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The World of Appreciation as Lebenswelt : The Value of Pre-scientific Experience in the Philosophy of Josiah Royce and Edmund Husserl

2023; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 18; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/19446489.18.2.04

1944-6489

Massimo Cisternino,

Pragmatism in Philosophy and Education

since its origins in herbert spiegelberg's 1960 Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction, the question of the rapport between Royce and Husserl has been generally framed according to a perspective that is at once conceptual and methodological. More specifically, Spiegelberg's attempt has been that of finding an equilibrium among this twofold perspective and Royce's theory of meaning and social self: Royce's theory of meaning as a purpose, which can be fulfilled by “reality,” or his concern for the identity of meanings among several individuals as the basis for his theory of the social self have counterparts in Husserl's phenomenology of intentionality. . . . Royce's social idealism with its insistence on the role of the individual within the Absolute might have gone well with Husserl's later theory of intersubjectivity and with his idea of a community of transcendental monads. (Spiegelberg 146)If, for Spiegelberg, the conceptual dimension allows for a continuity between Royce and Husserl (especially in view of a mutual awareness of each other's works1), the discrepancies that emerge at a methodological level are at risk of limiting our chances of finding a theoretically stable point of convergence: “Such affinities must not make us overlook the remaining differences in method and results. Royce's sovereign use of logic contrasts sharply with Husserl's slow approach through painstaking phenomenological analyses. . . . Husserl's limited results can hardly compare with the bold metaphysical vision which underlies all of Royce's deductions” (Spiegelberg 146). Despite this skeptical outcome, Spiegelberg's reading has had the merit of indicating a productive route to follow, that is, the conceptual one. The studies conducted in the late seventies by Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley around the conception of intentionality and temporal nature of experience,2 and more recently by Jason M. Bell,3 have both confirmed the potential of such a trajectory, but the overall tendency, implicit in both scholars, to privilege a strict conceptual understanding of these themes has resulted in the marginalization of that methodological framework that is in the first place responsible for the shaping of each philosopher's approach. Such methodological clarification of the Royce-Husserl relationship, albeit present in one of Kegley's later contributions,4 requires further work, especially in relation to what I take to be important topics for both philosophers: the European ideal of science and its consequences in experiential and practical terms.Still worthy of some attention is Spiegelberg's reference to Royce's social idealism, with respect to which I shall offer a few comments. Unlike Royce, Husserl believed that in the natural world-sense, there is always a nature there “experienceable by everyone” (Husserl, Cartesian Meditations 93). Even so, his Phenomenology can be said to have its idealistic leanings; suffice it to think of the consequences of the enactment of the transcendental epoché and how this leads to the provisional suspension, but not exclusion, of the natural world-sense: “[S]uch alonelessness (the reduction to my transcendental sphere of ownness) in no respect alters the natural world-sense” (Husserl, Cartesian Meditations 93; Spiegelberg 144), or of his project in Ideas I and how it was received at the time (Moran, “Noetic Moments” 199). Albeit worthy of consideration, the ontological perspective will be discussed only tangentially. More relevant to this paper's focus on Royce's and Husserl's methodological procedures is the debate around the status of scientific knowledge developed by the likes of Gustav Kirchhoff, Ernst Mach, and Richard Avenarius during the second half of the nineteenth century.Even if the sources of inspiration are different, the concern about the domain and extension of empirical sciences remains crucial for both philosophers. In Royce's case, it is Kirchhoff's and Mach's contributions to the topic that make the distinction between a world of description and a world of appreciation possible. Husserl's case is slightly different. According to Dermot Moran, Husserl's conception of the life-world (Lebenswelt), as it appears in his 1936 Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology and antecedent works, is derived from Avenarius's natürliche Weltbegriff (natural concept of the world).5 Avenarius's natürliche Weltbegriff is grounded in a realist ontology, and so is Husserl's natural world-sense.6 As we shall see, this aspect does not hinder the tracing of a linearity between Royce and Husserl in methodological terms. The idea of a pre-scientific or an extrascientific realm of experience preceding and