- Jeffrey L. Kosky
- Original
Jeffrey L. Kosky
Admitting the phenomenality proper to the phenomenon—its right and its power to show itself on its own terms—thus implies understanding it in terms of givenness. Husserl, summing up at the end of his career what was gained in his first “breakthrough work,” the Logical Investigations, indicates exactly what change was demanded of philosophical thought: “It was there (in 1901) that evidence’ (that dead logical idol) was transformed into a problem for the first time, freed from the privilege accorded scientific evidence and broadened to include the universality of original self-givenness (zur allgemeinen originale Selbstgebung erweiter)”. What broadening is being referred to here? No doubt the broadening of (Kantian) sensible intuition to categorical intuition. But Husserl is not concerned solely with the question of intuition here; and for that matter, this broadening itself must be justified. In fact, what is at issue is, more universally, the broadening of evidence to givenness. Broadening or deepening, or—because the “depths” would here seem more disputable than profitable—transformation. Why, that is, does Husserl disqualify evidence as a mere dead idol? Why didn’t he instead privilege its use, as well as the whole semantic network that connects it to the gaze, sight, the truth, etc.? Precisely because he redefined it radically —for sight and the gaze would see absolutely nothing if evidence remained a mere subjective impression, an effect of consciousness, in short an idolatrous mirror where the mind refers to itself an impression that impresses only it. For evidence not to close itself up in a simple idol of the gaze and not to remain a dead letter (one that consciousness sends to itself), what is necessary, with an absolute phenomenological necessity, is that evidence give more than a state or lived experience of consciousness, that it carry in its clarity the appearing of a nonconscious, a nonlived, a nonthought. What is needed is that on its screen there be projected and come forward something other than it—the unevident, the phenomenon itself. For this paradox must be admitted: the phenomenon remains, inasmuch as it is an instance exterior to consciousness, completely unevident, since evidence is defined as a mode or state of consciousness alone, independent from and indifferent to a possible transcendence. One cannot, solely on the basis of the criterion of evidence, demarcate solipsistic evidence from a things evidence. In order for evidence to decide by itself between a film without depth and the figure of a reality, in short for it to be able to let the phenomenon be seen, or rather, let it appear, a new term has to be introduced—givenness. Evidence sees nothing if givenness does not give it to let appear what does not belong to it, the essential unevidence of appearing as phenomenal appearing. For phenomenology does not begin with appearing or evidence (otherwise it would remain identical to metaphysics), but with the discovery, as difficult as it is stupefying, that the evidence, blind in itself, can become the screen of appearing—the place of givenness. Place of givenness, therefore not its origin but rather its point of arrival: the origin of givenness remains the “self” of the phenomenon, with no other principle or origin besides itself. “Self-givenness, Selbstgebung, donation de soi” indicates that the phenomenon is given in person, but also and especially that it is given of itself and starting from itself. Only this givenness, having originated in itself, can give the self of the phenomenon and invest evidence with the dignified rank of guardian of phenomenality, uprooting it from its idolatrous death. Of course, this change from dead evidence to evidence charged with givenness is enacted only through the operation of the reduction, but the reduction would not produce any phenomenological advance if it was limited to reducing evidence to the real immanence of lived experiences, however certain they might be. It draws its legitimacy and its fruitfulness only from serving givenness, from which, like evidence (though in an other mode), it receives all. Givenness gives life to the reduction as much as to the evidence, since it alone gives them charge over phenomenality.