Table Of ContentJames and Husserl:
The Foundations of Meaning
PHAENOMENOLOGICA
COLLECTION PUBLIEE SOUS LE PATRONAGE DES CENTRES
D'ARCHIVES-HUSSERL
60
RICHARD STEVENS
James and Husserl:
The Foundations of Meaning
Comite de redaction de la collection:
President: H. L. Van Bredat (Louvain)
Membres: M. Farber (Buffalo), E. Fink (Fribourg en Brisgau),
A. Gurwitscht (New York), J. Hyppolitet (Paris), L. Landgrebe (Cologne),
W. Marx (Fribourg en Brisgau), M. Merleau-Pontyt (paris), P. Ricoeur (paris),
E. Stroker (Cologne), K. H. Volkmann-Schluck (Cologne), J. Wahl (Paris);
Secretaire: J. Taminiaux (Louvain)
RICHARD STEVENS
James and Husserl:
The Foundations of Meaning
MARTINUS NIJHOFF / THE HAGUE / 1974
© 1974 by Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
Softcover reprint oft he hardcover 1st edition 1974
All rights reserved, including the right to translate or to
reproduce this book or parts thereof in any form
ISBN-1g: 978-94-010-2060-2 E-ISBN-13: 978-94-010-2058-9
DOl: 10.1007/978-94-010-2058-9
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wish to express my deep appreciation to Professor Paul Ricoeur
for the opportunity to participate in his seminar discussions on
Husserl, and for his constant encouragement and careful direction
of this research. I would also like to thank the following individuals
who have contributed in different ways to the accomplishment of
this work: Genevieve Capaul, Veda Cobb, Eliane de Compiegne,
Robert Dolan and Olga Poliakoff.
This book is dedicated to my parents.
June, 1974 Richard Stevens
Boston College
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction 1
1. THE WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE 9
1. The fundamental tenets of Radical Empiricism 10
2. The absolute sphere of pure experience 15
3. A comparison with Bergson 21
II. SENSATION, PERCEPTION, CONCEPTION 24
1. Knowledge by acquaintance and "knowledge about" 26
2. The recognition of sameness 28
3. The fringe structure of the stream of consciousness 32
4. The complementarity of perception and conception 35
5. Comparison between HusserI's epoche and James's return to pure
experience 40
III. THE GENESIS OF SPACE AND TIME 47
1. The pre-reflective givenness of spatiality 47
2. The elaboration of spatial coordinates 50
3. HusserI's theory of horizons and James's fringes 53
4. The temporal structure of the stream of consciousness 57
5. The theory of the specious present 58
6. Primary and secondary remembrance 61
7. HusserI's analysis of the now-phase 62
8. Active and passive genesis 65
IV. THE STRUCTURE OF THE SELF: A THEORY OF PERSONAL
IDENTITY 67
1. A functional view of consciousness 67
m
~~~~d
3. The pure ego 74
4. HusserI's distinction between the human ego and the pure pheno-
menological ego 81
5. The auto-constitution of the ego in temporality 84
6. The ambiguous situation of the body 86
VIII TABLE OF CONTENTS
v. INTERSUBJECTIVITY 90
1. Two inadequate solutions to the impasse of solipsism 90
2. Reference to a common spatial horizon 95
3. The problem of solipsism in the context of transcendental sub-
jectivity 98
4. The coordination of alien spatial perspectives through imaginative
variation 100
VI. THE TIDNG AND ITS RELATIONS: A THEORY OF THE
CONSTITUTION OF THE PHYSICAL WORLD 103
1. The positing of thing-patterns within the stream of consciousness 103
2. The sense of reality 108
3. The various sub-universes of reality 111
4. The region of the "thing" as a guiding clue for phenomenological
inquiry 118
5. The return to the concrete fullness of the life-world 123
VII. ATTENTION AND FREEDOM 129
1. The correlation between the focus-fringe structure of the object
and the subjective modalities of attention and inattention 129
2. James's dependence upon the "reflex-arc" theory of human activity 138
3. The relationship between attention and freedom 143
4. Husserl's study of attention as an index of intentionality 149
5. The spontaneity of the ego's glance 151
6. James's pragmatic justification of the possibility of freedom 153
VIII. THE PRAGMATIC THEORY OF TRUTH 157
1. Pragmatism as a method and as a genetic theory of truth 157
2. Four different types of truth and of verification 162
A. The truth of knowledge by acquaintance 162
B. The truth of "knowledge about" 163
C. A priori truths 166
D. The truth-value of belief 167
3. Russerl's definition of truth as the ideal adequation between
meaning-intention and meaning fulfillment 169
4. The retrogression from the self-evidence of judgment to the original
founding evidences of the life-world 172
Conclusion - ACTION: THE FINAL SYNTHESIS 174
Bibliography 181
INTRODUCTION
" ... a universe unfinished, with doors and windows
open to possibilities uncontrollable in advance." 1
A possibility which William James would certainly not have
envisaged is a phenomenological reading of his philosophy. Given
James's personality, one can easily imagine the explosive commen
tary he would make on any attempt to situate his deliberately
unsystematic writings within anyone philosophical mainstream. Yet,
in recent years, the most fruitful scholarship on William James has
resulted from a confrontation between his philosophy and the phe
nomenology of Husserl. The very unlikelihood of such a comparison
renders all the more fascinating the remarkable convergence of
perspectives that comes to light when the fundamental projects of
James and HusserI are juxtaposed.
