Regression toward naivety: On Husserl’s history and life-world Yutong Li

Regression toward naivety: On Husserl’s history and life-world

Yutong Li

Abstract

This paper focuses on Husserl’s life-worldly phenomenology as a “regression toward naivety.” First, I examine the concept of “life-world,” the destination of the regression. I will point out that it is an ambivalent phenomenon, defined by Husserl as the domain of “obviousness” and that of “selfevidence” at the same time—two similar notions with completely different connotations. As will be seen in the second part, the “regression” toward this primordial situation obliges us to bring up the discussion about history, which, for Husserl, provides us with the foundation of meaning. Furthermore, it is a continuous, vital process, a livelihood that is guaranteed by “tradition.” History in this sense, as I will analyze in the third part, brings us back to life. Life is a synthesizing principle whose constitution is its own world, but it stays naive, ignorant of its own achievement.

Keywords

Husserl, history, life, life-world, naivety

The paper presented here explores Husserl’s life-worldly phenomenology in his later work: The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology— shortened as Crisis hereafter. The major interest of this series of lectures is to call people’s attention to the “crisis” of the European sciences and to offer a solution for it. However, for Husserl, being the father of phenomenology, this crisis is not to be managed by a higher institution, nor to be treated by a learned physician. One should search for the medicine in another direction: downward and backward. The cure lies in his conception of the life-world, in the embrace of naivety.

In what follows, I will first discuss Husserl’s interest and method in the Crisis and emphasize how he understands his own project as a regression toward naivety. Husserl’s stance on naivety here signifies his departure from the apparent scientism and essentialism of Ideas I. 1 But a certain ambivalence remains, as is manifest in two definitions of the life-world provided by Husserl. Second, to advance the discussion, I will bring up the topic of history, since the problem of the life-world is contextualized therein. For Husserl, the historical apriori is the basis for the facticity of every individual enterprise, theory and practical alike. Its apriority results from the re-activatability of tradition, which manifests the voluntaristic attitude in Husserl’s historical philosophy. Third, this account of history leads us to the notion of life. What is peculiar about life is that it is at the same time both the constituting, i.e., transcendental, ego, and the naive human subject who is unaware of his own achievements. The ambiguity of life offers us an opportunity to rethink the naivety of the foundation as well as the foundationality of the naive.

1. The interest and method of Crisis

The crisis-philosophy aims to amend the problems caused by natural sciences. Having lamented that the European sciences with their exact, mathematizing, methods have lost the foundation of meaning necessary for the existence of humanity,2 Husserl offers his antidote:

(The) proper return to the naïveté of life—but in a reflection which rises above this naïveté—is the only possible way to overcome the philosophical naïveté which lies in the (supposedly) ‘scientific’ character of traditional objectivistic philosophy (Crisis, 59).

Life-worldly phenomenology appears to be having a particular character: the protagonist here is not a truth among truths, but a naivety underlying other naiveties. Natural sciences are not the foundation of our thoughtless lives, but the very opposite is the case. However, Husserl does not start with this view. He struggles his way to it.

1.1 From the scientific interest to the life-worldly interest

Commentators of Husserl have witnessed substantial changes that take place between the two magna opera of the founder of phenomenology, Ideas I and Crisis. For example, as Landgrebe describes, “Husserl’s Ideas are (...) still largely oriented towards scientific theory.”3 The phenomenologist’s task here is to carry out an eidetic reduction by free variation of phantasy. Husserl means to discover the essence at the expense of the individual existent. However, this “essentialist” attitude, at least its appearance, changes during the 1930s. As Landgrebe writes: “Here, on the other hand, it is the regression behind the given sciences in their factuality and the question of the factuality of this fact.”4 In Crisis, sciences are thematized in their facticity and contingency, i.e., grasped as something situational and grounded. Although the mission to lay a foundation for science might have come down in one continuous line, this mission obtains a new meaning in Crisis. Sciences are themselves philosophically naive and should be grounded on the life-world.

That a “naivety of life” should be the foundation of rigorous natural sciences at first seems to be an absurd doctrine. This apparent absurdity lies in that what is taken to be universally true, i.e., objective knowledge, should give way to merely relatively valid, subjective opinions. Is this not the first sign of relativism, in which each individual entertains their own truth, without being able to sell it to others? It is a problem that Husserl not only notices but also accepts as the ultimate motive of his philosophical undertaking: “The paradoxical interrelationships of the ‘objectively true world’ and the ‘lifeworld’ make enigmatic the manner of being of both” (131). The life-worldly foundation seems to distort the traditionally accepted relation between the objective and the subjective, but it is a risk Husserlian phenomenology must take, a dissolution of the old dualistic paradigms that gives way to a new truth.

1.2 Self-reflecting regression to life-worldly naivety

Husserl’s antidote for the crisis of European sciences is, again, a regression to

the life-worldly naivety. However, Husserl does not mean to really return to the primordial, pre-theoretical, situation of life-world with closed eyes. On the contrary, Husserl’s task is to relate the sciences oblivious of their origin back to the life-world, which is now thematized as the source of meaning. To use Husserl’s own words, “the proper return to the naïveté of life—but in a reflection which rises above this naïveté.”5 In other words, the phenomenologist reflects upon the life-world as a subject matter of the phenomenological science, but in no way does he allow himself to be enveloped again by this thoughtless situation where there is no (self-)reflection at all.

