Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology

NOTE

This translation is based primarily on the printed text, edited by Professor S. Strasser and published in the first volume of Husserliana (Haag, Martinus Nijhoff, 1950). Most of Husserl’s emendations, as given in the Appendix to that volume, have been treated as if they were part of the text. The others have been translated in footnotes.

Secondary consideration has been given to a typescript (cited as Typescript C) on which Husserl wrote in 1933: Cartes. Meditationen / Originaltext 1929 / E. Husserl / für Dorion Cairns. Its use of emphasis and quotation marks conforms more closely to Husserl’s practice, as exemplified in works published during his lifetime. In this respect the translation usually follows Typescript C. Moreover, some of the variant readings in this typescript are preferable and have been used as the basis for the translation. Where that is the case, the published text is given or translated in a foornote.

The published text and Typescript C have been compared with the French translation by Gabrielle Peiffer and Emmanuel Levinas (Paris, Armand Collin, 1931). The use of emphasis and quotation marks in the French translation corresponds more closely to that in Typescript C than to that in the published text. Often, where the wording of the published text and that of Typescript C differ, the French translation indicates that it was based on a text that corresponded more closely to one or the other — usually to Typescript C. In such cases the French translation has been quoted or cited in a foornote.

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Introduction

Edmund Husserl

§ 1. Descartes’ Meditations as the prototype of philosophical reflection

I have particular reason for being glad that I may talk about transcendental phenomenology in this, the most venerable abode of French science.¹ France’s greatest thinker, René Descartes, gave transcendental phenomenology new impulses through his Meditations; their study acted quite directly on the transformation of an already developing phenomenology into a new kind of transcendental philosophy. Accordingly one might almost call transcendental phenomenology a neo-Cartesianism, even though it is obliged — and precisely by its radical development of Cartesian motifs — to reject nearly all the well-known doctrinal content of the Cartesian philosophy.

That being the situation, I can already be assured of your interest if I start with those motifs in the Meditationes de prima philosophia that have, so I believe, an eternal significance and go on to characterize the transformations, and the novel formations, in which the method and problems of transcendental phenomenology originate.

Every beginner in philosophy knows the remarkable train of thoughts contained in the Meditations. Let us recall its guiding idea. The aim of the Meditations is a complete reforming of philosophy into a science grounded on an absolute foundation. That implies for Descartes a corresponding reformation of all the sciences, because in his opinion they are only non-selfsufficient members of the one all-inclusive science, and this is philosophy. Only within the systematic unity of philosophy can they develop into genuine sciences. As they have developed historically, on the other hand, / they lack that scientific genuineness which would consist in their complete and ultimate grounding on the basis of absolute insights, insights behind which one cannot go back any further. Hence the need for a radical rebuilding that satisfies the idea of philosophy as the all-inclusive unity of the sciences, within the unity of such an absolutely¹ rational grounding. With Descartes this demand gives rise to a philosophy turned toward the subject himself. The turn to the subject is made at two significant levels.

First, anyone who seriously intends to become a philosopher must once in his life withdraw into himself and attempt, within himself, to overthrow and build anew all the sciences that, up to then, he has been accepting. Philosophy — wisdom (sagesse) — is the philosophizer’s quite personal affair. It must arise as his wisdom, as his self-acquired knowledge tending toward universality, a knowledge for which he can answer from the beginning, and at each step, by virtue of his own absolute insights. If I have decided to live with this as my aim — the decision that alone can start me on the course of a philosophical development — I have thereby chosen to begin in absolute poverty, with an absolute lack of knowledge. Beginning thus, obviously one of the first things I ought to do is reflect on how I might find a method for going on, a method that promises to lead to genuine knowing. Accordingly the Cartesian Meditations are not intended to be a merely private concern of the philosopher Descartes, to say nothing of their being merely an. impressive literary form in which to present the foundations of his philosophy. Rather they draw the prototype for any beginning philosopher’s necessary meditations, the meditations out of which alone a philosophy can grow originally.²

When we turn to the content of the Meditations, so strange to us men of today, we find a regress to / the philosophizing ego¹ in a second and deeper sense: the ego as subject of his pure cogitationes. The meditator executes this regress by the famous and very remarkable method of doubt. Aiming with radical consistency at absolute knowledge, he refuses to let himself accept anything as existent unless it is secured against every conceivable possibility of becoming doubtful. Everything that is certain, in his natural experiencing and thinking life, he therefore subjects to methodical criticism with respect to the conceivability of a doubt about it; and, by excluding everything that leaves open any possibility of doubt, he seeks to obtain a stock of things that are absolutely evident. When this method is followed, the certainty of sensuous experience, the certainty with which the world is given in natural living, does not withstand criticism; accordingly the being of the world must remain unaccepted at this initial stage. The meditator keeps only himself, qua pure ego of his cogitationes, as having an absolutely indubitable existence, as something that cannot be done away with, something that would exist even though this world were non-existent. Thus reduced, the ego carries on a kind of solipsistic philosophizing. He seeks apodictically certain ways by which, within his own pure inwardness, an Objective² outwardness can be deduced. The course of the argument is well known: First God’s existence and veracity are deduced and then, by means of them, Objective Nature, the duality of finite substances — in short, the Objective field of metaphysics and the positive sciences, and these disciplines themselves. All the various inferences proceed, as they must, according to guiding principles that are immanent, or innate, in the pure ego.

