PART III
Karl Mertens
A peculiarity of Edmund Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology is that it forcefully declares its opposition to certain philosophical traditions, even as it draws on them as integral to its self-understanding. The emphatic innovator is really a spirited conjurer of points of contact with tradition. This is true not least for Husserl’s relationship to traditional metaphysics. On the one hand, Husserl decisively rejects this tradition insofar as, for him, metaphysical thinking combines all the attributes of a phenomenological cabinet of horrors. It is speculative, naïve, operating with “absurd [widersinnig] things in themselves”;1 it is obscure2 and dogmatic.3 On the other hand, there are justly renowned representatives of traditional metaphysics, above all Descartes and Leibniz, to whom Husserl programmatically returns whenever he understands his transcendental phenomenology as a new Cartesianism or a new monadology.4
Husserl’s connection to the metaphysical tradition must obviously be understood as a critical investigation of it, by means of which what is phenomenologically tenable is separated from what is untenable. Husserl is clearly not interested in Descartes or Leibniz as representatives of the metaphysics that he criticizes; rather, he is interested in them insofar as he sees in their philosophies a germ of thought that can be phenomenologically interpreted and appropriated. For this reason, Husserl’s Descartes or Leibniz cannot be identified with the historical Descartes or Leibniz. Transcendental phenomenology is a modified Cartesianism, a modified monadology. As a modification of philosophical-historical thinking, something is pregiven to phenomenology, something to which it must be related in its transformations. Otherwise, the connection to tradition would be nothing but a label without a philosophical point.
The following considerations attempt to illuminate Husserl’s recourse to the metaphysical tradition, using as an example his interpretation of Leibniz. The discussion is limited to Husserl’s programmatic suggestions found in the framework of his theory of intersubjectivity. In accordance with the view outlined, I want to assume initially that in crucial respects an affirmative appeal to Leibniz, for Husserl, would be completely senseless. He cannot extract from Leibnizian metaphysics a single idea by which his own philosophy can or should be considered a phenomenological transformation of monadology.
I begin with a sketch of what in the broadest sense could be considered the fundamental problem common to Leibniz and Husserl while investigating the crucial differences in approach between Leibniz’s monadology and the phenomenological theory of intersubjectivity. I will then show that these differences are so serious that the attempt to create a phenomenological monadology ultimately is not feasible.5 To put it simply and pointedly: either Husserl carries out a form of monadological thinking, and consequently fails to solve the phenomenological problem of intersubjectivity, or he offers a possibility for satisfactorily clarifying the problem of intersubjectivity phenomenologically, but as a result his philosophy loses the framework in which it could be called a monadology. Husserl takes the first path in his failed attempt at a theory of intersubjectivity in the famous—or infamous—fifth Cartesian meditation. He suggests the second path in scattered textual passages and manuscripts which he admittedly has never organized into a unified whole.
Similarities in Leibniz’s and Husserl’s Statements of the Problem of Subjectivity
Even when the ties between transcendental phenomenology and Leibniz’s monadology gain their full systematic weight in the context of discussions of the problem of intersubjectivity in Husserl’s late philosophy, Husserl’s interest in Leibniz can be understood as a consequence of the philosophical self-understanding Husserl articulates from the beginning in his conception of transcendental phenomenology.6
The project of a transcendental phenomenology is bound to the performance of the two complementary and fundamental methodological operations of the phenomenological epochē and the reduction.7 With the help of the epochē (the suspension of our beliefs regarding being)8 and the reduction (the leading back of all positings of being to transcendental subjectivity), Husserl gains a world-saturated intentional consciousness, namely, transcendental subjectivity. The phenomenological distancing from the natural attitude’s nonthematic belief in the world enables the philosophical thematizing of the constitution of any and every sense of being. Correctly understood, a being external to transcendental subjectivity is nonsensical, since every sense of being is constituted in it.9 All entities, consequently, are to be understood by means of a clarification of the intentional structures of transcendental subjectivity in the sense of being specific to them. Accordingly, transcendental subjectivity does not denote an entity distinct from other entities but an endless sphere, a universal field of sense-making. To describe and analyze this sphere, a distinctive form of transcendental experience emerges in Husserl’s late philosophy.10
The sketch of the phenomenological field of investigation is conjoined with a deepened reflection on the subjectivity of the subject. In Husserl’s last phase, that of genetic phenomenology, this subjectivity is no longer understood, as it was in his early transcendental phenomenology, as an empty I-pole presupposed—but not more closely thematized—in phenomenological analysis. On the contrary, it proves to be a concrete subject determined by the entire fullness of its intentional life, whose original dimension Husserl endeavors to reveal in his analyses of passive synthesis in the primordially flowing consciousness of time. According to Husserl, Descartes, despite his historic achievement of uncovering transcendental subjectivity, failed “to make the ego accessible in the full concretion of its transcendental being and life, and to view it as a sphere to be pursued systematically in its infinitude.”11 It is to Leibniz’s credit that in his conception of the monad he thematized the subject in its concreteness. In this context, the structural parallels between transcendental phenomenology and Leibniz come to the fore in Leibniz’s understanding of the monad as a subject that, in accordance with its internal rule of development, generates an infinitude of perceptions that reflect the infinite fullness of the universe and of God.12 Hence, Husserl can positively connect to Leibniz’s determination of the monad as an individual representation of the whole universe in order to identify—as he puts it in the fourth Cartesian meditation—“the ego taken in full concreteness … in the flowing multiformity of its intentional life, along with the object meant—and in some cases constituted as existent for him—in that life.”13
Nevertheless, Leibniz’s and Husserl’s shared notions of the subject that comprises the infinite fullness of worldly determinations within itself poses a problem for philosophical thinking. Depending on one’s emphasis, this notion of subject can still be formulated from two opposing sides:
1. If monads are characterized by their universality or, more specifically, the infinite fullness of their immanent, worldly determinations, then it is not clear how the monad can be understood as a subject distinct from the world that it perceives and that appears to it. Moreover, it is not clear how such a monad has an individual character by which it can be distinguished from other monads.
2. In starting from the concreteness or individuality of the monad, another question arises: How can the monadic subject be characterized by universality or an infinite fullness of worldly determinations? Subjectivity and individuality seem to rule out universal world-fullness [Weltfülle]. As a subject, the monad fundamentally stands over against the world; because of this, determinations of the world cannot at the same time be determinations of the subject. As an individual, the monad only comprehends the world under various aspects, never as a whole.
