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Husserlian Phenomenology

Phenomenology as a Method

As a Method the verbalization of a reflective analysis of man’s

(subject) lived experience as meaning-giving intentionalities (the intentional acts of consciousness)

directed toward meaningful objects in the world (the intentional objects)

in order to disclose the ontological or essential structures of both the subject and objects necessarily implied in the direct awareness of the lived experiences

in order to make it possible for the objects to appear meaningfully to the subject as these particular objects

and for the subject to establish meaning-giving intentionalities with these objects.

5 Principal Phases of the Phenomenological Method1. Bracketing (epoche) or suspension (literally, abstention) of

the empirical and metaphysical presuppositions of the “natural attitude,” the attitude that takes the world for granted. Foremost among such bracketed presuppositions is the question of beings existing independently of our consciousness. Intention is centered on the ways in which meanings appear to us qua phenomena, regardless of whether they exists as empirical entities outside of our consciousness. Fiction (non-empirical or “possible” experience) is considered just as reliable as fact. Only from this phenomenological or transcendental attitude will we be able to describe “pure” consciousness, abstracting from its embeddedness in the world of nature.

Epoche Through phenomenological reflection, we come to see that

consciousness is intentional, that is, directed towards an object. Consciousness is consciousness of something.

Through epoche all objects become reduced to their experienceable properties.

Through epoche, Husserl ultimately tries to ground a foundationalist epistemology and an idealist metaphysics. It is exclusively consciousness (conscious subjectivity or “pure ego”) that has absolute being, and all other beings are dependent on consciousness of their existence (See Ideas I, par. 49). This leads to the dissolution of the world into the realm of consciousness. Here we see an idealist turn in Husserl.

Hussserl is more radical than Kant in insisting (with Fichte) that there is no thing-in-itself beyond the reach of possible experience. Note however that nothing has changed with epoche, only our attitude toward the world.

Phenomenological Reduction

2. Phenomenological reduction. By means of such we could regain access to a presuppositionless world of transcendental immediacy where being becomes identical with its manifestation to consciousness. Being becomes reduced (retrieved or opened up) to the meaning of being.

Free Variation3. Free variation. Meaning is no longer confined to

empirical actualities but unfolds in a free play of pure possibilities. In the unfettered horizon of our imagination, we can now liberally vary or modify any given thing—a table, tree, person, etc.—until an invariant structure is revealed, common to all the possible appearances of the thing to our consciousness. This invariant structure is the essence or eidos of the thing intended.

Intuition of Essences4. Intuition of the essence as it emerges passively from

the overlap of the multiple acts of our freely varying intentionality. By means of transcendental intuition, consciousness becomes reflexive. The content of the empirical and phenomenological experience is the same, but the attitude towards this content is radically different. The table intuited is still a table, but it is now intended and grasped in a more fundamental manner—that is, in all its hitherto hidden dimensions. From being a self-evident given, it becomes instead a gift of meaning, an explicit reappropriation of all its implicit meanings.

Description of Essential Structures

5.Method culminates with a description of the essential structures of both noema and noesis, as these essences emerge from the free variation of imagination into the grasp of a united intuition.

Edmund Husserl (1859 - 1938) born on 8 April 1859, in Prostějov,

Moravia, Austrian Empire (now it’s part of Czech Republic), died on 26 April 1938 in Freiburg, Germany

Came from a Moravian Jewish family, but was baptized Lutheran in 1887.

Studied Mathematics (in Leipzin and Berlin) and Philosophy (in Vienna), the latter under Franz Brentano and Carl Stumpf

Taught philosophy at Halle from 1887, then at Goettingen from 1901, and then at Freiburg im Breisgau from 1916 until his retirement in 1928.

Important Works Philosophie der Arithmetik (The Philosophy of Arithmetic)

(1891) Logische Untersuchungen (Logical Investigations) (1900) Die Idee der Phaeomenologie (The Idea of

Phenomenology) (1907) Ideen (Ideas) General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology)

(1913) Cartesianische Meditationem und Pariser Vortrage

(Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology) (1931)

Die Krisis der Europaeischen Wissenschaften und die Transzendentale Phaenomenologie (The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology) (1936)

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Husserl’s Mission:To transform philosophy into a

rigorous science

3 stages in the development of his philosophy Overthrew an alleged psychologistic position in the

foundations of arithmetic. The task was to establish an antipsychologistic, objective foundations for logic and mathematics.

