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CHAPTER ONE

HUSSERL’S TRANSCENDENTAL PHENOMENOLOGY CONSIDERED IN THE LIGHT OF (RECENT)

Christian Beyer

Edmund Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology represents an epis- temological project which he sometimes refers to as “First ”. He also speaks of “Cartesian Meditations” and stresses that “the first philosophical act” is “the universal overthrow of all prior beliefs, however acquired” (Hua VIII, 23).1 This project aims at nothing less than a - sophical of our whole view of the world and ourselves. I propose to investigate into this undertaking regarding both its method and content and to relate it, where useful, to more recent (analytic) epistemology. For Husserl, the task of First Philosophy is to philosophically explicate our access to, or being in, the world, i.e., the of our con- sciousness. By an intentional state of , an intentional (lived) experience, he understands a state of consciousness that has a matter which it is directed toward, so to speak (cp. the literal of the Latin verb intendere); a state that is “as of ” something, represents something. It was Husserl’s teacher who brought this notion to the attention of and psychologists. In his Psychol- ogy from an Empirical Standpoint he says: Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an , and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a real thing [eine Realität]), or immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself, although they do not all do so in the same way. In presentation something is presented, in something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on. (Brentano 1995, 63)

1 Unless indicated otherwise, Husserl’s writings are cited after Husserliana: Edmund Hus- serl—Gesammelte Werke, The Hague/: Nijhoff/Kluwer/Springer 1950ff. [=Hua] and the translations are mine. 12 christian beyer

Intentionality is “the direction toward an object [die Richtung auf ein Objekt]”, or “[the] immanent objectivity [die immanente Gegenständlich- keit]”, such that each intentional phenomenon “includes something as object within itself.” Does that mean that mental phenomena constitute an inner realm, wholly separated from what is “out there” in objective “in itself ”? “I have been searching for reality all of my life”, Husserl once said to Helmuth Plessner, near the end of his Göttingen years, “and while saying this”, Plessner reports, “he took his thin walking stick with its silver crutch, bent forward and pressed it against the post” of his garden door (Plessner 1959, 18). Husserl is a realist. He is, in words, convinced of the of objects transcending what is given to our consciousness; objects to which there is more, and which are more, than what shows itself in present consciousness; and consciousness is always present (I shall return to that point). But Husserl is not a naive realist; this is one of the points of the anecdote told by Plessner. In pressing his walking stick against the door post, Husserl expresses a different attitude than G.E. Moore when raising his hands and exclaiming “here is a hand, and here is another hand!” in order to “disprove” scepticism about objective reality. Nor does Husserl adhere to so-called critical realism, the view (going back to Descartes) that we experience objective reality only indirectly, by representing subjective appearances or -data. According to Husserl, this view does violence to the facts of consciousness and thus violates the basic methodologi- cal requirement of phenomenology, i.e., “to open our eyes and take the phenomena as they offer themselves as against all firmly rooted theory and even despite it” (Heidegger 1988, 62). This formulation stems from ’s lectures on The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, which testify to a good understanding of Husserlian phenomenology. Heidegger there gives the following statement of the central problem pur- sued by critical realism: In themselves, it is said, intentional experiences as belonging to the subjec- tive sphere relate only to what is immanent within this sphere. Perceptions as psychical direct themselves toward sensations, representational images, memory residues, and determinations which the thinking that is likewise immanent to the subject adds to what is first given subjectively. Thus the problem that is above all alleged to be the central philosophical problem must be posed: How do experiences and that to which they direct them- selves as intentional, the subjective in sensations, representations, relate to the objective? [. . .] How do intentional experiences [. . .] relate to transcen- dent objects? (Ibid.)