A Reappraisal of Blaustein’s Exposition of Husserl’s Theory of Content

Abstract

Blaustein’s analyses contained in Husserlowska nauka… [Husserl’s Theory...] took a wide perspective on the problems discussed in the book. This enabled Blaustein to clearly define the value of Husserl’s theories compared to the traditions of Bolzano as well as Brentano and Twardowski. However, rather than stopping at the presentation and discussion of the theory of content, Blaustein raises interesting objections to it. As I have stressed in the preceding chapter, these objections resulted in part from his original findings that he later used in other object-oriented and systematic research. In the present chapter, I want to ask to what extent his critique of the theory of content in Husserl may be considered valid. I want to define the elements in Blaustein’s interpretation that seem to diverge from Husserl’s position. What comes to the fore in this context is the issue of psychologism and the related problem of understanding reduction. I want to address these two problems at the beginning of the chapter. Next, I will try to formulate a phenomenological, i.e., metaphysically neutral, interpretation of the phenomenal world to which Blaustein referred, as he analyzed the theory of content in Husserl. Finally, I will assess the interpretative proposal made by Blaustein, identifying its strong and weak points.

Blaustein’s analyses contained in Husserlowska nauka… [Husserl’s Theory...] took a wide perspective on the problems discussed in the book. This enabled Blaustein to clearly define the value of Husserl’s theories compared to the traditions of Bolzano as well as Brentano and Twardowski. However, rather than stopping at the presentation and discussion of the theory of content, Blaustein raises interesting objections to it. As I have stressed in the preceding chapter, these objections resulted in part from his original findings that he later used in other object-oriented and systematic research. In the present chapter, I want to ask to what extent his critique of the theory of content in Husserl may be considered valid. I want to define the elements in Blaustein’s interpretation that seem to diverge from Husserl’s position. What comes to the fore in this context is the issue of psychologism and the related problem of understanding reduction. I want to address these two problems at the beginning of the chapter. Next, I will try to formulate a phenomenological, i.e., metaphysically neutral, interpretation of the phenomenal world to which Blaustein referred, as he analyzed the theory of content in Husserl. Finally, I will assess the interpretative proposal made by Blaustein, identifying its strong and weak points.

7.1 Blaustein’s Misreading of Husserl’s Method and the Problem of Psychologism

This section incorporates some materials previously published in Płotka, Leopold Blaustein’s Descriptive Psychology and Aesthetics in Light of His Criticism of Husserl, 172–175. The materials are presented here as a revised edition.

Although Husserl knew of Blaustein’s book, he did not respond to Blaustein’s critique. Ingarden’s short review of Blaustein’s book provided us with some clues as to how Husserl might have reacted. For Ingarden, Blaustein confused two Husserlian theories, one from Untersuchungen and one from Ideen I.¹ For this reason, according to Ingarden, Blaustein failed to take Husserl’s theory of constitution into account. It is false that Husserl comprehended perceptual sense-data as two-dimensional and that he wanted to include sense-data in consciousness. At the same time, Blaustein went too far in claiming that sense-data are inherent to the world. That the object is constituted means that it is established in correlation with consciousness according to the object’s essence. Blaustein, then, failed to recognize the constituted character of the world. He viewed the world as divided into phenomenal and material parts. Ingarden’s critique also concerned Blaustein’s reading of Husserl’s notion of the noema; he showed that Blaustein did not take this element into his consideration of Husserl’s theory of content.² If Ingarden was right—and I think that his core argument effectively addresses the better part of Blaustein’s critique—one can conclude that Blaustein’s misreading of Husserl’s theory of constitution followed from two different but intertwined issues, i.e., from his understanding of Husserl’s method and his misinterpretation of immanent content. Both issues concern the question of how phenomenology overcomes the charge of psychologism and ceases to be merely descriptive psychology.

Blaustein was right in defining the phenomenological method as a change of attitude, but he failed to recognize the status of essences. This issue was discussed at length in Chap. 5, so here, I can indicate only a few points. If Blaustein defined essences as general objects and as timeless objectivities, he omitted Husserl’s description of the correlative structure of consciousness as directed toward ideal, though irreal, objectivities, which he clearly expressed in his 1925 lectures on psychology that Blaustein attended.³ Essences are rather constituted in a dynamic process Husserl called “eidetic variation.” One can, of course, comprehend the concept of variation as an elaboration of the concept of eidetic intuition as defined in the “Sixth Logical Investigation,”⁴ but that continuity does not justify the claim that Husserl held a Platonic concept of essences throughout his entire career.⁵ It is just the opposite. Husserl rejected a naïve concept of static essences in favor of a dynamic concept centering on constitution.

