Husserl III. Phenomenology as Transcendental Philosophy Philosophy 157 G. J. Mattey ©2002

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