Edmund Husserl and His Contribution to Philosophy - Essay Example

23 February 2009 Edmund Husserl Husserl's great contribution to philosophy is his investigation into theintentionality of conscious acts and "detachment". His concern begins with what he sees as the incompleteness of phenomena: that which shows itself needs to show itself to something. That to which phenomena are shown is the transcendental consciousness, which is not to be confused with the empirical consciousness that is the object of psychological study. The transcendental consciousness, whose very essence is to be conscious of something, in turn relies upon phenomena as that toward which consciousness aims, that which consciousness goes out for, that which consciousness intends. Husserl takes this intentionality to be the basis of consciousness, and in some of his writings, "intentionality" and "transcendental" tend to be used interchangeability. In Husserl's characterization of conscious intentionality we see a kinship with Whitehead's notion of the vector character of experience: "The experiencer aims at the data even as the data aim at the experiencer" (). To explore this intentional structure of consciousness, Husserl attempts to develop a method to reveal the complex contents of consciousness as clearly as we experience a simple sense perception. But even a sense perception comes to us amid a lifetime of assumptions and beliefs about the cause and context of the perception. Husserl tries to work out a step-bystep series of phenomenological or eidetic "reductions" in which reality, as presented in our "naive" experience, is bracketed in hopes of bringing forth the structures that constitute phenomena (Hart 644). Husserl finds that the uniqueness of consciousness lies in the fact that the phenomena are "constituted" by conscious activities regarding the phenomena's essences (or meanings). Husserl does not mean to say that things are imaginary inventions. Entities are not created by consciousness, but their essences are constructed from the hyle, the stuff presented to the synthetic character of transcendental consciousness. Husserl describes these activities as meaning intentions of consciousness and fulfilling intentions of phenomena. For example, my awareness of my desk is not identical to the desk itself. The desk is solid, rectangular, and several feet wide, but my idea of the desk possesses none of those qualities. Although the hardness and size of the desk cannot physically enter my consciousness, they are somehow presented to me from the stuff of my idea of the desk (Hart 645). Husserl shows that this presentation is an exceedingly complex activity in which sense data take many forms and occur within a complicated array of potential sensations. But these sense data would be meaningless without the meaning intentions, the noetic activity of consciousness that assigns appropriate categories such as substance, quality, and explains the relations as the shape, size, of a material object; that is, noetic activities constitute the "whatness" of what is intended by consciousness (Schrag 278). For Husserl, the "detachment" proposed in any judgment, then, is the agreement of what is meant and what is given in fulfilling intentions. The difference between Husserl's transcendentalism and Heidegger's is found in the latter's attempt to express the way phenomena are constituted in terms deeper than Husserl's transcendental consciousness. (Hart 645). Husserl's attempt is far too idealistic, subjectivistic, and egoistic for Heidegger. In considering consciousness to provide the fundamental, presuppositionless beginning of philosophy, Husserl places himself squarely within the Cartesian tradition that takes the cogito to be prior to what Heidegger considers the ontological structure beneath, the sum. Husserl maintains the subject-object dichotomy so severely separated res cogitans and res extensa. Critics admit that Husserl goes far beyond Descartes in attempting to resolve how the activities of the knowing subject become connected to the known through the synthetic acts of intentionality. But Heidegger maintains that there is a level of encounter that is ontologically prior to the subject-object construction. Knower-known dualism is an abstraction that arises after, indeed is derived from, the primordial experience of the world in which we find ourselves. To exist is to be intentionally related to the world in a manner that is fully revealed only when the Cartesian point of departure is turned around to establish a "new ontologico-phenomenal confirmation. In this focus upon the sum that understands itself in a world, we see the difference between Husserl's notion of a timeless, abstract ego and Heidegger's concept of historical, concrete human existence (Schrag 278). Husserl admits that his own phenomenological analysis' goes further the psychological practices because it allows clinicians to investigate images themselves paying less attention to conclusions and outcomes of the images. The facticity of the conscious subject is never the "pure" consciousness that Husserl claims synthesizes phenomena but arises from an historical situation that is always temporally, logically, and ontologically prior to any Cartesian subjectivity. Husserl unquestioningly presupposes an inarticulated mode of being of consciousness itself. Preliminary