Husserl o n the Ego 1

I z c h a k Miller

One of the changes that mark Husserl's transition from his early phenomenological position to his transcendental p h e n o m e n o l o g y concerns his conception of the ego? I will argue that Husserl's change o f mind about the notion o f ego was primarily motivated by his theory of time consciousness. In particular, I will suggest that it resulted from the desire to a c c o m m o date within his theory of intentionality an account of the simultaneous experiences of both self-change and self-sameness across time. We must distinguish two different groups o f questions about personal identity that tend to be confused with one another. T h e first is an ontological, or metaphysical, group of questions, roughly: what is a person, and what are the conditions for personal identity through time? T h e second group consists of phenomenological (or epistemological) questions, all of which derive from the general question: what is the structure of our sense, or experience, o f personal identity? These groups of questions are related. We should expect that a sense of personal identity is required for personal identity, but not necessarily the converse. T o see this, we need only consider the possibility of a person, brought to exist by a Cartesian evil demon, with full-fledged memories 3 of his past experiences that never were. Such a person has a sense of identity as extending into the past, without having a past personal identity. Husserl's phenomenology, in being a theory of intentionality, addresses itself primarily to the second group of questions. Yet, as we shall see, some questions from the first group do come up in the context of his phenomenological 'ecology'. In his Logical Investigations Husserl holds a Brentano-inspired view:
The phenomenologically reduced ego is... nothing peculiar, floating above many experiences: it is simply identical with their own interconnected unity [LI, p. 541].

reduced ego' to mean 'consciousness as reflectivity experience', then what Husserl is saying is that, upon reflection, he discovers that the experience of the 'unity' o f consciousness is accounted for by no more than a reflectively observable 'interconnectedness' among experiences - and that is, roughly, a phenomenological claim. On the other hand, if we assume that by 'the phenomenologically reduced ego' Husserl means, simply, 'consciousness', then Husserl seems to address here a question about the unity o f consciousness. Taking consciousness to be composed of experiences (in a broad sense, cogitationes), Husserl rejects a view that postulates an enduring element in consciousness (call it ego) as that which individuates a consciousness. Instead, he asserts that the unity, or singularity, of consciousness is a result of an 'interconnectedness' among its experiences - and that is, again roughly, an ontological claim. There is an obvious connection between the two claims: the phenomenological observation is usually that which is cited as important evidence for the ontological claim. T h e way I understand Husserl's early views, he was advancing both claims. However, to sustain these claims, we must be told more about the nature o f the 'interconnectedness' that performs the job of 'unifying' consciousness. T h e early Husserl does not have a sufficiently clear story to tell about it. In a further reference to the ecological view, he says:
I must frankly confess.., that I am quite unable to find this ego, this primitive, necessary center of [conscious] relations. The only thing I can take note of... [is] the empirical ego and its empirical relations to its own experiences... [LI, p. 549]

Husserl may here be making two statements at the same time: If we take 'the phenomenologically
Topoi 5 (1986), 157-162. 9 1986 by D. Reidel Publishing Company.

By 'empirical consciousness' Husserl means consciousness in the m u n d a n e sense - a psychological characteristic of persons, governed by psycho-physical ('empirical') laws. U n d e r this conception, the subject or the agent o f consciousness, the 'empirical ego', is a person - a psycho-physical individual. We might get

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IZCHAK MILLER the ontological and phenomenological 'unifying' roles an ego was supposed to occupy with respect to its acts. Thus, the early Husserl closed rank with Hume, who declared his own failure to find a corresponding abiding impression. But Husserl never retracts this feature of his earlier position. The ego that Husserl has since 'managed to find', and now considers to be 'necessarily there', is not itself an act (idea, impression - abiding or otherwise) among others. 5 The reason he failed to find it earlier is that he was looking in the wrong direction. His scientific convictions regarding the nature of persons distorted his earlier phenomenological conclusions. In particular, his (ontological) conviction that consciousness is 'nothing but' a series of experiences led him to adopt a phenomenological presupposition: namely, that the sense of self-unity m u s t be accounted for solely by some sort of psychological 'interconnectedness' among a person's experiences, an 'interconnectedness' conceived by him in a sense that excluded from the outset the notion of consciousness as an endurant. It is this presupposition that made him look reflectively (tongue-in-cheek) for an ego-qua-act among other conscious acts, declaring his inability to find it. As he never retracts his rejection of an ego qua 'idea f i x ' , so Husserl never gives up the (correct) idea that the sense of self-unity must be accounted for by an interconnectedness among a person's experiences. What he does reject now is his earlier concept~n of the nature of that interconnectedness. He is resolved to let his phenomenological account of self-experience be dictated exclusively by phenomenological observation - without any naturalistic preconception. As a part of that resolve, he requires of his phenomenological theory of self-experience that it accommodate two phenomenologically observed facts: the experience of cross-time sameness of consciousness, and the experience of cross-time conscious change. It is in the course of his attempts to accommodate these phenomena that Husserl comes to the conclusion that nothing less than the endurance of consciousness, its numerical identity across time, can account for the unity of consciousness. Indeed, the newly discovered Ego is not an entity 'inside'consciousness, it is 'reduced' consciousness itself. Thus, Husserl changes his conception of the nature of the interconnectedness required for the unity of consciousness and for the experience of the unity of consciousness. That interconnectedness involves now, irreducibly, a tacit (intentional) reference by each of a

