Abstract
Husserl’s philosophy of culture relies upon a person’s body being expressive of the person’s spirit, but Husserl’s analysis of expression in Logical Investigations is inadequate to explain this bodily expressiveness. This paper explains how Husserl’s use of “expression” shifts from LI to Ideas II and argues that this shift is explained by Husserl’s increased understanding of the pervasiveness of sense in subjective life and his increased appreciation for the unity of the person. I show how these two developments allow Husserl to better describe the bodily expressiveness that is the source of culture. Husserl’s account of culture is thoroughly intentionalistic, but it does not emphasize thought at the expense of embodiment. Culture originates not in an abstract subjectivity, but by persons’ expressing themselves physically in the world. By seeing how Husserl develops his mature position on bodily expressiveness, we can better appreciate the meaningfulness and the bodily concreteness of cultural objects.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Notice that artificial indicative signs are not indications in this sense. As Bernet (1988) explains, in this 1914 text, which Husserl wrote after revising LI I, Husserl distinguishes more sharply between what are presented in the first Investigation as two species of indicative sign—the natural and artificial. Now, natural indications are not really signs at all (because being a “genuine sign” requires artifice), and artificial indexical signs are not properly indications (because they are not grounded in a real relation).
The chronology of Husserl’s works here is relevant. Logical Investigations was initially published in 1900–1901; a seriously revised edition was published in 1913. Ideas I was written in 1912 and published in 1913. Ideas II was written, rewritten, and repeatedly edited from 1912 to 1928, and published only posthumously. This timing makes the puzzle of which I am offering an explanation all the more puzzling—why does Husserl in Ideas II and generally after 1913 use “expression” in a way inconsistent with his definition of it in both editions of Logical Investigations? Husserl’s LI revisions of 1913 were selective, as he tells us in the introduction to the revised edition, and he felt the need to leave much standing that he considered misleading, incomplete, or even erroneous in small ways. One might explain this puzzle by concluding that Husserl simply rejects in Ideas II his position on expression in the 1913 edition of LI. Given the chronology, I would find any such explanation implausible. My explanation does not suggest that Husserl rejects the position of the Logical Investigations on expression, understood in the narrow sense. Rather, the 1913 revisions of Logical Investigations retained the narrow use of “expression,” and its position is correct as far as it goes, though Husserl was at the same time developing a broader and more fundamental understanding of it.
Husserl’s broadening of this concept so that all acts of consciousness have meanings allows him to emphasize the role of intentionality in consciousness and to develop the understanding of consciousness that results. Because all acts of consciousness are correlated to objects as intended, where these objects are the meanings of these acts, consciousness is more clearly essentially embedded in relations. Gurwitsch again explains: “The temporal events called ‘acts of consciousness’ have the peculiarity of being actualizations or apprehensions of meanings; the terms ‘apprehension’ and ‘meaning’ are understood in a very general sense beyond the special case of symbolic expressions. It pertains to the essential nature of acts of consciousness to be related and to correspond to noemata. Rather than being conceived of as a one-dimensional sequence of events, consciousness must be defined as a noetico-noematic correlation” (1974, p. 233).
By “objectivity of sense” Husserl means that the objectivity is irreal, i.e., its being involves being a sense, being intended. For the sake of comparison later, it is interesting to note that John Searle says something similar: linguistic meaning arises when the conditions of satisfaction of one intentional state (e.g., a belief) are imposed on the conditions of satisfaction of another intentional state (e.g., a voluntary vocal action); the imposed conditions of satisfaction then belong, in an “observer-dependent” way (i.e., dependent upon being intended), to the imposed-upon condition. Thus the conditions of satisfaction of a sentence include other conditions of satisfaction.
It is an unfortunate ambiguity because philosophical errors might be made if one confuses the two senses of “perception.” For example, someone may argue that we never directly experience or perceive the thing as a whole because our perceptions of the thing are really only of aspects of it. In order to avoid errors arising from the ambiguity, one must keep the ambiguous (or analogical) character of perception in mind.
