Arguing for the "destruction" of the a priori

An interesting insight to the relation of the concept of individuals with the corresponding essences in terms of prior-posterior can be found in L. Eley's The Crisis of a Apriori (Eley, 1962). The whole approach in terms of prior-posterior draws on the assumption that the relation between an object-individual as a “this-there” and its essence is of an essential and therefore not of a factual character. However if the relation prior-posterior is of a constitutional character then it must necessarily be a factual connection (under eidetic “laws”) between the individual as a “this-there” and its essence. Indeed one cannot think of a way a relation of prior-posterior could be possibly conceived as an essential state-of-affairs without the acting of a subject, that is, without the enactment of an intentional “glance.” In Eley's view, reality and essence become distinct concepts/states-of-affairs in the sense that an individual whose thingness substance is a Konkretum A Konkretum is termed by Husserl an absolutely self-standing essence, in contrast to a not self-standing one called an Abstraktum. For instance, to the latter class belongs the formal categorial form object in general in contrast with the categorial form object with a concrete thingness substance, i.e., a Konkretum. A “this-there” whose thingness substance is a Konkretum is called an Individuum (Husserl, 1983, 29). “precedes” in the act of (intentional) experiencing as a concrete “this-there” its postulation as the last outcome in a concatenation of essences by virtue of being a de facto posterior of its prior-posterior.

To the extent that in Husselian phenomenology the fundamental ways of knowledge of essences is except for variation and free (rationally grounded) imagination also eidetic intuition, these are inconceivable but only as being acts carried out within objective spatio-temporality. In consequence, according to Eley, this may result in the “destruction” of the essential character of the relation of an individual to its essence having as a further effect the reduction of essences to pure possibilities hovering in “the air” of absolutely pure conceivability (Eley, 1962, 37-38).

In this sense Husserl's conception of essences may be characterized as the outcome of its contradicting moments. In Eley's succinct expression “Husserl conceives of the universal insofar as he negates it: The essence in Husserl's sense consolidates this negation; put it otherwise: Essence in the process of its reflection becomes deprived of itself” (Eley, 1962, 65). Obviously this claim contradicts the position that the “this-there” (as a thematic positing in real terms) presupposes

the corresponding essence in the understanding that only then it becomes meaningful to ask about the “what” of the “this-there.” Furthermore it implies that the character of the “precedence” of essence should be one of necessity just like the eidetic specificity of a universal eidetic state-of-affairs is one of essential necessity. (Husserl, 1983, 14)

To address these subtleties and resolve the presumed contradictions in a phenomenological approach to the concepts of essence and a priori, Eley proposed, based on Husserl's views in Ideas III (Husserl, 1971), the concept of a difference-unity (Dif- ferenz-Einheit) which must be presupposed so that essences are the conditions of the experienced objects they “precede,” in the sense of a prior condition that makes possible any thematization in the act of experience without being itself object of an essential intuition. But this would entail transcendencies associated with absolute subjectivity, a clue to Husserl's constant preoccupation with a radical reduction toward the subjective origin of the absolute flux of consciousness See (Eley, 1962, 20-21) and (Livadas, 2020)..

Talking of the a priori in terms of constitution and temporality

If a description of phenomenology can be summed up as the universal eidetic science of pure consciousness then one may reasonably argue that its ultimate foundation may be found in the subjective origin of inner temporality, in other words in the pure ego in virtue of a temporal-in-constituting ego.

Yet the fact that the double intentionality of consciousness, as an intentional form making possible the unity of the absolute consciousness as inexhaustibly fulfilled by new objects, may ground immanent unity independently of any spatio-temporal constraints can raise in turn the question of its own objectivity in real world terms.

Husserl referred in the Phenomenology of Inner time Consciousness to the double intentionality of temporal consciousness in these terms: It is thanks to the fact that retention is characterized by a double non-objective intentionality that the consciousness of temporal succession is at all possible as also the unity of temporal consciousness as such (Husserl, 1991, 84-88). This means that retentional consciousness as a phenomenon of the unfolding of inner time is manifest as a continuity or, to put it in metaphorical terms, a “fluidity” of the passing from a specious present, in virtue of original impression, to the immediate consciousness of the past and its continuously descending tail of retentions. In these terms absolute consciousness, displays a double non-objective intentionality so that it constitutes objective time as a continuous stream in actuality (through longitudinal and transversal intentionality) by constituting itself, in a way that itself may not be made objective for otherwise it would require a new consciousness-of so that again one would relapse into a kind of circularity in infinitum. Let it be noted that Husserl's reference to the continuity (Stetigkeit) of temporal consciousness due to the double intentionality form proves in fact to be by itself circular insofar as continuity cannot be taken account of as pertaining to the sphere of constituting (i.e., the phenomenological ego) by appealing to what is constituted (i.e., the objective flux).

