2—
Husserl's Transcendental Gaze:
Controlling Unruly Metaphors

I know the world I converse with in the city and in the farms is not the world I think.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Experience"^[1]

The phenomenological reduction that seeks the pure ego, beyond being, could not be secured by the effect of a writing, when the ink of the world stains the fingers that put this world between parentheses.
Emmanuel Levinas, "No Identity"^[2]

See the sun again with an ignorant eye / And see it clearly in the idea of it.
Wallace Stevens, "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction"^[3]

La lucidité est la blessure la plus rapprochée du soleil.
René Char, "Feuillets d'Hypnos"^[4]

La question à se poser sans cesse: par où et comment rendre la nuit du rève aux hommes.
René Char, "Aversions"^[5]

The inspirations of mother earth dawn from the melancholic's night of brooding [Grübelnacht ] like treasures from the earth; lightning-quick intuition is foreign to it.
Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels^[6]

I—
The Transcendental Viewpoint

Can there truly be a transcendental viewing-point? Does this thought make sense? Is there not something paradoxical in the very thought that the transcendental can be identified with a viewing-point? For Husserl, the paradoxicality, the uncanniness of this thought—if it occurred to him at all—would only have multiplied his passionate questioning of the possibilities of rational life—and of the prospects for their actualization in our time. The challenge, for him, was how, as a philosopher, he could overcome the

prevailing "blindness to the transcendental," the "Blindheit für das Transzendentale" that afflicts our contemporary culture.^[7] Because, from his vantage point, Europe was moving at an ever-accelerating speed into the vortex of a crisis—and it was clear to him that to a greater extent than his contemporaries would see, the crisis "has its roots in a misguided rationalism"—a "verirrenden Rationalismus."^[8]

In lectures given in Vienna early in May 1935, Husserl was so alarmed by the turn of events in Europe that he came out of his philosophical withdrawal and allowed himself to express, in words no longer so restrained, the dimensions of his vision, his sustaining hope and faith—almost, one might say, a dream—that, through the auspices of philosophical thought,

man gradually becomes a new man. His spiritual being enters into the movement of an advancing reconstruction. This movement proceeds from the beginning in a communicative way, awakens a new style of personal existence in one's sphere of life, a correspondingly new becoming through communicative understanding [Nachverstehen ]. Within this movement at first (and then later even beyond it) there grows a new sort of humanity, one which, living in finitude, lives toward poles of infinity. Precisely in this way, there arises a new type of communalization [Vergemeinschaftung ] and a new form of enduring community [fortdauernde Gemeinschaft ] whose spiritual life, communalized [vergemeinschaftetes ] through the love of ideas, the production of ideas [Ideenerzeugung ], and through ideal life-norms [Lebensnormierung ], bears within itself the future horizon of infinity: that of an infinity of generations being renewed in the spirit of ideas.^[9]

With words that, in spite of vigorous protestations, continue to echo Hegel, Husserl declares that, "only when spirit returns from its naive external orientation to itself, and remains with itself and purely with itself, can it be sufficient unto itself."^[10]

Somehow, the populations of Europe, and ultimately those of the entire world, must learn to see with eyes under the rule of reason. Somehow, humanity must find its way to "a life of reason," for only that, Husserl believes, will make us "selig," "blessed."^[11] And it is, for Husserl, the task of the philosopher to show the way. It is a question, he says, of "a universal responsibility," and first and foremost, the "self-responsibility" ("universale Selbstverantwortlichkeit") of the philosopher, whose assumption of this task is a necessary condition for the achievement of "autonomy" ("Autonomie").^[12] One may well, then, ask: To what extent is our historical, culturally predominant way of seeing responsible for the crisis that it now can (begin to) see? What is the moral responsibility of our culturally

reproduced way of looking and seeing? How—exactly—is the very "intelligibility" (my translation of Husserl's word "Einsichtigkeit") of our world-order, the very "intelligibility" of our web of sociocultural beliefs, customs, and practices, the moral responsibility of the philosopher? And how, or why, is this a responsibility for sight and insight?

For Husserl, the paradigm of rationality seems inextricably bound up with looking and seeing: so much so that it is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine expounding his ideal of reason without the rhetorical resources—the metaphors and allegorical associations—of the discourse of vision. "Self-responsibility" means, first of all, that "he who philosophizes proceeds from his own ego, and this purely as the performer of all his validities [Vollzieher aller seiner Geltungen ], of which he becomes the purely theoretical spectator [rein theoretischen Zuschauer ].^[13] We must therefore "perform [vollziehen ] the epokhé  . . . ; it is through this abstention that the gaze of the philosopher [der Blick des Philosophen ] in truth first becomes fully free: above all, free of the strongest and most hidden, internal bond, namely the pregivenness of the world."^[14] And this requires that we attempt "to understand the path of motivation, the path of the bestowal and creation of meaning which leads from the mere reorientation, from mere thaumazein , to theoria —a historical fact that nevertheless must have something essential about it. We must clarify the transformation from original theoria , the fully disinterested seeing of the world, . . . to the theoria of genuine science, the two being mediated through the contrast of doxa and epistemé ."^[15] And we must clarify in the pure light of reason—and for a gaze absolutely committed to the purest evidence of reason—all our fundamental inherited meanings, all the inherited concepts (the Sinngebilde ) on which our cultural life has been built.^[16] For Husserl, this can be accomplished only in so far as the philosopher "withdraws into himself" in a rigorously methodical way, i.e., by means of [1] the phenomenological epokhé and [2] the transcendental reduction, and "establishes himself as 'disinterested onlooker' above the naively interested Ego."^[17] In this peculiarly unconditioned condition, in a state of totally suspended engagement, "absolutely self-responsible," completely freed from all presuppositions and prejudices (Vorurteile ), the philosopher is able to perform "absolute insights, insights behind which one cannot go back any farther" and thereby to reconstruct all our crucial concepts, giving them at last the rational clarification of sense (Sinn ) that they require.^[18]

Read in the context of our current postmetaphysical disposition, this philosophy seems vulnerable to challenges from many different directions. Here, though only briefly, we will consider some of the contestations for-

mulated by Theodor Adorno, one of Husserl's most astute and most insightful critics, in spite of an occasional stubborn unfairness. In his early work on Husserl, Against Epistemology: A Metacritique , Adorno easily acknowledged Husserl's greatness and importance, whilst also pointing out some major problems and blind spots in the project.^[19] Adorno liked Husserl's critiques of positivism and naturalism, realism and idealism; and he also, therefore, was in sympathy with Husserl's attempt to construct for his thinking an autonomous position, a critical viewing-point, outside, or at least not (totally) within the force-field of the prevailing order of reason. But he could not concur with Husserl's extreme version of transcendentalism, which not only suspended the prevailing order of beliefs, practices, and judgments, but in a certain sense entirely removed the thinking subject from the world, thereby making it impossible for the philosopher to think and enact such dialectical mediations between subject and object, subject and world as his moral conscience—or, say, moral self-responsibility—would require. Husserl, he says,

rebels against idealist thinking whilst attempting to break through the walls of idealism with purely idealist instruments, namely, by an exclusive analysis of the structure of thought and consciousness.^[20]

In fact, he argues, Husserl is the most uncompromising of all the idealists, insofar as the objective of transcendental phenomenology is "to get hold of the Absolute and, in the last analysis, to deduce with an absolute stringency everything from one absolute point [of sight]."^[21]

On the one hand, Adorno could recognize in Husserl's "struggle against psychologism" the "freeing of critical reason from the prejudices contained in the naive and uncritical religion of 'facts', which he challenged in its psychological form."^[22] Thus he declared: "It is this element of Husserl's philosophy in which I see even today its 'truth.'"^[23] But, on the other hand, he could not overlook the abstract idealism, for which, it seemed, Husserl's ocularcentrism, his peculiar commitment to visualism, must bear some responsibility:

There was no other philosopher in his time in whose thought terms like "dynamics" or "process" played so small a role as in Husserl's, except for his last period. He used to interpret thinking not as action but as looking at things, that is, quietly facing them like pictures in a gallery. . . . From his mathematical beginnings to the very end he was concerned only with the justification of verités éternelles , and for the passing phenomena he held all the contempt of the classical rationalist. In brief, he was the most static thinker of his period.^[24]

Given Husserl's willingness, even if only in the realm of logic, to accept the authority of what he described, in his Logische Untersuchungen , for example, as a "mere looking" ("blob en Hinblick"),^[25] it is certainly difficult to deny the charges that Adorno makes.

