if anthropologism’s claim is that our truth is relative to our human constitution, then if there were no humans, there would be no truth.63 This claim, once again, surreptitiously relies on the notion of truth to assert itself as true. Husserl comments that “if we confine ourselves to the only species actually known to us, animal species,” then this claim amounts to two possible outcomes. The first possibility is that truth is dependent on us, humans, who “invented” truth; so if something happens to our species, then truth will mutate (“a change in [human] constitution would mean a change in the world”). This is already discussed above. Here, the concept of truth is relied upon to assert that “truth” is contingent on our species and, by the same token, that nature is dependent on us (if we change, the world will change with us)—which is again a misunderstanding of the meaning of the idea of truth. We assert something we deny. The second possibility is that despite the fact that we are “animal species,” we are also “evolutionary products of the world,” which can lead to the claim that “our truth” is the product of the environment and changeable with it (LI, § 36, 81; IP, 18). Once again, the same objection applies. As Husserl sums up, “We are playing a pretty game: man evolves from the world and the world from man; God creates man and man God” (LI, § 36, 81).
THE IDEA OF PHENOMENOLOGY
Natural thought in life and in science is untroubled by the difficulties concerning the possibility of knowledge, while philosophical thought is determined by the position taken with respect to the problems of the possibility of knowledge. (IP, 61; italics in original)
Husserl is the first to admit that his critique of psychologism and anthropologism in Logical Investigations does not get him out of the empirical world. As he writes in 1907, although his early underlying concern was theory of knowledge, LI left the validity of descriptive psychology intact. First presented in LI, Husserl’s insight is that “the possibility of analytic cognition” (§ 8, 47; italics in original) is important but is not enough to account for the knowledge of the world; that is, for the correlation between our subjective thinking and the world of objects.
In The Idea of Phenomenology, then, Husserl shifts from analytic reasoning to consider the problem of knowledge as such. His focus becomes “the relation of knowledge to what is transcendent” (IP, 60; italics in original), that is, the correlation between our thinking and the world.64 He recognizes that descriptive psychology, that is, empirical phenomenology, must be distinguished from transcendental phenomenology.65 Only transcendental phenomenology can solve “the great riddles” of “the correlation between being and consciousness” (ILI, § 5, 29). This is “the enigma of all enigmas,” mentioned earlier. How do I know that a thing in the world is the same as the one that I am aware of? This riddle leads also to the question: “How is it that I experience what is seen again as the same? How can it be experienced as the same?”66 These questions cannot be answered by comparing the object in the world with its “image,” which supposedly appears in my consciousness. The answers cannot rely on the law of causation; the object cannot cause the image in my consciousness. How can my one-sided perception, which I supposedly have in my consciousness as an image, do justice to my experience of the object in the world with all its “sides,” in its totality? The object and the mental state belong to different categories; the law of causation is useful to explain events in physical nature, but the extramental object cannot cause any “mental image.” When we pay attention to what we are aware of, we realize the enigma that phenomenology discloses: we always see more than what is “given” to us. The “mental image” cannot be the replication of an object from the world into my consciousness, so to speak; the object is irreducible to the image. We are always aware of the object in the world, and not only of the one side of it that we literally see. We always anticipate the sides of a thing that we cannot possibly see unless we move around the object; we assume that we see the object in its entirety.
Husserl’s insight is that to understand this enigma of meaning—this correlation between the worldly object and our knowledge of it—the phenomenological investigation has to leave behind the transcendent world of res extensa and pay attention to “the phenomenologically reduced consciousness in its individual flow.”67 It has to abstract from the actual world. Husserl’s proposition is the phenomenological reduction, or ἐποχή (epoché), which he introduces in IP.68 As Mohanty explains, “The epoché is not an expression of suspicion in the veracity of the given, it is rather a methodological step needed for understanding the sense of the world precisely as it is given, i.e., as a unity of sense that is achieved.”69 To express it differently, Husserl’s investigation is not into objects as they are in themselves, but into our meaningful experience of them.
The phenomenological reduction is Husserl’s response to the problem of psychologism and anthropologism. He considers the problem from a different point of view by showing that our knowledge of an object cannot be reduced to our subjective mental states.
For Husserl, “psychology is an experiential science,” while phenomenology is “a science of essences,”70 or, we might say, of typicalities. We can attend to the meaning of a thing if we bracket out everything that transcends our awareness and begin to pay attention to what we are aware of as it appears to us; that is, if we bracket out res extensa and concentrate on cogitationes. This does not mean that the world ceases to exist. If we experience something, it must exist in the world, but what we are attempting to do is to describe our awareness only. What becomes apparent is the fact that our consciousness is intentional.71 We always experience something as something; we are always aware of something as something.72
To investigate this constitution of experience, a phenomenologist must pay attention to the immanent flow of cogitationes revealing that we always see “more” than we actually see. The issue is how to describe this “seeing.” My perception of a tree in a garden is relative to my position in relation to that tree. The question is: How can I see this tree as a three-dimensional object standing in the garden when I really only see one side of it?73 How do I constitute the meaning of my experience from this one side that is perceptually given to me? How can I extrapolate from this one side and experience it as a tree blossoming in my garden? How do I constitute the cognitive meaning of my experience?74
According to Husserl, the sensations that constitute my experience of a tree are “moments of experience” that contribute to my meaningful constitution of this tree; but they are, by definition, not a tree. As Dan Zahavi explains, only by interpreting sensations do “we have an object-directed perception. It is [. . .] because the sensations are in themselves nonintentional [. . . that] they lack an intrinsic object-reference.”75 What is needed is the understanding of a synthesis: of how those sensations come together to form my experience of an object. How can I see the tree in my garden? I cannot explain my perception as meaningful experience if I posit sensations as primary. To account for my perception of the tree, I have to account for the synthesis through which the object becomes constituted. I have to abstract from this tree, this time, this place, and my empirical awareness of this tree. As Husserl explains, if I do not abstract from my particular “I,” I am still on the ground of natural science, in this case psychology, which investigates the mental processes of an individual consciousness. To understand the meaning of experience is to pay attention to the constitution of any and every experience. How does it happen that, in normal circumstances, we constitute the meaning of this one-sided percept as the tree standing in the garden, persisting through space and time?
We can attend to the phenomenon of a tree only if we perform a reduction; that is, if we pay attention only to “the sphere of pure self-givenness” (IP, 45; italics in original); if we pay attention to the constitution of meaning. For Husserl, “every act of thinking [. . .] ‘has’ phenomenally in it what it thinks.”76
