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Transcendental Anticipation: A Reconsideration of Husserl’s Type and Kant’s Schemata

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Abstract

In his genetic phenomenology, Husserl introduces types, pre-predicative frames of experience that guide the perception and cognition of objects. In this essay, I argue that there are two types that are functionally almost identical to Kant’s schemata. To support this conclusion, I first present an interpretation of Kant’s discussion of schemata. I argue that we must see schemata as pure, a priori cognitions that involve only pure intuition, pure concepts of the understanding, and the imagination. I offer two analogies to explain how schemata function to subsume objects under concepts and to anticipate possible objects of experience before moving on to discuss the schema of substance. Next, I present a brief explanation of Husserl’s genetic phenomenology, organizing my presentation around the idea of apperception. This paves the way for a demonstration of how the fundamental type is best understood as standing at the center of a cluster of concepts, including apperception, passive belief, natural bodies, and the one spatio-temporal horizon of experience. I argue that the fundamental type is central to Husserl’s attempt to ground logic in pre-predicative experience. Finally, I compare two specific types with schemata on the grounds cultivated in the previous sections. The first of these types, the fundamental type, functions to pre-predicatively anticipate objects of possible experience, just as schemata do. The second of these types, which is implied by but never discussed in Husserl’s work, serves to mediate between a formal system of rules and an intuitive grasp of the world, just as schemata do.

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Notes

  1. Allison (1981) argues that the schema of substance involves an impure perceptual element.

  2. Newton writes, “Absolute space, in its own nature, without reference to anything external, remains always similar and unmovable” (Newton 1934, vol. 1, p. 6).

  3. This is analogous to what Kant calls form of intuition (B160–161, note a).

  4. This is analogous to what Kant calls formal intuition (B160–161, note a).

  5. Thus, I agree with Pippin when he argues that there is a difference in kind between empirical and transcendental schemata: “Since the task for a transcendental schematism is to explain how there can be a universal determination of objects in general, such a schema must be a universal feature of all appearances, and must also be ‘purely’ universal, not some empirical predicate” (Pippin 1976, p. 161).

  6. For example, in the syllogism “all men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal,” “Socrates” is subsumed under the concept “mortal.”.

  7. See Pippin (1976, p. 159) and Allison (1981, p. 62).

  8. Nonetheless, this issue deserves more attention than I can give it here.

  9. In the “Amphibolies of Pure Reason,” we find Kant making an argument that is similar in form to the “two hands” argument, but which does not involve the incongruency of the objects in question: “Of course, if I know a drop of water as a thing in itself according to all of its inner determinations, I cannot let any one drop count as different from another if the entire concept of the former is identical with that of the latter” (A272/B 328).

  10. The exception here is geometrical concepts, which for Kant are given with intuitions. Yet, numerical distinctness is not required to ground the objectivity of the intuition of geometrical shapes while numerical distinctness is a feature of our experience of the world.

  11. The true test of my interpretation of the schemata would be to analyze each in turn. Yet, not even Kant does this and this would take us far beyond the scope of this paper. Here, I have chosen to analyze substance because it is often taken as difficult to analyze as a pure, a priori component of cognition.

  12. Though Kant defines schemata as transcendental time-determinations (A138/B177), Allison (1981) argues that the transcendental determination of time is more properly understood in light of the principles of the understanding. Here we find that because time cannot be perceived für sich, “it is in the objects of perception, i.e., the appearances, that the substratum must be encountered that represents time in general and in which all change or simultaneity can be perceived in apprehension through the relation of appearances to it” (A181/B225). Yet, this kind of representation is only possible if we already know what it is for something to be permanent, which is knowledge provided by the schema of substance.

  13. Fiona Hughes (2007) argues along these same lines. Yet, unlike de Boer, she does not think that schemata provide separate grounds for the a priori judgments listed in the “Principles” chapter and instead argues that these judgements are themselves schematized concepts.

  14. Husserl’s discussion of associative synthesis also recalls the A version of the transcendental deduction, but this connection is not relevant for the present discussion.

  15. Walter Hopp (2008) has argued that even in his genetic phenomenology, Husserl is a conceptualist who describes hyle as neutral sense content that must be organized by concepts. He points out, rightly, that though Husserl is concerned here with pre-predicative experience, pre-predicative experience is not necessarily coextensive with nonconceptual experience. He further argues that to improve Husserlian phenomenology, we must offer an account in which the intuitive contents of experience are already intentional, intentional independently of conceptual order. There is textual evidence for Hopp’s view, but as Donn Welton (1983) has argued, the textual evidence for this view is always heavily qualified and shows that Husserl ultimately backs away from this approach. Welton (1983, p. 224) also shows that there are principled and systematic reasons for Husserl to do so. For instance, as Husserl develops his account of time, he realizes that because the “now” never corresponds to a single point-like sense datum and rather contains a simultaneous spread of properties, the intentional object must already have an intentional organization. If we were to posit that our capacity to organize experience temporally is responsible for this simultaneity, we would still have to account for the content of the “now” that is then organized, and here we slide into an infinite regress.

  16. “In a ‘static’ regard, we have ‘finished’ apperceptions. Here apperceptions emerge and are awakened as finished, and have a ‘history’ reaching back […] the phenomenology of genesis follows [this] history, the necessary history of this objectivation and thereby the history of the object itself as the object of a possible knowledge” (Hua XI p. 345/634).

