Three Reasons Why the New Science Remained Hidden    

The reason why this utterly new science (a science of what comes to be seen—within its crowning achievement—as the genetic constitution of relation-like rather than thing-like objectivity) has remained buried and concealed within Husserlian pure consciousness is part of philosophy’s unfolding history on three fronts:

1. The first front entails a forward horizontal course of philosophical development that should have happened but that never happened. For, contrary to the clear and inevitable course leading from scholastic intentionality through Descartes and Kant up into the final, formal—and, be it noted, completely scientific—revelations of Husserlian phenomenology, the parallel course that would have propelled all Husserlian phenomenologists into such a deeper and more relation-like eidetic science, a course leading from hints, in Parmenides, of a formal eidetics of relation itself, directly into the  category of “real relation” in Aristotle, and eventually into the systematization of such a doctrine in Avicenna and Aquinas and thereby up into the  remarkable notions of mind-dependent and mind-independent relations embedded in Poinsot’s  semiology, was so completely derailed by the endless muddles of late-medieval nominalism as to then be utterly lost to modern philosophy as a whole. And consequently, the secondary (and philosophically off-the-mark) course that led into the eventual complete mathematization and even “mentalization” of relation for all of modern thought concomitantly rendered the idea derisory that one—rooting oneself in, and yet passing utterly beyond, thing-like intentional acts—can simply and directly and meaningfully intuit empirically real relations out in the world of natural experience.

2. The second front within the history of philosophy, a front that indicates some clear reasons why this new science remained hidden within general phenomenology, entails a backward vertical course of philosophical development that also should have happened but that never happened. Let me clarify what I mean by “backward vertical course.” Edith Stein begins Finite and Eternal Being, with the following remarkable observation: “There is indeed only one Truth but it unfolds itself to our human perspective in a manifold of individual truths which must be conquered step by step. If we succeed in penetrating to a certain depth in one particular direction, a larger horizon will be opened up, and with this enlarged vista, a new depth will reveal itself at the point of departure.”[i] General or traditional phenomenology overlooked a very significant form of such a regressive and originative depth “at the point of departure.” Let me explain. Husserl proposed, in his Formal and Transcendental Logic, a radical sense-investigation that would bring back Logic and, indeed, all of Philosophy itself, into its own original and self-confirmatory focus. The one discipline going deep enough into the palimpsestic sedimentations of human thought since the Greeks to then be able to accomplish these sense investigations was, of course, phenomenology itself, both in its genetic and in its static forms. Husserl found the regressive originative depth that he needed in the Greek notion of logos.[ii] Yet the original meaning of logos achieved a remarkably enlarged vista of itself in the corresponding Latin notion of ratio that we find embedded in thirteenth century ontological system building, variously translated as “reason,” “reasoning,” “argument,” and even—in a wholly referred-beyond-itself sense—“facet,” feature,” “aspect,” and “concept.”[iii]  Ratio thus became, at that time in history, the crown and highest layer of a threefold, layered view of human intellectual activity. The base layer was the wholly ecstatic “forming of quiddities.” The second layer was the self-confirmatory layer of judgmental “composing and dividing” that steadies itself within, and thereby--in actualizing itself--transcends utterly, the first layer. This second layer centered itself primarily in its innermost, generative and habitual knowledge achieved rather than in the ecstatic forming of quiddities of the first layer. The third layer was ratio, again steadying itself within, and--in actualizing itself--utterly transcending, the second layer, and thereby towering out to achieve “wholly objective scientific knowledge” as analogically systematized truth even about the actus purus essendi itself, a knowledge that, as objective, was utterly relation-like in character,[iv] rather than thing-like in character as in the first two layers.  If, now following Stein’s lead-notion of a backward vertical course, we connect the enlarged vista of Husserlian phenomenology back through the distorting refractions of nominalism and root it in the deeper and more genuine, and yet rarely recognized, roots in thirteenth century thought, we find, quite obviously, static phenomenology aligning itself with the first, wholly ecstatic act of the “intending intellect” that “forms the quiddities of things,” and genetic phenomenology—according to its constitutive emphasis—aligning itself with the second more solemn, more habitualized, more self-ensouled act of the “judging intellect” “composing and dividing.” But when we glance at the third, wholly relation-like layer, we find no final third alignment. There is no purely relation-like phenomenology yet developed that corresponds to this third level. What such a third phenomenology would actually look like is exactly equivilent to convergent phenomenology as such.