A few remarks are necessary here. First, an essence is not a separate object, distinct from the real object it corresponds to; rather, as Husserl put it, the real object is the object of its essence.⁶ Here, essences are given as “invariants” of possible changes, which means that essences are “general” not by virtue of abstraction from real objects, as Blaustein suggested, but rather because essences concern the possible structures of objects.⁷ This means that an essence is given as a set of possible variations of the phenomenon; that being said, the phenomenologist does not need to present all of the possibilities at issue. What is crucial here is rather the phenomenologist’s awareness that all possible variations are essential to the given phenomenon. Therefore, essences are constituted by consciousness and given in the modi of the “and so on” or “and so on optionally” (und so weiter),⁸ i.e., one does not have to present every variation. What is presented in eidetic variation is not an abstract and timeless object but a possibility. Thus, eidetic variation yields a general character not due to its object but because of the character of the presentation of the object. It is not the case that essences are transcendent timeless objects; rather, they are constituted in possible repetitions or variations. Finally, the object of variation is given as evident since one is able to constitute it “again and again” (immer wieder)⁹ in the operation of variation.¹⁰ Here, then, essences do not have the metaphysical status of general objects, as Blaustein suggested; they are purely descriptive objects instantiated by eidetic operations. In short, they are constituted and do not simply exist—neither real nor ideal.

Blaustein’s misreading of Husserl’s method—as focused supposedly on timeless essences—enables one to raise another objection. For him, as stated in Sect. 6.2.2, the notion of “content” which can be found in Untersuchungen is ambiguous and contains at least six meanings. Among them, Blaustein criticized the notion of “ideal meaning” which—as intentional content—was thought to be part of lived experience. He questions Husserl’s claim that such moments are indeed part of psychic phenomena. One reads:

Adopting an ideal matter next to the psychic [matter], which would be miraculously stuck in the psychic [matter] and thus be an unreal component of real consciousness, would be the only possible justification for accepting the identity of matter in various acts. However, the concept of such ideal, timeless matter, inherent in a whole series of acts, raises considerable doubts. […] In my opinion, the problem is resolved by the fact that a psychological analysis can fulfill its task completely without adopting such an irreal implication of an ideal matter in a mental and real act.¹¹

Blaustein questioned Husserl’s idea that an ideal meaning or, more generally, content can be part of any act at all. The problem is that he operates with a naïve notion of the ideal as a timeless object. Again, the ideal meaning is constituted. Moreover, Blaustein confused the descriptive level with the intentional one: he argued that ideal content cannot be part of an act since it is not real ex definitione. However, Husserl was clear that ideal meaning or content is not a real part of an act; rather, it is intentional through and through. In § 16 of the “Fifth Logical Investigation,” Husserl clarified that intentional analysis is not concerned with the question of the existence or non-existence of content, whereas analysis of real content examines real elements of consciousness.¹² Blaustein’s paradox—the ideal as part of lived experience—can be easily solved: intentional content, thus ideal meaning or content, is instantiated by the act, where the content is the act’s intentional property.¹³ Therefore, ideal meaning is not necessarily conceived as a non-real part of a real act, but rather as a property, i.e., as an abstract part of an act.

It may be argued that Blaustein’s misreading of Husserl’s method and his doctrine of essences is connected to his view of content and its role in Husserl’s Untersuchungen. Blaustein explicitly defined the aim of his dissertation as an attempt to “[…] expound Husserl’s theory of act, content, and object of presentations, which he presented for the first time in 1900 in his Logische Untersuchungen.”¹⁴ One can explain this with the fact that the Untersuchungen was a popular book in Twardowski’s seminars. Nonetheless, Blaustein neglected important changes that Husserl introduced in the second edition of the book from 1913, which resulted in a misinterpretation of phenomenology’s relation to psychology. After all, phenomenology is an eidetic discipline that describes essences, primarily the essence of consciousness. However, what is the object of phenomenological description? Blaustein, as stated above, listed three notions of “content”: (1) intentional content, (2) presenting content, and (3) descriptive content. However, he did not mention “real” or “phenomenological” content. In the “Fifth Logical Investigation,” Husserl defined the real content of experiences as their phenomenological content, and as a result, he defined phenomenology as an eidetic discipline that does not inquire into empirical relations.¹⁵ However, when Husserl defined phenomenology in the first edition of his book as descriptive psychology,¹⁶ he in fact suggested that it was concerned with real content. To avoid contradiction in this regard, one can argue that phenomenology investigates intentional content, which is not a real part of a given act. If this is the case, however, the consequence seems to be that the object is beyond the limits of phenomenological description and is placed in the ideal sphere.¹⁷ What is lacking in the first edition of Untersuchungen is a clear breakthrough in comprehending real content as a subject matter of phenomenology. In short, Untersuchungen requires phenomenological reduction. Finally, in the second edition (from 1913) of his Untersuchungen, Husserl replaced the word “psychic” in the phrase “psychic content” with the word “phenomenological.”¹⁸ This change is not merely a terminological one. It is rather connected with the deeper problem of how to understand phenomenology itself. If phenomenology concerns real content, it is nothing but descriptive psychology. Only from a transcendental point of view can one interpret the act as a noetic-noematic correlation. Husserl stated this explicitly in a footnote in the second edition of Untersuchungen that comments on a fragment from the first edition where he claimed that he overcame psychologism by distinguishing real and intentional content. It reads as follows:

