Ontology of the will — Geiger, Pfander, Husserl

Why doesn't Geiger consider the I, insofar as it reaffirms its own volition, to be its continuous cause? Why does the I become the effect of its volition? The reason for this, I would suggest, has to do with the limitations that a realist position necessarily entails: If I would be again the real cause of my volition every time I reaffirm or realize it, I would have to somehow causally interact with the world that provides the conditions for this realization. But these conditions could not, in turn, cause anything in me, as I determine myself absolutely in order to really will. The real I would then have to be awkwardly superimposed on its conscious experience. To avoid these kinds of consequences, the act of self-determination is in Geiger, just as in the later Pfander, a singular and exceptional act, one in which I seemingly step out of the immanence of experience. The conceptual price to pay is considerable: The will might be directed at the world, but it cannot be sufficiently influenced by it, neither in form of ideal indications (Pfander), nor in the deliberations of an “I can” (Husserl). While the reality of the I here does not consist in physiological processes that lie beyond the reach of the analysis of consciousness, it is nonetheless extra-experiential in a different sense: In realizing a volition, one becomes the effect of the real I which is the quasi-external cause of one's own actions.

In Husserl, we find almost an inverse scenario: the actual volition is a temporally extended series of acts striving towards fulfillment, a reiteration and readjustment of a persevering intention. Realizing one's will is conceived in processual terms and the willing I implicated here is the correlate of its experience. In light of the previous discussion, the basic question to be addressed in Husserl's phenomenology of the will is this: How is the willing I immanent in its experience? This can be unpacked in a subset of questions which will help to clarify my approach: In what sense is a self-determination, enabling the perseverance of the goal of the volitions (Willensziel), present in Husserl's description of realization? How is the fulfillment of a practical intent founded upon the fulfillment of underlying intentional acts such as perceptions? Finally, is there a reflexivity inherent in the realization of the will that clearly exhibits that we, in fact, act according to what we will?

One fundamental problem in this regard has been exposed by Tom Nenon: If we can only recognize our will through its empirical consequences (or its phenomenal consequences, in the case of transcendental reduction), then there is no immediate, self-transparent certainty that we, in fact, realize what we will (cf. Nenon, 1990, 308). This meshes well with the idea, presented in the last section, that there is no explicit willing I to speak of in Husserl. The discussion of Geiger and Pfander has shown that a self-determination to will is all the more removed from its realization, the more it is conceived as a pure act of a real, non-experiential I. This in turn suggests that the certainty that I act according to my will, can only be elucidated through its realization. Consequently, we may have to readjust our expectation towards the form that the certainty of willful acting takes. It might be that in Husserl, there is no single, or singular moment that exhibits the will as such. To experience our willing self-evidently, we are either referred to the processual, occurrent fulfillment of the practical intent, or to a retrospective reflection of it.

As discussed above, the formation of a practical intent, the impulse to realize it and the actual realization cannot be neatly separated-Husserl refrains from definitive statements See (Husserl, 2020, 26), where Husserl says that on this issue, all we can ultimately say is that the fiat structurally and temporally precedes the action.. What is clear though, is that in the action, the intention immediately transitions into a gradual fulfillment. The teleology inherent in realizing a volition implies an awareness of constant change, our constantly coming closer to (or drifting further away from) the goal. To this end, Husserl says that we are non-objectivatingly directed, in each phase of our action, towards its further course, just as the consciousness of our will is not just founded on our current perception, but on future acts we intend through it (cf. Husserl, 2020, 26). Our will is at any time embedded in the flow of our action. In this context, it does not make sense to ask: is what I am doing right now in accordance with my will? Rather, one could ask: can I expect the course of my action to lead to what I will in the first place? The difficulty lies in the fact that this question does not take the form of a representation or phantasy, but is grounded in our current perception. How exactly is the consciousness of will (Willensbewusstsein) grounded in occurrent activity?

