[Andrzej_Wiercinski_(ed ... - WordPress.com

Husserl’s Reflective PhenomenologyAlthough Husserl’s thinking underwent substantial changes over the span of his career,from his early concern with the foundations of logic to his later transcendental idealism,he always remained motivated by the Cartesian ideal formulated in his earliest works, theproject of establishing “apodictic” foundations for the sciences. Philosophy was to be a“rigorous science” grounded in indubitable evidence, an objective analysis of the mostbasic ground of experience and thought. Through a prejudice-free return to “the thingsthemselves” -- the given as it appears under methodologically controlled conditions -- phenomenologywould clarify the epistemological foundations of other sciences. Husserl’sphenomenology is “reflective” because it is based upon this Cartesian style examinationof the immanent contents of subjectivity. With Descartes, Husserl presupposes a selftransparentego. Husserl suspends or “brackets” (epoché) the “natural attitude,” the commonsense assumption that objects of knowledge exist independent of consciousness.Everything known is a datum of consciousness. Being cannot be conceived apart fromconsciousness. The “phenomenological reduction” returns to the “most basic field of work,”the sphere of “absolutely clear beginnings.” 2 We ‘reduce’ thinking or lead it back (reducere)to its original source, from the so-called ‘independent world’ to the immanentcontents of consciousness. The reduction reveals that the original data of thinking are notobjects but intentionally structured meanings.Within the realm of the purely given, every object shows itself as a correlate of asubjective act, the intentum of an intentio. Intentionality was originally a Scholastic conceptretrieved by Husserl’s mentor Franz Brentano. In order to find a scientific basis forexperimental psychology, Brentano distinguished psychological from non-psychologicalphenomena on the grounds of the psyche’s ineluctable directedness, its essential referenceto an object. 3 All consciousness is “consciousness of.” The known is a cogitatum of acogito, the intentum of an intentio, the object pole of an indissoluble relation to a subject.Brentano’s retrieval of the notion of intentionality was the beginning of the end of thereification of the ego in modern philosophy. For Brentano and Husserl, consciousness isneither a substance with the accident of rationality, nor a thinking thing. It exhibits afeature found in no substance or physical thing: directedness. Consciousness is an activity,a relation. “Each cogito, each conscious process . . . ‘means’ something or other, and bearsin itself, in this manner peculiar to the meant, its particular cogitatum. 4Intentionality means that the how of a phenomenon can be distinguished from its what.Husserl introduces a new set of inseparable terms to elaborate this distinction: noema, thatwhich is intuited, the what of an intention, and noesis, the way of intuiting, the how ofan intention. 5 To understand the given, it is not enough to look at its objective features;we must examine the way it shows itself. Perception of objects is piecemeal, but meaningis holistic and contextual; every noema has a noetic “horizon” constitutive of its meaning.We synthesize one-sided views of things into anticipated wholes. Intentional analysisexplicates these implicitly given ‘wholes,’ constitutive a priori horizons or eidetic contexts,2Edmund Husserl, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” in Edmund Husserl: Phenomenology and theCrisis of Philosophy, ed. Quenten Lauer (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 146.3See Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, trans. Oskar Kraus and LindaMcAlister (New York: Humanities Press, 1973).4Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorian Cairns(The Hague: Nijhof, 1960), 33.5Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a PhenomenologicalPhilosophy, vol. 1, General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. Fred Kersten (The Hague:Nijhof, 1982), 199-216.266