The monad must, consequently, be determined such that it disallows both the finitude-breaking and finitude-fixing moments in the concept of a monad. To do the one is to show how the monad, characterized by universal world-fullness, can be understood as a finite subject and individual. To do the other is to show that the monadic subject and individual is not separated from the world or other monads by an insurmountable gap. A monadology, therefore, has the task of making comprehensible the compatibility of the subjective and individual with the objective, intermonadically harmonious conception of the world. Leibniz and Husserl try to accommodate both aspects with the idea of an inherently perspectival monad. But to each “perspectival” means something different. This difference is intimately associated with the distinction between metaphysical and phenomenological thought. Whereas Leibniz begins with the assumption that there is a rational order directed by God and is able to ground the world of our experience from an external standpoint, the phenomenological interpretation of the sense-formations in our experience is committed to the principle of an internal recognition of our conscious life. Given this difference in methodological orientation, it is no surprise that Husserl “in all [his] deliberate suggestions of Leibniz’s metaphysics” nevertheless maintains a basic distance from Leibniz’s metaphysical thinking.14
With his notion of an individual substance or monad Leibniz responds to a central problem in the traditional ontology of substance. His response is that every determination predicable of an individual, insofar as it can only ever be a general determination, does not say what this individual is as it is itself. With his doctrine of an individual substance as a complete concept or complete being, Leibniz develops the idea of the individual characterized by the totality of its determinations. The complete concept says what the individual is as it is itself.15 To the individual substance in Leibnizian metaphysics belongs the entirety of all worldly determinations such that the individual substance seems to coincide with the world. Hence, the first problem sketched above: How are we to understand the fact that the monad can at the same time have a subjective and individual character?16
Leibniz attempts to solve this difficulty, first, by thinking of monads as fundamentally dependent upon both the universe perceived by them and the divine substance. He expresses this relation with his famous metaphor of a mirror.17 As a mirror of God and the universe, the finite subject is directed toward that which it reflects. This is pregiven to it objectively as something separate from itself. The same thought is implied by the Leibnizian determination of a monad as a representation of God and the universe. Furthermore, it is created by God. The perceptions and strivings of the monad from perception to perception do not owe themselves to a creative act of the finite monad itself.18
Second, Leibniz connects the metaphor of the mirror with that of monadic perspective.19 God and the universe mirror each other in a multitude of monads differentiated from one another by their respective perspectives—roughly comparable, as Leibniz repeatedly emphasizes, to the view of a city from various standpoints.20 Finite substance, per Leibniz, is an individual among other individuals. The determination of its perspective admittedly requires a more precise explanation. Since an individual substance is to be understood as a complete concept, its perspective cannot be understood as a restricted, fragmentary view of the world bound to a particular standpoint. For nothing can be excluded by this perspective. Leibniz instead clarifies the perspectivity of monadic perception in terms of various grades of clarity and distinctness within the represented totality.21 In connection with this, monads differentiate themselves by the level of the intensity in their striving.22 The multiplicity of monadic individuals owes itself to the possibilities for variation in the patterns of clarity and distinctness of the perceived infinity as well as the corresponding gradations of the intensity of striving. At the same time, these determine first and foremost the decisive difference between divine and finite substance. While the perceptions of the latter are always perspectival in the sense outlined, this is fundamentally untrue of God’s perceptions. God perceives everything with the highest level of distinctness.23
Leibniz’s metaphysical determination [Bestimmung] of the monad as a representation of God and the universe already points toward the solution to the second difficulty—the possibility of an objective, interindividual, concordant consciousness of the world. Since all worldly determinations are perceived by monads, the idea of their universal harmony is understood not so much as a solution to the problem of intermonadic agreement but more as an explication of an indispensable aspect of this theory. God creates the monads in such a way that they mirror the same universe.24 This implicitly requires the unanimity of perceptions among them. Since monads as individuals still perceive the same totality differently, a divinely established equivalence of the different ways in which the finite substances embody the same universe is required.25 Hence, the perspectival grasping of the world [Welterfassung] does not endanger the unity of the world perceived by the individual monads. The monadic perspective is the embodiment of an admittedly individual totality that is perceived idiosyncratically but completely. The world grasped perspectivally in each case is at the same time the world of all monads. In this regard, the multiplicity of monads has no constitutive significance for the objective grasping of the world. The monad has no window. As an autonomous individual, it owes its agreement with the perceptions and strivings of other monads to God alone and not to a mutual influence of monads upon one another.26
Turning to Husserl, one can address a problem comparable to Leibniz’s: through transcendental phenomenology’s theoretical approach with its notion of constitution, all objectivity in the end is something that the subject, in a certain way, produces. Therefore, how the world-constituting subject can be understood as a finite subject that does not create its objects must be clarified phenomenologically. The required clarification manifests the commitment of Husserlian philosophy to the intuitively given or what is given in itself as the basis of a phenomenological legitimation.27 Given this basic methodological orientation, there is also thought a moment of fundamental inaccessibility that implies an approach toward a finite subjectivity. For even if Husserl in the course of his philosophical development always emphasized more clearly the active and productive character of the constitution of sense,28 the processes of constitution investigated by phenomenology remain dependent upon something that is not a product but a presupposition of sense-formation [Sinnbildung]. By referring back [Rückverwiesenheit] to what is intuitively given, something can be brought to evidence in the phenomenological sense—and phenomenologically this means to either confirm or disconfirm. The recourse of phenomenological analysis to something pregiven enables us to properly understand the spontaneous and creative moments of the meaningful achievements it thematizes as achievements of a finite subjectivity.29 Consequently, what Husserl claims as determinative of the finitude of transcendental subjectivity does not reject the antithesis of divine creation, as Leibniz alleges but rather recalls the moment of dependence upon the pregiven, a moment that is indispensable to our experiential life.30