an impression that the 'interconnectedness' the early Husserl had in mind is a 'merely' causal one. But this would be a wrong impression. Indeed, the early Husserl did believe that the unity of consciousness is a product of natural laws, but he also took the phenomena governed by these laws to be irreducibly intentional: the laws in question had to account not only for the de facto unity of consciousness but also for the experience of the unity of consciousness. In a traditional jargon made contemporary, he took them to be laws that govern the occurrence and contents of a person's presentations, or representations, in such a way as to produce both the unity and the experience of the unity of consciousness. The discovery and specification of these laws would be the task of experimental phenomenological psychology. Probably the early Husserl countenanced something like Brentano's psychological laws of'primordial association'.4 In his later writings, Husserl makes a complete turnabout regarding the ego. Commenting on his earlier inability to find an ego reflectively, Husserl footnotes the above paragraph in the second edition of the Logical Investigations, saying, 'I have since managed to find it'. The view which he embraces now is this: So much is clear from the outset, that after carrying [the transcendental] reductionthrough,we shall neverstumble across the pure Ego as an experience among others within the flux of manifold experienceswhich survives [the transcendental reduction]; nor shall we meet it as a constitutivebit of experience appearing with the experienceof which it is an integral part and again disappearing. The Ego appears to be permanently,even necessarily,there, and this permanenceis obviouslynot that of a stolid unshiftingexperience, of a 'fixed idea'.... In principle, at any rate, everycogitatio can change.... But in contrast the pure Ego appears to be necessary in principle, and as that which remains absolutely self-identical in all actual and possible changes of experience, it can in no sense be reckonedas a reell part orphase of the experiencesthemselves[Ideas, p. 156]. This looks like a radical departure by Husserl from his earlier position on the ego. Not only has he "managed to find it", but he takes it now to be "necessary in principle", We get an idea from this passage as to why Husserl failed earlier to discover such an ego reflectively. Having been convinced that consciousness is 'nothing but' a sequence of interconnected events (acts), Husserl declared his failure to find an abiding conscious act (an "idea fix'), let alone one that can occupy

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person's experiences to one and the same consciousness, one and the same Ego. I suggested that one of the main motivations for Husserl's change of mind about the ego was his desire to accommodate within a phenomenological theory the experience of conscious change. The previous quotation contains ample evidence for the connection in Husserl's mind between his later views on the Ego and his views about change. During the years following the publication of his Logical Investigations and preceding the publication of his Ideas, Husserl embarks on an intensive study of the structure of temporal awareness. 6 He remains preoccupied with our experience of time for the rest of his philosophical career, always seeking to improve and refine his views about it. In the course of that study, Husserl comes to re-affirm the following Aristotelian principle: (a)

Before we turn to the next step in Husserl's argument, it is worth noting that in hts early lectures on time (1905), Husserl, who is still under the spell of his early view of the ego, tries in a last-ditch effort to avoid accepting (a') (and its ontological implications discussed below) by insisting that the change we experience our consciousness as undergoing is, somehow, not a bonafide case of change:
we find necessarily and essentially a flux of conscious 'alteration', and this alteration has the absurd property that it flows exactly as it flows and can flow neither 'more swiftly' nor 'more slowly'. Consequently, any Object which is altered is lacking here, it is not a question here of a process. There is nothing here which is altered, and therefore it makes no sense to speak here of something that endures [ Time, p. 99]

Change presupposes the existence of some enduring entity which is the subject of that
change.

To quote Husserl,
In change, and likewise with alteration, something enduring must be present - something which makes up the identity of that which is altered or undergoes a change [ Time, p. 114].

