritmetik (Husserliana 12; Hague: Nijhoff, 1970). Also see W. Biemel, "The Decisive Phases in the Development of Husserl's Philosophy", in The Phenomenology of Husserl: Selected Critical Readings, ed. by R. O. Elveton (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970), pp. 148-173.
10. Logical Investigations, p. 42.
11. This general misconception has been illustrated by E. Fink, in "The Phenomenological Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Contemporary Criticism", in R. O. Elveton, op. cit., p. 73-149. A clear exposition of psychologistic implications can be seen in T. De Boer, The Development of Husserl's Thought, trans. by T. Plantinga (Hague: Nijhoff, 1978), pp. 116-117.
12. Logical Investigations, p. 266.
13. Ibid., p. 562.
14. A similar view can be found in Dilthey's Ideas Concerning a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology, where he gives a concise definition of descriptive and explanatory psychology respectively. W. Dilthey, Descriptive Psychology and Historical Understanding, trans. by R. Zaner and K. Heiges (Hague: Nijhoff, 1977), pp. 35, 49.
15. E. Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, trans. by W. Alston & G. Nakhnikian (Hague: Nijhoff, 1964), pp. 13-14. Hereafter cited as the 1907 lectures.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., p. 25.
18. Ibid., p. 31.
19. Ibid., p. 35.
20. Ibid., p. 33.
21. Ibid., p. 34.
22. E. Husserl, "Philosophy as Rigorous Science", trans. by Q. Lauer, in Husserl: Shorter Works, p. 176. Hereafter cited as the Logos article.
23. Ibid., p. 169.
24. Ibid., p. 179.
25. Ibid., p. 180.
26. Ibid., p. 181.
27. Ideas I, 181.
28. The Logos article, p. 173.
29. Logical Investigations, p. 253.
30. Ideas I, 8.
31. Ibid., p. xx.
32. Ibid., p. 53.
33. Ibid., p. 57.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid., p. 58.
36. Ibid., p. 59.
37. Ibid., p. 66.
38. Ibid., p. 73.
39. Ibid., pp. 89-90.
40. Ibid., p. 89-90.
41. Ibid., p. 90.
42. Ibid., p. 89.
43. Ibid., pp. 102-103.
44. Ibid., p. 109.
45. Ibid., p. 112.
46. For example, Schmitt said: "I can see no way of escaping the conclusion that Husserl's transcendental phenomenology is a big muddle." R. Schmitt, "Transcendental Phenomenology: Muddle or Mystery?" in The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 2 (1971), p. 27. Also see P. Ricoeur, Husserl: An Analysis of his Phenomenology, trans. by E. Ballard & L. Embree (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1967).
47. Ideas I, 124.
48. Ibid., p. 125.
49. Ibid., p. 126. A systematic development from this view can be seen in M. Theunissen, The Other: Studies in the Social Ontology of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Buber (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984), cf. pp. 13-163.
50. Ideas I, pp. 125-126.
51. Ibid., p. 128.
52. Ibid.
53. "Phenomenology" in Husserl: Shorter Works, p. 29.
54. Ideas I, 139.
55. Ideas II, 17-9. Also see E. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. by D. Cairns (Hague: Nijhoff, 1967), pp. 99-100.
56. Ideas II, 27.
57. Ibid., p. 36.
58. Ibid., pp. 140-146.
59. Ibid., pp. 199-200.
60. Ibid., p. 311.
61. E. Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Third Book, Phenomenology and the Foundations of the Sciences, trans. by T. E. Klein & D. E. Doll (Hague: Nijhoff, 1980). Hereafter cited as Ideas III.
62. Ibid., p. 42.
63. Ibid., pp. 21-22.
64. Ibid., p. 64.
65. "Epilogue" in Ideas II, 414.
66. Ibid., p. 420.
67. Ibid., p. 421.
68. Phenomenological Psychology, p. 29.
69. Ibid., p. 34.
70. Husserl: Shorter Works, p. 22.
71. Phenomenological Psychology, p. 172.
72. Biemel, op. cit., in Husserl: Expositions & Appraisals, p. 302.
73. Husserl: Shorter Works, p. 31.
74. For example, Natanson said: "All descriptions made at the psychological level have constitutive roots in transcendental subjectivity, though it does not follow that the phenomenological-transcendental reduction must be employed to make out the eidetic contours of the social world. It is a matter of what one wishes to achieve." M. Natanson, Phenomenology and the Social Sciences (Evanston, Northwestern Univ. Press, 1973), p. 26.
75. Quoted by Biemel, op. cit., p. 297.
76. Dallmayr thinks that the parallelism is a "transition from a transcendental to a dialectical phenomenology." F. Dallmayr, "Phenomenology and Social Science: An Overview and Appraisal", in Explorations in Phenomenology, ed. by D. Carl & E. Casey (Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), p. 160. Also see E. Paci, The Function of the Sciences and the Meaning of Man, trans. by P. Piccone & J. E. Hansen (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1972).
77. Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, p. 58.
78. M. Merleau-Ponty, Adventure of the Dialectic, trans. by J. Bien (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1973), p. 206.
79. M. Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. by R. C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1964), p. 160.
80. Ibid., p. 161.