While a definitive answer here would have to take into consideration the different kinds of action and the associated degrees of premeditation, at this point, I want to focus on a decisive passage on the consciousness of the will. After having stated that the will cannot be based on a single act, Husserl claims that the volition is, just like the stream of perceptions founding it, in itself extended: “At every point the will is thus an extended continuity, such that the whole consciousness of the will is not just a simple continuity, but a continuity of continuities” „In jedem Punkt selbst ist also der Wille eine ausgebreitete Kontinuitat, so dass das ganze Willens- bewusstsein nicht nur eine schlichte Kontinuitat, sondern eine Kontinuitat von Kontinuitaten ist“ (Husserl, 2020, 26).. I take the two continuities to be the stream of perceptions on the one hand and the practical intention based on the ongoing perceptual process on the other. When Husserl says that the will is not just a simple continuity, he could be understood to mean that the will does not take the form of a willing I that simply animates (beseelt) every point in the course of action. Instead, since the consciousness of the will is itself extended, i. e. a continuity founded on another continuity, the relationship between the two is complex. I am involved in a certain action and experience a series of perceptions (first continuity). Based on this experience, I become aware of coming closer to fulfilling my intent. This awareness constantly changes because of my changing perception and can only be reflected on as changing (second continuity). What exactly is to be considered the consciousness of willing here, is it simply the changing awareness? I would argue that this is not the case, as I have to be conscious not just of the fact that I will but of how what I am doing aligns with my intent. The will is, as Willensbewusstsein, constantly changing, deliberating, never fully certain of itself, in expectation of its future fulfillment.

CONCLUDING DISCUSSION

One could say that if there is an I will in Husserl, it is firstly, tied to the objectifying acts of perception and secondly, in itself extended, such that I am at any one time conscious of my will as of a gradually changing certainty of fulfillment. To conclude my discussion of Husserl, I want to consider a problem that directly arises out of this characterization. If there are two continuities making up the consciousness of the will, then there seem to be two candidates to which the extension of the will refers: There is the expectation related to perceptions, in the sense that we apperceive the spatiotem- poral continuation of what we are presently conscious of, and there is the expectation of the will that is directed towards its fulfillment, based on these perceptions. Should we take it that there are two different expectations at play in realizing a volition? But how could we be conscious of both at the same time? It seems more plausible to assume that in a volition, we are dealing with a modified expectation in which we are not just directed toward future objectivating acts, but toward the increase of fulfillment of our intent. We expect that our action will lead us to eventually realizing our will. That we expect to eventually achieve this is what separates the volition from a wish For more on this distinction see: (Husserl, 1988, 112-115) and (Lotz, 2006, 125-129).. Yet actually experiencing oneself as willing entails, to a greater or lesser degree, an uncertainty in the face of what we continually strive to fulfill. The extension characterizing the consciousness of the will could then be understood to take the form of an uncertainty towards the realization of the volition: I know and apperceive that I will, that I act willfully, because I gradually know myself to come more or less close to, of acting more or less in line with, my intent.

Pfander and Geiger sought to describe the experience of the willing I in the confines of pure self-determination. One could say that for both of them, the feeling of certainty is correlative to the act of willing, which means that this act has no objective content in the usual phenomenological sense, but a feeling which is tantamount to the I itself Pfander holds that feelings require an objective content to be analyzed phenomenologically, see: (Schuhmann, 1982, 170-171). I hope to have shown with my discussion that the “willing I” is, as an objective correlate of acts of volitions, in many respects problematic.. In Husserl, by contrast, the vacillation of the feeling of certainty is tied to the ever-changing objective content the volition refers to, functioning as an index of the I that wills.

Paradoxically, the more one tries to locate the source of the volition in an I in a real sense, i. e. one that transcends the experience which can be described as being that of this I, the less one is able to locate the volition in this very description. This suggests that the moment of decision, so pivotal for Pfander and especially Geiger, might in some cases not be the most adequate basis for a phenomenological description of volitions, but rather constitute one founded act among others, serving merely as an affirmation for a will that is already taking place.

This is in line with a basic phenomenological insight, namely that the adequate description of the intentionality of an act has to consider how it relates to its object as meaningful, not as the real (reell) constituent of the intention See: (Husserl, 2009, 360 ff.). Similarly in the case of the will, the best approach may not be start with a real I that decides ex nihilo, but with the objective content the volition intends and to which the fulfillment refers. This in turn seems to exclude the strategy of naturalizing the real I to explain the will. Whether as metaphysical or as physiological, the source of the will can only play a meaningful role in phenomenology when one observes the continuous, manifold intentional structure of volitions into which it has to eventually translate itself.

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