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Husserl, Aquinas, Sankara - A possible mathesis universalis
By: Jim Ruddy

Prolog - This essay sets forth some foundational arguments to establish the existence of a new phenomenological science, called convergent phenomenology. Convergent phenomenology depends upon, while yet itself lying at one remove from, traditional, Husserlian phenomenology. Convergent phenomenology, while subalternate to the basic Husserlian investigations, lays open its own, completely new, scientific field of investigative research.

To aid understanding, I have put the exposition of these foundational arguments in the form of a reflective, autobiographical memoire.

1. Influences - After studying Classical Greek philosophy, Medieval Philosophy, and the phenomenologies of Husserl, Heidegger, and Levinas, and getting a MA in philosophy from St. Albert’s College in Oakland California, I went to India in 1971 to get a doctorate in comparative philosophy at the University of Madras in India, under the great Shankara scholar, T.M.P. Mahadevan. I had received, by that time, a far-off glimpse of three wholly self-grounded and final systems of thought: Advaita, Scholastic Metaphysics, and Husserlian Phenomenology. Each claimed to be the final ground of ontological truth, but I had the idea in the back of my mind that there was some hitherto undiscovered mathesis universalis that could bind all these systems together in a single higher unity of ontological truth.

The three great thinkers influencing my own philosophical life are thus Thomas Aquinas, Edmund Husserl, and Shankara. All of them were tireless, honest, formal philosophers of the expansive, never-ending task of uncovering and systematizing the hidden truth of Being. I have, in my own philosophical journey, spent most of my time traveling along with the three aforementioned thinkers, looking over their shoulders at what they were looking at, rather than deconstructing the obscurity of their philosophical texts. Most of what they said, each in their own stubbornly formal fashion, coincided, converged upward and became to me a great height of scientific knowledge, incontrovertible scientific knowledge, certain knowledge through the necessary first principles of logic, and I have, to this very day, seen no reason to doubt that Husserl's phenomenology. Aquinas' metaphysics and Shankara’s formal theory of the ontological primacy of Self-Consciousness are indeed genuine, logically intact sciences themselves even more self-grounded than geometry and algebra.

2. First Guiding Principles – Kevin Wall, O.P., whose tiny book, Doctrine of Relation in Hegel is a rare masterpiece of systematic thought, was the reader for my master’s thesis in philosophy. His enthusiasm was contagious and our discussions about logic and metaphysics always seemed to allow, right then and there, for quantum jumps forward toward truth, especially in regard to Aquinas’ notions of real and mental relations. From the many talks I had with him, I gained two guiding principles that have stayed with me during my philosophical journey. One principle was that Descartes had turned around the subject-object relation in such a way that the medieval notion of intentionality and of object-consciousness as being primary and pivotal for human thought became shifted into the primal error of viewing human consciousness as a kind of absolute subject-consciousness. “Subject,” which, in classical metaphysics, was a term for grounded scientific material (as well as for the absoluteness of a being standing utterly by itself and within itself) thus shifted and became a base term for “subjective,” now meaning unreal or ideal. And the evident existence of a real thing in the real world eventually also shifted and became, correspondingly, a problematic, unreachable “Thing-in-itself.”

The second guiding principle that I gained from Wall derived from his brilliant, investigative research into Aquinas’ doctrine of real and mental relations and the resulting interplay of these concepts within Aquinas’ theology. Following Wall’s argumentation, I arrived at the, at first, improbable, but, at last, unshakeable conviction that real relations actually exist in the world outside the self, and are not simply mental relations superimposed by the mind. Once this truth, so foreign to modern thought, became entrenched in my thinking, I was able to understand how Aquinas could move from real relations on the one side and mental relations on the other side to a special kind of pure and unique grasp of an “in-between “relationality, a relationality that was actually, as such, real from one side, mental from another. This new view of the possible asymmetricality of relation itself became the base for Aquinas’ entire theory of creation as well as his entire theory of human intellectus. The adages that I had often heard Thomist scholars proclaim, adages that sounded so obscure at the time, now made perfect sense: “Creation is really and dependently related to a God who is not really related back to it.” “The intellect is really and dependently related to an object of knowledge that is not really related back to it.” I also found that the slight alteration of Heidegger’s analytic of Being-in-the-World into a more dynamic analytic of Being-in-the-World-toward-God opened up whole vistas of new, descriptively-available material.
This was astounding to me. For if there are indeed these three kinds of relation, then there certainly should be a new phenomenological approach to this unfolding material that would take it into account. If “back to the things themselves” could be a rallying cry, so could the motto, “back to relational objectivity itself.”