  17. In Analyses, Husserl admits that he has “formulated [the concept of apperception] in an extraordinarily broad manner” and that “deeper investigations are needed here” (Hua XI, p. 337/625, n. 98).

  18. By “tension” I do not mean to suggest either a positive or negative emotional valence, though this may be intertwined with apperception in certain cases, as when I apperceive the spider that has just run across my desk to be behind the stack of books standing there.

  19. Summarizing his thoughts here, Husserl writes: “Consciousness of the world is consciousness in the mode of certainty of belief. It is not acquired by a specific act which breaks into the continuity of life as an act which posits being or grasps the existent or even as an act of judgement which predicates existence. All of these acts already presuppose consciousness of the world in the certainty of belief” (Husserl 1973, p. 30).

  20. Jeffrey Yoshimi (2009) argues that in his genetic phenomenology, Husserl draws a distinction between two systems of belief, one belonging to passive synthesis and the other belonging to active synthesis, one characterized by inattention and the other by attention. Yoshimi (2009, p. 128) cautions us that there is more work to be done in relating these ideas to each other systematically. Nonetheless, the importance of the distinction he develops lies in its clear and compelling rejection of Carman (2003) and Dreyfus’ (1984, 1992) Husserl interpretation. For the Husserl of Experience and Judgement, passive belief has neither the discrete, propositional structure of active belief nor the same kind of intentional structure. If active belief is like a ray originating from a center and strongly illuminating this or that part of the world, passive belief is like diffuse, ambient light constituting the horizon of possible experience. Contra Dreyfus and Carman, passive belief is pre-theoretical and makes the theoretical stance possible. We may quibble with the way Husserl has decided to communicate his ideas, but criticisms that focus on the words he uses to do so, and not the systematic whole within which they achieve their meaning, run the risk of arguing by equivocation.

  21. For Husserl, “moment” is a technical term referring to the necessary constituents of something rather than the removable or interchangeable parts of a whole.

  22. Churchill and Ameriks translate Spielraum as “realm,” but this loses the dynamism conveyed by the original German. A literal translation would see it rendered as “play space/room.” Yoshimi (2009, p. 125) translates it as “leeway” or “latitude,” which fits far better. It conveys the sense of a space that is both delimited and open, one that leaves room to maneuver but which will afford only so much play.

  23. This is a function of the horizon being continuous rather than discrete.

  24. In Ideas I, the idea of the determinable X as the self-identical thing is inseparable from the idea of the thing as adequately, that is perfectly, given (Hua III, p. 297/341). Drummond has argued that the “determinability of the ‘X’ should be understood as the object’s ability to come to a more precise determination in the course of a temporally extended experience (cf., e.g. DR, §§ 27ff., APS, 5, 20–22); as such, the ‘X’ of Ideen I is a genetic concept illegitimately confined within a purely static account” (Drummond 1990, p. 154). Nonetheless, it is sometimes useful, for the purposes of explanation, to think about the X statically.

  25. Here, “natural” is not to be confused with “naturalistic.” The natural attitude differs from the naturalistic attitude in that it is not “achieved and preserved by special means” (Hua IV, p. 183/192–93). See also Yoshimi (2009, p. 130).

  26. As Lohmar argues, a type “is generated through a series of homogenous experiences and can then guide our synthetic combinations of the singular, intuitively given elements of an object” (Lohmar 2003, p. 106).

  27. Here Husserl is discussing the local background of an object of perception, but apperception should carry this anticipation throughout the entire spatiotemporal horizon.

  28. “With each new kind of object constituted for the first time (genetically speaking) a new type of object is permanently prescribed, in terms of which other objects similar to it will be apprehended in advance” (Husserl 1973, p. 38).

  29. Though Joona Taipale (2012) is concerned with slightly different issues, his distinction between primordial and intersubjective normality is helpful for situating my own analysis. Taipale asks, what determines normal perceptual circumstances? In daily life, these circumstances are determined intersubjectively, not in the form of explicit norms or procedures, but in the form of embodied norms. Each of us tends toward a perceptual grasp of things that harmonizes with the comportment of others who are understood, implicitly, as having the same sensory capabilities as we do. Yet, we are not born with these norms already embodied. They are learned. Many of the types possessed by “developed consciousness” fit quite naturally here. Husserl argues that intersubjective normality is preceded, genetically, by solitary normality: “in the genetic sense, a concordant primal constitution must have been accomplished and it must have become a norm” (Ms. D 13 I, 232b, cited in Taipale 2012, p. 55). This leaves us with a question; namely, “whether it is necessary that such a system must throughout remain the frame of reference” (Hua XIV, p. 132). The answer is yes: “What I come to know in my concordant experience as a qualification of the world that is already valid for me—all this also concerns the world that the other experiences” (Hua XV, pp. 229–230). The fundamental type, with its systematic connection to passive doxa and the one spatiotemporal horizon, fits quite naturally here, at the level of solitary constitution and as constitutive of the validity of the world. We should remember, however, that solitary constitution anticipates intersubjectivity by constituting the world as one and the same. See also Husserl (1973, pp. 54–55) for more on solitary constitution.

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Acknowledgements

My thanks to Greg Kirk, Jeff Epstein, Whitney Howell, and reviewers at Husserl Studies for comments on earlier drafts. This project was supported by Purchase College’s Eugene Grant Incentive Merit Award.

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Diaz, E. Transcendental Anticipation: A Reconsideration of Husserl’s Type and Kant’s Schemata. Husserl Stud 36, 1–23 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-019-09249-3

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