The paradox on which Adorno puts his finger—a paradox that is also perhaps touched with a certain sense of irony—is that a position constructed precisely in order to make rational critique possible could end up too detached from its object for effective rational intervention:

uncritically and in contemplative passivity it lays out an inventory of the thing world as that world is presented to it in the reigning order. . . . The phenomenologist correctly says of the epokhé: "We have properly lost nothing". . . . He declares himself satisfied with a formal title of possession over the accepted "world."^[26]

Husserl's visualism encourages this passive, contemplative interpretation of reason and its task. And yet, whilst relying heavily on visualism, Husserl, like Descartes, attempts to suspend and, in effect, split off literal sight, so that he can, by a rhetorical transfer of sense, resume vision in a metaphorical sense—as the acts of a transcendentally purified Ego. Adorno does not miss this sleight of hand, tricking the incarnate eye:

Phenomenologically speaking, it belongs to the sense of seeing that it be "with one's eyes," and would not just be casual reflection and theoretical explanation. Seeing simply could not be conceived without eyes nor hearing without ears. . . . The deictic method, which . . . seeks to seize the sense [Sinn ] perceptually given, must expressly or not appeal to the sense organs in order to "show" in some way what may be sensed and what is sense-perception. The "I" which givenness necessarily requires is the subject as something sense-perceptually determined, one that can see and hear—and just that is denied to a transcendental or pure subject.^[27]

In an important note on the transcendental suspension of the signifying body, Adorno pursues a point that Merleau-Ponty broached rather more gently in the "Introduction" to his Phenomenology of Perception . Similarly challenging the claim that the transcendental reduction or suspension can ever be complete, Adorno argues that

the fact that fields of sensation are attributed to the body should be of immeasurable significance for the starting point of phenomenology, if the inferences were drawn from the description. . . . The admission of such a unity [of organ and perceptible hyle ], however, yields up nothing less than the fact that sensation, in Husserl's doctrine the immedi-

ate, irreducible factual state of the transcendental ego, cannot be isolated from the sense organs at all. . . . The constituens would be as dependent on the constitutum as vice versa. At this point, Husserl's analysis must cease, unless it wants to rupture the entire epokhé by a finding gained within it.^[28]

For Adorno, what is crucial is the dialectical mediation—and this means, on the one hand, that there must be sufficient distance between subject and world to make the subject relatively autonomous, but, on the other hand, that there must be sufficient connectedness to enable the subject to engage the world in critical interventions. In any case, even if a spectator were able in some methodic and systematic way to "suspend" all his worldly "interests" and disengage from all his beliefs about the world, he still would not be compelled—or even necessarily disposed—to exercise in relation to the world a capacity for rational and critical reflection. In today's world, there are already too many people willing to assume the position and perspective of detached, disinterested spectator, looking at their world with eyes of resignation, the downcast eyes of submission or eyes blinked shut in blind consent.

In "Zum Ende," the concluding note to Minima Moralia , Adorno boldly declares his philosophical faith and explains his understanding of the task to which he felt himself called. The note is long, but its relevance to our present reflections on Husserl's visualism and his assumption of the transcendental viewpoint perhaps justifies quoting it here in its entirety:

The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light. To gain such perspectives without velleity or violence, entirely from felt contact with its objects—this alone is the task of thought. It is the simplest of things, because the situation calls imperatively for such knowledge, indeed because consummate negativity, once squarely faced, delineates the mirror-image of its opposite. But it is also the utterly impossible thing, because it presupposes a standpoint removed, even though by a hair's breadth, from the scope of existence, whereas we well know that any possible knowledge must not only be first wrested from what is, if it shall hold good, but is also marked, for this very reason, by the same distortion and indigence which it seeks to escape. The more passionately thought denies its conditionality for the sake of the

unconditional, the more unconsciously, and so calamitously, it is delivered up to the world. Even its own impossibility it must at last comprehend for the sake of the possible. But beside the demand thus placed on thought, the question of the reality or unreality of redemption itself hardly matters.^[29]

Now, the first thing to notice is the extent to which Adorno's own thinking, here, is bound up with the rhetoric of light and vision. Although there is nothing in the text to suggest that Adorno was thinking of Husserl, it is, I think, striking how effectively it bears on Husserl's project.

Nearing the end of his life, Husserl, as we know, allowed himself to speak of our spiritual destiny, of the blessedness, the Seligkeit , promised by a life of reason. We also know that the life of reason meant, for him, a life in search of the unconditioned, a life, therefore, in which the apodeictic contemplation of essential truths would play a crucial role. Finally, we know that he believed such contemplation to be possible only from a position, a perspective, "removed . . . from the scope of existence," free of the worldly conditions the hidden intelligibility of which it is called upon to render manifest. These thoughts, expressed without his usual reserve in some of the texts assembled in the Crisis , certainly attest the depth of his anxiety, and perhaps betray a certain despair. But can we say that they constitute an "attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption"? In these late texts, we can certainly see that Husserl is resuming the great project of the Enlightenment, and that it therefore would not, perhaps, be misrepresenting his vision of transcendental phenomenology to suggest that it implies—or even in a certain sense practices and is—an ethics of lucidity. But is the light to which it aspires, or the illumination by which it is guided, the messianic light of redemption?

Would it be entirely foolish to read into Husserl's epokhé the motivating conviction that, as Adorno put it, "perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day," if not "in the messianic light," then in the light of an ideal rationality, an ideal consciousness, that Husserl knows, deep down, to be impossible, but toward which, even "in the face of despair," he will nevertheless strive—and all the more passionately, the more it eludes his reach?

To be sure, Adorno enables us to catch sight of a certain performative contradiction in Husserl's thought, indeed a certain perilous darkness and unconsciousness obscured by the very brightness of the thinker's vision: "The more passionately thought denies its conditionality for the sake of the

unconditioned, the more unconsciously, and so calamitously, it is delivered up to the world." And yet, in the end, does it not seem that Adorno himself effectuates an epokhé , a suspension of sense, closing his final note with a sentence, not at all of condemnation, but rather of admiration—the deepest respect for a thinker whose most impossible thought is wholeheartedly sacrificed "for the sake of the possible"? Adorno's final thought: "But beside the demand thus placed on thought, the question of the reality or unreality of redemption itself hardly matters."

II—
Husserl's Obsession with Vision

In his "Introduction" to the first volume of Ideas , first published in 1913, Husserl proclaims "a new way of looking at things," declaring that it is necessary that we philosophers "learn to see what stands before our eyes."^[30] Years later, after a lifetime of thought, Husserl confidently announces, in his Cartesian Meditations , that a "science whose peculiar nature is unprecedented comes into our field of vision."^[31] The phenomenological program inaugurated in the Ideas set the stage for Husserl's unwavering commitment to an ocular paradigm of knowledge, truth, and reality: "Immediate 'seeing' [Sehen ], not merely the sensory seeing of experience [Erfahrung ], but seeing in general as primordial dator consciousness of any kind whatsoever , is the ultimate source of justification for all rational statements."^[32] We must, he says, "fix our eyes steadily upon the sphere of consciousness."^[33]

Even a cursory reading of Husserl's writings, surveying his lifetime of work from the early Logical Investigations of 1901 through the late lectures and manuscripts of 1936, cannot but be struck by Husserl's ocularcentrism: his reliance on a vision-generated, vision-oriented rhetoric—and, as Derrida puts it, "the privilege given to vision."^[34] And not only his reliance on the tropes of light and vision, but also, more extensively, his apparently inescapable dependence on metaphors of all sorts. But this dependency and reliance would not be the catastrophe that it is for his philosophical program, were it not for the fact that the logic of his visualism tempted him to envision an uncompromisingly total suspension or bracketing of existential referentiality and an absolutely uncompromised clarity and determinacy of meaning.

Thus, in the meaning-structures constituted within the transcendental domain of phenomenology, he will not tolerate any disruptive forms of language: no luxuriant tropes, no unruly metaphors, no shades of meaning, no formations of meaning that would give way to what Mallarmé called a

"vibrating center of suspense,"^[35] nothing that could not be brought within the grasp of the pure transcendental gaze. But vision, whether it be literal or figurative, a proper sense or a most improper sense, cannot possibly satisfy and fulfill the transcendental conditions that Husserl requires. For the discourse of light and vision becomes altogether incomprehensible if it needs to deny shades and shadows, horizons and darkness, viewpoints and perspectives. Husserl wants all the advantages of light and vision, wants their gift of lucidity, wants their promise of apodeictic metaphysical presence—but without any of the sacrifices which perspectivism—the reality of light and vision—imposes.