In the First Edition I wrote “real or phenomenological” for “real.” The word “phenomenological” like the word “descriptive” was used in the First Edition only in connection with real (reelle) elements of experience and in the present edition it has so far been used predominately in this sense. This corresponds to one’s natural starting point with the psychological point of view. It became plainer and plainer, however, as I reviewed the completed Investigations and pondered on their themes more deeply—particularly from this point onwards—that the description of intentional objectivity as such, as we are conscious of it in the concrete act-experience, represents a distinct descriptive dimension where purely intuitive description may be adequately practiced, a dimension opposed to that of real (reellen) act-constituents, but which also deserves to be called “phenomenological.” These methodological extensions lead to important extensions of the field of problems now opening before us and considerable improvements due to a fully conscious separation of descriptive levels.¹⁹

Contra Blaustein, then, content is available not only to descriptive psychology but also to purely descriptive phenomenology, which comprehends lived-experiences in terms of noetic-noematic correlation and not as real experiences. Blaustein, it seems, was unable to recognize this aspect of Husserl’s phenomenology, as he interpreted intentional content to be real content. By contrast, Husserl’s second edition of Untersuchungen made it clear that this differentiation is necessary to go beyond the descriptive level of psychology and to do pure phenomenology. To be clear, Blaustein failed to ascribe intentional content to the essence of the act and instead joined it with the real part or component of the act (as correlated with the phenomenal world).

7.2 The Content-Apprehension Schema in Husserl vs. the Phenomenal World in Blaustein

7.2.1 Blaustein on Husserl’s Sensations and Their Function in the Act

The critical assessment of the theory of content in Husserl presented by Blaustein in Husserlowska nauka… [Husserl’s Theory…] focused on the following question regarding the understanding of sensations in the intentional context: are sensations parts of acts? Arguing against Husserl, Blaustein claimed that sensations are not part of lived experiences and defended his position by introducing the concept of the “phenomenal world.” It can even be said that he developed this concept to solve problems stemming from what he believed to be the unjustified practice of including sensations (understood as presenting content) in lived experiences. In his opinion, lived experiences comprise acts, but not sensations, the latter being presenting content (differentiated from descriptive content and intentional content). The situation is different in Untersuchungen, where the real or effective (reell) content of consciousness includes both acts and “sense-material” (Empfindungsmaterial).²⁰ According to Husserl, each real part of lived experience is “experienced” (erlebt), which means that lived experience is essentially consciousness. In commenting on this proposal, Blaustein said that it is inadequate. If it is true that sensations are not a real part of lived experience, how should they be described? To address this question, Blaustein advanced three types of arguments. The first refers to the differentiation between what is experienced (erlebt) and what is lived through (durchlebt), which was made popular in phenomenology by Conrad-Martius and developed anew by Ingarden²¹; this argument may be spelled out as follows: (1) lived experiences cover only what is lived through; (2) however, one can talk about “living through” in two ways: something is either “experienced” (erlebt) or “lived through” in the proper sense of the term (durchlebt); (3) the former meaning relates to sensations, the latter to acts, which is why (4) lived experiences sensu stricto cover only acts.²² The second argument, the role of which is to strengthen the first one, addresses a pair of concepts: “ichlich” and “ichfremd.” It can be summarized as follows: (1) lived experiences cover only those elements that are characterized by a “specific affiliation” with the ego (ichlich); (2) sensations, however, are “alien” to the ego (ichfremd). It follows that (3) sensations do not belong to lived experiences.²³ The third argument concerns immanent perception and can be summarized as follows: (1) lived experiences are given as obvious in immanent perception; (2) however, sensations can be located in the body and thus are objects of external perception as well; therefore, (3) sensations do not belong to lived experiences.²⁴ Again, if sensations are not a real part of lived experience, how should one describe them? Blaustein responded that sensations are part of the phenomenal world. To understand this proposal, it is worth juxtaposing it with Husserl and his idea of the content-apprehension schema.

Husserl used the schema to describe different types of acts, modifying it over the years and even abandoning it, as in the case of imagination.²⁵ In Untersuchungen, i.e., the work to which Blaustein referred, the schema was used to describe the status of sensations. The point is that, in lived experience, the same sensations may be apprehended differently. In § 14 of the “Fifth Logical Investigation,” Husserl considered the following example: “[l]et us imagine that certain arabesques or figures have affected us aesthetically and that we then suddenly see that we are dealing with symbols or verbal signs.”²⁶ In this case, the sensations remain the same, but the way they are apprehended changes. The objective reference—to the symbol or to the verbal sign here—constitutes itself on the basis of sensations, that is, in presenting content, which is the carrier of intentionality, strictly speaking. Therefore, the act of apprehending content is founded on sensations. However, there is an important difference. While the act of apprehension cannot be separated from sensations, sensations themselves may well exist without apprehension. This is why, in Husserl’s philosophy, apprehension is inseparable from content. However, in a given act, one does not experience sensations but objects. As one reads in Untersuchungen:

I see a thing, e.g., this box, but I do not see my sensations. I always see one and the same box, however, it may be turned and tilted. I have always the same “content of consciousness”—if I care to call the perceived object a content of consciousness. But each turn yields a new “content of consciousness,” if I call experienced contents “contents of consciousness,” in a much more appropriate use of words. Very different contents are therefore experienced, though the same object is perceived, the experienced content, generally speaking, is not the perceived object.²⁷

As the text above indicates, the act for Husserl points to a certain object, but this pointing is made possible by sensations which are apprehended in a specific way. The nature of content here is presenting, which is why content does not present itself. In short, it is transparent. Nonetheless, it is the part of lived experiences precisely as content, because sensations are lived through as they are apprehended or interpreted.

