Učník (2016:35-37) – o aparecimento e isso que aparece

Assim, quando refletimos sobre o fenômeno puro, apercebemo-nos de que as cogitationes não são puro dado, como assumimos no início, mas já "escondem todo o tipo de transcendências" (IP, 67). Husserl   apercebe-se de que "o aparecimento e o que aparece se sobrepõem um ao outro" (67; itálico no original). Temos tendência para nos concentrarmos na coisa, esquecendo que nenhuma coisa nos é dada de uma só vez e na sua totalidade. Como já foi referido, a coisa que experimentamos não é algo no mundo que vemos de uma só vez. De certa forma, "temos duas formas de dado absoluto, o dado do aparecimento e o dado do objeto". Como Husserl explica, usando o exemplo de um tom, "o fenômeno da percepção do tom, mesmo o fenômeno evidente e reduzido, requer uma distinção dentro da imanência entre o aparecimento e aquilo que aparece". Em A Fenomenologia da Consciência Interna do Tempo, Husserl descreve esta distinção como "um contínuo fixo de retenção [que] surge de tal modo que cada ponto posterior é uma retenção para cada ponto anterior. E cada retenção é já um continuum". Simplesmente não podemos experimentar uma coisa num ponto singular do tempo designado como "agora". O tom, por exemplo, nunca nos é dado separado da melodia. Um tom no proverbial ponto-agora é "a cabeça ligada à cauda do cometa de retenções relacionadas com os pontos-agora anteriores do movimento"; no nosso caso, da melodia. Husserl explica no IP que o objeto dentro desta imanência "não é uma parte da aparência, pois as fases passadas da duração do tom são ainda objectivas, e no entanto não estão realmente [reell] contidas no agora-ponto da aparência". Cada tom transporta consigo, por assim dizer, os tons anteriores que sintetizamos numa melodia, e o tom singular desaparece na peça musical global.

So, when we reflect on the pure phenomenon, we realize that the cogitationes are not   pure givenness, as we assumed at the beginning, but they already “conceal all sorts of transcendencies” [1]. Husserl realizes that “the appearance and that which appears stand   over against each other” (67; italics in original). We tend to focus on the thing, forgetting that no thing is ever given to us at once and in its entirety. As already noted, the thing that we experience is not something in the world that we see at once. In a way, “we have two forms of absolute givenness, the givenness of the appearing and the givenness of the object” (67). As Husserl explains, using the example of a tone, “The phenomenon of tone perception, even the evident and reduced phenomenon, requires a distinction within immanence between the appearance and that which appears” (67; italics in original). In The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, Husserl describes this distinction as “a fixed continuum of retention [that] arises in such a way that each later point is retention for every earlier point. And each retention is already a continuum.” We simply cannot experience a thing in the singular point of time designated as a “now.” The tone, for example, is never given to us separate from the melody. A tone in the proverbial now-point is “the head attached to the comet’s tail of retentions relating to the earlier now-points of the motion”; in our case, of melody. Husserl explains in IP that the object within this immanence “is not a part of the appearance, for the past phases of the tone duration are still objective, and yet they are not really [reell] contained in the now-point of the appearance” (67; square brackets in translation). Each tone carries with it, so to speak, the previous tones that we synthesize into one melody, and the singular tone disappears in the overarching musical piece.

This transcendence is comparable to that of the case of generalization. Melody, as such, is not in the world; only tones are (if we can put it this way), just as redness is not a part of the world in the same way as the red roof is. Redness and melody are constituted by us: “It is a consciousness that constitutes a self-givenness which is not really [reellen] contained in it and it is not to be found as a cogitatio  ” (IP, 67; square brackets and italics in translation).

In the “Preparatory Notes for the Course of Lectures (1910–1911): Pure Psychology and the Humanities (Geisteswissenschaften  ), History and Sociology,” Husserl notes that the consideration of the thing and its appearance—how it appears and how we posit its lawful appearance by bracketing out its transcendent existence—is not a question of the “real” existence or nonexistence of the object. Husserl’s key strategy is to consider “the thing’s real existence in some philosophical scheme.” In other words, it is his answer to Descartes   and Locke, and, later, Mill. Husserl’s point is that “regardless of how skeptically I proceed as a philosopher, and even if I want to deny the thing as an existent entity ‘in itself,’” he can demonstrate the way the thing is constituted. The thing-experience always proceeds according to ordered perceptions: we always experience the thing in the world as meaningful. Our experience of any and every object is not haphazard but uniform. We know that the cube has other sides, even if we do not really see them. There is no possibility of skepticism in this domain. As Husserl notes in Formal   and Transcendental   Logic, by bracketing out the world, we do not deny it; rather, we investigate the way of its positing by showing the lawfulness of its constitution (see, e.g., § 104, 275).

Husserl’s quest is to understand and describe our way of experiencing the world by showing the inadequacies of theories of empiricism; it is to return to things themselves by showing how our experience of the world is constituted.

In Experience and Judgment, Husserl points out that logic, or our formal knowledge, is based on prepredicative experience, our everyday living. As he puts it, “All predicative self-evidence must be ultimately grounded on the self-evidence of experience”; the task is to show that the origin of formal predicative logic is nothing but “the world of experience immediately pregiven and prior to all logical functions.” It is the world in which we live that “furnishes the ground for all cognitive performance and all scientific determination.”

Proceeding from this understanding of the constitution of the world, Husserl shows not only the original ground of formal knowledge but also the constitution of positive   sciences. As he suggests, philosophical considerations are different from theoretical reconfiguration of the world in natural science, because physicists “have a completely different attitude”; yet the basis for both is the life-world.