In Time and the Other , Levinas remarks that "De Waelhens reckons that the reason which prompted Husserl to shift from descriptive intuition to transcendental analysis resulted from an identification of intelligibility and construction—pure vision not [yet] being intelligibility."^[36] He, however, reads Husserl differently:

I think, to the contrary, that the Husserlian notion of vision already implies intelligibility. To see is already to render the encountered object one's own, as drawn from one's own ground. In this sense, "transcendental constitution" is but a way of seeing in full clarity. It is a completion of vision.^[37]

But when is vision ever complete? Perhaps such completeness makes sense as a regulative ideal. But can it ever make sense as a constitutive ideal? To be sure, Husserl shifted, as Levinas and De Waelhens point out, from descriptive intuition to transcendental analysis. However, he never renounced the ocularcentrism that made his theoretism, his "strenge Wissenschaft," seem to be a feasible philosophical enterprise; nor was he ever prepared to accept the "natural" and "proper" implications of his most improper use of vision-generated rhetoric. To the end, he was as if entranced by what Adorno calls "the magic glance of intuition."^[38]

Furthermore, even if it be admitted that, in a certain sense, Husserlian vision is already, as Levinas says, evidence and intelligibility, still we must insist on the fact that this vision of intelligibility is, and must be, discursively constructed. If natural vision necessarily fails the test of transcendental originality, metaphysical presence and clarity, then it can only be a question of a gaze peculiarly constructed in and by the discourse of transcendental philosophy. And yet, Husserl will explicitly acknowledge neither the discursive constructedness of his philosophical gaze—nor therefore the peculiar liabilities and vulnerabilities that attend this origin in a discourse, a rhetoric, irremediably contaminated by the loose talk and

idle chatter of the so-called natural attitude. Levinas is therefore justified in arguing that

Husserl will have taught us that the reduction of naivety immediately calls for new reductions, that the grace of intuition involves gratuitous ideas, and that, if philosophizing consists in assuring oneself of an absolute origin, the philosopher will have to efface the trace of his own footsteps and unendingly efface the traces of the effacing of the traces, in an interminable methodological movement staying where it is.^[39]

The truth that Husserl will not admit is that he is engaged in the discursive construction of an intellectual vision—a rational intuition—and that the way this vision functions is never really immediate, as Husserl claims, but is always itself merely a transitory moment in the arduous discursive process whereby a philosophically certified gaze and, correspondingly, a philosophically admissible evidence are to be achieved. "Achieved": that means, said in language—said in a language that can never be reduced to the immanence of transcendental experience.

The transcendental purity of Husserl's language is threatened by his surprisingly free use of figurative discourse and a rich vocabulary drawn from, and inseparable from, mundane experience in the "natural attitude": terms such as "secure foundation," "founding stratum," "copy"; phrases such as "shine forth" and "reflecting back as from a mirror."^[40] To be sure, Husserl is aware of his borrowings: "We spoke metaphorically of a 'mental glance' or 'glancing ray' of the pure Ego, of its turning toward or away."^[41] And he warns against taking his figurative language too seriously, too "literally," i.e., too figuratively. Such language is not really proper, not really appropriate to the nature of the phenomena: "We should not hold too hard," he says, "by the metaphor of stratification; expression is not [really] of the nature of an overlaid varnish or covering garment."^[42] Indeed, all "these figures of speech which have here thrust themselves upon us, those of mirroring and copying, must be adopted with caution, as the imaginativeness which colours their application might easily mislead us."^[43] But such warnings and demonstrations of caution are far from sufficient: as long as any mundaneity at all clings to the words on which he depends, and as long as there are words the meanings of which cannot be limited to their explicitly meant determination, the transcendental authority of his phenomenological claims is hopelessly defended.

In "Force and Signification," Derrida questions and problematizes "the metaphor of darkness and light (of self-revelation and self-concealment), the founding metaphor of Western philosophy as metaphysics."^[44] Among philosophers of the twentieth century, both Husserl and Heidegger may be

charged with this ocularcentrism—although they differ in that, whereas Husserl relies mostly on constellations of meaning related to the gaze, Heidegger relies mostly on constellations of meaning related to concealment and unconcealment, and thus to darkness and light. Derrida's challenge continues, pressing a point that applies more, if at all, to Husserl than to the most eminent of his students: "In this heliocentric metaphysics, force, ceding its place to eidos (i.e., the form which is visible for the metaphorical eye), has already been separated from itself in acoustics. How can force or weakness be understood in terms of light and dark?"^[45] It must, I think, be conceded that Husserl's method resists the recognition of force—is even designed precisely to evade or exclude the force-fields that would jeopardize a transcendental grasp of meaning. But it is not obvious that, or why, force and weakness cannot be understood within the discourse of light and dark. After all, Jewish and Christian theologies have given us many texts stained with the blood of wars, wars said to be between the forces of light and the forces of darkness.

Nevertheless, Derrida is surely correct when he argues, in "'Genesis and Structure' and Phenomenology," that an ocularcentric philosophy generates a virtually irresistible temptation to reify, totalize, and homogenize, and reduce the forces of temporality and historicity to a state of eternal presentness.^[46] Adorno advances a similar argument in Against Epistemology , observing that Husserl's methodological imperative to "stare fixedly at 'states-of-affairs'" turns becoming into being, processes into states, contingent events into permanent essences.^[47] And Levinas, too, in En Découvrant l'Existence , points out the exclusion of historicity when clarity is awarded the title of supreme principle.^[48]

But Husserl is not quite so easily indicted. Whatever the issue, his thinking almost always pulls him in opposing directions. In Ideas , for example, he reflects on the fact that, in the discourse of philosophers, "it is usual to compare attention with an illuminating light." But this reflection leads at once to the articulation of a phenomenological version of attention that registers a certain distance from earlier theories:

What is attended to, in the specific sense, subsists in the more or less bright cone of light, but can also shade off into the half-shadow and into the full darkness. Little as the image suffices to inculcate with the proper distinctness all modes calling for phenomenological fixing, it is still significant as pointing to changes in that which appears as such. . . . [For] brightness and darkness modify its mode of appearing: they are to be found in the directing of the glance to the noematic object and the described.^[49]

Although he reminds us, here, in a way that recalls William James, that attention, like the light to which it is assimilated, "can also shade off into the half-shadow and into the full darkness," there is no hint of anxiety or doubt concerning the clarity and distinctness of the boundary he wants to draw between experiences (Erlebnisse ) that are immanent and experiences (Erfahrungen ) that are transcendent. Nor is there any trace of anxiety or doubt concerning the possibility of achieving, through the phenomenological and transcendental "reductions," a mode of attention—immanent apperception—from which shadows and darkness would be absolutely excluded.

In spite of this persistent ocularcentrism, Husserl is nevertheless surprisingly critical—in fact strongly, sharply critical—of the so-called picture theory of the mind: neither its activity nor the product of its activity, namely meaning, can be understood in terms of the presence of images or pictures in an inner mental space. We must avoid being "misled," he says in the second of his Logical Investigations , "into taking the inner pictures which are found to accompany our names as the meanings of those names."^[50] This reinforces the position he takes in the preceding "Investigation," where, much to his credit, he challenges us, in a rhetorical style very much like that of the later Wittgenstein, to find any mental images corresponding to the attribution of a state of understanding:

Let a man read a work in the abstract field of knowledge, and understand the author's assertions perfectly, and let him try to see what more there is to such reading than the words he understands.^[51]

He even presses this attack on the picture theory so far, here, that he declares, quite at odds with his later inclinations, that, "if the meaningful is not to be found in intuition, speech without intuition need not be speech deprived of thought."^[52]

Moreover, whether or not two people have the same inner sensation or inner percept is not at all necessary for their ability to understand the meaning of a perceptual statement about the world.^[53] By the same token, he argues, as will Heidegger some years later, against a foreshortening of intentionality—a foreshortening, that is, of our contact with the world—insisting that "I do not [at first and immediately] see colour-sensations, but rather see coloured things; I do not [at first and immediately] hear tone-sensations, but the singer's song, etc."^[54] And yet, in spite of this unequivocal repudiation of image theories, Husserl still can somehow turn to describe tactile experiences as "perceptual images"!^[55]

In Against Epistemology , Adorno makes a comment on Husserl's position that brings out what might be considered the most consequential of his hidden contradictions, and he turns this critical moment, a moment in the discourse of profane illuminations, into a passage that returns us to a sacred covenant, the Jewish prohibition of images:

If the early genuinely phenomenological Husserl convincingly polemicizes against the image and sign theories of cognition, then that polemic could also be turned against the sublimated idea that cognition is a picture of its object through resemblance or adaequatio . Only with the idea of an imageless truth would philosophy retrieve the prohibition of images [Bilderverbot ].^[56]

But of course Adorno's interest in retrieving this prohibition does not derive from a desire to revive a sense of absolutely transcendent divinity; rather, it comes from an intense concern, essentially political, that the doctrine of intentionality will simply perpetuate the oppressive logic of identity: if he is afraid that philosophers will continue to "fulfill" what they suppose to be utopian images by giving them a content, a noematic sense, which merely repeats the prevailing conditions of social reality, he is equally afraid that this doctrine, conceived in sympathy with a correspondence theory of truth, will, in effect, reify and fetishize the presentness of the present social reality.

III—
Rays and Beams:
A Rational Reconstruction of Visual Intentionality

What if Husserl had seen intentionality as the unquestionable evidence of our connectedness, as so many threads by which we are woven into the world—threads that no nightwork can unravel? Wallace Stevens saw the intertwining, and likened the effect of its binding to the effect of a tattoo:

There are filaments of your eyes
On the surface of the water
And in the edges of the snow.^[57]

In question, here, are Husserl's Blickstrahlen , his rendering of the intentionality of the gaze (be it ever so immanent) as rays and beams. It is in the texts of this rendering that we finally confront, and can no longer deny, the unsettling truth that, in the guise of rigorous, faithful, and accurate phenomenological description, leaving the phenomenon in all essentials perfectly intact, essentially as it was, Husserl is passionately engaged in a rational reconstruction of vision—bent on altering, or more precisely on el-

evating, not only the gaze of the "self-responsible" philosopher, but also, ultimately, eventually, even the ordinary, "natural" gaze of every man, woman, and child. To the extent, that is, that such ways of looking and seeing remain deeply entangled in the irrationality of images, shadows, perspectival adumbrations, and distorting reflections, instead of striving to attain, through "inwardness," the clarity and intelligibility of rational insight.