The phenomenological determination of the transcendental subject’s individuality depends upon an appeal to our finite experience rather than a metaphysical distinction between a finite and a divine grasp of the world. The constitution of the world is on all levels an “oriented constitution,” in which a “central constituent [Zentralglied], in accordance with orientational modes of givenness” is singled out.31 As with Leibniz, this centricity [Zentriertheit] implies a fundamentally perspectival grasp of the world constituted in the intentional life of consciousness. In contrast to Leibniz, however, the methodological commitment to the phenomenological analysis of my conscious life’s intuitive givenness of objects themselves leads to the fact that, for Husserl, the centricity of subjective experience [Erlebnis] has a sense that connects to our ordinary perspectival experience [Erfahrung]. Perspective, consequently, is grounded in the subject’s being bound to a standpoint that provides a fundamentally limited and always merely fragmentary experience of the world.32
Consequently, if the exposition of transcendental experience must begin with the limitations of “each one’s own subjectivity [my emphasis],”33 the task of phenomenology is to make comprehensible, starting from the centricity of the finite experience of the self, the intersubjective experience of the world and the sense of the objective world based upon it. Once again, in contrast to Leibniz, Husserl faces, first, the problem of the intersubjective unanimity of the world experienced by concrete subjects. Since Husserl’s concrete subject is not all-encompassing and independent but is rather limited in its subjective experience, it is fundamentally dependent upon other subjects distinct from itself for the constitution of an objective world. Accordingly, on Husserl’s account, we cannot dismiss the problem of a subject’s egological closed mindedness (egologisch Verschlossenheit) even while unanimity in registering the world is introduced as the principle of a universal harmony. The possibility of a conception that can appeal to God as the sufficient ground of everything that exists is not available to a phenomenological theory, which begins from the experience of each individual conscious life. Perspectival centricity as the limit of transcendental experience can be overcome only if unanimity in the experience of the world can be made comprehensible as a constitutive achievement of a communalization [Vergemeinschaftung] of finite monads, a communalization that is possible for the subject itself.34
Thus, the problem of determining the infinitude of monads or subjects is not simply posed differently in Leibniz and Husserl. It is posed from completely opposing sides. Leibniz, against Spinozistic ideas concerning the negation of multiple finite substances, is anxious to account for their very plurality.35 To do this, he must make comprehensible monads as perspectival representations of the infinitude of the universe in their difference from divine substance and their distinctness from one another. By contrast, Husserl’s major difficulty, in departing from the concrete transcendental-phenomenological subject’s limited experience of the world, is to demonstrate the possibility of an objective apprehension of the world that as intersubjective overcomes the limitations of merely individual experiences and makes intelligible the experience of one world. The former threatens the loss of finitude; the latter must avoid a dangerously excessive finitude.
The Problem of a Phenomenological Theory of Intersubjectivity as Monadology
The fifth Cartesian meditation occupies a special place in the controversy regarding Husserl’s theory of intersubjectivity insofar as it is the systematic draft published by Husserl himself on this problem.36 In truth, Husserl redeems his claim to a phenomenological reformulation of Leibniz’s monadology—in such a way, in fact, that with this attempt at a monadology he inadvertently brings to light the failure of a phenomenological theory of intersubjectivity.
To clarify this thesis, it is necessary to explain a few critical places that stand out in the fifth meditation.37 At the beginning of the fifth meditation, Husserl first formulates a fundamental suspicion about transcendental phenomenology which has thus far been developed only as an “egology”: “When I, the meditating I, reduce myself to my absolute transcendental ego by phenomenological epochē, do I not become solus ipse; and do I not remain that, as long as I carry on a consistent self-explication under the name phenomenology?”38 To be able justifiably to quash the objection regarding solipsism, Husserl radicalizes the statement of the problem in an introductory methodical step. He introduces a thematic epochē, which shuts out any intentionality that references the sense-instituting achievements of another subjectivity. With the help of this innovative abstract epochē, Husserl attains a uniquely reduced sphere—the so-called primordial sphere. Granted, even the primordially reduced transcendental ego is not without a world. But this “world” is only “my world,” a “world” in quotation marks—without the sense of others and, above all, not including the constitutive achievements of other transcendental subjects. Consequently, the primordially reduced ego must ask how, within its sphere of ownness, the other can constitute itself in its sense as other.39 Doing so will show not only how the sense of other egos is evinced in the transcendental subject but also how it is possible for the ego to gain access to other co-constituting transcendental subjects, by what sense-constituting achievements the ego can first acquire the dimension of a transcendental intersubjectivity.40
The thematic epochē, as the disconnection of the sense of the other, of what is not myself, differs from the phenomenological epochē by virtue of its skeptical character. It has the specific sense of a thematic cancelation, which cannot be claimed of the phenomenological epochē.41 With the aid of this thematic epochē, Husserl sets up his solution to the problem of intersubjectivity. This has serious implications for the further analysis of the constitution of intersubjectivity. For, in the fifth meditation, Husserl, taking as his starting point the sphere distinguished by the thematic epochē, attempts to develop the sense of others and their co-constitutive, transcendental achievements. As a result, however, Husserl develops the phenomenological theory of the experience of others within the framework of the fundamental divide between self and other. According to Husserl, the understanding of the sense of another subjectivity rests upon an analogizing appresentation, in which the other attains its sense by a transfer of sense from my subjectivity. The gap between what is originally and reliably presented within one’s own sphere of experience and what is merely appresented—and not in a fulfilling presentation—as an analogue of myself remains in force in Husserl’s attempt to solve the problem of intersubjectivity.42 Accordingly, in formulating the problem of possible solipsism, in the methodical approach of the thematic epochē, and in working out the proposed solution of an analogizing appresentation, Husserl’s theory of intersubjectivity fixes in place a primordial subject over against which stands something that is fundamentally not a subject and can be experienced only in an appresentation rather than in itself. Every other [conscious being], every not-myself, attains its sense as an analog—as a modification of myself—from my subjectivity through empathy. As itself it remains fundamentally inaccessible.43 Although Husserl explicitly attempts to ground his theory of the communalization [Vergemeinschaftung] of individuals in his conception of the experience of others, the justification for this talk of a communal relationship must here be contested since a genuine reciprocity within the limits of Husserl’s theory cannot be established. Therefore, the classic objection to Husserl’s theory of intersubjectivity is to be accepted.44
Husserl’s fifth Cartesian meditation is both phenomenology and monadology. His transcendental subject turns out in fact to be a monadological subject. Like Leibniz’s monad, it lacks a window through which it can gain access to the sense-constituting achievements of another subject. There is no way out of the monadic world. In contrast to Leibniz, however, Husserl’s constituting subject as a concrete subject is not self-sufficient. It requires another transcendental subject to be able to constitute an objective world. Monadic insularity and dependence on other subjects, however, mutually exclude one another. And so, Husserl’s theory of intersubjectivity comes to a head in an aporia.
