Abstract
This essay accomplishes two goals. First, contra accepted interpretations, I reveal that the early Husserl executed valuable and extensive investigations of wishes—specifically in manuscripts from Studies concerning the Structures of Consciousness. In these manuscripts, Husserl examines two ‘kinds’ of wishes. He describes wish drives as feelings of lack. He also dissects wish intentions to uncover previously obscured partial acts, including nullifying consciousness, an existentially oriented act, and a preferring. Second, I reveal how these insights from Studies partially prefigure Husserl’s mature genetic phenomenology of drives and wish intentions. The mature Husserl develops his previous observation, that drives are experiences of lack, by describing these drives as having two moments: impulse and movement. Husserl also comes to new insights about wish acts, when he juxtaposes these intentions—as pure feelings that have no power to reach a telos—to drives, which he now conceives of as volitional doings.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
This is naturally not to deny that there are a few essays, which do touch upon Husserl’s theory of wishing. For example, Rudolf Bernet, Ullrich Melle, and Andrea Staiti have succinctly examined how Husserl conceived of the genetic relationship between drives and wishes (Bernet, 2006: 44; Melle, 1997: 178–180; 2012: 55, 65–67; Staiti, 2019: 13–15). Bernet has also addressed wishes in his new book, although he does not draw from Husserl, but instead develops a psychoanalysis through Freud and Lacan (Bernet, 2020). Further, Celia Cabrera and Verónica Kretsche, as well as Christian Lotz and Thomas Nenon have investigated how Husserl contrasts wishing and willing (Cabrera & Kretschel, 2021: 69; Lotz, 2006: 128f.; Nenon, 1990: 302). I am particularly indebted to Bernet and Melle’s insights.
For Husserliana volumes, I provide references to the corresponding English translations where available, following a slash after the German pagination. All quotations from the Logical Investigations come from the First Edition.
WB and TGBW were likely first written respectively in 1900 and 1901. On and around January 20, 1910, WB was copied and reworked. There is no exact dating for the revision of TGBW, but it was certainly reconceived sometime in 1910. I thank Thomas Vongehr for his help with determining this timeline.
Husserl’s analyses of wishes from these two 1910 manuscripts in Studien are of particular importance for understanding his overarching theory of feelings. Many of Husserl’s published descriptive analyses of feelings are concerned with outlining how feeling acts can be verified in a similar manner to how objectifying intentions are verified. In some passages from Lectures on Ethics and Value Theory (Hua XXVIII) and Studien, Husserl accordingly attempts to describe wishes as undergoing satisfaction via a structural mechanism directly analogical to the structural mechanism of fulfillment for objectifying acts. Just as empty objectifying acts are fulfilled via synthesis with an objectifying intuition, Husserl claims that wishes are satisfied via synthesis with a satisfying intention, namely a joy (Hua XXVIII: 328–341; Hua XLIII/2: 287–293, 421–422, 491–505; Melle, 2002: 233f.). Yet, as I have argued elsewhere (Byrne, 2022b, 2024), this method—of describing feeling acts as analogical to objectifying intentions—leads Husserl to conclusions that are often not accurate; Husserl is trying to violently force feeling intentions into the mold of objectifying intentions. In contrast, in these two 1910 manuscripts from Studien, Husserl does respect the phenomena of wishing and describes wishing as it manifests itself without any attempt to reshape wishes into objectifying intentions. The 1910 manuscripts are worthy of study for this reason alone; Husserl here presents his unalloyed picture of a feeling intention (and a drive).