But if we must accuse Husserl of a certain unwitting sleight of hand—the sacrifice of phenomenological description and the substitution of a "rational" reconstruction—we cannot avoid the next consequential step: noticing, namely, that this reconstruction is much more than, is finally indeed something quite other than, an innocent reconstruction, merely giving the phenomenon a clarity of definition, an intentional meaning-fulfillment, more satisfying to the vanity of reason; noticing, rather, that the gaze which this modestly presented "phenomenology" discursively constructs not only is unfaithful to the phenomenon—to our experience with vision just as it is lived—but undergoes alterations, in the name of a more sublime principle of reason, which in reality have imposed untold suffering and rendered our sight capable of unimaginable monstrosities: witnessing cruelties untouched by tears; creating visions of utopia that send humanity into endless nights of living hell.

Levinas is therefore justified in arguing, in "Diachrony and Representation," that "in thought understood as vision, knowledge and intentionality, intelligibility signifies the reduction of the other [autre ] to the same, synchrony as being in its egological gathering."^[58] "Seeing or knowing, and taking in hand, are," he explains, "tied together in the very structure of intentionality. It remains the intrigue of a thought that recognizes itself in consciousness: the 'now' [main-tenance ] of the present emphasizes immanence as the very excellence of this thought."^[59]

Although, to be sure, affective detachment and everything that this promotes—for example, the violence inherent in reification, homogenization, and totalization, as well as the drive to achieve clarity and distinctness in the immediacy of self-evidence—certainly represent strong tendencies latent in vision that, with only a little encouragement easily assert themselves, even to the point of predominance, we need to recognize the fact that Husserl undertakes a most artful reconstruction of ordinary, everyday vision: an artificial construction that, blinded by a certain conceit of reason, selectively favors just these tendencies and proceeds in a methodical way to abstract them from the unenlightened "nature" of vision. We need, therefore, to question this construction; and since there could be other constructions, constructions that would bring out, or bring forth, other latent

tendencies, making it possible for us to develop other potentials inherent in the nature of vision, we need to consider whether or not, in the final analysis, when all is said and done, the gaze that Husserl has constructed really serves the interests of reason. Reason, that is, as we presently find ourselves wanting to understand it.

Without quite realizing it, Heidegger puts his finger on the nightmare implicit in Husserl's reconstruction. In his Introduction to Metaphysics , Heidegger observes that, in our present epoch,

all understanding, as a fundamental mode of disclosure, must move in a definite line of sight . The nature of this thing, the clock for example, remains closed to us unless we know something in advance about such things as time, reckoning with time, the measurement of time. The line of sight must be laid down in advance. We call it the "perspective", the track of foresight [Vorblickbahn ]. Thus we shall see not only that being is not understood in an indeterminate way, but that the determinate understanding of being moves in a certain predetermined perspective. . . . We have become immersed (not to say lost) in this perspective, this line of sight which sustains and guides all our understanding of being. And what makes our immersion all the more complete as well as the more hidden is that even the Greeks did not and could not bring this perspective to light, and this for essential reasons.^[60]

With Heidegger's words in mind, let us return to Husserl and read some passages from his published writings, beginning with the 1901 Investigations .

[1] As early as his Logical Investigations , for example, Husserl was thinking of intentionality in terms of rays: single-rayed and many-rayed objectifying acts.^[61]

[2] Ideas I, §27, p. 92: Husserl speaks, here, without reservation, without cautionary words, of "rays from the illuminating focus of attention."

[3] Ideas I, §37, p. 109: "To the cogito itself belongs an immanent 'glancing towards' the object, a directedness which from another side springs forth from the 'Ego.'"

[4] Ideas I, §57, p. 156: Husserl asserts, but with scare-quotes which somehow fail to be sufficiently scary, that the Ego's " 'glance' goes 'through' every actual cogito and toward the object. This visual ray changes with every cogito , shooting forth afresh with each new one as it comes."

[5] Ideas I, §77, p. 199: "Immanent reflection" is described as a Blick , a focused glance.

[6] Ideas I, §78, p. 207: Using, as always, as in all his writings, the masculine gender, betraying his assumption that "the philosopher" must be a man, Husserl says: "As his glance [Blick ] turns toward the experience, it

[the eidos , the essence] thus becomes that which now offers itself to his gaze; and as he looks away, it becomes something else."

[7] Ideas I, §84, p. 223: In a section bearing the title "Intentionality as the Main Phenomenological Theme," Husserl maintains that "in every wakeful cogito , a 'glancing' ray from the pure Ego is directed upon the 'object' of the correlate of consciousness for the time being, [i.e., it is directed upon] the thing, the fact, and so forth, and enjoys the typically varied consciousness of it." (Also see §119, p. 310.)

[8] Ideas I, §92, p. 249: Husserl claims, here, believing himself to be providing a phenomenological description absolutely faithful to the phenomenon, just as it gives itself to us in our immediately lived experience, that "the attending ray [of intentionality] gives itself out as radiating from the pure Ego and as terminating in the objectivity, being directed towards or deviating from it. The shaft of attention is not separated from the Ego, but itself is and remains personal."

[9] Ideas I, §92, p. 247: Husserl speaks, here, of "the fixing of the beam of attention in its own appointed circuit."

[10] Ideas I, §101, p. 271: Now Husserl describes intentionality in terms of a "line of reflective vision," as "either a 'straightforward' or a 'reflecting' line of vision." (In Le Temps et l'Autre , Levinas calls our attention to "la droiture du rayon intentionnel" in Husserl's phenomenology and suggests the urgent need for an intentionality, a gaze, that connects by "detours.")^[62]

[11] Ideas I, §122, p. 315: The Ego, Husserl says, "does not live within the theses [that it posits] as a passive indweller; the theses radiate from it as from a primary source of generation."

[12] Ideas I, §123, p. 318: Venturing into the realm of the concrete, Husserl gives us a moment from his own experience: "Perhaps we recall a proof, a theory, a conversation—it 'occurs to us'. And yet at first we are not turned toward it; it must emerge from the 'background'. Then a personal glance is turned single-raywise upon it."

Perhaps these passages will suffice to make the necessary point.^[63] In question is whether or not intentionality has other shapes and configurations, which Husserl's rationalism cannot see: undulating waves, for example, and threads and tendrils. The more we take into account the prepersonal body of experience, the more such shapes and configurations catch our attention. Also in question: whether or not Husserl can exercise total control over what Adorno calls "the Medusa's glance": "the Medusa's glance of a sudden 'ray of vision.' "^[64]

The gaze that Husserl attempts—discursively—to construct is a geometrical gaze, linear, rectilinear, straight, direct, frontal; its focus is hard, narrow, sharply pointed: precisely what tempts us to consent to the domination of Vorhandensein , that "theoretical" ontology which, though valuable in its appropriate domain, can also become oppressive and violent when fetishized and universalized. The gaze Husserl describes is an artificial gaze, the peculiarly unnatural product of his unacknowledged artifice. Presenting us with a carefully manufactured gaze in the disguise of a phenomenologically transcribed experience, Husserl assumes that he can bring the gaze under his "rational" control. But, whether this gaze, this intentionality of rays and beams, is meant literally or figuratively, it resists, mocks, and ultimately annihilates this attempt at control. The gaze is ultimately unruly; and even the most cautious use of ocularcentric metaphors will ultimately subvert the artifice and conceit in Husserl's rationalism. There is just no way to secure a fixed center of focus, no way to control all the shades and shadows, the mirror-play of reflections, the darkness beyond the horizon, the contingencies at the margins, the spontaneous transgressions of the periphery, the anarchy lurking in the background. (See Ideas I, §35, p. 107, on focal vs. peripheral intentionalities.) Even Husserl's rays and beams, at first sight so straight and direct, so perfectly suited to satisfy the imperative of lucidity, can suddenly bend and curve, twisting free of an imposed rationality. In fact, by dint of a certain magic in metaphor, utterly beyond rational control, they may even assume the sinister character that they would bear under the stress of a Cartesian madness.

"The eye," as Emerson knows it, "is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end."^[65] He also says, in another essay, that "there is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title."^[66] To be sure, Husserl understands that, as he already puts it in his Logical Investigations , "a great deal is marginally noticed."^[67] But what about all that is not noticed—all that in fact is not noticeable ? What about all the things and events that fall outside the controlled circle of the rational gaze? Husserl wants to eat his cake and yet keep it around so he can look at it and contemplate it! So at one moment, he will freely acknowledge the presence of shadows, the background, the horizon, the invisible; whilst at another moment he will blithely continue his discourse on the apodeictic character of transcendentally purified evidence, serenely avoiding any entanglement in the phenomenology of

their "unruly" presence. What he gives with one hand, he takes back with the other.