It is now clear where Leibnizian metaphysics and Husserlian phenomenology must part ways. In the context of a phenomenological analysis, one cannot assume the determination of monads by a complete concept, since there can be no original experience of such a totality. Experience—even transcendental experience—is always limited experience; otherwise, it would not be experience. Instead of resorting to the metaphysical principle of a divinely ordered harmony, the phenomenological task is to make intelligible the meaning of an intersubjective objective world, even while departing from the finitude and centricity of the subjective experience of the world. The “windowless” character of monads is not phenomenologically acceptable. In a manuscript written in 1922, Husserl emphasizes this explicitly: “A monad therefore has windows, in order to absorb influences by others.”45 A phenomenologically suitable theory of intersubjectivity, not comparable to Leibniz’s, is, therefore, to be attained in Husserl’s interpretation of the so-called sphere of transcendental experience.46
Possible Approaches to a Phenomenological Theory of Intersubjectivity
In phenomenology a perspectival conscious experience takes the place of the monadically represented totality of the Leibnizian universe. As a limited experience of the world, it nevertheless refers to what is beyond the limits. What is beyond the limits is not itself present but is nevertheless co-given and is as a matter of principle convertible into phenomenological givenness. Under the title of horizon-structure, Husserl thematizes the referential relation of what is given in itself to what is co-meant, a co-meant that can, in turn, be converted into self-givenness in further experience but that nevertheless always remains afflicted with unfulfilled co-intentions.
In this process, the concrete subject’s experience of the world is co-determined by aspects of the constitutive achievements of other subjects. These aspects, for their part, relate to specific possibilities of the conversion of the things co-meant in what is itself given. A phenomenological theory of intersubjectivity must therefore interrogate the concrete transcendental subject regarding the way in which, in its oriented world constitution, the intentional achievements referring to the sense of other experiential centers are involved. Only through the involvement of other subjective perspectives in the sphere of transcendental self-experience can something like an intersubjective communalization be manifested and made intelligible. And only through this can it be shown how in a reciprocal horizon-formation intersubjective unities of sense and a common world constitute themselves. This communalization is at the same time a presupposition for all experience of the otherness of others.47 For others are other to me neither as mere analogs of myself nor because of their fundamental inaccessibility. Rather, they are other to me because they confront me in the process of communalization as someone with whom I come to grips.48 Therein I experience the other as someone who differentiates himself from me insofar as he addresses me or resists me, insofar as he surprises me and eludes me. The moment of a fundamentally open intersubjective experience thus belongs to the constitution of social sense-unities.
The infinitude emerging in this context and the universality of the phenomenological analyses of concrete subjectivity and intersubjectivity imply something completely different from the totality of infinite determinations—utilized by Leibniz in determining the monad—that are differentiated only by the grades of clarity and intensity of monadic striving. The complete concept of the monadic individual is, to a certain extent, replaced phenomenologically by the incomplete infinitude of transcendental subjectivity and intersubjectivity, which, inherently incomplete and interminable, can only be experienced as an infinitude in carrying out the progressive formation of a horizon. Instead of the Leibnizian equivalence of the different perspectives of a pregiven multiplicity of monads in the same totality, we find the endless and open process of the communalization of different individuals, which provides an endless field of work for phenomenological analysis.
With the analysis of the horizon-intentionality of consciousness, the fundamental problem of a phenomenological theory of intersubjectivity shifts from the question concerning the constitution of the other as a co-constituting subject within the primordial sphere to the exposition of co-constituting achievements of the other within transcendental experience, which is essentially already an intersubjective experience.49 Moreover, the concept of the horizon, as explained within the framework of a theory of vision and perception, is not fully fixed. With its help the frequently criticized one-sidedness of the orientation to consciousness in the context of Husserl’s intersubjectivity-problematic can be broken. For this, the integration of the horizons of bodily togetherness, of common actions, and of communication seem to be especially promising candidates. To what extent an intersubjective horizon-formation, so understood, fundamentally leaves the approach to phenomenological monadology behind must briefly be outlined.
Husserl has analyzed, above all in Ideas II, the body as a center of orientation, as a sensing and functioning “ego-body.” To the horizons of my transcendental self-experience belong not only the possibilities tied to my own bodily centricity (Zentriertheit) but also those of other bodily entities that, in their bodily behavior and expression, are given to me to be understood as others.50 Nonetheless, even in Husserl’s late manuscripts, his steps in this direction do not lead to a fundamental correction of the concept of empathy.51 This is because a consistent account of the horizonal structure of bodily others and of their achievements as constitutive of a common world would have led to substantial revisions in the character of transcendental phenomenology. Not only would the analysis of consciousness have been considerably augmented by the inclusion of the sense-constituting achievements of bodily togetherness. It would, along with the analysis of bodily experience already on hand, become phenomenology’s fundamental theme, cutting across the pervasive constitutional-theoretical gap between constituting and constituted. Husserl himself, in the context of discussing the relation between space—or the spatial object of perception—and bodily kinesthesia, had already been confronted with this problem in his early analyses of perception without yet drawing out the relevant theoretical consequences.52 This problem is exacerbated in relation to the constitutive significance of the corporeality of the other. Hence, it is hardly surprising that the intentionality of one’s own and of the other’s body, in the sense of a phenomenologically primordial experience, is first laid out, not by Husserl but in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception.53
The motility of the body as an “organ of the will” [Willensorgan54] is at the same time the presupposition for the determination of the practical possibilities of the “I can.”55 According to Husserl, this underlies the togetherness and separateness in which the horizons of social behavior are formed.56 One continually finds in Husserl hints of an analysis of the formation of sense out of the practical communalization of concrete subjects. Even here, however, a consistent phenomenological analysis of the sense-constituting achievements of a communal behavior would have led to a substantially modified conception of transcendental phenomenology. This would, if nothing else, have given rise to a new determination of the structure of the primordially flowing consciousness of time, which is attained largely in the analysis of perceptual acts.57