§ 2. The necessity of a radical new beginning of philosophy

Thus far, Descartes. We ask now: It is really worth while to hunt for an eternal significance belonging to these thoughts or to some clarifiable core that may be contained in them? Are they still such thoughts as might infuse our times with living forces?

Doubt is raised at least by the fact that the positive sciences, which were to experience an absolutely rational grounding by these meditations, have paid so little attention to them. To be sure, the positive sciences, after three centuries of brilliant development, are now feeling themselves greatly hampered by obscurities in their foundations, in their fundamental concepts and methods. But, when they attempt to give those foundations a new form, they do not think / of turning back to resume Cartesian meditations. On the other hand, great weight must be given to the consideration that, in philosophy, the Meditations were epoch-making in a quite unique sense, and precisely because of their going back to the pure ego cogito. Descartes, in fact, inaugurates an entirely new kind of philosophy. Changing its total style, philosophy takes a radical turn: from naïve Objectivism to transcendental subjectivism — which, with its ever new but always inadequate attempts, seems to be striving toward some necessary final form, wherein its true sense and that of the radical transmutation itself might become disclosed. Should not this continuing tendency imply an eternal significance and, for us, a task imposed by history itself, a great task in which we are all summoned to collaborate?

The splintering of present-day philosophy, with its perplexed activity, sets us thinking. When we attempt to view western philosophy as a unitary science, its decline since the middle of the nineteenth century is unmistakable. The comparative unity that it had in previous ages, in its aims, its problems and methods, has been lost. When, with the beginning of modern times, religious belief was becoming more and more externalized as a lifeless convention, men of intellect were lifted by a new belief, their great belief in an autonomous philosophy and science. The whole of human culture was to be guided and illuminated by scientific insights and thus reformed, as new and autonomous.

But meanwhile this belief too has begun to languish. Not without reason. Instead of a unitary living philosophy, we have a philosophical literature growing beyond all bounds and almost without coherence¹. Instead of a serious discussion among conflicting theories that, in their very conflict, demonstrate the intimacy with which they belong together, the commonness of their underlying convictions, and an unswerving belief in a true philosophy, we have a pseudo-reporting and a pseudo-criticizing, a mere semblance of philosophizing seriously with and for one another. This hardly attests a mutual study carried on with a consciousness of responsibility, in the spirit that caracterizes serious / collaboration and an intention to produce Objectively valid results. Objectively [objektiv] valid results — the phrase, after all, signifies nothing but results that have been refined by mutual criticism and that now withstand every criticism. But how could actual study and actual collaboration be possible, where there are so many philosophers and almost equally many philosophies? To be sure, we still have philosophical congresses. The philosophers meet but, unfortunately, not the philosophies. The philosophies lack the unity of a mental space in which they might exist for and act on one another.² It may be that, within each of the many different schools or lines of thought, the situation is somewhat better. Still, with the existence of these in isolation, the total philosophical present is essentially as we have described it.

In this unhappy present, is not our situation similar to the one encountered by Descartes in his youth? If so, then is not this a fitting time to renew his radicalness, the radicalness of the beginning philosopher: to subject to a Cartesian overthrow the immense philosophical literature with its medley of great traditions, of comparatively serious new beginnings, of stylish literary activity (which counts on making an effect but not on being studied), and to begin with new meditationes de prima philosophia? Cannot the disconsolateness of our philosophical position be traced back ultimately to the fact that the driving forces emanating from the Meditations of Descartes have lost their original vitality — lost it because the spirit that characterizes radicalness of philosophical self-responsibility has been lost? Must not the demand for a philosophy aiming at the ultimate conceivable freedom from prejudice, shaping itself with actual autonomy according to ultimate evidences it has itself produced, and therefore absolutely self-responsible — must not this demand, instead of being excessive, be part of the fundamental sense of genuine philosophy? In recent times the longing for a fully alive philosophy has led to many a renaissance. Must not the only fruitful renaissance be the one that reawakens the impulse of the Cartesian Meditations: not to adopt their content but, in not doing so, to renew with greater intensity the radicalness of their spirit, the radicalness of self-responsibility, to make that radicalness true for the first time by enhancing it to the last degree, / to uncover thereby for the first time the genuine sense of the necessary regress to the ego, and consequently to overcome the hidden but already felt naïveté of earlier philosophizing?

