A Critique of Transcendental Phenomenology

Husserl's analysis of perception allows us to elucidate the structure of appearance as such. It draws our attention to the very phenomenality of phenomena and to its own modalities; in this regard, it is based on a phenomenology in a radical sense of the word. This structure of appearance is most often ignored, by virtue of its ostensive function; in effect, in disappearing behind the object, in making it present, the adumbration is dissimulated as specific moment and as such causes itself to be forgotten. Naïve consciousness becomes fascinated by the appearing, captured by its presence — which it tends spontaneously to split from its appearance, in other words, to posit as self-sufficient — such that the moment of manifestation, the adumbration, is reinterpreted according to the realist mode as a "subjective appearance," as the effect of a real thing on a consciousness that is itself real. The task of the phenomenological époché is precisely to break this fascination in order to revert from the appearing to its appearance — in short, to suspend the thesis of existence characteristic of the naïve or natural attitude. For this reason, insofar as it is the nature of phenomenality to conceal itself in what it presents, it would not be inaccurate to say that the aim of phenomenology is to show phenomenality, to render appearance as appearing. The whole difficulty, which makes the époché a particular form of vigilance rather than a unique gesture acquired once and for all, consists in clinging to the structure of appearance as such, in not using surreptitiously during its description characteristics belonging to the appearing being whose appearance is the condition of possibility. The rigor of a phenomenology of perception therefore depends on its ability to cling rigorously to appearance as such, to respect its autonomy, so that the époché could ultimately be defined as the prohibition against importing or transferring within appearance any determination stemming from the appearing.

In accordance with this first description of perception, phenomenality can be characterized as the originary cobelonging, the mutual interweaving between manifestation and appearing. The adumbration puts us in the presence of the thing itself, its being consisting in a presentation. The appearing being, by contrast, is given as being "there," in person, but this being has no content other than the ensemble of the manifestations that initiate in it and never falls outside its moments of manifestation. It is this situation that Merleau-Ponty thematizes under the title "perceptual faith": the world is nothing more than what we perceive, and yet we perceive the world itself. Manifestation is its own surpassing; it is more vast than itself, since it is the unfolding of the appearing. The appearing, for its part, remains always at a distance from self because it appears only in disappearing from this in (and as) what it appears, only in being in a way more profound than itself. At issue here is an originary and perfectly singular mode of solidarity, since each of the terms is the unity of itself and its corresponding term; the structure of appearance thwarts the laws of formal ontology, which are only the laws of the appearing. The task of an authentic philosophy of perception therefore consists, while maintaining itself in the pure element of appearance, in qualifying and conceiving of this structure of phenomenality with respect to its originality. What exactly is the nature of manifestation? To whom does the appearing appear? What is the subject's sense of the being of the manifestation? Finally, what exactly appears? Does what appears and what constitutes the object of perception exist in the mode of the object? To approach the ensemble of these questions is to attempt to give a meaning to the concept of intentionality, which is both central and mysterious. Moreover, it seems to us that Husserl, at least before the genetic "turning point," cannot respond clearly to these questions because he does not succeed in remaining in the element of pure appearance; he tears the intentional fabric in keeping with the duality between the subjective and the objective, thus remaining on the margins of the system of époché that he advocates.

In Ideas I, the analysis of perception appears as a necessary moment, subordinated to the unfolding of the thematic of phenomenological reduction. In effect, Husserl proposes an initial characterization of époché as neutralization of the general thesis of the natural attitude; however, instead of implementing it immediately, he returns to the sphere of phenomenological psychology in order to develop an eidetic of consciousness and natural reality. This eidetic aims at underlining the contrast between the absolute being of the immanent (of the lived) and the contingent being of the transcendent (of the perceived) and thus aims at laying the groundwork for effective and definitive implementation of the époché. The latter passes through the hypothesis of the nonexistence of the world — as a hypothesis rendered possible by the eidetic characteristic of the transcendent — and opens upon a reduction to the region of pure consciousness, the originary region within which and from which every being draws its meaning.

In discovering the sphere of consciousness as residuum of the époché, Husserl thus justifies assimilation of phenomenology to a transcendental idealism. Therefore, the description of perception as givenness by adumbrations must be understood in its opposition to the determination of consciousness, of the lived experience, that appears right away as what is given by the phenomenological époché. In effect, "What can remain, if the whole world [...] is excluded," if not a region of original being constituted by pure lived experiences? The latter can be described in terms of their own "content," by virtue of an eidetic necessity; the essence of the cogitatio involves in effect "the essential possibility of a reflective turning of regard and naturally in the form of a new cogitatio that, in the manner proper to a cogitatio which simply seizes upon, is directed to it. In other words, any 'cogitatio' can become the object of a so-called 'internal perception.'" Moreover, in contradistinction to the transcendent thing, the characteristic of lived experience is that it is not given by adumbrations. Nothing in it exceeds its manifestation; it is nothing more than it appears, an absolute identity between appearing and manifestation. It should be emphasized that...