As this short exposition shows, Blaustein accepted the main thrust of Husserl’s idea that the object is related to through apprehending sensations. However, he did not agree to have sensations included in lived experiences. In Gilicka’s reading of this juxtaposition of Blaustein and Husserl, the status of feelings in Untersuchungen is non-intentional. Thus, contrary to Blaustein, Husserl indeed accepted—according to Gilicka²⁸—non-intentional elements in his theory. In doing so, she cited the following fragment of § 15 of the “Fifth Logical Investigation”:

Every sensory feeling, e.g., the pain of burning oneself or of being burnt, is no doubt after a fashion referred to an object: it is referred, on the one hand, to the ego and its burnt bodily member, on the other hand, to the objects which inflicts the burn. In all these respects there is conformity with other sensations: tactual sensations, e.g., are referred in just this manner to the bodily member which touches and to the external body which is touched. And though this reference is realized in intentional experiences, no one would think of calling the referred sensations intentional. It is rather the case that our sensations are here functioning as presentative contents in perceptual acts or (to use a possibly misleading phrase) that our sensations here receive an objective “interpretation” of “taking-up.”²⁹

This does not prove that Husserl excluded sensations—as a non-intentional part—from the intentional act. At best, he claimed that sensations are indeed non-intentional, but they still function as presenting content. Admittedly, one might find Gilicka’s criticism misleading and wonder whether her argument holds at all. I believe that Gilicka deviated from Blaustein’s argument. The main line of his argument is based on the thesis that sensations are separate from all lived experiences and not only from intentional acts. The point is that the dispute between Blaustein and Husserl was not so much about the potential intentionality of sensations and acts, as about the question of whether sensations are lived experiences at all. Certainly, Blaustein was aware that sensations are not intentional, but his critique—contrary to what Gilicka contended—was not about whether Husserl understood sensations as an intentional or non-intentional element of lived experience but whether he wanted lived experience to comprise both intentional acts and non-intentional sensations. The fragment quoted above from Untersuchungen says only that sensations are not intentional lived experiences, but the fact that they are lived experiences all the same is not challenged. Blaustein’s interpretation becomes problematic—as we will see in the following—rather in the context of his analyses of intuitive fullness (Fülle).

As mentioned above, the concept of intuitive fullness (Fülle) is supposed to be one of the meanings attributed to the concept of content in Husserl’s philosophy. However, strictly speaking, the concept is discussed in the context of a specific type of act, namely, objectifying acts in which the signitive intention is “fulfilled” by the act that adequately presents its object, i.e., the fulfilling act. Importantly, the model whereby the act is fulfilled through a synthesis of empty intention and intuition—not introduced until the “Sixth Logical Investigation”—is different from the content-apprehension schema which the “Fifth Logical Investigation” primarily uses.³⁰ The fundamental difference is that, whereas the former model talks about two acts (a signitive act and a fulfilling act), the latter assumes only one act—apprehension or interpretation—directed toward something without the act-character, i.e., sensations. This is why Husserl wrote about either the act-act model (“Sixth Logical Investigation”) or the act-content (sensations) model (“Fifth Logical Investigation”). Blaustein ignored that difference and seemed to understand the concept of intuitive fullness as a way to make the content-apprehension schema more specific. Hence, he effectively treated both models as one. Like he argued that sensations are not part of the act in the content-apprehension schema, he upheld that fullness is not part of the act in the case of the intuitive fullness model. However, the analogy does not apply to the two models but simply describes one of them. Blaustein wrote:

Again, I believe that intuitive fullness is not part of the act but something outside of it; however, because of its specific relation to matter, it serves as a representative of the intentional object of this act. Therefore, each presenting act is accompanied by certain sensory content that is apprehended and interpreted by the act. Apprehended and interpreted, sensory content, together with gestalt qualities, creates presenting content of the presenting act that is different from its intentional content (act-matter). The intentional content of the act is its inseparable part, whilst the presenting content accompanies it and belongs to it, but not as its part.³¹

This fragment clearly shows that Blaustein in fact equated intentional fullness with sensations, and as a result, he interpreted them both in the context of the content-apprehension model: the act (apprehension) interprets some sensations (intuitive fullness) that, according to him, are separate from the act. This misunderstanding probably stems from the fact that Blaustein failed to see that the theory of intuitive fullness does not relate to presentations as such but only to a specific type of act, i.e., objectifying acts that constitute knowledge about the object. Blaustein overlooked that, in Husserl, fulfilled acts seemed to correspond to Twardowski’s image presentations and thus only to a certain type of presentation. However, this is not what ultimately justifies the concept of the phenomenal world.

