Objects of consciousness are thus first and foremost given to consciousness. The epoché (a.k.a. the phenomenological reduction) is the process by which the phenomenologist extracts acts of eidetic intuition from the acts of categorical intuition that constitute experience. Eidetic intuitions are intuitions of the ideal essences of objects and events; the adjective "pure" in Husserl’s philosophy always refers to the essence of a mental act rather than its real existence (which is seemingly entailed in acts of categorical intuition, an appearance that itself constitutes the problem that phenomenology seeks to resolve/evade, namely the necessity for Kantian ontological dualism). I think (though this is not explicitly stated in any of the texts I read today) that eidetic intuitions are to be considered as immanent in categorical intuitions, but obscured to consciousness due to the imposition (by categorical intuition) of existentiality. The “principle of all principles,” which the epoché permits us to uphold, states that “we must attend only to that which is disclosed through pure intuition [i.e. eidetic intuition].”The epoché consists in two stages. First, the eidetic reduction systematically ignores all "matters of fact" by putting out of play (i.e. parenthesizing, a.k.a. bracketing) all posited objects of consciousness. For the early Husserl, this first stage is the only stage necessary in order to describe ideal essences. But later Husserl admits that a second stage is needed, the transcendental reduction, which, having already ignored everything that is posited by consciousness as matter-of-factual rather than essential, further ignores everything that is posited by consciousness as "real." As Cutrofello puts it: “What remains is a transcendentally purified consciousness for which pure phenomena [which have been parenthesized] are given as irreal.”
Against Kant, Husserl insists that consciousness does have “a secure means of access to the domain of the transcendental.” “Transcendental” in Kant is distinguished from “transcendent.” Whereas transcendent refers to that which goes beyond any possible knowledge of a human being/consciousness (i.e. that which lies beyond what our faculty of knowledge can legitimately know), on the other hand transcendental refers to the conditions for knowledge/cognition, “the way that we can possibly know objects even before we experience them.” (It’s unclear to me whether this distinction is precisely preserved in Husserl’s thought.) For Husserl, every mental act is characterized by intentionality, a concept derived from the work of Franz Bretano. Roger Scruton defines intentionality as as “reference to a content” or the “direction upon an object” (A Short History of Modern Philosophy, 264).
Husserl elaborates upon the implications of intentionality by positing a complex structure for all mental acts. Every mental act has the form of a noesis directed toward a noema. The noesis, which constitutes the act-stratum of the mental act, has two “inherent moments”:
- First, the hyle (matter). In the case of the particular kind of mental act called perception, the hyle is known more specifically as a hyletic manifold, something very like Kant’s “sensible manifold.”
- Second, the sense-bestowing activity (you can always tell the philosophers who wrote in German from the compound nature of their jargon terms!). This moment “synthesizes the manifold so as to direct consciousness toward a unitary object of some sort.” (It’s not clear to me what other kinds of mental acts are possible aside from perceptions, and so it’s also unclear whether every hyle may be considered as a “manifold” of some kind, or exclusively the hyletic manifolds involved in perceptions.)
The noesis also has a “non-inherent moment” (but don’t ask me to elucidate the nature of this non-inherence), which is its noema. The noema, which constitutes the sense-stratum of the mental act, contains a core (about which Cutrofello says nothing at all) and a noematic sense that serves to refer the noesis to its object.
This conceptual apparatus allows Husserl (or so he believes) to put the kibosh on the phenomenon/noumenon dichotomy that is central to Kant’s philosophy. Husserl argues that only one thing may be given to consciousness in a “perfectly adequate way,” and that is itself. (This is the self-plenitude of presence that consciousness experiences in “hearing its own voice,” so to speak [so to speak]; the fatal flaws of this aspect of Husserl’s thought will in 1962 launch the project of deconstruction in Derrida’s first book, L’Origine de la géometrie de Husserl.) But all physical objects can only be given to consciousness inadequately through finite adumbrations. Each adumbration is “surrounded by a halo of indeterminacies which could themselves be filled out only through successive adumbrations” (Cutrofello, 45). What this means is that the essence “physical object” is not a thing-in-itself (as Kant had it) but rather “the idea of the complete disclosure of an infinite number of adumbrations.”
After the epoché, a “residuum” remains: the pure Ego, which “is not immediately apprehended in any reflective act of consciousness” yet “is always there as a transcendency of a peculiar kind – one which is not constituted,” an immanent transcendency.