informing any scientific comprehension of the world (Kirchhoff; Mach; Avenarius) informs both philosophers’ thinking. If there is a difference, it is that Royce is the first to recognize the potentiality of this theme in philosophy, an aspect that makes Kegley's idea of American thought not simply being “derivative” but “originative” (Kegley, “Josiah Royce: Anticipator” 174–75) substantially true.My intention in the first part of the paper is to show, through a historical and comparative lens, how both thinkers emphasize the importance of the merely intuited experience of the world with the precise aim of rethinking the domain and limits of objective sciences and their status in everyday individual and social experience. The second part will focus on the same issue but from the perspective of Royce's and Husserl's critique of the Galilean ideal of science. I will demonstrate in what ways I think their views diverge by paying particular attention to Husserl's transcendental epoché,7 a methodological move that is absent in Royce, but that is certainly fundamental in Husserl's Phenomenology. I will conclude with a few general remarks about how to rethink the connection between American philosophy and Husserlian Phenomenology in light of the consideration developed throughout the paper.Royce discusses his distinction between a world of description and a world of appreciation for the first time in 1892 in The Spirit of Modern Philosophy.8 From one of his notes to the work, it is possible to deduce two things: first, that the distinction originates in the notion of description (Beschreibung) as it is developed by Gustav Kirchhoff and Ernst Mach; second, that his intention is anything but that of slavishly following his predecessors. As he explicitly says: “I must refer to the now almost classic discussions in the introductory lecture of Kirchhoff's Vorlesungen über Mathematische Physik, in the Lectures and Essays of Clifford . . . and in Mach's Die Mechanik in ihrer Entwickelung. . . . The present use of the word ‘description’ I borrow from Kirchhoff, extending, however, his notion in my own way” (Royce, Spirit 398). It is necessary to refer to these physicists to get a better sense of Royce's elaboration. Ernst Mach attributes the paternity of the conception of description and its use in mechanics specifically to Gustav Kirchhoff: “Twenty years ago (1874) when Kirchhoff defined the object of mechanics as the ‘description’ in complete and very simple terms, of the motions occurring in nature, he produced by the statement a peculiar impression” (Mach 236). “Peculiar,” because prior to the implementation of description as a fundamental methodological linchpin, mechanics was mainly a study of forces and of the causes producing them: all conceptions that Kirchhoff had felt to be overtly metaphysical and, for this very same reason, hardly suitable for a scientific understanding of nature (Brenner 642). It is for this reason that the notion of description represents for Mach, and to a no lesser extent, for Kirchhoff, the basis for all sciences and the condition of possibility for the communication of scientific knowledge: “The communication of scientific knowledge always involves description, that is, a mimetic reproduction of facts in thought, the object of which is to replace and save the trouble of new experience” (Mach 192–93). Its opposite, explanation (Erklärung), to be intended as an “insight into the causal connection of things” (Mach 237), is rejected on the ground of its unreliability in experimental sciences: “Does description accomplish all that the inquirer can ask? In my opinion, it does. Description is a building up of facts in thought, and this building up is, in the experimental sciences, often the condition of actual execution” (Mach 252–53).9The features that I have just indicated evaporate in Royce's rendition. Causality is assimilated within the spectrum of description: “Science, as everybody knows, assumes that the physical world is one where the law of causation rules, where nature is uniform. . . . In order to describe, we have to reduce the transient to the permanent” (Spirit 397–99). I understand causality's assimilation into description as serving the specific purpose of distinguishing a scientific from an extrascientific or a pre-scientific realm of experience. J. M. Baldwin's entry in the 1901 Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology seems to confirm that the domain of appreciation, as opposed to that of description, lies in this pre- or extrascientific dimension of experience or knowledge: “A way of formulating the distinction between judgments involving value and those of science” (Baldwin 62). According to this perspective, appreciation has to do with value-judgments (the “ought”), while description with scientific judgments (the “is”). Still, what we gather by looking at the “Physical Law and Freedom” chapter in the Spirit of Modern Philosophy, which is where Royce develops his separation between description and appreciation, is that the dichotomy is only partially related to the value/scientific judgment