Metodo

International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy

Book | Chapter

Jakobson and Husserl

a contribution to the genealogy of structuralism

Elmar Holenstein

pp. 27-70

Abstract

The influence of Husserl on Russian formalism and on the structuralism of the Prague School of Linguistics is especially manifest in the work of Jakobson. A direct literary dependence is traceable in the reaction against traditional genetic psychology, in the program of a universal grammar, and in several questions concerning the theory of meaning. Objective points of contact can be found in the theses of the intersubjective and associative constitution of objects. They can also be found with regard to the central topics of Husserlian phenomenology: the analysis of ‘essences’ (ie the elaboration of invariants and universals) and the phenomenological attitude (eg in phonology the precedence of the perceptual level over the physical and physiological levels). A comparison of Jakobson and Husserl not only yields a mutual confirmation of the fundamental aspects of their linguistic and philosophical thought, but also opens interesting paths for further research in both fields.

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1Originally published in Tijdschrift voor Filosofie XXXV (1973): 560–607 (translated from German by Erling Eng) and The Human Context 7 (1975): 61–83 (2nd revised version).

2When asked about the inspirations for the new conception of language and linguistics that reached a breakthrough in Russian Formalism and Prague Structuralism, Roman Jakobson, co-founder and leading repre|sentative of both movements, usually mentions four: the Kazan school of linguistic thought around Baudouin de Courtenay; Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale (1916); Husserl’s phenomenolo|gical philosophy; and turn-of-the-century avant garde trends in poetry, painting and music (Jakobson 1962, 631). The decisive impetus obviously came from the last-mentioned movement. The first three provided the initial scientific formulations of the new attitude and its axioms, methodological guidelines and isolated models of concrete analysis in the new perspective.

3Husserl’s contribution is hardly known today, not only among linguists but also among philosophers. In H. Spiegelberg’s (1971) history of the phenomenological movement there is no reference to this impact of Husserl on what has become one of the decisive scientific trends of our times.1 Third- and fourth-generation phenomenologists who turn today to structural linguistics do not realize that they are reaching back to what stems in good part from their own source. To be sure, these are partially ideas that faded into the background or were even rejected by the second and third generation of phenomenologists (Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty) for reasons that are no longer tenable.

4Roman Jakobson is to be regarded as the most important and influential mediator of Husserl’s phenomenology in the new linguistics. A brief historical survey of his direct and indirect relationships with Husserl, followed by an explication of the thematic points of contact between phenomenological philosophy and structural linguistics as these appear in his writings, is the aim of this article. Comparisons such as “Husserl and Wittgenstein”, “Husserl and Peirce” and “Phenomenology of the life-world and ordinary language philosophy” are presently very popular. But in contrast to such comparative studies, which attempt to detect an intel|lectual kinship in the respective total systems by means of individual topics of differing place value, it is possible to compare Jakobson with Husserl by starting from historical and literary contacts, and to use as basis themes that not only are vaguely related in spirit but agree to the very letter.

Historical survey of Jakobson’s relationships with Husserl

5The first volume of Husserl’s Logical Investigations (1900) was translated into Russian as early as 1909. It was the first translation of this trail-blazing work into a foreign language. Two years later a translation of the programmatic essay Philosophy as a Rigorous Science (1911) appeared at the same time as the German original. When Jakobson began his university studies in 1914/15 Husserl was not merely known in Russia, he was topical. To Husserl in Göttingen, Gustav Špet wrote from Moscow on 26 February 1914:

Phenomenology stirs up a strong and serious interest in all philosophical circles here. Thus far the Ideas [cf. Husserl 1913/1950] has not been much studied but everyone is talking about phenomenology; there are even special societies for studying phenomenological problems. I am defending the ideas of phenomenology in my lectures and classroom exercises, and have already had the opportunity of speaking twice in public. The opinion of phenomenology is everywhere high and positive; phenomenology is considered as the first and new step of philosophy.2

6Among the places from which the Husserl discussion spread out into the various disciplines (cf. for example Kistjakovskij 1916) were the seminars of Professor Georgij Čelpanov in the Psychological Institute at the University of Moscow. It was through Čelpanov, whose two seminars he attended in 1915–16, that Jakobson’s attention was first directed to Husserl.3 One of the seminars had chosen as its theme the early writing of the Gestalt psychologist Kurt Koffka, The Analysis of Ideas and their Laws (1912), and Jakobson was assigned the linguistic portions of the book. Koffka, a former student of Husserl, refers repeatedly in this book in discussing the distinction between the objectivating presentation and the non-objectivating presentation to the Logical Investigations of his teacher. In the same seminar Husserl’s theory of apperception (conception, attitude) was recapitulated in even greater detail. Since German publications were subject to Russian censorship during World War I, the members of Čelpanov’s seminar obtained Husserl’s Logical Investigations (whose first two parts had appeared in a second, revised, edition in 1913) illegally from Amsterdam. Part I of the second volume is said to have been one of the small store of books that Jakobson subsequently took with him as a refugee both at the end of World War I and in the spring of 1939.

7Jakobson’s reception of the Logical Investigations can be described as original and to a certain extent as unique. Husserl’s most important work first became famous for its refutation of the psychologistic grounding of logic in the Prolegomena. Within the phenomenological movement proper it was principally the analyses of consciousness in the Fifth and Sixth Investigations that developed a following. But what Jakobson adopted were, in addition to the First Investigation on “Expression and Meaning”, principally the Third Investigation, “On the Theory of Wholes and Parts”, and the application of the relationships secured from it to linguistic data in the Fourth Investigation entitled “The Distinction between Independent and Non-independent Meanings and the Idea of Pure Grammar”. In the Third Investigation Jakobson sees what one can designate by a loan from the title of the nuclear section of Ideas I (Husserl 1913/1950), “The considerations fundamental to phenomenology” as the considerations fundamental to structuralism. In this, Jakobson’s reception of the Logical Investigations was by no means attaching itself to something incidental. Quite to the contrary it agrees with Husserl’s own foundation of his philosophy. In his foreword to the second edition (xv) Husserl writes about the Third Investigation: “I have the impression that this Investigation is all too little read. I myself derived great help from it: it is also an essential presupposition for the full understanding of the Investigations which follow.”

8The governing insight of Husserl is that the phenomena of language, over and beyond the physiological, psychological and cultural-historical conditions, have a priori foundations as well. It is possible to show forms and patterns of relationships immanent in all linguistic data, on which every investigator of language reflectively or unreflectively bases himself (Husserl 1913, 338). As early as 1916 Jakobson first defended Husserl’s conception of a pure and universal doctrine of forms and relationship in the face of a supporter of the merely empirically proceeding school of the Neo-grammarians, against his own teacher and examiner at the University of Moscow, W. Porzezinski (Jakobson 1963b, 590).4 In 1936 he refers to the Logical Investigations as a work “whose breadth of importance for language theory can never be sufficiently emphasized”, and he terms in 1963 (1963a, 280), its Second Part “still one of the most inspiring contributions to the phenomenology of language”.5

9In 1917 Jakobson became acquainted with Gustav Špet, a student of Husserl from just before World War I and whom Husserl even in 1935 lauded to Jakobson as one of his best (Jakobson 1971c, 713). In 1920 Špet joined the Moscow Linguistic Circle, and through his writings exercised no little influence on one part of the circle, which was divided at the time in two directions, one more theoretical and one more empirical. The first was given the mocking, and punning, name of “Špetial”. In accord with Husserl’s anti-psychologism Špet insisted on the inadequacy of the genetic and individual-psychological explanations of language. Language is a social given, an object sui generis, to be investigated and described according to its immanent structural laws (cf. Jakobson 1929, 21; 1939b, 314; Erlich 1965, 62).

10Špet recommended to Jakobson that he study, along with Husserl and the Gestalt psychologists, the work of Anton Marty (1847–1914), whose just published Collected Writings (1916–20) with its extended series of papers “On language reflex, nativism and intentional language formation” (1/2) and “On subjectless sentences and the relation of grammar to logic and psychology” (II/I), as well as his magnum opus, Investigations for the Foundation of Universal Grammar and Language Philosophy I (Marty 1908), Jakobson at once secured. Marty, like Husserl, was a student of the Viennese philosopher Franz Brentano (1838–1917). Around 1920 he was, as Jakobson was soon to discover, better known in Moscow than in Prague, where he had taught at the German University from 1880 to 1913. The only linguist in Prague acquainted with his theories was Vilém Mathesius, himself a former student of Marty and later founder and first president of the Cercle Linguistique de Prague.

11During the 1920s in Prague Jakobson also came to know still other Brentano students, such as Th. Masaryk, the president of the young Czechoslovakian Republic and former professor of philosophy at the Czech University in Prague, among whose students V. Mathesius was again to be found; Chr. von Ehrenfels, whose famous essay “On Gestalt-qualities (1890) stands at the beginning of the movement of Gestalt theory; and O. Kraus, the most orthodox of all the “Brentanists”, with whom Jakobson made the oral examination for his doctorate at the German University in 1930.6 In Brentano’s writings, with which he had to become familiar for his examination with Kraus, Jakobson felt especially attracted to the theory of linguistic fictions (Brentano 1925, 133ff.), which became the initial stimulus for him to study linguistic transformations through changing tropes and figures of speech.

12 Still another Brentano student deserves to be mentioned in this connection: Carl Stumpf (1858–1936) who likewise taught at the German University in Prague and under whose sponsorship Husserl later, in 1887 at Halle, received the venia legendi at the university. Already, in his paper on Futurism (Jakobson 1919, 26) Jakobson makes reference to Stumpf’s demonstration of the correlation of form and content. In Stumpf’s late work, The Sounds of Language (1926) Jakobson found not only an exemplary start for the acoustic investigation of the phonemes (likewise in Köhler 1910–15), but also for their structural description, namely in the working out of two fundamental qualities of these sounds, of chromaticity and of the opposition of light and dark (Jakobson 1941, 378ff.).