Time and space are still, for Husserl, transcendentally ideal, because they are constituted by consciousness. The project of Husserl’s transcendental aesthetics is to describe the constitution of space and time (to provide a genetic analysis of them to complement the static analysis of the structures of mental acts [noesis – noema] that I summarized above). Each moment of the transcendental aesthetics reworks a moment of Kant’s three-fold synthesis of the “transcendental deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding.”
- First, absolute subjectivity is self-present, a self-unifying flux that, like Bergsonian durée (as Cutrofello helpfully points out) “can be intuited, but remains fundamentally ineffable.” This moment corresponds to the Kantian apprehension of a sensible manifold.
- Second, the constitution of immanent time (a.k.a. phenomenological time) is the moment of awareness of the sequential structure of successive states of consciousness. This corresponds to Kant’s reproduction of the manifold in the imagination.
- Third, the construction of objective time (a.k.a. cosmic time) is the moment of distinguishing a sequence of worldly events from a sequence of mental acts. This corresponds to Kant’s recognition (subsumption) of the representation in the concept.
(Cutrofello notes that the transition from immanent time to objective time corresponds to the work of the “analogies of experience” in Kant.)
Asserting the priority of immanent time to objective time puts Husserl very close to (and perhaps within) the unpopular position of transcendental solipsism, which Kant avoided by claiming that objective time must first be apprehended in order for the subject to determine its own existence in time. But Husserl has parenthesized all existenents, so, as Cutrofello admits, “he must affirm that the being of consciousness would not be extinguished, but only modified, by an annihilation of the world.” Need I add an exclamation point to this assertion? It might seem less preposterous (and less necessarily mystical) if one thinks of the world as a creation of consciousness, as distinct from the earth. (If I’m not mistaken, Heidegger will attempt to do just this. Perhaps I’ll find out tomorrow!) But can this be done without collapsing into what Husserl dismisses as “mere Weltanschauung philosophy,” with the “world” whose possible annihilation Husserl entertains as synonymous with a culture’s Weltanschauung (world-view)?
We’re not quite finished with Husserl yet. In his penultimate book, he offers the notion of sedimentation, “the building up of successive strata of meaning over time" (Cutrofello, 46). (I think it would be correct to say that these “strata of meaning” are composed of various noemae, or perhaps just of their noematic senses [since I still don’t understand the noema’s other component, its “core.”]) Sedimentation enables a science, an “on-going communal mode of inquiry.” Initially ideal objectivities exist only in private, that is to say as mental acts in the minds of individual consciousnesses. Husserl posits a “proto-geometer” in the case of the ideal objectivity of a geometrical object. That is to say, he claims that each geometrical object could only have come into being originally in private, as a mental act in the mind of its proto-geometer. Spoken language enables the communication of these private mental acts to others, but speech confines the spoken ideal objectivity to expressivity. So long as an ideal objectivity remains expressive, its sedimentation is not ensured; it exists only so long as someone is still constituting/reconstituting it. But with writing, the meaning can attain indicativity, “an irreducible indicative dimension that escapes the order of sheer givenness.” In contrast to the only-ever actual expression that speech offers, writing permits an ideal objectivity to become virtual, thus to become a genuinely public objectivity, a.k.a. a transcendental memory. (All this too will become crucial to deconstruction.)
The strata of meaning built up by sedimentation constitute a Lebenswelt (life-world), a shared cultural environment. (Is there only one cross-cultural Lebenswelt at a given time? I don’t find the issue directly addressed in any of today’s materials. But, to preserve our precious cultural relativism, we will surely incline toward the alternative hypothesis that multiple Lebenswelts temporally co-exist.) Scruton interprets the Lebenswelt as “the human realm (the realm of meaning),” in contrast to “the realm of nature (the realm of science and explanation)” (Scruton, 268).
There is, however, a problem: sedimentation cannot help but make possible a forgetting of the Lebenswelt. This forgetting results in what Husserl calls the natural attitude, which grounds philosophy in the natural sciences and thus misunderstands the ontological status of consciousness (which “cannot be reduced to a mere natural phenomenon,” as we have seen with the assertion of its non-extinguishability even by the annihilation of the world) as well as the status of nature (which as we have seen is dependent on consciousness for its existence [though not for its essence? Unsure.]). (The forgetting also enables “the more general dogmatic attitude,” but I am not sure what is meant by this.) In the natural attitude, scientists may proceed quite productively in utter ignorance of the meaning of their discoveries. “At stake is nothing less than ‘a struggle for the meaning of man’—the struggle between a naïve scientism and the phenomenological movement itself” (Cutrofello, 47).
No comments:
Post a Comment