For its part, while referring back to corporeality and social behavior, the open society of monads communicates in “social actions.”58 By means of communication, horizons of understanding are constituted—horizons that also demand specific forms of confirmation [Bewährung].59 Nevertheless, recourse to an analysis of the originally communicative experience of others and their sense-constituting achievement is out of the question for Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, grounded, as it is, in the philosophy of consciousness. Linguistic communalization, for Husserl, is always founded on the constitutive achievements of consciousness. The opening-up of a possible reciprocity in the relation between consciousness and language, by contrast, would have led to a revision of the relation Husserl recognized between pre-predicative and predicative experience. The early Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on the philosophy of language clarify the fact that the path Husserl charts does not lead directly to analytic philosophy of language but opens phenomenological possibilities that could have been exploited with regard to a satisfying solution of the problem of intersubjectivity.60
With the elaboration of such approaches to the intersubjective formation of horizons, a phenomenological theory of intersubjectivity certainly distinguishes itself from Leibniz’s view. Even if corporeality in Husserl cannot be understood in the sense of a merely spatial extension, a spatial boundedness of the phenomenological subject comes into play with the “designation of the body as a field of localization.”61 Leibniz can take this into account in his concept of the phenomenal world, but not for the sphere of spiritual monads that metaphysically ground the phenomenal world. Finally, the approach to social behavior and speech implies a reciprocity among subjects that directly opposes the metaphysical determination of spiritual monads, since, on a phenomenological understanding, concrete subjects are capable in principle of expanding their perspectival limitation only as a result of acting and speaking. In intersubjective reciprocity they can respond to, confirm, encourage, or correct one another
The approach to a bodily, practical, and communicative communalization of subjects that constitute a world in their respective horizons of togetherness is thus tied to a fundamental departure from monadological thinking. It makes little sense to understand Husserl’s phenomenological monadology as a philosophical guide to the solution to the problem of intersubjectivity. At best, Leibniz’s monadology can be understood as a foil from which the problems and possibilities of a nonmetaphysical thinking can be critically articulated. Moreover, the brief, concluding sketch should indicate that it might be the case that the windows of the phenomenological “monad” are at the same time windows in Husserl’s conception of transcendental phenomenology—windows that open up to a revision of Husserl’s explicit self-understanding of his transcendental-phenomenological analyses.
Translated by Robin Litscher Wilkins
NOTES
1. Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, ed. S. Strasser (The Hague: Martinus, Nijhoff, 1963), 166, 182 [translated by D. Cairns as Cartesian Meditations (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), 139, 156].
2. Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, ed. W. Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 206 [translated by D. Carr as The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 202].
3. Edmund Husserl, Erste Philosophie (1923/24), Erster Teil, Kritische Ideengeschichte, ed. R. Boehm (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1956), 79, 144, 183.
4. The application of the concept of metaphysics within the framework of phenomenology itself must be distinguished from the relation to the tradition of metaphysical thinking that is characterized by a rejection of traditional metaphysics or an approval of its representatives. Even so, Husserl’s determinations of this concept of metaphysics are not consistent. In the five 1907 lectures, Husserl understands metaphysics as “the science of beings in an absolute sense”; see Die Idee der Phänomenologie, ed. W. Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 23 and cf. 32 [translated by L. Hardy as The Idea of Phenomenology (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999), 19 and cf. 25]. Although Husserl here gives priority to phenomenological epistemology (23 [19], cf. 3 [61], 32 [25], and 58–59 [43–44]), in 1913, in Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, phenomenology itself takes up the function which Husserl assigned to metaphysics in 1907. See Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch, ed. K Schuhmann (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976) [translated by D. Dahlstrom as Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2014]. Hereafter referred to as Ideen I. In 1913, he designates the absolute given as absolute being [Sein] (Ideen I, 91–94 [77–80]); see also Rudolf Boehm, “Zum Begriff des ‘Absoluten’ bei Husserl,” Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 13 (1959): 218–220. Husserl finally uses the concept of metaphysics to designate a scond philosophy grounded in the fundamental science of phenomenology as first philosophy (Erste Philosophie, 1:14, 188n., 394; see also Boehm’s “Editor’s Introduction,” xvi–xvii). As first philosophy, of course, phenomenology assumes the role of a successor discipline to traditional metaphysics; see Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, 166 [139].
5. Here I agree with Klaus Erich Kaehler’s thesis [in “Die Monade in Husserls Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität,” Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 57 (1995): 692–709]. At the end of his article he states: “The problem of a transcendental monadology as phenomenology is insoluble” (709). Furthermore, I would like to thank Klaus Erich Kaehler for his helpful critical comments on an earlier paper of mine about Husserl’s relation to Descartes and Leibniz [“Subjekt und Monade: Zur Ambivalenz cartesianischer und leibnizianischer Motive in Husserls transzendentaler Phänomenologie,” in Cognitio humana—Dynamik des Wissens und der Werte, XVII: Deutscher Kongress für Philosophie; Workshop-Beiträge, ed. C. Hubig and H. Poser (Leipzig: Institut für Philosophie, Universität Leipzig, 1996), 1:653–660]. In the article, I interpret Husserl’s appeal to Leibniz’s philosophy as a possibility for transcendental phenomenology in overcoming Cartesian fundamentalism; what follows will be about fixing the boundaries of the attempt at a phenomenological monadology. With so much room for interpretation, it is obvious to me that the assessment of Husserl’s philosophical-historical regress depends upon the particular questions asked. In this respect, the negative conclusion of the current confrontation must be fundamentally understood in the context which is developed here.
6. The monadological conception is found in Husserl’s work as early as 1908 [cf. Stephan Strasser, “Grundgedanken der Sozialontologie Edmund Husserls,” Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 29 (1975): 3–4]. For more on Husserl’s overall preoccupation with Leibniz, see Herman Leo Van Breda, “Leibniz’ Einfluss auf das Denken Husserls,” Akten des Internationalen Leibniz-Kongresses Hannover 1966, Band 5 (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1971), 138–145.