1.3 Definitions of life-world

Why is the life-world a thoughtless state? This issue directs our attention to the two-fold definitions of the life-world in the Crisis. On the one hand, it is “a realm of original self-evidences (Evidenz).”6 Evidenz signifies the direct, personal, self-givenness in which the given thing is itself there. It has a “basic right” (Urrecht).7 Precisely in this sense, the life-world has primacy over the objective world. Life-world’s utmost familiarity also explains why it is the source of meaning, the memorable starting point for all the scientific superstructures. On the other hand, however, there is another definition with a negative overtone. In this definition, the life-world is understood as “the sole universe of what is pregiven as obvious.”8 But Selbstverständlichkeit, or obviousness,9 is not an innocent state for Husserl. For him, the transcendental phenomenology is “the science which reveals the universally obvious (selbstverständlichkeit) ‘world and we humans in the world’ as unintelligible (Unverständlichkeit), thus as a riddle, as a problem.”10 When facts speak for themselves and are taken to be intelligible in themselves, they are precisely not made intelligible, not understood, by us. We understand certain facts when we know what is the cause and what is the effect. The life-world is, as already said, the cause of meaning, but this privileged status in the causal relation is too obvious to be recognized, by itself or by its products—natural sciences. As the Hegelian instructs us, what is familiar (bekannt) is not cognitively understood (erkannt) because of its familiarity.11 The phenomenologist’s task is that of “transforming the universal obviousness of the being of the world—for him the greatest of all enigmas— into something intelligible.”12 He should make the obvious intelligible, but to do so, he needs to first problematize what is the most familiar to all. The contrast between these two definitions is ticklish, and the solution delicate.

While self-evidence serves as the basis and the standard of our knowledge— we only know things when they are given to us in themselves—obviousness precisely signifies the state of ignorance, our inability to realize and to explain. But is it not that the self-evidently given thing should also be obvious, and that the obvious alone (and not the obscure) can count as self-given? Life-world is in this sense carrying a double-sidedness between the self-evident and the obvious, between the profound and the naive. This subtlety complicates our regressive inquiry in the life-worldly naivety.

2. History and life-world

The solution of these questions detours through history. The world or the life-world is not merely a contemporary world. It has a history behind it, the memory of which also shapes our expectation for the future. Indeed, the prefix of the methodological notion, Rück- (regressive), implies a peculiar direction: the phenomenological inquiry is an inquiry that dives in the historical process. The ultimate object of such an investigation turns out to be the “primal establishment.” The destination of our life-worldly regression is the origin of history. Naturally, ordinary concepts like history and origin have apparently obtained new meaning under Husserl’s transcendental lens. But what do they mean?

2.1 A new understanding of history and tradition

History and tradition, common words in the daily life and oftentimes used in propaganda, contain an undeniably non-philosophic, plebeian connotation. This plebeianism and platitude have a pedagogical function. Talking about the ordinary understanding of tradition, Husserl comments: “From the superficial, however, one is led into the depths.”13 He founds his crisis-philosophy on the historical continuity, on the tradition. Tradition enables our continuous research into the past, not least into the starting point of our history.Metaphors allude to how Husserl conceives of history: “History is from the start nothing other than the vital movement of the coexistence and the interweaving of original formations and sedimentations of meaning.”14 According to the spatial expression of coexistence (Miteinander, lit.: with one another) and interweaving (Ineinander, lit.: in one another), moments in history are not following one another from without but are entailing each other, like one hook attached to another. History is a lively movement and has within itself a synthesizing and self-identifying principle: an organic and vital being that both sustains itself and provides an

uninterrupted “inner structure of meaning”15 for all particular events in it.

2.2 Historicity and historical a priori

Historicity anticipates this inner structure. Every science finds itself in a particular historical situation. Deductive sciences and other sciences alike, “all of them have the mobility of sedimented traditions that are worked upon, again and again, by an activity of producing new structures of meaning and handing them down.”16 All achievements are situated in a historical process and can be explained as such: they are based on the previous findings and taught to the next generation. “Everywhere the problems, the clarifying investigations, the insights of principle are historical.”17

However, historicity does not render history an empirical fact, a mere aggregation of documents. No relativism is implied either, where every truth would be only a local truth without any universal validity, unintelligible for people living in other periods of time. Quite on the contrary, Husserl’s history represents a transcendental essence, an absolute foundation that provides the condition of possibility for all the generable and corruptible facticity. History, for the phenomenologist, should be understood in its apriority: “All (merely) factual history remains incomprehensible because, always merely drawing its conclusions naïvely and straightforwardly from facts, it never makes thematic the general ground of meaning upon which all such conclusions rest, has never investigated the immense structural a priori which is proper to it.”18 Above all, this accusation aims at historicism, which, according to Husserl, “takes its position in the factual sphere of the empirical life of the spirit.”19 What the historicists oversee is precisely the reason why they can access facts that have passed, i.e., the “validity-ground”20 for facticity. Were there not “the general ground of meaning” (der allgemeine Sinnesboden)21 lying in the process of temporality, were there not a continuous consciousness bridging the present and the past, we would be denied even things that just happened a moment ago. The “structural a priori” stands on a ground, the historical Sinnesboden. This concept is yet to be explored, a job that phenomenology offers to do.