distinction, and that it has more to do with a “contrast . . . between the permanent and universal elements of experience on the one hand, and the private and fleeting elements of experience on the other” (Spirit 386). According to Royce, we always describe “in terms of assumed changeless things (e.g., atoms, elements, media, . . . substances)” (Spirit 399); that is, we proceed by way of a hypostatization of the appreciative content of experience. At first sight, description, with its emergence in life as a public property accessible to anyone, could seem to indicate a priority over the world of appreciation. But it is exactly this act of hypostatization, through which the transient elements of experience are turned into permanent describable patterns, that is highly problematic for Royce: We have suggested to us, in this distinction between the outer reality which is describable, and the inner appreciation which is unreal, one tragedy of our finitude, namely, that our descriptive consciousness, coldly and dispassionately devoting itself to the typical, to the relatively universal structure of our experience, seems to seize upon what is for that very reason real, abiding, yes, like the numbers and the atoms, everlasting in time, while, on the other hand, that which makes the moment often so dear to us, its appreciable aspect, its value, is indescribable, and so essentially private and fleeting. This it is that makes science often so cold to us, and facts so lifeless, while the glowing world of appreciation appears to be, after all, so fantastic and vain. (Spirit 394)I will come back later to Royce's criticism of science. For the moment, let us focus on the appreciative aspect of consciousness and how it differs from its descriptive counterpart. By necessity, the world of appreciation becomes accessible to me only on condition that the theoretical frameworks that natural sciences utilize to construct their comprehension of the world (in other words, through rigorous spatiotemporal patterns) are put aside. Royce does not use any term in the Spirit of Modern Philosophy that would in any way resemble Husserl's epoché, but the discontinuity in terms of the attitude that the subject has toward the experience of the world in appreciation and the consequent shift from the object to the subject, from the outer to the inner, is, I think, quite evident. The following passage provides a sense of this radical change in the subjective attitude, one that we might call pre- or extrascientific: How my own hat feels when I pick it up, taking it from amongst a large number of hats in a dimly lighted cloakroom, is something that I can only appreciate. I know my hat by the feel of it when I pick it up. How I know it I can't tell you. On the other hand, that I find my hat hung a peg higher than I myself left it, that it is hung on the right or the left side of the room, that just as I took it the clock struck ten, these are experiences that I pretend to be able to describe. I can tell you, so I say, just what I mean by them. I hold them to be experiences that anybody might have, whether he felt about my hat as I do, or did not. (Royce, Spirit 389)As we can see, the concluding statement tacitly raises the issue of solipsism and, with it, the question of whether the world of appreciation guarantees a stronger universality than that of the world of description. The fact that solipsism emerges as a theoretical possibility only within the world of appreciation, in other words, at the exclusion or suspension of the world of description, is to me indicative of Royce's intention to look at the appreciative content of experience as an exclusive resource for transcending the limits of private experience: “I hold them to be experiences that anybody might have, whether he felt about my hat as I do, or did not.” The key word here is “feeling,” and feeling pertains to the domain of appreciation. A few pages later, this intersubjective dimension becomes even more transparent as Royce describes the experience of other selves in appreciation as made possible through the mediation of Logos or Self (the world of ideals and truth) acting as a link between the I and the Thou: “In so far as I truly communicate with him, we are members of the same world of appreciation; and in this sense he is real to me by virtue of our organic unity in the one Self” (Spirit 409). It is for this reason that Kegley can talk about the world of appreciation as “the world of interconnectedness among minded beings” (Kegley, Josiah Royce in Focus 77).The passage, however, discloses another important aspect of Royce's thought that goes beyond the question of intersubjectivity. This aspect, that becomes more compelling and evident a couple of pages later, is Royce's criticism of science and the restriction that science operates over the world of appreciation: “This it is that makes science often so cold to us, and facts so lifeless.” Facts are lifeless because in the world of scientific understanding (the world of description), the object is simply a describable entity falling within a space-time framework, and this space-time