Page 329 - Contribution To Phenomenology

322 DAVID CARR

Ponty and Schutz, can be seen largely as attempts to remedy the
situation, to show that phenomenology and its offshoots did not have to
shortchange the social. Indeed, both thinkers seem convinced that
phenomenology has something valuable to offer precisely in this domain.
But are they right? It might be argued that the best way to answer
this question is to examine their work to see whether in fact they
overcome the defects of their predecessors and to see how much they
actually accomplish on their own. But what if their positive accomplish-
ments were achieved, not because of but in spite of their commitment
to phenomenology? What if they were hindered throughout by that very
commitment, prevented by it from recognizing some very important things
about the nature of the social? This is the possibiUty I would like to
explore in the following.
Where should we look for the fundamental tenet, the heart and soul,
as it were, of phenomenology? To me the answer to this question has
always been clear: intentionahty. In the Logical Investigations Husserl
borrowed the concept from Brentano and improved on it, in ways that
were partly critical of Brentano. But most importantly he made a decision
which was fateful for the whole course of phenomenology: he accepted
intentionahty as a fundamental principle. By that I mean that instead of
regarding intentionality as a fact that had to be explained or derived
from something else, Husserl chose simply to describe the intentional
relation, explore its many features and peculiarities—in short, to get
straight on what intentionahty is and entails. From that, it seems to me,
everything else follows. In particular, the phenomenological reduction is
nothing but the acknowledgment of the fact that the consciousness-of
relation (or quasi-relation) carries no commitment one way or the other
to the existence of the objects of such a consciousness. The reduction
solemnizes, as it were, the object-neutraUty of the intentional relation and
frees us from caring about the ontological status of the objects of our
experience so we can focus our philosophical attention on their meaning.
Now you may object to my saying that intentionahty and the reduction
are at the heart of phenomenology, since early Heidegger and early
Merleau-Ponty, if not Sartre, are severely critical of both principles. But
in my view these thinkers reinterpret but do not reject these notions. If
we take intentionality to be characteristic, not narrowly of "consciousness"
but of "human experience," if we see its essential feature that of
"meaning-bestowing," and if we conceive of the task of philosophy as the
description of the world as a tissue of meanings rather than a collection