At first view, nothing could be more alien to the pragmatic
mentality with its constant mistrust of any global system than a
philosophy whose basic drive is to discover absolute knowledge and
whose goal is to establish itself as a certain and universal science.
The histories of philosophy have always characterized James as the
typically American thinker who scorns the pursuit of universal truth
and regards all supposed certitude as provisional, subject to instant
revision at any moment in the process of the pragmatic construction
of meaning. James seems to take delight in a homespun and crassly
American terminology, as when he relegates the traditional problem
of truth to the question of the "cash value" of ideas. According to
J ames, the quest for the truth, " ... that typical idol of the tribe,"
is the trap of all rationalistic philosophy and betrays a fruitless
attempt to escape from the human condition.2 No concept or theory
1 William James, Some Problems in Philosophy. New York: Longmans,
Green, & Co., 1911, 141.
2 William James, Pragmatism: A New Name For Some Old Ways of
Thinking. New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907, 239.
2 INTRODUCTION
can ever freeze the constant flow of experience. Concepts are
functional instruments whose purpose is to summarize, make short
cuts, and help us to move about with intellectual economy within
the flow of experience. Theories are neither definitive answers to
problems nor assured visions of reality, but rather provisional plat
forms for further exploration and interpretation of the stream of
experience.
What is most striking in James, therefore, is his antipathy to any
attempt to encompass all of experience within the confines of one
perspective. Philosophy is perpetually self-critical, looking always
for new alternatives and broader perspectives. In the light of this
attitude, it seems that James would have considered rather pre
posterous HusserI's confident pretension that he had discovered a
method for founding the truth and certitude of all scientific thought.
Nevertheless, it is not a taste for paradox which prompts this inquiry
into the similarities between James and Husseri. For, as is evidenced
by several recent studies which explore the phenomenological over
tones in the works of James, it is possible to detect surprisingly com
patible directions in the two philosophies. A pioneer study by Johannes
Linschoten suggests that James's classic analysis of the characteristics
of the stream of experience anticipates many of the discoveries of
phenomenological psychology.3 Bruce Wilshire contends that the
shifting methodology, which has always been a source of confusion
to readers of James's Principles of Psychology, bears witness to a
development within James's thought. James's earlier option for a
psychophysical dualism, which he felt might preserve his psychology
from epistemological and metaphysical ambiguities, cannot be con
sistently maintained in the light of a "phenomenological break
through": the discovery of the field and horizon structure of the
stream of consciousness.4 John Wild finds the culmination of this
movement toward phenomenology in James's later Essays in Radical
Empiricism, where the inconsistencies of psychophysical dualism
3 Johannes Linschoten, Auf dem Wege zu einer phiinomenologischen Psy
chologie. Die Psychologie von William James. Berlin: Waiter de Gruyter &
Co., 1~61.
4 Bruce Wilshire, William James and Phenomenology: A Study of the
"Principles of Psychology." Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968.
INTRODUCTION 3
are fully abandoned in favor of a radical return to the data of pure
experience.5
Each of these commentators is sensitive to the principal danger
of such a confrontation: the temptation to give an excessively phe
nomenological reading to the philosophy of James by underplaying
certain radical differences between the two philosophies. However,
I feel that the insights of these authors should be complemented by
a more detailed analysis of the relevant texts of Husserl, and, in
particular, of those passages in Erfahrung und Urteil which indicate
a shift in Husserl's basic orientation, from the problem of the active
constitution of meaning to an exploration of the founding sphere of
"passive genesis," the structures of the pre-predicative world of
perception. I believe that a careful and precise interpretation of what
the later Husserl meant by a return to the life-world is a necessary
condition for any accurate confrontation between the fundamental
projects of James and Husseri. It can be misleading to apply the
term "phenomenological" to any penetrating description of the
originary data of perception. HusserI does not plunge into an im
mediate description of the structures of the life-world, after simply
bracketing the cultural and scientific strata of interpretation which
cloud the primitive perceptual data. His analysis of the life-world
always takes place as a moment of return (Hinweis) within the
transcendental perspective, painstakingly acquired through the
strategy of the epoche and the reductions. There is a circular move
ment in HusserI's thought, a process of withdrawal and return. The
discovery of SUbjectivity as the giver of meaning is made possible by
the bracketing of all false transcendencies and the permanent re
versal of the natural attitude. This bracketing is never abandoned,
but within the transcendental field of consciousness thus revealed,
HusserI discovers the necessity of a constant work of return, of re
discovery of a residue of passivity: the pre-given structures which
found the constitution of meaning.
James's effort to reveal the worId of pure experience, that para
mount reality which he considers to be the field of all original evi
dence, is assuredly his most "phenomenological" insight. Hence,
this study will attempt to explore in detail the striking similarity
between Husserl's return to the primordial evidence of the life-world
5 John Wild, The Radical Empiricism of William James. Garden City:
Doubleday, 1968.
