Article 001 - October 5th 2009 

How the Objects of Convergent Phenomenology are Attained 

by Jim Ruddy

jimruddy@xsacp.org

Within phenomenology, the purified subjectivity of logos as arising and focusing itself first as a Grecian originative beginning must be assimilated and finally objectified out within the purified objectivity of ratio as arising and focusing itself first as a Latin originative beginning. Unless this is done, finally and definitively, all truly scientific knowledge eventually fails, transcendental phenomenology being the first science to perish.

Thus as phenomenology, as infinite task, converges endlessly into itself, Philosophy, even as Philosophy, correlatively arises within the interiorizing nexus of retentive and protentive vagaries and temporal presences and finitudes of actually-constituting transcendental intersubjectivity, but its deeper, timeless nature itself depends finally and utterly on the objects to which it is directed rather than on the subject in which it lives. Heart-breaking ambivalence in regard to this very issue brought Husserl numberless times into the timeless stance of an absolute beginner.[i] And his friend and tireless co-worker, Edith Stein, both a transcendental phenomenologist and a Thomistic ontologist to the very last, saw this with blinding clarity.[ii] “Philosophy is a science…,” she tells us in her magnum opus, Finite and Eternal Being. “What establishes one specific scientific discipline as an intrinsically unified and coherent whole, setting it off from all the others, is its relation to a circumscribed sphere of objects. It is conditioned in its structure by this objective sphere and receives from it its rules and methods.”[iii]

If a science thus defines itself solely in terms of the formal view that it takes upon the objects in which it centers itself, how then are we to go about locating, fixing and elucidating the objects of the new science in question? This can be done in two steps:

1. Step One – The Horizontal Approach: Obviously the first step is to gather together all the force of Husserl’s entire array of reductive disciplines that opened up for him the domain of transcendental subjectivity and take a further stride forward, reductively, in the same direction.[iv] Thus the final limit-concept, gleaned by Husserl from formal ontology, the famous, purified “something about which”[v] that transcendental logic must deal with, as a final limit concept—against which the entire region of phenomenology brings itself into focus as an utterly new science of consciousness) must be quite-slightly altered into an even-more-radical limit-concept of “something toward…” pure and simple.[vi]  I am here not asking a phenomenologist to take this on faith, but am simply asking her to perform the reductive action in question, and then see what happens. Once done, the most formal and thus most primary object of the new science becomes in fact achieved, namely transcendental subjectivity itself viewed as “utterly related out beyond itself toward something else.” This new view, with apodictic clarity, opens us, once and for all, out into an infinite realm of experience of a new kind altogether diverse from transcendental subjectivity according to the previous view. In other words, transcendental subjectivity as the constitution of thing-like objectivity becomes bracketed, together with all its endlessly-being-clarified thematic positings, and the phenomenologist is left with a new realm of experiences and eidetic actualizations off from such experiences, namely: transcendental subjectivity as the constitution of relation-like objectivity, wherein all ordinary thematic positings, in their inmost subjective sense, cease altogether. Thus a new phenomenological “work” begins, and we will have much to say about this work later.

2. Step Two – The Vertical Approach: The second step in regard to pinpointing and clarifying the objects of the new science is a less ethereal step and a step more in line with Stein’s formal notion of what makes a science to be a science. We must honestly ask ourselves the following question: Once a beginning science starts to dimly perceive the ineffable “being” of the new objects arrayed before it, exactly how does it finally and theoretically achieve its own special “self-realization?” How does it become a true science and thereby become uniquely characterized by the circumspective range of its own special investigations? According to Stein’s formidable colleague, Heidegger, a new science often becomes defined in advance solely in terms of the “rough and ready,” provisional objects which it starts informally to describe and classify. It then originates within itself new, make-shift areas of work and eventually, here and there, proceeds to set forth, projectively, new, regionally-developed, thus purely formal, ontological categorialia, almost like a set of newly-owned “counters” according to which it must finally form its own distinctive “working concepts.” In no other way can a science ever vertically “come into being” and fully achieve itself within its ownmost, authentic, ontically-determined domain of special experience.[vii]  Now the rough and ready material for Husserl’s new phenomenology lay, as is well known, in the contours and contents of the “things themselves”: actual objects already embedded in the special, graspable, describable and absolutizable uniqueness of their own constitutive, intentional acts. Along these same lines, the more convergently-ordered, yet still rough and ready, objects of our new science become available for working phenomenologists solely within the constitutive power of a special timeless motion of ratio (which, within the new science is given the formal name “con-vergence”) wherein an entire array of intentional acts becomes referred beyond itself and wherein, by virtue of the very falling into place of that event, one central act, among all  those acts, is given—through what might be called a higher, grounded “landscape” of images[viii]—the character of lawfully ruling and formally and eidetically governing the rest of those acts, and thus utterly transforming the actual cogito, what Husserl eventually defined as nothing but the Transcendental Ego itself. Through such a quasi-ontological view of con-vergence as we must perforce prescribe for ourselves at this early stage, the “I think, therefore I am,” becomes “I think out beyond myself wholly toward something greater than myself, therefore (beyond being “here and now”)—I not just “am,” but “am simply,  toward...”[ix] Indeed to be toward in any authentic and final sense is to be nothing in oneself and everything out toward something else. This now has to be precisely what I mean when, as a convergent phenomenologist, I say “I.” It can, with apodictic certainty, be nothing else.

