Costello, Peter. Layers in Husserl's Phenomenology: On Meaning and Intersubjectivity.

Marratto, Scott

COSTELLO, Peter. Layers in Husserl's Phenomenology: On Meaning and Intersubjectivity. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. xiv + 225pp. Cloth, $60--Phenomenology is sometimes understood, usually by those who have had little actual contact with the works of its major exponents, to be a peculiarly introspective approach to philosophy. According to this view, research in phenomenology primarily consists in first-person descriptions of the various states of one's own consciousness. But a seminal insight in phenomenology, as inaugurated by Edmund Husserl at the turn of the twentieth century, is that consciousness is not transparent to itself, that the field of our experience is always haunted by the presence of others and by the sense of our own inherence within an historical horizon that transcends us. We are always interpreters, rather than simply reporters, in the field of our experience--and because that field is irreducibly intersubjective, the practice of interpreting the forms of experience is one that must be undertaken in dialogue with others. Peter Costello's book begins from this seminal phenomenological insight and exemplifies the approach to philosophical research that this insight entails. It is a superbly written study of the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, but its engagement with Husserl's work serves its larger aim of extending the field of phenomenological insight.

While Costello covers a number of different topics in Husserl's phenomenology, from the foundations of logic to temporality and historicity, issues that preoccupied Husserl at different points in his career, he demonstrates the unity of Husserl's project by means of his own insight into the crucial role played in each of these various analyses by the term Deckung and its cognates. The author begins with a discussion of intersubjectivity, and in this connection introduces Husserl's concept of overlaying (Deckung). In this discussion we see that Deckung, which is sometimes misleadingly translated into English as "coinciding," really implies a kind of overlaying in which difference, or noncoincidence, is preserved. As Costello explains, this concept is crucial for Husserl's account of the way in which we perceive other persons because it allows us to see how this process happens as a form of "passive synthesis," beginning from an immediate sense of the similarity between our animate bodies, rather than as a kind of active inference. While Husserl recognizes that I can have no direct access to another's experience, he also does not subscribe to the view that there is some kind of mysterious process behind my ability to recognize other persons as subjects, or minds. Ensuing chapters proceed through other topic areas--eidetic intuition (the intuition of essences), the transcendental ego and the flow of experience, the body, the life-world, temporality, and the logic of parts and wholes--and in each case Costello shows that there is a structural isomorphism, insofar as each analysis deploys the concept of "overlaying," between these dimensions of experience and that of the experience of other selves with which the book begins. Even more though--and this is the central thesis of the work--Costello shows that, beyond simple isomorphism, intersubjectivity is in fact the crucial dimension, the key to all these aspects of experience. For example, he demonstrates that the recognition of the unity of one's own lived-body (accomplished by means of an overlapping of its parts, and of the parts with the whole) presupposes an intersubjective horizon (likewise accomplished by means of an overlaying between one's own body and that of the other). The claim that intersubjectivity is at the core of all these dimensions of experience is a powerful and exciting thesis, and, to my knowledge, Costello's argument for this claim--which, again, makes use of the repeated deployment of the category of overlaying in each of these discussions--is quite original. Further, the book is also particularly powerful in that, while appearing to be about a single, specific topic in Husserl (intersubjectivity), it addresses this topic in a way that opens up into a study of Husserl's philosophy as a whole (covering the whole range of his writing from early to late) and, indeed, opens up into a discussion of the central issues of contemporary continental thought (with regard, in particular, to its ongoing concern with questions of alterity, community, difference, politics, and ethics).

The linking of Husserl's work to contemporary discussions in continental philosophy is also very timely, and the author's discussion of intersubjectivity and sensation is especially relevant as a rejoinder to Derrida's different, and very influential interpretation of Husserl's account of these issues in the Le Toucher--Jean-Luc Nancy. Costello's book makes a significant contribution to the field, and will be important for scholars and students alike, both for the study of Husserl and for the broader question of phenomenology's importance as a fruitful approach to urgent issues in philosophy.--Scott Marratto, Michigan Technological University