7.2.2 Beyond Metaphysical Interpretation

In line with the argument developed thus far, presenting content (sensations) should be described as follows: (1) presenting content is experienced (erlebt), and (2) it exists in the form of lived experience separately from the ego (ichfremd). (3) It is also given in presentations that are absolutely adequate yet transcendent (or, negatively, it is not the object of immanent perception). (4) It operates as a representative of the object, which means that (5) its apprehension refers to the relevant properties of the object. (6) Presenting content points to properties but does not have them. (7) As such, it is not part of act matter (intentional content), but, as Blaustein observed, (8) it “accompanies” the act. Given this account of presenting content (sensations), the following problem becomes clear: if presenting content is neither a real nor effective nor the intentional part of lived experience, and if it is not even part of the object at issue, how should one understand its status in the structure of the act–content–object intentional relation? According to Blaustein, to do justice to the above description, one should assume that presenting content belongs to the so-called phenomenal world—already discussed in Sect. 6.3—that is, the world of sensory content located in a two-dimensional space. The world is made of surfaces that combine with one another, change locations, etc. It is apprehended by and interpreted through acts. Owing to acts, the surfaces of this world are interpreted as facets of material objects and appear as visual, phenomenal objects (Sehdinge).³²

As I have already observed in Chap. 6, Marek Pokropski interpreted this as a theory of two worlds and accused it of problematic metaphysical implications.³³ Krzysztof Wieczorek also interpreted the proposal in a metaphysical context, showing that Blaustein’s fundamental intention was to avoid Husserl’s idealistic implications when sensations—and, consequently, the real existence of the world—are reduced to the act of consciousness; contrary to this tendency, it is enough to assume that sensations and appearances are outside the subject to justify the existence of transcendent objects.³⁴ Unlike Pokropski and Wieczorek, I think that Blaustein’s proposal may be interpreted while maintaining metaphysical neutrality. He emphasized that the phenomenal world, i.e., a set of presenting content elements, is given in a certain attitude. If presenting content is apprehended in the naïve attitude, what is seen becomes identified with the qualities or features of the object.³⁵ However, even then, changes in presenting content should not be referred to the object as such: “[a]lthough a colored surface, which I have interpreted as a side of a table, is shrinking and growing, I do not believe that the table is shrinking or growing.”³⁶ On the other hand, if my attitude is exclusively directed toward the phenomenal world, I apprehend what I see precisely as presenting content. In the paper entitled “O niektórych nastawieniach na świat nas otaczający” [“On Some Attitudes Toward Our Surrounding World”] that he presented on November 19, 1927, during the 276^th meeting of the Polish Philosophical Society in Lvov, Blaustein identified five different attitudes (with the caveat that the list is not exhaustive): (1) toward an uninterpreted phenomenal world (the world of sensory contents), (2) toward an interpreted phenomenal world (the world of views, appearances), (3) toward the material world (the world of three-dimensional blocks), (4) toward a physical world (the world of atoms, electrons, etc.), and (5) toward the world of things in themselves (totally undefined).³⁷ He added immediately: “[o]ne speaks here about layers of the surrounding world not in an objective, ontological sense, but rather as intentional correlates of our possible attitudes toward the world.”³⁸ Hence, talking about attitudes is an attempt to describe how a given layer of the world is made present, i.e., how presenting content appears in experience. Blaustein’s focus was therefore not problematic metaphysical theory, as Pokropski and Wieczorek suggested. Rather, he emphasized that the issue of the existence or nonexistence of objects is not decisive for studies into acts, content, and objects. Paradoxically, the idea of the phenomenal world is phenomenological to the core because it relates to the way in which sensations appear in consciousness, which they do as colorful surfaces, as appearances, etc. Blaustein believed that presenting content (sensations) appears under a specific attitude toward the world. Thus, analyses of attitude and the problem of “how” presenting content is experienced aim to address the question of how objects (and not consciousness) appear in experience.

This interpretation has an important advantage which becomes clear in the framework of Husserl’s theory—in which it is difficult to explain how presenting content or intuitive fullness fulfills the empty intention.³⁹ If presenting content is part of lived experience (as Husserl suggested), then it is not possible to obtain a clear grasp of what makes such experience “full.” The difference between an “empty” and “fulfilled” lived experience relates to “fullness” itself; however, it is not determined how the transition from the former to the latter takes place. In turn, if presenting content or intuitive fullness is the third element of lived experience, in addition to matter and quality, its status becomes problematic. Husserl rejected this possibility. Blaustein’s proposal consisted in noticing a subtle phenomenological difference that Husserl—as it seems—did not describe adequately: indeed, presenting content is not intentional; thus, it is not a real or effective moment of lived experience, but at the same time, it is different from the intentional object. Rather, it should be said that it accompanies act-matter and is available in a certain attitude, i.e., an attitude turned toward an uninterpreted phenomenal world. Thus understood, presenting content does not relate to lived experiences but to objects. Therefore, how should one define presenting content described as an element of the phenomenal world? I think that it is a way in which something appears. This description takes into account the fact that sensations (as interpreted by Blaustein) are transcendent in relation to lived experience, but if they were not apprehended, they would not present the properties of objects at all. By accounting for this way of appearance or manifestation, one can return to the object, i.e., focus on the interpreted phenomenal world. Phenomenologically speaking, the subject is directed toward the object through the ways in which the object is presented in experience.