framework freezes the constitutive fleeting character of appreciative experience, in other words, how I personally feel the object: “I find my hat hung a peg higher than I myself left it, that it is hung on the right or the left side of the room.”Royce is here anticipating Husserl's critique of Galilean physics and, more in general, science, as it will later be developed by Husserl in Crisis of European Sciences.10 According to Husserl, the world depicted by Galilean science is one in which nature and the bodies present within it are not experienced according to their everyday modality but rather as purely idealized geometrical objects: “[T]his pure mathematics has to do with bodies and the bodily world only through an abstraction, i.e., it has to do only with abstract shapes within space-time, and with these, furthermore, as purely ‘ideal’ limit-shapes” (Crisis 29). Galilean physics is, for Husserl, responsible for the substitution of the merely intuited world for what he calls “the mathematically substructed world of idealities” (Crisis 48). This world is, in essence, not dissimilar to Royce's world of description. It is a world of experience that rejects the more intimate way of accessing nature. It leaves individuals with no access whatsoever to the more primordial intuition of the world and other selves. The overturning that both Royce and Husserl wish for is in the opposite direction, from description to appreciation, or, to use a more Husserlian language, from the mathematically substructed world of idealities to the life-world. The following section will discuss this matter more in detail by paying particular attention to how Royce and Husserl criticize the European ideal of science.Albeit more articulated and complex in its structure, the project that the founding father of Phenomenology outlines in the Crisis of European Sciences is no less committed to a reevaluation of prescientific experience than is Royce's Spirit of Modern Philosophy. If there is a feature that separates Husserl from Royce, it is obviously that the former presents such a re-evaluation of prescientific experience through the lens of his transcendental Phenomenology, a move that in no way alters the fact that Husserl's account of Galilean science is perfectly in line with Royce. In the first part of The Spirit of Modern Philosophy, which is where Royce develops his history of modern thought in the light of the scientific revolution, Galileo is presented as a figure who encapsulates what Husserl more explicitly calls the “European ideal of science.” The scientific revolution that took place in the Modern Era is for Royce the result of two fundamental innovations: rational inquiry and the application of mathematics and geometry to physical science: “This new age is sure of reason, makes it lord, reveres it as the one revealer of mysteries, and as capable of discovering absolute truth. . . . [C]lear thinking about nature needs a good model. Galileo . . . had such a model . . . in the geometrical science” (Royce, Spirit 40). Despite the solidity of this methodological premise, the Galilean ideal of science suffers from one major defect: the practical inability to meet “the deeper passions of humanity” (Royce, Spirit 41). An individual, says Royce, “estimates, he appreciates his world; he doesn't merely long to describe it in mathematical terms; he has religious interests, too; and what have Galilean physics and Euclidean geometry to say of these?” (Spirit 41). As we can easily notice from this claim, Royce is not only stressing his view about what can be seen as Galilean science's major flaw, but he is also strategically connecting this issue to his dichotomy between description and appreciation. There is a world, call it of appreciation or simply life-world, that science, in its strenuous search for a universal validity and for a more rigorous mathematical interpretation of nature, has forgotten. Such a world must necessarily regain its space in science and posit itself as the basis for all scientific truths. As the following extract shows, the exact same concern animates Husserl's approach in Crisis: There has never been a scientific inquiry into the way in which the life-world constantly functions as subsoil, into how its manifold prelogical validities act as grounds for the logical ones, for theoretical truths. And perhaps the scientific discipline which this life-world as such, in its universality, requires is a peculiar one, one which is precisely not objective and logical but which, as the ultimately grounding one, is not inferior but superior in value. (Crisis 124)Husserl's intention here is not that of cutting any link with objective sciences, but rather that of indicating the ground out of which any scientific understanding of the world must arise. Once more, we are dealing with a stance that has affinities with Royce, in particular with his the idea that any descriptive account presupposes an appreciative level of experience acting as the ground for it: “At the basis of every description, e.g., of space, one finds an irreducible appreciation” (Spirit 400). The