7. Husserl only gradually worked out the functions of these methodological devices that were already introduced in the early drafts of a transcendental phenomenology. Above all, Husserl in the 1920s clarifies many of the inherent ambiguities of his earlier works—particularly of Ideas I of 1913—through a deepened systematic self-reflection [see Elisabeth Ströker, “Einleitung,” in Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen: Eine Einleitung in die Phänomenologie, ed. E. Ströker (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1977), xv–xvi]. See esp. the second part of the lectures on First Philosophy from 1923/24, which Husserl subtitled “The Theory of Phenomenological Reduction” [Edmund Husserl, Erste Philosophie (1923/24), Zweiter Teil, ed. R. Boehm (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959)].
8. Klaus Held, “Einleitung,” in Edmund Husserl, Die phänomenologische Methode: Ausgewählte Texte, Teil 1, ed. K. Held (Stuttgart: Reclam 1985), 36.
9. Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, 117 [84].
10. Husserl, Die Pariser Vorträge, 11 [translated by P. Koestenbaum as The Paris Lectures (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), 11]; Cartesianische Meditationen, 69–70, passim. Cf. Tobias Trappe’s concept of transcendental experience in Transzendentale Erfahrung: Vorstudien zu einer transzendentalen Methodenlehre (Basel: Schwabe, 1996).
11. Husserl, Die Pariser Vorträge, 12 [12; trans. modified].
12. Cf. Heinz Heimsoeth, “Unendlichkeit im Endlichen,” in Die sechs grossen Themen der abendländischen Metaphysik und der Ausgang des Mittelalters, 3rd rev. ed. (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1956), 74.
13. Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, 102 [67–68]. Cf. Strasser, “Grundgedanken,” 4–6 for further information on the decisive Leibnizian principles on which Husserl draws. Strasser also discusses the variations in Husserl’s recourse to Leibniz (6–9). Renato Cristin also notes similarities in the thought of Leibniz and Husserl in “Phänomenologie und Monadologie. Husserl und Leibniz,” in Studia Leibnitiana 22 (1990): 163–174, esp. 166–168.
14. Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, 176 [150]; cf. Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Texte aus dem Nachlass, Dritter Teil, 1929–1935, ed. I. Kern (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 20.
15. Cf., for example, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Discours de Métaphysique, ed. H. Lestienne (Paris: Alcan, 1907) [translated by R. Ariew and D. Garber in Leibniz: Philosophical Essays (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989)], §8; Leibniz’s letter to Arnauld from June 1686, in G. W. Leibniz, Die philosophischen Schriften, ed. C. I. Gerhardt (Berlin: Weidmann, 1875–1890), 2:54: “For that which unambiguously encompasses and differentiates a completely determined, certain Adam must include all his predicates in an absolute sense. It is only this complete concept which determines the general concept as an individual (qui détermine rationem generalitatis ad individuum)” [my translation—RLW]. It is important to note that this brief description only addresses the grounds of the Leibnizian theory of the individual [Individuum] in a partial and one-sided way. The above sketch could be completed first with Leibniz’s doctrine of primordial powers, which are grounded in substances, to which the derivative powers of the physical world can be traced, and with his thoughts on the immateriality of substance which is distinguished by simplicity [unicity] or indivisibility. In this case, the grounds for this can be understood in the context of Leibniz’s critique of Descartes. For more on this point, see Klaus Düsing, “Substanzmetaphysik und Philosophie des Organizschen,” appendix to Die Teleologie in Kants Weltbegriff, Kantstudien: Ergänzungsheft 96 (1986): 248–249. For Husserl’s connection to the simplicity and indivisibility of monads in the framework of his phenomenology of time-consciousness, see Strasser, “Grundgedanken,” 10–11. In this context of critically focusing on the question of the possibility of an individual as well as a supraindividual [überindividuell] objective perception of the world, the above reduction of the problems seems to me to be justified.
16. Even if one grasps the complete determination of the individual [Individuum] as an answer to a philosophical problem, it is thereby in no way established that or how the individual substance as complete concept is comprehensible. Horn expresses a similar reservation with regard to Leibniz’s logical and ontological approach to the determination of the individual substance of monad when he writes: “It cannot be doubted that there is such a logical-ontological double- or identity-approach in Leibniz’s work. Because of this, the question can only be, how can one comprehend this incomprehensible approach?” [J. C. Horn, “Einleitung,” in G. W. Leibniz, Grundwahrheiten der Philosophie: Monadologie, trans. and ed. J. C. Horn (Frankfurt a. M.: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1962), 19].
17. See, for example, Leibniz, Discours, §9; Monadologie, §§56, 83 [translated by P. and A. Schrecker as “Monadology,” in Monadology and Other Philosophical Essays (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965)].
18. Cf. Leibniz, Discours, §14; Monadologie, §§ 38–52, esp. §§47–48; Leibniz’s letter to Bierling from August 12, 1711: “Monas seu substantia simplex in genere continet perceptionem et appetitum, estque vel primitiva seu Deus, in qua est ultima ratio rerum, vel est derivative, nempe Monas Creata …” / “The monad, i.e. the simple substance, possesses—in general—presentative and appetitive functions. It is either the primary monad or God, in whom all things are grounded—or it is something derived from this, a created monad.” Leibniz, Die philosophischen Schriften, 7:502.
19. For the metaphorical understanding of this way of speaking, see also A. Gurwitsch, Leibniz: Philosophie des Panlogismus (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1974), 228–289, which refers to Dietrich Mahnke, “Leibnizens Synthese von Universalmathematik und Individualmetaphysik,” Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung 7 (1925): 305–612. (Cf. Gurwitsch, Leibniz, 228n130).
20. Cf., for example, Leibniz, Discours, §9; Monadologie, §57.
21. Cf. Wolfgang Bartuschat, “Zum Problem der Auslegung bei Leibniz,” in Hermeneutik und Dialektik, Band 2, ed. R. Bubner et al. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1970), 219–222. Of course, Leibniz continually referred to the imprisonment of the soul within a body [see Nouveaux Essais sur l’Entendement Humain, preface, in Die philosophischen Schriften 5:51; Monadologie, §63], through which it signals its perspective—its specific standpoint (see Monadologie §62). But this claim must not be understood as a purely metaphysical claim. Instead, with the reference to the corporeal boundedness of perspective, Leibniz supplements the metaphysical identification of the soul or spiritual determinateness of the monad through phenomenal description grounded first and foremost in the metaphysics of spiritual substances.
