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“Phenomenology as Descriptive Theory of the Essence of Pure Experiences” (Husserl 1975:191).

24/02/2011 By Kelly Cooper

“As concerns Phenomenology, it aims at being a descriptive theory of the essence of pure transcendental experiences from the phenomenological standpoint, and like every descriptive discipline, neither idealizing nor working on the substructure of things, it has its own justification. Whatever there may be in ‘reduced’ experiences to grasp eidetically in pure intuition, whether a real portion of such experience or as intentional correlate, that is its province, and is a vast source of absolute knowledge for it.

Still, let us see more clearly to what extent really scientific descriptions can be set up on the phenomenological field, with its infinite number of eidetic concreta, and to what services they can be put.

It is part of the peculiarity of consciousness generally to be continually fluctuating in different dimensions, so that there can be no talk of fixing any eidetic concreta or any of the phases which enter immediately into their constitution with conceptual exactness. Let us take, for instance, an experience of the genus ‘imagery of a thing’ as it is given us either in phenomenologically immanent perception or in some other (of course reduced) intuition. The phenomenologically particular object (the eidetic singularity) is then just this imagery of the thing in the whole wealth of its concreteness, precisely as it participates in the flow of experience, with the precise determinacy or indeterminacy with which it lets its thing appear, now in this aspect, now in that, and with just that distinctness or mistiness, that fluctuating clearness and intermittent obscurity, and so forth, which is peculiar to it. It is only the individual element which phenomenology ignores, whilst it raises the whole essential content in its concrete fullness into eidetic consciousness, and takes it as an ideally selfsame essence, which like every essence could particularize itself not only hic et nunc but in numberless instances. We can see at once that a conceptual and terminological fixation of this and every similar flowing concretum is not to be thought of, and that this applies to each of its immediate and no less flowing parts and abstract aspects.

If now there is no question of an unambiguous determination of eidetic singularities in our realm of description, it is quite otherwise with the essences at a higher specific level. These are susceptible of stable distinction, unbroken self-identity, and strict conceptual apprehension, likewise of being analysed into component essences, and accordingly they may very properly be made subject to the conditions of a comprehensive scientific description” (Husserl 1975:191-192).

Husserl, Edmund
1975[1931] Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. W.R. Boyce Gibson, trans. New York, NY: Collier Books.

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Spirit and Nature

03/02/2011 By Kelly Cooper

“In principle the possibility of contrasting one attitude with another rests on the more radical possibility of detaching oneself from every attitude, that is to say of performing the phenomenological reduction. This first act shatters the spell of the natural attitude and thus makes another attitude possible. Before ever establishing the priority of one attitude over the other, the phenomenologist renders possible another attiude through the primordial liberty of the ‘ultimate subject’ (letze Subjekt) for which nature is not more than the pure ‘sense’ of the acts constitutive of nature. Thus, he accounts for the difference between the two types of science by the difference between the attitudes in which they are rooted. He shows how to simplify the perspectives on man by means of changing attitudes, the phenomenologist being the disinterested spectator of all attitudes. Under his disinterested gaze, interested practices lose their naivete and with it their attractive power and hence their exclusive believing in the ‘being’ they consider.

Let us, then, make the sense ‘person’ appear. Will the phenomenologist create this new Idea by dialectic, or will he draw it by deduction from what has already been said? Not one line in the third part authorizes us to interpret constitution in either of these ways. Husserl always unfolds the complex intentions of consciousness, beginning from a sense already there in which they intersect. Hence, we read the opposition of the naturalistic world and the personalistic world in the appearance of man himself.