3. A New Schema Allowing for Both a Horizontal and a Vertical View: Once the new “convergent reduction” is carried out, and, as Husserl always told us, this is not everybody’s business, we have, in a remarkable extension of primordially-given and now-able-to-be-intuited material, the famed categorial intuition of the Logical Investigations becoming the ground for a kind of trans-categorial intuition into the new relation-like objectivities in question. All this is not as ethereal as one might think. Indeed, to actually situate this notion of pure relationality in general--now become transcendental subjectivity much in the way that “something-about-which” became transcendental subjectivity in the canons of Husserl--and to place this notion, in all its purity in a general schema in order to better understand it, let us recall a fruitful framework used by Donn Welton in his book The Other Husserl,[x] which helps us put Husserl’s working analogy between perception and categorial intuition into schematic focus. Welton tells us that the differentiated structure of phenomena is fourfold: 1. the as-structure, which is the sense of the object as noema, 2. the for-structure which is the noesis itself as the constitutive condition of the being of the as-structure, 3. the in-structure which is the horizonal arena of all appearance, and 4. the from-structure as the hidden yet all-encompassing horizon of the in-structure. (Through his static and pains-taking description of the “as” and “for” structures, Husserl eventually rose up to uncover the genetic habitualities of the in-structure, but, according to Welton, he never fully determined the from-structure.) What I am indicating by the limit concept of “something-toward” is simply a fifth structure, what one could call the to-structure, that finally allows phenomenology to fully determine its own from-structure as finally coming forth from subject-consciousness, somewhat in the way that Aristotle’s famous four causes form a matrix for the emergence of first philosophy. For harking back to the more primitive Aristotelian schema, we find that final cause (perhaps as a kind of in-toward-structure?) brings all the other three causes (material [as referred to the noema], formal [as referred to the noesis] and efficient [as referred to the completely relation-like structure called the “from structure” by Welton]) into focus.  What I am then saying in this at once horizontal and vertical schematic project of finally unearthing the objects of the new science, thus in this amassing and gathering together of all the forces of Husserlian reduction and passing even deeper into transcendental subjectivity, is not an utterly new leap into the unknown, but forms a cumulative whole with the structures that support it. Step One is therefore clear. By thus finally reducing all of pure consciousness from the completely thing-like “something-about-which” to the completely relation-like “something toward,” we are able thereby to leave all of general phenomenology behind us as bracketed, and enter the new, convergent phenomenology of Relation. Step Two is similarly clarified. To return to our medival example: Just as ratio crowns all thing-like objectivities thus actualizing them as toward something beyond themselves, the “to-structure” in this most general and most comprehensive sense—as the final and ultimate limit concept of general phenomenology itself--encompasses all such cumulative schematic structures and passes infinitely beyond them. The entire bracketed realm of intentionality as inesse simply re-emerges, at a lower level, as adesse, indeed as itself, now finally seen as such, since such intentionality is already an as-yet-not-completely-clarified ecstatic relational action toward its meant object. This happens somewhat the way that simply placing 3D glasses on in a movie theater bring the fuzziness of the screen into clear focus. Thus the new convergent science thereby achieved is not some mystical realm of Platonic forms or of any other kind of “super-real” objects. It is a realm of work that simply searches out its own formal objects in the relation-like bases and relation-like extremities of all the ordinary intentional structures that Husserl himself spent so much time illuminating and classifying. That’s all it is and nothing more, though its importance for philosophy is considerable.

Once Steps One and Two are achieved in their own workable actuality, it will become clear that the formal objects of the new science are twofold: 1. First, as primary and originative object, transcendental subjectivity itself in its concrete intuitability, now viewed as toward…; and 2. second, the now-finally-phenomenologically-describable “super-essences” of real relations themselves existing out in the natural world of human experience: now newly discoverable as grounded in the “things themselves” that Husserl vivified and exfoliated.

Please send short responses through the form below. They will be then published on these Forum's web pages.

If you wish to publish either more lengthy responses or new forum articles, please email them in a Word document to forum@xsacp.org