What Adorno has to say, citing Benjamin, in criticism of the old masters of the dialectic—those philosophers who betray the dialectic they profess to practice by submitting it to the totalitarian logic of identity—also applies, mutatis mutandis , to Husserl, whose normative principle of evidence, his phenomenological "principle of all principles," is obedient to this logic for the sake of a rationality that he can conceive only in strongly identitarian terms. In Minima Moralia , Adorno remarks that,

if Benjamin said that history had hitherto been written from the standpoint of the victor, and needed to be written from that of the vanquished, we might add that knowledge must indeed present the fatally rectilinear succession of victory and defeat, but should also address itself to those things which were not embraced by this dynamics, which fell by the wayside—what might be called the waste products and blind spots that have escaped the dialectic.^[68]

What are Husserl's blind spots? What can he not see, not notice, because of his commitment to a rectilinear gaze, a gaze of rays and beams, a gaze that insists on maintaining its focus on the center, a gaze that will never look askance? Why is the proper gaze for a philosopher straight and narrow? Why must it abstract from worldly interests and suspend worldly involvements in order to achieve theoretical authority?

Arguing against Husserl's transcendental method, Adorno contends that the "primacy of intentionality destroys, through endless protests of concrete plenitude, the relation of philosophy to the real," because intentionality becomes a way to bind the object to the act of consciousness and pull it into the sphere of consciousness, instead of a way to think our practical engagement in and with the world.^[69] For this reason, and in this sense, it cannot, I think, be denied that Husserlian phenomenology falls into an irresponsible idealism.^[70]

One expression of this idealism may be read in Husserl's seemingly unproblematic assertion of the freedom and spontaneity of the phenomenological gaze. In Ideas I, §28 (p. 94), he remarks, for example, that "I can freely direct my glance or my acts to the natural world or to any ideal world." Again, in §35 (p. 106), he writes of "a free turning of the 'look'—not precisely nor merely of the physical but of the 'mental look' ": a turning, for example, in the direction of those backgrounded things of which we are implicitly aware.

In this regard, what I am calling the problematic implications of Husserl's thinking already appear in his Logical Investigations . Here is a passage from the "Third Investigation":

The visual content head cannot be presented without a visual background from which it stands relieved. This impossibility is, however, quite different from the impossibility used to define non-independent contents. If we let the visual content head count as independent, we think that, despite its inescapable, accompanying background, it could be presented as existing by itself, and could therefore be intuitively envisaged in isolation. . . . The "logical" possibility remains unshaken, our visual field, e.g., "could" shrink down to this single content.^[71]

Believing that he can effectuate a transcendental reduction without at all altering the phenomenon, Husserl assimilates perception to the imagination and subjects it to a "reduction" which brackets or suspends precisely that existential sense by which it is distinguishable from the imagination. Thus he is tempted to ascribe to the perceptual gaze a freedom in relation to its field of operation that makes its abstraction from the ground seem to be both feasible and reasonable: "The attempt to doubt everything," he says, "has its place in the realm of our perfect freedom." Turning the world into a mere "thesis" posited by consciousness, he continues: "We can attempt to doubt anything and everything."^[72] After this, it seems to be only a short step to the conviction that a radical and absolutely total suspension of our existential involvement in the world is actually possible. Thus, in the "Prolegomenon" to his Logical Investigations , Husserl declared that

a perception is . . . possible , in which the whole world, with the endless abundance of its bodies, is perceived at one glance. But this ideal possibility is of course no real possibility; we could not attribute it to any empirical subject, particularly since such a vision would be an endless continuum of vision: unitarily conceived, it would be a Kantian Idea.^[73]

Of course, he acknowledges,

the world is not doubtful in the sense that there are [specific, concrete, and] rational grounds which might be pitted against the tremendous force of unanimous experiences, but in the sense that a doubt is thinkable , and this is so because the possibility of non-being is in principle never excluded.^[74]

But even this abstract theoretical thinkability makes sense only because Husserl's philosopher is from the beginning a disengaged spectator thinking in a "freedom" withdrawn from the world, looking at it as if from a transcendental space outside. Only in terms of this odd picture can it make

sense even to talk of thinking "the detachability in principle of the whole natural world from the domain of consciousness."^[75] What really is the Husserlian philosopher's "freedom"? What does it amount to? What are its ethical and political implications?

Vision, taken as paradigm of knowledge truth and reality in an ocularcentric philosophical discourse, does not inevitably or necessarily lead to a reduction of the background that renders it as just another figure. This reduction or assimilation is not inherent in the logic of vision; but it is a potential that tends to prevail, especially in our present age. Husserl's conviction that he can survey the entire world and put the world as a whole, the world in its totality, in doubt and, in effect, under suspicion only makes sense on the assumption that the world—the background of his present act of consciousness, the context of his present philosophical gaze—can be treated as nothing more than the sum, as it were, of all the objects that are in the world. But this assumption, which regards the ground as nothing other than another (albeit more comprehensive) figure, another object of intentionality, is deeply, terribly, tragically errant. We must turn to Heidegger, Husserl's student, to see and understand just how errant, how tragic, this way of continuing the Enlightenment project can be.

IV—
Evidence:
A Gaze That Leaves no Traces

What Husserl has constructed is not a blinding, sun-drenched vision, not a vision by candlelight stumbling through the shadows, and also not a vision moving gracefully by moonlight. It is a vision of the interior, a vision that the invention of electricity has made possible: it is a vision that prizes focus, fixity, centeredness, clarity, distinctness—"evidence." "Evidence," for Husserl, is the decisive goal of phenomenology, its philosophical touchstone, its "principle of all principles": "complete clearness is the measure of truth."^[76] This conception of evidence, first formulated in the "Prolegomenon to Pure Logic," remained essentially unchanged in his later works. "The most perfect 'mark' of correctness," he wrote there, "is inward evidence; it counts as an immediate intuition of truth itself."^[77] (Since seeing and written language are so intimately related, we should not overlook the marks around the word mark . What is Husserl afraid of here? What mark or trace is he attempting to scare off? What mark would he like to be able to efface?) This "inner evidence," he says,

is called a seeing, a grasping of the self-given (true) state of affairs, or, as we say with tempting equivocation, of the truth. . . . The experience of agreement between meaning and what is itself present, meant,

between the actual sense of an assertion and the self-given state of affairs , is inward evidence: the Idea of this agreement is truth, whose ideality is also its objectivity.^[78]

In "evidence," Husserl explains, "the state of affairs comes before us, not merely putatively, but as actually before our eyes, and in it the object itself, as the object it is."^[79] Thus, there must be, on the part of the philosopher, a certain Gelassenheit , a certain letting-be, letting the phenomenon show itself from out of itself, as, later, Heidegger would say in his "Introduction" to Being and Time: "We wait, in pure surrender, on what is essentially given . We can then describe 'that which appears as such' faithfully and in the light of pure self-evidence."^[80] What comes is worth the wait: "Every evidence 'sets up' or 'institutes' for me an abiding possession."^[81] (But it is not just a question of waiting: it is clear from other passages, other texts, that, for Husserl, nothing will come if all we do is wait.) Thus, insofar as "I" construct and achieve the sight of phenomenological evidence, I enjoy the sight of "truths that are valid, and remain so, once and for all and for everyone."^[82]

Such "meaning-fulfillment" (the concept is Husserl's, but it is meant, of course, in the most ascetic sense, denied all possible connotations of hedonism) requires strict adherence to the "principle of all principles." In the 1913 text of Ideas , this principle is formulated as follows:

that very primordial dator intuition is a source of authority [Rechtsquelle ] for knowledge, that whatever presents itself in 'intuition' in primordial form (as it were in its bodily reality), is simply to be accepted as it gives itself out to be, though only within the limits in which it then presents itself.^[83]

("Though only within the limits . . . ": But how can Husserl's line of sight control those limits?) In the much later Cartesian Meditations , this principle is still considered fundamental, and its interpretation likewise remains essentially the same:

[The "principle of pure evidence"] signifies restriction to the pure data of transcendental reflection, which therefore must be taken precisely as they are given in simple evidence, purely "intuitively" and as always, kept free from all interpretations that read into them more than is genuinely given.^[84]

(When we notice—read—the word "read" here, how does our understanding of "evidence" change?) The task for the philosopher that this principle lays down is, he says, "to see and to describe adequately what he sees, purely as seen, as what is seen and seen in such and such a manner."^[85] (How easy would it be—indeed, would it even be possible—to reformulate this task

without the vocabulary, the rhetoric of vision, of vision, in fact, very narrowly, very artificially conceived? Moreover, in the light of Husserl's reliance on a rhetoric of seeing, how can Husserl avoid drawing the line dogmatically between the sphere of immanence and the sphere of transcendence, with regard to the "presence" of shadows?^[86] "Shadows" may turn metaphorical when they are transferred into the sphere of immanence. But wouldn't there nevertheless be at least a metaphorical trace of the shadow interfering with the sovereignty of the immanent transcendental gaze?)