roots of this idea can once more be traced back to thinkers like Ernst Mach11 and Richard Avenarius.12 Mach's descriptivism, in particular, can be said to have left an equal if not greater mark on Husserl.13 However, there is a strong signal of discontinuity that Husserl has with respect to these thinkers—and, more in particular, with respect to Royce: the fact that the thematization of the experience of the life-world is only possible through the enactment of the transcendental epoché, a methodological pillar that is purely Husserlian and finds no historical antecedents, except, obviously, in Sextus Empiricus. The transcendental epoché suspends the question of whether there is such a thing as a true being or a world independent of us: “[W]e exclude all knowledge, all statements about true being and predicative truths for it. . . . [W]e also exclude all sciences, genuine as well as pseudoscience's, with their knowledge of the world as it is ‘in itself,’ in ‘objective truth’” (Crisis 156). Still, by looking at the following passage, it becomes evident that this act of “bracketing” of one's own prejudices about the world does not prevent Husserl from finding, within the very thematization of the experience of the intuitively given world, the same features of Royce's appreciative experience: The world in which we live intuitively, together with its real entities [Realitäten]; but [we wish to consider them] as they give themselves to us at first in straightforward experience, and even [consider] the ways in which their validity is sometimes in suspense (between being and illusion, etc.). Our exclusive task shall be to comprehend precisely this style, precisely this whole merely subjective and apparently incomprehensible “Heraclitean flux.” (Crisis 156)The subjective “Heraclitean flux” of which Husserl talks about is equivalent to the fleeting nature of the world of appreciation that Royce stresses in contrast with the experience of the world offered by descriptive sciences. Another move that I have mentioned earlier is the shift from the objective to the subjective. In line with Royce, Husserl understands that one of the reasons why science has not accomplished a full universality is that its look at purely idealized objects has excluded the perceiving subjects that constitute them as such: “Philosophy as universal objective science . . . together with all objective sciences is not a universal science at all. It brings into its sphere of inquiry only the constituted object-poles and remains blind to the full concrete being and life that constitutes them transcendentally” (Husserl, Crisis 176). In the transcendentally constituted experience of the life-world (which accomplishes the same shift of emphasis from the object to the subject that we have previously seen in the movement from description to appreciation), other selves can finally be authentically experienced, that is, not as mere spatiotemporal objects but as objects that are subjectively “felt”: “Only by starting from the ego and the system of its transcendental functions and accomplishments can we methodically exhibit transcendental intersubjectivity and its transcendental communalization, through which, in the functioning system of ego-poles, the ‘world for all,’ and for each subject as world for all, is constituted” (Husserl, Crisis 185–86). The shift from the object to the subject, the turn to transcendentally constituted experience, displays nature not as an egoic possession but as intersubjective reality. This world for all, already accessible to anyone in the transcendentally constituted intersubjective experience, reproduces, with a more sophisticated phenomenological language, another of Royce's famous philosophical tropes in the second volume of his 1901 World and the Individual: “Nature . . . is a realm which we conceive as known or as knowable to various men, in precisely the same general sense in which we regard it as known or as knowable to our private selves. Take away the social factor in our present view of Nature, and you would alter the most essential of the characters possessed, for us, by that physical realm in which we all believe” (Royce, World 166).This realm of experience is, for both thinkers, excluded in the common scientific understanding of the world. What the Galilean mathematization or geometrization of nature offers is the application of “pure idealities” to the world as they are revealed to us in perception. As we have seen, the consequences in terms of the ways in which we come to experience the world and other selves are severe. In the life-world, and to a no lesser extent in the world of appreciation, the bodies of other fellow beings are perceived as bodies moved by the same life that animates mine. They are not simply mathematical or geometrical objects; they are a lot more than what scientific understanding can grasp. This explains why, not many years after Spirit, Royce is led to identify the world of appreciation with the world of life: “We shall express the opposition of the two points of view by calling the realm of Being as our more abstractly theoretical