Therefore as intentionality cannot be thought of independently of what is intended, and this latter even if it is simply an object of imagination cannot but be a being-in-objectivity, it is really an issue whether intentionality in general and a fortiori the double intentionality of consciousness can be regarded as a priori acts themselves or just clues in the level of constituted of a transcendental subjectivity, origin of inner temporality. In the latter case one is left, as stated in earlier sections, in the limbo of admitting to a transcendence within immanence, the pure ego, whose “being” is rather deducible by logical deduction as an absolute origin of constitution-within-the-world, yet one not being derivable in terms of being-in-the-world I take note that D. Zahavi argues in (Zahavi, 2022), based on Husserl's writings, that the pure ego is not presupposed by a conceptual and metaphysical necessity, rather it seems to be “something” that is directly exhibitable, (Zahavi, 2022, 271). Yet his arguments in no way weaken the present article's global position..

Independently of these concerns it is true that intentional constitution, as a means to overcome Kant's dichotomy between understanding (spontaneity) and sensibility (passivity), may apply to both the reflective level of science and the pre-reflective level of the life-world so that it guarantees by the identity of the corresponding “laws” the validity of the laws of science. More than that it is the noetic aspect of intentional constitution, which eluded Kant's conception of formal and material a priori by means of the understanding proper (i.e., by transcendental apperception), that constitutes through the act of synthesis the structural unity of phenomena and points to the transition from static to genetic phenomenology with the latter dealing at the deepest level with the constituting function of absolute subjectivity. This is in fact, in view of Kant's and Husserl's convergent approaches in the reduction of the ontological a priori to the a priori of subjectivity itself, what substantiates to a large extent Husserl's contribution to the pure logic, that is, “the turn to the transcendental dimension of the a priori forms of cognizing subjectivity itself” (Murphy, 1974, 73). In fact by genetic phenomenology one may view the a priori of all subjective structures as pertaining to their functions as constitutive, both on the predicative, reflective level and the pre-reflective, pre-predicative one, something that makes the grounded on transcendental subjectivity a priori to be essentially associated with actual presence-in-constituting within the world. J. N. Mohanty has talked, referring to Husserl's Crisis, about a novel distinction between the objective-logical a priori and the a priori of the life-world. The a priori of the life-world is said to be “subjective-relative” (Husserl, 1970, 140), “pre-logical” (Husserl, 1976b, 141), and presupposed by the objective sciences (Husserl, 1976b, 139; Mohanty, 1974, 51). As a matter of fact Mohanty's argumentation about the life-world a priori by no means alters my own general argumentation in this article. All the more so since the life-world a priori, after the Epoche, manifests itself as a “stratum” within the universal a priori of transcendental subjectivity insofar as LW2, meant as the universal pre-given horizon within which any world experience is to be possible, under the Epoche is precisely the transcendental subjectivity (Husserl, 1976b, 63). The founding of the material a priori The level associated with the material a priori relates to those essences pertinent to material objects in their eidetic singularity.on the essential peculiarity of each sensuous content so that the corresponding material essence “appears” factually through its particularizations in experience makes the case about the transcendental subjectivity associated a priori even stronger. However one may enter a slippery ground here if the “predominance” of the material a priori leads to a deflation of the transcendental a priori as being conditioned on the constraints of factual experience. De Palma's views are indicative of the risk to run into an “osmotic” relation of the purely eidetic with facticity on the grounds that: „Die Fakta leiten alle Eidetik. Was ich exemplarisch nicht unterscheiden kann, davon kann ich auch keine ei- detische Unterscheidung und Wesensbildung gewinnen“ (De Palma, 2014, 198--199) “Facts guide all eideticity. What I cannot distinguish by virtue of example, I cannot gain its eidetic distinction or essential formation thereof” (my transl. -- S. L.)..

De Palma has further asserted that even though the validity of the formal a priori is independent of the “thingness” a priori, its applicability on the experience is tied to the existence of the latter whose a priori structure depends on the things/contents factually given (De Palma, 2014, 198-199) The nature of the perplexing relation of the formal and further of the transcendental a priori with the material a priori is not sufficiently clarified in the literature and could possibly be the subject matter of a new article. A propos I have in mind, Woodruff Smith's view that “ontology is to one extent a priori and to another extent a posteriori” and his reference to Quine in that “categorial ontology [concerning logical-mathematical claims. -- S. L.] lies at the center of our web of beliefs, yet is responsible to the periphery of perceptual observation” (Woodruff Smith, 2004, 246, 279-280)..