2.3 Tradition and its reactivation

History thus lays the apriorical ground. “Historicity” discussed above already hints at the fact that individual events in history exploit sources from history. This fact awakes modern human beings from their oblivion of what is

passed down to them, reactivating our consciousness of the tradition. The foundationality of history results from its whole process being dependent on the rehabilitation, exploitation, improvement, and modification of what has happened and been handed down.22

A surprising conclusion is that the secret of history hinges on a clichéd word: tradition. As we know from daily-life language, the word “tradition” refers to a set of habitus that is passed on by antecedents, which more or less exercises a normative effect on later generations. Sometimes it is taken to be a burden and sometimes a standard of our behaviors. No matter in which sense, it represents a relation between the contemporary and the past, a relation indispensable for all sciences, despite their self-styled absoluteness. Tradition is the air that enables the transmission of the sound of sciences.

However, for us to ever be able to hear something, there must be someone or something that made the sound in the first place. We see nothing ironical, then, when Husserl, whose eagerness for an absolute beginning à la Descartes manifests itself only patently in his Cartesian lectures, now takes history and tradition too seriously to be willing to stop before he arrives at that primordial sound. This primordial sound is what Husserl calls the “primal establishment” (Urstiftung).

Urstiftung has a two-fold interpretation. On the one hand, it is the first moment in the world-history, a moment that determines the following epochs by initiating a tradition. Greek philosophy is in this sense called an Urstiftung, since it establishes the theoretical tradition for the European history.23We can see another form of Urstiftung in Husserl’s manuscripts. Here, it is not a real world-historical event but a “reell”24 and transcendental genesis of the ontic meaning: a life-history. What is established in this case is not any philosophical doctrine or school but the primally established understanding of and belief in existence. One transient glimpse of a certain fragment suffices to establish a multilayered, well-structured, and anticipative horizon.25 The moment I see a smooth, white, surface before me, I immediately realize that it, say, belongs to my coffee mug, that it is an objective thing, and that it exists, etc.26 This anticipating act that evokes the type “mug,” “thing,” and “existence,” is the act of primal establishment.

For both of the interpretations of Urstiftung, the major consequence stays the same. Since it is the basis of all particular meanings acquired later, we should

(and always can) return to it in order to understand the contemporary, including ourselves. This undertaking is, world-historically speaking, a regression toward the Greeks, “the true birth of the European spirit,” or, transcendentally speaking, a regression toward naivety, i.e., the primordial certainty of Seins.

The world-historical dimension of Urstiftung, which prevails in Crisis, steers the discussion to the concept “tradition.” Tradition is the vehicle of our historical examination. It guarantees us a “continued inquiry”27 into the past. It reminds us of our historical way of living, linking our present being with our predecessors and their establishments. This merit of tradition comes from the fact that, although it might oftentimes be either intentionally ignored or merely implicitly accepted, it can be reactivated. That is, it can be a reservoir which we can exploit, or “a necessary subsoil of obscure but occasionally available reactivatable validities.”28 Phenomenology extends its optimism of Vermöglichkeit (potentiability)29 toward the historical domain by virtue of a reactivable tradition; history lies within the reach of the subjective potency. This subject is no longer a consciousness confined in the present moment. On the contrary, it opens up to the whole chain of the sedimented tradition.

Tradition, understood as such, incarnates Husserl’s voluntarism. It is a horizon “into which the active ego can also direct itself voluntarily.”30 Therefore, this tradition turns history into that which we can do something about. In other words, in order to reactivate the original meaning of this notion, we should stop taking it as the mere facts that have been passed on by previous generations. Instead, we need to understand it in its verbal meaning. Phenomenologically speaking, tradition is primarily the lively process of tradere (handing-down), not the ready-made product of traditum (the handed-down). The concept of tradition belongs to the domain of subjective potency.

Therefore, unlike in the ordinary understanding, this phenomenological tradition puts its stress on the subjective ability, instead of objective events that really happened in the outer world. This feature directs us back from world-history to life-history. History, whose continuity is guaranteed by the uninterrupted process of handing-down, is in this sense my history. In other words, history expresses the temporality of my life. As Landgrebe points out, history is closely connected with the problem of time-constitution. “It (the a priori of history) is the temporal structure of the ultimately constituting subjectivity that constitutes itself as temporal, as Heraclitan flux. This constitution takes place in each case in the ‘living present’.”31 We

should attribute our historical consciousness to the inner ability of retentionremembrance. When the vivid presence of self-evidence just passed by, it is still retained by our consciousness as something falling back but still in relation with us. This retention necessarily faints away, retreating into the darkness of our memory, but its disappearance will never be complete. “Finally this ‘retention’ disappears, but the ‘disappeared’ passing and being past has not become nothing for the subject in question: it can be reawakened.”32 This process of disappearance is irresistible, but its ceaselessness implies continuity, enabling me to trace back from this point to a previous moment in my life.