Wall showed me how Aquinas had taken a clue from the sui generis position of relation in Aristotle’s categories and had developed this fruitful notion into a system of relation that was every bit as sophisticated as Hegel’s doctrine of relation and even closer to the truth, a truth that lets things be as they are, and relations be as they are, because it first, quite wisely and with child-like simplicity, lets the divine reality itself simply be what it is. For such a child, absolute systems of thought, each claiming to be from their pinnacle outward the sole ground of ontological truth, are simply to be left to be what they are. This is not relativism. Relation, even defined absolutely, is still moving out beyond itself, toward its referent.

Having in mind Wall’s talks about both asymmetrical relations, real from one side, mental from another, as well as the actual existence of real relations out in the real world, apart from the mind, and re-reading through Husserl's Ideas in the summer of 1964, I became unsettled by a single, salient fact: If Aquinas' notion of asymmetrical relation with which he described both the human intellectual act (real from one side as out toward its object, mental from the far side back again) as well as the nature of created reality (real from itself toward God, but merely mental from God back to itself), were true, then even the Transcendental Ego of Husserl was, in its bracketed, material aspect (grounded as this here-and-now, created ego rooted in a physical body), henceforth real from itself outward toward God, but simply mental from God back to itself.

Once this is newly viewed after the epoche, how is pure consciousness able to give constitutive meaning to this simultaneously both real and mental state of affairs? If it is inextricably both mental and real, maybe this would explain the view of many of Husserl’s followers, especially Merleau-Ponty , that the epoche (at an intentional, thing-like level, rather than a converging, relation-like level) was never able to be completely and finally carried out. Indeed, this further, asymmetrical (real/mental) and wholly relational meaning of pure consciousness, though genuinely and intuitively true, was perhaps never seen by Husserl at all. I thereupon looked more closely at the given situation and saw that even our asymmetrical Being-in-the-World-toward-God remains as active/passive constitution within the Transcendental Ego. Indeed, such a now- purified “Being-toward-God" must rise up as the crowning and defining moment of the Transcendental Ego Itself.

It is that very core-matrix of converged meaning which gives the Ego its genesis-power of bestowing final, absolute meaning upon the entire self-world complex as being already more out toward God than anything in itself. I saw then that Husserl's phenomenology remained intact and genuinely self-grounded primarily as a description of thing-like intentionality (a purely mental relation already out toward its object) but failed to allow for a further description of the asymmetrical relation in question as such, in other words, in its essence.

There is an immensely profound reason for this: We cannot “intend” such a further relationality directly. More simply, a real, even an asymmetrically real, relation cannot be further referred to another real relation, or we would then be lost in an infinite regression of towardnesses going nowhere. When we try to analyze this at first, we certainly have an intuitive feeling that the mind can multiply out its own mental relations endlessly, but when we consider the actual unfolding transcendence of the real-self/real-world complex, this is not the case. In more formal terms: A relation (in this case the special “towardness” of intentionality toward its object) cannot be referred to another relation (the asymmetrical relation at the heart of the Transcendental Ego) without the resulting error of an infinite regress. Thus if a real or asymmetrically real relation, in its own essence, is simply a “being-toward,” irrespective of what it resides in, it cannot, without complete self-contradiction, actually possess the essence of being toward another being toward . Certainly mental relations, as Husserlian perspectival “rays,” and even as, in Aquinas, unfolding intelligibilities, can be referred beyond themselves toward other real or mental relations ad infinitum. But a real or asymmetrically real relation must actually be a being toward some final referent utterly beyond itself, or else it simply would not be what it is. And the referent must be either God or a created reality. Who would be aware of this more than the great classical Eastern and Western metaphysicians, especially when they spoke of all created causality as having the final nature of never being able to be extended into infinity but as eventually coming to rest TOWARD, pure and simple?