It is worthwhile to trace how Husserl’s theory of wishing would be worked out by the phenomenologists and existentialists who followed him, as this can provide helpful context for this paper. In particular, I discuss three ways that Husserl’s successors focus and expertly unpack one element of wishing, which was only mentioned or entirely lacking in Husserl’s account. First, while Husserl only points out that wishing is an essentially embodied experience in his mature works, (see section four), in Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty focuses his investigation of desires on the body. He demonstrates how desires and wishes are rooted in the body and perception. For Merleau-Ponty, wishing and desiring are bodily and perceptual phenomena that reflect our embodied experience (Merleau-Ponty, 1962). Second, while Husserl had pointed out that we can freely wish for whatever we want (within certain limits, such as being unable to wish for square circles), Jean-Paul Sartre, in Being and Nothingness, extensively analyzes how desires and wishes are manifestations of our freedom. He discusses how wishes are also choices for which we are fully responsible (Sartre, 1993, 43, 60, 70, 483). Finally, to my knowledge, Husserl never closely examined how wishing shapes (our experience of) the intersubjective community in his Nachlass. In contrast, in The Ethics of Ambiguity, Simone de Beauvoir explores the impacts of our desires and wishes on others (de Beauvoir, 2015: 23, 75, 137).
More specifically, Husserl takes these drives or instincts to be responses to—as Mensch calls them—the values of sensations—the pleasure or displeasure of hyle (Mensch, 1998: 221). When the ego is moved by the pleasure of a sensation, it can turn to that sensation. This turning is a striving and this striving is a drive—here, the drive of curiosity (Husserl, 2006: 325; Byrne 2023; Bower, 2014: 138; Mensch, 1998: 223).
Husserl writes, “Then there is a law, that the wish-quality is founded in a presentation, that is, an objectifying act, and more precisely, a ‘mere’ presentation” (Hua XIX: 583/1970, 216).
Important: Because of the language used here, it must be emphasized that Husserl’s 1901 description of this founding relationship does not establish a building-block theory of consciousness, as if a feeling-layer of consciousness would be placed on top of a distinct objectifying layer. While the founding relationship between feeling and objectification is described as one-sided, the ‘two’ intentions are bound together and mutually determine each other. They are unified in a similar way to how other complex wholes are unified. Just as a text is a unity of the scribbles on the page and its meaning, and just as a person is a unity of body and consciousness, so also, evaluative experience is the unity of the objectification and the evaluative position-taking, which mutually determine each other and interpenetrate one another. Sonja Rinofner-Kreidl outlines these important ideas in Rinofner-Kreidl (2013: 60–64).
The nullifying act can also nullify other doxic modifications. I can nullify the probably-existing, the potentially-existing, and so on (Hua XLIII/2: 494).
The mother’s ‘joy,’ which is nullified, is not the joy that the mother would experience if her son were truly alive. As stated, that joy is only implied by the wish but is not a part of it. Instead, the joy, which is nullified, is the joy in the mere (neutral) presentation of her son, which she actually does experience during the wish.
To properly understand many of the following quotes, one should remember that the actively wished-for object is intended as non-existent. It is the referent of a nullifying intention.
This conclusion, that a wish drive has no object is certainly one of Husserl’s more questionable claims. It seems to me that, from day one of their existence, humans learn to associate the feeling of hunger with food intake, and it should be the absolute exception to remain in a blind state of hunger. In other words: hunger seems to be always object-related, however unthematic it may be. There are several contemporary phenomenologists who do address and seek to rectify this point (and others) in Husserl’s theory of drives. For example, see Lee (1993) and Mensch (1998). See note 14 for discussion of Husserl’s mature views concerning the objects of drives or lack thereof.
To be highlighted: An active wish can emerge from a passive wish, but does not necessarily have to. Instead, as Husserl mentions, I can actively wish for or desire a certain flavor, even when I have not and am not undergoing passive hunger (ompare Hua XLII: 86). As Staiti writes, “The biological underpinnings of the need for nourishment cannot be at the origin of such desires” (Staiti, 2019: 15).