It must be said first that the sense of the soul is different from the sense of the person. I see a soul ‘in’ its body, its sense of touch in its hand, its joy in its face. I see the psyche well up and be reabsorbed on the level of bodies which are themselves inserted into the texture of things. Expectations and recollections roll forth and beat their lived time against objective world-time with its coincidences and intervals. Social institutions lend themselves to being grasped as a lay of stimuli and responses on the level of the behavior of the animate body. There is nothing in man that cannot be treated in a psycho-physiological fashion. Thus, in the natural attitude man falls back into zoology. Such are the tendencies of a study of sensoriality and localization; to be animate is truly to be an animal (Husserl sometimes speaks of animalia). However, we are not in this attitude when we live together, when we speak, when we exchange experiences, or when we live in the family, the state, the church, etc. Here we do not see man s a being of nature but rather as a being of culture. We do not notice the animal when we pay attention to the person. This is why a psychology of sociality, which limits itself to being an interpsychology where man is related to man as a stimulus having psychic functions, is deficient in its relation to man” (Ricoeur 1967:69-70).

Ricoeur, Paul
1967 Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology. Edware G. Ballard and Lester E. Embree, trans. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

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Husserl and Phenomenology

24/01/2011 By Kelly Cooper

“To sum up, phenomenology’s overall task is, for Husserl, to secure an ‘ultimate grounding’ of meaning in a ‘questioning back’ (Rückfrage) to the origins of our intuitive experience. The ultimate grounding is a self-grounding in that it presupposes nothing and so is absolutely original and scientific in a genuine sense, for it obviates all those speculative abstractions which naively mistake themselves for ultimate reality.

Phenomenology is therefore a science of science; it criticises the pseudo-scientific pretentions of naturalism for ignoring the fundamentally intentional nature of the ‘experience’ it purports to invoke as a principle of empirical verification. As Paul Ricoeur, one of Husserl’s most distinguished disciplines, put it: ‘Phenomenology is not situated elsewhere, in another world, but rather is concerned with natural experience itself, in so far as the latter is unaware of its meaning’ (‘Phenomenology and Hermeneutics’ in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 1981). In short, the suspension of the natural attitude which sets the phenomenological analysis in motion, is not a departure from our worldly experience into some Platonic heaven of immutable essences. On the contrary, it solicits a greater fidelity to our natural and temporal experience so that we may come to grasp its concealed depths, to re-cognise, as it were, the giving acts of intentional consciousness behind the givens of the natural attitude. To put it another way, we could say that phenomenology seeks to uncover the positing acts of human subjectivity which originally produce the positum of any so-called objective fact.

In several of his works, particularly Ideas and The Cartesian Meditations, Husserl seems to have believed that such a self-grounding of knowledge could only be achieved in the pure immanence of a transcendental subjectivity, unadulterated by the contingencies of empirical experience. Indeed some of Husserl’s disciples would regard his ‘transcendental reduction’ to the absolute interiority of a spiritual consciousness existing in and for itself, as a relapse into another form of idealism-and this in spite of all Husserl’s efforts to surpass previous idealist philosophies, Platonic, Cartesian, Kantian, Gegelian etc. There are indications in his late writings, however, and particularly in The Crisis of the European Sciences, that Husserl himself was becoming aware of the dangers of a transcendental solipsism and sought to overcome them by showing how all subjective consciousness is in fact grafted upon an intersubjective community which opens up the transcendental ego to a life-world of existential communication. The following pass age from The Crisis is a good case in point:

In our continually steaming perception of the world we are not isolated but rather stand within it in contact with other men…. In living with one another each can participate in the life of the other. Thus, in general, the world does not exist for isolated individuals but for the community of men; and this is due to the communalization of the straightforwardly perceptual…. It is only by making oneself understood that we have the possibility of recognizing that the things which ones sees are the same as those which the other sees.

This passage would seem to suggest that we arrive at an intuition of universal meanings not from within the solitary resources of transcendental subjectivity (as the early more ‘Cartesian’ Husserl tended to argue) but by means of a communal validation wherein each subject reciprocally corrects or confirms the other’s phenomenological description of his experience. Essences are therefore disclosed by the later Husserl as being neither eternal ideas nor a priori constructs of an autonomous ego. They are the result of an historical harmony of communication between human subjects. This is why phenomenology remains an endlessly open and collective enterprise, a proposal rather than a self-contained system, a task rather than a solution” (Kearney 1986:22-23).

Kearney, Richard
1986 Modern movements in European philosophy. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.

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