From an attack on psychologism, Husserl moved on from a philosophy influenced by a Brentanian descriptive psychology to a new discipline he called “phenomenology,” and a metaphysical position called “transcendental idealism.”

Developed this phenomenology from a form of methodological solipsism into a phenomenology of intersubjectivity and ultimately (in the Crisis of 1936) into an ontology of the life-world, embracing social worlds of culture and history.

The Search for Essence Husserl’s goal in Ideas is to produce a “new

eidetics” (p. 66) ‘Eidetics’ is derived from ‘eidos,’ a Greek word

meaning (among other things), form Form was taken by Aristotle to be essence Husserl was trying to build a science of essences The realm of logic and mathematics provides one

kind of essence A new realm is that of consciousness

How Not to Find the Essence of Consciousness Traditional philosophy has begun with the “natural

attitude” The natural attitude finds consciousness to be one

thing among many in a “real world” The goal has been to relate consciousness and

objects in space (Descartes) It will be shown that this goal cannot be attained The essence of consciousness will be found in

another way

The Natural Attitude We “generally posit” that there is a natural world

continually “on hand” This world contains spatio-temporal objects as well

as ourselves and other selves It also contains the values of these selves We direct our activities at this world in many ways,

from elaborate conceptual description to simple acts of consciousness of its presence

Our view of the world is changing, and sometimes we are deceived about it

A New Attitude: Excluding Descartes’s method of universal doubt provides a

clue Descartes negated the “general positing” of the

natural attitude by taking as false what is subject to the slightest doubt

A weaker approach is to modify the positing We change the value of a thing by “putting it out of

action,” “excluding it,” “parenthesizing” it

Pure Consciousness When we put out of action the spatio-temporal

world, pure mental processes remain These processes are “immanent,” in that they

remain within the sphere of the consciousness that investigates them

What lies outside the sphere of consciousness is “transcendent”

How is the immanent related to the transcendent?

More Terminology The exclusion is called a “reduction,” because part

of the object is put out of action The reduction of natural objects and focus on pure

consciousness is “phenomenological,” because it describes objects as they appear, not in their natural causal relations (Hegel)

This phenomenology is “transcendental,” because it deals with the conditions that make any knowledge possible (Kant)

The Components of Consciousness The description of consciousness initially

precedes the reduction There is a stream of mental processes,

including perceiving, remembering, imagining, judging, feeling, describing, willing—each has its own essence

In examining these, we exclude what does not lie in the mental act itself

An Example A sheet of white paper lies before me in semi-

darkness The seeing and feeling are “cogitationes” and the

sheet is “cogitatum,” not a mental process Perception involves an “advertance” (“turning

toward”) in which things are seized or picked out Beyond what is seen and felt is a background “halo”

of things, of which we are conscious in a “non-actional” way, without advertance

Intentionality In shifting from the actional to the previously

non-actional, the essence of the mental process remains the same

The essence is to refer “intentively” Intentionality is thus the essence of

consciousness (Brentano) It is not found in the data of sensation

How We Perceive Objects Physical objects are transcendent, as are their

appearances—only consciousness is immanent The stream of perceptions in viewing a table when

walking around it changes We “construe” the perceptions in certain ways, say

as colors We give unity to these objects through “synthesis” or

“adumbration,” (literally, filling in) (Kant) Consciousness is not perceived by adumbration

The Immanent and the Transcendent A “God’s-eye view” does not make the transcendent

immanent—the object would be immanent for God Appearances are not pictures or signs of

transcendent objects Rather, we shade in an object given in itself Immanent consciousness is given in reflection, with

no possibility of error (Descartes) We can doubt the existence of the world, if our

experience becomes incoherent

The Natural World is Our World Even if the laws of physics do not hold, the unities

we shade into it do The idea of the transcendent world is parasitic on on

our experience So, we can make no sense of the idea of a world

beyond our experience—there is one common world for us all

The world of unities filled in by consciousness is accidental and relative, unlike consciousness

The Primacy of Consciousness The world of experience depends on pure

consciousness By excluding our positing, we lose nothing,

but gain something absolute Reality remains, so the view is not “subjective

idealism” What is rejected is a bad interpretation of

reality