(JPIHP)
Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology represents a concurrent reflection about the meaning of things and about the meaning of human life. 1
From this perspective, the formulation in terms of which we sought to characterize Husserl’s phenomenology—as a concurrent reflection on the meaning both of things and of human life, in the mode of rigorous science—appears at first as an exaggerated affectation. 1
These shortcomings of empiricism, however, leave room for corrections and modifications of the reflective method in the direction which Husserl’s phenomenology will take.— 1
Appearance, manifestation, phainesthai in Greek, will be its fundamental problem: hence the name, phenomenology. 1
Phenomenology will no longer revive the project of an all-embracing logic of being. 1
Consistently with that, phenomenology will not consider as its highest goal the transformation into principles, reasons, causes, its ideal will not be an explanation subordinated to the principle of sufficient reason, but rather a comprehension of the thing, that is, of all that has to do with meaning, in the structured richness of its nature and substance. 1
Furthermore, phenomenology will not be a philosophy of the older, argumentative type, focusing on the analysis of internal contradictions and the intricacies of systems and seeking to formulate abstract solutions, it will seek, rather, to resolve philosophical problems on experiential grounds, seeing the things themselves, moving from abstract schemata to the fullness and depth of the sphere of life. 1
Thus phenomenology does not intend to demonstrate, as positivism and all the offshoots of empiricism, that science is mere description, perhaps an explanatory, reductive description of realities, of entities in their sets, moments, and relations. 1
The founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, nonetheless insisted that it is possible to comprehend this ultimate ground, to forge a comprehension that would tear it out of namelessness and make it accessible to all. 1
How did he arrive at his questions and his conclusions? Will his proposal that phenomenology be the foundation on which all science and philosophy ought to build, prove tenable, and how should we understand his claim that phenomenology, though giving up any claim to an exhaustive and definitive validity, is a rigorous science? In what sense is he carrying on the enterprise first proposed by Greek science and philosophy? Husserl was a mathematician by professional training. 1
Thus it is evident that the rejection of psychologism is only a part of the project of a philosophical systematics which already contains in nuce some of the chief motifs of phenomenology. 2
Here we encounter a new set of problems, only vaguely hinted at so far, from which there will arise, after extensive reflection, phenomenology in the strict sense of the word—a nonempirical theory of the internal, ideal structure of experience in its relation to its object. 2
Husserl’s conception of intentionality was to play an immensely significant role both in his phenomenology and in the thought of an entire generation of philosophers that followed. 4
Hand in hand with that, we noted, in the critique of Brentano’s conception of psychic phenomena as putatively wholly immanent and evident in their immanence, there arises the problem of the “pure phenomena,” purged of all objective positing and so truly guaranteed in its givenness—the basic problem of the pure phenomenology to come. 6
Now how can we make this absolute givenness an object of science? Is not givenness a Heraclitean flux from which we cannot step out, which changes at every moment so that while it is always absolutely given, it is given differently in each instance? Does not every science by contrast seek to posit an objectivity identical with itself, an objectivity identical for the various phases of the stream of various subjects, and so to transcendence? Then is not phenomenology as a science a contradiction? The task of phenomenology is not to eliminate all objectivity but to ground objectivity itself in immanence, to demonstrate the birth of transcendence in immanence. 6
Reell transcendence thus need not yet be transcendence as such—reell transcendence can also be an immanence of self-givenness Transcendence thus is not something that phenomenology can or need fear and avoid altogether, but rather only when it is not the transcendence of eidetic self-givenness. 6
However, since in essential self-givenness we shall be able to grasp all lived experiences and their eide, the fundamental problem of phenomenology will also be within our reach, namely the nature of cognition, the eidos of the process of lived experience in which in mere opinion, in hints, in symbol, in representative perception, in analogy, the object itself is ultimately given. 6
Husserl starts out by explaining wherein his examination of the experience, the lived experience of temporality, differs from an inquiry into objective, real time; phenomenology sets that time aside as a premise from which it would start and which it would use, though it retains it as a phenomenon which it will analyze in its correlation with mental processes whose being is guaranteed by their givenness. 7
For our purposes—an introduction to phenomenology—we need not develop fully this task at which we have hinted earlier, especially since Husserl himself only adumbrated it. 7
In this sense we need to pose further questions, examining especially this unity in which our own living is constituted, our simultaneously nonobjective, subjective, and yet always to some extent “objective” life stream, and this investigation will present phenomenology with its most difficult problems, placing in question the apparently most evident principles and givens on which phenomenology depended at its start. 7
Already in the sixth supplement to The Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, Husserl recognized a fourfold concept of perception: perception of a transcendent object; objective perception of an immanent object (not the tone of the whistle but rather a mere enduring tone in its coextensive phases); the perception of temporal consciousness in the “now”; and the perception of the temporality of the present itself (with its phase continuum).— 7
At the very edge of phenomenological visibility there appears yet another visibility which phenomenology did not explicitly thematize, even though it is not in conflict with its possibility—the visibility of relations even beyond the region of positive and objectival content—a dialectical visibility. 7
This paradox, however, would be catastrophic for the phenomenological approach only if phenomenology were to become fixated on its Cartesian starting point, on the idea of basing philosophy as a science on the exclusive self-certainty of (purified) consciousness. 7
Phenomenology, with every justification, placed at the center of its studies the fact that things present themselves in consciousness in persona, in perception, in in-tuition (though clearly not “intuition” in the sense of an inspired guess!). 7
Here phenomenology runs up against a limit contained in the very conditions of all clarity. 7
And so precisely a phenomenology of corporeity, which Husserl barely sketched, though in a way that can provide a basis for further work, proves crucially important. 8
Husserl does phenomenology in both attitudes but his more important, proper starting point is the personalistic attitude: here the actual circumstances on which I depend do not figure as physical conditions but as the whole of my experienceable context, and the relation to it is not merely a causal one but one of motivation. 8
At this point we need to recall certain reflections about the nature of the reductive process in its relation to reflection which Husserl elaborated in the critical effort at a phenomenology of the reduction, especially of the reductive epoché. 8
Perhaps, though, that is true even of a world in the strong sense of the word: of the world as the aggregate of all realities, the sum of all that can be included in the unity of objective temporal sequence (however we define this flow in its concretely objective form in the objective sciences), can be equally thematized in the context of that fundamental question of meaning, of significance which is elaborated by phenomenology. 8
For meaning constituted by subjectivity as a universum, as a world, is a rediscovered meaning; rediscovery presupposes a loss; why did the primordial absolute subjectivity lose or lack its own self? How can we explain this fact with which phenomenology begins and which we can only accept? For Hegel and his theological philosophy, the answer is given in the idea of the creation of the world out of the absolute freedom of the divine Being which is also an absolute necessity. 8
Quite the contrary, the historicity he describes was so reduced and rendered abstract by his proclamation of philosophy as the highest spiritual activity, of objectification as its primordial form, and of phenomenology as its highest aim that we can hardly see in it anything more than a partial contribution to the questions of a historical—and that means of genuinely concrete—perception of the relation of humans and the world. 8
Phenomenology helps not in spite of but precisely because of its not being a closed system. 8
Besides, Husserl’s phenomenology is the only great modern philosophy that carried out, in an exemplary fashion, the breakthrough from the modern mathematico-physicalist objectivism, attacking its basic conceptions not from without but rather by striving from the start for its consistent, absolute elaboration and justification. 8