Now, Husserl takes both of the following to be phenomenological facts: (a') We reflectively experience our consciousness as

It is clear that by the time Husserl submits the manuscript of Ideas for publication (1913) this line of argument has already died unnoticed. As we saw in the earlier quotation, the Husserl of the Ideas asserts unequivocally that "real' change and objecthood are characteristics of consciousness. While the term 'flux' is still used here and there in Husserl's later writings, its main theoretical role in his early writings on time that of intentional (conscious) agency - has been taken over by the term 'ego'. From (a) and (a'), together with the presupposition that phenomenological reflection is epistemically privileged, Husserl draws the conclusion that (b) Something must be the (enduring) subject of our conscious change, call it Ego. However, by the considerations of the phenomeno-

changing.
(a") We reflectively experience our consciousness as enduring, as remaining numerically the same. I say 'reflectively experience...' in (a') and (a"), rather than merely 'experience', in order to emphasize the source of authority of the claims, namely, phenomenological observation. This is significant because phenomenological observation, according to Husserl, is (in a Cartesian sense) epistemically privileged. That, in turn, is important for the next step in his argument for an Ego. But in emphasizing reflective observation I don't mean to suggest that conscious change and endurance is experienced by us only through reflective observation. On the contrary, Husserl maintains that we experience our consciousness as changing and, at the same time, as numerically enduring all along, 'prereflectively'. Reflective observation, Husserl correctly insists, does not create the experience reflected upon, it simply attends to it.

logical reduction,
(c) The 'field' of our intentional episodes is logically independent of the existence of our body, indeed, of the physical world at large.

Consequently, (d) The body cannot be assumed as the Ego (subject) of our conscious change.

This conclusion is supported by (a"), i.e., it is sustained by the further phenomenological fact that we reflectively observe the endurance of our consciousness through its various changes, as we reflectively observe these very changes. Three comments are now in order. First, part of the force of Husserl's argument

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I Z C H A K MI L L E R

depends on an understanding of his notion of phenomenological reduction. I am assuming that the reader is familiar with Husserl's concept of reduction. 7 Second, an obvious question is why not proceed directly from (a"), the claim ofepistemic privilege, (b) and (c) to the conclusion (d)? Well, there is nothing that prevents the later Husserl from doing so. For he is now convinced of the truth of (a"). But the fact remains that there was a time in which he wasn't convinced of it. His inclination, earlier, was to say that it is not the endurance of consciousness that we reflectively experience, but its unity; and that the latter can be accounted for by some 'interconnectedness' among experiences, one that does not presuppose the endurance of consciousness. The phenomenon of conscious change, on the other hand, cannot be as readily 'analyzed away', and it is his thinking about conscious change that led to his conversion. So the argument as proceeding from (a'), rather than from (a"), reflects, in my opinion, the actual theoretical route that Husserl took. Third, it is important to note that, even if sound, the argument I reconstructed above for Husserl is not, by itself, strong enough to yield the conclusion that the Ego is a numerically identical Ego across a person's life-time. Strictly speaking, all that it yields is an Ego that endures through the period occupied by the reflectively observed change. But reflective observation is limited to the temporal neighborhood of the 'present moment'. So this still leaves open the theoretical possibility that numerically different Egos exist in different segments of a person's life-time. Husserl rules out that possibility through an additional argument, derived from his account of experiential memory. Briefly, Husserl argues that a memory of a past experience presupposes the identification of the past and present Egos as being one and the same. I leave the discussion of Husserl's account of experiential memory to another occasion. The reduced ego is alternatively referred to by Husserl as the pure Ego, the transcendental Ego, or as the phenomenological Ego. Some of the pure Ego's attributes are abiding properties, such as character traits; others are episodic properties (intentional events) in the form of "cogito'. The latter are acts of consciousness. Husserl's distinction between the pure Ego and the empirical ego has led some of his readers to conclude that Husserl is committed to a Cartesian mind-body