To be sure, the question of whether the mature Husserl definitively concludes that all drives have objects is still contested in the literature. On the one hand, there are scholars like James Mensch, who—while conceding that the later Husserl does believe that some drives have objects—assert that the mature Husserl continued to believe that there are some drives, which do not have objects. Mensch claims that the mature Husserl identifies, “basic non-objectifying instincts” (Mensch, 2010: 240; see also Mensch, 2010: 231–235, 260f.; Lee, 1993: 168f., 175–180). For another case, Bernet writes that “The distinction between drives and wishes for Husserl is essentially related to the fact that, the wish—in contrast to the drive—originally and essentially is directed to an object (or a state of affairs) and thus that it is founded in an intentional presentation” (Bernet, 2006: 43f.). On the other hand, scholars such as Matt Bower argue that, for the mature Husserl, all drives involve both non-objectifying and objectifying components. Bower writes that a drive, “is both non-objectifying, as a blind preference that the ego is not aware of, and it is objectifying, as a preference that specifies certain thematic episodes of experience precisely as fulfillments of the instinct” (Bower 214: 140). In this essay, I adopt Bower’s reading, because I find his textual support to be more convincing.
For one prominent and very early example of this ambiguity, in the Fifth Logical Investigation, Husserl ambiguously introduces two distinct ways to think about the same drive experience. He descriptively examines the case where an experienced desire seemingly does not have “conscious reference to what is desired,” or, “we are moved by obscure drives or pressures towards unrepresented goals” (Husserl, 1970: 111/1984, 409). On the one hand, Husserl states that I could here be experiencing feeling sensations, which are simply un-apprehended and thus entirely lacking in intentional reference. They persist, as Lee writes, “as a mere state of sensations, that is, as a non-intentional experience” (Lee, 1993: 43). On the other hand, I may here be experiencing apprehended feeling sensations, whose presentation, however, lacks a determinate objective direction (Husserl, 1970: 111/1984, 410f.; see Lee, 1993: 43–45).
This conclusion—that drives are volitional—also has ramifications for active consciousness. When Husserl conceived of drives as axiological, he concluded that they could serve as the origin of active axiological feelings—that is, of wish intentions. Now observing that drives are volitional, he correspondingly asserts that they can be the source of volitional acts (Hua XLIII/3: 126–127; Ales-Berro, 2000: 250; Wehrle, 2015: 47). In other words, Husserl concludes that even intentions of fiat (Hua XLIII/3: 264–268; Melle, 1997: 183–186) are not without genetic origin—they are not without their own anterior.
Bernet emphasizes the fact that wishes are evaluative feelings when he states that they are the “affective anticipation (gefühlsmäßige Antizipation)” of the wished-for state of affairs (Bernet, 2006: 44).
References
Ales-Bello, A. (2000). Human world—animal world: An interpretation of instincts in some late Husserlian manuscripts. In A. Tymieniecka (Ed.), Paideia: Hilosophy/phenomenology of life. Inspiring education for our times (pp. 249–254). Springer.
Bernet, R. (2006). Zur Phänomenologie von Trieb und Lust bei Husserl. In D. Lohmar & D. Fonfara (Eds.), Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven der Phänomenologie (pp. 38–53). Springer.
Bernet, R. (2020). Force, drive, desire: A philosophy of psychoanalysis (S. Allen, Trans.). Northwestern.
Bower, M. (2014). Husserl’s theory of instincts as a theory of affection. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 46, 133–147.
Byrne, T. (2018). The evolution of Husserl’s semiotics: The logical investigations and its revisions (1901-1914). Bulletin d'Analyse Phénoménologique, 5(14), 1–23.
Byrne, T. (2021). Smashing Husserl’s dark mirror: Rectifying the inconsistent theory of impossible meanings and signitive substance from the logical investigations. Axiomathes, 31, 127–144.
Byrne, T. (2022a). The meaning of being: Husserl on existential propositions as predicative propositions. Axiomathes, 32, 123–139.
Byrne, T. (2022b). The origin of the phenomenology of feelings. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 53, 455–468.
Byrne, T. (2023). The origin of the phenomenology of instincts. Husserl Studies, 39, 69–83.
Byrne, T. (2024). The dawn of the phenomenology of feelings. Philosophy Today, 68(1), 147–165.
Cabrera, C., & Kretschel, V. (2021). Husserl’s phenomenology and the problem of the future: Towards a practical approach. Comparative and Continental Philosophy, 13(1), 61–74.
De Beauvoir, S. (2015). The ethics of ambiguity (B. Frechtman, Trans.). London Open Road.