13What is characteristic for the Brentano school, and what made it attractive for the Formalists, was its descriptive method and the recogni|tion of the autonomous structural laws of the objects they investigated. Added to that was Marty’s “teleological” or functional viewpoint — language as a purposive formation of means of communication — as well as the idea of a general grammar which was then taken up and further developed by Husserl.7 Thereby Brentano and his followers met the requirements raised by Baudouin de Courtenay and Ferdinand de Saussure and their collaborators. Baudouin’s collaborator N. Kruszewski (1851–87) defined the new science of linguistics as early as 1882 as a “certain kind of phenomenology of language” (Jakobson 1971c, 714), thus with the same concept occasionally used by Brentano and which became popular with Husserl.

14In Prague, which was one of the most cultural centers of the period between the two World Wars, Jakobson also encountered, in addition to the Brentano followers, younger students of Husserl: Alexander Koyré, personally and professionally esteemed by Husserl — “body and soul a phenomenologist” (Husserl 1968, 21) — lived in Prague on a stipend at the end of the 1920s. Later Jakobson, who became a close friend, discovered him again in New York during World War II, where Koyré helped him to secure a teaching position at the Ecole Libre des Hautes Etudes (Jakobson 1964, 269). Ludwig Landgrebe, Husserl’s assistant from 1923 to 1930, was granted the right to teach at the German University with a disquisition on Marty (Landgrebe 1934) and delivered a lecture in the Cercle Linguistique 18 May 1936 on “Field concepts in the science and philosophy of language”, whereby he also became a member of the Cercle. Also a member of the Cercle was another former Husserl student, D. Čyževskij (Čyževskij 1931). Along with the ideas of Husserlian phenomenology he also advocated those of the Hegelian, with which other members, and not least N. Trubetzkoy, were also most familiar (the theses of the wholeness — “The whole is the true” — and of the dialectical opposites — cf. Jakobson 1968a; 1972, 47; 1973, 12).

15Back to Husserl himself. Through Koyré Jakobson’s attention was directed to the Cartesian Meditations of Husserl which had appeared in French in 1931. What interested Jakobson especially in this broadly conceived “Introduction to phenomenology” were the last paragraphs on intentional analysis in the Second Meditation with the characteristic title, “The field of transcendental experience laid open in respect of its universal structures”, and the Fifth Meditation on intersubjectivity.

16In the last three paragraphs of the Second Meditation Husserl insists on two basic insights by which every phenomenological analysis is methodologically guided: 1) Each datum points beyond itself to an horizon of cogiven data as well as of possible modifications of itself. 2) All data, corporeal things, cultural objects (in other words also the linguistic entities) and likewise the modes of consciousness (perception, memory, etc) in which they appear, however “fluid” they may be by nature, are by no means variable without restriction: “They are always restricted to a set of structural types” (Husserl 1931/1950, 88). The same holds for the totality of objects and categories or — as Husserl puts it — regions of objects of the world as a whole. The world is not a chaos, but a systematically ordered configuration or, to use a formula that Jakobson and Tynjanov (1928) had introduced a bit earlier, a “system of systems” (390ff.). As a consequence “the phenomenological investigations do not get lost in disconnected descriptions, but are essentially organized (Husserl 1931/1950, 90). Correspondingly, philo|sophy is given the task of clarifying the “set of structural types” to which the object investigated belongs, and which constitutes its essence, as well as of revealing the “horizon structure”, the situation in which it appears and constitutes itself, together representing a “struc|tural rule” for the possible consciousness of this object.

17With regard to the problem of intersubjectivity, there was to be an opportunity for a direct exchange of thoughts a short while later. In November 1935 Husserl was staying in Prague to give lectures. On Jakobson’s initiative he spoke on 18 November in the Cercle Lin|guistique on “Phenomenology of language”. In Husserl’s own words, this visit in the Cercle meant for him “an absolute discovery”. He had not had the faintest notion that an entire circle of linguistic scientists were oriented according to the analyses of the Logical Investigations. A main point of the lecture and of the succeeding discussion was the intersubjective constitution of language.8

18Jakobson thematized the intersubjective constitution of linguistic formations years before the Cartesian Meditations and the lecture in the Cercle Linguistique. On this point there is thus no direct literary dependency, but a convergence arising from the matter itself. It is even possible to conjecture here a certain influence of Jakobson on Husserl. At the time of Husserl’s visit in Prague, Jakobson presented him with a reprint of his paper, “Folklore as a special form of creation”, which he had coauthored with P. Bogatyrev (1929).9 This essay is devoted to the specifically intersubjective constitution of the folkloristic objects. Its topics bring at once to the mind of the Husserl connoisseur his essay “The origin of geometry” (Husserl 1939), written a year after Husserl’s Prague visit. One might see in certain expositions of this essay an after-effect of the paper on folklore, or of the discussion in the Prague Cercle, which went in the same direction.10 However, it should be remembered that Husserl in his later years, as can be seen from his reception of Gestalt psychology, scarcely took any more from new trends than what he had already in his own way discovered. On the other side it is true for Jakobson’s development of the problem of intersubjectivity that Špet evidently had already interpreted Husserl’s antipsychologistic discussions of the Logical Investigations as an attack on the individual psychological explanation of mental entities (Špet 1917; 1927). Similarly, in Saussure the “langue”, the code of each language, is to be found already as an “eminently social thing”, contrasted to the “parole” engendered in an individual speech act.

19Finally, several other linguists and linguistically interested scientists are to be mentioned, who were likewise oriented to Husserl and with whom Jakobson entered into contact precisely in this regard. Among his Russian colleagues N. Zinkin (1968), and among those in Prague J. Mukarovský (cf. 1936) should be mentioned, as well as H. Pos, V. Bröndal and K. Bühler, all of whom co-operated with the Prague Cercle.

20It was the Dutch linguist, Henrik Pos, a former Husserl student, who in the opinion of Jakobson wrote one of the best introductions to structuralism and especially to the primary linguistic phenomenon of opposition (Pos 1938; 1939a). From his pen too came the basic elaboration of the distinction between language as it appears to an external observer, and as it is accomplished by the speaker and the auditor in actual experiencing (expérience vécue) (Pos 1939b), a distinction characteristic of the philosophy of Husserl and especially made use of by French phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty 1960, 106ff.).

21Viggo Bröndal, together with the younger L. Hjemslev, founder of the Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague, concluded the programmatic opening paper of the first volume of Acta Linguistica, first planned as journal for both the Copenhagen and Prague Cercles, with a reference to Husserl’s trail-blazing analyses of the formal structure of language and logic (Bröndal 1939; cf. already 1937). The paper had been thoroughly discussed by Bröndal with Jakobson.

22Karl Bühler, a psychologist close to Gestalt theory, at the Prague Phonologists Congress in 1931 delivered an important lecture on “Phonetics and Phonology”, in which, among other things, invoking Husserl he came out for the strict exclusion of psychological concepts from the definition of the phoneme.11 His Theory of Language (1934), which was first to understand how to tie together the linguistic philosophical ideas of Husserl, Saussure and Trubetzkoy (with whom he maintained a live contact in Vienna) into a unified and systematic conception, is, in Jakobson’s judgement (1970, 671) “still ... for linguists probably the most inspiring among all the contributions to the psychology of language”. Husserl for his part valued Bühler as one “of the first psychologists since Külpe who tried to make some use of my Logical Investigations”.12

23This historical survey may be closed with a reference to the most original phenomenologist after the death of Husserl, M. Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty visited Jakobson in New York in 1948 and also met him later again in Paris. His philosophical approach was however essentially more narrow than that of Husserl, so that his debate with structural linguistics was not very fruitful (cf. Merleau-Ponty 1968, 34ff.; Edie 1971).

Thematic points of contact between Jakobson’s structural linguistics and Husserl’s phenomenological philosophy

24If, for the thematic comparison of the works of Jakobson and Husserl, we start from Jakobson’s explicit references to Husserl and his direct citations, three clusters of themes result: the so-called “antipsychologism”, the idea of a pure universal grammar or doctrine of forms, and the doctrine of signification.13 In addition, through the Cartesian Meditations and the encounter in Prague, there is as a still further point of contact the intersubjective constitution of language. The themes of the doctrine of association, much to the surprise of many geisteswissenschaftliche and rationalistic investigators, who consider associationism a long since obsolete dogma of empiricistic and sensualistic psychology, must be assigned a central position in both men’s work. The theses of Husserl and Jakobson in this regard also deserve a brief discussion, even though developed without direct literary contact, in view of the way they corroborate one another (cf. Jakobson 1973, 15). To round off this comparative study, Jakobson’s work will be confronted with the two basic concerns of Husserlian phenomenology, the theories of the analysis of essences and of the phenomenological reduction. In this connection there are to be found in Jakobson not only particular impulses originating from Husserl, but also noteworthy initiatives to the further development of precisely these central Husserlian theories.

The so-called “antipsychologism”

25In contrast to a large part of the early Husserl following, Jakobson has correctly understood Husserl’s “antipsychologism” always merely in a relative sense; not as a rejection of psychology generally, but simply as a rejection of certain forms and methods of psychological explanation, in opposition to which a new psychology is to be developed, and in particular as an attack against the reduction of one science to another (Jakobson 1970, 670; 1971c, 715; cf. section entitled “The phenomenological attitude”).

26What Husserl turned against was the psychology of the closing nine|teenth century, which can be labelled a genetic, causal-explanatory, physiological, atomistic, sensualistic, individualistic, naturalistic science of facts. In opposition to it Husserl calls first for a statically descriptive psychology, later for a new kind of genetic psychology, namely one that elucidates motives, and is subsequently built into a phenomenological, holistic, intentional, intersubjective, transcendental, a priori science of essences. Apart from the absolutized concept of a transcendental, a priori science of essences, Jakobson’s understanding of psychology agrees in principle with that of Husserl.