Now, Husserl wants to claim that, even when this evidence is incomplete, or as he puts it, "inadequate," such that more experience with the Sache is not only possible, but may even be reasonably expected, it can be judged "apodeictic," absolutely indubitable, beyond the logical conceivability that it could ever become questionable or doubtful. Thus, for Husserl, the non-being or being-otherwise of such evidence may also be described as "absolutely unimaginable."^[87] As he states the point in his Investigations , "To know the ground of anything means to see the necessity of its being so and so."^[88] But I would argue that, with his claims for apodeictic evidence, Husserl ultimately confuses and conflates experience as Erlebnis with experience as Erfahrung . If immediately lived experience, as lived, is inherently and necessarily a conscious consciousness, pure awareness and self-awareness through and through, then it will necessarily be unquestionable in and during the very moment of its being erlebt , lived. And if we wish, we could use the term "apodeictic" to refer to this unquestionableness, this "absolute unimaginableness of its non-being or its being-otherwise." But Husserl's usage of the term undergoes an unjustifiable "glissage," a slippery shift or shifty slippage of meaning; for he goes on to interpret this apodeictic character as if it could also apply to a privileged form or condition of Erfahrung , knowledge. Knowledge, however, whether it be empirical or transcendental, can never be regarded, unlike the lived, flowing moment of consciousness, as unquestionable, inconceivably other, apodeictic.

This problem comes to the fore with a question that Husserl himself repeatedly broaches concerning the situation in which two practitioners of phenomenology see the Sache differently and cannot agree.^[89] It can hardly be sufficient for him to say, for example, that "it is obvious that where there is nothing, nothing can be seen; but it is no less obvious that, where there is no truth, there can be no seeing something to be true, i.e., no inward evidence."^[90] For this statement is purely formal; it provides no usable criterion for settling disagreements in phenomenological practice. Hence it is incapable of sustaining the distinction between psychological certainty and

transcendentally certified apodeictic evidence. Let us consider another of Husserl's attempts to think through the problem. This, too, is drawn from his "Prolegomenon" to the Investigations:

I can compel nobody to see what I see. But I myself cannot doubt; I once more see, here where I have insight, i.e., where I am embracing truth itself, that all doubt would be mistaken. I therefore find myself at a point which I have either to recognize as the Archimedean point from which the world of doubt and unreason may be levered on its hinges, or which I may sacrifice only at the peril of sacrificing all reason and knowledge. I see that this is the case, and that in the latter case—if it were then still reasonable to speak of reason or unreason—I should have to pack in all rational striving for truth, all assertion and all demonstration.^[91]

But if apodeictic evidence is immediately lived experience (Erlebnis ), and not a claim about knowledge (Erfahrung ), why is there a problem when two phenomenological insights disagree? Wouldn't such "conflict" be a problem only in so far as the moment of vision claimed—pretended—to be an apodeictic knowledge, a knowledge absolutely resistant to challenge, debate, revision, and repudiation? That Husserl frets so anxiously and obsessively over this question is a telling betrayal of the "glissage" I mentioned above, and correspondingly, an equally telling indication of his deep confusion—a confusion undoubtedly generated by, and obviously favorable to, his peculiar version of rationalism and idealism.

Like Derrida, Adorno broaches the problem of temporality. Again and again, Husserl bumps his head against this problem. However, whilst it must be said to his credit that he does not shy away from explicitly articulating it as a problem, it must also be said that he repeatedly deferred or postponed dealing with it. Thus, for example, in Ideas I, §81 (pp. 216–17), he describes it as "a completely self-contained sphere of problems" and blithely declares, "Fortunately, we can leave the enigmas of time-consciousness in our preliminary analyses without imperilling their rigour." Just this, of course, is what Adorno and Derrida will not allow. In Against Epistemology , Adorno, emphasizing, like Derrida, the impropriety of the "proper" and the impossibility of possessing knowledge as property, argues that

non-present moments . . . are not "here", not intuitive and not absolutely singular, but distilled from some other. Always more belongs to the "proper sense" of an act than its proper sense, the canon of Husserl's method. Every act transcends its periphery in that its meant content, in order to be meant, always demands the co-meaning of an other.^[92]

Levinas likewise problematizes the rationalistic (and implicitly, therefore, the Husserlian) conception of evidence, not only with regard to "diachrony" or "the impossibility of the dispersion of time to assemble itself in the present,"^[93] i.e., in the reified, self-contained presentness of evidence that the absolute rational gaze assumes it can impose, but also with regard to the optics. As for the latter issue, Levinas's strategy is, first, to make the optical rhetoric of rationalism turn against itself and then to articulate his own, radically different way of approaching questions of ontology:

the disclosure of truth is not a simple optical phenomenon. If in the quiddity of the beings that show themselves, their visibility and their being is not inscribed in the form of an attribute, it is their grouping, their co-presence, that is—and this is new!—the position of the one with regard to the other, the relativity in which the one makes a sign to the other, the reciprocal signifyingness of the one with respect to the other, that is equivalent to the coming to light of qualified quiddities themselves. The regrouping of all these significations or structures into a system, intelligibility, is the disclosure itself. The intelligibility or systematic structure of the totality would allow the totality to appear and would protect it against any alteration that could come to it from the look. And this indifference to the subjective look is not ensured in the same way for the terms, the structures, and the system. For a shadow veils the terms taken outside of the relationship in which they are implicated, the relations and the structures taken or surprised outside of the system that locks them in at the moment, when, still isolated or already abstract, they have to search for or rejoin their place in the conjuncture. . . . An order manifested in which the terms of the structures or the elements of the system hold together as an abstraction is still obscure and . . . offers resistance to the light, that is, is not fully objective. A structure is precisely an intelligibility, a rationality or a signification whose terms by themselves do not have signification (except through the already kerygmatic ideality of language). In the relationship, the terms receive a weightlessness, a grace, and something like transparency for the look, and get weighted down and occulted as soon as they separate from it.^[94]

He continues his critique of ocularcentric, photocentric metaphysics, arguing that

the intelligibility of being is always high noon without shadows, where the subject intervenes without even projecting the silhouette of its own density. Dissolving into this intelligibility of structures, it continually sees itself to be at the service of this intelligibility, equivalent to the very appearing of being. This is rational theoretical consciousness in its

purity, when the clarity of appearing in truth is equivalent to intelligibility, as in the good Cartesian tradition, where the clear and distinct ideas still receive light from Plato's intelligible sun. But the clarity comes from a certain arrangement which orders the entities or the moments and the esse ipsum of these entities into a system, assembling them.^[95]

V—
The Eidetic Variation:
The Discursive Construction of the Wesensschau

Distinguishing between the intuition (seeing) of particulars and the intuition of essentialities (insight, Wesensschau ), Husserl believes "that one can learn to see ideas in a type, represented, e.g., by the idea 'red', and that one can become clear as to the essence of such 'seeing.'"^[96] Husserl considers individual particulars and the essences (necessary truths) which represent them to be in a certain sense interdependent and inseparable; he is, however, much more interested in essences than he is in particulars. In fact, he shows no interest in particulars as such—no interest such as the painter or writer might have, in noticing them, looking at them, watching and observing them, examining and describing them—except in so far as they are the beginning of a process that enables him to achieve a clear insight into their respective essences and work on the construction of an ever more complete, ever more systematic essential ontology. Thus, he says, for example, that

no essential intuition is possible without the free possibility of directing one's glance to an individual counterpart and of shaping an illustration; just as contrariwise no individual intuition is possible without the free possibility of carrying out an act of ideation and therein directing one's glance upon the corresponding essence, which exemplifies itself in something individually visible.^[97]

Insight into the essence is achieved through ideation—or, more specifically, through a procedure that Husserl calls "eidetic variation":

Starting from this table-perception as an example, we vary the perceptual object, table, with a completely free optionalness, yet in such a manner that we keep perception fixed as perception of something, no matter what. Perhaps we begin by fictively changing the shape or the colour of the object quite arbitrarily, keeping identical only its perceptual appearing. In other words: Abstaining from acceptance of its being, we change the fact of this perception into a pure possibility, one among

other quite "optional" pure possibilities—but possibilities that are possible perceptions. We, so to speak, shift the actual perception into the realm of non-actualities, the realm of the as-if, which supplies us with "pure" possibilities, pure of everything that restricts us to this fact or to any fact whatever. As regards the latter point, we keep the aforesaid possibilities, not as restricted even to the co-posited de facto ego, but just as a completely free "imaginableness" of phantasy. Accordingly from the very start we might have taken as our initial example a phantasying ourselves into a perceiving, with no relation to the rest of our de facto life. Perception, the universal type thus acquired, floats in the air, so to speak—in the atmosphere of pure phantasiableness. Thus removed from all factualness, it has become the pure "eidos " perception, whose "ideal " extension is made up of all ideally possible perceptions, as purely phantasiable processes. Analyses of perception are then "essential " or "eidetic " analyses. All that we have set forth concerning syntheses belonging to the type, perception , concerning horizons of potentiality, and so forth, holds good, as can easily be seen, "essentially " for everything formable in this free variation, accordingly to all imaginable perceptions without exception—in other words: with absolute "essential universality ", and with "essential necessity " for every particular case selected, hence for every de facto perception, since every fact can be thought of merely as exemplifying a pure possibility .^[98]

Since Husserl supposes that, in this process of variation, the use of fantasied particulars, fantasied possibilities, can so unproblematically substitute for actual particulars, he allows himself to declare, in a passage he might later have regretted, that,

if anyone loves a paradox, he can really say, and say with strict truth, if he will allow for the ambiguity, that the element which makes up the life of phenomenology, as of all eidetic science, is "fiction" , that fiction is the source whence the knowledge of "eternal truths" draws its sustenance.^[99]

He seems, here, to be acknowledging, at the very least, the discursive artificiality of his essential formations. That this does not strike him as problematic is no doubt an index of his comfort with an interpretation which fits so well his commitment to transcendental idealism. However, if we hold him very strictly to his words, words that, as he himself admits, spell out an ambiguous meaning, the fictionality of his "eternal truths" will mischievously subvert his strong version of rationalism. For fictionality undoes whatever rationalism, whatever metaphysical absolutism, his paradigm of "seeing" can impose.