dualism. While I offer no opinion about Husserl's extra-phenomenological sentiments, I do insist that Husserl's phenomenology does not entail mind-body dualism. In fact, Husserl explicitly criticizes Descartes' conclusion that his reduced ego is a substantia cogitans as being a conclusion to which Descartes was not entitled by his own epistemological principles, and as a view which cannot be derived from purely phenomenological considerations. [CM, p. 24] Although I do not argue for this view in this essay, I insist that Husserl's phenomenology is compatible with (at least some versions of) both mind-body dualism and mind-body monism. In saying that our acts are in the form of cogito (! think, I perceive, I remember, etc.), Husserl is making, in my opinion, a twofold claim. The first is an ontological claim, namely, that the pure Ego is literally in the act as its subject (it "lives in the act" - as Husserl says), and that one and the same pure Ego is in all my acts. Thus, my 'stream' of acts is a unitary stream of acts distinct from other streams of acts since one unique pure Ego is 'in' (is the subject of) each and every act of that stream. The second claim is a phenomenological one, namely, that each and every one of my acts, apart from being object-directed, is also in a passive, apperceptive, way - Ego-directed. It is in virtue of the latter that I am 'pre-reflectively' continually aware - again, in a passive, apperceptive, way - of my own conscious singularity as an enduring singularity. Thus, the pure Ego, according to Husserl, is not a mere ontological postulate. It is a self-aware Ego; it 'announces' itself in its conscious acts, or - as Husserl technically puts it - it is a self-continuing Ego:
... we... distinguish- despite the necessary interrelationship-the

experience itself from the pure Ego of the experiencing process; and again: the pure subjective phase of the way of experiencing from the remaining, Ego diverted content of the experience, so to
speak. Thus there is a certain, extraordinarily important, twosidedness in the essential nature of the sphere of experience, concerning which we can also say that in experience we must distinguish between a subjectively and an objectively oriented aspect... [Ideas, pp. 214-215] The Ego is himself existent for himself in continuous evidence; thus, in himself, he is continuously constituting himself as existing .... The Ego grasps himself not only as a flowing life but also a s / , who lives this and that subjective process, who lives through this and that cogito, as the same I [CM, p. 66].

To say that the pure Ego constitutes itself as existent is

not to say that it causes itself to be, or that it otherwise

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brings about its own being, but just that certain features of its acts are interconnected in such a way so as to produce a continuous (passive) awareness of its enduring singularity. The ontological and the phenomenological claims about the nature of the pure Ego made by Husserl should not be confused with one another, despite some occasional ambiguities in his text. For instance, by saying that the pure Ego 'lives' in its acts, Husserl sometimes seems to intend the ontological point, namely, that the Ego is 'in' the act as its subject; but most of the time he intends, instead, the phenomenological point, namely, that the Ego constitutes itself through its acts. The ontological point about the Ego is that it is a constituent of its acts in a sense similar to that in which, say, a bouncing ball is a constituent of the event of its bouncing. In both these cases we distinguished the 'subject' of the event from the event itself. Phenomenologically, however, an act is conceived of as a 'pure' (intentional) episode, an event whose 'content' designates its Ego, on the one 'end', and its (purported) object, on the other. When Husserl insists that the pure Ego "can in no sense be reckoned as a real [reell] part or phase of the experiences themselves", he is not denying the ontological point that the Ego is a constituent of its acts. He is asserting, instead, that the pure Ego, unlike its acts, is not itself an event, an abiding act, an impression, an 'idea fix'. Husserl insists that my Ego is continually experienced by me as an enduring singularity, as one and the same T. I maintain that Husserl thought of the 'I' component of the noema in terms singular to those in which he thought of the determinable-X. In particular, he conceived of the T component as a 'purely referring' element in the noema which determines the subject per se, in abstraction from its Ego-properties, as the subject of the act. For symmetry's sake, I will refer to that subject-determining component of the noema as 'the determinable-I'. Furthermore, Husserl thought of the structure of my continual sense of personal identity in terms singular to those he thought of the structure of my continual experience of the identity of(purported) 'external' objects. Take an interval of time along which I continually experience myself as being one and the same. At any given moment of the duration of that experience I have a 'grand' noema corresponding to my total experience at that moment which contains a determi-

nable-I. Let us focus on two different moments along my experience, tl and t2. 8 The way I understand Husserl's view, he maintained (and I concur) that my experience of myself as being the same person at t2 as at t~ does not consist in an attributive 're-identification' of myself, based on my attributes at ti and t2. Instead, it consists in a straightforward identification of the T of the present experience with the T of the previous experience by prescribing the identity of the presently experienced subject with the earlier experienced one. What I have in mind is represented by the following schematic 'state-description' of what Husserl would call my phenomenologically-reduced self at t2, i.e. the description of the content of my sense of self at t2: (A) I(t2) [=l(tl) [Sl, s2 .... ], s~, s~ .... ],