Old psychology Husserl’s psychology
genetically-causal explanatory physiological statically descriptive genetically-motivationally elucidatory phenomenological
atomistic holistic
sensualistic intentional
individualistic intersubjective
naturalistic transcendental
inductive science of facts a priori science of essences14

27The closing nineteenth century gave scientific status only to genetic and causal explanations. In accord with the prevailing ideal of natural science at that time, the effort was made to conceive psychology likewise as an empirically explanatory science of facts. The most direct way to that was to reduce everything psychic to the physiological processes on which it is founded. As a consequence of this reduction, all of the mental and cultural phenomena also underwent in the last instance a physiological expla|nation. Thus in linguistics the laws for the acquisition and change of speech sounds, i.e. of artificial and cultural formations, were reduced to the laws that were thought to govern the process of articulation, customarily to the law of least effort (cf. still Saussure 1916, 204; Jakobson 1941, 334ff.). Quite apart from the difficulty of finding objective criteria for the degree of effort, this explanation must be charged with blindness in the face of all the structures immanent in systems of speech sounds. On the other side, in logic for example, J. Mill and H. Spencer reduced belief, the holding of something as true, by which a judgement is distinguished from a mere idea, to the “inseparable association” that has formed between two ideas. The association as such was explained mechanistically according to brain physiology, through the arousal of the same nervous pathway by two different stimuli. If the belief in the judgement were actually formed according to the laws of association of ideas, then it would be a matter of chance and not of insight. Every difference between the affirmations of a scientist guided by justifications and the capricious assertions of a schizo|phrenic would disappear (Brentano, 1925, 41ff.).

28Against such, finally, not merely psychologistic, but physiologistic reductions, Brentano and his supporters called for the processual des|cription of the respective phenomena in their relationships as the condi|tion of every genetic derivation. Before anything can be reduced to something else, it is first necessary to be acquainted with its inner structure and the matrix of relationships in which it is embedded. To the distinction of static descriptive and genetic explanatory psychology corresponds in Saussure’s Cours “the differentiation of synchronic and diachronic linguistics.

29While the Russian Formalists to a considerable degree adopted the sharp confrontation of such paired concepts as a methodical and heuristic principle, the Prague Structuralists from the beginning sought for a bridge and mediation between the opposites. For them are not only synchrony and diachrony no longer independent dimensions, but the identification of statics and synchrony or dynamics and diachrony is no longer maintained. For the Prague linguists the question raised by Jakobson in 1926 in a letter to Trubetzkoy became crucial: whether it were not suitable to bridge the gap between the synchronic analysis of the phonological system and “historical phonetics” by regarding every sound change as a functional event from the viewpoint of the overall system (Jakobson 1956a, 512ff.). With this insight the Prague linguists, as Jakobson shows with regard to Masaryk in particular (Jakobson 1933, 543), approximated more closely to the view of the Brentano school than to the radical dualism of Saussure. The Brentano student Masaryk had already advanced the thesis in 1885, in his Toward a Concrete Logic, that whoever is unfamiliar with the essence of any thing is unable to understand its evolution.

30With regard to equating synchrony with statics and diachrony with dynamics, Jakobson repeatedly points out that there are static states that survive for ages, and that on the other side dynamic changes always manifest themselves on the level of synchrony, in the interdigitation of various subcodes. Language is a temporal process. Each syntagmatic combination follows in a temporal dimension.15 In addition, the same universal laws governing the synchrony of the ethnic languages also dictate the order of acquisition of speech sounds by the child, or, in the reverse direction, the distintegration of linguistic competence in aphasia (Jakob|son 1941).

31In a completely analogous manner Husserl, in the course of his investigation, arrived at a revision of the overly abstract contraposition of statics and genetics. The various phenomena with which phenomenology is concerned are not givens which are fixed “once and for all”. They are pervasively dynamic in character, caught up in constant change, intrin|sically pointing backward to a genetic history and forward to possible continued developments. Thus, for example, the controversial “essences”, to which classical phenomenology is oriented, are not something which consciousness finds ready-made in itself or on a Platonic firmament of ideas. Rather, they grow genetically in the congruence of similar isolated givens. The congruence motivates the one experiencing it not only to objectify what is common, but also to idealize it. “Genetic phenomeno|logy”, which Husserl developed in his research manuscripts from 1917–18 on, distinguishes itself from the older genetic psychology in that it does not derive observed psychic and mental phenomena from physiological processes causally, but makes them motivationally intelligible from preceding phenomena. Omne phaenomenon ex phaenomeno. In the course of doing this it becomes evident that these motivational dependence relationships follow a priori and universal regularities just as the earlier described static relations. For Jakobson the panchronic laws too, which govern synchrony and diachrony alike, are not of physiological but of purely linguistic or phenomenological character, if we can term pheno|menological all that belongs to some thing intrinsically, just as it gives itself to us in experience.

32Phenomenology and structural linguistics agree in assuming the basic law of Gestalt theory, that every given is “field-conditioned”, and can be understood only through consideration of its positionality in a referential context. Husserl uses for the whole, which is given along with every particular, the concept of “horizon”. The front side of a house, directly visible to me, does not stand unrelated in my visual field. It refers among other things to the back sides of the house. The reference here does not go unilaterally from what is directly present to what is co-present, but also in reverse from the latter to the former. Both exist together in a functional community. Without the reference to the back sides the directly accessible front of the house not only loses its meaning as “front side”, but is also affected thereby in its entire phenomenal character. (Cf. on this “cubistic” view of things also Jakobson 1919, 25.)

33Structuralism once again insists, in contrast to the atomistic treatment of the individual speech elements by the Neo-grammarians, on their relational character and relational characteristics, on the relations of correlation and disjunction, in which they stand to one another intrinsically. The phonemes draw their function of differentiating meaning from the horizonal co-givenness (in a sort of virtual consciousness left undefined by linguistics as a non-philosophical and non-psychological special science: Jakobson 1939a, 282ff.; 1937c, 275) of oppositional co-phonemes within a hierarchically articulated system. In this elaboration of the stratified structure of the system of speech sounds Jakobson relied on the formal laws of foundation — worked out by Husserl in the Third Logical Investigation — by which wholes and parts in their relation to one another are governed (cf. following section, “The idea of a pure and universal grammer”).

34One of the important charges of Husserl against psychologizing logicians relates to the failure to distinguish between experiencing and content or object of such experiencing. Their confusion is encouraged through a linguistic equivocity. For the experiencing of an act and the object of an act the same expression is used for many acts. By “idea” we refer to ideation as well as to the ideated, by “perception” to the perceiving and to the perceived, and so on. Similarly, in speaking of judgements and inferences the judgements and inferences or the states of affairs corresponding to them are confused with the judging and inferring. When logical, ideal entities are reduced in such a way to their correlative psychic activities, it is believed that as something purely psychic they must also follow purely psychic laws (Husserl 1900, 167ff.).

35This principal distinction between mental acts and intentional objects, between what is immanent in psychic experiences as a real component and what is intentionally meant by them, is what revealed the autonomy of objects intentionally given to consciousness — logical states of affairs and linguistic entities — and their own particular structural lawfulness.16 It is not so much the psychic and physiological processes of articulation that determine what and how something is thought and spoken, but rather the immanent structures of what is thought and spoken that supply the rules for the articulation. The fact that a sentence is a meaningful and logical consequence of other sentences motivates me to its production, and not any psychic or physiological effect of preceding sentence articulations. In the same way on the level of the speech sounds it is these immanent structural laws that guide the articulation.

36But just as important as the distinction between mental acts and intentional objects is the holding back of the intentional givens as conscious (perceived, imagined, thought, etc) givens. Even when they and the relationships prevailing among them are autonomous and unable to be derived from the manifold contingent influences to which psychic life is subject, they may not after all be taken as transcending consciousness. Not only “what is the case for me”, in the narrower sense what is subjective, but also “what is the case in itself”, which in unreflected observation appears as objective, transcending consciousness, is always simply a datum of consciousness and to be elucidated as such. Besides the articulatory (physiological) level of the phonemes, with which above all traditional linguistics has been concerned, and besides the acoustic (physical) level, which came to the fore after World War II, the perceptual (pheno|menological) level is not only to be recognized as a level sui generis, but at the same time as the level actually intended in the process of inter|subjective communication.17

37What is decisive in perception is actually not the sensorily given in its brute materiality, but what is meant by it, i.e. as what it is taken as being, as it is “apperceived”, to resort to a terminology that is hardly any longer used today, but which was quite familiar to Jakobson from his Moscow seminars on Husserl (cf. Husserl 1913, 384ff.). This doctrine of apper|ception was, according to Jakobson’s confession, of essential help to him in developing and working out the concept of the phoneme.18 If we are attuned to sounds as speech sounds, then from the very beginning we perceive them in terms of the system from which they obtain their specific value. Just those features of a sound stand out through which it fits into the respective system.

38The relationships between the phonemes, or their distinctive features, are in phenomenological perspective by no means (as often expounded by structuralists) pregiven as merely abstract, static and logical relations. Behind relationships like those of similarity and of (maximal) contrast hide rather generative or — to speak phenomenologically — constitutive, motivational principles, to which the phonological systems owe their formation (cf. section below on “The intersubjective constitution of language”). In the presence of such a phenomenologically interpreted phonology the summary criticism of Chomsky with regard to structuralistic phonology (Chomsky 1968, 65) proves invalid, the objection namely that it has merely exposed the structural phonemic patterns, but not the systems of rules through which these patterns are formed and produced. At the very most one could criticize it, and that for perfectly clear historical reasons, for not having advanced beyond a small number of such generative principles, which it can nevertheless demonstrate to be the most fundamental and universal ones.19

The idea of a pure and universal grammar

39The real and positive concern of the “antipsychologism” of Husserl and of the early structural linguistics is the construction of a pure (autonomous) and universal grammar or formal doctrine of the language entities of the various levels.