The liveliness of the life-world results from the revival of the historical horizon. Stressing the importance of “tradition,” Husserl reminds us of the fact—a fact which underlies all other facticity—that who we are now, or the science we have today, is in a great part constituted by what we have received from predecessors, albeit always unthematically. Behind us there is always history, always some traditional heritage at our disposal. To “the usual factual study of history in general”, Husserl opposes an “internal history.”33 Husserl’s history is united by “the hidden unity of intentional inwardness.”34 His historical inquiry aims at a “genuine self-reflection.”35 The regressive direction, therefore, is not exclusively, nor even primarily, applied to the world-history, but to the inner life-history as well. History amplifies life, and life vitalizes history.

3. The double-sided life

Therefore, the discussion above about history leads us back to the issue of life and the life-world. History, a vital movement itself, resembles life, and life must always have a horizon that is history: “the horizon of the life-world is nothing other than the horizon of world-history(.)”36 Far exceeding the boundary of any individual human being, life stretches to the whole historical process. Lifehistory converges with world-history.

3.1 Life in its naive certainty

The first thing worth considering in our discussion of Husserl’s understanding of life is the word choice itself: whether “life” is the best phraseology is of course a debatable issue, especially since one of Husserl’s major adversaries is nothing but Lebensphilosophie and anthropologism.37 Life is a notoriously indefinite concept,38 and this ambivalence has a history in Husserl’s phenomenology. As Landgrebe believes, the compound life-world is at the

end of the day equivalent to “natural attitude” coined by Husserl twenty years earlier. “The expression (lifeworld) is rather nothing other than the designation for the correlate, now grasped in its full concretion, of what is already named as the ‘natural attitude’ in the Ideas.”39 Given the negative tone of the natural attitude, however, “life-world” is endowed with an unavoidable ambivalence.40

As we can read in Ideas I, the natural attitude culminates in the “general thesis” that “‘The’ world is always there as an actuality(.)”41 The natural attitude is defined by its confidence, its general position, of the existence of the world. The world never ceases to exist. But for Husserl, this certainty is just a belief, an opinion, a position or judgement that can be suspended, “parenthesized.”42 Now, the same seems to hold true for life. According to Husserl’s own definition, “(to) live is always to live-in-certainty-of-the-world.”43 The living beings in the life-world, like the natural attitude, cling to the certainty of the world without themselves realizing it. Life is naive in its thoughtlessness and its lack of reflection. “This life-world is nothing other than the world of mere δόξα (doxa), traditionally treated with such contempt(.)”44 Doxa is by its definition not an episteme, not any true, grounded, knowledge. Yet is it not the major lesson in the Crisis that this “world of mere doxa” is in fact the destination of our regression, the ground for all our meanings? Husserl’s new approach, a regression toward naivety, rehabilitates in this sense the doxa and the natural attitude. The notion life-world offers a healthy ambivalence that lets us rethink about the contemptible natural attitude, and reduction, supposedly its antidote. As Fink puts it, “in the phenomenological reduction, what is transcended is not the world as such, but only the limitedness of that ‘natural attitude’.”45 Natural attitude is the attitude most naturally adopted by human beings: we cannot conceive of a non-existent world, or, which has the same meaning, the nothingness of being. The philosopher who treats it as a problem does not himself step out of it. In other words, life and the world it lives in are both preserved in a higher perspective. What has changed is not our belief in world’s existence, but our attitude toward this belief, since we are now interested, not in the world itself, but the mode of its being, i.e., the mode of its givenness.

The change in attitude can be detected in our different understandings of the world. There are two ways to thematize the phenomenon of the life-world: an objective and a subjective way. The objectively understood world is the world which appears to us in everyday life: it is the all-encompassing universe.

Everything that was, is, and will be, is in this world. Every event, every change, happens in it, and presupposes the substrate of the world. No matter how time passes, this universe remains. This understanding of the world, Husserl tells us, is “that of straightforwardly living toward whatever objects are given, thus toward the world-horizon,”46 etc. This attitude focuses on the objective side insofar as its attention is paid to the mutable yet integrated process of things.

The subjective way offers a less common-sensical world-view. Instead of being obsessed with the fact that objects are unitively contained in the unique universe, this second way thematizes the how-ness or givenness of things. That is, the mutable, individual entities are now realized and examined by us “through subjective manners of appearance, or manners of givenness.”47 In this perspective, an object is not per se objective, but is rather recognized— given—as such. What Husserl suggests here is that, while the objective worldview postulates the continuity of things without further ado, the subjective world-view sheds more light on the synthesizing principle, the reason for the continuity. A “change of interest”48 (Interessenwendung) takes place here: we are not interested in objects alone, but objects along with their modes of givenness. The one consciousness, having lived through all the changes of objects, confers a continuous sense upon them and synthesizes them into one single whole that is the world.