phenomenological sketches must therefore be verified by returning to experiential facts as concretely exemplified, which in turn are reexamined (H art 655> "Object" in Husserlian phenomenology is a term whose denotation includes everything "subjective." But when the matter is put in terms of a subject-object schema, only two possibilities seem to be finally available -- either the a priori must be understood in terms of the free creative subject or described in terms of the static, structured object. From this vantage point, even if one tries to do justice to both sides of the polarity one may still question, with Ricoeur, whether it is legitimate to split the a priori into two parts, whether it can ultimately be accounted for in this way. The case is not appreciably altered by recognizing, as Husserl did, the phenomenon of "passive synthesis," which shows that the founding stratum of perception is never sheerly "receptive" but is always the result of a passive synthetic "agency." But although the subject and object of consciousness are "bracketed" so as to leave only the "content" of consciousness itself, this "content" nevertheless remains an object of consciousness; and, as such, it is accepted ultimately either as an objectively structured datum received by consciousness or as a constituted product of a structure-conferring transcendental subject. There seems to be no satisfactory middle ground within the dualistic schema. The ordering principle cannot come from both object and subject, world and mind (Schrag 279). By contrast, the phenomenological demand for presuppositionless attention "to the things themselves" required the suspension of all judgments pertaining to the worldly existence of the empirical subject of consciousness. The subject matter of phenomenology was thereby limited to the "pure" content of consciousness itself. In this way all acts of consciousness and, correlatively, all objects of consciousness became proper subjects for phenomenological investigation; they were considered capable of being clarified and grasped "eidetically," that is to say, in their "essential" structures (Hart 654). The a priori forms that render experience intelligible, in Husserl's view, belong to the material content of experience. They are given in the identificational forms and meanings that eidetically structure experience. Within the Kantian system, of course, the notion that a priori forms, categories, and ideas -- which are the conditions of the possibility of experience -- could be experienced or intuited themselves is an impossibility. For Husserl, then, the a priori is a property of essential intuition and of intuited essences, not principally of logical propositions or of the relations between the terms of such propositions. The a priori defines the invariant essential structures of the contents of intuition, and, as such, is something phenomenologically given. At times, in fact, it may be taken to be synonymous with "essence". It must be remembered, however, that the concept of essential intuition always remained itself a problem for continued investigation for Husserl. As a result, particularly in his later career, the notion underwent complicating transformations in the course of its development, notably in conjunction with the concepts of "constitution" and "passive synthesis." If the weakness of its ontological analysis and phenomenological grounding is its chief apparent defect, the most serious obstacle before the Schelerian critique may lie in the recent ascendancy of a type of philosophical thought -- both on the Continent and in the Englishspeaking world -- that regards the very project of endeavoring to secure a ground or foundation of any kind as philosophically pointless and pass. Lack of clarity about the nature of thought and intuition prevented the Kantian analysis from realizing its transcendental aspirations for the a priori conditions of knowledge (Schrag 279). In sum, The formal analytical a priori was defined by reference to principles of logic that were taken to be self-evident; but these principles themselves could not be said to be a priori in the same sense as propositions whose analytic character is determined by these principles. The possibility of synthetic a priori judgments was traced back to the general psychic constitution of human subjectivity; but the factual laws of empirical psychology could not be said to be a priori in the same sense as the categorial forms of thought and their ideal laws. Hence, in each case there is a lack of "transcendental rigor," which Husserl, in the overall charge he brings repeatedly against the Kantian conception of the a priori, attributes to "anthropologism" or "psychologism. The a priori conditions of mundane experience are found in the identificational structures of phenomenological experience. Works Cited Edmun Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson. London: Collier-Macmillan, 1962. Hart, J. G. The Rationality of Culture and the Culture of Rationality: Some Husserlian Proposals. Philosophy East & West 42 (1992), 643-664. Schrag, Calvin O. "Phenomenology, Ontology, and History in the Philosophy of Heidegger." In Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Its Interpretation, pp. 277-93, edited by Joseph J. Kockelmans . Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 2000. Read More