On the Discussion of Intentional History and Actual History

Then Senior Brother Donglin and Liu Ping joined in the replies, both saying that the distinction between intentional history and actual history was still not very clear.

Jin Shixiang replied:

Thank you everyone for your valuable comments;these comments have provided motivation and support for my thinking over the past few days!

The place where the problem was most concentrated in last time’s discussion-group article was still how to understand the relationship between “intentional history” and “actual history.” I would like to clarify this question in more detail in response to the questions and suggestions everyone raised.

First of all, intentional history and actual history are both discussed not within the causal sequence of natural time,but as an important distinction made under the phenomenological attitude.(A certain formulation in the paper may have caused a misunderstanding; I have already revised it.)Actual history, as a pre-given history, is the phenomenological basis of what Xiao Gu calls objective history.It is just that actual history is discussed under the phenomenological attitude that brackets the faith in being.In particular, it brackets the faith in being implied by the expression “objective.”

Second, the reason for distinguishing two kinds of historyis precisely that one needs to emphasize the close connection between the two.Their phenomenological basis is the “retention” and “protention” within temporal structure.They are two elements in the living present, and neither is a part that can be cut out and discussed on its own.The relation between the two kinds of history (intentional history, in which the sedimentation of meaning is brought about by retention; and actual history, which is intertwined with original evidential experience in relation to anticipation and involvement)is likewise so. Intentional history primarily investigates the logical conceptual conditions required for things to be understood in a certain specific way;actual history, by contrast, concerns the concrete unfolding of the above possibility conditions in the actual life-world,that is: the evident givenness of things capable of being understood in the perceptual world and the life-world.Intentional history is the conceptual condition for actual history’s occurrence and has logical priority,whereas actual history is the real mode of living existence and has existential priority.These two kinds of history are bound together in an inseparable intentional relation:intentional history has the possibility of being fulfilled by anticipation, and thus cannot be separated from actual history;while the intelligibility of actual history is the result of the sedimentation of intentional history,which also determines that it cannot be separated from intentional history. “Intentional—historical analysis”includes not only the logical analysis of sedimentary history, but should also include its interactive relation with actual history.Any static discursive field concerning the world includes not only actual history at some horizontal level (the original life-world and perceptual world), but also the conceptual sedimentation, accumulated through sedimentation, of things’ intelligibility “as …”. The intelligibility of things is inseparable from intentional history,while the appearing of things as they are cannot do without the original perceptual world and life-world of some actual history.

Finally, the concrete operation of this “intentional—historical analysis” method. Starting from phenomenological reflection that brackets the natural attitude (to avoid the interference of metaphysical existential presuppositions),with the aid of texts from the present or from a specific historical era,while sorting out and reducing the carriers of meaning within a specific stratum of meaning (everything meaningful,everything capable of being understood, or, in Xiao Gu’s terms, media)and at the same time clarifying the horizontally interwoven semantic context and life-world (actual history),one also structurally compares the vertically developmental sedimentary history of concepts, which is logical and ideal (intentional history).For example, in his work on the “Origins,” Klein cleared away and activated the life-worlds and historical contexts of different strata from the Vedic era and the Diophantine era,and from the standpoint of conceptual logical development explained the logical relation between the intentional sedimentation of the medieval distinction between first intention and second intention and Vieta’s innovative interpretation. Mark Smith, for his part,through the work of “desedimentation,” “reactivated”and restored the original meanings of the life-worlds and concepts of Ptolemy and al-Haytham,and then examined whether these core concepts had a relation of logical inheritance to the core concepts of the early modern Scientific Revolution. In short, intentional history is related to the intelligibility of concepts,while actual history is related to original perceptual experience in the life-world.Any experience includes both sedimented meaning and the participation of present perception.To borrow Kant’s famous saying in altered form: experience without meaning is blind,meaning without experience is empty.

Actually, I haven’t yet had the chance to introduce everyone to the very important work Klein did.Behind the terms he carefully chose himself lies his understanding of the activation of the classical world (especially the term intentionality at work, which translates Husserl’s concept of transcendental subjectivity). It is worth mentioning that,in his understanding of Aristotle’s philosophical system, he was deeply influenced by Heidegger. Broadly speaking,the mathematization of nature succeeded only with the collapse of the Aristotelian system.And reactivating the collapsed Aristotelian world was extremely difficult. To this end,Heidegger did a great deal of work: he wrote a monograph interpreting the relation between “potentiality” and “actuality” in the first three chapters of Book IX of the Metaphysics; he also wrote a long essay interpreting the concept of “nature” in the first chapter of Book II of the Physics; and he also interpreted Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics. These were among the reasons Heidegger gained the reputation of the “secret philosophical king” during his Marburg period. In short,these important works had a profound influence on Klein.The eleventh essay in the collection is basically a review of Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle.

Once again, thank you all for your comments, and everyone is welcome to write in and exchange views!

I offer a reply:

Thank you. I indeed did not understand the difference between actual history and the objective history in the natural attitude,but my original objection still remains:

……Although you mentioned that “in a broad sense, intentional history not only includes the logical analysis of sedimentary history,but should also include its interactive relation with actual history,” this “interactive relation” still seems to be one-way throughout,as if it were still a process in which concepts gradually sink down from the realm of ideas into the real world,with logical premises on one side and actual consequences on the other.But how exactly does the life-world of actuality interweave with and interact with the world of ideas?That is still not very clear.

Now Jin Shixiang’s supplement still has not clarified whether this “interaction” is one-way or

two-way. It is still a process in which concepts sink down from the world of ideas into the real world; that is to say, as Plato envisioned it, reality is a mimesis of ideas.Intentional history seems to construct a series of ideal premises,and then actual history is nothing more than these conceptual and logical things becoming real; actual history cannot be a “result.” But what I care about is,what is the significance of actual history for intentional history? Does the so-called original perceptual world,the life-world, also participate in the generation of intentional structures and the world of concepts? Or are these “conceptual conditions” themselves something independent, self-existing, self-rolling,something floating in the air? Is the so-called “fulfillment” of intention in actual history nothing more than some pure “overflow” that does not in the least damage history as such? Or is there,between the two, some even more “actual” “interactive” relation?

In short, whatever “actual history” may mean, characterizing the role of intentional history as “sedimentation” is something that leaves me skeptical and dissatisfied. “Sedimentation” is too one-directional and too static: it is like my going out to bask in the sun, which can hardly be said to be some kind of “interactive relation” between me and the sun. This silent, one-way activity simply settles downward from above, without arousing any counterreaction at all. “Crashing down” would even be better, because on the one hand crashing down leaves traces on the ground, and on the other it at least sends some new fragments flying back into the air. Rain falls one-way onto the earth, yet returns to the sky in another secret way. If one does not point out this path of return, does not uncover this cycle, then this phenomenology remains a phantom rootless water, and still has not escaped the metaphysics of foundationalism.

By the way, let me also say something about the image of history as I understand it: I am inclined to compare it to the form of a “snowball rolling.”

When a snowball rolls across the earth, there are three layers of history here:

One: the movement of the snowball itself;

Two: the changes in the earth;

Three: the track left by the snowball on the earth.

The objective history of the natural attitude, or rather “visible history,” is only this track, though of course this track also has content, width, and places of blur and shadow. So the task of objective historical textual criticism is to trace along the visible track and reconstruct its blurred parts.

Intellectual history, however, focuses on the rolling of the snowball itself. The snowball presents itself as something relatively independent, closed, self-contained, and endowed with a tangible structure. It is itself invisible, but through analyzing the track, and through reconstructing it by picking up the scattered fragments left behind from the track, we can restore the history of the snowball. And the snowball’s rolling also reveals a certain inner, independent tendency; the development of ideas has its own internal inertia. Therefore we may speak, relatively independently and apart from the concrete track, of the developmental logic of ideas themselves.

But this independence is not absolute, and the relation between the snowball and the earth is by no means one-way—by no means is it simply that the snowball unilaterally leaves its marks on the earth, while the earth seems to be merely a kind of resistance, and the original force comes only from the internal inertia of the snowball’s self-rotation. That is only a reasonable illusion. The earth is the snowball’s “environment,” and environment is not neutral or passive. Fundamentally speaking, the changes in the earth not only cause the snowball to be impeded, accelerated, or deflected; they are also the source of the snowball itself. As the snowball leaves traces on the earth, on the one hand it is reshaping the earth’s history; on the other hand the earth is in turn reconstructing the snowball’s structure.

The earth is environment, is actuality. Traditional metaphysics regards the actual as a mere resistance, but in fact actual history is truly foundational; it is the “conditions of possibility” that make the history of ideas possible. That is to say, this is a relation between logical structure and actual conditions, not a relation between logical conditions and actual results. Condition means environment; what serves as a condition is environment, is actuality. And modern logic, by applying an extreme notion of “necessary and sufficient conditions,” has obscured the original meaning of “condition,” so that we have all the more naturally tended to call the ideal and logical things “conditions” — which is often a major misunderstanding.

Jin Shixiang’s reply to me raised some sharp criticisms:

In the end, Jin Shixiang said my summary was quite on point. The discussion temporarily came to an end.