to be informally understood as the content of the predicates self-ascribedby me at t2, viz. identity with myself at fi, including the attributes s~, s2.... that I take at t2 to have ascribed to myself at t~, followed by s~, s~. . . . . which are the attributes I currently ascribe to myself.9 This is, in the broadest of outlines, my view of Husserl's conception of the structure of my sense of personal identity. The details still need to be worked out. Husserl's view of the pure Ego does put some strain on his distinction between the i m m a n e n t and the transcendent. In being a constituent of its act which 'survives' the reduction, the pure Ego seems to qualify as an i m m a n e n t entity. However, according to Husserl, our pure Ego is never adequately given to us at any given moment of our awareness of it. There is past 'activity' of the Ego which is not retained or remembered, as there is future 'activity' which is not yet experienced, not to mention its abiding dispositional properties. Thus, the Ego is, in some legitimate sense, always given to us as from a limited point-ofview, from which not all that there is to the Ego is revealed to us. In being, thus, inadequately given to us, our pure Ego seems to qualify as a transcendent entity. ~ 0 The pure Ego, considered together with its habitualities and its full 'stream' of intentional episodes, Husserl calls 'the Ego in its full concreteness', and for the Ego in its full concreteness Husserl proposes the Leibnizian name 'monad'. [CM, pp. 67-68] Indeed, the Ego in its full concreteness is much like a Leib-

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nizian monad.

IZCHAK MILLER It is a n E g o w h i c h ' c o n s c i o u s e s ' for 9 The formalism follows a schematic for phenomenological descriptions developed and discussed in my book Husserl, Perception, and Temporal Awareness (1984), op. cit. l0 Husserl seems to be aware of this difficulty, even though the way in which he states it is not very clear. Cf. Ideas, p. 157.

i t s e l f ( p u r p o r t s for itself) i n g r e a t d e t a i l a w o r l d i n w h i c h it is a n e m b o d i e d self, a n d i n w h i c h t h e r e a r e o t h e r e m b o d i e d i n d i v i d u a l s j u s t like i t s e l f w i t h w h o m it is e n g a g e d i n a n e t w o r k o f r e l a t i o n s . H o w e v e r , w e m u s t b e c a r e f u l , as H u s s e r l is, n o t t o i m p o r t i n t o p h e n o m e n o l o g y w i t h t h e t e r m ' m o n a d " L e i b n i z ' s phe-

nomenalistic c o n v i c t i o n s .

Dept. o f Philosophy Un iversity o f Pen nsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104, U.S.A.

Notes
l This paper is a sequel to a section in Chapter 9 of my book,

Husserl. Perception, and Temporal Awareness, Bradford Books,

The MIT Press, 1984. 2 Foran excellent historicalaccount of Husserl'sconcept of ego, see Douglas Heinsen's 'Husserl's theory of the pure ego', in Husserl, Intentionality and Cognitive Science, ed. by Hubert Dreyfus, Bradford Books, The MIT Press, 1982. 3 I am using here the verb 'to remember' in an experiential sense, i.e., in a sense which, unlike the relational version of'to remember', does not admit of existential generalization. 4 For a subsequent discussion by Husserl in which he ends up rejecting Brentano's theory of primordial association as an adequate account of the experience of temporal continuity, see his The Phe-

nomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness.

5 In the terminology ofldeas: the ego is not a 'reell' component of consciousness. 'Reell' is a reality predicate Husserl invents to characterize, exclusively, conscious states and events. 6 The output of that study is a massive amount of manuscript notes, most of which are not yet published. In the mid-twenties he asked Martin Heidegger to edit some of these notes for publication. The product of Heidegger's labor appeared in the Jahrbuch J~r Philosophic und phdnomenologische Forschung (1928), Halle a.S., Max Niemeyer, pp. 367-498. This important, but limited, collection of papers was translated into English and appeared under the title The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness (1964) trans, by J. S. Churchill, Indiana University Press, and unfortunately it is currently out of print. A more satisfying set of Husserl's notes, under the title Zur Phdnomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893-1917), was published in 1966 by Martinus Nijhoff (Den Haag) as Volume 10 (Band X) of Husserliana. 7 In particular, I am assuming familiarity with the interpretation of the reduction as advanced by Dagfinn Follesdal in his 'Husserl's notion of noema' (1969), The Journal of Philosophy LXVl, 680--687. That interpretation was further elaborated upon by David Smith and Ronald McIntyre in their Husserl and Intentionality." A Stud), of Mind, Meaning and Language ( 1971 ), D. Reidel Publ. Co., Dordrecht, and by myself in Husserl, Perception and Temporal Awareness (1984), op. cir. 8 Again, these two moments are moments in my 'internal time', i.e., in the temporal ordering of my experiences. A further assumption is that my experience at the first moment is still within my 'retentional span' at the second moment.