consciousness defines it, the World of Description; while the world as otherwise interpreted is the world of Life, the World of Appreciation” (Royce, World 26). But, differently from Royce, the embracement of the world of life, or life-world, requires for a thinker like Husserl a recourse to the epoché; in other words, it requires, on the part of the inquiring subject, a reduction to the transcendental sphere. The merely subjective, unless consciously enacted, cannot become operative on its own as the ground for an authentic experience of the world and other selves. It is not the case for Husserl that we are able to transition from a pre-scientific stage to a scientific or theoretical one without having performed a bracketing of those prejudices upon which science rests, nor without having voluntarily performed the shift from the objective to the transcendental. Unfortunately, on Royce's part, the shift from description to appreciation does not seem to express the necessity of a particular act of “bracketing” of one's own prejudices, nor the necessity of a reduction. This, from a Husserlian perspective, represents a serious methodological gap. Still, the difference in terms of how the world is experienced when the shift from description to appreciation takes place is described by Royce in terms of a radical change in the attitude that the subject has toward its own experiences and, therefore, not as a passage without discontinuity.14 While this is not tantamount to explicitly declaring the necessity of performing an epoché or reduction as an indispensable methodological move, it does indicate that Royce is aware that the two worlds, though interrelated, do not coincide with each other. Such a non-coincidence is, I think, functional to Royce's critique of science. Unless science uses appreciation as a ground for description, it will never be at the service of humanity, for “[m]an is not merely made for science, but science is made for man. It expresses his deepest intellectual needs” (Royce, Introduction 21). The ideal of a science being at the service of humanity is exactly what Husserl is trying to defend in Crisis. What this tells us in historical terms is not that Royce had somehow predicted a “crisis” of European sciences (for that would sound overly prophetic), but rather that he had provided Husserl and, more in general, philosophers with the methodological and practical resources for a way out of the “crisis,” and, with it, the indication of the path toward an intersubjective account of the experience of the world.The analysis here presented depicts a different narrative of the connection between American philosophy and Husserlian Phenomenology. As I have tried to demonstrate, Royce's thought has all the resources for a pre-Husserlian critique of the European ideal of science and, more importantly, for the individuation of those methodological tools that allow us to effectively overcome it. It is the methodological dimension of Royce's early thought that leads this critique, not simply, as Spiegelberg has it, the purely conceptual structure of his thought. If we look at the history of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Western philosophy, the methodological debate stands out as an issue of crucial importance, not only in Neo-Kantianism, but also in what will later become Phenomenology. American philosophy was not immune to these concerns either. Even if this methodological focus of Royce's thought can be also attributed to his familiarity with a number of different thinkers, from Wilhelm Windelband, with whom he had studied, to the previously mentioned Mach, Kirchhoff, and Avenarius, what remains authentically Roycean is the need to make philosophy something that could effectively operate in everyday life. Husserl's discussion in Crisis seems to be inspired, despite its at-times challenging technical vocabulary, by the same necessity. While the materials provided in support of this connection are not enough to confirm a direct influence of Royce on Husserl (especially in absence of more explicit sources like, for example, a correspondence between them), they can certainly act as an incentive to rethink once more the history of the relationship between American philosophy and phenomenology. The history of this connection cannot be reduced, as has recently been done by M. B. Ferri,15 to the spreading of Husserlian Phenomenology in North America through people like Felix Kaufmann, Alfred Schutz, Aron Gurwitsch, and Herbert Spiegelberg; nor can it be reduced to people like William Ernest Hocking, Winthrop Pickard Bell, Dorion Cairns, or Marvin Farber studying with Husserl and disseminating Husserl's thought in North America. What the affinity between these two traditions shows to us—and which most of the time, alas, we tend to miss—is the fact that North America was an already fertile ground in which to sow the seeds of phenomenological research. Again, with Kegley, the history of American philosophy is not simply “derivative” but also, and, perhaps, to a greater extent, “originative” (Kegley, “Josiah Royce: Anticipator” 174–75).