It is telling, though, that for Husserl the life-world has, conceived as prior to science, the structure that the objective sciences would presuppose as a priori in their substruction of a world which exists “in itself” (Husserl, 1970, 139). Even more important, the validity of the life-world is the outcome of the a priori “constituting” intentionality of transcendental subjectivity, and accordingly life-world as ultimate ontic meaning is immanently constituted according to the universal eidetic categories of thematic consciousness and the a priori norms of subjective (temporal) unity (Husserl, 1976b, 69). This, of course, weakens the view of those who claim that it is the objective a priori (material ontologies and the a priori of the life-world) that may serve in an essential sense as a clue for the investigation of the subjective a priori and not the other way around. The question that naturally follows is how one can bring into intuitive clarity the a priori modes of subjective constitution both on the level of spontaneity and that of passivity without, on the one hand, falling prey to the re- ductionistic lure of naturalism and, on the other, without generating circularities in talking about the a priori in terms of being-in-the-world.

For the moment I note that for Husserl the transcendental a priori, as operative both on the reflective level of predicative spontaneity and the pre-reflective level of passivity (where the life-world is intentionally “constituted” a priori) ends up in an eidetic reflection on the experiencing subject itself so that the transcendental philosophy of the a priori becomes an “egology,” a transcendental philosophy of the pure ego in view of the latter's essential being as being-in-constituting and in the concrete modes of being thus and so. Consequently the reflective experience of the transcendental a priori is reduced to an intuition of the ego in its essential, constitutive role. But then again one might pose the question: if the transcendental a priori is grounded in the intentional (noetic) structure of the transcendental ego, thought of in purely constitutive terms, then the transcendental ego must be itself a factual ego if it is to be a constituting one in concrete terms, something that entails the risks of a transcendental solipsism and empiricism in terms of factuality (Murphy, 1974, 76). The inevitable consequence is that one gets drawn into the muddle in which Husserl got enmeshed from the time he set out to describe the nature of the absolute ego on the operative level, in other words in factual terms, even as factuality was attributed properly to the factual ego in the sense of the latter as a `mirror' reflexion of its atemporal, pure self.

Husserl's attempt to determine the transcendental ego a tergo in terms of the factual ego, this latter conceived as the identical substrate of ego properties by which it constitutes itself as a “fixed” and “abiding” personal ego, points to a circularity in the reducibility of the transcendental a priori to the constituting (noetic) forms of the transcendental subject. This may be implied to the extent that the identical ego in virtue of active and affected subject of consciousness “lives in all processes of consciousness and is related, through them, to all object-poles” by means of a temporal constitution (Husserl, 1982, 66). Further, to dissipate any lingering doubts on the essentiality of the mutual relation between pure and factual ego, Husserl stated that:

I exist for myself and am continually given to myself, by experiential evidence, as “I myself.” This is true of the transcendental ego and, correspondingly, of the psychologically pure ego; it is true, moreover, with respect to any sense of the word ego. (Husserl, 1991, 68)

On the other hand the self-constitution of the factual ego according to the universal essential “laws” of temporal egological coexistence and succession, in more general terms those of temporal co-possibility, points to its conditioning on a foundation of inner temporality as a constituted state-of-affairs presupposing a constituting absolute, subjective origin. For Husserl what occurs in my own ego and eidetically in any other ego as such, with respect to transcendental processes, i.e., with respect to intentional processes, constituted unities, and habitualities of the ego, has its temporality and in this regard takes part in the system of forms that belongs to the universal temporality with which every imaginable ego, every possible variant of my ego is constituted for itself (Husserl, 1991, 74-75).

Even in sidestepping the question of temporality, insofar as we might accept the aphorism “the a priori is transcendental since `constitutive'; the `constitutive' is transcendental since a priori,” we not only rule out a transcendental a priori on a solipsis- tic foundation but due to the prevalence of transcendental constitution over vacuous ontological concerns we may extend the field of transcendental subjectivity (and thus of the associated transcendental a priori) to that of transcendental intersubjectivity within the life-world (Murphy, 1974, 77-78). Keep in mind that the transcendental constitution of the world is effected by eidetic laws proper to the factual or concrete ego that is meant in a more schematic or at least logically deductive description as the concretized eidos of the transcendental ego, the latter devoid of any in rem intuitive or constitutive underpinning.

Conclusion

As the general concept of the a priori has acquired, even within phenomenology, some varying connotations according to the particular context of discourse, I have tried to bring out, especially regarding the transcendental a priori, the ways by which it ultimately implies a kind of subjective constitution, either in objective (i.e., in a free variation activity) or in purely transcendental terms. Consequently one may proceed in an apodictic fashion and not merely by logical implication to the “destruction” of the concept of a priori by undermining the a priori, transcendental character of its originating source. Of course as it is common in philosophical debates this is not a position left unchallenged.