In the already mentioned paper focused on attitudes toward the world—“O niektórych nastawieniach na świat nas otaczający” [“On Some Attitudes Toward Our Surrounding World”]—Blaustein emphasized that the phenomenal world requires a “non-naïve” and “unnatural” attitude which, as he wrote, can be adopted by “[…] a psychologist, a phenomenologist (in the sense of Stumpf), a hyletic (in the sense of Husserl), or an impressionist painter.”⁴⁰ This comment is important for defining the theoretical framework of the analyzed concept and its sources. This is important because, in addition to Brentano and Twardowski, another point of reference in the present context seems to be the philosophy of Carl Stumpf.⁴¹ It is only when analyzing Blaustein’s idea of the phenomenal world and his polemics with Husserl’s theory of content that one can see clear connections. Thus, the very expression “phenomenal world” is to be found already in Stumpf (Erscheinungswelt), for whom it referred to the world separate from the so-called psychic functions but, as in Blaustein, including sensations.⁴² For Stumpf, this world is a set of phenomena by which, it is important to add, he understood the content of sensations (Inhalte der Sinnesempfindungen).⁴³ I think that presenting content in Blaustein may be understood precisely as the content of sensations in the sense of Stumpf. Among other points, this is justified by the fact that Blaustein accounted for sensations as absolutely adequate presentations.⁴⁴ As understood by Blaustein, phenomenology should focus as much on intentional and descriptive content as on presenting content that only “accompanies” lived experience. In other words, the object of phenomenology is phenomena. There are obvious differences between the approaches of Stumpf and Husserl, whether in relation to describing feelings as intentional or in the scope of phenomenological study,⁴⁵ but Blaustein was, as it seems, aware of them.⁴⁶ Failing to reconcile the description of sensations as foreign to the ego (ichfremd) with the nature of lived experiences, he suggested, albeit not expressis verbis, adopting certain solutions developed by Stumpf for whom phenomena (sensory content) are separate from psychic functions (acts). Let me emphasize that contrary to Pokropski and Wieczorek, this solution does retain metaphysical neutrality and makes it possible to supplement Husserl’s descriptions with the way in which an object appears as an element that cannot be reduced to an act.

7.3 A Critical Assessment of Blaustein’s Reading of Husserl

The theory of content in Husserl’s philosophy is complex and, following Hopp,⁴⁷ full of “internal tensions.” Bearing this in mind, when assessing Blaustein’s doctoral thesis, later published as Husserlowska nauka… [Husserl’s Theory…], Twardowski appreciated the attempt to offer a holistic account of this theory against the backdrop of how the problem of act is developed in the tradition of Brentano.⁴⁸ He underlined the author’s efforts to account for the analyzed theories as clearly as possible, even though the theories themselves are far from expressing their core object—i.e., the description of the act–content–object relation—comprehensively and lucidly. As a result, Twardowski recommended the reviewed thesis for publication and, as we know, helped his student prepare it for printing.⁴⁹ In his review of Blaustein’s already published book, Walter Auerbach also appreciates the clarity with which the author advances his theses.⁵⁰ Although it would be difficult to agree with Twardowski’s and Auerbach’s assessments of the indisputable accessibility of the work, we should not ignore its cost.

First, Blaustein all too often simplified Husserl’s theories, eventually reducing them to the act–content–object structure developed by Twardowski.⁵¹ Consequently, he failed to notice nuances that are important from a theoretical perspective, as well as the changes Husserl made in his philosophy. What is striking, if not outright wrong, is the attempt to disparage the modifications that resulted from the critique of the position from Untersuchungen and the major reformulation of the phenomenological project in Ideen I. Despite the fact that he was aware of those changes, reformulations, and even revolutions (including those in Husserl’s unpublished manuscripts⁵²), he ignored glaring differences between the two models of intentionality developed in both works. In Blaustein’s opinion, the overall structure of both of these models of intentionality is fundamentally the same, the only differences being in the terminology. Thus, (1) intention (from Untersuchungen) is to correspond to the object of the noema (from Ideen I), (2) matter to the content of the noema, i.e., noematic sense, (3) intuitive matter to the core of the noema, (4) sensations to hyletic data, and (5) act quality to act “character.”⁵³ The two projects are also linked by the theory of adumbrations that has gradually developed over the years. The only difference—of which, by the way, Blaustein was critical—concerns the fact that the noema is the object of an act and at the same time differs from the proper object of an intentional act. However, this reading is problematic. It is important to bear in mind that the theory of intentional content from Untersuchungen faced a fundamental difficulty when defining the scope of phenomenological analyses, limiting itself to the strictly immanent boundaries of acts, which, in line with the discussion above in Sect. 7.1, may lead to psychologism; as for objects, the theory treats them as equivalents of content. In turn, the analysis from Ideen I addressed both moments—noesis and noema—simultaneously and outlined a framework for transcendental research thanks to reduction. Since such nuances are missing in Blaustein, he cannot recognize the novelty of the investigations carried out in Ideen I. One should therefore agree with Pokropski when he said that Blaustein failed to sufficiently develop the concepts of pure consciousness or noema and reduced the position from Ideen I to a mere continuation of the project launched in Untersuchungen.⁵⁴ One may defend Blaustein against this objection, as Twardowski did, by saying that he was critical of the theory under discussion and, right from the outset, did not aim at simply reconstructing it, which is true even of the “Second Part” of his book, which was explicitly intended to take stock of Husserl’s work.⁵⁵ This argument weakens Pokropski’s criticism, showing that Blaustein did not set out to merely reconstruct Husserl’s position, including its subsequent reformulations and possible revolutions, but rather to propose an adequate theory of content. Adopting this point of view, one may agree with Wieczorek, who claims that Blaustein “[…] does not therefore want to be a faithful orthodox propagator or continuator of Husserl’s theory, but an explorer of new problem areas, as well as new applications of those phenomenological methods and terms that will prove acceptable and useful in his own analytical work.”⁵⁶ One should not forget that, in line with Blaustein’s own declarations, the theory of content developed in Husserlowska nauka… [Husserl’s Theory…] lays the foundation for his later aesthetic theory. If so, why was his reading of Husserl’s philosophy so reductionist?