When I left in 1971 to begin my doctoral studies in comparative philosophy at the University of Madras, I already had made up my mind to set forth, in my doctoral thesis, the final, ontological ground for a new science of convergent phenomenology that would bracket out what up until then had remained ”unbracketable,” namely, the entire realm of transcendental subjectivity discovered and mapped out by Edmund Husserl. A new, further bracketing must logically be set in place that would thereupon bracket out all thing-like objectivity from the transcendental subjectivity, and deal only with the relation-like objectivity left.

3. Objection – Some have asked me "How can the Transcendental Ego in its ‘bracketed’ aspect possibly have any ‘real’ relations outwards, since all reality is bracketed by the epoche--including the reality of God?"

To this I would answer: because the real relation in question is asymmetrical and thus retains a further "pure consciousness" aspect that remains after the epoche. This self-same aspect further emerges for direct scientific consideration after both the thesis of the natural standpoint AND the thesis of the Husserlian, pure consciousness standpoint are both suspended, and wherein no further use is made of the entire transcendental subjectivity as lower analysis of intentionality, and yet the relation-like character of transcendental subjectivity IN ITS ESSENCE becomes, in such a simple, shifted viewpoint, freed as a further investigation of new scientific material. It is this very material that I call convergence, defined as relation, as such, in its intuitable essence.

Another objection: what does all this have to do with Aquinas’ ontology? Many Thomists have held, unfairly I think, that Husserl’s phenomenology is based completely on a kind of Cartesian agnosticism, a doubt of reality itself. Aquinas, they say, never would admit to the possibility of such doubt, since the world, as God’s creation, couldn’t ever be doubted away entirely. What they are forgetting is the supreme bracketing that Aquinas carried out to arrive finally at the very pinnacle of ontological truth. And what did this supreme bracketing achieve? It achieved what the medievals called the pure act of existence itself, and Aristotle called the pure subject-consciousness of thought-thinking-itself. At the converging height of Aquinas’ doctrine of relation looms the famed analogy of being, which refers beyond itself toward the pure act of the divine existence not at all directly but indirectly through a referred proportionality of real, mental and asymmetrical relations, as such. And all I am saying is that the phenomenological constitution of this wholly formal and yet somehow referring-beyond-itself matrix has to then be achieved at the height of transcendental subjectivity, and a further, epoche-like shift of attention has to open up for us the new, unfolding scientific material now able to be exfoliated and perforce described.

How can this be done? The reality of God is indeed bracketed by the original Husserlian epoche. Nor is the reality of God reintroduced after the double levels of bracketing spoken of above. All that appears after the double epoche thus enacted is the relationality of relation-like objectivity in its essence, which is neither its mental nor its real aspect, since a relation's essence resides in neither but in its own towardness to that to which it is being referred.

Husserl , purely for purposes of research, divided his phenomenological arena into a lower description of pure consciousness in its essence, and a higher description of the constitution of meaning performed by the Transcendental Ego. I gradually began to understand that convergent phenomenology actually has two coordinated realms of investigation, one of them dealing with the asymmetrical relationity at the heart of transcendental subjectivity, and the other dealing with the constitution of real relation as such.