Adorno charges that the Wesensschau "is no 'seeing' of essentialities, but rather a blind spot in the process of cognition."^[100] His argument for this

position is that the procedure turns mere facts, mere contingencies, into unalterable truths of reason:

Facticity, the "impure", whatever is opaque to reason in producing the most obstinate resistance, i.e., with the foundation of the reality of objecthood, is sublimated into something prognosticated by reason, and thus ultimately a mere determination of reason.^[101]

Marx invented a name for this process; he called it "fetishization." As both a reflection on the world and a reflection of it, philosophical discourse can all too easily fetishize what it thinks. However, according to Adorno's critical social-theoretical analysis, Husserl's constructivist treatment of categorial insight suggests that "advanced bourgeois self-consciousness can no longer be satisfied with that fetishizing of abstracted concepts in which the world of commodities is reflected for its observer."^[102] Conceding the dialectical ambiguity in Husserl's work, Adorno accordingly notes that "essence does not just protect thinking from facts; it also opposes fact as sheer appearance whose validity is doubted and then posited in the epokhé, in order to bring the underlying lawfulness to consciousness."^[103] Raised thus into consciousness, its reality-status temporarily suspended whilst its meaning can be examined and its origin (Sinnesgenesis ) can be interrogated, both facts and essences can be unmasked, stripped of their fetish-character. In Husserl, then, Adorno sees the "bourgeois spirit" striving "mightily to break out of the prison of the immanence of consciousness, the sphere of constitutive subjectivity." But he also sees a dialectical contradiction or dilemma in this endeavor: it attempts this escape to freedom "with the help of the same categories as those implied by the idealistic analysis of the immanence of consciousness."^[104] Adorno does not connect this critique, however, to a critique of Husserl's ocularcentrism. Had he made this connection, he might have discerned another context where the biblical Bilderverbot could have given rise to a healthy skepticism regarding what can be seen and encouraged Reason's emancipation from the fetishizing tendencies in seeing and its rhetoric—and discerned how, by turning thought away from vision and toward the recognition of fiction, of discursive artifice and construction, it could have rendered thought more capable of transforming the world through a phenomenological practice which begins with the assumption that the world can always be otherwise.

In Otherwise Than Being , Levinas also tackles the problem of essence and attempts its displacement, moving it into the force-field of "Saying" (Le Dire ), making essence a temporal matter, a matter, at long last, for the discursive eye, the "eye that listens." For Levinas, the problem with the

essence that figures in the history of philosophy from Plato through Husserl is that it has been taken out of time, "fixed in a present," and given dogmatic protection in the finality of "the Said" (Le Dit ): "the entity that appears identical in the light of time is its essence in the already said . The phenomenon itself is a phenomenology."^[105] "The time of the essence," he says, "unites the three moments of knowing." But, he asks, "Is the light of essence which makes things seen itself seen?" To this he wants to reply that "it can to be sure become a theme; essence can show itself, be spoken of and described. But then light presents itself in light, which latter is not thematic, but resounds for the 'eye that listens', with a resonance unique in its kind, a resonance of silence." Conscious that he is proposing something that seems very strange, he adds that "expressions such as the eye that listens to the resonance of the silence are not monstrosities, for they speak of the way one approaches the temporality of the true, and in temporality, being deploys its essence."^[106] Levinas here returns the philosophical gaze to its metaphorical truth—that truth which Husserl, in a moment of abandon, a curiously "light" moment, was willing to acknowledge when he disclosed the artifice in the seeing of essences—and hence in the essences themselves.

VI—
Keeping Other People in Mind

When Husserl gives the passion of his thought to other people, what does he see? What is he moved to say? How does he keep them in mind?

What are others, what is the world, for me?—Constituted phenomena, merely something produced within me. Never can I reach the point of ascribing being in the absolute sense to others, any more than to the physical things of Nature, which exist only as transcendentally produced affairs.^[107]

Two matters of rhetoric, here, call for immediate comment. First, we should notice the "merely" and the "only": words that belittle, words that reduce, words that indicate the operation of what Adorno calls the "logic of identity." Second, we should notice how the "any more than" equates people with things, overlooking all the difference. Husserl speaks comfortably, confidently, about many things, things such as the pattern in a carpet ("Sixth Investigation," Logical Investigations , vol. II, §10, p. 700), "this paper before my eyes" ("Sixth Investigation," §5, p. 684), centaurs (Ideas , §79, pp. 207–8), "this apple tree in bloom" (Ibid., §88, p. 239), "a tree in the garden" (Ibid., §97, pp. 260–62), a table (Cartesian Meditations , §14, pp. 32–33), scissors (Ibid., §50, p. 111), a die (Ibid., §18, pp. 41–42), a house (Ibid., §14, pp. 32–33, §15, p. 34). When "meditating" on such things, he can

proceed untroubled by the specter of solipsism. And he can continue his untroubled thinking so long as he is not obliged—or so long as he does not feel obliged—to recognize in the "presence" of other people an essential difference from things. Or indeed, a difference so deep, so fundamental, that even to speak of "an essential difference" somehow fails to do justice to the phenomenology of our experience: the "presence" of other people utterly shatters even the logic of the difference Husserl eventually is obliged to draw.

In Husserl's transcendental phenomenology, there is a certain moment in which the reality of other people is treated just like the reality of things: both are subject to the procedure of bracketing—the epokhé that suspends the existential sense which the experience normally and "naturally" carries. In other words: "Other men than I, and brute animals, are data of experience for me," so that, "from now on," everything, "not just corporeal Nature but the whole concrete surrounding life-world, is for me . . . only a phenomenon of being, instead of something that is."^[108] Assuming a very odd sense of "what comes into view" for him, Husserl is prepared to accept the consequences of his procedure:

If I keep purely what comes into view for me, the one who is meditating—by virtue of my free epokhé with respect to the being of the experienced world, the momentous fact is that I, with my life, remain untouched in my existential status, regardless of whether or not the world exists and regardless of what my eventual decision [sic] concerning its being or non-being might be.^[109]

Thus Husserl can also say:

The psychic life of my Ego (this "psychophysical" Ego), including my whole world-experiencing life and therefore including my actual and possible experience of what is other, is wholly unaffected by screening off what is other.^[110]

In these last two passages, we can see, in the boldest, most explicit terms, the character of the vision that figures paradigmatically in the discourse of rationalism and idealism. In the name of a certain "enlightenment," we are brought face-to-face with a vision—a vision that includes a way of looking and seeing other people—that remains untouched, "wholly unaffected," by what it sees, or is given to see. But can a vision thus unaffected, thus untouched and unmoved, really be seeing other people at all? Can a vision protected from all vulnerability in relation to other people really be in touch with them—and in this sense, really see them? What kind of Enlightenment is this? And could it ever be a kind Enlightenment?

In Otherwise Than Being , Levinas draws our attention to the difficulty of registering sensibility in terms of the discourse of light and sight:

Sensation, which is at the basis of sensible experience and intuition, is not reducible to the clarity or the idea derived out of it. Not because it would involve an opaque element resistant to the luminousness of the intelligible, but still defined in terms of light and sight. It is vulnerability, enjoyment and suffering, whose status is not reducible to the fact of being put before a spectator subject. The intentionality involved in disclosure, and the symbolization of a totality which the openness of being aimed at by intentionality involved, would not constitute the sole or even the dominant signification of the sensible. The dominant meaning of sensibility should indeed enable us to account for its secondary signification as a sensation, the element of cognition. We have already said that the fact that sensibility can become "sensible intuition" and enter into the adventure of cognition is not a contingency. The dominant signification of sensibility is already caught sight of in vulnerability.^[111]

Caught sight of—but only, in the end, to be betrayed! For our vulnerability in relation to others, our susceptibility to being touched and moved by their visible presence, "cannot be defined," as Levinas rightly insists, "in terms of intentionality, where undergoing is always also an assuming, that is, an experience always anticipated and consented to, already an origin and arkhé ." Levinas grants that "the intentionality of consciousness does not designate voluntary intention only." However, as he points out, "it retains the initiating and incohative pattern of voluntary intention. The given enters into a thought which recognizes it or invests it with its own project, and thus exercises mastery over it."^[112] (We should recall, here, Husserl's words, "my eventual decision," in the passage about the epokhé just cited above.)