In light of the analyses carried out thus far, one is justified in suggesting that Blaustein looked at phenomenology from the point of view of the tradition started by Brentano. Recall that in Sect. 5.3.3, I mentioned that in one of his letters to Twardowski, Blaustein calls Husserl a “descendant of Brentano.”⁵⁷ Blaustein outlined the links between Husserl and the Brentanian tradition, confronting it at the same time with Bolzano’s ideas. In this context, the idea from Untersuchungen to account for the act as a combination of two inseparable parts seemed to be an interesting and quite successful attempt to solve problems by defining the status of content in relation to the act and the act’s object. Blaustein showed that Husserl’s solution, though basically correct, does not adequately account for the status of presenting content, i.e., sensations. As has been shown above, Blaustein drew on Stumpf’s idea of the phenomenal world and his concept of phenomena to better define what Husserl could not cope with (in his opinion). This interpretation seems to have several strengths. Blaustein followed Husserl, showing that there are differences between direction toward an object (act), the intentional content of the act, and the transcendent object (the act’s intentional object). However, Blaustein resisted including presenting content (sensations) in the real or effective (reell) part of the act, and he thus highlighted the ways in which objects appear in experience, a step that is arguably his greatest contribution to the development of Husserl’s phenomenology. He expressed this idea in his theory of the phenomenal world, which seems to maintain metaphysical neutrality.

Despite the advantages outlined above, Blaustein’s theory posed certain problems that might be attributed to his lack of consistency. It is important to bear in mind that he based his conception of the phenomenal world on the theses advanced by early Husserl and Twardowski,⁵⁸ arguing that sensations are not spatial because this quality applies to things rather than sensations. If sensations were spatial, it would be difficult to maintain the thesis that they are separate from things. To rephrase this concern in the Brentanian language, if sensations were spatial, they would be physical phenomena. However, since they are not spatial, they are not physical phenomena (Brentano); rather, they are lived experiences (Husserl) and are definitely not reducible to things (Blaustein). Nonetheless, neither Husserl nor Blaustein are consistent in this respect. We know that in his later studies, for example, those on the phenomenon of passive syntheses started in the early 1920s, Husserl abandoned this thesis and allowed for the possibility of describing sensations as colorful surfaces, i.e., in spatial terms.⁵⁹ In turn, when Blaustein set out to describe the phenomenal world, he understood it directly as two-dimensional colorful surfaces that are apprehended in a given act and that, thanks to this interpretation, relate to the object.⁶⁰ Blaustein’s description leads to the problem of the ambiguity of the term “spatiality,” because—as Blaustein wrote in Husserlowska nauka… [Husserl’s Theory…]—the term may denote a property of material objects as well as sensations that are described as “[…] elements of the two-dimensional, phenomenal world.”⁶¹ If the phenomenal world is indeed two-dimensional ex definitione, it is attributed to the quality of spatiality. However, Blaustein did not explain the difference between the two meanings of “spatiality.” Is the spatiality of the phenomenal world (a set of sensations) something different from the spatiality of the material world (a set of things)? If that is the case, what is the difference between them? Does the difference lie in the fact that the former is two-dimensional and the latter three-dimensional? Leaving these questions aside, the concept of the spatiality of the phenomenal world raises other doubts. Thus, Blaustein did not show how elements that are not spatial (sensations, which are two-dimensional) combine to become spatial (the phenomenal world, which is three-dimensional). Do sensations “acquire” this property through their combination? If so, how is that even possible? Blaustein did not provide definitive answers.