22. Cf. Düsing, “Substanzmetaphysik,” 250–251, 254.
23. Cf. Leibniz Monadologie, §§48, 60; Théodicée, §403.
24. Cf. Leibniz, Monadologie, §57.
25. Cf. Leibniz, Discours, §14. Cf. Gurwitsch, Leibniz, 240–242.
26. Cf. Leibniz, Monadologie, §§51–52, 56.
27. Husserl, Ideen I, 51 [43].
28. Cf. Edmund Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik, ed. P. Janssen (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 175–176, 188–189 [translated by D. Cairns as Formal and Transcendental Logic (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), 197–198, 211–212]; Erfahrung und Urteil, ed. L. Landgrebe (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1972), 235–239 [translated by J. Churchill and K. Ameriks as Experience and Judgment (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 200–203].
29. Hans-Georg Gadamer in particular emphasized that, in the context of constitution, the talk of productive or creative moments must obviously not be understood in the sense of a real creation or production; see his “Die phänomenologische Bewegung,” Philosophische Rundschau 11 (1963): 32.
30. In this context, the understanding of the idea of constitution, which vacillates between the production and the presentation of intentional sense-formations, allows itself also to be understood as a consequence of a theory that attempts to understand the subject as the source of any sense of being, without thereby wanting to abandon the idea of a finite subjectivity of the subject. (See my “Das Problem des perspektivischen Sehens in Husserls Phänomenologie der Wahrnehmung,” in Blick und Bild im Spannungsfeld von Sehen, Metaphern und Verstehen, ed. T. Borsche et al. (Munich: Fink, 1998), 57–60, as well as Klaus Held, “Das Problem der Intersubjektivität und die Idee einer phänomenologischen Transzendentalphilosophie,” in Perspektiven transzendentalphänomenologischer Forschung, ed. U. Claesges and K. Held (The Hague; Martinus Nijhoff, 1972), 24; Held interprets the double meaning of the concept of constitution as a difference between static and genetic constitution.
31. Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, 161 [134].
32. This connection to the usual sense of our talk about perspective does not apply to Leibniz’s understanding of the perspectivity of monads. Here the monadic perspective has nothing to do with a limitation grounded in spatial boundedness to a standpoint. The talk of a perspectival perception of the universe is always to this extent fundamentally metaphorical for Leibniz. Of course, in Husserl’s work the concrete subject’s perception of the world—except of course in the limited domain of visual perception—can only be considered “perspectival” in a metaphorical sense. In contrast to Leibniz, however, Husserl’s reference to perspectivity in the context of phenomenology must still be understood in the sense of an incomplete perception of the world.
33. Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik, 243 [236].
34. Cristin, “Phenomenology and Monadology,” 169–170, points to the fact that Husserl also understands intermonadic unity as harmony. Admittedly, for Husserl this concept has a meaning opposed to its meaning in Leibniz.
35. Cf. Bartuschat, “Zum Problem der Auslegung bei Leibniz,” 219; Düsing, “Substanzmetaphysik,” 250–251.
36. Husserl’s theory of intersubjectivity in the form he gave it in his fifth Cartesian meditation was the decisive reference point for all critical commentaries until the appearance of the three Husserliana volumes Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973). For an examination of the deficiencies of Husserl’s theory of intersubjectivity, see especially Alfred Schütz’s classic critique of Husserl, “Das Problem der transzendentalen Intersubjektivität bei Husserl,” in Alfred Schütz, Gesammelte Aufsätze, Bd. 3, ed. I. Schütz (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), 86–126 (first published in 1957), and Michael Theunissen, Der Andere: Studien zur Sozialontologie der Gegenwart (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1965). Furthermore, the weaknesses of Husserl’s theory of the perception of others have in the critical aftermath to Husserl prompted multiple systematic attempts at a phenomenological conception of intersubjectivity or of the social. Cf., for example, Bernhard Waldenfels, Das Zwischenreich des Dialogs: Sozialphilosophie Untersuchungen in Anschluss an Edmund Husserl (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971); and Klaus Held, “Das Problem der Intersubjektivität.” Several newer monographs that take into consideration the texts published in Hua XIII–XV address Husserl’s theory of intersubjectivity (see also Held, ibid.). Cf. Ichiro Yamaguchi, Passive Syntehsis und Intersubjektivität bei Edmund Husserl (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982); Richard Kozlowski, Die Aporien der Intersubjektivität: Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Edmund Husserls Intersubjektivitätstheorie (Würzburg: Königshausen u. Neumann, 1991); Geog Römpp, Husserls Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität und ihre Beduetung für eine Theorie intersubjektiver Objektivität und die Konzeption einer phänomenologischen Philosophie (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992); Julia V. Iribarne, Husserls Theorie der Intersubjektivität, trans. M. Herlyn (Freiburg: Alber, 1994); Dan Zahavi, Husserl und die transzendentale Intersubjektivität: Eine Antwort auf die sprachpragmatische Kritik (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996) [translated by E. Behnke as Husserl and Transcendental Intersubjectivity: A Response to the Linguistic-Pragmatic Critique (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001]. Taking into account the research manuscripts in Hua XIII–XV leads, in most of the newer works, to a weakening, if not a revision, of the classic critiques of Husserl’s theory of intersubjectivity.
37. A summary of the major steps in the constitution of the experience of others [Fremderfahrung] can be found in Kaehler, “Die Monade in Husserls Phänomenolgie,” 696–701.
38. Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, 121 [89].
39. Husserl, 124–126 [92–95].
40. Cf. Kaehler, “Die Monade in Husserls Phänomenolgie,” 696.
41. Although the phenomenological epochē brackets our positing of existence in order to make it possible to thematize—without concurring with its validity—what is in a certain manner within the brackets, the thematic epochē is characterized as a disconnection in the proper sense [Elisabeth Ströker, “Das Problem der epochē in der Philosophie Edmund Husserls,” in Phänomenologische Studien (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1987), 50 (first published in 1971); cf. Ströker, “Einleitung,” xxiii–xxiv, xxvii–xxix.]
42. Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, 138–141 [108–111].
43. Cf. Kaehler, “Die Monade in Husserls Phänomenolgie,” 699. For a detailed critical discussion of analogical apperception in Husserl’s work, see Held, “Das Problem der Intersubjektivität,” 34–36.