3.2 Life as a transcendental principle

But something phenomenological comes to our sight in the second Weltanschauung. The universe is conditioned by the subjective achievements. The ontic, unitary and universal validity of the world is constituted by our life that keeps unfolding without gaps. This Interessenwendung is, in this constitutional sense, a transcendental change. We need to justify Husserl’s life in “life-world” by showing that this vital being that keeps naively living into the world (hineinleben) is no one else but the singular and synthesizing principle itself: “the universal accomplishing life in which the world comes to be as existing for us constantly in flowing particularity, constantly ‘pregiven’ to us.”49 For Husserl, my life is one in substrate but two in expressions with the “transcendental subjectivity,” the principle of constitution. This is, admittedly, not Husserl’s own phrasing. What he comments on is rather the dubious duplicity (taken in the literal sense: doubleness), not of life, but of the I. That is, I am both the mundane subject, a man who shares the same passivity and finitude with my human fellows,

and at once the transcendental, active subject that carries out the constituting performances, an I-pole with all my acts, habitualities, and abilities.50

Yet still, this viewpoint suffices to show that life belongs to the transcendental side: the metaphor “life” is used to show that the I-pole is nothing abstract and hollow but replete with rich content, with the “concrete whole of life.”51 The second way of thematizing the world introduces “life” as a self-sustaining entity that despite its constant transmutations stays one and unitary. That is because, in its vital movement, this life unceasingly undergoes different experiences, evacuating old ones and anticipating new ones. In the normal life, i.e., in the situation where this life goes on and on without unexpected interruptions, its experiences prove continuous and stand in harmony with one another. The triple process of undergoing-evacuating-anticipation (or, when put under a phenomenological microscope: primal impression-retention-protention) happens in a quasi-automatic way. That is, I don’t need to consciously reflect upon the past so as to ensure myself of the continuity of my life, which is equal to say that this problemless and carefree life-world goes on and on in a selbstverständlich (natural, obvious) manner.

One more twist, however, should be added on to the chain of arguments. That life constitutes in this automatic, self-ignorant, and naive state, in its anonymity,52 is necessary. It cannot be stressed enough that life is, by definition, the constituting principle that knows nothing, and lets nothing be known, about its capacity.53 I take for granted that I am the same person today as I was yesterday, without realizing innumerably many infinitesimal moments of present hooking to one another in the meantime. In fact, the questionability of the constitution of this basis for life, the loss of its Selbstverständlichkeit (obviousness), occurs as a pathological phenomenon that leads to schizophrenia.54 The phenomenologist, after all, does not return to the transcendental subjectivity, but to the naivety of life. “The power of naivety”55 is powered by naivety. The primal establishment is established in a primeval way. We can better understand now why Husserl’s life-worldly phenomenology would “make enigmatic the manner of being of both,”56 rendering the subjective the principle and the objective the principiated. The analysis above reduces the enigma of two to the ambivalence of one: the ambivalence of the naive life, of the constitutive subjectivity that stays blind to its own achievement. The world exists because of life’s constitution. That is, the world exists in a necessary manner, resistant to all changes, and superior

to any finite subject, because life is constitutive in a self-forgetting manner, concealing the conditionality of this world.

The coupling of life and the world is a master trick. Its efficacy is straightforward—a mixture of the subjective and the objective—but to explain it requires abstract terminology. The constituting and the constituted entity are but two relata, two poles, in the same process of constitution. Fink summarizes this interdependence in concise language: “It is not that transcendental subjectivity is here and the world is there, and between both the constitutive relation is in play, but that the genesis of constitution is the selfactualization of constituting subjectivity in world-actualization.”57 The modes of existence of life and the world are only “enigmatic” for those who are unfamiliar with the transcendental, i.e., constitutional, approach. Life and the world are not disparate entities—this conclusion quintessential to the phenomenological philosophy has been made clear by the peculiar amalgam, the compound “lifeworld” in the very first place.58 In phenomenology, the subject is constituting, and the object is constituted. This hierarchy is turned over in the forgetfulness, in the naivety. This is the naivety that takes the objects and their universe, the world, to be absolute and self-sufficient. Husserl’s life-world comes and helps. It helps by excavating a more profound kind of naivety underlying other naivety, the naivety that makes other naivety possible in the first place. You must have a world first before you can appreciate its solidity and necessity.

4. Conclusion

To conclude, in this paper, we have first gone through Husserl’s understanding of the methodology in his life-worldly phenomenology as a “regression toward the naivety.” But instead of a thoughtless regression, this return is better called a regressive inquiry, in which the philosopher reflects upon the naive life and relates all other higher scientific achievements back to this vital being. This inverted foundational relation brings into question the mode of existence of both the objective and the subjective. And then, to deepen our conception of this primordial situation of the life-world, we brought up the issue of history, which is now treated as the principle of the phenomenological investigation. The core in the phenomenon of history, as we said, is tradition, read as a lively, continuous process of handing-down, instead of some ready-made and handed-down products.

This tradition vitalizes the process of history, leading us back to the notion

of life and life-world. According to our analysis, life is at the same time the constituting, synthesizing principle that unifies the domain we call universe, and a being that is ignorant of this accomplishment of its own and keeps naively living into the world. Husserl’s opposition to the metaphysical tradition, and his effort to solve the crisis of the European sciences, pass through his “regression” toward the naive situation of life. This life, at the end of the day, is the most superficial and the most profound at the same time. It is profound because it lies at the foundation of the validities of everything else, including the scientific achievements. It is superficial because it does not realize the might of its own, and keeps confining itself in this or that individual, and limited instantiation. Life is, in the final analysis, its own world.

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my thanks to Yixuan Liu, Wouter van Staveren and Josh Law for listening to my presentation and raising their critical remarks. I owe the current version of this text to the three anonymous reviewers, especially their suggestion to elaborate on the discussion of the “primal establishment” and incorporate scholarship from the past decades. Bernice Brijan also kindly provided me with much writing assistance.

