Phenomenology & the Causality of Reason

Feb 5, 2005, 12.00am IST
Kailash Vajpeyi.

Phenomenology is descriptive philosophy. It is like a mirror, showing us what is, as it is and as it presents itself. Phenomenology is indifferent to the process of metabolic changes in animate and inanimate entities. From the very beginning it did not start out as transcendental philosophy. It was taken to be descriptive scientific objective which indicated an inner connection with 'As-it-ism'. Thus the doctrine, according to Herbert Marcuse, simply reflects the fate of a world in which rational human freedom always can take only the initial step freely, to encounter words and uncontrolled necessity, remaining contingent with respect to reason. The reason or causality of reason operates in one direction only which cuts out the possibility of the empirical world affecting the intelligible essence of man. Therefore, phenomenology imprisons this essence in a past without future and stands outside of everything that has gone before it.


If one has to describe it, it is prior to everything. When Kant was developing the 'concept of essence' against the roots of transcendental philosophy his theory was questioned by Hegel and his dialectic. The basic problem with most of the European philosophers was that they wanted to establish an ideal philosophy which would cover different trends of thought and provide a new meaning to life. In Plato's theory of ideas, we find a quest for the unity and universality of being. It has been a constant effort of most of the linkers of the world to find a happy solution to the riddle of life. Like all states of being happiness is also a state of being. We can talk around it, we can describe its symbolism, we can stay in this state for a few moments and experience it but we cannot describe it. It is only an experience; the description of such an experience is only the verbalisation of a symbol; at the most the essence of such an experience.


Husserl undertook to propound a new theory of essence. He defines essence in opposition to the individual personality, calling it contingency of facticity of a cosmic order. According to Husserl, facticity is limited by the correlation to a necessity that does not stand for the mere factual existence of a valid rule for the coordination of spatio-temporal facts, rather, it has the character of essential necessity and is thus related wait i will seto essential universality. For Husserl, 'essence' stands for pure subjectivity that remains as a residuum after the phenomenological annihilation of the world and that processed the being of the world as constituting in itself the meaning of that being — a completely self-contained reality — something existing absolutely.


In Formal and Transcendental Logic, Husserl has accepted the fact that Descartes was the originator of transcendental philosophy. His 'ergo cogito' represents only a particle of the world, whereas the area of phenomenology is infinite. Spatio-temporal facts have no relevance in the field of genuine phenomenological study. In fact, the spatio-temporal world is an abstraction posited by consciousness in its experience — all contents of consciousness are exemplary; they may be termed as full fantasies, which from the point of view of phenomenological prehensions of essence, are nothing.

What significance does ergo cogito carry in the realm of infinity? According to Herbert Marcuse: To know does not mean changing or abolishing any aspect of life, But with Husserl, concern with the present is concern with eternity, whose timeless truth is the only solution to our spiritual distress. Husserl declares: "We must not ignore our spiritual distress for the sake of our descendants before it becomes indestructible evil".