44. See supra n. 36.
45. Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, Zweiter Teil, 1921–1928, ed. I. Kern (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 295. Husserl continues, “It is the window of empathy.” According to the above sketched critique, it is hardly the case that the windows of the monad are from a phenomenological perspective suitably determinable. For a positive adoption of the talk of the windowlessness of monads, see a text originating around 1908: “And the monad has no window, the monads do not interact with each other but have instead a universal accord. It makes no sense to want to affect consciousness through something physical. But changes in the appearance-group ‘body x’ in my consciousness implies a change, and a necessary change, in the corresponding appearance group ‘the same x’ in every consciousness.” Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, Erster Teil, 1905–1920, ed. I. Kern (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 7. See also Strasser, “Grundgedanken,” 7–8.
46. Such a theory of intersubjectivity neither pursues a metaphysical-speculative path in which unanimity is established as something already attained and as beyond any standpoint; nor is it merely relegated to an egologically accentuated transcendental subjectivity. Cf. also the two possible answers to the question of a justifiable monadology which Kaehler outlines (“Die Monade in Husserls Phänomenologie,” 705–709). According to Kaehler, monadicity is doubly transgressed in phenomenology: first, through the transition from the fact of “I am” to the eidos of a possible other like myself; second, through the recourse to the fact of the self-manifestation of others as an uncircumventable beginning point of phenomenology. In the second overstepping, experience—including the possibility of error—shows itself to be a dimension of intentional life that cannot be further grounded (ibid., 707–708).
47. The concept of the analogizing empathy of others does not do justice to this experience of otherness. For more on this point, see Kurt Rainer Meist, “Monadologische Intersubjektivität. Zum Konstitutionsproblem von Welt und Geschichte bei Husserl,” in Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 34 (1980): 588. Held, “Das Problem der Intersubjektivität,” 42, speaks critically of a “quasi-doubling of the I.”
48. For the idea of controversy in this context, cf. Berhard Waldenfels, “Fremderfahrung zwischen Aneignung und Enteignung,” in Der Stachel des Fremden (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1991), 64–65.
49. Zahavi, Husserl and die transzendentale Intersubjektivität, 11–15 [16–22], has attached significant importance to the difference between a constituted and a constituting intersubjectivity for a proper understanding of a Husserlian phenomenology of intersubjectivity. For Zahavi, the analysis of constituting intersubjectivity is the crucial problem of the Husserlian theory of intersubjectivity. “In the first place, we are of the opinion that Husserl’s analyses on the theme of constituting intersubjectivity are of philosophical value in their own right, and should therefore not always be placed in the shadow of his analyses of constituted intersubjectivity.… And in the second place, it is our claim that a presentation whose theme is constituting intersubjectivity can in fact illuminate the question concerning constituted intersubjectivity.… An investigation of constituting intersubjectivity has the precise task of establishing to what extent constitution is indeed dependent upon intersubjectivity, and must determine, on this basis, the legitimacy and possibility of the constitutive performance of a solipsistic subject (or perhaps also reject the value of such performance). To anticipate the results of our analysis, it will turn out that on the basis of Husserl’s later research manuscripts on the problem of intersubjectivity, it is possible to defend the view that at the end of his deliberations, Husserl revised the hierarchy of founding.… In other words, it will be demonstrated that Husserl’s analyses of the concrete experience of other—analyses that always take the route of spatial experience of foreign lived bodies considered as physical bodies—already move within an intersubjective dimension, so that the scope of the primordial reduction must be reconsidered” (ibid. 15 [21–22]). In this context, it is revealing that the fifth meditation’s attempt is intelligible at all only if one proceeds from an experience that is already socially determined. The manner of posing the problem of the theory of intersubjectivity as developed in the fifth meditation cannot even be understood in the terms introduced there. On the contrary, with the formulation of the initial suspicion regarding solipsism that introduces and justifies the efforts of the fifth meditation are brought to bear sense-constituting achievements that intrinsically presuppose our intersubjective experience. Only because the constituting subject of phenomenology always refers over and above itself to other co-constituting subjects can we understand why solipsism (and, in the account of the Cartesian Meditations, the primordially reduced world) must be overridden in transcendental phenomenology. In the primordial sphere itself, there is no problem of solipsism, much less starting points for the possibility of overcoming this problem. In other words, the entire phenomenological monadology of the fifth meditation already makes implicit use of a genuinely intersubjective experience.
50. Husserl, Intersubjektivität, 3:651, 664–665.
51. Husserl, 654–656; of course, Husserl has clearly seen here the constitutive role of the other for the perception of my physical being as a body (cf. ibid., 655n1).
52. Cf. Hermann Ulrich Asemissen, “Strukturanalytische Probleme der Wahrnehmung in der Phänomenologie Husserl,” Kantstudien Ergänzungsheft 73 (1957): 25–34, who accounts for the reciprocity in the foundation of the spatial object and the conditions of the possibility of its perception in a critical analysis of the concept of adumbration and sensing (see esp. 26 and 34n52). See also Ulrich Claesges, Edmund Husserls Theorie der Raumkonstitution (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff 1964), 99–101; Claesges highlights this problematic referencing the two aspects the constitution of the body as res extensa and kinaesthetic system.
53. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard 1945) [translated by D. Landes as Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Routledge, 2012)]; see also Bernhard Waldenfels, “Das problem der Leiblichkeit bei Merleau-Ponty,” in Der Spielraum des Verhaltens (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1980), 29–54.
54. Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Zweites Buch, ed. M. Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952), 151–152 [translated by R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer as Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book, Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), 158–159]. Hereafter referred to as Ideen II.
55. Husserl, Ideen II, 257–268 [269–280].
56. Cf. Husserl, Intersubjektivität, 2:169–170; Intersubjektivität, 3:477–478 and passim. In this context what is most important is the possibility of a clash of purposes (Intersubjektivität, 2:224–225) through which the horizons of action of the transcendental self-experience are essentially limited.
57. For suggestions of an alternative understanding of time, see Wolfgang Kersting, “Selbstbewusstsein, Zeitbewusstsein und zeitliche Wahrnehmung. Augustinus, Brentano und Husserl über das Hören von Melodien,” in Zeiterfahrung und Personalität (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1992), 86–88.
58. Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, 159 [132].
59. Cf., for example, Intersubjektivität, 2:473–476.
60. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception, 213–241 [179–205].
61. Cf. Ideen II, 151 [158–159].