Endnotes

1. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. 1: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, transl. by F. Kersten, Collected Works / Husserl, Edmund 2 (Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1982). 2. See, e.g., Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), §9, h. 3. Ludwig Landgrebe, Phänomenologie und Geschichte (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus G. Mohn, 1968), 149. 4. Landgrebe, 149. 5. Husserl, Crisis, 59; emphasis added. 6. Ibid., 127-128. 7. Ibid., 128. In his translation, David Carr dismantles the compound Urrecht and forgets to translate the “-recht” (right) part of it, as well as the juristic overtone of this technical concept. This does not seem to be the most advisable approach. Urrecht is attributed, besides the self-evident realm of the life-world in the context of Crisis, to the naive certainty of the world. In a manuscript written around 1930, Husserl explicitly argues that the world given in continuity or “unanimity” (Einstimmigkeit) should, too, be treated with the “basic right. Hua XXXIX, 234. The life-world is the foundation revealed only in the transcendental attitude of phenomenology, while the belief in the existence of world is cultivated in the naive situation of our daily life. That they should have the equal right to claim is the ambivalence I aim to show in this section and in the paper as a whole. 8. Ibid., 180. 9. I thank one of the reviewers for suggesting that I add a note on the translation of Selbstverständlichkeit. On the one hand, Evidenz, which has no selbst- attached to it, is translated as “self-evidence”, so as to avoid the misleading connotation of the English word “evidence” (see Carr’s translation note on page 128 of Crisis). On the other hand, however, Carr renders Selbstverständlichkeit as “obviousness” (or occasionally “taken for granted” etc.), leaving out its prefix selbst- (see his note

on page 24). Although semantically above reproach, which is the reason why I retain Carr’s translation, this rendering sacrifices the sarcasm. As will be seen three notes later, Selbstverständlichkeit (lit. self-intelligibility) differs substantially with Verständlichkeit (intelligibility), despite the similar appearances. The omission of this “self” has a significant consequence, as I try to show in what follows immediately. 10. Edmund Husserl, Briefwechsel, ed. Elisabeth Schuhmann and Karl Schuhmann, vol. 3.7. Wissenschaftlerkorrespondenz (Dordrecht: Springer Science+Business Media, 1994), 164; emphasis added. 11. Cf. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), 18. 12. Husserl, Crisis, 180. The contrast between “obviousness” and “something intelligible” is better shown in the original German, as is noticed by the translator, who remarks in the footnote: “i.e., of transforming this Selbstverständlichkeit into a Verständlichkeit.” 13. Ibid., 355. 14. Ibid., 371; emphasis added. 15. Ibid., 371. 16. Ibid., 368-369. 17. Ibid., 369; emphasis original. 18. Ibid., 371; emphasis added. 19. Edmund Husserl, Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy: Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man, trans. Quentin Lauer (New York, 1965), 122. 20. Husserl, Crisis, 373. 21. Ibid., 371. 22. Cf. Derrida’s discussion on the “repetition of origin” in his introduction to the French translation of Husserl’s text “Origin of Geometry” und Husserl: Edmund Husserl, L’Origine de la Géométrie, trans. Jacques Derrida (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962), 14. 23. For this “Greek primal establishment”, see: Husserl, Crisis, 71. 24. In his translation of Ideas I, Kersten renders “reell” as “really inherent”, interpreting it as “really inherent moments of consciousness as noetic hyletic”. See: Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. 1, 395. On Husserl’s distinction between real (transcendent) and reell (immanent and transcendental), and how this distinction affects his discussion of the problem of history, cf. Rudolf A. Makkreel, “Husserl, Dilthey and the Relation of the LifeWorld to History,” Research in Phenomenology 12, no. 1 (1982): 39–58, 51.

25. “The first validity establishes a horizon of further validity” (Hua XXXIX, 1). Both of the meanings of Urstiftung, by the way, are covered in Husserl’s First Philosophy. See: Hua VIII, 19, 151. 26. “Jede ‘Apperzeption’ (…) hat ihren Ursprung, ihre Urstiftung nach ihrem Typus (…) dass aber ‘Seiendes’, Gegenständliches, das ‘da ist’, (…) ein Titel ist, der nur Sinn hat aufgrund urstiftender Akte” (Hua XXXIX, 3). 27. Husserl, Crisis, 355. 28. Ibid., 149. 29. In contrast to actualities, which are exercised and experienced in actu, potentiabilities are my powers which are not exercised by me at the moment, but necessarily exercisable. On potentiablity or potentialities (Potentalitäten), see, for example, Husserl’s discussion in Hua I, 81-83. 30. Husserl, Crisis, 149; emphasis added. 31. Ludwig Landgrebe, Phänomenologie und Geschichte (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus G. Mohn, 1968), 162. The notion “living present” (lebendige Gegenwart), or “primal impression” (Urimpression), is discussed in great details in Klaus Held, Lebendige Gegenwart: die Frage nach der Seinsweise des transzendentalen Ich bei Edmund Husserl, entwickelt am Leitfaden der Zeitproblematik, Phaenomenologica 23 (Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1966). 32. Husserl, Crisis, 359. 33. Ibid., 378. 34. Ibid., 73. 35. Ibid., 71. 36. Ludwig Landgrebe, Phänomenologie und Geschichte (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus G. Mohn, 1968), 158; emphasis added. 37. Anthropologism is a doctrine that, as Bruzina puts it, roots “the fundamental determinations of being, the horizon of being, and being itself, in a contingent being, namely, human being.” See: Ronald Bruzina, Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink: Beginnings and Ends in Phenomenology, 1928-1938 (Yale University Press, 2008), 365. Husserl’s reservation about this philosophical trend manifests itself in, for example, his response to Dilthey: the a priori which he, Husserl, is searching for and which underlies all objective validity “is in no way confined by anthropolog(ical), historical, facticities.” See: Edmund Husserl, Briefwechsel, ed. Elisabeth Schuhmann and Karl Schuhmann, vol. 3.6. Philosophenbriefe (Dordrecht: Springer Science+Business Media, 1994), 48. Lebensphilosophie, or life-philosophy, is treated by Husserl as one of the major antagonistic constituents of German philosophy when he was writing Ideas I (See Husserl’s postface to Ideas I, in Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. 1: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine

Phänomenologie, Nachwort (Hamburg: Meiner, 1992), 138). 38. Cf. Hans Blumenberg, “‘Leben’—ein unbestimmter Begriff”, in Blumenberg, Theorie der Lebenswelt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2010), 9-24. 39. Ludwig Landgrebe, Phänomenologie und Geschichte (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus G. Mohn, 1968), 155; emphasis added. 40. Admittedly, as Iso Kern notices, this initial interchangeability decreases when the notion life-world gradually “takes on great systematic importance” in the 1920s (Rudolf Bernet, Iso Kern, and Eduard Marbach, An Introduction to Husserlian Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 217. Yet still, this situation does not diminish its inner ambivalence. Life-world, as its counterpart in Ideas, implies a double-sidedness, examinable under both the naive and transcendental perspective. But the change of attitude is an ambivalent practice itself: it is the way in which we see, instead of the thing itself, that has changed. Unlike in the domain of objective truths, where a thesis strictly opposes its antithesis, attitudes can be placed in a hierarchy, but are not mutually exclusive. To put it in the Hegelian language, the naïve attitude is sublated in the higher, transcendental one, preserved as one of the legitimate layers but deprived of the fundamentality it once imaged it has. Despite the possible change in perspective or attitude, a truly disinterested, “nonparticipant onlooker” (unbeteiligter Zuschauer) can always notice this equivocity, this “dualism” between the mundane and the transcendental (Eugen Fink, Sixth Cartesian Meditation: The Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995, 20). Blumenberg even suggests that the negligence of the life-world’s indecisiveness is precisely the “Lebensweltmißverständnis” (misunderstanding about the life-world) (Hans Blumenberg, Lebenszeit und Weltzeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 17. 41. Husserl, Ideas I, 57. The quotes around the “the” serve to underpin the singularity and necessary existence of this world: this world in its whole never altogether ceases to exist. 42. Ibid., 59-60. 43. Husserl, Crisis, 142. 44. “Diese Lebenswelt ist nichts anderes als die Welt der bloßen, traditionell so verächtlich behandelten δόξα” (Hua VI, 465). The appendix XVIII, to which this quotation belongs, is not incorporated in Carr’s translation. 45. Eugen Fink, Studien zur Phänomenologie 1930-1939, Phaenomenologica 21 (Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1966), 105-106. 46. Husserl, Crisis, 144. 47. Ibid., 144. 48. Ibid., 145. “Interest” is what directs an action, while “attitude” is the affirmation

of the corresponding interest (Sebastian Luft, Phänomenologie der Phänomenologie: Systematik und Methodologie der Phänomenologie in der Auseinandersetzung zwischen Husserl und Fink (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2013), 45). 49. Husserl, Crisis, 145; emphasis added. In Husserlian phenomenology, “accomplishment” or “Leistung” denotes the intentional productivity of consciousness. 50. Cf. Ibid., 182-183. R. Bruzina sheds light on this issue by accounting for it on the basis of the collaboration between Husserl and Fink. Husserl’s focus on the duplicity of the I instead of life here in the Crisis results from the influence of Fink, the last assistant of Husserl. See: Bruzina, Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink, 368. 51. Ibid., 183. An equally explicit definition of life can be found in Husserl’s lecture on “nature and spirit” in 1927: “the life (=the intentional subjectivity in her full concretion)” (Hua XXXII, 269). 52. “Anonymous” is known as what Merleau-Ponty will use to describe the function of the lived body, which exhibits a “break away from Husserl’s framework which is seen as hopelessly subjectivistic and solipsistic.” See: Sara Heinämaa, ‘Anonymity and Personhood: Merleau-Ponty’s Account of the Subject of Perception’, Continental Philosophy Review 48, no. 2 (2015): 123–42, 124. However, this deviation should not be exaggerated, since in the final analysis, the anonymity is nothing but the state in which the constituting, achieving (leistend), subject (embodied or not) stays ignorant of its own achievement. In Fink’s phraseology, for example, this “anonymity of the constitutive function” is another name for “the enclosure (Verschlossenheit) of the authentic, constituting, life.” See: Fink, Studien zur Phänomenologie 1930-1939, 6. 53. On the inscrutability of life, Cf. Landgrebe, Phänomenologie und Geschichte, 21, as well as Blumenberg, Theorie der Lebenswelt, 125. 54. For relevant pathological study, see: Wolfgang Blankenburg, Der Verlust der natürlichen Selbstverständlichkeit: Ein Beitrag zur Psychopathologie symptomarmer Schizophrenien (Berlin: Parodos Verlag, 2012). 55. “Die Kraft der Naivität”, a phrase borrowed from Blumenberg, Theorie der Lebenswelt, 172. 56. Husserl, Crisis, 131. 57. Fink, Sixth Cartesian Meditation, 45. 58. One conceptual problem remains unanswered, though: what is the surplus value of “life-world” compared to “world” alone? Staiti’s answer is that “the phrase ‘lifeworld’ is first and foremost a contrastive term. It contrasts with, e.g., “the idealized world of mathematical physics” or “the multiple worlds of historical cultures” (Staiti, Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology, 247; emphasis original). However, our discussion of life itself offers the possibility of a new interpretation: this life—as