3. The third front within the unfolding history of philosophy—where we can pinpoint some cogent reasons why this new, convergent phenomenology remained buried within Husserlian transcendental subjectivity—has to do with a revolutionary reversal of the meanings of the correlative terms, “subjective” and “objective” that took place during the period of thought proceeding from the thirteenth century, onward through nominalism and out into the thought of Descartes. By the time of Descartes, these terms had caused a reversal of meaning that didn’t have the harmlessness that is usually associated with such evolving and subtle shifts of philosophical thought. In Descartes we find that the famous subject-object relation had shifted its polarity to such an extent that the medieval notion of intentionality and of object-consciousness as being primary and pivotal for human thought became shaded off into a strange, refractive way of viewing human consciousness as a kind of absolute subject-consciousness, a kind of consciousness which, in medieval parlance, was reserved to God and the angels. Any possible and fruitful analogical proportionality between the “eject” of divine subject-consciousness and the “object” of human object-consciousness (two ways of knowing that for the scholastics were quite clearly and even uncrossably diverse) became placidly masked within a wholly essentialized (and yet, with the pineal gland postulate, still thing-like) notion of an idealized “consciousness-in-general.” “Subject,” which, in medieval and classical metaphysics, was a term for grounded scientific material (as well as for the absoluteness of a being standing utterly by itself and within itself) thus shifted after Descartes and became a base term for “subjective,” now meaning unreal or ideal. And the evident existence of a real thing in the real world eventually also shifted and became, correspondingly, a problematic, unreachable “thing-in-itself.”  As a result, when Husserl claimed that, not just human knowing, but also divine knowing, could only know perceptual objects by passing through an openly endless series of unfolding, perspectival views of such objects,[v]  there was no legacy notion of original “subject-consciousness” that could enable his readers to suddenly draw up short of accepting Husserl’s already hazy limit-concept in this ontic area. Only the emergent investigations of an utterly new phenomenological science, now basing itself on the original depth of the subject-object relation as it thereby, according to its own objective equilibrium, righted itself, could hope to bring clarity to such a masked state of affairs. This is, in fact, what the new convergent science has done. Indeed, J. N. Mohanty, in his usual steadfast and lucid way of clarifying exactly the matter at hand, emphasizes just this very point. Thus, in his Foreword to my book entitled Convergent Phenomenology , Mohanty writes “[Ruddy] does take out a part from the Aristotle-Aquinas heritage—the theory of real relations, of relations which are asymmetrical, real from one side and intentional from another, and embeds it in Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. The result is what the author calls “convergent phenomenology” embodying the truth that Husserlian pure object consciousness points beyond itself to the pure subject consciousness of God as He is in Himself. With this finding, the theme of ‘God’ is drawn into, and limits, transcendental phenomenology.” Mohanty even allows himself the excitement that such a new science entails for the whole of phenomenological movement itself. He says: “It is undoubtedly a great pleasure to read a competent work in which three of the greatest philosophers of the world—Aquinas, Sankara  and Husserl—are treated with equal respect, their philosophies ‘synthesized,’ as a result of which a new interpretation of Husserl is just on the verge of emerging… I hope this faithful re-interpretation of Husserlian phenomenology will receive the close attention of Husserl scholars and of phenomenologists that it deserves.”[vi]

Jim Ruddy

jimruddy@xsacp.org

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