Witold Plotka, The Riddle of Reason: In Search of Husserl’s Concept of Rationality

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• Texte complet en PDF/Full text in PDF: Vol. V, n°2 (157k)

   

   

Résumé

La compréhension de la raison humaine a été déterminante pour la phénoménologie de Husserl. Des Recherches logiques à la Krisis, le problème de la raison semble l'un de ses principaux thèmes de réflexion. Husserl aborde la question sous plusieurs angles distincts, évoquant les concepts de monde, de temps et de responsabilité. Ses découvertes l'ont conduit à identifier la crise de la culture. Les commentateurs doivent aujourd'hui mettre en question le concept husserlien de raison, s'ils veulent comprendre pleinement cette thèse. Cet article fait valoir que le concept de raison de Husserl est élaboré en corrélation avec celui de non-raison, conduisant les phénoménologues à adopter une division binaire entre rationalité et irrationalité. Par contraste avec les commentateurs qui accentuent le caractère rationnel de la phénoménologie husserlienne, cet article affirme que l'introduction du concept d'irrationalité dans l'investigation phénoménologique élargit significativement la compréhension initiale de la phénoménologie telle qu'elle est définie dans les Recherches. Husserl fut confronté à cette question par ses propres recherches. En conséquence, on affirme ici que la phénoménologie a connu un développement immanent menant de la thèse de la raison objective à celle de la corrélation entre raison et non-raison.

Abstract

Husserl’s phenomenology was shaped by his understanding of human reason. From the Logical Investigations to the Crisis, the problem of reason seems to be one of the main themes in Husserl’s considerations. He approaches the issue from different angles, talking about the concepts of the world, time, and responsibility. Husserl’s findings have led him to identify a crisis of culture. Scholars today should question Husserl’s concept of reason in order to fully comprehend this thesis. This article argues that Husserl’s concept of reason is constructed in correlation to unreason, leading phenomenologists to adopt a binary division between rationality and irrationality. In contrast to scholars who stress the rational character of Husserl’s phenomenology, this article asserts that the introduction of the concept of irrationality into phenomenological investigations significantly broadens the original understanding of phenomenology as defined in the Investigations. His own research confronted Husserl with this question. Therefore, it is claimed here that phenomenology underwent a process of immanent development from the thesis of objective reason to the thesis about the correlation of reason and unreason.

The “riddle of reason” was an expression used by Husserl in a note from 19101. He wrote about a “solitude full of mysteries,” the condition of a thinker facing the task of solving “the riddle of the cognition Sphinx.”2 In 1937, after almost thirty years of phenomenological studies, Husserl still spoke of the riddle as the “enigma of all enigmas.”3 Continuously, the riddle of reason resounds today in Husserl’s Nachlass as part of his investigations into the mind and the possibility of cognition. In order to solve the question, Husserl tried to build a phenomenology, a method which he hoped will lighten the field of rationality so “full of mysteries.” Husserl wrote about the necessity to investigate the phenomenology of reason.4 This is why pheno­menology, according to Ernst Wolfgang Orth, is “simply a name for the problem of reason — for human rationality itself.”5 Therefore, it should not be surprising that „[w]e must constantly return … [t]o Husserl’s notion of Reason.”6

In his work entitled The Operative Concepts in Husserl’s Phenomeno­logy, Eugen Fink, Husserl’s assistant and collaborator, introduced a helpful distinction between “thematic” and “operative” concepts. He defined the former in the following way: “[c]onceptualization in philosophy aims intentionally at those concepts in which thought fixes and preserves what is being thought.”7 The latter, by contrast, indicates that thinkers always “… use other concepts and patterns of thought, they operate with intellectual schemata which they do not fix objectively.”8 For Fink, the central and thematic concept of Husserl’s thought is the concept of phenomenological reduction.9 However, inasmuch as we present reduction as a kind of performance (Leistung) of reason, the main theme of phenomenology can be understood to be reason.

In this article, I view reason as a phenomenological “Sache”; to put it precisely, I seek to go back to the “Sache.” In the Preface to his book about Husserl and Fink, Ronald Bruzina writes that “[i]n inquiring into the phenomenological sense of ‘die Sachen selbst,’ no topic and no finding can stand alone. Every ‘Sache’ is a knot of the cross-weaving of many ‘Sachen,’ and the tug along any thread on connection will lead to endlessly many more.”10 Therefore, our search for Husserl’s concept of rationality will necessarily involve the study of many topics. First of all, we will consider the concept of objective reason and its critique. Secondly, we will proceed to reconstruct the question of reason, seeking to discover unreason as a correlative element of the theory of rationality. Finally, the article will outline connections between reason and unreason.

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