Hart, J. (2006). The absolute ought and the unique individual. Husserl Studies, 22(3), 223–240.
Husserl, E. (1939). Erfahrung und Urteil. Untersuchungen zur Genealogie der Logik (L. Landgrebe, Ed.). Academia Verlag (E. Husserl, (1975). Experience and Judgment (J. Churchill, Trans.). Northwestern.)
Husserl, E. (1970). Logical investigations (J.N. Findlay, Trans.). Taylor & Francis.
Husserl E. (1984). Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Teil (U. Panzer, Ed.). Martinus Nijhoff (Quoted as Hua XIX).
Husserl E. (1988). Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre (U. Melle, Ed.). Kluwer (Quoted as Hua XXVIII).
Huserl E. (2001). Logik. Vorlesung 1902/03 (E. Schuhmann, Ed.). Kluwer (Quoted as Mat II).
Husserl E. (2006). Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution (1929–1934). Die C-Manuskripte (D. Lohmar, Ed.). Springer (Quoted as Mat VIII).
Husserl E. (2008). Die Lebenswelt. Auslegungen der vorgegebenen Welt und ihrer Konstitution. In E. Husserl, Texte aus dem Nachlass (1916–1937) (R. Sowa, Ed.). Springer (Quoted as Hua XXXIX).
Husserl E. (2014). Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie. Analysen des Unbewusstseins und der Instinkte. Metaphysik. In E. Husserl, Späte Ethik. (R. Sowa & T. Vongehr, Eds.). Springer (Quoted as Hua XLII).
Husserl E. (2020a). Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins. Teilband II. In E. Husserl, Gefühl und Wert (T. Vongehr & U. Melle, Eds.). Springer (Quoted as Hua XLIII/2).
Husserl E. (2020b). Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins. Teilband III. In E. Husserl, Wille und Handlung (T. Vongehr & U. Melle, Eds). Springer (Quoted as Hua XLIII/3).
Lee, N. (1993). Edmund Husserls Phänomenologie der Instinkte. Springer.
Lotz, C. (2006). Action: Phenomenology of wishing and willing in Husserl and Heidegger. Husserl Studies. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-006-9006-7
Melle, U. (1997). Husserl’s phenomenology of willing. In J. Hart & L. Embree (Eds.), Phenomenology of Values and Valuing (pp. 169–192). Springer.
Melle, U. (2002). Edmund Husserl: From reason to love. In J. J. Drummond & L. Embree (Eds.), Phenomenological approaches to moral philosophy (pp. 229–248). Springer.
Melle, U. (2012). Husserls deskriptive Erforschung der Gefühlserlebnisse. In R. Breeur & U. Melle (Eds.), Life, subjectivity & art: Essays in honor of Rudolf Bernet (pp. 51–99). Springer.
Mensch, J. (1998). Instincts—a Husserlian account. Husserl Studies, 14, 219–237.
Mensch, J. (2010). Husserl’s account of our consciousness of time. Marquette.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of perception (C. Smith, Trans.). Routledge.
Nenon, T. (1990). Willing and acting in Husserl’s lectures on ethics and value theory. Man and World, 24, 301–309.
Rinofner-Kreidl, S. (2013). Husserl’s Fundierungsmodell als Grundlage einer intentionalen Wertungsanalyse. Metodo, 1, 59–83.
Sartre, J.P. (1993). Being and nothingness (H. Barnes, Trans.). Washington Square Press.
Staiti, A., et al. (2019). Desire as the individuation of need. A phenomenological proposal in dialogue with Barabas and Husserl. In S. Horton (Ed.), Somatic desire (pp. 3–24). Lexington books.
Wehrle, M. (2015). Feelings as the motor of perception? The essential role of interest for intentionality. Husserl Studies, 31, 45–64.
Williams, H. (2021). Husserlian empathy and embodied simulation. Theory and Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959354320966640
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
On behalf of all authors, the corresponding author confirms that there is no conflict of interest.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Byrne, T. Husserl’s Phenomenology of Wishing. Hum Stud (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-024-09743-4
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-024-09743-4