In any case, the question indicates one of the ways that has led to transcendental phenomenology.

Along that way we now intend to walk together. In a quasi-Cartesian fashion we intend, as radically beginning philosophers, to carry out meditations with the utmost critical precaution and a readiness for any — even the most far-reaching — transformation of the old-Cartesian meditations. Seductive aberrations, into which Descartes and later thinkers strayed, will have to be clarified and avoided as we pursue our course.

¹

Translator’s note: The Meditations are an elaboration of two lectures, entitled Einleitung in die transzendentale Phänomenologie (Introduction to Transcendental Phenomenology), that Husserl delivered at the Sorbonne on the twenty-third and twenty-fifth of February, 1929. See Strasser’s introduction, Husserliana, Vol. I, p. XXIII.

¹

Supplied in accordance with Typescript C. Cf. the French: sur un fondement d’un caractère absolu.

²

Author’s note: For confirmation of this interpretation see Lettre de l’auteur to the translator of the Principia (Descartes, Oeuvres, Adam and Tannery edition, Vol. IX, 1904, Part 2, pp. 1–20).

Appended later: If someone were to object that, on the contrary, science, philosophy, takes its rise in the cooperative labor of the scientific community of philosophers and, at each level, acquires its perfection only therein, Descartes’ answer might well be: I, the solitary individual philosophizer, owe much to others; but what they accept as true, what they offer me as allegedly established by their insight, is for me at first only something they claim. If I am to accept it, I must justify it by a perfect insight on my own part. Therein consists my autonomy — mine and that of every genuine scientist.

¹

Translator’s note: Sometimes Husserl uses Ego and Ich to express different senses. Since the homophony of I and eye makes the English noun I intolerable, Ich has been translated as Ego (spelled with a capital) and Ego has been translated as ego (spelled with a small letter).

²

Translator’s note: Husserl frequently uses the words Gegenstand and Objekt to express importantly different senses. Having found no acceptable alternative to translating them both as object, I differentiate by spelling this word with a small letter when it represents Gegenstand and with a capital when it represents Objekt. All this applies, mutatis mutandis, in the case of any word derived from Gegenstand or Objekt. If the English word object, or a word derived from it, stands first in a sentence, the German word is given in brackets.

¹

Later modified to read: we have an indeed literary, but not seriously scientific, philosophical literature — growing beyond all bounds and without coherence.

²

The passage beginning To be sure ... marked for deletion.

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First Meditation

The Way to the Transcendental Ego

Edmund Husserl

§ 3. The Cartesian overthrow and the guiding final idea of an absolute ¹ grounding of science

And so we make a new beginning, each for himself and in himself, with the decision of philosophers who begin radically: that at first we shall put out of action all the convictions we have been accepting up to now, including all our sciences. Let the idea guiding our meditations be at first the Cartesian idea of a science that shall be established as radically genuine, ultimately an all-embracing science.

But, now that we no longer have at our disposal any already-given science as an example of radically genuine science (after all, we are not accepting any given science), what about the indubitability of that idea itself, the idea namely of a science that shall be grounded absolutely? Is it a legitimate final idea, the possible aim of some possible practice? Obviously that too is something we must not presuppose, to say nothing of taking any norms as already established for testing such possibilities — or perchance a whole system of norms in which the style proper to genuine science is allegedly prescribed. That would mean presupposing a whole logic as a theory of science; whereas logic must be included among the sciences overthrown in overthrowing all science. Descartes himself presupposed an ideal of science, the ideal approximated by geometry and mathematical natural science. As a fateful / prejudice this ideal determines philosophies for centuries and hiddenly determines the Meditations themselves. Obviously it was, for Descartes, a truism from the start that the all-embracing science must have the form of a deductive system, in which the whole structure rests, ordine geometrico, on an axiomatic foundation that grounds the deduction absolutely. For him a role similar to that of geometrical axioms in geometry is played in the all-embracing science by the axiom of the ego’s absolute certainty of himself, along with the axiomatic principles innate in the ego — only this axiomatic foundation lies even deeper than that of geometry and is called on to participate in the ultimate grounding even of geometrical knowledge.¹

None of that shall determine our thinking. As beginning philosophers we do not as yet accept any normative ideal of science; and only so far as we produce one newly for ourselves can we ever have such an ideal.

But this does not imply that we renounce the general aim of grounding science absolutely. That aim shall indeed continually motivate the course of our meditations, as it motivated the course of the Cartesian meditations; and gradually, in our meditations, it shall become determined concretely. Only we must be careful about how we make an absolute grounding of science our aim. At first we must not presuppose even its possibility. How then are we to find the legitimate manner in which to make it our aim? How are we to make our aim perfectly assured, and thus assured as a practical possibility? How are we then to differentiate the possibility, into which at first