40The starting point of research in this regard is the insight that entities in their complications and modifications are subject to a set of structural types derivable from their nature. The aim is to lead back the laws that guide connection and transformation to a minimum number of independent elementary laws. In the investigation of the invariable structures that delimit the sense and range of the variables mathematics serves as a paradigm (Husserl 1913, 328ff.).20

41The a priori universal, which is grounded in the essence of the givens of language, is to be distinguished from the empirically universal, which is determined through the universal and yet merely factitious traits of human nature. The a priori universal is won through insight into the essential nature of a phenomenon, the empirically universal on the other hand through an inductively founded generalization. That we are dealing with a complex of incompatible word categories in the verbal sequence “this house is and” in contrast to the sequence “this house is red” can be taken directly from the meaning of the individual words. But that human speech includes only sounds within the limits of 20 and 20,000 Hertz is an inductively secured determination.

42Jakobson insists above all on two forms of relation, according to which all linguistic givens appear to allow themselves to be oriented: opposition and hierarchy. The aim of structuralistic research is a maximally simple and closed, dichotomous and hierarchic structured system, as it has been projected in model fashion for the classification of the distinctive phonological features. For the hierarchic stratification of the linguistic systems, which results from the laws of implication through which the individual givens are tied to one another, Jakobson bases himself, as already mentioned, on the forms of the laws of foundation worked out by Husserl in his Third Logical Investigation. “According to the logical definition, the foundation, i.e. the necessary linking of the two elements, can, as is known, be “reciprocal or unilateral, depending on whether the respective law is reversible or not”.21 Thus the acquisition of the spirants presupposes that of the explosives, and in the language systems of the world the first could not exist if the latter too did not exist” (Jakobson 1941, 360).

43As first motto of the study cited on “Child Language, Aphasia, and Phonological Universals”, Jakobson chose a sentence from the same Third Logical Investigation: “The only true unifying factors are relations of “foundations” ” (279). A unity grounded in the formal relation of foundation distinguishes itself from those unities with which Gestalt psychology above all has concerned itself, and which owe their unity to a form content proper called “Gestalt-quality”, a quality vividly evident like the sensory qualities of the elements of a group forming a unity. Such a Gestalt-quality is, for example, the serial character of a column of soldiers. The unity of the phonological system is thus not a visible Gestalt unity. It is not grounded in a Gestalt unity, but in a formal relation, just as the unity of colour and extension or of tone quality and tone intensity — Husserl’s examples of foundation — do not arise through a supplemental form content, through a visible bond, but solely through a reciprocal need for completion. It is noteworthy that Husserl introduces the laws of foundation in describing the unity of individual givens (tones and spots of color,) while Jakobson takes them over to describe the unity of systems of discrete givens of the same kind (phonemes).

44For the binary opposition as a universal law of form, there are likewise inceptions in Husserl, and indeed within his phenomenology of association. To be sure they have not been developed and made use of by him in the same measure as by structuralism. Phenomenology in particular does not evoke for the contrariety an economic (the conjunction of binary oppositions as the most rational system of decomposition and decoding) or even a logical justification (the opposition as a basic logical operation; Jakobson and Halle 1956, 499ff.). Rather it employs it as a transcendental principle, as a condition of the possibility of consciousness to begin with. It can be most easily shown in the simplest form of consciousness, sensory perception. Nothing at all can be perceived that does not ipso facto stand out from something else that differs from it (cf. the Gestalt psychological law of figure and background). In this sense the contrast reveals itself as a “primary phenomenon” (Husserl 1966, 138; cf. section below on “The principles of association as the most fundamental principles of structure”).

45Differently from the hierarchic organization of the entire system, the oppositional relation that primarily characterizes the individual entities is to be considered a Gestalt-quality. The opposition possesses both characters (Ehrenfels criteria) of Gestalten, superadditivity and transposability. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. The contrast phenomenon does not apply to the parts as such, but to both together as a unity, as a pair. Chickens, trained to peck at grain on a gray field and to leave untouched the grain on an adjacent darker field, leave the gray field when the field contrast of gray and dark is replaced by a new contrast of gray and light, and now peck their food again from the relatively lighter part. The bright-dark contrast is the primary given and separable from its factual bearers, the factual degree of brightness and of darkness of the bearers of the contrast (Jakobson and Halle 1956, 473). In analogous manner, in Danish for example, the contrast of strong-weak transfers from t vs. d in the strong position to d vs. δ in the weak position. The weak phoneme in the strong position is materially identical with the strong phoneme in the weak position. The contrast as such, as Gestalt-quality and as primary criterion of perception, is not affected thereby (Jakobson 1949, 424).

Basic questions of the doctrine of meaning

46Beside the idea of a universal doctrine of forms a still further major concern of Jakobson’s linguistics can be presented: the thesis that on every level of language, from its highest unities to its ultimate components, meaning is to be taken into account as a constitutive factor. This thesis too, so typical for Jakobson, has been partially influenced by Husserl’s Logical Investigations. “It is part of the notion of an expression to have a meaning” (Husserl 1913, 54).22

47Again and again Jakobson refers in this connection to the Logical Investigations, in demonstrating fundamental distinctions and no less in the exposition of particular problems. There is first of all the clarification of the relation between expression and meaning itself. Here Jakobson cites the well-known comparison of language with a board game, made famous by Wittgenstein, in Husserl’s version. In Wittgenstein the comparison serves to bring out the correctly understood, “demythologized” meanings the language signs as identified with the rules of their usage from a presumptive meaning supposed according to a certain traditional view, to reside in a quasi-presentational, mental accompanying phenomenon of the sensory signs. Husserl and Jakobson use the comparison only as a graphic illustration that the meaning is not contained in the physical and sensorily perceptible content of the expression. “What constitutes them [scil. the figures of the board game] phenomenally and physically, is quite indifferent and can be varied at will. ... Rather they become counters of the respective game through the rules of the game which give them their fixed games-meaning” (Husserl 1913, 69; Jakobson 1941, 350). A sound becomes a speech sound not through an elementary auditory sensation, through which it distinguishes itself from other tones, but through an intentional act, a specific comprehension or evaluation, through which it is brought into the order of a system of rules. In this interpretation the meaning is by no means attributed with the “character of a copy” (Husserl 1913, 314).23 The analysis of the syncategoremata stands against such a view. The meaning lies — subjectively — in the manner of my intention, in the manner in which I direct myself to objects, independent or not independent, and — objectively — in the mode of givenness of the particular objects. The meaning is by no means objectively conscious in the act of signifying. It can however at any time be rendered objective and plain by a retroflective regard.

48In the next semantic distinction, that between meaning and reference of the linguistic expression, Jakobson likewise starts from Husserl. Their difference appears in the fact that two expressions can have different meanings but the same object, and inversely the same meaning but different objects. In the second volume of the Logical Investigations, whose importance for language theory can never be sufficiently emphasized, Husserl investigates the kind of paired sentences like “a is bigger than b” and “b is smaller than a" and determines that the two sentences express the same state of affairs, but differ in terms of their meaning-content (1913, 48)” (Jakobson 1936a, 34). “If on one occasion we say Bucephalus is a horse and on another That cart-horse is a horse, then as Husserl (op cit., 46ff.) makes precise, the meaning of the expression a horse remains to be sure unchanged, but the objective reference has changed” (Jakobson 1941, p: 354). Already in his programmatic lecture of 1919 in the Moscow Linguistic Circle on “Modern Russian Poetry”, Jakobson had attempted to distinguish poetic and practical language from each other through playing off meaning and the objective reference of expressions against one another. “An important feature of the poetic neologism is the objectlessness. The law of poetic etymology is active, the inner and outer word form is experienced, but what Husserl calls the thing-reference is missing.” (Jakobson 1921a, 92ff.; cf. 1933/34, 415).

49Furthermore, to show the special character of phonemes, namely that to any definite and constant sound difference between two phonemes the difference of meaning is a merely potential one and by no means fixed and definite, Jakobson has recourse to Husserl’s distinction between sense-giving and sense-fulfilling acts (1939a, 292). An “empty” meaning intention, according to Husserl, is present when an expression as such is recognized while its meaning is not, for instance if I catch scraps of a language I have never heard before, or which at least is not “intuitively” given, when for example I understand how to operate correctly with a mathematical theorem though the theorem itself is not, or not any longer, transparent to me. There is fulfillment of meaning when I am able to “make clear” the meaning of an expression for myself and secure from it an intuitive or evident understanding. Jakobson transfers this distinction in the case of the phonemes to a phenomenon that remained undiscovered to Husserl himself. That this employment nevertheless lies in line with Husserl’s own usage is shown by his application of the distinction to the syncategoremata (Husserl 1913, 314ff.), which are to a certain degree related to the phonemes. Like these they are, for themselves alone, merely potential bearers of meaning. To an intuitive meaning they come only in the context of a more embracing meaning complex. While the meaning for the syncategoremata is however one that is definite and constant, that of the phonemes is variable.

50Other problems of signification for which Jakobson refers to Husserl are the particular character of the shifters (in the terminology of the newer linguistics introduced by Jespersen) or of the occasional expressions (in Husserl’s language), and the comparison of complete and incomplete expressions. “The comparison of incomplete and explicit messages, the fascinating problem of fragmentary propositions, challengingly outlined in Charles Peirce’s perusal of “blanks” and in the semiotic studies of Frege and Husserl, strange as it may seem, have found no response among linguists” (Jakobson 1963a, 282; cf. Husserl 1913, 308ff.).

51In regard to the shifters, as for example the personal pronouns, Jakobson turns against the widespread view that they are without a constant and general meaning. For this view he also cites Husserl: “The word I names a different person from case to case and does so by way of an ever altering meaning (Husserl 1913, 82; Jakobson 1957, 132). That is the only time that Jakobson expressly distances himself from Husserl. It must also be said that Husserl himself in his foreword to the second edition of the Logical Investigations (vol 1, xiv) qualifies the manner in which the occasional expressions are presented in the First Investigation as a “tour de force”. He justifies himself by saying that this introductory investigation has only the aim of directing the gaze of the phenomenological beginner to the initial, already most difficult problems of the consciousness of meaning, “without doing full justice to them”. Husserl actually revises his unnuanced introduction to the problem of the occasional expressions partially in the very course of the selfsame paragraphs, and then completely in the fifth paragraph of the Sixth Investigation. Thus for him as well there are two meanings for the shifters, one that is occasional or individual and one that is general, constructed one on the other in a unique and not easily separable relation.

The intersubjective constitution of language

52Husserl in the Logical Investigations turned against the shortsighted resolution of the logical objects into the acts of consciousness correlative to them, and made an effort to secure the correct explication of this correlative relation of subjective consciousness and objective things. How|ever it is only years after the Logical Investigations that the correlation of objectivity and intersubjectivity enters the sphere of his interest.

53An object, so reads the basic insight of transcendental phenomenology, exists only as correlative to consciousness. Hence an object is only brought to a philosophically adequate degree of evidence when not only its context, the system in which it is embedded, but also the subject in which both are constituted, is included in the elucidation, a spatial thing, for example, when the human body which as organ of perception “is also along” is considered at the same time. The Gestalt-theoretical duality of figure and background, and the structuralistic one of “-em” (phoneme, morpheme, etc) and context is, from the phenomenological viewpoint, to be expanded through a third pole, the constituting subject, into a triad.

54An analysis pushed still further subsequently leads to the differentiation or to the multiplication of the third pole. To the perception of a thing belongs not only the horizonal accompaniment of the appearance of my human body as the bearer, the subject of perception, but just as much the co-appearance of other humans, by whom it is perceived or can, in principle, be perceived as by myself. In this intersubjective horizon of things their suitability as signs, as means of communication, is grounded.

55Through the usage as sign a secondary layer of intersubjective references enters into things, one essentially different from the primary reference. The first reference is to other potential subjects, to whom I transpose my own thing perception. The second reference implicates factual subjects who in advance of myself have allotted a new dimension to things, their function as instruments of designation and communication, which I adopt as inter|subjectively instituted and conventional. Differently from “mere” things, whose subject-relatedness recedes behind the appearance of their indepen|dence of consciousness, instruments intrinsically refer back directly to subjects engaged in action with them and are thus in a good sense to be termed, (inter-)subjective”. Phenomenal fundamental facts of this kind are meant in speaking of the intersubjective constitution of objects and of the mundane mediation of the other subjects (mediation through the “world” of objects and in particular of cultural objects).

56I earlier pointed out a possible dependency of Husserl’s no less famous than enigmatic essay, “On the origin of geometry” (1939) from Jakobson’s and Bogatyrev’s paper, “Folklore as a special form of creation” (1929). Even if one is unwilling to accept such a direct dependency, their confrontation remains a most fruitful one. In the two articles the concern is with the intersubjective constitution of cultural objects, exemplified by the very different sisters of geometry and folklore. This makes a compar|ison all the more intriguing.

57In both papers the focus is on the objectivation and the tradition of mental or cultural objects. Husserl formulates his problem thus: “How does the geometric ideality arrive from its originary intra-personal origin ... at its ideal objectivity?” (369). To the mental or cultural products, for all of which there is the same problem of objectivity, belong, as he expressly notes, “for example, also the formations of literature” (368). In both papers objectivity is explicated as intersubjectivity and supratemporality. “Objective” is used for what exists “for everyone” and constantly. In both papers communitization (Vergemeinschaftung) or social acceptance and written recording are thematized as factors of the objectivation and tradition of the mental formations. In both papers the problem of a passive sedimentation of active productions is discussed, by Jakobson and Bogatyrev in relation to so-called “degraded cultural values”. In both papers finally the problem of the reactualization of those formations that lead a merely potential existence in their intersubjective or written mediation is taken up in detail. So much for the common topics, which individually are naturally treated in a different way depending on the particular context.

58One difference in particular deserves to be pursued. Husserl’s clari|fication of the intersubjective constitution remains confined to the principal and formal, even in certain sense to the potential. The aim of Jakobson and Bogatyrev on the other hand is to show how certain cultural formations owe their existence as such simply to acceptance through a collectivity. Thereby they go well beyond the analyses of Husserl. The sound shifts characterizing our language, for example, owe their existence to the fact that they were accepted by a community. Social sanction differentiates them from individual speech errors and lapses. The accep|tance in these cases is supplemented by the moment of sanction. In a similar manner, according to Jakobson and Bogatyrev, social acceptance or sanction is constitutive for folklore. As long as the folklore is not fixed by writing, as are literary works, its objective existence is dependent on its acceptance by a community. Only those elements of content and those formal particulars of it are preserved which are accepted by the community that transmits it. The intersubjective sanction does not make its entry in the wake of an individual creation, on a second level of constitution. It does not apply to the “offering” of an individual folklore poet. The sanction of the community functions rather in the form of a preventive censorship. The constitution of folklore follows, from the very beginning, on intersubjective “demand”.

The principles of association as the most fundamental principles of structure

59Phenomenology and structuralism proceed from a common primary phe|nomenon, the phenomenon of relationship. Husserl’s favorite term for it is the Kantian title of synthesis. In his “Paris Lectures” he characterizes “synthesis as intrinsic property of consciousness” (1931/1950, 17) — meaning: of the mental experiencings and of the intentional givens of consciousness. As Saussure puts it: In a linguistic condition everything rests on the relationships” (1961, 170), or in a manuscript which belongs to this passage (G 2.2lb 1968, 276), succinctly: “Everything is relationship”.

60The commonness between Husserl and Jakobson goes still further. Both adduce the classical factors of association as the fundamental and universal principles of the relationships they have thematized: similarity, contrast and continuity. Association for Husserl is “a transcendental phenomenological basic concept” and a title for “the universal principle of the passive genesis” (1931/1950, 113ff.). That is to say, the principles of association occupy an eminent position among the factors and laws underlying those syntheses which, differently from apperceptions, summarizations and these (judgements), do not originate from ego acts but, in Husserl’s concise formulation, arise “without ego participation”, “involuntarily” and “unconsciously” in a manner to be more precisely determined. Thus the most primitive formations of consciousness, sensory wholes, as for example spots of color, constitute themselves at once in standing out from something contrasting and melting into configurations with everything similar and contiguous. Above all similarity is implicated in an entire series of performances of consciousness, not least in performances of identification and of generalization — two achievements on which everyone naturally depends without having to give an account of their development.

61On this point as well there is no direct literary dependency between Jakobson and Husserl.24 The convergence is all the more remarkable since Husserl’s reassumption of the theme of association ran into a lack of comprehension among most of his followers, who considered this an outmoded concern of the old sensualistic psychology. Jakobson — as already before him Saussure — rather took his inspiration for his typology of main linguistic axes in terms of association theory from the trailblazing analyses of the Polish linguistic theorist N. Kruszewski (1886/87, 171ff.). “The doctrine of the two linguistic axes, inspired by the classification of associations by the English psychologists and their radical disciple Troickij, was raised in Kruszewski’s work from a mechanistic to a phenomenological level and grew into a harmonious, holistic and uncommonly fruitful theory of language” (Jakobson 1965/66, 435).

62The linguistic accomplishment, according to that theory, consists of two principal activities, first the selection and then the combination of elements into a meaningful conjunction. Each element is selected from a supply of elements that resemble it in a certain respect and could just as well take its place without the word sequence into whose order it fits ceasing to form a meaningful language unit. To the activity of selection or substitution over and beyond the association by similarity Jakobson attaches the stylistic figure of the metaphor. The selected elements are bound together in a combination characterized for its part by association in terms of contiguity and the stylistic figure of metonymy (Jakobson 1956b).

63For the second conceptual linkage of combination, association, and metonymy, one might wish for a differentiation. While the interchange|ability of the elements on the paradigmatic axis rests on the identity or similarity of their phonological, morphological or grammatical function, the combination on the syntagmatic axis is by no means based on a processual contiguity of the elements. What composes the coherence of elements on the syntagmatic axis is their grammatical form and their semantic sense. The contiguity is a secondary factum, the result of a sense-motivated linkage.

64Are there any combinations at all for which a purely temporal or spatial contiguity suffices? Are not combinations, beyond the external proximity of their parts, still grounded through and through on inner factors which prove to be actual promoters of conjunction, on Gestalt factors (a unity is formed by elements which combine to give a pregnant Gestalt) and on functional and meaningful relationships? Such kinds of factors are demonstrable not only in the most diverse metonymies (sail-ship, egg-hen). Above all they govern the syntactic combinations. Thus we deter|mine here, along with the “external”, merely temporal and spatial conti|guity, the presence as well of an “inner”, functional or meaning contiguity.

65With metonymies moreover it is not indifferent whether one proceeds from a part to the more embracing whole, or inversely from the whole to a part. The style and tone of an art work vary, according to whether its signs are derived from the inner or the outer horizon of what is described. A characteristic difference results if a film that approaches Geneva first shows the Reformation monument in a park of the city, or the Alpine range with Mount Blanc at whose foot the city lies. Here we come upon a new opposition of inner and outer. The distinction between inner and outer relationships is just part of the tradition of associationism. With its transfer over and beyond the opposition of association by similarity and contiguity to the phenomena broached here, it is perhaps possible to secure additional typological pairs of opposites, which likewise find their counterparts in psychology and pathology (cf. the psychological distinc|tion of introverted and extraverted).

66The third principle too, contrast, is of fundamental importance for the constitution of linguistic elements.25 As it has principally been worked out for the phonemes, each linguistic element is woven into a binary opposition or rather into an entire network of binary oppositions through which it acquires its specific value, arriving at its meaning-distinguishing function. We have already pointed out that phenomenology and Gestalt psychology have both in the same way elaborated on the difference of figure and background as the indispensable moment of every sensory perception.

67But is it legitimate simply to equate the figure-background structure of perceptual doctrine with the opposition of phonology? Aren’t we dealing in the first case with differences of any sort and of varying degree, but in the second case with maximal oppositions? And isn’t a simple difference, as Pos develops it in his “Perspectives of structuralism” (1939a, 75ff.) a form of sensory intuition, while the opposition as extreme difference is a category of thinking? A phenomenological analysis here comes to the following result.

68For a sensory percept to become salient it is true that a mere difference in contrast to a different kind of background is sufficient. However it is not the case that oppositions as maximal or optimal differences enter perception only through a cognitive act and modify it correspondingly. In sensory perception itself there are tendencies to idealizing formalization at work, tendencies toward homogenization, and likewise to the optimal exposition of distinctive qualities. Nowhere in nature can a mathematically perfect circle be found. But demonstrably we have before us, in our factual perceptions of circles, just as long as we do not reflect on them, idealized figures. Cézanne has taught us that we do not at all perceive our everyday objects in perspectival fashion, as the reckoning of natural science would require. A plate on the table, which we view from the front, is seen at the same time with a larger “opening” than is perspectivally “correct”. Perception tends toward an optimal representation of its forms and contents. This tendency becomes really noticeable when these forms and contents, as is the case with the difference of the speech sounds, have a function to fulfill. The opposition is as optimal difference primarily anchored in perception itself. Secondarily it is supported and utilized by the function that is assigned to the perception or which from the very first is responsible for its production. It is only subsequently that it can be grasped and thematized as a logical relationship.

69Over and beyond the optimal contrast with one another, into which perceptual givens endowed with a sign function enter, these data distin|guish themselves from sign- and meaning-irrelevant sense-givens through still another particular property. Signs tend, over and beyond their standing out from a background of a different sort, to achieve profile by taking up the contrast into themselves. The first linguistic sound-combinations of the child distinguish themselves through the maximal contrast of their parts (papa, mama). This contrastive inner structure of the signs which supplements the contrast to the surroundings may also be teleologically explained. A traffic sign fulfills its function most readily when, to the general chaotic background which threatens to devour it, it is given a “background” that is integrated with it, massively contoured, in the form of a contrastingly colored border, or formed of two conflicting colors.

Analysis of essence

70A comparison of Jakobson with Husserl would remain incomplete if it did not approach Jakobson’s work also in the perspective of the two best- known and in actuality most fundamental theories of Husserlian phenomenology, the theory of ideation or description of essences and that of the phenomenological reduction or attitude. If Jakobson’s work were not, according to its tendency and its direction, in accord with these two essentials of Husserlian philosophy, it would be impossible to glean from their writings anything more than a few common topics and, strictly speaking, of secondary significance, over and beyond a fundamentally different framework.

71But on both points what we find is not only a positive openness of Jakobson for Husserl’s phenomenological method, but even, beyond that, fully developed paradigms for its further elaboration.

72According to the phenomenological theory of essence, one comes upon in all phenomena, along with the contingent features that are variable, still others which make up the essence or genus of the respective phenomena and are correspondingly invariant. An ever-recurrent example of Husserl is the analysis of essence of the thing. It starts with the question: what remains from the free variation (experimentally, or even simply in phantasy) “of a thing but the invariant, a necessary, general form, the essential form without which something like this, as example of its kind, would be simply unthinkable?” (Husserl 1962, 72). One such invariant or form of essence of the thing proves to be extension. If one thinks it away, the thing also disappears. If, to the contrary, one thinks of the extension as merely larger or smaller, the thing as such is not affected. That some thing has an extension of 2.5m2 does not belong to its essence.

73Starting in part from Husserl’s idea of a general doctrine of forms, partly, like Husserl himself, directly from mathematics, Jakobson sees as a principal task of linguistics the search for the invariants in all the variations, for the general in everything particular (1963b, 590). The Husserlian influence is betrayed in such expressions like “literaricity” (Jakobson 1921a, 30ff.) and “poeticity” (1933/34, 412ff.). The object of the science of literature is “not literature, but literaricity, i.e. just that which makes the respective work a literary work” (1921a, 30ff.). With this program Jakobson belongs among the promoters of the newest linguistic development, in which the problem of the “universals” occupies a central place.26 In this Jakobson knows just as well as Husserl that in the search for the essentialities success is not to be had with induction and statistics, but only with phenomenological analysis and insight into the object of investigation itself. In the inquiry into the general meaning of a form the statistical criterion is inapplicable — usual and general meanings are not synonymous” (1932a, 9).

74The general distribution of a feature can also be merely accidental, factitious. General, and essentially necessary or essentially constitutive, are not congruent concepts. While Husserl — methodologically a monist — concentrated exclusively on the phenomenological method of exposing the generalities of essence, Jakobson also practices the various forms of empirical research, which lead merely to factitious generalities and “nearuniversals”.

75Also with reference to the procedure for determining categorial forms and identities of form, phenomenological philosophy and linguistics are in accord. Husserl’s technique of “free variation”, which he developed for detecting the invariantly essential, enters into his own linguistic analyses of the Fourth Logical Investigation (1913, 318ff.) as well as into present-day linguistics in the form of the “commutation test”. The concept itself, to be sure, does not occur in Husserl. The test consists of observing whether two material instances in the same context, under the same conditions, do or do not differentiate meaning. And even if Husserl is not the first to have grasped the role of this “commutation test” for linguistic analysis, as Bar-Hillel (1956/57, 366) conjectures, he is still at least to be acknowledged as one of its promoters.

76The phenomenological investigation of essences and its criticism have largely reached an impasse in metaphysical questions about the ontological status of the essences, and in epistemological problems of its subjective acquisition and givenness (problem of intuition). It is often pointed out that the classical notion of the description of essence is too narrow (atomistic) and too abstract. The essence of a certain object can be clarified only in its connection with other objects, and even then only if the entire region or category to which it belongs is also taken into consideration in the clarification. The objects that make up a region of objects (for example, the region of the phonemes, the morphemes, etc) have not after all been assembled accidentally like things thrown up on a beach. They are connected by structural laws. They condition one another reciprocally. However, nowhere in the phenomenological literature have the dependency relationships that pass through such a region of entities and are constitutive for the individual givens ever been thematized in the comprehensive manner with which that task has been undertaken by Jakobson and his co-workers for the system of the distinctive phonological qualities (cf. Jakobson and Halle 1956).

77A similar description of the essence of an entire region was accomplished by Jakobson also in the semantic sphere — for the system of cases of the Russian language (cf. above all Jakobson 1936a 1958). First the basic or general meaning of a case is looked for. For the accusative, which in Russian is used not only for the direct object of a transitive verb but also for the temporal and spatial modifiers of the intransitive verbs, the object of certain prepositions in conjunction with verbs of movement, etc, the general meaning capable of accounting for all the apparently unrelated instances turns out to be that of “directionality”. After every case has been questioned as to its basic meaning, the comparative analysis leads to the insight that the six or eight cases of the Russian language may be characterized by the presence vs. absence or possession vs. non-possession of only three qualities (directionality, marginality, quantification) and in this way embraced in a unitary, closed, binary structured system. We repeat: nowhere in phenomenological literature is there to be found a general analysis of an entire region of phenomena so perfectly carried out, not merely as an aperçu but in thorough detail. In this sense Jakobson’s phonological and morphological analyses are to be regarded as a pattern and model for eidetic phenomenology.

The phenomenological attitude

78In the center of Husserlian phenomenology stands his theory of pheno|menological reduction or — to formulate the problem positively — of the phenomenological attitude. The motives that led to it are very complex, the positive and negative formulations already show that. The most important are the Cartesian ideal of a presuppositionless science and, in the radical elaboration of intentional psychology, the finding of the correlation of subject and object. Thus there is consciousness only as “consciousness of something” and correlatively, something only as “something conscious”, i.e. as phenomenon of mind. In a methodical clarification of the world, as it is given to us directly as a phenomenal correlative of consciousness, nothing may accordingly be presupposed and introduced (for example, a physical world transcending consciousness), that is not contained in the single phenomena themselves, just as they assume form and appear in consciousness.

79At first glance the paths of Husserl and Jakobson here appear to part. Jakobson, in the theory of science, takes a definitely antireductionistic stand. His principle is: autonomy of every area of science, but not isolation. With the key concept of autonomy goes according to him, as a second, complementary concept, that of integration. A science like linguistics may not close itself up to all the other sciences under which its object likewise falls without deliberately truncating it. In contrast to Husserl’s tendency toward a methodological monism, Jakobson champions a hierarchically ranged pluralism of methods. On the strictly internal analysis of any phenomenal level in terms of its autonomous structuration must follow, in a second phase of the investigation, the verification and complementation, through taking into account the other levels with which the one first analyzed is interacting (Jakobson 1968b, 716; 1970, 656).

80A more careful reading however shows that Husserl and Jakobson have the same starting point for this problem and go a good part of the way together. Jakobson’s antireductionism namely is in its origins of precisely Husserlian inspiration. Husserl’s “antipsychologism” was, to be sure, an antireductionistic thesis. It was aimed against embezzlement of the autonomy of logic, and its dissolution into a psychological discipline. In this sense it pointed the way for the Russian Formalists in their dispute with the physiological and psychological explanation of language through the Neo-grammarians and with the biographical and cultural-historical explanation of literature through the Symbolists.

81In his most recent publications there are above all two problems for which Jakobson insists on an antireductionistic treatment: meaning and teleology (1970, 685ff.). In the first case his position, that of the non-reducibility of language signs to their phonic aspect, is once more directly affected by Husserl (cf. above section on “Basic questions of the doctrine of meaning”). With regard to the functional viewpoint and the rehabili|tation of the teleological principles of explanation implicated with it, his position likewise coincides with that of Husserl, in whose work — at the very latest, from the Ideas (Husserl 1913/1950) onward — teleological questions are repeatedly brought up.

82There is still the phenomenological reduction. Husserl would never, as Jakobson undertakes to do, have gone back to the acoustical (physical) correlates of disputed phonemes to discover or even merely to check on their distinctive features. What belongs to the essence of a phoneme, according to Husserl, had to be obtained solely from the perceptual experience of the phoneme and the intuitive grasp of its function. In an addendum to his Ideas from the time after 1923 he says in defense of the pure or exclusively phenomenological description of perception: “Nothing however may I attribute thereby to my experiencings, that I do not grasp absolutely, that does not make them up in their own essentiality... that the data of sensation are naturally, physically, and psychophysically caused and so forth, that does not itself belong to the experiencings in their own absolute essence ...” (Husserl 1913/1950 107, cf. 127ff.). Consequently it may also not be adduced in the phenomenological explanation of perception.

83We here come upon a limit of the Husserlian phenomenology. First of all in the sensory affections from which our perception arises there is to be sure no accompanying information of physical causation, and yet the affections appear as something “inflicted”. Thereby these experiencings in their own sense or essence point to an instance transcending conscious|ness, however one may then subsequently explicate its ontological status. Secondly, even if it is the case that in the perception of a sound nothing is contained of an acoustical wave movement, there still exists as a phenomenon the correspondence of auditorily perceived sounds and “physical waves”, in so far as they can be registered and made visible by a “spectrogram”. And this correspondence demands, like every other phenomenon, description, the working out of possible lawful regularities. The methodologically narrow Husserl, set on “pure” analyses of a given — in terms of experiencing within its (primarily) corresponding sense (organ) and in terms of content within its isolated ontic region — neglects such correspondences between the heard speech and the so-called “visible speech”, just as he heedlessly bypasses that other experience which surpasses a single sense, traditionally termed “synaesthesia” (Holenstein 1972, 44, 294).

84Jakobson’s recourse to acoustics may not be simply dismissed as naturalism. His entire activity differs fundamentally from the old perceptual theory through an orientation that can only be called phenomenological. A phenomenological analysis is characterized by a twofold starting point, the direct sensory experience (including its modifications in memory, phantasy, etc) and the meaning or function with which the sense experience is invested.27 The old natural science theory of perception accepts guidance from two dogmas, the dogma of the priority of physical reality and that of isomorphism. Guided by them it infers that to the features of the acoustic waves, amplitude (wave deviation) and frequency (rate of vibration) for heard tones, there may also correspond only two features, namely intensity (correlate of amplitude) and pitch (correlate of frequency). What Jakobson on the other hand undertakes is something altogether different, namely a structure-analytical comparison, unaffected by all natural scientific causal thinking, of the three given aspects of speech sounds, the perceptual, the articulatory, and the acoustical (more precisely, the acoustic rendered visible) aspects, and their hierarchical order ing in relationship to the end of language as means of communication. Thus primacy falls to the auditory (perceptual) aspect. The structure-analytic comparison of the different levels does not discover any isomorphy, no point-to-point correspondence, but a successive elimination of the redundancies together with a progressive exposition of the oppositional, meaning-distinguishing features from the articulatory (physiological) level over the acoustic (physical) and otological (otophysiological) levels, to the auditory-perceptual (phenomenological) level. “The closer we are in our investigation to the destination of the message [i.e. its perception by the perceiver], the more accurately can we gauge the information conveyed by its sound shape” (Jakobson, Fant and Halle 1952, 12; cf. Jakobson and Halle 1956, 488). The consequence drawn by Jakobson and his fellow workers from their findings is, in addition to emphasizing the neglected otophysiological stratum, the imperativeness of the systematic elucidation of the auditory-perceptual aspect, in other words, of a phenomenological phonology.

85Reflection on the function of speech as an intersubjective means of communication leads to recognition of the primacy of the perceptual level, not only over against the physiological and physical substrata, but also in the opposite direction over against the grammatical and semantic “superstructures” of the linguistic message. The primacy of the perceptual aspect is precipitated on the side of the linguistic part-sciences correlative with the different levels in the primacy of phonology. Here we come upon one last noteworthy parallel between structuralism and phenomenology. To the leading role of phonology within structuralism corresponds the privileged status of the phenomenology of visual perception within pheno|menological philosophy. It has been the visual and auditory perceptual spheres respectively, from whose analysis phenomenology and struc|turalism have won their basic principles.

86The privileged place of perception is understandable for pheno|menology, quite apart from the fundamental role played by perception for all “higher” forms of consciousness, from its “principle of principles”, according to which everything that presents itself originarily in “intuition” is a legitimate source of knowledge. Visual perception however is the most original form and the model of an originary presenting cognition.28

87In structuralism the turn to the perceptive moment of the complex reality of language is additionally motivated by the poetic interests of its earliest representatives. What distinguishes poetry from prose, besides the transfer of the principle of equivalence from the paradigmatic axis to the syntagmatic axis, is the accentuation of the speech medium, the primacy of the sound over against its relationship to objects, in short, the perception of the medium of expression. If it is the primary function of signs in prose to designate and not to figure with other signs in constellations of pregnant form, in poetry it is just these constellations and striking relationships among the particular elements, which acquire their own weight and their own value. The thesis of Russian Formalism of the “perceptibility of the modes of expression” as the distinctive feature of poetry (Jakobson 1921a, 30ff.; Erlich 1965, 74ff., 182ff.) thus became the gateway to one of the most fruitful phases in the history of linguistics.

88To return to the introductory question: how, besides the same starting point, is the course taken the same or anyway parallel? Husserl distin|guishes two stages in the phenomenological reduction. The first leads to the ordinary phenomenological attitude, also termed the “geisteswissen|schaftliche” attitude, in which each object is descriptively investigated in regard to its own structural lawfulness, and not, as in the naturalistic attitude, causally explained from underlying physical realities. The second stage leads to the transcendental-phenomenological attitude, in which every judgement about a being of the investigated objects as independent of consciousness is refrained from. The objects are thematized exclusively with regard to their constitution in terms of consciousness. It is the first stage that Jakobson follows cautiously. As the representative of a special science, he properly stops with it. What is gained by the second step certainly does not lie in a more extensive insight into the structure of the objects investigated by the various sciences. It extends only, alongside the primary goal of the analysis of consciousness, to the philosophical problem of idealism and realism.

89On the other hand it is precisely for the second, transcendental stage that phenomenology will find in Jakobson partly stimulation, partly confirmation, for its direction of progress. First: Jakobson, with his “approach” to the relation of the three levels of speech sounds, the physical, the physiological and the perceptual, shows how it is possible to make a bit of advance with this aporetic, philosophically totally confused problem. Secondly, his broadening of the subject of language from the individual consciousness in two directions, toward the intersubjective community and toward the unconscious layers of the psyche, coincides with Husserl’s own broadening of the transcendental subject. “Subject” of the constitution of language and world is no longer, as in the modem philosophical tradition, the transcendental ego alone, but before it, and along with it, also the “passive”, “associative”, i.e. unconscious and involuntary, “egoless” strata of the psyche (Holenstein 1972) and the intersubjective community.

90Jakobson’s structuralism does not lead to a “Kantianism without transcendental subject”, an absolute and objectivistic formalism, to consider a formula with which Ricoeur (1963, 55) has sought to label the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss.29 Jakobson has recourse not only to the subjective capability of various attitudes and apperceptions as a basic presupposition of linguistics and literary production and reception, but also, over and beyond that, to those dimensions of subjectivity, which precisely Husserl has shown as also belonging to the transcendental sphere, the dimensions of passivity and of intersubjectivity. The philosophy to which Jakobson’s structuralism looks ahead is a “Kantianism with a widened subject”.

91 We can conclude: Jakobson started in Husserl from the Prolegomena and the first four Logical Investigations. Thematically that means: “anti|psychologism”, expression and signification (in Husserl’s formulation, or “sound and meaning” in Jakobson’s), abstraction of essence, doctrine of the wholes and parts, and the idea of a universal grammer. One may be sur prised to find that Jakobson’s reception of the Logical Investigations evi dently breaks off with the Fourth Investigation,30 until one discovers that he joins up again directly with Husserl where the latter’s own working out and continuing development of the Fifth and Sixth Investigations, via the detour of an extreme egocentered philosophy, had finally conducted him, to the phenomenology of intersubjectivity and of the passive genesis.

92Many phenomenologists today seek to make contact with a richly successful structuralism and with its most important discipline, linguistics, proceeding from the existence-philosophical and hermeneutic offshoots of phenomenology. What they bring along with them are their own idio|syncratically coined, or rather uncoined, key concepts: sense, history and subject, which do not fit in with the methodologically and systematically strictly defined concepts of their structuralistic conversational partners.

93What is presented as meaning turns out to be amorphous and atomistic, hardly different from the “sense data” in the earlier days of sensualism. The “senses” (meanings) are joined together by a subject resembling a demiurge in the existentialistic variant, and in the hermeneutic variant the director of an avant garde theater of replays, performing classic pieces in ever new combi|nations, or in ever new, as striking as possible, variations. In each case they are at the mercy of a grandiose, unpredictable master. His product is then called history. In contrast, meaning and history in the structuralism of Jakobson, as in the phenomenology of Husserlian observance, are subject in like manner to a number of invariant structural laws which are limited by comparison with their numberless instantiations.31 Thereby structuration is conceived of less as the accomplishment of individual subjects than of “unconscious” layers of the psyche and an intersubjective community. Historically as well as materially, the most immediate path from phenomenology to the new linguistics leads from Husserl by way of Jakobson.