a transcendental or constitutional principle—is added on in order to confer its transcendentality to the world. That is, this constitutional Weltanschauung frees the world from the stationary or static picture, setting it in the vital motion and grasping it in its genesis. This needs to be addressed elsewhere, and now I am contended with showing how this transformation is present even in the metaphors. Boden (ground, soil), Husserl’s beloved metaphor for the world (see Carr’s note on page 18 of Crisis), is in fact an inanimate fundament for the vital beings, an element supporting the organic body but not organic itself. (Blumenberg offers a detailed analysis of this metaphor in the chapter, “Der Lebensweltboden”, in Hans Blumenberg, Phänomenologische Schriften: 1981-1988, ed. Nicola Zambon (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2018).) On the other hand, the preferred metaphor for life is the ever-flowing flux (Cf. Blumenberg, Lebenszeit und Weltzeit, 11, footnote 3). In short, in this geology of life-worldly phenomenology, earth’s solidity is shaken by water..

Bibliography

Bernet, Rudolf, Iso Kern, and Eduard Marbach. An Introduction to Husserlian Phenomenology. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993.

Blankenburg, Wolfgang. Der Verlust der natürlichen Selbstverständlichkeit: Ein Beitrag zur Psychopathologie symptomarmer Schizophrenien. Berlin: Parodos Verlag, 2012.

Blumenberg, Hans. Lebenszeit und Weltzeit. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986.

——— . Phänomenologische Schriften: 1981-1988. Hrsg. Nicola Zambon. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2018. ——— . Theorie der Lebenswelt. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2010.

Bruzina, Ronald. Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink: Beginnings and Ends in Phenomenology, 1928-1938. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.

Fink, Eugen. Sixth Cartesian Meditation: The Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method. Bloomington & Indianapolis:Indiana University Press, 1995.

——— . Studien zur Phänomenologie 1930-1939. Phaenomenologica 21. Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1966.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon, 1977.

Heinämaa, Sara. “Anonymity and Personhood: Merleau-Ponty’s Account of the Subject of Perception.” Continental Philosophy Review 48, no. 2 (2015): 123–42.

Held, Klaus. Lebendige Gegenwart: die Frage nach der Seinsweise des transzendentalen Ich bei Edmund Husserl, entwickelt am Leitfaden der Zeitproblematik. Phaenomenologica 23. Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1966.

Husserl, Edmund. Briefwechsel. Hrsg. Elisabeth Schuhmann und Karl Schuhmann. Vol. 3.7. Wissenschaftlerkorrespondenz. Dordrecht: Springer Science+Business Media, 1994.

———. Briefwechsel. Hrsg. Elisabeth Schuhmann und Karl Schuhmann. Vol. 3.6. Philosophenbriefe. Dordrecht:Springer Science+Business Media, 1994. ———. Cartesianische Meditation und Pariser Vorträge. Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1950. ———. Die Lebenswelt: Auslegungen der vorgegebenen Welt und ihrer Konstitution. Dordrecht: Springer-Verlag, 2008. ———. Erste Philosophie (1923/24). Hrsg. Boehm Rudolf. Vol. Zweite Teil: Theorie der Phänomenologischen Reduktion. Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1959. ———. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. 1: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology. Translated by F. Kersten. Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1982. ———. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. 1: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie. Hamburg: Meiner, 1992. ——— . L’Origine de La Géométrie. Translated by Jacques Derrida. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962. ———. Natur und Geist: Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1927. Hrsg. Michael Weiler. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001. ———. Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy: Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man. Translated by Quentin Lauer. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1965. ———. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy.Translated by David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970.

Landgrebe, Ludwig. Phänomenologie und Geschichte. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus G. Mohn, 1968.

Luft, Sebastian. Phänomenologie der Phänomenologie: Systematik und Methodologie der Phänomenologie in der Auseinandersetzung zwischen Husserl und Fink. Dordrecht: SpringerVerlag, 2013.

Makkreel, Rudolf A. “Husserl, Dilthey and the Relation of the Life-World to History.” Research in Phenomenology 12, no. 1 (1982): 39–58.

Staiti, Andrea. Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology: Nature, Spirit, and Life. Cambridge: University Press, 2014.