to bracket out the world in order to consider how meaning is constituted in this pure immanence. As Husserl puts it: “The whole trick here is to let the seeing eye have its say and to exclude all transcendent reference that is interwoven with seeing, those things that are ostensibly given or thought along with what is seen [. . .] those things that in subsequent reflection get imputed to what is given” (IP, 47). This means that for Husserl in IP, only knowledge based on “absolute givenness is ultimate” (45).78 “Absolute givenness” becomes the touchstone of truth because it is free of the riddle of transcendence.
In order to investigate the appearance of a tree, we must assign the epistemological index of dubitability to the “real” tree in the garden, to the space and objective time and to the empirical “I” (IP, 34). To reflect on my perception as a perception, “a reflection that simply ‘sees,’” we must restrict our investigation to the cognitive side of appearing (i.e., to the act of knowing), “the pure cogitatio.” We consider the constitution of meaning only. By this act, we disclose “the phenomenon of this apperception: the phenomenon [. . .] of ‘perception apprehended as my perception.’” As Husserl puts it: “A pure phenomenon that exhibits its immanent essence (taken individually) [is] an absolute givenness” (IP, 34; italics in original). The eucalyptus tree in my garden can burn or decay, but the “pure phenomenon” of a tree—the immanent quiddity of a tree—is indestructible, and it is given as the tree itself.79
The key term is a “tree itself.” It is a tree that we are aware of and not the singular perception of one side of this tree. Husserl warns us against the misconception of the atomistic understanding of perceptual data. There is no singular cogitatio that can account for our perception of a tree; “the self-givenness” of the pure phenomenon is always “bound to the sphere of the cogitationes” (IP, 46). We are aware of a tree because it is constituted through a synthesis of many sensations, but those sensations cannot be accounted for outside of the bestowal of meaning that we understand as a tree.
This investigation can also be described by analogy with the method practiced in natural science.80 Galileo did not posit the law of gravitation as applying to those two particular cannonballs that he is said to have dropped from the Tower of Pisa. He did not perceive this experiment as his own singular observation. He abstracted from the time and space of the experiment, from his own person as the one who was conducting this experiment, and from the actual falling cannonballs, and formulated the law of gravity, which would apply to any object whatsoever, at any time and place. Similarly, the investigation of “this” tree as a phenomenon, constituted through the act of knowing, for example, will reveal that there are other “typicalities” in the life-world that can be made clear. By abstracting from the world, we ostensibly discover “typicalities” that reveal certain basic structures that constitute every possible experience of any object whatsoever; present, future, or nonexistent but imagined. As Husserl puts it, “This goes together with the problem of recognition of the concrete typicality of the objects, and of the objects themselves in their type.”81
Husserl’s further insight is that the empty generalization of a “type” can be abstracted only from the particular “moment of experience.”82 I can reflect on the appearance of the red roof I see from my window. I am aware of this distinct red roof. By bracketing out the world, I pay attention to the appearance of this red roof as I am aware of it. However, this is still transcendence, since I pay attention to the cogitationes of my singular consciousness. I have to abstract from my singular “I” and attend to a pure phenomenon: the pure seeing abstracted from the world and from my empirical “I.” This particular then appears as this individual red roof, but by abstracting from this singular roof, it is an instance or a type of redness per se. So I “see” the redness in two ways, so to speak: either as an instance of this particular red roof, or, by abstracting from the world and my particular “I,” as an instance of redness in general—in other words, the type or eidos of redness that embraces all possible appearances of red color.
But how is it possible to see red in two different ways? Where does the “generalization” come from? It cannot be given to me as pure self-givenness. There is nothing in the world of objects that is redness in general. My intentional awareness can be only of the particular, but never of the general. As Husserl notes, generality transcends the pure phenomenon, the pure givenness.
THE APPEARANCE AND THAT WHICH APPEARS
So, when we reflect on the pure phenomenon, we realize that the cogitationes are not pure givenness, as we assumed at the beginning, but they already “conceal all sorts of transcendencies” (IP, 67). Husserl realizes that “the appearance and that which appears stand over against each other” (67; italics in original). We tend to focus on the thing, forgetting that no thing is ever given to us at once and in its entirety. As already noted, the thing that we experience is not something in the world that we see at once. In a way, “we have two forms of absolute givenness, the givenness of the appearing and the givenness of the object” (67). As Husserl explains, using the example of a tone, “The phenomenon of tone perception, even the evident and reduced phenomenon, requires a distinction within immanence between the appearance and that which appears” (67; italics in original). In The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness,83 Husserl describes this distinction as “a fixed continuum of retention [that] arises in such a way that each later point is retention for every earlier point. And each retention is already a continuum.”84 We simply cannot experience a thing in the singular point of time designated as a “now.” The tone, for example, is never given to us separate from the melody. A tone in the proverbial now-point is “the head attached to the comet’s tail of retentions relating to the earlier now-points of the motion”;85 in our case, of melody. Husserl explains in IP that the object within this immanence “is not a part of the appearance, for the past phases of the tone duration are still objective, and yet they are not really [reell] contained in the now-point of the appearance” (67; square brackets in translation). Each tone carries with it, so to speak, the previous tones that we synthesize into one melody, and the singular tone disappears in the overarching musical piece.
This transcendence is comparable to that of the case of generalization. Melody, as such, is not in the world; only tones are (if we can put it this way), just as redness is not a part of the world in the same way as the red roof is. Redness and melody are constituted by us: “It is a consciousness that constitutes a self-givenness which is not really [reellen] contained in it and it is not to be found as a cogitatio” (IP, 67; square brackets and italics in translation).
In the “Preparatory Notes for the Course of Lectures (1910–1911): Pure Psychology and the Humanities (Geisteswissenschaften), History and Sociology,” Husserl notes that the consideration of the thing and its appearance—how it appears and how we posit its lawful appearance by bracketing out its transcendent existence—is not a question of the “real” existence or nonexistence of the object. Husserl’s key strategy is to consider “the thing’s real existence in some philosophical scheme.”86 In other words, it is his answer to Descartes and Locke, and, later, Mill. Husserl’s point is that “regardless of how skeptically I proceed as a philosopher, and even if I want to deny the thing as an existent entity ‘in itself,’” he can demonstrate the way the thing is constituted.87 The thing-experience always proceeds according to ordered perceptions: we always experience the thing in the world as meaningful. Our experience of any and every object is not haphazard but uniform. We know that the cube has other sides, even if we do not really see them. There is no possibility of skepticism in this domain. As Husserl notes in Formal and Transcendental Logic, by bracketing out the world, we do not deny it; rather, we investigate the way of its positing by showing the lawfulness of its constitution (see, e.g., § 104, 275).
Husserl’s quest is to understand and describe our way of experiencing the world