4. Some Formal Proofs – In the summer of 1975, Mahadevan requested that Jitendranath Mohanty, the famous Husserlian scholar, be added as another reader in regard to my doctoral thesis. Mohanty read through a draft of the thesis and sent out a 10 page critique that went back to textual sources in Husserl and was incisive and devastating. It made me re-think my entire series of arguments. In the process of doing this, I came up with many newly-worked-out arguments, of which I shall mention only the following:

Residing at the center of the descriptive investigation of intentionality, the noesis/noemata paradigm best guides us when it is finally deconstructed and seen, within its traditional, ontological legacy, as a thing-like paradigm based on form inhering in and perfecting matter, species inhering in and perfecting genus, act inhering in and perfecting potency, existence inhering in and perfecting essence, accidental quality inhering in and perfecting substance, etc., etc. While pondering the logical groundwork of the new science that I had discovered (and being forever a forward-thinking ontologist at heart) I slowly became convinced that all such pervasive, thing-like paradigms (and even intentionality itself) must be left behind (hence, further bracketed) if we ever want to uncover and describe the final, unique, sui generis way that a relation (real, mental or asymmetrical) inheres in its term not by enlivening or perfecting that term but solely by referring that term out beyond itself toward that to which it was here and now being related. Aristotle, Avicenna and then Aquinas and Jean Poinsot, all saw that relation does not completely fit in the system of categories along with substance and the accidents inhering in substance. They agreed that the essence of relation lies not in inherence (as is certainly the case for all other formal, thing-like objectivities discoverable in the human realm of knowledge) but in relation’s unique, sui generis towardness to that to which it is here and now being related. And since radically new ways of looking at actual material of necessity demand an actual science of this selfsame material, my road now became clear: As Husserl, in his later work, looked back toward the realm of pure, formal ontology to gain thereby a radically new momentum for his descriptive research, I myself, in preparing my doctoral work on Husserl, Aquinas and Shankara, would start to look back toward the incipient beginnings of a subalternate ontology of real relation in Aristotle, Avicenna, Aquinas, and Poinsot in order to build the actual groundwork for this radically new science of convergent phenomenology.

Was I getting any closer to a possible mathesis universalis of all absolute systems of thought? I had seen that there was enough sophistication and clarity in Aquinas’ notion of relation to lead me to think that he had thought through to completion an entire “sub-ontology” of real relation, only he kept it to himself and did not “release it for publication.” I had also come to the surprising and momentous conclusion that all relations in Husserl’s system are mental, and that all relations in the Advaita system are real. This latter fact about Advaita actually came into focus for me, on the wing, as it were, after I had delivered a paper on the classical notion of the category of relation in Western onotlogy at the International Congress of Philosophy at Madras. While summing up the various papers read at the congress, and when he came to his wrap-up comments on my presentation of relation as real, mental and asymmetrical, T.M.P. Mahadevan, who learned much about Western ontology and logic at Oxford University, paused, as if lost in thought for a moment. Then he turned to me with an almost beatific expression on his face and proclaimed, simply, “All the different kinds of relations that you spoke of are real.” That was all he said. And if it were true that he was himself, through samadhi, at that moment, nothing other than Self-Consciousness, he would have been quite correct.

5. A New Science? It was in dealing with several investigations into the logical foundations of all possible absolute systems of thought that would wish to claim to be consistent within themselves that I had come upon convergent phenomenology as a “new way of looking at things” that might help. My work had indeed uncovered an entirely new phenomenological science opening up new material for further descriptive analysis, a science that would deal with transcendental subjectivity no longer as in-toward (intentionality), but simply as toward (convergence), no longer "in" at all. The subject matter of this new science would thus be the constitution of pure, relation-like objectivity, rather than thing-like, intentional objectivity. Hints of this new science (not, of course, as phenomenology, but as ontology) were foreshadowed in Aristotle, Avicenna, and Aquinas. And the salient fact, here, to remember, was that Husserl, following Kant, considered the essence of relation to be arrayed along with the other pure concepts of the understanding as wholly ideal concepts, not existing in the world at all.

