Dasein - Monoskop

82 PART II
which have—due to the influence of science—a naturalistic flavour.
Since Husserl eventually brings the life-world and natural language
into a relation of correlativity, we can attribute these ontological
commitments directly to language: thus we can say that Husserl's
''natural attitude" corresponds to a natural language with naturalistic
ontological commitments.
However, the natural attitude is not confined to an immediate
relating to objects in the world. Reflection upon how we experience
some object is part of our natural life. Yet in reflecting on how,
for example, we perceive something, we do not give up any of our
ontological commitments. Reflecting on how I look at my computer
screen, I do not drop the ontological commitment to the screen's existence,
and I do not regard my psychological experience as anything
but a worldlv event.
In Ideas /, Husserl goes some way to arguing that reflection in
general is possible. His central claims are that "it is the intrinsic
nature of an experience [Erlebnis] to be perceivable through reflection"
2 ' 0 , and that to deny the possibility of reflection is to state
a contradiction 271 : to claim that reflection upon our experiences is
impossible is to reflect upon our experiences. Husserl also holds that
a clear distinction between object-experience and meta-experience is
always possible, since each experience always carries with it something
of a "level characteristic" or "index". 272 Unfortunately, we are
told almost nothing regarding the nature of this index.
The key to why Husserl—as early as 1903—came to draw a
boarderline between psychology "in its normal sense" 273 and phenomenology
lies in the understanding that natural reflection does
not give up any of the ontological commitments and self-evidences
of the natural attitude. Furthermore, psychological reflection is nothing
but a systematic natural reflection (within the natural attitude).
In this dependence upon pre-theoretical self-evidences concerning
the existence of the world, psychology does not differ from
physics: "Both sciences start from the world in its usual sense ... As
explaining sciences they presuppose a given objectivization ..." 274
Thirty-three years later, in the Crisis, this dependence is stressed
again in terms of language-use: