KU Leuven

Hoger Instituut voor Wijsbegeerte

Husserl in Context
Professor: Dr. Julia Jansen

The Ideal of Adequation in Phenomenology and Metaphysics

Jonathan Culbreath
Research MA in Philosophy
R0684407

Academic Year 2017-2018

Introduction

It is a famously difficult task to discern whether Edmund Husserl falls within the realist or the

idealist camp in metaphysical epistemology. Not only Husserl’s own followers, but also modern

scholastic philosophers of an Aristotelian or Thomistic bent have offered widely differing solu-

tions to the question of Husserl’s realism, and the relation of his phenomenology to the “naïve”

sciences, especially metaphysics.1 Regularly, the question is whether objects, for Husserl, have

any existence “outside the mind,” and whether the mind can attain to the knowledge of them as

such. Husserl is notoriously ambiguous on this question, especially in his later work in Ideas. But

at the beginning of the Logical Investigations, Husserl seems to state quite clearly that the question

of the ontological status of objects is irrelevant to phenomenology, suggesting that his science is

metaphysically presuppositionless.2 Is there, then, no way to integrate phenomenology with a re-

alist metaphysical vision of the world, and a classical epistemology rooted in such a vision?

In this essay, I will propose a slightly different approach to this question of realism. It

seems indisputable that Husserl is not making any metaphysical claims per se. However, it is pos-

sible to gain insight into the implications of his phenomenology from the perspective of a classical,

1
The number of authors who have engaged in this dispute is too numerous to list here. However, several studies are
worth mentioning. One by Martin T. Woods attempts to show how Husserl fails where Aquinas succeeds in “bridging
the gap” between thinking and being. See Woods, “The Reduction of Essence in the Thought of Thomas Aquinas and
Edmund Husserl.” In The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review. Vol. 53, No. 3 (July 1989) 443-460. On the other
hand, Robert Sokolowski has at least two articles attempting to connect phenomenology to classical metaphysics:
“The Relation of Phenomenology and Thomistic Metaphysics to Religion.” In The Review of Metaphysics 67 (March
2014): 603–626; and “How Aristotle and Husserl Differ on First Philosophy.” In Life, Subjectivity, & Art: Essays in
Honor of Rudolf Bernet. Edited by Roland Breeur and Ullrich Melle. (Springer, 2012.) 1-28. Louis Dupre concludes
his investigation of truth in Husserl with the claim that Husserl is a consistent idealist, in both the early and late works.
“The Concept of Truth in Husserl’s Logical Investigations.” In Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Vol. 24,
No. 3 (March 1964), 345.354. Karl Ameriks, on the other hand, argues to the contrary in “Husserl’s Realism.” In The
Philosophical Review. Vol. 86, No. 4 (October 1977), 498-519.
2
The Shorter Logical Investigations. Translated by J.N. Findlay. Edited and Abridged by Dermot Moran. New York/
London: Routledge, 2001.) Pg. 97.

1
Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) metaphysics. Indeed, from this perspective, it may emerge that cer-

tain essential elements – despite minor divergences – of Husserl’s account of knowledge converge

with the metaphysically-informed claims of A-T epistemology, notwithstanding Husserl’s own

suspension of metaphysical inquiry. In particular, Husserl’s phenomenological description of

knowledge with reference to an Ideal of adequate fulfillment involves a specific kind of gradation

of fulfillment which corresponds very closely to a process found in A-T scientific method: I will

refer to this process, using the terminology of the Thomist philosopher Charles DeKoninck, as a

dialectic of limits.3 According to both Husserl and the A-T tradition, adequate knowledge is at-

tained in degrees, by which it approaches – but does not necessarily attain – a certain limit at which

meaning is entirely fulfilled, and the object is completely and determinately represented to the

knower. Accordingly, in what follows I will treat first of Husserl’s description of the ideal of

knowledge, in the Logical Investigations, and the progression of consciousness towards that limit.

Secondly, I will describe the Aristotelian-Thomistic conception of the dialectic of limits, by which

human knowledge progresses towards the complete representation of its object in the knowledge

of the First Cause; and I will manifest the correspondence of these two conceptions.

1 The Husserlian Ideal of Adequate Fulfillment

In the 1st logical investigation, Husserl distinguishes between two acts that are mutually necessary

for an expression to be meaningful. These are acts are 1) the meaning-intention and 2) the meaning-

fulfillment – also characterized as thought or concept on the one hand, and intuition on the other

hand.4 A meaning-intention is simply an act by which some object is meant or intended. This is

3
See, for example, DeKoninck, “La Dialectique des Limites Comme Critique de Raison,” in Laval théologique et
philosophique, Vol. I, no. 1 (1945), 177-185; “Concept, Process, and Reality,” Vol.2, no.2 (1946), 141-146.
4
See Husserl, pg. 109.

2
the act by which an expression, for example, bears its reference to some object or state of affairs.

An intuition, on the other hand, is that act by which this meaning is fulfilled for intender; in other

words, it is the act by which the object intended is actually given as it is intended. Such an act is,

e.g., a sense perception, in which a physical or “real” object is made present, so that any expression

of meaning about that object now bears its meaning in a fulfilled way. For example, I may express

a meaning that is about today’s weather: “The sky is overcast.” I may make such a statement when

I am confined to a room with now windows, and I cannot actually see the sky. My expression has

meaning, but that meaning is not intuitively fulfilled – it is empty or merely signitive – until the sky

itself, and the state of affairs that it is overcast, should actually be given to me when I see it. Thus

the act becomes intuitive.

In the 5th logical investigation, Husserl makes another distinction between adequate and

inadequate fulfillment. He introduces this distinction on the basis of a more conventional distinc-

tion between inner and outer perception (although Husserl points out that there is not an exact

correspondence between these terms and the terms adequate and inadequate, as we shall see). He

writes:

Every perception is characterized by the intention of grasping its object as present,

and in propria persona. To this intention perception corresponds with complete
perfection, achieves adequacy, if the object in it is itself actually present, and in the
strictest sense present in propria persona, is exhaustively apprehended as that
which it is, and is therefore itself a real (reell) factor in our perceiving of it.5

In other words, an adequate perception is one that is completely fulfilled, “one ascribing nothing

to its objects that is not intuitively presented,” and “which, conversely, intuitively presents and

posits its objects just as they are in fact experienced in and with their perception.”6 There is, so to

5
Pg. 205.
6
Ibid.

3
speak, “nothing missing” to an adequate perception. In the state of adequate fulfillment, every facet

of the object intended is also given in a corresponding intuition.

Naturally, then, an inadequate perception is one in which something of the object intended

is indeed “missing” or “absent” from the intuition. The object may indeed be fully intended, but

that intention is only partially fulfilled. In the 6th investigation, Husserl notes that such is in fact

always and necessarily the case in sensuous perception, in which only some dimensions of the

sensible object can ever be given in a single act; and thus the object is only ever presented in an

adumbrated way.7

These distinctions are the basis for Husserl’s entire description of knowledge, evidence,

and truth, in the 6th logical investigation, which is the climax of the entire work. Resting on the

distinction between adequacy and inadequacy, Husserl describes knowledge in terms of an ideal

of adequate fulfillment. It is crucial to realize that intentional acts of meaning receive their fulness

in degrees, in which the object is more or less present entirely as it is intended. Prior to all fulfill-

ment, meaning-intentions are merely signitive acts, they have meaning, but they are empty of the

actual givenness of their objects, in the way that a sign does not have that which it signifies as its

actual content – it is merely a placeholder.8 As such, a signitive act is simply speaking opposed to

an intuitive act as empty to full. They are completely removed from the goal of complete adequa-

tion.

The next “degree” of adequation is seen in acts of sensation or imagination, which, as al-

ready stated, can only ever be partially fulfilled. “The object is not actually given, it is not given

wholly and entirely as that which it itself is. It is only given ‘from the front’, only ‘perspectivally

7
See pgs. 306-308.
8
See pgs. 304-306.

4
foreshortened and projected’ etc.”9 Of such objects, there are an indefinite multitude of possible

and distinct perceptive acts, and an indefinite multitude of possible acts of partial fulfillment. One

can never exhaustively fulfill one’s intention towards such an object; and hence the ideal of ade-

quation is in a sense unattainable.

Nonetheless, Husserl insists that even sensuous perception in some sense bears a reference

to this ideal of adequation, in which intention and intuition fully and simultaneously correspond.

For even in the case of such perception, the object as it is in itself is still, as it were, “trying” to be

fully present; in other words, “[it] is not wholly different from the object realized, however imper-

fectly, in the percept. It is part so-to-say of a percept’s inherent sense to be the self-appearance of

the object.”10 Moreover, by a kind of ongoing synthesis of the many, successive, and disparate acts

of perception by which an object is given, a kind of unity may be approached in which the object

is fully offered, as it is in itself. “Even if, for phenomenological purposes, ordinary perception is

composed of countless intentions, some purely perceptual, some merely imaginative, and some

even signitive, it yet, as a total act, grasps the object itself, even if only by way of an adumbra-

tion.”11 This is manifest by the way in which, throughout the entire series of successive and partial

perceptions of an object, one still identifies it as the same object; there are not as many objects as

there are percepts. Rather, by some manner of synthesis, all acts of perception directed upon a

single object are recognized to offer the whole object itself, though with only partial fulfilment.

In the background, the ideal of total fulfillment lurks as the goal towards which all inten-

tional acts of more or less fullness strive, in which the object itself is directly given – and which is

properly what is called knowledge. Thus, Husserl writes:

9
Pg. 306.
10
Pg. 307.
11
Ibid.

5
 The relative manner in which we speak of ‘more or less direct’ and of ‘self,’ indi-
cates the main point: that the synthesis of fulfilment involves an inequality of worth
among its related members. The fulfilling act has a superiority which the mere in-
tention lacks: it imparts to the synthesis the fulness of ‘self ’, at least leads it more
directly to the thing itself. The relativity of this ‘directness’, this ‘self ’, points fur-
ther to the fact that the relation of fulfilment is of a sort that admits of degrees. A
concatenation of such relations seems accordingly possible where the epistemic su-
periority steadily increases. Each such ascending series points, however, to an ideal
limit, or includes it as a final member, a limit setting an unsurpassable goal to all
advances: the goal of absolute knowledge, of the adequate self-presentation of the
object of knowledge.12

Again, however, at least in certain kinds of acts – such as sense perception – this absolute fullness

is not approached in any observable incremental way, but by the synthesis of a whole, successive,

sequence of acts. In such a sequence, e.g. of individual perceptions of a single object, there is no

more fulness in a later act than in a previous act, they do not technically add to each other; and yet

“the whole synthesis of the series of imaginations or percepts represents an increase in fulness in

comparison with an act singled out from the series: the imperfection of the one-sided representa-

tion is, relatively speaking, overcome in the all-sided one.”13

The goal itself, the ideal of full adequation, is coincident with knowledge and self-evidence

in the absolute sense, and consists of a single act in which the object is represented with absolute

fulness of evidence:

The intuitive substance of this last fulfilment is the absolute sum of possible ful-
ness; the intuitive representative is the object itself, as it is in itself. Where a pre-
sentative intention has achieved its last fulfilment, the genuine adaequatio rei et
intellectus has been brought about. The object is actually ‘present’ or ‘given’, and
present as just what we have intended it; no partial intention remains implicit and
still lacking fulfilment.14

12
Pg. 313.
13
Pg. 314.
14
Pg. 328-329.

6
Accordingly, this is also where the notion of truth is finally brought to bear.15 Truth in the ultimate

sense pertains to the ideal of adequation towards which all forms of knowledge progress by way

of synthesis. Though truth may be seen from various perspectives, 16 all converge in the fact that

the ideal sense of truth pertains to the goal of perfect adequation and fulfilment. The notion of self-

evidence is correlative to truth, as the act of correspondence between intention and intuition; and

thus, “the epistemologically pregnant sense of self-evidence is exclusively concerned with this last

unsurpassable goal, the act of this most perfect synthesis of fulfilment, which gives to an in inten-

tion, e.g. the intention of judgment, the absolute fulness of content, the fulness of the object it-

self.”17

Thus, to summarize, truth in the ideal sense is known, i.e. knowledge in the ideal sense is

attained, when thought and intuition are brought into perfect coincidence, where the intention of

an object is completely fulfilled by the full and total encounter with the object in itself, in all of its

possible facets and determinations. This is the ideal of adequate fulfillment. Husserl seems to be

less concerned with the question of whether this ideal is actually attainable by any real conscious

entity; he seems to imply, at least, that it is not strictly attainable for sensuous perception, and it is

difficult to tell whether it is attainable by any other sort of consciousness. 18 The main use of the

ideal of adequation is, for Husserl, as a standard in comparison to which consciousness in all of

its gradations may be understood phenomenologically. Consciousness as intentional towards an

object is best understood precisely as a tendency towards total fulfilment; that is, the notion of

intentionality manifests itself as a certain desire for knowledge in the complete and exhaustive

15
Note that Husserl cites the classical scholastic definition of truth given by Thomas Aquinas. See, for example,
Summa Theologiae, Ia, q.16, a.1.
16
Husserl defines four senses of truth on pgs. 331-332.
17
Pg. 331.
18
It does seem to be represented in some way by so-called “inner consciousness,” and perhaps by certain kinds of
“categorial objects,” but this is not an issue for our present investigation.

7
sense. It is this character of desire that underlies the whole investigation. (Husserl does not use

this word, “desire,” but it is certainly implicit in his manner of speaking of the ideal as a goal.)

This character of desire, of tending towards fulfilment, is manifest in the specific acts and their

coincidence, which Husserl describes; especially the progressive and graded acts of intuitive ful-

ness, and in the ongoing synthesis of individual percepts which, as a whole, approaches the

givenness of the object as it is in itself, which is knowledge in an unqualified sense.

2 Metaphysical Knowledge as an Ideal of Adequation

The Aristotelian-Thomistic conception of knowledge in the unqualified sense is, unlike Husserl’s,

explicitly informed by a concept of metaphysics as somehow enshrining the goal or ideal of

knowledge. Metaphysics is that science which demonstrates the Universal Cause. Science itself,

then, is defined by Aristotle as the knowledge of the cause: “We suppose ourselves to possess

unqualified scientific knowledge of a thing, as opposed to knowing it in the accidental way in

which the sophist knows, when we think that we know the cause on which the fact depends…”19

Husserl’s description of the ideal of adequate knowledge mentions nothing about causes, and de-

liberately so. However, despite Husserl’s metaphysical neutrality, there is a surprising conver-

gence between his description of the progress of knowledge towards its ideal, and the Aristotelian-

Thomistic conception of knowledge as a progression towards the metaphysical knowledge of the

First and most Universal Cause.

In his commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas notes a crucial dis-

tinction between two types of universals which are known in opposite ways: 1) universals in the

order of simple apprehension are known by an act of abstraction, and are known first in the order

19
Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, I.2.

8
of intellectual knowledge; whereas particulars are known subsequently. “For being is the first thing

that comes into the intellect, as Avicenna says, and animal comes into the intellect before man

does.”20 In this example, man is a species of the genus animal; and we first recognize in Socrates

that he is an animal, before we recognize that he is a man. 2) Universals in the order of investiga-

tion are known, not first, but subsequently. These are universal causes, and they are not abstract

concepts – as genus and species – but real existing things; but we discover them only by means of

their effects.

Universals of the first type are sometimes referred to as universals in predication, while

universals of the second type are universals in causation. These two senses of universal, though

distinct, are nonetheless both relevant to the study of metaphysics, and they are related to each

other by means of a third sense of universal: 3) this is called the universal in representational

power.21 It is best understood first by comparison to the universal in predication, and rests on a

metaphysical distinction between the mode of knowing possessed, on the one hand, by mankind,

and on the other hand, by angelic and divine knowers:

Because man can only gather knowledge from the senses, the universal concept by which

he knows particular physical beings (really the only particulars of which he has direct experience)

is necessarily vague, confused, and indeterminate.22 Thus, the abstract universal concept animal,

by which I might first have intellectual knowledge of Socrates, is a merely vague and confused

way of knowing Socrates, because it does not yet offer me the more specific determination by

which I know him as man. This is precisely because by performing an act of abstraction, in order

20
Commentary on the Metaphysics, I, lect.2, 46. Translation by John P. Rowan. (Notre Dame, Indiana: Dumb Ox
Books, 1995.)
21
This phrase is adapted from Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, II.98, on the knowledge of angels: “But the intelli-
gible similitude which is in the separate substances is universal in power, sufficing to represent the many.” (My trans-
lation.)
22
See Summa Theologiae, Ia, q.85, a.3. “But it is manifest that to know something in which many are contained,
without knowing that which is proper to each thing contained in it, is to know something confusedly.” (My translation.)

9
to form a universal concept, the human intellect must somehow prescind from the concrete par-

ticularity of things. There is thus a loss of determination and concretion in knowledge by way of

a universal in predication. Such a universal, as such, simply does not contain in itself the actual

and determinate representations of its more specific and concrete members. Hence, it is necessarily

something imperfect – unfulfilled, as it were. In order to perfect this means of knowing, the human

intellect must pay attention to specificities: it is better to know Socrates not merely as animal, but

more specifically as a man; and even better, in person, so that in all of his concreteness, he may

be fully present to me in my experience.

By contrast, those intellectual beings who do not rely upon sensation in order to know

things do not suffer the loss of concretion in the universals by which they know. Thus, angelic

beings, and ultimately God Himself, know concrete things by a universal which contains the very

concretion and determination of its members within itself. This is the universal in representational

power; and it is a concept which is, as it were, fulfilled from the moment of its inception.23 In such

a concept, the objects of its thought are actually given in their full and actual determinacy. Socrates

is known, by a single concept, not only as animal, but also as man, and also as this man, with these

characteristics and these dimensions, etc. All the particularities of Socrates are known as actual

determinations of the universal by which he is thus known.

Both the universal in predication and the universal in representation are means of knowing

for their respective knowers, and in this way they are alike. But their difference is stark: the uni-

versal in predication does not represent the particulars beneath it in any actual way; it contains

them only in potency. But the universal in representation truly does represent its particulars, not

23
Angelic concepts are infused into their intellects directly from God. This is, indeed, the reason for their greater
intensive universality, in contrast to the concepts of man, which are received indirectly from God through the media-
tion of external, physical objects known. Hence man must rely on sensation. His intellect is posterior in being to
sensible objects; whereas the intellects of angels – and of course of God – are prior in being to sensible objects.

10
merely potentially, but actually. Thus, universals as a way of knowing many things simultaneously

differ for man and the angels: a man can only know a multitude in their unity by means of a uni-

versal concept; he necessarily gives up the knowledge of the multitude precisely as many, in order

to do this; whereas in order to know the many as many, he must have recourse to a multitude of

concepts. But an angel, by its universal in representation, can know the many as both one and

many, and this by a single concept. Consequently, an angel requires fewer concepts than man does,

in order to know the immense diversity of existing creatures; and moreover, each superior angel

in the hierarchy of all angels requires fewer concepts than his inferiors, the more powerful is his

intellect, and the closer it is to the divine source from which it derives all of its concepts. 24

In God, the hierarchy of intellects approaches its ultimate peak. God’s concept is not only

universal in its power of representation, but it is identical with His very essence: thus it contains,

in an infinitely intensive degree, all of its particulars in a fully actual, yet utterly unified and simple

way:

Thus, therefore, since the essence of God has in itself all the perfections which
every other thing has, and much more, God is able to know in Himself all things
with a proper knowledge. For the proper nature of each thing consists in some mode
of participation in divine perfection. But God could not know Himself perfectly
unless He knew all the ways in which His own perfection is able to be participated
by others; nor could he know the nature of being perfectly unless he knew all the
modes of being. Whence it is manifest that God knows all things with a proper
knowledge, according to their distinction from each other. (My translation.) 25

In other words, the notion of the universal in representation is thus found to coincide, in God, with

the universal in causation. For it is precisely by His essence that He both knows and causes things

24
For Aquinas’ treatise on angelic knowledge, see Summa Contra Gentiles, II.91-100, and III.80.
25
S.T., Ia, q.14, a.6.

11
in their particular determinacy: in knowing His own essence, He knows all things; and in “ex-

pressing” His essence and diffusing its likeness according to the infinite possible determinations

by which it may be imitated, He thereby causes all things.

This is, in fact, Aquinas’s explanation of the penultimate conclusion of the Metaphysics of

Aristotle, that the First Cause, or Prime mover, is a pure Intellect whose sole object of contempla-

tion is Itself: “Therefore it must be itself that Thought thinks (since it is the most of excellent of

things), and its thinking is a thinking on thinking.”26 Aquinas shows how this is not to be taken to

mean that the Prime Mover understands nothing other than Himself; rather, He understands all

things only in Himself, because all things are nothing more than the expressions of the divine

Thought.27

The object of God’s knowledge is fully present to Him, because it is Himself – who is

likewise His own thought. “In God, the intellect, and that which is understood, and the intelligible

species, and the act of understanding itself, are all one and the same.”28 There is, in God, a complete

givenness and immanence of the object, because there is complete identity between Himself and

His object; and moreover an infinite intensiveness of being, such that all His creatures are com-

prehended in the Essence which He knows.

From all of this, it is evident that insofar as the science of metaphysics seeks to know the

First and most Universal Cause, it seeks to know its essence. “For there is in man a natural desire

to know the cause, upon seeing the effect; for from this there arises wonder in men. Therefore if

the intellect of a rational creature could not attain to the first cause of things, the desire of nature

26
Metaphysics, XII.9, 1075a2-3.
27
See Aquinas’s explanation in the Commentary, XII., lect.11, 2614.
28
S.T., Ia, q.14, a.4.

12
would be in vain.”29 Thus, one may legitimately ask, is it possible for human science to attain this

knowledge of the divine essence?

This question may be answered by reexamining the means of knowledge with which man

is equipped. Man is equipped with the power of abstraction; but, as we have seen, the universal

which he abstracts from particulars is merely vague and indeterminate, universal only in predica-

tion, not in its representational power. However, man is capable of successively attending to the

indefinitely many facets of an object, and to an indefinite multiplicity of objects, by means of

knowing that are less universal – for example, by considering man rather than animal, or even

Socrates rather than man. Man is capable of degrees of universality. Could there be a way in which

both of these ways of knowing – the more and the less universal – could be combined by an act of

synthesis, so as to approach the mode of a universal in representation? In other words, could the

“gaps” of one’s universal concept be “filled,” so to speak, by successive acts of lesser universality,

encountering one’s object in its many various determinations?

The Thomist philosopher Charles DeKoninck suggests precisely such a process of refining

one’s knowledge, so as to approach a mode of knowing that is universal in representation.30 He

compares this process to a process of approaching a limit in geometrical calculus. A polygon and

a circle are two distinct species of the genus figure; but they can be made to approach identity,

inasmuch as they are truly limits of one another. Suppose I inscribe a triangle within a circle; and

suppose I double the number of sides of the triangle. And suppose I do this indefinitely, always

adding to the number of sides of my inscribed polygon. The polygon will approach closer and

closer to the circle itself, the area between them continually decreasing; and yet they will only

29
S.T. Ia, q.12, a.1.
See DeKoninck, “La Dialectique des Limites Comme Critique de Raison,” in Laval théologique et philosophique,
30

Vol. I, no. 1 (1945), 177-185; “Concept, Process, and Reality,” Vol.2, no.2 (1946), 141-146.

13
reach identity when the polygon’s sides are infinite in number. At that point, I would hypothetically

be able to comprehend both the circle and the polygon in one concept: figure. Of course, I can

never actually reach this point in reality – first, because there will always be an infinite number of

determinations of the polygon, and I cannot traverse the infinite; and secondly, because it would

entail a contradiction, in which two contradictory natures – circle and polygon – would be identical

with each other. Nonetheless I can approach this identity in a real way by an ongoing and succes-

sive experience of all the possible determinations within the genus – a universal in predication –

of polygon, thereby approaching the universal in representation, which contains all of its actual

determinations within itself.

This method – which DeKoninck names the “dialectic of limits” – could be applied to any

multitude of concrete or specific objects – or indeed, any multitude of aspects of a single object.

Between any two aspects, there are always an infinite of possible determinations, and perception

alone is in principle able to present each and every aspect to the consciousness. The synthetic act

by which one recognizes the common reference of every aspect to the selfsame object, as a certain

determination of that object, stands in for the recognition of the infinity that is bound up within

that object – just as the recognition of each of a certain multitude of object as a possible determi-

nation among infinite possible determinations of a universal is in some way a recognition of the

infinity bound up within that universal. Insofar as one recognizes each of these infinite determina-

tions in its actuality, one approaches the actualization of the infinite. And finally, insofar as one

recognizes everything within the bounds of experience as infinitesimal determinations of that

which is most universal, being itself, as being, one approaches what is actually and absolutely

infinite in being. No man can actually attain this infinity, of course; but it does actually exist in the

14
universal First Cause which is subsistent actual infinity, which is the end and goal of all meta-

physical investigation.

In fact, DeKoninck insists upon the necessity and fittingness of this mode of knowing spe-

cifically for metaphysics, inasmuch as metaphysics is the search for the First Cause. “The tendency

to know, as much as is humanly possible, the divine principle of its subject obliges metaphysics to

use this dialectical mode. It would not be wisdom if it did not always seek theology or take on as

divine a mode as is possible for man.”31 In other words, by this dialectical oscillation between the

unity of the universal and the infinite multiplicity of particulars, one is effectively approaching the

total unification of the entire sphere of knowable objects – approaching a kind of Parmenidean

oneness that only exists in the divine First Principle of all finite being.

3 Conclusion: Phenomenology and Realist Metaphysics Compared

One sees that this mode of knowing is essentially the same as that which Husserl describes phe-

nomenologically. Husserl implicitly sets up consciousness as a kind spectrum of consciousness,

progressively and synthetically approaching a limit which is perfect and absolute adequation –

Truth itself.32 Husserl makes no claims to the metaphysical implications of this spectrum; he pur-

ports to be offering a universal description of knowledge that does not take account of the factual

differences between human, angelic, or divine knowers. Perhaps, once one does begin to take these

differences into account, one sees that the spectrum approaching ideal adequation is in fact incar-

nated within a hierarchical framework of knowing beings, at the summit of which the absolute

31
“La Dialectique des Limites Comme Critique de Raison.” Private translation.
32
Aquinas likewise identifies truth in the archetypal sense as an adequation between things and the divine Intellect;
and it is according to this Truth that all lesser intensities of adequation are measured. See, for example, S.T., Ia, q.16,
a.1 and a.5.

15
ideal of adequation exists in God alone. All lesser modes of knowing are but the ways of approach-

ing this limit by stages of more or less fulfilled intentions.

Nor would the realism of Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics be compromised by such a

consideration of Husserl’s “adequation by gradation.” Husserl is describing a gradation in which

the object of an intention is, in a sense, more and more immanentized, to the increasing degree that

it is intuitively present. The A-T metaphysical epistemology likewise posits that knowledge is in

some way the presence of the known within the knower, an identity between knowledge and the

known.33 Evidently this is so in degrees, the ultimate case being full and perfect identity between

the knower and the known, in God. Charles DeKoninck wrote that the entire cosmos is an impulse

for the life of thought, that it is animated by a deep urge to progress from pure exteriority to pure

interiority.34 Being is in some way incomplete without reference to thought.35 Human knowledge

is the first instance of the cosmos entering into the immanence of thought – albeit in a merely

partial way. The intuitive presence of an object to intentional thought is still, in man, checked by

a degree of exteriority, of absence. Hence, he must continually go outside himself and seek for the

many facets of being and beings which he encounters in the world. He approaches the absolute

interiority of God by an ongoing synthesis of his many, discrete experiences and perceptions – the

33
See Aristotle, On the Soul, III.6., 431a1. “Actual knowledge is identical with its object.”
34
DeKoninck, “The Cosmos.” In The Writings of Charles DeKoninck. Vol. 1. Edited and Translated by Ralph McIn-
erny. (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008.) See also Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, I.
45-46.
35
Another brief essay to this effect is John McCarthy, “How Knowing Completes the World: A Note on Aquinas and
Husserl.” In The Importance of Truth. Edited by Michael Baur. (Washington, D.C : National Office of the American
Catholic Philosophical Association, The Catholic University of America, 1994.) 71-86. “Without supposing that the
world is derived from consciousness, phenomenology argues that it cannot finally be conceived without reference to
its being disclosed, that the world’s manifestation is a possibility belonging to the world. Consequently, the full real-
ization of the world requires that it be made manifest to, for, and by the knowing agent. In this respect the universe is
dependent upon the knower.” (Pg.80.)

16
“dialectic of limits” – so that the cosmic complex of objects towards which he directs himself

becomes more and more his. “The soul is in a way all existing things,” said Aristotle.36

In this sense, a new outlook on the controversy over realism versus idealism emerges. Not

that all questions have been answered – nor even that there is by any means a total agreement

between the epistemologies of Aristotle, Aquinas, and Husserl; but perhaps these traditions have

much to learn from each other. The Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition can find aid in Husserl’s phe-

nomenology to seeing a marvelous ascending spectrum of consciousness throughout the hierarchy

of being, at the upper limit of which a certain idealism is indeed appropriate: the divine universal

in representation bespeaks a total and absolute immanence of the object in the knower, to the point

of full identity with the First Cause. Conversely, Husserl can learn much from a metaphysical

perspective, if he were to see that his spectrum of consciousness ascending to the ideal of adequa-

tion can in principle only be enshrined in the framework of an ontological hierarchy of knowing

beings. In this way it is reaffirmed that the true ideal and goal of all knowledge is the contemplation

of the First Cause: that which is in itself most independently Real.

Jonathan Culbreath
University of Leuven, Belgium

36
On the Soul. III.8., 431b20.

17
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