So I would now have urgent reason to finally proceed forward into that "promised land" that Husserl said he would never enter. My reasoning proceeded thus: If there are real relations in the outside world, and if even pure human consciousness, after the epoche is, in its essence, a real relation toward something beyond itself, then there is henceforth opening up genuine, intuitable, and yet completely new material for a new science.
In the modern age, the notion of real relations existing apart from the mind’s own referring of things to each other is odd to say the least. What is interesting to note is that even in the time of Avicenna there were those who held to such a modernist position. Against all those who affirmed the position that real relations do not exist in reality, but are rather superimposed by the mind, Avicenna uses the following powerful argument: “What resolves for us the perplexity… is to turn to the absolute definition of the relative. The relative is that whose nature is only predicated with respect to another. Thus anything in the concrete that happens to be such that its nature is only predicated with respect to another belongs to the relative. But among the concrete existents there are many things of this description. Hence the relative in concrete things exists.”

As Wall used to explain, if we are walking along a country path and see two white, round stones lying next to each other, that they are similar to each other is not a mental relation that we impose on them from the outside. It is a real state of affairs that we find existing there already, and which would be there, even if we had never ever walked by. We, as transcendental subjectivity, can give constitutive meaning to such a state of affairs, but HOW? It doesn’t help to argue that, if the similarity of the two round stones is analyzed purely in terms of a constitutive meaning given by the transcendental subject, then we are no longer talking about "a real state of affairs" anymore. The point is that the essence of the relation itself does not depend at all on the real state of affairs as a thing-like objectivity to start with. Certainly, we have never, ever, in the empirical world, seen a real relation that isn’t already inhering in some substratum. Yet the startling fact remains that, although theories of how we abstract qualities and other accidental forms from their concrete individuality and attain to their universal essence abound in both Eastern and Western philosophy, nevertheless the even more thorny question of how we know real relations (apart from their base states of affairs in the world) is not even treated philosophically at all. It is almost as if it is assumed that the relation is simply seen, essentially and intuitively as already doing it referring beyond itself, or it is simply not seen at all!

And yet this does not contradict but rather substantiates the equally intuitable fact, generally conceded by classical ontology, that a real relation’s inherence simply does not enter into its essential nature to begin with. A relation, as such, is a lot more toward, then in.

Part of the difficulty lies in developing new terms for that which is seen in convergent phenomenology. Beyond all of this terminology, what we need to bring to intuitive clarity is quite simply the towardness of the relation in question rather than its "inness" in the state of affairs thus unfolding. Furthermore, real relations, to be known, are not intellectually “abstracted” from their inherence as are thing-like objectivities. They are simply seen, as Levinas might say of a Face, over against Infinity Itself, or they are not seen at all.

6. A Subalternate Science? Being-toward is surely a more honest and humble way of looking at human reality than is a more solidly-grounded (and yet more and more worrisome) Being-in-the-World. The fundamental scientific analytic of Being-toward is already a dependent, subalternate analytic from the start. Such a subalternate science thus is a science that depends for its existence on a higher science. Aquinas says that the science of cutting special pieces of wood to set into the side of a ship is “subalternate” to the entire, architectonic science of ship building itself. Convergent phenomenology is a subalternate phenomenological discipline. It is dependent on transcendental (purely Husserlian) phenomenology. It deals solely with the constitution (within transcendental subjectivity) of relation-like (converging or converged) objectivity rather than thing-like (intentional, “frontal”) objectivity. Simply expressed: Husserlian phenomenology exfoliates and describes real or ideal things-in-themselves as constituted within transcendental subjectivity; convergent phenomenology exfoliates and describes real or ideal relations-in-themselves as constituted within transcendental subjectivity.

Convergent phenomenology treats of “convergence.” Aquinas tells us, throughout his work that all created reality, both material and immaterial, is, first and foremost, a composite of existence which is its act and essence which is its form. This pivotal insight gives credence to all the further developments of the composite parts of each created level of beings in Aquinas’ hierarchy. Both the science of navigation and the lower science of piecing together the ship are in a single view the ship itself, as it is here and now being launched. To continue this fruitful metaphor: What launches the project of complete ontological knowledge of Being is the dynamic upsurge of both parts of any composite being into a unified whole which is indeed nothing other than the created entity itself, as it is in itself apart from the wholly relational activity of knowing. Convergence, not just as paralleling intentionality at a more rarified level, but also as paralleling the above classical insights of Thomistic ontology, is the dynamic upsurge of both the real and mental aspects of transcendental subjectivity into relationality in general as such, apart from all possible thing-like objectivity in which it is grounded. If a captain of a ship may use the wind to go against the wind, a phenomenologist may use transcendental subjectivity to achieve a new direction toward further, wholly scientific investigations into the pure relationality of Truth as such. Transcendental subjectivity must be finally and fruitfully viewed as moving out toward something beyond itself.

7. What of Heidegger? - I had read enough of Heidegger to know that he had rejected the insistent formalism of Husserl's eidetic phenomenology and tried to lay bare the ground of Ontology itself as a possibility of Being-there, of Dasein. But when one considers that human reality indeed has a sad, thrown, finite frailty of Being-in-the-World, as Heidegger said, then human transcendence into Being Itself is thereupon more clearly and scientifically delineated as the even more tenuous frailty of Being-toward-God, rather than as a being-tossed into a solid world at all, intending this or that solid object. Originating from the analytic of Dasein as Being-in-the-World, a convergent analytic of Dasein, as no longer “in, toward” but as simply “toward,” becomes necessary. The Thomistic, Cartesian, and Husserlian fact stands, that the entire outside world itself beyond consciousness, and, within it, the embodied human reality in its purely material aspect as already embodied, contains nothing necessarily real enough from minute to minute that would prevent its vanishing off into total nothingness. This is not another strange quirk in the analytic of Dasein, or a radical thesis of modern skepticism but a metaphysical truth about Being. Aquinas saw this with unparalleled clarity. All human knowledge comes through our senses from a world that indubitably exists here and now, but even in terms of ontological causality, that world does not necessarily exist and it could, in the future, not exist at all or perhaps exist completely otherwise that it does now.

To ask what human reality is, is to ask what human temporal reality is. Because my father had read Kant at the age of 19 and had then set aside an hour a day to “think about time,” he always used to smile when scientists talked about the age of the earth in billions of years. He told me, “What does billions of years have to do with our lived-though human time of the here and now?” For him, the arrival of a quail family each spring, out in our back yard, the mother quail being newly shadowed by a tiny squad of baby quail, was a miracle. As he would have expressed it, “These quail do not think about time at all. Only humans do.” In my doctoral thesis, I began to investigate the constitution of human time as the converging and converged embodiment of the transcendental imagination. Within such an investigation, pieces began, “miraculously,” to fall into place when I subsequently began to uncover and describe, not the active constitution of this or that single image as a used, pivotal convertuntur ad phantasmata within transcendental subjectivity, but the passive constitution of entire landscapes of imagery within which several images come into being as already being referred toward a single, central image.

Here is a pure case in point: Hermes Trismegistus described God as an infinite sphere whose center point is everywhere able to be determined, but whose circumference is nowhere able to be determined. In my thesis, I had first attempted to analyze the pure towardness of this image as one of several ground-images for all possible absolute systems of human scientific thought. What convergent phenomenology made clear was that the strange, proportional metaphor in question, with its nagging sense of expansive incompleteness, more adequately describes human perception of this or that unfolding thing than it does some encompassing divine presence. But, oddly enough, the unpacked metaphor of Hermes itself has no unfolding horizon, such as one can find in the lower, Husserlian descriptions of perception. Even real relations discovered out in the real world have no horizon, and are so frail that they give themselves up in their very being known and are seen utterly or else they are not seen at all.

In themselves, and as scientia divina, as "borrowed" from God, self-grounded, genuine eidetic sciences such as Advaita, phenomenology and metaphysics are indeed unassailable citadels of Truth. In my youth I saw this as final. But I now realize that these self-same edifices, under the aspect of being simply worldly, human creations in time, do not have even the presumed Heideggerian solidity of Being-in-the-World as ground.

8. A Kehre of Bad Conscience? - It has always been a frightening mystery to me why Heidegger, among his private confidants like Jaspers, ridiculed the kind and helpful teacher Husserl and even went so far as to call Husserl’s philosophy a “sham philosophy.” Perhaps he saw the worrisome incompleteness of his own Kehre as a wound, and attacked those closest to him, as wounded people often do.

Levinas, on the other hand, building on the systems of both Husserl and Heidegger, went directly and compassionately toward a more communicative and humane system of phenomenology. I now consider a great deal of what Levinas wrote to be within the science of convergent phenomenology already.
The sadness of a broken world of war and terrorism may wound us often enough. God knows, in the last century, not only Levinas but also Stein, Ricoeur and others saw this with blinding clarity. Nevertheless, once I slowly watched convergent phenomenology appearing and dove-tailing into the greater Husserlian system, I began to possess and come to rest in a much steadier hope, even in the midst of being orphaned in a sad world, where, it seems, more and more strident sham philosophies abound.

9. Conclusion: Toward a Final Mathesis Universalis – Nested In the relation of identity that identifies Truth and Being, Truth is related actually to Being. Being, on the other hand, as Being, is not actually related back to Truth. If Husserl had mastered this pivotal insight of Aquinas, especially as it is brilliantly and decisively unpacked in De Veritate, I believe that he would have viewed such an insight as a gate opening up on an entirely new field of descriptive scientific research. It was no coincidence that Edith Stein took De Veritate to heart as a kind of pure philosophical manifesto pointing toward a new phenomenological approach to God and to creation.

In a simple passage in Ideas, Husserl tells us that a slight shift of attention away from our real self-world complex toward the absolute nature of pure consciousness permits entry into pure consciousness as the field of the new science of phenomenology. What I am saying in this essay is that a slight shift away from the absolute nature of pure consciousness toward its asymmetrically real/mental nature permits entry into that self-same relationality as the field of the new science of convergent phenomenology. One of the best paradigm-examples for both cases of such a shift of attention is thus not a mystic rising into a new state of awareness, but an ordinary shifting of attention from the here and now counting of material things to the formal world of mathematics.

Nevertheless, my base for such a shift is not the intuitable essences of pure consciousness that Husserl began to describe. Rather it is something perhaps more grounded in common sense: Namely, the intuition that we cannot relate ourselves beyond ourselves toward something that is itself already outside of itself toward something else without losing all sense of what it means to be toward something in the first place! To fool ourselves at this moment, and to start to believe that we are doing something actual when we do refer ourselves reflectively in this way to our own thoughts about other things and/or about God, is not only to lose sight of the entire science of convergent phenomenology, and generally of phenomenology itself--it is also a losing sight of the created being that we, no matter how many ordinary shifts of attention we make, ARE .

To be at the least meaningful, the pure asymmetrical towardness of the Transcendental Ego cannot be eventually classified within transcendental subjectivity proper. In other words, it cannot be referred to another hierarchically placed relation, (or level of relationality) even at the remote height of pure consciousness, but must be left to be itself. For it to be itself, it must be itself, toward… It must be seen, finally, as simply TOWARD either God or a created thing. No longer simply absolute, which it certainly, from one side, is, but also wholly relative, which it also and undeniably, from the other side, is. For such indeed is the truth of pure consciousness, apart from any secondarily derived theory of truth. Any science, even the purely descriptive aspects of the science of convergent phenomenology at its beginning levels, looks for and rests in the truth.

And clearly, the cache of intuitable truth that Thomas discovered about the asymmetricality of human knowledge, as well as the cache of intuitable truth that Thomas discovered about the asymmetricality of the towardness of creation to the uncreated reality of God becomes a single cache of phenomenological material within the scientific scope of convergent phenomenology.

Perhaps searching for an ultimate mathesis unversalis is an enterprise that has no final, foreseeable outcome. But are not the vistas of Husserlian phenomenology also infinite; an infinite task, as Husserl himself said?

Letting things be themselves as they are toward God can also be an infinite task, but a task of a different sort.

By tracing my own philosophical journey, I have given some foundational arguments along the way that have firmly established convergent phenomenology as a genuine science. I have followed the principle: if there is a new field of material unfolding for thought, then there is the possibility of an authentic science of such material. I have slowly unfolded the sui generis nature of relation itself in its own essential purity as clearly possessing the character of a new, unfolding arena of scientifically describable material.
My doctoral thesis, begun in 1971, and accepted in 1979, was a less personal, more systematic attempt to present the logical and ontological groundwork that, once and for all, could be seen to establish convergent phenomenology as a legitimate science.

My long-standing friend Paul Ricoeur read the finished version. I remember one day, over lunch at the University of Chicago, we were talking about the many years of work I had done so far in attempting to inaugurate a dialog between Advaita, phenomenology and Thomistic ontology. He told me that the most important section of my doctoral thesis for him was the third logical investigation that dealt with the nature of relation (real-mental-asymmetrical) as such. When I asked him directly whether I had then indeed proved my case for an entirely new, phenomenological discipline, he shrugged and said “But of course!” My thesis was accepted by the University of Madras, Chennai, India, in the fall of 1979.

Footnotes


Wall, Kevin, Doctrine of Relation in Hegel (Albertus Magnus Press,1963)

Husserl, Edmund, Ideas : general introduction to pure phenomenology; translated by W. R. Boyce Gibson.
(London : Collier-Macmillan, 1962).

Taminiaux, Jacques, The Metamorphoses of Phenomenological Reduction (Marquette University Press, 2004), 27

Quoted by M. Mamura in his article, “Avicenna Chapter on Relation in the Metaphysics of the Shifa,” http://www.muslimphilosophy.com/sina/art/marmura6.pdf

Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle ,lesson 1, #27

Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, trans John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Harpers, San Francisco, 1962)


Heidegger, Martin, Kant And the Problem of Metaphysics, trans James S. Churchill (Indiana University Press, 1962)


This Latin phrase means, turning to phantasms or images. Aquinas upheld the view that human knowledge in this life, even at the supreme heights of human reason, requires images from the imagination as a necessary ground. His proof of this was usually a matter of fact statement that even given the sharing in divine knowledge that the first principles of logic entail, all of this glorious truth viewed as “ours” disappears utterly when we are hit on the head.

Faivre, Antoine. The Eternal Hermes: From Greek God to Alchemical Magus. Grand Rapids, Mich.:(Phanes Press, 1995) 94

Sheehan, Thomas, “Husserl and Heidegger: The Making and Unmaking of a Relationship,” http://www.stanford.edu/dept/relstud/faculty/sheehan/EHtrans/2-intro.pdf , 3

Levinas begins his seminal work, Totality and Infinity, by speaking of the implacable dissemblance of war.

Stein wrote a wonderfully imaginative dialog between Husserl and Aquinas, yet the writing gains philosophical power as a kind of super-platonic dialog left to speak about the ”things themselves” at its own level.

Ideas, p. 113.

I believe that the radical work of Levinas gains power by rooting itself in a special,workable pure logic behind both a soliloquy that speaks about something wholly ineffable, and a face to face conversation that does the same thing. Husserl became exasperated at his critics because they never looked over his shoulder at what he was himself looking at but rather came up short inside their own subjective thoughts about what he meant by this phrase and that phrase.

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