This theme is found in germ already in the Investigations, where Husserl comments that grasping an intimation is not an intellectual affair, but is perception in a broad sense: “The hearer perceives the intimation in the same sense in which he perceives the intimating person—even though the mental phenomena which make him a person cannot fall, for what they are, in the intuitive grasp of another” (Hua XIX/1, p. 40/278).
There is an interesting similarity here to Aristotle’s position on the body. According to Aristotle, the material cause of a living thing is a body that is potentially alive; he then rather cryptically elaborates, this refers to a body that is alive (See On The Soul II.1, 412b). The matter underlying the bone, sinew, blood, etc., preexists the living thing and persists after its death, and the seed and fruit are in potency to be bodies of living things, but none of these are in this sense “potentially alive,” i.e., they don’t have the potencies of life. Rather, the material that is a proper part of the living thing is the “organized” matter being put to work as the organ of the soul and is thus posterior to the whole, defined by the presence of soul. That is, the living body is not mere matter, but a real part of the living thing and definable only as a part: the presence of the soul makes the body what it is.
This is why Steven Galt Crowell is right to label the attitude of the Logical Investigations “naturalistic” in its categorization of intimation as indicative rather than expressive: “In Ideas II, for example, the concept of expression includes all that distinguishes the realm of spirit from the realm of nature. In the naturalistic attitude (characteristic of the analyses in the Logical Investigations), the body appears as an indicative sign or index of the psyche, but from the personalistic attitude the body is expression of the spirit. Thus, facial expressions, though not signs, mean something” (1996, p. 62).
For example, “[W]anting to view men and animals seriously as double realities, as combinations of two different sorts of realities which are to be equated in the sense of their reality” is a “fundamental mistake” (Hua VI, p. 222/219).
“Everyone experiences the embodiment of souls in original fashion only in his own case. What properly and essentially makes up the character of a living body I experience only in my own living body, namely, in my constant and immediate holding-sway [over my surroundings] through this physical body alone. Only it is given to me originally and meaningfully as ‘organ’ and as articulated into particular organs” (Hua VI, p. 220/217).
“Empathy is not a mediate experience in the sense that the other would be experienced as a psychophysical annex to his Corporeal body, but is instead an immediate experience of others” (Hua IV, p. 375/384–85).
As Husserl explains in Phenomenological Psychology, “Spatiality and spatio-temporality belong in a distinctive manner to matter and … everything psychic participates in objective extension only mediately by its matter and the spatio-temporality belonging to it” (Hua IX, p. 110/83).
„Die ,Anzeige‘ im Sinn eines objektiven Anzeigens (ein Objektives zeigt ein anderes an) liegt hier nicht vor, wo ich ja nicht einmal das Ding ,Leib‘ erfasse und für sich setze und fürs zweite den anderen Menschen. Der fremde Mensch ist ja keine von einem Leib abgesonderte ,Seele‘, sondern er ist Mensch und ist für mich wahrnehmungsmässig da in seinem leibhaften, und das ist hier wirklichen leiblichen Dasein, nur dass ich ihn in einer ursprünglichen Gegebenheitsweise habe, in der mir ,eigentlich‘ wahrnehmungsmässig gegeben ist nur seine aussenleiblichkeit, und siene innerlichkeit appräsentativ. So wie eigentlich und uneigentlich Wahrgenommenes eines physischen Dinges nicht gesonderte und durch Schluss oder ,Anzeige‘ aufeinander bezogene Gegenstände sind, so hier“ (translated by myself; emphasis added).
It is worth noting, for the sake of comparison later, that Husserl’s description of culture as derivative, irreal spirituality or mentality is similar to Searle’s talk of derivative, observer-relative intentionality. For Searle, “Meaning is a derived form of intentionality. The original or intrinsic intentionality of a speaker’s thought is transferred to words, sentences, marks, symbols, and so on” (1998, p. 141).
Of course, this sedimented meaning may disappear over years and generations. Notably, this wearing away of cultural meanings happens through neglect, in contrast to the wearing away through use that corrupts the physical aspects of cultural objects.
