comment on the Rorty quip

I’m certainly not the world’s greatest fan of Rorty. At his worst he can be pointlessly flippant and a bit too sure of his first impressions. But he also has a good side as an author, in that he often cuts quickly through pretentious rubbish and boils problems down to their essence. (However, this table can also be turned on him without difficulty. One of my undergraduate teachers, when asked to explain Rorty’s philosophy, said this: “Basically, you debunk everything, and what you’re left with is pragmatism and American democracy.” Which is perfectly accurate, and also sounds like something Rorty might say about someone else.)

Also, one appreciative personal anecdote about Rorty… While a graduate student I wrote to him once, politely, and said that I thought he had oversimplified Latour’s philosophy in one passage (I didn’t yet know Latour personally). Rorty wrote back in less than a week and conceded that I was right. That was very big of him, and it meant a lot to me at the time, obscure graduate student that I was.

But I very much appreciate the words attributed to Rorty posted on this blog yesterday:

“Every decade or so someone writes a book called something like Beyond Realism and Idealism. Then the critics go at it, and it always turns out that what lies beyond realism and idealism is . . . idealism!”

The most damning charge that can be made against phenomenology is that pretty much every phenomenology book is a “Beyond Realism and Idealism” sort of book. And on one level this is true. Husserl is the one who started the bad continental habit of dismissing realism vs. idealism as a “pseudo-problem”: a habit picked up by Heidegger and then spread throughout the subfield until it became a kind of phonily sophisticated initiation ritual for young continental thinkers. At least in analytic philosophy the problem has generally been taken somewhat seriously, and the great virtue of Lee Braver’s first massive book is that he puts an end to the “beyond Realism and Idealism” industry in continental philosophy. I hope people pay attention.

But back to Husserl… People of scientisic leanings are usually the first to notice that Husserl is playing this game. And since the game is directly at odds with their own program for bringing consciousness back into the natural world, they quickly become angry and dismissive toward Husserl. They see him as an idealist and as nothing more than an idealist.

In fact, you can’t usually get them to say even one positive thing about Husserl. But this dismissal of Husserl is a foolish and ignorant mistake. Why?

Because even if Husserl isn’t a realist, he persistently feels like a realist. And it is important to listen to our persistent feelings about things, because they signal the way in which our current conscious beliefs are overrationalized attempts to jam the world into our pre-existent Procrustean beds. If you’re honest with yourself about Husserl, he’s definitely not a realist, but there are good reasons why smart people like Jean-Paul Sartre can spend years thinking that he is one before finally seeing the light.

There’s another dismissive remark about Husserl that is usually heard more from mainstream Sallisean Heideggerian continentals, and that is that “Husserl is just a less interesting version of Kant” (I believe Sallis himself has said this, so I’m not unjustified in using his name to form an adjective here).

This is false. Husserl is not recycled Kant by any means. To think this, you have to think that the entire Brentano School (to which Husserl belonged, and which was rabidly anti-Kantian) meant nothing.

Now, it’s always difficult to criticize Kant, because in a crisis everyone wants to retreat to Kant as to Fortress Impregnable (the waves of Neo-Kantianism will perhaps never cease), and since Kant wrote so much on so many different topics, any critical statement about Kant can always be countered with some point in contradiction.

So, when I say that Husserl’s philosophy unlike Kant’s contains objects, someone usually rushes forward to say that I’m misunderstanding Kant. But I’m not. On this point, Kant makes no real advance beyond Hume. You can talk about synthesis by categories or by habit, and what is missing equally in both cases is the notion of a tension between experienced things and the shifting profiles by which they are encountered. Heck, you don’t even find this in Brentano himself as far as I’m concerned. It’s a Husserlian innovation, and a great one.

In short, Husserl is the first and only (until Merleau-Ponty) object-oriented idealist. It’s a weird position. And I don’t recommend it. But it contains elements of the coming philosophy, and those who are dismissive of Husserl are missing a rich and glaring philosophical point.

Put differently, if you can’t explain the key difference between Husserl and Hegel, then you’re missing one of the major breakthroughs in the past century of philosophy. (Even Heidegger didn’t always get it. In one bizarre stray remark he says that Husserl’s phenomenology can possibly be identified straightaway with Hegel’s Logic. Not a chance, Heidegger, and you know better than that.)

When in doubt, remember that phenomenology is at least supposed to give rise to many concrete descriptions. Yes, some people skip that part and blather exclusively about noetico-noematic structures, etc. But the better phenomenologists can and do give actual descriptions of things.

Ask yourself, then, why the philosophies of Kant and Hegel do not prod people to phenomenological descriptions. The answer is that these two great thinkers lack all awareness of the Husserlian tension described above: the tension, density, and thickness of experienced objects such as mailboxes, trees, blackbirds, and battles of centaurs. What could Kant or Hegel possibly do with these entities? Absolutely nothing. What can Husserl do with them? Describe how their eidos remains constant despite a swirling kaleidoscope of profiles through which they are encountered. It is the absolute end of the tenacious “bundle of qualities” theory of entities, since the bundle constantly shifts but the object does not.

And that’s why Husserl feels realist. The unity of objects, for Husserl, is in those objects themselves, not in a human subject that bundles or counts them. In this respect, Husserl is much more advanced than Badiou, and it remains shocking to me that many of the first people to wave their hands dismissively at Husserl-the-Idealist simultaneously cut endless slack to Badiou on the idealism/realism question. For Badiou really isn’t an innovator at all on this point, while Husserl is the biggest innovator of it in nearly 200 years, and arguably in the entire history of philosophy. Husserl still has a long future, he’s just been mishandled by both his friends and enemies so far. Give it time.