Abstract
Husserl’s official account of essence is modal. It is also, I submit, incompatible with the role that essence is supposed to play, especially relative to necessity, in his overall philosophy. In the Husserlian framework, essence should rather be treated as a non-modal notion. The point, while not generally acknowledged, has been made before (by Kevin Mulligan for one); yet the arguments given for it, though perhaps sound, are not Husserlian. In this paper I present a thoroughly Husserlian argument for that claim, as well as a Husserlian essentialist account of necessity. I also discuss the role of grounding within the account.
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Notes
This is especially true in later writings such as EJ and may be considered Husserl’s official outlook—with which the relevant unpublished manuscripts from the 1920s and 1930s are, unsurprisingly, in substantial agreement (Husserl 2012). This view is shared at least by Drummond’s Historical Dictionary of Husserl’s Philosophy (2007), according to which essence, or eidos, is “the a priori structures that make a thing an instance of the kind of thing it is.” In Ideas 1, however, Husserl seems to oscillate between talk of essence as the general essence of individuals (§2) and actual interest in essential relations among species and genera (especially, but not exclusively, of intentional acts). As a rule of thumb, the more interested Husserl becomes in methods to discover essences, the more does he move from the first to the second approach to essence. Another philosopher who is interested in the second sort of essentialist question is, at least according to some interpretations, Locke (Bennett 2001).
Original German: „ … die notwendige allgemeine Form, ohne die ein derartiges wie dieses Ding, als exempel seiner Art, uberhaupt undenkbar ware“ and „ das, ohne was ein Gegenstand dieser Art nicht gedacht werden kann“.
Arguably there is a difference between the impossibility that a-cum-u should not exemplify p and the impossibility that a-cum-u should be thought of as not exemplifying p. The question as to whether possibility reduces to, or is at least tracked by, mental performances is a central one in modal epistemology. In Husserl, possibilities and impossibilities are ideal objects resulting from a specific sort of imaginative intentional performances (Husserl 2005). Thus, if we read ‘thought’ in the EJ passages in a suitable manner, for it to be impossible that a-cum-u should be thought of as not exemplifying p just is for it to be impossible that a-cum-u should not exemplify p. Someone who, in the current debate, thinks that (at least some notion of) conceivability entails possibility is Chalmers (2002).
A transcendental idealist is someone who thinks that reality (in Husserl: Wirklichkeit) should be understood in terms of consciousness. Despite the exegetical efforts of some scholars, there really is no doubt that this is something Husserl did (which does not necessarily mean that there are no variations in the way he did it throughout his career). It is a further question whether this commits Husserl to a stronger metaphysical idealism (however the latter is to be cashed out); see Smith (2003) and Zahavi (2010) for discussion.
I am not opposed in principle to thinking of objects-cum-universals as qua-objects (Fine 1982). But as far as I can see there is no theoretical or exegetical need of doing so.
Even though Husserl thinks that necessity, and in fact modality in general, is a property of predication, he typically expresses modal propositions adverbially: in Logik 1917/18, while presenting the forms of modal propositions, he gives “Es ist wirklich so daß S p ist,” “S ist notwendigerweise p,” and “S ist möglicherweise p”.
Here and in the rest of the paper I make no explicit distinction between use and mention. No confusion should result.
It is important to keep in mind that I am reading (1), and the whole of Husserl’s project, as meant to illuminate the notion of necessity itself. There is nothing wrong in saying that a given necessity □A is grounded on another necessity □B. But if we expand this to every necessity, and read it as an account of the notion itself, then (and only then) it will be circular.
The logical form of singular general propositions is problematic in Husserl. I argue against Husserl’s own usage, and for my proposal (what I call the infinitive form), at length in Spinelli 2016.
Earlier on I said that the Husserlian construal of laws entails that not every necessity is a law. We are now in a position to appreciate why this is so: it is so because there certainly are necessarily true propositions that are neither about pure universals nor about all the possible examples of some pure universal. For example, ‘Socrates is an animal if he is human’.
Whenever Husserl is concerned with eidetic variation it is with the arbitrary rather than the universal construal of eidetic laws that he typically works with.
See Wallner and Vaidya 2020 for a detailed and excellent discussion of what it is for essence to be non-modal.
Van Atten (2007) claims that there is room in Husserlian phenomenology for mathematical objects which exist in time (choice sequences).
Except in the sense in which, in transcendental idealism, everything is grounded in consciousness. For a discussion of the relationship between essences and the ‘absolute being’ of consciousness, see FTL, §§103-105.
As a transcendental idealist, Husserl did not regard anything as independent of consciousness. Accordingly, the view of ideal objects in the Investigations is later abandoned in favour of a more complex outlook which I cannot hope to discuss here. To square this outlook with the characterisation of grounding given in the text, however, it is enough to substitute agent with finite agent.
For an excellent discussion of grounding and objective or metaphysical explanation, see Kovacs (2017).
If Husserl was not in fact an irreflexivist, then the account needs no amending.
In Husserl’s usage, “fact” (Tatsache, Faktum and cognates), especially in such phrases as “matters of fact” and the like, means something like a contingent situation or circumstance. In this sense, Husserl never uses “fact” as synonymous with “obtaining state of affairs.” What the second equivalence means is, rather, that what English-speaking philosophers have called “facts” are what Husserl calls “obtaining states of affairs.”.
For the relevant sense of ‘because’.
Self-evident propositions are such that no argument or evidence is needed to believe them. Epistemologically, they are self-sufficient. Yet this is not to say they are true in virtue of themselves.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Guy Longworth, Kevin Mulligan, Peter Poellner and Matt Soteriou for help and discussion. I am also grateful to the Warwick crew, especially J.C. Espejo-Serna and Daniel Vanello, to Michi Wallner and the wonderful people at Graz University, and to an anonymous reviewer. The greatest debt of all is with the late A.D. Smith.
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Spinelli, N. Husserlian Essentialism. Husserl Stud 37, 147–168 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-021-09285-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-021-09285-y