The Heideggerian critique of Husserl’s analysis of cultural objects—namely, that Husserl falsifies our natural experience by making the awareness of the body of the cultural object prior to the awareness of its irreal, cultural sense in such a way that the straightforward unity of the object is disrupted—would be valid had Husserl not developed the broader meaning of expression and used it to explain cultural objects, and had he not grounded all of this in the analogy with the person, the essential unity whose bodily and spiritual moments are distinguished only in abstraction from the personal whole. We grasp the tool as indicative of its use only when we are distanced from its expressive unity, either when we intentionally distance ourselves in theoretical reflection or when we are de facto distanced due, e.g., to an alienation from the culture of which it is a part. Of course, it remains true for Husserl that the “material world is manifestly prior in itself to the world of culture. Culture presupposes men and animals, as these in turn presuppose matter” (Hua IX, p. 119/90). The priority here is ontological (the real, as part of its sense, exists independently of being intended) and not necessarily temporal for the individual subject. We do not first see physical things as meaningless and lifeless, and then learn to understand them as persons or as having cultural sense. (Animism is false because it confuses the irreal “psyche” of the things of our surrounding world with real psyches, but it is a more natural position than naturalism, which abstracts from the spiritual predicates that the objects of our surrounding world have acquired and that constitute their identities for us.)
References
Bernet, R. (1988). Husserl’s theory of signs revisited. In R. Sokolowski (Ed.), Edmund Husserl and the phenomenological tradition: Essays in phenomenology (pp. 1–24). Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press.
Crowell, S. G. (1996). Husserl, Derrida, and the phenomenology of expression. Philosophy Today, 40(1), 61–70.
Gurwitsch, A. (1974). Phenomenology and the theory of science. Ed. L. Embree. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Husserl, E. (1952). Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution. Husserliana IV. Ed. Marly Biemel. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. English edition: Husserl, E. (1989). Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy, second book: Studies in the phenomenology of constitution (trans: Rojcewicz, R., Schuwer, A.). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Husserl, E. (1962). Die Krisis der Europäischen Wissenschaften und die Transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die Phänomenologische Philosophie. Husserliana VI. Ed. Walter Biemel. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. English edition: Husserl, E. (1970). The crisis of European Sciences and transcendental phenomenology: An introduction to phenomenological philosophy (trans: Carr, D.). Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Husserl, E. (1966). Analysen zur passiven Synthesis. Aus Vorlesungs- und Forschungsmanuskripten (1918–1926). Husserliana XI. Ed. Margot Fleischer. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. English edition: Husserl, E. (2001). Analyses concerning passive and active syntheses: Lectures on transcendental logic (trans: Steinbock, A. J.). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Husserl, E. (1968). Phänomenologische Psychologie. Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1925. Husserliana IX. Ed. Walter Biemel. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. English edition: Husserl, E. (1977). Phenomenological psychology (trans: Scanlon, J.). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Husserl, E. (1973a). Experience and judgment: Investigations in a genealogy of logic. (Ed. Landgrebe, L. Trans. Churchill, J. S., Ameriks, K.). Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Husserl, E. (1973b). Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge. Husserliana I. Ed. Stephan Strasser. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. English edition: Husserl, E. (1995). Cartesian meditations: An introduction to phenomenology (trans: Cairns, D.). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Husserl, E. (1973c). Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjectivität, Zweiter Teil: 1921–1928. Husserliana XIV. Ed. Iso Kern. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Husserl, E. (1984). Logische Untersuchungen. Husserliana XIX. Ed. Ursula Panzer. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. English edition: Husserl, E. (2000). Logical investigations (trans: Findlay, J. N. 1970). Reprint, Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books.
Schutz, A., & Luckmann, T. (1989). The structures of the life-world, Vol. II. (Trans. Zaner, R. M., Parent, D. J.). Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Searle, J. R. (1995). The construction of social reality. New York: The Free Press.
Searle, J. R. (1998). Mind, language, society: Philosophy in the real world. New York: Basic Books.
Sokolowski, R. (1974). Husserlian meditations: How words present things. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Sokolowski, R. (Ed.). (1988). Edmund Husserl and the phenomenological tradition: Essays in phenomenology. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Flynn, M.B. The Living Body as the Origin of Culture: What the Shift in Husserl’s Notion of “Expression” Tells us About Cultural Objects. Husserl Stud 25, 57–79 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-008-9041-7
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-008-9041-7