Is Philosophy Architecture or Cartography? (Long Essay)

Though their lifetimes were nearly three hundred years apart, Rene Descartes and Edmund Husserl had many things in common. Both were trained as mathematicians and only later turned to philosophy; both brought from mathematics a taste for rigorous analysis and exactitude, a thirst for certainty, and a hatred of skepticism; both were dissatisfied with the philosophical climate of their times, a decadent Scholasticism for Descartes and an exhausted Kantian / post-Kantian idealism for Husserl; both sought firmly to ground the other more specialized sciences in a kind of “first philosophy”; and both had an enormous impact on Western thought. Descartes is in many ways considered the founder of the whole modern tradition in philosophy, and Husserl is without a doubt the primary figure in the most influential movement of twentieth-century continental philosophy, phenomenology. Given their similar aims, however, it is instructive to contrast their methods. (Doing so also dispels the myth that philosophy never advances as a discipline). Husserl admired Descartes and sympathized with his goals—in fact, he even entitled one of his mature works Cartesian Meditations—but he was convinced that his predecessor had taken a wrong turn at the very beginning of his journey.

In spite of his plan to doubt everything, according to Husserl, Descartes had failed to call into question a fundamental assumption: the representative theory of perception. The assumption is that the world and the things that make it up are outside our minds, but what we have access to through our senses are representations, images, copies of those things inside our minds. The obvious question that arises is, How do we know that those representations match the real things? We don’t, and we can’t. This leads either to some sort of idealism (Berkeley, Kant) or to skepticism. Descartes is concerned with the latter. He writes,

Everything which I have thus far accepted as entirely true and assured has been acquired from the senses or by means of the senses. But I have learned by experience that these senses sometimes mislead me, and it is prudent never to trust wholly to those things which have once deceived us.

Convinced that sensation/perception is unreliable (as a pre-Kantian, he doesn’t make the distinction), he decides to doubt all of his perceptual beliefs and all beliefs that are based on them. He calls the existence of the entire external world into question, and in search of a better foundation, retreats inside his own mind. He finds what he is looking for in the cogito, the intuition of his existence as “a thing which thinks,” and then immediately in a deductive demonstration of the existence of a non-deceiving God. This, he believes, is the rock-solid foundation on which we can build an indestructible edifice of certain knowledge.

Unfortunately, Descartes’ successors quickly point out how in each of these two steps he smuggles in unwarranted metaphysical assumptions, and how when he is finished we are still left with an intractable mind-body problem, among other difficulties. They agree that Descartes’ problem is unsolved and that a chasm still yawns between representation and reality, mind and matter, thoughts and things. Here Husserl makes his first bold move: he argues that everyone’s mistake is falsely thinking of thinking in spatial metaphors. One consequence of this is that Husserl flatly denies the representative theory of perception. When we examine consciousness, he points out, we find that it is intentional, that is, directed, consciousness-of. It is irreducibly composed of a subject pole/aspect (the conscious ego and the act by which it is directed), an object pole (what it is directed toward), and a meaning pole (what the object is understood as). Now, if the object were simply an image, it would be entirely contained within consciousness, part of the act. But reflection shows that objects actually transcend consciousness. First, if I look at, say, a particular tree several times on different occasions, or if several different people look at it at once, it is clearly the same tree we are seeing, not different ones. Second, when we look at the tree from different angles or under different conditions, we see different parts of it. It is never fully present at once, the way an act is. Third, our very concept of a representation requires acquaintance with that-which-is-represented. You wouldn’t be able to think of, say, a painting of a landscape as a representation unless you had some sort of acquaintance with landscapes. You wouldn’t be able to recognize dreams or hallucinations for what they are unless you had at some point not been dreaming or hallucinating.

So global skepticism like Descartes’, the idea that we only have access to representations, is incoherent. “Since the interpretation of anything as an image presupposes an object intentionally given to consciousness, we should plainly have a regressus in infinitum were we again to let this latter object itself be constituted through an image.” We have direct, unmediated acquaintance with objects as presentations. “We are always already in contact with being.” To invert Plato’s parable, philosophers have thought they were in a cave, specifically a bony one filled with squishy gray matter. In fact, they have all along been sitting in broad daylight, and what they thought were shadows on the wall were actually the real things. Husserl’s second target, the equivalent of Descartes’ evil demon, is psychologism, the doctrine that the laws of logic are rooted in the nature of the human mind, not in the nature of reality. He argues that psychologism confuses acts of knowing, which are temporal, with the objects of knowledge, in this case the eternal, abstract, ideal, entities and laws of logic. The difference is evident under phenomenological investigation.

With the skeptical problematic out of the way, the primary task is no longer to construct a deductive metaphysical system. Without a doubt that objects are given to us, the fundamental question is how they are given to us. Thus Husserl calls for a return “to the things themselves.” He considers himself an epistemological realist, claiming that we know things as they actually are, but he is neither a metaphysical realist nor a metaphysical idealist. He believes that consciousness is essentially intended toward objects, while objects are essentially possibilities for intending subjects, and therefore it is incoherent to think of one without the other. The world only appears, and only could appear, in consciousness. It follows that that the first-person perspective is prior to the third-person perspective. So the work of phenomenology, as “first philosophy” and the grounding for all other sciences, is to clarify and demarcate the “phenomenological realm,” that is, the essential structures of consciousness. This requires epoche, that is, suspending or bracketing—not Cartesian doubting, which is incoherent—our metaphysical assumptions and judgments, including those of existence. In doing so we pass from the natural attitude to the presuppositionless phenomenological attitude.

The phenomenologist is less of an architect than a surveyor and cartographer (although, unfortunately, this too is a spatial metaphor). Before jumping to hasty metaphysical conclusions, as Descartes does, Husserl wants to linger in the phenomenological realm until it has been fully explored. Like the scholastic realists, he discovers that both acts and objects come to us in distinct, intelligible, essential structures. We can intend the same object through different kinds of acts, such as seeing, remembering, imagining, and signifying. Or we can with the same act intend different kinds of objects, such as physical objects, states of affairs, propositions, and abstract entities (categorial objects). We can intend the same object with different meanings, or the different objects with the same meaning. All of these need to be classified. In practice, our consciousness consists of multilayered intentions and complex objects, which needed to be sorted out. There is also the question of what in experience is constituted by the subject and what is constituted by the object. Fundamental ontology inquires into the general categories of being; regional ontology inquires more specifically into certain portions of the phenomenological realm. As regional ontologies, the special sciences need to be demarcated and situated within it. We can perform the eidetic reduction to determine which elements of a thing are essential and which are accidental. And finally, we can perform the transcendental reduction, which inquires into the conditions of the possibility of experience in general. This is an enormous array of tasks; and unlike Descartes, who sought to complete his project alone in his “stove” in a matter of days, Husserl emphasizes that phenomenology is a communal endeavor that takes lifetimes.