C. Romano, for instance, based on Husserl's views in the Introduction to Logic and Theory of Knowledge insists that

The material a priori is grounded in the very nature of the contents of experience. It is independent of the subject--objective--to the precise extent that it depends on these contents. The a priori laws that are true of colors define what color is for any consciousness capable of experiencing it. (Romano, 2015, 21)

However, without entering into further details, Husserl's views on the matter and in the particular reference may be judged as belonging to a phase of elaboration of his ideas prior to his evolution toward transcendental phenomenology proper It is quite suggestive to compare, e.g., Husserl's corresponding views in (Husserl, 1973, 376). I point out that Romano himself claims in another place that “Only that necessary structure of our consciousness [i.e., intentionality. -- S. L.] allows us to see how the a priori, while being a determination of our experience of objects, is also--and by this very fact--a determination of the objects of our experience” (Romano, 2015, 32).. Moreover and most importantly my attempt at “destructing” the a priori in the particular sense is inseparable from a conception of transcendental subjectivity as temporally constituting (and not constituted).

Turning back to the question of the temporal foundation of a radical egological analysis and the reductive argumentation by which the transcendental a priori comes to be accounted for in terms of the being and the modes of being of transcendental subjectivity, I have offered some clues to the circularities and the virtual impasse reached by putting the question along these tracks. It is true that the question of the origin of inner temporality was for Husserl a continuing challenge for which he dedicated much of his philosophical toils to come to terms with, especially in his transcendental phenomenology years, but for all his efforts it was virtually left unanswered to the end of his life. And to the extent that the concrete, genuine being of immanent onta has to be accounted for in terms of the primordial temporality of the living streaming present (lebendig stromende Gegenwart) (Husserl, 2006, 297), the question of the temporal foundation of the ego bears inevitably its mark on the foundation of the a priori and its presumed “destruction” for that matter As it may have been already made clear the term “destruction” in this paper is meant in the sense of a conceptual “dismantling” of essences and bears a strong connection with Eley's use of the term as pointing to a “destruction” of essences to invariants, in reference to Husserl's essential deprivation of the a priori nature of essences in Ideas I, and III and their reduction to a system of endless processes of continuous appearances.. As already noted in earlier sections a thorny persisting issue is the infinite regression re- flecting-reflected generated by the distinction between the pure, non-reflective ego and the constitutive, reflective one, mirrored in the distinction between the ontic (in the sense of eidos) and the constitutive a priori (the one of possible experiences or of possible modes of appearing) of which only the latter is by definition able of self-foundation, even though both are thought inseparable from each other (Mohanty, 1974, 50).

In the search for a clarification of the idea of a non-reflective ego, as anonymous “Ich,” which would cut off the endless chain of reflecting-reflected by excluding the possibility of “being” a consciousness-of, Husserl entered helplessly into the mire of overlapping or simply circular notions in the following sense. In the Bernau Manuscripts as well as in the Late Texts on Time Constitution18 he tried to establish a “lowest-level” subfield of consciousness as a field of a non-reflecting “possession” of consciousness (Bewufitseinshaben) thought also as a “lowest-level” of living experience which should be a prerequisite for all reflecting activity. This would come, however, at the expense of bracketing the reflective ego which would entail in turn the lack of any foundation, by virtue of evidence-in-reflection, for any non-reflec- tive origin of temporal consciousness. On this account Husserl sought in the Ber- nau Manuscripts a clarification of the essence of “being” of a primordial process (Urprozess) as preceding reflection by asking how in such a case one could think of a primary flux, perceived as a temporal one, yet one which would nonetheless not be made consciousness of a temporal flux nor of a phenomenological perception. The impossibility, by all means, to answer this question should be put next to the one of whether the pure ego, insofar as it is considered a presupposition of an ego-in-act for its own a tergo ontification, would be the same ego-pole in being thematized and so on in infinitum (Husserl, 2006, 187, 189). In the final count the question is reducible to whether and in what sense a pure, transcendental ego may not have the character of a consciousness-of and therefore be necessarily objectivity-constituting. And of course another challenge left unanswered is whether this may be conceived of in non-constitutive terms without the ad hoc call of a deus ex machina.

Consequently it seems that if the transcendence of the a priori can be reducible in constitutive terms to the temporal being of a transcendental subjectivity, we may indeed get rid of the platonic-metaphysical burden that run through centuries of rational thought until Kant's re-positioning of the concept of a priori in subjective terms. Yet one may run the risk of getting ensnared in the circular maze of introducing a non-reflective absolute subjectivity in constitutive-objective terms. In this eventuality one may be led, on the grounds of my argumentation, to an undermining of the concept of transcendental subjectivity and consequently of the transcendental a priori or perhaps even more properly said to their complete and outright “destruction.”

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