    Notes

  • 1 Husserl’s influence is noted briefly by Erlich (1965, 61ff., 65 etc), Pomorska, (1968, 18ff., 26ff.) and in somewhat more detail by Broekman (1971, 70ff.) and Sangster (1971).
  • 2 From the Husserl Archives in Louvain. Also cf. Jakobson (1968a, 18).
  • 3 Cf. Jakobson (1936c 42): “The debates in his seminars moved on a high level; impassioned psychologizers and tempestuous Husserlians were equally welcome participants here”.
  • 4 Cf. Porzezinski’s position with regard to Husserl in his Introduction to Linguistics (1916, 216)
  • 5 With one exception (Jakobson 1971c 715–717; cf. Husserl 1962) all explicit Husserl citations and references in the two first volumes of Jakobson’s Selected Writings deal with this Second Part of the Logical Investigations: First Investigation, 37–9 (Jakobson 1939a, 292), 46ff. (1941, 354), 48 (1936a, 34), 69 (1941, 350), 81 (1957, 132); Third Investigation, 265 (1941, 360), 279 (1963a, 280); Third and Fourth Investigation (1963a, 280); recurring formulations in Husserl (1939a, 283; 1963a, 282); cf. also 1973, 12 (Fourth Investigation, 336). Also, the “Moscow and Prague marginalia” in Jakobson’s personal copy of the Logical Investigations, of which he has given a duplicate to the Husserl Archives in Louvain, relate almost exclusively to the First, Third, and Fourth Investigations.
  • 6 Several reactionary Russian exiles among professors of the Czech University prevented him from receiving the doctorate at that university.
  • 7 In surveys of the historical development of this idea, Jakobson usually mentions Husserl and Marty together (1963b, 590; 1971, 713).
  • 8 Thus far neither Husserl’s own notes nor a written record by a participant have been turned up. Thus the only written source remains a brief report by Jakobson in the periodical of the Cercle (1936b, 64; cf. 1971c, 713ff.). According to some who were there Husserl probably spoke from jotted notes. Husserl himself wrote on 12 December 1935 to G. Albrecht that in Prague “he had to speak unprepared, completely extemporaneously in two scientific societies, and again for two hours in each case” (letter in the Husserl Archives in Louvain). From a letter draft found in the Husserl Archives on the back of a manuscript (K III 28, 64b) written in Prague and evidently addressed to the dean of the philosophy faculty of the Masaryk University in Brno, Eugen Dostál, it appears that Husserl had to turn down a further lecture at this university, one he had discussed with the “Brünn colleagues [Josef Ludvik] Fischer and Jakobson”, because of too many demands on him. “But it is definite”, the draft concludes, “that in the not too distant future I will come back to Prague and then under more favorable circumstances fulfill the wish of my honored friends in Brünn.” On the occasion of Husserl’s visit in Prague, plans for an emigration of Husserl from Hitler’s Germany to Prague were discussed. As events turned out, Husserl, or his posthumous papers, would have thereby simply moved from Scylla to Charybdis. In the polemics during the Stalin period in the USSR in the early 1950s, the Cercle was charged with having been seduced by “the genuine evil spirit of our linguist”, Roman Jakobson, as well as having succumbed to the pernicious influence of Saussure, Husserl, and Carnap (Jakobson 1965, 535).
  • 9 The reprints present to Husserl are missing from his private library, which has been preserved in the Husserl Archives in Louvain. It is probable that Husserl left them for safekeeping in Prague, considering the doubtful situation in Germany and the plans earlier mentioned on his return or even emigration to Czechoslovakia.
  • 10 With regard to that, cf. the section below on “The intersubjective constitution of language”.
  • 11 Cf. the definition of the phonemes as “des images acoustico-motrices les plus simples ...” in the Thèses of the Cercle (1929, 10ff.). Bühler, in having recourse to Husserl, does not do justice to the development of his philosophy subsequent to the Logical Investigations as a transcendental phenomenology in which the subjective constitution of all objectivities is thematized.
  • 12 Letter from Husserl to Bühler (28 June 1927) in the Husserl Archives, Louvain.
  • 13 “Antipsychologism”: Jakobson 1939a, 283; 1939b, 314; 1970, 670; 1971c, 713; 715. Idea of a pure and universal grammar: 1933, 542; 1941, 328, 360; 1963a, 280; 1963b, 590; 1971c, 713ff.; 1973, 12. Doctrine of meaning: 1921a, 92ff.; 1933/34, 414ff.; 1936a, 34; 1939a, 292; 1941, 350,354; 1957, 132; 1963a, 282.
  • 14 On the last three key words, cf. sections below on “The intersubective constitution of language", “Analysis of essence” and “The phenomenological attitude”.
  • 15 Cf. the very early polemic of Jakobson against statics (1919, 27).
  • 16 Cf. Stumpf (1907, 28ff.; 61ff.).
  • 17 To be exact, still further modes of givenness are to be distinguished: the neurological, in sender and receiver; the otological (otophysiological); but also the mode of givenness in the kinesthetic self-perception of the physiological process of articulation and the same in the external (part-)perception of this process by the receiver.
  • 18 Cf. Jakobson 1932b, 551ff.: “What is important in music is not the naturalistic given, not just those tones which are realized, but those which are meant. The native and the European hear the same tone but altogether different things thereby, since they comprehend it with reference to two different musical systems; ... Thus between a musical value and its realizations there exists precisely the same relation as in language between a phoneme and the sounds which represent this intended phoneme in actual speech.” The problem of (subjective) apperception also becomes evident in Jakobson’s discussion of poetic “attitude” (1921a, 30; 1960, 356) as well as of the diverse conceptions of realism (1921b). On the history of the theory of apperception cf. Holenstein (1972, 133ff.).
  • 19 A parallel is the relation of Husserl and Gestalt psychology in reference to the Gestalt laws of sensory perception. Husserl proceeded from the classical principles of association and stayed with them as the most fundamental and universal laws of configuration — a small number in contrast to the numerous Gestalt laws set up by Gestalt psychology.
  • 20 Husserl, who himself comes from mathematics, makes express reference (1913, 324) in connection with modifications to “arithmetic discourse of “transformations” of arithmetic figures”. That Husserl’s investigations of the possible forms of linguistic transformations remain sketchy and limited is regrettable, not only as concerns the present importance of the thematics of transformation. Its investigation is also very much needed for Husserlian phenomenology itself. One of the cognitive processes worked out by phenomenology, ideation or intuition of essences is invariably accompanied by a linguistic transformation, namely a nominalization (red — redness), if not — as many are inclined to believe — guided.
  • 21 Citation from Husserl (1913, 265).
  • 22 Marked by Jakobson in his personal copy of the Logical Investigations as “very important”.
  • 23 Once again marked as “very important” by Jakobson in his personal copy.
  • 24 Husserl’s most thoroughgoing study of association was published for the first time in 1966 (Husserliana, xi). For a detailed presentation and discussion of his phenomenology of association cf. Holenstein (1972).
  • 25 Contrast (on the syntagmatic) and opposition (on the paradigmatic axis) are not placed under the classical rubric of association principles in structural linguistics. But the employment of this heading imposes itself precisely from Husserl’s phenomeno|logical understanding of the principle.
  • 26 While the concepts of invariance and of universals become more important in linguistics — as mentioned, partly through Jakobson under the indirect inspiration of Husserl — and in other sciences, it is ironical that within phenomenology the viewpoint is spreading that Husserl’s theory of the intuition of essences is untenable. With this there is a sorry attempt made to show that the late Husserl had abandoned his earlier program
  • 27 Sensation and sense are for phenomenology both in the same way phenomenal givens. The phenomenalism of neopositivistic philosophy restricts itself to the first, the sense data, while phenomenology of Husserlian observance insists on the interwovenness of sensation and sense and on the participation of the force of meaning and function in the structuring of sense data. To this confrontation of neopositivistic phenomenalism and Husserlian phenomenology there corresponds in linguistics the antithesis of Bloomfieldian linguistics on the one hand and of the Prague linguistics on the other. In contrast to the restriction to the structural lawfulnesses immanent in the sound material as such, it was just Jakobson who repeatedly placed the emphasis on the relevance of the meaning function for the phonic structuration of speech.
  • 28 Jakobson would definitely voice some reserve against the choice of visual perception as point of departure for, and model of, a philosophical analysis. We are thinking foremost of the tendency he has emphasized to reification with visual givens. In Husserl such predispositions convert into corresponding inquiries. Thus the problem of objectivation occupies a central place in his philosophy. If auditory perception is not altogether missing — it appears, as might be expected, in the time analyses — still one might think that it should have been more relevant to him materially from the theme of the Logical Investigations and historically from his teacher, Carl Stumpf, a master of tone psychology.
  • 29 Lévi-Strauss accepted this formula, but perhaps only within the restricted horizon of the discussion with the “Philosophical Group” of the journal Esprit (Lévi-Strauss 1963, 633).
  • 30 Excepting the theory of apperception (conception, attitude), which Husserl develops in more detail in the Fifth and Sixth Investigations than he did in the First.
  • 31 “Every form of apperceptions is a form of essence and has its genesis according to laws of essence.” (Husserl 1966, 399).

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Publication details

Published in:

Holenstein Elmar (2020) Phenomenological philosophy of language: collected papers, ed. Aurora Simone; Cigana Lorenzo. Genève-Lausanne, sdvig press.

Pages: 27-70

Full citation:

Holenstein Elmar (2020) „Jakobson and Husserl: a contribution to the genealogy of structuralism“, In: E. Holenstein, Phenomenological philosophy of language, Genève-Lausanne, sdvig press, 27–70.