Equally important, albeit left unanswered, are questions about sensations that cannot be precisely located, as in the case of an omnipresent sound. Where can such sensations be found on the two-dimensional surface of the world? Blaustein’s conception here needs to be deepened, if not verified, in the context of embodied sensations. He was aware of the importance of this problem and mentioned the need to reflect upon the relationship between experiences from two- and three-dimensional spaces, the latter being related to the body and constituted in movement.⁶² What Blaustein did not mention, let alone consider, was an issue that seems to raise serious problems for the suggested model—namely, auto-affective sensations that can be located not so much “on” as “within” the body. If the phenomenal world does appear as a two-dimensional surface, where are the sensations that are experienced bodily? Describing the phenomenal world as two-dimensional, Blaustein eventually put emphasis on perceptual experiences, omitting bodily experiences. This is also reflected in his aesthetic theory—as I will show in Chap. 8—where aesthetic experiences are (mostly) reduced to those of perception. Therefore, the inconsistency that I have mentioned (sensations are described as non-spatial while the world is described as spatial) ultimately leads to major problems that seem to undermine the value of Blaustein’s proposal. In my opinion, this conception of the phenomenal world can be defended only if it is first interpreted as a phenomenological analysis of the ways in which things appear; describing this aspect of experience in spatial terms is misleading and limiting.

Other limitations arise with Blaustein’s decision to adopt the point of view of Brentano and, more importantly, Twardowski. When Blaustein adopted the thesis that mental phenomena are presentations or are based upon presentations,⁶³ all he saw in Untersuchungen is a version of this conception. He did not see that Husserl used a theory of act constitution that cannot be reconciled directly with Brentano’s thesis, whereby lived experiences are merely a combination of presentations, which, it should be noted, resulted in a revised classification of lived experiences known from the 1874 Psychologie.⁶⁴ What is also problematic in this context is accounting for objectifying acts from Husserl’s “Sixth Logical Investigation” as simple presentations; doing so, Blaustein ultimately included concepts and sensations (in the sense of Twardowski) in one category and failed to notice that the theory of intuitive fullness did not concern one presentation but rather a synthesis of two acts. In line with Twardowski’s findings, signitive intention should be understood rather as a concept (a non-intuitive presentation), while fulfillment should be interpreted as an image (an intuitive presentation). Mutatis mutandis, the “Sixth Logical Investigation” talked about different types of presentations. Yet, in Blaustein, signitive intentions and intuitive fullness are the same presentation. These are major terminological shifts that do not correspond fully to Husserl’s reflections. However, important as they are, I believe that they are superseded by methodological consequences. Blaustein consistently accounts for phenomenology as a variant of descriptive psychology,⁶⁵ which is why he stripped it of all references to what is eidetic (as discussed above in Chap. 5). This is the source of his critique of intentional and signitive essences and, no less importantly, his rejection of the eidetic nature of Husserl’s analyses. As already shown above, Blaustein did not want philosophy to address the essences of phenomena but rather their types. Thus, when he eliminated all of the essential elements from the act, he complied with the method of describing psychic phenomena developed by Brentano and Twardowski. The problem with this aversion to eidetic studies is that it prevented him from noticing the complex nature of Husserl’s theory of the eidos as an unreal (or irreal) element of a phenomenon that constitutes itself as a correlate of relevant acts of variation. More importantly, without differentiating between what is essential in the act and the act as lived experience, Blaustein failed to see the difference between the phenomenological content and the real content of lived experiences, which leads to secondary psychologism: here, phenomenology is supposed to address instances of lived experiences and their real contents. Paradoxically, when Blaustein followed Twardowski and opposed Brentano’s psychologism, pointing to the radical transcendence of the intentional object in relation to the act, he did not identify this thesis as an eidetic principle but rather as a descriptive principle, albeit one that is not strictly universal.

***In conclusion, it may be said that—in spite of their novelty and the interesting theses they advanced—the analyses from Husserlowska nauka… [Husserl’s Theory…] are embroiled in a number of difficulties, such as the problem of psychologism. Another problem arises in the context of Husserl’s theory of reduction. It would be difficult to defend Blaustein’s approach by adopting a metaphysically neutral (i.e., phenomenological sensu stricto) interpretation of the phenomenal world. Exploring the reasons behind these difficulties, one may arrive at the surprising conclusion that they result from the very element that makes Blaustein’s approach innovative, namely, its grounding in the tradition of Bolzano and, more importantly, Brentano. This conclusion is more general in nature. Blaustein’s reference to the tradition of Brentano in his interpretation of Husserl’s theory of content served a dual purpose. On the one hand, it had heuristic value, as it made it possible to outline the continuity of reflections on the problem of content in that tradition and thus recognized the importance of the solution from Untersuchungen (content as an inseparable part of the act), as well as to develop the final version of this solution (sensations as elements of the phenomenal world) in the spirit of Stumpf’s philosophy. I believe that this line of argument eventually led Blaustein to identify the problem of the ways in which things appear. On the other hand, it reduced other innovative aspects of Husserl’s theory of content (e.g., the complex theory of the noema), narrowed the scope of research to perceptual experience, and did not fully reflect the nuances of his method (e.g., the exclusion of eidetics), all of which ultimately seemed to result in a kind of psychologism. As I will show in the following chapters, both tendencies are continued in Blaustein’s aesthetics. The former reverberates in his studies into the different media of artistic expression, including cinema and radio. In my opinion, these studies were enabled by this sensitivity to the different ways in which things appear or different types of artistic creation. As for the latter tendency, it prevented Blaustein from making a sufficiently clear distinction between works of art and aesthetic objects, which exposed him to Ingarden’s accusation of psychologism.⁶⁶