To be sure, Husserl recognizes in the world the signifying traces , essentially distinctive, of the human presence, pointing out, many years before Heidegger's Daseinsanalytik in Being and Time , that, by virtue of an act of heeding (Achtsamkeit )

we find facing us in the natural setting, and therefore as members of the natural world , not natural things merely, but values and practical objects of every kind, cities, streets with street-lighting arrangements, dwellings, furniture, works of art, books, tools and so forth.^[113]

In Husserlian phenomenology, some things do get named, but only as typicalities, essential types. There is no narrative interest in looking at them; no interest in deeply examining their histories, no interest in deploying a descriptive phenomenology to reflect critically on their social

roles, the emotional and cultural values they evoke, or their place in our lives: they are bare particulars, or exemplars of a type. And yet, it must be noted that even the little which Husserl accomplishes with regard to the phenomenology of values breaks the powerful spell of the philosophical obfuscations and diremptions that accompanied the technological, industrial, and commercial innovations of the seventeenth century and continued with ever-increasing effects—reification, division of labor, commodity fetishism—into the century of Husserl's own lifetime. In this regard, Husserl stands virtually alone among philosophers of the early twentieth century: with only some brief passages, he redeems the perception of values, complicating the nondialectical distinction between facts and values and insisting that we must see values in the world and at the other end of our practices. Reflecting on the fact that we see values, that we see things as valuable, and that we see that things have value, Husserl says:

When consciously awake, I find myself at all times, and without my even being able to change this, set in relation to a world which, through its constant changes, remains one and ever the same. It is continually "present" for me, and I myself am a member of it. Therefore this world is not there for me as a mere world of facts and affairs , but, with the same immediacy, as a world of values, a world of goods, a practical world . Without further effort on my part, I find the things before me furnished not only with the qualities that befit their positive nature, but with value-characters such as beautiful or ugly, agreeable or disagreeable, pleasant or unpleasant, and so forth. Things in their immediacy stand there as objects to be used, the "table" with its "books", the "glass to drink from", the "vase", the "piano", and so forth. . . . The same considerations apply of course just as well to the men and beasts in my surroundings as to "mere things". They are my "friends" or my "foes", my "servants" or "superiors", "strangers" or "relatives", and so forth.^[114]

In Ideas I, then, he allows that we see human values quite "directly" and "immediately." And yet, in his later Cartesian Meditations , it is questionable whether he thinks that we may properly claim to see other people directly and immediately. Groundbreaking though this descriptive phenomenology is, however, we should not lose sight of its deficiencies. There is a certain quite uncanny detachment here in this passage, something almost audible, if not visible, to the "listening eye," something that I might be tempted into calling a theoretical alienation. Whilst the writing directs our attention to the "immediate presence" of social and cultural values, the presence of other people , the very people in whose lives these values obtain, seems to have only a very attenuated, virtually ghostly reality—as if

Husserl could more easily see the traces of their presence, the traces of their existence, than their presence, their existence, itself. The things that Husserl sees are things of value, things that human beings value—but the people themselves are strangely absent, missing.

There is something vaguely disquieting, even when he writes on the subject of love:

Just as noetically a ray of love proceeding from the Ego splits up into a bundle of rays, each of which is directed toward a single object, so too there are distributed over the collective object of affection as such as many noematic characters of love as there are objects collected at the time.^[115]

How faithful to the experience of love shall we say this description is? Does its difference from our experience as lived in the "natural attitude" deepen our understanding—or our experience? What is involved in seeing love this way? Is this (supposed to be) the description of a love that sees, that is not hopelessly blind? My questions, here, are perhaps a way of suggesting that we do not know quite how to read such a passage.

Whatever suspicions and reservations the passages we have looked at thus far may have encouraged are only multiplied by Husserl's attempt to settle the question of solipsism in the fifth—and the last—of his Cartesian Meditations . His efforts to dispel (or should we rather say "dis-spell"?) the impression of solipsism, of an uncanny transcendental monadology, only make matters worse, leaving this reader with the disquieting sense that the presence of other people is all too much like the spectral presence of ghosts. Or perhaps like the deceptive presence of a waxwork likeness—the "charming lady," for example, that Husserl amusingly admits he mistook for a "real" one as he walked through the Panopticum Waxworks!^[116] Despite his rationalism, despite his transcendental idealism, he could not resist the jouissance in being fooled by such dissimulation. As Gabriel Chappuys, secretary to Henry IV of France, once put it, expressing the essential spirit of the Baroque in words with which René Char and a Heraclitean Heidegger might easily have concurred,^[117] dissimulation can be "a veil made of honest shadows and violent respects which serves not to form falsehood but to give respite to truth."^[118] Be this as it may, "the other," Husserl tells us, speaking treacherously in the first-person language of phenomenology, "is a 'mirroring' of my own self—and yet not a mirroring proper, an analogue of my own self and yet again not an analogue in the usual sense."^[119]

As we know, Husserl claims that an apodeictic evidence "excludes otherness."^[120] Perhaps in the domain of logic, the rationality of this exclusion

is unproblematic. But when, in the context of his phenomenological treatment of our experience of other people, this rationality, based as it is on apodeictic seeing, on insight, stubbornly dominates the meditation, the excluding of otherness becomes the principal barrier to a faithful articulation—whatever that is—of our experience. The Husserlian is forced to say that, strictly speaking, our experience of (being with) others is not, and cannot ever be, truly rational. Adorno accordingly makes the astute observation that "the shadow of what Husserl has excluded falls necessarily over the protected zone of purity—and the fundamental operation of his philosophy is one of exclusion; it is defensive through and through."^[121]

The more our reading becomes entangled in Husserl's struggle, in the fifth of his Cartesian Meditations , to articulate "his" experience of other people, the more we are likely to agree with Adorno's judgment that the project is doomed from the very beginning:

The more recklessly the subject insists upon identity, the more purely it strives to establish its mastery, the more threateningly looms the shadow of non-identity.^[122]

(Notice how, here and in the preceding quote from his study on Husserl, Adorno expresses his critical thoughts in terms of shadows, a figure of speech that can only be intensely threatening to a phenomenology wedded to lucidity.)

The other person "brings to mind the way my body would look ' if I were over there.'"^[123] He seems to be utterly out of touch with the oddity of this way of experiencing and describing the presence of the other. Struggle as he might, Husserl cannot satisfactorily articulate our experience with other people, because he cannot in the final analysis renounce a phenomenology generated by the logic of identity. There is no way to work with "analogical apperception," "analogizing apprehension," "similarity," "mirroring," "pairing," and "the associative transfer of sense" that will break through the solipsism of Husserl's philosophical point of departure, the monadic transcendental Ego. Not even his recognition of a "passive synthesis of sense" can settle the problem; instead, it only intensifies the paradox, the philosophically generated enigma. The truth is that Husserl cannot even see others clearly, because his vision is terribly distorted by the optics of his commitments to rationalism and idealism. In Merleau-Ponty's "Working Notes," published in The Visible and the Invisible , we find a line which reads:

Blindness (punctum caecum ) of "consciousness."^[124]

In what ways is the philosopher's own purely theoretical gaze a tragic instance of this very blindness?

VII—
After the Dream

In his Philosophy of History , Hegel argued that, if one looks at the course of history through the optics of Reason, the events of history, seemingly without order, will begin to reveal their immanent rationality, their intelligibility in accordance with the cunning of Reason. Although Husserl wanted to distance himself from Hegel, his protests only confirm the proximity, for his faith in the power of rational vision, marked in fact, despite all differences, by his appropriation of the word "phenomenology," would not be surpassed in the slightest degree by that of his predecessor. But precisely this adequation, this correspondence between the way of looking and the object of this gaze, makes the vision of the gaze to some extent responsible for that which it sees. There is a certain theoretical way of looking at the world, a way that, in its mirrorlike reflecting, and in spite of its serene rational detachment, its assumption of theoretical neutrality and noncomplicity—or should we rather say, precisely because of this methodic disengagement?—becomes finally inseparable from the web of causes which have brought forth in time the very conditions of cruelty, violence, and destitution on which it is ultimately compelled to reflect.

Perhaps Husserl was only one nightmare away from the darker, but also more messianic perspective expressed by Novalis, who wrote, for the Athenaeum Fragments , that, "a transcendental perspective on this life still awaits us. Only then will it become really meaningful for us."^[125] Looking at the world through the cold eye of Reason, Husserl would sadly agree; but with his other eye, an eye rooted in a passionate dream of enlightenment and a deeply felt compassion for the sufferings of humanity, he could not refrain from proclaiming too early—much too soon—the glorious perspective of a transcendental Reason already, despite an infinite task, triumphant.

The obligation therefore falls on the poet, T. S. Eliot, for example, to remind us, as he does in "The Hollow Men,"^[126] through one of the countless voices denied to our hearing in the philosophical discourse of modernity, that—

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here

Dying before the Holocaust, Husserl was spared the horror of men whose eyes reflected the absolute impossibility of vision. For looking and seeing are impossible without faith, hope, and love. No transcendental I, no eyes. Here.