2. 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.
3. 5 Principal Phases of the
Phenomenological Method
1. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. Free Variation
3. 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.
7. Intuition of Essences
4. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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)
12. 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.
13. 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
14. 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
15. 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
16. 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
17. 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?
18. 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)
19. 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
20. 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
21. 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
22. 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
23. 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
24. 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
25. 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
